OrtizGames

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I am amazed as I read over the little text at the end of every story arc I play through. Every word in the paragraphs set before me is like a stab straight through my heart. Thirty minutes of irritatingly broken gameplay and I’m rewarded with the most painful realization ever conceived as a gamer, even stronger than realizing Square is never going to make a Final Fantasy VII remake–Fox McCloud is dead. He’s been since dead long ago, possibly around the time of Dinosaur Planet which, in spite of myself, I have to say was a decent platformer that was actually fun once you got over the fact that you were Fox McCloud running around on the ground with a stick and that you were basically playing Zelda. I could tolerate this. It was not what I wanted from a StarFox game, but I could tolerate it. In the same way I could tolerate playing Raiden in Metal Gear Solid 2. Trust me, I didn’t like it. But I gave it a chance for story’s sake, and I enjoyed the progression of events, even if I was controlling a queer, skin-tight-suit-wearing prettyboy who wanted to be Solid Snake. This, however, has so far been an unforgivable game. Star Fox: Command puts you at the helm of various pilots which you commandeer through each stage of the game, drawing little paths on the DS touch screen for them to follow. You must fly in front of incoming enemy blips in order to intercept them, and once you’ve drawn up your paths you press Advance (generally any button on your D Pad, in my case), and your ships will fly along their paths, causing enemies to spot them and exclaim, Metal Gear Style, and follow them, ready to be engaged. In that sense, it’s something vaguely similar to a tactical RPG. In fact, it’s reminiscent to the play style of Star Fox 2, the beta of which I still have erotic dreams about. I honestly think SF2 could have been the greatest Star Fox game of them all–no, the greatest space shooter of them all. It held promise, gameplay, graphics–everything refined–had the backing of an incredible story–I mean, that game had it all. And Star Fox: Command could have been everything Star Fox 2 had promised to be and more. But it has none of that. Instead, it borrows concepts, abstracts them, and adds on a tacky art style that makes me shudder and close my eyes, miserable. The tactical assignation system works fine and is simple to understand, but often lags whenever you’re waiting on a turn ending, and it doesn’t ever tell you it’s thinking, so you end up trying to click forward again, wondering if it didn’t register you pressed it the first time only to find that it jumps ahead and skips your next turn because you pressed forward again. It’s nearly cost me rounds of play, which is maddening. Then once you get past the tactical part of the game, you come to the shooting part. You’re prompted which enemy you’ve intercepted you would like to engage, and then you’re thrown into a free-roam square space filled with enemies, where you’re required to apparently “collect star pieces”. They’re essentially medals that look like stars. Yes, I know that sounds like Mario, and I have no idea where they came up with that one. You find these pieces shooting down key enemies that hold them, indicated at the beginning of any stage when you’ve engaged an enemy. The map will be filled with enemy ships, but usually you’ll just end up ignoring them and going after the star pieces, since you really don’t have time to waste–there’s a time limit, and you have to collect time markers dropped by enemies on the field in order to get back precious seconds. Yes, time markers. You control using the stylus, which is suprisingly pleasant, despite my roommate’s insistence that it can’t possibly feel natural. It’s certainly not something I’m used to, but it’s intuitive and comfortable. My hand doesn’t cramp up like when I play Metroid Prime: Hunters, and shooting is a breeze: just press any button, and if you’re a righty like I am it’s all too easy to use Up on the D-Pad. Hold to charge and lock on, like any Star Fox game, and let go to release your charge. Some ships have multilock. It all works fluidly. The only thing that results in impossible for me is firing bombs, which requires you to click a button on your screen – like Metroid Prime for DS’s turn-into-a-ball button, only more terse and idiotic, since you need to fire a bomb rather rapidly in this game whereas changing into a ball in Metroid isn’t necessarily a combat maneuver. However, none of the comfort actually matters. Now, I’m not saying shooting down enemies is easy. I don’t mean that at all. Star Fox: Command is absurdly difficult at times, with enemy fire hailing down on you like God’s angry Reckoning. But most of the time–the majority of the time–there is no skill involved in the game. Most of the time you can shoot down an entire enemy fleet without even looking at the screen. Enemy ships don’t avoid you, and oftentimes will fly straight into you, despite the fact that you’re in a quote unquote “All-Range Mode” scenario (for us Star Fox geeks). All you have to do is keep pressing fire, and eventually they’ll all die. Couple that with your insanely long-lasting barrel roll (draw a little circle on the DS screen) and you’re pretty much a massacre machine. All enemies conveniently have HP bars, too, so you know how close you are to destroying them–not that it really matters–half the time I’m not sure how much my shots actually do to them, anyway. Of course, there’s always the exceptions–some enemies, like these infuriating spinning <em>snail</em> things, don’t seem to take damage when you shoot them regularly, despite the fact that they have a glowing weak spot a la Star Fox 64. I think I even do more damage when I try shooting them in the head on than when I go for the weak spot. In those cases, a charge shot usually takes them out almost frighteningly fast (they don’t last much for having HP bars). However, some characters don’t have a charge shot–like Slippy, whose ridiculously strong lasers still can’t make up for the lack of a charge shot so they gave him the largest HP bar in the game as well. In these cases, trying to take enemies out can be somewhat infuriating. There’s also the fact that in the tactical bits you have to intercept and engage three different kinds of enemies: fighters, bases and missiles. Bases are just enemies with a giant mothership hovering around that shoots a giant laser. You ignore the mothership, collect the star bits, and then ROB (that infernal machine) prompts you to fly through rings into the mothership while using the barrel roll. Yes, into the mother ship. Like in <em>Independence Day</em>, only less suicidal. Don’t ask me why. When you destroy bases, they stop releasing missiles. We all remember the frustrating Sector Z mission with missiles. Star Fox: Command tries to duplicate that unpleasant experience, a mystery to me, by having you <em>fly through rings</em> while trying to shoot down one of the blasted things. Luckily, these missiles don’t have much HP, but I’ve had them get uncomfortably close to the Great Fox, and if I can’t use charge shot (with characters like Slippy, for example) shooting them down becomes ridiculously difficult, especially since the rings (called “beacons”) are generated seemingly at random and are pretty much relentless and unpredictable. Once you’re done shooting down all the enemies you’ve engaged this turn, the next turn begins. If one of the enemies or a missile manages to hit the Great Fox… well. You lose. You have to start the stage over. You also have Arwing lives again, and those represent the amount of ships you lose. If you run out of life or time in any skirmish with an enemy, you lose an Arwing. But your wingman remains in the game, acting as if nothing happened, despite their catastrophic death minutes ago. All that is <em>tolerable</em>, however, compared to the <em>writing</em>. I was insulted when I first started playing Star Fox: Command and I found out Krystal was in the game. Krystal is a gibberish speaking blue fox from a planet filled with dinosaurs with mystical powers. She is not a fighter pilot. Yet she was in this game, and how. The story revolves around the invasion of a species known as the “Anglar”, which are essentially just gigantic fish people. I imagine they must be somehow connected to Andross, because he’s in every game, but I haven’t finished it yet so I really don’t know. Basically, Peppy (who is a general now) implores you to go stop them, so you do. Predictably. Only, it’s just Fox and ROB at first. You gather up the crew as you go along, learning about how Fox is an emo kid and doesn’t want to risk anyone’s life–which all sounds fairly correct–but then when Krystal starts coming into the conversation everything goes sour. Fox with a love interest is wrong, and Fox with a love interest he pines over is almost painful. The definition of our vulpine hero is “a professional”, and Fox is one to every extreme, constantly striving to live up to the name of his father. Having him sob over Krystal when the girl suddenly turns out in a romantic entanglement with Panther from Star Wolf (Panther, the sloppy replacement for Andrew and Pigma, of all people) is just disturbing. Fox isn’t the only character who’s soul is dead in this game–Falco, our loveable, sarcastic, spiteful jerk suddenly steps out of character constantly through the game in revolting displays of affection. “Krystal!” he cheers at one point, “You sure can fly, girl!” My brain short circuited. Falco–the <em>real</em> Falco–would <em>never</em> offer a compliment if it wasn’t tinged with some sort of sarcasm or tease behind it. To anyone. Even his constant cutting off and dismissal of ROB as a “bucket of bolts” feels horribly forced and not at all heartfelt. Falco is supposed to be a jerk: cocky, insufferable, and internally deeply afraid of losing everyone but unable to deal with it. What happened to Star Fox? Why are Star Wolf good guys in this game? I’ve spent years gunning Wolf and Leon <em>down</em>–why am I helping them out now? It’s been evident more and more until I haven’t been able to ignore it any longer. Assault was a horrible piece of garbage, tolerable only because it had Arwings in it even if they moved far too slowly. But I realize now the issue with Assault wasn’t only the cheap gameplay and sloppy voice acting–but the writing that went into it, and how absolutely dreadful Star Fox plots have become, centered around Fox’s meager attempts to “find love”. Fox has never been about that. Now, he’s been robbed of his choice. Fox McCloud is dead, my friends. I mourn him with great sadness in my heart. Command could have been a decent game, despite its rather broken gameplay–I actually can enjoy myself on each missions, shooting down enemy ships and encountering curiously different final bosses. But it’s the story that firmly declares to me the fact that Nintendo has lost one of their great contenders for good. A lot of people say Nintendo has always had their big sellers–Mario, Metroid and Zelda–but what about Star Fox? That used to be a huge name for Nintendo, a classic that should have been able to maintain a strong and lucid IP for a long time. Everyone loves Fox. He’s a Smash Brothers character. So why did they let him sink so low? People may keep their unwavering faith in Nintendo, but after seeing how they’ve massacred one of my favorite video game characters of all time… well. Let’s just say if they come out with a new Star Fox that’s just as bad as this one, I may never buy another Star Fox again.

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In Monster Hunter Freedom 2 for the PSP, a player begins as a newly hired Monster Hunter arriving in a cold mountain town. The premise is that the player has been sent to replace the old Monster Hunter, who was killed by a beast that attacked the village. While playing this game, a player experiences several aesthetic values from it including Challenge, Self-Expression and the Epic model.

The Challenging model gives a player a specific sense of accomplishment as she works her way through the game. In Monster Hunter, a player will be sent on missions into the wild where she will constantly be challenged by enemies that are more and more difficult to bring down, but will be rewarded with money and rare loot from the corpses of the monsters she hunts. As her prey becomes stronger, she can use the items she collects from the wilderness to improve her own armor and weapons, allowing her to overcome the obstacles before her. Against each enemy she has the chance to practice techniques until she masters her weapon of choice, allowing her to defeat stronger and more agile enemies with skill and determination.

Players also get the ability to experience the Self-Expressive aesthetic, with several fighting styles to choose from in order to take down monsters, and with different types of armor and weapons they can buy or fashion. Each fighting style can change the gameplay completely, with ranged weapons dealing damage from far away and leaving players exposed with very little armor, and close-range weapons dealing massive damage in one blow or very quick bits of damage eating up an enemy’s health. An even more unique piece of equipment is the Hunting Horn, which is a support class for playing in a party, and heals or casts strength buffs on nearby allies. Each piece of armor has its own unique look and build. Players can also improve armor they own and make it stronger without having to change it for other, stronger armor. With several different body part slots to equip armor onto and many different styles and specializations to choose from, players are given the sense of satisfaction from earning their armor and the feeling of freedom that comes with being able to choose their appearance. As they complete missions and defeat more enemies, they also unlock titles for themselves, allowing players to adopt interesting customizable titles such as “Walker of Mountains” or “Racing in The Sky”. Players also get the opportunity to play cooperatively with friends over Ad-Hoc wireless connection. Up to four players can band together in a party and take on missions, allowing them to show off their stats and armor and share their abilities and experiences with each other.

A player is also presented with the Epic model when playing Monster Hunter. He will start out a lowly novice with no titles to his name, and as he completes quests will unlock titles, obtain items, expand his farm, forge more and more prestigious armor and weapons and fight monsters of increasing size and difficulty. The first beast a player will encounter is a terrifying, roaring dragon creature known as the Tigrex, which defeats a player utterly and leaves them stranded in the snow. The player must face the Tigrex again several times through the game, never being able to stand up to its power and being forced to run away, but with every loss comes more and more victories until a player is able to take the Tigrex down. Monsters even beyond the Tigrex will be greater in size, power and terrifying strength, but a player will be able to overcome them all in time, filling him with the feeling of accomplishing Epic and fantastic tasks. Monster Hunter does fall short when showing a player the result of his actions—the creatures he defeats will be alive and well if he ever returns to defeat them, and there is no visible change in the world if he chooses to help troubled people or not. However, the game can be excused in that through the fact that, regardless, a player still feels a great satisfaction from defeating and even capturing monsters, and the more he defeats those monsters, the more rare loot he will collect from their corpses—such as bones, skulls, teeth, hide and more.

Monster Hunter Freedom 2 takes many of the elements from an MMORPG and incorporates them into a unique single-player experience. Part action game, part roleplaying game, part Pokemon-collector game, Monster Hunter tries to give players a sense of challenging, epic play and allows them to express themselves by giving them a great deal of customization in both gameplay styles and visual appeal. Monster Hunter Freedom 2 was a huge success (and continues to be one) in Japan, where it not only has several released games on the PSP but has a large MMO Action-RPG game Monster Hunter Frontier. Unfortunately, in the U.S., it is very difficult to get a copy—however, there is a good chunk of fans who have gotten their hands on the game and enjoy it for its amazing blend of hardcore achievement gameplay and short, ten-to-thirty-minute causal play missions.

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My grandmother got me Bully, by Rockstar Games, for Christmas. I eagerly started playing it, and was just about ready to dive into reviewing it for today when suddenly I was struck with the strangest of urges to forget all about Bully and sit down at my computer to play with spaceships.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve dreamed–literally dreamed, like, this was what appeared in my head when I was asleep–about having a tiny, maneuverable craft that could fly through space at warp speeds, letting me jump from beautiful planet to beautiful planet in a few quick seconds of high speed rumbling. This is exactly what EVE Online has been able to offer me. So please understand and bear with me–my enthusiasm for the game is very biased.

However, I have to be utterly honest when I say this is perhaps the most refined MMO experience I have ever played, seen, or could have imagined. EVE Online, with just a few tweaks, could very well be the perfect MMORPG.

I’m going to explain this by using the basics of MMO gameplay. There’s four types of people who are involved in the whole Massively Multiplayer Online experience: Killers, Explorers, Achievers and Socialites. These are the basic psychological and attitudinal gameplay rules that have been analyzed by all kinds of experts such as Richard Bartle, the creator of the Multi-User Dungeon. We all have bits and pieces of each in us, and everyone has a different reason why they play. But for the majority, people have discovered everyone who plays this kind of game has similar motivated goals that drive their experience.

Explorers love to explore. They love to see all the rich and detailed worlds that have been generated by the fantasy game around them. They love finding and claiming new places, knowing where things are that nobody else know. They’re pioneers in the expansion of the game world.

Achievers are determined to beat the game. Not only beat it, but get everything possible. These are the people who get all the epic armor of a single set so they can look monstrously intimidating and almighty.

Socialites are in it to be with people. They love playing with their friends, starting guilds and clubs, knowing and meeting new people.

Killers just want to ruin the game experience for everyone. They find twisted pleasure in breaking the game somehow, or finding a new way to kill people that makes them irritating. They love to be a nuisance–and a successful one at that.

All of these player types fit me almost to a T, leading me to believe that I’m probably simply engineered to be the world’s most MMORPG-tuned gamer. I love every part of an MMO experience, and feel pained when a particular element is missing from the formula.

EVE Online is so amazingly brilliant to me because it misses absolutely nothing. There is nothing the player lacks in experience at all.

Firstly, let’s look at the premise of the game. EVE Online is an MMORPG based around travelling through space, in spaceships. That’s right–there’s no first person shooting, there’s no running around with a sword that’s too big for you. There are no magic points and there are no magic spells. You can’t be a gnome. This automatically turns people away. It seems the term MMORPG is unconsciously supposed to imply ‘ridiculously overpowered barbaric fantasy heroes killing dragons online’. Mega Manly Online Rippling Pecs Games.

In EVE Online, they throw all that fantasy cartoony stuff and throw it right out the window. Your HP bar becomes your ship’s shields and hull strength. When you’re shot down, you don’t come back to life as a ghost–your corporation revives a clone they have of you back in your home base and insert your digitalized mind back into it. You don’t earn experience by fighting–your characters reads books on their own. All you have to do is assign them a skill to learn, and they gain experience points over time, even when you don’t play. Of course, this also means that there’s no faster way of earning those skill sets, which is both the game’s strength and weakness.

So how does this game deliver an almost perfect MMO experience? For Explorers, there’s an entire universe to see, with different stars, planets, mining colonies, everything. It’s massive, and there’s different attitudes of play depending on where you go–going by a security 0 star is officially considered a form of suicide, because of the likelyhood of being shot down. It’s a little bit on the repetitive side, sadly, as there’s no way to see the lush worlds on the planets below. But I’ll come back to that later.

For Achievers, there is an almost ungodly number of things to get. Skills to learn, ships to buy, weapons to upgrade, money to make. There’s always something to do on EVE. You just don’t finish EVE.

Socialites have the ability to form corporations, and work together with corpmates to buy and build and achieve, reach farther than other corporations, and become domineers of the market and the social world. There’s a bit of a problem with this system, but I’ll come back to that in just a few seconds.

Lastly, Killers have the best lot of all. This game is wonderful if you love to break the game for other people. Since you have the option between being a pleasantly legal miner or a government-defiant pirate, you are capable of almost any style of play. I’ve seen pirates launch after swarms of newbies in a flood of destruction. If you can get a ship that’s quick and strong enough, you can easily assault and annihilate anyone of your choosing (provided they don’t warp away in time), making the game delightfully exciting.

But let’s come back to Explorers and Socialites. The experience is great for everyone. It’s great for Explorers and Socialites. But it’s not great enough. EVE has a wonderfully exciting universe that’s expansive and takes time and patience and know-how to navigate. But there’s not all that much to see. I flew my ship across solar systems, visiting planets, asteroids and space stations. The space stations were all beautiful. The view from space was magnificent. And then it was over. That was it. There were still places to go in the universe, but really–it’s the universe. How different are things going to get from one solar system to the next? The problem with this game is that it lacks the minute depth of something like SPORE for the explore-phile. People want to go down to the planets, look around, see the views, paint the landscapes.

A similar thing happens with Socialites–they have the power to make their own chat channels, to make corporations, to have connections all across the galaxy–but they can never really see their friends face-to face. EVE Online has a beautiful customization menu that allows you to make the most diverse and exciting characters I have ever seen in a game with customization. But all that work is then demoted to a simple profile picture, and no-one will ever see your character’s animated, fully rendered face.

The EVE Online team is currently working on a new expansion (just after releasing the Trinity expansion, jeez) which will supposedly allow players to get out of their ships and walk around in the interior of space stations and interact with other player models. That’s really exciting. I’m praying on that expansion, because I believe it may very well be what EVE has lacking that will make it pretty much the ideal MMO game.

I played through two weeks of the trail version over the winter break. It didn’t take me very long to realize how much strategy and depth there is to EVE gameplay, even though people continued to insist that newbies couldn’t understand the game until they played for at least six months. When my trial expired, I thought, “This is an amazing game. I could spend the rest of my life playing this game.” So I didn’t renew my account. I can’t. It’s dangerous–I may end up sucked into another WoW addiction that I just can’t handle. So I’m giving up EVE–because it’s simply too good, and will take up too much time. I can’t afford to be dedicated to that leisure right now. I mean, I need to review a game weekly! Not only that, but I already keep my WoW needs stifled because I simply can’t pay monthly fees–I don’t have enough budget to do so.

The Trinity expansion was recently declared “The Best Game of 2008.” I have to say, I agree. EVE really left me with nothing but positive impressions. I can’t wait till the new expansion is released, and the worlds will all become fully explorable and social interactions be heavily facilitated.

My final verdict on the game: if you want an MMO that’s not WoW and that’s seriously fun, get EVE. If you like space, get EVE. If you have free time, get EVE. It’s worth it.

And I will envy you.

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It’s done. My critical analysis of SPORE is complete. I promised I would finish it… about a year ago? Well, I’ve had to do some soul searching. And some gaming. And I had to graduate, settle into my job, decide whether or not I was happy with where my life was going…

Anyway, read the critique. It’s here: http://blog.ortizgames.com/gamecrit/the-controversial-spore/
Thanks for the patience, lads and ladies!

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I am currently writing about SPORE (I really am – I really want to) but in order to get rid of a bad writer’s block, I’ve taken a breather from it and am writing about something else first.

Today, I want to bring up Torchlight.
I’m fascinated by the outburst the game caused around the gaming culture – Steam users especially, since it seemed to be a Steam “event” and it’s been called “Valve’s latest obsession”. There’s been excitement all around about being able to deck out your character in amazing armor, being able to get all these awesome weapons with magnificent effects, how lush the textures are and how addictive and fun the game is… but the thing that bewilders me is about people being enthralled with Torchlight is that it really brings nothing new to the table.

Torchlight is Diablo. In fact, it’s so much like Diablo that I might dare suggest it’s a phenomenon similar to the Waiting-On-Warhammer syndrome for a lot of players that are Waiting-On-DiabloIII. It’s the game in between, while people anxiously await more news from Blizzard about their third installment of America’s Classic Dungeon Crawler. There is practically no difference between Diablo and Torchlight, and even the pet system is taken directly from Fate, another Diablo clone.

It’s not a flawed game by any means, but it’s a little bit like playing an enhanced version of Monopoly. It still looks and feels and plays like Monopoly, no matter how upgraded the graphics may be and how smooth the game runs and how pretty the armor is.

I’m not saying Torchlight is bad. On the contrary, it’s a pretty fun game that keeps me entertained and I was more than half tempted to buy the full version of the game for myself so I could continue playing it (Hardcore Mode allows you to play with Permadeath and Lord knows I like a good challenge) but in the end I decided to opt out merely because I realized I could get much the same experience by playing Diablo II which is a game that came out nine years ago.

The fact that people that continue carbon copying games that came out almost a decade ago really grinds my gears sometimes, especially because it happens so often and so much in today’s industry. Right now, today, seven of the top sold video games on the charts are remakes and sequels with overused, rehashed game mechanics that may essentially be the same game (including Uncharted 2 – regardless of how good the game is it is almost exactly like Uncharted and you cannot ignore that fact) and the other three games are Wii Sports, Sonic and Mario at the Olympics and Borderlands, which essentially draw their own mechanics from plenty of other games in the past like any sports games in general, Olympics simulators and… something (let’s not start on Borderlands).

How did Mario and Sonic at the Olympics hit the top 10? Is it on sale or something? An early Christmas present for the kids? Come on, people.

Coming back to reused game mechanics, however, I think Brenda Brathwaite hit just the right note when she talked about getting sick of console gaming and seeing the same game repeated over and over at GeekEnd in Savannah (earlier today at 4:00pm). We are in an age of such repetition and copying that it’s hard to really fall in love with a game anymore. There’s been so few games that have really been revolutionary in the past ten years; we can only draw a handful. It’s the stories that are capturing our interest now, the environments and universes these games provide – and yet, if film can experiment with elements of film all the time, why on earth can’t games?

Returning to Torchlight, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t play it and enjoy it, but I believe its sudden massive following is a result of people wanting to play Diablo III more than its inherent quality. It is Diablo, with a few elements of what Diablo III has been advertising. Conversely, Demon’s Souls, I’ve come to conclude, is undoubtedly a Japanese take on Diablo – a player improves stats by fighting hordes of monsters in dungeons with different levels, avoiding traps and heading deeper and deeper into more dangerous areas, having to head back home to recuperate losses and save their gains; loot-centric item system; dying means you have to start from the beginning. However, Demon’s Souls manages to provide enough of a change in the gameplay and style that most people I’ve brought this up to have scoffed and have had a hard time believing this game could be anything like Diablo. But it is! They’ve merely done a good job of re-presenting it.

This has made me appreciate Demon’s Souls slightly less, but at the same time, I can’t complain. It’s a well made game. I feel the same way about Torchlight. I do like it, but I wish we weren’t so reliant on the same formulas that we’ve relied on for since the birth of the games industry – the same conventions, the same strategies, the same A+ B + C cookie-cutter game ideas that make their way to store shelves every other week.

Let’s come up with something new, eh, industry?

tl;dr: Torchlight is a fine game, but why is it exactly like Diablo? Why are so many games identical nowadays? Why can’t we make a new kind of game?

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Hey, guys!

Don’t think I’ve forgotten you; I’ve just graduated and am now wrapping up a few chores before I can get down and dirty with SPORE, my gaming culture essay and some Beyond Good and Evil.

So as a brief prelude to anything I end up writing this week, here’s a few quick impressions on what we’ve seen at E3 so far:

1) The economy is down, so E3 is very unimpressive. They’re still hyping it up quite a great deal, but coming from the mouth of attendees, E3 is not great this year.

2) Impressions of individual companies’s “big announcements”
Nintendo’s Wii “Vitality Sensor”: The day I need a game to remind me my cholesterol is bad is the day I need to stop playing video games because they’re becoming my mother. The design looks like it may end up being cramp-city. Also, I swear I’ve seen this device before. Didn’t we see a leak preview image of this way way long ago? I’m getting some kind of déjà vu that tells me this should look familiar for some reason.
It’s argued that maybe it could help the game measure which is the best time to COMPLETELY THROW YOUR WORLD TOPSY TURVY like in a jump-spooks horror game, but considering we’re dealing with Wii graphics and Wii hardware here, how smart could the game possibly be for this? Let’s not forget, Super Mario Galaxy may have looked great, but the AI (was there any?) was pretty much limited to “Here Comes Mario, Beat Him Up”. Resident Evil 4 had that same idea down: “Here Comes Leon, Walk Sluggishly Forward And Attack Repeatedly”. Then again, somehow Capcom made it work with Monster Hunter Tri, too.
So, Nintendo, any examples on how this thing will work? What actual uses it has?
Enough speculating; let’s move on.

Sony’s WiiMote: It’s basically everything the original Nintendo WiiMote was supposed to be in its proof of concept video, only with dorky colored balls at the end of it which I suppose are part of the capture process. But of course, if it’s a visual mocap process, there will be horrible glitches involved as with any motion capture technology, which makes me wonder why we are still bothering with freaking motion sense technology. At least they had a technical demo. It made Nintendo’s and Microsoft’s presentations look laughable at best–then again, it’s just a tech demo–the actual product won’t be out until Spring 2010, which means there’s nothing coming this year. Except Heavy Rain. Of course. Which looks as amazing as ever.

Microsoft’s Wiimote “Project Natal”: This is basically an awesome futuristic idea that will never work because Microsoft can’t make it do half of the things in this proof of concept video with any accuracy. It is a wonderful idea, don’t get me wrong. If this actually ended up being what this video makes it out to be, I will personally send a letter of apology to Microsoft, purchase an Xbox 360 and shut up. But I’m quite sure this will not be what it will be like–it’s a proof of concept video, used for patent purposes more than anything, and the likelihood that it gets up and running before Microsoft gets set on releasing the Xbox 1080/720/3/THE OTHER ONE is extremely unlikely. This “Project Natal” doesn’t seem to have any working prototypes, and might as well be Duke Nukem Forever with the amount of working product we’ve seen.

In short, E3 this year is pretty much how I felt yesterday, standing in GameStop, scanning the shelves and realizing I really didn’t want to be there. We’re hitting a low point. The economy is bad. The games are bad. The future looks boring.

We need saviors.

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I’ve moved!
Welcome to the new home of It May Even Be in Our Time. We have a new look and a new address, new space and a new layout. And CSS! Soon to be integrated into the new OrtizGames layout, as well. Get ready to have your mind blown.

Part of this new kick in the rear for me is the fact that I’m graduating come May, and I need to have my portfolio site set up. Another part of it is the fact that my last post was in 2008 and I have not been able to really deeply analyze something in video games for even longer. My game designer streak needs attention. I need to write. Assassin’s Creed II is coming out and someone needs to complain about it.

Looks like this is a job for, wait for it, Superman.

No, seriously, I’m coming back. Just give me a month to update the freaking site.

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Imagine my surprise, logging on to my newsfeeds, reading over them in a semi-sick state with my throat in shambles, my nose congested, my attitude generally sour and so much work on my plate it is not at all funny, when I stumbled across this article on Gamasutra mentioning the debut of my hometown game developer, Xibalba Studios. As some of you might remember (most of you won’t) I worked with Xibalba Studios for a tiny bit as an intern level designer, and I got to see a bit of the development of their new title, Icebreakers. I’m very happy to see it revealed at EGS ’08 in Mexico City, and I’m looking forward to seeing the actual product released in 09.

If you haven’t already clicked on any of the links I’ve posted, do so, and look it up! Or Google “Icebreakers Xibalba” for a variety of different news sites, including this one (has a small screenshot), that all happily report the release.

Other than that, my SPORE review (and review of everything else for that matter) is on extended hiatus until I can get my ridiculous workload out of the way.

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I’m building a game. I don’t have time to document it because I am so behind in production. It will be posted here when it is released. It will be interesting. You will be able to let your kids play it. I hope you like it.

Also: http://www.mcvuk.com/news/32048/360-can-handle-MGS4-says-Microsoft

Reply:

Courtesy of: http://www.picturesforsadchildren.com/index.php?comicID=184

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I realize I haven’t been posting a SPORE review like I said I would. I’ve been floundering under work and school. I really need a vacation.And this is my vacation. If only this weren’t a Wii game. Curse you, Capcom. Within a year, I may actually have a purchase a Wii solely for this game.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1646312&w=425&h=350&fv=]

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