OrtizGames

SPORE works. Oh, God, I was so convinced the problem was my video card, but after Googling a little, I learned about a community of people that were having the same issues, and by using a simple yet retarded fix I managed to install the game and have it work. It doesn’t run spectacularly on my PC; it’s at lowest settings, and even then it has laggy moments (so maybe I should get the XG Station anyway?) but it runs, dear God, and I’m so happy that I finally have the chance to play. I’ve been out and about all today, fretting over being able to get home and play at 8pm. I’ve only made it to the Creature Stage.

But learning all about the issues and bugs in SPORE and the features that have been lacking in the final version, I’ve become thoughtful as to what problems must have arisen in its development, and where focus has been placed in the game design in order to refine particular aspects of the game that were considered core to its experience. Why is it plagued with so many glitches, errors and difficulties? Why is the DRM so broken?

I’ll be sure to write up a SPORE critique for you all sometime very soon. For now, I’m going to go into hiding for a few days while I play it.

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My computer cannot run SPORE: a game I have reserved two years in advance and have anticipated like the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.

I’m going to go be very depressed for a while.

[EDIT:] I realize I was too vague with my post, clearly, so let’s elaborate quickly: I have a Hewlett Packard laptop, which has had sufficient power to run a lot of what I’ve given it. It even ran Oblivion at like, ten frames per second. It ran the Warhammer Beta, if with horrible lag. But SPORE simply crashes every time I try running it, and when I checked The System Requirements Lab, it revealed to me that despite my previous assumptions, my ATI Radeon Xpress 200M integrated graphics card simply misses the mark for playing SPORE. It’s just a smidge under requirements, where everything else on my computer is relatively decent. Even my processor isn’t half bad, and it’s a Turion 64, which is nothing compared to a Intel Core 2 Duo.

I was devastated all yesterday, and I’ve really kind of lost hope to be able to play SPORE anymore, except for one small glimmer of hope: the ASUS XG Station, a portable external graphics card and multimedia handler for laptops lacking in the graphics department. According to its Wikipedia Article (which isn’t a very reliable source), the ASUS XG Station has been delayed until sometime mid-September while it’s finished up. This means it could be possible to upgrade my laptop using the external video card and be able to play SPORE. However, I have no idea what the price tag on this thing will be, and considering the video card used in it is $260 USD or so by itself, I’m worried the Station will cost somewhere around $350 dollars or more, a cost I just can’t dish out so readily.

I await to hear more news, but for now, I’m pretty much resigned to not be able to play SPORE until I get a new computer in a couple of years. And that really hurts.

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I had a strange and horrible nightmare last night that revealed several things about myself.

In the dream, I was playing a portable game. It could have been any console. Something like an action RPG with 2D graphics and puzzle elements. I ended up beating the game after what felt like an eternity of seeking treasure and fighting giant tortoises with cannons on their backs (I’m already considering the game possibilities of this) only to be taken back to my village and being offered a magnificent reward: a weapon I could later use by continuing the completed game, so essentially I could keep my prior equipment and do more long quests. In spirit, it sounds like a strange hybrid between Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles and Monster Hunter Freedom 2.

Anyway, the nightmare happened when I was trying to choose which of the legendary weapons of the village I wanted to have. As I was scrolling through them, I got a preview of that the weapon looked like, but nothing on its stats! Its attack power, special abilities and buffs were nowhere on the screen! And I looked around for some button that would give me the info of the weapon before I chose it, but I couldn’t spot any info on the screen, and was terrified to press any button out of fear that I would accidentally select the weapon when I wasn’t ready.

Then I accidentally pressed the back/cancel button, and suddenly the gifting ceremony was over! I was outside, and I didn’t have any of the weapons! I ran around the village trying to find where the ancient weapons were stored and see if I could still have one, but to no avail. Panicked, I tried to remember where I had last saved my game and whether it would be feasable to simply restart my console and try working back up to that point.

In my desperation, I woke myself up and lay there in stupor, thinking that timeless phrase again: “Oh my god, I’m so glad that was just a dream.”

And then I had to think to myself, “Only a game designer would have a nightmare about bad design choices in a screen for selecting a weapon.”

I must be insane.

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I just spent like seven nine hours yesterday playing World of Warcraft. I’m in Mexico with nothing to do for two weeks. I might as well play games. But World of Warcraft the whole day? I really need to play something else. Or do something productive. I guess I’ll go fix Mom’s computer, or something.

Wait, or Monster Hunter. (*finds PSP*)

Someone who is not successful said something that is completely a lie and irrelevant. If exclusives didn’t exist, practically nothing would turn games to one title or the other. It’s getting to the point where everything has the same features and abilities. If exclusives didn’t exist, people would have no reason to buy one console over another, and they’d all end up buying the cheapest one.

They’d buy the Wii. Can you imagine the horror?

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My critique (not review!) of Monster Hunter Freedom 2 is up. Generally, I have nothing but entirely positive feelings about the game. my only wish is that it seriously were an MMO, because the cooperative play available on Monster Hunter is just lovely, and in order to share it with my buddy Squall back in Mexico I need to either open up some seriously elaborate Ad-Hoc connections to my laptop and through the Internet or just go back to Mexico and sit in his room with him and his girlfriend, all three of us clicking away madly at PSPs.

Which is exactly what I will be doing come Sunday, for two weeks.

I want Rathalos armor.

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Please listen.

I’m not one. I never was one. People, if I were a Sony fanboy, I wouldn’t carry my DS around everywhere. It’s in my backpack right now. I’m playing Animal Crossing. I have Jam Sessions. I loved Twilight Princess. I have a Triforce badge and I own original copies of SNES Chrono Trigger and Earthbound.

The thing is, Nintendo has let me down. Check this comic out, and you’ll understand what I’m talking about. Scott Ramsoomair knows it. I know it. We all know it.

And Microsoft has been doing things wrong from the start. Porting games to the PC because you want to sell more copies of your software is not good business for your console. You wouldn’t have to charge for online play if you just let exclusives sell your console. But Microsoft doesn’t care–they seem to just want to crush the competition. They deal out absurd amount of money to turn titles like Final Fantasy XIII and GTA4 multiplatform.

What happened to when we were all calling the Xbox 360 the “Xbox 180″? Why have people overlooked the hardware limitations and the RROD? Have we forgotten how cheap Microsoft has been with us? Are we all going to be hypocrites and pretend we like Halo 3 just because everyone else says they do?

Here’s Halo’s story for you: A race of English-speaking aliens whose ethnic groups don’t look anything alike despite supposedly being the same race put a jihad on humanity for no real reason and follow religious leaders blindly to a giant Ring Planet which is secretly a massive weapon (which, for some reason, is left floating in space, abandoned, and easy to access) designed to starve a race of evil crap that lives on it. A dude with no personality called Master Chief (why have people forgotten how stupid that name was from the original Halo?) blows up the ring planet. Then the aliens invade Planet America and afterwards teleport to another giant weapon, and then there’s seven giant weapons.

Then Master Chief just kicks everyone’s ass, practically alone. There’s also an alien called the Arbiter. He has no other name.

The only reason I’ve stuck with Sony–despite delays, broken promises, lost exclusives and titles that are not as impressive as advertised–is because they still release exclusive content and they still have the best policy and strongest hardware out there, trying to give people more power to play with when developing games, allowing them to do more and more. There’s a lot you can do with a pencil and paper, but Nintendo went for construction paper, and Microsoft turned into a printer. When are people going to realize what painting in three dimensional space can do?

PS3 is my only hope for this Next Generation. Come on, guys. Just try to break out of the box and look at the situation.

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Instead of posting anything about recent news over the past couple of weeks I have been busy avoiding all contact with the outside world, since I have simply needed a break. However, I can’t continue running forever and sooner or later I would have to come on and talk about the recent explosion that has happened this summer in the form of So Much Cool.

The first stage of So Much Cool came when I got my hands on Monster Hunter 2 Freedom for the PSP, which I will be reviewing promptly–as soon as I can stop playing World of Warcraft again, since I could not resist the grind and already have a new Warrior up to level like, 15. MH2F is an amazing game. I have been geeking out over it for the past two weeks. If playing online wasn’t such an ordeal (especially with my absolutely shoddy connection down here in Mexico where I get 4,000 ping in World of Warcraft–I mean, come on) I would be giving this game Grade A points. But I’ll talk about MH2F later this week.

Part 2 of So Much Cool was the release of Metal Gear Solid 4: Sons of the Patriots. I have never seen the Internet this excited. Well, I have, but over a game, never. Post after post on blog after blog is about MGS4 and IGN’s perfect score rating for it. I, unfortunately, am not one of those lucky enough to have a copy of the game since launch date, but my good buddy Squall assures me after having beaten the game last night that it is spectacular. His only worry is that it is a great deal of servicing the fans, and he wonders whether a non-fan would appreciate the game in the same way.
Luckily, I’m not a hardcore MGS fan–I’m absolutely awful at sneaking and I have never owned the games–though I did try to play Squall’s MGS1 copy on my computer only to have it fail epically. I do know the entire storyline after having analyzed and researched the whole thing along with Squall, but I’m pretty sure there’s things I don’t know and I’m definitely sure it’s not the same as playing the game. So depending on how I react, we can make some safe assumptions about how accurate 10/10 may be.
I’ll be getting the game sometime in the last days of June, so we’ll wait and see.

The last stage of So Much Cool has been the release of the SPORE Creature Editor and the upcoming demo release on June 17. Details:

I don’t want to be an advertisment here, but download the demo on June 17, for your own sake. The Creature Creator is a ten dollar buy and it’s just indescribably awesome, but considering the demo is released in two days you might as well wait for something free, especially since you can already preorder the game from EA’s Online Store. Launch date for SPORE: September 7, 2008.
The game works on my computer–and not only works, but works on a decent resolution with pretty stellar graphics and I was able to make a lovely number of different creatures. I am just thrilled. I was so afraid I wouldn’t be able to play the game on my computer. But Will Wright loves me, I keep forgetting, and would never let me suffer that way.

This is such an action-packed summer, and already up ahead are the release of the In-Game XMB for PS3, Killzone 2, LittleBigPlanet, Resistance 2, SPORE for PC and Final Fantasy XIII and XIII Versus.
Slap Gran Turismo, GTAIV and Metal Gear at the beginning of that, and this is my favorite year ever.

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I can’t talk right now. I’m too busy applying for an internship, applying for scholarships, turning in midterms, working on commissions (due May) and playing Metal Gear Online.

MGO is my only salvation. My nerves are shot and I’ve worked myself down through the skin this weekend. Come Wednesday everything should be turned in, however, and I will be able to breathe once more.

Holding breath until then.

Wish me luck.

MGO is awesome, by the way.

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Gallery Page has just been uploaded. It’s not all that presentable yet, but the files are on it and you can view my portfolio. So that’s all good.

More to come later. I’m at work and very sleepy.

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I learned that if I Google the phrase “Don’t buy a 360″ in quotation marks, the very first link is my blog. Is this the message I’ve been conveying to people? I mean, the article it links to isn’t even telling people not to buy a 360, but rather is a complaint about something Microsoft customer service did.

Wow. I guess I really am severely biased against the 360. I suppose since all I really want for it is Bioshock and Mass Effect. If I wanted more games on it, I might be less inclined to dismiss it.

Such is life.

You learn something bizarre every day.

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