Kittyclysm. Meow all the way to 85.

Finished FFXIII. It’s well done but I didn’t like it that much. The ending was super sweet and I never noticed the logo significance until then. I didn’t go 100%, didn’t really want to. I think twelve was a better game.

Finished Darksiders. Really great game overall. I was only two armageddon blade shards away from the end. I got the abysmal armor set and had no problems with the end boss (one shot). I hope they do another one. It was a great ride although the framerate and feel was kinda weird the whole way through.

Tonbos is playing WoW again. I’m about 20% tempted. But I’ve got some fun productive things rolling on squarism, can’t lose the groove. I’m interested as to what has changed. But I’m not excited about being overwhelmed again. I tried playing again about a year ago and it was a bit overpowering. I just looked at my inventory, all the items, all the things to do and no one really noticed I was back. I don’t think anything will have changed in that regard but I’m interested to see how Kittycylsm will affect the game.

Finished PixelJunk shooter. I was just a few gems away from opening the last boss fight.

Right now, I’m starting back up on Heavy Rain. Then my finish list looks something like this:

• MLB08 (one season)
• Demon’s Souls (I might sell it actually)
• Okami
• Assasin’s Creed 2
• Skate (1)
• Little Big Planet
• Beatles Rock Band
• Rock Band 2

I don’t even want to talk about the unopened list. Hey Batman, I see you.

After having nothing but PC and speaker problems today, my Xbox decided to give up the ghost. Yep, another bunch of red rings staring at me. I’m done with this gen. I tried to buy a slim today but everyone is sold out.

I took the day to rearrange my whole AV setup which took about 4 hours. Try moving your amp around. It’s goddamn impossible without unplugging everything.

On the plus side, my setup is better.

On the down side, I’m outright buying my 2nd xbox which will be the 4th I’ve had.

A waterfall rendered so realistically that I got a glass of water.

I beat Megaman 1 on NES (I cheated).

Megaman is hard as balls. I suck at Megaman 9 and I’ve always sucked at any other one. It’s goddamn twitch shit. I can’t fucking stand elite twitch games. Ok, maybe you are good at megaman, street fighter 4 and all the other games I suck at. Great. You have my respect. But after that, there’s still a game there that I’ve barely seen.

Enter rewind.

Rewind is a feature on emulators that I’ve been slowly noticing. Maybe Braid turned me onto it. I’m not sure. Anyway, it simply rewinds time. Died on some spikes after carefully jumping over 20 blocks? No problem, just back up a few seconds. On one bar of health on the final boss? No problem, patiently rewind 100x and you’ll eventually get it.

So I beat it in one 1up (sorta) and actually had fun doing it. It was so pleasant that I got around to finally beating Gradius too. That’s only taken me since about 1986 to beat it.

Megaman has a great ending song and I’m going to remix it. Next up, Megaman 2? Damn, if only rewind worked on all the consoles …

When the PS2 was the end-all-be-all, I played Gran Turismo to death. I started late in the series with GT3 and loved it. I got 100% and it remains the definitive game that I completed. Then GT4 came out but I didn’t feel the same motivation to get 100% on it. I bought a wheel and had fun with it but it was pretty much the same game with a smoother interface and newer cars.

Who cares? Well it’s kind of a bit of insight into what was going on in the gaming world around this time. The PS3 was in development and Polyphony Digital (the devs of Gran Turismo) were famous for polishing their titles to obsessive levels. It was going to be a huge drought in the definitive racing series. Around this time too was the launch of the 360. Forza 2 was getting good reviews and I picked it up thinking it was going to be a cute diversion like Need for Speed or something like that.

Forza 2 turned out to be a hardcore racing game on par with Gran Turismo’s simulation take on racing games. It has a bit more edge than the weird mature smooth jazz GT style from japan but the gameplay is realistically pleasing to a GT player. I started Forza 2 when it was released (May 2007) and I’ve been racing a few circuits whenever I’ve had time or gotten an itch. So at 2.5 years, it took a long time to finish.

The ending was very weak and excepting the achievement, nothing really happened. I just finished all the races and put it away. Meh. But good game.

When GT5 comes out, I’m going all out with a G27 wheel and racing stand.

With E3 2009 over, a number of game sites are handing out awards and winner badges for their favorite vendor. I have watched and read their coverage and it has organized bulleted points of merit for each. Sony, with their strong line-up of games, Nintendo for their surprise Metroid announcement and Microsoft for their Project Natal. Project Natal with its image recognition wizardry and flashy “product vision” marketing slick sheet shows well with gamers who voted “who do you think did best at E3?”. This is intriguing. Has some kind of veil of deception been thrown on us? Sony and Nintendo had a strong software sequel showcase that is within their core business and MS promises a device that is no more revolutionary than a Wii Motion controller with more bells and whistles.

I am excited about forward progress and I want to have a minority report TV but this is a major software corporation who is copying Miis and remotes. There is nothing to be had that tech demos and mini games haven’t already given us. If the Wii Motion Plus can give us a light saber game then there is no market left for a light saber game where I hold an even more imaginary light saber. I turn a plastic remote into a sword, this is much more exciting than turning air into a sword.

The end-game is appealing. In a living room full of plastic peripherals; wheels, musical instruments, fishing gear, dance floors, tennis rackets, guns and even skateboards are approximated and interpreted as impressionistic clutter. Natal would lay waste to these contextual inputs where only one is useful at a time and all else lay in a closet. One would get upset if a basketball team had 5,000 players on the bench. Natal would abstract away the physical implementation of these plastics and make me become a sign language yoga traffic cop. This is the future but I don’t Microsoft to take me there.

Vaporware is a steamy cloud of water droplets emitting from a hot mouth (drama!). You can polish it up because the budget is limitless. You don’t have to worry about engineering and effort because you haven’t slaved away on anything yet. Everything is possible because no one can warn us of vaporware’s eventual let down. It is hope and blue sky. Burning off this vaporware fog is as easy as asking for a tech demo.

The video that made me buy Scribblenauts a million times is one where they try to break the illusion. Where I saw promises, I now see delivery. The testers of Scribblenauts write down random words and content appears. Precognitive design has happened. An artist built a Kraken and assigned animation to it. This is delivery, this is the work done and delivered into the hands of users. Natal has to have this test administered by skeptics and be able to interpret “Einstein fights God”.

Wow. What a game. Finished the DS remake of the SNES classic Chrono Trigger. 92 on metacritic, I don’t know what the SNES original would get these days but it’d be up there.

I have started it many times and either lost the save or lost track of what was going on. Buying and starting the DS version was a good move. They cleaned up a lot of stuff and the DS has a dependable save game function built into the cart itself.

When I worked in Florida at a Sony call center (hey, that’s a good job down there). I worked a 4pm-2am shift. There was a guy there who loved Chrono Trigger. He played it on an emulator while waiting for calls (I’m sure he had beaten it many times). I remember asking him what it was. He was very nerdy and nice at the same time about it. I must have seemed like such an outsider. This was in 1999. 10 years later I finally get around to beating it.

I followed a walkthrough and that made it much easier to find all the secrets etc. But it really wasn’t needed. It was fun seeing “omg massive damage” at the end but it was really a cake walk. I grinded a little bit at the end to get infinite strength capsules while listening to TWiT for 2 hours but it was more radio listening than playing. In the end, I had about 26 hours logged. Not horrible at all.

The game is very symbolic, er maybe not symbolic. I guess I mean they have circular and emotional story elements that very much make the game seem bigger than it is. For a game that is very dated, it still does a lot with sprites and cheap 2D effects. I’m glad to have this one packed away. Maybe 10 years from now I’ll beat it again.

2019. It’s a date.

Beat Grand Theft Auto 4. Goddamn is it good. One of the most compelling characters in anything I’ve ever seen. Niko Belic is a character that sticks with you. Good acting, good design, good game programming. It’s bigger than this blog is so I don’t need to go on about it.

I skipped the pigeon shooting in GTA4. It’s a mini game where you go around the city and shoot the “flying rats”. There are a crap-ton of them so I was marking them off in a digital map with a photoshop clone named Pixelmator. My little system was working great until I counted up how many I had left. My count was 57 and the game’s count was 58. That means I marked one down wrong. I spent some time backtracking but it was too much to deal with. Finding a missing bird is harder than finding a bird (and they are already hard to find). A bird that exists at least has a red glow on it and a missing bird is not as obvious. So I gave up on the whole goddamn thing.

The image above is from Beyond Good & Evil. Hmm, how to describe BG&E. I’ll keep this short. It’s an underrated and undersold adventure game from Ubisoft. It’s not as good as the fans say imo. I enjoyed parts of it (like the parts near the end) but it’s not the underdog that everyone says it is. I found it very frustrating and not that engaging. It had a very european developer feel to it (nothing wrong with that). It was just a little bit off most of the time. The controls were weird, the game engine didn’t keep up and the camera and level design was like playing blind pinball. I nearly sold it but then took it off the sell pile to put a nail in it. I’m just glad it’s done.