My fascination with hand held game systems stems from my childhood, when the very first video game system I ever owned–in all its monochromatic glory–was the original Gameboy. I treasured the two hours a day that my parents allowed me to spend on it, and my adoration clouded my judgment of the mostly crappy games I played on it.
Fast forward eight years, and now I have enough disposable income to actually buy these things on my own.
Insightful commentary after the jump! (more…)
So the other day my girlfriend offered up an interesting proposal to me. She would use her birthday money to buy my iPod Nano (at a slight discount) and I would spend an extra 50-70 bucks to upgrade to an iPod touch. Brilliant! But here’s the catch.
My iPod has been exhibiting…interesting tendencies since a couple weeks after I bought it. At random times the scroll wheel won’t respond to my delicate stroking. It will still move, but it randomly jumps around instead of smoothly scrolling. For example, if I’m trying to adjust the volume (and it starts out at max volume) touching it will cause the volume to jump down to the halfway mark, and then ‘scrolling’ the wheel will make the volume skip back and forth between the halfway mark and about the 3/4 mark. If I continue trying to move the volume up, the volume will continue to skip up and down the bar, slowly moving farther and farther down the bar with every jump until it mutes the sound.
Weird huh? The same thing occurs if I’m trying to navigate through the menu system. If the top menu choice is highlighted (i.e. ‘Music’ on the main menu), trying to scroll down to ‘Podcasts’ is nearly impossible. I have to scroll to the option, keep my finger on the scroll wheel at the desired position, then with another finger push the center button to go into the sub-menu. If at any time during the process I let up on the scroll wheel, the selection jumps back up to the top of the menu column.
Confusing enough? Yeah, if I could just get it to perform when I had my computer handy I’d take a video. In fact, I might just make that my mission this week. Anyway, if any of you guys have had, heard of, or even understand the problem I just described, let me know in the comments. Aaron suggests (and I agree) that I should just take it back to the store and see if I can exchange it. Hopefully that will go as smoothly as it does in my head.
So I bought another toy the other day. A Sony PSP. Yes, now I own two portable gaming systems. Why? So now I can review games from BOTH systems. Yay! (Truthfully, it was an impulse buy…and I had a gift card to my local used game store).
Like I inferred, I bought the PSP used. I got out to my car, popped a game in (Dungeon Seige, Throne of Agony), and started playing. As soon as the opening cinematic ended and I entered the playable game, my half-giant barbarian runs to the bottom of the screen of his own free will and keeps on running even after he gets stopped by a tree stump. I started pushing buttons and toggling the analog stick…and he still kept running straight into the bottom of the screen. Suddenly, he stopped his suicidal marathon and started doing what I was telling him to do. “Weird”, I thought. I played a little further into the game, and again my character started randomly running to the top of the screen of his own volition. I mashed buttons, twirled the analog stick around, and after about 20 seconds the controls started working again. I figured I was just unlucky, and kept on playing. Unfortunately, this pattern of random sprints to the top and bottom of the screen continued for the next hour that I played.
Finally I decided to go back to the store and see if I was just crazy, or if something was wrong with the PSP. The salesdude was very cooperative and after a minute of playing the game and watching Ed the Half-Giant merrily running off into the environment he apologized for my trouble and went and got me another PSP. This one was in better shape, and came complete with a Superman Returns adhesive skin. A handful of paper towels and some Goo-Gone cleaned the likeness of Brandon Routh off my PSP, and I was good to go.
First Impressions
After getting used to the blinding light that is the Nintendo DS screen, I had to bend over and squint to see the PSP’s screen in some of the darker environments of my game when I was playing in the daytime. That was really the only annoying part about the system. Well, that and the fact that you have to dish out more money to buy a memory card if you actually want to save your games. I didn’t realize that fact and inadvertently lost about three hours of playtime the day I bought it. I got a 2 gig memory card for thirty bucks used (new they go for around fifty dollars).
A neat feature that I don’t think I’ll hardly ever use is the built in WiFi and internet browser. Again, you need a memory card to use the internet (you can save images, music, and video to your card for later viewing), and it acts pretty much like a cellphone browser when it comes to viewing websites. After I bought my memory card I went over to a local restaurant and borrowed some wireless internet. I quickly realized that the previous owner of my card had been male, between 13 and 16, and emo. His internet history consisted of porn sites and “emo hair styles for guys”, while his musical tastes included Yellowcard and two other bands I hadn’t heard of. I won’t even get into the videos he had on there. Anyway, none of that’s relevant, it’s just further proof that we’re degenerating as a society.
The PSP game library is what attracted me in the first place. When I heard that a prequel to Final Fantasy VII (FF VII Crisis Core) was coming out for PSP, I got excited. When I found out I could play GTA, MGS, Burnout, and other more console-centric titles on this thing, I got even more excited. I’ll save my Nintendo DS/PSP comparison for another post, but the distinction between the two systems is never more evident then when you look at the game selections. MarioKart and Pokemon on the DS, Madden, Splinter Cell, and Burnout on the PSP.
While I’m still not sure it was the smartest purchase within the bounds of my budget (tsk tsk, I know), I’m having a ton of fun playing it and I’m looking forward to trying out some more games.
We at Hijinks Inc wish all of our readers safe and prosperous year.
In keeping with the tradition of making New Year’s resolutions (and promptly breaking them two weeks in) I’ve made my own list of soon to be broken promises.
1. Post once a week.
2. Use my gym membership
3. Live on 60 bucks a week while I’m going to school
4. Stop being a slacker (see 1 and 2)
Got any New Year’s resolutions you’ve made? Think you keep them for longer then a month?
In lieu of any meaningful content to present, I’ve finally decided to break my posting trend with something completely pointless: Commentary on video games!
Hellgate: London
First off, it’s not 3D Diablo. Honest. Even if it’s made by the same guys who developed Diablo 2, and you’re using exotic weapons to kill all manner of hell-spawned demons and undead, it’s not D2. Why? Well…we’re really not sure, but it’s not. Truth be told, while it may be unfair to compare the two games, the comparison is inevitable as the Patriots winning the Super Bowl this year. And unfortunately for Bill Roper and the gang, the game doesn’t come close to the polish of the original. It could, and at times you think it does, but you never get the feeling of belonging to the world you’re playing in.
I got hooked into (not onto) the game after listening to an interview of Bill Roper by the guys over at the 1Up Yours podcast; I came away really excited about the game, and started watching trailers and reading previews like a Flagship fanboy. Thing is, After dropping fifty bucks and spending twenty-thirty hours playing it, I’m not really feeling the quality of “this is awesome” that I expected to. I came into the experience really really wanting to like it, and that managed to carry me through the first week or so of playing it, but now I’m not feeling the urge to pick it back up at all.
Let’s get down to specifics.
The graphics? Pretty, but the dark and dank does get a little old after a while. I guess I can’t expect anything else from a game set in post-apocalyptic London though.
Gameplay? Fun, especially the evoker and marksman classes. My main is a guardian, mostly because it’s the easiest to play and hardest to die when lag strikes. Which brings me to the first of my big concerns. I don’t know if it’s the servers or if it’s because I’m playing the game over a DSL connection, but the lag is ALWAYS horrendous. Usually anywhere from a 1-15 second delay between my mouse-click in real-time and the response in the game. This might have gotten fixed in the past week that I haven’t been playing, but I doubt it. I honestly haven’t even tried to play a different class any farther then the first five levels online because I know I’ll do nothing but die in the later levels if there’s any lag in the game. Guardians do better when surrounded, evokers? Not so much.
Second big concern: no skill reset. In a game where skills make up EVERYTHING about your character, the lack of a reset button is nothing short of freakin’ ridiculous. If I have to pay 10,000 pallidum to do it, sure. Whatever. Just get that feature in the game and live as soon as possible. Especially in a new game when you really have no idea how all the skills work together in actual gameplay, its just stupid to expect players to put 50-70 hours leveling a character to fifty just to try out ONE set of skills. Please Flagship, please Bill Roper, do the smart thing.
The other thing people are complaining about is the lack of subscriber content. Since I’m not a subscriber and don’t plan to be, that really doesn’t concern me. My only hope is that the game will be patched to it’s full potential before too long. Because dang it, I need something to keep me occupied until Starcraft 2 comes out.