Hijinks Inc.

Category: Video Games

  • What I’m Playing: Inaugural Edition

    I sat here trying to think of a catchy title for about an hour, but I finally gave up and just wrote the article. My idea for this is to summarize what I played all week in a week-in-review type article every Saturday. Does anyone care? Probably not. Does it create some easy filler content? Oh heck yes.

    Nintendo DS

    Animal Crossing: Wild World. Turn it on, check the mail, check Nook’s, go fishing, get bored, turn it off. Amazingly enough, that’s all you really need to enjoy this game.

    Starfox Command. Five minutes into this game I almost put it back up on eBay for ten bucks and walked away. Ten minutes later, I was having a little bit of fun with it. The biggest downside is the awkward controls (hold the stylus in the left hand and scratch around the touch screen control the Arwing, use any of the other buttons to shoot). If they had forgot about trying to make use of the touch screen and stylus and just make a good port of the 64 game I would have been happier. Darn those game developers and their fanciful ideas of game innovation.

    PSP

    Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII. I love this game. I finished it on normal difficulty (took me 28 hours…and I think about a third of that time was spent doing missions), and now I’m playing through on hard. I thought I had a pretty good handle on the combat after playing through the first time, but the missions are kicking my butt this time around.

    WoW Logo

    World of Warcraft. My interest is winding down again. I can make it about two months before I have to stop playing for a while, and it’s been about a month and a half since I fired up my subscription again. I got my 70 geared up to the point that I could without raiding the 25 man instances with my guild. I just don’t have the time to commit to do that anymore. The most fun I’m having is playing it with my girlfriend every once in a while. That experience has reminded me that I take a lot for granted when it comes to understanding basic mechanics of the game.

  • Handheld Gaming Fevor, Part 2

    Last time I diatribed about the DS and it’s awesome (yet limited) library of games. That thought motivated me a few weeks ago to pick up a used PSP from my local used game store. First game I played was Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony. My first impression was, “Holy crap, these are amazing graphics for a handheld!”

    I played the original Dungeon Siege on the PC years ago, and it’s claim to fame was a beautifully rendered 3D environment with no load times. The PSP iteration of the series met the graphical bar and even looked a little better then the PC experience I had back in 2002. Now granted, DS:ToA was released four years later, but lest we forget, it’s a freakin’ hand held game!

    I’m echoing the sentiments of just about every writer that’s played good games on the PSP when I say that this is the closest thing to a console experience I’ve ever seen on a 2×4 inch screen. I’ve since picked up a trio of new and old games to try out on my new toy. Such as… (more…)

  • Handheld Gaming Fevor, Part 1

    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.

    DSPSPBWDSPSPDSPSPstacked

    Insightful commentary after the jump! (more…)

  • Another New Toy!

    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.

  • Frivolity

    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.

    (more…)