Virtual Adept

My latest reviews at Game Chronicles:

Alpha Prime, first person shooter for PC.

Conan, action beat-em-up for PS3 (it has a 360 ver also).

My Spanish Coach - learn to speak Spanish on the DS.

My French Coach - learn to speak French on the DS.

My Word Coach - learn to speak English better (bigger vocabulary) on the Wii. Also on the DS.

Sam & Max 201: Ice Station Santa - the latest adventure for the comedic duo, for PC.

Figured I haven’t written about gaming in a while so I would post up what’s going on.

I already wrote about my new custom firmware PSP which still rocks. I have been playing the old Sega Genesis game Shadowrun on it quite a bit and love how well the emulation works both in terms of interface and speed. Being able to use save-states to save / load anytime makes things much nicer for this otherwise potentially frustrating game (insta-kills are not too uncommon in the early game so being able to save often is a huge plus).
I figured out what was going on with my Wii - I had a messed up wii-mote. It sort of works but not 100%. But I guess I’ll keep it for use in multi-player tho I might want to leave it for the 3rd or 4th stick of last resort type thing. Played quite a bit of Red Steel with the new remote and it is pretty fun. I am stuck now in a puzzle where I can’t figure out how to get out of a room so I may need to look at a walkthru soon. Still need to finish Zelda and now Metroid Prime 3 is out so that’s another potential time-waster on the near horizon for me (it’s in my GF que). Wii Sports is awesome in multiplayer. But mostly my Wii has just kind of gathered dust, it’s my least used console of my this-gen ones.

The PS3 is actually quite fantastic. Mainly because the BD player rocks. We’ve been renting BD (Blu-Ray Disc) movies from Netflix lately. The quality of the picture is amazing. Just need to update my sound system so I can get that True-HD surround sound stuff. But anyway it looks great. And Resistance is pretty fun, I went ahead and did “buy-it” on GFly for that. I also picked up Untold Legends for it and downloaded Tekken 5 for it. I hope to rent Warhawks next I think. The Darkness looks pretty sweet on PS3 also, maybe better than the Xbox 360 version, but I am so used to the 360’s controller I may keep all my FPS games on that platform (except the PS3 exclusives like Resistance). It’s kind of sad the most of the better games for PS3 seem to be multi-platform and most of the great exclusives promised at E3 2005 have still not seen the light of day.

As for Xbox 360, I have been playing the crap out of it lately, with Bioshock, probably the best single-player FPS ever made, or at least as good as Half-Life 2 which was my previous favorite FPS. The graphics and sound is amazing in Bioshock and the story and setting are very cool. Gameplay has a lot of different options for letting you choose how to play also. Overall Bioshock is a great spiritual successor to the greatness that was System Shock.

Another great 360 game I’ve been spending time with is Blue Dragon, which is the long anticipated Japanese style RPG by the team at Mistwalker which worked on a lot of the Final Fantasy games. The game does really nothing new whatsoever, but it captures the classic JRPG style so well and is done with such amazing visuals and sound that it is a must play for long-time fans of the genre.

Spent a little time PC gaming but not much, mainly just keeping my WoW characters from losing stuff from their inboxes and I did play a few hours of Advent Rising which was actually better than I figured it would have been but still obviously not a great game. I guess it isn’t a complete waste of time but with so many A+ titles to play I doubt I will finish it. My PC is too long in the tooth for new FPS titles, as Bioshock’s demo has proven to me. I doubt it will be able to handle Crysis either. So I figure I can either just stick to console gaming for a while or upgrade, and most likely the first choice, considering how few PC exclusives are out and fewer still worth bothering about. As long as it will still run Hellgate London I probably won’t bother with an upgrade.

Play World of Warcraft on three monitors?! I sooo need to get this.

Had a really good time this weekend playing EverQuest 2 that I got in the SOE Station Access Collection. Lyndal and I got it at the same time to try out. For one thing we have been using Xfire and/or Teamspeak to do voice chat during the game and that just makes it a heck of a lot more fun. So we got some evil characters up to around level 9 or so in EQ2. Here are some random thoughts about the game.

First, leveling up is way faster than EQ was, but maybe it will slow down a lot later. I think it’s even faster than wow up to 9. Secondly, the game has some very decent quests. Way better than the quests from EQ1. About on par with WoW, really. I enjoyed the quests, especially the one where you have to go murder this guy’s ex girlfriend because since they are for opposing factions he can’t have her so he’d rather her be dead. There were other choice ones, like poisoning a loud mouth dark elf, and of course the standard go kill N mobs, or collect X widgets. But I did enjoy them overall.

The graphics to me are not as good as World of Warcraft. Sure, technically they are fairly impressive, but artistically I just think WoW is heads and shoulders above EQ2 and pretty much every other MMORPG. I also think the animations in WoW are much smoother and nicer looking than EQ2’s. Also the environments are nowhere near as compelling as WoW’s, at least not so far as I’ve seen. I was able to get EQ2 to run in a window much like the way WoW works so that was nice, I like being able to access Firefox or whatever while playing. EQ2 didn’t want to play nice with Xfire though, so I had to disable that.

The bottom line… would I pay $15 a month to play EQ2? Well, in a world without World of Warcraft, for sure, no problem. But I think I still prefer WoW over EQ2. I can see myself getting a toon or two up into the mid teens or early twenties in EQ2, though, because it is pretty fun. I will say that EQ2 is so far the best MMORPG I’ve played besides World of Warcraft, even better than City of Heroes which I liked a lot. So if you don’t like WoW for some reason and still want a fantasy MMORPG, check it out.

Here is a nice review of Titan Quest, the latest Diablo 2 style game for the PC. I tried the demo for this and was pretty impressed, so I bought the game. But I haven’t had time to sit down with it for much quality time. My initial impressions of it are that it’s a very good D2 style game, and if you liked Diablo 2 you should definitely take a look at the demo at least.

Here is a great article airing out some “dirty laundry” between Alienware and HEXUS, a hardware reviews site. Apparently HEXUS gave an honest review of one of Alienware’s recent PC’s, and now Alienware isn’t going to send them more review hardware. So reviewers take note: if you want to keep getting the nice toys you better just keep your keyboard shut about anything unfavorable to Alienware. And readers, keep this in mind when reading anything about Alienware PC’s from now on.

Update: Alienware responds to try and save face.

Leveled up my mage Xashi on Argent Dawn from 22 to 24 today. I’m really just killing time until Melingko levels up to 42 or 43 or so, so that he can adventure with Ami, my 43 NE Hunter. I really need someone to come join me in WoW. If you are on Argent Dawn or want to be on Argent Dawn, a fantastic RP server, then shoot me a comment so we can hook up. Pick up groups can really be a pain sometimes.

I recently resubscribed to World of Warcraft in anticipation of the imminent release of the expansion pack, The Burning Crusade. Well now Blizzard has decided to delay the expansion until January. Bummer. On the plus side, this means I’ll probably actually be able to log into the game over the holidays.

Quoting YouNEWB about EA’s latest online shooter, Battlefield 2142:

When you open the box, a big slip of paper falls out first, preceeding any discs or manuals. The slip of paper says, essentially, that 2142 includes monitoring software which runs while your computer is online, and records “anonymous” information like your IP address, surfing habits (probably via cookie scans), and other “computing habits” in order to report this information back to ad companies and ad servers, which generates in-game ads.

This is an outrage. I can’t believe anyone will sit down for this. I hope this game tanks and tanks badly, sending a message to those asshats that we’re not putting up with this shit. This makes me want to start a bonfire and toss every EA game I ever bought into it. I feel ashamed of having bought Burnout Revenge recently.

Oh well, now is the time to change. I won’t be buying any more EA games until they remove this from Battlefield 2142 and make a public apology, and make a public promise never to use spyware in any of their products ever again. I doubt that will happen, considering how little EA respect’s gamer’s privacy on Xbox Live. Gamers, do not give up your rights. You can live without this game, there is no way one game is worth handing over your life’s details to EA.

Had an opportunity to play World of Warcraft again for the first time in a long time. I played one of Lyndal’s characters while we tried out Xfire and Teamspeak with WoW with mixed results. Teamspeak worked well, Xfire not so well. It looks like I may decide to just did resubscribe to WoW. WoW looked great on my new computer, which I didn’t have when I quit WoW some 16 months ago. It really brought back memories. I even remembered the quests, heh. I guess it really impacted me in a major way, it’s a powerful game that can do that. Looking forward to Burning Crusade!

I have characters on Thunderhorn and Argent Dawn. Thunderhorn I’m horde and AD I’m alliance.

This post is just a list of cool links to outstanding gameplay videos for various games.

Half-Life 2 Portal, Episode 2, etc. Also be sure to watch this one about Team Fortress 2.

Gears of War footage with chainsaw. Gore is back!

The absolutely amazing gameplay video of Assassin’s Creed on the Xbox 360.
Bioshock gameplay video with developer commentary. This could be an awesome game similar to Deus Ex or System Shock 2.

Mass Effect video - the upcomming Bioware RPG for 360.

Zonk on Slashdot writes:

Via GameSetWatch, an article at The New Gamer talking about comfort games. These reliable, fun titles are the old favorites you consistently look to for amusement and solace after a bad gaming session, a bad day, a bad week. From the article, with the author’s comfort games: “Mega Man 2 - This Capcom classic has been with me since I was a kid, and I know it like the back of my hand. I’m sure that, if blindfolded, I’d somehow intuitively be able to maneuver through the levels, but I’d much rather be able to view it in all of its 8-bit goodness and remind myself of the good times.” My current top five would have to be Super Mario World, Half-Life 2, World of Warcraft, God of War, and Civilization IV. What are yours?

This made me really think about the kind of game that stays on my harddrive forever or the kind of game I’ll keep buying again and again if it comes out on new formats. I think Zonk kind of missed the point, considering almost all of his list were games released within the last few years. I hardly see how those games could be considered “comfort games” since they haven’t been around long enough. I would have to say that this kind of game is pretty rare for me, I typically do not have time to go back and replay older games I’ve already beaten before. But there are a few.

5. Empire Deluxe for Windows - the classic pure strategy war game. You have a very abstract view of the battle, with little icons representing tank divisions, infantry divisions, fighter squadrons, etc. Part of the fun is doing random maps and exploring it. Before this Windows version came out I played the old text version for DOS that was a port of the original Unix version. Your units were letters of the alphabet.

4. Doom - one of the first FPS games, and probably the most influential of them all, Doom was a great game with a killer soundtrack and cool enemies. It’s still fun today, I just played some of it again the other night on Xbox Live Arcade. I think my favorite version of this, though, was the ZDoom that added jumping and a few other nice features. Any game that gets remade as much as this you know is good.

3. Master of Orion II - While some may think me a heretic for prefering the second iteration of this classic turn-based space-themed strategy game, this is the one I was raised on and I just love it. I love designing new ships, I love the turn-based tactical space battles, and I love the overall strategic map and messing with economies and learning new technology and all that stuff. I think this game has never been off my hard drive for more than a few months since it came out.

2. Planescape: Torment. This is the best story driven RPG I’ve ever played. An amazing story and the game changes depending on how you play it which keeps the game fresh. I have beat this game three times. There is just something about the setting that draws me in, it is a very unique and haunting place. Just writing this post makes me want to replay the game again.

1. Diablo II + Lord of Destruction - I probably have sunk literally several thousand hours into this amazing time waster. If I had spent all of the time I played D2LOD doing something productive, I’d probably be a millionaire by now. This action/RPG with roguelike elements is as addictive as crack. The whole point is to level up your character and most importantly find really cool phat lewt to equip him or her with. The graphics and art were good at the time but very dated now but that doesn’t matter. It’s still a compelling experience. This game is far better online when playing on the closed realms on Battle.Net.

I’ll also list some also-rans that didn’t quite make the cut but still get re-loaded on my hard drive or have been there for a very long time:

Neverwinter Nights - This has never been uninstalled, still play it, mostly user mods and things. Fantastic game with tremendous replay value. It didn’t make the Top 5 because I never did beat the original story.

Might & Magic IV/V “World of Xeen” - is almost always on my hard drive, I love replaying this gem of an old school party based RPG.

Half-Life - I still play this from time to time. I’ve still never seen the ending, I always quit after about 20 hours into it. Still, the part of the game that I do like I really like and it’s a lot of fun. Someday maybe I’ll even beat it.

Unreal Tournament series - Have had a version of this always installed since the original UT. Right now I have UT2004 on there, and it’s always fun for a quick bot-game if I feel like winning, or jumping online to get my ass kicked if I want a challenge. One of the perfect “I have just 15 minutes” kind of games.

Freecell - I play this game all the time, when I’m waiting for something on my PC and the PC is too taxed to load up a more eye-candy-friendly type game. Really fun solitaire game that you can actually win most of the time if you’re clever.

So enough about me. What are your top 5 comfort games? Tell me in comments!