Are they out of their mind?
19. February, 2010 at 20:13 | In Game, Philosophy, Software | Leave a CommentTags: Games, PS3, Sony
I while ago, I downloaded the demo for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It’s a PS3 game and I like Wolverine, so I was really excited. Whoa, they really spent some time on the levels … lush forests … tree roots, plants … okay, I can’t leave the paths (in games, heroes can’t climb or crawl … see my post on Batman Arkham Asylum *sheesh*).
Anyway. I played a while. Hack’n’slay (you have to chop people to bits with Wolverine’s claws … so he has no brain, either … oh well). Then, there was that helicopter scene. You’re on a rope bridge or an edge or something, I forget. There is this helicopter with the machine guns, making your life (or rather the game character’s life) miserable. So you jump on it, slice the window, pull the pilot out and … chop his head to bits with the main rotor of the ‘copter …
What did you feel in that moment? Please comment below.
I felt: WTF?
In an instant, I found the game revolting. All my impressions about the nice graphics, all the artistic work was washed down with a wave of disgust. To my shame, I continued to play until he end and took out the last boss. Okay, there are special moves and such … but for some reason, I didn’t buy the game and I deleted the demo without hesitation. Later, I saw a game review in TV where they showed a lot of special moves, how to use spikes and your environment to impale your enemies and gore them in various ways. For some reason, they ran it in the afternoon, around 1500.
Frankly, are you out of your mind? I’m not a softy or against so called “killer games” but some time last year, a border was crossed for me. Wolverine. Wet. Bayonetta. Brain-dead games, meant for simple button mashing, asking for the reflexes of a 15-year old but with the graphics of a motion picture.
I’m not sure who pays the money to produce such games. I’m not sure who works on such games. I’m not sure which person at Sony gave their OK for the production or distribution of such games. I don’t care. I don’t care if you think it’s OK. I don’t care if any court think it’s OK.
I’m proud to say that I feel this is WRONG.
Maybe you should read up a bit on how the human brain works. For everyone else, just don’t buy such games. They are a waste of time and money. And while there is no proof that they are bad for your soul, they aren’t any good either. As I said: A waste.
R&C Future: A Crack In Time
16. November, 2009 at 21:00 | In Game | Leave a CommentTags: Games, PlayStation, PS3, Recommendation, RnC
Ah, I like those long game titles. Anyone remembering Leisure Suite Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards? I have a feeling that a title says something about a game. If they care about the title, they care about the game.
Anyway, it’s jump, run and shooting time. Shooting with anything you can imagine and sometimes with things that you couldn’t imagine before. There’s a burp gun, a rocket launcher called “Negotiator”, a robot sidekick called Mr. Zurkon (always complaining that it can’t shoot at the innocent). I like its remarks. “Mr. Zurkon doesn’t need no pesky nanotec to survive, Mr. Zurkon lives from fear.”
Game levels are as colorful and nice as ever. Especially the Great Clock looks awesome with it’s red and gold and reflections. Ratchet finally has some fur on his ears. The levels are also pretty short, there are tons of mini-games, you can go hunt for Zoni’s to upgrade your ship, or Gold Bolts or upgrades for your weapons. Old time fans of the series will find all the good stuff again, like weapons that get better as you use them, pixel precise jumping sequences, there is an arena, and funny comments by the ton. Game play is fluent. I wished more game companies would take care of my time like Insomniac does: While the game installs on the HD, you get to see a long into movie which sets the scene. Two thumbs up for that.
The new stuff is that you can actually fly around space a bit, shoot asteroids for fun (and some bolts), play the main story or idle in some side levels. There are levels for the die hard jump’n'run people and shooter levels. And when I say “die hard”, I mean it. I’m not that bad at R&C but I’ve had to use the skip option once. Some of Clank’s jump sequences in the Big Clock are insanely hard. I must’ve died a hundred times in there. The logic puzzles are usually more simple on the “jump” side but it takes some brainpower to run yourself four times through a level, timing the switching of buttons just right to get all your copied through. And in time. Luckily, you can skip a puzzle. 95% for that one. For 100%, there should have been a way to revisit a puzzle to try it again.
All in all, they kept the great stuff and added a couple of nice, new features. The individual levels are short but plenty, so you can save often or take a break, and won’t have to start all over again.
Recommendation: Buy.
Goodbye Fallout 3
11. November, 2009 at 21:45 | In Software | Leave a CommentTags: Fallout3, Games, PS3, Sony
I made a mistake. A big mistake. I admit it. I shouldn’t have. I still did. I bought the game officially in a store. Sorry. Won’t happen again. Bethesda is now on my “Don’t Buy” list and Sony is close.
What happened. A year ago, I bought Fallout 3 in a shop. It’s a German uncut version. I’d actually preferred the cut version; the splatter effect is probably some nice piece of FX code but blood doesn’t give me much. Can’t have that. I’m in Switzerland and I can’t do as I please. On top of that, it seems my shop sold me the Austrian version. It’s German, too, but different. Somehow. I don’t know. I’m just a stupid gamer. The main difference is that when I buy the addons in Sony’s PSN, then I get something that doesn’t work with my game. Because I must have the Swiss version. Since I’m in Switzerland. And I bought the game in Switzerland. And I have a Swiss PSN account. I think. I don’t know. I’m just a stupid gamer.
So what happens is that I have an illegal copy of the game. Illegal as in “if you’re in Switzerland”. Why Bethesda decided to produce three German versions? I don’t know. I’m just a stupid gamer. I don’t need to know such things. Why were the DLCs available for months for Xbox but not for PS3? I don’t know. Why did everyone say that the DLCs would never come to the PS3? I don’t know. Maybe it was because Bethesda knew what would happen. Or maybe Sony treats them like their customers. I don’t know.
The net result is that I have a game which I can’t upgrade (at least not without illegally creating an Austrian account on PSN). I probably can’t buy the GOTY Editition without loosing my save games. I don’t know for sure. I’m not sure I care anymore. My blood pressure raises when I only see the game box. I buy games to relax, not to heap more problems on my plate. I don’t care who is responsible for this crap. I don’t understand why it’s more cheap for Sony to put some text in the game description (“Don’t buy this unless you have BLES-00399″) instead of checking the list of installed games. It’s also sad that Switzerland doesn’t have any laws to protect customers who buy over the Internet. Sony can put anything in the rules of the PSN and I can only weep. I can’t even sell or ebay things I buy on PSN.
Makes me wonder what happens should I ever have to move back to Germany. Will I have to buy all my games again? Or will Sony be nice and allow me to keep my Swiss PSN account even though I’ll lose my Swiss credit card? Maybe they’ll expect me to live close to the border, so I can still buy games. Or carry the PS3 over, hook it up to PSN via my mobile phone, so I can update the games I bought.
Some more frustration: Fallout 3 has left about 600 save games on my harddisk. It would take me approx. 24 hours to delete them (it’s a process that involves pressing eight buttons in the correct sequence).
Or how about this: I bought a Sony LCD TV because the PS3 can talk to my media server. I was naively assuming that the TV would work just like the console. Well, it doesn’t. I can watch photos and videos on my PS3 but not directly on the TV.
Well done. For some reason, Xbox and Wii sell better than the PS3. I wonder why. The PS3 looks so much better!
Infinity
23. July, 2009 at 21:20 | In Fun, Software | Leave a CommentTags: Games
Every now and then, I stumble over something awesome. Infinity is a MMO a bit like EvE Online but attempting to avoid most of the mistakes. If the game is as great as the images, we’re in for a real treat.
Good Games for the PS3
11. October, 2008 at 21:58 | In Software | Leave a CommentTags: Games, PS3
I’ve recently upgraded to a PlayStation 3. I kept my old PS2, though, since the new PS3 can’t emulate the PS2. I wonder why that is … maybe it’s because Sony is still selling so many PS2’s? Ah, rumors 
Easy to create and hard to kill.
So what good games are there? Here is my list:
- Burnout Paradise City
- PixelJunk Eden
- Ratchet & Clank – Tools of Destruction
- Flow
Burnout Paradise City
Mindless street racing with a high adrenaline level. Ideal to waste a couple of minutes or an hour. Great graphics, no blood, no violence (it’s more like auto scooter) and nice ideas like smashing ads or the super jumps. If you don’t like some events (haven’t managed to win a single race, yet. I excel at kicking other cars off the street), you can simply ignore them and still complete enough of the game to have fun.
PixelJunk Eden
A definitive feel of Tarzan or Spiderman when you want to relax a bit. Simple, fitting graphics, no violence, no agression. All that and at the price it’s a steal.
Ratchet & Clank – Tools of Destruction
My favorite jump’n'run. Lots of insane weapons, Ratchet’s ears look great on the PS3, the story has more depth than usual; not sure I like the depressive realization at the end, though. Judge for yourself.
Flow
Like Eden, it’s a brand new kind of game. One of a kind. I play that when I want to come down from all the stress in my life. Go get it!
Bad games
I’ve got a couple of other games. First, we have the Orange Box with Half Life 2, two of the extra episodes, Portal and Team Fortress. I liked the puzzles in Portal. That games was much too short. I didn’t like Half Life 2 much and I hate the episodes. The story was great, the levels gigantic and intelligent. You could almost always find a way around without getting killed. But the handling … Freeman feels like a block of wood when you move him through the levels: You’ll get stuck all the time at hand rails and stuff like that. Sometimes, he’ll be able to jump on something, sometimes not. Sometimes, he’ll stay on top of a barrel, sometimes not. This sucks. And then those stupid zombie levels. Yeah, I’m stuck in the elevator scene in the first episode. Got killed five times in the dark and now, the games goes where it belongs: The trash.
Resistance – Fall of Man. I like the other games by Insomniac and I like this one, too. It’s just too violent for my taste. I like shooting pixels or push empty cars off the street or zoom down a highway at break-neck speed. I don’t like shooting at people. I finished the game but it left me asking: Is that all? Running around, shooting people, blow up stuff? Is that the result of many years of game evolution? Better graphics?
Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Oh well. Okay, the levels look great. When you scale the wall of the castle, there is a sense of vertigo. It’s breath taking. The jeep escape is a lot of fun. Smart story (mostly). The game character moves smart. You press a button and he takes cover. He’s smart, not a dead puppet like Freeman. He moves as if he was real. Again the violence cooled me off quickly. Too much killing, not enough puzzles.
Death Star in EVE Online
19. August, 2008 at 13:30 | In Software | Leave a CommentTags: EVE Online, Games
Apparently, a group of 4000 players of EVE Online have built a kind of a “Death Star” (a “titan ship” in the language of the game) to rule the game galaxy. Assembly took 8 months in total secrecy and the result was destroyed completely within 3 months.
Why a PC is not a Play Station
30. April, 2008 at 16:13 | In Philosophy | Leave a CommentTags: Games, PC, PlayStation
A few days ago, I bought a game: the Perry Rhodan Adventure (German only). I’m a subscriber of the weekly 64-page novels and yes, I’ve read all 2436 of them.
The game is nice and I can recommend it.
There is just one issue with it: It doesn’t run on Linux. At least not without some pains. First of all, game distributors waste some of the money you pay for a game for a copy protection. I say “waste” because it takes only a few intimate moments with Google to find a patch for this. So the copy protection is a waste of money since it’s so easily circumvented, it’s a pain for the paying customers (like me who can’t play the game) and it doesn’t bother the crackers because they never see it.
So after installing the no-CD patch, I could start the game but it would crash. Fiddling with the options in Cedega didn’t help, so in a last desperate attempt, I tried the “fail safe settings”. Finally, I could enjoy a few hours of gaming.
Final result: After paying good money for the game, I wasted one hour trying to make it work and then three hours to play. That could have been four hours of pure fun.
That’s why I usually only buy games for my PS2. I take the DVD and two minutes later, I can play. Two minutes, because the game has a 1 minute 40 second intro. No installation, no driver hell, no looking for the joystick, no bugs, no crashes, no instant messenger which pops up during the last boss fight and you haven’t saved for an hour.
Blog at WordPress.com. | Theme: Pool by Borja Fernandez.
Entries and comments feeds.
