Let's talk about Comcast
There's been a glut of introspective, tangentially gamey moping around the site lately. Allow me to pile on!
Borrowed from failblog.org
As a newspaperman, I'm not destined for great wealth, but because I have no dependents, my salary is enough to cover a few luxuries. A paper snapped me up straight out of college, and for a while, I made enough to live and buy anything I needed from Pennsylvania. Which is to say, movies and videogames and books.
I quit that job to move to California in 2007 and soon found a similar position in Palo Alto, but fortune compelled me to quit that job, too. I was homesick, plain and simple, though I keep telling people that I ran out of money. I've told that lie so many times that I almost believe it, and I'll probably tell it again and again, but that's another issue.
Long story short — in March 2008, I was jobless and flat broke. I picked up a couple freelance gigs, which brought in enough to live for a few months, but videogames and cable and whatnot were out of the question.
Then the paper here mercifully hired me back, this time as a reporter, and I had disposable income again. For lack of a better metaphor, it was like taking a gigantically deep breath after spending a year underwater.
I say all of that by way of preamble to make sure you understand how important it was for me to become a cable subscriber. I’m a freak about TV who develops a serious backlog in the fall and winter months, and an HD lineup with a TiVo-like solution was precisely what I “needed” at the moment.
I signed up for a monthly package with Comcast that included digital cable, “high-speed” Internet (also known as "plain old fucking Internet, people"), a handful of HD channels, a DVR box for myself and a standard cable box for my roommate. That totaled to $105 a month — a little steep for cable and Internet, I thought, but something I could swing with the help of a roommate.
Well, that lasted a year. My monthly bill jumped in August 2009 from $105 to $170 because my “specials” expired, and the actual rate would climb to nearly $200 in a few more weeks.
I balked at my local Comcast office, hoping the right mix of determination and incredulity might persuade the customer service rep to a) take pity, b) shit his/her pants about not hitting his/her September quota or c) both.
The outcome: none of the above.
Jumpman Review: "New Super Mario Bros. Wii"
I missed Mario. Sure, there's been a great Mario game on each of Nintendo's last three consoles, but it's just not the same when he's in three dimensions. Mario is the one character that I don't want to see punching bad guys in the face. NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII gives me the chance to stomp on goombas again.
Not much has changed. Bowser has stolen Princess Peach, again, and Mario will stomp on any residents of the Mushroom Kingdom who get in the way. And if you haven't played a Mario game since SUPER MARIO WORLD was released nearly 20 years ago, don't worry.The title character has a few new costumes, and he's learned how to jump off of walls, but he's still Jumpman at heart.
In addition to the fire flower and super mushroom common to all Super Mario games and the tiny mushroom that showed up in the Mario for Nintendo DS, New Super Mario Bros. Wii introduces an ice flower, a propeller suit and a penguin suit. The ice flower lets Mario freeze most bad guys into blocks of ice. When in the penguin suit, he shoots ice, swims quickly and can slide on his stomach. In the propeller suit, Mario can shoot straight up in the air and float down. Unfortunately, to get Mario to spin, you have to shake the Wii remote up and down, which isn't precise or very natural. It's not going to kill you often, but it is going to happen once or twice.
The propeller suit is handy, but handles poorly.
But aside from that one irksome control scheme, New Super Mario Bros. Wii oozes polish. Most levels are short, tightly designed obstacle courses that can be dashed through at full speed if you have the skill, and confidence, to jump at each right moment.
Three big coins are hidden in each level, and the coins can be traded for movies in Princess Peach's castle in the first kingdom. These movies are worth unlocking. Some of them reveal the big coins you haven't found yet, some of them reveal secret level exits, but the most interesting ones are the super skill videos that show off amazing precision work by people playing the game. The skill videos are fun to watch and give you ideas for how to up your game, which is important for the multiplayer portion of the game.
Players can work together to play through the game in coop mode, they can compete for scores, kills and coins in free for all, or they can compete for coins in coin battle
Luigi controls the lights while everyone else plays the level.
No mode works well well with two players. My roommate and I did little more than send each other to our deaths when we tried to help each other in coop mode. And if one player has more experience with the game, coin battles and free for all are lopsided and frustrating for the other player. A third or fourth player makes each mode more chaotic. That detracts from coop, but evens the playing field during coin battles and free for all because weaker players can conspire to doom the better players (like Luigi, the jerk).
It's a testament to Nintendo's polish that neither single nor multiplayer mode feels tacked on, and it's hard to say which style of play is more enjoyable. Among the multiplayer options, coin battle is the clear winner for me, but my solo playthrough was only broken by sleep and work. If you have access to three friends who want to play the game, use them, but it's not a big deal if you don't. Either way, "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" is an ode to the two-dimensional side-scrolling plumber platformers of the 8- and 16-bit consoles, and I couldn't be happier.
No dragons yet, but I'm full of hope
In the past two weeks I've been playing a lot of Dragon Age and a bit of Borderlands. But mostly Dragon Age. Cause it's pretty great, and I hear there be dragons.
BORDERLANDS
Ben and I did the first co-op lap around Borderlands. For a while he had a pair of game-unbalancing revolvers, and I'd have one kill for every three or four of his. But things had mostly balanced out by the last hour or so of gameplay. The end of the game surprised both of us, but that probably has something to do with our tendency to take quests without reading them very carefully.
My only real complaint with the game is that I wish I had more target variety. I killed so many soldiers and bandits. There's little aggressive wildlife besides the skags, and Eridians are rare until the end. There's great variation within the groups, but once you figure out a group's dynamic they're pretty easy to pick apart.
This is me. And this is my gun.
I'm playing through by myself as a berserker. I'm going down the punch-things-really-hard skill tree because I prefer shotguns to rocket launchers. I can take quite a bit of punishment before going down. The play dynamic is very different. I spend very little time hiding behind things now. I just run into the middle of things and hope I can knock everybody out before my meter runs out.
DRAGON AGE
I want to put more time into Torchlight and Risen, but the only game able to pull me away from Borderlands this week has been Dragon Age, a fantasy RPG from BioWare, those guys who did Baldur's Gate.
A lot of what made Baldur's Gate great is in Dragon Age. You have to worry about what your party members think of you (or at least have gifts on hand to soothe the feelings of your evil companions when you do good things). Characters of different alignments argue about what the group should be doing while you wander around towns looking for quests. Combat is an exercise in micromanagement -- complicated by friendly fire and area-of-effect spells, but that's nothing new. I like the changes Dragon Age brings to the table; I'll take mana pools over spell slots any day.
I want to be the guy on the left.
And there's the well thought out world, only this time it's pretty original. Sure, there are dwarfs and elves and orcs (though they're called hurlocks for some reason), but the fantasy basics are tweaked enough that nothing feels ripped out of Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons. The presentation has been excellent. When Alistair shield-bashes one of the darkspawn, they topple in very fulfilling way.
The story has been pretty engaging, and I haven't had to think this hard about dialogue options since Fallout 2. Options are rarely black and white and rarely redundant. The voice acting is good, but knowing the escape key skips spoken dialogue is essential because I don't have that kind of time. Unfortunately, one of the first important cut scenes is tied to the last line of text in the scene before it, and if you skip that line of text, you skip the movie as well.
The AI is also unfortunate. Your party members aren't bright, but at least you can take control of them. Your enemies have no such luck.
NEWS
Microsoft has cracked down on piracy, banning about 600,000 consoles from Xbox Live. The consoles run modified firmware, which lets them play backup copies of Xbox 360 games, even on Xbox Live. Of course, not every console is modified for piracy, but the Gameodactyl will have to weigh on on whether there's any reason to modify an Xbox 360 to play imported game.
Holy crap, Modern Warfare 2 sold a lot of plastic discs. And PC gamers aren't happy. Kotaku rounds up how it did against other forms of entertainment.
Chris Kohler leads us through the life and times of Nintendo as a video game company. A fitting history lesson for the days before New Super Mario Brothers Wii comes out. Sadly, no mention of why Nintendo release games on Sunday.
It feels like 1996 again
This week felt a lot like 1996. There's been lots of colored loot, lots of mouse clicking and lots of time spent pouring over skill trees.
BORDERLANDS
My mild fury at having to wait a week for a copy of Borderlands where you can actually aim was tempered a bit by knowing that everybody toiling on the console versions got bug-ridden copies of the game. Sure, my game has crashed a few times, but I haven't lost any specialization points and my phase strike ability worked from the start (well, once I reached the right level).
This skag doesn't like fire very much.
I don't have much to add to what Benji said about the game. It's a sick FPS with simple, solid RPG elements. I play an "invisible ninja chick who wields a shotgun" and various machine guns, and I haven't had this much fun shooting people in the face since Half-Life 2. The randomness of the loot system is a bit annoying, and mediocre guns often have silly level requirements, but I'm willing to look past that.
My biggest problem is that I can't play as much as I'd like. Benji and I are playing together, and we have to stay the same level or the game gets unbalanced pretty quickly. We played for a while when I was only two levels behind him, and I couldn't damage the bandits the game threw at us.
But Borderlands has made me happy, both when I'm alone and when someone's got my back. It's exactly what I expected, and it is good.
TORCHLIGHT
If, while playing Torchlight, you get a sense that you've delved deep underground in search of sweet loot before, don't be alarmed. A small developer called Blizzard made a very similar game in the 90s called Diablo. In fact, some of the people who worked on that worked on Torchlight, which might explain why it's so much fun.
Hanging out with my imp, puppy and golem.
Torchlight plays like Diablo, only with better graphics. Not much else has changed. Scrolls still reveal the identity of mystery drops and take you back to town, minibosses still surround themselves with weaker versions of themselves, and there are plenty of gems to fit onto your stuff. The only additions that are new to me are a pet that holds your stuff and basic spells that every character class can use, including your pet.
There are three character classes available. The destroyer hits things, the vanquisher hits things with arrows, and the alchemist has a marketable profession to fall back on if this dungeon crawling gig doesn't work out. I picked the alchemist because they're basically a cross between a mage and a summoner, and I like to sit back and cast ember lance while while my imps, wolf and golem engage the dungeon denizens. It's been a lot of fun, but it's also been really easy on normal, so I'll probably start over on hard. I'm not sure if I'll pick a new class. I like having minions do a large portion of my work, but the other classes have some pretty cool skills.
There's virtually no story and little quest variety, but if you're playing this kind of game for that, you're doing it wrong. This game begs to be played with the TV on.
WIDGET TD
Take control of towers in WidgetTD.
I also played the demo for a pretty simple tower defense game from Graybox Games called WidgetTD. Like any other tower defense game you build and upgrade defensive structures and hope they're enough to keep wave after wave of attackers under control.
The only mechanic WidgetTD adds to the mix is the ability to take control of any one tower. This brings up a first person cockpit view, and you can aim for the enemies you want. For some towers, this isn't much use, but from the cockpit, your basic gun tower can hit anything on the map. The difficulty seems a bit out of whack though; creeps' hit points ramp up far faster than you can upgrade your towers. Otherwise it's a strong entry for the genre.
NEWS
Here are some of the things we'll be talking about in this week's podcast.
Leigh Alexander talks about Demon's Souls in a Kotaku feature defending hard games. She says hard games aren't necessarily frustrating, and that a good hard game will explain why you fail and offer a road to mastery. But really, I just want to hear more from Rex about Demon's Souls, because everything I've read and heard about the game makes it very hard to not buy a ps3 right now.
David Carlton at malvasia bianca asks why we divide games into genre by their point of view, and not their content, and suggests we define Beatles Rock Band as a non-fiction game, not a rhythm game.
And finally, I feel bad for gamers who paid real money for legitimate copies of Borderlands before the street date, but couldn't play until the online verification servers came online Monday. Someday those servers are going to shut down and the only way to play the game will be with a crack. That's the real problem with licenses.
If you've got something else you want us to talk about, comment here or send me a message @gamegnathus
Physics Review: "Trine"
Watch out! The dead have risen and are headed for the kingdom. The good news: A wizard, thief and knight are prepared to stop it. True, they've been fused together by this thing called the Trine, but the wizard, Amadeus, suspects the two things might be linked.
TRINE is a 2-D sidescroller set in a 3-D universe with realistic physics, meaning when a rope is cut, whatever it's holding falls. You switch between characters on the fly, sort of like Trevor Belmont did in CASTLEVANIA III.
Like most sidescrollers, the goal in every level is to make it from the left to the right, and occasionally up. Frozenbyte puts a series of obstacles in your way that can be overcome using the skills your three characters have at their disposal. Walls must be scaled. Lava must be crossed. Skeletons should be dispatched. And experience must be collected.
Amadeus is a conjurer and telekinetic. He makes boxes and platforms appear, then moves them around. His only offensive maneuver is to conjure a box above a skeleton's head and let it fall, which is amusing when it works, but skeletons have a tendency to move.
The thief, Zoya, is the most flexible character. Her grappling hook is the fastest way to solve simple puzzles, and it's more fun than making boxes and platforms. And her arrows can handle most enemies, especially when she starts firing four at a time.
The knight, Pontius, starts off pretty weak but becomes a useful character toward the end, when he picks up a hammer. His preferred method of combat is bludgeoning, which swords aren't great for, but with a hammer he's suddenly bashing through shields and sending out lightning shock-waves. The diving hammer strike is the second most fun you'll have. He also has a shield, which can be pointed in any direction to stop fire or arrows.
The shield keeps Pontius nice and cool.
Trine encourages exploration by tying experience to two things. Half of the experience is earned by destroying skeletons. The other half is earned by finding green potions hidden throughout the levels. For every 50 green potions you earn, each character will level up.
There's a skeletal story structure, but it's extremely basic and serves only to give the characters something to do. But excellent voice acting and elegant narration hold the stages together and make the loading screens painless.
And the 2-D gameplay in a 3-D world works surprisingly well. The backgrounds are finely detailed and littered with objects, but it never becomes hard to differentiate between what's in the background and what's in the character's path.
In co-op, Pontius finds himself at the mercy of Amadeus.
My only frustration with the game is the lack of variety in things to kill. Aside from a few bosses, everything that's trying to kill you is a skeleton. Some of them breathe fire, some have shields and some have bows, but they're all skinless. It didn't make the game any less fun, but a zombie here or there would have livened things up.
It's $30 on the PC, but there will be PSN version soon, and it's probably worth waiting for because it'll probably cost less. To hold you over, Steam or Frozenbyte have the demo.
(Editor's note -- Patrick Klepek at G4 reveals today that Trine will not be out by the end of July, i.e. tomorrow, as Frozenbyte originally promised.
In designer Lauri Hyvärinen's own adorably Engrish breakdown of the situation: "Regarding 6th August release, can't say for sure is that even possible. US and EU releases 'should' be very close to each other. However, I must stress out I don't know for real, as there always can come surprises like yesterday did."
For the full story, click here.)
An emotional history unrelated to Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War II
Beating up defenseless citizens, popular long before GTA
I suppose I should devote my first few words to the origins of my gaming fetish. I have a thing for PCs. They're my constant. I spend all of work on a keyboard and, aside from time with the band and the girl, I'm on a different colored keyboard at home. It started with my dad, who conducted occasional marathon Kingmaker sessions with college friends until CIVNET made them obsolete.
When he brought home our first computer, a blazing fast 386 with 10s of megabytes of space, he played more games on it than me or my brother. He was the first of the family to beat MINES OF TITAN, and he spent more time trying to get games to run in DOS than whatever it was he told my mom he was getting the computer for. Browsing the store that sold shareware at Delco Plaza and going to computer shows are pretty much the only fond memories I have of my dad before he quit the soul-sucking insurance business to be a librarian and a poorer, less angry person.
Cave Story or Doukutsu Monogatari
I have an emotional attachment to the beige boxes. Sure, things 'just work' on PCs with an alarming irregularity, but that's what you pay for an open platform. My descent into DIY/Punk culture was tied to subversive gems like FALLOUT and one-man operations like CAVE STORY as much as it was to Operation Ivy and Against All Authority. Those games influenced me in ways that Sonic and Duck Hunt never did. The raw element of the indie game scene continues to keep me wasting most of my gaming hours on the PC today. The PlayStation Network, WiiWare and XBox Live Arcade distribution models are a good start, but still present painfully high barriers for developers to jump, which is a risk developers aren't always willing to take.
So that's my introduction. Now on to WARHAMMER 40,000: DAWN OF WAR 2.
DoW2 is incomplete. Two-thirds of what is there is exceptional. The single-player and cooperative modes recreate the small, squad-based conflicts that made the table-top game so fun to play. Without resources to manage, battles become a tactical affair. Cover is both essential and, with the right equipment, destructible, and each squad serves a specific function. But even the most thoughtful approach quickly breaks down into a chaotic grudge match, which is a joy to watch thanks to detailed and smoothly animated character models.
Space Marines, your only hope, and choice, in Dawn of War II
Sadly, though your squad leaders will grow in power and offensive variety, the missions remain the same. You attack Orks, Tyrannids or Eldar, or you defend a structure. Again and again and again. The illusion of control granted by non-linear missions helps, and group of squad leaders with real personality is a welcome touch, but the varietal deficit leaves the game feeling unfinished. What's there is a joy to play, that relieves the genre of its most tedious aspect.
The last third of what is there is a completely different game. It does away with the tactical approach in favor the resource management and large armies common to the RTS genre. There aren't any buildings, but it still feels more like the first Dawn of War than the single player game I've been playing. If I wanted to play DAWN OF WAR, I would. But I don't. I want to play what I've been playing with my roommate, only now I want to destroy him. And I can't for reasons that are beyond me.
Final thoughts? What is there of the game is great. What is missing? Too much to recommend a purchase at this point. If Relic releases campaigns for the Orks, Eldars and Tyrannids, and they add other races -- Tau and Chaos Marines would be a good start -- the game could be worth $50. But for now, it's really just for people who love the table-top version of Warhammer 40,000.
Also, I hate Games for Windows Live. It's intrusive in the game, and its logo is an ugly stain on the box art that screams this "game has been tainted by Windows, install at your own risk."
On tap this weekend: MadWorld, RE5, Halo Wars
What's up, nobody at all?
I'll be in court all day Friday, and Friday night is set aside for Russell Brand's Comedy Central special and the first third of the BATTLESTAR GALACTICA finale.
But I've carved out a good chunk of Saturday for a pretty substantial gaming blitz, which means playing and posting impressions of MADWORLD, RESIDENT EVIL 5 and HALO WARS.
I'm still in a quandary over which version of RE5 to pick up. They're probably identical functionally, so I've put down money on the 360 version because I know more potential RE5 players on Xbox Live. But Dactyl, who's told me he's getting the game as well, is PS3-bound.
If I can get assurances from Dactyl (hint, hint) that he will buy the game and be the Sheva to my Chris Redfield, I'll definitely go with the PS3 version.
Also, I've opened my MAPLE STORY account on the free MMO's Windia Server. Dactyl and Rambo should do the same.