22 posts tagged “games”

The latest game I'm playing: Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney.

Portal is one of the greatest games of all time, you know that. Of course it is. Valve published it.

Now, since it was a far too short game anyway, play this - Portal: the Flash Version, a professional-grade fan game. I'll go as far as to venture and say that it's far better than Codename: Gordon.

Highly recommended. Playable online at http://portal.wecreatestuff.com

Jaziel was around last Thursday - the last day of the exams, which we and Kenny (President of the English Language Society, ELS, don't you know?) celebrated by a few rounds at trying our hand with SWAT4's cooperative multiplayer.

This is the greatest thing about joining the ELS. We're a society with *allegedly* 90+ members, when the truth really is that we've only got like ten people making up the core of the society. We're not even a society anymore, more like the Bored Peoples' Club Of Those Who Have Survived This Long. I previously had been interested in snagging the main post there, but things took a surprising hike for the better when I was enthroned as King -- okay, whoops! Sorry -- ... when I was elected the School of Social Science and Humanities' Student President.

Jaziel and me regularly meet up, and Kenny, when he is able to pull himself out of being asleep, often joins as well. Jaziel could only go home around ten, so after we were done around 6PM, we decided to go back to my own Room I404. I played Deus Ex for awhile, extolling its virtues to Jaziel, who strangely enough for a hardcore full-time gamerismo had never heard of it.

Oh my God.

You've never heard of Deus Ex?

You need to be punished with death by chopsticks.

I jumped around games for a bit, putting on Homeworld 2 and a few others until finally deciding on the truly excellent indie Battlestar Galactica fanmade game Beyond The Red Line. I played for about three minutes before realizing, damn, let's watch the show instead. So I grabbed from over the desk my beloved Season 1 Galactica boxed set, and gave him a brief overview, and let the miniseries begin.

Bad idea in hindsight really, especially when you want to convert someone into watching Galactica. The miniseries is cut into two parts of two hours each, and my boxed set has no division between both parts, so it played a whole four hours. Now, I've watched the miniseries about five times now, love the series, but four hours is still a bit too much. Uh, I think now I know better.

Oh well. He can go back to watching 24 anyway.

(* = Jaziel's trying to do some sort of online poll on what hairstyle his hair should manifest. Now, who needs the American primaries when you have the truly riveting action of Jaziel's Hair Vote?)

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Speaking of which, I've finally gotten around to watching Battlestar Galactica: Razor, too. My verdict? It's cool, and I liked the young Adama scenes (can't catch Razor Flashbacks here though), but essentially it's a two-hour episode set in Season Two showcasing the tough, conflicted Lt Kendra Shaw, who despite being tough and conflicted, remains very very pretty. I love that about sci-fi - it happens in all of televisionland I know, but sci-fi's the absolute worst offender - there are a disproportionate amount of extremely pretty people around. Hell, even you have to admit Baltar's pretty, and so is Apollo, and let's not forget Tigh. Now Tigh's real, real pretty. Kind of like Jaziel's photo in the opening of the post. Kendra Shaw's a cool enough character that I hope she makes a flashback or something in Season Four, but I'm more of a Starbuck person, so frak that, I'd rather see a nice Kara scene.

I'm a really, really big Star Wars fan. You could say "Star Wars geek", even. In my library of books, I have like thirty Star Wars novels - like, ten New Jedi Order books, another then of the Bantam-published ones from people like Kevin J. Anderson and Mike Stackpole, even some of the movie tie-ins (they were presents), etc.

I can even go on to say that the first computer game I ever seriously played was the still-brilliant X-Wing when I was about four. Played a heckload of Star Wars games too. Some were great, like Jedi Outcast. Some were rather mediocre, like The Phantom Menace. Some were just plain awful, like Jedi Academy.

When I first bought and played Knights of the Old Republic, with Shafiq and me starting it up for the first time with mucho excitement, we were actually surprised. Surprised in a negative fashion. This was not great.

Background: I've played a bunch of RPGs ever since gaming became a major part of my life (circa three years old). My favorite games ever are all either RPGs or games with a lot of role-playing bits: Vampire: the Masquerade: Bloodlines, Deus Ex, Oblivion, etc. (Other _favorite games_ are Hitman: Blood Money, Medieval II: Total War, and World In Conflict, but yeah, let's get back on topic)

Now those were real games. Bloodlines was brilliant: dark story, darker atmosphere, darkest characters. Deus Ex was brilliant: fascinating story, fascinating atmosphere, fascinating characters (Paul Denton is still on my list of Role Models, actual fact). As for Oblivion, well, me and Shafiq stopped playing it because of the infuriating dialogue and the lag, but it's still brilliant.

I just cannot say anything of the sort for KotOR. The game looked old - though not ugly -, the story flat, the quests so typically cliched. The moral effect of things don't register to me. I did evil things for kicks, not because I ever particularly am a mean person at heart. Hated the game. Stopped playing. I haven't even gone past the Taris bits. The maps, oh my god, the maps. Such blah level design. Oh, and Mission. Every time Mission spoke I wanted to punch the screen. I've seen GREAT voice acting - see Heather or Jeanette or Beckett or freakin' Jack in Vamp Bloodlines. KotOR's wasn't even particularly accurate: the Jawas speak like some kind of super-accelerated mp3 of somebody speaking Japanese. Don't believe me? Play the game. Talk to an important Jawa in the game, and you'll find that you can detect lines that include stuff like "Watashi-wa" or something.

...And one day I gave it a second chance. I saved Bastila, got off Taris, studied as a Jedi, found three Star Maps, rescued Mission's brother, blah blah blah blah. Oh, and a lot of swoop racing, which I won, and a lot of Pazaak playing, which I nearly always lost.

I realized a few things:

1. The characters, despite some being uninspired and boring, were actually well fleshed-out. Bastila, oh Bastila. I'm in love with Bastila. I wish my female scoundrel-Jedi could have hot love with Bastila. (I know, I know, it's against the Jedi code. There is no emotion; there is peace). And Carth. Carth, oh Carth, I... am not in love... with Carth. He's amazing. So well written. So manly. Even Canderous's story is interesting.
1. Bastila's so human. Despite being a Jedi she's still so prone to flights of arrogance and then there's the subplot about her bad relationship with her mom, which gave me my first actual Moral Dilemma (tm). Would I give Bastila's dad's holocron to Bastila, or to her mom? I wanted so much to mediate their relationship like the Jedi I really was. Bah, failed. Screw it, Bastila's mom wasn't much of a nice person anyway.
2. And then there's Carth. Carth, good Republic soldier with trust issues. Good old Carth. My favorite male character since, ever.
2. It's not that bad. The music, the Star Wars-ish score, was pretty dang good. I spent about 15% longer in Tatooine's Dune Sea because I liked the score there. Music in games is a serious matter to me: this is why Hitman: Blood Money is so dear to my heart.
3. It's rather pretty good. The story, while utterly predictable (I haven't even played the game through, and I've even avoided as much spoilers as I can, yet I already can pretty much guess from the very beginning that I AM REVAN AREN'T I? AREN'T I?), is rather interesting. I like that it's set four thousand years back, even if it's remarkably technologically advanced for four thousand years ago. Either that or the next four thousand years that led to the movies were spectacularly technologically stagnant. This coming from the guy who owns The Essential Chronology To Star Wars.
   
1. Sorry, I'm sore.

So here you go. Don't tell Shafiq, but when I get back, I'm going to play some more KotOR.

Because Bastila is so, so hot. And vulnerable. I don't care if she chides me like the naughty Padawan I am every time I threaten somebody, I'm making her evil, I am.

What was the best blog post you wrote this year?  What was the best post or blog you read?

RockPaperShotgun wins all accolades, because now I no longer have to depend of dirty sites like GameSpot. But then again, I've never depended on them anyway.

With the best Gamer writers and some absurdistically humorous pieces, the Amirul B Ruslan 2007 best blog award goes to them and the Amirul B Ruslan 2007 best blog post award has to be the riotous, though arguably pointless, "interview with Warren Spector". If it's got Warren Spector and Nikola Tesla in it, obviously, it's going to rock.

So this is what happens when I don't check out gaming blogs for two months.

Eidos has announced Deus Ex 3. I felt a bit faint there, reading about it just two minutes ago. But clarity returned when I found out that neither Warren Spector nor Harvey Smith would be on board.

My prayers to the Lords of Gaming. Please, please, please: don't make this suck.
Okay, well, if it does I will eat the developers for supper. Realistic expectation: More like Deus Ex, less like Invisible War? (Though I loved Invisible War all the same)

Please God, shine your lamps of +3 Creativity on the souls in Eidos-Montreal.

...I am waiting for somebody to choke on that title.

It is a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning. The sun shines, sunnily (Gee, who'd have guessed), trees and grass rustle peacefully. I am without my nearly-all-powerful gaming computer, and I'm rather fine.

Having installed Dark Messiah of Might and Magic for Shafiq, a tedious task that required some thinking on both my and his part, I then decided to let loose at that really pretty, pretty cousin of Half-Life 2's, who we all call SiN Episodes, though sometimes when we're drunk at parties we forget she's called SiN Episodes, and call her something stupid, like SiN 2.

SiN 2 (sorry, Episodes) is rather short. Her cousin's got nicer teeth, better shoulders and is slightly more polite. SiN isn't too worried about her exposed thong, or the extreme slices of cleavage she offers with that coy, coy smile. Half-Life 2's too shy for that kind of thing. Heck, all she does is kiss her father on the cheek. SiN Episodes, or known by the nickname "Emergence", makes up for her lack of height more than enough.

She's wonderfully, wonderfully explodey, and she doesn't mind at all. I'm sorry - I have to compare you two cousins again. Half-Life 2 has an understanding of quality and plot and emotional resonance. SiN? Screw that. Shoot some druglab soldiers! Shoot some mutants! REALLY BIG MUTANTS! Shoot some more! Then ogle at Elexis.

SiN Episodes is really pretty. Just short enough, cute, and teases you with expectation of what's next. Too bad I hear news about there not being another Episode. You were... explodey.

Well, boo. Too make do for that, here's a photo.

...the subtitle means nothing.

The Dukes Of Hazzard is playing on HBO. The remote is a few paces away, nobody's watching, and I could so easily reach out and deactivate this mindlessness.

I am playing at MafiaMatrix. The game's a remixed, pimped-up, and in my honest opinion better version of Injustice. Join here. For each person who plays with me, I get $5 of bonus credits. And those would be awesome. Hahaha. Find me. If I'm not dead, I'm called Misnomer.

The free one-week donators-only in-game timers (oh the pain of three straight words with hyphens in them) help a lot. Watching the clock go down. Three minutes. Two fifty. Two forty... Two. One thirty... Five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One. DING! Earn time. And slowly but surely my ranking increases. Life is an unhappy mechanism where you earn money every three minutes, considering the emptiness of the two minutes and fifty-nine seconds set in between. I spend them gambling. I'm rather alright at blackjack. Once I won over forty thousand dollars (putting in a ten-thousand initial stake). My poker is relatively bad, but my blackjack's passable. I may have won forty thousand once, but I probably lost thirty grand five minutes later. I earn and earn and earn again. Every time I can double, I'll double. My blackjack is fairly alright.

Some excellent journalism, and a truly bemusingly awesome story.

It is worrying, so please don't click unless you know what "worrying" means in Amirul B Ruslan's dictionary. But makes for some good, if horrified, reading.

"Baby Unicorn Power!" by Tenshi Vielle of the Second Life Herald.

Being online tends to give me such delightful topics.

Alright, two things I know for sure:

World in Conflict's demo is very freaking awesome. It's everything I like in an RTS, but more! (And no more resource management... or... base building). I've been playing a little of it, but I think I'll go on to the skirmishes - they do have skirmishes, yeah? I especially love the camera: it makes me think of my favorite strategy game, the Total War series, and it makes me think of all that is lacking in the C&C series.

Also, because Battlestar Galactica is a personal favorite of mine... all other fans of Viper vs Raider action should check out the truly truly awesome Beyond The Red Line fan-built Freespace 2 total conversion. It's free, it's awesome, and frakking hell it's Colonial Vipers.