Leveling Down

Settling for playing GTA IV: The Lost and the Damned instead of Mass Effect 2 is just not good enough.

For the earlier part of this month I had been spending my time with Bayonetta, a newly released title that I truly enjoyed. But after I completed that and DJ Hero this past Tuesday, I discovered that night that it was apparently the Mass Effect 2 launch date. I had already made a conscious decision to skip buying Mass Effect 2 at launch, just because I had already gone through Bioware’s more RPG-oriented epic, Dragon Age: Origins, last month and my pre-ordered copy of BioShock 2 is releasing just around the corner. Plus, with the number of games I have sitting in my backlog, I realized that my gaming time might be better spent clearing through a backlogged title or two before BioShock 2′s release rolls around.

But why is this so difficult?
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Mass Effect is going to be a trilogy. Bioware told us that up front when the original released in 2007. Normally, that isn’t a big deal – trilogies happen all the time. But after playing the first few hours of the game, I started really thinking about it, and one question popped into my head… Is Bioware insane?

After much rumination, I have decided that Bioware is indeed crazy…LIKE A FOX! The Mass Effect trilogy is an incredibly ambitious undertaking, and playing the sequel has made me realize why I love what Bioware’s doing, and also why it seems like a suicide mission (see what I did there?). But before I go into it, minor spoilers of the original Mass Effect below, although I will do my best without revealing any big ones.

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With the recent news around the Rockstar spouse incident, I felt it would be a good time to share my thoughts on this topic. For those of you that are as old as I am, you probably remember the whole EA spouse incident and how that turned out. I think the Rockstar lawsuit will also rule in favor of the employees and their spouses, but the main problem is, EA and Rockstar are not the only companies that do this. It’s basically the entire game industry. It’s how it runs. That’s the sad part.

I don’t understand how people so talented are expected to work practically double the amount of time that we normal 9-5 people do. Perhaps it has to do with supply and demand: game company execs don’t care to keep their employees happy because so many college graduates are knocking at their door to get into the studio. Hopefully with more negative press, the public will be less interested in working in the gaming industry, resulting in less supply, giving current employees of the game industry more respect. Read on for my reasons why I don’t think you should dream of working in the gaming industry if you don’t want to give up playing games.
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You haven’t played Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney yet? OBJECTION!

I’ve finally just about finished Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, and it’s such a solid piece of work that I decided to re-sing my praises of the series. What makes Phoenix Wright so popular, and why is it worth checking out? Since the series has started to be re-released on Wiiware, I figured it’d be a good time to answer that question.

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The Dante’s Inferno demo has prompted me to determine why Western action-adventure titles don’t quite match up to the Eastern ones.

The Dante’s Inferno demo went live about a month ago, and I’ve been meaning to write up some impressions on that but haven’t had a chance to. The good thing is, now that I’ve completed Bayonetta, I was able to revisit the Dante’s Inferno demo again to see if any of my feelings on the demo have changed since playing Bayonetta. I started writing about it, but I found myself getting sidetracked from really writing completely about the demo, and instead I’ve divulged into analyzing Eastern versus Western game design. Read on for a little bit of my thoughts on the Dante’s Inferno demo, and a lot of my thoughts on Eastern versus Western game design philosophies for action/adventure games.
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Bayonetta finishes combos by weaving her hair into huge attacks

Bayonetta Bayonetta. Where do I begin. Funny – this is a game that when I started playing I was prepared to blog an impressions entry on it. My initial impressions were somewhat negative, but part of me felt like I was missing something so I decided to hold off and play through it more and just go for the review. As I continued to play the game past completion, I started to reach a zen-like trance with the game. Now, 20 hours later, I can say I love it. Read on to see how my first few hours with this game started off on the wrong foot but eventually found its way into…my heart?
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Interested in DJ Hero? cmfl3x thinks it’s an itch worth scratching

This one’s gonna be a tough one. On the one hand, DJ Hero has innovative gameplay, a great tracklist, a well built peripheral, and a lot of small, but cool features, that really help make it a solid package. On the other hand, it’s done horribly in sales, is hampered by an insane difficulty curve, and is published by Activision, the evil empire of gaming right now. So do I review the game based on my personal experience, or do I need to take into account all the other factors? I’m not totally sure, but we’ll find out together after the jump…

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Zelda: Spirit Tracks has some enjoyable dungeons, but unfortunately, you have to deal with riding a train to get to them.

I was traveling a lot last weekend, so I got a chance to spend some time with the new Zelda game for the DS. Part of me is under the halo effect that anything that Nintendo develops and publishes is going to be awesome, but when I heard that the new thing in this Zelda game would be trains and railroad tracks, I was less than enthusiastic. While the game has been getting a large number of positive reviews, after trying it, I’m not one that quite falls into that same crowd. I don’t like where Zelda is going, but perhaps I’m more in the minority with this. Read on for my impressions from the game after playing it a couple of hours.
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Toshiba’s prediction for the future of gaming.

Sometimes, I wonder if espion4ge and I are being controlled by the same hive mind, since I started this post before I saw his on Avatar. The title says it all: Do we really need 3-D games? At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas last week, Sony and a bunch of other companies showed off their 3-D technology. For many companies, it was 3-D TVs that don’t require glasses, for others, it was showing off technology that can run current games in 3-D. Samsung had a display where you could play Gears of War 2 in 3-D, with the TV doing all the work, not a specialized build of the game.

But honestly, I don’t care about this! Don’t make us waste money on this new technology, and even though it will be “optional” for a while, the high development costs are still going to affect us somehow. Aren’t we in a recession? People STILL haven’t fully adopted HDTVs, and now these companies want us to get 3-D ready TVs? Is Avatar awesome? Yes. Is 3-D cool? Yes, every once in awhile. But we don’t need games to go the 3-D route…at least not until TWO generations from now. And please don’t try to give us 3-D games if it means making us wear stupid stereoscopic glasses.

Personally, I like my life in 3-D and my entertainment in 2-D. This is why I find all this 3-D tech annoying and stupid. Maybe I’m ignorant? What do you all think?

Jake Sully, the film’s human protagonist, is able to control a synthetically created Na’vi to communicate with the alien race.

We’re off today for Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in the states, but I’ll post a short entry for those of you that are checking our site today. I got around to seeing the film Avatar in the theater with my wife this past weekend (the 3D version), and liked it a lot. It’s actually quite an entertaining film for the gamer crowd, so I wanted to mention it here that you should go see it if you haven’t yet. For the Digital 3D version, the theater gives you 3D glasses to wear through the entire film and several of the scenes appear in 3D, which is pretty interesting.

To be honest, my wife and I had no idea what the film was about, except that we’ve seen posters and it looks like some blue person and neither of us were too excited to see it. For those that want to go in fresh, don’t read any more of this entry and just go see it. But for those at least curious what the film is about, it’s a sci-fi film that revolves around humans landing on Pandora, an Earth-like moon that not only has tons of vegetation and wildlife, but another humanoid race called the Na’vi that is already living there. In order to communicate with the giant and blue-skinned Na’vi, the human scientists have figured out a way for the humans to control “synthetically created” Navi (which is why the film is called Avatar) that are a blend of human and this alien race. Basically, a human can “log in” onto their Na’vi and control the synthetic Na’vi just like they were really that alien. The storyline focuses on these human scientists trying to learn from this alien race, but at the same time, the humans have military that are not as interested in diplomatic relations. The main character, Jake Sully, is caught in the middle of all of this as a human that learns more and more about the Na’vi ways through his time spent with them.

What makes the movie such a treat for gamers is that it is has many elements found in video games today. The humans have mechs and several air units that look like Hornets and Vultures right out of the Halo universe. The two species are balaancing between diplomacy and warfare. Plus, the whole concept of the scientists going into a pod to jack into their controllable avatar is really not that much different from us gamers turning on a video-game and controlling the character we see on-screen. With most of the movie in CG, you can almost feel like you’re in a video-game world when watching the film. Some scenes are a bit groan-worthy, but overall I thought it was well worth watching – especially in the theater.