Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Not Just for Kids: Games You Might Have Avoided but Shouldn't- Part One

"Will that be all?" the clerk asked as I stood at the register at my local purveyor of fine gaming goods, his question penetrating the blank stare that had aggregated on my face over roughly fifteen minutes of waiting. I looked at the sole item in my hand, an empty display case for Super Princess Peach on Nintendo DS, and answered "yeah, that's it." As he searched behind the counter for a retail copy, he tried to make some conversation, "are you buying this for your girlfriend?" and before I had a chance to answer, "it's awesome how many chicks have a Nintendo DS, it's like it's actually getting them into gaming�" My eyes glazed over as he attempted to explain to me the state of females and videogaming and as he ran my credit card I replied to his initial question, "nah, I'm buying it for me." Now it was the clerk's turn to assume a blank stare accompanied by a slight look of embarrassment. "Oh, sorry bro, it's just usually girls or parents I see buying games like this."

While driving home I thought about what he had said about mainly girls and their parents buying games like Super Princess Peach. It's a great game that anyone can enjoy if you can get past the fluffy, feminine girliness and obvious stereotyping, (Peach has different powers based on her mood swings... I'll let you infer what you want from that), and it's too bad that a lot of male gamers are missing out on it. As my mind wandered, I began to think about other games that have alienated a large segment of consumers by tailoring the theme, style or even the box art for a target audience. I don't have the sales demographics to back it up but I would guess that since Viva Pinata is targeted at children and looks like a kid's game, not to mention that it was released in conjunction with a kids television show, many older gamers have chosen to avoid it. Few of my friends will give it a try, even after my attempts to convince them that despite the childish exterior it is a well-crafted and gratifying "strategy/simulation" game with a great sense of humor that anyone can enjoy and easily justifies the twenty dollar price tag.

My friends' innate aversion to Viva Pinata shouldn't surprise me. For core and hardcore gamers, avoiding niche games that are aimed at children or girls has become something of a defense mechanism. When we see a game with hearts or bright colors or large quantities of pink on the cover we automatically let our eyes slide over it as if it isn't even there. We automatically ignore advertisements that look too cute. It helps us avoid the suffering that is inherent to games involving Nickelodeon characters, Barbie or anything that ends with a Z, (Bratz, Horsez, Petz, Babyz). Unfortunately, this instinct of ours makes us miss out on some real gems that deserve to be played.

I'm not sure if there is a way to solve this issue, or if anyone else even considers it an issue. Perhaps it's just a problem that is and will always be inherent to the entertainment industry; adults largely avoid kids movies and television shows in the same manner. It just seems a shame to miss out on some of the great prizes that are hiding under the thin guise of pretty, pink girl games or cute, cuddly kids games.
The upcoming part two, will include a list of some of the better girl-friendly or kid-friendly games that you might have avoided but shouldn't.

Sunday, May 25, 2008

On the Precipitation-Lubricious Cliff of Legitimate System Requirements

I, like many gamers, am a fan of Penny-Arcade. Not a huge fan or even a big fan, but I'll admit that I check for new strips a minimum of once a week. One thing I have to give them absolute credit for is rabid devotion to, and love for, videogames. It only makes sense, then, that two guys who so love and understand videogames would pour their sweat, blood and all manner of other bodily fluids into making the best game imaginable. "Penny Arcade Adventures: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness, Episode One," is the result of their toil and I figured I should at least give the demo a shot.

Unfortunately, my experience has been a bit of a mixed bag; upon installation I tried to run the demo at the default settings and beyond the usual torrent of developer and game logos I was treated to a black screen and no hard-drive activity. Being a long-time PC gamer I've become accustomed to this sort of occurrence and often as not, simply rebooting the system after an installation will help motivate an application to work properly. After alt-tabbing out of the blank screen and restarting my system I dropped the graphic settings to a mere 800x600 resolution and started the game up again and sure enough, I slid uninterrupted through the opening sequence into the character creation menu where I was pleased to find that whatever character you create, it looks like Mike Krahulik drew it straight onto the screen. In fact, the whole game looks like it came straight from the panels of the comic strip. Krahulik's signature look has been masterfully transferred to the third dimension and what the game lacks in graphical capabilities is made up for with style. This approach is similar to what has been done with the episodic Sam & Max, Team Fortress 2 and the upcoming Battlefield: Heroes, (among others), and one of the results of such a design formula is that the games don't look dated, yet run on a wide variety of systems including PCs long overdue for an upgrade. You might understand why I was shocked when I ran into more performance issues.

The game ran like a fat guy trying to make it up a flight of stairs after a trip to Dairy Queen. I'm talking anywhere from three to ten frames per second. The laptop I'm playing on is by no stretch of the imagination a machine designed for gaming, but I can pull solid framerates on Battlefield 2, Half-Life 2 and Need for Speed: Most Wanted at higher resolutions so I was not expecting this low-tech episodic demo to be a slap in the face along the lines of Crysis. For a game such as this to run this poorly at 800 by 600 pixels is absolutely inexcusable, especially when my system meets the recommended system requirements. I would love to speak right now about the gameplay and the writing and one would hope the great sense of humour but the game just doesn't have quite the same flow when the mouse cursor, (the primary method of controlling the game), is either moving like molasses or jumping across the screen.

Stylistically the game is fantastic, a shame it wouldn't run properly
click on image for full view









As I said previously, I can't give my impressions on the game when running under ideal conditions. As a guess I'd say that if you are a fan of Penny Arcade, On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness is something you'll want to check out at least. I would only warn you that if you plan on playing the PC version and you have even the slightest doubt as to whether you can run the game smoothly, you would do well to try the demo before you drop twenty big ones on the full version. Until game companies start listing realistic minimum and recommended system requirements that's the best way to find out if a PC game is right for your rig.

Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Laptop-Friendly Gaming

I just moved to Canada and my desktop and Xbox 360 won't be reaching me for another month or so. For the past week my Nintendo DS has been my savior but I have a need for some competitive multiplayer gameplay that the DS just can't give me. As a result, I've been looking for games that will work on my not-so-gaming-friendly laptop and I've found a few, some of which may surprise you. After installing and testing, (and some uninstalling too... darn 60Gb hard drive), many of my mighty collection of PC games, I settled on a lineup that I consider a solid and well-rounded collection for anyone in my position with a relatively cheap laptop with limited hard drive space.

First of all, so you know what I'm working with here are the gaming-relevant specifications for my laptop. It is a year and a half old and cost $640 at purchase:

processor: 1.60 GHz Turion 64 X2 TL-50
memory: 2Gb G.Skill PC2 4200 laptop ram
graphics: Integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 1150, 256 Mb shared memory (steals from system memory)
OS: Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition

The Games

StarCraft: The long-awaited sequel may be just around the corner, but after ten years this game is still as great as it was when it came out and you can still find people playing it online. It's real time strategy that is a deep or shallow as you want it to be and so ridiculously well balanced that the only time I ever cursed a race for being cheap was when I found myself brought to my knees by a massive, well planned zergle rush, (though it was really my fault for not being prepared).

The Orange Box, Counter Strike Source & Day of Defeat Source: I don't know what it is with the Source engine, but my laptop has absolutely no trouble at all throwing down consistently solid framerates with the graphical settings at mid-high with the resolution at my laptop's max, (1280x800). The engine may be three and a half years old but it still looks fantastic and the gameplay in these games is a solid as you can get. Half-Life 2 and Eps 1 & 2 are some of the best single player experiences you can get on a PC, Portal is a great brain-bending diversion for a few hours and DoD:Source, CS:Source and TF2 take online multiplayer and compress, polish and refine it until you get PC gaming diamonds. Oh yeah, you also get Peggle with Orange Box, which has about the highest addictiveness:simplicity ratio ever.


The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind: My favorite open world game of all time and a shining example of what a Western RPG can be. From the moment I stepped off the boat in Seyda Neen and saw the beautiful, open world for me to explore I knew I was playing a game I had never quite experienced before. One of my personal favorite aspects of the game is the extraordinarily varied cultures. Each town has it's own distinct architecture and culture and you never get the impression of cookie cutter game design, quite a feat with a game of Morrowind's size. It doesn't look nearly as good as Oblivion, and you'll notice some unfortunate load times between areas, but those are small complaints over what is an otherwise amazing achievement in game design. The game looked and ran fantastic on my laptop even before I upgraded to 2 Gb of ram and with two expansion packs, it takes a long, long time for this game to get old.

Sam & Max: Season One: If you like adventure games, get this. If you yearn for the good old days of classic Lucasarts Adventures, or even their text-based forebears, get this. Heck, if you have even the slightest sense of humor, get this. The new, episodic Sam & Max is absolutely hi-larious and expertly written. The only downsides are that the episodic nature keeps the season from quite getting the true feel of a grand adventure, and it's also a bit on the easy side, but that doesn't keep it from being terribly entertaining. When you finish it and crave for more Sam & Max you can move on to season two!

Trackmania Nations Forever: A bare, stripped down arcade racer with great graphics, hundreds of courses and the most amazing ranking system I've ever seen, this game easily justifies a full $40 price tag. The catch... it's absolutely free! This one's a no-brainer so do yourself a favor and download it now.

Halo: This one might be a bit controversial, especially among PC gamers, but the original Halo was one of the best games ever made when it came out on the Xbox. Once it was ported to PC it was even better. Not only was the single player campaign a blast with spectacularly designed levels, but the multiplayer was simple, fast paced, and well balanced. I spent many nights playing Halo PC on my computer over the dorm network with the other guys on my floor. There aren't quite as many people playing online as there were about four years ago, but if you can get a game going you'll realize that the gameplay is still as solid as ever. The only downside is the lack of co-op in the single player campaign.

Civilization IV: This is one of the finest strategy experiences ever crafted. An empire-building turn-based strategy game where you start in the bronze age and work your way through history till the twenty-first century. Civ4 takes the previous Civ games and Alpha-Centauris and works them into something more than the sum of their parts. If you aren't a fan of turn-based games this may not be for you, otherwise you owe yourself to play this game. To call it 4X just doesn't do it justice.

Thursday, May 1, 2008

Is the New Space Invaders Extreme? (yes)



In the world of video games, the word "extreme" has become synonymous with crap. For whatever reason, the world of low-budget games has decided that adding the word extreme will make a bad game more appealing. To an extent, they're on to something, as I've seen many a foolish consumer at Wal-Mart duped into buying total crap like Extreme Bullrider or Extreme Watersports. I always wondered if the sort of people who buy those games are actually capable of installing or playing them on a PC, (a difficult proposition for some less than technically-savvy people). Of course, the Wal-Mart crowd is very different from us hardcore gamers that most game development companies care about and we know that a game needs more than a cheesy title to be worth our hard-earned cash.

All that being said, I might have finally gotten my hands on a game where the word extreme is justified. A couple weeks ago I ordered a Japanese copy of Space Invaders Extreme, (which I will sometimes refer to as SIE), for my Nintendo DS and I have to say I'm impressed. If you played the mediocre Space Invaders Revolution that came out a few years ago, put that out of your head completely and and prepare yourself for a game that paradoxically feels familiar and new all at once.

My first impression once I started playing was that SIE is a combination of the classic Space invaders and the techno-psychedelic rail shooter, Rez. As in Rez, when you fire your weapon or strike an enemy ship, notes are added into the arcade-inspired trance music. That in itself was a cool addition but I figured that was probably as far as Taito was willing to go for yet another arcade remake. It seems for the 30th anniversary of Space Invaders they wanted to do more.


As I worked further into the level progression of whatever mode I was playing I discovered more and more additions that add depth to the game. The enemies are more colorful and vibrant and there are trippy, pulsating backgrounds that add to the sense of movement and overall style. Powerups are now available if you manage to destroy four or more of the same color enemy ship in a row, (which is called chaining, reminiscent of Ikaruga), and the color of the enemies determines the powerup. Examples of such powerups are a spread shot, a shield and a super-powerful laser that is visually and functionally similar to Iron Man's colossal death laser in Marvel vs. Capcom. Also the enemy types are much more varied than in the past. The traditional enemy ships and flying saucers still make up the bulk of the enemies for you to destroy, but you'll also face off against giant versions of the enemy ships, ships with shields that must be broken through, ships that when destroyed break into more ships, ships that explode and damage everything around them and several others that I don't want to spoil including boss battles.

Unfortunately, I did not think to import a paddle along with the game. A "paddle" that plugs into the GBA slot of the Nintendo DS and affords a more arcade-style control option is available in japan. From what I've heard the paddle works extremely well but that isn't something I can attest to. It won't be released in the U.S. though so if you want to use the paddle you'll have to import one, though I can say the game plays fine with a D-pad as well.

Since I don't speak or read Japanese I can't comment on the different game modes or options, though there are options for local and Wi-Fi multiplayer. SIE has been out in Japan since February and is scheduled to release in the U.S. on June 17 at a price of $19.99. From what I've played it's a great fusion of classic Space Invaders gameplay and modern shoot 'em up goodness that truly deserves the title of "extreme," though I'll have to wait till I have the U.S. version in my hands to see.

Kurt Vonnegut and Shigeru Miyamoto

I have a long standing theory that Shigeru Miyamoto read Harrison Bergeron while growing up and completely missed the point. Now that I've played Mario Kart Wii, I'm more certain than ever. If you haven't read the story, then read it. It's extremely short and more than worth your time. Just replace the shotgun at the end with a blue spiked turtle shell.


(comic found on Penny-Arcade)

My Gaming Equipment

To help understand what I'm playing on: here's the equipment I'm working with. (Click for larger images).
Last updated: 02/10/2010


Xbox 360 20Gb launch edition and my TV: Vizio 47" 1080p LCD



My PC, the guts have changed but the case has remained the same for seven years.


The guts of my PC: Xigmatek 750W PSU, Athlon 64 FX 52 (overclocked to 3.0Ghz), 4GB OCZ Reaper PC2 6400, Radeon HD2600XT, Sound Blaster Audigy X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition, MSI K9A2-NEO, 500GB Western Digital HDD, 500GB external Hammer MoreSpace HDD


My PC monitor: Acer 22" 1680x1050 resolution LCD


My Laptop: Dell Inspiron 1501, 17" screen, Turion 64 X2 Mobile (1.6Ghz), 2GB PC2 5200, Integrated Radeon Xpress 1150 256MB, Windows 7



I've added a Playstation 3 Slim 120Gb to the mix.