• Wednesday, June 09th, 2010
So I’ve been gaming a bit more than usual once again. I finished Red Dead Redemption the other day. For those that don’t know, it’s an open world game set in the old west around the border between the USA and Mexico in the early 1900s. You play a man named John Marsden and it’s up to you if you want to be a law abiding gunslinger or or as an outlaw. At the end of the day it doesn’t make much difference which you choose. The game’s made by Rockstar who are famous for the Grand Theft Auto series of games, and it really shows. Personally I found it a lot more enjoyable than the most recent Grand Theft Auto, GTA IV, but like that game it’s still a world made up of largely unlikable characters with the story held together by missions relying on very muddy and glitchy gameplay. My tolerance for this formula has been rapidly depleting in recent years.
I literally could ramble on for thousands of words about Red Dead Redemption’s myriad problems and glitches or the vast number missed opportunities, but when it comes down to it the game still manages to hold it’s own while remaining fun. This is something GTA IV didn’t manage for me. Fun is why many of us play games after all and I’m not about to waste time on something I don’t enjoy. I happily played this game to it’s end and I think that stands for something. I’d be more harsh on it if it wasn’t for it’s powerful ending which to me redeems where they took the story. I really have to give Rockstar credit here. Still they can’t manage to wield the emotional clout of another game I’ve been playing, Fragile Dreams: ~Farewell Ruins of the Moon~, but that’s a topic for a future post.
I kind of feel like I haven’t been watching much anime lately, but it doesn’t entirely ring true when I say it. I’ve still managed to get through a few random series with friends as well as Funimation’s Blu-ray of Evangelion 1.11 that I imported a while back. Very impressed with that I must say. Of course 1.11 is already old hat and the next movie in this new Evangelion series, 2.22, is the new hotness of the fansub world. Watching it in any format but Blu-ray though doesn’t appeal. Blu-ray revels in content like this and I’m prepared to wait for the full experience. While waiting though it’s probably best I keep away from places like CDJapan and Amazon JP. I swear they’re trying to bankrupt me with Blu-ray boxset announcements. I’ve had to draw the line at The Legend of the Galactic Heroes Blu-rays which I’d love to own being one of the best series I’ve ever seen, but four box sets at 50500yen each (NZ$833 at todays exchange rate) is far too rich for my blood.
• Saturday, April 24th, 2010
Argh, I’m feeling really tired. Haven’t slept that well for the past few days. What better to do at such a time than write a blog post? So what have I been doing lately? Not really any gaming for once. Well okay, I have slipped in a bit of Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey on Nintendo DS in between other things. Good game and probably the best DS RPG I’ve personally seen to date. Lately I’ve only spent the odd half hour here or there playing the game though.
Oh, I’ve also been doing a bit of plumbing. Seems the tap controlling the water coming into the house developed a leak. Not a good thing to have extremely waterlogged earth under your house. It wasn’t especially visible because the pipe and tap were buried about 30cm under the ground. Seems the builders who constructed the place not only decided burying the tap was a good idea, but also that gluing the entire system together in such a way that that you couldn’t take any of it apart without physically breaking stuff was too. This made the job a lot harder than it needed to be, but to cut a long story short after spending $30 or so at Bunnings on bits and bobs the tap is replaced and everything is nice and dry again. Oh, and as a word of caution to anyone else thinking of doing something similar…new taps aren’t always assembled watertight when they leave the factory. You don’t want to have the replacement tap leak worse because the gland nut isn’t tight.
I’ve been keeping rather light on spending for some time now. Not completely by any means, I try and avoid extreme actions that I’d never stick to long-term, but more-so than usual. The biggest exception would have been the Westone UM3X earphones I needed for work when my Shure E5cs died. Yes, needed. For my sanity. But I digress. The improved cash flow may prove useful though given I’m eyeing up laptop upgrades. One of the new Macbook Pros specifically. Buying could either be viewed as canceling out all the good work of my reduced spending, or as an opportune “Just as planned” moment capitalizing on my cunning forethought . Currently I’m going with the latter.
There’s always the prevalent view out there that you have to be mentally incapacitated/gullible/rich/pretentious to buy a Mac when there’s cheaper and “better” Windows machines out there. In reality though there’s solid reasons to run any of the popular operating systems, and Apple hardware has some genuinely nice aspects to it that other brands lack. All of that aside though actually using Windows at least five days a week for a decade hasn’t made me like using it any better. Little frustrates me more than many of Window’s little party tricks. I’m not just talking about old stuff either; Windows 7 is no panacea. Non-Apple “Hackintoshes” running MacOS X have their place too (I dabble in this myself), but using one for my main machine when it could break with the next OS upgrade? No thanks. Honestly I’d sooner switch to Linux than use either of those (well technically I already maintain three Linux servers, but none even have a GUI installed). I may actually switch to Linux one day if Apple annoys me enough, which is entirely possible, but for now I want to always have at least one computer in the house that always works, has a responsive user interface, doesn’t interrupt me with inane dialogs all the time, and doesn’t get more convoluted with each release. And lets face it. There’s no debate that for those who aren’t afraid of the command line…Unix userland >>>>> DOS.
I think I’ll drop things here for the time being. That bed’s looking mighty alluring right about now.
• Friday, April 02nd, 2010
Well Dragon Age Origins: Awakening was a little disappointing. I still enjoyed it, but it didn’t build on any of the aspects I liked best in the original game. Instead there was a heavy focus on being a “Grey Warden”. In a way I’m not surprised in that this seems to be how Bioware rolls these days. Both Dragon Age and Mass Effect like to lock characters into belonging to a faction, and honestly I don’t see the need for this. In Mass Effect 2 the way they forced your character to change allegiance between such factions came across really awkward and implausible. In ME2 it could have been done better and made to work, but even then I don’t see why it’d be worth the effort. Where’s the payoff?
DAO: Awakening thankfully didn’t try any major changes like ME2, but also had problems related to factions. The big one to me is that they didn’t establish why the player (or the player’s character) should even care about the order of the Grey Wardens. So warden membership is low within the region? Who cares. The story already established there were plenty of other wardens elsewhere in the world. Why would a character who’s had little freedom in their life (mages and elves being two such groups within the game) want to sign up with another organization that’s going to order them around and keep track of what they do? Even if they were forced to sign up which is how it came across for certain “origins” in the original game, what would be their motivation for sticking around once the danger had passed and the compulsion had gone? None of this is considered by the game as the player is forced to go through the motions and be led by the nose to the predictable ending.
It’s hard to take Bioware’s disparagement of the linearity of their competitor’s games seriously when they can’t manage to do better themselves. Ironically Bioware’s own much maligned Jade Empire managed a tad better in this regard. It was still a very linear game, but at least it didn’t force you to sign on with club of crazies down the road, take on their goals as your own and defend them to the death.
Unfortunately that wasn’t the only issue with Awakening. It definitely felt like it was made by a different team than the original game. The pacing was overly fast and the characterization felt quite inconsistent and shoddy. The set pieces and plot twists came across as having been decided rather arbitrarily. One especially damning point is that the two “Blood taint” skills you could obtain in the previously released Soldier’s Peak DLC actually break when you import an old character into Awakening. In game it looks like they should work, but the skill dialog shows an error message instead of the category name and when you try to use them from the command bar they do nothing but trigger some buggy character animation. It’s not just me that sees this problem, Bioware say the two are simply incompatible. I certainly expected third-party mods wouldn’t work, but having such a visible problem with Bioware’s own official DLC really smacks of a lack of care and effort.
It’s a shame really as some of the core ideas and new characters really had a lot of potential. A few of the new elements work quite well. Having to make executive decisions as the region’s Arl being a case in point. Some of the environments were more dynamic and varied too. I certainly don’t mean to make this expansion sound terrible because it isn’t, but with a little more polish and a bit more thought it could have been substantially better than it is. I hate to see such wasted potential.
• Thursday, March 18th, 2010
So the news has been doing the rounds that Hamilton’s ITM 400 V8 race hasn’t been doing so well financially. Ticket sales are slow even compared to last year. A year which apparently didn’t make a profit and certainly didn’t bring into the region anywhere near the business that had been promised. Supposedly the council took out a $7,950,000 loan in the first year to help fund the initial setup. Now that may not look like a lot of money in this day and age, but it’s worth keeping in mind that this loan lasts for 25 years and is accruing approximately $500,000 in interest annually. In other words over the 25 years the interest alone will add up to $12,500,000, and that’s without even contemplating repayment of the principal itself. That’s another $300,000 every year. Nice one guys. The race organizers are now busy trying to scare people into buying tickets with the threat of us potentially losing the race in coming years. Well cry me a river. Or that’s what I would say if it wasn’t the rate-payers who are going to be left holding the bill for this mess.
But enough about that. I managed to hurt my right hand/wrist/arm recently and have been doing my best to let it recover. Don’t really know what the cause was, but there were a few things I’ve done lately that could have led to me pulling something. At it’s worst it felt like that moment just after someone has punched you really hard in your shoulder, only it felt like that 24-hours a day. Thankfully it’s much better now and seems to be on the mend so I’m just going to keep going easy on it for a while.
I haven’t been playing many games lately. Partly due to the sore arm, but I’d also finished Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth about two weeks back. Now I’m mostly waiting for the Dragon Age Origins: Awakening expansion (why do we get this three days later than the rest of the world?). I was planning to buy Yakuza 3, but it seems when it came to the western localisation SEGA decided to phone it in and cut significant content from the game. Elements of the dialog don’t even make sense any more with the cuts. It’s a shame as with Yakuza 3, and Yakuza 4 just released in Japan, the series looks to be finally getting beyond the “low budget Shenmue” vibe that it’s carried since it’s inception. I can’t say I’m too surprised though with SEGA once again making it clear they are their own worst enemy, but it would be nice if they at least tried to do right by their customers. On the whole it’s a big month for games, but I have no interest in Final Fantasy XIII and only a passing interest in God of War 3, so it’s looking rather quiet for me. Gives me a chance to catch up with highly recommended items on the back-burner like Batman: Arkham Asylum.
• Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Well the latter part of 2009 and the start of 2010 just blew past me. I did my usual trick of having a half written post or two lying around, but they aren’t significant enough for me to feel the need to poach anything. I’m not one to buy into the idea of years being “lucky” or “unlucky”, but quite a few of my family and friends seem to have been having a hard time at the start of the year in various ways. Broken limbs, infectious diseases, expensive stuff breaking or just general bad times. Certainly hope that doesn’t last.
In my gaming time lately I’ve been playing Bioshock 2. Finished it last night and I was impressed with what they’ve done. I finished Mass Effect 2 fairly recently as well and it was good, although not as good as it could have been. It improved on the first game in numerous regards, but fell down in some other key areas. The dialog was rather shoddy for a Bioware game which was made all the more obvious given it was released so soon after Dragon Age: Origins. ME2 definitely wasn’t the 10/10 title many of the reviews suggest. Then again it’s by no means the first time professional reviewers threw similar accolades at flawed games (e.g. Grand Theft Auto 4). I’ve got plenty more to continue on with time permitting. Got a copy of Ace Attorney Investigations for the DS on the way, Heavy Rain is due late February, Dragon Age: Awakening in March, Persona 3 Portable in June. Bound to be others I’m forgetting.
There’s not a lot of interest in the current anime season. So far certainly nothing I can imagine wanting to pick up on Blu-ray. I’m sort of casually watching a few things to see if they go anywhere, but odds alone would suggest most won’t. Fine by me really as it’ll be nice to have a couple of months of smaller CD Japan orders. Well once the current series I’m picking up are done with anyway.
I was going to write some more personal stuff here, but the words aren’t flowing and persevering with it would probably doom this draft to oblivion so I think I’ll let it pass for the time being.
