Gaming

Touching another man’s Wii

I promise the title of this post will be my first and only Wii penis joke. Really.

Tonight, three years after its debut, I finally got a chance to play around with a Wii, thanks to an invite from Nic to try his out. He got it for the best price possible — as a prize in a raffle. Nice!

We played some Lego Batman after I got the lowdown on how to use the wand and nunchuk controllers and I think I did fairly well for a newbie. I had to play as Robin but hey, it’s Nic’s Wii so if he wants to play Batman, he plays Batman, dammit (and after watching how many times he plunged to his death while using the bat glide suit, I wasn’t too concerned about playing the sidekick). In one particular room we managed to kill ourselves repeatedly. I would push the joystick on the nunchuk and press the A button on the wand and Robin, the boy wonder, would happily walk off into a vat of lava or some toxic goo. Repeatedly. Being made of Lego grants you a kind of immortality, however, so the sting of death is not severe. We made a pretty good team, I’d say.

After putting away Mr. Freeze and Clayface, we moved on to the pack-in game, Wii Sports, testing out Tennis and Bowling. In Tennis we played two games. Nic beat me fairly handily in the first round as my fatheaded guys ran around the court looking more like rejects from Lord of the Dance than tennis players. The second game, however, found Nic without his mojo as he bobbled nearly every volley, handing me an easy win.

After drawing in Tennis we played a round of Bowling and I’m a bit concerned about Nic dislocating his shoulder when he plays the real thing because he puts some serious English into his swing. And it works. He got 5 strikes in all and ended with three in a row after finding the “magic spin”. I did not find any magic whatsoever and managed no strikes, though I got a few spares to stave off a humiliating defeat. Neither of us got a gutter ball.

Overall, the Wii left me unimpressed with its graphics (though being on a standard def TV probably doesn’t help much) but the controls were easy enough to grasp. The precision left something to be desired, though (see the countless deaths in Lego Batman as an example). While the party games are fun, I can’t say I’ve got a huge urge to trade-in my Xbox 360 for a Wii just yet.

Still, I must win at Bowling, so my Wii play is not over.

M(icky) Mouse

These are apparently concept sketches for an upcoming game featuring Mickey Mouse for the Nintendo Wii. The game, called Epic Mickey, is being headed up by Warren Spector, who has worked previously on the decidedly un-childlike games Thief and Deus Ex. As you can see, the world being portrayed appears to be a bit dark. Much like the movie 9, this stuff would probably give little kids (a presumed target audience for the game) nightmares. I approve!

More art can be found here.

A good summation on playing Risk

I always sucked when playing Risk as a kid. It’s not a complex game but it does involve some math and I’m like Barbie when it comes to math — I’d rather go shopping. And I don’t even like shopping. The worst part is probably the Machiavellian maneuvers required to form and break alliances with others in order to conquer and achieve ultimate victory. I’m a nice guy, I just want to get along. The mentality doesn’t fit a war game well. While this quote from Quarter to Three’s gaming forum doesn’t reflect my own personal experience playing Risk, it does nicely cover how the game affects some people:

I have been so traumatized by Risk, I don’t even know where to begin. Games never ended without someone in tears. The last game of Risk I played, I was getting pummeled by my 10 year old cousin. In a huff, I started crying and threw my cards at her and quit.

I was 21.

On the flipside, I have fond memories of Careers, though I can barely recall any details of the game. I do remember we had the groovy version that included the Ecology career. Oh, those nutty 70s! boardgamegeek.com has an image of it here.

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How to read this blog, Part 1

How to Read This Blog, Part 1
by Creole Ned

This site is divided into six categories:

  1. Dating
  2. Gaming
  3. General
  4. Health and Fitness
  5. Photos
  6. Writing

Every post has at least one category attached to it. The content of each category is as follows:

1. Dating There are no entries for this because I am writing about my dating experiences elsewhere, therefore this category should have been removed but I forgot. Oops.

2. Gaming In which I share my gaming experiences or write about games like roughly one billion other people on the web do. As I don’t game as much as before, these posts are becoming less frequent. If you are not a gamer there is probably only a 50% chance you will find my insights worth reading. I arrived at 50% by just making a number up, kind of like a review score!

3. General The inevitable catch-all category. Random nonsense about life, media and anything else that doesn’t fit into the other categories.

4. Health and Fitness Currently I lift dumbbells three times a week and jog three times a week and it is here where I chronicle my hi-jinks, ranging from pulled muscles to getting rocks thrown at me by ill-mannered children. I also chat a bit from time to time about diet and food choices. If these things don’t set your heart a-flutter, safely ignore!

5. Photos When I add images to my gallery I post about them under this heading. However, I am currently debating over how to add photos to the site and my current hodgepodge method means I’m not adding nearly as many as I could. On the one hand, entertainingly bad pictures from my youth are going unshared. On the other hand…well, the exact same thing.

6. Writing Here I talk occasionally about the process of writing and books I have read. Mainly I discuss my ongoing writing projects, whether they are exercises, short stories or one of my novels.

Now that you know more about each category you can better choose how to read through this rich tapestry I call my blog. Or just skip all this and skim for saucy words like “hooters” and “malfeasance”.

Homeless fun in The Sims 3

A fellow who goes by the online name roBurky began posting about his experiment with a homeless father and daughter in The Sims 3 on the Quarter to Three forum. Their not-so-excellent adventure is now chronicled in a blog he has created and it is replete with screenshots covering their ups and downs. Their many many downs. Recommended.

Alice and Kev, a Sims 3 adventure in homelessness.

What you do when you have a huge gaming backlog

You start playing old games you’ve already completed, of course.

Have games become my new comfort food now that I can’t rely on Snickers bars and pizza? Probably. Instead of playing Fallout 3 or Left 4 Dead or even Spore, I find my current line-up of games is:

  • Titan Quest (2006) – playing through again in co-op
  • Lord of the Rings Online (2007) – playing with a Monday night-only group from Qt3. I always have a group. It’s nice!
  • Duke Nukem 3D (1996!) – bought off of gog.com and using the high resolution texture pack. My excuse? I never finished the fourth episode, “The Birth”

Someday I’ll start and finish a game when it still counts as “new”. Someday.

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Dear Logitech,

Your promotional Flash site for the new G-series line of products looks very snazzy. However…

logitech-promo

I do not think you mean what you say…

lightening

Admittedly, I’m old enough that I’m not up on all the cool kid lingo anymore, so it is perhaps possible that you really are comparing the speed of the G9x mouse to the descent of a uterus.

Meanwhile, I irrationally crave the G19 keyboard even though it will be ludicrously expensive. So pretty, so very very pretty.

Patches, we don’t need no stinking patches

Patches are an inevitable part of any MMORPG as the developers push out nerfs, buffs, additional or revised content and of course, fixes. This week two games had patches released that worked in reverse, seemingly breaking more than they fixed.

WoW Insider succintly sums up the latest patch to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft with The disaster of patch 3.0.8. Among the highlights: server-crashing bugs that forced them to shut off the entire PvP zone of Wintergrasp and access to the arenas. Major patches are something veteran WoW players have learned to anticipate with dread. On the plus side, lag-induced deaths are less painful now thanks to the addition of over 60 new graveyards and a buff to ghost run speed.

Meanwhile, the dev team for City of Heroes made the curious decision to push an 80 MB patch live the day before the twice-a-year and incredibly popular Double XP Weekend begins. This thread outlines the many things that weren’t fixed, error-riddled patch notes (a CoH tradition) notwithstanding. Unfixed powers, new features that aren’t actually there and the Virtue server having fits are among the highlights. Also, don’t wear our clothes!

Maintaining a sprawling and gigantic mess of ever-expanding code for a live game is not a simple task and any reasonable player will expect a few bumps along the way but these two examples seem to reflect a growing inability to just get the basics right without screwing something (or many things) up. This is why it’s best to have a diverse gaming library. when your favorite online game goes haywire, you can turn to the ever-reliable alternatives like Solitaire and Minesweeper. Oh Minesweeper, I’ll beat you this time!

Spore: The Milking, Part 1

While Activision devotes 90% of its production toward Guitar Hero titles (“Play Guitar Hero on your car’s GPS!”) EA is busying itself between studio closures and layoffs with preparations for the Sims-like milking of its newest declared mega-franchise, Spore. This Shacknews story reports there are four Spore titles due out this year. They are at least targeting different platforms — the Wii, DS and PC but is there really anything about the Spore universe that warrants a bunch of titles with only a tenuous connection to the original game? The answer is: you aren’t in marketing and your question is dumb.

I’m not terribly bothered by the incoming wave of Spore titles but I do think it reflects lamentably on the growing reliance by game publishers to produce one carefully-cultivated franchise (not game series, “franchises” of “products”) and then squeeze it for all its worth until its eventual collapse forces them to move onto something else (see also: the glut of hunting games and Myst clones in the 1990s that have all but vanished now).

Top 20 best-selling PC games of 2008

Here’s the Top 20 best-selling PC games of 2008. This doesn’t count digital distribution so the results are skewed. Let’s have a look!

1. World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King
No surprise here. World of Warcraft: Poop in a Box would sell a couple million copies. Fortunately the expansion turned out to be pretty good, even if it did actually contain poop (quests).

2. Spore
Incessant hype, lots of controversy (DRM, science vs. toy game design, penis creatures), that Sims-y vibe. No surprise it has sold so well. The Creature Creator probably played a big part in greasing sales.

3. World of Warcraft: Battle Chest
I guess everyone buying #1 would need something like #3 so this is inevitable.

4. Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures
They recently merged over half the servers but this sold like crazy for a few months. A textbook example of launching an incomplete game and torpedoing your long-term efforts as a result.

5. Warhammer Online: Age Of Reckoning
Four of the top 5 games are MMOs. WAR stopped bragging about its numbers even sooner than Conan and Mythic has been stealthily working on server merges/closures. Will publishers look at box sales or subscription numbers when deciding whether or not to green-light future MMOs? The answer is: more money will be flushed down the drain on expensive persistent-world games that fail to deliver while everyone keeps buying extra copies of WoW (see below).

6. Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
CoD is the new Quake. This game is a year old, which is actually kind of young for a PC title.

7. The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
Way down the list at #7. Shocking! The Sims 3 ships next month. Not so shocking.

8. World Of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Collector’s Edition
A lot of #1s were bought when #8 sold out. Probably going for $5000 on eBay now.

9. Fallout 3
Bethesda successfully revives a series that has been dormant for a decade, a neat trick. Name recognition still matters (or so 3D Realms hopes).

10. World Of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade
Yeah, okay, this has been out for two years now. Do people just buy some flavor of WoW every time they go down the PC game aisle?

11. Call Of Duty: World At War
See #6.

12. The Sims 2 FreeTime
Inevitable Sims 2 expansion, amazingly not in the top 10.

13. World Of Warcraft
There are three dozen SKUs for WoW. Buy all of them, people!

14. Sins Of A Solar Empire
The first RTS in the list (sorry, EA and Red Alert 3) and an impressive debut for Ironclad. Would place even higher if its Impulse sales were counted.

15. Warcraft III Battle Chest
“Hey, I thought it was World of Warcraft!”

16. The Sims 2 Apartment Life
My apartment life included a drunk landlord that tried to burn down the building. This will get recycled some time in the next year for Sims 3 (the expansion, not the torching ways of my ex-landlord).

17. Crysis
Despite murdering hardware, this game has done very well, sales-wise. PC gaming is still doomed though, right?

18. Left 4 Dead
Steam sales would place this a lot higher, I suspect.

19. Diablo Battle Chest
“I thought it was Diablo 3!” Diablo 2 was released in 2000. The most successful Diablo clone since then might be Titan Quest — and the developer shut down after its release. Advice to game companies: Don’t try to emulate Blizzard’s success. Even when your games are good, people will still choose a 10 year old Blizzard title instead. I recommend changing your company name to Blissard Entertainment as an alternate strategy.

20. The Orange Box
Again, Steam sales would lift this higher. Another 1+ year old game but it almost counts as brand new in comparison to some of the others.

A handful of FPSes, an RTS, the Blizzard catalog and the Sims. This was the state of (retail) PC gaming in 2008. I suppose it could be worse. Deer Hunter and Myst clones no longer make the list but it’s a bit scary that games that predate the original Xbox are still in the top 20.

Follow-up: Shacknews has an NPD report that PC retail sales dropped 14% in 2008 to $701 million. Considering that Blizzard generates over a billion dollars per year from WoW alone, I think it’s safe to say retail is providing a picture of revenue that is…less than accurate.