Category Archives: Games

Dec 16 2008
Games

Prince of Persia

Prince of Persia.  The name for some conjures images of a white clad, rotoscoped prince running, jumping, climbing (and often dying) his way through an underground prison.

Then there was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the Xbox.  Which was a great reboot for the series.  We’ll pretend that Prince of Persia 3D never happened.

The sequels to Sands of Time were okay.  I never really liked the direction Warrior Within went.  Overall it seemed too grungy, trying too hard to be “edgy” and “serious.”  After just a few hours, I grew tired of the combat and then didn’t come back for the third game in the series, The Two Thrones.  I may come back and revisit them at a later date, but for now I can just read the plot synopses and be done with them. Continue reading →

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Dec 11 2008
Games

PlayStation Home

Yes, where you, too can be hit on by fabulously anonymous denizens of the internet.

The launch is scheduled for today, December 11, for the PlayStation Home Beta.  I like the “beta” subtitle.

I’m looking forward to the place getting populated by more people, although I don’t know why.

I know I am not going to spend too long in the application itself.  I view it mainly as an interesting social experiment.  It’s as if a Sony exec asked, “If we add Second Life features to the demographics of PlayStation 3 owners, what will we get?” Continue reading →

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Dec 09 2008
Games, Technology

Ruined Techno for me, forever

The Nintendo DS is not considered a musical instrument.

There are music games, yes, and there was the brilliant in concept but flawed in execution Jam Sessions guitar simulator for the DS.  (Full disclosure:  I spent about two weeks just trying to play Jonathan Coulton’s RE: Your Brains.  It’s just too unwieldy on a directional control pad and a strum bar on the touch screen.)

The KORG DS-10 Synthesizer for the Nintendo DS is exactly what it says it is.  It is not a title for a KORG Synthesizer based game for the DS.  It is, in fact, a synthesizer and sequencer for the DS.

I’m going to let that sink in for a second.

It’s not a musical instrument simulator of any sort, it’s actually a synthesizer and a sequencer.  And on top of that, it uses the DS screen like a poor man’s KAOSSilator.  Which is a lot of fun.  Here’s a video showing what four of them together can do.

They wirelessly synchronize for beat matching and playback.  Of course, you’ll need a mixer to take full advantage of that, but who doesn’t have one laying around?

In short, it’s awesome.

Review based on doodling in the sequencer window and editing note lengths and values, and then adjusting the drum kit sequencer so that it repeats doom-tch-doom-tch-doom-tch while panning speakers from left to right and repeating for several measures before using the kaoss pad function to adjust peak and cutoff values for synth 1, while synth 2’s track is all doomp-doompdoomdoom-doomp and synth 1 and 2 mixed through the flanger FX at the end with the knob turned all the way wet and mixed so that the bass line on synth 2 isn’t overpowering the entire song at 142bpm.

I did not get to try the multiplayer mixing aspect of this program but god help me if I get another copy.

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Dec 06 2008
Games

Persistent Growth

Persistence. I’m going to call it a feature. Three really excellent titles feature persistence this year:

  1. The World Ends With You, by Square Enix for the Nintendo DS
  2. City of Heroes, by NCSoft, for the PC (and MAC!)
  3. Fable 2, by Lionhead studios for the xbox 360

The World Ends With You had a great system of character growth. Your skills are attached to wearable pins. The more you use them, the more they level up. What was also interesting was the fact that they would earn experience when you weren’t playing, but only to a certain level cap.

In addition to being a great game, it was always a major draw to come back to it after a couple of days to check on the pins and swap them out so that other attacks could become more powerful. Even when I wasn’t playing, my characters were getting stronger. It felt like the game was going on, even when it was switched off.

In MMOs the world goes on without you regardless of whether or not you’re in it. But nothing directly happens to your character. There’s no growth–at least in most cases. (World of WarCraft toys with this idea, but it’s merely a case of accruing a period of time where you earn double “rested” XP. This is done, presumably so you can log back in and level up twice as quickly to make up for the time you’ve spent falling behind your friends who raid full time, in addition to their 40 hour a week day job.) Continue reading →

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Oct 31 2008
Games

Lock's Quest

I like Lock’s Quest.

It’s a tower defense type of game, mixed with Rampart, and PixelJunk Monsters, with some combat thrown in. The combat is simplistic, and really isn’t the focus of the game, but it’s handy. In “tower defense” games, it’s frustrating when that one enemy slips past your defenses and you end up having to do the entire level over again. Granted, that’s part of the game, learning the waves and building appropriately, but it’s still frustrating.

In PixelJunk Monsters, you had to watch as an enemy flyer gets through and takes out your last villager.

By comparison, in Lock’s Quest, if there’s a Clockwork Soldier hammering away on the Source Well you’re supposed to protect, you can run over there and hit him with a wrench.

Yeah.

Much more satisfying, much less frustrating. Continue reading →

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