Play This Now: Mr. Robot

What do you get when you combine D/Generation, System Shock, Final Fantasy and a few dozen semi-obscure sci-fi references? A really weird game, obviously, but you'll probably end up with something very similar to Moonpod's little-known indie gem Mr. Robot. If I had to tell what kind of game it is I'd have to say isometric action puzzle platformer adventure/JRPG, which should give you some idea how busy this game is. As the massive colony ship Eidolon coasts towards their destination, its crew asleep in cryogenic chambers, hundreds of robots are busy keeping the ship running for the duration of the long journey, led by the omnipotent AI HEL-9000 (Get it? GET IT?!). Well, naturally, turns out HEL's up to no good, one of the crew members is dead, he's got a legion of security bots at his command and it's up to lowly service robot 1138 (Asimov to his friends) to put a stop to it. The game is split into two distinct halves, alternating between the two as you progress, puzzle platformer and JRPG-style combat. You'll navigate the ship pushing crates around, avoiding obstacles and making your way from room to room, but if you can manage to hop on an enemy's head or hack into certain terminals you'll enter a Shadowrun-y cyberspace, fighting hostile programs along the way. It's standard JRPG fare, you and your friends fight baddies, gain XP, get new abilities, buy new equipment and repeat. It's a fun, unique and charming game that I would've gladly paid $24.95 for had I heard about it sooner. But that's the best bit, all you've got to do is grab the GameTap client, no account required, and download the whole game for free. It's ad-supported, which means you have to sit through a 15-second video ad every time you want to play, but just compare that to how many unskippable videos Ubisoft or EA will put at the beginning of every game.

Link, GameTap's Mr. Robot page.

-K.

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Rainbow is the Most Potent Weapon in Freedom's Arsenal

The squad AI in Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six: Vegas 2 (Oakland 5) is amazing.

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Professor Layton Trailer

I felt like putting this up because I really got sucked into Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and you should too.

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Interplay it Again

Interplay, who I was sure was going to be dead and gone long before now after announcing their latest project, while they were already in a very bad spot, would be a Fallout MMO. As the market stands now, I simply do not see the value in creating an MMO, because Blizzard has essentially won that market, for the time being at least. It takes a lot of time, a lot of money, and you're basically swinging for the fences on a long shot, dozens have tried and failed. Instead of putting your company on the chopping block for a huge gamble, I always thought it would be a good idea to make some money on smaller games and work with the properties they still had. Clearly their internet spies, who know I'm a pretty big deal on the intertron, were paying attenion. They just announced that they're working on new titles in the MDK, Earthworm Jim, and Descent franchises. That sounds really good to me.

Also sometime last year Square released a 3D remake of Final Fantasy III for DS (The real FF3, not just FF6 renamed for the US), and now they're set to do the same thing with Final Fantasy IV this summer. I'm not too big on the FF series since the cast of incredibly dim-witted clownshoes made me stop playing Final Fantasy X half way through and I didn't even bother with X-2 due to the relentlessly irritating "girl power" vibe I got from it. Square could really win my favor again if they started bring the Front Mission games back overseas, or announced a sequel to Vagrant Story, or remade Chrono Trigger. There's actually a possibility to that last one, though. During an interview in Nintendo Power recently with director Takashi Tokita stated, "Chrono Trigger was a no-holds-barred, swashbuckling adventure that was a lot of fun to work on. If the demand is great enough, it's certainly possible." I am demanding this, and I hate most JRPGs. If they gave Chrono Trigger the same 3D treatment they did with these FF games, I'd buy twenty.

I don't know what I'd do with the other nineteen, though.

-K.

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Managing Synergies to Reduce Backward Overflow

Three months into my new job I was forced to attend an orientation conference this morning that last for four hours. 30 people were supposed to attend and I was about one out of 12 that actually showed up. Maritz is a large company that handles services for several other large companies, and while getting to know what each department does give me a better idea of what they actually do, it does nothing that helps me do my job. Or anybody else in the technology department, for that matter, since hearing the details about Maritz Incentives deals with Chase bank does not help people managing SQL servers or .NET programmers. This was all done alongside a PowerPoint presentation that had tons of useless clip art and effects. Holy shit, look at that icon spin!

I was also ready to kill everyone in the room and then myself when one of the speakers said they were looking to have a "paradigm shift."

Taking a tour of the Maritz Data Center, which handles all the data from the offices around the world, was kind of interesting -- For the first twenty minutes. When the head of the area started talking about new color copiers and showed us air filters made with horse hair he started to lose me.

I could've spent that time doing something much more worthwhile back at my desk, like reading web comics and watching last night's ball game. I'll go do that now.

-K.

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Testing Video

I'm just seeing how video uploading works here, and I'm using this screwed up line from Oblivion I captured to test it.

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An Open Letter

Dear People That Wear Yankees Caps and Jerseys,

Fuck you. I know you're not from New York, you've never even been there. You're only wearing that because it's a fashionable thing to do. You probably don't even follow baseball even remotely, because then you'd know they're a bunch of overpaid hacks and has-beens. They blow, and, by proxy, so do you.

Now stop it.

-K.

P.S. The Red Sox can go piss up a rope, too.

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What I (Dis)Liked This Week

Another week begins and here I am at work on no sleep, after tossing and turning for six hours. That also happened last Wednesday and I called in sick, I don't think they'd much like it if I did it again in such close proximity. Anyway, let's talk video games and stuff.

So getting tired of waiting for the release of the PC version next month, I finally popped in the copy of Mass Effect I got for the 360 a while back (Off the Expert Zone, I didn't pay $60 and just let it sit there). That was Friday night, and by the time I went to bed just before the sun began to rise on Sunday I had put 15 of your earth hours into it. What we've basically got here is a prettied-up Knights of the Old Republic that's more action-oriented and not set in the Star Wars universe, and that's fine by me. The enemy AI is a little clunky in that most creatures, humanoid, machine or otherwise, will most likely just run right at you and the game really likes to fuck you over in some of the indoor sections of side-quests where you'll enter a room and suddenly be gang-raped by twenty rocket-packing security droids. It's very clear that it was a carefully created game, crafted by teams of writers, artists and programmers that all brought a vibrant and complex universe, full of strange planets and races and history, to realization, but apparently there was only one guy in charge of the inventory interface and he was doing his best to get fired. When bartering there's no way to separate items by category, they're all just lumped in together, and when there's a billion types of everything (There are three different armor classifications per species alone) it gets a little frustrating, especially when scrolling moves so slowly. When you reach your maximum inventory limit the game tries to warn you when you're reaching it and when you find new stuff and want to take it but don't have room to you're not allowed. You can't even put it back down or swap out some older equipment for it, you're forced to discard it forever. Other than interface problems the game is engrossing and gorgeous and filled with character, the new conversation system isn't revolutionary but enjoyable and effective, and all the voice actors involved do a great job, save for Seth Green who plays the character of Seth Green as a spaceship pilot.

Since Grand Theft Auto IV is coming out in roughly two weeks I've decided to jump back into GTA: San Andreas, picking up the GTA collection for $30 on Steam. If you haven't played it yet then by all means you really need to because it's one of the best action games ever created and probably why I'm excited for GTA IV's release since I can only expect them to take the same improving formula and make it even better. Typically I'm very critical and dismissive of a game that takes more than an hour to "get into it" but that's the case with this, for me, at least. It isn't the fault of the gameplay, that's perfectly fine, it's just that in the beginning of the game you're introduced to a cadre of some of the most annoying characters ever produced in any piece of fiction. If there was a drinking game based on how many times someone says "gangsta," "busta," or "nigga" you'd be dead within the first two minutes. Though once you get out of the first city and out into the countryside, eventually meeting up with James Woods' CIA spook character, everything gets much better. James Woods makes everything better.

Been watching Nick Frost's (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) Danger! 50,000 Volts and it's a very entertaining show. Basically it's Nick tackling different survival scenarios that range from avoiding kimono dragon attacks to how to seal up a sinking naval vessel, with Nick interviewing related experts and taking part in hands-on demonstrations. There's an extra on the Shaun of the Dead DVD featuring an extra segment not in the series titled "Danger! 50,000 Zombies," with Simon Pegg as an Australian zombie expert, that's done in the exact same format of the show. I'm told you can find that particular "episode" on the internets, specifically YouTube. You should watch it because I said so.

That's pretty much it, I'm going to concentrate on not passing out at my desk now.

-K.

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Play This Now: Trilby - The Art of Theft

Trilby, the gentleman thief protagonist from the point-and-click adventure 5 Days a Stranger, returns in this stealth action platformer titled Trilby: The Art of Theft. Created by Ben Croshaw of "Zero Punctuation" fame, it's quite a departure from his earlier old school adventure game work, but a decent play nonetheless. It's easy to pick up and get into thanks to a quick tutorial and has a surprising length for a game created by one man. There's no saving in the middle of a mission, demanding you plan and time your movements carefully, but the lack of that feature can get frustrating especially when you're trying to go for a perfect mission rating. The higher the rating you receive the more prestige points you'll earn allowing you to purchase new moves and abilities to make things easier, as well as some unlockable outfits, adding some depth and replayability to a relatively simple game. You'll probably plow through it in an hour or two, but it's worth the download just to see a stealth game doesn't have to be military-themed or be an overwrought mess.

Download, artoftheft.zip (2MB)

-K.

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Inventing Things Which Have Already Been Invented

So after the rainout on Monday the real first game of the season began last night with an unfortunate loss to the Colorado Rockies, 2-1. Kyle Lohse had an impressive starting debut giving up only a couple hits and no runs. Kyle McClellan also made his major league debut coming in as a reliever in the sixth inning, retiring all three batters he faced and ending it with a strikeout that earned him a standing ovation from the crowd. He's from Hazelwood and he's only four months older than I am. Hearing those kinds of things casts a weird perspective for me.

As I was watching the game there was a particular Budweiser ad that came up several times, featuring their spokesman guy with tiny eyes and a misshapen head, talking about all the innovations AB has made throughout the history of beer. They were the first to have refrigerated rail cars, he tells us, and the first to put born-on dates on all of their products. Now he's proud to introduce AB's latest innovation: The Freshlock Cap. It keeps the air out, he explains, and the freshness in.
Maybe I don't know enough about the bottling process or hydrodynamics or general engineering or what-have-you, but I thought that's what a bottle cap already does.

-K.

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