It's been two weeks since my last post. Shameful.

The funny thing is that there's a weird point where I have too much to talk about. When that happens I basically freeze up and post nothing. This is one of those times. So I'm posting a quick and dirty post - just to break the logjam.

I just watched the latest episode of The Show with Zefrank, and the ad at the end was a perfect storm of bloggable points. See, The Show always ends with a static ad image. On the one hand it pays the bills, and on the other hand it fetches the ad image from a remote server. This allows some accurate usage statistics - not just who downloaded it, but who watched to the end. Anyway, the last few days have been ads for Gametap. Today's ad featured Jade from Beyond Good and Evil (for old school HiddenJestering see my BGaE review here, apparently RIGHT after I converted to MovableType (going by sequence number - it's number 6!) For bonus points see Bwana carping about playing old games in the comments. Some things never change :-D)

So yeah anyway. Why is this a perfect storm of bloggable points? Well, we discussed Beyond Good and Evil on this very blog. And there was a lot of discussion about game rentals and whether it was destroying the industry - but some of it either happened in email, or on somebody else's blog - I can't find the origin point on the Snarking (neé Sniping) Post. See here, here, and me being fucking snarky here for some mainly comment-based dialog about game rentals and whether it is a true danger. I'm mostly a smart-ass about it, but there was some genuine good discussion about it, and in my opinion it holds up in review. At that second link you can actually see me reference the service that later became Gametap (or it was always Gametap and I didn't know the name then. Not sure which.) So anyhoo, it struck me when I saw a Gametap ad featuring Jade - here's the mythical other channel advertising how they have a game that should have done better than it did. Since I've contended all this time that the other channels are there and the publishers will find them as soon as they actually care (read they need the $$$), it was heartwarming to see that Gametap may actually be maturing into that channel.

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Is here. I'm not sure that I really have high hopes for the movie itself, but the trailer made me chuckle. (I saw it on Chris Roberson's site.)

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So I'm back. Cleaned up, unpacked my suitcase and the like. This was a big week for games and gaming hardware, so I installed my Xbox 360 HD-DVD player (looked at some clips from King Kong and Serenity), set up my 360 wireless headset (charging, not really used yet), and sorted all the mail and the like. So more on those later. I'll pick up Gears of War on Thursday, and I actually grabbed Elite Beat Agents while on vacation. And I'm about a quarter through Vice City Stories, so I could talk about that as well.

And I'd better get some work done as well :-)

technorati tags:vacation, gaming, Xbox_360, HD-DVD

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I'm on vacation from now until next Monday, in Vegas for most of this week and then road tripping around southern California over the weekend. Updates will likely be non-existent. I'll be playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City Stories over the trip, so bug me about that when I return. Also I've been playing some Just Cause and so far I really like it. Between it and Saint's Row I guess this is the year the GTA clones stop sucking. (Some people would say Mercenaries gets that honor. I thought Mercenaries was . . . OK, but not spectacular. I didn't finish it, and I can't say as it bothered me much.)

Anyway, it's a blogging holiday. Away!

technorati tags:vacation, SLARTIBARTFAST_06, Las_Vegas

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So I did finally get Dead Rising from Gamefly. And I'm glad I waited, because ultimately? Unimpressed with it. It's almost brilliant and I really wanted to like it, but ultimately a game gets very few "make me play 40 minutes and they reload because the save points are so @#$^#$%#$ far apart" tokens, and Dead Rising burned right through the supply. The last time I played for a while, then found a homicidal clown juggling chainsaws who has some trick to killing him I suppose. Bullets to the head at point-blank range did no damage. Then he breathed fire on me, knocked me into a moving funhouse ride and as I stood up he came over and cut me with his chainsaws. End result? I lost five of my six blocks of health before I got control back. And the little orange envelope came out and away it went. Good riddance. I've got more games than I can handle, and I can't be bothered with games that spring cutesy bosses on you with little to no warning and no save point beforehand.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent is a different story. I haven't made up my mind about singleplayer yet, but multiplayer is a blast. I've played a bunch of coop-challenge play and tonight we tried the versus mode. They definitely streamlined the game down, it's faster paced than either Pandora Tomorrow or Chaos Theory, but that's a good thing, in my opinion.

Gabe from Penny Arcade disagrees with me and I can see his points without entirely agreeing. You can read that here:

You can like this game, that’s fine. But it really is a new game. This isn’t Splinter Cell multiplayer, this is Halo hide and seek.

Penny Arcade! - The Green Harvest, Part Two

Scroll down a bit - it's the second post of the day and it's titled "Yuck".

I don't really see the Halo comparison at all. It's definitely faster, and the mercs have lost the ability to place mines. In exchange they got more powerful grenades, unlimited ammo, and these super-cool remote hover-drones that can investigate the airducts where a filthy spy might be hiding. They can also quickly move from one terminal to another. In Chaos Theory mines were super-important because there were more terminals than mercs and you couldn't get from one to the other easily. So I usually ended up mining up one terminal so I could then guard another.

They are very different games, no doubt about it. The difference is that Double Agent supports six players versus four, and that you can have a friend up to speed in Double Agent with a couple of plays. I remember how complicated it was to explain Chaos Theory to a new player - I like this version much better myself.

I can see where somebody who played PT or CT three-four times a week for months on end wouldn't like it. But those people need to acknowledge that catering a game to them means an incredibly limited (and stagnant) market segment. At the end of the day Double Agent captures much the same feel (for me at least) while making it much more accessible to newcomers. That's all to the good.

technorati tags:gaming, Xbox_360, Splinter_Cell, Dead_Rising

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