Category: Gaming

Review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Posted on by Nimgimli

I recently finished Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune for the Sony Playstation 3, and even though the game has been out for over six months, I felt the need to review it just because I enjoyed it so much.

First let’s establish who I am, in gaming terms. I’m not an ultra-competitive, hardcore gamer. I’d call myself more experiential or narrative-driven. Or more simply, I play games primarily for the story or the exploration of a new world. Challenge doesn’t become important to me until it hits an extreme, either low or high.

I mention this because Drake’s Fortune isn’t a very difficult game (at least on the Normal setting) and it doesn’t have any multiplayer. It’s a linear romp from start to finish. My final save clocked in at ten hours and change, so its relatively short. There are hidden items to find and faux-Achievements embedded in the game, both of which might be enough to get you to play through the game a second time, but the narrative is what really drives this game.

You play modern-day treasure hunter Drake, who is convinced he is a descendant of Sir Francis Drake, even though there are no records of Drake Sr. ever having fathered a child. Drake Jr and his partner, Victor “Sully” Sullivan, are hunting for the lost city of El Dorado (and all its hidden wealth). Chronicling their journey is videographer and reporter Elena Fisher. During their adventures they’ll encounter ancient ruins, Nazi relics, and modern day pirates. While the storyline isn’t high-art, it’d make a wonderful Saturday afternoon adventure matinee, which in fact was what it was modeled on.
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First Look: Etrian Odyssey II

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been in an old-school gaming kind of mood recently, so when Angela gave me a shiny new DS Lite for my birthday, I went game hunting, and came up with Etrian Odyssey II. It’s got lots of old school RPG goodness in it, at least on paper. I’ve only done the first starter mission.

The first thing you do is create a “guild” for yourself. Guilds can have up to 30 (!) characters in them, and a party consists of 5 of those characters. Characters can be one of 12 classes (to start, it appears you can unlock more later) and you create them all. No pre-made characters or emo NPCs to join your group. When you pick characters for a party you arrange them into front and back rank. This feeling familiar yet?
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First Look: Spore Creature Creator

Posted on by Nimgimli

I finally got my hands on the trial version of the Spore Creature Creator. Full version is apparently out tomorrow and will cost you $10, and the trial is said to include about 25% of the critter parts.

First things first… messing with this toy is awfully fun. It’ll take you about 10 seconds to learn the basics of building creatures, and not much longer to figure out all the controls. The Creator is (or will be soon) available for Windows or OS X and you really owe it to yourself to give the trial a go.

All that said, now I’m going to be Mr. Negative, since there’s plenty of positive press about this toy. My biggest disappointment so far (and this is based on the trial, perhaps the full version offers more options) is how generally similar all the creatures turn out. At first glance you’ll say I’m nuts, but look at them for a few moments and you’ll see all the lines tend to be pretty similar.

Maybe its because the artists haven’t gotten the hang of things, but I think the problem comes down to the limitations of the tool. The basic body shape tends to be a blob with a single spine. Always a single spine, you can’t fork it or have a dual-spined creature. Each vertebrae can be enlarged or shrunk in order to shape your ‘blob’ but there are limits to this. You can’t taper the end of the spine into a whip-like tail, for instance.

Also, there is no concept of a discrete head. Instead, you create a head by swelling up the end of the spine, then sticking on a mouth/snout selection and adding eyes, ears, horns or whatever to the head-blob. But this means you can’t make, for instance, a wedge-shaped head. At least I haven’t figured out how to. It’s going to be round or cylindrical.

Now in all fairness, considering that whatever you create will animate, dance, be happy, sad, roar, punch or sumo wrestle at the touch of a button, it’s still pretty darned impressive. It would, I suppose, be quite a challenge to programatically extend these animations to a 2 spined creature with an ovoid gap in the middle of its body, or an upright octopod with a head, 12 tentacles and no body.

But I’m a greedy SOB and I still want more. Hopefully the full version will have a better selection of tails, horns and so forth.

In the meantime, we can watch the Cant (half cow, half ant, all attitude) dance.

Another Wii update

Posted on by Nimgimli

The glow you see today leads down a dark and twisty path to an update that breaks the Zelda hack. Yes, it adds some trivial features but basically it looks like Nintendo is shutting down this particular back door.

Apparently if you have the Homebrew Channel already installed, it’ll still work. Haven’t tested this though. If you’re interested in this Wii Homebrew Scene, I suggest you get the Homebrew Channel up and running before applying this update. Either that, or just skip the update, though you know sooner or later some game will require it.

Nintendo updates the Wii Nintendo Channel

Posted on by Nimgimli

Why is your Wii Slot glowing blue? It’s because the Nintendo Channel has been updated and now lets you rate games, as well as check out how other people (cumulatively) have rated them. You can rate any game you’ve spent at least an hour playing (a bit eerie that my Wii remembers that I played Excite Truck for over an hour at some point!).

Typical Nintendo twists apply. You answer the following questions for each game:

Was the person who played it the most male or female?
What was their age?
Is the game for everyone or gamers?
Is it Hard Core or Casual?
Is it more fun alone or with others?

And finally a “how highly would you recommend it?” slider with no numbers showing, so you can’t fixate on a specific score. You just slide the slider to where it feels ‘right’ to you.

All in all, not a bad feature. It’s reasonably fun to “rate” games (though sadly only one person can rate a game on a given Wii, as far as I can tell) as well as to look up how well gamers are doing. And then they link data in a “People who liked this game also liked these other games” fashion, though that isn’t always particularly significant. People who liked Wii Fit also liked Super Paper Mario… ok, but really these two games are about as diverse as two games could possibly be.

Bartle on games and politicians

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Here’s a quote for you. Richard Bartle speaking out against the “self-righteous politicians and newspaper columnists” who “beat on computer games”:

Call them [gamers] social inadequates if you like, but when they have more friends in World of Warcraft than you have in your entire sad little booze-oriented culture of a real life…

Richard Bartle: Gamers have won the battle against the censors | guardian.co.uk

It’s a fun rant, but really nothing you don’t already know if you’re a gamer.

Arcade Nostalgia

Posted on by Nimgimli

For the old-skool gamers among us, here’s a post that’ll take you back:

Coding Horror: Rediscovering Arcade Nostalgia

I really miss the days of (relatively) easy programming languages. You could make a simple game in Atari Basic pretty easily, and I spent countless hours typing in games from magazines (not easy on the Atari 400 chiklet keyboard!) and then tweaking/customizing them. Then saving them on cassette tape. Heh, frustrating good times.

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