I try to avoid “Collector’s Editions” of games since the regular versions tend to be pricey enough, but this time I got sucked in. Gamestop has listed the Spore Galactic Edition for $79.99, currently scheduled to ship on September 7th.
Extras of this addition are:
‘Making of Spore’ DVD video
‘How to Build a Better Being’ DVD video, by National Geographic Channel
‘The Art of Spore’ hardback mini-book
Fold-out Spore poster
Premium 100-page Galactic Handbook
I’m banking on Will Wright being heavily involved in the Making Of video, and I’m interested in the Nat Geo DVD as well. I’ve heard the latter referred to as “The Human Toolkit” in other places, and it apparently uses Spore’s graphics to discuss evolutionary theory. I figure if I get 2 half-way decent DVDs as extras, that’s worth $20, and the rest of the junk and cool packaging are worth another $10.
Now let’s just hope the full game is 1/10th as compelling as the Creature Creator is.
I’ve decided that Etrian Odyssey II (for the Nintendo DS) is a marathon, not a sprint. It’s looks like it’ll be a long, long game and I’m not going to try to power through it.
I have to confess I was getting a bit bored for a while, feeling like I was doing the same thing over and over again, but then I happened to backtrack down a side passage of the dungeon and found a quest item I needed. Completing this quest opened up three more.
One of the three required a class I didn’t have in my Guild, so I created a new character and had to get him to level 3. I also needed to send out my “Collecting Party” to generate some cash, so I sent the noob out with the collectors to get some combat experience. We farmed a node until we were out of “farming points” for the day, then headed down (ok actually its up… you start on the ground and work up in this adventure, but I still think of it as down) to level 2 of the dungeon, but without my Troubadour I had no way to Sleep the Bosses that roam around down there, so we didn’t get very far before we had to run for the stairs.
It has been said before, but one of the neat things about the game is that the story is so ‘lite’ that we end up making up our own story. With up to 30 characters in a guild, you’re either going to give them descriptive and dull names (Fighter1, Fighter2, Gather1, Gather2, etc) or you’re going to come up with good names, but then have to attach some imaginative trait to them to help you remember what their role is. And suddenly these characters start to tell stories to you.
Eh, maybe its just the writer in me, but that’s what is happening in my game. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go pull the wings off some VenomFlies in level 2…
I’m still thrashing around, jumping from game to game. I’ve been on a real old-school RPG kick lately but was getting the itch for something pretty and sparkly, so I ran out and picked up Lost Odyssey based on some friends praising it
Initial thoughts follow. I figure the game is old enough that anyone planning on playing it already has, so this is more for people familiar with the game. I’d love to compare notes.
Bad news first. Its locked up 3 times in 4 hours of game play. I don’t for a second think this is the fault of the game, since GTA IV locked up on me too (causing me to exchange it for the PS3 version). Nope, I think XBox 360 #2 is slowly breaking. But this means I tend to get really stressed out playing if its been more than 10 minutes since I last saved. I wish to heck I could get this on the nice, quiet, reliable PS3.
My first reaction to the game was “Wow, this is JUST LIKE Final Fantasy” which I guess we all knew, but the first town you visit is so reminiscent of the first town in FF XII that it was rather astonishing to me. Continue reading “Lost Odyssey for the XBox 360”
Previews of Guitar Hero World Tour are hitting all over the web (I’ll throw a few links in at the bottom of this post). I was rather surprised to find that GHWT was offering a lot of what I was hoping for in Rock Band 2.
Let’s get the big bad news out of the way first. Your downloaded Guitar Hero III content will not work in Guitar Hero World Tour. Wow. I mean just…wow. That’s going to be a huge drawback to those of you who’ve invested in a lot of DLC for GH3. Let’s hope they find some way to change that, or to give you GHWT song credits based on what you’ve spent on GH3 DLC, or something.
That big ugly hobgoblin out of the way, the rest is all goodness. Of course they’re adding a whole band feature including an even more elaborate drum kit than Rock Band has. But as someone who generally plays solo, what had me smiling was the 5 career paths, one each for lead guitar, bass, drums and vocal, plus one for the whole band. And rather than just a list of songs you play in order, apparently these careers are going to be more open, letting you choose where you want to play next and so forth. Hopefully it’ll be a bit more ‘game-ish’ than the solo stuff in GH 3 and Rock Band.
Additionally you’ll be able to set up set lists of up to 7 songs, and play them in order without having to go back to the menus. Great for when you just want to kick back and enjoy playing.
The Guitar Hero World Tour guitar has been made a lot more realistic looking, and has a kind of ‘slide panel’ on the neck for free-styling. It’s a bit larger than the other ‘fake guitars’ out there, too. Closer to full size.
But the really huge news is the Music Studio feature, which lets you create your own songs. You can capture them as you play, or go into an editor and get precise. Once you have a great song written you can share it with friends, of course. Apparently the editor gets pretty deep if you want to really dig into it.
It’ll be interesting to see what Harmonix does with Rock Band 2, but right now I’m thinking that I’ll jump ships and be a Guitar Hero fanboy for the next iteration. I really like the idea of being able to use a game to write songs! Not that I have an iota of talent in that department, mind you! 🙂
Anyone who played Fatal Inertia on the XBox 360 will tell you that the game was not very good. So of course I was expecting it to be not very good on the PS3, but after trying the demo, I have to say that it isn’t too bad. In fact it was pretty fun. It looks great, the controls are nice, I found some shot-cuts, fired off some cool weapons…
In fact at this point the only bad thing about it is the price of the full game. Are they really asking $30 for it? I need to actually check the store because that just seems too steep. At $20 I’d definitely pull the trigger, but $30 is a bit too high.
A quick update on my progress through Etrian Odyssey II for the Nintendo DS.
As advertised, the game can be a challenge. I’ve had more than a few total party wipes, which means Game Over. Actually one aspect where I think they missed out on some fun is forcing a reload after your party dies. Since a Guild can house 30 members, wouldn’t it be cool if you had the option to form up another ‘rescue’ party to set out from town? Oh well, maybe in EO III.
But the game is compelling. Thanks to the fans at GameFaqs I’ve learned at least one reason to have extra characters: there are resource nodes in the dungeons, but it takes a particular Skill to gather resources from them. Rather than devoting skill points to these Skills with your “main” adventurers, the suggestion is to create a set of “gatherer” adventures, and send them in to collect resources (which can then be sold for coin). You can gather once per node per gather skill point, so ideally you’d have a party of 5 gatherers with maxed out gather skills. But such a party probably would never make it to the resource to be gathered. So there’s a nice balancing act in building a party with a good number of gatherers and sufficient ‘fighters’ to keep them alive.
Good fun still. Looking forward to the weekend and the chance to put some serious hours into the game.
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. Continue reading “Review of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune”
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? Continue reading “First Look: Etrian Odyssey II”
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.
I try to avoid “Collector’s Editions” of games since the regular versions tend to be pricey enough, but this time I got sucked in. Gamestop has listed the Spore Galactic Edition for $79.99, currently scheduled to ship on September 7th. 
![](http://dragonchasers.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/cre_-06823207_ful.png "Thudz \\"Ta-Da!\\"")