Star Wars: The Clone Wars for XBox should be in stores today. Normally this would be No Big Deal since the GC and PS2 versions were fairly lackluster, but the XBox version has XBox Live! support, and all us XBL’ers are so starved for new content that we’d buy a Kate and Ashley game if it was Live! enabled.

As of this morning before work, Shadowbane’s login servers have been essentially down for 3 days now. Communication from Wolf Pack and UBISoft has been terse at best. If you’re thinking about picking this game up, don’t! If you’re reading this out of the archives weeks or months from now, please do your research before you waste your money like I did.

Phantasy Star Online keeps getting better. I’m learning how to raise my Mag properly now (its a kindof personal defense robot) and have seen some of the deeper (?) levels. Even watched a group kill a dragon! Very fun, especially with the XBox’s voice chat.

One drawback though, is there’s a long lag in the voice chat for this game. Haven’t noticed it on any other XBox games, though, so I think its some kind of glitch specific to PSO. Hoping they’ll patch it…

OK, addiction of the moment…. Phantasy Star Online 1 & 2 for the XBox. Play it over XBox live with voice support, and go and hack up stuff. Basically the game feels like Diablo or even Gauntlet, only in a 3rd person, over the shoulder format.

Why is it so fun? I think its a combination of the very basic gameplay, on the surface, with a lot of hidden depth that you can dig into as you get more into the game. Even things like how you name your character have an impact on its development. Plus, its a collecting game. Y’know how in Diablo you were always looking for a good drop off some monster? Same kind of thing here. Lots of looting, selling, buying…trying to make your character stronger while levelling him or her up.

Lots of fun, ONLINE. If you play it solo, it gets kinda dull. Oh, you can also do it split-screen with your friends.

OK, let’s get back in the saddle and get this blog moving again.

Having some down time over the past few days, I dug out my backlog of Computer Gaming World magazine and leafed through them. And you know what wisdom came out of that exercise? GIVE IT UP, CGW!!! In fact, why in the heck are we still getting paper computer gaming magazines at all? What’s the point? There’s nothing in this mag that I didn’t already know from the internet. For instance, the April 2003 issue had a review of DAoC: Shrouded Isles. When’d that come out? December, yes?

But speaking specifically of CGW, which was for years a decent rag…all I can say is, ick! The magazine now has the maturity of, I don’t know, EGM or GamePro or something. The Letters to the Editor section illustrates this most clearly. Among the “You guyz suxxors” letters is the odd person trying to get a point across or a question answered. Invariably, rather than addressing the issue, one of the staff just spouts off some rude comment at the letter-writer. That’s nice, eh? You take the time to write a serious letter to these bozos and they lip off at you.

My advice to Ziff: Put CGW out of its misery, once and for all. That, or just punt the current staff and get in some journalists who have a dash of respect for their readership. But even then, with the lag time of printing and distribution, your reviews are going to be horribly outdated, and your news ain’t gonna be new.

Bane is right. This game is killing me. It’s driving my blood pressure through the roof and making me all around angry and irritable. Why? Because the damn thing is BROKEN, that’s why! The servers are so sluggish and laggy as to be unplayable!!

But a glimmer of hope…there’s supposed to be a big patch tomorrow to address lag and such. We’ll see. For now, here’s my pro’s and cons of Shadowbane: Continue reading “Shadowbane”

The New York Times has an article about the come back of boardgaming (The PC Generation, Back to the Board (free registration possibly required) with the 30-something set. Call me an old softy, but any article that mentions The Compleat Strategist gets my thumbs up. I remember riding the LIRR from East Hampton to Penn Station (~3 hours) just to go to TCS to check out the latest wargames.

My personal nostalgia aside, it’s a pleasant read for board game fans (or wannabes).

So this weekend I dropped AC2 and started playing Shadowbane. This could be trouble, because when Shadowbane is behaving, its really very fun. My only hope is that it will continue to misbehave, as it has been doing from time to time (slow drawing in of terrain and monsters, leading to sudden deaths). Otherwise…I’ll be back into the 12-step program for MMRPGs!

To balance things out a bit, I started playing Zelda: The Wind Waker, too. I’m embarassed to say I’m in the first ‘real’ area and already hopelessly lost. *blush*

A while back, a company called Infinium Labs announced that they’d be introducing a new gaming console called The Phantom. Between the very near-future release date (December 2003) and the amazingly high number of games they claim would be available (upwards of 30,000) most people wrote it off as a big hoax.

This week, G4’s call-in/chat-in talk show, G4TV.COM had a phone interview with Rob Shambro, COO of Infinium, to talk about the product. And it turns out, product might be the wrong word for it, as The Phantom sounds more like a service. Shambro referred to it playing “PC and ported Console” titles, which may explain the 30,000 title figure, in the first place. Second, there’s is no CD or DVD drive in the unit, and your cable or broadband provider has to provide support for it. In fact, it sounded like the hardware will come from your provider when you sign up for the service; you won’t go out and buy a box at all. It’ll be more like your cable box. Games with be streamed down to a 100-plus gig hard disk on the unit, and you’ll pay some kind of a subscription fee to play them. The box features an Intel processor and nVidia graphics chipset.

So, hoax or reality? The jury is still out, but the product Shambro described sounded a bit more feasible than a console system rolling out with 30,000 titles, y’know? Infinium is supposed to be showing more at E3, so I guess we’ll have to wait until then to learn more.

Well, I finally finished Eternal Darkness, 9 or 10 months after starting it. Of course, I took an 8 month break in the middle of it. I don’t recall what distracted me from it, but it was a distraction, and not disappointment with the game, because start to finish, this was a great experience. ED has a great soundtrack, very good voice acting, a nice creepy plot, a huge variety of environments to play in, and a sweet mix of puzzle solving and combat and of course, the ‘insanity’ hook. The very end dragged a tiny bit, but I’m not sure if that wasn’t just because I knew it was the end and I was anxious to finish.

At the end [gameplay spoiler warning] you get to play, briefly, half a dozen of the characters you’d played earlier, in rapid succession. This really brought home to me how different each one was. Not just chronolgically, but how they were modelled and especially how they moved. Younger characters were lithe and fluid in their movements, while the portly old men were stiff and clumsy. Little details like that are what made Eternal Darkness special.

Not for the kids, but a great horror game (real horror, not gore-fest ‘Resident Evil’ horror) for everyone else.