With the leviathan Xenosaga behind me, it was time to press on. I needed something engaging but not too long (after a 60 hour game, it takes me a while to recharge my batteries enough to take on another monster). Eternal Darkness (Gamecube) called to me from the shelf. I’d played it about half-way through some time back and got distracted.

Eternal Darkness is one heck of a creepy game. You need to play this one in the dark. It’s a bit like Resident Evil with better controls, more magic (I think…I’ve never played very far into a RE) and really varied environments. It is not for the kids. We’re talking human skin lampshade stuff.

The idea behind the game is that you’re a girl investigating her familiy’s history, and in doing so, you keep ‘flashing back’ to different places and periods of time. So far I’ve been back to Persia, circa sometime BC and as far forward as 1952. You tend to visit locations several times, hundreds of years apart, which brings a neat “been here, but wasn’t able to do that” feel to the game.

Of course, the big hook was the whole way the game tries to scare you by breaking out of the box, so to speak. Sadly, this has been so publicized that it probably won’t scare anyone now. If you’ve heard about it, you know what I mean (most of the things that happen rely on you being taken unawares). If you haven’t heard about it, I’m not going to spoil it for you. Suffice to say the game plays with your head pretty effectively in the early stages. Once you get deeper into the game, you have ways of controlling your sanity, plus most of the games ‘tricks’ really only work once.

Anyway, so far, this is a really good ride. Sound and graphics are great, level design is really neat. A real sense of claustrophobia in some dank dungeons. Lots of “Indiana Jones” style trap avoidance, and most of the puzzles are easy enough that they’ll make you think for a few moments, but won’t stop you in your tracks. This allows the engrossing story to keep its talons in you. Oh! And you can save almost anywhere so it’s a good game for short sessions. While it might fall all apart in the endgame, I rather doubt it. But I’ll be sure to let you know.

Well, 58 hours or so since first slipping the disk in, I finished Xenosaga (ok, more like 70 or so hours if you count restarts). It still dumbfounds me that the game is getting so many average reviews. This is easily my third favorite PS2 game so far (1st is Ico, 2nd is FFX). Sure, there are some annoying aspects to it, but any game you play for 60 hours is going to have something that eventually starts to grate on you. But I really enjoyed the ways you could build your characters up, the mini-games, the graphics, and especially, the storyline. I’ve heard the storyline referred to as highly deriviative, but I didn’t get that. Yes, there were some scenes that were very evocative of certain scenes from various movies, but the plot, as far as I could follow it (heh) didn’t seem at all derivative to me. Well, with the caveat that certain common anime themes were included (giant robots and all that).

When I hit the end, I had enough emotionally invested in the characters that I had a few real ‘lump in the throat’ moments, which is always the mark of a good game for me.

All in all, a great game, in my opinion.

Here’s a MMRPG I haven’t played but that has me curious: A Tale in the Desert. While this isn’t the first MMRPG with no combat (I suppose The Sims Online earns that title), it does seem to be the first one with goals and things to do that don’t revolve around combat. To learn a little more, you might want to read this Gamespy Interview with lead designer Andrew Tepper. I plan on giving this one a go sometime in the near future.

So it’s after 1 am and I just managed to tear myself away from Galactic Civilizations. Back in the day I was a huge fan of “4X” games but as I grew older I found I didn’t have the patience for them anymore. GalCiv seems to somehow pack in that “grab you by the throat and never let go” gameplay with a sleek enough play mechanic that you don’t get bogged down, at least in the “small” galaxy maps. Part of this is probably because you only have a handful of planets to look after.

Add to that alternatives to the basic “Nuke ’em into the stone age” victory conditions and you’ve got a game well worth playing. Or at least, that’s my “initial reaction” determination. It remains to be seen if the game has legs.

Find out more about Galactic Civilizations at http://www.galciv.com.

Anyone who reads this blog must be a bit bemused by the subtitle. I certainly haven’t done much searching for adventure as of late.

But over the past week or so, I’ve fallen back into love with Dark Age of Camelot. I started a new character in a (more or less) new realm for me, and everything old is new again. It doesn’t hurt that my Merc is growing up in a generation of fellow role-players, and on a good day, logging into Camelot is like going to a RennFaire. Wonderful stuff indeed. I just lose myself in the world of Albion now, completely becoming my character…

OK, I’ve been nagged about a lack of blog entries, and as per the comment from the g/f below, I’ll have to admit that I’ve been addicted to G4TV, the new ‘gaming channel.’

It’s a really strange mix, this channel. Sometimes, I cringe, fearing someone will come in and see me watching this channel designed for 5 year olds. Other times, it gets hip to the fact that there are a ton of gamers in their late teens and beyond.

As best I can figure, they have two writers. One of them is a girl of about 19 (Tina Wood, I believe), and the shows she writes are pretty ok. The other shows are written by some faceless fellow (Tina is actually the host of one of the shows, too, which is how I know how old she is) and he’s really bad. Lots of jokes so corny they make your stomach lurch, lots of over-active hosts, as if the writer though the games were just a gimmick to get people to watch the host.

But what makes it all worth watching is tons of video footage of the games in action. After watching G4 for a weekend, reading a review and looking at screenshots ain’t going to cut it no more…

That ranger woman is starting to vex me greatly.

Here’s to a great game like Warcraft III being released just in time for a long weekend! Woot!

A Tale in the Desert is a MMRPG that just crossed my radar for the first time. It seems to be a lot different than most of the incoming MM games (The Sims Online being the exception). There is no combat in the game; it seems to be more about politics and social constructs. GameSpy interviewed the Andrew Tepper, president of eGenesis, the developers of A Tale in the Desert. The article is worth a read.

Me: I don’t know what’s wrong with me, Linus. E3 (The Electronic Entertainment Expo) is coming. But I’m not excited. I know I should be happy, but really I’m just depressed.

Linus: Dragonchaser, you’re the only one I know who could take a wonderful time like the annual E3 and turn it into a problem…

Me: Gaming is becoming tooo commercial. RATS!

OK, apologies for that… but E3 *is* this week, and I really can’t work up much enthusiasm for it. For those of you who don’t know, this is the Big Event in gaming… it’s a huge melange of tech playground, disneyland, strip joint, schmooze-fest and, of course, arcade. If you’re in the gaming business: publisher, developer, journalist, PR… anything… you’re at E3 this week.

So why aren’t I excited? No idea. I went to the first couple of E3’s (I was working as one of the editors at what is now Computer Games Magazine) and man, what a rush they were. Three days of frantic meetings about the stuff I lived for… it was intense… an assault on all five senses as game after amazing game was paraded out to strut its stuff in an attempt to seduce me (I was, after all, The Press *grin*). Then when the show shut down for the night… HUGE parties. Great stuff…

Well, so maybe I’m not excited because I don’t go any longer?

No, don’t think so. Although I did ache to go for the few years following me leaving the mag, I’m over that now. Instead, I surf gaming sites frantically, gathering data as rumours get confirmed and surprise announcements are made… and I share this with friends at the Pub. It’s supposed to be a time of wide-eyed amazement and exclamations of “oh man, how will I stand waiting for that to come out!?”

But I’ve checked out some of the pre-show coverage and nothing is exciting me. I’m not sure if its that the games are all just ‘more of the same’ or that we’ve already heard about the biggies. Or maybe its me.. could I finally be growing up? Ye gods, that’s a frightening thought.

Maybe its that I spend so much time in MMRPGs these days, and I know that I can’t really play more than one of them. Maybe its because there’ll be no new hardware announcements worth noting (though I’m still hoping Nintendo surprises us with a backlit GBA).

This is where I dazzle you with my revelation except… I honestly don’t have one. I think, though, that its me. I still call myself a gamer, but really I’ve turned into more of a game collector than a game player. I’ll buy a game, play it for a few hours, and shove it on the shelf to rot. They just don’t seem compelling anymore… after a few hours, I get bored. Hmm, well, maybe it isn’t me after all. Maybe the industry is getting stale? These days I get more excited about a game’s editing tools coming out then I do about the games themselves. Why? Because I have more fun thinking about building add-ons (mind you, I never actually get around to building them) than I do playing the games.

How weird is that? Maybe I need to start looking in the corners for floppy little old-style games that, with the right kind of love, can turn out to be something really special.

Bah, another blessed weekend fades into the past and its time to descend back into the firey pits of hell (aka work). I’m quite sure I was meant to be born a trust fund kid… but anyway…

Spent most of today shoveling out my hovel, but I did sneak some time to work through a great tutorial on using the Morrowind Construction Set. For the first time, I started to concentrate on WHAT I was building rather than HOW to work the editor. I think I could get used to this editor, though I still wish Morrowind was prettier. Mind you, its got great graphics, but they’re great graphics of a bleak and grim land. That, and IMO the humanoid models are homely as hell.

I like the look of Dungeon Siege a lot more, but until the next release of the Siege Editor I’ve put that on hold. Also on hold is the NWN editor, until the game comes out.

Of course at this point, its all moot because I don’t have a story to tell yet… still, practice with the tools can’t be a bad thing.