Tales of Vesperia
Grand Theft Auto IV
Condemned 2: Bloodshot
Just Cause
Alone in the Dark
Too Human
Viva Pinata: Trouble in Paradise
Operation Darkness
Lost Odyssey
Diablo
Diablo II
Bully
Ninja Gaiden II
Culdcept Saga
Devil May Cry 4
Assassin’s Creed
Army of Two
The Club
Beautiful Katamari
Resistance: Fall of Man
Hot Shots Golf: Out of Bounds
Blue Dragon
Enchanted Arms
Eternal Sonata
Oblivion
The Orange Box
Braid
Penny Arcade Adventures Episode 1: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness
Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction
Siren: Blood Curse
The Last Guy
PixelJunk eden
Castle Crashers
Okami
Manhunt 2
No More Heroes
Super Mario Galaxy
Super Paper Mario
Shadow of the Colossus
Yakuza
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne
The Red Star
Persona 3: FES
God of War
God of War II
Patapon
The World Ends with You
Bangai-O Spirits
Contact
Trauma Center: New Blood
Fallout
Fallout 2
Sins of a Solar Empire
The Witcher
Spore
God Hand
Killer 7

Sunday, August 17, 2008
Lord of the Rings Online
Over the course of the day I managed to put in a few hours in LOTRO. I hit level 21 with my Lore-master doing quests, which included my first Fellowship party with one other person as we decimated Elite spiders in Minas Eriol for a quest. I think I saw my first Fellowship maneuver opportunity, but I wasn’t sure because I’ve never seen one. If it was, I totally wasted whatever it was I could do for epic win. I also have managed to accumulate over 1 gold in this time. After that I started doing low-level quests in Buckland and The Shire to hit 22 because everything else I have flagged is either to high of a level or requires a Fellowship to complete. It is nice that I can walk past a ton of level 10 mobs, right up to the item I have to retrieve as part of my quest, get it and walk right back out without a fight. With only about 9k XP left, I’ll probably hit 22 this week so I can spend some of my silver getting new Lore-master skills. Am I a nerd yet?

Monday, August 18, 2008
Bionic Commando: Rearmed
Finally got a chance to try this out this week. I realized I had my NES copy of the game, but since my NES isn’t hooked up at the moment, I didn’t get any practice in before BC:R was released last week. I remember I used to be so smooth with swinging around with the bionic arm and getting through levels. I am definitely rusty. Most definitely. I defeated the first boss on my third try, that’s how sad it was. 16 minutes just to clear the level.

Lord of the Rings Online
More LOTRO. What I have become. Continued the easier quests to hit level 22 until I got greedy with a quest that required a Fellowship around level 18. Deep in the Old Forest, after a bunch of spiders, there was a big nasty Elite Haunted Barren-oak tree, with some bad tree root friends. I managed to get it down to about 24% before I died. The thing is, I was stupid. I only had one add that I could have kept indefinitely stunned or I could have kited the tree away a bit and maybe, just maybe I could have outlasted the Elite tree. Not going back to this until I am a higher level. Or with a Fellowship. Quit the session with 1.2k before level 21. All these low level quests are less than 200 XP each, so it’s slow going.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008
Lord of the Rings Online
Yes, more, more, more. Soon I’ll be treated for OCD. Or be found in an Internet cafe in Korea. Hit level 22 finishing one quest and defeating random things in the Old Forest. Picked up my one new Lore-master skill (Cracked Earth) which I’ve read is useful later on and completed the requirements to get the Apprentice level for Weaponsmith. I have a bunch of recipes for Scholar and Weaponsmith that require Journeyman level. So maybe soon, after some farming. I sold some stacks of crafting components at the auction house. I also gained two new class traits–Healer and Beast-lore. Too bad I only have one more free until level 27. Anyhow, I hit my goal so I can take a break on LOTRO for now. Just occurred to me tonight that I should have been taking screenshots to go with my updates.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008
Galaga Legions
Wow, this totally kicked my ass. This isn’t quite as tight or brilliant a remix as Pac-Man: Championship Edition was, but this is right up there regardless. The vintage, retro skin is where it’s at. Don’t even bother with the new or “standard” skin. Obviously I’m still struggling getting some of the game mechanics and patterns down so I can get better, but I do like the idea of side-pod guns that can you place in one of four cardinal directions whenever you want, even if they aren’t near you. This makes it feel like there is a rhythm towards clearing some of the stages because of how, where and when waves come at you. I know I’ll never get to the point where I can really maximize bonuses. Definitely going to keep playing this. I want to play more Pac-Man:Championship Edition now too.

Thursday, August 21, 2008
Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
Shamefully I’ve never played a Ratchet & Clank game, nor have I played the most recent iteration, Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. Therefore I felt a little dirty playing this episodic “sequel” of sorts–I’ll definitely have to myself the favor of grabbing the full title next week since what little I played so far was pretty fun.

Braid
I went back to Braid after a lengthy hiatus because I felt stuck and couldn’t figure out some of the puzzles. I’m still missing one puzzle piece in World 2 that I’m almost tempted to look up a solution for, but I won’t… yet. I solved the World 4-3 and then immediately got stuck and frustrated with trying to wrap my head around World 4-4 (“The Hunt”) so I gave up. Instead, I took a quick peek at World 5 and I was totally not ready for the shadow mechanics I encountered. Still managed to get a few puzzle pieces off of this one before I called it a night.

The highlight of the session was being completely stuck on World 4-3 thinking I had ruined my playthrough because I rewound too far when it turned out I had solved the puzzle by accident. One could say “eureka!” if one was old, which I am not, so I didn’t.

Q.E.D.

I mentioned this to Nayan, who unfortunately hasn’t had a chance to play Portal yet. Talking a bit more, lead to the following bit of exchange:

• me: max payne is another good one.
• Nayan: Is max an unreliable narrator? there’s a lot of doubt that you see in his dreams
• Nayan: like, in Max Payne 1, you kill yourself after you kill your own family…but i always thought that was a metaphor for essentially killing your family for being married to your job
• me: if only you take it far enough to question whether his dream sequences have affected his judgement in reality.

That was just the start of it. It was nice to read something last night that got me thinking a bit more about some of the games I’ve played with, ones that I especially hadn’t considered from a more critical point of view. Even better was that Nayan’s post generated discussion between me and a few other folks about storytelling in games.

Last night IGN put up a story about how Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune would get a patch to add Trophy support “very, very soon.” Which it is. In the piece there is a short video that shows Trophies in action in Uncharted (below). Along with that there’s a brief interview with a Naughty Dog rep, Arne Meyer, about the Trophy paaa…

Oh wait. Yeah, that’s me.

Guess now it’s “official.” Even though it’s just words on a screen, this feels as awkward as watching yourself on video or listening to a recording of yourself — I still have nightmares about my totally stellar (not) podcast spot with the G-Pinions guys. Thankfully I manage not to sound like a fool, so there might be more where these come from. Now, time to cease the auto-critique…

Flickr user Matthew Johnston has put together a pretty sharp photoset showing key Liberty City landmarks and their real-world versions around New York City. I still haven’t spent much time at all in Grand Theft Auto IV yet but this is great stuff!

Matthew Johnston’s “Sightseeing in Liberty City” photoset

Although some of the design choices do have a dubious otaku quality, hence all the schoolgirl age anime characters, the game design (mix and match character and arcana) and the sheer insanity of the character design — girl with devil wings? witch with a demon staff? 10 year old scientist hell bent on taking over the world while riding in a giant anthropomorphic blog of water/jelly? — are well worth feeling a little dirty. I just haven’t gotten to the point of looking at the move list and doing something other than button mashing whilst playing it.

The Winter Music Conference is in town, as evidenced by many of the clubs mentioning the WMC in their marquee and by the folks I see walking around — I think. However, I’m here for work. The event I’m flew out to staff is one of the few official WMC events on Tuesday to kick off the conference. Ben, one of my colleagues has put together quite the event: Paul Oakenfold is playing with members of the Florida Classical Symphony and a three-piece band, featuring the soundtrack he did for our game, The Bourne Conspiarcy, while Cee Lo makes an appearance as a special guest. The entire thing is being streamed live on Yahoo! and you can get there from the Bourne Sessions web site.

If you happen to live in Florida, or near it, and want a guaranteed entrance to the show, enter Joystiq’s Joyswag giveaway for a chance to get in — note that entries close at 12:00 PM ET.

Ouch.

The reason? Joystiq quotes Rigopulos as saying, “The cost of wireless technology on the Microsoft side is higher and to be able to offer those bundles at a price point that would be reasonable for consumers it was necessary … on the 360 side we are also bundling a hub.”

The reason behind the wired guitar in the bundle is rather unfortunate. I believe this is one of the few times that Microsoft should have worked to ensure parity between the bundles across the different platforms at all costs. This is one of those times where the folks in charge of these third-party relationships and third-party accessory licensing should have been thinking about the best interests of the brand and the platform as a whole. It seems that other factors were more key — most likely not setting the precedent of reducing or subsidizing the cost of the technology for accessory makers.

I can see that being an important factor, among several others, all extremely valid. However, it’s just a shame that it provides the PLAYSTATION 3 bundle of Rock Band a competitive advantage when Microsoft should be doing everything in their power to slam the door on one of their competitors. And that is a strategy that I feel remains valid despite Microsoft’s current lead in the global marketplace versus Sony.

The only thing missing from the post was a screenshot of the building in the rhythm game developed by Bizarre Creations, so, finding his post interesting, I decided to oblige. I got credited more than I should have — I really didn’t go beyond the call of duty, I just wanted to contribute to what I found to be an interesting article. At least with 30 St. Mary Axe and the genre Boom Boom Rocket resides in, Bizarre Creations doesn’t have to worry about answering to a higher power.