I think people who consider themselves a “gamer” (or an intense fan of any hobby for that matter) keep a truth buried. One that the holder believes that bringing the truth to light would cause them to loose face in the community. It’s little inconsequential truths like a friend of mine never played D&D as a kid or my wife never owned a console system so she has no muscle memory of where the jump buttons are.
My little truth is something simple and truly annoying. I rarely finish games (end the game and get credit roll). Being my easily distracted self this might not sound too astounding, but it is something I am not proud of. The list of games that I need to complete is only growing. Currently the biggest titles on that list are Fallout3, Dragon Age: Origins, and Bioshock 2. Two of these titles are at heart RPGs but for one reason or another they have discouraged me from continuing playing.
The problem that drove me away from Fallout 3 is I lost all my followers. Apparently a particular quest effectively kills all your followers when you are captured by the enclave. The Brotherhood of Steel guardian I could stand loosing, but they took my dog from me and that is something I just won’t stand for. I am fully intending on hacking the game to get Dogmeat to respawn in some fashion, then continue playing. Because I don’t think I would take the time to play through the game again, since I doubt I would change the majority of my decisions/interactions in the game. On top of that I haven’t even acquired all of the expansions, and I have got to play those. Now with the count down to New Vegas is getting dangerously close to ending the pressure to finish playing is getting quite strong.
As for Bioshock 2 and Dragon Age these two great games are suffering from the same plague. Getting their saves breaking delicately so I lost 2 hours of game play in Bioshock and 4 hours in Dragon Age. Honestly these are both good games and the biggest issue is that I am being forced to replay sections due to tech errors, not choose to replay the sections myself. These are the few games I could place a reason on why I stopped playing.
However the list of games that I cant place why I stopped is just growing. The Ballad of Gay Tony, the DS Castlevania games, Pheonix Wright, and I am fearing Red Dead Redemption is slipping on to that list. It’s grasp on my current play list is getting more and more tenuous. Thanks to the release of Limbo, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair, StarCraft II, Crackdown 2, Transformers:War for Cybertron…
I think I am doomed to see my list just keep growing.
Completion: 55% no credits rolled; but I’m savoring the 100% completion.
This game is a box of toys. Gameplay elements that are just set out in the world for you to discover. I can spend hours simply roaming through the game world. Hunting for wild game, an American Standardbred horse to tame, looking for some beautiful vistas, or just the next stranger to aid.
In this the game is one hell of a western story generator. The writing woven through the game is spot on beautiful, the characters they created can be both despicable and interesting. Situations you find yourself in generate their own stories as well; for example: I decided to take a shortcut off the trails and was ambushed by a pack of wolves that killed my horse. They were too quick for my pistol and repeater, but the knife made quick work of them. Leaving their corpses unused seemed a waste so I skinned the pack of four wolves, then another pack appeared, and another, and another. By then time I made it back to the trail I have carved a bloody path through twenty wolves. My wife now refers to my character by the name “Twenty Wolves.”
The only drawback I found With Red Dead Redemption was with the controls. This is nothing as bad as the targeting issues that were in Crackdown. Its getting use to their setup; the speed controls of the horse specially. The issue is rooted in my lifetime of playing with vehicle controls that used ‘a’ and ‘b’ as accelerate and brake. So my root reaction is to mash ‘b’ instead of the right bumper when I need to slow down my horse, which usually ends with me leaping off a cliff. My darling wife also calls him “Falling Brick.”
This is the beginning of the giving season. One of my favorite giving events happens to benefit the Child’s Play Charity. A Video Game comedy troop from Canada called LoadingReadyRun are, for the third year, enduring their fundraiser Desert Bus for Hope. Torturing themselves by playing Desert Bus, the most painfully boring games created, for as long as the donations keep buying up the hours of play. The ingenious part is the live broadcast of themselves enduring the game, keeping their sanity from being whittled down by responding to a chat room and drafting up donation challenges that end in torture for one of the crew. Last year one of the crew was forced to watch Twilight three times in a row due to three hundred dollar donations. I request that you to go, watch and then donate to these crazy folk to allow them to continue “hating themselves for the children”.
This morning’s reading of video game blogs discovered quite an interesting article by Matthew Kaplan from GameCritics.com . The article brings up how the elderly are currently portrayed in video games and touches on their minority status in protagonist roles, beyond the cliché role of the grumpy old man (using Bill from L4D in their example). In this article they ask: are we going to see more elderly heroes? The main gaming population, the kids that grew up playing the NES and Atari, are now in their thirties. Back when I was a kid I remember many games where the protaganist was a child: games like “Kid Icarus”, “The Boy and His Blob”, “Nemo’s Adventures in Dreamland”, or “Zombie’s Ate My Neighbors” and “Earthbound”. In my memory the child protagonist was a rather dominate choice of playable character, though the reasoning behind this could be simply that was the targeted demographic for video games of the time. But with the aging of the gaming population, as the article brings up, will we see larger use of elderly protagonists? Where this issue really gets me interested is in how you can create a game that has such a protagonist, coming up a game premise that would allow for, explain, and encourage the use of an elderly protagonist.
But, I digress. Kaplan’s article presents the issues far more succinctly and is defiantly worth reading. So, what are you still doing here?
So, some other sites have Mustache Monday, but I’m going to make it Movie Monday. Just to always have something to post at least once a week.
This weeks films are G.I. Joe shorts, nothing like the line of PSAs that came out a few years ago. These are the first five out of ten, five minute episodes written by Warren Ellis (of Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein fame infamy). Enjoy!
Well Beginning of another week, and I had no clue that there was such a thing as the World Beard and Mustache Championships, apparently this is where the majority of all crazy mustache pictures spring from.