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.

Fast forward to a few weeks back I was sent a link by a friend with the question, “Is that you?”, from io9 and yes that is me. My vid

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.”

Castlevania was responsible for introducing RPG level up and equipment management elements to Super Metroid’s open exploration theory. Anyway, back in ’97 what made this game so great for me was the fact that it was the first Super Metroid clone I owned. Let me set the scene.

Back in my formative gaming years the system of choice were the Sega Genesis and the Game Boy before that The only exposure to the Metroid idea of gaming was in Metroid II for the Game Boy, and short play times of Super Metroid at my friends house. The game that really illustrated to me how much I enjoyed gaming as a hobby was Metroid II for the Game Boy. Yes it was a horrible iteration of the series, since they zoomed in the game screen so tightly. But, hey, it was all I had. No other game I got my hands on until then allowed me to roam and explore the world openly. I had to copy maps out of Nintendo Power to figure out how to get to the end of the game. When Super Metroid was released I was only able to beat it after a rather cutting deal to borrow a SNES and the game for a month.

So, when I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (SotN) I was quite excited that I was allowed to explore the game world with the same openness and on a PlayStation, a system I actually owned. Upon seeing the fluid animations of the highly detailed characters, I was puzzled why more games went perusing 2D options in the 32bit age. But I digress.
Playing SotN was the first collaborative gaming experience I had. Needing to talk with other gamers who were farther along in the game to progress further myself was a new experience. Just as the Metroid games had done before, I was out of my depth on how to get beyond the bad ending, and starting to resent losing an hours worth of progress because of an inopportune boss fight. This all resulted in me taking home scribbled notes and waiting until a copy of the map was published in a magazine to answer all our remaining questions.
So honestly I am biased when I say that SotN is a great game. Having gone back through the castles and exploring 200.6% of that castle again I know nostalgia is adding to the game experience. Though it still is, and has always been, a great game.
Now, I have just finished earning the last achievement for SotN’s Xbox incarnation. All that is left for me is to climb to the top my friends high score list in the conquering of the castle. Please excuse me… Important work to do…

Picked up the game during Steam’s EA sale for about nine dollars, with the suggestion of a friend who has quite enjoyed the game on both xbox and pc.   My first play session lasted five hours since the game play was easy to grasp and succeed in, and the reward system encourages the just one more race mentality. Dangling the sweet candy of a new car or a license upgrade just in front of my nose.  It was this reward system that kept me hooked and playing  when the novelty of the arcade racing had warn thin, plus I could catch up on some series while still winning events in the game. Though restricted open driving world has made me loose more events I wish to admit, roam anywhere games like GTA have left me thinking that wooden guardrails can be broken through to cut corners (Paradise disagrees).

Though I was winning and progressing through the game the mode that endeared the Burnout series to me was missing, “crash mode” was gone.  It was only after the credits rolled I pulled up the Burnout wiki to discover crash mode’s fate.  This mode is indeed gone, and replaced with “Showtime”.  A mode triggered on any road that flings your car forward then uses the boost meter as jump fuel so you can hop your car’s burning wreck into traffic.  It was more like playing the inverse game of Frogger, where your trying to hop onto every car on the roadway, than the original chaotic physics puzzle that made crash mode so great in previous games.

In the end I still need to put time into the multiplayer aspect of the game, but with the removal of Crash Mode I think my time with this game has come to an end.  It was a little entertaining time sink while it lasted.

And now links to our gifts as mentioned at the end of the show:

Chris’s present. Dave’s present.  Rick’s present. Ooh a link to DTJAAAAM’s blog post on the 2009 Child’s Play Charity Dinner