Wednesday, July 18, 2007

Video Games

  1. The video game I'm working on at PlayFirst is going to ship really soon.
  2. I really want a Nintendo Wii but a big part of that is just because they're so hard to find. Also. I don't want to pay extra. I want to pay the $250 list price. It seems like a scam from Nintendo... "Hi, yeah, the Nintendo Wii is only $250! Not expensive like the PS3 or XBox. What? Oh, sorry, we're out of stock. We accidentally didn't make enough so demand is way higher than the supply. So you can buy one for, mmm, how 'bout $450?"
  3. Really what I like is to buy old PlayStation 2 or GameCube games. I think I'll wait until the Wii is older. Maybe when the Mini-Wii comes out or something. I like those old consoles. They've been around long enough that the games are cheap ($10 or less used) and its been established which games are really good. Or important for me too, which games are at least pretty good but cool and different (e.g. Odama... See below!)

Now that I have a little free time (see #1 above) I've been catching up on my stack of used PS2 and GameCube games. I played some Karaoke Revolution. It's like karaoke. Except with a score. And when you sing well you unlock more stuff. If only there was the ska or punk rock Karaoke revolution. Kelly even sang a couple songs. I'm an okay singer, but Kelly is really good. I knew she was a good singer before but now we can finally harness that skill for something useful. Unlocking everything in the game. :-)

Also played some Animal Crossing which is a genius game. It's just really well designed.

I played Lord of the Rings: Two Towers which I thought wouldn't be so fun. I loved the Lord of the Rings movies but was skeptical that the game would be fun. Note: I still bought it for like $5 used though. Anyway, it's fun but maybe too hard for me. The two cool things they do in the game are: 1) The game shows clips from the movie then transitions from those into the game graphics really smoothly so the difference between the movie and the game graphics isn't so jarring. 2) There's no goofy tutorial or tons of intro stuff to get through. It just dumps you into this battle and you start fighting bad guys. LOTS of bad guys. There are very brief tips on screen like Press X to attack (or whatever).

I bought an EyeToy PS2 camera a while ago for $10. The games that came with it were fun for like an hour. "Hey, look at me on the TV! I'm fighting ninjas. Sort of." All the games show the player onscreen and none have like any depth to them. I just bought AntiGrav and it's a whole 'nother thing. It uses the EyeToy camera but you don't watch yourself batting away cartoony ninjas and hamburgers. Instead it's a cool looking hover board race game. You jump to jump over obstacles, you lean left and right, you put your hand out to grab power-ups etc. I haven't played it a lot, but it's pretty damn cool.

Oh yeah, I played Odama a bunch on the GameCube. Well, for me a bunch is anything over an hour. 'Cause once you have babies that pretty much ends "doing things" for more than 10 minutes at a time. Anyway, Odama, wow, it's weird and cool. It's a combination of a real-time strategy game and, well, pinball. Now I love pinball, but computer pinball games don't usually suck me in. Apparently the promise of real-time troops walking around on the playing field while I, the player, gets to hit a giant pinball around was enough to get my interest. p.s. The game comes with a microphone so you can tell your troops what to do while you're busy knocking over the bad guys or hitting a floodgate to stop the river. Crazy! Also. The setting is feudal Japan and the narrator is an old Japanese guy and everything he says is in Japanese with English subtitles. Nice.

I'm too lazy to put pretty pictures in this post now. I'll update this later.

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