Those of you who don’t follow video game news too closely may not be aware of Heavy Rain.  It’s a game I’ve been following for some time, and every new trailer that is released makes me even more excited about it.  Calling it a “game” is even a bit of a stretch, it truly is more like an interactive movie.  Kind of like a really sophisticated “choose your own adventure” book.  Below is a video that was released this week that gives a really good overview of what the game will be like.  (It was aimed at a Japanese audience, hence the Japanese subtitles, but everything except the game dialog is in English.)  The basic idea is that there are four characters that you control through the course of the game, and they all end up investigating a serial killer (the “origami killer”).  I like the idea (which is discussed in the movie below) that you can’t truly mess up.  No matter what happens, you can keep playing and just deal with the consequences.  Even if all four characters end up getting killed, there is an ending to the story for that situation.

Anyway, the game won’t be finished until sometime next year, so I don’t want to give too much praise to a game just because of a clever concept.  That said, I totally dig the concept.

Also, this video is over nine minutes long.  Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Every so often, the popular answer on an Everybody Votes1 poll surprises me.  Here is one example from a few weeks ago:

Is this really what the majority of people think about how a series with prequels should be viewed?  I imagine there is some portion of the population that didn’t understand the question and thought “well I don’t know anything about Star Wars but why would you watch them out of order”, and chose the “I, II, III, IV, V, VI” answer—inadvertently choosing the “watch them out of order” answer!  But as popular as Star Wars is, I doubt this could account for that many people.  The question also doesn’t specify whether the numbers correspond to episodes, which could have confused some people.

If this is really what most people think, though, then I guess that would explain why the The Chronicles Of Narnia compilations inevitably feature the books out of order, with The Magician’s Nephew first (even though it ruins the book to read it first!).  But I can’t imagine, for example, a compilation of the Metal Gear Solid games featuring Metal Gear Solid 3 as the first game, even though the MGS3 story takes place thirty years before the others, and the MGS4 story picks up right where MGS2 left off.  Of course I said the same thing about the Star Wars movies last year, when I was talking about the Narnia books....

I don’t know, maybe I’m wrong.  It happens sometimes.  Anyone care to weigh in with a good reason why someone approaching a series of movies/books/video games/whatever would want to start with the prequels first?  Or maybe you want to weigh in to tell me you agree with me.  That’d be cool too.

PS: I think another problem with the question is that neither answer was the correct answer.  The correct answer is “IV, V, VI, II, III.”  Episode One is unwatchable garbage.  Two and Three are just garbage, but they aren’t unwatchable.  Episode Five is still the best.

I wanted to add two more points to last month’s Netflix vs. Blockbuster post.  First, Blockbuster allows you to continue to access your account and modify your queue even after you have cancelled your membership.  This is nice for me, because it means I can add movies as they come out in theaters, rather than sitting down next May and trying to remember every movie from the last year that I wanted to see.  With Netflix, you get nothing but a message telling you how to come back.

Second, Blockbuster announced in February that they would integrate games into their service, on a trial basis, and hopefully roll out the service by the second half of the year.  Apparently the trials didn’t go so well, because we’re almost halfway through the second half of this year and they haven’t mentioned games at all.  It would have been a very convient Netflix+GameFly type of service (speaking of which, if those two companies merged, wouldn’t that be cool?).  But I’ve since found Goozex (which I might blog about some day) to provide me with a fresh and cheap supply of video games.  And it’s not like Netflix offers video games either, so neither service has an advantage here.

A few weeks ago I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus.  Since the game is three and a half years old, I’m not going to talk about it too much.  The game consists solely of 16 boss battles, in which you defeat colossi that are often hundreds of feet tall.  But the interesting thing about the game is that you start to sympathize with the colossi.  The only reason you are killing these things is because some god told you he would bring your dead girlfriend back to life if you would do it.  But no justification beyond that is ever given.  The colossi are not terrorizing villagers or anything like that.  In fact, they keep to themselves in a land devoid of human life, and they’ve certainly never done anything to you.  And, with the exception of the final colossus, none of them even appear to be attacking you for any reason other than self defense.  In one case, you must even shoot a colossus with an arrow in order to make it wake up!  As I was playing the game, I had the thought that this must be similar to bullfighting.  I mean, the bull has never done anything to the matador, yet the matador provokes him and stabs him with swords, ultimately delivering a final blow in a weak spot (between the shoulder blades, I think).  This is quite similar to what happens in Shadow of the Colossus.  And the game has a satisfying ending which I won’t spoil.

If you follow games at all, you’ve probably heard the praises of this game over and over.  So I’m not going to continue repeating things that have probably already been said in much better words by much better writers than myself.

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a long time:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/hot_new_video_game_consists

It’s a satirical news story from The Onion, about a video game called “Close Range.”  I would summarize it more, but I think it’ll be funnier for you if I don’t.

Shortly after Christmas I applied some Best Buy gift cards toward Prince of Persia (the new one that for some reason has no subtitle).  The series has been riding on the goodwill created by 2003’s masterpiece The Sands Of Time.  And I have to take a moment to state again just how much I loved that game.  Since then, they released two sequels that didn’t even come close to living up to SoT.

Apparently someone at Ubisoft Montreal has decreed that their games must end with obnoxious cliffhangers.  There was at least kind of an ending to Prince of Persia.  Part of the ending was interactive, and I simply did not want the Prince to do what I had to make him do to complete the game.  So I will give them credit, as this means they did a good job of making me identify with the Prince to some extent.  Of course, after you do this, you get an ending that might as well say “please insert a credit card to buy the next sequel.”

Last week Ubisoft released “Epilogue”, a downloadable episode that takes place immediately after the ending.  Since it was only ten bucks, I bought it (the first time I’ve purchased any DLC, actually).  Well it didn’t really clear up anything, and actually ended more abruptly than Assassin’s Creed’s abortion of an ending.  I didn’t think that was possible.

I don’t understand this decision.  I’m sure someone at Ubisoft thinks “if we make a cliffhanger ending, then more people will come back for a sequel.”  I’m not sure this is a valid line of reasoning.  What they’ve put at the end of their games are essentially a mechanism to make the player very angry, not to generate sales of the sequel.  I don’t think that decent endings prevent anyone from playing the sequel.  Sands Of Time had one of the best endings of any video game that I’ve ever played, and I have come back for three sequels now (four even, if you consider Assassin’s Creed to be a “spiritual sequel”).  If a game is good enough, people will come back for more because they like the game that much.

All that said, I really enjoyed this game.  But can’t I expect the reward of a decent ending after having put twenty hours into playing your game?

I just played the Resident Evil 5 demo last night, and it seems to be very similar to Resident Evil 4, which is not a bad thing.  From everything I’ve read, though, you really need to play it in co-op to get the proper experience.  An AI partner just wouldn’t be the same.

So, does anyone out there have a PS3 and interest in playing Resident Evil 5 in co-op mode with me?

FYI:  We got some new games for Christmas, and here are the friend codes for those games:

Animal Crossing City Folk:  5112-7902-0335
Guitar Hero World Tour:  0302-3894-4530

Also, lots of Christmas pictures are coming soon.  Stay tuned.

This is awesome.

That is all.

Over the weekend I finished playing through Assassin’s Creed, and I felt compelled to say a little something about it here.  The game was very polarizing to reviewers when it came out last year—most either really liked it or really hated it.  Those who hated it said it was incredibly repetitive.  Gabe said on Penny Arcade that if you were playing it like you were trying to complete it as fast as possible (like a reviewer on a deadline), you would hate it.  All that said, I really liked the game.  It took me over two months to complete it, but that is because I didn’t play it continuously.

Two things I want to discuss.  First, I’m surprised the game wasn’t more controversial.  It is set in Crusades-era middle east, and one of the subtasks is to assassinate various Templars who are stationed around the game world.  Which is to say (if you want to exaggerate and misrepresent), you must kill the Christians to gain experience.  Add to that the fact that many of the assassination targets are Muslims (who aren’t known for being open-minded to such things), and it seems like something that would have gotten more attention from the Jack Thompsons of the world.  I guess Ubisoft was afraid of that too, because there is a disclaimer everytime the game is started, saying something to the effect of “this game was developed by a diverse group representing different religious faiths.”  But I guess either it worked or people just didn’t notice the game, because I never heard of any controversy.

Point the second:  the ending to the game was dumb.  Spoiler etiquette prevents me from discussing it, but it was bad.  In fact, to call it an ending would be to imply that there was some type of conclusion.  It would be more accurately called “the thing that happened before the credits abruptly started playing.”  I think they want me to be intrigued and eagerly anticipate a sequel.  I’d like to play a sequel, but not because of the way the game ended stopped.