Category: Gaming

This game slipped under my radar. I don’t follow a lot of gaming blogs, nor sites, so do sparse research on what’s good and not; usually by talking to other gamers.

Not sure how this one slipped so far, though. This was one of the games my wife bought used, but damn it is good. It takes place in the Forgotten Realms, a D&D specific fantasy land that book readers are familiar with; a place of magic, monsters, and deep characters.

One book writer in particular, R.A. Salvatore, wrote the game’s storyline, proving any good writer can transition to game writing, which the game industry really needs.

This point, however, is key since he made some of the Realms most memoreable characters, and I own all of his books in the Drizzt Do’urden line.

You basically play 3 characters thrown together in an adventure to save the land. Each character has their speciality in fighting, and each is essential to winning the games levels.

The cons. From the title, I scoffed it off in the past. I didn’t like the writer’s storyline from that series he wrote, Demon Wars, and wrongly associated the title with that series. Secondly, the Forgotten Realms logo was soo small on the box and online ads, I didn’t associate it with that. The box does not show the best screenshots from the game, nor imply the gaming style really well. The game itself, at least for me, does not give enough need to block & defend against attacks, nor give you many moves to utilize when you are surrounded by a throng of vicious enemies. You basically hack and slash your way to a super move to break free. Any good gamer would call this game really short.

The pros. Wow, very good cinemtography. I felt the same way about the introduction of the game that I did about the Playstation 2 Medal of Honor port. Medal of Honor is a World War 2 game for PC that Steven Speilberg helped direct. He apparently point more of his touch on it for the Playstation 2 version because from the get go, you feel immersed and blown away. This game had that magical, epic introduction where you are literally thrown into the action, un-ready, ill-prepared, and fighting for your life. It exactly mirrors what is going on in the game so it gives you this feeling of “wow… holy $H$(*)&$E!” as you feveriously push buttons.

The graphics are great, and push the XBox to the limit. D&D never looked so good.

The characters in the game, those that are in books, are just like I’d expect them to be (my wife said that the same thing about those she knew), which is extremely risky to do; you can either do really well, or really bad thus ruining the game. They took the risk and won gloriously.

The party itself is cliche, which is really good; any good D&D party is cliche by having balanced races, complimentarely classes, and overall a good team. I usually find it hard to identify with some characters in games, namely the ignorant, ogrish brute in FarCry; while I did like him towards the end, that was just out of respect for the tribulations he had to go through.

Throughout the game you are exposed to each characters flaws, and learn of their history, and how they deal with it. It really adds the suction this game has at pulling you into the story.

Some monsters have a creative twist, while others are exact to the D&D book rules, giving you a really good feeling about how this game is unique. Buying equipment & skills to pimp your character out feels really cool.

Finally, they got Picard to do voices! There is one major surprise for Forgotten Realms fans I won’t spoil, but pretty much makes this game worth picking up and playing just for that 1 fact alone.

Overall, while short, the game rocked, and you can at least play the game again with all of your equipment and skills if you start over. Some of the camera angles get weird, but overall you can tell each level and battle was planned with good shots in advance making this a great weekend ride.

Demon Stone

Last week, my wife felt bad I was getting my arse kicked (and still am Flash Player Team!!!) by an .ocx problem with Flash and having to write 50 billion commands for work. She got me 2 games, one of which was Dragonball Z: Sagas for XBox. It basically follows the part of the famous TV show I started on while in college; where planet earth is getting attacked by Vegeta and everyone is training to make sure they are powerful enough to stop them.

The cons. If you hit a level boundary, like a side, your character goes into mega-slow mo and stops. So, if you are running full speed, you stop even if you brush it. I could code collisions better than that mess. The game as hard as nuts fighting bosses, even though I put the diffuculty level to Normal (Easy/Normal/Diffucult). I made it all the way to the 3rd level in one sitting, and got owned by Vegeta. There is no physical way to get through mortar attacks, and plasma blasts that could level a house without going to Google to figure out how to beat him. Also, some of the battles are one on one, not what the cartoon storyline usually had happen. More often than not, it was 5 good guys vs. 1 super bad guy; in the game, they usually show real cartoon shots at the end of the battle to give context.

The pros. Just… like… the… cartoon. They did a very good job. The levels, the style of look, the characters look; it’s all exact. The sound effects as well as the explosions and screen shake all are that insane, epic, larger than life feeling you get when you follow the cartoon’s storyline. They actually show the bosses’ power levels. They hardly ever did in the cartoons, just gasping, “OMFG, his power level is huge!!!!” but never actually showing the #, nor the scale.

If I can’t beat Vegeta today, I’m trading it back in since it was used for another game.

Dragon Ball Z: Sagas

DOD Source. I gave this whirl late last night since I bought it like over a year ago with my HalfLife 2 purchase (it came with it) and was finally released this last weekend. She crashed on me twice, I think because my sound card drivers are fubared. Regardless, it looks a ton better than the original, obviously since it uses the Source engine. They lessened the power of the BAR (Browing Automatic Rifle) and increassed the kick of it, so you really have to utilize burst shots or within milliseconds of aiming straight, the kick throws your aim to the sky. I haven’t tried any of the other kits yet because I only got to play for about 10 minutes, but overall it’s still got the WWII charm of the first, focusing on intense urban combat vs. all out war like Battlefield 2 does.

Regarding this O’Reilly post. There was a place called eHatchery here in Atlanta that was basically a big building full of offices, supplies, and connectivity. It’s goal was to help dot-com startups get on their way. On the way out, I hear you could get Aeron chairs for a steal.

When her majesty’s laptop was working, she played Second Life every so often; it was more like a large virtual chatroom where she could play dressup, and socialize en-masse.

Her friend would make models that did stuff; the most notable being Final Fantasy 7 ‘esque “big gun” that this girl would carry around, and it lobbed kittens out of it; because of the physics of the game, they’d bounce around; pretty decent range too taking into account wind resistance.

Anyway, I’ve brainstormed with friends many times in the past on how can we integrate some of Flashcom‘s features into a Flash panel to allow us to collaboratively code; like pair programming, only done remotely.

I apparently have been approaching it from the wrong angle, as Second Life appears to be an eHatchery 2.0; taking the approach that focuses on the most important thing; digital communication. Once you get that down pat, and provide a digital medium that most matches the real-world, you can actually get some real work done, and collab with friends on creating things. You pay rent by uploading your creations vs. paying for office space. (See comments here)

One of the nice things about Director was, the .dir was not only the source file, but the runtime file; you can have to do stuff via the Message Window; much like Flash’s Output Window, but you could run actual Lingo (Director’s ActionScript) in the Message Window and get results. Second Life helps foster that immediate results to your efforts as well as allowing you to easily share with friends abroad.