Epic Spoon

Pinkkis

If little ragdolls could be alive in this world, I would have one of these. I would kill for one of these. I wouldn’t be ashamed to be a 26 year old man and admit I play with dolls. No matter what your mood is, there’s just something about Little Big Planet. I mean look at sackboy’s face. Just seeing that makes you grin from ear to ear. And everything else in the game will make you gradually explode in a rainbow of orgastic pleasure.

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Paul Zero

I’ve played a lot of The Sims 2 (website), EA/Maxis’s follow-up to the best-selling PC game in history (reference, if you don’t believe me).  I own all the expansion packs ($30 x 8 expansions) and all the stuff packs ($20 x 8 packs).  It’s like a drug habit for me.

The Sims 2 lets you, the player, craft the lives of a sim, or a family of sims, or a neighborhood of sims.  They can become all manner of creatures and work in strange and interesting jobs.  They live or die by your hand.  And trust me, there are some strange ways to see them check out (they can be hit by a satellite falling from orbit).

When you start the game, you’re always scrambling for money.  You need a new TV because the repo-man doesn’t like you ignoring your bills.  There are no walls on your bedroom because you ran out of money buying that bed.  Your sim is always tired and bored because the bed isn’t comfortable enough and the TV keeps breaking.  Sure, there’s a cheat that fixes that.  But with a little finesse and a lot of practice, you can find new and interesting ways to pay the bills.

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Paul Zero

In order to have better (read: cheaper) access to games to write about, I signed up for a GameFly (website)  subscription.  Let me tell you, it’s no Netflix.

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Pinkkis

** Spoiler warning for the game AND the new Bond movie. **

The new Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, just came out. While this isn’t as much of a review of the movie and I don’t want to really spoil the movie for anyone. But I do have some thoughs…

Casino Royale was a really fucking great Bond film and just what we needed so that we don’t all lose interest in the franchise. Quantum of Solace is the first “sequel” to a bond movie as it picks up 15 minutes after the first movie ended and goes on an action packed adrenaline filled ride without a moments rest.

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Pinkkis

Several years ago there was this thing called the Experimental Gameplay Project. It was a gathering of a few students at Carnegie Mellon and the focus was to quickly prototype different ideas for games, each game had to be made in less than seven days.

While there wasn’t really a lot of gameplay in most of them and they all just had one simple idea on which they were based on, some of them were really cool. As an old Bridge Builder fan, I immediately fell in love with Tower of Goo. A simple game where you built a tower as high as you can with slimy little goo balls and the intertwining physics of it.

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Paul Zero

While I’m loving Fable II (website), and have plenty more good things two write about it, I found something very unsavory while Achievement-hunting.  All Xbox 360 games comes with a set of Achievements which raise your gamer score and grant you e-peen.  These add up to about 1000 points per game and are split up in any way the developers choose.  Downloadable content sometimes adds new Achievements to a game.

Fable II has an Achievement you can only get if you have purchased the Xbox Live Arcade title Fable II: Pub Games.  It’s a dog trick that you learn after winning a tournament in the $10 XBLA game, which preceded Fable II’s release.

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Pinkkis

It’s taken a bit to come back to writing about this game, or anything else for that matter. But the fact is that there’s so little spare time that I’ve had and I have literally spent most of it playing Fallout. The scope of the game is blowing my mind.

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Paul Zero

World of Warcraft (website), Blizzard’s world-class multiplayer online game, is best known for the insidious and crippling addition that keeps so many people from doing anything else.  I should know.  It’s happened to me.  And when I broke free of it, I swore, “Never again.” Imagine my surprise when I discovered I’m playing the game again.  As it turns out, you can play the game without playing all the time.

Every Thursday night I sit down at my desk, load World of Warcraft, and hang out with four good friends who are too far away to just visit in person.  We show up, ready to go, at a prearranged time.  We use voice chat to talk, and to coordinate.  And we play a side of the game that was much harder to find when I played long hours on the game by myself.

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Paul Zero

With all the great games out there for consoles like the Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wii, it’s a wonder that no $60 game can beat cheap arcade games for multiplayer action.  In fact, with the exception of the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series, none of them even compete with games like Aegis Wing, Castle Crashers and Bomberman.

When I want to play a video game alone, I pick up whatever the current favorite is: Fable II, Mass Effect, Oblivion, Twilight Princess, or whatever has just come out.  But when I have friends over, we’re more likely to head to the Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA) or Nintendo Virtual Console to play something that cost less than $10.  In some cases, like Aegis Wing, the game was free.  So why do we keep playing that one, instead of a big-budget studio game?

It’s the same thing that kept me in the video arcades from the moment I could reach the controls until the day consoles finally killed the arcade.  Well, that’s not fair.  There are still real arcades, but they only carry gimmick games that need big setups (like racing games and dancing games).  But what I’m talking about is: simple arcade games are fun.  We don’t need ten buttons performing sixty actions.  We need two-button games that focus on the fun.

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Paul Zero

Like most video games, Assassin’s Creed (website) has its good parts and bad parts.  It’s the truly great part of the game that makes it so much fun.  If you’ve played it, you already know I’m talking about the Scimitar engine – the software that lets you run, jump and climb in a way that’s so easy, so predictable that obstacles in the environment disappear.  You can use every architectural feature to climb buildings.  You can run along narrow planks.  You can drop from ten feet up to assassinate your target from above.

Developer Ubisoft designed this engine using things they learned in the good-but-not-this-good Prince of Persia series.  They’ll be using Scimitar again later this year for the next installment of that series.

I normally advocate for choosing the right engine for each game; but even without the wall-climbing features of Assassin’s Creed, I think any third-person action/rpg game would benefit from its ability to move quickly up small ledges, hop fences and climb ladders.  If a game involves running around at all, I think it should have this.

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