A Space Big Enough For Any Criminal to Hide In

Lets not beat around the bush: I'm excited for Elite Dangerous and am looking forward to getting my claws on it.

One thing though: It's taken the form of an MMO - meaning I'll be sharing playing space with a whole lot of other players.
What I find particularly interesting about this is based on my experiences with the original Elite: As I recall, the player could build up a criminal record through trading illegal materials (ie slaves and firearms). And at the same time, the player could also make some money through hunting down criminals and claiming a bounty.

So thus lies in the potential for MMO players to engage criminal activities and build up a bounty big enough to gain attention from other players. It sounds like a clever idea to deal with troublemakers that MMOs always attract but then again, if you have a bounty then one would need the biggest, most powerful ship they can acquire (a challenge most people would see as one worth rising up to).

Of course, all this is just speculative so it would be interesting to see how it comes about in the finished product.

Doomed to Obscurity

Here's something I've been pondering on recently: Has anyone actually played Doom 2 all the way through?

The reason why I'm asking is that my experiences with Doom 2, at the height of it's mid-nineties popularity, is that everyone plays the first three levels before jumping straight into the death match. Whilst there was no denying death matches were fun - they are, after all, what sold Doom 1 and 2 - it does raise the question as to whether or not anyone did play the rest of the game all the way through.
Indeed, I played Doom 2 all the way through recently and saw many things that I did not recall originally - some of which I did not recall from my PS1 playthrough. Why is this so? Is there only so many Doom levels one can take before they all start looking the same? Did we all play the game for five seconds before entering in the cheat codes? Did we get sick of the bizarre level design that we resorted to a rage quit? Or did we just use the level skip just to get to that one Wolfenstein level with the Cyberdemon? (seriously, until recently I never knew there were two Wolfenstein levels).

Most likely it was the deathmatches that had such a powerful sway over gamers that it pretty much destroyed the rest of the game - still it wasn't called a revolution for nothing.

Jaded? Me? Never!

Another game has been cast down from my Hall of Shame. Goodbye…..Jade Empire!

It’s no secret that I love me some Bioware RPGs. Yes they all tend to be formulaic but they are compelling enough to see all the way through. And yet Jade Empire frequently comes across as being the lesser known middle child when compared to the likes of Baldur’s Gate, Star Wars KOTOR, Mass Effect and Dragon Age.
When playing this game I did get that impression but not in the way that one would expect. No, I found it the most difficult of Bioware RPGs. Remember how I mentioned previously that the advancements in the fighting styles are fixed and can’t be changed? Meaning that if you pick the wrong one, you’re stuck? Well that, in that sense, makes Jade Empire an unforgiving game: If you can’t progress then you have no choice but to start all over again – As I did.  That being said, I found the only way to success is to a) decide beforehand what styles you’ll use throughout the game, b) invest solely in those styles and c) most crucially of all, not spending all the style advancement points all at once. It prove successful but there were times when one particular style, the Jade Golem, maxed out turned to be a game-breaking one. Indeed, I found a maxed-out jade Golem, along with the focus sight, made the final battle so easy and so short it wasn’t funny.
I’ve never had this kind of problem with Bioware games since. Why even Jade Empire’s predecessor, Star Wars KOTOR, was more lenient. In fact, one common complaint I’ve heard against Jade Empire is that it is a short RPG – but considering the unforgivable nature of the game, perhaps it being short is merciful.

Still, I really enjoyed this game. It is indeed refreshing to pay an RPG set in somewhere that doesn’t resemble medieval Britain and to have the battles based around martial arts. I love the art direction, with the design of the game and a story with a plot twist I honestly didn’t see coming.

So yeah, Jade Empire is a winner in my book. Mind you, considering EA's love for brand recognition, it's kinda odd that a follow-up to Jade Empire has yet to be seen - but then again, perhaps it is best left that way

An Ode to Ico

Something I put together in anticipation for Good Game's greatest game special:

Favorite game? Ico. On the PS2
No joke: you’ve heard exactly what I’ve said
Not for me Portal, Halo and Wow too

No, give me a lad with horns on his head
Who meets a princess in a big fortress
Who can open doors and make black shapes dead

Both doomed to die: A fate to readdress
So an escape Ico and Yorda plan
Hand in hand through the castle they progress

Contending with: puzzles, solved as they can
And bashing, with a wood stick, black shadows
And, worse of all, Yorda’s attention span

Under bloom lightening the game flows
Showing Legend of Zelda how it’s done
Along with a loneliness this game knows

Oh Ico, you poor selling ball of fun
Father of Shadow of the Colossus
Now on the PS3 for everyone
Ico: Who does so much more with so less
Who proudly passes the ‘game as art’ test
And a real tear jerker I must confess

Yes, my favorite game’s Ico. It’s the best!
Mood, emotion: There’s nothing quite like it.
Even though it’s one big long escort quest

Knocked Back Down

Jade Empire update:

Alas my triumph over finally beating the Ravager was short-lived. Several fights later and one chapter later, I was trounced in a fight where not only was I knocked down but was completely trampled over.
Yep, it seems that I, once again, had invested all my skill points into the wrong fighting style.

Geez, this game is unforgiving eh? If you don't have enough points in the right fighting style you're completely fucked! And you can't go back and change it either! Nope, you have to go right back to an earlier point in the game and do it. All. Over. AGAIN!

To be honest though, once I completed the Arena guests, the fights that came afterwards (ie the Lotus Assassins Fortress quest) came across as being a breeze in comparison - a sure sign as ever that if I, the player, am growing complacent, then the rug is mere minutes from being pulled under me.
Still I've played Jade Empire enough that giving up now would come across as being a sign of weakness. I will beat you yet, you smug game....

Gateway to the Ravage Frontier

I've been playing Jade Empire a lot lately. Largely because I hit a brick wall that prompted me to abandon my game and start all over from scratch. It's not the first time such a thing has happened when playing a Bioware game but in this case I abandoned nearly 20 hours of game time.

But all in the name of defeating the Ravager? Totally worth it

We live in a digital world

In recent years, it has become clear that downloading games have increasingly become a standard - Why would you bother with a physical copy when one can legally purchase and download games from many providers like Steam and XBLA?

I however am viewing such a revolution with a degree of caution. My beef is that is increasingly become compulsory: Sure I can buy a game from a store but what I am ultimately purchasing is not the install disc I was after. The actual installation, so it would seem, involves downloading some monstrously huge exe that seems far bigger than the actual disc would hold. So a physical copy is thus no more than an installation code.

I'm not entirely against digital download - far from it. I would gladly pay for a game that is of a small size (ie Limbo's 98.9mb space) as opposed to some leviathan that chews up a large amount of hard drive space and takes forever to download (ie Dragon Age Ultimate's 23+ gig space).

Speaking as a survivor from the 8 and 16 bit eras, I recall there was a sharp divide between Computer and Console gaming. And one of the major advantages for Consoles was it it didn't have to contend with the load times that plagued the Computer camp - instead it provided games instantaneously. This the advent of the CD era struck me as kinda odd as it introduced load times to Consoles and was, to me, a regressive step from the Consoles' draw-card.
The reason I am bring this up is that people have been talking up the instantaneous nature of digital downloading. But for me, instantaneous does not mean spending more time waiting for the download to complete than actually playing the game.

And if I'm spending more time waiting for the game to download than playing it  then something has gone very wrong