Jeremy's Reviews Blog

Long time, no post...

2011-04-05T23:44:00.002-05:00

I've been writing reviews for a website, www.pspminis.com

That's pretty much been keeping me busy, writing 1 or 2 a week.

Tetris (PSP)

2009-10-30T05:50:00.000-05:00

You can make a pretty decent case that Tetris is the best video game ever made. For those that have somehow missed Teris, it's a puzzle game where you have to arrange falling variously shaped blocks so that they form an unbroken line across the playing field. It's a very simple idea, but something very fun.

Yet the basic formula has been screwed up. Tetris Worlds for instance, for the PS2, kept the gameplay but took away the score. Another recent version turned it into a dancing mascot show.

So I was a little apprehensive buying this version, especially at a fairly stiff price (at least for a PSPMini) of $9.99. Happily though, this version goes back to its roots and is one of the better versions I've played.

First off, it goes back to the traditional gameplay. That is, you keep clearing lines with the blocks dropping faster and faster until finally you can't clear them anymore. It has a plain, somewhat stark playing field, no fancy animations or distractions in the background. Crisp, responsive controls, usually more of a problem in clones, but some official versions have been sluggish.

So the core of what makes Tetris, Tetris, is here and quite well done. That said, it does seem to be a bit harder than the gameboy versions. It's been a few years since I played but I used to be able to hit 100 lines cleared all the time, and my record is well over 200. In this, it took me quite a few attempts to break 100.

Besides the original gameplay, you have about a dozen variants. These need to be unlocked by simply playing the main mode or some of the already unlocked variants.

Most of the variants apply some sort of special condition to the playing board and require you to clear 40 lines, as opposed to going until you lose. There's even one that is inspired by the PSP's flagship puzzle game, Lumines, where the blocks disappear with the sweep of a scanner

Some of the explanations of the variants could be clearer. For instance, I can't really make out heads or tails of how the gravity one works. Didn't seem to be any different than regular Tetris when I played it.

None of them seem to be better than real tetris, but they provide an interesting change of pace. And they are suited for shorter bursts of play, most can be completed in about 5-6 minutes, whereas as full game of Tetris can take ten or more.

Beyond that, it keeps track of various stats and has Xbox like achievements. Which don't do anything for me, but could drive some people to play more.

Anyway, could it be better? Yes. I miss the rocket launching from the original Tetris. A custom soundtrack feature would have been nice. I always have Robert Plant's "Tall Cool One" in my head while playing this, since that's what we called the long, straight piece back in my college days. So it would be nice to actually hear it on my PSP, not just in my head as I play.

But all in all, it's a very nicely done product, even if it is an Iphone port. 9/10

The Door to Saturn by Clark Ashton Smith

2009-07-26T15:30:00.001-05:00

This is the second volume in the "Collected Fantasies" series from Night Shade Books.

It collects some of his most popular stories, but beyond those, and a handful of other good stories, it's mostly dominated by somewhat lackluster science fiction efforts. About a quarter of the book is devoted to two space opera tales of the starship Alycone, and another quarter to two tales about people who travel into the future.

Unlike fantasy, these sort of tales really don't hold up very well, I feel. Having basically half the book taken up with them, feels like quite a bit of a waste, especially since this book isn't exactly cheap. $29 for 265 pages of public domain stories isn't a very good value, but worth paying to get the definitive texts in a very nice format. But when only half the book is worth reading more than once, well, it's a terrible value.

That said, it does contain some very good stories. The title story, which relates a surprisingly amusing adventure of the wizard Eibon. "A Rendezvous in Averoigne", one of the most picturesque vampire tales ever written. "The Testament of Athammaus" which is almost a fantasy version of The Dunwich Horror. And "The Return of the Sorcerer", which was badly adapted on an episode of Night Gallery. "The City of Singing Flame", another very picturesque and haunting tale, this one about dimensional travel.

Outside of those famous ones, there are a couple of other gems. "The Ghoul" and "Told in the Desert" I really liked. But that's about it.

Atlantica Online (after 4 months of play)

2009-04-21T05:23:00.000-05:00

Atlantica Online is a rarity among the many MMORPGs today, something different. In a sea of Everquest clones, Atlantica goes back even further - to the days where RPGs had turn based combat. When first announced, many were skeptical, some openly hostile to a MMORPG being turn based. But it defies the skeptics and manages to deliver an unique and addictive experience. Its main drawback though is its cash shop, which relies heavily on gambling. The endgame is also quite grindy.

Characters

You create one main character, but rather than a class, you pick which weapon he or she wields. Axe, sword, rifle, staff, bow, spear, cannon originally, a recent update has added a guitar and chainsaw.

You can also hire or acquire several other characters, called Mercenaries, to fight with you. At the start only a few basic ones can be hired - Archer, Gunner, Swordsman, Spearman, but as you progress in the game, you can recruit several others. A Shaman that can heal, a Monk that will protect you, a very big Viking with a very big axe. 21 different types in all, and apparently more are being added in future patches.

Graphically, there's not too much in the way of customization, only a handful of hairs and faces for your main character. The body changes according to what armor he's wearing, although there's at least one outfit in the game and for the winter holiday, there was a santa claus hat.

There are only four statistics (Strength, Vitality, Dexterity and Intelligence) and a handful of skills per character type, so much of the customization of the game depends on the squad of characters you deploy in battles, not the actual characters themselves.

Combat

This is pretty unique, visually the closest thing I can think of it resembling is the old Ogre Battle games, you have a squad of three to nine characters, arranged on a 3 x 3 grid, generally facing a similar sized squad of enemies (sometimes multiple squads, if there were other enemies nearby).

In this though, you actually control what your characters do in the fight. On your turn, certain characters, up to five, are eligible to perform a move. Which ones depends on initiative, it's somewhat random though some classes are faster than others. You then have 30 seconds to have your guys attack or perform skills (usually special attacks or healing magic) the enemy. Then when you've moved everyone, or time is up, the enemy takes a turn (of about 15 seconds, usually less). This repeats until the enemy or you are dead.

In a lot of ways, it's a graphical representation of combat in old school computer RPGs, like Wizardry, Bard's Tale and Might and Magic, where you had 6-9 characters arranged in rows, albeit just text wise.

30 seconds might sound like a lot, but once you get a full complement of characters, it can be very frantic keeping track of what you are doing. But in a good way. There's a lot of strategy and tactics involved, so you have to plan out your formation ahead of time, and react to your opponent's move.

Now granted, not all fights are like this. Most the fights vs monsters and such are relatively easy, especially early one. But some do require thought, especially those in dungeons, and battling other people certainly does.

Gameplay

Other than combat, it plays fairly similar to most MMORPGs. You navigate your avatar around a 3D landscape, going from town to town, NPCs to NPC, dungeon to dungeon, while getting into fights with monsters seen on the screen.

The game is largely quest driven, at least early on, with around 1500 quests in the game so far. That's not to say there isn't grinding involved, but your progress in the game largely follows a lengthy quest line. Every 5 or so levels, you have a different group of quest NPCs, based around a certain region and dungeon.

The quests themselves are not that innovative. Many involve killing a number of monsters. Sometimes to get a drop, sometimes to just kill a fixed number, sometimes to acquire information about a monster. Besides that, there are quests to simply give the NPC some sort of object which you have to buy or craft, fedex quests. Some quests do require interaction with other players, such as having someone on your friend's list, giving a gift, or sharing monster information.

But the variety is generally well done. You rarely have two quests of the same type in a row. Usually one killing quest, then a fedex quest or two, then giving them some sort of item, then another killing quest. Besides the main quest line, there are several sidequest chains. Generally these are either to recruit a new type of mercenary, or to acquire some piece of equipment.

PvP is a strong component of this game. It's mostly consentual, there are automated tournaments several times a day. PvP outside these tournaments is fairly rare and somewhat hard to explain, only heads of certain guilds can do it against members of rival guilds. These automated tournaments consist of 8 matches and last for an hour and a half. You gain a lot of money if you win, a decent amount if you lose, so there is a pretty big incentive to fight in them. It also keeps track of your win-loss record and ranking, which you can see on the website for the game.

There's a fairly deep guild system, which I have only barely touched. I started my own just to see how it works and it's pretty complicated. But in a neat way, with being able to control a town and have instanced dungeons. None of which I have tried, though.

Although it's a bit tricky getting used to at first, it has by far the most comprehensive in game help system I've seen. You can look up all the monsters you've fought (if you've fought them enough), seeing their basic stats and even what they drop. Or look up by items, see where it's dropped from, what you can craft out of it, etc.

And also entries on all the NPCs and mercenaries, as well as towns and dungeons. For these, you can even have it move you automatically to a location, or if you have the license, teleport there. The quest log is also just as nice, you can see earlier quests you have done, and each one in a quest chain is labeled numerically.

One somewhat controversial system in the game is "Stamina". Basically it's how many battles you can have in one day. You can still fight after it, but it reduces how much experience and loot you get. It starts off at 100, the abruptly drops to 50 when you hit 50th level. It seems to be a device to stop botting, both player and real money trader type.

You can gain it back in a variety of ways, form simply not fighting (1 per 10 minutes), to giving gifts to beginners, to winning PvP fights, to actively doing quests (many give it as a reward). You also lose it less if you group up with others.

The "Endgame" starts at level 90, though the level cap is at 120. But that's when you can start doing this games version of raiding, in this case, instanced individual dungeons. These dungeons are called "individual", but you probably need one or two other players, they are named that to distinguish them from similar dungeons for guilds and nations (groups of guilds).

Leveling starts slowing at level 95, which the amount of experience needed increases immensely. I went from gaining a level every day or so in the early 90s (pretty steady throughout much of the game), to a level about every week to where I am now (98). Apparently it gets slower and slower.

At the very least though, you are guaranteed a level a month. You gain bonus exp of 3% needed for the next level for doing the first three quests of the day. And since you can reset many quests, you never run out. Still, it seems like the number of new quests you have is a lot fewer than in previous parts of the game. Right now, where I am, I'm simply not high enough to finish the quests I have. So I'm basically going to have to gain a few levels by grinding.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics won't impress you, but they don't really detract from the experience. The landscape looks like a 10 year old golf game, simplistic terrain contours, very little vegetation, trees are static. Despite this, it's fairly choppy on my computer, which is old, but runs much better looking games better. The early parts of the games are the ugliest, it gets better looking later on.

Animations are good, though, with a lot of monster variety and little re-use of monsters. Character models are also pretty decent to excellent in some cases, including animated hair.

The sound is extremely loud for some reason, I had to set it to the lowest setting possible, which is a little too quiet. But the next setting up is too loud. NPCs basically say a phrase when you greet them, and each of your characters has three or four sayings when you click on them in combat. Which does get a little old, considering you will be using them for dozens, maybe hundreds of hours.

Community

Like most free games, it's a multicultural mix of mostly the young, college kids and bums like me. On the server I play on, it seems pretty decent enough. I haven't made any real close friends yet, but have had several positive experiences and probably group two or three times a week. But what's great is how the game is designed

First off, it rewards you for giving stuff to new players. So when you start you are going to be showered with gifts from higher level players. Much of it isn't worth much (just the minimum of 1000 gold, either money itself or equipment worth it), but I had one person give me 200,000 gold, another 100,000, which certainly has come in handy. It also encourages you to thank the giver, which I have, which has led me to talk to a few people (and get a few guild offers).

Secondly, it encourages partying with others. You can only group with 3 others, but some dungeons areas are meant for it. There are also group dungeons for your guild. And while many people simply like to solo, this actually rewards you for soloing with other people. Basically if you are in a party with others that aren't nearby, you get extra experience. As well as experience books, which can be used on any character (good for leveling up new mercenaries).

Thirdly, there are a lot of communication tools. I like the chat channel called "Peers", which is all the people around your own level. So if you need help with something, you can always find people to ask. This is especially nice early on, before most people find a guild. There's also a message board in the game, as well as a mail system.

Fourthly, the Guild system requires active management. Certain amounts of people have to log in, a fee has to be paid every day by members (out of a general fund), so most guilds are active and there is a demand to fill them up. And if the leader doesn't log in for a while, the rest of the guild can "impeach" him and name a new leader.

Cash Shop

This is basically the part of the game I really don't like. "Free" MMORPGs need some sort of income, so most have a cash shop. However, most also seem to be designed to extract as much cash from players as possible, and this is perhaps the worst I've seen in a "free" game.

The biggest culprit is the gambling boxes. Every month or so, they wheel out a new "box", containing a new type of mount or other sort of goody. Unfortunately, you've only got about a 10% chance of getting said goody, and each box costs $10. So you've got to spent a large amount of money to get a good chance of getting one, and even then there is no guarantee.

It also leads to an arms race, sort of, as every month the new mount is bigger and more outlandish than the next. It started off with horses, now we're up to floating mechanical suits. For a while this constant rollout of new mounts meant that the older ones were cheap in the game, but a recent patch made it desireable to keep old mounts, so the price of them have skyrocketed. And there are also new outfits and accessories like wings or hats. Also doled out in the gambling boxes.

Beyond that, there's a lot of other little things. Dungeons are quite long and multilevel (sometimes up to 8), so you have to do alot of walking unless you happen to have a teleportation license. Dungeon mobs also have really tough mini-bosses hidden in them, so you need a license to look at the mobs before you fight, so you can avoid them. But you can get both these licenses for only $15 a month.

Next up are mercenary rooms. The game is party based, with about 20 different character classes and more being added sporadically. But where do you keep the ones you aren't using in your party? A mercenary room. You can get a 7 day one in game without too much effort, but a permanent one costs $5 each.

And once you hit level 95, you'll probably want to buy an item to boost your experience gain, since the amount of experience neede to level up increases immensely. Before that, it was $10 for an extra 50% experience for 550 fights. But now they have added a monthly license which gives you an extra 50% for a month for $15, which is a much better deal (you'll probably fight 1500 battles a month at least).

Most of the cash shop items are tradeable in game, usually a good thing. But due to the uneven nature of the gambling boxes, this is perhaps not as good as it could be. The fancy mounts go for huge amounts of in game money, since they are so rare, but the rest of the stuff is fairly cheap, because it's not that great. So if you want money in game, it's not that great a return selling cash shop items, unless you happen to get a mount.

Company Support

This is something that is very important to an MMORPG. Having played one where there was a large disconnect between the developer and the company running the game, I know how frustrating it can be not getting any sort of updates or even just bug fixes for months. Similarly, "Free" games require a lot of cash shop use, which is much trickier than simply a monthly flat fee, because items often aren't delivered or work properly.

For the former, the Western version of the game is actually run by a subsidiary of the developer. So content updates seem to happen often and quickly, only about a month or two after the game is updated in Korea. The communication about when we get the patches could be better (they seem to be unannounced until after the fact). The one time there was an exploit in the game (which essentially handed out free money to high level players), it was fixed in a matter of days.

For the latter, I don't know, I've had no problems with the cash shop when I used it, or any problems with the game.

One thing that seems a bit lacking though are giveaways, specials, and in game events. I can only remember one giveaway in the time I've been playing, and that only gave away very minor stuff. And I've never seen any in game events, either.

One thing I do really like though is the ease of downloading patches. Unlike many other games, at least free ones, the patch download program will resume. And for some of the larger patches, there has been a preloading option. This greatly helps those with slower internet connections like me.

Final Thoughts

It's a fun game, for the four months I've played so far, it's been by far the most fun I've had in a MMORPG. Which perhaps isn't saying much, I've only played three for more than a month (besides this, Sword of the New World and Lord of the Rings Online, plus Guild Wars if you count that as an MMORPG).

Still, the cash shop really bugs me. I have no problems with a cash shop in theory. But the sort that relies on gambling is the worst. Just let people buy what they want, not having to spend $100s just to stand an even chance at getting the new goody of the month. I know though, that the gambling model makes a lot more money, the whole collectible card industry is based on it, generating millions from cards that cost pennies to print. But that doesn't mean it's a good thing, either.

And while they are constantly adding new content, there does seem to be something of a lack of content at endgame. This problem does pretty much plague all MMORPGs, since people can go through content faster than it can be created. But by having a high level cap that requires a lot of grinding to reach, and then having new content be tailored for those high levels, makes it harder to enjoy what new content there is in the game, without having to grind a lot to get to it.

My Top Ten Songs of 2008

2009-01-05T19:52:00.000-06:00

1) The Thrillseekers feat Fisher - The Last Time

Brilliant vocal trance tune. Very haunting chorus

"The time we touched, the last time you held me, I was a soul in your hand...

2) Fragma - Toca Me (Inpetto 2008 Mix)

(Interestingly they used a video from different mix of a song)

Okay, this actually came out at the very end of 2007. But officially released in 2008, and I'm still not sick of it.

3) Deadmau5 & Kaskade - Move For Me

I think Deadmau5 is a little overrated, but this song is very catchy

4) Eric Prydz - Pjanoo

(Got an official video, regular release is twice as long)

A few years ago had an interesting bootleg of a Stevie Winwood song (Call Me). But this is a piano driven house thumper

5) Cressida vs Store N Forward - Honeymoon at 6 am (Optimus Prime Mashup)
(only find half the song)

Takes two solid tunes and makes them into one great tune with just an amazing breakdown.

6) Ferry Tayle - Revanche (Kharybe Scylla Intro Mix)
(Couldn't find the mix)

As you can probably tell by the name, Ferry Tayle has always made the dreamier sort of trance. This is by far his best song. I love this mix, it opens with a piano

7) Mark Pledger vs Matt Hardwick feat Melinda Gareth - Fallen Tides
(Mat Zo Remix)

Haunting vocal trance tune.

8) Solar Stone - 4ever

Classic Solar Stone sound, despite only now being one member.

9) Trebbiano - Isle of May

Hard to describe song. Almost sort of breakbeat, but not quite. Kind of rythym driven though, housey. Melody sounds like it's done by an electric guitar

10) Myon & Shane 54 feat Carrie Skipper - Vampire

Originally just a Shane 54 song from a few years ago, never really caught on though it was a favorite of mine. But saw a (slight) remix and re-release in 2008. (Would be higher except it's not that new a mix)

Wow, long time no post...

2008-07-15T03:52:00.001-05:00

Oook

The end of an era...

2008-05-17T19:51:00.002-05:00

Looks like d20 is pretty much dead. My interest in 4e is minimal at best. And now I've been banned from ENWorld for complaining about people trolling Pathfinder topics there (4e fans apparently can't stand that 3.x fans even get a small bone).

At least RPG.net has the class to send me an email when they banned me (also for complaining about moderating - that's the key to getting banned from a place, though there it was because of a thread about how Americans are idiots, which somehow wasn't against the rules). Although there the letter was gloating about it, so perhaps class is the wrong word.

Sorry for not posting in a while...

2008-03-22T05:26:00.002-05:00

Not that I have a lot of readers, really. But my mother had been suffering from lung cancer since Dec 06. She did pretty well for a year, but then was very sick and finally passed away in late January of this year.

So I've been busy with that, clearing up her affairs and such, and really, not in the mood to write reviews. Constantly going to the hospital, then nursing home, then having to help take care of her in her final days was pretty draining.

I gotta say, lung cancer is not a pretty way to go. Not that there are a lot of nice ways. Sad, too, she was still smoking until her final day, despite being literally in her death bed.

Sword of the New World (PC, MMORPG)

2008-01-11T21:33:00.000-06:00

Sword of the New World is a free to play fantasy MMORPG. It's a bit different from other MMORPGs in a few ways. Most notably the setting, which is somewhat similar to the 17th century colonization of North America, although a fantastical version with magic and monsters. But also how it plays. For starters, instead of controlling 1 character, you control 3. The fights are also on a more massive scale. Most MMORPGs have mobs of enemies, this has mobs of mobs. And they respawn quickly, often before you can finish them off.

Characters

Character classes are Fighter, Wizard, Elementalist, which are pretty standard fantasy classes. But also the Musketeer, who specializes in firearms, and the Scout, which is a healer and jack of all trades class. But beyond the core classes are "UPC"s, which are "Unique Player Characters". These are actually playable versions of various NPCs in the world. You start out having 9 character slots, but you can expand this, up to somethings like 40 characters total. Characters don't appear to have any sort of level cap, going up to 100 and beyond.

Besides a character's class, their "stance" helps define their abilities. Stances are basicically how a character does something, or what they do. For instance, if you equip a Scout with a knife, they use the "Assassin" stance. But equip them with nothing, and they use the "Medic" stance, and focus on healing. Similarly, there are different stances for how the Fighter and Musketeer fight - be it a sword and shield, or with a rifle or with a pistol (or two pistols). Stances have "levels" as well, as a character fights in that stance, they gain experience and level up in them. Each stances has 4 or 5 "skills" that a character can use, though they start off with only 1 skill and learn more as they gain levels in that stance. These skills are generally special attacks (for combat stances) or spells (in the case of magic users).

Visually, there's not a lot of character customization, at least at the beginning. Pretty much every character of a given sex and class looks alike, other than their clothes. You can buy hats and later wigs which change their hair. Some of these (or the ingredients to make them) apparently require purchase though the real world money store. Right now, when you create a character, you pick a "costume" for them to wear, but apparently in the upcoming expansion, a character's look will depend on the armor they wear (unless you have an in game costume).

Equipment wise, it appears that you have to upgrade every 4 levels or so. Fighters can pick between a variety of melee weapons or even some firearms. Musketeers pretty much just use guns, though can use pistols or rifles. Elementalists can use items that let them cast fire, ice or lightning bolts. Scouts pretty much just fight with knives, either one or two.

There are a lot of equipment slots, but early on you won't have much except armor and a weapon.

Gameplay

Combat works like most of these games, simply click on a monster to attack. Then hit an icon on the character bar or a key to use a special attack or spell. A lot is actually automated, since you have 3 characters. It's apparently quite possibly to let your characters fight on their own while away from your keyboard. A fair amount of people do this to level their characters up.

Game progression seems to be from town to town. You do quests around the town, in the wilderness, then eventually get sent to a dungeon. And then visit a new town, with a new nearby dungeon.

It's somewhat grind heavy. There are quests to be done in the game, but many of those quests involve simply killing a certain number of monsters. Usually at least 150 of them. If you don't like grinding, a lot of these can actually be done by simply leaving your computer unattended while your characters fight on their own. But a lot will also get done simply by going through a map (enemies are that numerous).

Occasionally there are missions, kind of like Guild Wars. These are pretty simple, though, usually defending an area or defeating a boss. Sometimes escorting a friendly boss.

I found the user interface to be quite well done. Some things are a bit sluggish, like equiping items while in battle, but for the most part it works good.

The translation starts off being pretty good, but after you reach level 20 or so, becomes increasingly incomprehensible.

It's a surprisingly quiet game, in terms of in game communication. You only hear what people near you are typing, not the whole zone or town, though there are special in game items will let you send a message to everyone in town or on the server. This is somewhat refreshing as you aren't immediately beset by playground insults or comments about various nationalities or political parties like in some games. But at the same time, it often doesn't feel like you are playing a MMORPG. It's also hard to get to know anyone.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics are quite good. Not cutting edge by any means, but about on par with 2005 or so commercial games, which makes it look about as good as Guild Wars. Better in some areas (the number of monsters on screen), worse in others (the textures aren't as good).

Higher resolutions are supported. My monitor is 1440x900 and there is a setting for that.

The sound is pretty decent. Usual sound effects for attacks and the yikes. Characters will sometimes yell out the name of the spells they are using. There doesn't seem to be any speech for the cutscenes (not that there are many).

Just how "free" is it?

A lot of free games apparently have catches, like progression being very slow without buying in game experience increases or regular items being weaker than bought items.

This doesn't really seem to be the case here. There are experience increasing items for sale, but their boost is fairly small. The only thing that seems to be mandatory (almost) is when a character reaches 100th level, they need a money item to become a "veteran". This just gives them one additional ability point.

And there does seem to be ways of getting real money shop gold to spend without laying out cash. For instance, referring people. Also they might hand it out periodically - they gave away 500 gold for their 6th month anniversary.

The main draw of the cash shop seems to be the visual customization of your characters. A costume costs about $10 each (there are only a handful), and an "Andres Box", which apparently give you a random costume item, can only be bought as part of a megapack (with junk, mostly) for $20 or $40.

Final Thoughts

Though far from perfect, Sword of the New World is a fun and fairly different MMORPG. It probably wouldn't be worth a monthly fee, if only because it's severe lack of polish and poor translation, but for the price (free) it's a bargain.

At the very least, I think it's worth a look. I've found it to be a lot of fun, but then I'm still pretty low level. Since it's free, it's not like you have anything to lose, except the time to download the client (which is something like 3.7 gigs)

There is an upcoming "expansion", and the company behind this promises it will fix a lot of the nagging features people have complained about (translation, bots, lack of high level stuff), though whether or not it actually does will remain to be seen.

(Just in case anyone reading this wants to try it, and signs up, use my friend code

C6BC1D59

I get 200 gold for everyone that signs up and sticks with the game to level 20)

Forza 2 (Xbox 360)

2008-01-11T21:31:00.000-06:00

Forza is essentially Microsoft's answer to the Gran Turismo series of racing games. That is, a racing game that is realistic, without being painfully so, and containing a large number of cars the player can "buy", upgrade and race on a variety of tracks.

The original Forza for the Xbox beat Gran Turismo on the PS2 in just about every category except graphics (oddly enough, given that was the Xbox's advantage over the PS2). But Forza 2 for the 360 is a step backwards from the original Forza in a lot of areas except graphics, and while it's still a very good racing game, it's missing a lot of content and features from the original.

Gameplay

Gameplay follows the standard formula in games like this - you start with a little bit of cash, buy a car and upgrade it, then race, win more money (and occasionally) cars, and repeat until you win all the races (and own all the cars). Some races are one shots, others are championships, where you compete in several races and whoever wins the points wins the championship.

The driving model is quite realistic for the most part. The only thing I really found lacking was the motion of the car itself when you drive. Cars are not bricks, sitting flat, they rock back and forth - the front rises when you accelerate (at least in a rear wheel drive car), the front dips when you brake. There's almost none of that in the game. You do get a little when turning (the car should rock to either side), but it's not too noticeable. This is a major drawback - it really adds a lot to the immersion. I know in some games, I find myself leaning as I drive in the game. Not here, it feels somewhat detached.

Forza 2 has a full featured damage system. However, while fairly comprehensive in scope, it doesn't provide feedback. While sometimes what caused the damage is obvious, like if you hit a wall or another car, sometimes you have no idea. For instance, I've had a problem where some of my cars, mostly Porsches like the 959 and new 911 suffer engine damage while braking. The game tells me I'm suffering damage, but I have no idea why it is. Is the engine redlining? Or is the car somehow bottoming out?

The AI of the other drivers is generally pretty good. Rather than slavishly following the racing line, they will react to how you drive. So usually as long as you don't make any sudden moves, the AI cars won't slam into you. And some AI drivers are better than others.

The car selection seems pretty much the same as the original Forza (though not quite), which is pretty nice, but has something of an emphasis on race cars. Exotics are also well represented, with many Ferraris and Porsches, including my favorites, the Porsche 959 and Ferrari F40.

There's a decent selection of muscle cars, though not overwhelming, including the 1970 Boss Mustang, another favorite. But there aren't a lot of races to use them in.

I personally would have liked to have seen more Fords, there's only 9 in the game, though you do have some Mustang variants from other companies, like Saleen and Shelby. Also lacking are Australian cars, which is a bit odd given their strong love of car racing, though you do find the Monaro popping up in England.

The real weakness of Forza 2 is the amount of tracks. There really aren't that many, maybe half as many (maybe less) as in the original Forza. There's also not as much variety in the tracks. Most are real world race tracks. Which would be fine, except they all seem to be the same sort of racing, which gets boring. I miss the variety of the tracks in the original.

Graphics

Forza 2's graphics won't wow you, nor are they photorealistic, but there is a lot of detail to them. The cars especially look nice. But the tracks are well done as well, with lots of animated spectators that don't look blocky, well detailed trees. But at the same time, things on the track look a bit bland and washed out. I guess it's the lighting they use, it's like everything is under spotlights.

On the downside though, cars do not have a cockpit view, and while there is an option for a hood view, if you pick that option, there is no rear view mirror. That can be a major loss in tight races, as there is no other indicator of where the other cars are. And not all cars have hood views, the camera seems to be placed at a fixed point regardless of the car, not the drivers seat, so on some cars you won't see anything, or just a little bit of the hood.

Sound/Music

The game sounds fairly good, but the engine sounds can be a bit weak and depend too much on the view you use.

There's a soundtrack, mostly "electronica", that is commercial/MTV style electronic dance music, but also some "alternative" (ie, MTV stuff from the early 90s). Most of it is quite bad (exception being the classic Insomnia from Faithless). It only plays in the menus, though.

Loading Times

I usually only do this section for PSP games, but they are hard to ignore in Forza 2. Expect to wait 30 seconds or so to start a race, and long pauses when going through your car list as it has to load the car model from the disc. It's especially worse for cars with complex paint jobs, like many race cars. Even during some of the car modding do you have to wait for the part to load (brakes most notably).

Final Thoughts

Although at its core an excellent game, Forza 2 is basically just half (or maybe a third) of the original Forza, with better graphics. So it's something of a shadow of its former self. A pretty shadow, but in the end, like all shadows, not very filling. While I guess some of it can't be helped, as next-gen graphics are much more costlier to produce, the track variety is bad. Many of the better tracks of the original were left out in favor of the duller ones (especially the New York track, which is basically just 2 long straightaways and a lot of shadows). That said, there is a lot of gameplay in here, at least month's worth if you do every career race, but you'll be sick of the tracks by then.

They also failed to address the issues of the original, like the arbitrary nature of the "Peformance Index", which is how cars are classified. Despite the name, it has little to do with the actual peformance of the car (which gets rated on a scale of 1 to 10 in 4 categories).

And some new features are more needlessly complicated than they should be. For instance, you can take a photo of your car. But if you want it on your computer, you have to connect to Xbox Live, then have it send the picture to the Forza website, where you can download it. Why not just let you stick in a USB memory stick (like how GT4 for the PS2 did)? Or customizing the appearance of cars - it's nice they let you customize them so much, but why not just let you plug in a USB mouse to draw (like Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2 did for the PS2)?

The loading times will also drive you crazy. It's not that big a deal later on in the game, when you do longer races (for 15 minutes or more at a time), but early on, you'll spend a good chunk of your time looking at loading scenes.

Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights (PSP)

2007-11-26T03:49:00.000-06:00

The original Juiced was a flawed racer that was surprisingly innovative in a lot of ways. It was one of my favorite racers. Unfortunately, the sequel goes more mainstream and unfortunately loses what set the game apart.

Gone is the freeform, calendar based gameplay. Now progression though the races is almost entirely linear. And while team racing still exists, it's only for a few events

It also adds a lot of frustration, in the name of drifting. The drifting fad has died down, but it still shows up in games. In the original Juiced, drifting was mostly optional; you only had to do it to increase your rep with one group. In this, you have to do a lot of drifting, and be very good at it to progress in the game.

Gameplay

Instead of having races randomly generated on a calendar, gameplay now consists of a number of preset races you can do at any time. And then there is a checklist of things to do to advance to the next racing class (you start at 8 and work up). Besides winning races, there are things like "spooking" another driver, which is basically means stay behind them for a while. A little bar above their car fills up, then they crash.

The races themselves are all circuit races, doing laps. Gone are the point to point races and drag races of the original. There is a new sort of race in this, one where you get eliminated if you crash into a wall. Those are fun and intense.

There is also more of an emphasis on drifting. In the original Juiced, it was almost optional, in this, you need to win a drift race to advance to the latter half of the game.

The drifting wouldn't be quite so bad, but some are "endurance" races, which are basically where you have to achieve a certain amount of points by doing one non-stop drift. This is quite hard to do.

Drifting is also the one part of the game where which car you use is actually important. Even those pretty much every rear wheel drive car has a "Good for Drifting" logo on it, some cars are much, much better than others. I tried doing a race in one car, and just couldn't do it, then tried another one and almost without trying, won on my first try. Yet they pretty much handled the same. Just one drifted better.

Just going by forum posts here and elsewhere, several people have quit the game in frustration over the drift endurance races, something that is a sign of a poor design. Drifting is tricky in any racing game, but especially on the PSP, which usually features simpler controls. For instance, no analog gas or clutch, which is really a must for proper drifting.

One of the touted features is "Driver DNA", basically the game records how you drive and can make an AI drive like you or anyone else. This could be quite useful if crew racing were handled like in the original Juiced (where an AI team member could race for you), but in this, crews only matter in a handful of races, and you'll be too busy racing yourself to watch how they drive.

Cars, Modding, and Driving

The selection is actually pretty decent. The original Juiced focused more on cars real people could afford, topping out with a Viper and Corvette, but this focuses more on performance cars, going all the way to very expensive exotics, like the almost affordable Saleen S7 to the Messing Hellcat (supposedly the world's fastest production car)

The original Juiced had a weird and very touchy driving model. It was a mix of simulation and arcade, leaning toward simulation, and could be very difficult at times, especially in rear wheel drive cars, you could spin out going around corners easily, or just by hitting a bump in the road.

This has an entirely new driving model, one that is arcade-ish. And no more problems driving rear wheel drive cars, either. It's very easy to drive.

The original Juiced featured relatively realistic performance from cars. That's gone from this, they pretty much all handle and perform alike, except for drift races. There's a little difference, but for the most part, it doesn't matter what car you drive in a given class. This is good because it makes old muscle cars actually useful in races against newer cars, but it detracts from the whole experience, since everything feels almost the same.

Track design was one part of the original Juiced was lacking. The tracks were fairly bland. This has much better track design, with quite a bit of elevation change and offering different routes in some cases (no short cut, but some are better). But many of them feel claustrophobic, there aren't any that really let you go fast - no ovals. There's not a lot of variety, either, 5 different themes based on a country, each with a 2-3 tracks in the region. Most of the tracks are also quite short. (Apparently next gen versions have more tracks, lucky us)

Graphics/Sound

Graphics are one area where they have been improved over the original Juiced. Which had decent graphics, but rather drab looking ones. The graphics in this are much more colorful and vibrant.

On the other hand, there doesn't seem to be any weather, the original occasionally had rain. And there's no damage modeling.

I didn't like the music much in the original Juiced, and don't like the music in this, either, which is just some generic electronic stuff, essentially modern muzak.

The original Juiced featured other drivers who would talk to you during the race if you had bet on them. Taunts and congratulations. This sort of has that, including little pop-ups of the character speaking, but what they say is somewhat muffled and hard to hear. And none of the characters have much in the way of personalities.

This one also features a really annoying announcer who does a play by play of the race. Thankfully you can turn him off. But he's really quite annoying, particularly some of the phrases and slang he uses.

Final Thoughts

I was looking forward to this title, but very disappointed. Maybe it would have been better if I didn't like the original.

Still, even if you ignore the crew aspect being mostly removed (which had been my favorite part of the original), what's left just isn't that much fun. Too linear, too much drifting, especially how a drifting endurance challenge is mandatory in a game to progress to the second half. There's also not much in the way of track variety.

It's also got no personality. Despite the licensing of "Hot Import Nights" and the constant use of that logo all over the place, it feels quite bland, with generic music and unintelligble opponents ("Car 1", "Car 2", etc, the announcer calls them).

You also see pictures of women everywhere on the logos and loading screens, but they are nothing more than a tease. Street Racing Syndicate for the PS2/Xbox let you get a "girlfriend" who would be the starter for your races and you could unlock videos of her "dancing". That last bit was lame, but at least it was some sort of depth.

Even your photo has no personality, just a blacked headshot. Anything would have been better than that. Just picking from a few stock portraits, if they couldn't bother with an avatar system.

The PSP hasn't had many racing titles lately, so you might be tempted. But it's just not worth $40 unless you are really desperate for a racer.

Locales, Volume One (PDF)

2007-11-25T03:10:00.000-06:00

$5.50

Publisher Stock #: TFC001
Author(s): Nick Kristof, Dave Kristof, Brian DiGennaro, Greg DiGennaro
Artist(s): Nick Kristof, Greg DiGennaro, Mike Strane
Pages: 46 File Size: 2.21 MB
Original electronic format
Watermarked

Locales Volume I is the first product from a new company, The Fantasy Cartographic. They apparently don't have a website yet, but they are on RPGNow.com
http://www.rpgnow.com/product_info.php?manufacturers_id=2224&products_id=51180&filters=0_0_0&manufacturers_id=2224

This product is essentially a collection of "geomorphs". Basically an assortment of pre-drawn adventure maps where the gamemaster fills in the numbers and keys to his liking. But whereas the classic "geomorph" provided just maps, this also provides some adventure seeds as well, one primary background for the map and 2 or 3 smaller alternative ones.

It's systemless, being mostly maps, but the background and adventure seeds are fantasy. It seems fairly clearly intended for use with D&D or similar systems (Like C&C or Osric). Besides some of the races mentioned, like dark elfs who live underground, it also has a section that says "Notes for the DM".

Contents

It contains nine locations, but two of them are related, and combined take up about half the product. So whether or not you find that location useful goes a long way towards how valuable you'll find this product.

Said location is a giant cavern full of giant pillars, stalatites, and stalagmites. So big that various underworld races could mine them out and live in them. The cavern and one such inhabitated column, meant to be more of a fortress than simply a home (it is a home, but to a warrior like group), is mapped out. 16 levels, plus one sublevel, so it's a fairly big place. Although the middle levels are quite thin.

Another fairly large location, 6 pages worth, is a dungeon (or tomb, according to the background) that folds back in on itself. That is, if you turned turned left and walked forward the same distance 4 times, you wouldn't be back in the same place.

This idea was pretty clever, I thought, somewhat Dr. Whovian, and could really torment players who made their own maps.

The rest of the maps/ideas are only a couple pages each. A keep (actually 4 pages), an elemental temple, 3 types of caverns/lairs, and some old ruins. These are probably all more generally useful for the typical fantasy campaign, especially the keep. Though the keep is also perhaps the one map where a key being provided would have been helpful, since some rooms look like they have a definite purpose in mine just from looking at how they are shown on the map.

Looks/Layout

It's a clean, clear, easy to read file. No weird fonts, the maps are black on white and printer friendly for the most part (some extended black areas in the cave pillar fortress, to indicate where the rock is). There are some small color photos of the locale in question in the background page of each one, but not on the page you'd actually want to print out, the map of the locale itself. So a nice touch.

I'm not a big PDF person, so I don't keep up on the latest in advanced PDF technology. But this PDF didn't seem to use any bookmarks, which most ones have for quite some time now.

Final Thoughts

I personally have found such things useful. Anyone can draw maps, but often unconsciously they can end up looking alike. I know for some reason all my maps end up looking like a portrait of Ernest Borgnine when viewed from a distance.

The selection is creative and fairly varied, though perhaps 3 cavern style locations is one too many.

On the other hand, I think it would have been nice, since the product is systemless, to be genre-less as well. For instance, including background or adventure seeds for things like horror or science fiction as well as fantasy.

Admittedly, that might clash with the name of the company, but it would broaden its appeal. And many of the maps in this could be used for other genres. For instance, the cavern and its fortress could be some sort of elder race city, like in HPL's The Mountain of Madness or Basil Copper's Great White Space. Or in science fiction, it could be an underground moon or asteroid base or something. This isn't really a criticism, so much as a suggestion.

Value wise, comparing it to some of the other products on RPGNow, it seems like a pretty good deal. Similar maps of a location seem to go for $1 each

A State of Trance voting opens...

2007-11-18T01:49:00.000-06:00

It's time to vote for the top 5 trance songs of the year for Armin Van Buuren's radio show, A State of Trance (available on XM Radio

http://www.arminvanbuuren.net/

2007 has been a really amazing year for trance, almost as good as the golden age of 1997-1999 or so, when I started listening.

I went with

Deem - Tears of Hope (Aly & Fila Mix)

First heard this in the Summer. Really emotional breakdown.

Andy Blueman - Nyctalopia (Onova remix)

Another instrumental with a wonderful breakdown that's making the rounds among DJs at the moment, but not released yet. This one is more symphonic sounding and less focused, but still intensed. Like feeling the approach of a thunderstorm, how the woosh of the front passes over you.

Dash Berlin - Sky Falls Down

Nice vocal trancer. Have no idea who does the vocals, not on their website. Haunting melody, too, somewhat harsh sounding synths (Which fits the Berlin part of their name, german trance is often like that, or used to be), even the dub is pretty good. But I like the vocals, too. "I'll be waiting...'til the sky falls down."

DJ Shah ft Adrina Thorpe - Who Will Find Me (Summer Sunrise Mix)

Balaeric trance, which is a bit languid and has a spanish guitar sound to it. Very nice vocals, breathy. Very catchy, especially the lyrics in the latter half of the song "Dance dance in the morning light/ Hey Hey it's a beautiful day."

Cosmic Gate ft Denise Rivera - Body of Conflict

Like most Cosmic Gate songs, it's hard trance (which has harsher, heavier sounding synths) though not real hard, and like a lot of their songs, it's contrasted by lovely female vocals (They have a version of Somewhere over the Rainbow, actually.) The vocals in this are aggressive, too. There's no one thing about the song I like, but it's put together very well and I found myself humming it a lot. "All I know, all something something, a reflection of you, something something body of conflict"

(My favorite song of the year is actually probably Above & Beyond ft Zoe Johnston- Good For me, but he didn't play the mix I like, so I didn't vote for it. Ms. Johnston replaced Dido in Faithless after she hit it big, and if anything, her voice is better).

Nancy Drew and the Deadly Secret of Olde World Park (DS)

2007-11-12T19:49:00.000-06:00

Why is a man in his mid 30s playing a Nancy Drew game, much less writing a review of a one? Well, because I like adventure games, and those are the main reason I bought a DS. I also watched the 70s TV show as a kid.

Adventure games have faded a bit in popularity from the early years of computer gaming, but recently there has been something of a resurgence, mostly fueled by Nancy Drew. There's been close to twenty of them on the PC in the last decade or so, most of them huge hits despite scant attention paid to them by the gaming media.

Noting this success, a couple years ago I wondered "Why don't they put one on the DS?". Apparently others thought this, as Majesco decided to publish one. And so we finally have this. Nancy Drew and the Deadly Secret of Olde World Park.

Story

Nancy Drew dates back to 1930 or so, but she apparently still has the same cast of characters around her - her father, a lawyer; her doofus boyfriend, Ned; her friends Bess and George, who are cousins - one glamorous, the other a tomboy. The only curious thing is that unlike previous Nancy Drews I've seen, this one apparently can't drive a car. (She used to have a convertible)

Not surprisingly, the player plays Nancy Drew, as inquisitive as ever. The game starts with her getting a frantic call from her friend Bess about a dress being stolen. Can Nancy (and the player) help? Of course.

Finding the dress is only the tip of the iceberg, as it leads to a mystery behind Olde World Park.

The dialogue is actually well written and often funny. At least I enjoyed it. I was also amused that the game refers to a "vintage" car, meaning one from the 1980s, which threw me for a moment. I kept looking for something from the 50s or 60s.

Gameplay

On the surface, it plays like a traditional adventure game. Move your little character over a location, looking at things and finding clues, picking up objects, talking to people, solving puzzles, moving the plot forward.

But are three problems here. First off, the gameplay is awfully linear. I realize this is probably aimed at younger gamers, 10-12, I'd think, but kids aren't stupid. There's really no exploration or room to discover anything on their own, which if anything, I think kids would find more fun than adults.

Basically, there's no exploration. You are generlly limited to 1 or 2 screens/backdrops at a time. And every relevent item is highlighted with a symbol over the head.

Secondly, there is an overreliance on lame mini-games. Most tasks require the player completing a mini-game to accomplish. There's nothing inherently wrong with mini-games, but at the same time, poor ones can detract from the game and feel simply like busy work. For instance, the ones in Hotel Dusk immersed you in the story, because they were very similar to what your character was supposed to be doing. Here, they are obviously just mini-games.

For instance, to pick a lock, you simply wait until a little dot passes through a color circle and tap the screen. Or to get someone to talk, you might have to re-arrange a picture.

The only mini-game that resembled what Nancy was supposed to be doing was the sneaking min-game. Basically Nancy has to stay in the shadows and avoid someone. While that was probably overused in this, that type of connection, between the action and the gameplay made an otherwise mediocore minigame enjoyable.

All the other mini-games were just chores to play. Particularly the one where you have to disfuse some bombs, it requires you to press the DS buttons instead of use the touch screen. Buttons are one place where Nintendo has lagged behind Sony and Microsoft, they are simply labeled A, B, X, Y, instead of being color or symbol coded. I can't tell which is which without looking, and if I do look, it's too slow.

Those two problems could be overlooked if not for the shortness of the game. Adventure games are rarely long, but this will likely only take you 3 hours. Maybe not one sitting, but no more than two.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics are nice enough for the most part. Nancy and her friends are depicted more like comic book characters than anything else, and the dialogue is told in similar style.

Sound isn't much. Mostly just ambient effects. Luminous Arc proved that DS games can have a lot of spoken dialogue, I think adventure games like this should have it as well. But publishers are cheap and don't want to pay for that.

Final Thoughts

It's actually not a bad game, despite its flaws, I really enjoyed it while it lasted, it just could have been a lot better and longer. And the length makes it hard to justify as a buy, since the linearity gives it no replay value. At the very least, they could have added unlockable outfits (which make more sense in a game aimed at girls than something like say, Silent Hill, which does have them)

Second Time Around (DVD)

2007-11-12T02:57:00.000-06:00

This is a Hong Kong film from a few years ago. It's a mix of genres, like a lot of Hong Kong films, it's partly a romantic comedy, partly a gambling/crime movie. It stars two fairly big Hong Kong stars - Ekin Cheng and Cecilia Cheung. The latter I have a thing for, which is why I rented the movie, she's very attractive. Both were in Zu Warriors, which I think got a release in the US, and Ms. Cheung had a cameo in Shaolin Soccer, I think, but if you don't follow HK cinema, you probably have no idea who they are.

Ekin Cheng is a gambler, who thinks he's a great gambler. He and his friend concoct a scheme to steal some money so he can gamble and theoretically win and thus pay it back and still be rich. But things go horribly wrong, losing all the money to a card sharp named Jesus (there's actually a reason for the name) and he wakes up in the hospital with his friend dead. And discovers his friend was murdered. One of the cops investigating the case is Cecilia Cheung.

When Ekin gets home, he finds a message on his answering machine from someone warning him not to steal the money. Confused about the apparent premonition, he investigates, looking for the person that called him. Then lots of stuff happens, and he ends up going back in time along with Cecilia Cheung.

Then for a while, like the middle half, it's sort of a romantic comedy. Then they try to prevent his friend's death from happening, but like all things, it's doesn't work out as they planned.

All in all, a really good movie. Really bad subtitles, though. A lot of Chinese films aren't proper US releases, even though Netflix or Blockbuster carries them, but region free and done by companies over there. The result is, the subtitles are often not done by a native speaker or even checked.

In this case, it's weird because the movie has part of it in English (since it's set in Las Vegas) and even some of the English parts are subtitled wrong.

Congrats to Armin Van Buuren

2007-10-28T00:52:00.000-05:00

He finally placed first in DJMag's top 100 DJ poll. After years of making the top ten, and I think coming 2nd three or four times.

Besides being a hell of a DJ, he's always had a fairly consistent style (unlike a lot of DJs which just play whatever is popular at the moment), he pretty much pioneered dance DJs having a radio show (with his A State of Trance) - now almost every DJ has one, he just seems like a really nice guy, on his show, he's always cheerful. I would listen to his show when driving to the hospital to visit my mother, and it always made me feel a lot better.

Castle of Blood (Movie)

2007-10-28T00:35:00.000-05:00

This is one of those movies that I have no idea how got into my Netflix queue, I must have put it in there for some reason, but can't remember just why.

It's a 1964 B&W Italian Horror movie. Which is scary in of itself, actually. It's not that Italians made bad movies in the 60s, it's just they tended to feature really really awful English dubbing. And let's face, while Italian women aren't ugly by any means, in the 60s, they used way, way way too much makeup. But if you can get past that, you are rewarded with a fairly gripping movie. It's not horror in today's sense of the word, more supernatural suspense.

It starts off with a journalist arguing with Edgar Allan Poe about the truth of the supernatural. With the journalist, the protagonist, being a skeptic. Also present happens to be the owner of a haunted castle, Baron Blackwood or something like that. So of course, he makes a bet with the skeptical journalist, daring him to spend a night in the castle.

So the journalist does. He goes to the castle, and at first, thinks it deserted, save for a black cat. But then he meets a woman, the Baron's sister. They quickly fall in love. After, uh, expressing their love, the journalist meets the rest of the castle inhabitants. Which aren't quite as friendly.

The plot is perhaps a bit predictable. And perhaps not real believable. But all in all, it works well while watching it.

PSP-2000 (aka PSP Slim )

2007-10-06T00:46:00.000-05:00

I am a big fan of the PSP. I like video games, but don't really like sitting in front of a TV to play them. However, my old PSP has some problems. It's literally held together by duct tape.

So when the new PSP model was announced, I decided to save and buy one of those. I finally got one, a "Piano Black" stand alone model (as opposed to the ones in packs).

It's pretty nice. Most of the problems of the original PSP were fixed. The d-pad is great, diagonals are easy to do. The screen seems more visible outside, and ghosting seems a little reduced, though still there. (I also got one with no dead pixels, my old one had 4). It really is light, probably half the weight of the old. The analog nub seems more responsive.

It does feel a bit cheap. Especially the slot where you put the memory stick in. I'm not crazy about the UMD loading port, but not as bad as I feared. Haven't noticed any difference in loading times, but I'm not sure that will be addressed in older titles until it's built into the firmware. The manual was also printed on very cheap paper, almost like toilet tissue, worse than even comic book paper.

Still, I like it quite a bit. Cramps your hand a lot less, too. I had to get grips for my old one, but I'm not sure I'll need those for this one.

*I cracked the faceplate when PuzzleQuest froze on me, requiring me to take the battery out. The battery thing is hard to open. I used to much force. So I replaced the faceplate. But then a bug got in it somehow. I go opened that, and accidently broke that faceplate, getting the bug out. Then I put another faceplate on. Somehow this one borked the analog stick and I lost some screws, too, in the chaos of trying to get the stick to work. So I just taped it on, where it's missing the screws.

Sorry, been busy...

2007-10-06T00:36:00.000-05:00

Oddly enough, I've been busy writing a novel. I had been wanting to write one for quite some time, but just never got to much of a start. Part of the reason is that I was sure I could never find a publisher. Then I was browsing Lulu.com for some reason, and looked at the section on UFOs. I saw a novel there by Jacques Vallee, one of my favorite UFO authors. I didn't buy it, his last UFO novel, Firewalker (or something like that) was awful, but finally I just said to myself "Hmmmm, if a respected author finds Lulu.com an okay venue to sell his books, maybe I could, too. So quit thinking about it and write."

And so I have. Most of my free time for the last month has been writing it. Up to about 70,000 words now if I can believe the counter in MS Word. 350kb or so of plain text.

I doubt I'll sell it, probably put it up on Lulu.com if I can't find any takers. If it's good enough for Jacques Vallee, it's good enough for me.

(Jacques Vallee is a famous Ufologist. His fame has decreased over the years because he's not a big self-promoter, he has a real job outside of UFOs and does Ufology in his spare time - research not appearing on TV. But he was the inspiration for the french guy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind)

The House of the Wolf by Basil Copper

2007-09-07T03:07:00.000-05:00

Sometime in the early 80s, I read a novel about an expedition to a lost city of bizzare elder beings in the mountains. The novel really stuck in my mind. About 7-8 years later I discovered H.P. Lovecraft. At first I thought the novel I had read was HPL's At the Mountains of Madness, as the plot was somewhat similar. But when I finally read At the Mounts of Madness, it was nothing like the novel I had remembered.

Years went by, and I began reading as much mythos fiction as I could. Still, I couldn't find the novel I was after. Then finally a year or so ago, I decided to ask on the internet. At first, no one knew, as my descriptions were a bit poor, but finally someone recognized enough to say it was "The Great White Space" by Basil Copper. I managed to track down a copy, and sure enough, it was the novel I was after. And it was memorable as ever.

Anyway, turns out Basil Copper wrote a lot of books. Some of them were horror, but The Great White Space was seemingly his only "Mythos" one (and even that is slighly different, more inspired, than). Still, it was such a great novel, I tried to track down his other stuff via the library. But unfortunately, as authors get older and their worlds fall out of popularity, libraries literally throw their books out. And so I could only find one other horror novel of his. "The House of the Wolf", published by Arkham House.

Apparently he liked to write gothic horror novels. This is a take on the werewolf tale, as you might surmise from the title. It's set in Hungary, in an undisclosed time, in a crumbly old castle. It seems almost quaint, a werewolf novel, because they are pretty trite these days. And even when it was published, 1981. But the novel works because he does a great job of capturing the atmosphere, and he uses some of the reader's knowledge about werewolves as sort of red herrings. I was surprised at how much I enjoyed it.

The Fast and the Furious (PSP)

2007-09-02T16:36:00.000-05:00

The Fast and the Furious was a decent, if rushed, street racing game for the PS2. Now it's shown up on the PSP. It's pretty much identical to the PS2 version, except the addition of upgrading the car's oil. Which unfortunately, makes the game a bit hard to play, as it has a complicated control system, at least for drifting, which doesn't work very well on the PSP's limited inputs.

Gameplay:

Like a lot of these games, you start off doing a race in a borrowed car. If you win the race, you get extra cash to buy a car with. If you lose, well, you'd be hard pressed to lose.

There's a pretty decent selection of cars to begin with at start. Almost 20 cars, I think, ranging from the '86 Truneos and Focuses to one end, to Eclipses and Silvias on the high end, with RX-7s, Integras, 180SXs and more in the middle.

Basically once you have a car, you can free roam around Tokyo's highways. You can either engage in rollup races, where you come across another car, then flash your lights and then race until one car is ahead by 200m, or find a hot spot.

Hot spots are places where teams of racers hang out, and you can race them in fixed races. These races are generally either destination battles (where the winner must cross the finish line first), top speed battles (where the car with the highest speed wins) or drift battles, which are only in mountain hotspots, where the winner is the car with the highest drifting point total. If you win, you get cash.

For the first half of the game, these are really really easy. And in many cases, you can do them again and again. So cash really isn't a problem.

As you win, you unlock more opponents, including bosses, and more cars to buy, and new types of stickers and drift charms in the tuneup shops. And more and more hot spots will open up. There is are 80 different hotspot races to win in all. Each opponent has a bio and car, and many of these are based on real world people from the world of drifting, while some are from the Fast and the Furious movies.

The PS2 version featured terrible load times for the hot spots and then for the races once a hot spot loaded. So it's not surprisingly that this is a problem in the PSP version as well, though honestly, it doesn't seem any worse than the PS2 version. The post race loading is actually a bit quicker, because it saves the results to the memory card automatically, and on the PS2, it was glacially slow.

There is basically no loading while in free roam mode, but it's hampered by the small size of the city, and the small number (and ease) of the opponents. Only about 40 opposing racers, and if the real Tokyo was this small, Godzilla could destroy it just by sitting down. (Okay, not that small, but pretty close).

Race variety is also a bit lacking. It's always just you and one other car, and there's only 3 types of races. I would liked to have seen drag races, and perhaps some circuit races on a racetrack or something. Most race are also fairly short 1-3 minutes, except for one "Grand Tour" race which lasts 10 minutes or so and goes across most of the map (and is a lot of fun, since you can really go fast on some spots).

The driving model is not overly realistic, but is more realistic than arcade-like. You do need to slow down for turns (unless you have mastered drifting), but cars do seem somewhat more agile in the game than real life. There's no damage in the game to the cars. The PS2 version featured somewhat sticky walls, which would keep you from simply riding along the walls. But this seems to have been removed in the PSP version, I guess because the controls of the PSP make it almost impossible not to hit the walls at higher speeds.

That's the real problem with the PSP version. Especially with the drifting aspect of the game, the F&F is a very complicated game to control, because not only do have to steer the car, you need to manage the engine revolutions via the gas and clutch. It was hard to do it properly on the PS2, it's almost impossible on the PSP because you no longer have an analog stick for gas, and the clutch kick button is now one of the face buttons.

However, they seem to have made the drifting part even easier to win. You can pretty much just ram your car into the railing and hit the throttle and rack up drift points.

Cars and Car Modding:

Since it's set in Japan, the car list is very Japan-centric. And since it's largely a drifting game, it's also drifting-centric, with most of the cars being rear wheel driven. But there are some AWD and a few front wheel drives (like the Integra).

That said, you do some some good American cars are well. An old Mustang and a new one, plus some Mustang variants from Shelby and Saleen. Also some newer Corvettes, a Viper, and an old Chevelle. You don't find Hondas in most street racing games because they are very protective of their image, but this has a good range of them, including the NSX.

Car modding is pretty good. Basically in terms of performance, there are 5 different stages for various parts like engine, super/turbocharger, intercooler, brakes, etc. Usually a higher number is better, but not always the case, in terms of transmissions, where some are good for acceleration, others are good for top speed. And somewhat disappointingly, there is no tweaking of gear ratios. Also no replacement transmissions with more gears for old muscle cars (most of which only have 4 gears, and so have a low top speed). You also can't do anything like lower a car, or tweak the downforce, or set brake bias.

They added one more modding feature - changing the car's oil. When I first read about it, I thought you had to change the oil every so often, but the oil is actually handled like a part you can upgrade. Which is somewhat true, some oils are better than others, but I think taken to an extreme - the most expensive oils cost $1000s and add 50 or more hp to your car. That's a bit silly.

Visual modding is both good and bad. The good part is that all the parts are pretty much real parts, licensed from real world manufacturers. The bad part is, there aren't all that many of them.

Pretty much all the usual stuff is there. Neons, venting colored gas, etc (no spinners, as far as I can tell, thankfully). Two new additions to the genre are drift charms and valve stem lights. Drift charms are basically little dangly figurines that are attached to the rear bumper. These seem to be pretty much all of Namco properties, like Pacman and from their various fighting games and Katamari. Stem lights are basically just little leds that go in the valve stem of the tire. These are illegal in the US for street use, I dunno about Japan, but they look quite cool in action. Makes it look like the wheel is lighted.

In terms of paint jobs, it's not great. You only get to choose from a selection of premade colors, about 30. You can pick between metallic, matte, and glossy. They look better in the PSP version than the PS2 version, oddly, in the PS2 version they were all badly dithered. Usually that is a problem in PSP games, but I can't notice it as much.

On the other hand, the game comes with a very nice vinyl system. Pretty much like from Forza, but with some improvements. The premade made ones aren't much, but you can do a bunch of layers (I think 32 per area), and there are options for letters and numbers and shapes and you can really re-size them. So if you have patience, you can do some really nice stuff.

Graphics:

This actually looks quite good for a PSP game. While I wouldn't say it's the best looking PSP racer, this is actually one of the few PS2 ports that seems to look better than the PS2 counterpart. The visuals on the PS2 were somewhat blurry and pixelated, with a lot of dithered textures. Here things look quite sharp. There doesn't seem to be as much lighting though, indeed, I think car headlights are actually transparent sprites. They did manage to keep the hood view, which I think is a first for a PSP racer. Even has real time reflections on it. Quite cool.

Car models are also quite detailed. No driver though. It actually has a replay mode, so you can watch how you did in your races. Not many PSP racers have them. You can't save your replays, sadly.

Sound:

There are two important things in a racing game when it comes to sound: Engine noise and music.

The engine noise in this is pretty good, I think. Most importantly, V8s sound like V8s, or at least, big engines. The other engines sound wimpier, but they are supposed to. Turbos also sound right, with the valves going off.

The soundtrack is actually pretty decent. It's a mix of Japanese music (pop and some hip-hop, I think), American hip-hop/rap, MTV/Emo rock, and generic guitar solos. The Japanese stuff works pretty well. I have no idea what they are singing, but it's catchy, even the hip hop, which I don't usually like. The rest I originally found annoying in the PS2 version, but have grown to like. One downside though is that it doesn't tell you what you are listening to, so you have no idea which songs to track down.

Final Thoughts:

It's a fairly enjoyable game. The PS2 has a lot of good racers, so it suffered in comparison, but the PSP does not have as many, so in that regard, it might be worth a look. You do have to be patient with loading times (though that was true of the PS2 version as well) and the controls take much of the fun out of the drifting part of the game. And it's not the longest game in the world, either. C- or 6/10 here

Wolves on the Rhine (near final)

2007-08-08T15:17:00.000-05:00

The Romans. A very popular subject, especially if you watch the History Channel (probably second only to WW2), but also among historical fiction and movies. There have been quite a few roleplaying sourcebooks (AD&D, Gurps, d20 among others), and even one game still in print (Roma Imperious) based on them. But I can't actually recall any Roman themed adventure. Until now.

Wolves on the Rhine is a "programmed" adventure from Dark City Games. "Programmed" basically means you can play it solo if you like, although nothing is keeping you from running it the traditional way, and unlike typical (at least not from Metagaming or Dark City Games) solo adventures, you run a party of 4 characters.

As you might guess from the title, the adventure is set at the Rhine river, the border between Gaul and Germania. You are members of Twentieth (XX) Legion (who later would became famous for taking part in putting down the revolt in Britain). While not exactly a peaceful area, things have gotten worse lately, with the local barbarians raiding forts and towers and such. You've been assigned to talk to some friendly barbarians and see just what is going on.

If you are a fan of the original Conan stories (like I am), you probably can't help but notice a similar feel to some of them, the ones where Conan is on the frontier of Aquilonnia and is up against the Picts. Indeed, the plot (and name) is close to one of those, Wolves Beyond the Border. Although I guess it also somewhat foreshadows the XX Legion's experiences in Britain as well.

Some of the adventures from Dark City Games are pretty complicated. This one is pretty easy, as apparently it was written by a first time programmed module author (having tried to write a choose your own adventure story, I can say these are trickier than you think). It lacks even plot words (basically where if you find or do something, you write a word on your character sheet, and if you have that word later on, it can change things somewhat). This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does rather cut down on the replay value. There are actually still a lot of choices, but most seem kind of minor, and the consequences are immediate, rather that happening later on.

Gameplay

They use their own rules set for the game, which comes in a small booklet. The closest comparison is The Fantasy Trip, basically a system similar to GURPs, but simpler and less headache inducing. Characters have 3 stats, usually around 10-15 or so, and various skills. To perform a skill, you roll under that on 3d6 (or rarely 4d6). It's gritty - in that armor stops damage, and characters don't have hit points, but take damage to their ST stat.

Most of the previous adventures used the same set of fantasy rules, but as this is a historical adventure, the included rules was tailored for just for the Romans (complete with Roman armor and weapons).

At first, I thought playing through would be a little tougher than the previous ones, because there is no healing magic. But actually, in practice, my Roman characters had a lot more armor, which actually made it rather tough to be injured in most combats. Most the opponents would only do 1d6+2 damage, while the Romans could have up to 6 points of armor. So only a hit that rolled a 5 or 6 (+2) for damage would actually injure one of my guys. Of course, conversely, all that armor comes with a dexterity penalty, which makes it harder to hit in combat. So combat was a bit longer than in previous modules, with a lot of misses and blows that didn't do any damage.

Except the bear. Like all these modules it seems, the wildlife seems to be murderous (although I guess it's more fitting here), and the bear in this was quite tough.

Looks/Layout

Previously modules from them featured some snazzy looking cover art, then some average quality black and white interior art. Usually the same art as used on the counters. This does that, but the art is in full color, including on the counters (and the map sheet is in color as well). This dramatically increases the look of the art and the module itself. I actually usually use figures for the characters and foes when playing these games, but to not use the color counters in this made me feel guilty.

Final Thoughts

While I enjoyed this module, I really did find it quite short and well, too easy. It's almost impossible to screw up or get lost in it. Still, I guess it does have replay value, you need to go through it twice to see everything.

Also, perhaps because of its historical nature, it felt less like a roleplaying game and almost more like a boardgame. I mean in the past ones, I had fun creating characters to fit different roles, buying equipment, etc. In this, there's no equipment to buy, and very limited roles - basically either a Roman Legionaire or a Barbarian Auxiliary (I went with 3 Romans/1 Barbarian who was an archer). And no loot, either. Not even an "I put down a Barbarian uprising and all I got was this shirt" T-shirt. So to a certain extent, it was a bit harder to develop a connection with my characters, since they were all basically alike in terms of abilities and possesssions.

On the other hand, the production values are definitely the best so far, with the interior color art and color counters and map sheet. If you are playing a Roman game, I can almost see buying this just for the counters.

So, it gets a 3 out of 5 (or average) for substance, and 5 out of 5 for style.

Wolves on the Rhine (first draft)

2007-07-24T15:36:00.001-05:00

Maybe I jumped the gun about Gamefly...

2007-07-24T15:29:00.000-05:00

Their shipping times do really suck, but apparently the secret to get new games is to keep your queue empty of everything but the new games. And it seemingly works.

Also the "Keep it" feature is pretty nice, since you get a game which is quite new (the case/book are) and the price is nice.

Gamefly really sucks...

2007-07-20T16:00:00.000-05:00

Because there is something like 8 (or 9) RPGs being released for the PSP between July and August, far too many for me to buy, I joined Gamefly to see which was worth my money.

However, Gamefly has been something of a nightmare. First off, they are incredibly slow. They say they have two shipping centers, but apparently they don't use the one near me, so I'm stucking getting mail to and from California. Which used to only take about a week, but nowadays seems to take 10 days or more.

I guess that can't be helped (except letting their PA shipping center serve MO, since it's about 1000 miles closer), but what can is their customer service. I emailed a question about their "Fast Return" policy a couple days ago, and haven't got an answer.

Basically, they supposedly have "Rapid Return" like Netflix or BBOnline. Where once it gets scanned into the system, it's considered "returned". (Although it took a week after I mailed it to get scanned). However, this didn't free up a slot, so I'm waiting for a game to be mailed.

Lastly, the selection isn't great. Maybe it works better for more popular systems, but I haven't gotten a new PSP game yet high on my Queue, just old stuff down near the bottom.

Silk (DVD Review)

2007-07-13T02:51:00.000-05:00

Silk, or Guisi as the original Chinese title is, is a ghost story. Asian ghost movies have gotten rather trite, but this is pretty unique. It's got both more of a science fiction aspect to it, and more of a personal story, but to a certain extent, still follows the horror and investication angle common in movies made famous in The Ring.

A group of scientists researching anti-gravity are doing so by researching ghosts. Since ghosts don't really obey it. Finally the team finds a ghost to observe, but they need help trying to find who the ghost is (it's of a young boy). So they get a cop who can read lips to help them. The research team has had its share of troubles, especially the leader of it. The cop, too, is troubled, by a mother dying of ALS (aka Lou Gehrigs Diseases, I think).

That's pretty much the set up - I can't really go into details about the plot without spoiling things, but I found it quite original and refreshing. Really nice direction, too. Some really nice cinematopgraphy. Hurt somewhat by a really bad CG car crash which reduces some of the tension building up because the effects were just so bad.

Also interesting use of if not technobabble, I guess Michael Crichton style science. These things called Menger Sponges are used to see and trap the ghosts. They actually exist, but only as mathmatical models, really.

A-

Wicked Fantasy Factory 0: Temple of Blood review

2007-06-28T15:12:00.000-05:00

I was lucky enough to have a game store in my area participate in Free RPG day. Even luckier, they didn't have a limit on how much free stuff you could take. However, not to be greedy, I limited myself to 5 pieces, including this one, Temple of Blood from Wicked Fantasy Factory and Goodman Games.

Why the heck are you reviewing a free module you ask? Well, while free now, it will go on sale for $2 later this year for those that missed out, both in print and PDF. Not to mention, I suspect about half the freebies (at least from Goodman Games and Paizo) will end up on ebay. Plus, I want to, since I liked reviewing and I don't have much else new to, since 3rd party d20 modules, my favorite, have largely dried up.

Wicked Fantasy Factory

This is a new line of modules (and the developer of them) from Goodman Games. Goodman is famous for the Dungeon Crawl Classics series line of modules. Some of them are actually fairly experimental in nature, not just simple dungeon crawls (DCC#34 most notably), but I guess this was so different, it needed a new line. Basically, the premise is that they are like regular adventures, but "Xtreme!". That is, with over the top action. While the WWF/WWE is perhaps the obvious inspiration, it also seems derived from Hong Kong action movies.

While it's still just D&D, a few new mechanics are added. "Mooks" is one, certain weak opponents are designated as this, which allows the PCs to kill them easier. Basically when fighting them, the PCs get certain benefits - for instance, the ability to use Cleave and Great Cleave, spells cast vs them are maximized, etc, basically things to make them easy to mow down in numbers.

On the other end, for the Big Boss, just when you think he's been killed, he comes back to life. (There should be another option - when a PC gets killed, his twin brother shows up for the next adventure.)

More derived from video games than movies is "finishing moves", I guess like Fatalities from Mortal Kombat (I'm not much up on fighting games, so my terminology might be dated). Basically, when an opponent is near death, a PC can perform a finishing move on them, and if successful, the enemy is killed in a dramatic fashion (like in an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon). But if not, nothing happens.

Also in the module is "Phat Loot", basically a magic item or treasure worth as much as all the treasure in the rest of the module combined. (Besides making the item er, "phat", it makes it easy for stingy DMs to take it out).

The module itself.

I was pretty dubious about this when I first read the press release about it. I remembered the XFL (Xtreme Football League), which was similarly hyped, but failed because the football was not only not "Xtreme!" it just wasn't very good football. If you don't have a solid foundation, all the Xs and !s in the world can't save a product.

However, beyond the hyperbole and hype, there's an enjoyable module here. I shouldn't have been surprised, really, since Goodman's Dungeon Crawl Classics line was built around a gimmick, but if they weren't good modules they wouldn't have lasted so long (50+).

Because of the new rules, and the layout (large text, 1 whole page for the OGL), it's not the longest adventure in the world, only 7 encounters. The plot is actually somewhat Lovecraftian, or at least the villain is. A cultist of an evil crazy god has kidnapped 5 women in order to perform an evil ritual and it's up to the PCs to stop him.

It's got a lot of combat, but there is also some thinking involved. At least one fight is probably too tough for the PCs, and they have to figure out how to take out a bunch of kobolds rather than just battling in a straight up fight. Numerous options are provided. Similarly, one of the encounters can be fought, but also can be talked with, if the PCs were quick enough to pick up on something when they talked with the bad guy early on. Yeah, that's right, early on, they get to talk with the bad guy and exchange taunts with him. Pretty cinematic and a nice touch.

Art/Layout

All in all, the art is actually pretty good. The cover is too dark and the artist has a little trouble with hands, but isn't bad. The interior art is also perhaps not the best from a technical perspective, but does a good job of capturing the mood.

I especially like the artwork depicting the aftermath, two adventurers mobbed by the freed women, some with their arms upraised saying "Yeah!". It reminded me of the ending of Project Shadowchaser, a rather bad Die Hard/Terminator ripoff starring Martin Kove (the bad sensei from Karate Kid). But the ending was one of the most genuine I've seen, someone throws him a beer and he drinks it, then pours part of it on his head (and drinks some more).

Final Thoughts

For free, it's great. For $2, it's still pretty good. Perhaps a little short, but definitely on par with those $2-3 8 page adventure that AEG/FFG used to put out.

I just really liked the cheerfulness of the product. If it doesn't make you smile while reading it, or looking at the illustrations, then well, you're probably a fan of White Wolf's games. But I think most D&D fans will get a kick out if it, both running it and playing it.

Free RPG stuff...

2007-06-24T14:42:00.000-05:00

Yesterday was Free RPG day and thanks to my somewhat FLGS, I was able to get some goodies. But how good were the goodies?

Dungeon Crawl Classics 51.5: The Sinister Secret of Whiterock - This is probably the prize, in terms of desireability. It's a 16 page module, exactly like pay DCCs, thick cover and everything. It's a prequel of sorts to the upcoming Sinister Secret of Whiterock, the big expensive box set ($100 worth). Basically it's an old ruined castle. This though, is a section of old gnomish ruins. A bunch of them got trapped there after a cavein, and mated. And in Lovecraftian style, they regressed into a bunch of deformed savages.

Pretty good. Decent sized, too, 12 encounter areas. B

Wicked Fantasy Factory #0: Temple of Blood - Also from Goodman games, this is part of their new WFF line, which is meant to be "Xtreme", like pro wrestling, I guess. The adventure in this is somewhat short, only 7 encounters in 16 pages, in part because there is some new rules. Rules for mooks, finishing moves (like the final move you use to kill someone) and besides that, the text is kinda big. This also has a Lovecraftian theme - a follower of "He-Who-Dwells-in-Secrets" is performing a ritual involving 5 scantily clad ladies. That's not the Lovecraftian part, what's Lovecraftian is that he's used the spell that was found in his story "The Festival". B+

Gamemastery Module D0: Hollow's Last Hope - This is Paizo's offering. It's the slickest looking of the bunch, being in full color (all 16 pages) and with a glossy cover. It's also probably the most complete adventure of the ones I got. Basically the town of Falcon's Hollow is suffering the effects of a plague. The PCs, being nice, presumably help cure it by helping a local herbalist by gathering some ingredients she needs. The downside is that it's rather linear, they simply talk to her, she tells them about the 3 ingredients, and there only seems to be 1 way to get each one. The first two are relatively easy, but the last requires a 16 or so room dungeon crawl. A

Tunnels & Trolls - This contains the quick start rules (which take up 6 pages) and 2 mini adventures, 1 solo, one run by a GM. The solo adventure is pretty good, you play a Goblin looking for other goblins, and find some in an underground lake area. The other involves the party working on a river boat. B

Castles & Crusades - I got this because it says "Castle Zagyg Adventure Inside" on the cover. It's mostly just the quick play rules for C&C, though. Despite C&C supposedly being a simpler version of d20 fantasy, it takes 21 pages for the quick play rules, leaving 3 pages for the "adenture". Which actually isn't an adventure, it's an excerpt from an upcoming Castle Zagyg book. The choice of excerpts is weird as well, it's a workhouse/prison. D. I can't imagine anyone being happy with this "freebie". Admittedly, I don't like C&C, because I think if you might as well just play 1e AD&D rather than a gimped recreation of it using d20. But even if you wanted quick play rules of it, I can't imagine people being excited to explore a workhouse.

Delta Green (d20 Reprint)

2007-06-12T15:09:00.000-05:00

I've been a Call of Cthulhu fan since 1989 or so, starting with 4th edition. I was a hard core fan for a while, buying pretty much ever new release from '90 to '95 or so. But due to circumstances beyond my control, I lost all of my CoC books shortly afterwards, along with most of my other gaming stuff. Anyway, not really until d20 Call of Cthulhu came along did I get back into that game, being a big fan of d20. And CoC d20 got me back into CoC.

But by that time, Delta Green was out of print and costing a small fortune used on ebay. So I passed on it until the reprint.

As mentioned, Delta Green is a sourcebook for the Call of Cthulhu game. This version also includes stats for the d20 version of Call of Cthulhu, but otherwise is pretty much unchanged, other than presumably being reedited to make room for such stats, and they added a bunch of excerpts from glowing reviews in the inside cover of the book.

It calls itself "Modern", but in reality, it's very much set in the 1990s. But basically it's a way to play CoC in a more modern setting than the default 1920s.

Out of 340 pages or so, only about 140 or so make up the book itself (which mostly consists of a description of Delta Green and other organizations). The rest are appendices, including adventures.

Delta Green

Delta Green is a secret governmental (mostly) organization that fights the forces of the the Mythos, or at least the Supernatural. This concept dates back pretty far, arguably to some of the serials of the 30s/40s, where you had people like Commando Cody fighting invaders from the Moon and the like.

In role-playing, the premise igoes back to the early 80s, with the weird and wonderful Bureau 13 (available in a new edition in 2007, but sadly only in PDF). But is fairly common after that, including a group in Dark Conspiracy with a similar name (actually, it's their home base - its called Delta Seven)

But a group like this is certainly suggested by HPL's writings. He makes mention of the US government acting against Innsmouth. And indeed, in the sourcebook, that is essentially the origin of Delta Green. The first 50 or so pages of the book detail the history of the organization, starting from that incident, including its ups and downs. Its real heyday was during WW2, where it battled the occult forces of the Nazis ("Karotechia").

These days it's been largely driven underground. It was officially disbanded in 1970 after a bad operation in Viet Nam, but stayed active, just very disorganized. But just now (in book terms, in real time, 1995) it reformed with a more structured order, in cells, after the murder of its unofficial leader. This is where the book (and presumably your campaign) steps in, as part of the "new" Delta Green.

Things are a bit confusing here, though. Delta Green isn't so much anti Cthulhu Mythos, as anti-Supernatural (at least how it's presented in the text). But at the same time, they apparently have access to a lot of mythos tomes, and indeed, the head of the top cell has a 40% or so score in the Cthulhu Mythos.

Delta Green's Rivals and Opposition

While you'd think everyone would be happy having a group like Delta Green around, fighting the good fight, that's not true. It has its rivals. Its major one is Majestic 12, or MJ-12. This pretty much follows the standard MJ-12 folklore. Basically, if you've been living under a rock, they were formed as a group to investigate the UFO crash at Roswell. Anyway, in this, it hews to the more paranoid version of MJ-12, how they have made a secret pact with the aliens, the Greys, gaining access to technology and information, in exchange for the "right" to go about their business unhindered (or rather, with the cooperation and help of the government).

The key mystery here is that the Greys, are not really Greys, but literally puppets for the Mi-Go. But no one actually knows this except the Mi-Go themselves. (Pretty much every one who has heard of Delta Green the product knows this though, so it's not really a spoiler)

This actually makes a decent amount of sense. The original source of the Mi-Go (with regards to the Mythos) is HPL's story "The Whisperer in the Darkness". In that, the Mi-Go seem fairly interested in humanity. Not exactly friendly, but they took great pains to not actually hurt anyone in that story.

Besides MJ-12, Delta Green's old Nazi foe, Karotechia, still exists, although it's pretty much a shadow of itself.

Other Groups

Two groups neither associated with nor opposed to Delta Green are detailed. SaucerWatch, a UFO group, and The Fate, an occult nightclub/criminal organization.

SaucerWatch is fictional, but seemed to include some NPCs based on real life people in the UFO field. For instance, there is a Harvard psychiatrist who studies alien abductees (based on John Mack), a science fiction writer who has nightmare about being abducted by aliens (based on Whitley Striber), even a hot shot aviator from a famous airplane manufacturing company (based on John Lear). Still, it avoided the people who you constantly see dragged out on UFO specials on TV.

However, it's far too organized to be a believable UFO organization. Pretty much all the real world ones are too busy with infighting and are incredibly incompetent. At least based on personal experience. Most the real investigation is done by very small groups or individuals who keep a very low profile (since they are more interested in that than publicity).

The Fate, on the other hand, seems rather derived from the whole World of Darkness line from White Wolf. Which was sort of the next big thing in the early 90s. Oooh, we're mysterious and cool, hanging out in nightclubs and being vampires/mages/werewolves/etc, listening to cool underground gothic bands. In this case, it's mostly the middle one, mages.

Other Stuff

You get a bibliography on spy and UFO stuff. The spy stuff seems good, but the UFO stuff seems to be missing some essential reads, like Jaques Vallee's Revelations, which is about UFOs and Government Conspiracies (including basically the theme of this book - that someone is using the belief in Roswell and "Greys" and the like as a "control" system for humanity, which is exactly what the Mi-Go are doing) and Charles Berlitz's books on Roswell and the Philadelphia Experiment (which aren't exactly good, but are the ones mostly responsible for mentioning those two things, which seem to play a big role in the background of this product).

Also some brief info on spy terminology and some info on security classifications. There are several sample classified documents. Also a brief section on new mythos books, including a classic UFO book not mentioned in the bibliography, Jessup's "The Case for the UFO". The special annotated version. Which is where the Philadelphia Experiment came from, basically. (

Adventures

A good chunk of this book (80 pages) is devoted to adventures.

The first one is meant to be an introductory adventure, and is basically the movie "The Hidden" combined with Val Kilmer movie "Thunderheart".

Still, besides the rather obvious origins, it could have been a good adventure, but just doesn't seem fully developed. The alien pretty much just stays in one body (which just happens to be an ex-Green Beret) when the PCs deal with them. Similarly, rather than doing a lot of legwork involving roleplaying or interaction with locals, the PCs sort of short circuit that with a "vision quest"

The second adventure felt a lot more like a Dark Conspiracy adventure than your typical Call of Cthulhu one. Basically, the Greys/Mi-Go have taken over a small town and are doing horrible experiments on the people there, and watching the results

The last one is really a mini-campaign, or at least two parter.

It starts off in St. Louis, where I am from. It's amusing that they used the name of a local company (McDonnell-Douglas), but changed it a little (McConnell-Bayless). But they were bought out years ago by another company (Boeing).

Anyway, it starts off with a mysterious explosion at a local politician's party. Then it leads to a local new age contactee cult, and the PCs have to deal with a Terminator 2 liquid metal style opponent. This eventually leads them PCs to (presumably) deal with the main branch in another city.

There, the PCs end up in the middle of a Waco style crisis (having to deal with a cult's compound). But besides crashing the cult, they end up someplace they could never have imagined.

It's a pretty good adventure, if a bit combat heavy (at least that's the way it's assumed to be run). It does run the trouble of being something of a campaign breaker. In it, something happens that would likely change the future from that point on, which makes it troublesome running in a campaign set in the 90s, as everything from there would differ from out world of today.

Even more stuff

After the adventures, you'd think the book would be done! But no, there's almost a 100 pages left. Basically it's on creating PCs who are government agents. You get a listing of just about every government agency, a BRP template for them (basically just a skill list), and a sample character. That takes a lot of pages, since there are a whole lot of US government agencies.

After that comes a smattering of new rules. New skills, new spells, and guns, lots of guns (which honestly, I didn't think were needed, given that both CoC d20 and the later 5th editions of BRP CoC were full of guns)

d20 Aspect

While this is a d20 book, the d20 stuff is mostly just stats for the various characters. There are some small sections on new skills, but I'm not sure I would actually use it.

The relationship between d20 and BRP is a curious one. They are in essence, two different variants of the same original system (D&D), and thus share the same basic attributes (Strength, Dexterity, etc, rated 3 to 18-ish). But they both diverged almost from that begining, 30 years ago - whereas BRP kept the basic d100% skill system found in early D&D, only applying it to more and more skills (rather than just for Thieves), BRP dropped the concept of levels.

D&D pretty much came up with several systems of skills, before becoming up with a unified one d20 roll vs a target number in it's 3rd edition/d20 incarnation. But it kept it's level system, and for reasons of both game balance and making the game easier to run for referees, tieing in the skill system to the level system.

The upshot of it is, you can't really go around adding new skills and such to a d20 game system willy nilly, because the number of skill points is finite. If you have X amount of skill points per level, and Y amount of skills. If Y is too big, you have characters who aren't competent enough. And if you increase X too much, the characters get too competent. Or they will specialize in other skills.

To be honest, if I were going to run Delta Green using the d20 rules, using Spycraft as the base would be my choice, adding stuff from CoC d20 (You can just drop the mythos/Sanity stuff in pretty easily), rather than using CoC d20 as a base, plus the new rules in this. Because CoC d20 was really aimed at ordinary people, not spies, and while the new skills and feats and such cover this, you'd really need to add more skill points and feats to the CoC d20 classes for them to be used properly.

Whereas Spycraft d20 takes the tack that the PCs are spies/military/cops to begin with. There's a while different baseline of competence.

Final Thoughts

This is an nice book, but I'm not sure how useful it is.

The trouble with the material, at least from a 2007 perspective, is that it's too 90s, and feels dated. Back then, Roswell and the whole Majestic 12 thing was fairly fresh. But now it's gotten well, silly, from being parodied on shows like Futurama to being the basis for a teen soap opera. But that part actually stayed fresher than I expected. It's the other stuff that feels dated.

Most notably, there is an air of impending doom, like the apocalypse will soon by upon us. This is sort of a part of the whole millenial angst going on back then, as well as the Y2K thing. While it seemed important at the time, it seems rather quaint now.

While you actually find this apocalyptic theme in most CoC books in a modern settings (the "End Times" it is generally called), it's actually not really justified by the mythos writings. In them, makind lasts a pretty long time. At best, to the Zothique days (if you take Clark Ashton Smith as "Canon"), which is actually almost sort of post-human. But even if you just go by HPL himself, civilization as we know it apparently lasts until the 26th century, and humanity itself lasts for at least 15,000 more years on Earth (with an Asian sounding culture being dominant around AD 5000 and African in AD 15000).

I realize that Chaosium and company throw out a lot of other authors writings that doesn't fit their idea of the game (like Derleth and Lumley's really nice Elder Gods who look like the plush Cthulhu dolls), but that is straight from HPL himself.

Also, while I wouldn't say it dwells on it, a lot is mentioned about "militias". Which I guess was quite topical back then, what with Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Oklahoma City Federal Building Bombing, but these days is largely forgotten. (Not unlike say, Anarchists from the early 20th century and let us hope the current troubles in the not so distant future). If it were just in the source material, it wouldn't be bad, but it's also the premise of the 2nd half of the mini-campaign/adventure, rendering it somewhat harder to use in a modern setting.

Much of the technology we take for granted, is also just in its embrionic forms in this. Cell phones, laptops, the whole internet thing, etc. The movies the adventures are inspired by were released in the 90s.

Not to say that this is bad, just that it makes it less useful for a game set in modern day. While you could set a game in the mid 90s, when the book was written, the near past is often, well, boring. Because you aren't yet nostalgic for it. However, it is a great snapshot of the mid 90s. Better than watching one of those dumb VH-1 specials.

I would also have liked to seen a more comprehensive treatment of the UFO phenomenon. While the Mi-Gos masquerading as Greys is quite clever, it only addresses a small amount of reported alien types. Where are the human looking ones? Or the bellicose dwarves? Or the increasingly popular repitilian ones? Not to mention all the weird stuff.

While they somewhat addressed contactee cults in one of the adventures, it almost seemed more as an afterthought. I think much more could have been done there, especially on the religion/occult angle that many of them have.

I also think the whole Occult Club bit is just a bad attempt at a White Wolf knockoff. Maybe it's meant to be parody, but I dunno. Seems more like an attempt to try to emulate the "coolness" of WW 90's products. (Surprised they didn't try to get Tim Bradstreet to do the art for that chapter).

Lastly, the product largely assumes that as members of Delta Green, the players will be playing some sort of government agents, most likely FBI guys. However, I don't think it includes enough material on how FBI investigations work, for either the GM or Players to properly act the role. I mean, I guess you can go by what you see on TV or the movies (I guess the X-files would be the main one), where they just flash their badges around and do whatever they want. But that doesn't seem quite fitting for a sourcebook that is purportedly so authentic.

The great thing about Bureau 13 is that you played people who largely were pretending to be government agents (they were, but they didn't have a lot of training, they were ordinary people recruited). So if you didn't know how to act, it was part of the game. But this, you are supposed to be actual government agents. At least some guidelines would help.

This conclusion sounds really negative, but despite those flaws, it's still one heck of a book. I immediately placed an order for Delta Green: Countdown upon finishing reading this book.

Toshiba really sucks...

2007-06-05T04:17:00.000-05:00

Not only apparently their product quality, but their warranty service two.

Earlier this year, my old Apex DVD player (which is 3-4 years) started having trouble playing some of my dvds. Mostly tv shows, I guess cause they are dual layer and a little harder to read.

So, I go to buy a new one. And I end up with a Toshiba SD-4000, for about $50. Not a lot, but more than I paid for my Apex years ago.

And so 2 months later, my Toshiba starts having the same trouble.

So, I figure, oh great, but at least it's probably still under warranty.

But, apparently they don't let you just go to the store you bought it at and trade it for a new one. Oh no, that would be too simple. You have to box it up and mail it to them at your own expense.

How is it that a supposed high end, or at least big name electronics company won't let you return the product to a store for an exchange, but Insignia, maker of a low end, crappy products, does? I know because my father bought a portable DVD player from them and the battery connector in that crapped out. The warranty just said take it back to the store for a replacement. And he did.

UFO: Extraterrestrials

2007-06-04T18:47:00.000-05:00

Released almost 15 years ago, the game UFO: Enemy Unknown (better known as X-com: UFO Defense) is still considered to be one of the best PC games ever. In it, the player was in charge of a secret government force (X-com) charged with stopping an alien invasion. It combined turn based tactical combat with a tycoon like strategy layer and a Civ-style technology tree. Unfortunately, while it was huge hit, the sequels sold worse and worse (as they got worse), and the original company that published it went under. Over the years, the property has changed hands several times, with none of the new owners apparently planning on doing anything with it.

However, it has spawned a number of games "inspired" by it. The UFO AfterXXXXX series by Altar, but that changed the combat to real time. The original X-com designers, the Gollop brothers, made a couple tactical games (sans a strategic layer), Laser Squad Nemesis for the PC and Rebelstar for the GameboyAdvance. There are a couple fan remakes, the best of which is UFO: Alien Invasion. There's even a hentai game. But none really came too close to capturing what made the original great. Until this one, UFO: Extraterrestrials.

It's from a small company in the Czech Republic, Chaos Concepts, and is apparently their first game. As such, it's a little rough in some areas, but is still a very impressive showing.

Gameplay

You are tasked with protecting the planet from an invasion by aliens. But in this case, it's now the 22nd century, and the planet is "Esperanza", colonized by humanity in the early 21st century (how is not mentioned). Esperanza seems to be a fairly Earth-like planet, and is divided up into 9 somewhat oddly named (at least to an American perspective) states.

You get an overview of the planet from the "Geoscape" screen. This basically is a picture of the planet that you can rotate and zoom in on. Occasionally a UFO will show up and you will have to launch interceptors. If the UFO is shot down or lands, you then dispatch a plane load of soldiers to battle the aliens in tactical combat. This tactical combat is the real meat of the game, and where you will probably spend most of your time.

The tactical combat is turn based. You have a turn, then the aliens have a turn. Each soldier or alien has so many APs or action points, and each action like moving or firing a weapon costs so many points. If they save enough when their turn is over, they can sometimes interupt an enemies turn by firing at them when the enemy comes into view. (This is called "opportunity fire" and is pretty much a staple of these sort of games.)

There are basically 4 types of tactical combat missions: UFO retrieval (either when they are shot down or land), terror missions, base defense, and base invasion. In pretty much all of them, the goals are the same - explore the tactical map and kill all the aliens. Terror missions have an extra goal - you are supposed to save as many civilians as you can.

The tactical portion is played from an isometric perspective. The view is fixed, you can't zoom in or out or rotate, other than scrolling around the map. Many maps have more than 1 or 2 stories/levels where the action can take place on.

The map selection is this is decent, but could have used some more variety. Rather than completely randomly generated by putting together "blocks" like in X-com, this seems to use a number of pre-made maps and either tweaked a little, or rotated. There also doesn't seem to be a huge variety of terrain. There's arctic, desert, desert factory, forest, mines, and whenever you shoot down a larger ship, it almost always seems to land on a golf course. It's not bad, but like I said, it could have been better.

The neat thing is, other than walls of the UFOs, pretty much everything on the map can be destroyed, either shot or blown up by something.

Your soldiers can't be killed, but don't think this makes the game easier. When they go down in combat, they can take a long time to heal, often leaving you short handed. At the other end of the spectrum, the aliens can be quite tough. They don't really use any tactics, but they often take several shots to kill. They also like to sneak up on you. There's a pretty good variety of enemies - 14, I think, ranging from little floating blobs to clanking robots to miniature flying saucers.

The other part of the game is basically like a Sim or Tycoon game. You have to build up a network of bases on the planet, one base per region. Your main base can have a lot of different buildings, while the other bases can only have a few. You can also reseach items and build things you have researched. This part of the game is actually quite hard, it's very easy to go bankrupt.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics are somewhat bland and dated (say, 2003-ish), but the level of detail is pretty good. Lots of lights, flashing things. It really depends on the map, though. Some are quite ugly. All in all, it definitely won't wow you, but they are perfectly serviceable.

The scale of the objects on the map is a bit weird, though. Like a toilet or set of golf clubs is as big as a car. The animations are also hit or miss. Most of the aliens are animated smoothly, but your soldiers seem a bit jerky, and have no animation for throwing a grenade (they just sort of pop out of them in an amusing manner). Similarly, while the aliens move fairly smoothly, when they are killed, there's sort of a brief pause, and they are replaced suddenly by a dead one. There's no in between, "dying" state.

The music isn't necessarily bad, but is too fast for the game. Instead of nice, atmospheric, ambient music, it's fairly fast paced generic electronica.

Part of the fun of the original X-com was using sound to listen for hidden aliens. This sort of has that, but doesn't seem as deep as in X-com. You can hear doors open and such, but it's often hard to hear them move around.

One problem is that the sound levels of the different effects vary wildly. Some are too loud, some are too quiet.

Final Thoughts

I honestly can't remember the last time I played a game so much. Probably not since the original X-com, which I played for 3-4 days straight without sleep. This isn't quite as addictive, but close. I think I spent close to 50 hours on it during the first week I had it, sneaking in an hour or two during the day, then at night playing until 5am.

That said, it could have used a bit more polish. While it didn't bug me, I think it could have used things like hotkeys and some of the text is a bit stilted. (Also, the introductory video has some of the worst voice acting in a game, ever). It's also perhaps a bit too hard and too long. I had trouble playing on "Easy". And it took me two weeks of almost contant playing to finish. Which is a bit too much for a strategy game - the end part of the game seemed to drag out too much. More map variety would also have been very nice.

X-com fans might like it, but at the same time, they might dislike it because while it's a lot like X-com, there are enough changes that could bug them. Still, they should give it a try, if they keep an open mind, they should really enjoy this. At least I did. A-

Been playing UFO: Extraterrestrials...

2007-05-26T18:17:00.000-05:00

Gogamer got it in stock last week and shipped it the 17th, I got it on Monday the 21st, and have been playing it as much as possible since. Usually staying up to 5am. Yikes, it's really addictive.

It's very similar to X-com/UFO: Enemy Unknown, but at the same time, has several minor changes which seemed to have been meant to get rid of exploits. For instance, you now can't really make money by making items, so you rely more on funding from countries and loot from ETs. Soldiers aren't killed permamently (usually) which cuts down on save/load in the tactical game (which I admit I was guilty of). No mind control, which made the game really easy if you used it.

I really really like it. It's not perfect, but much better than I expected.

Jewel Summoner (almost final) - PSP

2007-05-16T15:13:00.001-05:00

The PSP has a fairly large number of RPGs, but very few ones designed originally for it (at least that have been released in the US). That's not to say that the ones the PSP has had are bad, but they often hark back to a simpler era in terms of gameplay and production values (graphics, cutscenes and speech).

This is one of those few original RPGs. Unfortunately, while it does seem to have better production values than most PSP RPGs, it's still probably a Playstation 1 quality RPG in that regard, just containing 5 hours of speech, and really doesn't take advantage of the PSP's hardware, with the exception of the built in clock.

Gameplay

You play as Vice, a young man whose mother was killed by a creature called an Abomination. He works as a monster hunter, trying to avenge his mother's death. He has this ability to summon forth a pet monster from a jewel to fight for him, which he uses to take on other monsters.

At least, that's what he does until one day he ends up losing his monster while trying to get more information on the monster he seeks while visiting the Academy of Jewel Summoners. In compensation, he is allowed to enter the Academy for training as a proper Jewel Summoner, along with a class of 4 other students.

While there, he picks 2 out of the 4 students to form a team with, and then he gets assigned various missions to do. Which tend to involve going to another town, then going to a dungeon of sorts, battling monsters, until you reach a boss.

Combat is pretty standard turn based, but with a few twists. The first is that it's very heavily dependant on the element the monster belongs to. This is not that new, but this has more elements, 8, than any other game I've seen. And using the right element against an opponent can cause his turn to be pushed back. You can also only use your monster so much - every thing he does in combat costs job points, of which he has a limited number. Once it hits zero, you have to swap him out. So combat actually is pretty fun, and requires some strategy.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of combat. So while it's fun, just having to do it so frequently in a dungeon can get a bit boring.

The dungeons are pretty linear, in that they only have one branch through them, but do have a lot of side passages which are eventually dead ends. There is no mapping in the game, so you basically have to memorize them. Certain parts of the dungeon require special abilities, which you learn as the game progresses, to access. Unfortunately, this is generally used to make you go through a dungeon a 2nd time, this time using that special ability to reach a place you couldn't get to before.

Graphics/Sound:

The graphics are pretty decent. The backgrounds are probably Playstation 2 level, but your characters and the monsters are closer to Playstation 2 level - fair amount of detail and things like hair and clothes move a little.

There really aren't 3D cutscenes, basically you get 2 pictures of characters talking, one on each side of the screen. The pictures are animated though, that is, their lips move and they blink. So the net result is pretty neat. Usually they talk in front of a static 2d backdrop, but sometimes 3d objects are put to good use.

I found the voice acting to be fairly good. Some of it is annoying, but it suited those characters (which were annoying).

Final Thoughts:

The trouble with this game is essentially twofold. First, the characters. Part of what defines an RPG like this is the story and the characters which make up a story. Unfortunately, out of your 4 team mates, only 1 is really truly a pleasant person, Lynn. The rest are annoying at best, horrible at worst. Two are basically mirror images - whiny brats. The only difference is really that one is female and talks about herself in the 3rd person. The fourth one is an old looking guy who is sleepy. And when he does actually talk, he'll put you to sleep.

So while the actual story is interesting, and the voice acting is decent, many times you'll be hitting the X button to move the dialogue because you just want them to shut up already.

Secondly, the game doesn't have a lot of depth. Sure, there are 110 monsters you can have, but really, only maybe 30 really different ones - most are simply variations. Like a Lion can become a Fire Lion, Blue Lion, Wind Lion, Ashen Lion, or Sacred Lion. While there aren't nearly as many dungeons as that, they too are reused a lot. You'll do one dungeon, then come back and do it again, only the 2nd time around you can access a few more areas of the dungeon.

The net result is a fairly short game. Maybe not as short as Astonishia Story, but you should be able to beat this in about 20 hours or so. There's some stuff to do after you win, and you can duel players via ad hoc wireless mode, but there's not a huge amount of gameplay here.

Not surprisingly...

2007-05-09T02:14:00.000-05:00

Never heard back from Tri-Synergy about UFO:ET.

People (who run famous blogs, really) like to talk about how powerful blogs are, but still, 99.999% of them just get ignored, only a few have any sort of media power.

So anyway, since it's not out this month, I instead bought Valhalla Knights for the PSP. Pretty impressive technically, almost no loading times, but as RPGs go, it's strictly a dungeon crawler, with a new fangled combat system.

So close, yet so far...

2007-05-03T23:57:00.000-05:00

UFO: Extraterrestrials is apparently being released today. Basically, the game is an X-com clone. Not 100% X-com, but it looks really really close. It's been in the works for something like 5-6 years, I've been following it at least 2.

So, apparently it's finally done. It supposedly went gold about 2 weeks ago and was supposed to be out May 1st. I had an order for it at Gogamer.com. But that was delayed another week, to the 7th. So I cancelled my order from there, and placed one at Gamestop. Then they changed their date to the 9th, then changed it to June 1st.

In the mean time, apparently the game is out in English in Russia. Reports about the game have started trickling in. And presumably it's been pirated already, since a bunch of people (who are not Russian) are talking about it on Gamefaqs.

And today, it's being released on Matrix games as a digital download. Which would be great, except I'm still stuck on dialup, and the game is something like 2 gigs. They also mention that stores in NA won't be getting retail copies until the 21st of May. Which is better than GS's date, but later than I hoped. And Matrix themselves would be selling a boxed copy, but theirs won't ship until the 18th.

Sigh. I was really hoping to play it at least next week. But guess it won't be for another 3 weeks. I really hope this wasn't part of a deliberate plan, trying to push download sales of it. I asked the retail publisher, Tri Synergy, to comment on it, but I doubt I'll hear from them.

The Sewers of Redpoint

2007-05-02T16:09:00.000-05:00

The Sewers of Redpoint

The Sewers of Redpoint is a fantasy module from Dark City Games's "Legends of the Ancient World" line. If you aren't familiar with that, basically, they are small, self contained modules which come in a little baggie which are meant to emulate the old "Fantasy Trip" adventure or minigames. Indeed, basically it is a minigame, besides the adventure, you get a small rules booklet, a board map, and a sheet of counters. All you really need is some d6s and pencil and paper. You don't even need other people, you can play them solo, if you want.

The rules are only about 8 pages, and are fairly similar to that of the Fantasy Trip (and its successor, Gurps), and if you have those rules, you can play with those instead. But these rules are certainly serviceable. Just to recap:

Characters have 3 stats, Str, Dex, Int. Skills, including attacks, are generally handled by rolling under the associated stat on 3 dice (but sometimes 4 for more difficult tasks). For most things (except combat), additional skill levels add 1 to the number which you have to roll under, for combat skills, ranks in that increase how much damage is done on a hit. How much damage a character takes is determined by his strength (ST). Armor stops damage.

Some characters can use magic. They have fatigue points equal to their intelligence (IQ). To cast a spell, they have to succeed on a 3D IQ check. There are quite a few spells, which a character has to known to cast. Each spell has a different fatigue cost. There's just one magic type (no arcane/divine like in say, D&D), but the healing magic isn't terribly powerful.

There's not a huge amount of non-combat skills, maybe 30 or so, plus reading/writing languages. Some of them do come into play into the adventure, so they shouldn't completely neglected.

The module itself

This is the 4th one of these I've played through (3rd in their fantasy line), and they range from the fairly easy to the fiendishly difficult. This is very much on the easy side, indeed, while it's not labeled as such, seems like a beginner module (although it's not for beginner characters, standard beginner characters have 32 ability points, the ones in this start at 36).

Essentially, in the city of Redpoint, a somewhat Lovecraftian cult (followers of the "Worm God") has kidnapped a holy child from a good church, and has disappeared with him into the sewers below (I think this was also the plot of a bad Eddie Murphy movie). Your party of characters must explore the sewers and retrieve him (unharmed, hopefully). Basically, it's a fairly straight forward dungeon crawl. There are almost 25 areas or rooms in total.

The exploration of the sewers isn't too linear. You don't have to go through all 25 areas. Indeed, there seem to be 3 main paths, with some branching between them. To get to the final showdown you do need a couple keys to open a door, so you might have to go through more than one path. Though it's possible to get them in at least one route.

One very interesting touch is there is a fairly extensive post-game process. That is, during your exploring of the sewers, you can pick up "plot words" which are basically like flags in computer programming, that tell the game whether you did something or not. Some are used during the adventure itself, but quite a few are for things after the adventure. This goes a long way to make it feel less like a "one-shot" and more like part of an ongoing game. (Although, you can earn a lot of money in the game, there isn't much in the rules set to spend it on)

There's also some background info on the setting used in their "Legends of the Ancient World" setting, mostly mentioning how after the "Mage Wars", civilization apparently mostly consists of scattered city states built on the sites of old ruined mage towers. Redpoint itself is an exception, and for whatever reason, has a somewhat Roman flavor to it.

It's a bit confusing, because a nearby city-state is named "Demeter", which of course is a Greek goddess.

Art/Layout/Etc...

Once again, the cover art by Nicole Cardiff is excellent, although the nitpicky will wonder why the guy is swinging a shortsword like that (since they are usually stabbing weapons).

You get a map of the sewers as well. It's essentially a flowchart, but beautifully illustrated, illuminated is really the word for it, like the old medieval manuscripts. Including a map definitely helps you run the adventure for other people (like a traditional RPG), as well as helping you not stay lost, but for the most fun, it's best to make your own map, and consult the one in the book if you only get really really lost (which probably shouldn't happen in this).

The sheet of counters basically features smaller versions of some of the art you see in the booklet. While they perhaps aren't the super high quality counters from say, Fiery Dragon Press, they're definitely comparable to the old fantasy trip ones, and good quality.

One trouble I had though was that there didn't seem to be any obvious counters for your characters, or rather, I couldn't tell which ones were meant for such. I think later modules from them solve this problem by using a slightly different background, but I'm not sure of the chronological order of their products, since they aren't numbered.

Final Thoughts

If you are interested in getting into these games, this would make a pretty good introductory module, because it's straight forward in terms of gameplay - like I said, it's basically a dungeon crawl. The other two in the line I've played were more varied in environment and more complicated in the gameplay itself.

It also puts you right into the action, so to speak. The other two (Island of Lost Spells and Gates to the Underworld) started off with you in a small village, where you walked around and gathered background information on what was going on, and shopped for stuff. In this, it starts at the entrance of the sewers. Which isn't necessarily better (in fact, I liked wandering about town), but again, more suited for someone new to these.

It did seem a little short, but the stuff coming after the adventure helps make up for that a lot.

Galactic Civilzations II: Dark Avatar (PC) - First Draft

2007-04-27T03:32:00.000-05:00

Galactic Civilizations II (GalCiv2) was an excellent game, but suffered from bugs and some features that didn't quite work correctly. The first expansion pack for it, Dark Avatar, adds some more features, which is welcome, but fails to correct most of the problems and flaws of the original game, while introducing new flaws.

The additions to the gameplay are not numerous, but do change gameplay quite a bit. The "king" of the space 4x genre has long been considered Master of Orion II (MOO2), and regular Gal Civ 2 was often compared to it. The Dark Avatar expansions adds several features borrowed from Master of Orion II.

The most notable of these features is planetary environments. Instead of planets simple having just a numerical rating on how good a planet they are to colonize, they now have a range of descriptors as well, "Barren", "Radiated", "Water". In order to colonize planets, the player must have technology of the apropriate type.

This has a fairly major change on the flow of the game. Instead of there being a rush to get every habitable planet within range, you now rush to get planets of your own type, and then have to decide which other environments you should reasearch. Because you won't be able to get them all, the AI will get some, and you will be in much closer contact (and vice-versa). Which makes the game far more interesting.

The espionage system has also been overhauled a bit. In regular GC2, you simply spent money on espionage via a slider for each race, and you gradually learned more about their empire. In this, you spend money to train spy units (similar to Master of Orion 2). Unlike MOO2, you place your agents directly on opponents planets, where they stop the building on that tile from working until removed (which you can do, or the AI can do by using one of his spies). And the longer the spies stay on that planet, the more they learn about that empire.

I found this to be less than ideal. It's a lot more work on the players part, but doesn't really add much depth to the game, because the only real additional benefit over the old system, is you can now deny a tile's production to the AI, for a turn a two (spies get eliminated fairly quickly, and are slow to be trained). And conversely, say you want to learn more about an ally, the only way to do so is by hurting them, which doesn't make much sense.

Races in GC2 were somewhat bland, just being different in terms of numbers. This expansion pack introduces racial abilities, basically each race has one superpower or ability that affects gameplay. This area needed some balancing, as some are vastly overpowered, like the one which restricts all other race's spaceships to 3 moves a week in your space (which in a larger galaxy is glacially slow).

And speaking of overpowered, there are now "megaevents". The game has always had events that happen from time to time, but now there is an option for "megaevents", which dramatically change the course of the game. For instance, the galaxy can sudden be plagued by 100s of pirate ships, each armed to the teeth, and which attack everything in site.

Unfortunately, events like that basically give the game to the player. The AI cannot cope with some of them well (like the pirates event), while the player can.

Lastly, there are now asteroid fields. These basically are little splotchs on the main main which can be mined (requires a special ship), and the mines provide a production bonus to a planet.

That's about it for major changes. The technology tree gets reworked a little bit, but not much. You also get a few new races, none remarkable, and the Altarian leader is now female. One of the more enjoyable bits of GalCivII is designing your own starships by putting together "jewelry", little virtual building blocks and pieces. DA dramatically increases the amount of jewelry available to you. Probably triples it, it's a lot more, and is almost reason enough to buy this expansion.

So, for an expansion pack, it's pretty good. But that said, there are still many unresolved problems with the game that date back to the original 1.0 release. Minor AI races basically only exist to be exploited by the player (ooh, look , free super planet). The AI still sends troop transports unguarded through emeny space. Many planetary improvements (especially wonders) are either mostly or completely useless.

Those were problems I had thought would be fixed in patches to the original game, but weren't. And weren't addressed in this, either.

Another thing I should mention is the copy protection/digital rights management scheme used in this. The original game had no copy protection, but required a serial number to download a patch from their website, and then internet activation once the game was patched. This takes that a little further, you now can only download a patch through their special DRM program, Stardock Central, and apparently it has to be the same computer that runs the game (otherwise it has to download the whole expansion pack, not just the patch). This makes things problematic for people like me whose gaming computer is not hooked up to the internet. And indeed, problems with Stardock Central and the first Gal Civ is one of the reasons I don't like to use my gaming computer and the internet anymore, it caused lots of problems for me at the time, due to bugs in it (apparently Stardock Central doesn't like Windows 98, or at least it didn't).

So ultimately, I think while this was a expansion pack that managed to make an already good game better, it also didn't fix any of the old flaws, and introduced some major ones of its own.

Gates to the Underworld

2007-04-08T20:08:00.000-05:00

Gates to the Underworld

20-25 years ago, I remember reading a Phil & Dixie comic strip about mini-games in Dragon magazine. The gist of it was, how ambitious in scope some of them were getting. Although sadly, they pretty much vanished after that golden age of gaming, they aren't quite extinct yet. And some are indeed still very ambitious. This one, Gates to the Underworld, will lead you into Hell itself.

It's part of Dark City Games's line of "Legends of the Ancient World" modules. Basically, they are adventures in the vein of the old "The Fantasy Trip" Microquests. They are "programmed" adventures, which lets you play them solo, but they can be GMed as well. They come with their own rules set, which again is similar to, but not quite, the old Fantasy Trip game. (For more details on this, read my review of their first module, The Island of Lost Spells)

The adventure itself is pretty complicated. A village, or rather, a small area has been plagued by demons. The PCs (well, you) must explore the area (including the country side and some ruined villages plus the one remaining one) and figure out how to close the gates to Hell. Which actually involves a short trip to Hell itself (which is I guess pretty similar that that of Dante's).

The most interesting parts are the villages and Hell. It's tempting to skip it, but the village you start at has a lot of information that you need to discover by talking with everyone possible. And at the end of the adventure, when you get to the underworld, you are often put in situations where you have to interact with damned souls. The descriptions of Hell are also quite vivid, if a bit graphic. (There's a warning about this on the cover actually.)

On the other hand, I found the countryside exploration a bit confusing. You really do need to make a map while playing through it, and even then I got a bit confused. Also I found the combat encounters in it a bit uninspired. Wolves and mountain lions mostly. Also made me wish there was more healing magic in the game's rules system.

It's actually funny, for a small company, the cover art by Nicole Cardiff puts to shame many of the bigger RPG companies. The interior art is more what you expect, but this is not really a bad thing, it fits the nature of the product.

I liked this adventure, but at the same time, I struggled with it. I have to admit, I got lost more than once. I would have to think it's somewhat on the "expert" end of skill levels.

Still, at the same time, the story in the adventure was compelling enough that while somewhat frustrating, I kept at it. I also really found that the characters in the adventure were both hokey and yet convincing and interesting at the same time.

So if you want to try out one of the Dark City adventures, this is probably not a good choice for a starter module, but is a good one if you played another one and are looking for a challenge.

Puzzle Quest (PSP)

2007-04-04T20:48:00.000-05:00

I first spotted Puzzle Quest several months ago in the upcoming releases on Gamestop's website. The name intrigued me, especially the subtitle "Challenge of the Warlords". I thought "Heh, they might have legal trouble with the "Warlords" people (a long running PC game series). Only later was I to discover this game actually was from the Warlords people, Infinite Interactive (formerly SSG), published by D3, and co-developed by Vicious Cycle (who also did the PSP version).

Gameplay

It's nothing like the Warlords games though, except using the same setting. Instead it's a fairly straight forward RPG, except that combat (and just about everything else) is handled through a "match three" puzzle game, akin to Bejeweled or Zoo Keeper. Basically you have an 8 x 8 grid, and have to match jewels by fliping the position of two pieces. When you make a match, the jewels vanish and the top ones drop down. Just what you match has various effects. If it's a colored jewel, you earn mana of that color type. If it's a skull, you do damage to the enemies hit points. There are also gold and experience points. In most cases, you take turns with an opponent, and whoever is reduced to zero hit points first is the loser. There's no real penalty to losing, other than having to try again.

You play as a new member of the Agarian Knights, a small-ish kingdom in the middle of Etheria. You can be one of 4 classes, and each class has it's own special abilities or spells, and thus plays somewhat different. There are also several skills, and these can be improved by skill points which you get when you level up (how many skill points a level in a skill costs depends on the class), or by spending enough gold.

First you have to pass certain tests given to you by your Queen. These are pretty easy, and once knighted, you are ordered to investigate and stop an ongoing series of attacks by undead creatures. That's the main quest, and it's quite long and involved. There are also a large number of smaller side quests you can do. Most of these quests are not really complicated, usually just go someplace and fight something.

The story isn't super compelling, but what really makes it enjoyable is the dialogue, especially with your companions. Over the course of the game, you meet a lot of people, and some can join your party. Some of the conversations are very very funny. In theory the companions are supposed to provide a small bonus or effect in puzzle combat, but thanks to a bug in the PSP, it doesn't work. They still provide extra quests, though.

If you skip the side quests, you can probably finish the game in 20-25 hours. With the side quests, it's probably at least double that, maybe more. And because there are 4 different classes, the game has a lot of replay value, since each class plays somewhat different. There are also some instant action modes, which lets you fight any monster you want, so if you just want to play a quick game, that option is there, too.

Beyond that, you can also forge items, conquer other cities, capture monsters, and build up your citadel. There's really no shortage of things to do in this game.

That said, the game isn't perfect. It's incredibly addictive at first, but after playing a while, you start to see some cracks. First off, it can be a bit repetitive. There's actually a decent variety of monsters/opponents in the game, but they tend to come in clumps. So you get a bit sick of fighting the same monsters over and over. Similarly, your class will generally use the same tactics over and over. Sometimes you will have to vary them a bit, but usually not too much.

Secondly, the difficulty of the game is uneven. Early on, the game is somewhat difficult because your character is weak, and has no equipment. A lot of times, winning depends more on luck than anything else. But then, later in the game, it gets to be very easy. Some spells are very powerful, and it's possible to build your character to have very high stats, which mean you can cast those spells right away. And if you know what you are doing, there are some combinations of spells that let you win any battle without any real effort, simply because you won't let your opponent have a turn. But even avoiding those, you'll likely win most of the time later on in the game, while early on you'll probably be closer to 50/50.

Graphics/Sound

The art in this is completely 2d. It's pretty simple, but very nice looking. They used some nice artists for the character portraits. On the PSP screen, it looks nice and sharp.

The sound is good enough, no speech or anything except the narration between chapters. The music is really quite nice, but suffers from there only being 3-4 songs. While excellent, you'll probably get sick of them eventually and turn the music off.

Loading

Loading times are decent enough for a PSP game, though not perfect. Basically, you have a small pause in the game the first time something happens. Either in combat or on the main screen. Like the first time you enter puzzle combat, you will have a pause on the first match, to load the animations, a pause every time you or your opponent use a spell for the first time, each time it uses some speech (Just two phrases in combat). Once it's loaded though, it won't have to load again until you turn it off or exit the game. The same with the world map, the first time you play the game, it has to load the map when you scroll around, or when it adds a wandering monster. The only recurring loading is when you have a cutscene shown. That's pretty quick, only 3-4 seconds.

Final Thoughts

This is one of those games that is really quite original, despite being based squarely on two conventional genres (RPGs & Puzzle games). And for that, it deserves a lot of credit. And it's addictive gameplay should appeal to just about anyone, from casual gamers to the hard core.

Still, it really needed some more playtesting, firstly, to iron out some obvious bugs, but also to fix the play balance of the game. That marrs an otherwise almost perfect game. But perhaps those problems are only obvious because the game itself is just so good. A-

Test Drive Unlimited (PSP) - First Draft

2007-03-28T00:39:00.000-05:00

Test Drive is one of the oldest racing game series, first appearing 20 years ago in 1987 on home computers. It was meant to be a relatively realistic driving game, giving ordinary people the chance to "test drive" exotic supercars, while evading the police. Somwhere along the way, it strayed from its roots, becoming very arcadelike (Test Drive 5-6) to destruction derby like (Even of Destruction), but this is a return to its roots.

Gameplay

It's set on the isle of Oahu, Hawaii. You start out with a bunch of money, and must purchase a starting car and a home to store your cars. You do various races and challenges to earn more money to buy more cars and homes. Sounds pretty typical for a racing game, right? It is, but what makes this different is the sheer scope of the game. When I said it's set on the isle of Oahu, I mean, you can drive around the whole island, which is 30 miles across from south to north, and about 45 from west to east. It actually feels bigger than that in game, you can spend almost an hour driving from one end of the island to the other.

And I don't mean just the roads, either. You can go off-road if you like, indeed, it's handy to evade police. As near as I can tell, police are really only a problem while you are free-roaming, and you are caught speeding (usually you need to be doing 120 mph+) or hit another car. In many cases they are easily evaded. If you don't, you get arrested and must pay a fine.

The driving model is realistic, but on the forgiving side. You can turn a lot easier than real life, but not nearly like in an arcade racer (say, Burnout or Midnight Club). There are 3 levels of traction control, the lower the set it, the more control you have, but the more likely it is to spin out as well. The sense of speed is also pretty realistic, which means that people used to arcade racers will find it somewhat slow.

There really seem to be 3 types of races. Races where you race other cars, races where you beat the clock, and speedtrap races, where you have to have a speed higher than a certain amount at a certain spot on the track (in some cases, several spots, which then get averaged).

Since the game is free roam, track courses are largely defined by gates that magically pop-up, along with your GPS unit (which tells you when to turn). Some races have a penalty bar which increases when you go off road. When it's full, you lose.

There's no damage to your car in the game, but collisions are elastic, depending on what you hit. If you hit another car, they go flying (similar mass, you have more momentum due to your high speed), but if you hit a semi-truck, you go flying (since their mass is much bigger). The AI is decent, although once in a while (just like real life) an AI car will do something stupid like cut you off or suddenly stop. The racing AI seems okay, but can be overly aggressive (knocking you out of the way), though not as bad as some (like Ford Street Racing, where it's downright homicidal)

Graphics

How good the graphics are really depends on how close you look, and how forgiving you are. If you look at a screen, it will likely look gorgeous, among the best on the PSP. On the other hand, because it's on the PSP, it does some from some aliasing (ie, jaggies), dithering (you have to look close for that), texture warping, and sometimes you can see seems when the terrain is raised. One of the things that really isn't a problem is draw-in or pop-up (that is, where objects suddenly appear on screen, Vice City Stories on the PSP really suffers from that with trees). While there is some, the distance for it is way, way in the back.

Indeed, the graphics really remind me a lot of Oblivion on the PC, if you turned the grass off and ran it in a lower resolution. Things tend to look like a golf course, but looks really nice.

The car models are pretty detailed as well. There are maybe only 7-8 different generic cars that appear as traffic, but for the most part, there is little "clumping", that is, you don't always get all the cars of the same model all the time. It does happen sometimes, but that seems to be based on the area of the island (places like ports tend to have more heavy trucks).

The one real downside is the variety. Because it's set on Oahu, it all pretty much looks like the same. You have some beaches, and the interior is sort of just rolling hills and farmland. There aren't many notable buildings, in general, the place has sort of a run down look, it reminds me a lot of driving through Mississippi or Arkansas. There are mountains, though, but they, being volcanic, are grey masses. I guess that's realistic (well, I haven't been to Oahu, but I have seen Hawaii 5-0 and Magnum), but it's a little dull. But I guess that couldn't be helped.

Cars

The car list is heavily dominated by, though is not exclusively, supercars. That is, extremely expensive high performance cars that most "real" people can't even dream of buying. There are a few normal performance cars (Mustang, Camaro, GTO/Monaro, Skyline, 350Z), but these make up the lower end. There's also a selection of classic cars, including the Shelby GT-500 and AC 289/427, the 70s Firebird with the big bird on the hood, some older corvettes and a couple others. But mostly it's about supercars.

Unfortunately, this is where the game suffers a bit. The two big names in supercars, Porsche and Ferrari, are absent. Probably the biggest name manufacturer in it is Lamborghini. There are some other companies you've heard of, like Lotus, Aston Martin, Pagani and McLaren. But a lot that are sort of on the fringes - companies like Spyker, Saleen, Koenigsegg. Sure, they are nice cars (indeed, some of the best), and you might have heard of them, even seen a car of these in some games. But not the big names when you think supercar. Then there are some you've probably never heard of (I hadn't), like Ascari and Noble. And there are supercars from "normal" companies, like Ford, VW, Chrysler and Jaguar. And few others that are mostly forgettable.

You can modify the cars a little, but not much. Basically, you can simply get them performance upgrades - 3 levels. You can pick the color of your car, but only from the list of manufacturer colors (which can stink in a lot of cases, like the new Mustangs which come in 11 shades, 10 of which are ugly, and the other is red). In some cars, you can pick different wheels, but only a very few.

Cars are divided into 5 categories: E,D,C,B,A, based apparently on overall performance, with E being the worst and A the best. Many races are restricted to cars of certain categories, but sometimes, like in Club races, it's the car manufacturer or something other trait that determines the eligibility.

Sometimes though, your opponents in supposedly restricted races won't be. In one race, I was using a Lotus Espirit, a C class car, and my opponents included an Ascari, a class A car. I still easily won, so I redid the race on "Hard". This time around though, my opponents were class C (and I won the race even easier).

Sound/Music:

The sound itself is pretty good. The larger engines sound pretty good, although the PSP speakers do tend to take away some of the bass. There is also a sound which increases as you go faster, I guess it's supposed to be the wind. But you usually don't hear that unless you have the window open. So it's a little annoying.

The music in the game, well, it's a large selection, but most of it is pretty bad. A lot of it seems to be generic "electronica", divided up into "Maximum Beats", "Phat Grooves" and "Chill Vibes" (the music is presented in radio station format). I can't imagine it would have been that expensive to get some real electronic dance music in real genres.

Beyond that, there are some songs that are considered "good", but probably aren't to the taste of most players. Notably, a classical music channel featuring such songs like Swan Lake, the Magic Flute, 4 Seasons, Ride of Valkyries, William Tell Overture, etc, which is almost like a greatest hits of classical artists; and "Sweet Radio", basically a collection of "funk"/old R&B songs. Like Big Bird, Funky Chicken, I'm a Road Runner. Also the classic rock staple, the James Gang's Funk 49.

There are rock and rap stations as well, but also it seems to be full of generic stuff that is basically the equivalent of muzak.

Given the setting of the game (Hawaii) and even the premise (car racing), I think they really missed the boat by not having a Surf Rock station.

Loading Times:

As any honest PSP owner knows, PSP games can suffer from some bad loading times. Amazingly enough, the loading times in this are minimal, even by PS2 standards, much less PSP standards. It takes about 3-4 seconds to go from the free roam mode to your "home" or other location, and the same to go back. Opening up the map of the island takes about 5-6 seconds, and is a little jerky, but that's about the worst. While free roaming you can occasionally have a slight pause or stutter, but that's fairly rare, even at high speeds, and usually is tiny when it happens.

Final Thoughts:

This is by far the best driving game on the PSP. Yes, it's lacking features found in the Xbox 360 version, which is disappointing (especially since it's the same price as the 360 version), but try playing a 360 on the go, even if you have one (which I don't). Judged by its own merits, it's extremely impressive and a lot of fun.

That said, it's mostly a driving game. If you are someone that likes car modding, this is not for you. If you like varied types of racing, then this is probably not for you.

And Jeanne d'Arc, too

2007-03-21T15:41:00.000-05:00

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/03-21-2007/0004550297&EDATE=

FOSTER CITY, Calif., March 21 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony Computer
Entertainment America Inc. announced today the August 2007 North American
release of Jeanne d'Arc, available exclusively for the PSP(R)
(PlayStation(R)Portable) system. Developed by Level-5, creators of the
renowned Dark Cloud series and the critically acclaimed RPG Rogue
Galaxy(TM), Jeanne d'Arc delivers a new tactical role-playing adventure set
across vast lands with detailed environments, unique characters, and a
diverse combat and gameplay system. In Jeanne d'Arc, players will step into
a colorful world that brings together history and fantasy, taking part in a
magical tale inspired by the life and times of the legendary Joan of Arc.
Combining an intricate tactical combat system, a heroic story with more
than 40 hours of gameplay, and a stunning visual style that truly dazzles
on the PSP system, Jeanne d'Arc is ready to deliver hours of strategic RPG
action to players anytime, anywhere.

Good day for PSP RPGs...

2007-03-21T14:53:00.000-05:00

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords just came out, which rocks, and XSEED just announced they are bringing to the US, Brave Story and Chronicle of Dungeon Maker (re-titled DUNGEON MAKER:
HUNTING GROUND). Both RPGs that got very good reviews in Japan, but I really thought weren't going to make it over here.

------------------

Dear Jeremy,

It is with great pleasure to announce that
XSEED Games has obtained exclusive
publishing rights for DUNGEON MAKER:
HUNTING GROUND, BRAVE STORY: NEW
TRAVELER and WILD ARMS®
5 for the North American market!

DUNGEON MAKER:
HUNTING GROUND and BRAVE STORY: NEW
TRAVELER, both for the PSP®
(PlayStation®Portable) system, are scheduled
for release in July 2007 and Q3 2007,
respectively. WILD ARMS 5 for the
PlayStation®2 computer entertainment system
is scheduled for release in Q3 2007.

These exciting new titles are in addition to
the already announced VALHALLA
KNIGHTS,
which will be released on April 17, 2007 for the
PSP system.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Build. Battle. Destroy.

An original title developed
specifically for
the PSP system, DUNGEON MAKER: HUNTING
GROUND offers addictive game play
with a simulation dungeon creation element
and real-time battles hunting for monsters to
collect items, gold, and to fulfill
requirements to complete the various quests
given by townspeople.

The Story

An ambitious but novice dungeon maker arrives
in a small town known to suffer periodic
attacks from violent monsters. He buys a vast
plot of land at the outskirts of the town to
create a grand dungeon in hopes of luring in
various enemy monsters which to hunt to
collect gold and items. He envisions his
complete dungeon to be one so appealing as to
lure the legendary Wandering Demon. Defeating
this menacing monster would free the
townspeople from the fear he casts upon them,
while winning acclaim as a true dungeon maker
for the "Architect."

Key Features

* Design and modify a customizable dungeon,
floor-by-floor, using simple controls to
quickly develop a deep and detailed dungeon.

* Strategically layout and improve your
dungeon to maximize its attractiveness and
lure in the most sought-after enemies to take
their loot.

* Fight real-time battles wielding various
melee and ranged weapons, casting magic
spells, rendering special attacks, and
summoning creatures to defeat the wide
variety of monsters including undead
creatures, orcs, and dragons.

* Enjoy the vast selection of building
materials to customize your dungeon and
complete quests to access the rarer items
from the wide array of weapons, armors, and
accessories to upgrade your warrior.

* Trade dungeons - Utilize network
connectivity to trade dungeons with a friend.
Show off your dungeon creation skills and
explore a friend's dungeon to see what kind
of monsters and treasures lie inside.

DUNGEON MAKER: HUNTING GROUND is
scheduled for release in July 2007.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
"Beyond the door you can change your destiny"

An original title created specifically for
the PSP system and developed by Game Republic
(Genji series), BRAVE STORY: NEW
TRAVELER features beautifully
rendered 3D graphics, an epic tale with a
host of colorful supporting characters, and a
traditional turn-based battle system easy for
beginners to pickup and play but with enough
depth and innovative features for seasoned
gamers.

The Story

On a day that starts out like any other, an
11-year-old boy's life is changed forever. As
the main character and his friend Miki pass a
leisurely afternoon, Miki suddenly collapses
from an unknown illness. When the girl shows
no sign of waking, the main character grows
distraught over not being a better friend and
not having the means to save her.
Suddenly, a strange voice offers him a
second chance: "Beyond the door you can
change your destiny!" He soon leaves the real
world and journeys to the world of Vision,
where, as a novice "Traveler," he will
surmount myriad ordeals in hopes of
ultimately meeting with the Goddess of
Fortune to have a single wish granted.
Valuable friendships, unbounded courage, and
his own personal growth will all prove
indispensable as he seeks out his destiny: a
life-changing adventure and the discovery of
a hero inside an ordinary kid.

Key Features

* A role-playing game with an epic tale,
introducing unique characters with distinct
personalities and leading the player through
the imaginative world of Vision as he learns
to become a hero.

* Traditional turn-based battle system
enhanced by innovative features based on the
story's themes of friendship, courage, and
growth:

Friendship - Form bonds
with party
members to create new, cooperative
skills.

Courage - Use "brave power"
(BP) to unleash powerful special abilities,
continually refilling the gauge as you
devastate the enemy.

Growth - The hero's main
weapon will evolve as he collects the
gemstones needed to meet with the Goddess of
Fortune. New
accessories can be forged by collecting and
combining the right materials. Each character
can also unlock a one-of-a-kind innate
ability.

* Beautifully rendered 3D graphics with
vibrant colors and a distinct visual style,
highlighted by polished character and enemy
movement, graphical representations of sound
effects, and a unique animation for each
special ability - all exceptionally well
drawn and intricately textured.

* Collect special birds which you can use
in mini-games or trade in for rare and
precious weapons, armor, and items.

* Network with friends to trade your
birds, or game-share a mini-game to have
friends assist in capturing rare birds.

BRAVE STORY: NEW TRAVELER is scheduled for
release in Q3 2007.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #35: Gazetteer of the Known Realms (Final)

2007-03-14T19:51:00.000-05:00

Dungeon Crawl Classics #35
Gazetteer of the Known Realms

The Setting

The setting is basically described in the two larger books. One is a Gazetteer, the other is a GM's guide (which has "secrets" of the various places, monsters, some NPCs, the list of gods, etc). Unfortunately, both are actually almost unreadable, because there the paper's background art is very dark and very detailed with a lot of squiggly lines, and the typeface is rather light (grey instead of black). The Gazetteer is actually worse than the GM's guide, I really struggled to read it, but the GM's guide is no great shakes, either. The best way to describe is like those entry the right letter tests when you sign up for a website or something, used to prevent 'bots from signing up.

Anyway, once you get past that, the setting is basically divided up into 3 regions. The Northlands, the Southlands, and the Lostlands. The Northlands coresponds to the typical D&D setting, that is, based on western Europe. The Southlands is quite a bit more interesting, it's based on Mesoamerican cultures. The Lostlands seems mostly inspired by Egypt and Middle Eastern cultures.

In fact, if you want to visualize the setting, spatially, that's about where they are set. If you imagine the Northlands as Western Europe, the Southlands lie to the southwest, about where South America would be (if a bit closer), while the Lostlands are to the southeast (where the Sahara and Egypt would be) and east (Western Asia). There's even something of an analog to the British Isles, a large island just offshore to the NW of the main Northlands, and full of unrully, Celtic like people (or maybe Picts). On the other hand, it's not perfect, part of the "Northlands" is actually quite south, the western coast of the southern continent (where part of the Lostlands), basically akin to say, Gibraltar and the west coast of Africa.

Although this is the largest section of this book at around 40 pages, nothing much really jumped out at me in the Northlands. You have a fading empire with a fairly unpronounceable name (Criestine Empire - at least 8 different pronunciations I can think of, and none are given in the text, and unfortunately, I can't help think of it as the toothpaste empire) and its various kingdoms/provinces, some of which have seceded or are independent.

Another kingdom has been invaded by a humanoid horde. Curiously, the free region of this area supposedly consists of 3 cities. However, the 3 cities have a total population of about 60,000 combined, while the region supposedly has a total population of 1.7 million. Which is fine for say, medieval Europe, but pretty much every square inch of Europe in medieval times was full of farming peasants. Doesn't seem suitable for a war torn region. And really, that same sort of demographics seems to apply for the entire Northlands, which implies that there really isn't much wilderness.

The Southlands are more interesting. Like I said, they are based on Mesoamerican culture (mostly Aztec, looks like), although a much less bloodthirsty one than in the real world. The area apparently used to be ruled by Snakemen (called the Drakon, basically the Yuan Ti with the numbers filed off), but the humans revolted. The snake people are still around, but there are 7 cities of mesoamerican like human, the Xulmec, along with a colony of the Criestine empire). This area only gets about 20 pages, though. Also weird that you get a guide to pronouncing "Xulmec", which really only has one obvious pronounciation ("Shul-mec"), since everyone (at least D&D players) knows that "X" = "Sh" in that context and there are only two vowels

Lastly is the Lostlands. It used to be a part of the world ruled over by Sphinxes. It basically resembles the Middle East and Asia. It gets around 15 pages.

Some of it it fairly straightforward, but you have some twists. Like for instance, there are Japanese like Dwarves (the nation of Taijin), and the Mongols are Wild Elves. (Sort of a reversal of Sovereign Stone, where the Dwarves are the Mongols and the Elves are Japanese). Also some other stuff like a city of golems, a big crater full of drow

(The demographics of this region tend to tilt the other way, everyone lives in a city, no one in the wilderness)

Since the nations of the world is covered in just under 80 pages, there's obviously not a whole lot of detail.

Geographical Features

This fills up about 10 pages. Most of the actual geological features (rivers, plains, mountains) are boring, but there are a couple pages on various famous dungeons. That is pretty interesting.

Organizations

This takes up about 20 pages. All sorts of groups. From cults to knightly orders to guilds. Just descriptions, nothing like prestige classes or stat blocks for the group themselves.

The GM's Guide

The Pantheon

This is a rather curious mix. Most of the gods are not from our world but completely fictional, but two are taken from Zoroastrianism - Ahriman and Ahura Mazda. Which I must point out, still exists today and is more common than you might think (I have relatives who are, a friend in high school's family was, and one of my teachers in college was). Okay, not super-common, but still common enough that some might find it offensive. And it's ironic that a religion that was basically the pioneer of dualistic theism, has its 2 gods used with a host of others).

Beyond those two, there are a lot of gods. Many of the others are inspired by different cultures. There are a number of Mesoamerican-ish gods, with Aztec sounding names. And one somewhat Cthulhu Mythos-ish (Zhuhn and the Outer Gods). Some names are apparently borrowed from the real world, but slightly altered. For instance, Pelagia, who in this case is the goddess of the sea, but in the real world can be confused with Pelagianism, a variant of Christianity. Or Aristemis, a goddess with a bow, but unlike Artemis is not a hunting goddess, but one of diplomacy and strategy.

Honestly, since they went with the two historic gods, I think they probably should have gone with actual Mesoamerican, Greek and Norse and whatever gods as well, rather than coming up with weirdly named variants. But I guess since they were cobbled together from all the various DCCs, it couldn't be helped.

Bestiary

The 25 pages includes a variety of monsters, including a number of Mesoamerican critters, a few new variants on standard D&D monsters, like a Azure Ooze and a Crystal Golem, the Drakon (their replacement for Yuan Ti, which is one of the D&D monsters not in the final SRD and so off limits to 3rd party companies without special permission, but were in the draft SRD and so made it into some modules, including I would guess some early DCCs).

I'm not really going to go into their stats, since that's not really my thing, but I was puzzled by a few things for the playable character races. I'm not an expert on such things, but a number of them are playable. Usually (I thought), when a race had racial levels (basically hit dice), they were equal to that races level adjustment.

For instance, a +3 Level Adjustment race would have 3 racial hit dice. So that when a you would have a character of x level, they would have an appropriate amount of total hit dice for that level. There are a few cases where they don't jibe. The most egregious is the thunder giant, which is a +10 level adjustment, but gets a whopping 24 racial hit dice. Granted, it would only come up when you have a campaign starting at 11th level (or are making a replacement character), but getting 24d8 seems like a heck of a deal.

(Then again, maybe that's a 3.5 thing. In 3.0, which I basically still use, racial hit dice generally = ECL or Level Adjustment)

New Rules

About 20 or so pages is devoted to new rules for the setting. New equipment (Mesoamerican style stuff, mostly, but a few others), new spells, feats, domains, etc. Nothing really outlandish or all that notable.

Rogues Gallery

Another 20 pages is devoted to famous characters of the setting. These get about a paragraph of description, and the basic stats (class, level and any notable ability scores). A number of them do get portraits, which is a nice touch, except they are really more like caricatures.

Other Stuff

There's a short chapter on Zero level characters. Basically 1st level characters with NPC classes. I think it's a bit vague in explaining how advancement works (see my note below in the part about the included 0-level Module).

Lastly there is are several pages listing possible "adventure paths" using DCCs. That is, groups of modules played in order that take the PCs from level 1 (or 0) to 20 (or almost to it, 15+). Why? It's sort of the "in" thing these days among D&D/d20 modules.

The Maps

I guess part of the reason the boxed set is so expensive, is that it comes with a number of big, full color maps. Which would be great, except honestly, the maps are nothing special. They aren't ugly, but they don't make you say "Wow, what a great map". And for some reason, they aren't hex mapped, either. I don't know how you could have a setting that is supposedly old school, and not have hex maps.

The Adventures

Halls of the Minotaur

This is a zeroth level adventure. Goodman already did one of this, DCC#0, basically the PCs are all 1st level characters with NPC classes, which means they are roughly 1 level lower than PCs (and thus zero level).

In that adventure, the pre-generated characters were sort of twinked out, that is, they were 1st level NPC class characters, but had high stats and some nice items, which made their fairly capable. This still has somewhat high stats, but not overly so, and the characters start off with basically nothing (basically equipped like medieval peasants).

Anyway, part of the tricky bits of 1st level adventures, and especially in something like this, is that characters are pretty fragile, and you have to make sure they don't fight anything that can take out a character in one round on average. This adventure does a pretty good job of it, except for the end fight, which is (shockingly) with a Minotaur.

The Minotaur is wounded, but he still does quite a bit of damage in the attack, enough to take out a character on average, much less a high roll or critical. And he's pretty much always going to hit.

So clearly, the PCs won't win in a stand up fight with him. Which the module points out, and gives ideas on how to deal with him in other ways. But at the same time, that's the sort of thing that experienced players would know, not beginner players. So the DM might have to do some hand holding. And also, beginner players might find it anti-climatic, getting to the final boss, then not being able to actually fight it.

(Though I should note, that the players earn at least 10,000 xp or so combined (and thus likely 2000 xp each if 5 characters) by the time they get to the Minotaur's part of the module, which should be enough to let them from from "0" (starting at -1000 xp) to 2nd level (1000), although the mechanics of this are not really explained. In the GM's Guide it says upon reaching 0 xp (from -1000), they can take a PC class, but it's not explained if that's in addition to their NPC level, or replaces it. So if they get another level and then another one at 1000 xp, they could have 3 character levels, 2PC/1NPC.)

The Thief Lord's Vault

This is set in the city of "Punjar" in the Northlands, a city full of thieves. Basically, it's the dungeon and vault of the head of the city's thieves' guild. Lots of fairly nasty traps for the most part, though later on there are a few minions of the thief lord. Although it's aimed at 4th-6th level characters, it's very much aimed for expert players who know what they are doing.

This dungeon itself is actually interesting, and most of the traps are well done. However, the module itself doesn't make sense from a logical standpoint (okay, that's true of a lot of dungeons, but this even more so). Why would a 17th or so level Thief Lord store his treasure in a dungeon that 4th-6th level characters could make it through? And considering the city is full of thieves, most of them higher level than the PCs, why hasn't the vault already been plundered? For that matter, why didn't the CE guards in the vault decide to take the money and skip out? They already know most of the secrets of the vault, and sort of a secret egress.

So anyway, neither adventure was bad, but neither knocked my socks off, either.

Layout/Art

As mentioned, the 2 large books have the background art on each page which makes it very hard to read. Other than that though, it's a pretty straight forward book.

The art for the most part is not terribly impressive. Goodman has employed a number of excellent artists in their other DCCs, including some famous ones like Erol Otus and Jim Holloway. None of them appear here, though. The artists aren't bad, but most are definitely "B" list or lower. (I really hate to say that, since when I write a review, I do often hear from artists, but it's true. )

Final Thoughts:

I've been playing D&D since the late 70s. Back when I was a kid, I remember the feeling my friends and I got when Greyhawk came out, how magical it was, especially looking at the map and all the wondrous places on it, and places we wanted our characters to explore. So perhaps nothing can live up to that. But I almost pretty much completely missed out on Mystara until the late 90s, and when I discovered that, I loved it. I even liked some of the 2e AD&D settings, like Birthright and er, Spelljammer.

So what I'm getting at, is the setting just really left me cold. Didn't do much for me at all. Still, it's pretty inoffensive compared to other d20 settings. It's not as boring as Kalamar (and while the names in this aren't easy to pronounce, they aren't nearly the tongue twisters like in Kalamar), not as "kewl" as Eberron, not full of seemingly randomly generated gibberish like the Wilderlands, not full of munchkins like Forgotten Realms, not whatever it is Arcanis is (strangely, although they are still making d20 stuff, I don't own a single product from Paradigm, and I probably have well over 200 d20 books).

So, if you absolutely must have a setting, this is perhaps the least worst of the choices (although for all its randomness at times, the Wilderlands is far more old school, more detailed, and certainly more interesting). But really you'd probably be better off just making your own from scratch, which is quite common for D&D and not that hard. Only the Southlands is really interesting, and that is perhaps too derivative of real world Aztec culture, rather than simply inspired.

Even if you actually like the setting provided, the scant detail really doesn't offer much you couldn't come up on your own by piecing the various DCC's together yourself - basically you just get the "glue" which sticks the DCCs together, not really any detail to help you run a game in any one location. So I'm not sure the value you get from this is all that great.

And while they have DCCs in the works up to at least #50, I have no idea if we will ever see any regional sourcebooks or the like. So if you get this, you are likely on your own if you ever want more detail.

Beyond that,the poor readability of the 2 main books really hurts. It's not overly apparent in my photo - it really depends on the lighting conditions. In bright light it's legible because the background art sort of fades, but the lower the light, the more the background art shows up. Reading outside is okay, but I struggled to read it in bed at night with just a small 75 watt table lamp.

So all in all, I have to give it a C-.

(Legal Note: Photos of the various pages and maps are used under the "fair use" provision of copyright law. And an excuse to use my new digital camera. Which actually takes much better pictures, but I downsized them to be much smaller)

Dungeon Crawl Classics #35 - The Setting

2007-03-12T20:58:00.000-05:00

Goodman Games was one of the early d20 startups, and like most of them, their products initially revolved around the company's own setting. In their case, it was "Broncosaurus Rex", a setting combinging the civil war, steampunk, and dinosaurs. Although actually quite interesting, this was fairly quickly dropped in the pursuit of other products, including the Dungeon Crawl Classics line of adventure modules, which are meant to be in the spirit of the old TSR modules for D&D and AD&D. This decision was probably wise, most other d20 startups are long gone, while Goodman Games continues to thrive, or at least continue to put out a large number of products, including 1-2 Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) per month.

Originally though, the DCCs were meant to be generic, that is, no real implied setting at all, and could be dropped into almost any world without a problem (which was largely true in practice). But apparently they decided to make a setting out of all the modules. And so this product, DCC #35 was born

The Product Itself

It's a boxed set and consists of 2 large books, 2 smaller 32 page modules, and a number of maps. Going by the page count the price is a bit high, but I guess when you consider the 32 page modules as going for about $12 each, it's a bit more reasonable. Still, too much for my blood until I managed to trade my copy of Rappan Athuk: Reloaded for it.

(Insert Photo Here)

The Setting

The setting is basically described in the two large books. One is a Gazetteer, the other is a GM's guide (which has "secrets" of the various places, monsters, some NPCs, the list of gods, etc). Unfortunately, both are actually almost unreadable, because there the paper's background art is very dark and very detailed with a lot of squiggly lines, and the typeface is rather light (grey instead of black). The Gazetter is actually worse than the GM's guide, I really struggled to read it, but the GM's guide is no great shakes, either. The best way to describe is like those entry the right letter tests when you sign up for a website or something, used to prevent 'bots from signing up.

(insert photo here)

Anyway, once you get past that, the setting is basically divided up into 3 regions. The Northlands, the Southlands, and the Lostlands. The Northlands coresponds to the typical D&D setting, that is, based on western Europe. The Southlands is quite a bit more interesting, it's based on Mesoamerican cultures. The Lostlands seems mostly inspired by Egypt and Middle Eastern cultures.

Nothing much really jumped out at me in the Northlands. You have a fading empire with a fairly unprounounceable name (Criestine Empire) and its various kingdoms/pronvinces, some of which have seceded or are independant

Another kingdom has been invaded by a humanoid horde. Curiously, the free region of this area supposedly consists of 3 cities. However, the 3 cities have a total population of about 60,000 combined, while the region supposedly has a total population of 1.7 million. Which is fine for say, medieval Europe, but pretty much every square inch of Europe in medieval times was full of farming peasants. Doesn't seem suitable for a war torn region. And really, that same sort of demographics seems to apply for the entire Northlands, which implies that there really isn't much wilderness.

The Southlands are more interesting. Like I said, they are based on Mesoamerican culture, although a much less bloodthirsty one than in the real world. The area apparently used to be ruled by Snakemen (called the Drakon, basically the Yuan Ti with the numbers filed off), but the humans revolted. The snake people are still around, but there are 7 cities of mesoamerican like human, the Xulmec, along with a colony of the Criestine empire)

Lastly is the Lostlands. It used to be a part of the world ruled over by Sphinxes. It basically resembles the Middle East and Asia.

Some of it it fairly straightforward, but you have some twists. Like for instance, there are Japanese like Dwarves (the nation of Taijin), and the mongols are Wild Elves. (Sort of a reversal of Sovereign Stone, where the Dwarves are the mongols and the Elves are Japanese)

(The demographics of this region tend to tilt the other way, everyone lives in a city, no one in the wilderness)

The Maps

I guess part of the reason the boxed set is so expensive, is that it comes with a number of big, full color maps. Which would be great, except honestly, the maps are nothing special. And for some reason, they aren't hex mapped, either. I don't know how you could have a setting that is supposedly old school, and no hex maps.

The Adventures

Halls of the Minotaur

This is a zeroth level adventure. Goodman already did one of this, DCC#0, basically the PCs are all 1st level characters with NPC classes, which means they are roughly 1 level lower than PCs (and thus zero level).

In that adventure, the pre-generated characters were sort of twinked out, that is, they were 1st level NPC class characters, but had high stats and some nice items, which made their fairly capable. This still has somewhat high stats, but not overly so, and the characters start off with basically nothing (basically equipped like medieval peasants).

Anyway, part of the tricky bits of 1st level adventures, and especially in something like this, is that characters are pretty fragile, and you have to make sure they don't fight anything that can take out a character in one round on average. This adventure does a pretty good job of it, except for the end fight, which is (shockingly) with a Minotaur.

The Minotaur is wounded, but he still does quite a bit of damage in the attack, enough to take out a character on average, much less a high roll or critical. And he's pretty much always going to hit.

So clearly, the PCs won't win in a stand up fight with him. Which the module points out, and gives ideas on how to deal with him in other ways. But at the same time, that's the sort of thing that experienced players would know, not beginner players. So the DM might have to do some hand holding. And also, beginner players might find it anti-climatic, getting to the final boss, then not being able to actually fight it.

(Though I should note, that the players earn at least 10,000 xp or so combined (and thus likely 2000 xp each) by the time they get to the Minotaur's part of the module, which should be enough to let them from from "0" (starting at -1000 xp) to 2nd level (1000), although the mechanics of this are not really explained. In the GM's Guide it says upon reaching 0 xp (from -1000), they can take a PC class, but it's not explained if that's in addition to their NPC level, or replaces it.)

The Thief Lord's Vault

This is set in the city of "Punjar" in the Lostlands, a city full of thieves. Basically, it's the dungeon and vault of the head of the city's thieves' guild. Lots of fairly nasty traps for the most part.

This dungeon itself is actually interesting, and most of the traps are well done. However, the module itself doesn't make sense from a logical standpoint. Why would a 17th or so level Thief Lord store his treasure in a dungeon that 4th-6th level characters could make it through? And considering the city is full of thieves, most of them higher level than the PCs, why hasn't the vault already been plundered? For that matter, why didn't the CE guards in the vault decide to take the money and skip out? They already know most of the secrets of the vault, and sort of a secret egress.

Layout/Art

As mentioned, the 2 large books have the background art on each page which makes it very hard to read. Other than that though, it's a pretty straight forward book.

The art for the most part is not terribly impressive. Goodman has employed a number of excellent artists in their other DCCs, including some famous ones like Erol Otus and Jim Holloway. None of them appear here, though. The artists aren't bad, but most are definitely "B" list or lower. (I really hate to say that, since when I write a review, I do often hear from artists, but...)

Final Thoughts:

I've been playing D&D since the late 70s. Back when I was a kid, I remember the feeling my friends and I got when Greyhawk came out, how magical it was, especially looking at the map and all the wondrous places on it, and places we wanted our characters to explore. So perhaps nothing can live up to that. But I almost pretty much completely missed out on Mystara until the late 90s, and when I discovered that, I loved it. I even liked some of the 2e AD&D settings, like Birthright and er, Spelljammer.

So what I'm getting at, is the setting just really left me cold. Didn't do much for me at all. Still, it's pretty inoffensive compared to other d20 settings. It's not as boring as Kalamar, not as "kewl" as Eberron, not full of seemingly randomly generated gibberish like the Wilderlands.

So, if you absolutely must have a setting, this is perhaps the least worst of the choices (although for all it's incoherence at times, the Wilderlands is far more old school and certainly more interesting). But you'd probably be better off just making your own from scratch, which is quite common for D&D. This really doesn't offer much you couldn't come up on your own by piecing the various DCC's together yourself.

Beyond that,the poor readability of the 2 main books really hurts. I have never seen anything as illegible as this. If they didn't sell it as a PDF, I would suspect it's an attempt to make scanning/photocopying/OCRing of it impossible, and thus theoretically reducing piracy, like the copy protection codes for games back in the early-mid 90s.

Galactic Civilizations II Gold (impressions and a rant)

2007-03-02T14:47:00.000-06:00

I got Gal Civ II Gold in the mail yesterday (from Circuit City which is selling it for $28 and offers free shipping) and played it a lot last night. It's not a huge jump over the original GCII, but a number of elements do make it more Moo 2 like. Really a lot of fun. They make an already great game better, which is hard to do.

On the downside, and at the risk of sounding like a nut I found out that they already have a patch for it which fixes somebugs, but in order to get the patch, you have to use Stardock Central, which is basically their version of Steam. I had some seriously horrible experiences with that program back in the GalCiv 1 days. Basically it would corrupt my desktop, making it impossible read anything on the screen. And it made itself run at startup (putting it in the auto load stuff without asking).

They said it's fixed now (and indeed, in response to my protest as to this new policy citing my past problems with it) said that early versions were "rough", but at the time back then, they never acknoleged my problem with it. How do I know it's fixed now? Especially since I am using an odd OS (the 64 bit version of XP) that they probably haven't tested it on, as well as weird video card (not weird, but new-ish).

I'm actually afraid to run it. Sounds silly, but it was really a hassle fixing it.

Grrr. I don't mind having to activate the product. I don't mind registering on their website to get patches. I did mind that they weren't selling the expansion in stores, only the "Gold" version which was full priced, but not that much. But this, this really

Hotel Dusk (DS)

2007-02-20T19:31:00.000-06:00

Hotel Dusk is pretty unique. On the surface it seems like an adventure game, but it's both more and less than that. While it has some game elements, it's really more of an interactive novel than anything else.

You play (or more accurate, the story is told from the viewpoint of) Kyle Hyde, an ex-cop who now works as a salesmen and sort of a private detective (specializing in finding lost stuff). His latest case takes him to Hotel Dusk, sort of a run down motel. Little does he realize that there he will confront his past - why he became an ex-cop, although it's pretty obvious to the player (since otherwise you wouldn't be seeing those flashbacks).

The story unfolds over one night there, each chapter being an hour or two of time (though will likely far more to play, at least early on).

Gameplay:

Gameplay basically consists of 3 things - wandering around the hotel in a 3d view; doing various sorts of "puzzles" and talking to people. The latter makes up most of game - you talk/listen to (well, read) people a lot.

So, just how much you like to read and just how interesting you find the characters in Hotel Dusk really determines how much you will enjoy this. I found the hotels denizens to be quite interesting for the most part.

Generally speaking, talking to the characters is simple. You basically pick from a list of things to say or ask, and the character responds. Sometimes you can pick from 2 responses asking the same basic thing, but in different tone, one usually being a real jerk, but much of what you ask is simply linear and has to be asked.

Still, I was impressed at the quality of the dialogue in the game. Each character has their own personality and speech patterns that they stick to. While I did spot a few anachorisms (the game is set in 1979), most of the speech is quite accurate.

That personality extends to you as well - you are pretty much stuck playing Kyle Hyde's personality, which can be somewhat limiting. For instance, one of the guests in the hotel is an attractive young lady. I would imagine a lot of guys would want to flirt with her. But Kyle doesn't like her, and pretty much always insults her. At best you can pick the least offensive question/comment.

Most of the puzzles aren't even really puzzles in the adventure game sense. Most of them simply have you doing something easy with the stylus, to get you more involved with the gameplay. Some are extremely annoying in that they require you to hit just the right pixel ("hunt the pixel" it's called in adventure games), but there are only a couple of those.

Really, I think the puzzles are meant to immerse you into the story, not simply be puzzles. Many of them require you mimicking with the DS the sort of actions Kyle does in the game. Some of these are pretty innovative, such as folding the DS up to turn something over or bring the objects on each screen together.

There's not a whole lot of exploring to be done in the 3d view. Basically just 2 floors of the hotel, plus the roof and basement. You can use the d-pad or the stylus, I found both to be somewhat awkward, but mostly used the d-pad. Your view is prety much fixed.

Graphics/Sound:

The graphics are quite stylish. Everything has a handdrawn look, especially the characters which look pencil drawn, and rotate through 4-5 different black and white sketches of them. The hotel is a bit more realistic, but still somewhat stylish, just in color. Still, I was somewhat disappointed in the graphics in the 3d view - they look more like something you'd find on the GBA or SNES. The DS isn't a 3D powerhouse, but I don't think it's that bad.

The music is generally nice. Some tunes seem a little out of place, but most is the sort you would expect in a noir-tinged mystery. On the downside, because you play this held sideways, you lose the stereo effect of the music.

Final Thoughts:

I think fans of mystery novels will like this. It's clearly inspired more by popular mystery fiction (and TV shows) like say Perry Mason or Columbo, than the more high brow literary stuff. A lot of people will probably find this boring, because it's more reading than anything else. Adventure game fans will find the puzzles too simple.

But it's something very different and the end result was quite compelling. I'm not sure it's worth the price ($30), but then again, that's about what hardback novels cost. I have had a DS for about 7 months now, and this has been the most fun I've had with it. It's not quite perfect, but I'm giving it an A-, or a 9/10 here. Just be aware, it's not for everyone. However, for people like me (who have read every Perry Mason novel) it's great.

The Legend of Heroes II: Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch

2007-02-13T16:25:00.000-06:00

Prophecy of the Moonlight Witch is the 2nd game in the Legend of Heroes series. At least in the US. In Japan, it's part of a long running PC game series from Falcom. These were remade by Bandai for the PSP, and brought over here.

This game, "A Tear of Vermillion" and "Song of the Ocean" (or "Cagesong of the Ocean") form the Gagharv Trilogy, which are set in the same world, but in 3 different regions divided by natural boundries (Gagharv basically being like the Grand Canyon, but impassable).

Although they are loosely connected, their stories really are not, so you really don't have to play one to enjoy the others. It can be fun to spot the connections between them, though. But it's really more of a bonus.

In any case, the series is from the Golden Age of RPGs, the SNES era. And so pretty much play exactly like those sort of RPGs, but have had a graphics overhaul.

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty simple, like most old school console RPGs. Basically you simply wander around talking to people. Then generally go to another town or dungeon, fight things, then go back to town and talk to more people. It's pretty much entirely linear, if you try to go where you shouldn't you get a message with directions on where you should go. And important people or objects have a red exclamation point to indicate you should talk to them or go to that area.

You can have up to 4 characters in your party at a time, but that changes according to where you are in the story - characters come and go a lot. There's no class system per se, but some characters are combat orientated, others are magic users. And some melee types use swords, others use something else.

There is a "pet" system, but it's very very minor. Basically a little critter follows you around, and finds potions for you. Occasionally you have to pet it for feed it to keep it happy, but not all that often.

One really nice thing is as you walk around in a place with monsters, you only fight if you run into them. Depending on their strength, they will seek you out or avoid you.

Combat in the US version is turn based. There is some small strategy involved because characters can only move so much a turn, and spells and attacks have limited ranges. But even so, most combats are pretty easy and quick. Perhaps a bit too easy, generally all you have to do to win is have Jurio cast an elemental spell which attacks all enemies. Usually him just doing it once is enough to win most random battles.

The game's interface is slick and polished. For instance, when you use magic to heal your party after a battle, once everyone is healed, the menu will close itself. And it's very easy to get through menus and such. There is also almost no loading whatsoever while you play.

Story

Since the gameplay of these old school RPGs is pretty much all the same, what makes them memorable is the story and characters. This is where I think the game isn't as good as "A Tear of Vermillion".

You play as Jurio (and Chris), two youngsters from the small village of Ragpick. As part of their coming of age ceremony, all Ragpickians have to go on a pilgrimage to 5 different shrines. And it's time for Jurio and Chris to go on their pilgramage, having just hit young adulthood.

There's something of a backstory to this. Basically 20 years ago, there was a young witch who also went from town to town, giving prophecies as she went. So in a way, you follow her path and learn more about her story. Really quite unusual in an RPG plotline.

There is something behind this, something somewhat more traditional (ie, big bad villain is going to destroy the world, Mwhahahahahahaha and all that), but this really doesn't became a major plot point until the very end.

So I liked the story. Definitely not like any other RPG I've played. Very much pretty low key until the end. I especially enjoyed one section that took place on a passenger ship, Jurio and Chris have to work for their passage.

What I didn't really like was the characters. While not cliches, most of the people who Chris and Jurio meet are not very interesting. Some of the characters who join your party I found to be downright annoying - particularly Alf and Lodi. Most the others you just don't know for very long, either. Chris and Jurio are very likeable though. Jurio is a bit of a dork, and Chris is , well, crazy is the only way to describe her, I think.

Also not really much in the way of romance, unlike "A Tear of Vermilion", in which the 2nd half of the game was basically a growing romance between Avin and Rutice.

The translation of this is not very good, either. It's nowhere near as bad as say, Astonishia Story, which is just wacky and incomprehensible in areas. But it's often rather awkward and stilted, far more than "Vermillion" was, I thought.

On the plus side, unlike "Vermillion", there really isn't any backtracking through old areas. You pretty much do a circular lap around the continent, eventually reaching home, but not really going over any old ground. And the length seems about the same. Easily 40+ hours for me, although the game doesn't keep track, it's just a guess.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics are wonderful. Although it emulates the feel of the 16 bit SNES rpgs, everything (but the characters themselves) is in 3D (albeit with a fixed camera). Textures are bright and colorful (where appropriate, anyway) and there are some really nice lighting effects. The water is also very snazzy looking. It really looks like an SNES game on steroids.

The sound is generally good, especially the ambient sounds like water, though it's not a whole lot of sound in the game. There's a lot of nice sounding music as well, which there is a lot of.

Final Thoughts

I really enjoyed the "A Tear of Vermillion", so perhaps I was doomed to think anything else would be a bit of a let down. But I didn't like this as much, and certain things I overlooked in that now started to bother me. For instance, there really needs to be a memo or note area that keeps track of your objectives. It's very easy to forget what you need to do, although the game never really lets you go too far astray. Combat also seemed a lot more repetitive, with the same creatures over and over, and tactics being very simple.

Still, I did enjoy myself, and unlike the majority of the RPGs I start, I actually finished it, despite it being fairly long. So still a good game. B or 8/10 here.

Pirates! (PSP)

2007-02-13T16:22:00.000-06:00

The original "Pirates!" was a 1987 game for the Commodore 64. It was quite popular, and I remember playing it a lot at the time. It was later ported to various other platforms. Then, in the early 90s, it got something of a makeover, and released as "Pirates! Gold" for the PC and I think the Sega Genesis. That was pretty much just a face lift in graphics. Then just a couple years ago, a whole new remake was released for the PC, "Sid Meier's Pirates! Live the Life", which basically brought the game into 3D and added a few more action segments. This was later ported to the Xbox, and now finally in 2007, appears on the PSP.

Since it's basically an old school C-64 game at heart, it's somewhat hard to describe in today's modern genres and terminology. Action-Strategy? A collection of minigames? Something along those lines.

Essentially you control a tiny ship on the screen, and sail around the Carribean, attack other ships, visiting ports (and possibly attacking them), searching for lost cities and buried treasure. The goal in the original game was to just make money and marry a beautiful lady, but revenge has been added to those goals, giving the game a bit more linear and streamlined feel to appeal to modern games.

As you move your little ship around the map, what you do will often launch a little mini-game or action scene. There are ones if you attack a ship, one if you attack a town, another if you search for treasure. Visiting ports is generally easy, but there is sort of a pac-man like game if you want to sneak into an unfriendly town, or a dancing game if you want to court the daughter of the local governor.

Attacking other ships is pretty simple. You control one ship, the computer controls the enemy ship. You move around trying to fire your cannons at the enemy, and they do the same. You have 3 different types of shot you can use, one general purpose shot (which has the longest range), one which knocks out sails, and one that kills the crew. If you simply want to plunder, it's generally best to knock the enemy ship down to 1 crew member, so they surrender as you get close. On the other hand, if you want to capture the ship, you might want to close as quickly as possible, where you will enter a swordfight with the enemy captain. If you win, you can capture the ship in good condition and possibly win over some of his crew members.

The swordfighting is both complex and easy. It's complicated in that there are a number of different moves you can do, but generally speaking, all you need to do is block and attack. In fact, you really generally need to just wait for your opponent to begin to attack, then hit him with a quick thrust (some attacks are slower or faster than others).

Attacking an unfriendly town is a very simple turn based game. It takes place on a medium sized map divided up into squares, not unlike a chess board, only with terrain (trees, rocks, hills, etc) on it in some places. You generally control about 3-4 units, which seems to be your crew total divided up somewhat randomly into Officers (good at melee combat), Buccaneers (guys with guns) and Pirates (who are okay at melee). The more men in the unit, obviously the stronger they are. The defenders of the town basically get the same treatment, only they have a couple more unit types, including Cavalry in some towns.

You get a turn to move your units (you get 2 moves per unit, which can be either move or attack), then the enemy goes. Usually you start fairly close to each other, so the whole combat only lasts about 3-5 turns at most. It's not really hard, the key is to really take advantage of the terrain by putting your guys with guns on a hill, and to have your other guys hide in the woods to attack from a flank when the enemy passes by.

Friendly towns are just navigated by a menu. You can visit a tavern, visit a shipwright, visit a merchant, and visit the governor. In the tavern, you can recruit more sailors (sadly, not by singing a Village People song), talk to a waitress, the bartender, or a mysterious stranger. The former just generally give you information, while the latter will usually try to sell you something that can improve your abilities (either do something better, or live longer). Visiting the governor is how you get promoted, and if you have a high enough rank, you can get invited to the dance by his daughter. Which is another mini game.

Basically you do a ballroom dance which requires you to press the correct button when she gives a hand signal. In the PC version, I found this to be almost impossible, because her signal is hard to notice, but the developers of this made it easier by telling you what button to press. You still don't have much time to do so, but it's definitely doable, unlike the PC version.

You pretty much keep sailing around, doing the same things over, until your character's health deteriorates and you have to retire. This can be somewhat repetitive, but the game generally only lasts maybe 10-15 hours. It's not something you are supposed to play over and over, but something you come back and play whenever you want. There is also a shift in how you play as you career progresses - first off, as you get better, you'll probably start attacking towns rather than ships, which is much more profitable. And secondly, you have a quest of sorts that you have to follow, which has you doing various different tasks

The developers (Full Fat) really did a great job porting it to the PSP from the PC. Not only does it play pretty much exactly the same, with no slowdown, the graphics are quite good. Maybe a little sparse at times, but it runs really well and the loading times are minimal (really only when you visit the governor or go into a swordfight, and even then, it's only about 5-6 seconds).

Still, I think the game suffers from some problems that were intrinsic to the PC version. For instance, you really should have been able to customize your pirate in terms of appearance. Since it apparently uses an in-game engine for the cutscenes and the like, it would only have taken minimal effort to have different faces or skin tones.

The Island of Lost Spells (Final)

2007-01-11T19:42:00.000-06:00

The Island of Lost Spells

The few years has seen something of a revival in classic gaming. Most notably Castles & Crusades and OSRIC trying to unofficially revive the 1st edition of AD&D, but some others, including a new version of Runequest, Paranoia, some supplements for Classic Traveller, and I think even a new-ish version of Tunnels and Trolls.

But this module (and the whole product line), The Island of Lost Spells from Dark City Games, flew under my radar completely. It's an unofficial revival of The Fantasy Trip and the old Microquest adventures from Metagaming, at least in spirit. It even comes in a ziplock bag!

If that doesn't make sense to you, some history: in the 70s and early 80s, there were a number of small games that were sold in very slim boxes or in ziplock bags. Basically they came with a small booklet, a sheet of counters (thus a bag or box was needed), and a map or two. Most of them were wargames, but some were roleplaying games as well, or hybrids of the two.

The Fantasy Trip from Metagaming was probably the most successful of these hybrids. It started off as a man level gladiatorial combat boardgame - "Melee" for hand to hand and "Wizard" for magical duels, but evolved into a role playing game with the addition of a supplement called "In the Labyrinth" and advanced versions of Melee & Wizard. And eventually there was a line of adventures for the system as well, called "Microquests". These were also notable because most (all?) of them were sort of like those Choose Your Own adventure books, suitable for solitaire play.

This product, "The Island of Lost Spells" (indeed all of Dark City Games products as near as I can tell), are meant to replicate those "Microquests", and it does a very good job of it.

What You Get...

It consists of a 32 page booklet (digest sized), a fold out hex map, a sheet of cardstock counters, and a 8 page rules booklet (again, digest sized, although only 6 1/2 pages are used). The hex map is marked with a number of generic rooms of various sizes, and with location indicators (like A, B, C, D)

The rules are pretty simple. Basically characters have 3 stats and possibly a few skills (not a big list, and each tied to an attribute), and to succeed in a task of some sort, they have to roll under the stat (or stat+skill) on 3 d6s (or 4 d6s in some cases). Armor is rated in points, and stops damage. Damage is applied to a character's Strength stat.

There's a small selection of spells, grouped by IQ Level. Casting spells causes fatigue to the caster, and in order to cast the spell successfully, the magic user has pass an IQ test. (Beats getting into Mensa).

Obviously, in 6 1/2 pages, you aren't getting the most detailed role-playing system ever, but it's surprisingly comprehensive, all things considered. There's about 30-35 skills, a handful of arms and armor, a couple dozen spells, and rules for improving characters

The Adventure Itself...

The adventure has the PCs exploring legendary ruins on an island, which in ancient times, was the home of a group of magicians. But first, they must putter around a village and equip themselves. And then charter a boat out to the island.

It's for one to six players, but it's "programmed" so to speak, essentially like a Choose Your Own Adventure book or Fighting Fantasy, but with less prose and more RPG. Basically you start at entry 001, then pick from a variety of options, and so go to entry x, y, z, etc. You will sometimes get a "Plot Word" while going though the adventure, these are sort of like flags in programming and depending on the location, will direct you to an entry not otherwise accessible.

For much of the adventure, play is pretty straightforward. But once you get into the actual ruins itself, it gets a little more complex. You need to use the included hex map you keep track of where you are in the room - most rooms have 4 different positions your character can be in. This can get to be a little tricky, especially if you have cats, who seem irresistibly drawn to maps with counters on them.

As you explore the ruins, you'll come across critters to fight, things to investigate (often requiring a successful skill check of some sort to reveal information), and occasionally an NPC. Obviously in something like this, interaction with NPCs is a bit limited, although if not running it solo you are generally given enough to improvise more conversation.

Initially there really isn't much purpose in your characters exploring the ruins besides looting it, but you'll likely discover a more noble one. You also find out the cause of the place becoming ruined. There are actually multiple ways to discover these things, so it's not hard to miss.

Although it's described as being for one to six players, the adventure itself is designed for 4 player characters. There is no advice given on how to scale the adventure for more or fewer characters, so if you have fewer than 5 players, you'd have to have them double up (or more) on characters (with one being the GM), or if you have six, I'd guess you'd have to have two GMs. Well, really, adding one character probably wouldn't break the adventure, but I would think having fewer would make it much more difficult.

Appearance/Layout

The quality of the book is good. While it's fairly obviously done on a laser printer or P.O.D, the paper used is quite sturdy. Indeed, the cover is almost too sturdy, as it has a tendency to not close enough.

The layout is very professional looking, nice and clean and easy to read. There's a consistent use of bold, italics, and spacing.

The art is something of a mixed bag. The cover art, in color, is very nice. The interior art is all very small, and while none of it is bad, none will actually make you say "Wow, nice art" like the cover.

Final Thoughts

I would say that the adventure itself is well designed. Somewhat less linear than I expected, and a lot more complex in terms of gameplay. It's not dumbed down at all. And although the page count of the product is fairly smallish, because of the small font used, tiny margins, and rather concise writing, it's longer than I expected.

On the other hand, there was a lot of page flipping involved. And while I understand how the positioning can be important for combat, it's also somewhat unwieldy in practice.

Bottom line, it definitely does a good job of emulating the old adventures, and it was fun to play. Somewhat ironically, most of the problems I had with it were fixed in a more recent adventure from them (Void Station 57, which I will be reviewing soon), so this gets marked down a little in comparison to a B

Woohoo! Got my Vrock bumper stickers...

2007-01-08T14:08:00.000-06:00

Pretty small thing, but when Vice City Stories for the PSP came out, I bought it right away because Vice City is a great place. Florida in the 80s, basically. Anyway, in the game, there are billboards for a bumper sticker for one of the radio stations in the game - Vrock - Home of the Vulture (a D&D reference) if you send them a SASE.

I send it way back in early Nov, I think. And finally got them today. I was only expecting one - they sent me 3, and 3 Rock Star Games stickers. Not the greatest sticker in the world, but pretty cool. And something you don't see a lot of these days - video games where the company will send you stuff in the mail. Activision used to do it in the 2600 days

The Island of Lost Spells (Rough draft)

2007-01-04T15:20:00.000-06:00

The few years has seen something of a revival in classic gaming. Most notably Castles & Crusades and OSRIC trying to revive the 1st edition of AD&D, but some others, including a new version of Runequest, Paranoia, some supplements for Classic Traveller, and I think even a new-ish version of Tunnels and Trolls.

But this module (and the whole product line) flew under my radar completely. It's a revival of The Fantasy Trip and the old Microquest adventures from Metagaming, at least in spirit. It even comes in a ziplock bag!

If that doesn't make sense to you, some history: in the 70s and early 80s, there were a number of small games that were either in very slim boxes or in ziplock bags. Basically they came with a small booklet, a sheet of counters (thus a bag or box was needed), and a map or two. Most of them were wargames, but some were roleplaying games as well, or hybrids.

The Fantasy Trip from Metagaming was probably the most successful of these hybrids. It started off as a man level gladiatorial combat boardgame - "Melee" for hand to hand and "Wizard" for magical duels, but evolved into a role playing game with the addition of a supplement called "In the Labyrinth" and advanced versions of Melee & Wizard. And eventually there was a line of adventures for the system as well, called "Microquests". These were also notable because most (all?) of them were sort of like those Choose Your Own adventure books, suitable for solitaire play.

This product, "The Island of Lost Spells" (indeed all of Dark City Games products as near as I can tell), are meant to replicate those "Microquests", and it does a very good job of it.

It consists of a 32 page booklet (digest sized), a fold out hex map, a sheet of cardstock counters, and 4 page rules booklet. The hex map is marked with a number of generic rooms of various sizes, and with location indicators (like A, B, C, D)

The rules are pretty simple. Basically characters have 3 stats and possibly a few skills (not a big list, and each tied to an attribute), and to succeed in a task of some sort, they have to roll under the stat (or stat+skill) on 3 d6s (or 4 d6s in some cases). Armor is rated in points, and stops damage. Damage is applied to a character's Stength stat.

The adventure has the PCs exploring legendary ruins on an island, which in ancient times, was the home of a group of magicians. But first, they must putter around a village and equip themselves. And then get a boat out to the island.

It's for one to six players, but it's "programmed" so to speak, essentially like a Choose Your Own Adventure book or Fighting Fantasy, but with less prose and more RPG. Basically you start at entry 001, then pick from a variety of options, and so go to entry x, y, z, etc.

For much of the adventure it's pretty straightforward. But once you get into the actual ruins itself, it gets a little more complex. You need to use the included hex map you keep track of where you are in the room. This can get to be a little tricky, especially if you have cats.

Anyway, as you explore the ruins, you'll come across critters to fight, things to investigate (often requiring a successful skill check of some sort to reveal information), and occasional an NPC.

I would say that the adventure itself is well designed. Somewhat less linear than I expected, and a lot more complex.

On the other hand, there was a lot of page flipping involved. And while I understand how the positioning can be important for combat, it's also somewhat unwieldy in practice

Void Station 57 (First Draft)

2007-01-03T04:09:00.000-06:00

Void Station 57

Void Station 57 is the first in Dark City Games' "Legends of Time and Space" line of adventures. Like their other adventures, it is inspired by the old Metagaming Microquest adventures. Unlike those others, it's a science fiction adventure, not fantasy.

It comes with an adventure booklet (28 pages, digest sized), a hex map, a sheet of cardstock counters, and a small rules pamphlet.

The Adventure Itself

The adventure deals with the crew of a starship who has come upon a fueling station in the middle of a void that appeared to be derelict. Since the reason the crew stopped at the place is because they needed re-fuel, they don't have much choice but to explore the place and get it up and running to re-fuel their ship. But that won't be easy.

While I don't want to spoil things, they have to face just about every sort of nasty thing you've seen in movies like this. Okay, not quite that bad, but the station has a lot of different problems.

Since it's meant to be like those old Microquest adventures, it can be played like a regular module (that is, with GM and players), or it can be played solo - like those old Fighting Fantasy books, albeit with you controlling multiple characters.

Basically you start out at entry 001 in the book, then read the paragraph, and are given a choice of which way to proceed. Like if you search the place, go to paragraph X, if you go left, go to paragraph Y, if you go right go to paragraph Z, etc.

Sometimes you run into hostile enemies (and so you have to run the combat), or have to do something that requires a skill check. Occasionally you pick up plot words, which basically are used to keep track that something has happened to either advance the plot, or PCs have aquired something notable. (If you've ever done programming or written text adventures, basically they are flags)

As mentioned, the refueling station has a lot of troubles. As you play, you piece together the cause of what happened, through the descriptions of the rooms you explore, and from objects left behind by the now dead crew

Rules

It comes with a small 4 page rules sheet. Very simple rules. Characters have 3 stats and a few skills. In order to succeed at a task (like in combat), they have to roll under the relevent stat (or stat+skill level) on either 3d6 or 4d6, depending on the difficulty (usually 3d6).

Damage is applied to a character's Strength statistic. Armor stops damage.

It's pretty simple to adapt the adventure to Gurps and also converts extremely easily to Classic Traveller. The latter has a few more stats and the skills are differently named, but the stat and skill range is pretty much the same and you can actually convert on the fly.

Looks/Appearance

While it definitely has a nostalgic feel, it's quite nice looking. The layout is crisp and clear, with consistent use of formatting (bold, italics, and the like). Seems to be well proofread. They picked nice, easy to read fonts.

The art won't "Wow!" you, but I've seen worse from much larger companies (and in much more expensive products). Although the cover art is quite good, actually. The map of the station is functional and easy to read.

Final Thoughts

I found this to be much easier to play than the other Dark City Games adventure I have - The Island of Lost Spells (a fantasy module) - part of it has to do with no magic making combat simpler, but also the structure of the module was better. Less page flipping, room structure was simpler, and a keyed map of the space station was a big help. The latter is also very helpful if you don't want to play it solo.

I also really enjoyed the adventure itself. It's a pretty clever setup, which oddly I don't remember seeing before in an science fiction module (though I guess there aren't all that many science fiction modules compared to fantasy ones), and some of the small details in the descriptions are really evocative and make it believable.

Bangkok Haunted (DVD)

2006-12-24T04:20:00.000-06:00

This is a horror movie from Thailand, I guess. At least it's set in Thailand. Strangely, upon putting in the disc, a box pops up asking whether you want English or Spanish. So at first I thought maybe it was a Mexican production.

Anyway, remember the 1980s when there would be horror movies that were basically anthologies? Telling 3 or 4 stories? Creepshow, Tales from the Darkside the Movie, a few others (like the one with Emilio Estavez playing video games). This is one of those, but unlike the 80s version, this is far more serious, not at all campy, and the stories are very long. 45 minutes each, it felt like, the movie is something 2 1/2 hours.

The first story is just weird. It makes sense, but I'm not sure I understood what the heck was going on exactly. It would play one bit, then flash back, then play another bit, then flash back. And so on. Okay. Quite different. At the opening scene I thought it was just going to be one of those Japanese style ghost movies, where the black haired ghost gets people (as typified by the Grudge). It's the story of 2 kids that grew up together, one beautiful girl, one a hideous deformed guy. One day they mysteriously disappear. You eventually find out what happens at the end, though it's somewhat slow in getting to that point.

The second story is just a mess. I had no idea what was going on exactly. About some sort of evil aphrodesiac. This was fairly graphic, with some sex scenes and corpses. It did have a couple funny moments, in some scenes in a porno shop.

The third story, on the other hand, is really excellent. It's almost not even a ghost story per se, but a crime story. A detective has a case where he finds a young woman strangled to death, hanging from a noose. He thinks it must be murder, because he can't find any way she could have hanged herself (ie, no chair), and she showed signs of a struggle. But the chief says it's a suicide. But the detective doesn't think so, and neither does the coroner, so they investigate further. Was it the woman's husband that killed her? Her ex-boyfriend? The chief? Well, just when you think what happened, it twists again. I really liked this one.

Azumi (DVD)

2006-12-20T01:12:00.000-06:00

Ever since I saw "Versus", I have been a fan of Ryuhei Kitamura. Azumi is his latest movie to hit DVD in the US, although it's actually from 2003 and so not that new. But I just got it from Blockbuster Online.

Basically it's the story of a ninjas in 15th-17 century Japan. Just when it isn't clear, but after they had guns (muskets), but before there were westerners around. In order to keep peace in the land, this guy swears to a priest that he will form a team of assassins to kill any warlords who make trouble. He does this by taking a group of children, and raising them together and instructing them in fighting.

Finally he and his ninja-kids (actually probably 16-17 year olds) go out into the world and start killing off the rebel warlords. At first this works, but soon complications set in

It's a rather brutal movie, and quite bloody, although not particularly realistic blood. And like many of his films, it's really long (the US release is just over 2 hrs, apparently the Japanese version is 2 1/2).

On the one hand, it is a fairly thought provoking movie. Most of the people the ninja-kids fight against actually don't seem to be particularly villainous. In fact (and I wonder if this was the point), their master is probably the most villainous person in the movie, or among them. But on the other, I'm not sure having characters who are the protagonists that are unlikeable makes for a good movie. The ninja-kids weren't very interesting.

Like much of his films, the action scenes are generally more stylish than action-y. There's a whole lot of them, though.

Woohoo! Legend of Heroes III announced for US release...

2006-12-13T17:57:00.000-06:00

I think. There's a press release @ Gamebrink, and Gamestop now shows it in their database....only $30, too.

Undercover Hidden Dragon (DVD)

2006-12-13T00:57:00.000-06:00

This is a Hong Kong movie which just came out on DVD in the US (at least it just came out on Netflix, where I got it from). I honestly haven't laughed so much in a long time. This is a very funny, very silly, very stupid movie, one that is a parody of various other Hong Kong films (and a few non-HK films as well, like Pulp Fiction and the Transporter).

The main character played by Ronald Cheng, is a slacker of sorts, who suddenly is told by a trio of beautiful women that he is actually an undercover cop, but has apparently lost his memory. He's enlisted to infiltrate the organization of a triad boss, also played by Ronald Cheng (though this isn't obvious, the two characters look a lot different).

He does this for a while, but then apparently in effort to parody a bunch of other movies, it takes some very strange plot twists, basically involving his friendship with his large (somewhat Sammo Hung-esquire character) roommate, who has a crush on one of the lady cops.

But he's then drawn back into working for the police again as an undercover mole in the crime organization, and it starts to again parody a different sort of movie genre (which I don't want to spoil).

It's just really all over the place. It really is like Scary Movie or Airplane where they take a bunch of other movies and sort of make a pastiche out of them. If you haven't seen those movies, you won't get the parody aspect of it, but there are a numerous sight gags and just the main character acting dumb. By no means high brow comedy.

There are some action scenes, but these are parodies as well. While the action scenes are extremely well done and impressive, they are very much over the top and clearly meant to parody action movies. Especially cool is the bullet camera parody.

Don't expect a serious movie out of this, in terms of plot or characters. The plot makes little sense because so many elements are parodies, and the characters similarly are taken from other movies. Check your brain at the door. The opening sight gag making fun of Initial D clearly tells you to. The joke per minute ratio isn't as high as Airplane, nor is it quite as over the top, but it's within spitting distance...

Ford Street Racing

2006-12-11T19:37:00.000-06:00

Ford Bold Moves Street Racing is yet another iteration in the "Ford Racing" series. There have been I think 4 of them on the PS2 and Xbox (and a couple on the PS1), but this is the first to appear on the PSP. As a Mustang owner ('73 Convertible), I guess I am the target audience for these games. I haven't bought all of them, but I did like Ford Racing 2, and so was hoping for something like that on the PSP. Instead, it's something still fairly fun, but somewhat deeper and more arcade like than that title.

Despite the name of the game, it's not really "Street Racing" in the commonly used sense of the world - that would be illegal racing. This is just normal racing, but on real city streets - apparently based on Los Angeles. (The original name of this game was apparently "Ford Street Racing: L.A. Duel", but the Ford PR people must have stuck that "Bold Moves" silliness in there, as that is the name of their PR campaign to explain how the company is turning around).

Gameplay:

Basically there are 3 gameplay modes: Quick Race, which dumps you into a randomly generated race; Career, the meat of the game; and Arcade, where you can pick among car and track types you've unlocked to set up your own race.

Career, the main mode, progresses fairly non-linearly. You start out with one race location unlocked, then win that, and 2 more race locations are unlocked. Each Race location consists of one series or cup race (that is, where you do multiple races and win points, and the winner is the one with the most points), and 2 challenges, which might be races, or other things, like exceeding top speed on a certain part of a track, or passing so many cars in a time period.

While it's no means "Ford Turismo", you do have money and a garage and have to buy new cars. No car modding or anything like that, and you can simply pick from a handful of colors (and change this when you race). Most cars start off locked, so you have to unlock them (usually be doing a challenge) to purchase them.

There's actually two halves to career mode - Solo & Team. Solo is just you racing, while team racing is you and a computer AI driver racing with you. Crew racing is actually sort of the new big thing in racing games, I think Juiced started it, then this had it, and now NFS: Carbon has it as well. It adds a new element in that you can switch control between your cars, and use some special commands - Block (which keeps other cars from passing) and Boost (which make you go faster). In practice though, they really aren't worth the effort using - especially switching cars because even if you are in the lead, the AI will have crashed your old car by the time you take over the other car and you will soon pass your old car.

The driving model is by no means a realistic experience - although cars do seem fairly accurate in terms of how fast they can go, handling is arcade like, that is, very easy to make turns without slowing down. There is a definitely feeling of weight and how it's distributed - for instance, the pickup trucks do feel light in the back, while the larger cars feel somewhat boatlike.

The AI of the computer racers is pretty bad. No, make it the AI is about the worst I've seen in a racer. First off, it clearly uses a "rubberband" system, that is, the AI cars performance is based on how you do. Very obvious - one second you will be way out in front, doing the maximum speed of your car. Then boom, from out of nowhere comes an AI car (of the same model as yours), just blowing past yours.

Normally I hate that, because it seems rather unfair. However, it seems to be the only way to make the AI drivers competitive, because they simply cannot drive. They have trouble just doing straight lines. In races with a lot of cars, this is more like a destruction derby or a Kennedy family reunion than a race. There is actually a damage system in the game, but it seems entirely cosmetic (thankfully, given the AI).

This artificial dumbness may be deliberate though, as a way of setting the difficulty. Later races in the game tend to have AI opponents that can drive in a straight line. But for most of the game they're just amazingly bad. You'll see the AI spin out, tip over, and just veer into a wall while going down a straightaway. And crash into you.

All in all, the racing actually reminds me a lot of the Project Gotham Racing series, minus the Kudos system.

As I mentioned, the tracks are all supposed to be set in L.A. I guess this is nice if you like L.A., but for most of us, it means that the tracks are not very exciting. And some parts seem familiar from other racing games also set in L.A. (Like Street Racing Syndicate, which at least had Free Roam). Most of the tracks are urban, but there are a few highway tracks.

Graphics/Sound:

The graphics in this are strange. The polygon count seems high, the car models are impressive (and include damage modeling, complete with flapping trunks and bumpers), but the textures look funny sometimes. Mostly it's when they are in shadows, but sometimes in the daylight, the textures look very grainy. I guess this is dithering, perhaps to save texture memory? I've heard some PSP games do that, but this is the first I've really noticed it.

The lighting is quite nice (though no night races, so hard to judge). One thing I liked is how the gas cap on the back of the older mustangs is nice and shiny. You don't usually see chrome effects like that in games, much less on the PSP.

Also really nice looking are the trees. Sometimes in PS2 games, the trees look like cardboard cutouts. Not these - these almost look like next gen trees.

The frame rate is very smooth, even with 6-7 other cars on the screen, and there is really no perceptible pop-up (just once in the while in the very distance) or texture warping. On the other hand, the sky/landscape backdrop sometimes looks very blurry and low-res (again, to save texture memory?)

The sound is pretty uniformly bad. Cars do not sound anywhere near like they should. Just way too quiet. There is no music at all while racing. You do get some tire squealing noises, but they actually sound more like a crowd "oohing" and "aaahing" than tires.

Loading Times:

Not bad at all. The game itself only takes about 25 seconds to load, and once at the main menu, you don't have to load until you enter a race, which takes about 12 seconds or so. About the least of any PSP racer that I've played.

Final Thoughts:

The basic gameplay is quite fun, although this seems largely in spite of the product as a whole (at least the boring tracks and stupid AI). The Project Gotham Racing-lite gameplay is not what I was expecting or hoping for (I wanted the somewhat realistic Ford Racing 2), but I found myself playing until my hands were sore - it's really quit addictive.

For a budget title, it's a pretty good game. Now that Midnight Club 3 is only $20 (and they've apparently fixed the loading times), that is probably the best budget racer for the PSP. But this is not bad at all. 7/10. Higher if it had more interesting tracks.

Dick Francis - Under Orders (Novel)

2006-12-02T03:05:00.000-06:00

I'm not sure how long ago I started reading Dick Francis's novels, maybe 6-7 years or so. But in that time I read pretty much everything he wrote, so I would look forward to his new ones. But then his wife passed away, and he stopped writing for a while. (There were some rumors about his wife actually writing the books). But now he's back with a new one after a few years.

Like pretty much all his novels, (since he was a jockey), it's somewhat related to horses. This features his only (I think) recurring protagonist, Sid Halley, a jockey turned P.I. (for lack of a better word) after his hand gets crippled in a steeplechase accident, in I think his 3rd novel. Usually his novels feature brand new people, so I wonder if he picked Sid Halley because he felt comfortable with him, or perhaps if he wanted to make sure he gave him one last go-round (so to speak) (since Mr. Francis is not getting any younger himself).

At any rate, it's definitely a Dick Francis novel. Perhaps a bit less brutal than the previous Sid Halley novels (which were kinda gorey), but still somewhat violent. While I'm not sure the plot makes all that much sense, it's an enjoyable read full of fairly interesting and sufficiently villainous characters. Also very modern in terms of technology, much of it revolves around internet betting. Not his best work, and if you aren't already a Dick Francis fan, it probably wouldn't convert you, but enjoyable for his fans (like me).

Rappan Athuk Reloaded (first draft)

2006-12-02T03:01:00.000-06:00

Product Background:

Rappan Athuk: Reloaded is a compilation of Necromancer Games' previous Rappan Athuk d20 system modules, combined with some new material, all in a boxed set. It's priced at a staggering $75, partly because it's a limited edition product, with only 1000 copies being printed, each numbered and signed by the heads of Necromancer Games.

There was some controversy about this. Firstly because it was originally meant to be competitively priced hardback ($40-ish, given the page count), with a decent sized print run. That would have been my first choice as a consumer, then changed to a limited edition, high priced boxed set.

Secondly, the head of Necromancer stated that Amazon.com would not be getting any copies (relevent because Amazon.com offered an insanely low pre-order price of $22). However, that not only turned out to be false, in that they did get some copies and honored that pre-order price, they've been offering copies of it well after the initial pre-order period, albeit for a somewhat higher price ($47).

Some feel this was an honest mistake, others feel it was merely a ruse to get more people to pre-order direct from White Wolf/Necromancer themselves. Who knows? All I know, is I was convinced not to pre-order from Amazon.com, but did end up getting one there (#200) at the higher price. So I still got a pretty good deal.

Thirdly, while this is available in PDF form, the price of the PDF is quite high - $50 or so, higher than the Amazon.com price for the print product.

I think the whole mess has left some fans somewhat irked at Necromancer. Myself included. So take the rest of this review with that in mind, though I try to be objective.

The Product Itself...

Rappan Athuk is designed to be something of a killer dungeon. Not the largest, perhaps not even the deadliest, but it's called the "Dungeon of Graves". Not because it's run by Peter Graves, but because of its lethality. Apparently from the notes, it was the megadungeon in the game of one of the heads of Necromancer games, and is about 25 years old, and has killed about 500 player characters in that timespan.

It's basically set in a mountain, and is about 15 levels in size. More actually, because some levels have multiple sections. It's not a linear or completely horizontal, but vertical, and there are difference entrances and exits to various levels. So to a certain extent, players can explore it in various different manners, and come and go (rather different than the other megadungeon on the market for d20, the World's Largest Dungeon).

The backstory is fairly simple - basically a group of followers of Orcus (the demon-god of Death) lost a war vs the armies of good, and fled. They found a hollowed out mountain (apparently old volcano) and set up shop. And thus Rappan Athuk was born. (No explanation for the name itself, though).

As such, much of the dungeon is filled with worshippers of Orcus, or various minions of his.

You get 3 books with this. One big book, which describes the 15 levels. One smaller book, which contains stats for the monsters and NPCs in the dungeon. And one small book, which contains the maps of the dungeon.

The Dungeon: Levels One through Five

Level 1: The Lair of the Dung Beast (4 pages)

The main entrance (sorta) for RA. This for lower level PCs, but has a couple complications. First off, the Dung Beast, which is a mimic who often poses as a toilet. He's basically unkillable. Also a bunch of wererats. Kind of a dull level. 4 pages

Level 1a: The Temple of the Final Sacrement. (6 pages)

This is another entrance to Rappun Athuk, but is somewhat hidden, and generally for mid level (10 and above) parties. This is a more interesting level, in that there are various tests and puzzles the parties must past to get through it. 6 pages

Level 2: Marthek's Place & Ambro's Base (5 pages)

This is a short level. Marthek is a crazy barbarian, Ambro is a stupid ogre.

Level 3: Beware of Purple Worms (6 pages)

As you might guess, this is full of purple worms. But also rats and umber hulks. And a Rakshasa

Level 3a: The Well - Zelkor's Lair (7 pages)

This level is the home of Zelkor, a spectre of a wizard.

Level 3b: Down the Well (11 pages)

This level is for very high level character (18+), and is the home of the Ravager, a rather nasty sort of critter which is nigh on unbeatable. Basically, the PCs shouldn't go here because they will almost certainly get killed.

Level 4: The Upper Temple of Orcus (6 pages)

This is the 1st of 3 Orcus temples in the place. As you might guess, it's full of Orcus's followers, as well as Max, a "surprisingly intelligent" Otyugh. Meant for 10th level or so characters.

Level 4a: The Upper Caverns (5 pages)

Not much here, pretty cavernish stuff - fungus, goblins, basilisks. Toughest bit are a vampire and his girlfriend.

Level 5: Banth's Lair & the Wight Catacombs (6 pages)

Banth is an evil wizard, who does experiments on dead critters. He's been given protection by Orcus, thus the wights and zombies around the places. He is the first of two evil wizards to have an apprentice who is not evil, but a slave.

Level 6: The Maze (6 pages)

This is obviously a maze, and houses a couple interesting locations.

Level 6a: Caves & Caverns - The Lair of the Spider Queen (5 pages)

More caves and cave stuff. The Spider Queen here is actually just a human wizardress.
There's a Who reference here - a spider named Boris.

Level 7: The Gates of Hell (7 pages)

If the PCs want to take out Orcus, they have to go to here. This is the first step on the path. There's actually a 3 headed dog guarding the place, but also some Mind Flayers

Level 7a: The Hall of Kazleth, the Phase Mintaur King (3 pages)

Has a nasty Minotaur and his crew - they can phase in and out. Also some goblins and a tomb

Level 8: Caves & Caverns - The Tomb of the Evil King (5 pages)

More cave stuff. Some scorpions and a Beholder. Some more goblins, and the evil King himself, who is undead. The backstory for him is a bit confusing, because it makes reference to a living Halfling in Bard's Gate, but that seems too recent to me.

Level 8a: Tomb of the Beacon (9 pages)

Now this is one of the levels in the dungeon that is really different. The Beacon in the title is a magical artifact which is housed here, along with the remains of its former owner, who was entrapped on this level by the forces of evil that built the dungeon. (Finding the artifact is easy enough, but freeing it is another matter).

What makes it different, is that it's inhabited by a colony of Flumphs. Flumphs have been callest the most useless (or maybe most pointless?) monster ever. They are sort of floating jellyfish.

Also on the level is an Beholder and a Roper, which are at odds with the Flumphs.

Level 9 - The Lower Temple of Orcus (4 pages)

The 2nd temple of the big O in this dungeon. Fairly standard, but has a few twists like a maze and a pack of displacer beasts.

Level 9a - Caves & Caverns - The Hydra's Lair (7 pages)

While pretty much self explanatory, besides the hydra, there's a bunch of other interesting places, like a tomb and a gate.

Level 9b - The Well of Agamemnon, Upper Level (5 pages)

No, it's not THE Agamemmnon, it's a different one. This one is a wizard (although sometimes in the text called a sorcerer), not a tragic Greek king. There's sort of a Greek link to him, his girlfriend was a priestess of Hecate, who got turned into a statue.

Level 9c - The Well of Agamemnon, Lower Level (5 pages)

This is where Agamemmnon actually hangs out. He's a vampire now, so he apparently doesn't do much but stay in his crypt (Oh yeah, I know if I were an immensely powerful immortal sorcerer), that's what I'd do)

Level 9d - The Bloodways (21 pages)

By far the biggest level of the dungeon. This actually has no map, it's everchanging, so the PC's passage through it is handled by a flow chart

Level 10 - The Lava Pit (5 pages)

Level 10a - The Great Cavern (10 pages)

Level 10b - The Goblin Outpost (5 pages)

Level 10c - The Talons of Orcus (8 pages)

Level 11: The Waterfall and Akbeth's Grave (6 pages)

Level 12 The Slave Pits (10 pages)

Level 12a - Grezneck (or, The Goblin City and the Hall of the Titan Cyclops) (14 pages)

It's not just a dungeon! There's a city of Orcus worshipping goblins in it as well. Apparently the PCs are supposed to befriend these goblins somehow, and use this city as a base of operations. Although this seems only plausible for evil characters.

Level 13 - The Portal of Darkness (4 pages)

If the PCs want to battle Orcus himself, they have to go to this level to enter a portal to take them to Level 15, where he awaits.

Level 13a - The Goblin Barracks

Level 14 - The Chapel of Orcus (4 pages)

This is the 3rd temple of Orcus in the dungeon. It's pretty small.

There is a portal here that go to the first large Necromancer Games dungeon, Tomb of Abysthor (also a much better dungeon).

Level 15 - The Den of the Master (3 pages)

This is the lair of Orcus himself. Or at least his "Avatar" (I hate that "Avatar" stuff, way too 2nd edition in feel). At any rate, he's pretty tough. In theory, he's supposed to be beatable, if the PCs have destroyed his 3 temples in the dungeon, because his stats aren't as high.

Even then, it seems unlikely that 20th level chracters could. Epic would be more of a match.

Final Thoughts (I really need a catchier name for the last part of the review)

I think it suffers from a lot of problems. Both the dungeon itself, and the product form.

First off, the dungeon doesn't have a lot of variety. 3 levels are basically the same thing, temples to Orcus. Oh sure, the specifics are different. But not that different.

Even some of the NPCs are basically the same. Like two different NPCs forced to be apprentices to evil bad guy wizards.

Secondly, it's not the easiest to use in a game. It's fairly high level (probably 10th minimum) and the PCs have to make the trek to it, where there are a number of fairly high level beasties. I really cannot see many players wanting to do this.

Lastly, the product form is less than ideal. Having the entire dungeon in one rather stiffly bound, perfect bound, softcover book, makes it very hard to use. Unless you want to break the spine, you can't lay it open on a table. Thankfully the maps are in another book.

I also think that the main dungeon book seems "padded" by the format they chose to use. By having something like 32 different chapters for the dungeon, you end up with well, almost 32 pages of white space when you consider the chapter header and the last page which is usually not close to being full. The outer margin isn't exactly small, either.

Ultimately, this is really only a product for collector's, I think. While parts of the dungeon are certainly useable, I think most people looking for an adventure will not find this product terribly appealing.

Deadly, yes, so DMs wanting to kill PCs might like it. But for the life of me, I cannot imagine that playing in it for more than a few sessions would be much fun. Too deadly without much in the way of reward, and far too repetitive, dull, and static.

From what I've read of the action 1st edition (and earlier) dungeons of Gygax, and Arneson and company, the designers of Rappan Athuk have completely missed the point.

Activision Hits Remixed (Final)

2006-11-28T20:13:00.000-06:00

Introduction:

The Atari VCS (or 2600) was the first really popular video game console. I actually owned a pong/squash/lightgun machine before it, but the VCS was cool because it was in color, and you could buy different games for it.

Most of the early games were done by Atari themselves, but 3rd parties started making them in the early 80s. Activision was perhaps not the best of these 3rd parties, but probably the most successful. This game is basically a compilation of all the Activision games for the 2600 (minus a few arcade conversions licensed from other companies).

Gameplay:

How well do the games hold up? Well, most of them, not so well, honestly. Part of the trouble is, Activision was mostly known for colorful graphics more than gameplay. So most of the games are extremely simple, and the graphics still look pretty crude by todays standards (if still somewhat more colorful than other old games).

There are only a couple complex games - Space Shuttle, in which you pilot a space shuttle to a space station and return; and Starmaster, which is basically an action version of the old Star Trek style games, where you had a big map and would have to travel sector to sector to kill a certain amount of aliens and manage your energy.

Most of the other games really only have one screen, or gameplay type. Still, like most old games, the shooters still hold up pretty well. Chopper Command, basically a Defender clone; Megamania, basically a vertical shooter like Space Invaders (but faster paced) is okay, but at least on my PSP, there's some blurriness due to the LCD. Spider Fighter is pretty fun. It sounds like a Centipede clone, but plays almost more like a Galaga style game (minus the ship capturing).

Pitfall and Pitfall 2, probably the first two platform style games, still hold up fairly well as well. Basically you jump and run past objects, or swing on vines to go from screen to screen. Pitfall is pretty much just a repetition of the same screen over and over, but Pitfall 2 is a full fledged "world" that you explore, with a myriad of enemies and objectives.

Also something of a Platformer is Keystone Kapers. Basically you play a cop and have to catch a criminal who has just robbed a shopping mall. You have to go through the mall dodging things like balls and model airplanes and radios. I thought Keystone Kapers was overrated then, and now, it still isn't much fun, because it's basically the same thing over and over, it's just each time they add one more obstacle. One of the prettiest 2600 games though.

There's only a couple of board games, Checkers and Bridge. I don't know how to play Bridge, and I don't like Checkers to begin with, so I haven't tried them. Some of the sports games are still kind of fun. Tennis plays almost exactly like modern day Tennis games, very little has changed, except the graphics. Hockey is sort of fun. Boxing is pretty bad.

There are some other famous games. Laser Blast, which basically consists of a UFO blasting tanks in a wave of three. This is one of those games that is more about endurance than skill, since you can play forever once you know how. Stampede, where you round up cows (not much fun). Barnstorming, where you fly through barns and avoid windmills. River Raid 1 & 2 - the first really is a shooter, but the 2nd tries to be more of a flight sim, but ends up being annoying to play.

Besides just Activion games, it actually has a few Imagic games. In its day, Imagic was probably the 3rd most popular developer after Activision and Atari, and probably my favorite. They had sort of "shiny" graphics, hard to describe, but it was a pretty cool looking style. This includes some their better games, Atlantis, which is basically sort of like Missile Command; and Demon Attack, a vertical shooter sort of like Phoenix (and quite good); and one of their worst games, Moonsweeper, which seems to be Gravitar clone. (At least I think it's the worst, others seem to like it).

Sadly, no Cosmic Ark which is one of the best 2600 games made and the sequel to Atlantis. (After Atlantis gets destroyed, you see the Cosmic Ark fly off into space).

One thing though. I don't know if its me getting old and my reflexes are slower, but some of the games seem faster than I remembered. Which makes them somewhat harder.

Presentation:

This is where the product really shines. Considering it's a budget title, they could have gotten away with doing a simple port of Activision Anthology. But they completely re-did the interface to fit the PSP and its controls, and took advantage of the large memory card size to allow you to save the game-state of all the games. That is, it lets you simply stop playing a game, and return to it later right where you left off. It even uses this as the screenshot when you scroll through the games.

Speaking of scrolling, that's probably the only real complaint I have - there's 40-something games in it, and you have to scroll through them one by one. They are in alphabetical order, and it scrolls fast (no loading at all in this once the main program loads), but still can be annoying.

Graphics/Sound:

The graphics are exactly like the original games. So are the sounds, as near as I can remember. The game default to the original ratio, but you can expand it out to fill the entire screen (this reduces the access to some of the controls, so you can't really play all games like this)

There's a 12 song 80s soundtrack, including some of my favorites, "Take On Me", "Safety Dance", "It's My Life", and the short version of "Tainted Love". Could have been better, and it definitely gets repetitive, but for a budget release, it's extremely good (and how many of these compilations actually have a soundtrack to begin with?). Unfortunately, you can't skip a song while playing, you have to exit to the main menu and skip. Only takes a few seconds, but could have been done a little better, maybe.

Final Thoughts:

I really didn't like the original Activision Anthology for the PS2 much, because it was something of a hassle to use, in terms of loading speed, and honestly, a lot of these games weren't that great to begin with 25 years ago. This on the other hand, is much better. And I think the portable format simply fits playing old classics better, since most of them are simple and can be enjoyed in a few minutes.

I'm still not crazy about most of the games, but this is just about as good as a old compilation of Activision games could be (only real way to be better would be to include more Imagic games, and Activision games from other platforms from the era, not just 2600). So I'm giving it a B+, or 8/10 here.

(I'm tempted to give it a 9/10, but having Atlantis but no Cosmic Ark is just wrong. It's like Cagney without Lacey. Or Ponch without Jon)

Hot damn! Emergency! Season 3 is announced...

2006-11-28T15:23:00.000-06:00

I was afraid they had pulled the plug on the DVD releases for Emergency! The first two seasons came out within 6 months of each other, but now there's been like a 15 month delay, I think. But due out in Feb 2007.

Amazon.com sucks (or blows)...

2006-11-23T13:48:00.000-06:00

I think I ranted about their stupid delayed shipping policy. But now I'm mad about them again, over the $100 Xbox 360 deal.

No, I really didn't expect to get one. But it would have been nice if the page had even loaded! Surely they should have expected massive, massive traffic.

Activision Hits Remixed

2006-11-23T13:46:00.000-06:00

The Atari VCS (or 2600) was the first really popular video game console. I actually owned a pong/squash/lightgun machine before it, but the VCS was cool because it was in color, and you could buy different games for it.

Most of the early games were done by Atari themselves, but 3rd parties started making them in the early 80s. Activision was perhaps not the best of these 3rd parties, but probably the most successful. This game is basically a compilation of all the Activision games for the 2600 (minus a few aracde conversions licensed from other companies).

Gameplay:

How well do the games hold up? Well, most of them, not so well, honestly. Part of the trouble is, Activision was mostly known for color graphics more than gameplay. So most of the games are extremely simple, and the graphics still look pretty crude by todays standards (if still someonewhat more colorful than other old games).

Still, like most old games, the shooters still hold up pretty well. Chopper Command, basically a Defender clone; Megamania, basically a vertical shooter like Space Invaders (but faster paced) is okay, but at least on my PSP, there's some bluriness due to the LCD. Spider Fight is pretty fun. It sounds like a Centipede clone, but plays almost more like a Galaga style game (minus the ship capturing).

Pitfall and Pitfall 2, probably the first two platform style games, still hold up fairly well. I thought Keystone Kapers was overrated then, and now, it still isn't much fun. One of the prettiest 2600 games though.

There are only a couple complex games - Space Shuttle, which you pilot a space shuttle to a space station and return; and Starmaster, which is basically an action version of the old Star Trek style games, where you had a big map and would have to travel sector to sector to kill a certain amount of aliens and manage your energy.

Also has a few Imagic games. Imagic was basically the 3rd best (although my favorite) developer for the 2600, after Activision. This includes one of their better games, Atlantis, which is basically sort of like Missile Command; Demon Attack, a vertical shooter sort of like Phoenix (and quite good); and one of their worst games, Moonsweeper, which seems to be Gravitar clone. (At least I think it's the worst, others seem to like it).

Sadly, no Cosmic Ark which is one of the best 2600 games made and the sequel to Atlantis. (After Atlantis gets destroyed, you see the Cosmic Ark fly off into space).

One thing though. I don't know if its me getting old and my reflexes are slower, but some of the games seem faster than I remembered. Which makes them somewhat harder.

Presentation:

This is where the product really shines. Consider it's a budget title, they could have gotten away with doing a simple port of Activision Anthology. But they completely re-did the interface to fit the PSP and its controls, and took advantage of the large memory card size to allow you to save the gamestate of all the games. That is, it lets you simply stop playing a game, and return to it later right where you left off. It even uses this as the screenshot when you scroll through the games.

Speaking of scrolling, that's probably the only real complaint I have - there's 40-something games in it, and you have to scroll through them one by one. They are in alphabetical order, and it scrolls fast (no loading at all in this once the main program loads), but still can be annoying.

Graphics/Sound:

The graphics are exactly like the original games. So are the sounds, as near as I can remember. The game default to the original ratio, but you can expand it out to fill the entire screen (this reduces the access to some of the controls, so you can't really play all games like this)

There's a 12 song 80s soundtrack, including some of my favorites, "Take On Me", "Safety Dance", "It's My Life", and the short version of "Tainted Love". Could have been better, and it definitely gets repetitive, but for a budget release, it's extremely good (and how many of these compilations actually have a soundtrack?). Unfortunately, you can't skip a song while playing, you have to exit to the main menu and skip. Only takes a few seconds, but could have been done a little better, maybe. Also despite the name of the game, none of the songs are remixes, just the regular version.

Final Thoughts:

I really didn't like the original Activision Anthology for the PS2 much, because it was something of a hassle to use, in terms of loading speed, and honestly, a lot of these games weren't that great to begin with 25 years ago. This on the other hand, is much better. And I think the portable format simply fits playing old classics better, since most of them are simple and can be enjoyed in a few minutes.

I'm still not crazy about most of the games, but this is just about as good as a old compilation of Activision games could be (only real way to be better would be to include more Imagic games, and Activision games from other platforms from the era, not just 2600). So I'm giving it a B+, or 8/10 here.

(I'm tempted to give it a 9/10, but having Atlantis but no Cosmic Ark is just wrong. It's like Cagney without Lacey. Or Ponch without John)

Small rant about Amazon.com...

2006-11-15T02:55:00.000-06:00

I have been using Amazon.com for years and years and years. Admittedly, not often, anywhere from 2-3 times a year to maybe 10 in a good one. But now they've apparently changed something, something which really really irks me.

Basically, they are trying to extort people into paying for their expensive shipping option. By adding a delay of a week to orders if you pick the "free" shipping option. And since the "free" shipping option replaces the cheap shipping option, it's either wait a week or get gouged on shipping. (Okay, gouged is perhaps too strong a word, it's only about $2 more than the actual shipping cost, but still they are making money off the difference).

I dunno when they started. I just noticed it this month when I tried to order NWN2 from them, and they didn't ship for a few days - I then cancelled, and ordered it from Gogamer.com, and it actually turned out to be less, too. And they used priority mail and only charged the actual cost ($4), while I think Amazon.com wanted $7.

It wasn't like that this summer. I ordred a couple things from them and used free shipping and I had no waiting time at all.

Guess it's time to find an alternative online book/stuff seller.

Neverwinter Nights 2 (PC) - First Draft

2006-11-15T02:52:00.000-06:00

Fun, tedious, funny, aggravating, compelling, but ultimately unrewarding

There's really two parts of Neverwinter Nights. The game that comes with it, and the toolset which will let you make adventures of your own. For the most part, the toolset is quite amazing, and also probably beyond the scope of most users. So this review focuses more on the game itself.

Gameplay:

There are generally three parts to a good RPG. The game mechanics it uses; the dungeons, questing, and situations you go through as a player; and the story it tells.

Like it or not, one of the most appealing things of RPGs (and what separates them from adventure games, really) are how your characters can go up in level or power, and improve in combat. This uses the D&D 3.5 rules, not exact, but pretty close. So it's got quite a lot of character building in it.

You can generally have 3 or 4 characters with you at all times. This is nice, much better than the original where you could only have 1 or 2, and much closer to real D&D, but the AI for the characters is somewhat lacking, and also somewhat glitchy. Mercifully, you can put them into "Puppet" mode, where they do only what you tell that, but that can be a lot of work. But necessary at times.

Probably the thing I hated the most about the game, were the dungeons you explore. Some of them, many of them in fact, are some of the most tedious, most aggravating ones I've played in years.

For instance, one dungeon requires you to find 6 ghosts, and have them participate in the ritual. Simply finding them all is a slog, but you then have to direct them to the ritual area by going around and turning lights off and on.

Most of the dungeons are just a drag, I thought. There's a lot of stupid running around, too. If you go the "good" route, you spend what seems like a lifetime working for the city watch, just to gain access to a part of the city to talk to a guy that advances the main plot. Running around, doing this and that. I thought it would never end. Just when you think it was over, you'd get another mission to do. A nightmare, almost.

You can manage a keep in the game, but it's a bit weird. It's actually very similar to the very very old computer games where you would manage a kingdom or planet simply by text messages. Each turn you could select something, and then you would get a text readout of the results. Except in this case, each "turn" happens when you talk to your major domo. It's not bad, but can be confusing because it's not explained very well at all.

One that was wasn't thought out well was the way your upgrade your armies armor and weapons. Basically, you have to be a prospector, and find "ore" all throughout the game. These are simply sections of the wall that look slightly different. The trouble is, most of these are in places accessible only in parts of the game before you even have a keep. So the first time through, you don't know to look for them.

Another thing not well thought out was the crafting system in the game. Basically you can make magical objects, armor and weapons. But it's all very convoluted, quite a hassle, and probably not even usuable unless you are playing a wizard.

Story:

The story doesn't suffer quite as much as the dungeons, but it could have used some work. The story is somewhat cliched, in that your main character is someone who is super special for mysterious reasons. What makes him special is probably completely new to anyone not familiar with D&D.

Part of the trouble is it's somewhat linear in your outlook. While you can play evil characters, only for part of the game, you end up being the respectable keep owner and lackey of Neverwinter Nights no matter what you do.

There are some really nice bits, like a Phoenix Wright style court trial (Sadly, you don't get to yell "Objection!", but it has some amusing moments)

To my mind, there are 3 story aspects in Bioware games (and their spinoffs, like this) that set them apart from other games: Romance, Character history, and interparty conversation.

Romance is generally a part of most drama, but sadly tends to be lacking in RPGs. While I don't expect Harlequin romance style stuff , having some romance in makes it more realistic, and perhaps more enjoyable for those of us who have reached puberty.

This has some romance, but basically only one option per sex, despite there being a lot of obvious candidates for your character's affection. What's worse is, there actually seems to be another option, but proves to be false, and is really just the designers yanking the player's chain. I get enough of that in real life, I don't need it in a game as well.

The characterization in this is quite good. The characters are all quite distinct, have interesting personalities and backgrounds. Usually in Bioware style games, you learn a little about an NPC, then they clam up, but eventually you gain their trust and they talk more about themselves. This still follows that formula to a degree, but it's much more abreviated - they dole out information about themselves very very sparingly.

The last thing that was prominent in Bioware games and its spinoffs was interparty interaction. That is, characters within your party talking to each other (and you). It's one of the more entertaining things of the games, especially the KOTOR series. In the first few hours, there seemed like there was a lot of that in this game. Especially the squabbling between the first few characters you get. But after that, there's almost nothing.

So anyway, while the story of the game had some really good moments, all in all, it could have used some more work.

Graphics/Sound:

Even with a high end computer, you won't be wowed by the graphics in this. That's not to say they aren't good - they are indeed extremely good, they just aren't very sexy. The detail of the textures is very nice, the lighting is impressive, the reflections and waves of the water are cool looking, but everything just looks a bit bland. By constrast, games like Oblivion will sometimes make your jaw drop in places, and that actually seems to require less in the way of computing power (at least in terms of your graphic card, this seems to use less memory).

Probably the most impressive things in this are the water (which does make it chug a lot) and the spell effects. And especially the shimmer due to heat (like over a hot road?). Very neat.

Some people will probably be disappointed that you just get to pick from a number of assorted premade models for your character, there's no face generation/customization like Oblivion, or the Sims 2. However, I was lucky and there was a model that is almost a dead ringer for me (I am one of those that usually plays himself in games). And you can change hair and skin color.

The sound is actually quite good. While not every line in the game is voice acted, the cutscenes generally are, and they do a good job. There are some really nice ambient sound effects, and the music is generally quite apropriate.

Final Thoughts:

It's funny, I found Knights of the Old Republic II (KOTORII), which Obsidian also made, to be somewhat tedious and unfulfilling in terms of NPCs, and with an unsatisfying ending. I thought perhaps it was just because KOTORII was rushed out for the holidays. But after playing NWN2 and finding the exact same problems, I have to think that maybe Obsidian just doesn't make games very well. Or at least ones I don't like.

I actually liked this a lot less than KOTORII, to be honest, but on the other hand, it does come with the toolset, so I'm giving it the same overall score, a C- (or 7/10). Because this game does have an immense amount of value - the original NWN saw hundreds of user made modules, some of which were very good.

Guardian of the Realm (DVD)

2006-11-12T15:35:00.000-06:00

This is a horror/action movie. It's very much a low budget one, but suprisingly good, I thought. Basically it's about a secret ogranization who hunt demons. It's set (and filmed) in LA. The main hero is this Australian guy with sideburns, and he teams up with this blonde from out of town. They stumble across this dastardly plot by an ancient evil demon lady.

It works because while the acting is not good, the script is. The dialogue, and even the plot, flows nicely. The characters are very likeable.

In a way, it almost seems like a pilot for a show, but there is a tiny bit of nudity, so I guess not. (Though the pilot for Poltergeist: The Legacy had some as well). B+

Double Tap (DVD)

2006-11-12T15:25:00.000-06:00

This is an action/crime movie from Hong Kong. It's actually about a gun instructor (the double tap is a shooting technique) and his girlfriend. Basically he kinda goes crazy, and start shooting people for fun, after discovering he likes it. And the police chase him. And he goes after the police.

It's a long movie, and it kinda drags, especially in the begining, which is all about gun range shooting. After he goes crazy, it picks up a little. But the trouble with the movie is that no one in it is particularly likeable - not the crazy guy, not his girlfriend, not the cops.

The Sims 2 Pets

2006-11-03T16:09:00.000-06:00

I just met a pet and it was super cool!

At least, that's what a sim thinks when he or she mets a pet. If you think pets are "super cool", then you should like this EP. If you think anything less of them, then you might be somewhat disappointed.

Pets is the 4th expansion pack for the Sims, which introduces pets to the game. That's pretty much it - there's almost nothing in the expansion pack except pets, except for one themed set of 50's space age furniture. No new hair, no new clothes, no new jobs (for sims, anyway). Just pets.

Gameplay:

While the name of the expansion pack is "Pets", the emphasis of it is on cats & dogs. Much like real cats & dogs are almost like humans, but not quite, so are sim pets almost like sims, but not quite. They have needs, but no aspirations. You can't really control them (unless you use a cheat), but you can have your sim try to train them. The personality of the cats and dogs are varied, but not so much as sims are.

Dogs come in two sizes, medium and small, while cats just come in one size. Not quite realistic, because the larger breeds like Newfoundlands are downsized quite a bit (they just don't look right as "medium" dogs, like in the game), and in real life, cats do come in big and small sizes (one of my cats is about 35 lbs, another is about 12), but understandable I guess.

They have 3 life stages as well. Puppy/kitten, adult, and elder. The lifespan is actually pretty much the same as a sim, and there is a aspiration object for sims which will let the pets add to their life. (Basically exlixir of life for cats/dogs).

For the most part, the interaction between the sims and the cat/dogs is fairly impressive. There are all sorts of commands a cat or dog can learn. Yowling on command, sitting up, shake paws. Besides commands, cats and dogs can learn a lot of different behaviors, which is generally either praising or scolding a cat or dog after they do something..

For instance, they can be trained to be agressive towards other animals, or friendly. Both have to be trained to not crew or scratch furniture. You can actually encourage bad behavior if you want.

There's about 3 different ways to show affection (awkwardly called "Give Love") and 3 ways to play with them (different between cats and dogs). For instance, dogs can play fetch, while with cats, sims pull out a feather teaser wand and the cat will try to kill it. Quite realistic, too, I use those to play with my real life cats, and the animations of the game is quite like how my cats play with it. They even try to kill it using their back legs.

That said, I think there could have been more. There's more than 3 ways to play with an animal in real life. And I think it should have been less standardized, that is, instead of sims being able to play with a cat with the feather wand, they should have to go to the store and buy different cat/dog toys.

There are some objects which animals can play with by themselves, but not many. Pretty much just a catnip mouse, a feather think that sticks to walls, and a chew tow. I really would have liked to have seen one of those balls in a cage things, among others.

Your sims can get a cat or dog in basically 3 different ways. They can either adopt a stray that comes by; they can call up a pet adoption service and pick a pet from a list; or you can create a pet in the create a family screen, and add it to a sims household. The latter allows you to create the dog or cat according to your whims. (Although, if you want a puppy, it's kinda tricky, because pet stores only sell adults and elders, and you can only make adults and elders in the game.)

The cat/dog creation is actually quite impressive, and I guess where Maxis spent more of their time. In a lot of ways, it's more like creating a face of a regular sim than anything else, you can choose various pre set things, then alter sliders. And then for the coat, it's more like decorating a car in a street racing game than anything else - you can add layers (markings, really) to a pet, of differing color and shape. It's not perfect - you can't do much with the layers except change the color, but there are a decent amount of premade ones. (You apparently can't make new ones, unfortunately).

Anyway, besides cats & dogs, there are caged critters. Basically fish, birds, and womrats. Basically you just buy a cage for one in buy mode, then have a sim "stock" it. Interactions with these are pretty minimal.

Graphics/Sound:

Nothing new graphically, except the sim critter themselves. They look pretty good actually.

Sound wise, there's quite a bit of new music, most of it by artists who appear on the Disney channel. If you like that sort of thing, you should be happy. If not, well, you'll be turning the music off like me.

And of course, pet sounds. Which sound realistic enough to confuse the heck out of my own pets. Especially the cat sounds.

Final Thoughts:

Even if you think that this expansion pack is just fine if it only had pets, I think it could have covered pets a little better. Definitely more toys and objects for pets to play with than came with it.

Ultimate Ghosts n Goblins (second draft)

2006-10-26T15:25:00.000-05:00

During the NES-SNES era of consoles, I was more into PC games. So I missed out on the original Ghosts N Goblins, or for that matter, most other 2D Platformers.

You play a knight named Arthur, who has to save a princess from some sort of evil guy. The story is meant to be somewhat cliched.

It's 2.5D, which is basically a cute way of saying it plays like a 2d game (that is, the screen scrolls from left to right with your guy at a constant distance from you), but features 3d graphics.

Gameplay:

Simply put, like most 2D platformers, the idea is to go from one side of a large scrolling map to the other, while navigating various obstacles and defeating or avoiding enemies.

Arthur doesn't run very fast, and he jumps somewhat awkwardly. He's pretty good with weapons though. Just what weapons he uses depends on what you pick up, but most of them are thrown.

At start, he can just jump once, but early one he picks up a magical device which will let him double jump - that is, jump, and while still in the air, jump again. He mostly obeys the laws in physics in not being able to change direction or alter his course once he had jumped, so you better be sure where he's going is clear. Once nice thing is that he can grab hold of things and hang from them - cliffs, chests, etc. So you don't have to make a perfect jump.

One thing about this game which is a little different from most platformers, is that you do a lot of attacking a lot with weapons. Arthur can use quite a large number of weapons, mostly thrown ones - a variety of knightly weapons like lances and axes, to things like firebombs. One, the whip, seems to be a melee weapon - that is, part of it stays in his hand. Each weapon has it's different plus or minus or special features. My favorite is the homing lance, which seeks out an enemy, but isn't as powerful as the normal lance you can throw. The downside, is, you can often accidently acquire a weapon you don't want. I don't like the firebombs, because they are sort of a close range weapon (but cover an area), which makes it not so useful against flying enemies.

Like most proper Knights, Arthur wears armor. This means that he can generally take a varying amount of hits before dying. Just how much depends on the difficulty level. You can also pick up more armor along the way. Like weapons, there's a variety of different armors, each with different powers. Shields, too.

Speaking of difficulty, this is really not an easy game. Even on the lowest difficulty, it's hard - you just get a whole lot more lifes than on other settings, and are able to withstand more hits before dying. That said, it's not too frustrating. Mostly there are just a lot (and constant) amount of enemies on screen to deal with. Jumping can be a problem too, but actually jumping on things isn't that hard, thanks to the ability to cling to the side of a platform.

The stage variety is really nice. Not only in terms of the environment, but in terms of how gameplay works. You might be going through a forest, then you are riding platforms in some bizzare thing.

Graphics/Sound:

This game is gorgeous. Very colorful, with rich and vivid graphics. Lots of little details, too. One of the nice things about the PSP is how sharp the screen is, and this game really puts that to good use.

To put it mildly, the screen is always busy with a large amount of enemies and often, moving terrain. And parallax scrolling and an animated background. But despite all that, I haven't noticed any slowdown at all.

The music is pretty good as well.

Final Thoughts:

There are probably two schools of thought on updating old games. Should they stick as much as possible to the original gameplay, just updating graphics, or should they overhaul everything, including the gameplay (like say how Castlevania was turned from a 2D Platformer into an Action RPG)? Neither is really right or wrong.

If you like the old school gameplay, then you should love this game. The only real complaint I can see is the length. It's not a super-short game, but can probably be finished in about 6-7 hours. You can go back and get secret stuff, but that won't appeal to everyone.

Also would have been nice if they included the previous games in the series as well. Most of them will be included in the upcoming Capcom Classic Reloaded, and maybe a sneak peak at them or just an original would have been a nice touch.

Actually, all in all, I think mainstream gamers might not like this game. Most notably because of the difficulty. Even on "Novice", it's not an easy game. And you are thrown right into the action, no tutorial, no explanation on how to fight or use magic.

The Fast and the Furious (PS2) Semi-final

2006-10-16T17:16:00.000-05:00

The original Fast and the Furious movie came out about the same time the Playstation 2 did. I remember because the first PS2 game I had came with a trailer for that movie. That game was Genki's "Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero", a street racing game.

Genki were big fans of the F&F movies, and a few years later, when the sequel "2 Fast, 2 Furious" came out, they were tapped to do a game based on the movie. This game was fairly different than their other games, and was going to be set in L.A. Unfortunately, after a few years of development, the game was cancelled.

Now for the 3rd Fast & the Furious movie, "Tokyo Drift", there is finally a game that has been released. This time around it's by Eutechnyx and Namco, developer and publisher of Street Racing Syndicate. Though somewhat ironically, it feels more like a combination of Genki's Tokyo Xtreme Racer and drifting games than Street Racing Syndicate 2.

Gameplay:

Like a lot of these games, you start off doing a race in a borrowed car. If you win the race, you get extra cash to buy a car with. If you lose, well, you're be hard pressed to lose.

There's a pretty decent selection of cars to begin with at start. Almost 20 cars, I think, ranging from the '86 Truneos and Focuses to one end, to Eclipses and Silvias on the high end, with RX-7s, Integras, 180SXs and more in the middle.

Basically once you have a car, you can free roam around Tokyo's highways. You can either engage in rollup races, where you come across another car, then flash your lights and then race until one car is ahead by 200m, or find a hot spot.

Hot spots are basically where teams of racer hang out, and you can race them in fixed races. These races are generally either destination battles (where the winner must cross the finish line first), top speed battles (where the car with the highest speed wins) or drift battles, which are only in mountain hotspots, where the winner is the car with the highest drifting point total. If you win, you get cash.

For the first half of the game, these are really really easy. And in many cases, you can do them again and again. So cash really isn't a problem.

As you win, you unlock more opponents, including bosses, and more cars to buy, and new types of stickers and drift charms in the tuneup shops. And more and more hot spots will open up. There is are 80 different hotspot races to win in all. Each opponent has a bio and car, and many of these are based on real world people from the world of drifting, while some are from the Fast and the Furious movies.

Overall, gameplay is fairly fun, but is hurt by two things. For the hot spot races, you have to put up with some serious loading time. You have to wait for the hot spot to load (20-30 seconds), then a reasonably short loading time for the race itself, then once the race is over, you have to wait for it to load again. It's extremely bad if you the autosave on, thanks to the glacially slow memory card of the PS2.

There is basically no loading in free roam mode (except for a pause of about half a second when an opponent is loaded, which actually just looks like a slowdown in the framerate), but it's hampered by the small size of the city, and the small number (and ease) of the opponents. Only about 40 opposing racers, and if the real Tokyo was this small, Godzilla could destroy it just by sitting down. (Okay, not that small, but pretty close).

Race variety is also a bit lacking. It's always just you and one other car, and there's only 3 types of races. I would liked to have seen drag races, and perhaps some circuit races on a racetrack or something.

The driving model is not overly realistic, but is more realistic than arcade-like. You do need to slow down for turns (unless you have mastered drifting), but cars do seem somewhat more agile in the game than real life. There is no damage in the game, but in an interesting twist, the walls are somewhat sticky, which eliminate the problem of "wall-riding".

Cars and Car Modding:

Since it's set in Japan, the car list is very Japan-centric. And since it's largely a drifting game, it's also drifting-centric, with most of the cars being rear wheel driven. But some some AWD and a few front wheel drives (like the Integra).

That said, you do some some good American cars are well. An old Mustang and a new one, plus some Mustang variants from Shelby and Saleen. Also some newer Corvettes, a Viper, and an old Chevelle. You don't find Hondas in most street racing games because they are very protective of their image, but this has a good range of them, including the NSX.

Car modding is pretty good. Basically in terms of performance, there are 5 different stages for various parts like engine, super/turbocharger, intercooler, brakes, etc. Usually a higher number is better, but not always the case, in terms of transmissions, where some are good for acceleration, others are good for top speed. And somewhat disappointingly, there is no tweaking of gear ratios. Also no replacement tranmissions with more gears for old muscle cars (most of which only have 4 gears, and so have a low top speed). You also can't do anything like lower a car, or tweak the downforce, or set brake bias.

Visual modding is both good and bad. The good part is that all the parts are pretty much real parts, licensed from real world manufacturers. The bad part is, there aren't all that many of them.

Pretty much all the usual stuff is there. Neons, venting colored gas, etc (no spinners, as far as I can tell, thankfully). Two new additions to the genre are drift charms and valve stem lights. Drift charms are basically little dangly figurines that are attached to the rear bumper. These seem to be pretty much all of Namco properties, like Pacman and from their various fighting games and Katamari. Stem lights are basically just little leds that go in the valve stem of the tire. These are illegal in the US for street use, I dunno about Japan, but they look quite cool in action. Makes it look like the wheel is lighted.

In terms of paint jobs, it's not great. You only get to choose from a selection of premade colors, about 30. You can pick between metallic, pearlescent, matte, and glossy, but none of them really look very good. And what's worse, on a lot of cars, the paint jobs are dithered, that is, you can see little dots on the car.

On the other hand, the game comes with a very nice vinyl system. Pretty much like from Forza, but with some improvements. The premade made ones aren't much, but you can do a bunch of layers (I think 32 per area), and there are options for letters and numbers and shapes and you can really re-size them. So if you have patience, you can do some really nice stuff.

Graphics:

The graphics are pretty good for a Playstation 2 game. It's somewhat tricky to judge though, because the game is set entirely at night, which means things can be a bit hard to see. Still, it's a very colorful game, with lots of lighting. Most other racers set in Tokyo (pretty much just the Tokyo Xtreme Racer series) were all just yellow, black and brown.

There's very good use of lighting. In fact, racing down some of the highways and tunnels felt more like I was playing 2001: The Game, as it is very trippy. I would have to think that epileptics might be bothered by this game.

The frame rate seems pretty solid. There is some slowdown occasionally, but only when an opponent is loaded, or a race is over, not actually during the race.

You only race against one other opponent, so it's not surprising that the car models are fairly well detailed. The only trouble is that (as mentioned), some paint jobs on some cars (the '05 Mustang in particular), the textures are dithered. That is, instead of being a solid color, you can see little alternating dots of color. At least in the replay and in the showroom/garage.

Sound:

There are two important things in a racing game when it comes to sound: Engine noise and music.

The engine noise in this is pretty good, I think. Most importantly, V8s sound like V8s, or at least, big engines. The other engines sound wimpier, but they are supposed to.

The music is quite a mixed bag. There's apparently a large number of tracks in the game, but a lot of them get repeated over and over.

But basically it's a mix of Japanese music (pop and some hip-hop, I think), hip-hop/rap, MTV rock, and generic guitar rock. The Japanese stuff works pretty well. I have no idea what they are singing, but it's catchy, even the hip hop, which I don't usually like. The rest is kinda annoying. But unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a way to select which songs you like or not. Also doesn't tell you what you are listening to.

Final Thoughts:

It's a fairly enjoyable game. I think it was rushed a little bit in order to make a release date that coincided with the release of the movie on DVD, and so is rough around the edges in places.

Still, it doesn't really add anything new to the genre. While it tries to be the most accessable drifting game around, I don't think it teaches it well. Basically just some videos and you get to try it youself (with no real explanation of what you are doing). And honestly, I found drifting to be easier (to do well, not just spinning and crashing into the rail) in Tokyo Xtreme Racer Drift.

I also think it's kinda short. While I dislike games where it takes forever to get good stuff (like say, Midnight Club 3), in this, you can get really great stuff only after an hour or two. I was 50% done after about 10 hours, and while I haven't finished yet, that's largely because my bedroom (where my PS2 is) has been invaded by my pets, making it hard to play action games (they get upset).

Also, the game assumes a lot of knowledge from the player. Do you know what a limited slip differential is? If you don't, you could end up being confused, because it's never explained in the game. But ironically, while it assumes the player knows a lot about cars, it doesn't offer the most advanced tweaks over a cars performance (gear ratios, ride height, etc).

That said, my real disappointment is with the free roam aspect. I knew it was just supposed to be the highways, but it still feels so tiny. Tokyo Xtremer Racer 3's version of Tokyo is much bigger. And there's only like 40 different free roam rollup races, all of them quite easy (the difficulty is finding them). But at the same time, it is a pretty good try, and even though most poeple (including me) might not notice, they really did try to make this a very authentic game. So I give a C+, or 7/10 here.

Ultimate Ghosts n Goblins (first scratchings)

2006-10-14T14:39:00.000-05:00

Dead Waves (DVD)

2006-10-11T03:56:00.000-05:00

This is a recent-ish (2005) Japanese horror movie. It's about a TV show which does stories on the paranormal, including a lot of people who are supposedly possed by evil spirits or demons. The story picks up with them doing a story on a possessed girl. (I think she's the one possessed, maybe the whole family). They go and film a sequence, which isn't too spooky, just looks like a crazy girl screaming.

Then there is a run in with a doctor, who is upset with the main protagonist (he's sort of the 2nd of command on the show, I'm not sure what his actual title is) because he feels that the show is really just exploiting mentally ill people. The protagonist denies this, but not very plausibly.

It then follows the family and the main protagonist for a while. Is it a real case of possession, or simple mental illness? (Not unlike The Possession of Emily Rose in that regard). This puzzle goes on for a while, then sort out of nowhere, the doctor comes back to the protagonist with some interesting data about whole people are killing themselves while the show is being aired live. This is the so called "Dead Waves" of the title.

Anyway, from that point, it gets kinda weird. I had trouble following what the heck was going on. And the ending, well, that made no sense to me. Sort of an interesting movie, though. Not scary, really.

Well, I guess complaining works...

2006-10-09T14:50:00.000-05:00

Scary that that title was remembered by Firefox (so I must have used it before). But Newegg.com finally came through with a refund. Whew.

Newegg.com customer service still sucks...

2006-10-06T20:29:00.000-05:00

Grrrrr. Does "Legendary" customer service ignore emails?

But on the plus side, I did today finally get a review copy of a game I had been waiting for. Which is nice.

Legendary customer service my #%#@#!#

2006-10-05T17:10:00.000-05:00

About a year ago I bought a video card from Newegg.com. About a month ago it went kaput, apparently. Just a tiny hair under the 1 year warranty. So I returned it for Newegg.com, hoping for a replacement.

At first, things went well. They sent me a RMA number. Then once they received it, they said they didn't have any more like it, but would give me a refund instead. Which was more than I was expecting, but great.

However, it's been like a month later, and no refund. On the one hand, I don't feel too upset, because I was thinking I would be lucky to get a replacement - a full refund never even crossed my mind. On the other hand, it pisses me off when people say they are going to send you something, and then don't. Especially when they brag about how great their customer service is.

It also sucks because it makes me not want to use Newegg.com ever again, and yet they have such low prices.

(I also hate companies which never send out review copies as they promised. Or prizes won in contests. Not that they should feel obligated to in the first place, but if you promise to send something, you really should follow through)

Bard's Gate (Pretty much final)

2006-10-03T19:16:00.000-05:00

Necromancer Games has been one of the biggest publishers of adventure modules for the d20 system. While most of them are fairly generic, they all tend to be set in the game gameworld. This mostly consists of having the same gods and referring to other Necromancer Games modules, but many of them do mention a city called "Bard's Gate".

Due to this frequent mention of the city, people have been expecting a sourcebook for Bard's Gate for some time. Since 2001 at least ("Tomb of Abysthor" mentions the sourcebook as forthcoming, along with an adventure called "The Wrath of Orcus"). But it finally has seen the light of day in 2006. Was it worth the wait?

Well, honestly, probably not. But what sort of thing does live up to that long a wait? Still, it is a good solid fantasy city, really only suffering from some blandness.

City Background

Bard's Gate is basically an independent city-state, ruled by a Burgess (one step below "Burger Queen", apparently). It's set in something of a wilderness area, along a trade route between two larger cities. It's a medium sized city, 20,000 to 35,000 people, depending on the time of year. It's about 800 years old, but doesn't have a heck of a lot of history (the timeline of history is pretty much in one small box).

In D&D, at least 3.x, cities have Alignments much like characters which sort of define how they operate ethically and morally. Bard's Gate is listed as being Chaotic Good, but seemingly differs from what I would think of as a Chaotic Good city. For instance, slavery seemingly is tolerated (which is neither good nor chaotic). There are fairly strict weapons and armor control laws. Rather than commerce being laiz faire, there are a staggering number of guilds, many of them overlapping. There's also a fairly strong police presence, as well as a number of private guards. All in all which would probably make the place Lawful Neutral at best.

The City Itself

The city has 16 different districts, each of which gets a chapter. This part of the book makes up about 100 pages.

Generally speaking, there's an overview of the district, followed by writeups of notable locations. Lesser NPCs have just their basic stats listed in the text (attributes and level and hp) while more important ones have full write ups in the back.

Locations generally get a few paragraphs devoted to them and mostly describe the place and its staff (and what drinks are served). For the most part it's good enough, though I would have liked to have seen some mention of who the regular patrons are. The people who run the place, especially a bar/tavern only make up part of the experience - the other customers are very important to.

A handful of locations do get a much more detailed treatment, including maps and room by room descriptions. These are generally the more important locations. For instance, a high priced Inn, a couple temples, a casino.

It's a fairly typical city. There are good sections, there are bad sections. There's a market section and a temple section. Thieves' Quarter. And docks. Usual stuff. Not all typical, though. One of the more unique districts is the Bard's College. Which is what the City is named after, I guess.

There is some silliness in some entries. For instance, there is something like a rock group. A bunch of barbarians called "The Accursed" perform at a bar in the Bard's College area, and it says that young female fans throw undergarments on stage as they perform. Kinda goofy.

Other oddities include a tavern run by female paladins, a leprechaun shoemaker, a sculptor who makes gargoyles (possibly a reference to Clark Ashton Smith's tales), a cannibalistic pie-maker, and a lothario halfling (which I have some trouble believing would be desirable to adult human women, but then again, they do have big feet, so maybe...).

It's all very interesting, but I would have liked to have seen something like an adventurer's guide to places. That is, sort of a listing of which shops they should visit, which temples provide things like raise dead to them, which wizards will do the same with stone to flesh and the like. A lot of that stuff is in the descriptions, but you have to pour through and take notes. But those things are what the PCs will likely be looking for.

More bars/taverns would also have been nice. As would adventure hooks for various places.

The Adventures

Two site based adventures are included. One is right in the heart of the city, and has the PCs investigating just what happened to the old Thieves' Guild (it died out somewhat mysteriously, and everyone who goes in, never comes out). The second is a gnoll lair outside of town.

I really like the one about the Thieves Guild. It uses a lot of custom monsters, so the PCs won't know what to expect. It also has a pretty good reward, because if they clear it out, presumably they now have a pretty swanky base in the middle of the city (albeit it's not clear who owns it anymore, if "finders, keepers" doesn't apply to houses).

The gnoll one is good if your PCs want to attack a gnoll fort. Which never did much to me personally, but some might get a kick out of it. It's fairly intelligently designed, so not a pushover.

The Gods of Bard's Gate

The modules from Necromancer uses a common group of Deities. Some are fairly standard D&D-ish and are derived from Mythology or certain fantasy writings. Orcus, Tyche, Hecate and Bacchus from Roman/Greek mythology. Some Norse gods like Hel and Freya and Thyrm. A couple Egyptian ones, Set and Ra. Gromm seems suspiciously like the Crom of Conan, though maybe not. Tsathogga, borrowed from Clark Ashton Smith.

No stats (and thus not very 1st Edition-ish), just a description and their domains, alignment, symbol, etc.

Other Stuff

There's a few new magic items, including a magical deck of cards which is pretty neat. The Deck of Prophecy, which doesn't actually fortell the future, so much as affect future events that are asked about. Some cards will give a bonus to certain die rolls involving that event, others give penalties.

A couple new classes - The Beggar and the Shadowmask. Both are somewhat flawed, I think. The Beggar is supposedly an NPC class, but misses the mark in realizing that NPCs classes are meant to be simpler than PC classes, not necessarily just weaker. So while it's weaker, it also has a bunch of special abilities, so it's a pain to actually make characters with.

The Shadowmask is a prestige class. Sort of a super-rogue. It uses a non-standard base attack bonus progression, something which really really irks me, and is generally a bad idea unless there is a good reason. There isn't one, I can see.

There are some new monsters, including some from the Tome of Horrors updating to 3.5 stats.

Layout/Art

It pretty much looks like every other Necromancer Games product. Fairly big margins, a lot of white space, but a very clean and nice looking layout that is easy to read. Good use of bold and larger, readable (ie, not too fancy) fonts for titles.

One thing they continue to do, which really irks me, is include the stats in the back of the book, and instead of giving you an exact page, just say "See NPC Appendix". Just how hard is it to say "see page xxx", instead? Yes, it takes some work to find the exact page number, but less than a minute or three each, and they had what, 5 years?

To make things worse, the NPCs in the NPC Appendix appear in a different order than they do in the main book. Or at least, the chapters do. So basically, if you plan on using the book, you'll want to write page numbers in.

Also weirdly, is that the NPC Appendix sometimes has a lot more information than just stats. Sometimes not.

The art is somewhat underwhelming. I would say a good chunk of the art in Necromancer Games products is done by one artist, Brian LeBlanc, who is also very very good. For some reason, he doesn't appear in this book. Instead are a bunch of different artists. They all seem to have a similar sort of style, which gives the product a coherent feel, but some are better than others. Indeed, some have a lot of trouble with faces or just people as a whole. It's not a bad looking book, but neither is it good looking, either.

Final Musings

It's a good, solid city usable in the majority of D&D settings. Kind of disappointing that there was no artwork from Brian LeBlanc, who illustrated so many of the original Necromancer Games adventures. Including the Tomb of Abysthor, which is a product you probably want to use in conjunction with this, since it's right nearby the city.

On the other hand, it was a bit sparse for a city book. So many sections of the city, but so few pages per section on average. And where are the random encounter tables? How can you have a city book with "1st Edition Feel" without random encounter tables?

If you compare it to the book I think really set the bar for d20 city books, Bluffside, it's pretty lacking in small touches as well (Like patrons of businesses, adventure hooks for every location, etc). But this book is far, far more generic and thus actually more useful to the average DM.

Dungeon Crawl Classics #34; Cage of Delirium (Rough Draft)

2006-09-19T15:04:00.000-05:00

The Dungeon Crawl Classics line of d20 modules from Goodman Games just keeps on going and going. But they aren't afraid to try different things, either. This is one of those different things.

Basically, it's a module that comes with a musical soundtrack. Or rather, it seems to be a module built around an existing musical soundtrack. Specifically, "Gates of Delirium" by Midnight Syndicate. Which is

Besides the cd itself, you get the inserts to put in a jewel case (which is a nice touch, and how I know the cd dates from 2001, according to the copyright notice on it).

The use of music in gaming can be helpful, but at times, it can be a distraction. Still, I remember when I first starting playing D&D, my friend would play the song "Dragon Attack" off of Queens latest (at the time) album, The Game, whenever a dragon would attack in the game.

I am a big music fan, but I am, I must confess, something of a snob when it comes to music (I don't mean to be, it just happens when most of the stuff you listen to only comes out on vinyl). I was honestly expecting to hate the music in this, and honestly, figured it would be very amateurish. But I was quite surprised - it's actually both quite good and professional quality.

The module

This is a somewhat unusual module for d20, in it takes place in a haunted asylum. I mean, how many D&D settings actually have asylums? About the only one it really fits would be Ravenloft, I think. I suspect it would probably be most useful for a d20 Modern game where the PCs were ghost hunters/paranormal investigators.

The asylum actually burned down (mostly) 40 years ago, and has a very tragic past. The head of the asylum had twin sons. Like all twins, one was good, one was evil. The good son ended up becoming a doctor at the asylum; the evil son was comitted to the asylum as a patient.

The good son ended up marrying a cured patient. This really drove his evil twin mad. So he concocted a scheme, whereby he would somehow switch places with the good twin. And he managed to pull it off. (I think I were a twin, and had a brother who was locked up in an asylum, I would get a tattoo saying "I am the sane twin" (or something to that effect)).

Anyway, now in place as the head doctor of the place (their father, the former head, having passed away before the coup), the evil twin had something of a reign of terror over the asylum. And when the wife of the good twin realized that they had switched places, the evil twin had her re-comitted. But not before she became pregnant. Which twin is the father, she didn't know.

His reign of terror went on for a while, some more tragedy struck, then eventually the patients rioted under the leadership of the good twin, and in the confusion, the place burned down. Killing almost everyone.

But the asylum and its dead would not rest peacefully. And so enter the PCs, to put them to rest. (There's really not a great hook for the PCs to get involved, though there are some examples given - the former head nurse being on her deathbed is one, another involves them being asked to by a local cleric).

The module itself takes up about 45 pages (the background takes up a good 5-6 pages, as do handouts) and about 40 keyed areas.

While there is some combat, a lot of the module consists of simply investigating the old place. It really is haunted by its history, and the PCs will encounter bits and pieces of it as they explore.

To get to the heart of the matter (the spirit of the evil twin) and confront him, they have to lower a necromantic energy barrier. This is done by doing various tasks - usually setting various spirits at peace. In the case of good spirits, doing something to make them happy (often by bringing them their favorite object which the evil twin took away and hid). That's right - while it goes against the DCC slogan, there are several NPCs in this that the PCs are meant to talk to, not just kill. The evil ones they can (and are supposed to) kill though.

Looks/Layout

To a certain extent, the DCC modules mimic the old TSR modules in how they look. Basically, little white space and a very simple layout. For the most part it's readable where there is a new area, but in the begining where there are no breaks, it can be a bit hard to read.

Final Thoughts

This is a rather unusual module in the Dungeon Crawl Classics line. While it definitely is still a "crawl", in that the PCs must comb the place in the course of the adventure, it's the only one of the line that I have where the background story is so vivid and so important to the module itself. It would actually make a decent horror movie, I think. Actually, now that I think about it, it would make a pretty good survival horror video game (in the vein of Silent Hill or Fatal Frame moreso than Resident Evil or Moonwalker). Definitely very memorable.

As mentioned, I do really think that an asylum like this really wouldn't fit most D&D settings, and many things, like the treatments and the place itself seem very 18th-19th centuryish, almost Victorian. So that does dramatically reduce the usefulness of this module. But on the other hand, it's not like the module pretends to be anything put a haunted asylum module, it makes no pretense of anything else, so the buyer does know what they are getting.

It's actually ironic, I recently got the first of Green Ronin's "Bleeding Edge" line of d20 modules, which also dealt with somewhat gothic horror (and as part of their slogan, takes something of a potshot at the DCC series). But this is far more "Bleeding Edge" than their initial entry.

Mansion of Shadows (d20) from Green Ronin

2006-09-19T14:58:00.000-05:00

This is the first in the line of "Bleeding Edge" adventures from Green Ronin. What exactly makes them "Bleeding Edge"? Good question. They give a list of 4 things: Good Story, Drop & Play (in terms of setting), Self Contained (in terms of rules), and Flexibility (in terms of game systems, at least d20 variants from Green Ronin themselves in the form of web supplements). I'm not sure any of that is all that new, but eh*.

This is from Robert Schwalb, an author whose worked I have really liked (Shadows in Freeport) and was sort of "meh" about (Big Trouble in Little Durbenford)**. So I wasn't sure what to expect. But early reports were good, and I tend to like modules about mysterious mansions with creepy families (Castle Amber for D&D, Morrick Mansion for 3.0).

The adventure itself...

It's got a very in-depth background, actually. But it can be summed up fairly quickly. Basically an evil cultist wants to perform a ritual to unleash a horrible evil upon the land. Most of the ritual involves this noble family, basically each one of the children of the family is possessed by a demon (or spirit) of one of the 7 Deadly Sins. But he can't get thrown into the mansion to complete the ritual, so he has to get it attacked by villagers so he can sneak in during the siege.

Although the module is 48 pages, it's a pretty short adventure. It consists of 5 basic scenes: The PCs saving one of the families kids from demons, and thus getting an invite to the mansion; some dinking around in town; them having dinner at the mansion and meeting the family; the PCs wandering around the mansion; the finale with irate villagers storming the mansion and the PCs interfering with the final part of the ritual.

I can't imagine the whole thing would take more than a session (3-4 hours) and a half. Maybe two if you dragged things out.

The reason the module is fairly lengthly in terms of page count while being somewhat short is that because while the adventure itself is somewhat railroad-ish, there's lot of extra info in case the PCs stray from the path, so to speak. You get the basics of the village in the area. You get a complete room by room description of the mansion itself (though it's not dungeon crawly at all).

However, I was expecting more attention given to the role-playing aspects. Most of the NPCs are covered rather superficially in terms of description. And in fact, because each of the family members is basically a parody of the 7 deadly sins, they have no real personalities. Servants get a line of description each.

The layout is nice and classy looking. The maps are also very decent. The art is okay, but a bit amateurish looking - hands and faces look a little funny (unless that's meant to be the style.)

Final Thoughts:

I think this gets a "meh" from me. It's not bad, exactly, but I didn't really like it, either.

First off, the plot of an evil cultist wanting to unleash hell is somewhat cliched. In fact, Green Ronin has a adventure with the same basic plot (though with very different specifics) in Hell in Freeport. The 7 sins theme is also worn out.

It's also rather tricky in a low-level adventure, because often the players will be just starting out. And because low level characters are fragile - for them, running away is often the best option for survival. In something like this, that can have serious consequences for your game-world.

Secondly, although it says the product is "Self-Contained", in reality it uses a lot of stuff (classes in particular) from various Green Ronin books. I do not consider it "Self Contained" to use a class from another book and not include the rules for that class, simply just a stat block and suggestions for other classes in case you need to change the stats. (This bugged me in "Shadows in Freeport" and that make no pretense about self-containment).

Similarly, I have some doubts about it's "Drop & Play" nature. Because of the whole 7 Deadly Sins theme, you need to have a campaign world where the 7 sins are well, sins. Yet in the real world, that's pretty much only medieval Western Europe. It started off as a list of 8 "temptations" or passions by some monks living in a desert, then evolved into the modern list of 7 for a variety of reasons that only make sense in part of our world, and because more than anything else, it's a catchy phrase.

This adventure would make a lot of sense for a game set in medieval Western Europe, like Ars Magica or Cthulhu Dark Ages, but just doesn't in a lot of D&D game settings, much less some d20 variants (including ones that Green Ronin provides stats for, like Thieves World and Black Company).

In fact, the module actually reminds me of a 60s Hammer horror movie, one of the ones based on a tale by Poe or some gothic author.

Thirdly, I think the module is too rushed, and not subtle enough. Rather than there basically being only role-playing scene with the family (the dinner), the creepiness of the family should have been spread out over a longer period of time. Say a week? At any rate, with more than just one basic event. And I feel that the creepiness of the family is just not that creepy. The 7 Deadly Sins aspect just makes them caricatures, not real people.

I would probably give it a 2.5, C-.

* I'm guessing the "Bleeding Edge" has to do with the somewhat dark nature of the module. For instance, one of the children lusts after his mother. It's implied that one of the NPCs was brutally abused by evil humanoids (Bugbears, I think) and driven crazy.

** Both of which I have reviewed, but I think those reviews were eaten in the great database crash at ENWorld. RPG.net should still have them.

Tomie (DVD)

2006-09-01T19:48:00.000-05:00

This is a Japanese horror movie. Shockingly enough, it's not about those creepy little black haired ghosts that kill people for some silly reason. Instead, it's more of a mystery and psychological drama, almost.

It's mostly about this girl (college age, actually) who is seeing a psychiatrist. Apparently she can't remember a period of time several years ago. A period of time which she thinks involved an accident, but actually involved a murder, where her best friend (named Tomie) was killed. Anyway, she wants to get her memory back.

In the mean time, a creepy detective comes up to the psychiatrist, and asks her about the college student. He then gives details of a case. Of how a woman named Tomie Kasomething or other was killed, but the body mysteriously vanished. And that there are earlier cases of a woman with the same name (and appearance) who were also killed, but again, their bodies vanished.

This kind of kills any real mystery in the movie, but it's the way that it's told that is very good. It comes off as real (and in how a real person would try to explain it). That's probably the strong suit of the movie, the characterization is very good. The movie itself really isn't that scary. It's very slow paced until the end, where you finally see Tomie.

The woman who plays Tomie is very very creepy. If this were ever remade in the US, Paris Hilton would be a great pick - she has the souless, creepy look down pat.

Moving Targets (DVD review)

2006-08-21T23:26:00.000-05:00

This a Hong Kong movie, a cop film, starring Nicholas Tse, Edison Chen, and Simon Yam (and Gillian Chung, I think. Probably mispelled a name or two).

It's the somewhat complicated story of 2 young cops and their fathers and families. One goes good, one goes bad (largely due to circumstances beyond his control).

Not much action. A gunfight at the begining that is over pretty quickly, and sort of made longer by using a in media res to start with, then re-winding to show the begining. And a couple other short ones later on.

Okay movie, but pretty predictable.

The Locker (DVD review)

2006-08-16T03:31:00.000-05:00

This is actually 2 movies on 1 DVD, The Locker and its sequel, imaginatively titled The Locker 2. (In Japan, it's called Shibuya Kaidan)

It's a Japanese horror movie. While not exactly like The Ring, it's one of those creepy ghost stories (and so more like Ju-on/The Grudge). In this case, it's a mysterious locker. There is an urban legend that if you put something in the locker, you will find true love or good luck. (Or something like that).

The first movie deals with 6 college students (or 20-somethings). They go on a camping trip, and on the way back they apparently stop off at this locker and make an offering. Then one by one they start mysteriously dying. Sorta. Some die, some go missing only to turn up walking around as crazy people.

It's not super-original, but the ghost in it is creepy as all heck. And it's very well directed, some really nice shots. Fair amount of tension. And some of the killing scenes are pretty neat. (Spoiler: For instance, this guy is sitting a restaurant, and he starts nodding. Like he's got some sort of nervous tick. But then you see the reflection of the scene in the street window, and it's actually a ghost whipping his head back and forth.)

The second movie picks up immediately after the first. It's not as good as the original, as it focuses mostly on the minor characters from the original, and adds a few more (school mates of one of the minor characters from the first). It was interesting to watch in terms of wanting to see how the story ending, but the directing wasn't as creepy or interesting, nor were the characters that intersting.

B+ for the First, C for the 2nd

Astonishia Story (PSP)

2006-08-11T05:03:00.000-05:00

Intro:

The PSP has no shortage of RPGs, but many of them are ports from other systems. Astonishia Story is one of those ports, apparently originally being a Korean PC game which was ported to the Korean GP32 handheld system. As such, it doesn't really utilize the power of the PSP, but nonetheless provides a pretty unique (if short) gaming experience for those willing to give it an honest chance. (The popular RPG it most resembles in terms of gameplay is the Shining Force series)

Story:

The main character is Lloyd, a Knight. He is assigned to be a part of an escort for a magical staff as it's being moved from one town to another. It's largely a ceremonial duty. Or so he thinks. But the staff convoy gets ambushed, and he is the sole survivor, left alive because the villain likes his spirit. But he is determined to get the staff back. Which is what the rest of the game revolves around, as he tries to recover it, but soon discovers that other magical artifacts have been stolen.

Basically, he travels around a world map from place to place. It's fairly linear, in that while there is freedom to go anywhere, ultimately you have to go one way to advance the plot.
(Though where to go is not always obvious).

While the plot itself is serious, many of the encounters and people he meets are rather bizzare. And there are a lot of jokes and numerous modern day references, so much so that you'd have think this was a Working Designs translation (except the modern day jokes in this are actually funny and aren't already dated).

When you combine this with a sometimes very odd translation, the net result is a very amusing, whimsical and surreal game.

The game doesn't have all that much characterization. Lloyd doesn't have much of a personality, other than being a bit rash and eager to be a proper Knight. There are a number of cinematic scenes which relate some dialogue and interplay between characters, but not all that many.

Gameplay:

As RPGs go, this is a fairly tough one. There are a lot of encounters, and you will be fighting a lot. Thankfully though, it's got a great combat system (very similar to Shining Force). While it's not quite as deep as in a tactical RPG, it's pretty similar. Basically it's grid based - the battlefield is full of squares, some full of terrain and obstacles, like hills and trees. Or tables and chairs. Each unit takes up space and blocks movement.

On a units turn, they can move, then attack or cast a spell or use an item.

There's definitely a lot of strategy involved. Especially early on in the game, where you just have Lloyd, you will want to fight where only 2 attacks can hit him at a time

On the downside, there's really not many different types of opponents. Maybe 20-25-ish.

Also, the game's combat engine seems somewhat unbalanced. Magic is much more useful than attacking physically. And this isn't helped by there being the games equivalent of Gandalf (a super-powerful wizard) in your party for quite a while.

However, by the end, you'll probably be breezing along, until you reach the final fortress (which comes all too quickly, probably 15 hours into the game), where the difficulty ramps up dramatically. If you are caught unprepared, you'll likely have to do a lot of backtracking and leveling. Especially for the final bosses.

Graphics/Sound

Although they don't really impress when you first start playing (looks like an RPGMaker game), the more you play, you begin to notice that the graphics are actually quite good. Basically, they are very high resolution sprites. The amount of detail in the game is extremely impressive. Both in terms of detail of objects, and the animation. Clocks move, fires burn, everyone has a shadow, there are birds and clouds constantly flying about.

On the other hand, they aren't very colorful. To my eye, it looks like the palette is only about 64 colors, like an old Sega Genesis game (okay, more than that, maybe 256, but no more than that). Even in the portraits, there's a lot of solid colors, no shading, which indicates a very small palette. There are also the occasional glitch while moving, the graphics get a bit darker. Not always, but enough to be noticeable.

The sound isn't so great. There's really no speech in the game. There are sound effects, but generally these day a second or so to load, so it's a bit weird. What sound effects there are, though, are quite good.

Loading Times

Loading times in general aren't bad. Maybe a second or two to change screens in a town, about 5 to enter/exit a town, and about that to enter/leave combat. During combat there will be a pause for a second or two for a new animation to load, if a unit performs a new type of attack. (If you use the same over and over it probably won't pause, but otherwise it will).

Final Thoughts

If you can get past the very old school graphics and appearance, you'll find a decent, if very quirky, game.

The real weakness of this title is its short length. You should be able to finish it in under 20 hours, probably closer to 15, depending on how much leveling you want to do.

This not only makes the game not a great value, but also really hurts the story of the game - it's hard to care about the characters because there really isn't much development in them. There are some nice touches here and there, like the romantic triangle between Lloyd, Ylenne and Akra (with Rodoug being hot for Akra himself), but that itself is unrewarding, because it's covered very briefly. You want to care about what happens, but it's just hard to bring yourself to, because the characters are so flat.

I really have to wonder if the game wasn't originally longer, but cut in half when ported to the PSP for some reason.

If the game were longer, I would probably give it a B-, but since it's so short, a C- is probably more accurate. Call it a 6/10

Pulse (Movie/DVD review)

2006-08-07T16:54:00.000-05:00

This is a Japanese horror movie. It's apparently being remade by Hollywood. I've had it in my Netflix queue for a while, but it generally got pretty low ratings, so I kept pushing it back down.

A lot of Japanese horror movies seem inspired by The Ring/Ringu, and while it does have that, this perhaps owes more to movies like "Fear.dom". Basically it tells the story of two different people, or groups of people. A woman who seemingly works at a flower shop, and a perpetually befuddled college student.

Anyway, one of the flower shops co-workers (a guy named Taguchi) doesn't come in to work. Then he mysteriously kills himself. Then so do other co-workers.

At the same time, the college student comes across a weird web site showing ghosts. So he goes to a computer lab at his school and tries to get help. And he befriends a really hot looking chick who is a computer science major (I think - she's always in the computer lab). And she helps him. Sorta. Mostly they just become friends.

Meanwhile, more and more people become prey to this supernatural thing. It either makes people really depressed, or turns them into shadows. Will the main characters find a solution to stop? Or even really an explanation of it? Actually, you know that from the begining of the movie. (One of those moves that starts at the end, and is a flashback)

It's a long and rather slow moving movie. There's not a lot of horror. More just general creepiness.

I enjoyed it, but I can see why so many others on Netflix gave it bad ratings. It really doesn't have much of a point, or any action, and nothing is ever really explained that well.

I strongly suspect that the movie was not meant to be a horror movie, but to make some sort of allegory about the use of the internet and how it separates people from each other, as opposed to real contact. I can see their point, but at the same time, I think the internet has been a boon for people like me, who generally aren't the most social folks. Not to mention the unattractive.

DVD: China Strike Force...

2006-07-26T20:13:00.000-05:00

I'm guessing this is a joint HK/American movie, based on the cast. I got it mostly because it had Aaron Kwok in it, who I liked a lot in the movie "Heat Team".

I wasn't looking too closely at to who else was in it, otherwise I might not have gotten it. It's got "Coolio" in it, who used to be famous for something or other about 10 years ago.

It's about 2 Chinese Cops (Aaron Kwok and this Asian-American who looks really really familiar, but I don't think has been in very many movies. Looks kinda like Daniel Wu, I guess). who are visiting someplace where they get involved in a murder. Why, I dunno exactly, since I don't think they are on their own turf. But nevertheless, they start investigating.

The people behind it are Coolio (who plays an American drug dealer named "Coolio".) and the guy from Brotherhood of the Wolf - Mark Damasccos (something like that, I can't spell his name, but he's instantly recognizable). And there's another one that may or may not be a villain, a Japanse chick named Noriko Something (she also has the same name as her character ?), who is really hot (apparently a former Miss Japan).

Anyway, there is a plot, but it's not terribly deep. Coolio and company are trying to horn in on Mark whatzit's fathers turf, while the two cops occasionally chase them. Coolio and Noriko are just really really bad actors. Really bad. Really really bad.

But Aaron Kwok's good, and the Asian-American guy is really really good. But the movie is worth watching due to some really nice action sequences. There's a pretty good chase scene involving a Lamboghini and a formula one car, and the finale features a fight on top of a skyscaper's glass panel. Pretty unique.

One Missed Call 2 (DVD)

2006-07-12T20:13:00.000-05:00

This is a Japanese horror movie. It's a sequel to the original One Missed Call, which was sort of a Ring clone. Basically in that, you got a call from yourself on the cell phone from a time in the future, and then you would die when that time comes. And basically deals with a couple people who got that phone call, frantically trying to figure out what the heck is going on and how to stop it.

The original one was okay, but nothing great as far as a horror story goes (more of a commentary on the media, I thought) and had a puzzling ending. The sequel was quite good and not only did it have a good (and understandable ending), it actually cleared up the confusion of the original ending.

Basically the mysterious murders have started up again. But this time they seem to have its source in Taiwan. . This time around you have a journalist, her Taiwanese estranged husband who are investigating, and a couple of restaurant related people, Kyoko (did something there) and Naoto (a waiter) and a couple of their friends, two of whom fall prey to the mysterious killer.

This one is a lot more like the Ring in the mystery itself. But it has a nice twist to it at the end. Which is maybe not original, but well done. I liked it a lot, the cinematography was also really nice.

Legend of Heroes: A Tear of Vermillion

2006-07-10T01:20:00.000-05:00

Intro:

Perhaps the golden age of the console role playing game was the Super Nintendo days. Besides games like Final Fantasy 2 & 3 and of course Chronotrigger, there were a host of games from other companies. All of them had a fairly similar style both graphically and in terms of gameplay. Graphically, they tended to feature anime style portrait (or stylized ones) for characters, but for moving around and fighting, featured those super-deformed sprites. You know, big head, small everything else. Kinda creepy, but popular in Japan.

When consoles went from 16 bit to 32 bit, and from 2D from 3D, the console RPG changed. The graphics became more realistic, or at least went from sprite based to 3d mesh based. And instead of cutscenes with the little guys moving around themselves and talking with text boxes, there were rendered CGI or animated sequences, complete with speech.

This game hearkens back to the 16 bit days, which may turn some off, but for others, like me, is pure gaming goodness.

Gameplay

Gameplay is pretty simple. Basically you simply wander around talking to people. Then generally go to another town or dungeon, fight things, then go back to town and talk to more people. It's pretty much entirely linear, if you try to go where you shouldn't you get a message with directions on where you should go. And important people have a red exclamation point to talk to.

You can have up to 4 characters in your party at a time, but most of the time you will have 2-3. There are no "classes" per se, but some seem to be more melee orientated and some more magic. Each character has their own weapon type to attack with. Avin uses a sword, Mile uses a boomerang (which may sound odd, but they are weapons), others use maces or whips or daggers. Everyone uses the same armor, which simplifies things.

There is a "pet" system, but it's very very minor. Basically a little critter follows you around, and finds potions for you. Occasionally you have to pet it for feed it to keep it happy, but not all that often.

One really nice thing is as you walk around in a place with monsters, you only fight if you run into them. Depending on their strength, they will seek you out or avoid you.

Combat in the US version is turn based. There is some small strategy involved because characters can only move so much a turn, and spells and attacks have limited ranges. But even so, most combats are pretty easy and quick.

The game's interface is slick and polished. For instance, when you use magic to heal your party after a battle, once everyone is healed, the menu will close itself. And it's very easy to get through menus and such. There is also almost no loading whatsoever while you play. Going into combat is pretty much seamless and only on certain occasions when you change screens (like going out of town) will there be a brief "Now Loading" message, which in many cases will disappear before you can actually read it.

However, the control of your little guy is a bit touchy. With the analog stick he can be somewhat wobbly. But you get used to it.

Story

You play Avin, a young orphan who grows up in a religious orphanage along with his sister. Then one day someone tries to kidnap his sister, so they are forced to flee. But in the turmoil, they are separated. He then grows up in a small village, and when he turns 17, he goes out into the world along with his friend Mile to try to find his sister.

There's a lot of story here. This is one game in a fairly length series, so the world has a rich detailed history. Avin and company travel all over, meeting new people (who join the party temporarily) and solving problems, and have run ins with recurring villains. All while the plot is slowly revealed.

I found the story quite compelling. There's pretty much all the things you want. Intrigue, romance, betrayal, angst, friendship, mystery, humor (most of which revolves around a young lady stalking Mile). At first I was cringing a bit, because you play Avin when he was a little kid for a bit, and I really don't like games where you play as children that young (10 years old). But that's sort of a prologue, and is quickly over. Once the proper story started, I couldn't put it down, playing well past the time I should have been asleep (and in one case, past sunrise).

I personally found the translation to be quite well done. It reads like regular English, but on occasion there are some spelling mistakes. Or rather, mostly problems with homophones - words that sound alike but are different. Like "Idle" instead of "Idol". But still, there is a whole lot of text in the game and only a handful of mistakes that I noticed.

Graphics/Sound

The graphics are wonderful. Although it emulates the feel of the 16 bit SNES rpgs, everything is in 3D (albeit with a fixed camera). Textures are bright and colorful (where appropriate, anyway) and there are some really nice lighting effects. The water is also very snazzy looking. It really looks like an SNES game on steroids.

The sound is generally good, especially the ambient sounds like water, though it's not a whole lot of sound in the game. There's a lot of nice sounding music as well, which there is a lot of.

Final Thoughts

This is a wonderful game for everyone that enjoys RPGs for the sake of story and character development (which would be me) and doesn't mind (or enjoys) a retro feel. People looking for action or character customizing will probably find it boring. Similarly, hard core RPGers might be turned off by its linearity, but I liked that because I could play it and not worry about getting a bad ending because I didn't talk to frog #3 in obscure location #2, nor did I need any help of a walk-through to get through the game or look at one out of fear of missing something important.

I was thinking about giving it a 9 out of 10, because while I really loved it, it's not quite perfect. But now that I think about it, I can't remember the time I enjoyed an RPG so much (probably Chrono Trigger). So what the heck, I'm giving it a 10.

Juiced Eliminator (PSP) - First Draft

2006-07-02T19:32:00.000-05:00

The original Juiced for the consoles and PC got somewhat medicore reviews and really wasn't a great game, but turned out to be one of my favorites. And a game I played more than far better games like Forza or GT4. In part because of two features that set Juiced apart from other racers, firstly team or crew racing (which has since been copied by some later titles), and secondly, the ability to set up your own races according to a large variety of criteria, make the already non-linear gameplay almost completely free-form.

So when I heard Juiced was headed towards the PSP, I was quite eager. In fact, it was one of the reasons I got a PSP in the first place (though not the sole reason). Unfortunately, while Juiced has made the jump to the PSP, it's gotten slimmed down, removing most of the features I liked the most about Juiced. It's still an okay game, and probably one of the best racers on the PSP right now.

Gameplay

Basics

Like the original Juiced, gameplay is largely calender based. That is , you progress through the game day by day. On each day there is either a race or a free day. You can either enter or watch the race if there is one, or if there is a free day, you can host your own event. You then take the money you win and either buy new cars or mod the ones you have. And just repeat until you get sick of playing (it's open ended).

There are 3 basic types of race: Circuit, where you do laps around a track; Point to Point, where you start from point a and race along the track to point b; Sprint, which is basically a drag race in a straight line. Also introduced in this game is "Eliminator", which is simply a circuit race where each lap the last place car is eliminated. There's also the "Show Off" event, which is not a race, but a timed drifting exhibition. Basically you go around the track and drive stylishly to earn points.

You can race up to 5 opponents in a race (3 in a sprint), and cars are divided into 8 different classes based on their horsepower. There are 9 different track regions, with about 4 different layouts each in each region for circuit races, plus one for point to point and one for sprint races (pretty much the only variation there is the length of the track)...

You may or may not be able to race in an event on a day, you need a certain amount of reputation with the crew holding the race to do so. Respect is earned by doing well at the thing that that given crew respects. One crew likes circuit races, one likes pink slip racing, one likes drifting, one likes your car collection, etc.

If it's a free day, you can hold your own race, either on your home turf or one someone elses if they like you enough. In the regular Juiced, you could set the entry requiresment of the race very specifically (like only a certain make or region of car), but in this you can only pick the class of car and the type of race.

Which is rather disappointing, because some cars just don't stack up well against others from other regions, but are competitive with others. For instance, the 2 Australian cars were meant to race each other, but are too big to compete with other cars in their horsepower class. And the trouble with the original Juiced was the requirements weren't specific enough; there are a large number of older cars in the game, but much like the Australian cars, are too heavy to be competive against newer, smaller cars with the same horsepower (not to mention their gearing is different).

The track selection in the original Juiced was pretty bland, mostly level and straightaways. This adds 2 more track areas and removes two. One of the added ones is pretty nice, reminds me of some of the fictional tracks from Gran Turismo, and has a lot of elevation change. The other is China Town but is incredibly bland, the only thing Chinese about it are some lanterns strung across the track (and only one string of those)

Driving Model

The original Juiced learned towards simulation, but was not real realistic. But this version seems more in the arcade category - you can turn a lot more than real life cars can. In fact, this causes some problems, there is a very big tendency to oversteer, which can cause you to spin out (particularly in rear wheel drive cars). So as a result, control in this is rather touchy - you are expected to go around corners pretty fast, but at the same time, it's very easy to misjudge things and turn too much, resulting in a crash. Not impossible, but takes a lot of practice.

Rear wheel drive cars in particular hard to drive, at least when they are high powered, because the game doesn't seem to have any sort of traction control (which even the Gran Turismo series has added) to help keep you from spinning out.

Cars do take damage, but it's mostly cosmetic. The most serious problem is you can lose all your nitrous due to a leak. (Supposedly your turbo also goes about, but this really is only a minor slowdown at worst). In the original Juiced you had to pay to fix your car, but in this you apparently have a really great car insurance company and don't have to.

Crew Racing

Juiced's real innovation to the racing video game genre was the idea of team or "crew" racing. Basically instead of just racing youself against 5 other opponents, there are races of 2 teams vs 2 other teams of two, or a team of 3 vs a team of three. In the original version of Juiced, you could give your crew members some basic orders on how to drive while the race was going on.

This keeps the crew racing, but removes the ability to tell your crew how to race during the race, both making it rather hard for your crew to win a race, and reducing your role from player to spectator.

This maybe have been because the PSP lacks the 2nd analog stick, but the original Juiced mapped the crew control to the D-pad, which the PSP has. While some people might prefer to drive with the d-pad, I don't think anyone drives with both the d-pad and the analog stick, so whichever the player doesn't use could have been assigned to control the crew.

And of course, when you aren't racing yourself, you don't need any buttons, and so it could have been implemented when only your AI crew is racing (again, something done in the regular version of Juiced).

Similarly, you used to have a free camera you could rotate around while only the AI was racing. Which was pretty cool. That feature has also been removed, though you can at least from from in front instead of behind.

Arcade Mode

There's also an arcade mode in which you simply compete in pre-arranged races with a car you are given. Typical of the arcade modes in most driving games, which I don't think anyone ever uses.

Cars and Car Modding

Basically, this works the exact same as regular Juiced.

As mentioned, cars are divided into 8 different classes, based on horsepower. So you want to sort of max out the horsepower in a given class.

Each car generally has 4 different upgrades in a few basic areas: intake, tires, turbo, exhaust, suspension, nitrous. The first level is unlocked from the start, but the 2nd and third get unlocked by using that car model in a race. Just racing it unlocks the part. The 4th level of upgrade is special, "Prototype" and has to be won in a special race which happens a couple times a month.

Body part upgrades basically work the same. But generally at start, only the stock parts are available, racing the car model will unlock an additional option each time it is raced. At least for bumpers and hoods and sideskirts, different wheels and neons are all unlocked at start. Most the cars have 3 different hoods, bumpers, and side skirts, but a few only have one or no options at all (mostly the older cars). Somewhat bizarely, for the '67 Mustang, you are forced between the slats on the back window and a spoiler.

You can either fiddle with permutations of the various parts on your own, or you can take the car to a tuning shop, where they will automatically figure out which combination of parts will give you the best results in each class. This saves a lot of time, and is useful, since you will likely have a lot of cars for the crew races. (Something like this is really needed in Gran Turismo, where it can take 5 minutes to mod a car with all the best parts, as opposed to 10 seconds here)

There are basically 2 neat features to visually modifying your car. First off, the decals of the upgrades you use are automatically applied to your car. Like if you use Nos, Bridgestone Tires, AEP brakes, etc, their sticker goes in a certain spot in your car. Kinda neat, though you can toggle this off if you don't like it (you can also adjust the color).

The paint system is good on paper, you can pretty much pick any out of a huge palette (based on RGB values). Then, you can pick the "metallic" color (sort of the shiny color), and on top of that, the "pearlescent" color (sort of a different color at a different angle). But the results tend to look rather bland.

There's only a limited number of decals (or vinyls), none of them all that attractive. So, overall, if you are mostly interested in customizing cars, then Juiced really isn't the game for you.

As far as "tuning" goes, that is, tweaking the settings of the car's various parts, well, there's not much to be done. Pretty much just lower the car and slightly adjust the transmission. The latter is just a slider, with one end being "Top Speed" and the other "Acceleration". So very basic indeed.

It's also very hard to find out much about the car in terms of stats. There's very little feedback on how fast the car is in the game, or how it handles. Basically just the option to put it on a dynometer, which will give you the top speed, but that figure is really only reachable in ideal conditions. If you want to figure out 0-400, or 0-60 times, then you are pretty much out of luck.

The car list in the game is pretty good. Probably one of the best mixes I've seen in a game. Most games either favor certain regions, but this has cars from almost everywhere - Europe, US, Japan, Australia. The only real exception is the apparently lack of Hyundais (from Korea).

On the other hand, while the mix is nice for the most part, it's lacking at the top end. There's really nothing that can compete with the Viper. Because the car classes in the game are grouped by horsepower, the Viper is generally put in the same class as the various Muscle Cars. But the Muscle Cars are much heavier, and thus much more tricky to handle.

And older cars are simply geared differently - back then, you were lucky if you had 4 gears, and so even though they have lots of horsepower, they only top out at 130-150, compared to the Viper's 6 gears and top speed of 230-250. Most games sort of gloss over this, but to it's credit, Juiced doesn't. But it also doesn't provide a solution, like say Forza, which lets you install a new transmission in the muscle car with gearing to go faster. So while they are in the game, the older cars are basically useless. Races can be restricted by make or country of origin (at least in the randomly generated races) - they should have added an age restriction as well.

Still, from classes 8 to 5 or so, the mix is fairly good. Some cars are better for short sprints, some are better for long ones, others are better at handling, so better in circuit or point to point races.

Graphics

The game looks quite good. Cars are fairly well detailed, the environments sort of bland but have decent textures. Lighting is pretty nice, there are 4 stages of lighting (Morning, Afternoon, Evening and Night) and at least in some modes, there are some nice reflections off the cars. There's also some very nice rain effects, drops of water rolling across the screen.

The pearlescent paint effect (where the color changes depending on the angle of the viewer) is somewhat muted though. At first I didn't think that feature was even working, but I can sorta get it to show up sometimes.

I haven't seen any sort of slowdown at all in the game, even in races with 6 cars and rain.

Sound/Music

The sound is pretty good actually. You can tell the difference between a muscle car and a tuner.

Most of the speech in the game occurs when you are either doing a team race, where your crew members will talk, or when you bet against an opponent, where they will talk when you pass them or they pass you. For the most part, it's pretty good. And more importantly, largely cliche free. No "Wassup Dawg!" or "Yo, Pimp!" or what have you.

The music is basically 5-6 licensed tracks from reasonably popular artists (Limp Bizkit, Queens of the Stone Age, All American Rejects, Cole Porter, Hoobastank), combined with about 10 generic tracks. Mostly 2000 era alt-rock sort of stuff, which I quickly turned off, but you may like if you like that sort of thing. (Sadly, there were a couple trance tracks, which I do like, in the original but they were taken out).

Loading times

As this is important to PSP owners, it gets its own section. Basically to load a race, it takes just under 30 seconds, and after its down, about 20 seconds to get back to the main menu. Most of these races last pretty long (at least 3 minutes, generally, some can last 10), so you do spend more time racing than loading. When you go into the workshop, it takes about 20 seconds to load that, then about 2-3 seconds when you change cars you want to work on. Not great, but definitely bearable.

When you use sleep mode, it goes right back where you left off imediately.

Final Thoughts

I don't know what to think. On the one hand, they basically took out most of the features which made me like Juiced so much, and the already hard to control RWD cars of the original Juiced are even harder to control. But on the other hand, it's still pretty fun and frankly, most of the other racers on the PSP are pretty bad, so I'm giving it a 7/10.

Wow, been a while...

2006-06-15T04:29:00.000-05:00

Combination of not getting any RPGs lately (been saving up for a PSP so haven't bought any and all the places who have sent me review copies have apparently stopped, ) and boring movies from Netflix/BB.

Street Supremacy - PSP (Final)

2006-06-15T04:26:00.000-05:00

Street Supremacy is the latest in the long line of street racing games from Genki. Although they apparently have the same name in Japan (Shotoku Battle), in the US, the name depends on who the publisher is. Most of them come from Crave, who call it "Tokyo Xtreme Racer" (and have the rights to that name). But Konami must have outbid them for the rights to this game, and they decided to call it "Street Supremacy". Other than being on the PSP, this version changes things around a bit, some for the good, some for the bad.

Basically, you play a street racer in Tokyo. You get so many credits to start and have to pick a car. Then you race other street racers, and depending on how you do, you get more money. Then you can upgrade your car, or buy new ones. Not exactly a new formula, but a tried and true one (and this series was one of the first to use it).

The races are fairly straight forward - basically an "outrun" race, that is, you have to be ahead of your opponent for so long to win. Each racer has a "spirit" bar that diminishes when they are behind or when they hit something. When it's gone, you lose.

While this is a fairly dynamic sort of race and one that makes you feel like you really beat your opponent, I would have liked more types of races. Most other street racers on the market have other race types - drag races, circuit races, even drift races (though I can do without the latter).

What makes Street Supremacy different from previous incarnations, is it adds a strategy element. It used to be you were a lone racer. Now you are part of a team.

Basically Tokyxo is divided up into several zones, and each one is controlled by a race team. The object is to take over each zone one by one, by having a team battle race. Basically a team battle is a 5 on 5 race, one at a time. That is, the 1st racer races the 1st, then the winner races the next one in line. And so on until there is no one left on one team.

While team racing has become the new thing for street racers, this sort of strategic gameplay where you battle for territory is new to the genre. At least, I've pretty much played every street racing game and I haven't seen anything like it. Unfortunately, you really don't have any sort of control over your team members. Unlike "Juiced", you can't coach the team members while racing, only watch. Nor can you improve their cars.

The driving model itself is fairly true to the series. It's not overly realistic, but neither is it arcade like. Cars don't really turn on a dime, it's more like they sort of glide. But it's very easy to drive with the analog nub. While you do get penalized in your spirit bar for hitting things like the side of the road, there is very little friction, so you can slide around curves in many cases. It's not like Gran Turismo where you bounce off of things, and in many cases there are projections or turnstiles that will completely stop you when you hit (you learn to be very careful around those parts).

Car customization is pretty decent. Not the most indepth in the series, but solid. You can improve the engine in 3 different ways, each with separate levels. Same with the transmission and clutch.

You can choose any color you want for the car by setting the red, green and blue values from 0 to 255. Nothing fancy like metallic or pearlescent paint, nor can you change the window tint, but you can paint your wheels 2 ways and change the head light color.

There are some 20 basic vinyls for the car, and if you like neons, you can pick any color you want (via the RGB values) and 4 different styles (Side, Front & Side, sort of pulsed). There's about a dozen bodykits and hoods for each car.

The car selection is unfortunately pretty limited. Pretty much just the big name Japanese sports cars - Skyline, GTO, Impreza, Evo, Fairlady Z, Supra, etc, along with the obligatory AE86. Some other mid range cars like the MR2 and the Celica, but they are generally too weak to compete for most of the games. (No Hondas, BTW, as apparently Genki decided to go back to their roots and clearly make it an illegal street racing game, which Honda frowns upon, at least unless you have the money of an EA)

The graphics are excellent. Probably the best in the series. Which is perhaps not saying much, as none of them really had great graphics. But they are sharp, crisp, and the framerate is solid while racing. While watching 2 AI cars race, the frame rate can drop, but I've never experiences that while racing myself - good sense of speed for the most part.

The game is set at night on highways, so it is a bit bland looking. Darkness and lots of pavement.

The sound is pretty solid, but not spectacular. Different engines sound differently.

The music is actually good. For the first time ever in a Genki Game, I didn't turn off the music immediately. It's a mix of styles, mostly electronic.

I had heard terrible things about the loading time for this game, but really, they aren't that terrible. About on par with first generation PS2 racing games. About 40 seconds to load a track area, then about 15-20 seconds to load each opponent as you scroll through them (you can scroll through them without their car loading, though). The frequency can be annoying though, since you basically have to re-load the area for each race because you go back to the map screen after each one. For team battles it just had to load the next cars, so the loading time is only about 20 seconds between each one.

All in all a pretty good game. Not the best in the series, but a solid entry. The gameplay is perhaps a bit repetitive, but it is fun. The first game I got for the PS2 was "Tokyo Xtreme Racer Zero" and the sequel is one of my favorite racing games ever, which I've spent countless hours playing. And I still find the racing in this to be incredibly fun, even though I know the city almost as well as the back of my hand.

The real downside to this game is that it's rather short. It took me only 2 days (albeit with a lot of playing) to beat the game once. It does have a "New Game+" where you can start again with all your old cars, which helps, but there are only 200 different opponents in the game, about a 1/3 of previous games. And most of the opponents are pretty easy to beat if you have a halfway decent car.

Some of the length is also padded by only being able to beat one opponent at a time. In the console versions, you would simply cruise around the city, racing opponents until your car overheated. Usually 5-8 opponents per trip. Even so, I think it took me about 50 hours to beat TXR3. This took me maybe 12.

Some more short movies reviews....

2006-04-25T20:33:00.000-05:00

One Night in Mongkok - A HK film starring Daniel Wu and Cecillia Chung. Mongkok is apparently a district of HK that is the most densely populated in the world. It's an unflinching look at the ugliness of crime in HK (and to a lesser extent, the poverty)... Basically, 2 rival gangs get into a fight. One side hires a hitman from China to kill the leader of the other gang. The hitman doesn't really want to do it, but has to do support his family.

Upon arriving though, he quickly discovered that the police are after him. So he hides out. And stays at a "love" hotel (ie, for prostitute) where he somewhat inadvertantly stops a guy from beating a prostitute. She is grateful, and he discovers that she is also from the mainland, having come to HK on a short term visa to work as a prostitute to support her family.

In the mean time, there's a group of somewhat disintersted cops looking for them. They aren't really bad cops, but when one of them commits a faux pas (sorta), they cover up for him.

It's a very powerful film.

Marebito - This is a japanese horror movie, from the guy who directed The Grudge (both US and Japan variants). It's a very weird movie. It's about a creepy middle aged guy who works as a camera man. Not just works, he really loves video. Anyway, he shots an image of a guy killing himself. He becomes fascinated by the look on the face of the guy. He then goes and investigates what he possibly saw.

At first I thought it was just going to be those Japanse ghost children, you know, pale, long hair, crawl funkily, etc. But that was just sort of a fake out. Sorta. Instead, he goes and explores the tunnells below Tokyo. Pretty cool. Almost Lovecraftian for a while. But apparently based in the old Shaver Mytery, with deros and all that.

But then he finds a girl chained up below ground. And rescues her. But then he keeps her as a pet. Which is when the movie gets sorta creepy. As he tries to rehabilitate her, she gets better, but he seems to get crazier.