Xboxing
I'm crawling out from under being a grad student long enough to say that I finally bit the bullet and picked up an Xbox 360. Despite its quirks (having to be plugged directly into the wall, which annoys the ever-loving hell out of me given that my house is full of stuff that must be plugged in and I have surge protectors in nearly every outlet), I'm vastly enjoying it. I can certainly see the life-sucking potential of Xbox Live. I'm already in the process of filling my hard drive with many demos, and as soon as I recover financially from buying the machine, I'll start picking up Live Arcade games (SETTLERS OF CATAN~!). As with the Wii's Virtual Console, the online content is more interesting to me than almost any of the actual software.
So far, I've played Dead Rising, Bioshock, and demos for Beautiful Katamari, The Simpsons (whatever the new game is called), the Prince of Persia Remake and the flashy new Pac Man game. I've also downloaded the demo for the Conan game, in hopes that camel punching is a feature. So, Dead Rising is actually pretty shitty. It's hard to imagine how Capcom could make a game in which you are trapped in a mall, able to go in any store, pick up any object, and kill hordes of zombies with it. But they did, and here's how: the zombies are really just there to keep you moderately entertained as you repeatedly run back and forth from one end of the mall to the other (a process that can take as much as 10 minutes) to fight against other humans is some of the most boring boss fights in history. Killing the undead is incredibly fun; too bad they didn't make a game about it.
Bioshock is every bit as amazing as you might have heard. What surprises me is that none of the reviews are saying how scary the game is. People who can't deal with horror movies are going to have a hard time playing it. It hasn't filled me with the same level of dread as the original Silent Hill or Fatal Frame, but it has a kind of disturbing David Lynch quality to it that gets under your skin and freaks you out. In particular, the plastic surgeon who is obsessed with making women look like Picasso paintings, whose office has "Aesthetics are a moral imperative" written on the floor in blood when you first walk in. I have traditionally hated the first person shooter more than almost any other genre, but this has changed my attitude (which is good, because owning an Xbox means you're legally obligated to play Halo).
As for the demos: The Smpsons is great, and funny, and will appeal to people who played the 4-player arcade game back in '91 or so; Beautiful Katamari is, in fact beautiful, and Katamari--nothing has changed, but the controls work better on the 360 than they ever have on the PS2; the Prince of Persia remake seems pretty fun, though I'm not really qualified to judge its overall quality as this is my first time to ever play a Prince of Persia game; the Pac Man "sequel" is also pretty awesome. It's just original Pac Man with a gigantic maze that only shows you a few of the dots at a time (when you finish them, more appear elsewhere in the maze). The coolest part is that you can set up ghost-eating combos. For example, if you eat a power pellet then eat all the ghosts, the score progresses as usual (400, 800, 1200, etc.), but if you immediately go eat another pellet when that one wears off, the score for each ghost picks up where it left off, allowing you to get some astronomical scores for eating them. But of course there's strategy as well, because you only get one power pellet per section of dots, so you have to wait until you've eaten almost all the dots before you eat a pellet, so you'll have another one waiting for you when the current one wears off. This is a lot to say about Pac Man, so I'll wrap it up by saying this is a definite buy. I'll be trying out Conan later tonight.
All right, back to being a reclusive philosopher.
So far, I've played Dead Rising, Bioshock, and demos for Beautiful Katamari, The Simpsons (whatever the new game is called), the Prince of Persia Remake and the flashy new Pac Man game. I've also downloaded the demo for the Conan game, in hopes that camel punching is a feature. So, Dead Rising is actually pretty shitty. It's hard to imagine how Capcom could make a game in which you are trapped in a mall, able to go in any store, pick up any object, and kill hordes of zombies with it. But they did, and here's how: the zombies are really just there to keep you moderately entertained as you repeatedly run back and forth from one end of the mall to the other (a process that can take as much as 10 minutes) to fight against other humans is some of the most boring boss fights in history. Killing the undead is incredibly fun; too bad they didn't make a game about it.
Bioshock is every bit as amazing as you might have heard. What surprises me is that none of the reviews are saying how scary the game is. People who can't deal with horror movies are going to have a hard time playing it. It hasn't filled me with the same level of dread as the original Silent Hill or Fatal Frame, but it has a kind of disturbing David Lynch quality to it that gets under your skin and freaks you out. In particular, the plastic surgeon who is obsessed with making women look like Picasso paintings, whose office has "Aesthetics are a moral imperative" written on the floor in blood when you first walk in. I have traditionally hated the first person shooter more than almost any other genre, but this has changed my attitude (which is good, because owning an Xbox means you're legally obligated to play Halo).
As for the demos: The Smpsons is great, and funny, and will appeal to people who played the 4-player arcade game back in '91 or so; Beautiful Katamari is, in fact beautiful, and Katamari--nothing has changed, but the controls work better on the 360 than they ever have on the PS2; the Prince of Persia remake seems pretty fun, though I'm not really qualified to judge its overall quality as this is my first time to ever play a Prince of Persia game; the Pac Man "sequel" is also pretty awesome. It's just original Pac Man with a gigantic maze that only shows you a few of the dots at a time (when you finish them, more appear elsewhere in the maze). The coolest part is that you can set up ghost-eating combos. For example, if you eat a power pellet then eat all the ghosts, the score progresses as usual (400, 800, 1200, etc.), but if you immediately go eat another pellet when that one wears off, the score for each ghost picks up where it left off, allowing you to get some astronomical scores for eating them. But of course there's strategy as well, because you only get one power pellet per section of dots, so you have to wait until you've eaten almost all the dots before you eat a pellet, so you'll have another one waiting for you when the current one wears off. This is a lot to say about Pac Man, so I'll wrap it up by saying this is a definite buy. I'll be trying out Conan later tonight.
All right, back to being a reclusive philosopher.