gwax's rumblings

These images are screen­shots taken from my copy of Soul Calibur that show my record of 1’04“02 in Arcade mode. All this think­ing about video games made me remem­ber and I fig­ured it was as good a time as any to put proof on the int­zor­web. We didn’t think to tape it when I beat the record, so this is the best I’ve got. Sorry about the tag­ging, but I care about this and don’t trust the inter­net half as far as I can throw it. Also, since this was back when I was at my absolute best, I would be mighty sur­prised if any­one has done any bet­ter than this, ever. Some peo­ple on the inter­net seem to have claimed bet­ter times, but the best con­firmed time I’ve found is around 1’30; if you can find bet­ter, please point me to it. It’s a real pity that I didn’t mange to beat a minute. For the search engines, if they care, this is my best time high score in Soul Calibur on the Dreamcast in Arcade Mode.

It looks as though Microsoft has decided to cap­i­tal­ize on their own­er­ship of FASA Interactive and the rights to all FASA based video games. Production is under­way on a Shadowrun game for the Xbox 360 (related arti­cles here and here and else­where). It looks like Microsoft may have found a way to con­vince me to buy an Xbox 360 or, at the very least, get under my skin about it. God I hope this game doesn’t suck.

I don’t know whether to get on the Playstation 3 or Xbox 360 band­wagon and it’s not because they both look great, it’s because nei­ther of them stands out. I swear, it’s like a mod­ern elec­tion. I’m pleased by my Xbox because of its incre­men­tal graph­i­cal improve­ments since my Dreamcast and because of some of its won­der­ful games but I don’t think there’s been any­thing ter­ri­bly rev­o­lu­tion­ary since the NES. The video game indus­try has been stuck in a rut of incre­men­tal improve­ments and minor new game­play fea­tures. The Xbox 360 is turn­ing more into a PC, which aggra­vates me because I already have a PC and I don’t like the idea of a mod­u­lar con­sole. The Playstation 3 makes me think of a movie indus­try par­al­lel, sequels tend to turn out great, some­times bet­ter than the first but the third in a series usu­ally tends to go down­hill: ignor­ing a few decent trilo­gies, look at the Terminator, RoboCop, Predator and other movie series; why don’t you do some­thing new instead of the same thing again. However, look­ing at Nintendo, a com­pany I’ve ignored for years, we see some­thing kind of inter­est­ing; I just watched the teaser trailer for the new Nintendo Revolution con­troller and I was com­pletely wowed. The Nintendo Revolution con­troller looks like a com­pletely new approach to video games; dur­ing the first few moments of the video I thought it was just another cutesy thing like most of what they’ve been doing but by the end I was com­pletely agog. The seg­ment of the video where a guy seemed to be using the con­troller as a sword prac­ti­cally had me drool­ing. I’ve got to say, if Nintendo can pull off the sorts of things that trailer sug­gests, I may become a die hard Nintendo guy like Sherv and Sam.

Today is the 6^th birth­day of the Sega Dreamcat. The Dreamcast, which I have often hailed as one of the best video game sys­tems of all time (prob­a­bly sec­ond only to the SNES), was released in the USA on 9÷9÷99. So, Happy Birthday Dreamcast, you’ll always hold a spe­cial place in my heart.

It’s nuts; I have been rolling like a fuck­ing fiend lately. No, I don’t mean that I’ve been doing MDMA, I mean that I’ve been play­ing Katamari Damacy a lot. Katamari Damacy is a really awe­some game that recently came out for the PS2 and involves lots of rolling.

To explain Katamari Damacy prop­erly I need to start by explain­ing the premise: the King of All Cosmos got colos­sally fucked up (drugs, alco­hol, sim­ply being crazy, who knows) and acci­den­tally broke all the stars in the sky (and the moon). You, the Prince of All Cosmos, being his son, are tasked with replac­ing the miss­ing stars. The King of All Cosmos is a very abu­sive father fig­ure, always insult­ing you and being mean and dis­in­ter­ested, though if you do an excep­tion­ally good job in rebuild­ing a star he will actu­ally com­pli­ment you highly (not easy to do). Anyway, so that’s the premise, rebuild the stars. Also, the game is really Japanese and seems like a solid adven­ture through col­ors and odd­ity. Oh, and there’s an ongo­ing sto­ry­line that involves this fam­ily some­how (it doesn’t make sense).

Ok, premise aside, let’s talk about the game­play. You have this ball (called a Katamari) and you roll it over stuff. When you roll your Katamari over things, the smaller stuff (rel­a­tive to your Katamari) gets stuck and your Katamari gets big­ger. The big­ger your Katamari, the big­ger the stuff you can glom onto it. The result of the glom­ming and the growth is more glom­ming and more growth (expo­nen­tial, approx­i­mately). You might start by rolling up thumb­tacks and end by rolling up moun­tains and islands. Some things are funny to roll up (for instance, peo­ple). Anyway, the game­play is insanely awe­some, also awe­somely insane.

I give Katamari Damacy my full endorse­ment as one of the best video games that I’ve played in a while. If you have access to a PS2, you are doing your­self a grave dis­ser­vice not to be play­ing Katamari Damacy.

As of a day or so ago, I have finally destroyed the heck out of Ninja Gaiden. I have col­lected all 50 Scarabs to unlock the orig­i­nal Ninja Gaiden and I have shot the clock tower to get Ninja Gaiden II and found Ninja Gaiden III in the Aquaduct. It has been a long time com­ing and it is now done. Of course, I did beat the game on nor­mal dif­fi­culty so I may, some­time far off, end up play­ing through again and beat­ing it on a harder difficulty.

Victory is mine, time to go back to try­ing to destroy some other games, like Project Gotham Racing or such.

It has taken me a great deal of time and effort but I have finally fin­ished Ninja Gaiden. Anyone that says that this game is not hard is a bold­faced liar but, thank­fully, it’s not usu­ally the frus­trat­ing kind of hard. Ninja Gaiden is great and I highly rec­comend it; ignor­ing Soulcalibur 2, prob­a­bly one of the best video games that I have played in quite a while. So yeah, I beat Ninja Gaiden and I’m all proud of myself now.

In addi­tion to being the title of an old Sierra adven­ture game that I used to be quite fond of, the term Trial by Fire applies pretty well to tomor­row. Those of you in the know will under­stand per­fectly, those of you not, believe me when I say that I am not look­ing for­ward to tomorrow.

That hav­ing been said, let me tell you a lit­tle about Trial by Fire, the game. Trial by Fire was the sec­ond in the Quest for Glory series of games. Quest for Glory was some­where halfway inbe­tween your stan­dard Sierra graph­i­cal adven­ture game (most of which were beau­ti­fully artis­tic pre-VGA games) and a mod­ern com­puter role-playing game. You wan­dered around talk­ing to peo­ple, get­ting items and using them in the right places, going through an elab­o­rate and immer­sive story, but there was also com­bat. The com­bat, although sim­ple by mod­ern terms, was well designed and reminded me a great deal of fenc­ing the time I decided to be retro and play old Sierra games a few years back.

I have good mem­o­ries of when David Caloccia and I used to sit around play­ing old Sierra games on my Dell 286 or on his Tandy 1000. Ah the good old days of early ele­men­tary school. It was pretty darned hard back in those days when nei­ther of us had a very large vocab­u­lary and the games forced us to inter­act with the game envi­ron­ment through tex­tual com­mands. I blame my early read­ing devel­op­ment, at least in part, on those Sierra adven­ture games.

As a quick sum­mary of the good ones, I thought that the Space Quest series was excep­tional, the Quest for Glory series was quite good, and the Leisure Suit Larry series was also quite good (I sus­pect moreso now that I would be able to under­stand the sex­ual humor). I never really liked the King’s Quest or Police Quest games all that much and I don’t really remem­ber any of the others.

Just as a short diver­sion from Sierra, but still on the topic of adven­ture games, I would also highly rec­om­mend Infocom’s Zork series, the Legend of Kyrandia series by Westwood and LucasArts’ Monkey Island series. Those and Sierra’s Space Quest series would be what I would sug­gest if some­one came to me and said, “I’m bored and want to play a good adven­ture game, what do you suggest?”

So, I was bored and look­ing for infor­ma­tion on the new Xbox Ninja Gaiden game that’s com­ing out next month and I decided to see what Gamespot’s top games are so I pulled up their search thing and searched for all games with rat­ings between 10 and 10. And there, lo and behold, was Soul Calibur, one of only 4 games to ever get a rat­ing of 10.0 on Gamespot. Yeah, I know that I’m a colos­sal dork, but in my defense, I really like Soul Calibur.

Progress Quest is really tak­ing off around here; now Fort Awesome has a guild in Oobag.

Last night a friend informed me of a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new com­puter role-playing game, Progress Quest. The really inter­est­ing bit is that it seems to be very rather unlike any other such game that I’ve ever seen. The pri­mary dif­fer­ence is that it is, what’s best referred to as, a fire-and-forget role-playing game. Besides the fire-and-forget bit, which I will get into in a momen­tar­ily, the game plays like other such games (Diablo, Baldur’s Gate, Fallout, etc.), except in that it’s a lit­tle lack­ing on the visu­als. It even includes net-play for those that pre­fer to have companions.

The game runs under Windows and there don’t seem to be any ports to other plat­forms. The sys­tem require­ments are incred­i­bly min­i­mal, requir­ing about 6MB or RAM and using an aver­age of 0%-1% of my CPU.

So, about the fire-and-forget bit; you start out the game, just the same as you would start any other com­puter (and many non-computer) role-playing games, by rolling up a char­ac­ter, select­ing a race and select­ing a class. The char­ac­ter cre­ation sys­tem informs you of the fact that the games atmos­phere is not a ter­ri­bly seri­ous one, but humor does not a bad game make. The inter­est­ing bit comes in after you have made your char­ac­ter and begin play. The con­trols and inter­face are fairly sim­ple; the inter­face is a stan­dard, fairly detailed char­ac­ter sheet and there are no con­trols. No con­trols, you might ask, well then how do I play and develop my char­ac­ter? The answer to that is sim­ple; it’s a fire-and-forget role-playing game, so your char­ac­ter will do all the work for you. Your char­ac­ter will run around adven­tur­ing, killing ran­dom mon­sters and mak­ing progress on his quests. This might strike you as a bit odd at first, but give it a lit­tle time and you’ll find that it really grows on you (and not like a fun­gus or a tumor).

I strongly rec­om­mend that you take look at it; it’s quite a lot of fun. And if you find your­self play­ing online, feel free to look me up, I go as “Contrad the 70^th” amd I play in the realm of Oobog. Contrad the 70^th, named after a brand labra­tory soap pro­duced by Decon Labs, is of the Land Squid race and a mem­ber of the Bastard Lunatic class. As of this post, Contrad is level 13 and I hope to play enough to get him to a sig­nif­i­cantly higher level; after all, it is IAP and I will have plenty of time on my hands.