As it seems to be the happening thing to do around these parts, I have up and gotten myself a personal blog at thedudehasgotnomercy.com. I haven't had a personal website in years now, so it's been interesting trying to get back to setting it up.

Game-related stuff will continue to be posted here, I guess. I don't have much to say about games, since I'm not a game reviewer and never really have to think about the games that I play in a critical manner. Some quick hits, if I must.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is probably a bit worse than Dual Strike. The de-emphasis on CO powers is a blessing and a curse, in that you can't be jacked up by a lucky enemy CO power, but a lot of the later missions become unbearable slogfests where you just have to push the enemy back for 35-40 days until you grind them out. (I'm looking at you, Mission 25!) Still, it's fun enough for what it is. The story doesn't do much for me, and the characters are all incredibly one-dimensional, but it's still worth checking out if you like TBS games.

Devil May Cry 4 is pretty good. It looks fantastic, obviously. The difficulty worries me a bit, though. I mean, DMC3 was a beast to get through, even on easy mode, but I'm playing DMC4 on the harder of the two default difficulty levels, and I've managed to kill every boss in one try so far. Granted, I'm not too far into the game, but I certainly hope there's some kind of challenge in here somewhere. Apart from that, it plays almost identically to DMC3, but there doesn't appear to be much in the way of weapon switching. I'm not even sure if there are any additional weapons apart from the default sword. I guess we'll find out.

Burnout Paradise is alternately great and disappointing. I basically play these games for Road Rage events, so it's a little annoying to have to drive around finding out where they are. I think they should've had all the events shown on your map from the outset of the game. The racing aspect of the game is dead to me; it seems like you basically have to memorize the entire map in order to know which way to go, or, alternately, have to check your map as you drove. Stunt events are pretty amusing, however. My big aggravation, however (and this has been one of the series' big drawbacks since Burnout 3), is the unskippable screens that are constantly popping up. Win an event? Enjoy watching a screen that tells you that you won an event for ten seconds or so, and add another 10 seconds to that if you unlocked a car as well. Unskippable stuff is unacceptable, especially since I was playing this at the same time as Advance Wars, where basically everything is skippable. A lot of the presentation stuff is gorgeous, but when I have to wait for a car to drop out of the sky before I can pick it out of the garage, that's just lame. The garage, now that I'm talking about it, is probably the worst part of the game thus far. Why bother classifying cars into different types if you don't even let us organize our garage with a filter?

So it seems like things will only get busier at work from now on. Obviously we're a bit understaffed at the moment, but we'll see what we can do with what we have.

You know, I've edited this message a few times now and as much as I wish I could make some kind of authoritative statement, I'm still very low on the GameSpot totem pole so it's probably not my place to do so. Maybe I'm a coward. I know there are some former GameSpot employees who have blogs that you can check in my Tracked Blogs list down below. I think they have some interesting opinions.

I surprised myself by getting the Mass Effect game guide mostly done before Thanksgiving. I was thinking I would have to do the main quest stuff first, then come back after the break and publish the side quests. For the most part, though, the side quests kind of play themselves; you're told precisely where to go and who to shoot, so none of them are all that difficult.

Luckily, this let me spend some time with other games over the break. I installed the Supreme Commander expansion, Forged Alliance, and spent probably around 15 hours with it. I haven't beaten it yet, but I did get to the last mission. I like the fact that it lets me do pretty much what I like to do: turtle up, build unconquerable defenses, and plaster the enemy positions with heavy artillery from a mile away. I started out Cybran, but now I think that if I play again I'll have to be an Aeon, if only for their rapid-fire heavy artillery with fragmenting shells. Stuff is wicked. If I want a good story-driven RTS I'll play World in Conflict or C&C3, but if I want some good-looking explosions, it's handy to know that Forged Alliance is around. Too bad it doesn't have a conquest mode like Dark Crusade did. Sure, I could skirmish, but I kind of like having something to tie it all together.

The other game I played a bunch of was Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. Not a huge fan of the platforming aspects (which seemed kind of bland after playing Assassin's Creed), but the combat is fun and the character interactions are worth playing for. It seemed like they were trying their best to make Nate a carbon copy of Malcolm from Firefly, or at least copy the more bemused side of his nature, but I don't have a problem with that since it's an affectionate homage and on the whole the character is pretty endearing. He even looks just like Nathan Fillion! And sounds just like him! It isn't actually Nathan Fillion's voice, but the voice actor does a pretty good job of sounding exactly like him, to the point where I just pretend it's Nathan Fillion and sit back to enjoy the ride. The game is pretty difficult and I'm not a huge fan of the new enemies that come out near the end of the game, but still, it's fun.

Ah, playing games for fun. Who knew that was possible? I also bought Call of Duty 4 over Steam; now I have to give that and Team Fortress 2 a whirl. Since I don't have Xbox Live and do have an 8800GT, it looks like now's the time to get back into online shooters on the PC.

So I bought an LCD TV around six months or so ago. It's nice and small and light, so it's easy to move around, and it's also an HD set, obviously, which is a big improvment for playing video games.

Except for Guitar Hero, unfortunately. I've had my problems when I tried to play through Rocks the 80s, but Guitar Hero III on hard mode is kind of the icing on the cake. The display lag (my calibration pops out at 30 milliseconds or so) is simply too high to play the game with any kind of precision. It might not sound like a high number (certainly a 30 ping in an online FPS would be highly desirable), but for whatever reason there's a noticeable lag between hitting the buttons and having them light up on the screen, enough to make the game barely playable on Hard mode. I got through the first set of five songs, but now I'm pretty sure that I'm going to have to dust off my old cathode-ray tube WEGA and hook that up if I want to play it without aggravation.

C'est la vie. Fun game regardless, from what I could tell. I'm also looking forward to picking up one of those new 8800GTs when they start becoming more available. Anyone have a line on a store that's got them in stock? Ideally there'll be an overclocked one with a warranty around somewhere.

"Also, this has nothing specifically to do with advertisements. EA has nothing do with Massive or potential ad-serving in Hellgate: London. First and foremost, any in-game advertising that would be in Hellgate: London is there to simulate how London looks in the real-world. Ads that represent this have been in the entirety of the beta, and in fact, have been shown in the game for well over a year. The fact is that we did not agree to potentially have ads in the game just to make more money. If we did not work with Massive, we would have to get individual approvals from every single company that we want to feature in the Underground stations. This is simply too time consuming and it's much better to have the experts to do it, allowing us time to focus on making Hellgate: London better and better while getting a realistic portrayal of London in the process."

This paragraph was slipped into the "EULA explanation" post over on the Hellgate: London website. Aside from the concern that's obviously engendered when a company has to tell you "There's no reason to be concerned," that portion of their statement struck me as being disengenuous. First off, the game takes place in a completely ruined London, circa 2038, although the hell invasion that destroyed the world apparently occured in 2020. So why do they need permission to nab advertisements from the year 2007? For verisimilitude? If I'm seeing ads from this year in a game that's set 30 years in the future, how is that helping to create a realistic game world? And does anyone really walk into a subway station expecting to see a bunch of ads for Nvidia and Alienware? Because they seem to outnumber the Eurorail ads by about 5 to 1.

Furthermore, why the need for a "realistic portrayal" at all? Your game has demons invading London, people wielding laserbeams and casting spells, and horny shopkeepers propositioning me every time I want to buy some analyzers. None of this happens in the real world, except maybe for that last bit. I don't expect your game to be realistic in its portrayal of London. Maybe people who live there will appreciate it, but that's a pretty small portion of your prospective audience, and given that your maps are randomly generated, I doubt they'll be finding many of their favorite landmarks where they'd be expecting them anyway. Why not go the GTA route and make up some plausible futuristic ads to enhance the fiction of your game world?

I think the answer lies somewhere along the lines of "We're saying this so that we can still serve ads to the customers who wind up subscribing for 10 bucks a month, since we're using them to enhance the game world and totally not to make money off of them, and thus, they're a feature that everyone should appreciate."

For the record, I generally don't have a problem with in-game ads. I recognize that games cost money to make, and I think the people who make good games should make as much money off of them as possible, and go on to make more good games in the future. The ads in Hellgate aren't particularly bad in any respect; they're not in-your-face and easily ignored. (Unlike the huge Dodge truck ads in the first GRAW game, for instance.) But it's annoying when people get cute about explaining them away. They're in there, you're making money off of them; just face up to the situation as it is.

In Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, the last heart container on your health meter flashes on and off constantly. It never stops. If your health bar is full, it's flashing. If you've taken some damage, it's still flashing. If you're almost dead, an incredibly annoying siren sounds comes on and cannot be shut off.

I could not finish either of the first two Splinter Cell games because of the reminder bar for your objectives. If you stopped moving for literally two seconds, a bar would pop up on the bottom of the screen, reminding you of what you're supposed to be doing. If you started moving again, it would go away. Since so much of Splinter Cell revolves around waiting, the games basically featured a billboard that constantly appeared and disappeared on your screens. Again, this drove me bonkers, and instead of actually finishing what appeared to be good games, I had to stop playing them.

Fighting games are also pretty bad for me. It's 2007, now. If you're porting your arcade game onto a home console, there's no damn need to have a constantly flashing "Press Start to Play!" reminder above the 2P life bar all the time. These things are constantly flashing and cannot be turned off. Why? Is there a single fighting game fan in the entire world who doesn't know that they can press play to hop into a game? Do we need a constant reminder of this? Does it need to always be flashing on and off?

For the life of me, I can't figure out why otherwise smart game designers persist in making games that have constantly flashes elements of the HUD or UI that cannot be turned off. I'm sure it doesn't bug most people, but it really, really annoys me when I have to play a game that has something like this in it, to the point where I will give up on decent games simply because I can't stand to look at it anymore. Seriously, if you're playing Phantom Hourglass and need to have a flashing heart to remind you to look an inch away from the middle of the screen to check your health, then you're probably two years old and don't have the hand-eye coordination needed to finish the game anyway.

I'm not epileptic or anything, and I'm fine with having flashing warnings on the screen if they serve some kind of purpose, but when they're patently purposeless (the objective bar in Splinter Cell was totally unnecessary, since you could check your objectives on your PDA at any time) and can't be switched off, then someone on the design team needs to be fired.

I've been playing a lot of games lately. Beat BioShock, beat Metroid, beat Airborne. I liked them all, but don't really feel the need to play any of them again anytime soon. Enjoyable enough. I confess I'm not drinking the Koolaid on Warhawk, though; seems fun, but it's not really my style. For whatever reason I'm just not as obsessed with multiplayer games as I used to be; they just make me feel nervous now when I play them.

After moving, though, I did manage to hook up my PS2 for one last roll in the hay with Guitar Hero II and Rocks the 80s. I've been stuck on Psychobilly Freakout in Hard mode for basically forever - at least for a few months now, although I obviously haven't been playing it every day or anything. I'm decent at the game, but I can't hold a candle to Alex or Brad or some of the other guys here in the office, so I'm pretty happy with being able to play songs on hard mode, not worry about the score at all, but simply trying to survive to the end. I usually wind up not even using my star power until I'm about to lose, so my scores aren't the best, but hey - I try.

But anyway, I finally beat it recently - my girlfriend was watching me play so I suppose I just do a little better in front of a crowd. After taking it on, I managed one-shot YYZ and the rest of the last tier of songs before finally losing out in Freebird at around the 75% mark. I consistently get stuck on the Guitar Solo I and Guitar Solo J part of the song - that wicked repetition of three-note pulloffs that come at you for about 20 seconds. I need to get myself into practice mode and try the song out a bunch before I can get through it. But still, I'm just happy I managed to get through Psychobilly Freakout - when you're stuck on something for that long it feels pretty good to get past it. And I guess I finally have all the songs unlocked for when people come over, although I'll need to beat Freebird to unlock Trogdor and the rest.

Even though I'm not incredibly good at the game, I have to say that I'm really looking forward to Guitar Hero III. After Rock Band was announced, I think the general feeling was that Guitar Hero III was going to be an ignominious end to a great franchise. Certainly Gun didn't convince me that Neversoft was a good fit for anything other than the next Tony Hawk's Desperate Attempt For Relevance game. But on the whole, it's looking like it should be a pretty good package; I might even pick it up for the 360 or the PS3 instead of just buying the PS2 package; my guitars are getting somewhat old anyway. I confess that I never really liked the shape of the 360 axe guitar, though; the little spike on it is right where I normally lay my wrist on the PS2 guitar, so it feels really uncomfortable to hold, and the positioning of the D-pad and the guide button makes me pretty likely to hit those while I'm trying to play. The Les Paul looks like it should be the solution to my woes, though.

Although only time will tell, I'm guessing that my apartment will be set up with Guitar Hero III and rock Band for the PS3 by the time Christmas rolls around. Nothing against the 360, but I don't want to have to get a Live subscription just to rock out online.

So what are you happy about with gaming lately? Any recent accomplishments you want to harp about? I'll have another one pretty soon, as my warlock is about to ding 58 and head to the Outland, where we'll no doubt pretty quickly replace all of our equipment. My friend and I have made duo characters three times now; once was a warlock/rogue (terrible combo), the second was a warrior/priest (fun, but on a server that had zero population), but now we're locked into a basically unkillable affliction warlock / protection paladin duo that's made the game a lot more fun. Looking forward to enlisting some of our friends and completing those epic mount quests.

Yep.

So, the new Leipzig trailer for MGS4 revealed what, four new bosses? I'm counting the Beast, Rage Angel, the Puppeteer, and the Laughing Octopus (my names for them, obviously; who knows what they'll wind up being called). That's in addition to Vamp and Liquid Ocelot and whatever other bosses that I don't even remember from the seven previous official trailers. I was talking to someone last night about this, and his comment was that it was weird how weird it would've been to play Metal Gear Solid 3 knowing all about every boss.

Maybe it's not that big of a deal; you did see most of the bosses of MGS3 before you actually fought them. But still, it feels like we know an awful lot about this game before anyone's even gotten their hands on it; I can't remember any other game besides maybe MGS2 and Battlefield 2 to have this number of official trailers before its release. That said, all of these are taking place in the same setting, and there's sure to be more to the game than just a desert city; we're also talking about the company that released a trailer with Snake fighting a Harrier jet on a bridge in New York, and managed to keep Raiden a secret until everyone actually played the game. So if this is the kind of stuff they're actually willing to show to everyone, here's hoping that Kojima has something huge up his sleeve for the shipping game.

Anyway, at what point does someone need to sit Kojima down and just give him a hundred million dollars to make an action movie? Hell, Wikipedia lists the production budget of Casshern to be six million bucks, and that movie looked amazing. Everyone knows that Kojima intended to become a film director when he was in university, and interpreted in that light, it seems like the Metal Gear Solid games are essentially the world's longest demo reel. Certainly their existance makes it pretty much unnecessary to actually make a Metal Gear Solid movie, which would be almost impossible to do without severely truncating the themes of the series, but I could see him making some grim sci-fi shooter that would be, if incredibly dense, then at least visually amazing. I still get shivers when I remember the encounter between Raiden and Solidus Snake on the oil tanker before Raiden fights the Harrier. Amazing stuff.

What is it about me that makes me so susceptible to trading card games? Yes, world, I used to play Tragic: The Gathering, spending a fair amount of my lunch money on Revised and Fallen Empires booster packs, back before everyone knew how terrible Fallen Empires would wind up being for the game. (Apparently it was overprinted and overbought by many game stores, causing some of them to actually go out of business since it never wound up selling all that well.) I mostly stopped playing by the time Ice Age came out, which was lucky for me, since that was around the time that they started their block format, which probably would've hooked me for good.

Unfortunately, just as I was starting college, the Star Wars CCG came out. It's still arguably the most complicated collectible card game to ever come out, which you can judge for yourself by skimming some of the "advanced rulebook" (PDF link). Although it was one of the best-selling card games out there for a while (and I should know, having spent a couple thousand bucks worth of student loan money on it), Lucasfilm in its infinite wisdom decided to yank the license away from Decipher, the company that was publishing the game, and give it to Wizards of the Coast, which, uncoincidentally, is owned by Hasbro, which Lucasfilm has a long history of publishing Star Wars toys with. That led to the unspectacular Star Wars Trading Card Game, which has apparently been discontinued. How on earth do you screw up a Star Wars card game? That license should basically let you print money, but somehow WOTC managed to screw it up by making what seemed to me to be a relatively lifeless game.

Anyway, I don't play much in the way of trading card games now. I did do a Magic sealed deck game at a local card shop a couple years ago, which was fun, and before that I used to run the Yu-Gi-Oh game days when I worked at a Books a Million, which was fun since that game shouldn't have ever been anywhere near as popular as it was. I don't necessarily understand a lot about anime, and specifically the more or less interchangeable tv show properties that seem to pop up every few years and become inexplicably popular before fading away. (E.g. DBZ, Pokemon, YuGiOh, and the inevitable death of Naruto...)

So why does Eye of Judgment tempt me so? Is it because I have some kind of genetic weakness for card games? Or because I really want to play something on my Playstation 3 that isn't Ninja Gaiden (which I've already beaten twice)? Or the fact that it looks like we'll finally be able to play a game of Dejarik from Star Wars? (Keep in mind that the cards for EOJ are being made by Hasbro....) Or is it just because I've seen a lot of the other high-profile games that are coming out this fall, and most of them have wound up being kind of disappointing for one reason or another?

So Eye of Judgment is shaping up to be my sleeper hit of the fall. The main drawback to it at this point will be the price, I'm sure: I can't see it retailing for less than 80 bucks if they package it with the Playstation Eye. On top of that, you have to consider the fact that you only get 30 cards with the game; an extra 80 will only be available in booster packs. If you want to complete your set, good luck shelling out $3.99 a pop for nine-card packs, or something like that. (No pricing's been announced, but I think they'll be sticking close to the Magic pricing; the cards are being made by Hasbro, after all.)

I'm also curious as to how the developers will prevent piracy of the cards, though: the Cybercode white paper (PDF link) explicitly says that it's possible to read Cybercodes by pointing your camera at a computer monitor, so it's feasible that someone will put out high-res scans of the rare cards on a website, and everyone will just go there and scan them all in to register them for multiplayer matches. Maybe the cards will have individual signatures to prevent that? ("You may be a victim of card counterfeiting. This Eye of Judgment card is not genuine...") It won't help in single-player, since you'll need the physical cards to play that. Maybe you need the physical cards to play in multiplayer, as well, although I know the computer draws your hand for you. In which case, do you have to go through your entire deck to find the physical cards that match up to your hand, or what?

So many unanswered questions.... At the very least, the technology behind Eye of Judgment should make for some interesting applications in the future. I'm sure every Sony developer and media relations guy will have a Cybercode section of their business card in a year or so. I'm also sure that the mucky-mucks at Hasbro are salivating at the thought of porting Magic Online to the PS3 with support for the Playstation Eye. Now that would be an interesting situation, although they'd probably have to print special Cybercode editions of their sets. Maybe Hasbro and LucasArts will team up to make some kind of official Dejarik game for the Star Wars fans out there?