Like seemingly most people that own an Xbox 360, my console has started exhibiting signs of being broken.  Over the past week, my game sessions have been interrupted with inexplicable disc read errors despite the fact that the disc is in perfect shape and readable in every sense of the word.  Earlier in the week, I called Xbox support and received some tips to test the problem despite the fact that it's fairly obvious that the DVD drive is screwing up, and tonight was the final straw.  While playing Ninety-Nine Nights, the game froze just as my character was hit, and my controller would not...stop...rumbling.  Jesus H. Christ.

On my second phone call to tech support, I blew through the automated helper and jostled the human rep into helping me get my system repaired.  I had heard horror stories about Microsoft's Xbox support, but for whatever reason, everything seemed to go smoothly, and I should receive a shipping box to pack the console in some time next week.  Then again, I still have to go through the actual process of shipping the system out and getting it back, so those horror stories could still hold merit in my situation. 

What the hell is a "killer app?"

Or, more precisely, why do people continue to insist on the existence of killer apps to justify a system's very existence, if not a purchase?  Generally speaking, all consoles need at least one or two games within the first year or so of its life that gain a high attach rate.  It's a strategy that puts more systems into more gamers' living rooms.  Just look at the Wii version of Twilight Princess and its reported 75% attach rate.  An average of three out of every four buyers bought the game with the system, and given the number of Wiis sold to date, that's an impressive number.  That must mean that it's a killer app, right?

Well, no.  Not to some people, anyway.  Apparently, Twilight Princess's subsequent release on the GameCube negates it from becoming a killer app based on the fact that it's not a system exclusive.  There are those that believe that Super Paper Mario will be the first true killer app, and crowds that believe the same about Metroid Prime 3, which is all fine and dandy.  Both titles are bound to do fairly significant business.  However, what about those people that don't care for those games, whether it be a general lack of interest in Mario or Metroid or some other reason?  Truth be told, although I bought Zelda when I picked up my Wii, the game I asked for first, and had more of a desire to play, was Trauma Center: Second Opinion.  Trauma Center was the game that convinced me to get the system ASAP.  It was my personal system seller, but there are undoubtedly legions of people out there that would christen it the Wii's "killer app."  Likewise, I'd rather eat my own tongue than play Halo 3.  As highly anticipated as the game is, I have zero interest in the Halo franchise.  As I said in a previous post in this blog, when I bought my 360 not too long ago, I was hoping to find the much maligned Ninety-Nine Nights because I'm a fan of that particular genre of action game.  It showed up on my doorstep via Amazon today, and I'm loving it.  The graphics, the music, and the ability to slaughter hundreds of dudes is all I could ask for from the game, and it has delivered.

All that this really comes down to is the fact that the "killer app" is a non-existent entity.  It is the ideal title that a person will buy a system to play and something that justifies the system's existence, but it's also something that doesn't exist because tastes differ too much.  There are those games that masses of people will buy a system for in order to play, but there's nothing particularly killer about them.  It's just a game that convinces people to buy a console, tagged with a moniker that became overused and out of style by 1995.

There are things that words cannot properly describe, and yet, there are things that can be described with but a single, glorious word:

Osu!

This is quite possibly one of the most beautiful gaming achievements I have ever seen in my life. So fluid. So perfect.

So...artistic? I certainly feel that way, but you should decide for yourself. I can only dream of having such skill and coordination.

I bought a 360 today, along with a copy of Oblivion. I had actually hoped that I could find Ninety-Nine Nights instead, but neither store I went to had any copies of it in stock. I have the system all set up on my TV and managed to get through the starting area and finished a couple of story quests in Oblivion, and so far so good. Don't expect to see me on XBL at any time in the near future, though. This dinky apartment of mine has 56k.

In any case, now that I have both a Wii and a 360, along with my DS and PS2, I think I'm set for most of my gaming wants and needs for the new generation. I have very little reason to buy a PS3 at this very moment, and I probably won't for the foreseeable future. That is, unless Square Enix should announce Valkyrie Profile 3 as a PS3 exclusive, in which case I'll be forced to get one. I guess I'll see if that happens.

Some of you are probably aware that in the past, I've worked as an associate, or contract employee, for Nintendo's Product Testing department through a temp agency.  I've actually done quite a bit during my assignments off and on while there.  I started off in Product Testing, before being moved to text editing. Most recently, I worked in their Lot Check department for about six months, helping out on the certification tests for numerous first, second, and third party titles released on the various platforms, including the initial rush of Wii titles. I even spent the week after Christmas 2005 in their call center, taking calls regarding the then-recently launched DS Wi-Fi service.

For the most part, I can't say that any of those experiences were negative.  I learned a lot about the game industry as a Nintendo associate, but it's not an ideal line of work.  Associates are not full Nintendo employees; when the assignment is finished, they're let go until another assignment comes along, and if the perms (full-time employees) don't think your doing your job well enough, might never be invited back.  Testing games in teams as large as they have at NOA is rough; most testers are very like-minded in that they're all avid video game players and share a lot of the same sort of geeky pursuits, but at the end of the day, each one is still just a cog in a larger machine, further cemented by the fact that NOA contract testers don't receive billing in the game credits.  It is also extremely unlikely that that most contract testers will ever find permanent employment within the company, making the experience of working there feel much like the experience of running in a hamster wheel. You get paid and you get some experience, but you're not really going anywhere.

Last year, during one of my breaks between Nintendo assignments, the temp agency set me up with a two-month stint at a much smaller Redmond-based game publisher called Valcon Games.  While there, as one only two testers in the office (and the only one there for at least the first three weeks or so), I worked on a pair of games for them, received better pay than I did at Nintendo, and even got my name in the credits. Granted, they aren't titles that are going to make hardcore gamers excited, but since Valcon is primarily a budget publisher, they could have been much worse. Truly, the best part of the job there was meeting the people running the company; together, they have a lot of experience in the industry on both the development and marketing aspects, and combined with my experiences at Nintendo, I learned a lot more about the realities of the game industry.  I spent February and part of this month working for them again on a different project, and will be heading back there again tomorrow for a two-day stint, presumably to help test the finishing touches on it.

Yesterday, I interviewed for a contract position with yet another company; the cell phone game developer Mobliss. If I should fill one of the openings there, I'll begin on Monday, and it will be, once again, a vastly different experience.  Cell phone game development is a different beat in and of itself, with different mobile carriers featuring different guidelines, and each carrier has a variety of cell phones with differing structures. This life I'm currently leading, going from one game company to another, is a strangely mercenary one.  With the amount of experience I'm gaining, I can't help but wonder if I may one day find myself working in the industry full-time, no longer bound by the restraints of contract work.

Warning: This turned out to be far more ranty than I had intended.

Yesterday, I picked up the PS2 RPG Ar tonelico: Melody of Elemia. I've played roughly ten hours into the game since then, and it's the sort of change of pace that I needed. Although I still have a lot of ground to cover, it's turning out to be a very fun game, much more so than the GameSpot review would have you believe. The story is fairly standard fair, with the straight-arrow hero questing to save the world, but it's the sort of old-school simplicity that's still fun to experience every now and then.

What makes the game fairly unique among RPGs is a concept called "diving". Essentially, the game's world is populated by normal humans and Reyvateils, or special girls capable of song magic. Reyvateils can only grow in power and create new songs if they have healthy relationships with their human partners. This growth is mainly fostered through diving, where the partner essentially enters a VR representation of the Reyvateil's subconscious.

The way that the game approaches this mechanic is fairly interesting, in that, from the characters' perspective, diving is an intimate experience because of the thoughts that a partner can access while inside a Reyvateil's mind. In that respect, and because of its personal nature, it's treated in a similar manner to how two people might have sex, but the purpose, rather than being for recreation or procreation, is to help the Reyvateil get over her mental blocks and personal traumas in order to become more powerful in a spiritual sense. It is because the game treats it in a fashion similar to sex that the characters often speak of the experience of diving as characters in other media (or people in real life) might speak of sex, with typical forms of innuendo and humor. The whole concept is actually pretty cute, and the way that the relationships are fostered through dives give them a sort of charm and intimacy that the basic courtship practices of games like Harvest Moon and Fable lack.

So what does this all have to do with the title of this piece? Well, frankly, having read the review and played what I have of the game, I'm not entirely certain that the reviewer understood what the game was trying to accomplish, or appreciated the method in which it was presented. The review mocks the game's innuendos as though they're purely there for poor comedic purposes. It's true that some of it is rather humorous, but a large portion of it isn't meant to be funny at all. It's just the characters talking to each other that way because that's what the game world's depiction of diving is like. It feels more like the reviewer is trying to deflect any sense of serious criticism in the same manner that a film reviewer might deny a movie serious criticism because it's not aimed at his gender, age group, general sense of taste, or all of the above. It's the unspoken excuse, "This material isn't for me, and frankly I'd be embarrassed to be seen playing this game, so I'll just slap a review together, call it 'okay for the "target audience,"' and move on."

I'm not saying that there are circumstances where reviewers aren't entitled to their opinions, but the general concept of saying, "Well, this reviewer likes RPGs, so we'll let him review [RPG X]," is flawed at the basic level. Reading the review, it's apparent that as interested in RPGs as he might be, he doesn't seem too enthused by the influences introduced from dating sims, a genre filled with text-heavy, visual-novel gameplay. I'd argue that this also influenced the review's ultimate view of the battle system, which seems to argue that it's structured too heavily around the Reyvateil's magic despite said magic being among the most potent forces in the game's universe. In a similar vein, there's a reason why Lenneth is the only one capable of doing extreme melee damage against the final boss of Valkyrie Profile. Simply put, the gameplay is tailored to the scenario.

When reviewing a game, movie, novel, or anything else, it's important to judge the media's general space within its genre along with its overall quality. No one is going to mistake Jason X for The Exorcist, for example. Not only is Jason X a straight-forward slasher film in comparison to the more spiritual, psychologically-based horror of The Exorcist, it's not even a decent slasher film and is outdone by far better films like Halloween. Even so, it's hard to give Halloween a direct, fair assessment next to The Exorcist because both films, while horrifying, are horrifying in completely different ways. Likewise, no one is going to mistake Ar tonelico for Final Fantasy VIII. Both games are Japanese console RPGs that emphasize romantic subplots, and both games feature combat systems based in the random encounter mould. They both even emphasize themes of personal growth through love and companionship. Ar tonelico simply takes this a step further in the gameplay department by putting that growth in the player's hands, whereas Squall's growth in Final Fantasy VIII is told almost exclusively through the story, with the occasional minigame thrown in for good measure.

This isn't a general criticism of the review itself; the reviewer might not have seen Ar tonelico any more or less favorably even with a more apparent consideration of the diving/relationship mechanic. It's a fun game, but it certainly has it's flaws. What I'm trying to get at more is the notion that being a fan of a particular genre in general isn't really a good qualifier for reviewing every game that fits that genre because games aren't the same as expandable waistlines. One size does not necessarily fit all.

The latest NPD hardware sales data for the month of February has been reported, and as usual, The DS has its stylus firmly planted up the PSP's UMD slot.  There's been talk that with better, more original PSP titles finally arriving, the handheld woudl see a resurgence, but where is it?  Sure, there are the occasional upswings in sales, but those upswings are nothing relative to the handheld market dominance Nintendo has maintained with the DS.  If a resurrection of the PSP market were to occur, shouldn't it have occured by now?

Of course, there's been the announcement of a portable remake of Final Fantasy Tactics, as well as Castlevania:  Rondo of Blood, which should make for two very strong entries in the PSP library, but will they make any difference when the existing big guns (Metal Gear, GTA) have barely made a dent in Nintendo's impenetrable armor?  Square Enix has already showered the DS with support, ranging from a crazy basketball game to a full-blown remake of one of the early Final Fantasies, and Konami has already released two Castlevanias of the Symphony mold on it as well.  Can either of those titles make as big a difference as some would like to believe?

And then there's the supposed PSP revamp in the works.  If Sony's smart (and the company has shown a tendency to do some remarkably foolish things as of late), the new PSP won't be able to do anything that the original PSP couldn't do (i.e.:  No second analogue nub), it will only be able to do what it could do before better.  More internal memory, a form factor that's more ergonomic than "sexy," and a battery with a better charge life would be a good start.

I'd really like to get a PSP for myself at some point.  There are games that I actually want to play on it either already in release or in the works, and it really isn't that bad of a handheld.  The problem I have is that it's not comfortable to hold, and at the price Sony's asking for it, still more expensive than I'm willing to pay for a handheld.  The problem is, if/when the PSP revamp is released, it will most likely hit the shelves at no less than what the PSP is currently selling for.  Technologically improved and more ergonomic, hopefully, but still too expensive for my needs when I already have a DS with a library of games that, in my personal opinion, blows the PSP library out of the water.  It's also not like I'm hurting for Final Fantasy Tactics, either, considering that I still have the original Playstation version and the GBA sequel.

I'd really like to believe in the PSP.  It's just that there's too much working against it:  overwhelming market momentum, an uncomfortable design, and a high price point are only some of the issues that the device faces.  When I look at the PSP, I want to believe in it, but all I believe right now is that it's headed down the same road as the Game Gear.  A good handheld that had a decent run in the market but was ultimately undone by Nintendo's momentum, technological superiority be damned.

A recent conversation in the forums about the upcoming GTAIV trailer has left me with one question.  With so many games aspiring for an open-world experience, where do the distinctions in genre and style lie?  How closely is a game like Crackdown truly related to a game like Grand Theft Auto:  San Andreas?

My answer:  Not as closely as some people believe, or would like to have you believe.  Although both games do share certain elements regarding city exploration, the ability to steal cars, and harassing the local population, Crackdown isn't really a game that should be called a GTA "clone."  While it's true that San Andreas gives the player a stat-building system that keeps track of CJ's physical condition, at no point does he gain superhuman athleticism.  In that regard, Crackdown is much more similar to Hulk:  Ultimate Destruction, which allows the player to do such things as use cars as brass knuckles and carrying civilians to the tops of skyscrapers, only to launch them across the city like a screaming ICBM.

Simply put, Crackdown and Hulk feature a much more arcade-like structure than that found in the GTA series, which, while freeform, doesn't allow nearly the same level of fantastic action because it's grounded closer to reality, despite its eccentricities.  As a series, GTA allows the player to take on the role of the delinquent child in a candy store.  By contrast, Hulk allows the player to lift the candy store off of its foundation and throw it, delinquent child and all.

What I'm getting at here is that the concept of the GTA clone is thrown about all too readily at games that don't really deserve it.  Despite its open-world environment and mission structure, no one would confuse Oblivion for being Grand Theft Auto:  Elder Scrolls.  Even games such as the otherwise traditional console RPG Metal Saga uses a structure that bears no resemblance to GTA and yet can still readily be described using the open-world moniker.

Make no mistake, Grand Theft Auto is definitely responsible for popularizing many of the elements found in open-world games today, but just because the game lets the player run rampant through its world doesn't mean that it's cloning the GTA experience.  It might look like a duck, but if it crows like a rooster and swims like a fish, it's probably not a duck.

I'm about seventy hours deep into Final Fantasy XII, have a heap of sidequests and storyline under my belt, and am well on my way to beating the game, but I haven't touched it in roughly four weeks.  It's a huge game with more content than I'm used to dealing with, and I needed a break.  I keep meaning to go back to it, but other games keep sidetracking me.  I picked up Final Fantasy VI Advance a couple of weeks ago, which is once again proving that it is hands down the best game in the series, and I've spent a large number of my evenings playing through The Bouncer again, again, and again.

This isn't really the fault of Final Fantasy XII.  I've enjoyed what I've played of it; the problem is that there's far too much on my plate at the moment, whether they be games I've wanted to play again for a very long time or simply because they don't eat up too much of my time.  Final Fantasy XII is a time-consuming game, and without casting Haste on my PS2, there really isn't any way that's going to change.

I came into this weekend thinking that I might finally be able to get back to it, but nope.  The Japanese release of the latest Fire Emblem this past week put me in the mood to revisit Ike and company in preparation for the game's North American release, and so I have Path of Radiance sitting in my Wii, already played up to chapter eight.  Even though that game averages a good thirty hours or so every time I play it, I can never seem to get enough of it.  If Final Fantasy XII were the same way, I'd probably feel a greater sense of urgency to get back to it, but for all of the character customization options FFXII provides, nothing really beats being able to turn Mist into a raging goddess of death and despair.

Fear me, Daein.  Fear me.

This past Christmas was memorable for a number of reasons.  The trip through the Denver airport was a disaster, but I managed to get home in time for the holiday, and I got to see my brother for the first time in a couple of years.  It was, all-in-all, a fulfilling trip home.

However, one thing about Christmas 2006 that will always stand out for me is that it was the day I first managed to beat the normal difficulty of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan.  I had spent the past several weeks busting my butt to beat "Ready Steady Go," but it wasn't until that evening that I managed to finally nail that last spinner and save the whole world through the power of cheering.  When it was over, I stared at the ranking screen as my score tabulated and the game awarded me with a B for my performance.  Still on an adrenaline high, I felt like my heart would burst as I sat there in the recliner, unable to stop shaking.  My physical exhertion had given way to a joyful but exhausted exhultation.  It was everything I could do to keep my mind focused and my hands steady as I moved the stylus around the screen, caught up in the excitement as the cheer squad helped everyone in the world destroy an asteroid through the power of pure will.

It was, quite frankly, one of the single greatest moments I've been lucky to experience in my many years of gaming.  Elite Beat Agents gave me a similar adrenaline thrill when I finally mastered Jumpin' Jack Flash, but although they're both fantastic games, Ouendan gets the edge simply because of the fierce, firy passion of the cheersquad.

As I look back, there are very few moments even remotely akin to this that could truly compare.  I've seen my share of gaming moments that were emotional for me, but Ouendan took it to that rare next level with its final stage, its level of challenge, and the nature in which everyone comes together in the end.

While this may seem strange to some, I think that what I feel towards the game is really indicative of a theory I hold towards gaming narratives.  They don't need long cutscenes, expansive dialogue, or characters with fully-fleshed personalities.  Even a little narrative, whether it be as nutty as a trio of ubermasculine cheerleaders helping people by shouting "Osu!" or a paragraph of text describing a space shooter's plot in the manual, can be just as meaningful as the plot of a well-crafted RPG or an action game with the complexity of the Metal Gear Solid series.  As simple as the narrative in Ouendan is, I spent fourteen stages helping people out of the pits of despair, and suddenly it was their turn to help with all of their might.  It's that right combination of the absurd and the heartfelt that make Ouendan one of the most unlikely charming, emotionally inspiring games I've ever played and likely will ever play, placing it up there in a rare territory only equaled a number of games small enough to count on one hand.