News: OMG FFXII FTW!?
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Gabe: The mood in the office this morning is somewhat tense. We all spent the weekend playing FFXII and we came back today completely divided regarding its quality. I have to admit that after putting in nearly fifteen hours over the past two days I"m prepared to call it the best FF game I"ve ever played. I know that"s at odds with what I said on Friday but it"s the truth. Tycho and Robert are actually playing together and they"re at about the five hour mark. They came in this morning saying the game was trash and I can"t blame them. They"re knee deep in what I"d describe as the tutorial phase of the game. If you played Kingdom Hearts II you"ll remember that"s a game that doesn"t actually start until nearly eight hours in. I don"t mean like you don"t start having fun until then, I mean you literally don"t even see the title screen until you"ve dicked around with Roxas for eight fucking hours. FFXII felt the same way to me. It"s extremely slow to start but now I"m having a hard time putting the controller down.
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Gabe: I had planned on making a couple posts last week but I ended up getting some kind of devil virus. It was the sort of sick where you don't really sleep. You just curl up in the bathroom and hallucinate that wolves are encircling you. I'm feeling better now though.I had wanted to talk about some stuff but I forgot almost all of it during my spirit quest. Let me see if I can remember anything. Sorry if this is sort of scattershot.I did go to the Pokemon Tournament and I ended up taking fourth. It was my first tourney and I was using a pretty crazy deck I'd built just a few days prior. Kiko also went and he took fifth even though we had the same win loss record during the day. They used some special Pokemon math to push me in to the final four and give him fifth. I pretty proud of both of us. It was a new level of competition that we'd never seen before and I think we played really well.If you're a fan of Transformers I highly recommend the new animated series on Cartoon Network. Some people might be turned off by the look but I think it's incredible. It's got a very Teen Titans look which makes sense seeing as it's by the same people. Even in vehicle mode these transformers are expressive and full of character. I read Amulet over the weekend (don't believe the date on his site, it is already in stores) and if you are a fan of comics I suggest you do the same. I don't want to say too much about it. I think that Kazu is one of the most talented individuals working in comics today. With Amulet he has created something timeless. I've collected all your Dickerdoodle pictures and there's some pretty great stuff in there. Give me some time to sort through them and I'll start posting my favorites soon. I'll get Tycho to help me pick a winner and we'll find something cool here in the office as a prize.-Gabe out
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Tycho:  This has been simmering on some tertiary heat source for awhile, and it may be time to serve it.  When a classic game is re-released for digital delivery, by what criteria are they being reviewed?
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Tycho:  It took three separate discs and two consoles to finally work out the Goddamn kinks, but we were able to play almost the entire Eternal Sonata demo.  Almost!  I wasn't aware people were still boiling discs, presumably in black iron cauldrons where carrots bob, but I don't want to live a life where boiling discs is normal.
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Tycho: Keek directed me to a radical (and potentially even "badical") article on BioShock over at Gamers Wif Jobs. I've been wondering about the recent PR shift the game has gone through, because I don't just keep hearing that it is a "shooter first," but I keep hearing specifically that it is a "kick-ass shooter," even though it's a game where you learn about Objectivism underwater while helping jealous composers get revenge. I've never doubted that the game will be great, by whatever road it reaches that greatness. The recent WWE slant just had me curious about whether I'll be able to perform a suplex in-game. You may not think that is important, but it is totally important.(CW)TB
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Tycho:  Sony hasn't been entirely clear regarding what their 1.92 update for the Playstation 3 actually does, suggesting that it "focuses on some PS3 compatibility and playability issues for select titles," but our own experience with the update has been conclusive.  In the Internet's dark places, aggrieved Lair fans are suggesting that this update improves the game's motion controls, and that each media outlet must rescind their previous scores.  I'm fairly certain this is magical thinking - neither Sony or Factor 5 will say with any specificity, and now that both our PS3s are updated it would be impossible to test.  Typically we don't take the traditional holidays off, nor do we take off non-traditional holidays, such at the Feast of St. Motherfucker - a holy day that I've only just now invented.  Gabe's father was around, though, and golf seemed like a good time investment.  Reading greens and choosing clubs for other people is about as far as I get, so for me the social aspects of the game are paramount.  Standing under the awning at the driving range, it's hard not to see where EA's Tiger series could improve.      This year's lobby system is much improved over last year's, but I'm not sure why the lobby itself couldn't be a driving range.  This is how virtually any actual round of golf starts, with every person hitting the bucket they bought and lamenting their performance.  A few of their minigames would work just fine in this context - don't create a custom game to play them, build all of the basic play into a casual, central experience.  From here, modes, courses, and wagers are established.  When new people pull in, carts can be heard.  Links for the 360 wasn't as complete as Tiger, but it had four player modes first - and it had a means to play Speed Golf that Tiger should loot from its fallen enemy.  Essentially, you play the round as normal.  Everyone else plays the round as normal simultaneously, and shots are keyed to a certain color so that the arc of each person's shot is visible to all other players.  They need to steal this - throw the name of each player on there, use the face, whatever.  This needs to be how it works.  You can play an entire course in a quarter of the time.  The RPG metaphor really worked the first few times I bought the product, but it's really lost its currency with me.  There's a point - and it may be with the '08 version of the product - where the number of courses are such that I don't actually want to pay sixty dollars again just to lose all of my character progression every year.  Gabriel's suggestion is to approach it more like a fighting game, which is to say like Mario Golf - with discrete golfer archetypes that have a suite of skills.  I'm wondering if Guild Wars doesn't have the answer - full priced expansions every year, with a perpetually tracked online experience where your prior purchase actually increases the value of the next.  Let all play - online and off - be a part of the core experience, let all play hone your ability.  Don't wall off online play into some purgatory as it is now, untracked, outside of the normal scheme of advancement.    With these thoughts in my head, excited by the sun-dappled future we had envisioned. we sat down to play a round online the next night.  After determining that one of us couldn't play at all or it would crash the game for everyone - a weird kind of crash where you can't play, but you're able to talk to one another about the crash - we were able to play eight holes, at which point it crashed before a victor could be determined.  They've only just made online Photo Game Face available for Tiger, for the first time since launch, but they had to deactivate online features for two other titles to do it.  So, no.  I don't have high hopes.
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Tycho: I just read through one of the conduits of Leipzig gaming news, and was jolted by a piece of news: Xbox Live is going to be moving into classic board games. I don't mean, like, Chutes and Ladders or some shit - though I don't doubt that GrowPot420 would snap that up on day one. No, I mean like Settlers of Catan and Carcassone. Pillars of the tabletop gaming community, so to speak. This is probably the biggest news of that convention for me. Getting people together to play these games, or finding people to play them with at all can be a trying endeavor. This is near Goddamn optimal.(CW)TB
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Tycho:  Rhythm games aren't my forte, but I have a lot of inbuilt experience with meter which helps me fake it until I can build genuine skill.  And, as rhythm elements have crept into the entire medium, Tycho stock has been in a boom phase.  It's understandable, then, that while I soar and illuminate - and Gabriel sputters, bound to earth - tensions related to my prowess have begun to burn red-hot.  That is, until they cool again.  These things have a way of working themselves out in the fullness of time.          There's an incredible article over at Wired this month (and possibly also in the magazine?) about the Bungie's psychological approach to game design.  What a tremendous challenge it must be to retain authorial control in such a case!  As someone whose output is rarely screened by any agency, the whole thing gave me chills.  The right to fail nobly in a creative endeavor (as we sometimes do) is such a powerful luxury.  No such luxury may be extended to them, upon whose toil an entire platform rests.  God keep me from such a fate.          I keep hearing that Metroid Prime 3: Corruption isn't being promoted very well, but the person saying this always seems to know about it, and then when people share this complaint in the thread those people also seem to be "in the know."  It ships on the twenty-seventh of August, if you weren't aware - but since you almost certainly are, we needn't dwell on it.  What we should be dwelling on are the series of teaser vids that Retro has been trickling out.  Metroid's largely mysterious heroine has always been a huge draw for me, and going into deep detail about the character would actually damage the mystique.  But the universe she operates in need not be vague, which is why these clips are such a rich meal:  there's the Aurora Unit trailer that modernizes ancient Metroid canon in a classy way, and there's a treat at the end of the Valhalla trailer that ties it all together.  They both cover a setting that has gotten darker and more sophisticated, tones we don't typically associate with Nintendo.       We like to get kicks in on the post-Harmonix Guitar Hero, partly based on their "wacky" multiplayer concept - which ordinary gamers will probably love - but also out of a sort of tribal loyalty.  This having been established, they've built an authentically heroic tracklist that really has a lot of beef.  Going from the most recent Rock Band announcement out of Leipzig, both versions appear to have Radiohead's "Creep" and the Beastie Boys' "Sabotage," which is something of a comfort.  After seeing different songs on each game from Metallica and The Rolling Stones, I wasn't sure if they were already traveling down the catalogues securing exclusive weaponry.  I hope that the labels in this case see the old wisdom of arming both sides.
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roundup Plus: Blizzard wins online game suit...CA adds utility-like mainframe pricing, expects...Salesforce.com reports subscriber surge.
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Travis Swicegood is teasing us with some output from a script in his latest blog post:   So my free time of late (what there is of it) has been spent on a project that's getting really close to v0.1 release. In other words, its first functional release. If you've ever run a test using the PEAR installer or know what a .phpt file looks like, you might be able to guess what I've been up.   Keep an eye on his blog for more information on his "secret project".
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Tycho:  Today's comic is based on a story we saw at Kotaku, but when I went over there to verify the link the story had been removed altogether.  For those of you playing along at home, what that means is that Kotaku
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roundup Plus: Monster says it could enter Japan by mid-2005...Novell to release Open Enterprise Server...Blizzard wins online game suit...CA adds utility-like mainframe pricing, expects.
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Tycho:  Months after it was necessary, Sony has thrown their blogging hat into the ring...  of blogging.  I've heard people compare it to Larry Hryb/Major Nelson's blog, but with a rotating "crew" of bloggers - like a public relations version of the Wu Tang Clan - it's more like Microsoft's Gamerscore blog.  Which, coincidentally, I never read because it is run by a rotating "crew" of bloggers, like a public relations version of the etcetera etcetera.  The mental image is that of a corporate hydra, the brand seared and scabbed upon its breast.
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Tycho:  We grabbed a couple demos yesterday afternoon to see if we were missing anything, specifically Tenchu Z and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, and came away with the expected comic materials.  I think Tenchu Z may get explored in a more robust fashion in Monday's strip, but after the loading is complete the demo flashes up one of those screens that is completely grown over with control instructions.  It wasn't even an especially bad one, and there are very, very bad ones, like the one in the demo for StarFire Saga V: Laserion.  It was merely an assault on the mind, paralyzing in its way.
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Tycho: Two new shirts today. One based on the Broodax Strips, which can be found here, and looks like this:   And another shirt based on the control scheme for Starfire Saga V: Laserion, which can be found here, and looks like this:   (CW)TB
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Tycho:  Gabe keeps coming into the Goddamn office with his Goddamn tales of high adventure, telling me about how there's tokens or some shit in Burning Crusade now, or maybe tiers, and other words I had scoured from my consciousness.  He also says there is hot new five-man content, which initially sounded like pornography.  The comic is correct - I purchased it in a moment of weakness.  As I must often approach you, the cherished reader, to apologize for this or that indiscretion, it may be more appropriate to say that I have moments of strength which are suspended in cowardice and moral decay.
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Rob Richards mentioned in a previous book review about some of the issues he was having getting the Oracle extension enabled on his Fedora 8 system. Well, he's come back after doing some more testing/compiling and has found some resolution to his issues.   I really didn't need to get it running, but the sheer fact that I tried it and it wouldn't work, pissed me off enough to spend some time getting it resolved. Hopefully this helps anyone else having the same problem. I am currently using instant client 11.1, but I did try the 10.2 version with the same results.   He steps through the process he followed - tracking down the missing libaio files, correcting an issue with SELinux loading the Oracle libraries and his realization: he just needed to allow text relocation. Included in the post are the command line calls that'd need to be made to make it all happen.