Wi-Philes

Last night while avoiding doing anything that might resemble being productive I stumbled on Eversion - a free to download old school style platformer. It came out at the end of last year, but it's new to me. The looks are cutesy, but we start with a quote from H.P. Lovecraft and a warning that reads "NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN OR THOSE WITH A NERVOUS DISPOSITION." This is, of course, a joke, but it ends up being a little closer to the truth than I originally thought. Looking at the readme file reveals the story, which is as follows. (No joke.)

princess is kidnapped

you must save princess

Well they get points for being concise, at least.

At first things appear to be pretty standard. Controls are simple - the arrow keys are used to run around, z to jump, and x does something called "eversion," which doesn't seem to do much of anything. So you're running around, collecting little gems, jumping on bad guys and having a pretty decent time. Then you find an area where the screen changes colors slightly, so you try out that "eversion" button. Pressing it warps you into a Zelda-esque dark world, where things are less cheery, but certain objects that you weren't able to interact with before are now of use to you. Keep going and you'll quickly figure out that there are multiple depths to this dark world, and you'll have to figure out when and where to go back and forth between them to collect all the gems to get the best ending. The first ending I got was pretty unsettling, I must say.

There are times in the game where the tone is so starkly different to what you first expected that things actually do feel a little creepy. It's still simple, 8-bit looking graphics, but the striking juxtaposition is enough to make you feel uncomfortable. I mean, it's not going to keep you up at night (unless you're a gigantic wuss), but it is there, and it's certainly worth experiencing.

I shouldn't have to talk you into trying this game. I mean, it's free. So grab it and give it a try. You'll like it. Unless you're dumb.

E3 is good and over, and I've had the weekend to recover from my trip and roll everything around in my head. Overall the show was much less chaotic than I was expecting, which almost surely has to do with the fact that it's a closed event and you have to be over a certain age to get in. I am grateful for this. Anyhow, here's what I thought of the media briefings.

Microsoft's Media Briefing

The whole thing was silly an over the top, but I guess that's what they were going for so congratulations to them. I've never seen so many celebrities in one place pretending to give a shit about video games. Regardless, they had a strong showing of software, including the announcement of a new Metal Gear Solid action game staring Raiden. I would probably be more excited about this if they showed any kind of footage. A few new Halo games: ODST and Reach. I'm putting money on Reach being an MMO of some kind. I don't really care.

The big deal surprise thing Microsoft threw out was Project Natal – which is essentially their controllerless, voice recognizing response to the Wii. A few applications of it have potential, I think, but the ones I liked the most were the more practical ones. Making voice calls and being able to pull up information from the web and share it while talking was cool. Pretending to kick a ball by kicking the air was less cool.

There were a good number of other practical, neat things they're doing with Xbox live. Netflix streaming improvements (you can finally add movies to your list through your Xbox), last.fm access, twitter and facebook integration. A few of those would be useful to me.

Nintendo's Media Briefing

This was definitely the most boring of the three briefings to me. There were a few awesome things announced, namely Super Mario Galaxy 2, New Super Mario Bros. Wii, Metroid: Other M, and one or two fun looking DS game... things. Other than that, this was a hard thing to sit through. Are we seriously talking about the Women's Murder Club DS game? And C.O.P. DS? Jesus. And what is this vitality sensor shit? Not only does it sound stupid, Nintendo failed to show off any real use of the thing. Why they decided to present it is beyond me.  Oh well, at least there were a few good Wii games announced.

Sony's Media Briefing

My big complaint here is that this thing was brutally long and spent way too much time on stupid junk. Other than that, I was fairly impressed. A very solid line up of games, the new PSP looks great (although $250 seems pretty high), Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker blew me away, and a few new Final Fantasy games were shown off for the super nerds. Most of the other games they showcased weren't big surprises, but most of it looked good. New Assassin's Creed, Gran Turismo 5 (man I don't care about this game), God of War III, etc. ModNation Racers looks awesome; it's basically a highly customizable kart racer that's clearly heavily inspired by the trendy hobby of vinyl toy collecting.

Sony's big reveal was their motion controllers, which seemed to be the farthest away from being finished but also the most interesting of the three companies. It seemed like real one to one movement, like what the Wii pretended to be able to do start out with. My biggest concern is that it seems to require a lot of hardware: up to two controllers a person and an eye toy. But the archery and sword tech demos were awesome.

Final Thoughts

Every company is now highly invested in some kind of motion control. Whether or not we'll look back at these years and say "that's really where it began" or "what the hell were we thinking?" is hard to know. I think if I had to pick who I thought had the best show it would be Sony - a lot of good games and some nice surprises. Second would be Microsoft for essentially the same reasons. Nintendo showed off a handful of exciting games, but beyond that presented nothing noteworthy or interesting. I guess I should have expected that, they're definitely in "slow and study wins the race" mode.

Braid is not a new game. It was released on the 360 almost a year ago. But it just came out on the PC, which means it's new to me.

For monetary reasons I've chosen to sit most of this generation out. I have a Wii and a PC, but I haven't been able to force myself to spend the money on a 360 or PS3. Plus, my Wii hasn't really gotten much play. For the most part I haven't really felt like I've missed much, save for a few shining stars like Metal Gear Solid 4 and Little Big Planet, which I've had to weasel my way into friends houses to play.

Quite a few games this generation have begun their lives on consoles I didn't have and drug their feet onto the PC. Which makes me happy not because I'm a PC snob, but because I actually own a PC. Well, Braid finally made its way onto Steam. My review can be summarized in three words.

Buy. This. Game.

It's beautiful, especially if you're a sucker for sprites like I am. The music is fantastic, the level design is great and the time shift puzzles are a blast to figure out. I'm not done playing it yet, but I feel pretty confident saying that it's one of the best games in the last few years.

Buy it on the 360 or buy it on the PC. It's even out on Mac, I think. Just do yourself a favor and buy the damn game.

I'm not sure what it is, exactly, that attracts me to them, but I've always loved arcade twitch shooters. One of my most played NES games was by far Life Force, which fits in to the Gradius universe somehow, I think. Jump forward in time a little bit and chances are I was sitting at home playing Darius Twin on the SNES - a weird game where all the bad guys are like, fish spaceships or something. Getting closer to the now, I spent a lot of time on my Gamecube playing Ikaruga, and enjoyed having my ass kicked by Gradius V on the PS2.

I think it was the release of Gradius Rebirth on Virtual Console that put me in the mood recently to get my hands on something of this flavor, but for whatever reason I decided to hunt down something to play on my PC instead of ponying up the cash for Rebirth. I ended up finding these and have been enjoying them thoroughly, especially Blue Wish Resurrection Plus, a game I was probably attracted to for its ridiculous name.

If this looks more fun than headache inducing to you, I highly recommend it.

I'm also contemplating importing Söldner-X: Himmelsstürmer (which definitely beats Blue Wish in the stupid name contest), a game that looks almost disgustingly gorgeous.

And all of the sudden my spring break schedule is completely full.