buttonmashing

Mashing buttons since 1984

Archives for 2006

Bully watching

by Leave a Comment

So Jack Thompson wants to see someone play Rockstar’s new game, Bully. And it looks like he and his buddy-pal-judgey are going to get their way.

Thompson said that he and the judge plan to watch the game played in its entirety, no matter how long that takes.

Of course, anyone paying attention to the initial reactions to the game knows that there isn’t all the much violence in the game, at all. It’s rated “T”, afterall. So what’s Jack really after? Of course he doesn’t care if there’s violence or not. We haven’t had any substantive controversies lately, so he’ll just make one up. He wants needs to reinsert himself into the public eye and finds his perfect target, another game by Rockstar. He “bullies” his way into this public display, hoping for resistance and the chance to point fingers. And that’s exactly what he’s going to get.

How ironic. Here’s to hoping it blows up in his face. (Figuratively, of course)

Read “Bully for You” at Wired for more info on Bully.

Game Politics has some more information about Thompson’s hearing being denied.

Wii 100% backwards compatible

by 6 Comments

I was going through my monthly clean-out of my Yahoo email address I came across this tidbit from Gamespy:

From: Joseph
In a recent news article you mention that “530” gamecube games are playable on the Wii. Is this the entire cube library, or are there limitations to the backwards compatibility as with the Xbox 360?

Li C. Kuo: I did a quick search on Nintendo’s official website and found a list of every GameCube game out so far. According to the website, there are 549 titles available for the GC right now. More are still being released. That’s a bit more than 530, however, Nintendo said “more than 530” GameCube games are playable on the Wii. We then asked Nintendo about this and were told that the Wii is “100 percent backwards compatible.”

The jury is still out on how much backwards compatibility actually matters, but it’s good to know I’ll still be able to break some necks with HUNK and RE4 Mercenaries.

This may be common knowledge, but it’s the first place I can remember seeing it in “print.” So there you go, future Wii owners — all your Gamecube games will work on your Wii.

Taking EA to task

by 5 Comments

Good post over at Dubious Quality, wherein Bill takes EA to task about the future of their sports games. Thoughtful stuff. Thinking about this is disconcerting, if Bill’s vision of the future comes true.

In other words, NBA Live might be an absolute train wreck, so bad that EA wouldn’t send out advance copies for review, but fixing that is totally unimportant to EA. What’s important is to make sure we can buy the fourth alternate unis of the Pacers.

Yikes.

Video Games in “The Office”

by 5 Comments

Did you catch last night’s episode of “The Office“? If so, what did you think about using Call of Duty as a prop?

I thought they did a good job. It looked like they actually used the real game (though I’m not sure, since I don’t play CoD) and they recreated the noob (Jim Halpert) perfectly. The shot of Jim’s guy running hopelessy into a corner while another player watched was perfect. Then when he turned around he was lined up perfectly for a head shot. Classic.

They even tweaked the geek psyche even more when they used a cute girl as one of the players. One of the better players.

Well done, NBC.

360 Demo Thursdays (Need for Speed: Carbon)

by 1 Comment

EA is not making many good games right now. More specifically, EA Sports. NCAA 2006 had a game-stopper of an error for the PSP version. Madden had issues with fatigue and their Hall of Fame mode. At first they were ignored but eventually corrected (even if they were a bit of a pain to fix). The Xbox 360 version of FIFA 07 was horribly gimped compared to its last-generation brethren. And most recently, NBA Live has come under fire for some pretty spectacular gaffes on EA’s part (you can see my favorites in this video). Then, when things couldn’t get worse, they announced that they’d be releasing “strategy guides” and “Classic Stadiums” on Xbox Live Marketplace. For Microsoft points. As in points you paid real money for. EA isn’t doing a very good jump of winning over gamers.

So I decided to see if EA could at least get a next-gen racing game right. I played a lot of Need for Speed: Underground and I love Burnout 3, both under the EA Games umbrella. So how would Need for Speed: Carbon stack up?

What exactly is the premise behind Carbon? As far as I can tell, it’s a street racing game where you a part of a “crew.” You race with your crew against rival crews for control of neighborhoods. Based on your performance in the different races and drift competitions, you can challenge a rival in a race through the canyon (one of these being named “Carbon Canyon”). You win the race, you take control of that neighborhood. Makes sense, right? Honestly, do you need a reason to race really fast cars?

The demo is pretty straightforward. You have three cars to choose from: a tuner, a muscle car, and an exotic car. The cars are customizable, but with a different manner of customization that I don’t really like. Instead of using off-the-shelf, real life parts, you can adjust how different components of the car looks using a bunch of sliders. You can adjust the look of your rims, the bumbers, the hood, things like that. I prefer the garage where you buy actual parts and customize your car that way. I’m sure they didn’t provide all the customization tools with the demo, but the ones they did include didn’t woo me at all.

Once you pick your car and customize it to your liking, you then can compete in three events, a race with your crew, a drift competition (those familiar with the Underground series will recognize that) and finally a challenge through the canyon. The race with your crew is pretty straight-forward. You can use your crew to either race ahead and try to finish first or fall behind and block cars as you race ahead. I wasn’t sure how the mechanics of using your crew worked, so I just raced ahead and won the race. Nothing too exciting. Same for the drift race. Same old, same old.

The canyon race was actually fun. You start off trailing your opponent and you rack up points the closer you stay to him. Halfway through the race, you switch places and he’s behind you, chipping away at the points you just earned. Finish the race with points and you win. Pretty easy, right? Well, the race through the canyon is tricky. Instead of using walls and railing as your own personal gutter bumpers, keeping you on the road, if you hit them too hard, you’ll crash through, plummetting to your death. It adds an extra dimension to the race, which frustrated the heck out of me but I came to appreciate it.

I started out the demo using the “muscle” car. I’d recommend against that. It handles like a dump truck. In fact, the collisions you cause in the game are poorly modeled. I’d hit a wall and lose control, but not in the direction or with the force I was expecting. It didn’t feel like I smashed into a wall. It felt more like I was bounced off the wall with a random amount of force. I didn’t care for how the collisions felt. The controls overall felt pretty good but not great.

The demo looked great (I’ve never seen such detailed asphalt in a game) and had the usual crap soundtrack that EA is famous for. It was easy to get the hang of things but overall didn’t impress me. At least not enough to buy Need for Speed: Carbon. Certainly worth a rental, as the canyon races were fun, but not enough to warrant a purchase for me.

Carnival of Gamers #18

by 2 Comments

… is now on display at Man Bytes Blog, presented by Corvus. In grand fashion, I might add.

Since we took a break from the monthly Carnival, there were quite a few submissions. Glad to see the Carnival still going strong. The next stop will be at Unfettered Blather in November. The next few hosts after that are being reshuffled again, but I should be able to straighten those out soon enough. A couple more volunteers have also come forward to help with the Carnival, which is great to see.

As always, you can Digg the Carnival here.

Dead Rising is dead to me.

by 62 Comments

Okay, maybe the title is a little over-the-top. Dead Risingis a great game, but right now I just don’t see myself playing it much anymore.

Dead Rising

(This post may reveal some minor spoilers, for those that care.)

I earned the “D” ending the first time through Dead Rising. I had no idea what to do at the end until it was too late. “D” is the poor man’s ending, not resolving much. I approached the end a second time and instead of getting caught by the SWAT guys, I hid like a little girl on the roof for 12 hours. Then, I forgot to actually be on the helipad and the helicopter left without me. Crap! I got the “C” ending. I decided I’d try my luck with a stronger Frank the third time through and found the SWAT guys go down pretty easy when I hack their limbs with the mini chainsaw. So I managed to unlock the “Overtime Mode” and eventually I earned the “A” ending (or “ture” ending, as the misspelling in the Achievements calls it) and I unlocked the “Infinity Mode” which is basically a non-stop zombie bash. How long can you survive while your health slowly slips away? I played the inifinity mode a few times, hoping to earn the “5-day” and “7-day Survivor” achievements. What a joke that turned out to be.

I managed to survive almost 24 hours when I decided I’d save and continue at a later time. I went to the security room but couldn’t save. Fine, maybe it wasn’t “safe” there anymore, so I went down to a bathroom and tried to save there. Again, no save. WTH? So I did a quick Google which brought me to the IGN FAQ for surviving Dead Rising’s Infinity Mode, earning those elusive achievements. (You can read the FAQ here)

Turns out, there is no save in the Infinity Mode. That is insane. And disappointing. Sure, it’s not the main game, but I was looking forward to racking up some serious zombie kills over a few days of gaming. It takes about 2 hours, real-time, to survive 24 hours, game time. That means 14 hours to earn the “7-day Survivor.” No one in the right mind is going to do that! (Actually, the longest anyone on Live has survived is 16 days. That’s THIRTY-TWO FRICKEN HOURS of Dead Rising, straight, people!)

I can’t fathom what the person was thinking when he decided this was a good design idea. Let’s make them play our 14 hours with no saving! That’s a great idea! No, it’s not. That’s insanity. It’s not even hardcore. It’s just not doable for 99% of the people playing the game.

Sure, the IGN FAQ tells you this is, “one of the toughest achievements in the game.” The FAQ also gives you hints on how to keep your Xbox from over-heating while you play for FOURTEEN HOURS straight. Toughest achievement? I’d rather not catch my entertainment center on fire, thank you very much.

In the end, this doesn’t detract from Dead Rising as a whole. The game is a great game. But I thought it would have a lot of replayability, but now I just don’t see it happening. In fact, I had started the game over, trying to earn some of the other achievements I never earned but now I don’t even feel like playing that anymore, knowing that the Survivor achievements will always mock me and my limited gaming time.

So for now, Dead Rising is dead to me.

Work in progress

by 3 Comments

Over the weekend, I’ll be working on my To-Do List I mentioned a couple weeks ago. Most recently, I’ve added a Contact Page, with a form to contact me directly, along with my Instant Messenger screen names and my email address. If you’ve got a tip, question, complaint, anything, feel free to drop me a line however you like.

I’m also using this plugin to set up all the different feeds I have to point to my FeedBurner feed. For those of you that read Buttonmashing through an RSS reader, this shouldn’t cause any issues but it will give me a chance to have a better idea of who’s reading the site through my feeds. Let me know if this causes anyone a problem.

Other changes will be occuring (mostly behind the scenes) but hopefully nothing will get garbled or wonky while I do my tweaking.

Update: I noticed after installing the plugin that the feed spit out like 20 of my latest entries (including my del.icio.us links and Flickr pictures). Hopefully that didn’t cause any problems or confusion.

Contact

by

There are a few different ways you can contact me (and please, feel free to contact me).

The quickest and easiest way is using the following contact form:

I can also be reached via email at buttonmashing@gmail.com

I can also be reached via Yahoo! and AOL Instant Messenger:

Yahoo! IM (preferred): cholo_75

AIM Screename: IaintYerPapa