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Archives for 2009

Cast Off Your Dream: Rez

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I kick off day 1 remembering Dreamcast games that were the most fun to play. Some may not have been critically acclaimed or best sellers, but hey, this is my list. Enjoy it.

Um…yeah. Rez.

rez_2_2 Back in 2002 I had come across a game for my PlayStation 2 called Rez. Its weird main character and trippy visuals instantly turned me off. Little did I know at the time that it was also available for the Dreamcast.

Fast-forward to 2008 and this little game shows up on Xbox Live Arcade with widescreen support and HD visuals for $10. By this time I had been full of Geometry Wars, Lumines and games like Warning Forever. Trippy visuals were ok. Plus, a certain somebody who specializes in obscure games would not stop raving about the original. I figured why not.

Absolutely amazing—and mesmerizing. I’ll be honest and say I’ve never played the Dreamcast version of Rez, but if this was close in 2001-2002 to the same game I played in 2008, then this game was completely ahead of it’s time.

Rez is a rail shooter where the main character floats in a form of cyberspace. He then locks on targets—up to eight at a time I believe and fires away. It gets to be a little harder than it sounds.

Rez_ingame Speaking of, the sound is key to this game. The music and effects pulse in rhythm to the shots and what is happening on screen. The PS2 version of the game came with a device called the Trance Vibrator. It would pulse in conjunction with the game. It was meant to be put in a pocket or sat on, but, well, this is a family-friendly site. I’ll stop there.

As a result of playing the game many people described having a form of synesthesia, basically crazy reactions to the game whether by sight, sound, or touch.

Because of it’s cult status, the Dreamcast version is incredibly hard to find. Well, that and it only had a Japanese and European release on the console. However, this is one of the few games that appeared on the system that can be revisited at an affordable price and enhanced for current generation game play.

You can even use up to four Xbox 360 controllers as trance vibrators.

Let Kurt Be Kurt

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It’s appears that the attorney for Courtney Love and two former Nirvana band members are calling for Kurt Cobain’s likeness in Guitar Hero 5 to be used only for his songs. They’re sighting a “breach of likeness.” After LOL’ing on that comment, I’d have to agree with them. It’s kind of creepy seeing Cobain sing “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting.”

Eidos: There’s A Pirate In My Belfry

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Batman: Arkham Asylum is a great game. It’s an excellent game. You should be playing it. It’s good enough to pay for. Apparently that wasn’t the case for one gamer who made the following post on an Eidos forum:

"Hi!
I’ve got a problem when it’s time to use Batman’s glide in the game. When I hold , like it’s said to jump from one platform to another, Batman tries to open his wings again and again instead of gliding. So he fels down in a poisoning gas. If somebody could tel me, what should I do there."

There were two initial problems with this. One, it was for help on the PC version of the game. It had not been released yet. Two, it’s not a glitch. From an admin on the forum who replied to the original poster:

"The problem you have encountered is a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free.

It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code."

Uh, snap?

Look forward to seeing a lot more of these wonderful conversations as more publishers adopt this style of copy protection.

Source: Afterdawn.

Cast Off Your Dream

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On September 9, 1999 I was was sitting at my workstation waiting for the sky to fall. Alarmists were predicting the pre-curser to the Y2K fiasco. It was my task to make sure all the clocks in the office computers would function properly. Planes were supposed to fall out of the sky. Nothing happened.

I had spent most of my high school and college working in the electronics department at the local Wal-Mart, and I was there for quite a few console releases. The Nintendo 64 was the last. I was a huge PC gamer at the time (a game a paycheck) and I couldn’t understand all the fuss over the last console—the Nintnedo 64. People came in at midnight to get it.

On 9/9/99 I had been married a month and was a year and a half removed from Wal-Mart. One of my old wedding buddies was still employed there. We (I still feel a part of the “family”—they were that good with loyalty) were the best store in the district. Sold the most goods. Made the most profit.

I remember my friend telling me that they sold one Dreamcast. One.

So began the rise and fall of the critically acclaimed Sega Dreamcast, a system that almost killed a company and eventually became a cult console.

I didn’t own one until I saw a used system on eBay used in 2004. By then the console had already been proclaimed a failure and I was buying it just to experiment, but more importantly to play a rare imported game that I came across that had become sort of a cult classic itself. I was a closet shmup fan, and I had spent more on the game than the system itself. Ikaruga was and is one of the best games I’ve ever played.

Over the course of the next year I came across Crazy Taxi, a Sonic game here or there, Soul Calibur (I still burn to play that one—not the sequels), and Ready 2 Rumble. After a year of play, in a state of confusion I sold the system and the games on eBay for a profit. I kept Ikaruga.

In April of this year the website Thinkgeek came across of a supply of new, unopened systems, and they were selling them for $100. I didn’t wait. Since then I’ve toyed with the idea of making a MAME cabinet using the console or at least an Ikaruga arcade cabinet.

The Dreamcast is now officially ten years old and it still has a little bit of life in it. With over 660 games it does see a few new releases a year although most of them are homebrew or done by an independent developer. Systems can still be had for a price and there is a relatively large underground market for games.

I have in my possession what I to believe to be seven of the most influential games on the system, and starting tomorrow and over the course of the next seven days I’ll be giving a little review of each one.

Do you have any favorite games on the system that you miss? My life with the console is short-lived and maybe some of you have married the system. What’s your Dreamcast story?

Update:

Cheap Game of the Week – The Orange Box

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I’m going to eschew my normal format this week because this is not about a game. No, in case you weren’t aware or are one of those rare individuals who do not own the Orange Box yet I am here to tell you that you’re missing something special.

For $20 you can get an excellent collection of games, one of which is perhaps the greatest puzzle game ever made. Even if you don’t like the puzzle genre you will appreciate this game because it transcends its genre. Not many games can do that. I can count on one hand how many games have appealed to me that have been in genres that I generally don’t touch. I would have fingers left over.

The Orange Box comes with Half-Life 2 as well as Episodes 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, and Portal. All of these games can be purchases individually on the PC, but for X-Box 360 and PS3 owners this is the only way to get all of these games. Team Fortress 2 is an excellent multi-player only game with a great style and excellent balance, crippled by the fact that roughly 99.3% of the TF2 population is on the PC. Aside from that, the Half-Life games have always been quality productions, even the somewhat short side stories from the original game. By the time you get to Episode 2 it is somewhat repetitive, but even when Valve is bad they’re still better than most other developers out there. Half-Life 2 is not a great shooter, but it is an excellent interactive story.

Portal is the standout here. While all of the games are good, Portal is nothing short of excellent. Pitch black humor and incredibly well done puzzle solving all done from the same dogged first-person perspective of the Half-Life series.

I would hope that at this point anyone reading has already purchased the Orange Box. It was a bargain at $60, but at it’s current $20 it is an absolute steal. If you don’t own it, go get it. Half-Life 2 and Portal are two titles by themselves that should be part of any gamer’s experience.

Wii need help

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So it would appear that our Wii has succumbed to the physical abuse my two year-old subjects it to on a daily basis. The Wii boots up to the home screen, but whenever I put a disc in, it draws the disc in, spins it for a split second, spits it partially out, draws it back in a second time and then spits the disc out completely.

According to the Nintendo trouble-shooting guide, my Wii needs to be repaired.

I’d rather not spend the seventy-five bucks on a repair, so I have a quick question to my fellow buttonmashers: Has this happened to your Wii? If so, were you able to fix it on your own?