It helps to be autistic.

I got my NES for Christmas when I was 6, and I kept playing it (fairly consistently) until I was sixteen–when the system finally gave out after 10 years of reliable service.  Yes, there were days when a game would freeze up on me just as I made it to the final boss battle..and yes, there were the times that I threw a game cartridge across the room in frustration…and yes, there were days entirely punctuated with my brother’s mantra, “stop talking to me!  You’re making me die!”  But, even with all of these petty frustrations, I am typing this blog not six feet away from a (somewhat) functional NES, and I can’t help but be happy to have it in my life.  Here are the 7 greatest games from my youth, although there were many, many more.

7. RBI Baseball - I get no enjoyment out of playing sports. I couldn’t care less when the Red Sox won the World Series, but RBI baseball was seriously fun, and it had the best replay-value out of any of the games in my library.  On my Genesis, it was Mutant League Hockey, and on my NES, it was RBI Baseball.

Short, fat, generic baseball gods.

6. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 3: The Manhattan Project – Everyone chooses the 2nd in the series because of the famous arcade version, and I have to admit, I spent many-a-quarter on that damn game, but TMNT3 was the one I had in my own personal library, and despite being strikingly similar to the 2nd, this one had cool special moves for every turtle.

5. Battletoads – Even though I rarely made it past the hovercraft level, I loved  the sense of power I got from a well-placed punch combo.

4. River City Ransom - This was the closest I ever got to playing an “open world” game on my NES.  You could just run around beating the hell out of people and taking their money, then spending it on rice balls and brass knuckles at the local candy shop (don’t ask why candy shops sold rice balls).

3. Super Mario Brothers 3 - Most would argue that this was the best game for the NES, and if it wasn’t so easy, I’d have to agree with them, but the fact of the matter is that most people just got the magic flutes and jumped straight to the end, which is too bad because the levels in the middle were wicked awesome.

2. The Legend of Zelda – This game got me through my childhood and led me down the path of geekdom more completely than any other game in my library.  It was (and still is) 100 percent compulsively playable.

1. Mega Man 2 – From the completely dope intro (Mega Man warping off of a windy rooftop w/ seriously cinematic style) to the depths of Dr. Wiley’s castle, Mega Man 2 was an exercise in skill.  Mega Man games are famously tight, but this one was downright elegant.  Every level of this classic side-scroller was perfectly designed and completely enjoyable.  Thank you, Capcom, for ensuring that I’d be awkward around girls for the next ten years (and beyond).

Ms, not Mrs

In 1981, Namco unleashed what was to become the most successful arcade cabinet of all time, Ms. Pac-Man, which featured subtle but significant tweaks on the original Pac-Man, thus seriously enhancing the gameplay experience.  A few of these changes were as follows: 1) Apparently, the logarithms (not that I remember enough sophomore math to really get this) which were used to program the ghosts made them less predictable and more erratic,  2) instead of remaining static, the fruit dances around the play-field and appears in a random order,  3) and, of course, Ms. Pac-Man features a female protagonist–which was a rare find in the male-centric world of 80s gaming.

Even if you’re a wee-young gamer, you’re probably aware of these facts.  You’ve been raised in a world saturated with Pac-mania.  Many bars (and Laundromats) here in Brooklyn feature a Ms. Pac-Man machine (even if it is adjacent The Fast and the Furious).  What you’re probably not privy to is that Ms. Pac-Man began her long career with a snip and a tuck–namely, a sex change.  She was originally a little guy named Crazy Otto (see below).

Who the hell is Crazy Otto?  He’s the brainchild of two MIT students, Doug Macrae and Kevin Curran.  Macrae and Curran basically hacked one of the original Pac-Man consoles and made a few key alterations, giving him legs and turning the ghosts into Furby-esque monsters.  Aside from that, their wizardry had to do with slight alterations to the A.I. (if you could call it that).  When they realized that they had somehow created a fantastic game, they promptly sold it to Midway, the North American distributor of Pac-Man, who (in turn) handed it over to the rightful owners, Namco.  And that’s all she wrote.  Without Crazy Otto, Ms. Pac-Man wouldn’t exist; without two MIT college students, we wouldn’t have something to do with the 30 minutes that our laundry is drying.

Sources: Game Informer issue 201, Wikipedia.org

Otto is so crazy.

Sure she's great, but she leaves crumbs in the bed.

Thanks to a co-worker whose identity I have yet to ascertain, I am as sick as a dog this weekend, which ironically is the first full weekend I’ve had off in about two months. Luck of the draw, I suppose. I an attempt to nip my illness in the bud I drank a ton of fluids, Vitamin C, all the good stuff, but when I took Nyquil before bed, I ended up in that torturous limbo known as exhaustion-but-can’t-really-sleep. So, curled up in bed, I picked up my copy of Patricia Briggs’ Silver Borne… then dropped it. Instead, I turned on Final Fantasy XIII, a game I have been nibbling at since it’s release. I got a funky flashback to a moment twelve years ago, where I also sick and did the same exact thing with FF VI… stayed up all fucking night playing. While I did that, I pondered a ton of stuff on the horizon.

First off, in case you’re wondering, FFXIII  isn’t a bad game, though there are a ton of reviews out there that claim to be disappointed.  Boo hoo. The story is not exactly spectacular, but as far as I’m concerned it’s par for the course in a role-playing game. It is also a much different game, for which I’m grateful in a way; its super linear, and it’s near-impossible to be lost. I don’t have time to dump into games like when I was a kid, so I like to come back two weeks later and know exactly where I am and what I’m doing. Second off, this is not a review. I don’t care enough either way to analyze it (even though I’m nearly finished the game). If you were on the fence, I would say go check it out. You’ll enjoy.

The rest of my day will be spent wrapping up Silver Borne, and wondering why:

1. My immune system has betrayed me.

2. Megan Fox got offered the lead role in Red Sonja… has anyone seen Jennifer’s Body?

3. I can’t fall in love with Caprica, yet continue to watch it.

Well, they’ve outdone themselves again this year, announcing a new equipment rank system for WoW players and two mobile games that are sure to be hits.

Epic Storytelling

Two New Mobile games

As a writer, I am super excited for the announcement of the game Queen’s Quest for mobile platforms from Blizzard. The fact I can move through this story of “betrayal, love, action, drama, comedy, life, death, destiny, freedom, war, peace, hope, despair, and epic adventure” using just my words is groundbreaking for the industry! And do I even need to say it? Look at those graphics, and that dialogue. I think I’ll have to stop playing WoW for this one. I’ll be picking up these 17 floppy disks from the store as soon as it’s released, you can be sure of that.

(and my personal favorite announcement..)

My EPEEN is bigger than yours! You can't talk to me!

Equipment Potency EquivalencE Number (or, E.P.E.E.N.)

With the recent emphasis in game about gear score (for those of you that don’t play WoW, each item has an “item level” that indicates what tier of content an item is from. Gear score is all of these item levels added together, which is supposed to be an indication of a player’s level of gear.. and, obviously, skill), the good folks at Blizzard have taken it upon themselves to further streamline this process of weeding out poor players from the best. They’ll be releasing the E.P.E.E.N. system with Cataclysm, the next expansion, which will phase characters out based on their E.P.E.E.N. ranking, meaning only the best will be able to speak to someone with a very high E.P.E.E.N. score. I think Blizz said it best:

As your number grows, the game world will tailor itself to you in other subtle ways: as the pool of players you interact with becomes more and more exclusive, you’ll no longer need to stand still in prominent locations quite so often to allow others to inspect your gear; you’ll have fewer time-wasting calendar invitations to sift through; and your friends list will become increasingly more manageable, reducing needless scrolling time. Any negative repercussions of these changes will be offset by the satisfaction you’ll receive knowing your equipment is significantly more impressive than average.

As always, Blizz, I commend you on your industry-changing April First news releases.

Awesome.

Nintendo, to me, has always appealed to a much wider audience than XBox 360 and PlayStation (which in my eyes makes them a more intelligent company).. neither Microsoft or Sony has really gotten a handle on the non-teenage/young adult-male gaming demographic, but Nintendo has. Yeah, Microsoft and Sony do that demographic VERY well, but what about the rest of us?

Just to illustrate how out of touch Sony is, I give you this quote: “Having been in the portable space for quite awhile, I think it’s an interesting move but one I’d like to see where they go from a demographic standpoint. Eight- and nine-year-olds playing 3D is a little bit of a stretch given where some of our research is right now.” (John Koller, SCEA director of hardware and marketing)

lolwut? Wow. He’s going to be regretting those words for a long time to come.

P.S. Look at how beautiful that logo is.

They have electricity in this one.

Fallout: New Vegas is coming!  Chances are that if you’ve held an Xbox controller, you’ve heard of the Fallout franchise.  What started in 1997 as a groundbreaking RPG for the PC has recently been rekindled into a healthy console franchise, complete with oodles of DLC for the highly addicted.  With the success of Fallout 3 behind its sails, Bethesda announced in April 09 that they’d be teaming up with Obsidian (the sequel guys, e.g. Knights of the Old Republic II and Neverwinter Nights 2), a team led by Feargus Urquhart (Fallout alum from the Black Isle days), to bring us Fallout: New Vegas in the 4^th quarter of 2010.

After much speculation, there is now an official teaser trailer, and a great podcast from OXM UK with Bethesda’s Pete Hines.  If you’re a fan of Fallout, you’re no stranger to the town New Reno from Fallout 2 (a Black Isle release), and with Urquhart back at the helm, hopefully we’ll see a world as depraved and complex as Fallout 2’s Nevada.

We’re excited about this one, guys, so get your PipBoy prepped for a Fall release

I’ll be interested to see how this plays out. Judging from the company’s success, this could do very well, but I’m not sure this is the best property to create a MMO from. I’ve told a couple of die hard fans I know about this, and they seem skeptical at best.

(In case you’re wondering, no, I do not watch the show.. but I’ve been told multiple times it would change my life. It’s on my list of things to do when I’m not pinching pennies).

Well, this past Monday, I was able to view it in all it’s glory. I wasn’t playing, our friend was, but I got enough sense of the game that I can say.. I want this game to revolutionize the way designers and consumers think about video games.

Is that a lofty statement? Maybe. But I think it’s well within Heavy Rain’s capacity to do so.

The premise of the game is summed up in one question: how far would you go to save the ones you love? It’s an intriguing question, and one you get to put to the test throughout the story with no (real life) consequences.

You are playing as four seemingly unrelated characters: a father looking for his son (presumably a victim of the Origami Killer), a private eye (investigating the murderer), a FBI agent with some very cool, hi-tech glasses (also investigating the murder), and an insomniac. Through really compelling story-telling, controls that mimic the urgency/real action your character is doing, and fitting music you become connected to the characters so deeply it’s hard to tear yourself away from their story (I had to go to the bathroom for about an hour before I finally gave in and asked for the game to be paused).

These are the things that make you feel not only as if you’re a part of the story, but that you ARE the characters. One of the opening scenes as the private eye has you fighting an abusive ex-client of this woman, and my friend said he really felt as if he were in a fight. I’ve seen that fight scene three times now, and each time the private eye has come out looking a little different. Depending on which hits you block, your character may come out with different injuries. At one point, his nose was broken; at another, he had a cut on his head. It’s all dependent on the choices and actions you, the player, take.

Which is what brings me to the most intriguing thing about this game.. the fact that every single decision you make (pull the trigger or don’t? try to sympathize to gain information or play aggressively? etc.) affects the rest of the game. If you kill that character, you may never know what their presence revealed later in the game. If you pissed off that person, they may never tell you important information that will help you. If you let your character die.. well, you’ve lost a view point.

I haven’t played the whole game. I don’t pretend to know everything about it, but from what I’ve seen and heard, Heavy Rain is something special. I can only hope that game designers will be inspired, and we’ll be seeing a new host of new, intelligent, and immersive story-telling games in the near future.

In this market, for a game to really be noticed, it has to step it up in the gameplay and intelligence of the design. Heavy Rain does this beautifully. As this review on GameSpot states: “Though it suffers from its share of plot and technical problems, Heavy Rain is nonetheless a bold and visionary step forward in the medium of interactive storytelling. [...] No matter how your adventure plays out, Heavy Rain is a profoundly personal experience that should not be missed.”

I only wish I had a PlayStation3 to be able to experience this on. Alas, I do not. So I urge everyone who can pick it up to do so as soon as possible, so I can live vicariously through you.

My Shepard looked like Frank Castle. But this one is still bad ass.

I have a problem. And that problem is I rarely finish a video game. I’ve played a lot (pretty much my whole life I’ve been a gamer) but the problem is that I get bored easily. Final Fantasy keeps my attention with stories and then loses me with the constant grinding. Games like the GTA series give me too many choices and I end up going on random sprees of malice rather than following the plot. Very rarely to games grab my attention and not let go. Bioshock was one. I played and beat it in two days, the story was so intense and the setting so interesting I couldn’t let it go. The Halo and Call of Duty series are others (although Halo has been losing its luster; although I am excited for Halo: Reach), but this is because my genre of choice is definitely FPS. Half-life, GoldenEye, Perfect Dark, and Timesplitters are some of my favorite games. Maybe because they are so short and linear, but mostly because the great multiplayer they offer. As much as I love RPGs I just can’t seem to finish them, unless the story is so good I can’t stop playing.

This is what happened with Mass Effect 2. (Full Warning some spoilers ahead but not things you probably don’t know.)

BioWare’s Mass Effect series is quickly shaping up to be one of the most satisfying video game experiences I’ve ever had. I’ll be honest first: the first game was good but not great. I enjoyed the shooter style gameplay, but I only really liked some of the characters. I never really felt part of a real crew, and I always ended up using Wrex, Tali and Garrus. The romance options were limited (if you’re going to be able to mack on some alien chicks at least let the player choose whoever they want right?) and the graphics felt rushed. Not to mention the horrendous planet exploration sections with the Mako which felt like you were driving on balloons greased in Crisco. I knew that the entire plan was to make every decision you made in all the games carry over to the next one, but the decisions in the first game were always rather black or white. It wasn’t until the final two missions where things got difficult and I felt like I was actually weighing options that could change the course of galactic history. In other words this game came out 2007. I just beat it in order to upload my choices into Mass Effect 2 (yes I play sequels where I’ve never finished the first game). It turned out that I was literally a mission away from finishing the entire time.

Mass Effect 2 blew all of that out of the water. From the minute I put the disc in and loaded it up I was hooked. The opening scene is hair raising and intense, and even shows some of the early ramifications of your decisions. Liara (who I romanced in the first game because she annoyed me less out of the choices available) didn’t want to leave me behind as the Normandy was destroyed around me. I actually felt a little sad seeing the ship become space junk around me. Then I died.

That’s right. The character I had spent an entire game with got shot out into space and crashed into a planet. A pretty bad ass way to go out (not as bad ass as Chewie who had a moon dropped on him) but something to write home about nonetheless. Flash forward to two years later. I am resurrected by the shady Cerberus and the Illusive Man, who for the entire first game had been running illegal experiments and was also probably responsible for the event that initially triggered my claim to fame.

We swear we are trustworthy.

What followed was me playing a game like I hadn’t played one in a long time. All of the complaints I had about the first game were either taken out or fixed. Horrible inventory system? Gone, replaced with a simple equipment screen. The one thing I had a complaint about is that armor customization should have been put into your private terminal so you didn’t have to go to your cabin to change. Mako? The way of the dodo, although the upcoming mission will have this bad boy as a vehicle:

The Hammerhead: A flying tank FTW.

The other thing is that almost every single character on my new crew was interesting. I actually felt invested in them (I was playing the Paragon path as usual) and their stories were always interesting. I especially liked Thane and Mordin. The opportunity to Romance almost anyone was also welcomed, and although technically it meant cheating on my ‘love’ from the first game (which will undoubtedly make them angry in the third game) I chose Tali as she was my favorite character from the first game and continues to have an interesting background and story. I can’t wait to see what happens with the Quarians in the third game. The controls are much better and the AI wont shoot randomly at walls and everywhere but the bad guy anymore. They combine powers fairly well on their own and the addition of hotkeys allows you to control their most useful ones. Battles were crazy but never too frustrating, and once I learned that Unity was the equivalent of First Aid kits in the first game (and not just a resurrection skill) I didn’t have many problems.

Things like this never got old.

I won’t give away too much of the story, but needless to say it hooked me. The decisions I made in the first game come back in this game in big and small ways. Even the smallest of reminders (such as emails from people I had saved in the first game) invested me into the character and made me feel as if I had actually accomplished something other than filling my Paragon meter. The dialogue interrupts (new to Mass Effect 2) and far more cinematic camera angles kept me glued to the conversations (although I read so much faster than they speak in the game that I sometimes skipped through some interactions). Knowing how my choices affected this game, I was far more conscious of how decisions made during Mass Effect 2 would carry over into the final game of the series. I knew going in that characters could die permanently, even Shepard. If you die during the final (insanely tense and cool) showdown you have to start all over for the final game.  The new enemies are scary and the galaxy actually feels like it could be screwed (unlike the first one where I always felt that I was unstoppable).

The game wasn’t perfect though. The new mineral scanning mini-game (crucial for upgrading your ship and weapons) was boring. Even the addition of one more upgrade to the scanner would have worked to curb this somewhat. As it stands its better than rolling around in the Mako, but still I felt that it stalled the flow of the story and the action too much. The cover system, while much improved, was also wonky at parts and I found my self popping out of cover all of a sudden to get a face full of laser sandwich. This gets especially frustrating near the end, and any battles with the new alien species. I’m glad Bioware took out the horrible (I mean really how did it make the final cut) inventory system and kicked it to the curb, but they replaced it with a cool armor customization feature that only works on Shepard. I also didn’t really notice all that much of a difference in gameplay with the boosts that various armor pieces give you, it was more aesthetic than anything else. This also carries over to the weapons, the variety of weapons was very slim. Most of my crew used guns that we started with simply because I really didn’t see a difference in killing things faster. I simply chose what looked cool. I loved the new elemental ammo, and liked that everything but the heavy gun used the same ammo, but there were times that ammo was too scarce and I was screwed. This is especially noticeable after you beat the game and unlock Insanity. You will die. A lot. Also it takes way more bullets to kill things, and given the lack of ammo you may find yourself wishing you had chosen a class with more powers. However, these are minor quibbles. Bioware has constructed a masterpiece from beginning to end.

In all I think this game is worth buying. I’m invested in a fictional character and universe like I have hardly ever been before and the final shot from the game will leave you shaking in an alley waiting for the third one to drop.

After all if I finished it, it must be good.

If you don't buy this game. I'll send Thane after you.