Game Soup

Though I finished GTA IV's story last week, I found myself drawn back to the game several times this week to tie up loose ends and because I guess I really just hadn't had enough.  I hopped back into Liberty City three or four nights to finish the Assassin missions, find all of the random stranger encounters, and mess around trying to get a few achievements.  I think I'm finally done, until I feel like playing The Lost and Damned.

Another nice time-waster for me this week was iDracula, a 99 cent iphone "twin stick" shooter.  You play a guy with a gun, several guns, killing various monsters that try to swarm you.  The controls aren't flawless (my left thumb doesn't slide all that well on the left "stick", but maybe that's just me), but they work well enough.  It's nothing revolutionary, but it's pretty fun and it's got freaking great graphics.  It's two dimensional and sprite-based, like a higher resolution Diablo II.  Someone really needs to take this "engine" and make a Diablo clone.  It could totally work, but I fear for the world's economic recovery if that were ever to come to pass.

I had occassion to try out a couple of new games this week, Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, and Crysis.  Hulk is pretty good, but kind of ugly these days, being a PS2 game, and also very simplistic.  It feels good jumping around an open city and smashing stuff, but this game's time was definitely 2005.  We're in a post-Crackdown world now, and the team that made Hulk should be coming out with their new game, Prototype, this year sometime (barring delay or cancellation, of course).  

Crysis, though--awesome.  All I'd ever heard about it was that there was some sort of suit involved and that it is pretty much the de facto standard PC benchmark these days.   I didn't know how amazing it would look on my PC (the game defaulted settings to high, but I should probably back it off a bit for a smoother framerate--I'm still new to the PC thing), or much about how open-ended the mission structure seems (I'm only about half an hour in so far).  I sat down with it out of curiosity more than anything, since I'd picked it up for only ten bucks.  I came away pretty impressed.  I knew I liked this game when I put the nanosuit into maximum strength mode and punched down my first tree.

Otherwise, I played some SuperSFIITurboHDRemix.  There was like one other guy online when I wanted to play, and he beat me over and over.  I lost with every character, except Akuma, who I don't have unlocked.  It was fun, though, and I won a few rounds here and there.  I stretched out my Noby Noby Boy some, tried out the Just Cause demo on Steam (not great as a PC port), and lastly spent a couple of hours killing stuff in WoW.  Ropvanks is now level 32 Warrior, with craptastic gear.  I'm using this mace I found and this goofy tiki head shield and random junk armor I've gotten from quests.  I'm still in Ashenvale, but I'll be leaving there soon, I think. 

The One Where I Got An iPhone

I have to write these posts more often. A week goes by and I play so many different things that I can hardly recall them all.

I replaced one mobile platform with another this week. Well, I actually sold my PSP months ago, but this week I finally sold my stock (games) in it, upon seeing the lastest crop of (seemingly credible) rumors about the next PSP. Whether it's the PSP 4000, PSP2, PSPi, or whatever, sooner or later they're going to come out with one done right, with a second analog, no shitty UMD drive, a download service (to be fair, they kinda already have this), and maybe a touch screen. I'll pick up one of those. For the moment, I'm fine with my 10+ DS game backlog, and my new iPhone.

Yeah, my 2 year contract with Verizon was up, and for only $20 more per month I was able to go from a shit phone I never used for anything but calling to a fucking revelation in mobile computing. The iPhone is god. The Internet in my pocket, accessible anywhere, not to mention a phone and iPod in one, and a decent (potentially great) mobile gaming platform. I've had it for 7 days, and I already find it indespensible. But the games--I've downloaded and tried out a small handful, and found two so far that I really, really like.

One is Galcon, which is sort of mini-RTS. There are a bunch of planets on the screen, and you face off against one or two enemies (CPU or humans online, if you can believe that) sending ships from planet to planet to conquer them and take over the entire system. Incredibly accessible, and crazily addictive. One game of Galcon can be over in 10-20 seconds, and they rarely last longer than a couple of minutes. It's pretty much the perfect mobile game to sit and play while you wait. There's a free demo version, and the full thing is $5. Well worth it, in my book.

The other is called Tap Defense, which is pretty much your standard tower defense game. Most people pretty much know what they're getting with this type of thing, so suffice it to say that it works really well on the touch screen, and it's a lot of fun. I hadn't ever actually played one before, but this is cool. And free!

Elswhere, also in the cheap and novel category, was Noby Noby Boy, the newest creation from the guy behind the Katamari series. It is insane. I picked it up about the time everyone's cumulative stretch length had reached the Moon. I wouldn't really call it a game, it seems more like a toy, just one that you download and play with on your TV using a Playstation controller. That's not to say it's not cool, it's just literally unlike anything that there's pretty much ever been in gaming. I like it, and I'll probably mess with it from time to time to contribute to Girl's space expansion.

I felt like knocking through some more of GTA IV this weekened, so I had a couple of sessions of that, totalling 6 or 8 missions done. According to the game's menus, I'm about 45% of the way done. The story is probably only about 65% of the total, though. I'm liking playing this like Oblivion--doing a bunch at a time, taking a long break, and then coming back later for another hit. At this rate I'll be ready for Lost & Damned around the time the next DLC pack comes available.

And finally, triumphantly, I finished the Starcraft Terran campaign. That last mission was giving me hell for a while. I kept trying to go back to saves I made along the way, but I had painted myself into a corner more or less from the beginning by being slow to gather resources and not discovering a Vespene geyser in a key base location. I must have spent 4 hours across a couple of days to no avail, and finally went online looking for strategies. That convinced me to try out the seige tanks' special seige mode and use them for offense and defense both. The mission is to take out a giant ion cannon on the other end of the map, but to get to it you have to fight off two seperate and very well entrenched Terran armies and then make your way past all the turrets, ghosts, and other guardians to blow it up. In the end I had like seven battlecruisers and a host of tanks, goliaths, marines, and ghosts storm the cannon and take it out with a combination of Yamato guns and nuclear missiles. It still took an hour and a half, not counting failed raids and stratagems gone awry forcing reloads along the way. It was an oddyssey in and of itself. Hard to believe that's only a third of (half of) the game.