The Hotdog Laserhouse

E3 recaps and opinions

So hey if you like reading my writing I’m usually tasked with summarizing and opining on the press conferences, and here’s me doing just that.

Microsoft

Sony

Nintendo

As I progress you can tell my brain started to turn a bit mushy - in the last 24 hours I’ve written something like 6000 words - that’s more than eight pages of text. Near as we get to Nintendo’s write-up, I don’t seem quite as opinionated as I was during Microsoft’s press conference (though that’s also because there wasn’t much during Nintendo’s to be fiercely opinionated about).

So yeah, enjoy, I guess?

And here’s a Sonic Adventure 2 Review

“I found you, faker!”

True story: one of the first reviews I can ever remember writing for any video game was for Sonic Adventure 2. I re-wrote that review for SA2 no less than twice as I improved my writing ability, making this the third or even fourth time I’ve written a review for it. Unsurprisingly, my opinion of the game has not changed much since 2001, though I have definitely gotten better at writing:

The story of Sonic Adventure 2 is a complicated one; Sonic Team took special care leading up to its release to keep many of its story details a secret, and even through the normal course of the game, much of the game’s plot remains unclear – perhaps due to poor translation, poor writing, or a combination of the two. It’s the kind of plot where things just happen, and characters sometimes make decisions that don’t really make sense except to serve as an excuse to set up the next level – yet it is still preoccupied with trying to tell us this at-times-laughable “story” about an evil, bio-engineered talking hedgehog with magical time-warping powers who is hell-bent on getting revenge on the planet earth. In a way, though, that’s video games – the plot to any Super Mario is no less ridiculous when you break it down, but neither does it try as hard to make you care about its story as much as Sonic Adventure 2 does, where its lengthy cutscenes can make up close to a quarter of the game’s total play time.

The other 3/4ths of the game is, of course, spent playing through either “Hero Story” or “Dark Story”, which is an oddly Japanese way of saying good versus evil. Each story is split up between three playable characters broken up by class, bringing the total roster to six, in spite of complaints that Sonic Adventure‘s large number of characters was pushing its star performer too far out of the spotlight. To combat this, Sonic Team attempted to streamline each character’s role – and while noble in concept, it does not always work out so well in practice. Whereas Sonic’s levels in the original Sonic Adventure were serpentine, somewhat open areas that each felt noticeably unique, all of the “speed-class” levels in Sonic Adventure 2 are built from the same heavily-scripted, linear, single-lane tracks hovering over illogical bottomless pits, turning every stage in to a glorified re-skin of Speed Highway. (Keep reading…)

Obviously I am not, uh, entirely kind to the game, though I do make a point to say that I do think parts of Sonic Adventure 2 are good. And it’s definitely better than Sonic Heroes, at any rate. I just hope this doesn’t spark too much vitriol in retaliation.

It is important to note, however, that if you consider my review as using the full review scale, I’m actually rating the game strictly as “Average”. But the only people who acknowledge that stuff are other reviewers, it would seem.

My NiGHTS XBLA review is up!

I’d say this took me longer than I anticipated, but it’s been about a week, and so far that seems to be about what I average for writing a review these days. But yeah! You know the four thousand images I’ve posted over the last week of a NiGHTS video? It was for this review. Your taste:

Thanks to the efforts of Microsoft and their Xbox Live Arcade, online leaderboards are thriving. Now more than ever is the time for NiGHTS: Into Dreams… to shine. Everything is right: as a $10 downloadable, it makes perfect sense, and stylistically, it should be able to rub elbows with the likes of Journey, Braid, and other “high concept” digital download games. This is the environment a game like NiGHTS was made for, and could prove that the game was perhaps a little ahead of its time. There’s one big problem: the controls. More than anything else, what helped set NiGHTS apart from many other games is the fluidity in its controls. The original concept for NiGHTS was to capture the grace of flight – something the original game manages to do very, very well. This concept was so important to the aesthetic of the game that the Sega Saturn version of NiGHTS came packaged with a special “3D Control Pad”. While the game could be played with a regular digital Saturn controller, to truly experience NiGHTS the way it was meant to be played, you had to use an analog stick. The Saturn’s 3D Control Pad would later serve as the basis for the Dreamcast controller, which in turn inspired the Xbox controller, which brings us to the modern-day Xbox 360 controller – an evolutionary legacy that started with the Saturn 3D control Pad. One would expect, then, that NiGHTS HD should control exactly like it did back on the Sega Saturn – but nothing could be further from the truth. (Keep reading…)

If you’re looking for the video, here it is, but I’d appreciate if you read the rest of the review, too.

Final Thoughts: Black Mesa Source

It was more than a week ago that I left off with Black Mesa Source; I had a Jet Set Radio HD review to write, and I’m the kind of person whom, when there is work to be done, it’s kind of all I can focus on. I more or less refused to let myself play anything other than Jet Set Radio HD until I was finished with my review, so with that finally out of the way, I started two things: preparing for my next video review (it’s going to be a doozy if it pans out), and resuming Black Mesa Source.

I wrote some preliminary words from the perspective of the first three hours, but now that I’ve finished the game, I can definitively say…

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(Source: blackmesasource.com)

Dreamcast Marathon Post Mortem: Uncomfortable Situations

I’d be lying if I said the Dreamcast Marathon ‘til Dawn went off “without a hitch”. It was late getting started, and almost immediately plagued with technical problems - the Virtual Audio Cable setup I used during the Sonic Endurance Race was impossible this time around, as it was creating some kind of indefinite stutter-loop. A work-around was deployed, but it was a little bit messy.

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On the next generation

<BlazeHedgehog> we’re in some kind of no-mans land
<BlazeHedgehog> everybody is holding their breath for the Xbox 720 and the Playstation 4
<Kyoma> True
<Kyoma> Ugh as much as I hate the idea of a new generation
<Kyoma> I still don’t think we need it
<Kyoma> every problem with games today will only be made worse by an even newer more expensive generation
<Kyoma> I don’t get how devs can look at a new cnsole with anything but dread and horror
<BlazeHedgehog> Right. I’ll be interesting to see how far they actually push hardware
<BlazeHedgehog> because you have guys like Epic and Crytek
<BlazeHedgehog> bitching about how they want 4-8gb of RAM
<BlazeHedgehog> and all this expensive nonsense
<Kyoma> So much excess.
<BlazeHedgehog> but like… I dunno.
<BlazeHedgehog> They request that stuff because I think they know they can use it
<Kyoma> its the guys who can’t shit out a game without it selling for millions that want more
<BlazeHedgehog> but it’s this weird situation where
<BlazeHedgehog> I guess they might be doing it on purpose to stomp out smaller developers
<BlazeHedgehog> the big get bigger and the small get smaller
<Kyoma> Exactly
<BlazeHedgehog> “Sure, we have 10,000 employees! We can handle next-gen.”
<Kyoma> The Wii was too weak but the problem was waggle and Nintendos complete lack of quality control really. We need weaker consoles to house the shit thats not mainstream enough to make millions outside of Japan
<BlazeHedgehog> No, the real problem with the Wii was everybody had their A teams working on Xbox 360 and PS3 stuff and pushed all the leftovers on to the Wii
<Kyoma> Thats true too. But when they didn’t it still bombed because everythings buried under shovelware.
<Kyoma> you can’t look at wii sections without cringing
<BlazeHedgehog> Developers KNEW the Wii was selling a ton but nobody important ever wanted to make games for it
<BlazeHedgehog> so it was a case of “We have to put SOMETHING out, because we’re losing money if we don’t”
<Kyoma> its sad. I am pretty sure I have every Wii game worth a fuck installed now.
<BlazeHedgehog> “What if we ported the PSP version of Prince of Persia 3 to the Wii. That’d work, right?”
<Kyoma> and when we started getting killer app RPG’s recently nobody gave a fuck and oh look you can only get this game is you PRE-ORDER
<BlazeHedgehog> yeah Nintendo is the worst at that stuff
<BlazeHedgehog> like I seriously think Reggie was brought on to handle Nintendo’s stupid “blue ocean” strategy where they appeal to grandmas and whatever
<BlazeHedgehog> and has NO IDEA
<BlazeHedgehog> what real people actually want
<BlazeHedgehog> from the Wii
<BlazeHedgehog> Because Nintendo Japan and even Nintendo Europe gets all this cool stuff and they do it right
<BlazeHedgehog> and Nintendo America just fumbles every single stupid thing that isn’t Wii Music
<Kyoma> It shocks me that this shit hasn’t bit them in the ass sooner.
<Kyoma> I mean clearly it has NOW. The Wii is dead and the Wii U is a direct response to the fact that they died before the generation ended.
<BlazeHedgehog> How could it? Their plan executed perfectly! Old people play Wii Sports Bowling at retirement homes! It’s on the news everywhere!
<BlazeHedgehog> But then like most fads it kind of pooped itself out after a few years
<BlazeHedgehog> and now
<BlazeHedgehog> all the grandmas are either dead or bored of the Wii
<BlazeHedgehog> so Nintendo has to come back to us
<Kyoma> And the competition cashed in on it with better hardware.
<BlazeHedgehog> and they forgot how to talk to real people
<BlazeHedgehog> They’re all top hats and “23 skidoo!” and we’re like “What the hell are you talking about, where’s Xenoblade?”
<Kyoma> Thats a really good way to put it