maniacal rage

Games are taking over my life. These last few months, as noted by others, has been a hard period on gamers. It started with BioShock and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Then Halo 3 landed and immediately started consuming evenings. Halo 3 improves upon the second game a surprising amount and I find myself constantly interested in playing, which I didn't think would happen. And then The Orange Box came out. Basically, my month is shot.

Half-Life is still one of the greatest games ever made, and was the first "cinematic" FPS I ever played on a PC back in 1998. I remember playing the game nearly straight through, eyes glued to the screen. The expansion packs, Opposing Force and Blue Shift, were also a lot of fun.

I eagerly awaited Half-Life². When it finally came out in 2004, I immediately started playing it on my outdated PC and fell in love again. Unfortunately, at the time, I was having enormous amounts of arm pain due to a damaged nerve in my right elbow. I couldn't finish the game.

Fast-forward to this month and I was finally able to finish the game on the XBOX 360. And, fantastically, I can now finally play Episodes 1 and 2. If you haven't played any of the HL games, now's the time to start. Especially since Portal is included with The Orange Box, and Portal is awesome. (I'm not even going to go into Portal in this post. It deserves its own entire rambling post.)

Yesterday, I received The Legend of Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass for the DS from GameFly. There's another bunch of hours. Oh, and Guitar Hero 3 comes out next week. Okay, so I'm getting nothing else done.

Um... the Halo 3 beta is good. Really good. Really, really, really good. On my HDTV it almost looks too crisp, if that's possible. New controls make more sense, new weapons and such are a lot of fun. Honestly, it's worth buying Crackdown to get it.

This might never end, you know, these posts about the Wii. Alright, maybe they'll end at some point in the future, but not yet:

I've spent about 7 hours in Zelda now on the Wii, and I regret complaining about the graphics before. Granted, they are much lower quality than, say, the XBOX 360, but the more I play (and especially once I got into twilight), the better it looks to me. I think it suffers from the fact that the first area of the game isn't well designed and so it gives a bad first impression. But it gets much better.

Gameplay-wise, Zelda is a crapload of fun. There are so many facets to the game so far and, at the risk of giving even the slightest detail away, you end up playing as a wolf, as a human (Link), riding a horse and more. The Wiimote control does feel a little tacked on, at least at first, but you get used to it and then it's fun.

I can't get enough Wii Sports Tennis. The more you play, the better the AI is against you, so matches last longer and are more challenging. I'm up to skill level somewhere around 340 and games are now much more challenging and enjoyable.

I just noticed the Wii Sports Fitness test, where you play various challenges and then your fitness "age" is determined from your scores. I just did it for the first time and I'm apparently 56. The Wii says I should take this test every day to improve.

For all the marketing done with the Wii's disc slot being lit up blue (even the box shows it this way), the slot never actually glows unless you have a message. Kind of weird for them to have used the lit up shot for everything when that happens very rarely. Not that I necessarily want it to be on. When I got a message just now it was pulsing and it was hard to focus on playing a game with that thing pulsing really brightly. I've switched it back to dim but haven't gotten another message yet so I don't know if the dim setting pulses. Still seems weird for them to have always shown the Wii with it lit up.

It's very comfortable to have the two controllers split. Having the nunchuck in one hand and the Wiimote in the other and being able to rest them in different places is surprisingly comfortable for the hands. Playing XBOX last night afterward wasn't a problem, per se, but I did realize that not being able to have my hands wherever I wanted them was a little constricting. It's not that I play with my hands all over the place, but being able to have your hands a foot or two apart causes less strain on my wrists. Granted, when I'm swinging my hands all the time to hit baddies with my sword that can't really be good for the joints, but still.

Second day with the Wii, more random thoughts and such:

It sucks that adding friends to your address book has to be two-way. It means you can't just message someone who doesn't have you in their address book as well—they have to first enter your Wii Number. You should be able to message someone if you know their Wii Number even if you're not in their address book. Or, at least, there should be an option to make yourself publicly message-able that way.

I've started to play Zelda. First thought: The graphics are piss poor. At first glance, Zelda looks worse than a Gamecube game to me. Granted, there are a few factors at work here: First, this is (or at least was originally) a Gamecube game and wasn't designed from the ground up for the (slightly) better hardware. Wii Sports looks better than Zelda in places. Second, the last time I played a Gamecube game it was on an old tube television and that helps a lot. Seeing Zelda in HD right now doesn't help it out at all. The textures are muddy and the poly count is very low. All that being said, the first few minutes of gameplay were fun. I'm sure the graphics thing will fade away in my brain. I bet going back to Gears of War after this will look photo-realistic in comparison (not that it's far from that anyway).

When you push the power button on a Wiimote to turn the Wii on, it turns the system on but the remote stays off. You have to push the button again (or another button) to turn the Wiimote on. That seems silly. If it knows to turn the system on, you'd think it would also check quickly to see if the system is now on and, if so, turn itself on. It's a tiny annoyance, but still.

There's no start button on the Wiimote. I think Nintendo was the first company to create a controller with a start button and this is the first one I've seen since without it. Because there's no start button, nearly all of the things I've played have you pressing A+B. That's so strange. It's fine, but weird.

Just got into combat for the first time in Zelda. Took a little getting used to, but it's kind of fun! Also, the more I play, the less the graphics bother me, although I still wish it was done in the style of Wind Waker (which I still think is one of the best looking games ever released).

Random collection of thoughts and experiences from the first day of playing with the Nintendo Wii:

The slot-loading drive is extremely smooth. Made me wish my Apple laptops had a smoother insertion. On my MacBook Pro, you push until it's almost in and then the drive snaps it up and makes all sorts of sounds, but the Wii takes the disc almost immediately with no force and smoothly accepts it quietly.

I had to update the Wii software twice. Then I went into a channel and it told me I needed to update again before viewing it, so I hit update and then it told me no updates were available. I still cannot view the news or weather channels because they say they require updates that I don't need. Boo. (Oh, okay—I just went to Wii.com and found out these channels won't be available until later.)

They aren't kidding when they say to put the sensor a little over the edge of the TV. Mine was flush with the TV's black bezel and my Wiimote was going nuts. Hanging it over by 3mm seemed to fix this issue for a while, but then it was back. I think the gist of it is that if the sensor has to go near solid black, it's gonna be a bit of an issue. I used the included stand and ended up putting the sensor on the sensor stand under the TV where it's not as near to black. This really fixed all issues, although I still have the problem where my hands are a little shaky and I can see it when I'm trying to be still with the mote. Guess that's what you get for having smoked those six years, eh?

The Wiimote is comfortable in the hand. It has nice weight and it fits my hand size pretty well (I wonder about smaller hands... guess we'll see when I convince Katia to play). It's still a little difficult for me to use the Wiimote as a pointer. I think it will just take time. Zelda should help me out in that regard.

When you're using the Wiimote as a pointer you get force feedback (vibration) every time you "mouse over" an item on the screen. This is great because it makes moving the cursor much easier for your brain. If there were no vibrations when moving it would be much harder for me.

The "Mii" channel is where you create your own little avatar, and I created one that looked pretty close to me (if you were to make me a two-dimensional cartoon character with a low poly count) and it was kind of fun. The only slightly confusing thing is the whole "mingle" and "parade" feature, which basically seems to mean that your avatar will travel around on the internet appearing on other peoples' Wiis. Kind of cool. I turned my Miis onto migrate and checked my parade but no one is there yet.

I keep seeing references to the Wii message board, but I don't know where that is. I looked on Wii.com and on Nintendo.com but didn't find it. They make reference to it as if it's part of the Wii channel system but I don't see it.

The shop channel works but it's pretty barebones right now. I guess they'll update this with more content as time goes by. Not that I'm all that interested in paying for old NES games, but you never know. Especially since there are other systems (SNES, N64, Genesis(!)) available as well.

Okay, so I load up Wii Sports. Right, let's try tennis. Play for a little while and all of a sudden I'm having fun. Serious fun. Let's try bowling. Simple mechanics, repetitive and yet—yes, oh my, I'm really enjoying it. I shout out "Yes!" when I get a double strike. Baseball is fun but not as much because it's kind of slow. Golf was okay but man oh man, tennis and bowling are fun! I find myself playing tennis very seriously and really enjoying it. Katia might like this, even.

There is a message system on the Wii and by default it sends you one message each day (that it updates automatically throughout the day) that contains your total activities by time. How many minutes you spent doing each thing. I feel like this is more for parents, but I thought it was cute. I just wish it didn't light up the new messages indicator on the Wii dashboard. I keep seeing "1" or "2" and thinking, "Oooh! Message!" but then it's the Wii telling me I just spent six minutes playing Wii Sports or something.

Oh, I just noticed I can add people to my address book and send message from the Wii. Cool. If you want to exchange messages, my Wii Number is 7439 2260 2806 8401. Feel free to send me yours, I'd love to try it out.

I haven't had a chance to even crack Zelda open yet tonight. But I did shoot a few quick photos of the unboxing and unit in place. I'll play with it more tomorrow.

Like many others, I found myself looking for a Wii yesterday and came up empty handed. I called all the standard places (Best Buy, Circuit City, Target, Wal-mart, et cetera) starting at around 9AM Sunday morning, assuming that the Wii wouldn't be in nearly as much demand as the PS3 and, since there were supposed to be about a million units available, I would be able to get my hands on one with relative ease. Not so.

Everywhere I called was sold out by 9AM except the Toys 'R' Us in Elizabeth, NJ which wasn't answering the phone and didn't open until 10. That store is kind of in the middle of nowhere so I gave it a shot and drove over, knowing that either way I needed to go to IKEA next door so it wouldn't be a total loss. I missed the last unit by three people and gave up, dejected, and spent four hours at IKEA instead.

Today I woke up, spirit renewed, aware of the fact that Nintendo promised to have nearly four million units in the US by Christmas this year (and that they would want to sell as many before Christmas as possible), so my chances of getting one before 2007 were pretty good. But then I wondered, what if Nintendo is already shipping more to stores?

I started calling all the same places again and they were all still out of stock, but they all said the same thing regarding the next shipment: soon. Very soon. "Hopefully today," a Gamestop employee told me. Suddenly I was energized—if Gamestop says today that means getting one this week was a possibility. And, logically, I thought, if they were going to get them today, 2-3PM was about the right time in NYC (that's a pretty average UPS delivery time). So, at 1:45PM, I called the Gamestop on 14th street and, lo and behold, they had just received 15. I rushed over and got one (and Zelda!). I got the second-to-last unit and more than a few people behind me in line left empty handed.

Now, Gamestop said that they have "no idea" when they'll get more, but I don't think that's true. I think they know they'll be getting more on a regular basis. Kmart also said they had more coming this week and next week, so if you didn't get your hands on a Wii, start calling places every day just before or just after average UPS delivery times.

This was an extremely long post for such a short point. Perhaps it's just my excitement causing me to babble. All that aside, I look forward to this evening when I can try the system out and I'll have more to say then.

On a side note, it seems impossible to find additional controllers and none of the stores I called had component cables. It just so happens that I ordered mine last week thanks to Cabel's recommendation and they happened to arrive today. Controllers I'll have to wait on.

If you've recently purchased Gears of War for the XBOX 360 and you find yourself having trouble connecting to various online games, you might want to try adding a port to your firewall/router. It seems that with the fall update a while back, the XBOX added another port of communication that wasn't there before (maybe it was added before the fall update, I'm not sure).

I used to have no problems connecting to games, doing chats, et cetera, but for the last few weeks I haven't been able to get audio chats working and connecting to games (especially in Gears of War) was extremely difficult.

Adding port 3074 (both UDP and TCP) fixed my problems. I've also got 88, 53 and 3330 (all UDP) open and this used to be enough, but not any more. 3074 seems to be required at this point.

Oh, yeah, and Gears of War is really as good as they say it is. I know it's hard to believe, but this might be the best looking game I've ever seen and it's actually really fun to play as well. Definitely recommended.

If one had a device that allowed one to look back in time (N.B.: The Light of Other Days, by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter), and one were to look back upon me during college (especially my first year), one would regularly witness the following schedule:

• Wake some time between 12 and 4PM
• Eat at the "Rain Garden," a crappy little "restaurant" in the student center
• Go to class until around 9 or 10PM
• Grab Mountain Dew, cigarettes and sandwich, head back to room
• Play Counter-Strike until 7 or 8AM
• Sleep

Counter-Strike was my life. I started playing CS back in high school when the very first beta was released, and I got more and more attached to it until my second year of college, when my right arm pain got to be too much for me to play any longer. That was a sad, sad time. Since then I've not returned to the first-person shooter genre via a PC (except to play Half-Life 2, which was painful but worth it), but instead have relegated myself to console gaming, that which luckily doesn't hurt my hands or arms.

One of the great things about Counter-Strike was the "realism" of how the game played—instead of instantly re-spawning when you die, you would have to sit out for the remainder of the round (usually no more than five minutes), and you had to buy your weapons with money you earned by doing well in the game. Effectively, it was a more reality-based version of your standard deathmatch FPS game, and it was loads of fun.

I've not played in a long time, but last week I came across the news that they've instituted a CS Weapons Market in the game, and I was instantly jealous. The new global system for weapons prices keeps all weapons in a constant state of flux depending on world-wide demand. If everyone buys a sniper rifle one week, it will become very expensive and therefore the next week most people won't be able to afford it. I love the idea of using the power of the internet and community gaming in this way, and it takes the realism to another level.

I'm not saying I agree with breaking street dates, but I'm also not saying I won't buy it if I see it early. So, yes, I have my DS Lite a few days before it is supposed to be released.

What a difference this is compared to the original DS design. Smaller, lighter, better, brighter screens... it's nearly one hundred percent better design-wise.

I had the original DS for a short period of time before I sold it because of the lack of games and how big and clunky it was. Now those two problems have been answered and the DS Lite is a fantastic product. New Super Mario Bros., here I come!

Video game pitch idea #27, Titanic: The Movie: The Game (title not final):

You play Leonardo DiCaprio (not his character), you're on the Titanic and you're looking around the ship for women. But you're stuck in the grimy bottom decks and to get good tail, you'll need to make your way to the top. To do this, you'll have to win poker games and slapping contests, as well as dance.

The poker mechanics will be simple—three-card hands, highest sum wins (face cards will be removed from the deck for simplicity and realism, we assume the people on the grime decks were probably not very intelligent)—and the slapping contests will be twitch-based combat. Just one button for slap, one for block. The dancing will require the player to press one button to raise a knee up and down and another button to hit the knee with a hand. Optional control could allow player to whistle or yell random phrases like, "Yeeee-haw!" and "I wish I had money!"

Once your character makes enough money, a scripted event will occur—the door to the stairwell will fall off its hinges and you'll be able to move up to the main deck and being to mingle with the wealthy passengers. We'll have some really great AI here. All the women (distinguishable by the oversized hats) will appropriate respond to your character's interactions with them. For the player, the system will be fairly simple—you'll approach a women and press the "interact" button, which will present you with three phrases: (1) How are you? (2) I am Leonardo. (3) Can we make love in the car I saw on a lower deck? (None of these phrases are final.) If the player chooses option three too quickly, the woman will walk away.

After several interactions, your character will fall in love and then a series of scripted events will occur: You will have intercourse with the woman (censored for E rating), you will pretend to fly on the edge of the ship, the ship will hit an iceberg. You'll get separated from the woman and you'll find a pistol on the main deck. Iceberg creatures will begin to attack you from all sides and you'll have to fend them off with your weapon while making your way through the crowds of socialites, all of whom are running to the edge of the ship and jumping off. Once you've destroyed all the iceberg creatures and their boss (the Queen), you'll find your woman and then the ship will sink.