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The History of LOLcats

New Xbox Experience - Avatar Selection

I can’t seem to pick an avatar. I’ve been here for 30 minutes and I just can’t find one that fits me. Am I being too shallow? Should I not care? Shouldn’t this avatar be a clear representation of who I am to other gamers around the world? Will I not be judged by this avatar? This is truly important. I will be here till I find the perfect one…

Xbox 360: Dead Space boredom, Left4Dead Redemption

Image via Wikipedia

This is a shorty post, but just wanted to talk about two games that I’ve been playing.

Dead Space and the Demo for Left4Dead.

Let me begin by talking about Left4Dead. It is like playing zombie killer in a bad zombie movie.. but fun. Really fun. You don’t have the cover system or any of the sophisticamated stuff of other FPS games, but playing with others in a bad B movie to kill zombies is just.. well.. fun. Can’t describe it, but particularly when your team jells well, it feels pretty bubble gummy ish. Mind you, I’ve played the demo twice, and well, I’ll get the game to see if that fun continues beyond a few sessions, but so far, this is one of the few demos that I’ve enjoyed enough to want to play more.

Now, as for the other game, Dead Space, I was sorely dissapointed. Maybe it is a genre thing you have to like. It has received enough awards that I feel I should like it, and in all fairness, the cinematics and plot seem to be cool, but trumping around halways at what feels like half speed only to be able to either shoot, stomp, or swing my big fat arm.. feels, well, slow. This game is probably going to get the least amount of Carlos time ever. I just get bored by the repetitiveness of the enemies, the lack of ways for me to fight, and for the long ‘walks’ between excitement points. The scenes are ’scare inspiring’, but if I want cheap thrills, I’ll just watch ‘Snakes on a Plane‘ or something.

So, I guess, I have a few games to try out over the holidays, COD5, GoW2, L4D, and perhaps a few more. We’ll see how we do. Will keep everyone posted. In the meantime, I still need to beat the other factions in my other current game, End War. Great game.

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Let’s talk about Video Games!

Image via Wikipedia

So I don’t have the time to write a bunch of reviews. I figured I would lump all my thoughts into one post. I’ve been playing a lot more video games in the last few months. I’ll talk about a few of them. These aren’t full reviews, just quick blurbs on each.

The RockBand Franchise
It all starts with RockBand and RockBand 2. All i’m going to say is, if you have an Xbox 360 or a PS3, and you don’t have RockBand or RockBand 2 I hope your console melts down. Sorry. It’s that simple. RockBand is one of, if not the best, multiplayer games out there. No there’s no gore, there are no guns, there is no “strategy,” it’s just raw, ridiculous family fun. That does not mean it’s easy, it can be extremely challenging and there are several features for expert players that can make the games loads of additional fun (i.e. drum pathing). Go out and get it, for you, for your kids, for your friends, whatever, just get it and have a party. Now you can’t even use the excuse that you don’t like rock, RockBand 2 is going to have a total of 500 songs by the end of this year! 500 songs! There’s alternative, rock, punk, metal, and more. What are you still doing sitting there reading this? It’s not going anywhere… GO BUY ROCKBAND!

Star Wars: Force Unleashed
I’ve never been one for single player games. I’ve always enjoyed multiplayer games, don’t ask me why, something about collaboration gives me the warm fuzzies. But I walked into Game Stop a few weeks ago and saw the cover for this game, I instantly thought “if i can run around with a lightsaber, this should be fun.” Ohh, it was so much more than that! The storyline, the gameplay, the combos, the fighting, the lightsaber, the graphics, the force (OHH THE FORCE), EVERYTHING is just ridiculously awesome. I played through the entire game in a week and am now playing through it one more time. I don’t think I have ever seen the essence of the Star Wars franchise channeled so perfectly into a title. The Force in all its glory is perfectly captured in this game. You can use it to your advantage through the entire game, to fight, to protect yourself, to move objects, to open doors, everything. If you can think it, you can do it. I can’t say much more. Try it, you will be plesently surprised. No multiplayer does kind of suck, but you will be too wrapped up in learning how to use the force and figuring out lightsaber combos that you will forget you are playing by yourself. Go get this one too!

Ninja Gaiden II
Here I am again, playing a single player game. I admit the idea of being a ninja was what got me hooked. The game play here is freakishly similar to Force Unleashed. My first thought was that perhaps they were built using the same engine. I mean you can give Ryu Hayabusa (the ninja) a lightsaber and he’ll look like Galen Malek (the main character from Force Unleashed). Anyway, that aside, NGII is also a great game. The combos, the cinematics, the weapons are all a lot of fun. This game is gorey, WAY too gorey. I’m sorry, I don’t care for flying limbs and shooting blood. Everytime you hit an enemy they bleed out, but they still keep coming at you until you completely decimate them with an even gore-er killing move. That said, it’s still a lot of fun! The store line was a bit difficult for me to understand, or to even care about. I was too busy learning how to block and fight. There’s no just pushing buttons in this game, there is too much coordination necessary to perfectly execute combos, hits and just survival in general. One negative thing I can say that bugged me is the camera angle/view. Although it was customizable I was way too busy fighting to figure out how to change it or customize it to my liking. Nonetheless, I do feel that many times I lost a fight because the angle was too far or I “lost” my ninja character on screen. Yes I know that sounds ridiculous, but there are some battles where you are fighting so many foes that it can get overwhelming. Do I recommend this? I don’t know. It’s fun, addicting, I like it, but I think the gore is just too much. I wouldn’t let my kid play this.

Gears of War 2
Back on the multiplayer side I recently picked up Gears of War 2. I can’t quite get the storyline, perhaps because I didn’t play the first? Not sure. Maybe its because I’m too busy plowing down enemies with my Lancer Chainsaw! Yea I’m sorry, I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at that development meeting, “Ok guys we need to figure out how to be different with this FPS, what can we do to entice the masses?” Some guy in the back, “How about replacing the bayonet on a machine gun with a chainsaw!?” I’m sure all the guys in the room passed out from the euphoria of just their imaginations! Anyway, back to the game. The gameplay is nice, the camera angle is perfect and the weapons selection is superb. The most important thing in the game: COVER. You have to use the environment to your advantage. You won’t survive more than a few SECONDS if you are without cover. You even have the ability to pickup downed enemies and use them as shields. Very interesting, I didn’t actually do this too much. I’m the sniper type, I like to shoot precise bullets from afar. There are of course, some ridiculous battles in this game, giant worms and sea creatures that must be fought, I hope I’m not spoiling it for anyone. I played a short round of multiplayer with a friend. That was fun, there are a great deal of maps to choose from. I’ll probably jump on XBox Live one of these days to play. One feature that I like about this game: you can turn the bloody gore off (pun intended). Look I don’t mind mowing down enemies with a chainsaw, but I do care about the ridiculous blood and spurts and limbs, not necessary (its the little bit of conscience that i have left). So I do recommend this one.

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Ubisoft’s End War

Image via Wikipedia

I recently bought the new Xbox 360 game from Ubisoft, End War (also available on other platforms).

It takes place in the not too distant future when we’re running out of oil (Frontlines Fuel of War anyone?) and countries and Allies go at each other to control what’s left of the world.

The game itself is no different than any other RTS game in that you are a commander and you have troops at your disposal. As you may know, however, a limitation most games of this genre have on the Xbox, is the lack of keyboard control necessary to manipulate many troops at a time.

This makes games of this genre quite a challenge to manage if you have many groups of different types of soldiers. Command & Conquer did a good job of helping you through these sorts of things, but it also didn’t bring anything new to the table in terms of how to interact with the game.

End War did just that. Brought something new and fresh to the genre. Voice Control.

First, let me focus on the bad. I’ve only made it to mission 4, but it seems that in order not to drive you crazy, you can’t have more than 5 total types of troops at one time. I can’t imagine what it would be like to try and talk through 12 or more different troops telling them each what to do.

Secondly, and this is perhaps something I haven’t figured out how to do yet, is grouping troops to all do something at once. I seem to have to tell each unit individually to do something.

However, what changes is how you feel when you play this genre. Talking to troops gives you a whole different take on the game. You feel it personally. You get frustrated when they don’t understand you (when you speak too quickly) and the sound of your troops communications are not piped through your TV, but through your headset, making the experience feel personal to you as a commander.

It is hard to say that the game does anything else that is marvelously different from other RTS games other than the voice command, but the combination of a decent story and cinematics + the voice command make it an immersive and emotional experience.

Update:

After having gone up a level, I can see now how you aggregate troops into groups, but it doesn’t work so well. It is better to move troops by type. I also get frustrated from time to time with the interface lag, but it’s acceptable.

I also now have access to the eagle eye tactical map which can make it very easy to manage the area, otherwise the chaos of the battle can make it very difficult to deal with.

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The New Generation of Touch UIs

Image via CrunchBase

The iPhone created a new playing field for all. Touch interface, easy app installs, app store, UI and apps that ´just work´and lastly, a nice form factor.

All the major players were floored and were left to scramble to come up with something of significance.

The first ones out were the Korean manufacturers… with Samsung and LG leading the attack with phones like the Prada phone and the Armani phone. However, the smartphone powerhouses were lagging in coming up with a viable competitor.

As of the last quarter, all the first gen competitive devices have been launched.

The Nokia 5800
The Blackberry Storm
The Google Phone

You could argue that Sony Ericsson´s G900/G700 phones are sort of touch, but they really are more of hybrids instead of a full fledged touch platform a la iPhone. And of course you have the WinMo devices like the Touch. However these are omitted because they were touch way before the iPhone, but in a different way, similar to how the Sony Ericsson´s are hybrids, but not quite´Touch´in the way an iPhone is. Stylus based touch platforms have been around for a while, but aren´t quite the ´Touch´that the iPhone innovated.

Anyway, back to the three that I mentioned above. I´ve now had a chance to try the three out. Not extensively, but just to get a feel for the ´experience´.

First of all, the one that I think was best representative of a well thought out ´new´experience was the Blackberry Storm. It looked and felt like a touch device, in spite of the lag in the interface and some quirks around their touch feedback technology (I didn´t care for it too much). The phone looks sexy, and the UI looks like it was modified for a fully touch-based experience. Icon size, movement, Landscape vs. Portrait mode, etc. The loudspeaker was pretty loud too.

The Google Phone was a close second in the sense that it was designed well and the touch elements integrate well with the deployable keyboard, but the phone itself feels cheap and doesn´t exude the class of the Blackberry. The app store seemed to work well as well, from the one app I downloaded. I think the Google Platform is the one that I´m most excited to keep on playing with because I think they´ve thought out some things that Apple has not. I don´t want to elaborate too much on this post, as I may be doing a full review of the device in the near future, but suffice it to say that there is substantial integration of ´search´as you´d expect.

The Nokia was perhaps the most disappointing for me because it just felt like a touch enabled Symbian device. In other words, things didn´t feel optimized for the new way of interacting with the OS. Slowness, quirks in the interface from the expectations of a keyboard, and some hiccups when asking the phone to do things.

I´m expecting that as with the first gen iPhone, by the time the second gen of these phones comes out, lots of progress will be made to make these really slick experiences. However, just from a gut feeling, the Blackberry seemed like the ´coolest´one to play with as an alternative to the iPhone, with the Google Phone coming a close second.

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Man Tries to Pay Bill by drawing of a Spider…

Ok, 

This is hilarious. If I had guts to do this, I would, but this guy did it and the result was pretty funny…

 http://www.geekologie.com/2008/11/good_i…