It’s Promising So Far

Dreamfall is turning out to have one incredibly riveting story (And I mean by any standard, not just “for a game”), so this’ll keep me busy for the next little bit. In addition, there was a spring cleaning of sorts over at the GameAxis office and I now have The Sims 2, Warhamer 40,000: Dawn of War, Impossible Creatures and Star Wars: Battlefront now sitting around waiting to be installed. Geez…

Too… Many… Games…

Always a nice situation to be in. The latest acquisition is this:

Yep, Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, and now I’ll finally get some closure, or at the very least, a little more knowledge of what happened to my favorite spunky adventurer, April Ryan, in a game that most people are saying is a pretty good game, but an amazing story. Much like the first one. More details once I’m done, although GameAxis has already reviewed this one, so this review will be more just my own observations.

The House Of Elder Scrolls IV

You know that you’re living in a House Of The Hardcore Gamer when it’s a married couple that has to take shifts playing their individual characters in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. This is essentially a massive “offline MMO” in that it has the huge scope and non-linear nature of a typical online Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game, but without any of the jerks screaming “OMFG! N00B! LOL!”

The Wife and I have chosen similar characters although, in a frightening show of true personality traits, she plays much more precisely and thoughtfully than I do. We both ended up with thief type characters with some minor magic, though mine was a custom and hers was selected from the available types. However, she tends not to get caught when she goes thieving, whereas I usually have every guard in town gunning for me when I pick pockets, get caught at it, and resist arrest. Or someone says something I just don’t like and I put an arrow in them. Or someone says they have the best house in town and I go in and steal every single thing only to get caught when I finally try and pick the pocket of the sleeping annoying person. So while she’s the thief type that doesn’t get caught, I’m the one that has “adventures” that frequently end with jail time or having to pay fines to someone to get out of it. As one magazine described it, the game is essentially a first person “Grand Theft Horseback.”

With any luck, my next game related post will be about Dreamfall: The Longest Journey, a new adventure game, which is a rare thing in these years when the entire adventure game genre is dying a slow painful death.

Random Thought For The Day

It occurs to me that we should ALL be so lucky as to “work like a dog.”

When you consider that the average dog spends most of the day sleeping until the owner comes home, then gets fed, or taken out for a walk where he is free to urinate or defecate where ever he pleases and have someone clean up after him, then go home to eat and sleep some more, only to have to repeat this strenuous schedule the very next day…

Man, I wish I worked like a dog. That would be totally sweet.

Working like a horse would be good too. Stand around all day and occasionally get used by incredibly attractive female models being shot for women’s sanitary products doesn’t sound too shabby…

The Quick Movie Opinion

Having watched X-Men: The Last Stand just the night before, I can now say that it was Just Okay. While by no means a bad movie, with some decent acting, a plot that felt logical and some nice action set-pieces, the actual flow of the story often felt uneven, and I while I can see that a few deaths here and there were necessary, they kind of dropped the ball on making them as meaningful or as affective as they could have been for the audience. I wont’ go into any specific details, but damn, could you at least have spent time developing the characters, giving them some moments, rather than just throwing them out the window like that?

HOLY CRAP

I JUST BEAT BARK AT THE MOON ON THE EXPERT LEVEL OF GUITAR HERO!

!!!!!!!

I’m so happy I could puke. Now all that’s left is finishing up the other less hard songs on Expert (I was an idiot and tackled the hardest song first) and I’ll be able to face Guitar Hero 2 with honor in November.

Thank GOD that’s over.

Now I just have to “5 star” it, which means play it nearly perfectly…

Getting Paid To Play

And by that I don’t just mean video games.

It’s a bit weird how the summer months always seem to turn into the good ones for creative work that you end up actually getting paid for. I’m still kind of shrugging my shoulders in a half-assed, “Finally!” sort of way over the fact that I’m writing a comic script–and getting paid for it–even if it’s only 48 pages and primarily for kids, but I’m looking at it as a warm up for Nowhere, the comic that the Wife and I are quietly working on in the In-Between-Times of projects.

Then there’s that pilot script for an animated program. Writing scripts for animation is a neat experience, so I’m always pleased when I get another project along the same lines. One of the nice things about a pilot is that you’re at that stage where you can define the stuff, rather than just coming into an existing series and having to get up to speed on the rules and continuity of the program. I can do it, but obviously being there at the ground floor and creating continuity is more interesting.

And finally, GameAxis, the magazine I write for, is taking the tenuous step of going from a free to a paid publication in June. Strangely, this doesn’t actually mean more work for me despite the increased page count, it just means less of my articles get editted out during the submission process. It’s going to be interesting to see how it does in the stores. One of the bizarre things about GameAxis in its current incarnation is that few people know about it, the reason being that because it’s free, regular readers who are aware of it will go down to their favorite gaming store or cafe and, when they see the new issue, help themselves to 5 or 20 copies to share amongst their friends, so the magazine tends to disappear within a few hours of going public, meaning that only a small, niche group that grabs up as many copies as they can in one go are actually aware of its existence. You ask anyone else about it that’s not a hardcore gamer and they blink and mutter, “There’s a game magazine in Singapore?” because they just never see it around.

Hopefully the next few months will change that.

Comics! Scripts! Games!

Man, there’s just a lot of stuff to write all of a sudden, and barely any time to play…

Yet Another Brief Post

I was busy writing up the review for a truly wretched Xbox 360 game called N3: Ninety-Nine Nights. As beautiful as a girl on Venice Beach on a Saturday afternoon, and sadly, about as deep and engaging. If ever there was a game that qualifed for Digital Bimbosity, this is it. Gorgeous to look at, but you impossible to take seriously.

Right, back to Kingdom Hearts 2. Which at least, has some substance going for it…

The Tired Post

Specifically because it was a long day at the office, followed by a special preview once again courtesy of the Shaw Brothers (Yes, THOSE Shaw Brothers, the ones that used to make chop socky flicks back in the day and are now reduced to just owning movie theaters) of Grandma’s Boy. Initially I had no interest in watching even a free preview because it hadn’t gotten on my radar in any meaningful way, but since one of the guys at the office is leaving on a trip and wanted to have a night out with the boys, I relented.

I should have followed my first instinct and said “No.”

Man, what an awful movie. Much like the old Dungeons & Dragons type movies of the 80′s, this purports to be about a particular subculture–in this case, gamers–but in the end actually alienates them since it’s obvious the makers of the film hate gamers. That except for one or two moments here and there, I didn’t actually laugh at this comedy. Then again, my taste in comedy runs more towards clever and/or bizarre, a la Monty Python or Spinal Tap, so watching a movie make a gag of someone making out and having sex with someone 60 years older than him was not my idea of high comedy.

Still have a little bit of script for the kid’s comic to write–mostly just so I can say I worked on it today to some degree, however pitiful–and then it’s back to gaming. I just “borrowed” the office copy of Rise Of Legends, a PC real time strategy that I enjoyed quite a bit while reviewing, so now I’ll play it for fun. Again. Ah, you know what I mean…