21st century digital boy

According to the Famitsu inteview with Kazunori Yamauchi, Gran Turismo HD will have two SKUs on the PS3. One of these games will ship with no cars, all of them will be purchased via microtransactions.

The other, Gran Turismo HD: Premium, will ship with two courses and 30 cars, with an additional 30 cars and an additional two courses online at a later date.

[...]

A complete copy of the game will cost gamers somewhere between $426.50 and $975, and that's without factoring in whatever Sony decides to charge for the menus (since that's all you'll get with GT HD: Classic).

Thought Bethesda had balls for their downloadable Oblivion content stunt? Think again.

WHY :-(

edited because Konami redid their website and now require registering to view screenshots ffs

So I finally finished Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay last Friday. I can only echo the sentiments that so many others have already voiced - it's a refreshing change from the rule in that it's a movie tie-in game that's actually pretty fucking good. On the other hand, it doesn't really have much to do with any of the movies, but is rather just an episode in The Misadventures of Richard B. Riddick - then again, this holds true for the rest of the franchise as well. The actual plot of the game is rather short and thinly spread, and in retrospect most of the things that happen between the introductory parts and the endgame feel like filler material. Funny enough, they don't do it while you're playing, or at least not nearly as much.

What impressed me is that, according to the game's (ridiculously¹ long) credits, Vin Diesel took quite a bit of involvement with this game beyond the voice acting - including production and design involvement. My respect for the man, which was barely even existent at first (I used to make horrible jokes about how Vin Diesel and Van Damme having the same initials), grows with just about any new project of his.

Okay, let's gut this sucker. EFBB is pretty much a standard modern FPS, but it has quite a few things of note. One - it looks pretty freaking good, even with the low-res textures on the Xbox. We're talking "puts up quite an impressive fight against HL2 and Doom3" good. Two - the stealth is good as well. There's not overly much of it, but it feels natural, good and is quite a lot of fun. Props to the design team for making this work so well. Three, and most importantly, at least the first third of the game - while being just as linear as the whole rest of it - has quite a few adventure-y elements. Different factions to align yourself with, side quests to do when you're bored with the main plot, the whole shebang. Again, while it's not excessively much, it feels like it just belongs. Even more respect to the design team.

There's a few bad sides too - mostly, as I said, the mediocre and thinly-spread plot with lots and lots of filler material. It's a bit like Half-Life in that respect, trying to tell a story but apparently not quite knowing how to talk². It feels less forced than it did in HL though, and the disjointed feeling of the plot with not only itself but also the rest of the franchise is more of a general problem of the Riddick franchise than a flaw in the game. Remember that biomechanical beast in Dark Fury that served no purpose at all but was pretty kickass when it showed up? Butcher Bay is basically like that, only that in Dark Fury it didn't take you a couple hours of gameplay until you got around to wondering what the fuck that was all about anyway.

Other than that, the selection of guns isn't exactly huge, and the guns are more tools than toys. Remember Doom's shotgun and chainsaw, or Turok's tree-felling triple rocket launcher and Cerebral Bore? Those weapons are toys, ie. insane fun to plough your way through the enemies with. Riddick's weapons are - sadly - a lot more utilitarian than that; on the other hand, this helps the non-shooty elements of the game come into focus better (and boosts sales in the simulationist part of the target audience). Also, the hand to hand combat has a few very good ideas, but doesn't work as well as it probably could. It's cool and pretty complex for an FPS, but somewhat hard to willingly control.

Next on my mental list, the endgame has a few pacing problems. Not of Arx Fatalis proportions, but quite noticable nonetheless. The last half hour of gameplay has a sort-of climax, but a short and not exactly satisfying one. And that climax is not the final boss fight, which makes the pacing near the end of the game seem even more hell yes this is awesome oh hey there what the fuck is going on here wait what it's over already what happened where's my epic asskicking. This is sort of amplified by the insanely long credits, which give you about three hours of time to reflect on the game - and of course particularly on the part you just played.

Finally, it's sort of missing the oneliners and "that's totally badass" moments that the movies had. The tea cup/can opener from Chronicles, the fire extinguishing system and knife-burying threat from Dark Fury, that kind of stuff. Aside from Riddick, there's less than a handful of even remotely memorable characters, and even those are... well, they're in there somewhere, at least.

Oh, and: there is a final cutscene after the credits. Which you will have to sit through if you want to see it. Have fun.

To summarise my main points about the game with a (slightly expanded and horribly "I need a girlfriend" nerdy) oneliner that came to my mind when talking about it on IRC: It's a bit like sex, only every time you look at your partner it's somebody else and you don't quite come in the end.

Nevertheless - if you haven't played Escape from Butcher Bay yet, you should probably give it a spin. A few parts of it don't quite know how they should do what they're doing, but once all punches are pulled it's a pretty damn good game. And that's what counts.

¹ trust me, I had to try very very hard to not make a horrible, horrible pun here.

² and even harder to not make a soul-crushingly bad dead-horse Gordon Freeman AND Riddick combo joke here.

Well, well.

Let me summarise what I've recently been doing - in my lifelong quest for, uh... I actually don't even know what for, but in my quest for it, I finally gave up college. Well, I didn't really want to, but I was growing very sick of it anyway when the college administration asked me to get my ass out of their college because I'd missed an exam time limit.

Shortly after, I found a want ad by a games company that fit my profile rather nicely. Games biz? Hell yes, I've been wanting to end up there anyway. On top of that, it's in Cambridge, so it sort of coincided with my recent thoughts about leaving Germany at some point.

So I applied, got the job, packed my car with the basic necessities (my three computers, my xbox, most of my clothes and a box of food), and made the drive of a rough 1000-1200km. Spent a night in a bed&breakfast in Dover, continued the drive, had my car make weird noises that made me afraid it may be dying. Arrived in Cambridge, headed toward the place I'd negotiated a private rental at, unloaded the car.

I'm still living there right now, after three weeks, because frankly the accommodation situation in this town is DISASTROUS. I've had two appointments to view rooms by now. The first one, nobody was there when I arrived. The second one was a bit less aggravating but still somewhat WAHT - the person who placed the ad went on holiday the day after the appointment, but forgot to send me an address beforehand.

In merrier news, the company is pretty kickass so far. Much like what I imagined and hoped the games biz would be, and it earns me money the kind of I'd have no fucking chance of making in Germany with my educational history. Cool people too; I had two spontaneous barbecue parties last week alone, several of them are at least aware of the existence of humppa, most have an at least somewhat similar taste in music, the whole nine yards. I think I'm gonna stay here for a while, at least once I've found a place to live that I can actually store my stuff AND live in.

Pics to follow as soon as I have a home with interwebs access.

I just found a DVD of Six-String Samurai while I was shopping for groceries. HELL YES. For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, 6SS happens to be pretty much my favorite movie of the past, oh, I don't know, ever. Kickass music, glorious camera work, and a premise that is made of crack and awesome. Because I'm a lazy bum, I'll just copy&paste a short review of it that I'd written someplace else when I'd first seen the movie.

Think Lone Wolf and Cub meets Mad Max meets 1950's Rock'n'Roll.

(German original and pictures)

"That is not dead which may eternal lie..."

After my visit to the nether hells, I am glad to be still alive, but nobody believes what I have to report. The fools - they don't see what is going on in front of their very eyes; they're too closed minded to recognise the things waiting for them just outside of their field of view which is so constricted by the blindfolds of their concept of reality. But I can understand... had I known the horrible, unearthly terrors that were waiting for me, I'd have turned back at once. And it all just looked like a game in the beginning...


Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the first part in a planned trilogy of games and tells the story of Boston cop Jack Walters and his encounters with the unseen things beyond our reality. It all starts out harmless, with his job being finding a missing store manager in the small coastal town Innsmouth. Walters soon finds out that there's something more going on in the village - the inhabitants are uncooperative and hostile, rumor has it that there's a bizarre change going on with them, and the whole town is overshadowed by an ominous religious cult. In first person perspective, the player explores the town and discovers its secrets, puzzle piece by puzzle piece. In the beginning, the whole thing is very much like an adventure game - you walk around, talk to the locals, find hints about what has happened to the missing guy and what's going on in the town in general every now and then. Soon, the uncooperative behavior of the local folk turns into direct attempts at impede Walters' investigations, and a bit later into a hunt aimed at getting rid of him once and for all.

Sadly, the gameplay follows this change: Dark Corners of the Earth takes a few hours, then mutates from a First Person Adventure to a shooter with adventure elements, which makes the otherwise excellent presentation of the nicely wrought plot suffer a bit. It's particularly not very Lovecraft to have the main character shoot his way through loads of horrible creatures to advance the plot. Nevertheless, the latter part of the game still sports a brilliant atmosphere worthy of the Cthulhu title. The plot in general is also very fitting in its basic concept and execution, but still has a few points where it runs slightly to massively against the typical style of the inspiring tales. It's hard to tell more about it without spoiling massive parts of the plot, which is why I'm not going to do so; uncovering the events is just as much part of the game as the gameplay itself. The inventory has a notebook used by Walters to write diary entries explaining his thoughts and feelings on the events and to collect the many small and bigger bits and pieces of information he finds. These are often relevant for puzzles, so they're worth reading closely.

On top of that, Dark Corners of the Earth takes not necessarily new, but at least little-used paths even in the First Person Shooter department. There's neither a gauge for the main character's health nor a crosshair or an ammo gauge - the inventory shows how many bullets of every type you have in total, but you can only guess how many shots you have left in the loaded clip. To make hitting enemies easier, you can steady the weapon and take aim - but holding the gun in front of himself for too long makes Walters' arms tire and start to shake. The physical health of the character is only indicated by various rough hints: his breathing grows ever more shallow, colours start fading to grey and his vision blurs slightly as he takes damage. Combat is rather deadly as it is already - even a single hit from a gun will usually massively hamper Walters' agility, and three or four hits will more often than not put a premature end to his investigations. Wounds need to be treated with the contents of first aid kits, not unlike Metal Gear Solid 3 - if you leave them open, they constantly cost more health until they either heal by themselves after some time or Walters has bled to death. Taking care of your wounds also takes a moment in which you're completely helpless, so there's not really a way to heal up during combat. In case of emergency, the inventory also holds a syringe of morphine, which you can use to keep death at bay for a moment longer and which will suppress the shaking caused by injuries; using it does impair vision via a lot of blurring and tunnel vision though.

In addition to physical health, you also need to take care of Walters' mental condition: he can't just die of wounds, but also just go insane due to continued exposition to unnatural or just plain traumatising things. There's no gauge here as well, just a couple of factors indicating his state. Normally, you'll hear Walter's heartbeat speeding up, accompanied by rhythmic vibration of the controller. Looking down from great heights will make him sway slightly and give tunnel vision. Examining a rotting corpse or looking at monsters for extended amounts of time will generally blur his eyesight and fill his surroundings with various weird noises. The effects aren't executed in as much detail and creativity as in Eternal Darkness on the GameCube - which Dark Corners of the Earth has quite a few things in common with in general though - but fulfill their purpose by enhancing the atmosphere and giving the player an impression of the character's mental state. Proper hallucinations or other concrete results of insanity sadly aren't there; only occasional scripted visions that warn of potential attackers or just build more atmosphere.

From a technical standpoint, there's a few less nice things to report: the game has quite a few bugs already known in the developer's forums which have been encountered by a number of players - usually resulting in a deadlock of the Xbox and sometimes even reoccurring in the same place after loading the latest savegame. At least one of these is related to a certain save point and cost me my save during testing; after loading, the game keeps running for about a second more and then reproducably locks up at the same point, no matter what I do. There are a few other scenes that had some user reports of reappearing crashes - in general, the game is running stable and without problems, but apparently there's a few places that have potential for fatal, game-breaking problems like this. Seeing as how Dark Corners of the Earth doesn't use Xbox Live - for obvious reasons - at least the Xbox version probably won't be seeing an update either. To make sure you won't fall victim of such problems, I'd recommend using several save slots at all times. On the Xbox 360, the game is playable, but has two known problems in addition to the ones already present on the Xbox: the intro and epilogue videos aren't shown, and the emulation will crash if one of the bosses uses a certain attack of his. The gameplay has little to criticise: some puzzles aren't exactly obvious or depend on tiny details and need some trial and error or just plain and simple a quick glance at a walkthrough to find the proper solution; occasionally there's also places that need some searching to find the next piece of the generally rather linear path through the levels.


Graphics: Hallucinogenic substances

The graphics in Call of Cthulhu are excellent both atmospherically and technically; while some of the character models seem a bit coarse at times, the game is quite pretty and the levels detailed and believable. Adding to this are all kinds of nice special effects: irregular glass will distort what's behind it, there's a moment of adaptation when moving between light and dark areas, sources of light don't have any sharp borders, the usual bag of graphical tricks. The consequences of insanity on Mr. Walters' eyesight are of note as well, as are the distortions and places of blurriness in his occasional visions. A bit more creativity in the hallucinations would've been nice, but they're decent enough and create a nice whole together with the rest of the graphics work.


Sound: Smaller and bigger language barriers

For a game relying so heavily on atmosphere and horror like Call of Cthulhu, sound is particularly important. Headfirst Productions deliver an excellent performance in this department - the game sounds glorious, in quality and style alike. Proper music is really only there during menu screens; in the game its place is taken by mostly melody-free atmospheric instrumentation. Environment sounds vary heavily in amount and detail. Sometimes, the silence is only filled by the game's replacement for music, at other times there's not much to hear of that and the environment itelf is alive with all kinds of sounds - footsteps of people walking around, cultists mumbling in bizarre languages and other, weirder noises. On the whole, the sound in the game creates tension and discomfort quite effectively - and that's what a game in Lovecraft's world should do.

The language Call of Cthulhu is running in is being determined by the Microsoft Dashboard's language setting - although this only changes the language of the subtitles; the voiceovers are always in their original English. Thus, if you're not used to reading subtitles and aren't very trained in English, you might run into some problems. On the other hand, players who speak the language well enough can enjoy the game completely in its original language by just setting the Xbox menu language to English. The translation occasionally changes the meaning of the original text and particularly struggles a bit when there's idioms, but is understandable and fitting in all important parts. Seldom there's also passages that were apparently overlooked as the game was translated and are still in English even if the language is set to German; while this is a bit of an annoyance and doesn't exactly testify a thorough checkup of the translation, the lack of a German version of these passages shouldn't prevent even players completely illiterate in English from getting ahead in the game.


"... but with strange aeons, even death may die."

Call of Cthulhu may not be quite what you'd expect from a game set in the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, and it isn't what the first couple hours of gameplay might make you hope either, but in spite of quite a few flaws in both areas a title of good quality both technically and in content and a refreshing change from the usual "hey, let's send some monsters through the windows with a lot of noise all of a sudden and give the player as little ammo as possible" material in self-proclaimed horror games. Personally, I hope that Headfirst will get the chance to continue their trilogy and pick up and improve upon the points of criticism the first game has. It remains to see whether the PC version - which is still without a release date - will iron out the technical problems or if we'll be seeing a direct, unchanged port of the Xbox release.


Tech Specs

Platform: Xbox
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Headfirst Productions
Genre: Shooter/Adventure
Release: Xbox already released (26.10.2005), PC announced
Web: http://www.callofcthulhu.com/
Age rating: 18+ (PEGI), M (ESRB), 16+ (USK)
MSRP: EUR 39,95

(via Taleel)

Desperate, tenacious, clinging like a grain of sand

Watching its foundations wash away, wash away

Drunk with the assertions they know they can't defend

Confident that they might... live again

Live again, live again

Would you give it all up to live again?

Bad Religion - Live Again (The Fall of Man)

But, for a certainty, back then,

We loved so many, yet hated so much,

We hurt others and were hurt ourselves...

Yet even then, we ran like the wind,

Whilst our laughter echoed,

So... I started playing Chrono Cross again a couple days ago, thinking that a game whose mere memory has moved me to tears once would be worth actually finishing some time - and it just had me burst out in tears again while I was just thinking about it, so I decided to write a bit more about it than I did back then.

Many people don't consider Chrono Cross a worthy sequel to Chrono Trigger. I'm inclined to say that it's not much of a sequel at all, at least not as far as I've played. Either way, its beauty far surpasses its official predecessor in my opinion, and makes me wonder why the Final Fantasy series is so popular and this isn't. I love this game from the deepest bottom of my very soul. It's all a bit hard to explain without heavy spoilers, so forgive me if some of this seems a bit long-winded.

In the beginning, the game sets you up with the stereotypical oversleeping young lad called Serge as the lead character, but as soon as the clichéd "wake up, you're late" opening event is over, you're assaulted by an utterly, gloriously gorgeous little fishing village in which Serge leads a calm, idyllic life. He has a caring mother, a loving (if somewhat bossy) girlfriend and generally leads the good life in one of the most beautiful environments I've seen in a game.

Even here though, the game's basic plot point shows through at every corner - people keep wondering about the past, about how things would be had they made different decisions ten years back, about whether "there's another me somewhere, leading a different life". I'm very, very prone to this kind of thinking myself, which makes this another big point where I can emotionally connect to the game. Either way, the idyllic life of a kid in a fishing village wouldn't make for much of a game, so soon the world changes. Again going with the basic point, the changes are subtle, but the repercussions for the lead character incredible. Small stone, big pond, you know the concept. After the event that starts the actual plot of the game off, all of the beauty and idyll is still there, but no longer Serge's to share. The game just tears you out of all the happiness, all the calm and repose, and leaves you a complete stranger in the only place that was ever familiar to you.

The game toys with the "what if" concept all the time. There's about 40 recruitable characters in there, but you're unlikely to even notice most of them if you only play it once. It has you make decisions without you even noticing that you are making a decision, because you normally don't expect having this many alternatives in a game. And, of course, if you notice later on that you did make a decision that could've lead to multiple outcomes, it leaves you wondering what would've happened if you decided differently.

Not unlike Deus Ex, the decisions you make don't influence the actual course of the plot much, but rather change the paths you take through it. Although I do read there's eleven (!) endings in there, I haven't reached a single one yet, so I might be off on this point. The relationship to Chrono Trigger is not really there as far as I've played, although there are quite a lot of references and recurring themes. I hear that this changes later on in the game, with the plot evolving to a point where it's an actual sequel to CT - again, I haven't got that far. Still, the basic plot point and the utter beauty the atmosphere of Chrono Cross radiates are very, very engaging to me.

I'm somewhat loath to talk about this game in technical terms, because I fear it might take the magic away, but I guess I won't be getting around it now that I've started whetting your appetites (I hope). The polygonal characters merge beautifully and barely noticably with the painted backgrounds, and they're more detailed than many other RPG characters I've seen on the Playstation. The graphics are very, very colorful, but in a good way. Everything just looks like it would on a beautiful summer's day, and it gives me a massive craving to actually be there, soak up that beauty, and live a calm and laid-back life there. Walk along the beach with a nice girl, enjoy the sun, the clear water and blue sky, that kind of thing.

The music has quite a few pieces that were in Chrono Trigger already, but also quite some original stuff. The instruments are most probably synthetic, but don't sound anywhere near like it, and together with the gorgeous tunes add even more beauty to the atmosphere. Time's Scar (the theme from the intro video) is what actually made me cry about this game for the first time; I was just listening to it and started crying right out of the blue. Even today I have no idea what emotion it caused that brought me to tears, but it gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling somewhere deep inside. Other gorgeous tracks in the game are Time of the Dreamwatch and Dream of the Shore Bordering Another World, both of which are actually just different interpretations of the same basic theme.

The gameplay itself has a few points of note. First off, I normally loathe turn-based combat in RPGs. It bores me out of my skull. I hate it. Hate hate hate. Not so with Chrono Cross - the combat includes a stamina system, which breaks up the turns a lot because as long as any of your characters have stamina, you can switch freely between them and have them do stuff. Normal attacks use either one, two or three points of stamina for weak, strong and fierce attacks respectively, casting a spell (or "using an Element" as it's called; more on that later) uses all of the seven points a character can have - but you can go into negatives. If you do, the character is unable to act until he's back to seven points of stamina. I still haven't quite figured out when enemies can or can't attack; I assume they're using the same system with less maximum stamina though. Stamina is recovered just like it's spent - a character that doesn't do anything regains as many stamina points as the one that is doing something expends, except when an element is used - that uses up seven stamina points, but all other characters only regain one. So basically, elements use stamina at seven times the rate of normal attacks.

On top of normal physical combat, there's a unified magic/tech/item system called "Elements". Every character has, based on their growth level (another interesting detail, read on), a certain "grid" in which elements can be arranged. Elements can be bought in stores or looted off dead enemies and treasure chests, and range from attack spells over one-use healing items to character-based special attacks. The latter are put into the grid at fixed points, the former can be freely arranged. Every element has a certain level; if it's put into the grid at that level, it works at normal efficiency. Arranging it on higher levels gives bonuses, lower levels subtract from its effect. To use an element, a character first needs to attack - for every time an enemy is hit, the level of usable elements goes up by one, and once an element is used, the level it's on is subtracted from that. So if you hit an enemy three times, you could use one L3 element, or one L2 and one L1 element. If you have the stamina, that is.

Moreover, there are no "levels" or "experience". After every battle, however small, every character has a certain chance of getting a bonus on some stats. The probability for the stats differs from character to character, of course. The only kind of "levelling" there is are the Growth levels, which define how many levels and slots the element grid has. Even there, there's no use in grinding for levels though, because new growth levels are awarded automatically for plot encounters. This way, Chrono Cross completely eliminates the need to levelgrind, which is what made all of the Final Fantasy games unbearable for me. Another thing I like is that there are no random encounters, which I loathe just as much as turn-based combat and levelgrinding - enemies just walk around on the map, and if you touch one, you go into combat. If you can avoid all enemies, you don't need to fight any battles that aren't plot relevant. You can, of course, kill enemies to gain stats, but even there you can only kill as many enemies as are walking around.

So, yeah. I love this game. It makes me cry, and I love it for that just as much as I love it for being one of the most utterly, utterly beautiful games I've ever played.

What was the start of all this?

When did the cogs of fate begin to turn?

Perhaps it is impossible to grasp that answer now,

From deep within the flow of time...