DAY 139 / GAME 139 Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

DAY 139 / GAME 139

Star Wars: Rogue Squadron

          One of the first opening levels in Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire was a recreation of the Battle of Hoth.  Here you find yourself defending Echo base against a group of Imperial Walkers while piloting a Rebel Snowspeeder from a third-person view.  I remember playing those levels over and over again thinking to myself, if they made a whole game just like this, I would be very happy.  Then, about two years later LucasArts and Factor 5 released Rogue Squadron, which was exactly that.



          Star Wars: Rogue Squadron came out in 1998, I remember downloading the demo for my PC which consisted of an early level in the game where you are flying around Tatooine in a T-16 Skyhopper completing various minor missions.  The game felt so advanced, portions of this demo felt somewhat sandbox as you could fly openly around the level and both the look and design of the game felt like the kind of game I'd been waiting for.  As a game the revolves around dogfighting and otherwise controlling the spacecraft of the Star Wars universe, Rogue Squadron was much more of an arcade title than the simulator feel of X-Wing from previous years.  The third-person view and generally slower speed allowed for levels that were close to the ground or required more ridiculous maneuvering.

      With about 16 levels that range from Tatooine to deep space, Rogue Squadron felt like those childhood memories of running around your yard with an X-Wing toy in hand, blasting imaginary AT-ATs as they made their way across the grass.  The third-person view, and the inclusion of a number of favorite crafts really solidified the whole 'virtually controlling childhood toys' feeling.  You are given the opportunity to control the X-Wing, A-Wing, Y-Wing, Snowspeeder, T-16, Millenium Falcon and Tie Interceptor as well as a very hidden unlockable Naboo Starfighter.  (Included before Episode 1's release.)

      Although the PC version felt like it featured richer graphics at the time, I ended up with the Nintendo 64 version instead.  Which is just as well I suppose since I also purchased both sequels on console as well.  Though the sequels featured better graphics and overall improved gameplay, Rogue Squadron still has a special place with me simply because it came out when I had dreaming about such a concept.  There's nothing quite like imagining an amazing game idea, only to find out that someone else had the same dream and that that person worked pitched it to LucasArts; and succeeded. 

DAY 138 / GAME 138 City of Heroes / City of Villains

DAY 138 / GAME 138

City of Heroes / City of Villains

          There's only a few MMOs that I spent any real time on.  Final Fantasy Online, World of Warcraft and this one; City of Heroes.  I can't remember how I had first heard of this game, I don't ever really remember many, if any of my friends who played this as well.  But I do remember spotting it on sale for $10 at BestBuy and with the free first month most of these MMOs include, I figured it was worth a shot even if I only got that one month's worth of play out of it.

      Turns out I got a lot more than a month's worth of gaming out of this purchase.  Though, I can't remember for sure, but I think I played City of Heroes on and off for about a year and then when the expansion City of Villains came out, an additional year.  Of course, I'm sure about 90% of this time was spent building hero after hero and villain after villain in the character creator.  With the ability to create up to 8 characters per server and up to 12 with the expansion at no extra cost (Some games like FFXI charge and extra fee for more than 1 character per server.) you can certainly believe I filled up every available slot in every available server.

      Seriously though, I made an absolute ton of different heroes and villains.  Men and women, big and tall, cyborgs, mutants, mystics, good and evil.  Anytime I had an idea, I made someone new.  Most of them I'd run through the first few levels in order to get an idea of whether or not I wanted to flesh them out more and if I really liked them or not.  In the end I only had a few I stuck with and levels seriously.  And even then, the few that I did level seriously after over a year I only made to about level 20 of a possible 50.  

        Even after all the time I spent in this game, like most MMOs I only saw a fraction of the world that was offered to me.  Typical of this kind of game, exploring the entirety of the maps presented require hours upon hours of dedication.  Though, one of the nice things about City of Heroes/Villains is that as you reach a certain level, about 15 or 20 depending on what kind of powers you chose, you start to receive different ways to travel quickly through the levels.  High jumping, teleportation, high speed running, flight and perhaps something else I am forgetting.  One of the big benefits of gaining these powers, is that you could now travel throughout the world all the while avoiding the horrible enemies within.  Considering that most of them would destroy you in one hit if you weren't leveled high enough.  

        I plugged a ton of hours into both City of Heroes and City of Villains, the concept worked well, played great as a single player MMO and kept itself pretty unique as far as both massive online games go and as superhero games go in general.  This of course, was before the Marvel MMO game came out, which I never tried but am curious how close the two were.  Considering how solid CoH and CoV handled, I'm surprised they closed doors the other year.  I really wanted to hop back in one last time before the servers shut down for good, but I never could find the time.  It was probably best to leave to memory anyway, like most MMOs.   

DAY 137 / GAME 137 Ren & Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention

DAY 137 / GAME 137

Ren & Stimpy: Stimpy's Invention

          Back when my brother and I were young we absolutely adored Ren & Stimpy.  For years we used to rent the VHS tapes of the series when we would spend the weekend at our dad's.  We watched it religiously and would spend hours drawing Ren and Stimpy as often as possible.  
           I'm not sure what about it was so appealing back then.  I mean, I know what I find appealing about it now, but it's not like I appreciated the particulars of John K's animation style back when I was 13.  I know I did love the style; I used to love Bugs Bunny when I was growing up and John K. drew a lot of inspiration from those classic WB cartoons.  There's also a certain air of crass absurdity that felt like it was more adult than something we should have been watching at the time, but really in the end it was just a ton of poop and fart jokes.  And rubber nipples.

          So of course, when a Ren & Stimpy game was released on the Sega Genesis, we were sure to jump on it.  Stimpy's Invention was this great side scroller that was chock full of the same wacky John K. style, fart jokes, fantastic art and animation.  BlueSky and it's crew did a great job of translating the show's art style onto the 16-bit platform.  There are a ton of different actions accomplishable by the two characters, each of which have their own animations.  The game contains a ton of different character sprites, all based on those from the show and the backgrounds all draw from the unique combination of simplified and hyper-detailed drawings of various episodes.

          Stimpy's Invention ended up being a great game for the two of us.  The gameplay worked well as either a single or two-player game, giving you the option of choosing to play as either Ren with Stimpy tagging along, the flip of that, or each player controlling one or the other character.  Single player gameplay still had the un-chosen Ren or Stimpy as a tag-along character since there were a few combo moves that required the two of them together to accomplish.  This included Ren using Stimpy as a kind of bouncy pogo stick or Stimpy using Ren as a kind of helicopter, what with his big ears and all.  

       But that was half the fun.  All the different rediculous things you could do with the two of them.  Ren had his different moves, Stimpy had his and then there was the combo moves.  Ren could roll Stimpy like a bowling ball, toss his nose at enemies, squeeze a fart out of him so hard you both shoot in the air, or just slap him left and right for the fun of it.  Stimpy could use Ren like a croquet mallet, a baseball bat or many other things I forget.  Aside from their own individual moves, apparently there were about 14 different combo moves in total.  Good thing they had Doug Tennapel on the animation team!  

        The whole game was as ridiculous as the tv show.  It drew as many references and influences as possible to really bring the two together and as two Ren and Stimpy nuts, my brother and I both found this game more than did the show it's justice.  There was at least another few games made for both the SNES and Genesis based on the show, but in the end this is the only one we ever owned.  Though, later we did rent one of the ones for the SNES which was quite good, but didn't feel as solid as this one and really overly difficult.  Once again, this is one of those games I feel I should break out and play sometime soon.  See how it has held up.

DAY 136 / GAME 136 Condemned

DAY 136 / GAME 136

Condemned: Criminal Origins

          There were a lot of fantastic new games that came out shortly after the 7th generation consoles were released.  As computing power became more than enough to manage what developers needed to match their imagination, there really seemed to be a lot less limitation on what could be produced.
       Condemned: Criminal Origins was one of these great First Person Shooter games that was barely a shooter, delightfully scary and visually outstanding.  It felt inventive and moody and made great use of the newer generation consoles.  Condemned places you as Ethan Thomas, an SCU agent investigating a serial killer.  One of the neat parts about this game is how you use various devices to investigate the crime scenes and dig up evidence necessary to progress.

         Condemned was just crammed full of atmosphere.  As you wandered around a dilapidated apartment, the only light streams in through cracks in boarded up windows creating volume in the dusty air.  During one of the rare time you have a firearm, you eject the clip to briefly examine how many bullets remain, the ammo count staying on screen only for a moment.  In the shadows, your culprit darts past, a serial killer bent on killing other serial killers.  But instead it turns out to be another crazed junkie, gone mad like the rest of the city from some unknown cause.  A cause that may even be affecting yourself.

     Condemned portrayed such a solid mood that even though you weren't necessarily battling something monstrous, alien or supernatural, you still were just about ready to crap your pants with every blind corner and dark hallway.  This is amplified by your Silent Hill-esque weapon limitation.  In Condemned, you are very lucky if you have a gun.  Even luckier if it has more than a couple bullets left.  Most of the time you find yourself tearing a pipe off the wall, or a wood leg off a chair to improvise as a weapon.  Running out of bullets means you leave the gun behind.  Being shot at?  Get to that gun as fast as you can, because if your attacker uses up most of the magazine, you're stuck with what's left.  Like I said, there isn't much shooting going on in this first-person-shooter.

    Condemned is easily one of the best of the most overlooked horror games.  And yet, I have no idea why.  It is extremely solid, both in controls and design.  It offers a ton of unique design choices and is absolutely terrifying.  I was super glad they made a sequel, albeit an undermarketed one.  In fact, I think it's about time Monolith went back and revisited this property.  Heck, even Warner Brothers got started on making a live-action movie based on this world.  
    Condemned is easy to find cheap, if you can find it at all.  If you're a horror fan, be sure to go back and grab this one, you should have never missed it in the first place.

DAY 135 / GAME 135 Need For Speed: Most Wanted

DAY 135 / GAME 135

Need For Speed: Most Wanted (2012)

          I may have a hard time writing this post because as it stands all I want to do is play this game right now.  I put it off for a while, almost two years, but eventually I came around when I saw it for $20 for the Wii-U; a system I've been itching to try a racer on.  

      With the exception of Shift 2, it's been a while since I've picked up a Need for Speed game.  In fact, I just realised that I hadn't played more than a demo of a NFS game since part 3, Hot Pursuit back in 1998.  EA released Need For Speed titles so regularly it was hard to keep up.  Since Hot Pursuit, they've released almost one new game a year, sometimes two a year to this date.  They've even used old titles without labeling them as sequels as was the case with the new Hot Pursuit and Most Wanted.  I've tried a lot of demos of NFS games; Need For Speed: Carbon, Underground and Pro Street.  Plus they have even more I've never touched; Need For Speed: World, Undercover, Nitro and The Run.  But there's something about Most Wanted trailer that really caught my eye and I decided it was time to get back on the wagon.

     Need For Speed: Most Wanted is one of the newer games from the series that isn't created by EA and instead by Criterion.  Not surprisingly it actually feels more like Burnout Paradise, also created by Criterion, right down to the similarly laid out open world map and 'Takedown' system.  This is not a complaint by any means.  Burnout Paradise is an incredibly fun racer, only lacking the graphical quality and brand name cars we now see in Most Wanted.  (Also, not necessarily a complaint.)  
      Unlike most racers, NFW: Most Wanted is open world.  Which means from the point the game starts, you can just up and drive throughout the city.  You can drive around and look for hidden cars to unlock, billboards to crash through for points and shortcuts for later races.  You can drive to start locations for various races and then launch them from there rather than in a menu.  (Although, unlike Burnout: Paradise, you can still access them via a menu system.)  Half of the fun is just driving around the city.  A gorgeously designed city with incredible camera and lighting effects, a fantastic day/night cycle and fairly decent traffic AI.

     Most Wanted not only looks incredibly gorgeous, it handles great.  Though, horrible controls haven't been much of an issue in modern racers.  EA has also licensed a number of fantastic cars.  It may not be the 100+ featured in Need For Speed: Shift 2, but it still has a nice little selection of supercars that contain some of my faves.  They've included a few classics including an older Porsche 911 and Lamborghini Countach as well as some modern works of art:  The Bugatti Veyron, McLaren F1, Nissan GT-R35, Lamborghini Aventador, Ford GT, Lexus LFA and the Porsche 918 Spyder.  They've also included a few really special, somewhat obscure cars, just to make me happy, which includes the Ariel Atom, BAC Mono and the Caterham R500.  Man, I get goosebumps just thinking of that car list.

     Need For Speed: Most Wanted is one of those racers that is just plain fun.  If I didn't have to get up for work I would have absolutely no reason to stop playing this game.  The Wii-U version is also a really nice version to have.  Being able to have the map displayed on the gamepad screen is a bonus.  Plus, the Wii-U version has some bonus features such as the ability to change your car from the gamepad screen, disable traffic and change from day to night and vise versa.  There's even a 'co-driver' mode that allows a second person to help control the car.  With that in mind, Leia has played this with me a few times.  One of her best lines came about when I was being chased by the cops and she told me I should pull over.  I had to explain to her that in this game, unlike real life, that would be a bad idea.

DAY 134 / GAME 134 Animal Crossing

DAY 134 / GAME 134

Animal Crossing

          Back in my mid-twenties for about a year I lived in a house with a few friends.  We all shared the living space and with that the TV and game systems.  Every once in a while someone would bring a new game home and we'd all get to check it out.  One day, someone showed up with Animal Crossing and at the time it was completely new to me.  
         Animal Crossing is a very unique social hoarding neighbour simulator.  It's hard to describe exactly what the goal of this game is, there's a number of things you can focus on.  In short, you arrive at a small town and within this town you basically start a new life.  You make friends with your neighbours, renovate your new house, collect things and furnish your rooms.  You can send mail around town, dig for treasure, plant flowers and go fishing.

         There's really no simple goal to Animal Crossing.  I guess it's kind of a zen thing.  The appeal is that each day runs based on a normal day/night cycle that matches your time zone and each day there are things to do.  The weather changes and so do the seasons.  If you're interested in fishing or collecting bugs, they vary throughout the year so simply playing for 8-10 hours in total will not do the trick if you want to sink your teeth into this game.  

       There are a number of sequels to this game on various platforms, though they are all very similar.  The first release was on the Nintendo Gamecube, which was the version I played with my roommates 10 years back.  They then released 'Wild World' for the Nintendo DS, 'City Folk' for the Wii and most recently, 'New Leaf' for the 3DS.  Each release varied only in added features as the core gameplay is very much the same.  
       The neat part about having played this game in a household of a few gamers was how the multiplayer functioned.  Up to four (if I remember correctly) players can set up housing in the same town.  Only one player could go about his or her business at a time, but the town is persistent so changes made by one person were seen by all who 'logged in' afterwards.

      So, with that in mind, you can only imagine what kind of nonsense went on.  We were known for gifting shirts to fellow villagers with rude messages on them about each other,  which the villagers promptly wore because they were so happy to receive a gift.  We graffiti-ed each other's houses with big penises and other novelties and we planted 'pitfall' traps for one another to fall into.  It was a blast.

       More recently with the latest version on the 3DS I've been having a blast.  Graphically updated with nice little additions to the town and internet functionality, New Leaf is addictive as ever.  Being on a portable system means it's easy to switch on for a few minutes (or hours) to check out what's going on in the town, collect a few things, say your 'hi's and then put it away for the next day.  Perfect for commuting.  

        Animal Crossing is one of those games that is enjoyable on a different level.  There is no finite play structure, no end game, no bosses, no shooting and no killing.  Not that I don't love those things, but it's nice to play a game once in a while where the social aspects, both real and fictional are the focus.  Plus, you know, collecting bugs.  That's a blast.

DAY 133 / GAME 133 Apocalypse

DAY 133 / GAME 133

Apocalypse

          Back when I was in high school I remember seeing a newspaper article about a new game for the Sony PlayStation that was to star Bruce Willis. This new game, Apocalypse, was to feature a digital likeness of the actor, who was to fight alongside you in a virtual world ending scenario.  

         This was one of the first games to really push this as a feature.  Digital renditions of actors had been used in past games, but then again they were all pre-rendered and other than Hell: A Cyberpunk Thriller I can't really think of many.  Eventually Apocalypse was released to the market, only with a few changes from it's original concept.  Instead of fighting alongside Bruce Willis, you now controlled him as the player character.  Which was probably for the best since AI for that kind of thing was still in it's infancy and didn't usually function very well.  (AI assistants tended to get stuck or die frequently holding you back or making levels much more difficult than they were intended.)

       Apocalypse was released shortly after ONE, also for the PlayStation, which felt very similar overall.  I was a little surprised to discover the two were completely unrelated during development considering how closely they turned out.  Both games used dual analog stick controls, one for directional travel and one for directional weapon fire a-la Robotron and Smash TV.  The camera was third person and sat high up with almost a top-down view, giving the whole thing a very arcade feel to it.  Both games also had a future setting, including various laser weapons and robotic enemies.    

         Apocalypse is about just that.  Bruce Willis is the only one who knows how to stop an insane evil scientist who wants to ensure his predicted apocalypse.  In order to achieve this he has created his very own four cybernetic horsemen to carry out the necessary destruction.  As Trey Kincaid, (Bruce Willis) you wield a number of weapons as you clear away wave after wave of enemies, which is a ton of fun as most of your weapons work as streams.  Machine guns, laser beams, a sweet looking flamethrower; each swiping across the screen obliterating robotic monster after monster.  I remember being particularly in awe at the look of the flamethrower since it was so rare for fire weapons to look half decent in a video game at the time.  It usually just consisted of a stream of circular fireballs instead of a single animated drawing or effect that reacted to your movement.  Basically, if anyone's ever played both, it's Alien 3 for Genesis vs Alien 3 for SNES.  (The SNES one was much nicer.) 

      Man, I could just torch dudes all day long..  Beautiful.  (Let's not read into that the wrong way.)

      Apocalypse was developed by Neversoft who worked on Spiderman, MDK, Guitar Hero and Tony Hawk.  It included tracks from Poe and System of a Down and the game engine even allowed for their music videos to be displayed on various billboards throughout the game.  A feature which was apparently used in Tony Hawk as well.  The switch from sidekick to main character for Bruce Willis was also advantageous for them simply because they could now cut out a ton of voice capture that would have been used for back and forth conversation and instead just had him read out some one-liners.  

      I enjoyed this game quick a bit back when it was released.  It's available now on the PlayStation Store, which I may consider grabbing sometime soon.  It featured some great gameplay, fantastic level design and a solid overall feel.  And hey, it's Bruce Willis.  How many times has he saved the world now anyway?