There’s a New Game in Town – And it Looks a Lot Like an Old One

Yes, it’s been a while. What with rebuilding a laptop, lost more managers at work, busy summer at a tourist destination, I’ve had to contend with everything short of an astronomical event.  Oh wait, the eclipse was last week.

One of my old Everquest friends recently tagged the whole gang for a link to a new game called Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen  that’s in development. It looks exiting, with gameplay being a real throwback to the early EQ days.  As someone who was part of the beta for EQ, I remember the early days.

It looks like it’s a crowdfunded effort, with some big names from the original EQ team including Brad McQuaid. So it’s got a good pedigree, and online footage looks great.  Only a few things worry me about it.

First of all are the specs for the PC to run the beast. I can’t find them.  On the other hand, it’s almost a lock that my current machine will NOT be able to run them (one of the reasons I’ve stuck with console gaming for the last several years).  Then again, turned way down I can still two-box EQ in its current form, so I’ve got a shot at it.

But the second thing that concerns me is the gameplay. In my opinion, Everquest became a victim of its own expansions. When EQ first came out, it wasn’t about beating the game, it was about the journey.   I was one of the first of my friends to run solo across from Quynos to Freeport.  Friends would gather from all over just to get past the first couple of locked doors in a dungeon.  Even during the Kunark days, I spent weeks gathering bone chips to give to some lizardman so that my poor human monk could semi safely use the bank in his city.

As the expansions continued to hit, they did two things – they added content solely for the endgame and in an effort to get people to those spots, they dumbed down the game to advance players to those spots.   Gone were the days of sneaking around to find someone to bind you near an unfriendly town.  Now you had a central plane of existence where you could easily teleport to any of the cities in a flash.  Once people had spent days on ‘Epic’ quests to gain awesome items, and they expanded to the point where these same items sit unwanted in the bank.   Rather than search the shops in each town for that last spell, just pop into the library and pick up a copy.  You didn’t even need to recruit a healer for a quick quest, just hire and NPC to follow you around.  He didn’t even want a cut of the loot!

Right now Pantheon is crowdfunding, and promising beta access to those who fund early. It’s got me interested enough that I’m ALMOST going to do it.

Will this be a return to the roots of games like Everquest? I hope so, but we’ll see.

I promise I’ll write about anime next time. No really!  While I’ve been less than impressed with the last few seasons, there are a couple of second seasons of shows I’m looking forward to including one that’s seen to it that I can’t get a tune by Aimi Tanaka out of my head.

Kingdom Hearts – Rerelease of a Rerelease

Kingdom Hearts was a brilliant concept for a crossover game.  How they ever convinced Disney to buy into it is a mystery, but I’m sure they’re glad they did.  The first game in 2002, and as good as it was, they followed up with an even better sequel in 2005.  Now, over a decade later, they are finally coming closer to Kingdom Hearts 3.

But that’s not what I’m writing about.

They were finally coming closer to talking about the game late in the PS3 game cycle, so they pushed the hype with HD remixes of Kingdom Hearts 1 and 2.  Separate games, full priced, but at least they each included one of the side story games and the cinematic for another game on each disk.  Honestly, if they had included the games in a single release at the time, I probably would have bought it, extras or no extras.  But to re buy two games at full price that I already had?  I’ll wait for the third installment.

So when I saw they were re-releasing the HD remixes on a single disk for the PlayStation 4, it sparked some interest.  The games WERE great, the remixes supposedly have extra content, and since it’s a rerelease of a rerelease of 11 and 13 year old games, surely the price point would accommodate a budget gamer such as me.  So I went online to see what the pre order price was – $50.

Yeah, no thanks.

Yes they were brilliant games.  Yes they will still sell a ton of the latest rerelease, but not to me. If they decide to drop the price, or I can pick up a used copy at GameStop a few months down the road at a good price, I’ll no doubt pick this up, But for now, if I decide to revisit the wonders of the game I played over a decade ago, I still have the PlayStation 2 in storage.  And that will be good enough for me.

Looking forward to Ratchet and Clank, The Movie

Or the movie, based on the game.  Not to be confused with the Game, based on the movie, based on the game, which is in my PS4 as we speak.  Insomniac Games has been treating us to wild adventures with the title characters on the PS2, PS3, PSP, and now the PS4.  With TV’s getting bigger and bigger since his debut in 2002, there isn’t much surprise that the characters will grow even more jumping to the big screen at the end of the month.

Now let’s be honest now.  Video game movies have been, well, less than stellar.  Ok, they’ve usually been absolutely trash.   Usually they will have nothing beyond the title in common with the source material.  Whether it’s loved or hated, it’s almost impossible to link the game with the movie.

As far as a link – this time it’s going to be hard to dispute the link.  Anyone who’s seen trailers for both the game and the movie can see they’re at least holding to similar story lines.  The quality of animation in both is also similar.  Pre release media makes it hard to determine which the source material is and which the copy is.

There will be differences – any game covers too much ground to put the entirety into a two hour movie.  Not to mention the grinding and leveling that makes up any game is downright boring on twitch, let alone a movie.  There’s a lot of speculation (if not absolute knowledge from insiders) that some of the later cut scenes in the game are directly from the movie, and there are snippets of dialog that simply seem out of place, but probably make much more sense in a broader context.  I’m sure the writers had to improvise to make them work in both settings.

While I’m hoping for great, I’m fully expecting this movie to be good.  Normally, with my tight budget, a movie that is only expected to be good is relegated to the “Netflix Blue Ray” queue unless later reviews make me pull my wallet out in anticipation.  This time however, I’m making sure I see it as soon as possible, and I’m encouraging all my friends to do the same.  In this case, the studios have taken a great source material, and apparently given it a full treatment to give it the credit it deserves.  We want to see more of this sort of collaboration, and we want it to be successful.

Summer Gaming Priorities — Orahood @ Home

June looks to be a bad month for gaming. And by “bad month”, I mean for my wallet. It’s bad enough that the ultimate time sink, “No Man’s Sky”, finally has a June 21st release date, but after waiting for most of a year for a US release date, Atelier Sophie has a release date […]

via Summer Gaming Priorities — Orahood @ Home

Fallout 4 – Collectors Edition FINALLY ARRIVED!

So….. yeah.  BYE BYE!

Dismal Anime Selections this Season has me down

Yes, it’s been a while.   Many things have contributed to this – some personal, some not.  One of the biggest reasons is that I simply haven’t found anything I WANTED to write about this season.  It’s been underwhelming.  The only show I’m making sure I’m regularly watching is season two of “Is the Order a Rabbit?”

Even standby’s have let me down – Yuru Yuri’s title call of “Akarin!” missing from the third season – is this even the same show we watched before?  I’m feeling letdown after letdown.

I’m sure there are a few more gems this season, but one of the problems I’m running into is the trend of ultra-short episodes.   Ok, maybe we can tell a story in 10 minutes.  8 minutes?  FIVE MINUTES?  Good Lord, “Komori-san Can’t Decline” looks cute but it’s TWO MINUTES PER EPISDODE!  Those poor overworked animators – they have less than half an hour of material for a WHOLE SEASON.  I’ve been waiting a few weeks, maybe a few episodes at the same time of some of these will actually make it worth sitting down and watching it.

I’ve been marathoning a few previous series.   I was halfway through Gate when my wife finally got interested, and I restarted it and we watched it over the course of two days.  Letting her know a second season in January was coming helped to get her interested.  I’ve also been offline playing the Nathan Drake collection on my PS4, which I bought in anticipation of Fallout 4, being released this week.

At least we have hope for the dead of winter – second seasons of the aformentioned Gate, as well as Snow White with Red Hair, are coming in a few months.

Fallout 4 – 13000 lines of Dialog – So What?

One of the big items reporting for Fallout 4 (a game I am VERY excited for) is that there are over 13,000 lines of dialog recorded, more than Fallout 3 and Skyrim combined.

My first reaction – so what?

Let’s take a look at the games mentioned.  Fallout 3 and Skyrim had a mute protagonist.  In Fallout 4, not only do you talk back, but you can be either male or female.  This means that if they had the same number of conversations, they would need THREE times the dialog (Male Protagonist, Female Protagonist, and Person spoken to).  Just saying there’s more than the first two games tell me there may be less overall conversations.

Now just to be clear, I AM excited for this game – it’s a game I’ve pre-ordered, and I do NOT pre-order games.  But giving us a “news” item like this, where if you think about the information given, it’s not very exciting.

Or newsworthy.

Anynet; or “How I Learned to Stop Worrying About My DualShock 3 Battery and Love my Playstation as a Media Center”

The other night, I learned I had a media center control for my PS3 all the time – hidden as a function of our TV!

Home late after work, turn on the TV, turn on the PS3, fire up Crunchyroll – and no video.  Check internet – looks like Crunchyroll is down.  Too tired to get excited looking for something on Hulu, I just start randomly checking settings on my Samsung TV – and there’s something called Anynet.  What the heck is Anynet?  Fire it up – and there’s the PS3 as a selection to link it to.  Grab the phone and a quick Google search shows it’s a way to use the TV remote to control some functions on the PS3.

Wait, what?

Sure enough the arrow keys on my Samsung remote are now controlling the menu – the center button replaces the X, and other keys make use of the circle and triangle buttons.   It works great for running applications. Not so good if you’re done with Crunchyroll and your wife wants you to start up Netflix.  It took some experimenting, but finally found the combination that gets around that.

The key is the tools button.  Hitting that gives you a menu that lists Anynet.  Selecting THAT gives you a few options including PS3 Menu – THAT is the equivalent to the PS button on the Dualshock. Select quit (or your next application) and you’re good to go.

Selecting the PS3 input from the TV remote turns on the PS3, turning off the TV at the main menu also turns off the PS3.  Now using my remote I can use all of the entertainment features of my PS3, and never once use the regular remote.

Video Game Release Dates

Bethesda Softworks got it right.  This year at E3, they formally announced Fallout 4.  They showed concepts, they showed video,  they shared all relevant information at the time.  Then they said, “Oh yeah, you’re going to be able to play it this year.”  And the crowd went wild.

Let’s compare that to Kingdom hearts.  Not the extra games, just the core franchise.   The first game came out in 2002.  It was a big hit, and they went on to follow with Kingdom Hearts 2 in 2004, two and a half years later.  On the disk was a hidden trailer indicating that there would be a Kingdom Hearts 3.

And the fans waited.

We waited for the rest of the PlayStation 2 cycle.  Every once in a while there would be concept art or a offhand remark that would give us hope.  But the game never appeared.

That’s alright; the PlayStation 3 is a more advanced system.  We’ve waited this long, surely the game would be coming soon.  And there were more reports, more hope, more hype.  But the game never appeared.

Finally we got to the PlayStation 4.  To be honest my enthusiasm has waned – the hype train has left the station, and I’m not as excited as I once was.  But there was an official trailer at E3, perhaps now we’d see when we’d be once again be leaping from reality to reality wielding the keyblade and saving the day.  The trailer ends with these words:

“Now in Development”

No kidding.  To be honest I now care very little whether or not the game ever will see the light of day.

But now I’m worried that another game is following in Kingdom Hearts footsteps.  No Man’s Sky.

Hello Games took E3 by storm this year with their live demo of No Man’s Sky.  It looks good.  It looked polished.  It looked like what I’ve wanted in a space sim for years.  They also made it sound, unlike Kingdom Hearts 3, like we wouldn’t be waiting ten years for its release.

IGN even made it their spotlight for July.  We knew, we KNEW that with the coverage it was getting, we had to at least be getting some idea of when we’d be jumping into the cockpit of our spaceship and exploring new worlds.   At the end of the month, they even had a “Ask me Anything” session with Hello Games, and surely that question would come up.

Their answer – we can’t even tell you when we can tell you a release date.

Now a month later, crickets. The No Man’s Sky information stream has dried up.  I for one am getting frustrated that a game that looked so close to being released two months ago is now in limbo.

When is that game coming out?

I know: another game post.  I’ll post some anime stuff soon, I promise, but it’s E3 season!

There seem to be bad trends in the AAA Video Game companies.  The first is “We’ve done great with game X 2014 – Let’s take that DLC pack, put it in a new case, and called it Game X 2015!”  We get games that are just a =little= better than last year.  Call of Duty, Battlefield, Assassins Creed, FIFA, Madden, MAKE IT STOP!   Rather than making them put out a good NEW game, they put out another mediocre game with the next year taped onto the picture on front.

Next we have the “We can make great games, and we’ll prove it by releasing it again!”  Master Chief Collection?  It’s just Halo with a new case.  During the Microsoft E3 press conference, one of their “big announcements” was a new release from Rare Games – a disk of all of their EARLIER games.  Ratchet and Clank Re-mastered.  Kingdom Hearts Re-mastered.  Final Fantasy 10 Re-Mastered. It never stops!  But the saddest thing about all of these re releases – THEY’RE BETTER THAN MOST OF THE NEW GAMES COMING OUT! (Final Fantasy 10 is in my PS3 as we speak)

Finally we have the worst offenders.  The companies that announce they’re working on a game, and next year say they’re working on the same game, and the next year they say…. Well you get the picture.

Sony’s Press conference started with the announcement of a new IP sure to wow the fans.  And they show footage for The Last Guardian.  Sure, it looks great! But I remember pushing preorders for this game more than two years ago for the PS3, then refunding money when the title was pulled.  It’s too late for me to get excited about this “new” title.

The real cringer was at Square Enix’s conference, where we saw more footage for Kingdom Hearts 3.  Ok, we know you’re working on it… how about a release date?  Release season?  Release YEAR?  End of the trailer we get – Game In Development.  C’mon people, we’ve been having this game hyped since the days of the PlayStation TWO.  Ok, the footage for Just Cause 3 almost made up for it, ALMOST.