Fixing a Hobie Catamaran (X-Real 720)

I've never been a sailor, but when I saw Fixing a Hobie Catamaran: 16ft Edition on the shelf, I just knew I had to pick it up.

The gameplay could be best likened to a point-and-click adventure. You buy the appropriate accessory and apply it to the appropriate part of the boat. Each accessory is purchased with real world money at one of a number of merchants. A little like the Trauma Center games plus Monkey Island mixed with a shady gold-farmer transaction.

The game consists of four big parts:

1) Fix the hardware. Two blocks (nautical for "pulleys") are broken.
2) The paint is horrible and chipping, so it needs a new coat.
3) There're a couple holes in the mainsail.
4) The hiking strap needs to be replaced with some equivalent.

So far I'm enjoying it. I've completed the minigame where I rebuild the first block. I couldn't replicate the rivet used (for a reasonable price), so I've used a stainless steel bolt.

The minigame I'm working on now is replacing the mast block. This one is fun, as I get to use a neat accessory called a "pop riveter". Of course, the first pop riveter I bought appears to be defective. Since the store isn't open again until Monday, I bought another one elsewhere and will return the original when the store reopens.

When I get a clear day, I'll fill and prime the hulls. It'll take another clear day for each layer of paint I put on. One cool feature is that you can customize the look of your fixed Hobie Cat. I've chosen a color called "Fire Red".

One aspect of this game I can't say I'm too fond of is the price of the various accessories. For instance, to buy sufficient marine topsides paint to play even one round of that minigame costs around $200.

(Which is why I haven't reviewed or even finished Prototype.)

Stood Up

I rushed through my review of inFAMOUS, even leaving out a planned paragraph talking about the super cool don't-trust-the-media subversion, in order to have it done before today. Because, you see, today I was going to buy [Prototype].

[Actually, you know what, fuck the official stylizations. It's "Infamous" and "Prototype" from now on. It's bad enough I bother to italicize them without throwing in all the fucked up capitalization and extraneous characters publishes seem to feel obligated to include in their titles.]

But, I didn't get to buy Prototype, because, as the fellow at GameStop explained to me, today is the "ship date" and not the "release date".

What the fuck does that mean? The publishers have been saying for weeks now that I could get the game on June 9th, 2009. Well, it's June 9th, 2009, and I don't have a new game.

This is, of course, in contrast to every single other game I've ever tried to buy on launch day. I either got them, or just arrived after they'd sold out. I've never had a game that simply wasn't available on launch day. None of the stores in the area had a copy. None of the stores in the area had even seen a copy.

Can you imagine if movies worked like this? What if "playing now at a theater near you" really meant, "Dude, like, I dunno... the reels are probably in the mail or something. Check back tomorrow."

inFAMOUS (PS3)

I haven't quite finished inFAMOUS yet. I've got one or two story missions left. But that doesn't matter. Short of Sucker Punch Productions arriving at my door and delivering a real sucker punch, there's nothing they could possibly do at this point that would ruin this game. Besides, I have the utmost confidence that they'll deliver a most satisfying ending. [Since writing the draft of this review, I have finished it, and the ending is most satisfying.]

You see, inFAMOUS is completely competent, polished, and playable in every way. There is no part of the game, from plot to platforming, that I do not feel was executed nearly without flaw. Sucker Punch missed no nuance of design, nor included a single bogus feature.

Let's start with the writing. I haven't seen better in this generation. For the first time in a very long time, I actually give a shit about the characters. I completely empathize with the player character, Cole MacGrath. I like the love interest. I could be friends with the best friend character. I totally buy the spooks and the cops and the government response and the quarantine. The betrayals hurt. At no point does the story ring untrue. At no point do I want to murder my allies.

As a game that makes a big deal of the Good vs. Evil karma mechanic, I really appreciate the nuance of the choices in inFAMOUS. While many of the choices are first grade ethics, others are not so clear cut.

For instance, in the beginning of the game, you're publicly accused of setting off the bomb that destroys New YorkEmpire City. As a result, the people of the city throw rocks and bottles at you, curse your name, tell you to clear out. After the first couple of rocks, I really wanted to murder the peons. I wanted to lay waste to them not to witness the destruction (as in GTA:IV), but because I was genuinely angry at them.

The gameplay of missions that make up the story is equally excellent. The missions are all different, with everything from infiltration to defense against onslaughts. Interspersed with missions in the city proper are a number of missions that take place in the sewers as you restore electricity to various portions of the city. These missions serve as short indoor platformer levels, and are some of the most fun in the game. They're also the levels in which you're granted new powers.

As you restore power to each area of the city, you unlock new powers. These powers can then be upgraded with XP (or, in the case of one power, by completing karma-aligned side quests). Surprisingly, not one of these powers is a dud. I wind up using all of them pretty regularly, although some quickly become mainstays.

My only real complaint about Cole's powers is that the basic lightning doesn't really look or behave like lightning. Instead of a continuous arc, each press of the button releases a split-second zap of electricity. The zap behaves more like a laser than a bolt of electricity, striking the precise point at which you're aiming and appearing as nothing more than a momentary blue flash. It actually has lightning graphics, but due to the camera angle, you see almost never see anything but the flash. It's boring, but it doesn't suck, so you'll use it constantly--to the detriment of your trigger finger's health, by the way.

Cole's other main ability, besides electricity, is to climb anything. In fact, the only viable tactic when fighting more than a couple of baddies is to seek the high ground. A cluster of gangbangers will tear you apart at close range, but they're easy pickings if you sit on top of a building and rain lightning down on them like Zeus.

One side effect of the climb anything mechanic is that building models have an unprecedented level of detail. Details that would be baked into the texture in any other game, such as window sashes and seams between cinder blocks, are actually modeled as part of the mesh. It's all of this detail that lets Cole grab onto the side of a building and scale it without looking like Spider-Man.

Sucker Punch has also provided Empire City with a liberal sprinkling of high-tension power lines. These make convenient walkways between distant buildings at the beginning of the game. Shortly into the game, however, Cole gains the ability to grind along them at a terrific clip. Since it's so easy to get between buildings, traveling the rooftops of Empire City is quite fluid and fun.

One of my few minor complaints about inFAMOUS, however, comes from the platforming mechanics. So as to make the running the rooftops a viable means of locomotion, Sucker Punch added a sort of assistance to your landings. So, if you're trying to make a jump, and you're going to miss by inches, the game will subtly alter your trajectory so that you don't miss it. It starts this process just as soon as figures out what you might be jumping for, so the result is usually just that things feel natural and you look like a total badass.

Except when multiple grab points are close at hand. Say you want to jump off a building and fall straight down to the sidewalk. You can't. Unless you jump several feet away from the building, Cole will catch every ledge and cranny on the way down. Want to jump past a cable to the open bed of a truck? Make sure you're at least three feet from the cable, not looking at it, and don't push the stick toward it at all. And pray.

While the graphics aren't stunning overall, the lighting is. Sucker Punch went with a deferred shading rendering model, which lets them light the entire game dynamically. This is utterly vital in producing convincing lightning effects. Your lightning bolts flash bright blue as they arc across the room, casting crackly, fuzzy shadows from everything. Frequently in the sewer levels, the only light will be the crackling arcs of electricity around Cole's hands. These cast the best shadows I've ever seen in a game.

Despite its lack of defects, inFAMOUS is not a particularly original game. Cole electrical powers are exactly the electrical powers you'd think of--I actually bet you can guess all of his offensive powers right now. The major plot elements are bland: terrorist attack, biological warfare. The world design is obvious, with separate islands, each controlled by its own gang. The enemies are boring gang members in campy uniforms, and they only have maybe three or four types of weapons between them.

But the point isn't that inFAMOUS is groundbreaking in its ambition. What makes inFAMOUS great is that it succeeds perfectly at everything it does attempt.

If you have a PS3, and even the slightest bit of mature taste, you'll go buy inFAMOUS right fucking now.

Infamous Teaser

I just got Infamous yesterday. I played it about twelve hours yesterday, with a steady progression of story missions. It's not over.

And I'm glad of that. Because, so far, it's delicious.

I'll get the full review up when it's ready. I expect another couple of days.

GTA IV Rant

I'm not going to bother reviewing GTA IV. You've already bought it, or you're not gonna. But, I am going to bitch about it.

First, GTA IV is the only GTA I've ever finished. The writing and difficulty levels meshed perfectly with what I needed to complete the story. But, in terms of actual gameplay, it wasn't nearly as fun as any of the previous titles. It's a good game. Just not as fun as it should have been.

The main thing Rockstar ruined is the cars. With the exception of the high-end sports cars, none of the cars handle even remotely acceptably. None of the vehicles have impressive acceleration. None of them corner easily. None of them skid predictably. All of them feel like they weigh three tons. It's a fucking video game. All of the cars should at least have the potential to entertain.

Another huge problem is the simulation distance. In previous games, you could sit on a tower and snipe at pedestrians blocks away. In GTA IV, if you're more than about five stories up, few or no pedestrians are simulated, and never any traffic. This means my favorite passtime of crashing cars by popping tires with sniper rifle becomes rather more difficult to facilitate.

The simulation distance also ruins high speed driving. You'll be zipping along in a sports car at high speed. All of the streets in front of you will have fuzzy red and white lights (of are just empty, during the day), but as you hig each cross street, they turn out to be mere phantasms. Until finally, of course, the program streams in some simulated traffic and you T-bone a Plymouth and shoot through the hood.

Combat was much improved previous games. Except for the weird cover system. But, does it matter? It's Grand Theft Auto. If the Auto part sucks, the quality of the Grand Theft interests me far less.

I'm just sayin', I had more fun last time, Rockstar.

EDIT: I just realized that I must have totally blocked out the memory of the loathsome goddamn goatfucking relentless and indiscriminate phonecalls and their chickenraping punitive solidarity system. I'm not going to talk about it. They shouldn't have done it. It's self evident.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (PS3)

I'm sorry for the lack of reviews lately. As a self-financed reviewer, I'm loathe to part with money for shit I know I'm going to hate. I've cleaned out the bargain bin of everything interesting. The used rack at GameStop is a wasteland. I even pulled out GTA:IV and went on endless, wife-annoying killspree rampages, envisioning each self-involved pedestrian and feckless cop I firebombed as an unproductive game development executive.

Then I saw that X-Men Origins Wolverine was coming out yesterday. My wife quickly reminded me of the old adage: thou shalt not buy movie tie-in games, for invariably they suck. But, I like Wolverine well enough as a character. And, I'd read an interview a few months ago with a designer in which he said, roughly, that previous video-game incarnations Wolverine had sucked and that he wanted the player to feel like an unstoppable nuclear-powered, nightmare blender of dismemberment. Roughly.

He's absolutely right on the first point. The issue always comes down to claws and regeneration. In some video game incarnations, these are both treated as "mutant powers" requiring "mutant energy" (or whatever) for each usage, as if they were equivalent to an optic blast (or whatever). This generally means that Wolverine's standard attacks will be an assortment of punches and kicks. And, thanks to the treatment of regeneration, Wolverine dies almost as easily as the other characters.

The other variant of Wolverine suckage is nerfing him. The developers animate Wolverine using his claws, maybe with a bunch of cool attacks. But, to keep him from unbalancing gameplay, they reduce the amount of damage Wolverine does to that of a kitten (or, say, Cyclops). Regeneration in these instances is either voluntary (i.e. press a button) or automatic but very slow.

The net result is that playing as Wolverine, you never feel like you're Wolverine. You feel like you're playing a weirdly neutered Wolverine, more of just a generic bruiser with a stellar haircut (or stupid suit, depending on generation). Maybe sometimes it even crossed over to feeling more like Edward Scissorhands on crank. But, I've always known that somewhere, at some point, somebody was going to tap the vast potential of the Wolverine trip. I kinda hoped this might do it.

But, you know, it's a movie tie-in game.

When I booted Origins, and saw the Raven Software logo, I cast aside all fears. Raven doesn't make bad games. They sometimes make okay games, and they sometimes make great games. But, they don't make bad ones.

The overwhelming sense of Origins is that, more or less, you feel like Wolverine. I'm not saying that it emotionally motivates you to sympathize deeply with the tortured character. I'm saying that you feel like an inhuman killing machine. A demon sent from the other side to rend asunder human flesh. You feel powerful.

First, your claws do damage--whether bone or metal. If you just run up and weak-attack repeatedly, you'll eventually fell any enemy. His friends may have beat you around the head and shoulders while you were doing it, though. So, you have a wide array of simply brutal attacks to dispatch foes more efficiently. My favorite is to leap from across the room at my target, knock him to the floor, and plunge my claws repeatedly into his chest. The targeting system is excellent, and it's intuitive to chain together attacks against multiple targets.

Next, you can absorb and recover from damn-near anything. No fight is ever over. Your health bar constantly regenerates (more on regen later), meaning that the only thing that can take you down in combat is rapidly inflicted damage. Huge gangs of enemies can do it, boss characters can do it, but you can literally stand in front of a dude or two with machineguns and remain alive indefinitely. So, if you're quick, you can take down huge swaths of enemies without any danger whatsoever.

Last, the game has beautiful gore and blood. Now, in general, I would say that gratuitous blood and entrails doesn't add much but humor and shock value to a game. But, in the case of Wolverine and his story, it's not gratuitous. Cuts from claws (and knives) sling streamers of blood into the air--a realistic amount, actually, if not too little. Excellent sound design contributes hugely to the experience. Fatalities often result in pieces of badguys flying in random directions.

But, you're fucking Wolverine. He hurts people. It's what he does. And rarely has a Wolverine property (book, game, or movie) had the balls to treat the damage Wolverine must inflict so graphically. And while it's usually fun to watch the carnage, I literally felt sorry for some of the digital dudes I had to kill.

Oh, and before I forget, there's almost no quicktime. There's somebody sitting in its chair, and it's far better. Instead of stopping the action and giving you some random code (as Yahtzee puts it "press x to not die"), Origins slows time for a fraction of a second. And you just do what comes naturally.

Time freezes, you ascertain that somebody's about to impale you, and what do you do? You don't press X, X, O and twirl the control stick. You just press the dodge button at the right time. And then, after you've gotten the upper hand a half second later, you might want to press the attack button. Want to take down the boss? Dodge, spin and leap, hang on to his back, and stab him repeatedly with your claws. Almost none of this is prompted. Furthermore, the moment of opportunity is simply a slowing down of regular time. As a result, the consequences of missing your moment are invariably just your opponent completing his move

But, Origins is hardly without fault. It attempts a bold (for gaming) non-linear story, with flash backs and flash forwards. One thread of the story is a particular mission with Team X in everybody's favorite carnage convention retreat, a temple thingie in a jungle in Africa. The other thread of the story deals directly with the timeframe of the film, taking Wolverine through a number of Stryker's anti-mutant weapon labs.

So, you bounce back and forth between labs and jungle/temple. The two most worn-out and busted video game settings. I understand a little lab time, what with the adamantium bonding process and all. And I'd forgive one short jungle level--'cause nobody seems to be able to make a game without one. But, all of the missions blur together, two endless and intertwined exercises in environmental monotony. There's nothing they do in either that I haven't seen a hundred times before. It's like the level designers were on strike, and they left level design to the guy who also had to paint the textures. But, despite their lack of interesting architecture, the levels are polished, unconfusing, and professional.

Some of the enemies are pretty neat. And some of the boss battles are phenomenal. And some of the enemies (in the jungle) babble constantly in what I can only assume is mock-African. Maybe it's a real language. But, I think it was just funny noises. But, many of the enemy types act identically... I've found one AI routine that's used for three different enemies.

And, of course, the levels are filled with platforming and "puzzles". I guess Raven felt combat was getting stale and so they threw this shit in to break it up. The puzzles are simplistic, although there're a couple that had me stumped for a few minutes. And the platforming always feels out of place in a Wolverine game. And, of course, there's the obligatory you-don't-have-your-powers level. That also doubles as the, uh, "stealth" level... but, again, you're fucking Wolverine, so you hardly handle it like Garrett.

I mentioned the regeneration as a game mechanic above, where it works flawlessly. But, Raven also included a visual regeneration system for Wolverine. Basically, as you take damage, your flesh is rent asunder revealing muscles, bones, and organs. Then, as you regenerate, the tissue regenerates and the wounds close up. It's kinda cool, but also a mixed bag.

It's all done in texturing the character model. So, you'll take a little damage, it'll reveal the "bloody" layer; then, you take more, it reveals the "muscle" layer. Probably the most straightforward approach for the effect. But, it means you can see the seams if, for instance, your shoulder blade is computed to take a lot of damage but your shoulder itself isn't. It also means that your viscera are sometimes weirdly lit, giving Wolverine the appearance of a mangled Ken doll.

And then there're Wolverine's clothes. Apparently, according to the game, Wolverine can regenerate bluejeans but not wifebeaters. Wounds to the torso regenerate to bare skin; wounds to the ass and legs regenerate to bloody bluejeans. Furthermore, his wifebeater is glued to his skin with an even film of spray adhesive. I conclude this because you can have the entire back of your wifebeater gone (only skin back there) but the front will hang on.

But, of course, some cutscenes will regenerate your wifebeater. My wife and I concluded that Wolverine must carry a supply of shirts in his pocket. Basically, the visual regeneration is cool enough if you don't pay it much attention, but doesn't hold up under scrutiny.

And then there's the plot. It deviates wildly from the movie. And yet it quotes some scenes line for line. But, the chronology of events can't match that of the movie. But, it answers certain questions I had after the movie. But, those answers don't make any sense with any other established Marvel continuity. It's some bastard amalgam of the movie plot and poorly-researched comic lore, all tied together with typically atrocious game writing.

I would liken X-Men Origins: Wolverine to Spiderman 2 on the PS2. In Spiderman, Treyarch so perfectly captured the exhilarating joy of swinging through New York City that gamers happily overlooked the lame story and repetitive random missions. In Origins, Raven captures Wolverine's primal spirit, brutal and visceral battle, effectively enough for me to happily overlook the unimaginative backdrop.

Where are the games?

Okay, where the fuck are the goddamn video games?

Why do I have nothing to play? Why is the only thing that's even kind of piqued my interest in about a month this game Flock? A game about kidnapping sheep in a UFO? This is the extraordinary experience that I'm going to spend my time playing?

It doesn't look like there's anything coming out on an actual disk until May.

That's really lame.