The Geek Life Notblog

P.S. I make a faulty Terminator 2 :: Grand Theft Auto 4 analogy in today’s episode. Replace Terminator 2 with Michael Haneke’s Funny Games and it makes a lot more sense.

I knew I was thinking of Terminator 2 for a reason, and that’s because it has more in common with Metal Gear Solid and its sequels. Way more chatter about nuclear deterrence, world peace, artificial intelligence, fate and free will in those games.

Oh, I was also saying how someone was “especially good” in Milk, and that someone is Emile Hirsch.

Who also plays the title character in Speed Racer. Which everyone should see and love.

P.P.S. Don’t forget! We’ll be at New York Comic Con this week, Friday and Saturday. I’ll be there Saturday!

Tim here. The second episode, The Vidya, is up and running and it’s December already. Crikey. We recorded that l’il number way, way back. Right after Halloween. So listening to it is interesting for a number of reasons:

1.) I sound like I’m underwater. Matt and Jess sound lovely. I thought a universal Bluetooth earpiece would be good enough for recording but evidently not. I pledge to emerge from the murky depths to get something better. Any suggestions?

B.) Although we sound aimless we do cover a breadth of games and issues (The best Final Fantasy, Fallout 3, DRM, Mega Man 9’s difficulty) that would interest the video gaming set out there. We don’t dissect anything in detail but we hope to cover a wide set of topics (totems, I call them: TV, film, video games) before we get down and dirty and talk explicitly about, I dunno, say, the strengths and weaknesses of Sega Saturn for 45 minutes. Well, maybe just weaknesses in that case.

&.) The podcast is a little time capsule. The only game we talk about that isn’t out yet is Prince of Persia (out this week). Everything else – Gears of War 2, Mirror’s Edge, CoD5 – has been out for a while and will hopefully be covered in detail in future recordings. Matt and I have been playing Gears 2 online but the man won’t play the campaign on his own. He better catch up fast, I’m not so sure I’ll be wary of spoilers for long!

3.) I didn’t crap out of the podcast at the end. I purposely left to make myself a tomato cheese melt. It was delicious.

More vidya.

Matt and I have been playing Smash Bros. Brawl online pretty regularly. We played offline before but I was under the mercy of his controllers of choice – the Wii Remote and Nunchuk. With a little patience and practice I could just barely eke out some sort of satisfactory performance, even a few wins, but without a Gamecube controller I felt like Thor without his hammer. I needed to play with power. So, online I’ve been doing that, whooping Matt left and right and it’s been a great old time. But when he plays as Ike…

Things begin to happen.

He wins. I can’t let that happen. Not anymore.

Meanwhile, I finally hacked my PSP. Sony built a nice piece of hardware but they forgot to support the thing with decent software (I can’t keep playing Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops forever). They also forgot a way to protect the scratch-happy screen, the analog nub is a joke and their selection of PSOne games available to download on their store network is also laughable. Oh wow, Tekken 2 and … Crash Bandicoot. Joy. Where’s Resident Evil 2? Where’s Chrono Cross? Y’know, great games that tons of people would pay money for? Meanwhile, Nintendo updates their Virtual Console on the Wii with three new games every week and these past few weeks have seen some stellar additions. Secret of Mana, Mega Man 3, Earthworm Jim, Gradius 2 … Not that all the Virtual Console releases are great (oh gee, another version of Street Fighter 2?) or that Nintendo isn’t guilty of their own moronic tendencies (Wii Music) but honestly. What is Sony thinking? What are they doing over there? Working on Home? Yeah. Great.

So, since Sony won’t give us anything it falls upon us, uh, liberators of the internets, to free the PSP of its binding firmware and actually give the poor thing something to do besides play Yoko Kanno songs and movie podcasts. Turns out the thing’s a wizard at emulation – Game Boy, NES, Sega Genesis, Game Boy Advance and some SNES games. My dreams of playing Contra 3 and Kirby Super Star – motherlovin’ Kirby Super Star, the holy grail of sweet, sweet, wonderful Kirby games – are dashed like so many Waddle Doos and Dees thanks to godawful frame-skipping and horrendous, well, emulation problems I guess. I don’t get it. But Chrono Trigger, Super Mario World and Earthbound all seem to work fine which is terrific since they’re, well, legendary! At least, that’s what I hear about Earthbound. After 13 years of trying and trying (I just couldn’t sit down and do it) I’m finally going to play that sucker and see what the big deal is about. And after that I’ll move onto Mother 3 and see what the big deal about that is.

Of course, this opens up the door to piracy… Luckily, the PSP hardly has anything worth stealing. The good games, I already own. And that’s pretty much all there is to that. Apparently, now it is possible to play PSOne games by ripping the ISOs from the CDs I already own onto my PSP memory stick. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me. Now I just gotta find out how! Hopefully I’ll be shooting zombies with Claire Redfield and hunting Frozen Flames with Kidd while on the caaaaan in time for the weekend.

Woo!

Y’know how you’re put on the spot and you can’t think of a reply fast enough? George from Seinfeld had that problem a lot and I did today when talking about Pokemon and Mirror’s Edge in today’s podcast. Matt asked what the big deal about Pokemon is. Well. It’s FUN, for one. It’s a deep, challenging RPG with over 300 characters you can mold and build to suit your style, there are tons of items and moves and secrets, a welcoming community to trade characters and items with, online play. Certainly there’s a nostalgia factory – the property’s been around a good, long while and is never going away. And it’s portable. It’s like asking what’s the big deal about Tetris? Whats’ the big deal about beer? C’mon. What more do you want? We’re obviously not changing each other’s minds here.

And Matt’s response to my query if he played the Mirror’s Edge demo out now: “It’s a jumping game. [or some similar snarky thing]”

So is Super Mario Bros.! RRRRRGGGHH. Try the demo, man. You too, Jess, you can download it on the PS3 through the Playstation Network Store. It’s the most unique thing out there. Every game out there looks like some brown, realistic shooter. Mirror’s Edge has primary colors. Do you remember the last time you saw those in a game? That wasn’t from Nintendo? It’s thrilling. The art design’s terrific, the music, the controls are different and weird and fun… the thrill of running away from armed pursuers. It’s completely different, emphasizing running and climbing and leaping over regular ‘ol SHOOTAN. It’s like the rooftop chase in Bourne Ultimatum or Casino Royale. And yes, you can see your legs if you look down. Try it out for PETE’S sake.

So yeah, in the feeble, limp words of George Costanza, “the jerk store ran out of you!”

Hey, I’m Tim. When Matt asked me to join Mastergeek Theater he made it clear he didn’t want it to just be video game talk.

I’m about to disappoint him.

It’s almost November and all the big game companies have to push their huge AAA titles down our throats like awful lozenges. I’m not really looking forward to any games this holiday season because A.) I got too many games to play already and 2.) the vidya’s expensive and all too often, disappointing. I haven’t touched the 360 since… I don’t even remember, but Ninja Gaiden 2 wasn’t worth it, and the PS3 is a $700 Metal Gear Solid 4-playing machine. Which I haven’t touched since I beat MGS4. Boy, I sure am glad I made that investment.

The Wii is getting some play. Not any actual disc-based games though. WiiWare titles Bomberman Blast and Mega Man 9 have been at my fingertips since mid-September and they’re lovely. Metroid Prime 3 does sit inside the console, unloved and forgotten since last August.

Nevertheless, video games are screaming at me for their attention. Walking in Manhattan I found this on the corner of 36th and 10th Ave.

Now, I dunno about you but that’s pretty big. There are Fallout 3 ads on buses, too and “TV specials” (30-minute commercials) featuring “industry experts” (Kelly Hu?! Who knew!) talking about how great Fable 2 is. I figure it’s just because this holiday season is more crowded than ever and marketers figure getting hacks to shill their warez on Sci-Fi Channel and Comedy Central (which is pretty much The Shaun White Snowboarding/Spider-Man: Web of Shadows/Max Payne the Movie Network now) is the way to get attention. …It works I guess. I certainly took notice.

The truth is video games have been in the public conscious as long as they’ve been around. Or at least as long as I’ve been around. No longer do we have to suffer the slings and arrows of the Super Mario Mario Show or Captain N (awesome as they were). Now things have gotten a little more sophisticated. Now we have Michael Ian Black and David Wain to tell us which game has the best HD graphix and totally killar gaemplay this yeer. Or the ever-drowsy Liv Tyler poking away at a DS Lite white as her molars.

On the other hand it’s nice the terrible mainstreaming of my beloved medium gets at least a little reputable exposure. Here’s an article about CliffyB, the mind behind the Xbox 360 shooter Gears of War (okay, I guess I do look forward to Gears of War 2). The writer goes a little overboard with the namedropping (Cormac McCarthy? I suppoooose he has something to do with GoW…) and hifalutin jibber-jabber but it’s cool that a video game is sharing print space with, er, the higher arts. Y’know.

Political cartoons and such.

So gog.com went into open beta today, and if you haven’t checked it out already you absolutely should. It’s a video games vendor in the vein of Steam or Stardock, but for older games that we “hardcore*” gamers like to call “classics.”

I first heard about Gog from Shamus Young (over at www.shamusyoung.com) while he was particularly upset about DRM on today’s games.  Gog’s most exciting feature to me is that you’re getting all of the games 100% DRM free.  You pay them for the download (almost always under 10 dollars) and you get the game in its entirely, with no DRM to speak of.

Also, most of the games have been “updated” to work in Vista and XP.  No longer do I have to install my copy of Wing Commander and realize that since the games frame rate was tied to my clock speed, it’s running at a gajillion** frames per second.

Now excuse me while I go remember why the original Fallout was such an awesome game.

*note: I’m a hardcore gamer like Budwiser is a “hardcore” beer…

**that’s a one with a bazillion zeros after it.