Gaming Weekend: High Definition Edition
There was a point this weekend where I was almost ready to give up. Making the long-anticipated plunge into the land of HD was becoming too much of a hassle. But I’ve been nothing if not patient. For years I’ve seen the beautiful HD sets and thought longingly about how great it would be to have one to display my video games in all their potential glory. A few extra days of irritation is but a drop in the bucket.
Finally, at the tail end of my weekend, I went and picked up my new TV. 46″ Samsung LCD with 1080p capability. I also purchased a new TiVo that supports High Def, I worked with Comcast to get an HD-capable receiver, I bought HDMI cables for my XBox and I picked up a PlayStation 3. It was a lot of money to part with in one weekend, but the end result is a home theater system that has gone from “old and busted” to “new hotness” in very short order.
Probably the most contentious purchase of the lot was the PS3. I ended up with the 40gb version, which does not have PS2 backwards compatibility. That’s kind of a sore spot because there are a few PS2 games I’d still like to play. But my main motivation for getting a PS3 was the Blu-Ray player, surprisingly enough. It’s not that I’ve tossed my hat into the Blu-Ray ring over the competing HD-DVD format, but I’m not that interested in re-buying a bunch of media all over again. However, I do rent movies quite a bit and I’d like the option to rent HD movies where available. And I can’t say I didn’t appreciate the price-reduction brought about by the feature-slashing Sony did late last year. Besides, since my primary interest was in Blu-Ray and most standalone players are as expensive if not moreso than the PS3 itself, it made some sense to go with the game console.
So it’s not perfect but I am hanging onto my old and perfectly functional PS2 which I can use to play any Silent Hill 2 or Persona 3 I want to, but I tend to focus on newer games as a general rule anyway so I actually don’t think I’m missing much, just kind of disappointed that such an obviously welcome feature had to be cut to make the thing semi-affordable.
Also, it may or may not be interesting to note that the purchase of the PS3 has cemented my console decisions this generation: I won’t be picking up the Wii until/if it gets down around the $100 price range. It’s not that I don’t have any interest in Nintendo’s console, but the few games I am curious about don’t offer enough to compel me to pick it up at the current price level. Also, I had all three consoles last gen and while I spent a lot for both the Xbox and the PS2, I felt like I got plenty of mileage on them for my money. I also bought a GameCube after only one price reduction and while I don’t feel like I was gypped in any way, I also think I could have held out until it was $100 or so, played all the games I wanted to play for it and been ultimately better off. So in an effort to live and learn, it seems like the Wii is shaping up to have a similar library by the time it’s all said and done, I’ll wait and play all my Super Mario Galaxies and Metroid Prime Corruptions somewhere down the road when everything is dirt cheap.
In any case I’m now rocking in full high def gaming glory, and I actually played some games in-between dropping all that money.
The Blade from the Heavens
So the one PS3 game I did have a chance to play briefly was a rented copy of Heavenly Sword. It’s difficult to really pinpoint the game because while definitely not as annoying as something like Ninety-Nine Nights, it shares an uncomfortably vast amount of common ground with that stinker, from the one-versus-multitudes combat to the mostly indecipherable plot told in pretty good but not jaw-dropping cutscenes. It’s too early to really be making judgements but it seems to me that most combat I encountered so far can be handled readily by alternating flurries of triangle and square mashing with a few flicks of the right analog stick to dodge. Possibly the combat develops over the course of the game, but the early going is less than delightful.
There is some effective storytelling going on right at the beginning of the game, and the voice acting seems solid so far, but there is something about the setting or the presentation or the graphics or something that makes the whole thing feel like it’s veering toward a chasm of storytelling suicide. I can’t express yet just what has me so bewildered by the plot but it’s definitely there.
So… This is Paradise, Huh?
My other big game of the weekend was Burnout Paradise. I picked up the game on the strength of both the series (which I’m new to) and the previews which made the game sound fantastic.
Now I don’t want to give the wrong impression so let me say up front that I really enjoy playing this game. The sense of speed and the free-roaming approach to the racing genre are sublime. The event set-up is well executed and the visuals and sound are pretty great. What I’m not so thrilled about with BP is the offline mission structure. The fact that every mission you choose to engage in takes you on some sprawling chase around the game’s setting and results at best with you halfway across the map now toting a new mark on your record but at worst winds up with you way out in who-knows-where no better off than you started. I know why they didn’t include a retry option, but when most of the races you come across take you to the same basic finish line, you end up milling around that area a lot looking for challenges you haven’t yet completed.
I’ll also note that the different events are pretty disparate in terms of their fun factor. The Stunt Challenges sound like fun but end up being exercises in boost management while you look impatiently for some sort of shortcut so you can begin racking up the multipliers. Marked Man challenges are almost more frustrating than anything since your best best is to simply take the least efficient routes to your destination because no amount of racing or handling skill can stand up to the super-cheap AI. Which leaves basically jump and shortcut hunting, plain old races and the challenge where you pretty much just execute takedowns as the real standouts.
What’s really unusual is how counter-intuitive the game’s non-event activities are to the rest of the design. Games like Crackdown and GTA reward searching the open world for tchotchkes by making you work deliberately around the map, poking into corners where possible to find the hidden items. But Burnout Paradise has you literally zooming around the world in a car you can’t walk away from trying to find things hidden down blind alleys and in off angles to the street layout. That means that the best way to find all the shortcuts and jumps and billboards is to drive slowly. In a racing game.
I’m just saying.
The Other Games
- Silent Hill Origins – I actually put a pretty hefty chunk of time into this game, getting past the Sanitarium at long last. Most of the time spent was due to the transition between TVs where I couldn’t play the 360, but I guess that’s what portable games are good for. I don’t know if I’ve already said too many glowing things about SHO, but I can’t stress enough how happy I am to find a Silent Hill game that captures the feel of the first one as completely as Origins does.
- Warhammer 40K – Yes, at long last I got a chance to play a match of 40K for the campaign I’m participating in. I used the new 4th Edition Chaos Codex which I have mixed feelings about. After playing one game I think it’s not as bad as I originally thought. Essentially they’ve drastically reduced the customization options you have with the army because most wargear is now either standard or unavailable depending on the unit type. Which makes crafting an army list less painstaking but also means you have less room to play with your point distribution. In any case I fielded a pretty sizeable army (models-wise) for the 2,000 point game and though I lost pretty significantly to my opponent’s suit-heavy Tau force, most of the loss was directly attributed to my own judgement and execution errors (I had some really bad rolls early in the game). My tactics were severely flawed but some of that was due to a lack of familiarity with Tau army lists (I let the railgun-toting guys who hid in cover live for way too long and they ended up slicing through my Defiler and Land Raider before I realized how dangerous they were). In the end I learned some things and had a really good time. Hopefully there will be more opportunities for wargames in the coming months, especially if we end up moving closer to the rest of the gaming group in a few months.
- Rock Band – Thursday night we finally had a chance to get a full four-man Rock Band session in gear. It was wonderful. We played for several hours straight, working our way through most of the Tour Mode until we reached a point at which we needed to either kick it up to the next difficulty level or call it a night. Since most of my other band members are really new to GH-style games, we switched up the roles for a few songs and finally called it a night. I wish there was a local multiplayer mode that more closely mimicked the Solo Tour’s progression (and didn’t result in us having to play Bon Jovi’s “Wanted Dead or Alive” four times in one night) but the game itself is really unbeatable for fun party-style play.