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Friday, November 6, 2009 09:35 AM
Lego Rock Band may be more fun for adults than kids
Lego Rock Band (PS3/360/Wii/DS), a new music game from Traveller’s Tales and Harmonix, combines the family-friendly aesthetics of the popular Danish building blocks with the rhythm-based play of Rock Band while providing enough difficulty options to let players of all skill levels get into the groove.
All of the game’s tracks have a “super easy” mode that allows players to strum any note or tap any drum to register a successful hit. Likewise, singers just have make sounds into the mic in time with the music to successfully complete phrases. Plus, young ADDers are looked after via a heaping helping of single song set lists as well as the ability to play shortened versions of each song.
However, there’s still a full range of more challenging modes, including easy, medium, hard, and expert. Indeed, you’ll do no better on the hardest levels in this Rock Band than you would in any other entry in the franchise—which is good, because as kids have shown time and again, they’re often more adept at playing games than their parents (check out this video of a teen playing Guitar Hero on expert with his elbow while solving two Rubick’s Cubes if you don’t believe me).
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Thursday, November 5, 2009 08:19 AM
Dragon Age: Origins not for n00bs
Unlike many modern role-playing games, which tend to shove players into the action head first and throw in a morsel of dialogue here and there, Dragon Age: Origins (360/PS3/PC), the long-gestating fantasy RPG from Edmonton-based Bioware released Tuesday, places enormous value on the story being told, the characters we meet, and the history and culture of the civilization in which we find ourselves.
The nation of Ferelden is beset by invaders known as the Darkspawn; orc-like creatures led by demons who seem to get it in their hellish heads every few hundred years that they ought to try to take over the planet. The world’s first defense is an ancient sect known as the Grey Wardens; heroes who have a secret connection with the Darkspawn and hold the power to unite humans, elves, and dwarves as a single, massive army to fight off the blight.
Clearly, there are plenty of parallels to other fantasy tales—most obviously J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings trilogy and John Boorman’s classic Arthurian film Excalibur—but Dragon Age churns out enough chronicles and lore to feel its own. Indeed, I’ve managed to amass nearly 200 entries in my codex—sort of a Fereldenian encyclopedia—each loaded with information about the game’s creatures, types of magic, cultures, and personalities. And that doesn’t include many of the stories I’ve heard during hours of discussions with non-player characters.
Put plainly, this is a game with the depth, imagination, and richness of a Neal Stephenson novel.
Monday, November 2, 2009 09:53 AM
Gay Tony is a good step for gays in games
Earlier this year I wrote a post for this blog about how gays aren’t often featured in games, and how the few homosexual characters that have appeared have been shallow stereotypes. I discussed Grand Theft Auto IV’s flamboyantly homosexual Bernie in particular, noting that while I was satisfied with how the game dealt with the subject of homosexuality in general, I was disappointed with Bernie, who is ostentatious, cowardly, and adorns his walls with paintings of muscle-y men wearing bulging codpieces.
Given the titular character in Rockstar’s second downloadable episode for the game, Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony (recently released for Xbox 360 via Xbox Live), I’d be remiss if I didn’t take a moment to readdress this subject.
Thursday, October 29, 2009 07:43 PM
Ninth verse, same as the first
The question I set before you today is whether innovation is always a necessity. Can a game be great if it does nothing but re-hash old ideas and tread familiar ground?
This is what I found myself pondering during a recent marathon session of Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time, the ninth game in Insomniac’s popular PlayStation-only platformer series.
I’ve played them all. I’ve liked them all (with perhaps the exception of Clank’s solo excursion, Secret Agent Clank—I’ve always been more of a Ratchet man). And while it’s been quite a while since I’ve thought these accessible, action-packed, and just plain playable games were truly innovative, I still find them completely compelling.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009 12:31 PM
Footballer Hero?
The Games Day Podcast is a fun and informative Canadian-grown Web show that I’ve been watching for the last few months. Hosted by a trio of guys in London, Ontario, the podcasts consist of game reviews, industry speculation, and discussions about game culture.
It’s entertaining stuff. But, perhaps more importantly, I can always count on these fellows to direct my attention to interesting game-related items. Like this video:
And here I was complaining about DJ Hero being physically demanding.
I don’t know much about this odd but interesting experiment other than what was written in the short blurb accompanying the video, which states that it was an attempt to create a three-storey-high guitar game controlled with soccer balls kicked by a team of “insanely gifted young freestyle footballers.”
Regardless, thanks, Games Day guys, for picking up on this. And keep up the good work.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009 12:56 AM
Forza Motorsport 3: What wasn’t fit to print
If you haven’t seen my review of the Xbox 360-exclusive Forza Motorsport 3, which was published in Tuesday’s paper, you can see it here. Unfortunately, constrictions inherent in the printed page kept me from diving as deeply into the game as I’d have liked in the review. Lucky for me I have a blog that lets me expand 'til my heart's content!
Friday, October 23, 2009 12:04 PM
Why do you play?
If there’s one thing that the reader comments on this blog have taught me over the last couple of years, it’s that people expect—and receive—different kinds of satisfaction from video games.
Some people play games to take in epic stories full of action and emotion. Others play them for a social experience, to have fun with friends and family in the same room or online.
Some people play games with an aim to challenge their minds, while others want to challenge their reflexes.
Some are only interested in the hardest games around, relishing the sense of accomplishment that comes with beating the most difficult enemies and puzzles, while others simply want to kick back and enjoy some mindless fun that involves little or no failure.
There are people who play sports games when they haven’t time or ability to engage in the real thing, and there are those who play active games to make themselves get up off the couch and enjoy a bit of exercise.
It’s clear that some people play games as a way to escape reality, while others seem interested in games that do their best to mimic the world in which we live.
Some people actually play games with an aim to learn more about specific subjects, whereas others see games as a distraction; a way to make the morning commute disappear or while away a lonely evening.
There are those who play to experience the unique artistry of the medium, and, in some cases, express their own creativity by generating their own content—which leads to people who play games to feel part of a community, to share their creations and ideas while making friends with groups of other players.
There are also people who are interested in seeing how games can be used to express original concepts, or present familiar ideas in new and different ways.
Indeed, some people’s primary interest in games seems to be the medium itself. They like to scrutinize the industry's most creative developers as they do new and unexpected things only possible in the world of interactive entertainment.
As for me, I can honestly say that I’ve played games at one time or another for all of these reasons, and that, more often than not, I come away contented.
There can be little doubt that medium’s sheer diversity of user gratification is really quite special, and I’m sure people must play for reasons that I haven’t even thought of.
So, why do you play?
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Friday, October 23, 2009 10:09 AM
Call it Fallout 3 Lite
You know those games that you really like even though you know there’s nothing all that special about them? Gearbox Software’s Borderlands (360/PS3/PC) is that kind of game for me. It doesn’t bring much new to the table and it has its fair share of quirks, but it hits most of the right notes for a fellow like me who likes to have a bit of role-playing and some sci-fi shenanigans thrown in with his first-person shooting.
Set on a planet that resembles to a large degree the Nevada desert and, fittingly, seems to have been colonized in large part by gun-toting, southern-drawling, risk-takers, Borderlands puts players in the shoes of a wastelander who is on the hunt for the Vault, an alien structure rumoured to be loaded with technology and wealth.
Though the action is that of a first-person shooter, it feels much more like a dungeon crawling role-playing game. The wasteland setting and shooter-cum-RPG action makes it feel a lot like last year's Fallout 3, but it’s equally reminiscent of the futuristic first-person dungeon-crawling PC game Hellgate: London, which, given the folks who worked on that title, probably means it drew some inspiration from the Diablo games as well. And, given that we have four characters from which to choose and that the game supports four-player co-operative play, one might even imagine that it owes a small debt to a game like Left 4 Dead.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:19 AM
Final Fantasy VII: Citizen Kane for the gaming set
Games don’t age as gracefully as books or film. It’s simply the nature of the medium. This doesn’t mean, however, that they’re not worth revisiting now and again.
A case in point is Final Fantasy VII, the beloved PlayStation One classic that essentially birthed the modern Japanese role-playing game. I downloaded it from the PlayStation Store a few weeks ago (it was released back in June) when I was playing around with the new PSPgo's download capabilities, and even with this holiday’s hot titles piling up around me I keep finding myself drawn back to this extraordinary game.
Monday, October 19, 2009 10:17 AM
A Boy and His (overpriced) Blob
From WayForward Technologies—the company that made the imaginative if somewhat frustrating horror puzzler Lit for Nintendo’s WiiWare service—comes A Boy and His Blob, a side-scrolling platformer for the Wii based on the similarly titled A Boy and His Blob: Trouble on Blobolonia, which was originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System about 20 years ago.
A fan of its predecessor, I’d been looking forward to this game since first reading about it earlier this year and learning that WayForward’s intention was to up the game’s accessibility and cuteness factor.
And, make no mistake, that’s exactly what they’ve done.
Controller Freak Contributors
Chad Sapieha
Chad Sapieha has been covering the video game industry in print and broadcast since 1997. He began writing about games for The Globe and Mail in 2004.