Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Been thinking about this one a bit, but I’ll keep this one quick. I mention them along with the platforms on which I played and preferred them. Starting with number seven…

7. Afterfall: Insanity (PC)

This game received very little fanfare, and still doesn’t have an official support or community discussion forum anywhere online. It’s a damn solid third-person horror game, which clearly takes immense amounts of inspiration from the Dead Space series, especially in controls and user interface. The action is fun, the scares are scary, and despite some kinda lame writing, the story is actually pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing more from this studio.

Link: Afterfall on Gamersgate

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Ammunition in shooter video games is up near the top of my list of Most Ridiculous Video Game Conventions out there today. Seemingly implemented because “that’s what you always do,” the mechanics are purportedly intended to instill a sense of urgency within the player, who should try and make every shot count. In reality, legacy imbalances within the standard implementation of these mechanics almost universally result in half-assed pacing mechanics that seem tacked-on at best, and controller-throwingly frustrating at worst. Read more

It’s been a while since I’ve had this part of my gaming needs so excited:

It’s also been a while since I’ve had a Friday night so wide open and free to dedicate to the pursuit of purely nerdy pleasures. I must have spent full-on weeks of my youthful life plowing intensely forward through each of the many Romance of the Three Kingdoms games. Tonight, I shall try and recapture this experience, only this time in Ancient Japan.

I’ll try and remember to post more about it during and after tonight’s experience.

I’m in something of a High Nirvana era of personal gaming enjoyment. I feel that there are more awesome gaming opportunities around me than ever before in my life. Tabletop, Video, Design, it’s a veritable cornucopia of exciting play. Let’s review!

As far as my table-topping goes, I’m in the middle of at least two games, with two more on the horizon. First is my Old School Palladium Fantasy sandbox game, which has had four gatherings so far and seems to be maintaining everyone’s excitement pretty nicely. This game is really doing a good job of reinvigorating me, both as an arbiter of events and as a creator of spontaneous content. I haven’t run this seat-of-the-pants in a long, long time, and it is quite simply titillating my gamer imagination. I go into each session with a mental picture of all the events happening in the world within a 20-mile radius of where the characters are, and as they move around, those events progress of their own accord. So far, the players have managed to hit up most of them quite nicely, and get themselves directly involved of their own volition. It’s wonderful. Read more

If you are a member of my closer circles of friends, you probably by now think I must be secretly working for the marketing team of OnLive. I’ve been a major shill for this company since I first encountered them at PAX 2009, and rarely a week goes by that I don’t spout out more OnLive propaganda, entirely of my own free will. A recent major technical difficulty that I’ve experienced with their service serves as yet another example of how awesome this company is, to me.

A while back, the Capcom game Dark Void went on sale for pretty cheap via the OnLive system, and I jumped on it. I’d played the original demo at PAX that same year, and I’d been wanting to give the full game a try for a while. I wasn’t disappointed, either: despite some fairly scathing reviews, I find Dark Void to be a pretty awesome action game. It’s more or less The Rocketeer, and I effing loved that movie.

Unfortunately, a critical game-crashing error has consistently plagued me at the very end of the first episode of the game (out of three). The error happens every single time I activate a crucial mechanic in the game. In fact, there’s no way to avoid the error, as that crucial mechanic is required to advance a certain scene and complete the end of the first episode.

Trial and error and a whole lot of guessing have led me to believe that the error is exclusive to the use of a game controller in that scene; mouse and keyboard work fine without issue. This wouldn’t be a huge deal for me (being a mouse-and-keyboard shooter fan on PC) if it weren’t for the fact that Dark Void is a much more enjoyable console-and-couch experience than a PC one.

The error is specifically limited to the OnLive platform, and their service team has been on the frickin’ ball with helping me resolve this. Believing it might be an issue specifically related to my own unique user data, the support representative assigned to the case even went so far as to play through the game from the beginning all the way just past the point that was blocking me, and then replacing my save data with his own. I would do terrible secret things if I were able to land a job that let me play video games in order to help out customers, all as part of a day’s work.

The error persists, unfortunately, but I can bypass it using the mouse and keyboard, for now. But their tech team continues to work on it, their support rep continues to communicate with me, and their response time and service level continue to wow me.

I’m impressed. Service teams today rarely do that for me.

Last year at PAX, I got a chance to try a hands-on demo of the OnLive cloud-based game system. I was heartily impressed, and have bought heavily into it. The short version: OnLive is a cloud-based PC gaming platform that has a huge number of games you can purchase and play, with all the processing being handled via the cloud. You can play either via an app installed on your computer (mouse/keyboard or controller), or via a separate “microconsole” that connects to your TV via HDMI. It even has an app for Mac and iPad, and I understand they are working on getting it on Linux and Android as well.

A couple of months back, I jumped on a special wherein you pre-ordered the game Homefront, and they sent you both another game and one of their special MicroConsoles for free. I cared (and continue to care) nothing at all for Homefront, but the bonus game was the amazing Metro 2033, and the console itself was woth $99. Getting all this for $49 was quite a steal. I continue to play the console regularly, enjoying games like Arkham Asylum, Borderlands, Just Cause, and more, without a single hitch in gameplay.

Well, they have just today announced the exact same deal, only this time it is for the upcoming game Red Faction: Armageddon. If you preorder it for $49, you get the game when it comes out, immediate full access to Red Faction: Guerrilla, and a free microconsole and controller. I have been planning on getting a second controller anyway for the exact same price alone, so this deal I immediately jumped on.

I definitely encourage you to check this one out. It’s an extremely portable full current-day gaming platform, and the array of games is quite impressive. I’ve yet to be disappointed. Plus, since the controller works with your PC, even if the game and system go bust you still have a nice controller left over. On top of that, it really is the only way I have found so far to “rent” new, full PC games and try them before you buy them.

Here’s the Link to the promo (and no, it is not a user referral, if that matters)

I remember years ago, at a previous service-related job in a previous city of residence, being handed a copy of the book Raving Fans and told to read it. The boss-man actually made said reading mandatory, and assigned a book report-like follow-up for all of us to turn in. The book wasn’t bad, in all honesty, and at the time my job performance benefited from having read it.

Years later, there’s very little that I recall from its pages, but one bit of it still sticks with me today: customers are more likely to spread the word about an absolutely terrible experience than an absolutely amazing one. Sadly, this is the case today. I’ve recently posted my very first review on Amazon, and it’s pretty negative. It’s about a subject that I love: Dead Space. Particularly, it’s about the atrocious work of animation that is Dead Space: Aftermath.

I’ll spare the details here, and instead just link you to the actual review.

The first is Realm of the Mad God. It’s a browser-based, online co-op fantasy mmo shooter. Yeah, that. And it’s great!

The other is Rogue Survivor, a rogue-like zombie survival game. It, too, is pretty damn great.

Apocalypse World – the new game from Vincent Baker – has been making the rounds through all the gaming blogs I regularly follow. It’s a grim’n'gritty, totally player/character-driven game of post-apocalyptic inter-personal relations. I’ve heard it described on more than one occasion as “Firefly, but after the bombs.” It’s wicked fun, and I’m currently involved in two steady games of it.

On more than one of these aforementioned gaming blogs, the writers have made comments to the effect of “this ain’t the tabletop version of Fallout, kids” or “if you’re looking for the apocalypse Fallout, try Gamma World instead.” My first instinct was to nod my head and think “yeah, this game is way more mature than Fallout, that’s totally right.” But upon recent deeper play-throughs of Fallout 3, I realize that that couldn’t be further from the truth. Apocalypse World is perfect for bringing the world of Fallout to life.

Let’s face it: the Fallout universe is right fucked from the get-go. It’s the blasted remains of a world scorched by a global nuclear war started in the 2100s – a war fueled by civilizations that never shed their 1950s ideals. As you wander the wasteland in any direction you wish to explore, you see the remnants of those elitist, isolationist ideals everywhere. You never once forget that the way things are now was caused by the smothering hubris of the last generation of powers-that-be, and in their stead you find only ruin and chaos.

The Fallout franchise is frequently remembered for its tongue-in-cheek humor, but what tabletop game session isn’t, as well? I’ve played all the games in the franchise to date, and while I agree that that humor is there and in droves, the most recent game in the series at times takes a stark turn towards the depressing and macabre. As a prime example of how Fallout 3 can definitely work with Apocalypse World, let’s look at the town of Grayditch. Yes, there be spoilers behind the cut. Read more

Check this video out. I understand it was made using Garry’s Mod, which I know little about except that it is some kind of Source engine mod to Half-Life and other Valve games.