Up until the release of Mass Effect 2, the original Mass Effect was a game I thought I would never touch with a 10-foot pole. The premise of the game did not appeal to me at all. I was well aware of the pedigree that BioWare has in the role-playing game space, but I hate RPGs. The last real role-playing game I ever got into was Super Mario RPG on the Super Nintendo. It featured third-person shooting combat, which I like. But I also don’t like managing an AI squad and I also don’t like the idea that all of the combat is dictated by dice rolls rather than shooting ability. Ultimately, I passed on this game because it didn’t sound like it was something I would like.
video games
Girlfriend Gaming: Why Make Her Join the Dark Side?
Happy Valentines Day! For those of you in love, out of love, or in-between love, I hope that your Valentines Day turns out to be a good one. Up until recently, the majority of my Valentines Days were horrible, but this isn’t the right forum to discuss that.
Anyway, I thought today would be a good day to start what may become a series of entries from me that pertain the role video games have in a relationship with a significant other that I call “Girlfriend Gaming”. I don’t mean to exclude the GLBT community, as some of my best friends are GLBT, but I would not be able to speak well on the intricacies of that dynamic. In any case, I’m sure that anyone with a significant other can find something to relate to here.
R18+ and Why You Should Care
As a North American citizen, video game censorship hasn’t really affected the games that I played since Mortal Kombat on the SNES, famous for not including blood. Since that whole debacle, the ESRB was formed and pretty much anything other than porno games are fine to sell here.
Other parts of the world aren’t as lucky. China is more prone to ban games that touch down on political issues. In 2002, Greece temporarily banned all video game playing in public. The one country I wanted to speak on in regards to censorship is Australia.
There’s No Place Like Home?
Last time I spoke about Silent Hill: Homecoming, I focused mainly on how freaked out the game made me. It took a lot of will from within for me to overcome my psychological shortcomings to get through that opening sequence. As a survival horror game, I thought it started out really well.
Unfortunately, my mental fortitude hasn’t been pushed nearly as hard since. Part of that has come from growing familiar with the world. But most of my growing weariness towards the game comes from the game’s design faults and squandered potential.
Would You Kindly Read My Bioshock Thoughts?
With the release of Bioshock 2 only days away, I thought I would take a minute to reflect back on my time with the original Bioshock.
I vividly remember reading video game sites and listening to podcasts who were hyping up how amazing this game was. I didn’t care. The screenshots looked pretty, but I didn’t care that it came from the guy who made the System Shock games cause I’d never played them before. I didn’t care about the Little Sister dynamic. I didn’t care that you could add elemental powers to yourself to add variety to the combat.
Then I played the demo. Oh, my, God.
Welcome Back to Rapture?
The original Bioshock came out of nowhere for me. It was a game that was a getting a lot of buzz from the journalists, but from the little I had heard or read about it, I didn’t care at all for the game. In my eyes, it was just another first-person shooter. Then the demo came along and rocked my face into another planet. Everything about that game to the spooky atmosphere to the combat and the impressive plot progression of that demo had me sold. It was the first game to ever sell me based on a demo. I rushed out on the morning of release and bought it.
Unemployed Gamer
Due to circumstances beyond my control, today is my first day of being unemployed since I started working in 2001. I will be diligent in trying to get back on my feet, and I hope this spell of unemployment doesn’t last for long. I have been pretty good at saving my money and my expenses are relatively low, so I should be able to hang out for a few months if things get that hairy. I pray that they don’t.
Are You Afraid of the Dark?
Flashback to sometime in the early 90s. I was between the ages of 8-10 years old around the time this happened. I was on a family trip, and we stopped at some souvenir shop that happened to have a haunted house in the basement. I guess it was more of a dungeon than anything. As a cocky kid, I thought I could handle it, no problem. Then I went down the stairs, saw a pitch-black hallway, and ran back up. I told my mom straight up, “I’m too scared to do this.” Wanting to get her money’s worth, my mom then came down there with me. This time, the lights were fully on, everything exposed, and nothing there that could possibly jump out of the blue and kill me. I think whoever was running the dungeon toned it down just so that I could get through it without messing up my underwear. I may have only been in that dark dungeon hallway alone for five seconds, but I still live with that fear to this day.
Home Decor For Nerds
A few weeks ago, I found myself at my local Rona, looking for a shelving unit to store and display my video games. To my surprise and amusement, I found a wall-mounted shelving unit specifically designed for gamers. It was shaped like a vertical paper storage unit, where your console would sit in the middle. The top was closed-off and had slots to store about 8 games. The unit also featured a hook on the side to hang a plastic guitar.
For most owners of a vertically-standing video game system, this solution would suffice. However, this shelving unit was horribly inadequate for me.
The iPad Cometh
If you’ve been hiding under a rock to keep away from the Internet today, you may have missed the announcement of the Apple iPad. This is essentially a giant iPod Touch with more hard disk space.
In Third Person 