I hadn't really been planning on playing Dragon Age: Origins, but I was sent a copy for feature-related purposes (more on that when I actually get somewhere with it), and I am really enjoying it.

But...

BUT--

I feel like I'm not playing it right. I'm always paranoid about Stat distribution (I'm playing an elf strictly for research purposes, no seriously, aw eff you), equipment management, character tactics, enemy-killing techniques, etc etc. I'm playing on ultra pussy mode, so I haven't come anywhere close to dying,* and that just makes me even more worried that I'm setting myself up for a big fall.

I had precisely the same problems when I played Fallout 3. "Western" RPGs have so many variables to manage, I can never shake the feeling that I'm fucking it all up. Japanese RPGs never give me a problem, even on the rare occasion they throw something completely different at me. Maybe it's because I don't often play Western RPGs, but I was weaned on Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy. Or maybe my fear of Western RPGs is totally psychomalogical.

Can anyone with a similar mindset lend some halp?


*I did have a party member sustain a bodily injury, but for the life of me I can't figure out how to apply an injury-healing kit.

**IMPORTANT NOTICE: There is a dog in my party, some kind of gigantic cross between a mastiff and an American bulldog. I named him Jon Talbain.

Oh, and this is my Amazon Wishlist for 2009.

I've been going through a rare (but not unheard of) bout of insomnia lately. I was watching a show called "Spider Riders" on Teletoon last night.

The content was pretty typical of any derivative anime stabled in the 4 a.m. time slot. Destined kid with spunk issues, disjointed sentences, treacherous family members, etc. To its credit, the pre-teen cast was bonded with gigantic spiders instead of yet another twenty dragons who are from legend, but are subservient to spiky-haired boys whose balls will never drop, ever.

Me: "I like the idea here. It's different. Everybody has a fantasy about riding a dragon into battle, but who wants to ride a spider?"

David: "Mary Jane?"

Well, I walked right into that one.

http://www.square-enix.co.jp/est/

the official estpolis (lufia) site is live. mixed feelings continue.

1. it appears to be a remake of lufia II (maxim, selene, gades, and in the trailer, guy.)
2. the trailer looks pretty nice for a 3D DS game; 3D DS games are not something i like. i wish they'd at least used sprite characters.
3. it's an action game. on one hand, the battles in L2 were not good. on the other, action RPGs tend to bore me.

so, yeah. i dunno. we'll see. comes out in feb. i won't import, but i imagine it'll probably come out here if it turns out to be anywhere near as decent as it looks. wondering if they'll dub or drop the voices from the US version. kinda hoping "drop", because it'd have the lowest tier localization budget, no doubt, which would = pain

seems that's how well michaels did with my framing order, and that's being generous.

i'm not totally happy with the evangelion poster, but i'll live with it. however, when i went to hang the ma vie en rose poster today, i noticed it was ALL kinds of fucked up in the frame -- all wobbly. if it's unsalvageable i'll scream (it doesn't appear to be.)

and the matte which was designed to cover up part of one of the other posters ... doesn't. it's technically a calendar and there are month names running down the left edge. they should either be covered or uncovered. i wanted them covered; i would have lived with uncovered. well, they're HALF covered. fail either way.

rockman is perfect, so i am not going nuts, but really. this took over two months and it turned into a disaster. i'm never going back there and i'm going to have to talk to the store manager and shit. ugh.

did i mention this took over two months when i was originally told "about two weeks"? fuckers.

( added pics )

thinking about how i am overstimulated but unsatisfied. do i need to unplug more?

everything is connected. there's a sense you know what everybody else cares about even if you don't care about it. there's a thousand voices babbling in the background at all times. with games, you know what you're supposed to be playing. everybody's doing this. everybody's doing that.

adam lambert. assassin's creed. sarah palin.

i think i need a vacation.

Hello! Some of you may recall the strange affair of the 1UP Holiday Feature, in which I asked for holiday-related game anecdotes. I've received some contributions, but there are a lot of people who offered help, and whom I haven't heard back from.

If you're one of those people, drop me a line and let me know if you're still planning to contribute! I can give you some extra time, but I really do need to know what the score is.

If you would like to contribute and can manage a quick turnaround, scream at me at nadiaoxford at gmail dot com.

okay, so i beat NSMBwii. there's still the star world (SPOILAR) but i need to collect coins to open those levels (so lame) so i dunno how much of that i will get to. i am not the MASTER OF UNLOCKING. we'll see. maybe i'll use FAQs.

it was good but not good enough to make me really happy. i think i was probably a mixture of too excited for it and in too bad a mood. i'll play it again in the future, no doubt, but i feel like i enjoyed the DS one more, flaws and all. still: good solid mario game and i can't complain about a new 2D mario game. it's worthy, just not worthy enough for me.

i still feel like SMW is the pinnacle. i really need to play mario 3 again. maybe that will be my next trick.

so, ars technica has posted a news story calling out reviewers who reviewed modern warfare 2 off of the activision junket. it's a better news story than i expected based on what i read first (an inflammatory blog post @leighalexander linked to.)

but it was weighing enough on my mind that it was getting in the way of my final boss fight with fucking bowser in new super mario bros. wii that i decided to get off the wii and hash something out here quickly, if for no other reason than so i can stop thinking about this shit and enjoy the rest of my evening.

i think that this is one of the smallest problems in video games journalism right now, even if being built up to be (or even is generally perceived as) one of the biggest. airfare! hotel room! the watchful eye of developers and PR! how could they possibly be unbiased?

well, leaving aside the fact that everybody is a squirming latex bag full of insane and subjective cool-whip and couldn't write an objective review if s/he tried (and believe me, some people are still trying) for the moment, i just want to say this: anybody who is blown away by a flight to LA and a buffet and a hotel room probably doesn't have the presence of mind to review a game very well, anyway.

reviewers would be blowing through MW2's singleplayer campaign as fast as possible no matter what -- probably not least because it's a high-quality, high-adrenaline experience (or so i gather, not having played it) and they would be blowing through it for the pleasure. i don't see a major difference between blowing through it in a hotel room, office, or home -- and this is as someone who played games to completion for review for about eight years straight on any variety of equipment/locales. it doesn't fucking matter. seriously. i chalk that up to another round of "if that affects you, you don't have the chops to review a game in the first place."

the story touches on what i consider the actually excellent, likely primary reason activision holds a review event like this. and that's to ensure that everybody out there is getting adquate multiplayer time on full servers in all modes. and they do that by scheduling these events so that they can have their test teams on the servers to play with the journos.

is this the same experience the consumer would have? no. is it the same experience that the journo would have if s/he waited till the game came out and reviewed it on the retail servers? no. going to guess, though, that most journos have a friends list packed with nonretards. unless someone makes a particular effort to get into a public game and live the reality of the servers to make a point of seeing what an "average" experience is, no journo is ever going to have that. should they? i guess. this is a randomizer and is going to vary from person to person -- even for journos.

i like to think that i was good at extrapolating, but i also like to think i was a better reviewer than a lot of people. this criticism holds the most water.

i think it used to be a much bigger problem in the days when average players couldn't hope to get these kind of matches together. i remember when shoe gave splinter cell: meaningless subtitle a 10 based on the multiplayer -- i thought it was ridiculous because he had an optimal setup. let alone the halo 1 reviews... but times have changed... a lot.

so, yes: i guess i am assuming a baseline level of competence and ethics from reviewers. i also don't think ethics fall away the second you get on a plane. i think that they're something you bring with you.

most reviewers i know are dedicated people who care about their readers. i personally considered the fact that i was spending people's 30-60 bucks every time i published a review and based my score on that; in my mind anything 8+ was a "go buy this game." i don't know if everybody keeps things that concrete in their brain (doubt it) but most don't want to steer their readers wrong or fuck over their publication.

most people also consider having to fly to LA to spend two days in an office, even to play MW2, a pain in the ass. particularly at this time of year, when they're busy as fuck.

in 2004 i flew to england to review fable. i had two days in a conference room at lionhead's offices, on a shitty, flickery PAL TV. every few hours peter molyneux would pop his head in the room and take a look at my progress and chat a little bit with me. PR bought my lunches, drove me to and from the office, and took me out to expensive dinners every night.

did this affect my review? sure -- everything affects your review. playing a game at home on your own TV versus in a web/magazine office while people are working around you affects a review. but did it affect it in any meaningful, artificial positive way? i don't think so. i wished i had more time with fable -- not that i much care anymore -- because i felt rushed. that's it. i am also confident that i got out of it what i was going to get out of it wherever or how much i played it. going into that situation, i took particular care.

see, there are way bigger problems than this, but this is the controversy du jour, i guess, or an attempt at creating one. wanna know a bigger problem? previews: everything you think you know is wrong with them (and a lot is that you don't.) reviewing a game in a slightly-off-the-ideal condition (more or less? who can even say in this case? i know i would have viewed it as "less") is not a major player in the problem.

i guess i do have to write my jeremiad about the shitty state of games journalism and why i'm happy enough to see the backside of it. that will have to wait.

rant off!

hey, any XL-wearing lost fans out there?

so like 2 weeks ago i bought the t-shirt of the day on http://teefury.com. they sell one t-shirt per day, at $9, and then it's gone.

i was like, hey, that's cool, didn't pay much attention, and then i ordered it. this is the shirt.

problem: it's a lost t-shirt. i do not watch lost; i do not plan to watch lost. (i also don't want to hear it, before you start.) anyway, i can't wear a lost shirt. i thought "hey, well, it's still cool, so i could ..." but i know myself. i won't. i'll wear it once and then toss it in the goodwill bin.

anyway, i'm totally down to just pass it along for $9 + $3 for shipping, which is what i paid in the first place. i haven't even opened the mailing package it's in. i'll just readdress it and send it along.

again, this is the shirt. it is now out of print and unavailable from teefury. it's an XL. COMMENT!

shit yeah. ghost in the sell 2.0 blu-ray shipped. when i get back from chicago i am going to have me a mini-marathon of GITS 2.0 and innocence on blu-ray.

also, is GITS really set 20 years from now? criminy.

i have a sick obsession with the killers song bones. it's so fucking cheesy but it's also super fucking awesome.

and it's such a good karaoke song. god, is it. BUT ON THE COLD WET DIRT I CRY. bad kyrics make good karaoke. and it's so fun to sing killers songs, because brandon flowers has like no range, but likes to sing long notes.

today i found my iPod wedged into the frame of my bed between it and the footboard. so that was good.

on the other hand, while i was checking my parallel parking job this evening i accidentally locked my keys into my (running) car and had to call a locksmith. ended up waiting about 50 minutes for the guy and gave up on my plans. nothing seemed more horrifyingly embarassing than meeting a whole bunch of people for the first time and explaining that i'm over an hour late for dinner because i've spent the last hour standing four blocks away waiting for a locksmith.

so yeah. it all balances out. ugh.

still, people are having worse problems than me. i'm not too pissed off or depressed about it. i'm just waiting for a week to go right.

My friends, today I have uncovered an important part of my heritage. No longer will I have to generalise myself. No longer will I have to deny who I am, or adhere to society's "norms" out of guilt and confusion.

Today, I deny the neat, sweeping label of "right-handedness." I am mixed-handed.

I write and pass with my right hand. I swing baseball bats, hockey sticks, and golf clubs with my left. I cut food with my left. In karate, I favour my left leg when I kick.

In all seriousness, this is actually a really interesting discovery about myself (and my brothers, who likewise play sports as lefties but are technically right-handed). It's not as if I've had to live a life of suffering and lies, but people have asked me, "Why are you batting the wrong way?" when I play baseball, and "Why are you cutting with your left hand, that is so friggin' bizarre" when I eat dinner. And I knew I wasn't ambidextrous, because I can't change my handedness at will. I have to write with my right hand. I have to swing with my left.

Michelangelo, Beethoven, and Hendrix were cross-dominant. So is Shawn Michaels from the WWE.

So is Shigeru Miyamoto, apparently. I've heard him classified most often as a lefty.

i'm on the latest episode of 4 guys 1UP, the 1UP general gaming podcast -- the inheritor of the 1UP yours/listenUP heritage.

we talk about the pandemic layoffs, chris hecker's IGDA/MIGS presentation, dragon age, and more. it's a good one i think! it's not just me, either, but david ellis, alice liang, jeremy parish. good.

Sick of traditional 'natural' animals veternarian Dr. Moeron employed the awesome power of vivisection to create whole new strains of life. How he made a cat without an anus we have no idea.

spending the past two days listening to 'humbug' a lot. i listened to the first two arctic monkeys CDs ridiculously large amounts. this one didn't catch on with me in the same way at all. it's a good album but there's something oppressive and almost weary about it. when i listen to the songs on it and just think about "is this a good song y/n" it is usually a very good song.

i mean, listen to the first track, my propeller. it's just... a determined metaphorical slog through ... sex? it just make alex turner sound a bit tired.

today's feature is an interview i conducted with susan o'connor. she's probably best known for working on the original gears of war's story, which i think is underrated in that, yes, it's a dumb story that doesn't make a lot of sense, but it does have craft and polish applied it in a way that a lot of games just don't, in terms of the dialogue. still, damned with faint praise.

she also worked on far cry 2 and bioshock and other stuff. it's an interesting interview about writing for games, if i do say so myself. i had a lot of rather specific and in-depth questions about the topic, because, surprise surprise, i understand writing better than other stuff in games.