Free Candy For Everyone

I am still playing Mass Effect. I’ve been talking to people at work about the game and been getting some interesting reactions. The first person I told that I’m playing it asked “Do you love it or hate it?” Apparently, those are the choices. I answered “both”. But most people have a pretty extreme reaction to the game. And I completely understand that. My reaction is extreme, but I think I’m kinda more entranced than anything else.

The Good
Here’s what I like about the game.
The visuals
It sure looks pretty. Well, the environments are rather bland. Spaceship, space station. Ice planet, rock planet. But the people look great. All the cinematics are done in game, which is really remarkable. What’s that mean, joe average reader asks? A lot of games pre-render the cinematics. They are essentially just movies, being played back, like something you’d watch on a dvd player. There’s nothing calculated, everything is static and cannot change. But cinematics done in engine mean that they can customize the movie for you. I got to decide what my main character looks like. Hey, I even got to choose to be a man or woman. Whatever armor or weapons I put on are visible on my character in game all the time, even in the movies. I can choose which 2 party members are in my squad, and whichever ones I choose will be in the movie with me. It’s an impressive technical achievement.

At first I didn’t like the cinematics that much. The faces move, but not enough. There are problems with the lips not always syncing up to the words. But the more I play, the more I don’t notice that it’s not perfect and just get immersed in it. The camera angles, the lighting, and the general cinematic flair they have to all their cut scenes is impressive.

The story
I’m not saying that the story is revolutionary or anything. But for a video game, it’s a great story. It’s interesting, and the attention to detail is astounding. Everywhere you turn there are optional items to interact with that give you more information about the universe you are living in. Every time you speak to someone you hear their voice, you don’t read their words. EVERY line is recorded. And considering you can play as a man or a woman, and there are some other options to choose about your backstory, some lines must have many different variants. It’s astounding, really. I can see how you could power through the game in 15 hours or so, but I’m 15 hours in and feel like I’ve just scratched the surface. I could just bolt on through the main story to the end, but that would be cheating myself.

The achievements
Let’s not forget about the compulsive, brilliant system of Xbox 360 achievements. One of the first things I do when I end my first play session with a game is to go to the Xbox dashboard and check out what all the achievements are for the game I’m playing. Mass Effect has some more devious achievements. I don’t even think it’s possible to unlock them all without playing through the game three times. That’s a lot of playing. I suppose you could sprint through on your second and third playthrough. But I don’t think I really need to play more than once. In any event, I’m constantly motivated to play just a little more to get to the next achievement. Or to try something I wouldn’t normally do (using a shotgun, I want my assault rifle!) so I can earn an achievement. Of course, achievements are a Xbox thing, so all X360 games have them. But still, it’s definitely contributing to my desire to play the game.

Tomorrow, I’ll deliver the bad news: what I don’t like about the game.

Last night I started playing Viva Pinata. It had been on my list of games to try, and when I found out that my company has an internal game library for us to borrow from, I promptly checked the game out. I brought it home and dropped it into my Xbox 360 with the intention of playing for an hour and then maybe getting a little WoW time in.

Over three hours later, I finally dragged myself away and went to bed past my bedtime. All day I was thinking about the game and excited to play it again tonight. It’s a game for children and adults too. I guess it maybe has the same sort of appeal as Animal Crossing, though I had a terrible experience with that game and cringe at the thought of it. Maybe I’ll share that story some day, but anyways, Viva Pinata is also a game that isn’t really a game, per-se. You don’t exactly have a goal, you just are trying to make a pretty garden and attract bigger and better pinatas. You’re controls are to dig holes and plant seeds, make a pond, plant grass, and to instruct pinatas to eat things. You can buy different things as well, but that’s the gist of it. Different pinatas are attracted by different things in your garden, like having enough water, or having carrots, or even having specific other pinatas (because they do eat each other!).

Yesterday it was always clear what to do next. I was cruising through and always had something bigger and better to do next. But today things were tougher. I couldn’t attract any new pinatas. Or I’d finally get one to come visit and a mean evil pinata would stomp through and kill it before I could make it move in. After a bunch of struggle I felt like I just barely took one step forward after a couple hours of play where as yesterday I ran a practical marathon of progress! Maybe I just suck! Who knows, but my enthusiasm has already waned. And yesterday I unlocked 6 achievements and today I only got 2. Yesterday I got 2 little “yay, you unlocked achievement” MOVIES and today, zilcho. Sad.

We’ll see if I pick up excitement as I get the cuter animals into my garden. I have mostly birds and butterflies and insects right now. And one annoying fox-type critter who I named Ralph who keeps attacking all my other pinatas. He’s wreaking havoc on my gentle little world but he’s my first named pinata and he’s my buddy! I don’t want to have to whack him (and by that I mean hit him repeatedly with my shovel until he bursts open, yes whack him, and he is no more), but if he keeps up his bad behavior I don’t know what choice I have! Oh, the dilemma.

So I’m maybe not as obsessed with the game as I was this morning, but it’s still good. And it’s only $20 right now, so I will probably buy it, because it’s worth $20, no question. But maybe that burst of crazed excitement was just a puppy love and now I’ll settle into a more comfortable friendship with the game.

This weekend I turned on my Xbox 360 for the first time in a while. Played some games, then looked at the Xbox Live Marketplace to see what was there. They had some clips and trailers from Comic Con for free download. I loaded one up and took a look. They also had a free download of the first episode of Jericho.

They had it available in HD so I downloaded it. I’d been meaning to watch the show, I just somehow missed it when it was on the air. The show was canceled but saved by its fans when they sent over something like 20 tons of nuts to the network to show their support. The download service was pretty cool. It just downloaded in the background, and as soon as it got to about 10% it said it was ready to play. It just continued downloading while I watched. No problems, the interface was simple. No commercials, of course. And in HD! I don’t know that I’d want to “buy” episodes of shows on Xbox Live, in general. The hard drive on my Xbox is the original one, only 20 gigs. It would fill up pretty quickly if I were getting lots of shows on it. There’s no permanence to it. Maybe if it were a “rental” for a few cents instead…

I love Guitar Hero as much as the next gamer. And I bought it for Xbox 360 (rather than PS2) specifically because I knew there would be downloadable songs. But when the songs came out, they seemed to be much too expensive. Three songs for $6.25, and not all the Guitar Hero 1 songs were available! So I didn’t buy them and decided to wait. But somewhere out there, folks like you, yes you, are buying these songs at exorbitant prices! Apparently, they have no intention of lowering prices because people are still buying the songs. Stop it! Stop the insanity, I tell you!

I love the idea of downloadable content as much as the next guy but this pricing is all off. Let’s think about this. Guitar Hero II comes with what, 50 songs? For … $60? That’s $1.20 per song. These song packs are $2.08 per song! That’s an almost 75% markup! Would you stand for that? No! I wouldn’t stand for that! Rah. Grr.

Stop buying things at ridiculous prices. Just say no!

Since we can never get enough Guitar Hero, Harmonix and Activision are releasing an 80s themed Guitar Hero game next month - Rocks the 80s. It’s only coming out for PS2, however. I’m hoping that the songs will be available for download on Xbox Live, since that’s the whole reason I bought the X360 version.

But then again, the song selection isn’t all that exciting to me. I thought I was a big fan of 80s music. I love my cheesy a-ha with the best of them. But I guess I have a limited view into what is 80s music because I don’t remember a lot of the songs that they’ve announced. At least not all that fondly. The list as culled from Gamespot:

“Round and Round” by Ratt, “I Want Candy” by Bow Wow Wow, “Metal Health” by Quiet Riot, “Holy Diver” by Ronnie James Dio, and “Heat of the Moment” by Asia. Flock of Seagulls’ “I Ran” and “I Wanna Rock” by Twisted Sister. Skid Row’s “18 and Life,” Faster Pussycat’s “Bathroom Wall,” Billy Squier’s “Lonely is the Night,” Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time,” Extreme’s “Play With Me,” Eddie Money’s “Shakin’,” and “Synchronicity II” by the Police.

I love the Police, so Synchronicity II is a welcome song, but where’s “Africa”, “Take On Me”, “Come on Eileen”, and anything by Pat Benatar? Maybe those aren’t guitar songs, I guess, but they’re my idea of the 80s! Sadness.