The video game "Second Life" now has a storefront where you can purchase bouncing-and-swaying-capable breasts for your in-game character. Sounds like a win-win situation to me! Perhaps they could work on more realistic hair next. What the fuck is that orangutan on her head!? (thanks to Games Digest for the story)
With the Someone keeps stealing my letters... game it's an all out frenzy of letter madness! The point is to spell words or make piles of letters or prevent others from spelling words, or whatever you feel like doing, while the other "players" use the same set of letters. And the other players are ruthless. Good luck!
Another great article railing against the current model of video game development and publishing. Explains how creativity is neither rewarded nor wanted. Tha author calls for blowing up the industry.
From the article:
"You can often tell a game has nothing new to offer just by reading the backcover text: If it's basically a list of features and numbers (five of this and a hundred of that), you know they've really got nothing to say."
And:
"Basically, as an independent developer in the games industry, you're just fucked. ... because royalty rates even for established developers are under pressure, and also because you don't get to own your own IP."
This dude is pretty much right on the money. I can't tell you how many games over the last few years I've started to play and then never finished. And why should I want to finish a game that is the same game I played the year before? Or the year before that? Most recently it was Resident Evil 4, which is okay, but it reeks of "been there, done that."
Let's face it, fellow gamers, true innovation is rare in the gaming industry. I touched on this topic almost 2 years ago and nothing has changed since then. The games are prettier, faster, more realistic, but not new. Incremental changes and variations on the same old stuff is all we get. Even the games I mentioned as being original in my earlier article are now tired. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas? Who cares? I've already played that game twice when it was called Grand Theft Auto III and Vice City.
Gaming as an entertainment medium will never die, but if it continues on this course it certainly ain't gonna grow.
It only took me two and a half months to complete the game ... but, what the hell. The phrase "finish a game" has slowly disappeared from my vocabulary since crocoKid's birth. In that two year span, I've played to completion exactly three games: Advance Wars, Knights of the Old Republic and Half-Life 2.
The Good
The gravity gun. This invention is the coolest video game contraption I've seen in a while. Forget about PDA's and the crap other games are using, innovation like the gravity gun blows them away. And it comes complete with a surprise to boot.
"Dog" More levels featuring Dog would have been very welcome.
Striders. These daddy-long-leg enemies are really fun to fight against. The strider levels might be the best levels of the game.
Headcrabs. Nothing creeps me out in a game more than the Half-Life headcrabs. When they're in the room I start to panic. I'll ignore just about any other threat until the headcrabs are killed. They're always jumping at my face, aarrgghh! Get 'em off! Get 'em off! The enemy I love to hate.
The Bad
Dialogue sound glitch. While the game ran perfectly 90% of the time, In a lot of the scenes with character dialogue, the stuttering and clipping was so bad I could not understand a word they were saying. Half the time manageable, other times unbearable.
The story. Okay, the story isn't "bad", but it's not great either. From reading critical reviews, you'd think it was the video game equivalent of L.A. Confidential. It serves the basic purpose of moving the player along from one level to the next. And that's all.
Overall, Half-Life 2 is pretty damn good. The best thing going for it is its variety of gameplay. One minute you're in an all-out gunfight, the next you're sneaking past a strider, the next you're driving a hoverbike, and the next you're chopping up zombies with booby-traps. Fun for the whole family!
It never rang true to me, but so many people reported it, I started to believe. Finally somebody uses their noggin to rebut the allegation that the video game industry is a bigger revenue generator than Hollywood. Grumpy Gamer lays it out.
