Why am I even bringing this up? Machine Studios has just laid out a list of PC games for which the creators are no longer receiving any compensation. The list includes a lot of my favorites: The Thief series, Dungeon Keeper, the Icewind Dale series, Arcanum, Fallout 2, and Mechwarrior 4. Luckily, I still have my CD copies of all of these games hanging out in a box in my attic. But whereas I might have been tempted to add an extra copy of one of these to my Steam account simply for convenience, this revelation has ensured that I’ll be going back to the copies I’ve got on CD. I don’t have copies of the Deus Ex series or Planescape: Torment, which are also on that list, but I can do without those. I didn’t enjoy either nearly as much as everyone else seems to have. And if I’m ever feeling particularly macochistic and want to replay Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth, I’m going to EBay.

These games are supposed to work offline and don’t. This makes me even more tentative about games like Diablo 3 which will apparently require constant connectivity. Even Mass Effect 3 will require a one-time online check. As always-on internet connections become more common, I think we’ll begin to see more and more of this. But goddamn it, it bugs me.

Free Month of Playstation Plus

Is there anyone who actually had a subscription to Playstation Plus? I mean anyone who’s not a games journalist. I understand that people who wanted to report about what the service actually does subscribed just to let the rest of us know what the heck the service was actually good for. Strange that I haven’t heard much.

Looking it up now, it seems that you get early access to demos and some betas, a free subscription to Qore (the PSN thing that nobody subscribed to before Qriocity was around for nobody to subscribe to) and discounts on some PSN content. You also get limited play time on certain selected games. So basically, Playstation Plus was created as a clearing ground for PSN games that don’t sell. You pay Sony every month, and they’ll let you play the worst of the worst, but only a little.

Movie Rentals for One Weekend

I’d forgotten that “renting” movies from PSN was even an option. One time they made Godzilla 2000 available for free for a few days, and I downloaded that, but the movie was so bad that we didn’t make it halfway through. I expect that most of the PSN offerings that they’ll make free are of the same quality. Besides, I’ve got Netflix and Hulu. Will PSN actually make anything available for free that I can’t already get through either of those channels?

Free Playstation Home items

I tried Playstation Home once. It was terrible, slow, and frankly kind of boring. Does anyone still use it?

A Free Game

So here’s the only thing on the list in which anyone will have any interest. Let’s take a look at the five games on their list.

• Dead Nation
  I’ll be honest. I’d never have been interested in this game if it wasn’t free. But if I’m able to get two of these games then I’ll likely pick up Dead Nation. It allows for online multiplayer, which I’ve only ever done before with HOARD. So maybe I’ll contact my brother for some co-op zombie hunting.
• inFAMOUS
  I played inFAMOUS about a year ago, and it’s not a bad game. But it seems obvious that this game was included primarily to sell the uncoming sequel. I won’t be choosing inFAMOUS since I already own it, but it’s not a bad choice for someone who hasn’t yet played.
• LittleBigPlanet
  Similarly to inFAMOUS, LittleBigPlanet has a sequel, and I’m sure that they just really want to sell copies of LittleBigPlanet 2. Still, not a bad choice. The two games are so similar that (to me) there’s not much of a difference.
• WipEout HD + Fury
  I had to look this one up. Turns out that it’s a racing game, which explains why I’d never bothered to learn anything about it. I’ve got no interest in racing games that aren’t named Audiosurf or MarioKart, so I won’t be downloading WipEout HD.
• Super Stardust HD
  When I first got my playstation, I downloaded the Super Stardust HD demo, and it struck me as a very well done bullethell shooter. I’m not very good at games like this, and I figured I wouldn’t get much further in the full game than I had in the demo, so I eventually uninstalled it. But now that it’s a free game on a list of slim pickins, I’ll probably download it.

In addition to the above Playstation titles, those who own PSPs can choose from the four games below.

• LittleBigPlanet
  The PSP version of LittleBigPlanet isn’t going to be as good as the primary PS3 version, and so it might be better to select another game from this list. And as much as my wife and daughter love LittleBigPlanet, I’m not a fan.
• ModNation Racers
  I tried the PS3 demo, and my opinions of this racer are pretty much the same as my opinions of most racers. Pass.
• Pursuit Force
  After reading about Pursuit Force, I’m marginally interested. Since they’re allowing two free games and I’m not interested in LittleBigPlanet PSP or Modnation Racers, I guess I’ll be trying it out.
• Killzone Liberation
  I’ve heard marginally good things about Killzone Liberation. I’m not a fan of shooters on handhelds, but it’s free, so I’ll be trying it. Can’t be worse than that PSP Tenchu game.

Looking at the PS3 game list, we can see that only two of the five games were ever full-priced retail releases. And those two both have sequels. I suspect that many people are in the same boat as me, owning both of those. Many people may also own the other less expensive downloadable titles. So for many, this customer appreciation program is even more of a sham. I’m not going to pretend that Sony’s outage ruined my life, and I’m not going to claim that they were grossly negligent in their security. But it was inconvenient for me even though I don’t play games online, since I couldn’t stream Hulu, and Netflix was incredibly spotty. If they want to issue an apology by awarding people games, at least they should compile a decent list of choices. I certainly didn’t expect them to give us Beyond Good and Evil HD for free, although that would have been awesome. Let’s look at some of the games they might have offered.

• Assassins Creed
  With three sequels, Assassins Creed is now an officially old game, in the same league as inFAMOUS. It seems natural for them to have included it. But I guess that Ubisoft is too DRM crazy to allow anybody to have anything for free ever. It’s too close to piracy. If Ubisoft had let us have Assassins Creed, they’d have had to phone us every 5 minutes while we were playing just to make sure that we weren’t lending the controller to a visiting friend.
• Borderlands
  It’s not a new game, so why not? Gearbox has already earned the bulk of their money on this game. It’s already downloadable on PSN, and including it would have exposed a lot of people to Borderlands who may not have already tried it.
• Dead Space: Extraction
  This would be a great way to try to get more people to use Playstation: Move. If more games used Move, I might be interested in dropping the substantial cash on the 3-part controller you need to use Move.
• God of War Collection
  Of all the downloadable games on PSN, this would be the one I’d most likely choose if it were free. I’ve already played the games on my PS2, and I’d be unlikely ever to revisit them, but the addition of trophies might make it worth going back and replaying.
• Hoard
  One of the three PSN games that I will likely never uninstall. I’m working my way through Hoard’s “medals”, which are like sub-trophies. Get enough medals and you get a trophy. The game is a lot of fun.
• Pixeljunk
  I know there are plenty: Racers, Monsters, Eden, Shooter, Shooter 2. Although I’ve got a huge affinity for Monsters, these are all good games.
• Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time HD
  I tried the game in its PC incarnation years ago and hated it. But even the HD version is no longer new, and would make a good option for a freebie like this.
• Prototype
  I actually think I liked Prototype a bit better than inFAMOUS. To be honest, they’re basically the same game. But Prototype had better gliding mechanics and I preferred running up walls to slowly climbing them.
• Trine
  One of my favorite PSN games, and my only platinum trophy. It would be a gem of a freebie, and a good promo for the forthcoming sequel.

Too Little Too Late?

It’s easy to scoff at the offer, but I suppose that Sony wasn’t really required to do anything here. They’re not going to lose any money by giving this stuff away, so it’s ultimately just a PR move. Hardcore gamers will likely already have these games. Those who aren’t might not ever realize that there was any freebie to be had.

It’s hard to look at Uncharted 2 and call it anything other than a great game. But I found myself repeatedly annoyed and frustrated with the game’s puzzles, camera angles, and especially the game’s controls. I hate running around for 5 minutes in a small room looking for where I’m supposed to climb only to receive a hint that I need to climb up to a ledge. Thanks. Might as well have had that hint read “win the game”. It’d be equally useful. I hate running up to a ladder and pressing a button to climb it only to have that button make me jump off a nearby cliff, falling to my death. I hate waiting 45 seconds for a guard to turn his back so that I can sneak up and mug him, only to have Drake dash to the other side of the doorway at which he’s hiding rather than through the door. A second attempt to go through the door made me dash back to my original position. It’s pretty rare that I get this far into a game without having gotten some basic mastery over the controls. And I hated some of the platforming for the same reasons that I hated the original Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. I’d try a jump two or three times and fall to my death before deciding that the game wanted me to choose a different path. After a half hour of searching for another path, I’d find that the one I tried originally was correct. It’s just that the first few times, Drake didn’t jump hard enough or something.

I really want to love this game. I’m partway through the train sequence, which I rage quit last night at half past midnight after my fiftieth death on the same checkpoint. When I go back to the game, I’m going to try harder to enjoy it. Everyone else loved the game, why oh why can’t I?

That’s okay. I can deal with that. But on Sunday when I went to start playing Trine, my Playstation threw a 8001050F error, and Trine wouldn’t start. Looking it up online, I found that the error code meant that I won’t be able to connect to PSN (which I couldn’t) and that I very likely would have to send in the console for repair. It wasn’t until today that I’m not the only one having this problem. Sony says that they’ll have a fix soon. Looks like I’m not playing Trine tonight. Hope I don’t lose the four trophies that I never synced.

So after that on Sunday, I decided to try a disc-based game and was pleased to find that Brutal Legend still worked. But I’ve decided that the only good part of the game is the part that appeared in the demo. After you meet up with Metalheade and start playing the RTS portion of the game, the gameplay is just crap. I’m really disappointed, because I love the game’s style and humor. If I could get past the poor gameplay, I’m sure I’d enjoy it. Too bad. I’ve listed my copy of Brutal Legend on EBay.

After the disappointments with the Playstation, I jumped on the PC to play Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. It’s a lot more polished than Butcher Bay, although I can’t yet speak for the story as I’m only about an hour into the game. But while transitioning between areas, the game froze and crashed. I didn’t try to start it back up after that, but I should’ve at least tried, because now I’m nervous that my cheap Direct2Drive copy of the game is a lemon.

I guess it’s back to Dragon Age for me. It’s my second playthrough and I’m seeing how badly I can screw up the world. I’ve already aided in destroying three of the game’s main areas, which I can only imagine will vastly change the game’s storyline. I can’t wait to see where things go from here.

Now, when it comes to Knights of the Old Republic, I must respectfully ask Greg where he gets his drugs as this is, hands down one of the best Star Wars games ever made.  Sure the battles sometimes got wonky, but I have three words that makes any problems with the combat magically melt away: dual wielded lightsabers.  Yes, that’s right.  Long blade in the one hand, short in the off and away you went.  Not only could you dual wield lightsabers but you could customize your sabers based on the crystals you put in them to make your blades even more effective.  My on hand was a normal sized purple blade that buffed my light force power and had increased deflections as well as increased damage.  Off hand was a shorter yellow blade that did extra damage to droids and increased my defense.  I was a bad motherfucker.  Droids, soldiers, Sith, it didn’t matter.  I’d cut ’em or deflect a bold in their  face.  In the end they all died.  This was the first game to show you just how powerful the Jedi of old were supposed to be.  None of this “these aren’t the droids you’re looking for” bullshit and meditating for ten seconds to life a rock three feet off of the ground.  These were badass Jedi warriors who kicked ass and took names.  The awesome story twist was just gravy.  The only complaint I had about the game was that the final battle was way too tedious if you undertook it with a character that focused mostly on healing and defensive Force powers and way too easy if you went full on Dark Side.  Oh well, guess it pays to be evil.

Now I found BioShock to be a hell of a lot more immersive than you do, but I played it on the 360 and it ran smooth as silk which helped a great deal.  What I fell in love with about BioShock was Rapture.  The setting was, simply put, amazing.  The fact that they could flesh out this world so well using the audio logs made it even more endearing.  Unfortunately they fell short with the moral choices which didn’t really amount to much at all other than a choice between two equally unsatisfying endings.  I also found the boss batle surprisingly pedestrian for a game that had been doing some pretty innovative things up until that point.  So while I don’t think Greg is completley off the mark for not loving BioShock, I think it’s better than he does and I also thought it was better than Half-Life 2, even if Robert Guillaume wasn’t in it.

Finally we have Mass Effect.  This was a game that I would have loved a lot more had I not gone for the full thousand points.  If you just do one run through the game the combat can be annoying at times, but you can get over it.  By the third time however every time your squadmates spend ten minutes unloading into a wall, or worse, into their squadmate’s back you want to punch someone.  Plenty of games can stand the test of time and be enjoyable no matter how many times you go back to them however this game ain’t one of them.  The MAKO sucks even more when you have to drive it again, the texture pop is even shittier by the twelfth time you run down the same hallway in the Citadel and the long, tedious elevator rides make you want to gouge your eyes out.  Now, that being said, every time I’ve finished this game I have started a new game right up because the last hour is just that thrilling and this is even when I started my third run and knew exactly what was in store for me.  Something about that final trek up the side of the Citadel as a space battle rages around you to taking on Saren with your buffed up squad gets me all a flutter and makes me want to jump right back in.  It’s a shame that the DLC they dropped since the game’s initial release ranged from so-so for Bring Down the Sky to “can I please kick you in the nuts for wasting my time and money?” for Pinnacle Station because instead of getting me excited for ME2, it just made me mad that I had to spend the money on it so that I could keep my perfect score in the game.  Sure that’s just as much my OCD as anything else, but I’d like to know what genius decided that the best idea for DLC was to take the worst part of the game (the combat) and build DLC entirely around it.  What’s next, the Oblivion Conversation Generator?  Oh, you say you’ve seen a mudcrab?  Thrilling stuff.

So yeah, I think Greg is way off base on KOTOR, slightly off base on BioShock and on target with Mass Effect just for different reasons.  All in all it’s not exactly the fires of an epic internet flame war, but it’s a start.

I’m going to piss off a lot of people now by talking about how I think some of the best-loved games in the past few years weren’t actually that good. Much of this might have to do with my personal opinion of Bioware’s game engines, since two of my three example games here are from Bioware, but I can’t help but feel that they were overhyped and overrated.

Over the years, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has developed a near-legendary reputation as an excellent game. But while I found the story interesting and the twist at the end was very nice, it was the gameplay that I found to be lacking. The combat boiled down to selecting an attack and running up to your enemy, then watching while the attacks were carried out, with the combatants standing there and waiting in between attacks. This certainly isn’t a mechanic exclusive to KotOr – even World of Warcraft (if I speculate correctly) uses this type of combat mechanic. I don’t like it. And while perhaps the same thing could be said about games I do love such as Baldur’s Gate and Final Fantasy XII, I find it much easier to view those two games as pseudo-turn-based games. KotOR feels like more of an action game, and as such the engine and the gameplay seemed very off-putting to me.

Jade Empire, as a game, had a lot in common with Knights of the Old Republic. But I enjoyed Jade Empire more because the combat engaged the player more by requiring a keypress for each attack and block. In that way, Jade Empire was more action game than RPG, whereas KotOR was more RPG than action game. I loves me some RPG, but not when it’s done with an engine like KotOR’s. I had the same complaint about Neverwinter Nights, which in my mind succeeded despite the poor engine and gameplay. But the main reason I liked Neverwinter Nights was the bundled Aurora creaton tool, with which I spent an ungodly amount of time. I’m not saying that Knights of the Old Republic was a bad game – I certainly did enjoy it – I just didn’t enjoy it as much as everyone else seemed to.

The second game on my “overrated” list is Bioshock. Bioshock had a lot of promise. When I saw the hallways beginning to flood at the beginning of the game, it was exciting. Here I am in an underwater city – maybe gunfire breaking these underwater tunnels will be a common mechanic! Maybe I’ll occasionally have to escape from tunnels before they flood! Alas – the danger is only imagined, and the flooding only happens that once.

Bioshock’s story was good, and the game was very atmospheric, largely due to the much-vaunted graphics. But on my machine, the game absolutely chugged, even at medium settings. I found myself comparing it to Half-Life 2, which was the best-looking game I’d seen at the time. On my machine, Half-Life 2 actually looked better, and ran far more smoothly.

Graphics aside, Bioshock didn’t have as good a story exposition as Half-Life 2 and didn’t have characters that I fell in love with in the way that I fell in love with Alyx Vance, Dog, and Dr. Kleiner. The camera and pipeworks hacking mechanics were cool, but what fell short was the je ne sais quoi – that certain charm that some games have and others don’t. Bioshock didn’t charm me. It received a solid meh.

The final game in my triumvirate of overration is Mass Effect. (*Greg ducks*)

I’ve got a lot of the same complaints about Mass Effect as I did about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. It felt more like the game engine you’d see in a point-and-click adventure and less like the engine you’d see in a shooter. In The Totally Rad Show‘s PAX episode, they mentioned that Mass Effect 2 feels “more shootery”, which is very promising, but the whole thing makes me slightly nervous about my much-looked-forward-to Dragon Age: Origins.

Mass Effect had a really interesting story. I loved the notion of an ancient über-powerful race of alien robots who destroy civilization periodically. But they didn’t end up feeling as badass as I’d have liked. They should have felt more like the Borg did in “Q Who?”

All in all, I did enjoy each of these three games. But they weren’t amazing, they were just okay.

Towards the end of last week, I got restless with the games I had to play. Borderlands and Dragon Age: Origins were still a couple weeks from release, and although I still had Final Fantasy XII to finish, I really just felt like playing something else. I played halfway through Half-Life 2 episode 2, I fired up Fallout 3 briefly, and I played a few minutes of Dark Messiah of Might & Magic. Meh. Not what I wanted. I played some Plants vs Zombies, some Scribblenauts, and some Zuma. Nothing was satisfying me. I didn’t want to start Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena until I’d have some time to really get into it, and I knew that I’d be dropping any other games I was playing on October 26th, once Borderlands became available for download via Steam.

Then it came to me: Oblivion. I’d reinstall Oblivion.

When I first played Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a few years ago, I had a blast with the game. But one thing that never sat right with me was the fact that all enemies in the game leveled with you. You’d never get mauled by a mountain lion at first level or bump into a rat whose ass you could quickly stomp when you were level 30. Then I found Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul. Although there are hundreds of changes enacted by this mod, the two parts that really make it worth it for me are the AI changes and the alterations to game difficulty. Now, the world is not such a safe place when you’re level one.

So on Friday, I installed the game and downloaded a number of mods. After installing everything and starting up the game, I noticed that there were strange translucent yellow areas all over the place – odd graphical artifacts. After another hour or so of play and googling the problem, I learned that these were missing meshes. The game was also crashing every hour or so. Rrgh.

I eventually decided to uninstall and reinstall the whole thing on Saturday afternoon. How upset was I when I found that after reinstalling, the meshes were still missing? The Oblivion Mod Manager has a tool for updating and re-registering meshes and textures, but it did me no good. I tried playing for a while longer, and the game had seemed to stop crashing, which was a plus, but when I realized that the missing meshes were actually containers, that every chest and barrel in the game was missing, I gave up. Quit. Uninstalled. I’m now playing the original Dungeon Siege at 1680 x 1050 resolution.

I’m sure that I could get the thing running correctly. It might take an extra install or two. But I just don’t have the willpower right now. From what I’ve read, it’s an issue with Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul – the game replaces containers and their meshes, and although I installed “OSCURO’S OBLIVION OVERHAUL V 1.3 + 1.31 & 1.32 PATCHES“, I seem to have somehow ended up missing the required meshes. Maybe next time, I’ll try downloading a different version of the mod from a different site. I’ve heard that disabling your firewall during the download is supposed to help. Or maybe I’ll just try FCOM, which contains “Francesco’s Leveled Creatures Items”, “Warcry”, “Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul”, and “Martigen’s Monster Mod”.

It’s funny – I don’t remember quite so many bottomless pits in any of the Star Wars movies. Sure, there was the part in Empire Strikes Back where Luke lost his hand and fell, and there’s always the Pit of Carcoon and the place where the Emperor fell to his death, then there’s the one Luke and Leia swung across in New Hope and the place where Qui-Gon and Obi-Wan fought Darth Maul… okay, maybe Star Wars is actually about bottomless pits. But I’d never really had that feeling before playing Force Unleashed.

I died a lot. And it was nearly always while falling into a bottomless pit. Generally the same one at least 5-6 times. This gets old quickly, especially when you’ve got to wait about 60 seconds while the game reloads your last checkpoint.

Let’s look at one example: I was fighting two junk guardians. I picked one up with The Force and threw him, then carved the other one up with my lightsaber. Jumping up to a platform, I found two more. While I was fighting one, the other hit me. Once. This knocked me back a bit and pushed me over the edge into a bottomless pit. Although I can double jump, I apparently can’t jump in mid-air while beginning to fall into the pit. So I died.

…a minute or two later…

I’m fighting the junk guardians again. This time I defeat them all before falling to my own death. The next jump is a big one, onto a small platform. I get ready, positioning the camera just right, then jump. But while I’m up in the air, I can’t look down – only forward – so it’s hard to see where I’m going to land. I fall into the pit, missing the platform by inches.

…a minute or two later…

Fighting those damned junk guardians. This is the last one, and I’m kicking his butt. While attempting to hit the targeting trigger, I accidentally hit the “dash” trigger and dash over the edge into the pit.

…a minute or two later…

I kill all the junk guardians easily, making sure to stay FAR from the edge. This time, I carefully prepare for the jump, and once again fall to my death because I can’t tell where I’m going to land.

…a minute or two later…

I’m playing Pixeljunk Monsters, having resolved to sell Star Wars: The Force Unleashed on Ebay.

More and more, I’m finding that I’ve got to play games on the easiest setting rather than normal, which is what I’ve generally done in the past. Ghostbusters was the first game I can think of that I found too difficult and played through on easy. I told myself that it wasn’t a big deal – John had suggested that I play on easy, and many reviews I’d read spoke of the game’s many difficulty spikes. So I played the game on easy, enjoyed the story, and didn’t feel like a wuss for having done so.

Then I started playing Street Fighter 4 online and discovered that I wasn’t nearly as much of a badass at the game as I’d expected to be.

I’ve also been enjoying Prototype. The jumping, flying, and consuming challenges are a lot of fun. They’re just the right amount of challenge – it takes me a good half dozen tries to get a gold medal. But when I got to the battle with “The Specialist”, I was destroyed. I replayed that fight six or eight times, and didn’t even come as close to winning as I had the first time. I looked up a couple FAQs and walkthroughs, which suggested that I use whipfist rather than the claw attack I’d been using, so I tried that, and lost even more quickly than I had before. The primary walkthrough on GameFAQs says “This guy isn’t very hard to beat at all. He’s mostly just an annoyance.” You might imagine how frustrated I got to read this after having lost so often. So my plan with Prototype is to go a few weeks without playing, and then go back and restart the game on easy. I only hope that the challenges aren’t too easy.

The same night that I got my ass handed to me by The Specialist in Prototype, I tried to start playing Resistance: Fall of Man. I got the PS3 game cheap on EBay since it’s so old at this point. Long story short: I keep getting killed. I might have to restart this one on easy too. I suck at shooters where I can’t use a mouse and keyboard.

Lastly, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. I’m currently stuck on this one. I think that if I have to restart this one on easy, I might just have to commit sepuku with a frisbee.