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”.

There’s a new trailer out of Dragon Age Journeys, a browser-based tactical RPG from Bioware. It’s been created to promote Dragon Age: Origins, which releases in early November. Not bad, as far as browser games go.

World 5, The Shoreline in Scribblenauts is perhaps the most fun I’ve had yet with the game. I got a gold star on nearly every puzzle level. Partially because they were easy, but primarily because the levels were so damn interesting that I kept wanting to go back and complete them in different ways.

I’ll only be looking at the puzzle levels this time. Because they’re awesome.

5-4: Get Her In The Pool

While this level certainly wasn’t easy, it took me a bit. I tried to lure her with taffy, but she didn’t go for it. I tried to lasso her and pull her into the pool, but she was moving too quickly for me to lasso. At last, I pushed her in with a construction crane. I also put an Ice Block on the diving board – beneath her while she was in the air. She seemed to slip off of that and into the pool nicely.

5-5: Rescue!

Here, you’ve got to rescue a beached whale. I managed to shove the whale into the water with a snowplow, pull it into the water with a flotilla, and dig beneath it with a spade until it just fell in.

5-6: Play Ball

Perhaps my favorite level in the game yet. How many things can you throw at this guy? For some reason, the first thing I tried was an eggplant. Beautiful. I also threw a human heart, which quickly netted me a starite. Then I threw a starite at him. That worked too. For some reason, you can’t throw a gerbil or a light bulb, and a grenade kills him before you get a starite. Too bad.

5-8: Win the Race

I’d learned from the leprechaun race that the first thing to do here is stop the other racer. So of course I put up a wall in front of her. Putting a lunar rover in front of her worked too, although I had to put a boulder in front of the lunar rover to stop her from pushing it up the hill. The toughest obstacle in this whole thing is the spiked ball. I had to push it out of the way with various vehicles for the most part, since bombs wouldn’t destroy it and I could only use the magnet to move it once.

That’s all for now. I’m not loving world 6, so perhaps I’ll revisit this topic once I find a world I do love.

If you were a fan of The Beastie Boys’ music video Sabotage, you’ll love the choose-your-own-adventure flash movie The Deepening. It’s basically the same kind of humor: bad mustaches and over-the-top cheezy cop action, with some your mom jokes thrown in for flavor. Good R-rated fun.

Play The Deepening

GiantBomb has just posted a video with a half hour of Borderlands gameplay. Check it out.

Keepers is a weekly segment in which I discuss games I’ve played that I’ve seen fit to keep after playing. I generally sell a game that I’ve finished, so the only reason I keep one is because I plan to replay the game some day. Classifying a game as a “keeper” is generally a badge of merit.

I’ve been waiting a while for this one. If you didn’t know that this website takes its name from a location (the best location) in Psychonauts, then you probably haven’t played the game. If that’s the case, you’ve seriously missed out. Psychonauts is by far the funniest game I’ve ever played, and beyond that, it’s just a good game. Where else can you go on a misson to rescue your friends’ brains? In what other game can you summon a psychic janitor with a piece of bacon? And how many games let you enter the mind of an insane actress and battle the theater critics that plague her psyche?

Psychonauts is hilarious ridiculous fun. I’ve replayed the game start to finish, and likely will again at some point. That’s really what makes a game a Keeper.

Of all the big holiday game releases this year, four have become standouts to me. I prepurchased Dragon Age: Origins in early 2009, back when I thought the game was going to be released in early 2009. I don’t regret that purchase, because the game looks amazing. Mikeyface‘s hype machine has got me sold on Borderlands. I’ve already prepurchased the game on Steam, and plan to get playing on the 26th when it’s released. Brutal Legend and Uncharted 2 both look amazing, but I’ll have to wait to pick up copies of those, as I’ve got far too much gaming on my plate for the time being. In anticipation of the Borderlands release on the 26th, I’m struggling to finish playing Final Fantasy XII, which has turned out to be a very long and very time-consuming game. But it’s a fun game, and I can’t help but compare it to another RPG from my youth: Ultima V.

Back in my days on the Commodore 64, I played through many Ultima games. I first got Ultima III and was amazed at its workings. Ultima IV was even better. But I never finished either of those games. I later went back and got the first two Ultima titles as well. Yet somehow, the one that really struck a chord with me was Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny.

Ultima V was far more than a series of dungeon dives and fetch quests. To my fifteen-year-old mind, Britannia was a coherent world full of realistic people and places, and a storyline that has stayed with me to this day. Ultima IV had been all about understanding the eight virtues: Honor, Valor, Compassion, Honesty, Humility, Justice, Sacrifice, and Spirituality. In Ultima V you learn that Lord British has been lost on an expedition to the underworld and that his throne has been usurped by the evil Lord Blackthorne. Blackthorne enforces tyrranical parodies of the eight virtues, and you later learn that he is in fact merely a puppet controlled by the three Shadowlords who’ve imprisoned Lord British in the Underworld. So you’ve got to travel the world, slowly gaining companions, learning the magic words that open the eight dungeons, each of which you’ll need to visit for different reasons, then follow the path of Lord British’s expedition to find where in the underworld he fell and thus retrieve his amulet. Through similarly convoluted quests, you’ll need to locate his sceptre and crown in different places, and learn the correct song to play on his harpsicord to open a secret panel and retrieve a certain sandalwood box from his personal chambers. The complexity and coherence of the game is astounding when you realize that it was made in the mid-eighties.

As I play through Final Fantasy XII, visiting and re-visiting towns until they become familiar, I begin to sense something that I haven’t since playing Ultima V two decades ago. Rabanastre feels like home in the same way that Britain did in Ultima V. Visiting the Sandsea tavern is like staying at the Wayfarer’s Inn. I like the way that certain items just aren’t available at certain shops. In order to buy everything you want, you might have to visit two or three very far-flung towns. The teleport crystals in Final Fantasy XII provide quick transport similar to Ultima’s Moongates. And while in Ultima V you could travel via ship, horse, hot air balloon, magic carpet, or grappling hook, Final Fantasy XII allows you a private airship.

Final Fantasy XII uses much the same magic system as its predecessors: base spell names like cure, fire, and haste with different suffixes (-ara, -aga, -aja) indicating the spell’s power and area of effect. Ultima V had a far more complex magic system: you had to learn which magic words to use and then combine them in different ways. And then, they wouldn’t work unless you’d puchased or gathered the correct magical reagents. Two of these: Mandrake Root and Nightshade, could not be purchased – you had to travel to a certain spot and dig them up.

Each of these games also has many optional side missions. Ultima V allowed you to travel to find the plans for the legendary HMS cape, which would rig your ship to travel like the wind. It let you find magical glass swords which would kill any creature with a single hit, but then shatter. You could join the underground resistance, or infiltrate “The Suppression” and sneak into Blackthorne’s castle. There was even a companion who’d join your party and then betray you. No – Yoshimo wasn’t the first betrayer in a video game.

Final Fantasy XII has an elaborate series of hunts in which you’re commissioned to locate and kill creatures. Similarly to Shadow of the Colossus, sometimes finding the creatures is more difficult than killing them. You’re then rewarded not only by the one who hired you, but also by the guild itself. Similarly, you can find and defeat “espers”, whom you are then able to summon to help you in combat.

Both games have enormous worlds that you could spend many hours exploring. There are entire dungeons and large areas in the games that I’ll never even visit. If I now had the time that I used to when I was 15, it’s possible that I might spend as much time with Final Fantasy XII as I did with Ultima V. But my life is very different now, and so I’m rushing to complete Final Fantasy XII before Borderlands comes out on October 26th.

As a lover of comic books, the original Marvel Ultimate Alliance was excellent fan service. Not only did it give you a diverse roster of heroes to play with, along with great abilities and unlockable costumes, it also gave you some RPG like attributes where you could level up your character and abilities however you saw fit. It was great fun and I still go back and play the simulator missions to unlock more costumes for my characters. So, you can imagine my excitement when MUA2 was released for the PS3. However, now that I’m playing the game I’m finding Activision took the lazy route and really watered down what could have been a great game.

First off, my aforementioned love of unlocking costumes took a serious nerf. In the original game you could unlock three additional costumes for each character, with each costume giving new attributes or stat boosts.  Not so in MUA2. Now each character only gets one unlockable costume and it’s merely a skin swap. No new stats or boost, just something to change on your team’s display. Weaksauce.

Second, the cast of characters is a bit disappointing. I know any Marvel game will be required to feature the most popular characters like Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk and Captain America, but I expected more diversity between this set of characters and those featured in the first game. The only notable inclusions are Songbird, Green Goblin and Iron Fist. The rest of the characters are nearly identical to the first game’s cast. I have a feeling that we’ll be seeing more additions via DLC since there are so many unplayable characters in the game with finished models and full power sets, but it still irks me that I’m playing with nearly the exact same characters as I did in the first game. I’d give up half of the current roster to play as Cloak & Dagger or Firestar.

My final gripe has to do with the game’s interface. At first glance it’s very slick and stylized. You can tell the designers intended you to play on Captain America’s side, as every screen has his shield logo and stars plastered everywhere. Even the power-ups in the game are shaped like little Cap shields. But once you start actually using the interface it’s apparent just how little work went into them. First off, when you want to load a game, you can choose Continue or Load.  Ok, aren’t they both the same?  Apparently Continue starts you off at the last auto-save point, and Load only selects your manually saved games. So if you saved a game after an autosave and choose Continue by accident, you’ll lose progress. Also, after choosing either option it goes back to the same selection screen and just sits there, making it look like it’s not loading your game.  After fifteen seconds or so it finally switches to a loading screen. It’s pretty disconcerting to watch.

The screens where you manage your character’s powers and abilities are pretty bare bones as well.  This seemed to be much more intuitive in the first game and here it’s just a list of stuff. There’s really no reason to turn off the auto-allocate feature since I’d probably have no idea where to start with this screen anyway. So I’ll just let the game think for me, taking out the main RPG element that made the first game much more than just a beat-em-up.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying this MUA2 as a straight action game, and the Civil War storyline is very well done. Graphically it’s a bump up from the last game but nothing drastic (the CG cut scenes are actually very poorly done for being on “next gen” hardware). The new Fusion powers are fun when you can decimate an entire screen of enemies or finish off a boss. Plus the possibility that I’ll get the myriad of unplayable characters as DLC is enticing. I just wish they’d have put more effort into making this an improvement over the previous game rather than cranking out a graphical upgrade.

Lots of the games I play are not new. While perhaps not all of them may qualify as truly “retro”, at least half of the games I’m normally playing are more than 2 years old.

Porting games to consoles on which they’ve never before appeared or re-releasing older games as downloadable titles is a good way for publishers to make money without having to invest in new development. I’m sure that porting game code to a new console isn’t the easiest thing, but it’s got to be easier than creating a new game.

Recently, they released Desktop Tower Defense for the Nintendo DS, and I snatched it up right away. It’s always been my favorite tower defense game, and the DS seemed a perfect platform for it. But there are many other games that I feel would make excellent ports, and many that I’m surprised I haven’t seen as downloadable selections on Wiiware, XBLA, or PSN.

Popcap has released more than one game on XBLA and PSN. Both myself and my wife play Zuma on our Playstation 3 frequently. So why hasn’t Zuma 2 been released on PSN? What about Bookworm Adventures 2 or Plants versus Zombies? I’d have bought Plants vs Zombies for the Nintendo Wii instead of for the PC had it been available on Wiiware. I’d also love to see a Nintendo DS port of Plants vs Zombies.

I’m sure that console exclusivity is the primary reason I can’t play Fable 2 or Dead Rising without buying an XBox, but I’m still hoping for a PC port of Fable 2, although Dead Rising is unlikely to get a port now that it’s so old. There was a Wii version, but from what I’ve heard it’s a significantly different game. Not as good.

Castle Crashers is likely a similar story – exclusive to XBLA. There’s been talk of a PSN release in 2010, and if that turns out to be true, I’ll likely buy a copy.

The Wii’s virtual console at first sounded like an amazing idea. All my favorite old Nintendo games! But they’ve totally flopped it by not releasing old games I want to play. I was glad to buy Super Mario Bros., Punch-Out!, and Ocarina of Time, but where’s Double Dragon 2? Where’s Tetris Attack? The Virtual Console has been around for years now, and I have yet to see my favorite old Nintendo games! In many ways, the Downloadable content situation in general is a colossal fustercluck. And I mean across all consoles, although the XBox is still the best by far. Just look at the situation with Trine. Released for the PC on July 3, released on PSN in Europe on September 17, and the PSN version doesn’t come out in North America until October 22. I doubt anyone will ever hear anything approaching a good explanation for that one.

And what about Commodore 64 games? After having heard (more than a year ago) that Commodore 64 games were going to be available for the Wii Virtual Console, I was ecstatic. But what have we gotten so far? International Karate is a fantastic start – before Street Fighter 2, I used to kick ass at International Karate. Summer Games II and California Games were… okay. Those are the games they’ve released. But where are the classic games that made the Commodore 64 great? Games like Druid, Forbidden Forest, Archon, Skate or Die, and the original Castle Wolfenstein. The Commodore 64 had great shooters like Into the Eagle’s Nest, Operation Wolf, Ikari Warriors, and G.I. Joe, killer platformers like Miner 2049er, Montezuma’s Revenge, Great Giana Sisters, and Jumpman, and it had fantastic RPGs like the Bard’s Tale series, the Ultima series, Phantasie, Wasteland, Autoduel, Legacy of the Ancients, Wrath of the Denethenor, and Pool of Radiance. What about the LucasArts SCUMM games? What about arcade titles like Defender of the Crown, Spyhunter, and B.C.’s Quest for Tires? And those weird quirky games such as Floyd the Droid, Star Paws, and Caveman Ugh-lympics. I could go on for a while about all the great Commodore games I’d love to see – I’ve left off many here. There are more Commodore 64 games than there are NES or SNES games, and I can only imagine that the licenses for them would be super-cheap. So why are there so few Commodore games available on the Virtual Console? And along those same lines, why not snatch up the ROMs for some old arcade games? One I’d love to see is the old arcade game Dungeons and Dragons: Tower of Doom.

Lastly, after the success that Scribblenauts has seen on the Nintendo DS, it would seem like a huge mistake to not correct that game’s shortcomings and then re-release it for the Nintendo Wii. If movement is separated from on-screen clicking, the physics system receives some minor tweaks, and the mechanics for placing chains and ropes are repaired, I’d recommend the game to anyone.

This is just funny. I’m not the hugest machinima fan, but this tournament-style competition between eight FPS characters pits them against each other reality-show style. Very funny.