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 was never a huge fan of the earlier Mario games. I played Super Mario Brothers on the NES and the black and white gameboy, but never got past world 3 or so. I played a few of the later sequels, but probably spent even less time on them. Super Mario Galaxy is the first Mario game that I’ve really gotten into, and the first one I’ve completed. I only got 96 stars, so I didn’t really fully complete the game, but I did see the “ending”. I think the last 20 or 30 stars are really only for hardcore completionists anyway.

Mario Galaxy does some very cool things. Even aside from the wacky powerups, the underwater and flying levels, the ray-surfing levels, and the crazy monkeyball level, there are absolutely tons of really creative and fun aspects to the game. Every so often, I’ll go back and try to get an extra coin or two. It’s pretty hard, especially when you’ve put the game aside for as long as I have.

You knew this one was coming, didn’t you? How could I cover video game music and not hit Beyond Good and Evil? Anyway, there really is some pretty nice music in the game. Hopefully, you enjoy it half as much as I do.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast – Beyond Good and Evil

In general, I’m not a big fan of fighting games. In fact, outside of an arcade setting, I suck at fighting games. Using a joypad to throw dragon punches feels as foreign to me as using a spork to cut steak. This is why I bought my SlikStik arcade controller years ago for playing Street Fighter 2 on my PC via MAME.

You see, back in the early to mid nineties, I worked at an arcade. Making pizzas, and later on running the LazerTron league. The bonus to this was that after hours, I’d stay and play video games for free. I got fairly good at Samurai Showdown 2, Virtua Fighter 2, and even a little Mortal Kombat 2. But no game did I play more than Street Fighter 2. I played the game so often that while I knew a few guys who could match me, I hardly ever met someone who’d beat me consistently. I learned how to use every character in the game, and used the characters I was less familiar with when I’d fight someone who wasn’t as good at the game. It was hard to win a game using Vega or Blanka – I wasn’t nearly as good with them as I was with Guile and Fei Long. And back in the Street Fighter 2 days, a 4 or 5-hit combo was impressive. And hard to pull off.

This weekend, I got the PS2 to USB adapter I needed to hook up my SlikStik to the new PC. It worked, and I played Street Fighter 4. I played and played that game. I played it until my feet hurt from standing up on the concrete floor of my man cave. And while I was standing there playing against some nameless person in Detroit or Reno or Little Rock, I was back in that arcade. Somewhere in the depths of my subconscious animal mind, I could hear the arcade cacophony – the pinball bings and blips, the wooden crash of skeeballs. I could smell the popcorn. And I was lining up my quarter on the machine for next game.

Street Fighter 4 is fantastic. My biggest fear was that even a tenth-of-a-second lag would render the game unplayable, as split-second timing is such a huge factor. My fears were unfounded. My biggest gripe is that the timing of Street Fighter 4 is slightly different from the timing of Street Fighter 2, and such a minor difference seriously throws off my game.

Even on normal difficulty, the game is no cake walk. I refuse to play on easy, and so beating the game to unlock characters is a challenge. On day one, I beat the game with Guile, Ryu, Ken, and E.Honda. In doing so, I discovered (remembered?) a very important fact – fighting the computer and fighting a human opponent are like day and night. You need to use vastly different tactics. When fighting the computer, you’ll find that you can use the same technique over and over, and the computer doesn’t learn. You also don’t have to worry about being cheap, and sometimes being cheap is the only option, because the computer gets really cheap – sometimes seeming to pick you up off the ground in order to throw you by way of inhuman timing. When you’re fighting a human being, you need to be at least marginally respectful. Cheap jab-throws, spamming attacks, or taking off the last sliver of someone’s health by using a special attack while they block are not acceptible. It’s arcade etiquette. And while I can’t expect every player on the internet to be familiar with these conventions, it seems that the majority of the good players are adequately respectful. My unfounded opinion of online competitors had been largely based on Penny Arcade’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory, but with Street Fighter 4, I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the maturity of most of the online opponents I’ve faced. One guy had a headset and actually verbally apologised the one time he cheezed me.

Since then, I’ve been trying (without luck) to set up my own in-monitor microphone so that I could say hi to some of the guys I’ve fought against. I’ve been in the GFW Live control panel adjusting voice settings, but the interface doesn’t seem to hear anything from my microphone. I’ve adjusted Windows sound settings and tested the mike in other applications, but haven’t yet had any luck.

Street Fighter 4 introduces a number of new rules and techniques that I’ve had to get used to. I don’t know whether any of them were in place for Street Fighter 3, which I’ve never ever seen, much less played. But things like focus attacks, EX attacks, and armor-breaking are entirely new to me. But I’m getting used to them. Much of the time I was playing online, I had about a 20% victory rate. But I got at least one win against every opponent I faced, so I’m not a total lost cause. I know that online competition tends to be pretty fierce, so I want to practice enough to be competent at the game before I click that “ranked match” button for the first time.

I’d like to close with an observation about the game’s music. The title theme for Street Fighter 4 is a song entitled “Indestructible”. And while it’s catchy enough that I’m hearing it in my head after having played the game for a few hours, the switch in music between Street Fighter 2 and Street Fighter 4 reminds me of the switch in music between Star Trek: Next Generation and Star Trek: Enterprise. Anyone remember the theme song for Enterprise? Yeah. That’s the feel I get from the Street Fighter 4 music.

Life in a Game is a YouTube series I first discovered a few years ago. I just started rewatching it, and I’m up to Episode 5-1 now. It’s pretty hilarious. Check out the first episode below.

Moving target release dates kill me. Staggered release dates are worse. I’ve only recently realized how many games I’d expected to be playing by now that I’m still waiting for.

The one frontmost in my mind is Trine. The game has intrigued me since I first heard of it, but the fact that my wife and I would be able to play co-op and the fact that it’s $10 less on PSN made my choice of console easy. More than once, I’ve planned to go home on a Thursday evening and purchase the game. Sony is such a gametease, if you catch my analogy. It’s been available on Steam for weeks now, and still nobody has any hint as to when it will be released on the Playstation Network. I don’t blame Frozenbyte – it seems that Sony has decided to release it whenever they have an opening in their PSN release schedule. When Trine is out, I suspect that it will be exactly the type of co-op game that Linda and I will enjoy: half Mario Brothers, half Gauntlet, and half Braid.

The next game that I’m waiting to play is Street Fighter 4 for the PC. This one’s already out, and although I can blame the late PC release date on Capcom, I can blame the fact that I’m not currently playing on no one other than myself. The reason I wanted the PC version so badly is because I’ve got a SlikStik Fighter. While I absolutely suck at Street Fighter with a gamepad, I’m pretty damn good with actual arcade controls. I attribute this to having worked at an arcade in college and gotten lots of after-hours free practice at Street Fighter 2. Hoepfully my slow-ass DSL connection is good enough to play online without game-breaking lag.

My issue is that I’d never realized that my current PC doesn’t have a PS2 port, which the SlikStik requires to connect. I tried a PS2 > USB adapter, but the device wasn’t even recognised by Vista. This is when I figured out that the PS2 to USB adapter I had was simply changing the plug shape to match the outlet and not actually converting the signal. Fifteen dollars later, I’ve got a true adapter on order and I’m praying that it will work, or else my beloved SlikStik is now useless.

The third and final game that I’m waiting to play is Dragon Age: Origins. But wait, shouldn’t I have known that this game isn’t out until October? Yeah. But at some point, Bioware had been predicting a Spring release date and I preordered from Amazon, thinking I’d have it in weeks, not months. This is the only time I’ve ever preordered a game, and it’ll likely be the last time. Dragon Age looks amazing, and everything I hear about it amazes me even more. I hope that I’m not disappointed. In October.

Although I’ve already posted a Free Game Friday game for today, I just found out that Bethesda has decided to offer The Elder Scrolls 2: Daggerfall for free download. Since you have to run the game with DOSbox to get it to work, they’ve got a detailed installation guide (pdf) that you can follow.

Download Daggerfall

By now, I’m willing to bet that most people have tried Peggle. While I personally prefer Plants vs Zombies, Peggle is fun enough to hold my attention for a time. If you’ve never played Peggle, now is the time to give it a shot for free.

Download Peggle: World of Warcraft edition

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.

When game developers design games based on movies, they’re nearly always train wrecks. The only movie-based games I can think of that were better games than E.T. for the Atari 2600 are The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and the recently released Ghostbusters game. Aside from that, there’s Enter The Matrix.

When I was writing a list a few months back of five poorly rated games that I enjoyed, Enter the Matrix was one of the first games that came to mind. Aside from the apparent existance of magic, the second Matrix movie wasn’t as terrible as a lot of people make it out to be. It certainly had some amazing action sequences. Playing a video game that tied in so neatly with that movie was a lot of fun, and the movie footage that you could view only by playing the game added quite a lot of value.

I’ve still got my copy of Enter the Matrix, and I like to think that maybe some day I’ll go back and replay it. I’ll leave you with my favorite video clip from the game. Enjoy.

I’m sure it’s happened to all of us. You’ll be playing a game, and some minor bug or poorly-designed sequence in the game just drives you up the wall. I suppose this is unavoidable. But when I see the same issues time and again in different games, I can’t help but wonder if they couldn’t have been better addressed by the game developers.

Certain annoyances have disappeared entirely as the medium has evolved. For example, I can’t remember the last time I played a game in which you were able to save your game in a state from which you can’t possibly proceed. (stuck in terrain, having permanently lost a plot-critical item) I think the last time I played a game with that particular issue was on the Commodore 64. But there are plenty of other problems that I see all over the place.

The most recent was when I was playing Ghostbusters last week. I’d reached the edge of a rooftop, and having captured all the ghosts on the roof, I found that there was nowhere else to go. I ran around making sure I didn’t need to trap more ghosts in order to trigger an event. I checked the doors and ladders to see if there was another area I needed to go to. I tried talking to Venkman, Stantz, and Spengler. No love. There was nowhere to go and nothing to do. Reloading the game fixed the issue, but the same exact issue popped up again later in the game, when I was in the museum. I’d killed all the ghosts in the area, and found myself locked in the Aztec exhibit with no exits.

Ghostbusters wasn’t the first time I’d seen that issue. In God of War 2, I hit a very similar situation – I’d reached the edge of a cliff I thought I needed to jump off, but there was an invisible wall stopping me from proceeding. When I reloaded and replayed, the invisible wall was gone. In Vampire: Bloodlines, someone told me to go to the second floor of building – I hunted for that second floor for hours, but it didn’t seem to exist and I in the end I had to stop playing the game.

Another issue that I hit in Ghostbusters is that of erratic difficulty. When playing the game on normal, I found that whle certain parts had a perfectly good difficulty level, certain parts were just way too hard. I had to restart the game on easy difficulty. Maybe the game should have a Kind Code.

And then there are my gripes about partner AI. There aren’t many games that make you play with a computer-controlled partner. Enter The Matrix comes to mind. (If Niobe was a blue pill, she’d never have passed her drivers’ test) The game I’m primarily talking about here is Resident Evil 5. In Resident Evil 4, you at least had a good amount of control over the girl you were protecting. I’m sure that was made easier by the fact that she had no inventory and didn’t try to fight enemies. You could tell her to follow you, or stay put. But in Resident Evil 5, your partner tries to fight and to help you solve puzzles. And worst of all, at certain points in the game, you need her.

At this point, I need to make a disclaimer. I’m referring to the AI partner as ‘she’ because I chose to play the game as Chris Redfield. Had I chosen to play as Sheva, Chris would be the idiot AI partner. No gender bias here. Purely circumstantial.

Sheva loves her handgun so much that when she runs out of bullets, she won’t use the machine gun. I can’t count the number of times when I’m fighting a miniboss and Sheva refuses to use her grenade launcher. I’ll be out of magnum ammo, and have to resort to using my handgun and flash grenades despite the fact that my partner has a goddamned grenade launcher. Sheva also likes to run far away when I’m being attacked so that when I go down and need her to revive me, she has no way to get to me in time.

But I’m not the only one she likes to get killed. One time, she ran ahead of me directly onto a conveyor belt that led into a furnace. Another time, she refused to stay more than three feet away from a reaper with an instant-kill attack. I wish I could ask her to hide in a dumpster while I fight the enemies by myself.

The most recent thing she’s done to piss me off is when I was fighting Albert Wesker. One of the items you need in this fight is a special rocket launcher. She took it and ran away, leaving me to fight the boss who I couldn’t possibly hurt without the rocket launcher. A minute later, I died because she was too far away to revive me when I was hit. If you’re reading this and can identify with my complaints about Sheva’s mental retardation, I suggest checking out Yahtzee’s review of the Resident Evil 5. He agrees, hilariously.

My last game gripe for the day? CD checks. I could vent all day about oppressive DRM, but CD checks aren’t oppressive so much as they’re simply antiquated. Why do games still require you to leave the CD in the drive in order to play? In the days before CD burners were mainstream, it may have been an effective anti-piracy measure. Today, I think its primary effect is to annoy me and make me buy more of my games from Steam. I tend to play 3-4 games at a time, and I’ve only got two optical drives in my PC. This means constantly swapping out CDs, which annoys me to no end. I generally go out and find a no-CD patch, which I have no qualms using because I’ve legitimately purchased the game. Companies like Stardock and Steam have it right. Just let me play the game for which I’ve paid you without the goddamned CD in the goddamned drive!

I’d let you know my opinion of the engaging Ghostbusters (gave it away a bit there), but I’m sure Greg will let you know his feelings about that game once he’s gotten through it, so I’ll throw in my opinion of a game he’ll be unlikely to comment on instead…

It’s easy to take the gains we’ve made in computer games for granted.  After reading some reviews of the newly released Fight Night Round 4, I believe some are making that mistake.

I’ve been a fan of the series since the first Fight Night.  From the beginning, the realistic environments and engaging control scheme have set it far ahead of any other boxing game.  Now, for this version, we have Mike Tyson (I’ll put him first for my health), a vastly improved physics engine, a large stable of recognized fighters, and many other features.

When some say that the title is “held back” by “limitations” of its training system’s difficulty and very long road to top rank status, I think they’ve missed the value of an excellent title.  If you have a game that’s a pleasure to play, why not make it take some time to achieve great things in?  If you are going to emulate the “sweet science” as they call it, why not have the player go through a bit of work to accomplish true greatness?  It does not keep the player from choosing fights that are at his level or easier.  It simply gives the player long term goals and training that takes effort.

I would encourage sports gamers or gamers that enjoy high quality games that actually evolve from year to year to give this one a try and see if they like it.  Especially those that never tried a Fight Night title.