Looks like someone with a lot of spare time has entirely recreated the original Resident Evil game with stop-animation clay figures. Having done this before myself, I can tell you what a colossal pain it can be. This one came out rather well. Check it out for a quick chuckle.

I heard this game mentioned recently on a podcast when Plants vs Zombies came up in a conversation, so I decided to check it out. While I don’t think Garden Defense isn’t as good a game as PvZ, it is a fairly good little tower defense game.

Play Garden Defense

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.

Yes, I mean all five (actually six) of the Resident Evil titles. I have copies of all six on their original platforms, and they’re all great in their own ways. I’ll admit that I find the even-numbered titles to be the best of them, but my Resident Evils is like my childrens. I love them all.

The first Resident Evil looks horrible by today’s standards and has dialogue that isn’t quite as well-written or performed as the dialog in most porn movies, but I spent the majority of a recent flight crammed into my little airplane seat playing the DS version. I’ve got to say – the game is still fun, and it’s damned hard. When you’ve got a limited number of typewriter ribbons to save the game and you’re playing in the admittedly short chunks of time that you typically have on a portable game console like the DS, having limited saves makes for a really difficult game. But the DS version added a lot of nice stylus puzzles, and some weird tacked-on knife fighting bits that keep you on your toes.

Of course, I still have my original copy of Resident Evil for the PS1, but with a portable version available, I may never sit down again for the PS1 version. On the other hand, I very well may go back and play Resident Evil 2 on the PS1 for… what? The sixth time? Depends on how you’re counting, I guess. The initial game is one that you can play through four times: twice with each character, since there are two nearly-identical missions. After those initial four plays, I think I went back through once or twice immediately, one time completing the game with only 6 saves and using no first aid sprays so that I could unlock some weapon or uniforms or something. I think I replayed twice after that, years later.

Resident Evil 2 is arguably my favorite of the series. The scare factor is just through the roof, and that’s what I love so much about the game. Resident Evil 3, on the other hand, is the bastard child of the series. Whereas RE2 had a “Nemesis” that appeared only in the game’s second mission, RE3 has his retarded brother who follows you around, moaning “STARS!” instead of “BRAINS!” In RE2, the Nemesis was one of the best parts about the game. In RE3, it’s just kind of dumb.

The game that should have been named Resident Evil 3 is the one they ended up calling “Resident Evil: Code Veronica X”. It was the first Resident Evil game for the Playstation 2, and it had a better plot, better graphics, and better game mechanics than the other games. At times, it even featured limited 3D, mediating the series’s much-maligned camera angle issue. I only wish you could have set the difficulty level lower. That way, I might have actually finished the game. Code Veronica is the only Resident Evil game I’ve not completed. Yeah, I’m discounting Resident Evil 0, Umbrella Chronicles, and the other spin-offs.

When Resident Evil 4 came along, it changed everything. It was a bit of a reboot for the series, replacing the mindless flesh-eating T-virus zombies with parasite-infected Las Plagas villagers and Nemesis with chainsaw-weilding crazies with burlap sacks over their heads. It reintroduced Leon Kennedy from Resident Evil 2, and turned the series away from its survival horror roots. Still, it was an excellent game.

Resident Evil 5 gave us co-op. I’m nearly finished with the game, and I can tell you that the best thing about it is the co-op. I first played alone on my PS3, and then tried the co-op with my brother while I was visited him on the East Coast. I can tell you that the game is about seventeen times better when played co-op. When playing single-player, the AI partner you’re given is idiotic to the point of absurdity. At least the PS3 trophies have funny clever names like “It BELONGS in a Museum”, “They’re ACTION FIGURES!”, and “Master of Removing”. If you get those references then you can renew your geek card.

Even with my complaints, I’ll be keeping every one of these games. I can only hope that when Resident Evil 6 is eventually released, they bring back some T virus zombies, just for old times’ sake. The flesh-eaters are always the scariest ones.

Here’s the second Lungfishopolis musiccast – this one focuses on the music from Nintendo Wii’s Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I’m not entirely happy with the audio quality on this one – I’ll try to do better next time.

Lungfishopolis MusicCast – The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

One of this year’s E3 announcements that escaped my attention until today is Nintendo’s announcement of the “Kind Code“. This is a system whereby if you find yourself stuck at a certain point in a game, you can activate the Kind Code, and the game then plays itself. In this way, you can figure out puzzles, or learn the best way to defeat a difficult boss.

My first take after reading this was distaste – that it was essentially a cheat added in by the game designers. And while in some ways it is, I can’t wholeheartedly object to the idea. When I think back to games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Eternal Darkness, which I had to stop playing because of a too-difficult boss, I realize that I’d have loved to skip that portion of the game so that I could experience the rest of the story after that particular battle.

Super Mario Brothers Wii will be the first game to make use of the Kind Code. I’ll likely buy it, since it seems like a perfect game to play co-op with my wife.

It looks like over the weekend, Hulu.com has begun blocking the PS3 browser from viewing their site. As I’m someone without regular cable TV, this stinks. You’ve hurt my feelings, Hulu.

Luckily, I found a fix on ypass.net. It seems that Hulu is using the User-Agent string in the browser’s HTTP request to determine whether you’re visiting their site from a Playstation 3 or from a computer. It seems that if you’ve got some basic network-fu, you can install a proxy server at home and thereby pass a different User-Agent string.

The proxy server recommended by ypass is squid. After installing, you should edit squid’s config file as follows.

Search for “acl localnet src” and set it to your internal network. You can remove the other localnet definitions if you’re not using them as shown here:

#acl localnet src 10.0.0.0/8

#acl localnet src 172.16.0.0/12

acl localnet src 192.168.0.0/16

Search for “http_access allow localhost” and add “http_access allow localnet” as such:

http_access allow localnet

http_access allow localhost

Add the following two lines pretty much anywhere in the file (the end of the file works just fine):

header_access User-Agent deny all

header_replace User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060215 Firefox/3.0.11 (.NET CLR 3.5.30729)

Then, after starting up squid, you go out to your PS3 and tell it to use squid as its proxy server. To do this, choose manual network configuration, and when you get to “proxy server”, set it to your PC’s IP address (which can be found by typing “ipconfig” at your PC’s command line prompt) and tell it to use port 3128.

I haven’t yet tried this, as I’ve had spotty luck watching Hulu from the PS3 in the past, but I’ve only recently hardwired the PS3 into the home network, so I may go back and give this a go. If any readers set this up successfully, please leave me a comment and tell me how it went.

It looks like Blizzard has released a third Starcraft 2 “Battle Report”, and it’s the best one I’ve seen yet. There are some brilliant moves by these obviously high-level players. Matches like these could easily be a spectator sport.

The video is in two parts, both of which you can view below.

Okay, so it’s got no sound effects. But it’s Burgertime! Besides, be honest – you’re playing at work, aren’t you? You don’t really want any sound effects.

Play Burgertime

So I’m currently playing The Conduit so that I can review it and like I do with most games, I check out the reviews that come out while I’m spending time with the game.  I’m sure this is a bad idea as you don’t want the opinions of others to impact your own review, but I can’t help it.  Part of this is just curiosity, to see if the impressions of others jive with my own.  Sometimes it’s anticipation; I’m excited for a game I don’t have yet, but will be reviewing, and I want to know if it’s any good.  I’m sure none of those reasons are sufficient for poisoning my well of opinions, but if I don’t read game reviews I may actually have to do my job and that ain’t happening any time soon.

On occasion I’ll read reviews that fly directly in the face of what I’m seeing when I’m playing a game.  In a lot of these cases, the differences are technical: they connected to multiplayer fine and I didn’t, they knock a game’s controls without seeing that you can change them, while I checked out the options, things like that.  With The Conduit, though, the differences of opinion have to do with the single player mode.  A good number of the reviewers find it bland and uninspiring, while I’m having a great deal of fun with it.

This brings me to the problem, that three little word: fun.  Fun is one of those words you’re supposed to shy away from in reviews because it’s completely arbitrary.  Granted, a lot of opinions put forth in game reviews are commenting on arbitrary things, but at the same time, if you have a 360 game that looks like an SNES game, even allowing for differences in opinions in regards to graphics, most people will agree that those graphics aren’t up to par.  Tom Chick, who is one of the best video game reviewers on the planet as well as an incredibly nice guy, never uses the word “fun” in his reviews as it’s unimportant.   What is important is if the game is designed well, does it do the right things and do them well.  It makes sense, as things that I find fun, say grinding for achievements, others may find stultifying.

The problem with this is that, in the case of The Conduit, I can see the points of the reviewers in regards to the single player story, however I’m having a great deal of fun with the game so those problems don’t matter to me.  So then I have a hard time reconciling if these problems are actually problems or the other reviewers didn’t have as much fun with the game so the flaws become much more apparent. I have no idea.

Now, arguably, I don’t play a lot of shooters as, for the most part, I find them boring.  Left 4 Dead had the co-op hook, but without it, it was just moving from one room full of zombies to another.  Playing those campaigns by yourself was not at all entertaining.  BioShock had the powers/weapons combination as well as a great setting.  I’ve heard that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare and World at War are great games, but honestly, military shooters bore the piss out of me, so I haven’t played them.  When I play a shooter, I’m not asking a lot from it, probably because shooters have, historically, just been about moving from room A to room B and killing everything you come across.  I want good controls, varied, effective weapons, decent enemy AI and a story that has enough to it to keep me motivated.  The Conduit has all of these things.  I’m not sure what else others would want from it.

In the end, I’m having fun with the game. When I have to put the Wiimote down at the end of the evening and go spend time with the wife, I don’t want to put it down.  I want to keep playing.  I want to see what the next alien enemy is.  I want to find the next experimental weapon.  I want to move from room A to room B and kill everything I come across.  I am having fun and I don’t want the fun to stop.  I just can’t say that in the review.

I’m hoping that by figuring out how to take “fun” out of the equation I can lay bare the design choices that make a game good or bad, but I’m not sure I’m talented enough to do that. There’s always the concern that if I take fun out of things, I may end up shortchanging a game.  Some games are repetitive and derivative and fun as hell any way.  Treating a game like that with more of a clinical eye may do that game, and those that might miss out on it a disservice.

I don’t know.  Maybe I need to stop reading the reviews of others so that I don’t overanalyze things.  In the meantime, you should totally play The Conduit.  It’s a lot of fun.

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.

The first console I ever bought myself was the original Playstation, thirteen years ago. And the first game I got for it was Armored Core. I played the crap out of that game, and I loved it. Beating the final boss was nearly impossible, but I eventually did it.

The sequels were also a lot of fun. I played some of the PS2 sequels, but never loved them like I did the Armored Core games for the Playstation 1. Even though I don’t have my Playstation hooked up right now, I made sure to keep Armored Core, because when I do hook it up, this will be one of the games I want to play.