In part one of this article, I discussed general gameplay strategies. Now, let’s take a closer look at the game’s individual towers. For your convenience, I’ve also created a printable pdf quick reference guide. Yeah, it’s really ugly – I know.

Arrow Tower

The only tower in the game (other than a hive) that can hit both flying and ground enemies, the arrow tower remains useful throughout the game. It’s especially useful at the beginning, as it’s the only way you’ll prevent waves of spiders from getting through. They also work very well when placed near your village as a last resort to pick off wounded monsters that have made it past your other defenses.

Every upgrade except the final upgrade to black is merely a range upgrade, so it’s generally not worth it to spend the gems or the time dancing in upgrading an arrow tower.

Cannon Tower
Cannon towers are the only power weapons you’ll have available early in the game, before fire and mortar towers become available. Later in a level, although they’ll do less damage than fire, tesla, or mortar towers, they’ll still be the backbone of your defense since you’ll have so many built. The greatest flaws of cannon towers is their short range and slow rate of fire.

You have to be very careful when positioning cannons. If they’re too close together, they may both fire at a single monster that could have been killed by one attack, thereby wasting a shot. Since their rate of fire is so slow, other monsters can then sneak by before the cannons can fire again. Also, cannons must be placed as close as possible to the monsters’ paths. Ideally, you want to place them where their area of fire covers a place where the monsters spend the most time. Corners tend to be good places to place cannons, since the cannons will attack the enemies the entire time they’re going around the curve. Every level of upgrade on cannon towers increases power, so upgrade them as much as you can.

Anti Air Tower
Until you can get laser towers, the anti-air tower is the absolute best defense against flying monsters. They’re fast and they have very good range. Although they don’t do much damage, they fire so quickly that the damage will add up. Unlike arrow towers, it’s definitely worth it to upgrade anti-air towers, since every upgrade increases the speed at which they fire. If that means a tower fires at a monster six times as it passes instead of only three, you’ve doubled the damage. The final upgrade is power, and as such is very useful. Unlike cannons, anti-air towers work well when grouped together.

Fire Tower
The fire tower is everyone’s favorite tower, and with good reason. They’re incredibly strong. They’re great for mowing down acorns and golems, and are even fairly effective on fast-moving spiders. They’re also an excellent way to attack bosses. But more so than many other towers, you’ve got to carefully consider where to place a fire tower. The fire comes out in a line that damages any monsters in the stream. The fire keeps coming out for a few seconds, and will continue to do damage to any monsters in the stream, but once it fires it will not change direction. This means that you’ll want to place the fire tower in such a way that its stream will hit as many monsters as possible. You should also never put fire towers right next to each other.

Upgrading fire towers is important, and it’s especially important that you get them to red as quickly as possible. The first upgrade from green to yellow increases the tower’s range, and the second upgrade from yellow to red increases the fire tower’s power, or damage. Going from red to purple increases the fire’s spread, and going from purple to black will give you extra range. Getting fire towers to the red level is critical, and the purple and black levels make it even better.

Ice Tower
Aah, the ice tower. If only Pixeljunk Monsters’s ice towers were as good as the freeze towers in Desktop Tower Defense. Alas, they are not. They don’t slow down enemies nearly as much as they should, and do close to no damage. As a result, the ice tower is easily the most useless tower in the game.

If you do use ice towers, focus on upgrading them to red as quickly as possible, since the first two upgrades increase the damage they do. The final two upgrades to purple and black only increase the spread, or area of effect.If you didn’t need to spend gems to unlock ice towers, I’d probably use them from time to time. As is, I never use them.

Laser Tower
The laser tower is at the same time one of the best towers in the game, and one of the most difficult to use well. Proper placement of laser towers is critical, because one of their greatest strengths is the ability to hit many monsters at once. Lasers have unlimited range. What? What’s that? Yes, let me say it again. Unlimited range. Laser towers will not fire until enemies come within their marked range, which is about the same as an anti-air tower. By itself, that’s good. But once it does fire, the beam continues to the end of the screen, hitting any flying monsters in its path, even if they’re all the way across the screen. So it’s critical to place the lasers in a location such that when they fire, they’re firing along a path of monsters, hitting as many as possible. If you place a laser tower poorly, it may fire across the line of monsters, hitting only one or two.

The laser tower’s first two upgrades are speed, which is good because the tower starts with a very slow rate of fire. The third upgrade to purple is range, which helps the tower fire earlier. The final upgrade is power, so it’s in your interest to fully upgrade the laser tower as quickly as possible.

Mortar Tower
At first, mortars may seem like no big deal, but in the end they’re just bigger cannons, and as such they do have a use. They’ve got great range, and the blast area of their explosions hits everything in a very large area. Upgrading a mortar is a bit of a mixed bag, as upgrading to yellow, red, or purple only increases the area of effect. But that final upgrade to black doubles the mortar’s speed, which is like having two mortars. Mortars aren’t as important as fire or laser towers, but they’re definitely useful in the right situation.

Tesla Tower
There seems to be a consensus in the online community that tesla towers are mostly useless. I’d like to disagree. In the right situation, I’ll use them in place of fire towers, and they do a good job. For example, in “Hard 1”, the level is constructed in a way that makes fire towers very difficult to use – it’s tough to place fire towers such that the flame will hit more than one monster at a time. But there are a number of places where two or three grouped tesla towers can wreak havoc when upgraded.

Tesla towers begin with a terribly short range, and usually must be upgraded to be useful. I’d suggest only upgrading them as much as you need to reach passing monsters, as every upgrade only increases range, and the fully upgraded range can sometimes be more than you need. There’s no point in spending gems so that you can reach forested areas where monsters can’t walk.

When fired, a tesla tower will attack every monster within range, which is fantastic. Not just enemies within an area like cannon or mortar towers, but every single monster it can reach. This is the power of a tesla tower. Once that range gets big enough, you can hit lots and lots of monsters at once.

Hive Tower
You can only build one hive tower on a level, but it can reach anything on the screen, including flying monsters. I’m not a big fan of the hive, primarily because it requires you to aim for it. The bees that fly out of the towers head directly for you, attacking any monsters along that path. In order to do acceptable damage, you really need to upgrade the tower fully.

The first two upgrades make the bees come out more quickly, and the second two increase damage. If you plan on using a hive, you really should upgrade it fully as quickly as you can.

Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party on Pixeljunk Monsters, but since I bought it from the Playstation Network store, I’ve been playing it constantly. It’s like crack. Not that I’d know what crack is like. What I mean to say is that the game is pretty damn addictive, and the demo’s free. We bought a second controller and my wife and I now play the game together in co-op mode whenever we have spare time. The great thing is that co-op is actually just a bit easier.

But it’s not exactly an easy game. I find myself playing certain levels over and over, trying to get that rainbow rating for completing a level without losing a single villager. It’s really sad when some cute village kid gets carried away by a giant bloated bee or crushed to death by Stompy the Golden Idol.

Amazingly, I tend to get worse the longer I play. On my first run, I’ll make it up to the thirteenth wave before a spider sneaks into the village and I immediately restart the game. Then I’ll make it up to wave six, where I’ll fail to stop a golem. On my next run, I’ll lose a guy on wave two. It’s infuriating!

But I’ve picked up a few things along the way. I’ve now rainbowed ten of the game’s levels, and I’ve only got the hardest level in the game left to complete, then the “Encore” expansion awaits. I’m hoping that I can help others avoid some of the angst that I’ve felt struggling through the game. All this week, I’ll be dishing out advice on how to ace the game. This first segment deals with general gameplay strategies.

Read the rest of “Pixeljunk Monsters Strategies, Part 1: Pro Tips” »

Parts one and two can be found here and here.

As I made my way down to the hotel lobby for dinner, I was thinking about how I really didn’t want to go to this dinner. I’m not a social person, and meeting new people while having to be professional didn’t appeal to me on a good day, much less one where I had just spent most of the day working and then took a 4.5 hour plane trip. Nevertheless, I felt it was a good idea for me to be there. I was also concerned about my outfit as I hadn’t packed for being semi-professional for one day, much less two days and I was pretty sure my “roll off of the tarmac” shorts and t-shirt ensemble wasn’t up to the dress code of the restaurant. At least I had elected to leave the monkey t-shirt at home, all four of them. I was also hesitant because, honestly, I didn’t feel like I belonged to be there. Nothing against my talent, meager as it may be, but the game reviewing thing is strictly a side gig for me. I use the money I get for it to buy Transformers and video games. The other people attending this event do this for a living. Should I have been there? I was, so it’s not like I could have changed any thing at that point, but I wonder, if I were in their shoes, and someone like me rolled up, would it bother me or would I not care at all?

I wasn’t waiting in the lobby long before I realized that my dress wouldn’t be a problem as the rest of the gaming journalists filtered in all wearing some variation on my outfit. Geek wardrobe FTW. Introductions were made all around and while I was told the name of the outlets everyone worked for, for the life of me, I can’t remember them. You hear the six names, all with some variation of “game” in them within the span of thirty seconds and see how well you do.

Once everyone was rounded up we headed in for dinner. I sat between the lead designer of the game and an editor at Team Xbox and across from the event planner. It was, literally, the best seat at the table as to the right of me I had someone to talk to about making games, to the left of me was someone to talk to about writing about games and across from me was someone to talk to about the promotion of games. Unless Ken Levine was going to pour the wine, I don’t see how it could have gotten better. It was a very fun evening with lots of good conversations. The event planner and the guy from Team Xbox were both big wine fans so they had lots of stories about wine and California which were surprisingly entertaining. I got in some really good discussions about GTA IV with the lead designer of the game. The wine was good and the food was good, although expensive. I would not be surprised if the bill for the meal was over a thousand bucks.

Now, a thousand bucks is an extreme amount of money for a meal, even a meal with 12 people present, and certainly with game developers and publisher grousing on how expensive it is to make games, it doesn’t make sense to drop that kind of cash on dinner, but in the grand scheme of things, that dinner, hell the cost of the whole event is a drop in the bucket. The original Saints Row sold around 2 million copies. If we’re conservative and say that only the first million copies were at full price, and retailers buy the game from the publisher at 50 bucks a pop, that’s 50 million bucks. If the game cost 10 million to make and promote, you’re 40 million in the black before you start tallying up sales for the second million copies. Even if the entire event cost $100k to put on, it’s such a small percentage of what they will probably bring in for Saints Row 2 that it doesn’t mean anything.

After dinner, folks were going about their evening in Las Vegas, and me being the type of guy who never shied away from wasting his money, I proceeded to get killed by the slot machines, thereby erasing any hope of making this an even remotely profitable trip.

The next day was game day. They dropped the 360 HD off in the room around 10:30 and I started to play the game. At this point, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to have happen. On the one hand, if the game was bad, I could prove to myself that these people could buy me all the steak in the world and it wouldn’t prevent me from writing my honest opinion. On the other hand, the guy I had just spent the last evening talking to was very nice and this game represented his and his team’s life for the past two years. Why would I want it to fail? This was exactly the problem I was worried about. My responsibility to the reader has to win out every time, but if the game sucked, what would I do at that evening’s co-op event? Smile politely, say something nice about it and then trash it in the preview? Be honest but make everything awkward? The mind reeled.

Once I got into the game though, I realized that my worries were unfounded. The game was very fun and offered an open world experience that was a lot different than the one provided in GTA IV. There was a distinct lack of focus, unlike in GTA IV, which I’m sure many people will find liberating even if I was somewhat put off by it due to my OCD like tendencies. Graphically it looked good, and the sound was great. It was a game that I wanted to keep playing once it got time to shut the console down and prepare for the evening’s event.

Unfortunately, by the time I got to the co-op event, I was so burnt out on playing games all day that the last thing I wanted to do was play more games. I endured though and managed to get some co-op rounds in. The evening’s event was interesting in that I could hear about everyone else’s experiences with the game, and how different they were from my own. We all had similar likes and dislikes, and I remember one guy, the guy from Gamespot, saying that he kept comparing it to GTA IV in his head. My reply was that you almost have to, because when people are making their decision to buy it, that comparison will probably be the foremost thought in their heads. Everyone seemed to like it, or was just really good about faking it.

I spent most of the night watching people play co-op and talking to the PR guy from THQ about his views on the industry and gaming in general. Once I had time, I spent about 25 minutes interviewing the guy from Volition, showing off not only my shiny, new voice recorder, but my inept interview skills. Listening to myself ask questions while transcribing the interview later on was an exercise in torture. I’m going to blame it on the alcohol. I thought it was odd that only myself and one other writer took the opportunity to interview the Volition guy. The other guy was also a freelancer, so I wonder if he too was told that he could get extra cash for an interview piece. I would think that everyone would want some time with the developer, if only to get some quotes to spice up their pieces, but that’s where I would be wrong. I can only assume that spending eight hours playing a game was more than enough material, and if most of them do this full time, and get paid salary, why put in the extra work?

Once the event was over, I was pretty much wiped out. Thankfully the THQ guy told us all that there was an embargo on the preview pieces that wouldn’t expire for a week, so that meant that I didn’t have to go back to the hotel and try and churn out a coherent piece. I was bummed out that I couldn’t go out with everyone else, but I was tired, it was late and I had to get up early in the morning. Game, set and as they say, match.

The next morning, I got up, waited in the lobby with a fellow writer while trying to get my driver on the phone and then rode to the airport with the writer from Gamespot. We had a really interesting talk in the car about how Gamespot reviews games, and about how they had just given Mercenaries 2 a pretty low score. I’m sure it was pretty boring for him, but for someone like me, a gamer who occasionally reviews games, it was fascinating. Once we got to the airport, I gave him a business card and we went our separate ways.

I’m glad I went on the trip, even if staying at home would have made better economic sense. Everyone I met was very nice and I got two good pieces out of the experience, one of which is here and one is here. The talks I had, both about making games and about reviewing games were very interesting, and not ones I could have had any place else. Even upon finding out that this writing for me was just a side gig people were real supportive and in no way made me feel like a second class citizen. Still, it was nice to take that plane ride home, even if sitting right on the wing made it so that I had to shove my earbuds deep within my auditory canals to hear The Untouchables on my PSP.

In October I’ll be reviewing the game, which means that I’ll have to start from scratch and do a lot of those eight hours all over again. A bummer, certainly, but at the same time, there’s so much to do in the game, I can take a different route and most of the stuff will be different. It will be interesting to see if my final opinion matches up with the preview opinion now that the glow of free food and drinks has worn off. If I don’t like the game, will thoughts of those I met come to my head as I’m writing some snark filled review? Maybe, but probably not. After all, I’ve been working for commercial software places for ten years now, and I know that there are a myriad of decisions that go into putting out a crappy product, many of them completely removed from the hands of those in charge of making said product, and that hasn’t stopped me yet. No reason to let a 50 buck steak do so now.

Today’s Free Game Friday special is a long-time favorite of mine. Taking the best aspects from that era’s Ultima and Bard’s Tale games, Wasteland improved upon them and created something unique. In the post-nuclear world of Wasteland, you create a party of desert rangers, assigning points to their pistol, SMG, assault rifle, and other various skills, my favorite being brawling. It’s quite obviously a predecessor to the Fallout games. You can eat hobo dogs and drink snake squeezins, fight outlaws and robots, and can even contract wasteland herpes.

The game marries Ultima’s top-down view with Bard’s Tale’s portrait-and-text battle system beautifully to create a strategic combat system not equaled until Baldur’s Gate was created years later. And the game is so small that you can store the exe on a USB drive and play it during your lunch hour.

If you play the game, a bit of advice: rope is always important, melee combat is a surprisingly good option, the toaster repair skill is actually not useless, and for the love of god, keep every servomotor you find.

Download from Abandonia

If none of this makes sense to you, check out Part 1.  If it still doesn’t make sense, then blame my crappy writing.

Shortly after agreeing to go on the trip, and getting all of my travel arranged, I realized that I had a big, nay huge problem, namely that the event was taking place on the same day that the Redskins kicked off the ’08 – ’09 football season. I am many things, but first on the list is a Redskins fan. I bleed burgundy and gold, so the notion of not wearing my Redskins jersey on that Thursday, even if said apparel didn’t fit whatever dress code would be expected of me. I brought this concern up with my editor, and he said not to worry, just explain the situation, show off my tattoos (for some reason it intrigues him that I have four tattoos), show my business card and all would be ok. First, I don’t know why my tattoos would make a difference. Perhaps the PR people would assume that if they didn’t assent to my wardrobe I’d stab them in some sort of biker rage. I don’t know. Second, wait, what? Business cards?

My editor then explained to me that I’d need business cards because otherwise I’d look like a dork. No, my four superhero tattoos wouldn’t do that, but not having a business card sure would. Right. Not being one to go against the wishes of the guy who doles out my assignments, I set about designing my cards. I did a halfway decent job and in an act that can only be attributed to nervousness, I ordered 200 of them. Now, to my credit, I paid extra to get cards made from 100% recycled paper feeling that the notion of me buying business cards for one event was patently stupid so there was no need to get trees killed for my stupidity. Why I bought 200 of them I still don’t know. Oh sure, I’d love to be able to go out to more of these events, but so many of them that I’d need 200 cards? Highly doubtful.

He also told me that I’d need a voice recorder. Well, I didn’t technically need one, but seeing how there would be developers there, and maybe I could get them to talk to me, a voice recorder would make things much easier on me. He also told me that if I got enough time with a developer that he’d pay me for the preview piece and an interview. Now, I don’t want to tell tales out of school, but let’s just say that I don’t get paid a whole bunch for these pieces. It’s more than I’ve been offered at other places, but far less than I probably could get paid if I actually put some hustle behind this gig. Without getting into numbers, even though I’d be paid for a second piece, any decent voice recorder would balance out what I’d get paid for the interview. Sure enough, the one that I ended up buying was even more than what I’d get paid, but I figured that this was a chance to a) ask some good questions about making games and b) it would be yet another piece to add to my growing collection. Plus, I can use the voice recorder for podcasting, which could potentially get me paid more, so I figured that the voice recorder, unlike the business cards, was a sound investment. Worse comes to worse, I can use it to blackmail people at work.

So, armed with my buttload of business cards and my shiny new voice recorder, I headed off to Vegas. While waiting for my plane, I met a guy going to Vegas for a legal insurance conference. When I told him why I was going, he thought it was pretty damn cool, which, honestly, up until that point, I hadn’t. I’m under no illusion that I’m some font of gaming knowledge, and that my opinion is the definitive word on games. I’m a guy who got lucky enough to find out about a job posting, and who was competent enough to put some work together to impress those that needed impressing. Having an editor willing to take a chance on a complete newbie certainly helped. I like to say that reviewing games is fun up until you have to review a bad one. Truth is, it’s not that much fun when reviewing good games either. Oh sure, occasionally you’ll play something fun that you never would have played, or expected to be good (Crash of the Titans comes to mind), but any time you have to do something under a deadline, it ceases to be fun. But, I love games, and I love writing, so as much as I like to complain about having to review some crappy DS movie tie-in game, it’s totally worth it. After talking to this guy though, it hit me. I was being paid, albeit a modest amount, to go to Las Vegas and sit in a beautiful hotel room and play video games all day long. It was, in fact, pretty damn cool.

The flight was uneventful, and I passed most of the time watching Escape from New York on my PSP (again with the games). I was picked up by my driver Dale, who also thought that my reason for being in Vegas was pretty damn cool and proceeded to tell me that his son absolutely loved Rock Band. Dale’s son, as it turns out, had great taste in games. Upon dropping me off at my hotel, he asked me what site I wrote for and as a result, Dale became my first official recipient of my business card. Not exactly how I planned on things going down in that regard, but if it gets another reader to the site, then who am I to judge?

After getting to my room, which was gorgeous, by the way, I unpacked, cleaned up and headed to the lobby to meet the other writers and the PR guy and the developer for dinner. I had officially arrived in Vegas and was ready to be plied with food, booze and whatever other earthly delights they could come up with to secure my favor. Who needs integrity when there’s steak on the menu?

Tomorrow, comes Part 3, the final part: Twelve Hours of Gaming and I Don’t Even Get a Lousy T-Shirt

I think I first started playing the Baldur’s Gate games back in 1999, and was thrilled to find a computer RPG based on Dungeons and Dragons, which I’d been playing with friends for years. At the time, I hadn’t played a D&D based video game since the gold box series on my Commodore 64.

Flash to nearly a decade later. I’m finally at the end of Baldur’s Gate 2: Throne of Bhaal. During the intervening years, I’ve played through the original Baldur’s Gate twice, played halfway through Icewind Dale, played the entirety of Icewind Dale 2 co-op with my wife, and played Baldur’s Gate 2 at least twice. But I’d never tried either of the expansions.

Right now, I’m sitting at the conclusion of it all. About a year ago, I started over playing Baldur’s Gate 2 from the beginning. I fondly remember holding my 4-month-old daughter on my lap while clearing out a mind flayer lair. I played all the way through and continued on to the Throne of Bhaal expansion, which I’d never tried before. At some point, I had to turn down the difficulty from Core Rules to Normal, cause while I can generally manage to take down the drow priestesses and beholder eye tyrants, the vampiric illithids and pit fiends get a bit difficult.

Two nights ago, I was ready for the game’s final boss. Given that I’d fought my way to the bottom of Watcher’s Keep, killed demi-liches, Hive Mothers, and Y’Tossi, I thought I was up to the challenge posed by the game’s conclusion. But after I’d driven back the final boss, and then fought a group of henchmen, I re-confronted the big baddie and quickly lost everyone in my party except my wild mage. Consulting a walkthrough, I found that I’d lost during the third of what appears to be seven huge battles I’d have to get through without resting or saving the game.

So last night, I spent over an hour re-distributing magic items to party members, carefully considering spell triggers and chain contingencies, and choosing just the right spells to fight these seven battles. In the end, I went with a lot of summoning and protection. I’m no stranger to Dungeons and Dragons, or to strategy of this sort, so I felt well-equipped.

Restarting the fight, I got through the first four battles pretty easily. But during the fifth, the boss teleported behind a giant column of light where I couldn’t see her. To clarify for those who haven’t played this game to its conclusion, this is the kind of battle where you should just focus on the big guy, because upon the boss’s death all the minions disappear, and if you kill them earlier more minions magically appear anyway. I was doing fairly well with that tactic until the stupid column of light got in my way.

Fighting behind that column of light, I couldn’t see my characters, and when they started to get wounded I couldn’t see who I needed to move in order to give wounded characters a clear escape route to run to papa Anomen for a heal spell.

So Minsc got killed. A minute later, Keldorn and Sarevoc followed suit. I figured if I could just tough out this fight, I could resurrect them before the next battle, then use that wish scroll to rest the party before the sixth fight, which is supposedly the hardest. I never got there. The boss threw some of those stupid beehive dart things at me – the ones that do damage every second for twenty seconds or so? It stopped my wild mage from doing pretty much anything other than falling down dead.

So I figure I’ll give it one more shot before I give up completely and just turn down the difficulty. Anyone have any suggestions? The online FAQs give no real good advice for this particular battle.

If you’re interested in reading about Baldur’s Gate related stuff, you should check out the Mr. Binky column Brandon wrote a while back on the subject: Remembering Baldur’s Gate

I should preface this piece with the statement that I really don’t consider myself a games journalist. I primarily review games for GameShark.com and also do preview pieces on occasion. “Confessions of a Game Reviewer” doesn’t have the same snap to it though, and in my recent trip to Vegas I did bust out my paltry interviewing skills, so I’m keeping the title.

But I digress. Last week I was invited to go to Las Vegas to play the upcoming open world gang masterpiece Saints Row 2 for a full day and I figured I’d share my experiences. As a gamer, I’ve always wondered what these big preview events are all about, and I imagine other gamers are similarly curious so here we are. I’d like to say that it was a non-stop tour of PR funded debauchery but it’s far, far less interesting. Onwards!

When the trip was first offered to all of the writers, my initial response was “Woo-hoo! Free trip to Vegas!” Why this was my first thought, I have no idea. I don’t even like Vegas. I am a horribly unlucky gambler capable of losing money faster than you can flush it down the toilet. I don’t like the heat, I don’t go to strip clubs, I’m not about to pay nineteen bucks for a watered down martini and the game I’d be previewing was a sequel to something I never played in the first place. On paper, there was no reason for me to go other than to get the experience and to continue my trend of being as open to assignments as possible. I mentioned it to my wife and she said I should go. Honestly, leaving her behind with our two young, rambunctious children was my primary concern, given that I’d be going for something as silly as playing a video game, so when she said I should go, I figured that I should go. I’ve done quite well by listening to my wife so far. No reason to stop now.

So I offered to go and due to a fellow writer’s Canadian passport problems (oh Office of Homeland Security, what horrors you have wrought!) I was given the chance. Once the initial feelings of “yay, I’m going to Vegas” wore off, I started to feel somewhat bad about the whole thing. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the video game journalism business is seen as fairly corrupt. Big name publishers pay for ad space, or to send writers to lavish events and as a result end up “buying” positive coverage of games that really don’t deserve it. As a gamer, I always thought that these events were pretty low class, but here I was, slavering at the chance to go to one like I’d never been on a plane, or had a meal purchased for me. Shouldn’t I refuse to go, opting instead to maintain my journalistic integrity? Did I even have journalistic integrity? I’m just a reviewer, it’s not like I’m ever in a situation to cover up some massive scheme to defraud the American public. I play games called “Time Ace” and then tell people how crappy they are. In the end, I figured that if my editor wanted someone to go, he wasn’t concerned about how it appeared for the site, and if he wasn’t concerned, then I shouldn’t be either. And so I wasn’t, that is until the details came out.

First, I found out that they were putting me up at the Four Seasons in Las Vegas. This ain’t no Holiday Inn. The Four Seasons doesn’t have it’s own physical building in Vegas, it’s the top four floors of the Mandalay Bay Casino. That right there should give you an idea as to how nice the place is and the level of expense. Plus, it’s the fraking Four Seasons. The plan was that they’d fly me in on Wednesday, put me up at the hotel Wednesday night, bring the console to my room on Thursday so that I could play the game on Thursday and then we’d have a co-op event in the penthouse suite (again, expensive) on Thursday night and then I’d fly home on Friday. When I was booking my travel, the travel agent said they’d get me a car service as well. The airport in Vegas is about five minutes away from the strip, and as it turned out, I could see it from my hotel room and could have walked there if I didn’t mind being crushed by the occasional jet landing. The idea of having a car service for such a short distance when undoubtedly the hotel would have a shuttle seemed absurd and a waste of money, but not wanting to raise a fuss I said “Er, OK” and that was that. Car service it would be.

Again the feelings that I was whoring myself out came out. This was an expensive hotel! There’s a car service! They’re spending a lot of money on my stupid ass! To an outside observer, would it look as badly as I thought it did, that I was essentially, being bought? Maybe. Maybe not. I have no idea. My coworkers, many of whom are gamers, thought that it was pretty cool and didn’t give a damn about integrity, probably because they think I never had any in the first place, or they don’t read the site I write for. Again, I figured that if my editor was OK with it, I should be as well. Plus, this was my chance to show myself that I don’t give a damn about fancy hotels and nice dinners. I was going to play the game and when the time came to write the piece, if the game was a piece of crap, then it’s a piece of crap and I’d call it like I see it. I’d be the most integrity laden motherfraker that ever put words to paper. They’d see! They can’t buy me! Not this guy!

With that, my travel was arranged, my itinerary was set and I was ready to go.

Or so I thought.

Tomorrow, comes Part 2: Voice Recorders and Business Cards and Expensive Steaks, Oh My!

Recently, Nintendo has been taking a lot of flack for the Wii’s lack of appropriate data storage. 512mB of internal flash memory just isn’t enough now that WiiWare is offering downloadable games. In a recent interview with Club Nintendo, Nintendo’s Reggie Fils-Aime said that they have a storage solution in mind, and that it’s better than a hard drive.

So what exactly is a better solution than a hard drive? It seems likely that they’re working on a way to make downloaded games playable directly from a SD card. This way, you could move your copy of TV Show King or Ninja JaJaMaru-kun onto a flash card, and play it directly from the card without the hassle of having to copy the game back onto the Wii’s internal memory first.

Still, I’ve come up with some storage solutions that I think are a bit more creative. What’s better than a hard drive? Here are my ideas:

The Gigabyte Wiimote
Currently, you can store Miis on your Wii remote, and bring them to your friends’ houses, where you can use them while playing Wii Sports or transfer them into your friend’s Mii channel. But the classic Wii remote has very little memory. Introducing the Gigabyte Wiimote! Within this controller, you can store twice as much as you can in the Wii’s internal memory! All the data is transmitted by Bluetooth, and you can play games directly from the Wiimote.

USB 8-track storage

With the plug and play Wii 8-track storage peripheral, you can store your games on archival quality magnetic tape. Since it can read all 8 tracks simultaneously, it accesses data at a rate nearly ten times that of traditional tape drives! Plus, since all Wii 8-tracks are 100% recycled products, you’re helping to save the planet.

WiiFun Card
The WiiFun Card is a kind of virtual punch card. But forget the hassle of having to feed cards manually into a reader or of accidentally shuffling the cards. The WiiFun cards are completely virtual. In an idea inspired by the save system of old Castlevania games, you can now save data from any game on a WiiFun card, freeing up internal memory for more WiiWare. Just enter the punches on WiiWare cards with your Wii remote. Most game save files only require you to fill out 32 WiiFun cards, although certain WiiWare titles may require as many as 128.

Wiimote Ham’n’Cheese Attachment
My personal favorite is the edible device. Inspired by Valve’s sandvich, the Ham’n’Cheese add-on to the Wii remote is inexpensive and delicious.

Here in sunny Lungfishopolis, we like to encourage gaming togetherness. Why spend a Saturday locked in the basement with your 360 when you could be sitting in front of the 52″ plasma screen in the living room with your spouse playing Boom Blox?

So we racked our brains and came up with some of the games we’ve had the most fun playing with our girlfriends and wives.

When I think of couple gaming, the first game that comes to mind for me is Mariokart. Before playing Mariokart Wii, my wife had never tried Kart racing. She took to it immediately, and MarioKart Wii has become the only non-cooperative game we play together. There’s even a “team mode” for when you want to be sure that blue shell won’t take out your spouse. When we play online, we tend to notice a lot of other couples playing together too. Oddly enough, we end up cheering these other couples on, even when we have no hard evidence that “Alex” and “Britney” aren’t actually two convicts named Jorge and Bubba playing from inside the maximum security prison a mile from where we live.

Mario Kart 64 is probably one of the best, if not THE best, game to play with significant others, friends or even enemies. The game is simple enough for novices to pick up and play, while including just enough depth with attack items and turbo boosts to let your racing skills shine through. Despite having colorful graphics and a do-gooder mascot in Mario, the gameplay can end up being downright cutthroat. I chose the Nintendo 64 version of this game mainly due to superior controls and ease of play. Mario Kart Wii is definitely fun but the controls are lacking, and the elastic AI is more obnoxious than usual. Truly a great multi-player game. Nothing says “I love you” like lobbing a perfectly timed Spiny Shell at your significant other.

The notion of monkeys having to traverse various obstacle courses while trapped in plastic spheres is an absurd one, but man does it make for some fun games. The joy of Super Monkey Ball is that the stages scale nicely in difficulty so that non-gamers can compete evenly with those that are in the chair every single night. Plus, as the stages get more difficult, they tax different parts of your brain, allowing for success for one where the other has failed. Plus, it’s just fun. When the puzzle stages are proving to be too much, the mini-games are a hoot and the Monkey Glide from the original game is hands down the best game I’ve ever played with my wife. If you have a Wii, see if you can find the original and some GC controllers. You won’t regret it.

Super Mario Galaxy is a great game even in its single-player mode, but the co-op is interesting in that the two players have entirely different roles. While one person controls Mario, the other has just a cursor on screen, and can do various helpful things, such as collecting star bits, freezing enemies, and pointing out the 1up that you just ran past. It takes some getting used to, but the mechanic works well. During the game’s later stages, you may find that you really need the second player’s help.

Guitar Hero is pretty much a no-brainer for anyone that wants to play video games with their spouse. Everyone loves music, everyone secretly wants to be a rockstar, and for some reason no one feels like a dork while pretending to play guitar with an oversized controller. My entire family plays this game, specifically Guitar Hero III for the Wii, and it was my 9 year old daughter that actually made the purchase. I think we spent a good three hours playing it together on the first day. My wife is great at Barracuda and Black Sunshine, while my daughter has learned the love of Pat Benatar and Metallica. Personally, I enjoy busting out Guns ‘n Roses and Smashing Pumpkins. You don’t really feel like you’re playing a video game while jamming with Guitar Hero, which I think is what makes it so universally fun to play. Watching your wife become obsessed with a video game is pretty fun too.

Our most recent discovery has been the PSN game Pixeljunk Monsters, and I’ll tell you – we’ve spent a LOT of time playing this game over the past few weeks. It’s got all the tower defense goodness of Desktop Tower Defense, with better graphics and co-op goodness. And the somewhat cutesy graphics might even entice your girlfriend to play. In Pixeljunk Monsters, you actually have to run around, build the towers yourself, and collect the gold from fallen monsters in order to build more. The two players have separate gold pools, which is both good and bad. You can’t spend the other person’s gold, but you have to watch out that one person isn’t a gold hog. You could probably write a thesis on relationship dynamics by watching different couples play.

When my brother introduced me to Virtua Tennis, my first thought was “this looks as boring as watching real tennis on TV.” But once I picked up the controller and returned a few serves, I was hooked. Virtua Tennis was originally a Dreamcast game, and since has been released as the Tennis2K series on several different systems.
Anyone can play this game, all you do is run to the ball and hit a button to return it. Although you can go deeper and learn ball spin and different types of shots, it’s not necessary to enjoy the game. Where the game really shines is in two or four player mode, where you can play singles or doubles. The singles gameplay is great, with controls that are so natural it’s easy to step into some epic rallies against your significant other almost immediately. Doubles matches against the computer or friends are especially fun, since you can play as a team and shout out shots to each other. It’s been a while since we’ve played Virtua Tennis, but now I’m tempted to dig out my extra controllers and force my wife to endure more of my old obsession with this game.

Before we had kids, Tiger Woods PGA Tour never left the GameCube. For a sports game, it’s tremendously accessible to non sports people, and the controls are all very simple. Best of all, we could each create a golfer that looked as much or as little like us as we wanted to, and progress through the game together by playing against each other. Along the way, a huge competitive streak emerged that exists to this day. The latest version (Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09) for the Wii finally has a motion swing that is as intuitive as the old, traditional swing, so we are, pardon the pun, back in the swing of things. Plus, it’s a game that you can play in front of your kids and not have to worry about anything worse than Daddy’s colorful language when Mommy chips in for an Eagle. Again.

Despite the fact that some folks on this site *cough Greg cough* don’t fully appreciate MMO’s, you just can’t ignore the fun that can be had playing World of Warcraft with your partner. However, to truly appreciate the fun in World of Warcraft you really need to play in the beginning areas of a game. Endgame raiding and four-hour dungeon crawls aren’t really fun when you’re sitting next to your wife and kids. The newbie zones have just the right amount of quests, mobs and sense of accomplishment to make the game very enjoyable as a couple. Completing the early quests as a team makes leveling much faster and if you don’t like the current zone or race you are playing, you can simply re-roll a new character with very little time lost. My wife and I had four different lowbie teams in WoW, and each one was a completely different experience. As a hidden bonus, you have the advantage of yelling across the room at each other rather than chatting over Ventrilo.

The original Baldur’s Gate is a decade old now, but it’s still one of my favorite games. All the Infinity Engine games (the Baldurs Gates, the Icewind Dales) have excellent multiplayer support. I’ll admit that not every girl will be into collecting magic swords and lining up lightning bolts – I guess I just got lucky. Before we were married, my wife and I played through Icewind Dale 2 together. When you’re each controlling three characters who have to work together to fight a battle strategically, communication is key. If you play with your significant other, I’ve got a tip: decide ahead of time which person is going to control to pause key.

You don’t usually think about co-op when playing a Lord of the Rings game. They seem to lend themselves better to solo hack-and-slashing than team-ups. But much to the surprise of my wife and I, the co-op play in Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was very good. You can each pick one of the main characters and battle side by side through the entire campaign. The interesting thing is that the game actually ramps up the difficulty during co-op play so you can’t just plow through. This really forces you to choose characters wisely and cover each other’s backsides or else you’ll quickly be overwhelmed by enemies. While this game isn’t typically what I’d choose to play with my wife, it worked out very well. It also didn’t hurt we are both LotR nerds. And to my un-surprise, my wife chose to play as Legolas EVERY time.

For this week’s Free Game Friday, I look back to a post Michael Abbott made last week, wherein he talks about this remake of the original Quest For Glory II, which has been given a total overhaul and released for free.

The sequel to Hero’s Quest, Quest for Glory II is an old school adventure game in which you can play a magic-user, fighter, or thief, and save the land of Shapeir from an evil wizard. Although I’ve never played the original, this sounds like a pretty sharp remake.

Download from AGD Interactive