I’ve been looking forward to Fallout 3. A lot. I’d be happy skipping Spore, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, and the new Ghostbusters game, so long as I get to play Fallout 3. At PAX, Bethesda released the Fallout 3 survival guide in pdf format. What can I say? It’s made of win. You can download a pdf copy of the survival guide, or pop over to Joystiq’s gallery to see the whole thing as a series of jpegs.

I’ve got boxed copies of the first two Fallout games at home, along with the accompanying manuals, and this one is keeping with the theme of the first two games. This makes Greg happy. I am very much looking forward to clubbing molerats, eating brahmin burgers, and nuking supermutants with a Fat Boy.

So, Mercenaries 2 dropped on Sunday, and with it, seamless drop in, drop out cooperative play.  Basically, by default, when you’re playing, any one on your Friends List can just pop on into your game and help you blow stuff up.  On paper, it sounds great but in reality, it’s kind of unsettling.

I was playing on Monday night, just doing my thing, racing to make some money, when there was a message on the top of the screen that one of my friends had joined my game.  I didn’t have my headset on and I was in the middle of a race with cash on the line, so I couldn’t stop to get it.  Instead I just finished my race while he did something or other.  Awkward.

Once the race was finished, I put the headset on and we were good to go, but before that, it was kind of strange. I didn’t ask him to join, and while having him there was lots of fun and very helpful, it’s not like I needed the help either.  Having someone be able to just pop into your game unannounced is somewhat unsettling, even more so to a hermit like myself.  It’s like getting up from the TV to grab some chips, and when you come back,  your neighbor is sitting in your couch.  You may like the guy, but that doesn’t mean you just want him there watching TV with you.

At the same time though, these people are on your Friends List for a reason, so why not have them just drop by and help you blow up buildings?  After all, the purpose of Live is for you to be able to play with others, and here’s a game that makes it as simple and unobtrusive as possible.  Shouldn’t this be a good thing.  Yeah, I guess, but when you’re like me, and the notion of picking up a phone and talking to someone is enough of a break in your solitary routine to cloud your entire day, having you appear unannounced in an attack chopper is enough to cause fits.

Yeah, I can change the setting so that only I can invite you, or that no one can ever join, but in doing that, I feel like I’d be dismissing all of the hard work done to make such a great system.  Plus, I probably should play more with others as a complete withdrawal from human contact isn’t good for anyone, especially someone who shares a house with three other humans.  So for now, I’ll leave the settings at the default, which means that when I’m tearing up Venezuela, others can pop in and help with the destruction.  Just, if you plan on joining, knock first.  And bring chips.

I’d been planning to write this week about the different platforms on which Spore is going to be available as of this Sunday. I’d been planning on discussing the potential pros and cons of each platform and asking readers on which platform they’d be playing Spore. I’d been planning to do this… until I went and did the actual research about Spore’s launch, at which time I realized, as I’ve realized so many times in the past, that I am in fact an ignoramus.

This Sunday, Spore is launching for the PC and Mac, and you’ll also be able to get a version of the creature creator on the Nintendo DS. No Playstation 3, Xbox 360, or Wii versions yet. So I guess there’s not immediately much of a choice. The only sad thing is that I’m really poor and my PC is in desperate need of upgrading. As you can see by my gamercard on the sidebar, I’ve been playing Baldurs Gate II, which is a decade old.

Fortunately, when I look at Spore’s system requirements, I see

Windows XP/Vista, 2.0 GHz P4 processor or eq., 512 MB RAM (768 for Vista), 128 MB video card (Pixel Shader 2.0 support), 6 GB HDD. Internet connection.

Whew! So it looks like my Athlon X64 and Radeon X1600 might just be able to pull it off.

And with that thought, I’ve come to realize something. The last games I’ve really played on my PC, I played about six months ago: Penny Arcade Adventures, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock, and Call of Duty 4. Aside from that, only Baldur’s Gate 2. Why? Because I can play the console games on my big high-def LCD TV, and the Playstation 3 has a heck of a lot more horsepower than my PC does, so the games are going to look a whole lot better. The PC is overall a much better platform – I’ve always been a proponent of PC gaming. I hate playing shooters without a mouse, and the resolution on a PC display can be much higher than the best HDTV. But PC hardware is expensive. That’s why I’m still running on a PC over three years old, and I’m sure that I’m not alone in my situation. Right now, I just don’t have two thousand dollars to drop on a new rig. And that’s really the crux of the PC gaming problem for a lot of people.

Enter Spore, with its wonderfully low system requirements, enabling folks without DirectX10 cards and dual core processors to actually enjoy the game. Aside from the system requirements, note that the PC and Mac versions are launching ahead of their console counterparts. End result: I’ll be buying the PC version. Not the eventual Playstation 3 version. Score one for PC gaming.

At E3, Nintendo announced their new “Motion+” controller, and developers expressed “annoyance and betrayal” at having not been given advance notice of its existence. It will be at least six to nine months before outside game developers are able to produce games that utilize this technology. Only Nintendo first-party games will use it any time soon.

LucasArts is planning to release Star Wars: The Clone Wars – Lightsaber Duels this November. Unlike its much-hyped cousin The Force Unleashed, Lightsaber Duels will use the Wii remote for lightsaber combat. We can expect that it will not have 1:1 lightsaber combat, but rather a clumsy approximation, since without the Motion+ controller, the Wii’s motion tracking is iffy at best. I can only assume that LucasArts less than happy with Nintendo.

So let’s imagine now that next year at this time, LucasArts comes out with Star Wars: The Clone Wars: Lightsaber Duels 2: The Duelening or perhaps another developer comes out with some similar sword fighting game. With Motion+, it’s gonna be teh awesome!!1 Right?

Not so fast. As someone with practical experience in boffer combat, I’ve got a few thoughts on this.

Read the rest of “The Problem with a 1:1 Lightsaber Game” »

Gods be praised!

Not only will the Front be represented in Rock Band, but it’s one of his absolutely bestest songs ever, the Achewood inspired track “Livin’ on the Corner of Dude and Catastrophe”. I absolutely can not wait to try my hand at dropping his inconceivably thick rhymes. It’s supposed to drop on Tuesday, so before I go to Vegas I’ll be dropping rhymes like bombs.

The song is in the PAX Pack and also includes the fantastically excellent “Skullcrusher Mountain” by Jonathan Coulton and “Shhh?.” by Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, of which I know nothing. Proceeds from the sale of the songs goes to Child’s Play, so you can rock out, knowing that you’re helping sick kids everywhere.

Ok, so not all game designers. Hell, I’m sure that most of them are fine, upstanding, young men and women, but lately, I’ve been playing some games where the design choices are so infuriating, that I feel the need to round up the various designers and smack them. At the very least I’ll voice my displeasure and then storm out in a huff.

But I digress.

Rather than get into everything that’s been bugging me of late, I’ll just touch on the high points. After all, I don’t want to give everyone the impression that all I do is complain. I mean, all I do is complain, but we should probably build up to that.

I just finished one of my many runs through Conan on the 360, all for the glory of achievements no less, and while I really enjoyed the combos and the super visceral thrill of taking a dude’s head off with a shield, the boss battles in this game were just abysmal. Conan, as we all know, is a barbarian. It’s like, in his title. Conan is known for his lightning speed, blazing fast reflexes and unmatched savagery in battle. What he is not known for is flitting around the melee range of a boss and goading the boss into attacking so that Conan can chuck an axe at it. Yet, this is pretty much exactly what I had to do for more than one boss battle in this game. It’s not that I’m bad at Conan. I got pretty dang good at popping off combos and such. It’s that all of the bosses had various ublockable attacks that would completely destroy you should you get caught under them. In fact, just for fun, I took on a boss Conan style, namely wading in and beating this fool down with the bladed weapon du jour. I got two, maybe three hits in before I was rent asunder. No one rends Conan asunder, or puts him in the corner for that matter. You never saw Kratos throwing vases at Ares, or using harsh language against Zeus. No, he got in there, flung his blades all about and made with the choppy choppy .We know that if there’s no Conan, there’s no Kratos, Kratos being the emo version of Conan after all. Hear me oh game designers! Be true to your character throughout the entire game, lest you lose your audience.

I’m also playing Dungeon Siege for the PSP and while it’s a competent dungeon romp, and quite a lot of mindless fun, whoever designed the Town Portal spell needs a good thrashing. Everyone knows what a Town Portal spell is. If you’re deep in some dungeon or haunted forest and you’ve run out of inventory slots, you simply cast a Town Portal spell and you’re back in town. You can sell your crap, buy some new crap and generally get all of your affairs in order. Once you’re finished, you go back through the portal and you’re right back where you started. In Dungeon Siege, they got everything right except for the part where you go back through the portal. In this game, you don’t go back to where you started, you go to the beginning of the level, complete with a full monster respawn. Niiiice. So not only do you have to trek all the way back to where you left, but you have to fight your way there and you’ll probably gather enough crap so that you need another trip back through town

Finally, I’m playing Too Human, a game so rife with bad game design choices that it could be used to teach a class on what not to do in a game. The one that seems to be bugging me the most is that I’m spending as much time walking through some huge hallway as I do fighting. It’s bad enough that every battle is pretty much identical to the last one, but making me trek a mile and a half to get to the next identical battle makes it seem even worse. This isn’t even counting Cyberspace which is the Too Human version of the Poconos, complete with long walks in verdant meadows all so that you can open a door that goes absolutely nowhere. I’m sure that Silicon Knights has some really great level designers and environmental artists, but if your game is supposed to be about goblin mashing, perhaps asking the player to spend minutes at a time undertaking a leisurely stroll isn’t the best of ideas.

Now that I’ve voiced my displeasure, I guess this is where I storm out. Which way is out? This way? No. Oh, got it. All righty then. This is me storming.

I’ve begun to notice recently that there are a lot of fairly good games that you can get online for free without stealing them. Personally, I prefer ninjas to pirates, so I’m going with the legally acquirable games.

On this coming Sunday the 31st, Red Alert will be thirteen years old. Electronic Arts, to celebrate this odd-numbered anniversary, is giving away the game for free. It’s not yet clear whether it will be free indefinitely from this point forward, or free only on Sunday, but I suggest grabbing yourself a copy while you can, even if you burn the files onto a CD and play it at some point in the future. You should be able to download the file from the Red Alert 3 website.

(Source)

Lungfishopolis.com is a site where we talk about video games. Don’t come here looking for reviews, although there may be one here occasionally. Don’t come here looking for the latest game industry news – you won’t find us writing about which game publisher just merged with who and how much Activision earned this quarter. Lungfishopolis is a couple guys in their thirties writing about whatever game-related stuff interests them, and trying to inject a good bit of humor into the whole thing.

I’ve had the idea for this site in mind for at least a half a year, and I’ve been working on it pretty consistently for at least a month. Along the way, I wrote two WordPress plugins, which you can see at the left: one for an upcoming games list, which was fairly easy, and the other for a custom multi-platform gamercard, which was somewhat less easy. I struggled with photoshop, where I have no skill whatsoever, and I won a silver medal in Beijing. No, wait. Strike that last bit.

The primary authors on this site are myself and Brandon – you can read Brandon’s other writings over at Disparate Elements, and you can usually find me lurking over at GregHowley.com.

Although I’ve (finally) got the site in launch-ready condition, you may notice minor changes in the coming days as I tweak the header graphic and the little video game character at the bottom left of the screen. Hope to see you around.

Although this is probably one you’ll only enjoy if you’re a fan of the original version, I know for a fact that there are fans of the old Bruce Lee game. If you’re aching to give it a shot and don’t feel like using an emulator, this is the right solution for you – you don’t even have to install this game. Just run the executable to unzip the file, then run the exe. No install required.

Download Bruce Lee