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So they did it. Gomp and Homp, mage clones extraordinaire, reached Outland today. Mere hours later Homp had hit level 60 (with Gomp purposefully behind with 40% of a level to go). And that was it, really. The big goal. The Refer a Friend system was completely used up, no more summoning or triple experience or level granting. Now Homp is ready for the big show (Outland) as is my severely underplayed Gnome Warlock Pewpewpew. If things continue I’ll be gearing up for the Really Big Show (Northrend), but even if I don’t, I accomplished the first real “congratulations, you beat the game” level. That said, let’s take a moment to say goodbye to Gomp, now relegated to an eternity of level 59 PVP.

It’s weird how something like this can have even a minor psychological effect on me, the player. Here is this character that I spent several days of my life controlling, more than I’ve played almost every other videogame out there, and now she’s going away. For instance, I don’t want to dualbox anymore. I really feel like the multiple characters can be extremely powerful in ideal circumstances, but as soon as something goes wrong (like an add), things go really wrong. I don’t want that kind of stress… it’s tiring, and only really worth it if you’re gaining tons of experience.

I wrote letters to some characters as Gomp when she was signing out for the last time, and it was actually kind of sad, as stupid as that sounds. For instance, she sent all of her money to Jess’ character Bedrest (who, after a little playtime tomorrow, will hit 30 and need mount money). Her sentiments were basically:

If you ever see Homp again, tell her that I’m thinking of her, whatever part of me that’s left to think. Never let her forget that this face we share is evidence of something greater than a simple referred friend; that we successfully helped each other to reach an unthinkable goal.

So, goodbye, Gomp. Goodbye forever.

The mages hit 56 last night, figuratively inches away from Outland. They are now embarrassingly undergeared and completely broke. Really looking forward to hitting those quests in Outland to get the decent green quest rewards…

For the moment I’m not really sure where they’ll be spending their time. Finished up most of the quests that are worth doing in Un’Goro (the only thing I want to do there now is kill me some Devilsaurs). Thanks to the ever-awesome Daddywarbuck I finished off the Linken quest line and waltzed through the Cauldron quests in the Plaguelands.

Also, with Jhonen imminent, my days left in WoW are certainly numbered.

I should, however, point out that I have now reached my original goal when starting up WoW again last month. I’ve gotten a character past level 55, which will allow me to roll a Death Knight when the expansion comes out (otherwise, I would have had exactly zero reasons to get the expansion). That means there are now a few new goals left for me to really achieve:

1. Get the mages to 59/60. I have to do this in order to use the full benefits of my Refer a Friend abilities by autoleveling my gnome warlock.
2. Get at least 1 character to 70. I’m not sure who it will be, although I’m leaning toward grinding one of the mages through Outland. Honestly I’m looking forward to playing only one character again!
3. Play more with the “casual” group (Juls, Mel, Jess, Jack, and myself). We’ve run a few instances and it’s been great! We could probably level the entire way through the game that way if we wanted (they all get triple XP if we play together). Unfortunately people keep going out of town, and leveling portions of the group will undoubtedly lead to the death of the casual team (I’ve seen it before, as soon as some of the team breaks rank the other guys get left behind and usually won’t catch up!).
4. Play a new character! I really want to make a decent tank, but I might just hold off that urge until the Death Knights Cometh. There are also more servers out there for me to hit up (I’d really like to spend some time on a PVP server), so maybe my altoholism will continue to run through my veins.

So that’s where we are! I never thought I’d make it to Outland, but it’s like RIGHT THERE.

A very profitable weekend for all the characters I’m leveling. Silvio’s 70 druid helped the Omplettes and Colin’s warrior through Uldaman and Zul’Farak (two instances I had never seen before). Didn’t get a lot of mage gear but the run gained me just shy of 5 levels and 100 gold (bringing the girls to 43). Also the Zul’Farak run granted Colin’s warrior 12? 13? pieces of gear that made him (pretty obviously) much more powerful. It turns out he kind of likes his warrior again! Saturday Night was a 5-man run through Maraudon. I had no idea just how long it would be, but the girls gained another 4 levels before it was done (half of those from quest turn-ins at the end of it all). We were all tired, and lost. It was an interesting instance; on the one hand it was The Huge, but on the other hand there was very little gear to speak of and a significant lack of money being earned. As such, the Omplettes are now broke again (levelling up is EXPENSIVE) and pretty undergeared (this tends to happen when you replace almost nothing in your gear from level 30 to level 48). The staff is still good, though! The bracers, less so.

Also, we ran our “casual” group through Blackfathom Deeps on Saturday. We were underlevelled but got surprisingly far! Unfortunately, Juls and I lit several of the fires at the end of the instance (the ones that bring lots of badguys into the room), and we didn’t have enough AoE to deal with that many enemies at once. Ended up summoning one of the mages to do the deed and blizzard them away to nothingness. Still, that party is pretty well balanced (priest, warrior, paladin, warlock, hunter) and fun to play.

But now for the real meat of this post! The first time I flew from Stormwind to Ironforge I made a pact to some day go into that searing gorge and kill me some of those Lava Spiders and giant robot guys. Every single time I’ve made that flight they’ve been listed as Level ??. But yesterday I was cruising over the Searing Gorge and I saw that the spiders were level 46-48. That is to say, killable. I made it my mission to go there, find them, and destroy them. I brought upon them such a frozen hell as to never have them question my superiority. I’ll be in the fifties this week. Not sure if I’ll continue past level 55 (the original goal I had was to level to the point where I could make a Death Knight when Lich King drops) and on through the portal, but I do know one thing. As soon as I hit 50 I’m heading to Un’Goro Crater and taking some freaking screenshots of the only other zone where I want to kill things, but have never been able to reach.

Had my first “please run this instance with me with your overlevelled character” moment last night. I realized that the staves my mages had were disgustingly out of date, and I needed to get something a little better. So Colin and one of Mark’s friends ran the Omplettes through the Scarlet Monastery Library (woo, my first time in that instance) three times to get a pair of these. That could pretty much last them until Outland, honestly. Kind of pathetic how Frostmourne is more than 10 times more powerful. You’ve got so far to go, little mages!

On the topic of gear, I’m really sad/glad to say that I’m pretty sure it’s my favorite part of the game. It scratches this primal itch in my brain that starts up when I realize that the benefits of levelling up would be even awesomer were my stats higher. Plus that rare drop feels special! Much more special than that expensive crap on the auction house… This leads me to believe that I will really enjoy the game at the level cap, which is both exciting and depressing! “Halfway” there, by the way. The girls are about to hit 36.

What a week! My mages are 33-Going-On-34 and their XP meter isn’t really slowing down (plus they’re autolevelling my Warlock in the process). /played is at 32 hours. According to my math once they reach 38 they will have completely paid for themselves just in the levels they’re granting to the Warlock. They’re now the characters I’ve played the farthest into the game (although, admittedly, I’ve played other characters for much more actual time) and I’m getting to see all sorts of new stuff with them. Went to Arathi for the first time with them, for instance. Levelled them from 20 to 32 by doing all the Darkshire quests (it turns out I really like those!), and I’ll still be seeing all sorts of new things with them in the coming weeks.

As for the group buddies we started the week around 14 but after some questing we entered into the Deadmines (my first instance since coming back to the game last month). Let me tell you, I miss playing instances! Group tactics and razor’s edge difficulty spell for a pretty fun evening. The triple XP characters all levelled twice in the actual instance (so they’re all at 19 or 20 now), and we all got tons of new gear. Unfortunately we didn’t manage to Do The Deed, Seal the Deal, Mark the Territory, so to speak. We got all the way to the Ship, and were slain by Captain Greenskin and his Elite Doomsquad. Granted, I couldn’t hold aggro as my Paladin (needed to train some abilities and stuff), and yeah, Colin fell off the boat. We probably could have finished it off but all the mobs would have respawned and some of us were tired of playing at that point. Still, we did remarkably well, I’d say. We’ll be back to take out that Van Cleefy Weefs someday soon.

Doomsnuggler is now holding a fish in his offhand.

This Recruit-a-Friend system has been pretty incredible! Juls, Jess, and Jack (THREE-J) have all been playing a little, and we’ve got our characters ready to start running instances. The triple XP thing is impressive! Your average quest will bring you in about 80% of a level, and collection quests tend to yield a little over 150% of a level (since you end up killing more stuff). This means you can just do the fun or easy quests and ignore pretty much everything else! Along with our new group, I’ve been dualboxing some mages at hyper speed. Started them last Thursday and they both dinged 24 this afternoon. Kind of awesome, but kind of diminished when I noticed that Mike Wong had rolled a new character on our server and was already at 24 WITHOUT the triple XP.

The master plan is to play with our group at a casual pace, and powerlevel the mages when I’m bored and nobody’s around. As soon as they hit 31 I’ll start granting levels to other characters I have on the server, essentially levelling 3 characters at once (albeit, 2 of them are identical mages, but that’s not really a problem since I’ll eventually spec and gear one differently than the other). If nothing else making a trial account and dualboxing some characters to 20 can be really awesome! If you level 2 characters to 20 on both the recruiter’s and the recruit’s accounts, you end up with enough stored levels to autolevel a 3rd character on the recruiter’s account to 20, ending up with 5 20s for the price of 2 (well, for the price of 2/3s of a character without triple XP, at least). Sure, a 20’s not exactly STELLAR WOW POWER, but it’s good to have a few guys sitting around for when new people start up and want to run Deadmines or something. If you can do this in 10 days you don’t even end up spending money on the recruit’s account!

Granted, that’s not how I’m rolling. My recruits all have legit accounts now and are played by people other than me most of the time. But still, incredible. Unfortunately my Undead Mage (Ouchdown) is getting neglected while I’m powerlevelling all these Alliance characters, but the bonus XP lasts for 90 days so I might even have time to level some Horde grinders before all is said and done.

Day one of The Great Recruiting was a disturbingly powerful success (for Blizzard). Ended up playing some new characters on our server and it was pretty awesome to behold our group (which incidentally will be well balanced for instances!). We have a Dwarf Hunter named Bedrest (my wife Jess), a Dwarf Priest named Foamier (Colin’s girlfriend Mel), a Human Mage named Smeepers (me), and a mostly naked Gnome Warlock named Doomsnuggler (played by professional puppeteer Jack). Juls will also be joining in the fun again, and Mike created a new guy on our server. Jess and Jack have never played the game before, and it’s really interesting to see their reactions to things that now seem so trivial. At the end of the night we walked over to Ironforge and Jack was nearly speechless with reverence. What’s funny is all I see is a gryphon master, an auction house, and a mailbox. It’s nice to see the game along with new eyes, though, as it forces us to slow down and really look at the lovingly crafted world.

So I really think Mage is for me! This was confirmed as soon as I got Frostbolt last night, and all of a sudden my character felt awesome. It’s also a good low-maintenance class I can play while teaching Jess and Jack how to do quests and get they kills on.

The boosted XP is kind of ridiculous. In a party of 4, we’re earning XP that is almost equivalent to soloing from kills. But with 3 DPS classes and a priest we’re killing stuff pretty fast! The level meter might as well just animate. Quest rewards are much higher, too. Unfortunately, it seems like we don’t have to do nearly as much questing, at least in the beginning. In the process of doing one quest we’re earning so much experience that all other quests in that chain are too low level. And grey quests won’t provide the triple XP. Personally I don’t think that matters, as in a few more levels we can start hitting up instances, and it seriously feels like we’d never have to do open world quests again.

Hooooooolyyyyyyyyy Crap. I’ve sent out invites to some friends. Let’s look at this objectively:

For each person you refer who upgrades to a retail version of World of Warcraft and purchases two months of game time, you will be able to give a character on the account you sent the invitation from an exclusive in-game zhevra mount. This unique mount can be claimed through the website, is only available to Recruit-A-Friend participants, and can only be applied to a single character.

1. Characters on both accounts can summon each other once per hour.
2. While adventuring with your linked friend/family member, you will each gain triple experience.
3. For every two levels the new player earns, the new player can grant one free level-up to a lower-level character played by the veteran player.

Is quest experience tripled too?

Yes, but only if the quest was not trivial (gray difficulty) for either character.

For each person you refer who upgrades to a retail version of World of Warcraft and purchases his or her first month of game time, the account you sent the invitation from will receive a free credit of 30 days of play time.

Hooooooolyyyyyyyyy Crap. I will be writing more about how this goes as things progress. But WoW at triple speed, PLUS extra character levelling, PLUS it’s only about 2/3s the normal price of playing (thanks to 30-day credits). That’s a video game right there. That’s how they get from 10 million to 20 million.

UPDATE: Jess has agreed to play with me, at least through the trial. Can you guys IMAGINE.

I watched the opening cinematic for World of Warcraft for the first time today in at least three years. I’m happy to report that the cinematic still looks incredible, and it does a pretty great job of making you want to really play the game and eventually become a badass. The Burning Crusade one isn’t quite as good, but is still better than the attract mode movies for most games. I remember being disappointed with WoW’s lack of cutscenes after the intro (or the in-engine voiceover plus camera pan that you get when you make a character). Sure, instances have a good amount of well-presented story in them, but over the course of the game your story is told predominantly through your quest log. It took me a few tries at the game before this stopped mattering to me.

About a month ago I was reading about Death Knights in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion and I really, really wanted to play one. But there was a small problem; I’d never reached the required level 55 to create one. So I started up again. I created an undead mage named Ouchdown. Several other people, now long past Just 70, show up from time to time to level their Horde Alts and I’ve been genuinely having fun with the game. I know now how important it is to really enjoy playing your class. At first I was put off by my mage’s frail body and his relative simplicity (compared especially to Druids and Warlocks), but after putting enough points into frost (and getting Mana Shield and Blink at level 20), I can say that playing a mage has been the most fun I’ve had. Since I’ve been back I leveled Pewpewpew to 30 and have just had him sitting there accruing rest XP, and as of a couple days ago I’ve got Ouchdown at 30.

But something was still missing. I still didn’t have any way to get a panda.

But Juls did, and he had quit back in 2006 (pre-expansion). He’d gotten a dwarf hunter to 60 and before signing off for good he sold off all his gear and mailed away the money. But he kept his panda collar. And his box for the Collector’s Edition. This past week Juls traded me his CE box and gave me access to his account. I know, I know, this technically violates the EULA, but it’s not like I’m anywhere near the same league as a guy who bots or a guy who buys a fully geared out level 70 character. The first thing I did was make an Orc hunter named Hugman who runs around with his best friend, a panda cub. I also tried my hand at dual-boxing (expect another entry on this later).

I had never seen Outland. And with Jhonen being born really soon, I doubt I’ll get Ouchdown or Pewpewpew to 60 any time soon. And I really want to see that content. I logged in and tried Juls’ character out. He still had a pet wolf, thankfully, but his armor was lower than my level 30 mage. I renamed him from Trygger to Barkbark (Hugman and Barkbark are eternal enemies) and moved him over to Farstriders, the server we’d all played on since Burning Crusade dropped. I had to get him a ranged weapon, and the cheapest one with the highest level was a bow on the auction house. Awesomely, Juls had never trained bows (or crossbows), so I had to find a bow trainer and basically start from scratch in Hellfire Peninsula.

After about two hours of questing with help from my friends Mel and Colin, Barkbark is up and running with about half of the armor he needs, and will hopefully finish off all the pieces with a few more hours. He can actually survive fights now, which is awesome.

I’m going to work on Ouchdown for a while, though. I want to earn that high level for reals. Also, to those of you close to me, I beg of you to force me to buy the Lich King Collector’s Edition, because if I don’t do this we’ll all regret it later. Just ask Jess who heard me complain about the WoW:CE for the last 3.5 years.

Fortunately for my future self, I pre-ordered and successfully received a Collector’s Edition of Burning Crusade when it dropped in 2007. Interestingly enough I did this using Best Buy’s website! Note also that on their website you don’t deal with employees! Anyway, when the expansion was released, pretty much everybody was playing again. We started out in the Draenei starting area with a bunch of Blue Skinned Freaks. In my spare time I played a Blood Elf Warlock and quickly realized that Warlocks were great! Unfortunately for him, most everybody I knew was playing Alliance, so I made a Gnome Warlock, did the March of Tears from Dun Morogh to Menethil, and hopped a series of boats to meet up with the Draenei characters.

His name was Pewpewpew. We had some fun questing! We did the Dead Mines a couple times and Blackfathom Deeps. I played until level 27 and then something took me away from the game; I think it was a busy time at work. Looking back, yeah, that was just about the busiest I’ve been here that Spring. Anyway, Pew took a rest, and I eventually unsubscribed. 27 was the highest level I had reached at this point. All the characters I had played with stayed on until 70 after I dropped out.

So I ended up keeping Warcraft offline from January 2005 until November of 2006. By far the longest lapse in my subscriptions. My wife and I were about to have our second anniversary, and she had said on more than one occasion that I was never to play Warcraft again. We had lived with this guy who played it all the time. Literally all day long every day. She thought this was not something I should do, and she had become convinced that this game was destined to ruin all players. So I let it rest.

But around Thanksgiving in 2006 I was bored one weekend and renewed the subscription. The expansion was looming at the time, and lots of people I knew were getting back into the game. Two friends from work and I started up new characters on a RP-PVP server getting ready for Christmas. Three Tauren Druids named Bullthazar, Calfspar, and Milkior, walked the Barrens looking for a King. We only played a few sessions but it was still remarkably entertaining (and this was not just because I had created a “/yell TELL ME, %t, HAVE YOU HEARD THE GOOD NEWS?” macro that I would use whenever we started a fight). When we went on the druid quests, we would sometimes encounter very high level Night Elf players, and most of the time they wouldn’t kill us. They would bow, and we would bow back. It turns out, I actually liked this game, quite a bit. Oh yeah, and another guy showed up named Beeflehem, which was an added bonus to our Christmas Story.

I learned two things in our time as the Wise Men. One: this game is more fun when you quest with friends; you level up faster and you die significantly less. Two: the priest class was not for me. While I never really liked playing a Druid, I had way more fun playing one than a low level priest. After Christmas, though, we sort of tapered off. I’d log in every now and then and use the GOOD NEWS button on NPCs, but we never played these character seriously again.

When World of Warcraft went Beta, I stayed up all night for several nights playing it. I played a Dwarf Priest. Looking back on it now I’m pretty sure I didn’t know about training on even levels or talent points. I just liked walking around, seeing Iron Forge for the first time. Seeing my first Night Elf was crazy (HOW DID YOU GET TO LEVEL 18 SO FAST). I was frothing pretty hard for this game to come out, even if it was going to be released less than a week before Jess and I left Chicago for our wedding in Los Angeles. Before the Beta even dropped, I had already reserved the Collector’s Edition. At Best Buy.

The morning the game was released, I walked over to Best Buy from my office. Got there at about 9am, right as they opened. There weren’t people lined up or anything. I walked over to the World of Warcraft display, and there was some dude standing there. This guy, this terrible awful guy, asked me if I had pre-ordered. I said “yep!” and he told me that pre-order people had to pick up copies of the game at Customer Service. I stared at about 10 copies of the Collector’s Edition for too long, then I asked if they had those over at the Customer Service area. He said “yes.” I walked over to Customer Service. There was a reasonable line already there. Perhaps a five minute wait. Everybody was picking up copies of World of Warcraft (regular editions, mind). I got to the front and said I wanted a Collector’s Edition. The woman said “you have to go get one off the shelf,” and I said “oh the guy said I’d get one over here,” and then I ran back to the display, but lo, Dear Reader, the Collector’s Editions had been devoured in my absence. The employee guy was gone. I would never have an opportunity to buy a CE version of the game; I had a wedding to go to, and a job to stop getting paid at. Didn’t change the fact that the part of my heart capable of loving video games (according to medical researchers, this part of my heart is several sizes larger than the national average), was broken.

So, don’t ever reserve products at Best Buy. Also, don’t ever talk to the employees there unless you are trying to trick them into giving you a deal on a TV.

But I really, really wanted that Panda.

My friend Juls had managed to get his copy of the CE, thousands of miles away in Florida. We met up (in the game) and he had the panda and it was awesome. I spent about 40 hours on a Dwarf Priest in those early days, not having any idea how to play, panda-less, newly married, and I quit that January (only paid for one month after the free month). I didn’t have any fun, really. I got to level 19. Was this because I was a dwarf priest, or because, deep down, I knew that I could never have a panda?

So Metal Gear Solid 4 is coming out in 3 weeks and I’m more excited for it than I’ve been for a game in a long time. Seriously I’m frothing like a thousand blue planets here. This might just be residual excitement*. It also might be my very real fascination with a possibly perfect ending to the series**. I’m not sure, but in honor of it, I’m playing lots and lots of metal gear. I’m about to finish off Snake Eater, which I’ve been playing on Very Easy so that I can really mess with people. I bought a copy of VR Missions on ebay because it’s apparently one of the best puzzle games ever made. I’m finally going to open up that copy of Portable Ops to give it a try… Anyway, Metal Gear. Or should I say “Metal… Gear?”

* For the record, the game that I was the most excited for pre-release (of all games ever made) was Metal Gear Solid 2, a game where I watched the trailer probably hundreds of times over the course of the way-too-long wait.

** In the first trailer for MGS4, there’s a section where Snake puts a gun in his mouth. I’m hoping the game ends with him doing that, and then a hint appears at the bottom of the screen “Press X to Kill Yourself!”

It is without question my favorite Zelda game, and probably my favorite Nintendo game. I was thinking about it because the guys at selectbutton were talking about it (again), and I was particularly moved by this post:

There’s something impulsive and wilfully, blithely destructive about Link’s actions in LA. He is just going around destroying the world brick by brick, he knows he is doing this because every dungeon boss says so, but he ignores them completely. While the townspeople treat him as a nice fellow and are completely oblivious of what he is doing to them, and Link doesn’t bother to explain.

This being in part Link’s dream as well, it is natural for him to keep going through the motions of his day-to-day waking life. Beating up monsters, solving block puzzles, finding the entrance to the next dungeon. But the usual positive consequences don’t follow.

Like Shadow of the Colossus, LA exploits the player’s compulsion/obligation to keep completing the gamey tasks to achieve something bittersweet and morally ambiguous.

All this perhaps has something to do with why although LA is thick with calculated gamey bullshit, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much as in modern Zeldas. Likely in part inadvertently, the game integrates the gaminess into its theme. Remember the scene where you are sitting alongside Marin on the beach, gazing into the distance? Instead of a bright blue sky and sea, there is the dull gray of the GB. Marin talks from her heart but you can only answer with either yes or no. When you finish the conversation and she offers to accompany you, you lift Marin above your head like a sword or hookshot and a text box says “you got a Marin!”. Somehow none of this really undermines the poignancy of the scene though, rather it contributes to its unreal, dreamlike aspect.

Persona 4!

That’s right! Another Persona game is going to drop… someday. Persona being my favorite game series in which I have never had any fun playing, this is some really exciting news!

Check out more scans here.

It’s been hyped since it took IGF 2006 by storm and it sort of disappears for a while and them comes back and people are all like “hey it’s Braid again” and it still isn’t out. It’s really incredible that a six level platformer game can take years and years to make, but through it all the game always looks better. When I first learned of it, the team had yet to contain David Hellman, the man who made the game truly beautiful. It comes out for Xbox Live Arcade soon, probably in about a month I guess, and you should absolutely buy it when it comes out.

I went and nabbed some full resolution screenshots of this thing. Every last screenshot of this game feels like an individual painting, and, well, it is. At times I find them ugly but then I find them wondrous again, which to me is a real mark of success, as it spills over into how the game plays as well. This is a game where the designer has tried to make you examine what a platformer videogame really is. And, I feel, you’ll have no choice but to pay attention while playing Braid.

This is the most atmospheric game I have ever played. Astute readers of my blog will recall that this was one of my favorite games of 2007, and to be honest, it’s probably one of my favorite games of all time. And it’s absolutely free over at Nifflas’ site. You should play everything this guy has made, but Knytt Stories was the first game from Nifflas that I feel gets it so right it borders on wrong (even when compared to the original Knytt, on which this expansion game is based). I’ve never felt so relaxed and tense at the same time. Even now, six months after I first played the game, the music calms me down and the gameplay cheers me up.

Also, there’s a level editor, and people have made some wonderful things using this very simple but very potent game. Here’s what I’m talking about.

Watch as much as you can. At about 2 minutes in I started downloading the latest XNA stuff. I mean, I’d seen the teaser trailer before. But now it looks like an actual video game.

So I’m getting hit pretty hard by The Taxman’s stronger hand, but that hasn’t stopped me from checking out some recent releases! Let’s see:

Devil May Cry 4
Rented this one for PS3 (they were out of 360 copies, but that’s cool because I liked the controls in the PS3 version better anyway). It’s probably the most approachable Devil May Cry game, but it kind of sucks that the humor of 3 has been mostly toned down (at least up to where I left off, Mission 14). Still, an extremely well-balanced high-speed combo-em-up that feels about as right as you could want. If you’re on a budget or aren’t sure that Devil May Cry is your thing, pick up the Special Edition of 3 and a copy of God Hand (you’ll have to track it down, sadly), both of which are better games than Devil May Cry 4. It’s really a pretty good game, though!

Audiosurf
Bought this on Steam for the low-low price of $8.95. It’s a weird combination of F-Zero, Amplitude, and Puyo Puyo. I like that I can feed it any music that I have sitting around, but I’ve found that the levels don’t match up as much as I would like (especially for music where beat detection is rather difficult). Still, it’s an OK game that has leaderboards for every song that you play, and I’ll probably boot it up from time to time at work while I’m waiting for a build or whatever.

Professor Layton and The Curious Village
Picked this one up for Jess and from what I’ve seen it’s a pretty good riddle game. Definitely the kind of game I want my kids to play! It’s smart and endearing and not insulting. It’s also good exercise!

Lost Odyssey
I rented this game mostly to prevent myself from being foolish and buying it, wholly expecting it to be kind of a not-good money-waste-em-up. Well, it turns out I really, really like it! It’s an extra-traditional RPG with a pretty good story and the best music the genre’s heard in years. I’m currently 7 hours in and so far, it’s made me want to keep playing. Also, the bossfights are megafuck hard, which is really welcome to be honest! You also cannot grind to become more powerful, which means that you have to employ new strategy and tactics in order to win every single bossfight! Also, the game makes you sit down and read short stories from time to time, which while uncomfortable, is a ballsy move that makes me respect the Gooch more than I thought I would given his ancient ways. Still, This and Blue Dragon have shown me that I really want Mistwalker to just destroy Square and merge with Enix already.

Burnout Paradise
I finally played one race in this game and then tore it from my 360, cursing its name, and the names of its children, and its children’s children’s children. Seriously. Way to completely miss the point, guys.

Other than that I’ve been playing Super Robot Wars W on my DS and maybe a little Mutant League Football on my Genesis or PSP maybe maybe. Maybe?

Reminder! This comes out February 10th in the US! I played the Japanese version and it’s a really good game! Don’t buy it at Gamestop (they’re charging $34.95 when everywhere else is charging $29.99)! It’s an adventure game! It’s a puzzle game! It’s made by Level 5! Here’s a trailer!

Between this, Super Robot Wars W (which I just got in the mail, hurray), and Shiren the Wanderer DS, I should be spending way more minutes of my life with my Nintendo Handheld than I have been recently. Exciting!

Got it this morning using the 800 points remaining on my 360 account. Now I’m at 0 points, so I should never buy anything on XBLA again (since this is the first time I’ve been at 0 points since launch, since games never cost the same thing as the amount of points you can buy). Anyway!

I’m assuming you guys know about the Rez Trance Vibrator (google it) (don’t google it). Well it’s back and WAY BETTER! Now you can hook up 3 extra 360 controllers and set them all to be vibration only feedback devices. I placed them all over my body and rocked out to the first level today; I can’t wait to EXPERIENCE the whole game this way.

Jack and I each picked up copies of Guilty Gear X2 #Reload or whatever for Xbox because we found them in a store. I also have Juls’ copy here, so I’ll give that back to him. Anyway, this game still works on Xbox Live, so we should all play it and stuff. Oh yeah, and I got sick at the end of last week, and some of the reviews I was writing for my Top 10 were pretty awful and confusing. Expect more soon, I guess.

Jack and I played the demo for this game quite a bit last night:

It’s a really good game, and were it being released in the US this year, it would have made my list. It’s called “yuusha no kuse ni namaikida” if you can’t read fixed-width japanese, with English translations ranging from “Cheeky, Despite the Hero” to “They’re Audacious Even For Warriors.” I don’t want to talk about it too much, but if you want to play it, and are one of the people that I can’t loan a PSP to, google it, play it, enjoy yourself.

As of tonight I have earned exactly 6000 gamerpoints. And I haven’t finished that one game I’m working on finishing which will most likely make it into my top 10 but now I have to make tough decisions again and you could always spoil it for yourselves and see what I’ve been doing through my gamercard.

So. No matter what I say in the next few days. You have to buy the Orange Box. And if you don’t want to play it on a PC, the 360 version is really well done (other than a Microsoft violation involving their press start screen and the Guitar Hero II guitar) (also, the 360 version has prettied up versions of Half-Life 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode One, while the PC version only got re-releases). If you saw the Half-Life 2 demo video in the summer of 2003 and you saw something there, something that you didn’t think you’d ever see. Something in the way that floating a mattress in water was different from floating some pieces wood. You owe it to yourself to play through the game again. And you more than owe it to yourself to play through the Episodes. Just fucking do it already.

And as soon as I’m done here, I’m going to run through Gears of War, probably multiple times, because I want to see where it stands. While I love the game, and I decry it as the best game on the Xbox 360, I never played through it. I don’t even think I played past the second chapter. But now I have to. It’s a personal mission. So if you have Live, let’s get our co-op on. It’s time, my brothers.

I was pretty certain that my top 10 games were rock solid by this point, but I decided to try out ONE MORE GAME just in case it was WORTHY. So far, it looks like it might be. I’ve written my reviews for the other 10, too, I just can’t justify saying “this is what I liked” when there now my be ANOTHER, at least not until I finished it off. Which, by the way, will happen either tonight or tomorrow night. So, bear with me.

Some people are probably writing a “Worst of 2007″ list or similar, but this is probably an impossible task. While I admit, it’s hard to play every good game in a year, it’s undoubtedly MUCH harder to play every bad one. The ratio of filler to quality is astonishing on store shelves, and sometimes games end up moving from the latter to the former before they ship. Some ideas just sound like, sure, that could be fun, and then MAN do they screw it up somehow. Arguably, the BEST games in a given year are the ones that completely surpass our expectations (but, well, I’ll be writing about that starting tomorrow). The games listed here are the WORST, though. I was pretty excited about all of these only to have my heart BROKEN.

Rogue Galaxy
This game came out almost a year ago? Man, I swear it was just YESTERDAY that I took down my Rogue Galaxy pre-launch wallpaper on my PC after having been bored by this game’s numerous failures. Level5, the developers of this game, as well as Dark Cloud 2 and Dragon Quest VIII, games that I rather like, tried to make a space odyssey. This is not the only space odyssey that disappointed me this year! It seems so strange though; like, how do you mess something like this up? You’re allowed to employ endless creativity, you can have a big or small story, and you just have to keep the audience AWAKE. However! This game, like SPOILER ALERT Mass Effect below are some of the most yawn inducing, lifeless games I played all year. There’s no emotion or connection to the bland templated characters (Mass Effect has ONE good character, FINE), you have no idea what you’re supposed to be doing, and in this game, at least, the combat was unforgiving and sometimes downright RUDE. There are two screenshots of this game that are LIES. One of them is a character reaching out to the stars trying to touch them, swallowed in the vastness of the universe. The other is of a wooden pirate ship flying out over a gorgeous jungle planet. This game did not immediately present me with this sense of wonder, and quite frankly, I kept getting lost and pissed off. I might try it again in 2008 if nothing good comes out for a while.

Heavenly Sword and Motorstorm and the PS3 until October 23
Man, talk about premature launch, huh? The PS3 didn’t get a good game until October 23, nearly a year after the system launched. When Ratchet and Clank came out, I exclaimed:

What the-? This High Def PS2 I have can play games that look like 360 games?

Because seriously, man, what a terrible year this system had. If a steady stream of quality releases continues (pro-tip: it probably will ebb and flow, but it’s still pretty desperate out there), and if they come up with some reason for me to buy the PS3 version of multi-platform games (bro-tip: they probably won’t because I crave achievement points), they might actually come close to being able to beat out low-tier game systems like the V-Smile and Tiger handhelds. But man. Fucking Motorstorm. And Ninja Theory’s Heavenly Sword (a game that wanted to be Japanese so bad, they even made imitation anime!). Man, Warhawk. And LAIR (guitar wailing in sadness). All those games that people thought would make the PS3 viable, only for them to be worse with each passing release. And here we are, a year in, and there are two honest to God GREAT games on the system (pro-tip: at least one of them appears in my top 10). I just feel sorry for these guys right now.

Assassin’s Creed
Thank God I started renting games. I frothed for this game pretty hard when I saw the first trailer. I even saw the sci-fi dual plot thing right away. But MAN. These guys created a really, really good climbing engine, and then… well… that’s pretty much all there is. Well, there’s that and the really slow-paced unnecessary cutscenes in both the past and the present (these are “Forced Walking in Gears of War” moments). And the Copy/Paste/Rotate of the multiple city designs in the game. Oh, and the Da Vinci Code twist at the end. Man… For a game where freedom of choice was such a big deal, they just took so much away from the player most of the time that it’s kind of crippling. Even the climbing often resulted in a failed jump or the same “I can’t jump on that” animation. Also, more like “Assassins’ Creed.” I thought the high profile failures ended here, though…

Mass Effect
“Thank God I started renting games.” I actually bought this game before I saw that Blockbuster had it (and returning it was the best decision I made with games this year). I was really looking forward to it until I saw some of the footage of the developers on some SciFi channel thing. Bioware’s illusion of choice ends up being use to great effect, it seems! HEY REMEMBER THAT PART WHERE I PUNCHED THAT GUY NO WAY I DIDN’T PUNCH THAT GUY. Jack and I watched this part of this interview, which was maybe 30 seconds in, and we turned it off, and refused to watch the rest. I still had hope that this could be a great game, if a little misunderstood. How about that one part, like 3 hours in, where some guy says “there are three important missions for you to take, one of them requires you travel to one of these sixteen planets to find some girl” and then you have to literally go to multiple planets, drive the stupid Batmobile thing for as long as you want, and then try and find this girl DEEP UNDERGROUND (bro-tip: use gamefaqs or something); I guess if you had the patience to talk to every person on every other planet you might have at least been pointed in the right direction. Here’s the run-down: Oblivion did the whole choice thing better, KotOR did Star Wars better, Uncharted did cutscenes better (SO MUCH BETTER), and Gears of War did the shooting parts of this game better. It’s kind of astonishing how bad the RPG screens are in this game, but even more astonishing is the reviews this game is getting… This is from the same group of people that thought KotOR 2 was an unfinished mess, and this game is FAR worse than that. Try driving the stupid Batmobile thing for a little while, and you’ll know what I mean. If you enjoy being lost all the time, and you really want to watch a Starship Troopers TV series dubbed into French and then back into English, you’ll really like this game.

Silent Hill: The Arcade
Granted, I was only excited for the game for about 15 minutes (the time between when I first saw signs advertising it and when I first got to play it in an arcade), it’s just one of the most miserable gaming experiences of my life. Tim Rogers and I stumbled into the machine in the arcade, wondering what a Survival Horror rail shooter would play like… It’s actually pretty simple. You take the parts of House of the Dead that were fun, and then you throw in boss battles where you cannot avoid taking damage (I don’t mean you might not avoid it, I mean there is no gameplay mechanic allowing you to avoid it), and you get the idea. You just have to keep putting money in to see the game. I wish I’d put my quarters into that Half-Life 2 arcade shooter instead.