SurvivalWhore - Blogs

PAX 2010 Report Part 2: Everything Else

Phasmaphobic — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 20:07:29 GMT

PAX 2010 Report Part 1: Video Gaming

Phasmaphobic — Tue, 21 Sep 2010 22:33:50 GMT

Here's a link to my full article on my real, personal blog

PAX 2010

VeiraVX — Mon, 06 Sep 2010 08:30:00 GMT

In an attempt to keep this readable, I've broken it up into sections by game demo. I missed most of the convention Friday, and all of Sunday, so I don't have a whole lot to write about. At some point I'll update this with more pictures, once I get them from those that brought cameras. I'm tired. Really tired. I'm even more braindead than usual, so my thoughts are pretty disorganized.

SPOILER WARNING: I'll put anything major behind a spoiler tag, but if you're a stickler for spoilers, you probably shouldn't read the Dragon Age 2 section.

DRAGON AGE 2

Before playing the demo, twenty of us were herded into a room with chairs and a big screen, where we were given a short speech about the various ways in which DA2 is going to be new and improved. There was no new info there; they basically just talked about how it's going to be more actiony, along with reassurances that they're not screwing everything up. They showed us an extended version of the "destiny" trailer, then it was demo playing time.

The PAX demo included two new things: the rogue class and default fem!Hawke. I'm trying to think of who fem Hawke looks like, but I can't put my finger on it. I want to say the singer from Elastica, but that's not right. In any case, she's damned cute. However, I'm not sure how I feel about her voice. Maybe it'll grow on me, but she sounded rather stuffy. Then again, this might just be the post-con crankiness talking.

I tried out the rogue class, since it was new & shiny & all that. However, I wound up playing as Hawke's sister Bethany for most of it in order to test out the mage class. Phasmaphobic & SaintValtiel might not have liked her, but I have a peculiar fondness for mages named Bethany.

The game was definitely fun, but in a lapse of judgment I picked an xbox to play on instead of a playstation. The damned thing crashed & had to be rebooted, meaning I didn't get to play as long as everyone else did. Pout. Although, Phas' PS3 was having all sorts of issues, so maybe it didn't matter.

Spoiler: cut for spoilers describing the first ~15 minutes of the game. most is info that's already out there, but there are some spoilers about the Hawke family.

It wasn't so much a demo as it was the first fifteen minutes of the game. It starts off with a movie in the same style as the intros to Origins & Awakening, summarizing the events of the Blight, narrated by someone who's probably Very Important. I wish I could remember more of what it said (specifically, if it talked at all about Alistair/Anora ruling at the end), but I was distracted by futzing with the volume on the headset, and I have the memory of a goldfish. I'm not joking: I made a mental note to remember default Hawke's first name, and it's already gone. For whatever reason, what stood out to me the most was the sad drawing of Cailan and the rather unflattering drawing of Loghain.

After the intro movie, the game begins with the Hawke sisters fighting a big mob of darkspawn, after which it cuts to a dwarf dude named Varric & a templar chick named Cassandra arguing about how the story "really" went. Cassandra has some intensely crazy eyes and some intensely awesome armor. Her voice sounded really familiar, but I couldn't hear enough to place it. Anyway, the Chantry somehow screwed up big time and the world is on the brink of war, so Cassandra is trying to find out everything Varric knows about Hawke since "the champion" was in the midst of whatever-it-was when it happened. Why does knowing about Hawke help anything? No clue. I'm guessing it will make sense later.

Since I didn't get as far as everyone else, most of the following info was gleaned from friends and by peeping on the guy playing next to me. After Cassandra convinces Varric to keep telling the story, he starts over from the beginning, when the Hawke family is running from Lothering. Apparently bro-Hawke dies about five minutes later, and my guess is that mama Hawke isn't long for the world either, given that superheroes aren't usually allowed to have families (it's just not as angsty if they have loving families, and as everyone knows, superheroes' abilities are powered by angst). Daddy Hawke was neither present nor mentioned, to the best of my knowledge. A templar shows up and - much to my dismay - has a wife with him. Since when can templars marry? I call malarkey. Anyway, the templar picks a fight with Bethany about being an apostate, and... that's about all I know, but I'm hoping it ends with a very stern spanking.

Lead writer David Gaider was there, but we didn't have a chance to talk to him, or any of the staff for that matter. They were very down-to-business about getting people in & out of there. I suppose we could have harassed him instead of playing, but I was pretty rabid about getting my hands on that demo, and I'm not sure what I'd say to him anyway. Neither "hey, good job" nor "Cullen's not creepy!" seemed worth missing out on playing.

As I mentioned before, Phas had a lot of problems with his game. Apparently it was glitchy as hell, freezing up & showing error messages & all kinds of badness. Mine was fine, aside from the xbox crapping out at the beginning. The rogue abilities seem pretty cool, from what little I saw; most seemed to be nifty types of dodges and sneak attacks. As for mage abilities, crushing prison was in there (HAPPINESS), along with mind blast, fireball, inferno, and something that I think was called spirit bolt, which seems to be the same thing as arcane bolt. I'm not a fan of fire magic, but I will concede that inferno was rad; instead of creating ambient flames, it summoned a meteor shower. It was quite a novelty to drop fireballs on myself without any friendly fire. I really wanted to ask them if arcane warrior is going to be in the game, because I will cry rivers of sadness if it's not, but as I said, I never got the chance to chat with them. Ah well, I'll just have to wait to find out.

As some of you might have seen on DA's facebook, they were taking photos of people who played the demo. They're doing some kind of randomly selected prize giveaway for people who repost their pictures to their own page. I'll probably do it, because I am a whore for prizes, even though it'll violate my separation of internet fandom and real life policy. Fucking facebook. Grumble grumble. They also collected our email addresses in order to give us some kind of in-game weapon for DA2. Sweet!

Phas & SaintValtiel left the demo a bit more worried than they were before about how the game is going to turn out. Specifically, they're worried that Bioware's changing too many things that don't need changing. I'm on the fence about that particular issue, since I think it's unfair to make a judgment until I have the finished product. It was certainly faster-paced; I didn't have the luxury of watching what other characters were doing while I was nuking darkspawn, and I really wanted to. The cooldown times on spells are much, much shorter, and I never ran out of mana, which is cool. I like the idea of casting a bunch of spells in rapid succession.

It's worth noting that the gameplay is similar enough to DA:O that I didn't have any trouble playing. It's not like when I pick up ME2 after playing ME1 and go "durp durp durp, what's this button do?" The main difference I saw is that it no longer operates on a "press x to watch your dude attack" system, so it's a bit more button mashy. However, it is NOT a button-masher; there is no "press this series of buttons to execute a sweet combo" business (as far as I know, anyway). I suppose if you're playing a fighter it might seem more like that, but it still has you map abilities to hotkeys, just like in DA:O, so you're not going to be playing Dragon Age May Cry. It's fine. Seriously. I enjoyed it. If people want to worry about something, I don't think gameplay should be it.

The cinematics are a bit rough still. As Phas pointed out, the facial animation doesn't quite sync with the voices, though I imagine that's something that's likely to be fine-tuned. The graphics are definitely a step up from DA1, but they still look a few years old. They were very excited about saying how "AWESOME" the graphics are going to look, so I can only assume they have some finishing touches left to do.

When replying to another character, Hawke was given three possible responses from a dialogue wheel, a la Mass Effect. The choices seemed to break down to "nice guy response," "meh... whatever," or "I don't have time for this bullshit." I'm really hoping we get more than three choices.

OK, I think I've probably written enough about Dragon Age 2. On to other stuff.

DEAD SPACE 2

Once again, Dead Space stole the show (at least for me), just as it did at Comic-Con 2008 and PAX 2009. Those guys seriously have their shit together.

Unfortunately, I really, really sucked ass at the demo. It's been a while since I've played Dead Space 1, so I was pretty confuzzled about what button does what. The seats were too close to the tv screens for me, so I was having some trouble with motion sickness type stuff. Regardless, it was awesome. Crazy awesome. Even though they kept having to come over to help me because I was too stupid to figure out the puzzle.

It seems to be the same demo they showed at E3 & Comic-Con this year. Isaac runs around for a bit, gets puked on (I already hate the pukers), then solves a puzzle (I'm told that by the time you reach it in the game, you've had plenty of tutorials and practice, so it won't be as annoying) in order to fly around in zero-G for a bit. Then he kills a bunch of insanely creepy children in a church, which is always good times. Finally, Isaac is attacked through a window by a space-helicopter piloted by the world's worst marksman. He dives through a hole in the floor into the waiting arms of an especially large, cranky necromorph. After a "shoot the yellow spots to win" bit, you're chased down a hallway, periodically having to turn around to stasis the necromorph while you tk open doors. The net effect is a pulse-pounding "SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT," which I'm guessing is exactly what they're going for.

It seemed faster-paced than the first Dead Space, but not in a bad way. There were still sections of wandering down suspiciously empty hallways, wondering when something was going to jump out of nowhere and grab me. Overall, the game looks like a perfect balance between keeping the elements that worked and adding new & improved stuff. The audio still succeeded in spooking me, even with convention racket in the background. It worked out well that we weren't able to hear Extraction last year, since it would have been very spoilery, but having earphones for the DS2 demo was nice.

Every time I've gotten to play a Dead Space demo, I've been impressed by how genuinely enthusiastic the people working the booth are. You can tell those guys really enjoy what they're doing, and they're good to their fans. Several of the people we met last year were there again, including their awesome community manager, Ben, who gave me a super sweet hoodie. Thanks, Ben! If my lazy ass had finished this site on time, I could have taken him up on his offer of setting up some interviews, but... well, maybe that'll still happen someday. Anyway, we showed up in time to get signed posters from the new graphic novel artist, Christopher Shy. The posters are GORGEOUS (seriously, I need a camera, my iphone doesn't do them justice).

We wound up hanging out with him for a bit on Saturday night, which was a surprise treat. It turns out that poster isn't the cover - it's just one frame from the comic. Color me impressed! I know people were bummed to hear that Ben Templesmith won't be doing the new graphic novel (myself included), but Christopher's stuff looks amazing. In addition to the one he's currently working on, there are two more graphic novels planned. He talked for a bit about the Dead Space movie, which is part of the reason they hired him, since he has experience in the film industry. He definitely understands that movies based on video games tend to suck most egregiously, largely because the people who make them ignore the source material and come up with something that only vaguely resembles the game (e.g., Resident Evil). I'm glad to know he's going to be part of the team, keeping them on the right path.

I also chatted for a while with Thomas Holt, the art director for Extraction. SaintValtiel & I built some Dead Space costumes for the con, complete with glowing health bars, and since he hadn't gotten a chance to talk with me at the booth, he hunted me down in order to thank me. Thank me. It completely blew my mind.

All in all, Dead Space 2 is looking fantastic. There were a fuckzillion demos at the convention, and I only got to play a handful, but DS2 was hands-down the best of them. I'm definitely looking forward to January!

DEAD RISING 2

I don't mean this in a bad way, but I honestly can't tell the difference between Dead Rising 1 and 2, aside from one starring Frank West and the other starring ~~Ricky Bobby~~ Chuck Greene. They told us that if we killed 250 zombies in 15 minutes, we'd get a prize, so I spent the whole damned time murderizing like a maniac instead of exploring and trying to combine weapons like I should have. I caught a couple, though, which were truly lol-worthy: one is a vacuum cleaner with circular sawblades attached to the end, while another is a beer hat. I only made it to 190 some-odd zombies, but they gave me a bobblehead anyway. It's pretty cute.

So yeah, if you liked Dead Rising 1, you'll certainly like Dead Rising 2.

RESIDENT EVIL 5

They had a demo of the Playstation Move edition of RE5, which I of course HAD to try out, given my unhealthy love of Resident Wiivil 4. I had some difficulty with the controls, seeing as how I'd never used the Move before, so Chris lost his head to the chainsaw maniac in Shanty Town, to my supreme embarrassment. I kind of wanted to tell the booth guy "I swear, I'm actually good at this game!!! :'( " but I refrained. In any case, you can bet good money that I'll be picking this up when it comes out. After all, there's nothing as great as having a motion controller to aim your gun... and then never, ever using it since you're only doing kniferuns. Hmm.

MARVEL V. CAPCOM 3

I got my ass handed to me so hard that I didn't get to see what my characters could do. At some point I realized that only four of the eight buttons actually did anything. I'm looking forward to playing it on a real controller instead of one of those arcade pads. I have no clue how to work those aside from completely random button-mashing. The gameplay videos I've seen on the internet were much more informative than me trying to bungle my way through a demo.

OK, that's all for now.

I am SO TIRED. Good god. The drive back home was excruciating. I'm glad I didn't fall asleep at the wheel. Here's hoping I didn't catch PAX plague this year!

Lighting Mechanics in Video Games, Tabletop

Phasmaphobic — Thu, 20 May 2010 22:41:14 GMT

Click to be illuminated

Games That Changed My Life #1: Dragon Warrior

Phasmaphobic — Thu, 20 May 2010 18:54:19 GMT

A blog entry draws near!

I would post it here in its entirety, but the conversion from HTML to BBCode is a pain in the ass.

ME2 reaper IFF run

VeiraVX — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 06:59:16 GMT

This post is to yak about some Mass Effect 2 insanity mode videos I recorded. Yes, I am aware of the fact that this has nothing to do with this website. However, it's my blog, so I'll talk about ME2 if I want to. I have another website-related post in the works that will likely be up soon.

REAPER IFF MISSION

Spurred on by discussions with R-Eins and Carpet Diem, I've recorded a run through the Reaper IFF mission on insanity mode. I'm quite irked by Windows Movie Maker making it difficult to add subtitles, but whatever. The run is super sloppy anyway.

GENERAL NOTES

Most of the time, if you see me using a skill on the fly, it's Throw. I only use the other shoulder button for Warp if I'm trying to get at a Scion... I think. Sometimes I get crazy and hit the wrong button. It happens to the best of us.

My sincerest apologies to Garrus and Thane for getting in my way. I love them to pieces, but the fact of the matter is that I'm from the survival horror school in which You Do Everything Yourself. If they drop, it's their fault; I'm not their babysitter, and they can deal with kissing their bruises once I've cleared the way. Sorry. That's just how it is. It's easier to kill shit myself - that's why they pay me the big bucks.

I realize that if I wanted to do a "perfect" run of this, none of the squaddies would drop. However, I have very little free time, and I don't feel like running through this until I get it completely perfect. Additionally, Garrus is kind of stupid and likes to get himself killed. Don't get me wrong - I love the guy - but I have the damnedest time keeping him alive. So why take him along for this mission? I thought having "team sniper rifle" at my back in their spiffy new DLC outfits would be dandy.

Other than that... this run is a bit gimped; I don't have my skills spec'd out the way I would knowing what I do now. Oh well.

Without further ado,

PART ONE

I was kind of asleep for the first part of this. It took a while for the adrenaline to kick in. Yep, I'm slow. Although not as slow as Garrus, apparently. "I THINK WE GOT 'EM ALL!"

I'm a bit baffled by how Garrus drops toward the end there. It looks suspiciously like friendly fire from the tech armor explosion, which is kind of funny. In any case, Garrus always drops during that particular segment, so I'm not sweating it too much. I know it's partially my fault for hitting the "go forward" button. I thought I'd fixed it before unpausing, but nopes.

PART TWO

Not much to say here except an apology for the video splicing hiccup. I didn't record the entire run in one go; I allowed reloads so that I could periodically turn the game off and go do something else. Even intergalactic badasses need to eat dinner.

My favorite part is the fight against the last Scion in this clip. Garrus rushes off to go give it a hug (WTF, seriously), so I had to run out and draw aggro by wildly firing my sniper rifle like a moron. In any case, it was totally worth it to see it drop off the edge of the walkway. It makes me LOL every time.

PART THREE

This is the boring part. Two Scions at once = suck. I approached this very conservatively because I get sick of watching Thane & Garrus get hit by the shockwaves. Losing Thane was a major flub, but oh well, it happens to the best of us.

PART FOUR

This part is a total crapshoot. So, so, so sloppy. I ought to be ashamed of myself.

Honestly, my usual approach to this is to kiss my squadmates goodbye, deal with everything myself, and apologize to them later. This time I made an effort (albeit a minimal one) to keep them alive for the sake of looking better on camera. I don't think it worked. I was just happy to have the damn run finished.

CLOSING NOTES

I realized after doing this whole run that a much more efficient way of dealing with the husks might be to have Shepard using Warp (since Shep's recharge time is much shorter than the squadmates') and have Thane use the area version of Throw once a number of them are de-armored. I haven't tried it out yet, though, so who knows.

The avalanche seems to also de-armor a lot of them at once; knowing this I'd like to re-record the ending segment using it more often, but I'm both busy and lazy so I probably won't.

And yeah... sorry for the insane amount of pausing and micromanaging. That's just the best way to do it on the 360.

Thanks for watching!

I'm Commander Shepard, and this is my favorite site on the internet.

VeiraVX — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 22:51:31 GMT

Yep, another Mass Effect reference as a blog title. I do realize this is supposed to be a survival horror site, so there is actually a reason for that.

Some of you who keep up with my ~~dreadfully boring~~ scintillating personal life know that I'm sick all the f'in time. [insert quarian joke here] It's been a lot worse than usual lately, so I haven't been able to do much other than feel sorry for myself and play Mass Effect 2. As such, I've run through the game a few times already and am settling into my usual video game M.O.: speedrunning and gameplay mechanic geekery.

I've spent a decent amount of this afternoon reading the ME2 speedrun thread over at speeddemosarchive.com, one of my favorite (although not often visited) sites. Speedrunners are some of the most clever people. The stuff those guys come up with blows my mind sometimes. For example, this:

BRILLIANT.

Reading over people's clever tricks for ME2 reminded me of why I started this site in the first place: an attempt to compile as much technical info on my favorite games as I could. Tips, tricks, glitches, gameplay mechanics, stats & strats, so on & so forth. I love that stuff, but it's hard to find it without slogging through uber-long forum threads.

There's quite a bit of irony in my current roadblock with this site's development. My initially begrudging involvement in video game website administration (helping out at devils-lair.org started as a personal favor to the webmistress when she needed someone to babysit the place for a few weeks) led to genuine interest in content/community management and the birth of this website. This in turn led to deciding to pursue the field professionally, leading to going back to school to become better at it, leading to becoming worse at actually doing it on account of having no free time. Sadly, being too sick to be productive includes being too sick to work on the site. I need my brain for that, and currently, the lights are on but nobody's home.

I don't actually have a site update for you today; I'm sorry. I just felt like rambling for a bit.

On a closing note, despite the fact Mass Effect has been doing a very effective job of stealing my heart away from Resident Evil over the last few months, and as intriguing as I find the notion of some kind of quasi-rigorous comparison of biotic combos, the thought of doing any kind of walkthrough or comprehensive guide for it makes me want to cry on the inside. Fear not, this place is staying a survival horror site. The awesomeness of the newly released RE5 Lost in Nightmares is encouraging, not only because it reminds me how much I enjoy Resident Evil games, but because it suggests Capcom might finally be getting it (big, giant knock on wood). And let's not forget Dead Space 2 coming out sometime this year. Yep, there's plenty of love left here.

Just don't bite my head off if you see thirty Mass Effect 2 threads pop up over the next month or two.

Because I'm a big, stupid jellyfish.

VeiraVX — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 12:00:45 GMT

Wowee, was I wrong about getting Dead Space Extraction screenshots or anything at all for Darkside Chronicles up, or what?! Sorry about that. Truth be told, I haven't even finished DSC; that's how unimpressed with it I was. I keep meaning to give it another chance, since my opinion of it was heavily biased by my temporary addiction to Dragon Age, but you know how it goes - too many games, too little time.

I imagine people are wondering if this site is ever going to get finished. Sometimes I wonder that too. We've lost a few staff members over the last few months, and most others have gone on hiatus until such time as I get my ass in gear and start pestering them again.

I'm really hoping to resume work on the site soon, at least on my end. I have a new plan of attack that I think will go faster and more efficiently. R-Eins has given me a whole ton of stuff that needs to be converted into website form, so it's not like we're lacking for material. I got so focused on skinning the site that I put content development on the backburner; I now believe it should be the opposite. I can always pretty things up at a later date, but in the meantime, we're essentially sitting on the server like a lump on a log, full of resources that people could be using if only they were organized.

As always, school is devouring most of my time. Interestingly enough, I'm doing two research projects this semester, both videogame-related. Maybe someday I can convince a prof to let me use this site as a project, and then I'll have no excuse not to finish this puppy up.

Alright, enough rambling. I felt like I ought to update this, though there isn't really much to say. As always, thanks to the forumers for keeping this place going. You guys rock my socks. Except for those damn spammers. I'll never understand why people do that. I mean, really - why take the time to create account after account and spam a tiny forum when you could be playing Mass Effect? It's beyond my comprehension.

of lamp post licking and delays

VeiraVX — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:15:34 GMT

I apologize for the lack of updates around here. There are several reasons for this:

1) School. After a five year vacation, I'm back at it, and it's eating way more of my free time than I anticipated. On the bright side, I'm learning things that will make website development go a lot faster once I finally have enough time to sit down and get back to it.

2) Being sick for most of the last 2+ months.

3) I'm not going to lie - Dragon Age.

Anyhoo, just FYI, we haven't forgotten about the site, nor has it been abandoned!

Once I get some free time, I need to get back to work on what I was last working on: layout and CSS. I also really want to get a bunch of screens from Dead Space Extraction (which is fantastic, by the way), since the last time I checked, I couldn't find any anywhere. I'll be using the forum to post any important tips/info/secrets/etc I find in Darkside Chronicles, as should you! It'll be a while before there's an actual page for it, so in the meantime, the forum is a good spot for compiling info.

Alright, back to work I go. Boo, hiss.

Wanted: Weapons of Fate - Some Quick Words

Phasmaphobic — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:41:50 GMT

Last night I finished a full play-through of Wanted: Weapons of Fate on the Xbox 360. It's a third-person shooter based off the action movie Wanted, which was in turn very loosely based off the comic series of the same name.

This game got a lot of bad press when it came out, but I enjoyed it. In fact, it is from my own enjoyment that I believe I can actually understand why a lot of reviewers didn't appreciate it. W:WoF was billed and advertised as a third-person shooter, but in actuality it played more like a hybrid of a 3PS and a Rail Shooter, with a strong leaning toward the latter. It had extremely linear stages and few variations of game play outside of "Get behind cover, shoot some enemies to power up, dash to different cover, then space-bend some bullets around a wall and kill more enemies." Occasionally there would be a knife-guy who ran up and made you press a button really fast, and some "interactive cutscenes" in which you had a limited time to shoot a few bad guys and bullets out of the air.

For a third-person shooter, this style of game play would normally be considered boring and repetitive, but from the viewpoint of a rail-shooter fan, this was a good step in the right direction towards making rail shooters feel a lot less like... well, like rail shooters. I think I put maybe 4 or 5 total hours into beating this game on Normal mode, and that including a bit of back-tracking to root out as many hidden items and unlockables as I could find.

If you don't like rail shooters, you probably won't like this one. however, if you do like rail shooters, and you think you'd be up for trying one with a lot more control and versatility, then check this one out. My final verdict: Rent It - you'll probably finish it in one or two sittings, tops, but you'll enjoy the ride to the end.