KidDynamo04

Incidently, if you've never played a Room Escape game before, here's a free, fun one:

http://terminalhouse.com/guesthouse_en.html

If there's a genre of game that the mainstream press seems to completely ignore, it's the Room Escape genre.

I write this because I just finised The Room 2 on iOS. It's not as good as The Room, but it's still a very, very fun game.

Room Escape games are basically an offshoot of the Adventure Game genre. Typically the games take place in first person and have you taking up the role of an anonymous individual stricken by amnesia. You are sealed in room that features no immediate way out. The only way out is to explore your environment and solve puzzles inside the room to make a way out for yourself. The reason why this is similar to adventure games, but different, is that no puzzles are solved through dialog options, and everything you need to solve the puzzles is contained in room you are in.

The first Room Escape game I remember playing was Normality, a PC game put out by Gremlin Interactive in the mid-ninties. I'm sure there are more high profile REGs out there, but most of the ones I've played tend to be Indie games available for free on the web. It also seems to be a popular genre on iOS, but those games, aside from the room, are of dubious quality.

Is anybody else a fan of the Room Escape genre? Anybody know of any good, modern ones aside from The Room?

That was the weirdest time, because it was around then that they were doing this absoltutely amazing E3 coverage. They had gotten the live stage down to science and for the first time I felt like I was really experiencing E3 and not just reading about it months later in a trade magazine. On the Spot was perfect, and I remember literally thinking "this is perfect. LIke, they could not do this any better." and then, like, the next week they all started to leave.

I haven't gone back to gamespot since then, but I wonder if it ever reached those heights ever again. To be perfeclty honest, while Giant Bomb puts out MORE entertaining content that Gamespot did in those days, I don't think it's ever reached quite the same level of fun. Probably because there are fewer people who are older and have more responsibilities.

Incidently, do you remember, by any chance, some weird video thing where Bryan Eckberg was taunting someone about fighting games? I can't even remember what it was a part of (probably on-the-spot) but he kept taunting the person with videogame titles. He was like "It's time see who's the best Street Fighter in Mortal Kombat! We're going to see who's the best Virtua Fighter! I'm going to test the Calibur of your Soul! ... uh ... Tekken." It was honestly one of the most hilarious things I've ever seen in my life and nobody I know would have any idea what I was talking about were I to try to describe it to them. I think about that in my head and laugh about it pretty frequently.

I personally don't feel like Nintendo games are ever as good as people make them out to be, these days. I mean, don't get me wrong, I LOVE Nintendo's history and legacy, but even the games they've put out recently that I like feel like they are made for children.

And I don't mean graphics or subject matter, I mean puzzles that outright tell you how to solve them, brain dead combat, and simplistic game designs. I think I got fed up with them when my brother and I were playing Double Dash on the GC, which was FANTASTIC coop, and we beat the entire game in about 3 hours. The entire thing. Everything that could be done in the game, we did. It felt like there needed to be like 2 more difficulty levels above the hardest thing they were offering.

If Nintendo wants my money again, they need to readjust their "games are for everybody" ethos. "Games are for everybody" shouldn't mean "Games are for the lowest common denominator." I'm not even asking for that much. Just add in an option on the options screen for stuff like "killing an enemy in Zelda doesn't give you all your health back in hearts all the time", or "computer assist in mario kart doesn't make it so none of the laps matter but the last one", or "turn off the dialog in Zelda that tells me exactly where to go and exactly what to do".

If Jeff is to be believed, that was very much the climate at Gamespot when he left. He mentioned on a few podcast, most specifically the one after Ryan passed, how there were a few people wanting to do a standard videogame hard news site and then the lunatics like Ryan, Jeff, Carrie, Rorie, Vinny, Brad and Rich who wanted to make weird cartoons and short web films and stuff.

I'm one of those people who have followed the careers of the staff at Giant Bomb for like a decade now. I left gamespot when Jeff got fired (which apparently I wasn't supposed to do. Whoops.) and followed them on to blogs, then to How To Build A Bomb and finally to Giant Bomb. One impression I always got of the guys on the staff, though, was that they never seemed too into the users of the site. The users were just... users. It was subtle things that made me feel that way. The way they answered questions at Pax Panels, the way they never really interacted with the boards, the way they answered emails, etc.

As 2013 went on, it felt like things started to change. Or, at least, I felt like things were changing. Culminating with Ryan's passing, I felt like the giant bomb "community" became much more of a thing. It seemed like the staff on the site tended to talk more about the community and make direct references to things happening on the boards. At one point someone, either Rorie or Patrick or both, made a comment that "Now I have no doubt that internet friends are real friends." That really seemed to resonate with me as the big turning point. Things like the Mailbag seemed much more interested in showing the staff's interaction with the community and the community's love for the staff. It seems like community cartoons, artwork, songs, and other ideas became more of a thing.

I say this just to say that the Giant Bomb community feels like a driving factor behind the site, now, which is interesting and cool. If the whole staff decided to take a break for a month, I feel like the community would still be churning up enough content to make the site worth visiting every day.

Anyhow, I was just wondering if anyone else noticed this. Hopefully 2014 will take the site to even bigger heights.

My Old Game Of 2014 Award goes to...

NFL Blitz (PS3)

This Christmas I spent the week with my brothers at my parents house. We played a TON of NFL Blitz. That game... MAN.

I've never really been a huge fan of previous Blitz games. I would play them, but I never loved the over the top violence and whatnot. It and other "arcade" sports games don't really feel anything like arcade game versions of the sports they are representing and instead feel like parodies (Which can be fun, but we lost the genre of simple-but-deep sports games that used to exist). Blitz (Do to the insistance of the NFL, if I remember correctly) dials down the absurd nature the Blitz series was famous for and instead doubles down on depth. Maybe I just haven't spent as much time with the series as I could have, but this game feels more deep than previous games have. I felt like I could really play a defensive game, where in previous games defense was just basically waiting to be on offense again.

The biggest plus about the game, which can't be stated enough in comparison to other modern games, is that the interface is lighting quick. You turn on the game, hit about two or three menu screens and then you are on the field. IT'S AMAZING. Contrast that to something like Little Big Planet Karting we fired up thinking it was going to be like Mario Kart. About 15-20 minutes into the game we just turned it off because we STILL weren't playing anything.

If you're looking for a game to have that "Windjammers" experience with, and you haven't given this version of Blitz a try... CRAP. Pick this thing up immediately. It's so much fun and I don't think it got enough attention when ti released even though it scored very well. I would never have given it a second look if not for Playstation Plus.

I ironically, my brothers and I were just watching the FFXV trailer two nights ago and the general consensus was that it was completely impossible to tell what was going on and what the players involvement in the action was supposed to be. Or even COULD be.

I'm saying 15 years ago, something like "Final Fantasy 15" or "super Mario brothers 12" was a literal joke because the idea of anything having 14 sequels was insane. You would see it in the Simpsons and stuff. Who in the world would want that many sequels of Anything? And ask yourself now, do YOU, really?

About 3 days after I bought it, I wanted to sell my PS4 and buy an Xbox. There is literally nothing interesting about the PS4 right now outside of Resogun. I haven't even hooked mine back up after taking it tomy parents for thanksgiving.