Mr_Spinnington

@XII_Sniper said:

Nah, that would just be spreading the content, and then I would have to visit youtube, which is not a pleasant experience anymore. Giantbomb's video player is waaaaaaay better than youtube's, so there's no need to leave the site.

core content shouldn't ever be outsourced, but i don't see any reason for intern content to be hosted on the GB youtube account

today i rented Shadows of the Damned:

now that i've gotten to spend a couple of hours with it, this game is pretty fuckin fly. it even taught me to swear a goddamn lot, so egg on the faces of those pundits who claim that video games can't teach people things

my review for Trenched is also up, so you can have another writeup to pale in importance to whatever the industry heavyweights have to say. verdict on that game is to buy and love it-- oh son of a bitch i just spoiled the fucking review

thanks to Shinji Mikami and Suda51 teaming up for a game, Shadows of the Damned hit my radar this week. there's a freaking trifecta - in fact - of talent here thanks to the involvement of Silent Hill sound director Akira Yamaoka taking helm of the game's audio atmosphere. well, those dudes along with a whirlwind of chatter on twitter, that is. you know you're into games something fierce when there are developer names who you recognize and follow, as if they're a decades-old movie director. be that as it may, they sold me on checking this one out, and i'm very impressed at the time. i draw a lot of comparisons to Resident Evil 4 when taking this game for a spin, as it plays like a more refined and action-oriented RE title

it also makes me hate myself even more for playing RE5 now, because this handles a lot like what RE5 should have. Resident Evil may have hit franchise fatigue, though, because it's also worn out its welcome of over-the-top craziness that SotD pulls off really well. it's hard not to draw parallels between SotD and RE4/5, ;f not for Mikami's direction on RE4 and how that changed in RE5, but also because i found out that i really really like having a button to 180 in a game-- something i didn't even realize i missed in shooters

another comparison relevant to SotD seems to be the extremely offensive, gory, and at times juvenile character of the game is against Duke Nukem forever-- if only for the close window of release between the two. i don't think this is a compelling topic, because the games are being evaluated based on far more than their attitude, and that doesn't seem to be part of what is taken into account when comparing their polarized receptions. it was worth mentioning, though

worth talking about moreso, is going into games nice and fresh-- intentional media blackout or not

for Trenched, i knew i would play it eventually due to it being a Double Fine title. while i may love that company, I never messed with Brutal legend, and Stacking wore down on me pretty quick, despite its appealing take on adventure games and unique art direction. if you couldn't tell, a game's style is a pretty big deal to me. don't get me wrong-- without some solid gameplay then you have a shiny-looking turd. that doesn't mean i'll always settle for bare-bones aesthetics or audio, either (unless it's a purposeful stylistic decision). for whatever reason, Stacked just didn't click with me. to round out their downloadable curriculum vitae, i had a good time with Costume Quest, but wasn't crazy about it

Trenched changes a lot of that, as it's the most gamey, and action-oriented game of their to date. that humor is more snuck away in favor of a lot of character, and the world they created hit a lot of the right notes for me

i also went into it knowing pretty much nothing, which meant there was nothing to lose and nothing to gain

as much as i love getting hyped up for games, i tend to have a better experience by taking trusted developer pedigree and word-of-mouth from people i can count on, without exhausting preview material and building fantasies of what could be. an unbiased, fresh experience with no preconceptions of what i 'should' expect have been yielding some fantastic results lately. i walked out of Bayonetta feeling so good because of this, again more recently with Trenched, and am finding another great discovery in Shadows of the Damned

note that these aren't completely blind investments, but are based on knowing what i like and what to expect from a developer or studio, or who to rely on for a quick elevator opinion. try it out sometime

the last third of the game was really well balanced, i think. it shines over the second section which has a lot of growing pains, and has some gorgeous art direction going on

finally an endgame setting that isn't borderline apocalyptic

who wants to go on a car ride:

i just got done talking about game tutorials in my last post. i forgot what games were like when instruction manuals were king-- when you got to learn through trial-and-error, or 'what does this button do' gameplay. i must prefer that rough, tumbled style of teaching oneself to play, because i'd rather let my hands learn than read text that i know my brain isn't committing to memory at the time. Ocarina of Time. that's a segue

video spoilers, i found it. Nintendo tricked me into buying this game as soon as possible, which i would have done anyway, butnow i have the wonderful added worry of ushing back home or to the nearest wifi hotspot to register the game for a free soundtrack. a free, physical, really real CD of Zelda music that i don't have to pay for. there's an expletive here, but i can't put my finger on which one it is

because i'm dog tired from being up forever and teaching my body to forget about caffeine, i'm not totally firing on all cylinders right now. i did want to get a blog up, and may do another one later. there are enough retrospectives and posts on the remaster of OoT to fill everyone's day already, and i don't think i have anything to add to those except that walmart dropped the ball today

you know what, i do have one thing to add: my personal thoughts. they're short. after 30 minutes getting settled into the game, i had a weird.. feeling.. like an emotion. this is the game i would have taken with me to school and played under my desk during class. i would have brought it on road trips, and camped out in the bathroom with it. it's exactly what the phrase 'portable Ocarina of Time' conjures up, and that's good enough for me

hopefully it helps the 3DS install base so that we get some actual new games on it

@Rhaknar said:

jeff does "voices" really well so its not surprising he does a great Duke I love how Brad always loses his shit when Jeff does voices too, cracks me up more than the voices actually :p

seconded, all of it

i had a lengthy blog all typed up and apparently it went into Crazy Nowhere Land after i submitted. because i couldn't hunt it down, i get to just write another one.i here's a video blog:

at this point it seems like Persona 4 is ages away, and for once that's not because we hit a wormhole into June 2008. i'm eking my way towards being able to sit and commit to that game, but just when it seems like there's a clear horizon, L.A. Noire comes out, or inFamous 2 comes out, or review product shows up, or it's E3 2011

speaking of which, i accidentally put thought and effort into my list for the Giant Bomb E3 quest. here it is, "Mr. Spinnington's "lies from E3", but i know you won't click that so i'll nutshell it for you: i'm a Sony fanboy now and Skyrim was dead last because it appeals to me as one of the last normal games

at this point in my original entry, i broke nostalgia and reasoning into dichotomies which defied definition and overlapped at the end

i was arguing with a friend about tutorials in games. she was agonizing over the beginning of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and i had to remind her that in-game tutorials are comonplace now. we only notice them when they sit on our faces for the first 10-30 minutes of a game, but can be invisible teachers when done right. Valve games are a good example. Portal 2 is a game. tutorials essentially murdered the art of instruction manuals, and the consequences of that are debatable

thanks to technology, we have more room than ever on a game disc for content, where back in the day developers were tasked with the strategy of breaking down elements of game instruction and game playing. in-game instruction manuals exist too, and while serving their function they also lose a lot of value. they can't be taken to school in order to help survive the day, or poured over in a bathroom while the illustrations and text whisk us back to the fictional world that we weren't currently in. the question starts to become whether or not game manuals are necessary, or just a thing we loved being able to have as a kid. are they nostalgic

there's a parallel example of technology-versus-tradition in film, which will be in the limelight once peter jackson's The Hobbit hits theaters at 48FPS. you see, theatrical releases are played by default at 24 frames per second, but that may soon change. that 'film' look that we're used to-- the one that still has motion blue, also comes with its flaws-- one of which being the juddery motion that camera pans assault audiences eyes with. the steady tracking doesn't fit a filmy framerate, but the higher we go, that problem starts to disappear. audiences will be challenged with a framerate closer to the home video camera 60FPS, and while this is optimal in games, it can in many people's eyes, cheapen a production-- making it look like a daytime soap opera

but then i hated 60fps when i noticed it in Call of Duty 4. i was at the time used to my Halo, and shooters running at 30fps. i grew used to it, and perhaps taht won't be an issue after a few minutes into the film. video games are still young, however. they're young to the point that we still review them based on technical performance rather than their theory or storytelling. in fact, i thin it says a lot about a game when people mention that it looks gorgeous, forget to keep counting pixels, and focus on the gameplay or identity of a title instead

in any case, in-game tutorials are a very new standardization. Nintendo is aiming their games at an audience of all ages, and may have a more obvious, archaic teaching system so that even walmart customers are clear on how to jump. over time, the tutorial segments in games will become more invisible, but what it leaves behind is the corpse of game manuals. i'm a sucker for video game paraphernalia, and in no time at all will be forced to read new material on the can, rather than revisit the same two paragraphs of backstory between Sonic and Dr. Robotnick whether i like it or not

here i find a can of worms on the subject of new technology and whether it warrants use in every part of our lives that were fine before. do we need to put motion and touch controls into everything? probably not. is it a thing we can do? yes, so we're going to see how much we can integrate that. 3D as a topic in general is a whole other entity i don't want to tackle right now, but i'm the kind of person who sits back and waits for thing to mature before i judge how great of an idea they were. if any of us were graded as a baby, we'd all be fucking failures from the offset

and i didn't even talk about the four other games. that doesn't matter so much as the fact that they're a roadblock

back to work

what is this i love this give me this

i finally finished and wrote my Witcher 2 review
 

can't wait to pay for this garbage

My mom bought me my first Playstation when I was four. She bought Mortal Kombat 2 with it (for a four year old, really?) but I guess it was more for her than me. She performed a fatality on me, scared me shitless. I didn't play games for a year until I was five and I whooped her with Sub Zero.