All right, I have to write about Final Fantasy XIII. I haven’t written anything for quite a while, and my avoiding the arduous task of writing about this game is the single, salient reason why.

I’ve been hard at work on my backlog. I haven’t slacked on my gaming during this dearth of correspondence. Just the opposite, in fact. I’ve beaten FFXIII and Metroid Prime, and I’m nearing the end of Dragon Age: Origins, Infamous, Baldur’s Gate, and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. So I’ve got viewpoints galore to chat about on each of these fronts, but the fact that I need to get out a piece about Final Fantasy XIII has thrown up a mental roadblock for me, and I’m just now trying to chip away at it. Let’s get started, shall we?

First off, I want to get this out of the way: I really enjoyed Final Fantasy XIII. I know that’s not a popular opinion with the vocal internet crowd, but I think it’s a more popular opinion than some among that crowd are willing to admit.

So this is why writing about this game and the way I feel about it is tough to do! I mean, look at that last sentence of that last paragraph. It’s literally DRIPPING with thinly veiled defensiveness. I couldn’t just state that I liked the game and walk away from it; I immediately felt like I had to leap to the game’s defense. It’s like when you have that friend who gets a new boyfriend/girlfriend and this new romantic interest is overtly mean and awful to your friend, but your buddy is like “No he/she is really cool! You just don’t know him/her like I do!” Listen you guys, I know I am that friend. 

Despite my best intentions of not wanting to simply write a defensive counter-argument style piece when talking about this game, using the complaints leveled at Final Fantasy XIII as a jumping off point seems to be an ideal place to start in dissecting why I think Square Enix both succeeded and failed with this entry in the franchise. All of this precursory text is meant to basically dispel the idea that I’m just trolling people who don’t like the game. That being said, please know that if you disagree with me you are stupid (JOKING!). Onward to the discussion!

Also: SPOILERS! You have been warned.

Before I launch into my address of complaints, let’s talk about what worked really well for this game.

First and foremost, let’s just get the graphics gushing out of the way: the game is stunningly beautiful. SquareEnix may fail on some fronts, but they did not skimp on delivering the eye-candy. You can’t fault them there.

Secondly, the battle engine was a really interesting distillation of the menu based systems of yore. The system took the basic RPG battle types, and rather than creating a myriad of jobs that were merely fanciful gradations of these types, they just called a spade a spade and went with the six. Many people didn’t like the “Auto-Battle” option that was implemented, but I liked it.

I mean, let’s face it, it’s not as though the other Final Fantasy games were symphonies of sophisticated battle planning except when faced with the occasional enemy level bump when entering a new area, or a particularly nasty tussle with a big-bad. I mean, I don’t know about you, but the tactical complexity of intuiting that I should use “Blizzard” against an enemy made of fire kind of lost its “Wow” factor after the fourth or fifth time it panned out in a battle.

The ability, and need, to shift your character’s roles on the fly made the battles infinitely more tactical, and the fact that the “Auto-Battle” command queued up more than one attack lent a flair to the battles that, in past iterations, had been a matter of mashing the “Fight” command over and over again. None of this is to say that the older systems and games didn’t have their merits, but let’s not knock something genuinely interesting just because it’s new, you guys.

Moving on to the complaints proper, the two things that I hear people say most often in criticizing the game are “There are no towns and no world map!” and “The game is too linear! It’s one long hallway!” The two complaints are related, of course, and you know what? They’re right…sort of.

There are not “towns”, plural, in this game, but there is a “town”, singular; it’s called Cocoon, and most of the game takes place in it. Cocoon, as the singular inhabited metropolis of the world in which Final Fantasy XIII takes place, serves the function that an array of towns have in past Final Fantasy games. The city of Cocoon is a shiny hotbed of unrest, filled to the brim with the usual one-liner NPCs that really didn’t contribute much to the overall experience beyond ambiance.

Cocoon is a well-realized locale. The areas that you traverse, the different people that you meet, and the lore that is pushed out through exposition and expanded text in the “Datalog” is all there to put flesh on the world you’ve been plopped in with your plucky band of adventurers. Though there is just the one “town”, there’s a lot to it, and there’s something to be said about that in and of itself as an inevitable design choice due to the direction that SquareEnix has taken the franchise in terms of bigger and better graphics.

People lament the loss of the way towns and locations were presented in previous games, and I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the places that people so fondly remember are probably found in Final Fantasies VII through XII. Many of the locales from the earlier titles were little more than five or six NPCs with single lines of dialogue coupled with an area for shops. While not without their charm, their design was more a necessity of the technology at hand, rather than a design choice. Once the technology caught up, the towns became their own interesting little artistic microcosms, and the places in the game took on new significance as they gained more and more personality through the depth and variety that could be added to their design.

Gradually, the world map has faded from the last few Final Fantasy games. IX was the last main series title to include the traditional “world map” as we’d come to know it, with X and XII opting for a series of discrete locations connected by airship travel.

In XIII, there is no way to wing around the world of Cocoon on an airship, and the vast majority of the travel is done on foot. The effort here, to my mind, was to add depth to the experience of traveling this world. There is no “fast travel” option that lets you hop from place to place in Cocoon. I’m not saying that there’s nothing to miss from the old way towns were created, but I think that this was an effort to expand the experience of exploring a world into something more meaningful. Final Fantasy XIII tried to create a location where you put one foot in front of the other in order to get from A to B, and the story happens along the way while you traverse this incredibly huge metropolis.

So here’s the million dollar question: With all that wonderful plot premise, and with all of the effort having been put into the creation of this world and the method of its traversal, why didn’t I care about Cocoon?

The goal in the design, to my mind, was to create a world that would help the player experience the journey itself, rather than grinding between plot points before popping into the new collection of shops and NPC one-liners on the horizon. While this approach works for the game at times, as a whole, I’d say that the effort failed.

Here’s where that linearity complaint really bites the game in the ass. Despite the fact that I spent a significant chunk of my time with that game running around in Cocoon, I didn’t get a terrifically good sense of the city itself. Actually, “running around” is a bad choice of words, isn’t it? It was more “running through”.

For lack of a better word, I felt like I didn’t “own” Cocoon, despite the ostensible efforts to create the experience of the journey, and I think that this was largely due to the unidirectional nature of how the city was experienced. The locations were beautiful and interesting, but if you blink, you miss them as you’re shuttled speedily forward to the next objective. This was tremendously disappointing for me. I would have truly enjoyed going back to them to get a couple of silly fetch quests or find some optional bosses.

If you think about it, backtracking really would have been a terrifically difficult thing to shoehorn into the storyline. Revisiting areas was not really an option as far as the context of the plot was concerned. Being l’Cie, the amped up human representatives of the aforementioned godlike Fal’Cie, the characters that you play as are all universally despised, feared, and hated by the folks of Cocoon. This being the case, you’re constantly driven forward, either running from or towards some plot point or another. The very nature of being a l’Cie carries an urgency, as the character’s “brands” that give them their powers are also slowly turning them into monsters.

The plot’s focus on fleeing and the sense of urgency that the game was trying to convey every step of the way is what led me to feel alienated from the world I was experiencing. I think the intent was to use this alienation to bond the player to the characters, and to that end, it worked. In spite of myself, I really found that I enjoyed Hope’s story arc. Snow became less obnoxious and more endearing as he reveals that his “hero” act is just him trying to keep it together in the face of loss. Hell, even Vanille has a great backstory once you strip away the horrendous outer layers of her characterization. To the extent that I did grow to care about these characters and their success in their endeavors, you could say that the device of alienating them from their world really worked. However, I think the cost was too high.

The constant flight from Cocoon led to a few memorable moments in dealing with the motivations of your beleaguered characters, but almost none of the city itself. You are meant to care about this place alongside the story’s protagonists. The player is supposed to want to “save the world” when they’re thrust into an epic quest of this nature. The downfall of the narrative’s execution in this instance is that the player only ever experiences this location as a hostile and hate-filled place. Cocoon, to the player, is a beautiful place populated by narrow-minded and ignorant people who are content to live our their lives as sheep to the Fal’Cie shepherds. The player spends the first part of the game fleeing the place and are confronted by new forms of deeply ingrained hostility, either from inhabitants or monsters, at every turn. Why should I care about that place? What is there to love? The characters are all fighting for their homeland, but the player, constantly rushed from plot point to plot point, never learns to care about Cocoon.

Really, the complaint here is about pacing. If I could have seen more of less of Cocoon, if I could have lingered in a few really well-defined places, then maybe I could have learned to love that smaller sliver of the place in the time I was given. In trying to immerse me and rush me at the same time, I wound up just focusing on the characters to the exclusion of all else. Since the characters are all focused on Cocoon in one way or another, even that made for a tough sell at times.

Then the momentum is totally turned on its head as the player arrives at Gran Pulse. You’re suddenly allowed to wander and explore, and this environment functions much as the traditional world map has in previous Final Fantasy games. It’s enormous, open, and has a great deal of ground to cover and explore. It’s also filled with sidequests! It seems as though the existence of this place within the world of this game should alleviate any complaints that people may have had with the earlier stuff that was mentioned, right? Well, again…not exactly.

Gran Pulse is great. It’s got just the right amount of ground to cover, and utilizes a warp system that progressively opens up the player’s ability to traverse the environment as you complete sidequests. I found the sidequesting, while tremendously repetitive, to be fun and rewarding. At least for a while. I had a hard time pinning down exactly when Gran Pulse fell out of favor with me.

I had really enjoyed the exploration and the careful process of setting my characters up to battle some truly massive optional bosses. It was nice to thumb my nose at the plot for a while and get to tool around in a huge open place. This wandering and grinding and monster-slaying felt like a very Final Fantasy thing to do, reminding me at times of the Veldt from FFVI. After I’d exhausted the optional bosses that I could conceivably defeat and with my character’s Crystariums maxed at the levels that they could attain thus far, I turned my thoughts back to the plot proper, my wanderlust sated.

This problem of world-building is really what made Final Fantasy XIII tough for me at times, and I think that this is really the root of the myriad of complaints that people level at the game. I’ll say again, I really liked Final Fantasy XIII overall.

So much worked really well in that game. The battle system was engaging and interesting, the characters were relatively well-developed and had interesting arcs, and the whole thing was generally stunning to look at. All that being said, without caring about the world in which all these things took place, the experience always had something lacking. I hope that SquareEnix, in building out the world of XIII in the sequels and spin-offs and in making new worlds for future Final Fantasy games, will realize that players need to feel connected to the places that they’re tasked with saving.

Not surprisingly, I really enjoyed the game. I generally enjoy a good shooter that isn’t a real-world war simulator. For whatever reason, I’m not a huge fan of staring down cross-hairs when I’m just having a historically accurate version of my own world reflected back at me. I’m a fan of your Fallout, Halo, Bioshock, and Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth style universes. The Half-Life series falls very neatly into this weird niche.

Now, as with many of my games, I have picked this one up and put it down several times over the past couple of years. I got it in a Steam sale with a slew of other titles, including the first Portal, and I was determined to play Half-Life 1 and Portal before delving into this later chapter in the life and times of Gordon Freeman. I’ve always been fascinated by this series. I was eager to jump in and get rolling with the meat of the narrative, but I felt that I should really do my homework first.

I have to say, first and foremost, upon firing up the game, I was really pleasantly surprised at how well the graphics held up. I mean, it’s not as though this is a game from the early 90s or something, but at the rate that graphical tech is improving these days, I was expecting to be thoroughly unimpressed. Contrary to my expectations, the game was a visual delight with great lighting, water effects, and an artful use of a broad color palette across a number of different and well-realized locales. The character models were well animated and, while not top of the line, they were definitely easy on the eyes.

The gameplay was really fun, but I wasn’t blown away by it. At first I put it down to the game’s age, telling myself that the game was seven years old, of COURSE these gameplay elements would feel outdated. It took me a while to realize that it wasn’t so much that the gameplay was some prototypical version of a mechanic that’s been refined in more recent years, it was simply that the formula had been recycled so many times that I was having a hard time being surprised. I’m old, not the gameplay.

The gravity gun was an extremely cool piece of hardware, but it didn’t seem particularly novel to me because I’d played around with things like the Telekinesis power in Bioshock. It was interesting and had plenty of unique applications, it just didn’t quite have the “wow” factor that it must have possessed back in the day. I was also disappointed that it wasn’t used more for a puzzle solving mechanism. I mean, yes, there were a few instances where you had to unplug something from behind a barrier or clear a road for the buggy (dear lord, the buggy…), but having recently come off of Portal 2, I hungered for some puzzling utilizing the gravity gun.

Also, I know I’ve mentioned this before with respect to Valve’s design principles, but I have to say I was consistently impressed with the way in which they very carefully introduced new set-pieces such that you were never quite in over your head. Although, I have to say, as much fun as I have with shooters, I am utter shit at them, and this proved to be my undoing on multiple occasions. I died and died and died…and then I died some more. It was only through some lucky twist of fate that I survived several of the more grueling segments.

This stupid-assface part of the game made me painfully aware of just how bad I am at shooters when it comes right down to it. It took me two different days of concerted effort to get through that part. When it was finally over, I felt like I’d truly accomplished something. I felt like I had achieved some sort of rite of passage with respect to my shooter skills, and I moved on to the next area…where I promptly died from a shotgun blast to the face.

Ok, so quickly, while we’re on the subject of my lack of skills, let’s talk about that very very longsequence of driving around in the buggy. Am I to understand that this contraption makes a repeat appearance in Episodes 1 and/or 2? Please tell me that it is not so. Beyond the fact that I was not particularly enamored with it as a means of getting around the world, I found that the increase in speed only served to exacerbate my craptastic performance with regards to shooting things. I found myself just driving as fast as I could at Combine soldiers and antlions alike, trying to just hit them as hard as I could with my front bumper and just hoping for the best regarding collateral damage.

The only time I managed to not feel like an utter dolt while running around and shooting stuff was when you get the God-Mode Gravity Gun at the end. Holy crap was that satisfying!

All right, so I’ve been trying to not be too spoilery up until this point, but from here on out, I’m not going to be so careful. You’ve been warned!

So first up, I wanted to mention the use of the Gman in this entry in the series. His presence in this game was far less pronounced than in the first. In the first Half-Life, the Gman was a more consistent theme, appearing and disappearing through far away windows or wandering serenely through locked off rooms. Now I’m to understand that this occurred in Half-Life 2 as well, but I can’t recall seeing him but for a scant few times on computer monitors.

I liked how the game opened with him basically kicking you back out into the world for his own reasons. I hate the feeling of there being a yoke around the neck of Gordon, and the game did a great job of letting you off the leash of the over-arching storyline for long enough that you (or at least I did) completely forget about the Gman and his motivations until he pulls the same stunt at the end of this game that he did the last time around. I have to admit, I felt a sense of profound frustration when he just stopped time and popped in to snatch me from my moment of victory.

The end of the first Half-Life left you with a lot more questions than answers, and even fewer clues as to what was really happening at Black Mesa. Half-Life 2 isn’t much more forthcoming with the answers, but there are a cavalcade of colorful clues to mull over.

I really want to know what those shuffling greyish denizens of the final stages of the game have to do with everything. I have a feeling that they have a lot to do with the future of “humanity” that the combine seems to be so concerned with.

Dr. Breen was trying to talk an imprisoned Eli Vance into supporting his mad quest, and he mentions a race of highly evolved fungal beings that have learned the secrets of inter-dimensional travel. I was immediately reminded of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories involving the moon/people referred to as the Yuggoth or the Mi-Go. Lovecraft himself played a bit fast and loose with the facts surrounding this particular fictional race he’d created, and I’m curious to see how much of any of the varying interpretations of these beings find their way into the Half-Life 2 world. If you want to brush up on your fungoid Lovecraftian beings and draw your own parallels, check out The Fungi from Yuggoth and The Whisperer in Darkness.

Moving on from the more cosmic-horror related elements, I was utterly drawn into this world with its much wider cast of characters. In the first game, it was pretty much Gordon, the Gman, and some vortigons, with Barney and a few oddball scientists interspersed throughout. There really weren’t any interesting named characters that helped move along a nuanced central plot.

I have to admit, I always felt like I wanted to apologize to the vortigons for shotgunning the ever-loving crap out of so many of them in the first game! Turning them from a race of cycloptic, gun-toting, storm troopers into helpful, singing, Freeman-fans was quite a 180, and it took me a while to get used to seeing them as friends.

I also want to talk briefly about the “romance” between Alyx Vance and Gordon Freeman. I’ve read a lot of reflective pieces where people poke fun at the fact that Alyx develops feelings for the stoic Gordon and we’re supposed to buy it, but I don’t think that the story would have worked with a comparable impact if the narrative had been done any other way. Again, I know this is a point that’s been made multiple times, but the generally held belief about the silent protagonist as a design choice is that a person is able to better invest themselves in a blank and silent cypher than if there were words put into the mouth of the player.

To my mind, that sounds a little weird. To say that someone is “investing themselves” in this way makes me think of some dude talking at the screen like he thinks he’s actually got Alyx there and responding to him. I don’t think that’s what actually happens when the silent protagonist works as a narrative function.

I think the silence of Freeman is important more for the purpose of not breaking the narrative cycle than anything else. I found that every time Alyx showed up, it was after some particularly grueling shootery set-piece, and her appearance meant the end of that particular spate of spastic shooting and flailing. She was the punctuation mark at the end of the toughest parts of the game, so the player comes to associate her with a sense of relief and temporary safety. I think that the psychological impact of that Pavlovian setup would have been significantly lessened by a talking Gordon. Everyone will have a different experience while playing the game, some will come through the various trials and tribulations relatively unscathed, some will stumble into the next chamber with no ammo and their health firmly in the red. No canned dialogue would be able to capture the entire spectrum of player experience. I mean, I know I would find it jarring if I, in one of my usual offerings, scraped by in a firefight, and then heard a bunch of cocky, Duke Nukem style bullshit coming out of Gordon’s mouth as he talked to Alyx or any other character. It would totally take me out of the moment. Gordon’s silence allows me to own the reactions that I have to Alyx and the other characters in the game without needing a give-and-take in the dialog. The brilliant execution of Gordon’s complete and utter non-rapport with Alyx is really the best example of why Dr. Freeman should keep his mouth shut.

All in all, the game was really great, and I’m looking forward to digging into Episodes 1 and 2.  Anyone else have any thoughts on the series?  Try not to spoil anything for me!

So, I’m working to get through my backlog, and, in being a bit more goal oriented in my gaming, I’ve found that…well I’m not very good at being goal-oriented in my gaming.

I’m the kind of gamer who needs to beat every sidequest, whomp every optional boss, get every achievement, explore every nook and freaking cranny of every dialogue option just on the off-chance that there may be a clue to uncover a secret character in the sequel.

This tendency of obsessive completionism just MIGHT be why I have such a large backlog in the first place. It’s a strong maybe, anyway.

I finally realized how bad my in game procrastination had gotten when I started playing more of inFAMOUS (thanks Sony!). I’m going the good-guy route on my first time through with the gravel-voiced Cole. The side quests in inFAMOUS aren’t exactly arduous, they mostly involve chasing something down and zapping it. They take a few minutes at best, and your options for distraction in a quest-sense are usually pretty quickly exhausted. The scope of my illness became apparent to me when I realized that I had been running around the streets of Empire City for over an hour without attempting a single mission! I would go a few steps, feel out the environment with Cole’s radar, and immediately get side-tracked. Oh, look a blast shard! Ok, just one more Dead Drop location and then I’ll start the mission. If that wasn’t bad enough, I realized that I was getting distracted from getting side-tracked from doing the optional missions by all the wounded citizens. I just couldn’t walk by them! I found myself slowly going up and down the streets, healing everyone in sight.

After I’d indulged myself in this bit of neurosis for upwards of half an hour, I abruptly came-to and realized that this was the very reason why I could never finish a damn game. I just get caught up in the on-the-side business. I think it’s because I tend to get overly absorbed in the worlds that these games have to offer. I don’t want the story to end because it feels like I’ll closing the door on all the good times I’ve had in these far-flung corners of universes that don’t really exist. This dallying eventually leaves me bored with various titles. My OCD approach to gaming isn’t doing me any favors. I started playing this way in an attempt to keep the game world alive, but my methodical approach winds up grinding out every last drop of enjoyment for me. The game becomes a chore.

Thinking on the games I haven’t finished, this started to make sense. It took me years to finish the first Mass Effect. I’m still not done with Dragon Age: Origins. I’ve been going through ‘Splosion Man over and over again getting the cake on each level. I stopped playing Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne for over a year because I couldn’t solve the “Puzzle Boy” side-quest. Just thinking about the Metroid Prime Trilogy made me feel exhausted!

I’ve been cheating myself out of a good time lately. I should be thirsting to play the Metroid Prime Trilogy, not dreading it. I need to be more willing to go along for the ride. I need to beat the game, but not into submission. I need to complete games without being a completionist.

This change of heart is really the only way that I’ll ever make a dent in my obscene backlog. Does anyone else have this problem? How have all of you come by your backlogs?

All right, in the spirit of trying to finish what I’ve started I’m actually going to go heal the Arl of Redcliffe in Dragon Age: Origins…after a quick jaunt to Orzammar…

Initially, I have to admit, I was underwhelmed by the idea of the Wii U. I wasn’t disappointed, precisely, I just didn’t care. I looked at the system and immediately said, “None of this looks terrifically new.”

Nintendo looked like they were playing catch-up. They finally are introducing an HD console, which is great and I’m as excited as anyone to see Link clear as day in 1080p. However, that little tidbit loses some of its flavor when you realize that, in the HD department, Nintendo is six years behind its competitors right now, and they’ll be even further behind the curve in 2013 when this new system releases. I’m aware that stunning graphics are not the chief goal of the Nintendo brand, so this didn’t surprise me. I just wasn’t blown away by the fact that their next console was in HD. It was a given in my mind before it was even announced.

The new controller had been leaked as a rumor well before E3 started, and, again, while not being disappointed, I wasn’t really excited about the technology. I was immediately reminded of the Dreamcast VMUs and of the GBA/Gamecube team-up of days gone by. Neither turned out particularly well. The integration of the touch-screen controller with the game on the main screen didn’t materialize in any way that made me eager to try it out. The “shield-mode” type gameplay looked interesting, but left a gimmicky taste in my mouth that made me wonder if it would be an interesting or sustainable mechanic the 1000th time you had to fend off arrows from your on-screen foes.

The other key feature of the controller that was showcased was the ability to pull the game you’re currently playing from the main screen to the controller screen. At the Sony conference the previous day, the Vita had shown off its ability to bounce back and forth between a tv screen and the handheld, so this stole some of Nintendo’s thunder in my eyes. The Wii U’s implementation of this feature seemed lackluster in comparison to Sony’s especially when I considered that, in as far as I could tell, the Wii U controller is not truly portable. Sure, you can play it around the house, as long as it’s in range of the Wii U, but I don’t think you can take it with you anywhere and still have similar functionality.

So, after all this, I walked away from the Nintendo conference wondering if there was an up-side to this reveal that I wasn’t seeing. It wasn’t until I started to watch some of the hands-on videos that it finally clicked for me: Nintendo has made an HD console out of the DS.

Nintendo knows what it’s doing with this dual-screen setup, and many third party developers are perfectly comfortable with it from a design standpoint, thanks to the success of the DS. Nintendo should be able to work wonders with this new system. The increased graphical capacities, familiar gameplay aesthetic, complete dual-stick functionality, and the (apparently) firm support of major third parties will carry them for years to come.  Good call Nintendo!  You’ve gotten your grubby mitts into my future-wallet once again!

I’m an RPG guy.  I love the things.  I’m a sucker for swords and sorcery in any and all forms.  Hell, screw the swords and sorcery, put some stat sheets in space and I am THERE (I’m looking at you Phantasy Star and Mass Effect)!

I play all sorts of games, but the ones I truly love are mostly RPGs.  Now, as a child, I didn’t really have a computer that was up to the task of playing games of any kind.  If I could get a page of text to save properly, I considered myself a lucky young man when I was dealing with that electronic abomination.  This being the case, I’ve always been a bit behind when it comes to the old-school, western pc RPGs, but they have been on my “to-play” list for as long as I’ve been aware of them.

I’ve also had a sort of “watching from afar” fascination with D&D.  I’ve never actually played, but I’d always looked at the older kids at the local comic shop with envy.  Sure they were nerds, so was I, but they were nerds with friends!  It looked great.  I never sought anyone out for pen-and-paper play, opting to focus on the world of electronic entertainment to fulfill my gaming needs, but the fascination has always nagged at the back of my mind.  I’m not particularly keen to find a group now, but I always felt like I missed out on some sacred rite of nerd-passage by never sitting down with a 20-sided die.

Fast-forward to this past Christmas.  My wife and I were short on cash, and decided to do some more budget oriented gift giving.  She knew I had a wishlist on Good Old Games, and, because she’s an awesome lady who pays far more attention to my ramblings than any sane person should, she bought me the original Baldur’s Gate.  I was ecstatic!  Not only would I get to finally experience one of the great, classic, western PC RPGs, but I would finally be able to dip my toe into the world of D&D.

Starting out, the learning curve for this particular game is quite steep.  I had forgotten how vital a game manual could be back in the day, and I neglected to properly bone up on the basics before setting foot in Faerun.  While my pedigree isn’t pristine when it comes to my experience with Bioware games, I have played Dragon Age: Origins and Mass Effect.  I thought that I’d be in for a similar kettle of fish when I fired up the character creation process.  I was sorely mistaken.

Being something of a Dragon Age vet, I decided that the only way to go for a first playthrough would be to just nerf the game by rolling up a super powered mage, right?  Turns out, times have changed since the Baldur’s Gate days.  I quickly found that my all-powerful mage was closer in strength to a petulant child than an almighty juggernaut of the arcane.  I had no idea that all the spells in the game are only usable once before you’d have to rest in order to re-charge it.  That was something of a shocker.  I’m far more used to magic-wielding characters having a pool of power to pull from.  Having to decide about casting on a per spell basis is an entirely different strategy element than I’m accustomed to.

I had similar realizations over and over again.  My characters died constantly, my mage was next to useless, and I found the dense lore to be a high barrier to entry while I tried to muddle through all of these other deficiencies in my abilities.  The more I played, the more I realized that I was wholly ill-equipped to play this game using the skills I had honed in the more recent PC arena.  I cracked open the manual and sunk some serious time into learning the interface and the intricacies of how the stats affect gameplay and character creation.  Armor class is better when it’s lower?  THACO?  This was all stuff that I had completely glossed over when I first dove into the game.

I restarted the character creation process, and this time decided to go with a Ranger class that specialized in Bows and in Short Swords.  Again, not my wisest choice of combat concentrations, as a character equipped with a two-handed weapon can’t easily switch to a sword-plus-shield combo in the heat of battle, but it was a far better match than I’d originally tried to strike out with.

I’m loving the game now that I’m building some momentum, and I’ll write more later as I make my way to Nashkel with my little ragtag band of adventurers.  Anyone else sunk some time into this one?

Another one that I put on my 1up blog!  I promise I'll run out of these soon.  Anyway, this one speaks for itself.

***

I'm a long-time fan of the Silent Hill series.  I own every game, and have gotten multiple endings for each one.  I have fond memories of me and my college roommates taking turns playing through the various stories, delighting in getting as far as we could before beer and being-awake-3am-ness made the tension unbearable.

My wife, Emily, and I moved from from Rhode Island to Colorado (I recommend anyone do likewise) in the summer of 2008. Being a huge nerd, I was very much aware that the 2006 film adaptation of Silent Hill was, in part, inspired by the the ghost town of Centralia, Pennsylvania. On our way to the purple mountains majesty of the Colorado skyline, I asked my ever-so-patient wife if we could go several hours out of our way to make a jaunt through the spooky locale, and she agreed to indulge me.

Do we all know about Centralia? No? C'mon everyone, weak showing. All right, well let me back up for a bit of a history lesson. Centralia, Pennsylvania was a coal mining town that has been active since roughly 1854. In 1962, a mine fire began under dubious circumstances. A mine fire is always serious, but methinks it truly becomes a disaster when it starts in a freaking COAL MINE. The coal is still burning today. It's been nearly 40 years, and the fire is still cooking the bowels of the earth's crust beneath this quiet little town.

No one is sure how the fires started, which, to my mind, is part of the wonderful mystique of the place. Who knows? Did some triangular-headed denizen of hell strike a spark against the coal miles and miles beneath the earth we innocently tread upon? I like to think so!

The burning coal made the town unlivable. People grew sick from the carbon monoxide levels. Occasionally cave-ins swallowed the already charred earth. The town's residents gradually abandoned Centralia.

So! This grisly backdrop inspired Roger Avery, the writer of the 2006 Silent Hill film. He adopted the whole mine fire milieu in order to add some weight to the film's plot.

All this in mind, I desperately wanted to walk the streets of Centralia, and, after much nerdy exposition, Em agreed that this little side-jaunt would be well worth our time.

We had directions. We figured that we knew where we were going. Once we passed a certain point, however, roughly within 30 miles or so of where we were supposed to run into our little ghost town, our turn-by-turn instructions lost all meaning. I'm not just making this up for dramatic effect. We were surrounded on all sides by artificial hillsides. Blasted landscapes whizzed by on either side of the car, formed from man's dynamite-fueled excursions into the crust of the earth. None of the signage that we saw corresponded to what we had written on the page in front of us. We drove through some of the most desolate countryside that I've ever seen for miles and miles, and then, just as we'd decided to give up the chase, we hit an awful pothole and rolled into a stretch of gray, dilapidated buildings. A few teenaged looking individuals skulked about on the sidewalks. Looking around us at the empty, hollow buildings, and the charred, smoking hillsides, we suddenly realized that we had made it into Centralia.

The feelings of desolation and oppressive loneliness were thick in the air. Despite the risks we'd been warned of (i.e. carbon monoxide and cave-ins), Emily and I pulled over and hopped out of the car to take a look at the surrounding landscape. It was too bizarre to not want to wander the hillsides. Evidence of the still-smoldering mine fire was in full force. We stepped out onto a small patch of land that was literally smoking beneath our feet.

We got to the top of the hill and saw a patch of level ground with a wrought iron fence. We trekked up to the gates, and realized, upon seeing the giant Russian Orthodox cross, that we had stumbled upon a cemetery. Now, I'll be honest with you. I know a lot of things. I'm a well-traveled guy. I love learning cultural bits and bobs as much as the next fellow, but I had never ever come across a Russian Orthodox cross before. I had no idea what the symbol in the center of the graveyard was.

To me, this was just yet another fascinating detail that helped me believe that I had somehow stumbled into the horror of the real Silent Hill. It seemed occult and foreign, and I didn't know how to reconcile what I was seeing with the world that I knew. It was culture-shock colored by knowledge of gaming, and I have rarely had the privilege of feeling my reality warp in just precisely that way.

After Emily and I had gotten our fill of gazing at Russian tombstones eerily wreathed in smoke, we turned around to head back towards the car. However, off in the distance, we noticed that the blackened, gnarled, tree-screened hillside was broken by a single brilliant spot of color. A bright shining blue steeple stood out among the foliage. A church. It seemed to be the only building in the whole town still intact.   

After some trial and error navigating the gravel roads, we drove right up to the front of the church. True to our long-distance assumptions, the church appeared to be either perfectly preserved or still in use. Tying this to the Silent Hill mythology in my own mind nearly led to a nerdgasm-induced synaptic meltdown. Emily quickly piled me into the car, and we rode roughly over the broken asphalt past the city limits of the creepy little village. We sped past an empty, dilapidated brick building, identifiable only by the sun-bleached stencil of the words “Police Station”, and got back on the road to Colorado.

I loved our trip to the real-world inspiration for the film world of Silent Hill. Anyone else ever been? Anyone else have pictures?

Part 2 of my examination of SaGa 2 !

***

Well I promised you a bit more SaGa 2, and I am a man of my word! So let's get into the meat of this thing, shall we?

SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu – Goddess of Destiny is a DS remake of a Game Boy game released in Japan in 1990 and in 1991 in the US as Final Fantasy Legend II. The new version of the game was released to Japanese audiences in 2009 in order to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the SaGa series. Unfortunately, the remake never made it state-side.

Lucky for all of us, the brave and beautiful folks over at Crimson Nocturnal took it upon themselves to do a full English translation of the game and put out a free patch for the internet at large. Hooray! Now there's a reason to import the title other than to practice your Japanese!

The effort to put the patch into practice was well worth it, in my opinion.

The core of the gameplay is essentially intact. The character creation system still revolves around four different character types: Human, Esper (previously called Mutant), Mecha, and Monster. The Humans are pretty much your jack-of-all-trades characters. They develop at a steady pace, and can use any and all weapons with a relatively average proficiency. The Espers develop at a slightly slower rate then their Human counterparts, but are innately more powerful when using magic-based attacks. Espers also have the potential to spontaneously develop spells and abilities that are rechargeable when your party stays at an Inn. Unlike Humans and Espers, Mechas don't develop by using items repetitively in order to strengthen stats. Mecha's stats are determined by the equipment that they have allocated to them, and, while the item's durability is cut in half when equipped to a Mecha, all items become rechargeable. Monsters can't equip any items or weapons, and they don't improve stats by fighting. Monsters grow in strength by eating the meat of the enemies you defeat, and then transforming into (hopefully) bigger and badder forms.

The story is also basically untouched, though the localization that the Crimson Nocturnal team has done is significantly more US friendly than the original translation. The graphical overhaul has really served to put flesh on the bones of the world that players enjoyed back in the early 90s. The environments are vibrant and distinct, and the character creation screen has multiple customization options instead of just providing a single standard form determined by character type.

My faithful favorite signature of the series has also come back in full force: the meat eating. The DS version does the player a favor however, by adding a Meat Dictionary (there's a joke there somewhere...) to the Main Menu screen for easy reference of the transformations that you've already put your teammates through. As nice as this additional feature is, it's not implemented as well as it could have been. You effectively have to take the risk of the transformation and then restart the game if you want to consult the Dictionary. Not real helpful in practice, but a fun additional tool nonetheless.

In addition to this tweak to the Meat Mechanics (again, there HAS TO be a joke there...), there are some totally new additions to the battle mechanics.

Random battles have gone the way of the dinosaur, replaced instead by visible enemies that give chase to your party on the world map and in dungeons. If you're trying to evade your pursuers, and you happen to have more than one in tow, you'll trigger a Chain Battle if you get caught. Your party then has to weather multiple waves of enemies, which can really put a dent in your dungeon supplies.

Muses are the biggest change to the world of SaGa 2. Muses are mystical servants of the titular “Goddess of Destiny”, and have a variety of roles to play. Each Muse is met while traveling in dungeons or in towns, and a cutscene and mini-quest will, if you pursue some pretty straightforward clues, lead your party into a friendship with the Muse at hand. Your party is then rewarded with a chunk of MP (Magic or Muse Points, I have no idea...). After befriending the Muse, they will occasionally reward you with more MP at the end of battles if you've used strategies that the Muse prefers to route your enemies.

These points can be used to purchase Threads of Fate from the Goddess herself. These special items have names like “Love”, “Loner”, “Family”, and “Rival”. Using these attacks in battle chain together and increase the damage dealt by your party. Depending on what Thread you use to link your character's attacks, the relationship between those two characters changes. These party dynamics help to color cutscenes throughout the story, helping to give your adventure a bit more color as you pursue the main storyline.

Overall, this DS game is a truly worthwhile overhaul of a classic Game Boy RPG. I highly recommend going the extra mile to patch an import copy of this game and give it a whirl. The story is fun, the battle mechanics have some great additions, and the character customization is very strong.

What am I forgetting...OH! The music! I won't waste more space gushing about the great job that SquareEnix did with giving the audio a facelift. I don't have the vocabulary to do it justice. I'll let a side by side of the title screen music, old and new, speak for itself.

First post in a two-parter that I wrote up on my 1up blog space.

***

The Final Fantasy Legend, released in Japan as the first game in the SaGa series, is probably my very earliest gaming memory. It's a brutal, austere, black and white memory, but it's a good one. I was both baffled and utterly hooked by the odd little Game Boy RPG.

I wasn't the wise and weathered gamer that I am today when I first encountered this glorious handheld grind-fest. However, I think I must have played some scant few minutes of the original Final Fantasy on the NES at some point, because I remember being absolutely shocked that the weapons had a limited number of uses, and that there was no system of “leveling up” in the sense that I recall somehow being familiar with. I like to think that I was just possessed some sort of innate cantankerousness built into my budding gaming persona.

My young self was quickly frustrated with the need to repetitively use items of a certain kind in order to build stats. Which weapons leveled each stat was unclear to my child-mind, and I remember finally just deciding that I should “use swords”. This character development scenario was very close to the much-bitched about system that Square employed in Final Fantasy II for the NES. Despite the minor frustration that this generated, I was quickly hooked on the grind of it. However, for all the monotonous grinding in order to improve my Human and Mutant characters, there was the constant gamble of the Monster class. Occasionally, at the end of a battle, a chunk of meat that apparently just sloughs off your enemies after they're killed would bounce into view. Just to add insult to injury, you were then asked if you wanted to EAT the beast you'd just slain. Yum! If you had a character that was a Monster class in your group, feeding the meat to this hapless patsy could trigger a transformation into another monster form. For a Game Boy RPG from 1990, the transformation matrix was pretty complicated. To my fifth grade brain, the trial and error process lent an air of mystery and risk to a system of battle mechanics that could very well have otherwise bogged the game down into unplayability.

The battle system was largely left intact, but the difficulty had been lowered (or maybe I was just a bit older?), there was a larger array of enemies, and the art quality had bumped up a notch. The Monster upgrading system was still in full force in this iteration of the series, allowing me to take some risks and chow down on my enemies whenever the opportunity presented itself!

The real draw of this title over its senior was the storyline. In The Final Fantasy Legend, the story was pretty simple: There is a tower; go climb it. Final Fantasy Legend II introduced the player to actual characters, and gave the player avatar a real backstory. It's a cliché in these days, but upon my first playthrough of this title, I was not so jaded that a “Go find your father who is fighting for a greater good!” story came off as old hat. I loved it! The father is this badass Indiana Jones-looking freedom fighter. He goes from world to world collecting artifacts or “Magi” in an effort to keep them out of the hands of those who would abuse their power to become gods.

These “Magi” were the key refinement to the battle system that helped to ease the grind and the difficulty curve that made the first game so daunting. Magi had different properties, and could be equipped to a character in order to provide various stat boosts. Collecting the Magi pieces not only helped to unlock new areas and advance the story, but also helped beef up your party so that you weren't getting totally whomped every time you entered a new area.

This game was the first game I can ever remember grabbing me with its musical score.  The title screen music was very close to that of the first Final Fantasy Legend, but there were some slight changes to the instrumentation that really blew me away.  I still hum that song to myself when I'm feeling like I need to feel like going to work in the morning is a mystical adventure.

Final Fantasy Legend III was a good game in its own right, but a different entry in the SaGa lineage has brought me back to the series after so many years. The DS remake of Final Fantasy Legend II, SaGa 2: Hihou Densetsu – Goddess of Destiny.

I heard about this game a couple of years ago when it first appeared in the rumor mill in 2009. I was thrilled by the idea, and was totally hypnotized by the re-recorded title screen music that the teaser website sported. I held my breath for a US release, and was devastated when the announcement never came. However, earlier this year, I stumbled onto a hidden treasure that only the internet could have brought us. Thanks to the good people over at Crimson Nocturnal, a fan translation patch for the game has finally made this new version of a childhood memory accessible to the English speaking crowd!

My original plan was to cover my impressions of the remake in this post, but I think I'm getting a big long-winded! I'll write up something on Saga 2 for the DS tomorrow. Until then, does anyone else have any great memories of this series? Anyone played the remake?

This is another piece that I first wrote on 1up on April 25th.  It was in the early days of the PSN outage, so there was no talk yet of potential credit card loss.  That one piece of the puzzle has made the whole situation a bit more dire than I make it out to be here, so keep that in mind as you read it.  I'm sticking to my guns on the bulk of the points, but I feel that the outrage is more justified now that it's been over two weeks and we're all watching our bank accounts.  Enjoy!

***

How is everyone coping with the PSN outage? I, for one, feel like I'm weathering it with a modicum of dignity. I've only cried twice and wet myself the one time, so I count that as a “win” for the ol' pride! In all honesty though, I'm really not all that put out by the whole situation. I really only have two gripes. First, I can't re-download Parasite Eve. I can't for the life of me remember why I'd deleted it in the first place, but I've recently had a hankering to revisit Aya Brea and her old stomping grounds. Secondly, I can't watch Netflix on my PS3. I think there have been reports of people still having Netflix connectivity, but I am not among that lucky and hallowed few. That would have been a real inconvenience, and I may have joined the teeming masses now clamoring for recompense, if I hadn't had my Xbox360 ready and at hand.

The idea of whether or not Sony owes we PSN users anything for this outage is really the meat of this story, I think. The fact that some Capcom games have been rendered totally unplayable due to this outage is an ultimate “I told you so!” scenario for all the DRM naysayers out there. I can't imagine having the disc in your hand, the physical thing itself, placing it in the system, and then being told that you can't play it. Horrifying. It just would not compute. I can just see myself putting the disc in, staring confusedly at the screen for a few minutes, taking the disc back out, wiping it off, and then putting it back in and starting over again. Though the PSN outage may have created the problem, the real transgressor in this particular scenario isn't Sony; it's Capcom and their draconian methods of copyright protection. I mean, I'm all for people getting paid for what they do, don't get me wrong here. Copyright protection is fine by me, but if it is so strict as to render the disc completely useless unless the stars and moon are aligned ever so perfectly, well then you may want to rethink your protection strategy. I daresay Capcom has lost a few of their faithful this past week. Maybe not many, but I'd bet a few strayed from the fold of the flock.

My frustration at a lack of access to games that I've purchased is in a similar line with the above disenfranchised buyers, but is just a bit out of step. I purchased a piece of digital content with the idea that I would always have access to that content, which seems like a reasonable assertion. Without such an assertion, the purchase is really just some sort of long-term rental program. Indeed, if I was so terrifically afraid that PSN might crap out, I daresay that I would have just sprung for a physical copy of the old PSOne gem. But I didn't. I purchased a digital copy for convenience's sake, and, until now, I've had no complaints. However, the realization of my fears in this recent outage has struck the most neurotic of nerves in my game hoarding heart, and I worry about what happens to my digitally assembled retro-collection if(when?) the PSN breathes its last.

Of course, I'm also speaking from the standpoint of someone for whom the allure of online play is not the sole and salient reason that I may purchase games, and I imagine that the average “online gamer” is having a really hard time being patient right about now. For some, the promise of online content and context is an inseparable and essential part of the package that is paid for when you slap your sixty dollars on the counter. These people will not be easily assuaged by a simple and well-worded apology. For them, this is not a mere issue of connectivity, but rather with a core, functional purpose of their investment.

The people with the real claim to compensation are the Playstation Plus subscribers. Now those individuals have a real gripe. Those guys are paying for a service that extends beyond what the rest of us freeloaders are griping about, and if Sony wants to save any face at all from this debacle, they'll have to pony up some kind of treat to placate their most faithful masses.

There's also the simple matter of not even knowing, at this point, if the outage is truly Sony's fault. If they really were the victim of an online attack, then I can't really work up much rage for Sony themselves. If Sony simply bungled something or some wacky neighbor of SCEA spilled coffee on a keyboard, then yes, I will take the matter up with Sony by way of internet whining. If they were taken down by an outside source, then getting mad at them seems rather like yelling “Why were you not wearing your bullet-proof vest ALL the TIME!” at a man who has just been shot.

I'm sure that the death of PSN is a long way off, and that my purchases are safe and sound. I'm sure business will resume as usual in a few days. I have other games to play in the meantime, and I'm really not all in a lather over the outage. I can see how someone would be. Sony's hurdle in the coming days is to make sure that they appease those with legitimate complaints, such as the Playstation Plus subscribers first and foremost, and then take a reasonable stand in the middle-ground regarding how they handle those who feel entitled, for whatever reason, to some sort of repayment for being denied a service that they aren't paying for.

This was a piece I originally wrote on my personal blog at 1up.com. I've finished the single-player campaign of Portal 2 now, but I had really just gotten started when I wrote this bit out. Even so, I like the observations I made at this early stage.

***

Initially I had decided that I'd just continue onward with my backlog, but, my friends, a more pressing demand on my time has taken precedence. My endeavoring to slay the mighty beast of my backlog has been slightly derailed by the coming of Portal 2.

When used here, "slightly" means "completely, utterly, and inescapeably". So the game is great. It's a constant pleasure to play, and I find myself having to hold back and enjoy the scenery as I propel myself from one challenge to the next. I have to keep reminding myself that there's so much more to the game than running as fast as you can to get to the next delivery of a gloriously deadpan fat joke from GLaDOS.

It's easy to gush about this game. I could go on and on about how good the narrative is, regurgitating my favorite jokes, and speculating on how it will end (I haven't finished yet!). I could do that, but I'll try and restrain myself. I am, after all, only just getting into Chapter 3, and I probably couldn't do the aesthetics justice yet, hyperbole or no. I'm sure that I'll want to say more on this game, but, while it's fresh in my mind, I thought I'd address some of the more interesting emotional reactions that I've had to the game thus far.

I was wondering if anyone else took umbrage with red-eyed cameras adorning the walls of nearly every test room (so far)? They're rather a ubiquitous feature, though a small one, and I can't recall the first time that I noticed their ominous stare following me around a room as I struggled to get from A to B. After noticing them, I quickly realized that opening a portal behind one of these silent watchers knocked them off of their perch on the wall. I passed through each subsequent test room, making a point to seek out the camera that I was sure would always be lurking around. Slowly, I realized that it had turned into a new sort of "objective" for me every time I entered a room. Find the camera, knock the camera down, begin the test. I reasoned that, if GLaDOS or whoever was trying to observe me, then it could only be in my best interest to not let the murderous robot absorb video input of my most daring deeds in her test chambers. It seemed like a perfectly logical assumption while I was immersed in the process of puzzle solving. Once I took a step back and realized how paranoid a random feature of the environment had made me, I had to laugh...but I didn't stop knocking those SOBs off the wall.

I'm sure my next big personal moment was one that quite a few of you share with me.

*MILD SPOILERS AHEAD*

So, upon entering one of the test chambers, I was surprised to see Companion Cube just hanging out in the middle of the floor! I felt a surge of nostalgia for the events of the first Portal, followed quickly by waves of remorse over the fact that the lil' cube had to die all those years ago. I know, I know, it's just a box with a heart on the side. It's not even a REAL box with a heart on the side; it's a box with a heart on the side in a GAME. I am a sentimental guy. This stuff gets to me. I struggled for a good while in the first Portal, trying to do all kinds of clever tricks to save the Companion Cube. I quicksaved and reloaded time and again, certain that there must be some way to save the little guy. Alas, if there IS a way (there's not, right?), I could never figure it out, and I was sincerely miffed every time GLaDOS poked at that wound with a snide comment about my having "murdered" the cube.

I'm sure there are others who felt the same way, right? I mean that was the POINT of the Companion Cube. And yes, I'm aware that the aspect of being "attached" to the cube emotionally was intended as a tongue-in-cheek thing for the most part, but I sincerely doubt that the Companion Cube plushies would have sold as well as they did if nobody else felt anything at all. The futility of that moment was really what made it so infuriating. Saving the Companion Cube was to be an act of rebellion against the evil, murderous AI that was constantly trying to find new ways to torture you. When the destruction of this seemingly harmless symbol becomes your only alternative, you're forced to act or be forever stuck.

So, getting back to Portal 2, I was happily surprised and immediately a bit apprehensive when I saw that the Companion Cube was back. My apprehension was instantly justified when I tried to pick up the Cube, and it disintegrated in my hands. Very funny GLaDOS! Hilarious even! Then the second Cube appeared, and, at first, it seemed as though I would get a chance to use this one, only to have it immediately disintegrate upon touching the laser. So, at this point, I basically gave up on the Cube. I told myself to just let the whole thing go, and solve the puzzle. And solve it I did! I thought myself free of the emotional bonds that had so seared me when I was forced to incinerate my buddy in the previous Portal installment.

Now, I don't remember precisely when it happens, but at some point in this test chamber, as I'm closing in on the solution, GLaDOS mentions that the Disintegration Field, usually in place prior to each elevator, is somehow malfunctioning in this particular room. Chell is warned not to take anything with her. I half-heartedly tried one or two tricky jumps to gain enough momentum to take me and the Cube to the platform leading to the elevator, but it was all in vain. Again, I turned from my friend, and decided to just wash my hands of the whole situation. Stupid Cube.

Then, as I passed from the test chamber, I noticed, there on the right side of the hallway, a pair of portal-compatible panels! Elated, I shot a blue-limned hole in the wall, and raced back to the cube, picking it up (I imagined Chell probably hugged it), and propelling myself through an orange portal on the floor far below. I didn't have to put the orange one so far down, but I thought rocketing triumphantly towards the elevator had a certain pinache to it.

Then it happened.

Once again, through some inexplicable robo-sorcery, GLaDOS just dissolved my cargo into thin air. My only solace was the ping of an achievement popping up in the right-hand corner of my screen. Despite the illusion of success, the whole scenario had been a cruel Morton's fork. There was no way to save the cube, AGAIN. I could have left it there, always wondering if there had been something more I could have done, but instead, I chose to invest the effort in saving it, and walked right into GLaDOS' trap. I tried not to let it get to me. I mused on the remarkable accomplishment of Valve's creative team, and I moved on, determined to kick the crap out of GLaDOS again.

I'll probably write more on this game as I go. I can't see myself not having more and more of these wonderful moments as I explore the Aperture Science Lab. More soon!