Today Max Payne 3 arrived from Gamefly. I played through the first disc and have very mixed feelings about it. On one hand it is a perfectly competent game. It always works. It controls well, the level design is solid, the graphics are decent for a console game, and the story is interesting and well written. But after playing it for several hours I have to say it is one of the most creatively bankrupt titles I have played in recent memory. This game has not a single unique mechanic or idea to its name at least so far. You walk down incredibly linear corridors and shoot dudes while hiding behind cover and slowing down time when you have the juice. It's just so average. I'm enjoying it but I just keep thinking how Rockstar, at the very least, usually brings something new to the table with each of its games and this game just doesn't have any of that.

I have to take a shot at the level design here. Now just a couple lines ago I said the level design was solid. I say that because it is virtually always obvious where to go. The levels are clear and feel natural. But they are also some of the most linear levels I have ever seen. They make Call of Duty look like a sandbox. There is no room for tactics in this game. There is always just one path to take and it is a very narrow path with a couple boxes thrown up to hide behind. What's more, the combat here basically plays itself if you set it to auto-aim. You can choose to manually aim, but how anyone could aim well enough to shoot grenades out of the air without help is beyond me. Maybe if I was playing with a mouse and keyboard but not with a 360 controller. So you have to choose between making the game all but impossible to beat and having the game basically play itself for you. You spend most of the game hitting forward and pulling the left trigger to lock on and the right to shoot. It's fun on a visceral level but there is literally nothing to it. That isn't to say it isn't hard. I'm playing on the easiest difficulty and enemies still do enough damage that using the shoot dodge mechanic is akin to committing suicide. So you walk forward, hide behind cover, slow down time, and take some pot shots until everyone is dead. Then you watch a cutscene before repeating.

Speaking of cutscenes, there are a ridiculous number of them in this game. Almost every single door you walk through (essentially after every battle) leads to a cutscene. These vary in length from 30 seconds to 5+ minutes. And chances are if something cool is happening in the game it is happening in a cutscene. Once in a while you are asked to shoot some people in slow mo at the end of said cutscene, but I never escaped the feeling that I really wished I was playing what was being shown on screen. I think some of the worst examples of non-interactivity in this game occur in the hostage-swap level. I was shocked that after the sniper started shooting, the game put the HUD up and theoretically gave me control, but Max just started running without me doing anything. In fact I tried to walk the other way or stop and he just kept running. It was like they pretended to give me control but really I was just experiencing another cutscene. Later, while sniping the game decides it is going to move the reticule for you. It follows along the path of the person you are supposed to be protecting, and then gives you control for five seconds to shoot a couple dudes before taking control away from you again. I really hate that critics praised the story aspect of this game. If you want your games to be movies then become a movie critic. This is a game. I want the gameplay to be exciting as well as the cutscenes and I'd prefer if the ratio of cutscene to gameplay was a bit less than 50/50.

If it seems I am bashing this game to hell, well I am. It manages to be everything that is wrong with games today. Relentlessly simple and heavy on special effects over substance it is barely a game and more of an interactive movie. Even the shining example of interactive movies, the Uncharted series, gives you control during the action sequences. That is what makes Uncharted work. Because you are in full control during the cool parts. In Max Payne you are rarely fully in control at any point in the game. Max Payne 3 goes down easy because Rockstar does its best to avoid frustration. Checkpoints are numerous, and the easy difficulty is easy enough that most players should be able to make it through without much difficulty. The game is kind enough to end cutscenes with you facing in the exact direction you need to go and since cutscenes bookend almost every room you are almost never lost or confused on what to do. This is shooters for dummies. An experience so easy going down that you can't hate it. But there is no meat on this game's bones. There are no clever mechanics, no tactical depth, no variety. I'm enjoying it in the same way I enjoy a movie, so I'll play the second disc, but the first has left me utterly underwhelmed. I know I rag on Rockstar a lot, but in a way this is a worse offense than their normal games. My problem with their work is often that the story and the gameplay don't mesh. In this game the story and the gameplay are one in the same. But unlike a game like Braid where the story is cleverly wrapped around the mechanics, in this game the gameplay feels like merely a way to get from one cutscene to the next. The challenge here comes not from intelligent scenarios requiring skill and strategy to overcome, but by putting a ridiculous number of enemies in front of you and having them do a ton of damage. Your only solution is to press forward and make sure bullet time is engaged. After all it will probably only be 30 seconds until another cutscene shows up.

I'll say again that I am enjoying Max Payne 3. It does go down easy. But I feel like I'm enjoying it in spite of the gameplay, not because of it. I love a good movie almost as much as I love a good game, but Dan Houser, as good a writer as he is, is no master screenwriter. If I want to watch a movie I'll go see a movie. When I play a game I want to do just that, play it. Watching cutscenes and holding down forward and right trigger are not what I call a game. That's called an interactive movie and I honestly am glad I didn't pay $60 to experience one of those.

And it was weird. American animation over the past decade has become more and more sterile. Pixar often deals with very adult themes, but it does it in a way that is appealing to children as well as adults. Most other animation studios simply make movies that solely cater to those under the age of 10. There are occasional moments of brilliance such as the original Shrek, Happy Feet or Coraline. But all in all American animation has become the bastion of politically correct children's movies that have a great deal of trouble appealing to an older audience. Now I like a lot of these children's animated movies. I'm a huge Disney fan and enjoyed Tangled, Princess and the Frog and Winnie The Pooh (their three most recent efforts). But every so often I yearn for something a little more edgy. Now you could mention anime, and there are "adult" anime, but 90% of anime either involves either high school drama, endless battles or, most often, both. Now again, I like anime as well. Studio Ghibli especially puts out amazing stuff, but when anime gets mature it tends to just become exploitative.

Which brings me to Triplets of Belleville. It's a French film by Sylvain Chomet and it is decidedly not something you would want to see with children, or your up tight parents, or your otaku friends. Featuring some graphic nudity, disturbing violence, and dark thematic elements this is a film that reminded me to some extent of the much more extreme works of Ralph Bakshi. Surreal, and featuring almost no dialogue, Triplets is a unique and decidedly odd film. The story can be somewhat hard to follow as most of it is told through visuals which can take a turn for the weird at almost any moment. And the whole film is over before you know it, but it was refreshing to watch an animated film designed for the art house crowd with mature elements and a dark, disturbing story.

I've criticized mainstream American animation in the past, and Triplets shows exactly why. Animation can be bizarre, surreal, and expressionist in a way that live action films cannot. Too often today animated films ignore the animated part, telling a story that could just as easily be told in a live action scenario. Triplets for me is defined midway through the film at a club where a waiter serves diners while bent in manners impossible for the human body to attain. It's incredibly strange but it is something that would only work in an animated movie. It's something unique to the medium, a medium which should celebrate the weird and the macabre but has become far to intent on appealing to family audiences.

If you want to try out a weird and unique piece of animation that is like nothing coming out of either the US or Japan I'd suggest Triplets of Belleville. Chomet directed a new film a couple years back which I'll have to get a hold of. While he may not be the brilliant storyteller that Miyazaki, Stanton, or Bird are, he dares to offend in an animated film and that makes him, to me at least, something pretty special.

We all have our personal choice for best year in gaming history. Mine has to be 2004, the year we got Halo 2, Half Life 2, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, World of Warcraft and Far Cry among others. This generation most people point to 2007 as the defining year with the release of Halo 3, Modern Warfare, Bioshock, Mass Effect, and The Orange Box. I have to say that 2013 is shaping up to be a year to remember. Will it eclipse 2004? I don't know but it has the best shot since 2007. On the docket just in the first quarter are games like Bioshock Infinite, God of War Ascension, Tomb Raider, Devil May Cry, Ni No Kuni, and Crysis 3 among numerous others. Later in the year we'll have The Last of Us, Prey 2, Metro: Last Light, GTAV, Gears of War Judgement, Beyond, Watch Dogs and numerous others. By the end of year we'll probably have a couple new consoles in the mix which will launch with Star Wars 1313 and the new game from Bungie. If that doesn't sound like a lineup to break wallets then I don't know what will be. All we need is for Half Life 3 to be miraculously announced for the launch of the next gen systems and it will easily be the year gamers have been dreaming of since 2007. What are some of your guys favorite years in gaming? Do you think 2013 will eclipse them?

So this past weekend Steam had a sale going for the games of publisher Paradox Interactive. Among these games was the King Arthur series. I knew nothing about the games going in but the screenshots and videos made the series seem similar to Total War so I decided to give the games a shot. Several days later the first game in the series had finished downloading.

The game is fun. It mixes RPG elements with Total War gameplay. It lacks the complexity of the Total War games as far as strategic depth is concerned, but it has its interesting RPG elements that somewhat make up for it. My biggest hitch is the performance. I have a computer vastly superior to the recommended specs, and I'm able to play Empire Total War at 40-60 fps. This game looks much worse than that one yet during heated battles the framerate can drop as low as the low 20's. It's not a massive issue due to the genre of the game, but I'm worried that if the first game runs this poorly, how will my computer handle the second game, released only earlier this year?

Of note, I tried changing the settings around to improve performance but there was virtually no difference between medium and high settings. I gained a massive 1 frame per second. It's a shame that this game is hampered by both that issue and by a bug that crashes the game to the desktop at the start of battles once every couple of hours. The game keeps something like 10 autosaves for you, but I don't get why they save at the end of a battle instead of the beginning. There is a major difficulty issue in this game where you are often given quests to defeat certain enemies whose power you don't know before the battle begins. A large portion of the time these battles end up being way over your head and you end up getting slaughtered. Of course the game saves directly after the battle, meaning you have to load the save before the end of your last turn if you want to survive. And it is very important that you do load if a hero falls as upgrading heroes takes a lot of time and losing any hero and all of the artifacts he holds can be a devastating blow to your empire.

All these weird quirks aside, I'm enjoying the game. It doesn't seem super long and the core campaign is RPG like enough that you wouldn't really want to replay it other than to choose the opposite side of the morality scale. Compare this to something like the Total War games which can be played over and over with different results every time, and it does feel a bit limiting. I hear, though, that the DLC which was included in the collection I got is more strategic and less RPG like so I'm interested in trying that out once I finish the main campaign.

So has anyone else tried this game? I know Paradox games are something of an acquired taste but I feel this is one of their better efforts and is something that can be understood without too much effort assuming you are familiar with this type of game already. Anyone have any tips or any tricks for improving performance?

Last year when EA was showing off Battlefield 3 they spent most of the year showing off only the PC version. They were pretty upfront with the matter but if all you did was watch a commercial on TV then you might have been disappointed when your shiny new game didn't look anywhere near as good as the version from the trailer. Now for a lot of people graphics don't matter and getting a watered down version of the game wasn't a huge loss. I'll argue that getting it at only 30 fps was a bigger loss especially for those use to the smoothness of Call of Duty. Regardless, while EA never outright lied, for those who didn't do their research there could have been a big blow to the face when they started playing their game.

This year EA did a repeat of last year. Except this time they showed virtually every game at their press conference off on the PC. And this time they didn't own up to it right after. But this year it wasn't just EA. Ubisoft was only showing its games on PC (I understand that this was the case even at Sony and Microsoft's press conferences), Tomb Raider was running on a PC, RE6 was running on a PC, everything was running on a PC. The only games actually running on the consoles they were being displayed on were the exclusives (You Halo and God of War and so forth). Now arguably Sony's exclusives especially looked better than most anything anyone else was showing save for maybe Watch Dogs and the stuff confirmed to be next gen. But the question is, for all of these third party games, will they actually look and run anywhere near as well on a console as they did on PC? The answer is obviously no. At best they will look pretty close but run at half the frame rate. At worst you will get the type of game we saw at the end of the last generation, where games looked decidedly worse on consoles than on PC. The question is, which games are going to look good regardless of system and which won't? And furthermore will gamers have any heads up in advance or will we be at the whim of critics to tell us what games are functional on consoles and what games aren't?

It's going to be an interesting year and a half until the launch of next gen systems and in that time I expect PC gaming will see a big explosion in popularity as people await a console that can keep up with the PC's on the market already. As someone who buys most of his games on the PC I think it is great that developers aren't holding back when it comes to their latest engines, but I also feel bad for those who don't do their research and end up buying something that doesn't work how they thought it would. What do you guys think? Do graphics and performance matter enough to you that this is going to be a problem? Or are you content with the graphics of current gen systems even after seeing what the next gen will be capable of at this year's show?

Oh and as a final note, thanks to everyone who took my survey over the past 24 hours. I got over 150 responses thanks to you guys so I'm set to go other than needing to get some more girls to take the survey. Didn't think of that skew when I posted it here. Oh well. So thanks everyone! I really appreciate it!

Hey duders. So I'm taking a marketing class right now and we are working on a project involving bottled water and flavored bottled water. Boring subject, I know. Anyways I need some help from people. We have to send out a survey and I was hoping some of you guys could take it for me. It's 10 or so questions and should take under 5 minutes. For the final question, my name is Seth. Linkage

For your help I will reward you with this trailer for the new video game movie from Disney, Wreck It Ralph.

Last year at E3 I said that the theme of the show seemed to be showing the same thing as the year before only with better graphics, save for Nintendo actually innovating. This year we haven't hit Nintendo yet but the first part seems pretty much spot on a year later. Halo 4 looked like all the other Halo games, but with better graphics. Tomb Raider went the Uncharted route and let's face it compare those graphics to Underworld and you honestly wouldn't believe we were talking about the same console generation. Assassin's Creed looked like Assassin's Creed with better graphics. The same is true of Far Cry 3, Crysis 3, Dead Space 3, Medal of Honor Warfighter, and God of War: Ascension. Yea all of these games were in a way different and hopefully superior to their previous entries but they were still very much entries in franchises that had been going on for quite a long time. Microsoft mentioned a couple new IPs partway through their conference, but that was pretty much it. We got short 30 second trailers for them but none showed any gameplay. In fact there was only one game shown so far that genuinely made me say, "Huh, haven't seen that before," and that game was Watch Dogs. The game came completely out of the blue, a new IP with absolutely no fanfare and it actually looked pretty cool. I'm not even remotely sure what the hell the game is about, but I can safely say that it is a genuinely interesting idea. Did the end hint at a MP game? Or do you play as a bunch of different characters? I don't know but regardless the idea seemed cool, and yes, it had great graphics.

Easily the graphics champ of the day though wasn't in any press conference. Star Wars 1313 premiered on Spike after Sony's show and let's just say that those are some ridiculously good graphics. The guy being interviewed said he didn't want people to know what was a cutscene and what was being played if they watched someone play the game. I can safely say that they succeeded at least in the parts shown off today. The game easily looked as good as the CG in most other games and put the other great looking games at the show to shame. I'm interested if they were running the demo off of a PC or a console, cause nothing else shown today looked even remotely that good. Plus a Star Wars game that shows a darker, grittier side of the traditionally PG-13 rated series is welcome in my book. I'm honestly surprised neither Sony or Microsoft opted to show the game at their press conferences because the demo shown was easily superior to the Wonderbook or whatever it was called. And I could easily have skipped the lengthy multimedia demonstrations at Microsoft's show.

In the end, first off I am simply amazed at the graphics being shown this year. I'm curious if some of the best looking demos were running on a PC or on a console, but at the very least some of the amazing looking PS3 exclusives must have been running on a PS3. Halo 4 looked beautiful but I felt it was upstaged later in the show. Tomb Raider did look quite good, but the animation was a major sore spot for me. It was okay but not nearly as good as the procedural animation Naughty Dog and Sony Santa Monica are doing on the PS3. Oh and Beyond definitely has my interest. No idea how it actually plays, but it did have the best facial animation of the show and the premise was interesting for a story. Quantic Dream's games are always more enjoyable to watch than to play, but maybe they can prove me wrong and make something that I enjoy playing as much as I enjoy hearing the story.

And that pretty much sums Day One up for me. Amazing graphics, probably mostly running on PC, and a few interesting unique ideas here and there (Beyond, The Last of Us, and Watch Dogs stood out to me) and that Star Wars game is just fucking beautiful.

And final note, was it just me or did Leon really move and shoot at the same time in the RE6 demo? Cause I'm pretty sure he did. Seems like Capcom is truly entering a new generation. Took them long enough.

So sad story. I'm broke. I actually spent time today scouring my apartment for loose change so I could buy a soda. Yea it's that bad. What that means is that I won't be able to buy any new games for a while. That doesn't bum me out too much as there aren't really any games coming out soon that I am all that interested in. So what to play? Well I have quite the backlog and now seems like the perfect time to start working through it. So I dusted off the old PS2 and took a look through my collection. I had played the original Kingdom Hearts maybe 5 years ago or so. I had RE: Chain of Memories and 2 sitting on my shelf untouched. So I decided that now was as good a time as any to continue playing this interesting series. So I popped in Kingdom Hearts 2 and my God the intro was one of the weirdest I have ever seen. 2 and a half hours of playing as a character never mentioned in the first game. Talk about late title screens. Anyways after the weird intro where you play as a Nobody named Roxas, you return to playing Sora and exploring Disney worlds. I'm 8 hours in right now and I still have no idea what that intro was about. So being confused I consulted a friend who is a huge Kingdom Hearts fan. Seems I need to play Chain of Memories to understand what is going on in 2. So after writing this I am going to pop in Chain of Memories and see if it is good enough to warrant a playthrough.

Other than the nonsensical story I like the improvements they made to Kingdom Hearts 2. Putting the camera controls on the right thumb stick freed up the L1 button to be used as a modifier so you can use abilities and spells without going through a menu. It makes the game about 10x better. I still don't use magic very much and the gumni ship levels are still pretty pointless and out of place, but overall I think this game holds up decently well and I'm enjoying it more than anything Square Enix has done this generation. One day when I'm not broke I may buy the DS and PSP games in the series. Until then I'll enjoy these old PS2 games during our latest summer gaming drought.

Well I finally am level 10 on PSN. It took over 100 trophies to do it. What finally put me over the edge was getting all the pieces of subject 16's video in Assassin's Creed 2. I was honestly thinking it was going to be something better than that. The ending of the game pretty much said the same thing. But, combined, that is a good twist to be sure. I'm interested in how the series progresses from here. Will Desmond take front and center in the third entry? Will a new twist be revealed that will blow all our minds? I'm interested in seeing how things progress. I guess it is a testament to the quality of the story that I am so eagerly anticipating the next chapter. 

I may or may not have time to do a review of the game, but I think it's about an 8.5. The controls could still be improved, the framerate has a tendency to take a dive when things get hectic, and some parts of the game are more boring than others, but the good far outweighs the bad. Most of the time the game controls well, is difficult but not frustrating, looks good, and has a deep and twisting story. I really liked upgrading my armor and weapons. I didn't like doing the assassin tombs. I felt that the controls and camera just couldn't keep up with what the game was asking me to do. It did force you to get better at the game, though. Still, I prefer the platforming in other games better. I think it would help if the game had a sticky system similar to Sucker Punch's games like Infamous. Basically when you jump your character locks onto the object that the game thinks you are jumping to. It is a little overdone in Infamous, but far too many times in Assassin's Creed 2I found myself trying to jump towards an object and ended up jumping off the side of a massive building. I understand that the game wants to give you a great degree of freedom, but if I am jumping along and directly in front of me is a ledge and slightly to the side of me is a gaping cliff the game should be smart enough to realize that I want to jump to the ledge and not over a cliff. It's difficult to quickly aim the stick in the exact direction I want to jump, especially when the camera is not directly behind me. Most of the time it isn't an issue, or at least a big one, but when you are trying to beat a timer, or have spent 10 minutes climbing up a huge tower, falling all the way back down just because you jumped at a 30 degree angle instead of a 40 degree one can be really frustrating. But again, most the time it isn't a problem. 

The combat also is good but could use work. Enemies take too long to kill. I don't think I died in combat a single time, but it often took me ten or fifteen minutes to clear out a room of guards. If I can take down a whole army without dying then the game is too easy. I often felt that the game would tell me I would get slaughtered if I tried assaulting somewhere, but it just happened that I had cleared that entire fortress of guards five minutes ago. There is a definite disconnect between how powerful the game says you are and how powerful you really are. A couple times the game had me trailing a target but didn't let me kill them. I would get within three feet of them but was told I had to wait until the right time. Of course the right time was when they are in a secluded fortress surrounded by dozens of guards. That just doesn't make sense. If I am within five feet of a target I should take him out. In fact several times throughout the game I was within five feet of the final boss and had to only leap forward to end the whole plot once and for all, but the game told me to stay back and just watch. This disconnect really frustrated me. Again, it isn't a huge problem most of the time, but when it does happen it can be very upsetting. 

So overall I liked the game but there is still a lot of improvements the third entry can make to allow this series to reach its full potential. Whether that entry takes place in the past or present, though, is anyone's guess. But I don't think you'll survive jumping off the Empire State Building into a bale of hay.    

So yesterday in Speech class a girl gets up and does a speech on a special tea called Kombucha. It is made using something that people refer to as a mushroom but is really a mix of fungi and bacteria. This culture is fermented with sugar and the result is an acidic, carbonated beverage that tastes like a very sour citrus soda. According to the girl giving the speech, she suffered from major stomach problems for her entire life, and several months ago a friend convinced her to try this tea. Within seconds of drinking it her stomach felt better than it had since she was a little kid. She has been drinking it for 3 months since and has not had a single stomach problem. As someone who suffers from major stomach problems myself, I decided to buy some Kombucha and see how it worked. The results were staggering. Within seconds of drinking the tea my stomach felt better than it had in years.

I looked up the tea on several sites and the basic consensus is that there are no proven benefits of the tea, but also no proven side effects. Doctors recommend drinking about 3-6 oz a day for several months, then take a week or two off and then start again for another three months. I plan on continuing the drink Kombucha and seeing what the long term effects are. I know there are several of you on here who have stomach problems so I'd highly recommend trying this tea. There are other unproven benefits of the tea but those are probably vastly exaggerated. I would simply recommend Kombucha for fixing stomach or digestive problems. You can buy Kombucha pre-bottled at stores, or you can culture your own. Buying a culture is cheap and you need only sugar and water in addition to that to make as much as you want.

Anyone here know anything about Kombucha? Anyone make it at home?

Later kiddos.