third week m-m-megapost!

Thus ends the third week of production for the February 2007 issue of Maximum PC. Since we publish 13 issues a year, that means we have to ship an issue every 4 weeks; the presses wait for no holidays, vacations, or trade shows.

Warning: This is a rambling, stupid-long, LiveJournal-esque, over-hypenated post. I apologize in advance.

The window from Haloween to CES is really the only time of year that I feel like making magazines is a grind, but thankfully this year the staff is back to full strength.

On a totally unrelated note, the new(ish) Bob Dylan album kicks ass. I’ve been listening to it almost non-stop for the last week or so. Also, new Shins on January 23rd. Can’t wait for that.

I’ve been making the most of the limited downtime I have by playing games and filling in my back knowledge of comics. I just finished Kingdom Come and The New Frontier, two of the modern DC “classic” series, and I’m on to either the first run of the Sandman (the Gaiman years) or the Crisis of Infinite Earths next. I’ve also started reading Skinny Legs and All and Busting Vegas, for completely different reasons. I decided to save Skinny Legs for the plane ride to Tennessee in a few weeks, but Busting Vegas (about beating blackjack) is entertaining and a very fast read.

On the games front, it’s been a lot of Gears of War in the evenings, with Rainbow 6: Vegas, various Wii games, and Final Fantasy III on the DS. I decided to stop playing FF3 so I have a good RPG for the trip back East. Vegas is suprisingly entertaining, and Gears is the most fun playing multiplayer I’ve had since BF2 and Halo 2.

That’s all we have time for this week. Come back next week when we talk about dog eye diseases and reading final pages.

Wii!

I finally got to pick up my Wii yesterday, without having to camp out or wait in the cold. Gina managed to snag a pre-order, so we had a big time yesterday with Super Monkey Ball, Wii Sports, Zelda, and Trauma Center (I’ll save my thoughts about Red Steel until I’ve had time to play more of it).

Not to put too fine a point on it, the controller kicks ass. It uses a hybrid gyroscope/optical sensor design, which I feared would be imprecise and gimmicky. Luckily, it works surprisingly well. It feels extremely precise, whether you’re hunt-n-pecking your way across a keyboard interface, or bowling in Wii Sports.

I’ve spent every free minute for the last few days playing either Zelda or Trauma Center (if I’m by myself), or Monkey Ball and Wii Sports with Gina. There’s a good reason that there are a ton of mini-game filled party games for the Wii. They’re just a helluva lot of fun.

Trauma Center is basically a rehash of the DS original, with better controls. Instead of moving the stylus to select your instrument, you use the analog stick on the nunchuck. It’s quick, precise, and easy; exactly what the way it should be on a game where speed plays such a crucial role. Activating the “Healing Touch” using a controller gesture is much faster too.
Zelda reminds me more of Ocarina of Time than any other Zelda game I’ve played. I’ve always enjoyed the Zelda games, and this one hasn’t disappointed. The game does start off slow, it gives you 3-5 hours to get used to the controls before the difficulty really ramps up and you have the first boss fight. I’m only about 7 hours in so far, but I’ll keep you updated on this.

More on the Wii this weekend!

Holy Crap – Gears of War Rocks

Last night I was pretty pissed to be stuck playing Marvel: Ultimate Alliance while everyone else on my friends list was enjoying Gears of War (Thanks Gamestop!). After spending a few too-short hours playing a little multiplayer and a little singleplayer, I understand what the fuss about this game was all about.

It’s taken me a few hours to get the knack of using cover, then popping out when a baddie is reloading to kick his ass. It’s a technique I’ve always used in first-person shooters, but it’s an actual part of the game design in Gears.

Two complaints so far. First, the checkpoints frequently save just before a cutscene or scripted event. That’s lame. Second, where’s the party system? Halo 2’s make-a-party-of-your-friends-then-we’ll-find-some-opponents-for-you matchmaking system was damn near perfect. It looks like Gears is going to have a large enough playerbase for a similar scheme to work, so let’s have it!

The kind of work you don’t mind doing

I’m working on my review of Guitar Hero 2 for Games Radar, which is really the type of work I don’t mind doing. I spent about 5 hours playing on Friday night–until my wrists and fingers couldn’t take anymore, and then played more on Saturday.

The short review is that it’s an improvement in virtually every way over Guitar Hero 1, and there’s even some stuff improved over the demo version of GH2. I’m also hearing that some stores are breaking the Tuesday release date, specifically Best Buy and Target, so get out there and get the game. The songlist is awesome, and the new co-operative mode—where one person plays lead guitar, and the other plays rhythm or bass—really, really kicks ass.

Marvel Ultimate Alliance

So, despite my local Gamestop employees best efforts to keep me from playing the game (“No sir, all eight copies behind the counter are preordered by people who haven’t been able to pick up their copies in the last five days”), I’m about two hours into Marvel Ultimate Alliance, and while it isn’t going to change the world, it’s been polished until it’s quite shiny and good.

Unlike the previous Raven beat ‘em up/action RPG X-men games, Ultimate Alliance gives you control over a boatload of characters from the entire Marvel universe, from Captain America and the rest of the Avengers to the Fantastic Four, on down to fan favorites like Daredevil and Deadpool (Flash-based playable character list). The basic concept is simple—take 4 superheroes of your choice, team them up, and smash your way through dungeons filled with both easy-to-defeat minions and a variety of supervillains (Mysterio, Scorpion, and Dr. Doom have showed up already).

It seems like the goofy everyone-must-be-running-the-same-resolution limitation is gone in the Xbox Live multiplayer, although everyone is still tied to the same camera, I don’t find that too objectionable. There are definitely better games coming out soon—Gears of War and Guitar Hero 2 both hit next week—but Ultimate Alliance is an entertaining diversion, and it’s something I can even see Gina playing with me and some friends on Live.

Guitar Hero is RAD

Not that I really needed another example of Guitar Hero’s rad-ness.

Splinter Cell – WTF?

I finished the new Splinter Cell game on my 360 this weekend, and while I really dig the new “Double Agent” gameplay, where you have sets of conflicting goals for each mission–both the NSA and the terrorist organization you’re infiltrating will tell you to do stuff, and you actually have to make tough choices. The addition of tons of hiding places throughout every map is also a major improvement. In every room there’s at least one place to hide, but many rooms have three or four desks and beds to crawl under and lockers to hide in. Forcing the player to make tough choices is definitely something I can get behind.

There are a few things I really strongly dislike. First, the ending is really abrupt. Like Halo 2 abrupt. There are multiple endings depending on the choices you’ve made, but the game basically just stops. That’s weak, especially considering the events of the game. However that problem’s minor compared to the hack-job that they ran on the multiplayer portion of the game.

The 360 version has no narrative-driven co-op levels that I can find (12 missions shipped on the original Xbox version of Double Agent). Instead it ships with a bunch of co-op training missions that feature insanely difficult AI with perfect aim and knowledge of your every move, whether it can see you or not.

I really enjoyed playing co-op in Chaos Theory, when I managed to get another person available with an hour or two to spend on a mission. I’m not the first person to talk about this, but the removal of the booby-trap gadgets (and the motion sensor vision mode) from the mercs takes away a lot of the fun of the merc portion of the multiplayer game. The new mode is much faster paced, but it lacks a lot of the sublety of Chaos Theory and Pandora Tomorrow’s sublime and complex multiplayer game.

Pre-order the Wii? Probably not

I got up a few hours early this morning to get a shot at a Wii preorder from my local Gamestop. By the time I arrived, roughy two hours prior to opening, there were about 40 people in line, for a store that said they had roughly 20 consoles coming. By the look of things, the first ten or so people had spent the night sleeping on the pavement in front of the store.

I’m just going to wait for the overpriced bundles online :)

Edit: Looks like my wonderful wife managed to score one after she dropped me off at work! Yay Gina!

Franchise whoring ^2

Take two massive franchises and put them together, what do you get? One helluva fun franchise all it’s own. I loved the first Lego Star Wars game, and the second one is even better.
Sure, it’s really, really short. The graphics aren’t so hot. And, it’s a damn kids game, but I honestly had more fun with the goofy, too-short kids game than I have with another Star Wars game since the first Knights of the Old Republic.

Controlling a bunch of Lego-ized characters from Star Wars is a hoot. The first time Chewbacca leapt onto a Lego Stormtrooper and ripped his arms off, I almost fell out of my chair laughing. The same kind of mildly perverse, yet in-jokey and deconstructionist humor pervades the game. The game’s a budget-priced $30, and the cutscene with Han and Greedo in the cantina is worth the price of admission alone. Buy this game now!

Vindication!

I knew there was something up with the first few shipments of Xbox 360s. Microsoft’s repairing all the pre-2006 Xbox 360s for free, and refunding the payments people for people who had to pay for out of service repairs.

Here’s the quote:

As part of our standard and ongoing process of analyzing repair data, we recently noticed a higher than usual number of units coming in for repair. Upon further investigation, it was further discovered that the bulk of the units were isolated to a group that was part of the initial manufacturing run of the console. Returns for repair are coming in for a variety reasons and it’s a higher rate than we are satisfied with. We’ve made the decision to comp repairs for consoles manufactured before January 1, 2006, and provide refunds to the small group of customers who have already paid for repairs.