Games, Life

mini-reviews for games I played in Nov and Dec 2009

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I figure I’d start off this year with a massive list of games I’ve played recently and then post individual game reviews as I play them. Also, for the new year, I’m going to try to endeavor to think more critically and reflectively about the games I play. But here’s a non-critical list of the games I remember playing in the last two months of 2009:

PC

  • Torchlight – level 35 or so, finished main quest. Fun Diablo clone with great art. Not sure it has legs, but it’s good for when you need a 30 min wind-down diversion.
  • Dragon Age: Origins – twice, on third iteration now. Google for reviews. I can’t really add anything more other than to say that it has very strong introductory chapters for the different origin stories you can choose for your character, drags a little in the middle (massing an army can be tedious), and has a relatively short end-game (what we’d get that army for again?), but all in all, classic Bioware and a triumphant return of deep(ish) party dialog. Looking forward to community mods.
  • Broken Sword 3: The Sleeping Dragon – I bought this game years ago but it never installed on my various computers I’ve owned over the last few years. Buggy install is a bitch. I saw it on Steam 2 weeks ago and figured I’d give it another shot. It worked! and it’s a pretty good game. Odd Tomb Raider-esque ledge climbing given its pedigree (the first two were point-n-click 2D adventure games), but they didn’t really bother me. The art did take a turn backwards though when they moved to blocky 3D. I played Broken Sword 4 a couple of years ago and remember it being much prettier.
  • Nancy Drew: Warnings at Waverly Academy – Yes, I’m a sucker for Nancy Drew games. They’re all generally the same with not much innovation between iterations, but that lets them pound out… what two dozen games? in the last few years. Kinda like trashy romance novels.
  • Nancy Drew: Ransom of the Seven Ships – Sailing and driving around was pretty fun, I have to admit. That was new.
  • Mirror’s Edge – the first-person pakour game that came out a year or so ago. Most games I play are at least a year old so I can afford them… But anyway, yes, this game was fun. Shortish. Captivating music. The cutscenes were done in cool Samurai Jack-esque cutout-esque artwork. It was frustrating a few times, but overall good. Racing game combined with platformer combined with FPS. Neat.

DS

  • Might and Magic: Clash of Heroes – Best DS game of 2009 for me. Though, admittedly, I haven’t played GTA or the new Zelda. Essentially, a puzzle game with RPG elements. Engaged me more than Puzzle Quest did.
  • Broken Sword 1: Shadow of the Templars – haven’t quite finished it yet. Just as good as I remember from playing it years ago when it first came out and then replaying it a couple of years ago on the PC. For some reason, Nico’s apartment as a sort of home base works really well and is missing from the later games in the series. Also, being able to talk about everything to everyone and get (mostly) unique dialog is pretty cool. The DS version adds some nice 2nd-screen portrait close-ups when talking with NPCs but the small main screen makes seeing the various environment elements a little harder, though they tried to make up for it by making things highlight when you touch the screen with your stylus. I bet the Wii version is great, so go buy it if you have a Wii!

Xbox 360

  • Fable II – Got this pretty much right after I (finally) bought an Xbox 360 in November. I think I liked the original Fable more. The morality system was pretty meaningless since it didn’t affect the story at all, just your character’s visuals.
  • Lego Batman – Playing with Robin. We aren’t done, yet. It’s fun. 🙂
  • various incarnations of Rock Band – Fun as always. The main reason we got an Xbox 360, actually. Well, that and the fact that it hooks up nicely to my home network and Windows Media Center.
  • Forza Motorsport 3 – When we get a house and a dedicated home theater room some day (I want to take you to a monster-free city), I’ll be getting a racing chair and a wheel to go with whatever version of Forza exists then… It is sooo beautiful. Damage modeling, too!

Wii

  • New Super Mario Bros. – Haven’t actually gotten to play it much, but I like it. The kids we sometimes hang out with like it.
  • Wii Sports Resort – borrowed from Steve. I spent a few hours just flying around. 🙂 Sword fighting is fun.
  • Wii Fit Plus – We had to rearrange our office to make enough room between the couch and TV for the Wii balance board. Now that we’ve set it up, we’ve used it maybe once a week, which is better than sitting on our asses all the time. Pretty fun so far, actually.
Academia, Games, Life

Happy new year!

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I’ve decided to post really quick reviews of each game I play.

The thing is, I’ve been replaying some older games and realizing how much of them I’ve forgotten, and then I have a tiny moment of panic about how ephemeral my experiences with these games are–a tiny existential crisis ensues. Do I play the games because life is nihilistic and I should just fill it with personally engaging experiences, or do I try to contribute something to the societal world–games culture and academic progress? And then I figure, well, it won’t take much time to write at least a one-line review of the things I’m playing.

Part of the hesitation, though, is also the fact that I play *a lot* of games. A LOT. It’s kind of frightening, actually, given that I’m trying to finish the dissertation and apply for jobs and do academic stuff at the same time. So, there’s a bit of shame or guilt involved, too.

But talking with Theresa, another student at the college of ed who also studies games and learning, has convinced me that knowledge about games is part of my academic identity. I’ve come to be known as “the games guy” in my department, and that label or position has definitely given me some cultural capital that I’ve been able to ply into various opportunities within academia, if only by giving me confidence in myself by seeing that others value my knowledge.

The positioning, though, is kind of strange since I don’t think I’ve done all that much to cultivate it. It seems like I can contribute to it and make it productive while also justifying all the game playing if only I shared my thoughts about these games, and thus, my new year’s resolution is to write about each game I play.

Or maybe I’m just trying to make an obsession have some sort of extrinsic value…

Games, Games Research

Top 10 greatest moments in games culture of the decade

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There’s a bunch of game review websites doing their top 10 best games of either the year or the decade right now. I’m continually moved towards thinking that games that are inherently good can only be great through a combination of intrinsic qualities and external player dispositions, situations, settings, and communities. In other words, I’m inclined towards thinking about gaming moments rather than the game artifacts themselves. To take that thought further, I think what’s even more compelling are moments that stem from the culture around games. And so, here are some great moments that speak of our growing, diversifying (yet also moving towards homogeneity), deeply intricate games culture of the past decade.

I had meant to do a top 10 list, but there’s no way I can think of the best candidates in one sitting, so I’ll start with these and add as people comment (here, via Twitter, via Facebook, or via Google Reader). No particular order:

[Note Dec 18:] It seems like two categories can be made out of the list, those that are trends and those that are specific moments. I’ve tried to keep it to specific moments, but it’s blurry. Also, it’s of course subjective, and, apparently, I have short-term memory since most of these are from the past 5 years.

  1. 2007: Very touching story about a mom who sent letters to her son through Animal Crossing. The story is touching. The fact that the letters might have been auto-generated, well… it’s still a touching story. Read about it (joystiq) or watch the story (YTMND).
  2. 2004: “Bow, nigger” and New Games Journalism.
  3. 2008: Project Chanology and Anonymous. Ok, technically not exactly games specific, but its basically griefing writ large. Good summary of griefing: Julian Dibbell’s article in Wired on Patriotic Nigras and Second Life (yay, guildmate!).
  4. Terra Nova blog (speaking of guildmates). Games (virtual worlds) culture needs people to write about it. Read all about trading real-world currency for in-game gold and items, for example.
  5. 2006: Million Gnome March in World of Warcraft.
  6. 2006 and 2007: South Park episodes on WoW (info) (video) and Guitar Hero (info) (video). Good example of gaming hopping into other media. (via Jen Stone)
  7. Settlers of Catan more popular than Monopoly and taking top selling toys and games spot on Amazon. (via Chris Ferejohn)
  8. 2005: Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas Hot Coffee controversy. (via Sean Duncan)
  9. Pro gaming actually exists. Eg, Fatal1ty featured on MTV and owns h1s own product l1ne.
  10. MC Chris’s, Fett’s Vette in Star Wars Galaxy machinima. First, it’s an example of nerdcore hip hop (also see MC Frontalot and MC Lars). Second, it’s an example of machinima. Third, it’s an example of how all these different media are bleeding into each other.

Life, Misc.

Happy holidays!

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and just a note: I updated this blog to latest wordpress release and went ahead and updated my plugins (and ditched some plugins I never use anymore). Let me know if anything is broken.

Life

The TV Show animated short

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The TV Show animated short

via Drawn!

Academia, web 2.0

Catching up on my rss feed, finally saw what the danah boyd controversy was all about…

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Here’s danah’s response and Jenna’s commentary.

I said it at IR10 and SoP, and I’ll say it again. 1. Twitter is a horrible backchannel tool since it is too open, too 140 character limited, too persistent, and 2. it’s NOT a backchannel when you project it behind the speaker!!!

Personally, I think snark and irreverence is perfectly fine in a backchannel, so long as it’s also constructive, productive, informative, and on topic. I think their reactions to the content of the bc is overreactionary, but it’s all besides the point because the conference organizers shouldn’t have been broadcasting it in the first place. It’s a BACKchannel!

Games, Games Research, Humorous, Life

Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation

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So, I played Dragon Age for a couple of weeks. It’s engrossing. Very engrossing. But I *was* disappointed with how little change there is to the plot or storyline with each of the six different starting conditions. Each start story was really well done, so to have the narratives from a particular one be mostly forgotten once you get to the main game… Well, on the official forums, SLPr0 wrote up a nice overview of some of the ways in which the plot could have been so much more (included after the break). Head on over to the forum thread (Literary Criticism in Regards to Flopped Plot Opportunities and the Human Noble Origin) to read the ongoing discussion.

And, of course, there’s Yahtzee’s take on Dragon Age, which is, as with all his Zero Punctuation videos, hilarious and spot on in that scathing-yet-there’s-a-bit-of-truth-there kind of way.

Continue reading Dragon Age plot flops and Zero Punctuation →

Academia, Games Research, Life

Currently working on…

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  • Dissertation (simultaneously working on proposal and actual diss, to be finished this year as a collection of previous papers plus intro chapter and new chapter on the enrollment of a third-party mod to my raid group in terms of distributed cognition and actor-network theory).
  • Toying with the idea of a paper on exploring activity theory, actor-network theory, and positioning theory through two DS games, Valkyrie Profile and Devil Survivor.
  • Applying for academic jobs starting next school year right now. If nothing comes through, applying for other jobs. Looking for a research position in Learning Sciences or maybe Comm or Media Studies that lets me focus on learning in games, collaboration in games, games culture, new media culture, etc.
  • Also, obsessively playing Dragon Age. Very strong betrayal theme in the game’s plot and in the world’s lore.  Makes me think about previous Bioware games to try to identify the the one-word theme for each… Doable?
  • Editing paper with Sarah Walter on comparing collaboration in WoW and Lord of the Rings Online through a distributed cognition lens. It’s turning out pretty good, I think!
Misc.
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Haven’t posted in a while, but this was too cool to just share via Google Reader.

Visualizations of choose your own adventure books!

(via GameSetWatch, via Waxy)

Academia, Life

moved server

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My previous post announcing that the server was about to be changed no longer exists!
It’s like the Twilight Zone! omg!! rofl!!1!!

ahem… anyway, it seems like my permalinks are broken so things like my CV and About page and any page, really, including single-post pages, are broken…

Fixing it ASAP, especially since I’ve started sending out job applications and include my url in my contact details…

Fixed! <undelete> though I had to change my permalinks from markdangerchen.net/year/mo/dy/post to markdangerchen.net/?p=nnnn which, personally, I don’t prefer since I think seeing the date in the address bar is more meaningful than the post ID…</undelete>

For reals now… thanks Erik!

Uh… I had to switch it back to default permalinks again since for some reason my CV page wasn’t working…

Changed the name of my CV page which fixed the permalink.

sporadic ramblings of a gamer in academia