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Round Two of the Cheapo Games Shootout (07-08 Edition)! SEMIFINALS Final Half!
posted by Joe
11.17.08 09:07PM
Let's finish up the intense semifinals action and determine which cheapass games advance to the mysterious finals! But first, a recap of the standings thus far:
Zack & Wiki: Trial and Error Rabbit Adventure (Wii): 6 (measured in points)
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree (Wii): 2
No More Heroes (Wii): 7
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law (Wii): 5
The Orange Box (PS3): 3
Slide Adventure Mag Kid (DS): 5
Pain (PS3): 2
Now follows the final trio (of six) categorical comparisons, with a potential three point maximum in each contest (although an effort will be made to limit the awards to a single 3 and a single 0, to name the best and worst in each comparison bout). Out of these seven, the top three will compete for the title of Best Cheapest Game 2007-2008, which will give the winning game the all-important VETO power when judging the 2008-2009 edition.
AURAL SATISFACTION: Best Music/Soundtrack/Audio
There's not a lot of standout work here, save one: "Still Alive" from Portal. That song is so good that I'm giving Orange Box the coveted 3 and no one gets a 2 because nothing even compares to how awesome that song is.
1s all around to No More Heroes and Big Brain for using the Wii Remote speaker, an additional 1 to Pain for bothering to come up with a custom theme song (which is a sucky metal tune, but I still find myself humming it), and fat goose eggs to all else.
A FACE TO A GAME: Best Cast
With the exception of Pain, it's been a while since I've played any of these games. So this category is really a measure of how well I remember the characters and storyline.
No More Heroes is super ultra sexy packed with cool people. Harvey Birdman has the benefit of hilariously leveraging the Hanna-Barbara library of forgotten characters. Portal has GLaDOS. Zack & Wiki has a unique cast, mainly lots of rabbits. Mag Kid has a bunch of refrigerator magnets. BBA has Miis.
Pain has... well, unfortunately nothing. Again, I can't judge Pain on what it became (cheesy sexy girls, the Buzz guy, and David Hasselhoff); I have to stick with what it was when it was cheap.
THAT'S WHY I OWN MULTIPLE CONTROLLERS: Best Multiplayer
There's no multiplayer at all in Harvey Birdman, No More Heroes, or Portal (although obviously Orange Box includes Team Fortress 2, which I have never bothered to play). Mag Kid might have multi; who can tell. Zack & Wiki has a weird multiplayer mode that is actually stupider than advertised: P2 can draw on the screen to point out stuff to P1. So there's your 1s, but Z&W gets knocked down to zero for being dumb.
Big Brain Academy provides reasonable multiplayer laffs, but it pales in comparison to Pain. Even though most Pain multiplayer is of the pass-the-controller variety, it's still fun to watch... and Pain Bowling is more fun than you'd expect (although a full ten frames is a bit much to ask).
Oh what the hell, let's give Orange Box a 2 since Team Fortress 2 is probably OK.
Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree 6
Pain 6
Slide Adventure: Mag Kid 7
Zack & Wiki's Awesome Waggly Pirate Quest 7
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law 8
The Orange Box 10
No More Heroes 12Unbelievable! Orange Box comes from a ridiculous fifth place to a second place finish! And former second placer Zack & Wiki falters back into fourth! I hope my math is right, because Orange Box now joins Harvey Birdman and No More Heroes in Your Final Three!
Next time: it happens! The winner is crowned via a methodology you won't expect!
Things We Learned This Week
posted by Joe
11.16.08 10:20PM
Yes to the bundle.Jeez, what stupid thing to make stressful. GameStop was in fact one of the "select retailers" getting the City Folk/Wii Speak bundle, so I shifted my $5 preorder to the bundle and I think I'm done buying games for the year.
They even conned me into getting the strategy guide (%10 off with purchase of game!), although I haven't yet ripped open the protective plastic wrap. It's not that I want the guide to spoil things, I just like it as a longtime Animal Crossing collector.
I haven't decided if I'm going to make any big deal about City Folk in the weblog fashion I did for the original and the DS sequel. I have this sinking feeling that City Folk will not have enough new content to warrant talking about it to such length.
Although I did already toss together a first impressions post for Aeropause.
Or course there's no squid.
Come on, fanboys. Did you really think that the squid thing was going to make it into the Watchmen movie? That's the first bit I'd cut, for damn sure. Unless I was making a thirteen week HBO series, then absolutely I'd leave it in.The new trailer is also hot. Gives me fucking chills. Finally, Dan Drieberg out of costume! I hope Doc Manhatten's voice gets some kind of imposing effect on it. He sounds too normal.
And I love the notion that eventually we'll get a Director's Cut with spliced in animated Black Freighter sequences.
When did Cartoon Network start runnng the Clerks animated series?
Man, am I paying attention at all?On a related note, Clark and I need to remember to watch CN on Friday nights for new episodes of Ben 10 Alien Force, Clone Wars, and Batman Brave and the Bold.
New Kingdom Hearts TCG expansion out.
And it's full of Winnie-the-Pooh characters! Damn I love this property. I only picked up two packs and I got lucky with a super-rare Dark Riku player card... who fields Heartless cards as Friends.I wonder if this game will last at retail long enough to go through all the dozen or so expansions that have already been released in Japan. I bet not.
Clark won a free Star stuffed animal.
Rhonda noticed Sprout had a Halloween picture contest where the first X entries automatically won a stuffed animal of late night puppet co-host Star. So she scrambled an entry together and got in under the deadline. We never did see how they used Clark's picture, but now we have a Star toy. And Star is kinda fugly. So, win?
Checking out of Harry Potter.
OK, we're officially out of Harry Potter ANYTHING until the inevitable blu-ray boxed set of all the movies. Hopefully by then they'll have figured out how to cram multiple movies on one disk. Or maybe by then it will all be download-only anyway. Either way, we're not seeing any more movies (particularly a two part #7, come the fuck on) until then. And no, I don't want any damn Tales of Beetle the Bard book.
Really? No Trophies at all?
I knew that the GTAIV Trophy patch would have Trophies you can only get by starting a new game, but I guessed I could still get some of the them. Nope! You can't accrue a single Trophy on a pre-patch save. I have no idea how far I am in the storyline (I just met Cogostino), so I am loathe to start over. Maybe in some future downtime, after finishing off this save, I'll kick off a new game.
I haven't written any substantial comics posts in a while, but the last two weeks were so good that I've gotta do it.
$44 on comics
posted by Joe
11.15.08 03:21PM
DC's Secret Six is now at #3 and it is so good. Gail Simone is just a top writer, and giving her a sandbox of tertiary characters lets her skills shine. In three issues she has introduced an intriguing new villain and a major new artifact to the DCU.
And Nicola Scott's artwork is absolutely perfect. Her pencils are realistic in proportion and presentation, finely detailed, and full of animation and expression. I like super-stylized stuff (like, say, Pat Gleason on Green Lantern Corps), but a gimmicky style is also usually used to disguise weaknesses in the forms... there is none of that here. Her stuff is real. It is a pleasure to pick up a book that both looks and reads this well (Yes, I know that the inker and colorist have a lot to do with this too!)
But I think DC needs to figure out what's up with Cheetah's costume. If her skin is colored like a cheetah's, does this mean I'm looking at her naked ass here?
Jonah Hex #37 features the rare instance of Hex having sex; I guess Palmiotti and Gray decided to give the poor guy a break! It's also a return issue for artist Jordi Bernet, whom I've lauded before. It's like John Severin meets Bruce Timm in as European comic strip... that's how his style reads to me.
Huge revelation in JSA #20: Starman's costume is actually a map of the Multiverse. Why wasn't this book given the "Sightings" tag? Plus there's a nice splash page with an Idiot's Guide to Crisis on Infinite Earths / Infinite Crisis. It's been so great to follow this book, as Geoff Johns has been playing chess with these characters since issue one. I'm sure I've mentioned this before as well, but having Dale Eaglesham do the art for the New Earth sequences and then switch to Jerry Ordway's classic lines for the Earth-2 bits is brilliant.
And Mr. Terrific. Again and again you prove to be one of my favorites. I am deeply ashamed that I didn't follow you into Checkmate.
And tying all of this into Kingdom Come? But without bastardizing or selling out the Kingdom Come original? So well done.
Speaking of that, it was nice to see Alex Ross again return to Kingdom Come in the JSA tie-in Kingdom Come Special: Superman. Although a little Alex Ross goes a long way. Yes, he is incredibly talented, but the more of his art that you see, you more you realize that he relies on the same poses and expressions.
Still, it was great to get some additional in-canon material for the Kingdom Come characters (which, really, is over a decade old now). The meeting between "our" Lois Lane and the Kingdom Come Superman was beautiful.
I really enjoyed Marvel Apes, and I am on board for any future Apes projects. (Especially if Marvel allows the cute cliffhanger ending of issue four to be played out!) Here's hoping that Marvel doesn't waste this world in some ill-conceived Apes vs. Zombies garbage. And that it doesn't follow the Marvel Zombies arc of going from really good to really shitty inside of two miniseries.
Does anybody not see the Guardians heading for a HUGE fall soon? In Green Lantern Corps #30, not only does that messed-up scarface Guardian try to intimidate the Zamarons into bowing out of the Lantern arms race (Really? She thought that would work?), and secretly instruct Yat to destroy the entire Zamaron planet should she give the signal, but then she outlaws love in the Corps. Just as several groups of married and involved Lanterns have been chasing that monster Kryb across the cosmos. Asshat.
At least we now know what happened to Fatality and that crazy ghost dog lady from Sinestro Corps. Pink uniforms all around! And let's drop the silly "Fatality" codename while we're at it.
DC, I'm ready for a third Lantern book. Although it's been a while since John and Guy had their own books, I'm thinking more along the lines of a full-on alien series... focusing on the non-human members of the Corps. Like a new Tales of the GLC, or GLC Quarterly, to name-drop titles from once upon a time. Heck, drop the "Green" from the title so we can get stories about Lanterns of every color.
Booster Gold #14, still one of the most fun books on the racks. I fear for the day that somebody decides Booster needs to be a serious book and they kill the mojo. "Thank you, magic hand!"
Was it a good idea to do Trinity right alongside Final Crisis? Because I regularly get confused, between the two of those and the JSA Kingdom Come storyline. All three are sort of covering similar ground, with plenty of alternate universes and timelines. The last few issues of Trinity have been really good, as we see what the DCU could be like without Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman. It's been a great payoff to the first fifteen issues being mainly about mysterious strangers pickpocketing the three of them. I have got to sit down and re-read this in one sitting, because it is better than 52 and way better than Countdown.
There was more of my man Mr. Terrific in Final Crisis: Resist. Once again, it's great to see DC let a smart guy just be a smart guy. I hope his decisions here in Resist become an important point back in the core Final Crisis series.
I also liked casting Justin Long as Snapper Carr.
Carrying out the weaker end of two week's serialized entertainment are Titans #7 and Batman: Cacophony #1. I'm in Titans because I like Wally, I like Nightwing, and I like the made-by-marketing idea of melding the original Teen Titans lineup with the animated Teen Titans lineup. But there's a lot of Titans backstory I'm not getting, even though I did do a few years of New Titans and Young Justice not that long ago. I will say that I greatly prefer Julian Lopez's art to whoever did the first few issues of this series.
Cacophony is the big new miniseries written by Kevin Smith... so I expect to enjoy the words, but not so much the art, which is by Smith pal Walt Flanagan. Walt needs some anatomy lessons pronto. I'm assuming he and Smith worked on the layouts together, and there is some nice work there (like when Joker peeks over his copy of "The Fountainhead," which they managed to do without resorting to the modern comic artist's crutch of photocopying panels! Although there is a lousy copy job near the end.), but most of the book looks like awkward fan art. Looks like the guy could develop a definite style, he just needs the proper training.
I don't know whether to applaud DC for not blowing out Kevin Smith's name on the cover, or chastise them for not blowing out Kevin Smith's name on the cover. I mean, you have to get really close to find that the guy wrote this book; casual fans are going to completely miss it. It also doesn't help that the cover (NOT by Walt Flanagan, but instead a generic Adam Kubert piece) is all red and black and therefore almost invisible on the shelves.
The Week in Links | Joe, 11.14.08
Animal Crossing: City Folk Commercial 2 (YouTube)
My sister IMs me this: "Have you seen the commercial for Animal Crossing with the two women? I don't think it's helping the cause."
There is no justice in tabletop gaming. | Joe, 11.11.08
How can the company that invented two affordable and amazing innovations in tabletop gaming - the Clix system with Mage Knight in 2000 and the tiny styrene model system with Pirates of the Spanish Main in 2004 - be unceremoniously shuttered in a four paragraph press release? Was there no way to save this company?
Aeropodcast #57 and Mirror's Edge | Joe, 11.11.08
Aeropodcast #57 is up and ready for your iTunes, although I personally did not have much to say during it. We had a full house of four staff members and guest Julian Murdoch of gamerswithjobs.com... and five guys is really quite a lot for a podcast. I think three is the magic number, or four if you have a guest and/or a host who emcees more than participates.
And even though we killed the topic and community sections, we still ended up with a monstercast of two hours! I prefer not to think about poor Stephen Munn, who did not participate in the extravaganza but still edited together five audio tracks with at least three mid-show disconnects. Oy.
As to why I had little to say, the main games of conversation were junk I have nothing on... Gears of War 2, Fable II, I can't even recall the other games they talked about because I kinda zoned out here and there. I'm not a good team member, I know. I got some good jabs in there when I could, because I was paying attention some of the time.
About the only item I had an opinion on was Mirror's Edge, and Julian covered just about all of my points. I try to assemble pre-show notes of stuff I intend to say, once I know what the various topics are, and Julian unwittingly nailed everything I had written down about Mirror's Edge. But I'll recap it here. [more]
Things We Learned This Week | Joe, 11.09.08
Moving back into Adamsvil next week.
Or will Animal Crossing: City Folk allow city names with more than eight characters? Now that would be some next-gen programming! But seriously folks. A new Animal Crossing next week means a whole new adventure for yours truly. My fingers are irrevocably crossed that City Folk will be more than a sideways port with minimal enhancements. And why does GameStop not yet have the game/Wii Speak bundle in their preorder system? Hey, you know what I want? Both Animal Crossing: City Folk and the Wii Speak microphone. You know what else I want? A $10 discount for buying both in the same package (Some rumors say the bundle is $20 cheaper!) Jesus.
Hallelujah. New Pirates content.
I think WizKid's long-lived Pirates of the Cursed Sea (four years!) constructible strategy game has entered the For Existing Fans Only phase of its life. Which unfortunately means imminent death cannot be far behind. The newest release - Savage Shores - is showing up not in $4 boosters but in $15 boxed sets. The boxes contain the equivalent of 5 boosters, plus a mega-ship... so the value is better, although a $15 box is a lot less likely to be impulse-shopped than a $4 booster. There are six boxes, each with a different pre-assembled mega-ship... and each contains one third of the cards needed to build one of two ten-mast huge-ass ships. I need to find out what boxes I need to buy so I can complete one of the ten-masters. And that will likely be the end of my Savage Shores purchases. Hurm. I actually like this pricing/compiling scheme a lot better.
The Week in Links | Joe, 11.07.08
Shake Your Betty (YouTube)
Two minutes of Wilma and Betty shakin' it. Fantastic user comment: "i've tried wanking off to this, but it doesn't seem to be doing anything for me."
Full archives available at fourhman.com.
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Cooking Mama | nds
Starfox Command | nds
Odama | gcn
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Bully | ps2
game review by Joe 01/13/07
When I initially walked through the gates of Bullworth Academy, the first student to walk past me yelled "I hate you!" Later on, I had that same kid eating out the palm of my hand. That's pretty much the character arc of Bully. You, as career ne'er-do-well Jimmy Hopkins, show up at a new school full of fools, and you end up as Mr. Popular. Not really the school slaying simulator that certain crusading lawyers and easily-swayed-by-the-press-release media outlets would have had us believe. Whether Rockstar intended Bully as a colossal bait and switch for the video luddite crowed, or... [continued at fourhman.com]
game review by Joe 11/09/06
Two years out, the DS has nicely matured. We’re past the days of tech demos being sold as full games (ahem, Yoshi’s Touch-n-Go). We have enough new-concept, high-profile games to outweigh the launch day panic of N64 ports ahem, Super Mario 64DS). And thanks to the GBA’s agonizingly slow price point death, Nintendo finally feels confident enough to stop selling their first-party DS games at the $35 level (ahem, Pokemon Trozei). The DS rode out that initial wave of gimmicky criticism and has positioned itself as a must-have, just in time to lateral a little of that mindshare over to... [continued at fourhman.com]
game review by Joe 09/12/06
I've been sitting out on the Starfox franchise for years, thanks to all the lackluster offerings during the GameCube era. It sucks, because I really liked Starfox 64 and I really want a new hip iteration in that style. For some reason, Nintendo is bound and determined to avoid that classic, blistering on-rails shooting action... giving us Starfox-as-Zelda and Starfox-as-Rogue-Leader-2 instead. Starfox Command is a return to the game's roots, but not in the way we all expected. Most franchises are ridiculed for not offering enough change-up. Starfox is the rare bird that gets smacked around for not maintaining enough... [continued at fourhman.com]
game review by Joe 05/24/06
I'm only about ten minutes into the first level when the thought occurs: "This is a pretty crappy game." That's never a joyous realization - especially when $50 was tossed like so much salt over the shoulder - but it is particularly grating when the game in question is something you've been anticipating for months. Odama is exactly the kind of offbeat, undefinable game that pulls me in. Games that offer up more than just various degrees of running / jumping / shooting / driving. I live for the thrill of locating games like this. They're underappreciated, underplayed... and in... [continued at fourhman.com]
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