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• Question of the Day: Why Can’t I Play Online?

  It’s getting bad. Ugly even. A friend walks up to me and asks the simple question, “Hey, John, what are you playing right now?” Then I think of the backlog. It’s a pile of games sitting by the consoles, a gargantuan mass of briefly played games, none of them seen to completion. I started Persona 4 in December! MadWorld? Yeah that first stage was a hell of a good time, for sure. My plan to beat Vagrant Story by March? Didn’t work out so much. What’s worse than the line up of single player games sitting by the boxes is the pile of those other games. Some of them I’ve even “finished”. You know the ones I’m talking about. The games that you’re supposed to play with other real live human beings over the internet. Resident Evil 5 without pushing around an artificial intelligence. Left4Dead with more than two people in split-screen. Racing in Burnout Paradise against, you know, drivers. Those games. The ones that keep slipping to the bottom of the backlog. Read More... Posted Apr 07 2009, 09:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, boom blox, resident evil, madworld, halo 3, question of the day, resident evil 5, burnout paradise, left4dead, persona 4, vagrant story, jenga

• Question of the Day: Valkyrie Profile and the Need for Voiced Dialogue

  My backlog is becoming untenable. There are games, games that I started months ago, sitting in a pile that appears to be growing of its own volition. Where the hell did that copy of Pro Evolution Soccer even come from and why is it sitting in the “to play” pile? No one in my home even likes soccer! The worst of the lot is Persona 4. Rather than hide myself away like some horrid realization of gamer stereotype, refusing to venture into the sun until the game is complete, I’ve been working through Persona since early December, taking it a bit at a time. It’s starting to drive me crazy. A few days ago, I fired it up for the first time since mid-February and was treated to one of its scarce animated cutscenes. Turns out that bear suit made a dude! Yeah, not a dude wearing a bear suit. The bear suit formed a dude inside of it. More startling than spontaneous dude generation was hearing the characters’ voices. I had forgotten they could talk you see. This is because, with very rare exceptions, I always turn off the voice acting in RPGs. Why? Because the voice acting is almost always terrible. Dragon Quest VIII’s British cast and Final Fantasy XII’s gang of breathy stoics are exceptions to the rule. Most of the time, you have to deal with screeching whiners who insist on naming every single thing they do and I’ll have none of it. Honestly though, I wonder why voice is considered a necessity in modern design. Read More... Posted Mar 19 2009, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: legend of zelda, twilight princess, square-enix, dragon quest, persona, atlus, final fantasy xii, question of the day, persona 4, dragon quest viii, valkyrie profile, eiji aonumal john Constantine, covenant of the plume

• Question of the Day: Ogre Battle and How Much Tutorial is Too Much?

  Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen hit Wii’s Virtual Console today. This is good for a variety of reasons. Quality Virtual Console releases are a rarity here in the far flung future of 2009. Ogre Battle is rare itself; its two English releases tend to fetch a pretty penny on Ebay. I’ve never played Yasumi Matsuno’s first foray into dense fantasy opera, so I’m looking forward to checking it out on the cheap. My history with the Ogre series is confined to Ogre Battle 64. OB64 was one of the only N64 games I ever owned and I spent many, many hours playing it in the spring of 2001. I had almost no idea what I was doing. OB64 throws you into the deep end as soon you start, burying you under a mountain of circuitous cutscenes and leaving you to figure out its blend of TRPG and RTS play on your own. I was pretty proud of myself for getting thirty hours into OB64 without a guide. That is, until I read a FAQ and found out about the nearly endless number of stats you have to consider if you want to actually see the game’s ending. Nothing in the game tells you about party loyalty or how to measure a unit’s leadership potential. Nothing in the game even indicates that these are things you’re supposed to account for. I love it when a game trusts me to learn how to play. I think that’s why people have responded so well to Retro Game Challenge. Even beyond its Famicom devotionals, the games trust you to learn their rules through play. Nothing is more frustrating than turning on a game and having to sit through an hour of tutorials, forcing you to plod through poorly acted scenes of someone telling you to press X to jump. By the same token, games like Ogre Battle are so complex that you need to have an in-game guide to teach you their rules by example. Read More... Posted Mar 02 2009, 05:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 2 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, wii, snes, Playstation, n64, super nintendo, virtual console, Retro game challenge, question of the day, square enix, tactics ogre, nintedo 64, ogre battle 64, march of the black queen, ogre battle, yasumi matsuno

• Question of the Day: Your Ideal Controller?

  These days, the console exclusive is a cagey beast rarely spotted in the wild. You tend to find them in specialized reserves for endangered species, which is to say, coming directly from console manufacturers rather than third-party publishers. There are a stray handful of third-party exclusives, many of them living in the untamed wilds of the Wii, but if you’re an Xbox 360 or Playstation 3 owner, you can almost always get the exact same game on both systems (give or take a handful of features.) DLC tends not to sway me one or another when deciding what system to get a game for. It’s all about the controller. After eleven years of using the damn thing more often than any controller, I’ve gotten all too comfortable with Sony’s Dualshock, so I tend to gravitate towards Playstation 3 versions of games. But I don’t think I’d say the Dualshock is my perfect controller by any stretch of the imagination. Read More... Posted Dec 16 2008, 07:30 PM by John Constantine with | with 3 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, playstation 3, nintendo, microsoft, xbox 360, wii, sony, question of the day, dualshock

• Question of the Day: Yu-Gi-Oh! And Card-Based Videogames?

  Good friend of 61 Frames Per Second and Screengrab blogger Scott Von Doviak did an ugly thing the other day. You see, Scott’s slowly making his way through IMDb’s Bottom 100 list, subjecting himself to the worst of the absolute worst in movies on a regular basis. My heart goes out to the guy every time his endeavor crosses paths with videogames. No one should be forced to choke down multiple Uwe Boll movies in a single year. They cause dementia. And gout. The ugly thing he most recently did was watch Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Movie. Now, I’m not sure how many of you out there are familiar with Yu-Gi-Oh! I’ve seen the show a couple of times. As far as I could tell it was about some kid from a new wave band holding out trading cards, screaming what they did at a mod, and then watching some monsters pose. Up until today, my understanding was that it was a cartoon/card game/videogame/underpants franchise created by a marketing department to steal money scraps from the Pokémon table, but it turns out it actually started as a comic by Kazuki Takahashi. I also knew that there were a number of videogames based on the series, but now I know that there just about forty games. Forty! Which brings me to my question: what in the hell is up with card-based videogames? Read More... Posted Nov 18 2008, 07:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 1 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, phantasy star, kingdom hearts, question of the day, Pokémon, baten kaitos, yu-gi-oh!

• Question of the Day: Why Can’t I Emulate?

  I am a console gamer. It’s not something I’m proud of, not a badge I wear to mark myself or somehow justify the way I view the medium as a whole. It does, however, define what I’m drawn to play, what genres I return to year after year, and just what I’ve had the opportunity to play since I was four years-old. Only playing games on devices that fit in my pocket or plug into a television has, by turns, given me an incredibly imbalanced game-literacy. Deep, respected play experiences bound to personal computers are things I’m familiar with by name only. Space Quest? Fallout? Oh, yeah, sure, I’ve heard of those. Great games, right? Call me a nerd with a seriously warped perspective, but I’m actually embarrassed, that guy sitting in a circle of academics discussing James Joyce and having to admit that the last book I read was Harry Potter. My console crutch hasn’t just kept me away from keyboard-and-mouse-only fare either; there are literal hundreds of classic console games I’ve never played, and will never have the spare cash or access to the actual cartridges or discs, waiting at my fingertips via emulation. Read More... Posted Oct 24 2008, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, snes, PC, final fight, mother 3, game boy advance, question of the day, fallout, Space quest

• Question of the Day: How Do You Make a Horror Game Horrifying?

  Don’t be afraid. There are no ghouls here. Just nerds. ‘Tis the season for delighting in frights, is it not? That time of year when Halloween is just around the corner, the days get darker, and the things that go bump in the night start getting goosebumps, because, hey, it’s cold out there. As I mentioned last week, it’s also the beginning of game season. Horror, as a genre, doesn’t have quite the presence it did in gaming a few years back, but autumn 2008’s seeing a number of high-profile scary games hitting consoles across the land. Silent Hill’s back after a four year absence, EA is releasing their brand new IP Dead Space in just over a week, and Atari is re-launching their ill-fated Alone in the Dark on PS3. Horror games are an absolute favorite of mine. There’s a visceral thrill they provide that is distinct to the medium, mixing the tension-and-release dynamic essential to horror in any medium with the deep satisfaction of accomplishment that comes from successfully playing a game. Read More... Posted Oct 06 2008, 06:00 PM by John Constantine with | with 4 comment(s) Filed under: john constantine, ea, silent hill, konami, atari, alone in the dark, dead space, question of the day