In 2003, I got Morgan Webb to agree that E3 was the “Mecca for Videogamers.” And while that may be slightly offensive to one group of people, I mean it in the most respectful way possible: my relationship with video games is as close to a religion as I will ever approach, and (much like Mecca) E3 is the representative focal point for my obsession. There is not a single event that garners more attention from the gaming press and fan base than E3, and I couldn't be happier that the ESA has reestablished it as the definitive games convention.

It was with great sadness that I watched E3 whither away to a shadow of the giant I once dreamed of attending. After a while, that sadness gave way to disregard as other shows became my E3 surrogates. But they never quite filled the void: PAX came closest, but it lacked the pomp and circumstance of E3’s conferences; GDC was far too serious; TGS suffered from featuring too many games that were irrelevant to American gamers; and Leipzig was just… well, too European. It’s that perfect blend of excitement, fun, and serious information that made E3 head and shoulders above the rest.



But now E3 is back, maybe not at full strength, but it’s back in a way that hasn’t been seen since 2006. And despite the festering carcass we call a global economy, E3 2009 will be forever known as the day that the gaming industry grew a pair, drew a line in the sand and said, “We’re not fucking going anywhere.”

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On a side note, how awesome is it that we’re getting Crackdown 2? The conference could end today and I would still be a happy man.

As much as I like games as an idea, I really don’t find myself finishing many of them. It’s not an issue of time or difficulty… rather, it seems like the games don’t give me reason enough to keep playing them. I don’t know how to best describe it, but it’s almost like very few games have the ability to grip me anymore. And I’m not talking about divisive or mediocre games, instead I’m talking about the likes of Grand Theft Auto IV, Persona 3, and Mass Effect... games that have been almost unanimously lauded by critics and fans alike. Perhaps some of it has to do that there is very little driving force to finish many of these games, and instead become exercises in prolonged, distracting gameplay lacking a strong focus.

So I spend a lot of time trolling Cheap Ass Gamer, the only forums I take the time to keep up with anymore (sorry Destructoid and 1up). The way I figure it is that if I buy a bunch of games for cheap, eventually I’ll stumble upon one that I’m going to like, and then the rest can get flipped on Goozex. I suppose I could sign up for something like GameFly, but I’m not a huge fan of renting games: there’s something about having the game available for exactly the moment I’m going to want to play it that I find necessary.

A few weeks ago, GameStop had a pretty good deal on a game that no one wanted: $4 for a used copy of Quake 4. I couldn’t pass it up, the price is irresistible, so I bought a copy and started playing. And to my surprise, I really liked it. Sure, it’s full of video game clichés like monster closets and space marines, but it harkens back to the classic era of first-person shooters and more than anything, it’s a lot of fun to play.

One of the reasons that the game works so well is that it is very tightly constrained: there is one path in which to complete any given objective, tasks are completed quickly and never bog down the action, and there are very few instances in which the player has their control over the character taken away from them in order to fulfill a cinematic. In many ways, Quake 4 is even more straightforward (and simplistic) than Quake 2 in that there are very few options (if any) afforded to the player. And while this may be frowned upon in today’s open-world, emergent gameplay era of video game design, it works perfectly for Quake 4 because of one thing: Quake 4’s aim is to create the feeling of a sci-fi action movie in which every player will have the same experience as the next.



Again, we have to ask ourselves: is it a good idea to create a game that puts so many restrictions on the gamer? I suppose my answer is that it isn’t a bad thing. A lot of emphasis and discussion is placed on AI design and unpredictable enemies, but do they really add much other than replayability to a game? Lets suppose that replayability was not a deciding factor in the judgment of whether or not a game is good or not (after all, Quake 4 does feature multiplayer and Ico, a game which is less than six hours long and features exactly *one* way to solve each puzzle, is critically acclaimed)… would you then rather the developer have planned a series of exciting moments and confrontations that will evoke an emotional response instead of so-called intelligent enemies? I would…

As I said before, Quake 4 plays out like an action movie: you’re a member of an elite squad of Marines tasked with helping with the offensive assault on an evil alien (?) homeworld. And while there are glimpses of the war at large, the story itself is tightly focused on your unit and more specifically the character of Matthew Kane. Never are you jumping (Call of Duty style) from one character to another, and never are you having major parts of the story glazed over with cinematics. Instead, the game plays out as one single thread of storyline from beginning to end, without trying to seem overly epic or momentous. If anything, the game is quite personal in scope, especially when considering the act break that occurs halfway through the game.



At four dollars, Quake 4 costs less than half the price of a movie ticket, even less than a movie rental, and is just as entertaining as your average special effects laden blockbuster. Sure, the story is hardly groundbreaking or even that well thought out, but was Transformers really a thought-provoking piece of cinema? If nothing else, it’s a fun trip back to a simpler time in video gaming and a good example for what could be accomplished by designers creating shorter, more focused games at lower price points.

Follow me here…

Phantasy Star Online was an amazing game. It really was. I think I have somewhere in the neighborhood of six hundred hours logged on my main character, and I don’t regret a single one of them. In fact, despite the wealth of amazing games available for the Dreamcast, I would almost have to say that Phantasy Star Online is my hands-down, all-time, favorite one.

But I sure as shit wouldn’t recommend it to anyone now. The same could probably be said about today’s subject, The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures.

Back in the summer of 2003, Nintendo was on a roll: the GBA:SP finally allowed gamers to actually see their games (well, those who didn’t Afterburner their GBAs), Capcom decided to go ape-shit with their GameCube support, and Squaresoft has finally been temped back to the N’s camp via a brand new peripheral known as the GCN/GBA link cable. Ahh, those halcyon days…

Cut to… well… now. It’s kind of hard to imagine that the link cable idea didn’t work out the way Nintendo imagined. Some people had GameCubes, a bunch of people had GBAs, and they were rolling the venture out on the shoulders of two juggernauts: Final Fantasy and The Legend of Zelda. Seriously, it seemed like a pretty well thought out plan.

Admittedly, there was a lot involved with getting the full experience out of these games: someone had to have a GameCube, several other people needed to have GBAs, and then someone (The GameCube owner? Each GBA owner? This part was unclear.) needed to supply the four GCN/GBA link cables. It really came down to those fucking link cables, a problem which could have been easily rectified: instead of including one “free” link cable with either The Crystal Chronicles or Four Swords Adventures, include two. This way, if a person were to have bought one of the titles, they could have experienced the game as it was meant to be experienced, that is as a multiplayer affair with GBAs as controllers. And since both of those games cater to *EXACTLY* the same fanbase, the chances that both would be bought would be very high, resulting in happy gamers with all the equipment needed to keep buying games that utilized the GCN/GBA link cable. Then all developers would have to do is come up with new and interesting ways to exploit the new game play possibilities.

{Actually, it just dawned on me that this is kind of like a giant beta test for the Nintendo DS. Get back to me on this… I’d love to know what other people think about it}

But the point of all of this musing and retelling is this: I bet, given the right set up and group of friends, Four Swords Adventures was absolutely a blast to play. Unfortunately, Instead of playing it in 2003 or 2004, I’m playing it in 2009… and there’s not a chance in hell that I can round up the people, let alone the equipment, necessary to play this game the way it was meant to be played.

That said, let’s begin…

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[I feel like I should admit something first. This isn’t actually the first time I’ve played Four Swords Adventures. The first time I played it was at E3 2003 while I was shooting a documentary. However, this is the first time I’ve played the retail release and the first time I’ve played it alone. My writing may reflect this.]

If you’re looking for a review as short as my time with Four Swords Adventures (FSA), I’ll tell you that I enjoyed the game. It felt, in many ways, like an expansion of the ideas set in motion with the Warioware (or is it WarioWare?) games: bite sized portions of games that can be enjoyed quickly and easily.

It almost seems like games like Four Swords Adventures set in motion the idea for the episodic games, like Sam & Max, that we’re enjoying today. As an adult, I really like these kinds of games because they allow me to complete games quickly, especially when I don’t have the time (or attention) to devote to lengthy, story-driven adventures. More so, with a game like FSA, it makes for a great party activity since guests can complete a section of the game and then pass off the controllers to others, since stages end quickly and the game play seems to remain relatively simple.

Unfortunately, I was not playing the game in a party setting or indeed with people at all, and yet the game held up surprisingly well. One of the reasons is that the controls are as simple as possible… they have to be, since FSA was designed to be played with the GBA’s four-button controls. In the single player game, the player is able to control their attacks with the face buttons, manipulate items with the right trigger, and manage their party with the left trigger. This party management feature becomes the most unique aspect of FSA that sets it apart from all other Zelda titles…

You see, back… some time in the past. There was some evil sorcerer, and a guy with a special sword that broke into four pieces killed him. Well, he’s back, and this time he has a taste for princesses, so he kidnaps Princess Zelda. So Link takes up arms, specifically the legendary sword, and promptly splits into four Links. Yea, the story is really not that important, but what is important is this: 1, you always have four Links, regardless of how many actual people are playing, 2, the four Links can be controlled in several different ways, and 3, it’s important to master the different ways in which they can be controlled in order to solve the game’s puzzles.

And at the end of the day, a Zelda game is really all about the puzzles. In most Zelda titles, you slowly gain items that allow you to progress into harder dungeons and solve more difficult puzzles… but not in FSA. The puzzles in FSA really come down to how you’re going to use your four Links to get to the next area. A lot of this has to do with the formation feature, a tool that allows you to take control of all the Links at once in one of four geometrical formations. For example, in the first stage, there is a large rock blocking a path that is too large for my independently controlled Link to pick up, so I organize my party into a two-by-two square formation, and now I can pick up the rock with the power of two Links. Again, this is very simple, but it shows how the game forces you to think about your characters as more than independent entities.

The formation tool also allows for some very cool battles. At the end of the first stage (the only one I was able to complete in my allotted thirty minutes), there is a boss battle. By this point, your party has acquired the flame wand (each item picked up applies to all Links) which is quite a powerful weapon on its own… however, you can organize your party into a straight line and create a devastating wall of fire that decimates the boss. So, while in a multiplayer game the party might have benefited from four players attacking the boss from multiple angles, a single player is still able to use the tools given to him to be just as successful in battle,

After thirty minutes with FSA, I still wanted to play more. Sure the graphics were overly basic, but the style harkened back to the classic design of Link’s Awakening and the Oracle-series of GameBoy Zelda titles. As a multiplayer game, I would assume this would be a crazy rupee grabbing romp that no one could resist getting their hands on, but even as a single player experience I have to recommend it to anyone who wants a game that can be enjoyed quickly and casually.

Grade: Recommended

Here’s something you already know: Games are fucking expensive.

That’s your lesson, go enjoy it.

Games are so fucking expensive that a lot of people make… well, some… money by telling consumers which games suck and which games suck slightly less. The problem with (most) of these guys is that they have the time to play through the games to their conclusions (hello, it’s their job) and are (again, most) required by some ethical code to do so… however, this ethical code is more for the benefit of the creator of the game rather than the consumer of the article. The result is that I have bought dozens of games that I have played for a short amount of time and never touched again. I simply couldn’t bring myself to continue…

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Once, I had a friend who was of the belief that if a game doesn’t grab your interest within the first thirty minutes, it wasn’t worth playing. Most of you are probably disagreeing with this statement right now, but let me ask you something: if the first ten or fifteen minutes of a movie are boring as hell, compounded by bad acting and poor direction, would you keep watching the movie? Probably not… why waste your time on something that is probably not going to get better? Then why would you continue to play a game that has awful voice acting, shoddy level design, and a story that seems like it was drafted using a page out of video game Mad Libs.

Now, I know what you’re thinking… the first ten minutes of a two hour movie is much more representative of the movie than the first thirty minutes of a ten or twenty hour game, and you’d be right. However, I still think this argument stands, and I’ll tell you why: the first thirty minutes of a game do two things, 1, establish what the focus of the game is going to be, and 2, let you decide if you care/buy into it. Allow me to explain further…

The first thirty minutes of an RPG are typically there to establish the game’s story, because that will most likely be the driving factor for most gamers in that genre. I’m not saying that RPGs don’t benefit from a good battle system, rather that most fall into one of the varying degrees of interactivity (note: this does not include action-RPGs like The Legend of Zelda and WRPGs like Fallout 3 and Oblivion). For me, the pinnacle of this kind of game (story over gameplay) is Final Fantasy II for Super Nintendo: sure, the battle system improved (slightly) over the original, but more than that, the story immediately got to work on drawing the gamer into its world of romance, betrayal, and political intrigue.

On the other end of the spectrum are FPSs. Sure, they have a story, but the focus is not placed on it (I don’t think that id is paying Hollywood screenwriters to script their games). Instead, the first thirty minutes are important to draw the player right into the action, that is, the gameplay. A perfect example of this gameplay over story is Crackdown for Xbox 360: all I cared about was leveling up my character into an invincible super cop that by the time I got to the “Oh shit!” moment at the end of the game, I could care less… the story (hah!) was irrelevant in comparison to the freeform game play.

So, in these examples, both Final Fantasy II and Crackdown would be recommended, despite fulfilling vastly different gaming “needs”. To use the metaphor of movies again, it’s the same reason that I can enjoy both “Glengarry Glen Ross” and “Serenity”… they draw the viewer in, but in completely different ways.

What wouldn’t be recommended? Man… I don’t know. How about Evolution Worlds? Honestly, I have no idea why I own that game, considering I barely put up with the originals on Dreamcast… and yet I do! Evolution is awful from both litmus levels: the story is barely there and the gameplay felt ten years dated TEN YEARS AGO!

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Basically, I own a bunch of games (many of which I have never played) and I’m going to play them for half an hour. Each. And then I’ll let you know if you should seek them out. As I mentioned above, I believe that the two most important aspects of a game are its game play and story, but that if the focus is clearly on one or the other it can make up for a lacking in the other. However, I do feel that graphics, sound design, replayability, and other factors add to a game, and I will (of course) factor these into my reviews as well.

Will I be reviewing new games? In response to that, please reacquaint yourself with the first line of this article. “Games are fucking expensive.” If you’re from a publisher or developer or represent one of either as an account executive or PR goon, then by all means contact me and let me review your game. Or, if you’re just some guy who wants desperately for me to not like some game that you like and/or dislike, feel free to send me your copy. Otherwise, I’m going to review what’s available, i.e. games you could give a fuck less about because they’re old as hell (read: from last generation).

Reviews will come three times a week (Monday, Wednesday, and Friday) and will continue until I run out of games. Sounds fair? And if I’m feeling particularly adventurous and not sick of editing at work, I may expand these into video reviews.

And with that, I would like to open this up to you to decide my fate… inaugural 30 Minute Review will either be:

The Legend of Zelda: Four Swords Adventures (GameCube)
or
Maken X (Dreamcast)

I could care less which one… I’m only out half an hour either way. Vote by posting your choice in the comments section.[url]

*PLEASE SPREAD THE WORD! THIS IS TOO BIZARRE AN OCCURRENCE TO GO UNNOTICED AND UNINVESTIGATED!*

VIDEO OF CoD2 ON QUAKE 4 DISC

<text copied from my thread on Cheap Ass Gamer>

Ok, so I bought a copy of Quake 4 for 360 from Kmart for $10 because I wanted to play Quake 2 again. After being nauseated by Quake 2 after about a level (motion sickness in addition to the game being just one gigantic cliche... the last time i'd played it, I was in high school), I decided to pop in Quake 4.

What happened next was insane.

I saw the Infinity Ward logo and thought to myself, "WTF? They worked on this game?" and then all of these WWII scenes started playing and I knew something strange was up, so I pressed a button and what did I see but the Call of Duty 2 menu screen.

So I popped out the disc and sure enough, it's labeled Quake 4, but the game on it is Call of Duty 2.

My question then is, is this an uncommon thing? Have I hit some sort of collector's motherload?

Good: Toys 'R' Us is taking pre-orders for additional Les Paul Wii guitars that will ship on Febuary 26th.

Sad: Unfortunately, someone forgot to tell TRU that the bundle itself is $89.99 on Amazon, making a list price of $100 for the guitar itself completely unbelievable. On the bright size, TRU is offering it at the bargain basement price of $60 for those who pre-order the peripheral*.

*note: peripheral requires additional purchase of additional Wii-mote peripheral for $40. Thanks, Activision...