Am I a Sony Fanboy?

I haven’t used this blog in a long time.  Its got a lot of embarrassing entries but right now I have to work through some emotions.  See my favorite console of this generation is about to die.

I think back on all the Sony products I owned.  My first laptop was a Sony.  I really didn’t know any better.  I didn’t realize that other laptops had more than 2 USB ports and even features like video out.  I didn’t realize that to get Linux to work on it, custom video drivers had to be made.  And I didn’t realize when I freshly installed Windows on it afterwards, that Sony required their software to be on it for the laptop to run as fast as it should.  And I certainly didn’t give it a second thought that year I had that Sony Ericsson.  Wow was that a piece of shit.  Why would I ever trust Sony again?

I remember when the PSOne came out.  How disdainful I looked at my friends for playing it.  How angry I got when I saw all the games that were coming out for it and not my PC.  Same with the PS2.  Hell I remember putting together a computer that at least spec wise trumped the PS2 a half year after its release.  I eventually obtained both of these devices begrudgingly.  I had a friend at the time who was a huge console fan and opened my mind to Sony.  Before I was only willing to buy Nintendo if anything.  I found out they were doing a motherboard upgrade on the PS2 and purchased the new revamped one and its never died on me.  Same with the PSOne.  Hardware wise they’re still pitiful.

The Gamecube was such a beauty when it came out.  Anyone who’s ever researched motherboard bridges and different styles of RAM (dynamic access isn’t the only way) shouldn’t require much to understand how the Gamecube could trump even the Xbox in many cases.  The PS2 Resident Evil 4 was so pitiful.

But the PS3, I loved it.  From the dashboard aesthetic to that glossy case.  And a ton of processors!  Sure the graphics card wasn’t as good as the 360′s and didn’t have as much ram but the design was meant to move away from those trappings.  People always have trouble adapting to change so its not a huge surprise not too many people jumped on board with the new take on design.  But the PSN was hacked and everyone was stolen.  My hope for PS3 to be treated with some equality is now gone.  The device I can still love.  The company, well I never did.

See I try not to talk about it much, but I loathe Microsoft.  Words cannot describe my absolute disdain for that company.  From Windows 3.1 to 96 to NT to 2000 to ME, Microsoft has never delivered stable products.  How I never became a Mac convert I’ll never understand.   I still remember Bill Gates firing those hundreds of people for a product blue screening on him in a press conference.  Things need time to be made Bill.  A lesson that Microsoft never learned.  Why people praise them after all those dead Xbox’s and 360′s I’ll never understand, but then again I’m not much of an online gamer.  And fuck all the registry hacks I’d have to do to get a pre-XP machine to run how I wanted it to simply gives me chills.  And also the idea that they lease us copies of Windows.  A lot of companies are evil, few are evil incarnate.  And the buy outs, how could I forget the buy outs!  Microsoft used to (might still) buy out their competition and then shut them down.  Microsoft is a company that was started by selling something they didn’t own!  How they won the love and admiration of so many will forever be beyond me.

See I don’t like the 360.  Straight up.  Didn’t like the Xbox either.  Neither were well designed and both died constantly, almost as much as the PS2 except probably more in the 360′s case.  Seeing my avatar every time I turn it on to the dashboard aesthetic drives me crazy.   The only thing they really did right was party chat and I pay them $60 a year for that.  I could be doing that on my PC for free.  But I do like Halo and Alan Wake.  I’m sure there’s another exclusive or two that keep me coming back as well but they aren’t coming to mind at the moment.

So where do I go from here?  I have begrudgingly given Microsoft business over the years.  My 360 elite hasn’t died yet.  I need to put together a new computer.

I keep asking myself did Sony actually mess up with the whole PSN hack?  I know the world is saying a big loud yes but hear my doubts.  Sony had to pay another company to come in and tell them that.  They had to hire a company to come in and fend off Anonymous and they had to hire a company to tell them what happened with the PSN.  Its right there in the press releases.  The amount of business and stock drop they are going to get for this might be enough to end the company.  A lot of people are angry that it took Sony 7 days to find out this information.  Sony can’t tell you what it doesn’t know.  And if it hired another company to tell them the damage like the press release says, they most certainly didn’t know.  If I owned my own company and my system was hacked, I wouldn’t forfeit my business by telling my clients that they’re information was stolen until I was at least 50% sure.  That is what Sony did by telling you.  A company that large fessed up.  The question is will they try to make amends?

Is it Sony’s fault they got hacked?  I don’t know.  My next question is whether the security on the PSN was comparable to other services like Xbox Live, Steam, Amazon, Paypal, Ebay, etc.  This isn’t the first service I’ve been a part of that this happened to.  Best Buy had this happen to them not so long ago according to an email they sent me.  Mods and cheats aren’t uncommon Xbox Live but no personal info has ever been reported taken.  Same with Steam.  Is this just because no one has ever tried hard enough?  Anyone who knows anything about coding and electronics knows its only a matter of time before a piece of hardware or software gets hacked.  Should our attitudes be any different when it comes to online shopping?  I don’t know.

There’s a lot of information we’re still missing.  None of it will change what has happened, but some of it might change how we see it.  This is a disaster but on the bright side no one is head.  Unfortunately everyone seems to see Sony as some form of Bin Laden.  They aren’t a good company.  I would never buy a Sony product outside of their Playstation brand unless it simply met the price point I was looking for.

Nothing is permanent in the world and everything is permitted.  Every house has windows, even digital ones.  Security is really just a social contract that we call government.  The problem is not all of us agreed to it.  And those that didn’t agree are a lot better with code and electronics.

Yeah I’m depressed.  My favorite console is about to die and all its going to leave me with until Nintendo’s next one is the 360.  Which means giving business to a company I loathe.  Can people change?  Sure.  Can companies?

Am I a Sony fan boy?  I don’t know.  Maybe I am.  Maybe that’s why I’m depressed.  The horses I seem to back seem to consistently be technically high ended unpopular kids.  Its a personal problem I suppose.  Either way, have to get my head straight with logic and reason before the next podcast.

Where I am now

Currently all my time is being devoted to my music projects and my podcast so for the time being this video game blog is shut down.  I will leave it up, as childish as some of its posts are, there are still some posts worth reading for entertainment or information.  For now find me at:

TheCarouselPodcast.com

ListenToMusiM.com

A Note to the Editors

I’ve found I simply enjoy hearing opinions on video games.  Yes, yes maybe that’s the obvious but most people only like hearing from people they agree with.  Now granted I draw the line on post comments on the major video game message boards, but any intelligible opinion on video games fascinate me.    And what intrigues me even more is how the opinion is delivered.  I would also love to see some charts and diagrams depicting who plays what games and which podcasts they tend to gravitate towards.

Justin McElroy from Joystiq for instance constantly speaks of his opinions (on the podcast at least) as facts and words to live by.  Granted he’s being sarcastic but its such a constant factor it is easy to forget that he speaks almost entirely in sarcasm (ie “this isn’t the kind of game I want people playing”, “you’re wrong, this game is bad.  Play some better games”, etc).   The Joystiq podcast is actually an interesting phenomenon to me.  I really enjoy listening to it and hearing all their opinions and subsequent deliberations but I rarely agree with any of them.  Yet I’ve listened to this podcast the longest out of the ones I still follow.  Ironically this podcast is probably the most insulting out of all the podcasts I listen to in terms of if the audience disagrees with the speaker.  Heck listening to their Final Fantasy 13 discussion was an extremely interesting set because of how much they disagreed with each other.  I could be wrong, but Ludwig sounded pretty ticked off.  Either way I still enjoy listening to them and keeping up with their news articles.

Giant Bomb is another site I can’t get enough of that I constantly disagree with.  Their review on Transformers had me feeling like I was a bad person (seriously society, why do you want me to feel bad for loving giant robots?  Giant robots need love too).  Giant bomb tends to have a round table discussion with the goal of coming to a consensus and declaring it video game law.  Its a fascinating approach.  I would love to hear what Nintendo fans think of Giant Bomb since they seem the most outspoken against the Wii.  Also where Joystiq constantly berates themselves, Giant Bomb constantly speaks with authority and conviction.  For me, Giant Bomb is mostly about humor because as I said, I constantly disagree with them.

And then you have 1Up, where I imagine most of the Nintedo fans go for their news.  Where Joystiq is fairly pro 360 and Giantbomb is kind of just shy of middle of the row between 360 and PS3, 1Up loves Nintendo.  Really in all reality, 1Up is simply the one website that doesn’t seem to berate Nintendo constantly (although they did seem to love Nintendo at E3 a little more than everyone else).

For me, the enjoyment on 1Up is Active Time Babble, the RPG podcast.  JRPG’s seem to polarize audiences all through the US, with people either loving or hating them.  The stereotypes that go along with JRPG’s are hilarious and almost always a complete miss, but this post is not about how JRPG haters believe every JRPG is Final Fantasy 7.  But really what happens in Active Time Babble happens through all of 1Up.  1Up has a whole lot more intelligent conversation and examination than either GiantBomb or Joystiq, but very few jokes.  So they run the  risk of boring the audience if they start dissecting a topic that does not hold interest for the audience.  But its this same strength that makes me wish all their podcasts were weekly.

Yes there are many, many other websites and podcasts to listen to or follow.  For me, these are the big three.  I’m not a fan of Destructoid and I’m not into the business aspects of the industry enough to follow Gamasutra.  All the other podcasts I listen to are fan based, the primary and best one of the bunch being That Video Game Podcast.

Anyway, this is just ramblings.  No one’s opinion is right.  And quite a bit more of both the science and business world are constructed of opinion than we like to believe.  I know you might disagree with me on science but let’s not forget, science is based on proving itself wrong.  The history of science is a fascinating subject especially when realized from that context.

Demon’s Souls – PS3

I finally found an affordable limited edition copy to pick up.  Typically Atlus games don’t sell out so I didn’t expect to have a hard time finding a limited edition a couple months later.  Boy was I wrong.

Pretty much the typical thing I hear about this game is how meticulous it is and how often your character dies.  Its a bit unfortunate in that those things aren’t the game’s greatest strengths, they’re simply what composes those strengths.  The game’s greatest strengths are its tension and atmosphere that keeps you on the edge of your seat with very little story or character interaction.  Oddly enough the sparse story and few NPC’s are what creates this tension and the result is far more stressful than most if not all horror games I’ve ever played.

Playing through the intro, I found the game’s look to be quite different that I expected.  The graphics aren’t horribly good, possibly even bordering on bad.  The fonts and menus are not particularly attractive.  The CGI scenes and drawn images however are gorgeous.  The character movement is a bit stiff.

This game accomplishes so much in the details and these are details that I’m guessing most didn’t even realize.  The first time you die the game announces that your soul is forever trapped in the nexus and cannot leave.  Ever.  And after a couple sentences you move on in hopes of gaining your physical shell back.  The few inhabitants in the nexus are so depressed and barely have any will to go on, merely looking to “eke” a living.

The level design is borderline brilliant in its enemy layout.  The game is super hard and if you’re not in a zen like mood,  you probably should wait until you are to play it.  By zen I mean able to accept humility.  To fail countless times to succeed only once.

The brilliant part is in its level design are the enemy types.  Typically enemies, at least in the first level before Phalanx (I haven’t played past here yet), are all very similar in height, structure and color.  They primarily vary in their weapon and attack methods.  But the game trains you to be scared out of your mind at the prospect of any new enemies and constantly reminds you of just how mortal and ill-equipped for this job you are.  After fighting dozens of drab zombies you might encounter a figure in full plate mail with red or blue eyes.  Or a giant monster.  And there is no telling whether you are capable of beating the creature at this point in time or whether you should come back later.  All you can do, is try.  Or ya know, look up an FAQ.

The online implementation is fairly genius as well although this part you may already know about.  From the onset of the game other players are constantly appearing as ghostly specters in a seemingly random fashion.  Their blood stains bring messages and will also show you their specter in their final moments before their defeat.  Later on you can summon their souls to fight with you or invade the realm of other players.  This is so subtle yet so utterly fascinating.

Demon’s Souls is a system buyer hands down.  If you don’t own a PS3, this is a game worth owning a PS3.  The only problem is you might not have the patience for Demon’s Souls and throw it out the window and then call me a dirty liar and throw a brick at me.  But considering Atlus only promised to keep the game running online to last April, you better hurry if you want to experience this since they can pull the online plug at any time.  Find a way to demo the game, see if its something you have the patience for.  Its not unlike the old Nintendo games where you have to memorize the level through infinite deaths.  But the effect the game has is truly astounding.  I know many will hate it, but I can’t recommend it enough.

Lots and lots of previews

Sin and Punishment: Star Successor – Nintendo Wii

Metal Gear Solid: Rising (PS3 and 360)

Dust: An Elysian Tail (360)

Project Dust

Child of Eden (Kinect)

Brink (Ps3, 360)

Bullet Storm (Ps3, 360)

Portal 2 (PC, 360, PS3)

Tron Evolution (PS3, 360, Pc)

Rage (360, Ps3, PC)

Ni no Kuni (PS3)

Castlevania: Harmony of Despair (360)

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow (360, PS3)

Twisted Metal (PS3)

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron (PS3, 360)

Marvel vs Capcom 3 (PS3, 360)

Scott Pilgrim vs the World Gameplay

Deus Ex: Human Revolution

If you’ve never heard of Deus Ex you should go and buy it for the $5 or $10 it costs on Steam.  Seriously, its one of my favorite games of all time.

Transformers: Shockwave has the touch

Too Many Games Coming Out

So I’m making a list here of all the ones I would like to purchase and their release dates so I can plan accordingly.  Also the next podcast we post will have quite a bit on Alan Wake.

Already Out – Red Dead Redemption (360, PS3)

06-22-10 – Transformers: War for Cybertron (360, PS3)

06-29-10 – Singularity (360, PS3)

07-06-10 – Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 Portable (PSP)

07-06-10 – Crackdown 2 (360)

07-27-10 – Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty (PC)

07-28-10 – Alan Wake DLC (360)

09-14-10 – Halo Reach (360)

09-14-10 -Front Mission Evolved (360, PS3)

11-16-10 – Fallout New Vegas

11-16-10 – Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (360, PS3)

03-11-11 – Dead Space 2 (360, PS3)

2011 – Star Wars: The Old Republic

That’s all I can remember right now which means I’m forgetting a lot of things so I’ll come back later and add stuff.  If its too much later I might do another post entirely.

Horror Video Games

Lately the world has me thinking about horror video games, from playing Alan Wake every night over the past week to Yahtzee’s review of Silent Hill Shatter Memories to the Tulsa Sidekick’s podcast themed on horror movies.  Its gotten me thinking, what makes a horror video game scary?  Just because a game is based in a horror genre does not make it scary.

First I should have a disclaimer here in that I used to be really into horror in general.  Monsters, death, demons, and all that fascinated me and when you inundate yourself with these things they start to lose effect on you.  For instance, Leatherface isn’t going to scare me by stumbling around and occasionally hacking off someone’s limb with a chainsaw.  But at the same time, the atmosphere and build of something like Ringu or Ju On most certainly will keep me on the edge of my seat.  But either way, I’ll keep that in mind while writing this and you should too.

Really there are two aspects of horror.  The thrill part and the monster part.  No it doesn’t need a monster to be a horror but there has to be some thing threatening to kill and/or destroy important things for it to work.  And the thrill typically comes from this.  The same thing applies to horror found in video games.  Typically there is a monster or monsters hunting you (or some threat of death) and you have to fight and escape from it.

In early horror games such as Resident Evil and Silent Hill, the idea was to give the players bad controls.   Fighting a monster with a gun when the gun mechanics barely work is a bit of a pain and can instill a slight adrenaline rush to simply get out of the situation.  The problem with this, and really all video game horror, is once you realize the mechanic it loses its magic.  Horror has to be unpredictable to a degree for it to work.

Take Silent Hill Shattered Memories for example.  This is a game I love but it has some serious flaws, the most glaring of which is the fact that you’re rarely in any danger.  The game is broken into two parts at the beginning and later on three parts.  The first part is story development, the second part running, and the third part is puzzle solving.  The only time you’re in danger is during the running section and even then you’re threatened by icy creatures that are threatening to hug you to death.  It might be a bit scarier if their limbs resembled something other than human, but it really is a broken aspect of the game.  The first time I encountered a running sequence, I was terrified.  But then I died and the terror I had felt turned into frustration.  I died an awful lot during the first run.  This game is very frustrating to someone like me who has worked very  hard to get the little direction sense I have.  But the magic of the horror died there in the game.  Nothing else was scary.  All the following running areas were fairly easy and pretty much the same.  The only thing that kept me going to the end of the game was the story.

For comparison, the original Silent hills were terrifying because you didn’t know what was going to happen and how many bullets you would have to deal with it.  Oftentimes there were monsters everywhere all the time and it was impossible to deal with them all.  Again I’m not saying Shattered Memories is a bad game, I’m just saying its not scary.  It lacks those essential elements of a good horror.

A game that I didn’t personally find terrifying but everyone else I know did is Dead Space.  The main character was too well equipped for me to be frightened of the game.  But Dead Space has another stereotypical aspect of horror in it: jumps.  The character turns a corner and here comes a creature two feet away announced by a loud orchestral  strike.  This is the director forcing you to jump, which is something I’ve never appreciated.  Its cheap compared to something that will give you nightmares for a week straight.  Its like that friend who makes fun of you because they suddenly act like they’re going to punch you and you’re the idiot for having a defense reflex.  But Dead Space had so many other things as a game right I was willing for forgive its trespasses.

The monsters in Dead Space were extremely disturbing, being the sown together limbs of former humans.  Any corpse can and will turn into an enemy.  The religious fanatics in the game also served as another disturbing aspect.  If its one thing everyone should agree on, religious fanatics are scary.  Hell, even religious fanatics think religious fanatics are scary (see Christians versus Islamics, or “The Great Satan” versus “Terrorists”).  One of the things I absolutely love about Dead Space was the mythology and fanaticism created around their monsters.  This is also something I love about Silent Hill.  It is very tricky ground to cover as you can’t reveal too much about the monsters, because half of the horror is always the player’s imagination.

Atmosphere is a must in any good horror video game.  Music can contribute heavily to the mood.  Akira Yamaoka is the most prevalent musician that I can think of for that example.  He seems to be able to pull all the right strings and put all the right noises to good use, creating a dark wonder lust out of song.  Sound effects also can greatly benefit tension.  Dead Space had a wonderful sound engineering team.  The ship would creak and moan, not unlike a house or a boat at sea, but different enough to take away that familiarity of a home surrounding and make it a completely foreign organism.  And lastly an environment that graphically looks like its living is a must.  Alan Wake does a wonderful job at this, as every tree branch moves, every person talks, and nothing seems to be painted in the background.  Dead Space also has a wonderful ship interior as it looks used and abused.  You can tell people living in the ship in Dead Space by looking at it.

Anyway, this concludes my foray into the thoughts of horror around video games (f0r now at least).  I intend on talking about Alan Wake on the next podcast.  Oh, did I mention I’m doing one of those now?  Listen to us at TheCarouselPodcast.com