Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

Ok, so I know it’s been a while since I last posted here, but I’m still alive…you see the updated Twitter posts, right??

In all seriousness though, I’ve had a good reason to be away for so long. Things have definitely changed over the past few months, and I thought I should share them with everyone.

To start, I’m living in Montreal now. It was somewhat of an unexpected move, to say the least. To put it in the simplest terms, an opportunity presented itself and I took it. I am now working up here for Bioware Montreal, my dream company. For those that know me, they know how much of a Bioware fanboy I am, and to be given the opportunity to be a member of this team and make some really awesome games is truly a dream come true. I can’t say too much about what I’m specifically working on, but I can say that I’m part of the team making Mass Effect 3.

Unfortunately, I did have to leave a great job in Toronto at Tecmo Koei Canada. TKC gave me my start in the industry, and I’ll be forever grateful to them for that. I worked with some truly awesome people over there too, and won’t ever forget them. Regardless of the games we ended up releasing, I think those were some of the best people I have ever worked with. We had something special there. The truly sad part of this whole story is that I just learned that TKC went through a massive round of lay-offs this week. A lot of these friends are now without a job. I know they were all great people, and I know for a fact that every single one of them will land on their feet in short order. I wish them all the best in their future endeavors. To any of them reading this, you WILL find something you want to do…trust me.

The last bit of news is of course my trip to Italy. My girlfriend and I took a trip over there from December 28th through to January 7th. We started in Rome, and from there traveled to Florence, Pisa and Venice. What a time that was. It’s almost a totally different world over there…almost. There is a lot of stuff that’s very familiar, but also so much that’s different. To start, there is a McDonalds over there, but it serves beer The architecture is just amazing. Walking around the Coliseum was a sight to behold, and seeing the leaning tower in Pisa was spectacular. We even took a gondola ride around the canals in Venice. Just phenomenal. If you ever have the opportunity to go, take it. The only regret we have it that we didn’t have enough time to explore Florence. Next time, I suppose…

What else…wow…so much that I’ve missed. Congratulations to the Green Bay Packers for winning the Super Bowl. Didn’t really touch on football much this year. That’s probably because my Cowboys self destructed. I still watched, but just never had the urge to comment about it. I’m sure more thoughts will spill out now that I’ve started to settle down here in Montreal.

Until next time…

A couple weeks back, I finished playing a DS game called Infinite Space.  It came out a while ago, and I just managed to get around to starting it back around the first of May.  All in all, I was very impressed with the game.

Infinite Space can be best described as a Japanese RPG, but instead of fighting orcs, elves and giant eyeballs, you’re in a space ship fighting other space ships.  Seems pretty cool, eh?  To RPG it out even more, you not only get 1 ship, but a whole fleet of them.  AND, you can customize your ships too, from what kinds of weapons each ship has, to what modules are in the ship, like Crew Cabins, cargo hold, Sick Bays, engines, bridges, and many, many more.  Oh, and to top it all off, you also assign crew members to different posts in your fleet, like First Officer, Chief Engineer, and even Head Chef.  Yeah, this game is an RPG in the true sense of the genre.

The game starts out as the main character, Yuri, discovers a crashed ship on his home planet.  He helps the pilot get the ship ready, and she (Nia) takes Yuri along for the ride.  You pick up new crew members and other characters along the way, do quests for various people, and discover this incredible force that enters your galaxy and wants to take it over.  It’s kinda your standard plot, but I’ll tell you, the storytelling is really good.  I couldn’t put the game down.  I just wanted to see what would happen next.  It’s got some of the Japanese RPG-type characters and such (like the quiet, but concerned hero, beautiful side-kick with very revealing clothing, and other stereotypes), but hey, this was created in Japan, right?  It’s part of the charm.

As for the gameplay itself, as I said above, you have a fleet of ships.  You’ll fly around from planet to planet, sector to sector doing the story missions and side quests, and you’ll get into random space battles along the way.  When a battle starts, you’ll have a meter that fills up (think the ATB meter from any of the SNES-era Final Fantasy’s).  When your turn comes up, you’ll use a portion of this meter to either Dodge, Attack, or Barrage (super attack).  Regular attacks take up 1/3 of this action bar, and they are just that…regular attacks.  A barrage though uses up 2/3′s of the bar and hits the enemies with a much stronger attack, except that it can be dodged.  Hence this is where dodge comes into play (which itself takes up 1/3).  Once you get into the battle system though, it’s pretty simple to understand.  Later in the game, you’ll gain access to special First Officer powers (depending on what crew member you put in your first officer slot), fighters, and Anti-air guns to combat fighters.  All these make for some interesting battles.

There’s also melee battles, which if I were to pick a weak part of this game, this would be it.  You have 3 attacks to choose from: Leadership, Slash, and Shoot.  Leadership beats Slash, Slash beats Shoot, and Shoot beats Leadership. Each side has a bar that starts to tick up as soon as you make a selection.  This then gives the other side about 3 seconds to choose an action (and their bar starts to tick) before you actually switch to your action.  The AI tends to be totally random though on it’s choices, so there’s no logic here…just straight up guessing, and hoping you guess right.  There are a few things you can control, like your health and attack strength, but if you never guess right, it won’t matter.  I tended to just load up on health and attack, and hope I got lucky.

The main story takes you across many different systems, and you do meet many different characters along the way.  It took me over 55 hours to beat this game, so it’s not for the light-hearted (mind you, I was farming for some of the best ships and components in the game, so naturally this takes a bit longer).  If you’re able to put up with the length and a bit of the JRPG-stereotype stuff, this is a must-play game, and worth every penny.

Overall, I’d give it a 4/5.

You can find it on Amazon.ca (kinda expensive) or just try searching on Ebay (if you can get lucky and find a copy for around $40).

Until next time…

Here’s a funny little one….I just signed up for the new Steam UI beta, and I was just sitting on my games screen when I noticed this:

If you’ll notice, in the Last Played column for Galcon Fusion, it says I last played the game tomorrow (click on the image if you want to see it a little better)…hmm…maybe Steam’s got some new kind of time warp machine that can predict the future?  Or maybe it’s just a bug, as things like this can happen in betas.

Still, funny none the less.

Oh, by the way…you can pick up Galcon Fusion for only $2 on Steam until Friday morning….it’s part of Steam’s Midweek Madness sale this week.  It’s a pretty cool little game.

Until next time…