I really had no interest in getting Rock Band (warning: site has noise, and changes your browser window size). I skipped the last two releases of Guitar Hero, since the songs past medium difficulty stopped being fun for me. With Rock Band, at the time all the cool kids were getting it, it was impossible for me to find a copy. At this point it’s too late, especially since I keep hearing how it’s all about the multiplayer, and I know a few people who’ve already got a set (and are welcome to invite me to come play it, now that I’m not working so much).

But then, something happens when you’re in a Best Buy with a $100 gift certificate left over from Christmas, and they have a now-long-neglected set hooked up, ready to play “Wave of Mutilation.”

It wasn’t quite the bone-shattering awesomeness of playing “More than a Feeling” in Guitar Hero for the first time, but it did remind exactly why I liked Guitar Hero in the first place.

My first impression, after playing through on Easy (gotta get used to the new axe, after all): the solo game is just a really highly-polished, well-done Guitar Hero, if they’d sacrificed the quality of GH1’s set list in favor of having more original recordings instead of covers. Everything looks really sharp and professional — kind of like, oh, a company that’s seen what a monstrous amount of money you can make from having the first true crossover videogame hit, and that it’s really actually feasible to build a whole platform out of a game franchise.

The guitar is much nicer than the original GH one — it’s still clearly a plastic toy guitar, but it feels significantly less silly. So far it seems less responsive both to quick strumming and to tilting the neck up for overdrive mode, but I’m guessing I’m just not used to it.

The drums are loud and humiliating, which have kept me from spending much time on them. If it were possible to hear the song’s drumming over my own, it’d be worth suffering the constant reminder that I have no rhythm. But since the only reward seems to be hearing tokkatokkatokka somewhat in relation to a song that’s playing on the TV, while the bar goes down and the crowd starts booing, I’ve relegated it to the back burner for now.

The microphone went immediately into a cabinet, likely never to be seen again.

The online stuff is really well-integrated (I got the Xbox 360 version), and by the looks of it, they’ve done a phenomenal job with the downloadable content. Charging two bucks a song is a little on the high side, but that’s outweighed by the sheer number of songs available, and their commitment to keep a steady flow of songs coming.

And I’ve got to say the ending credits are awesome; the first time in recent memory I’ve willingly sat through the credits of a videogame.

So that’s my late-to-the-party impressions: it seems to me that they did the best possible job of making the game. The only reason you could have for not liking it, is if you don’t like this type of game anymore. I’m waiting to see if I do. The one thing that everybody seems to agree on is that this is the ultimate party game: playing it with other people is a completely different experience, and it’s what the game was designed for. I’m impressed enough with the polish on the solo version, so I’m ready to be convinced.

Nick, Jake, Jared, and the rest of the gang are cranking out Sam & Max episode trailers so quickly, it’s almost like there’s a new one every month. (Come on, give me a break. I’m home sick and pumped full of cold medication.)

The next episode is “Night of the Raving Dead”, and so far it’s running neck-and-neck with episode 204 as my favorite of the ones we’ve done. It’s coming out worldwide the day before Valentine’s Day, so it’d be the perfect gift for that loved one who has Windows and enjoys point-and-click adventures that poke gentle fun at Europeans.

Hooray for well-timed blurring!

There’s been a bit of a hullaballoo on the internets about this doofus’ ill-informed ranting about the game Mass Effect, and his equally goofy followup.

There’s no shortage of attention-seeking ignorant people on the internet, and there’s certainly no shortage of excitable and belligerent videogame-fan blog-readers who lap that stuff up. (It has already been made into a comic strip, for instance.) And the article itself is comically ludicrous, but not quite enough to provide epic lolz, so there’s not much of note.

Except for this part:

It’s called “Mass Effect” and it allows its players - universally male no doubt - to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to “engage” and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game “persons” hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.

The objections to such filth should be simple to understand.

Starting with the disgusting idea that one can “create” their own versions of what people look like, removing warts, moles, and bald spots while enhancing - shall we say - the extended features of the game’s characters tends to objectify women, sex, and human relationships.

“The most realistic sex acts ever conceived” is a standout, of course, simply because of all the layers of imagery the phrase suggests. A less-imaginative writer, by which I mean a sane person, would have simply said “realistic sex acts” and be done with it, but this guy feels that Mass Effect has blazed a trail into undiscovered territory. You have to wonder if these are the most realistic sex acts ever portrayed in a videogame, or if in fact they are the most realistic sex acts any person has ever even thought to do. In which case: damn, I have got to get a copy of this game.

But as it turns out, I do have a copy of this game. And while every sentence of the guy’s article contains at least one factual error, his description of the infinite diversity of the character-customization system is the one that caught my eye.

Because of the hour or so I’ve spent playing Mass Effect, I spent at least 30 minutes of that using the character editor. And the best I could manage was a slightly more grizzled Bobby Flay.

Maybe I just got spoiled by The Sims 2’s character editor, but every attempt I’ve seen in other games of letting you modify your main character, has ended in wretched disappointment. To the point where I wonder why they even bothered. In a game like The Sims 2, which depends on having tons of modifiable characters, you can see how investing so much energy in the character editor paid off.

But if all I’m doing is seeing the back of this guy’s head for most of the game, with the occasional pause so I can watch him stare blankly at another bland character droning on about some galactic war or some such, then he can look like Steve Buscemi for all I care. The character editor in Mass Effect just lets you choose between male and female, each with a limited section of equally-unappealing pre-generated faces, variations on 5 or 6 hairstyles, and like ten billion different scars. Why?

Even assuming you are desperate enough to try and create a character who looks like yourself, so you can live vicariously through your avatar as he or she makes sweet sweet love to a pixelated, long-winded alien, you can’t. I know, I tried. At least, you can’t unless you happen to look like a weird cross between that guy from “Burn Notice” and Michael Biehn and you can’t manage to grow a beard that connects in the standard places.

Seriously: take another look at the FlayShepard at the top of this post. Is that someone you want to witness committing virtual orgasmic rape? I think not. I don’t even want to see that guy buying car insurance online. I want that guy to go back to his bit part as “Space Marine 2″ in made-for-Sci Fi-channel movies and leave me alone.

Which all goes back to my prejudice against BioWare in general and Mass Effect in particular: their obsession with meaningless choices. It’s clear that they put a metric (’cuz they’re Canadian, see) ton of content into the game, and there’s a ridiculously detailed (if somewhat dull, so far) backstory, and what must be hours and hours of reasonably well-written dialogue.

And yet they insist on undermining that content by delivering it in cheesy “Mad Libs” format. At the start of the gamel, you can choose one of three different backstories for your character; I chose “Orphaned by an alien invasion and picked up by a passing freighter.” Thirty seconds later, during the game’s prologue, an unseen voice says, “He was orphaned by an alien invasion and picked up by a passing freighter, which filled him with rage and an independent spirit. Is this the kind of guy we want saving the galaxy?”

When I was around eight years old, my parents bought me a personalized 45 (that’s like an MP3, kids!) for my birthday. It started with “Hey Charlie, it’s your birthday!” and then went on with the rest of the song without mentioning me directly. Even at that age, I could sense I was being pandered to. It was still more satisfying than my backstory decision in Mass Effect.

Now, from what I’ve seen so far, Mass Effect isn’t a bad game at all. It’s just not particularly compelling, partly because I get no real sense of character from it. So far, it just alternates between dumping the story on me, and letting me make insignificant choices in the story, and there’s nothing that pulls me in. I don’t think I’d mind being limited to one pre-generated character, as long as it was one of the most imaginative characters ever conceived.

There’s a guy at Carnegie Mellon named Johnny Chung Lee, who’s been doing experiments with the Wii remote, then putting his results up on YouTube.

The ones I’ve seen take advantage of the fact that the Wii remote is an IR camera, not just a standard IR-output remote, which flips the whole method of interactivity with the Wii on its head. As a result, he’s turned it into a low-cost interactive whiteboard, a Minority Report-style multi-touch finger-tracking system, and coolest of all, a VR head-tracking system:

The last one I definitely want to try sometime (he’s included all the necessary software with his demos), and would make for some awesome games if developers could get clued in and start taking advantage of this. When “Wii as lightsaber” is the coolest idea anybody’s proposed for the system, it’s clear that they need input from clever guys like this. (And Nintendo desperately needs to hire this guy as soon as he’s available).

Last week, Nintendo released Pokemon Snap for the virtual console. (Still no word if they’ll be releasing its obscure sequel, Pikachu, Oh No You Di’nt!)

The original game was a brilliant concept — a Pokemon photo safari — and it was presented really well. I’ll never understand why it didn’t go on to become a huge best-seller, since it got everything right: it’s got the obsessive/compulsive collecting aspect of Pokemon, in a completely non-violent setting that doesn’t come across as cloyingly or smugly non-violent.

And since it puts you in a little car on rails, where you can look around and see cool stuff happening around you, it feels more like what a Disney game should be than any game Disney’s actually put out.

The Virtual Console release is still pretty fun to play; I managed to get a few minutes in today, before the cold took me over and my head collapsed in on itself.

More than anything, though, it seems like releasing it on the Wii may have backfired on Nintendo. The Virtual Console and the Wii remote are really two separate marketing concepts (and in fact, you need a GameCube controller or their “classic” controller to play Pokemon Snap at all), but playing it on this console just reminds you how much better it would be as a Wii-native game. Moving the camera around with a joystick feels clumsy after you’ve just used a pointing-and-shooting device to start the game.

It’s highly unlikely, but I’m hoping that they’ll see a ton of downloads of the VC version of Pokemon Snap (since it’s had years to build up kind of a reputation as an underrated classic of the N64), and that’ll encourage them to make a sequel tailored for the Wii.

Fatal Frame, Dark Cloud, and Dead Rising all borrowed the photo-safari concept to one degree or another, but put them as an afterthought to a traditional (and combat-heavy) game. They don’t get the same basic appeal of Pokemon Snap, which flips the interactivity on its head, pushing you through a cool “ride” and letting you interact with that.

You see what we did there?

The trailer for the next episode of Sam and Max is up, and once again the young’uns have done a great job with it. (I had recommended a parody of “In Search Of” for the trailer, but everybody said they didn’t know what that was. Then they laughed and pointed at my gray hair and told me to go to bed).

The inexorable march towards season 2 continues! I can guarantee that this is the funniest video you’ll see linked from this blog post.

Sometimes I think game companies would be better off if they just dispensed with the marketing, and just mailed the game directly to my house and deducted the cost directly from my checking account.

I mean, there’s really no point in even pretending like I’m going to avoid buying Patapon the second it’s released in the US. A Japanese drum-based rhythm game where you use little armies of guys to attack monsters? I’m feeling violated.

It’s a shame it’s on the PSP, though.

I realize that fun with Babel Fish translations is old news, but I’m really enjoying how it handled this Russian review of “Ice Station Santa”, the first episode of Sam & Max season 2.

The only part that I can read is the reviewer gives a 55% (yikes! whatever happened to glasnost?), but the translation makes it sound so much worse. It’s not a game review, it’s prophecy, or the Book of Revelations. I recommend listening to Carmina Burana while reading the translation:

They rose from the ashes. They replaced measurement. They returned in order to take vengeance upon nasty, unreasonable lyudishkam. They will stop not before how. Name by them — the not on the staff police.

Telltale is today proposed to love and to respect, as almost the main stronghold of classical kvestostroya. I love it for a feeling of humor, respect for the rich dzhedayskoye past and blame for the excess regalias. Disorderly to poke by mouse is accepted in fleshe — where here classics?

Division on “good” and “poor” is terrifically popular in Americans. Good Lincoln — poor Lincoln, good Hugh Bliss — Poor Hugh Bliss, Good Santa… Certain, to always simpler translate the kept balance means from the feet to the head, having at one stroke overcome division between reality and absurdity, than to stretch the chain of analogies, to harden natures. Although it is complicated to require depth from the comics, it will not injure to adventure. Alas to me, alas.

Whom now you will astonish by evil Santa By klausom? Why not Iisus, not mother Theresa or check, at the worst? Idea to scrape the favorite of the children Of grincha with the pot-bellied grandfather, who spoils flues, zalyapana by the hands of lazy scenarios. Telltale — not of the squeamish. They began from the robot- philosopher, set By klausom to the house of detectives. Hopes, that house will destroy, and the detectives remove- after all of vosvoyasi, were not realized. Familiar views cut eyes. Finally darkens the mood of rendezvous with Soda Peppers, by debilovatymi Fricks from Season 1. Trinity lurked in the cottage in the region of the north pole, where heroes it will bring in in to the flame of retribution. And instead of the brutal handling above bezdaryami max it fills up by their snows. On whose it to side?

But the gone balmy old man sat down inside and he allows to approach no one to himself, firing from the automaton. In order to banish its seized demon, for associates it is necessary to find… not priest, no. Four riders of apocalypse, four tiny figurines. Rejoice, reactionaries, sobiratel’stvo returned.
[...]
Azh it was wanted filth to make ready. It heard, sent to kopam and President rat with the beetle after the cavity was capable to the coup d’etat… Probably, they will lie.

How to undertake the baking of means, developers decided to probe the related connections. Here to you, if you please, the entire family of beetles in the collection. In rat also it did not manage without the wife and the son. Son, by the way, is sick with the strange matershchinnoy misfortune and pours “pipami” through each word. To crown it all us they will introduce to the daughter To lefti, and at the same time also by its bar. Thus boarded up bar, where they released earlier not for what honey cakes. Excess occasion four additional series to hold pigeons more closely for the apartments.

What point-and-click horrors hast thou wrought, Telltale?