Scraping the bottom of the awards barrel

Achievements. I like ’em, and so do a number of other gamers. They add extra replay value to certain videogames, as well as reward you for doing something out of the ordinary or, in the case story-related Achievements, just continuing to play the game. Often times, they have fun titles or reference pop culture or a neat picture attached to them.

However, there’s also an entire population of gamers that ignore them and see them as nothing more than graphics to measure one’s e-peen with. Which I totally understand. Really, I do.

To me, getting all Achievements in a game is more of a personal mission rather than a bragging one. It’s something I want to accomplish because I want to see if I’m able to do it. That’s all. As you can see from my list to the right, it’s mostly LEGO games. I’m clearly not an Achievement whore. I just like getting them and talking about the hows and whys.

That said, soon after Achievements became all the rage, other systems and non-Xbox 360 games started looking into ways to hop on the trend wagon. PlayStation 3 introduced Trophies, which are, most of the time, exactly the same concept of Achievements. Little pings awarded for ping hunters.

And then came the Nintendo DS games. With no shared online community, they were less worried about branding a new concept than just coming up with tasks and rewards for players playing their games. Spore Creatures had Badges, Touchmaster 3 had its own versions of trophies, Scribblenauts had Merits, and now we come to Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, which is really scraping the bottom of the barrel with…Accolades.

Yes…Accolades. A word originating back to 1615.

ac·co·lade

–noun

1. any award, honor, or laudatory notice: The play received accolades from the press.

2. a light touch on the shoulder with the flat side of the sword or formerly by an embrace, done in the ceremony of conferring knighthood.

3. the ceremony itself.

4. Music a brace joining several staves.

5. Architecture

a. an archivolt or hood molding having more or less the form of an ogee arch.

b. a decoration having more or less the form of an ogee arch, cut into a lintel or flat arch.

Hmm. I guess I can’t argue with that first definition there, but something about this word screams ridiculous to me. I mean, maybe calling them Honors would’ve been a better fit. And it fits the medieval fantasy world, but I think Nintendo needs to just get the ball rolling and solidify some kind of in-game rewards system for both their Nintendo Wii and Nintendo 3DS/DSi/DS systems.

My suggestion?

Laudatory Notices.

Just think about it. You’re playing Mario Kart DS, you’re in second place on the final lap, and you just zoomed through an item box. Lucky, lucky you…it’s a red turtle shell! Waluigi is a few feet in front of you, and you let the red death fly, zipping by to seal the deal and win the race. <insert catchy musical sound> Laudatory Notice! Shell Shock

It’s gold, Jerry. Gold!

Don’t mess with this Fatherland Fighter

Well, Saarbrucken is no more. It took three return trips, but I finally cleared it last night of all white Nazi dots save for three or four hard-to-get ones:

Fatherland Fighter (15G): You completed 53 ambient freeplay in Saarbrucken.

…and let’s now transition into strange thoughts.

Part of me kind of secretly wishes that Sean Devlin, with each meaty explosion and Nazi death-scream, transformed into a much darker, looser form of himself like Wander did in Shadow of the Colossus as he took down moss-covered boss after boss after boss. Or maybe he instead lost color as the world around him blossomed. I understand why this wouldn’t work: Sean is doing a good thing, killing all those Nazis, because, as we’re taught, Nazis are bad, and killing them is good. The difference here between him and Wander is that: the Colossi are not inherently evil. They just exist, spending their days stomping around or hiding in caves, and Wander is the jerkface going around killing them because some bodiless voices tells him to. I just like seeing cause and effect taking place.

I mean, Devlin is basically a one-man army, and he’s taken out a lot of targets. With more to come. That’s gotta weigh heavily on his mind even if revenge is fueling his progress, even if he makes a funny Irish quip now and then, even if he lacks the same amount of remorse for running over a cow or pedestrian in the street.

There’s four more Achievements devoted to ambient freeplay events. They are as follows:

• Wrecking Crew: Complete 333 ambient freeplay in Paris Area 1.
• Unnatural Disaster: Complete 212 ambient freeplay in Paris Area 2.
• Walking WMD: Complete 239 ambient freeplay in Paris Area 3.
• Guerilla Warfare: Complete 425 ambient freeplay in the countryside.

Let’s do some math! To get all four, I need to blow up…1,209 more white dots. Well, maybe not entirely. Throughout the course of the main missions and just running around, I suspect I’ve taken out maybe 1/4th of those dots. But still. Man, that’s gonna take a lot of dynamite and rocket launching. I’m also working towards the Achievement of spending 75,000 contraband so this will help keep me focused too.

Either way, if there ever comes a day where someone is like, “Hey, do you know of a videogame with say 1,000+ missions?” I can answer with extreme confidence.

Let me boast about protecting the Le Havre coast

Work progresses slowly on The Saboteur as I sneak and sabotage my way to eliminating more and more white dots, also known as ambient freeplay missions. I try to focus on pockets of them, but do occasionally get sidetracked when escaping Nazis in pursuit and end up in a different area of the map than previously planned for. However, with a headquarters located in a church in Le Havre, I decided to try my luck clearing out the place, knowing that if Sean was killed in action, he’d respawn pretty close by so I wouldn’t have to trek back across the countryside and could easily stock up on grenades and such. This plan took some time, a lot of dynamite, and too much frustrating on having to constantly fight the same Nazis in the same spots after dying and returning to the scene, but it worked. See:

Coast Guard (15G): You completed 76 ambient freeplay in Le Havre.

Yeah. 76 is a lot of white dots. I’m sure I took out a few when playing the main story missions, but there was a good chunk I had missed. None were too hard to destroy save for three dots inside the fortress atop the hill, which, as you can see from my now unlocked Achievement, were not needed.

Le Havre is a nice little port town in the upper left corner of France. There’s docks and boats and a wharf and seagulls. It’s quaint, something out of a literary classic, and I like that. I can only imagine what it’s like now, in 2010, with iPads and tourists and sneakers with power laces. Maybe not as quaint, maybe not as literary. I almost felt bad when some citizens would spy me placing dynamite and go running off, shrieking, “He’s got a bomb!” as if I was ruining everything. My bad. Only trying to free y’all from Nazi oppression. I can just go back to drinking if that’s what’s preferred. Sorry, Jules.

My next Achievement target is for clearing out 53 white dots in Saarbrucken. Should be a piece of cake in comparison to Le Havre. I got a few last night before getting too sleepy. The problem this time around is that there isn’t a local HQ in the area, nor a weapons dealer. So, I need to stock up and go in prepared, not wasting a single grenade or bundle of dynamite. Otherwise, it’s a lot of back and forth, back and forth, and that’s just not fun. Yeah, if anything, The Saboteur could use a fast travel system. I understand why it’s not there–those Nazi checkpoints exist to keep you on your toes and give you something to run from–but it would sure make this end-of-game grinding a lot more feasible. Oh well. Still having a great time, and that’s nothing to complain about.

Welcome to Mars

I thought I needed a game to fill in the gap until I could play LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 again, but I think I was wrong. That’s like only two days away, and tonight I’m visiting Tara, leaving really only yesterday evening and tomorrow evening to battle boredom with my Xbox 360. Well, not really boredom…more like…procrastination. Yeah, that.

So. Red Faction: Guerrilla is cheap. The good kind of cheap. I found a used copy for $17.00 and, always having been a fan of the first two in the series, decided to give it a go. I’ve been on an open-world kick as of late, and for the first hour or so, it was actually hard to tell the difference gameplay-wise between this and The Saboteur. You run around and destroy the enemy’s stuff; you can hijack vehicles at the push of a button; the cover system is pretty lame; and you die a lot because instructions aren’t clear. But it’s fun. And crumbly. And set on Mars.

Red Faction is one of the first games I got for my PlayStation 2 way-back-when. That and Dark Cloud. It promised me I could blow holes in walls…and then go through the holes. Finally! It and its sequel were first person shooters, and they handled pretty well. I actually have more fond memories with Red Faction than with Red Faction II because I enjoy being a low miner in a renegade faction than some super soldier taking out zombies. Yup, zombies again. The only thing Red Faction II had going for itself was its multiplayer, even if I only ever shot at bots.

Red Faction: Guerrilla is more of an action-adventure game set on a very red, very dusty, and very empty Mars. You’d think with all that terraforming they’d have built a mall or burger joint. Anyways, this change is welcome. You play as a dude. Mason something. Something Mason. It doesn’t matter, and neither does this spoiler that comes at you predictably in the very beginning of the game: you are out for revenge against the Earth Defense Force (EDF) for killing your brother. Basically, you want to blow up EDF stuff and make people on Mars happy. Along the way you’ll collect salvage to buy new weapons and perks.

I played the main story for about two hours last night, which involved liberating a small development–I struggle to call it a town or anything close to that–from EDF hands. Blew up some buildings, defended a dorm, ran over some radio transmitter towers with a reinforced vehicle, and so on:

Spread the Word (10G): Liberated Parker Sector.

After that I roamed around the area, trying to collect some more salvage before exiting to the main menu screen. From there, I decided to see what this Wrecking Crew thing was about. Turns out…you wreck stuff! You are given a choice of levels and game styles, each with their own restrictions. Some limit the time you have for destroying stuff, and others limit your ammo. Fun all around. I tried each one once. Here’s proof:

Party Time (10G): Played all Wrecking Crew modes once.

I also partook (now that’s a funny word) in one multiplayer match over Xbox Live. I was not on the winning team, and I think I shot an enemy player once. There were also a bunch of jetpacks I didn’t know how to use. Yeah, gonna need some more practice…

So, all in all, it’s a decent game at this point. Like I mentioned before, very same vibe I got from The Saboteur. Big open world, lots to do and collect. That could be a good thing. We’ll have to see how it all plays out…

Spelunking for sweets and a soggy bottom

Soggy bottoms. Am I talking about that lusted, best-selling boy band in O’ Brother, Where Art Thou? or something babies always have? Well, neither actually. I’m referencing the fourth movie level in The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, where in our pie-loving dastard is stuck deep below the ground with broken pipes, sewer rivers, and evil clones. I just completed it last night, and had to only look up one guide to help me move along when stuck:

Soggy Bottom (10G): Completed the “Spelunking for Sweets” movie level.

The theme to this one was…evil clones. You record them only from specific starting points, and then can’t come into contact with them save for jumping on their top hats. They are red and evil. They eat evil, red pies. That’s kind of all you need to know about them. It made for some interesting and frustrating puzzle-solving, but we got through it, got our pies. Only one level–“Pie Own Worst Enemy”–proved troublesome and, again, once I saw how someone else did it, I felt annoyed that I didn’t take the time (pun intended) to figure it out.

Only one more movie hub world to go through, and then that’s it for the main point of the game. After that, the only Achievements left have to do with the challenge levels, and I don’t know if I’m skilled enough for them. Will have to give it a go, naturally, but I’m also a little apprehensive. I mean, I still don’t really understand the ins and outs of recording clones and mostly stumble upon a level’s solution with a little luck and patience. We’ll see. Next bottom I desire dearly is…Smacked Bottom. Hey-o!

This post is all about LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4

Apologies for the lack of content over the last few days. It’s summer, it’s the holidays, and it’s just not fun for me to update a silly blog when I’m spending time with loved ones, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care about you Muggles reading this drivel. Oh, I certainly do. You’re the best, even if you’re extremely quiet and reserved. Anyways…

LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4. I can has it. I left work last Tuesday and immediately headed to my local GameStop. Walked in, eyed the clerk, and cast my spell. “Avada Kedavra!” I shouted, throwing my wallet into his face. He fell over dead, heavy as a bag of rocks, faster than Edward Cedric Diggory could say, “Cho.” Another clerk came out, and this time I thought about what I really wanted.

“Um, do you have LEGO Harry Potter for the Xbox 360?” I asked.

“Sure.” He rung me up, almost in a daze, and then before he could call the cops on me for taking out one of his own, I threw a Stupefy in his face and hurried home. Alas, I had some other stuff to do, so the game just sat on my desk like a letter from Hogwarts, begging to be enjoyed. Finally, after some coffee and Clarkesworld slushing, it was time.

I played the first hour of the game and then, in some sort of crazy fever rush, wrote about it for The First Hour in the very same evening. No idea how that happened. Usually, it takes me a day or two to clean up my notes. Add in how lazy I can get and well…this is a miracle and should be looked upon as such. You can check out my review of the first hour of gameplay for LEGO Harry Potter: Years 1-4 by clicking this very sentence. I know, just like magic.

After that, I had to wait for Tara to come over so we could experience Hogwarts co-op style. We played the first hour again together and have, as of now, gotten to the middle of Book Two. Our next mission is most likely following the spiders into the woods to deal with Aragog. You’d think with an entire weekend we’d have gotten farther in the game, but the castle itself is almost like a never-ending level, with so much to explore and a Metroid-like progression to it. This means you’ll come across lots of spots you can’t access until you have a new ability, such as speaking Parseltongue to get by a snake or the right kind of spell to take out a specific obstacle. It makes retracing familiar ground a treat, and there’s always something new to see or experience or collect.

By far, it’s the best LEGO game I’ve played yet. LEGO Star Wars comes in a close second, but the simple fact that everything you see or interact with is magical allows for a much more fun–and surprising–environment. Hitting a couch in say LEGO Batman might just have it explode into a bunch of studs. Hitting a couch in LEGO Harry Potter could mean anything: seriously, so far, couches alone have done backflips, jumped high into the air, disappeared entirely, swallowed students, and shrunk down to the size of a dustball. That’s what I’m talking about.

Co-op is pretty fun. The camera occasionally still goes wonky, especially during lessons where you’re stuck in a small room, but otherwise it works well when splitting up. One thing Tara and I both really don’t like is that certain spells are lumped together under one spot, meaning if you want to cast a certain one, like where you shrink an opponent’s head or tie him up with rope, you have to wait for it to cycle through to it. Annoying and unnecessary. And since co-op is fun, I’ve decided that’s how I want to play the rest of the game. So, until I see Tara again over the weekend, no LEGO Harry Potter for me. That’s okay. I might go find a cheap game to fill in the gap until then since I’m mostly done with everything else in my collection, save for blowing up an endless stream of white dots in The Saboteur.

The Saboteur ends on a quiet, sad note

Unexpectedly, I flew through the remaining missions in The Saboteur, unlocking 9 Achievements in one gaming session, and experiencing one of the more sobering, psychologically haunting endings to a videogame in some time. Also, it was extremely sad, and not just because we came full circle with Dierker and the Nazi empire, but mostly because of this:

The Legend Begins (100G): You completed The Saboteur.

See? Sean Devlin was going places. That is, until Pandemic Studios became liquidated after the game came out, cementing that there’d not be another game from them. So, the legend begins…and the legend ends. No more sneaking around for Devlin, no more planting bombs and walking casually away as things go boom in the background, and no more telling cohorts that “things are about to go tits up.” I have to wonder what exactly the name of this Achievement means. Did they actually plan for more…or is it implying that everything done in-game–and that’s a lot of one-upping the Nazis–was done by one man, and that his actions will now live on forever? It’s kind of hard to tell. Companies do love their franchises and sequels, and I’m really wowed over by how much fun The Saboteur turned out to be, especially for its now low price. I guess it got lost in retail murk, but it was a refreshing WWII adventure, with really fun and varied main story missions.

I want to talk about the ending, but I don’t really want to spoil anything because I know at least one person that reads this blog is still chugging away at the game. So I won’t say much or go into specifics. It’s unexpected and totally a 180 spin of everything else thrown against you, and yet it works. It’s quiet and methodical, haunting and creepy, far from gimcrackery, all about a punch to the gut. It gives you a choice, and though the choice is obvious and ends the same way, I’m thankful the devs put it in there. It allowed me to enter Sean’s shoes and act accordingly.

The legend begins, the legend ends. The game ends…and yet it doesn’t really. After the credits roll, you’re right back in Paris, that map full of white dots (also known as ambient freeplay events) much more than an eyesore now–it’s Sean’s truly final mission, to rid Paris of all things Nazi, bring color back to the world, and maybe unlock some more Achievements. The only ones that will be really tough is getting all the Gold perks and completing the numerous ambient freeplay events throughout the map.

It’s gonna take awhile, but we’ll get it done…one explosion at a time.

Four new screenshots for Fallout: New Vegas

Exactly what it says on the tin:

I don’t really care if there’s barely a graphical update from Fallout 3. That’s not why I love that game, the graphics–and not most likely why I’ll love this one. It’s all about exploration, seeing what’s over yonder, discovering the contents of a room or cave or vault, and watching the in-game world react to your choices. That and this time around you get to punch a Super Mutant in VATS with boxing gloves. Aw, yeah!

C’mon, October 2010. Any day now.

P.B. Winterbottom is all about the pie in the sky

I recently used up my remaining 400 Microsoft Points to purchase The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom, a puzzle game that is all about manipulating time and collecting…pies. It’s got a great art style to it, purporting itself to look like the silent movies of way-back-when; you can even see projector lines on the screen from time to time, and the story is told in a silly, rhyming poem, but it really only boils down to this fellow P.B. Winterbottom and his never-ending lust for baked goods. In order to get these delicious treats, the player makes recordings of Winterbottom’s movements and toys with time to solve puzzles. A lot of the levels are pretty tough and will take a lot of trial and error, figuring out how to use these recordings to their potential, and I had to look one up online, which made me nearly slap my forehead when I saw the level’s solution. It made sense then, and I wish I had just kept with it longer to figure it out for myself. According to Wikipedia, this game was originally a student’s graduate thesis at the University of Southern California, and that’s just awesome.

I’m about halfway through the main movie story levels. All the Achievements have the word bottom in them, which I find to be hilarious. I’ve unlocked Burnt Bottom, Ticking Bottom, Evil Bottom, Hungry Bottom, and Hot Pie Bottom so far. More to come, as they seem pretty straightforward to unlock. Really looking forward to getting a Soggy Bottom. Er, moving on…

I was also surprised at how great the music is. It’s got this infectious drum beat during the main menu screen that really gets you excited to gather…pies. Still can’t get over that aspect. So, uh, ‘Splosion Man has an obsession with collecting cakes. And here, P.B. Winterbottom…he will stop at nothing to get his pies. Murdering a hundred clones of himself doesn’t even pinch his heart. He’d watch a thousand burn if he could. I don’t know. It’s just kind of weird that two Xbox Live Arcade titles that I both recently purchased are all about food. Cake and pie. Really need a sushi game now to perfect the trio.

Videogame Paris is as good as it gets

I will most likely never travel the world.

This is an easy assumption for me to make because I know what goes into traveling the world and seeing the sights, and I just don’t have that stuff. Money, time, that kind of drive, and so on. There’s really only a handful of places I’d like to visit, and they include Paris, France, anywhere in Ireland, and Tokyo, Japan. Okay, okay, and maybe New Zealand to check out all those Lord of the Rings locations. But other than that, I’m content with New Jersey and its surrounding states. We have nice parks and fun boardwalks, and hands-down great autumns.

In October, after Tara and I get married, we’re honeymooning it up in sunny, alligator central: Florida. Disney World and Universal Studios will be our main destinations, and what’s kind of neat is that we’ll get to do a little globe-trotting via the World Showcase in Epcot. There we can hit up everything on my list (I think) save for…well, Hobbiton and Lothlorien. There’s a smaller version of the Eiffel Tower at Paris, Epcot, and we’re totally treating ourselves to some sushi over in feudal Japan. It’s a lot of fun just walking from country to country, hearing the music changing, smelling new smells, and really being immersed–if for only a few yards–in a foreign culture.

This sort of worldly immersion happens from time to time in videogames, too. Fallout 3 had you sneaking around a totally effed up Washington, D.C., and I remember a forum posting that actually compared screenshots of the subway tunnels to that of real life ones; they were eerily on the mark. If I am ever to visit the Mall again, I’ll definitely be seeing it in a whole new way…mostly because I’ll be on the alert for Super Mutants. And despite all the hate I spew on Grand Theft Auto 4, Liberty City is a wonderful recreation of New York City, and some areas really do come to reflect that of their real counterpart. I am especially fond of their parks.

The most recent would be Nazi-occupied France in The Saboteur. It truly is quite an accomplishment, especially when Sean finds himself in the really controlled parts, the ones where only yellows and reds shine through the harsh black and white of the world. The countryside feels very much like a French countryside, and again, seeing as I’ve never been there, I’m only able to draw upon references from movies and books and paintings. It sure feels genuine though. I finally made it to the section housed around the Eiffel Tower a few days ago, and doing some missions at night and seeing it glowing tall and great in the background is a wonderful thing. I even spent a few minutes just casually walking down sidestreets, taking in Paris, hearing its sounds and seeing what was where. I have to trust that love and care was put into The Saboteur‘s layout and design despite it being the swan song for Pandemic Studios, and that a lot of what is there is there because…that’s where it is.

So, for now, I’ll take Paris, France from The Saboteur. My sister has gone before, and I’m interested in showing her some of the areas in a few weeks to see if she recognizes anything. Then Sean is going to jump off the Eiffel Tower and get an Achievement. Just so I don’t forget I’m playing a videogame after all.