Game Finished: Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty

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Ratchet & Clank Future: Quest for Booty
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I’m on a roll thanks to one of my New Year’s resolutions. I finished Ratchet and Clank Future: Quest for Booty earlier in the week. It’s a short coda to the previous game, Tools of Destruction, and explains how Ratchet figures out where Clank is after he…disappears at the end of Tools of Destruction. I scored the next game in the series, Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time on sale over Christmas and I wanted to finish this game so I could move on its sequel. This is the 8th (!!!) Ratchet and Clank game and it doesn’t bring much new to the table. There’s more of a focus on puzzle solving than in the previous games, and it’s really short, maybe 3-4 hours long, but it’s still got the trademark Ratchet and Clank humor and I enjoyed it well enough. The series features run and gun arcade adventure with some light puzzle solving, a lot of saturday morning cartoon humor, and generally great graphics. I’ve played all of them and solved several of them, including this one, but if you’re going to skip one, this is the one. Counterbalancing that is it’s cheap – I got it for $9.99 from the Playstation store as a download. Below is an ~8 minute video showing off some of the gameplay. Bottom line, if you’ve played the previous games and enjoyed them, you’re likely to enjoy this one as well.

New Year’s resolutions

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I’m a bit behind, granted. I have a good excuse – came down with pneumonia and it really knocked the stuffing out of me. I’m just starting to feel myself again after fighting this off for three weeks, and I’m still fighting a cough and dealing with fatigue issues. Anyway, I made two resolutions this year: To get back on track with my diet and exercise regimen, and to follow an example I set myself several years ago with my buying habits.

The diet and exercise resolution has turned out to be easy thanks to the bout of pneumonia. My weight had been creeping up and by this fall I was over 180 for the first time in a number of years, something I had begun to worry about. Stomach issues and a generally slacker attitude to exercise had me off my regimen for almost all of the summer and fall, so I figured, time for a new years resolution to address it. Pressures off now though – I’m down under 170 for the first time in at least 4-5 years. I just need to keep it off. As soon as my stamina is back it’s back on the exercise regimen, possibly adding in running, which I haven’t done regularly since I left Maine.

The second resolution is inspired by a successful resolution from years ago. At that time I had gotten addicted to buying books off of Abe books, ebay, and Amazon, and my to-read pile was growing faster than my read pile was decreasing. I resolved to only buy a book after I had finished at least one, and to generally focus on bringing down the number of books in the to-read pile. It worked. I still have a huge to-read pile (>20 books) but it no longer grows and it’s no longer close to 100 books. This year I’m applying these principles to videogames, because my to-play pile is like 15 games at this point and maybe higher. I’ve resolved to not buy a new game unless I finish one, and to focus on finishing off games I’ve left partially completed. I have this terrible habit of starting whatever new game I acquire, playing it obsessively for a week or two until the next game comes, then moving on, rarely finishing anything. No more! I’m working my way through games at a rapid clip, and not opening anything still in the shrinkwrap until I knock games off the list. So far it’s working – I’ve finished 4-5 games since the year began, and this was with me unable to play games for two weeks thanks to the pneumonia.

I’m such a hopeless nerd.

I’ve also put myself on a budget. Mint.com rocks for helping you see where you spend your money. I spend too much of mine on games, and that’s stopping as well.

Anyway, to sum up a rambling post, figure on a lot of  ‘Game finished’ posts from me, especially over the next couple of months, as I focus on a game at a time instead of flitting from game to game.

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Walking Dead comic series coming to AMC

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The Walking Dead
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The Walking Dead is a comic book series that riffs on the original George R Romero premise of slow, shambling undead hordes destroying civilization, borrowing liberally from other mainstream zombie fiction as it goes. I’ve read 8 or 9 volumes of the series at this point and overall I like it. I was pretty happy to see that the network that gives us Mad Men (probably the best dramatic series, ever, imo) has greenlit production of a television series based on the Walking Dead comics. I have high hopes for this and can’t wait until it starts. More details including an interview with the writer can be found here on wired.com, and some details on the recent greenlighting of the series are here on io9.com.

How much is your Steam account worth?

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Steam
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A little friday fun of a different kind, we’ll call it the  ‘scare the spouse with your gaming expenditures’ edition. Steam is the most successful of the PC gaming digital distribution platforms. I’m a big fan and have been using it for years. The folks at ddgamer have put together a little tool to calculate what your account’s worth. Remember when you look at this that the numbers are based on the current value of the software, not what you actually paid. For me this means my account looks like it’s worth a lot more than I actually paid because I so often take advantage of the weekly and holiday sales Steam offers. Caveats aside, here’s my account, which today is worth $1,603.26. Change the username to your own to calculate the value of your account. A side note – folks have actually been selling off their Steam accounts, so if the number makes you feel sheepish and you want to try and recoup some of that money, you can try selling it on Amazon zshops or ebay or whatever. Mind that Valve (owners of Steam) may not approve, it’s probably a violation of their TOS, etc etc.

Game finished: X-Men Origins: Wolverine

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I was surprised how much I liked this game. I finished it on the PS3 over the weekend. On paper, you’d think I would hate this game – there’s not a lot of variety in terms of the enemies you face, by and large it’s a slightly disguised corridor crawler, the graphics are pretty good but the framerate can get low at times, some of the boss battles are really tedious (Gambit, who you fight like 97 times), it’s incredibly repetitive, you can exploit the combat system (grabs are really powerful) and there are a number of annoying scripted quicktime events (ie you have to press the correct button or sequence of buttons at the correct time). The game has two really important things going for it though – the combat is fast and fluid and an absolute blast (and it’s what you spend 99% of the game doing) , and the game captures the essence of Wolverine as ruthless baddass more than any game ever has. It’s one of the best superheroes in tights videogames ever. *

The game loosely follows the plot of the recent (mediocre, I thought) film, fleshing out various areas of the plot with more opportunities for combat and adding in a huge section of flashback material that’s only slightly touched on in the film, but it also strays far afield in parts. The game’s actually up for an award for the script which surprised me when it was announced – not that the game’s script is terrible or anything, it’s above average for this genre but really, that’s not saying much. If you haven’t seen the film, it’s basically an origin story but it jumps around in time a fair bit to tell the story.

Gameplay wise it’s an arcade brawler at heart, with a thin veneer of rpg layered on which allows you to increase the power, number, and styles of attacks, recuperative powers, and special abilities Wolverine has as the game progresses. There’s also some light collectathon stuff going on in the form of dogtags on the corpses of fallen comrades and wolverine statues which unlock challenge missions.

The game’s sort of the videogame equivalent of junkfood – nothing beyond capturing the essence of Wolverine is done especially well in this game, most of the gameplay systems are mediocre riffs on mechanics you’ve seen before, but on the whole it comes together as a fun little brawler.

Below is a video of one of my favorite sections of the game, wherein Wolverine manages to take down a Sentinel. Few things will make you feel more baddass than that 😉

* One caveat here – I have not yet played Batman: Arkham Asylum yet, and it’s supposed to be even better.

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How to get your ratings out of Netflix

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I love Netflix and use it constantly, both for physical discs and for streaming over the network to my ps3 and xbox360. Consequently I’ve rated a lot of movies on Netflix, 983 to be exact. Netflix isn’t perfect though, and one thing about them that really annoys me is that they still seem to think the walled garden approach to content on the web is the way to go. The simplest evidence of this is how they keep the ratings you apply to movies locked up inside their site – there’s no mechanism to get them out. I’ve started using tools like Fandango on my iphone, and I wanted those ratings available to me so I could start porting them over. Enter the super useful Firefox extension Greasemonkey, and this script by the user Maarten over on userscripts.org. A few minutes after getting this running I had all my Netflix movie ratings in a text file on my local machine. Great, great stuff and super easy to get running.

Maarten