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My Doppelganger

Holy shit. This guy just got sent up the river in Colombus, Ohio for dropping bags of cement on the highway. The really disturbing thing is that he bears an uncanny resemblence to me.

If I didn’t shave for a while and came to work in my bathrobe, this guy could be my twin. Oh, except he has a cleft chin.

I’m still floored. How weird. I always wanted a cleft chin. I’m kind of glad I don’t have one now, it looks a little weird on me.

Finished Psychonauts

I 101%’d Psychonauts. Damn this was a helluva game. It’s not selling well at all, but it’s one of the best games I’ve played all year. You guys need to go out and give this one a try.

Seriously though, this is the first platformer since the original Mario 64 that I’ve enjoyed enough to play all the way through, much less collect the thousands of items scattered around the levels. If you enjoy games, you need to play Psychonauts.

Psychonauts

The last outstanding platformer I played was probably Super Mario 64. There are a lot of half-assed platformers, that have serious flaws, ranging from insanely difficult to just plain not fun. There are a couple of decent platformers, Voodoo Vince and Jax and Dexter fall squarely in that category.

Psychonauts is the first platformer that I’ve played since Mario 64 that balances easy accessibility and the ability for newbs to advance with complex and innovative puzzles.

Psychnauts puts you in summer camp for psychically gifted kids. In the course of your stay, you’ll not only explore a typical psychic kid’s camp, you’ll also journey into the mind of nearly everyone at the camp, from the counselors to lungfish. Inside each mind, you’ll have several goals—defeat an enemy, destroy an object, collect something—which advance the main story.

In addition to the basic “complete the mission and collect the reward” type missions, there are tons of objects to collect in each mission, and at the camp. You’ll find many of the objects as you explore, more than enough to complete the game. However, if you want to 100% the game, you’ll need to do lots of hunting.

Each mind you explore is different. Some minds are extremely organized, some are cluttered, some are insane, and some are very primitive. They’re all unique, and they’re all goood, old-fashioned, wacky fun.

Anyway, Psychonauts is really good, and definitely worth playing.

Finally, something new!

I got a PSP a couple of weeks ago, and while there are a lot of good games on the system, a couple of them have eaten large chunks of my gaming time—note that’s not portable gaming time, it’s gaming time. While I could be upstairs plastered to the PC or Xbox, I’ve been sitting quietly in the living room playing Lumines and Untold Legends.

First, a bit about the hardware. For the most part, Sony made the right choices for the hardware. The inclusion of a simple mini-USB port for PC connectivity and storing games on a fairly standard memory card format is awesome. I wish they’d gone with the cheaper, more ubiquitous SD Card format, but Memory Stick Duo is acceptable, and prices on media will drop the more PSP sales rise.

If you shell out for a larger Duo card, you can even enjoy music, videos, and photos on the player. Why view videos from a memory stick instead of just buying the special UMD-format videos that Sony is selling? Battery life and price. Right now, you can get a 1GB Duo card for the price of seven movies. With that memory card, you can watch _any_ DVD you own on the PSP, with a little transcoding. As a standalone portable media player, the PSP leaves a bit to be desired, but when you factor in the games, it’s awesome.

As for the games, Untold Legends is a typical hack n’ slash Diablo clone, that’s actually better than any of the more recent Diablo clones. It avoids many of the more annoying ‘features’ by making it easy to know what gear is good, and what is better. Only occasionally will you stumble across class-only weapons and armor, the only requirement for most gear is that you have a certain level. The boss fights are exciting without being frustrating (my hunch is that the game tones down the difficulty of a particular area after you die a couple of times), and some of the monsters are fill-up-the-entire-screen huge. It’s apparently the best selling title on the PSP, and it deserves that. The game is huge, even by Diablo-clone standards. I’ve put 15 hours into it, and barely feel like I’ve scratched the surface. Add in the dynamically generated dungeons, multiple player classes to try, and peer-to-peer multiplayer, and I can see Untold Legends absorbing a lot of time.

Lumines is a fairly typical post-Tetris puzzle game. The goal, stack falling multicolored blocks in such a way that they make four (or more) block squares of the same color. Once you make the square, those blocks are queued for removal, but here comes the trick. The blocks are removed in batches every few seconds when the scanline passes them.

This is where it gets tricky. As you progress through the game, more “skins”—combinations of block color, background animation, and music—are unlocked. Each skin’s music is a different tempo, and the tempo of the music changes the speed the scanline moves right to left across the screen, and the rate at which blocks are dropped. The upshot is simple—the game’s pace changes every few minutes. Slow paced skins require you to stack huge combos, while lightning-fast skins force you to make every placement count. As you reach the higher levels especially, the game will intermix fast scanline movement with slow block drops, and visa versa.

Once you get the knack, it’s quite addictive. One other note, you should definitely play Lumines with headphones. Not only will the ‘phones help keep you focused on the game, once you get the tempo of the music for each skin down, you’ll know where the scanline is without having to look at it.

More on Ridge Racer, Wipeout Pure, and Mercury later.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

I just finished writing the review of Chaos Theory, and I have to say that the kids up at Ubisoft Montreal have really done a bang up job with this game. It’s one of the few series I’ve played that just gets better every iteration.

In addition to the objective-based two-on-two multiplayer in the previous version, Chaos Theory also adds two-player co-operative multiplayer. Gina and I spent a couple of hours mucking around with it last night, and it’s super-sweet.

By working as a team, you and your partner can hoist each other into otherwise unreachable areas, take out guards in new and exciting ways, and make a general nuisance of yourself. It’s such a blast on the PC that I think I’m going to have to pickup a copy for the Xbox so I can play with my Official Xbox mag buddies on Live.

Single player is both more challenging and less frustrating than Pandora Tomorrow. In addition to doing a better job of spelling out the objectives, you can now save the game anywhere. That means no more useless repetition of the same portion of the level ten times until you get it just right.

Ubisoft also added completion stats at the end of every single player mission. Not only do you get a comprehensive kill count, the game tells you how many times you were spotted, how many bodies were found, and how many alarms you tripped, then it spits out a numerical score. Hitting 100% requires high skill. Not only can you not kill or knock out any enemies, you can’t even be seen.

Chaos Theory is a must buy in my eyes.

No posts mean more Halo 2

When I’m playing the same two games 99% of the time, it means there’s not a whole lot to talk about here.

Halo 2 is a thrice weekly event. I’m constantly impressed at how well the rankings—the game ranks you based on your wins and losses, as you win more games, your ranking goes up—show our relative skill. The guys I play with have consistently hovered in the 10-11 range, and we consistently beat guys lower than us, and consistently get beaten by guys higher than us.

Now that the game has been out for a while, I’m starting to see some more advanced tactics, specifically the Plasma Pistol + Assault Rifle one-two death blow. The trick is to use your Plasma Pistol to take their shields to zero, then finish them off with a single headshot from the Assault Rifle. It’s brutal, and the fastest way to kill someone in the game from range—without a sniper rifle or a rocket launcher.