exis's Blogs

I'm going to begin by reposting some stuff from a short-lived blog elsewhere. This seems a better place to host a blog that is predominantly about games anyhow. Sorry if this is a bit mangled, but it was originally three seperate posts which I'm combining to avoid flooding the front page, at admin request. So I'm sorry if this is slightly difficult to read, I'll make an effort to be more coherent in future.

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I just bought a second-hand PSP. Only hours after winning the auction, I was feeling some pretty epic buyers remorse. The thing is, the only reason I even started looking at PSP’s was because I heard the virtues of homebrew being touted. I’m very easily caught up in hype. Apparently, even for a system that was released five years ago. So I had a poke around, saw that I could get a sexy white PSP slim with custom firmware already loaded, for $250, and jumped. Now I’m thinking $250 might have been a little steep. I probably would have done well to shop around more. That combined with the fact that I’ve just blown anything $40 on an extra memory stick and reader/writer (which is kind of important), and I’m out $300 for something I had no intention of putting money down on two days ago.

Damn.

Well, as per usual, I justify it to myself in terms of AAA games at full retail. That’s only three games worth of cash, not so bad for a system that I’ll get a fair bit of play out of, right? … right? I’d look lamentingly at my lonely DS right about now, but I’m not sure exactly where it is. The funny thing is, despite commentators in the game industry trashing the PSP game library and lauding the DS’s, I find myself more drawn to titles on Sony’s handheld. Crisis Core, God of War, Wipeout Pure, Patapon, LocoRoco. And uh, well that’s about it for now. To be fair, if I actually get into Final Fantasy, hours utilized / dollar ratio will probably be pretty damn decent. Can’t be worse than what I got out of the DS…

My PSP arrived yesterday morning. Unfortunately I didn’t have much time to play with it before my Algorithms & AI exam lastnight. But since this mornings exam was only Epistemology & Metaphysics – a subject so easy to bullsh*t your way through that the exam wasn’t much more than an exercise in creative writing – I spent a good chunk of lastnight filling my PSP up with delicious history.

I find it slightly amusing that my progress in techno-geekery seems to be matched by an eerily mirrored regress. I put about $2500 into latest gen gaming hardware last year, ignoring money spent on software. I’m always pushing, almost involuntarily, to keep myself on the cusp of new titles, often resulting in a low bank balance and equally low satisfaction. I read large volumes of content describing games and technology that are months, or maybe years from releasing. Yet at the same time I’m finding myself drawn to classics which I never enjoyed. I almost feel obligated, like if I don’t consume these little pieces of nostalgia then my outlook will be forever tainted by my ignorance. There are parts of gaming history which seem to be considered a necessary portion of any gamers education. And dammit, I need to know what all the fuss was about.

The upshot of this is via emulation, I’ve rediscovered Sonic 2. I was always a little afraid of returning to Sonic 2, and finding that my view of it was entirely determined by nostalgia. If that were the case, I would rather never play it again. The memories represent too rich, too perfect an experience for me to risk marring.

I had no need to fear. The short time I spent with this lastnight was enough to convince me completely, that I could play this, and nothing else, on my new purchase, and still feel I had made a sound investment, in a thing of great value. Surely that will pass, but what it implies for the future of this console is terrifyingly exciting. If I can relive this sort of glee once every few months, this will have been worth my money several times over.

The E3 Star Wars: The Old Republic trailer was absolutely amazing. Now, I know not to expect this to be representative of gameplay. I was similarly impressed by the final Warhammer: Age of Reckoning trailer, enough so that it propelled me from “hmm”, directly into “f**k yeah Warhammer!”. But even then I was well aware that I was watching a pre-rendered CGI video that was created exactly for people in my position. That it made me want to go out and buy the game should be no surprise.

There’s been a bit of harping on message boards about how we shouldn’t be excited by trailers of this sort, where ‘this sort’ describes those entirely devoid of demo’d gameplay. While I do think we should reserve judgement and keep our wallets in our pockets, what they represent excites me. Whether or not Bioware is going to deliver the goods in terms of a compelling gameplay experience is really not something we can debate right now. The reason I think trailers like this are worth paying attention to is because they show what the developers want the game to be. And seeing that in this case, what they want the game to be is f**king awesome, I think we have the right to be excited.

We’re still a long way out, and Bioware has a stellar reputation. I will be watching this space with great anticipation.