Welcome to Properly Calibrated, unfortunate Google seekers. This is a blog where I (hopefully obsessively) chronicle my gaming exploits.
And by “exploits”, I merely mean “achievements”, not gameplay exploits.
And by “achievements”, I mean achievements in the general sense, not XBox Live Achievements™.
Clearly, most of the accomplishment-related positive-reinforcement words are well on their way to being repurposed by various companies.
After a few days battling the rocket drones and vehicular controls of Mass Effect (more on the later), I booted up the ol’ PS3 to rock some demos to the ground. Here’s why:
- My XBox has a flaccid, meager hard drive of 20 gigs is currently located somewhere under a pile of 5-meg-apiece Fallout 3 save files
- My PS3 has a mighty 80-gigabyte hard drive that occasionally whimpers in the night, weak from starvation
- PSN has different demos. Sometimes.
Oh yeah, and
- The PS3 will download stuff and then turn off automatically after. As far as I know, the 360 does no such thing. It’s considerate of the PS3 to realize its inherent capacity toward neglect and take steps to accommodate.
“You don’t wanna play? That’s cool, I’ll just turn myself out”
“You don’t wanna kiss? That’s cool, I’ll just see myself out”
“… drive myself home”
“… take my stuff and leave”
“maybe I’ll call you sometime, and we’ll hang? No? Maybe? Okay, maybe I’ll see you at the … grocery store …”
Poor PS3. I’d hug it, but it’s all pointy.
In any case, let’s talk about the demos I played tonight: Dead Space and Valkyria Chronicles. Verdict Sneak Peek: one of them sucks!
The Valkyria Chronicles Demo
Once upon a time, I bought Eternal Sonata because the visuals made me want to roll in a field of posies. The only other 360 games I owned at the time were Call O’ Duty 4 and Grand Theft Auto 4, so my exposure to the beauty that can be had when one isn’t trying to make their game look like Real Life, Man was somewhat limited. Valkyria Chronicles looks like Eternal Sonata drawn with pencil and watercolors instead of india ink and oil paint, and if the game creator was obsessed with World War II (bizarrely, from a European perspective) instead of Frederic Chopin.
Eternal Sonata’s graphics and combat in the demo sold me on the full game. The same thing might happen with Valkyria, although if it does, I’ll be praying that it adds to those mechanics. The Eternal Sonata sun/shade battle mechanic is literally all there is for the remainder of the entire game (full disclosure: not quite done yet). Although the demo sure doesn’t show it, from what I’ve read, there’s a lot more to Valkyria. I’m putting it on the to-buy list for sure.
The Dead Space Demo
I can’t believe there’s a button assigned to “Curb Stomp”.
The first time I played through this, I walked up the hallway, into the room, and promptly died in a slow-motion boxing match because I hadn’t paid attention to the fact that I had more than just a pistol (sorry, “plasma cutter”) with 10 rounds. The second time, despite being repeatedly warned by the helpful guy on the PA system, I shot a fat zombie (sorry, “necromorph”) in the belly instead of the limbs and got swarmed by baby headcrabs or something. I then was swarmed by a group of similar necromorphs and went down swinging. The third time, I used up the ammo to all 4 guns (sorry, “engineering tools”) before going down swinging once again, my limbs flying off all willy-nilly.
When you die, it appears your cartilage all immediately evaporates, as I often fell to the floor a limbless torso. I’m making up my own canon here that this is a function implemented by the makers of the suit, in case a spaceship was ever swarmed by zombies with invincible torsos and long pointy killer limbs. I’m sure that the game has a long, helpful narrative that will helpfully reveal why I have to shoot things in the limbs, but I bet I’d be tired of limb removal long before the limb-aiming became Explained instead of Arbitrary.
I understand that sometimes it might be fun to aim at limbs instead of heads, but a whole game of limb-aiming? Even playing through the demo 3 times, the limbs already became nothing more than a giant HP counter. I wouldn’t want to play a Fable against nothing but Trolls. (“Isaac! Shooting them in the body isn’t working! You have to shoot ‘em in the highlighted nubs!”)
The idea of the in-game menu system (projected in front of your character) is fun, but like the door panels in Mass Effect, attempting to meld The XBox Buttons into purportedly real-life situations generally results in some serious gameplay anachronism. Kind of like the health-meter on Grunting Dead Space Guy’s back that he can’t see: attaching a menu item to the character you’re playing is no kind of solution if it still doesn’t make any damn sense.
Also, although I lost patience after 3 tries (google “dead space demo hard”), I am suspicious that the demo is just a testing room that they threw a menu system on and dumped onto PSN. The demo is telling me, hey! Dead Space involves Hallways with ammo and Rooms with monsters! I respond, No Thank You! Supposedly the full game also involves Puzzles, which sounds an awful lot like Complicated Hallways.
Evolution wouldn’t have been kind to necromorphs. There’s a reason your heart is in your chest and not your left foot. Maybe there’s an explanation in the full game, but unless somebody ties Dead Space to a brick and throws it through my window, I don’t think I’ll end up playing it.
Tomorrow, Ideally: I return to Mass Effect for to bounce the hell out of some terrain!