Christmas means new games, and new players for old games.

I don't think I've quite managed to completely straighten out my living room from all of the Christmas chaos yet. My kids haven't noticed, though. They're too busy being Batman and Bumblebee. The two biggest hits of Christmas so far have been Batman: Arkham Knight, which has been out since the summer, and Transformers:Devastation, which was released in October.

Batman:Arkham Knight is another pitch-perfect Batman game from the team at Rocksteady games, and they even brought Kevin Conroy (Batman) and Mark Hamil (The Joker) back in to do some voice acting after having given them the last game (Arkham Origins) off. It's all of the things that you liked from the previous Arkham games plus a substantial amout of driving the Batmobile. Nightwing, Robin, the Riddler, Catwoman, the Penguin, Two-Face, and a few surprise bad guys show up for the fun.

Transformers:Devastation is strangely like Bayonetta. Not strange because it's Platinum Games at the helm, but strange that the Transformers fit so easily into the formula of a stylish beat-em-up game. There's more playable characters than Bayonetta, there's a lot more weapon modification than Bayonetta, but it's no mistake that my nine-year-old refers to the Focus attack as Witch Time. The focus attack, triggered by dodging out of the way at the last second (exactly how Witch Time is triggered in Bayonetta), allows for a few seconds of moving faster than everything else on the board and dishing out a rather serious beatdown. Some barriers to parts of a level have to be opened like this as well. Of what we've seen, the formula for the game is Giant Robots + Stylish Action = Awesomesauce! The only thing that my younger son hasn't liked about the game so far is that Grimlock is a bit sluggish and you need to repeatedly press the circle button to make him go faster. Bumblebee is his favorite character so far, as he easily outperforms his smaller size.

The other thing that is probably happening now is that a lot of people are playing Splatoon on WiiU for the first time.  While we have made some suggestions before, here's a few reminders.

1. Regular mode is just making sure you have inked more territory than the other team. Use your map (it's on the GamePad!) to find out if there are places that really need ink.

2. In the Ranked mode Splat Zone mode on maps that have two splat zones, have two people cover each one.

3. In the Ranked mode Tower Control, it doesn’t do much good to just run around and paint stuff without a plan.Get the tower, hold the tower, make a path for the tower. Use the dotted line to figure out where the tower is headed. You can’t just run around the tower shooting at it – at some point someone on your team has to get on the tower.

4. If you’re using any of the Nozzlenose weapons in Tower Control, you may find it rather difficult unless you’re extremely accurate. If you’re used to that weapon in regular mode, you may find it easier to use one of the Sloshers for Tower Control.

5. In Rainmaker mode – have the Rainmaker before you push forward through the map, and make sure the person with the Rainmaker is safe. If you have the Rainmaker and no teammates nearby, use the “C’mon” call by pressing up on the D-Pad to call them.

6. In Rainmaker mode – No lounging around! You can only use the weapon for a limited time.

7. It's a team game, play it like one. Nobody cares how many frags you get if your team loses.

Let's be careful out there and play nice, and I hope everybody had a great Christmas.

Games without fixed price points.

The band I play in on weekends has just started playing a version of Peter Gabriel’s Sledgehammer, deeply influenced by the version that the Brand New Heavies does. After one of our shows, the guitarist and I started talking about versions of Peter Gabriel songs that we like – like Pink and John Legend’s version of “Don’t Give Up” versus the album version that has Kate Bush singing with Peter Gabriel.  I explained about how I had started listening to Kate Bush just before I really got into Peter Gabriel, so the Kate Bush vocals really got to me at that time – even on things like “Games without Frontiers” where she’s just relegated to a small amount of backup vocals.

“Games without Frontiers” got me thinking again about the current state of the mainstream gaming market, where the biggest games are starting to throw their weight around and see who can create the biggest collection of things. The biggest amount of floor space in the big box stores that isn’t the locked game case. It is the shelves for Nintendo's amiibo, Avalanche's Disney Infinity (now on version 3 that includes Star Wars!), Activision's Skylanders (now including vehicles), and now Traveler's Tales' LEGO Dimensions. It’s no longer enough that a game is an expensive standalone proposition that sells for $60 apiece, because with all of the man-hours of programming that goes into that it can seem a very risky proposition for company shareholders. Thanks to the very fractured nature of the market, having simply the appeal of a game is not nearly enough. After the rise and fall of the Guitar Hero and Rock Band series that showed us that a complicated bit of licensing and some not-so-complicated plastic toys could be used to sell more product to customers, we now have games engineered to sell a crap-ton of high margin plastic toys both to collectors and gamers.

Guitar Hero did well from its inception in 2005 until around 2010. As a result of some really lousy looking fourth-quarter projections, Activision decided to put any future development on hold indefinitely which left Warriors of Rock and DJ Hero 2 as the last releases in 2010.  (Except that they couldn't leave well enough alone and "Guitar Hero Live" will be coming out the 20th of this month and longtime competitor Rock Band just released version 4 on the 6th. )

The first Skylanders was in 2011, followed by new games every year, because that's how Activision rolls. Fans had started complaining about how Trap Team wasn't as good as Swap Force, and before that they complained that Swap Force wasn't quite as good as Giants. Before that, the original Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure had been winning awards for being so innovative. The most recent one, SuperChargers, adds vehicles but somehow loses some of the fun out of the game. Of course, some of that is probably fan fatigue - if you put out a new game in the series every year, you will get a lot of scrutiny between versions and people will wonder if it's worth it to get the new one if they were still playing the old one.

The same sort of year-to-year scrutiny seems to be happening with the Disney Infinity games, but it really seems like Infinity is getting better and just expanding their universe. At first it was just Disney, and then they added Marvel characters in, and then they added the Star Wars universe to it. As long as the new characters are getting compelling in-game content, they don't have to change up how the game plays that much. It's an advantage over Skylanders in that they don't have to introduce characters to you from scratch - kids (and a lot of their parents) already know who Spiderman and Obi-Wan Kenobi are without playing the game. You can't say that about Eyebrawl, or Ninjini, or Hootloop.

With Nintendo's amiibos, there are a few things you need specific amiibos for. Toad wasn't super-difficult to get, but his amiibo unlocks extra content in Toad's Treasure Tracker. The Splatoon 3-pack, which I have never seen in any store, goes for $60 to $80 when it's supposed to retail for $35, and gets you some new single player training missions, minigames, and costumes. There may be other ways to get the costumes, but there's not a way that I can see to get the other content. There's also a weapon in Hyrule Warriors that you can only get with the Link amiibo - that extra $13 may seem a little excessive if you already paid $60 for the game and $20 for the season pass to get all of the DLC. Sure, the Chibi-Robo amiibo unlocks some things in the game, but it's easy enough to get the game bundled with the Chibi amiibo. (Achiibo?)

I avoided Skylanders intentionally because it seemed like a rather expensive proposition. Infinity seems a little bit better, especially with the addition of the expanded Star Wars universe, but the prospect of toy collecting to get levels still seemed  problematic for me.

But, given LEGO Dimensions' amazing combination of LEGO, Batman, Portal, Scooby-Doo, and Doctor Who, I hardly see how I will be able to avoid this.

I mean my kids won't be able to avoid this. Yeah, that's what I meant.

A quick bit of Bat-Humor.

Starring Imaginext Target Exclusive: Solomon Grundy.

Things to be thankful for...

So, it's Black Friday weekend, and all of us have been trying as hard as we can to get screen time. Everybody was on their DS on Thursday since we spent a lot of it in the car. My older son is working on Pokemon Alpha Sapphire on his Nintendo 3DS, and my younger son was playing more Scribblenauts and some Desktop Tower Defense on his 2DS. About the only thing that I bring to play on DS is my Korg DS cartridge, and I had fun figuring out how to make some drum noises that don't really sound like drums.

My older son and I are still trying to unlock all of the characters on Hyrule Warriors, and it seems like we've had to do a lot of repeated boards to get our characters leveled up enough to face the later challenges. I still have a long way to go on the WiiU version of Bayonetta and the new Bayonetta 2. I was in Gamestop the other day and my regular cashier asked me if I had started the new Smash Bros. game for WiiU, and my exasperated answer was that I still had a long way to go on the last two games that I got! We haven't even talked about the new LEGO Batman 3 game, since my older son and I are casually pretending that the game's not out yet so we're not inundated for requests from my younger son to pick up the game some weekend with Christmas on the way.

The first add-on pack for Mario Kart 8 came out a couple of weeks ago, and the playable Link character and the Hyrule Castle board are both nice additions to the game. I haven't played with the Tanooki Mario or Cat Peach characters yet, but I did see that some of the other courses make for some multiplayer insanity.  The Excitebike course has super-long straightaways leading to lots of shell-flinging shenanigans. Ice Ice Outpost is full of multiple paths most of which require rather precision driving or you will easily find yourself taking an ice bath.

So, even though I haven't picked up either of the newest systems, the PS4 or the XBox One, it still seems like there are plenty of games to play. There are still games coming out for the PS3, and the WiiU seems to have a steady stream of new releases coming out soon to be bolstered by the presence of the newest addition to the WiiU system, the amiibo.  Similar to their Skylanders and Disney Infinity counterparts, an amiibo is a plastic representation of one of the Nintendo characters with some electronics inside that will identify it to the WiiU. Unlike the Skylanders and Disney Infinity characters which each require their own portal, the Amiibo can talk directly to the WiiU gamepad. There is a newer model of the 3DS that has not been released yet that will also be able to read the amiibo information. For the 3DS and 2DS units that are already out, there will be an external  peripheral that will be released next year. Even more curiously, the amiibos do different things in different games. In Smash Bros., they become a specific character that you work on leveling up, in a very similar fashion to how they work in Skylanders and Disney Infinity. In Hyrule Warriors, different amiibos interact with the game in different ways. Some amiibos of the Zelda series characters give you weapons, and from the in-game description it sounds like some of the other ones give you random gifts (which I can only presume are materials to craft upgrades from). In Mario Kart 8, you can customize your Mii racer with an outfit based on the character that your amiibo is based on. I hope that they find other interesting ways to utilize these.

I am also looking forward to Street Fighter IV's upcoming Omega Mode patch, which will add a different version of each of the World Warriors to the line up, with different special moves and inputs. While the existing version of Ultra allows you to play as any previous Street Fighter IV version of any of the characters, the differences between those four versions are rather subtle and are just adjustments to the nuances of the game's balance. The Omega Mode versions are rather different, as you can see here.

So, what am I thankful for (as a gamer) this holiday season? I am thankful for the fact that there are more games out than I have time to play. That reminds me. I need to get ready for band practice.

In case you weren't in the target demographic...

...the LEGO movie was Awesome^TM! Actually, I thought it was just rather cute, but for some reason I can't stop saying Awesome^TM!
My kids really enjoyed it even though some of the parts were, as they tend to say, "derp". I was amazed that some studio exec hadn't managed to hijack the narrative and kept it close to what we understand the LEGO toys to be. I'm not going to spoil any details here since it's still in theaters, (*cough* Batman-is-kind-of-a-jerk *cough*) but I can definitely say that if you enjoy the basic free spirit of play you will enjoy the LEGO movie, and if you are too busy trying to teach your three-year old calculus on the way to his piano competition, then you're going to be mad that you wasted 100 minutes at the movies.

We watched it last weekend. Only a couple of dozen people were there for an afternoon show. I would have liked to see the 3D version, but I didn't want to give my younger child a headache. It was nice to see the adults and the kids laughing at different jokes.

For those of you that have seen the LEGO movie and are familiar with the works of Arthur C. Clarke, we have this video, done by a friend of ours and local LEGO expert.


For those of you that are thinking, "How did they not make a LEGO movie before now?" it's just that this is the first one in theaters. There were four Bionicle movies and a couple of Hero Factory movies that went direct to video. More recently there was the the LEGO:Ninjago TV series, a LEGO Star Wars direct-to-video movie, a LEGO Batman direct-to-video movie that came out at the same time as the LEGO Batman 2 video game, and a couple of movies starring LEGO hero Clutch Powers, one direct to video, and one 4D-direct-to-theme-park. Clutch Powers is voiced by Ryan McPartlin who most of us would know from the TV show "Chuck". He played Dr. Devon Woodcomb, Chuck's brother-in-law. Most often, he was referred to on the show as...

...wait for it...

"Captain Awesome".

Coincidence, or not?

And in other awesome news, speed cuber Kevin Hays totally destroyed the record for the 2x2x2 to 7x7x7 relay.

There is a force stronger than LEGO.

Based on my kids' behavior since the holiday break, I would have to say that there is one force in the world stronger than LEGO.

It's Minecraft.

For those of you unfamiliar with Minecraft, it's a 3D adventure game with whimsical low-res graphics with an emphasis on building structures, crafting objects from mined materials, and basic agriculture. While the graphics look like they came from 1995, I'm not sure you could have built a world as large as Minecraft's back then.

I got LEGO Marvel Super Heroes for PS3 this Christmas. Like most of the other LEGO games, they take a simplified storyline, infuse it with LEGO sets and characters, and have you play through it with the main characters, and then go back later for additional playthroughs with the other characters to find secrets and unlock even more characters. The LEGO Marvel Super Heroes story takes us to Manhattan just after the Avengers have saved it, only to find that the Silver Surfer has crash-landed on earth and Doctor Doom is hot on the trail of the broken bricks of his surfboard. Naturally, when the Silver Surfer appears, Galactus can't be far behind. With a possible grab for cosmic power and the fate of the Earth at stake, a lot of heroes and villains start coming out of the woodwork. All of the major characters from the Avengers, Fantastic Four, Spider-Man, and Guardians of the Galaxy make an appearance, along with some unsurprising additions. You know Stan Lee has to be there, since he's everywhere else.

Normally with that many days off from school my kids (or at least my older one) would have completely torn through the game by now. They had LEGO Batman 2 at 100% in a matter of days. However, they spent the majority of their gaming time during the holidays playing Minecraft, with Super Mario 3D Land for 3DS coming in a close second for my older child and Scribblenauts Unlimited coming in a rather distant second for my younger one. It's even gotten to the point where they're playing with actual LEGO less than Minecraft. Luckily, one of the LEGO sets my older son got for Christmas was a Minecraft set.

More so than for any other game, my kids are watching a lot of things on Youtube pertaining to Minecraft, and even sometimes while playing the game at the same time. I recall watching a few things for Resident Evil 4 in an attempt to improve my Mercenaries scores, but once I got the info I required I went back to playing the game. They're watching Minecraft videos like me binge-watching Community.

As a result of watching all of the videos, they have downloaded some of the texture packs for the game, but they haven't quite figured out the full mods yet. I suppose I'll have to work on that.

Over the last couple of weeks, they have played some of LEGO Marvel Super Heroes, and have completed all of the levels in Story Mode, but they haven't obtained all of the characters yet. My younger one still thinks that the hub area (Gotham) in LEGO Batman 2 is more fun than the Marvel hub area (Manhattan including the Statue of Liberty, The Baxter Building, the Daily Bugle, Central Park, and Grand Central Station), but he has fewer characters unlocked. It's nice that in addition to things like my kids finding out about Howard the Duck without having to watch the questionable film version, I can find out about oddball things like Superior Spider-Man without having to set foot in the comic book store to be berated about not reading enough titles.

Visting a previously ignored franchise, Part One

It's funny how the passage of time colors our perception of old games and distorts our expectations of new games. I was reminded about that as I had recently picked up the two Mortal Kombat games for PS3 recently now that the cheap bin is littered with them. This post will mostly pertain to Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe.

Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe came out in 2008 - I blogged about the character lineup a few months before the game was released but never ended up purchasing the game. I didn't have a PS3 when it came out, and then when I did get a PS3 it didn't seem like I needed to get it. I recently picked up a copy for under $10. I had not played a Mortal Kombat game since 2006 when the PS2 version of MK:Armageddon came out. I had been annoyed with the fighting part of the last few MK games (Deadly Alliance, Deception, Armageddon) but I had continued to play them because the storylines were interesting. They were like a bad soap opera that I couldn't stop watching. The storyline of MK vs DC isn't part of the overall Mortal Kombat story, and DC treated it like an Elseworlds scenario also, so nothing that happens in the story of the game affects any of the other games or comics. Now that I have played it, it seems a little like a rough draft of a game. Surprisingly it sold well, and it was a great swan song for Midway Games before they went bankrupt and sold off the rights to Mortal Kombat and a few other Midway properties to Warner Brothers.

The first part of the experiment: put two storylines together in a way that helps boost the visibility of both franchises. They did a good job with this by getting comic book writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray involved. The story has some cornball features to it, but nothing any more so than any of the previous Mortal Kombat games.

The second part of the experiment: get a fighting game to run in 1080p. If you're fuzzy on what '1080p' means, review my post "Is it really HD?" In an effort to maintain fast frame rates, most fighting games run in 720p so they don't have to push the extra pixels and the game can stay fast, since a little bit of slowdown here in there in the visuals will be enough for some hardcore fighting enthusiasts to throw a controller across the room. (Thankfully, the really hardcore fighting enthusiasts only use corded controllers and often they're the big arcade joystick style so while they may do a lot of damage, at least they won't go very far.) Midway opted to use the Unreal engine with some modification to make it simpler for them to have good looking models and not have to build everything from scratch. The Batman:Arkham series games use the Unreal engine, as does the new Devil May Cry game "DmC".  First person shooter fans had already seen this game engine for the "Gears of War" series and a bunch of the "Tom Clancy" series games, just to name a very few. (If you're inclined, check out a much bigger list here.) Other than the eyes on some of the characters and some of the facial expressions, the character textures look pretty good. The more complicated outfits (Scorpion, Batman) seem to look a lot better than the characters with a lot of skin showing (Liu Kang, Wonder Woman). But, it's not a deal-breaker, and overall the game looks good in still shots. There are parts of the animation that seem a little uneven, but I'm not sure that that's the fault of the game engine they chose - sometimes they have to keyframe a few things that are impossible to do with motion capture, and you can tell somewhat which things were taken from motion capture and which things were taken from pure animation.

The third part of the experiment: Make some changes to the fighting system (again) so that it feels 'fresh'. (Stop thinking about the 'Summer's Eve' commercial.) I don't think that this part worked. They added elements where the fighting gets different when two players are up close, and another similar element where the characters pummel each other through the air as they are falling from one part of a stage to another. I'm never sure which side of the screen I need to pay attention to when they show contextual button presses for the closeup combat since my health bar stays one particular side but my character does not. It seems to be less confusing when they do the same thing falling though the air, but it seems like it just slows down the gameplay.

Part of the requirement of 'fresh' in the Mortal Kombat franchise is that it seems to need to change character's special moves on a regular basis. Since I have spent more time with the Street Fighter series, perhaps that's a product of my expectations. Since Street Fighter 2, Ryu's three signature special moves (fireball, dragon punch, and hurricane kick) have always been performed the same way. That's not to say that they haven't changed other parts of his fighting style for the sake of variation and to help the balance of the game, but they left his signature moves alone. So, even through the Alpha series games, the Street Fighter III series, the EX series, and up to the current Street Fighter IV games, anybody that's ever played Ryu has had a decent chance to grab a controller and get in the game without having to start from scratch. This is basically true for every character in the Street Fighter series except Chun Li, M. Bison, and Adon. (Since this is the internet, I'm sure that somebody will think of more.) For anyone that had played any of the previous versions of the characters, few people would have any trouble adjusting to their Street Fighter IV versions. 

By comparison, Raiden, who appears in nearly all of the Mortal Kombat games, has had his three basic moves (lighting bolt, teleport, torpedo) change often in the last four games, so by the time you get to MK vs DC, none of them are the same. This is true of the majority of the Mortal Kombat characters over the last four or five games. The other part of this is that none of the characters in Mortal Kombat have overlapping movesets. In Street Fighter, if you play as Ryu, it's not much of a stretch to play as Ken, Sakura, Dan, Akuma, or even Sagat. Moves with similar properties are input in much the same way between characters in Street Fighter. In Mortal Kombat, everybody's projectile is performed with a different controller motion, which makes it that much tougher if they keep changing it every game. Maybe it's an important design decision to them, it's just not one that I like. Oddly, I don't seem to care if they change the Fatality inputs from game to game - it's not like it's actually part of the match and seems more like a surprise bonus feature (although a gory one.)

The one part of the fighting system that they didn't seem to change was that the game is still a 3D fighter (which Mortal Kombat has been since MK4) which can tend to nullify the effects of many of the character's projectiles since they can be easy to dodge once you're used to the 3D part of the controls.

So, to sum up, Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe made big strides in improving the visuals, but the controls and the gameplay seem to be a repeat of their other efforts (Deadly Alliance/Deception/Armageddon) that were not always well-received. Luckily for gamers, Netherrealm Studios learned from a lot of these mistakes before they put out the 2011 reboot of the Mortal Kombat series, but I'll have to save that for next time.

No, I have not dropped off the face of the earth.

Not having written anything here for a couple of months, there is some difficulty in finding a place to begin. However, looking at my own blog title, it occurs to me that I should start with the 'Gaming' part. I will have to gloss over some details, perhaps, but I think I can come up with the big picture items, in some sort of chronological order.

1) Both of my kids have 100% completion in LEGO Batman 2. I can't play any of the LEGO games without nodding off.

2) I still can't find my Gamecube copy of Pikmin. I used to play it before bedtime a lot, particularly the 1-day challenge mode, because I found it relaxing. At some point I will have to just find the Wii Play Control version. (At least it should render correctly on widescreen if necessary.) My replacement small-dose game before bedtime has been Resident Evil 4:Wii Edition in Mercenaries Mode, which is not particularly relaxing for me.

3) I still don't have all the ending movies unlocked in Tekken Tag Tournament 2, partly because there are a lot of characters and partly because I'm not willing to set it to a difficulty easier than 'Normal' and there are a few characters that I can't seem to get the hang of. (Lili, I'm looking at you.) Yes, I know I could just team her with a character that I'm better at and still get her ending movie, but I'm trying to be well-rounded.

4) I picked up the 'Game of The Year' edition of Batman:Arkham City, which includes some Robin and Catwoman missions on top of the hours and hours of Batman missions. I liked it a lot, and there was a lot more of the things I liked in the game, but it didn't scare me or creep me out like the original Arkham Asylum did. There was more emphasis on action in Arkham City, and it seemed like you interacted with civilians a lot less. I have finished the main story on normal, but I have not finished all the side missions.

5) I picked up the rather old (or at least old by PS3 standards) Burnout Paradise hoping that my younger son would appreciate the open-world aspect of it. Since he had so much fun running around the hub in LEGO Batman 2, and found all kinds of fun things to do outside the dungeons in Zelda:Twilight Princess, I thought he might get some enjoyment out of driving around at random discovering things, maybe have some fun crashing cars or jumping ramps and learning the layout of the city. However, it turned out to be a total non-thing to him unless he's watching me play. There are a lot of things to buy in that game and few of them ever became free or available on a disc, even five years after the game came out originally. My initial surprise/amusement was that downloading updates for the game took hours and hours and I woke up SuperMonkeyWife when the game rebooted and she was treated to Axl Rose's voice somewhere around midnight. (Somehow I slept through it, but I'm more of a fan of Slash than Axl.)

6) I found out that there is a another version of Street Fighter IV coming out- not that I'm surprised or anything. The four Street Fighter characters (Poison, Hugo, and Rolento from Final Fight and Elena from Street Fighter III) that they made for Street Fighter X Tekken that weren't available in other games will be included, and a new fighter that has not been announced yet will also be added. I can either upgrade my copy of Arcade Edition, or buy the whole thing and finally get all the other costumes. Capcom hasn't exactly spelled out the pricing or release dates yet other than to say it will be available in 2014 for arcades.

7) I picked up a used copy of Darksiders for PS3 for less than $8. (I tried to type this three other times and kept typing 'Darkstalkers' instead.) I was told that it was rather Zelda-like in terms of level structure, and I have not been disappointed in that regard. I have been a little disappointed with the controls, but the games that I'm comparing it to don't have as many items and functions to deal with.

8) My younger child discovered Soul Calibur V and Tekken Tag Tournament 2. He's not that good at the actual games yet, but he is endlessly entertained by the Character Creation/Costume Editor module in both games.

9) Both of my kids are playing the ever-loving daylights out of Minecraft. I have no idea what they are talking about a lot of the time.

10) Pokemon Y came out last weekend and caused my older child to try to adopt a position at dinner that involved having a fork in one hand and a stylus in the other hand. Even with this unorthodox approach, he defeated all of the Pokemon League by Wednesday. There are some side missions left, but I think he's already looking for a copy of Pokemon X.

I think that catches me up to now, gaming-wise. Next post: I know what cubes you did this summer.

The Importance of X (or A, as the case may be.)

Over the course of the summer I played the following action/platform games on PS3 all within a short span of time.

God of War 3 (completed regular difficulty)

Heavenly Sword (completed regular difficulty)

Ratchet and Clank:Tools of Destruction

Devil May Cry 4 (completed regular difficulty)

Bayonetta

Ninja Gaiden 2 (completed once, can't recall which difficulty)

I like all of these games, and for different reasons. Ninja Gaiden 2, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta are a different kind of gameplay from God of War and Heavenly Sword, and Ratchet & Clank is yet another kind of gameplay. The thing that I noticed the most from playing all of these games in the same timespan is that you can't jump in Heavenly Sword, and that Bayonetta and God of War use two different buttons to get into the item menus. The problem with the item menu didn't take too long, but the other thing really got me noticing how ubiquitous the use of the X button to jump with is (or A, if you're playing on XBox/XBox 360.)

I think that I only own a few games that have a jump mechanic where it's mapped somewhere strange. On the first Devil May Cry, they mapped the jump button to triangle which I never got used to. I was so glad that they fixed it in Devil May Cry 2 that I overlooked a lot of the game's other flaws. I wonder if they changed it for the HD remake? On the game "de Blob" for the Wii, they mapped jumping to swinging the Wiimote. In one case, it was workable but I had to think about it a lot. In the other case, I didn't have to think about it that much but it was largely inaccurate for me. I think Onechanbara for Wii has the jump button mapped someplace strange also, but you don't jump in that game enough for it to matter.

In general, I found it nice for the games that I listed at the beginning here that I didn't have to think about jumping. It kept me engaged in the game and not perpetually having to run back and check the controls in the menu. I presume that the same sort of thing happens with FPS games, where people have a certain expectation of a control layout and it's nice not to have to think about it so they can just play the game. With fighting games, I'm used to having to adapt a little for each character, so it's not so bad with different games having different button layouts but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a preference.

In the event that there isn't a standard, ubiquitous layout, I have to say that I really appreciate the times where there are visual cues or on-screen reminders available, especially for context-specific controls or buttons that see only occasional use. God of War does that fairly often, and I have to say that it's nice to jump back into a game after not having played it for a while and be able to open up a treasure chest right when I walk up to it and not worry that I'm about to accidentally use a magic attack on it by mistake. I just started playing Arkham Asylum in the last week and like the little touches like seeing (R1) right next to the little reticle that shows you what ledge you can grapple up to, or the little reminders in the corner about how to use the explosive gel once you equip it.

I have complained about bad controls before, so before I launch into a tirade about those I would just refer people back to my old post about Suda51 and Killer7.

Familiar controls (or at least intuitive controls) can help make a good game great, and in a lesser game can keep a help player interested long enough to care whether they finish or not.

LEGO Batman 2: A few days in, a couple of bugs.

My older son seems to have a reasonable array of heroes unlocked for LEGO Batman 2:DC Super Heroes at this point, plus the 5 extra villains from the villain pack and a few other miscellaneous characters. However, we had a small problem with Green Lantern. Around the Gotham Zoo area, there are some piles of green translucent bricks that are made for the Lanterns to build.  Holding the circle button (PS3 version) is supposed to build the group of bricks into an object, and then the object does whatever it is supposed to do and leave behind a significant number of LEGO studs. However, we here having the problem that the group of bricks would be built and then no action taken. Once the built bricks lay dormant for a moment, they disassemble, and then we were left to try again. It didn't seem to matter if some of the extra options were turned on or not. The only thing that seemed to resolve the issue was exiting to the main PS3 menu and restarting the game.

I had a different problem previously - after I loaded the villain pack the first afternoon, I started my own game but picked 'Load Game' even though I was pretty sure that there wasn't a game on my profile to load.  It appeared to start a new game, but it locked up at the first save point. I played again the next day, and was correctly kicked out of the 'Load Game' screen into the 'New Game' screen the second time and had no problem saving the game.

I don't know if there are more bugs to find, or if this is even the sort of game that will be bothered to be patched. We had problems with the Wii LEGO games locking up periodically, but of course those games didn't get patched.

It's Batman Day! Part 3

So, my older son had adequate opportunity to play his new copy of LEGO Batman 2:DC Super Heroes today, although without the villain pack installed. His favorite thing so far is the electric suit for Batman.

It was nice that once I logged on and redeemed the code on the receipt and everything installed that the villain pack worked on his profile, so he didn't have to replay everything from earlier in the day.  Oddly, I tried a playthrough and it locked up at the first save spot, so I'll have to see what's up with that later. The Lex Luthor minifig is cool.

I did not expect my older son to also come home with a Dalek minifig from the nearby bookstore.

 The only thing they had to report about the movie earlier in the day was that Mr. Popper's Penguins was better than Zookeeper, the movie they saw last week, and that the funniest thing in the movie was a penguin fart joke. I'm not sure what that says about Jim Carrey.

It's Batman Day! Part 2

At noon SuperMonkeyWife called me from the store to see if I want the $3 warranty. I made the John Casey noise, which I am quickly called out on. It was funny mostly because I was listening to the Nerdist podcast with Zachary Levi at the time. The kids had just gotten out of seeing a summer showing of “Mr. Popper's Penguins”, which I suspect that I will hear nothing about this evening.

It's Batman Day!

For some of you, you may think of today as Juneteenth, or others may just know that today is the new moon. For a lot of you today is just Tuesday. For me, today is Batman day. We picked out shirts last night, although my older son figured out that his long-sleeve LEGO Batman shirt was too itchy to wear, I had to put a LEGO Star Wars shirt on him instead. (Note to self : Wash the LEGO shirts with extra fabric softener.)

I haven't pre-ordered a game in a while – I may have mentioned it before. Since my older son got a pretty good report card, we decided that we would get him the LEGO Batman 2 video game when it came out. I did the actual purchase a couple of weeks ago, so that today I can send him with the receipt to just pick it up. (I called the store just to make sure.) Gamestop opens up at ten here, so we'll see what happens. There is supposed to be a Lex Luthor minifig, and some code for a villain pack.