The Janitor in Mirror’s Edge, I’ve Read That Book Before February 1, 2012

I got a lot of enjoyment out of EA and DICE’s 2008 game Mirror’s Edge, which was the story about a freerunner who used her parkour abilities to transport important information that the senders didn’t want to be seen by the totalitarian government who listened in and censored everything. Over the course of the game you can find a secret room in one of the levels, a janitor’s room, made up to look like an office. In it, you see the Janitor has a pet mouse in its cage, and notes left over that look like they had been written by a small child. When I first saw this room I asked myself, “Where had I seen this before?” and then remembered exactly where I had seen it.

When I was a freshman in high school I had the pleasure to read what I personally consider one of the saddest short stories ever written called Flowers for Algernon. It is a short story written by Daniel Keyes structured as a series of journal entries written by what originally appears to be a child but is actually a grown man named Charlie, who is a janitor living in New York with a mental handicap.

At the start of the story Charlie is about to undergo an experimental operation, specifically, brain surgery. A procedure was invented they believe could fix his mental handicap which was originally tested on a lab mouse named Algernon. The mouse was born mentally handicapped and had already undergone the surgery. Field tests in mazes before and after the surgery showed the mouse had an incredible improvement in its mental capacity and Charlie was selected as a test subject. Charlie and Algernon would race each other in mazes, Algernon would run the maze while Charlie would navigate through the same maze on paper. In the beginning of the story, Algernon constantly beats Charlie at racing the maze.

Charlie undergoes the operation, which is successful, and in the process of retraining his mind learns years worth of studies in mere weeks. As time passes he ends up falling in love with his teacher. It gets to a point where Charlie becomes so smart he becomes distanced from most of the intellectuals around him, smarter even than the people who worked with him at the start of the project.

However a lingering fear comes into everyone’s mind when the mouse’s intelligence starts to wane. Algernon becomes depressed, no longer wanting to run the maze, stops eating and eventually starves to death. Charlie leaves flowers at Algernon’s grave, showing that even in his state he considered that mouse a peer and probably his only friend. Charlie reasons the same will eventually happen to him and he works day and night to publish a thesis of his experiences before he reverts to his previous state. Eventually he does become handicapped again and starts falling back into his old habits. He stops writing his journal entries and instead plans to leave NYC so he didn’t have to see anyone who knew he was smart.

Okay, now onto the Janitor. Judging by the notes he left in his office, along with notes he had passed along to a businessperson who may have been his brother, he appears to be in a mental state of about six years old. You’ll also notice he idolizes his pet mouse (who appears to be alive) who probably is his only friend (like Charlie). They both have the same profession.

Could the Janitor of Mirror’s Edge be a “Flowers for Algernon” reference? It is considered a very popular and well known story, especially among nerds, or people who would design or play video games. The Janitor’s graffiti did also make it into the iPhone/iPad game, which could also give some credibility that this wasn’t just some fluke easter egg but a recurring point of the series. I would love to hear from one of the game’s developers if this was just a coincidence or if anyone working for the company intentionally created the character as an homage to that fantastic story.

Where Will Arkham Take Us Next? January 31, 2012

I just finished my second playthrough of Batman: Arkham City and I have to say that the game is a tremendous achievement that Rocksteady should be quite proud of.  It’s the superhero game that so many have asked for so long.

Now that I’ve come to the end of the game for a second time its gotten me thinking about just where is the series going next?  I know a lot of people will cite the game’s finale as exactly that…final, but there is a tremendous amount of tidbits and easter eggs sprinkled through the game which have been found by various individuals online that speak volumes that Rocksteady is planning a third Batman game.

Before I go any further I would like to make it clear to anyone reading this that this is an editorial, and it is my opinion based upon all the evidence I have gathered from the game.  Please do not take anything I post here as biblical or essential to what the third Batman game is going to be, or that I feel so strongly about my conjectures that if the third game turns out to be something different I will lose all interest in it.  I am doing this for two reasons, one, to inform the reader of anything they may have missed playing through Arkham City, and two, because its fun.  Prepare to be spoiled.

So with all this said, what are my expectations about the third Batman game developed by Rocksteady Studios?  Well, I believe it’s going to be titled, Batman: Gotham City.  This had been kicked around quite a bit since the end of the first game, Arkham Asylum, and all signs pointed before the official announcement of Arkham City that Batman was going to be fighting in a much bigger location than the first game.  After fighting through Arkham Asylum, and then Arkham City, to continue to up the size and scope of the previous game there really isn’t any where bigger for Batman to go than Gotham City itself, well that, and the evidence I’m about to provide ahead.

The game also intentionally left several loose threads for those who may have given the side missions a quick look.  While most of the side missions you partake in have a finality to their endings and usually end in the capture of whoever it was we were seeking out, like Mr. Zaazz or Deadshot, there are two sidequests in particular I want to reference which could be tied directly into what may be in mind for the sequel.

The first is the Watcher in the Wings mission, where Batman finds a masked avenger following him in Arkham City, and you can usually catch him at pre-determined points.  After following the trail left by him you will discover that it is none other than the superhero Azrael.  Azrael was a regular member of Batman’s allies in the early 90s and at one point replaced Bruce Wayne as Batman after his back had been broken by Bane.  He tells Batman that what he did that night would bring about an even bigger event that he could not even possibly imagine.  He explicitly says to Batman that from what happens in Arkham, Gotham will burn, giving credibility to my theory that Gotham City will be the venue of the next game.  The file is marked not as complete, but filed away into the Batcomputer for later review.

The other is the Identity Killer mission, where Batman investigates several murders involving corpses that had their faces removed with surgical precision.  You first get a tease about the mission when you meet one of the doctors in the church for the first time caring for a patient with his face completely bandaged and holding a box they could not pry out of his hands no matter how sedated he was.  When asked about the prisoner the doctor replied that the bandaged man wasn’t a prisoner but one of the doctors who did it to himself!  As you follow the trail, all signs point to Bruce Wayne being the killer (Wayne’s fingerprints were on one of the scalpels left at the scene and witnesses said Wayne did it), in fact Oracle had a theory that Johnathan Crane, The Scarecrow, may have been responsible for brainwashing Batman in some way to committing the murders.  It turns out that the murders were committed by Dr. Tommy Elliott, better known as the supervillian Hush, a former friend of Bruce Wayne and now insane criminal mastermind.  As he peeled off his bandages he revealed his face to Batman, the face of Bruce Wayne, which he was able to create for himself after taking certain facial features from all his victims and stitching them together.  He walks out of his apartment, letting Batman live.  Oddly, Batman reports to Oracle that Hush had left Arkham City and was “gone” even though all Batman saw him do was walk out the apartment’s front door.  The file is also flagged to the Batcomputer for further review and Batman said he’d go looking for him tomorrow.

The final tidbit I want to bring up is probably the thing you want me to talk about the most, and that is the secret easter egg which has been all over the internet for the past few weeks.  One of the ships in Arkham City actually can have its cargo hold opened by your cryptographic sequencer.  The sequencer spot isn’t marked like other spots, so you have to figure out exactly where to stand for the sequencer to work.  When you determine the password (hardest in the game) the hold opens.  If you move inside the shipment, the game shifts to a first person perspective, and you see various shipments of gross bugs inside of it, an obvious fear weapon.  In the far back is a human subject, alive and absolutely terrified.  The shipment is marked that it is to be delivered to Dr. Jonathan Crane, The Scarecrow.  The Scarecrow had been mentioned very rarely otherwise in the game.  One possible ending of Arkham Asylum showed he had survived the events of the first game and may have gotten his hands on the Titan formula (similar endings showed Croc or Bane getting it).  It was also clear he had been in Arkham City at one point (The Riddler marked Crane’s Scarecrow mask buried in some hay as the solution to a riddle of his) but overheard chatting of some thugs said they heard he may have been in Arkham City but they hadn’t seen him anywhere.  It was likely he had been in there but probably snuck out.

What does Dr. Crane have in mind for Gotham?  Will Hush be involved?  And finally, will the new Azrael be joining us?  Crane was part of the Hush storyline in the comics (as was the rest of the of the Batman villains, but I consider Scarecrow’s part to be left as a loose thread in that story) and the lingering plot thread about it involved Batman wondering if he had been exposed to the fear toxin at some point in the story, affecting his judgement, which is exactly the same feeling Batman has in the game during the Hush sidequest.  The original (and most well-known) character who held the title of Azrael was Jean-Paul Valley, who has been dead in the comics for quite some time.  Will this new Azrael, armed with the appearance and weapons of Valley but the name and story of Michael Lane be a friend or foe?  Gotham beckons.

Oh and, Harley’s pregnant.

A Perfect Platform for FMV Game Resurgence, The iPhone January 22, 2012

Back in the early 00s I was reading an article which listed various classic games from the various gaming genres and what at the time were considered the best most recent games of those genres. In that article, instead of listing a modern game alongside King’s Quest, they simply had the headline “Adventure Gaming is Dead.” Now in the early 2000s that certainly may have been true, but it sure isn’t anymore.

In my opinion, adventure gaming saw a resurgence in the latter half of the last decade primarily fueled by the episodic gaming experiment of 2006. While it was expensive and time-consuming to make a shooter and release it episodically, there was something about adventure games that lended itself well to an episodic formula. Telltale Games were probably the only survivors of the episodic experiment that I can think of, and it is still their preferred business model. However, they weren’t the only ones doing well with this new generation of adventure games. New adventure games started to see retail release and not only see decent review scores but sell pretty well. Quantic Dream released Indigo Prophecy (Fahrenheit) and started a whole new model of adventure games and called them interactive movies. They followed Indigo Prophecy up one generation later with Heavy Rain, which also saw great sales, had very high review scores, and personally convinced me to be an early adopter of the Playstation Move controller system.

However, in the 90s the adventure game was a staple of the PC platform before the FPS craze took over. There are a lot of classic adventure games that people have been talking about for the past twenty years that some people were never able to play. A lot of them were shot in Full-Motion Video (FMV). While the FMV trend was universally hated after it left us towards the end of the 90s, there are a lot of people talking about these games again, and inspired by internet personalities like The Spoony One, want the chance to play these games. Boxed copies of older games (especially unopened ones) can cost large amounts of money, or you could hope that they could see a downloadable release through an online service like STEAM or Good Old Games, but there’s still the chance of compatibility issues. You could have an older computer still lying around that could play the game, but the chances of them having long since broken down is very high. You could try to emulate the older operating systems that the game requires, but that would require either having a copy of the older OS in your archives still or buying a new boxed copy off eBay or Amazon.

All these problems beg for these games to see a re-release on a new platform better suited to handle an adventure game’s interface. When you think about what translates a mouse’s point and click interface the best the answer becomes obvious, it’s the touch screen. A modern iPhone nowadays has more processing power than a computer made at the time these classic adventure games were released and the downloadable marketplace can take advantage of the low filesize of some of the older games, and their expanded internal storage capacity can certainly fit the large filesizes of the larger games that used multiple CD-ROMs.

Adventure games are already out for the iPhone and iPad. In fact I remember shortly after the app store launched someone released the original game Adventure from the Atari. The tilt sensor translated perfectly as a control system in lieu of the lack of a directional pad. Telltale releases many of their adventure games to the iPhone/iPad since the third season of Sam & Max.

Older adventure games like Myst and The 7th Guest have already been ported to the platform, where they have access to a wide customer base with no fear of running out of product. There’s been a demand over the past two years to see more of these games get re-released for the iPhone, I think the most vocal demand has probably been to Konami and Kojima Team for a Snatcher iOS re-release, but I can think of a bunch of more games that would work perfectly ranging from Policenauts, to The Daedalus Encounter. Also I think a lot of people want the chance to play some of the games that reviewers have been bringing back into the limelight like Ripper, Phantasmagoria (and it’s sequel), and Johnny Mnemonic.

Having played (or seen played) some of these games personally I can attest they would work perfectly with a touchpad interface, and could probably be remade with just some minor tweaking to the game’s interface (like occasionally bringing up a keyboard/keypad). While its possible that many of the companies that made these games originally have long since gone out of business, someone must have those original game assets lying around in a vault somewhere. While these developers may not exist anymore the publishers certainly do, or have had their assets absorbed by other currently existing publishers. It would be a lot more profitable to work with already existing assets and release them to guaranteed sales in a market where they can’t sell out than build more full priced retail games from scratch.

A Home Without a UCON January 17, 2012

I’m unfortunate enough to live in an area where, while there’s a perfectly large population in it, is completely ignored by the mainstream media. Up until recently, the western United States was the only place to go when it came to any major gaming events. The Electronic Entertainment Expo has been in Los Angeles for the past twelve years, PAX was in Seattle, GDC in San Jose, and Quakecon takes place in Texas. If I wanted to attend any of these events I was going to need hotel arrangements, a rental car, and airfare, all of which are quite expensive. Yes I know there are some great fan created conventions like Magfest, but those were still pretty far away from me and would have required hotel arrangements and a lot of gas money. I longed for the day that I could attend some kind of major convention which would be within a reasonable distance of where I lived, and be affordable to attend.

Two years ago, that changed. I heard musings from several peers that a new convention was going to be held at the University of Connecticut, which, while not super close, was within a reasonable distance. Called the UCON at UCONN, the organizers were creating a new by fans for fans convention anyone could attend. There would be panels ranging from the debate on should anime be subtitled or dubbed, lectures by prominant professors on comparing the games of Halo to the work of Homer, and several viewing rooms showing all sorts of classic animation and science fiction shows. Best of all, it was free to everyone, and you didn’t have to be a student to attend.

I first heard about the UCON at UCONN while visiting Doug Walker’s site, That Guy with the Glasses. He announced that he was going to be at the convention for that weekend doing a panel and signing autographs whith his brother Rob. When I started to do some research on just what the event was I was floored. A free convention within close proximity and some awesome events planned for it? I signed up.

I attended the first day’s events with a close friend who was a UCONN alumni. Arriving just in time for the opening ceremonies, the organizer (a friend of my friend) kicked off the event and showed a funny little video he made of some of the things that would be at the con. It was a great way to kick off the show. After the opening I sat in for a lecture on Halo by one of UCONN’s professors and then hit the screening rooms to watch some episodes of Batman: The Animated Series.

That night I was really excited for the chance to watch the screening of Mystery Science Theater 3000′s most infamous episode, Space Mutiny, starring Reb Brown. I had never seen it before and was really excited to finally get the chance to watch it. Right before the episode started, Doug and Rob came in and sat down. They were really nice guys and we talked for a bit before they started running the movie. I told them to feel free to say whatever they wanted while it ran but they said the episode was funny enough without their comments added to it. We did however join together in a group sing-a-long of the theme song as the episode began. It was a great night, and to top it all off I think at one point I was hit on by a college girl dressed as Sailor Moon.

That Saturday was just as great when the panel kicked off with Doug and Rob Walker’s Q&A, there was a live improv show, and later on I kicked back and watched some episodes of Invader Zim. The night ended with a video game tournament, but while there was a pretty wide selection of games they were having tournaments for (various fighting games, etc) there wasn’t much of a presence for the paticular multiplayer games that I was any good at so I didn’t play. I asked Doug and Rob what their plans were and they said they had every intention to get into one of the gaming tournaments.

It was a fantastic weekend that I very rarely get to have in my home state, and I was really looking forward to the next year’s event. When the next year’s started up I felt that second UCON was just not as good as the first. I attended the first day and left very dissapointed. The show started a lot earlier than the last year’s had and the panel slotted for the prime time slot never happened because the host of the panel was MIA. It also ended really early, much earlier than the last year. Doug and Rob were delayed and didn’t arrive until that Saturday for their panel. After the disappointment of the first day, I didn’t attend the other days, although I did later regret not attending on Saturday because I heard that was the day General Zod announced he was running for President.

All good things must end and I’m sad to say that UCON at UCONN will not happen this year. My insider has informed me that the UCON student organizer was a senior at the time of the first event and graduated the year after. The organizer of the second UCON was someone different, and they also graduated after the event. Now it seems that with no guiding light, the convention will not happen. It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense to operate like this. Wouldn’t you want to keep the successful organizers of the events to continue their good work?

The world is a lot different now, as major convention organizers have started hosting events on the East Coast. PAX has an extremely successful second show in Boston. The New York Comic Con in NYC has hosted panels ranging from a preview of the upcoming Avengers movie to live demos of The Darkness II.

Now, I know there is another by fans for fans convention in my state that predates UCON, but I’ve never actually attended it due to cost or scheduling problems. UCON, being free and open to the public, had a charm about it that made me feel quite welcome. If they decide to bring it back, I’d love to give it another look.

Top 10 Things to do Until Christmas December 24, 2011

Hey everybody! It’s Christmas Eve. I know a some of you can’t wait for the day to pass and get to the main event tomorrow. Video games, consoles, handhelds and gift cards may find their way between friends tomorrow and I’m sure the anticipation is quite high.

For those of you with time off from work or school and before you go to spending all that time with friends and family at parties and events, you may have a small lapse in things to do and have some time to kill before tomorrow. Worry not, because Maniac has you covered with some things to do to kill time. Some regular readers will remember a lot of the stuff I mention here has been things I covered in the past. This is not designed to be a list of groundbreaking surprises, but a nostalgic take through the site’s history on the eve of the holiday.

10. Watch Game Boys. It’s free to watch and is pretty good. I know I reviewed it over a year ago, but everything from the characters to the soundtrack make the movie merit a second watching. Since Game Boys was released, Jones has also released another movie, Midnight Heat, which while not gaming related, is also great.

9. Watch Captain S team up with The Angry Video Game Nerd to save Christmas. First released back in Summer of 07, this is a yearly tradition for me to watch. A lot of the AVGN’s fans didn’t like this because it was not a vulgarfest like his usual videos are, but I enjoyed it a lot. Captain S reminded me of the superhero shows I enjoyed a lot growing up and seeing two unlikely heroes forced to join forces to save Santa Claus was just great.

8. Read the PVP Christmas Special. Written by Scott Kurtz for gamespy.com, the Christmas Special details a timeless story. All the employees have the rest of Christmas Eve off and with company gift certificates in hand spend the afternoon at the local mall. Of course the good hearted office troll accidentally gets confused for Santa Claus and flashbacks start happening of a certain movie about a miracle. It’s a lengthy read I will go through page to page every Christmas.

7. Do your LAST last minute Christmas shopping.

6. Download the free Batman Inc skin for Batman: Arkham City for your Xbox 360 or Playstation 3.

5. Pull one of your favorite games off the shelf and try to get some achievements in it you haven’t gotten yet. If you already got all the achievements, why not just do a victory lap through it?

4. For those of you expecting iPod, iPhone or iPad tomorrow, it would be a good idea to install iTunes in advance and migrate over your music library to it. You can even download apps from the iTunes store in advance. They’ll be installed automatically the first time you sync your device to the computer. Just make sure to create an iTunes account.

3. Check out some of my recent How-To videos. I have a lot of guides in there for various things you may need to know tomorrow. If you need to transfer your data to a new Xbox 360, connect your console to a new HDTV or install a new hard drive to your 360, you’ll find all the information you need here.

2. Check out some great gaming documentaries.  While G4 no longer airs any, they actually used to make some of the best, with their series Icons.  If you want to go looking for making-of documentaries for games through other means, most of the time game developers will produce them them for release online.  You could probably rewatch some documentaries included in game Collector’s Editions you already own, or you could go searching to watch some of them online, through various sites like GameTrailers.com.  Heck, their retrospectives alone are worth a watch.

1. Have a good time spending your day with friends and family.

My Disappointment of 2011 December 21, 2011

I don’t really have my own disappointment list of 2011, but if I did have something to say about the year is that I have been so disappointed that SO MANY major titles had to come out within the span of just three months. This has been bad for everyone, including the consumers and the retailers. Because so many titles from major franchises came out at pretty much the same time, there were a good half-dozen or so games that came out I just have not been able to play, including RAGE and Resistance 3.

This same thing happened in 2008, but the problem was made much worse. In 2008 the winter season got dominated by a SINGLE platform exclusive major release for each platform. Resistance 2 came out for the Playstation 3, Gears of War 2 came out for the Xbox 360, and there were premium boxed editions of the major music franchises with all the instruments. Games that came from (then) unknown IPs like Dead Space and Mirror’s Edge saw very little in sales, and wouldn’t get a second wind until the next year following a price drop.

This year, there has just been an OVERFLOW of major platform exclusives and multiplatforms. Forget about small releases, they have been largely ignored. In some cases you have major platform exclusives coming out for the same platform. This isn’t a console launch year!  It isn’t a good idea to compete with your own products.  Sure you may incite some consumers who were on the fence to buy your consoles with the new library of exclusives you have, but a console purchase is a BIG one.  Buying a new console (and everything that goes along with it) can easily take up an entire paycheck.  With new games being $60US a pop, a new console adopter could pay the same amount he did for the game console just by buying four new games before Christmas.

GameStop had mentioned they were expecting a major holiday season based upon the initial preorders they were getting for the strong lineup that was coming out. Then they posted less than optimistic returns because (gasp) people weren’t redeeming their preorders because there were just so many games coming out they just couldn’t afford to do it.  Didn’t anyone at GameStop’s management see the enormous volume of major releases coming out in such a small timeframe and ponder this may happen?

So with so many games having already released, 2012 with its so far pretty evenly spaced out release schedule, is looking like a much kinder year on gamer’s wallets, and the games lined up for next year are looking to be pretty free of major competition and will probably get decent launches.

Really looking forward to 2012, well, at least my wallet is.

The Best Game Openings Ever December 20, 2011

With the end of November, all the major game releases have come out before the holidays. With all the games coming out, the importance of how a game starts is increased tenfold. A game has to grip the player immediately in order to keep their attention and having amazing opening is essential.

I wanted to share with you guys a list of some of my favorite game openings over the years. These are presented in no paticular order.

Max Payne – The Prologue Level. My best memory playing the opening cutscene to the game was right after I had just installed a GeForce 2 MX 64MB into my new PC. In fact somewhere in my video archives there’s a high-8 tape of that reaction. Seeing the sweeping landscape of New York City as helicopters flew through it recording the journey brought upon it by just one person, the player. The camera climbs up the building and holds on our hero, Max Payne, finished with his journey. Then the game flashes back to the beginning where Max’s perfect life is destroyed. Really it could have happened to anyone. Drug addicts break into Max’s house and he is too late to stop them from doing what they intended to do, kill his wife and baby daughter. The developers chose to have this scene playable as you fight your way though the house trying to save them to give you a deeper connection to Max and his story. To this day it’s one of the most tragic scenes I’ve ever witnessed in any media.

Half-Life – Tram Ride. Everyone cites this game as having one of the best openings in the history of games and who am I to argue with them? The first game’s opening was perfect at setting the stage for the game and the environment you would be playing in. As you ride the tram on the way to work, you are teased with the diverse environments of the Black Mesa Research Facility. As the ride continues the information about just who the character the player is controlling. It was one of the first games to give a player downtime before the fighting started and it was a great design decision which foreshadowed where the player would be going over the course of the game.

Dead Space – Introduction. As our protagonist watches the brief transmission from his girlfriend silently, we know what’s at stake in this game within the first few seconds. Suddenly we’re shown the most beautiful vista of space that I’ve ever seen, as glowing light fills up the cockpit and we see our destination. We’re introduced to the supporting characters, and their archtypes are set up very quickly as all of a sudden, a dangerous situation is presented and they have to react to it at the immediate possiblity of peril. As Mr. Plinkett would say, is it cheap and easy? Yes. Does it work? Also yes. Another interesting note is that rewatching the sequence after playing through the whole game a second time, with full knowledge of all the supporting character’s real motiviations, the scene still works perfectly. I can’t say the same for a lot of poorly written movies or comic books which have twist endings.

God of War – The Hydra Battle. I don’t think anyone would ever question my choice of this opening. I know some would argue that the openings for each subsequent God of War game had been designed to outdo the previous game’s opening (in a lot of respects the Collosus of Rhodes in the second game was a bigger more epic battle then the hydra battle, in that you’re given the Blade of Olympus from Zeus to slay it) but there is just something so classic about the first God of War in that it’s an all encompassing beginning that plays a part with the game’s ending, something that no other God of War game has done. By the time we first hit the start button, the game menu morphs into the opening cutscene and we see our protagonist attempt suicide. Then the game flashes back to the events that started him on that path and we find ourselves on a ship under attack from the hydra. Everything from the atmosphere to the music feels right to complement the opening to this story as it serves to introduce the player to Kratos and the whole game’s universe. After the defeat of the hydra the game continues and we not only find ourselves being a jerk to a guy who’s been recently swallowed by the creature but we are also treated to some fully exposed breasts, something unusual for games of the time, but now more commonly accepted because of that game.

Bioshock – The lighthouse. Almost immediately upon hitting the start button you find yourself treading water in the middle of the ocean. The only safe venue to swim to is a lighthouse not too far from where you crashed. As you enter it and you see the first inklings of Rapture and it’s creator Andrew Ryan. Quotes of Ryan’s and statues made of him adorn the interior of the lighthouse. You step into the bathosphere and are treated to a short filmstrip about the ideals of where you are headed, but nothing in the film can compare to the vista you’re treated to of underwater city as the bathosphere makes its approach. When you enter you see a disturbing sight, a beautiful location with the remains of a protest. Hand carried Signs are all over the ground, but no people, not even any bodies. You ask yourself, “What happened here?”

Uncharted 2 – The Train Crash. The beginning of the game is actually the…middle of the game. Teased originally in preview videos, Nathan Drake found himself bleeding inside a train dangling off the side of a cliff. The player has no idea how he got there or if he will survive. Injured, you start the game’s first platforming segment, which the series is famous for. In no time, you’re climbing up the train cars as they dangle over a snow covered cliff. As you climb, things bend and break under your weight. It’s the perfect mash of suspense and adventure and it starts immediately. As soon as you see the dagger the scene ends and you see how Drake got to be there.

So those are my ideas but I want to hear yours too! What do you think are some of the best introductions in games? Post a comment!

A Second Broken Rock Band Christmas December 6, 2011

Rock Band 2 released one year after the release of the first Rock Band game.  The first being an enormous success and a financial gold mine for the developers and publisher, a second one was pretty much guaranteed and would provide all new features that the fans had been clamoring for.  The problems I had with the first game’s release forgiven, I planned to buy the new game’s Special Edition with all the new improved instruments that came along with it, including the new wireless drum set, which had become my preferred instrument.  After that next Christmas, I was able to get the money together to buy the new package, but remembering the trouble I had with the Rock Band, I decided to put a two-year warranty on the new game, figuring that in the off-chance I would have a problem with it, it would be faster just to return it to the store for a replacement than to have to send it back to the manufacturer like I had to with the last game.

The new wireless drum set I got with the Special Edition was completely out of whack and would randomly go through periods where it would no longer properly register hits since the moment I first started to use it.  How bad was it?  I could play through an entire song and register a very high accuracy where I could hit upwards of 99% but still only 4-star the song.  It would incorrectly blow multipliers without me even registering a single tap on the drum pads, blowing my score and the score of the entire group if I was playing with friends.

After a week of playing, I could no longer stand it.  I had a broken drum set, but unlike the last year, where the developers had already acknowledged that they had a problem with some of the guitars that shipped out, the game’s publishers and developers were not owning up to anything wrong with the new game.  I tried to get the publishers to offer me the chance to replace it, but there was no program in place for a free return like there had been with those broken guitars last year.  If I wanted a new drum set I was going to have to pay to ship it back to them to have them look it over and fix it.  Boy was it a good thing I had bought the game at a store that offered me an extended warranty on the item, I was going to use it.

I brought the broken drum set back to Best Buy with all my warranty information along with it.  I told the clerks what was wrong with the drum set and that the rest of the instruments seemed to be fine.  They took my warranty and told me they would be happy to replace the drum set, but wanted me to test any new sets to make sure I didn’t get another defective one.

They set me up at one of the Rock Band 2 demo stations and had me set up any of the drum sets I wanted to test on it.  I could play a song or two and see how it reacted while they watched.  This was actually kind of fun since they were set up on a pretty big screen with a sound system and I had no problem syncing Xbox controllers to a system.

For what felt like an hour me and some of the Best Buy clerks tore open brand new copies of Rock Band 2 only to find that their drum sets were also indeed completely defective.  I have no idea what was causing all these wireless drum sets to go bad, maybe it had something to do with how the product was packaged, but these were brand new out of the box drum sets and they were completely useless.  It was only after we opened up the third copy of the game we found a drum set that worked perfectly.  They replaced my broken drum hardware and the foot pedal just to be sure that everything worked, and told me they were sending the broken components (as well as all of the other new copies they found to be defective) back to the manufacturer.

I felt bad that we had to crack open so many copies of the game to find me just one working drum set but the store managers assured me they had no problem at all with it, because my warranty was valid and they were fine with knowing now that their merchandise was defective.  It saved them from selling it to what would become angry customers.

I posted an abridged version of this story on the Rock Band official forums after it reached its conclusion, with the hope that it would help anyone having similar problems with the drum set.  I was told by some of the people on the forum that the known failure rate for those drums were 66% at the time.  Why nobody owned up to what was obviously a major issue was never explained.  A full copy of Rock Band 2 cost quite a large amount, and with the amount of money paid you’d expect to have a working product or at the very least a guarantee along with it.  That just didn’t happen.

After this happening to me twice I was pretty much done with the music genre in general.  I stopped buying games bundled with new peripherals (my room was already pretty full with them as it was) and in some cases I stopped buying new music games in general.  After that year the market for it became far too over saturated and it was clear it bought too much into its own success.  When the market was new and there wasn’t a lot of competition, it was pretty easy to get into, by the end of its lifespan, it had become a nightmare of yearly expensive releases, new rebranded peripherals that offered little improvement than aesthetics over the previous one, and never ending DLC.  My wallet just screamed uncle and I had to call a stop to it.