WHY DO YOU MOCK ME?!?

(Okay, before people start with their OMG XBOX FANBOY garbage, keep in mind that I sold my 360 in favor of a PS3, so any of those comments are irrelevent. I'm just dishing out criticism.)

When I first heard of Borderlands, I was a bit interested, but not nearly as crazy for it as everyone else got. Now it's out, and while I'm still interested, I still won't be dropping everything to go out and grab it, but I may pick it up soon. However, something has come to my attention concerning the PS3 version that makes me wonder if I should do anything but rent it.

I've played more than enough FPSs this generation, and having that genre mixed with RPG elements sounds good. Diablo with guns? Yes, please. But the thing that really got my attention was the inclusion of split-screen play for up to two people.

I. Freaked. Out.

Not nearly enough games nowadays support split-screen, so when my friend told me that he'd been playing that for a few hours, I almost instantly went out to grab the game. But then I found something out about the PS3 version -- Something that's been plaguing the console's multiplatform games for years, and is one of my biggest gripes with the PS3 -- The lack of multi-profile support.

You can't log into more than one PlayStation Network ID at a time. You know what that means? If you copy your game save to a friend's console and try to load your character, you won't be able to. If your friend is logged into his/her profile to play as his/her character and you go to play as Player 2, you can only load any characters also saved to your friend's save file. Your save -- sitting on the console -- is useless until the logged-in profile is switched to yours, which would immediately leave your friend's character worthless while you continue to play.

The 360 version? Put it on a memory card and pop it in. Hey, you're done!


I don't understand why this is so difficult to do...

What the hell, people? I know there aren't many local PS3 multiplayer games, but this is a huge issue if you ask me. The only PS3 game that actually works with all the profiles simultaneously is LittleBigPlanet, in which you could move your characters anywhere and play as them as if you were playing on your own console. NO OTHER GAMES ALLOW THAT. If one developer can do it, then why is every other developer on the planet so lazy? Or hell, why did Sony make the OS work that way in the first place when they had over a year to copy the 360's features?

I absolutely love my PS3. I really do. But this is a much bigger priority than any cross-game chat crap -- Multiple PSN ID support is a necessity at this point. I swear, consoles today have so many little issues that sometimes I don't know how anyone could possibly think they're better than last generation's machines.

(Can you tell I'm pissed off?)

So yeah - I've been in Florida for the past couple days. My grandmother passed away on Sunday, and we flew out immediately from Utah (damn planes...). I'm sitting in a hotel room right now while stuff is getting prepared, So I thought I'd give you some impressions of games I've been playing. Sorry for the lack of pictures - I'm on my not-touch screen phone right now.

Demon's Souls

If you read my previous post about this game, you'd know that I was having a tough time liking it. It's glitchy, the camera's bad, and the targeting system God-awful. Well, none of those things have changed, but the game itself is still amazing. Never in my life have I been so addicted to a game, because it truly takes all the gameplay mechanics of the 8- and 16-bit games and puts a 3D spin on them. You'll need to dig into your decade-old gaming prowess to play this game, and not even that will be enough to keep from getting slaughtered. I love it.

Uncharted 2: Among Thieves

Oh. My. GOD. I never thought I'd say this, but if I had not already owned a PS3, I would have bought one just for this game.

The single-player mode is the most cinematic game I've seen outside of Metal Gear Solid 4, which is saying a lot. It's much more balanced than the first game, with much more climbing and puzzle-solving. The multiplayer is fantastic - It has perks, but not unbalanced or unfair like other online games I've played. It's still 90% skill, and the perks just give you a little oomph. It's like my favorit online game of this generation (Gears of War) but with the climbing system of Assassin's Creed. On the whole, this may actually be the best game I've ever played. It's that good.

Anyway, that's what I've been up to. Time to get back to reality... Wish me luck. What have you guys been playing?

Let's face it -- Internal memory is here to stay. All three current-gen gaming consoles have some form of internal memory, with the exception of the Xbox 360 -- It's hard drive can be removed just as easily as removing a USB device, but it functions the same way as an internal HDD. Every system comes with this storage space, and it's gotten to the point that we as gamers are constantly taking it for granted. We don't even consciously realize it's there anymore -- We download demos, full games, videos, and save our data without giving it much of a second thought. But recently I've been noticing it a lot more, particularly with the PS3, and I can't decide exactly how good of an idea it is for managing game saves. Take a walk with me and let's see what the positives and negatives of this technology are.

I'm pretty sure I don't really have to expand too much on the plus side of internal memory. Game demos, huge videos, and full games would never be able to fit on a standard-sized memory card, so a hard drive or internal flash storage is pretty much essential this generation. All of the internal memory in each console can be expanded, too, except for the Wii -- That really doesn't matter, though, because all of your games can now be run directly off of an SD card up to 32 gigs, most of which are dirt cheap, anyway. Without hard drives and such in our consoles, there's no way we'd be able to have the video rental services such as Netflix that are available now, because there would be no way to store them on anything else (well, maybe one at a time, which is ridiculous). Also, try downloading something like Warhawk or Fable to a memory card and tell me how that goes. For the big stuff, internal memory isn't just a luxury anymore -- It's a requirement.

When it comes to anything less than the big stuff, however, we start having problems -- Particularly with game saves, and specifically on the PS3 and Wii. How many PS3 owners out there have wanted to backup, transfer, or copy a game save for one reason or another, only to be greeted with the infamous "Copying this save data is now allowed" message? This is when I start to think that hard drives and internal flash storage are terrible ideas as far as saves are concerned. Last generation, we had these awesome things called "memory cards," and they stored all of your save data on a convenient, pocket-sized card that could be put into any console it was compatible with. Now, a lot of saves are locked to the console or hard drive, making it literally impossible to transfer the data to any other console for any reason (you can bypass this easily on the Wii by using homebrew). These consoles are pieces of electronic equipment, and they will have faults. I don't want my data getting corrupted or deleted completely for no reason at all.



Another more important concern over locked saves is the fact that it's just so damn inconvenient. One of the biggest offenders is Street Fighter IV. If you got the game for the PS3 like a lot of people did (because of the controller, I'd assume), don't think you'll be able to take your completely unlocked roster to a friend's house -- Unless you haul your entire console over there, even if he or she already has one, you'll have to re-unlock everything on the new console, because the original save file is completely non-transferable. What's the point of working on the game, unlocking everything as you go, if you can't use that data wherever you travel? Why should I have to work on my game for a second time when I should just be able to throw a USB drive into the system and copy the data? Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection is another one, and it's just ridiculous. Sega basically encrypted a save file that's linked to a bunch of Genesis roms. Why? What's the point in doing that? So I can't play my unlocked games with everyone else? Really? And what about the people who wanted to upgrade from an original PS3 model to the Slim, or those who don't want homebrew on their Wiis?

Sometimes I can understand locking saves, like in the case of Demon's Souls. If you can back your save up, then you can dupe all the rare items and souls that you've found, essentially giving yourself unlimited of whatever you want and making the online portion of the game extremely unfair. But after spending so much time on the game, hundreds of hours, no doubt, to reach the maximum level of 712, do you really want to risk losing your character? Why can't the saves be locked to our accounts like Dead Space and Mirror's Edge if they had to associate it with something? Completely blocking the player from getting to his or her game save is ludicrous. A friend of mine is coming out to visit from Jersey next month, and he wants to show me his character. Well, he can't, unless he plans on either A) taking a picture of his TV screen, or B) going through the airport security (which is God-awful now, as we all know) with his entire PS3 console. All of that instead of just being able to throw an SD card into the reader and carrying his character in his pocket. The negative aspects of game saves on hard drives vastly outweighs the positives, and I long for the day when memory cards become the standards over internal memory once again, but I know that's just a fool's dream. I suppose it's not all bad -- Capcom did in fact patch Resident Evil 5 to remove the copy protection from the PS3 save files (See? I'm not the only one complaining about this.).

The Xbox 360 has a few games that have locked saves, but there aren't too many. I think playing Demon's Souls as much as I recently have been has made me think about this more, and it just burns me every time. I know I'm probably overreacting a bit, but it really is a major concern of mine, and the only reason I haven't yet purchased games like Street Fighter IV. For demos and other huge files, the internal memory solutions the current consoles offer is a much better option -- The only option, really. But for game saves themselves, I just don't see how any of it is better than memory cards.

What do you think? Is making sure you can transfer your data important to you, especially when it comes to local multiplayer stuff? Well, I'm going back to celebrating my birthday by playing more Uncharted 2, which lets me back my saves up. :P

When Demon's Souls was first announced, it almost immediately became my most anticipated game of 2009. Even though it had been given an official North American release date, I still had to fight myself from buying the overly-import-expensive Korean version. I was happy I waited -- North American players were treated to what I believe is one of the most impressive limited editions ever. Atlus certainly knows how to deliver -- It's not quite Falcom-level, but it's still great to have everything it came with.

I grabbed the game early yesterday, and I've put about ten hours into it as of writing this blog. I can now safely say that I can't stand a lot of what I've seen. Now, I know what you're all thinking -- "Ooh, he's a n00b, he can't take the difficulty, blah blah." The difficulty is one of the reasons I bought it. I grew up during the NES era -- I believe games are getting way too easy these days, and gamers are getting way too soft. I couldn't help but laugh when so many people complained about the supposed difficulty level of Mega Man 9. Well, I welcome something as brutally hard as Demon's Souls. My problems lie with the game itself.

The first thing that bothered me was something that people complain about in a lot of 3D games, and that's the camera. In most games, I may get hit here and there because of the camera, but it's kind of crucial to not get hurt a lot in Demon's Souls. On more than one occasion, I've been either fighting an enemy or running away from one, and I get stuck on something because I can't see where I'm going since there was a wall blocking my view all of a sudden. This game does NOT play well with close-quarters environments.

Another thing that I found odd was the fact that I was getting attacked through solid objects. Enemy archers shot arrows through their squad mates to get to me, and it worked pretty damn well for them. Even stranger was when I was attacked by the wolves. I'd try to hide behind various walls (none of which were destructible), and their heads would go through those walls. They'd then proceed to bite at me with their heads glitching through said solid objects, and lo and behold, they'd be doing massive damage to me if I got close. As luck (and general assumption) would have it, I tried to attack those wolves through the wall, and I wasn't doing a single point of damage to them. Come to think of it, I suppose I wasn't even really attacking through the wall, since the animals' heads were sticking out of it. I got nothing. Keep in mind that this wasn't a one-time occurrence -- Objects seem to go through other objects fairly often, and you can tell that it's not supposed to happen.



But the thing that really gets my blood boiling, the thing that makes me want to do horribly illegal things to the game disc, is the targeting system. This. Mechanic. Blows. Let me outline how this works for you -- To lock onto an enemy, you simply point your character towards him/her/it and click the right stick. Boom, locked on. To cycle between which enemies you lock onto without taking the lock off, you simply use the right stick itself. Sounds good on paper, right? Well, try to actually use it. I swear Demon's Souls randomly chooses which enemy it wants you to lock onto. I was looking at an enemy -- a stationary enemy -- with both my character and the camera. It was also the closest enemy to me at the time. I pressed the lock-on button, and you know what happened? An enemy that wasn't even on my screen is what I ended up focusing on. By clicking that right stick, my character and camera swung to some enemy I hadn't even seen at the time, and I was swiftly and painlessly pummeled into the dirt. (Well, I assume I was pummeled -- the camera was so bad that I couldn't even see myself, but my death was a pretty good indication.)

The actual locking-on isn't the only problem with this system -- The way you cycle through your enemies doesn't work, either. As I've mentioned several times already, the camera in this game isn't that great. Well, since the right stick controls the camera when you're not locked onto anything but controls the lock-on cycle when you are, you can't move the camera at all when you're locked onto an enemy. But if the camera's so bad, what's your first reaction? To try to fix your view, of course. I tried that when I was locked onto an enemy. Guess what happened? That's right, my lock-on was immediately switched to another random enemy to my left, turning my character around. Commence with the swift and painless pummeling. That means that if you're locked onto an enemy and you need to move your camera around (which will happen), you have to get rid of your target, adjust the camera, and then re-lock onto the enemy, which isn't guaranteed to work for you anyway. You're liable to get killed eight times within the amount of time it'll take you to do all that.

I wanted to like Demon's Souls, and I still say it has one of the best premises I've ever seen in an RPG. The "level-up" system is one of the coolest I've ever experienced, and the character creation in the beginning is extremely deep. But there are so many problems with the actual game that it almost felt like I was playing a beta at times. I truly have respect for you guys and gals who can stick with the game through all this stuff, but I sincerely doubt I'll find a reason to not sell it soon, which really pisses me off, since I had been waiting for it for so long. I'd like to think it's not just me, but something tells me it is, seeing as how the game has gotten almost nothing but positive reviews.

What do you guys think? Anything you can tell me that may dissuade me from selling it, or do you think I should just go with my gut?

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EDIT: I took Ckarasu up on his suggestion below and I restarted the game as the Royalty class, and I have to admit, I'm having a much better time with it now. That's really strange to me, though -- I'm having more fun with the game playing as a different class with a different style, yet I'm still running into all the problems I complained about above. So why am I having fun with it all of a sudden? This game is a mystery wrapped in an enigma and topped with WTF.

At any rate, thank you, Ckarasu. I still hate the lock-on system and the various glitches I come across, but I'll be damned if your suggestion didn't help me out a ton. I have no idea why, but I have no reservations when it comes to enjoying games. :D

Thanks to Psychoholic420, I downloaded and played the crap out of the Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker demo yesterday. It's been one of the biggest games I've been looking forward to, and one of the only reasons I bought a PSP-1000 from a friend of mine. So what was it like?

You're given three missions to test out -- A tutorial, an actual sneaking stage, and a boss fight with a tank. Each stage plays pretty differently, so it's good that they made the demo to show you all the different styles of play you can choose from. Visually, this game is stunning. It easily looks better than most parts of the PS2 Metal Gear Solids, and the attention paid to detail is excellent. The controls really got to me, though -- You use the thumbstick to move Snake, and the face buttons (X, Square, O, and Triangle) to aim, as if it were the second joystick. It works, but it's not nearly as accurate as using an actual stick -- I suppose that's where the auto-aiming help comes in. There's another control scheme, too, which I call the RE5 scheme since it's a lot like Resident Evil 5. You move with the thumbstick, all of your actions are mapped to the face buttons (like the previous MGS games), and you hold R to ready your weapon. So how do you aim? If you hold L, the thumbstick goes from moving Snake to aiming your gun. Much more accurate than the face buttons for aiming, but now you can't move while firing. That wasn't a problem in RE5, but it sucks to have to stand still when a tank is coming right for you in this game. The controls are all up to your preference.

Interesting absences were the crawling and cover movement features. You can't crawl in this game -- At all. You can play dead, but you can't move while you're doing it. And if you press up against a wall to peek around the corner, you'd better be at the corner, because you can't strafe along the walls like you could in every other MGS game, including Portable Ops. I don't know if this is a big deal yet, as this was just a demo, but it didn't seem like a Metal Gear game without being able to do so.

Overall, it was a really good demo. I quite enjoyed it, and I'm still playing through it as we speak. What do you guys think? Which control scheme do you prefer?

Back when the guys at Sega were making consoles and had to compete with Nintendo, Sonic the Hedgehog was their ace-in-the-hole. Nintendo had Mario, so Sega needed a kick-butt mascot also, and Sonic was the most kick-butt you could get -- He was well-designed, he had an attitude, and above all, he was fast. Sonic was the coolest mascot of the time, and had a few games that were quite arguably better than some of Mario's offerings. When the Sega Saturn came around, however, the Sonic franchise hit a dry spot. The console never got a true, new entry in the series, as Sonic X-Treme never saw the light of day. Sonic 3D Blast was simultaneously released on both the Saturn and the Genesis, so that didn't really count in the eyes of the fans, either (although the Saturn version was far superior, if only for the different Special Stages). But there was one Sonic game on the Saturn that, while most people would love to forget it, I have very fond memories of, and that game is Sonic R.

I want to say that Sonic R was probably an attempt at countering Nintendo's hugely popular Mario Kart 64, since they both came out around the same time. Sonic R, however, did not live up to the competition -- It had fewer stages to race in and a complete lack of a battle mode of any kind, so the points for variety instantly went to Mario. But Sonic R had a lot of charm, especially if you were a die-hard Sonic fan like I was. While none of the stages were taken directly from any previous Sonic games, they were all very similar, even including the famous loop-the-loops. There were speed pads you could spend rings on to get an extra boost, springs, shortcut doors, the works. The stages had multiple paths to take to get to the finish line as well -- They were very well designed, in my opinion. Although there were only five of them, you could race differently every time you started the game up. I remember playing the game so much that I could almost literally play through the stages with my eyes closed. I still know where every single nook and cranny will take you.

There was definitely one thing that Sonic R had over the Mario Kart games, and that was the required skill level. If you wanted to collect everything in the game, it wasn't just a matter of completing the stages in single player mode -- You had to find items throughout the stages as you raced, and then finish in first place on top of that. The first type of item you could find was the Sonic Token, of which there were five hidden throughout each stage. After collecting all five and finishing the race within the top three spots, you got to race one of four secret characters -- Metal Sonic, Metal Knuckles, the dreaded Tails Doll, or EggRobo. If you beat them one-on-one, you unlocked them as playable racers. They weren't terribly different from their living counterparts, but they did add a bit of variety to the roster.



The second special item you could collect as you races was, of course, the Chaos Emerald. All seven Emeralds returned in Sonic R, and by collecting each one, you could race as Super Sonic, and without any Ring limitations, either. There were two Emeralds in each stage (except for one in the first stage), and you had to finish the race in first place in order to keep them. All of the Emeralds required you to pay a "toll" of sorts to get to them as well, meaning you had to collect a bunch of rings on the way. To find all of these hidden items in just three laps was daunting at times, to say the least -- My favorite self-made challenge was finding all the Sonic Tokens and Chaos Emeralds in the stage, finishing in first place, beating the secret racer, and getting to keep the Emeralds I had collected on top of all that. Victory was sweet.

Like I said before, there wasn't any kind of battle mode in Sonic R, but there were two interesting multiplayer modes other than just racing -- Balloon Race and Tag. In Balloon Race, there were balloons scattered all over the racing stages, and the first person to collect five of them would be the winner. Not overly deep or anything, but still pretty fun nonetheless. The only problem was that once you knew where the balloons always popped up, it wasn't much of a challenge anymore -- Their positions were never randomized. If you played the game often, you could just run to the locations of the balloons while new players would be left in the dust without even getting the chance to find a single one. Tag was just what it sounds like -- A game of tag. Players and CPUs ran all around while one person tried to run into all of them, at which point they'd freeze in their tracks. This turned into a time trial sort of game, as the main goal was to beat the times of everyone else who had played. Since the rival characters never went to the same places, this mode had a much longer life than the Balloon Race mode did. The coolest thing about these modes, though, was the fact that it basically turned the game into somewhat of a free-roaming adventure, and you could even explore and find all the shortcuts so you'd be ready for your next race. There was no time limit, so you could goof off for as long as you wanted to.

Although the Balloon Race was quite limited on the Saturn, the PC port of the game (which showed up a year later, and is available on the Sonic Gems Collection,) randomized the balloon locations, and it was surprisingly fun. I remember playing Balloon Race with my brother for hours at a time, and it never got old, since we were on equal ground playing it on the PC. This version of the game had a few more things going for it over the Saturn version -- Enhanced graphics, greater draw distance, and randomized weather patterns. If randomized weather was enabled, you'd never be able to tell what playing a stage would be like. Clear day and night just changed the backdrops, fog made it hard to see, rain made all the racers slide all over, and snow not only made the ground slippery in certain spots, but it also froze all the water in the stage, so all the lakes became huge shortcuts. It's a shame that the Saturn version never had these features -- After playing the PC version, I could never go back.



There's one final aspect of Sonic R that always gets brought up, and that's the soundtrack. People love to make fun of the soundtrack in this game. Each stage had a vocal musical number (two for the last stage, depending on whether or not you played as Super Sonic), as did the title screen and ending credits. Written by Richard Jacques and sung by TJ Davis, I personally found them to be quite catchy. No, they weren't the greatest songs written for a video game of all time, but they stuck in my head. And you know what really rocked? You could just throw the Saturn disc into a music CD player and play the songs like any old music CD. A game and a soundtrack in one? Sonic R is undoubtedly the greatest video game ever created by humans.

Sonic's recent games have been quite a bit under par, and his outings on the Sega Saturn weren't that great, either. But Sonic R, as much as people seem to hate it, has a special spot in the gaming part of my heart that can't be replaced. I don't know if I'd take it over something like Mario Kart Wii, but I still prefer it over most of the racing games I've played. It's nice to have the Gems Collection (and, in turn, this game) just to be able to occasionally relive one of my favorite games for the short-lived Sega Saturn.