[bad soda]

Stu and I spent the weekend with the Playstation 3, giving me the chance to play through Uncharted and Stu to dig into Assassin’s Creed and giving us both time with some of the downloaded games on his console.  We tackled Calling all Cars (where I established my dominance early on) and Super Puzzle Fighter (where he soundly disproved my former prowess, making me doubt if I was ever good at anything), and I got a bit of hands on with Everyday Shooter.  We also had the chance to look at the Bladestorm demo, and he had downloaded Flow but I didn’t try it out, having given it time on the PC earlier.

[PSN] Calling all Cars – FIRST IMPRESSION:  Pure, friendship-murdering competition
Player-driven competition is always rough territory for me, since I’m more of a co-op player myself where all cheap tactics are fair game because the opponents aren’t going to complain.  While my usual exception is Street Fighter and most other 2D fighters, Calling all Cars was still a blast.  But it’s brutal:  like Chu-Chu Rocket before it, it’s cute approach is a deadly facade that vainly disguises gameplay that rewards flat-out merciless betrayal.  All success is at the expense of another player, and the most talented jackass is going to be the winner every game.  Somehow, putting it like that makes it clear why I came out as the dominating player on this one.

[PSN] Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (did I get that right?) – FIRST IMPRESSION:  Same as it ever was
Bright, shiny, high-def blocks and backgrounds made the old sprites look disgusting.  It’s a shame that even with HD in the title no one had the time or funding to redraw the original sprites, still being recycled from the original version of the game that was released more than ten years ago.  The result?  Jarring inconsistency that makes neither the new graphics or old look acceptable.  In the case of Puzzle Fighter, it doesn’t matter even slightly.  Stuart and I are reasonable veterans of Puzzle Fighter, I played it originally for the Dreamcast and Stu picked it up for the GBA years ago.  More recently we’ve competed via PSP with Capcom Puzzle World.  For the most part we’ve been evenly matched, but given time I would inevitably pull ahead.

This all changed last night, when after having assumed my superiority for the last six months without playing, I was trashed 6 out of 8 games.  I was playing on the behalf of our own T the Initial, who sent me on a mission to get revenge for his embarrassing loss early last week by destroying Stu at his own game.  Yeah: didn’t happen.

[PSN] Everyday Shooter – FIRST IMPRESSION: A clear younger brother to Rez
A traditional shooter with musically inspired gameplay?  What Rez did with rail shooters, Everyday Shooter successfully does for dual-joystick shooters (e.g. Robotron, Smash TV, and more recently the likely competitor of Everyday Shooter: Geometry Wars).  Guided by the graphics, which are in turn guided by the soundtrack, the player has to discover the personality of each level in order to be able to destroy the enemies effectively and survive.  Unlike Geometry Wars, Everyday Shooter’s levels advance every time the song ends, tasking the player only with survival instead of needing to kill every wave of enemies.  High score, of course, differentiates the master from the lucky.  It was amazing, and hard.

[PS3] Bladestorm – FIRST IMPRESSION:  A broken attempt to improve Kessen
Bladestorm has a shitty camera.  It makes everything frustrating.  Given that it’s not really a very popular genre of game anyway, I’ll just metaphorically roll my eyes at it and never give it a second chance again.  Kingdom Under Fire at least got me to play through it once, and Dynasty Warriors is, you know, not actually that bad.

[PC] flOw – FIRST IMPRESSION:  Suprisingly not my kinda weird thing
I like Flow a lot, mainly because it represents one of the few truly new games.  Games are not art, and one of the reasons for this is that there are no other genres within the medium.  RPG, action, platform, RTS, these are not truly separate genres, because video games are too strict on their boundaries to allow for differences like the difference between biography and sci-fi/fantasy in literature.  But certain games, like Flow, and even The Sims, feel different.  These are not like the other ones, and I want more of that.

But the tragedy is that I like my video games to be action, sandbox, RPG or whatever and games like Flow are practically unplayable to me.  That said, when I did sit down to play Flow I lost track of probably two hours and I acknowledge that something was there for me, even if it hasn’t tempted me back.