7 posts tagged “gametap”

Seeing as how Jericho was released day-and-date on GameTap today, I can't seem to get away from it. Even as I type, the pulsating orifices and fly vomit that make up the chapter select screen ooze over the monitor behind me. Make no mistake about it, Jericho is a gross game, but it's also pretty damn sweet. Our fearless leader described it as "Ghost Recon in Hell." Fair enough, really. I haven't played much of it myself, but it's on my to-do list for the week.

A list that actually consisted of one title: The Orange Box. After tearing my way through Portal on day one, I've made it my personal mission to force my way through the Half-Life 2 series. I use the term "force" because I honestly couldn't stand it. To me, Half-Life 2 was about 8 hours of horridly paced "meh," highlighted by a few, brief glimpses of brilliance. That said, I was glad to have polished it off for a third and probably final time.

Half-Life 2: Episode One, on the other hand: wow. The first 10 minutes of it were easily more entertaining than the entirety of Half-Life 2. It makes me want some sort of roller coaster based off the series in the style of Disneyland's Indiana Jones. I'm not sure how I'll take to Valve's inability to tell a story for a second time around, but I hear its worth it for Episode Two.

I replaced a few of the links around here and played around with the wording elsewhere. Don't look for my name in the by-line of a Joystiq story anytime soon as I've left the world of blogging and moved on to a more interesting venture. As of today, I am the new community coordinator for GameTap. It sounds like a community management position, but it's actually much more complicated than that. Needless to say, things are about to get very interesting around here.

More so than how I spent my weekend: playing Halo 3. I'm now a Grade 1 Sergeant and Lukems owes me not one, but two steak dinners. My file share is filled with awesomeness for you to queue up, including a grenade stick that could only be described as epic.

Get hype time never seems to end.

My love and appreciation of bad fighting games knows no bounds. While I can't share with you the worst of the weekend (not that anyone really needs to see Dino Rex), I can share this -- a simple video blog that turned into a mini-project this weekend. I meant what I say in the video in that I originally set out to create a combo exhibition for War Gods, but I soon found that it was impossible. Enjoy it and the notes below.

Also, I wrapped up my first running feature over at Joystiq, The Guessing Game. Check that out as well when you have the chance.

00:01 - I really do love the "Land of Chocolate" theme a bit too much.

00:05 - I quickly found out just how much my camera hates low light situations. Behold! The miracle of post, iMovie production!

00:40 - It may look like there are people in there, but they're actually not. It's hard to explain, but the chat log there has gaps by hours.

1:06 - True story. I bought War Gods for $1.99 on New Years Eve a while back and so, for convenience sake, I placed it in the same tray as Street Fighter: The Movie. It made so much sense that I just left it there.

1:54 - And despite having this arcane fact seared into my skull, I could not find evidence of it anywhere.

2:26 - I tend to slur my words like a drunkard and never notice until it's too late. Doh.

2:30 - Something I didn't get a chance to touch upon.. the "3D" button in the arcade would get so hot due to its LED that it would seriously burn your hand if you rested on it.

3:55 - Waggle-Waggle. So what was Midway's best 3-D fighter? Bio F.R.E.A.K.S. Believe.

3:59 - Can you spot the part where I loop the footage backwards in order to remain constant? I bet you can't!

I always consider these trips to Bakersfield and exercise in exile. With the exception of the Chris and Susan Show, I've hardly even glanced at any video game related news or articles. I've done three things this week: sleep, eat Sonics and costume. Somewhere between all that, I make time to play with Momo, but that's about as stressful as it gets.

Of course, if I said I hadn't been even playing video games that would just be weird. Also, GameTap rolled over to their new hotness this week and I've been all over it.

If you logged into GameTap this week and didn't notice much of a difference (outside of the mountain of Neo Geo games just added), then we'd all be in the same boat. For as much as I love the interface, I was hoping for some sort of a makeover. The big change came over at the website where there are now message boards, customizable profiles, published playlists and more. Not everything is working at the moment, but their new site and giggle-to-yourself-in-the-night-worthy Summer lineup has me absolutely giddy over what's coming next.

Their releases for this big week consisted of some heavy hitters in Metal Slug X, Panzer Dragoon and Tomb Raider: Legend. It also included Art of Fighting which, in light of the recently released anthology for the series, is a laughable trip down memory lane. Though, to be fair, Panzer Dragoon is also a Hell of a lot more hideous than even I remember, but it's hard to complain with Panzer Dragoon Zwei coming in a few weeks.

And that's my shining endorsement. So the next time you see my quotes all over the Myst Online advertisements, maybe you'll see, "Jared Rea says: In a week where all I wanted to do was get fat and avoid video games, I still made room for GameTap!"

I've been in a state of perpetual planning for the past week. Be it for events three months, two weeks to even a day from now, "planning" is how I've replied to the day-to-day question of "What have you been up to?" If it's not preparing for the Game Developer Conference with Joystiq, it's Shelby and I getting our heads straight for Fanime this year. Both of which, I would like to believe are going swimmingly. Preparation is something I've been meaning to work on for sometime now and so far I think it's paying off. It's even given me a bit of time to -- can you believe it? Play video games.

The common joke in this industry is that the closer you get to the source, the farther away you get from the actual user-end of the deal. It's raw, but that's generally how it works. Listen to a podcast or look on a message board and it's clear to figure out who's actually playing games and who's just talking out their ass. I found myself falling into the slump of exclusively writing about games this past week so I made it a point to actually sit down and play some games for a change.

At the risk of sounding like a viral marketer, I've been playing tons of Myst Online: Uru Live. You may have seen the 1UP preview, but did you see the Joystiq double-feature? I've even managed to get Shelby lost with me as we managed to clear out a linking book all by ourselves. The satisfaction found in that alone was prossibly more so than anything we've toppled in Warcraft. Along with Myst comes GameTap of course and I've been sneaking in games of under appreciated classics like Gunsmoke, The Ninja and Giga Wing. Having only played the sequel before, I was surprised at how much different, not to mention better the original Giga Wing was. Why didn't anyone tell me it was essentially Mars Matrix Alpha?

Aside from Gametap I've been forced back into Bemani for the time being with a title to review and Pop'n Music to explore. The latter of which, is something I haven't "seriously" sat down with for almost a year and is thanks to the aforementioned Fanime plans. That's a different subject for a different day, but Pop'n made me realize just how out of shape my wrists are. Seriously now, I'll be playing a song and all I can think of is "I sure wish I could put my hands down."

Seeing as how the past week or so has been nothing short of a brief, yet painful blur, I thought I'd swing by and fill in the blanks.

Playing ... Gametap
I finally got Boot Camp installed on my Macbook Pro which means I took the Gametap plunge. Shelby and I have been crawling our way through Myst Online: Uru Live while I've already plowed through all the available episodes of Sam & Max. My preview of the former should be available this Monday. I was disappointed to find out that Beyond Good & Evil for PC does not support controllers though. Now how is Shelby supposed to appreciate its brilliance?

Rocking ... Optimus Rhyme, "School the Indie Rockers"
Thanks to the duo Penny-Arcade and their lovely ping-pong shinanigans, I was reminded that I never actually picked up the last Optimus Rhyme album. As my favorite act on the nerdcore scene, I found this rather distressing. Aside from that Very Best of Kiss album I picked up while down in Bakersfield, this has been at the top of my playlist all week.

Purchasing ... Etnies Slip-ons
These are hot. I've been looking for a good pair of slip-ons and everyone knows I'm a sucker for brown clothes. God only knows what that's about. I actually did a lot of clothing shopping this week which can only mean one thing -- I'm nervous about something. What? Eh, we'll have to wait and see.

Watching ... Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends
When your sleep schedule is as screwed up as mine is, you get to catch up on cartoons and the oddest of hours. It seems like every time I've turned on the TV this past week, Foster's Home has been there to greet me. The complete first season is out on DVD this March, finally. So soon enough I won't be at the whim of my own bad habits. Speaking of which ...

Regretting ... Tylenol PM
I am a tiny person. When my back pains started flaring up again and was depriving me of the tiny amount of sleep I currently function on, something had to be done. So I picked up a bottle of Tylenol PM. Tylenol for the pain reliever, PM for the "momma said knock you out" factor. Unfortunately, it knocked me out too hard as I didn't wake up that day until the late afternoon. Whoops.

Reading ... XBLA Shake-up Drama
When I heard that Greg Canessa was leaving his position as general manager of Xbox Live Arcade, my first reaction was, "Bail out!" But when I heard that he was moving on up to the east side of PopCap, I still thought "Bail out!" but also "Good for him." Now it'll be interesting to see if XBLA somehow straightens out after falling flat for the past, oh six months? I gotta tell you though ... Gametap sure is awesome.

Congratulating ... Susan Arendt
I am more in debt to this woman than she may ever know. Susan Arendt is Game|Life's newest blogger and I couldn't be happier for both her and Kohler. She finally gets a gig worthy of her awesomeness and Chris gets an east coast blogger that doesn't suck. Everybody wins!

"Let me tell you about this one" I tell David Reid, Vice President of Gametap marketing. "This is, believe it or not, my earliest childhood memory."

He laughs it up as I regale him with the story of the significance of Air-Sea Battle in my life. This is during a demonstration of the subscription service, Gametap, which allows gamers to play a metric fuckton of both classic and modern games. I'm trying to explain to him and the folks around us that the point of the game is to destroy as many objects as you can within the very precise limit of 2 minutes and 16 seconds. This is, naturally, only five minutes after I successfully brought Gametap to its knees trying to load the adventure classic, Willy Beamish.

"What is it that you like about this game?" asks one of the PR ladies. My first reaction was to look at the giant monitor before us, riddled with pixels the size of fists that once passed as superior graphics, Understandably, I laugh. It's only after I explain the subtle nuances of the adventure genre at the time, as well as the care free nature of the game when my second reaction kicks in. I'm getting really, really old.

My trip out to San Francisco today was a rather curious adventure through my gaming adolescence. Gametap itself is a naturally a cause of this, as playing The Ninja for Master System resulted in a flood of memories linked to far too many late nights, sneaking in just one more game while my parents wereasleep. The main reason I was there, however, was to see the latest in Sam & Max -- a Gametap exclusive. I owe a lot to the original Lucasarts adventure for more than just attributing to my diversification as a gamer.

Sam & Max: Hit the Road was the first game to actually make me want to learn where edutainment titles had failed. Games like Oregon Trail may have taught me about life and death, but Sam's incredibly sharp wit and dry delivery taught me that having a hugely robust vernacular was more pestilent than a firearm could ever be. It's not that games like Day of the Tentacle and Deja'Vu didn't make me work my brain before, but Sam & Max was the first that made me want to work it and this was a good decade before Japan welcomed their new Brain Training overlords.

Throughout waxing game design in correspondence with the state of the modern adventure genre (See: It doesn't exist), I couldn't help but giggle to myself every time Sam opened up his trap. Sure, the voice actor sounds much like a sorry impersonation of the original, but the magic of Steve Parcell is still causing that soulless beast to deliver the funny. That my friends, is magic.

After being enticed by my heroes, bouncing around and making armpit farts in three dimensions, I was ushered into a small room to see a reanimated corpse. A reanimated corpse in the form or Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. I somehow managed to glaze over the fact that Gametap had resurrected the online component of this for their service back at E3. While the game isn't fully public yet, it is easily one of the most intriguing -- most brilliant concepts in modern day gaming. I'm saving up my man juice for my 1UP preview, but what I experienced caused me to completely blow my load. It made me want some sort of mythical box that could play PC games again. Badly.

This wasn't my last stop of the day, but it was hard to think about much else having wrapped my head around the walking, talking Ages of Myst. Heading back to the Ziff Davis office for my second appointment, I gave myself a pat on the back for deciding to bring a sweater today. This city is getting real fucking cold.