Episodic original IP coming to the Playstation Network

Yesterday there was an announcement on the official Playstation Blog of a new episodic IP that's incoming to PSN called Rat Race, developed by SuperEgo Games. Rat Race is a comedy/adventure game, I'm thinking probably along the lines of such classics as the Monkey Island series and Grim Fandango. The announcement was made by SuperEgo co-founder Greg Easley and is described as a "labor of love".

"Rat Race is set in an office - an extremely dysfunctional one. The company is called BiggCo, and the people who work there make the Enron guys look like Nobel Prize laureates. Your job is simply to make it through the day as bombs go off all around you. As the clock ticks toward quitting time, you’ll encounter a rogues gallery including: Joy Chung, an impossible, and impossibly hot, PR exec; Chip Bratsby III, a pompous jerk whose career focus is getting you fired; and Dr. Ron Durfman, a research scientist who may or may not be intimate with his lab monkey."

Easley explains that the goal of SuperEgo is to make a game that gives you "the feeling of 'playing' inside an episode of your favorite TV show", and says they oftentimes describe it as an "interactive sitcom, but that doesn't do it justice."

I'm quite excited for this title. To me, the hard drive in the PS3 (and 360, as long as you didn't pick up the "Tard Pack") is for content like this. Episodic games that doesn't make sense to be pressed to Blu-Ray (or DVD) and instead have a rapid release schedule and gives short but satisfying gaming experiences. My hope is that we'll see a release schedule very in line with that of the Sam & Max episodes on GameTap and not that of Half-Life 2 Episodes or especially SiN Episodes. If it indeed plays with the humor and brilliance of the Monkey Island games and feels like you're playing an episode of The Office, you can sign me up for the duration of the series. I'll keep the space warm on my PS3 hard drive for its arrival.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 9:02 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

For the love of god...

Stop calling it the iTouch!!

>.<

That is all.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 9:28 am EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

Halo 3 (in progress) review

Busted into Halo 3 for the first time last night. Seems that I'm in the camp who got a copy of the Collector's Edition that came all scratched and stuff, but it still worked. But that's beside the point. So last night I got through the second act of the game (out of nine) and felt like blogging my initial impressions of the game. Mostly because with all the hype of the "Jesus game" I figured it couldn't hurt to have a less than glowing review out there.

It might be the ridiculous amount of hype and marketing that's all around, irritating the crap out of me (yes, Microsoft, I know that Halo 3 is coming, please stop with the marketing campaign bigger than Star Wars), or perhaps it's just the way things are, but as of right now I'm not amazingly enthralled in the game. It feels like Halo. It feels like Halo 2. It is exactly what the tag line says. "Finish the Fight". It plainly states that this is exactly what you've played twice before, just in different maps with some new weapons and gizmos that don't particularly change the way the game is played. When a Brute throws down a bubble shield (which seems to be fairly often) it's not much different than an Elite stepping behind a shield or box, except you can't use an overcharge shot or grenade to take out the bubble shield like you can those portable shield things. Granted, having a bubble shield is awesome if you're out in the open, gives you a chance to recharge, but there's no big change here.
The way everything feels is largely the same, except for the complete gimping of the pistol, but yeah. So far the single player campaign feels like an expansion. It's just there so that you can finish the storyline that couldn't (or at least wasn't) in Halo 2. In one review I'd read they pointed out that there were many fewer parts where you had to backtrack through an area you've already been through and I was ecstatic, reminiscing at how I wanted to shoot myself going through the Library TWICE in Halo. However, the second act features one such level where you run to the end, run back almost to the beginning, run back close to the end, and then run to an area that might as well be the beginning. Artificial level length sucks.

Playing through the beta I'm quite convinced that the multiplayer is largely more of the same as well. Weapon balancing, new maps, polish, etc abound, but it's just more of the same. Does it make the game less fun? No, certainly not. Is it overhyped? So far, IMO, yes. Graphics are better (though not to the degree that Halo 1 & 2 were in their time, Halo 3 is quite behind many other titles in terms of graphics, especially character models for everyone but Master Chief, the Arbiter and Sgt Johnson) and the environments are more engrossing with some pretty nice foliage effects in the opening level. We'll see how the game ends, if the story turns out to be fantastic, but for now I'm not particularly surprised that I purchased the end of the story mode with some entertaining multiplayer and undeniably awesome 4-player co-op. I'm sure it'll be worth it, but I'd have to say there are titles coming that I have a higher degree of anticipation. Game on.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 9:54 am EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

Wet and Wild never sucked so bad.

Last night was rather not cool. (Obligatory flashback: earlier in the week, I'd gotten the entertainment room set up with a new device stand, so things were looking pretty nice down there. Even got some zip ties to do some hardcore cable management. Very nice) Just before I'm about to go to bed, I go into the laundry room to see if the water line had backed up at all. Didn't look like it, but then I noticed there was some water on the floor that, interestingly enough, was flowing down to the drain instead of coming from it. Eventually discovered out that it was coming from the wall. Figured there really wasn't much that could be done at 1 in the morning so I put some towels down and figured I'd take a look again in the morning. Just out of curiosity, I checked the entertainment room right next to the laundry room. All appeared well, until I stepped on the floor close to the wall and water came out of the cracks. Further exploration showed that the west and north faces of the entertainment room had water leaking in, which was under the food and carpeted parts about 1/8 of the way into the room. So then I was up until 2:30 moving electronics upstairs and some furniture around to make sure there wouldn't be any water damage. Ugh. And here I thought that finishing up the basement was just going to involve finishing up drywall and painting on the south wall. And that it would be cheap. Ain't that a kick in the head.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 3:27 pm EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

Some proof that a HDD should be required

I've been listening to the 1up podcast and they've shown just how disruptive the lack of a HDD can be in the console space. At some sort of a conference there were some announcements made regarding MMOs on the 360. Apparently, there's been the decision that an MMO title should reserve 4gb of disk space on a hard drive for patches, extra content, etc. Sounds cool, right? Well, MS is really shooting themselves in the foot on this one. 4gb is not only what a game should reserve, it's *all* a game can use. If a developer creates content that pushes the space necessary to 6gb, guess what? They're going to have to cut down on what's in there to fit within 4gb. Developers were told they need to plan to have a scaler in their games so that when the 4gb cap is exceeded, content of some sort starts getting cut out, whether that be texture quality downscaling, areas becoming unaccessible, character models losing polys, etc. They attribute this cluster to the fact that there are x amount of systems out there without a hard drive and how MS gauges a person with their absolutely ludicrous hard drive prices. The Core system is a device for MS to hit the $149 price point as soon as possible. And not only is it most likely to hit the low $$$ amount quick, it's most likely to take the gamer's experience down to all-time lows quickly as well. Good job, MS.

Posted by BrokenDesign @ 3:25 pm EDT | Permalink | 5 Comments