Lost: Via Domus (Makes You Glad Game Rental Companies Exist)

I'm a pretty big Lost fan - over the last few years I've gotten sucked into the whole ridiculous mythos.  The more absurd it becomes the more I love it.  When I heard that they were releasing a videogame based on the show, I knew I was going to have to play it, even if it turned out to be a giant turd.  Luckily it turned out to be pretty decent (but only if you're a Lost fan), but I'm glad that I rented it from Gamefly instead of buying it.

It was like this game was engineered to be a rental and nothing more - it has seven "episodes" that you can complete in 30 - 45 minutes each pretty easily.  The game showed up in my mailbox on Saturday, and I finished it last night after about 3 sessions over the weekend totaling about 5 hours.  The game creates a new character (Elliot) who has a side story of his own that runs parallel with the first two seasons of the show.  His story is pretty good, not quite up to the top tier stories of the main cast, but certainly better than the backstory for Nikki and Paolo in Season 3.

This isn't an action based game (other than a couple chase sequences and a handful of areas where you can use a gun) - it's more like those old point and click PC adventure games (think King's Quest) - you explore the environment, interact with important objects/items, and talk to other characters.  You move around in third person in a 3D environment - the game controls and looks very similar to the present day Desmond portions of Assassin's Creed.  You'll also do some light puzzle solving - there are some puzzles involving reactivating power supplies by manipulating fuses to get the right voltage to the right areas, and some simple IQ test questions involving pattern recognition you'll need to answer to access computer terminals (examples - what comes next in the series "Z-X-C-V-?" and "2-4-8-10-20-22-?").  The puzzles were fun, but hardly challenging or mentally taxing.

In the game, you'll get to explore most of the iconic areas from the show - the wreckage strewn beach; Black Rock; the Hatch; the Swan, the Hydra, and Flame Stations; and if you really keep an eye out, you'll even get to see the Medical Station and Pearl Station.  The coolest thing you'll get to see in the game (and the big draw for me) is what is behind the concrete wall in the Swan creating the magnetic anomaly.   It's not any kind of huge revelation, but it's pretty cool nonetheless.   There's a lot of fan service in the game.

Other than the really short length, I only have a handful of gripes about the game.  First, you explore a couple of dark caves with a torch early in the game that have a number of bottomless pits in them.  Because of the third person perspective, it can be hard to tell these pits from shadows, unless you tilt the camera so you're looking at the ground.  You also have to extinguish your torch to pass through waterfalls, and sometimes there will be a pit nearby that you'll stumble into while it's still dark.  Another annoyance is encountering the Black Smoke in the jungle.  To get from area to area, you follow flag markers in the jungle to get from, say, the beach to Black Rock.  Occasionally, the Black Smoke will come along, and to keep it from attacking you, you'll have to hide in a cylinder-like grouping of trees.  Then when it leaves and you climb out of the trees, the game will often drop you out in a different orientation than you entered in, so you're often left unsure which way to go to continue in the direction you were heading.  Since the jungle is pretty dense and everything looks the same, you really can't get your bearings in any other way than using the flag markers.  It's not a huge deal, it just gets a little frustrating when the Black Smoke shows up every 30 seconds, hiding, the climbing back out and trying to find your bearings again.  Another weird thing is the trading system.  You'll find coconuts, bottled water, and other various objects lying around that you can trade other castaways for stuff like torches.  It works well, it's just weird trading Charlie a papaya, an Apollo bar, and a copy of Lewis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland" for a gun and a clip (why does Charlie have a gun and not Sawyer?).

The graphics are generally pretty nice - the environments look good, the Stations and living quarters all have a lot of detail, but some of the characters are hit-or-miss.  The character models for Michael and Tom especially will creep you the fuck out. Some of the voice actors from the show did their own voice work for the game (Ben, Mikhail, Desmond, Tom, and Claire), but each of those characters only have about three or four lines of dialog and you'll see them maybe once or twice.  Unfortunately, the character that has the most dialog - Locke - probably has the worst stand in.  Sawyer's stand in is also pretty bad - the guy doing his voice work has one the worst southern accents I've ever heard.  Luckily, though, the voice stand ins for Jack, Kate, Sayid, and especially Hurley are usually pretty solid and not distracting.

This game pretty much exists solely as fan service - there should be a sticker on the box that says "For Fans Only!".  If you're a fan of the show, give this game a rent and you'll blow through it in a weekend or a few nights.  But if the phrase "Dude, you got a little Artz on you" has no meaning to you, nothing in this game is going to make any sense to you, and the gameplay really isn't compelling enough to keep you interested if you're really not into the story.  It assumes a great deal of familiarity with the show's plot and character's, and the amount of enjoyment you'll get out of this game is directly correlated with that.  It is good for a quick achievement score boost - you'll get an easy 700 or so just playing through the story.  The rest comes from photographing certain objects that are important to the Lost universe that you may come across while exploring.  Most are of these are easy to find (Kelvin's suit, Desmond's mural), but a few (Hurley's Van, the Pearl Station, and the Medical Station) can be tricky to find unless you know how to uncover them based on your knowledge of the show.

Posted by ImaginaryEngr76 @ 11:05 am EDT | Permalink | 5 Comments

Sea-Monkeys (Or A Child's First Realization That Retail Packaging Often Lies)

My four year old daughter really, really, REALLY wants an aquarium full of beautiful colorful fish that she "can love and care for". Having an aquarium when I was I kid, I know pretty well all the upkeep and filthy water changes involved that I'll ultimately have to do myself, because hey, my kid is four years old. But I thought maybe I can see how she does with the aquarium gateway drug - Sea Monkeys. For those not in the know, Sea Monkeys are basically a kind of brine shrimp, and you can buy a kit containing food and freeze dried eggs that hatch upon placing them in water and adding some sort of "Instant Life" enzyme. You may remember seeing ads for these things in comic books back in the day:



Posted by ImaginaryEngr76 @ 10:34 am EDT | Permalink | 4 Comments

The Sand Drummer

Well, as mentioned in my previous blog, I made it to the Queensryche show at the House of Blues in Myrtle Beach Sunday night.  I had never seen them live, so it was a treat.  Even though they were playing in a relatively small venue, they put on a great show.  Their lead singer, Geoff Tate, had one of the most charismatic stage presences that I've ever seen.  Good to see that his 4 octave voice is still in fine form after all these years.  They played a "Greatest Hits" show, so a lot of the material was from their Empire album ("Empire", "Jet City Woman", "Anybody Listening?", and "Another Rainy Night Without You") but they played a good mix of even older stuff like "The Lady Wore Black".  The two big surprises were a couple of great covers from their latest covers album Take Cover - Pink Floyd's "Welcome to the Machine" and "Synchronicity II" by the Police.  I may try to catch them again soon when they tour playing Operation Mindcrime in its entirety.

As great as that show was, the most memorable part of the weekend was going out on the Beach (it was 70 degrees this weekend on the coast of SC) and seeing a drum kit set up in the sand.  It was a fairly nice kit, so at first we thought maybe it was there to film a commercial or something.  But a few minutes later, I witnessed a toothless wino come down off of the boardwalk (with brown bag in hand) and sit at this kit and drunkedly bang out some beats.  Not good beats, mind you, but beats that my 4 year old would find simplistic and erratic.  He was also playing with one drumstick and one twig of some kind and wearing a Trixter 1990 US Tour T-Shirt.  But to his credit, it was very windy, so the guy would have had a hard time playing even if he knew what he was doing.  But still, it was a wino playing drums in the sand at the beach, so it's a given that it would be awesome.  The only way it could have been more awesome is if there was another wino there playing the air guitar.  But it was his show - I doubt he wanted to share the spotlight. 

I've seen many street musicians play for booze in my time, but I've never seen someone with a full drum kit set up in the sand at the beach.  It left me with many questions - How was he going to get all of his gear off of the beach before the tide came in?  Where does he keep his kit when not on the beach playing for money?  Were the drums even his?  I did take his picture on my mobile phone, but unfortunately it didn't come out very well.  He started yelling something at me while I was taking his picture and I didn't want to stick around trying to get a good shot.  But at least I have my memories.

Posted by ImaginaryEngr76 @ 12:56 pm EDT | Permalink | 2 Comments

The Queen of the "Ryche"

A buddy of mine asked me to go see Queensryche live at the House of Blues this weekend in Myrtle Beach, SC.  I've seen a lot of bands live in my time, everyone from Bruce Springsteen to Slayer, but I've never had the chance to see these guys.  I was initially even more stoked about it when I asked my friend who was opening for them - I thought he said "Dio", but my excitement cooled down a few notches when I realized he said "Dokken".  Oh well - they can't all be winners.  I'm going to dig around on the internets and see if I can find a current setlist.  Maybe I'll get lucky and they'll focus more on "Operation: Mindcrime" and not "Operation: Mindcrime II".  On a related progressive rock note, I saw that Rush is coming to Charlotte, NC on July 20th - I gonna try to pick up tickets for that one as soon as they go on sale.

Completely unrelated, but I thought I'd share since it was such a good deal - Circuit City is offering a $10 gift card if you buy Devil May Cry 4 in their store this week.  I went there yesterday on my lunch break to pick it up, and the befuddled cashier gave me the gift card AND $10 off.  So after they applied my Gamers Club Card (10% off), I got the game for nearly half price - $34 + tax.  Not bad.  I had been trying to decide whether to get the PS3 or 360 version since I heard they were identical - went with the PS3 version because I figured the big black box could use a little love.

One last thing, have you or anybody you know broken the 100 song threshold on Rock Band yet?  The game comes with 57 tunes built in - just wondering if anyone has picked up 43 or more pieces of DLC.  I think I'm in the 85 song territory.  I'm trying not to think about the points outlay that I needed to get there.


Posted by ImaginaryEngr76 @ 11:28 am EDT | Permalink | 7 Comments

The Joys of Remote Play

I've got both a PS3 and PSP, but up until recently I was too lazy to utilize one of their most compelling cooperative features - Remote Play.  So I pulled my PSP out of the drawer it's been sitting idle in for nearly a year to try to figure out this Remote Play thing.  For those unfamiliar with this feature, basically the way it works is if you're out in the wild (well, out in the wild near a Wi-Fi hotspot) with your PSP, you can access features and content on your PS3 that's sitting at home.  It's similar in theory to Remote Desktop for PCs.  But where this becomes a great deal of fun is that I'll trot my PSP to work, and during my lunch break, I'll use my work's Wi-Fi hotspot to turn on, access, and watch videos that I have stored my PS3's hard drive.  I took it to the next level yesterday by leaving my PC on as a Media Server, and having my PSP tell the PS3 to stream videos and music off of my PC's hard drive.  So now I can catch up on any TV here at work during my lunch hour, and after the show's over, I just tell my PSP to shut down my console at home.  It also works for games - supposedly you can play certain PS3 games on your PSP and have the PS3 handle all of the horsepower consuming tasks - but I haven't tried that yet.

This whole process works really well for streaming stuff off of the PS3 HD, but I've noticed some lag trying to pull content off of my PC's Media Server.  I've been using it in an effort to re-watch all of the Season 3 of Lost before the big season premiere this Thursday.  Too bad we're only getting eight episodes this coming season - they'd better be awesome.


Posted by ImaginaryEngr76 @ 11:51 am EDT | Permalink | 6 Comments