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I should have picked up on it when the reviews tended towards forced "balance" against Fallout 3, the "predecessor"..
So as you may or may not know, Fallout 3 was the biggest gaming disappointment I've had since.. The Amiga was canned. Whether it was the foot-less power-armor, generally the utterly careless use of the source-material, the endless mutants, or the writing - all sterile and skeletal as if dipped in a vat of bubbling acid. The writing only having visible teeth, because all the flesh is gone.
So beside any of the many complaints I have had about Sony.. when it comes to everything from intellectual property protection that inconveniences the buyers rather than the pirates. To changing games after the releases with everything from patched in advertisement(that affects the performance of the game), to simply bad design-choices that ruin the game's appeal. And all the way to bad aftermarket support that does not match the amount you initially paid for the product, etc.
They then sue people at random in order to "protect their property", in much the same way they held the screenshot feature in MAG back for over a year. Before finally releasing it in the end after all - the only difference from earlier: a prompt in the bottom of the picture saying the screen belongs to Sony.
Since I talk to people in real life once in a while - about games, I mean - I get to hear things like this pretty often: "you know... I'm kind of losing interest. It's not fun to me any more. I think I'm going to sell my collection and do something else". "I'm gonna buy a DS.. you hear me, Jostein! A DS!!! I NEED HELP!!".
How could this happen? For different reasons, the most profiled games lately have been first person murder simulations with bad story-telling, single-player games where you achieve status as king by farting impressively in public, sequels to games that once were fairly successful. And not to forget - not that you could, thanks to the advertisement - tremendously overhyped action-games with no soul and recycled dialogue.
So, ah, one of my favourite "sub-Hollywood budget" games of all time is Fancy Pants Adventure. Brad Borne made this excellent physics-based 2d platformer in a hand-drawn style that debuted on Newgrounds, I think, back in 2006. It's technically and aesthetically brilliant - and you just run around jumping back and forth, kicking snail-shells, collecting scribbles. And chasing an ice-cream cone a mean rabbit steals from you (for the sake of a game-plot). You also have neatly animated hair and fancy pants.
The physics are definitively the best thing about the game - the way the character has momentum, and how the moves are based on the speed and direction you're moving.
So I finally caved, and bought a Move-controller. Of course, it's one thing to test it on a calibrated demo-setup, while standing in a lit room, and another thing to set it up for yourself. So let's see what we have here.
The package (the starter kit) contains:
A bunch of manuals. A disc with some demos. One bulb-controller. And a PSEye.
So, to survive Christmas, I went looking for something I haven't played, that would also work on the laptop. And after I was surprised very positively after playing the Mass Effect 2 demo, I picked up Mass Effect 1.
How to put this.. I've read a few reviews about the game. I've played parts of the Citadel myself. Watched parts of other gameplays. People wax poetically about the shallow, shallow and extremely superficial nonsense. And then there are these gems of writing and gameplay hidden down under the pole of a solid ice-planet.
I mean, why didn't anyone write about this?
This isn't just because I'm getting older - I've always thought about games as eminent time-wasting, and nothing else. But the reason why it's nothing else, is that game-developers rarely try. And games are generally thought of as impossible to shape into something in the high art range of for example a tv-serial. Or a bubble-gum commercial.
It's not really a very strange view - after all, the most popular games are published with a very conscious budget and target audience. Where niche-audiences have proven to be too small to justify the larger development cycles.. comparative to, say, a tv-serial or a bubble-gum commercial.
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