The Last Candle

So: PS3 and Xbox 360. OK. <p/> Somewhere along the line I became a PlayStation fanboy, which locks in a PS3 purchase for me down the line. But it’s gonna have Devil May Cry 4! And Metal Gear Solid 4! If they announced a second Jumping Flash sequel, I’d be moved enough to drive into Ann Arbor tonight to wait for GameStop’s opening so I could put the pre-order fee down in full. <p/>

• SquareEnix was so close to announcing a new Final Fantasy 7 universe game — they exhibited the prerendered intro from FF7 in real-time on PS3 hardware — but denied actually releasing a game in that universe. Damn you, Squeenix! (Update: The FF7 tech demo starts at 1:21:00 of this Gamespot stream. God, they really should just make that game and forget about FF12-X.) <p/> Unsurprisingly, it was announced that a Final Fantasy game of some sort would be released on the new console; I’ll be glad to play it when it arrives. Same for Final Fantasy 12 and Kingdom Hearts 2, whenever the heck they get those out the door.<p/>
• Looks like Devil May Cry 4 might feature a reunion with the castle from the original game, although I’m not sure how the original tropical location turned into the land of tundra. Guess I’ll wait on that one.<p/>
• Sony also gets the award for Greatest Screenshot with this Killzone 2 offering. Hope it’s real-time.<p/>

Microsoft wins for best presentation. They’ve certainly got the fattest, most arrogant mouth in the business (as further evidenced by the ridiculous MTV special a week ago and this super-sassy E3 press conference I’m trying to watch — the stream is jitterin’ something fierce), but damn: the 360 sure looks pretty damn fine too, feature-wise. Still, the only game I’m interested in for its release thus far is Oblivion. But I’ll see how that single game tally rises as E3 continues. (Gears of War does look kinda cool.) <p/> Next up: an announcement for a new Silent Hill game, please! Ooh, and some stuff from Nintendo about new Animal Crossing games would be nice as well. Or a new console, I guess.

So Wendy’s Free Frosty Festival of Delicious Delights descended upon Chelsea this past weekend, and Jocelyn and I took up the call for free Jr. Frosties. (While the free Frosty was told to be given out in recognition of Wendy’s customers being “supportive” through the company’s time of crisis and rogue appendages, I think the chain is internally celebrating justice being brought down upon the one who sought to rob ‘em out. Whatever. Free Frosty!) <p/> As it turns out, a Jr. Frosty is about 4 ounces. Free, sure, but small. This isn’t France, for cryin’ out loud. <p/> In any case, to show my support (and lack of fear of foreign biological objects in my foodstuffs), I ordered a bowl of chili along with the Frosty and a 5 pack o’ chickeny nuggety goodness. However, upon peeling the led from the bowl, a large and unusual object was indeed peeking out from the expected bean-and-meat flotsam.

<p/> Ye gads! Wendy’s holds an event in recognition of their supposed excellent food quality control, and here I was about to consume a product where the chili QA department had failed once again. <p/> So what is it, besides a potential media spectacle and civil lawsuit? Unground hamburger. So much for that heated limelight. <p/> A rogue bit of beef may be unspectacular, but when I discovered that the meat’s addition had given my side dish three times the usual quantity of meat (and a familiar meat, too), customer satisfaction hit the roof like the human cannonball under the Big Top given twenty times the explosive powder for his discharge. <p/> But I think it’s safe to say that the food management at Wendy’s is still cruising with three sheets to the wind.

…from Mount Pleasant. Yes: graduated! <p/> And now onto bigger, better, and more stressful things!!

Naruto, this decade’s version of Dragon Ball Z, has been rather lacking for about the past, oh, month. If Naruto has one giant problem, it’s that it makes the most polar changes in pacing of any series I’ve ever seen. A common example: there might be an impending plot-bending character-reaffirming fight, one that viewers have been building up for about 100 episodes (no joke) — and then there’ll be four episodes of flashbacks right in the middle or before the fight. That’s four weeks of boring, rambling dialogue sequences. Way to kill the momentum, guys! <p/> So that’s what Paul and I have gone through for the past several episodes. Since Naruto is by and large excellent (for those who like DBZ-ish episodic action animes, natch), we were getting quite frustated at the seeming increase in poor pace management and lack of the important stuff we watch Naruto for: clever and fantasy over-the-top fight scenes. <p/> Of course, it was just a matter of time before things kicked back up to being fantastic again. Tonight, we watched the previous two weeks’ episodes back-to-back to catch up, and as a result, I feel obligated to make the following statement: when Naruto is good, it’s really, really fargin’ awesome. <p/> I bring you a clip to exhibit my point. <p/>

<p/> (If anybody cares about what happens in Naruto episode 133, you may not want to watch; although I’m not supplying any context, so it might be OK. No deaths or anything series-shattering like that.) <p/> On an interesting aside, you can tell when you’re going to get a fight-heavy Naruto episode like the latest by the way the artwork looks. Evidently, there are several teams that swap around for different episodes, each with a distinct look to the drawing and animation. If the episode cranks up and the style looks like the one in the clip — characters a little more sketchy and less cartoony, but the animation is very fluid and detailed — then you’re in for an awesome battle.

Remedy Games’ upcoming release, Alan Wake, was revealed today, and I gotta say I’m really excited about this one — but only partially because of Remedy’s precedence of the Max Payne games. The selling point for me are the environments; take a look at the teaser or the screenshots to get an idea of what I’m about to exemplify here. <p/> I can play a game through almost solely on the basis of the atmosphere and environmental detail. Example: American McGee’s Alice, which had nothing great (or even good) in the gameplay department besides a few cool weapons, which were easily countered by loads of insipid jumping puzzles. However, the crappy gameplay was more than remedied by the surrealistic, incredibly detailed areas throughout the entire game which were incredible enough that I played the game through with earnest — twice. <p/> (A more recent release, Psychonauts, gave me a feeling very reminiscent to Alice’s experience after playing the demo: same-ole’ gameplay, but sights and scenery worth a hundred jumping puzzles.) <p/> As a second and perhaps more definite example: Shadow Warrior. Uber-violent, 3DRealms-racy and laughably over-the-top, this highly underrated FPS may be showing all sorts of age after eight years, but several of the levels are right up there as favorites simply because the developers were able to mesh simplistic, blocky (but still pretty good for the time) level geometry with great ambient sound effects such as wind chimes, wind blowing through trees, thunder in the distance and many others. Sound is really the key. <p/> Another example: ICO. Running around and jumping and bonking shadow boogiemen is kind of blah in itself, but everything else — story, narrative, environments, and the ambient feel — is so powerful and subtly integrated that the player can easily be drawn in. (Those ICO fellows sure knew what they were doing: check out these slides from a way back of a production design presentation on how ICO was conceived.) <p/> Anyways, this Alan Wake game. <p/> I’ve watched the teaser trailer about twenty times, just to soak in the feeling; it just looks, sounds, and feels like it’s gonna be chock-full of that environment immersion stuff. Real-time outdoors effects with shadows? Large, lush, and incredibly detailed outdoors environments? The soundtrack on the trailer is great with the thunder, wind, water and Gabriel Knight 3-esque soundtrack, but making the assumption that game’s going to be a bit longer than the teaser and have a few more sounds, we have Max Payne’s environmental detail precedence — that is, Remedy’s overall track record for detail — to count on. <p/> Add a good measure of that Payne-style action, a engrossing plot thanks to the thriller keepings, and this is looking like a sure-buy for me. <p/> It may not take much, but I know what I like.