Now that iOS 5 lets you change text & email alerts to your own sounds, I decided to totally trick my shit out with retro video game magic. Now instead of receiving annoying work emails, you’re actually accruing gold coins! Sonically speaking.

Anyway, since I couldn’t find any existing files that were formatted the right way, I converted some myself. And how could I hoard such lovely sounds? So here ya go!

Mario iPhone Alerts

[Glitch is a free browser game made by the people who made Flickr and before that, GNE . Katamari Damacy creator Keita Takahashi just joined their company. I have been playing it a lot. Note about screenshots: the game is still in beta, so it may look different when you play it.]

(image courtesy txkimmers)

I finally buy a house. It’s in Bortola, which turns out to be pretty far away from what I imagine to be the center of the action.

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At this point, I buy one game a month. That I bought LA Noire this month indicates that I wanted to like it. A few hours in, I was really into it. But now, a few cases from the end, I have no desire to even finish it. What went wrong?

Now that is a mystery I can solve.

LA Noire has a great story. It draws on hard boiled crime fiction both old and new (it owes a particular debt to Ellroy’s Black Dahlia) as well as the filmic corollary film noir. There’s a rich back story having to do with WWII, a string of murders, civic corruption involving the police, and a hard-working yet flawed and unlikeable protagonist. The characters are well-drawn, if not exceptionally detailed. The remarkable motion capture technology, which renders facial expressions with a liveliness not yet seen in games, is to be commended.

On the surface this looks like Grand Theft Noir – free roaming, large city, lots of car travel. But in reality it’s not that sort of game. It’s got one central mechanic that really works: the crime scene investigation mode. It’s a cross between third person and point-and-click adventure game. It’s well-balanced, fun, and most importantly represents something this game is adding to the noir tradition. It’s a reason why this is a game and not a movie.

Unfortunately, the other central mechanic, the interrogation of suspects, is a disaster. I’m not sure exactly why this mode fails so badly. Maybe real human interaction cannot be simulated when one party has only three stock responses to everything. Perhaps the facial animation isn’t quite good enough to pin a mechanic upon. Maybe the acting or writing wasn’t consistent enough, maybe it was but needed a tutorial. Maybe the lack of challenge makes something uninteresting – it’s near impossible to fail this mode, perhaps a tacit admission that the mechanic doesn’t work.

But the game cannot survive a core mechanic not working. The interrogations become glorified cutscenes that take up half the game, the other gameplay modes can’t compensate and the whole thing starts feeling like repetitive drudgework.

I am definitely excited by what LA Noire represents. It’s an adult game in the “real characters, real storytelling” sense rather than the swear words and gore sense. I am excited by the technological advance of real facial animation. I hope for great future things. I just don’t want to play it any more.

Here’s an encyclopedic, bitter and hilarious summary of all that E3 had to show this year. I am looking forward to Skyrim, Mass Effect 3, and Bastion. Yeah, I suppose the latest Jenova Chen game and probably Dark Souls (although I haven’t finished its predecessor, even though I liked it).

As for the hardware? I want very much to like the PS Vita, but after what I wrote here, you’ll understand if I’m not too optimistic about its chances. And the new Nintendo Wii U? Looks pretty great, I guess. I mean, it could be. I don’t know. They are so vague with the details that it’s hard to really know, doncha think? At least it’s a reasonably new idea. I know there are no new ideas, but that’s especially true of the video game industry.

The shit going down in Apple land seems a lot more interesting, and a lot of that wasn’t super-new (Lion’s features had already been promoted, and a lot of the iOS improvements are “inspired by” competing mobile OSes). iCloud seems to have an awful lot of small print, so I am waiting for it to get closer so we can resolve its details. But still. Cord-free syncing? I’d punch a Wii U in the face to get that TODAY.

With the announcement of the Nintendo 3DS and Sony NGP, the next generation of portable games machines is here. I don’t think it’s going to do so well.

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Microsoft’s new super-Wii has already been hacked, and there are some interesting things happening. Here’s a list. Love these images:

Also, it can essentially function as a 3D camera, as this video shows:

Wonder what will happen when people figure out how to string two or three together.

Well, it’s out now. I’ve spent a few hours with it and am somewhat impressed.

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A commercial for Halo Reach. Not only a great example of games promotion and what you can do with original shoots as opposed to renders or in-game footage, but also a phenomenal excuse for me to talk about my reignited excitement about Halo. The beta starts soon, and my poor 360, after two red rings in the past four months (never buy hardware from a software company, I guess), is theoretically ready to get on that shit. I haven’t played games much lately, and even less time is spent with online multiplayer – none at all, in fact. But I can feel the Halo meter rising. People at work are talking about playing again. And hey, two words: jet packs. Or if you’re busy, just one: jetpacks.

Did I mention the jet packs?

PixelJunk Monsters kills it. I bought it on the PS3 a few months ago and while I loved the first few levels, there’s a steep cliff where the difficulty curve should be, and I failed to climb it. For some reason during a hard month I revisited this game and I fucking LOVE it. It got me through some tough times. You have to embrace the cold hard truth that you will be playing the same levels over and over, you have to LOVE this. This is something old school, it is out of place with the low amounts of challenge we face in modern, casual-friendly games. However, the environment of the game is so pleasant:

You are moving back and forth, dancing, collecting gold and gems, building a system, and the replaying of levels is what is required to make the system PERFECT. Incidentally, this is surely by design; the game requires you to unlock harder areas by collecting rainbows, which you only get with a perfect score on a level, aka you didn’t let one monster through (you have 20 in your village, each monster you let through kills one, and normally you can win with only one villager remaining, BUT AT WHAT COST I ASK YOU? Save them all).

The environment is pleasant, the gameplay is well calibrated, with a few elements that perfectly compliment each other, and the levels and tower progression give you a great variety of play and strategy.

Incidentally, I balked for a while at buying the PSP version, which costs $20 compared to the $10 of the PS3 original. It is absolutely worth the money, however. The PSP version includes two add-on islands which represent a great deal of play time. The game is well-suited to the portable device and that’s where I’ve played the most of it.

Just assuming I won’t get around to writing up PixelJunk Shooter, the most recent release in the series, let me just add that it is awesome as well.

44 days, to be exact, when I was still evaluating the PS3. Since then it basically went Demon’s Souls – Uncharted 2 – Dragon Age – Little Big Planet (PSP). I didn’t finish Demon’s Souls, but hope to someday. I totally loved it, and would consider it one of the better games of the year. Many have said that of Uncharted 2, and I can see why, as it has great writing, excellent pacing, and plenty of gameplay variety. However, it seems a little old-fashioned. Perhaps it’s me personally rather than the industry as a whole, but I feel like we’ve moved on from linear story-based games that are trying to be like movies. The game does not allow you to make any choices other than which order to shoot the bad guys. I realize this was the case with Halo as well, and many other A-list games. But my tastes have gradually shifted.

Oh yeah, Halo ODST. Almost forgot about that one, as it was a bit of a flash in the pan. It’s interesting to note that said linear storytellers Bungie actually shifted to a non-linear, architectural model for the sections of ODST. It was certainly well-made, but short, and not really worth a full game price. Had a few epic sessions of firefight though – one game lasted two hours. Damn.

Not that it’s much different from what Bioware has been doing for years, but Dragon Age is more where I see the future of games, where every aspect of the game (gameplay, story, etc.) changes based on the player’s choices. It’s a party-based action RPG with excellent writing, mission design, and an extremely detailed world to explore. Sure, it’s elves and wizards which is a little played out, but despite that the material is strong. I’m nowhere near finished it, but still plugging away.

I rarely buy full-price PSP games, but I made an exception for Little Big Planet for some reason. I’ve never played more than the demo of the big boy PS3 version, so I don’t know how the portable game compares, but I’ve really enjoyed my few hours with this one. It’s generally a pleasant, relaxing experience playing through the story missions – I’m not a huge platformer fan but this is good stuff. I’ve played very few player-made levels, and haven’t tried to create them yet myself, but I aim to, and that’s all that counts, innit?

All the while I can never resist buying and barely playing iPhone games. The iPhone is an amazing games platform, blah blah. Great, your game uses all your batteries and then your phone is dead. A phone call interrupts your game and when you go back, it didn’t save. Or the game takes five minutes to load. Or the touch controls suck, again. Or it’s a dumbed-down version of what would be decent on another platform. I’ve definitely played some great iPhone games, but most of them I never spend more than half an hour with.

Not sure why I keep buying them.

The latest is Rogue Planet, gameloft’s attempt to rip off Advance Wars. Gameloft is like the iPhone’s Asylum studios, churning out cheap knockoffs of well-known franchises. Some of them are good in a workmanlike, the-gameplay-is-engaging sort of way, but they all feel soulless, with no originality or inspiration to be found.

It’s december – there are a million games out, and no time to play them. I’m hoping to try out the new Zelda, Assassin’s Creed 2, Borderlands and even Modern Warfare 2, but I probably can’t do everything I want to between now and the release of Mass Effect 2 and whatever the latest Final Fantasy is. But whatever – when it comes to video games, too much of a good thing is still a good thing.

Here are some semi-coherent thoughts from a month or so of PS3 ownership.

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Yeah, there’s this slim thing (pictured), and that’s great, but the important part: only now is the PS3 hitting the launch day price point of the PS2. Consoles traditionally launch at $300, but this time Sony and Microsoft went much higher ($399 for the Xbox 360 and $599 for the PS3), whereas Nintento went all the way down to $250. And just look what happened. Nintendo has sold more consoles than the other two put together.

The word is that Microsoft will now eliminate the Pro model and drop the price on the Elite to $299 to compete with the PS3. That puts it at the same list price, sure, but Microsoft still charges you an extra $50/year to play online, and the 360 can’t play Blu-Ray discs. For the first time, Sony offers the most value for the money. Take a look at the below chart, taken from PC World

I think those stats are a little hard on the 360 (not sure how many people care about the number of USB ports, or Sixaxis), but they speak some sort of truth, and that truth is not kind to the console with the 50% failure rate.

Do I sound eager? I do indeed plan to buy one. I’ve been holding off for this price cut. I’ve owned every console Sony has put out except the PS3, and I bought a PS2 at launch. If there are more people like me – and in this regard at least there may well be – I think these things will sell extremely well.

A word on downloads vs. Blu-Ray. I am perhaps snobbier about my HD signals than most. It comes with making TV for a living; you get very fussy about your picture quality. I think Rogers compresses the hell out of their HD feeds, and they suck. iTunes HD doesn’t look great either. If I can see compression artifacts, can we really call it “High Definition”, regardless of how many pixels there are? So suffice it to say that while many people are excited about HD downloads and think optical disc formats are already dead, I’m singularly excited about having Blu-Ray and its relatively guaranteed quality. Besides, with Canada’s so-called high speed internet being what it is (and what it is is oligarchitastic!), it took me longer than an hour to download an hour of crappyish iTunes HD Dollhouse. This new PS3 can’t come soon enough.

I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization Revolution lately, partly because there are few new games of interest right now, partly because Civilization has long been a favourite game franchise, and partly because of the new iPhone port. I now have this game on three platforms (360, DS, iPhone), which is sort of silly. So I just stepped up my difficulty level from King (medium) to Emperor (second hardest) and the difference is staggering. I’m not getting destroyed per se, but certainly not getting close to winning. This is a good thing, as it indicates there’s a lot more strategy to this game than you might guess from its general air of casualization as compared to past Civ games, which were insanely complicated. I’m also happy about Civ Rev’s shortened play time (three or four hours per game) – it’s a godsend for those whose minds Civ tends to conquer like pikemen under Roman tank armies.

So I’ve been researching strategies, and recently tested some out. Thought I’d share, y’know.

The Emperor AI civs will attack you constantly, so research bronze working first and then build archers. Aim to have an archer army in each city – it’ll hold you until the invention of gunpowder, or thereabouts. You’re not going to do a lot of attacking in this mode, not until the late game, so avoid wasting resources on too many military units that will just obsolete themselves, and concentrate on good defense. Meanwhile, concentrate your building on improving your cities.

My general civ strategy is to expand early in the game by spamming out settlers. This is much harder to do in Emperor, partly because you’ll need defensive units accompanying every settler and partly because you become acutely aware of the damage settlers do to their originating city. You lose two population every time you build a settler (unless you have a Republic), so in many cases you may do better to let your older cities grow and be choosier about new cities. I lost a game to a Chinese civ that only had four or five cities. But boy were they doozies.

The single most important point is that cities cannot produce both gold and science – that toggle in the interface between them is in fact toggling the city’s output (not simply the display of them as I had thought). So following from that, build cities to specialize in one or the other. In a gold-producing city, build a marketplace and then a bank; don’t waste time on libraries and universities. And vice versa, obviously. You will probably have mostly science-based cities, and one or two for gold. You’re going to want one or two production-geared cities that can spam out military units, too. But you probably already know that.

Don’t be afraid to micromanage as much as is possible in this game. For example, in a city that is working on a Wonder, switch the workers to concentrate on production. Or, if late in the game one of the AIs is close to winning and you’re closer to an economic victory than a technological, switch your cities from producing science to gold.

Early game exploration is as important as in easier game modes, with some good money available from villages, natural features, and barbarians. Getting navigation early on will help you find atlantis and the other ancient artifacts that will spew forth a bounty of bonuses.

Keeping your cultural production up is extremely important. Not only is it a possible route to winning, but you need some culture to prevent your neighbours from converting your cities. With a lot, you can be grabbing their cities, but also some fat bonuses in the form of Great People. Use them to reinforce your cities’ specialized roles. Great artists should be sent to cultural and/or border cities, great scientists to science-producing cities. Great builders are especially valuable, as they can be used to complete any production, including wonders. So you can park one, find a good Wonder to build, and then use the builder to complete it immediately.

Just as you are doing with your cities, you are going to want to specialize with your civilization as well. Figure out whether a domination, cultural, technological or economic victory makes most sense. Let your environment dictate this. If you are in arid, trade-producing land, go for economic or tech; if you have many neighbours, go domination or cultural. Each path yields its own bonuses.

This page has some interesting strategies for Deity mode that would hold true for Emperor as well. I do agree that an economic victory is probably the easiest.

Prototype is hells fun. That’s pretty much all you need to know. It’s got what we might charitably call a ‘traditional’ video game plot, with a genetic experiment gone awry, and a super-powered, amnesiac protagonist, and a viral infection turning Manhattan into a playground of zombies and soldiers. However, the plot provides all the motivation we need for some super-insane power-fantasy abilities, like growing massive claws out of your hands, running up buildings and leaping over them, and shape shifting. It feels a lot like Crackdown, with even crazier powers, but with less sense of humour.

The ‘consume’ mechanic is particularly interesting. In order to assume someone’s appearance, you basically eat them, but you also get a brief, impressionistic montage of their mind, revealing plot details. Sometimes this is part of the main plot, but you can also leap around looking for other plot items to consume. That’s pretty much all I do in there now – narrativized leaping. I find it pretty irresistible.

Front Mission: Evolved is coming to North American consoles. Although Front Mission is a strategy RPG franchise, this is a third-person action game. However, it’s giant robots, and the developers promise a hybrid of Front Mission, Call of Duty 4 and Chromehounds. Could it be the elusive Citizen Kane of giant robot games that we here at AR eternally await? Maybe. Hell yeah maybe.

Oh man, I forgot to make a wanzer joke.

Everyone’s favourite games conference aka press release orgy is here! The most concise way to catch up on E3 press conference porn is to read three posts from Offworld:

• Sony
• Nintendo
• Microsoft

Sony and MS are both trying to catch up to the Wii’s motion-sensing Wiimote, and MS’ Project Natal seems most interesting, as it’s a controller-free system, relying entirely on cameras to sense your body position and even recognize faces. That said, until practical questions can be answered (how much? how many games will support it?), it’s best to consider it as a rhetorical salvo in the PR wars and not an actual, tangible thing. Sony and MS both trumpeted their lists of exclusive games, most vague and ages from shipping. Some of them no doubt will be good, but neither could get through their presentations without showcasing some cross-platform games as well.

Nintendo, meanwhile, renewed its license to print money. No, they tried to make nice with the hardcore by announcing a truckload of Mario games.

A few things caught my eye. On the Microsoft side, more details of Halo 3 ODST are welcome (sounds like The Killing with space marines), and I’m happy that Bungie is doing another game in Halo Reach, but I was kinda hoping they’d give the Halo thing a rest for a while and try something new. Alan Wake looked cool, and I really hope Natal works and doesn’t cost a mint, but judging from MS’ track record, that’s unlikely. How much for that 160 gig hard drive again….?!

Sony’s PSP Go! was of course no surprise. But it looks slick, and it sounds like Sony is doing all the right things (woo developers, improve media experience, ditch UMD) to keep the PSP alive. And boy are there a lot of games coming for it, including a new Metal Gear, Assassin’s Creed, and Little Big Planet. But I’m of two minds about Sony. They’re currently fighting two losing battles and I wonder if they shouldn’t just cut their losses on the PSP and concentrate on overtaking MS for 2nd place in the living room. They’ve got so many first party developers tied up with PSP projects, it’s hard to see the logic. I was also really hoping for a price cut on the PS3. Why, why, why, are they not doing that. It’s insanity. I say that selfishly, because I’m looking to get one of the damned things, but it also seems crazy that Sony is sitting in third place with a console almost twice as costly as the competition, and not slashing their price.

Man, so much media has been consumed since the last time I posted one of these. I can’t possibly keep up. I was sick for a few days last week and that meant extra media doses while trapped in bed.

I will single out a focus, then: my rediscovery of the PSP.

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Konami cancels Six Days in Fallujah video game. “Despite the active involvement of dozens of Marines in creating the game, critics said that Konami was capitalizing on a war whose wounds were still fresh.” This is a big shame. People still see video games through the lens of escapist-exploitative-money-making, and not as a medium with a lot of potential to teach about the real world. I still remember playing Balance of Power) as a kid.

We need more documentary games!

Not much to report. Watched 24 and like ten minutes of Holmes on Homes, which I have developed a taste for after watching the Holmes in Katrina special. There is something elemental about it. The houses’ cracks always belie massive structural problems, which ALWAYS require a sweeping teardown, in which the house must be destroyed in order to be saved. I’m not sure if it’s a mythological retelling of the Bush administration, or a wish-fulfillment fantasy in which kind Canadians restore order and righteousness to the world.

24, well, you either like it or you don’t. (And talk about your Bush retellings. Is torture America’s greatest export or what? In today’s economic climate, can Obama really afford to close Guantanamo and stop extraordinary renditions?) Anyway, I’m certainly enjoying Evil Tony, but it seems inevitable that Jack will flip his Evil switch back to Good at some point.

Jack said “Right now, he’s our only lead.” Take a drink.

Other than that, I played about 10 minutes of Crisis Core. I know it has a more elaborate name than that. Now I loved Final Fantasy VII, and I loved Zelda (A Link to the Past). Why is it that I can’t seem to get into any jRPGs anymore? My suspicion is that I’ve simply grown tired of their mechanics. However, I still have a tolerance for Western RPGs, so perhaps the linearity of the Japanese games has grown tiresome. If all you get is the same story, having to press “A” over and over again for half an hour to get the next five minutes of it seems like a scammy way to have it delivered. Just render me off the cutscenes and call it a day, yo.

Hello, website. Here, I owe you a post. I’ve been meaning to experiment with a game diary. Hell, why not make it a ‘media’ diary, i.e. not just games – in case I don’t actually play any games. Which doesn’t seem very likely right now. Anyway, who knows, this may be even more boring and self-absorbed than normal. Or, it could be handy to refer back to later.

I’m casting around for a game to get into. I’ve tried many things, but nothing is sticking. I believe what I’m after is that feeling of absorption, which presumes that I absolutely love the game. Last time it happened was Fable 2, I believe.

Anyway, tried Far Cry 2 as I hear it is almost completely open, which seems to appeal to me these days. Unfortunately, it causes me motion sickness. Too bad – seems like a great game, and a refreshingly different setting.

Also managed to get past the level that was causing me grief in UniWar on the iPhone (mission 7). Not sure why they put such a hard one so early on, as the following mission is a cakewalk.

I watched a couple more episodes of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. It’s surprisingly good. You see the credit sequence with its barely-clothed girl prancing and shooting and you assume it’s going to be adolescent action bullshit. And then you get the plot where the sex androids are committing suicide en masse.

Finally watched Who Killed the Electric Car. Wouldn’t call it inspired, but it’s a fascinating story. The answer is of course ‘freemasons.’