The demo for Empire: Total War popped up on Steam earlier this week, so I gave it a spin; I’m a big fan of Age of Rifles warfare, though relatively few games are set in that period anymore.  The demo was short, but convinced me to definitely pick this one up; the sea battles, though, seem like they could end up being a little too slow to enjoy in the long term, but that can probably be more than made up by watching rows of musketmen get scattered by some well-aimed cannon barrages.   Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon arrived from Amazon on Monday, and that has become my current train-game of choice; only on chapter 6 at the moment, but I can say with utmost assurity that it is definitely a Fire Emblem game – I’ve already restarted several battles in order to find ways to save every unit, thus beggining the cycle anew…  My TF2 mapping continues on pace, and I think I’ll be ready to do some playtesting in the next week or so, thus telling me whether I’ve actually made something enjoyable to play.  Speaking of TF2, the Scout update came out on Tuesday, and it has quickly served to remind me why scout is my least played class; I figure I’ll have all the achievements right about the time Team Fortress 3 is ready to come out…

-Joel Haddock

A recent look back at some nemesis games raised one question over and over again: have games gotten easier recently?  Now, some may inclined to simply make the argument that we, as gamers, have simply gotten better at games on average as time has gone by, but that dodges the issue.  Instead, to really analyze this question, we first have to ask “what makes a game difficult?”

There are, of course, many answers to that question: intricate puzzles, tricky jumps, and twitch timing are all elements that can contribute to a game’s overall level of challenge.  At core of the matter, however, is something more critical.  In general, the difficulty of games can be broken down into two fundamental categories: challenges that, when encountered and failed at, a gamer says “I know what I did wrong there” vs. those that, following defeat, a gamer says “I don’t know what I did wrong.”

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I was entirely tempted to just write Street Fighter IV five times and call this update done, but my “journalistic integrity” is compelling me to actually say something about the game.  While on normal mode the game contains the now-fighter-standard completely cheap final boss, the game in and of itself is incredibly fun.  I’ve almost got all of the characters unlocked (still going for Gouken and Seth), and so far I’ve had the most fun playing as Chun-Li and Rose…Rose herself is beautifully animated, and the visual effects for her attacks are top-notch.  In other news, I snagged Soldner X: Himmelsturmer and have been playing the crap out of it’s pure, shmup-y goodness…look for a review in the near future, as soon as I can actually finish the damn thing.  It’s my goal to have Persona 4 finally finished in this next week, and assuming SF4 doesn’t keep eating up 100% of my free time, that goal could actually get accomplished!

-Jeff Feeser

So far this week I’ve managed to play through the first two islands of Fantasy General about 5 times; this is because I keep getting to the third island and deciding I’ve got the complete wrong army.  It’s been a good learning experience, and I’ve been branching out into trying some different strategies than the ones I’ve doggedly stuck to for the last ten years.  I’ve also been keeping my eyes on the daily trickly of information on the next TF2 class update for the Scout, which is, unfortunately, my absolute worst class in that game – I shall continue to wait patiently for the Engy update. Received Lost Odyssey from Gamefly the other day, but haven’t had a chance to crack it open yet, and I’ve got the new Fire Emblem for the DS en route as we speak, so next week should be chock full of new gaming stories.  Also been working on a redesign for the site, so keep your eyes peeled for that in the upcoming weeks!

-Joel Haddock

The word linear, when applied to video games, is death. We denigrate shooters on rails as trivial diversions best played with a beer in one hand and a light gun in the other. We treasure games like Grand Theft Auto, Deus Ex, The Sims, even Crayon Physics because they are profoundly nonlinear. They let us solve problems in unique ways and they let us design our own experience in large part. Then, surely, if our games are nonlinear, the stories that are bound to them must be too.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that video game storytelling is an entirely new medium. The history of nonlinear narrative runs further back than you’d think, but most of it is hidden like the mass of an iceberg. Academics tend to cite two things most often as the creative roots of nonlinear storytelling: a short story written by Jorge Luis Borges in 1941 called “The Garden of Forking Paths,” and a French literary movement in the 1960s called Oulipo — a contraction that when translated reads workshop of potential literature. But in truth, only academics really talk about these things.

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For some reason, I can’t quite seem to focus on finishing a Team Fortress 2 map successfully lately; after scrapping my first CTF map concept, I started up another one (as mentioned a few weeks ago), but now I’ve decided to drop that one and start work on a new variation of the first one.  While this does manage to keep things fresh and new, it’s not so great in terms of actually getting a final product.  This week also feels like a bit of a holding pattern in terms of starting new games, as I know a whole slew of titles I’m interested in are coming out over the next several weeks, first and foremost being the new Fire Emblem for the DS.  With that in mind, I haven’t really wanted to get too involved in any older titles, so I’ve just continued hacking away at King’s Bounty and Hoshigami.  Speaking of Hoshigami, if anyone out there comprehends this confeigm engraving system, please enlighten me; even the FAQ writers don’t seem entirely clear on it…

-Joel Haddock

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a very small tidbit of information about the upcoming (eventually) Doom 4.  I post this only because, although I was not a big fan of Doom 3, the first two in the series still tug at my nostalgia strings with the strength of a double-barreled shotgun.

The RPS info seem to show that Doom 4 will be a larger affair, with civilians and military characters acting in what could be large-scale battles.  This would be a big departure from Doom’s traditional hallway shootin’ action, but could be a bold step forward for the series if handled correctly. Only time will tell for sure.

There best be exploding barrels, though.

“Wuv, Twu Wuv – that is wat bwings us togevver today”

-The Princess Bride

Love, as we all well know, has been a source of inspiration for some of the greatest works of mankind. Paintings to capture a lover’s  image, poetry to capture a lover’s heart, or obscenely over-sized monuments to impress a lover with how many slaves you have; the story is repeated over and over again throughout history.

As we head towards the most celebrated love-related day of the year, let’s take a look at a few classic tales of romance as embodied in our medium of choice: the videogame.

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Far away from the city, atop the stone face of a lonely cliff, a man, clad in dark blue from head to toe sits and stares out at the temple in the valley below.

“….”, thinks Ryu Hayabusa, as he ponders his plan of attack, and how he will retrieve the statue of darkness from the evil Jaquio.

As he contemplates his next move, he notices the graceful motion of a single eagle, loping about in lazy circles, drawing closer and closer to the precipice.

“….”, thinks Ryu once more, as he readies himself for the climb down to the temple, not noticing the purposeful approach of the bird. And then, just as our hero is about to make his descent, the bird accelerates to the speed of sound, plunges into the young ninja’s chest, and bursts through the other side. Clutching the gaping wound in his chest, our hero falls to his apparent death.

Welcome to the world of Ninja Gaiden, a land of intrigue, action, and Birds. Deadly, deadly birds.

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After spending time over the weekend advancing plotlines in Persona, almost all of this week has been spent in various dungeon-crawling games. The boss in the 4th Persona dungeon didn’t even give a second though about handing me my own ass, so i decided that I needed to get my levels up, especially that of my healer. One thing I like about the Persona games is the “rush battle” option…if I know i’m going to win, hit triangle and your dudes will just attack over and over, until the enemy is dead, while I sit back and watch something on TV (truly, I am a great leader). Also nabbed “Dungeon Siege: Throne of Agony” for the PSP…I loved the PC games (and am a huge sucker for that style of game), and I’m enjoying the PSP outing as well…not a lot of depth there, but it’s good for a diversion when I just want to play something for 20 minutes. I also finally got around to hopping on the Left4Dead train, and almost immediately hopped back off due to my PC’s complete inability to play the damn thing at a decent framerate, which has angered me to the point where I’m finally considering biting the bullet and getting a new PC – anyone have any recommendations for the best gaming machine I can build on about a $650 budget?

-Jeff Feeser

My gaming time was extremely limited this week, to the point that I think all I’ve actually played was a short bout of Team Fortress 2 and some Hoshigami Remix on the train.  Hoshigami Remix, it should be noted, was designed by beings from another plane of existance with a deep hatred for humans; the coinfeigm engraving/evolution system makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever.  On the TF2 front, I put some more time in with my map (currently, ctf_inspiredname), and started trying to get a handle on playing Scout in preparation for the pending update.  Scout is the one class I have always studiously avoided, due to my really sucking at it – now is the time to remedy that.   Finally, I found myself suddenly missing Star Wars: Galaxies crafting system yesterday completely out of the blue; this is grounds for slapping me.

-Joel Haddock

The Shin Megami Tensei series of games is one with a large popular following in Japan, multiple titles under its umbrella, and a rich in-game history.  I knew absolutely none of this when I first picked up Persona 3 in 2007.  The “3″ in the title, of course, indicated that there were at least upwards of 2 games prior to it in the series, but I had been informed that I could jump into P3 without any prior experience with the series.  This, it turns out, was completely true.  The Persona games tend to be fairly standalone titles,  a la Final Fantasy, and while you may miss some subtle (or not so subtle) nods to the older titles, you can easily play them as their own entity.

Persona 3, on the whole, was a great game.  It was not without its flaws, however, and some of them could be amazingly frustrating.  An “expanded edition” of P3 came out shortly after I had beaten it called Persona 3: FES.  FES was said to contain many, many hours of additional content and expansion to the story, but having just sunk 60-odd hours into P3, I was not quite ready to jump back in.  As the months passed, and I geared myself up to tackle FES, Atlus announced that Persona 4 would be coming out soon. More importantly, it would be coming out on the PlayStation 2 and not the PS3, which meant I was actually going to be able to play it on launch day.  Thoughts of FES were pushed aside as I eagerly anticipated the next installment.

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