Check out this site: http://www.turboviews.com/

He does a great job of reviewing titles. The videos are both information and entertaining to watch. This should definitely be parked under your review site of choice for TG-16 / Duo, and Super CD games.

Categories: Games, TG-16
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This is the first installment of (presumably) a multi-part puzzle game series. The first version was fairly short but had a nice, not so in your face musical score. I guess it’s fairly typical for this type of game, as you’re often spending a lot of time in one particular scene. My advice to you is don’t pay too much attention when the game tells you there is nothing of interest here when looking at Granpa’s book shelf. I used information in those books to unlock the tool cabinet under the sink. Personally, I find the “find the hidden number” games to be annoying most of the time, so I hope there aren’t too many of them in the sequel.

Categories: Games, PC
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All you need to know about this game is that there is an awful software bug which rears its ugly head when you travel to Spain before Syria and get the chalice. This little detour works perfectly fine on the PC version, but the GBA version will never reveal the icon for traveling to Syria even after finding the missing clue. I now must restart the game from the beginning, if I care to do so.

Categories: Games, Nintendo GBA
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It has been a while since Dragon Age first appeared on the market. My wife have been playing off and on since the release, and we are close to completing the game, definitely within the last 25%. To make a long and frustrating story short, I managed to destroy our operating system installation accidentally one dark and stormy night (NTFS file system gone, EXT3 in it’s place with additional files installed on top for good measure), on the very drive which held our Dragon Age and Fallout 3 games. Two very long games, so no small amount of investment. Obviously, there was much drama and hand waving.

Long story short (didn’t we already do this part?), I recovered most of the save game files, reinstalled the operating system (Windows 7, 64-bit), and installed all of those nasty dependencies. Now, I was ready to install the game. I gingerly placed my Dragon Age game disc in the DvD drive, ran the auto-installer, and… whammo! A big ol’ data read error in my face. Now isn’t that just great. Insolent hardware! I went through this process several times later (copying contents from the disc to the hard drive, disabling the Data Execution Prevention for the installer, etc.), and to make a long story short, had no success with the same error appearing in seemingly random locations during the install. However there is a silver lining, and I eventually did manage to get a fully functional installation. Would you like to know how?

SCRATCH HERE TO REVEAL SECRET

I simply copied the disc’s contents from another machine’s DvD drive (an iMac in this case) to my Windows 7 box. Ran the installer and it worked. No fuss, no muss. Except for all of the fuss and muss I mentioned above. Please feel free to send me money if you find this helpful.

Categories: Games, PC
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I am really, really late in finding this out (I’m looking at you Jared), but you can still buy World of Goo and pay whatever you want for the title during their birthday sale. It’s an experiment of sorts, and the data they collected is not terribly surprising (I’ve seen data collected before which indicated purchasers went “on the cheap” because that’s “all they could afford at the time”), but if you think there is money to be made using this model, then it’s certainly worth it to go whole hog and put your data where your mouth is, or your money where your data is, or whatever.

Categories: Games, Linux, Mac OSX, Windows
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Amazing video of “The Beast” vs. Justin Wong at California State Polytechnic University. It was during the EVO Championship Series fighting tournament in 2004. It’s been a while since that contest, but anyone who has ever picked up a controller and played one of the Street Fighter games, or who was lucky enough to have a local arcade centre, should be able to recognize the skill involved in playing this game and others like it. I found a decent feed on YouTube.

Categories: Games
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I started playing this game last week but it had been sitting around on my Xbox 360 for about a month before I had a chance to play it (my wife and I had been deep into Fallout 3 and had little time for anything else). I have to say that I am impressed so far. The fine people at Capcom and GRIN have put their collective heads together and created a new experience around a classic title.

The training rooms are perhaps the most significant departure from the original. While the new visual look and great audio soundtracks do not change the gameplay experience, the training exercises are designed to enhance the game with a public ranking system and add a competitive edge for those who would not be completely satisfied by Bionic Commando’s mission based levels.

For those who like item and monster records in their games, and I am one of those people, this game adds that feature to a genre which has traditionally shied away from such features. GRIN has also revised how you hack the enemies communication systems. Instead of simply selecting the “hack” option and then waiting to see if you have been detected, Rearmed starts a mini-game where you need to direct a ball to various target spaces in a cubic grid.

However, the most important feature the GRIN team has added is to ensure that it feels like Bionic Commando. I hope you give it a try and let me know what you think about the remake.

Categories: Games, Retro, Xbox 360
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Right around the point where you finish with the Waters of Life quest, one of the waypoints during the main quest, the game crashes at different points much to the frustration of Fallout players everywhere. I do not know of a fix for Xbox 360 players, but for PC players, using your debug console may save you a lot of time and headaches. The basic strategy is to turn off the AI engine before the game crashes (you’ll need to experiment), progress to a new scene or area or event, then enable it again. We had to do this a couple of times: once during our approach to Jefferson Memorial (we reactivated it once we teleported to Janice Kaplinski), and again before we turned the valve to unblock the pipes (last request from your father). To teleport to Janice we followed these steps:

1. Press the tilde (~) and disable the game’s AI with the “tai” console command.
2. Enter the command: player.moveto 00019FC6. This will teleport you to Janice Kaplinski.
3. Talk to her, Dr. Li, and any other scientists, if you want.
4. Turn the AI on again with the same “tai” command.

Categories: Games, PC
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We’ve been playing Fallout 3 for a few days now and it seems to have a few problems, but nothing too major so far. Over the last week or so, I have read a number of posts and articles complaining about the stability of the game. Well, my response to these people is to just relax and try and fix your problem with the debug console – Xbox and PS3 users are out of luck, I’m afraid.

With a game of this size and complexity, you must allow for the initial round of bugs, even ones related to the main quest. Bethesda simply does not employ enough people to cover the same amount of ground as the community. As an example, how many people do you think have purchased a copy of the game since it was released? I’m lazy, but let’s just say 100,000 copies were sold. As is the case for almost every piece of software, users really do make the best testers since there are a lot of bored people in the world, and everything they do in the game is new and intriguing to them so they tend to poke and prod at the software in ways the game development company never expected. Do you honestly think Bethesda should try and compete with that many play testers? Well in order to have a testing team which can compete with a group that size they would need to charge $1000 for the game. Yeah, no thanks, I’ll live with my slightly crippled software, until they come out with a patch release.

When you think about the number of things which could have gone wrong, the bugs I have seen floating around the Internet are annoying, but not outside what I would have expected from a game like Fallout 3.

Categories: Games, PC
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e·vil [ee – vuhl] – marked by calmness and serenity even during times of hardship and pending doom; literally oozing politeness when not absolutely required or called upon to exhibit; marked by ignorant suggestions and reiterateration of obvious facts and conclusions (can sometimes be confused with an idiot); shows no signs of being bubbly in personality which should normally accompany excessive politeness.

We’ve been playing Tales of the Abyss a lot lately and there are a few disturbing character traits we’ve noticed with Fon Master Ion. We presume you’ve noticed how blindly and obediently he unlocks all of those doors leading into the Sephiroth trees? After the cataclysm, notice how Luke takes the blame for letting Akzeriuth fall into the miasma, but in fact it was Ion who opened the doors in the first place! Ion is also in constant communication with Grand Maestro Mohs in the first half of the story, who we all know to be corrupt with power. Mysterious disappearances which he claims are kidnappings? Yeah, you’re laying it on pretty thick Fon Master. Last, but certainly not least, is his disposition. Who in the Nine Hells is that polite or apologetic on purpose, except for the Prince of Darkness himself?

Categories: Games, Playstation
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