http://greggman.com Entries from Greggman.com About games_impressions en-us http://greggman.com/pageparts/rss_banners/banner-012.jpg http://greggman.com http://greggman.com/edit/moblogposts/2005-06-26moblog.htm I've finally been playing Grand Theft Auto : San Andreas so here's some impressions http://greggman.com/edit/moblogposts/2005-06-07moblogb.htm I recently finished playing Metroid Prime: Echoes for Gamecube. I got it back in November when it came out but at the time I put it in, played for about 20 minutes, decided it was mostly the same as Metroid Prime and put it away for awhile while I worked on Tanjunka. Recently though I decided I had some time so I went back to it. Here are my impressions http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2003-08-10.htm So I'm going to Shibuya today to meet some friends and as I get off the train I am greeted by posters saying something about a Space Invaders exhibit at the 109 building. Well, I've got 30 minutes to kill so I think, "sure, let's check it out". As soon as I get out of the station I see something I've never seen before. There are 3 giant TVs in Shibuya, one of them is 5 stories tall and it's playing Space Invaders live!!!!! It turns out they are running Space Invaders battles on the stage in front of the 109 building and they are displaying it live on 2 of the large TVs in front of the station including the live play by play annoucing from a cute Japanese hostess. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2003-07-02.htm If you are a music game fan you need to check out Gitaroo-Man. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-12-11.htm I recently finished playing Metroid Prime. It's probably one of the most perfect games I've played in a long time. It's hard for me to think of how to describe what makes it so good.Metroid Prime may well be the most immersive game made to date. Almost every little detail fits inside the game. There are no long boring cutscenes, in fact the longest scene is the opening scene at about 60 seconds, the second longest is after the first boss, maybe 40 seconds. The point is this is a game you experience by playing, not by watching. You are the action. You are the story. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-11-07.htm just finished playing Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus. Is that one of the worst names ever or what? Sly Cooper is good, the whole name though is quite long and not easy to read. Just my opinion. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-10-19.htm My friend Dan got me this book, The Ultimate History of Video Games and I can't put it down!It's not just some essay on the history of video games, the author, Steven L. Kent, interviewed several hundred people. Every page of the book has quotes from various famous and important people in the industry with the real stories and not just the rumors. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-09-20.htm I just went to both the JAMMA show and the Tokyo Game Show.The JAMMA show is a trade show for game centers/arcades. The show was pretty down/low key this time. Arcades seem to be quickly losing their appeal. There were very few games and they were mostly old stuff.I saw two gun games. One was House of the Dead 3. The other was a Konami game called World Combat. It's special feature was that 4 people could play at once although you had to really crowd around the machine. It had a soldier theme.I saw two soccer games. One by Sega, one by Sammy. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-09-09.htm Some of my friends told my I just have to play Halo. Some of them even claimed to have had no interest when it came out. "What, another first person shooter (fps)? Why would I be interested in that?" Their friends insisted that they give it a try and now all of them are Halo fanatics. Some of them have played nearly every day for 6 months or more.So, I decided I should check it out. I got an XBox and Halo. Probably the only game I'll be buying anytime soon for XBox. Here are my thoughts as I play. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-08-16.htm I was going to wait until I finished to post my current impressions but I wanted to write this while this stuff was fresh in my mind.Mario Sunshine: What can you say? It's still Mario but with the new main moves, hose and jetpack it is a new game and not just Mario 64 with new levels. But, dang!!!...it's hard! Maybe I just get more impatient the older I get. Most levels have only taken a 1 to 3 tries, only a couple up to 8 or 9 but it often just feels hard. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-07-21.htm I picked up Super Mario Sunshine this weekend!Again Nintendo shows the way. Mario is full of stuff you haven't seen in other games. Liquid is everywhere. The water looks amazing. Enemies are covered with paint. You can get paint on yourself and on your friends. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-07-15.htm Next in my list of overdue games, I finally got to play GTA3. I was not much interested in this when it first came out because I was never a fan of the first 2. If you don't know, GTA3 (Grand Theft Auto 3) was the number 1 selling game last year and got tons of critical praise was well as being called one of the best games in years even though it was rated "M" for violence and therefore for example not sold at WalMart which will not sell M rated games and usually accounts for like 30% of all video game sales. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-07-13.htm Now that I finally got my American PS2 I finally got to play ICO. WOW!!! Amazing!!! If you haven't seen it it's about a kid born with horns who, as all kids born with horns, is taken to this abandoned magic castle to be sacrified by being entombed alive. Except that by luck, his tomb is on shaky ground and happens to tip over and spill him out. He finds young woman who doesn't speak the same language that appears to be a prisoner in the castle, possibly also to be scarificed and he decides to help her escape. That's the premise. The game is finding your way out of this magic castle. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2002-02-23.htm Space Channel 5 part 2 came out on Valentine's Day this year. I joked to my friend Jake who is on the team that made it that I was worried I would be home with Ulala, the main character for Space Channel 5 on Valentine's Day because I had no girlfriend to take out that night. Fortunately I managed to make a real date for Valentine's Day so I didn't actually have a chance to play until now.This game is AWESOME. Of course if you don't like watching cute women playing music and doing sexy dances in front of you or musicals then I maybe this is not for you but I love it. It's even better than the first, at least so far, and I was completely addicted to the first one. So much so that I bought the soundtrack, the mix CD, made my computer desktop a shot from the game and I made 3 clocks *1*, *2*, *3*. Two of which I sent to Sega, one for Jake and one for the art director, Miyabe-san who, according to Jake, keep in on her desk. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2001-11-23.htm I picked up Rez yesterday. I think the easiest way to describe it would be if you were able to actually play a visualization from Winamp or Sonique ;-)You can download a movie(wma) of it here which I suggest you do to check it out or if you have a slow connection you can check out the screenshots. Imagine the end of 2001, Johnny Mnemonic, Lawnmower Man and Tron all rolled into one game. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2001-10-30.htm So of course I picked up Pikmin last Friday. You can see a video of it here if you haven't seen the game. Like I mentioned before they are advertizing the crap out of it with very cute commericals.If you want to see one of the commericals you can download it by clicking on the Pikman2.zip link on this page. The words are something like thisWe are Pikmin, we'll tell you about us.Carrying, attacking, increasing in numbers and getting eatenWe are living in many different ways on this planet http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2001-10-10.htm I just finished Max Payne.Couple of interesting things, as an example of how small the PC game market is in Japan, when I went to Sakuraya to get it 1 week or so ago they had 3 copies just stuffed in the shelves with the rest of the games. I'm not sure how big it was in the states but there's no place like Best Buy or Fry's with 100rds of copies of PC games here. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2001-09-19.htm I finished Luigi's Mansion today. I think like I said before, it's hard to call it a platform seller but I'll give it 5 stars for creativity. At least it's not just another run and jump platform game.I'm guessing I played 10 to 15 hours. There's just the one mansion, it's 3 floors plus a basement and a roof. It's divided into 4 "areas" where each area ends in a boss and a key to the next area. An area might consist of part of floor 3 and part of the basement for example.It's definiately at least a much check out game. For some reason I was under the impression that it was made by an American developer but upon finishing it all the credits were for a Japanese team. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2001-06-28.htm Today I picked up Rimo-cocoron. It's kind of cute. Basically you see a setting of people, like a room or a town. You can zoom in to very small details or out to see the entire scene. The people are going about their business and it's your job to help them by giving them inspiration. You do this by seeing their thought bubbles (like "I wonder what I should make for dinner") and then for example you take a picture of a meat store and beam the picture into the person's head at which point he will walk to the meat store and buy some meat. It's all 2d vector graphics and pretty cute. http://greggman.com/edit/editheadlines/2001-03-21c.htm Okay, the display is not so bad. It's still not great but it's not has bad as the Color Wonderswan. There's no contrast adjust like a Gameboy though. Not sure if it needs it or not.The carts are SMALL. Half the size of a regular Gameboy cart. Small is cool. You can carry more.