Molecularbear's Blog

I was very excited when I learned that the Curse of Monkey Island franchise had been given new life by Tellgame Games in the form of the episodic Tales of Monkey Island. My excitement grew when I learned that I could download the first chapter, “Launch of the Screaming Narwhal”, on the Wii for $10 dollars. Then I actually played the game and my excitement stumbled to the erratic rhythm of the game’s poor performance.

I really thought that the Wii would be a perfect fit for Monkey Island‘s vibrant graphics and slow puzzle/adventure pacing. But the game is somewhat choppy with load times that, while not outlandish, seem a little excessive given the content they’re serving up. If you run across the screen, the seams really begin to split open as the video shifts violently and the audio hiccups and repeats. While not a console powerhouse like the PS3 or XBox, the Wii does run Super Mario Galaxy just fine… I would think it should be able to handle the relatively pedestrian needs of Launch of the Screaming Narwhal. My best guess is that the game just isn’t optimized for the Wii; perhaps they wrote the PC version, then used some sort of generic porting utility to get it running on the Wii.

Performance aside, the look and feel of a Monkey Island game is duplicated quite well. The music, characters, Caribbean backdrops, entertaining puzzles, and amusing dialogue are all present – even Dominic Armato is back to voice Guybrush Threepwood, Mighty Pirate^TM. And yes, annoyingly the TM symbol appears in the dialogue subtitles. The game’s sense of humor wasn’t as good as I remember it, but perhaps I’m just viewing the past with rose-tinted glasses. Though certainly, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal is clever, funny, and includes a few “LOL” moments. Graphically… well, when your non-techie girlfriend says, “These graphics suck, can we play Fallout?”, you know they aren’t exactly brilliant. I thought they were fine, but I did expect them to be a little higher-res.

Quite a lot of complaining for a game that’s only $10, huh? There was enough content there to last me somewhere around 6-10 hours, so the price is well worth it. I definitely intend to purchase the next chapter, and am hoping to see some performance enhancements on the Wii, though I’m not holding my breath for that. Overall, I found Launch of the Screaming Narwhal to be relaxing, lighthearted, and fun – just want you want from the Monkey Island franchise.

BioShock is an astounding addition to the top tier single-player FPS’s that I have played (Metroid Prime and Resident Evil 4 come to mind). This post will not contain any spoilers because the story is something that you really need to experience for yourself. Set in a dark Ayn Randian hellscape in a decaying underwater habitat called “Rapture”, BioShock has arguably the eeriest, scariest atmosphere in any video game to date.

And that horrific atmosphere is the reason why I’m glad that I finally beat the game (with the “good” ending). I have always found video gaming to be an immersive experience, and this is especially so when dealing with a high quality of realism and art. The downside is that wandering through a bloody nightmare with twisted creatures jumping out at me isn’t exactly relaxing. Near the beginning of the game, you’re plunged right into the surgery center – I think you can guess what sort of horrors awaited me there. I initially thought that BioShock might be a little too gruesome a pursuit for me.

But like Resident Evil 4, the quality was just so good that I eventually had to pick up the controller and keep going. In the early goings, the enemies were raking me over the coals, but the tables soon turned, especially when I realized that you can effectively pause the game when switching between your weapons or your plasmids (read: magic). As the game progressed, I found myself frustratingly full of ammo and money – no survival horror going on here. My OCD juices began taking over as I carefully scoured and explored each map, hacking every machine, collecting every item, and hunting high and low to leave nothing behind. On the plus side, such behavior lets me see all the details, graphics, and artwork that the BioShock team put together.

Often when I do my “pack rat” routine with video games I wind up being ridiculously over equipped, and this was no exception. I took a cue from some of the tips on the loading screens and started to use my arsenal a little more, but I didn’t have nearly the amount of fun I should have. One of the tips wanted you to toss a proximity mine on the ceiling, then use a cyclone trap to send an enemy skyward into the mine. I guess I was too focused on efficiently killing the enemies to start thinking about setting up contrived death scenes. Though I did enjoy freezing them and then using a shotgun blast to shatter their frozen forms.

One thing I was a little surprised about was that the game would get laggy every now and then. Obviously the PS3 was having some difficulty in keeping up with the action at certain points. The worst was a moment when I was tracking a spider splicer on the ceiling – a security bot I’d hacked was attacking it, and I was blasting the splicer with my shotgun. The game floundered to like, one frame per second, before the splicer finally fell dead to the floor and the regular pacing resumed.

In the end, I was tremendously impressed with this vision of an Ayn Rand society gone bad. The political philosophies of Rapture, the 1950s style ads and decor, the creativity behind constructing this crumbling city beneath the ocean, the voice talent and dialog, the excellent plot complete with genuine surprises… BioShock is quite a production. Take the best and the brightest, and allow them to build a society without restrictions of government and societal convention. Atlas Shrugged, indeed. 9/10.

I picked up two copies of Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 for the Wii as a Father’s Day gift. The idea was that I could spend some quality online time with Dad by playing a round of golf every now and then. To start with, I dropped by the parents’ house and we played a few rounds in their living room. It was a blast. A little smack talk, admiring the courses, exploring the game mechanics, playing the front nine at Pebble Beach – we had a great time.

Setting our phones on speaker, I figured we could have a similar atmosphere remotely, watching the action online from our respective 50″ plasmas. We started a “Simultaneous Play” game, only to quit in disgust after about two minutes. Desperate for a decent round of golf, I hopped in the car and made the 20-minute burn over to the parents’ place.

Here is what the manual says about simultaneous play:

Play with 2-4 players in a Stroke Play match without having to wait for the other golfers to shoot before hitting your shot. The all-new Simultaneous Play lets you play quickly, as if you were playing by yourself, while each opponent’s shot is indicated with a real-time, uniquely colored shot arc.

If the game is like “playing by yourself”, then what the hell is the point of playing online!? As if that weren’t bad enough, the game throws a 30-second timer on the screen at the start of every shot. Instead of the leisurely, interactive experience I was hoping for, EA Sports has given me a goddamn assembly line. I am not alone in these complaints.

Perhaps when considering this game I should have put more research into how the online component was implemented. From a technical standpoint, I can understand why they chose to go this route; network traffic is probably nil when the only information you’re sending back and forth is a single shot arc every 30 seconds. And you’ll definitely close those network connections in a timely manner when the shot clock is pushing you along. EA seems to have chosen the laziest possible way to create online play – barely one step ahead of playing chess by email.

In the end, EA Sports has produced an online experience that completely eliminates the fun of playing with a live opponent. I thought that perhaps the “10” in the title indicated a level of maturity that would include every feature you could possibly want. While the game itself is awesome, it looks like I’ll have to wait to see if version 11 will provide actual online play.