warming, not burning
Why, of course I’d add two posts merely days after announcing I won’t be updating for awhile longer, why do you ask?
This is just to say that Green Pixels recently put up a couple more reviews of mine, for Guitar Hero Smash Hits and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 10 (the Wii version, with the fancy-schmancy new Wii MotionPlus pack-in). They’re both good! Go find out why.
OK, I don’t mean literally, in person. But I’ll be writing previews all week (and possibly next week) for G4TV.com. None are up right now, but I expect them to start popping up regularly within the next 12 hours or so. Come on over and say hello, won’t you?
[Update: Fixed link to reflect where the stories are actually posting. Come leave a comment!]
In preparation for E3, I needed to pick up a new laptop to replace the old Vaio that had served me so well for lo these six (!!) years. So I turned to my friend Brad Linder, who runs Liliputing, the leading netbook site on this whole wide interweb, for some advice. And then some more advice. And then just a little more. (Sorry, Brad.) Once I’d made my decision, he asked if I’d like to write up early impressions and a full review for the site. I happily agreed.
So head on over to Liliputing for early impressions of my brand-spankin’-new Acer Aspire One D250. And I should have a full review up sometime the week after E3.
1UP has just put up two new previews of mine. One is for the gritty super-slash-antihero game InFamous from Sly Cooper developers Sucker Punch. And the other is the 256-player (!!) first-person shooter MAG, from SOCOM devs Zipper. Both games look great. Check out the previews and see if you don’t agree.
[I’m surprisingly busy with work for this time of year — thankfully — so here’s another reprint: In My Day #106, originally published in The Official U.S. PlayStation Magazine, Issue #106, July 2006]
If you’ve been playing along with the OPM home game (that is, our staggeringly awesome podcast — tune in at radiopm.1up.com today! [Edit: :( ]), you know that a few of us here have been bitten by the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion bug. So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about why this game is so compelling. I mean, sure, it’s enormous, and sure, it’s real purty, but we’ve seen other big, beautiful games that haven’t captivated our interest (and that of millions of other players) like Oblivion has. But I think I figured out what that special something is that keeps people talking about the game: freedom.
Now, “freedom” is a buzzword that’s been thrown around since GTA3 made “sandbox” games the Hip New Thing. But consider what that means in the context of GTA: You can be a bad guy…or you can be a really bad guy. I mean, you can follow along the main story and steal cars and carry out hits and whatnot, or you can do all that plus run down pedestrians and beat grandmothers over the heads with baseball bats. What you can’t do is be a hero. (Well, you can be a goody-goody, law-abiding citizen, but that pretty much entails walking down the sidewalk and looking at architecture. Not exactly the most entertaining experience.) Continue reading “Beyond Good, Beyond Evil”