I’m a GeekBeat.TV Blogger!

A few weeks ago, Cali Lewis from GeekBeat.TV posted a call for bloggers. I’ve known Cali for over a year thanks to Twitter, and I’ve been a big admirer of her work on GeekBrief.TV and now GeekBeat.TV as well.

When I saw the call, I thought to myself it’d be great to get involved in that world. Her shows are heavily tech oriented, which I have a keen interest in, and I’ve been feeling for a while that I needed to get myself into a different headspace with my writing. I do a lot of technical writing at work; I wanted something a bit more fun. (Games may be fun to play, but the process of making them can be demanding!)

It didn’t take me long to take a look at my collection of RSS feeds for the current top tech stories, and I put together a sample article. Long story short, I sent the article in; myself, and hundreds of other applicants. Within a few days I was contacted about joining the team. A couple of Skype conferences later, here I am.

I couldn’t be happier about that decision I made, or the results. The blogging team is full of fantastic, diverse people, and we’ve already got an impressive number of articles up on the site in the few short days we’ve been producing content.

Today the blogging section is officially opening for business. Cali herself announced the changes on today’s episode.

I will be continuing my work at Ganz as a game designer for the foreseeable future, and this new position will hopefully help me keep my head on straight for a while!

Coming soon, in addition to reviews and impressions of the games I play, I’ll be posting excerpts of my GeekBeat.TV blogs here.

I hope you’ll support me and all of the other GeekBeat.TV bloggers in this new and exciting venture!

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games

The 2010 Winter Olympics have come and gone, and all that’s left are memories; memories, and this game from Sega. If you’ve ever felt the need to take part in the olympics without all that troublesome training and effort, now you can. You might find yourself looking like a green dinosaur or blue hedgehog as you compete, but hey, it’s a small price to pay, right?

Environments

Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Winter Games does a pretty good job of making you feel like you’re there in Vancouver. The events are all held in virtual recreations of the venues used in the actual Winter Games this year. Skiing down a mountain, over moguls or blazing a path down a bobsled or skeleton run feels incredibly authentic no matter what character you’re choosing.

Events

The events felt a little more hit or miss for me. Some of them are compellingly accurate, such as the bobsled/skeleton runs and curling. This is especially true of the bobsled/skeleton if you happen to have the Wii Balance Board, which does a wonderful job of using subtle body and weight shifts to control your movement down the track.

Others suffer a bit more for their translation to the controller. Hockey and Figure skating are, by their nature, unable to be represented with as much fidelity as something like bobsled. It’s unfortunate and leaves us stuck with events that have extremely oversimplified controls. Given the audience for the Wii, it’s hard to take Sega to task for this. I do think it was the right decision to simplify the controls, but it does leave gamers like myself feeling that those events are lacking.

Dream Events

One fun element of the game that I appreciate a great deal is the ability to unlock various “dream” event versions of the regular winter events. These take the relatively mundane “normal” sports featured in the olympics and translate them into forms that might feel more appropriate in a classic Mario or Sonic series game.

The dream ski jump takes you right out into space, leaping through vistas last seen in Super Mario Galaxy. You’ll fly through the great void in the sky, avoiding small planets as you aim to land on your mark. Another has you skiing down an obstacle course that’s taken straight from Mario Kart, items and all.

These dream events seem a little gimmicky at times, and the game play doesn’t always fit the concept terribly well. The Mario Kart inspired racing for instance is just too slow to really do Mario Kart any justice. On another level it just doesn’t matter though; if you’ve ever played the games these dream events are based on, you will end up smiling big-time when Sonic bowls Bowser off his skis and into a snow bank with a green shell on a sharp turn.

Persona 5 Upcoming

Word on the ‘net keeps coming up that there will be a Persona 5 and it will probably be on the PS3. There’s nothing yet on the North American version of Atlus’ site, but high profile stories citing the Japanese Sony Playstation site claim it has been confirmed. This is huge news for me. Persona 3 FES was a breath of fresh air in my little world of RPGs, something different than anything I’d played in the past. Persona 4 took the calendar-based time management elements of Persona 3 and the amazing character development and ramped the whole experience up to a new level with an even more compelling story and characters that grew as a necessary part of the story’s progression. It was a revelation for me, something that broke well and truly free of the Final Fantasies and Star Oceans that I’d played in the JRPG scene before.

There’s no word or even speculation yet as to when Persona 5 will arrive and no confirmation of the platform it will arrive on. It IS confirmed as a must-have for me, regardless of when and where it lands.

Final Fantasy XIII Impressions, Part 1

Image by Gord McLeod via FlickrI'm impressed with Final Fantasy XIII.

No, I'm VERY impressed.

FFXIII has a very different feel than I've come to expect from the franchise, which is pretty appropriate. When Final Fantasy first came to the Playstation with FF7, it changed dramatically from what came before with the introduction of 3D graphics to the series. When it appeared on the PS2 with FF10, it changed again, taking 3D graphics to new heights and adding voice work for the first time. Now FF13 streamlines the play experience in huge ways, which feel oddly subtle while totally changing the game.

For starters, there are a lot of cutscenes in this game, but while that's not unusual for the series, their length is. These are mostly pretty short scenes, and they come at you frequently.

Next, there are save points everywhere. I have played through several hours worth now, and I don't believe I have yet come up on a stretch where I went more than 15 minutes without hitting a new save spot.

Take these two features together and you've totally sold me. The rest almost doesn't even matter.

One of the big things that always drove me crazy about JRPGs, and Square's JRPGs in particular, was the insane lengths of time you could go without the ability to save. Not too long ago I gave up on Star Ocean: The Last Hope on the 360 because the console's instability  resulted in one too many crashes between far-spaced save points. I eventually ended up trading it in for the International version on the PS3, which seems much more stable and I may be able to finish it.

But it's still not high on my list of gaming priorities. It's a wonderful game, I love it and will finish it, but those 2 hour gaps where you can't save are horrific. Even without the risk of crashing, it's hard to rearrange my schedule around the game. If I'm playing at night and I hit a save point at 11:00, do I risk continuing? What if it's 1am before I find another place to save? What if I continue and find myself in a cut scene that's 20 minutes long, or 30? What if that cut scene can't be paused or skipped?

Square games have always been gorgeous and fun and moving, but there's always been an element of inconvenience. Final Fantasy 13's biggest change is the complete removal of that inconvenience.

I've barely scratched the surface of this game, but I already know I'll be finishing this one fairly fast. Star Ocean? Even Final Fantasy 12? I'll finish those as well, but when that will happen, I couldn't say.

More impressions to come as I progress...

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