February 2011

All Star Superman
Submitted Saturday, February 26, 2011 - 3:10:17 AM by Klaitu

Beware: Spoilers Abound!

Here we are again, another DC direct-to-dvd movie, this time starring Superman by himself.

I don't know what it is about killing Superman, but DC loves to do it, and All Star Superman is no exception. This time Lex Luthor does it, which is an improvement, as Lex Luthor is Superman's number 1 archnemesis.

All Star Superman is at times pretty ridiculous, pulling a lot of stupid elements from what I can assume are the comics.. but beyond all that crap, there's a pretty solid story in here.

In particular I give this film extra credit for 2 things:

1. Superman stays dead once he is dead.

2. Superman defeats Lex Luthor by using reason, without using any of his super powers.

Overall, this film is a little more thought-provoking than the usual DC fare.. though it does still contain a generous scoop of stupid DC nonsense. (Superman has a pet creature that eats stars in his basement)

Overall Score: 6 of 10



Superman Batman: Apocalypse
Submitted Saturday, February 19, 2011 - 8:00:19 PM by Klaitu

Another DC animated direct-to-video flick. Is it any good?

Well, it's alright.. It's the best DC comics movie released since Justice League: New Frontier.

Apocalypse is about Supergirl. Yeah, she's not in the title. She crashes to Earth and is discovered by Batman, Supes and Batman try to figure out what to do with her. Answer? Give her to Wonder Woman.

Wonder Woman is also not in the title.

Guess what? Supergirl gets kidnapped by a bad guy who lives on a planet called Apocalypse. It's a good thing everyone teams up to defeat him.

As I mentioned, it's not a terribly bad movie at all. It is mostly consistent with itself, and doesn't have many plot holes..

Really, my main complaint with this movie is that when I saw the title, I expected it to be Superman and Batman running around on the Earth after a nuclear war.. you know, like Mad Max except with superheroes.

Title fail.

Overall Score: 7 of 10



Marvel vs Capcom 3
Submitted Saturday, February 19, 2011 - 7:43:45 PM by Klaitu

You know, it's sometimes really, really difficult to write game reviews.

Take for example this game, Marvel vs Capcom 3. It's a fighting game from Capcom. All fighting games from Capcom are essentially the same game.. sure, this one uses 3d graphics, but it plays the same as its 2d predecessors.

It's basically a Marvel vs Capcom version of Street Fighter 4. If you're into that thing, chances are you'll like it.

I will say, however, that MvC3 is much easier than any Capcom fighter I've played since Street Fighter 2. Playing vs the CPU is no longer an impossible chore, and the game is pretty enjoyable.

Overall Score: 7 of 10
Quality Rating: 5 of 5
Rent it!



Leisure Suit Larry 6
Submitted Saturday, February 12, 2011 - 1:50:23 AM by Klaitu

The fourth installment of the EZ Mode Unlocked pile of shame challenge!

So, after Leisure Suit Larry 5, you pretty much know what to expect with Leisure Suit Larry 6, particularly in the way of tone and innuendo.



LSL6 plays a lot like the very first LSL game as it doesn't feature Passionate Patti. This time, Larry gets picked up by a TV Dating show's producer and is assigned to be a contestant, even though the show is rigged. He loses and is sent to a luxury spa for the weekend as a consolation prize.

This being a Leisure Suit Larry game, the spa is chock full of women whom you must convince to sleep with you. Why? Well.. because you're Leisure Suit Larry, and that's pretty much all you do.. in every game.. including this one.

This is one of Sierra's final adventure games, which is evidenced by the high quality graphics and sound effects. It still doesn't help the gameplay much, however. LSL6 is chock full of the obscure puzzles so prevalent to Sierra games.. though the game does give you a break by not having any "gotcha" puzzles.. at least that I ran into.

As in the first Leisure Suit Larry, the ultimate goal is to ascend to the penthouse and make out with the "hottest girl" in the whole place.

In terms of story, there's not a lot here. It's a missing element that just doesn't live up to Larry 2, 3, or 5.

Overall Score: 5 of 10
Quality Rating: 5 of 5
Pass!



Leisure Suit Larry 5
Submitted Friday, February 11, 2011 - 12:11:36 AM by Klaitu

The third installment in my response to the EZ Mode Unlocked pile of shame challenge!

Where do I begin? Is Leisure Suit Larry even relevant, or indeed.. known anymore? During the golden era of Sierra Online, Leisure Suit Larry became famous for being what we would refer to today as "M rated" for sexual content.. or perhaps they would be rated even higher these days.. it's hard to be certain.



LSL5 begins with Larry's quest to find the 3 most talented women to host "America's Sexiest Home Videos" and then.. sleep with them. The idea being that if they'll sleep with Larry, they'll sleep with anything.

Meanwhile, Passionate Patti (the female protagonist of the Leisure Suit Larry series) gets recruited by the feds to uncover the source of subliminal messages in music.

The game is split into chapters. First, you play Larry's part, then you switch into Patti's part. The entire point of this game is to cram in as much sexual innuendo jokes as possible.

Puzzles here are standard Sierra gameplay puzzles, and are a little harder than average in difficulty. The game relies on obscure background art as being the key to proceed at some points. It also contains a mandatory slot machine gambling game that is no fun, but thankfully it doesn't last too long.

An Example of typical LSL5 innuendo:


As it turns out, if you play this game when you're not 14 years old, you get a lot more of the jokes. Go figure. The game takes about 6 or 7 hours to beat.

Overall Score: 7 of 10
Quality Rating: 4 or 5
Play it!



Codename: Iceman
Submitted Wednesday, February 9, 2011 - 5:03:53 PM by Klaitu

The second installment of my personal EZ Mode Unlocked pile of shame challenge, Codename Iceman is a Sierra adventure game that was released in 1989. It was created by Jim Walls, who is perhaps more famous for creating Police Quest.

The Intro to Codename Iceman



It's the story of Navy Commander John Westland as he is called into service on a covert mission to rescue the US Ambassador to "the middle east" who has been kidnapped in Tunisia, but most of the game is about just getting to Tunisia aboard a submarine.

The gameplay is your standard Sierra SCI fare. Keyboard arrow keys for movement, typing interface for instructions. Iceman is regarded as one of the more difficult Sierra games as it is unforgiving with the puzzles, and there are death traps everywhere. It also has 5 or 6 copy protection checkpoints, which is steep, even for a game of this era. The first checkpoint, for instance, is performing the correct steps for CPR.

Iceman also likes to play "gotcha" with you. "Gotcha" is when you pick up some widget in the first few minutes of the game, and you can't complete the game without that widget.. but the game lets you proceed past the widget, play through the whole entire game, and get to the point where you need the widget, only to get stuck. Gotcha puzzles are common to Sierra games, but rarely are there so many in the same game.

For this playthrough, I remembered most of the game's more difficult sequences. As a kid, I kept getting stuck trying to enter Tunisia. I would always get detected by magnetic sensors in the bay.. but this time I discovered an item I was missing all those years ago that allowed me to pass through undetected. How did I miss it? Well...

It was part of a horrible, horrible dice game. A mandatory horrible dice game.

Sierra is no stranger to mandatory gambling. Space Quest 1 featured it, Police Quest 1 had it, as did Leisure Suit Larry 5 (the next game in my list). While those other games the gambling is merely unenjoyable.. in Iceman the gambling is downright hellacious.

Iceman took me about 7 hours to beat, 5 of which were spent playing that horrible, horrible dice game. Mandatory gambling brings this game down by far.

Of course, the game has other problems as well. Driving the submarine is pretty neat, but the submarine battles are also nightmares. Torpedo hits are at random, so you will often lose a battle even though you did nothing wrong.

Overall, I'd say that Codename: Iceman is one of the lesser in a pantheon of great games. It's needlessly difficult, and the puzzles aren't hard to figure out, they're just complicated.

Overall Score: 5 of 10
Quality Rating: 3 of 5
Pass, unless you are a Sierra nerd.



Below the Root
Submitted Tuesday, February 8, 2011 - 3:02:24 AM by Klaitu

Never heard of it? The game came out in 1984, so it's hardly surprising. The EZ Mode Unlocked podcast challenged its listeners to use the next 4 months to chew through games that you own, but you've never beaten.. a "pile of shame" as it were.

At first I thought that I had no games that fit the bill, but then I was reminded that these "pile of shame" games might be quite old.. like 27 years old. So, that brings us to Below the Root!



The thing with Below the Root is that you can't just play it. This game was created by the author of some moderately popular young adult fantasy novels known as the "Green Sky Trilogy". These novels ended in a cliffhanger, and so this game was created to be the end of the story.

All that is well and good, and I'm all for tying a game into extended media.. but if you just try to play this game straight up without reading the books, you're going to have an impossible time of it. After all, I had been trying to beat the game for 27 freaking years. Having never read the books the game is based on. I just couldn't bring myself to invest that much into the game.

So, for this particular playthough, I went ahead and found a walkthrough. Cheating? I say nay, as the game depends on knowledge of the books and I only used the walkthrough whenever I got stuck.

The game gives you a choice of 6 or so characters to play as, but they all look and operate pretty much the same. Some are stronger, some are better with magic. I chose a dude named Neric, who seemed to be average in all respects.

The game plays like a side-scrolling version of a Sierra game if it made a baby with a Lucasarts adventure. Keyboard controls movement, but the command system is a lot like SCUMM.

When you play Below the Root, your objective is not particularly obvious. It's an open world, so you wander around talking to the people who live in this giant tree. Some of the people help you with good advice and items. Other people want you dead, and give you bad advice or kidnap you.

As you bump into random people, you begin to get sort of.. prodded to go in certain directions, or visit certain people and talk to them. There are 5 of these people you need to talk to, and they all teach you a new magic skill.

The main objective of the game is to find the spiritual leader of the people in Green Sky, who are currently divided over racial issues between guys who eat meat, and guys who don't eat meat. Only this spiritual leader guy is able to unite the two factions and bring peace to green sky. He's sort of like a bad graphics white Martin Luther King.

The people of Green Sky believe that this leader has drowned, and that there is no hope. Nevertheless, it's your job to find him. How do you know he's still alive? I have no idea!

As it turns out, this leader did not drown, he got swept into an underground aquifer where he became trapped on a ledge, unable to escape.. that's where you and your magical powers come in, as one of them is the ability to teleport!

Below the Root is a solid game with the traditional puzzles typical of 1980's adventure games. The gameplay is solid, and is focused more on problem solving than combat. It took me about 4 hours to complete it with the assistance of a walkthrough. As it turns out, my last save on this game (dated 2001) was almost to the end.. I had found the spirit leader, but I did not have the teleport magic to beat the game..

No wonder I was hung up on the game for so long!

Overall Score: 7 of 10
Quality Rating: 2 of 10
Play it!



Venetica
Submitted Saturday, February 5, 2011 - 5:20:37 PM by Klaitu

Ahh, the first game of 2011. Sure, not the first game I played in 2011, but the first game I played that was released in 2011. Is it an indication of the new year?

I hope not.

Venetica is a cute little RPG programmed by Germans. In a lot of ways, it reminds me of The Witcher. Everything's a little bit "off" the voice acting is terrible, and the game seems like at best it would be a 360 launch title.

Music is unremarkable. The graphics are below average, and the gameplay is pretty bland. What with all the disadvantages here, that's a lot of weight to put on the story.. and the story just can't hold it all up.

It's your typical "young person, you have a destiny to save the world" kind of tale. Nothing you haven't seen a million times before. Venetica is odd in that the Grim Reaper is a protagonist, and yet you play a good guy.

Take Fable 2.. now make the graphics worse and eliminate the music. Good so far? okay, now take the combat down to one button, and while you're at it, go ahead and take out most of the story. That's Venetica.

Overall Score: 5 of 10
Quality Rating: 2 of 10
Pass.



The Old Republic: EA Conference Call
Submitted Wednesday, February 2, 2011 - 8:36:23 PM by Klaitu

You know, I haven't talked a ton about The Old Republic here on Special K, so here's your inaugural edition of Old Republic News!

Nerds everywhere are clamoring for knowledge about the upcoming game, most important the release date, which has not yet been set.

On February 1, EA held a conference call for various investors and SWTOR nerds decended upon it, attempting to glean as much information as possible.

Here's the important transcript from that call, as well as my own comments! Enjoy!

Magical Information from the EA Q3 2011 Earnings Conference Call!

Eric Brown: (Eric Brown is the CFO of Electronic Arts)

"EA is incurring significant development costs for the Star Wars MMO which is expected to ship in calendar 2011, but after the close of fiscal 11."

"We are expecting to ship Star Wars: The Old Republic in fiscal 12"


So, basically SWTOR is presently slotted between May 1 and December 31 of 2011. Something we already knew.

John Riccitiello: (The Devil.. err I mean the CEO of Electronic Arts)

"So, a couple things, and I know I'm not going to satisfy you with this answer because a fair amount of what you're asking about is either subject to NDA with our partnership with Lucas, or alternatively, you know we don't generally put out head count for individual titles. I will say the following things though, one is we previously described to folks that half a million subscribers or so the game is substantially profitable but its not the kind of thing that we would write home about it, anything north of a million subscribers, it's a very profitable business...."


If SWTOR hits 500,000 subscribers in the first month, it will rake in about 37.5 million dollars in the first 2 months, 75 million after 6 months, and about $150 million in the first year. This fits with the estimates of SWTOR's development cost.

Just to give some context, Final Fantasy 11 has about 500,000 subscribers. Eve Online is about 300,000.


"....Essentially it turns on a dime from being most likely quite sharply negative in terms of its EPS impact to positive the day the product ships so its an important inflection point for it...."


EPS = Earnings Per Share.

I will add a little bit more color on a few things, one is there's been a fair amount of talk on various blogs describing spends that are vastly higher than anything we've ever put in place so don't read sort of gamer blogs as having any substance, some of them bring a chuckle but they also bring a frustration for those that are being responsible with the management of EA's R&D dollars when they read sort of falsehoods out of the press."


Interesting that Riccitiello thinks blogs are press. He's referring to the "EA Louse" incident where a disgruntled EA employee reported that SWTOR cost $300 million to produce.. supposedly quoting "inside information".

Most Analysts believe the Development cost for SWTOR to be between $100 Million and $150 Million.

"The second thing that I would tell you is that the game is looking very good, a number of you will have seen it in a variety of our consumer shows, it's only gotten stronger, we feel very good about the title. We're currently testing it with a wide-scale consumer type thing but not sort of at the beta scale level-wise over the coming months...."


SWTOR has an atypical testing plan. Since last august or so, they've been doing focus tests. They give a limited number of people access for a month, using an older version of the game. Then, at the end of the month they eject all those people, and bring in an entirely different group of testers for the next month. These limited tests are quite large, which may indicate they are saving the "beta test" to stress test their servers.. in which case their actual beta could be remarkably short.

Either way, this does not bode well for an early or mid-spring release.

"....One of the reasons that we have pushed our guidance to May, which is where it's historically been over most of the life of Electronic Arts, is so that we have a better insight on just this title and things like the NFL situation so we can provide more precise guidance."


For those of you who don't deal with this sort of thing, "guidance" basically means "documentation that forecasts the earnings of our company". EA is required to report this information, but they've chosen to push that report back to May.. which seems to indicate that SWTOR won't be around before May.

"Western markets, you know we estimate that the leading competitor has six-ish million subscribers, paying subscribers, and that they've got approximately half of the market that seems to be growing in the five percent per annum based on the number of subscribers. So call it 12 million people paying for subscription based gaming in the way that we review as competition...."


I find this very, very interesting. According to this:

- Half the population of WoW is located in the Eastern market.
- The MMO market consists of about 12 million people, and grows by 5% annually.
- That half of the available market (6 million people) play MMO's other than WoW.
- The entire western MMO market is worth $2.8 billion dollars per year.

....We've previously indicated that sort of a million subscribers or more rings our bell, that's very well for us economically. So it's our view that we can be very successful without fundamentally challenging the market leader, cause we think we'll probably hit the smaller competitors harder when we get out there....


With a million subs and standard pricing, SWTOR would clock $240 million in the first year. Maybe I've spent too much time talking with nerds about MMO's, but it seems to me that this is a point that most people miss. SWTOR doesn't have to be a "WoW killer" to be successful. According to this all they need is 1/12th of WoW's western population.

I agree completely with his assumption that SWTOR will suck subscribers from non-WoW MMOs first. WoW subscribers are hardcore, and they're very "plugged in" to what's going into Azeroth. People in WoW have Night Elf Hunters they've been playing for 6 years, a time investment they are not easily willing to give up. It's much more likely that they will pull people out of games like LOTRO, Age of Conan, Champions Online, and DCUO. It will be interesting to see how this affects Eve Online. Eve Online is about space stuff, but it's also about doing a lot of math in spreadsheets and other kinds of things that you're just not going to be doing in SWTOR.

....Of course we have no particular ambition to be a distant number two, our ambitions are higher than that, but we've throttled back a little bit relative to our financial projections."


Probably a good call. If you over-earn people aren't going to complain as much.

"I think what you're pointing to is it might be getting tired after so many years. I don't know that to be the case. I have not seen them announce that their western market numbers are coming down. But I do think that the market would be absolutely receptive to something fresh and new and differentiated. If you will, lightsabers vs. swords. I think there's a marketplace for us here and we're going at it aggressively."


Good Gravy, I'm agreeing with Riccitiello again. Is the world turned upside down? Are pigs flying? Has hell frozen over?

I agree entirely with his assessment of the MMO market, and furthermore I think SWTOR will make them tons of money in the eastern markets as well.