Post of the Day: 2.20.2009

Gaming renaissance happening now?

A Few Things

This is more of an "update" post than anything else. I've got a few gaming-related things going on in the near future to talk about. Remember back around the time Fable 2 hit shelves, Peter Molyneux mentioned somewhere (can't find a link, I suck at Google) that one of his hopes with the game was to make it easy to pick up and play for non-gamers. This also might explain why, in general, the game was very easy, but I won't get into my thoughts on that at the moment. Needless to say, that piqued my interest at the time, and over the last few months I've been considering this idea.

What I want to do is get my wife, who really isn't a gamer but she has dabbled in a few (and helped me out on a few while I was playing) to actually play a small amount of a variety of games and write a bit about them. It wouldn't be a review of the game, it would be more of her thoughts on how accessible the game is for her, as a non-gamer - what she liked, what she didn't, would she continue playing it and why. As I mentioned in an earlier post, she recently played through the entirety of Flower and wants to go back for more (to get all the trophies), so perhaps that would be her first subject. Needless to say, she may be guest blogging here from time to time. We shall see.

Switching gears a bit, a few weeks ago I started getting together with some friends to play Rock Band on a fairly regular basis. This weekend I'm going to change things up a bit and invite a few people over to play Halo 3. I'll likely have enough info to actually write a review of the game, as well, after that play session. My brother and I spent quite a bit of time playing online with that game last weekend and I'm surprisingly eager for more action.

Finally, Star Ocean: The Last Hope releases next week, on Tuesday February 24. I'll likely be playing that game very heavily the first week or two, so a review should come fairly soon after release. I've already read one official review for the game - in Game Informer magazine - and it didn't impress me much. That is to say, the way they reviewed it didn't impress me. They rated the game a seven out of ten (with a "second opinion" of 7.75). Their qualms were with the story and dialog mostly, but what they said about it is kind of what I like about some Japanese RPGs - occasionally cheesy dialog and mildly cliché story points. Frankly, I don't see anything wrong with that. Star Ocean 3 was that way, and I loved that game. So, its possible that this not-so-great review of the game makes me want to play it even more. I know, I'm a bit of an oddball.

Flower Impresses

Everyone has been talking about the PSN game that isn't a game (or is it?) recently. That game, of course, is Flower - a very artistic, zen-like experience that you will either love or hate. I finally got around to downloading it over the weekend, except I didn't play it. I'm still trying (and usually failing horribly) to get my wife into some game - any game. (Useless trivia: I got her to play a one-on-one match in Halo 3 with me…and she vowed never to play the game again.)

So, I downloaded Flower and, instead of playing it myself, I handed the controller to her and let her play it. She covered the first couple levels the other night and just finished it up this morning. What does she think of the whole experience? I'm not sure, I haven't talked to her much. However, I'm attempting to get her to write a column for this blog explaining her experience with various games - with a non-gamer wife point of view (more to come on this in the future). If or when that time arrives, we will see what she thought of Flower in a post on this blog. What I know now is that she enjoyed it and was rather impressed with it - and that's saying a lot.