Back in April I wrote a bit about a few of the games that I was looking forward to most this year. That article has remained pretty popular over the months, and since the future which that feature referred to is now, I thought I would do a follow-up. A few gaming trade shows, a major merger of two gaming juggernauts and a development delay or two later, not quite all of the games on my list have been released yet, but I have gotten my hands on several.

Let’s revisit these in order, shall we?
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You can’t really have a list of cheap games without mentioning 3rd-party modifications, widely known as “mods” for short. A game not considered cheap might suddenly become a value proposition when combined with a strong mod community. Mods themselves are cheap, but they require the original game on which they’re built. In this case, you’ll need Portal.

Portal: Prelude is a full, lengthy campaign, set before the events in Portal. It was developed mostly by a small team of three living in Europe. It came as quite a surprise when it was announced shortly before its release, something very unusual in the mod community. The intent was to create a much more challenging Portal experience while retaining the atmosphere. This differs from other map packs in that those focus purely on the puzzles.
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Episode one is here.

From civil-protection.blogspot.com

Think the choice for this month is a good fit…

Drop Dead Sexy

This month’s artist lives right in my own neighborhood of the Los Angeles area. He does wonderful and interesting things on the digital front of art. He’s a vector artist who takes simple forms and turns out complex things with the vectoring heaven of artisty. He tends to focus on things of dark nature mixed with the female form, and out comes something that will leave you longing for a taste of sinful pleasures. The horned demonic women depicted in his pieces stood out to me, other than the intricate and hypnotizing designs that make up the frequent backgrounds in his work.
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I wanted to quickly share with you a video that has me geeking out. This is a video of a Lunar Lander Challenge in which Armadillo Aerospace competes with TrueZer0 for a prize of $350,000. Armadillo Aerospace is a private aerospace group that was founded in 2000 by John Carmack. Carmack is co-founder and lead programmer at id Software, a pioneer in the gaming industry which has developed such games as Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake and are currently developing Rage. I’m no rocket scientist (har), so I’m not sure how unique an accomplishment this actually is in the world of privatized aerospace, but I still think it’s pretty damn cool to watch.

Back in July, shortly after I started offering regular Comic Tips, I recommended everybody check out Rasl, a psychedelic sci-fi comic written and drawn by Jeff Smith with covers by Steve Hamaker. I just want to sent out a reminder that issue #3 finally dropped with the 10/15/08 week of comics. Up to this point it would appear that the book has been on a schedule of four months/issue. Unfortunately, at the back of issue #3 is an ad saying that the next issue won’t be dropping March of 2009. Thus, it looks like four months has now been stretched out to five, but it’s well worth the wait. Things really start to pick up in issue #3 and you start to get a good idea of what’s going on with Rasl, the extra-dimensional art thief.

With such an unfortunate release schedule as two to three times a year, I am worried that interest for Rasl will dwindle and it would cease to exist. Don’t let that happen! If you need a little bit more of a nudge, you can check out a five page preview of Rasl #3 over at Boneville, Jeff Smith’s website.

If you’re a reader or listener of ExtraLife you’ve probably heard of Scott Johnson’s gaming podcast Final Score. You also know it’s been on hiatus for a good many months. Recently he put out a call for people with recording ability and a gaming-related story to tell. I decided I’d give it a shot, so I wrote some stuff down, opened up Audacity and recorded a story. I sent him my submission, and apparently he liked it. My story is featured on the premiere episode of the re-launch of Final Score. It’s pretty corny but it’s a true story from several years back that I look back on fondly and often. Anyway, check it out, I am at the tail end of the show.

I’ve been a little bit out of whack this week so I don’t have a full feature to share. Hopefully a short status update will suffice!

I have been playing a lot of LEGO Batman, mainly. You may recall that it is one of the games I was looking forward to most this year. It’s very fun and has more content than I could have anticipated. On the RPG front I have started playing Rogue Galaxy on PS2 and on my DS I am continuing to chug along in Luminous Arc. Somewhere along the way I seemed to trip and fall into Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, also on my DS. I’m enjoying all of these but with the distractions of home renovations happening all day and the anxiety of soon-to-be-due school work I have not been able to shift my focus to DoSu this week.

I do have a short video to share, however. Running through various levels in Free Play mode of LEGO Batman for red bricks and canisters (gotta collect’em all), I came across a fun glitch. It involves Mr. Freeze, an innocent bystander and an inifinite supply of LEGO bits. If anybody else is playing, I’m curious to know if this can be duplicated on the console versions (I play on PC, of course).

Video game lore that extends beyond the games themselves, specifically through comic books, has traditionally been disastrous. With the high volume of video game comics these days, however, there are bound to be a few hits. For instance, I found that The Darkness Levels comics released just prior to the video game’s console debut in the summer of 2007 complimented it nicely and enriched my experience when I played through the game. Conversely, I had a bad run-in with the World of Warcraft comic and its lack of substance. Then again, as evidenced by the Halo comic, sometimes a venture into the wonderful world of sequential art can fail simply by being tardy; Issue #1 released in August of 2007 with #2 arriving that following November. We didn’t see issue #3 until August of 2008, a year after the series started. Disaster!

Unbeknownst to me until very recently, a manga based on the Ace Attorney series of video games have been coming out in Japan since 2007. Fortunately for us fans, Capcom has a hit on their hands and in September of 2008 they, along with Del Rey Manga, brought it to the western world under the name Official Casebook Vol. 1: The Phoenix Wright Files.
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A game can turn out to be a failure for any number of reasons. Maybe a game is like Beyond Good & Evil where it gets lost in the shuffle of bigger releases for years before being properly appreciated. Maybe you’re a developer who’s too close to his game to recognize fundamental flaws in certain aspects of its design, as was reportedly the case with Lair. Or maybe you’re like today’s cheap game, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and you just got a bad rap.

Originally released by Ubisoft in October of 2006 and developed by Arkane Studios, Dark Messiah didn’t have the luxury of blaming its less-than-stellar reception on other, more hyped games coming out along side it. 2006 wasn’t bad for games, but I don’t think Splinter Cell: Double Agent or Marvel Ultimate Alliance were what kept people from playing Dark Messiah at the end of October. No, Dark Messiah’s failing was primarily due to little more than a buggy launch that earned it a bad reputation. Alas, even the demo was plagued by bugs, so the game was leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths before it was even released. Despite what must have been a very frustrating launch for Ubisoft, DMMM has since been patched up quite nicely as well as had some hefty price reductions.
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