Now that’s a flashback. Rez was originally released by Sega for the Dreamcast and PS2 in 2001, and has just arrived on the Xbox 360 Arcade in an HD version. Rez is a rail shooter, but a musical one, a dated-yet-awesome musical one. It’s like Tron at a rave, with trance beats, iTunes-visualizer-esque visuals and a flying through cybertunnels, cyberhacking the network backstory. Rez’ creator is Tetsuya Mizuguchi, and you can read an interview with him at Game|Life here.
Notably, Rez was the game for which the Trance Vibrator peripheral was released.
I’ve almost played through the first three levels, and I would qualify this game as bitchin’ awesome hot shit. It’s original, easy to control, fun, and synesthesiatastic. At 800 Microsoft pesos, or around $10, I’d say it’s worth the cash, if only as a utility for inducing bliss – or possibly vomit – after a hard night out.
I’m a hardcore Civ player. I’ve been playing it since the first version, and I’ve tried every iteration of it. While I love the game, and think it has perhaps the most educational potential of any existing franchise, of course there are problems. The game is crack, first off. I can play most games for two hours and walk away no problem. But I often avoid even starting a game of Civ because I’ll have trouble stopping. I can lose an entire weekend to the bastard. Part of the problem is there are no goal-oriented stopping points, like the end of a level in another game. It’s all one continuous process until the game is over, which can be 12 hours easily.
Secondly, despite changes in each successive version to address this, Civ still requires way too much micromanagement. As of Civ IV, you can automate city management and production and the activities of workers, but when it comes to war, you’re on your own. Once you’re fighting a war, your turns can take ages since you have to move every unit manually. Also, you’ll probably want to manually control unit production, too. This is especially annoying when you didn’t even start the war, it was those damned Egyptians acting irrationally again.
That’s another issue. Again, despite gradual improvements, rival civilization AI could use some work, if only to make the diplomacy minigame more true to life. And finally, the game has ideological problems, mostly due to the valuation of different government and economic models. But hell, I can suspend disbelief to play the game.
It sounds like some of these issues are being addressed. With Revolution, the goal is a 3 hour game length, which is awesome. Apparently workers and city improvements are now automated completely, which is good. I have not seen any reports of the diplomatic game changing significantly, however, and despite improvements to the ‘army’ meta-unit, it doesn’t sound like there’s enough military automation either. But we’ll see, in april hopefully!
There was an MLG contest to make the best maps in Halo 3’s Forge, and the winners have been posted=. There are some interesting looking things there, and I hope to try some out tonight.
Toku and I have really been freaking out in Forge of late. There’s a real dungeon master appeal there, and it’s pretty addictive.
So D and I have been going a little nuts with Forge and Foundry in Halo 3. Together we created a map that every Geek must do at one point or another, an interpretation of Helm’s Deep. We set it up as a capture the flag map with loads of heavy artillery, man-cannons and even an exploding wall (which is way to much fun to commit suicide on.)
My only gripe with it. It’s a HUGE pain in the ass to get anything straight with the tools you are given. It’s like drawing engineering schematics using a crayon taped to the end of a ten-foot pole.
I am really hoping to try a game one day that involves a team slayer match wherein each side has their own “creator” that has to quickly provide a base and weapons.
maybe that’s just my dream…