February 28, 2007 - Revisions
It's been a bit of a chore retooling some of the older pages and articles
on the Laser for our upgraded layout over the past few days, but I was
able to find a couple of older articles I almost forgot about and rewrote
and changed them with some minor updates. I've actually found some nice
gems in there, with some stuff I almost forgot about. One of the key
advantages of online publishing is that it allows you to make revisions
and changes almost effortlessly. It's cool that I can go back and
take a second look at some of these older titles I reviewed when I first
began the site and see how perceptions have changed over the years. Of
course, a lot of games I thought were great at the time haven't held up
that well, but that's just part of life in the gamesphere. Some of the
stuff I wrote is kind of embarrassing on a technical level, with too many
typos and errors that somehow got through the cracks. While the rawness
has some appeal, I think smoothing out the edges makes for a better
experience for you readers out there.
February
23, 2007 - Flashback
This week, we're starting a new weekly feature looking back at the best
and most memorable games of all time. I can think of no better place to
start than with Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, one of the best
installments in the series that has definitely held a firm place in
gamers' hearts for the past decade. It's definitely one of the most
influential, highly sought after and talked-about games ever released.
Symphony has also set the stage for the many subsequent hand-held
master-pieces and its influence can be felt all the way through last
year's Portrait of Ruin on the DS. We hope you enjoy this new column on
the Laser, and don't forget to click on the 'classic' button to your left
for more retro fun.
February
19, 2007 - PS3 to PS1 to PSP
It's been a strange couple of days, since I've actually gotten a bit
more into the PS3 lately, which is due to a pair of recent purchases. I
picked up two of the launch titles cheaply at a thrift store and while
some of this might feel a bit duplicative, I thought I'd offer a couple of
first impressions for your amusement. The first game I picked up was NBA
07, the somewhat better than expected basketball title from SCEA which
features some pretty impressive graphics with the usual gameplay
mechanics. The real fun I had was playing the mini-game bonus modes, such
as around the court mode and stuff. NBA 07's ingame music is really
annoying and obnoxious, but you can turn it off relatively quickly. The
other title I picked up was a used copy of Need For Speed Carbon. I
already played and reviewed the Xbox 360 version of the game, but the PS3
version is slightly different since it supports the motion sensing
controller a bit. Visually, Carbon stays about even with the 360 version,
and features all the modes of that version. The biggest advantage of the
PS3 edition is that logging and playing online is a bit easier since you
don't need a special account and can connect wirelessly. Lots of fun
playing battles with others online, and you earn extra points for doing
this. In closing, I'd probably rate both games a B or B-, which isn't bad
considering I paid about half going retail for them. At the other end of
the spectrum, I picked up a nice mint copy of Total Eclipse Turbo for the
PS1 which looks surprisingly nice considering it's age, though the
simplistic gameplay wasn't enough to hold me for very long. I've also been
playing a lot of Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters, which looks like a
solid title and should please fans of the series. No doubt, there was a
strange Playstation-themed weekend.
February
16, 2007 - Another Week
It hasn't been the busiest of weeks around here, as the February
doldrums hit full force again. Things started off slowly as the week began
with a dearth of new releases and while a few games came in, there's
really not that much going on in the gaming world now. The biggest release
of the past week was probably Ratchet & Clank: Size Matters. While I
haven't played enough of the game to really form an opinion, my early
impressions of the title are positive. Onto other gaming news, it looks
like the PS3 is finally opening up a bit more online content, with next
week a key moment as Flow, Tekken and a few other things finally look
ready to arrive. After reading this month's brutal EGM cover story, it
almost makes you want to give up, sell the thing back to Gamestop and move
onto other things. Of course, that would be stupid with so many awesome
games right around the corner. Ironically enough, EGM also had a
complimentary story about marketers who use online forums to cause FUD on
their opponents, I wonder if the two are related. In other, much happier
news, I heard from two long time video game faneds this week for the first
time in probably many years. We send a big shout out to both of you: Andy
Saito and Benjamin Leatherman! Good to hear from both of you, thanks!
February
11, 2007 - Dots
Small-minded people surround the facts and things they don't
understand - they need to know, they have to know. But, the sad thing is,
when they find out the answer, which is usually standing right in front of
them, they don't really understand it. The stand underneath the sunlight
and wonder where the warmth is coming from, all the while refusing to look
up in the skies. You can talk slowly, in great detail or quickly merely
grazing over the facts, but there's really nothing you can do to make them
pay attention and realize what's really happening. You can see a field of
stars but see only darkness polka dotted by distant lights, while other
imagine entire worlds, and galaxies waiting to be discovered within these
worlds.
Over the years, a lot of visitors have come and asked me what or where the
origins of this site began. I've tried to come up with explanations and
revealed a few glimpses occasionally, but I don't think I'm really
comfortable with this line of thought. Why does every thing need an
explanation anyway? It's just the way things are now -everyone wants
answers, but no one seems to have the capacity to imagine - everything
needs to be taken literally, which is a fairly sad situation if you ask
me. I don't know the inner workings of everything I see or do or read.
There's much to be said for keeping at least a little bit of mystery in
life, and that's all you really need to understand. If you spend your life
trying to explain yourself, you'll rapidly find that path leads
nowhere.
If you realize that there are certain experiences and things that are much
more interesting if they remain mysterious, where the light itself is the
point, and is in itself what is courting you, like a shared smile of
love and beautiful thoughts, you'll better be able to really come to
comprehend that points and dots are more than the summation of their
implements. You can look at these broken pieces but miss the sharp edges.
When you walk alone, and the wind blows, and you hear or see something,
it's not always necessary to write it down and ponder the meaning - once
in awhile you just need to enjoy the moment. If that makes you uneasy and
you need every last polka-dot explained in encyclopedic detail, you're
probably not in the right space to understand these messages she has sent
to us from beyond the stars.
The next year was 1983 when games like
Xevious and Arabian came along with a few others like Congo Bongo, Buck
Rogers: Planet of Zoom and Donkey Kong Junior. each one came with a
new set of challenges. There was a special, almost surreal energy to games
back then that seemed to come and go as sensations and fads seem to. Many
of these titles live again and again on compilations and emulators,
allowing me to at least, catch a glimmer of the world I once had back
then. It was around the end of this time that I began having these strange
dreams. At first I didn't really know what was happening, they seemed
rather vague shadows, outlines of what would happen much later on. I still
remember the first time I saw her eyes, staring back at in my reflection
somewhere between the Star Castle and Berzerk cabinets. She began as a
shadow, a glimpse here and there but became more real as they months and
years went by. The dreams come and go, varying with intensity and meaning,
I still haven't figured out exactly who she is or what she means. Each
time I see her, it feels like a connection to that long ago time has been
re-established, and every time she appears, it reminds me of how I felt
back then.
February
6, 2007 - Invasion
Her eyes remained fixed on his every
movement, but he was unaware of this aside from a few fleeting moments
from time to time. He found himself swimming through the air in jet
streams, far above the surface turned brown and orange by years of
catastrophe and contamination, poisoned waters became undrinkable, like an
electronic concoction. The models and graphs seemed to be coming true,
along with the visions that haunted him since he was a child. Hunting him
through years, almost unchanging, he found himself running constantly away
while always wondering what it was he feared exactly.
While the endless self-absorption of the property owners became almost
understandable, there was still a sense that the end was closer than
anyone realized. At long last, the unprotected atmosphere
finally collapsed under its own weight, done in by a combination of
pollution, indifference and contempt for the media matched only by the
indifference of the walking robots that populated this virtual world. Was
this a sign of a divine manifestation or merely the glow of long standing
madness that became an almost inevitable falling? This question haunted
him for many years. Meanwhile, in a cocktail bar in another region
of the world, the taps filled with the light of computerized consoles, mixed with citrus juices
and artificial food coloring to seem more palatable. When the crash
happened, it felt like freedom. The vacation finally came and was well-earned, allowing a sense of rest not seen since before the dawn of
the digital era.
Watching the envelope fold in on itself
after finally being pushed too far, the walled-off observers began to assemble a package of thought provoking reports,
insightful analysis and self-congratulatory chest-beating until, they too
realized that the future was a trick they had played on themselves, something that would consume them as
well. Soon, that distant signpost would become an ever-shrinking spec in
the mirror. Today's wonder is tomorrow's curiosity. No one knew this
better than Jake did. A writer for the video game supersite, who watched
game systems come and go with a
steady gaze for many years, becoming ever smarter with an almost
prodigious sense of what would succeed and what wouldn't last, to the
point where his astute predictions seemed almost eerie to the other forum
posters who only knew him as jake1991. Once the strands of the web fell
apart from each other, untangled and separated, he found himself
lost, as if the previous 15 years of his life were an irrelevant dream, as
meaningless and pointless as a price reduction rumor or a gratuitous
feature on Japanese box art.
This was exactly as it seemed. The world slept until at last she came with
her armies. With her mesmerizing gaze -
able to see right through all of them, all of their manipulations, all of
their lies, their games, their plans, their transparency, their false
hoods. An endless addiction to emulation, able to see and hear the past
but never able to understand or comprehend - a reproduction merely numbers
inside the waters of an old fish tank, as foul and polluted as the minds
clouded under the spell. They were so busy trying to
unravel the wires that entangled them they forgot to focus on what was on
the ends of those wires - what they connected to and where they connected.
This is what mattered, not whether someone was the first one to jump on
some press release announcing a forgotten game or who was the first to
post a sarcastic quip.
The names have long since been
forgotten, but the message was abundantly clear: an age of fear came
crashing down almost immediately. There would be no going back. Humanity
would have to look to its technology to evolve, it would have to submerge
inside its technology and re-emerge changed, superior in some ways - while
losing some important things in the process. There was a sense, under the lightning red sky that the society that
had given rise to paranoia and despair began to collapse. As Gameine had
predicted in 1994, the prophecy had become manifest
and all those in its path were powerless to prevent its emergence. They
could do nothing as the mysterious phantoms
arrived from beyond the furthest reaches of all human comprehension. It
was the same dream, in slightly modified form that seemed to crop up again
and again, sometimes reassuring but mostly disturbing. What he remembered
most were the penetrating stares from faces that seemed to come from
beyond anything he could explain. She was a constant - immediately
recognizable yet completely incomprehensible. As dawn approached, the
dream ended. Slowly fading from memory as only vague outlines remained,
snippets of color, echoes of faces melted under the first morning
sunlight. It was as real as concrete but elusive like a falling leaf.
February
2, 2007 - Quiet
Things have been a bit quiet around the electronic gaming industry
lately, though we're in the hangover after two system launches and the
holiday season. Big announcements usually wait for later in the year. In
the meantime, a good strategy is to enjoy what you already have, and
that's precisely what I've been up to - there's a lot to play even in the
slow spot of winter. I have a couple of Xbox 360 titles that I've been
meaning to play like Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Rainbow Six Vegas
that I wanted to delve deeper into but lacked the time to do during the
holiday season. There's a few big releases coming up at the end of the
month, like VF5 and Winning Eleven which should hopefully fill the void
coming up. The new console release schedules are slim pickings lately,
with the biggest release Warioware on Wiii, which is kind of an indication
of just how slow things have gotten. The spring seems filled with promise
with God of War II, Heavenly Sword and Forza 2 on the way. Unusually, this
year seems a bit like a hangover from the excitement of last season, which
gives it a kind of an odd vibe. It's a good time to play catch up and
focus a bit more on adding some more titles to the Turbografx collection,
at least for me. You can't really do much else these days. It's a bit of a
strange time for me, anyway. On the Laser front, after a disastrous 2006
things are looking up a little bit this year, though I can't really count
on anything anymore - it's a one day kind of feel. In all honesty, it's
still hard to keep this going, and days can be hard sometimes, but I'd
like to thank all of you for sticking with me until now, despite the hard
times we've had in the past year. I apologize for last year's spotty
updates and chaotic redesigns. Hopefully, we'll make up for last year's
shenanigans with better coverage and more articles this year. I can't
promise anything, unexpected things can happen, as you know, but I'll try
hard to keep things on a more steady pace in 2007.
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