Late Night Consoling
Yesterday, after somewhere around eight hours of gameplay, I inadvertently wandered into a bug in Legacy of Kain: Defiance. Had I realized it at first, this would not have been a problem, but unfortunately I kept playing, oblivious to the fact that I had basically shot myself in the foot. It's pretty common in the game that doors will be inaccessible while you fight against enemies. Walls will block them, mystical barriers will show up, and so on. Well in this one part of the eighth level of the game, I fought some enemies, and the barriers didn't disappear. But I was still able to leave the room, so I figured there was nothing wrong. Alas, that wasn't the case. As I discovered after about another hour of gameplay, those barriers were still in place, and I couldn't get back to where I needed to be. And because I had been saving at every checkpoint, I no longer had a save game from before the glitch. But I refused to give in to this game's bugginess, and so I started over. Were it not for the holiday I probably never would have done this, but I had lots of time to spend doing nothing but playing games, and earlier this evening I reached the beginning of the eighth level again, only this time I did it in just over four hours. Not bad at all (although of course I skipped all the cut scenes and already knew the solution to all the puzzles). Still, life is hard for a Legacy of Kain fan. I put up with so much from this franchise, that it seems like every game I have to ask myself why on earth I still play these things. And yet I'm sure if they ship another buggy, repetitive game I'll be first in line to buy it. Although I say that now before I've finished Defiance...it may end on a note that causes me to leave and never come back.
| Swanky New Sony Icon Tonight's so slow that the biggest news I could come up with is the new Sony icon haiku threw together, which assuming everyone likes, will replace the largely disliked four buttons icon. Since Sony doesn't actually have a mascot, we've gone with the head of AIBO, the robotic dog. While technically this isn't game related, I'd be surprised if future iterations weren't able to directly interact with the PSP and/or PlayStation3. |
| Mystery System Wireless? A brief write up at The Magic Box reports that in the Japanese newspaper Daily Mainichi, Nintendo president Saturo Iwata mentioned that their new, mystery system, which is not a successor to either the GameCube or GBA, will contain "wireless data communication via radio." No word on whether or not this means it'll use the same pager technology as the recently announced GBA wireless adapter, although since we don't have a clue what this thing is in the first place, speculating about how it interacts with the GBA is pretty pointless anyway. |
| MTV's "Game of the Millennium" Poll MTV has opened up a poll for readers to vote on the "Game of the Millennium", which isn't particularly accurate, since you'll be voting for whole series in most cases (IE: vote for Super Mario (Series), Final Fantasy (Series), etc). The winner will be announced tomorrow night at 8:00 PM during their Ultimate Video Game Countdown. Sadly there's no way to write-in your own, so if you want to vote for anything not listed (which includes heavy hitters like Street Fighter and Sonic the Hedgehog among others) you're out of luck. |
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| Donkey Kong Retrospective 1UP has posted another one of their character retrospectives, this time taking a walk down memory lane with everyone's favorite bizarrely named monkey, Donkey Kong. Like their recent Pac-Man retrospective, this brief article has pictures of classic kitsch along with trivia factoids. |
| AC/DC: The Game With no other real news tonight, here's a fun look at a game that never was, courtesy of Atari Age (and insert credit for pointing me there). The game in question is AC/DC: Defenders of Metal (a name that conjures up more memories of Bill & Ted than I really need), which would have been a fine addition to the Jaguar lineup, and well...you have to go read the description. It's insane, making the actually produced games Michael Jackson's Moonwalker and Revolution-X (the Aerosmith game) look like classics (actually, Moonwalker both were surprisingly good games, especially Moonwalker). |
| Misc. Media/Previews | |
| GameSpy goes hands-on with Gran Turismo 4 Prologue (PS2), The Magic Box has new shots from Armored Core Nexus (PS2), Planet GameCube goes hands-on with DreamMix TV World Fighters (GC, PS2), CVG has new shots from Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes (GC) and 1UP has a new preview of Killzone (PS2). |
