Thursday, February 12, 2009

House of the Dead: Overkill (a.k.a. Country Fried Zombie) Impressions

Uh.....okay.

Many of us expected for the next entry in the House of the Dead franchise to be a PS3 or X360 port of the arcade smash House of the Dead 4. But we'd be wrong --- very wrong. Rather than deciding to work on a HD port of an existing arcade game, Sega decided to grant the franchise license to Western developer Headstrong Games in order to craft an original entry on the Wii. Uh-oh.

Well, the results, as expected, are decidedly mixed. Rather than following the same format as the previous games in the series, this one has a distinct grindhouse feel, from "feature presentation" loading screens to the over-the-top narrator and deliberate "film grain" cutscenes. The writing is also abysmal (as par for the course for the series), but in a different way. Any character in the game can't say more than two sentences without dropping an F-bomb or a reference to innuendo, incest, or toilet humor. Particularly African-American detective Isaac Washington. His speech and attitude in the game ("typical angry black man" stereotype) isn't really doing much for African-American representation in video games - and it's not funny. Additionally, since the game takes place in Bayou City, Louisiana, there are a ton of references to offensive Southern stereotypes as well (trailer parks, incest, etc.)... being a 'Yankee' myself, I found it funny for about two seconds before it just got old. Now don't get me wrong here - none of this content offended me, it just seems brutally forced. This is the kind of content that drunken college students would find hilarious, but most people would find unnecessary.

The gameplay itself attempts to emulate House of the Dead while adding a few additional features. Unfortunately, for some reason, the game lost its "tight" arcade feel in the transition to this new development team, and the game manages to feel more like Umbrella Chronicles than House of the Dead. The engine the game is running on is capable, and throws far more zombies at you than either HotD 2 or 3 provided (particularly towards the end of the game), but the tradeoff is that framerate issues are fairly common, particularly in two-player mode. The new features, the "mo-fo slow mo" that slows the game down to provide more opportunity for headshots along with the grenades from HotD4 add a bit of strategy as far as racking up the points is concerned, but don't do a whole lot for fans of the original games.

The game looks good (for Wii) but lacks fluidity. It's certainly a labor of love, and as such I do not regret the purchase. However - a warning for HotD purists out there - this game isn't what you expect and it will probably take a while to grow on you...

Monday, February 9, 2009

Connections ( コネ )

This will be a little different than most entries I write, because it's a bit more personal. Those of you who actually know me that are reading this, know that over the last couple of years I had to make a couple of really hard decisions as to the direction my life was going to take. More recently, in the last few months I managed to dodge a ridiculously wide-sweeping layoff that caught a lot of friends and acquaintances off guard. Quite a few people I know are getting uprooted against their will, so in some ways I suppose I can say I'm lucky.

Now with my second annual trip to Japan taking place in a couple of months, I begin to realize something. Although Japan isn't much better in the jobs sector than America at the moment, I've managed, in my time at IBM Rochester, to connect with not one but two different organizations within IBM Japan along with another company outside of IBM due to family business connections. I'm meeting with all three of these groups when I go to Japan, on a purely social basis. It's going to be a blast.

The way I was brought up was to never burn bridges, and I really do want to end up in a job where I can indeed travel to Japan on business occasionally. And having these kinds of connections can't hurt. If I did end up getting hit by the axe, I probably would have tried for JET this year, because I think I have the qualifications to actually get in. But since I'm still employed and the job market is still so tumultuous, I've decided against taking any leaves of absence at least until things settle down. In the meantime I intend to grow my network as much as possible. These are great people that I'm getting to know, and I'm definitely up for opening as many doors as possible towards what could possibly be a dream made reality.

In some ways, not moving out west was actually a better decision. I'm not kidding myself - yeah, it would have been great working for the Regginator at Nintendo. But I gotta say, I think I'm building more Japanese connections from inside IBM than I could ever build there. Weird, I know...

Sunday, February 8, 2009

Japan is a GO

Just finished making arrangements for my trip to Tokyo in April. Expect many blog entries and even more interesting pictures this time around...

In the meantime, my next targeted review is Street Fighter IV. Look forward to it.