I'm gonna wreck it!

If you are a video gamer like me and grew up playing video games in the arcade, on the Nintendo Entertainment System, or any other system, stop what you're doing right now and go see the movie Wreck-It Ralph.

Right now.

Because this movie is cleverly written, touching at times, humorous, and full of nostalgia. It's a crazy ride, but not cheesy at all. Think of it like a Toy Story of arcade games, where the game characters themselves have actual lives. (There, that's my mini-review. I'm a video game blogger, not a movie reviewer, and I don't want to spoil too much.)

Anyway, the movie focuses mostly on the "games" that were created just for this movie:

• Fix-It Felix Jr., the 8-bit platformer from yesteryear. Of course, this is where the main character of the movie plays as the underappreciated villain.
• Heroes' Duty, the metaphoric ultra-violent first-person shooter. Like Halo. Even Ralph is shaken by the action as he asks, "When did video games get so violent and scary?!?"
• Sugar Rush, the go-kart racing game that just shouts Japanese style Harajuku. Clearly based on Mario Kart.

Most of the characters from actual video games like Zangief, M.Bison, Sonic, and Q*Bert just have cameos to varying degrees. Watching them make their appearances is just part of the fun.

Now if you don't mind me, I'm going to start up my arcade nostalgia application MAME and play the following games from the movie:

• Q*Bert
• (Root Beer) Tapper
• Pac-Man

One more thing. The movie also had a reference to Metal Gear. Come on, now you HAVE to go watch it!

P.S. - By the way, this movie also reminds me of an old cartoon series from the 90's called ReBoot, which was also set in the virtual world of video games. That cartoon was groundbreaking in that it was one of the first to be animated with 3D CGI.

Bringing role-playing back into online role-playing games

If you're not a fan of role-playing games, particularly World of Warcraft, you can skip this ...

My new Pandaren Monk, Tenchusatsu

I bought the latest expansion pack for World of Warcraft called Mists of Pandaria. It's like WoW meets Kung Fu Panda, except that WoW came up with that concept long before the Dreamworks movie made it into theaters.

But rather than fill my general gaming blog with tons and tons of WoW posts, I decided to create a new blog where I play the role of my new Pandaren monk character, Tenchusatsu. You can follow the posts here:

New blog: Storm Winds Across Azeroth

Putting the R and the P back into RPG

A quick word about this ever-popular genre of games. If you're a gaming geek like me, have you noticed that role-playing games these days have lost the concept of actual role-playing? Players will just level up as quick as they can, then play on and on doing the same quests and killing the same virtual bad guys ad nauseum so that they can keep winning the same virtual rewards. What fun is being in a whole different world if you just treat it like another j-o-b?

It's all about expanding your imagination, escaping reality and being in a world where the story not only unfolds as you continue playing, but YOU have a real hand in creating the story, even in ways the game developers never imagined.

Now as with all blogs that I do, I'm not really expecting a huge audience. All I'm doing is trying my hand at creative writing just for the sake of it. If no one but my wife and I read this and enjoy it, that's all I need, especially years from now when I look back at what I posted and remember fond memories of having fun.

But hopefully I'll get a small audience to follow me, and that would also be worth the time and energy I put into this. It sure beats just playing the game and getting bored with the same old same old, that's for sure.

Avengers Alliance: Best Facebook game yet

There are a lot of games coming up, so it's time I restarted my blog to keep up. Since this is a gaming journal of sorts, I want to make sure I have all the games I've played this year covered.

First up, the Facebook game Avengers Alliance.

TLDR

(For every review of a game in my blog, I'll have a TLDR section, which stands for "Too long, didn't read." Here I'll have a very short abstract of the review.)

Avengers Alliance is the best Facebook game I've played. It has a good storyline, and it really appeals to nerdy fans of Marvel comics like me. I give it an 85/100.

Avengers Assemble!

This game, based not only on the hugely successful Avengers movie of this year, but also on most of the Marvel Universe, is pretty much a free-to-play Facebook game. It's in the same genre of "social network" games as Farmville or Cityville from Zynga. That means you can play the game solo for a while, but to really progress, you need friends. (Friends give you "social currency" in the game, which is required to progress. Without friends, said currency comes much more slowly.)

Fortunately for me, I happen to have at least one friend who is actively playing the game with me, though we didn't really plan it that way. I don't even think I ever sent him a Facebook message about the game, or even a message saying, "Yo what's up? Haven't seen you in a while. Oh by the way how are you liking the Avengers game that we're playing?" I really should, though.

Map of friend's city, where I can collect daily rewards

The good thing is that this game is better than the time I played Cityville. That game required me to keep adding more and more active friends to progress. I think I had up to five or six friends playing that game for a while, but then most of them quit after a while, and then I had to as well. Avengers Alliance is different because I can just keep going with one active friend.

I have other inactive friends that I've connected to in-game, but just the connection itself also helps me. (That's why I also got my wife to play the game a little bit. She doesn't have to keep playing, and I'll benefit from being connected to her.)

The greatest heores on Earth

I'm a big Marvel fan, so it's a lot of fun for me to hire some of my favorite heroes, level them up, and use their powers against bad guys, some of them well-known villains from the Marvel universe. Here are a few of my favorites:

Tony Stark, the man, the legend

Iron Man is one of the first heroes I get. He's also one of the "main characters" in the whole storyline, probably because he is now the most famous Marvel superhero.

Two words: OPTIC BLAST

This is Cyclops. When he does his Mega Optic Blast ability, he takes off his goggles and lets loose with all his power. Nice touch, in my opinion.

She doesn't have to be a telepath to know what I'm thinking ...

And here is Emma Frost, a.k.a. The White Queen. She's damn sexy, cold, and for some reason a good guy now, since I've always known her to be a villainess. I got her as a reward for a line of "special missions" that I played. Yeah, I'll admit that I had to pay real money to finish those missions. Hey, this game is so good I might as well pay some money for it.

Cool story bro

One thing that sets this game apart from the other social games is the storyline. It's not just fighting Marvel heroes against villains for no reason at all. Nor is the storyline a simple rehash of the Avengers movie. Instead (as far as I know) the story is completely original for the game.

Effect of The Pulse

Basically the story is that a mysterious energy pulse hits Earth and completely screws up communications, electronics, etc. Shards of a weird element called ISO-8 have also fallen from the sky, and said element can do both good and bad things to humans. Of course, this gets the Marvel villains all excited, since they want to use ISO-8 for bad things.

Who that total bad-ass? Nick Fury, ya damn right!

Nick Fury (the black Samuel L. Jackson version of the character, not the old white guy version) has invoked the Avengers Initiative. And this is where the story starts.

By the way, the game also has a database of character and story info called "Marvel XP," which does a wonderful job expanding the world depicted in the game.

Marvel XP

I choose you, Colossus!

Colossus giving poor old Bullseye a brass knuckle sandwich

That's a screenshot of Colossus, whom I call "The Big Guy," in action.

I guess it should be obvious from the screenshot that battles are turn-based and very strategic. It's a lot like Pokemon, except instead of pets, I have Marvel heroes. (Oh by the way, the guy in the upper-left corner is the "agent," i.e. the character that I myself play. Yeah, that's right, I play an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.)

Buy new weapons. Like a kid in a candy store.

My agent gets to use high-tech gadgets such as this weapon called the "P.E.W. 'Zealous'" ...

You have mutant super-strength? Big f'n deal, I has PEW PEW LAZOR!

PvE and PvP

The PvP pre-battle screen. I'm on the left, random player on the right.

There's also an element of PvP, or Player vs. Player. It's not actually real-time in that the opposing player has to be there, but if I feel like it, I can fight pre-assembled teams that belong to other players. Whoever has the best PvP teams will get higher ratings.

However, like all games that allow you to pay real money to get power-ups, truly competitive PvP isn't possible since it pretty much boils down to who spent the most amount of money. And if I did that, I wouldn't enjoy the fun of earning most of the rewards by playing the game and progressing. So yeah, PvP isn't for me.

Fortunately this game focused around PvE, or Player vs. Environment. Hence the storyline, characters, villains, missions, etc.

Bottom Line

Score screen after a victorious battle

The bottom line is that I'm still playing this game, still sinking time into it, still playing missions over and over again just to progress the storyline or get that new weapon or power-up, still hiring cool new heroes like Spider-man and Hawkeye, and still having fun.

This is probably the most successful Facebook game I've played. It even got me to spend some money on it.

By the way, if you're playing the game, send me an invite. I can always use more AA friends. ;-)

Pros:

• Engaging storyline.
• Great graphics.
• Good pacing on the progression.
• Fans of Marvel comics like me will love it.
• Don't need to bother too many friends to keep playing.

Cons:

• Battles can get a little long and drawn out due to the slow pace of status texts that pop up.

My score: 85/100

MLG 2012 - Take Me Out To The GG

Major League Gaming, or MLG, is a professional gaming league where pro-gamers compete for cash and prestige. For the three-day event in Anaheim, CA, there were five games featured, but only one of them mattered to me. It was also THE most popular game there and probably the biggest game in eSports history: StarCraft II!

As usual, the best way for me to describe the experience is via pictures, so here we go. The following is where two of the most famous StarCraft II pro-gamers were signing autographs. Yeah, I also got their autographs:

Notice how many people were waiting in line.

Above is DongRaeGu (real name Park Soo Ho), one of the best Zerg players in the world.

This is MarineKingPrime (real name Lee Jung Hoon), perhaps the best Terran player in the world. He was also the favorite to win the entire tournament.

This is viOLet (real name Kim Dong Hwan). He is also one of the best Zerg players in the world, along with Leenock (real name Lee Dong Nyoung) below:

 

By the way, Leenock is 17 years old. That's less than half my age.

Below is a shot of the computers used in the tournaments. Those players you see in front of the computers are all competitors. (If you know who IdrA is, a.k.a. Greg Fields, he's the guy in the blue shirt and glasses behind the red shirt guy. No, not the Red Shirt Guy from BlizzCon 2010.)

Here is Grubby (Manuel Schenkhuizen), who used to play WarCraft III competitively before making the switch to SC2:

And here is Stephano (Ilyes Satouri), a.k.a. "From Paris With Creep," widely regarded as perhaps the best foreign SC2 player in the world. (And remember, in the SC2 universe, a "foreigner" means a non-Korean.)

Here are shots of the main stage where the feature matches are played. This is analogous to "center court" in major tennis tournaments like Wimbledon or the U.S. Open.

Pictured above are two of the casters of the tournament, Dan "Artosis" Stemkoski and Nick "Tasteless" Plott. These two casters also cast the most prestigious SC2 tournament, the GSL, which mostly takes place in Korea. (MLG is probably the 2nd most prestigious.)

Here is what the match looks like to the audience. You can notice Stephano in one of the two soundproof players' booths:

And here is Stephano being interviewed after a victory. Unfortunately, he didn't make it to the top three.

I won't spoil who won the overall tournament, but here's a hint: It's one of the pro-gamers in my photos above. You can go look it up yourself.

By the way, there were other things to see and do at the event. Here is Robert Clotworthy, the actor who portrays the voice of Jim Raynor, the protagonist in the StarCraft II story mode:

Yeah, this mild-mannered man looks nothing like the rough-around-the-edges space cowboy he plays:

Here's a picture of me with a guy named MaximusBlack (Jeff Johnston), who along with NovaWar casts a popular SC2 channel on YouTube called LAGTV.

 

There was also a huge demo of the upcoming StarCraft II expansion called Heart of the Swarm. My friends and I enjoyed playing the demo so much, we're considering getting back into StarCraft II. (Currently we're taking a break from the game in order to play Diablo III.) I'll save my thoughts on the gameplay for a future blog post.

Finally, I'm going to close this entry with the statue that greets everyone at the entrance to the event. It's Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, the main antagonist in SC2. Isn't she sexy?

There you go, three straight days of watching StarCraft II matches, playing the next expansion of the game, getting autographs, and generally hanging out with other gaming nerds. Truly this is Nerdvana.

E3 2012 Day 3 - Oops I Did It Again

Once again, I get to E3 a little late. This time, it was even worse because (a) I spent two hours in line for Metal Gear, and (b) the convention ended at 5:00 PM today instead of the usual 6:00 PM closing time. Hence I only had three hours.

So yeah, there were two exhibits that I deemed to be "must see":

• Metal Gear Rising
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown

Metal Gear Waiting

After arriving to the convention at 2:00 PM, I immediately got into line for Metal Gear Rising. And the line moved at the rate of 10 people every 10 minutes. Overall, it took me and my friends two hours to finally make it into the booth.

Inside the booth was a room with TV screens. (No pictures, of course, since they prohibited photography.)They showed a 5 minute video clip setting the background and theme for the game.

I must say that after the long wait in line, this really felt like an amusement park attraction.

After the video clip, they opened the doors to the main room where there were Playstations and XBox stations set up with the game demo. I chose a PS3 station since I'm most familiar playing the Metal Gear series on Playstations. The game itself was a lot of fun, though it felt like a departure from the "Tactical Espionage Action" theme of traditional Metal Gear games and more like a slice-em-dice-em game reminiscent of Devil May Cry. I'll go into more gameplay details in a future blog post.

The funny thing is that my friends were ushered away from their demo stations 10 minutes after they arrived, but I got to stay longer. I'm not sure why, but it may be because while I was playing the demo, I was taking notes on my iPad. The exhibit attendees might have mistaken me for a member of the press. (Press members get priority in all exhibits at E3. They don't have to wait in line, and apparently they can stay at demo stations longer than other people.) If so, that would be flattering to me, since all I've got is this personal themed blog.

(The notetaking might also have given off the impression that I was a raving fanboy, which would be something given that I'm in an entire convention chocked full of nerds.)

XCOM: Enemy Rebooted

As my friends went off to see other exhibits, I went immediately to the XCOM: Enemy Unknown line. Fortunately for me, the wait was much shorter, and in about 10 minutes, I was ushered into a mini-theater. The presenters gave a demo of the game, complete with storyline, gameplay, and cool features.

Once again, I'll go into the details of the gameplay in a future post, but suffice to say that this XCOM game will be a reboot of the classic game of the same name from the early 90's. I was a huge fan of that game, but the problem is that the game is turn-based instead of real-time. The reboot will also be turn-based, which is kind of a risk in this day and age of first-person shooters, real-time strategy and role-playing, and fast-paced action games. But after watching the demo, I'm pretty sure that old will be new again.

I mean, hey, if Civilization can still be fresh and popular today, why not XCOM?

(Inside joke time: XCOM is all about the human civilization being attacked by aliens. At one part of the demo, they showed one of the good guys in the game and introduced him this way, "Who better to save civilization than the creator of Civilization himself, Sid Meier?" Sure enough, the character had Sid Meier's portrait.)

Indie Game Jones and the Temple of 'Cade

Next stop was IndieCade, which was an exhibit of independent game developers and the games they wrote. Some of the games looked halfway decent, and some looked like several low-resolution pixels chasing each other on a white field.

But I'm very interested in this, since I'm kind of an aspiring independent game developer. (On a related note, I saw an ad for Dos Equis on the way from the parking garage to the convention. It showed a portrait of the Dos Equis man, and it said, "He was never an 'aspiring' anything." Something I should take to heart.)

One odd thing was that IndieCade wasn't just about video games, but games in general. One such game was being played right there. It had something to do with pinning a clothes pin on the collar of someone else's trench coat:

Aargh, what do you mean "closed"?

Unfortunately, when I got to the West Hall to spend the rest of the convention at the Nintendo and Sony exhibits, that was when everything started to close down. Like I said before, it was 5:00 PM, but I thought I had a full hour left. Turns out closing time was not 6:00 PM as it was in the prior two days.

I was hoping to experience more Wii U games, especially Mario and Wii U Fit. I was also hoping to play some PS3 games. They even had Street Fighter X Tekken stations up, but at least that game is already released and I can just go buy a copy for myself.

 

But at least I did get to play Foosball on the Sony PS Vita:

Final thoughts and pictures

Overall, there was much more to do at E3 than I expected. If I go next time, I will definitely arrive early every day and not waste it sleeping in because I felt like hanging out with friends late during the night prior.

I would also try and find new and creative ways to pretend to be (or actually become) a member of the gaming press. That way, I don't have to wait in lines, and I'll get even more inside information on new and upcoming games and gaming technologies.

In the end, though, this was quite an experience for me. Sooooooo many games, and no way can I play them all, so I'll just focus on a few genres that I like. They might not be the games that garner the most attention, such as Call of Duty, Resident Evil, or Halo, but they will be the games that most easily ignite my passion to play and win.

In closing, I'll just share a few more miscellaneous photos, starting with me and Sonic the Hedgehog:

Booth babes striking a pose:

Finally, a model representing a game in the Starship Trooper franchise:

E3 2012 Day 2 - Wii Love Celebrities and Dancing

Day 2 was kind of short for me since I got a late start, but it was still filled with notable experiences.

First up, the celebrities. Adam West of Batman fame was there. He was promoting Family Guy Online. I didn't know this, but he plays himself on that cartoon series as the mayor:

I also got to see James Mardsen. He is probably best known for playing Cyclops on the X-Men movie trilogy. He was also in the movie Enchanted playing Prince Edward:

(Of course, I had to point out that even in E3, sometimes they can't spell ... I mean, come on, "Singning"?)

Next up, Nintendo, which has an awesome exhibit with lots of stations where you can play Wii and Wii U games:

Just a word about the Wii U. It's Nintendo's next generation game console. The most striking feature is their controller, which is actually a tablet with a full display. They have a lot of ideas that they will implement using the new controller, but I'll highlight one idea that is less related to gaming and more related to making people go "gee whiz":

Wii U Panorama View

In a nutshell, you can use the tablet controller to aim a camera in any direction you want: left, right, behind, up, down. It's hard to describe with words or even with pictures, but there should be videos up on the web. But since all I have are words and photos, here I go.

The demo they had was of a moving tour through one of four different locations. I chose Kyoto because I once visited that beautiful city, but the demo will have me go through the city when the cherry blossom trees are blooming. Once the demo started, I found my virtual presence on a cart being pulled by a man down a street in Kyoto. Next to me on the cart was a geisha, whom I can see by rotating my body and holding the controller to the right of me. To the left of me were houses, to the right was a canal, and all around me were cherry blossoms. Hopefully these pictures convey the general idea:

Now I can see how Nintendo could use this idea in some of their game franchises. For example, you could be a gunner in some tank game where you rotate the turret you're in using the controller. Or you could recreate the scene from Star Wars Episode IV where Luke and Han are blasting away at Tie Fighters in the Millenium Falcon:

But really, I think just the full panoramic tour through different tourist attractions is enough to make house guests go "Oooooooh ... Ahhhhhh ..."

Like I said, it was a short day, so I couldn't visit much more, but just a few words on the Microsoft XBox exhibit, where their biggest draw of course was Halo:

I didn't have time to go into the Halo demo booth, of course, but I did have some time to try out the upcoming Kinect game Dance Central 3. No photos yet, but my friend did take a video of me playing the game. I'll post that as soon as it's online.

OK I have to run off to Day 3. Stay tuned!