Seeing as how I grew up in Chula Vista, I think that’s great.  One condiment to rule them all, and in the stomach bind them.

I ate the first half, hot and also slathered with ketchup earlier in the day.  Accompanying it was a chocolate egg cream.  Accompanying that was Josh and Lori explaining anything on the menu that I had questions about.

And all of that together, really hit the spot.  After the blizzard kept us in our homes, a day of socializing with food was more than welcome.

Maybe we were all hungry after the long trip to Fairfax, but I don’t doubt that the food was delicious.  The egg cream was rich and chocolaty, and didn’t last very long.  It was made in the traditional manner with Fox’s U-bet Chocolate syrup.  It had a really amazing head of frothed milk that I’ve never been able to replicate at home.

Next time, I’m ordering a matzo brei, maybe some kasha varnishka.  Probably not celery soda though.

Awkward moment of the meal:  I notice a pirate flag when we enter, and I joke that maybe it’s pirate day.  Two seconds later, Lori points out that one of the servers may be wearing an eyepatch for medical reasons.  Oops.

Dumplings

I’m snacking on a veggie puff pastry after a cold Yuengling and a sake based bloody mary, when I think to myself, “This wasn’t what I expected.”

I’m at Ping Pong dim sum, a few blocks Northish of the Friendship Gate in Chinatown , and I’m eating what I can only call upscale non traditional dim sum.  Dim sum tapas is an accurate descriptor of this self created niche.

Thankfully, this niche is delicious.

My first experience with Ping Pong was actually the day before, I had spent some time there and I felt it warranted a return trip.

Lychee Rose martini

It’s a Monday evening, and it’s quiet.  It’s six o’clock and the after work crowd hasn’t come in yet for happy hour, which is four to seven.  Five dollar cocktails, all of which are exotic takes of traditional bar offerings.  For instance, the amaretto sour has wasabi paste in it, and the bloody mary is sake based.  Both were tasty.  I also had a passionfruit amaretto based cocktail which was also delicious.  Also good was the lychee and rose martini.  For the record, I didn’t drink all of these at once.

Elise, our waitress from Sunday is off duty, but hanging out and she recognizes me as I step up to the bar.  She tells me to order the wasabi amaretto sour that I didn’t order on Sunday.

My second cocktail is something with passionfruit and almond in a tall glass.  Sip by sip, Monday is fading.  It’s a new beginning for the evening.

The ramp up from quiet bar to happy hour “spot” is fast, and dare I say, furious.  Bartenders have moved into full production mode, and more than once I’m the target of an over eager muddling of lemongrass, lime, or lychee.

My bar fare arrives, hotter than I’m expecting, so  I sip on my drink to pass the time.

There are actually two bars, but one is actually just a seating area in front of the kitchen where you can watch the food being prepared.  I haven’t sat down there yet, but it does look interesting.

I’ll be coming back.

For a long time, the control has made absolutely no sense to me.

Left stick moves.  Stand still to aim and shoot.  No sidestepping.

Dead Space controls make sense to me.  Left stick moves, right stick is the camera and aiming.  Not much to say about it, however there are a lot of comments being thrown about regarding the Resident Evil 5 control scheme and how it adds to the tension of the game.  The main contention here is that you cannot strafe while aiming.  I am not a big fan of this particular design decision.  I have played the demo and Chris Redfield is incapable of sidestepping while aiming a weapon.  This means he cannot ready a weapon while turning around a corner.

This is a weakness not only in the gameplay design, but in the writing.  What they are telling me, with their icy, necrotic grip on an outdated control scheme, is the following:

Chris Redfield is a paramilitary special agent who cannot aim a weapon down a corridor whilst turning and walking to go down it.

By comparison, Isaac Clarke is a communications engineer in a space suit wearing grav boots who can.

An engineer.

The producers of Resident Evil 5 claim that their control scheme adds to the tension.  They claim that if a player can just run away easily, it destroys any pretense of immediate danger.

Dead Space absolutely destroys that argument.

Isaac, while not a ballerina, handles like a third person shooter persona should.  Left stick strafes, right stick aims.  Left trigger brings up the gun to aim, and the controls remain the same.  He can aim a weapon at a corner and then carefully, very carefully creep up around the corner until he can see that there’s nothing there to be afraid of.

Before being eviscerated by the necromorph that has silently climbed up the railings behind him.

I would like to state that building tension in a game should not generated via an artificially difficult or non intuitive control scheme.  What you are building with that design choice is frustration.

Resident Evil did start the current survival horror renaissance, but it over five (well, more than five really) iterations, it has yet to truly evolve it.  Which is funny, considering that a lot of the storyline of the Resident Evil has to do with an evolving virus.

Really.

I’ve finished Dead Space and I’m on my second playthrough, and while I’m doing that, I’m thinking about how it does a lot of things right, how it brings innovation to a stale genre, and how the survival horror experience can be enhanced as a social activity.

First the game is fun.  There are a lot of elements to this, but first and foremost, the game is a good time.  It grabbed me from the beginning with the cold opener, with Isaac and the crew of the Kellion quickly realizing the straightforward repair mission is turning into something bad. The story, while nothing groundbreaking or thought provoking, is on par with a good science fiction suspense movie.

The UI.  I don’t really talk about the user interface in games.  Mainly I’m a happy person if the UI is out of the way, or subtle in some fashion so it doesn’t detract from the gameplay or the immersion of the title.  I’m going to say this now, when I saw that they were telling the story through the user interface, that was the moment when I decided I was going to purchase Dead Space.  It’s a singular moment, early on in the game where one of your fellow crewmembers contacts you over the radio.  In typical sci fi fashion, this is a video call.  In atypical video game fashion, it’s part of the UI.

Isaac is wearing a RIG, which simply, is a “space suit.”  The RIG has a holographic UI, so whenever Isaac needs to access anything in game, it projects a hologram into the world so he can see it.  This is hard to explain, but is incredibly awesome once you see it in action.  An innovation in storytelling immersion that really only works here in the space horror genre, but very well done and executed in Dead Space.

I picked it up for the toys r us buy two get one free sale, and then put it away and didn’t give it a second thought.

Until last night.

Wow.It’s amazing.  Maybe it’s the PS3 Eye integration, I don’t know.  But for a karaoke game, it just does everything right.  You can pick the song you want right away.  No ridiculous unlocking of songs, if you just want to sing, you can sing.  It’s just that easy.  The game uses the original videos and tracks of the original artists.  Which, themselves are also funny, especially if you’ve picked up the 80s and 90s SingStar packs.  With the latest patch, you can actually put in the PS2 versions of SingStar and play the tracks from those volumes.

What makes SingStar excellent is that the developers of SingStar have taken the Karaoke experience and changed it into a great party game.  The interface never gets in the way of singing songs.  This is important.  Additionally, it gives you the option to pick a short or long version of the song you want to sing.

I highly recommend short versions, which are about a minute and a half long.  If that sounds short, keep in mind that four minutes holding a microphone and singing is an interminably long time, if you are waiting on your turn to sing.  The short versions allow more people to get time on the mic.  If you are fortunate to also own a PlayStation Eye, you will want as many people having a turn on the microphone because SingStar actually records a part of the performance.

This is a major selling point for the game, and honestly, one of the best parts about SingStar itself.  If you have a PS3 Eye, it takes a quick snippet of video to review after the song.  If you so choose, you can save to the hard drive for later viewing.

Watching the videos afterward is recommended.  I believe that I saved every snippet from that evening.

I only wish that the videos themselves weren’t hidden away in the walled garden of the SingStar Store.

It’s amazing so far, and extremely polished.  So far, meaning about six hours into the game, but the quality is apparent, even in the first hour of play.  The artwork, the animation, the attention paid to the interface, the intuitive controls, and the storytelling are all excellent.  It’s only more amazing when I realize I’m talking about an exploration type game, in the vein of the two dimensional Castlevania and Metroid series.

I normally dislike these games, mainly because I do run into the problem of them being “too big.”  However, Aquaria handles this beautifully by allowing me to annotate the map at any time.  Which is great, because I have a habit of putting these games on the shelf in lieu of a more twitchy title.   By the time I get back around to remembering where I am in games of this sort, I am so lost that I’m better off starting over again.

But I have the feeling that I’ll be continuing with Aquaria for a while.

It’s the the voice acting.  Jenna Sharpe really brings the character of Naija to life.  Her performance is amazing, and to be honest, she’s really carrying the game to greater heights.   The game is already well crafted.  Now it’s being performed with the caliber of voice acting that it really deserves.  Kudos to Jenna Sharpe.

She also played the part of Sniper Wolf in Metal Gear Solid, another character I really liked, but for different reasons.

So in short.  Buy Aquaria.

I’m about six hours in, and I just like playing it.

Update: Another couple of hours in and OH MY GOD THIS GAME IS AWESOME.  Surprisingly dark storyline so far, too.  Not going to ruin it.  You should just play.  There’s a mac client, too.

This has nothing to do with the fact that I associate this particular sake with some good times with good people.

Like the time we closed out Yosaku.  In costume.

Then there was Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time for the Xbox.  Which was a great reboot for the series.  We’ll pretend that Prince of Persia 3D never happened.

The sequels to Sands of Time were okay.  I never really liked the direction Warrior Within went.  Overall it seemed too grungy, trying too hard to be “edgy” and “serious.”  After just a few hours, I grew tired of the combat and then didn’t come back for the third game in the series, The Two Thrones.  I may come back and revisit them at a later date, but for now I can just read the plot synopses and be done with them.

Prince of Persia (no subtitle) is the new series for the current generation of hardware.

“How is it?” you ask.

“Pretty good,” is what I’m going to tell you.

What I played was fun, challenging, and engaging.  A lot has been said about the checkpoint system.  About how it makes the game too easy.  However, it hasn’t been referred to as the checkpoint system.

It’s a character.  Elika is the NPC character that “saves” you when you fall into an interminably deep pit.  Then, you appear at the last point the game saved your status.  It’s usually not too far back, but you may have to perform some of the same jumps and acrobatics.

As opposed to before, when you would rewind time or load your previous save game.

They’re just automating that process, streamlining something that you would have done anyway, and integrated it into the fundamental design of the game.  This leads to a better “flow.”  Instead of hitting a menu and then getting thrown back in after a fifteen or twenty second delay, I’m back into the game in less than three seconds, ready to try that jump again.

And again, until I realize I’m not supposed to make that jump.

But that’s me.  Overall, the streamlined mechanic let me focus on the job at hand, which was getting through the levels and collecting the light seeds.  Which I was perfectly happy to do.

Until my 360 stopped reading discs.

In short, I’m looking forward to playing it at some point, and I will revisit it.

Review based on playing through the first four  worlds, and getting enough light seeds for two of the four powers.  Had fun throughout.

No, not really. But if there was a movie with the above concept, then Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune would be the videogame adaptation of that movie.

Circuitious introduction aside, when I first saw previews of Uncharted, I blew it off as a Tomb Raider clone with a male protagonist. Granted, the previews were all based on a very early build of the title that even Naughty Dog (the developers) admit was shown too early. I lost interest and it fell off my radar, as many games do.

I didn’t think about it again until the demo showed up on the PSN Store on the PS3.

I watched the first cutscene and I was hooked. After playing it, I was sold. In fact, I went out and bought it on release day.

The demo sold me because it started with a cutscene that showed plot development and characterization. Showcased in the first cutscene is witty dialogue, great voice acting, and most importantly, a likeable main character that I immediately wanted to root for. Not to mention detailed backgrounds and stellar animation.

I found it odd that I immediately understood the character from such a short cutscene, and it impressed me that they were able to convey so much in so little time. Then I got it.

Nathan Drake’s character in Uncharted is Captain Malcolm Reynolds from Firefly. The voice actor sounds like him, the facial models, the bits of dialogue, even the animations have Nathan Fillion’s characterization of Malcolm Reynolds down. If I get a chance to ask the Naughty Dog crew whether or not that’s true, I’m betting that it would be an unequivocal, “Yes.”

If not, “Yes,” then I would expect a curt, “No comment,” followed immediately with, “Firefly and Serenity were SO. AWESOME.”

“SO AWESOME.”

My take: It doesn’t hurt that the main character resembles a certain captain of a certain space western television series that got canceled way before its time.

Back to the demo.  Instead of being something to whet my appetite for the real game, the demo served as as the cold opener for a movie that I didn’t even know I wanted.

The demo did eventually serve its purpose, I went out and bought the game after all.  I do have to point out that it was only after the storyline’s context and characters had been established.  Their construction of the demo shows that Naughty Dog puts dialogue and characterization first, then showing off technical gameplay elements.  The order of emphasis is critical here, because it shows that they know something that many other developers forget:

Their game will stand out because of its focus on storyline.

Not because of its gameplay or amazing water effects or fluid animation or really big explosions. Those help, but a lot of other games have those. What Uncharted has is a story that drew me in and characters that made me want to see what happened to them next. There are very few games that have those elements.

Great story, characters, and voice acting all combined with a really fun game made Uncharted one of the most compelling (and fun) video game experiences that I’ve had in a long time.

I’m looking forward to the sequel.

While the single player game brings nothing new to the table, the fact that I can save my multiplayer replays is amazing.  My proposed subtitle for the multiplayer aspect of Halo 3 is the title for this post, and rightly so.

Replays are comedy gold.

That said, here’s my service record.  It’s the same granular statkeeping as Halo 2, which is say, obsessive.  But now it has screenshots from the match.

Which make great if sometimes embarrassing wallpaper.