Final Fantasy XIII found its way into my paws when it hit stores Tuesday, but woefully it didn’t have a chance to find its way into my 360 until yesterday. Seeing as how it will take me an estimated 45 hours to complete the game in a pretty straightforward play-through, I think I’ll offer a few first impressions. My proper review will probably be around the 20 hour mark. That’s a lot of my life, 20 hours.

Here are 5 things I think about it so far! Note- I am an approximate 2 hours in. Also, thanks be to my girlfriend who played for me for a while because I was whining about thinking I had carpal tunnel.

1. Final Fantasy XIII hits you in the face with combat! Ouch! I keep hearing things about how this game, more than any in the series, doles out a lot of combat. And Square Enix makes that crystal clear immediately. You’re thrown into a dystopic industrial world with all of these assholes you don’t care about yet and you’re immediately fending off wave after wave of beautifully animated cyber-kitties. That sounds more like porn than I intended. Let’s call them mechano-tigers instead, eh?

2. Oh my god, is Final Fantasy XIII GORGEOUS. Final Fantasy XII hit stores 4 years ago, so the developers obviously chained themselves to their computers for the entirety of the last 4 years to make this game so beautiful. Unfortunately, I’m still stuck inside the kind of claustrophobic, industrial starting area, so I can’t wait to see what a lush, less inorganic area might look like. Also, no moogles yet (#mooglewatch).

3. “Vanille, ” the requisite young waifish character, is SO irritating! And what’s with her ever-shifting pseudo-Australian accent. Actually, she kind of sounds like a shrill, drunk New Zealander who has trouble using her “inside voice.” Of course, Vanille is in the grand tradition of young, giggly waifs in Final Fantasy games. Like Selphie (is that a name?) and Yuffie. You can spot the annoying-as-fuck character because their name apparently will end in an “eeee” sound. Like the eeee sound when I scream “SHOOT MEEEEE” every time she’s on screen.

4. Um, I don’t want to shop at a goddamn vending machine. No really (maybe I’m still having Bioshock 2 hack flashbacks). Final Fantasy XIII apparently does away with the concept of the RPG town altogether: there are no cities to explore in the usual sense, and instead of quaint little vendors in hovels selling you things that are weirdly translated from the Japanese, you get to walk up to a futuristic little ball and press a button to buy stuff. I DON’T WANT TO SHOP AT THE TINY BALL, even if one of the virtual shops is called something that sounds like Urban Outfitters and that’s kind of funny. I want a shanty and my weirdly translated dialogue back!

5.  I am trying to keep an open mind BUT I AM SO WORRIED. Sidequests and open-world exploration on a huge map are my two favorite parts of the Final Fantasy series. Aside from moogles. Those are separate. But Final Fantasy XIII demolished those features in favor of focusing on the combat system. And I am very heartbroken, even though I knew this. I will vow to remain quasi-unbiased about this (that’s not much of a vow, is it?), but we’ll see what happens. I hear the game opens up around the 17 hour mark. No, I’m not kidding. I hate to play FOR SEVENTEEN HOURS to see if I’m still let down. But I would do that for you. And for myself. Or to myself?

And that’s my First Gloss of Final Fantasy XIII. I’ll be back with some less stubbornly biased and more informed opinions soon! Not 15 hours from now. I don’t have that kind of stamina. And this is requiring way too much math. I quit.

AFTERSHOCK:

The Feb. 27 earthquake in Chile topped the seismic charts with a recorded magnitude of 8.8, but the initial devastation and rising death toll weren’t its only consequences. On a far less tragic but slightly more unbelievable note, the earthquake moved nearby cities:

“Concepción, the closest city to the epicentre of the recent quake, moved around 3 metres to the west, while Santiago moved about 20 centimetres to the west-south-west.”

And if relocating cities doesn’t impress upon you the quake’s strength, get this: the events of Feb. 27 actually shifted the Earth’s axis by approximately 8 centimeters, enough to shorten the length of a day. Granted you likely won’t notice the difference, but microseconds add up.

INFINITY WARD:

A lot of crazy shit went down at the Infinity Ward office last week, when parent company Activision fired two former Call of Duty head developers allova sudden. Lawsuits! Security officers! Gossip! I still don’t really understand this, it’s like Watergate, and I probably never will. Devour the Juicy Details over at Game Informer. Also nothing could ever pry this game from my cold, dead hands, so don’t even fucking TRY Activision!

GAGA ON ROCKBAND:
Lady Gaga will be joining the Rock Band ranks this holiday season. YES IT’S TRUE! Go on and pre-order, you Gaga-loonies! Go!

BSG MMO:
Apparently THERE’S GONNA BE A BATTLESTAR GALACTICA MMORPG THIS FALL, and it’s gonna be playable in YOUR BROWSER! What!! I am nervous and excited and just so very full of feelings about this!

TWO’S COMPANY:
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 just hit stores, and based on a lot of good press, the game sounds like it could give Modern Warfare 2 a run for its money. Bad Company 2 boasts a solid solo-campaign and the multiplayer, with its large strategic maps and vehicular combat, might actually improve on what’s often said to be the quintessential multiplayer gaming experience.

[Read More...]

Yeah it’s not the weekend, but I decided to call this thing I do where I talk about whatever the hell I want the “Geekender” and I’m sticking to it. Because these thoughts occurred to me over the weekend whilst watching my girlfriend toil away at Zelda: Twilight Princess. Which has a conspicuous lack of a good map. We’ll get to that.

I’ve always known that in another life I’m meant to be a cartographer. I did a project on cartography in the 4th grade and since then I’ve known that about myself. But here I am in this life, with no parchment and no funding or blessing from the Queen to speak of. Also, in an unfortunate turn of events, some other asshole discovered all of the continents already.

“In an unfortunate turn of events, some other asshole discovered all of the continents already.”

There’s such an intoxicating charm to the unknown. And while there’s an impossible array of stuff we don’t know or understand in fields like neural science, astronomy and and biology, I think we’ve pretty much got mapping the Earth covered. And that sucks. And yeah brains, stars and cells are cool, but I want to discover continents. Brains are confusing, stars are far away and cells? That shit is tiny.

Modern life is such a bummer. There’s no allure of distant, untrodden lands. No unsailed seas to beckon me. To add insult to injury, satellite imaging and GPS  kind of render an unrealized old-school cartographer’s dreams of glory and discovery completely obsolete. But my curiosity and apparent, inexplicable passion for mapping will not be quelled. It will only manifest creatively, in a manner that suits a life navigated by iPhone. My inner cartographer must seek the thrill of the unknown through other means, and that brings me to my point. Or at least my topic; I may not have a point. Video games are my topic.

Some games give us unique laws of physics (see: Braid, Bayonetta), most give us original opportunities. But my favorite games let the player discover a vast new world. And that’s why I like role-playing games. In RPGs, you often begin in a quaint village of some sort. This is my absolute favorite part: the moment you peek out of your starting area or opening level, you are struck by just how vast the undiscovered game world may be. The in-game map either illustrates this vastness with countless unfamiliar towns and obscure continents or it alludes to it, showing you the size of the world you’ve found yourself in and maybe filling in the teensy part of the map representing where you’re standing. This is my most intoxicating moment, though actually unfolding all of the mystery comes in at a close second.

“This is my absolute favorite part: the moment you peek out of your starting area or opening level, you are struck by just how vast the undiscovered game world may be.”

Games handle maps in different ways, and I’ll highlight a few of my favorites. In some games, like World of Warcraft, the combat and generally a lot of the goings-on actually occur on the world map or the “overworld” (sounds like “overlord,” creepy). Some games provide a map exclusively for navigation, and I love these too. To get between towns and dungeons or from one level to the next your character appears on a zoomed-out map and then you zoom them off to where you want to go.

Both kinds of maps are usually a scaled-down aerial view of where you are and what’s between there and where you want to go. Either way I love navigating around the map. Part of it I can explain and part is just this weird, pseudo- nostalgic joy that hearkens back to a time when there were totally unknown places out there just waiting to be discovered. I like it best when these exotic in-game locales unfurl unique inhabitants and architecture that isn’t just transplanted from Medieval Europe. That’s boring and it doesn’t make my imagination all hot and bothered.

So now I’ll showcase a few maps I love, or maps I think I’d love or maps I did love or maps you’d probably love! Maybe we’ll even go vaguely chronologically!

Zelda. Everybody loves Zelda. I actually didn’t play this game because I weirdly didn’t own it back in the day. But when I’d go over to a neighbor’s house and they had this shit up on the screen my eyes would glaze over with lust. In the legend of Zelda, your map was all you had. The map was the game and that was awesome. Or it looked awesome anyway. [Read More...]

PS3 Y2K:
Some kind of mysterious calendar-related error just caused everyone’s Playstations to implode. Well, not really, but the PS3 reckoning rendered the systems pretty useless for a while there. Don’t worry, they’re back, but that was a pretty boring stretch of time, wasn’t it?

POST IPAD:
Think the iPad’s just a grown up iPhone? Image a grown up iPad! And then a grown up that thing!
Gizmodo takes a look at the logical progression of the iPhone. Here’s hoping for a Twister mat style iThing!

Also, will the iPad be scarce when it hits Apple stores this month? Will we clamor over each other like rabid animals for it? We know the answer to one of these questions.

ASSASSIN APPS:
Ezio lover alert! Ubisoft just released a free multiplayer Assassin’s Creed iPhone app! But rumor has it the app will only remain free for 48 hours, so strike while the iron’s hot! Kinda like how Ezio stabs people when they least expect it. Kinda.

PHONE LOVIN’:
Looks like LG is jumping on the smartphone bandwagon. The company just unveiled the prototype Windows Phone 7 Series phone (so many phones in that sentence). This’ll be Windows 7’s first appearance on a branded device, which is exciting because I (and I think most Windows users) have nothing but love for Windows 7. Looks a lot like the Droid to me. We’ll keep you updated.

Not impressed? Sure, the LG phone looks nice, but want to take it to the next level? $300,000 can buy a lot of things. A nice little cottage on the seacoast or a private college education through graduate school for example. But you could always just blow that cash on a super high-tech cell phone! Think of the envious looks.

SPOCK SIGNS:
You’ve always known that Spock is a bad motherfucker. Now we know he’s really been flashing his gang sign all along.

TINY DINOS:
Check out these teeny, tiny dinosaurs you assemble yourself! For crafty geeks who don’t have room for the real thing, of course.

STATS HOMEWORK:
Are you all hot and bothered about the WoW expansion’s gameplay revamp? Check out the new blue post detailing how your stats are going all topsy-turvy in Cataclysm. Start crunching your numbers, nerds.

GEEK STYLE:
Need to up your geek factor with a few choice new wardrobe pieces? Start with this batman gear for the lady about town.

HIDE & SEEK:
Been struggling to find a use for your DSi’s built in cameras that doesn’t involve taking pictures of your cat? This new downloadable DSi game (currently only available in Japan) uses input from your DSi’s cameras to control an in-game camera that requires you to explore a 3-D environment to find hidden objects.

NERD CRACK:
This is an incredibly addictive game. Do not check it out. Srsly. But Robots + Unicorns + Adult Swim? How can you afford not to?

SCIENCE JAMS:
In all honesty, I usually hate autotuned things. But who can resist yet more autotuned Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking (along with 10 other scientists!)? Only assholes, really. If you want another Sagan/Hawking duet, don’t forget to check out their platinum YouTube jam. Also, how amazing is it that these make Hawking like meta-autotuned?

GAME CUBE:
I’m a sucker for those in-flight catalogs, and this kinda amazing, kinda goofy exercise in ergonomics is no exception. Wouldn’t this sucker make a sweet gaming chair? It looks like something from Speed Racer. And it folds into a cube!

FRENCH GEEKERY:
The trailer for Luc Besson’s new project Les Aventures Extraordinaires d’Adèle Blanc-Sec looks totally sweet. Dragons: check. Mummys: Check. Lady Indiana Jones: Check. French dude who directed The Fifth Element? Check.

TOMB RAIDING:
Who would play Lara Croft in the inevitable eventual reboot of the Tomb Raider franchise? We nominate Katee Sackhoff, Jennifer Garner and Eva Green. For their, uh…talent.

It’s hard to know how to introduce something like Chatroulette, the newest and perhaps the creepiest web phenomenon I’ve encountered within recent memory. At its core, Chatroulette is a bare-bones social media experiment. But unlike the more benign social media hubs in our lives — like Twitter, Facebook, even Myspace — Chatroulette rips open a Pandora’s Box of raw, completely anonymous weirdness.

If you haven’t checked out the site, listen up: Chat Roulette is NSFW. Like, really NSFW. Was it always thus? Sam Anderson at New York Magazine describes its humble beginnings:

“300 users in December [2010] had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube; another, The Frisky, called it “the Holy Grail of all Internet fun.” Everyone seemed to agree that it was intensely addictive—one of those gloriously simple ideas that manages to harness the crazy power of the Internet in a potentially revolutionary way.”

Safe to say; The Frisky might want to take that back now. Chat Roulette can be pretty terrifying, to be honest. But that’s not to say it isn’t worth visiting. Chatroulette offers a roiling, unstable social media experience that’s brilliant at its best and deeply disturbing at its worst. Anderson puts this strikingly huge range of potential well:

“It’s the Wild West: a stupid, profound, thrilling, disgusting, totally lawless boom. If ChatRoulette catches on, it might even swing our collective online pendulum back toward chaos.”

So you don’t have to suffer through the Chatroulette experience yourself, reading through these steps a few times should give you a pretty good idea of what goes down: [Read More...]