No Cash Value

Sorry for the delay getting something new up! My PC caught a power surge (or something?) and I was left without a way to draw comics. It’s fixed now, though - thanks to everyone who gave me a hand!

This Pitfall! thing twists my shit more that it should, but I hold the Pitfall! name with a certain degree of reverence, which is kind of a dumb thing to do given the quality of every other Pitfall! game made after 1984’s Pitfall II: The Lost Caverns. If you really want to celebrate 30 years of Pitfall!, maybe you should dig out your 2600 and play some em-effing Pitfall!, or if that isn’t an option, you can always download Microsoft Game Room and grab it there. Remind Pitfall Harry that we still love him. Because he’s lonely, guys.

So lonely.

Just like I AM when nobody tweets me. Help me persevere – follow me on Twitter @LittleTMart and fill my empty heart with your tweets.

See you next week!

-Mattout

Hello to you, young nephew. I know you can’t understand this or control your bowels or hold your head up on your own, but the good intent is there and maybe you’ll appreciate this one day when you learn how to read. Which is, what – in a year? I don’t know. Babies, right?

I played through the second episode of the Walking Dead game and it’s every bit as satisfying as the first, if not more so. I found parts of it to be so startling that I wanted to take a few seconds to collect my thoughts, but time is a luxury The Walking Dead rarely affords its players, and more often than not, I was thrust right back into thick of some MESSED UP SHIT with the clock ticking as I wrestled with my decisions – decisions that hold real weight in future episodes. With a diminished focus on plugging inventory items into their appropriate place in the world for the sake of making a puzzle, it feels less and less like the Telltale/Lucasarts formula of old and more akin to a visual novel, and given the source material, it’s a perfect fit.

I also picked up Final Fantasy: Theatrhythm for the 3DS and have been bearing down on that as much as the system’s limited battery life will allow. If you’ve ever played a rhythm game, you know the score: tap, drag, and swipe a series of dots and lines to the rhythm. And while that sounds pretty uninviting on the surface, the real draw here is tapping, dragging, and swiping to some of the most iconic music in video game history. I freely admit that my fondness for Theatrhythm is almost entirely fueled by nostalgia, which actually turns out to be beneficial as there really isn’t much to do.

To create the illusion of depth, Square-Enix added a system where you choose a team of heroes from past Final Fantasies and level them up as you progress through each game-specific block of songs. The problem here is that none of that seems to matter. The art is great and the characters are completely adorable, but equipping them and leveling them up doesn’t seem to serve any real purpose. You take damage as you miss, so leveling up means you can withstand more damage, but this is still a rhythm game, and if you’re missing notes to the extent that your hit points actually matter, you’re also kind of missing the point of rhythm games in general. Still, the final experience is rewarding enough to recommend you at least try it if Final Fantasy has had its hooks in you at some point during the past 25 years.

I'm out of here to scope out the Steam sale and see what kind damage I can do to my wallet now that I have a PC that actually runs games. If you want to read more of the things I type, you can always find me on Twitter @LittleTMart.

See you next week!

-Mattout

Sorry for the lack of a post last week. It was my birthday and things got exceptionally lazy around here.

Origin story or no, I'm extremely excited to see The Amazing Spider-Man next week. Because no matter how many times they cart out "with great responsibility," and no matter how frequently Peter struggles to master his newfound abilities, it will still be a better movie than Spider-Man 3. Thank you in advance, everyone who made this movie; please accept my ten dollars and my gratitude.

As always, you can find me on Twitter @LittleTMart or by clicking THIS LINK.

-Mattout.

At this point, I can only gleefully speculate at what preventative countermeasures are in store for us once the Wii U gets out into the wild and YouTube videos start cropping up of people damaging themselves and their belongings with it. I mean, this IS the company that shipped free gloves to protect overzealous Mario Party players (like myself) from painful blisters and could not rest until every Wiimote was sheathed in a rubber prophylactic cocoon. Hopefully their impending Wii U freakout will be just as amazing.

Mario Party, man. If you weren’t grinding that N64 thumbstick directly into the palm of your hand to achieve maximum RPMs, you were doing it wrong (and probably still winning).

As I recall, Mario Party also made a pretty good drinking game. The computer cheats you out of victory at the last possible moment - DRINK. You develop an open wound on your hand - DRINK. A verbal disagreement with a life-long friend escalates into a fist fight - DRINK.

Good times. Anyway…

As the curtain falls on E3 2012, relief is washing over me. I actually considered trying to get back in this year despite no longer possessing the proper credentials to do so and for the briefest of moments during the pre-show, when new hardware speculation was reaching its peak, I was kicking myself for not putting forth the effort. The urge to attend is based on the shortcomings of a long-defunct system of information delivery and usually resurfaces on the cusp of a new generation of hardware due to an equally defunct fear of missing something. Before the Internet flourished into the high-speed pipeline of vidjagame news it is today, I got my E3 scoops though mail-order bootleg VHS tapes of the show, and by the time those dried up I was working a job that provided me both the disposable income and the industry cred necessary to do the show up for reals. And while the notion of revisiting E3 held momentary allure, as it turns out, I’ve reached the point in my life where it’s no longer worth dropping a couple grand to fly to Los Angeles on the off chance they’ll debut something cool – a debut I can now just as easily stream to my PC in the comfort of my living room at the low, low price of not a goddamn thing.

Does my increased frugality and now ever-present desire to remain in an inert state on my couch in any way diminish the satisfaction of gorging oneself on the buffet of new information E3 has to offer? No it does not. So let’s get to it!

Star Wars 1313 came from out of nowhere and is looking pretty slick, and by pretty slick I mean Star Wars 1313 is the best-looking video game I’ve ever seen. The characters in the demo are supposedly placeholders, so it's unclear as to whether this game will star familiar faces from existing Star Wars lore or will focus on original characters designed specifically for the game. 1313 is set between trilogies and there are no Jedi, so there's at least some chance (never tell me the odds) we'll all be Nathan Drakeing it up in a galaxy far, far away next year with a young Han Solo. Either way, it makes one hell of a showpiece for what next gen hardware is capable of (what was shown was running on a PC) and although no specifics were announced regarding its release, for the first time in a long time, I'm excited about Star Wars. Nicely done, Lucasarts.

Ubisoft managed the only other real surprise of the show when they unveiled Watch Dogs during their press conference. While not quite on the same level as Star Wars 1313, Watch Dogs proved visually impressive enough to make us question which generation of hardware it was for (the demo shown was running on a PC). Even more impressive perhaps, was the novelty of the game’s premise: accomplish your tasks through the acquisition and manipulation of personal information, by hacking your surroundings, and…  guns, but that first 2/3 of the pitch is more than intriguing enough to set a hook in my eager, gaping mouth. As of now, Ubisoft’s website lists Watch Dogs for release on PC, PS3, and 360, although creative director Jonathan Morin went on to say he’s not discounting the possibility of the game making its way to yet-to-be-announced consoles.

I’ll probably type up another round of E3 impressions over the weekend sometime and update this post, but Watch Dogs and 1313 were referenced in the comic and I wanted to go ahead and talk about them now.

If you made it to the end of this post, you, sir or madam, are a complete fucking champion. Allow me to reward your diligence in the face of all those words with some shameless self-promotion by suggesting that you follow me on Twitter. Click your mouse on THIS LINK and drop the hammer on that follow button or look me up the old fashioned way (SO 1998!) @LittleTMart.

See you next week!

-Mattout.

Max Payne isn’t one to stand idly by and admire his surroundings. He’s a man of ACTION and taking a breather to soak up the scenery was never a part of the deal. If you tarry for any amount of time in Max Payne 3, Max is quick to spur you along to the next set piece with a string of increasingly less subtle verbal prods, which is a little weird, given all of the collectibles Rockstar scattered throughout the game. Rooms with buttons that open doors are the best because they go a little something like this:

“There has to be a button around here somewhere to open this door.”

“I think I saw a button back in that office.”

“Push the button in the office to open the door.”

With the exception of Red Dead Redemption, I would not classify myself as a fan of Rockstar-made games, so it was with some trepidation that I approached their Remedy-free revival of one of my favorite franchises from my bygone days as an avid PC gamer. I get bored with the GTA games within a few hours, usually because of their spongy vehicle controls and gunplay. Since Max Payne is a series built soley around its gunplay, you can understand my lack of faith in Rockstar to stick the landing.

Video games evolve. If they didn’t, even the best series would get boring, people would lose interest, sales would trail off, and gaming as we know it would cease to be in a few years. Change is what keeps video games relevant (unless we’re talking about Pokémon), so there’s a part of me that kind of respects Rockstar’s decision to graft cover-based gameplay onto Max Payne’s repertoire of slo-mo acrobatics instead of going the easy route and making another by-the-numbers addition to the franchise. There’s also a part of me that is deeply upset by this decision, as it kind of wrecks what makes Max Payne MAX PAYNE. His shtick has always been diving headlong into a crowd of dudes and making corpses out of the lot of them before his shell casings ever hit the floor.

That DOES NOT WORK in Max Payne 3.

If you jump into a crowd of dudes this time around, you’re going to die, quickly and often. All those new cover opportunities are there for a reason, and if you chose to ignore them, you’ll soon discover how much more fragile Max has become in his old age. I was playing on normal my first time through and all it took was one enemy catching me unawares to wipe out my entire life bar. You round a corner without taking cover and checking the path ahead? You’re going to get shot and you’ll probably die. It’s pretty disappointing. If I were a developer/publisher, the last possible thing I would want to do in a market that’s absolutely brimming with third-person cover-based shooters is downplay the very feature that sets my game apart from the rest of the pack.

While Max Payne 3 is by no means a bad game, in a perfect world it would’ve evolved into a game that revels in the insanity of its main character’s defining characteristic instead of taking the flair down by a few notches and falling into line as the competent-but-unspectacular cover-based third-person shooter we ended up with.

Want to follow me on Twitter? If so, you should do that right now – I’ll wait. @LittleTMart is the guy you’re looking for, or you can just click THIS HANDY LINK and click the follow button. Easy, right?

See you next week!

-Mattout.