The Way Things Are

by Jared Rea

Archive for March, 2008

That Wretched Adhesive

Published by Jared Rea on March 31, 2008 in videogames. 1 Comment

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Did you know that Folklore for the PlayStation 3 is rare? Me neither, but I’m starting to realize it. My girlfriend checked it out from her company store this past week and enjoyed it so much that I’ve now been tasked with hunting down the elusive disc.

As part of our fruitless hunt, we found ourselves at the GameStop in my hometown. Naturally, we came up empty handed but not without a story. Everyone knows that when you step into the bowels of retail Hell that is GameStop you should expect a distinct lack of quality in both service and product. Scoping out their PS3 section, I spotted a copy of Ninja Gaiden Sigma (tons, actually) for about thirty bucks. Not wanting to blow sixty bones on a brand new copy (Ninja Gaiden II is close enough), I decided why the Hell not. Still empty handed as far as Folklore went, we lurched our way towards the XBOX 360 games, wading through the poorly placed troughs of $10 dollar budget titles.

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Something Sweet to Throw Away

Published by Jared Rea on March 26, 2008 in videogames. 0 Comments

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I’m in the middle of a new-toy fit. The shiny — a powerful force of indoctrination — has taken hold and not even the might Boston and their six master tracks can snap me out of it. You see, I finally picked up a Blu-Ray Player PlayStation 3 and despite there being an almost total lack of anything worth picking up for the thing (No Country for Old Men not withstanding), I’ve managed to neglect other outlets for it. I’m not sure which impressed me more: seeing the brilliance of grapes in Ratatouille or the dearth of worthwhile content available on the PlayStation Store.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is that I bought FlOw.

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The New Hotness

Published by Jared Rea on March 24, 2008 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

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I’m finding it difficult to describe precisely how stoked I am about my new apartment. Imagine you’ve gone from having your junk dipped in a deep frier every day to instead getting Cold Stone ice cream served to you by unicorns. The move has successful cut my commuting time from two hours to five minutes and I’m telling you, this ice cream is delicious.

As far as I can tell, everything is in a much more normalized state that it was say, a week ago. I was in Atlanta, my girlfriend was left to fend for herself with no Internet and worse yet, we didn’t have a couch. An entire season of Dexter was watched upon the floor and consoles went untouched. I never realized how important that cushioned throne is for a home.

Well, now that we’ve got everything setup for the most part, I’d like to give you folks a peek. Pardon the awful cording job. There’s a trip to OSH in my near future.

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Street Fighter IV gets a facelift

Published by Jared Rea on March 14, 2008 in videogames. 1 Comment

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Things have been quite hectic around here as of late and I’ll soon be in a better position to deliver some updates to my blog. The long story short is that I’m finally moving back out (This weekend, actually!) and so all my commuting woes that have kept me away from, well, fun in general, will be going out the window. Until then, check out these two awesome posts that fellow NeoGAF user, MicVlaD, put together to showcase the subtle changes that Street Fighter IV has gone through in the past couple of weeks.

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The new shots are on the right-hand side and while the changes are very subtle, they make a huge impression on the overall look. The details are really starting to shine (Honda has nipples now!), the facial expressions (finally) look great and you can see the beginnings of their advanced lighting and filters going into play. After playing the game at GDC (of which I presented five days worth of features) I looked upon the graphics as acceptable. Not terribly great, but acceptable. We’re definitely getting into that “great” territory now. Enjoy!

Five Days of Street Fighter IV

Published by Jared Rea on March 3, 2008 in videogames. 2 Comments

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Life isn’t showing any signs of slowing down and this month is packed. Not only am I turning old, but apparently I’m taking a trip to Atlanta as well. The day after I get back it’s Dead to Me at Bottom of the Hill and somewhere between all this, I’ve got to find a new apartment in the city, finally get the new No Country for Old Arcades up and make time to play Lord of the Rings Online. Oh, and play Street Fighter. SIGH.

Speaking of which, last week I wrote a week long feature on my time spent with Street Fighter IV at the Game Developers Conference. If I had to put a number on how many hours I actually spent in the company of that machine, I’d put it somewhere around 12 hours. It was pretty nuts. Anyway, here’s the rundown.

Day One, Impressions: My general thoughts on the game and a proper explanation of the Focus system. It’s actually quite incredible to see how far the game has come in the past two weeks. It’s also incredible to see that despite these improvements, people on GAF hate it more than ever.

Day Two, Interview: I wish I had a video crew for this one as Yoshinori Ono is an extremely animated guy. We talked about everything from his first Street Fighter experience to his work on 3rd Strike. Good times!

Day Three, Characters Pt.1: This has gotten some criticism, mainly from people on the fighting game boards who keep crying about how they want to hear impressions from a “professional.” Unfortunately, they can never know the truth about that week.

Day Four, Characters Pt.2: Something I learned from my blogging days was to embrace controversy without actually doing anything wrong. In this case, it was tiering the characters. They’re actually quite accurate for the moment but even I know that it’s too early to say that kind of crap. Still, it made for great discussion!

Day Five, Meet the Press: A big thanks goes out to everyone who helped me with this article. I pinged a bunch of folks that I saw playing the game that week (and weren’t mashing their pants off) and asked for their opinion on the game. I think it turned out pretty well.