XNA, Darkness, and Restaurants
Covering PAX for three days kind of wore me out, so I'm just going to ramble a little bit and phone this one in. Random stuff tonight.
Games: Just finished Operation Darkness from Atlus last night. Like I said earlier, the demo available on Xbox Live doesn't do this game justice at all. I'll be posting a second opinion up on GameCritics pretty soon, but for now I will say that this is most likely going to be on my Top Ten of ’08. For SRPG fans, it was good, good stuff.
One other quick thing… well, I guess two, actually.
The first: if any readers have played Baroque (the Atlus-released roguelike on PS2/Wii) I'd love to hear your impressions of it. I only had the chance to play it for about 20 minutes, but I found it to be fairly intriguing. If you tried it, drop me a line and let me know what you thought of it.
The second: this may not be news to anyone, but I recently signed up for the XNA Creator’s Club on Live. For those who may not be familiar with it, this is the program that enables players to make their own game on a PC and then upload it to Xbox Live.
Personally, I don't have any interest in creating my own game at the moment, but a side benefit of joining this program is that members get to evaluate games that other people have made. The process of accessing the existing user-created library is not very clear, but after watching a tutorial video on the Xbox website, I finally figured it out and was quite pleased to discover around seventy different games available for download.
I'll blog more about this later, but I tried five games at random. I thought three were pretty terrible, one was a mediocre clone of Geometry Wars, and one was an impressive arena-style fighting game. With the advent of downloadable content, I've become more and more excited about indie projects, so the thought of having 65 more games to check out has got me pretty stoked.
Food: So if any of you have ever clicked on the link to the left and discovered the food review blog my wife and I write, you might have noticed that it hasn’t been updated in... a while. We were going pretty good and averaging one restaurant a week, but we got derailed when my son came to visit for the summer and we haven't recovered quite yet.
To be honest, I didn't think anybody really read it, but now that we haven't updated it, I’ve gotten a ton of comments asking why there haven't been any more reviews.
Message received.
We've got one new review in the pipe, and we are both getting ramped up to start doing it weekly again. Look for some new content there soon.
Posts
Reading today's entry made me realize that it must feel like you're writing into a vacuum some times, so just a note to say that I really enjoy your writing/thoughts and appreciate the effort you make to share. I check the blog out every couple of days and always feel rewarded, so please keep on keeping on.
Glad that you'll be doing the restaurant reviews again, they were fun to read! Also happy to hear a positive opinion on Operation Darkness. While a 360 is still quite a way off in the future for me (2012 here I come!), it is nice to know that there will be good games available when the big day rolls around.
Belated thank you, also, for all of your enthusiasm regarding Persona 3; I recently picked up a used PS2 and based upon your comments made P3:FES one of my first purchases. What an incredibly fun, rich game. I'm nowhere near finished (mid-October in 'The Journey') but I've played 65 hours so far, and each of those has been a real treat.
Hey Tony,
Thanks very much for that great comment. Reading stuff like that really makes blogging worthwhile... after all, if I was just writing for myself, I'd keep a diary under my mattress. ; )
The food blog has been updated, and I'm quite glad you didn't think I steered you wrong with P3. Nothing's worse than recommending a game and then hearing that someone thought it was terrible. ^_^
Thanks again for the comment, and I'd also like to encourage anyone else reading to leave comments once in a while... Blogging sure doesn't pay, but knowing someone thinks what you're doing is worth two minutes is just as good, sometimes.