BIT.TRIP BEAT

BIT.TRIP BEAT is like Pong on acid. Except instead of the sparse black background and one block you're knocking about, you have rainbow colored pixel imagery of brains and bushes and trains and whatever the fuck dancing around in the background, distracting you from the dozen blocks hurling toward your paddle at any given moment. The goal is to block all those blocks. You have to be Neo to accomplish such a thing, and I was far from it.

The first time I played this game, I thought it was fun but categorized it as something that I would probably never beat. I was fine with that, but in an attempt to get silly Steam trading cards, I started playing it again. After swallowing my pride and turning it down to Easy, I started having slightly more success. That is, until the third level, Growth. That level is evil, and the final boss is back to basics with a simple Pong game to 15 which made me feel incredibly bad about myself.

This section was surprisingly hard. If the bossman gets to 15 before you do, you have to start the level over. The trick is to hit the ball on the very edge of the paddle to get it going fast and at a sharp angle, but actively trying to do that led to more failure. The music on the boss level is also pulsing, kind of like a heart pumping, which makes everything more stressful, and also led to more failure.

So so many failures...



It wasn't until I played music over top the game that I relaxed enough to beat the damn thing. (Thanks Gwen Stefani's "Baby Don't Lie".) I wouldn't say I'm good at this game now, but I can confidently say that I don't altogether suck, and that's more than I could have hoped for with this ridiculous game.

Dragon Age Inquisition: PS3 Edition May Have Been a Mistake...

Today I was happy. I got Dragon Age: Inquisition in the mail, and I was ready to sink serious hours into a franchise that I love. Unfortunately, right when I was ready to play, the Playstation Network took a shit. I couldn't log in and import my Dragon Age Keep saved world state. I refused to start the game using the default game state, so I wait. After waiting for a couple hours for PSN to come back up, I finally get into the game. After spending about 15 minutes in the game after character creation, I think I may have made a mistake getting the PS3 version. I heard people complain about the graphics, but I dismissed them because I'm no graphics whore. However, there are visual problems that are distracting me from the game, and it sucks. Some points of suck:

• It takes forever to load. It takes so long to switch scenes to the point where I think it may have froze when it hasn't.
• All the people's clothes seem to have a low res texture on them. They all kind of look blurry.
• The draw distance is really close. I'll be walking and objects on the ground will pop into existence once I got close enough to them. It's distracting.
• It seems like there's no lighting effects on, so everything looks a little too bright and because things are not getting environmental light, it's just a certain brightness level always. This is especially noticeable with people's clothes, and it just calls attention to the crap texturing I mentioned earlier.
• The particle effects look really crummy.
• I saw clipping during the initial cut scene.

I didn't think it would look bad at all. Dragon Age: Origin looked a lot better. Skyrim and Uncharted both look amazing on PS3, so I didn't think it would make a difference. The PS3 seems like a strong enough workhorse to show awesomeness. I know it's capable. I think the problem is that those titles were developed for the PS3 and optimized for that system. They got all they could out of it. However, with Inquisition, I'm sure they worked to get all they could out of the next gen system, and the PS3 version had to have the settings turned down significantly just to make it work.

I'm bummed now.

I'll probably try to trade this in for the PS4 version, and it'll just sit around til I actually get a PS4. *sigh*