Gran Turismo 5

I've been playing a lot of Gran Turismo 5 this last month, in between holiday festivities and familial obligations. It's a great game to pick up for a few hours here and there, though I've experienced many frustrations with A-Spec (the mode in which the player operates the car directly) due to my lack of a driving wheel. Owing to this, I've spent most of my time toying around with B-Spec (the mode in which the player controls an AI driver or team of drivers) races and buying cars. I've had a ton of fun with this. It's a nice way to explore the tracks, compare vehicles, and observe different strategies. I've been slowly amassing a collection of cars meant to tackle the various challenges offered by each tier of content (9 specific races/tournaments per difficulty level) and tuning them up. I'm about to polish off the most annoying challenges - the Mazda roadster (Miata) challenge, the Toyota Yaris challenge and the pickup truck challenge. This will finish up the first 2 tiers of content, and I'm nearly through the third as well. Mostly I have been buying shiny new supercars and select classics. When I finally get a racing wheel I'll have a lot of cars to play with!

Console Cleanup

My attempts to polish off the uninspiring Final Fantasy XIII have failed. I was making decent headway towards my goal until I got my copy of Gran Turismo 5. Now all I want to do is drive in circles and tune up beautiful, shiny cars. It's incredible how addictive this game is. I'm not even a car enthusiast - just casually interested and easily amused. It doesn't help that individual races take around 10 minutes each, some much longer. It's easy to lose track of time as I did yesterday. Afternoon became evening before I realized that the day was gone. I'm finding the title fun as a casual player - it's clear and direct enough that I'm not having too much trouble. Advanced knowledge of historical cars would definitely be an advantage, but if I wanted to I could look up lists of the best cars to suit each challenge online. I enjoy shopping the used car lot without any outside assistance, though. It's a lot of fun to just pick a car off the listed specs and give it a try.

Also distracting me from my quest to finish up FFXIII is the arrival of Little Big Planet! I've wanted to play this game ever since I saw the first demo at the San Diego Comic Con years back, before it was released. And it seems like every time I have gone into any game or electronic store I find myself picking up a copy and toying with the idea of purchasing it. But when I am playing an MMO I do little else - I don't read, I don't go out and I certainly don't split my time with console games. So I have always held off on getting a copy until now. With the sequel coming shortly after the new year I decided I had better get my act together and explore the game so I am ready for LBP2. I have only experienced part of the tutorial thus far and have not spent enough time to offer much constructive commentary yet apart from one observation. This game has, without a doubt, the very best tutorials ever. I adore Stephen Fry, and listening to him do the voice over has caused me to actually pay attention and utilize a tutorial for perhaps the first time ever in my gaming career. The game itself is adorable and clever. It's been so long since I've played a game with such limitless possibilities and I suspect what it will show me is that my own imagination has been withering slowly over the years. I can't wait to start goofing around with the level creation tools!

TERA Updates

I previously posted about playing TERA at this year's Penny Arcade Expo in August. I'd been on a self-imposed blackout of information, not wanting to get too excited about the game when it was still in the earlier stages of development. I ended that blackout at PAX, though, and ever since I have been intrigued by this title. Even with the reports coming in from many friends that the new World of Warcraft expansion has fixed a lot of the things that have been angering me about the title for years, I have no desire to return to that franchise ever again. And Aion, which I love despite its faults, has experienced such a cataclysmic population collapse that it is simply unplayable. For me, this means I've got all my eggs in one basket with TERA. There's nothing else coming out in the near future, so if this game doesn't live up to the hype and my own expectations I will be completely out of luck.

Having lifted my self-imposed blackout surrounding the game, I decided to "like" the official page through Facebook since my Google Reader account is bogged down with dozens and dozens of blogs, webcomics, news sites and other webpages. I've been pleased to see the regularity of the updates that are rolling out for the different classes, races, and the world itself.  It seems like every other day, a bit more information is added to the official site. It's a very manageable rate that allows me to consume each bit completely, and the regularity also keeps my curiosity satisfied. This week the site also had an additional update, an interactive world map! It works well to aid exploration of the world's mythology and races, but the information is not very precise. I hope they'll release further updates with information about the zones in different regions. At current, it's only the broad strokes.

Gran Turismo 5

I've never been a huge fan of driving games, mostly because I always had trouble reaching the pedals in arcades and because I was never terribly interested in cars as a teen and young adult. For the last few years, however, I've become a huge fan of the BBC's Top Gear program. I watch it primarily because it's entertaining, hilarious and clever. But I have always held a great admiration for things that are well made and beautiful, and well manufactured vehicles are no exception. I still know very little about my own car, but I have recently become much more curious about cars. They are one of the great modern inventions and it's fascinating to learn about how they work.

My first impressions are good (though, it would be nice if they'd created a female shaped racing driver). There's a bit of content to install, a few settings to set and then you're off. I decided to start with a trip to the used car dealership, where I purchased my stunning first car - an unbelievably bright lemon yellow Toyota Celica. From there, I decided to work my way through the basic licenses to get a handle on the controls. It has been years since I've played a console driving game, and even then I am accustomed to using racing wheels so there's a lot to adjust to with the controller. Not knowing what speeds to use in different cornering scenarios began to hamper my license exams, however, so I decided to learn by emulation and entered my first race. This proved to be the right decision, as I was able to take the first few laps of each track in the pack as practice. Using the other cars as "bumpers" to keep me on the right track helped refresh the broad strokes for me, and even after just 3 races I saw a huge level of improvement in my consistency.

So far I am really enjoying the game, and can't wait to get another controller so that I can actually race friends. This will provide quite a lot of replay value. I'm excited to see what I will unlock once I advance to the next tier of content as well. I certainly hope there are more races in each subsequent difficulty level. I was disappointed to see only nine tournaments for the beginner rank, but considering how boring these easy races will be for skilled players I understand. I snapped a few pictures, including the one above, during replays. The photo capturing abilities are rich and the replays are very sharp as well - I'm having a lot of fun re-watching the races and analyzing my mistakes. It's clear that a great deal of work went into making this game sleek and rich with content.

Something else that I'm finding enjoyable about the game is the inclusion of specialty races with specific entry requirements. The beginner's races offer several tournaments of this type, such as a European car manufactured between 1960 and 1979 or small Japanese cars from before 1979. It's tough to afford extra cars at this point in the game, but it's fun to have the variety. Unfortunately, both of the classic cars I purchased to participate in these races proved to be very, very slow and handle terribly. I suppose it demonstrates a realistic representation of their actual performance, but it's definitely frustrating.

Social Games: CityVille on Facebook

Zynga has just released yet another Facebook browser-based simulation game titled "CityVille". Though I have only played it for a few hours I already have a much better impression of this game than I do of their recent "FrontierVille". Before I dig into my first impressions, it should be said that I enjoy their Farmville, CafeWorld and Mafia Wars games. But FrontierVille (and YoVille before it) was a massive disappointment - I found the homesteads cute and enjoyed the general style of the gameplay but found it to be so horribly balanced that it is unplayable.

It should first be said that I am a person who takes Facebook relatively seriously. I only extend and accept friendship invitations from people I actually know. Therefore, I have only a few hundred friends, of whom only a small handful play these type of social games. Since having a large number of friends playing the same games provides an advantage, this makes my progression in games slow but reasonable. With a bit of patience, I manage to eventually "unlock" new content and complete objectives by increasing my level. However, FrontierVille's unlock mechanism is based on the number of neighbors each player possesses, not their level. Whereas a player's level is constantly increasing, offering the rewards to those willing to wait for them, the number of neighbors caps very early for me. It was just my bad luck that not even half a dozen friends found FrontierVille interesting. This means that virtually all game content, from simple buildings and crops to complex quests are not open to me without spending enormous amounts of game cash (purchased with real dollars). All Zynga games offer special items for people willing to pay - this is a common practice for free-to-play content. However, where their previous titles offered vanity items and advantages to those buying game cash FrontierVille's poor design made it necessary to use game cash to purchase the basic skills and items needed to play the game.

CityVille is faring better after a short time playing - though I don't have enough neighbors to enable the train station and start a shipping business, I have been able to build my town up reasonably well. With patience I am staffing my community buildings with my friends, which allows me to increase my population and with it my variety of businesses. Even the expansions are more flexible - whereas my cafe and farm are perpetually stuck at their current sizes due to lack of neighbors, I can purchase expansions with money and documents sent by friends. This means as long as I have one or two friends playing and a bit of patience, I will be able to grow my town geographically. I'm pleased to see this trend, since FrontierVille was so frustrating and even CafeWorld is becoming bogged down under a ridiculous amount of content that favors people who purchase game cash. It will be nice to have a new diversion while I browse the web and watch television.