Mercs 2

I’ve been looking forward to the Mercenaries 2 demo on XBL for a few weeks now, and it finally arrived! I quickly downloaded it and fired it up (pun intended), only to be… well… disappointed. For a few reasons. The first being that I couldn’t easily tell what the heck I was supposed to do.

I was plopped down in front of a base, eventually figured out I had to land a helicopter on top of a building, and then… nothing. Nothing happened. I get out of the helicopter and a baddy immediately spawns out of nowhere and flies it away. I like to think of myself as someone who can usually figure things like this out, but… no dice.

Maybe it’s because I’ve never played Mercs 1, or maybe I wasn’t paying good enough attention to what the objective was. Regardless, I’m disappointed. Possibly in myself; I can’t decide if it was me or the game who is broken, so it’s hard to direct my disappointment.

I still plan on gamefly-ing it, if I can get my hands on a copy before October’s slew of awesome releases (Fallout 3, Fable, Gears 2… well that’s in November, the new Castlevania DS), at which point I will be so distracted that I will probably never come back to Mercs 2. Gamefly is a long shot, tho, as 95% of the time they are out of whatever game it is I want to play. Sometimes I question the validity of their service, but I suppose that playing a game 6 months late is better than not playing it at all. Plus, I get to play tons of games that I KNOW I would never consider purchasing, if for no other reason than to dissect them from a design perspective. And I suppose Mercs 2 falls under that umbrella.

~Savid

Super Power Club

My mom, presumably going through some old boxes or something, found my first wallet and sent it to me (I don't even remember owning it!). Check out the treasure I found inside:
Awww, that brings me back. Somewhere, rotting in my old closet in Hawaii are the first 50 or so Nintendo Power magazines (you know, back before Nintendo Power was one giant ad for Nintendo games, and instead had awesome maps, walkthroughs, tips for bosses, and what not). Those are probably collectors items now. These are the baseball cards of my childhood.

I've been working my way through the excellent series by Darius Kazemi titled Effective Networking in the Game Industry. FASCINATING stuff. That guy is a networking addict, it's great.

Specifically I've been contemplating his suggestions for business cards and have decided it's pretty necessary design one of my own. I'm sure I'll put a copy of it up here once that's done. I'm going to have Tracie (or if she refuses, someone else, or even myself) draw a little picture of me with some of my trademark distinctions (badass claw-shaped scar on my left eyebrow, childlike grin, blue eyes, yellow shirt). Or at least those WILL be my trademark distinctions after I, you know, network better. Not that I've ever had trouble meeting friends, I like to think I'm a pretty likable guy. That and I'm a good listener, ooooh how people like to talk. I'm such a good listener, in fact, that I spend 6 hours a day reading game news and other game-related blog entries, and ignore my inbox and this blog... hmmm...

Ok, back to the mines I go.

~Savid