When I started the Retrospective Overdrive program, it was to break up tedium and see how things have changed. I wanted to go a good period of time without just doing what I’ve done the past few years — nothing but playing Pro Evo Soccer.

But, why? It’s just a game; hell, it’s just a sports game, and I’m sure many who read the site look down on us who kick and throw balls virtually as if we’re some sort of cro-magnon anomaly, cavemen who have miraculously found fire and Xbox Live. It keeps coming back to style, though, for me. Very few other games have allowed me to express creativity as well as Konami’s Pro Evo/Winning Eleven series and, in particular, Pro Evo Soccer 2010.

Freshman year of college I picked up a PlayStation 2 after seeing how white-hot Gran Turismo 4 looked. Of course, I’d also heard about how good Konami’s soccer games were and since that wasn’t great on the Xbox, I bought it. I wasn’t a newcomer to soccer games — strong addictions to FIFA 2004 and 2005 prove otherwise — but Winning Eleven 8 was a good replacement, if a bit ugly at times.

This is where the addiction started in earnest: Winning Eleven 9 ('05-'06 season).

Winning Eleven 9, though, damn near killed me. I had to put my PS2 in the closet during finals because of that nonsense. And a couple years later, well after its sell-by date, WE9 kept me company when my first Xbox 360 succumbed to the inevitable, shuffled off this mortal coil and was sent to Texas to get fixed. WE9 doesn’t have a time-played tracker but I’d guess I put at least 150 hours into that damn thing, probably more. A few up-and-down years later, PES 2010 promised to be good, and FIFA was underwhelming, so the decision was simple. I’ve since put over 200 hours into PES 2010 in 15 months.

This again begs the question, “Why?”

The ball is round, the game is simple, but provides a clean canvas for you to express yourself — so long as you don’t use your hands. What both WE9 and PES 2010 allowed me to do is play a sport with the sort of creativity you see in real life but that is not found in any other sports video games. Basketball and soccer are a bit unique in that creativity, freedom and expression are viable offensive strategies. Football is all about execution, baseball is just one gigantic fucking spreadsheet by now, and hockey is too chaotic and compact with few moments of zen. But basketball and soccer both can be moments of sports art — and its particularly effective in the latter. Soccer inspires effusiveness and poetry, as seen both in the brilliant blog The Run of Play and even in match recaps. American sports are often quantitative, discussing who did how much of what; soccer is entirely qualitative.

Until I became a PES junkie, what I didn’t realize is that FIFA lacked that spark. Playing FIFA is like playing foosball, there’s one good route to take and you can spin the handles around to good effect. PES is more like chess. Attacking and creating a goal in PES is a multiple-choice question with no wrong answer, so long as the ball goes in the back of the net; the “right” way may vary by situation, but it’s in your hands. Want to fire in crosses from the wing? Go ahead. Want to have intricate passing through the middle, leading to a shot? Have at it. Fast or slow, wide or narrow, the choice is yours. The biggest cliche in sports gaming is that “it looks like the real thing,” and while FIFA may look like it in still screenshots, it’s a different story in motion.

This is all the biggest factor behind why I keep playing the game: most every match feels like a new challenge, and when you’re playing other teams that are good, you really have to account for the opponent’s strengths and weaknesses to capitalize on your own. For me, it’s methodical yet utterly addictive. I think I have about 20 goal highlights from PES 2010 saved, and no two are alike. It’s the journey, not the destination, that matters.

Add in other sports game and video game tropes, like players waxing and waning in skills as the years go on and new stars rising, and the variables multiply. As those factors change, so too does your lineup; as somebody who follows soccer I can attest that, in this way, art imitates life. Now that I’ve put so much time into this series of games, I’m not worried about the physics or controls; I understand those implicitly. When I play sports with my friends, I learn what they like to do and where they like to go; in the same way that playing sports with friends presents certain stable factors, playing PES for me is comfort and freedom within a ruleset. I know how the ball bounces, but it’s up to me to capitalize.

In that way, PES is like playing sports in real life — rewarding practice, persistence, and presenting subtle twists with every game.

Free riverfront concerts: Just another reason why SXSW is awesome

Holy crap, you guys. I can’t believe I’m still standing.

Not only did I just complete my second week at my new job, but I also subjected myself to two straight weeks of going out at night for music, food and drinks. I nearly overdosed on culture, having taken in a movie premiere, a dozen bands and a variety of Texas beers (not one of them held a candle to the Northwest’s best, for the record) and I’m proud to be able to sit here and tell the tale.

Of course, now that SXSW is coming to a close, it’ll be business as usual around here. Aaron’s up to his ankles in Dragon Age II’s trademark bloody, hypersexualized fantasy schtick, Doug’s digging deep into his gaming reserves, and I’m reluctantly easing back into the real world.

Aaron:

Fenris is a moody asshole with tattoos. In many ways he's the Francis of Dragon Age.

The past two weeks have been a blur. Suffice it to say, I’m playing so many games right now that I can barely keep it all together. What I do know is that I’m face-deep in the massive cleavage that is Dragon Age II. To say I’ve been “motorboating” that game would be an understatement, and anyone who has spent 10 minutes as Hawke would understand that all of my breast-frences (re: breast references) are justified.

I mean really: If BioWare was a person, it’d be the horniest 15-year-old art class T.A. whose creepy uncle gave him a stack of Playboys and Vampirella comics. And while the fantasy genre established its penchant for exaggerating the reproductive organs of women both human and elfin — and dwarven…unfortunately (Ugh -Ed.) — long before the Canadians took their stab at putting on a robe and wizard’s hat, it’s kinda straight-up weird that the same top-heavy body model is repeatedly copy-and-pasted onto the majority of female NPCs. To be honest I find it in bad taste. But then again, no one was applauding Dragon Age: Origins for its realism. Most people were just laughing at its horrendous sex scenes. And just like its forebear, DA2 fails when it comes to lovemaking (no pun intended).

Digital flesh aside, the game is very hard to define. I want to wait until I’ve finished the campaign to pen all of my thoughts on record, yet I’m beginning to wonder if I was wrong about my “most improved sequel” hype I wrote in the last Backlog. Whether or not I ever leave the god damn city of Kirkwall remains to be seen in my now-seventh year of being there.

So far I feel like I’m playing the Sims, improving my little “town” and going to work each day as the years tick by. If Dragon Age II was a Sims expansion it’d be called The Sims: Uh Oh, It’s Magic!, and it would have annoying relationships, blathering conversations and, well, decapitations. Oh wait, it doesn’t have to be a Sims game to have all of that stuff.

However, DA2 does have one thing going for it: Fenris. That guy is fly. But I’m simply horrified to think about all of the fan art that’s going to be made of him in the darkest depths of the Internet.

Doug:

Old video games: We play them so you don't have to stain your rose-tinted memories. Thankfully, MarioKart 64 holds up to the test of time.

Oh, god. Where was I? Oh yeah, playing games. So after my brief excursion going sideways in Forza 3, I put in Pro Evo Soccer 2010.

I think I’ve broken the 200 hour mark in that game. I am not proud. I’ve won my fourth straight Italian league title and my AS Roma squad is indestructible. That challenge conquered, I’ve jumped into building up my favorite team, Arsenal, and…oh god. This has to stop. I’ve poured far too much time into a two-year-old soccer game. I need an intervention. Beyond playing that a little with one of my friends, I’m putting that on the shelf for now.

Seeing as the Formula 1 season is a week away, it’s time to work on season three in F1 2010 in my attempts to take over the racing world and win more world titles than any American ever has. To compensate for jumping into the best car in the game, I’ve turned the AI difficulty up to the hardest level, which made for a stern challenge. Especially when I screwed up in the Australian Grand Prix, forgot how to drive in the rain during qualifying, started from the last position on the grid, and climbed up to sixth in the final order. That was good times.

I’m also spending a lot of time tracking down and playing older games for our Retrospective Overload, but that’s kind of SECRETS for right now. Rest assured, I have some of our best agents on the case, and I am personally tracking down things with sprites. Also checking prices on Amazon and being surprised by how some things retain value. Kind of shocking, really.

Lastly, I’ve been playing a decent amount of a web-based multiplayer game. Nah, it’s nothing like the Quake or Battlefield games that’ve been made for browsers. It’s something much, much simpler than that. You ever play the card game Apples to Apples? Of course you have. Match up a noun to an adjective; it’s a very high-brow game with the potential to be quite hilarious as some cards in the game are, for example, Adolf Hitler, Helen Keller, and Puppies. So there you go.

Well, there’s a web-based version made called Nutsy Bolts that is Apples to Apples with a chat client. Obviously, hilarity ensues. Especially if your friends have jacked-up senses of humor.

Nick:

What, me worry?

Thanks to the ubiquity of social media and the insane challenge of finding cool (and cheap) things to do in Austin during SXSW, I’ve been playing something of an alternate-reality game for the last couple weeks. By keeping up with a few hashtags on Twitter and making ample use of the Places function on Facebook, I’ve been socializing like crazy — and considering that I’m an introvert by nature, you can probably imagine just how exhausting that’s been.

But things are settling down, so that means more time for gaming. I sank a few hours into Dragon Age: Origins — Awakening (the single-worst punctuated game title in recent memory) and inched up past the 35-hour mark in Fallout: New Vegas, perhaps the laziest sequel to a game that was already kind of a lazy iteration over Oblivion.

But given my current lack of furniture and relatively little free time, I’ve been having a lot of fun with portable games recently. I blazed through an old, obscure Game Boy Advance game called Gunstar Super Heroes, the sequel to the tried-and-true Genesis classic from Treasure. It’s kind of incredible just how trite the game’s story is, though that’s not much of a surprise considering its source material. The action is what matters, though, and this game delivers. The only major downside is that it borrows far too heavily from the original, down to the exact same mission structure and even some identical boss battles. Of course, I realize I’m writing about a game that nobody reading this site will probably ever play, so…let’s move on.

Next up on the docket of obscure portable games: Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime. I bought it years and years ago after hearing some great buzz for it, but for some reason it never stuck. I’m hoping I’ll be charmed this time around.

And for those of you who’re asking: No, I’m not playing FarmVille, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

Okay, fine: So maybe we didn’t put our thinking caps on this morning to figure out what ties all three of our Backlog entries together. It’s possible that we didn’t get enough sleep because some jerk woodpecker just had to poke the hell out of a dying fir tree about five feet from a certain editor’s bed for roughly three hours. Maybe that same editor grew frustrated in hunting down a hilarious .jpg and drew a crude comic to vent his frustration instead.

Who knows? It is a mystery. So why don’t we just file it away for now and move on to more pressing matters?

Lovely.

Here’s the skinny: Nick is up to his old tricks, Doug is off the friggin’ deep end of football-induced insanity, and Aaron just really, really hates free stuff.

Nick:

We have to go deeper.

In case you ever decide to plagiarize our wildly successful business model, you might want to take note of a few key details about technique and approach. For example, the first thing I do before writing my Backlog contribution is make a list of every game I’ve played over the past week. This allows me both to prioritize my article’s structure and, in a rare instance of introspection, determine how much relaxation I’ve afforded myself in recent days.

That last part is a lot more important than I’ve allowed myself to realize recently. With so much pressure on my shoulders to find a new job and move back into the city – pressure that is primarily self-imposed – I haven’t had much time to play games, read books, play music, visit with friends, or just be a pleasant, mellow human being.

That’s going to change. I don’t think it’s foolish to suggest that someone can still have fun even while looking for work.

So here’s my pledge to you: Next week’s Backlog will mention at least one new game, and it will be a minimum of 147% more interesting to read. (Don’t you worry about the math — that’s my forte.)

But because you’re already here and it’d be rude of me to shove you back out into the cold, let me get you up to speed. I’ve begun work on my most ambitious project yet in Minecraft: the construction of an underwater city. And no, it’s not that underwater city; someone’s already recreated it anyway. I love how Minecraft makes it remarkably simple to take a concept and make it real in a shared online experience.

Speaking of Rapture, I’ve wrapped up Minerva’s Den, the self-contained narrative add-on to BioShock 2. It’s an interesting piece of content both within the BioShock universe and in terms of what a ten-dollar downloadable add-on can do for a game, and I’m hoping to get a review posted next week.

Beyond that, I’m trying to get back up to speed on pro drums in Rock Band 3 and enjoying some good, old-fashioned masochistic fun with Demon’s Souls on PlayStation 3 and 100 Rogues on iPhone. Something about a high-stakes, brutal, remorseless roleplaying game is just so damn compelling to me. I just need a good safe word.

Doug:

Yes, Doug is still playing this game. No, we don't know when that will ever stop.

Ah, video games. Just last night I put the wraps on my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2, saving the universe in quite the heroic way — and not losing a single crew member on the so-called suicide mission. I’ve still got a little content left to experience in the game, but I could go back through all I’ve already played for a third time quite easily.

Put a little more time into Super Street Fighter IV as well. Nick and I decided that if there’s ever a Silicon Sasquatch office, we’ll definitely have a dedicated SSFIV setup. I’ve loved fighting games for a while, but SSFIV is just about the pinnacle of balance, playability, and fun. I’m really, really terrible at executing combos on the standard 360 pad, though.

But neither of those games are the one I poured time into. Nope. That would go to the ever-present black hole, my addiction, Pro Evo Soccer 2010. If you’ll excuse me for a moment…

(Editor’s note: At this point, Doug has stood up and hastily pulled on his Arsenal soccer shirt. He is speaking in tongues. I’m calling the police.)

Seriously, it’s the time of year I start caring a lot more about European soccer. I’m always following along, but now that college football is done and the NBA playoff race hasn’t heated up, it’s time for soccer. Plus, Arsenal’s still in all four competitions, should win the Carling Cup (first silverware for five years, yay), and could still win the League for the first time in forever, so it’s time to pay attention.

I don’t know how much time I’ve dumped into my main Master League save, but I reckon I’ve played as major Italian club AS Roma for almost 60 hours. Now on my fourth season with the giallorossi, I’ve made some big-money purchases, developed players, and have quite the attacking team. I was using Roma’s stock 4-4-1-1 for a long time, and while it’s a fun way to play, it felt a bit too reliant on whoever is playing AMF (which, to begin with, is Francesco Totti). I loved how Roma’s attackers would switch positions and move fluidly, but I needed a new formation. Getting spanked by Real Madrid in the Champions League final precipitated change, so now I’m playing a more fluid 4-3-3 with a stock back four, DMF and two CMFs, and two SS and a CF up top.

The brilliant thing is that, by buying players who fit into multiple roles, I’ve created a midfield and attack setup where I can play total football until my black little heart explodes. My midfielders rotate responsibilities, my forwards swap positions on the field, and it allows me to do revel in why I love PES 2010: play going forward is much, much more organic and creative than FIFA’s recent games have been. With FIFA, it’s always felt like the best way to play is to put a ball through, spring the offside trap, and go one-on-one with the keeper. With PES, sure, that’s a way to do it, but you can send crosses into the middle of the box, to the far post, in early, and — crucially — you can attack and build in numbers, chipping away around the 18-yard-box until you find a way through.

It’s far from a perfect game — if my other favorite Konami soccer game, Winning Eleven 9, is too quick on the whistle, than PES 2010 is far too stingy awarding fouls, and free kicks are impossible to score on. However, it’s interesting enough to keep me going until the 2011-2012 season games are out this fall.

Aaron

Aaron's pretty sure this isn't a screenshot from the CSI demo he tried, but at this point he doesn't care. He also doesn't think anyone could tell the difference if asked.

Demos are a good and bad thing. They let you give games a preliminary test run before you put down a lot of money. At their best, demos preserve your wallet from waste; at their worst, well, demos let your girlfriend spend an hour playing a god-awful CSI: Criminal Some Bullshit or Whatever game on Xbox.

My girlfriend and I were spending a nice morning off from work together, hanging out and browsing the Xbox marketplace to kill time. I had just finished Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands (which, in short, pissed me off a great deal due to idiotic puzzles that truly deserve their own classification in the realm of “fuck this shit”) and made her sit through the entirety of the Dead Space 2 demo. Now, my girlfriend wasn’t upset or put out by my gaming choices the other day; in fact, she enjoyed watching the Prince defy gravity and an unassuming space engineer rip apart demon babies.

However, when I gave her the controller and asked her to pick the next game to play, she went straight to the demo section and downloaded that shovelware CSI demo. It was shit. Horrible, poorly designed shit. The worst part is, I found out that Telltale Games puts these things out! We both did our best to solve the mystery of a car wash cocaine murder, but after nearly an hour of lifeless voice acting and mind-numbing puzzles, we threw in the towel. Now we’ll never know “whodunnit,” and if Gil Grissom caught wind of our performance, he’d be upset yet passively bitchy. That’s the beauty of Grissom.

As I’ve demonstrated here in a very brief bit of writing, videogame demos are a beautiful thing when used right. In the wrong hands, though, they can be a nightmare. Overall, the CSI demo was a learning experience, one that told me how easy it would be to make a decent crime scene adventure game if given to the right team.

After the demo extravaganza, we finished out the day playing Kingdom Hearts. Since I’ve never even touched the series before yesterday, it was fun to sit down and see what the fuss was all about. I’m starting to be excited for the next installment on PS3, no less. It’s nice to play a Square-Enix game from a time before they started to suck at making RPGs (Final Fantasy XIII says hello).

Well, it was fun while it lasted.

With December and its myriad holidays out of the way, everybody’s got something to keep them busy. Doug’s back to work on his master’s program, Aaron has transformed into a job-applying machine, and I’ve thankfully found a job once again. Unfortunately, that means we all have a whole lot less time to be playing games, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to turn a blind eye to our sacred obligation to Silicon Sasquatch. Don’t worry! We’ve got a couple great articles that are almost ready for publication, and we’re anticipating a full run of content next week.

In the meantime, here’s what we’ve been keeping ourselves busy with.

Aaron wouldn't say 'I ain't afraid of no ghosts': he has much less bravado toward specters than you might think.

Aaron:

Now, the game I actually have something say about is Ghostbusters: The Video Game. Maybe it’s because I only paid a meager $12.99 at GameFly’s used game store (with free shipping), but I can’t help but like what I’ve seen. I’m perhaps halfway though the story now, and while the camera and controls are a bit rough around the edges, Ghostbusters is pure fun for fans of the movies. It’s by no means perfect, and that’s fine. The humor is there, the attention to detail in the firehouse headquarters is there, the proton packs are spot-on and the thrill of catching a ghost in a trap still makes me giggle just like my 6-year-old self used to with my toy Nerf proton pack and authentic jumpsuit. Ghostbusters is simple fun layered over a strong IP, and I truly hope Atari gives Terminal Reality another shot in future sequel. Maybe when the third movie finally (maybe) sees release next year, a tie-in game could coincide with the film’s debut.

In case you'd like some added context, here's what's happening. Man on the left: "Colonel! What have you been hiding from me!?" Man in giant robot: "Snaaaaaaaaaaake!"

Doug:

Much like Aaron, I’m just going to list out most of what I played over our holiday break because, being a degenerate graduate student, I had almost nothing productive to do between Thanksgiving and this week, when classes re-started up in earnest. Because that means a lot of time to play games, I’m just going to cut the fat and go list-happy.

I finished Brütal Legend (which seemed like it lost its storytelling steam a bit at the very end) and am close to finishing Batman: Arkham Asylum (trap-laden gargoyles are my kryptonite right now). I almost have what the gentlemen at Giant Bomb would term an “S-rank” (or 1000/1000 achievement score) on Forza Motorsport 3, which I also did a lot of online racing on during the break. I was definitely happy to hit Level 50 in that game and get the last gifted car.

The only game really worth the meagre Xbox Live sale over the holiday break was Marvel vs. Capcom 2, which was marked down to almost 60 percent off the regular list price and is worth every penny. Better than arcade-perfect, with every character unlocked from the start and online multiplayer capable? Yes, please. I also received a kind gift in the form of Shadow Complex, which scratches my Metroid-vania itch in so many ways. Definitely one of the best Xbox 360-only games of last year.

Lastly, my sports game fix has come in two forms — first, as part of multiple trips to downtown Portland old-school arcade Ground Kontrol, I’ve fulfilled my basketball jones by playing a bunch of NBA Jam. Nick and I (and friend of the site Andrew) went to GK on New Year’s Eve, and besides crushing the X-Men 6-player arcade game, the most fun had was running the two-man game with the Blazers on NBA Jam. The other sports game I picked up was, finally, Pro Evo Soccer 2010…which definitely lives up to the expectations I had for it based off my playtime with the demo. It may not be as pretty as FIFA 10, but it provides a much more challenging and fulfilling soccer experience. Crank the difficulty all the way up and enjoy smart AI in a sports game for once.

The story of a witch, her hair, and gratuitous almost-nudity. This is gonna be awkward.

Nick:

As a test to see who’s interested in the blog, I offered up a vote on our Facebook page to ask people which game they’d rather see me purchase and review first: Demon’s Souls or Bayonetta. Although there was support for both, Bayonetta got the nod and I picked up a copy last night. While I’ve only had time to play about ten minutes of the game, those ten minutes were extraordinarily promising. I just hope the game’s rampant, bizarre sexuality doesn’t weird out my friends and loved ones.

The majority of my free time has been spent on — yeah, you guessed it — Dragon Age: Origins. I keep thinking I’m getting close to the end, and then another 15-hour sequence of quests pops up. I’m absolutely enamored with the game, so I think I won’t have any complaints if it turns out the game just never ends.