Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches

Rhiannon is one of those cheap production adventure games which you only see stapled onto a collection of other adventure or even seek and find games at Wal-mart. In this case it was in the ‘Haunted Collection’ sharing a CD with Scratches (The game ‘Scratches.’ The CD didn’t have scratches.) But now that I think about it, you should probably return any CDs you buy that have Scratches on them… Teehee

The bootup sequence for the game takes forever and it’s unskippable. It’s not like it has a lot of stuff to show you or anything. It’s more like you’re watching a three picture slide show controlled by an old man who keeps falling asleep in between frames. Just click on the shortcut and go see what’s on TV while it finishes jacking around.

I started this game months ago so I don’t really remember the initial premise of the plot so I’ll just paraphrase/fabricate it. You go to this haunted house in the English countryside to watch it while the owners are gone. As you move along, you learn more about the history of the house and why it is the way it is. There is a singular demon in possession of the area. This aside, there’s really nothing spooky about the house. It just looks like an ordinary house that people are currently living in with electricity and only slightly outdated technology. The outer extremities like the workshop are only in a bit of disrepair. If there’s one thing I’d take from the other game, Scratches, it was the spooky-ass house. They could have really used it here.

So you do what you always do, explore and look for puzzles to solve. The movement consists of clicking through mostly static first-person prerendered views. There’s no fine movement or views available. You just have to deal with the game’s prescribed number of steps it forces you to take and whatever directions it allows you to look. Often times you’ll see things that you’ll want to interact with in the corner of one view and have no idea what combination of directional clicks is required to get you in front of it. Most of the time though you essentially walk past whatever it is and then turn back around to face it which is stupid.

All around, you find countless items you can look at but can’t pick up. This is because you have to do everything in order. If the game hasn’t told you that you need a bowl yet, you can’t pick up the fucking bowl. It was this aspect of the game, (which I hadn’t figured out yet,) that caused me to take such a long hiatus from it. You see early on I was trying to build a fire in the house’s fireplace but couldn’t. I took the kindling from the basket next to it and set it in the fireplace. Then I went outside to get the logs I saw near the axe. Alas, I could not pick them up. Building a fire was the only thing I could work on and the game wouldn’t let me so I stopped playing. I thought it was broken. You’d be surprised at how many adventure games have some stupid bug in them that makes it impossible to progress any further. When I researched the issue on the internet I found out what the problem was. I hadn’t yet listened to a message on the answering machine telling me to build a fire. Seriously? Of all the irrelevant shit… And it let me put the kindling in but not the logs? So I’m aloud to build HALF of a fire? What’s with that?

A habitual problem in the game is the overabundance of reading material. Books and books and papers and magazines and e-mails and more books. Just pages and pages of journal entries, scientific discourse and Celtic legend. I maybe skimmed the first five words of every paragraph and pushed it aside to forget about it. Unless the text is dialogue from characters speaking in the game or short little snippets of notes and news clippings, I’m not going to fucking read it. Figure out a better medium or a more succinct way of establishing back story and plot development because this shit is like pulling teeth.

The key to breaking the demonic curse involves these four elemental orbs that you have to create… from scratch. At certain points in the game you uncover documents which pertain to a specific legend and basically have a shopping list of objects that you need to get and combine in a specific corresponding elemental place to create the orb. Pretty much it involves trying to remember if any of that shit you weren’t allowed to pick up earlier resembles items from the list and if you even remember where the hell it is. Of course you’re just going to try and pick up everything while looking because let me tell you, some of these stand in objects are a real stretch. In one you have to find a cradle but all you can find is a printed picture of a crib. When you toss it in it turns into a real cradle. I mean if I can literally just put in a fucking picture of the object, why don’t I just go on Google Images or get out the encyclopedia and get everything in five minutes sitting in a chair?

There was another one which required a mouse. Now I knew it had to be a dead mouse from the cat since he kept bringing them in and I kept accidentally picking them up. Then I’d dispose of them in the toilet because they were useless and I didn’t want to have to look at them all the time in my inventory. Surely this was the sole purpose for those stupid dead mice but no. Do you know what I actually needed? A computer mouse. Yes, a COMPUTER MOUSE. So don’t use an actual mouse in a ritual that requires a mouse. Use a modern day device that is CALLED a mouse for no more reason than because it very vaguely resembles one.

While making the water orb you have to mix the correct items with various water samples that are labeled things like ‘joy,’ ‘duty’ and ‘hatred.’ Now beforehand you had to label these test tubes and then fill them at a spring in the yard. Ignoring the obvious question of how/why can the samples correlate with nebulous things like emotions, how did I know what intrinsic qualities the water would have before I gathered it? Second, how in the hell did all these samples gathered at a single water source organize themselves in the correct test tubes?

When making the wind orb, it’s impossible to find where you do the spell. The other ones were obvious. Put it in a fire. Put it in a hole. Put it in the water. But how do you put it in wind? The short answer is you don’t. Somehow you’re supposed to realize that the couch in the living room that you didn’t even know you could sit on, you’re supposed to sit on and do everything on the coffee table. In this one you’re supposed to mix tonal sound recordings with the items. So try this at home; go get your piggy bank and place it on your coffee table. Then play some music. At some point when the correct note is played, it should turn into a real pig.

Even for a fantastical magic spell, I don’t get how this is supposed to work. You're just combining a bunch of ordinary things together and getting gold from air. It would be like going to your uncle’s ranch for the summer and then trying to make magical shit by mixing various weeds from his garden with random personal affects you found in his bathroom by throwing them together in the pool. It doesn’t make ANY sense. That’s like something a seven-year-old would do. In fact it reminds me of how I used to mix random food and spices together and then liquefy it in a blender. Why? Maybe in the end you wouldn’t get a ‘fire orb’ but what you’d have was the most putrid and vile concoction anyone’s ever seen. Just one whiff of the watery humus-textured rainbow goo and you’ll be gagging into your open palm. It’s absolutely wretched in your nostrils but what does it TASTE like? You must taste it! You know it will be a highly regrettable experience but the substance is inexplicably alluring. It is the forbidden fruit and you can not resist. I don’t even know where the hell I’m going with this anymore so back on topic.

At the end, you finally get to use the orbs to banish the spirit by placing them on the correct tombstones in a cemetery. You have to find all four Rhiannons (Wait there are four? News to me.) and place the orbs accordingly based on their zodiac signs. This is the most finicky place as far as moving around and trying to look at the things you want to look at. But the worst thing of all is that in order to know most of their zodiac signs, you need to have read the correct articles of monotonous papers you’ve found. No, sorry. The only thing you’re going to get me to read for that is a walkthrough.

Great Books For Children

On days off from work, I sometimes accompany my wife to her job at her after school tutoring program which happens to be in the library of our old high school. When I’m there I sometimes entertain myself by going through the library’s thousands of badly categorized books. Not really to read. The objective is more to find something weird or funny which is not all that hard to do.

Can’t you just see lawsuits from a bunch of parents of stupid kids that read this book and then purposefully gouged their eyes out so that they could get a magic wand just like Jenny.

Is this really a guide on how to watch orangutans? Why would I need that? And look at that poor cat getting kissed so passionately.


In the 60’s and 70’s there seemed to be only one genre of children's book and that was the adventures of any given animal with a stupid name.


Be sure to feed your pudgy beaver lots of wood.


I remember seeing this book at school as an immature child and making fun of the name. Fifteen years later and nothing has changed.


Yeah, you can go ahead and leave me off of that guest list.


Well… shit.


Settle down children and I’ll tell a tale of silly soviet mishap.


I don’t want to be a pervert or anything but you see it, right? Right? I’m not just a dirty bastard trying to insert inappropriate things into everything?


What the hell?

No, seriously, what the hell?


There’s nothing wrong with the subject matter of this book but look at the faces.

Look at them!


Probably a book about liking solitude and why it’s wrong.


Boy I remember many a sleepless night as a 10-year-old wondering this exact thing. If only I had known about this book. There can’t be anything more edifying.


I stand corrected.

Holy shit! For real? An entire series of martial arts books for kids? That’s awesome.


Well kids, the best way to learn is through doing.


That cover is cringe-worthy. What the hell could be inside? Do I really want to know? I like how the white man is playing golf while the other less developed skin colors are off engaging in more simple-minded savage affairs.


The story of Timmy, his paste eating addiction and the people it hurts.

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

CLICK

Domino Rally

Before video games began pissing me off I had another source of high frustration. Back in the 90's from about 3rd to 5th grade I was inexplicably obsessed with Domino Rally sets. They were second only to Legos… and maybe K’nex. I used to go to Toys 'R' Us and ogle the giant wall of games where the Domino Rallies sat. The full sized sets went for something like $30.00 I think and being a small child with almost no cash flow meant that getting one was like blowing four paychecks at once. I always had to get the small sets which consisted of maybe 20 dominoes and a single gimmick. So I'd end up with my original full size set and a handful of other smaller sets representing their larger counterparts which I could only fantasize about.

Most people know that dominoes is a real game outside of standing them up so they can fall over but most people don't know how to actually play it. This is because the game is eclipsed by the amount of fun you can derive from setting off a chain reaction with its game pieces. When you hear the word dominoes, you don't think of the game, you think of shit falling over. In fact, now that I think about it, dominoes is kind of like the game Mouse Trap.

Do you know how to play Mouse Trap? The correct answer is who gives a shit? Just set off the damn mouse trap. Nobody knows how to play Mouse Trap and if they do they never WANT to play it. Everyone just wants to see a Rube Goldberg contraption in action.

You know what's really weird when you think about it? The "dominoes" in the Domino Rally sets aren't really even dominoes. They can't be used to play dominoes. They're a single solid color, smaller and with a hollowed out void on one side to be as cheaply manufacturable as possible. They're like the most abstracted and stripped down representation of a domino and their only function is to fall over. The only thing you could subtract from them and still retain that function would be their surfaces, just leaving a wire box frame.

Looks like fun! So the name "Domino Rally" is kind of a misnomer. They should be called "Plastic Bar Rally"

The thing that makes these sets more appealing than regular dominoes is the "stunts." Each set has some kind of overall theme and a few domino-activated devices or gimmicks that do something besides fall over. A rocket that blasts off or some ball on a track.

Man, look at that! Skeletons and ghosts and everything fucking glows in the dark! Show me someone who thinks this isn’t awesome and I’ll show you a liar
.
Most sets had these track segments of attached dominoes which I liked because you could just flip them over and they were set up. But over time and general abuse from a kid, the little fragile nubs would snap off of the dominoes, causing them to fall out of their holders. Then you'd have a line of dominoes with a gap making the whole row useless. I remember setting up broken track segments and then carefully placing regular dominoes in each of the gaps so they'd work, or putting in a domino that still had one nub left so it still more or less worked until it fell out again. Looking back on it, when it comes to that point, just set up the fucking dominoes by hand. But I guess there was still a finite supply of dominoes and you needed to make them stretch for maximum enjoyment.

They came out with an accessory called the Domino Dealer which was this little battery-operated car with a big domino hopper on the top. You switch it on and watch it slowly crawl across the floor, setting up a line of dominoes behind as it went. God, I wanted one of those! Then a thought occurred to me. I had no idea how in the hell you're actually supposed to apply this to setting up a Rally set. It'll put up a perfect line of dominoes. That's great. What happens when I need a curve or a squiggly line or dominoes going up stairs like oh roughly 75% of the time? And the times that you do use straight lines on flat ground, the line is going to be like a foot long or less. It's just a short transition to the next thing. I guess if you really really wanted to, you could set up the dominoes until you get to a straight part and then go get the Dealer so it can lay down 5 to 7 dominoes but that's like calling in the army to take out your trash. Or I guess if you just love watching really long straight lines of dominoes collapse then by all means, Deal it up.

Well they also came out with a more advanced version called the Pathmaker that had a few preset patterns it could do but it’s still going to be hard integrating the gimmicks.

This was the one big set that I had. I can't recall exactly where or when I got it but I'm certain I didn't buy it. I can't really remember a time where everything worked correctly and wasn't broken as fuck which either means I got it second hand or I was just a lot rougher on it than I remember. The helicopter blades didn’t spin because whatever mechanism didn‘t work. The thing that branches into five different directions only had some of it’s triggers working so it could maybe do three directions. I think the rocket’s fins went missing so all I had was the Styrofoam torpedo body with a skewed orange sticker on it. I also accidentally swallowed the metal ball used to launch it. (Yes, I know I was old enough to know better. Shut the fuck up.)

The orange domino muncher thingy goes down the escalator. It looks like an escalator attached to an elevator with a slide in between. How many or whether at all dominoes are set up on the escalator is pretty irrelevant since the ultimate result is akin to setting up a line of dominoes on a table and then swiping it off onto the floor with a backhand. It really sucked when a gimmick would break because without the weird devices, what do you have? A bunch of plastic bars and a tiny staircase. I conjoined whatever was left of this set with the small sets that I occasionally got to make big rallies. These big rallies that I envisioned usually never came to fruition because I was a stupid clumsy child. I’d spend 20 minutes setting up fucking dominoes and then accidentally knock them all over. Then I’d do it again and again. I started making fail-safes where I’d intentionally leave out a domino every so often to stop the reaction short if accidentally triggered. The only problem with this is that it’s a lot harder to safely insert a domino into a gap than it is place one at the end of a procession. Sometimes I found myself fucking things up while trying to remove the fail-safes.

Once getting everything set up to my liking and flicking the origin domino, some defect or contingency preventing a complete reaction would materialize midway through the rally. Now what? Do I reset and try again or do I pretend it didn’t happen and “help” it continue on, thereby greatly tarnishing the greatness of the overall experience? On the ultra rare occurrence that everything DIDN’T turn to shit, what transpired could only be described as 8 seconds of euphoric glory. Eight seconds… Son of a bitch... I’d spend four super frustrating hours trying to set up rows of plastic bars on the floor just for eight seconds of entertainment. Why did I enjoy this? And you know what I just noticed? THIS…

“Non-stop action!” And it's on every box. If there was ever an appropriate time to use this phrase, this isn’t it. There’s action but it’s literally over in seconds. The action clearly stops. Though if you watch this awesome commercial you’d think otherwise. Jeez, listen to that music. It’s like I’m playing F-Zero on the Super Nintendo. How many sets do you think that is? Like six? As a kid it would take me a week to set that up. Then I'd trip and fall on it.

Dead Rising 2

This is obviously the sequel to Dead Rising, a game which I’ve seen some of but never played and ultimately assume it’s the exact same premise with slight differences. It’s reasonable to expect a sandbox game where you’re trapped in a massive shopping complex of some sort with thousands of zombies and props/weapons/loot, similar to Dawn of the Dead.


Once the zombie disaster happened and I started the game from the safe house, I was a little disappointed that the game apparently wasn’t about having fun. Your first quest is to find Zombrex medication to give to your daughter at the safe house so that she doesn’t become a zombie. (I get bit by zombies all the time and it doesn’t bother me.) Unfortunately she needs it every day at a specific time. So that has a time limit. The stuff isn’t easy to come by either. It’s stupid because you have to come back and give it to her within a narrow time frame when you could just give the Zombrex to the adult you left her with and have HER deal with it in a much more realistic and reliable fashion.

There are survivors scattered around everywhere which you can escort back to the safe house for experience points, Zombrex, money or combo cards which let you make special homebrew weapons. The survivors only appear in certain places at certain times so all of those have time limits too. Most of the time you just walk up to them and talk to them a little and they’ll follow you but some of them want you to do really stupid shit. One guy needs Zombrex. Some need you to pay them money to get them to move. The worst is the three people that you have to beat at poker. I’m not that great at poker to begin with and what I’m used to is five card hands. I had to learn how to do this two card thing like they do in tournaments and what made it worse is that once again, my old TV doesn’t let me read .001 font so half the time I can’t even tell what the cards are. It makes it virtually impossible to build any kind of hand except pairs of things. I lucked out when I went all in on the second hand and surprisingly so did two of my opponents who lost and were out. Having the overwhelming majority of cash, I then widdled away at the third person until they were gone, just like in Monopoly.

Also there are psychopaths mixed in which are like boss fights only they’re all overpowered and you can’t beat them. No really, you can’t. When you first start out the game, you’re weak as hell and can barely make it from point A to point B intact much less have a chance at beating some asshole with chainsaws strapped to a motorbike. You have to just avoid every psychopath for the first half of the game. I was able to beat ONE early on; the guy with the tiger but that was only because he’s relatively weak and I sat safely behind a counter, drinking beer and throwing computer cases at him while he got mobbed by zombies. I also left without dealing with the tiger. Seriously, FUCK that tiger.

Hard to kill aside, the psychopaths are actually pretty entertaining. It’s like each one tops the previous one being creepier/more insane. You’re always thinking it can’t get any crazier than that guy and you’re constantly being proved wrong.

The craziest one in my opinion is Bibi the washed up diva that has strapped her stage crew and manager to bombs, threatening to blow them all up unless you help her put on a show for her adoring fans which are all zombies.

The creepiest one without question is Slappy. I like how his mouth looks like it was stapled up at both ends like he’s being forced to smile forever.

Then of course there are the main plot missions which you have to show up for at certain places at certain times and all of those have time limits too. There’s also the overall countdown to when the military comes in three days.

So basically first thing I’m bombarded with needing to juggle keeping my daughter alive, saving survivors/killing psychopaths and following the plot. Escort missions and time limits for EVERYTHING? That’s horrible. That sounds like the worst game ever. When the hell do I get to have fun? How do I make time to try on random clothes, make combo weapons or explore? Well there are brief lulls that occur sometimes where you can go to a couple of stores and screw off for a few minutes but that’s really it. Theoretically you could ignore everything that you’re obligated to do and just have fun running around smashing and throwing things. The only problem with that is that goofing around means you’re going to stay weak for a long time. At a low level, your attacks do less damage, you have less health, you run slower, you have less physical attacks and you can’t carry as many items. That really sucks. And of course, the best and most reliable way to level up just so happens to be saving survivors.

There are some things that don’t unlock unless you kill specific psychopaths like all gaming machines in the Yucatan Casino and more importantly the dirt bike and bike shop in the strip. The same can be said for certain areas of the map if you don’t follow the plot missions like the cashier places in the casinos and the underground tunnels.

As for leaving your daughter high and dry…

Sure, you can do that if you’re some kind of puppy-kicking, Satan-worshiping Nazi.

Essentially all this means is that in order to have fun, you have to do all this other annoying shit first. It’s like going to Disneyland and being forced to ride the monorail around and around all day. You just go from destination to destination, periodically looking out the window and thinking wow, that place sure looks fun. I wish I could be having fun right about now.

And it’s true, at least for me it was on the first play-through. I did nothing but missions the whole time. Everything else was just an irrelevant blur only to be experienced in passing on the way to the next mission. I didn’t gamble. I didn’t search for objects to make weapons, I didn’t take interesting detours. I barely even stopped to use save points. It was sad. It wasn’t until I restarted the story, which retains your personal progress like level and combo cards unlocked, that I actually loosened up a little. It was incredible all the stuff I never noticed because I was so distracted.

Even with your character at a high level, there is still a point in the game where wandering around aimlessly becomes too annoying to deal with and that point is when the gas zombies show up. Unless you’re driving a vehicle or using the zombie repelant drink, walking around is just too much of a pain in the ass now. The zombies have evolved from nice slow, meandering George A. Romero zombies into sprinting, tackling 28 Days Later zombies. They’re all over you all the time and you just can’t hang around anymore. Even the slow zombies made some things impossible like trying to play video poker or talk to survivors. In both cases you’re trying to do something while zombies are constantly fucking with you. You try to beat them away and just end up hurting the survivor or breaking the poker machine.

You know what else is shitty? Guns don’t do anything. They kill zombies okay but any time you’re fighting a live human, you might as well be throwing rocks at them. But fortunately the same goes for enemies shooting at you. You can quite literally defeat six guys with full auto rifles just using a fire axe, easily. Really the only gun worth a damn besides Blitzkrieg which doesn’t count since it’s several guns is the Super BFG combo weapon which can clear about an 8x15 column of zombies in a single blast. But the gun you have to modify to make it can only be acquired around the end of the game and the only way you can get there is to follow the plot the whole way. So for the last 15 minutes, live it up with your giant fantastically overpowered weapon before restarting the game with an empty inventory. What a crock of shit. They ALWAYS steal the fun.

That said, at least you retain vehicle keys that you buy because it would be terrible to finally buy the SUV key for $2M, (which is highway robbery if you’re not buying a Bentley,) just to have it for one round. Strangely the best part of the game was probably driving vehicles over hordes of zombies. I never get tired of it. You’re impervious to everything too, the asshole snipers, the asshole gas zombies and the asshole with a chainsaw motorbike. Nothing can touch you.

Seeing hundreds of zombies flying over the hood of my Hummer and messages flash on screen like “Special Kill Count Bonus,” I had to laugh because it looks exactly like every inaccurate depiction of violent video games you’ve ever seen in movies and daytime TV. All it needs is innocent pedestrians instead of zombies and maybe an evil sounding Mortal Kombat announcer to read out your score.

Halloween 2011

I didn't do a pumpkin last year so I did two this year.

Top: Silent Hill 2 (PS2)
Bottom: Clock Tower (SNES)

Dead Space 2

The first Dead Space might be in my top five favorites list of current generation video games. It didn’t scare me but it did marry two of my favorite movies together.

After the sequel came out, I though, I’ll probably get it eventually after the price is actually reasonable. This is standard procedure for every new game I want to buy. Right now it’s $40 for Dead Space 2 on a console which is still too much for me. But when I saw a Dead Space 2 collector’s edition box set for PC for $25, I had to get it. When it rang up, the price showed up as $40 and I had to point out that it was wrong and show the cashier. He looked bewilderedly at the clear as day $24.99 price on the shelf and called the manager over for an override. Seriously though, someone must have screwed up because I came back a couple of days later and the price had been changed back to $39.99, (which is still pretty good for a box set.)

In the beginning it starts you off Resident Evil 2 style, (AKA “Shittily”), in a giant crowd of enemies with nothing to defend yourself with. (And just in case you can actually recall how RE2 starts, no, a hand gun with three bullets does not count as something to defend yourself with.) The real problem is just figuring out which direction to run and getting wherever that is without getting hit more than about once. Not really that hard, although frustrating when you get cut down two seconds after starting because the prompt for the run button is for an Xbox 360 controller and you’re actually using a cheap Logitec controller which is loosely based on a PS2 controller. Oh well. It’s not like I haven’t successfully played through games that I had no idea what the hell the controls were and in some cases only half translated into English.
One of the first things you’ll notice about the game is that it’s really fucking dark; Doom 3 dark. A lot of the time you can’t see shit. Comparing the two games on this reveals some interesting tradeoffs.

In Doom 3 you got a bright moderately sized flashlight beam but you had to swap it out for a weapon if you wanted to be able to shoot anything, basically making you choose between being able to see the monsters and being able to shoot the monsters.

In Dead Space 2, all of your weapons have lights on them but the lights have about as much candlepower as a keychain LED. They illuminate such a small area it’s almost like looking through the scope of a rifle... for the whole damn game. Both suck but which is better? I don't know.

The off-to-the-side and over-the-shoulder views were something I actually tolerated pretty well from the previous game but in the sequel it just seems to screw you over. Being in a pitch black room with a tiny light, surrounded by enemies that are black and not being able to see anything to your left on top of that is like being fucking blind. It can take you half a minute to just locate an attacker, especially if it’s one that’s shooting at you from far away or bouncing off the walls like a spider monkey on meth.

I can count the number of times that I entered a room, saw an enemy, approached the enemy and then engaged them in combat on one hand. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the enemy in question jumps out at you from behind a corner, out of a vent, down from the ceiling, up over the railing of a platform, out of the door you’re opening in mid attack, spontaneously appears behind you with no explanation or in any number of other cheap asshole ambush tactics. There’s basically no reason, aside from running, to take your finger off of the aim button. For one, you can’t see without it. For another, you need to be ready to shoot the monsters which are constantly appearing randomly and without warning.

There are a few new weapons in the store now since the last game. One of them is actually a long range rifle which I really had to chuckle about. Please tell me at what point in this game is a single precision shot going to be preferable. I really want to know. Being able to snipe an enemy requires one of preferably two things; the enemy is unaware of your presence or the enemy is far away. This simply never EVER happens. Six enemies gang raping you in a dark corner is what happens. I can think of one time where you’re going down a tramway with those stupid little dog things that crawl on the ceiling and shoot at you where that might have been useful but even then I still couldn’t use it because I couldn’t see them and just had to keep moving around until I could trace their fire back to their location and investigate. I’m not going to take up one of my four weapon slots for this thing that I might use once.
The other weapon that mystified me was the Detonator. It’s basically just a gun that shoots or deactivates proximity mines. I think the biggest problem that I have with this is the game’s definition of “proximity mine.” It’s a bomb that explodes when someone gets too close to it. Everyone has known this since Goldeneye came out on the N64, everyone but the people that made Dead Space 2 apparently. In DS2, a proxy mine is a little canister that attaches to a surface and then shoots out a linear laser array. Should anything break the lasers, the canister explodes and somehow shoots out a linear explosion, mostly just effecting the area of the beam. So the proxy mines in DS2 aren’t so much proxy mines as they are a high tech tripwire attached to the trigger of a shotgun that you’d find mounted in a crack house. Why didn’t they just call it something more general and less misleading like a “ballistic trap?” Anyway, what I’m really getting at is that they’re useless. A device like this requires time to set up effectively and knowledge of when and where your enemy will be and as I’ve already said, this is not that kind of game. Unless you’ve memorized everything in the game, I guarantee that more often than not you’ll only be inconveniencing yourself with these things. I actually ended up selling that gun back to the store. Okay, I take it back. Perhaps they’re potentially useful against those fucking piece of shit velociraptor things. But again, I’m wasting space in my inventory with something I’m almost never going to use.
That’s right; the points are like the proximity mines in Dead Space 2.

I thought that was the end of the confusion but then I looked at the weapon descriptions in the game manual and found that it actually calls them “Detonator Mines” instead of the in game name of “Detonator” and describes them as “sensor-tripped mining charges.” Well, yeah it is sensor-tripped. Thanks for explaining that to me but how in the hell is it used for mining? Why would you mine with something that requires you to walk past it to set it off? What do they do, kill someone every time they want to use one? Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense if they were remote detonated mines? And that’s another thing; if the weapon itself is called a Detonator, why doesn’t it DETONATE anything? And if the charges are supposed to be used for mining, why do they shoot AWAY from the surface they’re on and why don’t they EXPLODE BETTER?! It’s like two different people designed this weapon and couldn’t agree on anything.

Sometimes along your path you’ll have to go through air ducts to continue. You actually have to manually crawl through and I’m not really sure why. There are no enemies to kill inside. There are no items. There’s nothing worth seeing. There aren’t multiple paths to explore. Now going back to Doom 3, it actually had ALL those things in the air ducts. In fact F.E.A.R. did too. I guess it’s debatable whether or not the 700^th mutilated corpse is worth seeing or not but it’s still SOMETHING.

Another thing I don’t get is these breakaway glass windows. If certain windows get hit, they shatter and suck everything out of the room including you unless you manage to shoot the little red button that closes the safety shutter. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be a hazard or something you use strategically against enemies but if the latter is true, you might have better success just strapping a bomb to your chest and running at the necromorphs with detonator in hand.

Let’s say you blow out the window and then start getting dragged across the floor from the vacuum. Now you’re supposed to shoot the button to close the shutter before getting sucked out. I think I may have accomplished this only twice in the first play through. Trying to hit that button is like trying to thread a needle by throwing thread at it and that’s if you A: Are expecting it to happen, B: Have maneuvered into a reasonable place to pull off such a feat and C: Have a gun equipped and loaded that is even capable of activating the button. Seriously though, nine times out of ten, I’d be fighting and then the window next to me would blow out, giving me approximately half a second to orient a shot. Why is it only some windows and not others? Why does the shutter always close at the last second in order to crush you? (It’s because being stranded in space isn’t violent enough.) Why do the magnetic boots that I use for walking on the ceiling do nothing to prevent this?

Toward the end of the game, I got to a quick time event where your insane companion Stross is trying to kill you. You’re supposed to tap the action button repeatedly, just like all the other one’s where an enemy grapples you, so I did and he stabbed me in the eye with a screwdriver. I retried this segment about half a dozen times which was extremely annoying since I basically had to rediffuse the same mine field every time before I got there. The quick time event proved to be impossible which gave me the suspicion that something was wrong with the game. A few internet searches later and I found that it was a bug in the PC version and you could apparently get by it by turning off V-sync, playing in window mode and turning the resolution down to 800x600. I did all those things and it still didn’t work. I looked for a patch but the only one I found said nothing about fixing the bug. I looked some more and some people said that if you downloaded a trainer and used the slow-mo function during the scene, it would work correctly. I honestly thought this was bullshit but I was out of options so I tried it and it actually worked. Then I had a jolly good time curb stomping Stross’ head in and tossing his dismembered appendages about.

Now there’s something seriously wrong with this situation, where a video game that you pay money for has an insurmountable glitch that you have to download some random coder’s trainer to beat but the actual company that made the game leaves you high and dry.

At the end of the game was a similar quick time event that I had the same problem with but I managed to get by it much faster this time. Both of these quick time events are stupid with faulty premises. Here, how about instead of melee quick time events with characters we do this; it’s called “Use the fucking gun that’s in your fucking hand to shoot the fucker you fucking retard.” Why am I just suddenly incapable of shooting things and just letting people strangle me or whatever? The game is just constantly going out of its way to do stupid nonsensical shit so that it can shoehorn in more blood and gore. There’s a hundred ways to die in this game I think only about two of those ways don’t involve having your head and limbs torn off or being eviscerated somehow. I know one of those is running out of oxygen which you can only do if you try.

Even looting bodies is excessively violent. Monsters drop stuff when you kill them but you can also ‘search’ the bodies for additional loot. Now how do you search a body? Why by further mutilating its corpse of course. Just stomp on them and watch the loot pop right out. The limbs also fly off in all directions as if they were attached with a couple of strips of Scotch Tape.

The final boss is your treacherous bitch girlfriend from the first game. It’s extremely aggravating until you figure out how to do it. Then it takes you twenty seconds.