And now for something completely the same...

It’s been a while since I’ve played Super Smash Bros. Honestly I haven’t played any since the first one on the 64 system. It was a pretty good game. I’m not that familiar with it’s Gamecube sequal Melee. But I was looking through a Game Pro or something at the book store and happened upon the character lineup for the new Smash Brothers Brawl game. In short, I was extremely underwhelmed. It’s so unoriginal and repetitive. They’re operating within such a narrow spectrum of characters and series’ that I get bored of the game just looking at the characters in a magazine.

Jeez, do you think that’s enough fucking Mario characters?! I thought this was Smash Bros. not Mario Party. Pick two characters. TWO! Get rid of the rest. Actually I think Mario can sit this one out. I’m kind of tired of him.

Samus and Zero Suit Samus? Why are they passing off what is essentially an alternate costume as a separate character? I don’t care how different their skills might be. It’s still the same character.

Lucas is just a watered-down version of Ness. What’s the point? Just use Ness. It’s like if they used Luigi instead of Mario. It’s the same person, the only difference is that nobody likes him.

Why the hell would I use Meta Night when you’re giving me King Dedede?

Who the fuck?

Who’s idea was it to put Sonic and Snake in? They’re good characters, don’t get me wrong. But I don't care who bought the rights to what, they still aren’t Nintendo characters and shouldn’t have even been considered to be in this game. Particularly Snake. That’s like inserting Officer John McClane or Rambo into Disney’s next Pixar movie. Did the Smash Staff just completely forget they have more than three franchises they can draw characters from? Remember Megaman? Remember Castlevania? I guess not. You have to go purchase characters from other consoles and then fill the rest of the roster space with Mario characters. And how cool would it be to go around as Richter or someone, whipping people and burning them with holy water?

First of all, this isn’t anyone you know. It’s just “Pok’emon Trainer.” Secondly, a pok’emon trainer doesn’t fight, (with the exception of those retarded karate dojos), and doesn‘t have any special powers or skills. They release a pok’emon and tell it what to do. I’m imagining this character having about three legitimate attacks: punch, kick, and release pok’emon. If he has any more than that in the game then it’s simply inaccurate.

Yeah, just bring in another primate character from the same game series. No one will get bored or anything. Personally I think DK is the worst character in Smash Bros. He could be easily replaced by the much more nimble Diddy, but are they doing that? No they aren’t. They’re keeping Donkey in as well just to keep with their theme of over-saturating the game with what is, (for all intents and purposes), the same exact thing.

Final Fantasy VII Minigame Hell

Instead of talking about Final Fantasy VII, I’m going to talk about some of it’s minigames. I typically don’t care for minigames. I think they suck. I don’t enjoy being thrown into random situations at the drop of a hat and then being expected to accomplish a specific task while having almost no idea of what’s going on. True, some are optional but most aren’t.

Train Graveyard: This isn’t so much a minigame as it is a puzzle. It’s this big junkyard full of defunct trains and various types of twisted metal and debris. All of this garbage forms a really bizarre and circuitous path through the yard. The problem is that the path is so weird and devoid of any form that you can’t tell what you can walk on, climb up, go under, go in between, go behind, go in, or jump off of. Sometimes it takes several minutes to just figure out where you can actually go and when you do figure it out it just seems to be a completely random and irrelevant path. The overhead view of the camera compresses everything into 2-D making it even harder. There’s one part where you drive a couple of trains into each other to make a path. After I did this it still took me a while to figure out what the point was. Their roofs lined up so I could probably walk across them but how do I get on top of it? The difficulty of a game shouldn’t stem from it’s indistinct graphics and horrible camera angles.

Squats: I seriously can’t believe you have to do this. So you need to get a wig for reasons that I’m not going to go into. Where do you get a wig..? Duh, from the local gym. Isn’t that where all cross-dressers go to get their accoutrements? The gym is full of musclemen that want the wig and so one challenges you to squats. Yeah squats. You know squats..? That sissy warm-up exorcise that you don’t do because it makes you look like a moron? Anyway, you have to do more than him before 30 seconds are up. There are three buttons you press in order and you have to do it in rhythm. If you get off beat you stall for a couple of seconds. I beat this weirdo on the first try despite a bad start. Then I made off with the coveted wig… whoop-dee-freekin-do.

Motorcycle Battle: The pretext for this is that you’re escaping the Shinra Building and you’re on a motorcycle while your friends are on a truck. Everyone has a lifebar too. You’re speeding down the freeway with motorcycle troops in hot pursuit. You’re supposed to race around beating them up to protect yourself and the group. This would probably be really cool with some kind of analog controller but no, you’re stuck with directional buttons making movement rather awkward. And it doesn’t help that we’re going about three times the speed limit and the camera seems to practically spin around me. Since I’m playing this on PC with keyboard everything is just a little more challenging. Just trying to find all the control buttons on the keyboard is frustrating. When I started the game, the default controls were literally all on the number pad. What, do they expect me to play this game using just my right hand? Who’s stupid idea was this? Have you ever played a videogame with one hand? Have you ever seen a one-handed controller? No, that’s retarded. Anyway, I was able to find the button for attacking on my right but not the one for my left. It didn’t really seem to matter though because ramming into other motorcycles was a lot more effective than using my sword.

Reactor Hill: It’s this big hill with a reactor on the top that you are supposed to protect from an encroaching army. Your enemies slowly advance up the side of the hill, (emphasis on slowly.) The way you defend the reactor is by placing soldiers and various armaments on the hill. It’s kind of like a Fire Emblem or Advance Wars type strategy game, only it’s not really fun or necessary to strategize at all. Every impediment you put in the enemies’ way costs a lot of money and it doesn’t really do much to them except slow them down, as if they needed to go any slower. When they get past your soldiers, your last line of defense is you. You get to fight them in a typical RPG menu battle. Well if you can just do that, then what’s the point of wasting tons of money on something that wastes your time and barely does anything? Just start the battle with no soldiers and beat the crap out of them yourself. Oh and the guy that you’re helping conduct this war is always asking you for money to contribute to the war budget. If you decide to donate, a box comes up with various amounts of money for you to chose. After you choose, he says thank you and then the money box comes back up again. What the hell, moocher? If a stranger gave you a thousand dollars would you say, “Hey thanks. Give me more now?” He’s lucky I’m helping him at all. My advice is to give him 0 Gil and don‘t hire any soldiers. It’s the cheapest, quickest, easiest solution to an overly-complex minigame.

Formation Marching: In this part you dress up like a Shinra soldier to infiltrate their base. Then you get roped into this stupid parade for the president and have to do a couple of simon says marching things. Honestly, this formation marching shit just makes me wanna kill myself. It’s not fun at all. It’s the opposite of fun.

CPR: You save this little girl from a monster on the beach but she gets knocked out in the water or something and you have to perform artificial respiration. Actually this old man runs down to the beach and tells you how to do it. Now if he already knows CPR why doesn’t *he* just do it? Does this really seem like an opportune moment to be trying to teach it to some random bystander? I’d report him to EMS for failing to respond. So actually doing CPR is really easy, you just press the “switch” button. Switch button? What the hell is that? Why did they give all of the buttons code names? It doesn’t make it any easier to locate. They might as well have named it the “purple orgasmatron” button. I spent like five minutes mashing every button on the keyboard and cursing at myself for not changing the controls. I finally found it, it was the decimal button.

Dolphin jump: You swim around in the water below some kind of Iron scaffolding. When you think you’re in the right location to make it up, you whistle for the dolphin, (AKA “Mr. Dolphin”), to come and jump you up on top of it. This is literally how it went: *What the hell am I supposed to be aiming at? The I-beam? Is it the I-beam? The dolphin doesn’t even jump high enough. He keeps going under it. How much closer do you want than that? Screw this.* I pretty much got it as soon as I stopped trying and started just repeatedly tapping the button without thought.

Grab the treasure: In this one you’re walking along this roller coaster track trestle. I think it’s actually supposed to be a mine car track because it has a drawbridge and it’s in a rural location but if it is a mine car track then why does the track go up and down so wildly? So as you’re walking, the track will break sometimes and you will fall. When you fall a box comes up that says to use the directional buttons to grab the treasure. There are two treasure bags, one on either side of you. Whether you’re supposed to grab them while falling or while climbing back up, I’m totally clueless because the directional buttons don’t seem to do anything. Needless to say, I didn’t get any treasure.

The Gold Saucer: The Gold Saucer is an entire theme park with several different themed lands. It has dozens of minigames and thank God I was thrown in prison before I could try a single one.

Chocobo Race: You have to win this race if you want to get out of prison. There

are like seven chocobo riders and you have to be the first one to make a lap around the track. Your impromptu and unnecessary racing agent gets you a different chocobo every time you lose. Each one handles a little different. The game itself is OK but the race track is a sickeningly fanciful acid trip. I’m not sure how much skill is actually involved in it either. It seems a lot more dependent on what chocobo you get stuck with. I beat it the third try with an ill-tempered chocobo.

Bastard Chase: I don’t know what to call this one so I used my creative license. This game is pretty simple in objective. You have to catch this midget wizard thing to get his key. There are 14 cave openings that he goes in and out of on the side of a cliff and you basically have to be going in the one that he’s coming out of. It’s not in real time though. You pick a door and then he picks a door. You’re never on the screen at the same time. The instructions for this minigame tell you to memorize the pattern of the openings he goes in and then catch him knowing where he’s going to come out. As far as I could tell, there was either no pattern or it was just a really long pattern. Although I admit I really wasn’t paying attention because I didn’t give a rat’s ass, even though catching him was mandatory. When *I* go through an opening, I come out of another opening at total random. How can *he* have a pattern? I just walked around and went in whatever openings I felt like, again not really paying any attention. Eventually I got bored of that and just went back inside whatever opening I happened to come out of, mostly because all I had to do was press the up arrow. Pretty soon after, I caught him. I’m pretty sure that just going back in every opening you come out of is a lot faster and more thrilling than actually trying to play the game.

Snowboarding: When I first saw the snowboarding screen come up my first reaction was “Whoa! This is gonna kick ass!” Twenty seconds later it was “Oh, never mind. My mistake.” The course is nice and long with jumps and obstacles. But just like the motorcycle game the controls make it suck. This time the directional keys are too unresponsive. You can’t make the turns because it basically wont let you turn. Well actually you have two ways of turning: one for barely turning at all and one for turning wildly out of control. You have to break almost to a stop to avoid hitting the edges of the course. Any time you touch anything, unless you’re breaking, you fall. Some parts have moving obstacles, randomly appearing obstacles, or just so many damn obstacles that falling down several times in a row is inevitable. Getting through without falling would be from luck with not much merit of your own. There are multicolored balloons on the ground and in the air that you can collect and as far as I know they do absolutely nothing. The best thing about this game I guess would be how fast you can go, (albeit for only two seconds before you hit something.) and the fact that you can do a few tricks like a grab and backflip.

Iceberg Hopping: In this game you have to cross some ice water by finding a path over some little icebergs in a matrix formation. For whatever reason each time you move, different ones sink and rise. You never know if the one you step on is going to be underwater after you step on it. It’s just a simple trial and error game but the annoying thing is that you have to do it again coming back. When I came back I expected them to all be in a row but no. Do it again.
Escape The Gas Chamber: Mash the four command buttons until you escape the restraint chair. Rather mindless.

Cat Fight: This is the best minigame ever! All you do is repeatedly press the OK button to slap that bitch Scarlet around. It’s epic! Although it is tarnished a little because I know Tifa can ball a fist and yet she doesn’t. *sigh*

Chocobo Breeding: No thanks.

Drive the Train: You’re supposed to stop this train from getting away. The whole premise of the train getting away is faulty. It’s running on the same track as “Grab the treasure.” Yeah remember… the track that you put a bunch of holes in, making it completely impossible to be used for moving anything? The train wouldn’t make it a quarter mile without crashing into the ravine. Anyway, when you jump on the train and get to the engine you have a time limit and have to pull some levers around…? You know I don’t really know how to explain this one. The instructions it gives you involve pressing two sets of buttons simultaneously and alternating between them or something. I had less than two minutes to do this and they gave me the most horribly incoherent functions to perform. I found the four buttons and just pressed them all a bunch. I guess I did it right because it worked.

Submarine: Son of a Whore! Could the controls be any worse?! This game is actually pretty easy but it’s practically unplayable. You’re supposed to pilot this submarine through a bunch of mines in a canyon and follow/sink another sub. The mines appear and disappear somehow and only hurt you when visible. Why and how would you ever make a disappearing underwater mine that doesn’t work when it’s invisible? While piloting the sub you can accelerate and decelerate. The rest of the time it just seems to go any random speed. You practically have to have a mile of clearance and five minutes to turn around. I realize it’s a sub and it doesn’t turn on a dime but is this really necessary? The ability to go up and down only accomplishes one thing, disorienting you. The graphics look terrible and there are like half a dozen pointless gages and dials blocking your view of the environment.

Bonous Material

How much of a dork do you have to be

to get a kick out of that?

Here's a good out-of-context

one that I thought I should share.

Another day in product design class...

To better illustrate what a typical day in product is like I've used screenshots from Azumanga Daioh.

Neverwinter Nights FAQ

1. Why are there so many traps?
2. Why do I have to get nude to cast a spell?
3. Why do I have to pay money to use a portal *I* created?
4. Who am I even paying the money to, the portal?
5. Why is it so expensive?
6. Do you know how many crates I had to look in to get my money?
7. Do you want me to save Neverwinter or not?
8. Why don’t character’s avatars look anything like them?
9. Where can I get a potion of Hitthedamnbastard for my level 12 Blind Imbecile?
10. Why am I fighting a polar bear?
11. Why is everything getting more expensive?
12. How/Why am I leveling-up without actually getting any stronger?
13. Why does my character spontaneously decide to stop attacking?
14. How should I pass the time while my character is fighting; read a book?
15. Do real sword fights have 5 second pauses in between hits?
16. How can a bear parry my attack?
17. How do you miss hitting a door, chest, pedestal, or other inanimate stationary objects?
18. Does Headraline ever just shut up?
19. Why do I have to fight so many dragons?
20. Will I ever be able to afford *good* store-bought armor?
21. Is an ettercap anything like a jabberwocky?

Are You Smarter Than A 5th Grader?

When I first heard about this show I was intrigued. What self-respecting adult doesn’t think that they’re smarter than a fifth-grader? My roommate sometimes watches stuff on his computer and I just so happened to catch a couple of episodes by proxy. The first thing I noticed was the theme song. It’s sung by children. What, is this show *for* fifth-graders? It didn’t take me long to realize that this show is monotonously boring. They talk forever about nothing. I don’t care about their personal life! Just ask the questions! They talk so damn much that they can only fit like six questions in a half hour. The questions are usually pretty boring too. I thought this was supposed to be a game show. Compare this to something like Cash Cab. It’s just question after question without any extra garbage. Now that’s a show. When the contestants answer their questions in AYSTAFG they always feel the need to totally explain how they came to their conclusion point by point and do the math out loud. If I wanted to experience long tedious explanations I’d watch Naruto or Yu-Gi-Oh. When they finally do answer, the audience always applauds. Why do they applaud? Any idiot can answer a question. The impressive thing would be if the answer is correct. Why don’t they just save their applause for that?

Also to my disappointment, the dynamics of the show were contrary to what I wanted/expected. Instead of pitting an adult and a fifth-grader against one another, similar to “Win Ben Stein‘s Money,” the fifth-grader is there for the sole purpose of helping the adult. They have a group of fifth-graders and the contestant gets to pick one to help them on each round. The kid answers along with the contestant but the contestant doesn’t know what their answer is. They get some lifeline things that they can use to get answers from the kid. That’s all they do. Wow, it turns out that the fifth-graders aren’t relevant to the game and are only minimally useful. What’s the point of having fifth-graders at all? Your help could just as easily come from a trained monkey or a fortune cookie. Come to think of it there used to be a show called “Street Smarts” where the players got their help from random people on the street. What was wrong with that? You actually got some variety and an interesting knowledge variable. You didn’t have a bunch of homogeneous robot children giving you answers. All of the kids always give a unanimous answer and they’re never wrong. When the contestant takes a kid’s answer with a lifeline the host always plays up the tension. Oh no, I hope she wrote down the correct answer or you lose. Since they’re never wrong it’s not tense at all. It’s like opening the bathroom door and saying, “Oh my God, I hope the toilet’s still there!”

When the contestant inevitably loses they have to say “I’m not smarter than a fifth-grader.” Well these aren’t normal fifth-graders. They select the smartest kids in the US to go on the show. It makes the whole premise of the show retarded. Oh, imagine that; a group of prodigy fifth-graders is more book smart than the average adult. I’m so surprised. The only reason most of them are probably on this show is because they have overbearing parents that orchestrate their lives for them and at some point decided that it would be a good way to showcase how great of a parent they are.

My Top 20 Most Aggravating Videogame Enemies List

Name: Hammer Brother

Game: Super Mario Brothers

There are always two of these on two platforms that are at different heights. They almost constantly throw hammers at you and jump up and down switching platforms. You get these nice big arcs of hammers going across the screen and there’s no way you can predict where they are going to go, making it almost impossible to get by without getting hurt. Why can't there just be one of them? That would be hard enough.

Name: Flame/Frost Atronach
Game: Morrowind

There’s not really much to say about these except they shoot a ball of whatever element at you, it causes damage over time and you die. That’s about it. Yeah, one attack and you’re dead. It takes forever to level-up to a point where you can actually take on one of these.

Name: Redead
Game: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time (and other zeldas)

These are basically zombies with a few key differences. If you get too close to them they scream and you freeze for a few seconds. During your immobilization, they move towards you and if they get close enough well… they rape you. What’s annoying aside from being raped is when you’re frozen you’re going “No! No! No! No! No! No!” the whole time hoping it won’t get close enough and you’ll escape the impending rape. Also, if you’re really unlucky, it’s possible to be gang-raped.

Name: Fetish
Game: Diablo 2

I’ve never heard of someone having an aggravation fetish. This picture actually depicts a fetish shaman. Just imagine the two guys separate and those are fetishes. This is I think the most hyperactive enemy ever. They run around and blow darts and attack you with spears. The thing is you’ll just be walking along and boom, there will be like a dozen of them on your ass. They’re so small you’d think they’d be easy to kill but no. And when you’re about to kill one, what does it do? It runs away, the little bitch. Sometimes you might not even see them again. In a large group, kill the shaman first because if you don’t it just resurrects all of the ones you kill. How annoying.

Name: “Night-vision Guard”
Game: Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

The whole time while playing an SC game you’re mentality is something like *Oh yeah, I’m a splinter cell! You can’t see me and I’m using technology far beyond your comprehension. You can‘t touch me!* Then you come across some bad guys with the exact same shit that you have and all of a sudden it’s not cool anymore. You can’t fricking sneak up on these guys because if you can see them they can see you. But the whole point of the game is sneaking. Having a fire fight with someone always gives you the disadvantage because there’s no quick responsive aiming system and there’s no running and shooting. There’s just stand still, aim, and get shot to death.

Name: Raven
Game: The Resident Evil Series

It doesn’t do much damage and it takes one shot to kill. Well that doesn’t sound too bad… Think again. That one shot could take 20 rounds to do. Usually you don’t need to kill them like in the hallway in the second RE. You just run through and hopefully you don’t get hurt. But in the first Resident Evil there’s one or two in the gallery puzzle room. So what are you going to do? Solve the painting puzzle while this bird pecks out your eyes? No, you need it dead. The problem is that your character has a really hard time aiming at it. If you don’t get it on the first shot when it’s in a linear flight pattern it’s likely that it’s going to take a lot more bullets once it starts swarming around your head. The only way to get it on the first shot is to already know it’s there so go back and do it again. Trust me, you don’t want to spend the bullets because Resident Evil *is not* going to compensate you.

Name “Flying Ninja”
Game: Shinobi

I couldn’t find a picture so just imagine one of the green guys on the ground is black, has big bat wings, and is pissing you off. Man these are great! It’s so convenient how they only show up when you’re wall-running over a pool of acid, a torrent of water, or a bottomless pit. Then they ram into you and you fall off and die. I just love this game.

Name: Spawn
Game: Quake

All they are is these little bouncing blue blobs. They’re really fast and chase you around lunging at you. If you don’t shoot them before they touch you, they blow up and hurt you. If you do shoot them before they touch you, they blow up and hurt you anyway. Isn’t that special?

Name: Troll
Game: Neverwinter Nights

First of all, they all seem to have Downs Syndrome or at least ADD. One arm is perpetually curled up against their torso and the other one just sort of flails around and that’s how they attack you. I swear sometimes they look over at the wall while they’re fighting you like they’re distracted or they just aren’t taking it seriously. The worst thing about them is that they are regenerating. Now since, you’re playing NWN you’re character is going to suck already. Fighting an enemy that regenerates establishes a perfect equilibrium where nothing is accomplished until you have a critical hit. It takes forever to kill them and the fact that they look retarded while battling you just adds to the frustration. There’s only one way to fight a troll and that’s while making grilled cheese sandwiches. Seriously, engage your attack and then leave the computer. Go make food or do a sudoku.

Name: Lakitu
Game: Yoshi Island (and some marios)

They float around in their little *happy* clouds and follow you through the entire level while bombing you with either bombs or spiny enemies. Because just going through the level isn’t challenging enough. You need some bastard up in a cloud that’s constantly throwing shit at you! You can’t even kill them. In the Mario games it’s next to impossible to do anything to him because he’s so high up. In Yoshi Island you can hit him with an egg but what’s the point? They always come back.

Name: Undead Archer
Game: God of War

These are so bad, the game has a special ability almost specifically for killing them. Before you get that however, it’s a giant pain in the ass. The first time you see them they’re on these pedestals and you have to push a box all the way to them so you can climb on top of it and kill them. You get the box closer and they shoot it. The box explodes and then they shoot you. You have to go back and get the respawned box and do it again. Then do it about fifty more times if you live that long. Come on, I’m just trying to push a box! Quit screwing around!

Name: Dancer
Game: Kingdom Hearts 2

You can’t hit them because they’re always sliding around on the ground like jackasses. And they attack you by dancing… You heard me. They grab your arm, swing you around and fling you up in the air. Then it takes like three hours for you to fall back down. I don’t wanna dance dammit! Let me go assface! Dancer… what a stupid enemy.

Name: Murlock
Game: World of Warcraft

This is the reason why you can’t just explore in WoW. These stupid pieces of shit are everywhere like vermin. If you’re near water at all, you can’t go anywhere without running into an ass-load of murlock. There’s like a murlock village every five yards on the shoreline. Even if you’re swimming in the water, they’re out there too. I wish they’d all just die.

Name: Bombchu
Game: The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask

I liked them better when they were a useable item. Does this look like something from a Zelda game? No, it looks like something out of a Ralph Steadman painting. These mouse things clatter around on the ground and if you go anywhere near them they come after you and explode. If you’re on your horse they can’t hurt you but if you’re on foot you’re screwed. You can’t outrun them; there are so many of them; and they respawn almost instantaneously.

Name: Photosaurus
Game: Alone in the Dark 4: The New Nightmare

These things have *three* legs and like a five foot long tongue that they use to hurt you with. They have an aversion to light so you use your flash light to keep them away but you are usually dealing with two at once. It’s really hard to maneuver through a room while keeping two at bay because as soon as your flashlight beam leaves one of them for even a split second you get the tongue in the face. The good thing is if the room has a light switch you can hit that and they’re toast. But that’s not always an option. You can actually kill them with a weapon but it takes so much ammo. As I recall It took six shots with the triple-barreled shotgun. That’s 18 shells! You have three courses of action; waste ammo, waste health, or waste time.

Name: Spider?
Game: Doom 3

The spiders always appear when you least expect it. They crawl around and sometimes lunge at you. And you always have to fight like thirty of them in a

row coming from all sides. They come out of these little ducts in the wall and

they just keep coming. When I first fought them I

thought, *What, is there an infinite supply of these?

Am I supposed to just run? What the hell?!* Sometimes when you’re minding your own business like trying to open a weapons locker or something you’ll start getting hurt. You look around and don’t see anything. Well look down, it’s probably a spider… or twelve.

Name: Gremlin
Game: The Castlevania Series

Since this is a side scroller, most of the enemies make one pass at you or go back and forth in their one little area. These things don’t do that. They get dropped off by these harpy things and then jump directly on top of you. Then they turn around and jump on you again and again and again. They will chase you for as far as they can and then some more harpies will come by to drop off more gremlins for you. It’s like running a gauntlet. You have a really hard time hitting something that moves in that pattern and if you ever get three on the screen like in the picture, you have no chance to survive. Make your time.

Name: Ghost
Game: Silent Hill 4

The main reason these really suck is that they don’t die. There is no way you can get rid of them. They hassle you throughout the whole area that they are located and you just have to deal with it. One of them, (I think it was Jasper), can go anywhere in the level. This is worse than the stupid lakitu. They move pretty slow but some of them hurt you just from being in the general vicinity. You have to go beat them up to get any sort of break. What’s really great is when one is hurting you and you can’t even figure out where it is so you can‘t stop it. You can actually fix the ghosts in place with a sword of obedience but only three of them exist and there are like 20 ghosts.

Name: Marlboro
Game: The Final Fantasy Series

There is no reason why you should ever try to fight one of these! They appear in random battles and have like three attacks. One of which is it’s favorite and incidentally the most annoying attack in the game. It’s called “bad breath.” The tentacle rape monster breathes on you and then all of your characters on screen have blind, confusion, poison, maybe sleep and God knows what else. The rest of the battle goes something like this: Since the characters are confused they attack at random without your consent. Likely it will be an ally but since they are blind they will probably miss but since they are poisoned they hurt themselves. You don’t even get to play anymore unless someone becomes unconfused but by that time you will have killed each other. All you do is watch your team die slowly and in the meanwhile the Marlboro gets to have it’s way with you. If you ever get ambushed by one of these, do yourself a favor and press the reset button. That’s how bad they are.

Name: Fallen
Game: Devil May Cry 3

I have just one complaint about these. They take two hours to kill! Fallen fly circles around you but they’re always facing you. They always come in pairs and have lances for weapons. Since they’re constantly flying around you they’re next to impossible to hit. Bullets don’t do anything and you can’t get them with a combo attack so you get to hit them once, (if you’re lucky), with every assault you make. The only semi reliable attack you can hit them with is a vertical sword chop. They also go through walls and when that happens you can’t hit them either. And also when you begin to fight them they have their wings folded over their body and you can’t hurt them at all. You have to beat their wings off and then you can theoretically hurt them; that is until they regenerate. That’s right, their wings regenerate after like a minute and then they are protected again. When you’re concentrating on one of them, the other one is always right behind you ramming it’s lance up your ass. It's frustrating and you want to just leave but you *have* to kill them or you can't progress. So if the fallen’s wings aren’t folded, it’s not in a wall, it’s not out of reach in some other way, you’re not sprawled out on the ground, and your accuracy is perfect you have a five second window where you can hurt them once. Then it’s only another 10 minutes until you can break their wings again and get another shot in. Have fun.