The Haunted Mansion

On one of my many trips to the Good Will Store where I search for cheap-ass video games, I spotted a game in the PS2 section that wasn't MLB 2002 or Guitar Hero II. It was instead The Haunted Mansion. A video game based on the Disneyland ride of the same name, NOT based off of the Eddie Murphy movie based off of the ride. I think the game must have come out before the movie because it actually comes with tickets to the movie... Actually it comes with ONE ticket... Actually it comes with ONE MOVIE PASS only good at participating theaters and worth up to $6.50. Holy Shit. In what year could you go see a new movie for $6.50? Cause it sure wasn't in recent memory. This is HARDLY a "movie pass."

I thought about buying the game. Sure, why not? It's $5. I collect horror games. This is at least marginally a horror game in complete condition with case, cover art and manual. You know what's weird now that I think about it? ALL the games at Good Will that are on disc media are in great condition with all their bits and pieces present and accounted for. This is a store that receives nearly all of their inventory via donations. People are just dropping games off in this condition at the curb outside and giving them away to the store for them to sell at a profit. Now go into Gamestop and look at the used games. Probably around 1/4 of the games are missing cover art and/or the manual or have some large mar on something like a torn or broken case. I haven't noticed if they still do this but some are even just a disk in a paper slip. THESE games are getting sold by their owners to the store. Why in the hell? I will never understand this. Why is it socially acceptable to buy a game, throw away the box and manual and keep it in a fucking CD binder? Why would you do that? Why would the store buy it back from them in such shitty condition? Why would another customer buy that same game from the store at a marked up price in such shitty condition? Why does a used game which is essentially just a disk, cost as much as a used game in the original case with art and manual? If you look on Amazon they sure as hell don't. What are these dumb fucks doing to their games that make the plastic on the front look like it was run over with a lawnmower? Why is it so hard for people to just buy a game, put it on the shelf, play it for a while and then sell it when they don't want it anymore? You don't need to throw components of the product away or beat the shit out of it with a tire iron. Just put it on the fucking shelf and leave it! Anyway, the point I was originally trying to make is that maybe there is a correlation between the two, suggesting that generous people take better care of their possessions. Or maybe Good Will just has higher standards. Yeah, that's it. The garbage that Gamestop sells for three times as much isn't good enough for the poor.

So I bought it.

The Haunted Mansion is about a man named Zeke, (pretty much this guy), who comes to the mansion and blah blah blah blah. He has to stop a dark cultist named Thorn who has trapped and corrupted the souls in the house. The guy looks like a cross between Jafar and Maleficent.

You make your way through the house room by room. Each door you come across is usually sealed and can only be opened with a certain amount of souls. The house incorporates a lot of elements from the ride which is nice. You've got Madame Leota, (the head in the crystal ball) who sounds nothing like she does on the ride. She's more of a cheery southern belle now. They replaced Helena Bonham Carter with Reeba McEntire. The loading screens have those morphing hologram paintings. There are those pedestal busts that appear to follow you. The evil looking clocks are the save points. The candelabra floating down the hall. Every painting you ever see in the mansion. Various ghost characters. This wallpaper...

The list goes on. There's a simple checklist of things you do to finish each room. Go in. Do a puzzle to turn on the lights. Collect souls. Leave to find the next room you can afford to open. (There are also some enemies.)

These puzzles are actually pretty good which surprised me. They integrate into their respective rooms well and most of them are interesting and original. I was expecting lazy puzzles. You know the ones. Just throwing in a slider puzzle with no context or find X number of keys. They never did that. The only problem is that nearly every single puzzle is completely aggravating and it can all be traced to a single and easily avoidable problem: excess.

I think the first real puzzle you come across is the floating book bridge where you need to do some good platforming on patches of floating books that go around the room. Oh this is intriguing, I thought as I worked my way across. Then it was, Why is it just going around the room? Where the hell is this even going? Damn, I fell off and have to start over. Finally I made it to the balcony. I have to do ANOTHER one now? After that it was, I have to do ANOTHER ONE?! It just starts to get really annoying.

There's a really nasty one that makes you solve five quasi chess boards as a human chess piece. It involves patience and timing and if you screw up, you start over. By the time you get to the third one, you're thinking, I can't believe I'm barely half way done with this shit.

There's a haunted fireplace that shoots fireballs at you in the trophy room. You can only make your way down the hall slowly toward it by jumping behind these three moving shields. I'm not quite sure how long this really takes but it certainly feels like an eternity when you're getting the fuck beaten out of you.

The gallery puzzle was impossible for me to solve because I could never find what the problem was. I never noticed that the pictures change because I've seen those pictures so many times by now I've completely tuned them out. I guess I should have used a hint but I went straight for a walkthrough.

In the ballroom there's a loud pipe organ that pushes you away. The only way to advance is to let giant spiders reel you toward them with their web. You have to go from spider to spider, always killing the last one so that the next one can take you. If you screw up, like by killing the wrong spider, there's no salvaging it. You have to go back to the beginning to make the spiders respawn.

The mirror puzzle is fucking broken. I re-solved it probably half a dozen times but one of the mirrors refused to catch the light. I tried every combination until coming back to the only one that made sense and then it just decided to work. Gee, thanks. I will say this, It's still not as terrible as the mirror light puzzle in the end of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. That was bullshit.

The giant billiard table just takes forever.

Those are just a few but almost every single one goes like this: Yay, this is fun --> This is a little less fun now --> This is starting to get annoying --> Okay, now I'm pissed off.

There are legitimately scary parts in the game. Parts that even scared... or at least startled me. When I was little, the ride The Haunted Mansion at Disneyland scared the shit out of me. I didn't try it again until I was in junior high. Now I think it's awesome. I'd go through it over and over,each time trying to notice something new. I tried to read the tombstones in the graveyard in the dim light. (I think they're complete gibberish.) I'd lean out and look behind the doom buggy and places that your attention was generally steered away from, sort of looking behind the scenes and trying to figure out how stuff worked. Anyway, my point is that my younger self probably could not have handled playing this DISNEY game out of fear. It wasn't until I realized this that I went back and had a look at the ESRB rating. It's actually rated T for Teen. I was not expecting this. I thought it would be a more or less silly game along the lines of Abbot and Costello Meet the Mummy. Don't get me wrong, the game is still silly but also remains dark and intense all the while.
The part where the reaper thing chases you down the hall is scary. The first time you walk past a boarded up door and a bunch of arms burst out to grab at you and hurt you is at least a jump scare. Yeah, it was surprising and delightful the first time but when it happens to you at six different doors while walking down the same hall, it's fucking annoying. Combined with reapers chasing you down the hall it's super mega shit time fucktastic annoying. Do you see what I mean? EVERYTHING that they do that's entertaining, they run into the ground and kill it.

Combat is stupid simple. You carry a supernatural lantern which shoots energy projectiles. That's all. Just spam the shoot button. The projectiles do different things depending on how long you charge the shot. As you collect souls, you also get fragments of death certificates. When you complete a death certificate, you get an upgrade for your lantern. It's actually a lot like a shoot 'em up.

Once you get all 999 souls in the house, you get to fight the one and only boss who's pretty easy. I'd seriously rather fight him than do the kitchen puzzle.

And at the end, what do you get? Grim Grinning Ghosts in four part harmony. Honestly, I'd be pretty pissed off if it ended any other way.

Surprisingly overall it's a decent game. I went in more or less expecting a kid's game and got a legitimate challenge. The puzzles are interesting and annoying which is better than mediocre and annoying. But it still hurts that they botched the execution so many times. It's dark. It pays close attention to elements of the ride. There's a lot of nice details like random stuff you can interact with in the environment such as dishes you can break and building blocks you can knock over. If you look close at a teddy bear, you'll notice that it's head follows you. It's the least shitty game that I was expecting to be shitty since Dino Crisis 2.

Dead Space: Extraction

Who the hell is this? She has too much hair to be the main girl.
 
The game is actually a prequel centered around the events of the first marker extraction from the perspective of the civilians near the dig site. It ties in with Dead Space similarly to how Operation: Raccoon City ties in with Resident Evil 2. I knew this game was originally released on the Wii. Then It was released in a bundle with the Limited Edition Dead Space 2 on the PS3. On the cover it says "Includes Dead Space: Extraction." However on the covers of the non limited editions that they make now say "Includes the demo for Dead Space: Extraction." Who the hell cares? Maybe last generation it might matter but now you can just go on the Playstation Store and download whatever demo you want without buying anything. This is like saying the game comes with an instruction booklet. The only reason they have that on the cover is to confuse you.
 
I started the game expecting a third person shooter, the same as the other two games. However, it began in first person with no ability to control where I went. I thought it was a cut scene but it wasn't. This was the game. It's a horror rail shooter like House of the Dead or Carnevil. I've never been this confused/surprised about what I was getting before. I even researched this game and somehow never figured this out. This explains why it was released exclusively on the Wii first and why there was the Move disclaimer before the game loaded. It's made for motion controls which would closely simulate an arcade experience. I'm stuck with playing it on a regular controller but you know, what are you going to do? Buy a Playstation Move? PFFFFFF! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HA! HAAAAAAAAAA!
 
You get your standard guns and abilities from Dead Space like stasis and kinesis which has a ridiculously long range on it and no recharge required. The stasis gives you three shots before it needs to recharge.
 
What is the deal with kinesis anyway? You can grab stuff that's far away so I guess that's useful but most of the time you're using it to plug in a battery or slide open a hatch. The seemingly simplest tasks are made to require this ability. In the future we've advanced beyond pushing buttons or using our arms and instead manually move every part of the machine with kinesis. THE FUTURE! You think that the cafeteria is full of people manipulating floating forks and drink glasses into their mouths? They probably put on their clothes with kinesis and walk by moving their legs with it too. Yeah I know, it's just an excuse to have some flashy ability and another game mechanic to include and I'm not saying it wouldn't be cool or useful to have but the way it's used is stupid. Going back to Red Faction: Armageddon, (two references in back to back reviews,) it's like in that game where you have nanobots. Which is basically having an instant 3D printer/replicator with you wherever you go. Just think about it. Who cares about ANYTHING? You can have whatever you want in two seconds. Want a shiny new car? Watch it materialize from air before your very eyes. Hungry? Have the bots make you a Happy Meal complete with toy. The terraformer that got destroyed in the begining and was going to kill everyone on the planet. Just fix it with nanobots. The applications are limitless. You have a magic genie with infinite wishes and you're using it to rebuild a rusty staircase or a cargo crate for cover in a gun fight.
 
The nature of the rail shooter usually requires you to just wildly shoot anything on screen that you want to interact with from flipping a switch to grabbing an item to making something dead. This game is different because in order to grab an object, you have to lasso it with kinesis which requires a little more accuracy because it's slow to fire. It also doesn't help that the camera view pans and boggles around like you're watching Cloverfield. You need to be constantly watching for stuff to pop up on screen because it's probably only there for a fraction of a second and then it's gone. And it's really frustrating if you fail to grab something important and then your character just turns their head and strolls on by. It's also strange when you see something for a moment and then have your character turn to talk to someone and during the entire conversation you're thinking about that weapon upgrade you just missed and waiting with bated breath, hoping the character will turn again for a second chance. Suddenly videogames feels less like videogames and more like Monday Night Football. Look over there. Over there! Come on. Yes! Get it! Get it! Get it! Get it! No! You idiot!
 
There are also parts where the game will stop and let you control the camera for no more than 5 seconds. And whenever that happens, you always wonder if you chose to look in the right area. What if something really awesome was just to your right but you decided to waste your time looking around on your left instead?
 
You've got a couple of new enemies like the severed head on the tentacle and the extremely bizarre flying delimbed body that appears to fly by flapping its pelvis... or was it the scapula? I can't remember. Those lumbering enemies carrying the tiny creepy crawlies within them are still there and I think the crawlies are more annoying than ever. If they get on you, you have to shake the controller until they're off. If you get a full batch of them at once, they don't just all jump on you at once like in the other games. One latches on and you spend a couple of seconds shaking it off. Then the next one gets on and so on until the one by one procession eventually ends. It takes forever. The only reason these enemies exist is to annoy you.
 
For bosses, you really need a fast firing precision weapon to hit the everpresent glowing targets on their bodies. Should you find yourself in a boss fight without one of these weapons then you're just up shit creek. When I got to the first boss I had no precision weapons at all. There are segments during the fight where you have to shoot the boss' tentacles to prevent them from bitch slapping you. I literally could do nothing but stand there and take it until it moved on to the next part. I eventually died because I can only go so many rounds like that and then had to start over. It starts you over at the begining of the fight with only half your vitality and the health packs in the battle don't respawn. Well thanks a lot, assholes. You just shot me in the other knee completely unnecessarily. How am I supposed to beat him now? It goes back to Fear Effect where you get weights strapped to you for failing to stay afloat.
 
Painting yourself into a corner aside, the game is still too easy, even on "impossible." There are four difficulty settings and ironically the easiest setting is actually labeled "normal." There's no "easy" mode even though they're all pretty easy.
 
You can only hold four weapons which is standard but what's not standard it having one slot taken up by the rivet gun. The rivet gun is locked on you at all times just so you can do parts where you rivet scrap together to block entrances. It has infinite ammo but is slow and shitty. It's a last resort which you never want to have to use.
 
You have to make do with the weapons that the game puts on the levels which can be as little as three. (It's even less than that if you fail to pick one up.) The other worthless weapon is the arc welder. It shoots a constant lightning bolt that is supposed to arc between enemies but typically doesn't. Even when they're standing right next to eachother. It does very little damage and you'll want to swap it out for ANYTHING else when you find it. The alternate fire lightning ball thing is okay though.
 

There's not much for new levels because guess what? You get on the Ishimura again, the derelict ship from the first game. About 60% of the levels are reused from the first game, most of them from the Ishimura. That's three separate games (every game in the franchise thusfar excluding Ignition... maybe,) where they use the fucking Ishimura. Dead Space 3 is coming out. Are they going to put it in there too?
 
The levels have frozen on me a couple of times which sucks because there are no autosaves so you have to quit and start all over again from the begining because you're just supposed to play through each level in one sitting.
 
There's no limit to the oxygen in your suit this time around. Oh and also the flamethrower works in the vacuum of space now. At least it does in the place where you first get it. What a fuckup.

Alice/Madness Returns

 I remember back in the late 90's/early 00's before there was a Best Buy in my town, I used to go down to the Circuit City to look at video games. I never really bought them. I just kind of fantasized about them. I don't know, I just like window shopping. I can remember well, specifically two PC game boxes for games that I was drawn to. One was The Crystal Key and the other was American Mcgee's Alice.
 
I never bought either but I did eventually play both, years later. The Crystal Key is a really shitty adventure game. Alice is an OK horror platformer. I think what originally drew me to this game was their iteration of the Cheshire Cat.
 
Look at it. It's creepy as hell. Creepy yet alluring. I liked this cat so much that I went to the Alice website on my Win98 computer and downloaded a free screensaver of it, still having never played the game. This was how I experienced all horror games back then. I'd go to the official website or fan sites and read character bios, enemy descriptions and look at pictures and screenshots, again, never playing the games. Why? Hell if I know. Silent Hill and the first and third Resident Evil games where on the Playstation which I didn't have, for one. For another, maybe I was too scared to play them and this was a safe way to experience them. Or maybe I liked using my imagination combined with the subject matter in order to make something fun while keeping the full game a mystery that if revealed could only fall short of my expectations and thereby diminish its enjoyment for me... Kind of like The Crystal Key. One day we must all grow up and play The Crystal Key. Or maybe we grow up WHEN we play The Crystal Key after we realize it's actually shit. It's a rite of adult disillusionment. Also that shit was all M-rated. I wasn't old enough to buy them, had no adult connections to acquire them and didn't know anyone that played horror stuff like that. I already told my story about buying Alone in the Dark 4.

Anyway, my point is that the first Alice game harkens back to the days where I first became obsessed with the horror/survival horror genre.
 
In the first game, Alice survives the house fire which killed her whole family and ends up in an asylum where she battles her inner demons in her own very twisted version of Wonderland. The second game is more of the same even though in the first one the ending implied that she made a total recovery.
 
A download voucher for Alice comes with Madness Returnes so I got it and played it again. The first thing about Alice on PS3 versus Alice on PC is actually the load screen. This is an important screen because on average you probably want to save every two minutes which blows. The game really needed more auto saves. In the PC version, every save file has a little timestamp and a screen shot so you basically know exactly where you were or at least which save was last. You always want to keep multiple save files in video games in case one gets corrupted. I remember when I played Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory for the first time and they only let you keep one file per campaign. I was about 80% through the game and went to save and it fucking froze while saving. Lost everything.
 
The PS3 load screen has no timestamps and the associated image is just a general picture for the level. Basically you just have to guess which one you want and then go back and load another one if you're wrong. Also instead of having the load, save and return buttons as little highlightable options, it just has the commands hotkeyed directly to the face buttons of the controller which you'd think would save time but it also makes it incredibly easy to accidentally load an older file when you're trying to save over it, making you lose progress because there is also no warning.
 
Movement and combat seem to be much better suited to a controller than a keyboard and mouse. Some platforming segments that I remembered as gruelingly difficult were much easier like the floating leaf part and those stupid gears in the last level. But there are still parts where there is no indication where you're supposed to go so you just jump around and kill yourself a few times until you figure it out.
 
You know what's really annoying? Waiting for shit that moves to come back around so you can jump on it. Gears. Platforms. Whatever. There's one part near the begining where there are these little puzzle checkerboard tiles that flipflop over each other to make a a tiny isolated bridge over an abyss. They go so fucking slow. If you miss them the first time, you just have to sit there for like five minutes watching these tiles crawl away in an extremely derisive manner. Then when you finally get on them just don't fall off. DO NOT FALL OFF.
 
The combat has little to no indication of hit detection. It could use some more sound FX for that. The music is decent... until seven seconds elapse and it loops. It's like they started writing music but then immediately got bored or distracted and decided to just put every small clip they had on infinite repeat and call it good.
 
When I got to the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb fight, my mind was blown by the amount of lag produced by the two self replicating nesting dolls. This game was released in '99 and I'm playing it on a PS3 and it can't fucking handle it! It slowed to around 2 fps. If a PS3 can't play this right, how in the hell was a general Win 98/2000 PC supposed to play it right? This game must have been the Crysis of it's day.
 
The game really starts to take it in the ass at the second Jabberwocky fight. The Jabberwock is large, flies and breaths fire. You are small, earthbound and have shit for accurate long-range weapons. Basically if you can land a couple of hits and not be scorched to death, it's time to save and do it again about 25 more times.
 
After a very aggravating dragout boss battle, it's time to enter the Queen of Hearts' castle. How do you do this? With an aggravating dragout platforming segment. The most appropriate analogy I can come up with is for you to imagine trying to walk a tightrope while thirty assholes with RPGs try to take you down. Kind of like in the end of Psychonauts... You know, it's funny that I made that connection just now because I actually found Raz from Psychonauts' skeleton hidden in Madness Returns. What's with that? 
 
There's a large variety of different and interesting weapons to use in this game. Actually there's kind of a problem with that. There are TOO many. When you get in a sudden fight, you need the appropriate weapon but it may take a while to scroll through all of the weapons you DON'T want. In the sequel you only have 4 weapons. (5 I guess if you count the clockwork bomb which is about as lethal as a pillow fight.) Two of them are ranged and comprise about 70% of the control clunkyness of the game. They constantly get stuck in aim mode. The aim reticule will only lock on whichever enemy you don't want to aim at and even if you switch targets a dozen times will still only lock onto another enemy you don't want to aim at. Often times you'll be shooting at a large and/or far away enemy with one until it overheats and needs time to cool down so you try to switch to the other one but it won't. It takes it a couple of really tedious seconds or taps to register. Then if you're switching to the teapot cannon it takes another couple of seconds for the weapon itself to respond. Once you see it switch you'll naturally hold down the fire button to charge up a shot but when you release it you realize that it wasn't charging at all and you have to start over again, doubling the time you're left vulnerable and the chance that your attack will be interrupted. The weapons in the first game were far better.
 
The way you upgrade weapons in the first Alice is kind of strange. You basically find duplicates of weapons lying around and the more you find of a weapon, the stronger it is but there's really no way to tell outside of combat that it is stronger. The exception is the dice weapon which the game literally gives you another throwable die for every diabolical die you find. In the second game you have to purchase upgrades with teeth that you get from smashing or killing things or find laying around. That's fine until you max out everything or start a new game+. Suddenly you're accumulating tons of teeth with nothing to do with them. I don't know why but that really bugs the hell out of me. I hate that it doesn't do anything anymore. Something I thought was really cool about Red Faction: Armageddon was the fact that even when you maxed out everything, you could still use your scrap to buy cheats and weird visual filters. Sadly that's the only instance I can come up with where they do that. Now Madness Returns does have unlockable concept art but you can't buy it. You have to collect bottles scattered throughout the levels. But what's stupid is that the bottles don't unlock anything until you find all of them on a level which you're probably not going to do unless you're specifically hunting them down with a walkthrough as you play and that is really shitty.
 
Alice has an overdrive mode where she does more damage to enemies. You can only use this mode when you find a specific item which activates it right then and there. The item is only ever placed where there are just a couple of enemies and/or in a precarious platforming segment where you can't really do anything, so what the fuck is the point? In the second game you have hysteria which can only be activated when on your last tiny fraction of health but sometimes you just go right over the threshold straight to dead without ever being able to use it. Still more useful than the one in the first game.
 
The first game had a better Cheshire Cat who I think is a contender for best video game guide character of all time. He appears and usually has something useful or interesting to say in a sort of evil Jeremy Irons voice (or Katz from Courage the Cowardly Dog if you prefer.) "Here's a riddle: When is a croquet mallet like a billy club? I'll tell you: whenever you want it to be." You know how in most iterations of the Cheshire Cat when he vanishes you can still see his teeth and eyes go last? Well it looks like they tried to do that effect for the game but got is backwards. The teeth and eyes vanish first, leaving disturbingly horrid voids in the cat's skull.
 
As for Madness Returns all by its self, all the characters are back but the good ones are evil and the evil ones that you killed already are alive again and... not evil. I don't really think there's any significance. It's just strange.
 
The level designs start out okay. I like the underwater part that looks like the underwater part in Disney's James and the Giant Peach. But the majority of the levels seem like they're composed of random floating shit over an abyss. There's no reason or continuity between anything. It's just really lazy and empty design. The levels also get really repetitive. They reuse the same puzzles over and over. On every level you can count on 2-3 slider puzzles, 1-2 rhythm games and 2-3 slides. Why? The slides are exactly like the slides in Super Mario 64. The more of them I did, the more I found myself jumping over the sides to land on lower parts of the slide, skipping large segments to get it over with quicker... like I'm trying to beat that stupid fatass penguin.
 
There aren't any bosses except for the final one. That sucks but it's not just that there aren't any boss fights. The game heavily implies several times that there will be a boss fight and there isn't.
 
There's no physical manual for the game. Instead you get a little card in the box telling you that the manual is on the game. You load the game and where is the manual? On the main menu. So if you're playing the game and you need help with something, you have to quit the game to load the manual. Then reload your autosave file and continue from wherever that was. How hard is it to just make it accessible on the pause menu? Or just fucking PRINT it with all the money you saved on not designing the levels.

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

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