Fields of Butterflies

Domino Rally

2012-01-17T16:16:00.000-08:00

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
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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

2012-01-02T19:09:00.000-08:00

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

2011-10-30T21:31:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-29T21:16:00.000-07:00

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.

My Creepy Little Big Planet Date

2011-03-27T17:40:00.000-07:00

I was recently given Little Big Planet 2 for my birthday. A rare novelty because I hardly ever buy new games and certainly not within a month of the game’s release. Sixty dollars is a ridiculous price for a game. It's kind of short but it adds a hell of a lot of new gameplay mechanics. It's almost half 2-D shmup now. In the first Little Big Planet, I ignored the online community in large. I can count the number of times I actually played in the same level with someone on one hand. In about half the levels that there were prize bubbles that required multiple players to get, I figured out some way to get most if not all of them by myself. I'm that kind of online player. In WoW I never joined a guild. Everyone knows If you join a guild, you can go into dungeons and get better loot and equipment. It’s standard procedure. Teamwork or even competition is generally rewarded in video games. The problem is the dual edge sword. You might want to join a guild simply because of the allure of getting fabulous glowing armor with bigger numbers but suddenly you have some guy trying to e-mail you a thirty page Acrobat PDF of rules and regulations you have to adhere to to stay in the guild. Sorry, no. I play video games to have fun. Sometimes that even includes playing an awful game. I don't play video games to subject myself to a bunch of tedious obligations. I like loading the game, doing what I want to do in the game and then turning the game off when I want. From what I had gathered looking at in-game pictures and playing a couple hundred community levels in the first game, the LBP community was largely comprised of furries, goths, emos and shemales probably in the range of 10-18 years old with an evenish gender split. Yeah I know, sounds great, right?

Little Big Planet 2 makes it much easier than the first to just spontaneously end up playing in a level with someone. I started letting people into my games and decided that it wasn't so bad. I even made a couple of friends. Not real friends; people that made friend requests to me. I checked their PS3 profiles and reveled in the fact that I had more trophies than what was probably a couple of thirteen year olds.

I played several levels with, (we'll call them Clingy5150,) who seemed unusually friendly and a little strange in general. Their profile basically said that they could only play on weekends. Sounded like parental rules to me. Whatever, it gives me a big window if I just want to avoid them for some reason.

A week later, I log on and am putting the finishing touches on a level I'm making. Seconds after getting into my level, I get a request from Clingy to join me. Here we go, I thought. The unsolicited pestering at all hours begins. I'm not about to let someone join me in a level I'm creating because they'd either be bored watching me place sound effects in various places or they'd be running around and screwing stuff up. I let the request timeout and continued working. Later when I was bored of building, I wanted to play and decided to ask Clingy to join. He/she did and I sent us to a level which had a multiplayer prize bubble puzzle which I hadn't done yet.

About half way through the level, Clingy starts having self-esteem issues about his/her in-game performance and put on the crying face. I gave them a little reassurance and wonder why I'm having to do this in a video game. They ask if I don't like them anymore. Jeez, I'm trying to have fun here, not immerse myself in relationshit drama. Thinking that this is about me ignoring them earlier, I explain that I was building a level. They seem fine with this explanation. We go into another level and they start having a self image breakdown, complaining about how no one likes them and telling me to be myself. I wasn't really sure what they meant by this.

Once we're back at my pod again, Clingy starts talking about how no one will be their friend. I tell them that I'm their friend and immediately begin to feel weird about it. I'll seriously do just about anything to diffuse awkward situations or at least get them to shut the hell up for two seconds even if it means doing something else that’s awkward…

Clingy says to me, "We're more than just friends." Okay... That was an interesting response. I follow them to their pod and they change the pod view to something more romantic. The term 'cyber' pops into my head. Suddenly I realize that that Little Big Planet literally has everything needed for anyone's elaborate role playing fantasy. Hell, they even let you film movies now. I'm starting to feel rather uncomfortable at this point.

Clingy asks me to kiss them. I paused for a moment. Is this normal? How should I know? Can sack people even do that? Why would they want to? I grabbed them because that’s the one of two interactive capabilities that isn’t violent. I kind of maneuvered the controller around for the head. It had all the eloquence of mashing two sock puppets together.

Well, that felt wrong. Can we... play a level now? After much browsing in the community levels, Clingy finally chose one. Finally! The talking’s over and we can do video games again. The level loads. We get in a car and drive to... a restaurant? What kind of level is this? Clingy sits down at a two chair table and pretends to eat the blocky food which sat there. OH... MY... GOD... I don't know which to be confounded over first; the fact that people make levels where you're supposed to go on a virtual sack person date or the fact that I'm on a virtual sack person date in one of said levels. I've seen some weird-ass levels but this is just... Why do I feel like I'm playing pretend with a little kid? Probably because I am. Either that or it's some grade A chat roulette trolling from a frat boy.

After dinner, we went dancing. Well actually we just flailed our limbs about on a disco dance floor. Then we drove away. Once we were back at Clingy's pod, he/she told me to change my appearance. I was dressed as a male detective from the future, kind of like the agent guy in Heavy Rain only with skin that constantly changes colors so sort of a Rorschach from Watchmen aspect too. Clingy just had a red dress and blond hair. They told me to change to what I looked like when we first met. Okay... I did and they got upset. They said that I didn't look like that. We're both girls now. I distinctly remember being my girl character (which I main as) when we met because Clingy somehow changed my skin color to tan instead of the green plaid I had it set on. He/she also made my entire pod red with stickers. Thanks, Clingy.

It is kind of messed up that you become acquainted with someone and then suddenly they switch genders and start wearing a green space suit with a feathered boa. I looked at all four of my saved costumes and tried to figure out what the hell they were talking about. My options essentially look like the following…

Daria or Enid from Ghost World

Rorschach

Zidler from Moulin Rouge

MCA as he appears in the Beastie Boy's Sabotage video.

Why would they want me to be any of those? Wait, do they think I'm someone else? Because that would make so much sense!

Suddenly two of Clingy's furry friends that he/she was with when I met them, appear in the pod. Oh good, now maybe we can go do something fun. (I never thought I'd be saying that about furries.) I can hear them slapping the hell out of me while I'm typing something out. Clingy says "Stop it. That's my BF."

Okay, I thought. It's way past time to leave. One of the furries responded, "That's a girl." I pressed the power button and tossed my PS3 out the window. Well, that’s enough LBP for today.

Dino Crisis 2

2011-03-16T06:40:00.000-07:00

Regina is once again roped into a crisis involving dinos. This time an entire research facility dedicated to researching the same energy that allowed dinosaurs into our time in the last game has disappeared in time. A team is dispatched through a stargate… I mean time gate to recover data and survivors.

Once the game started I realized, hey, I have a shotgun… That’s weird. I got a feel for the controls and noticed that when I aimed the shotgun, a little image of the gun appeared in the HUD with the number 100 in it. Wait, a hundred as in ammunition? A hundred shotgun shells? ONE-HUNDRED shotgun shells? It must be a percentage. When I fired the gun once, the number said ninety-nine. One-hundred shotgun shells. When I press the circle button I do a melee attack with a machete. I restarted the game to look at the start screen again. Yeah… it says “Dino Crisis” on it. Huh… I must have some kind of weird beta version where they accidentally put guns and ammo in it. Moments later, I’m blasting the ever-living fuck out of raptors while they attempt to ambush me as I’m running down a jungle game trail. What the hell’s going on here?

I get points for killing dinosaurs and extra points for higher combo kills. I can use the points at the save point computers to buy new weapons, weapon upgrades, first aid kits and various tools and equipment like armor.

The menu screen has… WHOA! A health bar? It’s even in the heads up display!

And the inventory has item names that make sense and aren’t part of some convoluted six part fetch quest? Are you insane?

And, HOLY SHIT! Some kind of file log where you can reread documents you’ve seen? Am I in the fucking Twilight Zone?

Girl on girl BDSM cut scenes ? …Wait, that didn’t happen.

First person vehicle driven rail shooter segments? Reminds me of the Jurassic Park arcade rail shooters.

What is this? Some kind of underwater segment with underwater weapons and underwater dinosaurs and a pneumatic propulsion system? You get to battle a plesiosaurus boss in an underwater reactor with a torpedo gun!

There is almost a dozen different dinosaurs in the game. Dinosaurs that swim and fly and even just run away when they see you. As far as I care to investigate, all of them are legit too. Even the Giganotosaurus which I had to look up. Yeah, it existed and yeah it IS bigger than a T-rex. In the game you can only kill it with a high powered satellite laser.

There are so many different and well-detailed environments that AREN’T just grey laboratories and loading docks. A lot of stuff looks like retaken Ingen facilities from the Lost World.

There’s a ton of awesome weapons and different things to buy. You probably won’t even get to give attention to all of them. Even the SUB weapons are awesome. Mines, insta firewalls and a Taser knife?

Even the time travel plot is a magnitude more interesting than the story from the first Dino Crisis and I couldn’t even hear half of it because of sound problems. Though I will admit that I actually liked the characters from the first one better, especially Rick.

This game is… fun. I mean the amount of fun is unprecedented and nearly unfathomable. I know it helped significantly to have low expectations in the first place but it’s still hard to understand. It’s like they fired the entire staff from the previous game or something. Dino Crisis 2 is completely different and on an entirely new level than Dino Crisis. It’s like comparing Resident Evil and Resident Evil 4 or Terminator and Terminator Two. And they fixed EVERYTHING. I can only really complain about two things. The fixed camera angles still conceal what’s ahead of you from time to time and the dinosaurs respawn WAY too fast. Basically if you accidentally walk back onto a screen that you just cleared a second ago, All dinosaurs are back. Unless it was a one big dinosaur.

The paramount difference here is that they actually figured out that a franchise named “Dino Crisis” should probability revolve around KILLING DINOSAURS.

Alone In The Dark: Inferno

2011-02-28T00:55:00.000-08:00

Alone in the Dark IV: The New Nightmare on PC was the first M rated game I think I ever bought in original packaging. I was too young to obtain it legally from a store. I had to try a couple of different Walmart cashiers before I found one that wouldn’t card me. This was about the time that they implemented those little alarm prompts at checkout for restricted products. You hear the little beep and hope that you picked someone who really didn’t give a shit about store policy and the law.

I remember the game as being pretty scary (experiencing it as a less desensitized 13-14 year-old.) One incredibly cheap but pants-pissing jump scare still stands out in my mind to this day. It was basically the equivalent to watching a screamer on the internet. And it’s at the VERY beginning of the game. It’s like oh shit, maybe I shouldn’t be playing this. At the end of the game it says “Edward Carnby will return.” Well, it took 7 years. I’ve wanted to play the previous games but I can never seem to get them to work on my computer so I guess my only option is…

Edward Carnby wakes up just as New York City begins to erupt in giant annoying black spires and hellspawn of four, count ‘em FOUR, different forms. There’s some kind of satisfying effect on a very primitive part of the brain while you’re watching everything fall apart. Buildings crumble. Vehicles explode and flip up into the air. It’s like HOLY SHIT! Did you see that building? It was all PKREEEEEERRRRRRR BOOOOOOM!!!

There are so many different components shoehorned into this game, (driving, puzzles, platforming, first person shooting, third person everything else,) that every button has three or four different functions depending on what you’re doing. There are quite literally five and a half pages of controls in the manual. Sketchy controls in general coupled with so many different controls sometimes makes it feel like you’re making suggestions or giving advice as opposed to controlling. It’s really easy to accidentally equip or unequip something and have no idea until you try to do something with it. You can end up stabbing a hole in the bottle you’re holding instead of aiming your gun or throwing the bottle in your left hand with the intent of shooting it only to realize that the object in your right hand is not the gun but in fact the flashlight lens.

Easily the worst part of the controls is the melee weapon combat. It’s hard to explain how bad the melee controls are unless you’re actually using them but basically there’s a huge disconnect with timing and proportional movement between the stick and Carnby’s arms. It doesn’t seem like there’s any momentum or follow-through with the swings. It can best be described as trying to wield a baseball bat with your feet. I never say this but I think the melee would be better with the motion controls of the Wiimote… or I guess the Move since I’m playing on Playstation. Or just why can’t it be like it is in Silent Hill Origins where you pick up an object then press button to swing it around or throw it. Hold it down to charge the attack. It’s not fucking rocket science. The other huge problem with melee is that when you’re in attack mode with an object, the right analogue stick is used for swinging. Previously it was the camera control. Now you can’t aim the camera anymore. You have to get the stupid camera situated BEFORE you even think about trying to attack. Then you just hope that you don’t have to REsituate it during battle. The camera’s pretty bad already without it being completely unusable.

For most of the game you’re screwing around in Central Park. The park’s really big so you need to steal cars to get around. (Don’t worry, everyone’s dead and they don’t need them anymore.) Getting around is not as easy as you’d think. There’s a bunch of those stupid black spires and pits and fault lines where the ground is raised into an impassable wall that you have to take a three mile detour to get around. Humanz, (I’m just going to call them zombies because what’s singular for humanz? Human? That’s stupid,) that you pass will often leap unto your car and start pummeling it which for some reason translates to bodily damage. AND THEY DON’T FUCKING COME OFF! You have to either run into something at a high rate of speed which is going to fuck up your car and slow you down big time or just keep driving until they decide to leave. It’s good practice that any time you pass a zombie while in a car to swerve. Just jiggling the sick back and forth as you pass is usually enough to fake them out and get them to misjudge their leap. Yeah, it’s stupid but you’re going to want to do it.

Cars have a tendency to just fall apart while you drive regardless if you run into things or not. Dents grow on the sides as soon as you step in. Then the bumpers will spontaneously fly off. Tiny invisible inconsistencies in the road make your car spin out or nearly flip over on its back. It doesn’t make any logical sense. Also there are no breaks. You can use what is described in the manual as breaks but it doesn’t slow you nearly fast enough which is great for when you’re driving at top speed down the road and suddenly an impenetrable wall of dirt just appears in front of you.

Some of the physics in general are just screwed up. In a segment where you’re supposed to solve puzzles while driving a forklift, I got stuck. You’re supposed to raise this ramp that looks like a random pile of debris with the lift so that you can drive up to a higher level. I ended up just jumping onto the top of the forklift and then jumping onto the next level. After dicking around up there for a while it became apparent that I needed to somehow have the forklift there with me since there were a bunch of large boxes that I needed to move around. The boxes were metal and probably big enough to stuff three to five illegal immigrants in each. Still, I found that I could push a two-high stack around just by running into it with my body. When I finally got the forklift up there, I was surprised to find that trying to lift and place them somewhere I wanted was a real bitch. When you try to move two at once, they just get horribly misaligned and fall over as if the slightest breeze will send them wafting across the room. When you try to stack them one by one, well… they get horrible misaligned and fall over again. It’s like trying to stack two giant beach balls with a hockey stick. It’s actually a LOT easier to just push them around by hand… which you shouldn’t even be able to do! The game’s so broken and anal retentive about some things.

The first time you get in a car, you have to smash open the window with a bat to unlock it. I stood there for five minutes gently tapping the roof of the car and bashing in the door, (the part UNDER the window.) I started to wonder if it was even possible. How hard is it to break a fucking car window with a bat? How do they screw up such a textbook example of interactive environment?

In several places you’re supposed to shine your flashlight with a lens over it so that it projects a symbol. You have to shine it on these invisible markers that you can only see for a few moments when you close your eyes. (Yeah, there’s actually a button dedicated to blinking.) Anyway you have to line up the symbols and hold it there for a while and it has to be PERFECT. If more than three photons are off, it doesn’t work!

The first time you’re supposed to use your spirit vision to see freaky shit happens when you’re trapped in a tiny room with absolutely nothing to do and only one thing to interact with. I turned the game on, played for ten minutes wandering around the room, accomplished nothing and then turned it off again. Wow, that was real fucking fun. The next time I tuned it on, it actually told me what to do. That’s nice because I’m sure as hell not going to think: oh, maybe I should close my eyes. The second time, it happened at the castle and I had no idea what to do there either because it never told me what the hell I was supposed to be doing. (And no e-mail instructions from Sarah do not count because I can barely read that shit on my poor person’s TV.)

In some places there’s living black goo on the ground that you can’t step on or you die instantly. Sometimes you won’t even know it’s there until you jump off of something and land in it. You’re supposed to keep it away by shining the flashlight at it. (Reminds me of those stupid photosaurus’ in the previous game except a lot more fucking annoying.) The problem is that the flashlight only seems to work some of the time and it gives you almost no margin for error. Logic would dictate that if you walked while pointing the flashlight straight down you’d be completely enclosed and protected by a penumbra of light but you aren’t. Trying to get through these areas with just the flashlight will drive you crazy. Just hope that you have a bunch of glow sticks or flares to toss on the ground.

You can make fire bullets and the game encourages you to aim them at the fissures on zombies because it will kill them. But if you do aim at the fissures it never works. I’ve had basically a motionless zombie standing in front of me with the laser sight trained on the fissure while shooting and nothing happens. It’s a hell of a lot more effective to just shoot at the zombies indiscriminately and leave it to chance. Why does everything have to be so finicky?

Running over zombies would be fun if A: They didn’t jump on your car and B: They actually died. It doesn’t matter how many times you reverse and roll back over them, they always get back up. It takes like eight bullets to put the weakest zombie on the ground for any significant amount of time. Still, if you stick around for long enough, they’ll be up and at you again. The only way to kill them is with fire, that is if you can find a way to harness it at the moment.

In your tiny-ass inventory you can create improv weapons, (most of which are useless in one way or another,) out of stuff you find around the park. Nine times out of ten your problem can be solved by throwing a bottle of flammable liquid and shooting it in mid air to make an explosion. You can do stuff like tape a glow stick to a flammable bottle but what the hell’s the point? The glow stick is just going to explode. You can’t even activate the glow stick while it’s on the bottle or beforehand so it won‘t even be glowing when it explodes. Another interesting thing is that you can toss a full bottle of Smirnoff and shoot it to make a John Woo sized explosion but the second you make it into a Molotov cocktail it becomes the biggest waste of flammable liquid in the game. One of the most useful combos is spray can with lighter. It’s ironically more effective than bullets since everything’s so susceptible to fire. You can just go around spraying fire at enemies. This was very interesting to me since it was exactly how I used to kill black widows in my garage as a kid. That is until I almost burned down the damn garage. True story.

The inventory screen is the interior of your jacket. I like how you pull it open like you’re announcing to everyone in the room, “I have a bomb!” The space for items is ridiculously small. On the left you have five slots and on the right you have four. Yeah that may sound like plenty but let me explain. On the left side resides your lighter and that stupid lens. You CAN NOT get rid of them at any time. So you only really have three slots. Your bullets go in one. Well, you need those. Your pointy implement sits in another. You don’t want to get rid of that because knives are hard to find. Okay so there’s really only one space to work with on the left. There are three different objects you can fit there, (rags, tape or bandages.) Forget about rags because bandages keep you from bleeding out when you’re critically injured and can double as a fuse. Tape is crucial for making things but you have to keep those damn bandages. Never drop them or you WILL bleed to death. It’s Murphy’s Law.

On the right it would be wise to always have a medical spray can to heal yourself. You should also have either a second medical spray can or some other flammable spray so that you can light various things on fire. Also it would be really good to have flares or glow sticks for the occasional black goo because if you don’t have them, you’re up shit creek. So that leaves us with…. Oh, one slot. Fantastic! Basically, find the most explosive bottle you can and put it in that slot. Every time you use it, go get another one. And that’s the inventory. It’s so aggravating to be trying to build things like this or just have to go find another bottle of something as soon as you use it because you can only carry one. Okay, drop the bandages and pick up the tape. Drop the Jack Daniels and get the plastic bottle. Oh, the bottle shattered on the ground when I dropped it. Great. Throw the tape away and get the bandages again. Where did they go? I dropped them right here, damn it! Oh and you know what else? The inventory is REAL TIME just like in Fear Effect! It’s not nearly as shitty but it certainly isn’t conducive to spending time to make anything!

One thing I can say I’m grateful for is the ability to hold a flashlight and a gun at the same time which is more than I can say for Doom Guy in Doom 3. In that game you either got to see the enemies OR you got attack them. Edward can even hold two things in his hand AND use the light by putting it on his shoulder.

All and all the game tries to do too much. It just seems like there are hundreds of little unresolved issues everywhere. They should have either dropped one ore two major components to smooth over everything else or just spent more time on it as a whole. It was better than the shitty movie anyway…

Fear Effect

2011-02-09T01:59:00.000-08:00

So, Fear Effect for the Playstation ,(at least disk 1), is set in a futuristic CEL shaded Hong Kong. Visually it looks like Bladerunner meets Killer 7. Sounds awesome. So how can they screw this up? When I first played I thought the backgrounds were prerendered with fixed camera angles but when I looked it up I found that it’s actually short clips of looped animation. I had noticed this but I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before so I didn’t know what to call it. No wonder this game has to be on four disks. The animated backgrounds look great except that the animations are only like three seconds long. Once you see them loop, (or even freeze), it breaks the immersion. So which is better: stagnant prerendered backgrounds or full motion backgrounds that keep showing the same thing every couple of seconds? Another weird thing about the game is that it’s in letterbox aspect ratio.

While playing, you alternate between controlling three different mercenaries on a team as they try to recover a kidnapped individual. The controls are, to put it mildly, a fucking abysmal pile of horse shit. For starters, the X button is fire. Yes that’s right, the X button; the button that has been ingrained in you as the action button. In third person shooting games there is traditionally an aiming mode that might make X switch to being the fire button for that moment but here it’s just fire plain and simple. So every time you go up to an object you want to investigate, you’re going to end up shooting at it instead. The real action button is triangle which I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. The square and circle buttons are, get this, your inventory. Yeah… Circle goes forward through your items. Square goes back. What the hell were they thinking? Those four buttons are supposed to be reserved for functions that are important/often used as in actual gameplay and they dedicated half of them to inventory? Lets see, what are we going to need to do a lot of quickly in the heat of battle? Dodging and running? No. Sifting through the various keys that you picked up. That’s going to be the most useful. The shoulder buttons are running, dodging, turning 180 degrees and sneaking. Which ones are which doesn’t matter because you’ll never remember anyway. That’s how intuitive the controls are. You have to actually mentally recall which button did what or just try them until you find it instead of just playing the game.

The controls for movement should be simple and self explanatory but they actually suck too. I don’t know why Sony didn't put analogue sticks on their Playstation controlers until three years after launch. So it’s the new 3D era of games. How do we move in them? Oh I know! A D-pad! That way the player has to zig-zag their character around retardedly and even the simple act of walking through a door takes countless minute adjustments to accomplish. Complain all you want about the fugly three-handed N64 controller but at least Nintendo knew it was time to use sticks. The game actually has support for the analogue stick controller but when you use it... I don't know but somehow the control becomes even worse which is just divide-by-zero mindblowing.

Luckily I'm playing on an emulator so I have free reign of the control assignment. I remapped EVERY SINGLE BUTTON save for the sneak button and the movement controls. And the only reason I didn't change the movement controls is because there's no other option than to have them shitty. Immediately after doing the game designers' job for them, the game is suddenly a significant degree better. That's not to say it doesn't suck in many other ways.

Going back to the so important inventory with two buttons dedicated to it, you have to scroll through it one item at a time in real time. This it really great for when you run out of bullets in the middle of a firefight and need to switch to a different gun with more ammo. You just have to stand there like a dumbass, taking hits until you either find something useable or die. I guess you could roll around if you’re good as multitasking but that presents its own problems.

The dodge or roll move is important because you can quickly distance yourself from an enemy and also become unhittable while rolling. What sucks about this is that you have almost no control over which direction you’re rolling. If you’re really careful you can roll straight forward or straight back. Everything else is completely random, from the direction you roll to the direction you’re facing when you stand up.

Whenever you come across a locked door that you happen to have the key to, you have to dig the key out of your inventory to use it and usually every subsequent time you want to go through that door. It's such a small thing but come on. I have the key. You know I have the key. The key's not good anywhere else. Just USE the damn key. I don't have to tell you to keep breathing or to tie your shoes periodically. It's just a tedious waste of time.

The other thing about the inventory is that it pops up on screen when you press the buttons for it. If you don't do anything quick, like in two seconds, it disappears and resets at the first item, making you have to find whatever item you were looking for AGAIN. There's no reason why it has to be like this. It could pause the game when I'm using the inventory. It could have its own screen. It could let me see all of the items at once. It could stay on the screen until I tell it to go away. This is what the screen looks like during gameplay.

Notice anywhere where they might be able to squeeze in an inventory? Like maybe half the fucking screen?

The health bar in the game (and the thing that the game is pretty much named after) is basically a fear meter kind of like in Clock Tower. It starts out green and when it reaches solid red and you get hit, you die. Several things affect your fear differently for better or worse, or so it's alleged. I’ve read a lot of explanations on the internet regarding how the fear meter works and they all say different things, most of which I think are bullshit. I know one thing we can all agree on though is that getting shot increases your fear. The only way you can get healed significantly as far as I’ve experienced is when you reach an unknown prescribed spot in the game like when you switch characters or finish a large segment/puzzle.

It’s hard for me to be legitimately upset at the health system when I don’t know exactly what the official game manual says about it so I went to replacement docs and downloaded a PDF of it. What it said is that in order to lessen your fear, (heal yourself), you can sneak kill enemies, do well in gunfights, solve puzzles and discover important items.

Sneak kill enemies: Bullshit. I sneak killed two enemies in a row with a red fear meter and guess what color it was afterwards… It was fucking red.

Do well in gunfights: True. I saw it happen. But you know what? I didn’t need it. Know why? BECAUSE I DID WELL IN THE GUNFIGHT.

Solve puzzles: True, but that’s basically the established healing checkpoints that I mentioned.

Discover important items: True but essentially you discover important items by solving puzzles so…

Things that increase your fear besides bullets in your head are running out of ammo and being detected by enemies.

Running out of ammo: As if running out of ammo wasn’t bad enough in and of itself, they have to punish you for it?

Being detected by enemies: Yes, sometimes it’s possible to pull off a sneak kill but most of the time it’s not. And yes, the enemies are probably going to “detect” me when I shoot several bullets right in their fucking face!

All and all, I hate the lifebar. It’s deceptive, unreliable and needlessly complicated. But what’s worse is that the way it punishes or rewards you basically equates to strapping weights on a drowning person because they’re failing to stay afloat or strapping life vests to someone in the desert for doing a good job not drowning.

The ever-present drawback of fixed cameras in an action game is that you can’t see where the hell you’re going. Every time you’re about to transition to the next screen, you could literally be instantaneously catapulted into a gunfight with half a dozen enemies with absolutely no warning and then just die. That’s not entirely true. Usually your fear meter pops up when you’re about to get ambushed. But still, sometimes you’ll find yourself having to mow down wave after wave after wave of enemies that are presumably piling out of some clown car just off screen. You have no idea where they’re coming from or how many there are. If you want to sneak up on someone, you basically have to go around every corner sneaking in the assumption that someone’s going to be there.

There’s a ton of ways to die instantly in Fear Effect. Getting electrocuted, falling off of something, getting burned. A lot of these things are so petty and aren’t even identifiable as deathtraps until you kill yourself with them. This game is a real dick. It just loves to sucker punch you with endless instakill scenarios, a lot of them coming out of fucking nowhere with no warning or explanation so you’d have to be precognizant just to not die. Diffuse the bomb! Run from the explosion! Jump quick! Now! Now! Now! Escape the guards! Look out! Faster! Switching characters! Everyone’s shooting at you! Watch out for the water! Don’t shoot that! Boom! Oh, look at that! Ha ha! You died! Try again, asshole! I'm suddenly reminded of this.

There are parts in the game that slow to a snail’s pace just because you’re constantly having to reload the game, play to the shitty death part and try again by killing yourself there enough times until you can figure out what the hell it wants you to do there. (If you watched that first video, that wasn’t even all of them.

The same step here/don’t step here puzzle keeps reappearing I don’t even know how many times. They work so great too with the terrible depth perception and finicky controls.

Yeah, this is about what that looks like to me.

At the end, you descend into hell to defeat the King of Hell. (Honestly I didn’t see it coming.) Out of the three characters, one is already dead and now you have to choose who to play as and who dies since they’re having a disagreement about how to proceed. I chose to play as the girl, not because I supported her ideals but because I knew she had more guns and ammo at the time… Also two arms.

Not so good for dual-wielding. I was also mystified as to how he even reloaded his guns. I didn’t know at the time that there was a different boss depending on who you chose. The guy’s boss is actually a lot easier. Hana’s boss however is a combat nightmare. The only way you can hurt him is by burning paper money that randomly appears. (I have no idea.) As I’ve already explained, having to use the inventory in battle is like trying to trim your toenails by kicking a big rock repeatedly. So basically survive long enough to grab the money, maneuver yourself into the always tiny interaction zone next to a torch, quickly find the money in your inventory while being raped and select it before the inventory disappears. Even after I could accomplish all of that, it would most of the time fail for reasons I’ll never understand. The only thing I could conjecture is that it was because I got hit right before using it but it’s not like I have any control over that!

Borderlands + DLC

2010-10-28T22:48:00.000-07:00

Once I cleaned the ridiculously large accumulation of dust out of my tower, I was able to play games on it again without them lagging far outside of playability. I started on the thickly outlined, cel-shaded FPS RPS Borderlands to break my long dry spell of PC gaming.

In the beginning you can choose one of four characters. It’s your stereotypical fare spanning from a vainy steroid- ridden meat sock to a pair of tits stacked on an ass. I was going to go for the soldier but I always end up doing that because it’s safe. So instead I chose the Hunter.

Each character gets three skill branches to develop. Out of those I went with Sniper first. Each character also gets a special ability. Mine was… Well I got this attack falcon… hawk? Anyway the cool thing about it is that you can just send it out and it’ll go find the closest enemy and kill them if it’s strong enough. You can just sit behind a rock while your bird goes and kills people. Well, only one at a time and it has a half minute cool down. Sometimes though, the bird will get stuck somewhere or just take a retarded amount of time to attack. I’ve literally stood for several seconds watching some guy come at me with an axe over the horizon, the bird swarming around him waiting and waiting… and waiting until I eventually have to take action by blowing his head off with a shotgun. Thanks for nothing stupid bird.

The world is obviously an homage to Mad Max even going so far as to insert actual references to the movies. The only problem with working with that material is that you can only take about two hours of playing in a humongous desolate desert junkyard before your brain goes numb. And it’s that way for the whole damn game. Everything looks the same; boring. The only way you can tell where you are is by constantly bringing up the map screen. Not even the heads up compass is very reliable thanks to the terrain layout. Luckily you have outposts which you can teleport between which takes off a lot of the travel time. That is if you can remember which name corresponds to which monotonous junk pile.

In a double whammy with the repetitive landscape, you also have repetitive enemies. There are maybe like six different ones? That’s excluding the ones that are just larger versions or other ones or different color swap elemental types. Another annoying thing is that sometimes the enemies will get so close to you, you won’t even be able to shoot them. Especially the midgets. Why the hell are there so many midgets? It’s almost like forty percent of the planet’s population is composed of midgets! Midgets who run at you screaming and giggling!

At some point you get the ability to drive cars which would be a lot more useful if they didn’t handle like a morbidly obese man with unicycles for legs. And rest assured if there’s only one obstacle within twenty miles of you, you *will* hit it. As if just driving wasn’t shitty enough they make you do vehicle combat to. It’s awkward and difficult enough to take out just one other vehicle but right after you do, two others will spawn directly behind you from out of fucking nowhere and blow your ass into outer space.

Now where did I park the car? Oh yeah, I left it hovering five feet off of the ground outside of the prison.

The whole objective of the game is to find “The Vault.” The Vault is supposedly some giant treasure that only opens once every two-hundred years. While you play, you take on missions to gain experience points, special weapons and money. Some missions have to do with the main quest. Most don’t. You’re main reason for doing them, aside from the three reasons I just stipulated, is so you don’t have to listen to someone jabbering in your ear every fifteen seconds about new missions available over in Fetid Stinkhole. Seriously, I only need to be told once. If I don’t break my legs to get over there ASAP it means that I’m doing more important things. SHUT. THE. FUCK. UP. The constant harassing could have been easily replaced with a simple map symbol or highlight that appears.

There are guns everywhere. You’re constantly on the lookout for better ones trying to compare and see which numbers are higher. This one does a lot more damage but the accuracy sucks. This one has a higher fire rate but only holds two shells. It came to the point where all of the numbers started to blur together and I just stopped caring. I hadn’t found better weapons in six hours of gameplay so why continue wasting my time? I didn’t even pick up expensive stuff to sell it because my inventory was always full of situational weapons. Hell, I never even carried anything to heal myself with. I always just used the health regenerating shields.

SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>>>SPOILERS>

Eventually you get to the Vault. The final boss which was hiding inside it, though huge, is quite literally the easiest boss in the entire game. I’m not sure if I understood everything I was supposed to at the end but what I took away from this was that the final boss was stupid easy and there was absolutely nothing worthwhile in the Vault… Awesome.

END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>END>>>SPOILERS>>>

The Borderlands DLC is a mixed bag. The ones I played included The Secret Armory of General Knoxx, Mad Moxxie’s Underdome Riot and The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned.

Right off the bat Armory loses points for having driving central to the gameplay. My computer started lagging like… a morbidly obese man with unicycles for legs because for whatever reason they decided to make the environments huge. It’s not like there are a lot of enemies on the screen or the environment is extra complicated, they just added eighty percent more expanse of sand and brown rock texture.

T-Bone Junction is the only town in the area. The whole place is extremely linear which is just great to have when you’re already dealing with repetitive terrain and enemies. From there you can only go either north or south on the freeway. Why there’s a freeway, I have no idea. It’s been road blocked in several locations by the soldiers of the Crimson Lance. Every few times you have to get out of the car and fight your way to some gate controls. Luckily once they’re all open, they stay open.

After playing for about two hours, I really wanted to quit. The problem was that I had yet to see an outpost, you know, the things that let you teleport between places you’ve already been to. I kept seeing new places and then checking the map looking for outpost icons so that I could be sure I could get back quickly. I jumped the car off of the ramp and made it inside the prison which is part of the main quest. Then I just turned off the game because I figured that There was no way I couldn’t have passed at least one outpost.

Once I had acquired the constitution to sit through another session of Borderlands, I ran it again and loaded my file. Much to my chagrin, I found myself spawning at fucking T-Bone Junction. As it turns out, there are no outposts *anywhere* in Armory except at T-Bone Junction. In case it’s not clear how incredibly terrible this is, here’s a little map which simplifies the problem.

Every single time you load the game, you’re going to have to drive the car and/or walk/fight through all that shit completely over again. So basically never turn the game off until it’s finished. Just when you thought it couldn’t get more repetitive, it does. What the hell where they thinking?

So after driving down the same highway for the thirtieth time, (unless you habitually alt + tab the game into your tray or let your machine overheat if you’re on a consol), you get to the secret armory. Then you fight General Knoxx which is a real bitch when you’re doing it alone. He gets to use a giant mech suit and several waves of minions. It’s actually very similar to the final fight in Avatar…

You know, it just occurred to me that the Borderlands planet is also called Pandora. Holy shit! It’s the same planet! Just after the inevitable nuclear holocaust carpet bombing that the Na’vi signed up for after they drove the military and mining company away.

Once he’s dead you have to go blow up the armory. You’re also supposed to loot it but for some bullshit reason, you have to start the two minute countdown *before* you loot it. Then you have to loot it quickly and escape. I of course didn’t find anything in one and a half minutes that I cared about or if I did didn’t have nearly enough time to digest the spreadsheet of numbers and stats in order to figure it out. You barely have enough time to fully open five chests and take nothing.

The Underdome is just what you’d expect, a bunch of tourney shit. So I don’t care.

Last but not least; the Zombie Island of Doctor Ned. This is by a WIDE margin the best thing in Borderlands. For one, it’s not in a fucking desert.

I don’t even need to say any more. You already get my point. It’s on an island with a spooky deserted mining and logging camp that became overrun with zombies. The whole thing is very tongue in cheek and actually funny. The beginning cinematic is narrated by Marcus who narrated the first cinematic. I kept having to remind myself that he wasn’t Strong Bad. Doctor Ned is actually Doctor Zed with a mustache… glued over his surgical mask. Everything generally has a much sillier air than the rest of the game. The level design kind of makes it feel like a more fanciful Painkiller.

The bad things are; still no more than one outpost. I don’t even mind so much since this area is a lot smaller than Armory, making getting around less aggravating and tedious. I was over-leveled for the area. What can you do? Most of the enemies are just zombies. Lots and lots and lots of zombies. Every time you get a zombie headshot, the zombie drops a brain. The brains are labeled as mission items but there’s never any reason as far as I’ve seen to collect them. I don’t know why they exist. Still, If the game had been a lot more like this, it would have been much less mediocre.

Drake's Fortune FAQ

2010-10-04T14:47:00.000-07:00

1. Why doesn’t Drake run at a pace that indicates that he would like to live?

2. Who the hell is shooting me?

3. MORE climbing shit?

4. What kind of grenade beeps?

5. Why is the aiming suddenly inverted for the vehicle segment?

6. Why are exploding barrels only identifiable as exploding barrels after you’ve already killed everyone around them?

7. Why does it take indefinitely longer for someone to train a gun with a laser sight, (a tool that makes aiming easier,) on me than it does someone to train a gun without one?

8. Legible ancient books?

9. In the humid jungle?

10. Really?

11. Where the fuck do I go?

12. Is *this* where I go?

13. Is *this* where I go?

14. How on earth did you make such terrible quick time events?

15. Is *this* where I go?

16. Do I HAVE to drive the waverunner again?

17. Where are all these exploding barrels coming from?

18. An exploding barrel factory?

19. That feeds into the river?

20. What kind of gun is Navarro using there at the end?

21. Some kind of magical sniper shotgun perhaps?

Infamous

2010-09-03T00:31:00.000-07:00

In Infamous you play as a Cole McGrath, a guy who has electrical superpowers thrust upon him in a Marvel-esque fashion, acquired through the activation of a device known as the “Ray Sphere” which also causes a humongous explosion destroying a large portion of the city. You crawl out of the crater as the sole survivor and dust yourself off.

As if that wasn’t bad enough the whole city becomes quarantined due to a plague outbreak. In a ridiculously short period of time the sociopolitical power within shifts to three factions or gangs which operate almost like they’re in some kind of urbanized version of The Road Warrior.

The main focus of the game is to reacquire the Ray Sphere and either destroy it or use it to make yourself more powerful.

The first cool thing you notice while playing, (well, besides being able to electrocute things,) is that no matter how high of a building you jump from, you don’t get injured.

You run your first mission and then get introduced to the first gang. Then you make enemies with them. Then suddenly for the rest of the game you can’t go anywhere or do anything without being shot at. Seriously, if you’re running down any given street and there’s less than two guns shooting at you, it’s your lucky day. Needless to say, it gets really old really fast. You’ll be minding your own business trying to climb a building to reach a blast shard or a mission start point and the bullets will be pelting you, slowly chipping away at your sanity. People on rooftops from half a mile away with impossibly perfect aim. It’s like trying to play World of Warcraft, (or really anything,) with someone sitting next to you poking you hard in the ribs every ten seconds. And it always has the potential to just keep escalating and escalating. You’ll end up having to reenact the entire hospital climax from Hardboiled just because you took a slight detour to grab one blast shard.

There are primary missions and then there are side missions. All missions give you experience points which you use to upgrade your powers. The side missions also help you take over territory in the city which will clear areas of gang members, significantly reducing the amount that you get shot at in that area and believe me, you will want to do every single one. You will want to launch a genocide. One can only take being jabbed in the ribs for so long before one wants to rip the person’s finger off and ram it through their eye socket.

Some missions are good or evil and some have choices that you must make along the way that will help either align you as evil or good. It’s a long process becoming totally good or evil. The different results are the game ending, your powers, your appearance and things that happen as the story progresses. The city changes somewhat accordingly. If you’re evil, people will shout threats at you on the street and even throw rocks or take a swing at you which is silly because if you play the game anything like me, hitting you with a rock is going to be the last thing they ever do.

The problem I have with the missions is that they get repetitive sometimes. You go into the sewer over and over to restore power to parts of the city. Out of like the forty side missions there are only about six different scenarios which just get copy and pasted.

Your motive to go into the sewers, besides being able to recharge yourself in the city with the power back, is getting new powers. Every time you go in the sewers you get a new power, all of which use electricity in some different way. You can throw shock grenades, ( yeah I don’t know how they work either.) There’s something which is basically the equivalent of a lightning ball rocket launcher. Both are very fun to use if you don’t mind blowing up every car and pedestrian within a two block radius.

There’s a psychokinetic push but it’s not called that because it’s electrical again… somehow. My first time playing through, I practically forgot this move even existed. My second time playing through I learned just how awesome it was. Why waste time shooting someone on the roof when you can just shove them off. You can even kill someone by rolling a car over on them. The weird thing about it being a fairly short ranged attack is that you might try to push an enemy who’s a little too far away and they’ll only stumble backward slightly. The car behind them however will be ripped from the ground like a styrofoam cup in a hurricane. What’s with that? If I’m trying to use my powers to defeat an attacker, it’s difficult but if I use them to make a pointless spectacle, then they work great?

There’s a precision electrical bolt which is basically just a sniper mode. Time slows down and the camera zooms in over your cursor which has suddenly adopted some kind of head repelling power. Anything that’s not a headshot might as well have been shot at the ground. The other reason you don’t want to miss is because it uses a stupid amount of energy. Three or four shots and you’re about depleted.

One of the more interesting powers is the polarity shield which is basically a transparent shield that you make in front of you. You can steer it around like the camera at where the gunfire is coming from. It doesn’t block explosions or RPGs or melee attacks or even point blank gunfire which blows. But what’s worse is that while you’re desperately trying to steer the shield in between you and wherever the bullets are coming from, Cole is trying to die. He stands with his head and legs completely unprotected and doesn’t even try to shield them. So if the enemy’s above or below you with a non planar trajectory you’re screwed. There is also no good way to run while shielding your back and that out of every possible scenario is the one you want most of all.

When a mission effects your karma negatively or positively it sometimes seems random with no relevance to what the morality factor actually was. If you’re evil, restoring the power makes you more evil but if you’re good, restoring the power makes you more good. Eliminating crime throughout the city is considered neutral. Healing wounded pedestrians makes you good but if you bio leech an enemy, (kill him to completely recharge your own energy,) it makes you bad. But at the same time if you beat the enemy to within an inch of his life, (AKA on the ground and no longer a threat,) then kick him off of the roof, killing him out of spite, it has no effect on karma. The good counterpart of bio leech on an enemy is arc restraint… which doesn’t do shit to help you.

At one point in the story you have to make a decision to either save your girlfriend or five doctors.
So which one is the evil route? Well it turns out that saving your girlfriend is evil. I have a problem with this. Maybe saving her was not in the interest of the greater good but I don’t think it makes you evil. The first time I played through, I was trying to save her but I accidentally climbed the building with the doctors and she died. Funny how such a stupid mistake can be made when it’s night and you’re being shot at while under stringent time constraints. The second time I played it, I chose the correct building and… it wasn’t her. It was a decoy. The bottom line is that you can’t save your girlfriend. Well that’s a load off of my mind.

To get around the city, you basically run everywhere which is fine most of the time since you can run pretty damn fast. You can climb almost anything which has its own set of annoyances. In Uncharted your parkour exploits are always fraught with extraneous and confusing bullshit. Where do I go now? Is this a ledge? Is that a ledge? Do I jump to that jumbled mass of vines? Okay, I’ll try. Oh no, it was just scenery. Now I’m dead and have to do the whole thing over again for the eleventh time. Man, I love this!

In Infamous you have the opposite problem. If you press the X button you jump into the air. It also activates a super-powered neodymium magnet inside you, making you gravitate to the nearest edifice where you become molecularly bonded to the architecture. Sure it makes climbing a building easier but inevitably when you have three semiautomatic RPGs and a gun turret pummeling you mercilessly, you’re going to want to get off of the damn wall. Pressing the O button is supposed to make you drop and it does… two feet down to the next ledge. Then you press it again and again and again and again, slowly working your way down until you eventually die from the gunfire. The other option is to try and jump away from the wall which either produces similar results or causes you to attach yourself to something else like a telephone pole or the building across the alley. When you’re trying to dodge bullets in the street, you always end up ducking behind a car or grabbing on to shit when all you want to do is just run the fuck away. Why is it so difficult to let go of a building or run?

Occasionally at super critical moments you will fail to grab on to something you were clearly close enough to grab. Sometimes you go to an edge and press O and you can’t drop down. Sometimes you can’t walk over a slightly convex surface or in between two random objects. Sometimes you need to climb an object which was obviously forgotten about when they were handing out climbing protocols.

Whenever you enter a new area, you get a bunch of new assholes with new guns and basically have to start from square one. It’s frustrating because your new enemies will always be much stronger than your old ones which greatly diminishes your sense of growing power. As you grow stronger, things just get harder. I know there is supposed to be a difficulty curve in video games but at no point do you ever feel powerful. You always feel like the underdog.

Now that you’re in the new area the people take three precision lightning bolts through the head to kill, plus they’re invisible half of the time, plus there are flying grenade launchers which also turn invisible, plus random proxy mines on roof tops. The more powerful you get, the weaker you feel. If you want to feel powerful you basically have to beat the game and turn the difficulty on easy.

At least the gangs in the Neon District and Historical District have heads to shoot. The other jackasses look like amorphous piles of garbage ambling down the sidewalk.

Water kills you. I don’t believe they mention this at any time in the game or even the manual so you just sort of have to figure it out the hard way. I don’t really get *why* it kills you. You’re obviously immune to electrical shock already so why would water make a difference? Maybe it makes you short circuit like a toaster in a bathtub or something.

Sometimes when you die in water, the controller has to vibrate full throttle for half an hour before you can play again. I hate this. The controller is vibrating about sixty percent of the time while playing. It vibrates when you’re hit with bullets or explosions or landing on the ground or shooting lighting or having hallucinations or a train’s passing by or you’re riding on the train, or you’re electrical capacity is being upgraded or you’re grinding on a power cable or the railway, which unfortunately is about the fastest way to get around.

I don’t know what other people think of controller vibration function but I find that it irritates me more than… whatever the fuck it’s supposed to be doing. It’s kind of helpful sometimes to have a little extra feedback so that you know when you’re being attacked but for the rest of the time, it’s either annoying or I couldn’t care less. It’s not fun to hold the controller when it’s vibrating and fighting to escape my grasp. Maybe I’m weird that way but whenever I grind the railway for a significant distance, I just put the controller on the floor until I think I’m almost to my destination. It’s either that or hold it until my hands go numb. The worst part is that the game has no way to turn off the vibration. Trust me, I looked.

In the end everything is revealed to you about the plot involving the Ray Sphere and it’s one big spoiler. After you’ve watched the credits, you’re free to just screw off and do whatever you want, which is great if you’re a completion whore like I am. On a related and bizarrely introspective note, as I was slowly grinding for points so that I could get my last power upgrade, healing the same people and killing the same respawn bad guys, I realized something. Empire City is purgatory.

Red Dead Revolver

2010-03-26T16:24:00.000-07:00

Suddenly I realized that my Playstation 2 game collection is almost solely comprised of Japanese shit. So I went out and got Red Dead Revolver used at Rasputin Music for four dollars. Seriously, that place can’t be a legitimate business. Prices that low have to be the result of some shady doings going down behind the scenes.

Anyway, RDR is a wild west shooter made by Rockstar. This is probably the most infamous game developer due to the copious amounts of questionable content in their games. You see that little R with the star, you just have to flip over the box and read the novel of parental warnings on the back. When I did this to RDR I was shocked to only find two things; blood and violence. That can’t be right, I thought. Sure enough, it wasn’t. Off the top of my head they forgot use of alcohol/tobacco, sexual themes and language.

In Red Dead Revolver you play as Red; a bounty hunter who’s parents were killed when he was twelve. The game is part sequence of events story and part bounty hunting where you take jobs. Each mission brings you closer to tracking down the consortium of bastards that killed your family. You get money for bounties which you use to buy guns, repair guns and buy extras like characters and levels you’ll never use in multiplayer versus. You also get money for every hit you make depending on the anatomical region, which is weird and a bit excessive. A headshot is actually worth eight dollars. By the end, you have so much money, you’re lighting your cigars with it.

When I first went through the tutorial, I was surprised that the way you shoot requires holding L1 to draw your weapon and pressing R1 to fire. Usually in PS2 shooters it’s hold R1 to draw and press X to fire. I wasn’t sure about this R and L thing at first but then I played it a little bit and it wasn’t so bad. Then I played it a little bit more and decided, no I was right the first time. It sucks. It’s fine for earlier levels where there are miniscule amounts of bad guys thrown at you at a slow pace. But when it gets intense and you’re just up against one continuous flood of enemies, you’re constantly holding that L1 button and let me tell you it really wears out your finger. You’ll get to the point where you’re strafing around shooting your gun off one second and then the next it’s holstered. Red’s like, “No, I’m done. Piss off.” You think something’s wrong with the game or the controller. Then you notice that your finger is actually too weak to hold the L1 down any longer.

You can take cover behind walls and objects and then lean around the side to shoot. This is a mixed bag. It’s nice to have something that shields you but you really don’t want to be glued to a wall when a handful of enemies storm around your cover. The funny thing is that when you surprise an enemy that’s glued to the wall, they are practically invincible until they actually leave their cover. *Then* you can kill them. The other thing that blows about cover is that when you’re against a wall you can’t dodge bullets. This seems like something you shouldn’t have to worry about when you take cover but if your hand is sticking out past the edge unprotected, it *will* get shot until you pull it back. But by the time you realize what’s happening, you’ve already lost half of your health just from getting shot in the fucking hand. Whenever you poke your head out to shoot, that will get shot too. Case and point, somehow you get shot a lot more hiding behind a wall than you do running around alone in a barren field. Never take cover.

The game’s gimmick is the “Dead Eye.” As you kill enemies, your dead eye meter fills up which basically equates to how long you get to use the ability. When you activate it, time slows down. Then you drag your crosshairs over the bad guys in sight. Little red targets appear all over them; as many as there are bullets in your gun. When you exit dead eye mode, you fire off a staccato of bullets which if executed well makes short work of them. In a way it’s kind of like bullet time but without the fancy John Woo acrobatics. This ability is however pretty useless for far away enemies and enemies that are moving, which is very annoying.

Another unique aspect to shooting is the duels. Okay, this is something I’ve never understood about the wild west mythos. Two guys face off, draw their guns and shoot each other. It’s the logistics that kill me. It’s not ten paces, turn and fire. It’s draw and shoot at any arbitrary moment. Obviously someone has to initiate. And if someone goes first, how is it fair, or at all an unbiased evaluation of who was the baddest. And what’s with quickdraw tournaments? Who the fuck would enter a tournament where basically everyone dies?

Anyway, there are parts in the game where a dueling sequence is initiated. You can be up against anywhere from one to three opponents, (which is pretty fucking ridiculous.) When this happened the first time, I was trying to read the tutorial which was coming up on screen. Damn this is complicated, I thought. This is the most complicated part of the game. Unfortunately I didn’t have enough time to fully comprehend it because the stupid tutorial was scrolling through automatically. Thanks a lot. After my unavoidable loss, I read the manual because it actually *lets* me read it. Dueling is basically just a manual dead eye mode. You press down and then up to grab and draw your weapon. Then time slows down. You drag your crosshairs over your opponent(s) The cursor turns red whenever you cross a part of the opponent’s anatomy that you can hit. The whole deal is to locate and tag as many spots as you can as fast as you can before your opponent fires on you. Sometimes, for whatever reason, you fail to draw your gun. I don’t know if it happens when you push up too fast or what but it’s really aggravating.

You actually get to play as several different characters as the story progresses, which is interesting. Except for when you play as General Diego. Not that it’s not interesting but that level is horrible. General Diego is one of the bad guys. In the one level that you control him you are supposed to fight Yankee forces on the other side of this bridge like that one scene in the Good the Bad and the Ugly. Shit’s exploding all around you and you can’t see from the smoke and debris in the air. The North side’s cannons are constantly firing, sometimes at you, so you have to just keep running. Although that doesn’t even work. They predict where you’re running and they put a lead on you. You have to do serpentine. Unfortunately you can’t focus on that because there are a bunch of assholes running around and shooting you too. You try to take cover under the bridge to take out the men but somehow the cannonballs get you anyway. When you get hit it takes you a while to get back up again and by the time you do, another cannonball is already inches from your face. The only level checkpoint is too far into the level which means you get to do the first half over and over and over.

Come to think of it, pretty much anything involving Diego sucks. Fort Diego is also a pain in the ass because you basically get to the end of the level and then die. The intensive trial and error part is conveniently located at the very end and the only way you get to do another trial is to play the whole level again… then die again. Rinse and repeat. The whole thing is that you’re supposed to get up to this gatling gun and take out the guys using it. (And yes, it takes a long time to get there.) Now once you capture a giant gun, what’s probably your next course of action? *Use* the giant gun! The courtyard below you is full of enemies. Why not cater them with a buffet of led sandwiches? The problem is that once you get on the gun you start getting shot a hell of a lot, (even more than if you were behind cover.) And occasionally someone will sneak up behind you while you’re using it. Also the gun is a piece of horse shit. It swivels around radically out of control, making it nearly impossible to train it on anything. And even when you do, the bullets have about as much stopping power as the old revolver that you started the game with. So compare that with the gatling gun from Darkwatch. That thing was slow but once you got it centered you could rest assured that anything behind your crosshairs was going to be vaporized into red mist. But point being, you go for the gatling gun, it gets you killed without fail. Don’t ask me why you’d go out completely unprotected into the courtyard filled with enemies that already have a bead on you, but that’s what you do. You spend like three or for minutes killing enemy after enemy only to have them continually respawn and only after the allotted amount of time has been wasted can you progress to the boss fight and receive a checkpoint. What a crock of shit.

Among the other levels that suck is the bar fight level. There are no guns. Just fists and bottles. For some reason you’re trying to protect the three saloon girls that run aimlessly through the bar. (What the hell did they ever do for you?) If two of them get knocked out, you lose. The fight is well, perfectly random. There are about a dozen fighters all punching each other and/or saloon girls. The combat is terrible. (Think fist fight with Silent Hill controls, terrible.) It takes half an hour to move the camera to where you want it and by that time you’ve been thrown across the room by someone and have to adjust it again. After being tossed four times in a row, you’ll begin to think that that’s the only thing they know how to do. And the process takes so long, you wish there was a fast forward button just so you can get back on your feet again. Sometimes you’ll be standing a good ten paces away from an enemy and you’ll just suddenly gravitate or teleport into their hands so that they can throw you. Everyone runs around chaotically making it extremely difficult to actually engage anyone. They all have WAY TOO MANY hit points. Ideally you want to work one of the assholes into a corner where they can’t escape and then just wail on them for three minutes until eventually they don’t get back up again. The level is hard but thank God it’s short… or at least simple.

The last level is the assault on the mayor’s mansion… and it’s a fucking nightmare. I’m not sure if it’s a blessing or a curse that your two friends Jack and Annie are with you. Sure, they shoot guns but Jack has a tendency to get himself killed which is an automatic game over and Annie has a tendency to kill you, which is also a game over obviously. Easily the worst part of the whole level is when Jack has to pick the lock on the front door of the mansion. You have to hold off an enemy tsunami of unbelievable proportions for three minutes while he sits there defenseless. Why are we even picking the lock in the first place? I bet ten to one we could just kick the door in and if not, just jam a fucking stick of dynamite in the keyhole.

It wouldn’t be so bad if all of the enemies were just regular guys but there are also guys dressed as generals who have their own names and life bars. I think they’re all on drugs or something because they have super human strength. It takes like three to four pointblank headshots to bring one down. That will never happen though because they don’t walk in a straight line for longer than a fourth of a second. They jump around like an acrobat and sprint up flights of stairs backwards doing 75 miles per hour. If you don’t kill them quick, (which obviously you won’t) another one will show up and then you have two. Then you get another one and you’ve got three plus half a dozen regular guys and then you’re just fucked.

Once you beat a level, you get rated on things like accuracy and damage taken. Passing the level automatically unlocks something but if you get a high enough overall rating you get a second unlock. You have the option to continue to the next level, replay the last level or quit. Chances are that the only reason you’d want to replay the level right then and there is because you want a higher score to unlock the second thing. If you don’t play it again right then and there, you don’t get to play it ever again unless you play through the whole game again. Seriously now, what is this? No level select = Bullshit

Red Dead Redemption is out in May. Looks awesome.

Banjo Tooie

2010-01-25T23:49:00.000-08:00

About ten years ago, I couldn’t wait for Banjo Tooie to come out. I had just played Banjo Kazooie, which I thought was awesome and I couldn’t help but be excited by all of the secret sneak peeks for the sequel that they stuck into the game… I never played it. I ended up selling my Banjo Kazooie cartridge and eventually I forgot all about Banjo Tooie, until now.

I must say that starting this game was a bizarrely intense nostalgic experience… but that won’t stop me from ripping it a new one.

The game starts out exactly where the last one left off. The evil witch Gruntilda is still trapped under a giant boulder. Her two, previously unheard of, sisters come by and rescue her. Then comes an extremely tedious cut scene with dialogue that takes forever. It’s almost as if they consolidated every cut scene in the game into one giant cut scene, because you literally don’t see any more scenes until the end of the game.

So, the weird sisters kill bottles who was the mole that taught you various moves in the previous game. Then you have to go talk to King Jingaling and you find that all of the jinjos are gone again and you need to find them. Boring… Then you talk to Master Jiggywiggy. Come on. Come on, damn it! I want to play a video game, not read a 500 page novel.

Eventually you get to go in an actual level and do something. As you play, you begin to notice that the golden jigsaw pieces that you’ve been accustomed to collecting aren’t as easy to find anymore. You used to be able to just climb something really tall and find one there or shoot eggs at everything to unlock stuff. You used to be able to just look around, find a puzzle, solve the puzzle, get a fucking jigsaw piece. Banjo Tooie however, is a lot more ambiguous about things. Some levels you could literally go in for the first time and waste an entire two hours before you figure out how to get a single jigsaw piece. It gets boring pretty fast.

Some of the pieces you can’t get without a special move from a later level. Sometimes you’ll activate something and you’ll see a little scene where a door opens or a jigsaw piece appears somewhere but you have no idea where it is. You might think you know and you’ll rack your brain over it for quite a while before finally giving up. Then, three levels later you’ll find that place. Interlacing the levels like this was an annoying idea. You gain access to levels by getting more jigsaw pieces over time. It’s really frustrating to be working on some puzzle that you can’t fully solve until several hours later in some locked place you’ve never seen before. How are you even supposed to know that you can’t solve it yet? I did one where I pushed a giant ice cube off of a cliff in one level. It fell in hot water in a different level where it melted. Then I went to that level where I hit a switch that let the water flow into yet another level where I got the puzzle piece. That wouldn’t be as much of a problem if each step of the puzzle wasn’t revealed to me in reverse order.

In each level you can find Mumbo who was the witch doctor that helped you in the previous game by transforming you into different things and also Wumba, the sexy Indian girl. In the old game, Wumba didn’t exist. Now that she’s here, she’s the one that transforms you into things while Mumbo helps you by letting you control him and use his powers at specific locations indicated by a pad on the ground with his face on it. Having the two of them seems pointless to me. Either replace Mumbo or don’t introduce Wumba. We already know that Mumbo’s capable of doing both jobs, so… yeah.

By the way, big T-rex is the best form for looking down Wumba's top.

To get any magical assistance, you have to give each one of them a globo which are these weird creatures that predictably hang out within feet of whoever’s house. What the hell is the point? If the globos are always right there next to where you need to use them, why not just make the price free?

And now it’s time to play “Old Game Versus New Game.” (never mind that they’re both old games)

In the old game when you collect five honeycombs, your life bar increases by one on the spot. In the new game when you collect the specific ever-changing amount of honeycombs, you go to the fucking store and buy a life bar upgrade.

In the old game when you collect all five jinjos in a level, you get a puzzle piece. In the new game when you collect a random-ass number of same-colored jinjos scattered across random-ass levels, you get a puzzle piece. There are also asshole fake jinjos that attack you when you get close to them.

In the old game you could shoot eggs and that was the solution to everything. In the new game you can shoot eggs, fire eggs, ice eggs, grenade eggs and remote control exploding eggs; most of which you‘ll never use. The only two that you really need/care about are grenade eggs and the remote detonation eggs.

In the old game Banjo and Kazooie stay together where they belong. In the new game you get to separate them, thereby making them both grossly inferior to the whole. The first time you get to separate them, you automatically play as banjo. You notice that your life bar is about half of what it was and suddenly you realize that you don’t have any moves other than run and jump. Then you ask yourself, why in the hell would I EVER want to separate them? What purpose does it serve? In truth it’s a great way to get you killed but eventually you do learn some character-specific moves that make it a little more bearable, (pun not intended.)

I have to say though that the worst part of the separation aspect is that life bar. I already mentioned that it’s smaller but not only that, the bar you have with a solo character and the bar you have when they’re together are independent from each other but only in a negative way. If you get the crap beaten out of you playing solo, (which is highly likely,) and then you join back together, your together bar will be proportionally lower. However, if you heal yourself back to full health while you’re together and then separate, your solo bar remains the same as it was before you healed yourself. How does that even work? You were at full health and now suddenly you’re injured again without ever even taking damage? Furthermore, if you fully heal one of the characters in solo but not the other one and then join together, it will show no change on your together bar. Then if you separate again you will find that the character you just healed is now back to the health they were before you healed them. In short, the only possible way to heal your characters in solo is to heal both of them in tandem before you join back together. The only way to heal your together bar is to be together while doing it. But if you’re goal is to injure yourself, the life bar system is suddenly highly flexible and accommodating.

Aside from that there are just a lot of little stupid things. Like everywhere you go there are various holes in the walls that you’re supposed to go in but there’s never any indication as to how you’re supposed to get in. You might need to be Kazooie or Banjo (concealed in his backpack) or transformed into some other animal or you might need to be using one of the remote control explosives. You’d think that the hole’s size would give you some kind of clue but no.

Look at that. I’m clearly small enough to get through but it still won’t let me through!
When you step on a character switch pad you have to press A to use it. But when you step on a warp pad you have to press B to use it. You will ALWAYS get it wrong.

Music notes are used as currency for getting new moves instead of getting jigsaw pieces. They also greatly reduced the number of notes per level and greatly increased their worth. You will never not have enough. They stick them all together in the same place which is lame.

Pterodactyl Land only has one family of pterodactyls. What, do they rule the land or something?
The game in general isn’t as good as the first one. Although when I started it, I had only two wishes that I wanted it to fulfill.

1.) No Snacker the Shark. I fucking hate him! Surprisingly, he was not in the game just like I wanted. But I was still extremely hesitant to enter any body of water due to PTSD.

2.) No quiz show. In the fist game you had to beat this quiz show where Grunty asked you stupid questions about things in the game. It was long and tedious and If you got too many wrong, you died and had to start over from the beginning. Well there WAS a quiz show but it wasn’t nearly as horrible.
The final battle is right after that, where unbelievably Grunty will continue to occasionally ask you quiz questions. If you get them right she goes easier on you. Come to think of it, the final battle is also easier than it was in the first game.

The ending is, well… Did you ever see Hostel II? Where the girl’s head gets cut off and the kids play soccer with it. It’s the same ending. What the hell Rare?

What is a man?

2009-10-28T22:02:00.000-07:00

A miserable little pile of pumpkin guts...

Dino Crisis

2009-09-12T23:05:00.000-07:00

Dino Crisis is a survival horror game on Playstation/PC with a dinosaur twist. The game’s made by Capcom and it has a very strong Resident Evil feel to it. You play as Regina, a government operative. You and four other agents go to this island research laboratory in order to kidnap the head scientist guy there. Soon after landing by parachute, you lose a team mate and have to move on without him. Immediately after infiltrating the perimeter you realize that something is very wrong on account of the bullet casings and eviscerated bodies on the ground. Basically from there you’re trying to finish the mission and escape the island. Similar to Jurassic Park but a lot less interesting plotwise.

One thing I notice right away is that there’s a lot of audio dialogue. This is weird because most games from that era either had a small handful of sentences uttered or noises like gasping and laughter or just had no voice acting at all.

The other thing I notice is that the only thing I have to defend myself with is a small handgun and ten bullets. Though all of my team mates have awesome weapons. What’s with that? Am I experiencing the firearms glass ceiling or was I in the bathroom when they were handing out guns?

Gail: I call the AK-47.
Rick: I call the .50 cal sniper rifle.
*toilet flushes*
Enter Regina
Regina: What’s going on in here?
Rick: Here Regina, you get the stick with the pointy rock on the end.

When you come across your first dinosaur, (a raptor,) your first thought is probably to kill it. After all, you have a gun and some bullets. What else would they be for? You start shooting at it and then you get critically slashed across the torso. After about five bullets the raptor goes down. It’s not moving so you walk past it to leave. Then it springs to life, biting you in the leg. You shoot it about three more times and it finally dies. You’re not looking too good either at this point. At least that’s what you guess since Regina is now limping and bleeding but you don’t know how close you are to death because guess what; there’s no life indicator. Wasn’t that fun? You’re out of ammo and you just spent your first aid kit. Let’s hope that was the only dinosaur in the game.

As you progress, you find little ammo boxes with items in them. You find some health related things and some weird stuff like intensifiers and multipliers which you can mix with some items to upgrade them, (just like in Resident Evil.) But all along you’re thinking; okay, this ones going to have some ammo in it, right? But it never does. Eventually you accept that this might in fact be survival horror in it’s purest form; AKA just run away. But if that’s the case, why the hell did they give me a gun in the first place? I’m obviously not allowed to use it.

Later, you get a shotgun and a modest amount of shells. (And by “modest” I actually mean it would be almost as useful to beat the raptors to death with your shoe.) It takes a lot of bullets to kill anything, which is understandable since they‘re dinosaurs, but are you going to give me enough fucking bullets to do it or not?

Working your way through the facility involves a lot of running. The dinosaurs are all raptors which is boring but there are different ones later. In some of the halls there are these laser grids that you can turn on and off to form a gate that protect you from the raptors. When they run into the lasers they get zapped and fall over. There are various puzzles that you have to solve on your way through. They’re fun and interesting at first but then they start recycling them over and over. I had to fix about four generators, recode two keycards, operate two cranes, and crack I don’t even know how many door codes.

Those door codes are the worst. The system used to access certain doors in the building are locked by what it called the DDK lock system. Why it’s called that, I have no idea. I’ll ignore the fact that no facility would ever have their doors locked like this. First you have to get two things. One’s a key and I guess one’s a decoder or something. After you use both of them at the correct door you have to do this little puzzle where you decode a matrix of random letters with some kind of key code. It involves canceling out the wrong letters and being left with a password that you then type in and enter. They start out easy enough but eventually the rules to the decoding system changes and they become these horrible Mensa entry questions. Look at this…

Does that make any sense to you? It’s great how they put in Saturday Night Fever subliminally. That’s not distracting at all.

Around the building there are notes and documents lying out on desks that you can read. Most of them are irrelevant and a waste of time if you read them but some of them have crucial instructions, like how to use the DDK or operate the reactors or they have key codes for various locks. When you read these you either need perfect memory or a pen and paper to write shit down. Unlike Resident Evil and Silent Hill, there’s no document memo in the pause menu for you to reread something. You have to just know everything because if you come up to a lock and you find you can’t remember the code, you’re sure as hell not going to remember what room the document containing said code was in. I consider having to write stuff down for a video game a design flaw.

The items that you require to progress are always keycards, chips, disks or some other electronic device.

They all have stupid acronym names. See?

Now think, do any of those names give you the slightest clue as to what the item might be or what it’s used for? No, they don’t. They’re just a bunch of random letters. It would be easier if the names were all in Latin. But at least they give you a vague description at the bottom.

The names of the facility parts and the names of the keys and the devices are all so non-descriptive and similar that it’s really easy to get confused. And just when you think you’re getting somewhere, something bad happens and you have to do a ton of other things to fix it just to have something else happen. A common scenario in DC on the PSX and PC would be that you have a locked DDK door. You have one DDK input disk H but you also need the DDK code disk H. It’s in the level B2 main office but you can’t get in there without a C. O. pass card. So you go get the B2 key chip 1 and the B2 key chip 2 and you put them in a computer and enter in the code that was written on one of them. Then you use the F. C. device to collect someone’s fingerprint, put that into the computer and do a puzzle to rewrite the C.O. pass. Then take the C.O. pass to get into level B2 and get the DDK code disk H. Put that into the DDK door with the DDK input disc H and then do a DDK password puzzle. Then the door opens. Is that not the most ridiculous thing you’ve ever heard? Not only is that a giant hassle just to open a door but they’re like a hair’s breath away from calling the grenade gun a “GG” and a door a “D.”

About half way through the game you actually start getting ammunition. There are these glowing deposite boxes in the walls, either green, red or yellow. Green has medical stuff in it. Red has ammunition in it. Yellow can have anything. But you can’t just open the boxes. You have to get plugs which you find around and use anywhere from one to three to unlock a box. After that, you can put things in and take things out of the box and even access same-colored boxes you’ve already opened.

What’s annoying about this is that you can’t stack like items in your inventory. In the picture all I want to do is stack the 11 S&W bullets together with the 15 S&W bullets, (which would equate to less than the maximum amount allowed in a slot,) but it won’t let me. If I take out the 11 bullets they have to take up their own separate space which is bullshit.

Eventually you get to see some different enemies other than the T-rex and the raptors. There are pteranodons and compies. Then you come across these…

I don’t know what the fuck these are but I wish they were slower, weaker and smaller. They hurt you bad. Their fat asses block almost the entirety of the hallways, making it impossible to circumvent them without getting hurt. When they run into the laser grids they don’t fall over like the raptors so you don’t get a head start running past them when you deactivate the grid. Basically if they’re in the room they WILL get you somehow. And if they manage to knock you down, you’re dead.

In general the dinosaurs in this game are real assholes. Sometimes you’ll be running past a raptor and they’ll whip you with their tail, making you drop your gun. Now you have to go snatch your gun off of the floor and sometimes the raptor will be standing right on it. Sometimes you’ll enter a room and the dinosaur will be right there in mid leap at your face. You could literally walk in a door and die instantly with absolutely no chance to react.

Then there’s the shitty fixed camera. Often you can hear a raptor snorting off screen somewhere. If where you’re going happens to require you to run toward the camera, there’s no way to see what’s ahead of you because the camera isn’t going to switch positions. You just keep running and hope the raptor or whatever isn’t directly in your path.

Possibly the most annoying thing of all is that the dinosaurs respawn. At first I thought it wasn’t respawning but some kind of random thing to keep you from ever truly feeling safe, because the dinosaur doesn’t reappear when you leave the room, it actually comes in through the door. Later, when I had ammunition and was actually able to kill some of the dinosaurs, I noticed that every time I killed a dinosaur, left the room and went back in, a new dinosaur of the same species would always come in through a door. This is outrageous! Half of the game you can’t kill dinosaurs at all and then when you finally can, they just come back. THERE IS NO POINT IN KILLING DINOSAURS. You might want to to be able to explore a room without being constantly chased and there are a few times where you have to fend off the T-rex but other than that, the guns are completely superfluous. What a crock of shit. I had one expectation/goal when I started this game and it was to kill some damn dinosaurs! And for all intents and purposes it never happened! I didn't want it to be Turok but... I almost want to say it's false advertising.

The levels are boring. I mean they weren’t at first but after you’ve spent five hours running through nothing but laboratories and cargo bays, they are. I was expecting to go outside the facility at some point, maybe run through some jungle or something but you never do.

At a few points in the game you have to make decisions as to which course of action to take. Your two team mates, who are only ever present for cut scenes, always have differing opinions on what to do next. Now I know Gail is in charge so why would it even matter what Rick thinks? I don’t know. Anyway, some of the decisions will influence the ending you get. In the beginning I was going with Rick’s ideas because they involved avoiding the dinosaurs in exchange for having to deal with the facility and its shitty proclivities. Later, when I got fed up with collecting acronyms and repeating puzzles, I sided with Gail; opting to deal with the dinosaurs instead. Then I found that it really doesn’t matter which way you choose. THEY BOTH SUCK HARD.

At the end of the game you find out why there are dinosaurs on the island which, believe me, is really stupid. Lets just say I really enjoy Capcom’s quasi science. Then you escape the island. I don’t know what the other two endings are but in mine I was chased by the T-rex through a big hall while in an emergency escape helicopter. Luckily, the helicopter was carrying a bomb. Must have been the Die Hard or the Rambo emergency escape helicopter.

Chaos Legion

2009-09-10T23:56:00.001-07:00

(on the back of the box)
“If you loved Devil May Cry, you’ll love Chaos Legion.”
--PSM Magazine

Me: Oh boy! I loved Devil May Cry! This’ll be awesome! *animated blue birds sing and the sun smiles down upon me as I skip home from the game store.*
Two hours later…
Me: What… What is this?
It’s a third person swordplay game with RPG elements made by Capcom but that’s about where the similarities end.

The main selling point of the combat and I guess the game in general is the legions. (Hence the name.) Think of them as poke’mon on PCP. You summon them and they fight next to you . There are seven different ones you can get, all with different attacks and deadly sin sounding names like Arrogance and Blasphemy.

A legion’s lifebar is powered by souls which come from enemies when you beat them. Every hit the legion takes from an enemy removes a little from the lifebar. Of course, when the bar reaches zero the legion’s crest breaks, it disappears and you can’t summon it until you regain a certain amount of souls.
Legions don’t really last too long in battle on average, which is annoying. But it’s actually a lot more beneficial in most cases to just not summon them at all. For one, you can run when they aren’t on the screen. But the second you summon them you’re forced to walk at a leisure mosey. Now it takes forever to get anywhere and you basically become a sitting duck. Second, there’s not a whole lot of difference between a legion and an enemy. You might have as many as six of the same legion on screen at the same time and really what that translates to is chaos and visual pollution. You’re no longer in control of the fight. You can’t focus on anything. It’s like trying to orchestrate a bar fight or a soccer riot.

You’re already on average fighting like thirty giant fucking spiders at a time but at least when the legions aren’t there you know who the enemy is and when they’re going to attack you. When you have them out they inevitably end up blocking your view of some enemy somewhere and then you get hit because you either had no idea they were there or you were distracted by some other asshole in the faceless crowd.
One nice thing though is that while the legions aren’t summoned you can use an assist attack which only summons the equipped legion for a couple of seconds to do a single attack at the cost of some souls.
Each legion is good for doing specific things. Some are better at fighting mechanical enemies or protecting you or shooting enemies from far away. Too bad there’s absolutely no way of knowing which ones you’ll need for a level until you play the level. You can only pick two legions to equip before the start of a level. If at some point during the level you discover that you picked the wrong two legions, well tough shit. You either have to restart the level and reselect the ones you actually need or just man up and slog through with your shitty choice, (if it’s even possible.)

The first legion you get is called Thanatos. He’s actually the strongest one of the seven, (nevermind that both it and you die constantly.) At the end of the first level it’s crest shatters into nine pieces which you can go collect if you want. And after that, the game actually asks you if you’d like to switch to easy mode to “just enjoy the story.” This struck me as funny because A: the story isn’t too compelling and B: I’m not a grandmother. Although it didn’t take me long to question my refusal to switch.

A couple of legions are pretty much useless. Arrogance is supposed to protect you but it’s nothing like what I had envisioned. Yeah, they’ll protect you if they happen to be between you and the enemy and I guess you could command them to stop and then hide behind them if you wanted to waste time but other than that, no. What they actually do is absorb attacks when they are hit, though it still does damage to them. The more hits they take, the more they charge their attack. You can command them to release their attack at any time and depending on how big of a beating they took they’ll shoot a beam that does proportional damage. There are of course several setbacks. Providing the legions survive long enough to even use their attack, their beams aren’t that long, their aim is horrible, they attack randomly if you forget to lock on something, they only travel for a short distance to get in range of the enemy and if it’s too far away they just give up and come back and the whole process of freezing the legions in place somewhere they can absorb attacks, keeping them alive, waiting for them to charge and actually getting them to successfully attack what you want them to attack is so arduous you just never want to use them. So they’re not good for protecting. They’re not good for attacking. What exactly ARE they good for?

Then there’s Blasphemy which takes the form of an orange bomb a little bigger than a soccer ball. Summoning it is about the worst thing you can do. All it does is waddle over to the enemy and explode on them. It really doesn’t do that much damage but every time it explodes it takes away from it’s life bar. So basically if you just want to waste all of your souls it’s great for that. The assist attack is decent though after a high enough level. You just throw it, (kick it,) like a grenade which seems much more effective for some reason. Still, I’m not going to ever equip this piece of shit because it doesn’t stack up to the other humanoid-shaped legions.

The attacks that your character actually gets are executed thusly; press the attack button. Press the attack button some more. Keep pressing the attack button. Swinging the sword is your one attack. As you gain experience and level up your legions, you can learn a few different moves through them. The problem with this is that you can only use the specific moves when you have the corresponding legion equipped. It really blows when you try to use a move, only to realize that you can’t because you don’t have that legion with you. Although after earning a ton of experience you can actually retain some of the moves without using the legions.

The first thing you notice when you start the game, (if you’re me anyway,) is that it’s kind of hard. In fact it’s REALLY fucking hard. Your measly life bar will sustain about three hits and then you‘re dead. The first level is an extremely boring and repetitive prologue. Everything looks the same. Actually the first five levels are all monochrome and interchangeable as far as their architecture and design. The prologue is supposed to be a learning experience but it’s way too long. I had the tutorial turned on, so every other thing you do brings up a tedious explanatory screen of text. Now that I think about it, this is the worst tutorial I’ve ever seen in a game. The explanations don’t explain anything. They’re worded badly and when they make reference to the button(s) you’re supposed to push, it says stuff like “press the assist attack button while in assault mode” or “use the shift button to switch legions.” Okay… That’s great. What the hell are you talking about? How am I supposed to know where those buttons are? You have to get out the manual to look up the function names and where the corresponding buttons are located. Now the reason I used tutorial mode in the first place was so I *wouldn’t* have to do that. If I wanted to read the stupid manual, I’d read the stupid manual. Why the hell couldn’t they just have a little picture or the default name of the button come up on the screen like every other game tutorial?

And another thing; why is the square button a confirm button? I don’t think I’ve ever played a game where square was confirm. It’s ALWAYS cancel. You really have to train yourself out of it quick too. Every time you go into the menu to use one soul or life recovery item you end up using two instead because you select it and press X to confirm and then square to leave but it’s not leave, it’s another confirm button.

Going back to the tiny life gage; there almost seems to be some kind of retarded bug with it. You rarely pick up healing potions and even when you do, you can only hold six small ones and two large ones. When you take damage and you’re about at half of your life, you wouldn’t think to use a potion because they don’t grow on trees and you still have half your life left. This is a 100% surefire way to get yourself killed. The next hit you take, no matter what monster it’s from, it WILL kill you. When you die you have to start back at the beginning or at the last checkpoint. The checkpoints are usually pretty far apart, so you’ll be repeating shit a lot. Luckily the game gives you back any items you used before you died.

The whole time you’re playing, you feel drastically underlevelled because everything is so difficult. There will be parts with thirty-some enemies on screen shooting at you and ramming into you from behind. There are machines that make enemies respawn after you kill them. You can destroy the machines but the only problem is that they’re completely surrounded by the same enemies that they make respawn. How long can you last? A lot of times you find yourself pussyfooting around. You go up, hit the enemy and run away because you can’t afford to ever get hit. That’s not fun, it’s fucking stupid. You can go back and play levels you’ve already done to make yourself and your legions stronger but you only get the ability to replay levels when you’re mostly done with the game.

Just when you think you’ve figured out the game, they make you play as this gunslinging girl that kind of reminds me of Lady from DMC3, only less badass and holding Trish’s guns… If Trish’s guns looked like humongous derringers. This turns out to be a completely different ball of wax requiring a whole new set of shitty tutorials. Initially I was very annoyed but soon found that even though I had no idea what I was doing, I was still doing a lot better with her than the main character. Unfortunately you only get to do this for one level. Screw this legion crap. Why can’t I play as her?

As you play through, you occasionally pick up level-up items. There are things that will increase your shitty life bar, things that increase attack and things that increase defense. When I first got one of these upgrades, I was totally mystified as to how to use it. It was in my inventory but it wouldn’t let me select it. Later I figured out that you don’t need to do anything. Just having it increases whatever stat. I have never heard of that before. Typically to raise a stat, you equip/wear an item or you use experience points. In the Diablo 2 expansion there were charms that you could keep in your inventory that did stuff if you wanted to be extra buff but in Chaos Legion it’s the primary level-up method. So every time you look in your inventory you see things like Defense Up X12 and Life Max Up X24. I’m not sure why but this bugs the hell out of me. It looks so sloppy. Why can’t I just use them to permanently add stat points and then they go away? Or at least put them on the stat screen so I don’t have to look at them.

At the end you have to fight the main antagonist who, for reasons unknown, is Sephiroth from Final Fantasy VII. Okay, it’s not actually him but they literally copied him verbatim. They even used the same cinematography from Advent Children.

Continuing with the Final Fantasy theme, they rape you in the ass with three consecutive bosses. Just kidding… Final Fantasy would have at least four. Anyway, it’s bullshit and if you want my advice; go get Thanatos. Or don’t play at all.

There Can Be Only One

2009-09-09T01:14:00.000-07:00

There is currently an internet poll going on at Gamespot that will undeniably and irrefutably decide the greatest video game hero of all time. Typically I wouldn’t comment on something as trivial as an internet poll, (because everything else I write about is very serious business,) but this is an interesting insight into a weird subculture coupled with a shocking, (and hilarious,) statistical anomaly. Round one recently ended and as it turns out, the iconic Halo character Master Chief has been defeated by…

Bub and Bob. Yeah, remember them? I know you’re probably thinking, how the hell did this happen when Halo has such a rabid fanbase? Well let me explain. I first heard about this poll while browsing the video games board, (or v,) on 4chan. The point of the thread was to basically tell people to vote for B&B and destroy Master Chief. I went to the poll and saw that the two dragons were already ahead of MC, (possibly legitimately.)

It didn’t take long for everything to go south from there. 4chan users on v generally have an irrational and intense hatred for Halo. Myself, I never really played it that much. It seemed average. Also I don’t think I ever played Bubble Bobble. I have played Bust-a-Move though in many an arcade. So anyway, v starts voting for B&B, but they don’t just vote normally, they keep refreshing their IPs so that they can vote multiple times. The dragons pull away and soon they are ahead by ten percent.

Under every character match is (was) an area you can post comments, backing either character. Needless to say, this became a medium for a humongous shitstorm. The Master Chief side was full of whinny-ass Halo fanboys crying. The Bub and Bob side was full of old school gamers and trolls. It was a sight to behold; one of those special experiences only procurable through the wondrous internet. Though, as expected, that forum disappeared REAL fast. In fact all chat was turned off, period.

Most of the MC comments seemed to either say that Halo is a revolutionary art form or list reasons, (including saving the world,) why MC is the best hero, following up with “what did Bub and Bob ever do?” Well maybe their accomplishments are a bit more simplistic but there is one very important element that B&B have that Master Chief probably never will and that is… a fucking face.

As it is, a first person shooter makes you really detatched from the character because the character almost ceases to exist. YOU are the character. But on top of that, Maser Chief is a John Doe that looks exactly like every other guy in Halo . It’s really hard to care about someone completely walled off behind a bunch of regenerative armor. The helmet never comes off. He doesn’t even have a real name. He could be a robot for all I know. When it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter what he accomplished because I have no way to connect with him.

Then you look at Bub and Bob. Daaaw, look! They’re so damn cute! I like them. They don’t even have to say or do anything. They’re already awesome.

Social sciences aside, it was quite delightful watching the pains of one of the most annoying fanbases in existence. All I need now is the Sonic and Cloud fans to cry, (both currently losing.) Also Donkey Kong should go. He sucks in Smash Bros. He sucks in sidescrollers. He sucks when he’s trying to kill you with barrels.

Yes, the poll is overly charged with animosity when all it is is a web poll. I won’t cry when everyone I care about eventually loses (like always.) I’m betting that either Link or Duke Nukem will win the whole thing, and I‘d be Okay with that. I just hope Mario doesn’t win. That would be the lamest thing ever.

Come on Dante! MOVE YOUR STUPID ASS!

Dracula X: Rondo of Blood

2009-08-05T10:16:00.000-07:00

Ever since I played Castlevania: Symphony of the Night I wondered about the game that came before it. At the beginning of SotN the first thing you do is fight Dracula from the previous game using the previous protagonist Richter. That’s kind of cool. How many games exist that have what is essentially a fully interactive recap? I wanted to play the previous game just so I could hear Dracula’s “What is a man?” speech again.

Then I find out that the game before it was “Dracula X.” This seemed weird to me since I can distinctly remember already having played that game a long time ago and I don’t remember the final fight with Dracula being ANYTHING like what was in the beginning of SotN. A couple of Google searches later I find out that the Super Nintendo Dracula X that I played was actually a shitty port from a PC engine game called Dracula X: Rondo of Blood which was only released in Japan, not counting the ‘07 PSP remake.

So I… acquire the game and boot it up. Naturally I’m expecting it to be in Japanese which puts me off because I assume the characters are actually going to be speaking to one another unlike in the port and I’m not going to understand any of it. But my mind is instantly blown when a black screen appears and I begin to hear a German narration with Japanese subtitles. What the hell? Why German? My only guess is that I’m in Germany. I mean anyone named “Richter” has to be German right? But why’s Dracula in Germany? I thought he hung around Wallachia or whatever… Transylvania. Though I guess his castle does have a tendency to appear in random-ass places. But in the port it actually says you’re in Transylvania so I don’t know. After that I’m only further mystified when I find that the beginning menu screens are all in English. Well that’s nice for me but how many languages are going to be in this game? I haven’t even started it yet.

Unlike past Castlevania games this one lets you create a file and save your progress instead of having to use passwords. When you start a new game you get to see a cinematic of a village getting attacked and Richter coming to town to kick some ass. The whole thing looks like some cheesy early 90’s anime, which is… awesome. Richter looks exactly like Ryu from Street Fighter.

There were no cinematics like this in the port which is lame. You get one explanatory one if you wait at the start screen and another one at the very end and they aren’t nearly as impressive; they also lack dialogue but it’s not like I could understand it in Rondo anyway.

Once you start playing you immediately notice that everything’s different. A lot of the stuff is similar but they also changed A LOT of things. It’s like déjà vu. You’re in the same burning town with slouching skeletons attacking you but the background is less detailed. There are enemies you’ve never seen before and the entire level has been redesigned. At the end of the level in Rondo of Blood you fight a fire-breathing dragon. In the port you fight a fire-breathing cerberus panther thing. Why’d they change so much stuff?

Now the reason that Richter is in the castle is because his girlfriend and her sister, (who also bares a strong resemblance to another character,)

were abducted by Dracula. You can rescue them in both versions of the game, (albeit a completely different ordeal in each of them.) The thing about Rondo though is that you get the option to play as Maria which means throwing cats and birds at skeletons and bats. What’s stupid is that you can’t switch between characters except at a game over screen. It would be nice to just be able to switch characters any time for particular obstacles along the way but no. In Castlevania III you could switch between characters by just pressing “select.” But what was stupid about that was that the characters shared the same life bar. They’re not one person. They should have exclusive life bars.

I played Rondo on PC, not through an emulator which meant no save state. I was reduced to doing it the old fashioned shitty way that the game makers intended. AKA play the same thing over and over and over until every minute detail of the level has been burned into your mind before finally beating the boss and advancing. This is typical of every Castlevania game prior to SotN and it really irks me. You get three lives and as you go through a level there are a few check points that you can respawn at when you die. There’s always a checkpoint just before the level boss and however many lives you have left after the level is how many shots you have at killing the boss. Once you’re out of lives you have to start at the beginning of the level. Why do you have to do that? I already passed the level. I don’t want to do it again. It’s not fun to have to keep doing it over and over every time you come across some ludicrously difficult boss. It’s just fucking annoying and a waste of time. Shinobi on PS2 is one of the most difficult and cruel games I’ve ever played but even they had the sense to have infinite boss retries without having to play the whole level again. And It’s not like I just use save state to cheat in all the boss battles I just don’t want to replay the fucking level every time I fail.

There came a point where I couldn’t stand it anymore. Stage 6 was where I decided it would be much more fun to stop playing. The nice thing about the level is that there IS no level. It’s just a boss, or bosses. When you go into the room the dark priest Shaft is there… doing something. He disappears and then brings back the boss bat from the first Castlevania. Then you have to beat it. When he’s dead the medusa/gorgon thing from the first game appears. (They’re all from the first game.) After that, the mummy appears. I assumed this would be the last boss just because it’s the third one. I don’t know… It made sense to me. It took me like 20-30 tries to finally beat all three of them. When I did I was very pissed off to find that Frankenstein’s monster appeared and killed me. OK, so there are four bosses. You know, it’s kind of dumb that all these bosses are like 1930s Hollywood monsters. What the hell is Frankenstein’s monster even doing here? I thought this was DRACULA’S castle, not Dr. Frankenstein’s. Did Dracula kidnap him too? So like 15 tries later I beat him as well. Good, now I’m done. No, Shaft reappears and I die. What is this shit?! Will it ever fucking end? Putting two bosses in a row is a dick move unless one’s really weak, but five all in a row with no checkpoints? That’s completely unreasonable and logically you’d think Dracula would be even harder than that. Fuck this shit! Where are the cheats? Give them now!

There is only one cheat as far as I know. It gives you the ability to select any stage. So I go straight to Dracula and… it’s still not like the scenario in SotN at all. They both have floors, which is more than I can say for Dracula X. (Dracula’s actually harder in the port than in Rondo) Richter and Dracula don’t talk. It’s a lot harder than it was in the recap. Maria doesn’t come to save you if you die. (I realize this is a necessary change because it would be stupid to expect you to just beat Dracula first thing without a handicap.) There are moves that Richter can only do in SotN like running, twirling the whip and the slide kick that he can’t do in Rondo or its port.

After beating Rondo Dracula, (much easier that beating five fuckers in a row or that stupid room with all the pits in the port version), I came to three conclusions.

1. If you only played Rondo and then later played SotN, you’d be confused.

2. If you only played the port and then later played SotN, you’d be like “What the hell is this? I’ve never seen this before in my life.”

3. They really fucked up the port. How can they even call it a port when they changed nearly everything? Why would they EVEN change anything? It’s easy to just translate a game and do nothing else to it. Maybe the Super Nintendo wouldn’t be able to handle the cinematics/dialogue but why did they put so much effort into making everything else shitty? It’s mind-boggling. Well, it’s not like Dracula X was a terrible game but the game it’s supposedly ported from makes it look like a concept model. It’s like if Super Mario Brothers 3 was “ported” and you ended up with Super Mario Brothers. It just removed a whole other dimension for no reason.

From top to bottom: Dracula X, Dracula X: Rondo of Blood, Symphony of the Night

Whatever happened to consistency?

Keepsake

2009-07-04T02:43:00.000-07:00

Typically I would just pirate an adventure game. The problem I have with buying them is that they have no replay value and then you get instant buyer’s remorse from shelling out $35 for eight hours of puzzles. But there is always an exception. I bought a pack of five Adventure Company games at Walmart on closeout for only seven dollars; no doubt a goldmine of anatomically questionable characters, uncomfortable voice acting and half-assed cut scenes. In the pack where Dead Reefs, Nibiru, Keepsake, Tunguska and Mysterious Island. Nibiru and Tunguska look more like my kind of thing but I hate to do the best things first so I pick something that looks about medium to me…

Keepsake is a point-and-click adventure that is fantasy based, (AKA badly integrated puzzles.) You play as a girl going to the Dragonvale Academy to learn magic as well as meet up with a long unseen childhood friend, Celeste. When you get there, you find the doors locked shut and all the students and faculty missing. And that’s the main deal, trying to figure out where everyone is.

The only person you get to interact with, other than the peddler man outside, is actually a wolf that you find locked up in a cage. You set him free and then he explains that he’s actually a juvenile dragon but some students turned him into a wolf as a prank. Note: He’s really an ugly dork human. He serves as your guide throughout the game.

The academy is ridiculously enormous and somewhat difficult to navigate even with a map. At some point you get involved with these convoluted networks of color coded warp pads. For the most part it’s useful but what’s with this?

What the hell is the point of this hub? Do people just feel like stopping mid warp to be trapped in here? What am I going to do here? Just take me where I want to go.

Also, one thing you’ll notice is the thousands of dragons decorating every room. I realize it’s Dragonvale Academy but this just makes me want to puke. They’ve got dragons up the ass. They’re on doors, the floor, the wall, lights, chairs, tapestries, books, statues, fountains, windows and virtually everything else.

For being a game with practically two people in it there’s a hell of a lot of dialogue. You can’t find a new puzzle without asking a stupid question and sparking a ten minute long conversation about what that funny glowy thing is. Sometimes you’ll just be walking along and suddenly someone will spontaneously make some sort of horribly introspective remark and voila; you’re not playing a game anymore.
This ghost appears later and you have to talk to it… unfortunately. He talks slower than my grandpa. Luckily It gives you the option to fastforward through dialogue. I can read his entire box of text before he finishes the first syllable. I’m not even exaggerating.

The puzzles in the game are pretty calibrated to my fancy. They aren’t so easy that I feel like I’m playing a game for three-year-olds and they aren’t so hard that I feel retarded. There’s also a hint system with three different degrees of information divulged and even an instant solution button for candy-ass gamers. (Yes I used it.) However, toward the end of the game, the puzzles really began to turn to shit.

Solarium Puzzle

In this puzzle you’re supposed to grow three specific plants in the school solarium. The solarium has a device that allows you to choose what season you want it to be inside of it. The season dictates which plants you can grow in the three pots. Each season has about five different plants associated with it and some of them overlap into other seasons. The first problem with this puzzle is the tapestry that supposedly tells you what plants you need in which pots. I thought I screen captured it but I guess not. But I swear to you that the puzzle will be easier for you having not seen it.

The second problem is the plants. Every time you cycle from one plant to another it has to go through an extremely tedious 10 second animation where the plant you were on shrinks back into its seed and then the next plant slowly grows in its place. You just want to get from plant A to plant E but you have to pay witness to everything in between as it waxes and wanes.

The third problem is the location of the season control for the solarium. Please take note using this helpful map…
Why didn’t they just put the controls in the next county… or South China? Not only does this not make any sense from a gaming standpoint, it doesn’t make any sense from a school construction standpoint. It would be like putting the light switch for the principal’s office on the roof of the gym, or having to go to the baseball field to flush the faculty toilet. It’s a two minute trip from the solarium, (where you cycle the plants), to the stupid controls, (where you cycle the seasons.) Assuming you start at the solarium and know exactly what you’re doing and where you're going, it can’t take any shorter than six minutes to complete the puzzle. That will never happen of course. Imagine just trying to get your bearings on the effects of the various seasons. Cycling through all seasons and plants takes about 16-18 minutes. And you haven’t even started trying to solve the puzzle yet. I could overlook the distance factor if they just had a warp pad going between them but no, the school contractor thought it would be much more useful to have a warp pad that teleports you three feet to a hub where your only choice is to continue teleporting on the same color pad.

Telescope Puzzle

This puzzle is not only overly complicated but very time consuming as well. You’re supposed to enter in each row and column of numbers in the box into the weird gyroscope to look at things in the telescope… I guess. You do that by fiddling with the individual rings. Each ring moves corresponding numbers in a certain way. Each time you press a ring you are subjected to a long-ass animation of the thing twirling around. You may have figured it out but now you have to sit there for an hour entering numbers. What’s the point of making you do the same thing 12 times? After 20 minutes of lining up coordinates for the telescope and not even being half way done, I was ready to press the instant solution button, (and I did.)

Forge Puzzle

This third puzzle is the worst of all puzzles. It’s defective. You get this thing…

Then later you go to a forge and there’s this puzzle with corresponding characters. Obviously since it’s a forge you’re going to enter the word ‘fire’ right?

Wrong. Nothing happened. I spelled ‘earth’ and ‘wind’ too but still nothing. I was going to try ‘water’ too but I couldn’t quite get it. Every button you press makes the surrounding buttons alternate to the opposite of what they just were, so it’s not like you can just punch it in like a typewriter. Naturally I’m stumped because there’s no other logical solution. So I press the instant solution button and turns out the answer is this…

Now I’m even more confused. That sequence isn't even on the legend. Why the hell would I ever enter that sequence? Is there some other legend that I was supposed to be going off of? I looked at three different walkthroughs on the internet and they all said fire was the answer but you were supposed to spell it like what the solution button had rendered. Then I noticed that each symbol on the legend corresponds to a specific letter in the alphabet. In other words it's not just a pretty picture. Each sequence of symbols translates directly and actually spells out one of the four elements. Going back to the solution that everyone agreed on but me. The symbol sequence for the game’s solution was five characters long. The word ‘fire’ is of course four characters long so those symbols *can’t* mean fire. In fact if you translate it it says ‘whfra’ which doesn’t mean shit. I kept looking at walkthroughs and finally found this picture.

Well that corresponds with *my* answer but this is for a different version of the game. I can’t even recognize the language that it’s in. So maybe I have some kind of screwed up hybrid. But then why is it still able to spell ‘fire’ in the English version?

So after entering in WHFRA like it wanted, the puzzle unlocked and then the camera cut out to a wider angle. Then, just for one last kick in the crotch it does this…

IT FUCKING SWITCHED BACK TO FIRE, MY ORIGINAL ANSWER. Thus my brain exploded and I had to be hospitalized. The end.

Nocturne

2009-06-02T02:02:00.000-07:00

Nocturne is an action adventure game with a horror twist. It plays a lot like Alone in the Dark IV. That includes the terrible fixed camera angles. The plot is that it’s the 1930’s and you are an agent working for an agency that deals with paranormal occurrences. It’s kind of like Hellboy or Vanhelsing.

You play as “Stranger.” Quite possibly the most awesome videogame character in existence.

He’s like a cross between Sam Fisher and Agent K, only with a broken grumpiness inhibitor.

The game is broken up into four parts which you can play in any order, but the overall story still make the most sense when you do them in numerical order. The controls suck, but I blame myself for part of that. I spent probably half an hour trying to calibrate a controller to it but got mixed results. Eventually I settled on a semi-custom keyboard and mouse. I also put autoaim on because the camera makes it hard enough.

Part I: Dark Reign of the Vampire King
Monsters: Werewolves/Vampires

You’re sent to this little town in Germany, to deal with the reappearance of werewolves in the area. Before that though, you have to go through this long tedious debriefing at HQ. You get paired up with a female dhampir named Svetlana. I went through the talking with every character and got some weapons. I headed to the door to leave with Svetlana following me and, much to my annoyance, became trapped between her and the wall. She wouldn’t fucking move, so I had to restart. This is a theme that happens occasionally throughout the game and the funny thing is that you don’t even need a retarded NPC to do it. You can get permanently lodged in between two grave markers or stuck on a chain link fence all by yourself.

Once you actually get to play, the game is just OK. I was turned off by most of the combat in the town and the castle. It’s hard to see what you’re doing when you’re in a mess of buildings or a narrow corridor with a bunch of doors and then you have something the size of a horse flying directly above you that you need to shoot but isn‘t even on screen. Also a lot of the levels are huge and elaborate which is typically good. But you’ll think you’ve been everywhere and you still can’t figure out how to progress. Then you find that you were supposed to go through some tiny alley that’s completely obscured from your vision by the shitty camera angle.

However, the forest in between the castle and town is awesome. You go in at night during a thunderstorm knowing it’s infested with werewolves. For a long time nothing happens. You find a wrecked carriage with a dead horse and you can see the wolves sometimes moving around behind trees in the dark. Then suddenly, without warning, you get gang raped by like five of them at once. So with that in mind, the level is still good.

Part II: Tomb of the Underground God
Monsters: Werewolves/Zombies/Insect Hellspawn

This is how the whole game should have been. You start out on a train that gets attacked by vengeful werewolves from part I. This doesn’t seem to be much of a problem considering that for every one time you get clawed by a werewolf you’ll fall off the train and die about 15 times.

So you make it to your real mission which has to do with a western ghost town overrun by zombies. Well, a few people still live there actually. You have to find the remaining townsfolk and take them to the church. This didn’t really make much sense to me because if the dead are rising, why would you want to be in a building that’s nestled in a cemetery? Typically I absolutely hate escort missions but at some point while leading an inbred she-beast in a muumuu and her American Gothic of a husband through a field while fending off curious zombie cows with an axe, I decided that this is actually the most fun I’ve had playing a videogame in a while.

Of course it wasn’t without it’s problems. I kept on getting shotgun shells but I never actually found a damn shotgun. This was also a problem in the castle in part I. I found a ton of wooden stakes and bolts but no crossbow. It wasn’t until the end of the level where I had basically eliminated every possible location and then decided to backtrack outside the castle to see if I could find it out there. When you first get to the castle you go one of two ways through a bunch of ruins before reaching the door. I chose the left which happened to be the way in. The right path goes to the crossbow. After accessing the castle I completely forgot about anything outside. If I’m already in the castle, what reason do I have to back out and snoop around some more ruins? There’s also a critical melee weapon that you can’t win without located in the same area. If I had gone into the dungeon without finding that, I would have been screwed because there’s no way out of there.

Part of the problem is that I either think too much or I think opposed to what I’m supposed to. At one of the houses in town I found a cellar in the backyard. My thought was that there were survivors inside and I needed to get the door open. When you try to open it, Stranger says it’s locked and he can’t break it down with the axe. Then I think, what *can* break it down? I found a box of explosives right inside the house and stuck it in front of the door, which was at the bottom of some stairs going into the ground like a bunker. I spent quite a while trying to find an angle I could shoot it from without blowing myself up. There isn’t one. I took it to a boarded-up mine and tried it there. I survived the blast but nothing happened to the door. Flustered, I went to the church and was told there were kids in the cellar and that they’d only open with a special knock. After I saved them, one kid opens the mine for me. Well, what the hell? Why were the explosives there? It’s like they just put it there to confound me and waste my time.

Deep in the mine there are a bunch of chambers where you have to find various stones and get past simple traps. At least they would be simple if they didn’t usually require you to jump over something. Stranger jumps like a blind kangaroo on PCP. He jumps too far. He jumps crooked. He jumps twice? They’re in absolutely no position to make this into a platformer with these godawful controls.

Part III: Windy City Massacre
Monsters: Zombie Mobsters with Tommyguns (You heard me.)

This is where the shit hit’s the fan. You go to Chicago to stop Al Capone from continually raising his dead mobsters back to life as zombies. The entire city is plagued with these assholes. They’re on top of roofs and riding around in cars. They’re constantly shooting at you and there’s almost nowhere you can go where they can’t hit you. Going back to the camera angles, this is where it becomes absolutely crippling. The fixed camera system works well for enhancing horror; not so well for a fucking gun fight. Imagine that you’re playing Grand Theft Auto and you just pissed off about 30 triads and you can’t get off their turf. They respawn. They’re on top of every building and you can only actually see about two of them at a time because the rest are shooting at you from off screen and there’s nothing you can do about it. You have to run around the city lost, all the while being hit by bullets. It’s not fun at all. It’s just horribly annoying. And it only gets worse when you have to escort a slow-ass guy all the way across town.

At the end of the level you have to blow up the zombie factory and escape while it’s exploding around you. The explosions cut off your escape if you‘re one second too slow. If that wasn’t bad enough, dozens of new machinegun-wielding zombies suddenly just appear where there were none before. If you touch any fire at all, even the slightest, you die; because your trench coat is made of papier mache drenched in kerosene.

Part IV: The house on the Edge of Hell
Monsters: Everything

The title is slightly misleading. The house isn’t actually on the edge of hell. The house *is* hell. It makes Windy City Massacre look perfectly delightful. The pretense is that the owner of the house calls you there to deal with a manifestation of paranormal shit in his graveyard. You can kill the imps but the skeletons just come back. At least they’re slow. The first puzzle involves searching the monsters for stolen crypt keys. Supposedly there are three keys but I only found two. I opened two crypts and then had to find two crosses of certain shapes to put inside them. One looked like an Egyptian ankh. That one was easy to get because there’s only one in the whole yard. The other one was a generic Christian cross which is everywhere. I don’t know how long I spent trying to locate every single one, thoroughly checking them all and attempting to jump to ones near impossible to get to or just impossible to get to. It was a long time. After reading some extremely vague walkthroughs, I found it.

Not this one.

Not these.

Not this one.

It's actually this one. See it? Isn't it so obvious? They all look exactly the same! What difference does it make if I use this ugly cement cross or that ugly cement cross?!

After that, I was in no mood to go find a fucking key that probably landed somewhere on the ground in between two camera shots and underneath a bunch of dismembered imp flesh chunks. So I used the skeleton key cheat.

After some more retarded crap, you figure out that it was all an incredibly aggravating ruse to get you to drop by and then the guy knocks you out. You wake up in a torture chamber and then…

Hello Stranger. I want to play a game. How many monsters have you killed working for Spookhouse? A thousand? Ten-thousand? Did you ever stop to consider the baby orphan werewolves? Or think that maybe Al Capone was running a legitimate business? A zombie, no matter how brain dead, can still value life. You, however, only destroy life. You have two options: play the most terribly convoluted, confusing and unfair level ever designed or suicide. If you chose death, the device in the corner will twist your body in half in approximately ten minutes while grinding your face off with rusty forks. Make your choice.

So you’re in this guy’s huge mansion which consists of nothing but monsters and deathtraps. It’s actually a lot like Saw II or Cube. You go from room to room to see what horrible bullshit you have to face next. Probably about 90% of the traps are impossible to not get killed by the first time. And even after that you have to figure out the right path, or the correct switch, or the right combination. It’s always, step in the wrong place; you die. Press the wrong button; you die. Open the wrong door: you die. Wrong room: you die. Too slow; you die. Touch something; you die. You cough; you die. Do anything; you die. You’re constantly being electrocuted, shot, burned and drowned. You fall in pits, get attacked by shit flying out of the wall and things crushing you from the ceiling. It’s fucking ridiculous. You can’t go ten seconds without being impaled or getting assaulted with full frontal nudity.

How ‘bout some fireplay, bitch.

These aren’t the kind of traps that make you feel smart once you get past them. It’s nothing but endless trial and error drudgery. It really wears on your nerves after a while. All of your weapons are gone and after about an hour of nothing but melee battles with zombies, electrocution and hundreds of doors that don‘t lead anywhere in an overwhelmingly large house, I decided I shouldn’t have to play fair anymore and used the all guns/ammo cheat.

The fuck is this shit?

There is an overall series of puzzles you have to solve and keys you have to get to finally get to the guy responsible. You eventually meet another agent that was imprisoned in the house and you basically get him to kill him. He tells you meet him in the guy’s control room on the third floor. What a brilliant idea! Don’t you think if I knew where his fucking control room was, I would have already killed him? And telling me to go somewhere on the third floor is about as specific as telling me to meet you at 'a bar' in New Jersey. Anyway, you kill him and win. Then you get emotional and weepy from the shell shock.

The ending leads you to believe that there will be a sequel. It’s been ten years and there still hasn’t been one. Had this game been executed better, it would probably be in my top ten favorites. If only parts three and four never existed. If and when the sequel happens, I’m going to have to check it out.

Kodomo No Jikan

2009-05-16T23:33:00.000-07:00

This show is retarded… Though I knew I would hate it from square one. The plot is centered around this wuss teacher that just started teaching a third grade classroom at a new school. Actually I think it’s his first time teaching ever. So naturally the students walk all over him for about the first half of the series and then it becomes slightly lessened. The other main characters are these three school girls…
This whore, who flat out asks the teacher to do her. (I’m not even exaggerating.) Sixty percent of her is made of hair. She’s the main girl and “love interest.” Keep in mind that she’s in 3rd grade. The whole show is based on this fucked up relationship that can’t happen. The whole point is that the girl wants to go out with the teacher and the teacher is trying to keep her at arm’s length and himself out of trouble.

This violent dyke bitch. She has a crush on Whore because apparently there was some mandate in Japan recently put into effect that requires all anime to contain pointless homosexual themes. She wears the stupidest shit to school.

Who would have not just one but two sets of different ears? Are the black ears her formal ears? A polka-dot bowtie? And a parasol? Really? This is why schools have uniforms. Kids are too fucking retarded to dress themselves. She’s verbally and physically abusive to the teacher, basically making her one of the worst characters ever. On multiple occasions she kicks him hard in the crotch. I don’t know what the deal is at *this* school but where I come from if you pull that shit once you’re gone. Dyke is conflicted with being secretly in love with Whore and Whore being in love with the teacher.

These huge glasses. She’s the normal nice one. The only point of her existing is so people like me have a non-shitty character to identify with.

So on the new teacher’s first day he walks into his homeroom only to find that all the girls in his class are changing clothes there. Why they don’t change in the locker room is a mystery. Maybe it’s a special ed classroom? Whore of course doesn’t mind being seen nude by anyone at any time. Though at first she’s apprehensive about him but 15 minutes later she wants to have his children. Queue the NSFW comments and sexual harassment. The worst part of this is the teacher’s stupid reactions. Sometimes he’ll get mad and chase her. Sometimes he’ll just blush and stammer. There are never any consequences for anything. Everyone’s free to kick or fondle his crotch at their discretion. In reality he should just tell her to shut the fuck up or go see the principal.

There is a female teacher that is meant to be the obviously reasonable choice in relationships. Whore is jealous of her because she not only detracts attention from her but is superior in every way. Though every time they plan on doing something together he always runs off like a dumbass. And it’s always because of Whore. They’re about to leave to go drinking and he’ll go, “Hey, who’s that? Is that Whore? What’s she doing? Looking out of a window? Awesome! I’m so there!” Then he’ll amble away with no explanation at all to his date about where he’s going or what the fuck he’s doing.

After a while Whore becomes a clingy stalker. The teacher finally sets her straight on the *I‘m going to prison if you continue to touch me* issue. Of course she doesn‘t care. She gets pissed off and mopey when anyone sees her for what she really is; a manipulative child and an asshole. Yes you’re a kid; deal with it.

Later she decides to dress up like a boy because she notices that boys get to crawl all over him during recess. So she dyes her hair black and shoves it into the back of her shirt to make it look shorter. Apparently there is some sort of wormhole in her shirt that leads to an alternate dimension because I think her extra 30 pounds of hair would be impossible to hide otherwise, even without the eight stupid croquet balls attached to it. The guise only lasts for a little while until she finds that she’s to girly to take being thrown about and shoved in the mud. Awesome! If only she could be trampled to a bloody pulp it would be perfect.

Everything else is just the teacher enduring horrible punishments from Dyke and Whore.
Oh boy, I really want to start a serious relationship with a 3rd grader that shoves me in the pool and ties me to a railing.

Where exactly do you buy lingerie for children?

Whore’s home life kind of sucks. Her Father left after a divorce and her mother died of cancer. The person that takes care of her is her… cousin? No, it was her mom’s cousin. So what the hell does that make them? Anyway, he was there for some reason and her mom was raising both of them. Or maybe he just lived with them. They really didn’t explain this shit well enough. But the point I want to make is that the cousins were screwing behind Whore’s back. Her mom’s dying wish was that he ‘protect’ her. He brings this wish to fruition like he was a robot with a single prime directive, letting everything else fall by the wayside. He’s very overprotective but for some reason it only becomes apparent in the last two episodes. You also find out that they sleep in the same bed.

They never give any evidence of molestation. Not that it matters anyway. We’re all just victims of society and shitty parenting so it vindicates us of perpetuating the terrible behavior, right?

The ending was predictable; the classic NOTHING FUCKING HAPPENS ending. Really, what did you expect? Teacher and student running away to live on an island together? At least one thing was realistic.

Don't stand so close to me.

Lost in the Nightmare

2009-05-15T02:29:00.000-07:00

I’m kind of a horror game slut so when I found this game on the internet I thought, why the hell not? Lost in the Nightmare isn’t exactly a well known title. The circle of people that have actually played it might be able to cram into a phone booth together. The game was made in Turkey I guess. That would explain why the game is in Turkish. Well… it’s translated into English to an intelligible degree for the most part. There are times where you get phrases that obviously don’t translate to English too well.

The game isn’t survival horror , (which is probably the most popular sub genre.) It’s in first person and it’s more like a point and click adventure game with horror elements. The plot is that you’re a detective that came to the small rural town of Karabalta to investigate the disappearance of some kids that went camping a while ago. While investigating you get mixed up in this story about a supposed murderer in town that got acquitted and a legend about some occult guy who made some ritualistic killings. Anyway, you play as this guy…

Burak Guney, who bares a striking resemblance to Harry Mason from Silent Hill. In fact lets gestate on waking up from nightmares in strange places for a minute.

Huh, that’s weird… Did I mention that Burak’s “nightmare” took place in an alternate reality, much like Harry’s?

To help facilitate my anger better I thought it would be fun to include quotes from another review, antithetical of mine.

“The game is very story-driven. It uses a kind of a 'point and click' system, and has a similar feel to Silent Hill.”

No it doesn’t, unless you’re talking about the first person parts in Silent Hill 4 where you’re lighting candles in your apartment to exorcize demons from the wall. Silent Hill being story-driven is kind of an overstatement. The “story” usually goes along the lines of, some bad shit happens and then you ultimately have to get the one thing you want (your wife, your kid) and escape. Again, Silent Hill 4 is the only example of something with story. If anything, Lost in the Nightmare has *more* story.

“The graphics are just lovely.”

Yeah, they‘re perfect for the visually impaired. In fact they're so terrible that it’s extremely difficult to not see the above quote as pure sarcasm. Was “lovely graphics” the first thing that crossed your mind after viewing my couple of screenshots? Be honest now. The thing about this game is that not only does everything look like this but virtually nothing is animated and when it is it’s animated at an astonishingly choppy one frame per second, usually with only two frames that it cycles between in a loop. It’s important to know when a game was made before you go bashing it’s graphics. Now when does this look like it came out? 90? 91? Try 2005. Actually now that I think about it, it reminds me of the old Windows 3D Maze screensaver.

Man that thing kicked ass. I always wanted it to be a video game. It was always thrilling when the rat appeared on screen too. And when you got all surfaces in the maze to be the psychedelic pattern it was like a crazy acid trip. Hmm, maybe I should just review the screensaver.

“The author has done an excellent job. The music is excellent.”

This is actually true. The music *is* excellent. Though it becomes slightly less impressive once you realize that they just fucking ripped music straight from the Silent Hill and Resident Evil OSTs and stuck them in the game. I half expect “You’re Not Here” to start playing at the end credits.

“The replayability in this game is excellent.”

I never actually finished the game but I’m going to go ahead and say no it isn’t. The very nature of adventure games is that they have the lowest replay value of any genre. They’re as linear is it gets and once you solve all the puzzles, that’s it. You already know all the solutions and thus there are no more challenges. As for me not finishing the game, it wasn’t because I couldn’t take it anymore. The game actually had a glitch where it wouldn’t let me select anything from my inventory. Needless to say there was some critical shit that I needed to use to progress but couldn’t. Theoretically it might have been fixed if I had installed a patch before hand. But I was like “Patch? Pfffffff… Who needs that?” Speaking of interface problems, there seemed to be some screens that once you got to them there was no way to backtrack to where you just were. I kept walking down to the lake and then having to ride in the boat to leave the area because it was the only thing the stupid game would let me do.

“This is one SCARY game.”

Well I guess it has it’s moments. I think the fact that it’s in first person is a large part of it. I also played it at night with headphones too, and that always adds to any horror game. I have to say though that the crowning achievement of scary in the game was something that was probably never meant to be scary.
Imagine you come out of your room at the small two story hotel in some archaic backwards town in the middle of nowhere. You want to go get some ice from the lobby ice machine so you hop in the elevator and press L. You go down, the doors open, and you see this…

This is going to sound stupid but I think I jolted back in my chair the first time it happened. But seriously, this guy is standing motionless, alone in a dark room, apparently just *waiting* for you. When he was behind the desk and I first came to the hotel I was creeped out by him. Then he feels the need to pull this on me. There’s no amount of light that can make this guy look anything less than a murderous psychopath/child molester. But all the fucking lights are off in the lobby. What reasonable explanation is there that doesn’t involve him being dressed like his dead mother and perforating my chest with a butcher knife the second the elevator doors open?

Deus Ex FAQ

2009-03-21T20:42:00.000-07:00

1. Am I the weakest cyborg in the world?
2. Why does is take five hours to reload a weapon?
3. Why am I endlessly bombarded by key codes and passwords?
4. Can I just climb down the fucking ladder without falling to my death?
5. Aren’t tranquilizer darts supposed to tranquilize things, not enrage them?
6. Are these maps and satellite images a joke?
7. Where the fuck do I go?
8. Why does every person take like 10 rounds to kill regardless of the type of gun I‘m using?
9. Why does my handgun only hold six rounds?
10. Why do they send me on missions equipped with practically nothing except what I *buy* from them?
11. Why does every air duct, crawlspace, and ladder end directly in front of a soldier, security camera, or security bot?
12. Why is that helicopter talking to me?
13. And how did it fly from New York to Paris?
14. Why is sneaking around so boring, time consuming, impossible, and unrewarding?
15. Why is this game called “Deus Ex” and not “Lets Set Off the Alarm 500 Times?”
16. Why am I always presented with a quick and simple solution right after I do it the shitty hard way?
17. Is there actually a point to hiding bodies?
18. How are these one foot tall mutants so damn dangerous and hard to kill?
19. Why’s it next to impossible to get out of the water?
20. Why does everyone insist on talking to me while I’m being shot at?
21. How is this game still so awesome?

The End

2009-03-17T18:44:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen; the zombie apocalypse is upon us…

Avon is Umbrella Corp. Board up your windows and grab your shotguns. The future is uncertain.

Avon Commercial

Final Fantasy 12

2009-01-08T20:22:00.000-08:00

When you first start FF 12 it takes a while before you really realize anything’s wrong. It start’s out fine. You get a streamlined battle system, a generic evil empire, (probably stealing magic crystals or some shit), and a lead character with ambiguous sexual orientation. The basic plot is you’re… umm…. Actually, I don’t really know. The plot is extremely political and I have ADD. They start talking legalese and I just sort of zone out. It’s like watching Gundam Wing. Well what I gathered is that this kingdom has been taken over via a coup d'état and king assassination. And the daughter of that king is trying to reclaim the thrown, (don’t quote me on this.)

The first thing you’ll notice is the new battle system. It’s more or less real time, but not in the fucking shitty Final Fantasy 8 way. In a sense there aren’t really any random battles anymore. No more running through a completely vacant field and being suddenly thrown into a battle. In this game you approach the enemies or you can even bypass them. This allows you to pick your fights but still has a random element since enemies can still attack you first if you’re close enough and there’s also the possibility of random nearby enemies joining the battle. When in battle three from your team fight at once and are able to walk around freely instead of just being in a stationary flank. You can pick actions from anyone’s menu at any time and they’ll perform that action whenever they’re able to. The whole process is greatly sped up. There’s no loading the battle screen, pressing attack 10 times, playing the victory ditty, watching the items, experience and gil gained screen, and lastly loading the “real world” screen again to finally be on your way. And the best thing is that while scrolling through your battle menu, THE GAME IS PAUSED. It only took them how long to catch on to this?

Every Final Fantasy game has a battle gimmick and this one is “Gambits.” It’s basically the ability to program your character’s to do different things automatically in battle, like heal allies under 40% health or cast whatever on flying enemies. You can buy or find various gambit abilities around. I though this was interesting for a little bit but quickly lost interest when I realized that my human intuition trumps any precognizant automated actions. I can’t rely on the programmed character to heal when they don’t have any magic left, and I don’t want two identically programmed characters to do the same thing at the same time to the same person. They can’t know what needs to be prioritized or what the enemy will do next. Only the player can do that which is why it’s easier to just not use gambits.

The main problem in the game is that there’s too much grinding. Actually, first lets talk about the skill grid. It sucks. It’s simple enough, with it’s squares in a grid. You start out around the middle of the board. Each square is a skill or license of some kind that costs X amount of skill points which you get from defeating enemies. Each time you learn one, the bordering skills around the newly learned skill will become unlocked and available to learn. Before that though, you have no idea what they are until you‘re right next to them. It’s like playing Battleship. What’s stupid is that you can’t use something like a helmet or sword unless you attain the “license” for it off of the grid. Now what it means by license I have no idea. Is it like a driver’s license where you have to learn how to operate your feathered hat or bracelet in a safe manor? Or is it more like a concealed weapons permit where you have to be of a certain status and face a thorough background check before you can own and wear a black belt? What would happen if I tried to use something without the correct license? Would I get arrested and fined? Just for wearing a fuzzy mitre? Also, sometimes You’ll get some kick-ass sword or something but you don’t have the license for it. Not only that, but you don’t even know where the hell the license is located on the grid so you can’t even begin to work towards being able to use it. You have to just sort of eventually stumble upon it later and by that time whatever it is probably isn’t that kick-ass anymore.

There are also things like magic abilities and techniques on the grid. Not only do you have to learn them but you also have to buy the ability from a store. I don’t know if it’s a license or what but it’s extremely frustrating. It’s basically like having to learn it twice. You’ll be constantly learning abilities that you can’t even use because you have to go spend a ton of money at a store to be able to. And there’s no guarantee that it’ll be at the first place you visit either. Depending on how powerful the ability is you’ll probably have to search for it. If it was a normal game you’d just learn the ability and it wouldn’t really matter if you ever used it or didn‘t, but in this game all you see is a giant price tag and a budget to be spent on more crucial things.

The map screen isn’t that great but it’s kind of hard to explain why it’s bad without actually using it. Lets just say you need to have a very vivid imagination. I have to say though that there is one awesome thing about it and that is that when you go to it there’s a summary of what you’re doing and where you’re supposed to go at the bottom of the screen. That just totally blows my mind. It’s like the antithesis of what Final Fantasy is about. I always thought the whole point was to be given vague ass-backwards directions if any at all. Then you get stuck and wander around aimlessly for 20 hours and then toss the game in the garbage because you want to actually play something fun. At least that’s what it was like before internet walkthroughs.

The boss battles in the game are way too dependent on the shit that you have equipped. You fight something fire based and you have to get something to protect you from fire or you’re dead in 30 seconds. So wherever the hell you are, (probably the furthest reaches beyond an unsettled barren desert or in some god-forsaken rice pattie surrounded by Charlie), you need to backtrack and travel to a store that hopefully has something useful to you. Not this town. Not that town. Oh here’s something, a flame shield. It’s only 4500 gil. you have 1266 gil and need at least three shields. So you go out and kill small animals for an hour and sell their loot to get enough to buy the three shields. Now you can go beat that boss… Oh wait, no one on your team has a license for this shield, also you don‘t know where the license is. So you go out and kill things for another hour to accumulate enough skill points to hopefully find the license. Then you make as many moves as you can on one character’s grid around where you think the license might be. If you run out of points and still don’t find it you go to the next character’s grid and go a different path. Repeat this as many times as necessary until the desired license is found. Once it’s found, restart the game. Now that you have all of your skill points back and know where you’re going on the grid, you can get the license and beat the boss... Oh wait, you have enough points to reach and unlock the license but not enough to learn it. Go back out and kill things to get enough skill points to acquire the license to equip the shield to beat one fucking boss and ultimately piss away 2-4 hours with repeatedly killing the same wolf respawn and staring at a chart. Wasn’t that fun? Don’t worry, you only have to do it for about 90% of the bosses. I think boss fights in Final Fantasy 13 should be just like this, only instead of selling loot you should have to fill out job applications to get a job and make money. Also you go to job interviews and answer questions. Then if you manage to get a job you have to work. I’m surprised FF8 wasn’t all over that one.

Safety First

2008-11-21T19:26:00.000-08:00

Make a sign.

Painkiller: Overdose

2008-10-12T13:42:00.000-07:00

Painkiller Overdose is of course the expansion to the first person shooter Painkiller. In Overdose you play as a half demon, half angel, (you do the math) bent on revenge against the demon dog Cerberus for ripping off his wings and imprisoning him in hell.

Right off the bat you'll notice that it's harder than Painkiller. In fact it's a lot harder since it keeps freezing and lagging. Logically I'd assume this is due to my computer. But this is a middle of the road FPS. It's not like it's Oblivion or something. I can play Doom 3 just fine and that has better graphics so what the hell? So I turn down the graphics until it looks like Quake II. The menu screens have this weird glitchy MissingNo. shit plastered all over them. I'll give it the benefit of the doubt and say that it's my computer or incorrect directX or something but I'm not willing to look the other way with the load times. These are the longest fricking loading times for any game I've ever played in my life. Longer than any RPG. Even longer than any Splinter Cell game. It's roughly a 3-4 minute wait from the time you press go to the time that you can move around in a level. It's one hell of an incentive to not die, cause if you do it's another 3-4 minutes before you get another whack at it. Even if my computer *is* a bit dated it shouldn't take anywhere near that long. It's really great when you get to a difficult part that you can't figure out. You spend more time loading the game than actually playing it. The load time for the first boss was three times longer than the time it took me to beat the boss.

The biggest problem in the game would have to be the weapons. Your arsenal is full if bizarre and depraved-looking weapons. In any other game, you have guns and the guns all shoot bullets/explosives or if it's really fancy some kind of laser or plasma. In Overdose it takes you five minutes just to accept the fact that the severed head you're holding is a weapon and that screaming noise that it makes it what you use to kill things with. It's hard to get used to. Also in the first half of the game you're always out of ammo. It's not because the enemies are strong or it's difficult to aim. It's because every gun shoots like twenty rounds at once and wastes your ammunition either on overkilling an enemy or more likely just making pock marks in the wall. Often you find yourself running around while being attacked and scrolling through all of your weapons to find something you can shoot. Does this have ammo? No. Does this have ammo? No. If and when you find something useable you're probably already dead.

Razor Cube: This is the hand to hand weapon that doesn't take ammo to use so get familiar with it cause you don't have ammo. It spins around in your hand and chops up enemies. It reminds me of that cube in the movie Hypercube that spun around and chopped up that guy... or did it? I have no idea what was going on in that movie.
Bone Gun: It's basically a shotgun but it shoots bones. Left click shoots one bone (out of two barrels.) Right click shoots some weird black shit that temporarily freezes enemies.

Chain Gun: The only gun that looks half way normal. Left click it fires bullets like a machine gun for as long as you hold down the button. Right click is a quasi rocket launcher that fires three rounds in a triangular formation per discharge. It seems to go through or around enemies sometimes and for a rocket launcher it's pretty weak. It doesn't have a very large blast radius so you have to have it explode practically on the enemy to do any damage at all. Although I seem to have no problem injuring myself with it.

Eggs: For some reason these reptile eggs are explosive. Not only that but you can remotely detonate them with a... is that a lizard? It doesn't make any sense to have remote mines in this game. It's never possible to sneak up on enemies and use them. The only time I really need them is when I don't have ammo or a chance in hell with the razor cube and in that scenario I don't want something that I have to detonate one second after I throw it. I want something that I throw and it explodes AKA a grenade.

Nuclear gun: It harnesses the power of nuclear waste. Left click fires these canisters of radioactive sludge which kill on impact, making me wonder why they need to be filled with ooze at all. It's not like the enemy's around long enough to die from radiation poisoning. Actually the canisters stay around for a while, emitting green gas which does seem to have an effect on really close enemies. But really they'd be just as lethal filled with rocks or even candy corn. Right click just shoots a stream of that same green gas directly at an enemy. In reality this would be extremely inconvenient because really how far can you spray gas? And what if it's windy out? What If it's blowing at you? You'd at least need a mask.

Head: This is the first thing you ever see when you start Overdose. (Welcome to Overdose; here's an unbelievably hideous severed demon head with a distended spine hanging out the bottom.) It's your first real "weapon." Left click shoots a laser. I have no Idea why. I guess it's coming out of it's eyes but it only shoots one beam. Which eye is it coming from? If it's coming from both there should be two beams dammit. Right click makes the head scream and project some barely visible... gas cloud? Again I don't know what the hell's going on. When it hits an enemy and takes effect they start convulsing and basically drop dead. The little icon by your ammo is a picture of a heart. That typically indicates what type of ammo the weapon requires. So I guess what it's saying is that in order to make the screaming head project a cloud you need to power it with hearts, five hearts to be exact.

Crossbow: Left click fires/wastes three bolts. Right click fires/wastes six shrunken heads. the heads bounce around and explode. Two of them might hit enemies. The other four will either hit nothing or hit you.

Sword: Left click shoots three giggling skulls in a horizontal line. They sort of hone in on enemies and injure them. They also sort of fly past the enemies and do nothing. Right click makes the sword fly around like a boomerang. I never really got the hang of this. It seems like you have to have a ton of crystals to even get it to start. Once it's flying around you can drag your crosshairs on to an enemy and if you can manage to hold it on them long enough, the sword will fly over and chop them in half.

With all that said I've decided to make my own Painkiller Overdose weapon. It's a chair gun that shoots brains. You can't shoot it until it's full of 500 brains and then it shoots them all at once killing one or two enemies... unless you miss. This is just a rough concept but the finished one will be made of polka-dot intestines that are on fire. Also, right click makes an aurora borealis occur but only if you have at least 17 shampoo bottles.

The other most annoying thing in the game is the gas. There's gas everywhere and it hurts you badly. Enemies throw gas balls at you. Gas comes out of their chests. There are tear gas cans. Spray paint cans. It comes out of plants. Nuclear gas. Gas in the water. Gas from the floor. Gas from pitchforks. There's so much gas and usually you don't even see it until it's killing you.

Everything moronic aside, the level designs are great despite the anachronisms and even though all of them are completely random and unrelated.

I don’t think they used ballistas in the American Civil War.

You thought you were safe from angler fish in the desert? You were wrong bitch!

The enemies are all interesting and incidentally have a tendency to look like characters from various movies and videogames. I don’t know if any of them were intentional but I’m pretty sure that the level names “Animal Farm” and “Village of the Damned” were direct references.

Second from the right, same hair.

Team Fortress 2

Silent Hill: The movie actually illustrates it better than the video game.

Diablo II Expansion

2008-10-06T16:07:00.000-07:00

The obvious good things about the Diablo II Expansion Pack are; the bigger stash, the two new characters, and a whole new act taking place in a snowy mountainous region worthy of being chronicled in it’s very own Wintersun song. The extra level also allows you more time to level up and learn all of your skills before the game actually ends.

Technically the game ends at the end of Act IV when you kill Diablo. By now you’ve killed all of the other prime evils except for Baal who escapes at the end, (a pretty shitty ending.) Then, if you like wasting money, you can get the expansion and continue your pursuit of Baal.

After you beat Diablo and start act V you begin in the under siege Barbarian fort on Mt. Aareat. Your first order of business is to stop the immediate threat of the encroaching demon army and catapults outside the gates. The problems start the minute you exit the fort. Hope you like ugly earthworks with trenches, mounds, ,footbridges and bombed-out towns ‘cause that‘s what you‘ll be seeing for the next two hours. All of this fugly garbage in your way makes a sort of labyrinth that you have to zig-zag through. And while you’re doing this you have to fight about 500 trillion of the most bland enemy, over and over. Twenty minutes later nothing has changed and you start wondering, is this going to stop at some point? Please tell me there’s more than earthworks and spiny mole-men. The monotonous and seemingly endless onslaught is punctuated with you getting hit by a stupid catapult with unknown whereabouts. Almost all of the level is linear. With the exception of the hundreds of obstructions that you have to walk around, you walk from right to left. Any time you’re not in an ice cave, you’re walking in one direction like a sidescroller. Eventually you get past the front lines and are introduced to what is the most annoying enemy in the entire game. Prior to the expansion pack, the little fetish tiki men were by a wide margin the most aggravating enemy. But after that they lost the title to…

...Imps. They shoot fireballs and teleport. But that’s not all. They’re actually the most versatile enemy. They can climb up and attack you from siege towers as well as from atop these big things that look like Wargreymon. Often you can’t get within striking distance before they teleport off screen. Then they’ll teleport back on screen just to shoot fire at you again right before they leave once more. Sometimes they just teleport like five times in a row. You’ll be dealing with about 3-8 of them at a time. It’s too much of a pain in the ass to chase them all down individually because it just takes too long. Just accept the fact that you’ll be traveling with them and be getting hit with fireballs constantly throughout this area unless you have some kind of silver bullet spell to deal with them.

Speaking of spells there are some things about the new Druids spells that really suck. The three different types of spells he has are elemental, summoning, and shape shifting. In shape shifting you can turn into a werebear and a werewolf and also get subsequent spells to perform while in either form. The problem is that you lose the ability to use all of your other spells while you’re in that form. You soon realize that there’s really no advantage to changing forms. In fact it’s more disadvantageous because you can’t use your best offensive spells. So that’s a third of your spells that you’re not even going to use because there‘s no benefit to you. In the summoning spells there are various animals and other life forms you can bring forth to fight or heal you as you play. There are three different types of vines that do different things but you can only have one summoned at a time. That makes sense I guess since a necromancer can only have a single golem at a time too. The druid can also summon a wolf/wolves depending on how many times the spell is leveled up. Then later you learn to summon dire wolves which are different. When I first learned this I thought it was good because it meant that I could have a dire wolf summoned in addition to my two regular wolves, but no. You can either have dire wolves or regular wolves out, not both at the same time which is bullshit. If you’re a necromancer you get to have skeletons AND skeleton mages out. How is that any different? Then later you learn how to summon a bear. And I thought surely I could have a bear and wolves. I mean, abear is totally different right? Again it was no. You either get the bear or wolves. And what makes it worse is that you can only ever summon a single bear. Leveling it up only makes the bear stronger. This leaves you to ponder which is better to have, one supercharged bear or an army of wolves? Well I’m certainly never going to need regular wolves again. In fact all of the early spells for all of the characters are pretty much useless after you reach about level eighteen. They’re so weak in comparison to the later spells that it would take 10 level-ups for one to emulate the damage of the first level of a later spell. It’s annoying because you spend points leveling up spells that you’re basically going to throw away and never use again.

Another thing I don’t understand about the expansion is the inclusion of ethereal clothes and weapons. The only difference between ethereal things and non-ethereal things is that ethereal things can not be repaired and consequently break and become useless at some point. Also they technically have lower requirements to use than their non-ethereal counterparts but that’s just a shroud to hide the fact that they’re pointless.

At the end of act V you get to fight Baal, the Lord of Destruction. If I remember correctly Baal is the pagan god of rain. In the Bible the Jews and pagans were having a deity-off to see who’s god was more powerful. The challenge was making a bonfire. Whichever god made a fire first was the winner. Despite all of the dancing and self mutilation performed by the pagans, Baal didn’t respond. (I guess he was sleeping.) Then the Jews completely dowsed their pile of wood with gallons of water and adding insult to injury it exploded into flames. The pagans were at a huge disadvantage though. What made them think they could get fire from a rain god?

So now that Baal is the new boss of the game doesn’t that mean that he’s tougher to beat than Diablo? The answer is yes, a hell of a lot harder. Well it differs from character to character. If you’re an assassin you can just surround him with flame traps and then hide behind a rock and wait. When you first find Baal, he's sitting on his throne and you can't hurt him. He summons five waves of the most annoying enemies from each of the acts. It's really easy to be instantly surrounded and die before even getting to lay a hand on Baal. You end up having to run back through the labyrinth until the enemies are thoroughly separated and then hunt them down one by one. After the fifth wave of enemies Baal escapes through a portal. You follow him and then the real fight begins. His main attack seems to be a flame wake that is not only devastating to your health but impossible to dodge. And it pushes you far away making it really hard to get close to him. If you have any summoned creatures they should be immediately vaporized. Ultimately in order to hit him you have to take a hit. Needless to say you’ll be taking dozens of trips back to town for more health potions. Baal can also duplicate himself so that there are two of him. If you manage to kill his replicant it’s of no consequence to him. He doesn’t get hurt from it and he’ll just make another one. One hundred trips to town later the boss of Diablo II is dead. But does it really matter?

Teaser

Strike Witches

2008-09-27T19:20:00.000-07:00

This just in; anime getting worse…

When I first saw promotional pictures for this show on the internet I thought they were just original pieces by some crackhead with way too much time on their hands. I didn’t think there was any way a concept with anything like this in it could be given the green light for production. How naïve I was… I’ve seen some retarded shit in my day but Strike Witches redefines the term. There is no word that even comes close to describing how ridiculous it is.

The year is 1944; instead of committing wartime atrocities in China and the Philipines, Japan is a key player in the employment of a new technology that allows magical loli catgirls to fly through the sky while discharging rocket launchers and machine guns. (Sounds like a reasonable premise to me.) A handful of girls from various countries you’ve never heard of are apparantly the only thing defending the planet from a mysterious enemy called Neuroi. (They’re like the gnosis from xenosaga but more like the angels from Evangelion.) The machines that the girls use to fly are called strikers. They’re basically two torpedoes that encapsulate all of both of your legs making the wearer look almost as lethal and badass as Mr. Rogers when he’s feeding his fish. For reasons unknown these girls can use magic, (hence the term “witches”), which they use to fly and create shields to block enemy fire. Also for reasons unknown, whenever the girls are in magic mode they grow a pair of cat ears and a tail. Now honestly, why does this need to happen? It’s like they just stuck it in randomly. Why do they have two pairs of ears? Can they hear better? Is that important? Do the cat ears even work at all? What’s the point? I’m aware that some people find this shit highly erotic but to tell you the truth, I fucking hate anime catgirls. They’re not cute or sexy, they’re just annoying and stupid. And in this case, totally unnecessary. Actually not all of them have cat attributes. A couple are dogs I think and there’s also a bunny. But that still doesn’t make it any less stupid. Now that I think about it this show is like what you get when you put a dozen random anime genres through a meat grinder.

The whole idea of training frail little girls in aerial combat is moronic. Wouldn’t that be the worst possible candidate ever? If the job requires you to one-hand a giant .50 cal while rocketing through the sky to kill aliens in mid air dogfights while half naked, would they be mentally OK with that? *I* wouldn’t be. I’m sure it would be an utterly terrifying prospect to any sane person. In reality who would they find that was suicidal enough to do something that stupid. And then there’re the other problems that they don’t address like wind chill, chapped skin, thin air, and red outs. Fighter pilots in exposed cockpits wear flight jackets, scarves, hats, and goggles. You think maybe that means that wind is a hazard? Maybe they need to be wearing something other than a fucking two-piece swimsuit. Actually there is one episode where two of the girls fly a biplane and dress up in aviator gear. So what they’re saying is that the only time you need to wear wind protection is when you’re partially protected by an airplane but *not* when you‘re completely exposed to the wind.

Anatomically speaking, no one would even be able to put on a pair of strikers because you wouldn’t be able to get your feet past the entrance. If you actually watch them put them on, the tops of their feet are parallel to their shins. In other words, their ankles are bent so that their toes are pointing strait down while they stand strait up. Never mind that it’s impossible, imagine holding it like that for the entirety of your flight. And why don't they wear parachutes or something? If they get shot down at low altitude over water they're probably fine but what If they're fighting over land or even high over water? Well they're fucked aren't they. Not that I care or anything. I really wouldn't mind if they all died. While watching the show there was always the tiniest vestige of hope that someone would die. They are in a war after all. But no they have to have everyone live happily ever after ‘n’ shit. How annoying. There was death in South Pacific and that was a musical. That's as idealistic as it gets. A girl died in Gunslinger Girl, a similar anime, a much better anime too. I kind of feel dirty just for comparing them. Although in a duel I think the strike witches would win since they have infinite ammo and never have to reload thanks to the creators spending little or no time on details not involving a closeup of an ass.

Aside from being able to make a magic shield, there’s no reason why they should be doing this. Why do they even use strikers at all? Why don't they just use airplanes? Or better yet, broomsticks? And let me just say that for a show supposedly based on magic, making shields is about the lamest use for magic I’ve ever seen.

One of the more disturbing problems with the show is the lack of pants. I mean put on some pants you fucking hippies. How am I to believe this is a professional naval facility if there is absolutely no kind of uniform or even pants. Everyone just runs around in bikinis usually with a random naval jacket thrown on. Imagine watching Tora Tora Tora with Admiral Yamamoto giving orders in a thong. This, coupled with the random animal ear thing makes it impossible to take any of the show’s “drama” seriously. I've heard it argued that pants would interfere with the strikers and that it would waste precious time to take off your pants in the middle of an air raid. If this was true, other non-witch females would wear pants or something normal but they don't. And you don't see fire fighters hanging out at the fire station in fire jackets, fire pants, helmets, and oxygen masks and they're under similar time constraints. And that's actually a lot of stuff to put on. All the strike witches have to do is jump in some dumb-looking propeller legs and away they go. And on a side note, ignoring the fact that the bikini hasn’t been invented yet, any woman wearing one in public in 1944 would probably be arrested for public indecency.

Your average Strike Witches episode usually goes something like this:

Pre-intro teaser making empty promises like plot, character development, and/or action.

Intro, (which has more action in it than all of the actual episodes put together, except maybe the first and last ones.)

Girls interact/Fondling ensues

Sitting at a table

Blatant lesbian overtones

One minute of flying

Bulging vaginas

Upskirts or more fondling

Outro

Next episode preview

The plot and setting are secondary to the fan service. Hell, they’re tertiary. They should have just made a yuri porno and save what could have been a very interesting WWII alternate reality for another anime that wasn’t just dicking around. The show’s actually based off of a manga but you get my point.

In episode seven, (Nice ’N’ Breezy), we see just how crippling going pantsless can be. One girl’s bikini bottoms go missing so she steals someone else’s. Then that girl has to steal some from someone else and so on until everyone is scrambling around to reclaim what’s theirs, always with someone left half nude. Apparently everyone owns only one pair of bottoms/panties or is too much of a dumbass to go to their room and get another pair. Or maybe logic is just irrelevant when trying to meet your arbitrary crotch and ass shot quota per episode. If there’s a perfectly reasonable excuse for occasional fanservice then fine but don’t just cram it down my throat. And it couldn’t hurt to make some of them look a little older. You can’t go five minutes without seeing some eleven-year-old’s camel-toe. I know pedophilia is all the rage in Japan but lets try to show a modicum of restraint here.

Episode five is entitled “Swift, Gigantic, and Soft.” Obviously they’re talking about breasts. (All except for the swift part. I’m clueless as to how a pair of tits can be swift.) Anyway, in this episode we learn that the main character Yoshika is a flaming lesbian who can’t stop fantasizing about her teammates’ boobs and has an irrepressible urge to molest them in a public setting. You think I’m exaggerating this…

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from anime it’s that all females are lesbians if not bisexuals.

In the last episode the witches have been disbanded and basically replaced by a single unmanned flying robot. It does their job better then they could ever imagine and generally makes everyone in the 501st Special Upskirt Division look like a pile of shit. Then they all died in a fire and no one remembered who they were. The end.

End... Get it?

Alien: A Biological Dissertation

2008-07-29T21:16:00.000-07:00

So the Alien trilogy is pretty awesome. Yes I said “trilogy.” Any movies based off of H. R. Giger paintings *have* to be awesome right? Sorry, I’m getting a little ahead of myself... For anyone who hasn’t seen them, the Alien movies are an iconic sci-fi/horror franchise started in the late 70’s. The basic premise of the first movie was a small crew of people of various occupations working on a cargo spaceship. They answer an SOS signal on some planet where they find an abandoned ship. (Ever since, this has been a typical sci-fi death sentence ala Event Horizon, Lost in Space, and Sunshine. You know, I don’t understand why they didn’t just name Sunshine Event Horizon II. It’s almost the exact same thing only it involves the sun. Anyway this is off topic…) While exploring the ship, one of the crew becomes a host to a baby alien. It gets brought onto the cargo ship where it kills everyone. But it’s not just about the killing. A large part of the movie is devoted to understanding the alien as a life form. The most interesting thing about it is that it goes through a few stages before it reaches it’s adult form. The concept of the facehugger phase is totally believable. It’s perfectly adapted for accomplishing what it needs to do. It has a bunch of long spindly legs for wrapping around the front of your head. Then under that there’s a long tail that It wraps tightly around your neck, usually incapacitating you. Point being, once it’s on you you’re not getting it off and it gets to have it’s way with you. It’s pretty sound reasoning. However, everything else about the alien is a little uh… less believable.

On the alien’s life timeline it starts out as an egg, (which always inexplicably hatches precisely when a human walks by it.) From the egg comes your facehugger. The purpose of the facehugger is to find a way inside a host organism, (mostly humans and always through the mouth.) Once it latches on to someone’s face it becomes somewhat mysterious as to what happens and how it’s accomplished. After a while the facehugger falls off of the victim’s face as a sort of dead husk. The victim, now a host to the alien, comes to and goes about life as usual until what is essentially a miniature form of the adult alien bursts out of their stomach and wriggles away into a dark secluded corner. At this point the host is dead.

Now going back to when the hugger first attaches itself to the face, what happened? Clearly the alien entered the host via the esophagus but what’s really weird is that the hugger and what comes out of the host’s stomach are completely different life forms. That’s perfectly acceptable because it happens with butterflies all the time. But when butterflies do it they don’t leave behind a totally intact dead caterpillar. Was the hugger just some kind of vehicle the alien was riding around inside of until it could get out and jump down someone’s throat thereby abandoning it? Or was the hugger a separate entity whose only purpose was to transplant an alien embryo in a nearby host and then die upon success of it‘s mission? But the real point I’m trying to make here is that it already hatched out of an egg, why does it need to further develop inside of a host? Shouldn’t it be more or less fully formed? If it is in fact a transplanted embryo why didn’t it just develop inside.. oh I don’t know, the egg it just hatched out of?! It’s like it has to hatch twice. And what if there was no host nearby or anywhere? Wouldn’t this be an evolutionary dead end? Or if not, it’s just an extremely inconvenient way to propagate your species.

When the juvenile alien exit’s the host, I dare say it’s small enough to cram snugly into a Pringles can. At this point the only thing it has left to do is grow. And holy hell does it grow! It goes from being about a foot tall to around six or seven feet in about half an hour. And somehow it manages to do this without eating anything. One minute it’s no bigger than a chicken and then the next time you see it it’s taller than the crew members. The law of conservation of mass just got suspended.

Another baffling time related discrepancy is how quickly the aliens multiply and establish themselves in a habitat. In the fourth movie, (OK yes it’s not really a trilogy,) a group of aliens get loose on a ship where they are being used as test subjects. No more than an hour later they’ve plastered entire corridors and rooms with their gross membranous snot goo, designated a room for their queen, started an assembly line of egg production in multiple rooms, claimed about a dozen people as hosts, hatched out of said hosts, killed several lab personnel, and created a fully mature human/alien hybrid. I’m aware that there is a difference in movie time versus real life time but in this movie it’s actually pretty similar. If the breakout had occurred at the beginning of the move, the aliens would have had enough time to create an entire civilization complete with night clubs and a sewer system. It almost makes the growth speed of the alien in the first movie look perfectly reasonable.

Something else interesting about the aliens is that they have highly acidic blood. Like so acidic that it can burn through several inches of metal in just a few seconds. I’m willing to let this slide for two reasons. A: I don’t know enough about blood and acid to make a legitimate complaint. B: It’s awesome.

Arguably the coolest feature of the aliens is their mouth within a mouth. Although if you think about it for too long it starts to sound kind of funny. I think I remember watching a Chip and Dale’s Rescue Rangers where Dale is watching an Alien parody on TV. Though instead of having two mouths, this one had like ten. They did have a valid point… if it already has two mouths, why not give it ten or twenty. It’s already outlandish. In the movie the inner mouth extends out of the outer mouth fast enough to puncture a skull and kill prey. So I guess that’s useful. The only thing is that since that mouth has to fit inside another mouth that’s about the size of a regular human mouth it has to be really small. Can you imagine having to eat solid food through a mouth half the size of yours? It would take forever. But since you never really see how the aliens eat I guess it could be argued that the small mouth doesn’t completely block the big mouth and they actually eat with the big mouth. Whatever...

Why go next gen?

2008-07-25T00:38:00.000-07:00

I’m still waiting for next gen consoles to be worth a damn but It looks like I have a while to wait yet. The main problem seems to be that I have to trade a reasonable price for quality games. In other words, the ability to play good games is more expensive than the ability to play bad games. Funny how that works…

PS3:
First off, it’s enormous. And the way it bulges out in the middle like that makes it look like an over-inflated life raft or something. I know I’ve seen computers this size, but computers do a lot of things. The only thing the PS3 needs to be able to do is run PS3 games. So why the hell does it need to be this big? Was it made in 1975? Are there vacuum tubes and tape reels in there?

Then there’s the price. I’m not going to pay $500 for the platform and then $60 for every subsequent game. It’s ridiculous. Not only that, they felt the need to make different models with different hard drive capacities at different prices. Well I hope you know the exact amount of hard drive space all of the games you will ever install is because if you don’t buy the correct amount you’re making a really expensive mistake. This isn’t a good thing. It’s just frustrating. Why have to install games at all? Well it makes load times shorter but what it ultimately does is inhibit the amount of games you can keep by varying degrees depending on how much money you fork over.

Maybe someday I’ll think about it when the price goes down enough but while I can still get new PS2 games and Devil May Cry and Splinter Cell cost $6 in the used bin I have little initiative to buy one.

Wii:
It’s embarrassing just saying the name of this consol let alone playing it. I remember when it was called the Nintendo “Revolution.” (Why does Nintendo always have to code name their stuff?) Anyway I recall thinking that the Revolution was a stupid name for a video game consol. Then later I was reading some magazine and learned that the official name was now the Nintendo Wii. Suddenly, the name Revolution seemed a lot less retarded than I had initially thought.

I couldn’t care less if my consol had motion sensing capabilities. In fact I think I’d rather it not have them. I understand the motion you
perform with the wii-mote is similar to the action in the game but it still doesn’t change the fact that you’re swinging around a TV remote like a moron.

The real problem though is that there aren’t any games on the Wii that don’t suck ass. God help me, I’m just not that enthused with creating a hideously deformed avatar and then suffering through nine holes of golf with it, or any other sport for that matter. Golf isn’t fun in reality. Why would it be fun on the Wii. Party games are stupid and so are mini games, at least as a purchase. Getting in shape is not entertaining either so I guess that cancels out about 96% of the games on Wii. Also I’m so tired of Mario at this point he can kiss my ass. We need another Mario game like we need another shitty Will Farrell movie.

The only cool thing about the Wii is that you can buy retro games off of the internet with it. At least it would be cool if you couldn‘t already get retro game roms off of the internet for free with your computer. Then it would be of great interest to me and wouldn’t seem like such a gravy train.

360:
The Xbox is obsolete. There, I said it. Well, maybe obsolete isn’t the correct word. It’s more like pointless. Since it’s made by Microsoft, every game on it is default ported to the PC. And if that’s the case then there is nothing an Xbox can do that a PC can’t do as well or better. So why would I buy one? Why would anyone buy one? (Unless they have a Mac.) It would be like if you had a regular computer keyboard and then went out and bought another keyboard that only had number buttons on it and was made specifically for typing numbers. And any time you wanted to type numbers on your computer, instead of using the ones on your regular keyboard you use the ones on your special numerical keyboard. Then it has a hardware failure and you have to buy another one. Doesn’t that sound like a worthwhile investment?

Holy Shit... I just realized that all of the consol names rhyme with eachother.

Lucky Star

2008-07-02T03:14:00.000-07:00

Lucky Star is an anime series based on a comic strip. It’s unique in one aspect: I have no idea why it exists. How anyone could become legitimately engaged in this show is not something I can fathom. Right off the bat, the show’s intro assaults you with a song and dance performed by all of the main characters. Now this is an automatic failure in my book. There’s just something about anime characters dancing that pisses me off. And if this wasn’t bad enough, the theme song is one of the worst sounding and lyrically incoherent songs I’ve ever heard. The vocals in the beginning and end are so awful they don’t even sound like they’re emanating from human vocal chords. It’s easier to believe it’s some kind of evil robot or demonic entity‘s creepy mockery of the musical arts. The first time I listened I briefly wished I had been born deaf. After that, every time I started a new episode I had to turn off my computer speakers and drag the slider bar on my media player to precisely 1:30 and start there. If I see or hear anything in the intro at all I get extremely upset. I never thought I’d say this but I’d rather watch the intro to Tenjho Tenge

The show’s plot is nonexistent. With the exclusion of a few episodes, it’s just four high school girls doing every humdrum activity you can think of: They talk about food, how to prepare food, and how to eat food. They do homework, text on cell phones, ride public transportation, and use computers. They also walk and talk, sit and talk, and stand and talk. I know this sounds quite thrilling and totally foreign to you but please try to contain yourself. I think Lucky Star is supposed to be a comedy but it’s really not that funny at all. However it never ceases to amaze me how it manages to keep you hoping for a payoff and then it never actually delivers. It’s like it tells you half a joke every episode and then stops before reaching the punch line thereby tricking you into watching it. In reality the show’s just a bunch of random unrelated scenes, (of the above mentioned content), thrown together. The thing that bothers me the most about the flow of the episodes is the lack of scene transitions. There are almost no transitions and it makes it really hard to follow sometimes, like when the scene cuts away and all of a sudden everyone’s wearing different clothes. Or when a character calls a person on the phone that they were just talking to in person a second ago. Or when they just slip a completely random and totally irrelevant two second clip in between two scenes, making you wonder if the people making it spent any time at all in post production. With negligent editing and zero plot development, you could just about watch the series upside-down and backwards and it wouldn’t change a thing.

There are countless anime references in the show but they’re never executed with any sort of tact. It’s always “Hey! Look at my new Sgt. Frog key chain!” Or “I love your Full Metal Panic plushie!” There’s also manga and magazines like New Type inserted within episodes. They aren’t spoof or even recreated versions though, they’re just literal scans of the front covers digitally added in. Kyoto Animation is the studio responsible for creating the Lucky Star anime. Therefore, any other series created by Kyoto Animation is fair play for showcasing and saturating every single episode of LS with to an annoying degree. Occasionally they reference an anime not under their jurisdiction. Of course when they do this they have to censor everything said and shown. Every time they say the name of the show it’s bleeped out. And every time they show a picture it’s blurred out. Now if legally they aren’t allowed to convey this information then why the hell are they talking about it? If you can actually figure out that they’re talking about the Gundam franchise then that’s great. But if you can’t then they might as well be discussing the socioeconomic parallels between chronosynclastic infundibulums and a totalitarian government. Nothing they say during these segments is going to matter to you in the slightest. It’s going to ridiculous lengths for a gag that was never going to be funny, interesting, or worthwhile in the first place. Actually the most elaborate and dynamic scenes in the show are always anime reference scenes which is pathetic because it leads me to believe that that’s the apex of the shows focus. In other words, the best thing they have to offer is content someone else made and we’ve already seen. How much effort/talent does that take?

i.e. About *this* much…

This is the show’s mascot… As you can see it’s a reanimated severed cat head grafted on to it’s own dismembered tail. Quite horrifying really. What sick bastard spawned this abomination of nature?

As I already said, Lucky Star is about four high school girls around 17 and 18 years old. But for some reason they’ve been drawn to look like they’re about eight, except for Tsukasa who look’s like she’s six. In fact pretty much all of the characters in the show look too young to be the age they’re supposed to be. The main girls look like they should be playing hopscotch on the playground. Their teacher and the police officer look like they could be high school freshmen. Miyuki and Konata’s moms somehow look younger than Miyuki and Konata. The only person that looks almost old enough to be who he is, is Konata’s father. That means that in the show he’s probably like 85 years old. It’s very weird watching high school freshmen come home drunk and listening to flat-chested eight-year-old girls talk about their periods. It’s been a while since I was in high school but I distinctly remember there being boobs. And that’s another thing, occasionally Miyuki will appear to have breasts but only when it is called to everyone’s attention how “big” her breasts are. After that, she morphs right back into a billiard-table-chest like everyone else.

If there was a main character in LS it would probably be Konata. Incidentally she’s my least favorite character. Her voice is annoying. She's about three feet tall, has blue hair and walks around with her eyes closed half the time. I don’t know what the hell’s wrong with her mouth. I guess she was born with a cleft pallet or something. She’s also addicted to anime, manga, and video games which I can’t help but see as a cheap ploy to connect with the target audience which undoubtedly has the exact same vices. It’s this latter quality that makes her character not believable. Girls are mentally incapable of being that enraptured by video games. Also, they never really show the video games that she plays. It’s always just her sitting at a computer, her holding a PS2 controller, and her saying “I played video games last night.” Why don’t they just show the damn games?! That would actually be interesting. I don’t care who got a new cell phone or about the correct way to eat a disgusting brown blob filled with goo. Show a shooter headshot or some finisher move from a fighting game. Or something like that Virtual Valkyrie MMO story from that one episode of Mission Hill. That was funny. Whatever… The games she plays probably suck anyway.

At the end of every episode is a short segment called Lucky Channel. All it is, is this manic depressive girl and a guy with perpetually closed eyes sitting at a desk talking about ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. Sometimes what they say is pertinent to the show but mostly it’s just asinine garbage. Actually most of the episodes of Lucky Channel are a great magnitude funnier and more entertaining than Lucky Star itself which is more sad than anything. I guess that’s why they put it at the end.

In the last episode of Lucky Star there’s a culture festival at the school and all of the girls decide to do a cheerleading number set to music for it. And surprise surprise, it’s the exact same dance and song from the intro. I’ve never watched a show possessing such bad taste that it would use the worst part of the show, (the part I’ve avoiding watching 22 times since episode 1), for it’s own climax. I mean what the hell made them think this was a good idea? And I still have no idea why it’s called “Lucky Star!”

The Adventures of Ecco the Dolphin

2008-06-11T19:04:00.000-07:00

Alex Kidd: In The Enchanted Castle

2008-06-10T23:39:00.000-07:00

This game has to be a joke. There’s no way anything could be this ludicrous without design. Before you even start the game, you’ll probably get to see this… Could they possibly make the character look like any more of a dork? Maybe, if they gave him buckteeth with an overbite. I’m also having a hard time believing he has a regular humanoid ear back there if we can see that much of it.

The first thing you’ll notice about this game, (even before the bad controls) is that if you get hit once you’re dead. Not only that, but everything kills you. Even things that shouldn’t kill you kill you. Even things incapable of harming you in your wildest imagination kill you. This is paradoxical because on the other hand, Alex can punch the shit out of bricks, pottery, and even trees with his bare hands. And he can completely destroy a full-sized sedan with a single kick. But if he touches a toy airplane he‘s dead meat.

Here’s a selection of the more outlandish enemies. However, I’ll try to rationalize as many of them as possible. Technically none of these enemies even attack you. They just walk around waiting for you to touch them and die.

Prairie Dog: Well obviously these are rabid mutant prairie dogs with a thirst for blood. Clearly they aren’t normal if half of one is as tall as you are.

Porcupine: Porcupines walk up to you on their hind legs and lay down with their spines sticking up, basically hoping you’ll jump on top of them and kill yourself. They seriously won’t move from that spot until you jump over them. Apparently they have nothing else on their plate today other than doing this.

Vulture: Why would you die from touching a vulture? Everyone knows they’re cowardly scavengers. And they’re scavengers because they’re incapable of hunting.

Toy Airplane: O.K. This is a product designed for children to play with but for whatever reason you aren’t intelligent enough to not slit your throat with it… or something.

Toy Soldier: They’re small and move slow as hell but periodically stop, thereby tripping you and causing you to impale your spleen on them.

Tiny Fire: It’s a fire about the size of a light bulb that’s so charismatic that you can’t help but pick it up and burn yourself with it until you have 3rd degree burns over 80% of your body.

Turtles: This is possibly the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever seen. When you’re swimming in the third level, sometimes turtles will just spontaneously hurl themselves spinning up at you from the bottom of the screen. Sometimes they launch clear out of the water. But that’s not even the half of it… Above the water surface are a bunch of turtles spinning around and flying, putting on an acrobatic display that makes Cirque du Soleil look like physical therapy on ice. There’s absolutely no reason or explanation for this phenomenon. Were they even thinking at all when they made this? Any three-year-old can tell you that turtles are slow and coincidentally would be the last creatures on this planet capable of flying. What the hell is they’re excuse for it?

Bee: Maybe he’s allergic.

Dung Beetle: It force-feeds you a ball of crap, making you catch hepatitis C.

Mouse: It’s carrying bubonic plague.

Old Man w/ staff: Let my people go!

Rock: Angry rock is angry.

The controls in the game suck. You can punch on command but kicking sort of just happens as you descend after a jump. Usually if you land on an enemy while kicking you can kill it but sometimes you don’t kick in time and end up dying. So basically you have to somehow coincide your randomly uncontrollable body movements with the moment of impact. Also you slide around everywhere like you’re walking on ice. Why does it have to be like this? Why can’t the character just stop moving when I stop pressing the control pad? Doesn’t that make sense? In reality I don’t wear Vasoline on the bottoms of my shoes. I don’t have to start walking backwards to keep from sliding past where I want to stop.

Within the levels there are “stores” you can walk into where there’s only ever one item for sale at a time. Instead of just handing money to the blue shirtless cueball store clerk to purchase the item, he makes you *bet* the money and then play him at rock, paper, scissors. If you lose the game, you lose the bet money and you don’t get the item, and you get a weight dropped on your head. If you win, you still lose the money, but you get the item and the store owner gets a weight dropped on *his* head. Now does that make any sense to you? Imagine if you went into Best Buy to get a laptop. As you check out, you pay full price for the laptop and then get challenged by an employee to rock, paper, scissors. You lose, the store keeps your money and the laptop. Does that sound like a good business model? Would you ever shop at Best Buy again? No you wouldn‘t. It’s a completely idiotic idea. And what's with the weight? Is it not bad enough that he already stole my fucking money?

The items you get from the store typically aren’t worth a damn. You can get several different things that “help” you and you can hold more than one of each. There are a few vehicles that you can ride like a self-powered helicopter that disappears for no reason when you touch something, and a motorcycle that also disappears for no reason when you touch something. On any given level that gives you roughly three seconds of ride time. What the hell’s the fricking point?!

There are a few bosses in the game. You don’t really fight them though, you have to beat them at rock, paper, scissors (go figure.) Well that sort of makes sense when you first hear it since your character is a worthless pile of chicken shit, incapable of touching everyday objects without expiring. Well that begs the question, how has he even survived for this long? Anyway, at the end of some levels there are bosses. You have to beat them at RPS or you die and have to do the level again. And then the shocking realization hit’s that beating the game is dependant to a large extent on chance. You could play the game perfectly and still lose because of a random number generator. When you lose to a boss they say something like “I can not be beat” or “you need more practice.” You need more practice?! It’s rock, paper, scissors for God’s sake! You can’t practice it any more than you can practice only hearing your favorite songs on the radio. This game scoffs at your childish notions of logic and sensibility.

The last level of the game is of course the Enchanted Castle. Actually it’s not so much enchanted as it is long and annoying. It’s like 20 times longer than any of the previous levels. It takes forever and gets boring really fast, especially with the droning music. Once you beat the boss at the end you find out that nothing was wrong in the first place and you just risked your life for absolutely no reason. Isn’t that special?

Constellations

2008-05-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

Ever since I was little I’ve thought constellations were stupid. Yes it’s an interesting passtime, finding shapes in things like clouds and stars but only if it actually looks like something in the first place. Trying to put stuff in the sky that isn’t there is retarded. Very rarely do the constellations look anything like what they are labeled as. Why were those stars chosen to make them? And why that configuration? It just looks like some random assemblage of dots. You could pick any other star cluster in any corner of the sky for any constellation and get something just as good if not better. You can’t tell what anything is without an illustration overlay. But then that just makes you notice how terrible the constellation is when you see everything that’s missing from it. I don’t know who invented them or how but I’m pretty sure it went something like this:

Ancient Astronomer 1: Have you finished designating the constellations yet?

Ancient Astronomer 2: No, I still have to find Hercules, Orion, the entire zodiac, and some bears. It’s a lot harder than I thought it would be. I can’t find anything that looks like Hercules.

Ancient Astronomer 1: Wait, you’re trying to find stars that actually look like the names on the list? That’ll take forever! We need those constellations in by Monday.

Ancient Astronomer 2: Well I just thought…

Ancient Astronomer 1: You’re not getting paid to think. Just close you’re eyes, spin around and point. Think of it as assigning characters to parking lots at Disneyland.

This is Pisces, the fish constellation (and my sign.) Have you ever seen a fish this long that was bent at a 30 degree angle? Actually I guess it’s supposed to be two fish jumping out of the water. At lest you can see the path of the fish.

Here’s Cancer the crab. How anyone saw a crab in two intersecting lines is beyond me. Every time I write the letter Y I’ll think about crabs from now on.

This it Gemini, the twins. OK, this one’s acceptable. They both have heads and all of their limbs are there. And I like how it looks like the one on the left is helping his brother who apparently has a broken ankle.

This one is supposed to be Taurus the bull. I was always able to spot the V for the horns and just assumed the whole constellation was only a head. Now that I see it in it’s entirety, It looks more like Freakazoid running with his arms stretched out.

Here’s Leo the lion, (AKA a question mark grafted on to a triangle.)

I’m sure you’re already familiar with Ursa Major, (or the Big Dipper.) It’s supposed to be a bear but I can’t even tell which direction it’s going let alone that it‘s a bear. Since when do bears have spindly stilts for legs? And why only three of them? Or is that the fourth one sticking out of it’s ass? Or is that it’s head? Maybe that’s it’s tail and the pointy end is the head. But if that’s true why is the tail so damn long? Actually this looks more like a stilt strider from Morrowind or one of those big six-legged monsters from The Mist.

It’s a crown, whoop-dee-do.

Sagittarius: Wow! Doesn’t this look just like a centaur drawing his bow?! It’s so life-like it’s almost photo-realistic!

Magnolia

2008-03-31T22:42:00.000-07:00

I watched Magnolia because it’s supposedly a good movie but it turned out to be one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. It’s convoluted. It’s annoying. It’s a waste of time. In fact it took me three days to watch it because it was so disengaging. The opening sequence with the three urban legends is interesting but it takes too long and doesn’t really do much for the plot… not that there is one. After that, it’s character introductions. Lots and lots of character introductions with fragmented back stories all in different scenarios and times shown in rapid sequence. This was the first time I stopped watching the movie. It was going for so long that I was starting to think that the whole thing was going to be like this, and I decided that I didn’t have patience for that shit. When multiple characters doing separate things are depicted in a movie you can always fall back on the formula that says everything will unify into one story eventually. The problem with this movie is that it never actually does this. It sort of does, on and off. But ultimately it’s just alternating between five or six stories the whole time. Why do they have to do this? It’s just exhausting and upsetting to have to keep up with that many developing stories mixed together. It’s like some kind of endurance test. It’s such a twisted knot of circumstances that you immediately stop caring about anything happening. I’d have a more satisfying experience turning on five random movies I’ve never seen before and watching them all simultaneously.

The whole point of the movie is that all of these people either know each other or incidentally have tangent meetings before continuing onward, creating an ever-expanding circuitous network of bullshit. And what does it all accomplish in the end? Absolutely nothing. They might as well all have nothing in common. They spend the entire movie drifting around and then nothing is gained by it. There’s no payoff. What it should have been leading up to is some kind of chain-reaction or series of events spawning a catastrophe that only occurred because each of the people somehow contributed a small part to it. I could see a good short film based on that but this movie is three hours long. Three excruciating hours of nothing.

What really makes this movie bad is the characters. Every single person in it is either a humongous asshole or a whiny dumbass that won’t shut the hell up. Every last one of them is ready to fly off the handle and throw an epic tantrum of biblical proportions at even the slightest inkling of opposition. Hell, Julianne Moore’s character is ready to curse you blind for making eye contact with her. My point is that they’re all terrible people with no redeeming qualities. Now one of the most important elements in any movie is to have a character that the viewer can latch on to, to experience the story through. While watching this movie I kept thinking, *if a nuclear bomb went off and the entire town was leveled would there be a single person I would feel remotely sad for.* The answer was always no. *None* of these people fit the bill. If the town *was* nuked, the world would just be a better place.

Then, for whatever reason, frogs fall from the sky on top of cars and buildings and all over the town. (Yes I know it’s an urban legend.) This is actually a pretty cool scene; too bad it’s too little, too late. The movie still sucks. My recommendation for watching it is skip to the frog part and turn it off when it‘s over. For those of you who’d like to experience Magnolia without having to see Tom Cruise, do this; clone the most despicable, irritating, loathsome person you’ve ever met 10 times. Now lock yourself in a white room with the clones for three hours. And that’s Magnolia.

More Banner Ads

2008-03-27T19:42:00.000-07:00

Because there is no limit to their numbers or how retarded they can get.

Blue sky.

Damn, this is like the worst graphic design I’ve ever seen on a crappy ad. Would it have killed them to put in just a simple background. The pictures also look like they were screen captured off of some camwhore’s live feed.

Wow that’s weird, some IM service I’ve never heard of has somehow sent me messages, (over a public medium), from some of my “buddies” that are apparently on it. What the hell is a “crush request?” A crush isn’t something you can request to have. It’s something that happens without your control, whether you like it or not. Even if someone has a crush on me it’s a moot point. I’m engaged.

God forbid someone gets scared. This seems like such a childish gimmick (pun not intended.) And at the bottom it says “subscription required” implying that you have to do tedious paperwork before you can be scared. If I want a cheap thrill I’ll look inside the soup pot in the cafeteria. Still, I have to be sure. So what really happens if you click on it. Well you get this…

What the hell is this now? I wanted to be scared, not have my palm read. Are they just hoping you’ll forget about the scary thing and get distracted by *this.* Still, I have to give them credit. Someone obviously spent a lot of time on this. Compositionally it’s boring though. They made it so damn symmetrical that it has the same writing on both sides of the picture. Giesel huh? Why does that remind me of The Sound of Music? Oh yeah Liesl… I mean I never watched that. Gisele can predict UR destiny? What is “UR?” Is it an acronym for something or is it the shortened form of “your” capitalized for no apparent reason? And how am I to believe that she can predict anything if she can’t even tell my gender?

She solves problems… *Sexual* problems. If you heard this in your head the same way I do, there would be no way you could read it without laughing.

THIS IS NOT A JOKE - YOU ARE THE 10,000TH BANNER AD TO TELL ME THIS!

Congratulations won a free prize eh? Good for him. Why is the A the only thing not capitalized in that sentence? That kind of bothers me. Also, if I was making a banner ad I wouldn’t use numbers for words like “Click 2 claim.” Using loose semantics like that just lessens it’s believability. Though I guess it doesn’t really matter because morons are their target audience anyway.

This ad doesn’t make any sense. Who’s to say which dinosaurs are good and bad. They’re all so cute. Why can’t they *all* be excellent?

I love it when they put fake buttons and drop-down lists on banners when in reality the whole ad is a single button. I’ve never heard of this dating service. I know they mean mate as in find a mate but I seriously can’t stop thinking about mate the verb.

Click release… what?! I don’t want to release my winnings. Are there no English-speaking people that make these ads? It’s not like it’s rocket science. All you need is one coherent sentence and no one seems to be able to do it right.

Well this is certainly creative. Three totally unrelated things making a banner. Only on the internet can one win such lavish prizes by performing the most menial of tasks. Why does this never happen to me when I walk into stores or look through the newspaper? You have to draw on the mug shot but drawing is the same as clicking so what’s the point? Obviously I had to click on something to even view the ad. What’s so special about drawing? And why on O. J. Simpson? There’s an asterisk next to the word “free” indicating a footnote that says “See terms and gift rules.” So I’m guessing that when they use the “term” “free” it doesn’t actually mean free in the way everyone uses the word. But then what the hell *does* it mean? Maybe the Xbox is *free* of internal hardware. Or it was *free* from restraint inside the delivery truck, causing it to become crushed and *free* from functioning. Also, according to the measurement scale in the background, OJ’s head is about one-and-a-half feet tall. Proportionally that makes him roughly 12 feet tall.

You succeed to make for happy fun time prize! Please use click to magic claim button!!!

People You Can't Stand

2008-03-24T20:16:00.000-07:00

Are there people in your life that you’re forced to interact with that can’t seem to say anything to you that doesn’t constitute bitching about something you do? Well I have two of them and unfortunately I have to see at least one of them almost every day. One is this guy that works at the cafeteria where I eat. He’s relatively new there so that might be the only reason he is the way he is. He’s been bothering me about not signing in every time I get something from the cafeteria. The way the food system at the school works is that you purchase a meal plan at the beginning of the semester that has X number of meals you get per week. I think I have 19 or something per week. Anyway, you’re supposed to go up to the counter in front of the grill and give the person there your name which they check off on a computer. It’s basically to make sure they know when they can charge you money for exceeding your meal plan which has never happened and will never happen to me. After that, you can order something from the grill or get something lying out on the opposite wall like pizza or salad bar. That’s the way you’re “supposed” to do it. The way it’s actually done, (over the two years I’ve been there), is you go order/get what you want and eat it. The person at the computer either sees you or doesn’t see you doing this and signs you in… or not. Its not Arma-fucking-geddon if you aren’t signed in. Since there’s food that’s already out why not just get it and eat it instead of walking past it to go wait in a line just to say your name and then go back to get a slice of pizza or a drink? That just waste’s *everyone’s* time. I always saw it as a method of regulating gridlock at the grill.

So he came up to me on several occasions while I was eating and told me I needed to sign in. He knows my damn name. In the time it took him to accost me he could have signed me in himself like everyone else does. It takes more time and energy to leave the kitchen, harass me, and return then it does to press two buttons on a touch screen monitor. So what… he wants me to go with him back to where he was just standing and watching me from to get signed in? If he knows my name and he knows I’m eating, what more information does he need? He doesn’t need me to wait in line at the grill and *prompt* him to sign me in so that I can go get a cup of juice.

I actually failed to sign in so many times, (3-4), that he wrote me up for it. I don’t know what that means for me but for him I’m pretty sure it means he’s anal-retentive. He’s the only one that gives a shit about what I do in the cafeteria and if he wants to fill out papers to uphold his subscribed bureaucratic protocol then that’s his prerogative. I just don’t know why anyone would expend so much time and energy to be a pain in the ass ultimately. Recently he’s been bothering me about how much salad I put on my plate and I can’t decide if it’s more or equally as trivial.

The other guy that won’t stop harassing me works in the IDS shop. Huh, both of them stand behind counters; weird. Well it’s not like there’s a specific thing he gets on me about, it’s anything and everything. It’s something new every time. Actually it’s often about cleaning something. Any time he’s in the room I feel like I need to stop whatever I’m doing or else I’ll be provoking him in some unknown way. Most of the stuff he says is small but he hounds you about things so constantly that it wares down your resistance and after a certain point everything he says just seems to set you off. Clean these tools off. Put a clamp on that. You’re going to clean this up right? Don’t use that. Why aren’t you cleaning? Turn on the dust collector. It’s nice that they have a sign on the band saw and a shop-tec to yell at you to turn on the dust collector but that still doesn’t tell me how to turn it on. Assuming you know what a dust collector is, the switch is still behind another machine. I saw a guy using a chop saw and he yelled at him to turn on the dust collector. Of course he had to ask where the switch was because it’s not at all apparent. He told him and then he asked “which one, there’s like four.” After all of the oblivious students they’ve had asking about the switch you’d think they’d make it a little less ambiguous. Or maybe it’s just too much fun haranguing them about it.

Another time he pontificated on this girl and I about not doing our part in clean-up time. At random intervals during the day a shop-tec gets on a megaphone and informs everyone in the shop that it’s time to clean up. If you’re unlucky enough to drift in during clean-up time, you get unjustly burdened with it like we did. We never heard the announcement but that doesn’t make us immune to being scolded for not doing what it said.

Yet another time, (after I had switched from using one lathe to the one next to it because the speed controls wouldn't stay where I put them); he came up and asked if I was going to clean up the other lathe. Would it be OK if I finished making the mess before I start cleaning it up? Son of a bitch! Just leave me alone. I hadn't even done anything wrong yet.

The time he pissed me off the most was when I lost the needle to my paint gun inside the gun washer. I usually take my gun apart and put it in the washer and it’s fine. There is a mesh metal sheet at the bottom of the washer to let thinner drain through and keep your gun from falling down. There are a few holes that are larger than the rest on the mesh and can allow the passage of a loose needle. On this occasion was when it happened. My first thought was to just remove the mesh and fish out the needle. The mesh isn’t secured in place at all. It’s just sitting on some pegs. Then I thought I should get a shop-tec to get it out because I don’t want to mess around with the washer. I should have just ignored that thought. When I went up to the counter the only tec there was… that guy. Oh goodie. I can’t wait to hear this one. I reluctantly went up and explained to him that I lost a gun part in the washer. As soon as I mentioned that my gun was disassembled while in the washer, it seemed to activate his big fat lecture mouth. He starts *complaining* (he never actually sounds like he's just requesting or advising), about how you're not supposed to put a disassembled gun in the washer. That's just stupid in my opinion. The inside, (AKA the important part of the gun), will not get cleaned at all unless it's disassembled and cleaning the outside of the gun is unnecessary. If I don't put the gun in the washer while it's disassembled there's no point in putting it in the washer at all. Anyway, he starts acting skeptical that he can get the needle back. He opened a panel on the side of the washer and confirmed his own suspicions by briefly glancing at the internals of the machine. Then He basically said that he couldn't get it out and to go ask so-and-so if they could do anything about it. I knew I should have just gone with my first instinct and done it myself or at least left *him* out of it. I waited for him to leave, removed the mesh in the washer and retrieved the needle. After reassembling my gun, I walked out of the room and passed the shop counter where he was. He asked if so-and-so got it out. I lied and said he did. Then he gives me this look and says, (emphasizing the word don't), "don't do it again." If there was ever a conversation in my life that required a crass rebuttal, that was probably it. A nice *go fuck yourself* or a *shove it up your ass* would have been most efficacious. I know it's never a good idea to have verbal altercations with someone I'm going to have to interact with several times from now until I graduate so I just walked away. I just wish I could have let him know that I managed to do the task that he couldn't, in less than 30 seconds.

Movie Soundtrash

2008-03-09T22:20:00.000-07:00

In hell, this is all you get to listen to.

Codec City

2008-03-02T19:31:00.000-08:00

Why does this world need so many media compression file types? Why can’t we just have one compression type with limitless resolution and aspect ratio settings? Instead we have an endless array of meaningless acronyms that have to be dealt with individually. If you want to open the file Pokemon.SKXEECGJSAQ-43783, then you have to get a codec that decompresses SKXEECGJSAQ-43783 files, (wherever that is.) Why should you have to do that? The files all do the exact same thing so what’s the point of having each one have it’s own stupid codec you have to acquire to open it with? That’s like if every time you got a letter in the mail, you had to use a specific letter opener to open it. If it’s a bill, use the bill opener. If it’s a Christmas card, use the Christmas card opener. Don’t have a Christmas card opener? Then throw that Christmas card away because you can’t open it. They’re all paper envelopes with letters inside. You should just be able to use anything sharp to open them with but no.

Having four or five file types is one thing but we have: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, RealVideo, AVI, DivX, XviD, OGG, OGM, Cinepak, WMV, MID, WAV, MP3, WMA, and M4P/AAC among many more. And in my opinion, WAVs are needlessly large files; MPEG-4s don’t work; and M4Ps were created by the Prince of Darkness. An M4P is a compression that online music stores use. The only difference I can see in it from an MP3 is that You can only play it through whatever service you bought it through like Napster or iTunes, which is just a pain in the ass. M4P was literally created to be less useful for it’s consumer. OGG is something I find popping up more often then it should. I remember I had to scour the internet for days to actually find a program that would play them. That’s another thing, if I have to research a file type in order to find a way to play it then the type in question just shouldn’t exist.

Who keeps making all of these file types anyway? Did it really seem to them like a good idea to make new stuff for an, (already polluted beyond use), universe of compressions? It’s like a handful of people creating new languages and then expecting everyone to use them. We don’t need any more languages. Languages get in the way. Here’s a good rule of thumb if you’re thinking about making a new compression type: unless your compression is going to make files 1/10th their original size, it’s worthless and no one will give a shit. Have a nice day.

Mortal Kombat Movie Marathon

2008-03-01T16:27:00.000-08:00

The Mortal Kombat franchise was created when co-creators Ed Boon and John Tobias stayed up all night watching kung-fu movies… at least that’s what *I* like to believe. There are so many MK characters that look like movie characters it’s weird. I’m certain there are a lot more than this but this is just what I’ve noticed. Inspired by, ripped-off from, or total BS from my head… You decide.
*SPOILERS*

Starting with the most obvious, we have Bruce Lee from “Enter the Dragon” and Liu Kang. They’re both trained as Shaolin monks. They don’t like wearing shirts. They also go WHAAAAAAAA!! when they throw a punch. Still, it’s a very common fighting game character archetype. What’s more interesting is that the plot of Enter the Dragon is very similar to the “plot” of the first Mortal Kombat. I.E. the main bad guy throws a tournament on his island inviting fighters from all over the world.

The main bad guy from Mortal Kombat is Shang Tsung. His movie equivalent isn’t from ETD though, it’s Lo-Pan from “Big Trouble in Little China.” They’re evil and impossibly decrepit-looking. They sit on their asses until it’s absolutely necessary to stand. And they steal people’s life-force to regain youth

Speaking of Big Trouble in Little China, here are some Raidens from said movie. OK they are actually called Thunder Lightning and Rain. That’s kind of weird, there’s also an MK character called Rain but he looks nothing like the other Rain. Actually he was supposedly named after Prince’s “Purple Rain” which makes a very silly visual pun.

Anyway, aside from dressing exactly the same and using lightning attacks, they also have the same moves when charging their lightning, if you compare it with an MK cut scene like the intro to MK Deception.

The three cyborgs, (Sektor, Smoke, and Cyrax) were actually said *by Midway* to be based off of a favorite sci-fi character. No name was mentioned but I think it’s pretty obvious that it’s the Predator. The Predator is a high-tech hunter from space that just likes hunting people with lots of cool traps. It’s been a while since I saw the original but I know in AVP he has this net he can shoot at prey. The cyborgs are all assassins which is almost the same as a hunter right? Cyrax, (the yellow cyborg) also shoots a net to trap people in, which is like the most annoying thing in the game. Still Predator looks most like Smoke, (the blue one.)

So Blaze and the Human Torch from “The Fantastic Four…” If I cropped the pictures a little more you wouldn’t even be able to tell which is which.

Here’s an interesting one; Kenshi and Neo from “The Matrix Revolutions.” They were both blinded by their worst enemy but still see with some kind of extrasensory vision. They have psychokinetic powers. Over their eyes they wear red headbands. I guess physically they look similar too. Also Neo stopping bullets and Kenshi’s “Telekinetic Push” have the same, (fun to practice in the mirror), stance.

Neo actually does this once or twice while outside of the matrix so it’s a legitimate power and not just “bending the rules” of the matrix. The weird thing is that Kenshi first appeared in Mortal Kombat: Deadly Alliance which was released in 2002. The Matrix Revolutions was released a year latter so I don’t know how to explain that one. Maybe The Matrix copied Mortal Kombat?

I’ve saved my favorite for last. It’s Kobra and Johnny from “The Karate Kid.” Look at that, they’re wearing the exact same gi! (If you’re using Kobra’s alternate costume.) Kobra also uses karate and Johnny is on the Cobra Kai Karate Team. Cobra… Kobra… Get it? They also both have cobras on the backs of their gis. I like to think of this as what Johnny looks like as an adult... with a big knife.

4chan Hates Kids

2008-02-13T16:13:00.001-08:00

So I got my internet back today only to find that I was banned from 4chan.org for a month. Maybe it’s a good thing. Though 4chan is a pretty cool site once you get used to all of the perverted, racist, assholes on it. What bothers me the most though is that I haven’t the slightest clue why I was banned. I tried to log on and I got a page saying “You have been banned from all boards for the following reason: child modeling” Child modeling eh? What exactly the flying fuck is that?
Not only did I not really know what I was being accused of, it was also totally impossible for me to have done it because I didn’t even have internet when I was banned. This modeling I thought might be some bastardized politically correct term for child pornography but even that doesn’t make any sense. At the bottom of the page was a box to leave an appeal and your e-mail. Here’s what I wrote:

“What is “child modeling?” If it has anything to do with [child pornography] then there’s absolutely no way I was involved. As a matter of fact I didn’t even have an internet connection on the 11th let alone log on to 4chan.”

Half an hour later, the appeal box had changed into; “Your appeal was reviewed and denied. You may not appeal this ban again.” They didn’t even send me an e-mail. Deep down I knew the appeal wouldn’t work but I was expecting an answer to my legitimate question. Don’t I at least deserve to know what I’m being falsely banned for? Maybe *they* don't even know what it means.

I’m still completely mystified by the term “child modeling.” It conjures images of back to school catalogs and Little Miss Sunshine, which I thought was a good movie but apparently 4chan couldn't appreciate it. It doesn’t make sense any way you interpret it. I’m not a child. I’ve never modeled. I can’t physically go inside of the internet and model children on a virtual runway on 4chan. Even if I could, why would that be bad? I can only infer two things from this phrase; either it’s a gross syntax error or 4chan just hates children.

My Cynical View on Holidays

2008-02-13T13:10:00.000-08:00

Well it’s almost Valentine’s Day and that just means another opportunity to throw money away. I’ve had a beef with this holiday forever. Actually most holidays I think are a complete load. Well, some more than others…

Valentine’s Day - A day where, for whatever reason, you are obligated to reassert the presence of the love you possess for significant others. Well that’s all well and good for people that are loved but for everyone else it’s a punch in the face. And another thing; I don’t want The Man brainwashing my significant others into believing they’re absolutely entitled to receiving flowers and candy every single year on February 14th.

St. Patrick’s Day - Another holiday with “St.” in the title. What, are we all Catholic? That’s bullshit. If the government wanted to make a Vishnu or a Quetzalcoatl day, it would get picketed and/or voted down. But if you staple an excuse for alcoholism onto it, the public can probably overlook whatever random deity or saint is attached. Does anyone even know who St. Pat was? Well no they don’t, but they *do* like being plastered-ass drunk. If people were required to go to mass to drink on St. Patrick’s day, do you think it would still have the same amount of observance? It’s a mockery. Maybe if I’m lucky enough, some bitchy atheists will complain about the name and get it changed to something more appropriate like Alcohol Awareness Day or Get Wasted Day.

Easter - I don’t really know what the point of Easter is. It has something to do with the resurrection of Christ, bunnies, and hiding shit in the backyard. Makes perfect sense. I’ll admit it has a quirk factor in that you’re hiding eggs that you may or may not see again. Then one day you’re mowing the lawn and there’s a thud followed by a fountain of shredded multicolored plastic and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

I only have one clear Easter memory and it involves an Easter egg hunt orchestrated by my dad. Instead of hiding a bunch of little eggs all around, he had put one big Easter basket cache somewhere for me to find. I looked around for like half an hour without finding anything. After being highly demoralized from this, I inevitably looked up at some point and found that the basket was in a damn tree. It wasn’t even below eye-level let alone within my reach. Ever since then I couldn’t wait to have kids so I could do the exact same thing to them.

Independence Day - Well how could I have anything against something that feeds my lust for unchecked pyro madness?

Halloween - Halloween used to be a big thing for me. I used to carve like half a dozen pumpkins, decorate the house, watch The Nightmare Before Christmas, and go trick-or-treating. Looking back I have to ask the question; what was I thinking? You see I’ve lived out in the country for most of my life, in a community with houses that were an average of 50 yards apart and then the driveways themselves would be like another 50 yards to the actual house. When you’re 8, the promise of free candy can easily cloud your judgment, (what little there is.) Is it more economical to walk through rural hickville for four hours to get two pounds of saltwater taffy and pennies, or to just go to Costco and get an $8 box of Milkyway bars? The decorations and whatnot I put out every year never got seen by anyone not living in the house because it’s the most secluded house in the neighborhood. It’s down a hill surrounded by a poison oak grove. You can’t even see it from the road. On the rare occasion that a trick-or-treater passed by, do you think they would go down the creepy road going God-knows-where in the woods? Fuck that, that’s where Michael Myers hangs out. I can seriously only recall one party of kids ever visiting the house for
Halloween. Jehovah’s Witnesses show up more often.

Eventually I wised up and started trick-or-treating at subdivisions in town. But I still decorated the house for some reason. One time I was going to go with my friend in his neighborhood but he got his hand slammed in a car door and decided not to go. It wasn’t broken. It wasn’t even sprained. He just got hurt and skipped out on trick-or-treating. Oh, I felt pain in my hand an hour ago so I don’t want an ass-load of candy now. Boo-fucking-hoo. What are you, a communist? I ended up going with his little sister who I never talked to. Thanks a lot.

The last time I went was when I was about fourteen. I went with friends and I swear every other house we went to had an occupant that would make some comment to me like “Aren’t you too old for this?” No, I’m the same age as my damn friends you fucker, I’m just tall. After that shit, I never went trick-or-treating again. I didn’t decorate either.

Thanksgiving - I’ve heard my mom say that Thanksgiving is her favorite holiday. I used to not really care about it but it seems that the older I get, the more I enjoy it. I like Fall. I like having a break from school. You get to see family you like that you haven’t seen in a while. You get to eat lots of good food. And you don’t have to fucking buy shit for anyone. This is funny because three seconds after Halloween is over, all of the stores are decorated for Christmas and it’s almost another two months to Christmas. Thanksgiving isn’t a consumer holiday and therefore unimportant to stores. For me, any holiday not developed and administrated by Hallmark, and Macy’s is worth celebrating. The down side is the school break is ruined because my school feels it necessary to completely encompass any sort of free time you might have by giving you extra homework. God forbid I actually get to interact with my family on Thanksgiving. The suffering is multiplied exponentially because the kind of homework I get involves thousand dollar 3d modeling programs, table saws, drill presses, compressed air generators, and disk sanders. Needless to say, I don’t have any of that shit so it makes it a little difficult. This alone makes me want to stay at school. The other thing is that with the people that you want to see come the people that you *don’t* want to see. Then the drama. Oh hell, the drama.

Christmas - Every time someone asks me what I want for Christmas I draw a blank. I can never come up with anything I actually want that someone will buy me. I hate trying to figure out what to buy people and who to buy for. It’s just highly aggravating for me. Come to think of it, Christmas is like a holiday built upon layer after layer of chores. Go get a tree. Set up the tree. Decorate the tree. Decorate the house. Find a parking space. Buy X number of presents for X number of friends and family. Now wrap all of those presents. Etc. Etc. But gift procuring is what really bothers me. What if they hate my presents? What if I hate there’s? What the hell am I even going to get them? This may sound silly but wouldn’t it make more sense for everyone to use their money to buy themselves presents that they want? Then everyone could wrap their own presents and put them under the tree. And all December people would wonder what you got for yourself. Then when Christmas comes everyone opens their presents and acts very surprised and elated over what they got themselves. They will turn to one another and brag about what they received and whoever gets the most expensive presents wins Christmas.

New Years - St. Patrick’s day with pointy hats and half-hearted promises to yourself to change in some way. Definitely not cause for celebratory fanfare.

iPods

2008-02-02T01:00:00.000-08:00

Ipod is still an unbelievable phenomenon even after being released like seven years ago. I haven’t even gotten to my main point yet and I’ve already found another thing about iPods that annoys me. The Way you’re supposed to write the word iPod is “iPod.” What is that “i” even for anyway? Is it supposed to be referring to “you” in first person like the pronoun? If that’s the case then it should never be in lower-case. Then after that, the P in “pod” is capitalized. Have you ever seen a word with only the second letter capitalized? And then if you use it as the first word in a sentence like I did, what happens? Does the P remain capitalized creating two capitalized letters in a row? i.e. IPod is still an unbelievable… Do you make the P lower-case so that, that doesn’t happen? i.e. Ipod is still an unbelievable… Or are the laws of basic grammar overridden to correctly state the word? i.e. iPod is still an unbelievable… Oh God, it’s horrible! I can’t look at it!

Anyway, what I was really going to talk about was how iPod has a monopoly on the portable mp3 player market. It has such a large presence you’d seriously think it was the only mp3 player in existence. Why is that? I’m 99% sure it’s the advertising because if it’s the quality then the rest of the market must be lightyears away from creating a functional product.

When I first got my iPod mini, (in ‘04 I think), I thought I just got a defective one or something. The battery’s lifespan was drastically short, (about 45 minutes.) It also had a tendency to freeze. I wouldn’t even be able to turn it off. Sometimes plugging it in to my computer would reboot it but not always. A couple of times I had to wait for the battery to die so it would shut off. Also sometimes when I paused it and tried to turn it off it wouldn’t turn off. I’d have to wait like 10 seconds for it to get ready or something and then it would let me turn it off. I got a Nano for Christmas over a year ago. I thought this would be the end to all the problems. Well… the battery actually worked which was more than I could say for my cousin’s. His Nano’s battery was defective and had to be sent in to get a new one. The rest of the problems however, remained. It still freezes and still has that 10 second delay shit that drives me crazy. My old iPod mini became a mass storage device for a while until it decided that it didn‘t want me to have any of my files back. So now it’s a useless piece of junk. I guess I did get a defective one. They’re all defective.

My roommate came in a while ago and said his Nano was frozen and it was. The backlight was stuck on and everything. It stayed like that for a couple of hours and then just turned off by it’s self. What the hell? Why is this such a big problem still? Is it just so damn popular you don’t even have to fix the problems? How much more simple does it need to be for it to not do this. It has one function; play music, and it freezes. It’s not rocket science.

House Creatures

2008-01-09T22:05:00.000-08:00

Well all of our pets died/disappeared so that means my family had to get a new generation of pets. (AKA one puppy and one kitten)

The puppy is the newer addition. It’s an Australian Shepard with fur white like snow, eyes as blue as the sky, and teeth like a motherfucking piranha. She lives in the kitchen and outside. Whenever you enter the kitchen she bounds out of the pantry tackles your feet and begins to bite them. Rest assured that this is going to occur for the entire duration of your stay in the room. She literally *will not* stop biting you until you leave. It’s occasionally punctuated by her trying to jump up on you or rip the cuffs off your pant legs but that’s about the zenith of interaction you’re going to achieve. This would be less annoying and a little more cute if it wasn’t so damn painful. You have to wear shoes if you go in the kitchen now but even then, her tiny teeth still go through and get your foot anyway. And not only that, she just starts biting your ankle. It’s not like she just wants something to chew on , she actually seeks out your vulnerable spot and bites it. She *wants* to hurt you.

There’s not even anything you can do to stop her either. Moving around makes it more fun for her. Staying still is a surefire way to get wounded. Kicking her away makes her do it more. I hope she grows out of this before she gets big enough to reach my face.

The cat has been around since before Thanksgiving. When I came home for break he avoided me at first but after everyone in the house went to sleep he would come into my room because I stay up late. He would hide under my bed and I could actually pet him sometimes. But since I came home for Christmas break he won’t give me the time of day and it pisses me off.

This is about as close as I can get to him before he runs away. (Yes
I’m aware of the resemblance to Ceiling Cat.) You can get closer if you aren’t male. (however that works) He’s constantly hiding and most of the time the only way you can tell he exists is by observing how much food is left in his dish. But then again that’s a variable because the stupid dog eats it too. What’s the point of having a cat if you can’t go anywhere near it? It’s a waste of money. I want companionship you bastard!

Recently I was given charge of the animals. Night came and it was raining so I brought the dog in. She basically lays right outside the door so she’s easy to find. The cat was there too, right next to the dog as a matter of fact. As I stipulated earlier, the dog is a sadistic maniac that no wants to be around. When I opened the door the dog ran in and the cat ran away. This leads me to ask the question, what does the cat think I could do to him that’s worse than what the dog is already doing to him? Unfortunately I was supposed to get the cat inside too. Fucking cat. You don’t have to let me touch you, just go in the house. After about ten minutes of *here kitty kitty* I finally got some food and lured him close enough to capture and bring in. I set him down and he promptly ran away under the staircase.

Can’t you get pets that are in between annoyingly violent and boringly reclusive?