Alone in the Dark (1992)

I haven't been playing video games much until recently. Been in a long transitional period and I either didn't have the time, or i was painting pictures or working on my next book or the games weren't anything to complain about. I've had the original Alone in the Dark for Windows for a while. I’ll be damned if I can get it to work on my Win7 with DOS Box or whatever. I do still have my Win98 computer which I theoretically keep for playing my old PC games. Haven’t hooked it up to try. Anyway, some time ago I stumbled upon Alone in the Dark in the Apple Store for iOS/tablet. It was like 99¢ or $1.99. Who the hell would want this, I thought. Is there really a significant market of massive nerds wanting to play this esoteric, clunky, old PC title on a touch screen? I bought it. It was on my horror game backlog and so cheap, might as well.

Alone in the Dark is credited with being the first 3D survival horror game. It allows you to play an adventure as one of two different characters like in AitD New Nightmare and of course one of those characters is the recurring protagonist, Edward Carnby who looks considerably less gritty but more dapper than his later incarnations and I’m fairly certain he may challenge you to fisticuffs if you disrespect his alma mater. I played the game a little, awkwardly duking it out with monsters in the attic that looked like life sized animate origami monstrosities and then I got stuck and stopped which is my problem with digital games. I just don’t possess the same drive to finish them. I picked the game up again like a year later, (now) and continued on.

Other similarities to New Nightmare include going to investigate at a haunted mansion and the backgrounds all being pre rendered images with a static view which I’m not really a fan of. Your control and view of your immediate environment suffers significantly as your character can be in and out of view and depicted in starkly different sizes and angles. There’s always the possibility that an enemy is directly in your path but hidden out of frame. These and your lack of depth perception can often make combat difficult.

The controls are sluggish and every time you wish to perform an action like attack or search you have to select it from a menu and then perform it. Edward is SO damn slow. The only character I’ve seen walk this slow is Nigel from Lost Crown and if you know who that is I love you. Edward can actually run but that presents its own problems which I’ll get to later. Edward’s sloth-like movements aren’t so bad since the majority of monsters you combat are just about as slow.

The game is non-linear so you’re just wandering around this NOT DARK house looking for items that will help you defeat enemies that are in the way or unlock doors or otherwise advance to new areas. One thing I found odd was all the junk you can accumulate in your inventory. There’s so much waste. When you get a first aid kit it’s not even a first aid kit. You open it up and there’s a flask inside and then you drink the flask and get health. Then in your inventory you have the empty kit box and the empty flask. So to make room in your inventory you have to toss them on the ground somewhere hopefully out of the way because they’re going to be there forever and if you walk over them it’s going to ask if you want to pick them up. Why can’t it just be a one part kit that is consumed when you use it? Also you’re presumably now walking around a poltergeist house wasted after chugging a whole flask.

There are three parts in the game where you need to use your lantern, which needs fuel and a lighter, to see. You’ll walk through a door and suddenly the entire screen will be black which always makes me think the game crashed again. I thought it was strange that you pull out the lamp and suddenly the room is illuminated homogeneously like every other room like the lantern is just a thing you hold that turns on the lightswitch. I know it’s an old game and I wasn’t expecting it to produce real time lighting effects but they could at least prerender the room darker. In fact they could do that for a lot of rooms because there was a distinct lack of spooky atmosphere. At the end of the game there is a segment where you go through a dark maze with your lantern. Just like the rooms all screens are uniformly illuminated while holding the lantern. The view is a bird’s eye almost top down view which essentially makes the maze something you’d find on a kid’s menu placemat. There are no enemies or items. It’s just you in a maze that you can completely see. What was the point, I thought. It would be one thing if it was a different view but there are no secrets. It’s just a matter of looking to see if the path goes through to the next screen and then walking there. It wasn’t until later when I watched Youtube footage from a PC playthrough that I saw what it was supposed to be, a little circle of illuminated area around the character with the rest of the screen masked off in black. What the hell? What else have I been missing on this shitty tablet port? Oh I remember, the music and sounds WEREN’T WORKING EITHER.

There are over a dozen different enemies in this game and only four of them can be killed with a gun. In fact a lot of them can’t even be killed at all. If you ever wonder if something or someone is an enemy. It is. So don’t touch it or you’ll probably die. That ghost sitting in the armchair? It’s going to be sitting there till the end of the game. Some of these things I understand but then there’s that pirate that I’m only allowed to kill with a sword and not the gun. Why? The enemies that can be killed with a gun aren’t worth the bullets and then the stronger ones are invincible or have to be killed with a special item. The worst of all is the rats in the cellar. You can’t kill them! They’re ordinary rats and you can’t kill them! You can attack them and they bleed and get knocked away but they don’t die. You just have to look around and accept that rats will probably be biting you.

There are some odd weapons you’ll find in the house including knives, swords and even a bow with only three arrows. For firearms there are two guns, a revolver and what the game claims is a rifle but it looks like a pump action shotgun and it uses “cartridges” that look like shotgun shells so I wasn’t too clear on that. It takes you two seconds to aim and fire it so make sure you’re far away from the enemy.

After you finish stuff in the house, you go underground into the caves and then shit gets real. If there was ever a game that shouldn’t expect you to be agile and accurate, this is it… and Ultima 8. Now I don’t know what this game is like as it was intended, (on PC,) but it sure as shit can’t be better with touch controls. There’s a directional pad in one corner of the screen and the action button in the other. It’s a walk, adjust, walk, adjust, walk, adjust affair typical of the early 3D Playstation games but worse because it lacks tactile feedback. When you go underground the first thing you have to do is run across a breakaway death bridge. It has no rails or ropes and the doorway at the end is smaller than the width of the bridge so you have to line that shit up on your best guess without seeing and gun it in one straight shot. If that wasn’t bad enough, getting into a run is actually difficult too. You’re supposed to double tap the forward arrow and hold but it works like 25% of the time. So if you get all that to align you immediately have to run down a tunnel while being chased by a graboid that will kill you on touch. The escape route from its path takes you directly into the most fucking agressive mole monster, (or whatever these are supposed to be,) in the game with no warning. And it’s right in the blind spot between views so you’ll probably have to kill it without being able to see it. Once it starts hitting you, you might as well reload the game because you can’t escape and you can’t get a hit in between its blows. It’s the action adventure equivalent of a marlboro hitting your party with bad breath.

A lot of annoying stuff down here including narrow breakaway catwalks, invincible enemies and respawning enemies but on the plus side I can apparently walk on water.

When I got to the boss of the game I didn’t even realize it was the boss of the game. It’s a tree growing on a tomb surrounded by water and one other enemy, oh and it shoots fireballs at you. I was annoyed by the stupid fireballs which were hard to dodge and make it difficult to explore. I found a hook which I used to unlock a door and then left. It wasn’t until looking at a walkthrough that I knew what that was all about. Can you imagine that? Has that EVER happened to you? You suddenly drop in on the final boss of the game and you’re like “Hey, I’m trying to explore a Lovecraftian cave system here. Can you maybe cut it out with that fireball shit? It’s making things kind of hard. Okay, I’m leaving now. Thanks for nothing. What was his problem?” You’re not supposed to be able to leave a boss chamber or screen in a video game until you defeat the boss! I thought that was standard. If I’d been locked in there I would have gathered that I needed to accomplish more there instead of continuing to wander around like a dumbass revisiting all of the places I’d been. I eventually had to consult a walkthrough and then a playthrough to figure out that you’re supposed to use the pendant on the stone marker beneath the tree and then light your lantern and throw it at the tree to burn it. Bitch, the tree was just shooting fireballs at me. Why would I try to burn it? Though I guess I did figure out I had to shoot an arrow at an arrow shooting painting. Maybe I’d know this shit if I’d read all of those stupid lore books I kept finding in the house. So I did what it said and nothing happened when I threw the lantern. I did it over a dozen times from different angles but it would not burn the tree. Eventually I said screw it, I’ve beaten it enough. I’m done. I watched the escape and the end sequence on Youtube.

One interesting observation I made about this game is that it’s probably the game that invented the dragged away game over screen you get in later games like Silent Hill 3 and Haunting Ground.

It’s short. It’s unexpectedly more playable than I thought. It was the pioneer of a genre but in the end I’m left with one burning question: Did this game actually scare anyone when it came out? I don’t know. I tried to research it but I couldn’t find any accounts which would have to be either magazine scans or Johnny-come-lately online reviews from the internet’s precambrian era but those would have been on sites/servers that have all died off. The game’s very dated and I’m pretty jaded so it’s impossible for me to gauge its worth in this area. Not only that but I didn’t even get the full experience. It will remain a mystery...

Patapon

The PSP sucks. Like Nintendo consoles since the dawn of the Gamecube, it has fostered nothing but a gaping void in its library where all of the good/interesting games should be. Practically half of its games seem to be Japan release only. It only has one joystick which essentially means every single 3D game is going to have a shitty camera in it. The battery power light sits under where my thumb sits on the button so I never see it change and then it just shuts off abruptly without warning. It’s a victim of Sony’s bullshit proprietary media conspiracy. If you want to have any reasonable amount of memory space on the damn thing, you have to spend upwards of $75 on a Memory Stick Duo Pro, (those memory cards that are used in… nothing else, maybe some kind of shitty Sony camera?) Nevermind that the PSP should have at least some built-in memory. It’s completely idiotic to have to buy a component separately that’s required for the device to function and at that price it’s almost like buying a second fucking PSP. Or you can just buy a Micro SD and put it in a Memory Stick adapter like I did for less than half the price. See, if Sony had a non astronomical price point for their presumably diamond-plated memory cards, I would have just bought one. Now since they left me no alternative they get none of my money because they are fucking greedy dumbasses. I mean they’re not even TRYING to be competitive with their prices. They’re just raping you straight in the eye.

All of that being said, HOLY FUCK DOES IT EMULATE! That is the ONLY reason and a damn good one to get a PSP. Because of the things it does that the company never intended it to do.

   

I finally got around to playing Patapon, not really knowing what to expect. It actually has the unique concept of being a rhythm real time strategy game. That’s weird. You control a tribe of little warrior guys called patapons by beating orders to them with a drum.

The most annoying aspect of this game is how fucking demanding it is on your attention. The volume has to be on. You need to be constantly engaged with the beat and giving orders to keep your combo going or you lose it and the amount of damage you do is greatly lessened until you can build it back up again. There’s no time to think or scratch your ass and there’s no pause button either. Even Guitar Hero has a pause. A big part of being a portable game is ease of access. In any other game I’ve played, I can find a nice spot in a level and put the PSP in sleep mode. Then when I come back, I can just pick up from there as if I never left. But Patapon doesn't play that shit. You need a solid uninterrupted block of time in the hyperbolic time chamber with no distractions. I have a wife, a two-year-old, a dog, school and a job. I can’t just tell it all to shut the fuck up because I’m trying to play Patapon.”

Whenever circumstances force me to put the game down, I usually just find myself quitting the level. I was mid battle and I just threw away my frenzy by stopping. If I put it in sleep and come back, I’ve lost all of my momentum and I’m just going to have to pick up the beat again and try to dig myself out of the shitty situation I created, (sometimes hopelessly) so what’s the point? Just start over again. All because of a momentary falter in my concentration.

The warriors are all blithering imbeciles. A single ordinary enemy melee guy can take out an entire unit of spear guys without taking a hit simply because spear guys are too retarded to use spears for close range or melee attacks. He’ll just stand there hacking away at them and they won’t lift a finger in self defense. It’s like in chess if you have a pawn and a knight next to each other. The pawn can attack the knight but the knight can’t do shit to the pawn until it backs up a couple of spaces. (Is that right? I’ve never played chess.)

Your infantry guys are just suicidal and are typically the first to die. Although half of the time they’re just used for blocking. The rangers hang out in the back, shooting arrows in a big arc over the rest of your guys. They’re last to die and also incapable of defending themselves at close range. They’re always falling in and out of range of the enemy and constantly have to move to set up again only to find that the enemy has since moved again and they must set up again elsewhere. God help you if all you have left is your rangers and they’re up against one last infantry guy who just strolls back and forth. These are the moments that you just want to put the game down and go get a drink or get on the internet while the rangers are dicking around but you can’t. You have to stay there and beat the fucking drum while two equally moronic parties scroll back and forth across the screen until chaos theory allows enough accidental arrow strikes to cause death. The only control you have over the situation is to just keep telling them to attack.

The horse guys do fuckall as far as I can tell so I never used them. I never even recruited any of the lumbering tank guys. My favorite though is the Megapons. They strut around with these sousaphone instruments and when they play them, it launches weird symbols or sounds that crash into the enemy. It looks like you’re hurling obscenities at them.

There are three types of levels; hunting, battle ground and boss. Hunting is easiest to survive. The objective is to just kill as much wild game as you can before they have a chance to run away. Infantry units are counter productive in these scenarios because they just chase animals away. Battles are the most fun because you’re just going through, mowing down fortified defenses and killing the evil bizzaro patapons. I really hated boss fights at first. Typically bosses telegraph their attacks to you by assuming a specific posture indicative of what they will do next. Maybe it’s about to slam the ground and you need everyone to jump back to evade it. Or maybe it’s best to just block whatever it is. What’s particularly annoying is that it takes four beats to input a command and then some for your guys to carry out the command, meaning there’s a humongous latency of four to six beats between each complete action your guys do. Way too often you don’t have enough time to finish the evade or block command before the attack hits you. You have to just follow the pace of the game’s beat regardless of how out of sync you may be with the boss. You might start putting in the attack command and then immediately see the boss assume his attack posture. Now just accept the fact that you’re going to get clobbered and can’t do anything about it because there’s not enough time to put in another command. Maybe if you act really quick, you can abandon your previous command and put in a new one but then you lose your combo which makes everything take longer. Either way it blows and there really isn’t much you can do about it except play extremely defensive/paranoid.

There are various things that you need to collect on certain levels like a catapult to attack a castle or a new command that lets you beat another level. On one level you need to call rain down from the sky to cross the scorching desert. And let me tell you about that fucking rain. You need it but they don’t tell you where you can get the command for it. You have to do the beat written on this random totem in a random level. Then you get the “Dom” drum which just means that you can use the X button to drum now. Then it teaches you the sequence to call rain which is “X,X,X,X,X” Seeing that written out makes absolutely no fucking sense in a musical scenario. Its like me telling you to sing that one song that goes “dun dun dun dunnnn dun dun dun dun dun dun dunnnn.” The beat in the game is always 4/4 time. (It’s kind of hard to waltz into battle.) There are five notes to activate rain or whatever power so you can sort of deduce that at least two of the notes in “X,X,X,X,X” are going to have to be eighth notes or offbeats. But that doesn’t really help much. Do you know how many different ways there are to shove five notes in a 4/4 measure? A lot. On top of that, you can only enter it while in a frenzy. So in order to try to enter it just once, you have to string together a ten measure combo prior. If you fail to start the rain, start over from the beginning and try a different way. But that’s only half of it. After you successfully get a frenzy and then enter the command correctly, you have to do a simon says minigame where you copy the beats on screen to build rain clouds. After that sequence, you automatically lose your frenzy because you don’t know when the regular in-game beat is going to start again so you miss it. Then finally it rains. You have to do this every time you want to use a juju. Gee, I don’t think this is as convoluted, annoying and cryptic as it could be. Do you think there’s any way we can do it while balancing spinning plates and walking on an invisible tightrope in a wind tunnel?  

I don’t feel like strategizing a lot of the time. If I come across something difficult, I’m probably more likely to just throw more guys at it than think about a strategy. That’s what General Ulysses S. Grant would do and he seems cool. sometimes you just need more powerful guys but there’s a limited number you can have of each type. You can’t make more powerful ones until you get rid of older shitty ones to clear space. I couldn’t figure out how to do this for a long time until I finally looked it up on the internet. You have to select the guy and press select to retire him. Select is clearly labeled on the screen as “Quit” AKA having nothing to do with it’s actual function. Except in that screenshot from the internet that I posted, it says "retire." Do I have a defective version of the game or something? No wonder I couldn't figure it out.

During levels, you can find weapons, shields, money and raw materials which are all typically dropped by stronger enemies. The problem is when you’re facing a horde of enemies and you kill one, you can’t get whatever it dropped until you clear the other enemies out of the way. Items disappear after a certain amount of time and that time is often too short so it will be gone by the time you get there. One of the stupidest cliches in video games is when shit disappears when you put it down or don’t pick it up in time. How many times have you accidentally thrown something on the ground in Harvest Moon instead of handing it to your girlfriend and then it vanishes into thin air? It’s such a fucking pointless mechanic and why would you even design it like that except to be an asshole? There should be one scenario where something is allowed to disappear: magic. Did a wizard magic that shield away to an alternate dimension? If the answer is no, then it needs to fucking stay on the ground until someone picks it up, like in reality.

Other than better equipment, the materials you find are basically what you use to upgrade your patapons. Each warrior type takes two specific object types and some money to create. The better the objects, the better the warrior but also the higher the cost, (and it goes up fast.) Money does not accumulate fast enough during the natural progression of the game so when I get to a certain spot that needs more warriors to get past, I end up having to grind for cash at the hunting grounds so I can make them. It actually gives you instructions on how to grind as a tip. This aspect could have been a lot less annoying if I could sell raw materials for cash but you can’t for some reason. You can’t sell your materials or even your old shitty equipment and as a result I have rare materials up the ass but I can’t do anything with them because I don’t have enough money to craft them.

There are some mini games where you can gamble, (or throw away in the toilet,) a material that you can’t use to win a better material that you can’t use. I’ve unlocked four of them and they all seem to be simon says type games. The one with the Bonbon tree, or whatever it is, is pretty easy. The xylophone in the rock baby’s toes; not so much. The biggest problem with it is that I can’t fucking hear it. The music is too overbearing and makes it nearly inaudible. I seriously have to turn the volume all the way up if I want any chance of picking up the xylophone tones. The metallurgy anvil one I tried once. Then I stopped because I didn’t feel like chucking away a bunch of rare shit just so I could learn the game well enough to be successful at it. For the cooking one, I was never even able to find whatever material they wanted so I was never able to play it. But rest assured, If I ever come across whatever apparently ultra rare material it requires, I’ll be first in line to piss it away on your undoubtedly contrite cooking minigame.        

Thoughts after E3: WiiU

WiiU

Once upon a time I loved Nintendo games. When I think 'beloved nostalgic video game' the first games to come to mind are Mario 64, Ocarina of Time, Pokemon Red and Link's Awakening. Those were the days. But then the next generation came along and suddenly there were three choices now: Xbox, Gamecube and PS2. I didn't really know where to go from there. I looked at the Nintendo Gamecube because Nintendo was all I'd ever known and it had been great so far. The console looked stupid, the controller looked stupid and there weren't any games that interested me. It's hard for me to know if at that point I grew out of Nintendo or Nintendo grew out of me. The continuation of my favorite games/franchises just didn't look appealing to me at all. Toon Link in Wind Waker looks like shit. Mario Sunshine is about washing things. For some reason, the fanboy parasite that had been implanted in my brain never flourished. I couldn't just buy a game simply because it had Mario or Link in it. Both of those games are fun... probably. But they look stupid/ugly so I don't want to play them. And that has been all I've thought about Nintendo since. The console looks stupid, the controller looks stupid and there aren't any games that interest me is exactly what I thought about the Gamecube, exactly what I thought about the Wii and exactly what I think about the WiiU.
 
Nintendo didn't do a big flashy press conference at E3 this year because they're idiots. They have a bad system launch with a weak line-up of games followed by mass confusion. Then a chance to set everyone straight arises with E3 and what do they do? Avoid the big stage. Yes, that will surely work things out. Good thinking, Nintendo. But I guess they didn't really have anything to show. They did some smaller Nintendo Direct thingies where they unveiled... a slough of underwhelming and predictable games everyone had already seen.
 
OH MY GOD! The WiiU is going to have Mario and Zelda on it? STOP THE FUCKING PRESSES! I guess I should just be impressed that it's going to get ANY games at all... even though it's not any time soon. You know what got people really excited? Megaman being confirmed in the new Super Smash Brothers about ten years too late. What's the matter? Did you finally run out of Mario characters so you have to resort to putting something of substance in now? This really shows how overrated and blown out of proportion SSB has become because people literally hang on Nintendo's every word when they're making a roster. Every time another character is confirmed, it generates as much if not more hype than if they announced a new game starring that character. It's just one big circle jerk and it's so pathetic that people shit themselves over this. I need to get a WiiU because Megaman is going to be on the roster of a game coming out in a year. Does that make any sense to you? Well it does if you're a retarded fanboy. 

Why does Megaman look like a dwarf toddler? Isn't Megaman a... man? His N64 model looked better than this... And they still don't have Simon Belmont. It's like there was some kind of renaissance where they went through all their characters, (Megaman is Capcom but whatever,) and made them all look like shit for every game then on. They've zeroed in on the uncanny valley. I seriously just hate their style now because they can't seem to make anything that doesn't look stupid, ugly, infantile, or possesses even a shred of dignity except for maybe Metroid... which they didn't show.

Back when I enjoyed playing Nintendo games THEY DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THIS! You can not tell me that this shit is meant for anyone mentally past the age of five. And if you are not absolutely sick of Mario by now, you are either too young to have gotten bored yet or you have a mental disorder.

Things that weren't Mario and Zelda included Bayonetta 2. A WiiU exclusive sequel that shouldn't exist to a game that was fucking stupid. The combat was top notch but everything else about it was fucking stupid. I know because I own it. The game sold bad and didn't make enough profit to spawn a sequel. Everything was exactly how it should be but then Nintendo decided for whatever reason, (probably because it's stupid and Bayonetta is repulsive,) that it was worth picking up.
 
You know what would have been interesting? Something actually new and refreshing made by Nintendo or just something unexpected. Nintendo unfortunately owns the rights to Fatal Frame now. They could theoretically make a Fatal Frame game where you use the stupid tablet controller as the viewfinder of the camera. Wouldn't that be something? No, it wouldn't because it's not Mario or Zelda.
 
I think I've finally figured out what Nintendo is doing and it kind of disturbs me. They're crippling themselves and it's on purpose. They're narrowing their scope to a critically small range to pinpoint a niche market of players... their own fans. Nintendo superfans. Yes, they're targeting people that are already brainwashed and loyal to their company. They cut out the rest of the potential market by not doing a press conference and they're pigeonholing their games by bailing out all of the third party developers and not focusing on any big new IPs. At this rate, the WiiU is just going to be a one trick pony Mario and Zelda box for their mindless fans that lack the capacity to care about anything else. If Sony's PS4 only had Infamous, God of War, Resistance, Little Big Planet, Uncharted and WipEout games, that would get pretty fucking stale and boring but it looks as thought that's what Nintendo is shooting for. 

Assuming Xbox One stays delusional, this generation is only going to be one and a half consoles: The WiiU with only Nintendo Games and the PS4 with literally EVERYTHING else. Their presence at E3 consisted entirely of remakes, sequels and rehashes. Nintendo is the new Apple, once great but now stagnant and bricking itself into a corner with its cult of slaves.

Thoughts after E3: Playstation 4

Playstation 4

Sony had a gigantic leg up in E3 in that they went after Microsoft's Chernobyl of a presentation and really that was all that they needed. They came out and said "We won't be doing any of that bullshit that Microsoft is doing" and everyone's like "I'll take ten PS4s, please." Other than that, the PS4 looks... okay... except that they'll be charging for online now. I think just for multiplayer. I'm not a big multiplayer guy so whatever. It's still stupid though. Why does it cost to play multiplayer on a console but it's free on a PC? Are console's just assholes? Probably.
 
For the longest time, Sony didn't say anything about the actual PS4 console, just the controller which I don't give a shit about. It's a controller. That's like if a car company was unveiling a new car and all they talked about was the fucking steering wheel. If this wasn't the video game apocalypse, the PS4 would probably be considered decent/okay but since the standards have been drastically lowered, people went ape shit fanatical over features that we've had forever. We just took them for granted until they were finally jeopardized by Microsoft. These are just simple things that Sony wouldn't have even mentioned if Microsoft hadn't made them a huge deal. But they DID make them a huge deal and suddenly those simple things became a pivotal selling point. Sony did say that the emphasis would be on games which people liked. Well no shit, it's a game console. But it's not like they brought out a game or added some kind of groundbreaking innovation that got everyone excited. They just weren't insufferable scumbags.
 
Microsoft: Our new system stabs you in the face when you pick up the controller.
 
Sony: Our new system DOESN'T stab you in the face when you pick up the controller.
 
Audience: *deafening cheers*
 
We're seriously all on board with Sony just for doing the same old and not raping us but also because they told Microsoft to go fuck themselves. And I have to say, good for them. I really missed the Sega/Nintendo slur campaigns of the 90's. No one really wants to rock the boat anymore but when your opponent digs a hole that deep and you know everyone hates them, how can you resist? Sony at E3 was exactly like the scene at the end of Oh Brother Where Art Thou where the governor campaign subplot is resolved. The new candidate goes on stage interrupting everyone's fun, says he's a member of a KKK lynch mob and proclaims that fun is now over. After he gets booed and yanked off stage, the incumbent takes the mic and says, "Wow, that guy's a real dick. Bring the fun back out. Fun for all!" After that, it's just in the bag. So there you go, the prize for least shitty-looking new console goes to the PS4... because they weren't insufferable scumbags.

Thoughts after E3: Xbox One

I've wanted to say something about all the next gen consoles just like I did for the last generation of consoles but I wanted to wait for E3 before I did it. After seeing Microsoft and Nintendo's hands, the coming E3 was something that I beheld with horror, a great juggernaut on the horizon. The destroyer of worlds. This is it, I thought. This is the end of video games. At least I have a giant backlog of games from a less shitty time, a simple time where consoles actually played games and didn't try to sell you Doritos. A time where you could own a game like you could own a movie or a car or a hammer. Oh, what we once had...

 

Xbox One

Does this really require any discussion at all? It's a cable box with the design language of the 1970's, only lacking the faux wood paneling. It costs the most out of the three consoles by $100. It's Kinect mandatory. It doesn't support used games. It has a DRM policy that requires it to have not only an internet connection but a paid subscription to Xbox LIVE or it locks you out. It watches you masturbate, reports you to HUAAC as a terrorist, rapes your dog and sets fire to your house. Yes, that's correct, It was designed by blind aliens that live in a cave. You would have to be completely fucking delusional to think people would want this.
 
Even after seeing what happened with Sim City's always online DRM disaster, Microsoft still thought it could pull off an entire console that does this. Perhaps it was too late to alter course at that point but it doesn't matter because you shouldn't have to learn this from example. Do some critical thinking and USE YOUR FUCKING BRAIN. What is the point of requiring online checks? It's to make piracy more difficult. So who does it benefit? Ultimately no one. It can only be at best for the consumer not a hindrance and at worst, it makes the system unplayable. For the company that makes the system it makes less people want to buy from them. It's a feature that only has negative effects that outweigh whatever 'good' it was intended to do. There's a Confucius quote for this; "Never use a cannon to kill a fly." You can't stop piracy. In trying to kill the unkillable fly, you just destroy everything around it. If you have to stop piracy so bad, then don't make games, because that is the only way. No one will be playing them anyway.
 
The no used games thing is really all they need to say to get me to not care about the new Xbox. Probably around 80% of my games are used because new games have an overblown price tag and I don't believe in digital copies. They're trying to strip away every basic freedom that players have enjoyed since day one of the first home console. Imagine if in the next election, one of the candidates said "If I become president, I will abolish the constitution. There will be no freedom of speech, no right to a trial or any of those other things that the government and law enforcement find annoying or difficult to deal with." Would you vote for them?
 
No, you know what? These aren't basic rights of people that play video games, they're basic rights of consumers in general. Right now you can go into your public library and borrow any number of intellectual properties in every medium including movies, books and music and enjoy them for free. But woe betide anyone trying to pull that shit with a video game, our most time honored and sacred of art forms. A new video game costs 2-3 times more than a new movie which has a comparable budget. Game publishers like EA essentially don't want you to be able to own their products, making greedy corporations like the MPAA and RIAA look like Santa Claus by comparison. Like I said in the beginning, a game should be just as easy to buy, use, loan and sell as a hammer. It's not magical. It's not the Second Coming of Christ. It's just a fucking product like every other product in the world. This holier than thou bullshit that video games have needs to stop but it won't. Why? It's all because we, (and by 'we' I really mean all you dumbasses out there,) allow it to continue by preordering and buying their shit at day one for $60. Then you buy all the day one DLC for it. Four hours later you're trading it in for $2 toward the next over-priced and over-hyped piece of shit.
 
But even you dumbasses have a limit, a limit which was finally found by Microsoft. So congratulations to you. When Microsoft peddled the Xbox One at their reveal and at E3, you didn't stand up and cheer "Yes, Microsoft! Yes! Please sodomize me with your endless and extremely convoluted list of totalitarian rules detailing what I can and can't do with MY games that I purchased. I can't wait to have a device in my home straight out of a dystopian sci-fi novel that watches and or listens to everything I say! And I love the added feature of needing to be connected to the internet for no good reason! It's so very useful and not at all a potential stumbling block!" Yes, good job, dumbasses. There may be hope for you yet.

What's in a name: WiiU

Nintendo recently launched a brand new game console called the WiiU. I know this probably comes as quite a surprise to you seeing as how Nintendo apparently wants to keep it a secret. Needless to say it did mediocre in launch sales. There are many factors that people suspect in this equation of failure; the small cluster of games the device has, most of which are ports of games that everyone has already played, few and dwindling supply of third party developers tagging along or their 'accidental' target market of casual gamers wandering away during the advent of addictive and easily accessible phone and tablet games. But the most glaring and weighty fuckup (that is completely Nintendo's doing) is that no one knows that the WiiU even exists and if they do know about it, they don't know what the hell it is. They think it's a new expensive controller for the Wii.

Everyone knows 'Wii' was a stupid name. If you disagree, you're wrong. Sorry. What the fuck is a Wii? The word 'we' already exists. Maybe it's more like 'wee' as in 'Wee! I'm having fun!' or wee as in small or piss or penis. I really don't get how it can be the name of a product. Next generation rolls around and they decide to keep the terrible name 'Wii' and put an irrelevant letter at the end of it. 'WiiU' is still not a name. In fact it doesn't even resemble a word anymore. It's an onomatopoeia. It's the sound that Patrick Star makes when he's imitating a siren. I think I see what they were going for. It's like 'We' and 'You' put together... and... it's still stupid. It might as well be WiiTHEY or WiiBeepBoop.

The worst thing about the name is the ambiguity. It means nothing... That's not entirely true. The most important part of the name 'WiiU' is 'Wii' as in the previous console which was very successful. If you want to have a successful followup console, it might be a smart move to associate it with the prior, already established and already successful, console. Unfortunately the 'U' part of the name doesn't do it's job at indicating that this is a new Nintendo console.

When You name a new console, It goes (company name,) (console name,) (number/version;) i.e. Microsoft Xbox 360 or Nintendo 64. There was only one 64 so it never needed any version indicator. Look at Playstation, (the best example,) it has PS, PS2, PS3 and soon PS4 like movie sequels. Although a rather boring naming convention, there's no bullshit and people know what the fuck is going on when the number at the end of the name increases by one. There are of course exceptions like the Super Nintendo Entertainment System but you know what, I think adding the word super in front of anything lets you know it's new and different.

So why can Microsoft call their second Xbox an irrelevant name like '360' and Nintendo can't call their second Wii a 'U?' Well, Microsoft actually told people about it for one. But ignoring that, you have to look back at the Wii and the accessories piled high around it. The console is easily the most accessorized gaming device ever times ten. There are Wii Sports things like bats, rackets and golf clubs. There's the balance board. There are handguns, shotguns and crossbows. Then there's the Wii Wheel, Wii remote and Wii Plus. I just looked it up and it's incomprehensible. Is all this shit real? It was actually manufactured and sold in stores?

There are so many Wii tea cozies and Wii dialysis machines flying around, how is anyone supposed to pick out something called a 'WiiU?' It's easy to dismiss any random product with Wii as a prefix as just some accessory for the Wii or one of its games. In context with the rules that Nintendo has established, the name 'WiiU' means that the product is a U. It's a U made for the Wii. This is why people are literally thinking like this:



Should we get one of those new U controllers for the Wii? Never mind. It's $300. That's ridiculous.

Nintendo keeps up their tradition of slapping the console name on every game they can get away with. Remember Wave Race 64, Doom 64, Quest 64, etc? That was stupid and unnecessary but at least it was consistent. Now with the letter U as the focus things are just going to devolve further into a giant muddled punfest clusterfuck.

Look at Wii Fit U. Why isn't it WiiU Fit? The original Wii Fit was of course on the Wii. They failed to give the game any sort of identity and Instead attached Wii to it, you know, so that consumers won't get confused and think that the game is for the Gamecube or the Genesis. The problem now is that the sequel game isn't on the Wii. It's on the WiiU. So it actually has two consol names in the name now but it looks like they just stuck the word 'Fit' into the name WiiU. Then there's the problem with the way it sounds: "We fit you." It makes a sentence. A sentence that has nothing to do with anything. A sentence that if you think about it for too long actually begins to sound really creepy in a Silence of the Lambs woman suit sort of way.

So how do you avoid this kind of disaster? Well, here's what you do; give the console a completely new name to distinguish it from the Wii or name it 'Wii2.' Now I know its not punny or annoyingly whimsical or as childish sounding but it gets the point across. This is the new Wii. Better than the old Wii.

Or better yet, you could use these things called 'advertisments' and tell people that the product exists, what it does and why you'd want to buy one.

Dead Space: Extraction

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

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

Why go next gen?

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.

Codec City

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.