Alice/Madness Returns

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

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

Rhiannon: Curse of the Four Branches

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Great Books For Children

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

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

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


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


Be sure to feed your pudgy beaver lots of wood.


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


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


Well… shit.


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


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


What the hell?

No, seriously, what the hell?


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

Look at them!


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


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


I stand corrected.

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


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


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


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

Tomb Raider: Anniversary

CLICK

Domino Rally

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead Rising 2

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As for leaving your daughter high and dry…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halloween 2011

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

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