Nothing media about this, but felt the need to put this all somewhere and didn't want to make something new for this one reason.
It's 2 AM. I can't sleep. This isn't a new issue. This issue happens three or four out of the seven nights in a week. I can't blame it on anything else but myself though. I couldn't stay awake during the day, and now I'm suffering for it. I could have done something to keep myself occupied, but instead I collapsed on my bed and passed out of consciousness for some time. And now I'm here.
Could I indulge in the nightlife I so often find myself in? Yeah, I guess, but I haven't figured out not to climb in bed an hour or two before I'm ready to sleep. But more so it's a lack of things to occupy my time. I feel that the day has reached a close, that I should just climb into bed and sleep the night away. Sleep feels like the next logical progression.
But it's not. Often it's not.
I'll sit in bed checking things on my phone hoping that I can stay occupied until my eyes stop reading. When that doesn't happen, I'll convince myself that it's time, put my phone down and close my eyes. They'll stay closed for minutes until I open them with ease, seemingly unaware of the goal I'm trying to achieve. My body does not function in ways I'd like it to.
And so why is it such a big deal? Why does this make me miserable? Is it anxiety of a lack of sleep for the morning? Is it fear that this horrendous "sleep schedule" is actually harmful to me in some way?
No, it's not. It's nothing like that. I think of the song Car Radio by Twenty-One Pilots. In silence, we have to confront our thoughts, there's nothing to distract us from the things we don't know about, the things we're anxious about. Lying in bed, not only am I saddened by the lack of anything worthwhile coming out of my lazy ass during the time, it's an appropriate reflection of what I do during the day. During the day, I don't do anything particularly productive and then eventually the next day happens. I don't like that. Just as I don't like that I sleep during the day and it prevents me from sleeping at night, I don't like that my avoidance of work and obligations lead me to such an empty life.
At 2 o'clock in the morning, there's nobody to talk to, nobody to share your time with, or rather, nobody to occupy me until I can sleep. Loneliness is ever apparent and it makes me question loneliness during the day as well. Not that I'd tell anybody.
So what's there to take away from all this?
It's 2 o'clock in the morning. This sucks.
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Gone Home
Gone Home is a game that's hard to describe. As a genre, it's a story driven point and click adventure game, but without really having the puzzles from a point and click game. Or an adventure game. It has puzzles, like 3, but they're all fairly straightforward and instead of needing thought to be solved, they need exploration, in which you find the right thing and it tells you how to solve the puzzle.
And it's mostly just one puzzle: what happened here? You return home to a mystery, a dark and spooky house and you try to figure out what's going on. In exploring the house, you find notes and scraps of paper explaining current events of your family, though mostly from your younger sister. Occasionally, an audio diary is played from your sister to you. And, well, that's about it. Seriously.
It's hard to explain, but I will say here that I really enjoyed this game. Though I played it for 90 minutes and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, it's not only hard to explain why, given a game so functionally bare-bones as this, but I also must do so without spoiling anything, which is pretty damn hard. This is pretty close to feeling like a movie, but could never ever be adequately done as such, as it'd make a pretty boring movie. In film, it's always said to show, not say, and there's not a lot of showing. Likewise, because you are controlling a person wandering this house, there is a sense of discovery, as you start to know the people who lived here, and you feel this story unraveling, because you're the one unraveling it. And because the player is the one unraveling the story, I feel that I'd be cheating you in revealing anything to you about the story.
I guess part of the reason I find the game difficult to describe is because I haven't played anything quite like it. If I had to equate it to anything, it's most similar to To The Moon, another short indie game with little gameplay but a magical story to tell. And in that regard, it's fantastic. It has a story, a brilliant story in my opinion, told in a unique manner, one that I can't imagine being experienced in another way. It would be like if a haunted house made you care for characters and question your perceptions of people.
I honestly can't say too much more about this game. It entertained me for 90 minutes at 3:30 in the morning. I highly suggest picking it up cheap on a steam sale, as I don't think I could recommend it for it's full price or even half of its full price, but for what I got it for, as part of the Humble Indie Bundle 12, I'm pretty damn glad I got to sit down and play through it.
If you think you could be entertained by a story driven fun house, by all means, find the game cheap and pick it up. This is a game I'd recommend to people looking to enjoy a story in a unique way. This is a game I'd offer to the "games are art" argument, as this is something that I can't imagine being enjoyed through any other media than a game, and this one nails it on the head. This game is different. It's short, it's satisfying. And it works.
And it's mostly just one puzzle: what happened here? You return home to a mystery, a dark and spooky house and you try to figure out what's going on. In exploring the house, you find notes and scraps of paper explaining current events of your family, though mostly from your younger sister. Occasionally, an audio diary is played from your sister to you. And, well, that's about it. Seriously.
It's hard to explain, but I will say here that I really enjoyed this game. Though I played it for 90 minutes and thoroughly enjoyed the experience, it's not only hard to explain why, given a game so functionally bare-bones as this, but I also must do so without spoiling anything, which is pretty damn hard. This is pretty close to feeling like a movie, but could never ever be adequately done as such, as it'd make a pretty boring movie. In film, it's always said to show, not say, and there's not a lot of showing. Likewise, because you are controlling a person wandering this house, there is a sense of discovery, as you start to know the people who lived here, and you feel this story unraveling, because you're the one unraveling it. And because the player is the one unraveling the story, I feel that I'd be cheating you in revealing anything to you about the story.
I guess part of the reason I find the game difficult to describe is because I haven't played anything quite like it. If I had to equate it to anything, it's most similar to To The Moon, another short indie game with little gameplay but a magical story to tell. And in that regard, it's fantastic. It has a story, a brilliant story in my opinion, told in a unique manner, one that I can't imagine being experienced in another way. It would be like if a haunted house made you care for characters and question your perceptions of people.
I honestly can't say too much more about this game. It entertained me for 90 minutes at 3:30 in the morning. I highly suggest picking it up cheap on a steam sale, as I don't think I could recommend it for it's full price or even half of its full price, but for what I got it for, as part of the Humble Indie Bundle 12, I'm pretty damn glad I got to sit down and play through it.
If you think you could be entertained by a story driven fun house, by all means, find the game cheap and pick it up. This is a game I'd recommend to people looking to enjoy a story in a unique way. This is a game I'd offer to the "games are art" argument, as this is something that I can't imagine being enjoyed through any other media than a game, and this one nails it on the head. This game is different. It's short, it's satisfying. And it works.
Thursday, July 3, 2014
Trans4mers
I don't believe it.
It's difficult to believe.
I am a person who not only watches internet reviews of terrible, terrible productions, I seek out some of these movies as well. I have friends who scrounge retail stores in search of VHS tapes that look bad. They watch shitty movies. For fun. I watch shitty movies and people watching shitty movies.
With all of that, without a single doubt in my mind, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction is the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life.
It's 5:03 AM right now. I left the movie theater some 8 hours and 40 minutes ago. Somewhere between the and now I got 6 hours of sleep. This movie still remains in my head, infecting my thoughts about anything else. Questions are still there to be answered. I attempt to answer the questions I propose to myself, though it's mostly just one question repeated ad nauseam.
Why?
Why, oh God, why?
Enough bullshitting around. Let's get to the movie. We arrived at the movie at 6:30 ready for something. I haven't seen any transformers anything ever, nor do I intend to, current or older. Cause I don't care. Transformers never got me as a kid except for that one that was on Toonami or some shit some 12 years ago. I knew these movies were bad. I wasn't prepared for this.
I was reluctant to even join my friends in this experience and probably wouldn't have had it not been for my wanting of the Mass Effect Trilogy. Had it not been for Mass Effect, I would not have gone to the movies. Fuck you, Mass Effect.
Ah, I didn't mean it. But whatever. Movie starts, I'm sitting in the theater next to my fairly intoxicated friend. Scene begins, some sort of disgusting looking dinosaurs doing dinosaur things until space aliens come and drop bombs turning everything nearby into metal matter. It implies that these probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, but not only do we see a small dinosaur OUTRUN the blast of the explosion, the entirety of their bombings were enough to cover the square footage of my small, 3 stoplight village. Unless they spent YEEAARS repeating this explosion technique, it's baffling how we're expected to believe they took out everything. EVERYTHING.
Cut to sometime in the future, we're in the arctic where we see a woman clearly not properly dressed to be in such cold conditions looking at a giant metal piece of something. What is it? What is she doing? I dunno, it must be important though because a person threatened to shoot her because I don't know, he's insecure?
Forgive me if I am unable to recall these scenes properly, as they're convoluted in their order, and some are just unnecessary. But whatever. At some point, Wahlberg and another guy, Lucas, enter an old movie theater. At some point we get Wahlberg's name, but it's awkward to spell, awkward to say, as it rhymes with his last name, and it's honestly just easier to call him Wahlberg because you aren't for a second going to see him as anything else. Not his fault. Anyways, in this theater, he finds a semi truck that looks like shit and takes it home with him because he's an inventer and likes fiddling with things or whatever.
Cut to his hot daughter getting out of the car with her hot friends, talks with Wahlly and Lucas- which by the way who the fuck is this guy? I don't ever remember it being stated who he is. He says to Wahl that he has a hot daughter, then says to her that he's like her uncle. He's an asshole and comic relief. Whatever. She complains that he's strict, and doesn't really make that much money, blah blah blah, whatever. A lot of nothing important happens until he hooks up the semi to a battery and jumps him alive. At some point a missile goes off, everyone calls it a missile, but it just flies around and doesn't ever explode. Optimus is jumpstarted and threatens the humans, then sees they're not bad, calms down.
Asshole Lucas called CIA or somebody to try and... why am I trying to recap this movie scene by scene? In text format, that's not necessary. The plot of the movie is stupid, people are trying to harness the metal both in transformers and from that early scene where they find a big metal something. This is where I got confused, the entire time, the villians, the big corporate baddies, one working for that company, KSI, one working for the CIA, they're talking about taking Earth back from the transformers by... creating their own? And I didn't see the previous trilogy, but didn't the transformers just fight on Earth because whatever? Were the autobots defending Earth? That's what I thought, and so the plot is after Man of Steel, everyone hates Superman because he's an alien and he caused widespread chaos because these people are masters at missing the forest for the trees. But then I don't know how much of what they say is just rhetoric, just to sound good, as the first use of their transformer prototype, it goes berserk and kills some people probably. Seeing this, the head of the company justifies it saying that innocent people die all the time. SO THEN WHY ARE YOU SO MAD AT THE TRANSFORME-nevermind.
Even with this, I guess some CIA people made a deal where they provide an alien transformer with Optimus and he gives them a seed. What is this seed? What's its practical value? It's only use is a bomb- yeah, big surprise, the bomb looking thing you got from the big evil looking alien robot is a bomb and he wants to destroy a big city. Why did they want this?
They get it, Optimus is taken, the transformers go and get him. Again, I haven't seen the previous ones, but were the same transformers in this one in that one? Cause they all suck. We were excited for Bumblebee's appearance but it's like being excited to play Brink. It's most likely going to be bad, but with the level we've overblown it, his presence alone was enough for forced enjoyment. But the other 3? There was an irish stereotype that sounded like if somebody autotuned somebody's stomach rumblings, there was an asian stereotype that stupid and offensive, and there was a transformers version of a guy halfway between Gragas from League of Legends and the Heavy from TF2. Yeah, they all suck. I hate them all. And how do they have earth stereotypes if they're aliens ah fuck it.
They go to save and they save Optimus and the entire time Wahlburg, his daughter, and her boyfriend are along for the ride and hey look, his daughter and that guy are all in love and Wahlberg doesn't approve do you see it audience do you see how Mark doesn't want this relationship to happen but they do things anyways and he gets angry at them do you see it DO YOU SEE IT YET? And her boyfriend has a terrible accent that he occasionally loses. I thought it was just generic southern, honest, but Wahlberg keeps calling him Lucky Charms, hahahaha, it wasn't funny the first time, but maybe it'll be funny the next thousand times he calls him that. He may be an inventor, but he's not creative. Everything they do sucks. Why are they in this movie? Why can't it just be about robots doing punch ups? Why does it have to involve these assholes?
Either way, Optimus is pulled off and they... all go to China? Yeah, KSI moves their R&D to china because... people in America might get suspicious? Whatever. The villain in the ship goes back to get them, there's a villain in the prototype made by KSI named Galvatron, and all the vehicles they made as prototype transformers join him by transforming in a manner similar to Chris Brown in his video "Transform Ya." In a convoluted and contrived manner, the three humans and also the baddie from KSI who is now not a bad guy and also a comic relief character so insufferable you just want to shove the bomb so deep down his throat his farts explode.
It's difficult to believe.
I am a person who not only watches internet reviews of terrible, terrible productions, I seek out some of these movies as well. I have friends who scrounge retail stores in search of VHS tapes that look bad. They watch shitty movies. For fun. I watch shitty movies and people watching shitty movies.
With all of that, without a single doubt in my mind, Transformers 4: Age of Extinction is the worst movie I have ever seen in my entire life.
It's 5:03 AM right now. I left the movie theater some 8 hours and 40 minutes ago. Somewhere between the and now I got 6 hours of sleep. This movie still remains in my head, infecting my thoughts about anything else. Questions are still there to be answered. I attempt to answer the questions I propose to myself, though it's mostly just one question repeated ad nauseam.
Why?
Why, oh God, why?
Enough bullshitting around. Let's get to the movie. We arrived at the movie at 6:30 ready for something. I haven't seen any transformers anything ever, nor do I intend to, current or older. Cause I don't care. Transformers never got me as a kid except for that one that was on Toonami or some shit some 12 years ago. I knew these movies were bad. I wasn't prepared for this.
I was reluctant to even join my friends in this experience and probably wouldn't have had it not been for my wanting of the Mass Effect Trilogy. Had it not been for Mass Effect, I would not have gone to the movies. Fuck you, Mass Effect.
Ah, I didn't mean it. But whatever. Movie starts, I'm sitting in the theater next to my fairly intoxicated friend. Scene begins, some sort of disgusting looking dinosaurs doing dinosaur things until space aliens come and drop bombs turning everything nearby into metal matter. It implies that these probably caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, but not only do we see a small dinosaur OUTRUN the blast of the explosion, the entirety of their bombings were enough to cover the square footage of my small, 3 stoplight village. Unless they spent YEEAARS repeating this explosion technique, it's baffling how we're expected to believe they took out everything. EVERYTHING.
Cut to sometime in the future, we're in the arctic where we see a woman clearly not properly dressed to be in such cold conditions looking at a giant metal piece of something. What is it? What is she doing? I dunno, it must be important though because a person threatened to shoot her because I don't know, he's insecure?
Forgive me if I am unable to recall these scenes properly, as they're convoluted in their order, and some are just unnecessary. But whatever. At some point, Wahlberg and another guy, Lucas, enter an old movie theater. At some point we get Wahlberg's name, but it's awkward to spell, awkward to say, as it rhymes with his last name, and it's honestly just easier to call him Wahlberg because you aren't for a second going to see him as anything else. Not his fault. Anyways, in this theater, he finds a semi truck that looks like shit and takes it home with him because he's an inventer and likes fiddling with things or whatever.
Cut to his hot daughter getting out of the car with her hot friends, talks with Wahlly and Lucas- which by the way who the fuck is this guy? I don't ever remember it being stated who he is. He says to Wahl that he has a hot daughter, then says to her that he's like her uncle. He's an asshole and comic relief. Whatever. She complains that he's strict, and doesn't really make that much money, blah blah blah, whatever. A lot of nothing important happens until he hooks up the semi to a battery and jumps him alive. At some point a missile goes off, everyone calls it a missile, but it just flies around and doesn't ever explode. Optimus is jumpstarted and threatens the humans, then sees they're not bad, calms down.
Asshole Lucas called CIA or somebody to try and... why am I trying to recap this movie scene by scene? In text format, that's not necessary. The plot of the movie is stupid, people are trying to harness the metal both in transformers and from that early scene where they find a big metal something. This is where I got confused, the entire time, the villians, the big corporate baddies, one working for that company, KSI, one working for the CIA, they're talking about taking Earth back from the transformers by... creating their own? And I didn't see the previous trilogy, but didn't the transformers just fight on Earth because whatever? Were the autobots defending Earth? That's what I thought, and so the plot is after Man of Steel, everyone hates Superman because he's an alien and he caused widespread chaos because these people are masters at missing the forest for the trees. But then I don't know how much of what they say is just rhetoric, just to sound good, as the first use of their transformer prototype, it goes berserk and kills some people probably. Seeing this, the head of the company justifies it saying that innocent people die all the time. SO THEN WHY ARE YOU SO MAD AT THE TRANSFORME-nevermind.
Even with this, I guess some CIA people made a deal where they provide an alien transformer with Optimus and he gives them a seed. What is this seed? What's its practical value? It's only use is a bomb- yeah, big surprise, the bomb looking thing you got from the big evil looking alien robot is a bomb and he wants to destroy a big city. Why did they want this?
They get it, Optimus is taken, the transformers go and get him. Again, I haven't seen the previous ones, but were the same transformers in this one in that one? Cause they all suck. We were excited for Bumblebee's appearance but it's like being excited to play Brink. It's most likely going to be bad, but with the level we've overblown it, his presence alone was enough for forced enjoyment. But the other 3? There was an irish stereotype that sounded like if somebody autotuned somebody's stomach rumblings, there was an asian stereotype that stupid and offensive, and there was a transformers version of a guy halfway between Gragas from League of Legends and the Heavy from TF2. Yeah, they all suck. I hate them all. And how do they have earth stereotypes if they're aliens ah fuck it.
They go to save and they save Optimus and the entire time Wahlburg, his daughter, and her boyfriend are along for the ride and hey look, his daughter and that guy are all in love and Wahlberg doesn't approve do you see it audience do you see how Mark doesn't want this relationship to happen but they do things anyways and he gets angry at them do you see it DO YOU SEE IT YET? And her boyfriend has a terrible accent that he occasionally loses. I thought it was just generic southern, honest, but Wahlberg keeps calling him Lucky Charms, hahahaha, it wasn't funny the first time, but maybe it'll be funny the next thousand times he calls him that. He may be an inventor, but he's not creative. Everything they do sucks. Why are they in this movie? Why can't it just be about robots doing punch ups? Why does it have to involve these assholes?
Either way, Optimus is pulled off and they... all go to China? Yeah, KSI moves their R&D to china because... people in America might get suspicious? Whatever. The villain in the ship goes back to get them, there's a villain in the prototype made by KSI named Galvatron, and all the vehicles they made as prototype transformers join him by transforming in a manner similar to Chris Brown in his video "Transform Ya." In a convoluted and contrived manner, the three humans and also the baddie from KSI who is now not a bad guy and also a comic relief character so insufferable you just want to shove the bomb so deep down his throat his farts explode.
Gragasbot and Bumblebee are protecting the 4 humans, which involves KSI asshole to complain about how his protection isn’t good enough. OH LAH DEE DAH the huge robots saving me from the other robots that I MANUFACTURED BY THE WAY aren’t doing their job up to my standards. I’m not satisfied well FUCK YOU. The two bots are somehow holding their own against the swarm of protobots and a lot of the focus is still spent on the humans, which involves Wahlberg shooting an alien gun at them. The things are like a thousand times his size and he’s shooting peas at them. What the fuck.
They do that and the other three go get the robo dinosaurs, what? How did they get there? Why are they there? Why do they transform into dinosaurs? Why does the robo t-rex still have tiny stubby arms, why, why, why? Whatever, they commandeer them into the city, robots are riding robots, shooting robots, it looks ugly, we’re never completely sure what exactly is going on where, we have NO idea where these bots are spatially to the other two and the humans. Gragasbot says he’s out of ammo and ideas. Asshole, you just threw a goddamn car into a robot and you’re out of ideas? What, are you getting tired? Because you’re a ROBOT. You don’t hear Bumblebee complaining. You don’t hear him saying, well, anything.
But whatever, the autobots save them, then the humans get IN A VEHICLE TO DRIVE THE BOMB. Yes, even though we’ve seen hundreds of cars bring crushed like in foil, even though we’ve seen cars flung in the air without second’s notice, even though the transformers TURN INTO CARS THAT NEVER APPEAR TO BE HURT, no, go drive the thing that’s hinting at the destruction of a major city in a goddamn hotwheel.
They don’t even go anywhere! They end up at a factory thing. Optimus fights the big bad guy whose name I don’t even know, no, it’s not the prototype bad guy, it’s the alien bad guy. Optimus has a sword because I guess swords are better than guns, the villain gets it and stabs Prime in the chest and sticks him to the wall. Bumblebee comes in and saves him, the humans are there and they help distract the guy, pull the sword out of Prime, and Prime stabs the bad guy through his robo heart and tears him apart. Over his dead body, Optimus grumbles something about wing honorable. OH YES, having 5 people jump on this guy instead of having a clean one on one fight, yeah, that’s honorable. Fuck you. By the way, what were the other autobots doing in this time? Why was Bumblebee the only one to help? Where were the dinobots? What’s going on? Am I dead yet?
Something happens, some explosion goes off NOT the bomb, mind you, just some other one, Optimus protects the humans because fuck you, and all the protobots are destroyed. They all convene somewhere and talk about… something. Galvatron, yeah, remember him? He’s in the background and walks away. Why did nobody pursue him? They just forget about him? Whatever, it’s over. The movie is over. It’s over.
Sitting in this movie theater, this mostly empty theater of maybe 15 people, my friend and I unapolagetically talked throughout the entire movie. Everything had something that could be commented on. There wasn’t a single thing in this movie that I could point to and say, “Yeah, they did that right.” There’s not a single thing in this movie that didn’t deserve to be nitpicked and pulled apart. There are all sorts of things in this movie that I haven’t talked about.
—-
All robots have green blood.
There is a robot that has a parachute.
Fire and metal swords are more powerful against robots than bullets, or any projectile.
KSI man questions R&D about why he didn’t have control of his prototype. Next scene. KSI on a phonecall, says he has complete control over his robot. Next scene. KSI wonders why he doesn’t have control over his robot.
In the final fight scene, the bad guy punches Optimus essentially straight into his elbow and it makes a bone-snapping sound.
KSI asshole gets a text about how the seed he has is a tactical nuke, followed with an LOL. He sees this upon getting into an elevator in China with a Chinese man. Upon seeing the text, he starts laughing uncontrollably. This unfunny “joke,” though I can’t possibly categorize it as a joke, is him reading a text on his phone. He then goes to EXPLAIN this “joke” to the man in the elevator who not only looks completely uninterested in this dickhead, he also probably doesn’t understand him. Which is a good metaphor for the audience’s relation to the people who made this garbage.
They never explain what happened to the mother/wife. The establish that she’s not there, but we never once see her in a picture or a flashback, never hear anything about her. The only direct mention is when they say the daughter is just like the mother. The FUCK is that supposed to mean?! How are we supposed to understand this?
There’s a clip where we view a car in a topdown view where it just looks like garbage. It looks like it was rendered for the goddamn Nintendo 64.
There are a few instances of deep slow motion, where something is happening in slow motion and we’re either supposed to feel suspense or worry for a character, rather than just plain slow motion for cool action. Two times, the framerate is just absolute shit, it wasn’t filmed in slow motion so it’s slowed down and you can count the number of frames. It looks horrible.
When they’re driving the bomb, there’s a section where a propeller falls and almost hits the car. They jam on the brakes and stop. We see the propeller bounce over it, and as it lifts, it reveals the car with the people having the stupidest goddamn expression on his face. It’s like the director told Wahlberg to look like a cartoon character who just saw somebody ejaculate on his grandmother.
—-
There’s probably more I could say. Hell, I know there is. My friend and talked throughout the entirety of this movie and I couldn’t care less. No, I didn’t give this movie respect because it didn’t respect me. This movie didn’t care, but not only that, it was an impressive level of not caring. It feels like it was written by a 13 year old that saw the original trilogy when they were new. Nothing in this movie makes sense and it seems like the instant something came into his head, they tossed it in the movie wherever he said without question, without paying any attention to anything else in this movie.
He left the movie theater screaming.
I feel dirty that my friends and I gave money for this movie. I feel upset that people enjoy this movie. I’m not one to criticize people for their interests, but if they can justify their approval of this movie to me, I will give them everything I have.
This movie has a 6.4 on IMDB. I give this movie a 0/10.
Monday, May 5, 2014
Amazing Spider-Man 2
It's rare that I see a movie in the theaters. In the past year, not including this film, I've seen two films in theaters, Captain America 2 and The World's End (which I actually saw twice because of how kickass it was). What better way to capitalize on this opportunity than to share my thoughts about it with the internet? So, what did I feel about it? Well, I didn't like it.
This reviewish thing is kinda be kinda spoiler-iffic. I won't spoil the ending, but suffice to say I didn't like it.
I'll start off explaining that I really liked the original Toby MacGuire Spider-Man movies. Well, you know, except for the third one because nobody really liked that one. Granted, I haven't seen them in quite some time, but I remember enjoying them quite fondly. And along with that, I didn't see the first Amazing Spider-Man movie. Now, I don't know how much that would affect how I feel about AS2, because I don't really think it would be that big an impact. Yeah, I'd probably care about Gwen Stacy more, but I'll be honest, I actually quite liked the relationship between the two, even if some stupid things happened with it. Now, putting in perspective of the rest of the movie might shed some light on as well, but more on that later.
I'll start out with talking about Peter Parker himself. Don't know how many people are sayin this, but I miss MacQuire. I really didn't like Andrew Garfield in this movie, but I feel that it was mostly the script rather than him as an actor. He just did things that make me roll my eyes. Like, Spider-Man's thing is that he's kind of an awkward teen guy that makes snappy retorts at villains, right? At least that's what I got out of it. Peter doesn't at all seem like an awkward teen, I bet he was really popular in high school (haven't seen the first one). And Spider-Man's always kinda sounded like a dick, but rather than being endearing or likable, he's just annoying. There's the kind a dick that would be fun to hang out with, then there's the kinda dick whose mouth you want stapled shut. Garfield Spidey is in the second category.
The villains suck too. The main villain is Electro, played by Jamie Foxx. The last Foxx movie I saw was Django, where he plays a badass shootin' people and being awesome. Here, he plays Max Dillon, a nerd stereotype. Check it out, he wears loser glasses, he has a comical gap between his front two teeth, he's got no friends, he gets bullied, and he carries a lot of things in his hands and then they all fall out of his hands and its funny lets laugh at him! This is grown man working at Oscorp. This shit's happening to an adult cause everybody's still in high school. He gets saved by Spider-Man once and turns into stalker levels of creepy because "he remembered [his] name." Man, that's some Nickelodeon shit right there. pbs kids or whatever. He turns into Electro as a direct result of people picking on him. Everybody leaves, and he's sent to fix something. Instead of somebody following this extreme safety protocol to fix something, something like TURNING OFF POWER IN AN AREA, the guy doesn't do it for Dillon because he's a lazy fuck. Thus, Dillon's shocked, then falls into a tank of electric eels. Then becomes Electro because comic books.
The other villain is Harry Osborn, the character that's so incredibly annoying with almost everything he does. He never feels like a human, more like an alien doing his best human impression. I guess they're trying to build him as being this unfortunate kid who has a shit relationship with his dad and therefor underdeveloped as a person or something, but he's just this unlikable asshole. I can't even say I feel bad about the tension between his dad, they both sucked and I don't even know why he went to his death bed. Obligations or something. I felt more for the guy in Inception who had a shit relationship with his dad. Eventually he turns into Green Goblin, an ugly one at that. It's never really a tragic or difficult thing for the viewer, I don't care about this kid and I knew he was gonna end up killing himself, which, spoiler alert, the villain dies.There are a couple other baddies, the generic evil corporation guy in Oscorp who wants to cover up shit because that ALWAYS fucking works. There's a doctor doing experiments on Electro who's German because of course he is. They video tape conversations with Electro, and in whatever year this takes place in with all their super advanced technology, they still can't manage to get a video feed and recording that's more than, like, 5 frames per second.
The other main character is Gwen Stacy who, surprisingly enough, was pretty much the best thing in the film. I don't know, yeah, some things were pretty shoehorned into the movie for convenience, like when she knows how to solve a problem because high school science lawl. I guess it was the fact that she had more to do than nothing. She had to decide between this high school love relationship or attending school in another country. And, ironically, the one thing I feel would have really been amplified from seeing the first movie was still the best part of the movie, it was the one thing that didn't fall terribly flat. I guess his aunt was also pretty well acted, but she's not too prominent in the movie.What else is there to really say about the movie? The plot was, well, kinda silly, as is expected from a movie like this. Some other issues I had were that the movie liked to make a point of something, then drop it. There's a part in the beginning where Spider-Man's overworking himself and gets sick. Then it gets dropped. Then they raise the idea that public starts to see Spider-Man as a menace for damage to the city. This is a plot point I hate in superhero movies. Unless it's a game like InFamous, it's a terrible idea to have the people hating the hero. You're upset at the damages he's causing to the city? Spider-Man is the least damaging of the superheroes! What's he doing, leaving web residue? Do people honestly believe that's worse than having it controlled by a man made of electricity?
So, overall, I guess the effects were pretty cool, the main female leads were cool, but aside from that, everything fell flat and/or annoyed me. 4/10.
Oh yeah, and the ending was stupid.
Thursday, May 1, 2014
Fine - Alkaline Trio
But really, it's more the lyrical content that brings me back over and over. Simply put, it's about a guy that's, well, fine. Shit's happening around him, things he can't control. There's another person giving him bad news, and he knows it. (It's gonna hurt like hell when you pull back the hammer and fire). And you know, with all the pain this guy's going through, all the uncertainty, he's still fine. Let him know when you've got some good news to tell him. He can wait.
Sure, the guy lives with all these problems, all these issues out of control, and he himself is directionless about where to go with his life from here (All the stars in the world couldn't help me steer my way out of this kiddie pool). In the scope of the world, this relationship isn't really a big problem, even though he's struggling with it now. But, even still, he's fine. He'll survive. Yeah, he drinks to get past the issues, but he wouldn't trade in his hand for all the aces in the deck. He's fine.
Alternatively...
It's about a person who's deeply depressed, the other person, the rejection absolutely ruins this him. A guy who only wants to be happy. He recognizes how silly this issue is, but yet he can't ignore just how much it pains him. Every time he proclaims that he's fine, he's lying. It could be to other people, his friends, his family, or it could be to himself. No matter how many people try to help him with his problem, this is really a problem he has to tackle himself, a problem he can't overcome. It would be foolish to follow him, he clearly can't accomplish the thing bringing him down so. He's tried many times with whatever it is, and it's fallen through every time. Maybe he just wants to convince himself that he's happy, and he's doing whatever he can to do so, with lies, with alcohol.
It should be fairly simple to realize why I relate to this song so easily, why I listen to it as frequently as I do. It's because I'm fine.
Monday, March 31, 2014
Dead Island
Hey, have you seen the trailer for Dead Island? Yes, this is early summer 2011 and this trailer is one of the most popular things to come out of E3! Did it even come out of E3? Maybe. But it's really artistic and emotional and powerful!
I actually do really like this trailer. It's really well done and paints this game to be an intense, emotionally rollercoaster of a zombie game. And what did we get? We got... Dead Island. A game that made gamers around the world go "eh." The game got 7-8s from review sites, but all in all, the game is just... Not very good. This is coming from a person who played a game for like 60-70 hours, mostly by myself. I can't convince people it's a good game, I can't convince MYSELF it's a good game. Because it's not. I mean, it's okay...
But lemme explain the game a little. It's an open world, sandbox-ish rpg zombie survival. The game largely consists of wandering around doing side missions of various flavors of ridiculous. You'll have endless missions of giving bottles of water to somebody, or a mission to get a person a teddy bear, or an awful escort mission. The missions are almost always boring and just kinda needless padding. You never feel like you're making progress, just doing menial shit.
The environments range from beach resort, to shitty shambling town, to jungle area, to, if I remember correctly, testing labs. Yes, I completed this game 3 times, and no, I barely remember what happens in the end. Bottom line, the beach resort is the only good environment. You can drive the awkwardly handling trucks around a pretty open area and have fun getting them lodged in staircases. The city has you walking everywhere getting blindsided by people with guns, and the jungle level is, well, a fucking jungle. I don't even remember what the labs were like, but I feel there were a lot of people with guns to kill. Either way, they go from interesting and kinda fun to bad, bad, boring.
The story? Shiiiiit, it's almost all mashed together from generic zombie ideas. Take zombie ideas you have, throw them into a pot, boil boil boil, out come the zombies. You are one of four survivors immune to the infection, therefore you do stupid sidequests for people that have no personality that nobody cares about. The city's been overrun by people who want to assume power over all the lifeless houses and dead bodies, and you need to help random people by stopping them? Then you go to a jungle for some reason, and, hold on, lemme read up on this plot again from Wikipedia... ... ... Oh god, that's right... God, I remember this plot. A guy starts talking to you via radio or something, tells you he can make a vaccine from the survivors, he's on a prison, then you go there, help the prisoners arm themselves or something, then the infected the scientists were studying kill the scientists at some point, then the guy on the radio steals a prototype vaccine or something and you kill him on the roof. This plot just seems so tired, there's not a single thing interesting about it!
Speaking of things not interesting, let's take a look at the enemies. Generic walkers, generic runners, generic big guys that take a lot of hits and knock you back with impressive force even if they themselves have no arms, the exploders, the fat guys that spit at you, the big guy that charges at you, and people with guns. Not a single one of these are interesting, and the fun of killing dies halfway through act 1. You fight with weapons that break apart as if they were all held together by masking tape and chewing gum, you repair them by shoving dollar bills into a workbench, or upgrade them by stapling money to them making them more powerful, yaaawn. You also have a kick, but that drains your stamina as well as swinging, running, or jumping, so you're bound to be back peddling without any stamina while zombies slowly walk up to you, smack you once and you fall on your ass because no stamina means you fall over like bowling pins.
It shouldn't be difficult to see why this game is so boring. It's a game that survives only on concept. Almost everything in this game is implemented poorly. Story sucks, characters suck, enemies suck, environments suck, combat sucks, really, it's difficult for me to think of a single good thing about the game. I mean, analog combat was kinda fun, but it still sucks running out of stamina all the goddamn time. Uhmmm... Driving is funny, I wouldn't say fun... Really, it's a game that holds up on concept alone. With the incredible trailer, it was forced to be a serious drama of a game and ended up flat out silly, or eye-rollingly stupid, or just impossible to be invested in because everything about it is so one dimensional. The only redeeming quality comes from playing with friends and getting into wacky hi-jinx, like getting a truck stuck in terrain, or laughing at the shadow animations. Eventually that wears off and you're just fucking booooored.
I can't convince myself that Dead Island is a good game. It's not a terrible game. It's just so boring and annoying and barely functional. It doesn't deserve the trailer that announced it. A fitting trailer would have been bulletpoints in black font a white background for how factory made and lifeless it seems. And it actually makes me a bit angry thinking about it now. Yeah, this game kiiiiinda sucks.
I actually do really like this trailer. It's really well done and paints this game to be an intense, emotionally rollercoaster of a zombie game. And what did we get? We got... Dead Island. A game that made gamers around the world go "eh." The game got 7-8s from review sites, but all in all, the game is just... Not very good. This is coming from a person who played a game for like 60-70 hours, mostly by myself. I can't convince people it's a good game, I can't convince MYSELF it's a good game. Because it's not. I mean, it's okay...
But lemme explain the game a little. It's an open world, sandbox-ish rpg zombie survival. The game largely consists of wandering around doing side missions of various flavors of ridiculous. You'll have endless missions of giving bottles of water to somebody, or a mission to get a person a teddy bear, or an awful escort mission. The missions are almost always boring and just kinda needless padding. You never feel like you're making progress, just doing menial shit.The environments range from beach resort, to shitty shambling town, to jungle area, to, if I remember correctly, testing labs. Yes, I completed this game 3 times, and no, I barely remember what happens in the end. Bottom line, the beach resort is the only good environment. You can drive the awkwardly handling trucks around a pretty open area and have fun getting them lodged in staircases. The city has you walking everywhere getting blindsided by people with guns, and the jungle level is, well, a fucking jungle. I don't even remember what the labs were like, but I feel there were a lot of people with guns to kill. Either way, they go from interesting and kinda fun to bad, bad, boring.
The story? Shiiiiit, it's almost all mashed together from generic zombie ideas. Take zombie ideas you have, throw them into a pot, boil boil boil, out come the zombies. You are one of four survivors immune to the infection, therefore you do stupid sidequests for people that have no personality that nobody cares about. The city's been overrun by people who want to assume power over all the lifeless houses and dead bodies, and you need to help random people by stopping them? Then you go to a jungle for some reason, and, hold on, lemme read up on this plot again from Wikipedia... ... ... Oh god, that's right... God, I remember this plot. A guy starts talking to you via radio or something, tells you he can make a vaccine from the survivors, he's on a prison, then you go there, help the prisoners arm themselves or something, then the infected the scientists were studying kill the scientists at some point, then the guy on the radio steals a prototype vaccine or something and you kill him on the roof. This plot just seems so tired, there's not a single thing interesting about it!
I promise this looks more fun than it is for 90% of the time.
Speaking of things not interesting, let's take a look at the enemies. Generic walkers, generic runners, generic big guys that take a lot of hits and knock you back with impressive force even if they themselves have no arms, the exploders, the fat guys that spit at you, the big guy that charges at you, and people with guns. Not a single one of these are interesting, and the fun of killing dies halfway through act 1. You fight with weapons that break apart as if they were all held together by masking tape and chewing gum, you repair them by shoving dollar bills into a workbench, or upgrade them by stapling money to them making them more powerful, yaaawn. You also have a kick, but that drains your stamina as well as swinging, running, or jumping, so you're bound to be back peddling without any stamina while zombies slowly walk up to you, smack you once and you fall on your ass because no stamina means you fall over like bowling pins.
It shouldn't be difficult to see why this game is so boring. It's a game that survives only on concept. Almost everything in this game is implemented poorly. Story sucks, characters suck, enemies suck, environments suck, combat sucks, really, it's difficult for me to think of a single good thing about the game. I mean, analog combat was kinda fun, but it still sucks running out of stamina all the goddamn time. Uhmmm... Driving is funny, I wouldn't say fun... Really, it's a game that holds up on concept alone. With the incredible trailer, it was forced to be a serious drama of a game and ended up flat out silly, or eye-rollingly stupid, or just impossible to be invested in because everything about it is so one dimensional. The only redeeming quality comes from playing with friends and getting into wacky hi-jinx, like getting a truck stuck in terrain, or laughing at the shadow animations. Eventually that wears off and you're just fucking booooored.
I can't convince myself that Dead Island is a good game. It's not a terrible game. It's just so boring and annoying and barely functional. It doesn't deserve the trailer that announced it. A fitting trailer would have been bulletpoints in black font a white background for how factory made and lifeless it seems. And it actually makes me a bit angry thinking about it now. Yeah, this game kiiiiinda sucks.
Wednesday, March 19, 2014
Binary Domain, First Impressions
So, if you are a PC gamer at all, you should be aware of the Humble Bundle. If not, what have you been doing?! The latest of bundles happened to be a Sega bundle, and having not played many of the titles, I decided to give it a go. One of the greatest things that can happen is when expectations are largely surpassed and that's what Binary Domain has done.
Well, what's it about? The year is... something future, maybe like 2042 or something, and as a result of sea levels rising, many cities were left inhabitable. People got too attached to said destroyed cities and decided the best thing to do is create newer cities on top of the older cities. Nobody can really do anything in the flooded areas except robots causing a massive increase in demand for said bots. With these robotics, a New Geneva Convention was established with added clauses, such as Clause 21, robots may not externally appear as humans. One of these, a "hollow child," was found slinging accusations at the main robotics company in America. With heavy denials, attention is turned to a Japanese corporation, and is where the game picks up with you, Dan, and your friend, Bo, infiltrating Japan "covertly."
Gameplay focuses the standard third person, squad based, action-shooter. You have some guns, you have a couple people with you, and you shoot at robots. The gimmick this game touts is issuing squad commands through your mic. You can yell things like, "Cover me!" or "Sure," or "Damnit!" to respond to teammates or signal things in battle. The only mic I have is an onboard mic on my laptop and living in a house with 30 other dudes doesn't leave me feeling comfortable shouting weird things at my computer. Alternatively, I just hold tab at hit whatever response I feel accurate. While it may be an interesting idea, it's just easier to hit buttons for it. It reminds me of that whole Mass Effect 3 "better with Kinect" bullocks.
The actual gameplay is shooting various flavors of robots with various flavors of bullets, and I will say, 4 hours in, shooting robots is pretty fun. The standard robot grunts you fight aren't completely harmless, but still kinda fun to kill, as they explode into bits providing visceral exploding joy. The others I've fought being spider-ish zapping ones, spider-ish exploding ones and robo-snipers have all been fairly unique and entertaining, if not sometimes annoying. The bosses have been fairly creative and unique as well. Tense and rewarding, although sometimes repetitive in the whole, shoot this spot a thousand times- oh, now-I-get-a-command-on-how-to-actually-beat-this-guy-and-I've-been-doing-nothing-this-whole-time kind of boss fight.
The games not without its faults. Playing on the PC, it's really quite messy of a port. There's no rebindable keys, or any key configuration or layout at all. You don't reload with R, sprint with shift, or switch weapons with the mouse wheel. If you missed how to do something in the tutorial, you're stuck guessing how to do it, and even the tutorial kinda sucks on PC. Aim with [M] and shoot with [M]. Reload with [M], shoot a charged shot by holding [M]. Contextual crane adjusting minigame? Move box with WASD, turn box with [M]. If you didn't catch on yet, M is something on the mouse. No, I'm not going to tell you which one, figure it out yourself. The game also has problems with unplugging or replacing anything in the audio jack, resulting in the game crashing for whatever reason. One time the game crashed causing me to play a goddamn rail shooter segment again. Which kinda sucked. Although it did lead my to notice that every time you get hit, and I mean EVERY TIME you get hit, your character responds with an audible grunt. Getting shot at with machine guns, UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH reminding me of beta Minecraft where Steve had a male voice indicating when he got hurt, then falling into lava.
Aside from this, I haven't had anything in terms game-breaking bugs or something really taking me out of the game. I'm pretty interested in the story and the characters, actually. I want my character to be liked by the other people on the team, and, like in real life, appreciate the approval of my squad-mates. The setting is pretty interesting and I do want to know what more we'll discover. Now, I am only 4 hours in, but seeing robots programmed to think they're and discovering they're a robot for the first time is pretty damn moving. A goddamn robot committed suicide and I felt bad! Have YOU ever felt bad for a robot? Didn't think so!
I dunno. I've been crushed before by the loss of a volleyball as well, so maybe pulling my strings isn't as hard as it seems.
8/10 (for the first 4 hours)
Well, what's it about? The year is... something future, maybe like 2042 or something, and as a result of sea levels rising, many cities were left inhabitable. People got too attached to said destroyed cities and decided the best thing to do is create newer cities on top of the older cities. Nobody can really do anything in the flooded areas except robots causing a massive increase in demand for said bots. With these robotics, a New Geneva Convention was established with added clauses, such as Clause 21, robots may not externally appear as humans. One of these, a "hollow child," was found slinging accusations at the main robotics company in America. With heavy denials, attention is turned to a Japanese corporation, and is where the game picks up with you, Dan, and your friend, Bo, infiltrating Japan "covertly."Gameplay focuses the standard third person, squad based, action-shooter. You have some guns, you have a couple people with you, and you shoot at robots. The gimmick this game touts is issuing squad commands through your mic. You can yell things like, "Cover me!" or "Sure," or "Damnit!" to respond to teammates or signal things in battle. The only mic I have is an onboard mic on my laptop and living in a house with 30 other dudes doesn't leave me feeling comfortable shouting weird things at my computer. Alternatively, I just hold tab at hit whatever response I feel accurate. While it may be an interesting idea, it's just easier to hit buttons for it. It reminds me of that whole Mass Effect 3 "better with Kinect" bullocks.
The actual gameplay is shooting various flavors of robots with various flavors of bullets, and I will say, 4 hours in, shooting robots is pretty fun. The standard robot grunts you fight aren't completely harmless, but still kinda fun to kill, as they explode into bits providing visceral exploding joy. The others I've fought being spider-ish zapping ones, spider-ish exploding ones and robo-snipers have all been fairly unique and entertaining, if not sometimes annoying. The bosses have been fairly creative and unique as well. Tense and rewarding, although sometimes repetitive in the whole, shoot this spot a thousand times- oh, now-I-get-a-command-on-how-to-actually-beat-this-guy-and-I've-been-doing-nothing-this-whole-time kind of boss fight.The games not without its faults. Playing on the PC, it's really quite messy of a port. There's no rebindable keys, or any key configuration or layout at all. You don't reload with R, sprint with shift, or switch weapons with the mouse wheel. If you missed how to do something in the tutorial, you're stuck guessing how to do it, and even the tutorial kinda sucks on PC. Aim with [M] and shoot with [M]. Reload with [M], shoot a charged shot by holding [M]. Contextual crane adjusting minigame? Move box with WASD, turn box with [M]. If you didn't catch on yet, M is something on the mouse. No, I'm not going to tell you which one, figure it out yourself. The game also has problems with unplugging or replacing anything in the audio jack, resulting in the game crashing for whatever reason. One time the game crashed causing me to play a goddamn rail shooter segment again. Which kinda sucked. Although it did lead my to notice that every time you get hit, and I mean EVERY TIME you get hit, your character responds with an audible grunt. Getting shot at with machine guns, UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH-UH reminding me of beta Minecraft where Steve had a male voice indicating when he got hurt, then falling into lava.
Who doesn't love RAAAAAAAIIIIIIIL SHOOOOOOTER SEGMENTS?
Aside from this, I haven't had anything in terms game-breaking bugs or something really taking me out of the game. I'm pretty interested in the story and the characters, actually. I want my character to be liked by the other people on the team, and, like in real life, appreciate the approval of my squad-mates. The setting is pretty interesting and I do want to know what more we'll discover. Now, I am only 4 hours in, but seeing robots programmed to think they're and discovering they're a robot for the first time is pretty damn moving. A goddamn robot committed suicide and I felt bad! Have YOU ever felt bad for a robot? Didn't think so!
I dunno. I've been crushed before by the loss of a volleyball as well, so maybe pulling my strings isn't as hard as it seems.
8/10 (for the first 4 hours)
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
GTA V Story 1
Joined a race, still am, actually,45 minutes into it. It's supposed to be a fun race where you drive around and blow each other up, nobody's actually meant to win it. I could have won 40 minutes ago. There's a shipping container in the middle of road. A truck drove into it, started glitching, front end inside the container. I climbed on, and as it was shaking it caught on fire and exploded, killing me.
5/5 would race again.
5/5 would race again.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Collectibles in Video Games
Collectibles have an interesting evolution throughout gaming, an evolution I'm pulling straight out of my ass and assuming. Easter eggs began in games as early as Adventure on the Atari 1600, and from then, people always wanted shit for people to find. Now, power-ups are also something that started at some point and probably also had some affect on the state of collectibles today, but I can't be buggered to do any research about them because this is a silly blog post I'm writing at work to kill time. And I just got all the collectibles in Saints Row IV yesterday night (great game read the review here).
BUT anyways, I imagine at some point an easter-egg guy and a power-up guy got compressed together into one gaming concept: the collectible. When did this happen? Well, uhm, sometime, uhh, around the, uhh, sega... playstation... nintendo... microsoft... colecovision era. You know. Sometimes they're there for fun, sometimes they're there for stat boosts, and sometimes they're then main focus of the game. But there are ways to do collectibles right, and there are ways to do them wrong. So lemme tell you what is right and wrong.
Case 1: Banjo Kazooie/Spyro the Dragon (EARLY PS1 era Spyro, none of this wishy washy Skylanders bullshit, whatever it is)
Make a hub-based adventure game where you go around and collect a bunch of small things in a level and collect less larger things in the same level where the larger things are more important and ultimately the goal of the game. Now, I've only played like 20 minutes of Banjo Kazooie in like 2010, so whether any of this is accurate to the game I'm just assuming because fuck you, I was a Sony kid. But I loved Spyro. I loved getting everything I could in each level, as I am a perfectionist. It was excellent. The collectibles were very liberally spread out, some of the larger, more plot relevant ones were quite rewarding, like the skateboarding one, or were more bullshit, like boxing. This type of collectible in a game, when well executed, can result in a masterpiece, like PS1 Spyro games. When executed poorly, it can result in, well, Enter the Dragonfly.
Case 2: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare/World at War
You get collectibles (intel/death cards) in the campaign, and they alter gameplay when you replay the campaign. Well, if you're playing World at War, it affects the co op campaign. But only if it's online. Splitscreen death cards is asking a bit too much. BUT, regardless, I think this works pretty well. I played through the campaign of CoD4 many a time, and many times I fiddled around with the cheats. Ragtime Warfare, or infinite grenade launchers was always a blast, and the very few times I've played co op with paintball mode, or with rocks has been a fun time. Collectibles affecting gameplay of linear games, thumbs up from me.
Case 3: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Modern Warfare 3
This encompasses the three Call of Duty games, the last three I fully played, MW2, Black Ops, and MW3. This has intel scattered out throughout the campaign. ... And that's it. Really, that's it. You find the intel for the sole reason of... Perfectionism? Because you want the achievements tied to it? That's the only reason I got intel in those games, it was my only incentive! It was really just kind of an after thought, or an addition because, well, the previous games had them in it! And we just wanted a shred of replayability. Now, some people may enjoy finding intel, but no, this kind is not for me. It's just kind of a waste.
Case 4: Bully: Scholarship Edition
There are 75 collectibles, in the forms of rubber bands, scattered throughout the open world map of Bullworth. Upon collecting all 75, you're granted with an achievement as well as the rubber band ball weapon, a ball that you throw and bounces around for a while until settling. This is a pretty fun item, and to my recollection, pretty powerful. It's a solid reward for your exploration. Although the exploration is kind of undermined, as the rubber bands are all just indicated on the map. I actually kinda like this, they knew that people would just look up a map online anyways, so why not just give it to them? If it was possible to temporarily remove them from the map, that would be nice, but I really dig the execution.
Case 5: Crackdown
This is actually a lot similar to the Spyro/Banjo Kazooie type of having a bunch scattered around to pick up. The only difference is that now it's an open world city and you're a SUPER SOLDIER. And I'm only gonna talk about Crackdown 1, as Crackdown 2 is Crackdown 1 where everything is stupid and also your dog's dead. Crackdown, to my knowledge, has 500 agility orbs, 250 or 300 secret hidden orbs, and 50 or so stunt jumps. Almost all the jumps are in awkward positions making the attempt to get them all the more fun. The secret orbs are pretty spread out, but I don't think I ever found more than 100. The agility orbs, on the other hand, are plentiful and beautiful. From atop a building, one could see dozens of agility orbs ready to be collected. They're fun to get, AND they serve to improve your agility level, allowing you to run faster, jump higher. This MAKES the game. Crackdown is a game made entirely by its prevalence of collectibles, and it may very well be good enough to make my next top-games list.
Case 6: Saints Row IV/Assassins Creed something
Now, I've only ever heard of the manner of Assassin's Creed collectibles for one of the games, maybe Brotherhood, maybe Revelations, but I remember hearing that you collect a certain amount of feathers or something, maybe 50% or 75%, and the rest will just appear on the map. Similarly, after completing a side mission in Saints Row IV, you unlock a collectible finder to display any pick-ups on the map. I like the idea that progression shows any collectibles, or that by finding a certain amount exposes the rest. Also, Saints Row has them integral to gameplay and even story, as contrived as it is. But I'll let it slide for how camp the game itself is.
Case 7: Grand Theft Auto IV
200 pigeons scattered around the city to shoot which may also give you a wanted level. Fuck you.
I hope you've all learned a great deal from this and about my interests in games. Having collectibles be very prevalent and drive gameplay? Excellent, awesome, do it. Having them be displayed in the game, if it's a sandbox game and there are a bunch to collect? I like it. They know I'm gonna either look it up anyways or just not bother. Having a few to unlock secrets or unlockables, essentially easter eggs? I can enjoy those as well. Having a few because your game feels obliged to have them? A waste of my time that the developers know and use only to artificially increase replayability. Collectibles should be fun and rewarding, not a chore.
BUT anyways, I imagine at some point an easter-egg guy and a power-up guy got compressed together into one gaming concept: the collectible. When did this happen? Well, uhm, sometime, uhh, around the, uhh, sega... playstation... nintendo... microsoft... colecovision era. You know. Sometimes they're there for fun, sometimes they're there for stat boosts, and sometimes they're then main focus of the game. But there are ways to do collectibles right, and there are ways to do them wrong. So lemme tell you what is right and wrong.
Case 1: Banjo Kazooie/Spyro the Dragon (EARLY PS1 era Spyro, none of this wishy washy Skylanders bullshit, whatever it is)
Case 2: Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare/World at War
You get collectibles (intel/death cards) in the campaign, and they alter gameplay when you replay the campaign. Well, if you're playing World at War, it affects the co op campaign. But only if it's online. Splitscreen death cards is asking a bit too much. BUT, regardless, I think this works pretty well. I played through the campaign of CoD4 many a time, and many times I fiddled around with the cheats. Ragtime Warfare, or infinite grenade launchers was always a blast, and the very few times I've played co op with paintball mode, or with rocks has been a fun time. Collectibles affecting gameplay of linear games, thumbs up from me.
Case 3: Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Modern Warfare 3
This encompasses the three Call of Duty games, the last three I fully played, MW2, Black Ops, and MW3. This has intel scattered out throughout the campaign. ... And that's it. Really, that's it. You find the intel for the sole reason of... Perfectionism? Because you want the achievements tied to it? That's the only reason I got intel in those games, it was my only incentive! It was really just kind of an after thought, or an addition because, well, the previous games had them in it! And we just wanted a shred of replayability. Now, some people may enjoy finding intel, but no, this kind is not for me. It's just kind of a waste.
Did you want a reason to replay any given level? Now you do!
Case 4: Bully: Scholarship Edition
There are 75 collectibles, in the forms of rubber bands, scattered throughout the open world map of Bullworth. Upon collecting all 75, you're granted with an achievement as well as the rubber band ball weapon, a ball that you throw and bounces around for a while until settling. This is a pretty fun item, and to my recollection, pretty powerful. It's a solid reward for your exploration. Although the exploration is kind of undermined, as the rubber bands are all just indicated on the map. I actually kinda like this, they knew that people would just look up a map online anyways, so why not just give it to them? If it was possible to temporarily remove them from the map, that would be nice, but I really dig the execution.
Case 5: Crackdown
Case 6: Saints Row IV/Assassins Creed something
Now, I've only ever heard of the manner of Assassin's Creed collectibles for one of the games, maybe Brotherhood, maybe Revelations, but I remember hearing that you collect a certain amount of feathers or something, maybe 50% or 75%, and the rest will just appear on the map. Similarly, after completing a side mission in Saints Row IV, you unlock a collectible finder to display any pick-ups on the map. I like the idea that progression shows any collectibles, or that by finding a certain amount exposes the rest. Also, Saints Row has them integral to gameplay and even story, as contrived as it is. But I'll let it slide for how camp the game itself is.
Yes, I got all of these because this game is awesome. And hell, this guy already got 300 of em.
Case 7: Grand Theft Auto IV
200 pigeons scattered around the city to shoot which may also give you a wanted level. Fuck you.
I hope you've all learned a great deal from this and about my interests in games. Having collectibles be very prevalent and drive gameplay? Excellent, awesome, do it. Having them be displayed in the game, if it's a sandbox game and there are a bunch to collect? I like it. They know I'm gonna either look it up anyways or just not bother. Having a few to unlock secrets or unlockables, essentially easter eggs? I can enjoy those as well. Having a few because your game feels obliged to have them? A waste of my time that the developers know and use only to artificially increase replayability. Collectibles should be fun and rewarding, not a chore.
Wednesday, January 29, 2014
The Iliad, the 3000 Year Old CLASSIC
I don't like reading, I'll be the first one to say it. School killed my interest in reading by forcing it upon me instead of letting in naturally come to an interest. Or at least that's what I'm gonna blame it on. I mean, I used to like reading way back in... 3rd grade or so. Back before accelerated reading. Now I hate having to read things and face every reading assignment or book with the same dread that a young child has towards his siblings' concerts, or with the same dread that the Acheans had towards Hector SEE I KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON.
Actually, that's kind of a lie. I've read about 300 pages of this, but it lost me so early on. What exactly does that mean? Well, for one, I don't look into the text at all. I don't care what it has to say, really. These concepts are hinted at or mentioned and they just pass on right past me. I don't know what to look for when I'm reading this, so I don't know what I'm missing. And that doesn't bother me. Because this book lost me. I have a very basic understanding of the plot up to book 15, but it's a bit muddled. I'll see what I can muster up. Acheans are fighting the Trojans for Helen, Agamemnon, the leader of the Acheans, is an asshole and likes fucking people over for glory. Achilles is a super-powerful butthurt little kid who lets soldiers die because he was bullied and wants an apology. Gods fuck with outcomes of the battles, people kill each other, and Hector is an unstoppable Trojan by the virtue of Zeus or whatever. Hector kills Achilles' friend and that's when it gets personal, so he kills Hector. Oh, sorry, that didn't take up the required 300 pages of text with unimportant faff. Well, it's unimportant to me!
I just don't get it. This book survived 3000 years and will most likely survive 3000 more because it made it this far, right? How is this book considered such a classic? Why do people argue over the merits of this book over something more wholesome? Actually, no, those can apply to almost any book regarded as a "classic." But that just goes be to me disposition on reading and books in general.
My biggest issue is probably that the book just likes wasting my time. And no, that's not the mean-spirited "reading is a waste of time" stance I took in the first paragraph rehashed, but rather the mean-spirited "I don't understand why most of this text is here" stance. On three occasions for the class, we were told that certain books or sections of books could be entirely bypassed. Why is that? What am I missing? Why are they there if they have no impact on the rest of the story? Why am I reading this? Make it stop, please! Make it stop! There are segments of text where page after page after page is just a guy gathering his men with their armor and ships. Why do we need to hear this? Why is this important? I don't understand how anyone could be compelled throughout such a waste.
Actually wait, more specifically to how it likes to waste my time is the notion of fighting in this. Homer (yeah it might not have actually been Homer, but fuck you the name is an easy thing to blame) took a look at battles and came to the conclusion that talking about people stabbing each other over and over is actually kind of boring. But instead of deciding to cut out the boring shit for a streamlined, and more concise, series of text, he decided it would much better to make everything needlessly detailed. Not only does EVERY SINGLE PERSON get their own confusing name for no reason, every death is explicitly mentioned in the text. Why? Because fuck you, Calvin.
Most of the conflict comes from this one unstoppable dude slaughtering everybody and I guess this is just telling that I don't know how these ancient battles were enacted. It would be impossible for a group of people to just surround this dude and dismember him, no way. Little did I know that battles were just conga lines of each military meeting head to head in the middle with continuous one on ones. It's like the card game war if every single card had a name, a family, and a short description, like the shortsighted son of the Ace of Spades, the 2 of Clubs. And then occasionally the god of cards fucks with the line-up or drops an arrow onto the couple of the cards, or floods them out, or something weird.
Bottom line, I'm just not at all invested in the story. So many people are characterized that I can't keep track of them and lose all interest in them. Their cause isn't noble at all, fighting for a girl? Yeah, this is older times and they don't interact and deal with things like we do, but that's the inherent problem. Do I care that people do these brave and over the top acts for the glory? No! Fuck those people, the people who like to have a good image by doing weird shit, sacrificing themselves, fuck em. I think they're all selfish assholes, and this book is only reassures my point.
Maybe it'll get better later on, but I don't care. I couldn't be bothered to care. Hell, if I wasn't in this class, I wouldn't have given this book the light of day. If I were to pick it up on a whim, I would have dropped it 10 pages in. I just don't care about anything that happens in this book and I just want it to disappear. But it won't. It's existed for this long. There's no reason for it to stop existing. It's a classic, Calvin, don't you see? Can't you respect it? No. No, I can't. I can't respect it for taking the short time I may have on this planet and wasting a very valuable part of it. I mean shiiiit, I could have been playing Counter Strike instead of reading this.
Actually, that's kind of a lie. I've read about 300 pages of this, but it lost me so early on. What exactly does that mean? Well, for one, I don't look into the text at all. I don't care what it has to say, really. These concepts are hinted at or mentioned and they just pass on right past me. I don't know what to look for when I'm reading this, so I don't know what I'm missing. And that doesn't bother me. Because this book lost me. I have a very basic understanding of the plot up to book 15, but it's a bit muddled. I'll see what I can muster up. Acheans are fighting the Trojans for Helen, Agamemnon, the leader of the Acheans, is an asshole and likes fucking people over for glory. Achilles is a super-powerful butthurt little kid who lets soldiers die because he was bullied and wants an apology. Gods fuck with outcomes of the battles, people kill each other, and Hector is an unstoppable Trojan by the virtue of Zeus or whatever. Hector kills Achilles' friend and that's when it gets personal, so he kills Hector. Oh, sorry, that didn't take up the required 300 pages of text with unimportant faff. Well, it's unimportant to me!
I just don't get it. This book survived 3000 years and will most likely survive 3000 more because it made it this far, right? How is this book considered such a classic? Why do people argue over the merits of this book over something more wholesome? Actually, no, those can apply to almost any book regarded as a "classic." But that just goes be to me disposition on reading and books in general.
My biggest issue is probably that the book just likes wasting my time. And no, that's not the mean-spirited "reading is a waste of time" stance I took in the first paragraph rehashed, but rather the mean-spirited "I don't understand why most of this text is here" stance. On three occasions for the class, we were told that certain books or sections of books could be entirely bypassed. Why is that? What am I missing? Why are they there if they have no impact on the rest of the story? Why am I reading this? Make it stop, please! Make it stop! There are segments of text where page after page after page is just a guy gathering his men with their armor and ships. Why do we need to hear this? Why is this important? I don't understand how anyone could be compelled throughout such a waste.
Actually wait, more specifically to how it likes to waste my time is the notion of fighting in this. Homer (yeah it might not have actually been Homer, but fuck you the name is an easy thing to blame) took a look at battles and came to the conclusion that talking about people stabbing each other over and over is actually kind of boring. But instead of deciding to cut out the boring shit for a streamlined, and more concise, series of text, he decided it would much better to make everything needlessly detailed. Not only does EVERY SINGLE PERSON get their own confusing name for no reason, every death is explicitly mentioned in the text. Why? Because fuck you, Calvin.
Most of the conflict comes from this one unstoppable dude slaughtering everybody and I guess this is just telling that I don't know how these ancient battles were enacted. It would be impossible for a group of people to just surround this dude and dismember him, no way. Little did I know that battles were just conga lines of each military meeting head to head in the middle with continuous one on ones. It's like the card game war if every single card had a name, a family, and a short description, like the shortsighted son of the Ace of Spades, the 2 of Clubs. And then occasionally the god of cards fucks with the line-up or drops an arrow onto the couple of the cards, or floods them out, or something weird.
Bottom line, I'm just not at all invested in the story. So many people are characterized that I can't keep track of them and lose all interest in them. Their cause isn't noble at all, fighting for a girl? Yeah, this is older times and they don't interact and deal with things like we do, but that's the inherent problem. Do I care that people do these brave and over the top acts for the glory? No! Fuck those people, the people who like to have a good image by doing weird shit, sacrificing themselves, fuck em. I think they're all selfish assholes, and this book is only reassures my point.
Maybe it'll get better later on, but I don't care. I couldn't be bothered to care. Hell, if I wasn't in this class, I wouldn't have given this book the light of day. If I were to pick it up on a whim, I would have dropped it 10 pages in. I just don't care about anything that happens in this book and I just want it to disappear. But it won't. It's existed for this long. There's no reason for it to stop existing. It's a classic, Calvin, don't you see? Can't you respect it? No. No, I can't. I can't respect it for taking the short time I may have on this planet and wasting a very valuable part of it. I mean shiiiit, I could have been playing Counter Strike instead of reading this.
Sunday, January 19, 2014
SAINTS ROW IV
Contrary to my latest blog post about To The Moon, Saints Row IV is a game that's just 100% damn good fun to play. Hands down, SRIV is easily the most fun I've had with a game in a long time. For those unaware, Saints Row is an open world sandbox game, similar to that of Grand Theft Auto. This game was available for free play for the weekend. In two days, I put in enough time to beat it. I played 18 hours in two days. The last time, I played for 8 hours straight. Now, I play a lot of video games, but I can't for the life of me point to the last game I played for 8 hours straight. It would probably be Rock Band 2 when I did the endless setlist and that was what, 2008? 2009? I dunno. Maybe I played a Call of Duty for that long sometime between now and then, but the fact that I could do this and enjoy it the whole time throughout and even now WANT to play more of it? That's pretty telling. This game is glorious. I'm genuinely upset it got overshadowed by GTA V.
So what's this game about? What's the premise? Intro sequence is a mission with you killing terrorists. They're planning on launching a nuke. And they actually succeed in it. And how do you stop it? You jump ONTO THE MISSILE. And then this song comes on. Your squad mates say a bit about how heroic you are while you're ripping parts of this missile out. You pull enough bits out, then jump off and it explodes midair while you're freefalling. The title card appears, then you land at your desk in the oval office, perfectly fine, because that's the kind of game this is. You are the president. Then the earth is abducted by aliens, mainly one named Zinyak. He trap everyone in their own personal hell, one which you initially escape from, then appear in a simulated version of Steelport where you have SUPERPOWERS.
Surprisingly enough, the dubstep gun was one of my favorites for overall
effectiveness as well as BADASS VALUE.
A great video game critic once said something like, "A sandbox game is only as good as the means one has of traversing it." A mission or two after you enter the simulation, less than an hour in. You're given super speed and super jump. Instantly this makes crossing the city (something you'll do A LOT) fast and, most importantly, fun. Clusters are also introduced, little blue floating collectibles. There are a thousand of em. 1255. Throughout the game, I got about 1150. They're fun to get and you they function as upgrading your superpowers. Partway in the game, you also get an ability that shows the clusters on the minimap helping out greatly. They never become an annoyance except maybe when you want to quit because it's 5 in the morning and you're tired but you keep seeing one in the horizon. It managed to reintroduce the fun collecting of Crackdown without being the tripe of Crackdown 2.
The bulk of the game is doing the random sidequests while the game tells you that it's useful to fucking with Zinyak or something. It's a bullshit reason, but they're fun to do, so who am I to complain? There are the sprinting races inside the simulation which are really fun, as well as ones in a simulation which are less fun. There are towers to climb, there are collectibles to collect, there are things to do, and that's the important thing to note. There are a lot of things that one can do and most of them are fun to do. Sure, they have fuckall to do with the actual plot, environment, and are just sidequests for cash and xp, but they're there, and the fun ones are really fun. And the other ones? Well, they're there if you want to play em.
The progression of the game is what you'd expect, given the premise. Get your crew back bit by bit, then kill Zinyak. You save each member from their own personal hell and each one remains entertaining and vastly different from each other. They're all memorable and perfectly fit the tone of the game. And the tone is fun. Cause this game is fun.
Just one of the crew member saving missions.
Another one is a replication of Final Fight.
Ultimately, I'm just a bit upset that this was so overshadowed by GTA V. GTA V, while yeah, it was a technical marvel, it certainly didn't grab me quite like SRIV did. I have no real reason to go back and play the single player in GTA V. I don't really connect to the characters, the plot is... I dunno, crime/gang stuff. The best part about GTA is the environment is pretty cool. That gets instantly rocked by traversing buildings Prototype-style. Yeah, super powers nullify the purpose of cars, but that doesn't bother me for a second. Superpowers > cars any day of the week. What are the benefits of driving a car, you get to listen to the radio? Shiiit, there isn't a single song in GTA that I like to listen to often enough to listen to outside of the game. There's not a song I miss from that game, nor a song I have that I'm glad is in the game. That soundtrack suuuucks. SRIV on the other hand, while it has a significantly less number of songs, they are significantly better. Not only can you listen to the radio outside of a vehicle; it's always on, you can make a playlist AND there are enough songs that I'd use on a playlist! Macklemore, Kendrick Lamar, FIDLAR, EMF, Haddaway, ah, so good.
At the very bottom line, this game accomplishes what it set out to do. It took it's silly premise and ran at a dead sprint. Superspeed. This game doesn't ask to be taken seriously, which works absolutely towards its favor. It works excellently and it's been a long time since I've had quite this much fun with a game and easily top 2 games I played from 2013. It's genuinely difficult for me to decide my GOTY with this in the mix. 100% recommend.
9.5/10
To The Moon
NOTE: This blog post is going to be spoilerriffic, so if you think you'd be interested in an emotional, story driven, isometric, pixel art journey through a dying man's memories, BUY IT.
I've always held gameplay to be more important than story in a video game. Games can exist with no story, Super Smash Bros. Melee and Rock Band just to name a few. But a game cannot exist without some sort of gameplay, that just makes it a really long movie. Say what you will about games like Heavy Rain, or The Stanley Parable, but they DID in fact have a some gameplay, if if it was just wandering around and hitting contextual button commands. But especially last year did I discover the importance and impact of a great story-driven game. Through playing both Bioshock: Infinite the Spec Ops: The Line, I discovered that even if gameplay is important, a game can always have more impact with a compelling and emotional story.
Enter To The Moon, a 2011 indie game from the mind of Kan Gao and developers Freebird Games, although it's worth noting that the team of Freebird couldn't fill up a starting lineup in a basketball game. And that's the kind of thing that should help you figure out what the game is. It's a bit short, taking around 2-3 hours to beat, has a purposefully retro aesthetic, and has no spoken dialogue. Almost. I'll touch more on that later.
The game begins by looking down onto a house by a lighthouse. Two kids play the piano when they hear a crash. The view cuts and two scientists, Neil and Eva, climb out of a car. The tone is established as being a bit comedic, with the two pointing fingers, and the driver explaining that he swerved to miss hitting a squirrel but did anyways. They bring a large case from the car and you are then given control to direct this group to a house. You reach the house, knock, and are welcomed in by a woman who brings you upstairs to a dying man named Johnny. You know very little about him until you take a look around the house. You discover a room completely full of paper origami rabbits and a broken music box. You then go back to the man and your partner and discover why you're there and what you're doing. With helmets, the scientists access his memories. With this technology, they can grant patients their dying wish. Johnny last wish was to go to the moon. He claims not to know why, so you and your partner traverse back through his memories Memento style (and actually use mementos as links to previous memories) in an attempt to spark the desire to go to the moon at a young age in order to have him become an astronaut in time.
This is where the true meat of the gameplay is introduced and doesn't really deviate from this until a bit of an arcade segment near the end, but that's not that important. There are essentially two modes of playing. There's walking around exploring and clicking on things collecting clues to link to the previous memory sequence that's pretty reminiscent of Cole Phelps but 8 bit and more natural. The other gameplay thing is switcher puzzles that appear when attempting to travel back to the next memory. That's about it. Does that sound enticing to you? Probably not, but this game doesn't sell itself on the gameplay and neither will I.
Not really sure how to describe it, but the buttons flip all the things in the row and you
want all tiles face up. Simple enough, mostly.
As you travel back in time, you begin to discover just what happened throughout Johnny's life. You discover he is a widower to a woman named River. She rejects using money to continue with her medical bills in favor of completing the dream house they'd started. Johnny plays a song he composed on the piano for River which was the same song the two kids were playing in the intro sequence. By passing back again, you witness an exchange where River gives Johnny an origami rabbit and asks him to describe it. You get the feeling that Johnny isn't quite describing it in a manner River would have preferred. Continuing further, it is revealed that River has a persuasive personality disorder. At moments she appears to be distant and unable to relate to things, and as this was diagnosed lately, it's very difficult to treat. Regressing further, you experience the couple's wedding, their dates, their lives together. You feel the connection between the two and really become attached to them, even though you know the end. Or at least I did.
One memory is jumped into with Johnny confessing the something was the reason he first approached her, although doesn't say what. Later, you see this first encounter in a school. Johnny is encouraged by his friend Nick. It's an awkward encounter, one to be expected, but they agree to go on a date and to go see a movie. Then the next jump into Johnny's young life is blocked. We're unable to see what happens, nor access it. Returning to the future, we discover that Johnny has beta blockers, an item used to block out one's memories. By triggering his memory with a scent similar to that time (contrived, yeah, especially as the scent is the dead squirrel roadkill), Eva and Neil return to the young memory to discover Johnny had a twin brother, Joey who was killed in a car accident. By moving further back, we see Johnny was a bit jealous that Joey appeared to be the favorite, but joey was nice enough about it. We then go to Johnny's earliest memory, one at a carnival at a very young age. He runs off into the woods to a spot to gaze at the stars. River appears, but doesn't reveal her name. They talk about the stars and how River sees a rabbit constellation. She asks Johnny to explain it, and he does it extensive detail, until he is called away. They say they'll meet there again in a year, and if they get lost? They'll meet together on the moon.
With this, we discover Johnny's long wish to go to the moon, as well as what happened with the relationship. The beta blockers covered up the original encounter of Johnny and River, and any attempt the scientists had of sparking such an interest of space travel to Johnny as a child was futile, since the reason for going to the moon was always there. By preventing Joey's death in the memories and taking River away temporarily in the school to somewhere else, Johnny continues on with his life alone. We chronologically progress through the memories with any semblance of Johnny and River's relationship being wiped away. This all happens throughout a cutscene and was truly upsetting for me, enough to possibly squirt out some liquid from my eye-holes, but that's not important. The only problem was that this is also the one instance of a voice-over. The song that they chose to play over involved a child singer. While I understand why, I kinda killed it for me. It would have been excellent with the piano pieces they used the whole time.
We reach the conclusion and see Johnny being initiated into NASA. He takes his tour around the facility as we follow him until finally, he is introduced to one of his partners, a woman by the name a River. And yes, this entire ending is contrived, the fact that they BOTH get into NASA to be in the same crew together is an outrageous possibility, but fuck you because I wanted this relationship to end happily and it did! Even if it was only Johnny's memories.
No, those aren't tears, I swear.
It's rare that a game has such an intense emotional impact on me. This game was 3 hours long and had a bit of bollucks and annoying gameplay, but this was a game I was genuinely interested in seeing be resolved. I wanted to see how it ended. Was a disappointed? Absolutely not. Unfortunately if you read this, there's pretty much no reason to go buy and play it now, but at least hopefully you understand my enthusiasm for it.
9/10
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Grand Theft Auto Online
GTA Online was a thing that made perfect sense, something that people understandably wanted, something just a bit more structured than GTA IV's. GTA IV had freeplay, which devolved to people killing cops together, picking up weapons, stealing cars, just the very base, simplistic things that make GTA fun. Killing things with different weapons you can pick up, driving cars you can steal. The fun comes in the hi-jinx that you and other players create, as well as enjoying the fun possible to create with the game's boundaries. What are the restrictions in playing? Well, you can't go bowling, but I can't honestly say that's a limit in the sense that mechanical pencils limit you to not sticking them into a pencil sharpener. What I'm saying is that the things it took from you weren't preventing you from doing what you would (most likely) want to do in such a game, just as a mechanical pencil lets you complete the desire of writing. Why do I say this?
If I were to describe GTAO, in a word, it would be restrictive. Or it would be grinding. What is grinding? Grinding is the padding of gameplay with useless, boring tasks to unlock abilities, or other fun things. Grinding is not fun. Nobody should really build a game around grinding. Then your game is a Skinner Box and people don't play it for fun, they play it to be told they accomplished something. Which they didn't. Because it's grinding. It's not hard, it's boring and tedious. Nobody's gonna be impressed if you cut down a tree with floss, no matter how much you brag about it.
Blasphemy! Heresy! How can such a thing be said!? I'll explain my position articulated with where I am in the game. I have quite some hours into GTAO and am level 28. I have a house, two motorcycles and a bicycle in my garage. I have a few guns, just small arms and an assault rifle, nothing big or flashy and at the same time, nothing FUN. No rocket launcher, no sniper rifle, no sticky bombs. Why, you ask? Well, some items are locked off until you reach a certain level, and others are just too bloody expensive to have to purchase and constantly refill ammo for. "Now Calvin," I hear you say, "you can get money AND experience for leveling up at the same time by doing jobs, races or other activities!" Yeah, and you know the problem with that? They all suck. Well, that's unfair, they don't all suck, but most of the ones I've played certainly do. To purchase upgrades for personal vehicles, you have to win races with those vehicles, so why do any other races when they don't help you get your wheels upgraded? I just have to do more races! And frankly, I don't play GTA to race, I play it to make pedestrians into the fillings of my vehicle and building sandwich. So down go the races as a fun alternative.
Yeeaah, I love riding on jet skis then getting gunned down. I'm having fun already.
Deathmatches are just hideous. Max Payne 3 is a shooter with shooter mechanics. GTAO is like trying to shoot moving ducks in a carnival while you're strafing on a segway. They just aren't fitting for a larger scale gunfight especially when you're constantly getting flanked, or being killed by bigger, better weapons because you couldn't make the money to purchase good weapons and ammo because you're stuck trying to get money through deathmatches and you can't because your weapons all suck and have no ammo and you can't get better ones because ARGH!
It's also important to mention the survival mode, which is 10 waves of horde-like gameplay. "If you make it to the end, you get $20,000!" the game says enthusiastically. Yeah, what does it require from me to make it to such a level? "Well, err... You're gonna have to play it safe near the later rounds to make sure nobody dies-" Wait, why is that? "Well, the higher the level, the more enemies there are and the harder they are to kill! And helicopters!" So yeah. Survival devolves to you and buddies hanging out in a spot waiting for the AI to path to you, which they usually won't. Then you'll walk out to find someone to kill and instantly die. They always have better aim than you AND more people than you. Playing it safe takes around 2 hours for $20,000. Does that sound good? Well, it shouldn't when a race can give like $5000 for 5 minutes AND the fast cars you want cost upwards to $650,000 with upgrades up to $25,000. Survival is a test in patience, waiting in tedium. Because that's what I want in my Grand Theft Auto game.
Finally, the jobs. Let's take a look at the jobs. Briefly. I've done some jobs, some missions. I have not done a single mission that didn't follow this format:
1. Go to a place
1. Go to a place
2. Kill people there
3. Pick up item
4. Return item to place
5. During drive back, people will drive towards you and try to kill you.
6. Kill some of them, return product.
EVERY SINGLE MISSION I'VE DONE followed this EXACT same format. And yeah, if some of the later ones deviate from the format, excellent, but I didn't get that far. And I don't want to. If my incentive to slog through shit is to have fun, why can't you just remove the shit? Why can't you just have a fun game, huh? It's necessary to start with awful, boring things that people hate? You shouldn't have to bank on the silliness of your friends to make the jobs fun.
Now, I forgot to talk about the character creation, which needs only brief mention.
This is EASILY the stupidest way to create a character. How many times have you created a character and thought, "I want to do this less directly. How about instead if directly picking faces, body type, size, and the basic body things AS WELL AS picking clothes for your character, I'd much rather do this more indirectly by picking 4 grandparents, then adjusting resemblances." Probably zero times because you're sensible. And then you can allocate time per day in doing activities which does something, I have no idea what. Thanks for the direction game. Now I know.
Seriously, can anyone tells me what this does?
Now with all of this, it's very easy to make the wild assumption that I hate this completely and prefer GTA IV over it in every way. That's just not true. I do enjoy it, just terribly disappointed with how Rockstar had arranged this. Why close off the fun things? Why make people grind for fun weapons and vehicles ESPECIALLY when other players can kill you over and OVER AND OVER.
This is not how you make a fun game. I understand the need for progression, as a multiplayer mode that gives you everything (see: Just Cause 2) can get boring and lose its fun after some point. But at the same time, the fun in multiplayer ESPECIALLY in sandbox games is creating fun with friends or other people and then destroying shit together. Give us some freedom, Rockstar. How about this, let us create a private game (which is already annoying as it is because you have to create it from story mode), then let us set a bunch of options, give us money, give us the option to buy whatever, let us mess with cops. Restricting us in a GTA game makes us not want to continue on especially when we get our shit pushed in by random players. We don't want to get to that level to exact revenge, we'll just quit and play a more fun game.
Bottom line, this could have been great. As it is, it's annoying. I can still have fun, because friends can make things fun, and given vehicles and high places, fun things can be formed. But it could be so much more. Making money annoying to get and having to grind for levels is bad. And it's obvious, they want us to circumvent the annoyance of that by buying money with real money, but that's dirty, Rockstar. And hey, where are the heists?
4/10
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Nazi Zombies
I liked Nazi Zombies. I really did. Treyarch, you dun fucked up. Here, I'll make this quick and simple right now. I will list the zombie maps in order of best to worst.
#1. Verruckt - World at War
#2. Der Reise - World at War
#3. Kino der Untoten - Black Ops
#4. Call of the Dead - Black Ops
#5. Ascension - Black Ops
#6. Shi No Numa - World At War
#7. Nacht der Untoten - World at War
---Official separation of maps I enjoy to those I don't---
#8. Five - Black Ops
#9. Moon - Black Ops
#10. Shangri La - Black Ops
#11. Buried/Die Rise - Black Ops II
#12. Tranzit - Black Ops II
Honorable shit mention - Dead Ops Arcade
Clarification, I have not played Mob of the Dead nor have I played whichever one has the Big Daddy/Nautilus from League of Legends in it.
But hey, do you see a pattern here? I sure do. Let's see the ones I don't like. All maps available in Black Ops II and then the last maps in Black Ops (and Five but shut up). Let's delve a little deeper into this.
The maps in World at War are all solid. I put the original as the last one I enjoy purely for the fact that in comparison to the other maps, it just seems a little bare, but I can still enjoy it. The only reason it's as low as it is is because there's only so much you can do. Shi No Numa is also moderately low (for the good games) because again, there's only so much you can do there, or so me and my friends discovered. It succeeds on the fact that it's still zombies and there's nothing particularly annoying except yourself and your friends sucking. Verruckt and Der Reise almost need no explanation as to how and why they're great. The way they're structured allows for many fun options including a FULL MAP ROUNDABOUT in Verruckt.
Simple, solid, wonderful.
You can also be a complete shit and hang out in the BAR room for no reason. Why is that room even there? Just cause. And the fact that this is the only map where people start separately kind of confuses me, as I thought it worked quite well. These maps I can replay again and again without having to do the same exact thing for success.
Black Ops maps on the other hand... They're a mixed bag. The theater is great for the things it does well. It's a large, but clear cut map. There's nothing confusing, you don't really need to be explained anything. The power doesn't need three arbitrary things to be activated, and it's relatively easy to upgrade a weapon. The major fault of this is the introduction of Treyarch making horrible decisions. Every map from here on out has some terrible design choice, some incredibly annoying aspect/enemy. Why are there Nova gas zombies that pop and are fucking annoying? They're not a challenge. They just suck and are annoying and everyone hates them and there is NO WAY to get around it. They felt they needed another enemy to circumvent burnout, so they added annoyance. Thanks.
Call of the Dead and Ascension are really close in terms of quality. I really enjoy both of them, as the maps are (arguably) easy to maneuver through, and there's not much to be explained. Yeah, Ascension, we don't have to do three things for power, but we do for Pack-a-punch. Call of the dead just has both of em straightforward just sitting there, you just gotta get there. But again, with these maps, we feel we have options when playing them. The layout of the maps doesn't make them so crushingly difficult that we feel we have to hold out in one place for success which is BORING. But again, they have some stupid, annoying decisions. Monkeys in Ascension can go fuck right off. Yeah, they replace the dog round AND give you all a free perk if they don't break they machines, but oh they WILL break the machines. They go for the machines you have perks in and trying to defend against small, quick moving things is futile. Machines are usually in corners, so you'll be trapped in this corner trying to defend a machine and just get shit on. Call of the Dead has George, and I don't even hate him that much, but he could have been implemented better. It's fun to harass him for no reason, and he DOES actually add tension when you round a corner and see the big bastard lumbering your way. He takes a while to kill, which scales based on how many people you have, and I actually killed him multiple times with friends using sickles only. I dunno, I had fun doing it. But the biggest problem about this is that he comes back. He shouldn't. If he takes ass-long time and ammo to kill, he shouldn't come back ever, ESPECIALLY not the next wave. That's a dick move.
And now the bad maps... Five is, again, just incredibly annoying. You work your way down the building until you get to the power room and you punch it. Then come the Novas, as well the Pentagon Thief. Ohhh, the pentagon thief. You ever want a fight a bullet sponge who steals your gun? No? WELL TOO FUCKING BAD. It's like playing Rock Band, then reaching a difficult solo which not only has a lot of notes, each time you fuck up, it deletes progress on previous songs. Lose an upgraded gun because you thought it would be easy to kill him with it? You fucked up and it's most likely gone forever. But not only that, during this round, the elevators don't work, so you have to rely on these random teleporters to get from place to place. You'd have a better time just standing in the corner getting wrecked by this guy as it just saves time and you'll be done with this shit again. And again, the only really strategy is hang out in the pack-a-punch room and shoot em as they come in. Or that's the only one I could figure out.
Next on the list is Moon. Oh ho ho hooo, Moon. Moon is a culmination of just awful, AWFUL ideas. The only reason it's above others is it's a bit endearing with its awfulness like a frail puppy covered in its own shit. You can't help but just laugh at the ideas it fucked up. So, you spawn and you gotta run to a teleporter to go the moon, but you can wait and farm some points before round one. I like this idea, but you better hope you and your partner are coordinated. One goes down, you're fucked. You're not going anywhere. But when you DO make it to the moon, there's no air! You know this by your character gasping for air THEN DYING. There are NO instructions, nothing telling to get the fucking breathing apparatus, they just kinda hope you'll figure it out. That's NOT how you make a game. Come on, I know you're working on Call of Duty, but you have to know SOME basics about gameplay and conveying what you're supposed to do. Next on the list of moon-characteristics: low gravity. Low gravity is fun, especially with a dolphin dive. You know what's not fun? Sprinting down a slope, then floating all the way down only to be greeted by the welcome wagon of rag-tag zombies ready to know at your floaty ass. Why are there zombies on the moon? Whatever, I don't care. Next, the map layout. The map layout is horrendous. Between every room is small enclosure between the two rooms that serves two purposes: having a breathing apparatus for when the game decides to spawn you NOT in the original spawn, and pushing your shit right in. That's right, you will die because of these opaque, ridiculous doors. Too many times a scenario where, "Oh shit, my friend's down 5 rooms over! Better sprint over." You open the door to find 6 zombies ready to greet you with with 6 swipes, INSTANTLY down on your ass, or better yet, finding the astronaut who headbutts you to the spawn. I haven't even mentioned the astronaut yet, he takes some random name as if he was player controlled or something. He's a bullet sponge that grants you NOTHING for killing him. Don't wanna waste ammo but still wanna kill him? Try the knife. Or don't, cause he grabs your ass and blasts you to the spawn. Now, this isn't annoying in itself, but the stupidest thing is this removes ALL of your perks. ALL OF EM. THAT. IS. BULLSHIT. I love losing an insurmountable amount of progress do to BULLSHIT like this. Oh, and as a final takeaway, there's a room with bounce pads, a Bio-Dome. These bounce pads have a predetermined arc that sometimes decides just not to work. You miss your landing because you can't control yourself or do anything in the air? Say goodbye to everything, you're fucked. And when you make a worse Bio-Dome than the one with Pauly Shore, you need to rethink your life. So that is Moon. Not even the worst one yet.
Shangri La is just miserable. This one's balls hard, you never feel like you can do will in this level. There are no good places to hold out, there are no good roundabouts. You play for 5-10 minutes, get your ass handed to you, then you quit or play a better map. From bullet sponge zombies that explode and kill you, to getting trapped by spikes between sections of the map, this doesn't do anything good. And there's not even anything to write home about. Even worse.
To round out the Black Ops maps, I'll say a short a bit about Dead Ops Arcade. Ever wanted to play a more generic, music-less, ugly version of Geometry wars? Well, this is the game for you! A $1 indie game is better than this.
Dead Ops Arcade is a lesser map than I MA3D A GAME3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT
But now we finally reach the Black Ops II maps. Now, I'll say this, I bought every map pack for every map I stated above. Yes, I'm a bit stupid, but that's besides the point. I didn't buy Black Ops II. I didn't play any of these nearly as much as the other ones, and for good reason. I played Die Rise and Buried about 5 times total for both. They're confusing messes of maps. Sure, some may like the freedom and exploration, but when you need to pay money to get to other parts of the map, this becomes a hefty total, and you don't know if these are good ideas. You get lost, then you're dead. And Die Rise has a mix of dogs and monkeys. Instead of a dog round, there's something that moves quickly, jumps on walls, then scratches your eyes out. Then you die, get pissed, and toss the disk into a paper shredder. There's not much to say on these maps, as I didn't play them too much. It just boils down to too complicated, to much shit that's not explained, too much shit I can't be bothered with. Next.
TRANZIT.
Tranzit... Tranzit... This one map could have its own blog. This is the absolute worst. I don't understand people who enjoy this map. I genuinely don't. Not only is it upsetting that Black Ops II was released with less Zombie maps than Black Ops, it's also worse than any of the previous ones. There is so much wrong with this map, from the confusing nature of the map's mechanics, to the enemies, to the map layout, to the characters, to ANYTHING. I can't say there's a single thing about this map I enjoy. Yeah, the original map is in there somewhere, but I tried to find it once (with instructions on how to do so, mind you), couldn't find it, died, couldn't be bothered. But first off, the characters.
CHARACTERS:
The characters first had voices in Verruckt, then were given actual characters in Shi No Numa. Occasionally, the main 4 are different people, like in Five, they were Nixon, Jefferson, Castro, and Macnamera (who is an atrocious asshole), or Call of the Dead where they're 3 actors and Sarah Michelle Gellar who is the only notable one for being annoying. But this one has four assholes and not a single one likeable. The original four where all right, Takeo was kind of annoying with his Japanisms, but Richtofen more than made up for it. This one, everyone talks way too much and says things that make you cringe, or just makes you upset.
MAP LAYOUT:
The map is post apocalyptic, something that's not surprising on it's own, but it has these cracks on the ground and lava pockets that hurt you by crossing over them, which will happens all the goddamn time. Take a few steps, hit some lava, get stunned, slow down, get hit by zombies, die. The mapitself is separated into 5 sections, each one separated by intense fog and a long road. You're intended to travel between the two on a bus which takes some time to return if it leaves without you, which creates waiting, something this map is all about. Occasionally, you'll have to get to the previous section, so you want to wait for the bus to get there, then wait for the bus to go, so you'll leg it. Going through the fog is like wading a maze of hip-deep shit, then getting periodically stabbed for it. You'll occasionally lose direction of where you're going, have to go through extended sections of lava, which you might not make and just die, but worst of all are the "denizens." They fly to you, grab onto your face, and scratch at it. You have to repeatedly knife to get them off. AGAIN, not at difficult, challenging, or fun. Only annoying. The shouldn't be. But since the map is separated into 5 sections, they're essentially 5 separate maps, each of them too small to be interesting, and have some vital perks that you may have to go back to. Traveling from part to part sucks, and staying in any one spot ALSO sucks.
MAP MECHANICS:
So, as you know, the main thing is the bus that transits people from section to section, and as you know, I hate it and it sucks. But other mechanics are stupid and don't make sense. You can craft items if you find all the necesary items, but you can only ever carry one of these. You ca make a zombie riot shield which to be fair is quite funny, but it doesn't give you any points, and you'll need to carry the turbine anyways to unlock the pack-a-punch room. This in itself is a confusing mess that is incredibly difficult to discover on your own. You gotta place a turbine by a green door with a power symbol on it, then in the next section, you have to blow up a vault door with a grenade or ray gun. This in itself is confusing, as there's no way to know that would work. Then, if there's a turbine by that door, a chamber in the vault will open up. Again, this is just asking too much of the player. And if you say I'm just stupid and couldn't piece it together, fine. But having to do this with the constant threat of zombies is annoying. To people who defend things like this by saying that making crawlers were always a part of playing, yeah. That's true, they were. BUT, we didn't play Zombies to get to the crawler part. We didn't play to get to the point where we can stick our thumbs up our asses and wait for shit to be done. Nobody's favorite part was watching other people use the box 20 times. We play to shoot things and have fun. Tranzit is none of that. Tranzit is a test of waiting, patience through bullshit, and having a high tolerance for the map's shit.
Now, after all this, there's one more thing that needs to be mentioned. Treyarch and their "easter eggs." The easter eggs where you activate three stones or bears to play a hidden song is fine. Those are generally harmless and neat to discover on their own. But from Call of the Dead onwards, there are achievements for each level to do a multistep process which takes an ass long time and would no way be naturally stumbled on. Things that take 40 minutes to do, some REQUIRING 4 people is absolutely bullshit. Completeing the easter egg in Call of the Dead grants you NOTHING in game. There's no incentive to do it in the game, only for external bragging rights. They're not fun, they're bullshit. Just take a look at some of these. Seriously. THIS is BULLSHIT. I hate the presence of these. MAYBE in a game on its own, MAYBE in a game where you're not CONSTANTLY bothered by the presence of zombies, especially in a game where you initially die in only two hits. These are awful and I don't understand how people would figure these out without a guide, or enjoy some of them. They're incredibly luck based, and shit.
And so with all of that, you should be able to understand why Zombies are just a bit dead to me. With each iteration, they attempt to add more shit to make it BIGGER AND BETTER, which like the Call of Duty series in general, has just been a downward decline into mediocrity and frustration. Zombies used to be great, it used to be simpler. I could have forgiven them if Shangri La was the worst it got, but it's not... Every single one in Black Ops II that I've played is just awful. There's nothing good about them except for how great they make the older ones feel and play. So, Treyarch, you've lost me as a CoD Zombie enthusiast. I hope you're happy. I will forever remember the fun I had and will continue to play the good ones, and even occasionally play the shit ones for a brief, BRIEF period for a laugh, or for a fresh experience.
I mean, at least none of them are Extinction level bad, right?
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