Frenetic Pony

I've lost progress due to auto-save no working right twice, apparently you MUST quit the game before just turning off your Xbox. But that's not really why I found this game uninteresting. This game is, kind of like a static puzzle game to me. Or, rather exactly like. The guards are slow and EXACTLY predictable, as is everything. It doesn't even feel like a stealth game. At no point have I had to suddenly hide in a dark corner, silently trying to project waves of hope directly into the game and make the enemy not see me. At not point has NOTHING unpredictable happened. I've always known exactly what's going on, why I failed exactly each time, and what I should try next. So, a static puzzle game that's just dressed as a stealth game, at least to me. To me a stealth game has always been nerve wracking, always wondering if they'll find me, if I'll screw up. There's nothing of that in Mark of the Ninja. So I'm not going to pick it back up. But, if you're going to buy it, at least know this, hopefully if you've already bought this then you do enjoy it.

So I saw Battleship, sort of, for some reason. This is the best example of the stupidest movie ever! Someone in Hollywood took every parody of every Michael Bay/Jingoistic crap movie ever made and made into an actual movie that wasn't trying to be a parody, it's friggen awesome! The story is that Nasa finds another world that's like ours, and then builds something that looks like an Ion Cannon from C&C to "send a signal" there. The signal, of course, gets there faster than light, and a few years later some aliens show up and crash land on earth. Right in front of the dumbest motherfucker to ever live, and a terrible actor, who decides to win a girl he met in a bar by breaking into a 7/11, stealing a burrito, and then taking it to her as the cops try to arrest him by tazing him into submission. Anyway, the aliens crash land in front of dumb jingoistic motherfucker's navy boat, which he's about to get kicked off of because he's a dumb motherfucker. He, being the main character, goes out and tries to see what it is in a tiny raft boat. Oh shit, it's aliens! That don't do anything, they just sit there. Put up a big forcefield around Hawaii (where they are) and then sit there. The navy, being that this is a terrible movie, decides to shoot a "warning shot" at the god damned alien spacecraft because why the fuck not. The aliens return fire, on the sole gun that shot at them. It blows up, killing like a dude. And then they go back to sitting there. This requires dumb motherfucker to order his tiny boat to attack these gigantic, terrifying alien spacecraft with a machine gun. Dumb motherfucker's dumb fucking brother takes this opportunity to order his Navy Destroyer to also shoot at the aliens. Who return fire, AGAIN, blowing up the ship, AND ONLY THAT SHIP THAT FIRED ON THEM, while 2 other navy ships sit by it, completely unharmed and under no threat. Now Dumb Motherfucker is even more angry. Not only do these aliens have the sheer nerve to be fucking aliens, a crime that warrants immediate execution all on its own, but now its personal! He gets back to his own destroyer and begins ordering everyone to start firing on these alien sonsubitches. And so it goes throughout the ENTIRE FUCKING MOVIE. The aliens, with their terribly inefficient weapons considering they can travel through interstellar distances with ease, get their asses kicked for having the impertinence to try and defend themselves from the humans, who are of course all dramatically played up as heroes everytime they murder the aliens in cold blood for showing up to our planet at all, despite the fact that we contacted them. At the end of all this the bad old aliens are defeated, their plans to... try and make peaceful contact ended by the heroics of Dumb Motherfucker, who is of course treated like a hero for saving the earth from having to acknowledge intelligent alien life as anything other than something to immediately kill upon sight. I wish I was exaggerating, but I'm not. The movie makes a very very specific point, again and again and again, that the aliens are only EVER defending themselves from Dumb Motherfucker and his fucking dumbass cohorts. They go out of their way again and again to avoid unnecessary casualties, never harm a fly unless fired upon, and are generally incredibly god damned patient with a race that's actively trying to murder them on sight just because. I felt like Leslie Nielsen would be showing up at any moment, revealing that the entire thing is an incredibly bizarre parody, but he never does. Would definitely recommend while recording a mock video for youtube while drunk with friends.

Yay! Desmond is just annoying. My Guess is: The whole aliens and other world thing is some ancient plot to get people to activate some kind of human race ending fuckery, so the real aliens can come and colonize the world. Nee 2012 end of the world stuff, yay conspiracies! Plus you continue the series and get rid of Desmond in one fell swoop. Regardless, while the promises made for this game (more stealthy, more polish, more open worldy goodness) all sound excellent I'm still going to wait for reviews. I've got other games to play and Brotherhood was disappointing.

Already backed. For someone who complains about many games today, and has a hard time finding games I like through the mess of them, I'm sure buying a lot lately. But heck, I'll take all the old school rpg games I can get! I just wonder how, since they're going for sword and sorcery, the setting will handle "The Tolkien Paradox". A term I just made up in which: If you copy Tolkien, you'll end up unoriginal to some greater extent (D&D, Elderscrolls, Dragon Age, Harry Potter, et al.); but if you don't, you'll end up uncompelling most of the time (Ugh, just... ugh). Well, Planescape: Torment wasn't terribly Tolkien. And Harry Potter had originality, partially thanks to its modern setting of course. I'm sure there's something to be done.

I would disagree with continuing Hitchhiker's, but that's me. Also, there's a sequel to Dirk Gently??? Book found! Thank you very much.

So, desperate for a book that would fit my overly critical criteria I happened to remember that Douglas Adams had written other things besides The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (which starts off great and then goes downhill). And apparently the best of those books was called Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency. I started it yesterday and am done today, and it was worth every page and word. While it's got the same sense of humor in parts certainly, it's also a different sort of tale from Hitchhikers. A lot smarter about things for one. And now that I'm done with it I'm back to the grind of finding complex (in the sense of ideas, not literary function) and/or fun and original material to read again. Based on whatshouldIreadnext.com's suggestion I took a look at "Sharpe's Tiger" based on enjoying the Master and Commander series, and then immediately put it down and went to look for something else. But such is life and books I find.

So I started this, and felt it was a bit plodding and slow. But then I finished the first part, and was surprised! It reminded me of something Philip K. Dick might have come up with, so I happily plowed on. Wow, if I'd thought the beginning was plodding I didn't know the meaning of the word. The rest just trudges much like I imagine a boulder trudges its way down a hill thanks to the movement of tectonic plates. There's always the sense that something interesting is going on. But let's not discuss that interesting thing, let's take the next two dozen pages to describe walking down some bloody stairs and not advance the actual plot at all! Just could not go on with it, though I suppose if "slow burn" is up your alley it should be a different story.

Actually, what annoys me about SC are the utterly insignificant tasks that you must perform in order to win. It's not that I wasn't any good at them, I got mining down to optimizing exactly which patch of minerals each new probe would go to when made in order to maximize things just that much more. 5 minerals difference max for each one, but in the early game there isn't much else to do so I did it. But eventually I quit, because I simply became sick of all the little minutia I had to be paying attention too. I'd learned most of it; but at the same time I didn't find it interesting. I was just sick of being able to lose, or even win games because of the smallest little task that I didn't complete (or did). These things weren't actual decisions, instead they were things like remembering to constantly scout new areas with my observers, or to constantly micro-manage each battle that was going on, or etc. Things that were important to do, but didn't need any actual consideration. No brain power except keeping a huge checklist of things in your own mind and slamming keys on your keyboard as fast as possible. I just wanted to get back to the strategy, but my brain was under constant assault to remember all these trivial tasks that wouldn't take care of themselves. Enough that by the end less that 10% of the games I was playing ended up being about actual strategy. A lot of the time I was winning because someone missed scouting where I was coming from, or had one really good rush and it failed, or etc. Point is, I'd end the game knowing 90+ percent of the time knowing exactly why I'd won or lost because of one exact moment, and the rest of the game would end up being rote memorization, no actual consideration of strategy or tactics or anything.

Heck, you're here. Join someone here! Borderlands 1 was a FANTASTIC co-op experience. One of those rare games where the only possible thing playing with others could do was enhance the experience. Yeah, there are co-op games that depend on others to be fun. Borderlands (assuming it's similar to 1) isn't that type of thing. It's totally drop in/drop out, skill independent co-op where others just add more chaos and fun and explosions to the mix. You don't even need to worry about others in the game, you can work together (or not) as you see fit.

I absolutely love BG2, played it three times through and will happilly play it a fourth once the Enhanced Edition for that comes out. That being said, should I play BG1 as well? I've heard differing opinions. Some that 1 is too basic and straightforward versus 2's more modern take (ala non linearity, companion dialogue, etc.). Others of course say to just go for it.

Ironically they seem to have ironed everything out only to make consistently worse games. It's amazing to see higher budget games that take much longer to make, without much of the problems of newness and innovation that came before, by ostensibly the same company ending up consistently worse. But they are, which is just strange. Diablo 3 just isn't fun for me. Starcraft 2 slicked back veneer isn't as fun in some ways the original Starcraft either. And all the little sidebits, like voiceacting and music and writing and etc. are definitively worse! I suppose this is an example of a game being more dependent on its designers than how much money or time a team spends on it as an indicative of its eventual quality. Because, as far as I understand it, the designers aren't the same for SC2 or Diablo 3. Which in turn really makes me wish game designers would get their due in the gaming industry instead of being sluffed off to the side for the most part and all the concentration being on the game's title or the "company" making it.

It's weird, but I've got a multi million dollar idea. I say it's weird, because just an idea should not be worth millions. It shouldn't be possible; you should need to do a lot of work, and be motivated, and get everything right, and etc. You should actually have to put forth all that effort that comes after the idea and be the one to get that idea off the ground. But thanks to the current state of the US patent system, I wouldn't need that. I'd just need to patent it, and suddenly it's a multi-million dollar idea simply because I would "own" that idea. Which I find disturbing. I'm not really into the whole patent litigation and extortion racket. In fact I'm dead against it, as it's a dead weight loss on the economy of the world as whole, and besides just feels icky. But at the same time, heck I'm still in college with student loans. And it's an odd position to be in really. Usually, when you hear people with a "million dollar idea" they don't know what they're talking about. But thanks to years of economics classes and a somewhat obsessive hobby of learning every scrap of information there is about modern technology and the business surrounding it I've got a pretty good notion of what this "idea" is worth. And as stated above, thanks to patent litigation what should be almost worthless is potentially worth a lot. Of course, one should never count their chickens before they're hatched and etc. But as I go about learning how to apply for a patent (how to write it out in the most weasely, legalese terms available, how best to hire a patent attorney) I also find myself considering what would happen in the not unlikely event that this "idea" is actually worth a lot of money. Call it 3 to 2, maybe 50/50 that it is assuming it's not patented already, and all preliminary research suggests it isn't. And yet I find myself almost hoping it's not worth money; because I don't like stress, and I don't like extortion, and I don't actually want it to be worth money. But I don't want student loans hanging over my head, and I don't actually like the notion of a traditional office job. In fact as much as it makes me sound like a self interested pinhead with no notion of reality I never the less loathe the idea. My only thoughts at the moment, which as I said keep straying towards some optimistic future that has a decent chance of not happening at all, are that I could just charge depending on the company in questions business ethics. Microsoft and Apple, and their patent trolling ways, would get the shaft for example. While Facebook, which is actually kind of nice about things on the business end (yay open source!) would get a very cheap deal, if not for free and because. I don't even know why I'm writing this. It makes me sound like a horrible and stupid person in a way. But writing it in a public place at least makes me feel better about it. Get's my head straight and helps me get back to work on this thing.

So I just bought this game off Amazon's (still current?) sale. This plus Bioshock 1+2 on steam for $20 was too good a deal. The story so far (about 2 and half hours in) is definitely going towards a more interesting twist (and turns) on the modern war type shooter. That and some of the levels are just gorgeous to look at. But the big thing for me is that it's actually fun! I can hardly believe it, since for the most part I'm so utterly sick of games where I kill people that I check almost every day whether the SimCity beta has started and I'm in it. But somehow it does manage to be fun. Maybe it's because unlike Max Payne 3 enemies die in one or two shots, instead of being bullet sponges. Or maybe because I have to constantly pick up new weapons since there isn't unlimited ammo. Or maybe because I can't just sit behind one wall permanently while clearing out the current wave of bad guys thanks to them throwing grenades that don't suck. Either way,

I love how anything looks, because well, i like looking at things Regardless, and in as far as I know, it's updated in more ways than just the graphics (which is why it's taken so long). Apparently the AI, design, audio, story stuff, and even puzzles have attempted to be remade where appropriate. And as someone who also loves HL1 I can see the trepidation there, I can also say that one of the stated reasons for the mod taking so long as that they wanted to try and do as good a job as Valve would have remaking all of this. One can only hope they came even close to achieving such

No, just totally unimpressed and had no fun with Oblivion and Skyrim. Also this is a mod before it was paid DLC. As was cooking, and having a wife, and companions to begin with, and... basically half the "cool stuff" Bethesda's done is just copying what modders have already done with their games. And yet they still manage to do it with less skill as their coding is crap, their sounds are replaced by modders working for free, their artwork is crap that's also readily replaced by better stuff from modders for free. Basically anything they've done, unpaid modders have been able to make better quickly and readily. Which makes you wonder. They could hand pretty much their entire development off to their dedicated modding community and get a much better game out of it in all likelihood.

And I'm Nick Breckon. But seriously, I now consider Bethesda as a studio nothing but a lazy, unimaginative, sloppy, and uncaring group of commercialized bargeheads who think a game is just copying all the stuff modders do for free in their previous games, but not as well, and then selling it to people with trumped up marketing. And I'm kind of sorry Nick works for them, you're better than this Nick!

Oh it's dumb, and bad, and terrible even. It's just such a goofy, schizoid, dumb and terrible movie that it ends up being funny in its own ways. Like I'd totally forgotten about that viral video, and there really is a total recreation of that! Oh, and one of the best parts is, one of the best parts is that the "heroic, climactic moment" of the movie is that dumbass motherfucker and the old guys have to stop the aliens from sending a message back to their planet. What's the message? Fuck if we know, probably "don't come to this planet of psychotic murdering things". But the point is, the aliens are trying to do something and have to be stopped. So the heroic struggle is a bunch of guys trying to move and old artillery shell to their old ship's guns. There's minutes of this stuff, heroic music blasting as these guys try to carry something heavy. Of course they get there, and shoot at the aliens. This one shell then blows them the hell up, and the explosion, that's right, the explosion itself travels upwards like some sort of hungry beast thing, directly along these cable lines and only these cable lines to all these satellite dishes to blow them up too. The explosion is alive! And apparently intelligent. Either that or every single thing that sciency equipment was made out of is also incredibly, highly explosive, including the friggen satellite dishes, which were apparently made entirely of TNT or something.

Jesus indeed, or Thor, or any diety of choice. This game is juuuust what I needed. I played Starcraft 2 until I was hitting diamond and above level in 1v1. But that just had too much frustration involved. It was more fun to win than to play, and whenever I lost I could almost instantly tell why. One single mistake and I'd have just spent half an hour incredibly tense and wound up just to lose to not scouting right for thirty seconds. Even winning could be almost as thankless; when I won the same way, or was alternatively playing someone who'd gotten into the same rank as me using some idiotic one shot tactic that failed. I'd get no satisfaction out of those matches, his only chance was blown and now I just wasted another 10 minutes and being very hyped up to finish off someone who wasn't even approaching a challenge. TA on the other hand was just plain fun to PLAY, win OR lose. I'd love the huge cross map artillery things, as long as I got to build some, or a giant robot or something I was having fun. And PA sounds very similar, and I hope it ends up being so.

I suppose one example of how this game is schizo in its design, but can still be fun at times is a power you get very early on, like right at the beginning. You jump and then go into this kind of guided tornado spin attack that twirls you through the air. If you're near enough enemies you can do it continuously, turning your guy into this crazy guided missile tornado that just spins all around the map doing an insane amount of damage. Heck, exploiting this can get you to kill these mini boss rock giant enemies in a flash by just tornadoing them back and forth. But it can get can get so ridiculous that its still fun, you'll tornado off into the air and get going so fast you'll end up halfway across map/stage area, wondering where the heck you are.

Oh yeah, and that Fox/Cat/Flying thing totally has furry boobs. It does.

This is such an ambitious, oddly designed game. There is a heck of a lot too this game, a lot of detail and a lot of stuff. The game looks very cool, there's just a ton of solid voice acting, a ton of items, a ton of extra stuff to find and explore, all these little easter eggs. But it's also a very schizophrenic game, just all over the place. The tone of the story and setting swings back and forth from this overly serious melodramatic stuff that feels like its out of a similarly themed anime; to the next moment being a fourth wall breaking tongue in cheek affair that pretends like it was never serious at any point. The combat controls feel very good but you're given such maniacally good powers that it becomes a non challenge and not really that dynamic. Perhaps the best example of how schizophrenically this game was designed is the weather. The game is semi open world, but cycles through sunny/misty/rain with lightning/pouring all the time, almost regardless of where you are, or what you are doing. The designer did all this work and art, to code in making it do all these types of weather, and then just set up the game to go through the same cycle again and again and again everywhere. Instead of say, giving map areas unique atmospheres by making one place rainy, another misty, another sunny, and so on. Which results in all the map areas kind of blending together and not feeling unique. Which is a shame, as all this schizophrenia, as if once a game feature is "in" then its done, and you don't have to think about how to use it or where it goes, drags down a game that has a lot to offer. It could have been a really great game with all it does, but instead its more of an interesting game that's decently enjoyable. I suppose I'd recommend it for people that like similar anime stuff and don't mind highly repetitive stuff. Just like my brother, for whom both desriptions apply and from what I know he enjoys this game well enough.

Agreed, the rarer and less common something is the more important it seems to us humans, regardless of what it is. We get excited over things like weird shaped rocks. The opposing force is true as well. The more commonplace something is the less we get excited about it. "Oh, air. Yeah, it's there." and yet we need it to live. Regardless, having played the simply excellent "Mission Improbable" mod just last week I was reminded that there can be such a thing as classic gameplay that's not outdated. It was the most fun I had playing a shooter, any shooter, in years and is basically a chapter that could have slotted almost seamlessly into Half Life 2. I would challenge anyone musing that Half-Life as a game or series being "outdated" in terms of gameplay to actually go and play them again. For me at least it's remained just as fun and is in fact superior to every shooter I've played within the last 2 years.

Welcome to searching for a place. I remember searching for something 4 hours away from me. I would email them, drive all the way up there, and in one day get both meetings canceled. "Sorry Bro, just rented." Oh, yeah, sure. Thanks. Hey, it can make you feel better about the rest of your life. Currently I'm sitting here on not enough sleep, waiting in vain for a break in Hollywood and too impatient to even wait for an email back, even though I know from experience this can take days to a week or more for anyone to respond. But I can look back and say, hell, at least I didn't wake up at 6:30am to drive four hours straight just for nothing!

On "Guilt" about Video Games, and all entertainment: There's no other way to put this. If you have guilt, any guilt, over what you like to do. Then you have to ask yourself one question. And that is "Who gives a shit?" Who care, and why, and why the hell do I even care? All that "great" stuff, all that charity, all those "Great" people in history did not do what they did to be great. Einstein did not write physics papers and theories to be a great physicist or advance the knowledge of mankind or etc. He did because he liked physics, that was his DOTA, that was how he had fun, and every great person in history is little different. "Greatness" is, for pretty much everyone, just a nice side benefit. And so you, whoever you are, maybe you like to do something that isn't celebrated by others. And that's the real definition between "unimportant" and "greatness". That's the real accomplishment. Usain Bolt is considered great because the Olympics exist, and world records exist, and because it's celebrated, and all of that allows the fact that he's really fast, and likes to run, and likes to compete that makes him "great". The only difference is that it's celebrated by others. Even charity, even then we do that because we feel good about it, because it gives us something, and it's considered great because it's celebrated. Heck if you REALLY wanted to help people, if you REALLY wanted to make that huge difference then you'd invent a better solar cell, or invest in a company that's doing so. Helping something like fusion powerplants become a reality in 30 years wold help more people than the entire sum of all the charity given to anybody and everybody in those intervening years decades and even centuries after. But we don't think like that, because our brains aren't built to that way. So yeah, we are short sighted animals that derive pleasure from short term amusements. Ohwell. So hopefully, or at least I hope, that anyone with this complex would get over it, and enjoy whatever they do guilt free. Knowing that what they're doing really isn't any more or less important than what 99.999999% of other people do that same percentage of their lives. Or if they really want to be that "great" person, if that's really your thing, if you really want to be approved of by others; well then that's your thing, and hopefully you're doing that instead.

Yeah, Far Cry 3 looks like just another shooter, which I am more than done with at this point. The dream in my head was a cross between Far Cry 2 and Day Z that was more polished than either. Unfortunately it looks like most every "Triple A" studio still wants to play it far too "safe" to try anything like that. Despite playing it "safe" killing off developers and dwindling their sales for something like a year straight now. But, then again, games take time. Maybe sometime next year or the year after we'll see the results of adjustments to all these failed, generic, "me too!" shooters and action games and get back to some sort of variety and innovation.