toblix

That sounds pretty awesome. Hopefully it won't be an incomplete bug-ridden mess. The concept of indirectly controlling or aiding the main character has always fascinated me.

Speaking of Gears of War, should I get it?

Oh, if that was the truth I'd still be playing WoW. It's just such a hassle changing weapons when I constantly have to wipe drool off my chin and have my diapers changed. What, am I the only fucking guy not to think Bioshock's combat was totally and off-the-wall awesome? That's it, I'm going on Youtube to look at all the cool combat strategies Bioshock offers me.

What the Hell?

Yeah, the big daddies. Well, I could always open with some clever traps or something, but it'd never have much effect, and I'd still end up having to just shoot and shoot and shoot. The melee guys I could evade, but once they hit me once, I could pretty much just try to find the biggest gun and click until I respawned. With the ones with guns, it was just a big shooting competition, with my advantage being eternal life. If there was some layer of strategy I never found it. I never said the combat was hard, I said it was tedious. I'm not exactly Mr. Strategy, so I'm sure there are more intellectually stimulating ways to kill the Big Daddies than to just shoot. It's just that I'm not strategic enough. And I suck at most games. It stems from my tendency to give up quickly when faced with repeated failure and/or high stress levels. I even think the "life bar" in Phoenix Wright is a pain in the ass!

What, for fighting? Sure, that was the interesting parts of the combat. Setting shit on fire and... all that. Interesting, by the way, how the examples of how complex the environmental interactions were were not only examples of that , but also an exhaustive enumeration. Anyway, I usually found that fiddling with weapons and making sure I wasn't using the wrong ammo type was too much of a hassle to do clever stuff on the fly. I ended up with using the crossbow, then shotgun, then revolver on people, and the machine gun, then revolver on machines. I often opened with setting people on fire, too, although that usually made them run away from me, something I seldom wanted. And then there was the photography bit, which I thought was cool, but never actually used because I couldn't be bothered with it on top of all the weapon switching. And switching to magic in mid-combat just to discover I'm out of mana sucked. Didn't the 360 version freeze the game when you were switching weapons and magic? I would love that.

The more I think about it, as a shooter, I thought it quickly became tedious. The combat -- especially weapon/ammo/magic selection -- was a real chore to handle right to the end, and the Big Daddy fights were never fun. I just ended up in a corner, unable to move, trying to select and fire any fucking weapon before I was sent back to the respawn chamber. The Myst-esque/-ish aspects of exploration, and the story, were really what made me want to progress further. I really think that the fact that I actually enjoyed it, despite the amount of boring fighting, is a real testament to their world and story crafting skills.

I spent the weekend completing my media computer, which is the computer that's sitting under my television instead of under my monitor. I got the last piece (RAM) on Friday and spent saturday installing Windows XP, figuring out the drivers, setting up the remote, etc. Finally I could watch Prison Break e03s01 in 720p on 40 instead of 18.4 inches. It was cool. Sunday night I saw 300 in 720p which was awesome.

I realise I've written too many hateful posts about games and too few ones expressing my love or liking for any games. So my promise to you is this: And that, my friends, is The Toblix Promise. Thank you.

Okay, stop me if this is too crazy. Let's assume games are made just like a sausage is squeezed into its inside-out-turned pig's anus or whatever it is that holds the ground snout in place. Naturally, as the game progresses and the deadline approaches, just like the sausage-maker grinds the snouts less and spend less times picking worms and boils from the pig's heads he uses as the sausages' main ingredients, the game designer makes more shit game. Thus, we get the Meat Circus, Xen and the last parts of Bioshock. How about we start with the ending and make sure that's good, and then do the rest? I know it's crazy, and that marketing prefers when all the cool stuff is in the parts most people actually play, but hey, maybe people don't complete games because the ending parts usually suck? Is it particularly hard to make a good ending? Don't they think about the ending until it's almost time to publish? It's not fair that the people who invest the most time in a game and actually finish it are rewarded the least. We should have awesome, funny and crying-making endings! I know I'm wrong about this, but why?

What, that's today?

It seems that way to me. I have limited experience with Japanese games (Silent Hill 2, 3, 4, Okami, probably a couple more), and although Dead Rising was supposedly a "Western" game, it still has all these weird things that these games have. Some of them I like, like great character design and textures and excellent cut-scenes with lots of motion-captured standing around and gesturing. The characteristic long silences and sounds of shoes on the floor. But there's also the fucking lack of consistent game difficulty, and always leaving me feeling I haven't fully experienced the game properly because there's some special ending that's the really real "Real and True Ending", and explaining almost nothing, so you have to discover everything yourself, or, as in my case, go to GameFAQs and read about them there. I bet Japanese games are responsible for 90% of all GameFAQs FAQ traffic (not counting walkthroughs). I'm ranting here, and probably ignoring facts, but I still have this weird feeling when playing Eastern games that I'm always doing something wrong, or I'm not spending enough time playing, or I'm not doing things in the right order, I dunno. Dead Rising was fun, but I feel like I had to walk out 15 minutes before the movie ended and got the rest of the story explained from some smelly guy outside the theatre.

Holy Jesus, this is horrible! After realising that I'll never in a hojillion years manage to do even the first of the many quests in Overtime mode, I just watched the replay of it on Youtube. Turns out there's a shitload of new stuff, cut-scenes enemies, locations (yeah!) that's only available to those who manage to fight off the difficult end-game baddies. So I'm thinking about how, reportedly, most people don't finish a game like Half-Life 2, a game that's never gets even close to Dead Rising's frustrating difficultness, I'm thinking maybe a couple of hundred people actually played those last parts. This is a perfect example of reverse game design! They had all this cool shit at the end. Think about it, the player spends all his time inside the mall, and then at the end there are these new locations and stuff... but they make it so hard most people probably never know these things exist. Especially since you get endings that seem to sort of wrap up the story even if you "fail". I'm glad I waited so long before getting this, so I could use FAQs and Youtube to get the experience I feel I should've gotten without them. I've said before how Japanese game design feels somehow fucked up to me. This is a prime example.

So, just having thrown my controller at the screen in rage, always the best time for me to comment on games, let's look at Dead Rising and how this game "mixes it up a little" towards the end: Anyway, this game is awesome, but I'm having problems with the Japanese ending rating system, where you have to be this crazy masochist to get the "True ending". It's really incompatible with my desire to do and experience everything in games, do all the quests and so on, and my spectacularly low tolerance for difficult gameplay. Whenever I play a game almost to the end, and then give up, there's a wound in my heart that never heals. A fear that, when someone asks me if I completed Dead Rising, I'll only be able to say "almost had it, but it got too difficult at the end". Anyone else get this far? I seem to remember someone else mentioning not getting past these late game enemies. edit: Okay, so getting the A ending wasn't that difficult. I've unlocked Overtime mode now, though, which seems to bring some extreme gathering quests and a couple of tricky fights. Jesus.

Yeah, I didn't have any great problems with Meat Circus either (I think), but that wasn't the point. For many or most it was a disappointing ending part or something. You know. Anyway, there's the promise and expectation thing, sure. When you're entering the last parts of the game, there's nothing you don't know about. There are no new features or gameplay types coming, and worst of all (for me) there's some big fight coming up, followed by a too short ending movie. I think more games should mix it up a little, sort of like Bioshock alost did with the... I don't know. I guess I just want longer ending movies.

I'm really happy every time games like these have great mainstream success. I hate it when I talk about a game I like and people have never even heard of it.

Ah, close call, but you'll find you're not really that spoiled. That spoilers are unveiled in emails are unacceptable.

I know it is said that the ending is short, but

So, is TF2 supposed to crash? I got about one minute of play time on my own server before the game broke some computer law. That's beta, for you, I guess.

I know! Excellent!

I got your friend invite thingie, but clicking accept didn't do anything. So I tried decline, which worked. Anyway, I've added everyone from the IT group, but it seems I have to be invited to actually join.

But did you cry?

Forget it. ( I didn't say anything)

So's Dark Sector.