Good Christ. Lisa's columns on Kotaku were pandering, awful shit, but at least I only had to get past the one HEY LOOK AT ME GIRL GAMER picture per article to just laugh at the terrible humor content. Now, of course, there's her new series on The Escapist, where bad video game humor goes in the hopes that it will get legions of mouthbreathing fanboys like Yahtzee and TGWTG.
Lisa's new video series is, get ready, a weekly Top 5. On one of the few message boards I go to on a regular basis, there was a former staff contributor from Cracked who quit from the soul-sucking preoccupation that alot of mainstream humor has with Top X humor. According to him (and it's hard to argue with him with the evidence), nothing text-based can get remotely as much traffic as a Top X list. Well, except for a Top XXX list that involves breasts. So, I'd like you to guess what Lisa was wearing, and how often she hopped while slightly bent over in her 5-minute review.
There are only really two mysteries to Lisa at this point.
1) Who are these fucking nerds kidding? Reading over Escapist comments for Lisa's video was slightly akin to standing next to the aisle of a porn theater that has turned its lights on, mid-feature, to an audience of well-to-do gentlemen. Nobody is lascivious or perverted, but instead all follow the same basic feature: "Boy, I was worried she was just another pretty face, but instead she was really funny and made me forget how I would tie her up and force her to lick my Limited Edition Master Chief helmet!" Oops, that last part was my genetic traits picking up pathetic mental energies over the internet.
Maybe you giant babies love lists so much that you would watch them even if it was done by some beard commander enchilada supreme you'd still laugh and go post your feeble comments. But I cannot, nay, I REFUSE to believe that anyone would have given a shit about Foiles' video if it had not been presented by an attractive petite. Ignore Lisa's awkward arm movements, and try to focus your mind towards the actual content. Every joke is basically just "hey video games." Lisa can't even sustain a Penny-Arcade HM VIDEO GAMES ARE QUITE DISPARATE FROM REAL LIFE joke. Hell, even her list was stupid: Only a complete poser would have a "Top Five Sexiest Glasses" and not include Lucca, and sure as hell would not have fucking DUKE NUKEM or WESKER. Waaaaaaagh.
But no, I'm sure Escapist bootlickers would steadfastly refuse that Foiles's bimbo act would have any part in their enjoyment of this piece of high-class entertainment. A few tried to argue that Lisa was actually parodying the bimbo/Top 10 aspect, to which I say, "No she didn't, you pathetic liar."
2) How much of this shittyness is planned? Could Lisa really be a sort of analogue of the female writers of times past, pretending a deference and lower intellect while in reality she is truly a greater wit than us all? Well, change "truly a greater wit than us all" to "moderately clever," and I'd say it's certainly possible. Even if she's not really funny, she certainly got the pathetic nerd business landscape down, having formed a fanbase on Kotaku, IGN, and now Escapist. I'm sure she's already in negotiations with TGWTG (EDIT: whoops, angry joe, truth to say i've never actually seen a thing on tgwtg because i'm not a dick nose, song and dancen).
Now, returning to that Cracked writer, you can see where I'm going. Lisa could very well be aware that game journalism and humor is ultimately a fucked up horrible thing to begin with, so why not put in minimal effort that, paradoxically will get the most profitable responses? As I've noted before, the great thing about slutting out for nerds is that you have to show less skin than you would for most other audiences, as long as you can pretend to like Street Fighter. And again, while I rage about her lack of humor, it's not like there's really any funny video game humor, and columns are apparently a binary choice between "hey do you like games where you can kick really high girls rule ^_^" and "THE SOOTHING DIALECTIC IN A ONE CREDIT CLEAR IN DODONPACHI." At least there's more honesty in the former, especially within its audience. I'm not saying she's spoofing the whole game girl bimbo thing, but rather that she refined it into some sort of plutonium powered laser beam that is currently burrowing into the earth's core, where her Amazon wishlist has been chained for a millenia.
Or maybe she's just a dumb idiot. Either way, this is your New Heaven Salesman, and Eagles of Death Metal sound just a little too much like Led Zeppelin to enjoy it.
Monday, December 6, 2010
well i think he has some interesting ideas and he's really funny
Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee says execution is the appropriate punishment for the leaker who provided thousands of State Department documents to the website WikiLeaks.
“Whoever in our government leaked that information is guilty of treason, and I think anything less than execution is too kind a penalty,” Huckabee, a likely presidential candidate, told reporters Monday during a stop at The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library to sign copies of his new children’s book, “Can’t Wait Till Christmas!”
THIS IS WHAT WAS RUNNING ARKANSAS IN THE NINETIES
Saturday, December 4, 2010
Wishermaster 3: Beyond the Gates of Hell
What is it about horror sequels that are filmed concurrently? Return of the Living Dead 4 &5 were filmed at the same time, and now, as I decide to review Wishmaster 3, I find out that both it and Wishermaster 4 were also filmed at the same time.
Now, it's not that Wishmaster 1 & 2 were shining achievements of movie genius. For all intents, the original was Wes Craven reallocating some of his Nightmare on Elm Street profits into a new "Monster whose power is creating interesting special effects." Unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven skipped any attempt to make the Wishmaster, an evil genie/djinn who tricks people into wishing, then FLIPS THE WISH SCRIPT. The plot for both movies is negligible, but it had a couple of things going for it, primarily a great deal of awesome SFX setpieces, and the acting of Andrew Divoff as the Djinn, who perfectly captured the lighly gruesome tone of the movie. If you're curious, here's a compilation of the death scenes from the first two movies. The second movie is worse than the first, though I'd argue that Divoff's role, and the intelligence of the film makers to make the sequel basically a complete retread of the first, still makes it entertaining.
Wishmaster 3 focuses on Diane, a TA or something at a college who suffered a Big Tragedy as a kid where her parents were blown up in a car accident that she witnessed. There's a terrible romantic subplot where she can't say that she loves her boyfriend (who is taking the class she is TA-ing in). In a giant warning flag about the level of cinematic excellence, after a nightmare in the opening scene, Diane goes outside just so we can see her erect nipples.
Diane also has to work at the college Museum of Creepy Artifacts, and for some reason is allowed to look at some box that is a direct rip-off of the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser. Djinn is eventually released, and possesses Diane's creepy professor, and here we get to the first big problem of the movie. Jason Connery isn't a terrible actor, but he lacks the crazy bug-eyed scenery chewing of Divoff, and his facial hair just makes him look like a metrosexual version of Robert Patrick from Double Dragon.
I'm not really sure what the Djinn is going for here. He's blackmailing the professor, but it's never made clear how the Djinn would approach the Sociology Chair and Board of Directors with this revelation, since he's a giant evil hell beast. What's weirder about all this is that the script implies that the professor understands what the Djinn is all about with "granting wishes." But whatever, he cracks and decides to go for a carefully worded wish of "two women I find most attractive in the world to be in love with me." This leads to what I assume is Connery's reason for being in the film, as two naked chicks start writhing all over him. Of course, they're actually demons, which doesn't make sense in the context of the wish.
We follow with an awful sex scene between Diane's best friend and her boyfriend behind a couch where a guy is watching MTV (which also gives this movie two and a half nude scenes by the 30 minute mark). Eventually, the Djinn goes to the administration building to find Diane's address, but is cockblocked by an elderly secretary who won't give him Diane's transcript because it's confidential (which is surprisingly accurate, I guess the movie researched FERPA), but of course she wishes that "all these files would go up in flames so I could get the hell out of here." GUESS HOW THIS TURNS OUT, CLEVER VIEWER. It's actually better than you think, as the woman proceeds to open up a file cabinet and get a jet of flames right to the face.
What follows is 20 minutes of Diane going SOMETHING IS WRONG and everyone going NOPE YOU CRAZY, until for some reason the Djinn reveals himself in front of Diane's boyfriend. He and Diane flee to a church, where the Djinn is waiting for them, along with Random Slut #1. Diane refuses to wish citing that the Djinn can't hurt them without a wish being made, to which the Djinn is all "thas cool oh btw Random Slut #1 already made a wish wanted to lose some weight want to wish nao? :3" She refuses at first, so we get a vomiting scene that less gross than that from City of the Living Dead. Diane, being a retarded bint, gives in and wishes to end Random Slut #1's pain, which goes about how you'd think.
She then makes the second wish, which suddenly propels this movie from a crappy sequel to utter disaster: "I wish to invoke the spirit of St. Michael to help me." Yes. That is the wish. The Djinn actually grants this one, but apparently the spirit has to inhabit a body. Initially she gets possessed, but then the boyfriend shoves her out of the way. And lo, Greg the Boyfriend gets blue contacts, and super-deep voice, and a curvy-bladed sword that was bought for 59.99 at some craft store. Djinn transforms into his demon form, and a pretty goddamned embarassing fight proceeds, where the Djinn throws a pew at Michael, and Michael reverses with a armflip into the altar.
The final 30 minutes of the film alternate between Diane and Michael the Angel running from the Djinn (occasionally with Michael berating Diane about her dumb fucking decisions), while he randomly kills her friends. The rundown includes:
Oh and in the end Diana realizes that she could just kill herself before making the third wish, but then the Djinn catches her arm just before she throws herself off a building. She then telepathically grab Michael's sword, stabs the Djinn, both fall and die but Michael just casts Life 3 and yay everyone lives again.
So, what is there to say? If you get the mien to watch a movie directed by someone actually named Chris Angel, use that handy thumbnail function on the Netflix instant viewer to find the death scenes, as there is nothing else going for this movie. Still, it at least had the wisdom to retain the whole basic plotline, which is better than I can say for Wishmaster IV, which is literally a romance involving the Djinn. NOPE. NOT KIDDING.
Now, it's not that Wishmaster 1 & 2 were shining achievements of movie genius. For all intents, the original was Wes Craven reallocating some of his Nightmare on Elm Street profits into a new "Monster whose power is creating interesting special effects." Unlike Nightmare on Elm Street, Craven skipped any attempt to make the Wishmaster, an evil genie/djinn who tricks people into wishing, then FLIPS THE WISH SCRIPT. The plot for both movies is negligible, but it had a couple of things going for it, primarily a great deal of awesome SFX setpieces, and the acting of Andrew Divoff as the Djinn, who perfectly captured the lighly gruesome tone of the movie. If you're curious, here's a compilation of the death scenes from the first two movies. The second movie is worse than the first, though I'd argue that Divoff's role, and the intelligence of the film makers to make the sequel basically a complete retread of the first, still makes it entertaining.
Wishmaster 3 focuses on Diane, a TA or something at a college who suffered a Big Tragedy as a kid where her parents were blown up in a car accident that she witnessed. There's a terrible romantic subplot where she can't say that she loves her boyfriend (who is taking the class she is TA-ing in). In a giant warning flag about the level of cinematic excellence, after a nightmare in the opening scene, Diane goes outside just so we can see her erect nipples.
Diane also has to work at the college Museum of Creepy Artifacts, and for some reason is allowed to look at some box that is a direct rip-off of the Lament Configuration from Hellraiser. Djinn is eventually released, and possesses Diane's creepy professor, and here we get to the first big problem of the movie. Jason Connery isn't a terrible actor, but he lacks the crazy bug-eyed scenery chewing of Divoff, and his facial hair just makes him look like a metrosexual version of Robert Patrick from Double Dragon.
The confrontation between the Djinn and Creepy Professor is one of the better/worse parts of the movie. After Diane leaves the Professor after his terrible come-on, the Djinn just appears and glides across the floor. Djinn demands to find the person woke him (the central theme of every Wishmaster theme being that the person who unleashed the Djinn must make three wishes, thereupon a shitload of Djinn will awake and rule the earth), and he refuses. Djinn first offers him some hot women, but when he hesitates, we get this:
I'm not really sure what the Djinn is going for here. He's blackmailing the professor, but it's never made clear how the Djinn would approach the Sociology Chair and Board of Directors with this revelation, since he's a giant evil hell beast. What's weirder about all this is that the script implies that the professor understands what the Djinn is all about with "granting wishes." But whatever, he cracks and decides to go for a carefully worded wish of "two women I find most attractive in the world to be in love with me." This leads to what I assume is Connery's reason for being in the film, as two naked chicks start writhing all over him. Of course, they're actually demons, which doesn't make sense in the context of the wish.
We follow with an awful sex scene between Diane's best friend and her boyfriend behind a couch where a guy is watching MTV (which also gives this movie two and a half nude scenes by the 30 minute mark). Eventually, the Djinn goes to the administration building to find Diane's address, but is cockblocked by an elderly secretary who won't give him Diane's transcript because it's confidential (which is surprisingly accurate, I guess the movie researched FERPA), but of course she wishes that "all these files would go up in flames so I could get the hell out of here." GUESS HOW THIS TURNS OUT, CLEVER VIEWER. It's actually better than you think, as the woman proceeds to open up a file cabinet and get a jet of flames right to the face.
WOOMPH
What follows is 20 minutes of Diane going SOMETHING IS WRONG and everyone going NOPE YOU CRAZY, until for some reason the Djinn reveals himself in front of Diane's boyfriend. He and Diane flee to a church, where the Djinn is waiting for them, along with Random Slut #1. Diane refuses to wish citing that the Djinn can't hurt them without a wish being made, to which the Djinn is all "thas cool oh btw Random Slut #1 already made a wish wanted to lose some weight want to wish nao? :3" She refuses at first, so we get a vomiting scene that less gross than that from City of the Living Dead. Diane, being a retarded bint, gives in and wishes to end Random Slut #1's pain, which goes about how you'd think.
She then makes the second wish, which suddenly propels this movie from a crappy sequel to utter disaster: "I wish to invoke the spirit of St. Michael to help me." Yes. That is the wish. The Djinn actually grants this one, but apparently the spirit has to inhabit a body. Initially she gets possessed, but then the boyfriend shoves her out of the way. And lo, Greg the Boyfriend gets blue contacts, and super-deep voice, and a curvy-bladed sword that was bought for 59.99 at some craft store. Djinn transforms into his demon form, and a pretty goddamned embarassing fight proceeds, where the Djinn throws a pew at Michael, and Michael reverses with a armflip into the altar.
LOOK AT THIS GODDAMNED SWORD
The final 30 minutes of the film alternate between Diane and Michael the Angel running from the Djinn (occasionally with Michael berating Diane about her dumb fucking decisions), while he randomly kills her friends. The rundown includes:
- Random Slut #2 wishes for heart to be broken, which features a really bad cross-section of her heart exploding, like a Ghost being exploded in Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt. Which basically makes me wish I was watching that instead (Stocking is mai waifu).
NON DES KAAAAAAAAH
- Diane's best friend's boyfriend gets beaten up by the Djinn, eventually wishing for the Djinn to "Blow Him," which culminates in him getting floated in front of the Djinn, who literally blows him into a bull statue.
- Finally the best friend, which features the most brutal kill in the series. Djinn chases her into some animal research lab. She hides from him in some cabinet, and for some reason, the Djinn just gives up and leaves the room. In possibly the worst decision of the series, she calls Diane and says "I wish there was somewhere to hide." For some reason this instantly summons the Djinn, who carries her across the lab and stuffs her head into a rat cage, telling her "NO ONE WILL FIND YOU IN HERE LOL." Now, while it's not like the Wishmaster series has high logic standards to uphold, but I don't think being stuffed in a rat cage really works as a place to hide in any connotation, especially as Diana immediately finds her.
Oh and in the end Diana realizes that she could just kill herself before making the third wish, but then the Djinn catches her arm just before she throws herself off a building. She then telepathically grab Michael's sword, stabs the Djinn, both fall and die but Michael just casts Life 3 and yay everyone lives again.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, WISHMASTER III
So, what is there to say? If you get the mien to watch a movie directed by someone actually named Chris Angel, use that handy thumbnail function on the Netflix instant viewer to find the death scenes, as there is nothing else going for this movie. Still, it at least had the wisdom to retain the whole basic plotline, which is better than I can say for Wishmaster IV, which is literally a romance involving the Djinn. NOPE. NOT KIDDING.
Thursday, December 2, 2010
The Desperate Tim Rogers Tries to Stay Afloat on Kotaku
You know, most intelligent people probably guess that with Tim's columns getting way less viewcounts than Lisa Foiles's, or hell, even Leigh Alexander's, we were going to see some pandering. The column last month about MMOs might have been pandering, I'm not sure. Tim doesn't really seem to know how to pander, considering that the central MMO of that column was Final Fantasy XI, an game that I think even All Points Bulletin players felt sorry for even as their experience imploded in hilarious mismanagement. I didn't read the entire column, and what I don't read I don't really remember, except that Tim had a Strange Opinion about the MMO experience and tried to relate it to something else. I'm sure Tim was physically pained writing a column about it all the same, considering his hatred of the masses and slow-paced loot grinding games in general (his review of Diablo II on one of his many unimportant sites was apoplectic at the whole slot-machine aspect of the game).
But whatever. Tim had a month to recover, watch as Lisa Foiles' newest column (which was basically her stealing that women's heroine stereotype flowchart from Jezebel (which they stole from another blog, to be fair) and going "video game heroines are strange!") rise to EIGHTY THOUSAND HITS, and plan a new idea! Then as he actually admits in so many words he realized his ideas are horrible (in his own words, his column this month wasn't psychedelic enough, which implies that the limits of Tim's mindscaping has been pressing his hands against his eyes real hard) and no one really pays attention to his columns except to say "oh so long." A real change was needed So this time, he was going to go Web 2.0, making mental air quotes while preparing his date his some japanese girl who mentioned liking Lucky Star.
Yes, he's taking questions from the audience using Twitter about video games. No, his answers are not limited to 160 characters.
The first thing I noticed in the column was a pretty sad attempt to validate himself as an important gaming person:
I hope you didn't read that. Here's what we can glean from this passage:
Here's some other snippets, bolded for the "come on what man don't do this" parts:
There are others questions with face-slapping moments, but you've got the idea at this point, right? I've tried to exhaustively summarize Tim Roger's columns before, but it's just impossible. Not because I'm mad or anything, but they're just so underwhelming to read, despite angry nerd views to the contrary. It's like going to a restaurant that some friends worship, and others go on chowhound or eopinions to write nasty hateful reviews about and gleefully show them to you, and you just get a watery soup and a waiter out of a Tom Petty song.
I don't want to bring up icypalm (ho ho) again after all of his naifs pumped up my blog statistics, but while I hate his columns...actually, that's the thing. His writing is pretty terrible, but at least there's a sort of adventurous, gleeful misanthropic vibe to them that makes it fun to hate them. Tim Roger's writing, especially his stuff on Kotaku, is impenetrable dreck dumbed down for a site audience that really wants to know more about two feet tall ceramic sculptures of Tifa. Now he's clearly given up any sort of rock-star gaming journalist aspect and pandering for subscribers on fucking Twitter. What's next, a blog on 1up so he can compete with Jeremy Parish on who is the bigger early-2000s gamer has-been? I can't care about this shit anymore, and neither should you (at least until he starts getting catty towards women or something).
NEXT TIME. TALKING ABOUT PERSONA 2: INNOCENT SIN
But whatever. Tim had a month to recover, watch as Lisa Foiles' newest column (which was basically her stealing that women's heroine stereotype flowchart from Jezebel (which they stole from another blog, to be fair) and going "video game heroines are strange!") rise to EIGHTY THOUSAND HITS, and plan a new idea! Then as he actually admits in so many words he realized his ideas are horrible (in his own words, his column this month wasn't psychedelic enough, which implies that the limits of Tim's mindscaping has been pressing his hands against his eyes real hard) and no one really pays attention to his columns except to say "oh so long." A real change was needed So this time, he was going to go Web 2.0, making mental air quotes while preparing his date his some japanese girl who mentioned liking Lucky Star.
Yes, he's taking questions from the audience using Twitter about video games. No, his answers are not limited to 160 characters.
The first thing I noticed in the column was a pretty sad attempt to validate himself as an important gaming person:
- He mentions that he has 1600 twitter followers. To this, I sort of want to pat Tim on the head, as I'm pretty sure that if I opened up a twitter account that was me posting tridaily hollywood actresses I wanted to play metal slug with, I could get 2000 followers within a month with a minimum of whoring.
- His first question is a wackily pedantic question from Bryan Lee O'Malley. Who is that? It's the guy who wrote the pretty good Volumes 1-3 of "Scott Pilgrim," then went on to write the absolutely miserable Volumes 4-6 of "Scott Pilgrim." In Tim's defense, he claims that this was the first question he got FOR REAL, though whether he's lying or not, the only sure truth is that I feel alot better about not actually buying any of the Scott Pilgrim books.
- The whole "oh I'm such a bad writer in an ironic way" I talked about in blogs past is out in full force.
Note that half of the questions and answers significantly involved the whole sticky friction thing. That column was Tim's big break, and I'm not sure if Tim really understands that the whole of his Kotaku fanbase seems to be around the DISCOVERED CONCEPT that sometimes a game slows down in order to heighten enjoyment. It's something akin a writer who attempts to create great works of genius, and is primarily known by 90% of his fans for being the originator of a fairly clever fart limerick.
Of course, it's not like Tim is pounding out works of genius. Here's him talking about Vanquish, a 4-hour third person shooter that was noticed for like five minutes because some guys who worked on Resident Evil 4 or 5 left Capcom to work on it:
I'm talking about American football. Nearly no one outside of America knows what American football is, or, at least, they don't know enough about it to be able to spot its nuances in other works of media.
Gears of War is simultaneously a game of inches and a game about linebacker-sized dudes Going For It on fourth and sixty-five. The "stop and pop" cover-based game mechanic stresses defense over offense. The medium-term goal of Gears of War is to clear every enemy in the area. The short-term goal is usually to clear every enemy you can clear from your current position. Your current position is either the only place you can be without dying at this very moment or a place you've already been. Gears of War is about "painting" the battlefield with safety. You stop, you pop, you earn a better grasp on more strategic position, you move forward.
Vanquish, on the other hand, is more soccer than football. It's almost as though the game designers understood how integral football was to Gears of War, and decided that, in order to make a "Japanese" — or, well, "Not Completely American" — third person shooter, they could possibly start with soccer.
Soccer, like wearing skinny jeans, is a sport that is more or less about ball placement. A skilled player can put the ball anywhere on the field, from any time, from any position.
Well, the one place a typical player can't put the ball simply through a little application of will is, of course, the inside of the goal. That's the tricky part. Scoring a goal in soccer is a momentous occasion. In American football, you can score a goal by soldiering forward and not messing up. In soccer, you're going to end up face-to-face with a goalkeeper — essentially, a rival with a terrain advantage. You couldn't make it harder to score a goal in soccer if you put the goal on top of a hill.
So, ball placement: soccer is about choosing where to put the ball at any given moment. When choosing where to put the ball, the player has to consider the position of his other teammates and their formation, and his rivals and their position. Soccer is about positioning the ball with a little preemptive thought about the path each play will take. As your rivals out-think and out-maneuver you, play after play and plan after plan fall abandoned by the wayside, scrapped in favor of new tactics.
Vanquish is like soccer in that the player controls both the athlete and the ball. At any time during any given firefight, the player can use a dash ability to sprint, near-invincible, to and from any position on the battlefield from or to any other position.
In short, from anywhere on the battlefield, you can put the hero anywhere.
I hope you didn't read that. Here's what we can glean from this passage:
- Tim knows literally less about football than Klosterman.
- He is sort of right about Gears of Wars being a series of "plays," but holy shit I don't know where he's coming from with Vanquish. I've only watched the game, but the main feature is an easy to use propulsion system on your hero's man-sized mecha suit that allows him to jet around the battlefield. It's a neat little idea, but that has nothing to do with soccer, which is just as strictly play and team-based as American football. The notion of a superstar being able to control a chaotic, closed-in field is closer to lacrosse or hockey, but of course, those aren't cool sports, right?
- Mario is like bowling because friction friction friction.
Here's some other snippets, bolded for the "come on what man don't do this" parts:
It most certainly could be. In fact, the creator has even called it that in so many words.
When I talked to Gran Turismo director Kazunori Yamauchi in 2009, he said that the game is, in fact, a role-playing game. The player obtains licenses, earning access to new circuits and cars. He earns money by winning races. He spends money to purchase cars.
Cars are like weapons — they can only accentuate the player's innate abilities. Unlike in a standard role-playing game, where the character gains power and ability by simply playing ceaselessly and persistently, in Gran Turismo the up-leveling happens inside the player's brain as he unlocks new brain-places and connects gaps between previously existing patches of wisdom.
Surmounting a challenge in Gran Turismo requires knowledge of yourself, the challenge, and the tool — the car — you use. You have to learn each car's personality in about as much detail as you get familiar with the life and back-story of a character in an RPG.
In 2004, Yamauchi told me that, during his years as a young gamer, he much preferred Choplifter to Super Mario Bros., because he could imagine it was him inside that helicopter. Maybe Choplifter is a role-playing game, too.
"Role-playing game" is a loose term. It doesn't just mean dungeons, dragons, menus, and monsters. It can mean a game where you have to invest a little bit of your own brain in the name of pretending what's happening in the world of the game is "real" or "important".
Sports games and role-playing games have more in common than you might ever think at first. Shingo "Sea Bass" Takatsuka, director of the Winning Eleven soccer series, told me that he considers the Winning Eleven series "role-playing games". He says that, outside basic knowledge of game controls, attack plans, and the basic rules of soccer, the key to playing the game well is understanding the personalities and playing styles of individual players. Players' abilities are represented by a few convenient integers, though outside of that, players with similar ability ratings might be capable of doing completely different things. Mastering the game requires understanding who can do what, and how.
I feel like I've hinted at this in a previous column: I want to make a game that makes someone feel the way they feel when they look at their chat client's buddy list and see a little pencil icon by your name. They sit there, wondering what you're about to say. And then, maybe, you never say anything. Maybe you went to bed after typing a letter — maybe "a", maybe "k" — into a chat message and then not pressing enter. That's cooler than "poking" someone on Facebook.
(I WISH I COULD MAKE THIS EVEN BOLDER)
There are others questions with face-slapping moments, but you've got the idea at this point, right? I've tried to exhaustively summarize Tim Roger's columns before, but it's just impossible. Not because I'm mad or anything, but they're just so underwhelming to read, despite angry nerd views to the contrary. It's like going to a restaurant that some friends worship, and others go on chowhound or eopinions to write nasty hateful reviews about and gleefully show them to you, and you just get a watery soup and a waiter out of a Tom Petty song.
I don't want to bring up icypalm (ho ho) again after all of his naifs pumped up my blog statistics, but while I hate his columns...actually, that's the thing. His writing is pretty terrible, but at least there's a sort of adventurous, gleeful misanthropic vibe to them that makes it fun to hate them. Tim Roger's writing, especially his stuff on Kotaku, is impenetrable dreck dumbed down for a site audience that really wants to know more about two feet tall ceramic sculptures of Tifa. Now he's clearly given up any sort of rock-star gaming journalist aspect and pandering for subscribers on fucking Twitter. What's next, a blog on 1up so he can compete with Jeremy Parish on who is the bigger early-2000s gamer has-been? I can't care about this shit anymore, and neither should you (at least until he starts getting catty towards women or something).
NEXT TIME. TALKING ABOUT PERSONA 2: INNOCENT SIN
Sunday, October 31, 2010
BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART III: what
So, as you may last remember, I needed a boat for some ill-defined reason, but the DARK DRAGONS have blown it up, so I need to find their secret base with their own boat. Meaning I have to backtrack yet fucking again to find the secret boat of the DARK DRAGONS.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART II (THE STORY SO FAR)
I regret that I didn't take many pictures.
For reasons I don't know, when I started playing, the input for capturing a screen was the same for the fast forward button. I didn't realize this until ten minutes into the game, whereupon I removed the capture button and found one hundred and thirty .pngs in my gba folder. That's really the harshest thing I could say about this game, so if you really want to know more, follow me into a magical, ill-defined world.
For reasons I don't know, when I started playing, the input for capturing a screen was the same for the fast forward button. I didn't realize this until ten minutes into the game, whereupon I removed the capture button and found one hundred and thirty .pngs in my gba folder. That's really the harshest thing I could say about this game, so if you really want to know more, follow me into a magical, ill-defined world.
BREATH OF FIRE IS FUCKING TERRIBLE, PART I
I am doing this review as a public service. I want you to read this, and from that, realize you should never play this game regardless of any misguided retro charm, or bizarre desire to START FROM THE BEGINNING of some mediocre rpg series.
A few days ago, I started playing Breath of Fire for the Game Boy Advance. Originally it was for the Super Nintendo. This was its boxart, and WORRYING SIGN NUMBER ONE:
I decided not to play the snes version, not because of CHUNK MCHUGEPALM and his rapeface, but that doing some research revealed that the GBA version literally doubled the amount of EXP and gold gained per defeated enemy. This was WORRYING SIGN NUMBER 2, as any game that so spectacularly botched its required grinding in the original iteration probably has other issues.
Oh boy.
It's hard to pin down, halfway through this game, the worst part of things. The "story" is probably the worst thing, and as I'm going to post more updates on what a mess this game is, I should probably start with all of the other problems.
I think the most obvious problem is the goddamned pace of this game. I recently bought a new gamepad, and mapped the emulator's "fast forward" button to the right trigger button. This was a response to Golden Sun, which has some really really languid cutscenes (I want to cut the person that thought that good storytelling was having character sprites have emoticon bubbles over their head while repeating a plot point for the umpteenth time). But the worst thing is that, for all of Golden Sun's faults, it is a goddamned rollercoaster Bruckheimer fuckdaze compared to Breath of Fire.
Everything in Breath of Fire just has weird little delays going on. Pushing start to go to a menu has a half-second of empty space. Fights are an eternal back-up at a traffic light, each attack taking an infuriating space to clear. Apparently in a bid to save the sanity of a new generation of gamers, the GBA programmers included a run button. That's right: in the SNES version, you had to walk everywhere. As a surreal anachronism, or warning, holding down B lets you purists walk.
But it's not just technical delays. I'm no great RPG expert, but I've always looked askance when reviewers whine THE ENCOUNTER RATE IS THREE STEPS PER BATTLE about certain games. Usually, the complaint is a fairly large exaggeration, at worst you're actually going to be dealing with a random battle once every screen, or twenty steps or so. But hey, Breath of Fire is ready to show you the truth. While it's not always as bad, I've gone through certain caves where I went two steps before I had to face yet another pack of evil flies as I try to find my way out of my fifth identical hallway. To be fair, there are extremely cheap items that remove encounters, but the insane grinder monkey in me refuses to utilize them unless the XP gain is negligible or I'm completely fucking lost.
Which slickly leads me to my next point: the dungeon design is so goddamned bad. I'm wracking my head to think of worse dungeons in RPGs, but it's so far an utter blank. Generally, I'm used to designers of bad dungeons at least having the common decency of making them short (ala Golden Sun). Even the caves Breath of Fire take over five minutes to get through, thanks both to the aforementioned awesome encounter rate and just the general unending corridors of the same texture without any variation. Even the maps I drew for my imaginary rpg starring my cats when I was eight had more verve.
Here, I am including a FASCINATING DEMONSTRATION (mute the first video, unless you like autistic commenters and/or hate awesome japanese music) of what I am talking about. I'd like to note two things here:
1) This dungeon is the second-most interestingly designed dungeon I have seen.
2) The most interestingly-designed dungeon was literal carbon copy of this dungeon (even the weird placeholder floors), except the water was replaced by LAVA! Holy fucking shit.
A side effect of generally being stuck in endless hallways with absolutely no landmarks is that you will frequently get lost as shit. The constant enemy interruptions also ruin things monumentally. The whole thing is like some awful videogame interpretation of Kafka with floating blue bird pin things replacing the laconic gatekeeper. Oh, and as a special fuck you, some dungeons won't even give you an automatic exit once you get Mission Critical Item #42, forcing you to try to remember everything in reverse, as there is apparently no "warp out of dungeon" spell or item, which is especially confusing as the game does give you a town warp spell when you're in the overworld (one of the very few "convenience" additions to the game).
Graphics are whatever. Not exactly awful, but certainly unimaginative. Towns are actually worse than dungeons as you will run into houses with the exact same layout, including placement of chests and hidden items. Enemies haven't already descended into alternative palette hell, so kudos for that, Capcom, I guess. I've given up listening to RPG music since Fugazi gives me far more inspiration to murder evil fleas and amoebas than whatever lame themes you babies consider to be music.
Of course, I'd be willing to forgive all this shit if the combat was genuinely interesting, or at least treated party members as vaguely different units requiring different commands and tactics to maximize efficiency. As we'll see in the next part, any hope for this is false and what were you thinking, you dirty disgusting little piggy?
A few days ago, I started playing Breath of Fire for the Game Boy Advance. Originally it was for the Super Nintendo. This was its boxart, and WORRYING SIGN NUMBER ONE:
I decided not to play the snes version, not because of CHUNK MCHUGEPALM and his rapeface, but that doing some research revealed that the GBA version literally doubled the amount of EXP and gold gained per defeated enemy. This was WORRYING SIGN NUMBER 2, as any game that so spectacularly botched its required grinding in the original iteration probably has other issues.
Oh boy.
It's hard to pin down, halfway through this game, the worst part of things. The "story" is probably the worst thing, and as I'm going to post more updates on what a mess this game is, I should probably start with all of the other problems.
I think the most obvious problem is the goddamned pace of this game. I recently bought a new gamepad, and mapped the emulator's "fast forward" button to the right trigger button. This was a response to Golden Sun, which has some really really languid cutscenes (I want to cut the person that thought that good storytelling was having character sprites have emoticon bubbles over their head while repeating a plot point for the umpteenth time). But the worst thing is that, for all of Golden Sun's faults, it is a goddamned rollercoaster Bruckheimer fuckdaze compared to Breath of Fire.
Everything in Breath of Fire just has weird little delays going on. Pushing start to go to a menu has a half-second of empty space. Fights are an eternal back-up at a traffic light, each attack taking an infuriating space to clear. Apparently in a bid to save the sanity of a new generation of gamers, the GBA programmers included a run button. That's right: in the SNES version, you had to walk everywhere. As a surreal anachronism, or warning, holding down B lets you purists walk.
But it's not just technical delays. I'm no great RPG expert, but I've always looked askance when reviewers whine THE ENCOUNTER RATE IS THREE STEPS PER BATTLE about certain games. Usually, the complaint is a fairly large exaggeration, at worst you're actually going to be dealing with a random battle once every screen, or twenty steps or so. But hey, Breath of Fire is ready to show you the truth. While it's not always as bad, I've gone through certain caves where I went two steps before I had to face yet another pack of evil flies as I try to find my way out of my fifth identical hallway. To be fair, there are extremely cheap items that remove encounters, but the insane grinder monkey in me refuses to utilize them unless the XP gain is negligible or I'm completely fucking lost.
Which slickly leads me to my next point: the dungeon design is so goddamned bad. I'm wracking my head to think of worse dungeons in RPGs, but it's so far an utter blank. Generally, I'm used to designers of bad dungeons at least having the common decency of making them short (ala Golden Sun). Even the caves Breath of Fire take over five minutes to get through, thanks both to the aforementioned awesome encounter rate and just the general unending corridors of the same texture without any variation. Even the maps I drew for my imaginary rpg starring my cats when I was eight had more verve.
Here, I am including a FASCINATING DEMONSTRATION (mute the first video, unless you like autistic commenters and/or hate awesome japanese music) of what I am talking about. I'd like to note two things here:
1) This dungeon is the second-most interestingly designed dungeon I have seen.
2) The most interestingly-designed dungeon was literal carbon copy of this dungeon (even the weird placeholder floors), except the water was replaced by LAVA! Holy fucking shit.
A side effect of generally being stuck in endless hallways with absolutely no landmarks is that you will frequently get lost as shit. The constant enemy interruptions also ruin things monumentally. The whole thing is like some awful videogame interpretation of Kafka with floating blue bird pin things replacing the laconic gatekeeper. Oh, and as a special fuck you, some dungeons won't even give you an automatic exit once you get Mission Critical Item #42, forcing you to try to remember everything in reverse, as there is apparently no "warp out of dungeon" spell or item, which is especially confusing as the game does give you a town warp spell when you're in the overworld (one of the very few "convenience" additions to the game).
Graphics are whatever. Not exactly awful, but certainly unimaginative. Towns are actually worse than dungeons as you will run into houses with the exact same layout, including placement of chests and hidden items. Enemies haven't already descended into alternative palette hell, so kudos for that, Capcom, I guess. I've given up listening to RPG music since Fugazi gives me far more inspiration to murder evil fleas and amoebas than whatever lame themes you babies consider to be music.
Of course, I'd be willing to forgive all this shit if the combat was genuinely interesting, or at least treated party members as vaguely different units requiring different commands and tactics to maximize efficiency. As we'll see in the next part, any hope for this is false and what were you thinking, you dirty disgusting little piggy?
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