JohnnyFox's NewsCast

I bought a new computer

2012-02-11T23:57:00.000+02:00

For all my life I have had the habit of lagging years behind everyone else in terms of gaming technology, especially when it comes to PC gaming, but I think I'm finally catching up as I went out today and bought an expensive piece of machinery. It's an AMD P6-2020 A8-3800 with 2,4 clock speed and 8GB RAM and Radeon HD 6570 to handle the moving pictures. Naturally with Windows 7, 64-bit.
I have no idea how good of a PC that is these days and how soon it's declared absolute deadweight for the common user by the more technologically inclined out there, but I can at least play Hitman: Blood Money, Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Thief: Deadly Shadows on it at max settings with 1400x900 resolution with perfect framerate. Never done that before. And from what I have seen of the system requirements of the more recent PC game releases, I should be set to play quite a few games with quite high graphical settings quite well. The gaming side isn't the only reason for this purchase, but it is something I'll probably do quite a lot.

What my new PC purchase means for my walkingthrough business is this: I can, in theory, record and upload videos in HD quality now. At least PC games, but I have thought about also buying an HD capture card once my bank account recovers from today's beating.
I promised already to record more of Deep Water (a surprisingly popular game on my channel) and try and record Animaniacs for SEGA Mega Drive, and I suppose I should stick to my word once every 5 years or so, but I do want to at first test my ability to record and edit high quality videos that take years to upload with my slow internet connection.
Some games I'm already planning to record on PC are the aforementioned Hitman: Blood Money (probably a LONG series of Fukksaround), Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Thief: Deadly Shadows, as well as Death to Spies and Condemned: Criminal Origins. I would also possibly do XIII and Beyond Good and Evil if they work properly, but both of those two I had issues with before despite meeting the system requirements with my old PC.
I am still planning to record more PS2 games, especially Maximo vs Army of Zin, but unfortunately having a new PC doesn't change the fact that Dazzle only records low quality video and since I have plans to upgrade that part of my technology as well I'd like to wait until I can get the best possible footage from the consoles.

That was about it.
Regarding my physical condition, the legs are healing fine. I do still walk a bit funny due to the minor pains and certainly couldn't run a marathon. Not that I'd ever run a marathon, working legs or no.

Johnny Comes Limping Home. Again.

2012-01-26T16:29:00.001+02:00

Well, as you may or may not know, in Finland every man who turns 18 is drafted into the Finnish Defence Forces. Three years ago it was my turn and the visit was shortlived due to my knees failing. I spent 5 days trying to march with the pain in my legs, then 5 more days lying in bed of a temporary hospital in the garrison listening to some large metallic thing bang on the wall outside my room day and night. I was sent to an actual hospital where the doctors screwed up in a few ways and sent me back to the garrison too early. I was then released from service and driven to the parking lot of a hospital in my home city with only a modest amount of cash on me and a nearly dead cellphone.
Only things I got from that fun little trip were a haunting pain in my knees that has lasted over the years, arms badly bruised for weeks from literally more than a dozen bloodtests they took during the last 5 days in the all of them hospitals (4 times in a row at one of them because the nurse kept screwing up my social security number and had to redraw my blood every time) and a rather large hospital bill that my mother had to pay because I had no income. And I never got my pay for those weeks I did spend in the army because the clever bastards released me exactly 6 hours before the payday, so I wasn't in their system or eligible to receive the payment anymore at the moment they would've sent it.
There's lots that went wrong that I'll leave out from this post, but overall I can say that it was a shitty trip and I never figured it could get worse.

Well, three years passed and earlier this month it came time for me to retry this shit again. My class was lowered from A to B due to my knees so I thought I could handle it this time. Those in class B are supposed to have it slightly easier due to their physical conditions, you see. Well, on the first or second evening there a corporal came and told all of us that we shouldn't expect anything to be easier even with our class B papers, that it's just for publicity and in reality it has no bearing in the army. He actually said that, I could put quotation marks around that sentence.
Of course I thought "what the fuck?" and decided to ask about it from a doctor later that week and see if it's true. Indeed, when I asked about it the doctor said "yep, it's true, everybody goes through the same treatment the first two months before you choose you specialisations." Well, I didn' get through even one month three years back, how the hell am I supposed to get through it all now? The doctor told me to "just try" and sent me away.
Of course, over time the pain in my knees got worse and worse to the point that walking became difficult (again) and I had to go see a doctor about it (again), and I was again told to just try and finish my service anyway. I didn't get any painkillers or anything, and I had to still try to do the same shit that everyone else did that I couldn't have done even with healthy legs.

I got so pissed off that I made my mind and decided to quit the army and pick the alternative way to handle my duties as a Finnish person. Of course, it wasn't easy because at first the lieutenant asked me to rethink and go talk to the captain the next morning if I hadn't changed my mind. Of course I didn't change my mind, I was dying in there and I didn't get any help from anywhere, what fucking choice did I have? Stay there until I couldn't even crawl anymore and then get driven back home again to pay a few more hospital bills with no money?
The captain tried to talk me out of it as well, only he wasn't as nice about it as the lieutenant. I'm not even going to try and explain everything he said, but he's a stuck-up dick who doesn't seem to care about other people, and I'm not just talking about my situation. The captain was an overall jerk and tried to scare me to stay. What he basically told me, in a nutshell, was that he couldn't just throw me out of the army with bad knees and insisted that I at least go speak with a doctor (again).
Well, I'll skip the waiting and walking and talking even though it was a pretty rough day and just get on with it. The doctor at first didn't want to get involved because it's not his job to discuss with me about my choice to leave the army, but agreed to sign a paper that basically said that my knees would get better over time and that I would be able to walk normal and handle my civil duties someday (even though he doesn't really know that for sure). And then he fucked up and had my classification changed to "capable of regular military service", but nothing ever came from that so I won't dwell on it. And I still didn't get any painkillers or anything.
I finally returned to the captain who made another speech about how I shouldn't quit and blah blah, but grudgingly let me go and fill a form that you quit the army with because he had to admit that it's my right to choose and he couldn't keep me there against my will. It's one of the few rights people still have in this country, I do believe, but it seems to be a constant struggle to keep it. At least in my case it was.
Well, I returned the form but of course it wouldn't get sent anywhere that day because I was running stupid errands all day and apparently the big shots in the army like to stop working an hour and a half too early and since it was Friday my paper would't get processed until Monday, so I decided to go home for the weekend. This isn't the end of my day, though.

We were released 1 hour 40 minutes AFTER the last bus for the day had left and our garrison is in the middle of nowhere, so of course getting back home was going to be a teensy bit tricky. Thankfully I got to know some great guys in the army who offered me a ride to the bus station of a nearby city so I wasn't left just standing there in the snowstorm, but unfortunately what none of us knew was that this city is apparently a shithole and has no busses going to my home city. Yup, great, now stranded in a slightly larger place in the middle of nowhere, at night when it's cold and snowing.
Well, long story short (too late), I took the next bus to a completely different city where I then caught another bus home and when I got back here I had to take another bus from downtown (dubbed the "drunk-train") to get all the way home. I arrived home at 05.30 Saturday morning, and I had left the garrison 17.30 Friday evening. 12 hours of traveling with a fever and two legs I can barely walk on. I ran out of money paying the bus fares and only barely made it home, by the way. And the army doesn't compensate for those rides either. They would if I had only taken one bus, but since I had to take several they won't. Kind of a shitty situation to be in.
I spent the weekend at home and then on Sunday evening went back to the garrison for one night to wait for my paper to get processed, and indeed the next morning I got the word that I was getting out. It was a rough day, running back and forth carrying loads of stuff around, but I got through it with the help of a cruch and loads of painkillers I took from home since, once again, the army didn't provide me anything, and at last I were a free man again. Still not quite the end of the story.

I missed the last bus home. Yup, I had very slowly walked to the nearest bus stop in the middle of nowhere and missed the last bus to anywhere for the day. I actually got to see it as it drove past me as I had gotten to the stop, which is much more infuriating than missing it by 20 minutes or something. And it was again cold and snowing, and I hadn't eaten all day. Well, nothing else to do but walk about 5-6 miles in the middle of dark woods I don't know to the nearest "city" I've never been in (it's a smaller place than the neighbourhood I live in, not much of a city). Took me several hours and several stops for moments of silent crying, but I pushed through. Probably mostly thanks to the painkillers.
Once I finally found my way to the "city" I had a quick bite in a local fast-food joint and then sent a message home regarding my current whereabouts. Of course this "city" was the very place where all those "last busses for the day" leave from so now I would've been promptly stuck there for the next 10 hours. Thankfully my sister claims to be wealthy (she's only doing better than me and my mother) so she called a taxi to get me home and paid for it.

Now I'm home, unable to walk and I'm told I have bronchitis. At least I didn't lose 20 kilograms like last time.
That's the story of Johnny in the Finnish Defence Forces. I'm never going back there!

By the way, walking 5-6 miles in pitch black woods in the middle of nowhere when you're sick, have two busted knees, are dehydrated and haven't eaten anything besides painkillers is a really fucking stupid idea and I can't blame the army for that. Though as far as I'm concerned, they now owe me about 330 euros for all the expenses.

BUT I'M BACK!

KA-BLOOM!

2011-12-29T20:14:00.001+02:00

Merry New Year! Or almost, in a couple of days. You'll probably read this in 2012, though, so it doesn't matter.

Haven't been in any Christmas spirit thanks to the damn army, but I'm still going to list the gifts I got like I do every year. I won't take any pictures this time, though, because I just can't be bothered. Damn army!
I got candy, sports clothing, the fifth season of McCloud on DVD, a film called True Gun on DVD, a Terence Hill film called Man of the East on DVD, a John Wayne film called The Barbarian and the Geisha on DVD, a book about the artist Kaj Stenvall, a Kaj Stenvall calendar, an oddly official and fancy Disney's Mickey Mouse notebook that is so fancy I won't dare to ever write anything in it, AND I got Saints Row: The Third for PS3.
I wasn't supposed to get anything much for Christmas this year because my mother already bought me a new PS3 when my old one broke and she also decided to pay for the Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim hat I got last month, and those were chalked up to being early Christmas gifts because I wouldn't stop insisting on paying for them myself.

Already finished Saints Row: The Third once and it's the new walkthrough I'll start uploading today. Fun game. I like how the game is so insane that absolutely anything can happen, but it still feels like the feet are somehow kept on the ground. I also really like the amount of character customization and the freedom of changing your character completely during the game whenever you want after the first two missions if you get bored of looking the same all the time.
I thought the best person suited for the action in this game, or any game ever made, was Cate Archer so I created her once I found the the go-go suit.
Seriously, Cate Archer is the most beautiful video game character ever and has been into more shit than most video game characters combined. In fact, a lot of actions sequences in Saints Row: The Third bring into mind the No One Lives Forever games. Does freefalling from an airplane without a parachute while gunning down goons ring any bells? Yup, NOLF had that and Saints Row the Third has that.
I also created a perfect lookalike of Agent 47 from Hitman, but switched back to Cate because, quite frankly, Cate has breasts. Cate's breasts beat anything. In fact, Cate herself refers to them as good "weapons" in NOLF1 chapter titled "A Man of Influence" when Tom Goodman wonders how she's going to get to Dumas, and in a game as crazy as Saints Row the Third you need all the special weapons you can get. Also, I'm a lonely heterosexual young adult male, I like breasts. What's so wrong with that? While were on the subject of breasts, Saints Row the Third also has excellent breast physics, best I have seen. Only problem is that large breasts in the game look ugly, so you're better off going with smaller ones. Mmmm, breasts...

Oh, I also got 50 euros from relatives so I went and spent it right after Christmas (I don't have a lot of relatives).
You remember that top ten most wanted games list I did a long, long time ago? Remember game #3 from that list, Maximo vs Army of Zin? Just try and guess where I'm going with this.
Yes, I bought it. New copy, too. Been hunting for it since 2003... or was it even earlier since I learned about it from a demo and a preview article? Anyway, it's instances like these that give life a meaning. You look for something, and almost a decade later you find it. I'm almost not even bothered by the fact that I don't have any time to actually play it until next summer thanks to this army business, because I have obligations as a YouTube Partner and must spend the next 11 days recording, editing and uploading just so that the Fullscreen people don't think I'm a complete shithead that disappears into thin air for 6 months. I know I've already proven that I am, but I don't want THEM to think that.
Fucking army. Would it be too much to ask for world peace and laws against military training for the start of 2012?

I bet that right when I'm returning home later next year I'll get run over by a bus before I get to my PS2. It would be just my luck.

I am a YT Partner

2011-11-25T16:25:00.009+02:00

Achtung!

I haven't proof-read this blog post that I wrote in a hurry so it most likely has hundreds of typos

and half-done sentences that make absolutely no sense! Keep this in mind just in case.

I haven't felt like doing anything this whole month and I just didn't feel like writing blog posts before that, but I suppose I have to try and pretend there's still life here and give you, one person, the general jist of things that have been going on before I receive a delivery of my own copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and lock myself away again for a few weeks.

This past month all I've wanted to do is sedate my brain with video games and movies and forget everything else for awhile, and I tried out some games I've had sitting around for a long time.
I finally managed to install Jagged Alliance 2, after a few failed tries, and played it for a few days. I have to say I was expecting a little bit more from it, possibly out of desperation to find a new awesome game to keep me occupied for weeks, but it's still alright. It's a bit like Fallout in a non-apocalyptic (debatable) setting if you replaced majority of the quests with straight up firefights and added in this mercenary business element you have to keep in mind.
One of the reasons I was eager to play Jagged Alliance 2 was that I really loved having firefights in Fallout and Fallout 2 and JA2 is just more of that basically, but I quite frankly didn't like many of the areas I ended up having fights in. I really enjoy shootouts indoors in rooms and corridors and with stuff I can take cover behind and strategize with, but during my first 24 hours of play I only ever saw open areas like airfields and not-so-dense forests. The few times when a fight could've taken place somewhere with stuff, the enemies always stayed in the wide open where I couldn't possibly get to them without having my ass shot up. Seriously, my healthy mercenaries with 85-95 (out of 100) marksmanship armed with rifles (long range weapons) couldn't hit the enemies as often as the enemies armed with revolvers (close range weapons) hit me when firing from great distances, so trying to attack enemies standing in an open space was ridiculously dangerous considering the circumstances. I eventually became too careful with my moves, only moving an inch at a time with the entire squad and as the battles got slower and slower the fun drained out. The movement speed both in battle and out of battle is soooooooooooo slow even for the fastest characters that it really got tiring.
When I realized that my first owned mine could actually run out of ore and stop giving me money, and would actually do that soon, I decided to stop playing. I was just trying to learn what everything does for the first time ever and threw money around like it was nothing once I took over the mine, and if I wanted to continue playing I would've really needed to start a new game and play better, and I just couldn't be bothered to spend another two-three days redoing the fights in the open spaces.
But, it's a fun game and I understand why some people love it so, and I know that even I have times when I could really get into it. Just not right now.

I also finally downloaded Team Fortress 2, because I can't say no to free stuff even if it's from Steam and takes a quarter of a day to download.
I can definitely see why it's a hit. The gameplay is fun and hectic and any way you want to play it, you can, because there's a class for everyone for every situation. What I really appreciate is that they also added in an offline practice mode, which I think is rare for full online multiplayer games. I know there usually tends to be a quick tutorial mode in every game to teach you the controls, sure, but TF2 has an actual offline battle mode that has a really good AI for the bots and feels almost the same as the actual game with people. This really great because one of the problems with online multiplayer is that once the game has been out for a while new players have a lot more trouble trying to fit in with the old crowd that has already learned all the tricks and make fun of all the people who haven't, and TF2 is especially difficult to get good at because there's so many classes and each one is so different from the others, but with a practice mode you can hone your skills in private without the fear of everyone calling you a noob fag in the chat because your repeated failing at a backstab is the sole reason tyour team lost. I can personally vouch that the offline practice mode helped me get in to the game faster AND it was fun to play.
Over the course of two days I played on two servers, one Finnish server which seemed fun and friendly although there was very little chat activity, and the Video Games Awesome! server that had much, much more talking and clearly most of the people were good sports, but there was one guy who talked smack to people he thought weren't good enough. Didn't say anything about me, but being a noob fag myself I take offense on behalf of the other people.
So, can you expect to see me playing TF2 a lot from now on? No, for one very good reason: my graphics card is crap and whenever the there's a lot of movement onscreen, which is all the time in TF2, it gets a little bit choppy even at the lowest settings. Not so much that it would ruin the fun entirely, but it's annoying nevertheless and I could never be able to play a spy, a sniper or a scout like that seeing as how those classes demand speeds and precision around enemies. I might still play on occasion when I really don't have anything else to do, but really not going to be very often and the only thing I will ever play as is the demoman, or sometimes the medic. And I never know when is the best time to release über as medic, although I haven't had any complaints so far.

I also played Fighting Angels for PS2, which I'm sure is all of your most favourite video game ever. It's a Japanese budget title originally from the Simple 2000 series, and it's a bit like a really crappy version of Rumble Roses. It has no voice acting, it has no story, it has really only one arena, all the outfits are shared between all the fighters so there's no differences between one fighter or the other, the controls are awful, he idea that some matches in this wrestling game are to the death and allow you to use a M16 is ludicrous BUT sadly the game is not ridiculous enough because the M16 deal is the ONLY funny aspect of the game, and what's really the last nail on the coffin is that the game covers far less fetishes than Rumble Roses.
If you want to jerk off to a video game about Japanese women wrestling in silly settings, get Rumble Roses because it has most of the types of sexy fantasies playable, whether it's an almost naked ninja girl, an obviously underage school girl who "officially" is 18, a sexy teacher, a sexy nurse, a latex devil, a biker in a black leather catsuit... well, you get the idea. All Fighting Angels really gives you is almost identical bikini chicks.
Trust me, you have to be really pathetic to buy Fighting Angels as it's worth nobody's money despite it being a budget title.

And yes, I am pathetic for buying Fighting Angels, but I had a good reason to get it: I collect Simple 2000 series games as a joke. I actually like some of them.

I also played Commandos: Strike Force for PS2. Commandos 2 is really the best isometric real-time strategy game I have ever played and I actually prepared a big review post of it months ago that I never actually completed, but it's always questionable how well a game like that translates to a first- or third-person viewpoint. I'd say it works really well in Strike Force, I actually liked it. Of course, the game really isn't anything like Commandos 2, as you have much, MUCH smaller missions, much less characters and much more shooting action. In Commandos 2 you infiltrate these ginormous installations patrolled by a couple of hundred enemies and it can take you several long hours to complete a single level, so some of the missions from Strike Force seem like Wario Ware games in comparison, but then I suppose that's always the case when comparing a little more action oriented 3rd person game to a point-and-click strategy game where action usually means game over.
The only things that bug me and bug me bad about Strike Force are the horrid controls and the damn loading times on PS2. I don't know about the PC version, but the controls feel a little clunky on the controller and what stopped me from playing the game further was the fact that whenever you fail you have to start the ENTIRE mission over and suffer through the awfully long loading screen again, and repeating sections of the missions just gets boring.
But, I do think I could enjoy it on the PC if some of the problems don't exist in that version. I really liked Death to Spies, and Commandos Strike Force is a lot like a Death to Spies lite with it's sniper/spy oriented stealth gameplay sections where you strangle people dressed in a disguise and sabotage equipment or sneak in bushes and stab enemies in the back when they go off alone and then snipe some other guards from a distance.

I have also played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a lot recently, and I do mean a lot. I decided to give it another go to see if it's really any good and if I should think about getting Skyrim. You may be aware that I didn't think very highly of Oblivion in the past, and I have said such things as "the level up system is designed ass-backwards" and "it's time consuming in a bad way" because while I have put a few hundred hours into the game I never got much entertainment out of it. It always just tricked me into doing chores in hopes that I start having fun soon and before you knew it I had leveled up too high and became weaker in comparison to the ever-growing-in-power regular enemies and had no fun fighting stuff with my abilities because almost every common enemy at that level can take anything you dish out to them.
Well, having played a stealth based, almost full-thief/ranger character and then a full mage character with no effort put into blades or any of that crap, I at first had tons of fun roleplaying a character. I had exciting battles where I almost lost and sometimes easy ones where I dominated, and I started to regret everything bad I've said about the game. I thought I began understanding the logic behind how the level up system works and how the leveled loot and enemies make sense, but again, once I reached level 20 or so, which was really soon because I followed the game's ass-backwards recommendations to how to build a character, the fun was gone again. I could turn the difficulty down but that's not really fun either after a while. I don't want everything to be easy, I just want variety in the encounters. On normal difficulty I kept running into these behemoths of adversaries who can soak 400 points worth of damage, and having literally a dozen of those 3-5 minute long battles during the travel from one city to another got tiring, especially since they're supposed to be sort of easy, and in comparison to quests that take you into tight spaces they are. When kiting a Minotaur Lord around the forest and blasting at it with poisoned daedric arrows with a daedric bow with 100 marksman (and 100 alchemy + expert equipment for the poisons) for 5 minutes becomes your most common "random" battle, the game gets DULL as all hell.
Seriously, this is a well known fact and I can't stress this enough if you ever want to enjoy Oblivion: make your major skills something you NEVER would use and then stop leveling up at around levels 12-16 if you really want to feel like you actually grow in power. If you take the game's own advice on what kind of character to play as, you become WEAKER over a very short period of time due to the constant use of the skills that raise your level.

I couldn't have gotten tired of Oblivion (again) at a better time because although I already made the choice of not getting Skyrim, after watching Angry Joe's review of it I reversed that decision immediately. If what the reviews say is true, Skyrim fixes every problem that ever stopped me from having fun in Oblivion, and really I don't think Oblivion sucks that horribly either, just the level up system screws you over bad if you get too carried away playing instead of counting skill points for hours.
I really hope Skyrim, which I should have in my hands literally within the next hour, really is as good as advertised, and while I am a young curmudgeon who hates everything I hate to admit I am really excited about playing that fantastically awesome piece of shit game from the lovable incompetent people at Bethesda. I'm just joshing of course, developers like Bethesda, despite their occasional bugs and design mistakes, don't really deserve hate. It's too popular to be hateful of big titles these days, and when an exaggerating hatefilled little cock like me says that, I think it means something.

Maybe it means that Christmas spirit has crept into my black heart. Now that I think of it I have had some heartburns lately...

I also watched the Fred Astaire film The Band Wagon last night. It was fun.

Oh, yeah, and I'm a YouTube partner now thanks to the kind people at Fullscreen.net and their seemingly limitless patience with me and my doofusness with worng email addressess and whatnot.
This means I will be putting more effort into the YouTube channel than ever before, which really isn't a lot, and not until I get my share of Skyrim. Also means that people don't have to keep repeatedly asking me why I haven't been accepted as a partner yet despite my thousands of crappy videos. I am a partner now, happy? No? Why not?

No next generation for you, dudes

2011-10-11T19:32:00.000+03:00

The story behind this post is that in the GameFaqs Batman: Arkham City PS3 board someone asked in a topic if people think the PlayStation 3 will continue to get new games for another 3-4 years or will the next generation of consoles get announced soon. To my horror clear majority of people replying to him foolishly believe that this generation will last only a year or two at best, some waiting for a new Sony or Microsoft console in 2012 already. One guy there even believes that the WiiU is the first console of the next generation, not really understanding that it's just Nintendo trying to catch up and get their cut from this gen.
So, in my wisdom I posted my reply. This is it.

Like it's been said by other people already, the technology leaps right now for the next console would be so abysmal it's not worth it to produce a new system. Sure, there's always some potential for an upgrade but right now the new technology a PS4 or X720 would need to be worth buying for the average gamer would cost too much to produce in mass and sell for a price the regular consumer could afford.

Furthermore, it's not the consoles themselves Microsoft or Sony get profit from, it's the game sales. In fact, Sony has lost a ton of money with PS3 as a console, because they have to sell it for less than it actually costs to manufacture, but this tactic pays off in the end when they get their share of money from the games. Without a console there would be no game revenue so the initial loss is perfectly acceptable.

The only reason Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo will create new consoles is to have the advantage. The consumer is a dumb animal who obediently follows the leader for shallow rewards, and if one console is much more advanced than others then people are likely to be more interested in buying that one for many reasons. Maybe they think it'll last longer than the previous generations of consoles or just believe that the new technology will open new worlds for game design. Regardless, the company with the console that sells or has sold a lot is the one that is like to also sell more games. It's why Sony didn't hurry PS3 out and why PS2 games were being developed even after PS3 came out, because so many people already owned a PS2 that it was guaranteed that PS2 games would continue to make profit, for a short while even more than PS3 games when we count in what they lost with the actual console.

WiiU is just Nintendo's way to get their share of current gen game sales. It's not any more advanced as a console than PS3 or X360 is, but when it's out those old Nintendo fans who so far have only had Sony and Microsoft to offer them the many popular HD titles in recent years will get a chance to jump back on the Nintendo wagon and give them their money.

You have to understand that Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft don't put out new consoles out of love for technology or because they like to amaze their customers, but because they want to make a profit. Sometimes it's just a good business tactic to put out a new console.
Right now, Sony and Microsoft are on top of the world because they are selling games like crazy. Putting out a new console now would be stupid of both of them because they wouldn't be able to get any significant advantage over the other and would risk losing money on the manufacturing costs. They will milk this generation until it looks dry, and THEN move on.

So yes, I do indeed think PS3 has another 3-4 good years left.

I posted this message here on this blog for two reasons. One, I have nothing else to fill the blog with again, sorry. Second, this post is a good way to show you that I do indeed write long rants on the Internet on a daily basis. I often write this much even on YouTube comment sections for crying out loud, and it's the exact reason why I'm always so amazed at being seemingly unable to post new stuff on my own blog more often. I suppose I always need a discussion starter, something to break the gates.

I didn't buy Dead Island, and I guess I never will

2011-09-30T02:57:00.000+03:00

Sheeet, I'll just write this blog post out so that I'll have something new up here.

So, if you haven't followed my twitter updates like you should because I'm awesome, there's a few completely uninteresting things I can tell you about here and now in length.
Despite my bad habit of spending everything I have on shitty games nobody's ever liked I have actually been saving money lately so that I can buy Batman: Arkham City on the release day, BUT some weeks ago I got a little oddjob to do that paid me enough to buy one new game in addition to Arkham City, and I kept precariously teetering on the brickwall of choice between Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Dead Island for quite a while. It wasn't so much that I didn't realise Deus Ex was definitely worth getting now because I have had my eyes set on it ever since I heard Spoony and Angry Joe talking about it a year back in their 2010 E3 videos, but it just seemed like Dead Island's co-op alone could be worth getting that one now and get Deus Ex: HR cheap for Christmas. I kept watching days worth of playthroughs of Dead Island and read reviews of both games like mad while trying to figure out what to buy. I even got so frustrated with not being able to make a decision that at one point I figured I'd better not buy either of them if it's this difficult. Thought I better save that money and buy something shitty, old and used instead, like Quest For Sleeping Beauty or Street Boyz. Yes, I will buy those two games someday, I'm just waiting for my loose screws to drop.

Eventually, though, I decided to buy something new for once and I came into the conclusion that although there is a chance that I could have a fantastic co-op experience in Dead Island with Gamerbomb, who I thank for offering to play it through with me, it's not a game that deserves to be paid in full for. It seem Dead Island derives all it's best qualities from other, much more successful games, and while there's nothing wrong with taking existing ideas, you still have to make the fucking game playable. Dead Island is such a lazy effort from the developers that even I get mad at it just by watching other people play it. It looks to be a game that mixes some basic ideas from bigger hits like Borderlands, Left 4 Dead and Fallout 3 but ends up being a repetitive, unimaginative 'smack mad people on the head and collect a few dollars from their corpses to rub on your weapons' type of experience covered in glitches, sometimes horrible game breaking bugs. The idea of taking the weapon level/rarity/upgrade system from Borderlands is just silly with the weapons being kitchen knives and sticks (that are relatively rare for a supposedly realistic world), the story seems to be just awful, the characters lack character, the environments seem dull, the whole game is about beating up zombies in such a manner it doesn't seem fun after the first hour (which should be impossible to do because killing zombies is always fun), and the mechanic of fixing your weapons with nothing but money every 5 minutes is a lazy attempt to make the players feel like they're doing periodic maintenance of equipment and being self-sufficient and pro-active in the post-apocalypse.
Seriously, I got so mad at Dead Island just by watching other people play it that I dare not fathom what might happen if I actually spent any of my own money on it. I honestly feel that Dead Island with it's boring presentantion of what are supposed to be tried and true game mechanics, riddled with bugs that were only made worse with the patch that was supposed to fix everything, does not deserve to be bought at full price. I don't think I'll ever actually buy it myself, and I don't think I'll even mention the title to anyone in case someone from my family gets an idea to gift the game to me.
I don't care if the developer is a small-time studio that could use the support and I don't care if it's actually the publisher's fault for rushing the unfinished project out, because the one thing than matters is, "is it worth buying in my current situation". To me it seems like Dead Island is not.

So I bought Deus Ex: Human Revolution and have actually already beat it twice, and I can tell you now that it is one of the relatively rare games that really deserves to be paid good money for. It's a lot of fun with a lot of replay value regardless of whether you prefer gunplay or sneaking, although I think it's mandatory to enjoy things like reading stuff and listening to dialogue because half of the game is just straight up story. I'm not sure I would say it's a masterpiece or definitely the best game this year yet in terms of overall quality and polish, but it is such a solid and entertaining game that it feels greater than the sum of it's already decent enough parts, and I now have faith in Eidos Montreal's ability to make Thief 4 an entertaining experience. And let me just tell you here and now, it is NOT an RPG like some people call it, it only has vague RPG elements. It's a linear action adventure game with occasional hub-like city areas you can momentarily roam in with optional tasks to accomplish and a plethora of alternative methods of play to try out, with RPG-like elements on the top. I think I'll actually write a detailed and lengthy review of it some day, but I was thinking I'd try recording a walkthrough of it first so that I'll get at least three runs under my belt and have a more solid basis for my final thoughts, and that way I'd also be able to get screenshots for the review without relying on outside sources.
If you don't remember or didn't follow me way back when, I originally created this blog ONLY to serve as a throwaway general update page for my then website johnnydfox.com (courtesy of D. Stygle from PSDProtocol, thank you Darren for paying my bills for one year) that I could update easily without logging into my server host all the time just to update one file with two short sentences, but after being left with only this blog I have decided over the past year to aim at only posting three types of updates: full reviews of games and films, long-ish rants of individual aspects of games and films that alone would serve as good discussion points if anybody cared about what I think, and lastly as well as leastly the completely useless posts that only serve to link my walkthroughs and LPs to this blog (like the previous four posts), and I really wish to be able to provide whatever images I use in reviews myself and not have to pilfer them from MobyGames everytime. So basically, only deep thoughts or nothing with only self-took screenshots or nothing. Of course I haven't come even close to reaching this goal, like, ever, but a man can dream. Unless he's mentally unable to do so, which I think you'd have to discuss with a doctor of some kind instead if you have such problems.

Personal life updates like what the colour of the hair of the girl that gave me an embarrassing boner in the bus was or how my digestion is, like am I still crapping green nuggets or is there blood in there, I would hope to keep between me and my twitter followers.
So, in 2027 there will be nothing but insightful articles on this blog and nothing but shit in the twitter. Stay tuned till then, my deranged pals from another uncle.
This has once again been a 3 in the morning update for no reason other than me being bored while waiting for videos to upload, from your smoking hot neighbourhood adonis who shouldn't ever open his mouth in public.

Be seeing you.

EDIT:

Regarding the suspected time of availability of the Deus Ex: HR walkthrough, it's probably going to take a while. I really like sticking to recording one game at a time and I really want to do the Thief games back to back which takes a couple more weeks to finish. I also want to try and do Batman: Arkham Asylum in anticipation of Arkham City's release. By the time Arkham Asylum is up, if it stays up and doesn't get taken down by 12-year-old kids who found out YouTube's greatest weakness, that being that the service is unreliable and often easily manipulatable crap, I'll already be playing Arkham City, unless it's release date gets pushed like it probably will. I'd say you can expect Deus Ex halfway through November, at the earliest.

If you actually read all the way through this post without skipping a single line when there aren't even any images to look at, get your head examined. I think it may be cracked. Why are you even reading my blog in the first place?

2011-09-28T00:08:00.000+03:00

Thief II: The Metal Age
PC

Slip through the shadows. Steal to survive. On the streets and rooftops of a darkened city, where the forces of a corrupt sheriff loom, it takes someone with a soft touch and even softer step to stay ahead of the law. For a master thief like Garrett, the choices are clear: profit or perish. Thief II: The Metal Age expands on the smash-hit "first-person sneaker", Thief: The Dark Project, demanding a whole new level of stealth, strategy and skill to survive.

Recorded with Fraps

A great game. An awesome game. A regular masterpiece. Took all the great things that the original Thief gave birth to and made them better. The definitive sneaking game.

2011-09-28T00:02:00.000+03:00

Thief: The Dark Project

Sneak... Stalk... Steal... Survive! Sneak through the shadows of 12 treacherous missions including haunted cathedrals, subterranean ruins, and forbidding prisons, in a dark and sinister city. Stalk your prey on the quest for stolen goods with your blackjack, sword and an assortment of unique arrows. Steal for money and uncover the hidden agendas of your allies and enemies as you play through an unravelling story of deception and revenge. Survive in a world where shadows are your only ally, trust is not an option, and confrontation results in death!

Recorded with Fraps

Classic game. Recording this walkthrough made me appreciate and love Thief: The Dark Project even more than before, but it's still inferior to the second one, the Metal Age.

2011-09-27T23:50:00.000+03:00

Hitman: Blood Money
PlayStation 2

Hitman's back, drawing you closer than ever into his deadly world where staying anonymous, being smart and totally ruthless are the key to a perfect execution. Lucrative contracts on the rich and powerful in high profile locations make killing for money good business. But when a rival agency enters the scene it's war and only the best man will be left standing.

Recorded with Pinnacle Dazzle Video Creator Platinum

I looove this game. Love it so much I bought it twice.

2011-09-27T23:10:00.000+03:00

Hitman: Contracts
PC

When you kill for money, there are no rules.
Hitman: Contracts takes you deep into the mind of Agent 47. Enter a world of crime, sin and greed. Encounter his greatest adversaries, completing the work that made him so ruthlessly efficient and deadly precise, the ones that shaped him as an assassin. Understand, nothing counts except the target. Anyone can kill, but can they make the perfect hit? Take on the role of 47 and do what you must to get the job done, because in a professional Hitman's hands everything becomes a weapon.

Recorded with Fraps

I love this game. I didn't like Hitman 2: Silent Assassin at all and expected Contracts to be crap as well, but I was positively surprised at how the developers managed to take all the gameplay elements that Silent Assassin introduced to the series and make them actually work.
Read about my first ever playthrough of Hitman: Contracts HERE!

Johnny Fox's Top Ten "Most Wanted" Games

2011-09-17T18:44:00.002+03:00

Simple top ten lists made by all kinds of people about all types of things can be often seen all over the Internet, because making them is as easy as counting to ten and a lot of people over the age of six can do that. That's why I'll be doing one here and now, as I'm chronically lazy yet I still wish to keep updating my blog somewhat actively.
Still, there are some positive sides to a top ten list as well. When done with thought it can be ten little capsules of information in one big spoonful that helps explain something about a larger context, like a person's fascinations. Why not try and clarify my eccentric taste some with top ten lists, as I am the guy this blog is about and I do like talking about myself. And at least I'm not a preteen doing a 30 second video for YouTube about "the best horror films of all time" where the top spots are held by the Hostel, SAW and Scream films. Seriously kids, you suck! Stop sucking!

This particular list is about my "most wanted" videos games. It's perhaps even more pointless than simple "favourite" lists but may need a little bit more explaining. See, I'm not talking about games I'm looking forward to or hope are going to be made or games I can't afford to buy right now, I mean games that have been already released long ago that I just have serious trouble finding here and now. Games that I would most likely choose over a better game at a store even if the price was a little bit more than what I tend to pay for used games. Games that I may know nothing about, but desperately seek out so I can place them on my shelf and finish a "quest". It's one of the great joys of video gaming, searching for games to buy. It's why you call yourself a "collector" and not just a gamer.
I got the idea for this list when I realized that just recently two spots from this list were vacated when I bought some games I have been looking for for ages: BMX XXX and Giants: Citizen Kabuto. So, the point of this list is that I have some strange obsession over certain titles I sometimes know very little about, and I really can't say if many of these games are actually any good.

1. Urban Chaos, for the PC.
I think I found out about this game when it was a recommendation next to some shitty beat 'em game I was looking up on GameSpot, and it has been sitting at the top of my list ever since. I hear it's a beat'em up action adventure game with varying indepth sidemissions. And no, it has nothing to do with Urban Chaos: Riot Response, that one that's SWAT 4's inbred cousin.
I want the PC version specifically because I hear the console versions of this game suck tremendously.

2. Death to Spies: Moment of Truth, for the PC
I first heard about Death to Spies the same day I bought it. It's a Hitman-esque stealth-infiltration game where you play as a SMERSH operative in the second World War wearing disguises, strangling people in silence and spending hours upon hours replaying one single fucking mission because there's just too many regular sentries everywhere that prevent you from apprehending those damn snipers undetected. Well, Moment of Truth is the sequel to Death to Spies, and seeing how much I enjoyed the first one despite never finishing the stupid 8th level with even a hint of professionalism, and seeing how Hitman is one of my favourite series of games ever even if Death to Spies can't even compare to it, I really want this game. Want it bad.

3. Maximo vs Army of Zin, for the PS2
I had and still have the demo of Maximo vs Army of Zin on one of those PS2 demo discs that you most often got with larger gaming magazines and which I actually uploaded videos of on YouTube that one time years back, and the demo is what got me excited. Too bad I never found the damn game anywhere despite looking for it around when it was released.
All I know about Maximo vs Army of Zin is that it's a cartoony medieval action-adventure game starring the main character from Ghosts 'n Goblins, heart boxers and all, and that the demo rocks. I also know that there exists another, earlier 3rd-person Maximo game called "From Ghosts to Glory", and I suppose I want it as well even though it's title hasn't been burned into my brain that bad yet.

4. Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive, for the PC
I got the demo disc for Desperados:WDoA from a Kellogg's cornflakes package a long time ago, and after I finally got a PC that met the system requirements a few years later I got hooked. I borrowed the full game from a friend once and even started recording a video walkthrough, but sadly Giovanni Vindigni, the guy who did the music for the game claimed copryight infringement and almost took my damn YouTube channel down. No, seriously, I know the differences between a regular notice, a video take-down notice and a "Your account is just about fucked" notice, believe you me.
Inspite of the game being really crappy, simple Commandos-type of isometric point-and-click strategy game taking place in the old west with laughable but supposedly serious voice acting, without any of the great features that I know at least make Commandos 2 so great, I still like it a lot and really want it sitting right smacking next to the even shittier sequel, Desperados 2: Cooper's Revenge that I bought in a fit of madness. Don't know much about the 3rd game in the series called Helldorado, other than that it allows you to cause an accident by sending a wagon into a watertower at some point, and I have little interest in it.

5. Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death, for the PC or PS2
I was a pretty big fan of Judge Dredd comics back when I was a kid. I accidentally stumbled across the adult comics section of our local library one day and after finding that the stuff with sex and violence was better than most of the cookie mysteries found in the kids' section I started visiting the library regularly for the Judge Dredd comics, and occasionally a few other comics I was WAY too young to borrow but did anyway. I've even thought about buying Judge Dredd comics to fill my own shelves with several times but damn they're expensive, even in second-hand bookstores. I also liked the Judge Dredd movie when I was a kid and I still have it on VHS, but not even my childlike mind back then could believe it to be true to the source material. I just liked it as a funny Stallone film.
The reason I'm not talking about the game yet is that I know very little about it other than what the demo showed me, which was Judge Dredd shooting and arresting a few street thugs with incredibly iffy controls. But I want Judge Dredd: Dredd vs Death for PC or PS2 regardless. I have actually once heard a guy say that the game is awesome, but that was the one and only person I've ever heard of that actually played this game, so the credibility of that statement is suspect.

6. Stubbs the Zombie in Rebel Without a Pulse, for the PC
It's a 3rd person action adventure comedy game about a guy who died in the nineteenthirties and rises up as a zombie in I what I recall is sort of a futuristic fifties, and during his quest to cause massive chaos in the new modern city built over his resting place and turning the people there into zombies as a revenge for his death he also finds his old love and a long lost son.
I've seen the game played through twice, and I want it. For the PC, since I don't have an Xbox.

7. Jaws Unleashed, for the PS2
It's... uh... a game about a big killer shark terrorizing an island resort that was shaping up to be such a poor product that the creators decided to get the Jaws license to save what little there was to be milked out of the project. And I happen to be missing a game where you play as a killer shark from my shelf.

8. Messiah, for the PC
Messiah tells the at least partly comedic tale of a little cherub sent to the futuristic cyberpunk Earth by God to clean up sin and corruption, and it was developed by Shiny. Why wouldn't I want this game?
I still remember the first time I heard about Messiah. There was this television channel called MoonTV back then that had a lot of music and video game related shows, and sometimes they even showed things as simple as 15 minutes of unedited gameplay without adding any sort of commentary, and that's where I saw Messiah being played. And that's when I decided I'd want the game.

9. MDK, for the PC
Another comedic 3rd-person shooter Shiny title I think I saw being reviewed on MoonTV when I was a kid. You know it, I want it.

10. Dungeon Keeper 2, for the PC
Got a German ISO file of Dungeon Keeper 2 once just out of interest, and got hooked. I didn't understand a single word, it was prone to crash and the file was missing some textures apparently, but I liked the gameplay so much I still tried to play it. I did try the first game out as well, but it's not the one I fell in love with.
Sadly, though, DK2 is also the one game I have little chance to play again, for with a copy of Dungeon Keeper 2 I would also need a PC with a version of Windows that could play it. Oh, and I really want an actual existing physical copy, not a GOG download. Downloading isn't collecting.

Aaand that's about it. It's why this list sucks, I can't say much about many of these games for certain and so I can't say much at all. But hey, at least I have a new update on the blog. It's not like it matters what it is, nobody reads my posts anyway.
There are several other games I really want to get as well or I'm at least interested to learn more about, but these are what after some serious thinking seem to be my absolute most wanted.

Cover images from MobyGames.com

BMX XXX

2011-09-09T18:28:00.000+03:00

I just recently went out to buy games again and came back home with 8 new titles with an average price of 3,45€ per game, and one of these games I picked up was the infamous sleaze-fest BMX XXX that threatened the public safety with nipples and sexual references in the early naughts. Those of you who are younger than me and missed the brief debacle this game caused back in the day, let me take the time to tell you what it's history was and how the game was received in around 2002-2003 when the game came out, or what little I know and remember at least. Don't ever fully believe anything I make out to be factual.
BMX XXX was the third bmx game from the developer Z-Axis and publisher Acclaim (Dave Mirra BMX "3" was released some days later), and was to be another Dave Mirra endorsed title. However, during some point in the game's development the developers decided, for some unconfirmed reason, to turn the previously innocent little trick-biking game into a heavily adult-oriented celebration of profanity with unlockable real-life striptease videos, teats and all, as a means of reward for completing certain challenges. As you might have guessed, the game was not a welcome addition to store shelves once it became public what a Satan's perversion of all that is good it really is. Dave Mirra himself, whoever the hell he is, demanded to get his name off the project once he heard about the game's new content and tone and then sued Acclaim when according to Dave they continued to use his likeness and name to promote the game anyway. Sony demanded the game to be censored in North America before they would let it be released on PlayStation 2, while oddly the Gamecube and Xbox versions stayed as they were, or that is what I have been told. Despite the censorship that ensued certain US retailers, the nation's foremost morality-police that would never deal in anything that a person could use to harm themselves or others physically or mentally, still refused to stock BMX XXX.

Real* live breasts, with nipples on top.
Yeah, not taking any chances with the blog.

* Real as in fake ones that physically exist

I never were into knowing anything more about video games than what the random titles on my shelf were until 2005 when I created my GameSpot account, and back when BMX XXX came out I had only just bought a PlayStation One, didn't have Internet and were not a subscriber of any gaming magazine, but the outcry caused by the game's immoral offerings was so loud that the sound of it managed to reach my eardrums. I still remember one Saturday morning when I caught a review for the game on a Finnish video game show, and got more and more excited the more the reviewer bashed the game. As a male going through puberty around that time and already developing an uncanny taste for video games I of course wanted to someday own this sexually charged shitty titty game no young one should ever lay eyes upon, and the title was forever archived somewhere in the dark fungal growth of the back of my brain. Years it sat on my own personal "most wanted games" list and now, here in 2011, the start of the the decade that I predict sees a much needed change in the non-gaming mass' opinion on video games and how they should be rated, I actually own it. I have personally experienced what some silly people have called the worst game ever, or at least most atrocious and depraved title to be released on consoles, and I can truthfully answer the main two questions that many people may have asked regarding BMX XXX: Is the game really that horrible? Is the nudity really so over the top it should've been banned? No, and not really, not in my opinion.
It may very well be that I'm just an adult now and have a healthier outlook on life than the many smallminds back in the day and have learned to finally rate video games using more than two grades. Or maybe I have just played too many horrible games and can't tell what is good and what is bad anymore, and maybe I have been desensitized to sex and violence by games like Conker's Bad Fur Day, Postal 2, Barbie Horse Adventures 2 and Sexy Beach 3. I don't know. All I know is that in my opinion the fuss regarding BMX XXX and it's content was an overreaction, as usual, and people who say the game is the worst ever have probably never played more than five games. The game isn't good by any means, but there's no reason to exaggerate, games shouldn't be rated in the extremes. Except whenever I see it fit to do so.
Oh, right, you're thinking that I can't talk about the nudity because I have the PS2 version, but that's where you'd be wrong: the rumours were all true, the PAL area version is in fact uncensored. It's probably due to the French, their casual use of nudity in films has liberated our continent from sexual repression.
But anyhow, I suppose I should get to describing the actual game sometime soon.

BMX XXX takes a dump on the player.
Yes, it's only pigeon poo,
the game's not THAT depraved.

BMX XXX has two modes of play: the Hardcore Tour and the multiplayer. The multiplayer offers three different modes playable on five different levels taken from the Hardcore Tour. The modes are called Skillz, Paintball and Strip Challenge.
Skillz is your usual who-gets-the-most-points-in-two-minutes mode, and I see no reason to explain it further. Paintball is a little bit more interesting in that in it one player has 90 seconds to collect as many boomboxes scattered around the level as he possibly can while the second player uses various different types of "paintball" guns to try and ki--... erm, non-lethally drop the other one, and after either the active rider has lost all his health or the time is up the players switch roles. There's a good assortment of different types of guns like the pistol, sniper rifle, machine gun, rocket launcher and grenade, and while the game calls them painball guns, I would seriously contest that. There's no paintball in sight, the sounds are straight from a (cheap) shooter game, and although the game lacks blood when the player falls down I wouldn't have been surprised to see some. Considering that the game's biggest problem is the lack of effort, seeing a neat and usual idea like this for a multiplayer mode is surprising. In the less inventive Strip Challenge mode both players try to get high combos with a clothing article removed from the opposing player's rider everytime a new record for highest combo is set. It's a rather dull and short mode, because a couple of combos are ridiculously easy to do and the round ends after one player has set the record four times.

BMX XXX:
Literal pile of shit

The Hardcore Tour, the game's singleplayer mode is divided into 9 levels, or at least that's what the back cover says even though I count eight levels. Two of these levels are so-called competition levels where in order to continue you must get to the top three list by doing certain amounts of all types of tricks and getting a high score within a two minute time limit, twice. The rest of the levels are called challenge levels where you have 20 different challenges spread across the playing area that you can do rather freely, with ten challenges needed in order to unlock the next level. I actually personally find it a little annoying that competition levels exist and are placed between challenge levels, as competition levels are more boring. The playing areas seem like excerpts from the challenge levels with a duller backdrop and a couple more halfpipes, and the fact that you can only play in these levels with the two minute time limit takes away any fun of freedom. I also found it little bit confusing on what I was meant to do in order to get higher score from the judges, as in order to get better scores you need to pull off all types of tricks several times each as well as get a large amount of points. Just getting the points and doing one or two of each type of trick isn't enough.

Pointless violence can be funny...

... but you need lots more for it to work

The problem I have with the challenge levels, however, comes from the serious lack of payoff for what you're doing. I have to say that for the most part the only thing that kept me going was the prospect of seeing what stupid shit the game will throw at me next in the form of not-so-funny jokes and cutscenes depicting wanton mayhem, but sadly, out of 20 challenges a level only a few of them actually have any "point" or variety to them. Several of the challenges are the exact same ones in all of the levels; collect 45 tokens, find all gaps, deliver 5 people to a certain place, get a high score, get an even higher score, get the highest score, get a high combo. Then there tends to be a couple more challenges where all you need to do is complete a certain gap or two (which you'd finish while going for all gaps anyway) or do a "long" grind, wallride or a manual, sometimes in a specific place. Then there's the four or maybe a whopping five challenges where the task is given to you by a "comedic character" and completing it rewards you with the level getting opened up a bit in a challenge ending cutscene. The game really suffers from this, because not only are there so few "humorous" challenges that could keep your interest in playing, as you might have already guessed the content of the cutscenes is also not the most entertaining. I like to think I have a well developed sense of humour and I can appreciate the kind of crazy, sleazy, immature, even dark type of comedy where people cause large accidents with puke, tits are the focus on many occasions, cardboard planes can fly and a guy is decapitated for no particular reason, but BMX XXX's humour falls short of the point where I'd find it amusing so often that I honestly couldn't crack a smile at any point in the game. A larger quantity of these bad jokes would've actually helped to press on, as seeing so bad it's almost funny humour is better than nothing during a several hour playthrough. Must admit that it's not the worst stuff I've seen, though. Considering how bad a bad comedy game can possibly get, BMX XXX actually has surprisingly decent ideas for jokes and a lot of the humour could be saved with some very simple fixes to how the jokes are presented. Living in a world where a frighteningly large amount of people actually find things like Disaster Movie or Epic Movie funny, I have no reason to believe that the in comparison superior brand of comedy of BMX XXX couldn't have it's fanbase as well. That's IF those potential fans were old enough to play this Mature-rated game. That's another mistake the ratings boards made, because this game is more immature than anything. If it wasn't for some bad language, a decapitation scene and eight nipples (six real ones) I would give the game a rating of T personally.

Even redneck Johnny and his mullet can do tricks in BMX XXX

I mentioned earlier how to me the only thing worth playing for were the brief custcenes, and one could say that's where my problem lies as alternative sports games like this are meant to be played for the fun of riding around doing tricks, not story. While I admit that I'm personally not big on just messing about and going for the points in games most of the time, BMX XXX shares at least some of the blame. The game isn't really challenging in the least and although the mechanics behind the performing of tricks are very good and the control scheme works, the ease at which you do everything just helps to devalue the act of pulling of the big stunts. My only problem throughout the game was that my game didn't come with the manual, maybe it had raunchy enough imagery to be good spank material for the previous owner or something, and so it took me a while to figure the individual tricks and which buttons activate them, and still, once I realised what the modifier button was for I started doing 540 Nothings out the ass during huge transfers. Even if you messed up a trick and are about to land sideways, the game is so lenient as to let you latch on to nearest grindable object with the press of a button everytime, even if you're not even close to it. It's like Sly Cooper physics and takes very little actual skill. When the most hardcore tricks can be performed by anyone with two thumbs, it doesn't take long for an averige player to wish for some point to it, and because tricks are so easy to pull of completing any challenges that require performing tricks feels redundant when they can be completed within literally seconds.

The only difficulty the game presents is for all the wrong reasons. While performing the tricks is easy, the general steering of the bike is much more iffy. The bike blasts off like a rocket from a complete stop, doesn't halt very easily, turns mostly in 50 degree increments and hitting a wall bumps the bike to a new direction without slowing down the speed. Furthermore, the biggest challenge of many of the, well, challenges is in spotting the collectable objects or even the challenge givers themselves in the level as they have oddly short draw distances sometimes, and when you mix the speed at which your bike tends to go with the need for calm movements to scan the area even the simplest objectives can become brief exercises in frustration despite the small level sizes. Then again, once you do find what you're looking for, the challenges become so easy again that you wonder why they exist.

Rarely gets more adult than
tits during the actual gameplay

The skitching in this game is pointless. There is supposedly a mechanic available that allows the player to hang on to cars and get more speed, but this is the most useless feature ever. Only time you EVER use it is for the challenge in the first level where you need to skitch a police car for a short while, and after that it becomes impossible to do on levels where some extra speed would help with certain objectives. Not that it would increase your speed any even that one time you can do it.
There also some bugs and problems with the game. Certain few ramps and halfpipes seems to be broken enough to often make you fall on your ass immediately upon riding on them, and an especially big nuisance on competition levels is a weird glitch where the rider is stuck in first-person view and will no move no matter what you do, until after about 20 seconds of mashing buttons.
Still, no game seems to be completely without their problems and despite BMX XXX's flaws the gameplay is still adequate and while casual gamers may find the fun shortlived I can assure you that a huge fan of games like these, like Tony Hawk's Pro Skater and Matt Hoffman's whatevers, should be able to get some kicks off of it. It's not complete shit, at least compared to it's peers. In my opinion the best gameplay in any alternative sports title is found in EA's Skate, where doing the smallest tricks feels more rewarding than any built in challenges, messing around is worth your while and exploring the town for neat spots to trick is something you do on your own. Buy your copy of Skate, today!

The audio of BMX XXX is a bit lackluster in many regards. Most of the voices seem to have been recorded some place other than a recording studio, possibly a seedy downtown alley, as the sound quality is a tad crap. I think two of the speaking characters are voiced by a real living kid and kids are always annoying, and many of the characters sound just like all other similar characters from every single crappy comedy game. The pimp sounds exactly like what you'd imagine if you've ever played a comedy game with pimp character, the hippies sounds exactly like the crappy hippie voices from any other game, the sad guntoting hick of a sheriff with only one bullet sounds like a stereotypical smalltown hick sheriff... you get the point I think. Then again, I think maybe BMX XXX preceded a lot of the games I'm thinking of, so maybe it both gets points for being original firestrater and should be destroyed for it's crime at the same time, because I hate stereotypical shitty voices in my crappy cheap games!

The sounds during the levels are unimaginative and mostly annoying. The weak sounds the bike itself makes, like the rattle of the chains and the sound of tires hitting the floor are nice, but everything else from pedestrian shouts to the simple boop-you-completed-a-challenge sound get on my tits after a little while. Seriously, the happy sound, the chime that tells you you've done something good should never annoy you and that's what it does to me, maybe partly because it just tells me I really didn't achieve anything by completing a so-called challenge. The pedestrians often each have their own things to say, one or two of them, and they keep repeating their favourite line everytime you ride anywhere near them. The pimp shouts "I'm gonna cut you, bitch" or "What did I just say, bitch" when you go anywhere near, the hookers yell "Wanna ride me like a bike?" and a street vendor keep advertising his "hot salty nutsack" when in shouting distance. It gets preeeetty damn tiring, hearing that same crap over and over and over again. But, I must remind you right about now that no matter how stupid the hot salty nutsack joke is, one year later the popularly believed to be a superior alternative sports title endorsed by a big name sports figure, Tony Hawk's Underground did pilfer that same joke and kept on repeating it about as much as BMX XXX does in the Manhattan level, so it's not like BMX XXX is the only game to have crap jokes. A lot of games, good and bad, are guilty of many of BMX XXX's crimes.
The soundtrack is abysmal, or at least it feels like it. I count 19 songs that you can cycle through in the options menu during the game. Unfortunately I only find three or four of them good enough to listen to and it gets tiresome having to constantly pause the game to skip to De La Soul's The Magic Number or Green Day's Basket Case, and let's just get it out of my system, when one of the best artists on your soundtrack is clearly Green Day, your selection stinks regardless of the fact that Basket Case is their best song.
I know, I know, it's probably a money thing with the artists or rather the thieves that leech off of the artists, but in these kind of games music is crucial to keeping up good mood and the will to play on, and choosing a good soundtrack is important. I don't want to have to shoot myself over what I hear on the forefront while playing.

The visual gag is funny, the attempt to
drive the joke in through dialogue was not

I suppose that's about everything one really needs to know and say about BMX XXX, and my final verdict is that the game is a subpar alternative sports title, and that's the keyword. Subpar. The game's biggest problem is lack of effort and general polish that clearly stems from the developers' realisation that they were working on something that was doomed to pass unnoticed by the public and be forgotten within weeks, a game damned to the garage sale hell with all the other sports titles nobody ever wants but somebody's stupid aunt keeps buying for gifts. BMX XXX isn't even close to being one of the worst games ever, just one of the more forgettable and possibly only the worst you'll ever play. Even from my pitiful 100 game PlayStation 2 collection I can name about 14 games worse than this, and a few more that are on par solely because of a personally interesting or so-bad-it's-funny premise. The reason BMX XXX got and still keeps getting so much shit is for the controversy it got when it was released. People who wouldn't have ever bought or even heard about a third game in the Dave Mirra series ended up focusing their adolescent attention to this new, notorious titty-game for a few minutes and went with the popular opinion, only they were and still are largely commenting on other reviews or gaming forums where there is never even a vaguely grey area, only hate or love or get the fuck outta here.
Well then, was the decision to add raunchy humour and nudity a horribly wrong choice? No, of course not, the game WAS noticed and it WAS bought by people who othwerwise would've never shed a single penny on it. Even without the 30 second striptease videos and constant fuck-all humour the game couldn't have saved Acclaim from their downfall, on the contrary it probably would've been a quicker death. At least there are still insane people like me around who are proud to add BMX XXX to their awful collections because it was so well known for a little while, and the content isn't so bad I would feel like committing a crime placing it on my shelf or playing it. The step over the line the game took was only ever very minor one, even if the striptease videos are rather titillating.

Yeah, I admit that picking up the game in the store and placing it on the counter took enough guts that I probably would've passed on it if that one good looking female worker had been there to handle the transaction that day, and I admit there was that invisible presence that speaks in silence in my room yelling at me "You're playing that game for the titties! You sad, lonely pervert!" But once I played a few levels that feeling went away. This isn't a game you hide from your mother, this is a game you hide from your grandmother. And video game snobs.

Now I must go reflect on my life and ask myself why I wrote this much about a game I bought for the sake of novelty.

Broken Sword

2011-08-26T17:43:00.001+03:00

I've promised to write an angry blog post about Hitman: Absolution based on what we know about the game so far based on developer interviews, as I am a big, angry, ranty fan of the Hitman series who has to kill the developers if the next game sucks since all the murder and violence and general immorality in the those games has brainwashed me into becoming a deranged killer. That's all nice and dandy, but the bad part of it is that I've also lost hope in video games and think every game sucks without trying them myself and I can't believe the next Hitman is going to be anywhere near what it should be. I mean, Io-Interactive was also behind Splinter Cell Conviction and that game was shit! I know, I know, Conviction has it's fans as well, but that proves nothing! Even the person popularly thought to be the most evil, Mr. Hitler, STILL has his fans and the bastard's been reportedly dead for nearly 70 years now (although we do now know the Russians lied to us about the skull and the eye witness). What I'm rambling on about is, if you like Splinter Cell Conviction then you're a nazi!
Well, regardless of my profound thoughts I got discouraged from writing that angry post about a month ago for who knows what reason and desperately sought for some other activity to help me escape the apathy when my eyes suddenly gazed upon the complete yet still largely unplayed collection of Broken Sword games sitting on my shelf.
And I installed and played them. All four of them.

Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars, or Circle of Blood as it's been often called somewhere else, is an adventure game classic. Almost everytime I've read a list of "the best adventure games ever" either this game alone or usually both the first two games back to back have been ranked in the top five and if neither of them have then someone's always crying about it in the comments section. I've read articles specifically written about some Sierra's classic game series with comments comparable in length to the article itself right under it praising the original Broken Sword and how it's better than anything Sierra ever made. That sort of fanaticism is usually annoying to witness, I've even completely lost all respect for Metal Gear Solid fans because of such nutcases, but after having played Broken Sword myself I can completely agree with the older fans, Broken Sword really is one of the best adventures games I've experienced. I'm not an adventure-game buff, though, so that probably weighs nothing.

The story of Broken Sword begins with a patent-lawyer named George Stobbart sitting outside a Parisian café enjoying his vacation when suddenly the café explodes. This starts off the quest for tracking down the clown-suited assassin who blew up the café and eventually stopping a loony cult from gaining mystical powers that they intend to use to take over the world. During his adventure George sees a lot of interesting places, pilfers a lot of interesting items and meets a lot of interesting new people like his to-be-series-long-partner Nico Collard, an interesting couple called Pearl and Duane and that one Nobel prize winner from the country whose name he couldn't pronounce.
The dialogue between George and the various persons he meets is really the biggest and best part of the game. The story, as the game's title might suggest, deals with a lot of Templar history and legends, and to be quite frank I don't really care about such things, but the dialogue and especially George's lines are often absolutely hilarious and Rolf Saxon delivers them with unusual honesty and talent, and the storyline events are so well sequenced that even if I didn't care about the grand scheme of things or the end goal, I ALWAYS wanted to progress just to see what happens next. That's really the best kind of storytelling if you ask me, because when you're pushing through a game just to see the end you won't enjoy the journey as much because your mind is set on something further away, but Broken Sword is structured so that it's throughly enjoyable and memorable because you constantly focus on whatever is happening in it at the moment. The game is very well written.
The dialogue is funny but not kiddy-funny. It's classy and amusing and although it's not ever explicitly adult it does have a mature tone to it. Mature largely in the sense that it doesn't treat you like you were a moron. Subtle jokes that still make you chuckle like Nico wondering how a person, referring to one of the bad guys, can be so evil as to pose as a doctor after George had just recntly disguised himself as one as well, or George mentioning that some idiot left the water running in the basement are delivered like any other line in the game and the dialogue doesn't pause for a second to remind you that you should laugh. That makes the funny even funnier.

I don't think I mentioned it in the post, but the game looks awesome

Of course, even though Broken Sword IS mostly an interactive story, it does still have it's share of puzzles to solve or it wouldn't be called a video game. I know I have a bad habit of bringing up Sierra that I should control more, but unlike their games Broken Sword's puzzles are much more casual and much, much more logical. In Sierra's classic games, when you pick up an item you have no idea where and when to use it because it's almost always something bordering on illogical, like using a moldy cheese to charge up a magic wand, and you often end up just trying everything with everything without even necessarily knowing what you aim to achieve. In Broken Sword, however, once you understand what it is that's preventing you from progressing, which tends to be easy as George helpfully declares to himself the nature of the problem if you inspect items, and then take a look at what items you have and what's on the screen, without Sierra-like wanton trial and error you'll always have at least a hunch of what you should do. Even an idiot like me can hear the whirring of small gears and the clicking of pieces finding their correct places in my brain when playing the game.
Some might think that what I just said means that Broken Sword is too easy because the puzzles don't stump you for hours, but it's not really true. Broken Sword's difficulty is close to perfect for what it is; an interactive story. The puzzles pose just enough challenge that you have fun figuring them out, but never too much to force you out of the narrative. If some section was too difficult, the overall Broken Sword experience would then suffer from the hold up.

Broken Sword II: The Smoking Mirror will fix whatever problem you had with the lack of difficulty in the first game, IF you had any problem at all. If the first game was perfect, then this game is likely to be tougher. A tad higher difficulty doesn't mean the game's puzzles would be illogical, though, not at all, but there are a lot more puzzles to solve, and a lot more parts to the puzzles with a lot more distractions from the actual puzzles. If you ask me, though, I prefer it like this. Hey, I said the difficulty in the first game was close to perfect, not perfect. The puzzles are still solvable with logic alone, but it takes you a little bit more time to actually distinguish all the useful pieces from the rest of the scenery and the correct order in which you should do what. Getting out of the first screen alone is more complicated than I think anything in the first game was, although not excessively so. Adventure game pros looking for challenges wouldn't get their fix in Smoking Mirror, but MY slow brain steamed at a few points, and I liked the sensation I got once I passed a screen all on my own wit. In the first game, passing a screen rarely made me feel triumphant for finishing the task, only happy that I could see what's up next.

The... uhh, beautiful? Nico Collard

Of course, other smaller things have also changed between the two games. Instead of you being able to travel between locations at largely on your own free will, Smoking Mirror is always in charge of where you are. In a way I like it better this way because I can fully concentrate on the one screen I am in, and try to pass the puzzles knowing there couldn't be anything else I could do somewhere else, but then again you do end up getting the feeling that the game's events, locations and puzzles find YOU, rather than you going out to find THEM. I think that it's important for a great adventure to be grounded and let the player to be the one going forward, instead of the adventure coming towards the player who just solves the problems as they come up.
I also can't help but feel that Smoking Mirror is less story and much more gameplay. I don't know for certain if that's good or bad. I think I ended up enjoying Smoking Mirror more than Shadow of the Templars, but maybe I enjoyed it in a little bit different kind of way, or maybe I welcomed the change of pace after finishing the first game. I dunno.

This game's a visual treat

The story of Smoking Mirror unites George Stobbart with Nico Collard for another adventure several months after the events of the first game when Nico asks George to come back to Paris for some reason. As George's luck would have it, on the first day of meeting Nico she ends up getting kidnapped by Mayan indians and George is left tied to a chair in a locked room with a deadly spider advancing towards him, AND the place is on fire. That's how the game starts, and yes, it is indeed a very interesting ride even if the story has a tendency to take the backseat. The overall plot is about smugglers and some bad people trying to return an ancient Mayan god back to life to bring the end upon the world, but like said this "epic" sounding story just doesn't seem to ever be the thing to focus on and largely just acts as a vehicle to deliver the adventure and exploration and not the other way around, and perhaps this has something to do with what I said earlier about how the first game is structured so that you have your eyes set closer to home. In Smoking Mirror, after you release Nico from her captivity, you basically start the "main quest" immediately and see the end of the game coming waaaay before you're actually there, so all the smaller tasks like finding artifacts to defeat the ancient evil feel like pitstops and detours in the grand scheme of the plot.

Love this bit and the next few screens after this

Regardless of the story feeling less important, the game still offers the same old awesome writing that was endlessly amusing in the first game in the way of dialogue. Dialogue is still as witty and talking to people never feels like a drag. You in fact itch to talk to everyone about everything to see what they have to say. For example, there's a part where you must send a correct item from your inventory to a village shaman to get a chance to speak to him. In some other games you might try to choose the right items immediately in this kind of a situation, but here I can almost guarantee you will try out everything BUT the right item just to see what happens. And as you can guess, what happens is usally very amusing and worth the extra time spent dicking around. It's also important to note that in neither of the first two games messing about is so dangerous that you would have to save the game every step of the way. You can indeed die at certain points in both games, but what's nice is that you can always see when something is too dangerous to do without saving, and if you can't see the danger then someone will point it out before you rush blindly into it. So it's certainly not the death-fest Sierra games usually deliver. Although, sometimes excessive dying in adventure games is actually more fun than passing them flawlessly...

Broken Sword: The Sleeping Dragon is the third game and the first in 3D. I also assume it was made specifically for the consoles and only ported for PC, as it has no mouse support whatsoever and all actions are tied to four directional keys and four action keys with two or so "trigger" key actions. Sounds a lot like something fit for a PS2 controller.
Sleeping Dragon is also regarded by Broken Sword fans as "utter garbage", and while I do not agree with that sentiment at all, I can sort of see what's going on in the heads of people who do. It's very different from the first two.

The story of Sleeping Dragon begins with Nico getting framed for murder and having to track down the real assassin to clear her name, while at the very same time in a different corner of the world George is getting involved in yet another mess of cultists seeking mythical powers. The game keeps switching the character you play as back and forth until at one point the stories intertwine when George and Nico bump into each other and realize that they have a common enemy. The main villain in the game is largely the same from the first game and Sleeping Dragon is basically a continuation of the Templar theme.

Damn that Sewer Jacques!

The game doesn't feel a whole lot as good as the first two in many ways. Although the plot can be very interesting at several points and it's well written again, there is much less entertaining dialogue than before. Even though there are plenty of moments when you can tell the situation on-screen is supposed to be funny, it's not really as humouring as you might have learned to expect by now. There is still a lot real amusement to be found, sure, but there are often looong gaps between the truly interesting bits and the game can get at times a tiny bit boring. The game's ending is rewarding, though, which is welcomed after the rather brief ending screens of the first two games.

Gameplay's changed quite drastically in Sleeping Dragon. Although it is still largely about investigating the scenery and using items with other items and talking to people, what's different is that there seems to be a LOT less points in the areas that you can interact with, so you won't be spending ages looking at everything like before, and you certainly won't have to bother your brain at all trying to figure out what to use with what because the "puzzles" are largely nonexistant and there are only a handful of points of interest that do not contribute to your progress in any way. If Shadow of the Templars was an easy adventure game, Sleeping Dragon is hardly even an adventure game in the first place. The fact that the game has roamable 3D-environments further highlights the sparsity of interactive entities, which is funny as well as sad when it was probably the designers' intention to make the game feel more alive (or just to cater to kids who think that 2D = old 'n shit). When you look at a large area you can roam and there is only one single point of interest sticking out of the often dull scenery, it's really just more depressing than anything. It's another good example of what I often preach about, that being the game developers' desperate need to jump on technology bandwagons for the sake of being competitive without thinking what harm they might doing do their product. The scenery isn't ever AWFUL to look at, but it often could've also been better and even at it's prettiest it's still dead.

Exciting.

The 3D also poses a problem with your control over the character, because the camera is fixed and it's always eager to jump from corner to corner or spin around in it's own path while you're trying to navigate streets and hallways. Trying to keep the character running in a straight line without bumping into walls every three steps is incredibly frustrating, and there is even one point in the game where I failed an action sequence three times in a row only due to the camera flipping around, making the movement keys switch places at inopportune times and going ass-backwards from what the controls should've been considering the camera's new position. Instead of holding down to run towards the camera I had to stop, press up, stop and then hold down because the game had to take a moment to realize that down was now backwards. It was even sadder that this happened right after a lenghty, unskippable cutscene. Having the old survival-horror tank controls where up is always forward no matter the placement of the camera would ease the pain quite a bit. Or, using a joystick of a controller might work too, so I guess I suggest you just a controller no matter what you're playing the game on.

The new, more beautiful Nico Collard.
She's in my top 3 sexiest female video game characters of all time.
Yup. Right up there with Cate Archer and Tron Bonne.

Of course, being a 3D game that seems to be mainly a console game, there are also a few new things to "enrich" the "tired old" gameplay, such as brief platforming sections, crate-puzzles and quicktime events. You might think that's the last straw and decide to forget you ever heard of the game, but the game doesn't really drop these on you too often. Well, okay, it's a popular joke that Sleeping Dragon is mainly about pushing crates, but seriously, they're not that bad. The crate puzzles are simple and take less time than you'd think, the platforming sections are brief and relatively rare and I think there are only five or six quicktime events in total, you sort of see them coming and you only have to press X... I mean, down-action button once to pass them. It's more about activating something within a cutscene rather than playing Simon all of a sudden to be honest. There are also some sneaking sections, which for the most part are casually fun.

Broken Sword: The Angel of Death a.k.a. Secrets of the Ark: A Broken Sword Game is the last game in the series and like Sleeping Dragon also boasts 3D-environments, but that's largely where the similarities end, because this game tries it's best to be more like the first two games. Mouse is once again your main tool of progression, you click everywhere to find items to pinch and then you use the items on other items. Instead of huge open spaces with boring background areas are of perfect size and often have enough details to make them seem more than just backdrops. Quicktime events do not exist, only a couple of boxes get pushed, platforming bits are even shorter, only a jump or two, and not at all as repetitive as in Sleeping Dragon.
So, it's considerably closer the old fun, but there are still problems. Camera is still a bitch at times. That's the only problem I can actually think of right now... oh, yeah, and that fucking glitch that, for the second time, forced me to replay two hours of the game because the game got stuck. Hey, don't you tell me to save the game more often! I don't need to save, saving is for sissies!

Hacking

The main new addition is the hacking minigame. Every now and then you need to find out something, a phone number for a company, information from a website George is locked out of by an asshole, security codes for locked doors or simple bomb defusal guides for when you have only ten minutes left to live, and that's when you begin hacking. The hacking minigame is a pretty fun one, but some of the final puzzles are pretty difficult to crack in my opinion. You have to place mirrors, tubes and dividers onto a grid in a way that allows a light beam to pass through nodes and end in the server, but this is made harder because you have to navigate past solid squares and avoid tripping alarms. It's a puzzle.

The story this time doesn't tie into the previous games in any way, altough Templars and manuscripts are still often on the forefront. George has quit being a patent-lawyer and has instead started running a bail bonds office. A woman named Anna Maria comes to ask George for help because she's being followed by some mobsters that are after her valuable manuscript. The game begins with you escaping from the thugs and the tension doesn't often let up during George's quest to find out who are the bad guys, how to foil their plans and where and when does Nico come into play. The story holds your interest all the way to the bitter end, the places you go to are fun, and I dare say the dialogue is mostly better than what it was in Sleeping Dragon, the humour is actually funny. Jokes can sometimes seem a little bit more downplayed than what they were in the previous games, but not much and they're still actually very amusing.

Why doesn't George just stay in Paris? I would.

The one big problem the story has is the ending. It's very, very abrupt and what's worse is that it's a downer, which really sucks after the very positive ending of Sleeping Dragon. I'm guessing maybe a fifth game was planned, and I really hope it's actually made, because I'd hate to see the series end in such a downer. Sure the ending is different from the previous three and yes it catches you off guard, but it's also crap and short and when the credits begin rolling you just sit there staring at the screen asking yourself "what the fuck?". I don't want to spoil what little could be spoiled, but if you think of playing the game yourself, don't get your hopes up, kid.

Anyway, I don't think I have too much to say about Broken Sword games anymore. Maybe I should've started writing this post sooner, huh? I bet you could write five times as much about each of the games if you got in the correct mood.

At one point George has to decapitate 25 gang members on video for a
mad director. Well, it would be an interesting turn of events, don't you think?

My final thought on the entire series is that I highly recommed the games. The first two, Shadow of the Templars and Smoking Mirror are the kind of games that will undoubtedly find their way into people's lists of classic games 'till the end of time, and although the other two aren't the same undying "classic" material, I have no reason at all to discourage people from playing them. Sleeping Dragon may be the weakest of the four but it's still a decent enough game and definitely worth a playthrough, and Angel of Death is a quality game and a blast at least the first time through because the puzzles in it are pretty much the variety that you could imagine seeing in the originals and all four games offer challenges solvable with logic to go along with smart and entertaining writing. How invested you become in the story of each game is largely dependant on yourself. Still, even if you have trouble with the plot, Rolf Saxon's awesome George Stobbart is the same likable guy in all of the games even if some of the other voice actors tend to blow quite a bit, and through his lead you should be able to survive the occasional dips in quality.

Sigh

Seriously, the haters that say the two newer games suck and should be avoided at all cost are greatly exaggerating, at least in my opinion.
Go play Broken Sword is what I say. Especially the first two.

All but first two screenshots grabbed from MobyGames.

Forgot to take screenshots of Smoking Mirror,

technology prevented from doing it in Sleeping Dragon,

couldn't be arsed with Angel of Death.

I gave in to the twemptation

2011-07-28T02:07:00.001+03:00

You should know that I don't usually take part in these hip new Internet... things, but I reckon twitter's been around long enough now that it's not cool to have a twitter account anymore, and so I assume it's safe for me to finally have one as well. I like to lag behind everyone, that's why I haven't posted my L.A. Noire review yet. I wait until the subject matter is old and uninteresting enough that nobody particularly yearns to read about it.

Anyway, here's my twitter:

http://www.twitter.com/OscarPhyre

Finally I will be able to post short messages to no one in particular about nothing in particular, all the while following my all time favourite personalities, like... uh... no one in particular, I guess.

Well, I have a twitter. It's also visible on the right side of this blog so all you 4 people can look at it once a month. Let's see how long I can manage to find it interesting enough to update.

And let's also see how long it takes me to get one follower. I'm not a person so it should take quite a while.

I learned a new joke from Overlord II: Fat people.

2011-07-22T19:20:00.002+03:00

Alright, so a few things similar to what I've blogged about before have happened again so why not try and update the blog more than once a month.

A few weeks ago I started doing some almost regular exercising, because to my amazement I noticed one day that I actually have grown a little bit of a stomach. Not a whole lot, but just noticeable. Some of you might tell me that of course I'm getting fat when all I do is eat, sit and play video games and my only daily exercise is a half a minute jerking of my knob, but it's weird to me because despite years of inactivity and eating junk food and sweets I've most often been sickly thin and below the normal weight for a guy my height. I thought it might be a good idea to do some pre-emptive weight-losing if the 20-year-old tapeworm I must've had in me has died and can't keep me spaghetti-thin and pathethic looking anymore. And maybe someday, if I exercise continuously for several years, I manage to grow enough muscle somewhere to garner some lonely female's admiration. I do have one strong muscle already, but I've been to court for showing it off to girls publicly.

I also went to my favourite game shop one day, because being the stupid ass that I am I thought it would be a good idea to buy Hitman: Blood Money for PS2 just so I can record a walkthrough of the game in some form. I bought it new and paid the same amount for it that I paid for the first three games in total, so I hope somebody watches the videos.
Why do I put money into walkingthrough even a year and a half after I quit it when I know I never get anything back? And then YouTube's robots shove copyright infringement notifications down my throat like some lifer showing the prison bitch who's in charge, and although a lot of the claims are false and I could prove it if given a chance I'm sometimes too scared to dispute them because 1) there's no dispute option for "the asshole is cheating Google AdSense to get revenue for nothing" and 2) because some of the groups who make the claims are "notable" enough that I have no chance in hell against them in the credibility contest. I'm just left crying in the showers and being thankful they didn't do it in my pooper this time. Oh, well, 'tis an old story that I seem to like to moan about every time I can and this is probably the 257th time I've begun berating YouTube, or mostly Google, for being evil.
But yeah, Blood Money, uploading now. All levels are recorded and edited already, just uploading them at about one day intervals.

I also bought Overlord II for PS3 when I was in the shop and I had the idea that I'd record a walkthrough of it as well since I have one done for the first game and it's add-on already. Unfortunately you won't see me playing it for one very good reason: the game sucks. It's so crap that I don't think I'll even finish it once to see how it ends.
When I recorded the walkthrough of the first Overlord game, I may have been overly critical when talking about it because around the time I bought it I was going through the "I hate everything next-gen" phase that most gamers undergo at least once in their life. The truth is, Overlord was AWESOME, and so was the add-on. Not flawless, but hell of a blast to play through. The game was long despite being linear, it had a wacky style of lampooning known fantasy stories and themes and being honestly funny about it, it had an actual story to it, it had actual characters and it had several fun levels with varying themes and enemies and obstacles to beat.
Overlord II on the other hand, although I haven't yet finished it, doesn't seem to reach the level of fun the first game had. Firstly, although it would seem to have a very solid basis for a good story in the beginning with the introductionary level having you play as the Overlord when he was just a child and causing mayhem in his home town and making a friend when this red-haired girl helps him get even with the mean kids, by the end of what I'd call the first chapter all intriguing story related issues presented in the beginning are resolved. Without even having a decent battle or actually challenging obtrusions in your path you've beaten the man responsible for your exile from your home, taken over the town and made the now grown-up red-head childhood friend your mistress. Oops, there's that storyline done and motive to fight lost, now to just follow linear paths wherever they might lead. Of course the bad guy you beat in the beginning is just a lackey and there is a bigger threat out there trying to take over the world, but as a player I have lost my interest in tracking down some poor schmucks I haven't actually ever met. OK, I'm the Overlord and I aim to conquer, steal and destroy and I know there exists an opposing faction aiming to also put and end to my reign of terror some day and I might as well take the fight to them, but that evil entity is something I, as a viewer of the story, have no actual interest in.
The first game had a very subtle way of leading you from place to place without you seeing any definitive end goal until the moment the Wizard appeared and finally allowed you to find a meaning in everything you did throughout the game. You were constantly drawn to the next area because there was something there you, the player, knew about and wanted to explore/steal/destroy/kill. Overlord II is leading me blindly through narrow paths without me realizing what purpose exploring the new paths would serve.

I really like the visuals, but the level design sucks

The story and a motive to see an end to the New Order being non-existant is a bummer enough, but lack of story is no problem to me if the levels are fun. Sadly, Overlord II's world has been a boring one. Levels are just sort of fluff gameplay sections that are normally created just to pad out a game to make it longer or to separate heavier events or gameplay sections so that the experience doesn't feel rushed, but unfortunately all Overlord II has is fluff with nothing interesting happening almost ever. OK, I sort of enjoyed playing the bit at the beginning as a kid terrorizing the locals and I kind of liked the part in the Empire Building where you controlled a green minion in order to bring the green hive to the tower gate, but apart from those bits the game has been very unentertaining. With the first Overlord I enjoyed pretty much every minute and every area. I found it FUN to ransack the Halfling Homes and kill sleeping Halflings and I found it FUN to eplore the Heaven's Peak sewers killing off hordes of zombies. Overlord II's areas are just boring and repetitive, there's only a couple of differently themed ones and they feel like they were just cutouts from the first game. And there's only two shitty little towns? What?

Big breasts on a slim body mean that she is interesting and everything
she says is funny while she's in trouble because she's hot piece of ass.
At least that's what the devs would like to tell you.

What's a real disappointment is that the game isn't even funny. The first one was very funny and if I dare say the ridiculous humour was in a sense very classy, but Overlord II... dear me, apart from everything lifted from the first game, all Overlord II has is forced jokes a 11-year-old comes up with. It's actually very easy to imagine how the creative process of this game went as far as the writing goes. I believe it went exactly like this:

Worker: Sir, we're worried about the future of this project. I think we've used all the best, most funniest material for the previous game already, and we're having trouble coming up with new things to poke fun at and at this rate the game will be a short one.
Overseer: No probs, kid. Just remember that the minions are energetic screaming morons, all people are dumb cowards, Gnarl hates everything fluffy and the mistresses are nagging pairs of large tits devoid of any personality, because nagging women are funny and large tits are both humorous and make men more interested in the game.
Worker: Yes, yes, I've got all that but the game has to have at least a few new jokes not seen in the first game. I was thinking, there's these mermaids who--
Overseer: ...are fat. Next.
Worker: Oh, yeah, ha ha. 'Cause classic mermaids are depicted as beautiful young women, so these ones are fat. Well, anyway, we need to somehow make the game's main villain, the Empire, a little more lighthearted but still have them be something the player will want to eradicate from the world and--
Overseer: ...so you make all of them fat. Nobody likes fatties, and they're easy to laugh at. Because they're fat.
Worker: Well... I suppose it works out alright. Their population has become fat and lazy and obnoxious thanks to slave labour and new machinery catering to their every wish. Ok. Then I thought about a brief appearance from some fairies since we haven't used them before, and Roy thought that it would be funny if--
Overseer: ...they were fat.
Worker: Sir, I don't think that actually works as a joke at this point.
Overseer: Hmm... make them act like old ladies. Fat old ladies. Fat old ladies that are almost naked. Their repulsive naked fat bodies will be the source of laughter for everyone who hates fatties. Which is everyone.
Worker: Uhh... alright, whatever. We still have some issues about how the elves should act and look like, and they're the other recurring enemy of the game so we need something really good.
Overseer: They're fa-- wait, no. We had them in the previous game already and they were thin. Hmm... You know Postal 2? Take it's basic template for the crazy activist and make that a kid friendly hippie type who loves everything fluffy.
Worker: I suppose I have to, then.
Overseer: And kid?
Worker: Yes?
Overseer: Their priestesses are fat.
Worker: ...Fat.
Overseer: Yup. Fat.

He's fat. It's funny.

I have to admit, I am a gifted playwright if I do say so myself. Of course this little play I wrote doesn't really depict two real life people talking, instead the characters are representations of the two main creative forces behind any game: the worker who enjoys his craft and wishes to only produce something of good quality to entertain the audience without exception, and the overseer who wants to streamline everything and is desperately trying to make a project go forward even when no direction has been chosen, having the final say in everything, aiming to always finish a project rather than finish a project with dignity. Both these "people" can live in one person and most often do. I'm saying this so I won't be insulting any one particular person that I have never met.

She's fat, so she's funny.

Regardless, the exchange between the Overseer and Worker in my visionary dialogue is accurate. The recurring joke of the game is that female characters that aren't the mistresses or regular elves are fat. I admit, fatness can be amusing in some scenarios, but as a person who could apparently become fat in the future, and who has some sense of humour, I don't really think making every character in the game fat is enough to make it a decent parody of anything. Oh, here's an idea I have for a movie: it's a parody of Aliens, but get this; the aliens are fat, and the marines are fat too except for the lead and the nameless chick with large breasts, and then there's this old lady who has a cat that's also fat, and a fat alien eats the fat cat and farts and the fat lady hits the fat alien with her cane but falls over. The End! What a funny story, Mark.
The first Overlord has a fat guy in it as well, a really fat guy, in the form of Melvin Underbelly the Halfling Hero, but you know why it works in his case? He's not fat just because. There's a good reason for it: every one of the heroes you defeat represents one of the deadly sins and for Melvin it's gluttony. He's a halfling, someone who is supposed to be very small, but he has gone so insane about eating all the time that he has become several times larger than a normal human and he has gone so far he doesn't even shy away from cannibalism to satisfy his hunger. In Raising Hell his fatness is made much more humorous through what I would call ingenious little gameplay obstacles, minigames where his round shape is used to proceed through the level. It works there, but here just the fact things are fat is supposed to be funny.

Fat mermaid. Hilarious.

Just to note, I don't know what I'm saying anymore, it's 2.:25 AM and I have a headache because I caught a cold one warm summer day.

Ok, so the game isn't completely without it's charms when it comes to humour as I have found some things very amusing, I have to admit. Gnarl is still as funny as ever, I liked the two sentences the one Nordbergian man says about how he also once in the past... (I wish it was a longer running joke) and I liked the introduction to the gnomes, it was a very funny scene. I also thought the part where the gnome, in order to save his life, hides under the to-be mistress' skirt, looks up and goes ecstatic. It's an often used joke that for example a much funnier parody-comedy game called Conker's Bad Fur Day also used, but a classic one. Also, as gnomes in this game are very tiny little balls of hair, it's logical that one would fancy the unshaved crotch of a human female; it probably looks like a female gnome with a large vagina. I'd pork a female gnome too given the chance, I think, if only there weren't the obvious physical differences preventing me. Wouldn't do it with a large gnome, though. Who'd want to shag a fatty?

Fat women. That's a new one.
Get the fat joke yet? It's that they're fat.

The other crap in the game is... well, crap as well for the most part. Characters are so forgettable I can't remember who, if any of them, have made any actual appearances. No, I honestly had trouble remembering if the person on screen was supposed to be someone they showed before. Only the mistressess are people you recognize. Kelda was easy because she was obviously the one kid who liked the Witch boy and the other one has her gigantic tits zoomed in on whenever she's in a cutscene, and unlike all the Imperial women she's not actually fat so she's easy to differentiate from others. I don't think there's really even been any other actual story-related characters. Borius was just a generic fat 'tard with about two lines of dialogue total before getting an anti-climactic death.
The spells in the game are more of an afterthought than anything, and I don't even think the Halo spell works. Nothing happens when I try it. There's three spells with two different possible effects that don't help you any. Overlord at least had me using the boost and fear spells a lot in fights to ensure victory, here all I do is burn random trees.
Apart from the green hive section entering a minion's body has been less fun than it should, providing only a better look at an obstacle you could handle with just sweeping the minions around were there any vantage point for the Overlord. The sailing of the ship, annoying. It's so damn slow and clunky and serves little purpose other than to make a small area of the map take longer to finish.
The game actually feels less like a full game than the add-on to the first game, Raising Hell. How do you achieve that?

Elves.
Not sure if I'm supposed to laugh. Would help if they were fat.
Lol, fat elves! Where do I come up with this shit?!

Yeah, Overlord II has been so disappointing thus far that I don't even know if I'll finish it once. I might give it another go someday when I'm well again as I may be too harsh on it just because I've taken ill and can't necessarily focus on any video games, but considering I've written this blog post under the same illness, I would imagine it's safe to say playing Overlord II is more boring than writing a boring blog post like this in the middle of the night for no particular reason.
But, maybe Overlord II picks up the pace eventually, and if you believe I were mistaken when judging it harshly based on only the entire first half of the game then please let me know soon so that I can go and finish it and enjoy whatever greatness the developers might've saved for the end.

Since my last birthday I have had the part accidental habit of buying my games in bunches of threes, and I didn't break the combo yet. I also bought a PC adventure game called Gray Matter. I have seen that name on the shop's website several times but have never paid much attention to it, thinking it was just another cheap quiz show game or logic puzzle game. It's not, it's actually a point n' click adventure game from the creator of Gabriel Knight. I have no clear recollection of which adventure game series Gabriel Knight is, the series that's absolute shit or the series that's said to be great that I have never ever seen in action, but I decided to buy Gray Matter because... I... don't play adventure games a lot? Now that I think of it, why did I buy it? Why did I buy anything? Well, I'll try the game out someday once I've finally gotten around to playing through the Broken Sword games I've bought in the past. Got all four of them and have only played the fourth one, because I'm not big on adventure games. Why DO I buy adventure games? Maybe I'm hoping that by playing adventure games I become smart, I don't know.

Two people who the LP nazis on my ass would like to hang.
I was going to black out their names to protect the innocent,
but then I realized that no one is innocent

That's about it. A lot of people have been asking for LPs again, or Fukkarounds as I would like to call them due to the "original" (not the original, the "original") Let's Players being a bunch of whiney ass nazi punks who cry at you if you don't follow the "official" LP formula, but I don't know if I ever get around to recording more, because I personally don't get anything out of the videos and I actually hate my commentary so much I never even listened to it while editing. God damn microphone I bought will just be sitting useless in the closet, tied to a metallic pipe with a belt because I needed a makeshift stand that I never used.
Might not be writing a whole lot of posts this summer either, as you may have noticed, as it's just too fucking hot and I can't bother. Shame, because I had a lot of screenshots taken of a few games I specifically prepared to rant in length about few months back and I just never got around to writing them. Maybe some day, when I'm cold and lonely again.

By the way, I really like that Blogger has updated the compose mode so that when I switch between HTML and compose it remembers the spot where I was on both modes. Don't need to scroll around as much anymore when making sure everything works out alright.

Now I must end this fat dominated post.

Moving on from the Prisoner to Danger Man

2011-07-08T20:23:00.000+03:00

I have played even less video games since the last post from three weeks ago than in the weeks before it. I have not even touched a video game in ages. Well, I did straighten out the games on my shelves one evening so I did technically touch a video game box.

Anyway, last week I was out of town for a few days. You don't know which town I live in, where I went and what I did while I was away so no point in saying anything more about that.

I finally finished watching all the Prisoner episodes. Great series. It took me longer to watch through the series than it normally would have because I managed to accidentally force my mother to watch it with me and she has less free time than me so I had to wait longer before seeing the next episode, and I of course had to show her the first 7 episodes that I had already watched alone. Rewatching the episodes I had already seen recently was actually a very good thing, because I actually noticed a lot of new things I missed before and some of the episodes, like Free For All for instance really did open up more for me on the second viewing.
The worst episode of the series in my opinion was Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling, where number 6's mind is planted in another man's body. This episode was written because Patrick McGoohan was filming Ice Station Zebra ( I've been looking for the book for years now, by the way) but they had to continue filming new episodes for the series anyway, and you can tell McGoohan wasn't around to say no to certain stuff. I'm not saying the Prisoner is a perfect series and that all the episodes McGoohan did get to influence were masterpieces, but this particular episode is just a failure in every way it can be. First of all, the actor playing number 6 after his mind is transferred just doesn't have the acting skills needed to make it work. Not saying he was necessarily a bad actor altogether, but he's not number 6 nor does he have the needed presence and charisma. When the entire series is all about two things, McGoohan and the Village and the episode takes place outside the Village already, you better pull off the best most applause-worthy performance anyone has ever seen, whether you're just impersonating McGoohan or doing your own thing with the role.
The episode having neither of it's two sole attractions is already a handicap enough, but then they introduce number 6's love interest from life before the Village, the one we have never heard of before even though he's supposed to be so in love with her that he was going to marry her (despite the fact that he was going to leave the country alone before getting kidnapped), and all things considered a romantic interest just doesn't fit in with the series at all. Then there's the weird end where right after the professor-in-another-man's-body has taken one step outside, no. 2 is somehow unable to just call the helicopter pilot back once he figures out he's been fooled. The ending and the entire episode is so stupid on so many levels it's hard to explain why it's so stupid in one entire blogpost even, but you'll understand it if you ever see the episode yourself. So, worst episode in the series, it never even had a chance.
The best episode is harder to pick, but one noteworthy episode is Free For All. I find it interesting that on the first viewing I thought it was clearly the worst of the first seven episodes, but on the second viewing liked it a lot.

Now I'm in the middle of watching McGoohan's other great series called Danger Man on flash video files. A great example of what I wrote about in the previous post, this series has never been released on DVD in Finland. The best way for me to buy it would be to order a US DVD set of the series under the title of Secret Agent from an Australian online store (or possibly some country closer than that but I failed to find any other suitable stores) and have them ship it here. They do make purchasing the DVDs of old tv shows rather difficult for us, don't you think?

Oh, coincidentally(?) they have begun showing the 2009 Prisoner miniseries on tv here, first episode was shown last Monday. Looked as boring as I thought it would after having read everything there is to know about the series.

2011-06-23T22:05:00.000+03:00

Not a whole lot has happened. Nothing much gaming related, I haven't played anything since... a long while ago. Haven't been in a gaming mood.

Remember that accident I had soon after last Christmas when for some bizarre reason that had nothing to do with my temper my spare PS3 controller got broken a little bit? I finally got a new extra controller to replace it, a MadCatz wireless one. It's shape is much better than the Sony official one, it's a little bit heavier which I prefer and the best part is that the R2/L2 triggers are MUCH better than the Sony DualShock ones that break so easy, so it's a lot more comfortable to use. Bad things about it are the sharpness of the edges of the D-pad which can end up hurting your thumb if you have to use it a lot and the fact that the controller automatically enters sleep mode in such a short time that a medium length (modern) cutscene is enough for it to turn off and it's a bitch trying to get the PS3 to recognise that the controller is active again after the cutscene.
So there's both negative and positive things to say about it.

A long while ago, last year in fact I torrented the original Prisoner series, but it was only just last Saturday that I began to watch them. I was so excited, I remember watching the series when I was about six years old or something although I never did understand it at all and couldn't even remember much anything but the Rovers and number 6 running around, making this basically my second chance to see the series for the first time. I had to force myself to shut the PC off at 4 am and leave some episodes for a later viewing because the series is so addictive.

My mother and my sister decided to spend the yesterday afternoon walking around downtown just browsing through fleamarkets and stores and I went with them thinking I might find something neat myself. The trip started crap for me because I couldn't find ANYTHING while both my mom and my sister found books and movies they've always been looking for and only now just found, all at once for some reason. There weren't even any games sold anywhere that I could buy, the fleamarket I used to find some rare games in had apparently gotten rid of their gaming table and instead it was full of fancy fabric. Since the rest of the family spent so much money on books at this one used books store and I was probably getting visibly tired of walking around aimlessly and not finding a single Terence Hill/Bud Spencer movie anywhere we decided to go to one more store and then head home, which was perfectly fine with me. Then...
You will never guess which 60's British cult classic television series that has been in my mind everyday for the entire week, that I had no hope of ever finding on DVD here in Finland because there's problems with importers here getting the rights to sell the series and the series was last aired here 17 years ago on a channel that has been dead and buried for a long time, was sitting there on the shelf almost immediately as we entered the store!!!
It was The Prisoner DVD box set! The original! On DVD! I naturally picked it up the very second I spotted it without even thinking about it. I just read "The Pris-- YOINK!" Got it!

Some might ask me "Johnny, if you had all the episodes torrented already, why so excited about getting the series on DVD? Waste of money, right?" WRONG! All wrong. I'm not proud of torrenting my favourite movies and television series, but a lot of them are cult classics not often found in stores here, and I just don't want to forget them. Like for instance the Terence Hill and Bud Spencer films. Watch Out, We're Mad is one of my favourite films, and guess how difficult it is to find here: nigh impossible. I checked the importers and online stores that supposedly stock the film, and some of the online stores have lost the rights to sell it a long time ago. Only version I could theoretically buy is a DVD brought here straight from Italy without any subtitles. I don't understand Italian. Until I can buy the film on DVD or Bluray or whatever it will be in the distant future I will hold on to the version I downloaded years ago. When I have paid for it, I will destroy the downloaded file, or re-use the video if I taped it from TV. That's what I do.
I know there's no use in trying to defend myself because those who are against torrenting won't care and those who aren't care even less, but to me these films and series are important pieces of art that make life livable and I'll be damned if I let someone stop me from enjoying them. I'll pay when they let me.

The E3 2011 Recap:For Once I Don't Have to Be Ashamed of Sony

2011-06-13T01:44:00.004+03:00

E3, the big(gest?) gaming media circus around that may have once upon a time had some gravitas just recently happened again, and for probably the first time ever I actually watched majority of the live feeds of the main conferences. Here's a short-ish recap of E3 2011 from a guy who knows nothing about either E3 or the actual gaming business, nor cares much for that matter. I just want my Hitman: Absolution, God damn it!

Microsoft conference was the first I saw, and I think it was the first official conference as well. I know some companies had non-E3 events going on alongside E3, but nevermind them. Microsoft, from what I could tell, had two very simple goals this year: remind us that CoD series will never change, and admit publicly that Kinect was always a complete ass-tastic failure and a step backwards in gaming. I say that because 1) the Cod:MW3 demo looked just as boring as MW1, MW2 and Black Ops, altough it does make it easy for people to know whether to buy it or not, based on if they want another copy of the same game or not, and 2) every single game in the Kinect line-up looked atrocious. Well, maybe not the Sesame Street game and that dancing game sequel. No, seriously, every damn Kinect game was a crappy rail shooter, from the Star Wars Jedi knight game to the next Fable game. Yes, you read it right, FABLE as a rail shooter. Fable. Rail. Shooter. In-fucking-sane. And sad part is, it's not Microsoft's fault, Kinect CAN be used for interesting fun things I'm sure, it's just the stupid companies who lack innovation and imagination and who treat the Kinect as a cheap gimmick and something of a successor to PlayStation EyeToy and only aim to make quick cash-in games that are to blame. The games they showed aren't worth talking about, take my word for it for once.
In a shit nugget, Microsoft's conference was crap, akward to watch at times and boring overall.

EA conference was next, and dear oh dear, it wasn't very good either. Their main points were, sadly, Facebook. They made a big deal about every single upcoming game having the scoreboards integrated with online, whatchumacallit, social networking sites. Yeah, if you were tired of your Facebook "friends" spamming you with annoying updates about... the hell, pink cows?! then just wait till you get an update everytime somebody on your friends list scores a touchdown in Madden. Well, teaches you little kids to learn how to properly use Facebook I suppose. Yes, you would be able to avoid trouble on Facebook if you just knew how to use it.
The EA line-up of titles was largely disappointing. I think it was Need for Speed: Run that looked incredibly stupid for a driving game. Part of the demo was driving away from explosions, a large part of the demo was scripted events and doing one long quicktime event to run across rooftops, then stealing a copcar and another quicktime event after a scripted crash. A driving game turned into a scripted film about a felon fleeing partly on-foot from the over-enthusiastic killer traffic police destroying the city with missiles because of one man violating the traffic laws of Chicago. I think someone at EA may have just seen Blues Brothers very recently, eh guys? The one question I ask is, will this NFS game have split-sceen or not? The previous one didn't, and for a driving game all about the multiplayer chases it was a bad choice.

Another SSX game is coming. Going down a snowy hill, hitting a ramp and doing a flip, landing and going down a snowy hill some more. I think that is what the SSX games are all about. My only question is, and I ask this everytime I see an SSX game, how are they able to make females in winter clothing look so damn hot? If I played the SSX games a lot I suppose I would eventually only get an erection with women in thick, warm jackets. I already do, but not exclusively. Right now I still get an erection from everything.
Madden and Fifa. They're both football, one's about carrying a weirdly shaped thing through a field of padded guys, the other one has people using their feet to move a ball into large nets and faking injuries.
Insomniac had a new game coming called OverStrike I think. Didn't show any gameplay footage, only a trailer, but it looks like it might be something between Borderlands and Team Fortress 2 with 4-player co-op.
There was also... wait... I forgot. Nevermind.
And lastly Battlefield 3. Or is it Bad Company 3? Can't be Bad Company, it has nothing to do with Bad Company. It must be Battlefield 3. Gameplay clips looked amazing, and considering that the game is supposed to have open maps like the old Battlefield games, Battlefield 3 could be a must-buy.
The EA conference was bad, not solely because of some uninteresting announcements like social network integration with stats, but also because the speakers hadn't rehearsed their speeches too well and you could every now and then see them reading the teleprompter.

Ubisoft conference was surprisingly interesting. It was clear that they had planned ahead and knew what they were going to talk about without sounding too rehearsed or staring at a teleprompter, although I do think they should get Mr. De-Caf to host next time to avoid the show being so annoying at times.
I'm not a big Rayman fan, in fact I've only ever played one Rayman game for about two minutes, but the new 2D Rayman game called Rayman Origins Ubisoft showed looked interesting for a budget title. It has fun looking levels and 2-player offline co-op, and the demo was clearly not scripted. A big problem with E3 demos is that they always tend to look scripted even when they're supposedly being played live, but the Rayman game demo was clearly not pre-recorded and it gave out a good, casual feel for us gamers.
The new Far Cry game looked pretty fucking cool and interesting with nice action sequences and stealth kills, but at a glance so does Far Cry 2, so who knows what the final result will be.
Assassin's Creed... uhm... Revelations I think, the last part of Ezio's story I would presume, didn't show anything new that people didn't already know would be in the game. Combat looked the exact same as in all the other AC games so far, climbing looked the same, everything looked the same. Maybe it might be a little bit more "grand" in the way of action sequences as towards the end dozens of ships were blowing up and sinking, but it seems to be largely the same core game as AC2. Although, it really doesn't need to be too different yet since it's basically just the conclusion of AC2. It's AC2 pt. 3. Once AC3 comes out, it might be a good thing if that one was distinctly evolved from AC2, but that's in the far future. So, the AC:R bit of the conference was lackluster since it gave us nothing new.

The last thing I remember from this conference was the Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon stuff, Ghost Recon: Future Soldier and a free online Ghost Recon game. The free game is, well, free as far as I could understand, and Future Soldier seems to be heavily focused on teamwork. The demo showed off some pretty neat and complex team-strategy stuff and if I had any friends I would definitely consider getting Future Soldier. One the reasons I'm a singleplaying man by choice is that very few co-op games actually force players to rely on each other and strategize and trust each other and work in sync, and the ones that exist aren't that popular with the mass. Many co-op modes have you resuscitating fallen comrades, sure, but that alone isn't enough to make players feel like a team and this is especially noticeable with people crying about kill-steals in many online games. If you're a real team, you can't steal kills from friends. Most co-op and team modes in games are the same thing as singleplayer modes, you just have a couple of extra characters on screen that you shouldn't shoot, but Future Soldier seems difficult and more boring to solo which in turn will, or rather should be it's strength in the multiplayer market once it's out. So, I'm sort of excited about the new Ghost Recon, although I will probably never buy it.
Hey, by the way guys, we should totally all play SWAT4 online co-op together some day. Guys?! Anyone out there?! No? Aww....

Sony conference probably blew a lot of people away. If I may assume something, I think a lot of people expected Sony to once again make asses out of themselves, especially after the recent hacks, but if we have to pick a winner of E3 like the sad gaming enthusiasts online do every year, Sony won. Put your hand down, son, Sony won and that's final.
They started off with an apology for the PSN downtime and thanked fans for support, but forgot to apologize for having some of the worst security in recent history and putting customer data in danger.
After the apology Sony showed off Uncharted 3, and Uncharted 3 looks to be just what you'd expect Uncharted 3 to be. Uncharted is the second greatest thing that Naughty Dog, despite having several good titles, has ever done. The best is of course Rings of Power, but nevermind my shitty taste in games.
Sony also showed us Battlefield 3 demo. EA showed only clips, but Sony had a demo of the game being played. Guess what! The demo looked INCREDIBLY boring, as it was all about this guy driving a tank slowly across a vast open desert with very little happening. Took him like 5 minutes, maybe more, to accomplish nothing. Guys, Battlefield 3 may be awesome and maybe when we get to drive the tank ourselves in the context of the story we'll be excited about it, but you really shouldn't just show us a slow progression through a fucking desert and expect us to get hyped up. The only thing we gamers collectively jizzed over at a relatively same moment (exact time varies due to stream lag) was seeing the EA clip of the player TAKING DOWN A FUCKING SKYSCRAPER WITH EXPLOSIVES! Destruction, show it off. It's cheap to offer quick thrills without a context knowing full well gamers will fill the blanks with more action, I know, but these demos and trailers are meant to get people excited about the game. Everyone but war-nerds with tank-fetishes were looking at their watches while the guy on stage was driving the tank towards one direction with barely anything impeding his progress.
Sony also advertised, cheap money-grubbing bastards as they are, their 3D television. It's a GAMING television. Okay, Sony, we know you make electronics and we know you want 3D TVs and glasses to catch on because YOU are the leading manufacturer of 3D technology of this kind, but save the adverts for shopping networks, okay? I know E3 couldn't be of less value if all they had were trained monkeys trying to panhandle with B-grade actors faking enthusiasm in the background and with marching bands playing music over some long and pointless montages of old games people don't want to see when they're here to get the NEWS, largely because that's all it is already and we can only go up from here. Point is, don't whore yourself out Sony. Or rather, don't whore yourself out more than the competition. I still love you.

Sony also showed off some Move game about a medieval knight. Looked... bland. Since that was so short, I'll waste the lines reserved for the indepth game description by telling you why I think Move is better than Kinect: Move lets you at least potentially play real games with characters moving freely while you swing your ice-cream cone shaped wiimote around, Kinect only lets you flail around in rail shooters until you die of exhaustion. Some PS3 titles have already been patched to support Move, and surely many upcoming titles will have support from the start, and these games are real games, big games, where you control your character's movement and jumps and climbing and whatnot. Kinect is only truly useful and admittedly unbeatable with dancing games, and companies developing games with Kinect in mind are only able to produce games comparable to -I don't want to say it but I must and already sort of did above- PS EyeToy. I find it silly when people claim Move is the EyeToy clone, when Kinect is much closer. Move is only a Wii clone and Wii is better than EyeToy.
I think Kinect COULD be used for more, but it seems the companies don't care. Just go look at the E3 Kinect stuff and tell me those games are worth more than 10 bucks a pop and you shouldn't be able to keep a straight face. Sony is more interested in using the Move to ENHANCE the gameplay of titles already designed with a controller in mind, taking nothing away, only adding another method of playing. I also have a weak back due to my own utter stupidity as a kid and couldn't be able to play Kinect games for extended periods of time, but Move... doable.
Anyway, that was much more E3 2010 stuff than 2011. Let's move on*.

The big big... thing, of Sony's conference was the NGP or as it is now called PlayStation Vita. It's got touch screens and touchable back and buttons out the ass, so many pushable parts it has in fact that it is indeed a large button in itself. A large, stylish, high-tech button that can play Uncharted 3 and let you create stages in ModNation by just fondling the backside of it like it was the new Lara Croft in flesh. That's not the biggest surprise, though, PS Vita being so awesome isn't the reason Sony will dominate handheld markets this and next year. The big fuss is it's affordable price, $250 for the wifi and $300 for the AT&T powered 3G version. And, sadly, 250 euros for wifi and 300 euros for 3G in Europe... assholes, that's not how you handle the currency values! The numbers are supposed to be different! To me all those prices look awful but according to the modern hipster-gamers it's not a whole lot, and I don't know whether AT&T is good or bad since at E3 the audience BOO'd when they heard it's AT&T and after E3 I've heard that the company's actually a preferable choice for the consumer. I really can't say, I live in Finland and until last year AT&T might have as well been a lawfirm for all I knew. The PS Vita will hit the stores by next Christmas.
So, in the end Sony may be a big whore, have subpar software design for their console, sometimes hire annoying pricks for customer service department, own an unhealthy attitude when it comes to criticism against their product and save the extremely private customer information in unencrypted .txt files in basically public folders, but somehow they still manage to stay afloat. Well, what can I say, it's all just business and every company is far from flawless. We just like to pick on Sony for some reason, I can't imagine what that reason might be. I still love you, Sony.

Nintendo conference was the last and I must admit I missed a portion of it due to some of my own personal computer trouble, but if you think the following recap doesn't accurately depict Nintendo's conference then post a comment and tell me what I missed that was so great. I know that after the ESRB leak about Project Café people took it for granted that Nintendo would dominate E3 and that this year E3 would be awesome because of it. Nope.
First, we looked at an overlong montage of Zelda. I have owned only two Zelda games, Oracles of Seasons and Ages, and never beat either one of them. I got so bored towards the beginning of the 8th dungeon in both that I just quit. After the Zelda montage, I think they announced some 3DS titles, possibly MGS3, and I think maybe also a new Paper Mario game. Now Paper Mario series, that's what I could get behind. They look fun. Of course, I missed the 3DS part of the conference so maybe neither of those two games were announced, but who cares.
The big announcement everyone and their mother were watching Nintendo's conference for, the fabled Project Café... it's a controller with a screen on it called WiiU, and along with it comes promises of third-party support in 1080p. Yippe-do-daa, Nintendo will, at last, let the hardcore Nintendo fans who fought the urge of buying a 360 and a PS3 play games we guys have been playing for years now, and they get to do it on a small screen if they dont want to use a television screen. Say what you will, but I don't think a controller that allows video gaming at the same time someone watches TV is such a big deal. Sure, it may be useful to some people, but I really don't think it's going to attract any more customers to the new console than what the prospect of playing Battlefield 3 on a Nintendo console will. In fact, the controller may be more harmful if it's uncomfortable to use. The actual new console the WiiU controller is only a part of remains a mystery to be solved later.
So, you can see why Sony won. Nintendo announced very little this year, with the worst part being that everyone expected them to reveal a complete new console with innovative new features, and it was just a controller with a touch screen. Even the release date of WiiU is still unknown to us, as all they could say was that it'll come out sometime 2012. Nintendo couldn't win this year's sad little popularity contest, because they didn't give us anything concrete, only promises of potential. Sony promised something neat for next Christmas and actually did show it off live.

I forgot when it was that we saw the new Tomb Raider E3 demo, but I have to say, I'm probably going to buy the game when it comes out. I've never been much of a fan of Tomb Raider to be honest even though I own 8 different games from the series and both of the movies and have some of the comics. Even when I was "fan of Tomb Raider" in my early teens it was just a family-friendly way of saying I fantasized about Angelina Jolie in hotpants when jerking off at night. The new game is a reboot of the series and seems much more grounded and gritty, with the fantastical jumping and swinging ditched in favour of slower paced survival through extremely hostile and scary caves and the ridiculously derivative "push blocks on top of marked squares" puzzles swapped with more varied interactive and intuitive puzzle sequences. At least I hope that's how the new game will be.
The new Lara is also naturally younger, has smaller tits and a larger ass, and if the demo is an accurate representation of the final product's voice acting the younger Lara also moans and screams like she's having the best sex ever. Turned me on a little but also made me feel quite a bit awkward listening to it alone in the context of things. I know I sound like a pervert, especially if we take into consideration that she's screaming and moaning in pain from breaking her arm and in fear of getting mutilated and being eaten by things lurking in the dark, and partly the pervert vibe I send is fully intended for the sake of my poor humour, but just look at the demo footage yourself and tell me you don't find her scream incredibly sexy. Certainly a game you must play with your headphones on if you don't want people to think you're watching hardcore hardcore porn, and I like it. I'll listen to her moaning while thinking of the SSX series chicks and have me a bloody good time. Hope the voice acting stays.
Also, good idea to focus on the backside, after all it is what we stare at throughout the game. Don't have to do what Tomb Raider 3 did and have the game make the camera spin around 180 degrees every now and then to zoom in on the chest for no apparent reason.
I like women. A lot. And I'm lonely.

Also, I missed TES: Skyrim stuff so can't say anything about it other than what I've heard from other sources it sounds like shit, Gears of War 3 looked really crap and stale, and what little glimpse we got of Mass Effect 3 was rather unexciting compared to what the first game looked like. Never played any Mass Effect games or Gears of War games, I've seen gameplay footage like walkthroughs and think the games look boring, but the E3 stuff of those two sequels looked very inspired.
I also missed whatever they had of Batman: Arkham City, which must have been very little since I only had a few bathroom breaks, but we already know it's going to be awesome and compete for the GotY awards of this year with... uh... well, I suppose Skyrim will get a lot of unmerited praise, so we don't need to get any more hype. Our Arkham City hype gauges are full.
EDIT: After a few more looks at Skyrim from different sources, it's looking quite interesting and while I'm still skeptical of how much it will do right and how great it can be, it is looking very interesting. Still, Oblivion looked interesting and it was technically broken and in the end very boring.
Bioshock Infinite looks like something I might get. It looks real pretty and sounds to me like it will have a lot of very interesting features and a great plot.

Anyway, I guess I already accomplished my two main goals of proving that I'm a sad lonely pervert and completely oblivious to what modern video gaming, the industry and the media is all about, so I'll stop here even though I did catch a few unofficial, backstage, developer-on-reporter shows as well. It's a long unintelligent post, I know, but it's been a while since the last post and it's a God damn hell in here, I'm roasting like a pig in an oven and can't possibly concentrate on providing a thoughtful, to-the-point recap I could be proud of. Bye.

(* this was a subliminal message planted here to get you to buy PlayStation Move)

State of Emergency

2011-05-18T00:45:00.000+03:00

(Pardon me if there's any typos or misspellings or if the wording of some sentences seems off, I had the shits bad while writing this and at one point I fell asleep for a few hours, so I weren't at my sharpest, which is already rather dull. I'm also proof reading the text at 12:30 AM while picking my nose. I blame the game, it's bad and boring, definitely the cause of all my problems in life, even though I played it a month ago)

I played State of Emergency for PS2 a long while ago but on the blog I'm trying to catch up with the games I've played in the approximate order I played them so I'll try to pass my judgement on it now inspite of having forgotten things about it.

State of Emergency was a pretty big disappointment to be honest. I've been sort of looking for it on and off since I heard about it years and years ago and it's a shame I only found and bought this year, because I think I could've appreciated it's arcade-style gameplay a little bit more when I was younger. Right now, though, with more experience with video games and with a much more refined taste, which is debatably still crap, State of Emergency is in my opinion just bad. Not necessarily so bad you could laugh at it or make a big angry rant about it saying it's the worst game ever, just so bad you don't ever recommend it to anyone.

First of all, as a full-fledged arcade style... I don't know, mayhem game I suppose, it has no story. The basic premise is that the country has slowly but surely fallen under the rule of the Corporation which has removed rights from the people and lied to the masses in order to supposedly create a completely lawful, calm and productive society while raking in more money for the large corporations, but a rebel group called Freedom Movement has been fighting against the corporate power and the feud has escalated to the point where the Corporation has placed the country in a state of emergency in order to have a good chance at stomping out the last rebels once and for all, while there's riots and people just panicking on the streets of Capitol City.
There's no cutscenes and no plot other than the intro movie showing an explosion and then gameplay footage, it's just you as one of the five characters killing the Corporation's police officers and blowing up cars and buildings. The lack of story is perfectly acceptable in arcade-style games like these if the actual game is good but State of Emergency just blows and a story, old and clichéd as Freedom fighters rebelling against the tyranny of the Corporation may be, could only help keep your interest in it.

State of Emergency's all-star cast includes such memorable characters as
that average guy, that chick, that fat guy, that black guy and that thin guy.
By the way, I don't think you can pick up that trash can in the image.

There's five characters to choose from and from what I saw each one does have a short "backstory" description in the selection screen that tells how they joined the Freedom in one sentence, but apart from looks they're not different from each other, have no cutscenes or dialogue and no special attributes. Their characteristics and personalities can be summed up easily with 'the chick in purple suit', 'the generic average guy' and 'the fat badass gangsta', and the gameplay experience doesn't change in any way if you select one or the other. Also, three of the five characters are locked and can only be selected once you beat levels in the Revolution mode, the closest thing to a story mode the game has, so your options are limited anyway. I find it kind of stupid that the guy on the cover, the fat gangsta, the "face" of State of Emergency is one of the locked characters. Why do that? He's the only guy we know, and he's the only guy who could potentially have a persona.

The Revolution mode I mentioned is one of State of Emergency's three modes, and I'll describe it last. First, the most fun of the game modes is called Chaos and it's all about getting a high score, and you get points for killing enemies and causing destruction, extra points if you cause specific type of destruction when the game tells you to, and you lose points if you kill civilians while the civilian kill penalty is on. After a few tries, though, the fun goes away after you've beaten the default high scores and seen everything you can do. Using grenades and bazookas to blow up cars and buildings that serve as the edges of the map, shattering glass panes with gunfire or fists and killing Corporation guards and street gangs with punch-kick combos or rifles and flamethrowers is everything. I realize I just made it sound appealing to people with good imagination, but take my word for it, the mode gets boring. Go play GTA 2, get a bazooka and fire it repeatedly on the same bit of wall and occasionally a stationary car and you should get the jist of what Chaos mode eventually amounts to, as the levels in State of Emergency are tiny and the way you you can keep on going destroying stuff is that when you turn your back to the destroyed walls and cars and enemy spawnpoints for a long enough time they'll regenerate and respawn. So you basically go through the same bit of street about twenty times doing the same exact stuff until some random enemy kills you for good or you run out of time.

False advertising. The image almost makes it look like a fun beat 'em up.

The most boring and pointless mode of the game is Last Clone Standing. What you do in this mode is kill a hundred clones that run around the level aimlessly, although often away from you. It's boring and pointless because your only goal is to kill all hundred guys as fast as possible, so all you do is run back and forth between assault rifle spawns and spray bullets at clones as they run past you. You can't melee them as they run away so fast your attacks wont hit most of the time and they can take a few hits before going down, and it's not even fun when they don't fight back.You can't use throwables like grenades as the grenades have weak damage and small splash radius and there's a delay between throwing the grenade and it exploding. You'll also pass on the pistol, submachine gun and flame thrower because hitting with them is less likely than with the assault rifles you can find from most corners of the area, so... yeah. You shoot a hundred guys running away. It's even less fun than it sounds if you think it sounds fun at all. Try imagining a game mode in Resident Evil 5 where all you did was shoot a hundred chicken as fast as possible in the middle island of the Marshlands 3-1 chapter, and you have a good idea of a game mode much more fun that what Last Clone Standing is.

Like mentioned, the closest thing to a story mode this game has is the third one, Revolution mode, and it's terrible. If Chaos is the most fun and Last Clone Standing is the most boring mode, Revolution is the most annoying. And the longest.
In Revolution you are given different tasks by the Freedom Movement that you go do and then you come back and get another task, and this goes on until you've done about a fifty tasks in a level. There's no voice acting, you just read the mission objectives, and the missions themselves are what makes this mode so annoying. At least half of them involve either protecting someone or something or trying to kill a fleeing target, and dear Lord doing either of those is frustrating. When protecting something, the enemies beeline straight to their intended target and in order to divert their attention you have to hit them, which isn't as easy as you'd think. Hitting targets that are moving away from you is much more difficult than it should be, and there's sections where a large group of them spawn almost right behind you at the same time and only one of them has to reach their destination to make you fail. Retrying tasks is as simple as running back to the guy who gives out the missions, which thanks to the tiny size of the levels is always a 10 second jog away, but it's tiresome to run back and forth between two nearby spots just because your kick never connects with the last enemy before he enters the door you were guarding. The killing of fleeing targets is as frustrating as protecting something, because due to the small size of the levels your target only has to run for 15-20 seconds before they're safe and if you get too close too early they can literally turn on their heels at the door they used to enter and immediately make you fail before even entering the level, forcing you to once again run back and forth between two spots, and because meleeing a moving target is nigh impossible and the target always has an entourage of 20 guards and runs only slightly slower than your sprint speed you really need the guns that the Revolution mode rarely gives away. When you do get guns, however, the task is usually completed with one burst fired a second after starting the task, making the missions practically nonexistant then.

One of the whopping 15 identical bits of street the game offers you.
The Mall level is the most different of all, it has a roof and floor instead.

Tasks other than protection of locations and running after fleeing targets involve picking up objects and carrying them back to the task-man or just plain killing a couple of enemies, but nothing ever makes the gameplay feel rewarding or like you're accomplishing anything as all tasks literally only take 15-30 seconds from start to finish, are mostly just frustrating with cheap sudden one-hit failures during the escort and protection missions, have no visual payoff and you couldn't care less about the noble cause or the random Freedom people you help because there isn't any story or characters to emotionally invest in. It's all just busywork. In Revolution mode you don't even get weapons too often and destroying the windows of stores gets you nothing, there's nothing else but the windows to interact with and you can't cause brawls as big as you can in Chaos mode, so there's no fucking around for fun to do either.
The destruction in the game was made out to be a big deal, like you destroy scenery with random objects picked up from the ground and the back cover of the box states that, and I translate a quote from Finnish: "thousands of destructive weapons", but there's no destruction beyond blowing up stationary cars, badly damaging buildings and breaking windows, and there's 8 guns, 2 projectiles and from what I've seen 9 melee weapons that have largely the same animations. You don't pick up TV screens or potted plants like I thought you would even though you can see them on display in store windows and civilians actually carry them around, and you can't even smash mailboxes, only windows.
There's also only a few hand-to-hand moves if you try playing State of Emergency as a beat 'em up game during Chaos mode. Kick and punch that you can do small combos with, grapple and a power move. The controls are iffy, like some Japanese budget beat 'em up if you've ever played one, and shooting has no aiming whatsoever. You can press a button to supposedly aim, but for me it didn't do anything, and so any shooting in the game is just spraying bullets at the general direction the character is facing, which is why the pistol is so useless.
The levels are horribly tiny and get this: there's only 4 levels total, and they have really no differentiating key features, just slightly different layouts.

This image sums up the only worthwhile aspects of the game:
buildings on fire and people running

State of Emergency is just plain boring. Bad controls and no point to the gameplay. There's no reward for playing it and there's not even a cheap hook that would keep you interested and get you to come back to beat your high scores like arcade games like this need. Games like Crazy Taxi and, oh God, even Under the Skin are also largely plotless arcade games that rely on simple point collection to keep you playing, but they have payoffs to what you're doing. Crazy taxi's nutcase driving is thrilling and Under the Skin rewards you with varying visual gags for every prank, State of Emergency gives you neither the thrill nor the visual rewards.
Someone might think that judging a game so harshly might be unfair now, after all it was released ten years ago, but State of Emergency obviously had nothing to offer the gamers in 2001 and now in 2011 it has even less, and that's all I'm here to tell you.
I will never know what it is I saw or heard about State of Emergency that made me think it might be a good game, and I also honestly don't believe anymore that State of Emergency 2 is crap compared to this, because State of Emergency 2, as far as I can tell, has some gameplay and a story.

Although, I will have to give the game one praise: the amount of people running on the screen is astounding. You can have easily two dozen enemies surround you while a good several dozen civilians run around like headless chickens in the background. But that, my friends, does nothing to make the game better.

Credits for the images go to gamespot.com, ign.com and gamestudies.org.

Thanks for lending me them guys, I couldn't've captured any screens from the shits.

Yup.

2011-05-11T17:55:00.000+03:00

Yup.
Went to the check-up today, I'm going back to the army next year with my physical condition classification lowered so I don't have to participate in as many physical activities as I did the last time.

And more games.

Bought Commandos Strike Force for the PS2. I know it's not similar to or as good as Commandos 2, but... I bought it. Looks interesting, just more console-y and action-y than Commandos 2.
I also bought The Settlers III Gold Edition. I believe I really like city/economy building, I just haven't found any really good examples of this game type. I hope Settlers III is at least decent. Don't recall ever reading too much about this series before so I don't know what to expect exactly, but I am slightly worried about some critics making a big deal about the combat. I HATE wars in my city/economy building games, I want to design and build working cities, not command troops across empty fields. If I wanted combat, I'd buy the Total War games.
And to get one game free I also got The Movies for PC. I like SOME tycoon games, especially Theme Park, Railroad Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon, so I should be alright, but even if I do ever get bored I can always create a Movies version of Red Dead Revolver. And it was free, so I don't care. Makes my collection look bigger.

Mirror's Edge

2011-05-06T19:46:00.000+03:00

I promised more than a month ago to write about Mirror's Edge, but got distracted by something. Now, I don't really remember much about it, but here's a very hastily put together quick review anyhow.

Mirror's Edge is a lot of fun, much more so than what you'd think just by looking at somebody's walkthrough of it. Seriously, the concept of a game being about running in first-person sounds like a ridiculous idea suitable for some budget title, but in the end I liked it so much that I really hope they're making a Mirror's Edge 2, just with a little more length and much more freedom.
The running is very down-to-earth and dare I say realistic, but thoroughly exhilirating, and the hand-to-hand combat is, as far as I can tell some of the best first-person melee combat ever seen. It's a lot of fun disarming and beating the heavily armed opponents up like some martial arts master whenever they're blocking your path and what's really amazing and what really makes the running and combat work is the fact that the controls don't suck at all. The actions are mapped to what feel like just the correct buttons for them and although every now and then there's a section where you may need to do a few actions in quick succession it always feels doable, at least when you're just playing through the story mode. In the time trial challenges not necessarily so much, in fact I personally found some of the stuff downright impossible, but then again I never learned how to use the R2 and L2 triggers on the PS3 controller with my middle fingers. My ring fingers just aren't mutated enough to provide the needed amount of support to hold the controller steady if I try applying pressure to the front triggers with my middle fingers. I can't even finish the Office time trial level at all, it's just way too tricky with it's perfect angle jump crap and jump-coil-wallrun-turn-climb bullshit. I call hax on people who claim to have passed it! DAAAAMN YOUUU!
The game gives you an option to use the enemy's firepower against itself by allowing you to pick up guns after dispatching the opponents but it doesn't force you to use guns if you don't want to, oh no, you only have to fire one single bullet in the entire game and even that shouldn't be aimed at a person. This is a really fresh and nice new idea, having the gunplay for once truly be the very last resort if you suck instead of making it an occasionally mandatory part of the gameplay. I think the devs had some balls to not force in shooting levels and props to them for that.
The storymode is a bit short, in fact so short that if you could perfectly copy the world record speedruns of the chapters the entire game would probably be much less than an hour long and there aren't any optional tasks other than to collect a couple of packages while you're running, but I guess a more average gamer will have a 5 hour game here. The story is incredibly predictable and you'll be able to call out the so-called mystery bad guys and surprise good guys the second they are introduced in the story, and quite frankly the story is so weak you probably have the same problem I did and won't actually consider the cutscenes to have any significance in your adventure to jump over fences and slide under pipes. I honestly couldn't even relate to the main character Faith despite seeing the game itself through her eyes, the character development is that thin. I just imagined I was running across rooftops purely for fun.
Due to it being so short and offering little else to do when the story is done I can't recommend everyone to buy it this instant (although it is dirt cheap now), but thanks to good production values and developer's effort I CAN recommend everyone to try it if possible as it is a refreshing experience. If you find yourself to belong in Mirror Edge's hardcore target audience then you'll spend countless days trying to beat your own and other people's time trial and speedrun results.

I also played Assassin's Creed 2 more than a month ago and I think I'll just skip writing about it for now. Not because I wouldn't have anything to say, but because I think I'd have too much and I just can't find the energy to monologue about one single game as long as I think I could. If you're interested in knowing my general opinion on it, though, in my eyes Assassin's Creed 2 definitely made up for the huge mistake known as Assassin's Creed and I have to hand it to Ubisoft, despite the first game being a lousy tech demo and not an actual game, I honestly think they have a hit series here thanks to AC2. I'm glad I took the plunge and paid the high price for it, Assassin's Creed 2 is a very, very enjoyable game and I recommend buying it. Never, ever, however, put money into the first Assassin's Creed if you can still avoid it, it didn't even have any story in it so it's not needed to understand what happens in AC2. Bring on Assassin's Creed 3, Ubisoft.

Bought more games. I buy them in threes.

2011-05-06T16:50:00.000+03:00

Last Monday I was out helping my sister put her artwork on display in this small art boutique downtown.

Last Wednesday I once again went out to buy used PC games. I specifically went to buy Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines for PC, as I've been looking to get it for a few years now and finally found it. Probably pointless to describe it as I'm sure most of you know what is even better than I do, but it's a roleplaying game in a world of vampires, and to my understanding it was made by largely the same people who were behind creating some of the Fallout games, although I personally haven't checked and compared the creators' names and the companies behind this game and any of the Fallout games have seemingly nothing to do with each other, so I don't know. I've probably just been fed false information again, or maybe the Fallout game in question was Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel. Anyway, I had to get my hands on this game when I heard that it really IS an actual role-playing game and not just an "RPG". I'm going to create a stealthy character and play as sneaky as possible.
I also bought Commandos 2: Men of Courage and Commandos 3: Destination Berlin for PC, they're isometric point-and-click real-time strategy stealth games. Ever since I found out that I like this particular type of RTS through Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive I've had a longterm plan of getting into the Commandos series as well, and as I was looking around the store for anything else I could buy to go with Vampire The Masquerade and saw both Commandos 2 and 3 I finally decided to pick them up. I gave Commandos 2 a bit of a whirl yesterday after I got pissed off at Contract J.A.C.K. and here's two things I found out: 1) Oh, man, it's confusing and 2) Oh, man, it's awesome! There's such a ridiculous amount of things you can do with the different classes that it easily beats SWAT 3 in terms of beginner's confusion when trying to understand what the actions are and how to do them and when and where, but it's so damn fun and rewarding once you do get the hang of everything. Without having really even started the game I can already whole-heartedly recommend Commandos 2: Men of Courage to most people. Go buy it!

I have also been able to play quite a lot in the past week so I'll post my thoughts on possibly and hopefully six games in separate blog posts. Probably not all of them today, though.

With Hitman: Contracts finished, I'll take my leave

2011-04-29T15:11:00.002+03:00

Death to Spies is way too buggy to be recorded, so I gave it up. I already mentioned in the earlier post that the cutscenes are problematic, but on top of that there's some framerate issues whenever I turn Fraps on, and on top of that the AI is buggier than I remembered. The levels also take longer to complete than what I thought and I don't want to upload every level in two parts when there's hardly anything happening (the game can occasionally be a little bit boring). So, forget about it.

Hitman: Blood Money, forget about this game too. I tried recording the first mission for a few hours, and again the framerate is a little bit wonky and I really don't want to spend hours and hours recording and editing and uploading just to have more than half of the comments be complaints about how the videos are shitty looking slideshows. I'll record Blood Money when I've either upgraded my PC, which will be never, or bought the game for PS2, which will be seemingly never since I can't fucking find it.

I were only interested in recording Thief: Deadly Shadows, Spy Fiction and Tenchu: Fatal Shadows to make this sort of a stealth game marathon, but there's not much point when the main attractions can't be uploaded.

I'll go do something else now.

I'm not insane!

2011-04-28T19:10:00.000+03:00

Alright, a small update on absolutely nothing.
Today I had my psychologist's appointment, but I chickened out and just walked past the building. I did, however, decide to do the unthinkable and go to the drugstore to get my drugs on a whim. I don't know, maybe I'm not as afraid of getting myself into social situations as I think I am, maybe I just don't like to get into social situations when other people force me into them. I never had any say in this doctor and psychologist stuff myself.

I don't know why I take pictures of my games either. I just do.

But more importantly, yesterday I went out to buy video games because I once again saw online that there was a game in my usual store that I wanted. You'll never guess what it is, not in a million years! Well, if you're not going to guess it then I suppose it's pointless to talk about it... hell, I'll tell you anyway: It's Deus Ex, for PS2! Although it is for PS2 and not PC, it shouldn't be too much of a problem as I've read that apart from more loading screens it's very faithful to the original, and being the happy owner of 95 PS2 games I think I can avoid discriminating the PS2 port of one of the world's best video game experiences just for being inferior.
The store still has the "buy three get one free" offer so I also bought Syberia and Syberia 2 for PS2, so I sort of got Deus Ex free of charge. Syberia's supposed to be one of the all time best adventure games, especially considering it having been made long after the actual golden age of adventure games. I'm not much of an adventure gamer myself, I mean, just look at my Fukkaround of Fahrenheit (fail minigames in order to not get game over, what the fuck? I still don't get it), but I hope Syberia's still entertaining. Syberia 2 is supposed to suck in comparison, but I thought I'd complete the series in one fell swoop.

I guess you want to know about walkthroughs, since I am doing them again for the time being. I decided to start recording Death to Spies before Hitman: Blood Money, because Blood Money is the game I play to relax and Death to Spies is the game I play to slowly kill myself, so it makes sense to leave Blood Money for later to calm me back down. If you don't know how difficult Death to Spies is in comparison to Hitman games, here's something to give you the general idea: yesterday night I spent more than six hours recording only the first level of the game on Normal difficulty. Alright, the main reason it took so long is that I decided to record a clean run without any saving mid-level and the game is a little bit buggy, but still. The later levels especially give me the chills, I still remember spending two days trying to beat level 8 and still not finishing it silently. Dear Lord, what have I gotten myself into again?

I also think it's a good idea recording Blood Money later because I think I'll be spending much more time on it. Like I said, I can't decide on any one way of beating some of the levels, so I'm planning to maybe upload the cutscenes separately from the actual missions and then record and upload several different runs of the levels. Like A New Life for example, I counted 3-5 ways I could do the mission, each one distinctively different from the others. Not every missions has enough options to warrant several complete runthroughs as it doesn't matter much if you syringe or fiber wire the target, but most have potentially at least two very different ways to be completed. But, we shall see if I can bother to record, edit, render and upload that much.

By the way, the Death to Spies walkthrough probably won't have the cutscenes intact. Not only are the cutscenes incredibly dull, but the game is so bugged that majority of the cutscenes don't even play correctly, so you'd be missing half of the lacking dialogue anyway. I don't really think anyone even cares if there's cutscenes, people will probably just completely overlook this walkthrough and complain about me not doing Blood Money immediately.
If you want to know more about how Death to Spies' story unfolds, here's the entire plot transcribed:
Some high ranking Russian army officer is suspected of treason, so this other high ranking officer questions our protagonist regarding his assignments during World War II. Every cutscene goes like this:
- High ranking officer man: You were part of this and this operation. Tell me about it.
- Our protagonist: I was dropped a mile south of the location... [gameplay begins here]
So, you won't be missing much. I'll leave in the final cutscene just to piss you off, though.

Hitman Contracts walkthrough coming so soon it's already here!

2011-04-23T20:27:00.028+03:00

First things first and things related to the Contracts walkthrough foremost: I wrote about my first ever playthrough of Hitman Contracts on this very same blog back in early 2010. In case you don't recall ever reading them, and who would've read them when hardly anyone knows of my blog's existence, but are interested to know how I felt playing Contracts months after Hitman 2 made me think the series sucks, read these posts:

http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/i-dont-need-practice-im-professional.html
http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/midnight-meat-beating-at-fetish-party.html
http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/better-homage-to-thing-than-actual.html
http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/pry-into-maids-shower-you-bet.html
http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/ive-got-one-who-would-win-between-47.html
http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/todays-update-on-my-progress-in.html
http://johnnydfox.blogspot.com/2010/03/innovative-new-text-based-speedrun.html

So I started recording a walkthrough for Hitman Contracts, as you may have already noticed if you've looked at my YouTube channel today. I wanted to fullfill at least one of my many promises and thought that doing a Hitman Contracts walkthrough was the easiest one. It's a Silent Assassin runthrough on Professional difficulty and I'll mostly be using the probably best known ways of beating the levels, so it's nothing special.
After I'm done with Contracts I'll do Blood Money, and I'm taking requests for methods of beating the levels. Because Hitman games don't require CD's to be played, Blood Money has been the go-to game of mine whenever I have felt bored, and after the numerous playthroughs and different tactics experienced I tend to find myself a little bit lost on what exactly I want to do when I start playing a level. I certainly don't know what to record and show to people.

After Blood Money I also plan to record walkthroughs for at least Death to Spies and Thief: Deadly Shadows, but most likely also Spy Fiction and Tenchu: Fatal Shadows. Beyond those, I don't think I'll record any other walkthroughs for YouTube. Unless, of course, I can find Death to Spies 2.

As per usual I did have plans for other type of content to put out, but looking at the largely unedited Second Sight LP videos and the barely-worked-on Sony Vegas project file I've had on my PC for the past 6-7 months I think I should just go fuck myself rather than start and not finish anything new.

Also, next week I have an appointment with a psychologist. I tend to get panic attacks whenever I face any sort of social situations and my mother thought it best that I see a doctor before I have to deal with the army business again, and to get over the problem so that I can educate myself further and get a job.
This might explain why I make such a big deal about going out to buy video games, every time I go outside and deal with store clerks and random people looking at me when I just miss my bus and people coming to ask me about my opinions on politics on the street is a small victory for me. It's a little bit silly, I'm supposed to just walk into the psychologist's room, which alone I'm normally afraid to do, to talk to a person I'll be afraid of talking to about a subject I'm afraid of talking about. I haven't even answered the phone when they've been calling me to schedule the appointment, and I got prescripted some really mild sedative type of drugs that according to the doctor I briefly saw don't actually do anything, but I'm too afraid of going to the chemist's to get them.
I don't know if it's a good idea to talk about psychologist appointments on the Internet, I actually think it's a bit stupid, but this is my personal blog that's supposed to be about my personal matters as much as it is about video games, and honestly this is the only pressing issue I've had in years, so why not mention it.

Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away

2011-04-18T01:48:00.006+03:00

Yesterday, which was Saturday, was a pretty nice day. I received a little bit of cash for doing absolutely nothing on Friday and out of interest checked the website of my regular gameshop to see if they had anything interesting. Indeed they once again had something I've been looking for, and so at 5 in the morning I decided that the next day I'll go downtown to buy more games and also check out my sister's art-thing. She had some of her works on display in this citywide art event and since I were about a walking distance away I naturally had to pay a visit and surprise her.

A couple of hours of sleep later I got up and got ready to leave, but things didn't go smoothly. I realized that I didn't have any good jeans clean or in decent enough condition to be worn, I didn't have much small change for the bus fare since the money I got on Friday was a 50 euro bill, the shoulder bag I thought about using to carry the games was broken and lastly I realized that my sister hadn't told me where exactly her art is located.
But I really wanted to go so I took my new jeans that my mother brought that are too long and slightly baggy for me, and used safety pins to fix them for my size. Then I dug up my literally dusty old school backpack from the corner, texted my sister asking where to go to see the art and scrounged up some smaller change from the pockets of my jackets I hadn't worn since last summer. Then I put on my sunglasses and went out, and I deliberately had this big grin on my face the whole day. I noticed that when you're happy and smiling, other people seem really fucking pissed off. The bus drivers looked mad as hell and from what I could hear from people talking, most were just bitching about various little problems they have in life. One guy almost rode his bike right into me and gave me an angry look and shook his head when he went by, even though HE was on the wrong side of the road, not me. Anyway, I felt even better because of all that. For once it seemed like it wasn't me who missed the bus in shitty weather.

Anyway, games. First and foremost I went out to get Contract J.A.C.K. for PC. It's to my knowledge at the moment a very mediocre first-person shooter, but there is a specific reason I've been looking to buy it: it's the prequel to NOLF2 and seemingly the last game to ever come from the series. I hope the reason why the NOLF series is dead isn't Contract J.A.C.K.'s unpopularity, because I've read that the publisher decided to discontinue the series solely because it didn't rack up quite as much money as they wanted considering the huge amount of money the games' development cost.
Would be kind of stupid to blame the main games for the fact that fans of NOLF didn't flock to buy a "standalone expansion", that 1) has a completely different name, 2) has a completely different main character, 3) has a different style 4) has dumbed-down gameplay, 5) has a shorter campaign overall and 6) was never that heavily advertised, but if it is true that the publisher was disappointed at the profits then it would make more sense if Contract J.A.C.K. was the one game they focused their eyes on when they made their decision. Both of the first two main NOLF games got several Game of the Year awards from gaming related press as well as nominations for all sorts of other different awards, from which some of they did win and all of them they should've won (NOLF 2 was ROBBED of the Excellence in Writing Game Developers Choice Award), I don't really see how much better the reception of the games should've been in order for them to be considered successes.

The other game I specifically went after was Tenchu: Fatal Shadows for PS2. It was a little overpriced considering my usual range, but I thought "why not" since it's incredibly difficult to find games from this series, I had the money, there weren't any better choices in the shop and as I'd like to think of myself a stealth game connoisseur I must sooner or later take a look at the grandmother of stealth genre as we ~~know~~ love it. You see, the general beginnings of 3D stealth games start from 1997 with Thief: The Dark Project (the grandfather so to speak), and the very next series right after that was born in 1998 with Tenchu: Stealth Assassins. Metal gear Solid, the annoying uncle who farts loudly in the dinner table came in 1999. These three are considered by most people to be the big three of stealth games and together pushed the squeeky minecart of creeping and stalking in video games into motion. I'd like to point out that the ever so awesome Hitman: Codename 47 came out in 2000, as did the recently mentioned The Operative: No One Lives Forever, and since Hitman games added a completely new spin to stealth gameplay I think it would be appropriate to officially include it in The Quartet of Stealth Gaming, but then again nobody ever listens to me. 2001 was a crap year for stealth games and gave us nothing, in case you were wondering.
Fatal Shadows isn't the first Tenchu game, I think it's actually the fourth game in total and I've read that it doesn't actually have anything to do with the plot of the main series (another spin-off?), but if Greg Kasavin knows anything then I'm all set with this one, because according to Mr. Kasavin Fatal Shadows shows that the Tenchu series hasn't, or hadn't in 2004, evolved. If Fatal Shadows is just more of the same then I'll be getting the general jist of the series that much better.

And lastly, as the shop had "buy 3 get 1 free" offer if you bought used PS2 and PC games, I decided to grab Destroy All Humans! for PS2 along on a whim. I did sort of plan to buy CSI: 3 Dimensions of Murder for PS2 since my mother is a fan of CSI and I could get her to play it even though it's probably shit, but I didn't see it on the shelves.
Back when DAH! was just released it was high up on my most wanted games list, but I never happened to see it anywhere and never got it for my birthday or for Christmas either and since then my enthusiasm for a comedy game parodying 1950's sci-fi stories where an alien does stuff on Earth has plummeted, and I had to go past the shelf three or four times before I made the final decision of picking the game up.

After buying the games I went to see the art, came home, tried recalling how much exactly I hated playing Splinter Cell Double Agent, watched 007: A View to a Kill since it was on TV and that's about it.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent for PS3

2011-04-16T21:12:00.000+03:00

I'm just going to go right ahead and write everything I have to say about the game here and now, unedited, regardless of how long this blog post gets.

Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent for the "next-gen" (nowadays current gen) consoles is a piece of shit, and on top of that the PS3 version is just a piece of shit port, so I lose twofold. The End.

Stay tuned for my opinions on Mirror's Edge, Assassin's Creed 2, Black and White 2, a blog post about what happened this Saturday, a post about what I think should be and not should be in Hitman 5 and a video walkthrough of Hitman Contracts. Yeah, I like compiling to-do lists.

Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare Pack

2011-04-12T19:59:00.001+03:00

I suppose it's finally time to write about the games I got for my birthday. I already started typing a blog post about Undead Nightmare more than a week ago when I thought I'd write about each game individually, but then I got bored of writing and went back to playing games. ~~I still don't feel much like writing so I'll just put my thoughts about each game in this one post as short as I possibly can.~~
This post is already getting pretty long so I guess I will indeed divide my ramblings into separate posts like I originally planned.

Undead Nightmare Pack, get it only if you think Redemption's multiplayer is a lot of fun but you haven't yet actually bought any of the DLC, as it has the Outlaws to the End, Liars and Cheats and Legends and Killers packs included. All those packs in total may be worth the purchase, but the singlepayer of Undead Nightmare would be very disappointing if you expect anything out of it. I've seen a lot of people on forums asking if they should play Redemption first before trying out Undead Nightmare, and the answer is an extremely simple two parter:
Yes with no exceptions and drop those obviously high expectations you have for Undead Nightmare.
If you think that Undead Nightmare has any actual content to add to the Redemption experience, you're already going to be disappointed because the gameplay is obviously and literally entirely about shooting zombies in the head from start to finish, and there really aren't any actual new missions. In fact, the stats screen tells me that after 100% completion I had done a whopping 4 missions. Yippee. Seriously, your goals in the game vary from walking from point A to point B doing nothing but watching cutscenes for a minute, to killing a hundred zombies over and over again (which you do the entire few hours UN lasts), to collecting herbs (as if Redemption's herbalist challenges weren't dull enough). That's literally what you do in the game as far as gameplay goes. I could seriously write a walkthrough for every missions here in this post in less than six sentences.

What's the meat of the game you ask, then, if the gameplay is so incredibly ~~dull~~ nonexistant? Seeing John Marston deal with the apocalypse with a pinch of comedy, of course, with basically all the main characters from Redemption making a cameo at one point or another. Even some of the lesser characters you barely even remember existing appear in zombie form, like that one entertainer you only ever read about in paper in Redemption. Undead Nightmare also pokes fun at zombie clichés as well as the original content of Redemption and has some great fanservice to offer, and the first time you spot these amusing things you'll definitely chuckle. For example the random encounter from Redemption where the guy mourns his dead friend and puts a gun in his mouth exists in Undead Nightmare as well, but instead of the guy shooting himself the dead friend rises up scaring the crying man and the man shoots the undead's brains out in panic and then just sits there in shock, so you can see that there is a good amount of attention to detail in Undead Nightmare. It's just too bad that the drunken people who were responsible for coming up with the idea of Undead Nightmare at the company party fell under the table as early as they did, because the appeal of Undead Nightmare dies too soon. The latter half of the "story" is just... it all takes a nosedive soon after you've met Herbert Moon in Armadillo, and it's really a shame. Just ten or fifteen more minutes of the good stuff from the first half placed in the latter half and it would feel more complete, but with the weight of Undead Nightmare being at the very beginning the thing feels like half finished.

Basically, if you want to experience Undead Nightmare without buying it, you can just watch Video Games Awesome's Undead Nightmare videos and after that all you're missing are the sasquatch and Herbert Moon encounters, and I'm sure both of those cutscenes are somewhere on YouTube as well. Then you're done, sadly.
Undead Nightmare singleplayer has nothing to offer once finished and I'm unhappy that the stranger mission where the old man lived with his dead wife didn't return in any way, although I can understand that his appearance would've made Seth's spotlight a wee bit dimmer.
Undead Nightmare is also incredibly easy, I only died twice, once because the game glitched and threw me in the air then made me fall for 15 seconds, and the other time while trying to torch wolves on foot for the challenge. It's for the better, though. Nobody would play Undead Nightmare if it was actually challenging, since the gameplay is so unentertaining.

Now, the multiplayer... I don't know if I'm one to talk since I'm not much of a multiplaying man myself.

Jesse Lynch, still not playable

The co-op missions from Outlaws DLC, they're alright. It's fun to play some real missions through with friends, but I feel like they mostly just boil down to competitions of who shoots the most guys, at least with random people, and I don't have a lot of friends with PS3s who'd actually play Redemption. Only one I've played Redemption online with so far has been GranTruismo4head, all my other friends on the list seem to just be playing Black Ops nonstop. Not to say that I wouldn't have had a few pretty fun games with strangers, some of those guys with mics are actually pretty awesome. At least the ones who speak English, I've had to mute about a dozen Luigis and Pierres for mic spamming in weird mumble languages.

Legends and Killers pack is made to look like something for the fans of Revolver, but it's really just for those who wanted to be fans of Revolver but couldn't. The characters it adds are Red Harlow, Jack Swift, Annie Stoakes, Buffalo Soldier, Shadow Wolf, Ugly Chris, Pig Josh and Kelley. I would've wanted Mr. Black, Professor Perry, Bad Bessie, Kid Cougar, Diego, Daren, Sheriff O'Grady, Griffon and Jesse Lynch, but I suppose asking them to put and effort into DLC and making it worth the price is too much to ask.

Oh my God, what is wrong with your face?!

Red's character looks good but sounds off and the things he says aren't at all Red Harlow-ish, same with Jack Swift. Jack sounds too grizzled and is too much of an old angry English stereotype, in Revolver he was Englishmanly polite.
Buffalo Soldier looks alright and I recall he sounds good, too. Shadow Wolf is sort of meh but has the most different things to say out of the bunch. Kelley's character is pretty good. Pig Josh looks probably the most off of all of them but I think he sounds good, and Ugly Chris looks much better than he did in Revolver but sounds pretty much exactly as he should, on par with Annie. Annie Stoakes' voice is SPOT ON, but her face looks messy and her ass is flatter than it should. One thing Revolver fans everywhere know is that Annie has a great ass!


I trust you agree, it's not round enough in the DLC. You'd still rather stare at her ass than look at her face, though. Yes, I know, and I would like to get a real girlfriend someday...

Liars and Cheats adds the main and side characters from Redemption, so it's rather obvious they're all exactly as they were in the game. I'm just sort of sad that Jack wasn't the 16-year-old version.
Undead Nightmare adds some zombie skins as well, and overall the three packs do add nice variety to the utterly piteous selection the regular game has going on. I mean it, Redemption's online character selection is crap, too many of the almost exact same character skins which were only added to the selection because as R* needed teams for team-based modes they already had the skins available and playable. They're mostly just filler characters, and I don't like it.

"Cause she's got a great ass!"
Yes, I'm still on about Annie's backside.

The new modes the packs add are hit and miss. Like I said, co-op is good, but Land Grab is just pointless and most players just ignore it whenever someone stakes a claim. Even the trophy related to the mode doesn't entice people to try Land Grab because we all know you'll never get eight other people to fight you at the same time. Sometimes you struggle just to get eight people on any form of free mode lobby, let alone to have 15 people on from which 8 are willing travel to your location do battle for pittance.
Stronghold is almost dead from what I can tell. I only got into one game once that had four people. One left immediately after I came in, another two by the end of the match. Two player Stronghold games are boring, by the way.
The new DLC versions of the regular gang matches and free for all matches that add new arenas are deader than Stronghold. Didn't find a single soul there. Shame, I would've liked to take a break from repeating the same 6 maps. R* should've just fused the DLC modes with the regular, because this is downright criminal if you ask me, charging for a handful of extra maps that should've come with the base game so that nobody can play the new maps. Nobody can play the new maps because the people who didn't buy the DLC can only play the regular modes with the old maps and naturally after finding out that there's nobody playing the new modes the people with new modes go back to playing the old modes because at least there's people to play with there. You can't play alone in multiplayer, which is one reason Revolver multiplayer mode will always beat this new Internet/LAN only multiplayer "experience" we have going on today. Nowadays you need multiple TVs, consoles and games to start up an offline match. Who's rich enough to do that? At least back then you could play with yourself.

Not a suggestion, an order! And use that dynamite, boy!

Undead Overrun mode gets old eventually, especially after playing Undead Nightmare since the gameplay is the exact same thing you do in Nightmare, but an online zombie survival mode seems to be mandatory in all games these days and it is a good way to level up and is quite fun in the right crowd. By the way, I managed to get to wave 23 with only two other guys once. Wasn't as awesome or hectic as you'd think. Also, people, USE YOUR FUCKING BAIT AND HOLY WATER! We have a fucking time limit to think about and you assholes sit on your precious baits and holy waters, and even hog the coffins when your inventory's still maxed out!
Poker and Liar's Dice, very nice additions, really nice if you get some good people with mics on like I did one evening. But Rockstar, raise the fucking allowance a tad or have it go up to 200 dollars if you're under. I had to spend an hour of playing to get to 0 in order to be eligible for allowance because barely anyone plays for less than 100 dollars a game and I personally just want to PLAY. Figure that, I play games because I want to play games, I must be insane. Also, I lost twice my input's worth once, but then the multiplayer of RDR is bugged like fuck in every way and it was the night I was trying to lose my money anyhow.
Races, boring. Dead and boring. Dead boring.

I think that was it. Explosive rifle, meh. Tomahawk, wish I had it in RDR singleplayer instead. And where's Scorpion revolver?!

I know my writings may seem a bit angry here, but I suppose the Undead Nightmare Pack IS worth the purchase as a collection of DLC, considering it IS just DLC on a disc and shouldn't be thought about as a full game. It did get me to spend an extra week playing RDR multiplayer and allow me a chance to finally reach rank 50. Shame bonersgamesforums don't seem to ever have RDR PS3 online events, and it's especially shameful I missed the only two they had back when the game just got released.

I think that's it for now. Stay tuned for my incredibly insightful and indubiously lengthy post about Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell Double Agent for the PS3. No, you sit there and stare at the screen, and remember to refresh the page once every 24 hours. Eventually something new should pop up.

Happy Birthday to Me!

2011-03-21T21:22:00.000+02:00

It's my birthday, and because my family members have jobs and work Mondays we celebrated it yesterday by opening the presents.
My sister got me a red Ramones t-shirt. She jokingly said that because she knows that I'm a fan of the Ramones and read a lot of Donald Duck comics she'll be buying me Ramones and Disney stuff for gifts for the rest of my life, but I have nothing against that.

My mother got me two DVDs and two PS3 games. The films were Hirttämättömät, the old Finnish comedy-western that I have talked about in the past and actually started creating an English translation for (which never went past the 10 minute mark because I didn't get the subtitle file to work right in Media Player) and The Last Action Hero.
Hirttämättömät was quite a found. I've been looking for it for the past year whenever I've been in a store that sells DVDs but haven't found it, and then my mother just happened to bump into the lone copy of it in the store two days before my birthday. Apparently the stores around here don't consider it to be very popular and they had only ordered one copy. A big and very positive surprise was hiding inside the wrapping this time.

The two games she got me were Fracture and Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. I don't really know if I can like Fracture for what it is, because I know my mother must've paid way too much for the game than what it's actually worth and I think it'll distract me when I try playing it. I'm not bitching about not getting something different instead, I'm just sad about the money my mother wasted on it and I would've preferred only three gifts instead, that's how much I hate the general idea of paying too much for crappy games. If parents keep buying their kids overpriced games, the game developers and especially publishers will never get the message we're trying to send them about the drivel they pile on us not actually being worth the 60 dollars (US) and 70 euros (EU) that they cost. Stop making such shitty games you assholes! I don't know if Fracture actually is shit, but I'm not expecting anything great from a generic shooter where you change the terrain in twelve different ways. When I feel like digging ditches and making molehills, I take a shovel and go play in the sand outside.

And then I got more presents today from the most wonderful person I know: me. If you don't buy presents to yourself on your own birthday, then where on Earth do you think you'll be getting them?
So I went and spent all the cash I had and bought Mirror's Edge, Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Assassin's Creed 2 for PS3, Black and White 2 for PC and State of Emergency for PS2. Didn't think I'd get B&W2 and State of Emergency, because the store has listed them wrong online and when a few months back I went to buy them they were actually State of Emergency 2 and Black and White, not the other way around. Had to buy the games now that I saw that they were finally the correct titles, and I had both on my to-be-bought-list, and they were cheap. Funny thing, judging by the pricetag marks on the cover of State of Emergency, I'm the fourth or fifth person to buy this particular copy. Hope it's not defective. The disc itself looks to be in mint condition despite so many previous owners, nice to see not everyone tries to eat their games.

Double Agent on PS3 is a relatively rare find, may have something to do with the Sony hate some devs and publishers have expressed more or less obviously in the recent years, maybe back in the day they decided to not release too many copies of DA on PS3 just to fuck people over (it's Ubisoft, they're all varying degrees of evil). And the game's probably just as underwhelming as I expect it to be, but 10 euro sneaking game is a 10 euro sneaking game. It's fucking Splinter Cell, I'd even buy Conviction just to complete the series if it was on PS3, which it isn't. I suppose it's for the better that Conviction isn't on PS3, because then I'd be tempted to get it and regret it for years to come. My uneducated opinion on Conviction, based on walkthroughs and LPs, is that it sucks. Best story and controls (at least from what I can tell) in a Splinter Cell game ever and it has to be such a stinker. Awful. And some people think it's the best one in the series. Yuck.

Yes, I gave in and bought Assassin's Creed 2. The first game was probably the most overrated piece of shit excuse for a game of this gen in the previous decade, with crappy, unskippable, endless story and no actual game anywhere in the less-than-10-hour adventure, but I still remember Derek telling me that my hate towards the sequel is unwarranted as AC2 is apparently actually good. After some research online I came to the conclusion that he may have been right, as it seems AC2 is the game the first one should've been. It was kind of risky of Ubisoft, those bastards, to release AC and tell us they're making it a trilogy from the get go when the first game was so lacking, but I suppose it's not a big deal after all if the series does get good. Still, the trilogy stuff puzzles me, because right now there's three AC games out already. Can't they count at Ubisoft, or are they telling us that AC2 is just half of a game with Brotherhood being the second part? Or did they decide it's better to forget the first game entirely and give us the good trilogy they originally promised us with AC2, ACB and AC3?

Mirror's Edge is Mirror's Edge. It was relatively cheap. That's about the story behind that purchase.

I'm also actually a bit pissed off right now. I tried my best to be in a good mood today, but skipping the boring and overdramatized story of the day's events I'll just say I finally got tired of the crap when the bus I was getting on sped off and left me behind to be laughed at by complete strangers, and so I walked 6 miles home in that shitty weather cursing my bad karma, the noise of the traffic and the awful city planning all the way. Of course I'm largely to blame for my own misfortune and especially for choosing to walk home when I could've caught another bus, but still. You just can't let a bad day be only half bad.
Yeah, yeah, so maybe 6 miles in any weather isn't that much for you youthful joggers out there, but the past year I have mostly spent sitting down indoors, which is very unhealthy especially for someone who was released from the army for basically being a tired little weakling, so a 6 mile walk just like that out of nowhere is a bit surprising.

Anyway, I suppose I have to go play video games now.

I'd say it's Wednesday again

2011-03-09T22:22:00.000+02:00

Alright, two weeks. Haven't done much and the few topics I could write more about are something I'll save up for their own specific posts later, like for example my opinions on a few movies I've watched just recently.

I had a bit of trouble focusing on anything last weeks and jumped from game to game. I played Black & White, which is still broken and overrated, I played Minecraft and just couldn't focus on building anything, I played Hitman 2 again and it STILL continues to just outright piss me off whenever I try playing it, and I also gave Desperados: Wanted Dead or Alive a chance but it just annoys me now because it's the game that almost got my YouTube channel deleted and why I can't upload videos longer than 15 minutes. And people try to tell me I'd be safe uploading older games.
I did eventually manage to settle down with Splinter Cell Chaos Theory for PC and finally get around finishing it. It was a bit of a disappointment, because I was expecting the last levels to be slightly different from the PS2 version but they ended up being almost identical if we don't count the fact that PS2 has loading screens at certain points of the levels. I wasn't expecting a whole new game, just different enough to provide an interesting comparison, but most of it is really exactly the same. This might sound contradictory after the previous statement, but I also found that apart from the loading screens I do almost prefer the PS2 version over the PC version in terms of gameplay. Believe it or not, there are certain places in the PS2 version where the ways you can avoid the enemies in the levels seem better designed. I don't mean stuff like the amount of enemies in an area or larger differences like entire rooms being completely different, just small stuff like placements of lightsources and their luminance, and a couple of placements of cover, pipes or zip wires.
I said I only almost prefer the PS2 version, because in the end Chaos Theory is still the best Splinter Cell game ever despite the platform, the differences between the versions aren't huge or anything and the PC version has a few nice things the PS2 version doesn't, especially if we start talking about graphics.

This week I've spent watching Awesome Video Games (the entire Monday) and then Video Games Awesome (the entire yesterday), so at least the last two days have been time well spent. I recommend you also check out and subscribe to http://www.youtube.com/farfromsubtle if you haven't already.

Now I must stop writing this and go cry and tremble in fear regarding my two year break from the army coming to a questionable end and a certain other little thing that recently popped up that I might write about someday once I have a clearer idea of what to talk about exactly. Nothing serious, just stuff I personally find incredibly frightening. The next two months are going to be awful if you ask me.

Steam as DRM sucks, in my opinion

2011-02-22T00:26:00.000+02:00

Last week I tried to play several different games and had a couple of disappointments. I finally tried installing Sin Episodes 1 on my computer and found out soon after that my physical copy is as good as shit. It uses Steam as copy protection which means that the game can only be played by the first person to register it on his or her Steam account, which in this case wasn't me. That person who sold away the physical copy of the game lost nothing since Valve actually supports making safety copies of their games for players' own use instead of doing what every other company does which is preventing the copying of games in general. So the only idiot who got tricked here was me.


My only two good reasons for Steam. Unfortunately for Relic and Valve, I only pretend to be a sad enough person to buy games for breasts. I'm more of an assman, really.

People who use Steam to buy their games often wonder what exactly it is that others find so wrong with how Steam works. Now I'm not saying that Steam is the antichrist of gaming and should be terminated, I can admit that it is a great service for people who play a lot of different games but don't want to collect them or go out to actually buy them, but there's no denying that Valve is only looking to rack up as much money as they can, with "customer satisfaction" being somewhere on the very bottom of their priority list. Gamer's are clearly just cash-cows to them, just look at the extra content people are expected to pay for, and especially the pricess they are expected to pay for them, on Team Fortress 2

Anyway, companies making profit isn't at all what I'm against. If somebody pays large sums for content I wouldn't download for free, that's their business and as long as they're happy, and Valve is happy, I'm happy. In fact, even if they're all unhappy, I'm happy. What I AM against, however, is using Steam as copy-protection.
If you have half a brain you can paint the horrific visions of the future on the walls yourself, but if you don't happen to see where this eventually leads, here's what I've figured will happen if Steam, as it is now, becomes an even bigger factor in gaming:

No more rentals. Since a copy of a game will be permanently locked to one person's account, renting of games becomes impossible. So no more weekend rentals to see what all the fuss with some games is about, either you buy it or forget it (although an admittedly ingenious idea of making rentals work would be to copy the method of 30 day trials of PC software, but do it with full games and make people pay for the "trial")

No more trading away older games to fund the purchase of new games. I dare to make the bold claim that majority of those who continuously buy new games at full price cover part of the cost of their newer purchases by selling away the games they're done with. When you can't get rid of older games, the basically useless physical copies begin to pile up in the closet and you spend even more money on games than ever before

No more borrowing games from or trading games with friends. When I was a kid, which wasn't such a long time a go in my mind, trading and borrowing stuff between friends was a big thing. We traded toys and VHS tapes of movies, but borrowing and trading video games is what really connected me with kids my age up until my late teens. First I borrowed Altered Beast and Galahad for Sega Mega Drive, later when Sega died I got Ape Escape and Bomberman Wold for PlayStation from my friends, and even later still I continued borrowing PlayStation 2 games like Ratchet & Clank to and from people in the neighbourhood, which stopped them from being mean to me and making me cry. Video games brought the young ones of this neighbourhood of 25 000 people together, but somehow I feel like these days video games only pull people apart... Only way to borrow games with Steam would be if your friend trusts you enough to allow access to their Steam account, but I believe sharing Steam accounts with people is a serious TOS violation and you'd lose ALL Steam games you have ever bought in an instant.

You're permanently dependant on your Steam account and Valve's kindness (and existence). A little error somewhere and you might lose your entire "collection" of games, and with time, if this "Big Brother" of gaming becomes any more powerful, what prevents them from "tightening the rules" and milking you for a little bit more? Monthly fees for singleplayer only games, or monthly subscription fees to sustain the account? Sounds ridiculously evil and in it's deviousness unplausible NOW, but it's not at all impossible in the grim future my awfully cynical eyes see.


"Let off some Steam, Bennett." I loved this film when I was a kid, and I still find it funny.

Now if you're a PS3 gamer and don't give a shit about the problems of PC gamers thinking that you're not affected by any of this, do consider the fact that Steam is coming to PlayStation 3. It's already obvious that companies expect every person to have Internet connection and that already sucks, especially here where I live now that some banks are forcing people to do all of their transactions online and actually charge hefty sums if you dare to even enter the bank, and with Internet connection being such a "necessity" is there really any reason why PlayStation 3 games wouldn't end up using Steam as a method of copy-protection as well? Then, when PS4 or whatever the next big console you intend to buy is is released, you can't just sell away your old PS3 and your library of PS3 games as they're useless without your account that you are not allowed to sell.

Valve and any other companies that push this sort of online activation of games claim that this is just their way of fighting piracy and that their intentions are honest, and I have nothing against companies protecting their assets, but the claim that their main goal with online actviation was anything but to get more money out of the people who already buy their games legitimately is bullshit. Search the Internet a little bit, look for any information on how much trouble this type of DRM causes for pirates, and come tell me Steam has had any real impact on games that require a registration with a Steam account. Only reason why games like CivV, TF2, L4D and L4D2 may have been pirated less is the fact that barely anyone plays those for the singleplayer experience, especially not TF2 for the obvious reasons, and for the online multiplayer you need Steam accounts.
Steam games aren't uncrackable so piracy lives on, and the only people who will suffer from all this in the long run are people who buy their games legitimately, as has been the case with all types of copy-protection throughout the history of video games (apart from the PAL release of Spyro 3, the best copy-protection in history). Right now, though, the people who suffer the most are people like me who, as buzzards prey on good offers at game stores, waiting for some soccer mom to bring in ages old games from her son's closet, ready to pounce at the sight of any good titles and buy all the classics with their pocket lint. I honestly don't know if that's morally wrong, to buy used games, DVDs, VHS tapes, books or music CDs, or any type of art previously owned by a private person in general, but I have a feeling that most consumers of the world would say it isn't.

I'm not insinuating anything.

Valve, and possibly many other companies like it believe in their greed that by removing people's ability to acquire games used will result in everyone buying their products at full price, but that's a logic error. Indeed the people who normally buy their games used would be divided into people who begin to buy games new and people who stop buying any games that demand a Steam account, but my guess is that less people would start buyng Valve games new than what Valve is optimistically hoping for. I really can't say that if Steam registrations of games become more prevalent in gaming and the avenues of trading games between consumers narrows that I would stop playing video games altogether, because that would be too thick of a dookie to even flush, but I am first and foremost a collector of video games. I don't buy weekend titles and I don't pay for something I can't place on my shelf. As long as possible I will devote my time and money on acquiring games that DON'T require Steam to be played, and with more than two decades of video games (that I'm interested in) I have enough existing titles to search through already. I don't need Steam to make my life more complicated.

As usual I could go on and on about this, but considering that I didn't originally mean to even mention Steam in this particular blog post, as hard to believe as that may be, I'll move on to rest of my week of video games after a final reminder to you all: Steam isn't pure evil and shouldn't be gotten rid of and if someone finds it to be the best service ever then that's good, but I just wish that none of you ever forget to never let any company to get too big or allow them to control the market and especially consumers however they want. Even if it's a company you like, if it gets too big and poncy and their policies change, you'll just end up royally fucked. It's easier and safer to prevent things from changing too fast than to revert back to the old ways after change has taken place, so keep an eye for any chances to say NO! when companies try to milk you dry and do raise your voice when appropriate and at all possible.

Anyway, back on the original and now lost track, after Sin Episodes Emergence, or my personal lack of it rather, was such a disappointment I tried installing XIII for PC. After about 45 minutes I finally got my PC to even read the disc, and after another 15 minutes I had the game installed. Sadly it took only 10 minutes of gameplay to find out that it doesn't work. I suppose it's incompatible with Vista or something. The game does run, and runs fine too, but enemies act really weird, I can't sometimes get past simple events like the walk with the lifeguard at the very beginning as she just stands in place, I hear sounds or get hurt a minute late, and without frames dropping or anything else in the game changing my character switches speeds from too fast to too slow. Changing settings, running the game in compatibility mode and changing the affinity to run it on one core all yield the same crap results. Shame, too, because the game looks really interesting and I dig the art style.

Fantastic Dizzy ends like all great stories should:
with the smaller hairier testicle next to the bigger, smoother one.
Seriously, I like the game, it's just really weird.

I have also tried to continuously play Rogue Ops since I honestly would like to shout an angry review of it over some footage and upload it somewhere, but I haven't made much progress. The game isn't difficult, far from it, it's just so damn booooooring. Every 4 minutes or so I feel like getting up to check the email or go eat a sandwich and when I do get up I end up leaving the game paused for hours and just forget about it. It's not even so bad it's funny, it's just so bad it makes me feel stupid for playing. I know I'm stupid, I just don't like to feel like it. I hope that if I do write a blog post or even record a video review of it someday that I can still remember all the jokes I've made of it when I was still young, though I think it'll be my grandson who finally beats it at this rate (I started playing it about three weeks ago, and to put things into perspective the first two levels take like ten minutes each to finish).
I've mostly just played Sega games instead of Rogue Ops, trying to get as far in one run as possible in games I never beat as kid. Comix Zone seems a lot easier now than it did when I was a kid, but the two roms I have crap out at the end of the fourth page and the screen turns into pixelated vomit and Nickelodeon gack that moves. However, I have rediscovered the fun of Revenge of Shinobi and Shinobi 3: Return of the Ninja Master. I sucked so much when I was a kid that I only got to stage 3 of Revenge of Shinobi where the soldiers appear once, but now, without past experience I've gotten much further in one run.
I also found out that for some reason I have a rom of Fantastic Dizzy on my external harddrive, and I played it all day last Saturday. That's actually what I started writing about in this post, a review of Fantastic Dizzy and I titled the post "Fantastic Dizzy is Fantastic" but changed it when I realized that I'm just listing why Steam is the devil's work. I suppose there's not much to review in the game anyway, it's a very fun adventure-puzzle-platformer but without much replay value after you've beaten it, and if you're bored you can go to Abandonia.com and download the older Dizzy games for DOS absolutely free. I suppose I might do that myself someday, now that I found out how childishly fun the games are.

I also finally got John Carpenter's The Thing on DVD now, so at long last I have all my all-time favourite movies available on my shelf at any given time. And I even bought it new and unused! Yay!

Surprise, I still don't like walkingthrough

2011-02-11T22:52:00.000+02:00

Sorry for not updating sooner, but I have been on my RedDeadRedemption account on YouTube a bit more and because Google tries to push it's shitty ideas for connecting accounts I'm apparently not able to log in to a YouTube channel and this Google owned blogging service at the same time because I haven't linked the different accounts together. Yeah, have to start using one single account for the entire Internet soon. Hell, have to use one account for everything IRL as well, with Google having a hand in basically everything technological, maps and phones and all. Isn't it scary that a company that wants to know every detail about you in order to be able to sell it for the highest bidder will soon have complete control over you?

So, a week or two ago I finally cleaned up my harddrive and got enough spare room for storing video files and thought that since my only excuse for not recording Red Dead Redemption was lack of storage space for the footage I might as well start recording a walkthrough for my RedDeadRedemption YouTube channel. And I did, I recorded about 4 hours of gameplay one evening and have already uploaded some missions (most still set as private) to YouTube, but problems appeared only a minute after the first video had finished processing. A company called Sanoma NL filed a copyright claim for the first video. Sanoma NL is better known, on YouTube at least, as a channel called gamerNL that uploads game reviews and such for a website called, not surprisingly, gamer.nl.
Now, I know that it's just YouTube's automatic content ID detection program creating the claims, well, automatically, and whoever's behind gamerNL hasn't re-claimed any of my videos after disputed the claims the first time, but this has reminded me of the problem I quit uploading walkthroughs for originally and why starting a possible two month project of recording footage of a long ass game may be a futile endeavour. Even though gamerNL hasn't claimed ownership of more of the RDR2 videos, another company, a lot bigger than Sanoma NL, has. Because content in videos can be claimed by several companies even at the same time, this could lead me to disputing claims on individual videos several times, and disputing claims certainly isn't a lot of fun when I honestly can't say I have any real right to upload the walkthroughs in the first place. I know the companies that claim ownership of my videos don't actually own the content either, but that's not really what YouTube/Google people care about, their question is do I own rights to the content.

I could go on all night about how uploading walkthroughs is a waste of time for me and how I get nothing out of it anymore, but seeing how I have written posts about that subject before I might as well cut to the end: I don't know if I should even bother trying to upload Redemption. It's better to make the decision of giving up now when I have only spent a few days working on the videos than to realize that it was a fruitless effort a month later when I have 67 videos up and all riddled with advertisements that profit various big gaming websites. I already have enough walkthroughs on my external harddrive that I've been forced to delete from the web for one reason or another.
Oh, and on that very same note, the entire MGS4, LBP and Star Wars Battlefront walkthroughs, the two Pong videos and some GTA IV online videos are now gone from my account.

While I'm pondering about the future of my Redemption walkthrough I'm going to spend my time doing what I do best, which is nothing. While doing nothing I will built up guilt for being a lazy bastard and then suddenly feel obliged to do something again. For some odd reason YouTube has taken away video time limits from my JohnnyDFox channel to tempt me with the chance of uploading long videos, and I still have that microphone sitting in the closet that I bought last month that I haven't used that I should at least test out, and I would also like to voice my thoughts on Rogue Ops as soon as I can muster enough strength to finish the piece of shit. I just don't know how I could mix all these things together to maybe produce something interesting...
Or I could just do a Let's Play of No One Lives Forever on PC, I dunno. I'll think about moving my ass from the chair once I've done enough nothing.

Rogue Ops sucks, Champions Online is cool,my new chair sucks, Minecraft is still cool

2011-01-31T00:20:00.000+02:00

Not a lot to talk about. I started playing Rogue Ops and it's taking me quite a bit of time and energy solely because it's so goddamn boring. Seriously, I've only finished the first two levels and they've actually been relatively short and easy, but I feel like throwing the game out. There have been so many things wrong with it so far I could really write an angry post about it already, but I think it's better to see the entire game through and then be even more pissed off.
When I uploaded those PS2 demo videos way back when and just rushed through the Rogue Ops demo because it quite honestly sucked ass I was still willing to give it the benefit of doubt, especially after people sent me messages about how big of an idiot I am and how much I suck for not playing the demo properly and realizing that the game is actually quite fun, more fun than what the demo would make you think, but the demo is in fact an honest representation of the actual finished product. The demo's a little better, though, because it's shorter and came free on a disc with other, better demos.

Like most of the girls I've dated in my time,
my Minecraft world also looks better in the dark

I've been building a city in Minecraft a while now. My intention is to create a shop for every possible resource and item, and then build a home for every "store owner", then build a harbor and a castle. It's going a bit faster now that I chose to turn the difficulty to peaceful and don't have to hide half of the time or rebuild stuff Creepers break, but it could still be faster if I could get a mod that allows me to spawn items to work. It's supposed to enable chat in single player, but doesn't for me.

It may look like crap, but... try it!

I also tried out Champions Online for a bit after seeing it on LordKaT's stream and finding out it's free and fun. If you're interested in a fun superhero MMORPG that's free to play and has the most amazing and easy to use character creation I have ever seen in any game, try out Champions Online. I've created myself, Garret from Thief and Snake Plissken from Escape From New York so far.
Only reasons I'm not constantly playing Champions Online is that my graphics card sucks and really have to play on the lowest graphical settings, and simply because it's an MMO. MMO's need to allow the player to access all sorts of shit at all times so there's tons of different crap I can't be arsed to shift through, I don't know anyone else who plays it and all those damn items and powers and their stats are confuddling to me. What the hell do I do with Ego? Is high Constitution good? Where the fuck do I buy better items?
But, I do recommend you to check the game out yourself if MMO's are closer to your heart than mine. i just like the character creation. I wish all games that allow customised characters had character creation like Champions.

I'm also very annoyed. I broke my old chair's legs with my weight yesterday and of course needed a new chair. So my mother bought me a new cool looking black chair, but it sucks for sitting. It's... shit. It's already optimized for "office work" by the looks of it, there's no way to adjust the position and it really hurts. I have been sitting on it for four hours now and already have pains. I can't lean back even a little bit or I end up pushing my ass off of it, it's really uncomfortable. I don't feel like complaining about it to my mother and make her buy me a new one, though, so I think I'll just stop sitting infront of a computer entirely and find a life.
Who was the idiot who thought that people must sit in 85 degree angles and constantly lean towards their desk? Find him for me, and kill him. By making him sit in his own chair.
Oh, agony.

That's it for now.

Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure

2011-01-23T19:55:00.001+02:00

So, after playing Batman: Arkham Asylum and finding it to match my high expectations I was excited to to try out the other game I specifically went out to buy, Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. It may have been a bit of a let down.

Marc Ecko's Getting Up is a simple game to describe, really. It's a linear 3rd person beat em up platformer where your main goal is to scribble your name on walls and be proud of it. Now, it may not seem like a game majority of people would care much about, but in theory it is a game that I, due my uncanny taste, would find very enjoyable. Not great, but enjoyable.
First off, I like beat em ups and Marc Eck... MEGUCUP's combat isn't total shit. You have your punch and kick attacks that you can alternate to make three-move combos with a possible power-move at the end. You have a grapple move that after a bit of struggling with your opponent let's you punch, kick or throw the poor sap around a bit. Blocking and targeting is assigned to the same key, which isn't unheard of, and you also have an evade move that allows you to do a cool looking roll that usually let's you quickly dodge attacks while at the same time allowing you to pick up health and weapons from the ground. There's also some sort of taunt moves that allow you to verbally assault your opponent while he's down, though I never used those much. The combat is very simple and once you learn to use evade instead of the useless block it becomes easy to beat just about everything by rolling on the floor between the punches. So you can get by with the combat controls, but the amount of fights and the time you spend handing out asskickings to the various losers each time does get pretty boring pretty soon.
What I like about the fights is that stuff does break here and there, which crappier beat em ups (bmups?) rarely do. Bathroom stalls do break, and immediately disappear, when you're thrown through them, and kicking a guy into pipes or walls does make the pipe shoot out water or make some flakes of paint fly off the wall. I'm not saying the destruction is that detailed and this certainly isn't The Warriors, but little things here and there make the constant smacking of guys a little bit more bearable, feels a little more like you're hitting stuff when you see shit break.

Trane

The sneaking aspect of the game is crap. You press crouch to walk sneakily and occasionally you'll get a chance to bonk a guy in the head and one hit KO him, but it's relatively rare. Most of the time, as far as I can tell, the areas are built and the enemies are placed in such a manner that there's no sneaking to be discussed and walking silently could've as well been removed from the game entirely. The few times it's sort of an option, whatever fight you would skip is something you really don't need to, and the area you'd have to pass by tends to have bonus objectives to complete.
Furthermore, the walking controls are very loose and they're somehow, in a really weird way, tied to the camera's point of view when the game feels like it, so every now and then your controls may be inverted in the middle of moving if the camera decides to go to a fixed position, and you'll hit a wall. Then you'll hit the wall again since the game itself has problems realizing when the camera and controls have changed. What I'm saying is, there are a few points where choosing the right direction to walk to is just guesswork and controls slightly suck.
Climbing is a big part of traversing the levels, and it's simple and works. You want to climb a pipe or something, walk into it. Want to hoist up ledge, jump to it and press up. Everything's simple to do, and although the places you can climb up don't stick out from the rest of the scenery much you'll have no problems figuring out the right route if you just look at your objective and what's around it.
Speaking of looking at objectives, Trane, the main character, is very intuitive and can use his Intuition, by pressing the F key, to see all objectives in the level relatively nearby. This works only part of the time. I intended to finish every single bonus objective during my short-lived playthrough and the Intuition mode refused to show me some objectives until I had died and started the level over. What if I hadn't been the obsessive F-key tapping gameplay sucking nut I am? I would've missed bonus objectives in this video game and cried! It's serious shit. Well, point is, the game's objective finder can be rather problematic.

Trane

The painting and tagging and whatever you happen to call doodling on walls is relatively simple. Smaller stuff that you can do everywhere is as difficult as choosing the tool from a menu, then holding down the middle mouse button and picking one out of four styles you chose from your blackbook prior to entering the level, then choosing a color from a few different ones that mostly don't stick out that well and then clicking left or right mouse button to place your mark on the wall. Larger pieces, your primary objectives, demand a sort of a minigame where you keep holding the middle mouse button, press and hold left or right mouse button to spray and occasionally stop spraying when the pressure drops to shake the can all the while using movement keys to move Trane left and right and the paint can up and down around the outlined area to evenly spread the paint and create your masterpiece. To score maximum amount of points you must avoid drips, meaning you avoid painting continuously on areas flashing red, finish the piece under a time limit and go big, meaning you choose the larger version of the graffiti. You also get points for heaven spots, but this is something you can't control since the available spots for graffiti are preset. Early on in the game you also get the option of painting faster than normal, but this also has the drawback of causing drips more easily, and with the normal painting speed you have more than enough time to finish anyway.
If you're wondering if the painting is anything at all like The Warriors tagging, no, it's not. It's actually just simple enough for being something you do a LOT in every single level, as it is the main focus of the game, but not too simple to bore you outright. At first it may be a bit of a challenge, but once you learn the correct rhythm to moving the paintcan around it gets easier, which fits well with the game's story of an aspiring toy writer slowly getting bigger. On mouse and keyboard the controls for tagging are generally way too clumsy, though, and it doesn't help that the menu for the smaller stuff resets back to whatever tool the game thinks should be the default, that usually being marker pen, so you may eventually just give up everything but the marker tags and main objectives as choosing the tool over and over again becomes a little cumbersome.

What's his name again? Oh, right, Trane.

The selection of choices for what to paint is a tad disappointing. First of all, you can only choose four different images for each type of doodles for each level at a time, which is explained by Trane not carrying his blackbook around with him even though he really does, and even then there's not THAT many good choices to choose from once you have everything unlocked. I know, because I had to use the unlock all levels cheat and it also unlocked everything in the blackbook, and I went through all of them. You would basically get the same results if you just wrote a random word in Microsoft Word and copy/pasted it in different font styles, that's how sad writing the same word, Trane, everywhere is. Just slightly different curves on the top line of the T.
The game also always has one specific graffiti locked in one of the four slots for every level and it's usually the one I liked the least, and painting only three of my own choices annoyed me. I would understand if it was to ensure that you have at least one graffiti selected so you can actually finish the main objectives in the levels, but you can't empty any slots out anyway and even if you could, forcing you to choose one before letting you move onward would be a better way to reach the same goal. Why limit choices further for no reason?
The other graffiti artists in the game must also be a bit out of ideas, as you end up seeing the same shit wall after wall in each level. You'd think a game about graffiti art that includes apparently legendary graffiti artists as in-game characters would focus on the creativity and art side of the graffiti artistry, but hey, maybe imagination in our time is overrated anyway. Let's just go beat up and kill a lot of competing artists that paint the same thing over and over again and just paint the same thing over and over again over their repetitive pieces, who cares? Well, I do, for starters.
On a closely related note, the game also missed a chance at letting the player create their own graffiti. Even Tony Hawk's Underground and THUG 2, two games not about graffiti but skating let you combine a couple of preset images from a rather large library to customise your board and tags. MEGUCUP doesn't, and on the PC I can't even edit the image files to replace them with my own creations. Apparently I'm too creative for this game about 'art'.
Must kill creativity.
Must conform.
The game does allow you to choose basic letters and numbers for stencils, but since you can only pick four different ones at one time, all you could write are words with only four different letters and even then moving Trane only slightly is so incredibly frustrating that within only one minute you will definitely give up trying get the letters ART to follow F instead of going over it and messing up the message.

"Camera is within a sector that is not in memory!"
I see...

The music in the game is pretty good. It's nothing that I frequently choose to listen to on my own, but it is something I don't mind listening to when available. Voice acting is miss and slightly less miss. The main main characters like the game's protagonist Trane himself sound alright, but everyone else, especially the graffiti legends sound like... me in my Mortal Kombat LP, just scripted. I didn't have a script, so I'm more pro.
The story starts out meh, drops to blah, and then jumps through eh to yeh, and it seems like it could become a real urban epic before the end despite the slow start. I'm actually very sad that I can't experience the promising story myself. Why can't I see it myself? Well...
There's one BIG problem I have with MEGUCUP, a problem so big I can't finish the game legitimately, probably not by cheating either. The problem is that I have the PC version, and the PC version is a port. A very BAAAAD port. At least I hope it's just a bad port, or it's a very shitty game on the consoles.

Trippy. Looks like I got hit by a syringe from Postal 2: AWiP

You can tell that the game wasn't made for PC specifically because the mouse isn't supported in any of the menu screens and the control scheme is absolute crap for anything but a gamepad, but the biggest problem is the camera. The camera is bad, very bad. I don't mean bad like it gets hung up a few times or is hard to move, I mean bad like it shows you either a black screen or spins around you and shows you about 30 different, distorted viewpoints per second. No, seriously, look at those last three screenshots, two of them I took during the camera-spin of what-the-fuck and the black screen one is from the action level where Trane rides a train (Trane on train, funny). Apparently the train goes so fast it leaves the camera behind, but the camera also once got stuck inside the train where it shouldn't even go in the first place and I saw only the passengers.
I can forgive almost every other problem the game has, like the insane skips and... well, horrificly insane skips, but the camera actually prevents me from seeing anything so I can't possibly finish levels. I can't tag because I don't see where to move the paintcan, I can't fight because I can't see the opponents or avoid their attacks, I can't even see some levels at all, and after hours of searching online I didn't even find any fixes, official or unofficial, nor did I find any mods. All I could find were people posting about various problems they had with the PC version and complaining that they couldn't finish the levels. I resorted to using the unlock all levels cheat in order to skip over levels I can't finish, but the problems persisted level after level and actually got worse, and it was even more disappointing to see all the graffiti art that the cheat unlocked as well and find out there wasn't that much to see, so I am not going to try playing the game again.

Ummm...

I'm pretty angry. Well, I'm not that angry anymore, because I started writing this post three days after playing the game and have been writing it slowly over the course of the past three days, so I've mellowed out, but I really think I could've enjoyed the game a lot if the camera just wasn't a broken piece of shit. I really thought the story was going somewhere interesting.

If you want to know whether I recommend the game or not, for the PC absolutely NOT. Consoles, I can't tell. If I ever see MEGUCUP for the PS2 for the same 4,90€ I paid for the PC version I think I might buy it, but the PC version is definitely something people should try to avoid because although you could be a lucky winner and be able to actually play the game, is a mediocre beat em up platformer about graffiti art really worth the time and trouble? I don't think so, and I actually like the concept.
I could endure every other problem the game has, but not being effectively blind. If I must draw the line somewhere, I better be able to see it.

Dear Lord, Batman: Arkham Asylum is absolutely excellent!

2011-01-17T01:36:00.111+02:00

Well, I already knew that Batman: Arkham Asylum was good when it was released and everybody were surprised at how good a Batman video game can actually be. I certainly were surprised, because I remember watching the early demo videos at PwnorDie back when the site was a video host and thinking to myself "that game is NOT going to be a hit". Well, I was wrong.

The game is just about, if not completely flawless in every major way.
The gameplay is mostly beat 'em up and sneaking combined with a bunch of running and platforming around with Bat-gadgets. Batgets? The sneaking is a lot of fun, since with your detective vision, gadgets and ability to enter airducts the size of a man you're basically a predator hunting for prey. Don't take it the wrong way, sneaking around isn't way too easy since guns in this game hurt, at least on Hard difficulty which I played on from the start since I'm so great, but the game gives you the necessary tools to let you be as awesome as Batman himself and take the goons out one by one, and sneaking does get a little bit more challenging later on when the amount of armed thugs increases and Joker takes away your best friends in stealth, the gargoyles that conveniently exist in almost every room in Gotham.
The only problem that I can see with the stealth gameplay is that there's not enough of it and the sneaking sections all seem very "artificial" in the sense that everytime you enter a large room with gargoyles on the walls and six to eight armed guards walking about the place, you know you've entered the game's "sneaking challenge", and once the last terrified guard hits the ground you know the sneaking section has been completed and it's time to drop stealth until you enter another large room with gargoyles everywhere. So basically 95% of the sneaking is just you completing the predator challenges from the game's challenge menu, only you're doing it during the actual game. It's not bad, like I said taking out the henchmen one by one and listening to them getting more and more nervous is a lot fun, but the sneaking sections just clearly stand out as specifically crafted for a short sneaking moment.
Other than the stealth challenge rooms standing out, the game flows onward in a perfect way and at a perfect pace and has nothing too much or too little. There's just enough of walking and running, beating up thugs, saving guards, chatting with the villains and platforming to move the story forward without making the game all about one single element. You do end up having hand to hand fights most of the time, but it's not at all like clearing out one room after another full of thugs, you do enough of all the other things in the game between larger bouts that it wouldn't be accurate to call it a beat 'em up game. I would rather call it an adventure.

It looks boring here, but remember that there's probably
20 guys unconscious outside the borders of this image

Talking about the combat, when Arkham Asylum was released, the freeflow combat was celebrated as innovative by both the developers as well as the critics. Now, from my experience, when a game supposedly innovates it either poorly copies something that is already a common mechanic used in games or is indeed something that hasn't been done before but for a good reason. In beat em up games the most common "innovations" have been the ability to redirect punches in the middle of combos, counter-attacks and using your right stick for attacking in all 360 degrees. I wouldn't dare to call Arkham Asylum's combat innovative myself, because with my luck someone would then point out a game for the PS2 that did the same thing seven years earlier and people will call me an idiot (again), but if someone else does claim it to be innovative then I am not one to call it bull.
The combat in Arkham Asylum is ingenious in it's simplicity. Regular beat em up games that do anything right give you a dodge/block move, a heavy and a quick attacks (or punch and kick) and a grapple, and then you do []+[]+Δ combos to punch punch kick one guy's health meter down and move on to the next. What you'll get here, though, is an attack, a stun, a dodge and a counter button, along with quick batarang and quick batclaw moves that I never found that useful for combos to be honest, and then you apply each move where necessary in order to move from one guy to another seamlessly until you get openings to finish them, with attack for when enemies are idle, counter for when someone tries hitting you, stun for guys with knives and dodge for cattleprod guys as well as for continuing combos. You also have two unlockable unblockable special moves that come available as you reach high enough combos, allowing you to instantly take out any of the more dangerous goons and get through the crowd a little bit faster. Combat in this game is basically like a more evolved quicktime event where you press the right action button at the right moment, but you choose your targets and move around freely, and you don't get icons popping on the screen all the time. I don't know if it sounds that great, but it does work really well in practice.
The way enemies are hurt is relative to how many of them are standing. A group of ten guys take a lot more regular beating before going down, but the last guy standing will go down in one punch no matter how little attention you've paid to him during the fight. I find this quite neat of an idea, and realistic as well. I mean, if you just saw Batman take out nine of your pals in one flawless freeflow combo, wouldn't you hit the ground immediately as well? I'd probably just punch myself out at that point. It's detrimental to morale, you see.
I'm not entirely sure if I make the combat sound exactly like what it is, but trust me, it's fast and great, and it's also challenging to master. Like I said, I played on Hard and got game over five times in a row in the VERY FIRST FIGHT. Alright, I might've sucked some at first, but that changed later on. When you time actions right and start getting those 60 hit freeflow combos and just outright murder those poor thugs (figuratively speaking, as Batman doesn't kill anyone (although it's debatable whether those goons I dropped down the bottomless chasms actually lived)), the combat doesn't just look good, it feels great. Few things are as satisfying as calmly walking straight up to a group of thugs and beating the crap out of them in one flawless series of strikes without giving them a chance to hit back.

You get to glide down to kick people upside the head

I think I'm starting to lose steam here, but I'll try to just list what else the game does right, which is just about everything.
The level designs are great. The areas look good and have a very dark atmosphere, like an asylum currently under the control of Joker located in Gotham should be. The obstacles in your way to the objectives are well thought out and I may have found it a bit too exhilirating whenever I was able to easily maneuver around a roadblock with the help of batgets and batskills.
Another great thing about the areas is that they're (almost) seamlessly connected, the game doesn't have loading screens other than when you die and restart from a checkpoint or when you play the challenges, and even then they're quite short. The game loads in the background, or during a quick animation of Batman going through a door (I really don't know when the game loads, I'm just guessing), and getting from, say, the botanical garden in East Arkham to the medical facility in West Arkham doesn't take long at all, which I noticed when I started hunting for the last of Riddler's riddles. Well, admittedly sometimes when you travel a long distance off the main story path, the game does have the audacity to load for up to a whopping three seconds between locations. Can you believe this bullshit? Three seconds! That's long enough for me to take a bite out of a sandwhich if I have one prepared. How on Earth do those bastards dare to waste my precious time once every 8 hours like that? Yep, it doesn't really load for that 3 seconds very often.

The transitions between the real world to Scarecrow's fear gas induced nightmares are very nicely done, I must say. The first nightmare may take you a minute or two before you realize it's not real, and the third one's transition is pretty funny if you don't know it's coming. I had a vague memory of it from when I watched a complete walkthrough of the game a long while back AND I knew it was coming at that moment, yet I STILL went "WTF?!" for a brief second. And the actual nightmares are quite well done, although I think the platforming in the nightmare levels could've been a tad more exciting.
The sound work is pretty great. I haven't watched Batman TAS in several years now, quite frankly I think I was about eight years old when I last saw it, but I did still recognise the main voices, and hearing Mark Hamill's Joker making announcements throughout the game and hearing his henchmen mutter something in reply was just too entertaining for me to really get into Batman's state of mind in the sense that he'd probably not like hearing Joker joke. The music did it's job, and the sound effects were fine. Only problem I have with the sounds is the rumble that the breakable walls make when you use the upgraded Batclaw on them, it's far louder than any other bit of sound in the game and always makes me jump.
I like how the game's character designs for the villains aren't just direct copies from any pre-existing Batman designs (as far as I can tell), but they look perfect for the job anyway. So the villains are recognisable but in a way also original, setting the game as a stand-alone story better.

She may excrete deadly toxins from her skin, but that's what
the film The Naked Gun invented full-body condoms for

The detective mode is quite useful, in fact a bit too useful as I ended up spending about half of the game with it on, and it does give you the good feeling of having the upperhand when you can see enemies through walls and ruin whatever surprise those poor disguised or hiding goons think they have for you. While jumping into Batman's shoes and getting to actually experience the job of world's greatest detective is fun, it is, however, also a bit disappointing how simple all the detective work really is. All you do is turn the detective vision on, spot the clue and follow the trail, with the mode doing all the work for you, sniffing the whiff of alcohol in the air and scanning fingerprints from a mile away and even recognising the DNA of blood stains. I would've liked slightly more challenge in that department.
But it's only the main story "detective work" that I would've liked to be more challenging. The Riddler riddles were just perfectly easy for a video game collectible objective. The riddles, Riddler trophies, all of the Joker teeth and majority of the Arkham spirit slabs are just easy enough for anyone to find on their own without help if you just pay attention to the surroundings in each area and keep an eye out for any weak walls and grates, and even if you do start getting frustrated with trying to find the last trophy, the Riddler maps make that problem disappear. It's just great extra fun looking for them and hearing the Riddler get more and more pissed off, and I laughed at the final call. I certainly wouldn't want the next game in this (hopefully long) series to have collectibles as braindamagedly awful as finding and shooting 200 pigeons in a place the size of Liberty City. How the hell could anyone possibly be so insane as to try and find all of them without any help from the Internet when it took me like 5-6 hours even with maps and images at hand? Rockstar may churn out stellar games but some of the smaller tasks they put in those games just suck rectum, like the Auf Wiedersehen Petrovic trophy. They definitely overestimated the appeal of GTA's online mode there, aye? A hundred billboards to photograph around the city instead of the pigeons would've been much more... not poo-ey, and just nix all online trophies from now on, ok? Safer that way.

Anyway, back to Arkham... Well, I forgot what else I meant to say about the game when I got this sudden but familiar urge to stab a Rockstar developer in the eye with a pencil. Rockstar, not Rocksteady. I have nothing against Rocksteady, those guys know how to make a great, FUN, not-at-all-frustrating, enjoyable game.
Oh, right, Arkham Asylum's cinematic gameplay experience demands praise. You know how some video games do the cinematic experience thing so well that it basically hurts the actual gameplay in a way? Batman: Arkham Asylum is a perfect, and I repeat that, that, combination of gameplay and cinematic moments. Really, it's astounding how well the gameplay and cutscenes work together. I mean it, it's great. Just having the credits roll during the walk inside the asylum at the beginning is great.
What also demands a mention, I guess, is the single worst element in the game as a whole: the boss fights.

Spoiler: this is the only real boss fight!

Neal already mentioned in one of the comments a while back that the boss fights are, and I quote, "horrible pieces of moldy ass waste with putrid skunk cunt on top". Well, I took the liberty of slightly misquoting him to get his ass brutally beaten if anyone ever sees him on the streets and his original comment might not be quite as colourful, but let's nevermind it.
I have noticed that an increasing amount of people seem to have problems with many of today's games' boss fights. I have never read a single positive comment regarding the boss fights in games like Arkham Asylum, MGS4, Turok, Stranglehold, Dead Rising 2, Bionic Commando, Overlord, Prince of Persia, Borderlands or Resident Evil 5, only to name the few games I have actually personally kept a close eye on. All I ever hear about boss fights in games these days is that they suck, and in RE5 and MGS4's case them having "the worst boss fights in the entire series". I don't have that big of a problem with the boss fights in any of those games and although I have grown to absolutely loathe MGS4 I still think the Laughing Octopus, Metal Gear and Raging Raven bosses were quite exciting even compared to the earlier, better games in that series.
Arkham Asylum's boss fights aren't complete shit, but they are largely... nonexistant or just lacking in ways. The only real boss fight you ever have in the game is the Poison Ivy fight. The Joker fight is mainly about beating the regular goons, Bane is like any ordinary titan fight, Scarecrow fights are actually platforming sections with a bit of fighting against goons, you never really fight Killer Croc and you never fight Harley Quinn. I don't really think the game is lacking something with it's unremarkable boss fights, in fact if my opinion is worth anything I think the game might actually work better as it is now than if it had more classic boss fights as storyline milestones, but still, I am able to understand that if you go into it waiting for big brawls against the villains then you'll be disappointed, and in that regard the game would be missing something big.
Lastly, the challenge mode is suprisingly fun for such a simple feature. At first I thought the challenges would be annoying to complete for the trophies and that I'd just end up breaking another controller in the process, but no. I spent two hours straight trying to get gold in the final combat challenge and never even thought about there being a small chance for the possibility of perhaps pondering about maybe losing my temper by accident, and now I've got the platinum trophy. Only thing the game could use would be some sort of a survival challenge mode where an unlimited amount of thugs appear until your health is completely drained, although that would mean the mode would definitely eventually end with Batman losing, which would not feel right at all.
Just to clarify, though, the challenges, while fun, aren't really as engaging or long-lasting as Mercenaries mode from RE4 and RE5 (although I personally never cared much about Mercs). I have also not downloaded the Joker challenge maps yet, but I suppose they're fun. You beat guards as the Joker with his unique moves and strut around arrogantly in the "sneaking" challenges, what's not to like?

Scarecrow's cool. I sort of hope he makes a return in the sequel

In the end, Batman: Arkham Asylum is easily summarised: it's just downright fucking awesome, period. It's greatest strength is that everything from the freeflow combat to silently gliding behind enemies and knocking them out to using gadgets and solving the many problems in Arkham indeed makes you feel like YOU are the goddamn Batman! Every critic I know has said that and I hereby join the choir. The style and mood is all correct and there's no way any person in the development team was thinking about just cashing in with the title, and the most annoying thing about the entire game is that it doesn't last longer, although as it is now it's of acceptable length and never starts dragging. If there was still a website a man could safely upload walkthroughs to for everyone to see, Batman: Arkham Asylum would be one of those games I would've started recording immediately upon completing it the first time. I could even imagine making it an exception for my no walkingthrough rule and upload it anyway for the fun of it if my computer wasn't so full of clown-on-cow porn.
The game and it's character bios of Batman villains managed to raise my interest enough that I may think about trying to start reading (older) Batman comics, and the game definitely sold me the upcoming sequel. If Batman: Arkham City is indeed five times larger and does indeed add things like interrogating criminals (and hopefully other detective stuff as well) but still retains the overall quality of the first game, then it could, in my opinion that few agree with, be the best game this year (or next if it gets pushed). Only announced upcoming new title I think could possibly rival it is L.A. Noire.

I were going to say that Arkham Asylum might be in the top three best games I've played this year until I realised that it's already 2011 and it's only the second game I have played this year, making it THE Best Game I Have Played This Year So Far, but if we count 2010 in as well to make it fair, then... shit, I played the entire Hitman series, Fallout 1 and 2, Red Dead Redemption as well as Conker's Bad Fur Day (emulated) in 2010, so the competition would be rather rough. Horrible, it's only been one year since I played many of those awesome awesome awesome games for the first time. I suck.
And yes, Batman: Arkham Asylum easily beats Fallout: New Vegas, even if it is much less time consuming in the end. It's actually very odd what happened when I started pondering which one I liked the best. I can not, for the life of me, remember that much about New Vegas anymore. It's been only four days since I ended my THIRTEEN DAY long playthrough and it's like someone has surgically removed all memories of it. I only recall vague images of sniping Deathclaws, the roulette wheel of that damned loading screen spinning and a frozen screen of the Hoover Damn battle only minutes before the game would end. I suppose New Vegas was a bit more meh than I thought, although looking at how little I could say about the game in the three blog posts do make me wonder how much I really ever had to say about it in the first place. That's why I specifically chose the words "time consuming" above instead of "longer", because I can't be sure I enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas. I thought I did...

Thank goodness that Batman was here to save me!

Finished with Fallout: New Vegas

2011-01-13T16:58:00.005+02:00

Alright, I am now done with Fallout: New Vegas, even got the platinum trophy. It glitched one too many times for my liking, or to be more precise it froze on me three times within one hour, so I stopped roleplaying and just hurried through the trophy related tasks and story quests using fast travel, and I dropped the difficulty and turned off Hardcore so that I didn't die from the fast travel. Funny enough, Hardcore mode is actually a pain in the ass only if you fast travel a lot since you'll constantly get dehydrated and miss chances to get more water and food during the travels.

This may look like a static image at first glance,
but it is actually moving video footage of the game.

I've already spent majority of post space in two blog updates just listing various glitches I've come across in the game so I won't do it again, but trust me, I could easily write a third list and many of the glitches would be something that lead me to reloading a save. The game, even with the current patch, is so broken that any article about New Vegas in the Fallout wiki is mostly just information of any bugs the player might experience when dealing with whatever character, location, item or quest the article in question is about. I'm serious.

I do have to say that as far as the quality and quantity of the quests and the ending of the story go, New Vegas is a HUGE improvement over Fallout 3. Back when Fallout 3 was just about to be released there was quite a bit of talk on how it was going to be the first game ever that REALLY has hundreds or maybe even thousands of diffrent endings (not that any sensible person would've believed it), and when it was released it really only had four that were at all different, and what type of ending you'd get depended solely on some minor choice in dialogue and overall karma.
New Vegas goes back to the original Fallout style, telling more specifically how you affected the different companions, factions and locations, and they're often further changed based on which of the four major Mojave-changing paths you took.

Something I don't like, though, is how little danger there is in the Mojave desert. Running from the Mojave outpost to the Nellis AFB is nothing to fear, and those locations are at the opposite corners of the map. Really, I faced more danger during my one mile long walk from home to school back when I was a kid than I ever did while walking from Jacobstown to Primm in this game about a dangerous post-apocalyptic world in which mutants and raiders are ready to kill you at every step, and it also took longer. Hell, you literally encounter more danger in Fallout 3 just by walking from Megaton to Rivet City, and those two places are relatively close to each other on the map. Sure, you could make some argument about how cramped Fallout 3's world is with enemies at every corner, but that doesn't take away the fact that New Vegas is also cramped, but Fallout 3 delivers the feeling of a inhospitable dystopia better. Between New Vegas and Nellis, the only aggressive enemy you can see is literally the mad Brahmin in the Mole rat Ranch. New Vegas' map is a lot smaller, feels even smaller due to a lot of space being locked out of or filled with mountains, and how friendly the world is just further emphasizes the size.
It also annoys me that there aren't any random encounter spawn locations. Only place where the type of enemy I faced changed was the small "town" to the south and slightly east of Red Rock canyon, where I first killed some raiders and then later on some Cazadors. And although I was hinted at possibly getting jumped by any factions that hate me, I never was. Often factions that hated me just let me pass through their territory without any trouble at all.
The Mojave is a boring, hospitable place where a trek from one end of the map to the other is comparable to your averige shopping trip, just a bunch safer.
Also, when I wrote the first impressions post I said that I liked seeing creatures fight each other. I did, while I still saw that they fought each other. From Novac and beyond, the only fight I ever saw was between Fiends and Giant Fire Ants, largely due to there being so few places in the desert where creatures roamed at all.

So, in the end I have to say that some reviewing cunts online just have shit for brains and Fallout: New Vegas is not Fallout 3 repackaged, both in good and bad. Fallout 3's biggest problems are the story, quests and total length of any adventure you'd have in the game no matter how you roleplay, but it's strength is the entire world. It feels like a post nuclear shithole where life sucks. Doesn't sound like something positive on it's own, but you must understand that it's a video game about a post nuclear shithole where life sucks.
New Vegas' strengths are the story, quests and the possiblity of role-playing through the quests, and the fact that thanks to Fallout 3's existence the smaller gameplay elements have been tweaked for the better, but it's biggest problems are the INSANE AMOUNT OF GLITCHES AND BUGS and the lifeless map. I know, it's a post nuclear desert and it feels as empty as a post nuclear desert, but it's a bit TOO post nuclear desert for a video game you play for entertainment.

I also can't quite comprehend why I'm not just able to recycle my empty bottles and fill them with purified water from lakes or water taps. I mean, it's a world where there is, supposedly, a huge problem with water being irradiated if it's even available at all for most people while the land is literally littered with hundreds upon hundreds of empty bottles and large masses of radiation-free water (which is why the lack of water sounds odd). Put one-plus-two-plus-two-plus-one together man, and go live like a king as a water merchant!
Why'd you have to eat the empty plastic bottles after drinking the water from inside them, anyway? They must weight like 0.05 pounds when empty, you could carry a hundred of them to Lake Mead! IDIOT!

I'm now somewhat relieved that I'm done with Fallout: New Vegas, instead of slightly sad like I usually am after finishing a game I've enjoyed. The glitches made me so mad a few times that I almost destroyed my now one and only working controller, and despite looking forward to re-role-playing it earlier I actually don't want to anymore. It's too buggy and dead to warrant another run anytime soon.
I'm going to stop now, go eat something and then start playing Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Three months later, a relapse

2011-01-09T16:39:00.000+02:00

After three months of not buying any new games myself I got a bad itch in my wallet and went out to spend the money my grandmother sent me for Christmas.
I checked my regular joint's website for any titles I have been on the lookout for in the past, and sure enough I did indeed spot a few that raised my interest: Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Content's Under Pressure for PC, State of Emergency for PS2 and a used copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum for PS3.

I did find Marc Ecko's Getting Up and Batman: Arkham Asylum and bought both, but to my disappointment the State of Emergency I saw they had was in reality State of Emergency 2, which is not even a distant cousin to the first game, so I left it on the shelf. Because I have this addiction problem with buying new (old) video games I couldn't just leave with two titles, so I also bought Rogue Ops for PS2 and BloodRayne for PC.
Batman: Arkham Asylum has you sneaking around Arkham as Batman, Marc Ecko's Getting Up has you sneaking around spraypainting shit and having fistfights with armed people if you fail at sneaking, Rogue Ops has you sneaking and hiding your magnificent ass inside pottery and BloodRayne has you running around in tight leather giving the nazis some sexy hickeys, so that's three more games giving me the chance to sneak around.
I'm just sad that the game where you're a flexible creature of the night infiltrating nazi bases and getting up close and personal isn't a sneaking game.
I might write something about these new games once I get to playing them, but right now I'm still preoccupied with Fallout: New Vegas, a game which consistently introduces more stuff to like immensely and more glitches to prevent it from being the great title it should be.

My mother also bought me a new game for PS3 soon after Christmas because the price tag caught her eye: 4,90€ for a brand new, sealed PS3 game. Hell, it costs me more than that just to take the bus downtown and back when I go buy games, and larger stores around here don't sell new games that cheap even if they're shitty PS2 games with damaged covers.
Although it's easy to understand why it was so affordable once you read about it online, as the game in question is Stormrise. Judging by the reviews it's a shitty game. It's a shitty, broken game with bad design and it got 2.5 on GameSpot. Well, according to Metacritic it also got some better than averige scores from other major review sites, but I trust GameSpot in this. Many of GameSpot's reviews may be full of crap but from my experience they're less full than some others.
I suppose I should play it myself before giving it a good bashing, but to be quite honest the GameSpot review frightens me too much, and it's real-time strategy. Only RTS game I have ever liked, that I can remember at the moment, was Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, and I gave that game a much too positive review just because it surprised me how much fun I had with it.

Also, when I went to buy those four new games I mentioned earlier, I sort of gave in and spent a bit of money on a microphone. A real microphone that looks like a microphone, not a cheap headset that crackles, like the one I used to record the YouTube LPs and which broke soon after. I tested it and it works and the sound quality should be at least decent. There was a bit of static, but I think that can be easily fixed just by adjusting the sound settings, because everything's still set up for the old headset.
I'm just telling you this in case you're one of the two people who want me to do more LPs, because what this means is that I have basically no good excuse to not do LPs as far as lack of recording equipment goes, and if I don't actually do LPs then I have just wasted a wad of cash on yet another piece of junk electronics that I'll never use. You should know how much I hate wasting money (on anything other than games) so I'm now forced to try and get my money's worth out of this microphone.

Third, fourth and fifth impressions of Fallout: New Vegas

2011-01-06T21:13:00.001+02:00

Alright, so I've now played Fallout: New Vegas even more, and I'm getting somewhere. I've reached the Strip, killed Benny and gotten the chip back, and now I'll start just exploring the wasteland for all the side stuff I missed, because seeing the way NCR, the Legion and Mr. House are acting and looking at the quest details and which quests reward trophies, something tells me the main questline is coming closer to an end, or at least a point of no return regarding faction loyalty, and I believe the game just ends with the last quest so... yeah. Punisher Blues will continue to bring scum to justice until I feel like it can all end. After this first playthrough is done, I'll be playing an evil female character and see what the other side of the coin in New Vegas has to offer.

This is pretty much what I do, but wearing a Sheriff Duster

I have to say, the game hasn't turned into Fallout 3 yet, but glitches it's had a plenty. Glitches I forgot to mention or hadn't encountered yet when I wrote the last post include absolutely horrendous textures where stuff, mostly the ground, is partly a blurry mess. Like when in games, like Fallout 3 for example, the "close-up texture" loads a little slow and all you see is the "distant texture" for a few seconds and then see it suddenly change, but instead in New Vegas it stays permanently blurry. In some places it's REAL bad and looks like if you just woke up and still can't quite focus on anyhing.
Creatures have also dropped through the ground a couple of times and gone to hell, especially visible when the kill cam follows. I suppose you could say that they... fall out in New Vegas.
There's been occasions where the quest marker on the map has pointed me to a wrong spot, and it's not a that I would've been on a wrong floor, since it has been outside.
People have been turning hostile against me despite the fact that I haven't worn any faction armor since the first session. First the NCR tell me I'm doing a great job and suddenly every one of them, in a blink of an eye, start shooting at me. I thought that maybe they just have something against my companions, but when the attack companions THEY ATTACK COMPANIONS, not leave them alone to attack me. They would also attack companions immediately upon setting their eyes on them, not wait around for a while.
Sometimes people have been knocked unconscious by nothing. Nobody attacked them, they just fall on the ground. I guess even NPCs like to have a bit of a kip sometimes. Maybe they're narcoleptic.
The game has frozen on me several times. Several. Most often in Freeside, but a few times elsewhere and during loading screens. Freeside has also been extremely choppy.
Companions have gotten stuck a few times. It's always fixed when I reload a save, whether they were stuck already when the game saved or not (I suppose the game just checks whether I have companions or not and teleports them to me at load), but still. It's good, though, that reloading any save unsticks them, because in Fallout 3 when companions got stuck they were permanently stuck.
In the Kings' mission when the Kings' member tells the King about what Pacer is doing, the gang member appears from thin air next to the King and gets stuck, and since it's in the "talking mode" the game gets stuck. This happened several times in a row despite my best efforts in making Rex move out of the way. Why does the messenger have to teleport in so close? Every other time anyone is teleported in for a conversation, they teleport further away so that you don't usually see them drop in.
The game has also gotten stuck in a few transitions out of conversations, allowing me to move the camera and press start and little else. Usually this has happened when two characters have tried initiating a conversation with me at the same time.
The 10th NCR ghoul never spawned in the sidequest "We Will All Go Together" and now I have a quest permanently incomplete. By the time I gave up and read about the quest to find about this problem, I had already saved over every one of my safety save while looking around the entire southern portion of the map for the little shit and couldn't go back in time to the moment before talking to the one sane ghoul.
I have also gotten stuck in the terrain a few times, luckily mostly outside so I've been able to use quick travel as a method of fixing the situation, but one time it also happened indoors and all I could do was to reload an autosave.
Yesterday night I quit playing because the game quit playing. I thought that I hit the remote for my TV or something when the screen went crazy, but it was just that the game, on it's own in the middle of a fight, quit itself and returned to the PS3 main menu. So now the game is telling me when to quit? It was 2 AM and I was getting headache, alright, but I decide when I go to bed, not you game! I'll die playing you if I want to and you can't stop me!

But, for some good points, the game's quests have been quite a lot of fun for the most part. I've liked the snooping around for the culprit type of stuff, and some of the quests have brought to mind the Hitman series with stuff like sneaking into hotel rooms to silently kill a guy, drugging wine bottles, killing cooks and dragging their bodies into freezers out of sight, smuggling in weapons past security checks and dressing up in faction clothing to fool people a bit. Hitman games are some of my all time favourite video games, with the exception of Hitman 2, so... I like. You know I am a fan of sneaking games in general, in fact out of the four new games I bought last Tuesday three have stealth gameplay in them (yes, I bought more games again), so the fact that in New Vegas I actually get a lot out of the sneak skill is great. In Fallout 3 the sneak skill was mostly just to get sneak crits indoors against unavoidable mobs of enemies or for pilfering everything in stores, but in these New Vegas quests stealth has some actual use.
I, suprisingly, like playing Blackjack and Caravan in New Vegas. Going for the few trophies related to these games doesn't hurt, which is good.
I also like being able to carry a fucking deadly "one-hit-kill" arsenal for once. It took me quite a while of playing before I could feel safe trading away my more common good weapons and ammo, but now that I dared to spend some caps and sell all the junk I've been hauling everywhere I feel a bit better, and lighter. I dropped my precious modded .357 magnum and my precious suppressed Varmint rifle and my precious shotguns and my precious repeaters and bought an Anti material rifle with 111 damage. Doesn't matter that the ammo is a bit more scarce and expensive, it'll kill everything with less bullets. I'm also carrying my Hunting rifle with 45 damage for "smaller" kills that need a rifle, a Hunting revolver with 50something damage for close-up death and .44 magnum with around 40 damage for all the tiny critters whose brains I splatter just for kicks. In comparison, most other regular guns widely available do only 35 and less damage, so I'm well prepared. I'm also wearing the 1st Recon beret for +5 crits.

So the game is even more broken than it was in the beginning, but although the scales between fun and glitches have turned slightly more even towards the end, I am still having enough fun to play on.

First and second impressions of Fallout: New Vegas

2011-01-03T02:57:00.006+02:00

I have played Fallout: New Vegas now for a total of, let's say, 16 hours. I haven't even gotten to Novac yet, so my views on the game at this point are limited, but I have managed to burp up a few mental notes about the game already.

Let me get this over with first: New Vegas is NOT a direct copy of Fallout 3. I've read a couple of (amateur) reviews of New Vegas while looking for some information about the game and some have stated that supposedly New Vegas is a new setting in name only, and that all it does to differentiate itself from Fallout 3 is adding a few new weapons and armor and the Hardcore mode. What the flippin' fuck is wrong you guys? Are you dense? Do you want to be a professional critic so bad that you criticise just about everything in new games without scrutiny?
Back when I was young, and I still am only pushing 22, long-running video game series worked like this: first game set the base mechanics and to a slightly lesser extent introduced the story, the setting and the characters. The sequels would then retain the base mechanics, the whole reason why people could safely purchase the new games knowing they'd still like them, and only change a certain few things about how the game is played in each new entry while mainly focusing on continuing the overall narrative and/or the... I don't know what it's called, the "soul" of the game? The thing that can make completely different games seem related, you figure out the correct word.
If the series suddenly and drastically changed between two games there was a more or less valid reason for it, for example the evolution/change between platforms, change of developing studio, or simply just the artistical incentive when the sudden change in gameplay was to further drive in the significance of the drastic changes in the story. In some rare cases the people behind the games may have even wanted to conquer new audiences and drop the "dying" fanbase. (Some examples of changes: GTA2-GTA3, Fallout2-Fallout3, Spyro3-Spyrowhatever, Jak & Daxter-Jak2). In fact, games most often get criticised when they fail to stay loyal to the series as they piss off the original fanbase even if the change isn't for the worse. Remember the cries when they showed footage of the first Splinter Cell Conviction? That game didn't look too much like shit, it was just completely different (and had stupid distraction methods. Stealing phones in a crowd to divert guards, what?) and so the studio SCRAPPED THE WHOLE PLAN and remade Conviction from scratch, final product being the thing they released last year. You could say Splinter Cell series has been the same game over and over again, but the skulking in shadows and the trademark moves are exactly why people continued following the series.

Don't look like no DC ruins from here

My point here is, the crucial differences in games are more often than not very small in the larger context if you really think about them, and New Vegas changes almost everything it possibly can from Fallout 3 without risking alienation of a large group of fans. So far the game looks completely different, with the setting being far closer to that of a classic wild west where people are rebuilding life than the grim post-apocalyptic rubble-filled hole of DC where life just sucked until you died. I recall Fallout 3's base colors being gray and worn brown, New Vegas has so far been sun scorched yellow and sky blue.
The story (main quest), at least so far, seems more cinematic, better paced as the main thread to follow and more importantly it's definitely the most fresh set up for open adventure the entire Fallout series has seen so far.
Fallout set you up as a guy from a vault, a closed community, sent out to find a water chip to save the vault while at the same time fighting with the BoS against the rising army of super mutants. Fallout 2 set you up as a guy from a small village, a somewhat closed community, sent out to find the G.E.C.K. to save the village while at the same time fighting a little less with the BoS against the rising threat of the Enclave. Fallout 3 set you up as a guy from a vault, a closed community, on a mission to find a G.E.C.K. to save DC while fighting with the BoS against the rising threat of the Enclave. Tactics set you up as some guy from BoS fighting some new rising threat of something, and in Brotherhood of Steel, the shunned PS2 game I never got my mittens on, I'm guessing you were a BoS recruit set out to fight some rising threat in the wasteland. Again. Don't correct me if I'm wrong.
New Vegas sets you up as a courier who has lived outside and at least starts out with the mission of getting payback against people who shot you in the face and stole your package that you are still responsible for, while the NCR is fighting the rising threat of the Legion. See the pattern and how it changes in New Vegas?
Ok, I haven't played that far yet and maybe soon I end up fighting with NCR to defeat the Legion and the contents of the package is the key to saving the wasteland, but the beginning of the story at least has been far more interesting than what Fallout games have come up with in the past. New Vegas also has faction status system that would seem to allow me to befriend "the enemy" if I so wished, something no Fallout game has done to this extent before.

At this point, while writing the post, I took a break and watched Murder on the Orient Express as it was on TV, so I lost some of my original points regarding New Vegas' originality, but you get my drift anyway. The game is different, has new content and several things regarding the game mechanics have been tweaked for the better, but what made Fallout 3 Fallout 3 and a good game can also be found in New Vegas, the good stuff has just gotten slightly fatter. Saying that New Vegas is a copy of Fallout 3 is only about two notches less insane than saying Fallout 3 is just Oblivion with guns, but still stupid and neglectful. So, a large RPG is played from first-person viewpoint, alright, but what else was same about Oblivion and Fallout 3, huh? What? Yeah, didn't think you had an answer either. New Vegas is, by my standards, only as close to Fallout 3 in terms of content as a sequel should be. It's new, but familiar.
Of course, if the rest of the game quickly takes a turn for the worse and it's just Fallout 3 all over again I promise I'll put someone's feet in my mouth, but until then you better come up with examples of the things you would've changed about New Vegas if you want to make me believe New Vegas is just more of the same.
And besides, even if it was, it's still good. I mean, look at Fallout and Fallout 2, or Thief 1 and Thief 2, or Spyro 1 and Spyro 2 and Spyro 3, or Jak 2 and Jak 3, or.. well, any game that backs me up, really (but none that contradict my point).

Sometimes I just like to sit here for hours,
watching the hardworking ants... well, work hard

Anyway, I love Fallout: New Vegas so far. I like the feeling of a western the game has had up till now, I like how the main quest leads me onward while constantly giving me the chance of completing other quests without having to illogically break the pacing, I like Hardcore mode and how it gives some real use for the normally useless food items and how it doesn't allow me to carry 5000 bullets for a gun I never use, and I like the ability to really play a role and choose sides and have good as well as bad results for my actions, even being able to fail quests.
I like being able to mod a rifle with a silencer to actually have a silenced gun that doesn't completely suck ass. I like not having to pray to God that the game drops me another gun of my chosen weapon type just so I can repair the little piece of broken shit, as I now have weapon repair kits that I can use on any weapon. I also like being able to craft the weapon repair kits myself, because now I have even more reason to sift through random junk instead of just the old caps, ammo, guns and stimpaks. I like how I can create ammunition for my chosen guns if I can gather the necessary parts, as it allows me to use one type of weapon a little more and not constantly be afraid of running out of ammunition before I can reach the next merchant. Basically I just like to tinker, and New Vegas lets me tinker, which I like.
I like how the world seems more like a living place , where animals and gangs seem to have much more of their own territiories and occupy certain spawn points of the map more realistically, as animals seem to have their own "nests" that they defend. I like how ants for example don't attack unless you get too close to their home or attack first, and only hiss at you when you're getting too close, making the world more... realistically inhabited. I like seeing different critters of the world battle each other more often, so it doesn't seem like everyone's just plotting against me. I like being able to jump gangs that I have just witnessed surviving a rough battle with radscorpions, and start taking potshots at them from a good vantage point so I can collect the loot. I also like the crows that appear everywhere, and I like how they blow up into little red bits when shot.

I have accidentally aggravated these nature's little wonders
and must now make a hasty retreat to avoid upsetting
the delicate balance of the ecosystem

I also like the card game Caravan, although I still don't fully grasp it's rules and can't understand why it's supposed to be challenging if you have a good enough collection of cards.
All I can really say is that Fallout: New Vegas is like a mixture of the various good bits from Fallout 3, Fallout 2 and Red Dead Redemption, and some.

But, alas, the game also follows Black Isle's and Bethesda's Fallout series tradition, being badly broken at it's current state. After only 16 hours of gameplay and with the latest patch installed it has managed to cause me enough headaches to partly negate all my perhaps much too positive first thoughts and hurt my excitement.
First of all, the most noticeable problem is that game has continuous hiccups. It stops for a brief half a second every 10 seconds or so when running about, as if it was loading something. Why? Does it really load something? Shouldn't it be able to load without getting stuck constantly? Am I asking too much when I expect it to play smoothly? It's not the end of the world, but it is indeed very annoying, and I don't particularly enjoy getting annoyed when playing games.
There's also problems with visuals. Creatures in some cases, when appearing, appear as giants and only shrink once they get close. More of a funny occurence than a problem and as far as I am concerned this relatively rare bug doesn't even need a fix, but still...
Items appear from nowhere a lot more than they ever did in... any game I can remember, really. GTA Vice City Stories for PS2 suffered a lot from this problem (well, all 3D GTA games did to some extent), but not as much as New Vegas does, large objects just... pop in and pop out like I was hallucinating. Just aiming can reveal a large wall of crap infront of me that I am unable to see again once I release the L1 button.

Meet Jacklyn, my packass. She came on to me,
so I laid her on the ground and stuffed her with my junk

Items and people also disappear. Corpses vanish in some cases within a minute if you don't stare at them and even if you DO stare at them, which I witnessed especially close when using the corpse of Jacklyn to transport several hundred pounds of goods (as dragging a corpse is faster than walking overburdened or making several trips), but some have yet to disappear although I killed them first thing when I started the game. I've lost lots of loot from dead raiders this way.
I've also witnessed several objects like armor and weapons turn invisible, yet still have their names pop up when I point the crosshair to where I last saw them.
In some cases enemies are able to shoot through walls.
Often I supposedly miss clean shots 20 times a row in situations where it is impossible for that to happen even if there was a considerable spread. I know you think I just suck and make excuses, but just take my word for it sometimes the gun just doesn't seem to fire. Although, this reminded me of another point I actually like about the game: using the crosshair and iron sights is truly the preferable method of aiming in New Vegas as V.A.T.S. isn't as accurate and bullet spread is lesser than in Fallout 3, where V.A.T.S. was just king. I do still use V.A.T.S. but only when dealing with fast, more deadly enemies at closer range.
Anyway, back to the glitches I was talking about before my train of thought was derailed by the realization that New Vegas also has good things to counter the many technical problems. The game doesn't always notice that you have taken off your faction armor, so people like the NCR that like me may start shooting without provocation as the game thinks I'm still dressed in Legion armor even though I'm wearing a Sheriff's Duster.
In aiming mode, the gun may completely disappear and not let you aim with it in first person, although you can quickly fix this by switching weapons, aiming, and switching back. Annoying in battle anyway.
I forgot some glitches since there really are many, but for the last, my second session ended because Fallout: New Vegas froze permanently and I had to turn off my machine. Freezing once every 16 hours is better than what Fallout 3 did unpatched, but come on, this is patched AND it still has a dozen other problems. Now me and my brethren are eagerly anticipating whether the developers drop the DLC stuff for a second and release another fix, and whether it'll do anything good. According to reviews I've read, installing the patch after having started the game actually fucked up the save games for some users.
It's hard being a PS3 gamer as we are at the mercy of game companies. PC gamers have PC gaming communities and their fine people who provide unofficial fixes for games fast, doing the developers' work for them. Unpaid.

I don't care who that is, he gunna get it!

So far there are very few things about the game I dislike that aren't glitches, but one of them is how the trait "Four Eyes" isn't clearly explained at the beginning. The traits normally have both a positive and a negative effect, so when the game told me that with "Four Eyes" a character has -1 perception without glasses but +1 perception when wearing glasses, I understood it as getting a +1 effect on top of my original base Perception value along with the regular eyewear bonus, and since I thought my character called Punisher Blues, a vengeful vigilante on a mission from God, would eventually start wearing sunglasses at all times I'd get a free bonus point to perception.
What the trait does in reality, however, is lower your base perception value by one instead of it being only an effect -1, and then give you +2 perception effect with glasses. So because my base value originally was 6, with the trait the game counts it as being 5 and makes me ineligible for certain aiming related perks that I would've gotten without the trait, but I also don't get any bonus to compensate for the loss as the +1 effect only covers the originally lost base point, meaning that although I have perception of 8(=5+3) I would've had perception of 8(=6+2) anyway without the trait. So in reality, this trait just gives you TWO disadvantages and no advantages: having to keep the relatively rare eyewear at good condition at all times (because if it breaks you can't wear it) and not being able to get certain perks you'd normally get with the stats you have.
Sucks, and it's a good thing I'm playing a role here and just have to accept whatever shitty disadvantages I get or I'd go murder me some more devs. Hey, I punch doors and throw controllers in fits of madness, you don't want to mess with me!
I'm actually contemplating starting from scratch while I still can without screwing majority of the experience. I think I'll flip a coin when I start playing again tomorrow or something.

He dun gotten it! Just like his buddy,
who died due to lack of head five days prior.
Hey, I undressed that guy only to check his pulse!

Anyway, in the end it's true what some professional critic once said, although I can't remember which one or what the exact words were: Fallout: New Vegas is both an incredible experience you shouldn't miss out on but it's also bugged up the rearshaft like nobody's bloody business. The various technical problems aren't reason enough for you to pass up on this awesome game if you have any reason to believe you'll like it, but you shouldn't expect a bumpless ride. Buy it and play it, but get ready for some painful crap.

Note, however, that I have no fucking idea what the game is like beyond the first hours and few starting quests, so don't take any of the words above seriously. In fact, just forget everything I said for now. Alright?

Dead Rising 2 is dead fun

2011-01-01T03:04:00.009+02:00

Alright, so I have now done everything there is to do in Dead Rising 2 apart from the co-op playthrough and various minigames that only reward you with small cash prizes.

Dead Rising 2 is quite fun. Using the large amount of objects scattered here and there to kill off zombies never gets old, to me anyway. I never get tired of using the lance to pick up zombies and throwing them over the rail in Palisades Mall or trying to keep zombies at bay just with the bow and arrow. Creating combo weapons is also fun and useful for the majority of the recipes, which I found slightly surprising because generally when video games offer some sort of create-your-own-weapon thing it's just to make the game sound more appealing, and the effort you have to put into scavenging parts and creating the weapon doesn't match the usefulness and/or coolness of the resulting item. In Dead Rising 2, however, the parts for each combo weapon are pretty much always in the same general area, so while you're casually going around punching zombies you might suddenly get the notion of creating a Freedom Bear or a Blitzkrieg just because all the necessary items happen to be there, and it's worth the short sprint between a pitchfork and a drill motor in the Food Court just to stick zombies on the end of the Auger and watch them spin around while limbs fly off in the air, and weapons like the spiked bat or knife gloves are your go to crowd control and psycho beating partners. Hell, I even like the drill bucket that so many others find waste of data space.

Ooh, yeah! I love gore!

Another zombie falls prey to the deadly airborn swordfish

The gore from the zombies looks quite nice. Since there's so many of them on the screen at once you'd think hitting them with weapons would just knock them on the ground with a little blood spurting out, but no, dismemberment and mutilation of zombies is, for the most part, very detailed in the game. If you happen to swing a broadsword at a zombie while it's in a little different position, like getting up from the ground for example, the cut-off point of the loose bits that fly off is according to the swing of the blade unlike in many games where the area is only an estimate on which section of the body out of six sectors was hit closest. I like how zombies react to losing body parts as well. Often they do just go down gurgling the instant you hit them, but sometimes they lose an arm or a leg and bleed profusely everywhere while desperately trying to still get to you before finally going down. Seeing a fat zombie have a large swordfish sticking out of his chest for a second before he actually falls always makes me feel happy. I like the carnage in Dead Rising 2. One might say that obsessing over detailed violence and gore and blood spurting everywhere is something only a troubled individual would do, but if you're telling me I'm troubled I'm gonna ram a splintered table leg through your guts and eat your children! So don't.
I also like freezing zombies just for the hell of seeing them stuck in the middle of funny animations. Well, that's really the only use of freezing them, but it's fun all the same. As a quick note, the screams and moans of the zombies also sound nice. I shot the legs off a zombie with a shotgun once and the death scream was surprisingly appropriate and kind of scary, and that's what made me pay more attention to the sounds in the game.

What I really don't like about Dead Rising 2 is it's fire related animations and how much shit is on the HUD all the time. The fire is really lackluster and using weapons like the molotov or flamethrower isn't nearly as exciting as you'd think, in fact they can be downright boring, and flaming gloves is just... bah. Flaming gloves is my least favourite combo weapon.

Since fire in the game sucks, this is the best
thing you can do with the fire extinguishers

The HUD, well, you can see just how cluttered is in the pictures I took. Only your inventory closes, everything else stays on the screen the entirety of the game. As you can see, missions are always listed on the right hand side of the screen, and there is no way to turn them off if you don't give flying moose bollocks about them. Even if you complete all possible missions as fast as they pop up, the game STILL shows the upcoming case files on the screen despite the fact that it's too early for you to actually begin them. If I can't do anything story related yet, why must my screen be so obscured by pointless info? And that radio icon on the bottom left, it pops up and stays up whenever you have new unchecked missions or you get a call regarding the story. It continues to stay on the screen if you answer a call and skip the dialogue, and the game goes as far as to call you back over and over until you have spent some specifically vague amount of time reading about Katey needing Zombrex at 7 o'clock for the fourth time. I know what she needs and when and I'm in a bit of a hurry now, which is precisely why I skipped the dialogue for the third time in 5 seconds. Stop calling me already! Well, to be honest the HUD isn't that bad looking and the calls aren't at all constant, so... forget what I just wrote. Far less annoying than you'd think.

The story of the game is something I expected to be more of a nuisance, and it can be a bit if you just start a new story to slice zombies since the beginning of the game is two minutes of cutscene starts and loading screens even if you skip them, but I was surprised how well everything came together moodwise when I finally decided to finish all cases and beat all psychopaths and save all survivors, in the fifth runthrough. When I played the role of a guy in the middle of a zombie apocalypse looking for medication for his kid while saving people and trying to uncover the truth instead of a jackass that lets his kid die just to spend three days throwing flower pots and LCD monitors at zombies uninterrupted, the game got a very different but all the same a really good mood. The feeling of it really being a dire situation where people are fighting for their lives and in some cases going insane really did come across to me quite well when I had less time to place servbot masks and stuffed toys on zombies' heads, and psycho battles started to feel more like natural occurences in the world instead of boss fights specifically put in your way. Admittedly, if the game didn't offer the possiblity of freely running around and going nuts with drill buckets and plate launchers while dressed as a cowboy the story alone wouldn't be able to sell 10,000 copies, but it's still more than just a tacked on loose plot thread.

And they let kids play with these, you say?

I must mention that although a large amount of the "mission" of the game is escorting somewhat helpless people around, it never gets nearly as annoying as some other games' escort missions. Biggest trouble is getting a large amount of survivors through a loading all at once, but other than that they usually hold their own against regular zombies just fine, and aren't completely stupid.
I also quite enjoyed the detail, references and humour in the game, but I won't talk about those more. I do still wonder, though, who else provided Jared with Zombrex, since during the 4 days I only gave him two shots... there's a huge plothole there, if you save Jared that is. I let him die four times and killed him myself once.

Oh, that's nasty. It's all mush in there.

The online mode and trophies of Dead Rising 2 are something that made me hurt myself and my controller. Reportedly the game has problems tracking your progress with clothing worn and melee weapons used so when I had trouble getting the collection trophies for those I was almost certain the game fucked me over, and all my frustrations I accumulated over the course of six days and six playthroughs caused me to snap a bit when Randy, one of the psychos, killed me by cheating and sent my progress back another 20 minutes in the final run that I had to start only because one stupid piece of clothing is hidden in the Tape It or Die crew's HQ that's only open for a couple of in-game hours on the third game day IF the game has room to spawn four more survivors, and if and when the place opens up the game doesn't actually inform you of it in any way so you MUST read about it online to even find it exists so it's all just horrible bullshit on the game makers' part! Well, anyway, when Randy killed me I got so mad that I punched my bed, my shelf, my wall and my closet door, everything very hard and very fast. I think the neighbours thought someone was killed, but they have no right to complain after all the racket they've been making over the years. At least I went insane in the afternoon, not at 2 FUCKING AM BLASTING SHITTY POP SONGS AT FULL VOLUME! I'm not really built for hardcore brawling so I naturally hurt my hand pretty bad. Don't think anything broke, though. Well, now that I'm calm I can admit that the game only fucked me over with the firearm trophy, everything else actually worked fine. I just forgot to use the training sword and wear the beachwear from Americana casino. My bad.

I do still think that Zombie Genocide Master trophy is one of the worst ideas for a trophy in a while. To get it you must kill 72,000 zombies in one playthrough, but the mechanics of the game make this a rather crap trophy idea. Trying to get it legitimately, you MUST spend the entire game, from start to finish, just driving around and killing huge mobs of zombies while every 5000 zombies or so using save/loading to replenish your car's health and the mobs of zombies (cheating with a co-op partner, you can either do it faster or remove the time limit). That means several hours of boring grinding WITH the likely possibility of actually FAILING to reach the magical number in time and having to START FROM THE BEGINNING if you don't have a clear strategy from the very beginning. You CAN NOT get the trophy by any other means legitimately, no matter how fast you create tesla balls, so it is definitely not a trophy you'd get from a regular playthrough, and it's not a regular grind trophy because of the possibility that you're sent back to the beginning if you're too slow.

Watch out, this man needs a doctor!

I personally think trophies and achievements are more a way for developers to encourage trying out things in games that people might pass up on otherwise (trophies for playing a match online or completing side tasks in games) and to reward more dedicated fans (trophies for playing a game for a certain, large, amount of time). Spending the entirety of a game to drive up and down the outside area for nothing BUT the trophy? Insane. This is a trophy that once again separates the people suffering from OCD and idiocy from the regular people who know what video games are, or perhaps used to be, all about. And yes, I got the trophy. I am an idiot, although a somewhat more respected idiot among the idiot society now that I have the stupid trophy to brag about.

Playing the online modes lead to another case of a sudden outburst of anger. I like the online mode, though it's not very... group event friendly if you get what I mean. If you don't, well I mean that it's an absolute shit idea if for example somebody set a DR2 online event up at bonersgamesforums. It doesn't work, the mode's so fucking casual that you only play it to get more money for the story mode.
Anyway, I managed to snatch the first two trophies in the very first episode I played very easily, and win in another two game types in the second episode I played. Then problems arrived. I kept getting Ramsterball and Zomboni rounds in every episode, and those are two modes I won in already. Slicecycles is ALWAYS the last round and I already won that in the first episode also, and so I got frustrated. Not only is it annoying to be playing these modes just for the trophies (yes, trophy hunting's the hobby of idiots, I admit) but sad thing is that I happen to like Ramsterball, Zomboni and Slicecycle matches the LEAST, so I didn't even have fun.

I can still fix it. Get me some duct tape and a hammer.

The rare times when I did get to play the other modes I was either disconnected from the other guys before winning or there was someone who just absolutely crushed everyone else, giving me no chance to win. After two hours of this shit I got so mad I sort of, casually, very calmly, in orderly fashion, threw my controller on the floor, breaking it, and now I'm still missing two screws and a triangle button. Not that big of a loss, it was the controller I've hated using because the left stick and R2 and L2 buttons have trouble registering actions, possibly being the largest cause behind my losing streaks because the DR2 online games only use those buttons. I've only used the controller whenever I've had to charge the better one, as I wasn't even able to perform certain tricks in Skate with the broken one. What was worse than the controller breaking was the fact that I threw it with the same hand I hurt punching stuff earlier, so I damaged the hand even MORE.
But, letting out some steam and changing controllers worked in the end, because even handicapped I then managed to win every single mode I hadn't won in yet first try AND I won almost every episode in a row until I was done. And now I'm not going to go back to the online mode ever again, because it has no staying power.

You see, zombies?! You see what you
get when you mess with the living?!

So there, despite some stupid shit Dead Rising 2 is absolutely one of my favourite games on the PS3, largely because it actually reminds me of my all time favourite video game The Warriors, and it's odd that it was the first game to ever make me so mad as to get me to hurt myself and break an expensive controller. It's never happened to me before, which is surprising looking at all the games I have played and suffered through in the past. Maybe all the repressed negative feelings from 21 years of my life are finally coming out? Who knows, before it's too late to stop the madness.
Still looking for someone I can do the co-op playthrough with, though. From my PSN friends list only tekkenfanaat has the game and I don't know if he actually likes it, he just happens to have every single PS3 game ever made it seems

I were going to write about my first impressions of Fallout: New Vegas, but I think I'll start separating different blogging topics into their own posts, start writing about New Vegas some other day and go watch the fireworks. Oh, and happy new year of 2011, only one more year till the end of the world!

Happy New Year 2011!

All images, except for game cover, taken and edited by me. For once.

4 Weeks Later It Was Christmas

2010-12-28T19:20:00.001+02:00

Here's what I got for Christmas.

A classic, "retro" style Ramones alarm clock. It makes a helluva racket when it goes off making sure that both you AND your neighbours definitely wake up pissed off, just like alarm clocks used to do (who the hell wakes up to the gentle beeping sounds the new digital ones make, huh?). All I can say is, thank heavens I don't have to wake up in the morning for any reason.

A black hat. Don't think I'll use it much, because the fabric is so loose that when I put it on it turns into an Amish hat that's one size too large for my head.

A Sex Pistols tea mug.

A Mickey/Goofy Disney glass. For whiskey.

Candy. Well, I ate a lot of it already.

A Mickey Mouse plushy toy.

A Mickey Mouse keychain.

A metallic box with a picture of, I think, Kaj Stenvall's duck painting.

A grey shirt.

Posse DVD.

Geronimo/The Quick and the Dead double DVD.

Psycho DVD. A true, classic Christmas movie.

Dead Rising 2.
In four days I've beaten it four times, doing a fifth run now where I complete all cases and save all survivors and defeat all psychos. I'm level 50, and I've gotten majority of the trophies as well as finished literally 99% of the stuff needed for the collectibles trophies that I haven't yet gotten. Yes, I have even killed 72 000 zombies.
If any of you people have Dead Rising 2 for the PS3 also, I am looking for somebody I can finish the co-op stuff with. They say it's better with a friend, but I have no friends. Nobody I know well has a PS3, and hardly anyone I even barely know actually likes Dead Rising's type of games. Stupid people, have no taste!
Once I'm done with Dead Rising 2, I might write a short post regarding how I feel about the game.

Fallout: New Vegas.
Haven't yet played it, because I know I'll spend a great deal of time with this game and when I start playing it I want to focus solely on it and no other game, so I'm just playing Dead Rising 2 until I just can't take it anymore and need a change. Dead Rising 2 is a perfect example of the type of game I can come back to at a later date just to screw around for a day, but Fallout: New Vegas is quite probably something that I won't immediately play again once I'm done with the story.

And if you're wondering what has happened with me not posting anything for a month, well... the first week I had something in mind I wanted to write about, possibly about some movies or something, but I honestly just forgot what it was so I thought I'd skip a week.
The second week I were going to start posting short comic strips of the weird and funny "logic" of some of my favourite video games, and thought that since I have at least 9 ideas and the content would be actually good it wouldn't matter if the posting was a bit delayed, but I realized again that can't draw for shit so... there went that idea.
The third week I decided to start recording videos, but most of my plans failed because of hardware and software problems (hell, just taking those pictures below took me 30 minutes of work, and I had to try 8 different programs. Damn this new technology sucks!). I even started finally recording a Red Dead Redemption walkthrough for my probably now forgotten RDR YouTube channel, but soon after I had set everything up I realized that I have so much shit on my harddrive, including the raw files of the Second Shite LP I STILL haven't edited, that I couldn't store the footage of Redemption.
And this last week I have been very excited about Christmas and have been playing Dead Rising 2 quite a lot since Christmas eve. I've only slept about 5-6 hours a night and I've got wrinkles under my bloodshot eyes, so you're (un)lucky I managed to take time off of zombie slaying to post this.

The happy news is that although my PC, or Windows Vista rather, keeps fucking up and having failures when booting up, my antivirus is renewed for another year so the useless crap and the hefty amounts of donkey porn on my PC is still well protected.

Sorry if the images are messed up, this blogging service doesn't have any easy method for image alingment that would work well. It's either easy OR working, not both at the same time.

10 000 subscribers on YouTube andHitman: Blood Money on Rookie isn't THAT different

2010-11-28T16:24:00.000+02:00

Here's the celebratorial video, Don Fernando Must Die - 10k subs special:

And I finally played through Blood Money on rookie a few days ago. Considering my playstyle it wasn't much different from Professional, not to me anyway. The differences between Rookie and Pro is the ability to have multiple saves during a level, slightly dumber and slower AI, everything marked on maps and no notoriety. I couldn't remember to save during levels and only ever used the function once for my advantage, so it didn't change my playthrough much in any way. I even forgot to save between levels all the time, so once I beat A Dance with the Devil (second to last level) and quit for the night, I had to restart You Better Watch Out (exactly in the middle of the entire game).
Notoriety being gone had no impact on my gameplay whatsoever either, since I've never finished a level and left witnesses or camera footage behind.
Dumber/slower AI gave me more trouble than help at first, since on early levels they just wouldn't care about coin distractions (I like using it even if you CAN do without it). Later on in the game the AI seemed almost regular to Pro mode's, just a teensy bit less perceptive and just ever so slightly slower to turn around when noticing my footsteps. All in all the "accommodating AI" just widened the openings for suitable moments of attack. I suppose the word 'accommodating' means that if you fuck up a hundred times the AI will eventually forget you even exist, but despite some retries I never noticed a change between try 1 and try 5.
Everything being marked on a map didn't have too much of an impact on MY playthrough, but for a newcomer the maps would be much more helpful than most people would think. For the most part I could still remember where and when critical pairs of eyes would be from my Pro playthroughs, but that's because I spent hours just observing them when I first played the game. I had to, because that was the only way to familiarize myself with how they acted in the level, but with the Rookie map blips you could get almost the same info I gathered the hard way just by staring at the maps for five minutes at the beginning of each level. I personally prefer the less helpful map because it gives more for me to see and find out myself, and it's more exciting when you don't know for sure if a guard is around the corner or not. Besides, scrolling through 7 layers of maps in the middle of a critical moment just because IOI decided, for some reason, to needlessly separate outdoors from indoors even when they're at the same height is not as much fun as seeing things for yourself.

Overall, I just proved something I've always thought a bit more true, that true stealth games don't change too much when changing the difficulty. The objective is always to avoid detection and if you play stealth games as seriously as I do, you avoid detection the same ways whether the AI is weak or strong.
I can't claim that people playing on Rookie suck or anything, but I can say that people who got Silent Assassin ratings on Rookie can get them on Professional just as well, because the timing of guards and how they act for the most part don't change. I would still dare to recommend even newcomers to start on Normal or Expert anyway, because the ability to save mid-level is the most important help feature for the casual gamer and it's really all you would ever need to make the game more fun.

And in case you also obsess over Blood Money, here's my completion times for the missions so you can compare them to your own and call me a noob and feel good about yourself. The difficulty doesn't matter, since I used the exact same tactics that I've proven to work on Pro as well and will bet you money I can do the same on any difficulty. Ratings were Silent Assassins for the most part, but lower for A Dance with the Devil since I always, ALWAYS blow up Maynard John instead of duelling with him. Amendment XXV was slower because Mark bugged out and... acted strange (did you know that if he gets stuck in the scenery and you catch up to him, he teleports to the rooftop?).

A Vintage Year - 4:24
Curtains Down - 6:00
Flatline - 12:07
A New Life - 5:17
Murder of Crows - 10:58
You Better Watch Out ... - 9:48
Death on the Mississippi - 12:44
Till Death Do Us Part - 4:15
A House of Cards - 12:34
A Dance With the Devil - 12:38
Amendment XXV - 14:18

Quick Update

2010-11-25T17:26:00.000+02:00

I'm about to hit 10 000 subscribers on YouTube soon and although I'm not too interested in celebrating over minor "milestones" I suppose I have to for once note it somehow and so I have recorded and edited a little video that I'll upload to YouTube once I see the 10 000 reached but the video isn't too special so don't get excited it is just a compilation of several different ways of killing one and the same target in Hitman: Blood Money and then a quick Silent Assassin run of the first level at the end and the most interesting thing about it is that I finally tried actual cropping of videos in Sony Vegas 7 for the first time and now I'll go play through Hitman: Blood Money all the way through in one sitting on Rookie difficulty to see what it's like because I have only played the game on Professional because I am awesome like that oh and I have stopped playing Fallout 3 because after writing the previous blog post I started sort of browbeating myself to feel bad for playing Fallout 3 and not thinking about the Second Sight LP so who knows if after the Blood Money run I will take a second sight at the Second Sight videos though I doubt it and by the way nice pun I made there bye.

Hmph. I actually sort of like rambling on about nothing for several paraghraps compared to this...

I like Fallout 3

2010-11-18T18:48:00.001+02:00

Uh... coincidentally with what Derek suggested in his reply to my previous post, I have been replaying Fallout 3 for a while now to see if I could have any interest in getting New Vegas.

As you know, Fallout: New Vegas has been recently released. It's the Fallout 3 type of new Fallout game done by the original Fallout guys, and from what I can tell so far it incorporates the new engine with the original details of the Fallout universe (for example, RadAway is once again more of a rad-hoovering kit than a bag of brown goo, very important for a game to get right!).
I weren't too interested in Fallout: New Vegas to be honest. After reading the reviews and watching some gameplay clips I thought of it as a Fallout 3 with a different tint and more bugs, and although I've never actually said Fallout 3 is crap, or if I have I didn't mean it literally, I've never really liked to praise the game either because I've felt it's had more than it's fair share of positive press.
After watching about the 200th video of Dead Rising 2 where a banana hammock showgirl Chuck is riding a tricycle (very original of all you thousand random guys) I decided to instead completely spoil some other game for myself that I didn't plan on getting anytime soon, and conveniently Spoony has done a bit of Fallout: New Vegas on his justin.tv channel. The game still looked boring to me, in the "these new features seem interesting but I don't know, is that all there is?" kind of way. Like when you are promised a plethora of features and given three examples, and in the end there's a total of four new features. Game developers, publishers and critics always exaggerate (which is why I think I may have a future in game reviews, all I do is bullshit) and try to make your imagination tell you that they're only showing 2% of what they'll give you in the final product when it's really 75%.

Anyway, like was written in the first sentence, Fallout: New Vegas' release brought Fallout 3 back to my mind again and since I have nothing better to do than play video games I started a fourth character in F3. Because I've already played through Fallout 3 before (you may even remember my Fallout 3 Platinum trophy post way back) I set myself a few key rules for this playthrough. No abusing of the game's design flaws or my knowledge of the game to make things easy for myself, no jumping out of my good guy character just to get sweet bad karma rewards, and no quick travel. Basically you might say I made the game a chore for myself.
The result of this playthrough is that I have changed my opinion: Fallout 3 is right fantastic and I do want Fallout: New Vegas now.
Seriously, restraining myself and playing the game like a role-playing game and not just teleporting between locations changed the game experience remarkably, and now I see Fallout: New Vegas as a new opportunity for a similar, but also a more powerful gameplay experience since I haven't yet managed to find as much about it as I did with Fallout 3. With Fallout 3 I fucked up and didn't play it in a way I should've right from the start, I read spoiler reviews, quick traveled between quest locations and whatever extra there was to miss I spoiled by reading the Vault, the Fallout wikia. New Vegas is my second chance for that special gaming experience I missed two years ago. I won't read anything more about New Vegas for now and when I do get it I'll play it like I've been playing Fallout 3.

What also made me slightly more interested in New Vegas was hearing people talk about the added nuisances like hunger, thirst and ammo having weight. Casual gamers, kids these days, probably don't understand why someone would want those features to stop you from flying through the main questline in 5 hours, but I look forward to the added challenge, or fun as I personally like to call it. When I initially heard about a "hardcore" mode when someone was whining about it being pointless and annoying online, mostly crying about there being a trophy for it that he felt he should get without playing on hardcore, I imagined a mode where the game is permanently locked on Insane difficulty, your saves are limited to certain save locations, your skills are crippled, no perks etc., but once I found out that all "hardcore" means is having hunger/thirst, ammo weight and mortal companions, I asked the nonexistant presence next to me "Why would you NOT play on hardcore mode?" What are gamers these days, little babies? What's next in line for games, you stop dying on normal difficulty? On Easy the enemies die when your health is depleted? In the foreseeable future games probably play themselves while you watch, and kids will complain about having to press the start button to begin.

If you didn't quite get the point of this post, I just went the long way around saying that I've been playing Fallout 3 lately and that's why I haven't posted anything.
I also played a bit of Minecraft, although it's starting to get more and more boring everytime I play it, and I played a few levels of Hitman: Blood Money. I've been wanting to do an indepth guide of Blood Money since the first time I played it through, but I really can't because everytime I play it or watch someone else play it, I find something new about it. It's a daunting task, writing a guide, and I'm already busy doing nothing.

On other news, I thought about buying my mother the "25 years of Dr. Feelgood" collection for Christmas, but my great plan was ruined at that same instant because finding it, or any other Dr. Feelgood cd is not simple in Finland. Oddly enough I do know a place in town that sells the one and only cd of the short-lived and far, far more obscure US band of similar style and name, Doctor Feelgood. All the more evidence to support my theory that I'm actually living in some sort of bizarro world where everything I know is wrong.
I don't often buy gifts and presents, but this would've been a cool one in my opinion because I don't think my mother knows about this particular British pub rock band but I would dare to bet that she'd like the music. Everyone in our family has a good taste when it comes to music.

Remember that post two months back when I said I had recorded MORE Second Sight and wanted to do something with the footage? Well, truth is that I intended, and still do, to upload it as a Let's Play, but nothing like the YT LPs I did (I really weren't being serious with those LPs, guys. Honest!). I'll actually edit this one. Heavily. And the commentary will be more along riffing, as you MST3K kids might call it (unfortunately my childhood was MTS3Kless). And the commentary will be edited. Almost completely. Out. And I'll have a video review to go alongside the crap. Don't hold your breath waiting for it all, though, it'll be posted on my blog as soon as it's up and I'll even post an advertisement on YouTube to fish viewers. Why anyone would be looking forward to see any new LPs from me at all is none of my business though.
You might be interested to know that although I have not even started actual editing yet, and probably never will at my pace, some progress has been made. I do have a Sony Vegas project file created for it, I cut the first 2 minutes of nothing out, I have cropped all the footage to fit the screen and most importantly I have realised that, very akwardly, my 5th joke into the damn thing was straight out of someone else's funny LP. I knew the joke was too funny to be one of mine the second I made it.
I wrote about the LP here to remind myself of it more than inform any of you about it, since I have a bad habit of leaving things undone and my PC is crapping out just enough to make me think I should organize my files before the smoke rises out of it.
Now I'll go play Fallout 3 and forget I ever even had Second Sight.

As an extra, here's the local weather report: since last week the snow melted, the water froze, the ice melted, more water rained down, and this morning it started snowing again and it looks like winter. Again. I hope it stays evenly cold from now on but it probably doesn't.

Darker times, lower spirits

2010-11-08T20:42:00.000+02:00

If you haven't noticed, for the past few weeks I haven't really posted much. That's because I haven't felt like doing anything lately. I often tend to write something in updates about how I haven't done anything at all, but of course that's rarely the case and in truth I just don't really think whatever it is that I have been doing is all that important or any of your business, but ever since it started slowly getting darker as winter approaches I have just felt tired and depressed. For the past week I have literally slept all day and only sat infront of my PC listening to music during the few hours of the day I have been up, and even when I wrote about Thief :DS and had my own Halloween movie marathon I wasn't really all that into anything. I haven't even touched a video game since Thief.
I can't be entirely sure yet, but I think I'm getting over the Autumn melancholy now. I feel like I should do something, though first I think I should get a haircut because I look like a hippie right now. Then I'll do something. Like play video games. Hey, you may think playing video games is just a simple hobby to pass the time, but trust me, suffering through crap like Paparazzi and Second Sight feels a lot like work to me. And the pay is bad.

Oh, and my computer is crapping out. If I don't post anything new until January, it's because my PC finally died and I can't afford buying a new one immediately.
And for a weather report, there's snow for real in Finland. Came down yesterday, almost melt this morning but not quite.

Gruesomely Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T21:13:00.000+02:00

Although here in Finland Halloween is a shallow commercial thing few know of and nobody actually cares about and the 'official' date is whatever the companies who make the money out of Halloween themed crap decide is best for them, this year it being sometime later next week, I'm frightful tonight.
Usually on Halloween I watch my favourite movies like Evil Dead 2 and 3, Return of the Living Dead 1 and 2, The Thing and Clue, but this Halloween I'm watching Japanese gorefests and Hitchcock's classics, in fact I just got done watching Vertigo.
I know, I know, Hitchcock doesn't have a whole lot of supernatural monsters or anything in the spirit of Halloween, more like in the spirit of murder your wife for a ton of cash, but... fuck you and your spirits, I watch what I want and you can't stop me!

Anyway, happy Halloween and stay ghastly out there. Should be easy, I bet you're a frightful looking bunch already.