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[14 May 2009|10:28am] |
We decided to see the new Star Trek movie the Saturday after it came out. Jessie and I got to the theater early so we got in and grabbed seats for our friends. Most people went on looking for seats when they found out that the ones we saved were taken. This one guy, however, felt it necessary to call us a bunch of dicks for saving seats. He didn't even have to guts to say it to Jessie's face. He just muttered it loud and clear enough for her to hear it as he walked away.
Eventually, my friends showed up and we enjoyed the movie. The trailers all looked great and I told Jessie I wanted to see them all. Even the ridiculous looking G.I. Joe movie which I referred to as "movie porn."
Star Trek was good. The cast was great except Uhura. Not so much that she was a bad actor but there didn't really seem to be much to her part. That and she totally had a Legolas in Return of the King "A diversion..." moment.
Here is a drawing of the Enterprise I did for a Robotion post that will be coming up eventually.
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| My 2 Credit(s) - 3/20/09 |
[20 Mar 2009|10:08am] |
For the eleventy billionth week in a row, all I've really been playing is Left 4 Dead, although this time, a bit more on the PC. Thankfully, you won't have to read about how much I love that because I've got a topic on my mind and it has been eating at me like some kind of mind parasite.
A couple weeks ago Street Fighter 4 was released and the world rejoiced. I, however, greeted it with the same apathy I have for any fighting game. I've never really liked them and always found them to be kind of boring. I've certainly played my share of them starting with SFII on the SNES up to current day and with each of them, I get bored really quickly. After several conversations with Jessie and Bronson, I've managed to distill a few explanations as to why this might be and I present them to you henceforth.
The Arcade Experience
The first thing that came to mind is the fact that these games were born arcade machines. It's game design with quarters in mind in that these games were designed to get as much money from you as possible. To me, this is a particular hostile style of game design and I can taste it when I play. I'm not playing the game, it's playing me.
The Quality Experience
In my many attempts to explain to Bronson about why I was so anti-fighting game, it often came down to the fact that 99% of the time, the games go down exactly the same way. Two guys start a game, they mash some buttons, and about ninety seconds later one of them gets to tell the other guy, "Heh, I won that round. Wanna play again?"
Okay, so maybe that only describes a match between two low-level players. How about two guys who've played the crap out of the game and learned all the combos and strategies? That would go something like this: Two guys start a game, execute some combos and parries, and about ninety seconds later one of them gets to tell the other guy, "Heh, I won that round. Wanna play again?"
The high-level players would have practiced and trained their characters for hours (days? weeks? months?) to hone their skills and ultimately have the same gameplay experience. That seems like a tremendous waste of time to get to the same inevitable end that's equivalent to a coin flip.
Okay so I totally lost my train of thought. What it comes down to is that I've been looking for an objective reason for why this particular style of game doesn't interest but it ultimately comes down to personal preference and I hear that there is no accounting for that. This also falls apart because one of my favorite games is Geometry Wars and you don't really get any more arcadey than that.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter or if I'm just the one being the asshole.
Another game I thought of that breaks my model is Fight Night Round 3. I never bought it but I played the demo a lot. I had fights that lasted maybe a minute and some that seemed to last forever. It was slow and deliberate and fast and mindless at the same time. Getting in a brutal series of punches felt great and that's probably what it's like for high-level SF players when they're playing each other. I'm so full of contradictions!
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| My 2 Credit(s) - 3/5/09 |
[05 Mar 2009|05:40am] |
I've been busy trying to update heart-comics so I haven't had much time for playing games or writing about them. I've actually been sleeping a bunch more. What's up with that?
I did play a little Left 4 Dead and so I have a fun tip for anyone who is interested. As you probably know, the Tank is a big dude. He usually picks one of the survivors and chases after them when he appears and he will follow this character wherever he goes. You can use this to your advantage by having this character jump through a window. When the Tank tries to get through, he scrunches up as small as he can and sort of wiggles is way into the window frame.
While he's doing this, you should send two people outside the window, leaving the other two inside. If you're lucky, he'll alternate between trying to get to the people inside and outside and basically just be stuck in the window unable to do any attacks.
If you're the one the Tank is going after, you can do something else to keep him trapped there. Once he snuggles into the window frame, move to an area that is off to the side of the window. The Tank will continue to try to jiggle his way towards you. Here is a quick sketch of what the hell I'm talking about.
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| My 2 Credit(s) - 2/26/09 |
[26 Feb 2009|07:27am] |
Time is short for me today, friends. My boss had the gall to actually give me things to do during my shift so I didn't have the time to give this as much time as I would've like.If you want to read a nice long intelligent take on Street Fighter IV instead of me yelling about how much I dislike fighting games, check out this post by my partner in crime, Bronson.
Still, I'll do a quick run through of what I played because I know it delights you so.
( Left 4 Dead, Mirror's Edge DLC, Afro Samurai Demo, SF4, and GTA4 DLC )
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| My 2 Credit(s) - 2/19/09 |
[19 Feb 2009|06:26am] |
Onechanbara: Bikini Samurai Squad:
This is a game that I've been looking forward to for a long time. It is so wonderful. Don't get me wrong; it's a terrible game but it is so god damn wonderful. Several times I uttered aloud, "Oh my god this game is terrible. I love it."
The premise behind this game is that there are these girls with "Baneful Blood" flowing through their veins and this grants them the ability to fight legions of the undead with samurai swords in binkis. How could this game go wrong? Well, first of all, there are only about three or four attacks you can make and you have to make them over and over and over and over and over and over and over again with almost no variety. When playing with Aya, you start off with a sword attack and a kick. You can mash either of these to chain attacks together or interchange them and incorporate some jumping to mix it up. Not long after, you unlock the second sword which you would hope would make things a bit for interesting but, no, you end up doing a slightly modified version of the single sword attacks.
Secondly, the level design is almost non-existent and what little of it there is is reused several times over. So far, I've seen an outside city environment, an inside mall environment, and an underground sewer environment. They try to give off the illusion of there being more levels by making you go through it with a new character or with only one character. When you play through the levels, there are no indications of what you need to do or where you need to go. The map system is sort of helpful but there is very little information given.
This is true of the game overall. You are basically thrown into it and you're expected to figure it out. For a while, I had no idea why the zombies were all of a sudden grabbing my swords instead of being sliced in twain by them (your swords get bloody after multiple attacks and you have to clean them off regularly). At one point I exploded in some kind of dark energy and my character was surrounding by dark smoke or something with my HP was slowly draining. I eventually died because of this and didn't find out why until I accidentally hit the back button to find that I had an inventory. In my inventory was an item that would take me out of rage mode which is apparently what was going on when I asploded.
In addition to the sword getting bloody, your character also gets covered in zombie blood and filth. This is apparent in the character model and in an icon/guage that slowly fills with red. Once full, you go into rage mode. To lower the rage level, you either use heads of statues that you pick up along the way or walk by a statue that's somewhere in the level. Next to the rage guage is another meter that builds up whenever you chain multiple attacks. When you raise this meter to a certain threshhold, your character glows and their next attack bursts with white light. I figured that was just because I was doing awesome but this was an indication that I could do a combo attack which drains this meter. There's another kind of combo attack you can do which will drain your health. All of this I either figured out on my own or read on GameFAQs.
The game's story is easy enough to figure out even though it's absolutely ridiculous and nonsensical. So far I've fought some dudes in blue suits, a crazy teenage schoolgirl with a giant spiky sword, giant zombie meat monsters that attack by throwing regular zombies at me and red misty smoke blood monsters. As far as I can tell, the antagonist is some old lady who is out to get my blood. Also, there are clones! All of this is explained, sort of, either through giant pages of scrolling text or "cut scenes" where the characters stand there and speak lines at each other. The dialogue is actually sort of decently read in Japanese but the English translation is in some weird monospace font. The letters are all way taller than they need to be and there is no spacing between words so you just get these long lines of characters that require your full concentration to parse.
Despite all of these things, I love this game. There is something incredibly satisfying about jumping into a crowd of zombies and hacking and slashing away at them with giant ropes of blood peeling off in every direction. As terrible as the combat system is, the ever present combo count on the right side of the screen encourages me to play better and play longer. So far I've played a few hours of the story mode. I've heard from a few places that the Survivor mode, where they just hurl wave after wave of zombies at your until you die, is where it's at. No traversing terrible maps or deciphering greasy tidbits of plot. Just straight up zombie destruction.
There's tons more to complain about (ridiculous motorcycle sequences) and love (one of the characters is named Annna) which I may come back to after I've played some more. It was hard enough getting this stuff down. On the surface, this is a very simple game to talk about but as soon as I tried to put it down, I just kept remembering more and more stuff about this game that just blows my mind.
Other than this, I played a bunch of Left 4 Dead. No point in going over that, really. I may not have much to write about next week so I'll maybe go in depth about why Left 4 Dead is the best game ever and how you should feel bad if you're wasting time playing any other game.
Coming up next week, hopefully I'll have had some time with the GTA 4 expansion The Lost and Damned. I may try and play some Call of Cthulhu for Rebel FM's Game Club.
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| My 2 Credit(s) - 2/12/09 |
[12 Feb 2009|06:50am] |
Okay so this is a little late. I usually start writing this up Tuesday morning but I got a little sidetracked by getting offered a freelance job. Anyways, games!
Resident Evil 5 Demo (last time!):
So I played through the demo one last time and I got a hang of the controls. It wasn't ridiculously jarring like the first time around and it was familiar just from having played it so much.
For those who haven't played it, when you start the demo, you're given the option of playing two levels. I'd been playing the first one over and over and hating it. I imagine there is more to it than I played but all I ever get out of this level is running into a building and then getting a bunch of dudes running at me trying to kill me. After mucking about with them for a few minutes another guy with a huge axe comes at me and kills me. That'd been my entire experience with the RE5 demo so far.
( RE5, Half-life2, Contra, L4D, Halo Wars )
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| [Insert Yet To Be Decided Name of Weekly Gaming Blog Post Here] |
[04 Feb 2009|07:15am] |
I wrote up a big thing about playing the Resident Evil 5 demo some more but I decided to give it another shot and I should have a post up tomorrow specifically about that. On to the other games.
Hexic HD
The following is a brief explanation of how this game works. There is a field of hexagons. Your cursor moves around the field focusing on groups of three hexagons arranged in a triangle. You can rotate this group clockwise or counterclockwise. If three or more hexagons of the same color come together, they are cleared from the field and you score some points. If you manage to arrange 6 hexagons in a ring, you unlock a star. The star allows you to rotate the six hexagons around it. If you manage to arrange 6 stars in a ring, you unlock a gem. If you manage to get three gems together, you win the game. If you manage to get 6 gems in a ring, you super-win the game.
Up until this past week, I'd only ever managed to get 3 gems together but I was finally able to get that ring of 6 gems together and super mother fucking win that game. The best part of it was that this unlocked an achievement, the last of 12 that I hadn't been able to get in the almost 3 years of playing this game. That felt pretty good and now, I never have to play that game again.
Half-life 2
Ravenholm is scary! I generally don't play scary games because they always get me (Fuck you F.E.A.R.) so running skeleton zombie things in Ravenholm wasn't the best of times for me. The priest dude was pretty rad though.
I really can not express how much I hate the vehicles parts of this game with written words. You know how a dog will latch onto a stuffed animal or rope and then whip its head back and forth, I imagine to try and snap the neck of the thing they caught? That's sort of how I feel whenever I have to get into a stupid vehicle in this game.
When you're driving a vehicle, up is accelerate, down is deccelerate/reverse, left is left, right is right. This changes a bit if you're moving backwards, as you would imagine. If you hit left, the back of your vehicle starts moving to the left and your camera swings to the right. Makes perfect sense. Except that this occurs if you're just holding the down button. If you're speeding along and you want to stop hard, you hold the down button. If you hit left/right at this point, your camera will turn left or right as if you were moving backwards even though you're just deccelerating. Maybe you just come to a stop and start going backwards that quickly but it's really disorienting.
That's one of the things that makes me sick, literally near-vomiting sick, in this game. The movement in general is so unnatural. You never really feel like you're a person moving through an environment. You always feel like you're a camera with a gun strapped to it floating through a space or as I've described it before a one-armed robot on rollerskates made of butter. It feels more like a 3D environment is sliding around you and not you moving a character through an actual 3D space. That always gets my motion-sickness going full force.
Anyways, I did a bunch of buggy sequences and now I'm in some bridge or something. The Starship Trooper bugs were annoying as fuck. I'm still in the first third of the game aren't I?
Left 4 Dead
Didn't play as much of this as I'd wanted. Jessie and I messed around in Versus a little bit and we played No Mercy on Normal with 2 bots. It went extremely well.
I tried playing it on Expert again. I was alone so I didn't last long. If I had even just one other player, I think I'd be able to get through.
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| Weekly(?) Wednesday Wrap-up |
[28 Jan 2009|05:56am] |
In an effort to write and blog more often, I've decided to try and post once a week about what I've been playing. It's been almost two weeks since the last one so I've been busy. I kind of go long talking about Left 4 Dead but you'll have to forgive that. I am a little in love with that game. Anyway, here we go.
Resident Evil 5 Demo:
I was really hopeful for this game. I'd heard from all around that RE4 was really amazing and when I tried it, I hated it because you move like a robot from the 70's - only one axis at a time and at a snails pace. More recently, I'd heard that RE5 was RE4 but with better controls and graphics. How can you go wrong with that? Well, you still move like a robot and you still can't move and shoot at the same time. Asteroids solved this problem 3 decades ago.
Fallout 3:
Things are looking better for Fallout. I'm enjoying myself even though I died once or twice (stupid Fire Ants!). I really wish I had like a month or two to just lose myself to this game but I'm a grown up now. I don't have time for this. Also, I have other games I'd rather be playing.
One thing that really bugs me about this game is that it's really dark. And I don't mean teenage angsty and moody. I mean like they forgot to include light in half the areas. I'd told this kid to wait inside a phonebooth or something and I met up with him there in the middle of the day. He was standing inside the thing and I could barely see him. Sure, I could see super bright points of light bouncing off certain spots like his eyes, teeth, and nose, but it was almost pitch black. Sometimes I can see better inside with my pipboy light on that I can see outside during the day. What's up with that?
Hexic HD:
Started this up because I had a few minutes to kill and I wanted something easy to play. Forgot how much fun it was, did really well really soon. Then I screwed it up a bunch and I hated it all over again. If you haven't tried it, you should give it a chance. It's a really excellent puzzle game.
Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2:
This game is like a drug. It's so damn easy to just start a new game (usually Pacifism) that I can start playing and then I'll look up at the clock and 2 hours will have gone by.
Half-life 2 (PC):
I managed to get this running fairly well on my MacBook. I had to drop all the settings to low but I'm not looking for eye candy here. I actually made a fair amount of progress in my first session though I had to take frequent breaks because of motion sickness. I'm about to head into Ravenholm which is pretty much where I left off when I was playing this on 360. I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface of the game but that's what happens when the tutorial is over 2 hours long. The hover boat was still fucking retarded but I got to shoot at a bunch of dude with guns and their little heart monitors going off when you kill them is just so damn satisfying.
Left 4 Dead:
I finally got to take a nice big bite out of the multiplayer experience and I am a little torn. Having usually played on normal, going up against human opponents was a big leap since it's basically like playing Expert mode, if not harder. This is made worse when you can't communicate with half your team because they don't have mics on. That I can deal with though. With enough practice in single player and campaign, Expert mode will be manageable even with the handicap of the rest of my team. Playing as the infected is a completely different thing.
( More ramblings on Left 4 Dead Versus and Campaign )
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| Gamezzz |
[15 Jan 2009|11:13am] |
Been wanting to put gaming bloggish posts somewhere and this is where most people will see it. I'll probably xpost in other places until I find a good regular place for it.
Here's what I've been playing recently and some impressions:
Rock Band 2: Still awesome, still sinking so much god damn money into this game. Why they gotta keep releasing awesome songs? Still prefer drums over every other instrument.
Mirror's Edge: Everything about this game is fantastic except the few things that suck. First person parqour works so god damn well and it's terrifying each time I fall. The combat is great despite what a lot of the internet thinks. It's not perfect but it is really really good for something people aren't used to doing: hand-to-hand combat in first person. Regardless of this, the best solution is always the running solution. I'm looking forward to the DLC coming later this month though running puzzles aren't as much fun as badassedly disarming a dude.
Fallout 3: I'm not very far in and if things go as they are going now, I don't know how much further I will be going in. It's probably mostly option paralysis or just the fact that I don't have time to play 100 hour games, especially if I get maybe 2 hours of playtime a day. In light of that, the game is really good. I was expecting Oblivion with guns, which it is for the most part, but the sci-fi setting is much more interesting to me. Also, there are guns. Shooting still involves dice rolls which I hatehatehate but it's not so bad and shooting heads off mutants is always a good time.
I already screwed up at least 1 mission and my desire to have the best playthrough has me itching to start over but that's something I'll just have to let go. I figure I will certainly get my money's worth if I just play through the main quest, even though I've been branching off already. The dialogue is fun. Jessie gets a kick out of the obviously evil things you can say. She says she will play through but I'll believe it when I see it.
Dash of Destruction: This is the free Doritos game. It is actually pretty fun. I got all but the multiplayer achievement because I couldn't be bothered to find an online game. Running around a a T-rex destroying buildings and eating Doritos delivery trucks is a good time. Makes me want to eat Doritos.
Half-life: I just can't do it. I got nauseated and motion-sickness'd before I even got my HEV suit on. I'm hoping the fan created remake in the Half-life 2 engine will make it playable for me. I may just look for a video playthrough to get me through it enough to understand what-goes-on so I can just move on to Half-life 2 and its episodes.
Left 4 Dead: I don't need any other games, ever. This is a serious problem since I still have all of Fallout and Gears of War 2 to play through. I own 2 copies of it for 360 so we can get some delicious multiplayer going or if Jessie and I just want to play on our own screens. Jessie also got it for me on Steam for Xmas as part of the Valve Complete Pack. Switching between 360 and PC is a little weird. My accuracy and efficacy go down when going from PC to 360. Still, it looks great on my desktop.
I still have dreams of getting 4 360s and 8 people together for 4v4 Versus. Maybe this Spring for MoCCA.
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| Zoom |
[09 Dec 2008|03:55am] |
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[14 Nov 2008|02:02am] |
You know those NASA guys are always being lazy and cutting corners.
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| I am so bad at this! |
[25 Sep 2008|07:52am] |
I was going to write a blog entry on coffeeforbreakfast but I tend to just ramble and then lose interest so I'm going to try and write up a real post later. I just needed to show this off.
I will have details in a CfB post hopefully tomorrow.
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| HOUSE |
[04 Sep 2008|05:42pm] |
I've noticed recently that my LJ icon has been showing up as this:
Whenever I show someone else, they say they just see my rabbit icon. This only seems to be happening when I visit livejournal for the first time in a while and it only fixes when I force refresh the image.
Update: WHAT HELL?!?
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| Work in Progress continues |
[22 Apr 2008|07:48am] |
Here's my final project for my animation class so far. It got stretched and the framerate got bumped up to 10FPS so it's a little stretched and fast. I am thinking of keeping it down at 8FPS which means I only have like 9 more seconds to animate. We shall see.
Final Project Section 1 & 2
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[21 Sep 2007|07:23pm] |
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| WOOO!!! |
[11 Aug 2007|08:52pm] |
I just broke 10,000 gamerscore points on my Xbox Live account. It may seem trite and pointless but sucks to you and your assmar!
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