Poop is for Butts

Should I buy a Cintiq? [y/n]

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:55:27 GMT

I've been planning/saving to buy this for the past couple of months and I will finally have enough for it in a week or so. Hooray!

or so you think!

They're cutting back the overnight shift at work so starting this fall I'll be (most likely) working a Monday-Friday 8-4 day shift like a normal human. Ultimately, this means I won't have an 8 hour block of time every day where I can just draw the whole time. Depending on where I am placed, I could probably still get away with drawing at work but not to the extent that I used to.

Basically I don't know if this will end up being a wasted purchase or maybe since I'll be able to draw digitally and faster, I wouldn't need as much time to draw anyway? If I don't buy it, I could save that money for something else. I was also saving up for a MacBook Pro so I could put it towards that. Or just hold on to it for something else in the future.

Any input would be appreciated!

Meet Ed Theodore Undying

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 11:01:02 GMT

Thu, 14 May 2009 14:30:19 GMT

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.

My 2 Credit(s) - 3/20/09

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:11:25 GMT

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!

My 2 Credit(s) - 3/5/09

Thu, 05 Mar 2009 10:41:13 GMT

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.

My 2 Credit(s) - 2/26/09

Thu, 26 Feb 2009 12:30:00 GMT

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
Did you expect me to not play this? I was going to write at length about how awesome this game was and why but instead, I will tell you that I played my first truly enjoyable game of Versus and it is mostly attributed to the fact that the other team was terrible and we demolished them.

Mirror's Edge DLC
I will be honest. As soon as I purchased this with my Microsoft Space Doubloons, I regretted it almost immediately. As I ran through the first new time trial, I wondered why the hell I would pay cash money for it. An hour later I was still trying to perfect my run on that same level. I've since poked around the second and third and in each one, I kind of miss the combat. The running puzzles are still amazing and getting runs down just right is still incredibly satisfying but I didn't get to beat a dude down with my swiftness. It got a little monotonous.

I've got so much on my plate right now that I don't know if or when I'll get back to it but I feel okay about my purchase since I've put a couple hours into it and had a good time.

Afro Samurai Demo
Take everything I said that made Onechanbara a great game and then actually make it a fully functional, well designed, pretty looking game and you'll have Afro Samurai. I doubt I'll pick this up any time soon but it would certainly be nice to rent or pick up used. This also got me interested in watching the series.

GTA 4: The Lost and Damned
I picked this up via Amazon and got 3 months of Live for free with it. GTA was also one of my favorite games of last year. These are reasons why I have no problems with spending twenty bucks on this game. Still, I am not as excited about it as I thought I would be.

I really miss Niko. Johnny is an interesting character to play, though he is just as "loathsome" as Niko was but he's a biker dude which automatically makes him kind of a dick. Niko had some charm to him and despite being willing to kill people for money. Johnny on the other hand does it for fun. The gang always talks about putting down deadbeats who are apparently anyone that opposes or offends them in any way.

In pretty much every mission, Johnny makes some pained faces as Billy, the newly released from prison president of the Liberty City chapter of The Lost biker gang, tells everyone to mount up so they can go kill some dudes. Then you go and kill some dudes without remorse. I guess that's what you get out of a GTA game; it was basically the same with Niko.

The game itself is still great. I'd forgotten how good it looked and felt to be running around in Liberty City. It took a while to get the hang of the controls again but after an hour or so, it was like it was last April all over again. So far the persistent missions are fighting with rival gangs and motorcycle races.

The gang wars are super easy. Find the other guys and then shoot them until they die. You start out with a sort of powerful but inaccurate as hell sawed off shotgun but I grabbed a pistol as soon as I could and started getting headshots on everyone. The combat is not too difficult in this game.

The motorcycle races are pretty much just like they were in GTA4. A few laps around a section of the city and most of the time, you just shoot at the other dudes until you get to first place and you stay there. This time around, you get to beat people off their bikes with a bat which is really satisfying. The motorcycle physics seem much improved although it might be because of the special bike you get. It's called the Hexer (Dexer? the font is weird) and it's a custom made bike just for you! If you ever lose it or leave it somewhere during a mission, you can just call your buddy up and he'll drop it off for you.

I'm definitely having a good time with this. It's What I'm Playing right now, the game I go to when I turn on my 360.

Whew, I managed to get more written than I'd hoped. See you next week. Oh, and in case you don't know for some odd reason, this is my Gamertag.

My 2 Credit(s) - 2/19/09

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 11:26:42 GMT

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.

My 2 Credit(s) - 2/12/09

Thu, 12 Feb 2009 11:56:45 GMT

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.

When the same thing happened the third time around, I thought I'd had enough but I figured I'd give the second level a try. This was a good decision. Instead of immediately going into combat, I had a chance to explore a little and fight a crazy person here and there. There really wasn't much to see or find (I didn't get that far in) but the experience was so much better than the one I had in the first level. The best part was where I finally got to see a bit of the co-op mechanics. Sheva, my AI partner, jumped to a building across the street where she was immediately inundated with crazies. I had to support her from across the street with a rifle. She died pretty quickly, mostly because I was not aiming carefully, but I actually had some fun.

Still, my complaints about the controls stand. You're either walking at a glacial pace or jogging slightly faster. You can't do either if you're shooting or have your knife out. I still see no reason why this is the case. You walk slow enough so that you can't just circle-strafe a dude and slash/shoot him until he's dead.

The only thing that really makes up for the fact that you can barely control your character is an incredibly stupid enemy. You have some hostile villagers running at you to kill you only to stop about ten feet from you and begin to very slowly approach you, weapon raised. Then, when they are in striking distance, they stop again, giving you at least a second or two to shoot or stab them before they finally try to hit you. Hit or miss, they wait another few seconds to swing again. When you finally manage to kill an enemy, they fall to the ground and then bubble into some kind of evil oil or some shit which disappears, revealing some ammo or maybe some medicinal herbs.

Replace the hostile villagers with a for-real zombie and that encounter sounds like it could've come straight from the first Resident Evil game and I think this is the core of the problem. It's not the controls that are clunky and antiquated, it's the combat itself. When Resident Evil first came out, we didn't really have a firm grasp of navigating a 3D space in a video game. Cameras were locked in place and movement was relative to your character. The game and the combat had to be built around this fact. Now, in 2009, we've overcome that hurdle and moving through a 3D space comes naturally for both developers and gamers.

But then you still have this game franchise. Playing through that game with contemporary controls would be trivial. Imagine your standard RE hallway with maybe three zombies except now you're Master Chief. There would be no contest, no threat. Even if you could only use melee attacks, you could still zip around and take out these zombies with minimal effort and so the tension and fear that survival horror games are based on vanishes. The only way to make enemies and combat which are still stuck in 1996 relevant is to impose artificial limitations on player movement and control. Instead of evolving the game with contemporary control schemes, Capcom kept the game the same and deprecated the controls.

That's not to say that this kind of game is bad or that it's wrong to enjoy it. I know I would love to see graphical updates of decade-old games, despite their now dated controls and gaming conventions. But this particular game does not appeal to me at all and I will certainly not be purchasing RE5 when it comes out.

Half-life 2
I think I'm done with this game. I ran back and forth under that stupid bridge so many times. When I finally managed to turn off the force field thing, I couldn't manage to get the car up the hill onto the bridge (apparently you're supposed to?) so I just gave up and walked all the way to the next level (Sandtraps?). Gamefaqs tells me I'm more than halfway done. Unless there's anything really super-compelling that I'm gonna miss out on, I'm finished with this game.

I feel like I've been playing forever but it still feels like the game hasn't started. I've just been going from Point A to Point B to Point C with nothing really happening at all. The combat isn't particularly exciting. I'm just going through the motions and it's not fun.

Contra on XBLA
I forgot I bought this and played it for a bit when Jessie and I had some friends over. It is a hard unforgiving game that was meant for kids and was designed such that you kept feeding it quarters. I am too old for that shit. Still, it was kinda fun and I got an achievement out of it.

Halo Wars Demo
I didn't have time to get too deep into this and I'm a little worried that I never will. I was hoping that T3h Haloz would force me into playing and enjoying an RTS but I'm not sure it will be able to. It is definitely streamlined and on easy-mode but I don't know that it's something I want to keep playing. I only tried the tutorials and that made it seem pretty easy to pick up and play. I'll give the campaign a shot before I make a decision on the game.

Left 4 Dead
I played a few times over the weekend when Gugger was down for NYCC. Good as usual. I finally got to try out the barn in Blood Harvest. We got scattered a bit and could've held it better but we did fine and I would love to try it again.

I actually played a bit on the PC as well. My accuracy actually went down a little, which is strange. I guess the sticky-aim on the console version works better than I thought. I also found that the game is a little harder. I'm not sure what it is but we died a couple times. It's probably because I'm used to playing with people and I was playing alone with bots. They sometimes don't get to the boat/tank/watever as soon as they can and they end up dying. Stupid jerks!

Coming Soon!
I ordered Onechanbara after finding out I'd gotten that illustration gig. That's the chicks in bikinis with katanas hacking at zombies game. How can that game not be fun?

Also, I ordered the GTA IV DLC The Lost and the Damned off Amazon. If you order it from Amazon, you can get 3 months of Live for FREEEEEE

Onechanbara should be here by the end of the week so I'll have some words about it next week.

Also, if you didn't notice, I finally decided on a name for my regular gaming posts.

[Insert Yet To Be Decided Name of Weekly Gaming Blog Post Here]

Wed, 04 Feb 2009 12:18:00 GMT

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.

Weekly(?) Wednesday Wrap-up

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:03:34 GMT

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.

As an infected, your basic strategy is to just be the biggest dick you can be to the survivors. Sure, it sounds great but I think secretly, I'm morally opposed to this and I always want the survivors to win. Granted, that's a small complaint but what I really hate is the fact that there's no training for playing as an infected at all. You're dropped in and immediately all your actions 'matter' and you're going to suck at it and people will yell at you. Okay, so I was doing a lot of the yelling even though I was probably the worst Infected player there but it was frustrating all the same (I did manage to get a really nice hunter pounce towards the end though).

As it is when you're playing as the survivors, lack of communication makes playing as the infect horrible. You do the most damage when you all attack as a group so if no one is talking to each other or coordinating, then uou're as bad as the computer AI on easy, slowly attacking the survivors one at a time when they're tightly packed together and highly defensive. The other team managed to destroy us because they attacked as a group. I think at one point they had three hunters pounced on top of three survivors.

Despite all this, I'd still like to play some more Versus once I've had a bit more practice.

Playing through a campaign with Jessie the other day, I noticed that the red barn at the end of Blood Harvest is a really great place to camp. At one end of the barn on the second floor, there are some exposed beams. If you get on these beams, normal infected have a hard time getting to you. If they come at you from the second floor, they aren't smart enough to run on the beams so they just fall to the first floor.

There are ways for the infected to get to you (jumping and climbing up to the beams or climbing up a refrigerator against the wall) but the process takes a long time and you can take them out at your leisure.

The majority of the zombie hord comes at your through a hole in the barn rough accessible from the outside over some hay bales. The hole is opposite the beams I mentioned so you can see them streaming in from a mile away. Whoever has the assault rifle can probably take them all down single-handedly but if he misses any, they'll just harmlessly fall to the ground floor where you can pick em off after the masses are dealt with.

The special infected aren't quite the pushovers the regular infected are but they are easy to manage as well. The best a Boomer can do is bring more infected and they can be handled like I mentioned above. The Boomers themselves are pretty big targets so you see them coming from a mile away. As for Hunters, well, in this kind of situation they are basically a joke. I'd be surprised if they managed to do much damage at all if they pounced a survivor. The other players are usually close enough to melee or shoot the Hunter off with little effort.

The Tanks actually have the same problem as the normal infected when dealing with the 2-story beam thing. It's funny to watch this huge hulking beast running at you only to fall from the loft onto th ground floor. Still, being as big as they are, the Tank can climb back up to the second floor or even onto the beam pretty quickly. Luckily, the climbing animation is labored and someone with the auto-shotgun should be able to take it out. The first time I tried this method, the Tank got turned around and ended up climbing to the top of the roof of the barn. He was so mad that he couldn't find us! He just skulked around in circles hitting the ground occasionally until I guess he timed out and he just fell over and died.

The biggest threat to survivors holding the barn are actually the Smokers. If you set yourselves up well, the Smoker will more or less have to be inside the barn to get a good angle to snag a survivor. Given that, it's pretty easy to shoot his tongue off or even kill him before he entangles you. If you aren't able to pull it off, he's still relatively close to the barn so your partner should be able to free you in a jiffy.

The best part of holding out in the barn though is that when the armored transport arrives, you can pretty much jump out the second floor window of the barn and land right behind it. As always, it helps if you've got a pipe bomb to keep the infected busy while you're trying to get in but you should be able to pull it off without.

Gamezzz

Thu, 15 Jan 2009 16:47:03 GMT

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.

Zoom

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 08:55:37 GMT

Q Train Zoetrope

Wed, 26 Nov 2008 06:34:24 GMT

I can't find an adequate way to embed the high quality widescreen version of this youtube clip so here's a URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXyE_2fmshY&fmt=18

Fri, 14 Nov 2008 07:04:29 GMT

You know those NASA guys are always being lazy and cutting corners.

I am so bad at this!

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 11:54:28 GMT

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.

HOUSE

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 21:41:34 GMT

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?!?

Work in Progress continues

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 11:49:59 GMT

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

Heart-comics!

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 19:30:24 GMT

Hey all, if you get a chance, you should become a fan of Heart-comics. Ya'll know how to use the Facepage right?

In case you haven't been keeping up...

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:47:12 GMT

...with coffee for breakfast, I've been taking a 2D animation class. Check behind the cut to see what I've done so far.

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 23:23:47 GMT

WOOO!!!

Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:52:30 GMT

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!

Our Work Is Never Over

Fri, 10 Aug 2007 03:47:41 GMT

Hawaii'd'd

Sat, 16 Jun 2007 01:01:16 GMT

As you may have guessed from my previous post, I recently spent some time in Hawaii. I present the following as proof of my excursion to our volcanic islands in the Pacific.

Hawaii 2007 - June 6
Hawaii 2007 - June 7
Hawaii 2007 - June 8
Hawaii 2007 - June 9
Hawaii 2007 - June 10
Hawaii 2007 - June 11
Hawaii 2007 - June 12

Or the entire trip alone

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 14:46:57 GMT

HAWAII'd

Meet Tyler Miles

Mon, 21 May 2007 03:24:59 GMT