| Have you played No More Heroes 2 |
[Mar. 18th, 2010|05:01 pm] |
STAB STAB STAB STAB STAB STABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTABSTAB STAAAAAAAAAAAAAB
It's basically No More Heroes: Streamlined Edition. Motorcycling and exploration are down, emulated 1980s gaming graphics and bizarre segues to first-person film noir cutscenes set in what seems to be the intellectual counterpart of a nudie booth (yes, I deliberately dragged out that description to get across how weird it is) are way up. Did they get rid of some things that made the first game good? In a sense, yes, but it's like the transition from one Mario game to the next: some things are going to be different, but you still hop and bop the same way. Or decapitate and mass-murder, as the case may be. The ridiculous factor is cranked right up again, and the usual reviewer-friendly quick hits are still present. ("No More Heroes makes you save in a bathroom" is this generation's "EarthBound has wacky backgrounds in the battles!"
There's really no point in focusing on what they left out. For example, the reduction of the city to what's essentially a mini-map combined with a list of locations simply changes the pacing structure of the game (no more going to the shop to get a job, then going to the job location, then going to the agency for a mission, then going to the mission location...) What I'm enjoying the most are the little changes: adding the roulette wheel for wrestling moves, so I don't feel bad trying to kill people that way; a second damage-based option for activating darkside mode, in case my luck is bad and I really need to kill this group of axe-swinging fat guys; and changing weapons on the fly, reducing the amount of time I spend staring at the drawer under the bed, wondering whether I want to take the Blood Berry or the one with the phony-sounding Japanese name on this run. Best of all, playing with Travis's cat now serves a purpose: she's gotten fat in between games, and you're helping her lose weight with adorable minigames. Hooray!
One not-quite-a-complaint thing, though. I love oldschool games as much as the next guy. But there are systems with slightly better graphics which could still be considered throwbacks and haven't yet been mined for the nostalgia factor. How about some SNES and Genesis inspired minigames next time? |
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| Everybody's got problems |
[Mar. 17th, 2010|09:42 am] |
I got new shoes, they're black and sort of runner-ish. The label said "slip-free soles" so that ought to be good. The old ones were literally falling apart. Every day this week I pulled an increasingly large chunk of foam out of them. I don't enjoy buying shoes, so I put it off as long as I can, then I look for the first pair that doesn't offend my sensibilities (no I do not want a garish red stripe down the side with your logo embossed) and if they fit, I buy 'em. From the Payless, because I'm not trendy enough for Shoe Company.
My only green shirt is in the part of the laundry which I haven't washed yet, so I'm wearing a white shirt with a green Fangamer pin. Nobody else at the office is wearing green; the closest anyone's got seems to be beige. I needn't have worried, and in fact I feel a little proud that I'm the only one who even bothered to worry about it.
In short, I've been solving problems. So why do I still feel like I got too many?
Who wants to come over and fill up this empty house with me? |
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| Addendum to previous post and continued thoughts |
[Mar. 12th, 2010|09:44 am] |
Did I say I was "approaching denouement in Arcadia"? Sorry, apparently what I meant was "about to go on a ridiculous fetch-quest in the Farmer's Market". I bet I get onto the metro only to discover that it's broken down and I have to fight my way from car to car...
It's weird what makes you think of the things you think, though. I just got into it on the subject of why I would do something I hate. The internet's a tough tattle: we all assume we know what's going on based on the most prominent aspects of each other's pronouncements, but the fact is, we know next to nothing -- we extrapolate from what we hear, with the result that a single complaint is taken as a final pronouncement of total forswearing upon the subject. Likewise, by only presenting what I dislike about Bioshock, I'm doing everyone a disservice by acting as if I only hate it, and am continuing to play it because I hate myself. Whoops!
So with that in mind, I'd like to mention some positives. I really like the stop 'n swap method of applying plasmids and tonics. SS2 had a method where it showed you a couple dozen upgrades and you had to pick one out of the blue, trying to guess what would be the most useful in the future. With the Gene Bank, all is ease and comfort, provided there's a terminal nearby in case you want to make a trade (there isn't one in my current area and I'm finding it a bit challenging to hack stuff right now.) I kind of dislike those "build your character your way!" games -- don't even get me started about the opening training sequence in SS2 -- but I'm down with a certain degree of customization. I was thinking of working the phrase "illusion of choice" in here, but I suppose the abilities I've chosen do influence my mode of play, even if it's not as complex as some other titles.
Speaking of hacking: I hold a quiet appreciation for the old arcade standby Pipe Dreams. I was never much good at it, but I found the essential idea captivating. Hence, I enjoy Bioshock's new hacking game quite a bit. The old "press random buttons and hope for the best" minigame in SS2 fit that universe better, but in Andrew Ryan's world, everything runs on pipes, steam, and gelatinous green stuff.
The old-timey music is wonderful, even if I don't recognize most of it. They say they're gonna use the music in this complementary fashion in Portal 2, which I wholeheartedly approve.
And, inasmuch as I complained about the characters in my last post, I admit that I am kind of interested in weaving together their plot arcs through the audio diaries. There's a story worth the telling hiding in here, and I'd like to see how it ends.
There you go: reasons why I'm still playing this game even though it bugs me. From now on, whenever I complain about anything, please assume that there are unspoken reasons why those singular complaints haven't led to my refusal of said things. After all, I only share what I want to say, which perhaps isn't always what you want to hear. |
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| Have you played Bioshock |
[Mar. 11th, 2010|11:53 am] |
Every so often, there's a moment in a video game which strikes me as a missed opportunity. In Bioshock, it happened right off the bat, and it made me wonder if I'd really be cut out for the game as a whole. You begin in an airplane, smoking a cigarette, and then suddenly you crash into the ocean. Control is gained as soon as you surface on the water, surrounded by fire, the fuselage of the plane behind you. In the distance is an ominous tower, which you're supposed to swim towards. I didn't. I swam to the plane to look for survivors. There were none. There was no reward for my actions except the gradual sinking of the wreckage. Oh well, I thought, as my character paddled towards the stairs. I guess I'm not supposed to be too altruistic or anything.
Now, having gotten a little further into the game -- I'm approaching denouement in Arcadia -- I know what was missing. It would've been easy to add a couple of burnt corpses in the water to represent the pilot and a stewardess, perhaps. They wouldn't even have to be searchable, if the developers thought it was too early in the game for that command to be introduced. As it was, I had a disquieting sense that not only was I the sole survivor (obviously the intended effect), but furthermore, I was the only one who hadn't been disintegrated. Ain't that a fine howdy-do in Rapture.
Of course, everyone in the game is advising me not to trust each other, and in turn I've ceased to trust the game. It's the same as System Shock was: every time you think something good is going to happen, whoops! The containment lock just broke on a shipment of radioactive psychic cannibal orangutans, you need to go pick up a John Belushi DVD to get the code to open the door to the garbage dump, and the only guy who knows the devilish secret of the malevolent architect/computer virus/ancient intergalactic god-species just died in front of you on the other side of a bulletproof window! I know, it's standard game design to provide "challenges" and "plot twists", but the Shock series turns it into kicking the player when he's down. If I was harvesting the Little Sisters instead of rescuing them, I'd have next to nothing to feel good about -- although I did get to kill that psycho plastic surgeon, so I guess that's something. But come on now. I don't care about Andrew Ryan, I don't care about Atlas, and the way things are going I'm not even sure if I care about getting out anymore (because there probably is no "out," just a big sign at the top of a ladder which says "ha ha escape is impossible sucker!" at the end of the game.) What am I supposed to care about? My "morals?" Fat lot of good those did me at the beginning. My steadily increasing battle capabilities? Baby, I've seen the splicers and I've read the logs; the sooner I can get this EVE flushed out of my system, the better. My own personal health? I've got the Vita-Chambers for that.
Aha!
It bothered me in System Shock and it bothers me now. In most FPS games, and indeed most games in general, when you die, it's "game over." You reload from the last save point and you take another stab at it, or maybe you get to keep your EXP but lose half your gold, but there's a palpable sense that you've at least gained some knowledge in exchange for whatever penalty you took. In Bioshock you just pop out of a tube somewhere and you have to run back to the place you got slaughtered. You have less ammo and supplies, because you keep whatever you had when you died. And maybe there's a couple of new enemies in your way, forcing you to use up even more resources, although you might get something back for it (randomly generated enemies being your primary source of money.) And things generally don't change once you've returned. I was fighting a Big Daddy, and he took me out after I'd gotten his health down about halfway. I came back and he was still wounded. Well, if that's how it's gonna be, why did I waste all these medkits trying to beat him in one go? It's simultaneously too challenging and lacking in challenge; my incentive for not dying is to keep myself from being annoyed, I suppose, and since I'm already annoyed it's not really doing much to hold me back.
I'll keep plugging away at it, of course. Now that I've invested this much time in the first place, I suppose I will take a certain degree of satisfaction from putting a bullet between the eyes of whoever's got me going on this wild goose chase after all. I probably don't get to, though. More likely, I come right up face-to-face with Andrew Ryan, and just as I'm about to blast him, someone stabs me in the back. Cue the sixteen-hour prison-themed maze level. |
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| I am going to stop reading you, Megatokyo. |
[Mar. 9th, 2010|11:26 am] |
(Gauntlet you should not read this entry it will only fill you with rage)
It takes a lot, an awful lot, to get me to stop reading a webcomic. I've been keeping up with Sluggy Freelance since high school. I stayed with Bruno The Bandit through an unbelievable number of update droughts before finally letting it go. Once I've put a title onto links.html, it stays there until one of two things happens:
1) I find another comic worth replacing it with.
2) I decide to drop two comics at once.
This is because links.html contains a two-column table which must be kept even at all times. It also makes it difficult for a new comic to get added, since it either has to come along at just the right time to get considered for a substitution, or I have to have a fit of discovery which leads to a double add-in (and the length of the list is long enough that I consider such additions unsavoury.)
Well, I think a change is coming, because I am out of patience with Megatokyo. I realized it with this comic. There's something like a dozen characters depicted in there, and I don't know what any of them are doing. Somewhere in the mess of rising and retired idols, arbitrary magic girls, and weird sentiments about how banging girls is like a video game (yeah go back a couple of comics and tell me that's not what it's about) I have ceased to care. Personal apathy isn't often my driving force for getting rid of a link, but it happens. Real Life Comics went when I got fed up after another "oh I'm gonna make big sweeping changes to the characters and setting because I forgot this was supposed to be a journal" comic with no real punchline. CAD got the boot because of a "storyline" where Buckley was like, "email me to say what dumb thing should happen next!" and "make all the characters kill themselves and end this travesty forever" wasn't an option. (Mercifully, this was at least a month before that comic upgraded the internet hate machine to version 2.)
In fact, MT has been on my watchlist of "comics I should probably get rid of" for a while now. But until today, I wasn't really sure what I'd replace it with. Luckily I've run across an old link to an acquaintance, something I think I wanted to add but couldn't justify last time I remembered it existed.
Congratulations, Jeffrey Rowland's Overcompensating. You are the Equation Of The Week. Someone be sure to let me know if Megatokyo ever ends or produces net-changing epic lulz. |
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| CON GRA TU LA TIONS |
[Mar. 7th, 2010|02:34 pm] |
There's this old Tom Green clip where he covers his hands in shaving cream and wanders around the Byward Market trying to get people to shake hands. At one point, he walks up to a lady, creamy palm outstretched, and says "CONGRATULATIONS!!" in this really ridiculous over-the-top way.
Every time I ever say "congratulations!" any more, I want to say it exactly like that. Every time I go in for a handshake I want to say it. Sometimes I just want to say it for no good reason. And nobody knows what I'm on about, because I'm the last person alive who remembers early-year Tom Green skits. I have it on VHS for heaven's sake, so I can't even upload it to show you what I'm talking about. Well, maybe this'll help spread some understanding and maybe it won't. I just thought I should tell somebody. |
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