Mini Review: Back to the Future: The Game

Allow me a bit of a fan boy squee of delight. Not only that this game got made, but that it's not shitty. <fanboy>SQUEEEEEE</fanboy>

Seriously though, this game is really good. The voice acting is superb, Christopher Lloyd is back as Doc Brown and it's like they just wrapped 3 yesterday. He fell right back into character and it's great. AJ as Marty is...well to paraphrase Christopher Lloyd: if I didn't know that it wasn't Michael J. Fox, I'd swear it was. He is that good.

The writing is great; of course, they had Bob Gale, the co-creator of the series, as a creative consultant and from the interviews I've seen, he had a fair amount of input. Everybody at Telltale Games did an outstanding job of capturing the spirit of the classic trilogy and putting it into the game.

I was a little worried about the art direction, when I first saw previews and screen shots and what not; it looks cartoony, but it works. I really like the way the game looks, plays and sounds. I cannot wait until February for the next installment. In short, if you're a gamer and you like Back to the Future, buy this game!

Mini Rant

God damn it! WoW: Cataclysm has been out for what, three days and I'm already tired of this shit. If you're like me, and patronize a good deal of gaming related sites (i.e. spoonyexperiment.com or escapistmagazine.com) and watch a lot of videos on said sites, you've seen the ad for this fucking waste of life about a billion times already.

Look, Blizzard, I get it. LotR:O going free to play has really hurt you, so you're trying to something you claim is game-changing but really just seems to turn a crapsack world into an even bigger dung-heap. God I hate this fucking game. I've already bitched at length about it, and I'm sure Cataclysm won't make any difference to me, although I'm also sure that at one point, I'll be fucking bored enough or drunk enough to re-download this fucking vapid waste of time and try it out yet again only to be pissed off again at how utterly pointless and cartoony the whole fucking thing is and come on here to bitch about it.

Bottome line: stop eye-fucking me Blizzard! I get that you've got a new waste of time and money out, but I'm still not going to buy it.

Highlander: There Should Have Been Only One

I'm a nerd, in case you haven't noticed by reading this utter rambling crap. That's why it's odd that I've never seen the movie "Highlander" until recently. I knew next to nothing going into this movie other than the long sad list of crappy sequels, usually bitched about by The Spoony One. I'll admit, his bitching about the shitty sequels are what inspired me to watch the original and you know what? It's a damn good movie. Now I wish I had taken part in the Highlander battles while I was still participating in Dagorhir.

Anyway, the tagline for the first movie was "In the end, there can be only one." How does one make a sequel to that? It's built into the movie that there can't be a sequel without some serious retconning or ad-libbing. It could be done, and much better than how they did it, which I'll get to later.

For those of you who haven't seen Highlander, I'll give you the skinny: it follows Conner Macleod, played by Christopher Lambert. Is it weird that a Frenchman is playing a Scotsman? Yep. And yes, I've heard the complaints that Lambert doesn't do a Scottish accent, but he does during the flashbacks to Conner's past. It's not great but the dude tries. It makes sense for him not to do an accent during the present day segments; seriously, if I'm an immortal I'm going to try to lose my accent asap to try and be inconspicuous. Anyway, we see Conner hack some dude's head off in Madison Square Gardens. Yes, that's the opening to the movie. We don't know who the fuck this dude is, or the guy he's fighting with a katana or why they're fighting. Pretty badass scene to be honest, but after Macleod takes the guy's head, he experiences the quickening. We don't know what that is, for all we know, Macleod just blew up. Then we flash back to Conner's past. Get used to this. We flash back quite a lot to important events in his life.

The first flashback we see how Macleod became immortal. Pretty simple. He was a Scottish highlander (hence the title) and his clan went to war in 1536. He was killed by another immortal, The Kurrgan and comes back as an immortal himself. Then we see another odd casting choice in Ramirez. Sean Connery is always awesome, but let's face it. He's a Scotsman, playing an Egyptian masquerading as a Spaniard. Weird. Ramirez is Obi-wan to Macleod's Skywalker. He's the older trainer that explains everything to not only Conner, but to us. Immortals cannot die, except by severing their heads, they cannot have children, they do not fight on holy ground and when the time comes, they compete for the mysterious Prize. All the immortals duke it out until only one remains and that one is the winner.

The rest of the movie shows The Kurgan killing lots of immortals and flashbacks to more of Conner's life. Then we get the obligatory ginormous battle between Macleod and The Kurgan ending in The Kurgan's beheading and Conner winning the Prize, which turns out to be unlimited knowledge and power, as well as a normal mortal life and the ability to bear children. All in all, a good movie, well shot and including characters that we actually care about, which is rare among today's movies.

I'm not going to touch on the sequels here, if you want to know about those abominations visit The Spoony Experiment. I will voice my opinions on how a sequel should have been done. Sure, the first movie's favorite line was there can be only one. But a sequel could have been done if they put a bit of brain power into it. First we have to inject a bit of bullshit though. Show Conner on his death bed. He's recounting the events of the first movie to a friend of his, who we focus on more than normal, establishing that he's our new hero. Hell you could use Adrian Paul as the new guy; he's a swordsman, attractive, and hell, they used him in the later sequels as well as the series. He doesn't need to be a Macleod; although it could be possible if we establish him as Conner's son. After Conner dies, our new guy, who we'll go ahead and call Duncan since I've already got Adrian Paul in my head for this, leaves the funeral bummed out by the loss of his friend/possible father. On the way home he is killed in a car accident and we witness the quickening of a new immortal.

We witness his utter shock at waking up in a morgue and his starting out as an immortal, meeting other new immortals and explaining what he learned from Conner and eventually we see the game begin anew and the immortals coming together to battle for the Prize.

Sure, it's not a great movie, but by God it's better than Highlander 2: The Quickening isn't it?

Spoofs. (Warning: Strong language)

Remember in the 80s and early 90s when spoof movies didn't suck? The Naked Gun movies, Loaded Weapon, Hot Shots! and anything by Mel Brooks were comedic gold. Now we're stuck with the '"INSERT GENRE HERE" Movie' movies and that's about it. These fuckin' movies. I haven't seen one since "Scary Movie 4" and I'm fucking glad that I haven't.

I think it's a true indictment either of how stupid the movie-going public actually is, or how stupid Hollywood thinks we are. These fucking movies take the most annoying characters, bad writing and directing and throw in copious amounts of scatological humor and call it comedy. Listen very carefully Hollywood:

THAT SHIT ISN'T FUCKING FUNNY!


The only people that laugh at scatological humor are stoners, children and idiots; oddly enough the same people that keep the show Family Guy on the air. Sure, 15 years ago, I found this shit amusing but damnit I've grown up. Why can't these fucking morons?

See, back in my day, we had we had men who knew how to do comedy, by going completely over-the-top with the ridiculousness and playing it deadpan serious. Sure, there was scatological humor, but they didn't rely completely on the disgusting shit factor. And that's why they worked. No matter how over the top things were in The Naked Gun, Leslie Nielsen played it like he was Joe fucking Friday.

I'm just rambling and swearing at this point so I'll cut this short: QUIT MAKING SHITTY SPOOFS!

PS: RIP Leslie Nielsen 11 February 1926 – 28 November 2010

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Awesome. I am a fan of the Assassin's Creed series. I love the parkour, mainly because I lust to acquire the skill to do it. I love the hidden blades of Ezio and Altair, the story is intriguing if a little vague and the characters are believable and for the most part, like-able. Sure, Altair was about as two-dimensional as a sheet of paper, but that was kind of the point. He was taken from his family as a child and trained to kill. It's all he knows. He's basically a sociopath at the beginning of the game and as we move him through the game, he turns into a person. It's called character development. Sure he doesn't have an Arabic accent like all the others, but hey, its the Animus 1.0. It's still in beta, cut it some slack.

Anyway, Brotherhood takes everything that was awesome about part 2 and makes it smoke crack. There are new moves, the ability to use projectile weapons with your sword/dagger equipped and of course the lovely hidden blades. Now, I've not finished it yet, so I haven't trained any assassins, but the whole point of the game is to take over Rome and build an assassin's guild. Epic stuff here people. You also get to rebuild Rome, much like Monteriggioni in 2. Also, if you like, you can explore Monteriggioni in 2012 as Desmond by exiting the Animus. There are things to do as Desmond, such as check your email, which may prove useful and maybe give some insight into the other assassin's minds. There are also relics to be found around the town, left over from the siege at the beginning of the game.

The main new feature, and probably the one I've spent the most time messing around with is multiplayer. I don't play console games online often, mostly because I can rarely find people playing the same game as me (lookin' at you Prey). I think I've progressed to level 4 in the past couple of days but it is awesome. I've only played 2 different game types; one where it gives you a target and vague compass directions to him. You get to choose one of the deadly characters, stalk your victim and kill him or her while trying to avoid the bastards trying to kill you. It's sweet. The other kind of game is a team game. The first round one team tries to kill the other and the second team tries not to die and the second round is vice versa. Not as good as the other, but still cool.

Anywayyy...that's pretty much my initial thoughts of the game. May say more after I beat it and progress farther in multiplayer but I probably said everything I needed to right there. If you like AC, BUY THIS GAME.

UPDATE:

Finished the game. Upgraded all my baby assassins to master assassins and tore ass through Rome with them. Awesome. I don't think there's anything that's quite as satisfying in these games as calling on your assassin brothers to rain arrows down onto a group of guards that are in between you and a target.

On a side note, the ending was just as confusing as some of the others. Assassin's Creed 3 had better be a 40 hour game to explain some of the shit they've put me through.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow

"You like Castlevania, don't you?"

For those of you who haven't played Metal Gear Solid on the original Playstation (lucky bastards, all of you), Psycho Mantis says this if you have a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night save on your memory card. Which I always did.

Castlevania is one of the best series the NES ever gave gamers. Oh I know, people defend Mario and Zelda, but let's tell the truth, those games have basically been the same since inception. Castlevania has actually tried different things, with varying degrees of success. From adding RPG elements to what amounts to a classic action adventure game (in games like Simon's Quest and SotN) to trying to break out of the side-scrolling game play (Castlevania 64, Legacy of Darkness and Curse of Darkness to name a few that only kind of worked). SotN is considered the peak of the series and is apparently very rare on the PSX, and was my introduction to the series, and damn was it awesome. If you haven't played it, go on Xbox Live and download it. NOW.

I have to hand it to Konami, they have tried to put all the games into some kind of timeline, and isn't below saying games weren't part of the chronology. If I remember correctly, the two games on the N64 were removed, probably more because they suck than because they couldn't fit them in. Almost every aspect of those games were absolutely dreadful. So when a new Castlevania game was announced for the PS3 and Xbox 360, I think every fan was cringing in fear because we knew it wasn't going to be side-scrolling, they were going to venture into 3d territory again. Ouch.

Then we saw the teaser trailer. And it's narrated by none other than Patrick Stewart. Odd. But when Captain Picard talks to you about vampires and werewolves, you listen. So maybe this won't suck. Then they announce that Hideo Kojima, the genius behind the Metal Gear series, was going to have a part in the game. Now, I met this announcement with a loud, uproarious meh! Because I never really liked Metal Gear. MGS was ok, but after that, I couldn't care less. I don't care what anybody says Metal Gear Solid 2 sucked ass; any game that I have to play through a segment where the main character is naked and holding his junk so we don't see it is worthless. Anyway, the announcement that Hideo Kojima was going to work on the new Castlevania game was hot shit in the video game world.

Alright, enough beating around the bush, is the damn game any good? Well, yes, yes it was.

First off, when I bought it, I noticed the case is really heavy. I buy a lot of console RPG's like Oblivion and Fallout 3, so I figured the book was just freakin' huge. Nope. I pull the book out and it's like four pages in English, then Spanish and French. Then I look closer and it's two freaking disks! I don't know if that's just for the 360, because I think blu-ray has a higher capacity on the disk, so maybe it's just one for the PS3. Seriously, I haven't seen a multi-disk game on a console since I quit playing my Playstation. Damn.

So I figured the graphics would just be mind blowing if this game takes two disks. The graphics are great, suitably gory and detailed. Actually, yeah, mind blowing is a good description. My only issue is a lack of control over the camera; it's static and the view changes on its own. It does it fairly well and I was rarely aggravated by the camera, I just would like to be able to look around and check out the scenery; I had the same issue with Dante's Inferno. The sound effects were great, the voice acting was top-notch and the music was awesome. Especially in the music box area where we got to hear Vampire Killer from the first game. It was a welcome throwback to the original series.

There are four difficulty settings, the hardest unlocked by beating the game once. To get 110% of the game completed, you have to play on the hardest setting, Paladin. This setting is challenging, not balls-out hard like Halo 2 but it's a nice step up in difficulty. There are tons of things to find, upgrades to life and magic and subweapons like normal. And there are trials to do on each level after you have beaten it once. Some of them are really difficult, like beating a Titan in one minute and thirty seconds, to the downright easy, like beating the first level without all the villagers being killed.

This game is long too. Probably one of the longest games I've played recently that wasn't an RPG. I bought it last Tuesday and played pretty much constantly all through Wednesday and Thursday and still did't complete it until Friday. Now that was only going through the story, I didn't go out of my way to find stuff, I didn't go back and do trials or unlock stuff, I just played beginning to end and it took me three days. Not too shabby. There was something else I wanted to mention but I cannot think of it to save my life right now. Maybe it'll come to me later and I'll edit this again. Anyway, that's about all I have to say: if you're a fan of action adventure games or the Castlevania series in general, you have to play Lords of Shadow. You won't be disappointed.

Ugh

I keep meaning to get on here and talk about the latest game in the Castlevania series, Lords of Shadow, but I just keep running out of time. By which I mean my bed starts talking dirty to me and I pass out :D. Hopefully I'll be able to collect my thoughts sometime later today and post them. If I don't pass out again, which is lookin iffy.

Bai nao. ZZZZZZzzzz....

Stephen King's IT

Last week, the Nostalgia Critic did a review of this movie. He hammed it up, turning it into a Stephen King drinking game. Look, I have no issue with the NC doing this, it's his job to nitpick and go over-the-top for laughs, and the problems he pointed out with the movie are legitimate. But let's be fair to the movie: it was made for tv in 1990, so not only are the effects not going to be that good, but the story is going to have to be butchered. Not to say they did a bad job with the story, they hit the main points of the book and captured the atmosphere of Derry.

I'm going to compare/contrast events in the book and movie and explain a logical reason why they were changed.

Sightings of It


Almost all of the seven Losers' first sighting of It was changed from book to movie, but the changes make sense when you take into account budget and whatnot.

Ben: In the book, Ben saw It as the mummy while walking home from school in the winter. The movie was probably shot in the spring/summer and they couldn't afford to draw out the shooting long enough to actually shoot in the dead of winter. Also, Ben saw the creature on the frozen over Canal, a channel that keeps the Kenduskeag river flowing through downtown Derry. I don't know of any town in America that has something like this and it would have been to expensive to create some kind of analogue and so, Ben's sighting was changed to seeing It as his father in the Barrens.

Bill and Bev were unchanged.

Eddie: Eddie saw It as a leper under the porch of 29 Neibolt street. This would have introduced several plot threads into the movie that would have made it probably made it 2 hours longer, so it was changed for time.

Richie: Richie saw It as a moving Paul Bunyon statue. Let's face it; the computer technology that tv studios had to work with even now could not make a 30 foot Paul Bunyon statue look anything but fake. Back then, it would have been worse. This one goes to tech and budget.

Stan: Stan saw dead boys in the Standpipe. Once again, we deal with location and budget. What town has something like the Standpipe?

Mike: Mike saw a giant bird at the ruins of the Kitchener Ironworks. Once again location and budget. They would have had to create a field full of detritus from the exploded ironworks and on top of that make a giant bird chase a small boy. No way they could have done that on a tv budget in 1990.

So we can understand why these changes were made. Other changes were mostly for time; they left out the Neibolt street stuff and the children facing down the giant spider.

Another thing the Critic complained about was the flashbacks; and he's right to complain about that. Half of the story is told through flashbacks, both in the movie and the book. The thing is, in the book they make sense. The adults forgot everything about that summer and the phone call from Mike triggers their memories and they start to remember things that happened. As they remember, we learn what happened.  This isn't really explained in the movie and the flashbacks get kind of annoying.

I think the movie was made for fans of the book, who can kind of plug in the missing sequences from the book to make the movie that much better.

God I don't want to talk about what I'm about to, but it's all the people who trash on this book seem to focus on: the sex scene in the sewers between Beverly and the boys. Look, I know it sounds bad, especially when you take into account the kids are 12 but damnit, it's not the point of the book! First of all, did you pay attention to this book? Supernatural forces were keeping the kids bound together as one force to kill It. When they were leaving the sewers, the bond began to break down and they got lost. Bev used sex as a way to bind them together forever. IT MAKES SENSE WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF THE BOOK!

Besides, it's not like its written in disgusting detail like a Penthouse Forum letter; its very downplayed and sweet, not to mention vague. This is sex from the point of view of a kid who's just starting puberty. If you let something like this, which amounts to maybe 20 pages in a 1104 page book, hey, too bad for you. IT is one of Stephen King's best. The man not only knows what scares us, but how to write it.

CSI

I liked the original CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. I thought the premise was great, at the time there was a distinct lack of forensic shows and it worked. I hate cop shows, but I have always enjoyed science and stuff so this seemed like a happy middle ground. Then the spin-off started cropping up. Miami, New York plus like a thousand look alikes like Bones (which I love, I have no beef with Bones) and NCIS, which has since spawned its own spin-off: NCIS: Las Angeles.

Seriously, do we need this many shows about the same damn thing? The way I see it, the only one worth a damn  still is Bones, which is basically all the Fox network has going for it aside from Chef Ramsay shows. Vegas CSI should have ended long ago, when William Petersen left. To me, he was what made the show great; he was a quiet, introspective character who could be really funny at inappropriate times. Kind of like me. I thought they should have ended the show when he left, but no, somehow it endures. Come on guys, Nick Stokes cannot carry the show by himself, put it to rest.

I can't say too much about CSI: NY or NCIS; I don't watch them. I can tolerate NCIS sometimes, but it's hard to enjoy a show my 50 year old mother swoons over. Kinda kills the tension when she's hollering about how hot Gibbs or DiNozzo is. I enjoy the show, but it kind of grates on my nerves after 2 or 3 episodes and somehow we always seem to catch it on marathon day or something.

Now, regarding CSI: Miami. Oh dear god do I hate that show. Seriously. I mentioned it in passing on my FB but seriously, David Caruso chews more scenery in that show than John Travolta did in Battlefield: Earth. My god. He so consistently hams it up, I'm surprised there aren't teeth marks on some of the props. I know what he's doing. William Petersen usually had some kind of witty remark right before the title sequence. So Caruso's trying to do that. But see, the thing is David, William was clever about it. He didn't feel the need to chew scenery while delivering his witticisms. When he did it, it was always kind of sarcastic, with a smirk on his face. When you do it, I want to push my thumb through my eye and give myself a frontal lobotomy with my thumbnail. Seriously dude, stop it.

Well, I've said enough and I think sleep might be nice; I'm at the stage of weariness when you're sitting perfectly still, yet the floor decides its time to shimmy and shake. Night all.

Game Review: Sanitarium

I've been on an old-school pc gaming kick recently. Now, you have to realize that what I call "old-school" may not mean the same thing to everybody else. I consider early to mid 90's games old school, simply because I didn't have a computer at the time and when I did get one, I had never heard of these games.

Sometimes I go on IGN or GameSpot and search a game I have, say Thief: Deadly Shadows for instance, and I look at the other games it recommends. Sometimes the recommendations pan out like when I searched for T:DS and I found out it was the third game in the series and that lead to me playing the other two, which are much more tense and overall enjoyable than the third. One game I found while checking out recommendations was this one, Sanitarium by ASC Games.

Sanitarium, besides being one of my favorite Metallica songs EVER, is a nice little action game where you take control of a prisoner in a very whacked-out asylum. It's your job to figure out what in the hell is going on. The game is divided into eight chapters across three disks and..It's freakin' awesome. I'll admit, I got this one quite awhile ago and lost interest when I got stuck in the second chapter. I found it again the other day and re-installed it on a whim. There are a few things I disliked and I'll get to those but I'm going to start off with what was awesome.


The story was great. I don't want to give anything away, but it kept me guessing right until the end. The visuals were creepy and, although dated, were still good. The sound also added to the atmosphere, although most of the voice acting was, well, bad. Then again, it was released in 1996 and I don't think I've seen any game from that time when the voice acting didn't kind of suck.

Now, there were only a couple of things that irritated me about this game. Mainly the length. Even though it was eight "chapters" it only took me a few hours altogether to beat. Sadly, the controls were completely horrible too. Now, I'm playing on a touch pad on my laptop, so maybe it's better with an actual mouse, but I had real difficulty controlling the movement of the character and sometimes would be thrown in an odd direction just because I wasn't paying enough attention to where my cursor was. I would have liked an option to use the keyboard for movement, but oh well. It was still a great game and if you haven't tried it, you probably should. It's currently up for purchase on gog.com.

Hell's Kitchen

Hell's Kitchen has officially pissed me off. Well, not the show its self, but the dumb fucks on it. Assholes! Seriously, here they are, jack assing around, all of them professional chefs, something I would sell a kidney to be able to do, and they fuck up like this? Yes, they deserve every bit of screaming Chef Ramsay throws at them.

I fucking love this show, because half the time, these guys (professionals all of them) are fucking up stuff that I can casually get right. Yes, I know that it's always harder when there's pressure from customers, I have worked in the food service industry, I know how to deal with that pressure but damn. This guy, Raj is his name. I think they listed his age as 49, Chef Ramsay even said last week that Raj'd been in the business longer than him and yet the guy was a complete and utter jackass. Every time he was on the screen I wanted to jump into my TV and strangle the incompetent ass. He was constantly screwing up, when the guys lost the competition tonight, he didn't do anything but wander around and look stupid. What a wank.

On top of being completely useless in the kitchen, he was always whining in their version of the Diary room that "oh I'm the best chef here" and "nobody likes me, they're all out to get me" and "I'm gonna win". Dude, they didn't like you because you are utterly worthless in the kitchen, they were out to get you because, not only are you worthless in the kitchen, you are constantly screaming at the top of your lungs that you're awesome and that you're gonna win. To lift a line from Chef Ramsay: Piss off!

Meanwhile, on the women's team, there's a girl who's a little 22 year old white girl who thinks her shit doesn't stink and also insists on being the worst kind of ghetto bitch alive. Basically she's a female Raj, who is not only worthless and thinks shes fuckin awesome but is now gonna sabotage her own team to make herself look good.

These two worthless fucks are completely ruining this show for me this season and pissing me off to no end, but they are making such a scene that I can't focus on the other chefs to see if there's anyone that's worth a damn. FAIL.

Game Review: Metro 2033

I don't know whether to dislike this game or not. I'm incredibly under-whelmed by it. Maybe I'm just burned out on FPS's from days of playing Singularity. That may be it, because if I pick the game apart, it's pretty good. I'll explain.

It's a post-apocalyptic game, based in Moscow. Twenty years ago we blew the world to shit and the survivors took refuge in the subway tunnels. Pretty original; far-fetched, but not quite as far-fetched as the government preparing decades in advance for the apocalypse and building Vaults for it. Our main character, Artyom, was born when the bombs fell and raised in the Metro tunnels. A friend of his step-father is visiting the station (apparently named Exhibition, although I don't think this is mentioned until much later in the game.) The station is having problems with mutant attacks and also attacks by something called "Dark Ones". No, that's never explained; it's kind of like the weird shadow people in Condemned. They're there, they're vital to the plot but nobody really knows what the fuck they are.

The graphics are OK. The majority of the game is in the dark so you don't really notice them a whole helluva lot, but there are glitches. I don't know if it was just me, because the DVD drive on my Xbox 360 is starting to crap out, but the textures sometimes lagged behind the rest of the game so sometimes things were really fuzzy. Other than that they were good; the mutants were disgusting and rather creepy, seeing Moscow and a city blown to hell and plunged into nuclear winter was mildly depressing. The sound was basically what you would expect from a game where you're stuck in the subway tunnels under a nuclear blasted Moscow inhabited by mutants: lots of growling, grunting and other creepy sounds.

The other thing that struck me as original and actually making sense was the currency: they use military-grade ammunition as money. I know I already mentioned that, but I still think it's awesome. That was one of the things that bugged the piss out of me about Fallout 3. Bottle-caps? Really? What the fuck use is that? Bullets makes sense; in a mutant infested wasteland, bullets have value.

I don't know, there aren't any major sticking points that really piss me off with this game, but I still just can't tell if I like this one or not. Just...meh.

Semi-Halloween Related Post

I love the horror genre. I've been exposed to it pretty much all my life. I grew up watching scary movies, both old movies from the 1950s and movies from the 80s and 90s, which is when I was a kid. Stephen King is probably still one of my favorite authors of all time, but horror-wise, I have to add in Richard Harris, Dean Koontz and Mark Nykanen, who I don't think does horror exclusively, but he did write a particularly bone chilling book called The Bone Parade. More psychological than normal horror, but damned good all the same. Anyway, horror isn't just books and movies, there are some frightening video games out too. I wanted to talk about one of my favorite series and why it mystifies me that it is my favorite.

I'm a fan of the Resident Evil series of games. I've not played anywhere near all of them, but I've played all but one of the official numbered sequels. Well, I started Resident Evil: Director's Cut a few days ago; my PSX crapped out a few years ago, but I still have all my games and I can always use emulators, right? So here I am, emulator on, cd spinning in my drive, XBox controller plugged in, listening to the horrid voice acting calling up that feeling of nostalgia and I wondered to myself: Why in the hell do I like these games?

Nostalgia value aside, these games were awful. The plot was face punchingly stupid at the best of times, the voice acting was consistently horrid and I have next to no use for zombies at all, so why did I like these games? I blame RE: 2 which was the first game I played in the series and is probably still my favorite to this day.

Resident Evil 2 (Dual Shock Analog Version) was one of the first games I owned on the old PSX. Not only that, it was the first relatively scary game I ever played so of course I loved it. I was able to look past the poor control scheme, which still doesn't make any damn sense to me, and the hokey voice acting (not as bad as the first one, but still horrible) to see the gem that was there. After beating RE: 2, I played the first one, and to me it didn't hold a candle to the second. Neither did 3 or 5 for that matter, although I did enjoy 5. If you're wondering where 4 went, well I didn't play that one. It wasn't released on a system I owned except PC and the PC version bites the big one. To me, the series peaked with 2. The puzzles were fiendish, the creatures nasty and rather frightening, and the situation, while laughably implausible, was tense and nerve wracking. On top of that, it was essentially 2 games in one; there was the A game (for me A was almost always Leon) and B which followed the other character (Claire). While a lot of it was the same, there were enough differences between the two for me to feel like I was playing 2 games and hey, 2 games for the price of 1? Killer fuckin' deal, right?

Game Review: Singularity

I don't know guys. I enjoyed the hell out of this one, but now that I've finished it, I just don't know how to feel about it. Usually when I finish a game, if it's good, I'm bummed because it's over like I am when I finish a book. But here lately I've been remarkably underwhelmed with these games. I don't know if it's because I'm finishing them so damn fast or what but...I dunno. Lemme collect my thoughts and hash this out.

I'm having a real hard time thinking right now, so I'll start with a short plot description: You are Captain Renko. No, I don't know what branch of the military made you a captain, just roll with it. Typical silent protagonist, I don't think we ever see his face or really care for that matter. You and your team (read: guys to be killed before the tutorial mission is over) are sent to an isolated island off the coast of Russia. Apparently the commies were fiddling around with some things that they shouldn't have been and now the island's leaking enough radiation to kill an orbiting satellite. Damn. How'd they keep the island a secret? With that kind of radiation reading shouldn't it glow in the fucking dark?

Anyway, one predictable helicopter crash later, you're stranded, weaponless. Yeah, they sent a strike team in to investigate this island with no weapons. Maybe you lost them when the chopper went boom, but shouldn't Renko have at least a side arm? Don't they strap holsters on anymore? You start wandering around, reading notes, listening to audio logs and wondering why you can interact with 55 year old typewriters and why the phones still have a dial tone after that long. Hmm...This is starting to sound like Dead Space in first person. Not that that would be a bad thing, that game kicked ass.

They start up the what-the-fuck-o-meter when you walk into a destroyed room and get hit by a time bubble or whatever and poof! You're whisked away to 1955. You are soon hit by a car after pushing your peeping tom dad out of the street...wait no...That was something way cooler. Instead of re-living BttF like we all wanted to, you find yourself in a burning building and you end up saving a guy's life. Hilarity ensues when you return to 2010 and discover Oh Noes! The guy you saved has become a horrible dictator and taken over the world!

Yeah, it's pretty predictable after that: you run about, taking orders from characters you don't know anything about trying to fix what you did to the timeline.  Ok, so the plot isn't the greatest, yet I kept playing it, and I'll probably crank the difficulty up to extreme next time I boot it up. Why? I hear some of you asking. Because, childrens, the plot really didn't matter. Yes, this is coming from a guy who purchases games by considering if the story being told is any good or not.

Honestly, the thing that kept me playing was...Well I don't know. The weapons were good, but standard for an FPS. Where this game shines through is the TMD, Time Manipulation Device. It allows you to shift items and sometimes bits of the scenery back and forth 55 years. So, for instance, if you come upon a staircase that's crumbled to rusty bits and chunks of twisted metal and you need to get up it and you haven't had your tetanus shot lately, use the TMD and it will shift it back 55 years to when it was whole. Spiffy. Actually, it is fairly awesome to see staircases and walkways and fuseboxes flying back together. You can also use it on your enemies and age Russian soldiers into mummies.

Taken as a whole, Singularity is OK. Just OK. The standard time manipulation FPS plot and untrustable side characters was made up for by the awesome factor of the TMD. There is also a fair amount of replayability, with tons of upgrades for you and your TMD, as well as 3 endings and I think four difficulty levels. Not a great game, but it's one I will definitely be playing again soon.

Updates soon. Maybe.

No new review, just a quick update. I don't like giving a review of a half played game and I'm in the middle of three right now: Metro 2033, Alan Wake and Singularity. I've played the most on Singularity and I have to say it's probably one of the most original FPS's that I've played since maybe Powerslave on the PSX. I may do a quick write up on that one if I can find my copy of it.

Anyway, I think I'm well over half way through Singularity so I may do a full blown write-up on it, if I'm not too busy with Alan Wake, which I'm also finding intriguing, mostly because I read a lot of Stephen King and it reminds me of his writings. On the second episode now and it's decent. Haven't played much on Metro 2033, but I have to say that the currency makes much more sense in it than Fallout. It's a post-apocalyptic game where survivors have taken refuge in the Metro tunnels; anyway, the currency is military-grade ammunition, which makes more sense than bottle-caps or pretty much anything else. Let's face it, ammo is pretty much the most valuable resource anyway, why not use it instead of money?

Well, that's about all I have to say right now. I'll get back to Singularity after work tomorrow and write up my thoughts on it. I'll also hunt down Powerslave and go through it again if I can. And I may finish Legend of Dragoon and do something with it.

What the hell happened to Vampires?

Ok, I'll be the first to admit that I may be the only heterosexual guy who read and pretty much enjoyed the piece of romantic fluff called The Twilight Saga. Had to turn off my brain to do it, but I didn’t really wanna think at the time that I read them. But honestly, does anyone remember Anne Rice? Seriously, was I the only one who enjoyed Lestat de Lioncourt's arrogance and self-centered attitude?

Honestly, I thought Louis was a whiny, pissy emo punk, at least in Interview with the Vampire, but I think that was kind of the point, but doesn't it seem that he's somehow, become shiny and changed his name to Edward Cullen? But whatever.

I remember, growing up, that it was cool to be a vampire slayer. Remember the Castlevania video games? Simon and Trevor Belmont made it cool to kill vampires. Hell, even in Dracula killing the undead demons was a desirable thing. I dunno, I probably wouldn’t wanna get romantically involved with someone that’s gonna want to drain every ounce of blood out of my body and leave me as a desiccated corpse. That’s not what I’m looking for in a woman. Biting is ok in my book, but dying is not high on my list of things to do, know what I mean?

Critics always call the Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice “sexual” or “erotic” or “sensual”. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I’m a guy but I just don’t find anything at all erotic about it. They’re good stories, well told and Lestat is probably one of my favorite book characters, which happens to be a lengthy list including but not limited to: Roland Deschain from The Dark Tower, Durzo Blint and Kylar Stern from The Night Angel Trilogy and probably a dozen others. But I’m off topic here; I’m bitching about vampires becoming utter wussies. Vampires used to be men. Manly, visceral creatures, which broke into women’s bedchambers to suck the very life out of a woman and leave her drained, which is how most guys would like to leave a woman’s room, but few can actually do, so these ladies turn to the trashy romance novels with Fabio on the cover or vampire books.

But the beauty of the normal vampire novel (read: an Anne Rice vamp book) is that the vampires couldn’t care less about women. They come across as bisexual, and even that’s pushing it, because if I remember correctly, one of the books mentions that vampirism makes the sexual organs completely useless which made me utter an internal huzzah! because I really don’t wanna think about vampire sex.  Wait…how the hell did I get here…Must go back and collect my thoughts.

Oh yes. It used to be cool to want to be a vampire slayer; and it was mainly because of Simon Belmont and, in a way, Abraham Van Helsing (from Dracula, not that horrible Hugh Jackman movie). They even tried to get girls into blood-sucker killing by introducing Buffy, but judging by the success of Twilight and the like they weren’t successful in that attempt. It’s time to bring back our beloved vampire killers. KONAMI; NINTENDO! I’m begging you, please, let us dust off the Vampire Killer whip on a next-gen console with a Castlevania game that doesn’t suck balls! Please! I want either a new, decent 3-d Castlevania game, or a damned evil vampire movie. As it turns out, both of those wishes may come true soon. Lords of Shadow looks promising and I thought I saw an evil vampire movie preview the other day. Huzzah! I’m just tired of teenage girls and MY MOTHER swooning over brooding, emo pretty boy vampires like Edward Cullen. Am I asking too much?

Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here

I won’t lie; I did just that when I picked up Dante’s Inferno. The reviews I’ve read were mixed on it; some people complained that it was a God of War clone, which it is, but that’s not a bad thing. I don’t think I’ve heard a single person complain about GoW. I never got to play it, so Dante is a good stand in. People who’ve read the book bitched because it altered the storyline, changing it into a “damsel in distress” kinda thing. Look, I’ve read the Divine Comedy; I enjoyed the hell out of it. In fact, before buying the game, I re-read the Inferno to see how much of the original poem is in the game.  And I’m pleased to say, there was a fair amount; mainly from Virgil, your guide through Hell, but there are a few snippets and lines from Dante and other characters.

The problem a lot of people had with the game was the nudity. Naked men and women abound throughout the game and yes, at times it is gratuitous, especially Beatrice. At first, I thought that she should have been clothed, but honestly, the more I think about it, this is the afterlife. Is there any real need for modesty in the afterlife, let alone in Hell? Anyway, that’s not the point. Most of the nudity is justified, as the majority of it is in the circle of Lust. Let’s face it: the naked human form is what drives lust, so this makes sense. Besides, why are you bitching about nudity and not the hours long, buckets of blood violence? I don’t get that. I was just as mystified when people complained about the Hot Coffee mod in GTA: San Andreas. Look, it’s an M rated game; your kids shouldn’t be in the room while it’s being played, let alone playing it. Quit blaming video games for poor parenting. M rated games require you to be 17 or older to purchase. If you don’t want you kids to play violent/sexual games, don’t buy them! How hard is that? Once again, I digress; I’m not here for ethical debate.

The environments were very well done, and each represented visually the sin that the Damned were being punished for. The only circle that I thought didn’t really exemplify its corresponding sin was Fraud, but how do you represent that visually? My biggest complaint about the game, other than the ending, which I’ll get to in a minute, was the lack of camera controls. They chose to use the right stick (I’m playing on the Xbox 360 by the way) as the dodge controls instead of camera controls. Personally, I’d rather mash a button and use the movement controls to dodge and have decent control over the camera and the ability to gawk at the damn environment that the developers worked so hard on. I dunno, maybe that’s just me.

Now on to my other major complaint: the end. It’s a really short game; I think I clocked in around 5 hours or so, but I wasn’t playing on hard, and I didn’t take the time to find everything; I go back and do that on my second or third playthrough. It ends pretty much the same way as the poem does: Dante ascends to Purgatory. And then the dreaded words that haunt my dreams: To Be Continued. Ok. Like I said earlier, I’ve read the Divine Comedy. To me, the Inferno didn’t scream video game; it’s a dude following a spirit through Hell. Not a lot of action there; thus they changed the storyline and added in hordes of dead enemies. Ok. Now, Purgatory is even less video game fodder, and I think the developers realize that. I did a little checking around the interwebz and found out that they have no intention of making Purgatory. I can understand that, and applaud their intelligence at realizing this. But I wish they had figured it out earlier instead of torturing me with those three cursed words.

All in all, I enjoyed Dante’s Inferno. I can deal with the changes to the great poem and I can deal with Dante being a weapons-grade douche instead of a great poet. I can even forgive the “to be continued” crap at the end. For a hack and slash game, which I don’t usually like, it was excellent. I won’t be trading this one in to GameStop anytime soon.

Bioshock

Just a quick update to this one; I say late last night/early this morning…don’t really remember when this was so I can’t update it. Just deal with it. :)

Just finished playing Bioshock 2 late last night/early this morning and I have to say: I liked it better than the first one. It’s rare I get to say that about a sequel; usually they’re much worse than the original (Like Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within). I liked almost everything about this one better than the first. The ability to use plasmids and a gun at the same time, the power of the plasmids, the weapons, the Big Sisters, I just enjoyed it. The things that I disliked about the first one were mostly gone in this and I was happy about that. In the original Bioshock, I felt too much like I was being lead around by the short hairs, which I guess was kinda the point of the game; that was basically the plot of it. The second one, while still very linear, felt a little more open to me; I don’t know why, but I felt like I was able to wander around the areas more.

It also seemed to last a lot longer than the first one (to me at least). Plasmids were powerful, but not “I AM GOD, BOW BEFORE ME BITCHES” powerful. ADAM was more plentiful in this one, probably because there are 4 different sources for it: gathering with Little Sisters, saving/harvesting the LS, killing Big Sisters and ADAM slugs in the underwater segments. But to balance that out, there are a good deal of plasmids, each of which has 2 upgraded forms, and an enormous amount of gene tonics to add to your power. One especially lovely gene tonic was the “Drill Specialist”. It limits you weapon wise to just the drill, the research camera and the hacking gun but it makes the amount of EVE your plasmids use so miniscule that if you’re feeling froggy, you can go old school Big Daddy on the splicers of Rapture, which is decidedly awesome and gory as hell.

My only complaint was the “good” ending. It didn’t seem good to me; I went through the trouble of saving Every Single Little Sister in the game and it gave me a kinda lack luster good ending, but I guess that’s par for the course; the first game’s good ending was kinda crappy too. Anyway, I’m gonna say what every review I’ve read says: if you liked Bioshock, you’ll like 2. If you were sorta on the fence about the first one, like I was, you might like this one. If you hated it, don’t bother. Cheers.

Old LJ post #1: Regarding MMORPGs

I play MMORPGs (massively multiplayer online role playing games for those of you who don’t speak geek :-)). I even enjoy some of them. Now, having got that out of the way, prepare for the ranting!

World of Warcraft

This game is…Well, to be fair, it’s not awful…but it’s close. I’m serious. Look, like I said, I play MMOs, I’ve played the twisted abomination you people affectionately call WoW. I’ve played it for a good long while…Not long enough to max a “toon” out, but I don’t have that kind of patience or money.

Honestly people. I play games for plot. That’s what I’m in it for. That’s why I like Guild Wars: the plot may be weak and have more holes in it than Swiss cheese, but by the gods it’s there! There is absolutely no plot to WoW. I’ve played as almost every race; the intro “movie” to each does good at describing the race’s current plight, but you can do absolutely nothing to rectify that plight. It’s just a series of “go here, kill this, bring me proof” quests or "collect" quests which tend to also be “go here kill this” quests.  There’s no motivation behind these actions; the quest givers kind of sketch out a reason as to why they’re asking you to do this, but it seems like so much hollow prattling that it’s annoying.

Even the races that are “attuned to nature” like the Tauren or Night Elves have an endless amount of “go kill things kthxbai” quests that makes no sense; in the little bit of back story that I’ve managed to glean from the strategy guide says that the Night Elves revere nature and only kill beasts of necessity (which I take to mean for food and stuff like that, like American’s romanticized vision of the Native Americans before the arrival of the Europeans). Yet here I am as a fledgling level one Night Elf carving a path through the wilderness, marked only by the corpses of beast and bird. Seriously? They claim that it’s because of an “imbalance in nature” and seem to hint heavily that the Horde (read: bad guys) are to blame. So instead of laying waste to low level Horde to fix this “imbalance” I’m taking out the creatures that really aren’t to blame at all. That makes as much sense as America’s stand against drugs by putting the users in jail instead of busting the dealers and drug lords.

Oh lord, I’ve been ranting about this for almost a page and I’ve yet to touch on the most annoying and game killingly bad part about WoW: the endless, hour killing, drooling on my keyboard hoping it will short out and kill me level grinding. God even the name makes my stomach turn and my mouse hand ache. For anyone unfamiliar with the term (who am I kidding, nobody’s reading :D) this refers to basically camping out in an area, killing all the monsters in the area and waiting for them to re-spawn; lather, rinse, repeat, lather, rinse, repeat and lather, rinse, repeat…as needed. If this were required maybe for half a level every now and then, maybe it would be ok; I could get over it but no. It’s required for almost every damn level that you attain; and the level cap is what? 80? I don’t know, maybe it’s just me, and judging by the amount of people playing this cursed game it is.

Update:  Ok, I’ve played through yet another 10 day free trial of WoW and I may have found the only class that suits me: the rogue. Like I said, I was only playing for 10 days, but I think I managed to get almost to level 20. Now, you have to realize, I was doing other stuff for these 10 days, like working and sleeping and playing other games. If I hadn’t done any of those things, maybe I could’ve maxed out, or maybe I’d be a drooling idiot with sunken, hollow eyes from the radiation of the monitor and an endlessly twitching mouse finger, a corpse stuck in front of a computer, trying to grind out levels for all eternity. God how depressing an image is that. Not the point. Since finding my ideal class, I realize I may have been too harsh on WoW in my initial ranting. But I still stand by my ramblings. This game is not worth the price of admission; if it were FTP (free to play) I would keep it on my computer and play all the time.

Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar   

Ok. Done with that horrible game; let’s move on, shall we? Everybody bitches about LotR: O, saying that it’s a rip off of WoW and whatnot, but honestly, when everyone considers WoW to be the top echelon, it seems to be natural that they would want to take some things from WoW. But honestly, if we’re talking fantasy, isn’t every modern fantasy taking something or other from LotR? Why are we not paying proper homage to this lovely game? Alright, I admit it, I’m biased: I love The Lord of the Rings, the books, the movies (to a lesser extent) and basically all of J.R.R. Tolkien’s writings. So when I found out that LotR: O was coming out I wanted to try it out. I did and I fell in love. The amount of farming and pointless grinding present in WoW is there, but to a much lesser extent. There just seems to be a lot more love and time put into it than in WoW and I would expect no less; LotR has a fan base that spans generations and if they got it wrong there probably would have been fire-bombings by angry fan boys dressed like Frodo. But I digress. I can’t really say they stole the action bar and crafting panels from WoW; the action bar seems present in every MMO, and I would expect the crafting from LotR: O, since Tolkien was fond of including craftsmen among the tales of the great.  Like I said, I’m biased, but to me, it outstrips WoW in every aspect: game play, graphics, sound, storyline…Everything. It is what I want in a game, not just in MMOs, but in a game in general. On another note, this fall LotR: O is going free to play; kind of.

There are certain things you’ll have to pay for, although I haven’t read this in detail, as my current subscription comes down to $10 a month, and I’m ok with that.

Guild Wars

This was the first MMO I played. The fact that there’s no subscription fee is what mainly drew me, but it also has a plot. Like I said earlier, that’s what I play games for: story. It’s not a great story; typical xenophobic plot: vaguely humanoid furry creatures want to wipe out the humans, much devastation ensues. There are various other plot points involved, but I haven’t reached them, as I haven’t finished the Prophesies campaign. There are problems with the game, I won’t deny it. The lack of the ability to solo without henchmen (npc’s who you can recruit to help you die less), the necessity of choosing a second profession even if you won’t use it and probably some other gripes that I can’t think of right now because my brain is kind of fried.

Star Trek: Online

I can’t really comment too much on this one: I only played the open beta, but what I saw was decent enough. It was a mix of space combat and combat on foot, the graphics were decent enough and it had what passes for a plot in the Trek Universe so ok. Can’t say much more on this one, as I lack the funds to further go where every nerd has now gone before. Additional note after the fact: I don’t know if there are other races playable; like I said, I only played the open beta and that wasn’t for very long. As far as I know, you’re only the Federation. I’ll admit: I’m not a Trekkie by a long shot, I kinda watch the movies, and I may watch an episode of TNG if its on, but I won’t go out of my way to watch it. Now, correct me if I’m wrong, but the Federation is more about exploration and diplomacy, right? I know, the main enemy I was facing was the Borg and the general concensus of the Star Trek universe is that the Borg are EVILLLL, but seriously, I was blasting everything that twitched menacingly, which is normal for MMOs, but if you’re gonna do that, make Klingon the main race or place it during TOS when the Federation was at war with just about everybody. Dunno, makes sense to me.

Star Wars: Galaxies

Don’t really need to say much on this one: from what I’ve read, general consensus says it sucks, I played the 10 day trial and wasn’t impressed enough to disagree.

Star Wars: The Old Republic

Honestly, I’m genuinely excited about this one. I played Knights of the Old Republic and I really enjoyed it. This one is from the same people (I think) and it shows a lot of promise. I saw some game play videos and it looks like it may be decent, but sadly, once again I shall lack funds to keep up a subscription even if it is worth it.

Final Thoughts

This started out as just a way to bitch and moan about the shortcomings (in my perspective) of everybody’s favorite MMO and it changed into a review of every MMO I’ve ever played or (in the case of TOR) anticipated…and that’s OK, because I know nobody reads this and so what? I vented my spleen on all this crap and I feel better.

Update

I think I'm going to start posting my older rants from my LJ on here. I've had them written down in a Word document on my computer, as it's easier to put down my thoughts there as I'm thinking them, that to constantly have this page open on my browser. So over the next couple of days I'm going to go through this 8 page document of bitching and moaning, update what needs to be updated and try to finish getting my thoughts down about the massive retcon that needs to happen to the Star Wars prequels and how we can make them better. Most of the document is game related, with a couple of deviations, complaining about people my age and the one that I've gotta finish about Star Wars. So with no more ado, I'll get right on that.

On a separate note, isn't it odd how I write like I'm talking to someone, when I know nobody reads this? Just kinda odd. :D

Games.

If my thoughts seem a little disjointed right now, please excuse me. I'm trying to sort through what I was thinking about at work several hours ago.

Not exactly a review tonight. I just got off work and I've been thinking all day about video games. Specifically, games that irritated me during my childhood and have haunted me to this day. I kind of got the idea from Spoony's Bayou Billy review; basically he says that the game haunted his childhood because it was so hard, yet he kept playing it. My entire NES experience, with the exception of a couple of games, was like that.

Back in the day before the internet, there weren't any faqs or reviews or anything. Especially kids like me, who didn't subscribe to Nintendo Power, we were fucked when it came to knowing if games were any good. The only thing you had to go on was the box art, the blurb on the back and maybe what your friends told you. Needless to say, everybody got their share of shitty games. I'll go in depth about two in particular that I never beat that still mock me even now, 20 years or so later.

First and foremost, I have to say, Back to the Future 2 & 3 was probably my favorite. It's an LJN game, which is enough to make most NES fans shudder in horror, but it's not that bad. If you're looking for it to follow the movies plot, then you're going to be disappointed. It kind of does, but not really. The gist of it is, you play as Marty, attempting to get the sports almanac from Biff, but in order to do that, you have to travel between 1955, 1985 and 2015 and attempt to find 30 items and return them not only to their correct time, but the correct location. If you don't map it out, you're screwed because there are something like 20 streets on each of the 3 times. Seriously, it sucks. I think the furthest I got was about 10 items found but not returned. My dad and I had all three years mapped out, but we still couldn't find where everything was, let alone where it went. After you get through 2, you get to play 3, which is about half as long and not really worth it. I loved this game as a kid, but it still haunts me that I was never able to complete it. As if the game wasn't already knock-you-down, steal-your-lunch-money hard, but they make it freaking long as hell and don't bother with a password system. Fuckers.

The second game was almost the same. Same company, a movie tie-in game, time travel, nut-bustingly hard...Why did I like these games back then? Bill and Ted's Excellent Video-Game Adventure. The name almost screams "I suck!" doesn't it? It's not nearly as bad as it sounds, really! The object of the game is to return certain historical figures back to their time and make it to the Wyld Stallyns concert. Obviously you play as Bill and Ted, but the duo is split up for this adventure. Bogus. You alternate between the two on each level and each one gets harder until you're pulling your hair out in frustration because you've spent half the level in jail and don't even have one piece of historical bait. Oh yeah, I didn't mention that, did I? The historical figures don't want to return to their own times and so you need to find bait to lure them into the booth. Some of the locals are hostile and will throw you into jail and you have several items that you can use to either calm them, kill them or distract them, and you will be using them all to get through. I think the farthest I ever got was the next to the last level. Once again, maps are your best friend in this game, so much so that the instruction manual has map pages instead of note pages. The reason maps are required in this game is that it is completely random. I mean, RANDOM!!! There are certain places where the historical bait always is but the bait is random, you will find bait for figures that you don't need...bah, it's just confusing.

I got my NES for, I think, Christmas when I was 5 and I still own it. Through out those 20 years of gaming, I have only completely beat two games on it: NARC and Wizards and Warriors 3: Kuros Visions of Power. That one was incredibly hard and it was a very satisfying win. But those two games, from a few of my favorite movies growing up, still mock me, even two decades later.

Book Review #1: The Night Angel Trilogy

Oh snap. I forgot to mention I may be doing some book commentary too, didn't I? Oh yeah, that's because I thought of it this morning. Ha. Anyway, I read. A lot. As I sit here typing on my laptop, I have a bookshelf stacked two rows deep with books, at least four boxes of books in my closet and an unknown number of boxes full of books in storage lockers both here and in Kansas City.

Having grown up as a fat kid that hated sports (and I still do, but that's neither here nor there), books and video games were how I spent my time. I tend to like book series because finishing a book really bums me out and it's nice to know that there's another book after it.

I've read several, but I'm gonna babble about one I learned about recently and just finished a few weeks ago.

I actually learned this from a web video from LordKat, one of the contributors to ThatGuyWithTheGlasses.com. It's The Night Angel Trilogy, composed of The Way of Shadows, Shadow's Edge and Beyond the Shadows. They're fantasy, kinda. I hate to think of the phrase "action-packed" because it's the most over-used phrase that critics tend to fling about, but seriously, it is one of the only descriptors that I can think of to describe these books. I'll try to summarize the plot without spoiling too much.

The books follow Kylar Stern, a "wetboy", this universe's term for an assassin with certain magical abilities. And, you know, that's about all I can say to not utterly spoil parts of the three books. Reading these books takes some getting used to, because the author jumps around a lot between characters, but every time he does, it's because something important that we need to know is happening there.

God, it's so hard to describe them, but they are so wonderful that I seriously considered starting the trilogy over again after finishing Beyond the Shadows. That is probably the highest praise I can give a book or series; that they are so good I want to just start them over again from the beginning.

Game review #1: Thief Gold

Good lord, I own a lot of video games. Not as much as the Angry Video Game Nerd or The Spoony One or any of the other major game reviewers, but I have a fair amount. See, I've been gaming since I got the original NES when I was about 4 or 5. And after 20 years worth of birthdays and Christmases and just random buying, I've accumulated a fair collection of games. NES, Genesis, Playstation, Xbox, Xbox 360, I've gone through the normal consoles and enjoyed them all. But I'm probably gonna stick with more recent games, as I've not touched any older games recently that weren't for PC. And on that note, I'm going to review a PC game I've been playing a lot lately, mainly because they're working on a sequel right now: Thief Gold.

Now, this game came out in 1998, so it looks very dated compared to today's games, but it is still an excellent game. The levels are large and gorgeous, with a fair amount to discover in each. I've not gotten through the whole game, but I get nervous when I play it and need to take a lot of breaks. I try to ghost my way through, maybe blackjacking a couple guards along the way, but because of the darkness and Garrett's complete lack of any decent sword skills, it gets nerve wracking. Add in zombies and other critters that can kill you and it's just plain creepy. The voice acting is really hit and miss, which is normal for the time; Garrett is especially well done by Stephen Russell who has continued to voice him throughout the series.

All in all, Thief is a great game and a great series. It's hard to say "if you like 'insert genre here', you'll like this" because Thief is a genre-bending game. It's what's called a first person sneaker. If you enjoy stealth games and first person games, you should enjoy Thief. Cheers, you taffers. ;-)

Restaurant Review #1: Cafe D'New Orleans

At least I think that's the name. It's a local restaurant up in D'Iberville that we went to a couple months back. It was...Ok. I've eaten worse. If you know me, you know how much it hurts to admit that; I like to think that I've got a mildly refined palate and admitting that I've eaten some food that most professional chefs wouldn't feed to their dogs is shameful.

Ok, lemme say what I liked about this place, that should help me gather my thoughts.

First of all, the atmosphere was very home-y. It felt like the restaurant in my home town; we called it The Cabin, because the outside looked like a log cabin. It was just a little place that we went to because we felt comfortable there. That was how this place felt; there are murals of the sea and swamp land on the walls, nets and boat gear and stuff like that on the walls, just a really charming place. I guess that's the word I'm looking for: charming. 


The charm ended when I picked up the menu. It's mostly seafood; that's not a problem, I like that. In a place this close to the Gulf of Mexico, I expect to see seafood and would hope that they're buying locally. The menu is not large; I cannot remember everything on it, but it was a relatively small menu. We all ordered different things, like we usually do at a new restaurant, but we all started with salads, again normal for us. My problem with the salad may seem like a minor thing, but the surrounding area needs to be taken into consideration.

This restaurant is a stone's throw from a large farmer's market. I know, because I work with a lady that habitually goes there to buy and sell. The salad at this place was obviously out of a bag. Now don't get my wrong; I'd rather have bagged salad than no salad at all, but it was that really plastic tasting lettuce that only seems to brown under refrigeration like a week later. I expect better out of a restaurant that's maybe 100 yards from a farmer's market. Maybe they have a good reason, but I doubt it.

Next. I only remember what my mother and I ordered. I'll start with hers, because it pisses me off significantly less. Basically what she got was what in a better restaurant is called a chophouse steak or salisbury steak. Simply put it was a hamburger smothered in gravy and, get this: served over rice. Lemme say this now: I love rice, but seriously, this dish should have been served with mashed potatoes. I hate mashed potatoes, but honestly this needed them. The rice may not have irritated me too much, but it was undercooked, which I'll get to in a second.

I ordered...oh god it kind of makes my stomach roll to think of it...Blackened chicken and shrimp creole. I've made shrimp creole. It was damned good stuff too. I've also made blackened chicken, and it was also damned good. But you know what? It never crossed my mind to mix the two. If done properly, this probably wouldn't have sucked so completely and utterly and pissed me off. Words cannot describe how completely ASS this dish was. I'll start with what didn't suck. The sauce was flavorful and actually pleasant. It was almost as good as mine :-D.

Now the downside to this dish that could have been great but just wasn't. The chicken, as well seasoned as it was, was horribly over-cooked to the point of not just being dry but rubbery. Seriously, there are rubber balls that aren't as rubbery as that chicken was. The rice was undercooked to the point of being crunchy. Like I said, I love rice, but nothing irritates me quite like crunchy rice.

I've saved the worst for last: the shrimp. Oh sweet buttery Jesus the shrimp. Have you ever had really overcooked shrimp? Know how it's kind of stringy and rubbery? Yeah. Nasty. On top of that, you know how every cookbook and chef tells you to devein the shrimp? Because the vein down the shrimp's back isn't really a vein but the digestive tract? Yeah, whoever was cooking didn't know that, because the shrimp wasn't de-veined. Pardon my French but TABARNAC! There is no reason for this kind of high class ineptitude.

Ok, there is one reason, and it was broadcast in big letters on their marquee: Now hiring cooks.

New blog, same stuff.

Yeahh, this is my new place to put down random thoughts; nobody uses LJ, at least nobody reads my LJ and so I'm going to stop using it. Like I update it anyway, I don't think I've posted on there since February, but anyway.

I'm Brett, like you couldn't tell that by the name of the blog; I'm a gamer and cook in my free time, so I will be posting my thoughts on new or old-ish games that I've played, what I thought of them and what not. I'll also be posting about recipes that I've tried; not the recipes themselves, just how they turned out, what they were etc...

I may throw in some restaurant reviews also; I have one in mind that I've been wanting to get off my chest, so I may have to rant a bit about it. I may come off sounding like Gordon Ramsay on Kitchen Nightmares during these, but oh well.

Umm...Yeah, not much else to say. Updates to come shortly; I generally rant in a word document then post said rant if I feel like it. I write how I think, so things come out very disjointed. I'll try to keep some kind of flow going if I can, but if not, meh.