[  Mood: In Love ]
[ Currently: Making a supersonic woman of you ]
Woohoo, a review I wrote about a videogame that got published a month ago is up on the main page! Click it here for moral victory. You know what this means, people? Some day, I could be making Joe Crowe money. Make sure to give feedback about how much I rock, unless you’re a filthy damn tentacle loving communist, much like KaosDevice.

And on the non-ephemeral internet based half of my life, I’m about to move to Orlando to start my long ago promised job working for The Mouse. This move represents a significant cut in pay and a significant increase in rent, so I don’t know why the Hell I thought this was a good move six months ago when I first got out here from California, but I’ve already started. So don’t stop me now, because I’m having a good time. I don’t measure things in celsius, that’s why they call me Mr. Farenheit!

Oh, hello, blog. Don’t sneak up on me like that when I’m rocking out to Queen. It’s not safe.

For you.

Right naw, I’m about halfway through the single player of the latest Splinter Cell game. I guess it counts as Sci-Fi since its set in the distant of 2007, but I dunno. All the technology in the game exists in some way, if not an analogue easily accessible with a 360 controller. Playing whacky 80s music in the custom soundtrack of an intense Tom Clancy spy thriller is better than chocolate cake, by the way. Jumping over a railing, sneaking up behind an Islamic terrorist, grabbing hiim, shanking him in spine with a combat knife and dumping his corpse over the side of a two hundred story building is a thousand times better when you’ve got "HERE WE ARE, BORN TO BE KINGS, WE’RE THE PRINCES OF THE U-NIIII-VEEERSE!" blaring in the background.

Oh, dear sweet baby Baphomet, I want the Highlander videogame to come out right the Hell now. Ooh, and I want it to come out on the Wii, so I can give the ol’ Adrian Paul glare to my TV set right before I chop a guys head off. I guess I could do that with a regular controller, but me want to choppy choppy.

[  Mood: Shocked ]
[  Currently: Listening to Deerhoof ]
My life is Hell. Listen to this over and over again for an hour to find out why. Goddamn you, insidious indie rock! Starts off all cute guitar riffs and apathetic percussion, and then, "Panda panda panda panda panda, panda panda panda bye bye." It’s like Bjork teamed up with Raffi and Reel Big Fish to make an entire album of songs that will get stuck in you brain, FOREVER. This is the kind of thing what drove Hunter Thompson over the edge. This is a dozen times worse than Loituma. And there’s nothing that can get it out of my head. I’m listening to The Cure and still humming "Panda panda panda" over and over again. I beg you, reader, kill me and eat my brain. It will give you power.

Sigh. I guess I can keep on living, considering the epic release list November has coming up. F.E.A.R., Gears of War, Dead or Alive X2, Marvel Alliance, and probably a dozen other titles are all coming out in the next couple weeks. The purpose of this is two fold: To cockblock the PlayStation 3, and to have enough copies of games on the shelves that when December 25th comes, people like you can spend money on those games for your friends like me.

F.E.A.R. has been out on PC for about a year, but when it was first released, people were crying about the system specs so much that its sales didn’t really impress. PC gaming is kinda stuck in a slow downward trend, much like the western European economy and population index. I’m hoping that the console version catches on with 360 owners, because the developer is really talented. They shipped a launch title, Condemned: Criminal Origins, which was sort of a clash between C.S.I. and The Ghost Whisperer. Okay, so I don’t actually watch those shows and therefore that previous sentence is probably in no way valid, but if you also don’t watch those shows, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. Condemned had a lot going for it in the drama, storytelling and psychology department, so it should be pretty interesting to see what the producers did with a game that actually got good reviews in F.E.A.R.

Gears of War, I haven’t followed too closely. For all the praise its been getting, it looks really generic to me. I’m afraid that it’s going to be something akin to GRAW, which was so super realistic that it made playing it with a controller instead of a M16 seem oddly frustrating. I’m sure its going to be good Sci-Fi, but watching the trailers, I can’t help but feel like I’ve played this game before, or at least have seen its analogue on a Sci-Fi Channel Original.

And Dead or Alive X2. Mediocre dating sim with CGI titties! Woohoo! I am buying that so hard, but there are a few things I’m concerned about. First of all, the new hair system from Dead or Alive 4 still sucks. It looks like strips of fabric glued to their scalp. Secondly, the boob physics seem more cartoonish than they did in the past. I’m guessing this is customizable like it was in all the previous Dead or Alive games, but its a bit distracting in the new trailer. I’m thinking Itagaki should’ve toned things down for the demo, because its drawing a lot of critique from the fanboys, and the game ships in about two or three weeks.

panda panda pan pan, panda panda… GODDAMNIT!

[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Working in a coal mine. ]

So I’ve been doing some research into financing models for web based businesses. How much to spend advertising and where, whether to start with my own domain, when to start offering self referential t-shirts, how to build a fanbase, etc. It’s been a heckuva ride, and it seems like its 20% good comic, 50% good website layout, and 30% persistence. You’d think the persistence thing would be a more pressing matter, but nope. Artists seem to take weeks off at a time with no real negative impact on their business. Meanwhile, there’s a lot of people that have webcomics that people just have never heard of, and never will. I think the key is in getting decent web banners on major websites. For example,

Questionable Content is my favorite offender regarding the self referential t-shirt thing. It’s like Jeph Jaques draws his characters with the t-shirts he offers in the store as a way to help push them. Oh, wait, that’s exactly what he does. While a lot of his designs are bizarre yet unfunny, there are a few gems that bid a hearty "Wtf?" that I myself am tempted to purchase. The Indiana Jones as God shirt is particularly appealing, and I’d crap from laughing just looking at this poster while sitting across from my toilet:

For all of his painfully slow exposition and formulaic strips week after week, I have to say that I am impressed by a lot about Questionable Content and how it evolved over the years. Just looking at the first strip versus the latest strip, and you can really see how well the art improved. And the story moved forward after stagnating for about a year – the guy really found his groove, which is good, because on top of being talented, the guy uses his web comic to share indie music tips. I never would have known about Stephen Malkmus or Banshee Beat if it weren’t for the several days I spent filing through QC.

Hanyway, I got my scanner back today, so I should be able to start uploading images and inking them in photoshop. Or yes, Inkscape. I think Inkscape and Photoshop are mostly going to be a background thing, I’m really having fun defining exactly what parts of a sketch I want to keep by keeping everything in pen. A lot goes wrong with that, but, this is how the west was won or some other excuse to avoid technology that would make my life easier.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Reading , just kidding. I’m playing videogames. ]
2003. It was a good year. I assume fine wines were fermented, babies were born, a certain young blogger lost his virginity to a morbidly obese female bus driver. Frasier and Friends dominated Thursday nights for office workers who had many children to keep quiet and away from their wallets, quoting Seinfeld was funny in a non-ironic way, and Saddam Hussein statues were being shoe’d by the charming yet exotic Iraqi people. But what stood out the most about the abyss of that calenderial black hole of nothing that was 2003, was Fable.

Google image search is a cruel bitch.

Fable had a rabid fan following only The Phantom Menace could be nonchalant about. The producers of the game were promising the world at first – well, at least, everything that was in Oblivion in 2006, was supposed to be in Fable in 2003. Considering how fast the exponential improvement of feats game developers are capable of grows, that would have been an epic task, on par with understanding the previous convoluted sentence fragment.

Sadly, while the developers did have the skill to deliver on their promises, they were limited by the X-Box’s capabilities and a publishing schedule pushed on them by Microsoft. Rabid fan demands and rumor mongering also brought upon a flurry of ludicrous expectations, such as the ability to horribly murder children, engage in air to ground combat while riding a dragon, and explicit cartoon sex scenes. They wanted it to be a mini-game that involved "thrusting" the analogue sticks in different directions. I guess you could use the right stick to write the alphabet with to simulate cunnilingus.

Every review of the game said the same thing. Something along the lines of, "This isn’t the same as what we were promised, but its still an okay game." Bullshit. It is a great game, with plenty to do and plenty of replay value. If its still fun to play three years later, it was fun to play to begin with. If people had abstained from ruining every detail of the game’s playability, they would have found Fable to be absolutely the most innovative game of its time (2003). And I say that with a deep, loving respect of KotOR. The morality meter, the combat, the magic – everything moves at an aggressive and fun pace, at least when the disc isn’t loading.

The game is a bit more tedious than I remembered. I’m surprised by how the load times are moving so slowly, especially on a backwards compatible 360. I can understand why having an open world was scratched given the limitations of the original X-Box, but they could have designed the maps and quests so things could move more efficiently, so that the gameplay might actually last longer than the loading screens.

I get to make out with Legolas first!

Fable 2 is currently in development, and to my understanding, with a whole new team, which is good. Big Blue Box, a Lionhead subsidiary, made the first game, and they just loved their fans too much to implement fun game elements over fan demands. And they loved themselves a bit too much, too. You can customize your character to have the same haircuts and facial hair as many of the game’s project leads, including the Carter brothers, who I am a dork for knowing what they look like. If I ever made a game, I’d also be a bit narcicistic, but at least I’ve got an interesting, sexy, psychotic clown thing going for me. The Carters are just pudgy, bald englishmen, and thus, your character often becomes a pudgy, bald englishman.

Hi. We’re here to save the world and eat your last jelly donut.

In the end, Fable will always have a black spot in its franchise history. The franchise is marred forever by the high expectations of the proletariat, which is a shame, because its a great showcase for innovative concepts in gaming. If Fable 2 does not deliver for petty magazine game reviewers, whiny fan boys, and GameStop employees, the backlash will be so bad that there will be no Fable 3. So, the solution is to kill and eat all of those people before Fable 2 ships. Yeah, yeah, I know, "But that’s your solution to everything." When I stops working, I’ll start talking out my problems.

[  Mood: Sleepy ]
[  Currently: Playing illegal tag. ]
I did it. After five days of taking "liberties" with my PTO to work on "personal projects," I have successfully read the entirety of 8-Bit Theater. That’s five years of web comics in five days. I am a machine. Built to read web comics.

I’m not going to lie to you. 8-Bit Theater is not worth your time. Don’t do as I have done, do as I say. Skip it – its not that funny. The comic didn’t get off the ground in the humor department until around 2003, or possibly, early 2004. Even then, most of the jokes that do go off are blatantly stolen from pre-season seven Simpsons episodes, or just re-hashes of jokes that the author acknowledges we didn’t laugh at the first time he did it.

What was nice about going through the whole thing all at once was that I got to witness how a story is told. Not a particularly interesting story, but all the pieces fit – everything is there for a reason. In one of my classes at one point or another, I remember reading some guy saying, "If there’s a gun above the fire place in act one, somebody better have used it by act five." Or something like that. College is a mild, beer flavored haze at this point. Anyway, the guy who made this, he did a good job of sticking to that quote that somebody said at some point. I don’t think this is the type of thing you can start in the middle of – either you were a fan from day one, or you spent five days reading this garbage, frame by frame.

All of the characters have very two-dimensional motivations. The thief steals stuff, the fighter fights things, the black mage is evil, the red mage is a pompous homosexual, etc. The characters tell self deprecating jokes scattered throughout the years that are always much akin to, "Teehee, our motivations are two dimensional." This doesn’t make them any less bland and uninteresting. Maybe the comic is better in small doses, when you’re just reminded bit by little bit about each character’s drive to do the stuff they do. Of course, there’s the occasional breaking of character, but sometimes that feels like he just misattributed a speech bubble rather than deliberately tried to flesh out a personality.

And of course, if you have the pleasure of reading the comments at the bottom of the page after the comics of 2002… Well, Stewie Griffin says it better than I:

So, for those who didn’t follow it for the past five years, what could possibly motivate you to start from the beginning and work your way forward? Boredom and the desire to procrastinate things that truly matter in life, both of which, I’ve had in abundance lately. That is all. Don’t gots? Then go catch up on good web comics, like www.vgcats.com or www.homestarrunner.com. In fact, Homestar can take some time to get into as well – they had some shakey years before they perfected the joke rhythm, and there’s layers upon layers of self referencing humor.

But I guess that’s just the process. You suck for two or three years, stop it, and then people look back with nostalgia on your work back when you sucked, thus making your new material God-like and inspiring t-shirt buying rampages.

[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Watching u fap. ]
I’m not sure how the crap trackback pings work on all those sites that typically use them. I just ignore it and scroll past typically, so let’s see if vaguely linking to the trackback URL of a video of a horrible tragedy does anything for me.

And now I wait for the internet fairy to bring me traffic. I guess I may as well comment on the content of that video in the meantime. Basically, a bunch of rich European hippies decided that it would be pretty bad ass to go hiking in the most communist part of China. There they witnessed Bhuddist pilgrims trying to make their way to India to touch the Dalai Lama being gunned down by Chinese soldiers.

We’ve had quite a few people in the entertainment industry use the west’s value of freedom of speech to scare the Hell out of the public. Lots of cyber punk stuff conjuring Orwellian views of the future, wherein society is not free, the public is incapable of defending itself, religious tolerance is replaced by obedience to the state, etcetera. Pleasant places to unleash Johnny Mnemonic or V or some blonde woman running with a hammer on. But those characteristics don’t really describe the direction western civilization is headed, it describes where a lot of eastern civilization already is. Anything implying the opposite is just trying to prey on fear to make money, while anyone interpreting the opposite is just spitting on political opposition. Dystopian future movies like Aeon Flux, The Matrix, that one where Milla Jovavich ran around in front of a blue screen for two hours in slow motion are pretty entertaining, yeah, but that’s all they are. Pretty entertaining.

[  Mood: Hypnotized ]
[  Currently: Reading your mind. ]
It’s the weason we awe gathewed hewe, to-day.

Actually, I’m here today to tell Mr. Bey and the 411 other spammers who unsuccessfully comment on my blog about a faggy Japanese RPG I’ve been playing for the past several days. I bought Enchanted Arms, the game I complained about probably creating emo kids and fag hags, not because I was looking forward to playing it, but because I wanted to have something in common to talk about with a bunch of anime fans at my work.

I was partially dreading the experience, but its actually a pretty fun game. Not all good. I’m about three random encounters away from breaking the neck of the nearest kitten, but that’s nothing new. Lots of self deprecating Japanese humor, including a flaming gay guy who lisps, wears make up, and makes sexual advances on one of the main characters in an only slightly veiled way.

Can you spot the queer in this picture?

The awkwardness of having gay friends who find you attractive, I can relate to that. But I’m a very straight shooter. The day that I kill, have sex with and eat a man is never going to come. Sorry, boys. Maybe something magical yet horrible can happen at a full costume furry convention some day between you, me, a carpet cutter and a strategically placed hole, but I’m not a furry, so there go your chances.

I’m not all the way through the game, so I won’t elaborate for now, but I will say this negatively: The combat system is much akin to a big lump of dog crap presented to you on a chess board. It’s turn based, and kinda feels like that hologram game Chewbacca and R2 were playing on the Falcon, only boring, repetitive, and frustrating. You can move your pieces, trade party members out for a bunch of specialized replacements with varying attack radiuses and stat bonuses, but how many fucking creepy Japanese dolls can a person order to have the shit knocked out of them before they realize they have a really bad return on investment? An infinite number apparently, because I can barely go three steps without hitting a random encounter. Ah, well, at least the story is okay. For a faggy Japanese RPG, of course.

That said, I’ve been getting the creative juices flowing lately. I’m an okay arteest, and have been seriously thinking about starting an online web comic. I actual want to call iti that, "Faggy Japanese RPG," and map out a story line that’s sort of a parody of this, and just about every other Japanese RPG ever made. Something in the middle of Order of the Stick and SNAFU, with the storyline and the vulgarity. Still working on the story – maybe I’ll start posting it here once I get this link circulating? Hrum. Possibilities.

[  Mood: Cool ]
[  Currently: Listening to Satan ]
That’s right, I am an ass ett to the public interest. Not only have I landed the top spot on the sci-ku contest for the past three contests in a row (here, here, and here), but I am also quoted on the main page for Subspace 80s Edition, AAAAAAND, Joe cited me in a news article.

So what am I doing when I’m not carrying this mother of a niche science fiction website? I’m making YTMNDs, playing videogames and working on my abdominal muscles via osmosis. Totally works, bubs. Anyway, in the circumstance of my sudden, violent death, these YTMNDs should be released to the press:

GBI
Bad Places
10 Great Things About America

Beware of the Fight Club moment in that last one at the end.

Also, videogames. After five days of battling it out with the Tattaliglias, Scaramangas, and Donkiokongos, I have become the Don of the Corleone family. I have beaten The Godfather for the X-Box 360, and right when it was starting to become repetitive, boring and frustrating, too.

I can’t say that I can recommend this game if you have already seen the film, or even just the first one. And if you haven’t seen it, this is a good way to get an idea of what the story was all about over a forty hour playing time period. The missions are short and sweet, but they are spread out over a very large, open environment, with confusing assed highways, no off ramps, and a frustrating amount of invisible traffic that doesn’t pop into view until you’re two seconds from smashing into it head on at sixty miles per hour. Just like real life.

As an additional challenge to just getting from point a to point b, there’s how easy it is to get rival families and police pissed off at you. If you gun down a few dozen gang members in the street, their syndicates act like there isn’t an infinite amount of other people to replace them with, which there is. Hell, kill one cop and the entire station falls on your head. This can make a one minute trip cross town to get from one mission to another into fifteen minutes of annoying battles, both with stupid AI and a stupid camera system.

But let’s focus on what’s positive. What’s nice about The Godfather is that a lot of the original cast signed up to do voice work for the game, sans Pacino and Brando. There was a lot of hype that this was Brando’s last project before he died, but the producers deemed his recordings unusable and hired an excellent impersonator instead. I had no idea until I stumbled upon the wiki, the guy was really good. Basically, the best parts of the game are the cut scenes – great character models, great voice work, and your customizable character makes for a very smooth generic avatar. He even gets a few dramatic moments to flex his soap opera acting muscles, too.

The character customization is pretty interesting stuff. You can make your character look like pretty much any white guy you know. Sliding scales for weight and muscle give varying physiques, while the standard hair/face/clothes stuff is there, as well. I made my guy look exactly like Indiana Jones, which, trust me, was funny at the time.

The sandbox gameplay is limited. After the real money starts coming in, there’s little reason to continue to play the game outside of the story and mission mode. You can visit brothels, but all the girls there will remind you of your grandmother, and you can’t actually do anything to them, which is a double whammy. You can also bribe police, but that’s not exactly gonna keep you loading up the disc. You can shake down stores, but it becomes way too easy way too quickly, and again, there’s little point in doing that since all it yields is money, which is all over the place.

The last things to do that pose any fun factor or challenge are assaulting enemy strongholds, and robbing banks and trucks, all of which, again, becomes very repetetive and unrewarding. I’ve tried to take on the same stronghold about a dozen times now, haven’t been able to beat it yet.

To sum up, there is little replay value to this game. It has an iffy combat system, bad combat controls, mediocre graphics, and a great franchise attached. All in all, its just a great port of a bad PS2 game. It might be worth a rental, if you can find a place that doesn’t have a stick up their ass about renting 360 games, but perhaps not so much a buy.

Next time: I’ll describe the smell of the inner workings of my belly button, and wax philosophic about smileys.

[  Mood: Very Sad ]
[  Currently: Playing The Godfather ]
I have done something that I can only dream the Don could forgive. As soon as I show my face in the lower west side, I will be swimming with the fishes. For this transgression, I can offer only my most honest apologies.

I have mistaken John Marley for Abe Vigoda. Sally Tessio is not Jack Woltz. I was wrong, and I am sorry.

I have performed what the cheapasses in the video gaming community know as a "Game Stop Rental." I bought Call of Duty II used, beat it, and brought it back to trade towards The Godfather. I regret neither decision. The Godfather has been a challenging and deep game that I will enjoy for weeks, whereas Call of Duty 2 was more of a rental on steroids. I mean, the game was beautiful, but that’s about it. It wasn’t particularly fun, just nice to experience for novelty’s sake. On a scale from one to ten, 1 being novelty a la watching a Ronald Reagan movie, whereas 10 being fun a la having your girlfriend flash her tits on Splash Mountain, I’d say it was a solid 4.

The Godfather, though. Yeesh. The difficulty curve is pretty steep. I’ve ended up looking like Sonny Corleone trying to get through a toll booth on many, many occasions. More on that game when I’m not so young, dumb and horny. I wanna go to Disney World all of a sudden for some reason…