[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Working in four hours. ]
Main street is lit up. Soft Christmas music rumbles low in the ambience. Elaborate reef decorations hang over head between three story buildings, one every fifteen feet. On one end of the road, between city hall and the town’s high class italian restaurant, a massive Christmas tree shines and glitters with all the warmth and love of a hug from a grandparent. On the other end of the road is Cinderella’s castle, its color changing every one hundred seconds into one of one hundred eighty four palettes and patterns, each one more lovely than the next. Electric lights suddenly turn on, turning the sad lack of energy that comes with dusk into an inspiring and energetic beginning of a great night. Then there is a slight buzz in the air, and the Bing Crosby music grows louder – its eighty degrees at night, but its snowing. A Christmas miracle. A young boy in a Buzz Lightyear costume looked up at me from his stroller, his brown eyes opened as wide as possible, and he shouted "NIEVE VERDAD!" through his big, white smile. "That’s right, ranger," I smiled back, "Real snow." His family, still looking up at the black night sky, trying to swat a flake or two with their hand unsuccessfully, continued on to Tomorrowland.

Merry Christmas.

[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Playing Rainbow 6 Vegas ]
I loves me some Tom Clancy. I have a lot of family in the military (namely: all of them except me), so I got switched on to his novels at an early age. The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, NetForce… I’ve been cover to cover with them all, mainly on cross country flights. While all the stories have been good, ghost written or not, the videogames written in Clancy’s name have been sort of a mixed bag.

I read Rainbow Six the novel long before I played Rainbow Six the videogame. It was a great story about the UN’s need to form an international team of specialists to deal with terrorist threats by sharing playbooks. Thus, cultural and strategic diversity gave the team its name, "Rainbow."

The Six of the title is actually a military nomer for team leader. And the team leader of Rainbow, the Six, is an iconic Clancy character, like Jack Ryan and Sam Fischer, named John Clark. Formerly a CIA spy and Navy SEAL, Clark is now an old man and has to stop the terrorists from the sidelines, sending his son in law and a bunch of European fruitloops after eco-terrorists and remnants from the IRA. Despite being full of diplomatic holes and unlikely terrorist team ups and leaps of logic in what foreign intelligence agencies are capable of piecing together, it was a great read and stank of foreshadowing to 9/11 – the first chapter takes place during a 747 hijacking by a group of Islamic suicide bombers, and back in the days when people in high places could get a permit to bring their gun on a plane.

This franchise inspired a series of videogames, titled after the books, but only the first few games included John Clark, the man who literally was Rainbow Six. I’m almost through the first level of the latest installment, Rainbow Six Vegas, and so far, there’s only five members of Rainbow, so its not really Rainbow, there’s no John Clark, so there’s no Six, and its taken place in Mexico, so no Vegas. Okay, that’s fine, it’s still early in, maybe things will change. But what I can bitch about is that the game has decided to take a more narrative approach, whereas earlier Rainbow Six games focused on tactics. This means that you can take one or, if you’re lucky, two shots before you keel over dead, whereas earlier games also allowed you to die easily, but it let you switch perspectives to your next team member in line to continue the mission and finish the fight. The character that died had a face, a name, a specialty and ranking in that specialty (demolitions, infiltration, assault, computers, etc.), a back story and a medical history. If they were wounded in the leg, they’d limp and could take a couple missions off to heal up. If they died on the mission, they were gone, and their specialties and utilities could no longer be used. You’d feel bad that not everyone made it home, even though the character development was minimal, if not non-existant. You’d become frustrated if you lost a team, especially if your failure meant that you’d lost someone who was the best at what they did.

Now things are frustrating in a whole new way.

The change in gameplay philosophy ensures that you’ll be constantly be going through the same process over and over – play for thirty seconds, turn a corner, get shot in the face, get pissed off, grow angrier as the game takes a full minute to reload, play for thirty five seconds, avenge your earlier death, get killed two seconds later, get pissed off, etc. Vicious cycle. It does not help that the friendly A.I. is borderline retarded, sometimes seeming to be waiting to be stumbled upon and killed, while the enemy A.I. is nothing short of genius and relentless.

In the end, whether this game is fun or good or not may boil down to how much work went into the story, since the strategy elements have been neutered. The last Rainbow Six game was not much better than a direct to video Jean Claude Van Damme movie, or maybe it was worse. So far in level one, things aren’t sounding too bad – something about Coyotes smuggling terrorists through the massive idiotic holes in the U.S./Mexico border. You know, the ones that someone can ride an elephant through preceeded by a mariachi band and not get caught.

Maybe things will turn around later. Who knows? If I can find my Zoloft, I just might be able to beat the first level before I lose it and drop the disc in the nearest gas station urinal.

Yeah, Mike, I’ve seen a *lot* of this game.

I think it’s a good idea to start creating more Christian fiction that is easily accessable by everyone, all ages, races, and yeah, especially look to include non-Christians in our fun. Marketing people are also wise to continue hyping the older stuff like Narnia and Phillip K. Dick stuff and (so I’ve heard in a convuluted and confusing assed way) LotR, all of which has been successful in the past and continues to be because they are really, really good times.

HELL YES! I mean…

But the Left Behind series doesn’t hinge on the books being really, really good times, they hinge on being hyped from the pulpit. Which worked really well, by the way, especially in smaller churches and on BTV (Baptist Television. I’m serious, it’s in extended cable. There’s a tubby black woman with floppy tits jumping around screaming on it right now). The writing translates the authors into characters in a post apocalypse world, and the whole story is totally narcicistic and is all about them and their courageous adventures and deeds, and how they assume the world will go down, and its all very petty and small and unrealistic, and I hate this series, you get the point.

So, we start with a book series I don’t really respect, but in all fairness, other people liked the story and I’m not that big on the whole "book thing," anyway. That’s why I’ve got a picture of Stiltman getting nailed in the balls with a rocket pinned in front of my toilet. Because I don’t need Reader’s Digest, I just need to see something and laugh a few times, and all I have to do is tear out a page of Perdido Street Station and my business is done.

Now on to calling the game a piece of shit before I’ve played it. Its like the developers asked themselves, "What would be the least fucking relevant genre to host this series in an interactive way that will totally cut off the console market, yet appeal to the eight PC gamers who love heavily censored violence and shitty graphics? OH I KNOW, AN RTS!" It’s the least narrative type of game that you can present, and since the focal point of the books is how two men survived the apocalypse, I’m guessing it’s not going to translate the story very well, which is okay, because it sucked. In a way, the genre itself is sacriligious, because in RTS games, you play God.

Its Alanis Morrissette. Get it? Because it’s ironic? Bah.

Anyway, here we have a game that has, from the looks of things so far and for whatever reason, been poorly made on the cheap, appeals only to the Christian gamer market, focuses on the "fuck you, non-believers, you’re going to suffer and then go to Hell" part of the new testament, and is of a genre that has never told a story very well, ever, and IMHO, was done after Starcraft in 1997. I’m guessing some Christian geek in his basement was playing Red Alert 2 and said to himself, "You know what’s missing from this game? FEAR OF GOD." He slapped on the name of a Christian franchise that was already popular and voila, a game for fifty bucks cheap. And you know what the worst part of it is? Some asshole I know is going to think, "Well… He’s Catholic… He’s a gamer… What can I get for a Catholic gamer?" AND THEN BAM!

It’s right there waiting for me under the Carone family Christmas tree without a return receipt, forcing me to re-gift it as soon as possible to make some other poor sap who doesn’t want it miserable. Or I can use it to piss off orphans by donating it to charity. That’d be the Christian thing to do. Heh heh heh, stupid orphans.

And I have no idea what the Hell the vikings are all about. Those guys show up in the weirdest places.

[  Mood: Confused ]
[  Currently: Eating both. ]
Now is the winter of our discount tent. As it is ten o’clock in the post-meridian, I find myself having waited too long to order a pizza, and have three choices.

1. Go out to eat at Denny’s or Wendy’s.
2. Finish off the ice cream in the fridge.
3. Stop getting fat by eating at 10 P.M.

If I go out to eat, I will spend upwards of five dollars on a meal that tastes like shit. If I finish the ice cream here, I will be hopped up on delicious sugar, and I will not have said ice cream for a later date. The other contents of my refridgerator are as follows:

11 Dasani Water bottles
1 Jar of Publix Brand Yellow Mustard
1 Tub of Heinz Ketchup
6 Sam Adams Boston Lagers
1 Empty box to something

My father told me the other day that these are the best years of my life. I am going to Wendy’s and will stop by 7/11 for toilet paper. That sentence was not a non sequitur.

[  Mood: Evil ]
[  Currently: Watching the internet. ]
1. Lock them in a room with Christmas in the Stars playing in the background.
2. Yell, "WHAT DID YOU DO WITH WALT’S HEAD, MURDERER!?" at a guy in a Mickey costume at Disney World in front of a bunch of kids.
3. Sneak up on a duck and punt it into a crowd.
4. Raise your leg, grab your ankle and do the Roger Rabbit while farting in an elevator.
5. Take a bite out of every piece of food at a cafeteria lunch line, and then put it all back. Then vomit on the register, and announce, "My what a lovely tea party."
6. Constantly talk about how much better the Star Wars prequels would be if it had been more like your eight years old fan fiction.
7. Be fat and brag about your black belt.
8. Approach a podium at a Science Fiction convention and refuse to step down until someone asks a question about your book.
9. Sit between rows of pews and meditate on the Buddha while chanting in the middle of mass.
10. Naked public yoga.

Do I regret moving from California? Honestly, a little.

[  Mood: Cool ]
[  Currently: Eating fried chicken. ]
My job makes my feet hurt. I stand around and walk for eight hours, occasionally stopping to take a picture with my super sexy Nikon D70. Yet every day, I can’t wait to get home and lie down on my dinner table/couch/inflatable air mattress and fall asleep. I’m sleepy, I’m losing weight, I’m out of energy and motivation. It’s time to stop making other people happy, and time to play some Gears of War while lying flat on my back.

So how the Hell does Leslie Hall dance around like that and still weigh two hundred pounds? She must just… eat, constantly. At 7-11. That is not a gut that has occurred naturally over time, much like the average beer gut or post-baby delivery gut. That is a gut that is maintained and cared for and loved. It is a genuine, beautiful, luxurious lady gut. Or she just has the worst metabolism in the world. But you know what? Either way, it works for her. There’s nothing funnier than a high energy fat chick. She’s like a living cartoon character and I’d punt a duck to go to one of her shows. But not just for the gem sweater rapping.

I also have a mega crush on DJ Dr. Laura.

Oh, yeah. Me likey the bad irish liberal arts major look. Come to Jackie-boy, it gives me the small b-cup cleavage. I want a foot massage with special happy ending.