Order of the Stick is a great webcomic. I really enjoy it, and I really appreciate how great Rich Burlew is at creating cliff hangers. HOWEVER, there are a lot of angry forums on the internet, and Giant in the Playground’s forum is one that I’ve been targeting for a while. See, often times, I like to go into character and post on forums with the explicit intent to annoy and anger people I hate. And there was a lot to hate here. Rabid fanboys, people who stay in their RP character at all times, people who type English with a European accent ("top’ o ther mernin’ tuh ye, laddy!"), and the ever popular mightier-than-thous forum veterans.

That said, here is how I chose to piss them off. Well, actually, it’s part two of my Order of the Stick fan fiction, which unfortunately never saw the light of day. I’d have part one as well, but they’re surprisingly quick on that "delete thread" button over there. The first three names are those of the first three people who lashed out at the story – I had planned to continue killing off my "enemies" in the story until the thread got closed.

Not any more. One forum down, about a hundred thousand more to go. Next on the radar: The official Sci-Fi Channel forums.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Working …not! ]
Crackdown

The cover art on the box, the screen shots, and the developers had me believing that Crackdown would be yet another super violent cop-killing game wherein the protagonist would be a mouthy african american youth with a hankering to smack some ho’s shortly after tapping their asses. Now, not to get off on a tangent about violence in video games, because I hate cops just as much as the next man, but after games like 25 to Life, Fiddy Cent: The Videogame, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and Saint’s Row, I’m kind of sick of hearing the word "nigger" once a minute. Its just offensive to my virgin ears, and cheesy to my blaxploitation fan ears. Richard Pryor would not approve.

So I downloaded the newly released demo of Crackdown, rolled my eyes, and braced myself for a mindless run and gun with the words "shit," "fucked," "ass," "nigger," "nigga," "motherfucking," and "shitcock" interjected randomly and liberally into the gameplay. Maybe they’d even be combined into fun sentences like, "I’m gonna gat yo nigga ass like I fucked yo motherfucking nigger mama up the ass with my shitcock." Did Crackdown sucked as badly as I worried?

Fortunately, no! It turns out that the game’s protagonist is a *very* silent product of genetic manipulation that can be easily and efficiently cloned. You start off as a slightly stronger, faster and uglier human being and slowly work your way up to hulking superhero. Your character physically transforms based on what actions you take as you progress in your mission. If you do a lot of running and jumping, he becomes sleek and slender. If you do a lot of melee attacks and pick up heavy things and throw them at people, your character becomes the friggin Hulk. There are also upgrades for driving and shooting, but I haven’t noticed if that changes anything with the character model. Its also nice that you have a number of choices for your character’s face, as I hate the default selection (above).

The violence is over the top, but its a lot of fun. Everything about the game has a very comic book feel that doesn’t come through in the screen shots. Lots of cell shaded textures and tall buildings – the city is like a DC version of LA. That means a lot of traffic congestion in what is supposed to be an open world game, but once you get a few speed augmentations, its a lot of fun to hop thirty yards from block to block while raining bullets down on top of your enemies.

The storyline seems pretty generic, but unlike with Lost Cause, it doesn’t get in the way of enjoying the game. There’s no crappy voice acting or cheesy lines because there’s barely any voice acting at all. You’re told your mission is to blow the crap out of the city and then you’re sent on your way. This just might be a buy, especially if I can get one of the limited edition boxes that lets folks in on the Halo 3 beta.

Star Trek Legacy

I read on trektoday.com that a lot of the story had gotten cut from the game due to budget constraints, including a lot of voice work by Avery Brooks. This is incredibly unfortunate, as the game would’ve been even better if they’d been in it more.

After I got past the Enterprise era stages and banished Captain Archer back to the pit of Braga’s despair where he belongs, I heard an unmistakable voice. Captain James Tiberius Kirk. I have to admit, I’m such a geek, I cried a little inside, even though I’ve seen Shatner left and right in other shows on primetime TV ever since his career got off the ground again on Boston Legal. I really missed the character – all the bravado and deep drama. His missions take up a significant portion of the game, and commanding both the 1701 and the 1701-A was a thrill.

What was not so much a thrill is how frustratingly incompetent the friendly A.I. is. They don’t know what to do unless you gently guide them by the hand every step of the way. The combat is also slow and clunky, as it should be. I was really surprised to find that the Intrepid Class (Voyager) starship controlled very nimbly, and could do circles around larger capital ships, like the Sovereign (Enterprise-E). My geek knowledge expanded. The save system also sucks – if you die at the end of a twenty minute mission, you have to relive the last twenty minutes of your life all over again. Not fun.

The storyline can only be pieced together if you come into it already with a significant depth of Star Trek knowledge. So, I’m going to spoil it in case you don’t care. Basically, a rogue Vulcan uses her background in disease theory to attempt to infect the universe with a kind of logic virus, that would eliminate all emotions and make all sentient species more Vulcan-like. When this fails, she attempts to take over as Borg Queen, being personally infected by Locutus, Captain Picard. Its up to Captains Archer, Kirk, Picard, Janeway, and whatever rank Sisko is, to head her off through time. Archer stirs up the bees nest, Kirk kicks her ass, and Picard finishes the job.

I recommend this game for Trekkies only. Trekkers need not apply.

Viva Pinata

Much like Slurm, it’s highly addictive. Raising and developing species of pinatas is an epic task that is ultimately fun. Its especially fun if, like me, you have to skip a few meals in order to be able to afford a new videogame console, and suddenly you can purchase thousands of dollars in merchandise with a successful ranching business.

The AI is not intelligent, it is purposefully difficult. Animals deliberately disobey you to encourage you to punish them by whacking them with a shovel. Fights will break out, animals will die, and the circle of life is blatant in every interaction. Flies crap if you feed them, the animals have to have sex via a maze mini-game in order to procreate, and every once in a while, some asshole will come over and kill something at random. This is a great game to teach children the harsh realities of life and the benefits of spending money like a…

And that’s how, as they say in the stand up comedy business, we come full circle.

KNIFE HAND FORWARD! SHANK AND WEAVE!

[  Mood: Sick ]
[ Currently: in ur base kiling ur mans ]
William "Tiberius" Shatner. Patrick "I’ve Seen Everything" Stewart. Kate "Tracheaotomy" Mulgrew. Benjamin Sisko. Quantum Leapman. Should their powers combine, geek society should implode in a series of girlish squeals and waves of joy should wash across humanity like the moon would create waves of death and destruction if it ever forgot what it was doing for a minute. Yes? Almost.

Too soon?

I did scream like a girl when I got the game. But the joy part, that’s, eh… Harder to come by. The game progresses chronologically, with the Captain that Bleeds kicking off a vague, two hundred year catastrophe that he could’ve easily prevented, but didn’t, which is exactly how the Enterprise writers would have handled things in seasons one through two. I assume that Captain Kirk will be kicking this problem’s ass into the next generation, and then I can pretend to give a damn about the friggin’ Voyager until Ben Sisko shows up and slaps Q, in a no-love kind of way, until the problem is solved. However, the shitty save function is not allowing me to progress past Captain McDidn’tBangT’Pol "we’re still worried about transporter technology, anyeuh" crapfest.

I’d give her "cunning" score at least a 9. She’s been in Maxim.

And the soundtrack is deceptive. Combat is lumbering, slow and boring. This is not Wolf 359, this is more like, "We ran over budget on Species 8472 effects again and have to use stock footage of the Voyager passing a blue moon." The dramatic music, however, makes you think you’re in an X-Wing, beating the crap out of the Death Star. Not so! The NX-01 steers like a friggin space cow. I’m also not impressed with its fire power. You really need to be in four places at once to be able to handle those pesky Romulan bastards, and given, it helps that you can take command of up to four ships at once. Problem here is: The controls to keep all four of your ships in line are kinda something you have to guess at and check on. The Coto (teehee) will stand dead in the middle of space and observe a vessel full of doctors on a mission of mercy gets pulverized by disruptors, probably while the crew is synthesizing popcorn and simuhol to prepare for the big explosion that sends me reeling back to the start of a twenty-two minute mission.

Traitors.

This game, much like the past decade and a half for the entire Star Trek franchise, punishes the fans for their loyalty. Thank God that I rented this pile, so I wouldn’t be tempted to sodomize the hole in the DVD out of spite. Maybe I’ll do that, anyway! That ought to teach the next person not to rent games over the internet.

There’s a burning crusade in my pants.

Oh, yeah. I found out how to cure neck pain.

[  Mood: Very Sad ]
So I woke up, cracked my neck, and it stayed cracked. Ow. Ow. Ow. How do I fix this? I’ve gotten loaded up on every medication I have in the house, nothing’s helping. I can’t turn my head to the left. That’s really inconvenient! There’s a lot of things to the left that I want to see! This seriously hurts! OW!

[  Mood: Fed Up WIth Life ]
These are the games I currently have collected for the 360, and a quick blurb about each one, minus a couple I just rented.

Battle for Middle-Earth II
Tom Bombadil saves Gloin’s ass on several occasions. Sauron loses. Buy an HDTV or don’t play this game.

Burnout Revenge
This is the only good racing series ever made. It rewards you for crashing instead of forcing you to oversteer around crappily designed tracks with bad controls. A great game to get girls into gaming with, as the fact that you suck at it is advantageous during gameplay.

Condemned: Criminal Origins
A suspenseful first person beat-em-up/adventure game. This format could be the direction that our beloved Grim Fandango and Full Throttle franchises take in the future. Most of the game, you’re plodding along condemned buildings, searching for various serial killers, waiting for a deranged hobo to pop out of a corner swinging a mannequin leg at you. You rarely have a fire arm, and when you do, it’s almost like you don’t want to use it. Like you want to save it for whatever big enemy is going to come at you in the future – but by the time that inevitably happens, you’re usually stuck wielding a piece of pipe in your hands. The melee combat was a lot of fun, and despite the packaging describing it as a survival-horror game, it really is more of a thinking man’s first person shooter. Especially if you’re a man who thinks about crushing in the right temple of an obese crazy lunch lady with a twenty-five pound sledge hammer.

Dead or Alive 4
Mediocre fighting game with CGI titties.

Dead or Alive Xtreme 2
Mediocre dating sim with CGI titties.

Dead Rising
When the game first starts, the difficulty curve is perfect, the innovation of picking up anything and using it as a weapon is fresh, the photo taking aspects are a fun gimmick… and then something happens. You realize it’s impossible to save, the friendly A.I. is borderline suicidal, the weapons don’t last, and the zombies easily overwhelm you every time you step out of the humble safety. And if you don’t have an HDTV, the game is unplayable, as reading the details of mission goals is not possible. A greatly promising title that turned out to be a great disappointment in the end.

Enchanted Arms
A gay Japanese RPG for gay Japanese people. Hilarious to the rest of us, as long as we don’t mind those goddamn random encounters.

F.E.A.R.
It came out on PC a year before it came out on the 360, but I enjoyed playing it with the controller a lot better. The slow mo effects are fun to play with, the melee attacks feel like they’re straight out of a Jet Li movie, and the arsenal and enemies make combat very satisfying. F.E.A.R. also played with some of the first body awareness structures, meaning you’d look down and see your character’s body move in a realistic way, instead of a weird shadow like your character was some kind of floating head. Great for a dumb shooter, but much like Condemned failed to scare me, so did this.

Gears of War
I really think this game is overhyped. Its a lot of fun, and the controls are tight, and the graphics are great, but its gotten at least three Game of the Year awards. I don’t think its quite *that* good. I think this is a case of "hey hey hey look at the shiny thing that came out at the end of the year forget the other stuff give it awards" syndrome hitting a lot of big media reviewers. The game actually had a really crappy difficulty curve, the weapons aren’t balanced at all, the game is full of gonzo glitches, and the soundtrack is shit, basically. There’s a lot to love here, particularly with co-op mode, but there’s also a lot to hate.

Hitman: Blood Money
This franchise is sort of love it or hate it. Poor level design and glitch heavy gameplay combined with highly suspect A.I. have limited the game’s fan base, but the members of said fan base will tell you: This is one cool game. 47 returns once again to cause havok in the United States, previously having been restricted to the middle east and europe. Ironically, even though he’s now in America, most of his adversaries are foreign nationals – a German white supremicist, a Colombian drug king, an Uzbekistani oil baron. European developers only know the American character from stereotypes in American films, and as some of the only American villains are archetypes of Colonel Sanders and Hugh Hefner. Good gameplay nonetheless, but it doesn’t last or remain interesting for nearly as long as it should have.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: Legend
This game is kind of full of itself. It isn’t particularly good, but it expects you to break your back trying to get all of the secrets and easter eggs. The time trials require hours of attempts, and is absolutely not worth it. The story wasn’t very good, Lara Croft continues to be a frigid bitch, and I still don’t answer the sex appeal. As usual, the camera is crap, and the combat is so unrealistic it borders on comical. Not a very good game, and it stinks of the skeletal save system for the PS2 version. Autosave is not next gen, it should be a given!

Lego Star Wars II
Like smoking crack with a joystick. An excellent game, all around.

Marvel: Ultimate Alliance
Alternate between hitting the a and b button! Choose from forty different skins for what is essentially the same character! Play through the same two marvel storylines they’ve been revisiting for the past thirty years! Get bored and toss the controller across the room while you make a beer run instead of playing this shitty over-hyped game!

Ninety-Nine Nights
An unforgiving Japanese beat ’em up game. While better than anything the Dynasty Warriors franchise has ever offered, a lot of the gameplay is unsatisfying, and the story is hard to follow.

Prey
This is what I’d choose as game of the year. Prey is a mind bending ballet of science fiction, ballet and death. It’s nice to have a reminder of why kids thought I was cool when my Cherokee grandfather showed up to school with a Jurassic Park lunch box. It wasn’t until later in life that they weren’t cooing over the lunch box. This was a great game with a touching, emotional story about loss, immortality, and crashing planet sized harvesters into the sun.

Quake 4
This was a piece of shit.

Splinter Cell: Double Agent
This could’ve been a movie just as easily as it was a game. Michael Ironside gives the performance of his career as Sam Fischer. Highly recommended for those who enjoy 24 or anything with the name Tom Clancy on it.

The Godfather
A lot of fun, but at its heart, its a poor GTA clone. The driving aspects could’ve used more scrutiny, as well as the difficulty curve. By the end of the game, no matter what armor or health upgrades you’ve made to your character, you die in just a few shots. That’s unacceptable in a game with a shitty camera system. Overall a skip.

[  Mood: Happy ]
[  Currently: Playing  ]
And thus the internet did become the ultimate environment for anonymity and second identity. We can change our names at any time we want. Our avatar. Our tone in our writing. Even our environment. With a few clicks of the mouse and taps on the keyboard, suddenly, I am transported to October 1999, a time of hope and prosperity. Freshman year of High School, thoughts of lost virginity, Michael Jackson jokes on Letterman, Bill Clinton jokes on Leno, and my escape plan, college, was only four years away.

Even this layout reminds me of Pier One commercials starring Kirstie Alley. And I’m okay with that. What next? Dive back into some old literature. Beatnik blues cafe stuff from the fifties and sixties, the collected works of Neal Cassidy and Allen Ginsberg, Phillip K. Dick and turn of the twentieth century worship. Anything done stream-of-conciousness, China Mieville, and MST3K movie marathons. crooOOOOOOOOW!

I have six more days off until I work again. Until then, I intend to go nuts. I think I’ll put my ugly Leia action figure up on ebay and see who salutes. Maybe claim that there’s an image of the Virgin Mary in the hologram on the side in the item description.

Well, I just burned through my first run of Marvel: Ultimate Alliance. That was a pain in the ass. Controls that decided whether or not to respond on a whim, PS2 graphics, game crashing bugs, and an RPG upgrade system that pretty much did everything for you, making the choices you made if you took the system into your own hands feel futile.

Its cool seeing Spider-Man next to Wolverine next to Iron Man next to Ghost Rider, kicking ass and unleashing the fury on some Doom Bots and Asgardian Viking warriors… But it would be a lot cooler if they would just abandon the freakin’ dungeon crawler look. The environments look like crap, the characters look like crap, there’s no lip synch in-game… Basically, the whole game is alternating between the a-button and b-button while trying to get from one side of the map to another.

All of the character pretty much control exactly the same. There is virtually no incentive to choose to play as Colossus over Luke Cage, or Spider-Man over Deadpool, or Captain America over Mr. Fantastic. The selection of characters is initially pretty impressive, and its fun to put together teams like the Fantastic Four or the New Avengers, but its all cosmetic, which eventually becomes boring. There’s also a lot of heavy hitters missing due to rights issues. Volition has The Punisher busy cleaning up New York, Ubisoft has The Hulk under lockdown, and there are zero (0) characters from any of the Max comics. Not even Keanu Reeves as Constantine. In other words, this is a very kid friendly game, and if you have a nephew to keep quiet for a few hours, sit him down with this and you can go use the internet in peace. I, however, hated this game.

Ultimate Alliance had a lot of potential and failed me miserably. It had a lot of hype behind it, and a lot of that hype carried into the initial 8.0ish reviews. In the end, this game disappoints more than Ang Lee’s big gay Hulk movie.

[  Mood: Cool ]
NES/Famicon – Heterosexual male. Suffered greatly from the frat boy mentality that the only way to express committment was through pain. Almost every game for it is impossibly hard, a great way for those who aren’t looking to get into any long relationships to get out of them quickly. Gave V.D. to Peach, Zelda and Samus Aran.

SNES – Bisexual transgender shemale. There was something for everyone on this console. Games were so fun, that you felt dirty after playing them. Gina Gershon in 32 bit form.

Nintendo 64 – Asexual male. The first console to have a phallic controller.

Between James Bond, Mario Kart and Bomberman 64, it had no need for the touch of a woman.

Gamecube – Virgin female. Total chick console.

Wii – Most fun girlfriend ever. She likes go karts, paintball, bowling and cartoons. You don’t want the relationship to go forward nor end, you just want these lovey dovey days to last forever, and so does she.

[  Mood: Confused ]
I was clicking around this site, looking for a deal on Astroboy DVD sets for my dad, when I noticed they had an adult section. I’m thinking, "Yeah, okay, hentai, I’m kinda passed that at this point in my life. Might as well, just to have something to make an obscure reference to at a later date."

Seriously. I got burned out on cartoon porn after dating a girl who loved it far more than I did – but she’d only watch it if it had the original Japanese voices. Apparently girls who both look and sound like they’re twelve getting tentacle raped turned her on. Not that I’m complaining, she was a freak in the bedroom and a… also a freak on the street, probably why that didn’t last.

After I got passed the idea of a Hello-Kitty vibrator and "girlfriend knee pillow," I stumble upon this mysterious, gellatenous device:

That, my friends, is not what it looks like. Unless you thought it was a pocket vagina, in which case, it’s exactly what it looks like. I am so very tempted to order one of these. Not for personal use, mind you, as it looks wrong and dangerous and disgusting. BUT it would be awesome to go digging around for my car keys, and whoosh, here comes the pocket vagina, straight into my best friend’s hand, "Hold this for a second, I need to get to my keys." "What’s this?" "Pocket vagina."

Or just leave it lying around in public. When I was a freshmen in High School, I was once so bored that I left a note on every fifth car in a grocery store parking lot that simply read, "Sorry about the ding." The desperation on people’s faces as they scanned their car up and down in every direction from every angle, the angst, the confusion, the pain, the laughter, the tears… They should have sent a poet.

Anyway, leaving a pocket vagina lying around in, say, a dentist’s office or on top of a public library computer’s keyboard, maybe with a note with an arrow pointing to it that simply said, "pocket vagina." I’d be busy for days, waiting to see if someone tried to pick it up and run off with it, or freak out, or sniff it, or Pan knows what.

What’s yen to dollars? Like one dollar = one Japanese grotto? Something like that… Or is that pesos…