[  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…

[  Mood: Evil ]
[  Currently: Listening to The Immigrant Song ]
We come from the land of the ice and snow, from the midnight sun where the hot springs blow. Hammer of the Gods. We’ll drive our ships to new lands. To fight the hordes, singing and crying:

VALHALLA, I AM COMI-IIII-IIIIING!

That’s right. I’m metal. However, in the time it took me to type out those lyrics, my playlist has gone from Zep to Rock Lobster by the B-52’s. My dad likes them, he’s old.

Motion in the Ocean.

I got my paycheck today! That means I can buy useless nerd crap and eat for another month! Hooray x2! The question is, what overpriced mediocre video game do I drop sixty bucks on today? I have choices, you see.

1. Call of Duty 2 – These games are always fantastic. I love romantic portrayals of WWII like fat girls love fried chicken buckets and crying into them because they’re lonely. The problem is, it is a first generation 360 game, and I’m not guaranteed of its quality.

One of the major flaws of the Call of Duty franchise is that the games were produced primarily as educational aides, not realistic intepretations of what really happened in the big one. This means that its totally historically inaccurate to hide the cruel realities of war, you plow through about an eighth of Germany’s population in each level, and there’s no gore, to protect the chil’ren from the violence. Its like Spielberg digitally editing walkie talkies into Saving Private Ryan to replace the guns or something.

2. Just Cause – This is basically a GTA clone whose emphasis is getting rid of Hugo Chavez. While it is interesting in the gameplay footage I’ve seen, I’m not sure I can get used to how ludicrous having a parachute pop out of nowhere is at all times. Its not even mapped on the main characters body, which might seem like a minor complaint, but the guy who was dragging a parachute with him everywhere he went in Attack of the Killer Tomatoes was my favorite character in that film. I’m disheartened that the parachute is not only invisibly omnipresent, but also functional. Exactly the opposite would’ve been a far more hilarious combination.

3. Saint’s Row – F*ck, n*gg*. This sh*tty game made me want to grab that Goliath motherf*cker by the throat, b*tch slap him upside his Riddick lovin’ head, and f*ckin scream in his face, "WHY AREN’T YOU ACCELERATING YOU’RE MOTHERF*CKING LIFE IN THE MOTHERF*CKING NAVY, YOU GODD*MN PUNK B*TCH! Now get the f*ck off my X-Box before I make you listen to some B*rb*r* Str**s*nd on the custom motherf*ckin’ soundtrack. B*tch." Seriously though, I rented it, its the pinnacle of mediocrity in GTA clonery.

4. The Godfather – This is yet another GTA clone. However, it is a GTA clone with Brando in it, and thus, it is a serious contender. People seem to really like this game, even though I’ve never tried it. So far, I’ve heard that it’s Stella. Like it’s a game that I can’t refuse. I just hope that there’s no monkey human hybrids in it like there was in that Val Kilmer movie. Er, damn, there goes my Brandoendo streak. As an angry Italian guy, this game appeals to me in almost every way. I’m particularly looking forward to seeing the horsehead in Abe Vigoda’s bed rendered in HD 360 graphics.

Good times.

5. Enchanted Arms. This game is fag hag training. It’s hard to see that yet another Japanese RPG is going to infect yet another generation of emo boys and dumb girls who dream of falling in love with spikey haired, turqoise eyed androgynous men, who in turn play gonzo Japanese RPGs. Tis a vicious cycle.

6. Ninety-Nine Nights. Aka, NNN, according to the kool kidz. This one is actually a decent prospect, but as I understand it, the one button combat becomes tedious after a while. The game is long, the graphics are beautiful, and there are CGI hooters, but the reviews it got at release are not promising.

Which game did Jack choose? Why does he mock Abe Vigoda’s horrors? Where did the button on my pants go? Find out next time, humble reader, same blog time, same blog internets.

[  Mood: Evil ]
[  Currently: Playing Dead Rising ]
So, I got bored and clicked around, and behold, I can make a blog here. As Sean Connery said in Finding Forrester, "Yes. YES!" And the template comes complete with my own pastey little blood splattered goth guy who apparently buys his t-shirts online and needs to get in contact with some visine vis a vis Ben Stein. How did the artist know what I look like?

Now that the creation is out of the way, I need something to blog about. Should I bitch about how I didn’t lock down my sale today because my boss is an idiot? Or about how much I miss my girlfriend? Or should I just defecate on the post-good-Star Trek science fiction world in a series of sharp, sarcastic comments while I cry inside like a bitch? You decide, America.