The new year starts off with a ton of work. No surprise there - what with games such as The Elder Scrolls Online going into beta and everything. And while I'm not at liberty to say whether or not I'm taking part in it, the whole thing finally gave me an idea for an article I could send in to cracked.com - 'X things you didn't know about being a freelance games critic'.
While it is true that my life mainly consists of pants-free gaming bliss, there are a few hidden catches, such as having to spend a significant amount of time playing (and usually finishing) games you don't particularly care about or even hate. What's worse, this job can make you hate your favourite games. Imagine you're seriously looking forward to some new MMO. And then you get invited to play it at some early press preview event through the job. You see character creation, the noob zones, tutorials and all that. Then you join an early beta. And another one. Then the headstart event. Characters usually get deleted from one preview event to another, so you start over a lot. By the time the game actually goes live, there's a pretty good chance you're very tired of the game's first half.
At least you can go a bit crazy in character creation
But release is when the real fun starts. You might be told to play your least favourite class in your least favourite spec - because freelancers don't always get to choose, so you have to play what nobody else wanted. To the maximum level. Within a single week, which means 8-12 hour gaming sessions every day. Once the job is finally over, you'll be so sick and tired of the game, you may not even want to roll the kind of character you originally intended to play anymore. But since you're now an expert at the game, you'll be asked to spend the next few months writing more class guides, dungeon guides, guides about new content and so forth. Whilst constantly leveling and upgrading that one character you never cared about, but had been forced to play for work. Whee!
"Alright, here's your character. We need you to spec into diplomacy and decorative cake frosting."
There's also the whole looking like a complete dick thing when reviewing awful games. Give a shitty game a shitty rating and the PR guy you've spent the last few weeks chatting with might lose his job. Take pity and give it a good rating and lose readers and credibility. You can't win.
Of course it isn't all bad. It absolutely made my day when a bunch of readers recognized me while I was out shopping and they totally lost their shit. Too bad I'm in a different country now and nobody knows me over here. I love the attention!
In other news, Might & Magic X: Legacy
Xeen reference FTW!
This game is exactly what I need right now. I've been craving some old school RPG fun where I get to create a whole party of adventurers, rather than just a single guy. And Legacy is pretty good. It's too cheap and broken to be great, but it's still decent. By "cheap" I'm really referring to the weird mophile phone app engine they've used to create this game. It lags, stutters, takes eons to load and it looks a bit weak. I'm also referring to the ancient public domain sound effects, which I've been hearing in cheap games for the past decade or so. There's "generic bird noise #38", which has been used in browser games since the first day browser games had sound. There's "shopkeeper clearing his throat" every eight seconds, which I've first heard in Rage of Mages 2. There's "generic fart noise #627" in town (why??), which has already been used in the Monty Python and the Holy Grail pc game roughly 20 years ago. They're also using some stuff from Might & Magic VI, such as the pause/turn-based mode sound effect when you level up and finish quests. Weird.
Only when you're really good at being a wolf can you become an elite wolf
Sadly, each of the four races only have two different faces per gender in character creation (two human dudes, two human girls, two elf boys, two elf girls, etc.) and there are no more gnomes or halflings. And the elves are generic high fantasy. Anyone remember the elves from parts 4 and 5?
Elves.
In case you're wondering about some of the facial expressions - Might & Magic features negative status effects such as depression, insanity and broken-heartedness.
Oh well. This isn't Xeen anymore and the elves are the same fair-haired skinny chicks you see in every fantasy game ever.
The game actually feels and plays a lot like Xeen, which is good, because it's supposed to. Unfortunately, they've also added some stuff from the newer games of the series. You can only create four instead of six guys (boo!), skill trainers are scattered all over the world and their locations need to be memorized/googled all the fucking time (BOO! Hissss!). But the strategic battles are great, the dungeons are really fun and there are some old school riddles here and there, most of which aren't overly difficult.
Get your mind out of the gutter, you!
Did you know monitor lizards enjoy climbing? I wouldn't say they're very good at it, but that doesn't seem to stop them.
He looks pretty awkward when he does that - and it usually ends with him falling on his face. But he no longer needs a lift when he wants to get back in his tank, which is a good thing, I suppose.
Hugo appears to dream when he's asleep. Fascinating stuff. If you own a cat or a dog, then you probably know that they do some weird shit in their sleep. My cat chews in her sleep. Must be dreaming about food or something. My family's dog would twitch, sleep-run and howl in its sleep. Nothing as spectacular as this, though:
Our lizard doesn't get this dramatic, but he bounces around a lot and makes little coughing noises. Not all the time. Maybe once a month or so and he's not "coughing" when he's awake, so there's really no need to worry. I wonder what reptiles dream about.
I have this recurring dream where I visit my family in Germany or my parents come over here to visit me. When I visit them it's usually at some new place they've just moved in to and everything is fine. Figures. Because nothing is fine with them while I'm awake. They split up years ago, my stepmother has moved on (new guy) and my dad talks about how they're "best friends" now. My brother tells me it's all bullshit and he's never gonna get over it. Messy stuff. Haven't seen my family since I moved to the UK nearly four years ago, one 3 hour visit from my brother aside. They're not coming here, I'm not going to Germany. I'm not sure why my subconscious wants them all back together and happy again. That family was never happy. There were some good moments, of course, however rare they might have been. And a whole lot of crap. Brain, can you stop dreaming about that now? That's be great, thanks.
I have this friend who backs every single game on Kickstarter, ever. Ever. And he gets no small amount of abuse from me, because of course he does! Is he fucking insane? Backing a Kickstarter campaign means you spend real money on a game that might be released several years later, usually with countless delays and countless promised features removed, because they ran out of time and funds.
Some projects get funded, they keep your money and then there's no game at all. Because fuck you. Or, as the final update on Clang stated in September 2013: "...one of the hidden catches is that once you have taken a bunch of people's money to do a thing, you have to actually do that thing, and not some other thing that you thought up in the meantime." Yeah, you dickholes! How dare you expect a game, only because you've given your money to a guy who said he was gonna use it to create... well, a fucking game? The outrage!
Of course this is one of the worst examples I could find. The truth is, if I'm hoping to see any new RPGs, which play like Planescape: Torment, Baldur's Gate or maybe Wizardry 8 or Ultima VII, then there's really no way around Kickstarter. Well, Dragon Age is probably the closest modern thing we have to Baldur's Gate and I'm not gonna knock it, but I miss being able to create my entire party, to micro-manage their abilities and skills and their inventory, to watch them rise from a random bunch of adventurers to powerful heroes. Or watch them perish because I fucked up, then start over, which can also be fun. I don't think we'll see any of that in any mainstream AAA RPG anymore. And that's where Kickstarter is getting my hopes up. At least a little.
Some decent RPGs have been funded and released through Kickstarter now, none of which really blew me away. Shadowrun Returns is decent, but entirely forgettable. Fantastic writing, good story, but there's no real exploration, unimpressive AI, the whole thing can be finished in one night. Aarklash Legacy is a nice game with fun, strategic battles, but the story is weak and all characters, whilst featuring their own unique skill trees, are pre-made.
Oh yeah, it was the game with lots of shadow and... uh.. running? I think?
Those games were fun little budget titles, but they make me wonder if I should really get my hopes up for something really great, something massive that stays with me like Baldur's Gate did. Is it even realistic to hope for that? Is it fair? I think so. I'm not expecting production values of hundreds of millions of bucks, but a fantastic story, more than 8-10 hours of gameplay and deep character-customization. Let me create my own party if I want to. Surely this can be done on a smaller budget without looking as shit as Avernum (sorry!), right?
Sorry, I'm just not desperate enough.
- That's what she said!
I'm genuinely excited about Divinity: Original Sin right now. Even Claire seems to have a bit of a wide-on for this game right now and we might have to buy the double-pack on Steam. A cooperative game mode, which features two fully customizable characters sounds great and the trailer had me at "gather your party".
I find the idea absolutely fascinating. Gameplay is very old-school RPG, but the cooperative side of it is entirely new, as far as I'm aware. In multiplayer, decisions aren't simply made by "player one". Both players get to make decisions and the game allows and even encourages that players disagree with each other's decisions, so you argue things out in-game, which also has an influence on character stats progression. Could this be the beginning of a new genre of couple-based RPGs? Not bloody likely, but the idea is fun.
I can't wait to experience it firsthand, seeing as Claire and I have extremely different play styles. In Dragon Age I would take pity on a starving, imprisoned deserter and trade him some food for a key he'd offered me in return. Claire skipped the whole helping out part and just killed the poor fucker and took the key off his cold, dead hands. There was a whole lot of My Shepard - Your Shepard stuff when we both finished the Mass Effect trilogy and compared how our stories played out. There's gonna be a lot of conflict when we play Divinity together. I can't wait! I just hope it's not gonna become repetitive and result in the same endless dialogues and little else.
I'm also excited to see how Pillars of Eternity and Tides of Numenera are going to turn out. Looking at trailers, screenshots and concept drawings make me want to install some of my favourite old games again. I'm almost tempted to give Ultima VII another shot, as well. Ahhh... Ultima.
It would be a bit weird and geeky to say that Ultima has changed my life, but I guess it had a bit of an impact, at least. The English language? Yeah, I speak that shit. Ultima taught me. I still have the C64 version of Ultima V: Warriors of Destiny right here on my desk. Mint condition. Cloth map, rune alphabet, the notes and lyrics to 'Stones' and all that. I was about ten years old when I first played it, the whole thing was in English and there was no Gamefaqs (or any fucking internet) when I didn't know what to do. Heck, I couldn't even play the damn game without a dictionary at hand. A few years later I was excused from English class, because I was good enough to teach the other students. Today I live in the UK, my fiancee is British and while I had not planned any of this because of Ultima, the language practice that went along with the game sure has helped kick things off a bit.
One of my geeky friends wrote a love-letter to a girl once. He used nothing but runes. I read it out loud in front of the class. He couldn't believe I played Ultima. Happy days.
So, am I excited about Shroud of the Avatar? Nope! Wish I was, but right now I find it hard to believe that more than 26,000 people were excited enough to donate a total of more than 3 million Dollars to help fund this thing. Because the guy behind this game managed to buy a vacation in fucking space, so he sure as fuck couldn't fund his own stupid game without help, right? And for as much as I love traditional RPGs, I think they're overdoing it with SotA. NPCs all talk and behave like chat bots, which I suppose can be fun if it's done right, but my question is - why? Does that really add to the immersion? I have to type out questions to NPCs, hoping to find the right, context-sensitive keywords? Doing so might give you the illusion of freedom when compared to multiple choice dialogue, but it also removes a great deal of user comfort.
And that's what bothers me about the entire game. Don't get me wrong. I can agree when Garriott says that today's RPGs practically play themselves, they just point you in the right direction with a big, fat marker, you can just skip through all the boring quest text. I can live with the fact that they want to abandon most of that stuff, but only up to a point where they want you to make your own notes. How is this good or immersive? If you watch Garriot's interview with Spoony, you can hear him talk about how you won't just find comfortable notes in your quest log, telling you about whom you were supposed to talk to or where you were supposed to go to, even if it just came up in a dialogue - you have to remember these things, yourself.
Now I don't know about you, but I have a job, I'm taking care of my own little family and my entire life won't just suddenly revolve around Lord British's new game. Sometimes I might only be able to play for an hour or two at a time and when I get back to the game the next day it would be nice to have a quest log or a journal, which reminds me where I left off. Without forcing me to write everything down on my own. That's not hand-holding, it's a fucking comfort-feature, which has been part of every RPG for the past decade or so.
Heck, when you're running around aimlessly and without a clue where to go next or whom to talk to, it's all working as intended. It's basically Ultima VII all over again - if you're not familiar with that game, look up the Fellowship quest line or watch Spoony's excellent video above. And for as much as I loved that game back in the day, I'm not sure I wanna go back to a time where there was no quest-tracking whatsoever.
And has everybody forgotten about Pagan and Ascension? Yes, I know, EA, hasty release, yada, yada, yada, but Ultima IX fucks official canon worse than any Star Trek porn fan-fic. It screws with just about every previous game of the series, from Mondain's skull just sitting around in a public museum to making Dupres heoric sacrifice entirely meaningless. I'm not even talking about bugs, crashes, underwhelming visuals or the tiny game world - they didn't even get the damn story right.
Actually, I lied. Let's talk about graphics for a minute. Did you see Shroud of the Avatar?
Meh.
Yawn.
It's certainly not the ugliest game I've ever seen, but it's not great by any stretch of the imagination. Next week is the 2nd early access release for backers, who donated 45 bucks or more. The game is supposed to be released in October. Those muddy textures aren't gonna get much better. The game looks a lot like Vanguard: Saga of Heroes. Which looked pretty nice back when it was new. Which was in early 2007.
It's not just me, is it?
What worries me the most is the lack of an actual game in all the footage released thus far. I've seen videos of people typing to chat bot NPCs, people moving ridiculous amounts of furniture from random chests to their inventory and I've seen a whole lot of badly-animated sheep. Is that it? Are we going to get a proper story? Epic quests? Or is this a bread-baking simulation where I can hang out with other people and just pretend all kinds of things, which aren't actually possible ingame, like some kind of medieval SecondLife?
We're supposed to be months away from release and so far there's this okay-ish game world and very little else.
I'm sure that some of the die-hard enthusiasts are already getting a kick out of this game. Some folks who act like Ultima Online was the holy grail of MMOs are probably creaming their pants over this right now. And hey, why the hell not? Enjoy - I hope this is gonna be the game for you!
But I'm not feeling it. I wanna go crazy about it, I wanna look forward to it, but right now I'm not feeling the magic. Heck, maybe I'm wrong, maybe the game is gonna get killer reviews and maybe one day you'll read blog posts on here about how much I love playing SotA. I could get into the early access thingie right now. But... I dunno, maybe I would have been more excited about this a decade ago, but RPGs have grown up and so have I. I'm getting too old for this shit. I want my quest log.
One thing I absolutely love about my job is to add nasty, filthy jokes to everything I write, just to see whether the guys at the office will find and/or censor it. Just to see if I can get away with it. And to make the whole thing a lot more fun to read, obviously. This weekend I was asked to play-test Nosgoth and in my article I've compared F2P-shooters to ass-flavoured pickles. I've also mentioned how I got surrounded by enemy players, who then proceeded to blow their load right into my face like I was the female lead in a Japanese movie for adults. I'd ask you to guess which of these two jokes got censored, but I kinda gave it away with today's headline.
Crazy thought: It's much more important to write a fun article about a game than a scientific analysis of how good or bad every individual component of a game is. I'll go even further and say that, at least in case of a print article, you can fuck most of the facts about the game you're reviewing and readers will still appreciate you if you're entertaining. Tell you what, I don't know shit about most of today's games: I flat-out refused to be part of the Elder Scrolls Online beta, I'm not looking at WildStar and I quit WoW a year before Pandaria came out. I mainly write for a role playing magazine and the only games I've touched the last couple of weeks were Street Fighter, Warframe and Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior. And 2013 has been the most successful year for my career thus far. January 2014 is looking pretty good, too. Because I write comedy.
Ironically, there's an old posting hidden deep within this blog where I moan about people who want to abandon rating systems for game reviews and talk about how we should stop analyzing them. Heh. My bad. I kinda get it now.
Seriously though: Why would you buy an overpriced print magazine about games, which is chock-full of information you could have obtained for free on the internet at least a month ago? No, really, why the fuck do you people waste money on that? Don't get me wrong, I appreciate it and I am deeply grateful to all of you for putting food and video games on my table every month. And if I had to guess, I'd say a decent portion of our readers buy the magazines, because they want more than just bare-bones information. They want to be entertained. That or they're complete idiots who have never heard of the internet before. I'd like to go with the former.
A while ago, the publisher asked me to review this horrible zombie survival online game. I don't care about zombies. In fact, I have a real phobia of zombies, which prevents me from showering with the curtain closed. Some unresolved childhood trauma thingie. I don't care about this particular type of game. I don't know shit about it. I didn't know how to review that stuff. So instead of writing a serious, fact-based, analytic review I wrote a survivor's diary, based upon my experiences with the game.
Basically, it describes my change from a curious, friendly player to a murdering asshat, who lures other survivors to their deaths and takes their shit. Which really happens in just about every zombie survial game, because it always turns out that zombies are mostly harmless and the real assholes are the players. Big surprise there, I know. You either ragequit from getting killed by assholes all the time or you survive long enough to see yourself out-assholing everyone on the fucking server.
The whole thing ends in, "I watch myself cracking the poor guy's skull open, before I proceed to rummage through his belongings for some beans and a cool new hat. I am scum."
The whole thing describes my gameplay experience. No "visual quality is suchandsuch" or "there's a frame dip of 2.5 in this particular area of the game" or shit like that. And my boss asked, "Are you sure about this? It looks strange." But they usually trust me and let me get away with my crazy shit and they printed it and people liked it. Some actually commented on it and said they wanted to see more articles like that.
Ironically, when I filled out the mandatory score thingie where you have to rate each individual component of the game, I was way, waaaaaaay off and gave the game the dumbest review rating of all times, demonstrating how much I suck as a professional reviewer. But people didn't really mind, because the article was still a pretty good read.
Let's be realistic here for a moment: If you see a magazine on the shelf that has, say, Neverwinter on its cover and you buy it because of that, chances are, you already know about Neverwinter, anyway. You've looked up gameplay videos on Youtube, you've checked out the website, maybe you've even joined the beta. You don't really expect to learn anything new from my review, you just like to read about that particular game. Heck, chances are, you're gonna look right at the score, maybe the screenshots and you'll skip most of the actual article because, again, you already know everything I have to tell you. But a surprise dick joke might get your attention, right? You may find yourself reading the whole thing, just to see if I put any more in there. And if my next article contains an even filthier joke or two, you might end up reading stuff about games you don't even care about, just because you see my name underneath and you're hoping for more silly stuff. Or you'll hate me and ignore my stuff altogether, but we can't all be loved by everybody.
No, shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!
Of course you can't overdo it, or things go from funny to just plain stupid and nonsensical. But it's nice to be the guy who gets away with it. It's nice when people put enough trust in me to let me do my weird stuff and print (most of) it. It's what makes the whole thing so much fun. I was invited to a gaming podcast a few months ago to stand in for a guy who quit last minute. I had about an hour or so to prepare, I didn't know shit about half of the stuff people were discussing on there, so I just raved and screamed and moaned about one of the games, its publisher and its player base and people thought it was fucking hilarious. Sometimes zero preparation is all the preparation you need. Though I don't think I want to repeat that anytime soon. The same old joke can only be funny so many times.
I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Today started with a bukkake joke being published along with one of my articles. And it made me happy. I love my job.
I like to visit Golden Axe's grave to put down some flowers now and then and to share some stories about how great Golden Axe used to be before they fucking killed it.
Fucking...
...killed it.
People never understand why I hate everything. Why I can never just like a thing or even take something they like and shit all over it. The answer is simple: Sega. Imagine growing up with amazing games like Shining Force, Phantasy Star and, of course, Golden Axe. You probably can't, because none of that stuff was made by Nintendo. You lucky fuckers.
Let's take a more popular example: Sonic The Hedgehog. You can play any of the old 16bit Sonic games and they're still fantastic. Look at any Sonic game that came after and they'reallsupershit. Granted, their latest kart racer and Generations make exceptions to this rule. They were so good, people found it difficult to believe Sonic didn't suck for once. Still, "Something must be wrong, this game isn't shit" doesn't exactly speak for the quality of the series.
Now imagine the same thing happening to just about every video game you ever cared about as a kid.
With the of release Beast Rider I simply couldn't take it anymore. One of the greatest ever beat 'em up games turned into prehistoric porn. Figures - Shining Force went from tactical role playing to awful Diablo-clone. How it went from there to portable dating sim is entirely beyond me. Oh, if you read that article, make it a fun drinking game and have a shot whenever you read "the player".
How did we go from this...
...to that? What the fuck HAPPENED, Sega?
Anyhow. Let's just say I stopped following all things Sega, as I was clearly no longer part of their target audience. And with their shit off my radar, I've ignored everything, including a really cool fan project, which had been finished sometime in 2011.
It was only yesterday when I tripped upon that game. I was watching a couple let's play videos on Youtube showing off some of the world's most awful games. And in one of the videos you could see the guy's explorer and there was a file in there. GoldenAxeMyth.rar or something. Made me curious, so I googled it. Holy fuck.
It's Golden Axe and it's better than the original.
Golden Axe Myth is a fan-made prequel, which is really, insanely good. The visuals are different, it's faster-paced, more violent than what you might know from the good old days, but it's still incredibly, undeniably Golden Axe.
The game had some fun surprises in store for me, one of which was the roster of playable characters: Death Adder, the main bad guy in most other Golden Axe games, happens to be one of Myth's main heroes. You almost wouldn't recognize him without his trademark helmet and the golden axe. I didn't know Myth was set in a time before the original Golden Axe, so the whole thing was a bit confusing until explained by the story. What a fucking cool idea! Death Adder has always been that generic, faceless bad guy and Myth gives you an insight on what might have been before he turned into the archdouche of slaughter. Him starting off as a hero is plausible, not overly far-fetched and the idea was simply brilliant. Kudos!
Ooo NOW I recognize you!
Combat actually feels better in Myth than it did in the original. One problem with most fan-made remakes of old 16bit games is how they never get the controls right. Myth works really well with a controller (or four controllers in multiplayer!) adds double-jumps, a handful of special moves and makes everything a bit more fluid and modern. It's a huge improvement over Golden Axe 1 and 2 and less awkward than Golden Axe 3's slightly more complex fighting system. No more pressing multiple buttons at once to pull off certain special attacks, no more ridiculously powerful special moves, which make every other attack obsolete. And there's a block button now. Yay!
They've added plenty more dragons to ride around on, as well as golems, toads and a few other freaky mounts. Unfortunately, some of them seemed a bit broken and glitchy on my playthroughs. The red dragon would regularly freeze up and refuse to move, the toad only moves with the help of the jump button and most of them aren't really very helpful in combat - they make things more difficult, if anything. Attack and Defense power pickups are another new addition and allow you to power up your hero - at least until you die and drop your powerups again.
There are also a few secret areas in every level, which contain loot, treasure and even a hidden character:
Somewhere between Golden Axe 3 and Myth, Chronos got incredibly beefy.
The custom sprites and assets used in Myth are nothing short of amazing. All the heroes and baddies look incredible and are full of personality, with the exception of Tyris Flare's sprite.
The eyebrows, proportions, pose... it's all a bit weird.
Still, a big fuck you to all the whiners, who complain about the game's style and the characters being too cartoony and exaggerated. This:
is clearly an improvement over that:
Besides, Sega were already going there, anyway. You know, just in case you're not aware of Golden Axe - The Duel:
Unlike most other fan projects, those guys have created all the characters and sprites from scratch, instead of just ripping off existing games. There's a whole lot of fan-remakes for all kinds of beat 'em ups, from Double Dragon to Streets of Rage and many of them just use stolen artwork and character sprites from games like King of Fighters. Heck, the Golden Axe fan projects that came before Myth did the exact same thing.
Golden Axe Myth also comes with its own soundtrack, which consists mostly of re-mixed tunes from the original games, which range from catchy to awful. My main problem with the soundtrack is that I still remember every single tune these re-mixes are based upon and unfortunately, the Myth versions rarely do the original justice. Many of them completely skip over the best parts and just endlessly repeat the first half of the original tunes.
Still, at least they didn't just rip the original Mega Drive tunes and threw them in there in horrible quality. Some other fan projects have done exactly that.
The game has a few warts here and there. All the ingame text is pretty bad and full of typos and grammatical mistakes. Enemies occasionally drop keys (which you lose upon death), but I can't for the life of me figure out what they're for - and it refuses to tell me. Same with gold. You find gold in chests, but there don't seem to be any shops. There's also a load game feature, yet high scores, unlocked characters and progress are actually never saved.
There's also the matter of difficulty. I've beaten the entire game on my first playthrough. There's some replay value, thanks to the various playable characters and some alternative paths here and there. There's a ton of baddies and boss monsters but my biggest enemy in this game comes in the form of bottomless pits. Some levels feature a few ridiculous jumps and it doesn't help that the pits are usually surrounded by annoying flying enemies, who have the nasty habit of pushing you down there. What's worse, there is one particular level where you traverse said pits via moving platforms. If you happen to die there, it's entirely possible to respawn and instantly die again, because your character will reappear where a moving platform had been and gone a second ago.
Most of these problems went away when I got the hang of double-jumping, but I'd rather have problems defeating certain bosses than holes. And once you are joined by one or more friends, the whole thing turns into the proverbial cakewalk.
I don't want to be too harsh criticizing this game. It's made by Golden Axe fans, it costs absolutely nothing and it's simply a lot of fun to play. So, if you've actually bothered to read all this crap until all the way down here, you might as well go, download it and see for yourself.
Fucking Steam Winter Sale. You know that shit? Where you buy dozens of games and then you never touch them? Claire looked through the Steam library last night and found Unmechanical. A charming little puzzler, which we purchased because it was charming and little. Not so much for the puzzle part. I hate puzzle games. A friend once tried to gift Portal (2? I dunno) to me through steam for about a month and I kept refusing until the stupid thing just disappeared or something. I dunno. I guess he gave up. Look, I appreciate the notion and everything, but leave me the fuck alone with those fucking portals. So... Unmechanical:
It's got adorable robots and shit.
We finished the whole thing in one sitting. Easiest puzzle game I've ever played. Which I don't mind at all. I don't enjoy staring at the screen for hours, screaming, "I'M LOOKING RIGHT AT IT!" unable to figure out what to do and all. With the exception of one incredibly dumb, annoying puzzle, which got us stuck for a half hour or so, it was all pretty logical and not difficult at all. But fun all the same. And hey, who knows, maybe I'm just super smart or something. Höhö!
The one thing that seriously bugs me about Unmechanical is its ingame hint function. Hit F1 to get a visual hint, which gives the whole thing away. It's too tempting to fucking cheat your way through there. Which we didn't. But at that one annoying puzzle, which had us stuck for a half hour or so, it was insanely difficult to resist. You know. Hit F1. Better yet, fucking Google it or something. We're so used to having walkthrough videos and gamefaqs and crap, it's no wonder games are getting ever more straightforward and hold your hand all the way through. Why bother challenge people's intelligence when they just look shit up?
What's even more annoying is how you get an achievement for never hitting F1 and we didn't get it. Because during the first ten seconds of the game, a little popup tells you about the F1 feature and it doesn't seem to disappear. Until you hit F1. BAM! No achievement. ARGH!
Sherlock Season 3. Man. What fantastic writing! Never been a massive fan of Sherlock Holmes. Read some of the novels back in school, watched a few of the old movies, Hound of Baskervilles, yada, yada, yada, the basic stuff one would know when at least slightly interested in literature. Which helps appreciate the modern TV adaption even more, of course. Mustache, hat, nicotine patches, I get it. Though I really wish they'd remove those stupid timers with the massive, red numbers whenever there's a bomb. I wasn't expecting to see shit like that on a show like Sherlock.
Why would you even put that there if you were the villain? Either you detonate the fucking thing remotely or you set the timer to whenever you want it to blow up and be done with it. Why would you want a bunch of fucking glowy numbers to remind you? It's not like you'd forget about something as big as the detonation of your own fucking bomb, right? "Aw crap, did I set it to blow up at six? Or maybe it was after Corrie, so I could watch it on the news? I always forget. Better run back and look at the big fucking timer!"
That's the next thing. You're not gonna go back and double-check. You'd put the timer on the remote or some shit. Not the bomb. That shit only exists to help the hero. And to show the audience that shit's about to get real. Which stopped being fun sometime in the 80s when MacGyver did it. "See, I'm gonna push this button here when I want to nuke the damn thing and THEN a pointless 30 seconds timer begins, to give the good guys a chance to defuse the whole thing. Bad guy code, can't break that." It's as annoying and overused as the bad guy, who shoots everyone in the face, including his own henchmen, just to show how badass he is. Yet he only captures the good guy and puts him in some elaborate death trap, which never actually works. Usually topped off with the bad guy revealing all of his plans. You'd think that even the bad guys watch cheesy 80s action flicks and learn from them.
Ahem. Anyway. Sherlock. New season. Fucking awesome! And relatively plausible, for the most part. Sometimes I hate it. Sherlock looking at any random object for about a second and deducting a character's whole life from it. And it all seems to make sense. You're watching that shit, going all like, "Aw yeah, I could do that!" when you couldn't deduct where that piss stain on your pants came from after a night of heavy drinking. Stupid, ridiculously attractive, clever, talented Benedict Cumberbatch. Even his fucking name is fucking interesting. Bastard.
I don't quite understand why they cast him as Smaug, though. His voice has been altered so heavily, he might as well be voice-acted by Coronation Street's Deirdre Barlow. And that dragon bears as much of his likeness as Draco did to Sean Connery (i.e. none). Desolation of Smaug was okay, though, aside from all the shit that has already been criticized to death by everyone. I agree, film wasn't super awesome, but it wasn't terrible. Also, Stephen Fucking Fry. In a shit role, but in a Hobbit film nonetheless. Bastard. I wanna be on the panel of QI just once. I'd be terribly boring and not funny, which applies to at least 50% of their regulars, so I'd fit right in. I need my own TV show.
So yeah, new year's resolutions. Do you have any of those? Ever remember any of them for more than a week? My brain loves to go crazy around new year's eve. Usually when I'm in bed, it's 6am and I'm running out of precious sleep time. And all those crazy ideas seem strangely amazing and brilliant when they come to me. "Dude! We're totally gonna work out from now on! Like, you should totally get up right the fuck now and do crunches! You're not sleepy, anyway! Do like 50 of them every morning, for like a year, it'll be awesome!"
Mhm. Sure. My brain is also trying to convince me that I should merge this whole blog thing and my youtube channel. You know, less writing, more blabbling on video. Be famous. Like TotalBiscuit or AngryJoe or some shit. Eloquence, strong personality, that kinda crap. I dunno. I think I'm just gonna take a nap. Also, fucking bank holiday in Germany. Again. I had no fucking clue. No wonder nobody posted any news today. It's gonna be my fucking job. I didn't know. Argh! Back to work! I'm not getting paid enough for this. Not remotely...
We're starting 2014 being idiots. You see, sometime around new year's eve our lamp in the living room went dark. Poof - gone. And no spare light bulbs in the house. Well, I tried ordering some from the local supermarket, but the delivery monkey had the great idea to substitute the one I ordered with a different one, for a different socket.
They've also substituted egg nog with peanut butter, because fuck me.
I think he was more or less trying to tell me to just buy a different fucking lamp to match the bulb he delivered instead of the one I ordered.
So we finally went out to the shop today to get a replacement bulb. I screwed it into the lamp, applied a little too much force and broke it. This was also the moment where I realized that the lamp was unplugged. Because, you know, lizard walking around the house, not giving a fuck about my lamp and shit. So I've spent the next ten minutes digging through the trash looking for the old bulb I assumed was broken. Which was a little disgusting, but still better than walking all the way back to the shop to buy yet another one. Sigh.
On a happier note, our Warframe "clan" finally had its emblem approved and patched into the game. It's a time and money-consuming process only a complete idiot (read: me) would undergo. You see, every clan (or 'guild' for you MMORPG people) can represent their members with a little holographic emblem shown on characters. If you've ever played any incarnation of Counter-Strike, you'll know that giving people the possibility to upload images of any kind will always and inevitably result in penis. Let people create images with in-game tools like on Call of Duty - penis again.
And then they call everyone else fags. If only they knew how to google irony...
So if you want a clan emblem on Warframe, you need to have it approved first. Well, actually, there's also the matter of paying cash shop currency worth 10 Dollars up front. Like so:
150 Platinum equals ten Bucks. Wanna make changes? Ten Bucks again!
So first you pay them for the privilege to upload stuff, then they'll let you know whether or not they approve of your emblem. If they don't, they'll let you know in an email, but you won't get your money back. If they do approve, however, they'll upload it straight away. Actually...
Time between request for approval and upload for our emblem: Two weeks.
This is so bad and so wrong, it's badong. If you don't get that reference, fucking watch Kung Pow, maggot! But since we've got more money than common sense around here, I've stolen some copyright-free image off some ancient Angelfire website and edited a bit to my liking.
Clan emblem wot I done.
We named our clan Double Dragon, because it really just consists of Claire and myself. There's a nice, ragey red dragon and a mellow blue dragon and if you can't guess who is who, you're an idiot. Double Dragon wasn't just fitting because we're only two people and everyone likes dragons and shit. Warframe is about Cyber Ninjas in space and the original Double Dragon was not. But it's a beat 'em up game with martial arts and stuff. Also, the main characters in the Double Dragon games fight side by side, but they're also rivals. At least that's what I deduct from the fact that player 1 and player 2 have to fight to the death at the end of the game and the winner gets to make out with the girl. Manipulative bitch! They're also siblings and we're not, because that'd be gross, and we're not main storyline characters on Game of Thrones.
Anyhow. Took a while, what with the whole approval process requiring an actual human being, which happened to be celebrating Christmas and what have you, but they've finally patched our fucking emblem into the game. Behold:
For ten bucks, I still shoulda been allowed to put my erect penis on there.
So now we can properly represent our epic 2 person clan in-game and people can freak out. OMFG Y U SO KEWL? And we're like haha noob. Or something. I don't know.
Fuck.
I just realized I forgot to get bread when I bought the light bulb. What am I supposed to do with all that free peanut butter now, which should have been egg nog in the first place? Argh!
