A better title for this post would be "Hulu vs. Netflix vs. Illegal Chinese Streaming." But to make it a fair fight, I'll just go with the "legal" internet TV and movie sites.
Netflix ranks as one of the top ten companies to fuck the goose that laid the golden egg. They had the perfect business plan, basically putting Blockbuster and other movie rental stores out of business. Little red DVD envelopes made up half of all non-junk mail and were set to save the US Postal Service. But then...the suits that ran the company did what suits do and got drunk off of hookers and blow. In their coked-out minds, thinking they were golden gods free to roam the Earth and bend mankind to their omnipotent will, they thought they could get away with secretly jacking up the price of their service and not telling anyone. Then they started losing millions of dollars.
After a great amount of confusion and panic, hookers being tossed to the side and blow flying everywhere, the suits decided to send a ridiculous apology email saying that they were ever so sorry to have broken the trust of their customers...but they were still going to jack up the price. Oh, and they were also going to take their outrageously successful business idea, DVD rental-by-mail, the core of "Netflix," and turn it into a separate business called "Quikster." Now you had to pay even more to get Netflix back in the form of streaming video.
After they lost another hundred million in stock prices, the suits had to apologize even more and begged customers to continue getting gouged for little in return. Today Netflix streaming alone is $8 a month for an extremely limited selection of movies and shows. Netflix's business plan now revolves around sucking in customers with cheap monthly streaming and secretly transitioning all their streaming stuff back to DVD so customers have to pay the full price of their increasingly-expensive service. More cocaine, please.
Hulu was also a popular streaming site dedicated to TV and movies. It was free, worked well and was well-liked. It was too much of a good deal, so of course it had to be "monetized." A monthly charge was threatened, leading to the loss of interest in 100% of all Hulu watchers. A 3/5ths compromise of sorts was developed, so now you can have "free" streaming for an extremely limited selection of shows, or you can pay for "Hulu Plus" and get a fairly limited selection of shows added to the free stuff.
Free Hulu is inundated with commercials. I was watching a free 20 minute show and literally after 2 minutes of the show's beginning there was a good 1 minute block of ads. The ads are the same 2-5 ads repeated infinitely, so I hope you like Allstate and Citibank.
Netflix's more notable selection includes:
-Lots of bad anime
-Terrible CG movies being played on FX
-Crappy comedy shows
-Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog
-The first season of a show you like that's in its 8th season
Hulu's selection includes:
-An insane amount of bad anime
-Chinese movies
-Good '70's shows that by today's standards are hilariously cheesy
-Oh here's a good show...oh wait Hulu tricked me into thinking it was free, here's a 90 second preview (Sandwiched by 1 solid minute blocks of ads)
-Seriously, a shit ton of anime
Fuck this, illegal Chinese streaming sites are the best.
Tuesday, May 8, 2012
Tuesday, April 17, 2012
Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3
Red Alert 3 is a game designed to be stupid. Not just any kind of stupid: aggressively stupid.
Back in the '90's Westwood made the original Command and Conquer, and soon after that the original Red Alert. Full Motion Video was the current plague on gaming. Cutscenes featured terrible acting from no-name actors and actresses in front of green screens goading you into greater feats of tank rushing and attack moving.
When EA took over in the early 2000's, they held a secret meeting where they discussed the past success of the C&C franchise and what they needed to improve on to make their games popular to the modern audience. Obviously, the continuance of the dead art of FMV was paramount. Pencil more terrible B-list actors into the budget! Give me Tim Curry as a Russian premier! The asian chick from Battlestar Galactica as your personal assistant! Michael Ironside as some general! James Earl Jones trying hard not to cry!
After fucking up the Tiberium francise for a good decade and offhandedly fucking up Red Alert 2 for good measure, the C&C drones came up with the amazingly racist and fun-to-play Generals and its even-better expansion Zero Hour. Generals was lots of fun despite a bad campaign, terrible FMV and shittily-coded multiplayer that, even if played 50 years in the future on quantum computers, will still bog down like you were playing Crysis on a Pentium 2.
Red Alert 3 attempts to copy some of what made Generals fun and fails. Gone are the options to play each of the 3 races in a different fashion like Zero Hour let you do. Each of the 3 races, Soviet, Allied and Gay Empire of George Takei, plays very differently. This is even to the point of having buildings constructed in different ways, somewhat like Starcraft. However, this just means that only the Soviets build buildings in a rational way and the other two races have you micromanaging the shit out of everything just to build a base.
If you try to play a skirmish against the computer, then God help you. The enemy AI's all secretly work together to beat on the puny human. You'll see AI-controlled units all the colors of the rainbow attacking your base at the same time at regular intervals. When you start a match these AI's will take over your map screen and broadcast shitty FMV acting at you while you scramble around for a few seconds trying to fend off attacks. The speed of the game is way too fast for everyone except Koreans on Ritalin to keep up.
If you make the mistake of watching the intro movie you will want to take your own life rather than watch fat Tim Curry make an ass of himself by trying to approximate a Russian accent. Instead of playing this game, send a letter bomb to the EA offices showing your appreciation for all their hard work keeping this long-dead franchise twitching.
Back in the '90's Westwood made the original Command and Conquer, and soon after that the original Red Alert. Full Motion Video was the current plague on gaming. Cutscenes featured terrible acting from no-name actors and actresses in front of green screens goading you into greater feats of tank rushing and attack moving.
When EA took over in the early 2000's, they held a secret meeting where they discussed the past success of the C&C franchise and what they needed to improve on to make their games popular to the modern audience. Obviously, the continuance of the dead art of FMV was paramount. Pencil more terrible B-list actors into the budget! Give me Tim Curry as a Russian premier! The asian chick from Battlestar Galactica as your personal assistant! Michael Ironside as some general! James Earl Jones trying hard not to cry!
After fucking up the Tiberium francise for a good decade and offhandedly fucking up Red Alert 2 for good measure, the C&C drones came up with the amazingly racist and fun-to-play Generals and its even-better expansion Zero Hour. Generals was lots of fun despite a bad campaign, terrible FMV and shittily-coded multiplayer that, even if played 50 years in the future on quantum computers, will still bog down like you were playing Crysis on a Pentium 2.
Red Alert 3 attempts to copy some of what made Generals fun and fails. Gone are the options to play each of the 3 races in a different fashion like Zero Hour let you do. Each of the 3 races, Soviet, Allied and Gay Empire of George Takei, plays very differently. This is even to the point of having buildings constructed in different ways, somewhat like Starcraft. However, this just means that only the Soviets build buildings in a rational way and the other two races have you micromanaging the shit out of everything just to build a base.
If you try to play a skirmish against the computer, then God help you. The enemy AI's all secretly work together to beat on the puny human. You'll see AI-controlled units all the colors of the rainbow attacking your base at the same time at regular intervals. When you start a match these AI's will take over your map screen and broadcast shitty FMV acting at you while you scramble around for a few seconds trying to fend off attacks. The speed of the game is way too fast for everyone except Koreans on Ritalin to keep up.
If you make the mistake of watching the intro movie you will want to take your own life rather than watch fat Tim Curry make an ass of himself by trying to approximate a Russian accent. Instead of playing this game, send a letter bomb to the EA offices showing your appreciation for all their hard work keeping this long-dead franchise twitching.
Thursday, February 16, 2012
Helpful hints for finding employment.
So you decided to venture on the internet to look for employment? How the fuck did that happen? Oh, you heard of craigslist? Well this is the only site you will ever need for your job hunt. If you follow these simple steps you will land a job almost certainly.
1) Pray. This works quite well because you have no fucking chance in hell of getting noticed. Historically the bible was created by someones pet, mistaken by jesus and stolen by god. So how does this go with obtaining a job? Well think back to the first paragraph, re-read it five times, maybe six, and dismember your own head, only then will you understand the collerlation between job-hunting and praying.
2)Cold call. This works extremely well, especially when you are an established prostitute. You can find clients relatively easily. If you get someone that is under 12, make something up because you might be able to network enough to get to their parents, and that's good for 20bucks, maybe 60 if they are rich. You don't want to set your hopes too high as a prostitute, you might forget to take your vitamins. This is also the point at which you cut off your head again. You can never do this enough because finding a job is impossible, and you are wasting your time.
3)Send 500 emails a day. This doesn't work because you can't possible do that, and I don't even know why you are trying at this point. It's preferential that you cut off your head and quit reading this article. You probably thought this article was here to help you, but you now realized that you have wasted your time, and not only that you have read something extremely negative, and you probably will kill yourself.
And that concludes finding a job! We have learned that through praying, you wont find a job. Also we have learned that cold calling will not find you a job as well. And finally, you can send as many emails as you want, you'll still be penniless and produce stillbourns if you ever attempt to procreate. This is the best advice I can give you, and it works. Now do America a favor and decrease the population today!
1) Pray. This works quite well because you have no fucking chance in hell of getting noticed. Historically the bible was created by someones pet, mistaken by jesus and stolen by god. So how does this go with obtaining a job? Well think back to the first paragraph, re-read it five times, maybe six, and dismember your own head, only then will you understand the collerlation between job-hunting and praying.
2)Cold call. This works extremely well, especially when you are an established prostitute. You can find clients relatively easily. If you get someone that is under 12, make something up because you might be able to network enough to get to their parents, and that's good for 20bucks, maybe 60 if they are rich. You don't want to set your hopes too high as a prostitute, you might forget to take your vitamins. This is also the point at which you cut off your head again. You can never do this enough because finding a job is impossible, and you are wasting your time.
3)Send 500 emails a day. This doesn't work because you can't possible do that, and I don't even know why you are trying at this point. It's preferential that you cut off your head and quit reading this article. You probably thought this article was here to help you, but you now realized that you have wasted your time, and not only that you have read something extremely negative, and you probably will kill yourself.
And that concludes finding a job! We have learned that through praying, you wont find a job. Also we have learned that cold calling will not find you a job as well. And finally, you can send as many emails as you want, you'll still be penniless and produce stillbourns if you ever attempt to procreate. This is the best advice I can give you, and it works. Now do America a favor and decrease the population today!
Wednesday, February 15, 2012
Legends of League of Legends: URGOT
If you're one of the brain surgeons, doctors or lawyers who regularly plays the original Warcraft 3 mod Defense of the Ancients you might be familiar with the Multiplayer Online Battle Arena game League of Legends. It's a game that pits werewolves against deaf women with giant harps that shoot lasers, rock men against the guy from Assassin's Creed, pirates against squirrel men piloting robotic battlesuits. It's a game that's good at wasting your time. You get pit against other dirtbags who refuse to pay money for a finished product but are too lazy to use bit torrent.
Which leads us to our champion spotlight of the day:
Urgot: The morbidly obese cyborg crab man.
Urgot is fucking awesome. When you start the game playing as him you're basically a huge bully. He works best in mid-lane where you go one-on-one with the best guy from the other team. Your E skill is an acid bomb with mid-range that tags an enemy, doing slight damage over time as it melts their face off. However, when you hit level 2 and grab your Q skill you then have the ability to tag someone with an acid bomb and lob ballistic acid-seeking missiles at them from a huge distance. This effectively makes you the Aegis missile cruiser of the game. You are a battleship of pure long-range damage output and mobility and your W is a shield to help you slug it out with whomever you're dueling against.
Urgot's ultimate is one of the trickiest in the game. You hit someone with it and you switch positions with them, while at the same time upping your armor for a few seconds. Enemies that are harassing you are immediately thrown into places where they really don't want to be: In the middle of your team or underneath an angry turret. You can use people trying to gank you as stepping stones to freedom as you switch places with someone trying to block your path. Most opponents you use your ultimate on panic at the sudden jarring shift of position (with the accompanying crazy sound effect it produces) and start flailing and waste their summoner skills trying to get away.
Urgot's strategy is to ramp up in gold until he can get his Perfect Item: The Manamune. Once you get it you no longer have to worry about wasting mana. Just keep spamming your abilities as Manamune rewards you with a higher mana cap for doing so. And then you get more attack power the more mana you have. It allows you to unfairly steamroll in offensive power until you get to dangerous levels.
Making Urgot as scary as possible is one of your goals. Grab some lifesteal so you can heal yourself as you fight. Get Guardian Angel so everyone can see you'll revive if you ever get killed. Grab both the blue golem buff and the red lizard buff in the jungle so you have a ton of spinning shield shit around you whenever you fight. Fuck it, grab Stark's Fervor too so you have a glowing green icon underneath you as you run around. It's like pimp my ride with a fat guy on robo-crab legs.
With great-sounding voice acting, fun skills and a plasma cannon for an arm, Urgot is one of my favorite Legends of League of Legends. He is regularly overlooked by most other players, at least until they see him bearing down on them surrounded by swirling buffs of all kinds and launching acid bombs and seeker missiles as he inexorably moves towards their base.
Which leads us to our champion spotlight of the day:
Urgot: The morbidly obese cyborg crab man.
Urgot is fucking awesome. When you start the game playing as him you're basically a huge bully. He works best in mid-lane where you go one-on-one with the best guy from the other team. Your E skill is an acid bomb with mid-range that tags an enemy, doing slight damage over time as it melts their face off. However, when you hit level 2 and grab your Q skill you then have the ability to tag someone with an acid bomb and lob ballistic acid-seeking missiles at them from a huge distance. This effectively makes you the Aegis missile cruiser of the game. You are a battleship of pure long-range damage output and mobility and your W is a shield to help you slug it out with whomever you're dueling against.
Urgot's ultimate is one of the trickiest in the game. You hit someone with it and you switch positions with them, while at the same time upping your armor for a few seconds. Enemies that are harassing you are immediately thrown into places where they really don't want to be: In the middle of your team or underneath an angry turret. You can use people trying to gank you as stepping stones to freedom as you switch places with someone trying to block your path. Most opponents you use your ultimate on panic at the sudden jarring shift of position (with the accompanying crazy sound effect it produces) and start flailing and waste their summoner skills trying to get away.
Urgot's strategy is to ramp up in gold until he can get his Perfect Item: The Manamune. Once you get it you no longer have to worry about wasting mana. Just keep spamming your abilities as Manamune rewards you with a higher mana cap for doing so. And then you get more attack power the more mana you have. It allows you to unfairly steamroll in offensive power until you get to dangerous levels.
Making Urgot as scary as possible is one of your goals. Grab some lifesteal so you can heal yourself as you fight. Get Guardian Angel so everyone can see you'll revive if you ever get killed. Grab both the blue golem buff and the red lizard buff in the jungle so you have a ton of spinning shield shit around you whenever you fight. Fuck it, grab Stark's Fervor too so you have a glowing green icon underneath you as you run around. It's like pimp my ride with a fat guy on robo-crab legs.
With great-sounding voice acting, fun skills and a plasma cannon for an arm, Urgot is one of my favorite Legends of League of Legends. He is regularly overlooked by most other players, at least until they see him bearing down on them surrounded by swirling buffs of all kinds and launching acid bombs and seeker missiles as he inexorably moves towards their base.
Friday, February 10, 2012
Dungeons of Dredmor
The Indie Revolution in gaming is upon us. What does that mean for you, the aspiring game developer? Well, for you it means that you can grab your kid brother and cobble up something on your parent's Commodore 64, add some chiptunes and, voila! You have your next indie sensation. Send your gold copy to Gabe Newell (be sure to wrap it in cheese so he takes interest) and it'll be on Steam within 24 hours, probably part of another Humble Indie Bundle for $19.99.
Dungeons of Dredmor works on the basic assumption that you have no idea what Nethack is, and it's a pretty good assumption as the only people who do are dangerously obsessive Autistics who moderate the Nethack wiki. This game flew across my radar when it appeared in PC Gamer's 100 Best Games of All Time list (which, shockingly, does not feature Deus Ex as its number 1 game any longer. Now it's Portal. More cheese, Gabe?)
Dredmor is pretty much Nethack lite. However, that might be an unfair statement. While Nethack has had a lot of work put into it over the years, making it possibly one of the most complex and difficult RPG's ever made, it has had absolutely no work done to it to make it remotely palatable to the average human being. ASCII characters making up the visuals combined with a stark cliff face of a learning curve do not pull in the customers as well as graphics and sound. I'm looking at you too, Dwarf Fortress.
So Gaslamp Games made an easier-to-play Nethack with Super Nintendo graphics and decent sound effects and music. Chiptunes, of course. That's the Indie hallmark, everyone loves chiptunes. Retro is the candy that gaming nerds crave.
Nethack's staples still survive: Hardcore game mode, where there are no loading saved games and character death is final. Ramped-up difficulty that will have you slaying tiny blobs of goo one level and horrendous mind-raping abominations from Below the next. You drink from fountains and they either make you feel good or poison you. Your can choose for your character to be laughably inept to deal with the challenge of defeating a dungeon's worth of monsters, just for fun.
However, you won't see truly random happenstances like putting on a ring that's cursed, which you can't take off, which makes you float around and unable to go downstairs until you exit the dungeon the way you came. You won't be able to kill a gnome and use your tinning kit to make canned gnome to eat later. You won't drink a potion that turns you into a tarantula.
Dredmor's graphics and crafting system are notably good and fun to use. The character creation system is hilarious. You choose 8 aspects to throw together in a mishmash and see what kind of adventurer you create. You can have an armor-using mathematician magician who uses blood magic and crossbows, who specializes in mushroom magic to summon killer fungus to defeat his enemies. And he's a sparkly Twilight vampire as well.
The game has a lot of referential and sardonic humor, which helps make it a fun little diversion. If you're a neckbearded hipster then you'll love this game's many references, which are the nerd's lifeblood.
What really shows this game's Indie origins are the fact that it crashes every 15 minutes and gets old really, really fast. Having a game that centers around you having a hardcore, un-revivable character who you play for a couple hours until he or she becomes really cool, then gets deleted when the game crashes, is not a hallmark of a professionally-made product. Gaslamp Games then proceeds to not give a fuck, instead making a half-assed sequel with more references and chiptunes instead of patching the original game.
Thanks, but no thanks. There's nothing I Dredmor than an unfinished product.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The Eagle (2011)
The Eagle: A Channing Tatum Joint is a stressful movie. With so much moral ambiguity it's hard to know who to root for...the oppressive Romans who seek to rule all of the British Isles, or the native Britons who dress up like lunatics and murder for fun? Never mind that the movie just assumes you'd be on the side of the Romans, because the filmmakers are too stupid to realize that their main character isn't even slightly sympathetic.
Deliverance Banjo Kid all grown up on 'roids Channing Tatum is all the star power The Eagle has to offer, which should give you an indication of the movie's quality. From Fighting to GI Joe Rise of Cobra to Dear John, Channing has been trying as hard as he can to be the Steven Seagal of the 21st century. The squinting, the mumbling, the cavalcade of instantly-forgettable performances...it's all there. He just needs to get old, join up with some obscure Asian religion and become a truly overweight shitbag cop and the cycle is complete.
Oh yeah, the plot. So apparently in Roman times they made these giant golden eagles that vanguard forces of the army would take into newly-conquered lands. Channing's dad was a super cool Roman general guy who decided to take one of these eagles into enemy territory and was promptly torn apart by the super-evil Briton savages who selfishly didn't want to be enslaved. The Romans build Hadrian's wall to keep the filthy paleskins at bay, forming what you might call a Green Zone that's a safe refuge for the civilized soldiers in the midst of a war-torn land. The jarhead (or brush-head) Roman soldiers find themselves led by the son of the failure who lost the Eagle. Lucky for them, Channing has super-human hearing due to the fact that he has severely reduced vision from all that squinting and wakes them all up in the middle of the night to fend off a surprise Briton ambush.
The director must have realized at this point that no one in the audience gives a fuck so he has the Briton leader, a babbling Druid, take some Roman soldiers hostage. They drag one up to Hadrian's wall and behead him. Pretty gruesome, eh? Not really, since The Eagle is PG-13 so retarded teenagers could potentially pay money for a ticket. Any time in the movie that someone is about to get beheaded, eviscerated or otherwise brutally murdered the camera turns away.
So this turns out to be a ruse, and Channing's phalanx of wannabe Spartan warriors who went out to save the other survivors gets set upon by war chariots. After a magic spear throw that kills the Druid leader Channing gets hit by a 2-ton out-of-control chariot that knocks him out and cuts his leg a little.
He goes back to the Green Zone and gets some stone-age surgery which turns him into a cripple. While rehabbing his leg he visits the local bread and circus deathmatch where the daily matchup is the two-face helmeted gladiator guy from Gladiator versus a shrimpy 98-pound Briton slave who refuses to fight. As the Gladiator is about to strike the killing blow the audience screams "Death! DEATH!!" with their thumbs down. Channing has an epiphany and throws his thumb up, yelling "No! Life! LIFE, GUYS!" which totally turns the mood of the crowd around. The Briton whose life he saved becomes his slave, swearing to be loyal to him forever.
Channing decides to go on an epic quest to find the eagle his father lost while being devoured by cannibal Scots. He takes his Briton slave up past Hadrian's wall into the wilderness. At every opportunity Channing treats his slave buddy like shit. He orders him around, tells him about how his people need to be crushed by the Empire and squints at him accusingly. Channing doesn't even speak the local language and if anyone figured out he was a Roman soldier his innards would be used for haggis and blood pudding. The slave is his only hope for survival, but he's still an elitist dick to him. You would think that as soon as Channing closes his eyes to rest the slave would cut his throat and head home. Maybe it was really hard for the slave to tell if Channing was asleep or not, which is understanding.
Channing finds some old Roman soldiers who escaped the massacre back in his father's time. They have all gone native and no one knows where the eagle is. The only thing that points Channing in the right direction is praying to Zeus, wherafter he hears an eagle cry and follows it to the North. I didn't even make that part up.
Channing and the slave come across the Seal People, an ultra-savage group of Britons who wear grey bodypaint and bone armor 24/7. Channing's slave tricks them into believing that Channing is actually HIS Roman slave. Channing is unable to deduce this ruse and instead becomes enraged and calls the Briton a traitor, attempting to kill him with his bare hands. The Seal People then proceed to beat his ass, repeatedly. "We'll help you keep your slave in line" they helpfully offer.
After being humiliated for a while at the hospitality of the Seal People, Channing becomes witness to one of their heathen Druid rituals. They all get drunk on goat piss and hallucinate while their deer-antlered shaman dances around in front of him. And what does the shaman have as his magic staff, but the golden eagle. As soon as he sees the eagle Channing tries to assault the shaman and promptly gets his ass beat again by the Seal People.
Channing's Briton slave then reveals that he was faking the whole time and he's still indentured for life to his Roman master. They grab the eagle and take off on horseback. The only one left in the village who's not stoned off his ass from last night's ritual is a little kid who is sorry to see the two leave. The slave gives the kid a little wooden fish to remember them by and to not wake anyone up.
After their horses' legs break in the peat moss of the Scottish Highlands, it's a foot race against the Seal People. Everyone back in ancient times had the ability to run for days on end. It was a survival tactic that allowed them to hunt wooly mammoths, one which disappeared with the invention of polyunsaturated fats. Channing's wound starts to give him trouble and he goes into septic shock. His slave runs off back to Hadrian's wall in a stupid attempt to get reinforcements from the Romans. In case you were wondering, Channing still treats him like a dick. He very begrudgingly gives the slave his freedom in order for him to leave his side to go find help.
So the Seal People who have been running for a week finally catch up with Channing, who takes time off from puking his guts out to somehow be in fighting shape again. Magically, his former slave comes back with all the disgraced old Roman warriors who had lost the eagle to begin with, their armor and weapons still intact. "Defend the Eagle!" Channing commands.
But the Seal People have one last surprise. The director must have remembered that at this point absolutely no one would be sympathetic to Channing and are most likely actively rooting for the Seal People to kill him, so he tries to demonize the savage Britons one last time. The Seal People have brought that little kid from the village, the one who got the wooden fish from Channing's slave. They then slit his throat (off-camera) to show just how hardcore they are. It's cool that these guys sprinted for a hundred miles with a little kid in tow just to make a point (and wipe out one of their small village's only male heirs), but whatever. A slow-mo 300 Spartans fight ensues where all the Seal People and old Romans die and Channing is branded Best Roman Ever. Hooray!
Moral of the Story: Pray to Zeus, and you'll get shit done.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Deus Ex: Human Revolution (2011) - Breaking and Entering Evolved
Setting aside for the moment the fact that the original Deus Ex somehow keeps finding its way onto Top 10 Games of All Time lists (If not the #1 Game of All Time), it was still a game plagued with issues. These issues have become popular to ignore by gaming journalists, who have been seeking for years to turn the "Best Game Ever" debate into something more complex than just "It was Half-Life. Alternatively? Half-Life 2."
Playing the original Deus Ex would lead one to notice some glaring problems. Namely, horrendous voice acting, casual if unintended racism, retarded sound effects, abominable AI and convoluted plotline.
Now, this is a '90's action game so I'm going to let all those problems slide. I'm going to do this namely because Deus Ex was the most hilarious game I've ever played. A game that took itself so seriously and attempted to bring up so much deep commentary on government, religion, power and the future of humanity, one that allowed you never before seen freedom to complete missions in any way you wanted...none of that mattered when you were tasing the homeless in the streets, gathering up as many '40's of malt liquor as possible and downing them at once, breaking into someone's apartment and stealing their couch, beaning cops in the head with basketballs, and generally being a cyborg criminal nuisance.
My experience with Deus Ex can be summed up into my first impression gathered during the game's training mission. As JC Denton you're set through a variety of simple trials to get you used to the controls, augmentations and inventory screens. At the very end of the training mission, however, you encounter a GIANT ROBOT FIRING LIVE AMMO. Evidently UNATCO is pretty serious about putting you through the ropes before sending you into the world. In trying to escape this mechanical monstrosity I was introduced to the damage system that was able to calculate injuries down to individual limbs, even going so far as to immobilize them until you've received adequate medical attention. I got my legs shot off and had to crawl across the finish line.
I continued to scrape along in agony as my superior congratulated me over the radio on my achievement and subsequently expounded at GREAT length on the happenings of the world, UNATCO, terrorism, the "gray death, etc. etc." All the while I'm crying with laughter, screaming at my monitor for a medic and oh god why is no one helping me.
I'm happy to announce that, while the outright silliness of the things you could do in the game world have been toned down a bit in Human Revolution, most of what gave Deus Ex its flavor have returned. Homeless people lie in the streets waiting to be shot with taser guns and brutalized with your augmented steel fists. Apartments with easily-hackable door locks range far and wide. The AI is still laughably bad, voice acting ranges from decent to horrendous (Eidos has a very specific stereotype in their minds on how blacks and Chinese people talk and act.) You get to go to China for no real reason and check out people living in pods. Poverty is everywhere, people whine constantly about the nature of humanity and augmentation and governments.
While there's no GEP gun to be found, the main difference in augmentations in this round is that they are all useful and pretty cool to boot. They are also extremely expensive, so you really have to take some time to choose what to upgrade. Do you up your hacking skills to be better at breaking and entering, or do you boost your battery system so you can punch more whores in the face before having to find a Cliff bar?
Sadly, alcohol is not nearly as prevalent in Human Revolution as it was in Deus Ex, leading to far fewer instances of wanton drunkenness on the job. This is due to the fact that liquor gives a legitimate boost to your stats, temporarily pushing your health up past 100% like you were Bender or something. The only way to replenish your battery power (after performing multiple lethal takedowns on Chinese civilians) is to eat powerbars, supposedly to "replenish nutrients." So you can run out of powerbars pretty easily and be wandering through a Shanghai market where street cooks are frying up meat in woks left and right and there's shops full of snacks everywhere you look, but you go hungry because all Adam Jensen eats is a specific brand of candy.
I am about halfway through the game and enjoying breaking as many laws as humanly possible, surpassing what he term "humanly possible" even means as I see through walls, jump from 5-story buildings and land without a scratch, punch through walls and immobilize transients with a sonic cannon.
Final Verdict: I never asked for this.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Dwarf Fortress: Tales of Promise and Failure
Dwarf Fortress (Or: Armok, God of Blood volume II, Dwarf Fortress) is a game that appeals to me much in the way Nethack appeals to both me and to people with sick senses of humor like me (but who, unlike me, are obsessive and Autistic.)
Namely, it's a game about losing. Losing in surprising and horrifying ways. Ways that are also funny.
The Aspergers-afflicted shut-ins who play this game refer to this aspect of the game as "Fun." "Fun" being a sarcastic way to describe grim failure. Most of the work the creators of this game have done in creating Dwarf Fortress is to create ever more varied ways for you to lose.
This game has levels of complexity that dwarf (fuck you) supposedly complex games like Civilization and Master of Orion. It revels in demonstrating to you how intricately it can create an entire planet of dwarves, elves, goblins and humans. In a matter of minutes it will randomly generate hundreds of different biospheres that rate landscapes based on terrain, local wildlife, vegetation, geology (including dozens of types of rocks, minerals and ores that make up the dozens of subterranean levels), danger level, local civilizations and, of course, how blatantly evil the surroundings are. Whereas in Civ your biggest concern is which river you plop your first city next to, in Dwarf Fortress you have to worry about whether your first Dwarf settlers will be instantly surrounded and devoured by hell rats.
And, even better, the biggest Autistic masochists can play the game with its original graphic options. Meaning, there are no graphics. Everything is in fucking ASCII format, so a dwarf is represented by a different-colored happy face, an arrow is a <, a dog is a d, a monkey is an m, an elephant is an E, and a horrendous hell-beast is a D. If you care about your sanity at all, you can download a tileset that somewhat attempts to represent the world in a more convincing way than a lazy bunch of letters and punctuation marks. You'll also turn the default music off IMMEDIATELY and play some internet radio instead (I recommend either classical music, or dubstep.)
After a random world is generated, the game will then spend about 10 minutes generating an entire HISTORY of that world, including notable historical figures, events, heroes, cities, tomes and legends. It's sort of retarded and pointless, but the game likes to flaunt this aspect of itself.
You start Oregon Trail-style with about 8 dwarves showing up in your chosen area. The lives of these brave few midgets now rest in your incapable human hands. As in Nethack, there are shortcut key-presses to remember, menus to delve through, jobs to assign, food supplies to manage, rock to dig through, labors to assign and train, structures to build, caverns to carve, smooth and decorate, and lots and lots of time to waste.
Over time more dwarves will stupidly join your doomed civilization (And don't kid yourself, it's doomed.) Your society will swell through accumulation of useless, stupid Dwarves with titles like "Cheesemaker" and "Miller" who steadfastly refuse to make cheese and mill, instead choosing to drink dwarf beer and fuck and make useless baby dwarves who instantly become targets for goblin pedophiles.
I don't want to list every way in which your Dwarves can be brutally maimed over the course of their adventures, but here are a few of my favorites that I've either encountered directly or read about from Autistic people posting online.
-A Goblin kidnapper appears in your fortress, luring you into sending all of your poorly-trained militia after him. Soon after they leave the safety of the fortress they are set upon by well-armed Goblin raiders who kill or cripple your soldiers, leaving the rest of your Dwarves to be murdered in their bedrooms.
-Human traders enter your area, bringing with them valuable items for trade as well as some Yaks. One of the Yaks goes insane immediately after appearing in your territory. The Yak tramples the humans and goes on a months-long rampage through your fields and into your fortress itself, killing about 4/5ths of your Dwarves.
-Your Dwarves dig too greedily and too deep, attracting Cave Trolls, Albino Alligators, Imps, Tentacle Demons and Forgotten Winged Poisoned Elder Snails.
-Your Dwarves go insane through lack of clean water and turn on each other. Lack of laws and prisons mean that murderers go unpunished, and bad feelings send your society into a spiral of revenge killings.
-Herds upon herds of elephants roam through your lands, stomping your Dwarves into paste and camping the bodies of the dead. They feast on any other dwarves who idiotically try to loot the items left behind, or even those who attempt to bury their fallen comrades.
-You choose the least evil (and therefore happiest and most magical) area to place your fortress...and your settlers are murdered by Unicorns.
More stories await those brave enough to read through more text than the game itself in my future updates.
Namely, it's a game about losing. Losing in surprising and horrifying ways. Ways that are also funny.
The Aspergers-afflicted shut-ins who play this game refer to this aspect of the game as "Fun." "Fun" being a sarcastic way to describe grim failure. Most of the work the creators of this game have done in creating Dwarf Fortress is to create ever more varied ways for you to lose.
This game has levels of complexity that dwarf (fuck you) supposedly complex games like Civilization and Master of Orion. It revels in demonstrating to you how intricately it can create an entire planet of dwarves, elves, goblins and humans. In a matter of minutes it will randomly generate hundreds of different biospheres that rate landscapes based on terrain, local wildlife, vegetation, geology (including dozens of types of rocks, minerals and ores that make up the dozens of subterranean levels), danger level, local civilizations and, of course, how blatantly evil the surroundings are. Whereas in Civ your biggest concern is which river you plop your first city next to, in Dwarf Fortress you have to worry about whether your first Dwarf settlers will be instantly surrounded and devoured by hell rats.
And, even better, the biggest Autistic masochists can play the game with its original graphic options. Meaning, there are no graphics. Everything is in fucking ASCII format, so a dwarf is represented by a different-colored happy face, an arrow is a <, a dog is a d, a monkey is an m, an elephant is an E, and a horrendous hell-beast is a D. If you care about your sanity at all, you can download a tileset that somewhat attempts to represent the world in a more convincing way than a lazy bunch of letters and punctuation marks. You'll also turn the default music off IMMEDIATELY and play some internet radio instead (I recommend either classical music, or dubstep.)
After a random world is generated, the game will then spend about 10 minutes generating an entire HISTORY of that world, including notable historical figures, events, heroes, cities, tomes and legends. It's sort of retarded and pointless, but the game likes to flaunt this aspect of itself.
You start Oregon Trail-style with about 8 dwarves showing up in your chosen area. The lives of these brave few midgets now rest in your incapable human hands. As in Nethack, there are shortcut key-presses to remember, menus to delve through, jobs to assign, food supplies to manage, rock to dig through, labors to assign and train, structures to build, caverns to carve, smooth and decorate, and lots and lots of time to waste.
Over time more dwarves will stupidly join your doomed civilization (And don't kid yourself, it's doomed.) Your society will swell through accumulation of useless, stupid Dwarves with titles like "Cheesemaker" and "Miller" who steadfastly refuse to make cheese and mill, instead choosing to drink dwarf beer and fuck and make useless baby dwarves who instantly become targets for goblin pedophiles.
I don't want to list every way in which your Dwarves can be brutally maimed over the course of their adventures, but here are a few of my favorites that I've either encountered directly or read about from Autistic people posting online.
-A Goblin kidnapper appears in your fortress, luring you into sending all of your poorly-trained militia after him. Soon after they leave the safety of the fortress they are set upon by well-armed Goblin raiders who kill or cripple your soldiers, leaving the rest of your Dwarves to be murdered in their bedrooms.
-Human traders enter your area, bringing with them valuable items for trade as well as some Yaks. One of the Yaks goes insane immediately after appearing in your territory. The Yak tramples the humans and goes on a months-long rampage through your fields and into your fortress itself, killing about 4/5ths of your Dwarves.
-Your Dwarves dig too greedily and too deep, attracting Cave Trolls, Albino Alligators, Imps, Tentacle Demons and Forgotten Winged Poisoned Elder Snails.
-Your Dwarves go insane through lack of clean water and turn on each other. Lack of laws and prisons mean that murderers go unpunished, and bad feelings send your society into a spiral of revenge killings.
-Herds upon herds of elephants roam through your lands, stomping your Dwarves into paste and camping the bodies of the dead. They feast on any other dwarves who idiotically try to loot the items left behind, or even those who attempt to bury their fallen comrades.
-You choose the least evil (and therefore happiest and most magical) area to place your fortress...and your settlers are murdered by Unicorns.
More stories await those brave enough to read through more text than the game itself in my future updates.
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