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!

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.

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.