HOUSE OF AWESOME!!!!!!

AWESOME REVIEW: TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FUCK, WHO CARES?

2009-07-02T16:42:00.003-06:00

Michael Bay hates me.

I know, he has plenty of good reasons. I'm overweight, grumpy, aging one day for every 24 hours that go by... Hell, most of the time, I hate me. But after Transformers, I thought me and Mike (his friends call him Michael) had an understanding: He does movies in which shit blows up, and I forgive the dog for licking balls.

Mike, you fucked it up.

I had every right to expect this movie to be awesome. The first one was great! It had real charm, giant robot fights, Megan Fox, Optimus Prime... it was like a tech demo for the awesomest movie ever. Sure, it was no Citizen Kane, but it was fine. Fun. The sequel promised more giant robots, more charm, more Megan Fox, and it delivered: a loud, explosive package of empirical awesome wrapped in a nutty shit tortilla.

I don't think it's too much to ask that after all these years, Michael Bay learn how to make a fucking movie. You know, to ease us in with some exposition, then tease us along with a compelling story, then nail it home with an exciting ending that pays us off for sticking with it for so long. But Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen isn't so much a story as a perfect simulation of having one's head dunked in a flaming cistern of animal shit... and I'm not talking about the pleasant kind, either.

The movie begins with our friends the Autobots having teamed up with the American military to stop the Decepticons from decepting. This is partially because the Autobots and the American military teamed up in the last movie, but mostly because Michael Bay can't go three days without fellating the US military. If this were a review of Michael Bay's Strawberry Shortcake, then I'd be talking about how she was teamed up with an elite unit of berry, berry well trained commandos.

So, the Autobots are teamed up with the military, and they're airdropping into China to take on some Decepticons. Because China likes letting us and our giant robot aliens into their airspace, it all goes down without a hitch, and soon our favorite Autobots are chasing after the Decepticons. Or... at least I think they are. And wait, those aren't our favorites. They're new guys? And that Decepticon is really an Autobot? And how many silver sports car robots are we following here? And why is there a pink ice cream truck that the military guys call "the Autobot twins," when there's also a pack of three motorcycles that they refer to as "Arcee"?

Ooh, nevermind. There's a giant robot there, rolling over China, and only our friends the unknown, confusing Autobots can stop it! WooHOO EXPLOSIONS!

Fuck you, Michael Bay.

So then we see Sam Witwicky as he's getting ready to go to college. He's talking with Megan Fox (doing a fine George Hamilton impression), who is breaking up with him, I think over a disagreement over what brand of motor oil they each bathe in before leaving the house. Apparently she's mad he's going to college, and she doesn't think he'll be faithful. Who fucking cares? That's already a whole paragraph that had no giant robots in it.

Michael Bay can't just let it go here. He has to rope us in. He can point to the movie and say, "Dude, there's a huge scene in which Optimus Prime busts out some swords and cuts some bitches," and I have to legally say, "Yeah, ok, you're right." Then he laughs like a hyena on meth and gets back to fucking up the movie.

There's a huge giant Michael Bay military porn section that seems to take up more than half the movie. Giant robots + bombs and shit = awesome, generally... but not here. You can't tell who's getting shot. The military owns the giant robots (whom I assume are Decepticons, but I can't fucking tell, and I know the military can't), and Sam runs around with a sock full of dust that can resurrect Optimus Prime (oh, I forgot to mention, Optimus dies).

A bunch of construction equipment combine to form Devastator, which should have ben the awesomest thing ever. But Michael Bay fucks it up. He manages to avoid telling us much of anything about the Constructicons before then, and then Devastator turns out to be about as awesome as a sick chihuahua on valium, getting his ass kicked by a pair of Autobot Jar-Jars whose ghetto-crunk accents that make Eddie Griffin look like Charlton Heston.

The plot of the film is simple, and goes something like the following:

....

I have no clue. I am a Transformers dork from way back, I have no clue what this film's about. Some old Transformer was trying to destroy the sun, and then some Primes stopped him and hid his machine in a pyramid so that he'd have to engage in all sorts of awesome stuff before he can try to kill the sun again. Then... the military does some crap, Sam and Megan Fox say things, and some nodescript, anonymous robots transform into cars that are AVAILABLE IN YOUR LOCAL GM SHOWROOM NOW!!!

All the film had to do was show some robots, have them fight each other, and have a plot that makes sense. At this point, though, the dog isn't just licking balls, it's moved a few inches south.

Fuck you, Michael Bay. All I wanted was a Transformers movie, and you give me this.

Uma Thurman is my girlfriend

2007-03-19T13:14:00.000-06:00

Yes, it's true, I am in a relationship with Uma Thurman.

Imagine my surprise when I learned the truth. There I was, innocently opening my email, unsuspecting that this would be the day that Kill Bill herself would become my Lady Liaison.

But there it was: The correspondence.

Such a happy day it was! I mean, we've never met, but I did so admire her knobby, man-like feet in Kill Bill! And yeah, so I did think they had the roles reversed in The Truth About Cats and Dogs, in which she played the Hot Chick to Jeneane Garofalo's Frumpy But Interesting Personality Girl. But these things cannot get in the way of our Love.

I was immediately blown away by my dear Uma's caring. To begin our relationship, she immediately expressed concern about my sexual health, explaining that I could get Viagara for very cheap. She went on to point out similar deals on Cialis and other medications that she must have felt would help our relationship become stronger.

And then came the sweet talk, as seen in this excerpt from the very letter that proposed to me her love:

Episode, will put her fledgling acting. Swimsuit lingerie glamour amateur portraits articles! Current castings contact enter. Pics wedding photos stripped dirrty to, source for with. Tyra banks valeria mazza!

My heart, it is going pitter-pat! Here's more from my silver-tongued Hollywood vixen:

Later began fearlessly break, free mass media. Turlington, cindy crawford claudia schiffer elle, macpherson. Yourself, forum posts current castings contact! Tyra banks valeria mazza sabato jr marcus mark. Bridget hall carmen, kass christy turlington cindy, crawford. Interested as its own, art form im, keen. Only, voiced small part.

There are few things hotter than a hot chick saying the names of other hot chicks. It's almost like lesbians, but without most of the awesome lesbian stuff. Still, she knew how to hit my buttons!

All that was really sweet, but it wasn't until the end of the letter when she really poured on the charm, expressing in poetry what she couldn't express in prose:

That hid true self scope talent.
Commercial, timecindy staying powerkate mosstop.
Should reenact steamy kiss, madonna mtv music but?
Been, made darker theme the.

And that, my friends, is why Uma Thurman and I are in love.

Stays Crunchy, Even in Milk!!!!!!

2007-03-12T15:00:00.000-06:00

So. Chris Taylor thinks he can make a great game without crunch, does he?

Ha. We'll see about that.

Tell me, Mr. Taylor. Without your staff working 14 hour days, who was there to cover when the build failed? Or when a designer, bleary and confused from lack of sleep, put in a placeable or wrote a script that broke an entire level?

And who was there to help fix everything when one of the staff, drunken from the dinnertime bitch session in the local pub, changed an untouchable constant that rendered half the game unplayable?

And who, pray tell, was there to smooth over the rough when a cranky designer said What I Really Think to an exhausted artist, sparking an inter-departmental rivalry that will poison the production process for games to come?

And who will fix the bugs caught by testers on their 16th hour that day, the bug put in by a designer when, eyes bleary from 15 hours of staring at a monitor, he tried his best to quickly fix a bigger problem with an inadequate band-aid?

Who, sir? Who will fix these problems?! Who will minister to the morale of the project, trodden and kicked aside like a paraplegic at the Running of the Bulls? Who will speak to the poor workers, giving them shallow appeals to their inner gamers, coaxing from them the best performances they can summon given that they just don't fucking care anymore?

Who, I ask you, will call that shitty catering company to order more dinner for those starving waifs who cannot, simply cannot, get home to their families for the fifth, sixth night in a row?

What's that you say? What? You say that without crunch, those problems don't exist!?

Ha. HA, I say.

Builds break! Bugs are introduced! People get grumpy!

But then they go home and rest? Think about what they're doing? Possibly solve problems in their minds, in the comfort of their own homes? Kiss their wives and raise their children, without missing valuable months of the kids' childhoods?

And they return to work refreshed, rested, and... what?

Ha. Impossible. You can't make a great game without crunch. You'll end up rushing, and compromising, and the game will suffer. Ha! Got you.

Oh wait. Supreme Commander, you say?

Ha. Erm, Hm. Damnit.

Well, still. You're wrong. If you were right, then more people would have caught on to this during the many, many times this same argument has come up in the past. So what, we've seen studies for years saying that crunch is counterproductive. So you come along. Why do you think you're any different?

Every great game in recent years has been made under the spectre of crunch. Oh, except your Supreme Commander. Oh, and Oblivion, whose Ken Rolston told us in person that the Oblivion team worked little to no overtime at all. But how good could Oblivion be? It's not like they've
sold 3 million copies or been the whole reason Take Two's stock was upgraded.

Chris Taylor, I call you out. I challenge you to make a single great game without crunch time. Go ahead, I'm wait--Oh, you already did.

Okay, okay. But let's see you do it again.

MEHWWEDGE

2006-06-12T15:26:00.000-06:00

It's done. I gone and done made Ms. Awesome into MRS. AWESOME.

It's a strange thing, being married. It's kinda like being painted with a coat of invisible paint. You know something's different, and everything just seems a little bit new, but really, as far as anyone's concerned, everything's still the same. I'd been living with Ms. Awesome for some 4 or 5 years now, but now we're MARRIED. Weird.

A few things have changed:

I have to call her my "wife" now, which is far less hip than saying "girlfriend." That latter term is reserved for a whole other kind of relationship now.
The relationship got a nice shot of "new" after the ceremony. Kinda like it did after we went from friends-to-dating, from dating-to-engaged, and so on. The difference is, this time there's no next elevation. I supposed we could go get "marrieder," but I'm not sure how that's done.
We could go off and have a kid now, if we want. That's messed up. I mean, we could have done it before, but it's like, expected now. Shiver.
Married couples seek us out to hang out. We used to hang out with almost exclusively singles, and we were the only real couple. Now hanging out with married people seems like the thing to do. Odd.
Here's the weirdest thing: Everything that happens is now evaluated with an emphasis on "It's going to be like that for the rest of your life." If my wife drops pudding on the floor (literally, not a euphamism for taking a shit... but I think the example would still hold), I think to myself, "She's going to be dropping pudding on the floor for the rest of our lives." Bizaare.

We have a great relationship. We laugh at the same crap, we torment our cats in much the same way, etc. She's a fantastic cook, and I'm highly skilled at eating stuff. It's great. And honestly, I have to say that mehwwidge was one of the best things that has happened to me. Because despite the fact that not a lot has changed, some very important things have. No more doubts as to whether she digs me. No more wondering if she's the one. No more trying to figure out where to go when I've had a bad day or when I need someone to talk to. I can't describe how all that is different now, it just is. And that's cool. I imagine it'd be the same if we'd have a civil ceremony or some dude dressed like Rerun from What's Happening giving our vows. There's just something about the act of doing it that makes everything different and the same at the same time.

As a wedding present to ourselves, we're replacing the bumper of our car, which got sheared off in an accident in the parking lot of the airport after we finally returned home from our wedding trip. But we also snaked off some bucks to buy ourselves an Xbox 360 and three games: Dead or Alive 4, Tomb Raider: Legend, and Rumble Roses. The latter was mostly a joke until Mrs. Awesome saw the scantily clad ladies and put it on the "No, really" pile.

I love my new wife.

AWESOME REVIEW: X-MEN: THE LAST STAND

2006-05-29T16:19:00.000-06:00

Someone once said that you can polish a piece of shit, but it's still a piece of shit.

People say all kinds of stuff, but it applies to the new Xmen film fairly well. The thing is, well, they put on so much damn polish that I bought the film like it was a hooker at a garage sale.

Oh, and SPOILER WARNING.

The movie has two layers: One is the "HOLY CRAP THAT GUY SHOT LASERS OUT OF HIS FACE" layer, and the other is the "Hm. This doesn't make any sense as a movie" layer. There's also the "Why does Brett Ratner hate the X-Men?" layer, but we'll get to that.

On the former level, the movie owned me. I watched Beast flip around and kick people's asses, even though he was really Frasier under all that immovable makeup. I watched Wolverine, empowered by plot, kick the asses of everyone in the room. I watched an apparently 13-year-old girl kick the ass of Juggernaut, and it totally made sense. I watched Iceman do stuff and then do some other stuff. And so on. Essentially, I got caught up in the bright flashing lights and loud noises, and the film took me away.

I didn't even notice until later that the film had some serious flaws. There were a couple of major deaths in the film that were handled poorly, even without the "OMGZORZ THEY KILLED MY FAVE CHRRACKTOR AND INVALIDATED ALL MY FANFIC" angle that a lot of people seem to take. Cyclops in particular got a punk death.

Basically, in the film, someone has discovered a cure for being a mutant. A mutant kid has the power to negate other people's mutant powers, which supports the idea put forth in the comics of "Mutant Power as Convenient Plot Device." Like the gadgets of Blade or Batman Begins, if a character needs something, someone out there has a mutant power that can do it. Magneto meets up with a tattooed chick who can run fast and ALSO detect mutants and tell you their "class." Meanwhile, it took Magneto and Prof. X to invent Cerebro, which did the same thing, but with much flashing of lights and without the cool running-fast powers.

So anyway, the US is putting the mutant cure on the market, but it's also using it as a weapon against mutant criminals. We're supposed to see this as a violation, even though people like Mystique are terrorists and mass murderers. So OMG, it must be stopped, etc.

Also, Jean Grey is back from the dead in a plot twist that surprises no comic book fan older than 12, but now she's sorta evil and more powerful. And she has bright-red hair now, which means she's evil. Actually, she was standing there all in red, with a corset (that was actually really loose on the thin Famke Jansen) and cloak and looking for all the world like the Scarlet Witch. Anyway, first thing she does is kill Cyclops like a punk. Then she seduces Wolverine (because, really, how can you not?) and then kills Prof. X. Big funeral.

Suddenly everyone is afraid that the school is under siege, even though Magneto said in so many words that any mutants who stay out of his way will not be harmed. A true Ratnerian scene of anguish ensues.

The real difference between this film and the Singer ones is that Ratner has no damn clue what he's doing. Here's a scene from the film:

Wolverine: Grr, argh. I'm such a beast. Also, I have lots of empathy and am the perfect man.
Rogue: Oh, I am so comflicted. Sean Ashmore likes me, but he also wants to get into Kitty Pryde's pants. But she has the power to phase out of her pants without effort, and the moment I even touch Sean Ashmore all of his inexplicable lustworthiness will absorb into my skin. Boo the fuck hoo.
Wolverine: Grr, snort. I say you stick to your guns, bub. Rowr. Maybe make him some muffins that say, "LUV U" on them. Or draw him a picture of you two holding hands.
Rogue: You're so manly-yet-sensitive, Wolverine. Any girl in the audience would be lucky to sex you.

That's essentially it. Toss in something witty that plays on every character's powers ("Rogue, you suck!" or "Not everyone sees the world through rose-colored glasses, Cyclops! OMG LOL"), and you have the wit in a nutshell.

Two new X-Men joined the cast this time: Beast, played by Kelsey Grammer having just come from a Botox injection, and Angel, played by a marble statue with wings. Angel's role in the film was pretty much to flap about and represent how awesome being a mutant was to those mutants who had graceful and beautiful wings. I think if I were a mutant whose superpower was the ability to constantly shit out of my nose, I'd probably be very cross with Angel.

Storm played a much greater role in the film, too, which I think is a large reason why Cyclops bit it like a teething baby at a styrofoam festival. Luckily, she didn't have a hell of a lot to say; she mostly blew crap up and flew around--a pleasant improvment over Old Storm, who generally flitted about sayting stupid crap until the moment when she could make coulds go away or attack stuff with CG tornadoes.

In the end, stuff blew up, which is always good, and superheroes were doing the blowing-up of stuff, which is even better. The big problem with the film, outside of the fact that it sucked in general, was that it threw crap all over the franchise. It seemed obvious that Brett Ratner cared about the film to the total of zero, the way the actors were generally phoning in their performances and toddling about in what appeared to be the least comfortable leather outfits imaginable. He killed off Cyclops, Jean Grey, Prof. X, and essentially, Magneto and Mystique. And then, right at the end, he tossed in a bone to anyone who wanted to try to revive the scorched earth. Ms. Awesome came out of the theater announcing her intention to boycott Bryan Singer films from now on, simply because he "abandoned" X-Men and the franchise went down the toilet.

I can see where she's coming from. The film was kinda a jumble of poor direction and flashy, "This oughtta get 'em!" action and SFX. I'm almost ashamed that I liked it as much as I did, but it doesn't take much to get me with a superhero flick.

I'd like to see the film again, but not until after I kick Brett Ratner in the balls and make sure there'll be an "X-Men Begins" in the next 15 years or so. In the meantime, I'll go see Superman Returns alone and fret about what it means about me that I liked X-Men: The Last Stand.

Geek Flag at Half Mast

2006-05-04T11:04:00.000-06:00

I was reading this thread at RPG.net, and I realized something.

I don't have the energy to be a real geek anymore.

I mean it. As mighty and masculine and awesome as I am, I just can't keep it up. I can't keep caring about the little crap that geeks have to care about.

The thread linked above is one about the new Superman Returns trailer, which made me giddy like a little girl. The people on the thread took that awesome trailer and decided to argue about whether the actors are too young and whether Kevin Spacey makes a good Lex Luthor. And my first impulse was to post something resembling the following:

"Dear Damn Nerds,

"Who gives a flying crap about how old Clark Kent looks or whether Lex Luthor lives up to your weird fantasy of who he should be based on the comics, which present a new version of both Clark and Lex every other goddamned issue.

"Furthermore, this Superman movie is all the Superman movie any of us will get for the time being. So shut the hell up and just watch it.

"In addition, going to see a movie is not the same as pledging a thousand dollars to support a charity or political candidate. It is 12 bucks and two hours of your life. Stop acting like going to see a movie is doing the studio any damn favors. You're not that important.

"Also, I don't care about your pseudo-intellectual thoughts on whether the 'source material' was treated with respect. It's a damned comic book. They don't even respect themselves.

"And you're ugly.

"Sincerely,

"Awesomelord."

But then I realized that I don't care enough to even post that. Because what will happen is that they will all turn on me and assert their right to geek about in a destructive manner. It's just not worth it.

Where did my energy go? Why don't I care whether or not Spacey's Lex Luthor is too whacky or a new Clash of the Titans film will exist? Why can't I focus on the stupid little details and work myself up into a froth that completely ruins my eventual moviegoing experience, regardless of the actual quality of the film I grudgingly go to see?

Maybe it's age. I did age a little yesterday, I think. I was sitting around, and I saw some kids outside, and I thought, "Damned kids. Get off my lawn." And then when I was burying them, I got a twinge in my back. So I figured I was aging.

And then I thought about it. I never hear old men geeking about. Is it because they, too, lost the energy to do so? Or is it, maybe, because geeking out just isn't that important in the grand scheme of things?

It's a rough realization when you find out that giving your all to complain about insignifiant details might not be a healthy way to go. Someone talking about the threatened Aquaman TV series might go, "OMG, Aquaman isn't going to be from Atlantis!!!", and I might respond, "OMG, Aquaman exists as an entity in fiction!!!" Who cares where the TV Aquaman is from. If it's a good show, frickin' watch it. If you don't want to, don't. The effort you save from not griping about it could be what saves your life in the coming apocalypse.

So yeah. I don't know if I need to give up my geek badge or not. Maybe it's for the best, especially since I'm getting married soon and no longer need my geek badge to pick up chicks.

Karl Rove Blackmails Senators

2006-02-07T11:16:00.000-07:00

Read this.

I wish this blog had any real influence. Because I know the average American won't see this, and I think it's frightening.

The Bush Administration is putting political pressure on Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee in charge of investigating the administrations unauthorized wiretapping of American citizens.

This means that any Republican who votes that the White House acted illegally in wiretapping citizens without seeking court approval will be "blacklisted" and not given any support from the White House when they run for re-election in November.

These senators have choices, then: Vote their conscience, which in this case will tend to be to vote that the White House was in the wrong, or vote scared and toe the party line, getting these bastards off the hook for spying on American citizens and, at the same time, getting these gutless Senators re-elected in the future.

I fucking hate America.

John Romero Still Exists

2006-01-31T10:38:00.000-07:00

Read this.

If you ever needed proof that someone "up there" hates us, there it is.

If you're not caught up on John Romero, he is a cyborg from the planet Suck who basically built up a reputation as one of the co-founders of id software and then squandered that reputation on cars and womens. He was with Ion Storm Dallas (what then-Ion Storm Austin's Warren Spector referred to as "that other Ion Storm") and headed up a team whose greatest claim to fame was that one of the level designers was a hot chick. They eventually released a game called Daikatana that was hailed as the best game ever on one of the most memorable Opposite Days ever recorded. More recently, he worked for Midway, which no one really knew, and he did some nGage games that no one ever played.

And now he's working on an MMO.

Another bit of catch-up: MMOs are awesome. Everyone wants to do one, and no one will admit the truth, which is that the current art of the MMO has already been mastered. Back when EQ and Anarchy Online were the big fish, people were saying that there's not enough audience to play so many MMOs. Now EQ, Asheron's Call, Anarchy Online, EQ2, Eve Online, Star Wars Galaxies, Matrix Online, and others have found a fairly decent audience each, and World of Warcraft is out there with 5 million worldwide subscribers. No one else will announce their numbers, but I would guess that the next most popular game is posting subscriber numbers of about 300,000. Maybe more if you count random Korean MMOs. The fact is that the great majority of MMOs fail miserably before they even launch, because everyone sees how profitable EQ was and World of Warcraft is, and they want a piece of the pie, but they don't try to innovate or give the market anything new. Well, that's not true. EQ2 lets you order pizza from Pizza Hut without leaving the game. So I guess that's something.

John Romero wants to do an MMO. Clearly he can handle it, because he once had a Ferrarri and a hot chick and long greasy hair that made him look like the drummer in a Ramones tribute band. And he worked on Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows, which has managed a 66% from the criminally droolish gaming press.

Oh, and he has a new wife who was like, totally in high school when they met. Check out her blog, LOLZ. That has nothing to do with his MMO or anything, I just thought it was interesting.

Anyway, I hope you're all excited about Romero's new MMO. If it's as good as his other recent work, well... Hmm. I can't even think of an appropriate joke, so I'll end with an old-school GamePro preview ending:

"If Romero's new MMO is as good as his other work, then the MMO world will 'Quake' and 'Die(katana)' when it runs the 'Gauntlet' this 'Doom'... er, summer. Or whenever."

Ow. I think I broke my soul.

Reviewers: David Perry doesn't care what you think

2006-01-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

Here's an interview with Shiny Entertainment's David Perry.

It's not entirely worth reading, because despite what David Perry thinks, he's about as relevant as I am. Which isn't much. Well, he's a little more relevant. But you get my drift.

I'll save you some time. Here's the best part of the article:

"The thing about the video games business is that the reviewers who critique your games are very hardcore gamers with very strong opinions that don't necessarily reflect those of the mass market. When we did 'Enter The Matrix,' we wanted to sell as many copies as we possibly could and, in fact, we made something like $250 million. In order to do that, we did focus group tests and made many changes in the game in order to make the average gamer happy. You'll find that, with most games today, the people who buy your games give higher marks than the reviewers. And that's something that you have to watch out for in our industry. You can't judge whether your game is successful based on what the professional critics say."

Note this: "When we did 'Enter The Matrix,' we wanted to sell as many copies as we possibly could..." Not, "We wanted to make the best Matrix experience we could." I think that's significant.

I think I've talked about the Enter The Matrix situation here, in which Atari released "review copies" in the form of boxed copies during E3, at which point even the quickest online reviewers couldn't have a review posted until the game had been on shelves for approaching a week. So folks had no info on the game other than "All the magazines seem excited about it" (which we were, because back then the Matrix was cool, and we didn't know much else about it ourselves) and "It's the damn Matrix," which was enough to sell games back then. The game went on to sell, according to Atari, 4 million copies in the first week. Then the reviews came out and almost universally (I believe Game Informer gave it a good review, but they couldn't have possibly reviewed a final build) panned the game. I'm not sure what happened to sales at that point, but I like to think they tanked. That game was a blight on the industry, buggy and poorly developed.

So Dave Perry doesn't care what critics say. He only wants you to buy his damn game. Here, here's some more:

The Hollywood Reporter: The gamers' word of mouth is more important than the critics' reviews?
Perry: Yes, that's what really matters. If we put all of our attention on making the reviewers happy, we'd create a game that would be for hardcore gamers and would please only a very small percentage of the mass market. That's not why we're in business.

It's clear he's in business to make tons of money. That's assumed. But it's another sign that the industry is leaving hardcore gamers behind. Good or bad, who cares? But the trend is that games are leaving behind the audience that made them popular in the first place. And here, David Perry, He Who Brought Us Enter the Matrix, is announcing his intentions, not to make a good game, but to sell tons of copies to people who don't know any better.

I give reviewers a hard time, and they do deserve it most of the time, but to dismiss them as hardcore gamers who have nothing to add is irresponsible, and it's clearly the words of a man who got burned by poor reviews. "Oh, they gave it a bad review because they're out of touch with what the average guy likes," is the traditional comeback of a developer who gets a bad review. What people fail to realize is that game reviewers aren't academics in an ivory tower; they're GAMERS. They do the job because they love and know games, for the most part. Some of them can't separate their frustration with playing so many games that are exactly alike from their honest sense of what's good and bad, but some can. If you want to know what a gamer will think, they're the best source. Not the developer.

I know. I have sat here in the bubble, working on one project at a time, unaware of what goes on in development on other titles. Even ones in the same company. I've also been out there, a journalist, seeing development teams working on things they think are innovative but are also being worked on in parallel at other companies, who also think they're being innovative. You want to say, "You do realize that this is the sixth RTS we've seen this week with that hotkey system?"

Perry is basically saying, "I don't care about advancing the art of games, I just want to sell copies, and to do that, I will find out what the 'average gamer' wants, even though there's no such thing." Which is fine, and even ballsy to admit, but it's sad that that's the state of the art for the industry. Any true artist or designer who cares for his work would feel gut-punched to know that the person really making the decisions for the project is some kind of non-existant "average gamer."

I want to kick Dave Perry in the head. But come to think of it, I've wanted to do that for some time, so I'm not sure if this article caused it or not.

Dead or Alive 4 Review for Xbox 360 on GamePro.com

2006-01-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

I hate to do this. I generally hate to speak ill of the publication where I used to work.

Okay, that's not true. But I'd like it to be. Anyway.

Read this review of Dead or Alive 4 on GamePro.com. I'll wait.

Enh. Screw waiting. It's not really worth reading.

This review, it should be noted, was featured in the print version of GamePro, in the issue meant to go off shelves today. Which means that it was on shelves a month ago. Which means that the reviewer was working on the review three months ago.

Please, now, note the date of release for DOA4. 12/29/2005. Note also that the Official Xbox Magazine didn't have reviewable code by December 16. So the illustrious GamePro apparently had reviewable code back in (complex math) early October.

And the article shows it. This is the fluffiest, lamest major review article I've ever read, and I've written some damn fluffy and lame articles for that mag. Let's go through the major points of the review:

The game is good (Intro)

The game is very pretty

You can play as a Halo-type Spartan (Holy crap!) plus a bunch of details about the Spartan character and none about any other character

The online game-matching lobby is cool, as is collecting stuff to "trick out" your online lobby avatar

That's it. Hey, reviewer! How's the fighting system, which I've heard has backed away a bit from reversals and more toward a striking style like Tekken? How are the new characters (aside from the Spartan)? How many new outfits do the characters have? Can't you a LEAST make a bouncing-breast joke? I mean, c'mon, dude. These are women with BOOBIES.

Look at the screenshots, too. The huge ones in the online review. They're clearly NOT taken from gameplay. They're PR screens. The screens of the online lobby have JAPANESE TEXT IN THEM. What... Okay, I suppose if you were reviewing the Japanese version, you'd have to interact with Japanese players on the Japanese servers. Fine. But... man.

You put that together with the completely crap-smoking review, and you get a horrible mess of editor irresponsibility. If I was on the fence about DOA, I would want to know about the fighting system, how it controls, how hard the AI is, how fun the single-player version is, etc. I got a far better review of the game from here (scroll down a bit, look for "Update 12/31/05"), at Wataru Maruyama's personal blog, where no expectation of impartiality is implied.

The GamePro review is such a loaf of seeded poop that I am almost embarrassed to have worked there. If that's what the mag has become, a rag that reviews previews just to get them on the cover, then I will start an underground railroad myself for the cool people who still work there. Because that review is complete crap, and it's their cover.

I didn't mention the author of the review, mostly because I have no idea who it is. Some guy named JohnnyK. Whatever.

I blame GamePro publisher Dan Orum. Because I think there's room there to blame him for all problems in life, and not just the ways in which GamePro has gone into the toilet.

Just... It's sad. I guess I'm inviting this upon myself for expecting game journalists to be responsible, but there we go.

Anyway, I couldn't stomach the rest of the issue. If anyone knows if there are any cheats in there for that Call of Cthulhu game, let me know.

Deep Thoughts

2006-01-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

I don't know who, if anyone, is still reading this out there. Somehow I still get about 199 readers a week, but I imagine it's all spamming engines and such. Which is fine, because today's post is likely really depressing, so maybe some of those spammers will just get all melancholy and throw themselves off a building.

Maybe, just maybe, I'm SAVING THE INTERNET.

Anyway.

So, I spent large chunks of New Year's Eve and New Year's Day in the emergency room. You see, I have this inflammation in my boy parts, the fighting of which sometimes makes me a little lightheaded, particularly at meals. On New Year's Eve, I began to feel lightheaded at lunch, and I thought, "Well, crap. This hasn't happened in a little while." I went home, played some Warcraft until I needed to sit down on the couch and rest, and just sorta sat. Ms. Awesome was at work at the time. And so I was left there with my thoughts.

Soon thereafter, the Lady came home and left for a party with her friends. I told her I wasn't feeling up to being around drunks, but I told her to go and have fun.

I noticed the chest pains soon thereafter. A tight ache in my left chest, mostly around the left side of my sternum. I was like, "Okay, this sucks," and decided to go on with life. Until my thoughts got the better of me. And I checked online for "heart attack symptoms." And it seemed like me.

HEre's an aside: If you ever look online for symptoms, you WILL come away thinking you're about to die. The symptoms for everything that you find on the Internet are:

Some pain somewhere

Dizziness or not being dizzy

Having a stomach

Breathing

If you or anyone you know has any of these symptoms, then STOP LOOKING UP DIAGNOSES ON THE INTERNET.

Anyway, so I thought I was going to die. I called an advice nurse, and her basic prognosis was, "Go to the emergency room," which is pretty much all they're programmed to say. In Canada, the emergency room isn't slow enough; we need an advice nurse to waste more of our time.

So I called a cab (on New Year's Eve, even... it was fun hitting redial over and over with my chest hurting and thinking I was going to die alone) and finally got through. I went to the emergency room and waited. Strangely, it wasn't overly busy. In fact, it seemed almost deserted. Everyone assured me that the "fun" would begin around midnight. I hoped I'd be out of there by then. It was about 8pm.

Anyway, long story short, I had many tests done, and they all turned out fine. My blood pressure was good, ECG looked okay, X-rays, fine. The diagnosis? No fucking clue. All they knew was that I was unlikely to die right away. Which I suppose is good.

So, fast forward to New Year's morning. Chest pains still there, even more intense. I still feel like I got run over by a shit truck, whatever that is. The Lady goes to work, and I try to play Warcraft and just get better. I end up feeling really badly and sitting on the couch, and my imagination caught up: What if last night was a mistake? What if something had changed? What if they missed something? I called the advice nurse again, and she parrotted, "Go to the emergency room." All I wanted her to say was, "Suck it up, pansy, you're fine. Just get some rest and shut up." But she's not authorized to say that sort of thing. I think they can only really say, "Hello," "What is your date of birth," "Ella Fitzgerald," and "Go to the emergency room."

So, another long story short, four hours after I got to the ER, I got called back. I actually took it as a good sign that they didn't rush me in like they did the night before. The Lady got off work and took a cab to the ER to be with me, which I thought was super-awesome. She even brought our Nintendo DSes.

This time, I got an ECG, and that's about it. A doctor came in and said, "I looked at all your crap from last night, and I think you're not going to die." And he listed off a number of "reassuring" factors: I'm young(ish), not doing cocaine, the pain is pretty constant (a heart attack wouldn't be a low-grade ache over a period of days), it doesn't get worse when I exert myself, etc. I'm glad he did that, because ever since, whenever the pain got bad, or I felt really lightheaded, that doctor's head appeared over my shoulder like Firestorm on the Superfriends.

Anyway, so I don't think I'm going to die. Not right away, anyway. I still hurt, and I still feel like crap, and I still have no idea why. They said it was likely muscular or some inflammed cartilage or something. The doctor said to finish out my antibiotics (8 more days or so) and go back to my other doctor like I was supposed to. I think if I were going to die, he'd not have said "wait 8 days."

Anyway, there I sit. I'm at work today, feeling weak and out of place, but I'm there.

The whole thing has made me think, though. I mean, really, something really bad can happen at pretty much any time. I could have a heart attack right now, with little warning. I could be alone at home and have a heart attack and die feet away from the phone. Someone I work with had an aneurism while sitting on the shitter a few weeks ago. It's freaky. You could be driving to work, and a truck filled with chloroform could wreck in front of you and make you go unconscious. Seriously. Your brain could explode, without warning, at any time.

It makes me a little paranoid and anxious, which doesn't help my condition. It makes me want to have people around (and by "people" I mean "Ms. Awesome") at all times. I am constantly monitoring my chest pain, going, "Ooh... I think that felt a little more like a pain and less like an ache, I'll dial '9-1' and hold my finger over the '1.'" There's a general fear of the body just... failing. It's potentially crippling.

But there's more to it than that. I've often postulated that the reason Californians seem so laid back is because they have, on some subconscious level, accepted the fact that the ground could open up and swallow them at any given moment. On some level, even if they don't realize it, they have accepted that, and live on. Hell, I accepted it. I went through a number of earthqakes in the Bay Area, as did millions of other people.

If I can find that sort of acceptance with this "I'm going to die RIGHT FUCKING NOW" thing, I think it'd do me some good. Light a fire under the ol' arse. That's the sort of thinking that begets children and works of art. It makes one cancel his Warcraft subscription and rely on Microsoft Word to pass his free time.

I know myself. Nothing will come of this. Eventually, I'll feel better, God willing, and I'll go back to my slovenly ways. Or will I? Maybe this is it, what I needed to get going, get into shape, and become the monster-buff super-genius I've always thought I was (when, in reality, I was more like The Blob than like Superman).

Anyway, those were my thoughts on the whole situation. I'm currently waiting it out, seeing if this damned chest pain goes away. It has been... 4 days now? And it's about the same. Which, really, means I should stop worrying about it so much, because cardiac problems are sudden and intense. But I worry, and it seems worse.

Anyway, I imagine even the spammers have stopped reading this now. Theoretically, House of Awesome!!!!!! should be back with a vengeance in the next few days. We'll see you then.

People are Such Whiny Retards

2005-11-21T14:41:00.000-07:00

You know what really gets my goat? I mean, other than the other stuff? It's that people can't accept it when someone has an opinion that differs from their own.

Okay. I'm trained as a critic. I was told early on not to present my opinions as, well, opinions. Because if you're a reviewer, you can't say, "This game is complete crap, but that's just my opinion, YMMV, LOL." You have to be an authority. No one will trust the opinions of a reviewer who says, "I think, and this is just my opinion, so take it for what you will, that this game might be just a little bit on the crap side. But hey, that's just my two cents, your mileage may vary." No. I want to kick that reviewer in the balls. It's bad enough that most reviews end with, "If you like games that are good, then you'll hate this game. But those of you who like games that pretty much suck may have just found your game of the goddamn year."

So when I give my opinions on things, I generally don't put in significant disclaimers everywhere. I'll say, "I think that's dumb," imagining that we live in a perfect world in which the words "I think" are enough to indicate an oncoming opinion. But not so! Apparently the fragile egos on the Internet cannot handle that sort of elaborate linguistic code.

I recently posted on a message board to announce that I thought the new Legion of Superheroes series was good. I noted that I always thought the Legion was dumb, what with the Element Lads and the Cosmic Boys and the Light Lass and what not. The new series is good even with all that, and I was surprised, so I posted away. Little did I know that I was about to stir up deeply held emotions in one guy who would respond.

He said, "I'm glad you like the new "dumb" series. He explained why he hates the new version, calling it "morose" and "cliched" and so on. A few people posted back, going, "I dunno, I think I like the new series better, academic literary reason why complete with examples from Melville." Then he said, "Yes. At least you're not just calling it dumb."

Dude. Me saying, "I think it's dumb" is not the same as saying, "I think you're dumb for liking it." And even if it was, how fragile is your self-image that you are insulted by me, someone you don't even know, saying, "This thing you like is stupid"? So insulted were you that you carried on this "It's dumb" grudge for three posts. And now I think you are dumb.

It's not the first time. People are so damn insecure online that they can't handle someone disliking whatever stupid thing they like this week. If you dare say, "I think maybe Joss Whedon is not the second coming of Jesus," people will get all upset at you and accuse you of threadcrapping or being insulting. You have to have a list of IMHOs and YMMVs that make it look like your opinion ought to be speaking at someone's college graduation. At that point, you begin to acknowledge that your opinion has no value besides just getting out there so people can look at it. And then people say, "That's just your opinion," failing to realize that ALL THINGS ARE SOMEONE'S GODDAMN OPINION.

People need to grow up. If my saying Serenity had a bad ending is a grave insult that affects your self-image but can be wiped away by me saying, "But that's just my opinion, LOL," then there's something seriously wrong with you. Don't make me dog-tag my generally harmless pop-culture opinions just to keep your fragile self-esteem from breaking into pieces.

Of course, that's just my opinion.

BEST SPAM EVER

2005-10-14T15:34:00.000-06:00

I don't know if anyone is still reading this, but I got the best spam ever on this blog today. I have a spam-blocker thingy on here now, but I wanted to show this masterpiece to you (links changed so this ass doesn't get any traffic from me):

"Help me Dude, I'm lost.

"I was searching for Elvis and somehow ended up in your blog, but you know I'm sure I saw Elvis in the supermarket yesterday.

"No honest really, he was right there in front of me, next to the steaks singing "Love me Tender".

"He said to me (his lip was only slightly curled) "Boy, you need to get yourself a shiny, new plasmatv to go with that blue suede sofa of yours.

"But Elvis said I, In the Ghetto nobody has a plasma tv .

"Dude I'm All Shook Up said Elvis. I think I'll have me another cheeseburger then I'm gonna go home and ask Michael Jackson to come round and watch that waaaay cool surfing scene in Apocalypse Now on my new plasma tv .

"And then he just walked out of the supermarket singing. . .

"'You give me love and consolation,
You give me strength to carry on '

"Strange day or what? :-)"

Awesome.

HOLY CRAP! YOU'RE RIGHT!

2005-09-21T15:14:00.000-06:00

Read this article. It will BLOW YOUR MIND.

You can read more on this fascinating new subject here, here, here, and here.

OMFG.

ROBOTS TAKE CONTROL OF PRESIDENT OF THE US

2005-09-13T13:44:00.000-06:00

ROBOTS HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE US.

This is the first and most severe such mental takeover since this incident back in January.

The death toll of the imminent alien invasion is projected to be in the millions.

Please Watch This and Pass it On

2005-09-09T13:24:00.000-06:00

An MSNBC newscaster is mad as hell and will not take it anymore.

It took balls to come out and give that commentary on a major news network. Please watch this and pass it on to anyone who may be feeling discouraged that the administration is getting away with its criminal negligence.

FEMA Hates New Orleans

2005-09-07T10:46:00.000-06:00

This article disgusts me.

At least people are reporting this stuff.

A Story From Nawlins

2005-09-06T14:59:00.000-06:00

I don't know where this story came from originally. I get the impression it is the story of a tourist who was caught in New Orleans during the hurricane.

I'm cut-n-pasting this from the email I got it in, so forgive the length. It's an interesting read. I wish everyone could read this.

Hurricane Katrina-Our Experiences
Larry Bradshaw
Lorrie Beth Slonsky

Two days after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, the Walgreen's store at the corner of Royal and Iberville streets remained locked. The dairy display case was clearly visible through the widows. It was now 48 hours without electricity, running water, plumbing. The milk, yogurt, and cheeses were beginning to spoil in the 90-degree heat. The owners and managers had locked up the food, water, pampers, and prescriptions and fled the City. Outside Walgreen's windows, residents and tourists grew increasingly thirsty and hungry.

The much-promised federal, state and local aid never materialized and the windows at Walgreen's gave way to the looters. There was an alternative. The cops could have broken one small window and distributed the nuts, fruit juices, and bottle water in an organized and systematic manner. But they did not. Instead they spent hours playing cat and mouse, temporarily chasing away the looters.

We were finally airlifted out of New Orleans two days ago and arrived home yesterday (Saturday). We have yet to see any of the TV coverage or look at a newspaper. We are willing to guess that there were no video images or front-page pictures of European or affluent white tourists looting the Walgreen's in the French Quarter.

We also suspect the media will have been inundated with "hero" images of the National Guard, the troops and the police struggling to help the "victims" of the Hurricane. What you will not see, but what we witnessed,were the real heroes and sheroes of the hurricane relief effort: the working class of New Orleans. The maintenance workers who used a fork lift to carry the sick and disabled. The engineers, who rigged, nurtured and kept the generators running. The electricians who improvised thick extension cords stretching over blocks to share the little electricity we had in order to free cars stuck on rooftop parking lots. Nurses who took over for mechanical ventilators and spent many hours on end manually forcing air into the lungs of unconscious patients to keep them alive. Doormen who rescued folks stuck in elevators. Refinery workers who broke into boat yards, "stealing" boats to rescue their neighbors clinging to their roofs in flood waters. Mechanics who helped hot-wire any car that could be found to ferry people out of the City. And the food service workers who scoured the commercial kitchens improvising communal meals for hundreds of those stranded.

Most of these workers had lost their homes, and had not heard from members of their families, yet they stayed and provided the only infrastructure for the 20% of New Orleans that was not under water.

On Day 2, there were approximately 500 of us left in the hotels in the French Quarter. We were a mix of foreign tourists, conference attendees like ourselves, and locals who had checked into hotels for safety and shelter from Katrina. Some of us had cell phone contact with family and friends outside of New Orleans. We were repeatedly told that all sorts of resources including the National Guard and scores of buses were pouring in to the City. The buses and the other resources must have been invisible because none of us had seen them.

We decided we had to save ourselves. So we pooled our money and came up with $25,000 to have ten buses come and take us out of the City. Those who did not have the requisite $45.00 for a ticket were subsidized by those who did have extra money. We waited for 48 hours for the buses, spending the last 12 hours standing outside, sharing the limited water, food, and clothes we had. We created a priority boarding area for the sick, elderly and new born babies. We waited late into the night for the "imminent" arrival of the buses. The buses never arrived. We later learned that the minute the arrived to the City limits, they were commandeered by the military.

By day 4 our hotels had run out of fuel and water. Sanitation was dangerously abysmal. As the desperation and despair increased, street crime as well as water levels began to rise. The hotels turned us out and locked their doors, telling us that the "officials" told us to report to the convention center to wait for more buses. As we entered the center of the City, we finally encountered the National Guard.

The Guards told us we would not be allowed into the Superdome as the City's primary shelter had descended into a humanitarian and health hellhole. The guards further told us that the City's only other shelter, the Convention Center, was also descending into chaos and squalor and that the police were not allowing anyone else in. Quite naturally, we asked, "If we can't go to the only 2 shelters in the City, what was our alternative?" The guards told us that that was our problem, and no they did not have extra water to give to us. This would be the start of our numerous encounters with callous and hostile "law enforcement".

We walked to the police command center at Harrah's on Canal Street and were told the same thing, that we were on our own, and no they did not have water to give us. We now numbered several hundred. We held a mass meeting to decide a course of action. We agreed to camp outside the police command post. We would be plainly visible to the media and would constitute a highly visible embarrassment to the City officials. The police told us that we could not stay. Regardless, we began to settle in and set up camp. In short order, the police commander came across the street to address our group. He told us he had a solution: we should walk to the Pontchartrain Expressway and cross the greater New Orleans Bridge where the police had buses lined up to take us out of the City. The crowed cheered and began to move. We called everyone back and explained to the commander that there had been lots of misinformation and wrong information and was he sure that there were buses waiting for us. The commander turned to the crowd and stated emphatically, "I swear to you that the buses are there."

We organized ourselves and the 200 of us set off for the bridge with great excitement and hope. As we marched pasted the convention center, many locals saw our determined and optimistic group and asked where we were headed. We told them about the great news. Families immediately grabbed their few belongings and quickly our numbers doubled and then doubled again. Babies in strollers now joined us, people using crutches, elderly clasping walkers and others people in wheelchairs. We marched the 2-3 miles to the freeway and up the steep incline to the Bridge. It now began to pour down rain, but it did not dampen our enthusiasm.

As we approached the bridge, armed Gretna sheriffs formed a line across the foot of the bridge. Before we were close enough to speak, they began firing their weapons over our heads. This sent the crowd fleeing in various directions. As the crowd scattered and dissipated, a few of us inched forward and managed to engage some of the sheriffs in conversation. We told them of our conversation with the police commander and of the commander's assurances. The sheriffs informed us there were no buses waiting. The commander had lied to us to get us to move.

We questioned why we couldn't cross the bridge anyway, especially as there was little traffic on the 6-lane highway. They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans and there would be no Superdomes in their City. These were code words for if you are poor and black, you are not crossing the Mississippi River and you were not getting out of New Orleans.

Our small group retreated back down Highway 90 to seek shelter from the rain under an overpass. We debated our options and in the end decided to build an encampment in the middle of the Ponchartrain Expressway on the center divide, between the O'Keefe and Tchoupitoulas exits. We reasoned we would be visible to everyone, we would have some security being on an elevated freeway and we could wait and watch for the arrival of the yet to be seen buses.

All day long, we saw other families, individuals and groups make the same trip up the incline in an attempt to cross the bridge, only to be turned away. Some chased away with gunfire, others simply told no, others to be verbally berated and humiliated. Thousands of New Orleaners were prevented and prohibited from self-evacuating the City on foot. Meanwhile, the only two City shelters sank further into squalor and disrepair. The only way across the bridge was by vehicle. We saw workers stealing trucks, buses, moving vans, semi-trucks and any car that could be hotwired. All were packed with people trying to escape the misery New Orleans had become.

Our little encampment began to blossom. Someone stole a water delivery truck and brought it up to us. Let's hear it for looting! A mile or so down the freeway, an army truck lost a couple of pallets of C-rations on a tight turn. We ferried the food back to our camp in shopping carts. Now secure with the two necessities, food and water; cooperation, community, and creativity flowered. We organized a clean up and hung garbage bags from the rebar poles. We made beds from wood pallets and cardboard. We designated a storm drain as the bathroom and the kids built an elaborate enclosure for privacy out of plastic, broken umbrellas, and other scraps. We even organized a food recycling system where individuals could swap out parts of C-rations (applesauce for babies and candies for kids!).

This was a process we saw repeatedly in the aftermath of Katrina. When individuals had to fight to find food or water, it meant looking out for yourself only. You had to do whatever it took to find water for your kids or food for your parents. When these basic needs were met, people began to look out for each other, working together and constructing a community.

If the relief organizations had saturated the City with food and water in the first 2 or 3 days, the desperation, the frustration and the ugliness would not have set in.

Flush with the necessities, we offered food and water to passing families and individuals. Many decided to stay and join us. Our encampment grew to 80 or 90 people.

From a woman with a battery powered radio we learned that the media was talking about us. Up in full view on the freeway, every relief and news organizations saw us on their way into the City. Officials were being asked what they were going to do about all those families living up on the freeway? The officials responded they were going to take care of us. Some of us got a sinking feeling. "Taking care of us" had an ominous tone to it.

Unfortunately, our sinking feeling (along with the sinking City) was correct. Just as dusk set in, a Gretna Sheriff showed up, jumped out of his patrol vehicle, aimed his gun at our faces, screaming, "Get off the fucking freeway". A helicopter arrived and used the wind from its blades to blow away our flimsy structures. As we retreated, the sheriff loaded up his truck with our food and water.

Once again, at gunpoint, we were forced off the freeway. All the law enforcement agencies appeared threatened when we congregated or congealed into groups of 20 or more. In every congregation of "victims" they saw "mob" or "riot". We felt safety in numbers. Our "we must stay together" was impossible because the agencies would force us into small atomized groups.

In the pandemonium of having our camp raided and destroyed, we scattered once again. Reduced to a small group of 8 people, in the dark, we sought refuge in an abandoned school bus, under the freeway on Cilo Street. We were hiding from possible criminal elements but equally and definitely, we were hiding from the police and sheriffs with their martial law, curfew and shoot-to-kill policies.

The next days, our group of 8 walked most of the day, made contact with New Orleans Fire Department and were eventually airlifted out by an urban search and rescue team. We were dropped off near the airport and managed to catch a ride with the National Guard. The two young guardsmen apologized for the limited response of the Louisiana guards. They explained that a large section of their unit was in Iraq and that meant they were shorthanded and were unable to complete all the tasks they were assigned.

We arrived at the airport on the day a massive airlift had begun. The airport had become another Superdome. We 8 were caught in a press of humanity as flights were delayed for several hours while George Bush landed briefly at the airport for a photo op. After being evacuated on a coast guard cargo plane, we arrived in San Antonio, Texas.

There the humiliation and dehumanization of the official relief effort continued. We were placed on buses and driven to a large field where we were forced to sit for hours and hours. Some of the buses did not have air-conditioners. In the dark, hundreds if us were forced to share two filthy overflowing porta-potties. Those who managed to make it out with any possessions (often a few belongings in tattered plastic bags) we were subjected to two different dog-sniffing searches.

Most of us had not eaten all day because our C-rations had been confiscated at the airport because the rations set off the metal detectors. Yet, no food had been provided to the men, women, children, elderly, disabled as they sat for hours waiting to be "medically screened" to make sure we were not carrying any communicable diseases.

This official treatment was in sharp contrast to the warm, heart-felt reception given to us by the ordinary Texans. We saw one airline worker give her shoes to someone who was barefoot. Strangers on the street offered us money and toiletries with words of welcome.

Throughout, the official relief effort was callous, inept, and racist. There was more suffering than need be. Lives were lost that did not need to be lost.

2005-09-04T10:10:00.000-06:00

Haloscan commenting and trackback have been added to this blog.

CNN.com - The big disconnect on New Orleans - Sep 2, 2005

2005-09-02T16:38:00.000-06:00

Just read this fucking article right now.

No. Shut up. Read it.

We'll be here when you're done.

An American's Guide to Canada pt. 1

2005-08-30T11:50:00.000-06:00

I've wanted to do this... well, since I got here, really.

Welcome to AN AMERICAN'S GUIDE TO CANADA!!!!!! pt. 1.

This will be a series (which may or may not be entirely made up of this one post) that will cover the weird shit that goes on in the Great White North. I'll talk about food, people, and uhmmm... other stuff. Oh, and TV. Canadian TV is really odd.

But I digress.

Today's post will cover some misconceptions that folks from the US have about Canadians. I, of course, base this entirely on the assumption that, despite evidence to the contrary, everything in Canada is the way it is in Edmonton. Because I can't be bothered to travel anywhere else to learn stuff.

Misconception: Canadians are just like Americans.
Fact: Canadians are sort of like Europeans wearing American skin-suits. I've never seen one of these suits in manufacture, so I can't say for sure, but in general, Canadians are more well-adjusted, awesomer, and more generally gnarly than Americans. They are less uptight about stuff, more generous on average, and much more willing to laugh at themselves. Which is good, because a lot of people wear socks with sandals around here, and that would get you killed in the States. The best way to tell a Canadian from an American is to ask if the person thinks "Corner Gas" is funny. If he says, "Haw haw, I love that show," he's Canadian. An Amercian will say, "Haw haw, yes, but I prefer to fart out in the open."

Misconception: Canadians say "eh" all the time.
Fact: This is true. One has to work hard to be able to decipher the different inflections and tones involved in the Canadian language. For example, "Eh eh eh EH eh Ehhhhh" means "Where is my window-scraper," while "Eheheheh eh eh EHEHEH" means "Well, then I said--GET THE FUCK OFF MY FOOT." Some people in Western Canada seem to say "Hey" instead of "eh," but this regional dialect is easy to decipher.

Misconception: Canadians can shoot fire from their eyes.
Fact: Also true. They are also impervious to bullets, can race at high subsonic speeds, and calculate pi the the bajillionth decimal point in 3.14 seconds. They just choose not to.

Misconception: What is up with Canadian potato chips.
Fact: Dude, I know. WTF.

You'd be surprised the differences here. The little ones. Like, "pasta" is pronounced "Past-a," as if Mario were saying the word "past" ("You won't get-a past-a me!"), as opposed to "Pahsta" like civilized humans say. They also have a Conservative party up here that is about as right-wing as Hillary Clinton is on Tuesdays (when she has her brunch with the Religious Middle). Oh, and their cars seem to transform from hideous minivans into sexxxy convertibles when summer comes, just as the hottie-vaults open up and let forth their cargo around late April or early May.

There is also no crime here, as far as I can tell. By that I mean, bad things happen, but they don't seem to be entirely illegal. Like, there's a billboard up on one main road that reads, "When you give money to prostitutes, who is really the victim?" That same billboard in the States would read, "If you give money to a prostitute, prepare to die, criminal." Actually, it'd read more like, "George W. Bush is awesome, all hail the glorious God-King," but you get my point. My point is that the billboard is trying to reason you out of soliciting a prostitute. It appeals to your conscience and your self-discipline. Same with drugs. In the States, "head shops" have signs like, "If you even say the word 'pot' in here, we get to kill you." In Canada, you see signs that say, "COME TO OUR STORE AND TOKE UP WITH US, BECAUSE WE SMOKE WEED AND SELL WEED ACCESSORIES AND DID WE MENTION WE'RE HIGH RIGHT NOW AND SMOKE WEED?!?!?!!?!? YOU TOO RIGHT?!!?!??!!?!"

Canada has $1 and $2 coins, called "loonie" (for the picture of a loon on the back) and a "toonie" (because the coin was invented by a four-year-old whose mother thought everything he said was cute). The decision to make these coins was apparently to help with vending machines, phones, etc., because you can't shove a dollar bill into a drink machine and hope everything will go well. The $2 coin was made because the average soda in Canada costs $14 CAN, and people got Repetitive Stress Injury from dumping loonies in one-by-one. Of course, this creates a problem when visiting strip joints. I'm still not entirely sure how people tip strippers here. The best bet would be a coin that could transform into a paper bill and back. And perhaps you could combine 5 different bills to form Devastator.

Contrast with the States, where people are regularly called in on false counterfeiting charges for trying to spend (legal tender) $2 bills. The US even tried a $1 coin for a while, but it failed, probably because people kept wondering why the stores were giving them Chuck E. Cheese tokens as change. Hell, the only reason they still have pennies in the States is because if they got rid of them, uncles would have nothing to give their nephews and nieces for Xmas.

The cops in Canada seems to be more reasonable, as well. I was pulled over by the Mounties in some National Park or other. The guy said, "Did you know what you did wrong?" I said, "Uhm, not really." To which he replied, "Well, okay then. Good day." I have yet to have a cop beat me senseless for being black. And no, I'm not black, but that doesn't stop cops in the States.

Anyway, that's part 1. I hope you found this post enlightening. If no crazy Canadians burn me to death with their eyes for this post, you can probably expect a part 2 sometime in the undefined future.

A Startling New Opinion!!!!!!

2005-08-16T12:02:00.000-06:00

What do this link, this link, and this link have in common?

Someone on GamerGod has an original opinion about how we need more women in the game industry.

We went almost a month before this popped up again. I already had the trifecta, and now we're bumping up against the covetted "quinfecta."

While I happen to agree with the sentiment (that female developers are generally better suited to make content that women will enjoy), the prevailing argument (that games are leaving out 50% of the audience) is still pretty much off-target. It's like saying that the NFL is missing out on 50% of its possible profits by focusing only on men. Marketing is a powerful force; if women were the target audience, then women all over the place would be playing video games. But gaming has become so much a part of the Western male gender identity that the real problem isn't "how to market to women" so much as "how to market to women without alienating the billions-of-dollars-a-year male gamer market."

Truths:

More men than women play games.

More men than women buy games.

More men than women make games.

More men than women identify themselves as gamers.

More game companies market to men than women.

The game industry pulls in billions of dollars every year.

Non-truths:

All media must appeal to all people equally.

Game companies have an obligation to appeal to you, no matter who you are.

Diet Dr. Pepper tastes just like regular Dr. Pepper.

Given these facts, I have two questions: 1) If people outside the target demographic for games enjoy gaming, then where is the complaint? What makes them enjoy gaming despite the fact that game developers are all sexist pricks who wouldn't know a real woman if they were one? 2) If those people do not enjoy gaming, why are they accusing the game companies of not serving the demographic? Why don't significant numbers of them come together and create games for a different target audience, rather than trying to change a game that has been played the same way for years? You'll notice I cleverly hid extra questions in within those two main questions. Mwhahaha.

Serving a massive unserved demographic is one way to make craploads of dough. But we're still waiting for someone to come along and make that game that sweeps up all the female gamers and gaming-curious folks. Are we to assume that companies like Microsoft, EA, and Sony, who would all kill their grandmothers to pick up a quarter rolling down the street, haven't done research into the feasibility of courting the female market? I mean, come on. Some press hack writes this article every few weeks; I can't imagine this "hot issue" somehow squeaked by the radars of the Big 3 game companies.

I agree that my company's games would be better if we had female designers and writers. That's a given; diversity of opinion and background only help a project appeal to more people.

But does the industry have to bend over backwards to be all things to all people?

Nah. Though it'd be nice to see the industry bending over backwards.

Because the industry is HOTT.

Jack Thompson is AWESOME!!!!!!

2005-08-08T13:42:00.000-06:00

Behind this link you will find a transcription of an email exchange between VG Cats' Scott Ramsoomair and the intrepid Jack Thompson.

Essentially, this is something I wanted to do here, but couldn't. Because I had a brief email conversation with this jerkoff (Thompson, not Ramsoomair), and I didn't save it for future use.

This guy is a moron. Pure and simple. He apparently claimed that Will Wright was making deals with the porn industry to allow massive mods full of nudity and sex. He's making shit up now. It's so cute.

By the way, his email address is jackpeace@comcast.net. Have at it.

Oh Come-Goddamn-On

2005-07-22T17:30:00.000-06:00

Sims 2 content "worse than Hot Coffee" - PC News at GameSpot

This Thompson guy is a nutbag, pure and simple.

Hot Coffee is one thing (everyone is commenting on this, and so I probably won't), because it was a deliberate attempt at circumventing ESRB ratings and giving a naughty nod to fans. But Sims 2? Come on! Grow the fuck up.

I have to be honest with you. I want the kids to see some nekkid boobies. Not hardcore farmyardteens.com crap, but what's the harm in a nekkid someone preparing to shower? I mean, kids are generally naked when they're about to shower, anyway, so they know everyone does it (those who actually shower, that is). Why give them complexes about their bodies and those of others? I'm not saying Ma and Pa need to do the Nude Troop Revue in front of their kids (those are for the bedroom, folks), but really. There is little more natural than a naked human being (though the entirety of that body might not be natural, strictly speaking).

Besides, the game is rated T for Teen. This means that kids who see worse things on MTV (erm, I mean Much Music... I'm Canadian now, I think) can apply a patch that they downloaded from the Internet, where they all know how to find porn anyway, and see a Sim's "naked" Barbie-doll body. Woo! Holy shit, Billy! Let's have a swordfight! Grab the soap!

The best part of the article is how much of a koo this guy is. Jeff Brown, corporate communications for EA and complete tool, pointed out that removing the blur only produces a smooth, mannequin-like body. Which is in direct contrast to Thompson's statement that the game "contains, according to video game news sites, full frontal nudity, including nipples, penises, labia, and pubic hair (Thompson's words, from GameSpot)." Thompson apparently followed up with (bold emphasis mine), "The sex and the nudity are in the game. That's the point. The blur is an admission that even the 'Ken and Barbie' features should not be displayed. The blur can be disarmed. This is no different than what is in San Andreas, although worse." He even actually noted that kids can be "nudified," saying that this was "much to the delight, one can be sure, of pedophiles around the globe who can rehearse, in virtual reality, for their abuse."

People need to grow the hell up. Women and minorities are still being shat upon in the US. Companies are getting away with stealing billions of dollars from their employees and from the government. We've nearly lost as many soldiers in Iraq as people who died in 9/11, not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians who have died since the "end of the war." We have prisoners in Cuba who are held without charges and without representation or trials and who are being tortured with the approval of the US government. And this guy, this total, utter, brain-hosed psycho, is ranting about how a blur covers an anatomically incorrect Barbie doll figure in a computer game? Little kids see Barbies and Kens naked all the time, you unconscionable freak. Should they be rated Mature, too?

I think if this guy is this outraged about Sims 2, he'd be horrified to know what's out there on the Internet. There's stuff out there that makes Hot Coffee look like cold milk.

I feel like I'm in my house, and there are monkeys on my lawn throwing shit at my house. No matter what happens, no one will shoo these monkeys from my lawn, and so I have to sit there and accept that shit will be hitting my house. The worst thing is that there's a chance that the police might come by and think the shit-flinging is a good idea and start doing it, too. But with machine guns. Actually, this analogy is putting a cool image in my head, so it's not really serving its purpose. Let's just accept that I'm annoyed and wish I could shoot this Thompson guy in the balls with a BB gun.

If ever there was a better use for a "Make Him Stop Breathing" button... well, I think I linked to it earlier today.

Forbes.com Goes On A Limb: "Video Games Need Female Touch"

2005-07-22T13:51:00.000-06:00

I am so goddamn awesome.

Read this article on Forbes.com. It takes the risky and innovative stance that the game industry needs more women and women gamers.

Then go here and here to read my timely response to their article. It's so timely, in fact, that both of those posts I link to are FROM THE PAST!!!!!!

I'm so awesome it hurts. Especially when my awesomeness kicks me in the mouth.

...

2005-07-22T10:25:00.000-06:00

ARGH!

RIP James Doohan

2005-07-20T10:48:00.000-06:00

Fuck. Scotty's dead.

He has a scene in Trekkies that I think sums it up. He seemed like one of the good people in the world.

Even for non-Trekkies, losing a decent person is something worth at least a moment of silence.

......................

My Home Country is Screwed

2005-07-20T10:45:00.000-06:00

The title of this post links to a page about God-King Bush's Supreme Court Nominee.

I don't fucking get it. How much worse does the country need to get before people wake the hell up and do something about it?

This is retarded. Bush has shown nothing but contempt for the Consitution and nothing but love for big business and war. He has charged the US into an unwinnable war, lied to the world (and worse, the Americans), bullied nations, fucked the environment with a chainsaw, set science in the US back years (chasing the real science off to China and other countries), ruined education, threatened Social Security, drafted our retired veterans, named a pro-torture psycho to Attourney General, given the top %5 of the US tax cuts, and... well, I'm sure the list goes on, but typing this tastes like poison.

I have never been so saddened and embarrassed to be an American. The country is nearly unrecognizable to me, someone who grew up after the Civil Rights and hippie movements. I seem to remember a nation that had liberty as its ideal, but I wonder how much of that was just me drinking the Kool-aid.

And every new day brings another straw, and the camel's back is snapped in half. Bush's White House Chief of Staff leaked the identity of an undercover CIA operative to the press to get back at her husband, who released counter-Bush information that spoke out against the rationale for the war in Iraq. That's a felony that could lead to 10 years or so in jail, and it endangers everyone the woman ever worked with in the entire world, as foreign government now can suspect them of spying. Bush originally said, "I will fire anyone found to have been involved in this leak," (not the actual quote; I imagine what he really said was more like "Blah blah, freedom blah, read me a story, blah blah.") but a day or two ago he backpedaled, saying something to the effect of, "I will fire whoever is convicted of this crime." We have evidence, including Karl Rove's lawyer's statement, that Rove did this, but Bush won't stop sucking Rove's dick without a conviction. And Bush's neocon loser supporters are all over this, saying, "This is all a liberal witch-hunt" and basically acting like US politics is a team sport. Oh, and Dick Cheney's aide "Scooter" Libby was also believed to have been involved in the leak. Note that both Libby and Rove denied their involvement before. Remember another presidential figure who recently got caught lying? What happened to him?

And now Bush nominates the human smoke screen Judge Roberts to the Supreme Court. Here I was, holding out hope that maybe Bush might do the right thing and nominate a moderate judge to take Sandra Day O'-fucking-moderate-Connor's seat when she retires, but it turns out that I'm stupid. How could I expect Bush to do the right thing and try to heal the huge divide between the left and right in the US? No, he has to keep reaching for power in the government.

Goddamnit, something has to change in my home country, or things will change suddenly and violently. As it is, Bush is doing everything wrong, as far as I'm concerned, and roughly half of Americans are eating it up and going, "Woo hoo!! Take that, Liberals!" like they should be proud that their homeland is being ruined.

Fucking retarded country. I can't wait for the EU to power up and start bringing the States back to Earth.

Best Film Review EVER

2005-07-11T14:34:00.000-06:00

This is the best film review ever. Not kidding.

Note the following line, and then compare it to mine in my F4 review below:

"There is a sense in which attacking this movie is like kicking a dog for not being better at calculus."

I bet that in the end of the game Roger Ebert turns out to be ME.

I Enjoyed The Fantastic Four

2005-07-11T11:52:00.000-06:00

I almost titled this post "STFU," but I figured it'd be too vague.

It's no fun to write a positive review for a movie like Fantastic Four, so I considered making stuff up to hate about it. When I think about it, there are a number of things to complain about, but complaining about plot holes in this movie is like kicking a little kid. Sure, it's a lot of fun, but there's no real challenge, and the kid didn't mean to steal your balloon.

It's a fun movie. I refuse to even qualify that by going, "It's fun but brainless." I fucking liked the movie. In some ways, it showed up Batman Begins by being unapologetic in its comic-book cheese. Doom walks into a storage area looking for stuff and finds a box labelled "Heat Seeking Missile" and another that reads, "Hyper Coolant Device." Then he goes, "Ohh yeahhhh...." I half-expected to see "Invisible People Kill-o-tron" and "Anti-Rock-Guy Explosion Device." Then Doom sets up his diabolical plan, which is to shoot at the F4's home building with a missile. Brilliant!

If anything, the big complaint is that Dr. Doom is fairly crap. I mean, Johnny Storm can heat himself up to nearly the temperature of the sun, and Sue Storm can apparently contain that much heat in her forcefields, but Dr. Doom essentially shoots lightning from his hands and has the power of Wardrobe. Oh, and he's made of metal, which is cool.

The awesome parts are when Doom and Reed Richards get into science-geek battles. "You know what happens to rubber when it gets cold?" asks Doom of Reed, several times, just to set up Reed's AWESOME LINE: "Do you know what happens to metal when it cools too quickly?" AWESOME YOU ROCK DUDE. Cue wailing guitars.

The Thing and the Human Torch rock the movie, because they have a genuine brotherly rivalry going. Torch keeps playing pranks on Thing, and meanwhile, life shits upon the Thing every chance it gets. Michael Chiklis does a great job of getting shat upon, and his Thing outfit doesn't look nearly as bad as it could have. In fact, it's quite convincing except around his neck where it looks too much like skin.

The thing that rocked most about the film is that it wasn't overly self-aware. It didn't try to hide its comic book origins or go completely campy to apologize for its inherent dumbness. It presented the subject matter the way it's always been presented: with love, fun, and action. There's a reason why I and others read comics, and it's not to be assaulted with angst and realism and hard times. We like to be entertained, and that's the sum of it.

You may or may not like it, but this isn't about you. I enjoyed the hell out of the film and soaked up all the dumb crap, chalking it up to traditional comic-book storytelling. According to Rotten Tomatoes, 75% of film critics disgree with me, but film critics suck anyway. Especially that one in San Francisco with the hat and the leather jacket. He sucks.

Star Wars Episode III: The Backstroke of the West

2005-07-06T11:06:00.000-06:00

This is the new funniest thing I have ever seen.

Earth is PWN3D!!!!!!

2005-07-04T10:55:00.000-06:00

War of the Worlds taught me two things: One, don't try to drive a Dodge minivan into a sea of desperate people, and two, if there's an alien apocalypse, go to Boston, because it'll be perfectly fine when you get there.

By the way, this post has more spoilers than a high school parking lot. But then again, so does the H.G. Wells work this film is based on, so if you don't know the story, shame on you.

Of course, shame on me. I never read the story myself.

I'm not sure why the film is called War of the Worlds, because there only seems to be one world really doing any effective warring. Earth's counterattack is essentially Tom Cruise with a belt of grenades. It's a bit like exclaiming, "War... of the Species!" just before smacking a fly with a flyswatter. I would have called the film "Massive Assraping of the Worlds," but then that might have upset the parents.

Not that the film as-is wouldn't upset the parents. Aside from showing a realistic family in crisis (well, realistic except for the idea of walking-forehead Miranda Otto as the doting mother who will somehow make it all better if we can just get to Boston and find her), the film shows humanity at its worst this side of a zombie epidemic. I can hear it now: "Mommy, would Daddy kill Mr. Nelson with his bare hands just to keep the aliens from hearing Mr. Nelson's mad prattling while we're hiding out to avoid being captured and having our blood sucked out by a giant Hoover attachment?" For some reason, some people think that Spielberg = Family Friendly, to this day, despite Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan being high atop his list of recent films.

At first, I was surprised to see Dakota Fanning get second billing in the film, with Tim Robbins and Miranda Otto caricaturing about, but she did a fine job being a neurotic child who got that way because her mother and doting stepfather allowed her to. She has a realistic child-scream that rattles the nerves, and she has a way of being sassy without being sitcom-child precocious. She's like the girl version of Haley Joel Osment, so expect to see her pop up in increasingly inappropriate roles as people try to capitalize on the one child in Hollywood who can apparently act. I can already imagine her starring in A.I. 2: Small wonder.

In any case, here's the plot: Aliens come and blow shit up, then die mysteriously from disease. Meanwhile, Tom Cruise is a bad father and must reconcile with his estranged children while being in an apocalypse. Simple, stock plots, both. Luckily, Spielberg takes both plots to their logical extremes: The aliens not only blow shit up, but they do it while looking awesome and being mysterious (up until a point). Tom Cruise is not only a bad father, but he leaves his kids to order food when he goes to work because there is no, count zero, food in the house. The kids order health food (because they suck), and Tom Cruise can't bear to eat it. Tom Cruise then invites his son out to play catch and ends up calling his son a prick. Good stuff.

But Spielberg manages to mess it up, as per usual. Steven, I know you hate guns, but in a crowd of hundreds of people in New Jersey during an apocalypse, I'd think there'd be more than two guns. Aside from the military, which really serves no purpose in the film, the film features three guns. I guess the rest of the people had Spielbergian cell phones.

Then Spielberg makes the mistake of showing the actual aliens in the flesh, and they're frickin' cute. They're like big-headed baby mushroom people with huge round eyes and a tendency to pick up and stare at photographs of Tim Robbins' family. Suddenly all the destruction they caused is cute, like a baby stomping about and breaking your fine ceramic pottery. "Awww," you say, "That ceramic vase may have cost me $100, but this destructive baby is priceless!!"

Finally, any fear that the audience has that Tom Cruise's wife and son might be dead has completely no payoff, because at the end of the film they're perfectly fine, hanging out with grandma and grandpa in the completely un-ruined city of Boston. I guess while the aliens were stomping about and, by this point, falling on stuff, the folks were eating beans and playing a rousing game of Parcheesi. It's supposed to come across as a relief that these characters are still alive, but since you are meant to hate Miranda Otto for treating the asshole Tom Cruise so badly, and since you never get to know Tom Cruise's son or his greasy '80s death-metal haircut, it just comes over as disappointment. After the easy way in which everyone but Tom Cruise dies in the film, for an entire family to have rolled natural 20s on the dice just seems off. I guess plot immunity is a wonderful thing.

The best thing about the film is how grim it is. This could have easily been another huge blockbuster thrill ride, but it's not. It shows humans at the brink of desperation, and it details what depths some people will go to to survive and protect their families. The film does a good job of keeping the threat personal; it doesn't go out to the national or global level, but rather keeps it all down to how it affects Tom Cruise. I'll excuse the "Bad father learns about family" plot because it keeps the camera focused on the human crises and not the cool ships towering about. And these ships really are a threat: We see early on how effectively and indescriminately they kill, so when we see two at once, we go, "Holy crap," and when we see legions, we slap the retarded kid behind us for constantly going, "Whoa" in that deadened I-just-swallowed-my-tongue voice of his.

That's the other thing: We had these annoying people in the seats behind us who just wouldn't shut up. When the film began and we saw a picture of an amoeba, the father of the family pointed, chuckled, and went, "An amoeba!!!" I'm not making this up. Every time something happened that was more exciting than Tom Cruise standing about, the kid went, "Whoa." Like, Tom Cruise goes to the phone and says, "Hello, Dominoes?" and the kid goes, "Whoa." I turned around three times and told them to shut up, which worked for a moment, but they struck it back up. Luckily the film was grim and scary enough to shut down the three working neurons in their brains about halfway through the film.

Anyway, not a bad film, but I probably won't remember it in a few months, which generally tells me that it's solidly mediocre.

Also, Tom Cruise is teh Scientologistz0r, lolroflmgdao.

That is all.

Why Does Toyota Hate America?

2005-07-04T10:08:00.000-06:00

Toyota-New-Plant, 2nd Writethru Bgt

Sweet.

Whoa! Unexpected!!!!!!

2005-06-30T10:31:00.000-06:00

BBC NEWS | Technology | Women gear up for gaming invasion

Well, I'm convinced! A forward thinker has the balls to come out and say that women are the future of the games industry! He's a goddamn genius!

Like I said before, This happens every few months. Each time they list games women like: Zelda, Tetris, online Popcap stuff, etc., and note that one day there will be more female gamers than there are now. This article has the extra bonus of talking about the PMS crew or whatever, a group of "top-level" female gamers (What does that mean? They can play video games well?) who go to stores and talk to women about games while defeating men in whatever stupid FPS happens to be running. Check out the picture of the ladies in the article. Yes, I don't begrudge them the fact that they are as God made them, but c'mon. Are those three going to convince the Cosmo crowd that they need to kick a dude's butt in Battlefield 2? It seems a bit like Lou Ferrigno trying to convince me that scrapbooking is a wonderful hobby. I'd be like, "Yes, but aren't you hugely muscled and a former Incredible Hulk? I believe you because I'm scared of you, not because I'm convinced by your stance on scrapbooking."

Not that I'm afraid of Lou Ferrigno, mind. He's a pansy.

They keep at this so hard because they know that women have a lot of money and that women spend it on stupid crap like shoes and bills. They know that if they can get some women who play games to stand around in a gaming store, they can reel in other women. Do not be fooled: They're not after women because they think that entertaining women is a worthwhile goal. They're doing this because they know women have money they like to spend in the mall. The problem is that they're too cheap to do what they really need to do: Hire developers who will design games that are fun rather than ones that simply copy Doom. They spend time recommending fruit-ifying games when all they need to do is good-ify them.

The tinfoil hat in me suggests maybe these articles come out with such frequency and repetition because they're an attempt to try to tell female gamers that female gamers like games. But that's crazy talk!

Right?

Canada Further Embarasses the US

2005-06-29T09:34:00.000-06:00

Ha ha, US. You've been owned.

Canada's House of Commons just yesterday passed legislation legalizing same-sex marriages but providing institutions a right to refuse to perform such marriages for various reasons.

This means that gay couples have a right to be wed, and that churches that disagree don't have to do the weddings.

My god. Rights are being handed out all willy-nilly here in Canada. It's obvious that we're all catching Teh Ghey up here, like we did with that horrid stomach flu a few months ago (man, that messed me up... but not as much as teh ghey!).

An important thing to note: The leader of the Conservative party up here has vowwed to fight this if his party forms the next government, but to do that he apparently has to go down in history as the first Prime Minister in decades to actually strip legal rights from Canadians. I have to wonder, is political suicide a mortal sin like the other kind?

Canada isn't perfect, I'll say that. But I look down at my home nation and I just feel ashamed. It's pretty clear that the US hasn't led the world in anything other than pigheadedness and intellectual denial for years now. Canada is among a handful of countries that realizes that no one is hurt by allowing gay couples to get married. I have yet to hear a single real argument as to why gays shouldn't be allowed to stand in front of a minister like the rest of us can. Nothing but hatred and ignorance stands in the way.

I understand that the law still needs Senate and Queen approval, but that those are essentially ceremonial steps.

I'm an American, sure. But today I'd be proud to call myself a Canadian.

The Definition of Superhero

2005-06-23T09:39:00.000-06:00

A "Superhero" is defined as anything that Stan Lee came up with for Marvel during his tenure there. This means that if Stan Lee came up with "Walking Man," who heroically strolled across traffic in a slightly gay skintight outfit, then walking is a superheroic act.

I'm writing this because someone asked for my opinion, and whenever that happens, I am compelled to give it. Leave aside the fact that I am often compelled to give my opinions when no one has asked, too.

So, is Batman a superhero? Let's take a look:

Batman prances about in a costume. Check.

Batman fights evil. Check.

Batman has a sexually dubious relationship with an underaged boy. Check.

Batman has powers that are uncommon among the average people of the world. Check.

Categorizing stuff is silly, and it's easier to just say Batman is a superhero than it is to quote line and verse to exclude Batman from the genre he helped popularize. Check.

Yeah, Batman doesn't shoot skunks from his eyes or fly about, but he is quoted as being at the very pinnacle of human capability, mentally and physically. That sounds like a superpower to me, considering that he has had no more time to hone himself than the average other person obsessed with revenge. He also has the power to grant gadgets Plot Immunity, which means that his gadgets and stuff don't have to be explained. Basically, you can say, "It's because he's a bajillionaire!" as you would say, "It's magic!" or "Radiation!!!!!!" for any other hero.

He's also larger than life and fights villains that are the same. A regular hero would be a soldier in the army or a cop/firefighter/paramedia. A superhero fights dudes in purple spandex who show up and claim to be the ruler of the world.

Thus, Batman = Superhero.

Film Critics Are Retarded

2005-06-22T17:06:00.000-06:00

Okay. I'm about to back up the geek bus a bit today. Just giving you fair warning.

I have a few things I'd like to say to the film industry about Batman. Batman is a psycho. He is a revenge-obsessed sociopath who puts on an outfit meant to scare people and leaps about in the city at nighttime fighting the only people in the city more insane than he is. He's sorta like a tights-wearing White Rabbit, leading us through the Alice-in-Wonderland of Gotham City, where we meet people like the Penguin and the Joker and the Scarecrow, who all use some sort of gas or another. He wins, not because he has superpowers, but because he's BETTER THAN EVERYONE. Batman beats Superman by having kryptonite and not being afraid to use it. He then stands nearby and explains to Superman why he got beaten.

Note to Hollywood: Batman doesn't wear impenetrable battle armor. He doesn't glide about on a magic cape. He doesn't go to Q to get an explanation as to how this unlikely gadgetry works.

Goddamn you, David Goyer. Your Blade: Trinity stupidity got into our Batman movie. I hope you accidentally sit on a seatless bicycle and spin around before the grenade around your neck goes off in a violent fashion... also by accident, of course. Or better yet, I use your own tactics against you: "This here puppy is a nydogen-expanse freeload module, capable of exiblating three-thousand kilos of hexablon extrakagate in less than twelve stixohexins. In layman's terms, this crayon's gonna wax your half of town and everyone in it. Time to color stuff red."

Why can't someone win because they're awesome? Why must every Goyer hero have inexplicable gadgets catered specifically to win the game, no matter what? In Blade vs. Batman, Blade would get anti-black-outfit nuclear-tipped acid darts, and Batman would get weaponized aerosol Daywalker repellant.

Someone in Hollywood has to realize that you can't really make a real comic book movie without making it a comic book movie. Sam Raimi just about had it right: He didn't put Spider-Man in some stupid black latex outfit and roll up some lab-coated punk to go, "See, this baby here is a patented anti-jet-surfboard foam gun. One good shot of this will go back in time and make sure Green Goblin never got born." And he had a canon reason to put Spidey in black. Batman is awesome because he's awesome. He survives gunfights not because his outfit is bulletproof, but because he either dodges bullets or makes the thugs too afraid to shoot right. Christopher Nolan nailed the intimidation aspect extremely well (for the most part), but still, you think, "Well, how awesome can he be? He's reliant on bulletproof outfits." How much more badass would it be if Batman survived by simply being more badass than everyone else?

Anyway, that's neither here nor there. Film critics are retarded.

Film critics for the most part are too good to enjoy a Batman movie. Either they go in expecting a campy thrill ride or they expect the film to just suck. Most of the reviews on Rotten Tomatoes that are negative essentially boil down to, "How DARE Nolan make a comic book movie with real emotion and brains behind it?" Others say, "Tim Burton is like, the Batman god, and this movie is nothing like that, so 'Booo!' I say."

Batman Begins is a fine film. I saw it twice, and I loved it both times. It made Batman seem plausible, not as a guy in a suit, but as a man who has the drive and the means to take a stand against criminals. It drove home that Batman isn't the (exceedingly awkward-looking) guy in a black suit, but rather the overarching personality of the grown-up Bruce Wayne. Batman is the sum of all the experiences Bruce Wayne has had since his parents' death, and the outfit is just a public face. In fact, in this particular movie, I felt myself wishing I'd never seen the Batman outift and that Bruce Wayne had continued on with the ninja-mugger-of-death outfit he had when he spoke to Sgt. Gordon the first time.

That's mostly because the new Batman outfit, and the way Bale carried it and spoke in it, were all horrible. not from a fanboy "Wahhhh, I cannot like this because it is not how I would have done it had I the money, power, and talent to have made this movie myself!" standpoint, but from a "Damnit, this badass character looks stupid crouching there like an imp in his goofy pointy mushroom hat and his Harvey-Fierstien-with-a-tracheotomy voice" perspective. There wasn't a single point in the movie in which I felt that Batman out-badassed the scenes in which Christian Bale just bandied about being a ninja. It was like they replaced Bale with a laryngitic leprechaun whenever Batman was wearing the suit. The rest of the film, the roughly 80% in which Bruce Wayne was just Bruce Wayne, Bale was fantastic, charismatic, and vaguely creepy, and most importantly, believable.

The supporting cast was more or less excellent, as well. Michael Caine's Alfred is the Most Awesomest Character Ever in Films, and that includes Zombie Pirate Henchman #2 in Pirates of the Caribbean. Michael Caine showed once more why he has the power to shoot staples from his eyes. Gary Oldman was decidedly un-Gary-Oldmanlike as pre-Commissioner Gordon, underacting and essentially doing a damn fine job being a majorly skilled character actor in an important but understated role. The villains were universally awesome, except one scene in which Scarecrow is standing there in his mask and a suit looking for all the world like a guy in a suit with a scarecrow mask on. The best way to make a villain look dumb is to make his thugs look more badass than he is.

Katie Holmes was neither particularly well written or well acted, and she isn't really hot enough to make one forget Batman's badassedness. Still, she did okay, and her relationship with Bruce Wayne is refreshing in its not-entirely-Hollywood-cheese manner.

The hero of the film, the man who tied the whole thing together, was definitely Mr. Water Company Exposition Guy. Toward the end of the film, when things are getting fairly stupid, this guy shows up and goes, "If that train gets to the center of the city, which is Wayne Tower, the entire city's gonna blow!" Then they cut to something else (I think it was Batman punching a train in the mouth) and then back to this old guy. "Seriously though, man, it sure will suck if that train gets to Wayne Tower and makes the city blow!" The guy and his assistant proceed to do absolutely nothing from then on, but we still include this guy in the cross-cutting during the climax of the film. Batman fighting, train speeding away, Gordon doing something important, train speeding, old guy going "She gonna blow!", back to Batman, to the train, to Gordon, to Batman, to old Water Guy, and so on. And then, when the Day is Saved (spoiler), the Old Water Guy gets a SIGH OF RELIEF ON CAMERA. Like he was there all along. I half expected Batman to show up with the Old Water Guy, shake his hand, and go, "Gotham can't operate without good ol' blue-collar guys like you, sir. Salute!"

Still, not even David Goyer's complete retardedness can ruin Batman Begins. And David Goyer sucks.

THE CHURCH OF AWESOME!!!!!!

2005-06-15T11:55:00.000-06:00

I'd like to hereby announce the foundation of the CHURCH OF AWESOME!!!!!! on this day, the whateverth of June, in the Awesome year of 24,567,043,221 AFY.

Many of you may not be familiar with the tenets of this great religion, and so I, Big Goddamn Pope For Life Awesome bin Fricasee I, shall endeavor to enlighten you. Rest assured that you all meet the criteria needed to be made privy to this information. Otherwise I'd have been forced to resort to a round of Instinct Clarification and submit you to a full Internal Glaxicom Reconstitutional.

Should you choose to disseminate this information, be aware that you forfeit your rights to sentience in regards to the CHURCH and thereby become a Token Bretheren slated for Occupational Reinhabitance.

The CHURCH OF AWESOME!!!!!! is based on the principles of being completely awesome at all times. Its tenets were brought to this Earth 24,567,043,221 years ago by a giant goddamn flaming tyrannosaurus named Beezu. Unlike all the other dinosaurs of the time, Beezu believed that being entirely fucking awesome was the path to true enlightenment, and so he went around eating all the dinosaurs who disagreed with him. Since all most dinosaurs did at the time was sit around and sink into tar pits and stuff, Beezu pretty much had a smorgasbord on his tiny little vestigal hands.

It was all good for awesomeness when another awesome thing from outer space, a gigantic space asteroid named Floorplan, came crashing to Earth to try to stop Beezu's awesomeness. While Floorplan was a creature of awesome, he hated Beezu because he knew Beezu was far more awesome than some giant goddamn rock from space, and so he tried to destroy the world by thrusting himself at it with great speed. While this didn't eradicate all awesomeness from the planet, it did destroy Beezu and most of the dinosaurs Beezu hadn't yet eaten. The CHURCH knows this as The Great De-Awesomnification.

Ironically, this disaster didn't completely destroy Beezu; rather, it made Beezu a god. Beezu gained great powers of awesome from this, and surviving an asteroid attack made him even more awesome. He began preaching awesomness to the lesser beings, the small lame mammals and huge awesome plants and stuff. Eventually a bunch of monkeys turned into people, and Beezu was about to eat them when he thought a moment and realized, "Hey, one day these people will be pirates and ninjas and zombies and robots. I shall let them live, and they shall be my Agents of Awesome." To this end he inserted transmitters, called "Bluvins," into all of the new people so that the people would be driven to make more people and thus create more awesomeness. For males the Bluvins became "pecs" and "balls," and for females, they became "boobies."

Unfortunately, Floorplan wasn't dead forever. He had become part ofthe Earth and began to slowly corrupt people's Bluvins. What once was a simple source of awesome (balls and boobies) became also a source of lame. Mostly because my stupid religion needs an antagonist. So anyone you hate has lame Bluvins, whereas you have awesome ones.

To this day Beezu fights lame Blevins with the hope of restoring Awesomeness to all. See how quickly you understand my secret jargon?

The tenets of the CHURCH are as follows:

Don't not be awesome. This one ought to be self-explanatory. If you feel the desire to be lame, that's your lame Bluvins talking. Report to a local AWESOME CENTER for Delamenification.

Don't kill people. Every religion needs this one so it can say, "We discourage murder, so you can't sue us because it's not our fault our Head High Archbishop slaughtered 37 children." Really. This is the most important commandment in the CHURCH from a legal standpoint. *wink*

Don't hoard your money from the CHURCH. This is very important. Your personal assets lead to lame Bluvins; just look at Donald Trump and Paris Hilton. Your best bet is to give us all your possessions for safe-keeping while you awesomnify.

Eat every goddamn diplodicus. This is more a holdover from Orthodox Awesomeness. Since there are no diplodicuses left in the world, this is often interpreted as, "Beat up fat people" or, "What the hell does that mean?"
The agents of Floorplan are everywhere. Anyone who disagrees with you is obviously a Floorplanian with uber-lame Bluvins. Ignore them, or better yet, kick them in their Bluvins for justice.

Beezu is watching you. Beezu likes to watch stuff, and he loves to watch you as you bumble through your daily life. The lamer you are, the more Beezu watches you, and really, who likes to be watched by a giant flaming ghost dinosaur in the sky? You can Beezu to stop watching you temporarily by sending me $25 per five-minute period of time.

Give me some money. Seriously. If you don't, you're full of lame Bluvins and get to be destroyed by my black PR campaigns. I'll tell all your friends that you suck.

The most important thing to note is that one day Beezu will return to Earth and eat all living creatures who are lame. This is meant to frighten you into compliance, particularly with the tenet wherein you give me money.

Oh, and also, this isn't the deepest secrets of the CHURCH OF AWESOME!!!!!! Only those who have reached the top levels of the CHURCH can learn its awesomest secrets, which involve water pumps, Chee-tos, and ninjas. Seriously, that shit is awesome. So give me some money.

All hail Beezu and the awesome Bluvins, Amen.

Girls and Games

2005-06-14T15:40:00.000-06:00

Just so you know, I'm not really a misogynist. I pretty much hate everyone. There are things I don't understand about women, and they sometimes drive me crazy, but I generally enjoy their company and respect them. Even though all the pregnancy crap pretty much ruined Angel for nearly two seasons; I know that Women at Large weren't responsible for that, and I can safely reserve my anger for that for two or three females in specific.

That makes me a minority in the game industry, I imagine, but hey. Being a minority is cool. I've been left-handed all my life (Down with Righty!), and the moment someone organizes a Sinister Million-Man March, I'll be there, if only to get street cred so I can walk around in Oakland without getting beat up next time I go there.

So. Once every twelve minutes someone says, "Hey, I just realized that girls don't play games that much!" like they just stumbled upon some great universal truth. This sparks magazines to run articles and marketers to go, "Hrm, and these 'women' tend to have money, right? Shouldn't we be setting about getting some of it?" Then everyone thinks that there's something wrong with game companies because they aren't going after women.

Here's a newsflash for people: For a game company to actively go after women would be like contributing to charity.

You have two groups: One is an easy sell and was already buying tons of products like yours and clearly enjoys spending money on them, and the other is a group of people who require extensive education about your product and generally thinks your product is dumb or frivolous and not worth the price of half of one of those pointy-toed shoes build specifically for groin-kicking. Which does your short-sighted company greenlight money for? Do you advertise to the sure thing or the longshot?

Most places go for the sure thing, because, well, it's a sure thing. If the advertising costs the same and the reward is greater, who can blame them? And so ads have big-ass boobies in them and show nerds getting laid because they bought the latest Halo game. Advertisers go after the boys and not the girls.

But this is likely a good thing. Have you ever seen toy ads that go after girls? They're horrible. Pink shit goes everywhere, and two little girls wave dolls about and go, "Oh, it's time to go shopping with Trevor! Maybe this time he'll shine that glinty smile at me!" Imagine that for Unreal Championship and you have an idea where it's going.

No one is to blame for this. Video games got popular with boys before there were grenades and sniper rifles and giant boobies everywhere. Remember Atari 2600? Boys liked that better than girls did, even when all you had was one orange square shooting at another or a dude with an arrow-sword fighting a duck-dragon. The original developers (and most of them today) were males, and so the games had themes like "Blast stuff" and "Conquer territory with your radioactive death-line." Still, even back then there was a Pac-Man for every Space Invaders.

Put alongside this that the female gamers I know have the most complex tastes of any gamers I've met. My fiancee in particular loves puzzle games and The Sims, but she also loves carving things up in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance and beating people up in Jade Empire. At the table, she digs playing social characters but wants to be kick-ass in a fight, as well. Another woman we gamed with was the most bloodthirsty person I've ever shared a table with. These aren't isolated incidents.

So why do we think "a game for girls" means "pink tripe about planting flowers and hugging"?

I think it'd be nice for more women to enjoy playing games; it certainly makes my life easier that I can share that with the soon-to-be Mrs. Awesome. But I think it's unrealistic to think, "The industry is a villain because it's not focusing on women." This isn't much more realistic than going, "How come knitting companies don't target men?" I can imagine it now; loud guitars, mud flying about, and a dude grimacing as he knits the hell out of a scarf with skulls on it while two hot chicks in bikinis loaf about around him. The dude can flex and show his scarf and go, "Oh YEAH, knitting is AWESOME!!!!" before thrusting his hands into hot coals and grimacing some more. Then he shoots a gun and drives around.

I say, if you want more women to play games, stop targeting them so damn much. Maybe actually make a game that can sell on its own merits rather than relying on pictures of "hot" CG chicks to sell it. Games like Knights of the Old Republic, City of Heroes, World of Warcraft, and the like attract female gamers not because they have flowers or involve "nourishing," but because they respect the end user and don't flaunt the stupid crap.

Meanwhile, stop patronizing them. Don't print articles going, "This sucks, the industry needs more chicks!" Don't pretend to be interested in more girl gamers or girl game developers when you're obviously not. And stop pretending that what men and women want from entertainment is completely different. It's not. Women want fantasies and entertainment like men do, and yeah, most women might not enjoy something like Manhunt (though not many men enjoyed that one, either), but you don't have to go so far as Barbie's Dream Hotel or Mary Kate & Ashley's OMG What's a Sandwich? to have something a woman will like.

"Women" is a group made up of individual people, not a homogenous group of demographics. Make games people like, and a number of women will play them. Women are awesome; they tend to like cool stuff. The problem is that publishers put out games that suck but include hooks that trigger men's balls to tell them to play them, and this trick doesn't work on women.

You'll have to actually make a good game to "fool" that crowd.

Why God Hates Geeks

2005-06-10T13:53:00.000-06:00

Hey folks. I'm a geek. Seriously. But come on.

God hates us.

It's why sitting on one's ass makes us fat. It's why not going outside keeps us from getting attractive tans. It's why eating Doritos and drinking Mt. Dew are bad for us. In a geek-friendly world, these things would be required staples. The world is hostile to us.

So why does God hate geeks?

God hates geeks because we are petty and divisive and arugmentative. The average geek has some amount of higher brain function that is often used to create stories or goad computers into doing backflips, but we spend our time arguing about whether Connor and Cordy should have slept together or coming up with schematics for lightsabers. We spend more time on average wondering why so many people on Tatooine speak English than we do speaking English to other people in society. We sit at the TV or computer and play violent video games and then claim to have actually had the adventures we just played. We're dreamers, but few of us actually seek to make our dreams possible. Those who do are either gods (Roddenberry, Whedon) or are sacrificed at the altar of I Could Do Better.

But the worst thing--the WORST thing--about geeks is this: Geeks hate. We hate harder and faster and with more vitriol than most other creatures on the planet. And we hate dumb stuff that really affects life to the sum of zero.

Case in point: this thread on RPG.net about a new constructible card game White Wolf is developing. Think Pirates of the Spanish Main with a more Car Wars-like overtone.

If the game were published by any other studio, the response would likely be, "Sounds interesting," or, "Not my cup of tea." But since it's White Wolf, the response was, almost immediately, "Screw you, White Wolf, this game will suck." Based on nothing more than a paragraph of information, people jumped to the conclusion that the game will be crap. Personally, I think it sounds pretty cool, and any new game idea that gets put out is a new game we can try out. But people are so angry about this that even Ethan Skemp, White Wolf employee and developer of Werewolf: the Forsaken, couldn't sway them. They just came right back at him and explained that they were unconvinced that this new project will be any good. When told that the game might not actually be targetted at fans of White Wolf's World of Darkness games, they shined back a Penny Arcade comic about a game not being made for critics. Because that's obviously the same thing.

This isn't the first attack of geek hate. Whenever a movie that has some importance to geeks is announced, we leap on it and beat it to death. I imagine that there are more net words in forum threads complaining about Superman Returns than there were in the last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica. If comic book movies were protected under the Hate Crimes acts, then there would be few geeks left walking free in the US, and I'd be right there with you asking you to trade me some pudding for my cigarettes.

I could pass a rumor that a Green Lantern movie would come out, and within a couple of days it would be covered in sloppy green geek hate. I'd say, "Hey, I hear they're making Green Lantern: the Movie," and within seconds people would be like, "Oh man, Warner Bros. sucks. I bet they'll get Brett Ratner. He is a crap director. That movie's gonna suck." For some reason, many geeks enjoy the preceived pain of having a favorite show, game, or comic ruined because it means they can prattle out detailed forum posts about who they think should burn in hell. That's the other thing about us geeks: We're most articulate when we're hating something. If you don't believe me, screw you. What do you think this blog is about?

Technically, there's nothing in the Bible that outlaws outright, unreasoned hatred of an idea or TV show, but then, they didn't have very good TV back in the Bible days (pretty much just Veggie Tales and Cinemax). If there were a process for amending the Bible, I bet that would be a hot-button issue. "Thou shalt not hate on stupid shit like sci-fi TV shows and unreleased games you know nothing about" would make a great 11th Commandment, though I imagine there would be other amendments made first, like "Thou shalt not wear shorts with black socks" and "Thou shalt be allowed to fall asleep after sex without guilt."

Geeks, we must stop the hate. No one is served when we spend so much time and blood pressure hating stupid shit. I'm taking one for the team here by hating on the haters, so don't let my ironic vitriol be in vain.

Just stop the hate.

One Correction

2005-06-09T13:21:00.000-06:00

According to this article, being a nerd alone isn't enough by itself to guarantee a life of inaction.

I'm just being a responsible counselor.

Nothing Exciting Ever Happens to Me

2005-06-09T11:26:00.000-06:00

I'm starting to realize that I lead a pretty boring life. I'm not really complaining, because things are pretty awesome: I'm getting married in less than a year, I have two awesome cats, I am actually doing some writing for a game at work, my fiancee is rising in the ranks at her job, etc. I'm not talking about a lack of stuff happening. I mean interesting stuff.

To clarify, I consider the following things to be "interesting stuff":

Ninjas

Tornadoes

Explosions

Being attacked by guys with piranhas for hands

Getting shot with a laser

Emeril

Tractors with jet engines

Swimsuit models asking me stuff

Black currant jelly

If you go back through all of my entries in this journal, none of the above things have ever happened to me. It sucks.

Sometimes I just sit there at dinner or hanging out with my friends and try to think of something interesting that happened that day. Like, I feel like something did happen, but I can't remember it, like Tommy Lee Jones came in after and shined me. Like, I'm not really spending most of my time at a computer in an office, but rather I'm out saving crippled people from Sudden More Grievous Crippledness or performing surgical strikes for the Special Forces in Afghanistan (are we still killing people there?). It sucks when the most interesting things I can say are "I might run a game of Angel" or "Man, my Defender sure can't solo."

Then I look at where I'm coming from. I am a treasure trove of mid-level trivia from The Dukes of Hazzard (in an alternate universe, there is a long post on this site poking fun at the Dukes, but in our universe it got eaten by Blogger). I can laugh for hours about the rules nuances of the World of Darkness or D&D. Sometimes I am aghast at how much of a geek I am, and sometimes I just think, "Man. If only I could run into some black currant jelly."

So I figured, why bother with it? Why worry about why I'm not Action Man when I can help others with the knowledge I do have?

And so, I present A Bunch of Ways to NOT to be Action Man:

Don't go outside: A lot of people get this one wrong. In general, if you go outside, you can't avoid being involved in some sort of dramatic action sequence. Even just driving to the store gets you stuck in the pathos of shaking your fists at other drivers and mental struggles with traffic lights. Not only that, but there are attractive women out there whose jobs it is to walk around the streets to spice up your driving experience. Also, going outside on sunny days could lead to Sports.

Don't play or watch sports: Sports is the death of the Anti-Action Man. Western legend is built on physical prowess, and sports are the best way to display physical prowess short of building an ark or having a gang-bang competition (which is sorta like a sport). You may think you're just tossing a football around, but before long you're leaping about and diving and high-fiving and being whisked off to outer space to fight the Kodan Armada. Besides, sports can lead to Being in Shape.

No Exercise: Exercise is the #1 killer of the sedentary lifestyle. Nothing kills off a good gut like getting rid of it. Exercise involves a lot of moving about and heavy breathing, and that never helped anyone avoid interesting things. If you feel you need to work off a little energy, the best bet is to sit on the couch and dangle things at the cat. The cat's insane runnings about will exhaust you and burn off that energy by proxy.

Cocaine is not your friend: Cocaine is an excellent way to have an interesting life. It may be awfully appetizing, looking all white and vaguely chalk-like, but don't do it. One sniff of cocaine and you're grinding your dirty boots into Eddie Murphy's expensive couch or writing episodes of Scooby-Doo with veiled drug references like, "Hey Scoob, wanna go get high and engage in buggery?" or, "Rey Raggy, Drugs are Rawesome for rildren!" Cocaine also enables you to vibrate your molecules through solid objects, which often leads to High Adventure.

Master the *tsk*: Whenever someone is excited about something, make sure you go, "*tsk*." Example: "Hey, want to go and pick up some free gold ingots at the gold-giving-away place?" "*tsk.*" Part of avoiding action is making sure your close friends get no action as well. The best way to do this is to show utter disdain for anything they care about. Younger, hipper Internet kids can replace "*tsk*" with "meh" to have the same result but with more likelihood of being punched for being annoying. That makes "meh" risky because being punched is generally considered action.

Have a busted-ass car: Cars are anathema for the anti-action set. If your car is perfectly fine, you're likely to just randomly get up and go traipsing off to the mountains, where action is a way of life. The slightest paranoid car problem can put the kibosh on that for sure. Personally, I prefer the "Mysterious Slow Leak in the Front Passenger's Side Tire That Remains No Matter How Many Times You Change the Tire on That Wheel." Strange noises and no shocks in the back are good options, as well. In general, if your mom would yell at you for driving in your car, you're good to go.

Spend time making lists on your petulant blog: This one ought to be self-explanatory. If not, let me know and I'll give you a list of reasons why this works.

Have a condition: Any condition can do, as long as you can look at someone, shake your head, and say, "I have a condition." Stomach conditions are good, because they are usually a side-effect of being sedentary anyway, and people generally don't want to think about what happens when your condition flares up. The classic example is the headache, but you can use your imagination, unless your condition is "lack of imagination." In which case, screw you. Your condition sucks.

Have strong opinions about pop culture: This is a touchy one, because strong opinions, even about the stupidest crap like Vulcan sex drives, can lead to violent verbal or physical confrontations and thus, action. Used skillfully, however, your strong opinions can shoo away people who might seek to force action upon you, particularly girls who might bring you some sex. You get extra points if you can argue your strong opinions on an online forum or in a petulant blog, and extra double points if your blog has lists.

That's not everything, but that's hopefully enough to get you started. If you have any questions, leave me alone.

Whoa.

2005-06-06T18:45:00.000-06:00

Phew. Boy. Was I cranky today.

Your Star Wars is Crap

2005-06-06T14:46:00.000-06:00

Just so you know, don't click on the link in the heading today. I warned you.

People (as in, more than one person) have asked me why I didn't post my thoughts about Episode III. Well, screw you, hippy. Just because a movie comes out doesn't mean that I have to start ranting about it. It's fashionable to be uppity about Star Wars lately, and well, if I wanted to be fashionable, I wouldn't wear the same pair of rubber ducky slippers every day. I was just busy being proud that I didn't have a strong opinion one way or another about the film, as if I had somehow passed the test and could advance to the next stage of Geek Awareness.

But there has been a common thread in most Star Wars criticism I've heard, and that is that no one knows what the hell they are talking about. People say, "George Lucas can't write!" but these people don't have their own cultural phenomena feeding their bank account with merchandising royalties. People say, "WTF is up with Jar-Jar?" without considering how dumb Yoda probably looked in the day, or that alien that flicks the little stick comingout of its chin to talk. We're talking about a film series with characters named things like Lando and Greezlepump Slapdeback, the majority of which never had names until someone wanted to make action figures. It's a saga that says, "It's the Force!" with the same confidence that most pulp stories say, "This must be some kind of SCIENCE!"

Granted, the films did employ more midgets than the blockbuster Willy Wonka vs. The Time Bandits, but let's not sugarcoat it.

Star Wars is crap.

Episode III, Episode VI, Episode MCMXCXLVII. This is a bright-eyed film-school-hack's vision of A Film That Would Be Cool. It has such memorable lines as "She gonna blow!", "Stay on target!", and "Coohhhh hsssssh, coohhhh hsssssh." It didn't even have Star Trek's "Future's so bright... shades" outlook. It had grown men running around in dresses and whacking each other with glowing sticks.

Let's look at Episode IV:
Tousle-haired, whiny farmboy. Princess with here-today-gone-tomorrow accent. Walking carpet who speaks in growls, but everyone understands him. A smuggler who's actually pretty cool, but who looks one bad haircut away from turning into the evil blonde jock from The Karate Kid. A clumsy, effete robot who understands 6 million forms of communication. A small wee trashcan with a spinny head that speaks only in beeps, but everyone understands him. Since everyone shopped at the GI Joe Laser Emporium, the good guys shoot green lasers, and the bad guys shoot red. And what the fuck is a moff?

Now, people ascribe all this Joseph Campbell stuff to the films, and yeah, it's all there. But that's because Lucas cribbed the story straight from the Campbell outlines. Meanwhile, people are basing their lives on this shit. Dude, the film had rubber aliens, and not even that many of them. You like the films because you saw them when you were ten, and you saw the films because you had all the toys, not because they're life-changing films in their own right.

So when people say "Episodes I-III are crap compared to the original series," I say, "Screw you asshole, the original series was crap, too."

Unlike many people out there, I can tell the differences among the reasons why I enjoy something. Below are the reasons why something might appeal to people:

Because it's good ("The thing that sucks about The Big Lebowski is that nothing sucks about it")

Nostalgia ("That cartoon is awesome because I saw it when I was 12! Who the hell went back and cut out the frames of animation and made the voice acting suck?")

Irony ("This show is awesome because it makes my stomach reject my lunch... but in a good way!")

Sex ("Man oh man, that Disney-sponsored actress is very attractive! I bet she'll be hot when she reaches the legal age of consent!")

Mindless Fun ("Jerry Bruckheimer presents A Michael Bay Film Michael Bay Blows Shit Up A Film By Michael Bay is awesome! Did you see the leaning tower of Pisa get eaten by giant dragonflies?")

Because you're stupid ("Mortal Kombat for Genesis is the best game ever.")

You like Star Wars because of Nostalgia and, possibly, Irony. Admit it. The films are crap. And yes, I'm looking at you, Empire. Saying "I'm the best Star Wars film!" is like saying, "I'm the most pleasant-smelling of all the turds!"

It's cool to like the films. I like 'em myself. I even liked some parts of Episode II. And yes, Episode III was an improvement. But you must admit, if anyone other than George Lucas made that film, with the logical speedbumps present in that script, that director's name would be Uwe Boll. Let's examine:

Padme's Amazing Size-Changing Belly: She goes from being relatively skinny to massive to skinny again to lumpy to massive to smallish again. Then, after the babies are born, she's huge again. Not only that, but she tells Anakin they're pregnant, and then three days later she has twins. Her uterus wasn't big enough at the time to be holding a Luke Skywalker action figure, much less two babies the size of her entire torso.

Mace Windu is the Stupidest Jedi Ever: Every other word from Made Windu is, "I don't trust Anakin." But he somehow trusts Anakin enough to leave him alone with the corrupt-at-best Chancellor. Maybe he hoped that their man-boy love would keep them in line. Then when Anakin comes by and says, "The Chancellor is the Sith Lord, we should rush in there now!", Mace goes, "Hrm. Good work, I totally believe you." THEN Mace goes in, confronts the Chancellor, has him beat, and is stopped by Anakin going, "No, you shouldn't! Killing him would be bad, just like when I killed Dooku and all the sand people!" And Mace is like, "He has a point, I guess, maybe I should hesitate--OH MY FUCKING GOD THE SEARING PAIN. BITCH."

Anakin's Dream: Anakin has a dream, and his mother dies. He has another that shows that Padme will die in childbirth. This sparks him to turn evil. Well, this and the suggestion that a Sith lord once knew how to raise the dead. Meanwhile, they have bacta tanks and robot doctors and mechanical limbs and space flight and sentient droids and parsecs defined as units of time measurement. Anakin takes this dream, decides that Padme's death is imminent and that the only way to stop it is through necromancy that may or may not be a lie, and turns evil and kills children. I would have prefered the dream be replaced with a dumb robot going, "We don't know why, but she will die in childbirth unless there's necromancy." Which brings us to the next bit:

Lost the Will to Live: A character in the movie actually says, "She's perfectly healthy, but for some reason, she's dying. We don't know why, but she has lost the will to live." That character is a robot droid doctor in the high-tech society of Star Wars. This is the same world in which, a couple decades later, a robot doctor revives Luke after getting beat up by his dad, losing his hand, and going head-surfing through giant mechanical Fallopian tubes, and all that doctor had to do was go, "Boot boot boot" and float Luke in Gatorade.

Hiding Babies in Plain Sight: "Okay, we have two babies whom the Empire might be looking for. Let's hide one with the only Senator to escape Coruscant and hide the other with people who knew Anakin on Anakin's home planet. This is brilliant! After that, we'll go ahead and help that Nigerian prince move those funds."

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!: Darth Vader, upon rising from the evil Frankenstein table, asks about his beloved Padme. When the Emperor tells him she is dead, he goes, "NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO" and arches his back as we zoom out from the scene. My only thought is that Palpatine was testing the Manchurian Candidate triggers he programmed in. I imagine that the next few days were made up of Palpatine going, "Lord Vader, there are dead kitties on deck 6," or, "Lord Vader, they cancelled Freaks & Geeks," just to make sure the Dark Lord of the Sith's Overacting Protocols were ship shape.

These are not fine cinema, people. It's frustrating to see the continuation of a childhood favorite not live up to expectations, but jeebus. Get on with life. You spend so much time hating the new stuff that you forget why and how you enjoyed the old stuff: because you saw it with fresh eyes and no expectations, and because you didn't have this perverse sense of ownership over the films. You could enjoy them when you were 12 and not have to worry about losing your geek cred, which probably has a street value of a smack in the face.

Whew.

OH NOES!!!!111

2005-05-18T13:22:00.000-06:00

Check this out.

Don't Panic!

MARKETING AWESOME: Game Boy Micro

2005-05-17T16:52:00.000-06:00

Game Boy: E3 2005: Meet Game Boy Micro

According to George Harrison, Nintendo of America's senior vice president of marketing and corporate communications, Game Boy Micro will redefine your personal image. "Because of its diminutive size and industrial-hip look, Game Boy Micro immediately identifies the person playing it as a trendsetter with discriminating style," he says.

This scene presents itself:

Hot Chick #1: Hey, whoa! Do you see that 31-year-old zit-faced doughball over there?
Hot Chick #2: Oooh, yeah. He's playing Game Boy Micro!
Hot Chick #1: He's obviously a trendsetter with discriminating style, eh?
Hot Chick #2: Mmm hmmm. Let's go over there, start making out with each other, and invite him to our secret hot-chick orgy club!
Hot Chick #1: Zut Alors! My face explodes with unleashed passion!

Maybe I'm just being cynical, but I doubt playing a Game Boy will ever immediately identify one as a trendsetter with disriminating style. I mean, not even cell phones do that, and they're much higher on the Get-You-Laid-With-Hot-Chicks scale than Game Boys. That scale goes as follows:

1: Being a Baldwin
2: Being gay
3: Big loud goddamn souped-up import cars
4: Being a huge jerk
5: Axe Body Spray
6: Not having a passionate opinion on Star Wars one way or the other
7: Teeth filed to points
...
97: Being a cannibal
98: Having a cell phone
99: Playing a Game Boy
100: Having a pile of shit for a head

Seriously. I used to have a frickin' watch with games on it, and another that transformed into a robot. If neither of those got me laid back then, good luck with your damn Game Boy Micro.

The Nomadic Peoples of Jesp

2005-05-17T16:00:00.000-06:00

Jennifer Government: NationStates | Jesp | the West Pacific

The link above is to a page where you can see the progress of the Nomadic Peoples of Jesp. It's my nation in Nation States, an odd little web game about running a small nation, in my case, into the ground.

I figured it'd be awesome to start a nation and then make every horrible decision possible when presented with an issue. For example, I decided to make cannibalism legal and government-supported, I vetoed a restriction on hunting the water buffalo (my national animal) for food, I demanded that any gold reserves found in the nation be turned over to the government, regardless of who owned the land they were found on, and squashed a pitiful request for, well, less dictatorship in my governing style. Ha. Foolish imaginary mortals.

I find it interesting to watch my front page as it lists the failures of my nation. I imagine that this experience is far more profound than I'd like it to be, at least from my Canuckistani perspective on the US.

One Giant Leap for Technology, a Small Step for Gaming

2005-05-17T12:03:00.000-06:00

First off: Three words for Rockstar Games: "Get off it."

Everyone knows you're going to make GTA for whatever systems you think will sell the game. In fact, looking at the list of games for PS3, it reads like someone cut and pasted game titles from the PS2 launch and added one to the sequel numbers. But the best is this: "Namco showed this. Konami unveiled that. EA showed video of this. And Rockstar noted that they will make Grand Thef Auto for the system."

I could say I'm going to make Best Game Evar for the PS3, and you couldn't dispute me at this point. This is all hype, people. Sure, some of the stuff looks great, and there's loud, pumping music, hot chicks, etc. In the end, nothing they show you now has to come out. It's all hype. They want the journalists to go to their little booths and say, "OMG, I know I said Xbox would be the final word in gaming ever, but seriously, I really mean it this time with the PS3!!!!1" They want to keep the console wars going. Because this hype is free advertisement for them. Which is fine. But man, it takes balls to say, "Yeah, we're making GTA for this" with nothing to show for it and pass it off as a hype point for the system. If the industry is a homeroom class, Rockstar is that arrogant football-player prick in the corner who keeps scoring big with one play and who thinks people would pay $2 to drink a glass of his piss.

Anyway, that's not the rant I wanted to put up for today. It's like an extra bonus rant. Good for you.

When you had a 486 with Windows 3.11, you likely had a word processor. When you had a Pentium with Windows 95, you had a word processor. Now we have P3s and P4s with Windows XP and Word 2000/XP. The processors have grown exponentially. But notice that the word processors don't work monumentally better than they used to.

There's something in computers that I call the "resource footprint" because I can't be bothered to find out what it's really called. The resource footprint is a measure of how much of a machine's resources it uses up just being on. In the case of PCs, while PCs have become tons more powerful over the years, common applications like email, web browsing, and word processing haven't really changed much. A large part of this is the huge resource footprint needed for the newer versions of Windows and other "important" background programs leaving less room for the improvement of other programs.

For consoles, the resource footprint is small, but there's a similar thing in games. I'll call that "Flabbadeedoo," since I'm making up terms. The flabbadeedoo is the amount of system resources a game uses up just being "marketable": high-powered graphics and animation take up most of this, but so does voice-over and detailed sound. Flabbadeedoo is the resource footprint a game leaves for these things that improve the underlying experience of games and make them more likely to sell but that don't necessarily contribute to making a better game.

Let's take a look. We had loading times on Playstation, with its extremely crappy CPU and low RAM and slow CD-ROM. We have loading times on PS2 and Xbox, as well, with their much faster and more powerful systems. With all the bluster about how powerful systems are, the levels aren't that much bigger, really. And in Halo 2, you still do the same thing you did in Quake: Run around, shoot stuff, blow stuff up. Sure, they added in a little Twisted Metal, and the voice communication is nice in multiplayer, but really. We're on a gameplay innovation treadmill, and meanwhile, technology expectations are driving up game costs and forcing developers to sacrifice gameplay to make room for pretty colors.

Not only is the flabbadeedoo getting larger to nearly negate the larger system resources of the new consoles, but the leap in payoff for that flabbadeedoo increase is getting smaller and smaller. With the jump from SNES to PSX, we got true 3D, polygons, textures. From PSX to PS2, we got better lighting and gameplay graphics that looked like PSX pre-rendered movies. From PS2 to PS3, we get... what? You can see skin rippling on a boxer's face when he takes a punch? Where's the gameplay improvement in that? How does that in any way make my boxing game experience markedly better?

With that processing power, they could make a 1st person game with no damage HUD. Maybe the screen blurs dynamically as you take more and more damage. Maybe you begin to see flashes of things in your "peripheral vision." Maybe you can look down and see your clothes ripped and the skin underneath torn open. Maybe when your hand or arm is broken, you can't wield the heavier weapons. That sort of thing seems far more immersive to me than a monster glistening 17% more than before.

Instead, as the system resources grow, the flabbadeedoo grows to match. Fight Night Round 3 will use up so much more of the system's resources to make sure that the guy's face flaps appropriately when punched that the growth in system resources is nearly meaningless to gameplay. So much extra work and resources for such a small payoff. Wouldn't that processing power be better spent on physics or AI, especially in adventure and action games?

So. Less flabbadeedoo, more useful gameplay innovation. That's all I ask.

Semana Grande!

2005-05-16T16:35:00.000-06:00

If you're a big sweaty geek like me and most people I know, this is a pretty big week.

Most other people don't really care. I envy thos people.

The big news is that E3 and the new Star Wars film both happen this week. I'm sure I'll get to Star Wars sometime this week, but for now I want to focus on that ear-shattering wankfest, E3.

Just to cement the source of my crankiness on the subject, this is the 9th E3 since I started going to the show, and the second one I've missed since then. That's long enough to see patterns emerge, and if you're a jaded bitch like me, patterns tend to make you cranky. I recognize the following patterns from every time I've been to E3:

The "industry-only" event is crowded with suspicious 8-year-old industry insiders.

Every major hardware company has some "big announcement" to make, touching off the "Pre-E3 Press Conference Wars" and making sure everything's old news by the time you get to the show floor

Attractive women spend a week getting sweated on by trolls disguised as gamers

Once-strong publishers with crap line-ups try to appear relevant

One game rises as the universal undisputed "Best of E3," usually thanks to some cleverly edited non-playable video footage. It hardly shows up at the next year's E3

Exhibitors do anything and everything in their power to get you to pay attention to them, short of actually making original and fun games

Journalists form strong opinions about things they hardly even saw at the show, based on the marketing/PR folks' promises as to what that game will one day be

The area around the EA booth is more life-threateningly loud than Irritable Bowel Night at the all-you-can-eat buffet at Cabbage Hut

Someone dressed as Daisy Duke will lie all over the General Lee, no matter whether there's a Dukes of Hazzard game coming out or not

Hot chicks will hand gamer trolls T-shirts for stuff. Those gamer trolls will wear the shirts because a woman touched them

Everyone laughs at Kentia Hall, despite the half-naked Korean chicks and convenient cafeteria area.

That's just to name a few.

So, if you want to see my E3 2005 predictions, change all the verbs in the above bullet points to future tense and put the words "I predict..." above the list. I can't be bothered to predict anything this year.

I will say this: For the first time in ages, I couldn't give a flying crap what the new consoles are like. I saw the video for Gears of War today, and I thought, Oh cool, it's Brute Force without the actually existing. I hear Perfect Dark Zero looks good, but... well, I already played Perfect Dark, two generations ago. My patience for the console innovation treadmill is getting thin. Sure, it's nice that the Xbox 360 can interrupt the DVD I'm watching to tell me that my friend wants to play with me online, but... whatever. This is the first hardware generation that I'm just not buying the hype for. I don't know why.

I'm much more excited about EpIII than I am about E3. I just don't know whether to do my Episode III rant before I see the movie or after.

Whew. Back.

2005-05-11T15:31:00.000-06:00

Well, I've returned from a week-long vacation to the root-place, where family tossed home-cooked meals at me until I could no longer stand up. I learned several things on my trip:

You must eat healthy snacks before you eat junk food.

Napkins go into the garbage can after you use them.

5-year-old nieces are filled with useful information.

Not updating this site makes my traffic jump.

Seriously. I got my traffic report for last week, and for some reason I had a nearly 30% jump in traffic that week. I can only assume the following:

You folks are huge fans of gay people or Lorne Lanning.

You have multiple friends who are fans of gay people or Lorne Lanning.

Either one is fine with me, really. We'll see how traffic does next week.

Oh For God's Sake, People

2005-05-03T17:33:00.000-06:00

CBS News | Alabama Bill Targets Gay Authors | April 28, 2005�19:30:27

I'm shocked. I just am. I cannot believe that the land of my birth (the US, not Alabama) is heading down this path. I cannot believe the Land of the Free can promote such things with a straight face (pun not intended, but "pun not intended" notice intended).

I grew up in the South on the northern rim of the Bible Belt. I distrusted black people and goofed on kids for being "gay" when they were just different. I'm not the only one. I'm not particularly proud of this.

When a friend of mine from college came out, not long after I moved away to San Francisco (there's some irony there), I wasn't sure what to think. I'm ashamed sometimes that I had to say, repeatedly, "He's still my same friend" to myself to make it all fit. I eventually settled on, "Well, of course! He's too smart, too talented, and too good a dancer to be straight!" He moved out to SF soon thereafter and came out to me in person, but up until then I shamefully held out that maybe what I heard was wrong. It was fucking HARD to accept for some reason. Sure, I had known gay people in college, but they were always over there, not here with me watching TV and talking shit about George Lucas. It occurred to me, eventually, how much harder it msut have been for my friend to accept his own realization and come out with it; he had to come out to a house full of guys who had spent most of their college careers hanging out and being pals. The realization of that courage smoothed it all out for me, somehow.

So I'd like to say something to anyone left in the world who feels like they need to act against homosexuality:

GROW THE HELL UP.

Seriously. There's no effect a gay person will have on your life that is as great as the one their being gay has had on theirs.

Gay people will not turn you gay; if you become curious, then that curiosity was always there. Gay people are not evil, nor are they poisonous. Gay people are smart, funny, talented, and interesting people in general, and the average straight American's life would be better for knowing some gay people. The most interesting thing about gay people is that they're not even really queer, in the original sense of the word. They're people. When they hang out with other gay people, antennae don't spring from their heads. They don't reproduce by budding. They don't communicate via a series of sequential changes in pheromones. They don't take your children to Faerieland where they are raised to become evil monster fae children. At least, not as far as I know. They love and feel pain and seek comfort just like straight people. The only difference is whether or not the person they seek comfort from has a penis.

There are so many things in this world that should be a higher priority than banning media that contain gay people. That should be on the list just below legislation that guarantees oxygen the right to vote. Instead, we get our beloved President seeking legislation to "prevent liberal libarians and trendy teachers from 're-engineering society's fabric in the minds of our children.'" I'm sorry assholes, but you're banning Tennesee Williams, much AIDS literature, etc., not to mention the damage done to gay children who will never find out that living the way they are wired is, at the very least, not damning them to Hell.

I'm not asking people to go whole-hog and start being pro-gay and all that. I know it's harder than that. But I will say that my life is far richer knowing the friends I know who just happen to be gay, and to think that continuing my ignorant attitude toward gay people would have robbed me of so many people who have enriched my life....

Just grow up, people.

The New Deep Throat

2005-05-03T10:46:00.000-06:00

Fast-forwarding this show through to the plot points, here's how it goes:

An attractive young man, a Canadian in Italy, stands in his apartment. His wife comes in, and she wonders when their guest will find an apartment. Cue guest to come in, a tall man from "back home," who's staying with the couple. Everyone looks at each other for a moment, and....

*fast forward*

The two attractive young men look for an apartment in Italy. They're having no luck, so they agree to screw it and go home.

*fast forward*

The two attractive young men go out again looking for apartments. They come to one that looks decent before the prospective roommate, an attractive Italian blonde, makes her way into the room.

*fast forward*

The two men, the first man's wife, and the new roommate hang out in the new apartment drinking wine together.

*credits*

I've often said that kung fu movies feel like pornos to me: They have some shallow plot punctuated by pure-entertainment. That is to say, the plot carries on until someone starts fighting, then the plot stops until the fight is over. It's like, "Okay plot, we have to titilate the audience with our kung-fu stylings; you can come back in a minute." In fact, if you exchange sex scenes for the fights in a kung-fu movie (or fights for the sex scenes in a porno), I imagine the plot wouldn't make much less sense.

I've been watching a lot of the Food Network lately (trust me, it links up) because it's disgustingly entertaining to me to watch people make food that makes me think, "I, too, can make food like that!" For some reason I can watch the Food Network for hours, without a single trace of drugs in my system, without getting bored.

I guess where I'm headed is that the plot above is from a cooking show.

There are a few cooking shows now that are much like pornos. There's some plot (Two Australian surfing guys, one of them is getting married, so they decide to cook fabulous dishes for the wedding), and there are cooking sequences in among the plot bits. In the plot above, which is from the cooking show David Rocco's Dolce Vide, he cooks some cookies for his guest, then some kind of fish, then some pasta e fagioli, then something else I don't remember because I was busy explaining the whole cooking show = porno idea to my fiancee. Whenever the cooking started, the plot stopped, and the show became a cooking show. When the cooking was over, the plot continued.

Just like in a porno, you're left thinking, "Why the plot?" You could do without it and have more time for cooking, right? But it wouldn't be as interesting. Just like in pornos, some people just need the plot. And when you think about it, how many times can you cook something in the space of an hour? It's good to have a few minutes to rest inbetween "sessions."

Also just like porno, couples can watch these shows together and say, "Why can't you do that more?" and "I think he's using too much custard." It's kinda like porno that you wouldn't be embarrassed to have your mother walk in on. Unless you were wanking it to Dolce Vide, in which case you have other things going on.

I guess the coolest thing would be to mix cooking shows with pornos. Like, the plumber walks in and sees the half-naked housewife, who invites him into the kitchen, where she is making a salt-crust grill and some tuna tartar con broccoli, and they make out like rabid skunks while the oven preheats. That sounds like entertainment that would set a college dorm aflame.

Witty Lorne Lanning Title Here

2005-05-02T11:55:00.000-06:00

Back in the '80s and early '90s, there was a genre of cartoon series that I refer to as the "Last Minute Savior" genre. In these shows, a group of plucky kids would go off and have adventures, and they would inevitably get into trouble and rely on their insanely super-powerful friend to save them. This friend would appear (having been called on whatever device the kids used), save the day, and then spend a few moments of his time chuckling about how stupid the fat kid in the group is. This genre included such fine cartoons as Godzilla, some seasons of the Super Friends, Captain Planet, etc., as well as such favorites as He-Man and the Masters of the Universe and Voltron. Each series featured a powerful, awesome superhero who would appear at the end and save the day by being awesome, just so the kids didn't have to.

Lorne Lanning always struck me as one of those types.

I attended a pre-Atari Infogrames racing school event at Laguna Seca raceway in California. The event drew tons of gaming journalists and developers who were working for Infogrames at the time (making such fine titles as Looney Tunes Racing, Looney Tunes Beach Volleyball, and Looney Tunes: Looney Tunes), because the folks at the event got to drive around tracks really fast. We drove Formula 0 cars, go-karts, and Dodge Vipers because Infogrames wanted to buy our reviews. Didn't work, but that's beside the point. The point is, I got Lorne Lanning on my team, and we won.

I'd met Lorne before then, and I remember being struck by two things: His Superman-villain name, and his Hollywood-awesome-but-geek-underlayer attitude. He's a big guy, standing tall and reminding one of an elder-statesman superhero alter-ego, even as he fell back into the squeaky voice he used to lend VO to Abe of Oddworld fame. At the event, he strapped on a helmet and turned into a speed demon, saving our team of fat journalist geeks at the last minute. Dude drove like a bat out of hell and exclaimed, "I drive faster than this on my motorcycle!"

Oddword: Stranger's Wrath is one of my favorite games I'm not really playing at the moment. It's a great game for innovation; you shoot stuff, but you have to hunt for your own living ammo, and the game's story is a bizarre cinematic jewel. I'm not playing it because I'm playing Guild Wars, and because it doesn't really satisfy the "Blowing shit up" impulse that I get so often after nine hours a day of picking through some other writer's text looking for errors no sane human would care about.

Now, Lorne Lanning is out of the biz. This post's title links to an interview in which he explains why. Essentially, he's being chased out by publishers and the way things work now, and I can go along with it. What EA did to Stranger's Wrath was a travesty; the game deserved to explode through pop culture, but instead it came out with a whimper and was a financial disappointment.

I'm not too worried about Lorne's future; Oddworld Inhabitants has always been able to produce amazing creative works with the tools they have lying around, and Lorne's a last-minute superhero. My concern is that the industry has chased out one more talented and excited creative force. The theme song for the creative side of the business lately seems to be "Another One Bites the Dust." How prophetic Freddie Mercury's words.

One more reason this business sucks.

A Small Goddamn World

2005-04-29T10:35:00.000-06:00

I was sitting here at work, minding my own business, when all of a sudden there it was: a link to a little Flash movie called "A Men's Room Monologue."

It's not the finest film ever made, but it's funny and cute and well done. And it's a freshman film school project. And (get this) it's by someone from my old alma mater.

Man. It was all fun and games until now. I was sitting here, thinking, "Man, life is good. I'm working at a game developer, got my apartment, two cats, and a girl, and I've probably gained like 40lbs. Awesome." But then this damn thing came and showed me that I haven't done a damn thing since I got out of school. My degree has just been sitting there in a glass case with the words, "In case of resume, break glass."

I see Flash cartoons all the time. Some of them are better than this one. But the fact that this is by someone from my old school makes it somehow more inspiring and real. I sit here and compare this with my own Freshman films, and I think, "Self, you suck." This guy has sound and urinals and awesomeness. I had little blobs of Play-doh attacking my friend while he slept.

Since I graduated from RIT in '98, I haven't done a damn thing with my degree. Not a single little film, not a solitary wee script. I have shot short video of my cats making out, but that's it. I complain about having too many ideas and not enough time, but the truth is, I don't make time. I don't. And why?

It's been almost 7 years since I graduated. Life has kicked me in the balls a few times since then; I was dirt poor in San Francisco, I got laid off and laid back on, etc., but that's no excuse. The excuse is that I'm afraid to make something of worth, for some reason. I let myself sit there and play computer games all the time when what I should be doing is learning to use Flash and making little films that I can be proud to have made. Yeah, thousands of people may be playing the game I worked on this past year, but if thirty people see a Flash animation I made, then that's far more "worth it" to me.

When I watched the short linked above, I thought to myself, "I could do that." I'm not sure I could anymore, but damnit, I owe it to myself to try.

Which means I probably won't.

Federal Court to Rule on Whether Blade: Trinity Licked Balls

2005-04-22T08:21:00.000-06:00

CHUD.com - Cinematic Happenings Under Development

Wesley Snipes says that Blade: Trinity, which I reviewed here, was forced on him, and that he didn't have time to express his concerns about how crappy the film was going to be. He's suing for $5 million.

He ought to sue for whatever he would have made had the films gone on for another sequel or two. David Goyer took a film series that simply rocked and made it lick balls.

Snipes claims that the purpose of the film was to create spin-off characters (the Nightstalkers) for the studio. I can't believe I didn't come up with that. I fear I may lose my cynic's license.

The Men from the Boys

2005-04-21T14:03:00.000-06:00

Ah, the World of Warcraft PvP Honor System.

I'm sure that sometime last week the gates of Hell crack'd, freeing only the smallest and pettiest of demons to prey upon humanity. Many of these despicable creatures hollowed out the souls of employees at Blizzard and began making decisions in their stead. The result? The new PvP Honor System.

Let's take a look at what has happened since the system landed:

Popular questing areas in the mid-game have been rendered useless by gangs of roving NPC-killing thugs.

Level 60 characters are hunting down and gang-killing level 48 characters for "Honor"

Alliance groups are camping Horde targets and Horde-slanted instances

Players on PvP servers report not being able to live long enough to really play, thanks to bloodthirsty gangs of gankers

Places like the Undercity and the Alliance camps in Stranglethorn are routinely wiped of NPCs

The "I threaten to quit but end up not quitting" quotient on the official forums has increased seven-hundred-fold, while the "I already cancelled my account" quotient has grown exponentially

The gameplay experience for a sizeable number of players has been sacrificed in favor of the small number of high-level, PvP-interested players who are happy with the change.

Visiting the official WoW forums (a maddening and faith-in-humanity-draining experience on a good day) reveals two sides: those who feel the game was ruined, and those who tell the former group to stop being a bunch of babies. The casual gamer's MMO of choice has become a ganker's paradise in less than a week.

Really, this just serves to remind me why I think that most people who play these games should just be destroyed. Those who just want to run around and quest and play (and who joined PvE or RP servers to do so) have had their play experience ruined by Honor-hungry gangs of bored high-level players. Basically, Blizzard has chosen to reward some players for making the game unplayable for others.

Well, unplayable isn't exactly true. PvP-server players can travel in groups and generally be careful, even though that won't stop a level 60 group from annihilating a group of level 50 players and getting "Honor" points for it. Folks on the PvE servers, however, don't have the option. To get Honor points on a PvE server, you have to attack opposing-side NPCs and hope that players get angry enough to try to stop you. This ends up with round-the-clock NPC killing, which causes the deaths of generally every NPC in a town. If you're questing in zones like the Hinterlands, Arathi, or Stranglethorn, you're likely to find that your griffon/wind rider master is dead, as are all of the quest NPCs and merchants. This means that people, many of whom don't play WoW for any type of PvP interaction at all, cannot turn in quests, cannot travel to other flight points, and cannot sell or buy items. As much fun as that sounds... well, it doesn't sound like fun at all. And Blizzard's system encourages it.

The baffling thing to me is that Blizzard has a decade or more of dealing with online morons to draw upon. How they could put forth such a naive and stupid system is beyond me. Thus the devils-from-Hell theory. The other theory is that they did it on purpose, which makes my head explode.

Oh well. Maybe I won't be playing Guild Wars alone after all.

My Head Hurts

2005-04-20T11:57:00.000-06:00

Station Exchange

I hate it when I see a situation that I can't immediately form an opinion on. Usually I jump quickly to one side or the other and then change my opinion all willy-nilly as needed, but in this case, I just can't. Basically, SOE is acknowledging the fact that people are buying and selling EQII currency and items for real-world cash, and they're making moves to give a controlled, SOE-sanctioned environment for this to take place. I just... Damnit, I can't decide how I feel about this.

One on hand, I hate the fact that there are people out there who pony up hundreds of real-world dollars to shortcut the game experience. People will pay hundreds of dollars for in-game items and high-level characters so they don't have to go through the grind to get to the top levels (where they tend to realize there's nothing to do). It's the most messed up thing. I can't imagine anyone paying that kind of money for a savegame at the end of KotOR 2. Not to mention that people are making tons of money selling things they didn't manufacture and never owned in the first place. Argh. That really bothers me.

On the other hand, it's good that SOE is trying to make a secure environment for this sort of thing. People get ripped off at a fair clip in these situations, and SOE is setting up an Exchange in which a third party (SOE) supervises the transactions via PayPal and credit cards (and they take a small percentage of the sale for themselves). The problem here is that an infrastructure already exists for people to buy and sell things outside of SOE's supervision, and it's pretty clear that neither Blizzard nor SOE either cares enough to or are capable of putting a stop to the practice, despite what their EULAs say. I mean, really. If I can go out there and find a farming company to buy WoW gold from, then Blizzard can damn well find this stuff out themselves. They just aren't trying to stop it.

Really, I'd just like to see the money going to the ones who deserve it: The developers of the game. It's retarded that people can make livings selling virtual property they never created, never built, and never owned. Yeah, the seller may have camped Grognar the Ballshitter for a week for the item, but so what? It's part of the game. I started to get disgruntled with the grind on my druid in WoW, but did I feel I should be compensated for it? No. I never put in a single day of work to make sure the druid class was balanced, that its powers worked, and that it looked cool, whereas the Blizzard developers worked some horrid crunch to get the game out there so greedy morons could make hundreds of dollars selling Blizzard's property.

I think MMOs should just bite the bullet. When you buy an MMO, you should have the option of buying the regular version for $50 or the Super Mega Awesome version for $1000, which includes a level-capped character with perfect gear and 1000 gold. Better yet, you can pay $2000 and get a game that, when you log on, shows you the ending of the game and says, "You win!"

Far be it from me to deny someone his living, but really, it's retarded. The worst part is that it wouldn't exist if bigger morons weren't willing to pay these people for the stuff. That's the worst part for me. People are willing to pay hundreds of dollars to skip to the end of a game they like enough to invest hundreds of dollars in. And rather than stand up and protect their intellectual property, SOE is bending over and endorsing the sale for real-world cash of items SOE designed and implemented. It's like if I came over and blatantly sold one of your DVDs to someone in front of your face, and you just nodded, shook hands with everyone, and took a few pennies for letting me come over and sell your shit for my own profit. It's just stupid. I mean, while it doens't affect my WoW experience in any way to know that people are out there farming and selling in-game items (especially since my own WoW time has been relegated to periodic time-wasting at this point), it offends my sense of how shit works and of how those who created and manufactured a product should be the ones benefiting from the sales of that product.

Hrmm. I seem to have formed an opinion.

SOE, shame on you. And, good job.

Coolest Game Ever

2005-04-19T14:03:00.000-06:00

I imagine it went something like this:

Hasbro Exec: Okay. Any more bright ideas? We're late for lunch.
Hasbro Idea Guy: I have one: Kids buy figures, push them around on the table, and the goal is to knock the figures over by hitting them together or with giant spring-loaded rockets.
Hasbro Exec: Goddamnit Bob, you keep bringing this up. Don't you remember the lawsuits?
Bob: Yes.
Hasbro Exec: Then why bring this up now?
Bob: I dunno. I thought this time would be the time.
Hasbro Exec: We're late for lunch, Bob.
Bob: I know. But lookit! I had some made!
Hasbro Exec: Okay, fine. I'll take a look.

(Bob busts out a few figures. They look like horribly misshapen Star Wars characters, some with gigantic goofy hands and others with big fuck off guns that shoot spiring-loaded rockets)

Hasbro Exec: Those look like crap, Bob.
Bob: I know. But it's like this: If you don't pay to manufacture and market these toys, then my friends the Horribly Misshapen Clone Troopers and I will have something to aay about it.
Hasbro Exec: Bob, I don't think--

(Bob triggers several figures to fire, and the Exec is assaulted in the eye by several huge-ass plastic missiles)

Hasbro Exec: OH GOD THE PAIN IS EXQUISITE
Bob: Anyone else have a problem?

(Silence)

Attacktix is an interesting idea: Why not let the figures physically hash things out on the table? Instead of rolling dice and tallying hit points, you march your figure up and thwack enemy figures, hoping to knock them over. Or you take aim from afar, fire a (surprisingly powerful) plastic rocket at the enemy, and hope to knock the enemy over. Really, you end up with a game in which kids are shooting at each other with plastic rockets, which really sums up my childhood to a T. But this, in the day and age in which most toys' "rockets" only fire about 3 inches because some kid managed to shoot himself in the eye and burst into flames or something, shows an interesting reversal of flow. This tells me that toy manufacturers either don't care if kids shoot themselves and burst into flames, or they have decided to take a risk and put something out that's new and different (if not terribly deep). That's somewhat encouraging.

There's some strategy to it. The more expensive the figure, the harder it is to knock down. Melee units have faster movement (represented by the number of clicks, or "tix," made by the little wheel in the base as you push the figure along on the table. Many units have special powers that activate when they fall over, often enabling other figures to take a free attack or letting the player bring dead figures back to the table.

The rules are simple, and they're based on physical things. For example, the Emperor can possess enemy units, but only if the Emperor figure can physically grab on and piggy-back the possessed figure without touching the table himself. If you shield a figure with another, and if the figure in back physically props up the shielding figure, then the figure in front doesn't die. The simplicity and physical nature of it is pretty damn interesting and, dare I say, refreshing. It beats counting squares or arguing whether one can pre-measure before one shoots.

I'll likely never find someone to play this game with, but I like it in theory. I just can't shake the feeling that it won't be around too long before some parent hauls her burning wreck of a child to court with one huge red rocket sticking out of his eye. Hrm. Maybe I'll get a second starter to keep closed for eBay.

Just... Wow.

2005-04-19T09:40:00.000-06:00

Treat your mother right

Oh. My. God.

..........

Guild Wars and its Relationship to Balls: An Essay

2005-04-18T17:00:00.000-06:00

In case you're not aware of my balls-related rating system, look here and here. That ought to provide the background needed for this article, as well as serving as useful kindling if you print them out.

I played Guild Wars most of the weekend (part of the Beta Weekend event). As you might remember from this article, I've been looking forward to Guild Wars for some time. In fact, ever since they first showed it to me many moons ago, I've thought, "Hrm, that looks like fun." I pre-ordered my copy, got into the Beta Weekend Event (or BWE, as the kids call it), and played most of the weekend away.

Working at a game developer and living among fairly hardcore WoW fans as I do, I am surrounded by people who are harsh gaming connoisseurs, or however you spell that. I seem to have been the first person in my circle to kick the WoW addiction (and get my balls back) for the most part, and Guild Wars, to me, represented another way in which I amd some friends might spend some time online without having to grind to hang out together. I played all weekend, partially to find out if I'd like the game, and partially to inspire some friends to try it out and see if they like it, too.

The result? Almost universal failure.

I'm not sure why. For my part, I really like the game. The complex way in which skills can interact, leading to varying ways of handling problems, appeals to me. I made four characters: A warrior/necromancer, a warrior/ranger, a necromancer/elementalist, and a ranger who didn't last long enough to get a secondary profession. The warrior/necromancer handled quite a bit differently from the warrior/ranger and the necromancer/elementalist, and I liked that. My favorite was the necromancer/elementalist, and I nearly got him to the point at which the rest of the game begins before the weekend ended.

I had maybe 10 or 12 skills with the necro at level 7. I had a ranged lifetap, a touch-ranged lifetap, a couple of damage spells that affected multiple targets, my undead minion-summoning spell, a resurrection skill (which anyone can get but only works once per mission, unlike the resurrection skills monks get), etc. In most situations, I could use my DoT lifetap on the enemy and wait him out, but if things got hairy, I needed to think quickly. If I could get three guys close together, I could pretty much take them out all at once and end with nearly full health if I paid attention. But I had to pay attention. It wasn't just, "DoT this guy, send pet, stack more DoTs, drain life drain life drain soul dead." It seemed far more hectic than that. It felt a bit more like the Diablo II necromancer in that you were always moving, always casting a spell, and most likely always doing something different and exciting. Killing felt less like grinding when I was rounding up bandits by the threes, surrounding them with bugs and firestorms, and creating bone terrors from the fallen to hound those who still live.

I enjoyed the long walks through really pretty areas. I enjoyed finding trainers (even the elementalist trainer by the big awesome tower in the snowy area), I enjoyed going through the catacombs for the fifth time (each time the path led me through a different area, to temples and caverns and ritual chambers I'd probably never have found just running through). I enjoyed going to get the devourer egg both times I had to do it. I enjoyed fighting grawl to collect their necklaces; I only needed five to get that piece of equipment from the collector who wanted them.

Sure, the game has its problems. For some reason, characters and certain terrain have huge collision boxes that block movement, making it a bit of a chore to get around compared to, say, WoW. Lag can be an issue, with characters popping about (if you are detained from your destination, you'll likely be jumped there after a few seconds... even into the same space as the NPC you're trying to reach). Also, the Mesmer class requires a higher degree of twitch and timing than other classes, but they note that it's for "advanced players" on the class selection screen.

But yeah. Guild Wars sorta reached for the balls this weekend. I think about it more than I think about WoW at this point, and WoW was the previous balls-holder.

My friends, though, went the other way. I spent the afternoon playing with one, and we had fun, but he decided he wouldn't buy the game in the end. Another friend took pains to point out everything that was awkward with the game (he even picked the Mesmer class for his first character, which seemed to be a bit motivated by spite). My fiance' played a bit last night, and she loved the character design and the look of the game, but she found it hard to learn, which is fair, since there's no tutorial to speak of. In the end, I found myself wondering when Guild Wars would stop licking balls.

As much as I liked it, and as much as I know I'm going to buy it when it comes out and play it as long as I enjoy it, the game apparently licked so much balls that I'll be playing it alone when I do, and that sucks.

I dunno. Am I insane? Are other people too critical? Is it that they resist leaving WoW, or is Guild Wars really not good? It seemed good to me, a good halfway point between WoW and Diablo, and considering there's no $20CAN monthly fee, I'll overlook some missing polish in return for a game that has some interesting choices to make and far more flexibility and uniqueness per character than a game like WoW. Every time someone complained about something in Guild Wars, I wanted to say, "Dude, look at Beyond Divinity and other games like that. This is lightyears past that crap." That a no-monthly-fee game can even compare to an MMO is worth something to me, and having it compare favorably against other online action RPGs like Diablo definitely puts it in line for having the balls. Every instance in which it licked balls was like a bad collision volume here or a bit of "too much walking around" there.

In the end, my friends didn't like Guild Wars, and I really did. Since I suck at making friends in these games (because I am a snob who feels like everyone else in the game is a knuckle-dragging 13-year-old psycho), I will likely play it until I can't solo anymore and then drop it. And really, I've already played it far more than I've played the last three games I bought, so there you go.

Just... if Guild Wars hadn't licked balls so much, it would have my balls by now. Such a complex balls relationship can never be a good thing.

Trending Downward

2005-04-14T11:04:00.000-06:00

I had a conversation with a friend of mine a while back. Here's essentially how it went:

Friend: You should write a rant about how Game Rankings scores tend to drop over time after the initial reviews of a game come out.

Me: Hrm. That's a good idea.

(Several weeks pass)

Me: What should I write about? Oh, I know! I'll write about how Game Rankings scores tend to drop over time after the initial reviews of a game come out! I am pure genius incarnate!

I guess I hadn't thought about it before, but it's true. Generally, especially for big-ticket games, the scores on Game Rankings tend to start high and drop over time. Since the games don't tend to actually lose quality after they're released, there must be some other explanation for that phenomenon.

It could be the novelty factor. Maybe the earlier reviews are just more hyped on the game, and so they give the game higher review scores than they otherwise might. That doesn't speak highly of the reviewers, but then, none of the suppositions in this rant do.

There's also the fanboy factor. Big magazines and sites tend to assign reviews to the people on the staff who like and know the game in question the best. For example, when I was in the biz, I reviewed a fair amount of action/adventure and PC RPG titles, because I liked those. I never reviewed sports titles (except hockey and wrestling, one of which I really liked, and I bet you can't figure out which), fighting games, etc. So right there, you're more likely to get a positive review unless the game is extremely disappointing. The smaller groups, which tend not to get early copies and can't always manage to get reviews out when the games ship, don't always have that luxury. Maybe that's why the later reviews tend to be lower than the first ones.

There's also the extremely cynical (and poorly named) swag factor. The big guys all get copies of the game from the publisher, well in advance of others. They've also been romanced to some extent by the publishers and have developed some intimacy with the game through demos, press events, swag, etc. When such a game comes out, the review goes one of two ways: extremely positive with a stupidly high score, or sadly disappointed with a much higher score than the review's text would bely. The little guys don't always get copies, and they often have to buy their own at ship, which avoids the swag factor entirely. While the little guys might not have the professional experience that the big guys do, their reviews might be more honest, since they don't have that incestuous relationship with the publishers' PR folks that the big guys do. While I don't think there's a lot of swag whores in the mainstream gaming mag biz, it's hard to ignore the fact that a low score can seriously wound your relationship with the publisher, and the big guys rely on the publishers for early copies, pre-release assets, and early-development scoops. The little guys, who have a frequent buyer membership in Target's electronics section, don't have to worry about that. Also, when a publisher hands you an exclusive review, you're far more likely to be positive in your review. You don't want to shut off your chances of getting other exclusives by giving a poor review, and no one wants to see "IGN EXCLUSIVE!!!!!!!!" on a review for a game that gets a 6.5/10.

Game Rankings is an important site. As journalists, we hated it, because not only does it traffic in others' hard work, but it also gives publishers a crowbar with which to try to pry corrections and second reviews from us. When I gave one game an 85%, I got comments from the publisher saying that Game Rankings rated the game much higher, and that all of my colleagues disagreed with me, so I should seriously rethink my score. Granted, I got much worse feedback from the readers (mostly consisting of variations of "U r teh ghey lol"), but the publisher was trying to use Game Rankings as a tool to get me to say, "Oh golly, I'm so sorry, I'll get about fluffing my score up right away suh!"

Now, as a developer, it's a handy tool. I can tell at a glance how the game I worked on is being received, and I can see how the readers feel about each review. The funny thing is that folks at my company are going, "That low review is crap, because look at how low-rated it is on Game Rankings!" without realizing that the readers who ranked the review are the same folks who gave our game a 63% rating before it even came out. It's the same case of "Everyone's a moron except those who agree with us."

Anyway, as time goes on, scores on Game Rankings tend to slide downward, meaning that Game Rankings is a handy tool only after a few weeks have passed since the game's release. If the big-time reviewers were more responsible and less wide-eyed and likely to spontaneously go chibi when they get handed a game to review, then the problem wouldn't be as bad as it is. As it is, irresponsible reviews lead players to buy games they wouldn't like and developers to pat backs that maybe ought not to be patted quite yet.

It's amazing how much in this biz depends on the whims of poor managers, irresponsible journalists, and fickle end-users. All that money, hanging by a thread.

Video-fenky's Fenegi on Ferrets

2005-04-13T10:23:00.000-06:00

Fenegi said to me, "I deny that ferrets are mean."

There. I quoted you, just like I threatened.

Na na na na na, We're Not Listening....

2005-04-12T10:22:00.000-06:00

Seeing game reviews from the other side, as a developer, is proving an interesting experience. Compared to writing reviews, the reviews themselves have more weight when they're about your product. This is your hard work on display, with some outside voice you've never met (though actually, I met a lot of these folks when I was in the biz) bridging the gap between your company's carefully phrased marketing and the gamers hungrily awaiting the game.

Despite what everyone in development says (until the review is positive), reviews are extremely important. Many times during the development of our latest game, I heard people refer to how they thought something would be reviewed, often in the same sentence that they trashed reviewers for being ignorant shills who give every game high ratings. Really, reviews are part of the two-part axis of success for games, sidling up next to sales success in the horrible mixed metaphor of life.

We've had generally ridiculously high scores for our reviews thus far, which leads people here to giddy optimism. Now, don't get me wrong, I think our game is good, but I also think it's far from perfect. In fact, some here have expressed that development on this game was a nightmare compared to previous titles. One guy even told me, "Don't judge [company] by this game. This game is being handled horribly." But so far, well, the reviewers have been, well, ignorant shills. And the folks here are eating it up.

The two voices so far that have bucked the trend have been Gamespot and 1UP, which is often the case. When I read the review on Gamespot, I found myself thinking that the reviewer wrote exactly the review I would have written: insightful and honest and both brutal and fair. The game came out positively, but Gamespot didn't blow sunshine or anything else. The reviewer listed what is, in truth, the comprehensive list of what is good and bad with the game. 1UP was likewise honest, though quite a bit more harsh in text and less harsh in score.

Reading the Gamespot review gave me hope. While I don't want our game to fail in any way, I would like its flaws to be realistically acknowledged, and, well, it's hard to be realistic about stuff when someone is tossing your salad. Gamespot is a popular site, and better yet, it's respected, unlike IGN and its apparently random scores. Surely the folks here will see the mostly positive review, think, "Well, yeah, he touched on some things I thought were wrong with the game," and keep in mind ways to make it better. But no. It wasn't long before the attacks began.

"Don't let one lone dissenter get you down." "Look how low that review is rated on Gamerankings.com." And my personal favorite: "He must be confused, because he gave our game the same graphics score he gave Cubivore (note complete with screenshots of both)." Never mind that Cubivore came out in 2002, three years ago, before research and development led to improved graphics and performance on all platforms.

People who were, weeks ago, saying, "I generally trust [reviewer's] reviews," are now saying, "He was confused." The same people who were buying PSP games based solely on this reviewer's recommendation now point out how poorly that reviewer is doing on Gamerankings. Did the reviewer get hit by the retard stick in the meantime, or something?

I wondered why things never seem to change at this company, or indeed, in any company in the game industry. It's because people don't trust professional, outside feedback, and the majority of such feedback is so afraid to be honest or so filled with blind fanboy lust that they give everything a glowing review unless it's safe to do otherwise (i.e., the game is so crappy that the publisher goes, "Yeah, well, we know."). Intelligent, fair, and honest reviewers need not apply. We're only here to polish knobs, not to inform readers and help developers improve.

The frustrating thing is that we all suffered for this project, and taking the bad to heart might help reduce the suffering in future projects. While I'd love for this game to sell kajillions, I'd rather our next few titles not be exactly the same. Most reviewers bend over and don't ask for a reach-around, and developers, blind with love for their babies, slide right in and go to town. And when one guy doesn't bend over, and rather stands up face-to-face and asks for a handshake instead of a right royal rogering, developers are caught holding themselves. Now all of us who worked so hard on this project can expect to do so on another project exactly like this one, and it'll be justified, because everyone but "that psycho child-raper at Gamespot" gave us a infinity-bajillion-on-a-ten-scale rating.

Now, I understand morale and the need to keep it up (since I seem to be so good at inadvertantly harming it with my presence), but I also understand the need for honest feedback and for people to be real about what they've accomplished. It's all well and good to think, "Cool, we got awesome reviews, look out, world!" but we need to look at the big picture and accept that every review is an opinion, including the slavering fanboy ones. As the career counselor Marty Nemko, Ph.D. says at the end of his weekly radio show on NPR, "We gain comfort from those who agree with us, and growth from those who don't." We're getting plenty of comfort. Now for some growth.

MMO OUTCAST LFG

2005-04-06T11:00:00.000-06:00

Gamasutra - Features - "Social Game, not Social Life? ArenaNet on Guild Wars and the "Casual" MMORPG"

I've said (and read) many times that the problem with the MMORPG is the MMO part. I may be an antisocial ass at my core, but I enjoy soloing in World of Warcraft and teaming up when I have to. I like slaughtering my way through an area and, when I get to the boss, forming a partnership with the other folks there to fight that same boss so we all share the experience and the quest items that drop. I do not like being forced to group in these games, nor do I like the fact that many of these games, at high levels, almost force players to become the paragon of their classes: Warriors tank, priests heal, rogues "DPS," and mages "nuke." Jack-of-all-trades classes, like druids (my main class), get slotted into one of their ability groups; in the case of druids, they seem to be expected to heal and only to heal, despite that they can act usefully as a light warrior or a pseudo-rogue, as well. If you aren't specialized one way, then you're useless. High-end raid groups, which seem to either be the only way to have fun or the only way to really gain experience and items at high levels, are generally run by lifers who don't care who you are, as long as you're a Protection-specced warrior with his pants.

Personally, I'm not interested in playing someone else's game. I don't want to get to level 60 just to be a face in some dood's raid crowd. Some people really enjoy it. Me, I prefer slaughtering troggs by the hundreds at lower levels, by myself or teamed with my fiance' or a friend. But the game, for better or for worse, has aged to the point where level 60s run everything: If you're not level 60, you don't "know" your class, according to the forums. The new content coming from developers is generally new dungeons for lvl. 55-60 characters. Soon, here comes Battlegrounds and probably a level-cap increase. Which is all fine, because the lower level stuff is already well done. It's just that I'm not likely to ever see the higher-level stuff, and if my cat-form-specced druid will be forced to heal to play the high level content, most parts of me don't really care.

I linked to the Guild Wars article above because I have always found that game intriguing. NC Soft was one of my contacts back in the day, and I was lucky enough to get extensive previews of City of Heroes and Guild Wars early in the cycle (thanks, David). The central premise behind Guild Wars is, as you'd kow if you'd bothered to read the article, that the game will require no subscription fees. What they don't get into in the article is the somewhat innovative character development structure in the game. That's both its highest selling point to me, and the reason why more people probably won't leave WoW for Guild Wars.

Basically, you start at level 1 (as you might imagine) and play through level 10 or so (might be 20; I don't remember). At that point you have your character as he will be, pretty much for eternity. From then on your development isn't so much in how strong you are, but rather what equipment and skills you have. Each character has a "skillbook" that contains his skills, and he can have maybe 8 skills equipped for a given mission. The trick isn't just in grinding mobs until you're so strong that you can roll over an obstacle, it's in obtaining more skills so that you have more to choose from when you go into the next mission. A level 20 guy and a level 50 guy are, in theory, different only in the number of skills they have to choose from. Granted, the level 50 guy has played more, and so he has better equipment by process of elimination, but there you go. The best comparison is between a Magic: The Gathering player with a starter deck and two boosters and one with a starter deck and a hundred boosters. They can both only bring 60 cards to the table, but one guy will likely have a better deck by default. It's also extremely possible for the younger player to defeat the older one, too, if they have good cards and decent skills.

Since ArenaNet and NC Soft aren't getting paid to keep you logged on month after month, then the "grind" doesn't pay off for them. They want to make a compelling game that will A) be fun enough that you'll recommend it to your friends and B) act as a compelling preview for future expansions, which will have a real price on them rather than being free quarterly updates. Also, since a level 50 character isn't exponentially more powerful than a lower level one, there's no sense in making players grind to reach come godly maximum level. In some ways, the game becomes more about the missions and obtaining new skills and trying out the ones you have than about watching an XP bar slowly slip from left to right.

Now, they are doing some things that could hurt immersion in the game world, like give main hubs with instantaeous transportation anywhere in the world, but that's nothing worse than what Sony Online did to EverQuest with the Plane of Knowledge. As time goes on, it seems more and more obvious that players don't care as much about game world cohesiveness as they do about making macros to eke 0.5% more effectiveness out of their characters. If they cared about cohesiveness, then they wouldn't be farming major story dungeons like the Deadmines or "saving" Gnomeregan for the tenth time. World of Warcraft succeeds in its immersiveness, but that's a cherry on top, not the bottom line. For Guild Wars, the cohesiveness is based on your character, not so much the world. In some ways it's refreshing to anticipate playing a game that is unabashedly a game.

Now, this is all supposition. Guild Wars could suck when it comes out, or the strength of my fiance' continuing with WoW could keep me from buying Guild Wars when it comes out, but on paper it sounds like a good idea. Why shouldn't casual gamers be able to play with the lifers? Why shouldn't lifers be rewarded with more choices of skills? Why should lifers be gods compared to folks who only play 2 hours a day or so? Why not even things out, let everyone conceivably compete with everyone else, and hrmm... NOT CHARGE A MONTHLY FEE?

Hey. They're doing something different, which makes my toes curl. We'll see how it turns out in a few weeks.

Out the Door

2005-04-05T17:37:00.000-06:00

It's an odd feeling having a game you worked on go gold. I'm not sure I can even adequately explain it.

The game I've been working on for several months went gold recently. The past few weeks, the office has been like a ghost town, and now new people are scoping out my office to see where they want to put their stuff when they move in and I move out to another one. A lot of people have been on vacation for weeks, while others of us have gone on to new things or interim things to work on until the other projects ramp up. It's strange to see things go from WORKWORKWORKWORKWORKWORKWORKWORK to ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

The feeling around here is blind relief, really, but everyone is waiting to see how things go with the reviews. We're all prepared to spit on the critics and say, "Screw you, we were making art!" and stuff, and generally disregard negative feedback and take positive feedback straight to heart. Personally, having reviewed games professionally for a very long time (and doing it here for a while with no professional standards whatsoever), I'm curious to see what people say and see how much of it is discounted as "ignorant critics" or taken to heart and used to improve future projects. I'll probably get all frustrated and rant about it here when it all happens.

It's an interesting feeling. On one hand, I think, "Cool, people are actually playing it, and I played an important-ish role in getting it done." On the other hand, I think, "I friggin worked on this piece of shit for months, pouring my heart, soul, and personal relationships into it, and if they don't like it, well, goddamnit." In a lot of ways, the game is ending for us, but for everyone else, it's just starting. The game's life starts on its release date and goes on from there. But we're done with it. It's in YOUR hands now. All the crunch time and emotional difficulty and job-threatening exhaustion culminate in a game that I hope tons of people will like.

Reading the reviews will be interesting. I have my issues with the game that mostly come from knowing ways in which it could have been better. I know many things that affected the quality of the game, and I know reasons why those things didn't happen. I'm way too close to the project to form an opinion, but I am also highly critical of the game. I imagine that I am more critical than the critics will be, which frustrates me. If someone gives the game a real, honest, constructive review with real feedback, then maybe someone will take it to heart, and maybe the hubris I can see sprouting up among the staff here will fade. These people are immensely talented, and they are more so when challenged, but "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Anyway, our game's almost out, and while I won't tell you which one it is, I hope you play it and enjoy it. Despite my overcriticism, I think it's a good game that is rather different from most other stuff out there, and, well, if you buy it, then I can become rich and personally awesomnify the world by 27%. Which is a net awesome gain of about 15%.

AWESOME REVIEW: SIN CITY

2005-04-04T10:21:00.000-06:00

It says a lot that I was actually disturbed by Sin City.

I read the graphic (appropriately called) novels several times on the train going to work in San Francisco. I remember being somewhat shocked by the books, but I enjoyed the visceral rawness of it, and I liked being shown things I'd never see in my normal life. Some part of me is interested in humanity's rock bottom, which I guess is why I liked undeads so much when I was DMing D&D. The Sin City comics were great, because everyone involved was bad, even the good guys. The cop trying to save a little girl blows the kidnapper's balls off. The guy avenging the murder of his perfect woman is a complete psycho madman. There's a layer of blood and silt on everyone in the town, and Frank Miller is the best at making characters who are covered in blood and silt.

The film is interesting in that it rarely ever shows blood as blood. Sometimes it's a white pool on the ground. Sometimes it's black and pooling in a dead man's slit throat. Sometimes it's even yellow. But the thing is, whatever color it is, it's somehow nastier than regular ol' red blood. Somehow the film sells us the three-color world of Basin City so completely that even in white sillhouette a man blowing his brains out is nasty and horrifying.

I had forgotten much of the graphic novels, and so it was interesting to rediscover the stories. I had forgotten Elijah Wood's character in the book, which was good, because it let me rediscover him in the film. I had forgotten Benicio del Toro's secret in the book, so I could discover it in the film. Of course, I had forgotten much of the rawness of the book, or I assumed that some of it would be glossed over in the film, but I was wrong. It's all there: The hooker tearing a girl's throat with her teeth, the talking severed head with the gun barrel sticking out of it, the dismembered guy being eaten by his own pet wolf. Somehow, where I said "Whoa, ew, cool" in the book, the film made me say, "Oh man, good lord."

It really is a fantastic film, and I imagine that the reaction I mention above is one the film causes on purpose. The "review" I linked in the title bar above contains an itemized list of the "offenses" in the movie, in case anyone's keeping score. Robert Rodriguez, the director, apparently shot the movie using the comics as a storyboard, and it shows. There were individual frames in the movie that I remember from the comics, which is pretty damn cool. The actors, especially Marv, looked more or less exactly the way they looked in the books. Marv's parole officer, played by Carla Gugino, looked exactly the way she did in the comics, especially in one scene in which she speaks with Marv in the bathroom, She's naked there, and it's almost like they gave her prosthetics or some CG to make her body look exactly like her character's body in the comics. The attention to detail is amazing, and the way in which it's different from our world is just pronounced enough to reassure us that this sort of thing isn't really happening on Earth.

I think I'd like to see it again, a matinee by myself, where I can really take a look at the film now that I know what to expect. It's not often that a film, especially one for which I read the comics, to disturb me the way this one did. I want to find out why it disturbed me so.

Besides, it was a damn good movie of a damn good comic. I'm tempted to take the comics with me when I go so I can compare and contrast. I expect a hideously good DVD.

Gamasutra - Features - "Unionize Now?"

2005-03-29T10:47:00.000-07:00

If you're a faithful reader of this site (all two of you), you've read my rants about crunch time and about EA's response to the now-famous EA_Spouse. The article linked in the title bar above is from Gamasutra, and it discusses the idea of unionization among game developers. Is it a good idea? I dunno. It's definitely interesting that it's coming up, though.

I won't get too much into the argument, since it's all handled in the article itself, and I won't let you get away without reading it, because it's a good article. Seriously, though, something has to be done, and really, if there's talk of a union, then publishers and developers ought to come together and figure out how it got so bad so quickly.

The main issue here is, really, crunch time. In other businesses, an employee might be asked to work overtime when there is a project due or when the team has fallen behind. In the game industry, crunch time is essentially scheduled into the project and lasts for months at a time. Employees are expected to work 60-100 hours a week for months at a time and to be grateful when the company says, "We know what you're going through, go on home if you're feeling burned out." Yet, when you do go home burned out, or if your burn-out shows in front of your fellow employees, then you can get into trouble for "hurting morale," as if the mandatory hours don't hurt morale enough already. What compensation you get is meager at best; I think I made $1000 in ~$150 monthly bonuses and 5 extra vacation days for 7 months of 60-70 hour weeks. And that's FAR more than most people get for worse schedules. In a previous post, I figured out what I'd be owed if I got time-and-a-half for that time, and if I were making the bare minimum of $8/hour, and it ended up being six times as much. The extra $1000 and 5 days bought my health, my free time, my emotional health, my social relationships, my enthusiasm for the job, and my relationship with my fiance'. To this day I haven't recovered, and I'm trying to combat the feelings of apathy for the job and resentment for the employer that wouldn't accept "I'm exhausted and burned out" as an explanation for performance problems that, clearly and demonstrably, started in about the fourth month of crunch after a sterling three-month review.

Essentially, game developers and publishers ask their staff to hitch themselves to the company wagon and pull, with only the token sugarcube as a reward for all the towing. "I Worked 80 Hours This Week" machismo and blind corporate jingoism aside, that's essentially what they're asking. And it doesn't matter if you're the producer or if you're a temporary QA tester, it's shit to expect people to work so hard for so little payback. Even if you're from one of the "good guys" like I am. My angelic employer only expected 60-80 hours a week for seven months.

Everyone thinks there's no answer to crunch, but I disagree. The answer is out there, and if a company professes to having searching for the answer as a high priority and they haven't found one by now, then they're lying to you. Either they found answers but refuse to use them, or finding an answer isn't a priority.

The number one answer is Better Goddamn Scheduling. Don't schedule with crunch time in mind; see what you can do in the time given you with normal hours. On the project I worked on, active writing and plot work didn't end until after the voice-over was being recorded. In fact, the VO recording sessions marked the deadlines for when a given character's lines had to be locked down. Even in the last week or two before certification began, we had leads saying things like, "No arbitrary lockdown date is going to affect us." We had a major boss change with a month to go in the project, and no one bothered to tell me about it until I got a question from Prima wondering why the boss changed and seeking information for the strategy guide.

So it goes like this: Preproduction, in which you nail down story and a features list as well as possible. Prototyping (possibly the most important step), in which you create versions of the game that work in previous engines or on tabletop. Production, in which you take lessons learned from prototyping and apply them to the actual game engine, developed during the prototyping phase. Post-production, in which you test, test, and test the stuff you did in Production and polish the game so that it looks finished. The game I was just working on never really entered a "post-production" phase, not until there were only weeks left to go before certification. And, as far as I can tell (I wasn't there), the game went through little or no prototyping: No box levels (where designers can place characters and monkey about with the scripting and stuff) or other prototyping efforts.

Also, the production team needs to learn to say "No." A number of features were suggested in the later days of the project, and a fair number of them got okayed for testing. Which meant that someone had to implement them, test them, and then remove them when they didn't work. Add all that wasted work (which wouldn't have been wasted during a prototyping phase) to the fact that the production team had scheduled demos (each of which required its own tiny crunch time from those working on it) to be developed just about every two or three months, taking development effort away from the final project. For example, the first few hours of the game we're putting out were singled out to be a press demo, and so they got the focus from the team and full testing for two or three weeks with only a couple of months left to go before certification. Given that kind of attention, it would have taken fourteen weeks to give that amount of polish to every part of the game, when we only had, at that point, six weeks left, including lockdown and testing. And so, we squeezed fourteen weeks of work into eight weeks.

The real answer to crunch time is just to not do it. If you're scheduling crunch time into the game's schedule, then something is wrong. Hire a scheduling consultant, hire a few more warm bodies for the project's staff, etc. Don't let anyone fool you; if you're counting on your employees to work 60-80 hours a week for more than half a year to get your game done, and if you're not willing to pay them more for the extra work or hire more people so you don't have to work everyone so hard, then you're EXPLOITING YOUR WORKERS. You're saying, "I expect my employees to give of themselves for the company, but I'm not willing to give anything back." The old "But they love their jobs!" excuse doesn't fly any more than my own "I'm exhausted and burned out" excuse did. When people are taking long coffee breaks and thinking about unions, the "job love" excuse is invalidated by the fact that those people do not love their jobs. You're like an abusive spouse taking advantage of its mate's loyalty to keep with the beatings.

Unions are probably not the answer. The answer is to bring down every single publisher and developer who exploits workers in this way, but the public won't get behind that. After all, if Johnny Twelve-Year-Old wants a football game next year, he has to get it from EA. Consumers don't really care about how a game was made, as long as the game's Quality-to-Hype ratio is fairly even. No, change will have to come from the inside.

And so, yay for unions.

AWESOME REVIEW: GOD OF WAR

2005-03-24T10:59:00.000-07:00

Over the past few years there has been a handful of games that, out the outside, looked really cool but that were secretly designed only for alien robot cyborgs from outer space. These games, including such knuckle-exploders as Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry 3, are obviously some Last-Starfighterian attempt to recruit our young into military service (or, in this case, ninja service) and not regular play-for-entertainment games of the human variety. Sure, when you play, you feel like a badass for the thirteen-point-seven seconds between instances of the reloading screen, but... well, there are no legends of ninjas flipping off walls, slicing people in half, and reloading several times per mission because some white-ninja mook killed them.

Sure, there have been a couple of games that were both awesomely cool in combat and accessible by those of use without two thumbs on each hand. Legacy of Kain: Defiance was one of them. You can do so many cool things (and do so, repeatedly, ad nauseam) that you almost forget that you're doing it in the same level over and over. Crystal Dynamics knew they were dealing with a badass vampire lord, not some spoiled, washed-out newbie hoping to save the world. So you could swing a big sword, telekinetically toss people around, perform huge combos, and drink blood from across the room. Fricking awesome, right? Imagine what would happen if someone combined that sort of empowerment with, like, more than one level!

In God of War, you are a mighty warrior, chosen of Ares, charged with destroying the God of War himself. Doing this requires, as you might imagine, mowing down wave after wave of evil bad guys, many of which were ripped from Greek mythology and had their togas and sandals replaced with AWESOME. Kratos (you) does this with a pair of bigass swords chained to his arms, but he could just as easily do it just by bludgeoning things to death with his scrotum, because he drips awesome from every pore. He's even bald, and he has a goatee, too, and big unicolor tattoos. In the beginning of the game, he wakes up with two naked women in his bed, and he's unsatisfied because his awesomeness is too much for two naked women. The developers could have just as easily replaced the model for Kratos with the word "AWESOME" and had the word "AWESOME" wield two bigass swords (or a scrotum).

The thing is, Kratos' awesomeness comes across in gameplay. Moments from the beginning of the game, you're grabbing enemies and tearing them in half. And you're doing this before the tutorial text tells you how to do it, because the combat is so intuitive (once you get past the fact that X is jump and not the main attack) that you can generally figure things out on your own. So, minutes after you start the game, you're fighting hordes of dudes, tearing them in half, and doing insane air-juggle combos that would make Soul Calibur's Maxi go, "Good lord man, just chill."

Then you see the genius of the balancing system. Every time you get comfortable, they toss in a new monster. First it's the minotaur, which does all sorts of blocking and isn't in any way simple to kill. You first run into two of them, and you have to figure out how to win. Things like parrying (which is what happens when you time a block perfectly, and which is insanely simple to discover and perform) become important when the enemy isn't just loafing about like the undead dudes you fight at first. Then you get the mini-game symbol, which brings you into a "kill it" mini-game that is different for each type of enemy (Minotaurs require rapid button presses, gorgons require rotating the analog stick according to prompted patterns, etc.), and if you kill an enemy that way, you get a specific power-up reward (Minotaurs always give Health). Essentially, every time you see a new enemy, there's a real sense of, "Well, damn, how the hell do I beat that," coupled with a likewise real feeling of, "Guess I better just get to work." The challenges in the game generally feel daunting-yet-doable, and the cannon-fodder battles are just enough to remind you that you are a badass, no matter how badly that stompy ogre with the jawbone club clobbers you.

One amazing thing about the game is that it is apologetically epic in scope. Before you even finish the tutorial mission, you meet up with the hydra and beat it up. Soon thereafter, you enter Athens, which has been attacked by Ares and his minions. You beat up a few minions and work your way into the town, and there you see Ares, all 200 stories of him, stomping about and tossing people around. The scale is such that Athens seems like a puddle to him, and the people are like little tiny bugs. The hydra was huge (at no point does the entire hydra, or even any two of its heads, fit onscreen at the same time), but Ares is a monster. And you get to fight him. Again, "Well, damn, how the hell do I beat that?"

I have never played a game that made me feel so awesome and insignificant at the same time. Kratos shoves aside ogres and minotaurs; he wields Medusa's head as a weapon against his foes; he has the attention of the other gods, who hate Ares but won't break Olympian policy by directly waging war on him; and he sleeps with two naked women at the beginning of the game (oh, and they are really naked; somehow, Sony got away with naked boobies in God of War). On the other hand, his enemy is a god to whom Kratos himself is roughly the size of a horsefly with no flight ability or annoying buzzing sound. Knowing how awesome Kratos is only helps you anticipate how awesome your enemies must be. Oh well. Guess you better just get to work.

And that's the trick. God of War doesn'y rely on making you learn the hardcore ins and outs of the system to win. When you beat it on super-hard difficulty, no spaceship from ancient Greece is going to come and conscript you into taking on Ares for real. The game is pretty, intuitive, empowering, and cool, and you don't have to be part of that 1% of gamers who don't mind reloading 25 times to get past the first boss.

Well, damn. How the hell will anyone beat that?

PLEASE DON'T KILL GDC, YOU BASTARDS

2005-03-16T17:59:00.000-07:00

If you don't know anything about the game business, there is one thing to know: E3. If you know a little bit more, there's another: GDC.

E3 is the Electronic Entertainment Expo. In theory, it is supposed to be an industry-only show in which game publishers show off their wares to buyers. E3 was meant so that EB and GameStop can know what Actision is up to this year. In practice it is the ultimate masturbatory fantasy orgy for the video game industry, where the idea of rich publishers owning the world is reinforced by huge-ass booths full of hired porn stars who pretend to like sweaty journalists and half-drunken buyers.

GDC is the Game Developers' Conference. In the past, you could describe the event by reading its name out loud. You have keynote speeches, some game demos and stuff, and tons of classes and workshops about how to become a better game developer.

In recent years, though, many publishers have begun to see how useless E3 is as far as getting the good word out to gamers. The gaming press HATES E3, except in the way in which it tweaks their horny gaming fanboy vibe. They hate covering the event, but they like to go because the convention center is full of Pamela Anderson clones who can somehow manage to pretend the press members are sexy. The publishers have realized that to a journalist, E3 is a drunken flurry of hot chicks and loud noises, interspersed with a handful of games that the press remembers because the hype was so huge that the games managed to punch through the din.

For the past few years, the publishers have been making special "Editors' Days" in which they take a full day (or two) in April and show off their E3 titles. Then, when the press shows up at their booth at E3, no one has to do anything but go through the motions and promptly forget.

Some publishers, however, have set their sights on GDC. It's perfect! GDC is held in San Jose, California, in mid March. It's a place teeming with game developers, some of which don't even get out to E3. It's the home of the annual Independent Game Festival, in which the little guy gets a bit of recognition. It's also cheaper and perfectly timed to be a test-run for E3.

This year, apparently, Microsoft gave away a thousand HDTVs at its keynote speech. Meanwhile, Nintendo staged a bit in which six people came onstage and played Mario Kart DS over wireless network with Nintendo's president and Bill Trinen. At the end of Nintendo's bit, they asked the participants for the DSes back.

I've heard people bringing this situation up and using it to comment on Nintendo's stinginess. Nintendo is, indeed, pathologically weird about who gets their materials and when and for how long, but in the end, it's Nintendo's prerogative, because it's their materials. But I think people are looking in the wrong direction. I don't think Nintendo's wanting the DSes back is so odd. I think Microsoft's handing out a thousand TVs at a game developers' industry conference was a bit inappropriate.

It's jsut dirty. Here we have all these starving game developers who are taking time out of their busy schedules of working 80 hours a week to hang out at a conference for 14 hours a day. Some of these people can influence decisions as to what platform their team develops for. Some of them might even be up for grabs to a hungry publisher. Meanwhile, Microsoft is handing out free TVs... and not just TVs, but thousand-dollar TVs. Microsoft took a keynote speech (which was essentially an ad for the next Xbox) and made it a bribe-fest, while simultaneously making Nintendo look like misers for not handing out the DS systems they rightfully owned.

For those who are confused, here's a breakdown: E3 is for handing out free shit and giving the industry a hand job. GDC is for getting together with other developers and trading ideas on how to make better games. Just to keep things straight.

When you go to GDC, you're a developer hoping to connect with other developers and learn something. When you go to GDC and receive a free TV from Microsoft, you're now a gleeful consumer who got something for free. To some extent, one that differs for each person, you've been bought by Microsoft. If you're there to learn something or teach something, as opposed to being there to win something, then you lose. If you're there to win something, then don't fucking go.

Enh. I really have no problem if Microsoft wants to hand out TVs to people and buy a certain percentage of the developer population (they own a lot of them anyway). My problem is that people are seeing this and thinking that Nintendo is a bunch of stingy bastards. It's like someone pulling out a machine gun during a boxing match. You don't think, "Oh man, Henrico Rodriguez Gonzales is a shitty fighter because he's boxing without a gun!" The gun-guy isn't a pioneer changing the face of the sport, he's a moron playing unfairly. That sort of thing would threaten boxing as a sport, just like this sort of high-profile press-moment nonsense threatens the usefulness of GDC as a developers' conference, as opposed to a pre-E3 hype factory.

Stop fucking co-opting things for your greedy personal use, publishers. Let some things exist as they are. Let GDC be a boring (for outsiders) conference at which developers trade ideas and come away better developers. You already took over E3, so let those of us who care about the QUALITY of games keep GDC. You can make your own pre-E3 thing and call it "Industry Wankfest No-Fans-Allowed *Wink* Conference 2047."

Don't kill GDC, you bastards.

"Here's a bone, suckers," says EA

2005-03-14T15:05:00.000-07:00

Is antone still out there? If so, read this: Gamasutra - News

My favorite part: Rusty Rueff sez, "The employment environment at EA was built to allow you flexibility as professionals, with the expectation that time on the job could be managed without watching the clock. Unfortunately, labor laws have not kept pace with this spirit of entrepreneurialism, innovation and creativity."

Goddamnit, Rusty. You just don't get it. When you have so many of your employees casting about looking for fairness, you come up with this shit. So now, any employees eligable for overtime pay become hourly workers with a strict schedule and "very structured work days." Now, anyone who accepts overtime pay is no longer eligible for bonuses or options.

Damnit, Rusty. You and EA are criminal geniuses.

EA's options are violently worthwhile. The company, despite its inner evil, makes money hand over fist. Its games sell a lot, and thus its bonuses are pretty high. Is that worth more than the appropriate overtime? Nah. Does it make going hourly a tough sell for an employee? You betcha.

Adding up my crunch time, I'd say I have... roughly more than 500 hours of overtime in the last seven months. If I were making $8/hour normally (I assume I make more than that), that overtime would come out to $6000 assuming time-and-a-half. The EA employees making the fuss were probably working more like 80 hours a week, so $13,420. That's on a wage that is approaching minimum. I imagine that the folks at EA would be getting at least $40/hour with time-and-a-half based on their current salaries. Now we're talking huge money.

Now, EA will take this into account. They will do complex calculations to make sure they aren't paying their employees that much money. They'd probably take the amount they pay someone now and figure out how much that is per hour for an 80-hour week, then work it out from there. Without painting EA as evil, it just makes sense. After all, we're talking about paying each hourly employee another 50% or so of his or her salary.

So, EA employees, look this over closely, and don't believe Rusty Rueff's bullshit about how this is an insult to you. What you're essentially doing is giving up the ability to amble in at 10 am in return for what is likely to be notably more money. MAKE EA pay you overtime, folks. The industry is watching you, and all of us who worked all the extra hours are cheering for you. Rusty Rueff makes it look like the evil California labor laws are trying to bring you down. Don't listen. Don't move to Florida. Don't let them showhorn you into a sweatshop. Because man, if you leave EA, there are tons of good places that would love to hire an old EA guy. Seriously.

Dude, win. Because until there's a union for game developers, you are the little guys' only hope.

You Got the Touch!

2005-02-28T15:53:00.000-07:00

I've been reading all sorts of opinions on the state of game journalism, and I have even written a bunch of stuff on it. I even wrote something very profound and awesome on the topic of game journalists being too easy on developers the other day, but my computer crashed and I lost it. Oh well.

I was thinking today while sitting on the crapper that it's true: Reviewers are too easy on developers and publishers. Not in the old "You don't use enough negative Simpsons references" way, but in the "Your focus is too narrow and pointed in the wrong direction" way. Game reviewers concentrate on everything BUT the important bits: Did the game change your life? Did you learn anything? Did you want to call your mom when you were done? The answer to most of these questions for most games is, "No."

So I think, someone must do something. Some game magazine must get out there, put its neck out, and do something different. Then I remembered how, in my past experience, it was nearly impossible to do that. We tried to do it with Gamestar, but they made us put boobies in it. Incite tried it, but they got bogged down with Gene Simmons talking about how awesome Twisted Metal is. Obviously, since those magazines failed, no one wants to read responsible, intelligent game journalism.

So who can make the change? Who can be a Superman in this new era of Superfriends?

I'm looking at you, Game Informer.

Yes, I know. No one sees you as a real magazine. The other mags hate you because you have such a huge circulation, and marketers see you only as a basketfull of eyeballs looking at their ads. It sucks being the official mag of a popular game store and being force-sold to people who come in that store. No one respects you until you bring out that Big Number: 1.5 million circ. It's probably more by now; who knows?

But you are the hope. You are the future. You are in the unique position to actually do something about the state of things. And why you, you may ask?

1) Because you're widely read. If GamePoo Xtreme decided to buck up and do reviews that really talk about what's underneath the games, no one would care. If they ran a cover that read, "New Lara Croft Game To Be Developed By Bungie," no one would see it. But you, you can do it. You can make a mass change, and tons of people will see it. Yeah, they might be disoriented or upset, but that brings us to the other factor:

2) You have a captive audience. Your audience is stuck, man! As long as Gamestop keeps giving their employees incentives to whore out your mag, you'll have a huge audience no matter what you do! If you have a 15% renewal rate (which is what I heard a few months ago), you have nothing to lose! If you're going to pass transitorily through the hands of over a million people, you might as well do it with something worthwhile.

You hold the keys to the future! You can write intelligent reviews that are more than just, "The controls are adequate, but nothing to write home about." You can say, "Metal Gear Solid 5 attempts to tug the heartstrings, but its tugging proves false as poor characterization turns the people you meet into stereotypes and archetypes that we've all seen a million times." You can say, "Driver 6's overreliance on technology betrays its insecurities when it comes to actually affecting the viewer." You can say, "Fable 2 gives players a sense of deep ownership of their own actions that expands what can be done in video games." A good piece of art is great, but it's not exceptional until someone tells the masses why it is so.

Looking at Game Informer and its huge readership and captive audience makes me think that THAT is the place to get this stuff done. Get intelligent with the reviews! Don't let game writers get away with poor stories by saying, "Yeah, it's crap, but what do you expect from a shooter?" Don't let RPGs get by with boring combat or poor design. Examine the game, learn what it's like to make a game, and know what makes one game system work and another fail. What makes a fighting game crappy? Don't just say, "poor controls." Say, "The timing is off, and one might think that in a game that emphasizes bloodthirsty action, the main character might be able to interrupt enemies' attacks with more brutal ones of her own."

Put that in your magazine, and let the captive audience lap it up (or ignore it at will; they still get the magazine, so advertisers won't give up on you). Your example could change the business, and all the other magazines will look at you and say, "Not only did they con out over a million circ, but they ALSO have intelligent articles that actually educate me on what games really are!" You'd help the business grow, you'd help keep developers and publishers more honest, and you'd get to say that you did it--you are this generation's Edge.

Game Informer could be the future, folks. Shudder.

PC Games: Adventures in Self-Publishing -- Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich

2005-02-16T13:56:00.000-07:00

PC Games: Adventures in Self-Publishing -- Freedom Force vs. the 3rd Reich

Argh. I had this whole diatribe on how awesome it would be if more developers self published, but then I lost it because this posting window sucks. Anyway, because I don't feel like typing it all again, here are the highlights:

Irrational is self-publishing Freedom Force vs. the Third Reich. They have a deal with Vivendi to put the game on shelves, but the marketing, packaging, sales, etc. are all Irrational.

This is a good thing because publishers have different interested from those of the developers and the gamers: Whereas developers want to make an enjoyable game that people will enjoy playing, publishers want to sell a game that will sell to as many people as possible, regardless of its quality. To sum up: Developers = good, wholesome, Wilford-Brimley-in-Cocoon; Publishers = Grand Moff Tarkin.

The game industry needs an independent sub-market like the film industry has. Whenever Hollywood gets lax, they fear that a Kevin Smith or a Napoleon Dynamite will pop up. When the game industry gets lax, it turtles and puts out more banal me-too crap. If EA was afraid that some guy and his friends in Nebraska might make a game that's cooler than theirs, they might be less flippant about dealing out crap to their "loyal" fans.

There was something about EA being evil, so there. I worked there, I know: EA = evil. See above re: Grand Moff Tarkin.

I enjoy watching the television show Monk.

I think that was about all I had.

Man. If you could have read the article I was planning to post, you would have been all impressed by my intelligence and wisdom. Now you have to content yourself with just imagining how wise and intelligent I must be. Which really isn't that much, so don't hurt yourself.

Pre-emptive Anal Web Fanboy Review of Constantine (by BlazerFan017)

2005-02-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

Okay man, I haven't even seen the new Constantine movie. I've only seen the trailers and stuff. I have to say, as a long-time reader of the Hellblazer comics, I am disappointed.

First off, dude. What is up. Neo is Constantine? what is up with that?! They could have picked any Englishman in the universe to play Constantine, but they went with Keanu, probably because Keanu was wandering around muttering to himself about "squiddies" and "machines," and someone saw him, asked him to say "demons" instead, and just filmed him. I mean, c'mon. Constantine has blond hair, and Keanu has brown hair. WTF?!

Plus, Constantine's typical scummy acquaintances have been replaced with Rachel Weisz?!! Dude, she was pretty hot in the last part of The Mummy and stuff, but her knees are way too sharp. I would have rather put like, Kate Winslet or something in there. Rachel Weisz is WAY below my standards.

And then Constantine is like, fighting evil and stuff? Hey, Hollywood, this is comic is written by an ENGLISHMAN lol. There's no evil fighting in English comics. Just a bunch of snide conversation with moments of real insight surrounded by just standing around being cool and figuring out new ways to hold a cigarette. Sometimes someone complains about American beer, and then there's a part where someone complains about Ren Faires (sorry LustyWench_073!).

And Keanu! He is sooooo crap. Did you remember that part in Matrix where he was like, "I need more guns," and then some guns came out, and he was like, "Whoa." And then Trinity had this expression like she didn't care and was like, "Whatever, I see this every day." And then did you see the part where Keanu had to make out with Monica Bellucci, and she was like, "In order to get what you want, you have to make out with me," and Keanu was like, "Let me think about it," and Trinity goes, "Hey bitch, not with my man," and then Trinity walked up and made out with Monica Bellucci and they were all over the floor and stuff, and then they looked at me and went, "Hey BlazerFan017, can you help us out with having sex?" and I was like "Okay!"

Anyway, Keanu sucks. I think they should have used someone more edgy and underground like Gary Busey. Or Jeremy Irons or something. Or like, Dennis Leary. It doesn't matter though, because I would have hated whoever they picked.

Oh man, I hope they do that part in issue #47 when Constantine does that thing where he's in the trenchcoat. That was so awesome. But I bet they won't. They just want to take out all the cool stuff, replace it with crap, and like, kick all us loyal fans in the balls. Hey Hollywood, we are the ones who pay your salaries at $13 a pop. You better watch yourselves! There better be no mistakes or I will see them on one of my 6 viewings, and I will discuss them with the people camping out with me for tickets, and post them on the Internets (hee hee) for all to see, and then no one will ever go to a movie again ever j/k lol.

If I made this movie, Constantine would be English and he would come to America and complain about American beer and how he can't smoke in bars (but he will smoke anyway and kick anyone's ass who told him to stop). Then he would show up at my upcoming fanfic convention and there would be a demon and Constantine would kill it by telling it about how cliche it was and shaming it into oblivion. Then he would do something cool, and we would all go out for beers (real ones). Then some hot girls would come by and me and Constantine would go do them. Like, Monica Bellucci's unfamous twin sisters lol roofles.

Anyway, I hate Constantine because Hollywood wants to destroy my childhood and pee all over the modern world's fine literature, which includes Hellblazer and Buffy.

--BlazerFan017 out! ~'~,~<@ <=======|}===+ <(^*^)>

John Smedley Shakes the 8-Ball

2005-02-11T18:02:00.000-07:00

Sony Online's President John Smedley on the future of MMOs

Damn good post. Smed, we love ya, man.

More on this topic later. I'm going home at 6pm tonight.

On Being a Retard

2005-02-10T16:09:00.000-07:00

Interesting observation I've made. There are two possible states for occupational performance: Awesome Employee and Complete Retard.

The mistakes I mentioned in a previous post were bad enough and visible enough to spark an inquiry into my previous work practices, which apparently came up with a number of different problems people had with me (few of which ever came up to me to give me a chance to improve). I now have a performance plan to adhere to, and if I do not, I get canned.

It was interesting to see the things that people thought I was doing poorly. They included response time on assignments that typically boil down to people running in, dropping something on me, and expecting me to finish that assignment right away, regardless of whatever else I'm doing. The assignments I was not finishing also included ones I didn't know I was supposed to be doing and ones no one told me were mine to do. I'm being vague here, and not in a "will remain nameless, but the initials are..." kinda way.

That's all good. Because, screw it. I will do this performance review, in the middle of crunch, half-sick, exhausted, and pissed for the lack of life outside of work. It will be my opportunity to say, "Yes, I do have that many assignments given one day and due the next, and yes, I am receiving jobs from all these different directions." I can say, "Haha, I beat you by doing exactly what you wanted me to!" I'll really shove it to the Man, I tellya.

The performance review isn't really what's bothering me. It's the aforementioned Awesome<=>Retard spectrum (or lack of spectrum) that gets to me.

Case in point. Up until a couple of weeks ago, I was awesome. One of the bestest editors evar. I edited the writers in such a way that the writing improved, the writers felt respected and like they had a say in the edits, and that the project as a whole benefitted from my input as to how to improve the dialog and fix tiny logic holes. I had a glowing review in September that had a few tiny marks on things that were chalked up to not having a chance to be properly trained (since I was pretty much dropped on the project a month or two before crunch started).

Now, a couple of visible (and admittedly pretty major) mistakes later, I'm a complete tool. Every time something comes up that I need to respond to, one of my many supervisors emails me and checks that I responded to it. "Did you send this to the guy with the what-not?" why yes, yes I did. I sent it yesterday to that guy's co-worker. Had I known that that guy had taken over today, I would have sent it to him. By the way, I also sent it to that guy three hours ago. "Are you going to make sure these guys see this?" Yes. As a matter of fact, I got the thing a minute ago, and haven't had a chance to forward it on. I am, believe it or not, working on something else from time to time, in the moments when my thumb isn't exploring my rear end.

I understand that a lack of trust is the issue, and that it is my fault the trust was violated. However, big mistakes have been made all around on this project (as they are on every project), and some of them make mine (in my opinion) seem pretty minor. For example, a miscommunication between departments led to the complete removal of a pretty major character, and the resulting rewrites. Other mistakes possibly led to an extension of crunch time for the entire team, holdover of personnel who had been assigned to other projects, and so on.

My mistakes were pretty big and visible, and they represented a failure to perform my duties to their highest quality, and so yeah, I should be punished. In a lot of ways, this company has been gracious with their willingness to give me a second chance. I did, after all, screw up. And apparently, according to this performance review form, I've been screwing up for a month or more now.

And the company "understands" that I've been stressed on crunch, and that I'm not handling it very well. And maybe this isn't the line of work for me, because I can't seem to sacrifice my health, my free time, and my relationships for the work. Maybe that's true. But over the past few days, since this inquiry happened, I've gone from "Good employee and awesome editor who needs some training" to "complete screw up who needs Mommy and Daddy to hold his hand at all times." Despite the fact that I've since held successful meetings with the top-level folks in the company (and meeting-making is one of those skills I need but have never been trained in here). Despite the fact that a CEO of the company replied reassuringly to my apology after one of the mistakes. Despite the fact that this week I have juggled detailed email conversations with important people from four organizations while combing our website for inaccuracies, writing articles for upcoming press coverage, answering questions from our localization partners, keeping my buglist on zero bugs, and, y'know, trying to find mistakes to fix in the text that's actually in the game.

It's okay. I have plenty of time to do this stuff, because an email clarifying that we are all required to work Saturdays put me back to 63-hour weeks until further notice. Awesome.

In other news, spring is coming. It can't come soon enough for me.

HOUSE OF AWESOME!!!!!! has arrived!!!!!!

2005-02-09T09:55:00.000-07:00

Check out this post. Scroll down to the bottom, read the comments. I'll wait.

......

Dude, I got spammed! Sweet!

Wow. I cannot contain how awesome that is, on so many levels. Let's take a look!

OFF TOPIC! Fun things to do....

Off topic! Nice of you to tell me! I'd never know that based on the fact that this post is attached to my weepy and sentimental Will Eisner death post!

On the other hand, Will Eisner was all about "fun things to do," so I'm not sure how off topic all this is.

Please Delete this post if this is not ok!

Not ok? NOT OK?! This is awesome! It saves me the effort of looking up URLs of BDSM and Inpirational Poster sites! Now I can get mt pr0n and p0stz0rz from the same place!

Inspirational Posters

At first, I thought this didn't fit with the other links, but now I am forced to imagine that these posters are less traditionally inspiring (like a pretty waterfall and rainbow with the word "Efficiency" printed under it) and more naughty (Like someone's face with a sack of marbles draped on it and the word "Teabag.").

Adult Sexo Novelties

That may be the funniest three words ever written. If it were four words, however, it'd have to compete with "Take my wife... please!"

Sex & Swingers Personals

House of Awesome!!!!!! would like to present a new service for those of you who obsessively visit my Will Eisner death post: Sex and Swinger Personals! Now when you're remembering one of the greatest comic book creators of all time, you can also get your hook up on. Just remember to wash up!

Free Online Poker

Online Poker isn't free. It cawsts folks lahk you an' me.

Poker cawsts a buck-oh-fahve.

BDSM & Alternative Personals

This iced the cake for me. Apparently, some computer marketer somewhere decided that House of Awesome!!!!!! attracts readers that gamble for free in between bondage-laden swinging sessions with their adult sexo toys under the watchful eyes of a poster that shows a moonlit glade and the word "Change."

Aside from the fact that it sucks, this is the best day ever.

Scrrrunchious!

2005-02-07T14:15:00.000-07:00

I want to note that this post is entirely my own feelings on the matter of crunch time. I'm sure they'll upset someone, but then, to be honest, this is my place for expression. Bear with me, the regular stupid or entertaining stuff will be back later.

I thought I had crunched before. Toward the end of an issue at my old pub, we would all work extra hard to get the issue done. It's human nature to leave things to the very last minute, and in the case of my old job, those who got done early ended up doing the work of those who worked more slowly. Which was a great way to convince someone not to work harder or faster. As long as one's name was next to the appropriate number of articles on the monthly issue tracker, it's all good.

Now, at my old job, I was pretty disgruntled, and I almost always left work at 5:30 (so I could go sit in an hour's worth of traffic). When I got my new and current job, I was consistently staying until around 6:30 or 7, not because those were the prescribed hours, but because that's when I felt the desire to go home. That was a full day, from 9am to 6-7pm (9 to 10 hours, for those of us who are math whizzes). In one of those days, I could edit over 12,000 words if I really cranked, and the edits would be thoughtful and countered with suggestions as to how to make the text better.

Crunch time started for real as early as early September 2004 (and possibly late August). Not everyone was on crunch, and the art team had been on crunch since July. Some people on the design team already worked insane hours on their own, because they cared about the project and had some work to do.

Me, I've always tried to be a "Get your work done and then go home" kinda guy. Mandating a 56-hour work week (and for a few weeks in October, a 72-hour week) seemed a bit counterproductive when the team already worked as hard as they needed to at the time.

Now, granted, even at its most hardcore, my company is far better about crunch time than many others. This isn't me saying, "Waahhh, I had to work a lot!" but rather me saying, "Here is what crunch time is like, in my experience."

The first three weeks of real crunch time are the worst. You get the notice with the new hours, and you think, "Wow. That seems like a lot." You don't think about how important weekends are until you miss out on a few. People who love their job start going crazy, lashing out or just getting really, really quiet (my personal favorite). You miss weekends long before you miss weeknights, and after about three weeks, the fatigue is setting in but you're not quite adapted to it all. Tempers flare, people get offended, and the more mild-mannered folks close in on the curmudgeonly ones in the Race to the Heart Attack. Meanwhile, my girlfriend (pre-fiance') and I nearly break up. My company grants me a day off to spend some time with her (and a day off spent with her is rare, since our schedules rarely intersect as it is).

Try getting anything (non-work related) done when you go to work before anything opens, get home after anything closes, and work through weekends. The car languishes, the house goes without cleaning, there's no need to buy groceries, and there'll be none of that "leisure," thank you very much.

After that, things smoothed out a bit. We got our weekends back in December (most of us), but some people still came in to get stuff done. I remember when I started thinking of Fridays as almost like vacation, because we got to go home at 6pm (officially). Saturdays and Sundays became flurries of activity as one would try to get all appointments and chores and errands done on those days while also trying to remember one's spouse's name and maybe squeeze in some free time.

After about month 4, though, things start to get rough again. Personally, even though I haven't worked as many Saturdays as others since an email went around saying that Saturdays were on a "need-to-work" basis, I found myself coveting my evenings more. I started going out to meet my fiance' for dinner, and I began to lose my gruntle over the fact that I couldn't choose to go to a decent sit-down restaurant because I had to get back to work that night. We ate a lot of fast food (and still do) and enjoyed about an hour of staring at each other because we're both too tired to talk about anything, and there's nothing to talk about anyway but work.

You start to realize that you can call in sick one day and still do over 40 hours that week. And you do call in sick, because physically, you're exhausted, and colds and stuff just blow you over like a house of cards in a stiff breeze. Before crunch, I called in sick maybe once or twice a year. Since crunch started, I think I've called in sick 5 times in 6 months. Personally, I think I have reached a symbiotic relationship with my own cold virus, which provides me with an entertaining "stoned" voice, while I provide it with shelter and Quizno's sandwiches.

Then I notice myself making little mistakes. Back in August I bragged 12,000 words edited in one 9-hour day. I'm not sure my mind could take that now. Little distracted mistakes, errors of not knowing an answer and not asking someone who did. Visible errors that a man with a well-rested mind wouldn't make. And I'm grumpy, and I'm holding dear to my weekends, because I can't seem to live for work but there doesn't seem to be much else going on. And the one weekend in over a month my girl and I can spend together starts as a disaster (early morning spent cleaning and running garbage back and forth between my 4th floor apartment and the dumpster in the parking lot, punctuated with a flat tire and a trip to Canadian Tire). She had planned a dinner party for that night, the first Saturday we had together in so long, and it was a rite of passage for our finally-furnished apartment and our recognition of a sizeable passel of friends after moving here in May.

After that shitty morning, already exhausted and sweaty and grumpy from cleaning and automotive problems, I was in a bit of a poor mood when I went in that day. And my rough mood rubbed off on others, and I got into trouble for affecting morale.

You know things are bad when one grumpy dude can topple everyone else's morale. Personally, I think that I at least had 5-6 months' crunch time for an accomplice.

We're weeks before the game we're working on has to be done. The skins on the drums are stretched thin. I'm remembering fondly the guy who edited 12,000 words in a day. I remember bright-eyed co-workers and comraderie that didn't center around how few more weeks we have left before some normalcy returns. But this is normalcy; when I have an evening off, I never know what to do with it. When "See Girlfriend" is in your day planner with underlines for importance, things are just a little askew.

Like I say, my company is pretty good about handling crunch time (though whether or not the months-long crunch is essential is a topic for more academic industry minds than my own), and as an editor, I've had fewer weekends than the designers who are working hard to make sure the game is perfect. But knowing how I feel about crunch, I imagine it's worse for those folks. Maybe they have better mechanisms for handling it than I do. I don't know. I just don't thrive when I'm exhausted, half-sick, and missing my fiance' and my cats.

As an aside, I worked double shifts in the warehouse where I worked after my first year of college. It sucked, but my hourly wage there was multiplied by 150% for those extra hours. Not sure why that's relevant.

When I got here, I was an awesome editor, a pretty good creative person, and a rather excited human being in general. Now I'm a half-sick, exhausted shell who feels bad because the 56 hours he works per week is less than the 70 hours or more that others work.

Oh well. Two or three weeks to go, and then, I assume, sanity is mine.

Cossacks of the Old Republic

2005-02-05T14:19:00.000-07:00

Maoist International Movement reviews Knights of the Old Republic

"As is well known for the fascist bastards, they take enjoyment in killing others, and the game rewards the player for killing common people. In fact, it is not possible to progress in the game without killing commoners, and the manufacturer plainly tells the player: those who have the courage to kill, are strong. Those who don't are weak."

Sweet!

Let's Make a Game!!!!!!

2005-02-02T19:46:00.000-07:00

Hey guys! Let's make a game!

First off, what sort of game will it be? Let's look at the market.

Things to rule out:
1) Deep, intelligent RPGs: Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines failed miserably, despite its intelligent dialog and fairly deep character development system. So did Temple of Elemental Evil. In fact, we almost guarantee sales by not making our game a Troika game.

2) Any kind of real challenge: No one likes a hard game these days, because you can't beat a hard game in the time before you have to take your rented game back to Blockbuster.

3) Innovation: Sure, some experimentation is good here and there, but don't go all crazy. No one wants to be the next Molyneux.

4) Gamecube: I mean, c'mon. Like, three people own this system, and they're all using it to play Pokemon on their TV.

Using our heavily researched market data, I have decided that our game shall be an action game with "RPG elements." That means that you essentially run around breaking stuff, but you get some points that you can assign here and there that don't really affect the game too much. After all, we don't want anyone to bork their character. Also, you get to make some decisions when you're talking to people. Like this:

NPC: Hey, I have a quest for you. My thingy was taken by some guy, and I want you to get it back.

PC OPTION 1: Okay, sure! I'll get it back! Nice!
PC OPTION 2:I hate your face! I'll get it back, though!
PC OPTION 3: PIZZA!!!!

Our game will have tons of action. You will run around with machine guns and swords and grenades and energy swords and chainsaws and sniper rifles and rocket launchers and katanas. During the game you'll assign points to one or more of those weapons, thus making your character nearly imperceptibly better at them. You'll also collect trenchcoats and plate mail and lawnmowers for armor, and pizza boxes. Every enemy you kill will give up experience points, because we all know that the best way to learn about life and improve onesself is to kill lots and lots of goblins and stuff.

Our story will be epic. You are a young man named Hannibal Caine, born under a prophecy that you will be the one who either saves the world, destroys it, or just sorta sits around and doesn't affect the world in any overt way. At first you interact with your family and friends, randomly killing stuff that comes to attack you, when out of nowhere, your town is invaded and destroyed, and all you held dear is irradicated. YOU must take up arms (be they swords or nunchucks or sword-chucks) and get vengence for those dead people you hardly met in the beginning of the game.

Our market research found that players like all genres of games, and so our game will take place in an ancient past filled with dragons, cops, motorcycles, robots, zombies, King Vitaman cereal, more zombies, and Starbucks. Our research also found that gamers can't stand to do just one type of thing all the time, even if we COULD get that one thing to be super awesome and compelling, and so we need to toss in some minigames and side missions to "mix things up." In our game, the hero will have to help rebuild towns and cities after he wantonly destroys them, and he will do this by engaging in a Tetris-like minigame with falling bricks. Also, every now and then, we will remove all the cool weapons from our hero and make him sneak around in poorly developed stealth missions that suffer from an obvious lack of development attention.

The action will be intense, but since no one likes a hard game, we'll create difficulty settings:

Easy: Enemies die within ten seconds of entering the screen, whether the player hits them or not.
Medium: Enemies take three swings at the player, miss each time, and then run around flailing ineffectually until the player kills them himself.
Sorta Hard: Enemies do some damage to the player, but they then feel bad about it and set themselves on fire.
Hard: Enemies fight the player as normal, but they die off before they kill the player.
Master: Enemies dress up like good guys and talk in falsetto voices until they have the player fooled, and then they attack and die as in "Hard" above.
Hardcore: Enemies spawn right on top of the player, shove a bazooka up his ass, and pull the trigger, all before the player even loads the game the first time.

The last one is there to please hardcore gamers and game testers, who are convinced that a game isn't fun until one is on the verge of a heart attack from anger.

Oh, and there must be a twist: The bad guy you have to fight in the end... is you! Not only that, but there is another super-extra bad guy after that, and he is also you! And it turns out that you, the player, aren't even the player! But then you also turn out to be you!

And you get to sleep with chicks. Any chick you meet, you can sleep with her, but the screen cuts to black and just says, "SEX" in big letters. Because, you know, the children.

But still: HOT.

Cool, we're almost done. We just need a name. I wanted something like, "Katana Man," but our publisher wants something with "Dark" in it, or "Forces." So I propose:

Shadow Forces: Dark Master Evil Shadows of Darkness - the Abyss of the Undershadow's Dark Penumbra

Oh, lest I almost forget:

II

Because no one wants to buy the original in the series. Sequels sell, man. We'll release SF:DMESoD-tSotUDP Gold in a year and include the original in the package. We'll contract some poor fool to make it in Game Maker. Also, the original can double as the crappy GBA version, too.

Well, there you have it. We made a game, and it rocks. It's already sold 28 million copies, and not only that, but also porn stars want to sleep with all of us.

Good work, everyone. See you for the sequel.

Everyone Read This

2005-01-28T16:22:00.000-07:00

Oughtta Stay Out of Pictures - Why video games shouldn't be like the movies. By Clive Thompson

An interesting article on game storytelling. The developer where I work is big on cutscenes and in-game storytelling, but I personally see some of the weaknesses of that style. Taking control away from the player for extended periods of time isn't always a great idea for game design, no matter how strong the story. Anyway, the article sums it up, and I'm too damn crunched to write any more today, so there you go.

Sarah Polley Nails It In One

2005-01-27T10:55:00.000-07:00

Sarah Polley, star of the recent Dawn of the Dead, says the coolest thing I've ever heard anyone say, ever, in an interview with Gamestar (RIP):

"I think it takes a lot more nerve to not be in on the [Scream, Freddy vs. Jason, etc.] joke. I saw [Dawn of the Dead] with an audience last night, and people were kind of like shocked, because we're so used to that kind of ironic, tongue-in-cheek, like we're all way too sophisticated to actually be scared. I think that era has had its day, and I think people actually want to experience real things in theatres again. I think that it's really brave to make a movie that isn't just making fun of itself the whole time. And it's funnier, actually. "

Everything is so damn ironic and cynical, and you should really consider that, coming from me, the Awesomelord. The new Dukes of Hazzard movie stars goddamn Jassica Simpson as Daisy, Seann William Scott as Bo, and Johnny Knoxville as Luke. Even considering that The Dukes of Hazzard was not fine theatre in its day, it at least took itself pretty seriously and presented an entertaining show. This movie will be, according to my sources (who are essentially the gnomes who live in my head), a mocking, ironic film that goes, "Look how much more awesome we are than the original show! Ha ha, lookit how we make fun of this stupid show!" From that, you get a few laughs, but nothing new.

Satire has value when it's poignant and intelligent. The original Scream almost had it nailed, presenting real horror alongside satire about horror movies, but it still came down to a lot of, "Ha ha, lookit how dumb these movies are! The sex kitten always dies! Ha ha!" The original Knight Rider show is pretty cheesy in hindsight, but it created something new for viewers to enjoy. All the David Hasselhoff jokes let us feel superior to a man who has a huge cult following in Europe (whereas our own cult followings leave much to be desired), but they mean nothing to someone who doesn't understand why David Hasselhoff is so funny.

Sarah Polley's comment is true. It'd be nice to see more real entertainment and less one-punchline jokes masquerading as such.

You are Not a Journalist, Dude

2005-01-20T17:06:00.000-07:00

I promised a rant on this. Well, actually, I was going to do one anyway, so there you go.

I was an editor on a game magazine. I did that work for five years, which I suppose makes me a bit of a veteran in an industry in which the old timers have only been around for 15 years. Here's a little bit about what an editor of a game magazine does:

1) Writes articles. Most articles we'd write were either features, reviews, previews, or strategies. There were always 3-7 news articles in there, but the magazine's 3-month lead time meant that the "news" was anything but. It was always as up-to-date as possible, but a lot of it boiled down to, "In case your cable was down last month, here you go."

2) Edits articles. Believe it or not, someone edits the articles you read in game magazines. In fact, at my old pub, an article would go through several layers of edits, each with a different focus. Here you look for content problems (which rarely happened), here you looked for typos, here you made sure that the text lined up right, etc. In general, the editing done by the actual editors (save that done by copy edit) boiled down to reading the article, making sure the words "workmanlike" and "presentationwise" were only used once each, and passing it on.

3) Keeps up with industry contacts. This is the weak link, here, which I'll explain in a bit. An editor has to keep up with industry contacts, meaning that he must call his assigned PR reps once every week or so and find out if they have any other information to spoon feed him. This involves pretending to like that contact (or, sometimes, actually liking them, and in rare instances, hooking up with them) and getting "sensitive information," like whatever that company's marketing plan allows the magazine editors to know that week.

4) Organizes stuff. You have to keep up with assets, press sheets (very important, since this is the bulk of your content), etc. You also have to keep track of any sections you're in charge of, keep a tracker of the games you think are worth covering (generally any game with a kids' cartoon named after it), and all that. Fun.

5) Sits in meetings. Sometimes they are cool meetings, like demos of games, and sometimes they are crap meetings, but sometimes it seems as though editors spend all their time in meetings. It sucks, because this plus everything else leaves precious little time for the least important thing on this list:

6) Plays games. Reviewers rarely play through games unless they are web writers with a huge staff backing them up or they work weekends and evening hours, which many lifers do. On a good week, I would play games maybe 6 hours for the week. Most of the time, those games suck. I aimed my section toward previews for that reason; I didn't feel that my section should have tons of reviews if I was the only person available to write them.

Notice that nowhere on that list will you find "Investigates stuff" or "asks hard-hitting questions." That's because no one--not the mag you're on, not the game publishers--wants you to do any of that. Despite the fact that I can go online right now and find timely and numerous reviews for games that came out this week, print magazine publishers still believe that reviews and previews sell issues. If your cover read, "XBOX CONSOLE ENTIRELY A TOOL MEANT TO DRIVE NINTENDO OUT OF BUSINESS, PROOF INSIDE," no one would give it another look unless the headline were next to Kanouyuko, the cute-and-sexy-and troubled-yet-independent-and-strong female love interest in an upcoming wannabe-Japanese action-RPG-collection game.

I was on a trip to a developer to see a game for our cover article, and on the wall I spotted flowcharts and diagrams and plans for a game that, even now, has yet to be announced. I could have easily splashed a news article in the mag about it ("FIRST INFO ON EARLY DESIGNS FOR SECRET NEW GAME"). I could have worked the situation so that I could be close to that board as much as possible, taken notes on what I saw, and maybe even asked a developer (not the lead designer, but maybe one of the lower-level working stiffs) about it off the record. Working at a developer now, I see tons of ways a smart journalist could spot clues and get info about secret projects planned for years from now. In fact, I doubt that visiting game writers have picked up on the acronyms and titles mentioned in passing by people who work here. A journalist would be listening in, aware that they will hear something they shouldn't.

The problem is, this sort of thing isn't encouraged. In fact, there is an understanding with game publishers that a journalist will not write about anything the publisher doesn't want written. Even with a review, the publisher can say, "Don't tell anyone about the fighting system," and the reviewer is obliged to comply. The punishment for failing to do so is an angry letter from the publisher to the mag's CEO and, often, witholding of assets from the magazine, which limits the mag's coverage of that publisher's games in the future. The bottom line is that game mag writers are the puppets of the publishers. You rarely read anything in a print magazine that the game publishers don't want you to know.

When I was in journalism, I and a few others at my mag tried to change the focus a bit. I was tired of features that were, essentially, just free ads for the game they were about. We're talking 5 page previews full of fluff about how awesome the game will probably be, with one line of caveat saying, essentially, "Maybe the game won't be as good as we hope, but we think it will!" A couple of other editors and I decided to try new stuff. Interview developers (NOT publishers) about game cliches and ask them why they keep using them. Confront developers about mature games and why they make them. Ask developers why they think gamers don't finish games. Even in the fluff pieces, include sidebars full of the developers' history, interviews with interesting people involved with the game, etc. Do anything more than the typical, "Why are you so awesome?" ass-licking that game journalism tends to be. In the months since I left, I could see that philosophy really taking shape, and the magazine was far more readable for it.

Writing reviews and previews is not journalism. Printing a "scoop" that the publisher gave you is NOT journalism. Asking that three of the seven screenshots the publisher is giving you be exclusive is NOT journalism. Writing an article about what you THINK a game will be like is not journalism. Giving in to Rockstar's demands that you run the screenshots they give you for your review, even when they are obviously not taken from real gameplay, is emphatically NOT fucking journalism. Actually, running anything that Rockstar Games allows you to run is definitely not journalism, because Rockstar is in complete control of who knows what when, and they are masters of making games seem better than they are by withholding information.

Anyone with a love of games and elementary writing skills can be a game journalist with the right contacts. Actually, you don't really need the love of games, because being a game journalist is a good way to kill that love for good. If you want to distinguish yourself from the flock, you need to do something different.

Try being a journalist.

Jumping to Conclusions: Resident Evil 4

2005-01-18T10:07:00.000-07:00

After thirty minutes of Resident Evil 4, I feel entirely qualified to say that I just don't get it.

If you read the reviews linked above, you'll learn that this is the best survival horror game EVER. It's like the Halo 2 of survival horror, except that Halo 2, as the best game ever, is already the Halo 2 of survival horror. I just don't see it.

What I see is awkward controls, a camera view that makes me feel like I'm running forward at a diagonal, an aiming system that makes wild shots the norm, and enemies that have none of these limitations. I can't dodge attacks without running, I don't have enough bullets to really shoot the guys coming at me, and while I don't operate like a truck anymore, I operate like a drunken suicide case who has to stand still to shoot a gun. Needless to say, the swarms of guys who each take nearly an entire clip to kill tend to take me out with Olympic ease.

Maybe I'm a big retard. Maybe I'm too busy thinking about tomorrow's field trip to McDonalds to actually be any good at the game. Other people seem to like it. Other people seem to like it a lot. They seem to have discovered bosses and other cool bits, while I tend to die to the Spanish Fast Zombie Clones over and over. But damnit, the game controls horribly. I can't get past that.

Yeah, you get to jump through windows and kick people's heads and knock over ladders and stuff, but that's essentially just pressing A. I have yet to think, "Man, I just did something cool!" Instead, I think, "I just pressed A and watched something happen!" Likewise, I don't feel like a crack secret agent who has been through zombie hell. I feel like a rookie at a firing range who hasn't learned that mobility in a firefight could save his life.

I assume it gets better; it has to. Otherwise all the reviewers are retarded. I'll give the game another shot, but maybe I need someone to explain to me what makes the game good. I'm missing something, and that something is the key to having fun in the game.

Objective Opinions?

2005-01-14T14:24:00.000-07:00

GameDrool, a blog from one of the editors over at GamePro. The original article prints a long, interesting letter from Trip Hawkins, the now-president of Digital Chocolate and former-master-chief of 3DO.

The comments below that article get into the philosophy of game reviewing, with comments from, "Good on that reviewer!" to "Game reviewers need to be more open and objective." There seem to be two camps on this issue:

1) Game reviewers need to be objective. Championed mostly by game publishers and people who insist on calling game reviewing "journalism," this stance believes that game reviewers should take into account the chance that someone out there will enjoy almost any game they review, and so they should angle the review toward finding the good things about each game and communicating those.

2) Game reviewers should give their opinions. This one is self-explanatory. When someone is paid to play a game and tell what they thought about it, then you're obviously asking for opinions. This one makes reviewers succeptible to their inner biases, say some, and it skews their reviews likewise.

There's good and bad in both camps. For Camp 1, you risk a review that reads like the manual for a support group ("The game's not fun for me, but hey, we're all okay, you might like it!"), but you also avoid some of Camp 2's bias. I believe that a skilled and conscientious reviewer stands in both camps, able to understand the good and bad and the difference between that and what he likes and dislikes.

For example: I don't like having to reload multiple times on a level. I hate the interruption of game flow and the frustration that creates. Others like the challenge and don't mind reloading, because they like trying to approach the problem from different angles. If I mention the dying and reloading in the review, it's just my opinion that it's lame, and that's not necessarily true for others. But if that sequence in the game causes reloads because of cheap shots, poor controls, or unfair challenge, then that's not going to be fun for the "different angles" guy, either. So I put it in my review, so people know what to expect.

Then, what happens when someone reads a review like, "This game isn't really that great, but you might like it"? That tells no one anything. That reviewer might just as well have written, "I like pretty flowers, and zeppelins are big!" The reader gains no information and has to go somewhere else for a clear opinion on the game.

For Camp 2 folks, you have to be considerate of the state of the gaming art just as much as your own likes and dislikes. You can't just say, "This sucks! This game is like " and hang it up. You have to be able to explain, often in objective terms, why the game wasn't fun. Learn about game development processes, figure out why something turned out the way it did, and drop that in the review. Maybe make notes and plan to look into development snafus for a future article--developers are often willing to do post-mortems for publication, and there are few things readers like more than seeing behind the scenes. At that point, you're getting into actual journalism, which is where the objectivity comes in.

As a reviewer, you don't have to be objective, but you have to be fair. You have to understand things and keep things in mind and know stuff. You have to have played tons of games and be able to compare them. You have to be ready to say unfavorable things about a game you were hopeful about, and you have to be ready to suck it up and accept that, just maybe, Barbie Beach Vacation or whatever has some redeeming value. Maybe not to your readers, of course, but to someone.

Opinions are subjective by their very nature. When someone writes a review, they're not searching for the truth; they're forming an opinion. The reason I say that reviews aren't journalism is that I don't think they are. Journalism is the search for and archiving of truth and facts, and there is precious little of that in game mags these days... but that's another topic. This belief that reviews must be objective comes from the confusion that reviewing is journalism. Reviews are opinions, and they don't have to be objective. They just have to be educated.

Anyway, I wanted to bring this discussion here, especially since 50% of the 4-person readership I have here are game journalists/reviewers or were at one point.

So, let me have it.

Someone Finds Bush's Remote Control

2005-01-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

The Australian: Bush vows to cut out the 'cowboy' talk [January 15, 2005]

"Quick! Knock out Cheney and take it!"

"This is gonna be so much fun!"

News from The Roanoke Times -Rodeo in Salem gets unexpected song rendition

2005-01-12T09:16:00.000-07:00

News from The Roanoke Times -Rodeo in Salem gets unexpected song rendition

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

*snort*

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Okay, Fine. My Top 10

2005-01-10T14:46:00.000-07:00

Don't ask me why I linked to normalMode above. Just don't.

Maybe it was because that site's Top 10 list inspired me to make my own. Now, granted, I've done almost nothing but World of Warcraft (I'm not the only one), and so I'm pretty much just going to make stuff up.

Anyway, here we go: The TOP 10 AWESOMEST STUFF OF 2004!!!!

10) Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines
So, it didn't sell a lot, and it was buggy as hell, and it contained some really questionable design decisions (You are rewarded for being a very social-focused character, but eventually you have to wade through combat to win), but damn if it didn't have the finest video game dialog writing in decades. Meaningful choices, real characters, and intelligent handling of mature subjects made Vampire a must-play for anyone interested in game dialog and storytelling. Which is, apparently, only a few thousand people.

9) Cats
Ah, the joy of pet ownership. Months ago, I had no pets, and I find it hard to imagine what life was like then. Thinking back, though, I imagine that my apartment didn't smell like poo, my sweatshirts didn't have tiny white hairs all over them, and I was well-rested and less cranky when I woke up in the morning. That said, they are cutie-wootie, as well as cuddly-wuddly, so, #9.

8) Dracula
I don't think he was involved in any pop culture this year, but Dracula's awesomeness cannot be limited by time. Well, no, he was in Blade 3, but I'll keep him at #8 regardless.

7) Fable
The game to end all games except WoW, Half-Life 2, Halo 2 and all games that came out since dropped this year to a surprisingly hostile crowd. Despite the fact that the end of the game was a bit of a "Haw, haw!" to players who spent the whole game maxxing their melee skills, I played and enjoyed this game to the extent that I was looking forward to coming home from work and popping it in for a few hours. Of course, it only took a few hours to beat Fable, and at that point I was desperate for any reason to come home from work, but there you go. It's mostly on the list because some people at work still complain about it to this day, cementing it in the Not So Much Remembered as Not Forgotten hall of fame.

6) The Show With the What Now
There's always some popular show that I missed during the year, but to be cool I have to put it on my list. This covers all of those. It's either Arrested Development, Desperate Housewives, The Lost, or something like those. Maybe Tru Calling. Who knows. Anyway, there you go. My bases are covered.

5) Space
Space comes in at #5 with a bullet. Mostly because it's really awesome. Filled with spaceships and space pirates and Space Awesome, Space is a shoe-in for the Top 5 of 2005.

4) Harold & Kumar Chase the Burger
Special thanks to the French for their version of the title to the best stoner comedy in years. This movie made Dude, Where's My Car look like Dude, Where's My Car. Plus, Doogie Houser. Honorable Mention: Dodgeball, which in French is entitled, Ball Chaser.

3) Some Book
I never read anything, but there's a book on this list. I'm guessing it's probably the sequel to The Davinci Code or something. Actually, I read the first half of the sixth Dark Tower book, so let's change this to:

3) The First Half of the Sixth Dark Tower Book
Word.

2) World of Warcraft
Less than a week before WoW shipped you could hear me going, "Pshht, I am above these petty MMORPGs, this one is just EQ done again, and also you are stupid." Then the game came out, I bought two copies, followed by 2 two-month subscription cars and a second computer. Now if the Nazis need to find me for some reason, I'll be easily spotted sitting in front of my monitor running through Loch Modan. However, woe be unto the Nazi who interrupts my WoW time. Damn Nazis.

1) Canada
Moved to Canada this year. All year long, people told me, "Boy, it sure gets cold here later," but I didn't believe them. -40 degrees Celsius is like the Tooth Fairy of temperatures, except that I've looked every morning and, no quarters. When you're thinking of temperatures so cold that your intestines freeze and shoot out of your belly at supersonic speeds, it's hard to understand exactly what it means. I'll be finding out in a couple of days.

Anyway, Canada wins because it is awesome. Yeah, so the health care isn't free, but it's there when we need it. Yeah, the prices are high, but the good ol' US dollar is dropping, so that'll even out a bit. Yeah, it's cold, but... okay, it's just cold. The biggest problem I've run into is that the people here pronounce "pasta" to rhyme with "masta," as in "masta killa." If Canada and the US turned into giant robots armed only with their respective awesomeness, Canada would win, and it would be saving children and avoiding falling on puppies the whole time.

So, there you have it: my Top 10 awesomest things of 2004 or whatever. Read it and weep.

Will Eisner, 1917-2005

2005-01-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

I met Will Eisner once or twice a few years back. Whenever you meet someone you admire, there's a frisson of nerves, like there's some kind of aura of awesomeness around that person. On the outside, he was just an old man, like someone's grandfather. But when you meet him, you realize that this is the man who made comics the respected medium it is today, who recruited Bob Kane and Jack Kirby to work for him in the 1930s. This is the man for whom the Comics Oscars are named. The guy is The Man.

Someone told me once that he saw Eisner at every ComicCon he went to, and that every time he saw Eisner, he marvelled at the fact that Eisner was still alive. The man's legend is so large among some people that most of us just assumed he was dead already.

He wasn't famous for creating Batman or for bringing post-modern attitude to comics. He was famous for defining comics, for teaching the artform, and for inspiring comic scholars like Scott McCloud to think of comics as something other than "funnny strips." He wrote strips in the 60s that dealt with everyday people with everyday problems. He pioneered the graphic novel. He walked on water.

Meeting Will Eisner, I realized that if Benjamin Franklin were alive today, that would be what meeting him would be like. Shaking the hand of a pioneer, an inventor, and an innovator. Touching the fingers that tapped the temples from which sprang The Spirit. Hearing the voice that taught comics' most lauded professionals how to tell a story in pages with panels. I'm sure that somewhere, Nicholas Cage is finding clues to Eisner's treasure as we speak.

I linked to the official bio of Will Eisner from his website, so I won't go into his life here when there are already better sources. He's a worthwhile man to research if you like comics, and his work is a worthwhile read. There's also a good interview with him, which you can find here.

Sometimes we take such comfort just knowing that certain people are still around that we take them for granted, and when one of those people dies, it's like a slap in the cultural face. Will Eisner's passing leaves a hole in pop culture that many won't even know exists.

G'bye, Mr. Eisner. We'll miss you.

'L.A. Times' Drops Daily 'Garfield' as the Comic Is Blasted and Praised

2005-01-06T09:32:00.000-07:00

'L.A. Times' Drops Daily 'Garfield' as the Comic Is Blasted and Praised: "a strip produced by a committee, devoid of originality, devoid of guts, a strip cynically DESIGNED to be inoffensive and bad, on the theory that public tastes are insipid."

It wasn't just me.

RIP Will Eisner

2005-01-05T21:06:00.000-07:00

I just found out through Normal Mode (linked above and off to the side) that comics pioneer Will Eisner passed away Monday from complications from bypass surgery.

I'll have more on Mr. Eisner later, probably tomorrow, but damnit. If there ever was a true sign that maybe the Rapture was on its way, this is pretty much it.

More info here.

The WoW Age War

2005-01-05T20:49:00.000-07:00

Linked above is an interesting thread on the World of Warcraft forums. In it, a poster proposes that Blizzard create a 20-or-over RP server to attempt to filter out some of the immaturity in the game. The original poster finishes her post with, "And for all I know, it is the adults, but I think this would help the problem somewhat for those of us that want to play a semi-serious game."

What follows is 12+ pages of arguing, accusations, insults, and general good times. G'head, read it. I'll wait.

Actually, maybe I won't.

It's interesting, because lately I've noticed that WoW, more than perhaps any other MMO I've played on (and I've played a lot), has a bit of an age-gap problem. On one hand we have the hardcore Bliz-kidz who migrated over from Diablo 2 (one of the most exploited and abused games out there, and one which was released back in the 1700s and still finds an audience of loud, leet-speaking cheaters), and on the other hand we have casual gamers who were attracted by the bright lights and pretty colors. In the middle we have experienced MMO veterans, but we'll leave these aside because most of them just want to get in there, kill monsters and take their stuff, and log out with a smile on their faces. As always, in this case, the silent middle-ground majority isn't worth a damn thing, because it's much more fun to talk about the whiners and screamers.

Most of these arguments seem to devolve into arguments about the merits of actually typing real words rather than Internet shorthand. "U" versus "you," "LFG" instead of "looking for group." Someone gets called a "grammar Nazi," someone else gets called "intolerant of young people," and someone else gets called "a jaded, bitter old fogey." And though I am all of those things, I resemble those remarks.

In my last job I wrote for a magazine that, despite its own public protests to the contrary, was skewed toward younger audiences. The trick to getting a younger audience is to convince them that you're really going for an older one. A 13-year-old will always be interested in what a 17-year-old is doing, but the opposite is rarely true. One reason why kids seem to grow up so fast is that the media and people marketing to kids constantly feed them more and more "mature" content, because they know that young teenagers don't want "kiddie stuff."

So young people flock to games that seem more mature, making older people, who believe that they are the ones for whom the game was made (and who are often right), uncomfortable. In a society in which the "age is maturity" idea lies at the heart of the "separate every age group by the year" school grade system, the Internet, and MMOs in particular, bring kids and adults together in the same world and simply say, "Play nice!" When one person in an area wants to spark a conversation about "OMG, Ashlee Simpson is soooo lame, i hear she effed Fred Durst lolololol roofles," while another wants to kick back with a beer and slay some orcs with his wife while the baby sleeps, you don't have a real healthy environment for cross-demographic solidarity.

To set the record straight, I'll say what no one else will. Older people are, on average, more mature than younger people. I can say that as someone who is peering over the edge of 30, and I know that people older than me will generally agree. Unlike most people in the world, however, I also experienced the younger ages, as well. I know for a fact that saying, "Older people are more mature than you," to a person between 13 and 18 will generally spark a "Nuh uh, you are a Nazi, loser," response. Younger people don't like to be confronted with the fact that they are young. The same phenomenon makes 14-year-olds write in to game magazines pleading that the editors convince their parents that they can handle Grand Theft Auto. The fact that they will, indeed, grow older and both A) become of age to purchase those games and B) become mature enough to really handle them almost completely escapes them. They want to be older now, to feel older now.

A lot of it comes down to respect. Young people don't get much respect. Young people think, "When I'm older, I will be able to play whatever I want and do whatever I want, and older people will respect me, because I have the power to act on my will." Because they are constantly pandered to by media and marketers, who serve them the sex and boobies and course language they think instantly makes them more mature, these kids think they're ready NOW, and so they should have that respect NOW. Cue sense of entitlement, end argument.

On the other hand, older people think that people aren't truly mature until they are exactly the same age that the older person is. As if, at age 25 or so, a person goes from Diddy Kong to Golgo 13 in one smooth shift of perspective. Older people cannot accept that every social ill is more likely caused by someone around their age, and so they blame younger people. The main characters in The Full Monty are older people, folks. So are Trey Parker and Matt Stone, Mike Judge, the Ramones, Paul Reubens, and Blink 182.

The solution? Older people must attempt to understand what drives younger people. Kids just want to be treated like people, man. Really, that's it. And they are people. When their parents and older people around them won't give them respect, they got to television, music, sex, etc., who are there with all the respect the kid can buy. Give a kid REAL respect, and you make them socially bulletproof.

Meanwhile, younger people need to understand that wisdom does indeed come with age, even if it's not exactly directly proportional to it. Older people tend to have a better grasp of what's important in the world, they have often lived through hard times and made it through, and they generally have a better sense of perspective. Back in the day, young people used to "learn stuff" from older people. I know I did.

We're all on the Internet together, and no one is going to change by staying the same. While it makes the WoW forums more interesting (which is, I believe, the point), it doesn't serve anyone to have this odd age war. If you want to hate an age group, hate babies. They're goddamn useless.

BBC NEWS | Business | Games giant EA buys Ubisoft stake

2005-01-04T14:33:00.000-07:00

BBC NEWS | Business | Games giant EA buys Ubisoft stake

Toldja I'd get it for you, and I am not a liar, no matter what that one lady says.

Also, because you're nice: EA buying out DICE

Good to see EA is back on its old pattern of succeeding with a developer, buying them, and ruining them. It's nice of developers to offer EA a "try before you buy" program. It's like EA gets these developers on layaway.

OMFG WTF!!!!!

2005-01-03T17:48:00.000-07:00

OMFG! He's updating! The world will surely end now!

So, it's 2005. New Year's Eve used to mean hanging out at home, eating a spread of tasty finger foods, and maybe getting a sip of champagne if I asked nicely enough. That was a long time ago. This year, we had New Year's in a pub very near (nearly in) my apartment and had champagne from a plastic cup. Awesome. On a better note, since the last time you heard from me, I got engaged to my lovely and talented girlfriend of 3.5 years. Also awesome, but not in an ironic fashion.

2005 looks like it will probably be, well, much like 2004, just with more World of Warcraft. Same president, just surrounded with more evil geniuses and fewer (read: one less) actual voice of subtle moderation. The various wars and other travesties caused by my nation of birth will likely continue through the year unless stopped by some foreign superhero of the kind mentioned in passing in Astro City. Y'know, like the "Birds of Paradise" in Rio de Janeiro. Like in those books, these heroes' involvement will likely be reduced to one panel.

As for games, well, my inside sources for that dried up months ago. The deeper you go into the industry, the more your general contacts dry up. Now I know tons about what my current company is doing, but little about what anyone else is doing. I know now the phenomenon of "developer tunnel vision," which prevents developers from being aware of each other's "new features" and which causes five games to come out at the same time with the same sparkling new technologies. At the same time, I'm more aware now that games really do take a long time to make, and so a lot of the concurrent technology development really is a coincidence.

I imagine that Resident Evil 4 will be pretty good, and that a number of other games will rock. That's good enough for me.

In other news, and this probably deserves an AWESOME NEWS bit, EA has purchased controlling shares in DICE (the developers of Battlefield: Ad Nauseam--a completely baffling and unexpected departure from official EA developer-gobbling policy, I'm sure) and a fair chunk of Ubisoft, as well. I've heard that the French government is considering tossing Ubisoft some money to combat the apparently hostile procurement of shares, mostly because it's too hard to translate "EA" into French (I believe it would come out to, roughly, "Electroniqueaeouxois Artimapotomous" or "XRG"). I'm thinking that this whole thing might be good, because it's only a matter of time before we see Samwise Fischer in Shire Cell: Blanket Fish Together Gel.

Anyway, so, my New Year's wish for everyone is that 2005 be at least as good as 2004 time a bajillion. And I know I'm supposed to make a resolution, but I prefer putting the responsibility for stuff firmly on the shoulders of others.

Sin City Trailer

2004-12-23T13:33:00.000-07:00

We interrupt this Festivus celebration to bring you this special report: There is a new Sin City trailer that wants to kick your ass. Click on the headline to get there.

Have a Moderately Enjoyable Festivus!

2004-12-23T08:33:00.000-07:00

What's with you people? Why aren't you out celebrating Festivus?

I figured I'd take a moment to remind us all of the true meaning of the season by beginning the Airing of Grievances. So here goes:

1) Goddamnit, the new Blade movie sucked. You know my detailed feelings on that, so I'll let it lick--er, lie.

2) Despite my desire to love it, KOTOR II hasn't grabbed me in any way. It's probably because it's buggy and weird, but who knows. That didn't stop me when Vampire did it.

3) Games are getting stupider. Are gamers really that dumb, or are publishers going overboard? Either way, there's a fair bit of stupid in the genetic mix.

4) Your face is dumb. No, really. You ought to get that looked at.

5) My balls currently belong to World of Warcraft. I'd like them back. I don't want to walk by a guy selling them on the street. Some people say I should get them permanently attached, but I don't know.

6) One out of every 9 cans of Canada Dry ginger ale is kinda skunky. I don't know why. I still drink it.

7) Whoever invented cats also invented evil, and they include a little free sample of evil in with the cat, like how you used to get Myst free with everything you'd buy in the mid-'90s.

8) Crunch time is likely to begin anew in January, and I was just getting used to having weekends.

9) My driver's side window on my car is busted. It wil go down, but not back up. This wouldn't normally be so bad when the temperature is -25 degrees Celsius, but it sucks when I have to open my door to punch in the parking keycode or accept poison from the local drive-thru burgermart.

10) This list only goes to 9.

There are a lot more, but I can't say them here because I have to go ship presents that won't get to their recipients before Valentine's Day, because Customs is slow and so is the post office. Ooh, add that one up there, too.

In short, I hate you, games are dumb, and Blade: Trinity sucked.

Happy Festivus.

Mystery Martian cleans US space buggy. 22/12/2004. ABC News Online

2004-12-22T09:20:00.000-07:00

Mystery Martian cleans US space buggy. 22/12/2004. ABC News Online

I considered stealing the "homeless guy/squeegee" joke from Fark.com, but I think it would jsut cheapen the experience.

AWESOME REVIEW: World of Warcraft!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2004-12-21T09:21:00.000-07:00

You have to help me. World of Warcraft has my balls. It has them in a tight grip and will not release them. It has demanded that I forego showers, real meals, and spending time with friends who aren't either short, purple, or roughly cow-shaped. God damnit, I swore this wouldn't happen again.

My girlfriend and I made new characters: undead priest and warrior. we played and played, and somehow it was more fun than the last thing, a Tauren warrior/druid combo. Which was more fun than the one before that. Damnit, how can this game keep getting more and more fun? It's supposed to run on addiction, not actual good content (EA, I'm looking at you, foo).

I bought a new goddamn computer to play this, so that my girlfriend and I wouldn't have to fight over it. World of Warcraft has my balls in a grip and will not let them go.

World of Warcraft makes you remember the little perfect things, like the phone number for the nearest pizza delivery place that has the 2-for-1 special and the names of your friends' characters online. You become acutely aware of how much time you spend at work. You gain a supernatural ability to needle through traffic at high speeds because you know that your personal DPS is dropping every second you spend away. And fuck, I don't want my warrior to be any less efficient.

If you ask anyone, they may say the game has problems, and it does: its players. MMO folks have been fishing for things to complain about since sliced bread ("NERF WHOLE WHEAT LOLOL"), and they hit this game hard. Blizzard didn't test a couple of classes enough before they shipped the game, but really, every single class is fun, at least to level 10. Trust me. I've played them all.

The biggest problem with this game is that it has my balls. I wish it would give them back, as I might like to use them someday.

AWESOME REVIEW: BLADE: TRINITY

2004-12-17T14:33:00.000-07:00

A thoughtful analogy for Blade: Trinity.

Pretend you grew up with poodles. Your family had a couple, one after the other, and they were great dogs. The first one was an awesome puppy, and though it declined in its later years, it was a great dog. The second one was a super awesome fantastic dog that could beat up tanks with its bare hands.

So when you get out on your own, you of course want a poodle. You go out, seek out the breeder who bred the first one, even, and pick out your puppy. And it's all cute and lovable and awesome, and so you invite your friends over to see it. When your friends get there, the dog goes up to each one of them, one at a time, and sticks his nose right in their crotches.

Not only that, but he sniffs and licks and rubs his head around and generally looks like he's getting off on it. And your friends laugh and laugh, and they say your dog is teh ghey and imply that you are less of a man for having a poodle that eats balls. And no matter what you try, you can't convince them that your other two poodles were great and that this one, for some reason, insists on licking balls.

That's Blade: Trinity.

You see the trailer, and you think, "Ooh, Blade is cool. I liked the second movie a lot! Also, Jessica Beale or whatever is really hot." Therefore, the movie must be great, right? But then you go in, and you sit down, and the first "awesome" thing that happens is one of the last. Then Parker Posey, an actress with a long history of improv and black comedy, completely snarfs her role as a "scary" goth vampiress.

And you think, "God damn, this puppy is licking balls, and I can't stop it."

It gets worse. Because improbable blue gadgets are apparently cooler than FUCKING VAMPIRES, Blade: Trinity has a gadget for every situation. They have bullets that explode with sunlight, silver-plated stakes, and even an arrow that contains a disease that only works on vampires. The explanation? "And this blind beauty over here is River Field or whatever. She's just as badass as the rest of us. Explain whatcha got, River?" And then River says, "This puppy here will blow up a vampire like it's a sock full of dynamite on Christmas," and that's it. Then you know that the ultimate first father of all vampires, who is so perfect that he never needed to evolve, is destined to be destroyed by some punk girl with a bow and arrow. It's all good though, because Dracula is crap, too. It's good to see the director's retarded European cousin getting work.

Dracula, the most powerful vampire who ever existed except the other vampires in the movie, has the power to change his shape into whatever the most plot-appropriate form is at the moment. Rather than turn into a rat or somethiing to infiltrate the good-guy hideout, he takes the form of a dead friend of the good guys. They're not likely to freak out at that, right? Then Vlad the Impaler has a little girl at his whim, and she insults him, and he apparently just walks off. Sweet. Also, the world is full of tons of unnamed vampires who can be dispatched by punching them with the proper swagger. Of course, Dracula has no power, supernatural or otherwise, over these vampires, and there's no telling why Parker Posey wanted to raise him in the first place. Though, I have to admit, Dracula is pretty awesome in his True Form. Someone designing that form was thinking, "In the first Blade, the vampires had two jaws and were kinda scary. The second blade, they had three jaws and were really scary. We'll give Dracula... like, seven jaws! Take that!" Unfortunately, all he really does in that form is throw Blade around and skulk in the costume-flaw-concealing shadows.

The movie has its cool parts, wirth watching for a Blade fan. Like Triple H and his pomeranian. Parker Posey's brother in the film does surprisingly well. And Blade himself is a badass on the Wesley Snipes scale. He slings blades around and punches women like no one else in the business.

But then, man. That dog keeps licking balls. Combat scenes are often blurry and difficult, with punching noises occurring when no punches are being thrown. The ultra-cool "Blade vs. the FBI" plot gets hot and then tossed out when Blade solves the problem by beating up a bunch of nameless FBI dudes. Kris Kristopherson staggers around going, "I'm not gonna lose you again, god damnit" and shooting shotguns at scores of FBI agents only seconds after he tells Blade not to kill humans. Oh, and every single word, except the three lines Blade says himself, of the film is exposition. Here's an example:

BLADE: And who are you punks, who came to save me last scene?

JASON LEE IMPERSONATOR (JLI): We are the "good guys," Blade. Also, I used to be a vampire, this here is Whistler's daughter, the nerd makes magic bullets, and the blind woman's cute daughter has no idea how bad this movie is.

BLADE: I see. You think you can help me? You kids?

HOT CHICK: I'm not just an incredibly hot woman. I'm also super badass at all types of fighting and can kill eighteen undead vampires with my bare hands and exploding babies.

BLIND GIRL: Oooh, I just hacked into God's computer with my blind hacking abilities. Look at the information on my screen, which I can understand even though I can't see or read it.

NERD: These puppies make every vampire in the world blow up just by you wishing for it to happen. But we only have one, so make sure you use it only at the end of the movie.

BLADE: I'm still not convinced.

And so on. Then you get to the end fight:

DRACULA: Ah, Blade, I see we are here fighting with swords.

BLADE: I am here to kill you or to die, or both. Unfortunately, the "Blade could be killed too, and so he should decide whether eradicating Dracula is worth losing his own life and make a valiant sacrifice" plot is wasted, because we solved it by not addressing it in the least.

DRACULA: You have honor, Blade. But I will kill you by punching you with fists.

BLADE: .....

A great battle ensues, then the Hot Chick shows up, like all hot chick sidekicks, shoots an arrows that misses, and then Blade gets the final blow.

No matter how badass an enemy is in a Blade film, there's always the uber gadget. The Earth itself could turn out to be a vampire, eating cities by the hundreds daily until Blade shows up, and Blade will fight some dudes with his sword and then use the uber gadget on the Earth to defeat it. How much tension can there be in a plot when, no matter how awesome the villain is, you know that Blade will come up with some sort of silver-coated UV laser garlic spray to defeat it?

Damnit, this puppy just won't stop licking balls.

RIP: XBN

2004-12-14T17:06:00.000-07:00

I found out today that another magazine, Xbox Nation (XBN) also got canned the same day as GMR. See below (Anutha One Bites the Dustah) for accompanying rant.

"But WHY isn't he talking about World of Warcraft?"

2004-12-14T15:32:00.000-07:00

Because I am dying to play it more. I am, sir, an addict, and I have the swingy croutons to admit it. But, alas, I am working 12-hour days most days, and Chez AWESOME has but one computer, which usually sees the lovery AwesomeLady at its helm.

But... BUT. Another PC is coming, and soon I will have another method for ignoring the things that really matter, like family, friends, and Xmas.