Red Dead Redemption: Rawhide

giddy up...please, god, just giddy up...

There are two reasons why smart young African American men like CJ Johnson become carjacking criminals, and they have nothing to do with 400 years of historical oppression or an inherently biased socioeconomic system: It’s because most jobs are not feasible via mass transit, and all other means of transportation available require constant mashing of the accelerator button.

Do we see illegal aliens straining their fingers this way? No sir. Yet now, when it comes to putting honest American family men like John Marston back to work, we require them to rely on this same method, even after it’s proven to cause repetitive-stress injuries and the commission of felonies? For so called “Realism?” I can see a rather European type of “ism” but it isn’t the one that begins with “real!” Holding down the button was good enough to simulate equine gait stimulation in GUN, and the approach is just as strong today.

Are there no depths of depravity to which you won’t sink, Rockstar? Not if I have anything to say about it! God bless my loyal listeners, and God bless America.

Prototype: Is this why the real America hates us?

Personally, I'm less concerned about the military's lack of anti-insurgency skills than I am about the fact that I've assimilated over a third of the hearts and minds in this city and I still don't know how to drive a car. God damn it I hate New Yorkers!

Secret Service: Threat Level Orange

No one ever suspects the troupe of identical men in orange parkas.

Let's all be fair but firm this holiday season...

...If you see something, say something.

Suikoden Tactics: The nameless, faceless, eyeless underclass

If a quarter-century’s worth of video gaming has taught me anything, it’s that people take shortcuts. Time is finite, and work infinite; it’s understandable. We all do it.

But most of us don’t do it like this:

no, no that’s alright…

That’s right, eyeballs. Suikoden Tactics features over 50 playable characters, each with their own semblance of a personality, but I guess there wasn’t any left over for non “plot” related characters…

You rich, white, heterosexual males are all the same! With your power, and your privilege, and your eyeballs!

I mean, okay, overlook some frame skipping here, unbalanced enemies there, it’s expected. Unintelligible interface, unskippable animations, unavoidable loopholes, whatever...

Couldn’t have seen that one coming…Oh, wait. I guess he couldn’t…

But is it that hard to slap a couple eyeballs in an NPC’s skull? It’s not like you aren’t going to recycle their faces a hundred times anyway!

Doesn’t it just break your heart? The young idealistic hero really cared about that guy, in the blue, who was a merchant…what was his name again?

Oh and by the way, that plot? It's about a kid looking for a bunch of cannons that turn people into fishmen. No, seriously.

Kane and Lynch Hate You.

In case you can't read that text it says:

"Click and hold RS and push LS DOWNWARDS twice
to give a secondary weapon to Lynch."

Is there anything else that needs to be said?

Maybe It's Moogle Syndrome

Why, Final Fantasy? Just tell me why? Is it not enough to make every other line of dialogue an ellipse, that you feel it necessary to beat my brains with constant meaningless exclamations? I already have a moogle in my office- I don't need any in my game.

*NSFW* Watch my angry angry YTMND now. *NSFW*

A James Pond Christmas

GOD BLESS US, EVERYONE!

Ah, 'tis the season to be obligated. To stand in long lines, sweating under multiple layers, waiting to buy a bunch of crap for a bunch of people you'd rather not have to speak with, dreading the stuffy holiday parties and piles of thank you notes you'll have to write for the bunch of crap you get from the bunch of people you'd rather not speak with, and if they play one more Christmas Carol you'll have no choice but to dropkick the nearest child and go set something on fire.

oh boy. another turtleneck. thanks grandma.

Peace on earth and good will toward men can no more be established by fiat of the calendar than good games be made by simply following a formula that made other good games.

Take James Pond 2: Codename Robocod. Everyone has loved a good sidescroller since the days of you-know-you, and Mickey's Castle of Illusion had recently proven they could be done in a pseudo non-linear fashion (this was before someone thought it would be a good idea to extend Mickey's butt-stomping romp to walking broomsticks), so why wouldn't this work for the James Pond franchise? And the only thing that could sell better than a run-n-jumper had to be one which took place at the North Pole! Only problem: James Pond is a fucking fish, people.

I sssStop...polluters...I don't tttTalk constantly in a hhhHigh pitched voice...
I don't even tttTalk at all! wwwWhat did I do to deserve this?

The worst part of it is that they already had a winning formula with the original James Pond! Being a secret agent, he went on a series of discrete, time-sensitive, goal-oriented missions with a jazzy soundtrack and smarmy grin. Being a FISH, he did this underwater, providing for an omni-directional side-scrolling experience the likes of which hadn't been seen since the oddly named 2-player Sega Master System port, Quartet. What was the so bad about this that they had to go and turn him into every other running jumping cat, bat, or ninja from the nth dimension, except in fucking Christmas land?

Oh well. Best way to get through stuffing a round peg into a square hole is to just relax and try not to think about it. It'll all be over soon, so you might as well try to enjoy yourself just a bit.

Oh fuck this, cousin shortcake. Let's go get high in your little sister's room.


Dude...look! It's my brain! This is the best Christmas EVER!

On the edge of Vomiting

Do you remember back in 1997 when Wired magazine ran a cover feature on Doom, titled Doom Goes To War? While we were all playing Descent II and waiting for Unreal to come out, here was Doom, the game we all played in 1993, gettting the cover treatment. This, to my seventeen-year-old hardcore Gamefan-reading eyes, was proof beyond all doubt that Wired was out of touch, that it just didn’t “get” it.

Argh!!! The pixels make the man!

I couldn’t help recalling this yesterday as I watched a curious story rise to the top spot on Reddit and get Dugg 785 times. Wired.com’s Clive Thompson brings us Victory in Vomit: Sickening Secret of Mirror’s Edge. Now the first thing I’m wondering is whether this story would mean anything to anyone if it wasn’t running on Wired. I’m the first to admit that Wired has come a long way editorially since that Doom cover, but a story on the potential for an fps to be vomit-inducing?! My mother might write a story like this, but what action gamer worth their salt has this problem?

Thompson’s thesis hangs on the apparent effect of proprioception in Mirror’s Edge, supported by being able to see the main character’s arms and feet while she runs around. To me this comes across as an exercise in mental masturbation. DICE comes out with a game that looks different from the fps pack, and Wired has to blow it into a big exposition. Perhaps the simpler explanation is that since Mirror’s Edge isn’t very focused on gunplay the developer’s had to show us something else, just to keep us anchored in the game’s virtual space.

Trespasser let you see stare at your own breasts. Feel like vomiting?

What Thompson is really getting at is art direction. I found Mirror’s look to be striking, but that shouldn’t be enough to carry it. If this game made Thomson puke, is that a case for or against buying it? This leads me to the issue of loving on a game for its look and contrivances, and not for playability. Negative Gamer ran a great article on this. If you want a fair review, Ben Kuchera at Arstechnica does a fine job dealing with Mirror’s shortcomings.

So I ask, what’s the story here? Why is this Wired post getting voted up? If Mirror’s Edge made this review vomit, I imagine Wipeout XL was an absolute nightmare for him.

F.E.A.R.: Reading is fundamental. Also efficient.

I don't read poetry, biographies, or non-fiction essays. I skip forewards, and afterwords, and notes about the type. I'll reach for my DS before a New Yorker or Max's copy of Lucky Jim on any given commute, but that doesn't make me illiterate.

Reading may not be rumble or motion-compatible, multiplayer-enabled in any traditional sense of the word, and you don't even earn achievement points from it, but it remains the fastest way I know to assimilate and comprehend complex strings of data. Except Excel, of course.

Bottom line is I can read quicker than listen, and the quicker I hear what you have to say the quicker I get back to killing people. Bioshock understood this. Why don't you?

okay you get a point for the word "assfuck."
That brings your grand total to...one.

Perhaps listening to a constant string of answering machines in the dark sounded like a good idea on paper, but someone in that brainstorm should have remembered that usually, when video games expect you to put down the controller and, you know, watch, they give you something to look at. So until you've merged FDR's fireside chats with Seaman or made an FPS of Lake Wobegon, lets have some text, okay?

Dead Rising: Time flies when you're killing zombies. When you aren't...not so much.

The main Dead Rising storyline unfolds over 72 game-world hours. Much of its replay value is derived from running back and forth through the mall, juggling tasks with discovery in real-time. But somehow this composite of innovative gameplay ideas includes 12 hours without a single mission while the military storms the place. This is how I spent it:


A precipitous troop pullout occurs in the final hours before your helicopter exit arrives. This is how I spent it:

Final Fantasy Tactics, part 3

Foolish mortals, I have drawn you into the depths of hell! Now face the wrath of my hydras, behemoth, and...chemist!

Final Fantasy Tactics, part 2

I've never been much for Judeo-Christian morality, but I do believe in consistency, and find it sinfully incongruous that "atheism" is a status effect with neither completely good nor bad connotations, like, say, "poison," or "regen," while "charm" is only effective on members of the opposite sex.

Final Fantasy Tactics, part 1

Sit still damn it! All this walking in place is making me nervous. Just...Stop...Moving!!!

thanks to jnz and somethingawful for the pic

Guitar Hero III: Do you have what it takes to rock?

How bad do you want to rock? 14-steps-to-start-the-game bad?

#	SCREEN	TO ADVANCE
1	Nintendo Legal	Wait
2	Activision Logo	Press button to skip
3	Red Octane Logo	Press button to skip
4	Neversoft Logo	Press button to skip
5	Vicarious Visions Inc. Logo	Press button to skip
6	Budcat Creations LLC Logo	Press button to skip
7	GH3 Intro Animation	Press button to skip
8	GH3 Title	"Press any button to rock"
9	Mode Menu	Press button to select career
10	Band Menu	Select band and press green (does not pre-select last band picked)
11	Difficulty Menu	Select difficulty and press green (does not pre-select last difficulty played)
12	Intra-Account Menu	Press Green to "play a show"
13	Venue Menu	Press Green to select venue (it does pre-select last venue reached)
14	Song Menu	Press Green to select song (it does pre-select last song reached)

Me, I'm keeping my day job.

The Darkness...It does not hide my shame.

I can understand how it would seem appealing to put yourself in the shoes of a tall, brooding hitman risen from the dead by dark supernatural powers which enable him to chew through an entire SWAT team with infinite bullets, a 30-foot tentacular claw, nightmare snake minions that eat the hearts of his enemies, and black holes created at will in search of street justice, but there’s a reason why The Crow never became a video game franchise.

And this isn’t it.

It’s because that stuff is simply no fun.

Sure the snake thing is pretty cool the first ten times until you realize, kneeling in the dark under the light bulb you just shot out, that you’re never going to die. Not ever.

Games get more “cinematic” and “accessible” each day another Maxim-reading 30-something middle management moron plunks down $499 to play the latest Madden on PS3 or another earnest douschebag gets his girlfriend hooked on Wii Tennis, but aren’t they easy enough already with regenerating health and checkpoints every other step?

I still see everything through till the end, but handing out "achievement” points for that doesn’t necessarily make it so.

You want a game that would be “cinematic,” if not “accessible?” Let me be Alvarez in Oz.

And next time give Lauren Ambrose red hair, please.


**Did you catch our Darkness hit single on ytmnd yet?**

Loco Roco, in haiku

My gnarled claw hands cry
for ibuprofen relief
they will not receive.

Dear Nintendo,

Dear Nintendo,
Whose bright idea was it to make a very loud, high-pitched chirp every time I started my Wii?

Please fire him.

Simpsonize me...Actually, on second thought, don't.

So it took a week to get simsponizeme.com to load, and another week to find a picture the damn thing would actually accept (after resizing them to 640x480 pixels, of course), but here's the best I could do:

Madonna

and B.D.

Scarface Does Not Want You to Play

Having the option to "Continue" in menus, pre-selected when save data is detected, is a perfect way to get players quickly back in the game.

Scarface deftly uses this feature to streamline the process down to a mere 15 steps.

#	SCREEN	TO ADVANCE
1	Sierra splash screen	Press x to skip
2	Farsight splash screen	Press x to skip
3	Opening movie credits	Press x to skip
4	Loading screen	Wait.
5	Load successful notification	Press x to continue
6	Main Menu	Press x for Single Player
7	Single Player	Press x for Movie Scenarios
8	Movie Scenarios	Press x for Continue
9	Level Select	Press x to Select current level
10	Continue Scenario	Press x to Continue current level
11	Intro to level text w/ quote from movie	Press x to continue
12	Scene from movie	Press x to skip
13	Briefing w/ quote from movie	Press x to continue
14	Goals	Press x to continue
15	Autosave	Wait.

Why God Why: 24 the Game

Have you ever pressed Start before, to skip a game's crap logo splash screens and had it actually pause on the splash screen? So you can sit there and look at their logo more closely? Yeah, neither have I.