A Very Half-Assed Reaction to the Age of Conan Video Game

In the tradition of my very half-assed reactions to fantasy stuff, I will here review the Age of Conan MMO. There's a free to play intro, so I decided I'd take a crack at digital Hyboria.

First things first: the game needed to download 3+ gigs of stuff before it would play. That's in addition the ridiculously long install time. Even after that, it had to update itself for at least another ten minutes after I launched the game and got into the character builder. After I built my character, I had to wait ANOTHER ten minutes before I could actually fire up the game.

If you had any doubts that I was going to make a "Conqueror" class Cimmerian hero with the height and muscles maxed out, you haven't read enough of this blog. Surprisingly, the Cimmerians in this game are quite pale. Makes me wonder, considering how often Robert E. Howard refers to Conan as a "bronzed" man. Well, maybe he was just dipped in bronze at some point in his career.

First, the good. I kind of like the combat system of selecting to attack left, high, or right depending on where your enemy is defending. Since the screen shows you were best to attack (wherever the enemy has the fewest arrows), it's basically the world's easiest game of Simon Says, but it does get more interactive than just rick clicking something and going for a pee break while the fight unfolds.

I was hoping these three basic attacks would last me, but soon enough as I leveled up (the game threw levels at me the way I throw coins at dancing girls in Tarantia), I unlocked a bunch of abilities that have a short warm-up meter and then unleash an attack that takes a few seconds to cool down. So though I could say it's more or less like World of Warcraft, what I really mean to say it's more like World of Warcraft and less UNlike World of Warcraft. Still, the three basic attacks does work for me. It's kind of fun, forcing the player to take an active role in the fight... if you ignore that you're just swinging wildly away at each other anyway while you both stand still. Hack and slash, swashbuckling brawling this ain't.

NPCs have exclamation points over their heads when they have quests for you and question marks when you're ready to complete the quest. If you don't know why this is a criticism, you've probably never played a fantasy MMO.

After coming across a maiden in need of saving literally thirty seconds into entering the game (after someone bitched at me about me being a slave who just survived a shipwreck and told me to go into town), I killed a few beach combers, freed the maiden with a key one of them dropped, and then she started following me around, cheering and clapping every time I got into a fight. She became my very own personal cheering section while I got chewed on by baddies. Yay gender equality.

At this point I should mention the performance. My six year old computer (the retired Southern gentleman planter Colonel Aloisius Dell) did most emphatically NOT enjoy playing this game. I turned the settings all the way down until the graphics looked worse than World of Warcraft (flat textures, pastel colors, crude movements), but the screen would still freeze for a few seconds when there was too much going on--usually when I was getting stabbed in the nipples.

I beat up some pirates and their pet cats, found a few slightly less awful items (I started the game with a broken oar as a weapon--apparently I couldn't even find a whole oar), and beat up a fat guy who used to be my slavemaster. In this conversation, the game made sure to earn its M rating, making reference to "raping" my ears, calling the dude a "whore's son," and various other jargon Tarantino would have been proud of. It would have been a tense scene if our conversation wouldn't have drawn on so long, or if I could have just broken it off with a kick to the groin. He's all "Hey, my slave! Come be my slave again." I'm all "I'm going to kick your balls off." He's all "Don't be like that. Let's get you into town and I'll sell you." I'm all "I'm going to tear you a new asshole." He's all "There's no need to get bent out of shape. We can work this out. Here, put these chains on." I'm all "I'm going to tear off your head and shit down your neck." He's all "If you really feel strongly about it...." I'm all "CAN WE JUST START PUNCHING EACH OTHER ALREADY?" He's all "Well, if you REALLY want to." (Conversation paraphrased.)

After I beat up some Picts (hanging out in Tortage, in the Barachan isles? eh, it's a demo area), I headed past some vine-covered idols of dark gods (points) into a forgotten jungle-swallowed temple (more points) to fight some ghoul-type monsters. After doing my usual ass-kicking, I grabbed the key to a door and headed through the rest of the jungle. I punched some gorillas in the balls (REH loved using gorillas as enemies, so even more points here), then came across a flowing river of lava.

I really could have just gone over the bridge, but I decided to see what happens when I touch the river of lava. I gingerly dipped my toe into it, only to be told that I've been incinerated. A few seconds later, my character died, and I respawned. No biggie. My cheering section even found me a moment later and we continued with our day as though nothing happened. I talked to her, and she didn't even seem to notice that I, apparently, just died a horrible flaming death not thirty seconds ago and reappeared somewhere in the jungle. There was a gimmick about me being marked somehow and not allowed to die by the gods, but this really broke my sense of being immersed in a gritty fantasy world and reminded me I was playing a game.

When I arrived at town, I was told I couldn't go into town since I was wearing my slave chains. Instead of just putting on a really loose long-sleeved shirt, I was told to go talk to the blacksmith, who then told me he couldn't take my chains off until I helped him shore up a dam to keep lava from destroying the town. I had to go grab materials for him to help build the dam. Now, anything involving lava is awesome, so I might have forgiven such an obvious fetch quest, but this is a game with Conan's name literally all over it. It's not called "adventures in extreme engineering."

The blacksmith also reminded me of another complaint, which might seem trivial, but it really chapped my loincloth-clad ass. In character creation, I maxed out my character's muscles and height, and yet it seemed like every male NPC was A FREAKING HEAD TALLER than my guy. Maybe I get bigger as I level up or something, but nothing makes me feel weenier than having to crane my neck to look up at every Tom, Dick, and Harry who wants me to fetch his widgets. And a Conan game should NOT be making me feed weenie, BY CROM!

And then I saw my first other player. He jumped out of the town, bunny hopped right by me, swinging his sword wildly, and disappeared around a corner. I wish I was exaggerating.

At this point, I exited the game to go pick up some library books, and when I went to boot it back up, I found out I'd have to download the entire three gigabytes AGAIN. I guess it just lost the first three gigs or something. In a fit of rage, I buried my axe in the monitor and shouted, "BY THIS AXE I RULE!" (Okay, that's a Kull reference, but it's close enough via "The Phoenix on the Sword" connection.)

The verdict? It's an MMO. It's got some gimmicks, but it's just another MMO. There are buff classes, healing classes, magic classes, and melee and ranged DPS classes. Maybe the graphics would be better if my computer was made during the Obama administration, but that's not really at issue here. An MMO is a grind. You fight the same enemies over and over. You execute pointless, grinding quests. You swing wildly at enemies until one of you falls over. You kill "weedy grunt enemy" and "slightly bigger, though only slightly less weedy grunt enemy" a thousand times before you finally start equipping things that aren't called "torn ragged brown-stained loincloth with a hole that lets the breeze through." You're not changing the fate of empires or thwarting evil wizards, you're doing the same linear kill sprees a thousand other players are doing at the same time.

If you're looking for the tight action, the thrilling swashbuckling, the intense emotion, the wild bloody exotic ADVENTURE that is Conan, a video game just won't cut it.

It's almost like I saw this coming before I even tried it....

Now if you'll excuse me, the necromantic ghost of Robert E. Howard is at the door, and he's got a knuckle sandwich he needs to give me.

(PS Yes, I did go back and play a little more, but it wasn't getting any better, so I got bored and did the blog. I told you it was half-assed.)

It is one in the morning. Do you know where your Akuma is?

There is something in a man that seeks out competition, even conflict. There is something that yearns to be the best, that seeks to defeat and destroy the opposition and see his enemies scattered at his feet. The noblest form of this pursuit is the duel, and the true modern duel is the fighting game. Well, that and martial arts.

I have never really been a Street Fighter player. Sure, there was the youthful crush in the arcade when I was around ten, followed by brief dalliances with emulators and a fling with the Capcom characters in Marvel vs. Capcom 2. The truth is, ever since I got my Dreamcast, my one true love has been Soul Calibur. Compared to Soul Calibur's dynamic rhythm of dance, Street Fighter is a combo frenzy, more brutal and less artistic. Plus Soul Calibur had weapons and a late medieval theme, while Street Fighter has offensive stereotypes. As a young man, I played Soul Calibur for hours on end, beating every single mission in the first game (even the ones that warned you how difficult they were) and logging untold hours on Soul Calibur, Soul Calibur 2, and Soul Calibur 4. We skipped 3. Not sure why.

My Soul Competitur moved away a few years ago, however, and my circle of friends are Street Fighter fans. So, like a boxer teaching himself jujitsu so he can get into MMA, I had to teach myself Street Fighter IV. It was a struggle, especially considering some of my friends have been playing Street Fighter at least as long as I've been playing Soul Calibur, and their power level is right around, say, NINE THOUSAAAAND. But if this was the way I was going to get my fighting, I would see it through.

I learned quickly that the charge characters are completely contrary to my brain's way of processing moves, so I switched to the circle characters. I also had the advantage of having played Darkstalkers as a teenager, which taught me all the basic circle moves (half roll forward, tap forward+half roll forward, double attack buttons for EX moves, etc.). (I know Darkstalkers also has charge characters. But those characters suck.)

After experimenting with a few of the characters, I settled on Akuma. Above all other reasons, he is the ultimate badass, a fireball-flinging maniac with glowing red eyes and a supervillain's sense of superiority over the human race. Plus his super move is identical to Morrigan's from Darkstalkers, which is also a plus.

Though I have worked to forge myself into a warrior in this new art, I have continued to lag behind, getting increasingly frustrated along the way as I saw Akuma hit the dust again and again. Finally, I made a decision. In order to be the very best with Akuma, I would set myself the goal of beating all of his hard trials. (This would also give me some nifty icons to use for myself in online multiplayer, which is lovely.) This was quite some task, as I was still struggling with the normal trials.

Trials are a series of combos of increasing complexity that you have to perform on a standing opponent. Some are frustratingly hard. Others are even more difficult.

I finally beat the normal trials, sometimes taking as much as half an hour per trial, but then I moved on to the first hard trial. And I could not do it. I spent two hours late into one night trying without success. I just couldn't pull off the focus cancel move in time. Every time I was either too late with it or the focus attack would go off instead of cancelling into another move, wasting too much time.

But I was driven. Like a dog with his teeth in his prize, I did not want to let go. Like that boxer after getting his face pounded out of shape his first night of MMA, I refused to let it get the better of me. I was going to become a warrior, no matter how much longer it took. I tried again the next morning for another hour without success. And more that night, with building frustration and swearing, alternating soothing Akuma to console him on his failure and threatening him to shape up or else. Finally, by what felt like pure luck, I did it. After copious pelvic thrusting and a victory dance I was ashamed even my TV could see, I moved on.

The next trials brought the same level of frustration. I would try for hours, take a break, and come back. My brain was aching. I was learning to string together moves from pure muscle memory, though even then it was a matter of trying it over and over until all the stars aligned and it went off perfectly. The third trial was relatively easy, and the fourth was a matter of getting the tricky timing down. Then it came down to the fifth and last trial.

It was brutal. To say the timing was split-second would be an understatement: even a fraction of a second would have given me some leeway, and this sadistic trial gave me none. If it's true that the jiffy is the very shortest possible measure of time, then I was measuring the timing in jiffies. Not only that, but I had to stand the character in the exact right place. EXACT. Too close, and he would do the wrong move. Too far away, and the move wouldn't land.

It went on for hours. I didn't eat. Papers went ungraded. I told myself I would stop at 7. Then 8. Then midnight. I practiced each step of the sequence individually and in tandem with the steps around it. I had to get every move down perfectly. My thumbs changed colors. They became sore, then numb.

"It's not your fault, Akuma. I know you're trying."

"Damn you, Akuma! Just do what I tell you!"

"Are you playing with me, Akuma? Is this fun for you? Do you like to see me hurt?"

"I just don't know if this relationship is going to work, Akuma."

"I'm sorry, Akuma. Don't be cross. You know I don't mean any of those hurtful things I said."

And copious swearing.

Finally, at precisely 1:01 in the morning, I did it. Through some random chance, through some combination of providence and sheer tenacity, because even if I can pull it off only once in ten thousand tries it has to go off right some time, I did it. And then I went to bed.

I wish I could say that I don't feel a sense of accomplishment, that I realized at the end how empty and meaningless succeeding at a video game is. I know none of this translates into real world skills and I can't put "Passed all of Akuma's Hard Trials in Street Fighter IV" on my resume. I know in twenty years no one will care about Street Fighter.

But I do feel accomplishment. I set myself on a task that seemed almost impossible and I did it. My thumbs are still hurting, as I'm reminded every time I tap the spacebar. I wouldn't be at all surprised if some facts about plate tectonics or the Cambrian explosion or the Hapsburg dynasty have been displaced in favor of the exact timing of Light Hurricane Kick -> Gorshoryuken. But I did it. Akuma is supreme. I am Akuma.

By the way, I also beat the game on Hardest Difficulty. But that was nothing compared to this.

((PS I know Akuma is called Gouki in Japan, but I don't care. These are the facts: M. Bison is white, Vega wears a mask, and Balrog is a boxer. While we're at it, I'll probably always say "Rye-you" rather than "Ree-you". That's just the way it is. Oh, and I did grade the papers during a break in gaming. I may be driven, but I'm not negligent.))

The Conan Video Game

I'm not reviewing the MMO, for reasons I stated earlier. Instead, I'm reviewing the game for the 360 and PS3.

When I found it used for twelve bucks at GameStop, I wasn't expecting much. I thought it would be some vague attempt at creating a fantasy game with the name tacked onto it, something completely un-Conan with orcs and elves and crap like that. I expected awful graphics, awkward controls, and a storyline that stuck to the source material about as closely as Conan the Destroyer did. Which means not at all.

But I was surprised to find that wasn't the case. The game actually stuck more closely to the original stuff than the books did. Conan looked and acted like Conan should, even throwing out brash quips when he kills his enemies that sound like something straight out of Robert E. Howard, such as "Let Crom judge you" and "I'll cleave your skull to the teeth!"

The storyline was vaguely Conan-esque. My only complaint was that Conan, like many heroes in video games these days, loses his powers after the first mission and has to use experience points to recover them. For some reason, the pieces of his armor are also imbued with magical spells, which he can use as he recovers them piece by piece. As any fan will know, Conan never uses magic. But really, magical power (let's just call it mana) is very rare and the spells aren't much more effective than a good piece of steel, so that does make up for it somewhat.

If you've played God of War, you don't need to know anything to play Conan. The control system is ripped directly from the other game. It's derivitive to the point that it can hardly even be called a different game; the only 'difference' is that Conan can pick up and use the weapons of his enemies. Everything else is precisely the same as God of War. Don't get me wrong; I love a little Kratos action, but Conan could have used his own control system, something more reckless and swashbuckly. Most of the time, the camera behaves and the controls work, but they do sometimes get awkward. Particularly annoying is the need to tap a button to climb walls, and if you don't tap the button quickly, you casually release (and usually fall to your death).

Ron Perlman does the voice of Conan and Claudia Black does the romantic interest, which really lends the game a leg up. Sadly, the graphics don't match; despite this being a PS3/360 title, the graphics don't look any better than many PS2 games I've played.

The stages feel nice and Conan-y, from savage-infested jungles to sand-swallowed cities. At one point, Conan seems to travel to ancient Greece, which felt completely wrong because the Hyborian age is thousands of years before Greece ever existed. But hey, even Howard borrowed from time periods up to the age of piracy, so it's hard to be critical of that. (Conan even appears in one story wearing a buttoned coat and a tricorne hat.) A particular joy was a demon-worshipping cult in a cave that kept killer gorillas. (Howard included gorillas as villains almost as often as he used snakes.)

One surprising pleasure was the boss fights. Apart from the interminable final fight in which you have to repeat the same process four times to defeat the end boss, the boss fights are all unique and interesting. Half the time, it's more about solving puzzles than about button mashing. The game does incorporate push-button cutscenes, which I hate, but you can't have everything.

Because of the gratuitously topless women and the over-the-top gore, the game will appeal only to a limited number of fans. Robert E. Howard himself was never above making a buck from his own creations at the price of the world's 'integrity,' so I can see him approving of this game. Though it's derivitive, there are worse ways to spend ten bucks.

Borderlands

As readers of this blog will know, I'm a big fan of the post-apocalyptic genre, particularly of the Mad Max movies, which I think are still the epitome of that world. It's not a stretch, therefore, that I should be interested in the new game Borderlands, which a friend of mine rented for me for the PS3. Before I continue, I should include that my friend and my brother both like the game a lot, so it seems I'm the minority opinion here.

The graphics are cell-shaded and stylized, which makes the game feel like a weird dream. The characters you meet are all varying degrees of ridiculous charicatures, which is a major strike against giving the world the right feeling. A lot of the apocalyptic (the game is actually set on a border planet, but let's call a potato a potato) elements are played for laughs. There are also no conversations: the characters, of whom there are precious few, are only there to give you quests, and shops are just dispenser machines.

The game is marketed as a mixed FPS and RPG, but it doesn't hold up as either. I've been playing FPS since the Doom days, so I've developed a bit of talent, but the game requires none. It's a slog of shooting each other a lot, and hiding when you need your shield to recharge. Since the game is heavily hit point dependent, it translates to just a lot of lead in the air while you whittle down the opponents' health bars. The controls are fine, except for the vehicles, which always move in the direction you're facing rather than turning the direction you're turning the control stick, which just doesn't feel right.

The game doesn't work as an FPS, because you really don't use any skill in fighting, but it doesn't work as an RPG, either, because you can't make any choices in the story or even interact with the other characters. Character customization is pretty flat (you get a tree of buffs like in World of Warcraft, but they're really not that great), and you get a grand total of one special ability. This might change later in the game, but I played to around level 20 of 50, so I'd like to think I at least scratched the surface.

You've seen these characters before. The big brute, the magical slender woman, the standard soldier, the skinny sniper. Hell, apart from the woman, you've got them all in Team Fortress 2, and in that they're actually more fun.

The guns have varying effects, including shocking your enemy, eating through their armor, or setting them on fire. This does provide a level of picking the right weapon for the job, which is nice, but the plethora of guns the game advertises just isn't attractive to me. The guns have a bunch of different modifiers, like the yellow weapons in Diablo, that make them more or less unique, but they're about as consistent and useful as those weapons: just because you can pile a bunch of random modifiers on something doesn't mean it feels 'right', which many of these guns don't. A gun that shoots really fast AND has low recoil AND does fire damage is just... fair, since it really just boils down to raw damage output. If the guns were closer in damage potential, like they are in most FPS games, you could pick the flavor that suits your style best. When it comes down to it, I'm really not that excited about shooting weird guns, particularly when it's shooting them at the same enemies over and over.

Which brings me to one of the biggest downfalls of the game: the enemies level along with you. I don't understand why games these days all seem to have a level-up system. It makes sense in games like Dungeons and Dragons, where it means (or should) that you can fight bigger and more interesting enemies, but what's the use if you never get other enemies to fight, but just tougher versions of the same ones? In a world where most of your enemies are human anyway, it doesn't make sense. Why should one particular noggin take ten (or a hundred) times as much destructive power to go 'splode as another? For that matter, is any one gun really a hundred times more deadly than another?

Now, I know that these complaints can really apply to many games, even games I love, such as Fallout 3, but those games have elements that rise above the rest, elements such as writing and interesting characters and mood. Borderlands lacks all of these. It's a long grind. There were a few standout moments of "hey, that was kind of cool", but really it was hours and hours of slogging through the same enemies with little to make it worthwhile.

Wild West FPS

I think I abandoned any coherence of theme or topic in my blog a long time ago, so now I'm going to write something that might even interest one person in the world: why I believe no one will ever make a Wild West first-person shooter game that feels right. I have tried Call of Juarez, Red Dead Revolver, and Gun, and none of them made me feel like I was either in a Western movie or in a real-life Wild West situation. The reason is that video game developers are too tied to traditions of first person shooters, traditions that are opposed to the way a Western game should feel. These include:

1. You Run Everywhere. Since the days of Doom and Quake, first-person shooters have featured a guy running endlessly. Although some modern games attempt to make this a bit more realistic by giving you limited amounts of running, these still, more often than not, give you superhuman abilities to dash from place to place like a giddy pony, prancing merrily while laying down a hail of bullets.

Why it doesn't work: How many Westerns have you seen in which the heroes, instead of moseying down Main Street while tumbleweeds blow by in the background, instead charge down the dusty lane like a maddened bull? Or, in the middle of a firefight in the tavern over the only good-looking showgirl, dodging back and forth like a paranoid with a bladder problem? It just doesn't work. If there's a run function at all, it should be used extremely sparingly: very brief bursts of speed paced far apart.

2. You Piss Bullets: In the original FPS games, the only limit to your ability to shove out a living wall of ammo was your total ammo capacity. Even in more modern games, your guns carry dozens of rounds and take only a second or two to switch magazines. This lets you spew out such a ridiculous number of bullets that it makes that scene from Hot Shots Part Deux seem like a tea party with stuffed animals by comparison.

Why it doesn't work: In the Wild West, your gun didn't have an ammo belt leading down into a mystical lead reservoir in the Marianas Trench. In fact, the famous Colt Peacemaker held six bullets, five if you didn't want to shoot yourself in the leg if your gun got jarred. To reload, you first pull the hammer back to half-cocked, then use the reloading rod to push out every used cartridge, one at a time, rotating the cylinder as you do so. Next, you insert each new cartridge, one at a time. Even assuming you walk around with a handful of cartridges and have completely steady hands while bad men try their very best to improve your body with convenient blood ventilation (as all games seem to do), this is highly time consuming. Of course, some guns allowed for entire cylinders to be swapped out for pre-loaded ones, but I doubt even a skilled gunfighter would carry more than a few of these at a time. And that only applies to pistols; rifles were frequently single-shot, and even lever-action rifles had to be reloaded one bullet at a time.

3. You Mow Down Hordes of Bad Guys: This one is self-explanatory. In most games, you practically win entire battles single-handedly. Considering how many busloads of remarkably similar-looking enemies you kill, I'm surprised your character doesn't get carried off to Valhalla by valkyries during the inevitable death sequence. (The Call of Duty games are particularly bad at this: on the one hand, they expect you to chew through more bad guys than Rambo. On the other hand, despite your jaw-dropping killing power, you get walked through the missions by your squad commanders like a directionally-challenged twelve year old, as though having a single set path to travel from beginning to end of the map wasn't enough. Apparently, your supervisers think you are the embodiment of god's wrath on Earth sent to mete out justice on the unworthy, with the problem solving skills of a kidney bean.)

Why it doesn't work: While there are Westerns with high body counts (The Wild Bunch comes to mind), these inevitably involve Gatling guns. Since I don't want to go on another tangent about what annoys me in FPS games in general, let me just say these parts are basically pointless mini-games; entertaning only so long as the thrill of massacring the entire population of a small town with a powerful weapon lasts. In most situations, fights are between fairly small numbers of people. In The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, Tuco and the man with no name sneak up and blow up a bridge and everybody leaves. In an FPS, they would have to shoot everyone anywhere near the bridge, blow it up, and then fight and kill the army that shows up to avenge it. Actually, it wouldn't be both of them. It would be the man with no name doing it all, while Tuco shoots one or two enemies, tells the same jokes ten times, and complains about how poorly you're doing as your soft squishy organs are slowly and forecefully replaced by lead.

4. Everyone is a Superhero: You shoot a bad guy in the stomach at point-blank range. He convulses for two seconds. Then, he shoots you in the face. Everyone takes as much killing as a buffalo, not to mention your own character survives so much he might as well make a living dynamiting train tunnels by holding the explosive in the right place and waiting patiently for it to blow, only to repeat again once he waits a few seconds or consumes a few health packs for his health to recover.

Why it doesn't work: Nothing is worse than shooting someone with your last bullet, only to have him shoot you right back as you struggle to reload. Also, just how well would Unforgiven have worked if Gene Hackman would have gotten up, brushed himself off, and squared off with Clint Eastwood all over again after Clint shoots him the first time? What about if during the climax to The Quick and the Dead, if Sharon Stone had to shoot Gene Hackman seventeen times instead of twice(actually, let's not talk about The Quick and the Dead. It's a silly movie.)? It's just not right, man.

HOW IT SHOULD WORK: Fewer bad guys. Fewer bullets. Each bad guy has a good chance to kill you; one or two hits and you're gone. No health packs or bandages or any such bullshit, except maybe bandages to partially repair limbs crippled by one bullet. When you're done, you light a cigar, toss your poncho over your shoulder, and ride your horse off into the sunset.

Bonus: Oh, and no freaking half-hour cut scenes. I don't want to have explained to me why my character wants to kill these people. I can fill that in for myself. Heck, I can do so in three words (four if you count the contraction): he's being paid. And that's plenty good enough for me.

Here's the final scene to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, my favorite Western. Now imagine if, instead of standing there firing one shot, they all charged in from opposite ends of the cemetary, banging away the whole time. Then, once they closed to within the ring, they were all three dashing around in circles, shooting off bullets all over the place, each getting hit a dozen or two times, reloading all the while, before finally collapsing... and respawning to start shooting all over again. It's just a good thing Sergio Leone doesn't play FPS.

A "Review" of Street Fighter IV

My friends recently rented Street Fighter IV for the PS3, and since neither of them has a PS3, we've been playing it at my apartment, and they left it here for the weekend.

When I was a kid, I spent hours in front of this game. On the rare occasion I had quarters, I'd play, mashing buttons like a fiend and usually getting my ass not so much handed to me as shoved in my face by older kids who knew what the hell they were doing. More often than not, I watched those kids playing each other. I wanted to think that, one day, I, too, could make those cartoon characters beat the crap out of each other as well as they could.

It's past two o'clock in the morning. I've been trying to beat the final boss with Abel since 1:00. I finally did it. I've been swearing more than I probably have all year. I said things aloud to the screen that I never thought I'd say to anyone. I've railed, I've seethed, I've punched the air. I have Nintendo thumb so much my left thumb is literally purple.

But I finally beat that sonofabitch Seth. I unlocked the last character it's fairly(!) easy to unlock. I feel like I accomplished something epic. I feel like long poems will be written in heroic couplets about this day. The day Seth met Able, and, after a grueling war that lasted long into the night, stood victorious.

And unlocked some sad dumbass Bruce Lee wannabe I will never bother playing as.

E3 and The Dark Knight

I have this to say about The Dark Knight: stop reading this and go watch it. It will kick the shit out of you.

Maggie Gyllenhaal's nose looks terrifyingly like Michael Jackson's. She is not a good-looking woman. That's a real shame, since every character seems to make a point of saying how good-looking she is in the movie, as though the producers were trying to convince me of something I know isn't true. And no, that's not a spoiler; the Joker says it in the trailer, and anything in the trailer isn't a spoiler.



I'll be honest: my review of E3 is a huge complaint-fest. Read this only if you want to hear me whining like a bitch with a skinned knee.

So I actually paid attention to the ultra-consumerist stack of advertisements and shamelessly masturbatory presentations that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo this year. At least, that's what I think E3 stands for; there wasn't a single indication WHAT the three E's are in this year's presentation, but that's neither here nor there. Apart from some significant website surfing, most of my information came from G4. Side note: holy crap. Watching G4 makes me feel like I'm watching a student production by a bunch of nerds on cocaine. Is there nobody on set who's older than thirty? What's meant to seem fun and random feels like a bunch of kids doing public access, except they get to interact with some real industry powerhouses, like some Bizarro world Wayne's World.

Moving along, there was almost nothing at E3 that got me excited for anything. One of Sony's few exclusive games is BigLittlePlanet or LittleBigPlanet or whatever it's called. It's so adorably cutesy I almost had to have a root canal just hearing about it, and it involves the sixaxis controller's direction sensing function. Note to Sony: get off the Wii bandwagon! I bought a PS3 because I don't give a shit which way my controller is pointing and neither should my system. So long as I'm pushing the right buttons and moving the right sticks, the controller could be up my ass, and that's fine (well, not technically, but you know what I mean). If I wanted to waggle a controller like a jackass trying to convince the system to do what I'm desperately trying to approximate, I would have bought a Nintendo.

I've been really excited for Left4Dead, but now I'm not so sure. They unveiled new footage to go with what they already showed us. The verdict? It looks like outdoor maps play just like the indoor ones, except with new backgrounds. Give me a break. This is starting to feel more and more like an endlessly repetitive, mind-numbing zombiefest that only a good multiplayer will possibly save. But I'm starting to doubt it.

Resistance 2, fortunately, made the hurting stop for a second by reassuring me that it has a multiplayer co-op mode. I breathed a sigh of relief. But wait: it's online only! If I want to play on the same console, I have to play competitively. Since I don't have any friends who own a PS3, I'm humped. Thanks, Resistance 2!

And Fallout 3 looks cool as hell (I'm already considering assless chaps and a leather facemask to get into the post-apocalyptic feel), but is also disappointingly single player. I'm starting to feel like the days of co-op multiplayer on one system are becoming a happy memory.

They were raving about Farcry 2 on G4. It doesn't look any better than games that were out years ago. Seriously, UT 2004 looked pretty comparable. It's nice of them to try to make games that will run on my five-year-old system, but there was seriously nothing in this game that set it out from anything else. It must have taken a whole trunkful of amphetimines to try to get excited about that game.

And what the hell, SquareEnix? Honestly, I shouldn't bitch about Final Fantasy XIII being on both X-Box 360 and the PS3 since I'm probably not going to plunk down sixty or seventy big ones to buy it, but seriously, I was hoping it would give the PS3 a big market boost to help it in the console wars so I'd have other, better games to look forward to. But no dice, so I'm pissed. It looks like the poor performance of the PS3 so far has caused SquareEnix to have second thoughts, so now they're in their "trial separation" phase, where they're still getting together now and then, but all they do is awkwardly watch TV until SquareEnix comes up with an excuse and leaves early, leaving Sony alone in bed and clutching a bottle of Jack Daniels, curled up in the fetal position wondering where it all went wrong.


This blog is for entertainment purposes only. Don't come crying to me if you disagree.

Oh Shit

Sony has lost more than three billion dollars on the PS3.

Seriously, that sucks.

Sorry for the language to everyone below 18 and/or living in Utah.

I know it's fairly common for games companies to lose money on their consoles, and we've known the PS3 is being sold well below cost ever since it first came out, but considering how badly the PS3 is being WTF PWNED in the console wars by the Wii, this isn't good news.

Why I will never play the Age of Conan MMO

Conan as he is meant to be: covered in blood, holding two gore-soaked swords, with a barely-dressed woman jonesing for a helping of his steely thews. (ironically, image taken from a video game)

Some people, particularly people who know about my fondness for both computer games and Conan, have suggested that I might look into the new Age of Conan Massively Multiplayer Online game. I've heard that the graphics are great and that the gameplay will be a lot of fun. To begin, let me say that I don't think I'll ever play any MMO again; at least, I hope I won't. To say I got burned playing World of Warcraft is an understatement: I got flame-charred. Games like that only give you the illusion that you're playing; you're just pushing the game through its paces, either succeeding in killing-this/going-there or going back to try again, like a glorified version of Chutes and Ladders.

So then, why does a Conan MMO offend me so much? When I was a lot younger, I used to look forward to the coming of the "Bookmobile" because the library in my little desert military base wasn't much for adventure stories, but the Bookmobile had so many fun books, not least of them books with a strong, brave man on the cover holding a sword! And so I was introduced to Conan, and I thrilled at the far-fetched tales of his wanderings and adventures, swept away to a heroic time and place. I must have read a dozen of those novels at least. Conan will always have a place in my heart assured for him just for that.

Now, I have rediscovered Conan in the stories by the man who created him: Robert E. Howard. Unlike the novels I read as a boy, these stories aren't just "doing Conan," expanding a world of adventure and fantasy. To Howard, Conan meant something: it was about the heroic struggle of a single man against the world, a real man, as Howard himself might have put it. Howard believed that civilization was a corrupting influence on what it really meant to be human, and he used Conan to strike back against a world he hated for its destruction of individuality and spirit. A Howard Conan story is more than just a remarkably visual and gripping read that I see reflected in the fantasy genre all over; it's a deeply-felt story of a time Howard longed for, when a man's worth truly mattered. And it's come to mean much the same for me: I, too, wish for a time I could be something more than just a nearsighted, skinny lad with no prospect of anything magical in his life. Sure, Conan would have bent me in half like a blade of grass, but at least I would have had that chance to stand up and be something.

And that is why I will not be trying the Age of Conan MMO.

In quest of Steam-powered Happiness

So, no thanks to my good friend the Lord Admiral of Her Majesty's Airship Fleet, I've been looking into the steampunk thing recently. For those of you who don't know what that is, take one part Smashing Pumpkins's "Tonight, Tonight" video, one part Jules Verne, one part Charles Dickens, and one part Wild, Wild West, stir very thoroughly (to break up any chunks of Kenneth Branagh from the latter part), and voila! steampunk. Of course, I've known about this for a few years now, and I've read the first "major" steampunk book, The Difference Engine, partly because my lord and master (William Gibson) was one of the people who wrote it. But I haven't really gotten into the whole thing until the Admiral encouraged me to.

Part of my looking into this thing has involved some awesome art, notably a steampunk Dalek.

But most importantly of all, I've been looking for a video game that uses steampunk. Those of you who play World of Warcraft already know what I call steam-pathetic: steam-powered stuff that clanks around, but with none of the elegance or wonder of the Victorian age, and completely lacking that amazing quality of Victorian culture that true steampunk should embody.

That's exactly what I found in Silverfall. The game is a pretty average Diablo-clone. The graphics look good, the characters being the high point, but the story is flat as a Japanese woman, and the voice acting is laughable and pretty spotty:only the most major conversations have a voice element, the voice actor frequently says things differently than the text does, and at one point a character said "cur-stal" instead of "crystal," which really makes me wonder who they get to do these things. Then there was the biggest turd: the monsters level up with you and respawn in all the zones. That's right: when you first leave town, you fight level 1 or 2 zombies. Later, when you leave the same town the same way, you fight the same zombies, except now they're still your level. This completely takes away any point in levelling up and getting new equipment! In fact, you have to struggle to get new equipment just so you can keep killing the same monsters you were killing five or even ten levels ago! It's as if everything cost more just because you got a raise. Imagine if you had to write the exact same paper every year in high school and college, except it got a page longer every year. Yeah, that's basically the same thing. Then, to put the final nail in the coffin, there wasn't a hint of Victorian culture anywhere in it. Sure, there was the very most basic glimpse of steam-powered stuff (a steam-powered chainsaw sword being the high point) and the promise of a flying steam-city as a later base you can visit, but overall, I found it to be a very disappointing mix of World of Warcraft steam-powered gizmos and Diablo. Steam-pathetic indeed.

Then I tried Arcanum. If I can say one thing for Silverfall, it has very nice cell-shaded 3-d monsters and characters. Arcanum is the opposite. Sure, it was made five years before the other game, but its graphics are pre-Diablo. Can you say Fallout-riffic? The story had some very promising Victorian elements, though, even though the first town I came across was more Wild West than Victorian London. Then again, a Wild West character might be very at home in a steampunk adventure as a gunslinger/mechanic. Hmm....

All in all, I might actually buy Arcanum. Its graphics were pathetic one-dimensional crap and the story had me yelling "CHOO CHOO!" because there was no way off the train tracks, but at least it had that hint of Victorian elegance.

And you have to admit, trains are pretty steampunk.

Now That's How It's Done!

Today, all props go out to an unnamed boy who, when his mother was being attacked and strangled, jumped into action by slashing the throat of the man attacking her, killing her attacker. The boy was twelve. And what had he been doing prior to his heroic act? Playing video games. Yet more proof that you just don't mess with gamers, even twelve-year-olds.

The story: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080402/ap_on_re_us/boy_stabs_man

My young friend, my hat is off to you.

Thoughts

I saw a commercial on TV for something that's "hand-blown." You really have to wonder how they can manage that. I know there's the guy in Pan's Labyrinth with eyes in his hands, but this takes it to a whole new level. Mouths in your hands? Does the esophagus run all the way up the hand?

Late-night G4 has commercials for hookup lines. One of the tag-lines was "Meet REAL girls!" I guess they know that their audience might have difficulty differentiating real girls from the other kind. Here's a hint, guys. The girl in math class? Real. Lara Croft? Not real. Angelina Jolie? Mostly real.

Being a geek always gets better. Video games are constantly becoming more beautiful, more interactive, more interesting, and just more engaging. Seriously, though, does anybody ever think of the one-handed geek? What about the blind geek? I can imagine that for the average guy, losing an arm doesn't take away his ability to watch football or hang around drinking beers. But for a geek, it's socially crippling. Not only does it halve one's talking speed (typing, of course), but it makes being a 1337 gamer virtually impossible.

I mean, sure, they had that program special about some blind kid who was really good at Soul Calibur 2, but one of the kids they had playing him on the show even said that he couldn't figure out how the kid kept pulling off those unblockable moves. What?! They had this kid playing n00bs who don't even know how to execute an unblockable? No wonder he kicked ass. If they would have given me a controller, I would have kicked his ass. Just keep walking around him until he loses track of your position, gets frustrated, and throws out a few attacks. Step in when he's vulnerable in the middle of a combo and lay on the hurt. Once you break his flow, he won't recover. Yes, I actually put thought into how to kick a blind kid's ass in SC2. What next?

People need to start coming to me for ideas about writing comics. I leaf through comics and say to myself that the stuff I come up with is much better. Yes, I'm probably the only one who thinks so. But if you're desperate for ideas, get in touch. I've got this one involving demons. You won't be disappointed. Or maybe you will, but if you're wondering where all that came from, it's really from my watching G4 and them talking about comics, but I'll pretend it's a built-up frustration from my constant effort to find someone to do the art for my webcomics ideas.

Here's an exchange of messages that happened a while back with the guy who promised to do a volume for me, but didn't do a single page. Not even a single frame.

Him: How's the comic going?
Me: I might ask you the same thing. Or are you asking whether I chose anyone else to do the art after I stopped hearing from you? I didn't.

And that was it. After half a year of not hearing from him, waiting for ages to see some sort of progress from him beyond basic head concept sketches, I got nothing. And I've still gotten nothing. Maybe I'll send him a message.

Okay, here's what I just emailed him:

Hi,
Did you ever get more work done on that comic we had planned? Or, even if not, are you working on anything comic-like? No hard feelings if you've decided to go back on making the comic, but I'd like to know if that's the case, so I can try to move on with the project.

Okay, so I lied about the no hard feelings thing, but I never tell people when I'm really pissed at them. Maybe I should. But enough people hate me as it is.