Pagoda of Gaming

If you read the second last post in it’s entirety, I can confirm your thoughts. I did get told everything I expected I would in the car ride back to Fraserboring. My hair was commented on, things I should do at the weekend was touched on, my financial position, and the whole “I don’t want anything for christmas, just for you to be nice to me and not fuck it up” thing, to paraphrase.

Fraserboring is so bleak right now, and I expect it to stay as such the whole weekend. It hasn’t been discussed, but Aberdull may be on the cards tomorrow, which is about as bad as staying here except I get a better meal.

I’ve spent much of my evening so far “fixing” my father’s laptop, who retardedly, clicked on one of those “ZOMG YOU GOT VIRUSES IN YOUR PC, I HAVEN’T EVEN SCANNED IT YET BUT I JUST KNOW YOU HAVE THEM! YOU’RE A GULLIBLE FOOL SO INSTALL THIS PEICE OF SOFTWARE AND THEN BUY IT” stupid shitty anti-virus ads. He installed it, but never bought it, thankfully. To be honest I haven’t gotten totally rid of it. All is gone apart from this stupid thing that makes IE, god forbid he use firefox, forget it’s current homepage and make it go to this stupid thing that lists fake amounts of viruses in your system and tells you to “click here”. I went and installed McAfee security suite, so I think I’ll leave a note saying “don’t fucking click on anything that has the word antivirus or spyware or malware unless it has McAfee written on it somewhere”.

The only thing that seems to have hit the web in the past 24 hours would be Jeff Gerstmanns firing from Gamespot. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, let penny arcade’s news section fill in the BLANKS. I have to say that I used to think that Gamespot was the shit. Then their head host dude Rich Gallup left, -5 points. Now that Jeff got allegedly fired, -10 points. So to quote their ratings system, I’m giving Gamespot a 1.0 Bad. Their site is no longer entertaining for me. Everyone seems to think so too, NeoGaf has taken it upon themselves to autoban any talk about gamespot, cnet and it’s affiliated sites, Eidos and any Eidos related game. Quite good, quite good. To Geff, all the best, you’re an entertaining man, all gamespot had going for them apart from the canadian newsreader guy with the funny name, and I’d hate to see you dissapear completely. To Eidos, fuck off, you haven’t published or made a good game in years and you know it.

So all I’ll be playing this weekend will be what little is left of my WoW subscription and some little bits of EVE here and there. Turns out that the big assed Trinity patch is coming out in 5 days. The one that has completely new reskinned versions of everything in the game. I was surprised, I wasn’t expecting it for months let alone next wednesday. It is by many standards the re-launch of EVE, to open up the gates to some of the crazy stuff they mentioned at their fanfests. Me, I can’t wait to own a bar in a station in the middle of nowhere. I’ll call it “Neptune’s Bounty”.

I was going to grab a youtubed version of the new Trinity trailer and embedd it about here, but I thought that a shitty youtube resolution wouldn’t do the game’s new graphic engine justice, so click HERE to have it open in your media player of choice or click HERE to go to the game’s trailer page.

It’s the same everyday in a hell manmade. What can be saved, and who will be left to hold her?

I dunno about you, but that makes me really thirsty. Good thing I’ve got this half crate of Irn Bru to the right of me.

I don’t think I posted the original chocolate rain, but you should have seen it or atleast know about it, unless you’re a faggot.

I realise that it is infact 3:37am, and I also realise that I haven’t started that essay yet. Doesn’t matter, there’s little else I can do to make tomorrow any less of a shitstorm. I’ve got this essay to write, another sort-of essay to write, I’ve got to pack up some shit, maybe even do some washing, get fucking train tickets, get a fucking train to aberdull, sit through 4 hours of buisness lectures, one hour of games industry (highlight of my week) and half an hour for an academic tutor meeting. I also have to deal sitting with my mother in the car for an hour and fix my retard-father’s laptop when I get back to the ‘boring. And pre-emptively trimming the beard might be a good idea to avoid getting “You really need a haircut” every five seconds in amoungst all the “why didn’t you get a job for the winter”.

And most of that has to be delt with before 5pm, which is about 13.5 hours from now.

If someone could present me with a gun, this process would go alot quicker, quicker to the point of not at all.

I’ve spent most of my time on the net today trolling for Rock Band stuff. There seems to be a distinct lack of videos on Youtube that feature all 4 instruments being played at a decent level of difficulty. The “official” forums are pretty shit too, all full of people complaining about this and that. Though I did find one awesome thread, some guy took the time and effort to make a 75 page PDF with all the lyrics for all the songs in the game. CHECK IT. I’m sure it’s useful to some. I downloaded it and saved it under “I won’t need this until fucking spring”.

As you could imagine, I’m starting to long for the game, in the way that a dog would long for it’s master to come home. Spring is seeming like a long time away, but hopefully it’ll launch without the problems it’s been having in the US, namely the defective instruments. But also, it would be nice to get a huge cataloue of songs to play out of the gate, from disk and DLC sources and the revamping of the official website to become a sort of myspace for ficher-price rockers. Having all that ready for the european launch would be great, we can dream can’t we?

finding other people for the inevitable band shouldn’t be too hard. I have some people in mind, with access to a projector. You know who you are. “Pool’s Closed” has been the band name I’ve used since forever in every version in guitar hero, it would be nice to carry on the legacy with a few extra people manning the plastic clickers.

I think I’ve said before that I want to get the game for the PS3. I suppose my reasons are my own, I want to have something I actually play on the damn thing, and for some fucked up reason, I know more people who have PS3’s than 360’s, or atleast plan too. I also think that the DLC is slightly cheaper on the PS Store than on XBLM. I don’t need the achievements for this game either, they are pretty stupid.

Here is today’s video, what I consider to be the best Mac ad spoof ever. You can watch it and then leave if you want, the rest of the post is just me venting about shit.

So I’m heading home for the weekend tomorrow. It sucks, I know. I don’t really want to either, I’d much rather stay here until the whole christmas thing happens. But the ‘rents expect it of me for some arcane reason. I guess it comes as standard with the whole only child thing, not only am I expected to be perfect and act in a certain way, I’m expected to come home every two weeks, because god forbid I actually look after myself.

I’ll be spending the weekend mainly checking in with certain relatives, certain store owners and avioding questions from the parents with hard-crafted lies or simple diversions, spectacular questions like “Where did this letter from the bank come from, even though I totally opened it because I totally don’t respect your privacy” and “Why haven’t you got a job for the winter”, to which I can’t reply “I bought a PS3″ or “Working makes me want to hurt myself in a special way”. Then there’s spending time pulling teeth from my mother’s skull, asking what the fuck it is she want’s for christmas, having her say “I don’t want anything at all, I just want you home for the holidays”, which roughly translates into “You’d better buy me something good or I’ll go on a strop for two months and you’d better come home and not fuck up everyone’s holiday”. If I play anything at all it’ll be EVE or WoW, which I’ll gladly do. Anything to distract me from my misery.

My pwnmas holidays seem to have been cut short also. My timetable’s alot different from last year, for some reason my three weeks off start the week before the regular school holidays instead of giving me a week to myself after. It just so happens that it’s my father’s birthday the first week of my holidays so I have to go home to keep the peace, and because I’ll be on holiday I’ll be expected to stay. Hanging round my parent’s house for a week whilst they go off and work isn’t fun. I’ll expected to do stuff like cook and clean and any other odd job that’s put to me. The worst part is that I’m expected to like it. Then there’s christmas, but I can save all my comments on that particular religious fuck up for another post.

Never the less, in three weeks, my “holidays” start (using the term as loosely as possible), and I shall jump on the crazy train to Aberdeenshire with nothing but my NinTop and that special mask I wear when I’m home, the one that keeps me from saying certain things and makes it seem like I’m having the time of my life. I fucking hate that mask.

But inside your heart it is black and it’s hollow and it’s cold

My fingers swell with pain. I never realised how hard I hit the controller until I made that quick video, I guess it does explain alot, like the reason I’m typing this with my right hand, whilst my right rests in a cooling bowl of water. I doubt I’ll be doing little more than watching the last lot of battlestar tonight.

To clarify, that’s not my best playing of Lay Down by Preistess, it does infact suck ass. I’ll get better though, and when I do something really worth recording, I’ll totally upload something to prove my worth. Never know, I’ll maybe get picked up be a record label, become a rock star, get hooked on heroin hero, have a self revelation then return to my life as I knew it.

So Guitar Hero 3, well, what can I say. It’s entertaining, just a hell of alot less than before. It was either the right decision for Harmonix to sell the franchice to Activision or it was Neversoft that borked the game. The graphics haven’t changed at all, apart from giving your digital band’s male singer the jaw of Steven Tyler and more sparkely stuff for the next gen’s. The battle mode is utter shit, there’s no reason for it being there apart from making the game seem less like an expansion pack to guitar hero 2. And why the fuck do I need to play co-operatively to unlock some of the songs, that’s just bullshit. And I have no desire in engaging in online multiplayer, because it makes no sense for the genre.

The song list is really weird, HERE it is in all it’s…. glory, I suppose. First off, I’m just at the last set of songs on Hard mode, and the only song that’s given me trouble so far is the Queen’s of the Stone Age one, And that’s for two reasons: 1, because the rest of band make, how could I put this, “unintelligable rock”. So much that you can’t hear yourself playing over the rest of them. And 2, because it’s got a really shitty rhythm. I found the easiest way to beat it is to turn off the sound for the band and the SFX, leaving it just with your guitar noises. I’m sure that the final batch of songs are a bitch to play, I just haven’t gotten my teeth into them.

I’m not a fan of all these songs I’ve never heard before, or songs that I’ve heard before, but play very differently from what I thought they sounded like. Let’s just break it down into this, A little list of all the songs that I actually like in this version:

* “Hit Me with Your Best Shot” – Pat Benatar
* “Barracuda” – Heart
* “When You Were Young” – The Killers
* “Miss Murder” – AFI
* “Lay Down” – Priestess
* “Paint It, Black” – The Rolling Stones (Encore)
* “My Name Is Jonas” – Weezer
* “Even Flow” – Pearl Jam (Encore)
* “Rock You Like a Hurricane” – Scorpions
* “Welcome to the Jungle” – Guns N’ Roses (Encore played with Slash)
* “The Metal” – Tenacious D
* “Knights of Cydonia” – Muse
* “Cult of Personality” – Living Colour † (Encore)
* “Through the Fire and Flames” – DragonForce

That’s 13 out of 42 songs. I have to say that the Killers song is quite enjoyable, even though the rest of their music sucks balls, certainly my surprise hit of the game, though it matters not since the same song makes an appearance in Rock Band. But the rest of the songs, the other 29 songs, I’m glad to have completed them and say to myself; “I’ll never have to play that again”.

For experiment’s sake, let’s do the same list cutting of Rock Band’s Initial song list, Full list HERE:

* “Ballroom Blitz” – Sweet
* “Black Hole Sun” – Soundgarden
* “Dani California” – Red Hot Chili Peppers
* “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” – Blue Öyster Cult
* “Enter Sandman” – Metallica
* “Epic” – Faith No More
* “Go with the Flow” – Queens of the Stone Age
* “The Hand That Feeds” – Nine Inch Nails
* “Here It Goes Again” – OK Go
* “Learn to Fly” – Foo Fighters
* “Next to You” – The Police
* “Orange Crush” – R.E.M.
* “Run to the Hills” – Iron Maiden
* “Sabotage” – Beastie Boys
* “Wanted Dead or Alive” – Bon Jovi
* “When You Were Young” – The Killers
* “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – The Who
* “Brainpower” – Freezepop
* “Pleasure (Pleasure)” – Bang Camaro
* “Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld” – Timmy and the Lords of the Underworld

That’s certainly bigger. 20 out of 58, but that’s only the songs that I like, not to mention the ones that I know. But just look at it, the amount of epix songs in there is staggering. We’re not counting downloadable content either, which I should mention that Rock band has much more to choose from and has much more planned to come than GH3.

I’m not sure what the new GH3 guitar is like, I thought I’d save my self a couple of bucks and just get the guitarless version, though I do imagine that the new one is somewhat better than the old Xplorer. It doesn’t matter much anyways, It’ll be banished to the dusty corner once Rock Band rolls into town. Another thing, the Achievements suck ass, moreso than the game’s previous iteration, CHECK IT. They all beg for you to dedicate your life to the game and want you to drag another person down with you. To the point that there is very little for you to Achieve if your a lonely bugger and without an XBL connection.

And so we wait for Rock Band… The PS3 version I think, because I actually know people that have PS3’s.

All in all, the game really should’ve been called: “Guitar Hero 2: The Legend’s Of Rock Expansion: Rock Band Training Because It’s Not Out In The UK Yet”. I think that’s more catchy, don’t you? Here’s that killers song to sing us out. Warning, the music video makes no sense.

Lay down just like in a coffin, Then I’ll have nothing but a song

Amber Shepherd, Lesbian Lover and Secretary to the Universe. A giggidy giggidy, a giggidy goo.

So, Ahem…

#1. WHO’S GREAT FUCKING IDEA WAS IT TO MAKE THE MOST RETARDED, CUNTFAGGOTRIED, BORKED AUTO-SAVE SYSTEM OF ALL TIME???? IT’S FUCKING STUPID THAT WHEN I DIE BECAUSE THE COMBAT LAGS INTO MY FACE AND PRESENTS ME WITH A BILLION FUCKING EXPLODING ENEMIES THAT I LOSE OVER AN HOUR OF MY GAMEPLAY!!! IT’S JUST STUPID! And yes, I have lost many hours of the game because it fails to autosave anywhere remotely near where I was. You have to train yourself to save every time you enter a room, if your within hostile territory. Losing hours on a game that demands so much input has made me put down the controller and turn off the console three times already. Three times I’ve gone “Fuck this, let’s go watch battlestar”. It’s not that it’s consistantly bad either, some of the levels save at appropriate times, it’s just that some don’t. And when they don’t, they don’t. In a catastrophic fashion that set’s your character back 6 levels of progression.

#2. It’s graphically borked. To be honest, It wants to be a game on the next generation of X-Box, because the thing just does not want to load the fucking textures. You can see it too, each layer of each model’s texture is slowly taken into existance. It really does remove alot from the game. Combat is laggy as fuck too, especially when the shit hits the fan. Then there’s the environmental stuff, like your typical invisible walls and stuff that for some reason you can walk through. It also seems to me that your character just seems to float about at times, especially when your on a moving contraption like a lift or train, you can sometimes catch the characters moving when they shouldn’t be. Another thing. Each member in your party, including yourself has one of every weapon type in the game strapped to your back, this includes weapons you cannot even use correctly, i.e. have no skill training in them so you cannot use the sights correctly and your aim goes to fuck if you try to use them. Though the reason to have them all their must be for the in-game cutscenes, to ensure that each character can pull a pistol or a rifle at any given point. That’s actually quite clever imo, but still, kinda lame.

#3. The Game is deceptively large. You think you’ve got a universe at your fingertips, regretfully, no. Most of the planets, and by most I mean 9/10 planets, in any solar system in the game is un-inhabitable, meaning you can’t land your fucking ship and go exploring. The uncharted planets, that you can find in some systems, are little more than a big square bit of land with a couple of interesting points on it. Don’t get me wrong, the game is big, it’s just that sometimes, you can feel a little boxed in.

#4. You have no idea what your class actually does in relation to combat until you actually play the game. I’ve replayed the first two to three hours of the game three fucking times because I just couldn’t kill shit. The Infiltrator class sucks balls at the start because your aim with a sniper rifle is sooo jumpy and unstable that it takes forever to hit something and all you’re left with afterwords is a pistol and “tech” powers that have no use in combat until you get to the end of their progression trees. Then I tried the vanguard, who cannot hit a fucking thing at medium to long range. You’ve got shotguns that overheat after 2-3 shots and a pistol and “Biotic” powers (which I’ll bash on later). So Then I dropped all that, which at the time was 4.5 hours into the game, and went for the safest, straightest to the point class of all time, the Soldier. Awesome, you get to use all 4 weapons and you get a decent amount of health and best of all you can kill shit at a decent pace.

#5. The story doesn’t match the gameplay situation. So you’re essentially the baddest motherfucker in the galaxy, the guy right at the top of the military ladder and yet the galactic counsil can’t spring for the best of the best equipment? I have to go wading through trash cans to get my sniper rifles. I don’t even get a salary! If I’m the only one on the mission to save the galaxy from super-douche and his army of toasters, you would think they would give me some sort of super weapon. No they just give me the ship that I was already on with a crew of people I just happen to meet on the way. It’s intergalactic conicidences at it’s best.

#6. Money is irrelevant. You never have enough of it to buy anything decent. Not that is matters anyway, you get all your stuff from the conveniently placed cans and boxes throughout the game world. You don’t need to spend it on anything, because everything you want is just given to you, within reason.

#7. The game tells you NOTHING. The so called tutorials are utter shit, just peices of text thrown up that are cryptic in relation to what they actually mean. Oh and thanks for fucking telling me that X skips huge sections of dialogue, I could’ve used that ten hours ago. This would be the first time in ages that I’ve had to read a manual for a game. Here’s another aweosme example, I was stuck in the deepest of deepest research facilities, overrun with your typical Antlion creatures, and the game has the nerve to pop up infront of my face “Warning, you have almost reached your inventories capasity, you only have 150 units of space available in your inventory, of which 136 of which is already occupied”. WTF! Since when did I have an inventory. You cannot simply go and see a list of everything in your inventory. You have to go through the equipment windows and view everything within it’s own specific type of item. Where it the number saying 136/150???

#8. The “Magic” is hard to use. Not to mention that instead of giving you a MP guage or something to govern how much “mana” you have, everything has a long-assed cooldown. And we’re not talking your traditional fireballs and lightening bolts here, this shit is ripped right out of the mediclorian. Yes, they essentially are force powers. Throw shit with your mind, make a little useless black hole or make a little floating sheild that is impossible to place where you want. The powers also suck ass at the start, much like the Tech powers. If you want my opinion, leave them alone until you get the sexy blue bitch in your party then get HER to learn all the good stuff then simply tell her to use power X on targetY if you’re desperate.

#9. It really want’s to be a shooter and it really wants to be an RPG. Not really a bad thing, just in the way that it is executed. There’s a veil over the top of the shooting element that stops you from pulling off amazing shots that you do in the regular shooter, a veil made of calculations and number crunching. For example the reason you can’t fucking aim with the sniper rifle is because if the crosshairs stayed steady, you could supposedly one-shot most enemies in the game…. You can one-shot most enemies with the sniper-rifle, the weak ones, it’s just an utter bitch to aim because this is not exclusively a shooter.

#10. The truck is stupid, for many reasons. Firstly, why the fuck doesn’t it handle like a warthog? Bungie pwned that control scheme and this truck is essentially the love child of a warthog and a scopian tank. It just handles like shit because the left stick changes which way is forward in a 360 degree fashion. And if it’s a military truck, why does it only have one turret and one cannon. My passengers are just supposed to sit and do fuck all? no no no no, they should be shooting at shit too. I do love the booster rockets though, the get out of jail mechanism that saves you if you get your ass stuck on the geometry.

All of that shit aside, it’s not a terrible game, infact it’s a very good game. It’s just that all the things that are wrong with the game stand out like a bullet wound in your cranium. It’s not a keeper and it’s not a rental. It’s something you buy, finish, and if you don’t want to play through it again you trade it in. But you should play it, just to see the potential it has. Maybe “Mass Effect 2 : More Alien Pussy”, which I assume is in the pipeline, will come out with most of these problems fixed. The lore of the game, the stories, the creatures and the history of the game’s world is a work of brilliance, that does almost fill the hole in my heart that Star Wars left behind. A background that has a hint of every space epic ever made from Firefly to Battlestar Galactica.There does need to be more Mass Effect, just a more streamlined and working version. Let’s just say that if this game was A New Hope, then the next one had better be Empire.

Regardless, if I finish it by the end of the week, I shall be trading in my copy for some Guitar Hero 3 action. Guaranteeed. Now If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to get some chinese food for my meal of the day, before I fucking collapse. I’ve been living off Irn Bru and Haribo the past 24 hours. Fuck Yeh Seakings!

So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.