Fungii.com

CSI Deadly Intent The Hidden Cases DS

I've been playing CSI Deadly Intent The Hidden Cases on my new Nintendo DSi. It's pretty good, not very challenging, but it is fun being part of the CSI team and investigating cases.

One thing that bugged me just now as I was finishing the first case, a piece of dialogue comes up where a suspect says " ...but the crew showed up earlier then I expected..." Argh, don't they have somebody to go through the game and correct obvious mistakes like that? Very annoying.

Some of the puzzles can have slight hiccups, like this one where you have to put together a picture with a bunch of pieces using the touchscreen. You can drag the piece or rotate it, but sometimes when you try to drag it, the piece rotates instead, or vice versa. Another puzzle, where you fix some corrupted data, was pretty tiresome. Still, the gameplay was a bit of a cakewalk, and yet still fun.

The game incorporates a few of the CSI characters, namely Brass, Hodges, Catherine Willows, Ray Langston and Al Robbins. The graphics are serviceable but the replays of the crime could certainly have been handled better. The music is kind of "bleh" and repeats itself over and over. Where is the Who intro tune?!

Caesar III - Lugdunum

Freaking X-Box Gamercard bullshit kept bouncing me to the XBox Live home page every time I loaded my main page here. Fuckers!!

Anyway, I finally beat the Lugdunum scenario in Caesar III. I forgot how freaking hard this game could be!! Eek!

GHII:Possum Kingdom

I managed to finish Possum Kingdom in Guitar Hero II today, although I only got 74% or something. I did better earlier but when I was changing the cables on my XBox, it reset itself and I lost my score! Then I was so pissed off I couldn't play worth a damn. Oh well, I'll do better next time. I hope.

Guitar Hero II

Actually, that video is from Guitar Hero III but I only have GHII. That video blows me away, I could never play that song. Not in a million years, I'm so uncoordinated. Yesterday my GH guitar stopped working so I had to bring it back to the Future Shop and exchange it. When I got back, after doing some practicing, I took another shot at my first song [Surrender] in career mode. When I first got this game, I immediately went into career mode and tried to play this song. And got booed off the stage! Oh the humiliation! So last night I started off pretty good [100% in the first section!] but then I screwed up and people in the crowd were booing me and I thought I would lose again. But I stuck with it, hitting the odd streak here and there, and finished the song! Awesome, I'm a rock god, I limped through Surrender!

XBox360 Live login error fixed!

I figured out what was going wrong when I tried to setup my account on Xbox Live and the solution was ridiculously stupid! This was my problem:

What was the problem? The virtual keyboard you use to type in this information has what appears to be a "." key at the bottom, in the same area where the period is on a regular keyboard. This is not a period, but some other character, an underscore most likely. Although it's hard to tell, even at 1080p resolution! I entered my email address again, being sure to use the period key from the virtual number pad this time, and it went through no problem. Doh!

Too bad MS didn't see fit to give a more pertinent error message rather than the completely inaccurate, not to mention misleading "Xbox Live signup is currently unavailable. Please try again later." Sometimes I think they do this shit on purpose just to fuck with us. Bastards!

XBox 360

I got an Xbox 360 this week. Couldn't really afford it, but I couldn't pass up on the deal they were offering at the Future Shop - Forza 2, Spiderman Alliance and Guitar Hero II [with the guitar] were free with the purchase of the premium system.

Today I tried to get XBox Live set up on it, what a fucking nightmare. I bought a Linksys router, which was a royal pain to get working by itself. As if that wasn't bad enough, the Live account signup kept rejecting my email address as not valid. So I created an account using my PC and then tried to use that account to get on Live. But it keeps telling me it can't do it and to try again later. I tested my connection to Live and it says everything's fine so I don't know what the problem is. I fired off an email to Live support so hopefully they can help. Very frustrating.

Japanese Nintendo Commercial

I like how the guy comes flying out the bus into a brick wall, shakes himself off and keeps running.

PS2

Last week I finally got around to buying a Playstation 2. The price dropped down to $130 and I had a $25 off coupon, so I figured it was a good time to take the plunge. I bought two games to go with it, GTA: San Andreas and God of War. GTA was about what I expected, I played the first one on the PC before and wasn't terribly impressed. This one is about the same. I'm not sure what people see in this game, it's pretty mediocre overall. As for God of War, I'm more than a little pissed with it. I got to the place where you fight the Hydras, rather early in the game, and I keep kicking this Hydra's ass, but it doesn't die and I see no special moves I can use to kill it. Consulting a walkthrough, it says I have to bash it's head against a pole three times to break the pole off, then I can beat it. I go back to the game and bash the Hydra's head against the pole at least a hundred times, literally, and the damn pole never breaks off! Going back to the internet, I find out there's a "glitch" [bug] in the game where sometimes the pole doesn't break and you have to start again from the begining. Argh! So I go back, start the game from the begining, make it back to the Hydra, and the fucking pole still won't break off!! Now I'm totally pissed off and I'm not sure if I want to go through this bullshit a third time to get past this fucking bug. So much for console games being "bug-free".

The console itself seems pretty sweet though. It's the "slim" model so it's pretty damn small. I put it on top of my old NES to keep it off the carpet, and it's amazing how much smaller it is than the good old Nintendo. I'm not sure I like the gamepad though, too many buttons and I keep hitting L2 when I'm trying to L1. The handles are also smaller than the Gamecube's controller, I have to kind of crunch my hands up to hold it. And if you're using the anologue stick all the time, it should be where the d-pad is, not way in the middle. Meh, I guess I'll get used to it. The power/reset and eject buttons are also way too small, hard to find in a darkened room. And I wish the red light didn't stay on when the unit is turned off, it's fucking distracting. It also seems rather cheaply made, at least next to the Gamecube, which is built like a tank. The one thing I do like about it is the digital out. After switching it over to the digital output it sounded much better! I guess they used cheap D/A converters to keep the cost down.

So yeah, I like it, but it certainly has it's flaws. Any must have games for this console? I was thinking of getting Gran Turismo 3 or 4 as they seem to be selling cheap. Maybe Shadow of the Colossus if I can find it cheap. Or Katmary Damacy if I can find it at all.

Update 1: It looks like I might have to return my copy of GoW, apparently this glitch is hard-coded into the game itself and there's no way around it. What a piss-off!!

Update 2: I found out how to get past it! Apparently, you have to hit the "O" button like a madman before the post will break. Doh! Oh well, I got past the Hydra, saw the naked chicks and made the vase fall off the shelf. Woohoo, this is getting good!

Wii

So, yesterday, Nintendo announced the final "release" name for their next-gen console, formerly known by the code name Revolution: Wii [pronounced the same as we]. At first I was a little puzzled and bewildered by this name, and quite frankly, I didn't like it.

But now, 24 hours later, I must say it's grown on me and I think it's a cool name. It's certainly very unique, completely unlike any console names of late. X-box, Playstation, Gamecube; these names seem to merely describe what the object is, not very imaginative. Wii, on the other hand, is a completely new, made-up word, it isn't based on any word, in any language in existence [as far as I know]. And I think that's cool. It fits, Nintendo is going off in a completely new direction with this console, so it makes sense that they would name it something totally out in left field, bizzaro. And it's a short, easy-to-pronounce word, easy to remember. It's sounds the same as "wheeeee!", you know, the sound people make when they're having fun. Which is what games are supposed to be all about, having fun. Not this dead serious war that many people make the video games market out to be.

Of course, a lot of people are having fun with the word because it sounds like "wee" as in "pee" or "weewee", what kids call their dingus, their wang, their Johnson, their "penis!" Now I have no problem with this, as it does sound the same and it is kind of funny, although it gets rather tiring after awhile. And people sure are talking about the damn thing, that's for sure! But the people who suggest that Nintendo needs to change the name for English-speaking markets because of this similarity, well that's just ridiculous. It also sounds like "we", and nobody snickers every time we use that word in a sentence, do they? "But Wii will be used as a noun, just like wee" the detractors protest. What-the-fuck-ever. If you're talking about the Wii, people will know what you mean by the context. And if they still snicker each time you use the word, then they need a tall glass of grow-the-fuck-up.

As long as Nintendo follows through with a console that works as advertised, the name won't hurt them at all. And it certainly helps set them apart from the other two.

Wired: In Defence of Wii

RE4 Finished!

I finished Resident Evil 4 tonight. Good game!! I'm not sure what "The Mercenaries" or "Assignment Ada" is, but I guess it's a couple more missions they give you once you complete the main game.

Resident Evil 4

I finally picked up RE4 for the Gamecube last week. I was trying to get it from the Future Shop for the longest time, but they don't carry it, apparently. Then I was trying to get it from Amazon.ca, but it was always sold out, although the PS2 version always seemed available. I finally tracked it down at Best Buy, for a decent price too, $34.99.

The game's interface was a bit frustrating at first, the way you have to go into "aiming mode" before you can fire your weapon is a pain in the ass sometimes. No, all the time actually. Like when you're firing at a big monster and he get's too close, so you try to get out of aiming mode so you can run away, but it takes so long that he stomps on you before you can change back into "running away" mode. Bah! And there's no strafing in this game, you always have to move forwards or backwards before you can turn. Sidestepping would be so much easier. Your character moves awefully slow, too, even in running mode.

Otherwise, this is a pretty excellent game. The graphics are the nicest I've seen on the GC, the story is developing nicely [I'm on chapter 2-3?, I think] and it's tons of fun blowing away the zombies. There's a decent selection of weapons that have various upgrades to keep it interesting, and even some puzzle sections to break away from the 'killing zombies' gameplay all the time. I'm not crazy about the way the game flashes button combos on the screen once in awhile when something unusual happens. Like when this boulder comes rolling towards you, you're suddely supposed to press "A" to run away, then "A+B" and then "R+L" to duck out of it's way. It doesn't really add anything to the game and the skills you learned up to this point are useless, you just have to keep replaying the scene over and over again till you get it right. Kinda stupid.

Evolution of Link

Different versions of Link through most of the Zelda games. Got the original version from here via Joystiq.

Need for Speed: Underground

I finished Need for Speed: Underground on my Gamecube today. Woohoo! It was fairly easy, there were just a couple tracks that drove me nuts. Like track #85. And the low-rez graphics made the game a lot harder than on the PC because you could hardly make out what was coming up to react in time. On the other hand, I liked using the GC controller much more than a joystick on the PC. Much easier to control. Now I need to pick up NFS:U2, it's cheap nowadays too.

Making the Sacrifice

I read this article [The Escapist - Making the Sacrifice] and while I found it an interesting read, her arguments were weak and unconvincing.

The idea that because most games use an "big boss" at the end, that this is an example of some biblical story of "scapegoating" is silly. Most stories have a protagonist and antagonist, and when the main antagonist is defeated, all is well, the story is over. This has nothing to do with religion, it's just a very basic storytelling technique that many stories employ. Somehow saying this is a specifically religious storytelling technique is naive.

"In any society, the scapegoat is not singly responsible for all wrong with the world, but he is made to take on all the blame."

And I hate the term "scapegoat theory", because it implies that the main boss is being wrongly accused of all the ills in the game world, when in fact they are the one and only cause of all the ills in the game world. Ganon in Zelda, Bowser in Mario, these are the big bads that deserve to be defeated because they are bad.

"The end of Sauron immediately resolves all the evil in Middle-earth. "

No it doesn't, Saruman goes to the Shire and wreaks havoc.

"In videogames, the death of the archvillain returns the game's universe to a Utopia. Religion is directly avoided in videogames, even though its influence is obvious."

No, they're trying to tell a compelling, entertaining story, and if religion has nothing to do with the story, then there's no reason to put it in there. I daresay religion has zero influence on the vast majority of stories told via videogames. The author seems hellbent on equating storytelling to religion.

"Another interesting aspect of god games is they consistently offer the player-deity rule over primitive village people. Is this to suggest that the fiction the game world tries to create would not survive in a contemporary setting? Is the modern player too arrogant and narcissistic to believe a god game could function in her city?"

Arrogant and narcissistic? No, maybe because most of us [outside the USA anyway] live in a secular society where the influence of religion is minimal, whereas primitive societies were ruled by superstition and other religious nonsense. Hence, more conducive to a "god game". I would think this would be obvious.

"The seminal SimCity, for example, asserts that a society can function fully without any place of worship."

And by implication, you're saying that it can't? Ha.

"As mayor, the player makes decisions regarding airports, sea ports, hospitals, fire departments, police stations, post offices and residential areas, but is not allowed to consider building a church."

I don't know where you live, but in my world, the mayor isn't responsible for building churches. Besides, I distinctly remember my sims building churches themselves when I played the game, so your argument is without merit.

And using GTA in this discussion because they say "goddamn"? WTF? GTA, like most games, totally ignores religion, they don't say "goddamn" to make some kind of religious statement.

"Religion and spirituality among players - be they religious, sacrilegious or passionately irreligious - remain higher on the hierarchy than any other aspect of our humanity, like economics, politics, race and nationalism."

Huh? No, religion is pretty low on the totem pole for those of us living in a secular society [where most games are sold], except for the most fanatical fundamentalists. And completely irrelevant to non-believers like myself.

"ToS is an RPG that creates a believable mythology. It recounts the journey a group takes to regenerate a dying world, and involves thick symbolism of scapegoats, rituals, prayers, angels, demons and an all-powerful goddess, Martel."

Funny you should mention Tales of Symphonia, I just began playing that game and I'm mostly enjoying it. Except for the religious elements, which I find irritating and unnecessary.

"But new methods of blending religion and spirituality are clearly being forged. The examples of recent successes cannot be ignored."

Mixing religion and gaming is like mixing religion and politics - not a good idea. When you put specific religious symbols and ideas in a game, you immediately alienate almost everybody outside that faith. And some people within that faith will be offended because you didn't "get it right" and are making a mockery of their beliefs. Besides that, a lot of religious people are against gaming in general. By incorporating religion in a game, you are greatly shrinking the number of people your game will appeal to and almost guaranteeing the failure of said game. You might get lucky and hit a "Passion of the Christ" success, but the gaming market is completely different from the movie market. I daresay there are a hell of a lot more religious movie-goers than there are religious game players, in total numbers and in percentage of audience. Just look at Doom, one of the most popular games ever, employing pentagrams and other satanic imagery. If anything, the general gaming audience is anti-religion and any game prominently featuring a specific religion will fail miserably, outside the niche of that specific religion.

Chessmaster 10th Edition

Holy shit, I only made one post here in December! It was a busy month at work and I didn't have much time to mess around. And I was [am] obsessed with Chessmaster 10 lately. I always wanted to get into chess, but all I really knew was how the pieces moved so I was a pretty crappy player. Still am, I guess, but at least by going through the tutorials in CM10, I can say I know a little more about the game. Like pins, forks and skewers.

I'm almost done the first set in the academy section, the ones by Josh Waitzkin. They're pretty excellent, he explains stuff in a quiet, clear manner that makes it real easy to get into. I've been playing the CM10 "personalities" one by one, starting with the real low ones and working my way up. The low-scored ones are pretty easy, I even beat one without losing a single piece! I'm currently rated 1093 and the last opponent I beat was Miranda, rated 1207. I've just been playing against opponents until I figure out how to beat them, then moving on to the next higher rated opponent. One player that I should play against again is Thorian. I did manage to beat him, but he was pissing me off because he really beat me bad a couple times. I think it's because I was castling too early and he would immediately attack the side my king was on. It would probably be better if I waited until he committed himself to attacking up the middle and then castling. Maybe. Another thing I like with this program is the way you can go back in the training mode and load a game you lost and try to figure out where you went wrong. And hopefully figure out a way to win. I haven't played any of the tournaments either but they look like fun.

AOEIII

I finished the AOEIII [Age of Empires 3] campaign yesterday and while it was fun, much funner than slogging through Dungeon Siege II [which I still haven't finished], it's hard not to think that this game could have been a hell of a lot better. It's very much like the previous games in the series, so if you've played the previous games you'll know what you're in for with this one. I found the graphics merely OK, not spectacular like some people have claimed, though that might have something to do with my older Ti 4200 graphics card.

New stuff with this iteration:

• villagers don't have to go back to the town center to drop off their gold, wood or food [which is nice, a welcome development]


• you accumulate experience points that you use to buy upgrades between scenarios and customize your city


• you get to use those upgrades in the form of cards that you can play during the scenario for extra goodies


• hero units with special abilities


• when you move from age to age it opens up new cards you can play plus a bonus for each age


• you can build trading posts with the natives and build native units


• railway stations that help accumulate XP or resources

The main innovation in this game is the home city screen where you get to play your bonus cards. The problem with the home city thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that you just get more "stuff", stuff that's already more than easy enough to get through the usual game mechanics - resource gathering, building units via barracks etc... I played on medium, so maybe I would have appreciated the home city concept more if I played on hard? And to be fair, a few of the cards were unique, like having my hero use balloons. Some cards help your units build faster, collect resources faster, some give you a bunch of new military units or a new town center wagon. They were a nice bonuses, but you could easily play the game without them. And the "customize your home city" thing has to be one of the most useless features to ever be introduced in a game. Between scenarios you get points you can use to unlock upgrades to your home city in the form of new buildings and city dwellers and such. Effect on gameplay? Absolutely zero. The only difference you see is in the way your city looks on the main menu screen. Utterly useless.

Like most RTS's, the pathfinding AI is pretty pathetic. I built a wall around my city in one scenario, leaving a gap in one spot for my army to get in and out from. After building up an army within my walls, I tried to send them out through the gap. They bunched up on the wall and stayed there, no amount of clicking would get them to move out beyond the wall. The only way to get them to move was to select a small group, send them out away from the wall, then grab another small group, send them out etc... I eventually destroyed a larger section of wall to get larger groups out, but of course that meant enemy armies had an easier time getting into my city. Another common RTS bug is still in this game - when you build a wall close to a building that produces units, the units can get stuck between the building and the wall, where the only way to free them is to destroy that section of wall, leaving another weak spot for the enemy to attack. They could easily solve this problem by leaving a buffer around each building for units to move around freely. But they don't, fuckers. In another scenario, I built up a very large army away from my city, then went back to do some maintenance at my town center. When I went back to my army, it was almost completely destroyed! WTF! I rebuilt my army, and then just watched it to see what was going on. The enemy would send a single unit out to draw off a handful of my men, then return to its city where its large army and the city's defensive buildings would utterly annihilate my small group of wayward units. Then it would do the same thing, again and again, until there was nothing left of my once formidable army. There is no "hold ground" option for your units, all you can use is a "defensive posture" which doesn't protect you from this tactic. The solution? Endless, tiresome micro-management. And it is tiresome; I can remember a small group chasing a bait unit back to the enemy, I lassoed them and sent them back to the main army. As soon as they got back to the main army, they turned right around and attempted to race off to their deaths once again. Aaaaiiieee! Little bastards! You can't change the way your army faces, like in Rise of Nations or Rome: Total War. Large battles turn into large chaotic blobs, all you can do is keep clicking and hope your side comes out on top. And you need to keep clicking, if you don't half your army will decide its heart isn't in it and quit fighting. I found the hero unit's special powers pretty useless, combat is too fast and chaotic, by the time I tried to use it, the battle was over.

The default interface on this game takes up way too much of the screen, you have to go into the options screen to get the minimal interface and turn on a bunch of options that should have been turned on in the first place. The game is zoomed in too far, even zoomed out all the way, it still feels cramped. When you load a saved game, it starts off paused. How do you unpause it? After hitting every key on my fucking keyboard, I found out it was the "Pause/Break" button. Since they don't let you control the game speed in any way, the pause key is used more than any other, so I remapped it to the spacebar. There is no way to change keymappings in-game, so you have to exit the game and edit some text files. You can issue orders when paused, but they don't give you much feedback usually, other than the "click" sound, so I found myself issuing orders when paused, unpausing to be sure they took effect, pausing again and moving to the next area that needed attention. Then there is the whole Windows 2000 fiasco. I choose to use Win2K because some of my hardware won't work in XP, plus I'm fucking lazy and poor. Anyway, when the demo came out for this game, it wouldn't install on Win2K systems, saying it wasn't supported. Of course, a workaround was found and it worked perfectly fine on Win2K systems. Then Ensemble, the makers of this game, promised that the full game would let you install on Win2K, but they wouldn't support it. Well, the full game comes out, and the install routine does an OS check and refuse to install on Win2K. By simply using "setup.exe /a", it will install on Win2K and plays perfectly fine. Although I think you need to do some registry hacking to get online play to work. What a bunch of crap, it's like MS is blackmailing you to upgrade to XP just to play their fucking games. Bastards!

Anyway, a good game, but nothing spectacular and doesn't move the genre forward one iota.

Dungeon Siege II

Played some DSII today. Yawn. Not a terribly exciting game, too easy. You can't choose your dificulty level either, they make you play on "easy" before you can unlock the veteran mode. Most of the time you don't feel threatened at all, your life gauge barely moves from the max. You get tons of "loot", but 99.9% of it is worthless, so you waste a lot of time examining crap to see if it's worth keeping. Pretty tedious after awhile. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through already so I'll probably follow through and finish it. Not recommended.

Portable Gaming '05

I finished Final Fantasy I & II on my GBA-SP awhile back. Then Soul of Rebirth, which was more of a little add-on than a full fledged game. Cool games, I liked how they updated the graphics and ported it to the GBA, well done.

I then tried to pick up where I left off with Golden Sun: The Lost Age, but it was impossible to get back onto the storyline. After I got the boat, I travelled all over the world checking things out, but now I'm lost. It's a very good game, kinda like FF but with added puzzles to figure out so it's not just levelling up all the time, you need to think about what you're doing.

Frustrated with GS, I saw a bunch of GBA Zelda games on sale at Amazon, so I picked up the original Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventures of Link [both of which I finished way back in the NES days], Zelda: A Link to the Past and The Minnish Cap [never played these two]. Started playing the first Zelda and I hope to continue through the whole series. Damn, this first game starts off hard, you don't have much life! I'm up to 5 hearts now so it's getting easier. I also have two Tri-force shards and the blue ring and the bow. I might play this through at the same time from my Zelda collection on the Gamecube. The GBA edition seems like a straight port, no improved graphics or extras, maybe that's why it was so cheap.

Finished the Wind Waker!

I did it, finished Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker! Woohoo! I thought it was a pretty fun game. Mostly on the easy side, but it had tons of stuff to do, I'm sure I missed half of it on my first run through. Well worth the $30 I spent on it. I can't wait for their new one, Twilight Princess. Although I still haven't finished Ocarina of Time and I haven't even started Majora's Mask. I've also got the first two on my Zelda Collection disk. Might pick up the GBA Minish Cap sometime too, if I ever finish FFII and Glden Sun II!

My Gaming Life

I'm near the end of the Wind Waker, just going through some puzzle-type corridors to get to the big boss, Gannon. At least that's where I think I'm at. I got all eight shards of the tri-force and am attacking his fortress under the tower of the gods. The only drawback I see is that I've already used up my potions, so hopefully I can defeat Gannon without them.

I'm also attacking the final fortress Pandemonium in Final Fantasy II on the GBA/SP, I'm on the eighth floor. I'm also just about out of potions in this game, so I hope I can make it to the end soon. Without potions I think my group would die off pretty damn quick.

After FFII I'm going to try and pick up where I left off in Golden Sun II. I got the boat in this game, went off exploring the world and kind of lost track of my place in the storyline. I might have to consult a walkthrough to get myself back on track. On the PC, Dungeon Siege II is lined up for some major hack 'n slash action.

Waker Progress

Played some Zelda: The Wind Waker today. Finished the Wind Temple, now I just have to find the pieces of the Tri-Force.

Tower of the Gods

Played some Wind Waker today, just beat the Tower of the Gods level. So far I'm loving this game, probably my favorite Zelda yet and I've played most of them. I finished the first two, Zelda and Link, and I did most of Ocarina of Time [I'm still stuck in the fish; I know how to finish it, it's just a real pain], so Majora's Mask is the only one I have that I haven't played yet. I'll probably pick up the Minish Cap for the GBA someday, once I'm done Final Fantasy and Golden Sun II.

Wind Waker

Playing Zelda, just got some soup from Grandma. Just thought you should know.

New Games

Last week was really slow, so I picked up Final Fantasy I & II for my Gameboy Advance SP, thinking I could play it today at work. Nope, it was totally busy from begining to end, so I never even got to turn the damn thing on. I hate that, last week was so slow and I had nothing to do, even the batteries in my MP3 player died.
I also picked up The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Wanker for my Gamecube. So far I like it, I'm trying to save the little fag's sister trapped in some bird's tower, I think I'm almost there. Some people have complained about the sailing in this game, but I haven't got to that part yet. I finished the first Zelda, the second Zelda [which I really liked back in the day] but I'm still stuck in the fish's belly in Ocarina of Time. I read the walkthrough on how to complete this section, but it's damn hard. And frustrating, if you drop the girl in the wrong place, she teleports way back and you have to start from there again. I also have Majora's Mask, but I was trying to wait till I was done Ocarina of Time before trying that one.

Rise of Nations Sequel

Big Huge Games has announced their sequel to Rise of Nations [one of the best games ever IMHO], Rise of Legends. I'm glad that they decided to not do another "historical" game, as that could get boring and get them in a rut, just look at what happened with Impressions. [which had good games, they just did variations on the same game without breaking out of that mold until they reached a dead end] I was a little peturbed that they chose to do a fantasy game [like we don't get enough of that genre!] but it seems like they're trying to stay away from the typical Dungeon and Dragons type atmosphere that pervades most games of this ilk. Steampunk vs. Prince of Persia, could be cool.

I was checking out their site, came across this page for their programmer job. Ha.

That's the last time I loan you my cybersabre!

At least, in my frustration, I didn't stab anybody [Online gamer stabbed over stolen cybersword]. If somebody steals your dragon sabre, you're allowed to stab them, but only virtually, stupid!

via Evil Avatar

Dawn of War

Finished Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War yesterday. Pretty cool game, but rather shallow strategy-wise. Almost every mission was your basic build up your army, and then head out and destroy the enemy. Not much variation on that theme, and most missions were very, very easy. [playing on normal] The game was also quite short, only eleven missions. Having said all that, I still had a blast playing the thing. The graphics were very well done, it played without a hitch [no major bugs], good cutscenes with great voiceovers, lots of cool units and upgrades. The stuff your units say when you click on them gets rather annoying after awhile though. Instead of a simple "yes", they'd say something like "yes, by the leave of the magnificent Emporer I will now go to that spot and crush mine enemies with great vengence." [not really, I just made that up] But it is really long and repetetive. This game was much more fun than Warcraft III, which I thought was rather tedious. Anyway, now I'm moving on to Rome: Total War, a much deeper game, but has some crucial bugs that really drag the game down a few notches. Oh there was a bit of a bug in DOW, sometimes the pathfinding was a little flakey and you would have to babysit a unit across the map, but that was rare.

Finished off another game

I finished Ground Control II today. I had a lot of fun with it at the begining playing the NSA scenarios. But when the campaign switched over to the Virons, it kind of lost steam for me. I could never get the hang of the melding/unmelding thing. The graphics were really nice in this game, nice and bright and playable in hi-res, unlike say, Doom3. ;) After awhile, it became hard to be creative tactically though. You needed rocket launchers for a protection from artillery, artillery to soften up enemy positions, anti-air personel to take care of air units etc. I guess there's not really any way to avoid that type of thing, but it did make a lot of the scenarios just more of the same after you reached a certain point in the game and you had access to all available units. I guess the Viron missions were a way of mixing things up, but I just didn't enjoy the Viron ep's as much. The story was ok and the cutscenes were actually pretty decent. I'd give it a 8/10 methinks.

Doom 3 Finished!

I finally finished Doom 3 today! Woohoo! I was trying to finish it on the weekend, but it just kept going on and on. While it had its moments, they used the "monster popping up behind you" type of thing way too often. Once or twice, it's a surprise. Hundreds of times over the course of a game? Tedious. I hated the Guardian, I kept shooting the seekers, thinking eventually he would stop respawning them and fight me mano-a-mano. But no, they just kept coming. Hours later, I figured out what to do. Doh! The big boss was cool, he kinda looked like the boss critter from Diablo. It was pretty easy defeating him, I knew almost right away what to do. After the BS I went through with the Guardian, I'm glad it wasn't too hard, I didn't want to deal with that kind of frustration again. I played most of the game with headphones on. For some reason, it wasn't as immersive with just my computer speakers. Anyways, good game mostly, but I'm glad it's over!

Golden Sun: The Lost Age

It's been fairly busy at work this week, but when I do have a break now and then, I've been playing Golden Sun: The Lost Age on my GBA. It's a pretty cool RPG in the Final Fantasy mold, and a sequel to an earlier game called simply Golden Sun, which I've never played. So far, it's been pretty easy, I kind of wish it was a little more challenging. Although it does have all these mini puzzles that you have to figure out, usually involving moving block A to get to block B, moving block B to get to block C etc. and then reaching some kind of chest to get a new goody. It's fun and if I get a call, I can usually finish the puzzle before I have to shut her down and get back to work. You also get new psy-powers from time to time which aid you in progressing in the game. Again, not very challenging, I've only encountered two boss-type characters, a scorpion, which I easily dispatched, and a couple pirates, who beat me the first go-round, but I creamed them after leveling up and making sure my hp/pp was full up. The story is fairly well done [a lot of text to read on me little GBA screen!] and the graphics are very good, I really wish Nintendo made a GBA with a bigger screen, this game could really use it. The sound effects and music are also very well done, reminds me of the classic NES Final Fantasy's.

In short, if you have a GBA, I would definately recommend this game if you're at all interested in Final Fantasy-type RPGs. A quality title, I hope there's a sequel. If not, I'd like to pick up the prequel, if I can track down a copy so late after its initial release.

Finished SMB3

I finally defeated Bowser today and returned peace to our fair Mushroom Kingdom. Yea for me. After you finish the game, you can go back and play any level in any world that you completed earlier. I wonder if there's anything different the second time around? I want to go back and find all the secrets and stuff that I missed out on the first time through. This time I was basically just trying to get through each level as quickly as possible to get to the end, although I did get the "perfect clear" message after completing each world. Great game, my favourite of the Mario games.

SMB3

Slow day at work today, which wasn't so bad as I finally got to play some Super Mario 3 on my Gameboy. Got up to world 8, the last one. Woohoo, I'm almost done! :)

Paper Mario RPG

A new Mario game. [Japanese] Weird.

I'm on the ship in world 6, SMB3. Woohoo!

Ground Control II Demo

Played the tutorial in the single player Ground Control 2 [FLASH] demo. Pretty fun, simple, easy to pick up. Liked it a lot better than Generals, which never really hooked me.

Flames/Sharks

Funny article about the Calgary/San jose playoff series. I have no idea what the next game is going to be like, they've both played great at times, and like total crap at other times. It's been a very strange series, with no team able to win at home through five games. The good news is that San Jose has home ice [dis]advantage. So we should win this one if it goes to game 7, but I hope that isn't necessary.

Splinter Hell

Played a little bit of Splinter Cell on my Gamecube today. Can't say I'm terribly impressed. I used up all my bullets and then it was hell getting through the last bit of the first level. Doesn't anybody leave boxes of ammo lying around anymore? Maybe I'm just spoiled after playing the awesome Prince of Persia, but this game is definately a step down. My neighbours probably think I have Tourettes after hearing my um, running commentary while playing this game.

Prince of Persia

I finished Prince of Persia tonight! Yea for me. Wicked game, it was a lot of fun. The fighting, the puzzles, the story, everything was top notch. I really liked the music, the drummer [?] from the Tea Party did it. The voice acting was well done as well. Heck, everything about it was great. I only got stuck once, at around 55% there's this part where you have to throw a timer switch which raises a gate, then climb a ladder, cross a bunch of balance beams and run across the raised gate before it goes back down. I had to redo this damn thing about a hundred times over before I finally managed to pull it off. Other than that, the gameplay was well balanced, challenging in spots but never too hard.

Prince of Persia

After the aforementioned Zelda bogdown, I decided to take a break from that exercise in frustration and check out this Prince of Persia thing. Wow, what a cool game, I'm totally wired on the thing. I'm around 35% done. It has this 'sands of time' thing where you can go back a few seconds in time when things aren't going your way [ie. you die] and replay the scene, hopefully with a better outcome. Very cool, basically a super quick reload of a saved game when you die. You only have four [or five?] of these things, but you get many chances to reload with more sand, like when you kill an enemy, you basically suck the sand out of him. In fact, you have to, otherwise he just comes back and kills you. Or tries to. There's also a slo-mo trick like in Max Payne ala Matrix. Very cool. Another cool feature is when you freeze an enemy in place and get to slash him to death unresisted. Jumping over your enemy and slashing him from behind is loads of fun as well. The game is divided into sections, each section requiring you to solve a series of puzzles, at the end of each section you get to save your game and usually replenish your life, if not also your sands of time. So you can play a short bit, save your game and pick up exactly where you left off the next time. Avoids the problem I'm having with Ocarina of Time very nicely. This game alone has justified my purchase of the Gamecube.

Zelda bogdown

I was playing Zelda: Ocarina of Time on the Gamecube and I made it to the part where you get sucked into the big fish. At this point, things got a little bogged down. I know what I have to do, pick up the little girl and use her to trip a couple switches to get through doors. The problem is, killing those jellyfish is major pain in the ass. When you use your sword, they electrocute you. So you can use the little bomb thingies, but you only have 30 of those. You can use sticks, but they break off when you hit the jellyfish, so that's another weapon that has limited uses. There's also the magic fire thingy, but you only have so much magic. As if that's not bad enough, after saving your game, when you reload, you don't find yourself back in the big fish, you start way back in your house in the forest! So you have to make the journey all the way back to the big fish before you can even begin to pick up where you left off. This is one thing that I really hate about some console games. Reminds me of the time I played Resident Evil on the Playstation. I made it all the way to the end of the game, but if you die while fighting the big boss creature, the game kicks you way back to an earlier section and you have to spend the next 10-15 minutes working your way back to the big boss. I got sick of doing this and never finished the game. It's not that I thought the big boss was too hard, I just hated going through that useless bullshit just to finish the damn game!

Gamecube!

My Nintendo Gamecube came in via UPS a couple nights ago. The last console I owned was a Nintendo SNES, so I'm pretty excited to have a modern console, although I did have access to somebody PS1 for awhile.

Anyway, the system came with the Zelda collection, which consists of four games [The Legend of Zelda, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, Ocarina of Time & Majora's Mask], a demo of The Wind Waker and some little movie clips about the Zelda franchise. I've played the first two a long time ago, finished them both. The last two are totally new to me so it should be fun getting some Zelda action happening after so long. [that didn't come out right...] Unfortunately, the damn thing doesn't even come with a memory card so I was unable to do any serious gaming.

Yesterday, I rode down to Future Shop to get a memory card and of course, I just had to pick up a game for my new system while I was down there. I decided on the Prince of Persia/Splinter Cell double pack [two games for the price of one]. When I got home, I played a little Ocarina of Time [is that a stupid name or what?], very enjoyable so far. Then I fired up Prince of Persia, intending only to play a couple minutes to check out the gameplay style. An hour later, I was still at it! It's a very cool game, the graphics are very nice, the animation is very fluid, the gameplay is fun and easy to pick up, I love it. Maybe I'm just easily impressed because I haven't played any console games for so long. Splinter Cell seems ok, I was a little thrown off at first because you can't move your character at the very begining of the game. I thought the game was defective! But after you follow the tutorial's instructions and look around, it then allows you to move around. Doh!

Waking up from the American dream

I finished MP2! Cool game, pretty damn short though.

Max Payne 2

I've been playing this game a bit lately, it's not bad, very much like the first one. Maybe even easier, or maybe it just seems that way because I'm familiar with the gameplay. I'm almost finished I think, I'm on Chapter Three: Mission Seven. The thing is, I died and when I tried to reload, the game crashed! I've tried loading different saved games, but they all make the game crash during the loading process. Looks like I'll have to reinstall the whole game just to finish it. Shit.

Tried the patch, it worked, yea!

3DRealms Max Payne 2 forums

NY Post article on Take2

What a nasty article in the NY Post about Take2, publishers of the Grand Theft Auto series. Never mind that Take2's problems with the SEC are totally seperate from whatever games it publishes. Also, if Take2 went down, I would think the actual creators of the game, Rockstar Games, would have no problems finding a new publisher, seeing how successful the GTA franchise has been. And this author needs to familiarize himself with the concept of 'freedom of speech', like you know, you don't like it, don't buy it. And GTA wasn't created in a vaccum, there are other games [Postal 2 comes to mind] that are just as bad, not even considering other media, say movies. [Natural Born Killers]

People, this is insane. This is 10,000 times worse than the worst thing anybody thinks Michael Jackson ever did to a little boy - or than any lie the feds think Martha Stewart ever told them, or any line in any song that Bruce Springsteen ever sang that rankled a cop in the Meadowlands. And trust me when I tell you, Mr. Mayor, what Take-Two Interactive is blowing into your face every day is a whole lot worse than second-hand cigarette smoke.

Ah yes, dying of cancer from second hand smoke is so much more acceptable than an offensive video game. We have our prorities in order, don't we?

Wired says some Haitian civil rights group is sueing everybody involved with GTA:Vice City because it has the line "kill the Haitians" in it. This is a little more understandable, kinda stupid thing to put in a game. Even tho they meant the drug gang called the Haitians, you have to wonder what the hell they were thinking when they put that in there.

There was a mention of the NY Post article on Penny Arcade.

To begin, I have seen articles of greater erudition float to the top of my Alpha-Bits.

The next game in this series looks to be GTA4:Sin City to be released November 5, 2004. Ok, no more GTA stuff, I've never even played the damn game. But I've heard it's fun.

Finished Warlords Battlecry II

I finally finished Warlords Battlecry II last week [?] and it was a pretty excellent game, but with a few flaws. It was very deep with a lot of spells to learn, different creatures to kill and races and professions to chose from. There were also a lot of different scenarios with assorted winning conditions to keep it interesting. The hero system with all the upgrades you get to use was a lot of fun. The chance to build Titans was also very cool. When your titan finally appeared, you knew you were ready to kick ass! I played as the humans throughout the game, so my titan was the Sirian, a slow-moving giant, but packing a big-ass fiery sword. It's a real-time strategy game but you can set the speed and set orders during pause. I accepted the enemy's offer to cede victory to me after 48 wins as I was getting a little tired of the game and I wanted to move on.

As to flaws, there were a few. There wasn't much of a story. While a story isn't absolutely necessary, it would have enhanced gameplay. The graphics were rather mediocre. Units would converge into one big blob during battles. It was also a very dark game, graphically, even when the gamma was set to its highest setting. To make matters worse, there was a 'night' spell enemy heroes could use that would make everything even darker. Very frustrating, luckily my hero had a spell to turn the 'sun' back on. In one scenario, the enemy hero kept turning it into night and I would use my spell to turn it back into day, but then he would immediately turn it back into night! Very irritating, I hated that one.

The worst problem, for me, was the single-game save system, ala Diablo. Many times I would save thinking I was doing good, only to have a huge enemy army come along and slaughter me, right after I had saved the game, screwing up my only save-game, forcing me to start the scenario from scratch again. Not to mention times when a unit would end up 'stuck' on a rock or something, rendering it useless for the rest of the game. This only seemed to happen when reloading saved games.

Another problem was the cannon-fodder nature of the gameplay. Trying to build up units in your retinue from scenario to scenario was pretty well useless. To do this, you had to babysit your retinue units to make sure they didn't die. I gave up after awhile as it wasn't worth the effort. Too bad.

Overall tho, this was a great game and I'd highly recommend it despite its flaws. Of the few games I played this year, I would put them in this order:

1. Rise of Nations - great game, very polished, same old RTS gameplay but very well done and fun
   
2. Warlords Battlecry II - great game marred by a few flaws
   
3. Kohan - mediocre game, highly overrated, the balancing of resource collection against army size was an interesting twist on the old RTS gameplay, but it was still an average game, very simple
   
4. Warcraft III - worst game I've played in a long time, a total waste of time, I played it to the last scenario when it bogged down on my old computer, never bothered to finish it on my new computer, absolutely putrid
   

Well, that's what I played, and completed [except WCIII], in 2003. I know, not much, it's hard to find the time to play lately.

Warlords Battlecry II - Progress Report

I've claimed 41 territories so far, so I'm doing good. I think my hero's up to level 20. But the last couple cities I tried to conquer ended in disaster. I slowly build up my army, keeping them close to my towers, protecting my buildings, when the enemy hero comes along and totally annihilates my entire army with one spell!!! Argh! I'm not sure how you're supposed to get around this, but it is rather discouraging and not terribly much fun. :( I guess I should just avoid those cities until I'm more powerful.

Warlords Battlecry III

Looks like there will be a Warlords Battlecry III. Maybe I'll be finished WBCII by then...

Official Site

Towards Absolution

And now for more important matters; I have 25 victories in Battlecry II! Some of these scenarios are really difficult! I was trying to play one against Dark Elves but I think it was actually Daemons controlled by Dark Elves. Anyway, I can barely hold off their hordes until their Titan [Balora] comes and totally wipes out my base. I'm playing Humans and I have tons of archers but she just smokes them, no probs. I tried rushing her base early, but her regular troops are very strong and she held me off with minimal damage. I also tried spreading my archers around so she could only kill them one at a time, but that didn't work. The best I could do is get her hit points down to 500, from her max of 850. [?] Eventually, I resigned the scenario and moved on to a different one. It's funny, all the scenarios say 'Expect determined resistance' but some are way, way more difficult than others.

Good game, very difficult and somewhat frustrating in places tho.

Warlords Battlecry II

Sorry, I haven't been blogging lately, I've been wired on this game. It's a very deep game, as in it has a lot of stuff! :) [spells, beasties, items, upgrades, etc...] I should be finished in, oh about ten years. I think there's 60 scenarios in the campaign and I have something like 15 victories so far. I should win a little more easily now; before I hadn't read the manual and I missed out on a bunch of stuff that could have helped me early in the game. Doh! Now that I've read the manual I should be able to kick some Dark Elf ass!

Max Payne 2

Four Fat Chicks review Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne. Sounds pretty good. Played the first one, great game. Hated the end tho, had trouble hitting that last wire, had to reload a hundred fucking times. Otherwise, it rocked.

Infuriating dream sequences nearly ruined the first game, adding ridiculous (and insanely difficult) jumping puzzles to a game in which they had no place; again conscientiously respecting the feedback from fans, Max Payne 2 does sport dream sequences but with a drastic reduction to the frustrating mazes and jumping puzzles. No one minded the dreams as such, just that they were jarring and clumsy. The opportunity to explore the internals of Max's mind is actually kind of cool, and new graphics make the dream visuals very compelling.

I loved the dream sequences in the first game! I thought they were well done, fun and took you into a different, nightmarish world instead of the oh-so-familiar constant shootfest. And I didn't find them that difficult at all, quite easy actually. The part where Max is wired on drugs was damned hilarious as well. I haven't played a shooter for awhile, I think the last one was either Medal of Honor or Soldier of Fortune, both good games. Maybe I'll check this one out...

Kohan

I just finished the game Kohan: Immortal Sovereigns. It was OK, not great. Most of the game was very easy, except for the final scenario which was rather tough. The main problem I had with the game was its oversimplification. The resource gathering was abstracted to building improvements into your city and capturing mines. Battles were also simplified to the point of attack/flee. You couldn't apply any tactics, it was simply attack or don't attack. And if you fled, you couldn't control your movement until after the unit reached a rally point, rather frustrating if he was fleeing into trouble.

It was different from your typical RTS [real-time strategy] game. Balancing the collection of resources against the drain of resources required by your army was probably the most interesting part of the game. But once that novelty wore off, there wasn't much of interest left. The graphics and sound were serviceable and it did have more of a story going for it than say Rise of Nations. [which had much better gameplay tho] There were also the odd short cut scenes interspersed between scenarios. Let's hope their next game [Kings of War] has a little more meat to it.

HL2 Source Code Leak

Shacknews link.

Slashdot discussion.

Blue's discussion.

While I do feel sorry for the people at Valve for having the Half Life 2 source code leaked onto the internet, they seem to not take very much responsibility for their part in this state of affairs. They had the source code internet accessible, they contracted the virus [or whatever it was] [unpatched Outlook apparently] and did nothing about it until it was too late. Actually, he couldn't find a worm or virus, so he reformatted his hard drive anyway. Then he observed suspicious activity with his webmail account [??] and there were keyloggers installed on several computers at Valve. This all sounds very strange and I don't think we're getting the whole story here.

Anyway, Valve will live, HL2 will be a huge success and this leak probably won't mean much in the long run. Maybe it'll force them to change Steam, which I found to be a pretty stank piece of software.

"If you have information about the denial of service attacks or the infiltration of our network, please send the details," he said. "There are some pretty obvious places to start with the posts and records in IRC (Internet Relay Chat), so if you can point us in the right direction, that would be great." Valve have set up a specific e-mail account, helpvalve@valvesoftware.com, for people to send any information.

Here's some info, you little fucking whiners: pay more attention to security, dumbass! [sorry, it's Friday and I'm feeling snarky]

From the Half Life 2 site:

To whomever it was behind this crime against a company that has supported us over the years better than any other before them; it looks like you're on your own. It's only a matter of time before you're caught, and you will be.

Yeah, this is right up there with the Holocaust and 9/11. Whatthefuckever.

From some usenet post:

Leaked internal valve aim log
TomCruiseMan: r u there?
1984Haxx0r696969: :)
TomCruiseMan: excellent, you know what tomorrow is?
1984Haxx0r696969: yeah, hl2 comes out, right gabe?
TomCruiseMan: *evil grin* i fuxxored it all
1984Haxx0r696969: what?
TomCruiseMan: i uploaded half-life 2 source to an ftp server
1984Haxx0r696969: GABE! WHY THE $$*(%(%&$ WOULD YOU DO THAT?
TomCruiseMan: LOLOLOLOL
1984Haxx0r696969: what the f is wrong with you?
TomCruiseMan: just kidding, it's not hl2 source
1984Haxx0r696969: whew, u got me, you dickhead!
TomCruiseMan: there is no hl2
1984Haxx0r696969: ?
TomCruiseMan: u heard me, there is no hl2. i uploaded hl1 source mixxed with
quake2 source and i replaced all "quake" with "source"
TomCruiseMan: ?
1984Haxx0r696969: *speechless*
TomCruiseMan: i don't want anyone to find out i've spent $10 million of our
hl1 money on doritos
1984Haxx0r696969: wtf
TomCruiseMan: vivendi thinks hl2 is almost done... man, it took 5 goddamn
years to write steam
TomCruiseMan: they forgot it took us years to write a quake1 engine game
TomCruiseMan: i'm fuxxored
1984Haxx0r696969: what are you gonna do?
TomCruiseMan: uploading the "hl2" source, blame it on outlook and then say
we're delayed another year
1984Haxx0r696969: wtf, blame what on outlook??? what about ati?
TomCruiseMan: ati is expecting a build by end of the month
1984Haxx0r696969: yup, you're fuxxored
TomCruiseMan: no, once i announce hl2 source is leaked, i can get 1 more
year to write hl2. sep 30, 2004
1984Haxx0r696969: if you hire carmack and god maybe.
TomCruiseMan: it would help, i can't code anymore, i've been working on
steam by myself for 5 years. my work keyboard is packed full of crumbs
1984Haxx0r696969: ???? where did everyone go?
TomCruiseMan: i fired everyone and bought the local domino's instead. free
pizza, mf'er!
1984Haxx0r696969: do they deliver that shit right to your mouth, bitch?
TomCruiseMan: f u, goat licker!
1984Haxx0r696969: goddamn idiot. you are going to get shot when they find
out the truth
TomCruiseMan: 1 year man, they bought that shit already for hl1, they'll buy
it again.
1984Haxx0r696969: where did all the screenshots and videos come from?
TomCruiseMan: counterstrike guys did it all as a favor... and free pizza
1984Haxx0r696969: shit man, what about nvidia?
TomCruiseMan: nvidia is suing my ass for $50 million
1984Haxx0r696969: what are you going to do?
TomCruiseMan: dump ati and go with nvidia... then trash ati
1984Haxx0r696969: you can't do that! everyone will see right thru you
TomCruiseMan: no way man, i will fuxxor ati and get those monkeys off my
back
1984Haxx0r696969: you are insane man, i like it
1984Haxx0r696969: but you're still fuxx0red
TomCruiseMan: listen bill, you used to be my boss, but now i'm my boss,
trust me
1984Haxx0r696969: ok. if you can delay until sep 30, 2005, then it will
match the longhorn delay. can you put in code to only run on longhorn?
TomCruiseMan: no problem
1984Haxx0r696969: k thx
TomCruiseMan: gtg, pizza is here
1984Haxx0r696969: bye

Infinium Phantom Console

You might have heard about this new gaming system that's supposed to be coming out soon. Reading this article, seems pretty clear it's nothing but a scam. Apt name tho, nothing like rubbing their noses in it, eh?

Rise of Nations

Well, I finally finished the Rise of Nations campaign, tho I didn't finish within the alloted turns so I only got a marginal victory. I didn't realize there was only so many turns, I actually clicked on the next turn button early in the game and I didn't bother moving my armies around very much. Anyway, it was still a wickedly fun game.

Rise of Nations

I figured out how to take screenshots in this game today. Just about finished, only three nations left. Yipee!

I won!

I won my scenario in RON. But I just repelled the invasion so I didn't gain any territory. Ho hum.

Game Brain

I tried playing Morrowind on the weekend, but it's kinda hard at the begining. You spend a lot of time wandering around trying to figure out what the hell is going on. Tonight I wanted to play a game, but Morrowind just seemed to intimidating, so I fired up Rise of Nations. The last time I had played this game, my army was bogged down fighting the Germans. Well, after loading the saved game tonight, I could see it was a lost cause, so I reloaded and began fresh from the start. It's going much better this time. I just dug in and waited for those Nazi bastards to attack me. Like bashing their faces against concrete, I think I'm gonna win this one. Shit it's late, I gotta go to bed. I'll try to finish the scenario tomorrow. If I don't post, you'll know I got my ass kicked.

Sim Mafia

The couple say they have ransacked apartments, sent out their "troops" to urinate on others' lawns and once drove another player from the game.
This is a mature, social crowd...

The online version of The Sims seems to have attracted the usual miscreants trying to ruin the game for everybody else. To tell you the truth, I can't blame them, that damn game can get pretty freaking boring.

You can't produce something that's this potent or powerful psychologically and not have some accountability for it.

Oh brother...

Terrible Mr. G

This sounds way too familiar. [Mp3 with foul language]