Inconvenienced

The only review you can trust

2008-09-06T02:11:00.002+01:00

Recently I've been seeing articles about the unclean side of the game-reviewing industry. It goes something like this: Let's say you write for a gaming magazine. People read your magazine if you have the first review. You have the first review if the developer gives a copy to you early. The developer gives it to you early...if you write a good review. This unfortunately happens for a lot of games, the most obvious example being Halo 3, with some occurrences appearing for, say, Bioshock. Having recently bought Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, and finding it infinitely more fun than the reviews said it was...and also owning Assassin's Creed, and still having fun with it (maybe because I wasn't the one hanging on every goal the developers planned from the start) I begin to wonder if we can really trust reviews.

In a way, this is a superb metaphor to the actual News. If you, the reader, trust the opinions of Fox News, you can stop reading right now and go on to buying more iPhones. Obviously, their news is often dealt through the opinions and workings of their owners, plus whoever happens to be supplying them. Gun company gives cash, they support the war in Iraq. But I won't be getting into that right now.

However, if we do apply this metaphor, there is one parallel we can draw: Two things that take a completely humorous attempt at each, and actually manage to perform very well. I am of course referring to The Daily Show, and Zero Punctuation.

The Daily Show is a news show free to criticize the actions of other news shows, and thus far seems to be the most "neutral" of the news. They criticize whatever's funny, and do so openly, rather than trying to portray someone in a bad light by toning down the brightness on a particular clip, OJ-style. Zero Punctuation works sort of the same way; it's usually only looking at the BAD parts of what's new, and will normally beat something into the ground on his own. No one is supposed to agree with every word he says, as it's always intended for humor.

But this parallel still brings an unusual realization to me; if it's true, then does that mean that Zero Punctuation is the best review source we have? He's not doing it so the developers will give him early copies (heck, he lives in AUSTRALIA, for god's sake; he gets them last.). He's doing it to be funny, and he definitely need not worry about losing viewership, now that any new ZP is going to go to 3000 Diggs within 15 seconds. This really makes him the most neutral source, and one to really be reckoned with in a way. I mean, sure, you can tell before you watch it that he's going to hate the game, but you'll pick up enough of the bad and good to decide for yourself. He thought HL2:E2 was too linear, and only for HL fans, but there are plenty of us HL fans. He thought Halo 3 was just a "normal shooter", but some people go for that.

By the way, just be sure you remember that there's one parallel that can never be drawn. You can never fly out to Iraq and decide for yourself what's going on; but you can always try out the game, so leave it to your own opinion.

Best read whilst tripping balls

2008-04-28T08:51:00.008+01:00

Title unrelated.

Anywho, remember when I told you the other day about my mental condition? Yeah, I was only partially joking. There actually WAS a diagnosis pending and I am, in fact, mental. Off my rocker. Madder than a hatter on abestos and deliciously artery clogging Cinnabon sticky buns.

Maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but I shit you not when I say that I have been clincally diagnosed as "fucked up in the head." Like, by a doctor and shit. I'll spare you the scintillating details, but I can confirm that the disorder starts with "A" and ends with "DHD with predominate innatentiveness."

Yeah, that's right. AD-mofoing-HD. I always thought I might have had mild ADD at worst, and even then I thought I was over-reacting and blaming my lack of focus on a disease because being defficient because of a disease is exponentially easier to blame for missing homework than being a fuckwit. However, since God seems to have an unusual sense of humor, it turns out that I've always had a similar problem to that one neighbor kid that I always hated for being an annoying, fuckfaced, energetic loser. Que sera sera, I suppose.

I can't help but shake the feeling, though, that this is just modern medicine telling me why that it's ok that I suck. They tell me I'm going to get special meds, extra time on homework, special tutors, the whole nine yards and then some, and it makes me really uncomfortable. I've never really liked being treated special, to be honest; it's always felt like people are just humoring me when I get that little extra something that other people don't have access to. It kind of makes me feel like I'm cheating at life or something.

Still, I guess I'm glad I got this shit sorted out now. I don't think I have to mention how much of a pain in the ass it would have been had I gone to college without this information. My tiny brain probably would have exploded from the pressure.

Also, it turns out that the evaluation test I took had an IQ element to it that I was unaware of. It turns out that, while my visual processing of information is sub-par, my audio processing is FANTASTIC, and my total IQ rounds out somewhere around 130. That's right, bitches. I'm practically a motherfucking genius. Hell yeah. I'm a ne'er do well, layabout, lazy, innatentive, scumbag who is bad at expressing his ideas on paper and will probably never be good at any mathematical endvours, but at least I'm a SMART one.

Updated as frequently as the Dead Sea scrolls

2008-04-23T19:51:00.004+01:00

Wow, this thing is still breathing? I could have sworn it entered its death throes ages ago (about when it started), but I've been wrong before, and this time I'm rather grateful for it. Many thanks to Katana for showing some initiative and not only writing stuff, but writing decent stuff. Truly he deserves some mad props for that. Likewise, thanks to drunky for not just deleting it like most sensible people would have. His apathy and WoW addiction are useful for something, at least.

Anyway, yeah, it's me, and I am back to writing on a semi-regular basis. I say this tenatively, though, as I'm still hella busy with school work and my psychological state (diagnosis pending!) isn't exactly helping. However, my writing skill is begining to atrophy and I desperately need to practice my wordcraft, so I asked myself, "Why the fuck not?". I came up with several reasons, but I decided to come anyway and you're just going to have to deal with it.

Look out, world; Pwnzerfaust is writing again! (Poorly)

8 of the best long-take shots of all time

2008-04-07T03:48:00.003+01:00

Primer: A "long-take" is when a camera moves for an abnormally long time without needing to cut to another one. They are often used for feelings of extensive realism or just to impress people with extreme camera work. Often, CGI is used to splice together extremely long ones, or in some of the cases below, they are made almost entirely using CGI. I obviously don't know of everything, and may not have videos for them all, but this is from what I've seen.

8. The Matrix Reloaded: Burly Brawl (Beginning at 4:00)

This one is just barely notable to me, and to some it's just a nice bit of CGI. Keanu Reeves himself is in some of those shots, which shows some pretty nice mixing.

7. Star Wars Episode III: Opening battle (Ending at 1:20)

Like Reloaded, this one loses points for being CGI, but it's still very impressive and enticing, giving an enormous overview of the large-scale battlefield, then rushing the shot through close encounters with the engaging ships.

6. The Sixth Sense: Kitchen Scene ("Oh, you've got a spot!")
The first of our non-combat long-takes, and the first for which I don't have a video. In this scene, we move from the laundry room near the kitchen, into the kitchen where Bobby is having cereal. There is a short interchange between them, and she takes his tie back into the laundry room. When she returns, all the cabinets are open, with not a sound heard indicating such. There is another conversation between them before he leaves for school. Not amazing, but somewhat difficult to do in one take from the enclosed space.

5. War of the Worlds: Conversing in the van
So Tom Cruise is known for nothing more than Scientology now, but you can't deny it's pretty interesting how they got this shot done. The camera circles around the outside of what seems to be the only vehicle working for miles. The conversation held is pretty lengthy and the camera moves to each character as they talk.

4. Touch of Evil (beginning at 0:54)

The opening to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil would be pretty impressive even in today's cinema, but this was made long before even the invention of the steadicam. The camera starts on a closeup of an actor's hands, and ends several blocks down the street in another closeup. Even I don't quite know how they did it so smoothly.

3. The Protector

I don't like movies with throwaway plots, but I also love kung-fu flicks, so overall I enjoyed this; it's a really impressive shot that apparently took about a month of preparation. Some very nice moves in this as well.

2. Atonement (beginning at 0:46)

When I was first shown this, I was impressed at about 3 minutes. My eyes went wider as it went ON and ON. Additionally, all of the extras are very occupied with their various tasks, and it must have taken ages of choreography to get it right.

1. Children of Men: Take a Wild Guess
As disappointing as it is, I don't have a video for this one; YouTube videos of the famous 6-minute take have been removed multiple times. However, on the other hand it would be best for everyone that you watch this movie at your next available chance. Film appreciators everywhere were simply amazed at the fact that this didn't win Best Picture of 2006. Additionally, this isn't even the only long-take in the whole thing; there are at least 3 other scenes that I can recall from memory that involved extremely long takes. If you were at all impressed by the previous video of Atonement, I highly recommend you watch this movie the next chance you get.

Movies are for the weak. Go read a book, you playa.

2008-02-05T01:38:00.000Z

Anyone who visits a semi-intelligent discussion board like The Escapist Magazine's forums is going to notice something much wanted by large groups of people; better stories in games. I agree! When a star line in a hit video game is "What if you miss?" "I WON'T." then you know something's probably in need of fixing.

But as I read further I begin to notice some people might even be taking this idea to an extreme. Some people actually say that story is now MORE important than gameplay, and here is where I sort of have to draw the line. YES, the gaming world has needed some actual writers, as opposed to people who pen the dialog as they go along. But taking an elitist stance gets us nowhere.

The fact is, story, while important, is still secondary to what matters most; gameplay. Heck, it's a GAME. You'd think that the attribute that contains the word would be most important. Things like art style, graphics, story, are used to spice up a game that is already great. Case in point...

...a game called Aperture Science. This is a First Person Shooter released by Valve in the Purple Box in 2007. You play as a test subject for a combat facility that has to shoot her way through turrets and androids to defeat the evil AI ruling the place and get out. You get to use the Assault Rifle (a medium-range gun that shoots bullets real fast.) the pistol (a medium-range gun that shoots somehow-weaker bullets less fast) and the BFG (a weapon that programmers spent an enormous amount of time on, but you only get to fire once at the end). The game also has a BF2-clone multiplayer.

Now in this game (yes, end the sarcasm, it's a fake metaphor) the gameplay is dull and repetitive. BUT, the story is superb! Turrets speak in soft voices, GLaDOS mocks you with strangely emotional dialogue...but NOBODY CARES. Because most people stopped playing after having to kill the same turret the fiftieth time with the same circle strafe. Not even having Still Alive play at the end would save this game, because nobody would even play that for.

So there you go. Portal, like many games in 2007, had a great new idea. But not only was that idea just a little bit better, but it also had great art, great dialogue, great story, etc. In fact, here's where I have to make another point.

Far too often, people summarize the voice acting, writing, and plot of a game into just that; STORY. Now even as a die-hard Half-Life fan I have to admit this much; both Half-Life and Halo are essentially about aliens trying to take over the world and create Poisoned Kitten factories. So why does one kind of bring tears to people's eyes while the other brings X-box Live flaming? It mainly lies in the writing. Half-Life has characters that are often with you, make you care about them, have pretty convincing dialogue and not over-the-top personalities. I think if a game just got that idea down, then even if it were about Noir Detectives who decided to go shoot up the streets, it could have something going for it.

Then there's voice acting. This really comes into play with War games. Compare the Medal of Honor trailer's dialogue (GO GO GO! TAKING COVER! WHISKY TANGO FOXTROT!) to the highly approved casual remarks of the AC-130 gunners in Call of Duty 4. I think you'll notice a difference.

Things like writing and voice acting, while important in a game, I consider to be just above graphics in importance. No one can deny that things like UT3 are pretty damn fun, even when the characters all spout one-liners.

If anyone ever wondered why I hate WoW...

2007-12-22T23:08:00.000Z

THIS IS WHY.

Some jackass on a WoW IRC channel has taken it upon himself to not only have every friend he has vote for his machinima, but also to DOWNVOTE every other video on the site. One machinima that you may have heard of, in which GLAdoS faces off against the HP computer (prize of the contest) was at around 90 votes, and now has -16!

Do not let people win through such cheap and underhanded tactics. One way to deal with it is to vote for the machinima you like, and be sure to vote down on the video of the guy who incurred it.

Also, it would help to E-mail the site's creators and let them know that the public will not let this stand. If general knowledge that they let a spammer win a contest gets out, the site will undoubtably become less popular.
(the contest is not over yet, and there is still time to act)
On December 27th the contest will be over. Let's hope it's over for the WoW jackass.

Quick rant on Prickly City

2007-11-29T16:50:00.000Z

Today's point of discussion
Recently Scott Santis has been pissed off at the journalism site huffingtonpost.com because it employs its bloggers without pay. Well, I've got news for you, Scott. Here are a list of other things on the internet that usually have no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Writing this blog (or most blogs)

Posting videos on YouTube, or any video site except MoneyTube (whose legality is debatable)

Writing an open-source project on sourceforge.net

Writing a whole novel on fanfiction.net

Editing together retarded yet somehow funny pictures on icanhascheezburger.com

Posting the result of 2 days in Garry's Mod and 72 hours in Photoshop

Writing a game guide on gamefaqs.com

Making a comic that has the exact same joke 4 days in a row

Of course, if the concept of not being paid for something is daunting to you, you can of course stop DOING whatever it is you're doing.

Game of the Year on Inconvenienced

2007-11-19T03:02:00.000Z

Well, it's easy to say that there's been a lot going on this year in terms of great games. Which is certainly more than can be said for last year. Reviewers said "Gears of War?" and we realized that no one had made anything better.

Now we have a whole slew of things to consider. We have Team Fortress 2, Crysis, BioShock, Halo 3, Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode 2, Super Mario Galaxy, Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, Guitar Hero III, Call of Duty 4, Unreal Tournament III, Ratchet and Clank Future...the list goes on. And amazingly enough, in that list alone, we have FIVE GAMES that aren't sequels! FIVE!!! That's 38%!

But as we all know, Game of the Year can't be about statistics. We don't simply take the game with the highest numerical rating and slap on the medal. The game has to break boundaries, be really fun, and we need to know that we'll remember it next year. (speaking of which, last year's GOTY is now on PC...)

Many of you will know me for being the obsessive Half-Life fan, but in the face of the sheer number of high-quality games that have come out this year, even I have to go into some deep consideration.

2007 has been a great year for games, and so my supreme authority deems the game twenty lines down to be the undisputable game of the year.

ALL OF THEM.
Why are we fighting? Why do we have to always pick one over the other? Do we really care if a game on a system that we don't even OWN gets worse reviews than another one? Game of the Year was only established to convince people what games to buy. But it has mutated into something that at this point, I don't like.

It's now a contest of fanboyism, a debate of minute details and things that can be considered so objective that in any other field they would be ignored.

Well, consider this, fanboys. Consider the fact that in the end it comes down to preference, and even the most well-learned psychologist/game critic won't be able to tell why there are people who liked Clive Barker's Jericho. And there's no reason we should make fun of them either. If they like the game, let's not try to convince them that their opinion is wrong. Let's not make the world think we're all game designers and take an in-depth look at the mechanics and decide whether it is allowable for someone to enjoy the game. Let's let them have fun.

The fact is, I don't want one game to be Game of the Year this year. Whereas often we are looking for innovations beyond any other, such as in that ever-distant spectacle, SPORE, I think that what 2007 turned out is pretty damn good. Let me demonstrate...

Team Fortress 2 showed us that Nintendo's cartoony styles could actually work harmoniously with one of the gorier games to come out this year, and remains the one online multiplayer game that anyone can pick up and play.
Crysis pushed boundaries for graphics, in games and even in the general CGI world. It also gave us the perfect way to approach a situation in many different ways. We have no doubt it'll remain the benchmark of choice for overclockers.
BioShock told us a story that seems completely uninfluenced by any of the traditional plotlines we've seen. It's not an alien invasion, a demon taking over the world...BioShock was something else entirely.
Halo 3 finished a wide-stretching storyline, and remains one of the best twitch-multiplayer games around. It also made an enormous leap in machinima with the introduction of Saved Films and the Forge.
Portal took things so much farther than Digipen's original creation. All the incredible writing from Psychonauts has visibly carried over into a solid game mechanic that works in ways even the developers can't imagine. It remains the only game that reviewer Yahtzee Croshaw has no criticism for.
Half-Life 2: Episode 2 finally took the Half-Life story somewhere. It reminded us that whereas all acting in movies is starting to look like Keanu Reeves, it's still possible for a game to bring a tear to your eye.
Super Mario Galaxy was more than a "flashback to the platforming era". It EXPANDED on the formula platformer. The gravity flipping and great, while not excessive, use of the wiimote, made this game definitely worthy of the long-standing Mario name.
Assassin's Creed brought Parkour to video games, and provides us with one of the most massive, GTA-style freeroaming games to come out all year.
Mass Effect, like KOTOR, gives you characters you will care about, worlds that will touch your eye, and a story that is truly unforgettable.
Guitar Hero III became the second video game to have a South Park episode based around it, and reminds us all of why we love music.
Call of Duty 4, rather than creating a new gimmick for the FPS genre, polishes the game that it knows so well to a mirror sheen. And it sent a powerful message to EA: WORLD WAR 2 IS OVER. GET WITH IT.
Unreal Tournament III provided a fantastic engine for BioShock, Mass Effect, and many other games to come, and is the first console game to attempt to bring mods from the PC to the consoles. Besides that, multiplayer is undeniably fun and varied.
Ratchet and Clank Future is finally one of the best PS3-exclusive titles, and combines the fun platforming of Mario with the also-fun gunning of Unreal. Except, in a manner of speaking...these guns are bigger.

We don't need a game of the year. As Christmas approaches, let us move our words from hateful fanboying (Altair would SO beat Master Chief in a fight) to mutual love of all games. (What if Altair taught Master Chief to be an assassin?)

Even if that includes Jericho.

Crisis: Way too Early review

2007-11-12T22:53:00.000Z

NOTE: Crisis is a game made by a hippy in Southeast Malasia. Thus it's not surprising that you've never heard of it. It definitely has nothing to do with Crysis. It would not make sense for me to be playing the game "Crysis", even though it may or may not be on some piracy sites already.

So not much has changed from the Crisis demo; you still jump out of a plane with a less than adequate introduction and really choppy framerates. I was running the game in DirectX 9 on low settings until NVidia has the good sense to write some real drivers. After the well-known demo, you head further and further into lonely-ville as more and more of your squadmates are killed off by the annoying blue ice alien thing.

I had a lot of fun tossing barrels and broken pieces of buildings at enemies in the demo level using Ultimate Strength, but soon enough the game starts to discourage this. First off, there are exactly one million freaking south koreans (no, not North Koreans, you're thinking of Crysis, and I am definitely not talking about Crysis.) and often you'll be fighting them at a really long range. Furthermore, there will be TWO million South Koreans if you have the sheer lunacy to get seen by someone and let them set off a flare.

Furthermore, there are one too many vehicles than one would like in a Long Cry-esque game. Soon enough you will be pitted against a tank without any helping hints as to how the fuck you're supposed to destroy it. One of them I managed to lure near a gas station, then tear a hole in both its hull and the lurking ozone later. The other, which thankfully seemed to have its turret stuck in a hole in the wall, I left alone for some 15 minutes before finally finding a stack of missile launchers. I used about two launchers (amounting to 6 rockets) before the thing blew up. This sort of brings up the question, what the hell would I do if I had missed with some of these, or blown up the gas station early? I'm not sure if Critek has completely thought that one through.

This extends to helicopters as well. In one section I was using Speed to go down this very long river to an extraction point. I would be using a boat, but unlike boats, my FiberSuit doesn't blow into a million pieces when a bullet larger than a splinter hits it. I kept feeling like the game was supposed to give me something to take these things down, but I ended up putting up with the thing the whole 2 miles or so. Afterwards, the impending boss battle felt comparatively easy.

Let me make this clear; if recent FPS's have felt easy for you, take a look at Crisis. You're going to have enemies all around you and not much cover. In my opinion, Kojima should have given up the tagline "No place to hide" to Critek. You'll need to use the suit abilities to survive, but beyond that you'll need to have some damn good aim, and as hard as it is, a damn good framerate.

Conundrum: Chapter 2.

2007-11-07T20:16:00.000Z

The Wildcat's latest chapter in his Conundrum fanfiction of Half Life.

Smoke created a black haze in the vacant hallway. The scent of blood was but a ghost in the thick air. Abandoned offices lined the corridor. Emergency lamps cast yellow light into the darkness.

At twelve feet in height, the creature could only traverse the tiny human structures in a burdened crouch. His thick chitin exoskeleton scraped the ceiling tiles and exposed the electrical conduits above. He occasionally swatted his broad claws against an office door, more for amusement then any true purpose.

His canine head shifted only slightly with each step. Green twinkles flickered from his pupils as they adjusted for the power-drained darkness. His feral snout whiffed the air in search of new prey.

The remains that lay deeper in the facility were bitter. It was as if decay had soured the meat. But the "scientists" had seemed rotten from the moment of the kill. Perhaps they were some subspecies that possessed particularly sickly, stringy meat.

Then again, the creature may have merely imagined the dislike of the scientist's flesh due to the ease with which he had dispatched them. Even the lowliest prey could offer a challenge when faced with certain death. Yet, these humans had been terribly frail.

It was as though they did not wish to live. Some of them had practically waited for the end. The security teams had been armed with automatic weapons and explosives, but they rarely used them until their death was imminent.

The creature grunted with disgust. He hoped to find suitable prey outside. Nevertheless, the humans had been a pleasure to kill. After all, they had kept the beast in a pin and...

Actually, the creature could not remember what the humans had done to him. He blamed them for pains he could not hope to remember. At the first chance to escape, he had gladly torn his victims to shreds.

He ransacked their laboratories and pillaged anything of interest. It was a minimal restitution for his forgotten torments.

He had taken something called a "cloaking field generator". Somehow, he knew that the device had value, but also needed charging. A second lab had yielded two small green balls. The soft, moist orbs seemed useless. If not for the level of security, he would have shown no interest.

The creature growled with frustration. Each floor was a maze of tunnels, hallways, and monitoring rooms. Of six explosive charges he had taken from a nearly empty weapon locker, he had used five for "short cuts".

A muffled sound caught the creature's ears. He sniffed the smoke and snorted. He had almost missed the bitter human scent amid the smoke. They were close, but not in his corridor.

He hammered an office door and pushed through the frame. After tossing a desk aside, he kicked the opposite wall. The concrete cracked and crumbling pieces trickled to the floor.

Both claws pierced the damaged surface. He pried his claws free and placed a final thunderous kick. The wall fractured, allowing the beast to bash through the new opening.

Minus the scorch marks and battle damage of his rampage, the hall seemed sterile. Florescent lights hummed incessantly. Their sickly white glow covered everything. Everything, that is, except the darkened elevator at the end of the corridor.

As twin metal doors sealed the opening, the creature detected the faint scent of fresh air. Instinctively, he knew that night had fallen.

He lurched down the corridor and covered the distance in a few quick strides. With two sharp jabs, he crumpled the metal doors. Their inner workings groaned and snapped under the pressure.

The creature buried his claws in the weakened seal. Twisted steel tore out of its track. He tossed the crumpled hulk aside and kicked the remaining components into the lightless shaft.

Below, dozens of floor entrances counted the depth of the pit. Above, the elevator car chimed its arrival at the first floor.

After he considered his options, the creature groped his bandoleer for the final explosive charge. The blast ripped the lift apart and fragments cascaded down the shaft. Through the thinning soot and concrete dust, the gapping hole in the first floor wall became visible.

Without hesitation, the creature hurtled himself into the void. His claws snagged the opposite wall. In seconds, he scaled the shaft and hefted himself into the opening.

The first floor was different from the other levels. It stood twice the width of the other hallways. Furniture such as waiting room chairs and coffee tables decorated the corridor. Ornamental wallpaper with matching molding ran the length.

An open lobby lay at the end of the hall. Office entrances were infrequent and randomly spaced. The back of a large reception desk guarded the lobby. Of all the adornment, the windowed wall on the other side of the lobby most interested the creature.

Several stray bullets scratched his boney armor. His prey then quickly fled. Two of the humans sought shelter in an open office. The third sprinted for the lobby. Soured odors filled the creature's nostrils. He would not devour them, but he would enjoy the taste of retribution.

Crunching glass and crumbling acoustic tiles dirtied the floor behind him. Thundering feet crushed the delicate furniture.

The first prey dove over the reception desk only to reappear and fire an assault shotgun. The weapon discharged as it spiraled over the desktop.

Shock and terror passed over the pale man's face as he felt of the spurting stump that had been his shoulder. The claws were a blur. Impact threw the body into the plate glass wall. The creature wiped his claws on the reception desk with a wince at the soured odor.

Cowering in their office, the two remaining men checked their automatic rifles. One human hid behind an oak desk. The other dared to peer out of the doorframe.

"Okay... he's out," the leader said into a shoulder-mounted radio. "We'll give him some convincing shakes with our grenades and then point him away from CRI."

As soon as the leader was in the hall, the second man stood and readied his weapon. The wall fractured behind him. A smattering of gore erupted beneath the creature's foot. The remains jerked only slightly and then stilled.

"He came back for us!"

The man raced through the lobby and leapt over his other mutilated accomplice. He crossed the courtyard before stealing a glimpse back and lobbing a contact grenade.

Uncertain of the blast's success, the man ran around the nearest building and began to follow a concrete perimeter wall. A jeep pulled into his path and two men exited. A third readied the mounted 50-caliber machine gun.

"Where is he?"

"Headed this way. Grenades ready."

In silence, the small security team waited. Every whistle of the wind warranted scrutiny. Any groan or squeak from the neighboring buildings required cautious observation.

Pained cries fell beneath the crushing blow. The mounted gun fired a single powerful stream before its action shattered over the gnarled body.

A volley of contact grenades struck the vehicle and filled the night sky with fire. Beyond the flames, the creature watched his remaining prey.

Two quick rebounds from the sides of buildings brought him down atop a hapless victim. He pummeled the snapping body into several chunks and then dove away from twin grenade explosions.

The fireball ruptured the perimeter wall. Chunks of concrete mixed with a cloud of sand veiled the predator. Realizing their weakness, the humans escaped in opposite directions.

One of the men ran between buildings and hid behind a storage crate. The creature leapt to the nearest rooftop in a single effortless bound. His eyes appeared to glow green in the miniscule light of the night. His prey had become too easy. He was sickened by their vulnerability.

Angry with his victims and their pitiful actions, the beast hopped down beside the crate and dragged the human out by his leg. The man tried to fire his puny automatic rifle, but the bullets bounced harmlessly off the heavy exoskeleton.

The creature gripped the man by his chest and crushed his ribcage. He then ripped the corpse in two. With a few strong sniffs, he detected the last prey. It was an easy, though unpleasant scent to follow.

He crawled back to the rooftop and searched for his victim. The grenade struck with a delayed thump. Fire and shrapnel collapsed the ceiling.

The man turned to run only to have the creature pound to the ground in front of him. In a panic, the man fired another grenade. His shot missed wide and obliterated the wall of a darkened warehouse.

The beast's jaws clamped shut on the man's head. A burst of blood and tissue spewed from the dead man as he fell.

Spitting and gagging, the predator groaned with disgust. He stomped on the corpse once for pleasure and then returned to the parameter wall.

In the twinkling light of several small fires, the elongated snout slipped through the opening and sniffed the desert breeze.

"I smell... fresh meat."

The creature darted into the open wilderness. After a few bounding steps, he summoned his great strength and launched into a high arc over the dessert. He sailed above the white sand dunes in silence.

His legs burned as he thumped into the sand. He hesitated long enough to survey the environment. Before him arose a city skyline.

The creature faced the nearest building and leapt into the sky a second time. He thought odd of the city as he approached. It was calm and quiet. Perhaps his prey had conquered the city as he had conquered the laboratories.

Bricks cracked and fell into the street below when the creature slammed onto the side of the building. His weight would have easily carried him through the wall were it not for his own animal prowess.

With a few strong sniffs, he found the scents of many humans. They were pungent, more so then the scientists. But most of the meat smelled fresh, not bitter as his other encounters.

He crawled to the building's rooftop. He moved silently among the buildings. With short jumps, he crossed alleys and streets.

An occasional pause to observe the neighborhood presented only more of the human buildings and their fragile occupants. Had the creature not stalled to double check his own findings, he would have missed the black figure nearly three blocks away.

The silhouette appeared for but a moment above the rooftops before he dropped out of view. He was human, but not a scientist or guard. No flesh was visible. His odor was muted, almost non-existent.

At last, the creature had found his quarry. He dropped into the nearest alley and attempted to scent the man. He followed the dingy pathway with increased stealth.

Near the base of a six-story building, the fading smell mingled with that of a normal human. The creature pulled his weight onto the building's face and scaled the wall with barely a sound.

He stepped onto the rooftop with caution. A human clad in a business suit leaned over the farthest ledge of the roof. The man was watching something down the street. Though he clutched a handgun in his fist, the human seemed unaware of the beast.

"Do not be afraid human. You are too weak to be my prey. But did a human in some sort of body suit pass near here. His scent was obscured, not as rank as yours."

In a panic, the man began to fire wildly at the creature. His bullets harmlessly struck a taller building next-door. Barely two spare shots ricocheted off the creature's chitin.

"That was a mistake."

Into a massive fist, the gun disappeared. An unfired round exploded within the collapsing magazine. The useless chunk of metal cracked to the gravel of the roof.

His fear transparent, the man scurried through an access hatch and slammed the cover. Mildly amused, the creature hurtled across the street in pursuit of his prey.

A strange wind crossed the beast's nostrils. "Something is not right."

It was not his prey. He had sensed something more distant, across the city. The creature dismissed the matter, as he sensed no danger to himself. His prey was close.

High-pitched human screams directed his attention. He sped his pace, careful to retain his stealth.

A double blast broke the night air. He was close. The conflict ahead assured him that his prey was waiting.

I'm making a note here; huge success.

2007-11-07T01:55:00.000Z

Just so you know, this is, hopefully, the first in a series of reviews of the games contained in The Orange Box (sans Half-Life 2 and Episode 1). Tune in for the (hopefully) weekly installments so you can see how I more than likely fortified your opinion on how you made the right decision in purchasing this product so you can go and brag to your friends about how much more kick ass it is in comparison to Halo 3 and how they totally shouldn't have spent their money on it when they could have bought the almighty Orange Box. Then they'll walk away from you hesistantly because they don't know you and you don't actually have any friends.

First in the line up is the massively anticipated and highly acclaimed Portal, so named for the absolutely bleeding obvious. If you somehow missed the hype for this game because you were too busy being socially outgoing or masturbating to Alyx/your favorite anime show pornography, then please zip up your damn pants long enough for me to choke out a brief plot summary. Portal documents the altogether uneventful yet entertaining adventure of your character, Chell, through the testing grounds of the seemingly abandoned corridors of Aperture Science, Inc. whilst being accosted by a dead-pan mechanical voice with the occasional hint of attitude, all of which takes place in the Half-Life universe. You also get to use a portal creation device. Hence "Portal." That's all I can really say without spoiling anything important or cool. There's some nifty back story that you can find if you actually dig around a bit; none of it's plot critical, but all of it is pretty hilarious, so I recommend you do a little searching, if only for the enrichment of the thing (if any of you can tell me about the relevance of shower curtains to this game, I'll give you a cookie laced with cocaine). Something that you might not notice so much in-game but will look back on fondly is the humor; to be short, it's absolutely hilarious. I've almost never been so amused by well-delivered lines in a video game. If you've read my previous article, you'd know my stance on well written and developed scripts, and Portal manages to tell a good story whilst inciting fits of girlish giggling the entire way.

And, of course, the companion cube. I won't spoil it, but when Katana once said that it has more character development than Master Chief, he wasn't just being the elitist bag of console-hating rage that we've all come to know and love.

To get to the meat of the matter, the gameplay just happens to be the moist, artery-clogging delicious center of the game, to which the story is merely the ambrosial, heart stopping butter-cream icing. Naturally, as with any game except Final Fantasy or Sudoku, the gameplay is, in the end, the only thing that actually matters. Seasoning is nice, but what you really want is the big, juicy steak that it covers. And, just like steaks, there are some games that try to cover up a shitty slice of beef with lots of frills and spices that, while making the meat a tad more palatable, simply cannot cover up an annoyingly bad base product (read: Every MMO ever made). Portal just happens to be a prime cut ripped straight off of a living pure-bred steer, whose blood and remaining body parts were then sacrificed to the gods so that they might bless this Holy Grail of gaming genius. And then some extra shit was set on fire just for good measure.

Ok, I exaggerated. The steer was actually sacrificed to the developers over the course of several hearty, delicious meals. However, I was not exaggerating in that some extra shit WAS set on fire, but that was in an unrelated office party incident and involved an excess of acholic beverages, matches, and "double-dog dare you"s.

Moving on, Portal has incredible gameplay and some genuinely challenging puzzles (holy shit!) thanks to it's innovative use of the portal system. You do have to give Portal a great deal of credit in that it's the first came to use portals in a competent, enjoyable fashion (I'm looking at YOU, Prey). However, I do have SOME issues with it. Mostly, it's linear. INCREDIBLY linear. Any given puzzle in the game has, on average, 1.2 ways to solve it (the .2 meaning that there are a few puzzles in the game that can be solved in two ways, the second of which is usually, weird, convoluted, and/or not so fun). I can understand the need for linearity in a puzzle game, but, considering how short Portal is, they could have at least given us a little extra something; and no, the challenges don't count. Basically, once you finish the game, you've finished the game. For good. You can't really even come back and play it later because you'll remember how to solve all the puzzles and it's no longer the challenging, new adventure that is was when you first slid it into your disc drive. It turns becomes a fairly droll repetition of previous, subconsciously memorized movements and actions with little variation from the original. Other than the linearity, though, I actually have very few complaints. Some of the puzzles were somewhat vague as to the next step, and the final "puzzle" isn't really challenging at all, but those are overall pretty minor and didn't much affect my playing experience. Just that damn linear element.

Bluntly, this game was really overhyped. And still is, for that matter. I can understand where all of it came from ("Game with Portals isn't too Warped!", "Reporter Reports that Portal doesn't Fucking Suck Shit!"), but sometimes we just need to realize that games don't have to stay overhyped after release. It doesn't deserve all of the high praise and cult-like worshippers that it gains. Obviously it deserves some acclaim and maybe a loony fanatic or two, but nothing like the hoards of people screaming "Pure genius!" that it currently gets.

Don't get me wrong; Portal is a spectacularly good time. It really, really is. But it's just not perfect. Or long.

Just like sex with your mother.

To Games: Stop Wasting our Time

2007-11-05T04:29:00.001Z

I realize I'm quite an addict when it comes to making up completely misleading titles so let me recompensate by writing something that no doubt many of you people will agree with, and possibly call to arms an uprising against responsible companies, were it not that many of us don't even know where they are.

See, my frustration is not with how games cause us to look at our watch and exclaim "It is 3 in the morning." It's more that there's so much time in games where we can't do anything. Let me try to make some explanation of this. In the recent Medal of Honor Airborne, you are forced to watch the EA logo and "opening"...thing...of the main menu. You must then click Continue Campaign whereas you must watch a long 3D briefing, something which you have no doubt seen before, and doesn't help since most of us can improvise our own attack plan once we've hit the ground.

Conversely, I have recently been playing Grim Fandango, whereas when you hit the shortcut for the game, a little window pops up offering to take you DIRECTLY TO your last save game. No menu, not much loading, and before you know it you're Manny, looking around cluelessly for a bottle in which to store some Coffin Shooters.

I could go into a lengthy analysis of what, specifically, people should be doing to fix all this, but this is not some psychiatric interactive entertainment analysis: It's simple, the longer the time between you hitting the shortcut and you being actually IN the game, the WORSE.

It goes beyond this too, however. During the game, keep in mind that some people are going to play it over and over again, having absolutely nothing better to do and apparently believing that whole bit about a secret level hidden behind a blast door. First, make all cutscenes skippable. Besides the fact that your writing and voice actors are horrible, consider that someone has ALREADY SEEN THEM. Half-Life 2 becomes a prime culprit of this, because in reality it would be really awkward to be able to skip a cutscene in Episode 2. What I liked was those bits in Half-Life 1, where a scientist would start talking for the plot-interested player, while the speedrunner would wave goodbye and continue bunny-hopping away.

But I'm not going to limit this to just cutscenes. There are even short, 0.3 second segments in games that will annoy me in the same way. Instead of forcing a "jump over barrier" animation that removes control of my character, why not just let me JUMP it? I realize people are trying to move from cutscenes to always-first-person in an attempt to immerse the player, but this really fails when suddenly you're no longer "playing as" mr.shootspeople and just "watching through the eyes of" mr.shootspeople. But would you kindly agree...it DID make some sense in Bioshock. This is also apparent in games where your character getting hit requires you to recoil back and such, unable to control your movement. (Lost Planet is the prime suspect and thus has been sentenced to 4 days of constant minigunning)

I think Resident Evil 4 was one of the first to help counteract this by introducing a level of interacivity even in those awesome cutscenes. Those seem to be pretty mandatory for many games now, but I feel like as long as they're properly executed, they're just there to make the game a bit more fun. The obvious solution for anything removing control by the player is by allowing the player to interrupt things. I hate any game that doesn't let you stop reloading your gun in order to whip out a pistol and cap the monster that popped out at you.

The British Gaming Industry in the '70s and '80s.

2007-11-03T10:30:00.000Z

First off, apologies to Sum0 for not posting this sooner. In my defence last night I was very tired and didn't get round to doing the biz. Here it is now.

Oh, and the captions of the pictures are done by me. I'm telling you this so as not to disgrace Sum0.

---

I would.

1984 - Elite. 1991 – Lemmings. 1996 - Tomb Raider. 1997 - GoldenEye. 2004 - Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. While the US and Japanese industries hog the limelight, and European developers are responsible for some of the most innovative recent games, the British games industry has worked busily in the background for nigh-on three decades. In 2004, the British games industry recorded sales in excess of £2 billion, making the UK the biggest market in Europe and the third biggest in the world after the US and Japan.

It all goes back to November 29th, 1972, when Pong, the first widely popular video game came out. Pong, however, was developed by the then fledgling American company Atari. Though it made it to British shores (my parents have photographs to prove it), back then the British games industry was non-existent.

The 1970s

For the next ten years the video game industry established itself, dominated by Japanese and American developers and companies: a new breed of geeks, working on university mainframes, pushed the boundaries of games design with text-based adventure games like Adventure (1976) and Zork (1979); giants like Namco and Nintendo established themselves in the arcades with games like Space Invaders (1978) and Donkey Kong (1981); and in 1977 Atari established the home console market with their seminal Atari 2600.

One of the first wholly British games to be created was MUD, or Multi-User-Dungeon, created by two students at the University of Essex in 1978. 19-year old Roy Trubshaw wrote the first version of the game on the university’s PDP-10 mainframe. MUD, inspired by text adventure games (like the prototype versions of Zork, at that time still in development) was originally a series of interconnected rooms through which multiple players could move around, explore, and chat to each other.

While Trubshaw concentrated on the technical and programming side of things, the planning of rooms and puzzles – the actual game design – was taken up by his friend, 18-year old Richard Bartle, who describes the writing of MUD as a “team effort”. When Trubshaw left university, Bartle remained and worked on polishing Trubshaw’s code into a finished game: adding a points system, monsters to fight, and the game’s ultimate goal of reaching Wizard status: giving players all-powerful, meta-game admin abilities.

MUD, perhaps the first multiplayer game with a persistent world, became phenomenally popular. Initially just played by students at Essex, the game was eventually opened up to players across Britain using then-new modems, as long as they logged in at the off-peak times of 2am-6am. Even with those unsocial hours, MUD was always full to capacity. A cross-Atlantic link to ArpaNet (the predecessor of the internet) allowed American players to join in too. Over time MUD evolved into MUD2, which is still going strong today, almost 30 years later. MUD’s influence can be felt in today’s Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games like World of Warcraft, which despite their 3D graphics still owe a debt to the work of a pair of British university students.

The 1980s
Despite the success of MUD, it was limited to a fraction of computer science students and a few hobbyists. Video games had yet to reach the general public.

Enter Sir Clive Sinclair. Bespectacled, bearded; invariably described as a “boffin” by the British press; revered and ridiculed in equal measure. His grandfather a naval architect and his father an engineer, Sinclair was born for the electronics industry. After a few years selling electronics kits and writing a book on transistors, Sinclair started Sinclair Radionics Ltd. in 1961, a few days before his 21st birthday.

It was in 1980, however, that Sinclair made his (unwitting) entry into gaming history. The Sinclair ZX80, his first home computer, ran at 3.25 MHz, had 1KB of RAM, was in black-and-white, had no sound, and sold 50,000 units at a mere £99.95 – which meant that the UK led the world in home computer ownership. The following year saw the updated Sinclair ZX81: and in 1982 the definitive model, the ZX Spectrum, was released.
The Spectrum was a revolution in home computing. With a colour display, rudimentary sound, and a much-maligned rubber keyboard, the “Speccy” sold for £99 in its most basic model and became widespread in homes and schools across Britain.

I would. (This, by the way, is Clive Sinclair)

The Sinclair computers were easy to program and a generation of “bedroom programmers” sprang up. Northern Irish developer David Perry described his first success in the games industry in a BBC interview.

“I sent a game I wrote to a magazine. I think it was a driving game, a black blob avoiding other black blobs. They printed it, and I was really happy.

"Then after I sent them some more games, a check for £450 came in the post. I was shocked, as I didn't even have a bank account. Just imagine how many sweets I was able to buy!”

From his bedroom, Perry went on to develop more games for the ZX Spectrum. After moving to the US, he formed his own company, Shiny Entertainment, in 1993. He went on to create the hugely successful multi-platform Earthworm Jim series, the critically-acclaimed MDK, and more recently two games based on the Matrix films, Enter The Matrix and Path of Neo.

The years following the release of the Spectrum saw an explosion in British games design. Matthew Smith developed the legendary platformer Manic Miner in just six weeks in 1983, and followed it up with Jet Set Willy in 1984. Both were true pioneers in platforming games, years ahead of the competition, and pushed the Spectrum to its limits with colourful graphics and in-game music – a first for the Spectrum.

Another Spectrum developer was Codemasters: a partnership of two brothers, Richard and David Darling, founded in 1985. Codemasters were popular for their low-price budget releases such as the Dizzy series, starring an anthropomorphic egg (and coincidentally coded by another pair of brothers, Philip and Andrew Oliver) and titles such as Advanced Pinball Simulator.

Over the next twenty years Codemasters rose to become the second biggest games publisher in the UK after Eidos, some of their more recent releases including DiRT and Clive Barker’s Jericho.

The Spectrum wasn’t the only home computer popular in Britain. The Amstrad CPC, Acorn’s BBC Micro (commissioned by the BBC to aid computer literacy, and widespread in schools), and the internationally popular, best-selling Commodore 64 were all common – and Ashby-de-la-Zouch-based developers Ultimate Play The Game coded for them all.

Ultimate Play The Game (usually shorterned to Ultimate) were founded in 1982 by yet another pair of British brothers, Tim and Chris Stamper, who had previously worked developing arcade games. Their first release as Ultimate was Jetpac on the Spectrum in 1983, a game involving a spaceman who must assemble a rocket and fuel it before blasting off to the next level. It was hugely successful, selling 300,000 copies to a market of about a million Spectrum owners. In the same year, Ultimate released Pssst, Tranz Am, and Jetpac sequel Lunar Jetman.

The following year, Ultimate released Sabre Wulf, an action adventure and the first game in the Sabreman series. Wasting no time, they released the sequels Underwurlde and Knight Lore in the same year. Knight Lore is notable for its isometric, 3D graphics engine dubbed “Filmation” by Ultimate, an innovation copied extensively by other publishers.

By the end of their second year, Ultimate had churned out eleven hit games on the Spectrum. The Stamper brothers’ high-quality, regular releases built up a huge fanbase in Britain, despite their media shyness.

But then everything changed. In 1984, the Stampers acquired the newest Japanese sensation: the Nintendo Famicom, a revolutionary 8-bit games console. Though it had been out in Japan for nearly a year, it would only reach the US and Europe in 1985 and 1986 respectively, renamed as the Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES). Amazed by the potential, the Stampers soon diverted all their attention to it. In 1985, they sold the Ultimate name and back catalogue to Birmingham-based U.S. Gold, and abandoned the Spectrum for good. Having impressed Nintendo enough to receive a license to develop for the NES, they expanded their NES development into a full business. They called themselves Rare.

But more on them later.

This game is called Knight Lore and it is pink. Somewhere someone claims this to be their favourite game.

Following in the footsteps of MUD developers Trubshaw and Bartle were David Braben and Ian Bell, who met in 1982 as undergraduates at Cambridge University. Though they were each working independently on separate games, they decided to collaborate to write a game for the BBC Micro. It was released in 1984 as Elite, and quickly went down in video gaming history.

Elite places the player in a small, lightly armed spacecraft, 100 credits, a rating of “Mostly Harmless”, and a universe of 2,048 planets to explore. Players can travel from space station to space station, buying goods such as food, machinery, and minerals at a low price in one region and selling them for a profit in another. Alternatively, they can sign up for military missions, collect bounties, mine asteroids, or conduct piracy on merchants.
There is no goal in the game. Players can choose their own objective in the game universe: to achieve a level of “Elite”, to accumulate wealth, to put together the most powerful spacecraft. This sort of freeform, complex, non-linear gameplay was completely novel at the time and even today remains a holy grail for game designers.

Elite was not the first game in the space-trading genre, but it was far more expansive than any previous efforts and featured revolutionary 3D graphics. It sold 150,000 copies for the BBC Micro alone, and was eventually ported to 12 other platforms (including the Spectrum).

For many years, developers tried to create the next Elite. David Braben himself made a successful attempt in 1993 with Frontier, developed by his company Frontier Developments, but the sequel First Encounters was bugged and failed miserably. More recently, Microsoft’s Freelancer was a success, along with Egosoft’s X series. Elite has been taken to its logical conclusion with EVE Online, a massively multiplayer online space trading simulation where the players themselves determine the flucuations of the market economy. But these games all owe their existence to the work of two university students twenty years prior.

In 1991 a remake was released, called Elite Plus. It was programmed by one Chris Sawyer, who we’ll get back to later.

By the end of the 80s, the British games industry was in a transition. The Spectrum, never that powerful in the first place, was being increasingly outclassed by newer machines such as the Amiga 500, the Acorn Archimedes, and the IBM PC. Dedicated games machines like Nintendo’s NES and Sega’s Master System were increasingly popular, too. The stage was set for a new burst of creativity.

This is Elite. Fear it, for in some quarters it is labelled as a God.

Digg this!

What The Land Before Time XIII should have been like.

2007-10-31T16:29:00.000Z

When I was a nipper, it was one of my biggest pleasures to watch The Land Before Time series of animated films. I mean, what red-blooded boy wouldn't have that in his top ten activities? It's got dinosaurs in it, and it's a cartoon; a winning formula if there ever was one. But over time, I got bored of those simple movies, preferring instead to watch more traumatising flicks. However, it has recently came to my attention that they're still making them, and XIII is the latest in the series. It's due to be released in November, and when I found out I just sat there, thinking not only "do people still watch that stuff?" and "holy hell, what a missed opportunity!"

As you all know, 13 is an unlucky number. Combined with a Friday, it's practically Apocalypse Now; it's the ghoulish version of 9/11. Today is Halloween, an annual version of Apocalypse Now, and more commercialised. It doesn't take a whole lot of thinking to combine the two together, and think: "I have an excellent idea, what say we forget about this bound-to-be-boring plotline of friendship and youth, and give the kids what they really want to see? Zombie Dinosaurs!"

I am aware of the fact that The Land Before Time movies are not known for their controversy. Their targeted audience are kids who haven't heard of "homosexuality" yet, and if they ever did hear of it (which their parents wouldn't approve of) they would quite likely twist their face and assume that Jesus would deal with these people personally. But I propose that half the kids who watch the damn series wouldn't mind it at all if there were more scenes of dinosaurs being ripped to shreds by Sharptooth.

Speaking of Sharptooth, I think it would be an excellent plot-twist for him to come back to life and lead the zombie army into battle. Let's face it, there's been no better villain in the series than the fucking massive T-Rex who was the first villain, and his demise (being drowned under a rock) was one of the biggest cop-outs ever. Where were the ridiculous amounts of blood? Instead of being torn to pieces at the hands of a similarly dangerous creature, he had trouble swimming in a pond. And I apologise if I just spoilt the first film for anyone, but you should really watch awesome films sooner.

Sharptooth in Land Before Time XIII.

I also think that Spike should be zombified. It's nothing that I have against him, being as he is the jolliest of all the group, but this idea appeals to me for three reasons:

He is already terminally slow, which means he can fit into his new role perfectly. His facial expression is normally the standard face of a brain-fried carnivore anyway. Like the bully that would kick you in the shin at school. Fair enough, his is an expression of happiness rather than mild indigestion, but just imagine said bully was bought a new car. That kind of face.
As slow as he would be, having Spike stomping up to you, trying to bite your face off, would be absolutely terrifying and much more memorable than anything that "Hi guys, I use a lot of petrol for my chainsaw!" Leatherface guy could manage. Having him mutter incoherently as he chews your flesh would probably be the worst part.
Whenever Spike is there, happily trotting along, you get the impression that while danger could reach the group, nothing bad could ever come of it, because Spike is never fucking worried. He's just got a massive obnoxious grin that in my view hides the soul of an omniscient being, put on Earth to provide comic relief and other niceties. Remove Spike from the group, and place him as an antagonist, and start running as fast as you can, because Spike is gonna get you.

I was going to edit this image badly in Paint to give Spike a more zombie-like apperance, but on second thoughts that fucker is already scary enough. Is he yawning or opening his mouth to eat someone whole? Holy fuck.

Now that we've established why Spike would be the uber-zombie (and really, if it gets too scary for the little 'uns, he could always get turned back in a scene fit to be the dictionary definition of "Deus Ex Machina"), I also think we should consider the possibility that Littlefoot and Cera should get it on. And by "on" I mean having sexual intercourse. Now, I'm not into bestiality, but it would be the natural evolution...

(sorry about that. I had to go down to have a plate of Beans on Toast, with hot-dogs. Oh, and there was the small matter of answering the door three hundred times to give bratty little kids one or two awful-tasting sweets while making witty remarks about their shit costumes.)

....of their relationship, and it would be the perfect sexual education for children, having two of their favourite characters Making Magic would effectively tutor children on the ways of "sticking it in her pooper." I think that they might be underage, but in this movie they'd be at least sixteen. It is, after all, a zombie movie. You need to have teens in it somewhere.

But just because they're of consensual age doesn't mean that old Grandpa can't lecture them on not going to the Dinosaur Graveyard, only to be completely ignored and ridiculed when the group decide unanimously to go to the Dinosaur Graveyard. As that has been the base plotline of every single movie so far - senile old man tells naive playful kids not to venture into Point of Danger X, while being conveniently ignored - I can't see why we should break tradition now, especially considering the importance of this fact. "Don't go to graveyards or you'll have your face digested by the undead." One of the main facts of life, that.

I think we can all agree that my version of the thirteenth movie is far far better than the one coming out in a matter of weeks. All they really have to do is scrap that pitiful idea, ring me up to get the rights for the idea, and then give a further ring to ol' George Romero.

And then ring up me again with an offer to direct when Romero turns them down.

Digg it!
Crack it!

Conundrum: Chapter 1

2007-10-30T17:55:00.000Z

Apologies for the change in schedule for this chapter; originally meant to be appearing tomorrow, I've instead decided to post it today so it doesn't collide with the article I have planned for Halloween tomorrow, and vice versa.

Wildcat would like it to be known that the character "Wildcat" in this piece isn't actually a blatant attempt for self-promotion, but instead his username stemmed from the character itself. Without further ado, here's the next chapter in a fanfiction epic.

A shimmer of light and nothing more. With a new moon and a light cloud cover to steal the stars, the grey rooftop was bathed in darkness. A weak light above a maintenance hatch merely pretended to offer fresh illumination.

The street below, Clifton Boulevard, was dimly lit by street lamps and traffic signals. The nine o'clock curfew had already cleared the streets of life and darkened the neighboring buildings.

Absence of life and light gave the city an abandoned feel. It was a notion that pleased the black suited vigilante.

The silent figure strolled across the roof of a five-story building. Barely a sparkle of glint from his colorless armor gave the silhouette shape. Matching backswept ears crested his helmet. The chrome of his facemask and fingertip claws was barely discernable.

His gate was deliberate. With each step, he concealed the lengthy 36-inch barrel of a rifle in his own infinitesimal outline. He preferred caution and never revealed all of his strengths to would-be combatants.

It was the vigilante's eyes that truly revealed his presence. Backlit night-vision lenses gave him the glowing crimson eyes of a phantom.

He stopped abruptly. He listened intently as his suit amplified the ambiance. The maintenance access began to open lazily. A pittance of light filtered through the opening. Beyond the hatch, a gawky, well-dressed man ducked into view. The new figure crawled through the hatch in an ungainly manner.

Somewhat amused by the sight, the crime fighter lowered his rifle. With the booming growl of his synthetic voice, he called out to the little man. "What are you doing there?"

The new man stumbled and turned to face the vigilante. "I had a report of a man on a roof over here. I'm Agent North... Perhaps I should ask YOU what YOU'RE doing here." North leveled a small side arm at the vigilante as to accent his statement. His actions drew a slight snicker.

"The Wildcat," the armored figure said with a nod. "I'm on patrol."

Agent North pointed to the long rifle and asked, "With that?"

"Absolutely, something bad is going on tonight. I can feel it."

"I think you need to put down the gun and come with me sir. NOW."

"Afraid not agent, I have a job to do."

Before the agent could react, Wildcat whirled to face the edge of the building and stepped into space.

Inaudible outside of the stylized helmet, he spoke a command into his microphone. In less then a second, the computer analyzed the command, removed it from its output queue, and executed the instructions. As the ground rushed up to meet him, a burst of super-compressed gas surged from beneath the back panel of Wildcat's armor.

When the dust of the pavement began to stir beneath him, the vigilante barked a second silent order. The hidden micro-thrusters silenced, and he struck the boulevard with minimal force.

After a quick glance at the dumbfounded Agent North, Wildcat continued his patrol. He used a scanner function to monitor the police and military communication channels. Yet, only a single police band was active.

Reports of curfew violations and an occasional bum dominated the transmissions. Wildcat had listened to the same signals every night for the entirety of his two-week stay. It was a remarkably quiet, boring city considering the circumstances.

The crime fighter had been conducting his typical efforts and monitoring his alter ego's investments when the first national newscasts aired. The reporters had indicated that a terrorist effort had been thwarted and that a so-called "dirty bomb" had been safely detonated in the desserts of New Mexico.

Naturally, questions arose surrounding the decision to detonate rather then dismantle the bomb. Later, reports emerged that identified the blast as a surface detonation, a practice that had been prohibited on a governmental and international level for decades.

New rumors arose, but every question seemed to have an answer. Even so, The Wildcat's mind was dissatisfied. The entire matter felt empty. He never could explain his decision to visit the site, but experience had taught him to trust his instincts.

After a brief aerial search, he had found the blast site among several devastated ruins on the edge of a canyon. Strangely, the canyon did not appear on any of his maps. Wildcat also stumbled across a city nearly 60 miles to the east.

Perhaps the most striking discrepancy was the complete lack of a military presence in the area. Under normal circumstances, an unidentified aircraft such as Wildcat's custom-built Cougar 10 would draw a fighter escort and demands to land. Instead, the vigilante had found only silence.

He had landed outside of the city and walked confidently into town. Two police officers and a man that identified himself as a federal agent awaited Wildcat at the outskirts. Their weapons drawn, the three men welcomed the armored stranger with demands that he surrender. A pair of police choppers had already secured the Cougar 10, and reinforcements were en route.

In the two weeks that followed, the vigilante had eluded the "authorities" and patrolled the city by night. He also selected several sites for possible field bases and observed the populace.

At that moment, The Wildcat stopped in the middle of the street. One of the police communications had captured his attention.

"...suspect is armed with long rifle. Suspect is wearing a... an expensive Halloween costume."

Deep rumbling laughter escaped the black helmet. The vigilante muted the police band and examined his rifle. While he waited, the flickering and dim streetlamps caught his attention. Something was draining the city's main power plant for the third time in one week.

"Hold it freak!"

The Wildcat glanced over his shoulder at the officer. "Freak? Oh, that hurts."

A second, older officer trained an assault shotgun on the vigilante. "Drop the weapon, put your hands on your head!"

"One way or another, you're not staying on the street tonight," the first officer added.

Wildcat turned to face the officers. "What IS with you people?" He then uttered a silenced command.

A simple chime and synthetic female voice conveyed a warning. "Stand clear... Stand clear."

In a gush of activity, the micro-thrusters engaged and a cloud of dirt and rock encircled the suited figure. He rocketed toward a neighboring building and left a freshly worn pothole in the street.

Once above the edifice, the stream of gas silenced. The vigilante dropped onto the structure with a hollow thud. For a single taunting moment, he peered down at the officers. "Well... At least I'm off the street."

The Wildcat preferred the rooftops to street travel. Fewer people interfered and he had a better view of the city skyline.

He returned to his original course and resumed his efforts to monitor the police band. Shortly, his thoughts returned to the strange events that originally drew him to New Mexico.

The situation was obviously not a simple matter of political maneuvering or a show of anti-terrorist muscle. The president and his administration suffered politically for allowing a dirty bomb to enter the US. And detonating the device in such a grandstanding manner had served only to outrage activist groups around the globe.

Even the local infrastructure had been adversely affected. The power plant regularly suffered from power drains. Local communications networks had only limited capacity, and no phone or internet connections could be established beyond the city limits.

More disturbing however, was the lack of interest by the locals. In fact, no one even discussed the city's problems or the supposed terrorist effort. Of course, a National Guard unit or some other military force should have been present to help keep the peace, but the streets were patrolled by local law enforcement alone.

Not that crime was a problem. The people were ever obedient and orderly. It was as though the entire city were removed from reality.

The Wildcat hesitated for a moment as a new police report crossed his headset. Apparently, the alarm system at the laboratory complex east of the city had been triggered. Every night the alarms sounded at the Chamberlain Research Institute.

At first, the vigilante had responded to the alarms with fervor. Yet each night he arrived to find a security team reassuring the local police force of a false alarm. After two weeks, the alarms seemed more like the proverbial boy who cried wolf.

Still, the police message left an uneasy sensation in Wildcat's gut. After all, in the children's tale the boy encountered a real wolf but received no aid as his people became too accustomed to the repeated hoax. The crime fighter resolved to investigate after his standard patrol, if for no other reason then his own peace of mind.

Suddenly, the night air was cut by a shriek. The woman's voice was shrill and filled with deathly fear. Her voice echoed among the buildings.

Wildcat charged to the edge of the rooftop and peered down into an alley below. A door in the side of the opposing building stood open. Two grungy middle-aged men slowly pried a struggling woman from the apartment.

The first man menaced the girl with a double-barrel shotgun. Wielding a long knife, the second man restrained the victim. Blood spattered both men and smeared the girl's long sleep dress.

Tears streamed down the young woman's face. The shotgun carelessly waved to and fro before her. Abruptly, the knife's blade found the straps of her garment. The silky fabric fell away exposing soft skin to gruff, perverted hands.

The Wildcat placed his rifle aside and opened a small holster on his belt. He focused his aim on the thug that caressed the girl with his shotgun.

With a soft buzz, the dart bored into the man's throat. Stunned, he clutched the wound and lowered his weapon. The tranquilizer took affect quickly as the man stumbled about at random.

The second man, startled by his friend's erratic behavior, lowered his guard. His grip on the topless girl loosened. "What? What's wrong?"

At last, the shotgun wielding man succumbed to the chemicals and slumped to the cold alley's pavement. Realizing the opportunity, the girl ran screaming toward the nearest street.

In a single motion, The Wildcat holstered the dart gun, snatched up his rifle, and leapt over the ledge. He activated the micro-thrusters for a split second to slow his six-story fall. The vigilante dropped between the young victim and her attackers.

The remaining thug reacted instinctively and lunged at Wildcat's abdomen. Pain and fear were visible in the criminal's grimace. He stood shocked, astonished to find that his blade had not penetrated the fabric of Wildcat's suit. The man's hand had slipped over the blade and blood began to seep from the fresh cut.

The man dove for his partner's shotgun, rolled, and blasted both barrels into the vigilante at point blank range. Wildcat slammed into the neighboring wall with a thunderous crack. He let his rifle drop to the ground and growled.

The vigilante kicked the shotgun aside and pounded the man in the chest. With fierce vigor, he ripped the thug off the ground and flung him against a nearby dumpster. As the man slowly regained his senses and turned, the vigilante plucked the 12-gauge from the ground. Wielding the weapon as a club, Wildcat whipped the man across the face and watched him collapse into a pool of blood.

"You should have surrendered when the knife idea didn't work," The Wildcat muttered as he retrieved the knife and placed both weapons next to the victim's door. Evidence. "And where are those cops when you need them?"

I should have saw this coming.

2007-10-28T11:41:00.000Z

Jonny McBane and Dave Walker from the forums present to us the most awesome Halloween story ever. There's not much I can say that won't spoil it, other than: Go watch it now you bumbling idiots!

Or, alternatively, just watch it here.

The Cognitively Challenged Person's Guide to Writing Like a Big Shot

2007-10-27T00:25:00.000+01:00

If I know the vast majority of you as well as I think I do, then I already know you better than I'd like. I also know that none of you mentally deficient boobs could write a half-way decent penis joke if you had your pants unzipped and a thesaurus in your free hand. Hell, you guys would probably find a way to screw up a joke about Microsoft and erectile dysfunction. Consequently, in my constant struggle to make the world an altogether more awesome place, I believe it's time I gave plebes such as yourself a lesson in proper writing etiquette so that you too can go from an enormous douchebag with an over-inflated ego to an enormous douchebag with an over-inflated ego who can also write short, quippy comebacks and subtle references about bedding with other peoples' mothers. (Note in advance that this article could result in the reader feeling delusions of adequacy or self-importance. These feelings should subside by the end of your next day at your dead end job or your next trip to the DMV.)

Subject Matter

The first and foremost thing you should consider before writing anything about anything is figuring out what the hell you're going to write about. Don't even try to start without a damn good idea of what issue you're going to dance around for twelve paragraphs whilst you madly try to turn everything into a shitty pun or veiled sexual reference (consider it practice for when you run for congress). Firstly, remember that your readers never want to see anything remotely controversial or within the realms of sanity. They're always just looking for a quick read and a cheap laugh so they can bring some passing joy to their empty, joyless, sexless existence. Remember that when you're writing for some idiotic, ungrateful little shits to bring some passing joy to YOUR empty, joyless, sexless existence. Secondly, consider the interests and age of your scummy cesspool of an audience and try to pick a subject based off of that. To aid you, I've composed a brief list of age groups and the main interests thereof;
13-18: Sex jokes, video games

19-35: Gratuitous sex jokes, video games, pretending to be important

36-60: Clean wholesome activities, sex jokes

60+: Bran, smelling bad, driving slow, Viagra jokes

Title

The main thing you need to remember about the title is that it's the attention getter of your literary masterpiece. The title is the thing that introduces the reader to your article before it is unveiled to the reader and the full glory of it is imprinted in their brain forever more. As such, it needs to be interesting and big. But mostly big. It's like the bulge in your pants; the bigger it is, the more people will stop, point, and stare at it. Then you reveal unto them the whole thing in all its shining awesomeness.

Content

I have only two real tips here, but they are incredibly important, so take note and remember this advice, for it will serve you well in your future endeavours of funny-making.

1. Everything must be a joke

I cannot stress this enough. No matter what, your ultimate goal is to keep your reader interested, and if you're not telling a joke or building up a punchline, then you can essentially discard whatever you just wrote because no one gives a shit if it isn't piss your pants funny. So you always want to make sure that your readers walk away from your article more enrinched by the experience and with at least one less pair of good shorts.

2. Dick jokes

They're funny.

Varying Your Language

English is a nifty little language in that there are a dozen different ways to say just about everything. In fact, there are literally over ten terms for a penile erection. So just remember to toss it up a little bit here and there. For example, instead of saying "idiot faggot bastard douchebag," twice in a row, you could instead substitute it for "moronic gay-wad fatherless vagina-licker."

Dealing With Writer's Block

...

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Stop fucking whining about the number of maps

2007-10-26T20:58:00.000+01:00

Every time someone has a complaint about Team Fortress 2, the number of maps comes into it, and it makes me really fucking pissed. I really begin to wonder if this reviewer has really played many popular skill-based online shooters, because I have a retort backed up by factual evidence.

Valve has seen that when you play CS:S, chances are you'll be sitting in an arabic setting known as DE_FREAKING_DUST. Players just started hating most of the maps they put out, and now it seems that the only 3 maps anyone ever plays are de_dust, de_dust2, and cs_office. That's it.

Of course, they're also playing custom maps with all disregards to level design just because people like the aspect of flying around with naught but a sniper rifle.

And to prove this isn't just the hearsay of some fanboy writer wanting to back up his game, I'm going to show you something. This is the first page of server results I got when I opened up my Steam server browser for Counter-Strike: Source. You may notice some colors inherent of a bad MySpace page...

Now hold your eye-bleeding for one second because these colors have a point. Red represents a server on a custom map, somehow taking the game BEYOND its tiny number of existing maps, yellow represents a server full of bots where no one is actually playing, blue represents a server playing one of the aforementioned insanely popular maps, and green represents people playing another map.

Notice how little green there is. And yet reviewers seem to think that the needs of those green people should be satisfied, as opposed to all the other people in this graph who seem to be quite enjoying themselves. (except for the people getting owned)

Now I'm going to make yet another bold and impossible accusation. Valve are gamers. Yes, those pixel-pushing office workers play games, have their own clan, spend entire days with office matches, and know what they find fun. And thus they look at statistics such as this and say "Wow. You remember that plan where we just make a bunch of maps however we can and put them out with Team Fortress 2? Yeah, let's NOT do that. Let's just make sure that when people are playing ctf_2fort over and over and over again for the next 10 years, they're STILL gonna like it.

One would almost think that the "quantity over quality" philosophy many associate with the orange box would carry over into the game, but no. Instead you get thinking like this: (Quote from Jeff Lane of Valve)
"Multiplayer communities tend to focus on a small group of maps, playing them over and over again. Instead of producing a large number of maps, most of which would go un-played, we decided to try and build a single map with more innate replayability than any we'd built before."

Reviewers: If you truly believe the game should have more maps, fine. I'll go whip together 50 orange-textured awkward faceoffs that inevitably end in blue always winning. Will you green-server people be satisfied then?

Game review: Dawn of War

2007-10-25T18:16:00.000+01:00

Drunky, my boss and former flame, asked, nay, begged me to join this blog in order to write some funny articles, reviews of the latest games, and insightful comments. I plan to do so reviewing every fucking thing on my Steam account. Today, we begin with...

In order to review this game, we (and by "we" I mean "I") will separate the review into categories, and give each of them a score between 0 and 10 points. At the end there will be an overall score for the game. So, let's get to work!

1.-Setting
This RTS (real time strategy) game is based on the interesting and dystopian universe created by Games Workshop in order to sell cheap plastic figures at ridiculously high prices to unsuspecting or mentaly ill customers. This universe is filled with factions who just love fighting each other, from the Empire of Man (think what the world would be like if Jesus had been the son of Stalin and Hitler...and these are the good guys) and the Orks (green beings who try to fit the word "git" into every single sentence), to the Eldar (space elves) and the Necrons (space zombies).

Since I support anything that involves zombies and ripping-off stupid kids, I give the setting a 10/10.

2.-Graphics
Dawn of War (sometimes refered to as "DoW") has been praised by almost all of the big reviewers (such as Gamespot) for it's "amazing" and "true to life" graphics.

"Holy shit! Fucking awesome!" -IGN

Personally, I don't see what's so great about it.

Of course, I may be biased. As some of you know, I happen to live in South America. I wont tell you the specific country, seeing how you'll end up confusing it with Cuba or Mexico anyway. The thing is, we have limited access to computer and computer parts here (or, as we call it, "El Diablo's machine"), so I'm only able to run the game on the lowest settings. Anyways, the details on the game are fantastic. While the facial expressions are not so great (still better than the ones from Brothers in Arms), you usually don't mind, mostly because of all the fucking gore on the game. There's gibs everywhere, explosions and bullets filling the screen. The effects of the lasers is great as well, and you can feel your screen shaking with each explosion (and believe me, there are lots of those, from grenade launchers to Orbital Strikes).

Matias and his three wives.

And more good news: Every expansion adds a little improvement to the graphics (Winter Assault added more gore, and Dark Crusade included that "see the whole scope of the battlefield" camera thingy you can also find on Company of Heroes). With the new expansion, Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War: This Time it's Personal (winner of the "Longest Title Award" at Gamernode, 2007) we can only expect Relic to replace the little 3D soldiers with actual footage from World War II. I give the graphics a 8/10

3.-Sound
"We are Chaos! Chaos is strong! Hurr Hurr!" Fucking annoying cultists. 3/10

4.-Single Player Campaign / Races
On the original Dawn of War, you play as the Space Marines, the über-soldiers of the Empire, fighting the alien forces that invade an Imperial planet. After doing some research, I gathered information about the campaign being based on the Bible. I guess that's interesting. Anyway, let's see the races from the original game:

The Space Marines:
The strongest units of the Empire of Man, they battle their enemies with guns and swords, wearing a powersuit, and always willing to die in the name of the Emperor. They strength lies on their strength and ability to kill pretty much any other unit on the game using only their infantry (You would have to me really stupid to lose using these guys). During the campaign you play as these brave men, trying to defend an Imperial world from alien invasions. On the Biblical sense of the campaign, it is pretty clear they represent Jesus' power, falling from the sky to "save" us, willing to die for our "mistakes", and always eager to "kick xeno ass".
FUN FACT: They are much cooler than their Starcraft counterparts, and don't die as easily.

The Orks:
Similar to the ones from every role-playing game ever, except this time they have machine guns and tanks. Their strength lies on their numbers and propaganda. You build "Waaagh" banners, which allow you to build more units, until you have an army of roughly three thousand soldiers. These soldiers happen to be the weakest life-form of the universe, and it takes only one Space Marine squad to kill all of them (which makes you wonder how they managed to invade the Imperial planet in the first place, I figure that simply yelling at 'em would cause a massive heart attack and end up sending them to Ork heaven). On the biblical sense, I believe they represent the Roman Empire, invading the hero's home (Israel), and being stupid. They dissapear halfway through the campaign (you kill their leader, and I suppose they all comit suicide afterwards).
FUN FACT: All of the Orks seem to be retarded. This may be because an ork is actually some kind of very advanced fungus.

The Forces of Chaos:
Fallen Space Marines. If you thought that the blood-loving, suicidal, xenophobic zealots that call themselves "Marines" were bad, imagine how they would be if they followed a demon instead of an Alexander the Great rip-off. That's right, they're bad ass. In fact, they're so bad ass...

...that they even have fucking horns. Isn't that subtle? Horns means evil. Tremble, you weaklings!
Now, on the Bible side of the story, it is easy to see that they represent the Jews. They are "fallen" marines, not following the orders of their God (or, may I say, misintepretating them?), so the Space Marines are sent to put them on the right path, even if that means dying for their sins. If the implied symbolism wasn't enough, one of their units is called "the deadly Torah", their leader's special ability is stealing the enemy's resources, and they even crucify one of their units when it says that they should "repent."

To the left: Sreist, a Chaos "heretic". To the right: Jesus.

You face them as the "ultimate enemies" on the game, and are only defeated after the Imperial Inquisitor (played by Samuel L. Jackson) orders an "Imperial Holocaust" on the planet.
FUN FACT: They control the most annoying units of the game.

The Imperial Guard:
These men are the backbone of the Empire's army. Their strength lies on nothing at all. Even though they aren't a playable race on the original game, they appear over and over and over again on the main Campaign, and you even get to control them on a couple of missions. They're not very useful, anyway. They happen to be almost as weak as the Orks, and they have the lowest moral on the game, meaning they may not die when you yell at them, but they'll start crying, throw their weapons, and then get into fetal position. After that, any other unit of the game simply walks towards them and stabs 'em in their heart slowly, very, very slowly. It's not as pathetic as it is disturbing. Being the cowards they are, it is obvious they represent the Bible's Frenchmen. (Note: I know the French didn't actually appear on the Bible, but since they were on the DaVinci Code, drunky tells me it is a fair deal).

Sacre Bleu!

The Eldar:
Half aliens, half ninjas, half elves. Their strength lies on their lack of strength, since they use stealth and lots of annoying invisible units to kill their enemies. I believe they represent the Bible's Eldar.

A lack of time prevents me from reviewing the campaigns from the expansions, Winter Assault (based on the battle of Stalingrad) and The Dark Crusade (based on the conquering of America by the spaniards), as well as the new races. They all suck anyway. 7/10

5.-Multiplayer
In order to test the game's multiplayer, I challenged our beloved drunkymonkey to a game of 1 on 1 (just like we used to... in bed). After he said something about "kicking my ass" and "Tally Ho Gents!", we started choosing our army. You see, the game allows you to paint your units, so internet players can customize their armies (as you could expect, half of them have names like "the dark fallen" and are completely black, with the other half being football teams).
We turned ours into mirror images of ourselves...

Top: Drunky's "Third Street Saints"
Bottom: Matias' "Royal Queens"

...and started to fight. Needless to say, he kicked my ass. I blame my troop's low morale. 0/10

6.-Bugs
Amazingly enough, I found no bugs on this g-

Sieg Heil!

...

8/10

7.-Overall Score and final comment

I think Relic may have misinterpreted the Bible. I think they did it on purpose, too.

OVERALL SCORE: 4/10

-By Matias

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Join us next week, when I'll review Valve's latest shitfest: The Orange Box!

Conundrum: Prologue

2007-10-24T23:07:00.000+01:00

The Wildcat is a force to be reckoned with on the Inconvenienced Forum. He is the creator and maintainer of the Half Life 2: Cataclysm thread, a juggernaut when it comes to forum RP. He is also the site admin of the Half Life 2 Files-hosted Bored With Life, and now he presents to the Inconvenienced Blog the prologue of his Half Life universe fanfiction. It's a good 'un.

--

Long shadows stretched down the city streets and up the sides of melancholy buildings. The late afternoon sun hung over the western desert town. The hot, dry wind stilled for the first time in weeks.

Scarcely a dozen people meandered about on Webber Avenue, and they would soon be inside the nearest structures. The air raid sirens had assured compliance of the denizens, but repeated drills had dulled their reactions.

A police cruiser rolled to a stop in the intersection with West 7th Street. The officers sat quietly for a few minutes and allowed the whipping red and blue lights to signify their authority.

One of the officers finally rasped a question of his partner. "Okay Cap, what is this? Another drill?"

Before Cap could answer, the sounds of rotors shook the air. The marine aircrafts' shadows flashed over the squad car and continued on their eastward flight path.

Cap shot a knowing glance at his partner and then pressed the send button on his radio. "Alright people listen up, this is Captain Heath. This is NOT a drill. I have been informed that the factory is closed... repeat, the factory IS closed.

"We now report to Agent Oldham and his people. A communications black out is in place for all civilian and low rank personnel. We're way beyond formal police codes and orderly evacuation. No one leaves the city.

"You know the routine frontward and backwards. Always face east, away from the base. Always wear your safety glasses. Keep the streets clear."

With that, the captain and his partner emerged from their vehicle. The men drew their side arms and double-checked the moving parts. By that time, only a fraction of the city's inhabitants remained outside. Clearing the streets would be an easy matter for the local police force.

Three blocks to the south, the doors of a second patrol car opened. To the north, a third duo vacated their cruiser. Soon, the entire city would be surrounded by armed law enforcement.

"Let's do it," the captain muttered.

He then fired a single blast into the asphalt. He knew that the bullet could ricochet, but he followed his orders dutifully. Multiple reports drifted on the air as the process was repeated throughout the city.

Heath raised a bullhorn to his lips and spoke. "Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a drill. Report to the nearest building and wait for further instructions. Anyone caught on the street can and will be shot." Heath tossed the bullhorn into the car and closed the door.

The captain and his partner began to stroll down the avenue with their handguns at the ready. The remaining pedestrians scattered for the nearest structure. No one actually expected the police to encounter serious resistance, but the officers remained tense for the sheer gravity of the situation.

The few vehicles permitted within the city limits stood abandoned. Each storefront was empty. Every window was faceless.

Captain Heath took note of one peculiar storefront window. Inside sat a row of televisions, each displaying the same announcement. The emergency broadcast instructed all observers to seek shelter.

Heath snickered. Even the bums of the city knew to go into the nearest building when the air raid sounded. It was always the adventurous or a few rebellious teenagers that dared tempt fate during the drills. Or an outsider that stumbled into the city on the wrong day.

The rhythmic thumping of chopper blades drew all attention to the sky. A pair of transports accompanied by their fighter escorts passed above the rooftops. Their easterly course carried them past the city quickly.

No markings. The aircraft were pitch black and plain.

"Rob... those aren't ours." Heath glimpsed his partner's startled face and then spoke into his radio. "Let's hurry this up."

Aside from the local police, the streets had been abandoned. Occasional chatter crackled from the captain's radio.

A group of teens. A bum hidden in a dumpster. They were the typical stragglers during any air raid drill. Nothing out of the ordinary.

"Hey!" Rob barked into an alley. "Put your hands on your head and step into the open!"

Captain Heath rushed to his partner's side. He leveled his glock at the young man that cowered beside the dumpster.

"Okay! I'm coming out," the man cried. "Just... don't shoot."

The man raised his hands and revealed a digital camcorder. Slowly he crept out of the shadows. A look of fear had been plastered on his face.

"What did you think you were doing?" Heath demanded.

"You can't cover it up forever," the man said defiantly. "I know the truth and you have no right."

"What are you? Drunk? Stoned?"

The strange man began to scream wildly. The brightness filled Captain Heath's vision. He closed his eyes and held his protective glasses as though he feared they might fall off.

After a few moments, Heath opened his eyes and stared down at the stranger writhing on the ground with his hands over his eyes.

As Rob leaned down to tend to the shrieking man, the captain turned to face the western sky. Barely visible above the horizon, Captain Heath could see the billowing top of the distinctive mushroom cloud.

A few moments later, the ground began to rumble. The horrific sound of the explosion was muffled only slightly by the distance. The very streetlights and buildings quivered at the sound.

"A-alright, p-p-p-prepare," Rob stammered into his radio, "...let's p-p-p-prepare for r-refugees." The man looked at the enthralled captain. "Cap? T-there w-will be survivors... w-won't there?"

Captain Heath remained silent and awestruck. He had no answers for his comrade. The city was safely out of range of the blast and most of its radiation, but that was the limit to its safety.

The sight before him was indescribable. His own emotions could not be vocalized. It was at that moment that Captain Heath knew his life, his whole world, would never be the same.

Press Start

2007-10-24T01:03:00.000+01:00

Click here to watch

Or, for even higher quality:

This is something Sinoda and I have been working on for a while. It would have been longer, but...after a while we realized how little progress we had made and decided to finish it up while we still had the patience.
You need DivX Web Player to view this. If you don't have the web player or it doesn't work for you, you can also download it. I'll have a 640x480 version up soon. (I would put it on YouTube, but several scenes require you to be able to see small things moving in the background, something you definitely CAN'T do on YouTube's shitty quality.)

Places of Mythology.

2007-10-23T19:22:00.000+01:00

Ah, mythology. It brings excitement into the usually dull reality of life. Instead of listening to out-of-touch world leaders babbling on about how great it is that men with very expensive and very lethal rifles are building a new future for those that are unfortunate enough to be living in the Middle-East, we get to sit back and listen to epic tales of violence, the Gods that perpetrate and endorse it, and headstrong women who find clothes to be more of a hindrance than a practicality.

But what are the stories without settings? In order for the actions to take place, they need a place to take place in, and mythology has no shortage of these. And to be honest, the places that are documented in these myths are much much much better than the places we have now. I mean, how cool does Camelot sound? Not only do you get to have massive feasts on a round table, but it’s a frigging castle. It’s a shame then, that no one knows where it was.

And this is what this article is about. I aim to provide logical answers to the question that plagues the mind of every historian. Just where is [Kickass Point of Interest X]? In a spiteful break from tradition, we’re going to cover four currently lost bastions of mythology. And we’re not going to do Camelot, neither. It’s only a model, after all.

Valhalla…

Valhalla, if it indeed exists, is quite possibly the most masculine place on Earth. But that is not to say that the only women allowed there deal in food preparation and nothing else, quite apart from it. Instead I mean it is the dream of every man worth his heroic salt to end up in Valhalla rather than the far more boring sounding Heaven. Indeed women serve a very important part in the Halls of Valhalla, valkyries being the ones that ferry dead warriors to this alcohol-fuelled afterlife. The first thing a fallen warrior sees after realizing he is in fact dead are a group of on-horseback, presumably promiscuous women who you can talk about swords to without them sighing, rolling their eyes, and then gossiping about how sad you are to their mates. They don’t gossip. They war-cry. Now, I don’t know about you, but I call awesome on that.

And that’s before even getting to the damn place. According to Wikipedia, “the hall itself has 540 doors, so wide that 800 warriors could walk through side-by-side.” In that case, coming down to breakfast to get your daily dose of Cornflakes for the day must be a truly monumental experience. And yes, I did just include Cornflakes and monumental in the same sentence. And for similar word contrasts, consider this: There is a rooster living in Valhalla called Gullinkambi. Even mentioning his name would force everyone in the same room as you to flex their muscles and say things that they wouldn’t necessarily say in front of their grandmothers.

If Breakfast Time doesn’t really get your juices flowing, how about this: Valhalla is just a really big waiting room for the greatest battle the world has ever seen. Ragnarök. This is basically the time in which the world will transform itself into a South Korean styled MMO in which you complete repetitive quests for money and epic loot. With a choice to be a Swordsman, Magician, Archer, and many more, you’ll spend the rest of eternity grinding rats while having an out of body experience, viewing yourself from an isometric camera angle.

And if we’re judging the quality of these places by the size of the inhabitants’ beards, Odin here pretty much wins it.

…is actually….um….

I can’t actually find a place that lives up to how bloody hardcore Valhalla is. I mean with Valhalla you have everything. You have demonic roosters, you have scantily-clad women, you have buckets and buckets of the ale stuff, and you have the knowledge that pretty soon you’re going to partake in the biggest, goriest, and most epic battle that the world has ever conceived. Also, from then on every proper noun and noun you ever use will be as testosterone-fuelled as Hulk Hogan.

Apart from Hugh Heffner’s house on a Friday night, you aren’t going to get that sort of quality anywhere else.

Atlantis…

Atlantis is a far more poetic and tragic affair from the general piss-up that Valhalla is. Located in the Atlantic ocean, it was apparently made up by Plato to forward his political beliefs. I can just imagine that happening now, George Bush stomping up to the podium and saying, “Howdy y’all. I’ve been hearing rumours on the Internets, right? And I’ve decided to answer these rumours with this: Imagine a massive island in the Altantic ocean full with powerful and important people. You with me so far? Then it sinks. Thank you for listening.” And then there’d be a rapturous applause.

I’m not quite sure why Plato came up with this idea, but the story of Atlantis is something that has captured peoples’ imaginations for centuries now. Basically it was the place where Poseidon hung out when he wasn’t making colossal waves for “rad surfers to tame.” Poseidon, being the cheeky sod he was, ended up falling in love with a mortal woman called Cleito, and they were at it like rabbits. They had ten kids together, who all took part in ruling the place.

To hear words about Atlantis, it pretty much sounds, in the early years, to be some sort of island utopia. Everyone appeared to be very rich, and I’m guessing the city of Atlantis itself had an astonishingly low crime-rate. The land was fertile, the animals abundant and varied, and the water clean and not say infested by various peoples’ piss.

Of course, this being mythological history things suddenly went wrong. And when things go wrong in mythology, the Gods start getting peeved, and when Gods get peeved, lightning bolts start falling from the sky. Zeus and the rest of his cronies decided that the government of Atlantis had turned into something he didn’t quite like, so instead of replacing that government with another government, he did what any right-thinking God would do, and sank the whole island, killing absolutely everyone on it.

…is actually New Orleans.

God, that was predictable, wasn’t it? I was going to put Gloucestershire down, but at the risk of this article becoming too British-centric, I decided to go for the obvious.

The flooding of New Orleans was not because of Zeus getting pissed off at how selfish people are of late, but because of what is called “really rubbish preparation.” No amount of prior warnings to the prospect of flooding seemed to make anyone wake up and say “holy fuck guys, maybe we should actually have a half-decent defence, just in case there’s a flood! I mean that not actually happen, being a port city and all, but y’know, stranger things have happened!”

While New Orleans didn’t actually sink, a good percentage of the city was submerged for a few days, and that’s got to count for something.

The Garden of Eden…

Ah, the Garden of Eden. The place which, according to Christianity, housed the first two humans in this world. One called Adam, and the other called Eve. It was supposedly a wonderful place, where the grass hadn’t been mindlessly picked at by some irritating youth, where the animals hadn’t been industrially herded into the backs of vans to be taken off to be slaughtered in a dark and badly ventilated room, and where you didn’t get signs telling you, in no uncertain terms, “do not step on the grass, thank you.”

What you did get was a sign telling you, in no uncertain terms, ‘do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, thank you.” If there was ever a reason to headbutt someone, I’d say it was because Eve was stupid enough to listen to a suspicious serpent who mysteriously appeared and got her to eat from a tree she had been specifically told not to. You just can’t trust snakes with anything…hadn’t she seen the Jungle Book? Anyway, because of this she pretty much doomed the rest of the human race ever to a life of misery. For being the first female, she did a pretty fucking bad job of it.

But she and Adam can both be blamed for being really bad parents. They must have forgotten to tell their first son, Cain, to under no circumstances kill his younger brother, Abel. Because that’s exactly what he did. If God created man in his own image, he must have been pretty damn depressed by that time.

But we’re digressing. You can pretty much imagine the Garden of Eden having a nice white picket fence running along the outside.

…is actually Hayes Garden Centre.

While researching this piece I saw that the Scottish, bless their souls, seemed convinced that a place called Mòinteach Bharbhais is actually the location of the Garden of Eden. Well, screw you Scotland, and the rest of you countries that seem to want to claim the Garden of Eden as your own, because I know from first-hand experience that the Garden of Eden is actually Haye’s Garden Centre.

It’s nestled in the British Lake District, in a town called Ambleside, and it’s one of the most heavenly places you’ll ever go to. The car-park is of a reasonable size and you can almost always get a space (if you can’t, there’s plenty of car-parks in the vicinity you could use instead), and right outside there’s a wishing well you can entertain the kids with, if they’re particularly gullible.

Inside, the fun really starts. There are loads of two for one offers on potted plants, and there’s a wide variety of them to choose from. If plants aren’t your thing, there is a multitude of garden sheds, and there’s even a sculpture and novelty section, and tonnes of shelves with joke books on them if your idea of humour is limited to making awful jokes about farmyard animals crossing the road.

As far as I know, there are no trees that you absolutely mustn’t eat the apples of if you don’t want to incur God’s ultimate wrath, but the staff attendants normally don’t like when you take fruit off the branches and tell you off. I’ve found that a swift swing to the face with a baseball bat normally ends their protestations, though. And then I normally pour soul on them. And maybe cut their legs off with hedge-trimmers.

The Hill on Which Jesus Was Crucified…

This is pretty much the point in which humanity had buggered up so many times it just wasn’t funny any more. After murdering so many people that God was forced to flood the world, you’d think we’d learn to take a hint, but no. Just a few thousand years after that, we end up killing the manifestation of God on Earth, which really goes to show what a terrible lack of business sense we had back then. We could have just forced him to turn water into wine for the rest of his days, that would have done wonders for the alcohol industry, but no, we stick the saviour of mankind on a cross and feed him vinegar until he doesn’t feel like living any more.

It was like it was a contest to see who could be the biggest dick to Jesus. Feeding him vinegar is pretty damn sly, but how about putting a crown of thorns on his head, or making him carry the same thing that’s going to kill him? Or maybe letting a convicted killer out of jail instead of someone whose idea of violence is to push over a few tables when he doesn’t like the idea of gambling in a temple?

…is actually Iraq.

Because I’ve heard that everyone is very Cross there. Hur Hur Hur.

My next article comes up tonight.

2007-10-23T15:14:00.001+01:00

It's twice as long as the Swan tirade, and in my opinion it's twice as good, too. I'm waiting to submit it until peak time though, so that when the Digg campaign starts, it'll become immediately popular.

Further afoot, I have chapter one of fifteen of one of Wildcat's fictions, and that'll be coming up tomorrow. This will come in weekly instalments that appear each Wednesday.

And Moxx's first article looms ever closer. I've been reading some of it, and it's the kind of thing you'd expect from that crazy cat, and it's about a subject that I'm sure you'll all enjoy.

Why Game Developers Should Give A Shit About Scripts and Voice Acting

2007-10-22T11:04:00.000+01:00

Pwnzerfaust today provides us with an article whose subject I feel very strongly about, Of course, this being The Texas Rattlesnake, it's filled with capitalized profanity and at the end of it if you're a script-writer for a game, you're bound to feel pretty damn suicidal. I sent a team invite to Pwnzerfaust a few days ago via email, but the git hasn't replied to it yet, so here's his contribution sent via email.

So my friend and I, suspended in a half-way drunken, half-way really-fucking-tired stupor, were bored and looking for something to do late last Friday night, and since we had already put angry cats in homeless people’s backpacks the Friday before that, we decided to give a long, hard, calculating look at our list of options. After a few tries at the dartboard, one of us finally managed to sober up enough to hit something that wasn’t a foot, the wall, the ceiling fan, or my clock radio, and that thing was Halo 3. We fired up the Xbox360, popped in the game, and started co-oping on normal (because we’re sissy pansy-asses like that). We had loads of fun for a while, but then we decided to stop beating the shit out of each other with gravity hammers and play the game properly, and then it just turned into something to do.

Anyway, we got to the second level or so and watched the cut-scene because neither of us remembered to press the A button to skip the damn thing. After a fairly good line delivery by the person who voices the Prophet of Truth (“Thinking... what? That you might escape the coming fire?”), we heard something along the lines of this:

“Ma’am, the squad leaders are requesting a rally point. Where should I tell them to go?”
*After unnecessarily pulling the slide on her pistol* “To war.”

…What.

No, seriously; what?

I mean, I’ve heard of being metaphorically kicked in the balls, but I never thought metaphors would actually jump up and actually kick you in the balls, causing you literal physical pain in your symbolic token of manhood. My disbelief would have lasted a good deal longer if my friend had not both ruined and greatly contributed to the importance of the situation by shouting “BITCH THAT DOESN’T HELP AT ALL!”

After a fit of uproarious yet completely serious and professional laughter, we continued playing the game as we had, just barely having forgotten the previous corny line before another one came up. And another. AND ANOTHER. And the corny dialogue JUST WOULDN’T FUCKING DIE. It was like night of the living dead only the zombies are sound waves and they want to kill your brain cells rather than eating them. And they’re at least one-hundred times more horrifying.

Unless you’ve been living in a hole/serving in Iraw (arguably the same thing) for the past decade or so, you’ve probably noticed that this is a recurring pattern in big-budget, big-business video games. If you haven’t been living in a hole/serving in Iraq yet still failed to discover this trend, you probably failed the similarities part of the IQ test. Large gaming corporations have just seemed to stop caring about the potential benefits of well-spoken, high-quality lines. They honestly don’t seem to realize that bad voice actors can turn the most epic and serious of situations into absurd and unbelievable idiot festivals.

Let’s take something like… oh, I don’t know… Oblivion, for example. The voice acting wasn’t horrid, to be sure, but I think that it could have been so much more. I just didn’t FEEL the actors; their joy, their pain, their cries as I ripped out entrails with a fiery claymore that screamed with the voices of women, children, and exceptionally girly men. Oh, and Patrick Stewart. Seriously, what the fuck was that about? Did they just record him talking in his sleep or what, because that was simply dreadful.

Then there are games with good voice acting and good writers. The most recent addition to that category that comes to mind is the towering, phallic monolith that is BioShock. If you haven’t played it, go back and read my exceptionally witty comment about your IQ, only reword it in such a way that it includes the words “BioShock” and “phallic monolith” without sounding convoluted or contrived. If you HAVE played it, then you would know that it’s probably the best game released this year for many thousands of reasons, all of which I cannot list simply because this article is reaching critical mass with me staying (mostly) on topic. For me, one of the most noticeable of these reasons was the absolutely spectacular voicing. Every character, major or minor, has a distinct, unique personality that is created almost entirely with their voices and dialogue. Every time Atlas’ voice cracked in on the radio, I felt comfort. Every time Andrew Ryan bellowed out of the speaker, I felt chi!
lls run up and down my spine. “A man chooses, a slave obeys,” is officially my favorite piece of dialogue ever written for any movie, television, or gaming production because it was so remarkably surreal, disturbing, and passionate that I was literally too stunned to move for over a minute after the scene was finished.

I tip my hat to the developers at 2K, because they know what a good monologue can contribute to the mood and story of a game, they know what the muffled sobs of hideous shells of people undone by their own greed can do to intensify the already thick and spreading atmosphere. Unlike so many game developers today, they know that gamers are not drooling cavemen lumbering around shouting “Want make dead people with bang-stick!”, that we want a story and characters that involve us, that coerce us into a world not at all our own. Game play is a must have, a fantastic story is key, but neither of those can fully deliver the best gaming experiences there are to be had. As they say, most of communication comes not from what you say, but how you say it. If you want to say it in the form of a high-explosive device to the face as opposed to a masterpiece of human speech, then by all means go ahead and do so, but I guarantee you that you’ll get no erections of happiness from me.

Still to come...

2007-10-21T21:49:00.001+01:00

If you look downwards, you'll see Katana's article about disappointing games - the ones that had potential to be classics, but fell just short at the final hurdle. It's really rather good.

Moxx should have his first article up in the next few days. We've been discussing it and we're convinced it's going to be very, very funny.

trapped, well, I dunno what he's doing. I should really badger him for information. It'll be something you'll wish you'd never read, you can count on that.

As for me, I'm going to be writing a few more humorous articles in the next few days too. Right now I haven't decided which one to use first, but when I do you can expect something that'll be funnier than the mostly-experimental swan article.

Tragic Games

2007-10-21T21:44:00.001+01:00

No, I'm not referring to games with a good plot that make you miss a character. I'm referring to those games that have one or two strong, very unique gameplay elements...but ultimately fail because the game is completely unpolished. They turn out buggy, with the mechanics badly used and just not fun. Here are a few examples.

1. Just Cause
Just Cause is a story about a Spaniard stuntman-turned-secret agent named Rico trying to overturn a regime somewhere in a group of islands. The game failed because it tried to be GTA, and didn't even get that far. The cars are impossible to drive, jungles make driving much more frustrating than cities (dodging every single tree is NOT FUN. Neither is driving on the main road) and it seems like the police are just ALWAYS after you.

What COULD have made the game almost a smash hit is the parachute. Rico has a re-usable parachute which you can stow and take out multiple times in one fall. Besides using it to fall great distances, you can use a grappling hook on cars, then use it to parasail above them. Also, after falling a long way, you can translate the momentum forward and travel quite a long distance by gliding with it.

Since Rico is a stuntman, you can also "jump" from your parachute to a vehicle, then shove out the driver and take it for yourself. Or, when being chased, you can jump out of your car and into the pursuer's.

But this is one of the points where the ideas fail. Wouldn't it be great to jump to their mounted turret, and take them out before jumping back to your car? There's also the tendency for all your crazy ideas to fail. I'd like it if the game were to encourage action-movie behavior by letting an abandoned car roll alongside another car without slowly veering away, or by taking out all those damn trees that result in so many chase-scene buzzkills.

2. Penumbra: Overture

Those without enough money to actually BUY a game may remember the free one called Penumbra. It was a horror puzzle game in which you didn't really get much that you would call a weapon. The physics system was even more refined than Half-Life 2, and you could interact with things beyond just grabbing and throwing them. Doors were opened by moving the mouse left to right. Levers were pulled by dragging the mouse back. Drawers were...you get the idea. It really helped the immersion factor.

What DIDN'T help immersion was having enemy animations with about 3 keyframes per attack. Some reviewers said the wolves in Overture just seemed to vaguely move upwards towards you for their 'leap'.

The problem is, you can only have a horror game if the player can die from their lack of reaction. So this essentially means there WILL be combat. But the interface is built in a way completely unsuited for killing anything. It seems about the equivalent of playing Postal by going to your inventory and using the command "Use Glock on Man" 27 times. (yes, that joke is sort of taken from Zero Punctuation)

This is especially disappointing because physics puzzles are even better than HL2 in a controlled environment. I was able to use a wooden board in Penumbra to make a ramp up to a vent, and I could imagine controlling something like a steering wheel. Fighting wolves though...let's not go back to Tomb Raider.

3. Far Cry

Far Cry wasn't exactly bad. It got about 90 scores on Metacritic, but every reviewer could see this one cliff in the game at which you just start falling. Far Cry was fantastic; besides being THE most updated graphical benchmark for DirectX 9 (and soon DirectX 10), Far Cry was a real thinking man's shooter.

Well, since this phrase is thrown around more than an asthmatic kid's inhaler in a game of Monkey in the Middle, I'll elaborate: It really pays off to look at a situation first. First time I played, I saw a beach full of enemies and assumed I should kill them. I proceeded to do so, and the game's mechanics certainly didn't discourage it. But next time, my binoculars found a little path on the opposite side of the cove...I drove my boat over and crept up it. I was able to tap the tower sniper on the shoulder before knocking his lights (and precious bodily fluids) out with a machete, then continued to sneak up on my objective without even being spotted by anyone. Since this objective was a jeep...the situation then evolved into an interesting car chase.

Far Cry is known for giving people entirely different situations through its wide open environments. But the problem is, this doesn't happen when you're indoors, and that's what much of the game consists of. While it's possible to use vents to get behind enemies, much of the game's tactical thinking gets lost about midway through. Beyond that is the fun-to-play qualities of your enemies that gets lost as you encounter mutant "Trigens" which use all the different attacks you'd expect a crazed monkey to use. Primarily...just leaping straight at you while absorbing all your bullets.

Even Crytek admits this is where they got lazy. They wanted their game out before the Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 fan-covered wonders. This becomes especially apparent in the game's "boss fight" which is essentially just 4 of the toughest bad guys in an open area where there's not much you can do except use noclip to get by, which is literally what I DID after about 5,000 tries at full health and decent ammo.

Crytek hopes to solve these problems in Crysis, although Ubisoft is also working on Far Cry 2. The games look equally impressive, with Far Cry 2 actually converting some Crysis fans. My computer can run Crysis in DirectX 10, so maybe someday I'll put up my review of it.

So that's everything I can think of. Comment on some other games that would've been great, but sucked.

The case of the Rapid Typist

2007-10-21T11:08:00.000+01:00

As part of this blog's feature-list, I'll be looking for stuff to use on the forum, to put on Digg and send out to a wider audience of people so that the actual blog staff have to do less work (I kid, I kid). This is the first of such, a hilarious detective story by currently-residing-in-Japan forum member Sum0. Be sure to digg it.

Ambrose Hopkins paused as he arrived at the front door of his trendy city house, in the trendy part of town. On the doorstep in front of him his cat, a Maine Coon called Apollo, was sitting, lazily licking herself. "I have no catflap," thought the tall, well-built amateur detective, "and my cat was inside when I left home. Something is afoot." Ambrose silently selected his house key from the inside pocket of his raincoat and slowly, silently, placed it in the lock and turned. The door opened on silent hinges with a silent push. Creeping inside, Ambrose closed the door behind him silently. He then hoisted himself on to the bannister of his elegant staircase and crawled up, avoiding the creaky wooden steps and using the posts as handholds. Reaching the silent sanctuary of the upstairs landing carpet, he dismounted the bannister, drew a highly-illegal fifty-thousand watt tazer from his left trouser pocket, and with a swift kick opened the door to his bedroom.

"Argh!" said the man inside, a short gentleman in a bowler hat wearing round spectacles and Lycra running shorts. The man's hands were poised over the keyboard of Ambrose's iMac, in an unmistakable home-key arrangement. Ambrose rose his tazer to point directly at the man's head, then reconsided and positioned himself for a thigh shot. "Who are you, and what are you doing here?" he demanded.

"Argh!" said the man.

"I won't ask you again!" said Ambrose, activating the electric prongs so that they gave a satisfying crack and a blue glow in the half-darkness of his bedroom.

"I'm... I'm a time traveller!"

"Excuse me?"

"I travelled back from the future!" The man's eyes gleamed in the dull sodium glow of the street-lamps.

"What nonsense! Time travel is theorectically improbable, and that's good enough for me!"

"But... but... I have travelled back in time ... in order to retrieve the private diary of the famous Ambrose Hopkins!"

"You... you have?"

"Yes!"

Ambrose rose his hand to his chin.

"Well, that would explain the Lycra. I'm ... famous in the future?"

"Yes! You're a legendary detective!" said the short man.

"Amateur detective," said Ambrose.

"Yes! Everyone knows you. I was hired by a company to retrieve your private diary from your computer... because... everyone wants to know what was going on in that head of yours!"

"Why, that's fantastic!" said Ambrose, beaming.

"I was just about to search for it, see..." The man turned to the computer and tapped effortlessly on the keyboard. He certainly could type quickly, thought Ambrose. "Look, here it is! Now, if I may just download it to my future memory device..."

"There's time for that later. Come, have tea with me!"

"But I really shou-"

"You've come all this way to get my diary. Surely you'd relish the chance to relax and have a cup of tea with the famous Ambrose Hopkins?"

"Well, er... I suppose so!"

"Excellent, friend! Let us retire to the sitting room."

-

Ambrose poured some more tea. "So, Mr Sterling. Your description of the future is fantastically vivid. What do you think the most important invention in the future is? I mean, will be?"

"Well, it'll be -- I mean, it was... er... the invention of mind-machine interfaces in... 2050!"

"Really? Fascinating!"

"Yes, it... it lead to a real revolution in how we use computers. No longer do we use our hands to push buttons, or move cursors: we just think the thought, the computer picks up on it and executes it instantly. It's really something. Of course, it all happened years before I was born. I've never known any other way."

"I see. Excuse me, I think I hear the door. Please, my friend, wait here. Have a slice of cake!"
The small man sat rigid, eyes roaming the sitting room. It was very, very Victorian: elaborate wallpaper, a large cabinet, rows of leather-bound books, large luxurious armchairs, and a large, HD-ready flatscreen television. Ambrose had left the room. The small man slowly got up and made for the door, which had been left ajar. He leaned out into the corridor -- Ambrose had headed to the front door, and was nowhere to be seen. The small man tiptoed down the corridor into the modest-sized kitchen, where his point of entry -- the back door -- was still unlocked. Quietly, the man reached for the door-handle and turned it, with the greatest of care not to make a noise --

Click.

A jolt went through the man's body.

"Mr Sterling, I'd like to introduce you to my good friend, Detective Thompson." The small man looked at the long arm holding the pair of handcuffs snapped tightly around his wrists. A gruff-looking, moustached man narrowed his eyes at him.

"I'd like to inform you, Mr Sterling," said Detective Thompson, "that you are under arrest for breaking and entering a private property, and for illegally accessing Mr Hopkins' computer system. You have the right to remain silent."

"What? What is this? I'm... I'm a time traveller! I thought... you... you said you believed me, Ambrose! It's true! The... the lycra!"

"I'm sorry for the masquerade, Mr Sterling, but I knew you were lying all along. For the one thing, the very notion of time travel is ridiculous."

"But we discovered a way! Using wormholes and--"

"That's irrelevant, Mr Sterling. You mentioned that in the future, computers are controlled by mind-power alone."

"It's true! It's incredible!"

"And yet you have an almost phenomenal ability to touch-type. I noticed it when you were using my computer."

"I-- but--"

"How, exactly, would a traveller from a civilization where keyboards are obsolete know how to touch-type?"

"It was--" The man started to sweat.

"I propose, Mr Sterling, that you are actually the popular novelist, Mr Howard Wells, whose stories of crime and mystery are a hit in the weekly publication Tales of Crime and Criminality, and who additionally penned a fantastical tale of time travel in your recent novel, Waterloo 3001! This would, naturally, account for your ability to type ever so well and also your uncanny ability to come up with such an unlikely explanation for your activities. Your intention to steal my diaries was a simple ruse to gain inspiration -- or should I say, plagarise material for your ever-popular series of stories!"

The man frowned. "Well, Mr Hopkins. It would seem that real life has put me into a situation that, if I were to write it, my readers would criticise as being utterly unbelievable! I tip my hat to your skills of deduction, as one story-teller to another."

"Take him away, Detective."

"Right you are, Ambrose." Detective Thompson led the restrained Mr Wells down the corridor and out of the front door, to the waiting police car.

Ambrose Hopkins walked back to his sitting room, and drank tea with his cat.

Good News

2007-10-20T21:22:00.000+01:00

Good news, guys, the blog here is about to get ten times better. Yeah, that's right, I'm joining the team here. Think of me as less serious than Katana, less hateful than Matias, and much, much funnier than drunkymonkey. Waaay funnier.

Honestly, who writes about swans, anyway?

ONE FUCKING TRIBAL

2007-10-20T18:35:00.000+01:00

When talking about awesome boss music with a friend, he brought up the music from the final boss of Jet Force Gemini, an old game for the N64. I loved this game and would have beaten it had ONE TRIBAL not been missing...

You basically need every single tribal in order to reach the area in which to beat the game. This proves difficult when you are standing two feet away from a spot where every FAQ and walkthrough in the universe is saying a tribal should be standing but ISN'T.

As such I was left to repeatedly play the rest of the game as it was, and there's a reason it was one of Rare's more famous games from the old N64 era....well, even if it does have like a 70-something on metacritic.

But let's face it. Halo 3 got a 94. You can't trust anyone now.

The game is played out in a style similar to that of Quake, Shadowgrounds, or any other sort of shoot-anything-that-moves fest. You get a plethora of different weapons that never seem to run out of ammo, ranging from a machine gun to a homing missile launcher (which seems to look more like a pistol somehow...fuck every weapon looks like a pistol...that gun on the right is a sniper rifle)

The way you control your character, though, is a bit unusual from most games. You move around like any Super Mario 64 or Donkey Kong 64 or Conker's BFD or anything like that, but when you hold the R button, the camera pulls in close to your character, you actually get an aiming crosshair, your character goes transparent, and you now have the common FPS-style movement seen today.

I realize this is now kinda common in games like GTA today, but back then I think it was the perfect execution, and the perfect way to get people to transition to that whole WASD thing, and learning that yes, the left and right buttons just make you STRAFE. And, if you didn't like it, you could run around like Mario until you have the need to shoot an enemy that's above you. Boss fights sort of pretended you always had R pressed, and kind of worked well for it because you'd need that camera view anyway.

The boss music wasn't bad, but I think the main reason I loved it back then was because the bosses were so good. The best way to execute a boss fight is to have bullets and attacks flying everywhere, and yet ensure that any half-competent player can follow a certain method to dodge them. Basically, keep em on their toes, but never knock him off them.

You'll also notice in the video I just linked that, among two other characters, you get to play as a dog. Now, this makes about as much sense as the Warcows from Unreal Tournament 1, but it still elicits a fan response just the same. It's nice to have something just as absurd as the game mechanics it's built around, as well as the satisfaction of knowing an entire army was laid to waste by a puppy with a gun taped to his back.

The game also has this whole Sonic & Tails co-op mechanic: Shortly you find a little robot called Floyd. (which, thereafter, confused me whenever anyone referred to Pink Floyd) When you plug in a second controller, another person can control Floyd and shoot stuff with his fairly hard-to-control laser gun (but hey, it gets friends interested in the game) While the game also had a decent multiplayer mode, this was really what we preferred doing.

I've been able to find ROMs of the game in the past, and I'm wondering if any emulators have let it be played with the mouse. If so, I'd certainly pick it up again.

If only to get that ONE...

FUCKING.

TRIBAL.

The case against: Swans

2007-10-20T14:34:00.000+01:00

I normally consider myself to be quite a mild-mannered, calm man with a definite lack of hatred running through my veins, but occasionally this stature towards the world is broken when unavoidable yet infuriating concepts and entities present themselves. Therefore, I have decided to share with you my hates, the things that get my blood boiling so badly by the end of thinking about it I've already killed several innocent people.

The first of these hates is something that used to scare me when I was a little nipper. Actually, perhaps "scare" is the wrong word. A better (group of) word(s) would be "petrify with great conviction". Meeting this malformation of creatures would be like the child-form of the Day of Judgement, where instead of Saint Peter you get a great white beast with apparently no eyes looking at you, trying to get in close so it can peck your hand off. It hisses at you like you're the greatest inconvenience it has ever suffered, and soon you'll be lying on the ground, blood dripping to the floor. In short, this animal is the Cthulhu of childhood.

I'm talking about swans.

Now, most people seem to think that they're the royalty of the sea or something. Other aquatic creatures see them, and they move out of the way, looking on as they "gracefully" glide to where they want to be. But I see them as more of a mob, those animals move out of the way not because they feel as if the beings they are likely to upset are better than them, or have more rights, but because they'll get ripped to shreds if they don't. Big Tony the Swan will not tolerate other animals acting as if they have a right to exist.

Because, let's not kid ourselves. Swans are horrible vicious creatures with no empathy towards anyone or anything. They are undeniably beautiful, but so were Sirens. Hell, so is Poison Ivy, but while you wouldn't necessarily want to have intercourse with a swan, their appearance is deceptive. You're lulled in, you want to go up to them and stroke them, or give them a piece of bread, but then you hear that hiss. It is the blood-curdling cry of Satan's duck.

I wouldn't mind swans so much if they just kept themselves to themselves and didn't interfere with anything that didn't involve them, but let me ask you a question. Have you ever tried to feed ducks while swans are about? It truly is a horrific vision, and one that philosophers probably argue is a mirror to the human race. As soon as a bread crumb falls to the ground, the swans are on it, leaving the less fortunate, but much more peaceful ducks, hungry. It is your duty to the rest of the duck world that, next time you're distributing bread products to our webbed-foot friends, you make sure the swans are distracted with the cries of some small child, while you selflessly and heroically give the underdogs a well-needed piece of Warburton's.

You want further prove that swans are evil? They are the national animal of Denmark. Do you know what also comes from Denmark? That's right, the Vikings. Perhaps I'm a little biased here as the Vikings practically raped my country and through them the most pure Britons you'll get in this country all live in Wales (which is really embarrassing), but those two as a combo would be even more horrific than the upcoming Alvin and the Chipmunks movie.

I can almost imagine ten thousand heavily armed Vikings riding into battle on the backs of ten thousand hissing swans. When Aragorn was talking about the day that the hope of men fails, he was obviously talking about that day. The last battle at Mordor was a cakewalk compared to what that would be like.

And just to prove that I'm not utterly proud of Britain, according to Wikipedia, the Queen "retains the right to ownership of all unmarked mute swans in open water". This is the same Queen that had Princess Diana killed (kudos to you, conspiracy fans!), and only smiles when ten thousand or more people are waving at her. And whilst we're on the subject, British tabloid/toilet roll The Sun once claimed that immigrants had been eating the Queen's swans. I know fine well this story isn't true. No one would eat a swan. But a swan would eat you.

But wait, the tale gets suddenly worse. Yes, even worse than the blatant swan propaganda that is the Ugly Duckling. For in Australia there is a horrid abomination of feathers. To call it a living thing would be truthful yes, but it would likely make you lose hope in this whole life thing. I spotted one while on my holidays in August, and I've only just stopped having nightmares.

Yes, it is a black swan (and, incidentally, another one behind it). These, truly, are the bane of humanity. Within their black form lies the beating heart of a thing devoid of emotions, of concepts like love, honour, decency, and friendship.

Friends, I propose a crusade. Pick up your guns and harmful household utensils! Swans cast a dark shadow on this world, and our only choice is to butcher them all!

They are planning the same thing upon us.

First CREATIVE TF2 machinima created

2007-10-20T01:37:00.000+01:00

Well, Lit Fuse was very good at being able to make the first Clips of Nothing Happening in Team Fortress 2 Editted Together. BUT I HAVE MADE the first machinima!

Even if it's 6 seconds. (you can't actually do this ingame; it's an illusion)

Check out the banner!

2007-10-19T23:06:00.000+01:00

Thoughtfully provided (free of charge, mind you!) by the masculine, tough-guy form of MS-DOS4. I'd say he has a worrying monopoly on this "custom images" jazz, what with designing most of the custom images you'll see on the forum as well.

Anyway, you've probably also noticed that there has been some changes in other areas of the blog as well. There's a nice blue theme running through everything, and I've added links to the three places (other than this) you'll find Inconvenienced throughout the web.

There should be a bundle of activity over the weekend, so watch out for that.

And because I thought it deserved a bit of an advert, check out Sum0's detective stories. Despite one of them being about a murder, they made me smile.

It's Friday.

2007-10-19T16:56:00.000+01:00

And the start of the weekend. A weekend that will bring with it a sprucing up of the appearance of this already saucy blog, a slew of links, a couple more contributors, and possibly, just possibly, the first article.

I've gotten into the beta test for Hellgate London, so over half-term I'll be checking out that and telling you how I get on. The first impressions of the game are "above average", so I'm a little cautious going into it. But as someone who isn't gleefully sentimental about Diablo (I missed all that buzz), I'll give my honest opinion.

By the way, I don't know why Moxx posted a picture of a character from Happy Days, but here's a link to PC Gaming Blog Rock Paper Shotgun as they check out what has got to be the greatest Transformer ever made.

Heeeeey!

2007-10-19T00:38:00.000+01:00

I am Moxx, AKA Monoxx, AKA Matias, AKA Potato, AKA Judas, and this...

is Fonzi.
I'm here to make sure the blog is awesome and Katana doesn't fuck this up. So there.

Good Morning/Afternoon/Midnight/Morning/Afternoon...

2007-10-18T23:08:00.000+01:00

My name is David, often known as Katana. I used to make a lot of machinima on Facepunch on YouTube, but now I'll be writing for this blog. I suppose what goes on here will mainly depend on what people want. I'll be avoiding the obvious news that everyone knows about (Orange Box has come out!!!) and may try to go for lesser known, but interesting, things, or just opinion pieces on existing stories. Please post comments on the sort of things you'd like to see on here.

Fun fact: The last word of this blog was almost "her"...which would have resulted in a number of nonsensical sexual comments.

Just a quick post to get this started.

2007-10-18T23:00:00.001+01:00

Hokay, if I do this right we should have a regularly updated blog with updates in regards to the forum, humorous and insightful articles (or, if Moxx writes them, absolutely hideous works of offence), and a groundwork for what Inconvenienced, if a website ever appears, will be like.

I might have something funny written over the weekend. Over Saturday and Sunday I'll edit this page and get it looking nice and presentable, and add some more features. It's not going to be the reincarnation of Jesus Christ by any means, but if we do enough, and link enough, perhaps we'll get some new members.