Articles by Matt Dukes
Vanir is the sort of man who has openly wondered aloud about his own armor class in front of his own grandmother. Despite this, he has still managed to somehow become both married and a father. By day, he develops web applications. By night, web applications develop him. In addition to his weekly column Dire Flailings, you can also find Vanir at Stupid Ranger, read his Google+ feed or follow @direflail on Twitter. I guess you could also e-mail him. If you had to.
Mysteries Of The Unknown, Volume XVI: Unhappy Fanboys
*** WARNING: Spoilers for LOST and BSG to follow. You have been warned!!!! ***
Like many of you, I spent my Sunday evening in front of my TV, looking for some closure after six years of Lost. Like many of you, I had my theories as to what in the hell was going on, and I’d heard from several sources that the end of this great show wouldn’t disappoint.
Unfortunately, I was disappointed. Actually, I was furious. I’ve since calmed down, but I still think the ending to Lost wasn’t good enough. I mean, sure, it wasn’t as catastrophically stupid as the Battlestar Galactica finale. I can admit that a goodly portion of the reason I didn’t care for the LOST finale was that I wanted it to resolve itself differently than it did. I loved the time-travel stuff in the previous season, and I had every reason to think the whole nuclear bomb thing spawned a separate timeline in which awesome events would occur allowing the people in the “real” timeline to eventually prevail through a final payoff of their previous nuclear option. It didn’t. Not my favorite option, but I can live with that.
Here’s what does bother me.
Imagine that you are running a D&D campaign. The adventure revolves around solving some big mystery, and every clue the players uncover seems to raise several new questions. Your players love this stuff, and they keep asking you to do more of this. This goes on for years, and is one of the most beloved campaigns your group has ever known. Many of the larger secrets of the story you’ve been weaving all these years have yet to be fully revealed, and your players all have theories. Eventually, you decide to end the campaign. You end the current story arc, explain vaguely a couple of the campaign’s mysteries, and then suddenly all the PCs are in Valhalla giving each other hugs. I imagine at least a 72% chance that you will be stoned to death via hurled dice.
Call me crazy, but if one of the primary means by which you engage your audience is by coming up with freaky inexplicable crap to keep them wondering, you had damn well better do a good job explaining what you’ve been causing all their poor neurons to needlessly fire about by the time the series ends. Instead, we got a wrapup of the current story arc, an explanation of all the weird crap that ever happened in the form of “well, that’s how Jacob ran things”, and ten minutes of violins and group hugs designed to make my wife cry. When you end this kind of series like they just ended Lost, it no longer matters whether they had any idea what they were doing from the start. You never find out. Did they end it this way to keep people asking questions? Maybe. But that’s not a very nice thing to do to your fans who have been dying for any shred of information since the beginning.
The sad thing is, had this been just another season finale, I probably wouldn’t have my knickers in a twist. I enjoyed all the Jacob vs. Smokey and picking a new protector stuff. I thought Hurley was a cool pick for the new guy, and Ben perhaps the most interesting choice of his #2 available. I even sort of like wondering if Jack turns into a smoke monster. In fact, I liked pretty much everything except for the “alternate reality actually being Purgatory” bit. That was the final twist of the knife to me. They told us the island wasn’t Purgatory, and they told the truth. That was just evil. That made me think that somewhere in California, the producers of Lost are in an underground bunker filled with money – laughing at all of us.
Photo cc 1995 Jeff Kubina
Review: “Mega Man 10″
When Mega Man 9 was announced last year, many old-school NES gamers (myself included) rejoiced at the Second Coming of the Blue Bomber, in all his simulated 8-bit glory. Then, once it came out, a great many people were reminded that, like its much older NES brothers, Mega Man 9 was really hard. Too hard, some might say, but the game still received a positive reception with both critics and fans.
A year later, Mega Man 10 arrives, and it looks like Capcom and Inti Creates were definitely listening to their audience. Mega Man 10 is every bit as hard as its predecessors — but for those of you who don’t like rage-quitting while reliving the nostalgia of your 8-bit youth, concessions have been made for you. There is now an Easy Mode that puts floating platforms above the spike pits, which have long been the bane of Mega Man’s existence, repositions the enemies in the level, and nerfs their damage a bit. Having marinated myself in Mega Man games for over 20 years I found the Easy mode way too easy. However those who are having trouble or who just want the nostalgia without the high challenge level will likely welcome this feature. There are a couple other nice new additions as well. Once you finished Mega Man 9 you could play through the game again as Proto Man. This must have been a very popular feature last time, because in the 10th game you have the option to play as Proto Man right from the start. You can also play as Bass if you buy the downloadable content pack.
The new Robot Masters are well-designed and naturally lend themselves to having interestingly themed levels, but I do have to wonder what was going through the mind of the guy that designed Sheep Man (who sends wool-clouds up into the air to shock you with lightning). Trying to figure out which weapon is the counter to lightning-fleece was quite a challenge. For that matter, figuring out the appropriate counter-weapon for any boss was not easy. Used to be, if you found a weakness, it was over in 3-4 hits. In fact, some previous games would show the boss being affected in a special way by its weakness (like Morph Moth in Mega Man X2 catching fire). Not in Mega Man 10. You know it’s the right weapon if it did more than a tiny sliver of damage. You still have to learn the boss’ patterns, and be expecting a fight every time. It’s changed a lot since you could just smash Cut Man’s face with a Guts Man rock twice and be done with it. [Read the rest of this article]
You’re Not Just Good, You’re Golden
With all the recent hubbub about Facebook and privacy concerns, one might wonder if this is just another one of those molehill-problems that the media is mountain-sizing. You know, like mad cow disease, Y2K, and light beer. I tend not to worry too much about such things, because I don’t put incredibly detailed information about myself online. Some suggest that even putting information about your birthday on Facebook is a security risk. I’m honestly not sure about that, but I do know that Social Security came about in 1935. It stands to reason that somebody may have had time to figure out the algorithm for generating a Social Security Number in 75 years time. After all, the encryption they had back then was roughly equivalent to the copy protection measures found in SSI’s Pool of Radiance (which, I might add, science has found a way to defeat).
For the life of me, I never have fully understood the human compulsion to fill out forms containing their personal data on a computer. If I walked up to a random person on the street with a form asking for their personal data, they’d probably think I was up to something unsavory (like signing them up for a credit card), and tell me to shove off. You put the same person on Facebook, and it wouldn’t surprise me if at least a good portion of their extended profile information is filled in. What benefit does this give anyone but Facebook and their demographic-engine? You know, aside from thoughtfully tailored ads for the user’s pleasure.
I found myself asking the same question some fifteen years ago. I was 19 years old, it was 1995, and I was running a modestly successful local BBS. Most of the other BBS users in town were older than me, and almost all of the sysops were. For some reason, if you were in the greater Peoria area, male, 40 years old, and into ham radio, chances were decent that you either ran a BBS or called one. Being younger, I tended to attract a younger crowd, and thusly we became the bane of the local FidoNet hub with our youthful exuberance (and willingness to start a flame war over the slightest of offenses). Even so, my BBS still racked up a couple hundred user accounts. Most were one-time callers checking the place out, but I probably had a good 30-40 regular users and lively message boards.
You know what I also had? The name, address, and phone number of every last person that called.
Why? Well, that’s what happens when you don’t read the documentation to your BBS software very well and make all the user account info mandatory. I remember telling people who asked me why they needed to put in their address that “this is so I can verify you’re a real person”. I didn’t need it, of course. There were callback systems that could, at the very least, know there’s an active phone line on the number they put in. Most of the boards in town didn’t require complete information, and you could put in whatever you wanted and it would still let you through. (For instance, my co-sysop – whose address was “KEVORKIAN”.) Fortunately for them, my dear mother did not raise an asshole. I probably could have gotten into some trouble using all that data. I knew people who got in trouble for similar things. However, there was one instance in which having all this data did cause me a lot of trouble.
The BBS software I used to run was called Renegade. It had all sorts of nifty features, one of which was called MCI codes. I forget what it stood for, but we used to joke that more expensive BBS software would have used AT&T codes. Yup, we were nerds. Basically, you could write a message containing these codes, and it could display all sorts of information back to the user about themselves. It was supposed to be used so sysops could make nice status screens telling people what address they have on file, and how many megabytes they’ve downloaded this month, their security level – that kind of fun stuff. Well, as it happened, this 13 year old kid on the board who went by the handle CAPTIAN JAMES T. KIRK had been reading the Renegade documentation. We hated this kid. He would always come on the board and piss a bunch of people off, and then we would flame him mercilessly and he would retreat for a couple days and then the cycle would repeat itself. One day, the good Captian discovered something else I hadn’t turned off – letting users use MCI codes in their messages. And so it was that he put in a little something like this:
HEY @a I KNOW YOUR ADDRESS IS @b AND YOUR PHONE NUMBER IS @c AND I'M COMING TO YOUR HOUSE TO KILL YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR DOG.
This would yield output specific to whoever was reading it, so at the time I saw something like:
HEY MATT DUKES I KNOW YOUR ADDRESS IS 235 FAKENHAMMER LANE AND YOUR PHONE NUMBER IS 309-555-4857 AND I'M COMING TO YOUR HOUSE TO KILL YOUR FAMILY AND YOUR DOG.
I remember thinking “hey, that’s a pretty neat trick”. Then I noticed my inbox had fifty messages in it.
Apparently this idiot had managed to convince pretty much everyone who called in that day that I had for some reason given their name out to a psychopath. I had people threatening to come to my house and kick my ass. I had people crying and wondering how I even knew they had a dog and why I would divulge any information about said dog to a third party, much less an angry nutjob. Even people I called regularly for help on how to set up my board got fooled and were angrily sending me messages. It was the largest instance of mass hysteria I’ve ever personally witnessed, and the happiest we ever saw Captian Kirk.
It took a day or two, but finally I managed to convince my rabid userbase that it was just a trick. The incident is still legend among those who were there.
We call it the Golden Mindf@$k.
The KFC Double Down – The End of Humanity
O Humanity, I always knew you would bring about the end of yourselves. Not by war, or nuclear fire, or grey goo. Not even by capricious use of antibiotics do you bring your end. Nay, your end is far slower. Far rounder. Far more…. corpulent.
Our race has bravely survived such threats before: the coming of the Dread Arches, the Lich-King of Burgers, even a burger so terrifying that even the other burgers branded it a Monster. Yet we still stand (albeit in roomier battle-pants). This spring, everything changed. On the twelfth of April in the year two thousand and ten, KFC unleashed its greatest creation: the KFC Double Down. Simple is its payload: two breaded boneless chicken breasts, cheese, bacon, and some sort of evil mayonnaise to make it (and humanity) go down that much easier.
Yet, it is not the Double Down itself that will destroy us. Nay, it is what it represents.
Through all previous crises, humanity was simply enticed by value. More food for a higher price. This upping of the serving-size ante continued until 2004 when the Arches seemingly suffered a crisis of conscience and eliminated their Super Size choices from their menu in lieu of a more reasonable Large. Though the actual fat intake was only a few grams lower and it is widely thought the Arches were only doing this as a public relations manuever, humanity’s death clock was nevertheless set back five full minutes. The Double Down seeks not only to move the Death Clock forward those five fateful minutes, but also to overclock it. Death may be the only fast thing humanity ever does again.
BEHOLD! The abomination eschews bread, known for centuries as the only part of the sandwich typically not fried in something. The victim is forced to grasp the destroyer directly by its fell meats, poisoning the soul, damning the consumer forevermore. For now it is proven that a man’s dignity is not greater than his carnal lust for fried food, and his willpower not even enough to lift a finger toward a napkin. Now they have us – and, despite their greasy talons, they will not let us go.
Woe betide us! The seventh seal is broken, and Fatnarok begun. The seas will run nuclear green with Dew, and the dead will wake, but be unable to rise from their graves. The world-serpent Jörmungandr will finally begin to consume his own tail, and discover he is incredibly caloric.
We are undone. Soon also will be the seams on our pants – and our lives. This is the flavor of our end.
(Photo courtesy http://www.flickr.com/photos/djjewelz/4509710783/ and, no doubt, copyright the dread KFC.)
Cleanings of Spring Dawning
This past week, my wife and I have been going through the house getting rid of old stuff. She enjoys freeing up space and seeing the house clean. I enjoy looking at my old stuff, reliving all the good times we had together, and almost weeping when I throw any of it away. To be honest, it’s hell. Some of it makes sense to keep. Old favorite toys, comics from my childhood, a Wico bat handle joystick the quality of which has never been seen again in any controller since. However, I must question the need to keep mail order catalogs from computer companies so someday in the future I could remember how much a parallel port printer cost back in the day. Yes, that was my logic back in 1991. No, the experience did not live up to the hype.
Part of me is glad I saved some of these toys so that my son could play with them. However, forces I was not prepared for have been in play this entire time, and may utterly ruin this plan. Did you know that old plastic gets brittle? Neither did poor Shockwave when I accidentally amputated his arm trying to transform him for old time’s sake. Fortunately, it was not his blaster arm. Unfortunately, back then I didn’t know that batteries corrode and blow up and ruin electronics. Shockwave is not particularly pleased with me right now.
Worst of all is the stuff that has sentimental value but I just can’t think of a legitimate reason to keep. I have two large boxes filled to the brim with all my old AD&D 1st Edition books from high school. It’s quite heavy. Just cracking the lid on that box brings back memories of ridiculously overpowered Monty Haul campaigns and my power-levelled Fighter/Cleric/Mage soloing the Elemental Princes of Evil from the Fiend Folio. I used to walk with a hunch because I was always carrying 100 pounds of books with me. I got into a shouting match with a friend over his claim that getting hit in the face with a black dragon’s breath weapon would give him a CHA bonus because the scars made him look tougher. I was thirteen years old, it was intensely stupid, and I loved every minute of it. However, as much as I love keeping them around, I continue to acquire gaming stuff and I don’t really have the space to make the Ultimate D&D Room. I also find it unlikely that I will ever play in a D&D 1E campaign ever again. Do I really want to keep them around just to flip through the pages now and then?
Old videogame systems are my other problem. I’ve got nearly every major console since 1980 sitting on a shelf and no intention whatsoever of actually hooking any of them up. Are they decorative now? is that lame? With the advent of emulation during the mid 90′s (and now widespread legal emulation), I can play almost everything I ever want from my childhood without having to keep a giant rat’s nest of RF adapters and controller cords in a box somewhere. It’s not exactly the same, but I’m not sure it ever can be. That, for better or worse, seems to be the conclusion leading me to finally get rid of a lot of my old stuff. The memories will always remain and be perfect. Keeping this stuff might spark an odd memory here and there, but it’s taking up room that could be used for new memories.
There is an old proverb (which I have failed utterly at finding) that says a boy becomes a man when he can leave his toys behind. Does this mean that finally, at 34, I’m growing up? I have no idea. What I do know: my wife is getting happier by the day, and some day in the near future a nerd’s going to walk into a Goodwill and wind up renting a U-Haul to get it all home. The cycle begins anew.
Review: Dragon Age: Origins – Return To Ostagar DLC
Last year, I played (and reviewed) Dragon Age: Origins, an absolutely superb RPG by BioWare. Why did I love Dragon Age? Let’s review:
- Rich story, setting, and characters
Okay, I guess that didn’t really require a bulleted list. Say what you will about any other part of Dragon Age, it always delivered on story, and if you didn’t feel like you got your money’s worth out of that game, it is this writer’s opinion that you may want to reconsider how much enjoyment it is reasonable to expect to squeeze out of $60.
However, Return to Ostagar rubbed me the wrong way.
Let me clarify here: the content itself was not bad. Matter of fact, it gave you a little closure on some of the opening events in the game, and a few neat items that might trigger a little nostalgia from the beginning of the game. The level design was spartan and kind of boring, but that is to be expected. You’re revisiting a reasonably wide open area. It’s not some evil beast’s dungeon. It’s a camp and a battlefield. They throw one new monster at you, and by “new” I mean “it does the same stuff pretty much as other monsters you’ve seen but it has antlers”. I beat the crap out of everything, got all the items, and was done in under an hour. Nothing to write home about, but it would have fit in just fine with the game at release, and nobody would have thought much about it.
Except, as you may have noticed, Return To Ostagar is paid downloadable content, clocking in at 400 Microsoft Bucks (or about 5 American Rubles). To start off, that is about 1/12 the retail cost of the original game. Playing 1/12 of the original game should theoretically take you somewhere between 3 and 5 hours. This took me one, and for the money it was a pretty bland hour at that. I’m guessing 35 minutes of that hour was beating up the same old darkspawn guys you’ve seen the whole game, 20 was running around, and 5 was doing anything else interesting.
There is very little story and almost no dialogue to speak of in this content. You find a dying man that says, effectively, “gaah I am dying and I have the keys to a treasure chest in Ostagaaarrrrrr…“. Then you take the keys and, well, return to Ostagar. Then everybody decides to stop communicating for awhile in lieu of breaking hurlock skulls, with the notable exception of one disturbingly hilarious bit of dialogue where Wynne hits on Alistair. (I know what you’re thinking, right? That’s so gross. Mages should never do it with Templars.)
As for the other 55 minutes of the expansion that didn’t follow my comprehensive bullet-pointed list above of things I liked about Dragon Age — you run around picking up things, chase a little annoying guy around between fights, slaughter the crap out of a tepid boss, and then get some items. I’ll admit that the history behind these items and getting closure on this part of the story are appealing. What’s here is good, but there needs to be a lot more.
The end of the regular campaign (especially depending on how the story ends!) means that all expansions take place chronologically before the big final set of battles. This means you can’t beat the game and then go back and play this in the game you saved when you won. You’ll have to start a save point before the end, play the expansion, and then redo the ending if you want it all included. Not that you would really want to, except for the sake of completeness. None of the plot in Return To Ostagar has any impact on the story, and the items are not as good as what you’ll have at the end of the game from a regular playthrough. From a roleplaying standpoint they are interesting, but I’m not real happy that I paid real money for items that I’ll never actually use. You go ahead and try them out against the Archdemon. Let me know how that works out for you.
At the end of the day, that is what is lodged in my craw about Return To Ostagar — it’s not bad, but paying $5 for it is a lot to ask. I can’t use most of the equipment unless I play through again, it’s a bunch of bland fighting, there’s not much dialogue or story, and it’s really short to boot. Though perhaps not as much so as my other Xbox Marketplace regret of the week, a $5 lightsaber for my Avatar, this feels like a money grab, an example of paid DLC just because they can. If I’m expected to pay money over and above the cost of a game that I bought, I at least expect a good amount of value for my money. Return To Ostagar, unfortunately, does not deliver in this respect. I really feel as though it should have been included with the game, as The Stone Prisoner was (though I thought its price for non-owners was a bit steep too).
Nobody is more surprised than me at me giving a BioWare product a negative review. They’re my favorite game company, hands down. At the end of the day, my issues with this expansion are almost exclusively with the decision to make something this minor into paid DLC. My recommendation: skip this one and go get Awakening instead. I like some meat on my expansions.
Save vs. Misogyny: An Open Letter To Gen Con’s Event Organizers
I’ve been coming to Gen Con every year (save one) since 1997. When I first got married, I brought my wife. Not being much of a gamer, she was bored out of her skull, but she is quite resourceful and found things to do in Indianapolis while I was in a berserk game-frenzy for four days. After a couple years of this, she decided she would rather stay home when I went to the ‘con, which is fine with me. These days, she takes our son to visit Grandma for a couple days, and I head to Indy to nerd out as usual. I’d much rather she was relaxing somewhere she liked than being stuck effectively alone in another state for most of any given day for a four day period.
A couple of years ago, I noticed events starting to appear in the Gen Con catalog under the heading “Activities for the Better Half.” I thought this was a really good idea. Most of the activities had to do with crafting and dancing, but they’ve started to expand to things like women’s self-defense (which, as a karate instructor, is a topic near and dear to my heart). I’m not sure I agreed fully with most of the events being geared toward women (surely there are male non-gamer spouses?), but these events seemed like a step in a good direction. Granted, these activities aren’t near numerous enough to take up a non-gamer’s whole day and night, but it’s certainly far better than nothing if they don’t want to stray far from the convention center for something to do. At its heart, this is an accomodation for non-gaming spouses to make them feel more welcome. I can’t speak for anyone else’s relationships, but I know I have a lot more fun when I know my wife is happy (and if she isn’t, I’d rather it wasn’t because of me). This is a win-win for everybody.
Imagine my surprise, then, when I went to register for events this year to find this:
Let’s review. Non-gamer spouses are offered events to help them pass the time and have a little fun. +5 to diplomacy, good job! And now they’re being visually characterized using an old euphemism holding down their gamer-spouse and keeping him from having fun. It does not take a particularly high INT score to understand why women would find this offensive.
As for us guys — you shouldn’t put up with this either. Especially if we have kids, some of us are depending on on our spouse’s kindness in taking over our responsibilities for a few days so we can go to Gen Con. It’s hard enough not to pull Wife Aggro under these circumstances without the convention’s organizers officially mass casting Mordenkainen’s Anachronistic Misogyny all over everything. Sure, I get it. It’s a joke. It’s a terrible joke that reflects very poorly on geeks everywhere. As a part of society that generally slants more toward the progressive than most, this should make us all angry. And even if none of the societal or ethical implications bother you – this kind of thing makes women angry and makes it harder for guys to enjoy our yearly pilgrimage to Nerd Mecca.
And so, I plea to the elder gods of Gen Con: Please, please change your stupid ball and chain to something less offensive and horrible.
Review: “God of War III”
When I was in jr. high school, I checked out a couple books on Greek and Norse mythology from the school library and very quickly got hooked. I was our Scholastic Bowl team’s secret weapon. When other teams would score a lot of points of useless topics like math and science, my deep knowledge of how Hephaestus got maimed and how Freya got her beautiful necklace (gross) could snatch victory from the jaws of defeat faster than Hermes racing to the little deity’s room after a trip to White Castle.
[WARNING: God of War 1 spoilers!] A few years ago, I played the first God of War game on the PS2, and thoroughly enjoyed their spin on the Greek pantheon. The concept of interacting with the gods and visiting legendary locations was cool enough. Getting killed, thrown into Hades, crawling back out again, and finally kicking Ares’ ass was amazing. Having the series’ protagonist, Kratos, kill Ares and assume his job as the God of War at the end was nothing short of genius. At the time I played this game, I was going through a very stressful period of my life, and I’d never played anything so graphic and violent. Stomping on a harpy, ripping its wings off, grabbing another, and repeating as needed was downright therapeutic.
I never played God of War II, but when I was considering whether to play it before I tried out III, I’d heard there wasn’t much plot to speak of. Some quick research confirmed this was correct, and that it’s all about losing your powers, getting out of Hades again, and killing everything in sight. Okay, there’s a little more than that, but not so much that I absolutely needed to play it first. After finishing III, I am happy to say there was a lot of new plot, and almost all of it referenced only the first game. But enough about the old games. Let us discuss the third and mightiest in this series!
Let’s establish something first. Your opponents in God of War III are nothing less than the Greek gods themselves. Fortunately, Sony Computer Entertainment America is really, really good at epic, gigantic boss fights. You’re going to fight things that make some of the bosses in Shadow of the Colossus want to head to the gym to bulk up. For the love of Thanatos, you’re going to use one boss’s psoriasis as a climbing surface. That is huge.
The amazing sense of scale in God of War III extends far beyond mere boss fights. It is clear from the very beginning of the game that you are a tiny speck compared to the environments and creatures you will be maiming and destroying. It gives you a really excellent feeling that you are a tiny mortal dealing with forces much greater than yourself. At times, the camera pans out really far while you’re in the middle of a big fight with lots of enemies, and it looks bad ass. Normally, I would freak out when something like this happens because I can’t see what I’m doing, but fortunately this is a God of War game and all you typically have to do to kill a lot of weaker enemies is spin around repeatedly and let the ketchup flow all around you.
God of War III is incredibly violent, sometimes to the point where it made me a little uncomfortable. The entire game is based around you hunting down many of the Greek gods and pretty much murdering them. Kratos beats down his opponents, stalks them slowly as they beg for mercy, and then finishes them off in very creative and almost laughably gruesome ways. Almost. There are special finishing animations for pretty much every enemy in the game, usually involving decapitation, amputation, or disembowelment in some capacity. You’ll see them really often but fortunately it didn’t get particularly irritating.
There is also some sexual content in God of War III, but it is presented in such a way that I have trouble believing somebody at SCEA wasn’t trying to make a statement about this weird quasi-Puritanical “VIOLENCE GOOD! SEX BAD!” morality quandary we have going on in the United States. This is perhaps the most realistically violent game I’ve ever seen, and yet when the sex scene shows up, they pan away to two lesbians (no, really) giving non-descript but nevertheless spicy commentary on the totally epic sexual exploits unfolding before them. There’s also an action sequence, much like you would use in an extended finishing move, that very loosely simulates the sexual acts Kratos is performing. (Not since Rez’s Trance Vibrator feature has the Playstation’s hardware been so sexually provocative!) Other than that, there’s no shortage of bare breasts in the game, and they’re not afraid to show nipples either. Some of the monsters have decided to go topless for comfort as well, and, while still hideous, they are fortunately not apt to destroy any man’s future desire to mate like Dragon Age’s Broodmother.
You can perform a wide variety of different actions in God of War III, most of which have been designed to take the blood on the inside of something and put it on the outside. Given that you have four primary weapons by the end of the game, all of which have their own combo moves, this adds up to a lot of things to remember. Additionally, you can perform several comparatively peaceful actions like “jumping” and “dragging objects”. Consequently, the controls of the game have a bit of a learning curve – but even if you just button-mash for most fights, you will in most cases end up decapitating something. I found a couple of combinations with one or two weapons that suited me, spammed those the entire game, and still managed to render extinct at least three separate endangered species before I finished the game. (It may have been four, but I couldn’t really tell with all the blood.)
There were a couple things that annoyed me about the game, but they were relatively minor. The camera, though it at times performed feats of badassery in illustrating the scale of a large battle, frequently would place itself somewhere that made it difficult to see what I was doing. This was usually done just before a save point and somewhere I needed to jump across something that would kill me, making me waste 3-4 minutes each iteration. It also would occasionally obscure the passage out of a room, though I’m not sure if it was intentional or not. Also, the game was not particularly forthcoming about where you were supposed to go next, and I have a lot better things to do than backtrack all over the whole game in order to find a little hidey-hole I missed the first time through just to get to the next level. This game is supposed to be epic and fast-moving, not frustrating.
Though this game is pretty heavy on the “killing everybody” and relatively light on “plot”, I will say what plot is there is pretty good. Granted, 90% of this game’s cutscenes consist of some god uttering some variant of “lolz u suck kratos”, after which you’re given the opportunity to convert whoever said it into a lasagna-like substance. The dialogue between characters, though shallow and over the top, feels natural to the story and is well-delivered. The game’s biggest surprise for me, though, was the ending. After you kill the last boss, you’re treated to a very artfully done interactive end sequence that wraps up the series nicely. It took a really long time, but I found myself emotionally invested in what happened to Kratos for the first time since I saw his origin story way back in the first game. I couldn’t believe it. It was a welcome finish, and I felt like a got a couple scraps of my humanity back after so much murderin’. For those of you who are concerned about a touchy-feely ending, don’t worry. The game’s designers still remembered what game this was, and the very last thing you do in the game literally covers the screen with so much gore you can’t see anything anymore.
I don’t know if I completely agree with all the review sites that give God of War III a perfect 10/10 rating, or call it the “Best Game Ever” — but I will say this game kicks (literally) huge ass. At the very least, I can safely say this game is a must-play for anybody with a Playstation 3, or for any time travelers from ancient Greece who are having issues with their faith in the face of all these newfangled religions and want to take out their rage and frustration in a non-destructive way that reflects well upon the time-travel community.
Mighty Anthropomorphin’ Power Rangers
As the father of a 2 year old, it’s interesting for me having my son approach the age where I started remembering stuff. I remember bits and pieces of the tail end of being 2. I remember wearing Ernie footie pajamas at the drive-in theatre in town, watching Star Wars for the first time. I also had my first stuffed animal friend, a bear named Fluffy. My son hasn’t latched on to any toy in particular as a buddy yet, nor really given any of his toys any anthropomorphic qualities. I’m curious to see when he starts, and what personalities he starts assigning. Part of the reason this intrigues me is because I’d like a little insight into my own childhood. I used to name almost every toy I owned, and I can remember sleeping with my bed filled to capacity with little plastic toys so that they didn’t feel left out. I can definitely appreciate caring for the feelings of others, but in retrospect I think perhaps feeling empathy toward a Grimace comb obtained from a Happy Meal might have been a bit much. Trying to break myself of this behavior wasn’t easy. Basically, it involved putting my best friend in a box and telling myself he wasn’t real. Though I was aware at the time it was the mature, healthy thing to do, it still felt completely wrong. To this day, it’s still a little hard to watch Toy Story.
Looking back on my childhood, I’m not particularly surprised at this. I got mercilessly bullied as a child all the way through high school. My imagination has always been my playground and my sanctuary. Inventing my own friends who wouldn’t hurt me seems pretty logical under the circumstances. Hopefully, my son won’t need to do this. I don’t know if growing up this way is a common thing, especially among geeks, but I do know it colors my perspective on parenting.
We watch a lot of PBS around my house these days, and two of my son’s favorite shows are Thomas the Tank Engine and Bob the Builder. Both of these shows feature anthropomorphized machines, and they all have faces of some sort and speak and have feelings. Matter of fact, in both shows the machines are happiest when they are useful, and sad when they’re not. It makes sense for this type of show, and it helps little kids understand that it feels good to help others. That’s great — until I think about it too hard and ruin everything.
It was an episode of Thomas that set the dread wheels in motion. Somebody found a spot on a map that nobody had been to for years, and they sent a team to check it out. It was all overgrown and when they cleared it out, they found this old steam engine. 50 years ago, he had finished a day’s work and parked in his shed, and then nobody came back for him. They show him sadly waiting through a couple seasons, and eventually falling asleep until he was found. In the story, he was all happy to be found and they refurbish him and everything is great. But I’m thinking this engine is sitting alone, in the dark, unable to move or talk to anyone for half a century. He’s going to be crazy, incredibly pissed off, or both. And even if he’s not, he’s going to be really depressed that he could be forgotten that easily.
That got me wondering how the trains get built in such a way that they have personalities, and why they are all subservient to Sir Topham Hatt. What creature is born with an instinctive love of tourism and industry? Not long after, I saw an episode of Bob the Builder where Scoop is complaining he’s the only digger around, and so Bob’s dad calls the machine rental store and brings in a happy new member for the crew. Isn’t that slavery? (Does it count if you’re just renting them? I’m imagining a chain of stores called “INDENT-U-RENT”.) This, of course, is not a new concept to anyone who’s seen Star Wars. C3P0 has lots of stories to tell about all his former masters. They even made a cartoon series about it! But the droids are pretty nonchalant about all this, even quietly accepting their fate when Luke buys only Threepio and it seems they’re going to be separated.
It’s not always like that, of course. The Matrix is a great example of what happens when the machines are aware of their fate, have the physical capability to do something about it, and have no programming in place to dictate a course of action other than murdering us and turning us into Duracell batteries. This makes me worry about the eventual fate of Sir Topham Hatt and Bob The Builder and everyone in their worlds. What if the economy takes a dive and the work dries up? You’ll have all these frustrated, depressed machines with nothing better to do than destroy. What if they become aware of their plight and rebel? And what are you going to stop them with? All the tanks and planes probably have faces, too. You’ll be relying on Robert the Rocket Propelled Grenade and Friends.
It’s times like these when I consider giving in and turning on Dora the Explorer. Yes, she makes me want to saw off the top of my skull and scoop my own brains out to end my suffering, but at least I don’t generate apocalypse scenarios for Sunflower Valley. Sometimes I soothe myself by thinking this will help prepare mankind for the Singularity. I will hide in a bunker with people who are prepared for the Zombie Apocalypse, Alien invasions, and the Grey Goo scenario. We will form the League of Improbable Doom, and whip each other’s irrational fears into an unstoppable frenzy.
This is really making me want to play a golem-specialist wizard. Or just a golem. Or to invent an anthropomorphic steam-engine class for 4E. Warforged are for amateurs.
The Power Of The Music Of The Nerd
When I was growing up, it wasn’t cool to be a geek. When I was really little we barely even had computers or videogames to play with, so geeks had to do things like “reading” and “science” and the only science fiction shows on TV were old reruns of Star Trek and a bunch of movies about apes. I was very pleased when the Internet started to get popular right about the time I was entering college, dragging up with it the popularity of geek culture.
Today, it seems like our people have carved a niche for themselves in most areas of modern culture. There are TV shows just for us. One of our most beloved pieces of literature (written in the dark times known as “the Fifties”) was even turned into one of the highest grossing movie franchises of all time – at the turn of the millenium, no less. There’s a way geeks dress. There are shops out there devoted solely to selling things nerds will want. If you see a bunch of Mountain Dew cans around someone’s office cubicle, there is a fair chance they work for an IT department. They’ve even developed special kinds of Mountain Dew specifically formulated to stimulate the gaming centers of your brain (and, I suppose, to fuel fictional racial hatred).
It is curious to me, then, that there isn’t geek music. At least, not a lot of it. I love Jonathan Coulton to death, but he unfortunately stands relatively alone in a giant field of “mainstream” artists, relegated to that terrible “novelty” music category by most of society. I’m not crazy about the fact that Taylor Swift can replicate herself and win a Grammy for a musical documentary of her clones’ fight for mating rights with a football player, yet a song laser-targeted at the hearts of lovelorn IT guys like Code Monkey sits in relative obscurity. Other geek-specific forms of music exist, but are even more obscure. Gamers have been known to hoard and play videogame soundtracks. (Protip: DON’T try to listen to nothing but music from the Legend of Zelda series on a 15 hour drive if you value your sanity. ) We’ve even got our own music subculture, though very few who aren’t part of it already have any idea it even exists.
In the absence of music targeted toward us or music we’ve created for ourselves, what then have we turned to? Is there a specific genre we lean toward? I guess it should not surprise me that a culture like ours who prides ourselves on being different doesn’t really flock to anything in particular, and we like to take our chosen brand to its extremes. I know a UNIX admin who can’t get anything done without hardcore industrial or Eurodance blasting through his headphones. I have a friend who just completed his doctoral thesis in philosophy that lives on scary Swedish death metal. I like my rock to have big hair and huge synthesizers, and I like the songs to be about Greek mythology whenever possible. My wife, a graphic designer, listens to Adam Lambert and the Glee soundtrack, to Missy Elliott when she thinks I’m not listening, and then out of nowhere here comes a bunch of Modest Mouse albums “before they sold out” and post-Pavement Stephen Malkmus. I haven’t met a terribly large amount of geeks who like country music, but I suspect that’s more because of where I live than anything else. And you can’t tell me the gangsta rap sequences from Office Space haven’t been re-enacted a thousand times, at least in our imaginations. All those swirlies growing up made us much too angry not to want to bust a cap in someone’s ass, just a little.
I’m curious to see the response from our readers on this one. If you’ve got a second, check in and let us know what music keeps the nerd-fires burning in your soul. If I’m lucky, there will be enough of you that nobody remembers that my favored go-to music when I really need to focus on coding is Madonna. I only wish I was kidding. How was I supposed to know she was compatible with Perl regular expressions?
