is a pretty boring movie. Anyway, here are three things I have decided are the culmination of a full day of procrastination. They are, in essence, an embodiment of how I should not have spent my time. Regardless, I enjoyed them and I think you will too.
First off. Awwwwwww. I get a kick out of this one for purely sappy reasons. I am also excited to see someone who operates aSuper Mario World level editor is also fairly competent with a woman. Presumably. Maybe he’s rich or she’s blind or the whole thing was a lie or they’re both un-paid actors. All nay-saying withstanding, Awwwwwwww.
Another video from the same site making a pretty amazing claim. I like it, I like it a lot. The claim closely parallels the plot of The Man from Earth (add it to your queue here Xbox 360/Netflix subscribers), but is far more interesting because it deals with Neo. This has nothing to do with video games but neither does your mother, so there’s that.
This last one is pretty damn amazing for 2 reasons. 1. This guy is talking to smart people about what he considers important problems. Problems like alien invasion and asteroid collision. Problems usually relegated to science fiction. It’s an amazing video. 2. Look at the date. February 2002. He’s talking about super-bugs and environmental collapse before bird-flu and An Inconvenient Truth even got off the ground and became so in vogue to support. And he’s really cool. His name is Stephen Petranek, and he sees the future.
Also, to all those wondering, I am not dead. My life has become more… bountiful in its necessary activities and I am currently trying to grow into a better writer. I am not promising to finally understand the then/than issue, but I might not be so boring soon. Fingers crossed.
There’s a very nice feeling, when I get a chance to wake up, play some Batman, grab something to drink, enjoy a TV show, and wander over to the computer to find that twitter has essentially found me everything I want to write about today. I know that sounds like a specific set of things to occur but today wasn’t even the first time this has happened this week. I figure since someone else did the leg work of running an interesting piece of content down they deserve a nod, so RyanScottRyan, you’re cool. Good job.
Today’s thing that just plopped into my lap is called RunMan: Race Around the World. It’s a game coming out in one week based on the very simple idea that running really fast is awesome. The gameplay is one part I Wanna be be Guy and one part Super Mario Bros. while the aesthetic is something resembling 1st grade finger paints. I feel like I am having fun just reading the bullet points. The main site itself promises “You can’t die” and describes the game’s art style as crude. These are wonderful little nuggets that designers who know what they’re doing are comfortable throwing around. If the game’s not about the art being photo realistic or even pretty then they can joke. It’s knowing what they’re making and being proud of it, very refreshing.
RunMan looks like a lot of fun, more fun then I can express without sounding very base. You run really fast and things explode. Watch the trailer, you’ll agree with me.
Going back to school, poor as hell, no job worth mentioning and trying to write for 3 sites a day. Yeah, you heard me, 3. I now am a weekday editor for InsulinFunk or the ‘Funk to those in the know. Feel free to read that every day and give money to them and me, whatever.
I am also on the second newest JPAGP discussing my soul searching journey to Massachusetts and beyond. In this example “beyond” replaces The Mall of America for dramatic effect. I hope it helped. Feel free to google me, I am going to write my own Wikipedia up tomorrow.
So the Super-Elite has been unleashed. Previously unconfirmed speculation about the existence of an incredibly large and as far as I can tell useless hard drive have finally been confirmed. Don’t get me wrong, there are ways to fill up a 120GB hard drive but as far as I can tell unless you’re either too busy for some simple data management or are actually trying desperately to do so then it’s not an issue. I meditated with a laser-focus on the whole idea and just couldn’t imagine the use. My mind reeled, “maybe if you bought every Rock Band and Guitar Hero song… not enough.” I just don’t know.
Demo impressions are useless, play the demo. I’ve decided instead to tell you more about the Girl. I have a fantastic woman in my life. Most nerds are happy with any woman, maybe I would be to, but luckily I have an amazing woman who likes me for some indiscernible reason. She has a lot of very good qualities and many of the qualities she lacks I have in spades. We’re a great team and more then that we know it enough to use our differences to our advantage. For instance, I can read a map very well. She makes knows how to encourage me. I encourage too but since everything I say sounds like a lie or a backhanded compliment I think she does a better job at it then I do.
All of this pails in comparison to what she did this morning. At PAX she pre-ordered Brutal Legend for me, a very sweet thing to do already. Then, since she’s Allison and everything good happens to her, she won the limited edition 17 inch Eddie Riggs statue. That will be in my apartment near the end of the month, but it wont be mine officially. I can handle that. No, what happened this morning what selfless. She received an email giving her the code for early entrance into the Brutal Legend demo and gave it to me without second thought. I opened by saying we have complimentary weaknesses, Brutal Legend is my weakness. I would not have been able to do the same thing, had our roles been reversed.
I will be playing the demo today until I can’t anymore. Don’t talk to me, I’m not interested. Unless of course if you’re the Girl, then I have all the time in the world. All of this was written in the time it took my Xbox to download the demo. Bye.
I am always a wait-and-see kind of guy. For instance, I had to wait and see with the PSP until there was a God of War skin coming out before I even considered it. Also games, online, HD in the palm of my hand, yadda yadda yadda. It was mostly about the sick paint job and it was a good deal. It had literally everything I wanted for the console. But I have never had a music player.
The Appelization of the industry has made me not trust anything. I don’t want iTunes, I don’t want DRM, I want a music player. But the Zune was this clunky joke. And what, pastels? Am I gonna be the 800th guy you see today with the black one? So when I saw the Crackdown 2 Zune HD above I sort of fell in love. I don’t know any of the stats or abilities. I don’t know what it costs. It might be a cell phone. It might be able to float on its own. I don’t care, I want it. I want it more then the game at this point.
I recently was explained that page-rankings exist and that I suck. I can’t really refute either of those claims but the second one has really got me down. It turns out that I am ranked 23,811,562nd on the internet. Frankly, and I don’t know why, I expected much better. Joystiq, a place I one day hope to work, is 1,723. That means I can now mathematically prove that they are 13, 819 times better then me. But wait, there are 15 writers on Joystiq which means individually any one member of the Joystiq editorial staff is only 921 times more popular or respected. I can live with that.
People who know me know that I am a huge fan of the Joystiq Podcast and especially Justin McElroy. The whole JP crew happen to also be some of my favorite bloggers but the Justin is my favorite on-air personality. I’m sorry Chris, I know how much that pains you.
Anyway, a few years ago I made a T-shirt mock-up of “I’m gonna kill you… wake up.” It’s a little JP meme taken from an on the street experience at GDC. At the end of the email I told Chris that he should add me on XBL. No shit, he actually did. This might have been right before the whole place blew up or maybe he was just getting rid of another person. To this day I am amazed he hasn’t deleted me. But that opened the door.
I thought I might as well go for the whole set and, with the recently added (at the time), ability to look through your friend’s friends list, I quickly found Justin and Ludwig’s gametags. I opted not to send a friend request to Ludwig because I was young and naive and afraid I would never play him because he’s an ocean away. The time has passed and I know his friends list is full up now, whatever. I’m not bitter about it, really. So I sent the friend invite. Somehow he wasn’t completely thrown by the guy with 8 friends, 1 being his boss, none of the others being people he knew, and added me.
I’m done. The story has become too convoluted and stretched out. With a 3 week vacation and missed weeks in between, the cohesiveness of what I was trying to accomplish has become little more then a shadow of its former self. I would love to tell you about the most recent exploits of Vorian Darkmagic but am no longer currently moved to tell the tale. Perhaps when I go back to school at the end of the month and get into a different game I might be able to keep a more rigid schedule. Thanks anyway.
Welcome to nitpicking, an idea I had while falling asleep that is meant to take great games and talk about them in enough detail that it will seem excessive. This time it will be Batman: Arkham Asylum.
Batman succeeds in its execution of a simple idea, make a good, licensed Batman game. Rocksteady essentially stripped all (or almost all) the preconceived notions about what should be in a video game in general and instead focused on only what would make sense in a video game about Batman. There is no lame swimming level, no ice level, no levels at all in fact. The conventions that Rocksteady chose to adhere to are only those that helped execute their vision.
In a much better article then I am capable of writing, Ludwig Kietzmann makes the case that Batman: Arkham Asylum is secretly a Batman RPG in a particular sense of the word. Now, I know he’s right in one regard, there is nothing about B:AA that isn’t roleplaying Batman, but the connotation is such that is trying to be assimilated into another genre. I have tried to boil down what makes a game an RPG before, usually failing with some horrible definition like, “it must contain an inventory system, but not all games with inventory systems are RPGs,” and really I don’t know if I can do better, but the sad fact if that Batman is not one.
What Mr. Kietzmann is saying, eloquently and insightfully, is that every decision made along the way is there to make fans and newcomers to the Batman mythos feel like they actually are Batman and not just bowing to game conventions. Batman would do the right thing so there aren’t any side missions. Instead Batman finds out that there’s a person in trouble or nefarious villain trying to kill everyone and he just goes to take care of it. It’s a game cliche that can feel forced when handled wrong. The feeling of, “Now I’ve got to go kill 20 scorpions,” is never a good one. With Arkahm Asylum though you don’t need to even shoehorn reasons as to why Batman would run off in the middle of what he’s doing to go save a single hostage. He’s Batman. Read More
