Its been such a long time

(o Y o) a big breasted hello to you all, its been a fair amount of time since my last post here so I understand if no one is reading this or really gives a shit about what i have to post here... thats not gonna stop me from posting again tho :D so for the 3rd time im back boyos here with your weekly dose of the internet funnys!Slash Musical suggested listenings

First things first,
Over the past couple on months i have fallen head over heels in love with the concept of abridging.So lets just make this as painless as possible and get it over with right from the getgo


This is an abridge of an abridge (fan based parody of a fan based parody) by the youtube user Littlekuriboh. Hes pretty good at what he does,even people who have never seen naruto can appreciate the absurdness of the show.

Next lets round off this little "don't call it a comeback" (wow even I feel bad after that one)with a bit of the tune'ige

first up we've got the foo fighters bridges burning off there new album wasting light.
I have a great idea for this song, when the 2012 election is all dead an buried i want to make a little compilation video of when each candidate lost it to this tune(the rick perry broken robot moment, or michele bachmann's hpv vaccinations cause retardation).

Rock on


Next My all time favorite trip/hop artist Blockhead ...

nuff said

Let me just say that yea this song is in Korean,and yes its funny.Im going to have to rethink my whole disliking of the Korean culture mind set... anyway enjoy this song from the perspective of a dog XD


Well that all ive got on my mind for the moment guys / girls/ Superintellegent space men from the planet P, I bid you adieu from all of me to you
_Dom

Treat

that right bitches VVFS is back, give brett some views

Desert Punk

If you like big tits and even bigger explosions you'll like Desert Punk. Its a really enjoyable show as long as you take it for what it is which is over the top action and busty babes. I started to think they'd develop the story a little more and it seemed like they tried to but it all kind of falls apart at the end and goes back to boobs and explosions.

The anime is set in the Kanto desert a waste land with skeletal remains of futuristic cities. Desert Punk or Kanta Mizuno is a ruthless mercenary (who's big claim to fame is having never failed a job) living in one of the settlements in the desert but away from the "capital city." His luck changes when on a mission to take out a group of bandits and recover some treasure he comes across a "lost woman" in the desert. The woman turns out to be Junko Asagiri a mercenary after the same treasure. Junko turns out to be Desert Punk's main romantic interest (although he's not too picky as long as the chick's got massive fun bags and not hard on the eyes) and his biggest rival/pain in his ass. In a battle with a man know as the Shimmer Sniper Kanta finds a little girl who he kindly helps out. Little does he realize but this girl Kosuna is the sniper's apprentice. After defeating the Shimmer Sniper Kosuna pursues Desert Punk in the hopes of becoming his apprentice and she ultimately succeeds.

With Desert Punk what ya see is more or less what ya get. The show spends a lot of time dancing around the idea of a really interesting plot line but in the end a lot goes more or less unresolved. It's almost like the writers animators or whoever thought that the show would have a longer run. This anime would have been perfect if there had been a second season they could have finished the story rather than leaving the view sitting there at the end of the 24th (24th?) well final episode saying "What? That's it?" Don't get me wrong it is enjoyable but don't expect a whole lot of intrigue.

It's a fun anime to watch especially if you like big breasted women I know I've said that a lot but that's in the description of the show on hulu. If not or you're looking for something with more depth this isn't for you. I personally liked it but only watch it if you feel like watching something stupid and hilarious.

Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion

WOW! That's about all I can say about Code Geass. I've been meaning to watch this one for quite some time and have just been putting it off and now I'm wondering what the hell took me so long. Lelouch is quite possibly the greatest hero and anithero of any show I've ever watched and not just anime.

This anime's main story line revolves around Lelouch Lamperouge or Lelouch Vi Britannia a prince of the Holy Britannian Empire the major world power. Lelouch and his sister Nunnally are in hiding at the Ashford Academy the school which Lelouch attends because both his and Naunnally's mother was murdered under mysterious circumstances and Lelouch and Nunnally are presumed dead. The action starts when returning from a chess match against a Noble of Britannia Lelouch accidentally involves himself in a struggle between the Japanese resistance (Japan has been subjugated by Britannia and renamed Area 11) and the Britannian government. In the struggle Lelouch gains a mysterious power known as Geass which allows him to command anyone to obey a single order unconditionally until that order has been fulfilled. During this first decisive battle Lelouch takes control of the Japanse resistance and leads them into a near victory. Unbeknownst to Lelouch the Britannian Empire sends Suzaku Kururugi (Lelouch's dearest friend) into battle with a new and unique Knightmare mech which Suzaku uses to effectively squash the uprising. Lelouch later discovers that one of the resistance fighters is also one of his class mates Kallen Stadtfeld she later becomes his ace pilot when Lelouch establishes a new resistance group known as the Black Knights and lead by Lelouch in disguise under the name Zero. That's just the first series which is 25 episodes. In the second series Lelouch and the Black Knights establish their own country and name it the United States of Japan and join together with the other major world power the Chinese Federation forming a pseudo country of approximate size and power to Britannia with the Black Knights as the military force for the "country."

Now it may seem like I went into a lot of detail about the plot but that barely scratches the surface there's countless intrigue and romance, death and betrayal and under it all each individuals drive to fight for justice and end the war mongering of the world. Lelouch is one of the most interesting characters because he has to lead a double maybe even triple life to accomplish his goals. He is a true renaissance man. He's an excellent leader and strategist, a great friend and is willing to accept the role of the true bastard to unify the world. He expertly creates an undying symbol for Justice in Zero and does his best to protect innocent lives. However when he needs to Zero is not above making sacrifices for the greater good. Throughout the entire series there's always that lingering question in your mind is he the good guy or is he just a selfish bastard. I'll leave that to you to decide however I think that Lelouch executes his plans for world peace nearly flawlessly despite the loss of many of his friends and occasionally what he believes was his whole reason for fighting. On the other side of this coin there is Suzaku who believes that no life should be sacrificed unless it's unavoidable and that people should work within the system to instigate change. Suzaku is an interesting character because he is an 11 (Japanese) an "honorary Britannian" and also the son of the last prime minister of Japan the one who allegedly took his own life to get the Japanese people to surrender to Britannia. Suzaku is deeply troubled because he is a soldier that is rapidly ascending through the ranks of the Britannia military and trying to maintain his beliefs that every life sacred. He is also old friends with Lelouch and Nannually and on several occasions nearly succeeds in discovering Lelouch's identity as Zero whom he regards as the absolute epitome of evil. It is interesting to watch their friendship grow and change since neither knows the others true identities Lelouch the "Black King" of the Black Knights, and Suzaku the "White Knight" of Britannia.

I would definitely give this a big recommendation. I've barely scratched the surface of this show but if I were to do a longer review it would probably turn into an in depth analysis of good and evil and all that bull shit and I don't want to get preachy. So long story short if you listen to nothing else I have to say listen to this. Watch this anime it's fucking awesome also if you've got the time check out Full Metal Alchemist Brotherhood and Gurren Lagan. Which I may not get around to reviewing for awhile because I've got so much good stuff to watch that its hard to go back and rewatch them by myself. That does not change the fact that they are brilliant and so is Code Geass.

Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion

I'm not going to lie, I played this because I can't wait for Skyrim. It's an everyday obsession of mine. I'm counting down the days and cursing the God who didn't invent time travel. I've considered freezing myself like Cartman or accidentally raising a demon who possesses and kills all of my friends, forcing me to open a portal back to the Middle Ages and then fight a horde of skeletons and take a potion that sends me forward in time, but I'll drink a little too much and go too far ahead to a point when Skyrim has finally, FINALLY debuted. I really want the game is what I'm saying, and Oblivion is a good band-aid until I can get my grubby hands on a copy.

Oblivion was a launch title when the Xbox 360 debuted all the way back in 2005. Six years is a long time for a video game, and yet it still looks fantastic. Yes, there's pop in, the character models are all ugly as sin and a lot of the environments look similar, but it was made back when Halo 2 was a wildly popular and attractive-looking game. It ushered in that new generation with style, and still looks good. Normally I don't talk about graphics because normally I don't care. Of course you need to be able to see what is going on in the game, but beyond that it isn't really that important. There's the surface aesthetic value, which is very nice but it wears off. You may be entranced by a game's brilliant graphics for the first hour, but the six after that degrade the "wow" factor somewhat. Oblivion and game like Oblivion are an exception, however, because the aesthetic is necessary to the game play.

When you think of game play in Oblivion, you probably think of the swordplay or the magic or the speechcraft system that doesn't work very well. All of that is actually a very minor part of the game play. Oblivion's main driving game play is walking, or more specifically exploring. It's about discovering places and looting them. It's about sinking into this world and learning every nook and cranny. It's this weird repetitive cycle where you go to caves to level up and find loot so that you can kill bigger things in different caves. This is the core game play of the open-world RPG (as well as most MMO's) and its so much fun.

I love exploration and it's handled so beautifully here. There are so many places to go and so many things to see. There's a guy named Goblin Jim and he lives in a cave with a bunch of goblins. Why? If there's an answer, I never found it. You get quests out of the blue just because you happened to wander into an invisible town or you talked to a guy who's having trouble catching fish. Now, the freedom isn't what makes this intoxicating, but the accomplishment. You are doing things in the world. There's a main story about demons breaking out of Hell (I'm sorry, daedra breaking out of Oblivion,) but no one I've talked to cares. This is not a game driven by narrative, it's a game driven by the environment. It's a game driven by mystery. There are small narratives and one big narrative, sure, but you can ignore those and search every cave, like I did, for the best sword around. This isn't Hamlet on the Holodeck, but that doesn't mean that it is without feeling and meaning. I was actually quite moved the first time I played Oblivion. I was just walking along a river near the city of Leyawin and I ran into a cottage. The moon was big and it was all really beautiful. This game is about exploration. It's about getting outside and finding things. Every time I play it I want to walk across the country and possibly kill a wolf.

In terms of nitty-gritty mechanics, I love that using whatever your skill is actually raises that skill. For example, using a sword makes you better at using a sword. They make you choose major and minor skills at the beginning. Major skills get a boost and raise your overall level as they develop which in turn raises our stats. It's all very roundabout and I'm glad they're getting rid of it in Skyrim. The animations look silly now, but that's unfair. I don't like that the difficulty of the enemies gets higher as you level. It's frustrating because part of the fun of leveling your character is becoming this unstoppable badass that can fell a goblin in a single blow. Player characters in RPG's are tied more to the player than in any other genre, which is why you want them to feel powerful. Who cares if it make the game a little unbalanced? I'm not saying there shouldn't be difficult enemies in the game, but I should be able to kill a goblin with one swing once I get to a high enough level. These are minor gripes in a game that really holds up after all of this time.

I've heard people complaining about Skyrim, which I haven't mentioned is the next game in the series, but I hope I don't have to. The main complaint is that its the same thing that Bethesda has been doing forever. I understand the whining, but at the same time I just don't care. I agree that the game industry has been a little stale in terms of innovating in their triple-A titles, but we still have tons of indie games being made. Even if they weren't, though, the Elder Scrolls series is not the issue. These are games which have game play actually benefits from better graphics and larger disc space. These are worlds to be explored and immersed in, and worlds have all sorts of polygons. So let's ease off of Bethesda and their beautiful worlds and put a little more pressure on the faceless Marines shooting at the color brown.

100th POST

Well we made it 100 posts of me blabbing on about shit people don't care about, But you know what I'm plan on doing another 100 or 2
so you the reader can just sit back and enjoy this 100th post with the knowledge that hundreds more are on there way>:D
for my 100th post i uploaded a bunch of songs me and the chaps made way back in the hay day of us all not getting laid ... I hope you enjoy them as much as i do... but probably not

"Next im coming to your home town, I piss on your shit then burn it to the ground !!!" ahhh what good times


I heard that Ebert said that this was a "GREAT" club song... I think he knows about that stuff


A warm pianoy song about the Big man in red,mmm so soulful (mad props to erik 4 holding on to this and his piano skillz )

Well this is _Dom saying I'll see you at dose 101

:D hope youve had fun reading

Treat

Simmon and lewis in america 

Gears of War

I know I'm late with this post. I could give you all of the reasons why (school, friends, copious amounts of drugs, ect.) but anyone who reads this is more than likely one of the people who partook in whatever I was doing so congratulations on gumming up the works guys.

Gears of War is one of the most influential shooters of all time. It was a selling point for the Xbox 360 and introduced gameplay mechanics still very much in-vogue. One need only look at the regenerating health as well as a lack of any health bar in the HUD present in nearly every modern shooter to see its influence. However, the game is not without problems, some of which are glaringly obvious from the get-go. However, the game is also useful in a discussion about how meaning and feeling can be conveyed through gameplay.

The story is unoriginal, to put it bluntly. Its about a bunch of steroid-pumped space marines doing what steroid-pumped space marines do; shoot metaphors for enemies of the US. Yes The Locust, which is what the alien horde calls itself in this game, are obvious stand-ins for terrorists. They pop up wherever they want and the government can't stop them. They're zealots fighting because an authority orders them to. Hell, they even travel through the sand and there's mention of emulsion, which seems to be something like oil. I don't think I have to mention that when the average American thinks of terrorists, they think of the Middle East and two things the Middle East has a lot of is sand and oil. I shouldn't expect subtlety from a developer named Epic and a game called Gears of War, I know (also, the soldiers are called COGs. Get it? They're COGs in the GEARS of WAR!!).Anyway, big Americans shoot brown people facsimiles is the basic plot of the game.

The main characters in this space marine saga are Marcus Fenix (player character), Dom (second-player), Cole and Baird. They don't go very far beyond their roles as tough guys, usually having lines like, "Over there," and "Got him!." Grunts and shouts are the order of the day, but that doesn't mean that there isn't some room for charm. I can't deny that I love Cole Train, the big African-American guy, despite I also recognize that his only character trait is being the big African-American guy. Dom's character gets some development (he's searching for his wife) that works slightly better in the second game than this one, even though its very manipulative. On the other hand, Baird's one character trait is that he's a dick and I'm pretty sure that Marcus Fenix was voiced by the Kool-Aid Man. Actually, it was John DiMaggio, who you may know as Bender from Futurama, doing my least favorite voice in his repertoire. I'm not kidding about the Kool-Aid Man thing, by the way. Fenix even says, "Oh yeah," sometimes. It's extremely distracting.

The story isn't the draw, though, it's the game play. You don't play a game called Gears of War to think. However, game play is, strangely, where Gears of War becomes the most interesting in an academic way. Most shooters, especially before Gears, have a tendency to feature a nearly invincible protagonist mowing down countless, faceless enemies. In a lot of ways, this game keeps that tradition alive in the mowing down countless, faceless enemies sense. However, you don't feel invincible while playing the game. Epic uses a cover system that was revolutionary for its time. Even on the lowest difficulty setting, if you sprint around with Marcus and try to hack up everyone with the chainsaw-bayonet (yes, there's a chainsaw bayonet), you're going to die. Marcus can't take bullets of that magnitude. This cover system fundamentally alters how the gamer experiences the game and what the game is about. Now you aren't firing an endless stream of bullets, but your jockeying for the best cover positions. They also introduced the active reload which makes it so that, if you hit the reload button at the right time, you reload faster or if you're really good a boost to damage. Now reloading becomes a major factor. By placing less emphasis on the shooting and more on movement and reloads, Epic creates a feeling of fear. It can be scary, especially in the later levels when explosive arrows can kill you in one hit if you're too cocky. While the game is still dripping in testosterone, there's actually a hint of melancholy to the proceedings rather than an all-out dick sword fight.

Is Gears of War perfect? No. Not even close. The dialogue is terrible and all of the characters are as flat as cardboard. I also wasn't impressed with the boring brown colors and the equally uninteresting story line. However, what makes this game interesting and important is how it engages game play. It uses the cover system and the active reloads to create a panicky, somewhat depressing atmosphere that the story should have played up more. The ultimate problem with the game is that they couldn't decide if they wanted to make a manly shooter or a slightly more thoughtful game about how scary it must be to be entrenched in a land that is not your own, under fire from a people you don't understand. They tried to make both.

Quickish hit

Some really great music put to 20 minutes of the best cosplay, you'll see this side of the pacific ... if you've got 20 minutes to burn give it a look

_Dom
(J-treat)

Modern Warfare 2

Spoilers, but you've already played this so it doesn't really matter.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare was sold with the promise that it was as realistic as you were going to get in a first-person shooter. While this may or may not be true and the story may have revolved around action-movie set-pieces, those set-pieces could be really compelling at times and we became (somewhat) invested in the characters. The Ghillie suit mission was especially a high point for the series. When Modern Warfare 2 came out, it was the highest selling game of all-time. It still may be, I'm not sure. It was a favorite of mine and my friends for a while and I have fond memories of playing it. My recent play-through of the campaign proves that you can't go home again.

The campaign is just so poorly put together. You play five different characters over the course of the single-player campaign and three of those characters die with one being gravely wounded. In the first Modern Warfare game, you played three characters and one of them died. When they died it was shocking and quite effective. When the three characters die in MWF2, it feels forced and really unnecessary. This is especially true of the astronaut portion where you float in space for a second and then get blown up for no real reason. I don't think they even name the poor guy. Even when the game is picking up steam, then completely break the tension when they switch to another character. For instance, there is a scene where you are an American soldier defending Washington DC from the Russians (because we are living in 1984 for some reason.) The helicopter you are in is shot down and you are being surrounded by the enemy. Ammo is running low. It looks like everything is lost and then...it switches to a different character. Granted, it shows how what happens afterwards came to be, but did it really need to be shown. It would have been way more effective if it had happened and then the player found out why. In fact, when the why is shown, it still doesn't make sense. I don't want to give it away despite the spoiler warning, but it all hinges on a character who is always portrayed as good allowing something bad to happen without anyone giving any real reason why. This is another common with the narrative; people do things that make absolutely no sense and then a bunch of people die. It's stupid and frustrating. I expect better from Lance Henrikson, Captain Anderson and the guy who played the sniper in Saving Private Ryan (they all lent their voices and, with the exception of Captain Anderson AKA Keith David I didn't realize it.) 

Strangely enough, the most interesting, fun and well-made part of the game is simultaneously the least realistic the invasion of America. I'm tired of the Russians as bad guys as much as anyone who doesn't masturbate to Red Dawn but the environments are so interesting, the missions are varied and, most importantly, the story is actually cohesive. While America is invaded, you play as one character, in one squad and you stay in an area that is both familiar and varied. It's not realistic, but games don't have to be and, often, shouldn't be. In a space where you can create anything, why would you create something exactly like the world around you?

So the single-player campaign with it's pointless deaths and poorly constructed narrative is fairly stupid. It doesn't matter, though, because people bought this game for its multiplayer. The single-player campaign is little more than a glorified tutorial meant to teach newbs the basic mechanics so as to avoid a Counter Strike-sized learning curve. Multiplayer used to be huge when I was living in a house with five other guys, but playing it again made me realize that it's really nothing special. Maybe its not fair looking back on this game after everyone who owns a game studio decided to steal their format, but especially after Call of Duty:Black Ops introduced wager matches, MWF2's multiplayer is lame. The killstreaks are still kind of cool and all, but at this point the only people left playing are the hardcore douchebags who couldn't move on when the new games came out. Even so, the matches are often glitchy with connection issues often cutting games short. The gameplay itself isn't particularly varied, with the regular deathmatch, capture the flag and territory holding matches that have been around since online games themselves. The guns are fun to shoot and all, but it's nothing special.

I realized that the reason my friends and I enjoyed those matches was because we were out on our own for the first time and could stay up all night with two walls of TV's constantly playing and shouting with each other. In the beginning, because Infinity Ward decided that beta testing was for chumps, the games were so glitchy and easily modded that the matches were all-out insanity matches. Hosts would pile thirty people only the smallest map so that every time the player spawned, eight people were below them. With no kill cap, a player could get sixty kills in a match. It was ridiculous, but it was fun. This is what made the game good and fun to play; friends and insanity. Once they lost those, we were left with uninspired multiplayer with a few bells and whistles attached and a single player campaign with a few good moments that were snuffed out by a stupid narrative structure, ridiculous plot twists and ethical problems. I forgot to mention the implied torture that one of the supposedly good characters engages in that is never mentioned and has no repercussions. So there's that. Overall, it's a really misguided game that made a lot of money because it is easy to play with your friends. I'm sure Modern Warfare 3 will sell plenty of copies, but I'll be too busy playing Skyrim to care. 

Eden of the East

Wow! Just wow. I just got done with Eden of the East an anime I started and finished shortly after my post on Torchwood. It was unbelievable. A definite must see. It's up beat it's dark there are serial killers and corrupt politicians. I have to give a big shout out to my buddy Dom for turning me on to this one its fuckin fantastic.

This anime is narrated by the lead character Saki Morimi a young Japanese girl who is just about to finish college and is taking a trip to America to celebrate. While visiting the White House in DC she meets a naked man running around with a gun and a cell phone named Akira Takizawa. Saki gives Takizawa her coat hat and scarf to cover himself up so he can get home then heads for the airport so she can go back to Japan. Saki however realizes her passport is in her coat pocket and ditches her bag to chase after him. By the time Saki catches Takizawa we've learned that he has no memory of who he is, he's in possession of several passports himself, and he's got a shit ton of guns in his apartment. Takizawa selects a passport at random and heads to the airport with Saki and the two of them head to Japan where Takizawa discovers that his phone can do anything he asks it to. Hijinks then ensue.

This show is exceptionally well done. From episode one you're left with a sense of wonder and mystic. Who is Takizawa? How'd he get this phone? Where can I get one? Surprisingly for an anime of this length you find out almost all of the answers to the questions you ask with few exceptions. Eden of the East is exceptionally well planned out there aren't any notable plot holes and all of the characters are likable or have some sort of redeeming quality. There are two movies as well which may answer the few lingering questions in your mind like who is Mr. Outside and who is the Supporter but I haven't watched them so I couldn't tell you.

Once again I'd definitely say watch Eden of the East its on Hulu. Its got a really interesting story. The animation is quite good. It's short so it isn't much of a time commitment On the whole its got to be one of the better animes I've ever watched. I want to say again mad props to Dom for this one.

Torchwood

Alright for all you Who fans out there this one is pretty enjoyable. While not as light and geared towards all ages as Dr. Who is Torchwood is still a decent show. Its certainly not for everyone not even necessarily Dr. Who fans. Torchwood is considerably darker with much less likable characters and more adult situations.

Torchwood follows the story of Gwen Cooper a police officer who accidentally stumbles upon Torchwood a secret section of the British government charged with fighting aliens and figuring out how their technology works so humanity can defend themselves against alien incursion. The head of this branch of Torchwood die hard Who fans will recognize immediately as Captain Jack Harkness one of the Dr.'s companions from the first season of the 2005 series. That fact is one of the main reasons I would recommend Torchwood to people. It gives you a much more detailed history on one of the Dr.'s more interesting and less well known companions. Along with them they have a cynical douchey medical officer and an odd Japanese computer genius. Although I would have to say that one of my favorite characters on the show would be Ianto Jones who does a little of everything (including Jack) because of his witty one-liners and snappy dressing if nothing else. This is a show that I would suggest you not get too attached to any of the characters except Harkness as he cannot die because this takes place after Rose brought him back to life at the end of Dr. Who 2005 season 1.

All in all I wouldn't necessarily say this is a must see but if you're bored and looking for something to watch give it a shot unless you like Jack on Dr. Who then I'd say go right ahead you get a lot more of his goofy over the top attitude and "futuresque bi-sexuality." If you do like the show or just want to know how it may conclude season 4 of Torchwood starts airing again November 14th 2011 so you've got about a month to catch up.

Minecraft

Some minecraft adventures with the guys at yogscast

enjoy

Portal 2

There is a part in Portal 2 soon after you escape from the Aperture Relaxation Center when the player as the elusive and, within the game, nameless character falls through a glass ceiling (Though a quick Google search will reveal her name to be Chell.) The player finds that they are in a glass cube. It is not hard to see that this cube is as high-tech as the facility it resides in, yet vegetation has grown  over it. The natural world is encroaching on Aperture Science at an alarming rate. The cube is mostly empty with just a a few things lying around. A portal opens up on a wall and, in case they didn't know already, the player knows that this is the cube where the first game started. It's obvious that Chell is right back where she started.

Portal 2 is a game that knows it's not in a vacuum and exactly what a developer can do within this new artistic medium. It's timely, dealing with issues of technological advancement for it's own sake, the blurred line between the natural and the artificial and, especially when looked at in conjunction with the Half Life series, the effects of a war between two corporations that have brilliant minds, unlimited money and no morality. They are aware they are making a game, not a movie, and use that to tell their story. Look at the very beginning of the game. Wheatley, played by Stephen Merchant who is one of my favorite actors and new favorite voice actors, tells you that you may have a little bit of brain damage. He tells you to speak. A giant A button with the message "Press A to speak" pops up on the screen. If you press A, you jump. Wheatley then tells you that you jumped , so try saying apple. Same thing; you jump. Wheatley then says that it'll have to do and the game moves on. This scene exists because it's hysterically funny, but also because it shows that Valve knows what they're doing. They rarely use cut-scenes or cinematics in any of their games; they tell the whole story from the first person perspective. They play with the medium because the medium needs to be played with. This game is a great game because it has something to say and knows how to say it without giving up.

Something people seem to forget about this game is how simple it is. There are, really, two active characters in the game besides the player; Wheatley, and GlaDos the big evil robot lady. Of course, there is also Cave Johnson (voiced by JK Simmons, who is also amazingly good,) but he is really just a recording. He is fantastically funny and informative, but he also isn't in the game beyond a few portraits and a gruff voice-recording. You could also argue that the turrets are characters, but they are more just obstacles to be overcome. So, again, two characters besides the player, who never speaks. Yet through darkly hilarious dialogue and through design choices they made with the world, Valve manages to convey all the meaning they need to. For instance, look the reoccurring theme of the blurred line between the natural and the artificial. To start with, Aperture is falling into disrepair and there is vegetation growing throughout the facility. Once Chell falls to the bottom, the old facilities are rundown and ravaged by age, not to mention surrounded by these massive caverns. Nature is reclaiming this area as well. Birds are even nesting down there. Wheatley is an AI, sure, but he speaks like a nervous human. He is all robot but he has a personality, something usually reserved for organic life. GlaDos embodies this idea more than anything else. She is an AI, but one derived from an organic consciousness (Caroline.) Though she is more monotonous than Wheatley, she still has a personality an plots revenge, something only humans and dolphins do. Then, there is also the fact that she is plugged into a potato battery for about half of the game. This is essentially an organic body for her. Even Chell has been augmented so that she can fall long distances without dying. There are more examples, but the point is that Valve is using the game medium to convey themes in a very subtle way. This is something lost in most games and for most developers.

Gameplay also holds meaning in this game. One of the most important things that video games tend to lack is a way to convey meaning that is unique to the medium. Valve uses the world's design and aspects of gameplay to make reflexive statements about the industry itself. Look at how Wheatley makes puzzles. All he does is cram two different test chambers that GlaDos made together to make one large test. One the first one that he makes, he even makes Chell run it twice because he's too lazy and stupid to make another one. This seems to be a very obvious statement about the lack of ideas in the industry. Wheatley takes the role of the designer or level designer who just doesn't care. The level doesn't matter, its a means to an end. There's also the introduction to the game I discussed earlier which pokes fun at the tutorials that most games start with. Then there's the conflict resolution button that Chell presses to stop the dispute between Wheatley and GlaDos, which is less meaningful but is using gameplay for comedy rather than as just something to do to make it to the next cut-scene.

This is what makes the game truly great, possibly even perfect. The gameplay and the narrative are inextricably entwined in Portal 2. One supports the other. You are always moving in this game; always doing something. The gameplay doesn't exist to advance the plot so much as it's where the plot lives. Everything happens within the context of the interaction between the player and the game. Wheatley can't hack anything until the player turns around. They could have easily had him just hack the door, but this works for the character and is tied to what makes a game a game. They use the unique tools that the medium gives them to tell a story that never could have been told in any other medium. The world is too deep for a film. It's too reliant on the actual senses for a book (would Cave Johnson be funny without JK Simmons' voice?) It's story is too tied into a player actually controlling Chell to be anything other than a game. That's the way it should be.

Internet stuff (9/20/11)

Yo yo yo yo yo ... yo. homies !
My time down here in vegas is quickly coming to an end, and honestly I love all your faces but f*ck this town kicks so much more ass. Yea anyways Heres some vids that was / are interesting and/or AWESOME!
so yeah enjoy.

Firsty first first, the diablo 3 Beta has been unleashed !! actually idk how long its beena running but the guys over on Yogscast finally got there beta keys and did a great 6 part video... hope my diablo boys find this interesting


Have you ever wanted to recapture the glory of rolling down the street on your trike, looking like a boss, and running away from the monsters that you imagined were chasing you... well maybe screaming down a mountain at over 55 mph can help recapture a little bit of that


This same group went and made maybe the most awesome slip'n slide / ramp ever  ... srysly I bet These guys have the best f-ing summers. its like they go out and do all the shit we sit around and talk about doing


Now I know no shave November is still over a month off but, its always in style to show a little upper lip hair love


Thats all the video fun ive got for you today ...blah blah blah you know this bit
(how about some points for my contributors being all wordy and informative eh ...yea!)
I'l see you at your next dose
_dom



musical treats

Dragon Age:Origins

Just one big pile of spoilers.

For a long time, I was really in the dark about why I enjoy Dragon Age: Origins as much as I do. It's is a pet peeve of mine when RPG's force you to push a button and watch your character repeatedly attack something over and over. Attack should be a button, not a mode. That's the reason I never got into another of Bioware's much lauded RPG's, Knights of the Old Republic (well, that and I didn't have an original Xbox.) However, this pet peeve of mine is a central aspect of Origins. It's how you play the game. Granted, there are activated spells and pound the attack button throughout combat even though it does nothing, but such a distance is created between the player pushing one button and the character going ape on an enemy that the player's emotional suture to the character should be broken, thus killing the illusion that the RPG is inherently trying to create.

But it doesn't. Despite my status as a self-avowed hater of the one-click, many-attack fighting style of this game, I've beaten it almost three times now. I beat it the first time with a Dwarf Noble named Cap'n. He was a black dwarf with ginger-red hair who fought with the biggest weapon I could find him. Then I beat it a second time with Mugen, a human noble and rouge who duel-wielded swords and was a cunning back-stabber. This time around, I used a Dalish elf, who was a rogue again because I realized partway through that I hate being a mage. In these last two playthroughs, very little changed. I had created Mugen as a perfect playthrough character. Everything turned out the best for every race in the land. However, whereas Mugen preferred the dark, fantastically evil Morrigan as his lady friend, my elf (Havanna Bob) chose Leliana, the shy former nun who is surprisingly down for a foursome. Besides that, I chose a different dwarven king in Orzammar because even though Bhelen leads his people better, he is the scummiest character in the game. So why did I do it and why am I telling you all this? The answer to both of these questions is that Dragon Age: Origins is one of the best cases for narrative in games that I've ever seen. I kept coming back because I didn't want to leave this world they'd created. Everything works so well together that it becomes somewhat of an addiction.

One of the big draws of this game was the origin part of Dragon Age: Origins. The player gets to choose a race, a class and an origin story, go through a fairly well-made character creation tool and then play out whichever one of the six origin stories they chose. These prologues are pretty good. They're appropriately dramatic and fun to play through. All of them end with the character being recruited into the Grey Wardens, who are the requisite order of badasses. The only problem is that they're fairly superfluous in the grand scheme of the game. They affect how certain characters talk to you, sure, but other than that the events in the origin are rarely mentioned. Which race you pick can greatly change the outcome of the story and the class affects how you play throughout the game but the origin doesn't really affect how you see the darkspawn or anything. The only thing it does is give you a little more insight into whichever race you pick and can make you hate the guts of certain characters (killing Arl Howe as a Human Noble is a fantastic feeling.)

After the prologue, every character regardless of races goes to the fortress of Ostagar where they meet the cocky new king who is obviously going to die very soon after you meet him so who cares. There's going to be a big battle with the Darkspawn, evil monster people, and you learn more about the Grey Wardens and their badassery. By the end of this story arc when Ostagar goes horribly wrong and the next one begins when you start gather armies of dwarves, elves and men, the game starts feeling more and more like a cheap Lord of the Rings ripoff. The game starts to turn things around, however, once you get to the small village of Lothering.

Lothering. Katie said I need more picures

It's here that you start to realize that this game may have been cut from well-worn cloth, but there are some tricks hidden in the sleeves. For one, you can get a giant as a companion who goes by Sten. Sten isn't his name so much as his rank or title. He is of the Qunari race (pronounced like coon-ari) and is first met in a cage because he killed an entire family when he couldn't find his sword. Then there's the townsfolk who try to murder you because the guy who screwed you over said that you killed the King. They don't believe it, but there's a bounty and they have kids to feed. This is not a happy story.Once you leave Lothering, the Darkspawn come behind you and BURN IT TO THE GROUND. There are children that are possessed by demons, a cult of dragon worshipers that want to defile a relic, dwarven politics and elves who are being hunted by werewolves who may be the victims but kind of aren't. It's a dark story with dark tones.

And this is why the characters work so well. They're funny, engaging and very well-acted (with some exceptions, children being the most notable.) There isn't one companion in the game that I dislike. None are too preachy, too stupid or too bland. Even the aforementioned Sten who acts without emotion based solely on duty has that lack of any humanity, has a strange likability to him and, even stranger, a plausibility. . Morrigan is probably my favorite, though I enjoy Leliana and Alistair as well. She is a cruel, evil bitch who is just trying to be practical. She does soften up, but not to any degree that's unbelievable. It's just enough to give us hope for her.

The settings are fantastic as well, if a bit cliche. The dwarves live underground. The elves live in the forest. The humans have thatch huts. However, within these cliches, they again breathe a new life. Darkspawn also live underground, so the dwarves have to constantly fight them in the ruins of their once great empire. They also have a lot of intrigue within their nobility caste (oh and there's a caste system) that creates opportunities for some great satire. The elves that live in the forest are called the Dalish and they are the traditional J.R.R. Tolkien elves in many ways. However, there are also city elves who were enslaved by the humans long ago. This creates a lot of tension if you pick city elf as your origin. There is also friction between the Chantry (Ferelden's church) and the mages. Magic is seen as a curse by many and any mages not confined to a place that the Chantry can keep an eye on them (called The Circle) are labeled apostates and are executed on sight or arrested. Bioware did a fantastic job of creating a country on the edge of destruction from the outside that is leading to fractures in the society on the inside. The way all of these dramas play out are fantastic and mostly up to the player.

Now, I've gone on and on about the story, but haven't mentioned too much about gameplay. This is because, as I mentioned, I'm not a huge fan. They have plenty of awesome weapons and armor to choose from as well as spells and special moves called talents. However, the gameplay itself (at least on the Xbox 360.) is somewhat boring. The one-click fighting is lame, some bosses have really annoying knock-down moves or paralysis moves that don't allow you to fight back and overall it's just not that satisfying.There's also quite a few bugs that pop up all over the game, from problems with the conversation system to being pushed around by your teammates in a fight. It's not terrible, by any means, it's just not the reason this game is so great. It's great because of the world they created.

This game is a perfect illustration of video games as a narrative device. You do need good gameplay, and hopefully have great gameplay, for a game to work. However, if there are holes in the game's battle system or if the graphics aren't top notch (and they aren't as evidenced by the sex scenes) or if the music can be somewhat annoying at times (rewatch that sex scene,) a fantastic story with engaging characters can work wonders. If you have any doubt, search for Alistair slash fic. On second thought, don't. Just assume there's a lot because there is and now I can't get certain images out of my head. The point is that the people who played this game and have been writing about it have barely mentioned gameplay. It's all about the story and the deep, immersive world Bioware created. In the realm of RPG's, story and world are the most important components. Everything else is important as well, but not as much as in a puzzle game or a shooter. You can forgive a glitch here and there if you still get the sexy witch in the epilogue.

George Carlin

Dose 9/12/2011

Hey guys i just wanted to make a new post with a few videos, so yea I hope you'll enjoy and i'll try my best not to ramble on too much before the vids


I have immense respect for anyone who can do comedy for a living,either as a classic stand up or one of the more modern interpretations. The art of make people laugh and have a good time is by far the most noble, as a comedian your success is based off a basic human emotion and Thats incredible!
But more then that comedians are becoming modern day philosophers,They tap into that human element and they see us at our basic level and again this is amazing.
Today Ive gained tremendous respect for one of the Best,Out of the blue while looking around at Fail compilations, and video game demos I found One of the greatest speeches ever made. I give you Charlie Chaplin's last speech in the Great Dictator


Going in a little bit of a different direction I found Ign's playthrough of skyrim at pax so I figured i would link the three vids, even though im sure all my buddys who have been waiting on this game have already seen it :D (still my treat to you guys to see um again )

More The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Videos

More The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Videos

Then I thought we could finish completely today completely on the other side of comedy as where we started and look at some MMD / japanese guys doing backstreet boys... yea we've come a long way from Chaplin... O well its still funny

That is all that I wished to share with you guys today, I hope it was enjoyable, and enjoy the rest of your day, till I see you at your next dose
_dom
Treats ( god i spoil you )

Double Feature Part 2: The Magician King

A while back, I reviewed The Magicians, which it turned out had a sequel coming out (The Magician King). I was immediately excited because I realized it when I was double checking some facts about the book while I was reviewing it (aka, I saw on wikipedia). I enjoyed The Magicians, up until the end, so the fact that "the end" wasn't actually "THE END" made me very excited to read this new book...which I literally just finished about an hour ago.

Truth be told, Lev Grossman did it to me again. I hate reading books when I don't know there's going to be more. Once again, the ending left me hanging, which means a sequel, which angers me in many ways. I dislike having hanging endings. Even Harry Potter, which you knew was going to have a sequel, would leave off each book in a way that made you hunger for the next one, but there was still a somewhat clear "end"--he was back with his Aunt and Uncle for the summer, and he would be bored stiff and want to go back to Hogwarts, just like the rest of us. Grossman is not so good at endings, I'm realizing. Without spoiling anything, essentially what happens at the end is the textbook "third act crash", setting up the next book and essentially making everyone rage face that the next book won't be out for another couple of years most likely.

That being said, the rest of the book had me hooked the entire time. That's why I was so mad about the ending, I felt like there wasn't a payoff. Besides that, Grossman writes with a humor I can truly appreciate, with personality that most editors make you throw out the window. There are many references to Hogwarts, hacking, hobbits...if you're a nerd and you wanted a freakin' letter to a magical school, this book knows how to play to your feelings and experience, while also saying naughty words.

SPOILERS AHEAD IF YOU HAVEN'T READ THE MAGICIANS

This is just so I can have some space and no one accidentally reads spoilers. Carry on. 

The book picks up the plot two years after the ending of the first, with Quentin, Julia, Janet and Eliot all living as royalty in the once-thought fictional land of Fillory. Quentin has become restless and wants to go on a quest, which you just know means bad news. Soon enough, he gets one (or what turns out to be a beginning of one), and takes Julia along with him, feeling a need to help her with her life. Readers of the first book will remember that Julia learned magic on her own, instead of attending a magic school like Quentin did, but not a lot was revealed about how she went about doing that in The Magicians. Well, it gets revealed in this book, that's for sure. Roughly every other chapter switches over to Julia's perspective, and takes you through how she learned magic, and eventually why she's acting so weird. The pay-off in this area is spectacular, though the resolution seemed a little too perfect to me. The journey was what I enjoyed.

That seems to be how I feel pretty consistently when it comes to reading books by Lev Grossman--good god I love the journey, but I hate his endings to no end. Most of it stems from sequel rage, but in addition it feels almost abrupt when he ends his books. I would suggest reading this book, but I would wait two years so that perhaps the final (if it is only a trilogy) book is out, and you can continue on reading, without feeling a need to rip your hair out.

Double Feature Part 1: Gods Behaving Badly

Hello everyone! Sorry I've been away so long yet again...and sorry that I will be away again, but to make up for it, there's going to be TWO reviews coming at you this fine evening. I'm hitting a bit of a busy streak from here until the end of the month, which is going to make reading a little difficult, but I'm trying to make it up to you fine folks with a double dose of good ol' book readings.

Gods Behaving Badly was the first book I read after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In this case, it was a book I had found entirely on my own. So far, nearly everything I've reviewed has been from a class, or recommended to me--not this time! Truthfully...it's not a very hard book to read. Very simple, not too long (just over 300 pages, but a little larger than average font size), and I'd never heard of Marie Phillips before (although I still don't know her now...I may have had to look up the author...)

So why did I decide to read this book?

I'm a sucker for Greek Gods, that's why. The plot of the book revolves around the 12 major Greek Gods, living together in modern times, many of them as roommates. Yep, that means that Artemis, Apollo, Athena, Ares, Aphrodite, Hermes, Zeus, Hera, Dionysus, and Hephaestus all live in the same house. Poseidon still lives under the sea, Persephone and Hades are in the Underworld, while Eros lives outside the house and has found refuge in Jesus. That was probably my favorite part of reading this book--I may have had some issues regarding how some of the characters were portrayed "personality-wise", but I loved the "modern representation" of the Gods. Dionysus runs a night club and makes his own wine, Aphrodite is a phone-sex operator and Apollo is a tv fortune teller.

Now, the question has probably come to mind as to why Eros is believing in Jesus, when he is a God himself. Well, that's where the true plot of the story starts to come in. The Gods are slowly losing their powers--they're immortal, but their power is still fading, and once it's gone, they'll die. Most likely, anyways. Wrapped up in the Gods quest to restore power are two mortals: Alice and Neil, who are very awkward at admitting their feelings to each other. Their interactions, as well as their later ones with the Gods made for a very amusing read.

Someone well-versed in Greek mythology (like me) would enjoy this book just on that. I particularly enjoyed it because Artemis was given a lot of page-time, which was a nice change for me. She's always been my favorite, and Athena always seems to steal the lime-light. Regardless, the "modernizing" of the myths made me smile to no end, despite the simplistic plot. It's not a "must-read", but if you have it around, and you have a background in mythology, you'll enjoy the book anyways.

NEWS FLASH: Apparently this is being turned into a movie right now. Christopher Walken will be Zeus. But Nurse Jackie is playing Artemis. I am somewhat disappointed by that choice, but I don't know who I'd pick otherwise. Too biased against my favorite Goddess. Also, random thing--changed "Alice" to "Kate". Hooray Hollywood book adaptations!

A Bunch of Stuff That May or May Not Make Sense

This article is going to be very unfocused. I'm working through some ideological issues.

Today has been a hell of a day for my experience as a blogger. I was writing a post about fundamental elements of game design when I tried to look up the name of the first game that Odyssey creator Ralph Baer created for a one-off joke. As I checked the most reputable sources I could (read: Wikipedia,) I started to find essays and articles about video game theory that were very academic and in-depth. Now, six hours later, I have just finished a keynote speech by Ian Bogost about video game ontology that dealt with everything from the ludology/narratology to metaphysics. Its been a bit of a maze.

As I was reading these, I started to think that my career as a theorist was over before it had begun. I was operating on the belief that video game theory was non-existent. In fact, it was flourishing right under my nose and getting into metaphysical discussions about Kant and melting my brain with its awesome academicism. I can't operate on this level; I just don't have the background in philosophy to really get into that discussion. Then I had the realization that they still weren't talking about what I want to talk about, which is the theory of game aesthetics and how to create meaning. They were abstracting video games into a realm which I have no business being in; ontology. I didn't even know the meaning of the word until tonight. It is the philosophical study of being and reality, by the way. I'm more into how art creates meaning, not whether or not art is real. So I can breathe something of a sigh of relief now I guess.

Closer to my realm, Bogost and Jesper Juul (another theorist and designer) have both come to a conclusion I find very interesting; that games are a mixture of the real and the fictional. Every game has a real set of rules imposed upon a fictional narrative and world. No other art form really has this issue because video games have the distinction of having a real person in real time imposing their will on a fictional universe. This is what makes video games as an artistic medium (no matter what some people say) so fascinating. How do you evaluate human interaction artistically? How do you evaluate the play between reality and fiction artistically? These are the questions that video games raise and I would like to answer. Mostly though, I want to help push video games into this cerebral realm so that they can expand as an entertainment system as well as a thought-provoking work of art. 

Again, this is very unfocused and more for me than anyone reading this blog. If anything, this is just to show you guys that its not that I'm being lazy, I'm just working through some heavy shit. Any ideas I have right now are more like dough than wedding cake so I'm working on it. I'll have a review up next week of...something. I swear.

From Dust

I'm pretty sure there's no spoilers, but don't complain if there are.

If The Discovery Channel has taught me anything, it is that nature has the potential to be quite powerful and terrifying. It can kill you in a variety of sadistic and inventive ways and would most likely enjoy the act; like the Jigsaw killer, but without the morals. This is what From Dust, a new God game developed by Ubisoft, tries to convey, though with a much more reverent tone. The makers of the game have attempted to capture the fury of nature as well as the fear early man must have felt in its presence. For the most part, they succeeded.

The game starts off with a small, unnamed tribe of people playing music and calling into being The Breath; a spirit which can control the element which is the closest thing to a player character that this game has. The rest of the game requires the player to use the spirit's powers to guide The Tribe to giant totems left by a group of people called The Ancients. These totems bestow the player with useful powers such as jellify water or evaporate which both do exactly what it sounds like. After The Tribe as settled around all of the totems, they then can leave through a little gateway which leads to the next map. The whole story is building towards a final place where The Tribe can finally settle down. The ending is an anticlimax, but an anticlimax I actually kind of enjoyed. It is surprisingly deep, if a bit lazy. Now, I'm not spoiling the ending because, to be frank, the story doesn't matter. This game wasn't created for the story. It was created for the experience.

Eric Chahi, whom I will refer to as the director of the game though I don't know his actual title, has stated that he wanted to make this game when he saw a volcano erupt. He witnessed the brute force of nature and felt that a game needed to capture this. This is an area the game gets absolutely right. The environmental mechanics in this game are fantastic. The water and the lava move realistically, finding the path of least resistance and turning into rock and steam when they meet. The tidal waves and volcanic eruptions in the game can be truly terrifying and awe-inspiring. There is one map especially where there are two volcanoes in an ocean that is spectacular. You can watch one volcano form into an enormous, imposing, Mount Doom-esque peak while the other one fills with water and becomes a sandbar. The sandbar also happens to have a spring in it, called a source in the game, and this spring forms a river and eventually a delta. I loved playing around with the features of these gorgeous maps by diverting rivers and building giant walls of sand or igneous rock. I'm sure there are a multitude of ways in which this game can be used I didn't even think of in my short time with it (I only played it in two days because the other game I was playing is starting to bore me.) This environmental gameplay is a really fascinating and innovative play on level editors like the Halo Series' Forge Mode.

Now, I wasn't as impressed with the human side of the game. While I liked this idea of The Tribe and the totems, I didn't feel like the AI was there. It was a bold move to make arguably the most important part of the game impossible to directly control. The only way the player can influence The Tribe directly is by choosing which totem or power marker to walk to next. The player cannot pick the route. This becomes increasingly frustrating as the difficulty of each map ramps up. It got to the point where I found myself dumping hot lava on my people because they refused to use a ramp I built them and insisted on staring at a sheer wall and crying for help. It would have been amazing if the AI for The Tribe was as good as the environment. If they could find their way around obstacles or even decide that a flood was probably something they should

run away from, the frustration factor around this game would have been greatly diminished.

As I mentioned before, From Dust is a part of the God game genre. This is an often overlooked genre of game which includes The Sims series and almost every game ever developed by Peter Molyneux, most notably Populous and The Black and White series. I would also argue that strategy games, including real-time strategy games like the Age of Empires series and turn-based strategy games like the Civilization series would also count as sub-genres. They all feature a third-person camera which is pulled back to create a sense of omniscience and lack a visible character for the player. Rather, the gameplay is centered around controlling units of people, animals, magical beings, et cetera to carry out some task, usually war. From Dust is something of an exception because, as noted above, the player does not actively control their units. This lack of control does not exclude From Dust from the genre, of course, as they are still units whether under player control directly or indirectly. Indeed, this lack of control reveals an interesting facet of the God game never considered.

By definition, God games are games where you play God. Whether this is literally or figuratively true depends on the game, but the player holds a God-like sway over the characters of the game. However, despite the apparent freedom these games allow, they are defined by their limitations. God, within the world of video games, means that the player is unbeatable. For instance, the often used "God Mode" which gives the player unlimited health/ammo/shields/whatever else allows them to cheat through a choke point within the game. However, a God without limits is not a game, it's a sandbox. There would be no narrative and no structure whatsoever. So in the RTS genre, you are limited by resource management or a number of units. Turn-based strategy games have similar limitations and much more including economies and other factors that vary game to game. Even The Sims, a game where you can actually delete the windows from your sims' house and light their house on fire, is limited by the amount of money that your sim makes. From Dust's limitation by way of The Tribe makes these limitations very obvious. The only real God in the world of games is the developer.

So, to sum up, From Dust isn't really deep, but it is fun. There is a story mode and a challenge mode I didn't really get into, but there isn't a crazy narrative or anything. It's more of an amazing tech demo with an interesting mythology (I forgot to mention that there are these little stories that The Tribe has in a Memory section that are kind of cool.) It's 1200 points on the Xbox Live arcade, and I suggest getting it if you have nothing better to do.

Internet stuff

(RAMBLINGS)
With all of the media that we consume on a daily basis, A thought occurs... why not put a large amount of it in one place?
Well for one that would be a crap ton of stuff... I mean try putting youtube videos,Music, episodes of tv shows, a games, maybe a football game, and internet reviews on one page. ok ok actually you probably could do that, but not on a blog :P
Anyways that's beside the point... actually that is the point, wait what ? nvm
(RAMBLINGS)

Here's some new internet videos, some of them cool stuff, other music, others still deep philosophical vids.

Intro to eden of the east, amazing anime(but dont watch it till I get back to Eugene :D), and the song grows on you


Ever wanted to strip down and look at what the human race is from an "alien" perspective?
Well this is a funny video :D


This is Phelous, he's Canadian, and awesome.... hmmm I wonder are all Canadians awesome ?? I'll have to run some tests (brbz)


Below is one of my favorite "new" internet reviewers, I say "new" because ive been watching all of his stuff almost religiously for about the past month now but i dont think ive commented on him before... anyways Heres The Spoony One in his review of mazes and monsters, the video that convinced me I need to DM


RL fallout,
4 t3h |\|3rD5


If you have the desire to be deep and introspective and truly see that we are insignificant as humans in the grand universe(or if you just got stoned cuz ) you cant go wrong with a little Carl Sagan.

(all seven videos on the Sagan series)

I think I shall leave you with that traveler,
this is _d0m saying I'll see you at your next dose
may the council look after you till then

treat KA-WA-II - ness

Welcome Back, Me!: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Hello everybody! Sorry it's been such a long time since I posted, but hopefully it was worth waiting for.

I recently finished reading The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, written by Haruki Murakami, who is a well-known modern Japanese fiction writer. After reading this book, I completely understand why. I was given an except of this book to read in my Modern Japanese Literature class, and it did not give the book the justice it deserves (although it did peak my interest which got me to read the whole thing, so I guess there's that). A review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is apparently not something that is new to the blog-o-sphere, but here's my two-cents anyways.

To give you an idea, the book runs just around 600 pages (my copy, anyways), the excerpt was maybe 30 pages of that. The expanse of this novel is phenomenal--as you can probably guess from the page count--it covers months in the life of Toru Okada (the protagonist), plus it takes you back in history with stories from older characters. These stories often overtake the main storyline, which can make the book a little hard to read, but it truthfully adds so much to the story, I don't think the book would work without it.

I guess you want to know what the book is about, huh? That's where things get...complicated. It's very hard to nail down exactly what the book is about, because at that 600 page count, it covers so many different things. To begin with, it tells the story of a failing marriage and the search for a missing cat, and the overall drive for Toru is to get his wife back. However, within that there's some strange supernatural aspects involving wells, women who "heal" people through prostitution of sorts, a brother-in-law who doesn't seem to be who he says he is...all connected in a way that Toru must unravel in order to get his wife back somehow.

Probably the hardest part about this book for many readers will be just how Japanese it is. Murakami takes great care in his descriptions, which are fantastic, but often very little will happen in a chapter and that can deter some readers. I personally enjoyed the descriptions, especially when Kumiko (the wife) first leaves--you can truly feel the lagging that Toru feels as he waits for her to come home and doesn't know what to do with himself. Murakami received the Yomiuri Literary Award for this book, and those who read this novel will understand why. However, if you don't enjoy a book that drags once in a while to make a point and you don't have the patience for a 600 page read, you probably won't enjoy The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and that's just the honest truth. But, if you think you can read this (you should know better than I), I highly recommend it. It's weird, but oddly mesmerizing, with by no means a "fairy tale ending" and a great read for the right kind of person.

Pokemon Blue

There are at least two games that I have been meaning to review for a few weeks now (Bioshock and Dead Space) yet have been pushed to the side for a variety of reasons. This week, that reason was Pokemon: Blue Version. A few friends of mine have put together a tournament which I will be participating in, so I've been dusting the cobwebs off of my game and trying to remember exactly how the original games worked. I can't keep the Pokemon I've been raising because we're supposed to start training on the same day in the interest of fairness. However, I thought I'd try out a few combinations and mess around with some different Pokemon off and on until the match. Then, it became all-consuming. I haven't stopped playing the damn thing in three days. So, without any other games and as a last resort, I am forced to review it here and now. Luckily, Pokemon raises some interesting questions so I don't look like a complete asshole.

From the instant the intro cinematic with Jigglypuff fighting Gengar (somewhat of an unfair match-up) began playing, it felt like I was main-lining nostalgia. It was coursing through me and I couldn't get off of the couch. There is an almost zero percent chance that anyone reading this review has never played any Pokemon game and I doubt many of you have never played the originals, so you can imagine how I felt picking my first Pokemon again and kicking my rival's ass (His name is too dirty for this blog) and catching a Rattata because it was the only Pokemon I could find that wasn't a Pidgy. All of this is so indelibly tied to my childhood that I have to recognize that I am going to be horribly biased in this review. I have loved every minute of playtime in my game so far, but I can't accurately measure how much of this is from the gameplay and how much is from memories. This whole time I've been wrapped in a warm, fuzzy woolen blanket of nostalgia and I can't say whether some of that wool is covering my eyes.

So to really start this review, we need to talk about story. It is an extremely simple road narrative about a boy going out in the world to become the best Pokemon trainer, like no one ever was. It has been done many, many times in all forms of art, but is a very powerful structure. I never get tired of road narratives. The first Pokemon games also did a really good job of populating the world with interesting characters and sub-plots. I love Team Rocket infinitely more than the lame criminal organizations that followed if for no other reason than they were actually evil. Yes, they were stupid enough to station a look out guard in front of a poster that hid a secret switch, thereby negating the whole point of hiding the switch, but they were also into really heavy stuff. They were stealing Pokemon, they were running gambling operations, they kidnapped the head of Silph Co and they even killed a Marowak. They committed murder, which none of the other lame asses ever did. Team Aqua and Magma either wanted to make everything all ground or water, which is so stupid; who would ever want to do either of those things? Or Team Galactic wanting to destroy the world so that they can rebuild it? That's crazy but also too supervillian-y. Team Rocket is just a bunch of thugs who want to get paid. They are a strangely realistic element in a world populated by magical animals that fight each other for no real reason. Really, the story wasn't necessarily strong, but it was relatable. It was about growing up and finding your place in the world. Of course, the road has been used as a liminal zone (a place in-between places) where change happens since The Odyssey or even before. Therefore, it is a natural fit for this game's classic coming-of-age story. Then the antagonists were so good and main protagonist such a blank slate that anyone could slip into the role. It may not be Hemingway, but the game resonated in a very universal way.

Beyond story, the game also resonated with its use of the Pokemon themselves and the amazing gameplay. The game is really just a turn-based RPG in a lot of ways, but the developers tweaked the formula to create a majorly-addicting masterpiece. You have the basic stats of attack, defense, speed and special. These haven't really changed throughout all of the games, though the special stat has been split into special attack and special defense. Overall, they are basic stats that all RPG's use, though the names may be different. Then the Pokemon have their attacks. Each Pokemon can only have four moves, which is ingenius because it simplifies the actual gameplay while adding strategy and variety to the experience. Then of course, there is the gotta catch 'em all hoarding aspect of the game. You are encouraged to collect all 150 Pokemon in the game, which forces you to trade between Red and Blue, as some Pokemon can only be found in one version and some only evolve when you trade them.

I'm starting to realize that going in-depth into the gameplay is completely unnecessary. Pokemon games have changed in very minor ways throughout the generations. New Pokemon have been added (though they look more stupid every generation,) new evolutions, time, date, beauty contests and a million other tiny things have been added, but the skeleton hasn't changed. Pokemon is about catching things and then making them fight. It works because of it's simultaneous depth and simplicity of the gameplay, the bond that grows with these imaginary creatures as you raise them, the timelessness of the narrative and now, after about thirteen years since it first appeared in the United States, it works because all of us old fogies in college have fond memories of our pocket monsters. Are the graphics good? No. Who cares?

I realize that my contributions to this blog are about art, so I need to look at this game from that perspective as well. Is Pokemon art? No. No it is not. This is not to say that it isn't a great game. It is. I think it's fantastic and more fun than it should be. I think there is a feeling among people, and gamers are people despite what some lawyers have claimed, that if someone says that something isn't art, then they are saying that something isn't good. This is not the case, at least not for me.

Now let me completely retract that statement. I know this is bad for an argument, but I don't care. I think it's important that you all know that I've had a sudden change of heart. Pokemon very definitely fits my definition of art. It is a narrative that drives at a deeper meaning and can arouse an emotional response. I think that Pokemon is kind of a beautiful game. Sure the puzzles are silly, the dialogue is often stupid or weirdly translated and the story itself is not really that deep, but I think that's all very true of a lot of silent films too. Pokemon Blue and Red are about growing up. They're about drive. They're about wanting something really badly, working hard and achieving it. Along the way there is real danger and consequences, but you overcome that. There is also a message about conservation that was much more subtle in the original games than the later ones. I don't know, maybe I'm full of shit. It's a classic tale with a very interesting twist that hits many deep themes with a minimalist, almost expressionist world design. That sounds like art to me.

Cool stnuff

Just a few sweet videos Ive found around the net over the past week, I am sorry but all i feel like posting is a few videos im doing enough blogging about RL stuff at least for right now ... so I hope you'll enjoy the following vids :)
And I'll leave you until your next dose with them









Enjoy

Galaxy Railways

Ok just finished Galaxy Railways and as I was looking at a character name list I discovered there's an OVA and sequel series that I haven't watched but I'll probably get around to it. This was actually a surprisingly good show. I went it to it expecting to watch some shitty anime that was watchable and that's about it. Now I fucked up when I started Galaxy Railways cause I started in the middle at like episode 12 or something (because that's the way its set up on hulu episode 12 or 13 comes before 1 and it will take you to 13 or 14 if you aren't careful) and even still I enjoyed the show from the first episode. Granted after going back and watching the first twelve or so episodes it made a lot more sense but you don't need to know the back story to appreciate the story.

The way the story really starts a young version Manabu Yuuki and his older brother Momaru Yuuki sneak aboard there father Wataru Yuuki's space train nick named Big One. Wataru Yuuki is the captain of a Space Defense Force (SDF) train charged with protecting all of the other civilian trains on the galaxy railway system. Manabu and Momaru sure picked one hell of a day to stow away. The are discovered during a rescue mission of a civilian train that is mysteriously destroyed. Just as the Big One is about to leave a dimensional hole tears open and a fat ass alien ship starts to come through. All of Big One's guns prove to be in effective however and Wataru elects to sacrafice himself in order to give the rest of Big One the necessary time to escape. We then skip ahead in the future I can remember how much exactly but now Momaru is a man and Manabu is well on his way. Momaru has decided to follow in his fathers foot steps and join the SDF much to their mothers disapproval who is still shaken by the death of their father. That all happens in the first episode which ends with a phone call from the SDF headquarters located on a planet called destiny telling Kanna (Manabu and Momaru's mom) that Momaru was killed in the line of duty. Fuck right losing a son and a husband to the SDF this does not however discourage Manabu from following in both his father and brother's footsteps and joins the SDF and is even assigned to his Dad's old platoon (Sirius) and his old train Big One now captained by Manabu's dad's second in comand Schwanhelt Bulge. The other notable members of Sirius platoon include Louise Fort Drake Manabu's romatic interest, Bruce Speed Manabu's partner that prefers to work alone because he thinks he's cursed and kills all his partners, David Young Louise's partner and a wise cracking gambling badass, and Yuki a robot medical officer.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that this show wasn't some super cheesy poorly written piece of garbage that I had to pass the time with. Instead I found that Galaxy Railways was quite enjoyable. Now I started in the middle which I have done before and I usually hate the show no matter how good it is if I start in the middle of it. This anime however flowed quite well with absolutely no back story whatsoever. You could literally drop into the story at just about any episode with maybe 4 exceptions and the end and but completely fine filling in the blanks that you didn't know because most of it just uses common sense. It's really enjoyable to watch from the beginning though because you can watch all of the main characters develop and grow. The development of the relationship between Spica Platoon (an all female platoon) and Vega Platoon (an all male platoon) is quite enjoyable to watch change although they aren't in many of the early episodes both platoons play crucial roles in the end of the story. This anime had a really gritty real world feel to it that not all anime can pull off. It also had a fair amount of feel good moments in it to to balance things out but in the end they aren't afraid to kill off main well loved characters or take the watcher down some unhappy roads.

This is another definitely must watch I can't wait to check out the OVA and sequel season to see what they're like I hope they're just as good as this one was.

Games and narrative

I suppose there may be spoilers.

I suppose I should start this post off with my definition of an art form. An art form is any medium which purposefully conveys a narrative, which determines what has the capacity to be art. Now, this is not my definition of art itself, which would have to be much longer and more convoluted. The idea of art is tied into too many different facets of humanity and is too varied from one person to another to have any real definition. What is art is what we think is art. Arguing what is or isn't art is as pointless as arguing what is or isn't God.

Based on that definition, what can or cannot be art is based on whether or not you can tell a story with it, and telling stories in video games has always been a daunting task. In most forms of media, the author has complete control of their story. They can write, film, edit, paint or do anything they want to convey some narrative to their audience. Of course, the audience will interpret this story in any way they want, but the author has complete agency to put anything in front of their audience they want at any time. There is no way for someone to stand up in the middle of the film, turn the camera around and look at the crew; it's a one way street.

The great question when considering video games as an artistic medium is how can a developer tell their story through this game. In fact, this was the crux of the argument that Roger Ebert made when he decided that video games could never be art. He was operating under the assumption that, in giving players part of the control within the game, the developer was giving up authorial control. It would be impossible to tell their story because the player could, if they wished, make their player character sit in a corner for three and a half hours. No story would be told simply because the player did not want it. This is my example, not his, but it does illustrate the point he was trying to make: players control the game and, therefore, the story, which takes away from any message that was trying to be conveyed and saps any artistic merit. No matter how we feel personally, this is a valid concern. Though no one would ever sit in one spot for three and a half hours (I hope,) it is possible to play games in a way that the developer didn't intend. The developer has little to no control over the camera or sound cues, making it difficult to time everything just right to create any sort of meaning for the player.

The most ubiquitous solution to the control problem for game developers is the cut-scene or cinematic. Cut-scenes, in case you are interested enough in video games to read this blog but not enough to actually play a video game, are short sequences where the player can no longer control their player character and pre-rendered animation relays plot information to the audience. The camera, the characters and every other part of the world follow predetermined paths that the developer set. They always take place in the middle of a game. Cinematics are a broader category which include cut-scenes as well as beginning and ending animations. Nearly every game for the past ten years or more have used cut-scenes and cinematics to tell their story simply because it is much easier. If you take control away from the player, you can tell any story you want without worrying about the player simply wandering in the other direction. However, cinematics and cut-scenes in particular create a much more troubling problem than developer control. The way cinematics are used today developers aren't creating games, they are creating movies with interactive bits in between.

Of course you need gameplay to make a video game, but it goes deeper than that. For a video game to truly be a video game, the gameplay needs to be the centerpiece; it needs to convey the narrative. If you watched a film but all of the information about what was happening came from a live play right next to it, you wouldn't be watching a film you'd be watching theater. The same is true of video games. Without the majority of the story being in the gameplay, you are playing through meaningless little set-pieces which lead to another cinematic which advances the plot. The cinematic, the short animated film, is the driving force while the gameplay is supplemental. It should be the other way around.

Some game developers seem to understand this. For instance, Valve never uses cut-scenes and uses cinematics sparingly, and only as a means to quickly recap what has happened so far to the player. The Half Life series is famous for keeping the player in a first-person perspective at all times. They effectively use this technique to create a real sense of dread about what is around the corner as well as force the player to really inhabit the role of Gordon Freeman. Freeman doesn't even speak throughout the game. Irrational also uses cinematics sparingly in their fantastic game, Bioshock. The game is all about control, as I will get into more if I ever get around to reviewing it, and Irrational uses cinematics to play with that idea. Whenever the character is not in control of his own actions, the player isn't as well. The only sequences which are cut-scenes or cinematics in the game are the intro, when the player character first chooses to harvest or rescue a Little Sister, the famous Would-You-Kindly reveal with Andrew Ryan and the ending cinematic. All of these, with the exception of the end, are out of the character's control, so it is out of the player's control through the cinematic. It is a very clever use of the device.

However, these games are largely the exception. Most games use cut-scenes as checkpoints which make it so that the player is performing tasks which are loosely tied to the plot until the next section of the story can be revealed. The Uncharted series, for instance, often falls prey to this. They are extremely fun, to be sure, but the gameplay is all set-piece with the story being revealed through cut-scenes. Again, this is not to say that the game isn't fun or even isn't good, but in a lot of ways it isn't a game. Of course, this is taken to an extreme in the Metal Gear series. Hideo Kojima is known for using ungodly long cut-scenes to tell his stories. Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater is especially bad. The beginning cinematic lasts somewhere around eleven minutes and thirty seconds and many of the cut-scenes are longer than five minutes. This is not counting phone calls.

If video games are to advance as a medium, developers will need to realize that cinematics, specifically cut-scenes, are not the answer to their problem. They need to tell their story through the game itself. This is easier in first-person games, of course, because it is easier to trap a player a room without it feeling too contrived. Still, the movement needs to be made away from the staid cliche of the cut-scene. Developers need to decide what makes games different and use that to tell their stories. Movies aren't just filmed plays; video games shouldn't be interactive movies.