'Tis Better To Reign In Hell

Now, some of these I picked up for cheap, so I don't feel too bad about not having gotten to them yet, but I'd still like to play them. And this doesn't include a ton of games that I have picked up, but probably won't ever play anyway, sadly.

Currently Playing:
Halo Wars (82%)
Fable II (89%)
Dante's Inferno (75%)
Dead Space (Play through's 2 & 3) (89%)
Etrian Odyssey II (82%)
Dawn of War II (85%)
Secret of Monkey Island (86%)
Titan Quest (77-80%)

( To Play: )

( Finished Games )

You know, sometimes I think I was better off without a ton of disposable income, having to pick and choose which games I picked up. But the thing is, I don't think there's a single game on that list, or even the ones that aren't on that list, that I regret buying. Because they're all games I'd like to play, SOMEDAY. I look at my shelves for games I'd be willing to get rid of, and I can't really find that many. It's really quite frustrating, on almost all accounts.

Originally posted by neo_prodigy at Spirit Day

Darksiders is, by far, the best Zelda game I've played in a long, long while. An excellent update to Link, they threw out the "save the princess" mechanic, and brought in some truly excellent puzzles. I have to give a huge round of applause to Nintendo for the job they did on thi...

What?

What do you mean, Darksiders isn't a Zelda game?

It's made by THQ?

So Nintendo just got shown up in one of it's own major franchises?

Well then, let me start from the top.

Darksiders, as you probably know if you're at all interested in reading this review, is a game released by THQ early this year. In fact, with a release date of January 5th, it was probably one of the first games to be released this year. An unknown IP, it had very little advertising initially, but was quickly heralded in the gaming communities as an excellent title. Combined with a free offer for Red Faction if you bought the game first hand, it quickly brought in a ton of sales, outselling the amazingly well received Bayonetta (according to Wikipedia.)

Darksiders is a game that borrows heavily from its predacessors, most notably (and almost exclusively) Zelda. Like a lot of games, you start off at the peak of your powers, before being humbled back to a state of almost uselessness. Of course, in this game, you play as one of the 4 horsemen of the apocolypse, so "uselessness" is a relative term. You start off with a Big Ass Sword, and really, what else do you need?

The plot of the game is fairly simple - someone started the war between Heaven and Hell early, and you got blamed for it. You're out to find out who framed you, and kill them, and anyone who stands between you and them. For a plot so mired in heavy-handed stuff, it handles it really well, while keeping it simple enough that it doesn't bog down too much yet keeps you interested in continuing your quest for revenge.

The game is set on the ruins of earth - humankind has all been wiped out, and demons have pretty much taken over the place. The locations are never specifically identified, although in at least one location you can see what appears to be the Golden Gate Bridge. But I guess with most of the human race wiped out, locations doesn't really mean much.

The individual locations you go through, and there are about a dozen or so of them, are wonderfully created. Never once did I feel like I was going through somewhere I had been before. You'll slaughter your way through a Gothic Cathedral (as seen in it's entirety in the hour+ demo of the game), a barren wasteland, a spider infested city (one of the best done spider level I've ever seen), an underground subway system, and more. A lot of these areas are more or less overworld areas, although don't take that to mean they're boring - almost every place you go has a good assortment of bad guys and puzzles.

Let's stop and talk about the puzzles. Never before have I seen such wonderful puzzling in a game. Although Zelda has continued to evolve over the years, for the most part the puzzles have kept pretty much the same, in my experience. (I'll put out there that I've probably played less than half the current stable of Zelda games, so if I'm wrong on this account, don't berate me too hard for it.) Being a new property, Darksiders couldn't rely on previous puzzles to pave the way. They took the elements they had (in most cases, elements found in Zelda games - Hookshot, Boomerang, Bombs to name the major ones) and found new, wonderful ways to integrate them into the environment. My memory is horrible, so I can't remember specific puzzles, but in every dungeon there was at least one time when I was blown away by the way the level designers put together a puzzle. They were almost all of the perfect difficulty - making you look and explore, and try different things, but never to the point where you wanted to throw your controller at the TV because there was obviously no way to get past that room. Each dungeon usually focused a good amount on the newest item you obtained, but managed to not ignore all of your previous training. And more often than not they would require you to use multiple items in specific combos that made me wonder why I hadn't ever thought about doing that before.

I'll also point out, for those of you aching for Portal 2 as I am, that one of the later items in the game is basically a portal gun, and it's used to very, very good effect. Although the dungeon you get it in is one of the longest in the game - it could have been reduced by 1/3 and not have missed a beat.

The bosses are extremely well done - each one is very different in tactics, never reducing the game to "oh yeah, let's do this again." In most cases the dungeons leading up to said boss fight train you very well for the fight ahead, so there's very little confusion about what you need to do, which is something not all games do well.

That being said, there are some issues with the game. My biggest was probably jumping. The response to jumping is a bit soft - I fell off cliffs and into ravines more times than I could count because the game didn't respond to my jump soon enough. The only thing that kept this from becoming a real issue is that the game doesn't consider that a death - it just takes a bit of life away and resets you to the ledge you were on. So after a few tries, and a handful of your life, you can usually make the jump. Only in one puzzle room did this really become an issue - you had to set up a specific set of platforms, and if you missed the last jump, you had to do it all over again. Each time you set up was probably a good 5-10 minutes, so it really became a headache at that point, but other than that, it really wasn't too bad.

The other big issues was the targeting. For the most part the game will throw a handful of guys at you, and you'll chop your way through them. The combat system is very similar to God of War or other hack & slash games. There isn't quite as much emphasis on dodging & blocking, although there is a counter system, if you choose to use it (I did not.) Most of the time, this works incredibly well, allowing you to target one guy, and still kick the ass of everyone around you. However, at least once they threw me into a situation where I had a big baddie kicking my ass, and a bunch of minions along with him. Because of the way targeting works, I couldn't effectively target the big guy to take him out, but I also couldn't clear out the minions easily without taking a ton of damage. I eventually got through it, without dying even, but it definitely made the case for a better targeting system.

Speaking of deaths, don't expect to die too often in this game. I think I died once throughout the entire thing, although I came close a couple of times. I'm not sure what you'll take away from that - whether you'll think the game is too easy, or too hard, or what. For the most part, it's just right, but there are times when it strings together more than a few tough fights without really giving you the resources to restock on your healing in between. If I hadn't been as anal about getting life shards (heart pieces), I definitely would have died a LOT more than I did. There were a couple of times when I finished a long series of fights with less than a blow left on my life bar. Of course, there are other times when you're wading in health. I really never quite understood how they dished out the healing.

Anyway, I think that's enough on the game for now. It's definitely a solid 8.5/10, if not a 9/10. I'm still trying to figure out just how much I liked it, but I know it was well worth the purchase. If you have the time (and I know with Halo:Reach coming out, not many of us will - hence why I pushed to finish it this weekend) I highly recommend you pick it up. You can find it for $20-$30 these days, and I'm sure this holiday season, you'll be able to find it for a bit less.

Summary:
Pros: Excellent puzzles, great combat, fantastic locations, well above average story, interesting characters.
Cons: Difficulty can be a bit uneven, some control issues.

There's a lot of the game I didn't cover, so feel free to ask questions if you have them!

Today, I went into space. No seriously, I did, and it was awesome. And affordable - $623.80 for a ticket to lower earth orbit and back.

We took off from Boston. Not sure what we were doing there, but I was trying to get a hold of an old high school friend - who for some reason was still in high school, living with her parents, only she wasn't actually in school. Anyway, I don't know why Jamie and I were in Boston, but we were, and while I was there, I decided to go into space. So I bought a ticket for that day's flight.

The inside of the shuttle looked pretty much like the inside of a plane, only without the over head storage. There were two seats on each side of the isle, and they were nice and comfy. Everything was beige. We took off like a plane did, and flew around Boston for a while, until the boosters kicked in, shaking the shuttle for a bit until they got settled.

With the boosters on, we headed out of the city and continued to accelerate, although we were still flying along the earths surface. We passed over a nascar track where everyone waved, happy to see a shuttle still flying. We then headed out over a desert-y type area, past a big brick testing facility.

While we were doing this, I was chatting with my passengers, and the flight master came around and took our tickets, ala Amtrak. Not really sure what he would have done if we hadn't had the tickets - it's not like we could get out, although we weren't exactly far off the ground - we were just going really fast at this point.

Then, all of a sudden, we were in space. I remember thinking I must have blacked out, because I didn't remember getting there, but there we were, floating around. Sadly, we were almost at the end of our time there, and had to get ready for re-entry - this made me sad, since it meant I had been blacked out for most of the awesome part of the trip. But the view was beautiful. You could see the horizon of the earth, and some of the atmospheric effects, since we were just outside the atmosphere. The curve of the earth was prominent, although I can't remember seeing much of the earth proper - the windows in the shuttle weren't all that large. But as we got ready to start our descent, I remember seeing the International Space Station behind us, and I was sad that I didn't get to see us pass it, as evidently they waved to us.

We started our descent, and I was a bit worried - motion sickness and whatnot. Never very good with Rollercoasters. I asked one of the other passengers if the descent was going to be bad, and they said no, not really. This was their second flight, although she had another one planned - she was an elected official of some sort (small) and there was a flight for politicians only at some point she was going to be on.

The shuttle started to shake as we entered the atmosphere again, and I must have blacked out again. When I woke up we were on the ground, on some road out in the desert again. I tried to hold on to the things I had seen while in space, and not let them slip away like a dream. But there was a part of me that wasn't even sure it had actually happened - it was so brief and wonderful.

People were getting off but I'm not sure where they were going. I got up and out of the shuttle, where Jamie met me. I was just off the shuttle when I realized I left my shoes on the shuttle - not sure why I took them off in the first place. One of the attendants had found them, however, and brought them to the front where I picked them up.

----

Waking up from this dream was disheartening, because I know I'll never get to go into space, and I know it has to be even more beautiful than it is in my dreams. I think part of the prompting for this dream was watching Atlantis land yesterday, the end of the last space mission it'll ever be a part of, and the end of one of the last space shuttle missions ever - we only have two more. I understand why they're canceling the space shuttles, but it makes me sad to think that we're ending such a huge legacy. And that we're, in a lot of respects, further behind capability-wise than we were 40 years ago, despite such huge progress in technology.

There are a couple of people on my F-List who I think would have a shot at this:

http://io9.com/5520915/impress-kick+ass-mark-millar-and-win-a-new-job

If any of you get it, I'd just like a shout out.

1. Pick 15 of your favourite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Fill in the film title once it's guessed.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search functions.

( Quotes Below )

It's ironekilz's Birthday!

Today I bought some livestock.

No, not for me. Or for ironekilz. We have no place to keep livestock. Plus, it would eat all our books, and then we'd have to kill it, and that'd be bloody and messy, and... yeah. Not a good thing.

No, instead I bought livestock for Worldbuilders 2009. Worldbuilders is a charity event/raffle partnered with Heifer International that's in it's second year, and one of my favorite ways to give. Seriously, it ranks up there with Child's Play.

It started last year, I believe, organized by the author Patrick Rothfuss. He's a fantasy author, one that I suspect many of you reading this would enjoy. (He only has a single book out too, which makes it easy to pick up, although I suspect you'll hate me for it if you do, when you realize that he only has one book out once you're finished with it.) And not only is he a damned good author, but he also matches 50% of your contribution to Heifer International through Worldbuilders. How he's able to do this, I'm not sure, but he swears that it happens, and I believe him, even though they've already raised over $100,00.

But not only do you get more bang for your buck, but he has a ton of great things to raffle off if you donate. For every $10 you donate to Heifer International, not only does he match, but you get your name put in the pot for a drawing for a ton of awesome swag. Included are a lot of great books, some dvd's, and even some music. But don't take my word for it - Go see for yourself!

So please, if you haven't given anything this year, this is a great way to do so. It's only running for another couple of days until Jan. 15th, so you don't have much time. (Of course, you can ALWAYS donate to Heifer International.) Heifer is a great way to make a real difference in the world (A- on Charity Watch), and this way you can make even more of a difference.

So I know that most of the people on my friends list are gamers. And as such, I just wanted to bring to your attention a game that is well worth your time. That, and it's on sale.

Machinarium is a game you might have heard of a while back - it was released earlier this year to glowing reviews.

It's an old style point-and-click adventure game. You're a little robot who is out to stop a gang of bad robots, solving puzzles and making friends all the while. The art style is gorgeous - all hand drawn and I believe water colors, and it's a joy to play in. The mechanics are excellent, if not a little frustrating at time. Unlike most other P&C games, you can only interact with the objects around you. This makes it both a bit easier and a bit harder - you have limited options, which is nice, but you also can't just mouse over everything on the screen to see what you need to use. The other unique thing about the game is that there is absolutely NO text in it. Everything inside the game is done by cute and wonderful pictorial pieces. You find out the back story of the game through these little vignettes, and it makes the game all that much more endearing.

The game is friendly in that you won't die, but that doesn't mean it's easy. There have been several points where I've gotten fairly thoroughly stuck. There's a good hint system for each area, but when you're stuck to the point where you don't know where you're supposed to go, it can get kind of frustrating. But it also makes those "Ah HA!" moments all that much better.

Currently it's on sale for $10 and includes another game ($5 regularly) as well. You also get the sound tracks (which are amazing) and some art. This sale is only good until the 25th, I believe, so it's worth picking up now. It's a flash-based game, so you can pick it up for whatever platform you like - they give you download links to Mac, Windows and Linux, all included. You can even grab all 3 versions, if you have multiple platforms or want to make sure you have it for your upcoming computer purchase.

I really can't recommend this game highly enough. It's cute, clever, fun and interesting. I haven't finished it yet, so I can't tell you how long it is, but I've put in at least 4 hours, so I've already spent less than a movie ticket and gotten more time out of it.

Avatar has been hailed as a revolutionary movie. Already in contention for Golden Globes and rumored for Oscars, it has the movie world abuzz. But does it hold up to the hype?

In a lot of ways, yes. It's my opinion that this is a revolutionary movie - in a purely technical sense. We've finally gotten to the point where we can create and fully flesh out any world we can now imagine. And that's the greatest strength of this movie.

The movie is beautiful. The use of colors is fantastic, in a way I'm not sure we've ever seen before outside of an animated movie. Which, some could argue, this still is - but it certainly doesn't feel like it. One of my complaints about almost anything CGI related is that they always have the lighting up too high - everything is brighter and more vibrant than it would be in real life - especially when it comes to skin tones. Final Fantasy: Spirits Within is a perfect example of this - they had almost everything perfectly modeled, but their lighting was off just enough you could never forget that it wasn't CGI. This isn't the case in this movie. Everything looks real - looks real enough to touch. From the dirt to the plants to the Na'vi themselves, there is nothing in this movie that hints, for a moment, that it's not a real, physical object.

If they can accomplish this on this scale, then we've truly entered the days of movie magic, where ANYTHING is possible, as long as we can imagine it. While this movie cost a rumored $500 Million to make, I think, like most movie technology, that we'll see the cost on CGI of this scale and quality come down in price over the next few years to the point where it's commonplace, and movies truly are limited by the vision of their crew.

I saw it in IMAX 3D, and I have to say, I'm still not blown away by 3D movies. I've seen a few now, and it never feels like more than a gimmick. I think that's the case here as well. Don't get me wrong, it doesn't detract from the movie at all - but there was never a case when I saw them accomplish something in 3D that they wouldn't have been able to on a regular 2D screen. Of course, I say this only having seen it in 3D, and that's really the problem with this technology - it's incredibly hard to compare. Maybe the world wouldn't have felt as rich and vibrant and real if I only saw it on a flat screen. But since it's not really the sort of thing you can do a side-by-side comparison on, I'm left still feeling like 3D has a ways to go to really prove itself. That being said, if you can see it in 3D, and are willing to pay for it, I don't see any reason not to - as I stated above, it doesn't detract from the movie in any way, and I could be wrong about it not enhancing it either.

The plot is.. well... I've heard it described as "Dancing with Smurfs", and that's pretty much on the target. There's really nothing new here, in terms of story. Outsider comes into tribal community with plans to learn about them, only to fall in love with them and choose them over his own race. In a movie with lesser visuals, I think the story would have fallen flat, but because the strength of the visuals is so strong, it manages to turn a fairly well worn plot into something worth watching, just because the world is so rich and vibrant and new.

Well, mostly new. The other complaint I had about the setting is that it's only just alien enough. There are horses, but they're alien horses. But you know they're horses, and that's what they're used for. They still have the same shape, the long neck, the strong legs (only now there are 6 of them). Same with the Na'vi. They're taller than us (almost twice our height) and blue, with cat like faces, but other than that, they're still mostly human - they have breasts, 2 arms, 2 legs, mothers, fathers, and kiss when they fall in love. Sure they're alien, but only alien enough to make sure we know that they aren't us. Even some of the more exotic creatures are still limited in scope to being amalgams of creatures we have on earth - there are very few truly alien creatures in this movie. (The small whirling dragons are probably the closest, although I have to wonder how they actually manage to survive being attacked by any predators.)

But again, all this is forgivable, because even though it's only just alien enough, it's completely, fully fleshed out and realized. And honestly, I'm not sure that the movie-going world is ready for completely realized creatures that are truly alien. Even the iconic Alien still has 2 arms and 2 legs, as does the Predator. I can't think, at this point in time, of any truely alien creatures brought to life, in any manner, on the big screen. So sadly, I think we're going to have to wait for that.

Overall, I think this is a movie well worth seeing in the theatre. The larger the screen you see it on, the better, as it will be just that much easier to forget about the theatre and immerse yourself into the gorgeous world they've created. And I think that, really, is the magic that lies in this movie - never before have we been able to allow ourselves to travel to such a different (yet similar) world.