Deep Fried Puppies

I believe the worst possible thing to say during sex is, “I’m going to pound the farts out of you.” I cannot conceive of a way to either play that off or make it sexy. I don’t care what you’re doing, who you’re doing it with, and how many other people are involved, it just does not work.

Anyway, I’ve had some wtf moments in the last few days. My GM is getting the plot in high gear in the Exalted game I’m in. Good stuff. We’ve gone surprisingly far without any violence. A friend of mine has been doing some soul searching about the direction she wants to take herself, and that also has been done with surprisingly little violence. I think she found herself on the wrong side of a hard choices. For me, it seems inevitable that my life is headed right down the crapper. It’s going to happen, and there’s not much I can do about it. The only thing to do is furl my wings and powerbomb after it. By the way, that first one is real. It existed, it was used, and thank God I didn’t have to work on it. That would have been a shitty day.

The Throne War I’m concocting is going to be either in the roughly cannonical world of PFR that we’re all used too, or a new setting entirely. NGE is certainly a competitor. I really have a hard time deciding. I do want to mix it up some, but don’t know with what to mix it up. Pulling ideas out of my brain is easy, but none of the rest of you can relate as easy as I can. That’s why I was thinking some anime or comic series. At the very least, we could watch badassery for inspiration as necessary. Not that it would be too hard to see where I’m coming from.

I expect this is going on the short list of most disappointing video games Mia has ever played. Right up there around FFX, for very similar reasons.

The game doesn’t want to be played. It wants to be watched. It wants to be appreciated. But it sure doesn’t want the player to get his hands dirty with the actual controlling of the damn thing. I started counting, and a match averages 40 seconds with 26 seconds of unskippable CG between matches. Approximately 40% of the game play is watching CG that gets old after the first iteration. I don’t give a damn if Balrog stands up and beats his fists together for five seconds. I want to, oh, PLAY THE DAMN GAME. Every special move takes the gameplay out of actual play and into more stupid CGs where one character or another is getting flailed around like a rag doll. In theory this is cool. But since you have no control when that’s happening, it simply disrupts the flow of the video game. Every super move, most special attacks, and all the really good throws involve this flow breaking CG. You can’t get rid of it.

There is no quick continue as yet. Which means every time I lose I have another thirty odd seconds of hitting buttons pointlessly, trying to skip some retarded animation of Ryu looking grim and determined that I stopped giving a freak about hours ago. The clipping has a lot of issues, most especially with Balrog it seems. His fists go right through people a lot. The same happens to others, especially with sweeps. Very jarring. Given that the game prides itself so much on graphics, you think little graphical errors like that would be scrupulously avoided. But they aren’t. Lots of times, people coexist with others. Ryu’s head was sticking through Guile’s chest several in a lot of end fight animations, making one wonder if Guile had defeated his opponent so destructively that Ryu was now a disembodied ghost.

But this is Street Fighter. Everything up until this point has been window dressing for the play control, right? Honestly, yes. The game could be utter shit, but as long as the fighting was good, I’d play it anyway. I did that with Capcom vs SNK2 for years and loved it, because the fighting itself was awesome. If the playcontrol is good, I can easily overcome bad graphics, annoying CG, and a terrible front end.

Remember when I said the game was probably one of the biggest disappointments I’ve ever played? That should tell you something about the gameplay.

It really isn’t that good. The game has that millisecond delay that I never liked in Tekken or Soul Caliber. When you hit a button, there’s a brief pause that while the computer figures out how to render the next moment. It’s incredibly disruptive. SF has always been about lightening reactions, and pacing that made such a delay inexcusable. Secondly, the clipping problems I’ve mentioned above. Very bad. The control scheme has changed again. Maybe this is a SF3 thing. I don’t know; I wasn’t really impressed with that game either. But throws have gone to some new and obnoxious combination, easy rolling is gone, the dash seems to be haphazardly applied to tactics. The super combo meter is new and shiny, but I can’t tell if it’s at all useful yet. It seems to want you to break your own combos a lot. Maybe that will get useful as I get the hang of it. I won’t pass judgement yet.

Graphically, it’s very well rendered bad art. Everyone looks like a WWE fighter. Ryu, the man with no neck, is a Brock Lesnar clone. His deltoids are bigger then his head. Chun Li is amazingly bad. Most of the others simply bear little to no resemblance the characters I’ve come to know. But everything’s rendered so carefully you can see in pristine detail the atrocious character images that hop about like diseased retards.

Back to the subject of game play, fireballs don’t seem to hit close targets a lot. I think it has to do with whether or not the enemy is walking towards you. Regardless, the old combos don’t work too well. Fireball ranges are similar to Alpha, in that damage decreases over distance. Kicks and punches have weird attack angles. This I may get used to, as I think it’s a ramification of the new graphical style.

The new boss, Seth, is a pretty cheap bastard. I’m not impressed. Movies are usually animated, which is cool. The beginning and closing movies, that is. The infuriating CG is the same annoying faux water color as the rest of the game.

Ultimately, the final judgement of a game comes from what I’m thinking or feeling while playing it. With SFIV all I ever say or think is “Hurry up,” or “Can I play now?” It’s never wow, or cool, or gee. I just want the damn CG to end, the menu screens or splash displays to go away, and just to be able to play the fucking game again. Then, while playing the game, I’m oddly disappointed, as the old street fighter I expect and want is dangled before my eyes, but never allocated to me.

Basically, it’s just not fun. One star out of five.

Has anyone from EA ever played a video game? Has anything that company ever produced that isn’t Madden been play tested? I doubt it.

I rented Mirror’s Edge. It looked like a great game, but the reviews were unilaterally very negative. Still, I figured it would be worth a few bucks to rent. Perhaps just to see the truth of the matter.

The truth of the matter is that game is shit. You die, randomly, for no fucking reason. The police have heat seeking bullets capable of pursuing the player around walls, through vent shafts, and through twisting mazes. The boss fights are the most frustratingly random event imaginable. Play control is pure shit. Clipping is atrocious. The game, based on something called free-running, is unbelievably linear with no room for creativity. It is, in fact, shit.

This game simply isn’t fun. There is no fun left in it. It’s like doing the licensing requirements of GT4 over and over again without ever moving past that stage. I honestly wonder if anyone involved in the creation of this thing every played a fucking game. Does the director know what the concept of fun is? Because he murdered every iota of it.

The game has exactly one way to progress through most puzzles. It doesn’t really tell the player what that method is. As such, endless repeats are necessary to divine minuscule details that separate possibility from futility. Endless. The game is paved in frustration. It’s like writing essays on an unknown topic. Fun is dead.

And by the way, there’s very little free running, because the ass backwards combat systems is rectally inserted into every element of gameplay. Combat sucks donkey cock in great deep-throated slurps. It’s everywhere, ruining every moment that could, possibly, be fun.

In short, do not play this game. It’s worse because a great idea is ruined through terrible implementation. 1 star out of 5. On par with the Earthsea movie.

While I’m thinking up my next riddle, I propose a diversionary game to occupy you. It’s called, “Is Mia Lying?” You should have been able to tell that from the title of this post, but if you’re in this article you’re probably a moron. Because morons are in fact the point of this game, because I’m going to reveal a series news stories, not provide any links, and dare you to guess whether I’m lying through my teeth or the people of Earth are in fact utter blithering nincompoops. You could, of course, just Google everything, but you won’t because my readership is by and large lazier than a sedated sloth sewn full of whale lard.

First, PETA recently attacked the new Batman movie for glorifying cruelty to animals. Remember that scene at the beginning when the bad guys sick their dogs on BatBale? Remember BatBale beating up the dogs? Yeah. That. Quote: “They didn’t need to make Batman into a dogphobic man!…Doesn’t the man with the James Bond gadgets know anything about peanut butter treats and deflecting devices?” Now, my dear decerebrate idiot, you have pushed the boundaries of staggering stupidity beyond the realms normally reserved for hollywood starlets and Pamela Anderson with that particular witticism. Have you ever been attacked by a dog? Was the dog distracted by peanut butter? If you replied yes to both of these and the dog was anything remotely resembling the trained attack animals from the DK, you are a worse liar than I am.

Second, tobacco is being developed as a promising cancer treatment. This is a bit like using bullets to treat gunshot wounds. One wonders what exactly is the point here. Do you give the victim enough last cigarettes to develop cancer powerful enough that it reaches out from the poor bastards chest when Death arrives and strangles the grim specter, thus rendering the previously terminally ill immortal? Are these scientists brilliant, retarded, or simply so cunning they’ve realized all they need to do is string the words ‘cancer,’ ‘research,’ and ‘give us more money for’ together in a roughly, and I mean very roughly, coherent sentence and the grants come rolling in?

Next, there’s a game coming out for the Wii called “Fat Princess.” Large groups of players rush back and forth in childlike glee to capture the rotund royalty, or rescue her depending on your view point. Unfortunately, they are blocked by the nefarious scheme to feed the portly princess cake to fatten her up and this make her more difficult to carry about. Certain members of the feminist movement we shall call “wack jobs” have decided this is offensive to women everywhere. Yes. It certainly is. It pushes the stereotype that eating too much cake makes you fat, and fat people are harder to lift than thin ones. Filthy lies those. As bad or worse then the ones that come out of my dirty mouth.

In addition, some very cunning individuals in India have retaliated against monkey gangs, by which I mean gangs, Crips and Bloods style of monkeys, hairy primates with tails, that are pestering the locals by importing other gangs. Of bigger monkeys. Now it’s only a matter of time before even bigger, Russian monkeys move in and soon the African apes will make a play for turf as well. Then some poor group of lemurs will have to run the gauntlet to Delhi ala The Warriors. Either that or the monkeys will unite against a larger, more dangerous predator in their habitat and peacefully co exist while they make war upon that unifying menace. Anyone wanna guess what top scientists are predicting that menace will be? Here’s a hint, they’re dumb, mostly hairless, and will sneak up on you and punch you in the toe when you’re innocently singing along to some of your favorite music.

So that’s them, guys. Which one am I lying about?

First, before I get into anything, I want to say that Brian Campbell is my hero. I really love the slow motion parts.

Now, back to the present. Tonight we won a rather tough hockey game against one of our major rivals in the league (score: 4-3). Granted, it’s just a beer league and doesn’t matter too much in the grand scheme of things, but it was still awesome. Now, I really enjoyed this game because of a few of accomplishments. One, I had a great pass/assist almost the whole length of the ice that led to a goal. Two, I didn’t get thrown out of the game for fighting. And three, I racked up 2 consecutive penalties with only 3 seconds in between. Get called for tripping (it was a crap call, though understandable: guy stepped on my stick blade and fell), serve two minutes in the box, come out while opposing team is in our zone on a 5 on 3 power play, see guy getting a pass for a one timer, hit guy hard from the side to save the goal, skate back to the box for another 2 minutes. Now, I wonder if this is a record. Anyone know of any other player in any league to have two consecutive penalties with less time in between?

Also, I love sunshine in the summer.

And Mia, Jackson may be a thug. But Hextall is a real goon.