Tea Leaves

No retarded “friendly fire” on the major league fireball spell. So you can incinerate your enemies with appropriate abandon. That is all.

I haven’t had a lot to write about lately, for several reasons: first, and most importantly, I tend to prioritize work over my hobbies, but then in addition I’ve developed several new hobbies that don’t lend themselves as much to this weblog (”And then, when I painted the 1/72 scale Carthaginian infantry, I used turquoise as the dominant accent color!”) (more…)

Having given up on Dragon Age I jumped into arguably the second epic production of the Fall Season: Assasin’s Creed 2. You might remember that Assassin’s Creed was a fantastic running, jumping, climbing, stabbing engine wrapped up in a overall game that sucked your very will to live. In a lot of ways, AC2 is better. But in a lot of ways, it’s just more of the same.
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Here’s the thing, game developers: I don’t want to buy your game if it isn’t on Steam.

I’m exaggerating, of course. When I say “on Steam,” what I really mean is “I don’t want to buy your game if I can’t buy it and immediately download it to my hard drive, on any number of arbitrary desktops and laptops that I own, via a service that keeps track of whether or not I bought the game forever.” (more…)

I decided to quit playing Dragon Age today. Actually that’s not right. I really decided to stop playing on Sunday. After three fourths of a day at work, I had come home to unwind for a couple of hours and throw fireballs at creatures from the great below. I was in the Dwarf city of Moria… no wait, it was called something else. Anyway, having run across the map about a dozen times to talk to all the anonymous people with sketchy British accents that I had to talk to in order to actually trigger the opportunity for fireballing, I was making my way through the dungeon. The trip was going pretty well, and in due time I had burned, frozen, shocked and otherwise pummeled several dozen criminals into submission. I went back to my quest giver to get my reward, and he told me to walk back across the map to fetch the next in what had become an nearly endless series of macguffins.

Dutifully, I soldiered on and passing through the next door to the next area I found … another dungeon 15 times larger than the one I had just left. At this point, the depth of my quest stack ™ had just been pushed to about 5 or 6 before I could escape the clutches of the Dwarves and get on with my life. It was too much. At this point I decided to stop.
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I was going to write a snarky unfair assassination of Dragon Age where I would have cataloged the ways in which Madden 10 is better than Dragon Age. But, I had done that sort of thing before, and I wasn’t really feeling the creative flow. Then to my great amusement and delight, I found that I will not have to provide the snark here because I can let Zero Punctuation do it for me. No, he doesn’t compared it to Madden, but that’s OK. I can’t stop giggling.

I decided not to buy Dragon Age: Origins about 6 months ago, when I saw their teaser video on YouTube.  It can only be described as, quite possibly, the dumbest piece of marketing ever created.  It’s so sophomoric that even an actual sophomore would be embarassed to be seen watching it. Here, have a taste:

Yes, apparently Dragon Age: Origins is “the new shit”, and I decided to take them at their word, because, really, with all these good games around, who needs to play with shit? (more…)

A couple of years ago, we two Petes collaborated on a brief parody of a certain video game reviewer’s writing style. We actually worked on it for quite some time. Many of this writer’s more obvious annoying habits – the fact that he always makes sure you know that he lives in Japan and is really popular with girls and his habit of analogizing every game to an obscure early 1980’s game that you’ve never played – were easy to imitate. But what was much harder was imitating this writer’s ability to pump out page after page of sheer unmitigated volume. The man has a relationship with words like a sorority girl who has just lost her first drinking contest has a relationship with beer: emerging in an unending torrent, horrifying everyone who witnesses the aftermath.

Our meagre parody topped out at a paltry 1200 words, which wouldn’t get you past the introductory remarks in one of this gentleman’s pieces. And now I have the perfect example to share with you, because he has just written Can Videogames Be Our Friends, which at a mere 12,000 words is probably one of his shorter pieces. Find yourself a nice, comfortable chair, and have something nearby that you can punch, and enjoy.

For those of you who are more interested in the statistical side of things, I present the following, Harper’s Review style precis:

• First mention that he speaks Japanese: 7th sentence.
• First mention of how wealthy he is: 3rd sentence.
• First oblique mention of his girlfriend: 6th sentence.
• Bonus Points: Explicitly later mentions that he has gotten laid.
• Bonus Points: 9 paragraph (2000 word!) digression on “hostess clubs”.
• Ultra Bonus Points: The entire point of the “hostess clubs” digression was to mention that he dated a hostess.
• Mega Ultra Bonus Points: mentions that he has gotten laid “so many times in real life…” because of his ability to play music
• First analogy to older, sucky game: 3rd paragraph.
• Article mentions Dragon Quest
• Bonus Points: He describes this wanky hardcore boring RPG as a “casual game”
• Number of Japanese game developer/directors namedropped: 5.
• Bonus points: Uses the phrase “Hideo Kojima once told me…”

Really. It is beyond belief.

As my friend Nat said, I can’t decide if he’s really this thick, or if he’s just cleverly figured out how to monetize infuriating people.

Same pitch perfect Harmonix gameplay. But this is by far the best music collected into a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game. They will never make another fake guitar game with a higher hit ratio, because honestly, there is no better pop music than The Beatles. That is all.

I used to play a lot of board games.

This was back when I actually lived near my friends, and hung out with a critical mass of people who enjoyed the hobby as well. I have a small collection of games from back then that I don’t play much any more. (more…)