Well, the past few days on Giant Bomb have been weird. Mostly due to the fact that some slacker in Northern Virginia apparently decided to take a heaping cup of coffee into the server room without a secure lid of any sort. This is why Zojirushi thermoses are important people. Keep your liquids out of your servers.
But while Giant Bomb was engaging in the resultant apocalyptic war against the robots, I had issues of my own to contend with. Specifically, this past Friday was my Logan's Run birthday. What does that mean? Aside from spending the whole day within the mindset of a 1970s Michael York sci-fi film, wondering when my would-be assassins would come for me, it also means that I turned thirty. While some post-modern jerkoffs would likely say that it's just an arbitrary, round value meaningless to existence and why the fuck should anyone care, the fact that I've been around for three decades is actually a bit mind-blowing. Especially when I consider that I have maybe another fifty years left if I'm fortunate, and will be truly blessed if I can live even longer than that while maintaining both my mental faculties and a healthy physicality.
In short, I'm no longer at that age where I blithely think I'm invincible. Feels pretty good.
But in the meantime, I still enjoy me some video games.
What I've Been Playing
Yep, still going at it. Conquest Mode is a beast with a lot to do, and with over sixty playable characters and five difficulty settings, there's a lot I haven't even dug into yet. Xing Cai's stats are nearly maxed out and Cai Wenji is getting fairly monstrous as well, but most of my characters are still comparative weaklings. Also, beating up dudes by strumming a harp is still awesome. Zhang He is also still, blessedly, a complete fruit.
As I wrote in my last blog, I've been having fun with Mortal Kombat. The story mode is impressively well done, though the difficulty of the two-on-one battles and certain boss fights can become atrociously difficult. The extra modes are also pretty fun; Test Your Luck is especially wacky. Having random matches between armless, zombified fighters with super-strength can be very amusing. Other than that, the game proves that the series still has a promising future, though I said the same thing after Deadly Alliance came out and then they proceeded to piss that good will down the drain with Deception and Armageddon. We'll see how it goes, though.
No, there isn't much to this game, but then again, it's not something I expect to be playing for long stretches at a time. It seems more suited to quick breaks or stints on public transit more than anything else. It's also disappointing that there isn't any skydiving in the game. And for me, nothing will beat flying around in the gyrocopter in Pilotwings 64 and firing missiles at that giant metal guy from hundreds of miles away and hearing his pained scream in the distance, hitting him by blind freaking luck.
This game. Is awesome. Street fights. Hostess bars. Pachinko. Sega arcades. Mahjong. Chase sequences. Murder. Suspicion. Absurd locals. This game has got it all, really. It also helps that the characters are likeable scumbags, as opposed to GTA-esque psychopathic scumbags. Now if only PSN was back up and running so I could actually use it.
