Yup, it happened again! Despite my best attempts, I emerged from my rostered two days off with more stuff in my brain. Check it.
 

Forgetting to do the Save & Quit thing can be a bitch.

Podcasts make everything okay.

There will only be one king of the futuristic battle racer in my lifetime.

Having the theme to 'Allo 'Allo stuck in your head sucks.

I seem to get to the end of every weekend and think I'm a little bit wiser than I was two days earlier. Yes, this even includes the weekends where I drink everything in sight and end up asleep in a shower for 3 hours before my previously-sleeping girlfriend realises what's happening, gets out of bed and has to mop the ceiling because I forgot to turn the bathroom fan on before I collapsed. With this in mind, I intend to start of a series of blogs that impart my cache of newfound knowledge, if only to keep my blog ticking over between the times where I vomit up pages of opinion on some game that nobody cares about. So without much more ado, I present the inaugural "Things I learned over the weekend" blog for Monday, 13 September 2010.
 

Cyborg Justice isn't as bad a game as Video_Game_King would have you believe...

Invisible lions can really fuck you up if you're not expecting them.

My girlfriend is never not funny when she talks in her sleep.

It's not often (read: it never happens) that a video game makes me want to read a book, but that's exactly what's happened with Fallout 3. Although I'm late to the apocalypse, I've totally fallen head over heels in love with the game. 114 hours, 145 saves, 3 DLC diversions and 9 bobbleheads later and I still can't wait to leave work of an evening, eager to get some wasteland wandering in before my lass gets home. With all those stats in mind, with all the trekking through the radioactive badlands, I'm surprised that it took my brain so long to make the connection between Fallout 3 and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

As I'm sure many other people have, I became aware of Philip K Dick's writing through the movie Blade Runner. For those not in the know, Blade Runner was based (with varying faithfulness) on Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Like the movie, the novel tells the story of Rick Deckard hunting some crafty androids who are almost indistinguishable from real humans. Where Ridley Scott's cinematic masterpiece diverged, however, is in the backdrop upon which the events take place. Blade Runner is set in an overcrowded megalopolis, chock full of neon signs, flying cars and billions of agendas; Dick's original story unfolds within the crumbling post-apocalyptic remains of a mostly abandoned Earth.

In a giant, empty, decaying building which had once housed thousands, a single TV set hawked its wares to an uninhabited room.

This ownerless ruin had, before World War Terminus, been tended and maintained. Here had been the suburbs of San Francisco, a short ride by monorail rapid transit; the entire peninsula had chattered like a bird tree with life and opinions and complaints, and now the watchful owners had either died or migrated to a colony world. Mostly the former; it had been a costly war despite the valiant predictions of the Pentagon and its smug scientific vassel, the Rand Corporation - which had, in fact, existed not far from this spot. Like the apartment owners, the corporation had departed, evidently for good. No one missed it.

The sole occupant of the dilapidated apartment complex is J.R. Isidore, delivery truck driver for a company that repairs artificial animals. Isidore is stuck on Earth, in this wrecked building, with nothing but his thoughts for company:

Silence. It flashed from the woodwork and the walls; it smote him with an awful, total power, as if generated by a vast mill. It rose from the floor, up out of the tattered gray wall-to-wall carpeting. It unleashed itself from the broken and semi-broken appliances in the kitchen, the dead machines which hadn’t worked in all the time Isidore had lived here. From the useless pole lamp in the living room it oozed out, meshing with the empty and wordless descent of itself from the fly-specked ceiling. It managed in fact to emerge from every object within his range of vision, as if it – the silence – meant to supplant all things tangible.

It's not long before Pris, one of the females from the group of rogue androids that Deckard is chasing, takes up residence in Isidore's building:

'Listen,' he said earnestly. 'If we go all over the building looking we can probably find you things that aren't so tattered. A lamp from one apartment, a table from another.'

'I'll do it,' the girl said. 'Myself, thanks.'

'You'd go into those apartments alone?' He could not believe it.

'Why not?' Again she shuddered nervously, grimacing in awareness of saying something wrong.

Isidore said, 'I've tried it. Once. After that I just come home and go in my own place and I don't think about the rest. The apartments in which no one lives – hundreds of them and all full of the possessions people had, like family photographs and clothes. Those that died couldn't take anything and those who emigrated didn't want to. This building, except for my apartment, is completely kipple-ized'

'"Kipple-ized"?' She did not comprehend.

'Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers of yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.'

'I see.' The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

'There's the First Law of Kipple,' he said. '"Kipple drives out nonkipple." Like Gresham's law about bad money. And in these apartments there's been nobody there to fight the kipple.'

'So it has taken over completely,' the girl finished. She nodded. 'Now I understand.'

'Your place, here,' he said, 'this apartment you've picked – it's too kipple-ized to live in. We can roll the kipple-factor back; we can do like I said, raid the other apartments. But –' He broke off.

'But what?'

Isidore said, 'We can't win.'

'Why not?' The girl stepped out into the hall, closing the door behind her; arms folded self-consciously before her small high breasts she faced him, eager to understand. Or so it appeared to him, anyhow. She was at least listening.

'No one can win against kipple,' he said,'except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.'

(Side note: Kipple is one of my favourite Dick terms, and I still use it during internal conversations with myself. I don't think I'd ever dare drop it into casual conversation, though.)

J.R. Isidore is also what is known as a special – a chickenhead in common vernacular – meaning he couldn't pass the minimum mental faculties test. Chickenheads are a marginalised group of people in what's left of Earth society, seen as lesser citizens. Looking at the world of Fallout, I'm reminded of the ghouls, another group of humans who are considered by many to be beneath regular people. Obviously there are some ghouls who are quite intelligent, but there are those who have diminished thought capability due to the post-war fallout. Although it's not completely analogous, I can't help but draw the comparison.

I used to read books all the time. Now, in a world full of podcasts and handheld gaming, I find that the pastime I used to love so much has pretty much disappeared from my daily life. It's a shame, and every now and then I'll see my girlfriend with a book and kick myself for letting the habit slide. But the beautiful irony is that a video game – a very intelligent and well-crafted digital experience – may be what brings me back to the joy of reading. When was the last time you could say that about something you played?

I may have jumped the gun and/or jinxed Ryan on this bet (not that his end of the bargain's too difficult to uphold), but I've designed a special commemorative shirt in honour of the Gran Turismo 5 wager that Masters Davis and Vignocchi have entered into. Ahhh, Giant Bomb... your constant desire to make these stupid bets is a boundless source of inspiration and hilarity. Don't go changin'.

I don’t know if it’s Stockholm syndrome, or if Denis Dyack really knew what he was talking about a couple of years ago, but Too Human is slowly winning me over. Actually, make that very slowly. I’d only ever played it as a weekly rental when it was first released back in 2008, and at the time I thought it was a strange beast that I didn’t know how to handle - there were aspects of it that I quite liked, but the game as a whole seemed to be holding me at arm’s length.

So many elements seemed to defy my gaming instincts. The combat method seemed confusing and inexact; the story seemed like a mishmash of ill-explained ideas that were probably cooler and easier to follow if you sat in on a bunch of Silicon Knights design meetings; and I think we’re all aware of the drawn out death animation that appears too often and cannot be skipped.

By the end of that first single week with Too Human, its personality seemed to border on sociopathic: it knew all the things it had to do to appear a competent and deep experience, and it was simply performing all these actions to try and fool me that it was a normal, functioning game. Ultimately, though, it all came off as a bit soulless. As I returned Too Human to the video store, I didn’t really feel ripped off by my time with the game. I merely felt a slight edge of bemusement and dissatisfaction. What the hell did I just play?

Now, let’s go all wobbly and strike up the harp music as we return to 2010, shall we? Are you with me? Neat.

A couple of weeks ago I found Too Human in a bargain bin for $8. I think we all know where this is going, right? Well, sort of. There are still a bunch of design decisions in the game that I can’t get behind, but after sinking more hours into it I’ve started to come around to the way it all functions. While the combat still feels a bit like Cyber Dynasty Warriors, I found myself dying way less this time around. I don’t know why, but things just seem to be… clicking.

I’ve only recently come to love loot in games (cheers, Mass Effect and Borderlands) and I think this new outlook has certainly added to this title’s appeal. Loot is both a boon and a nuisance in Too Human – there’s so much and so many different ways to manipulate it that the player is spoiled for choice. The problem came when I realised that a disproportionate amount of my game time was spent faffing about in the pause menu, managing all the armour, glyphs and weapons that Too Human vomits at you in thick, colour-coded torrents. Oh, and to top it off, pausing the proceedings doesn’t stop the game clock from ticking over. Ugh.

What I have been enjoying are the environments found in each level. I remember at the time that their flavour was written off as being cribbed from Halo, but I feel that Too Human’s offerings definitely have their own identity. The textures are crisp, the lighting is nice, the normal mapping is used in some pretty cool ways and the level of grime applied in some of the more menacing areas is implemented in a nicely grotty manner. The only time the look of the levels falters is, perhaps ironically for the game's title, in some of the game’s more organic areas. These can look a bit like something from Silicon Knights’ GameCube days, but you barely spend enough time in them for it to be a real issue.

The other thing I find impressive about the environments is the way they manage to capture a sense of vertical scale. Despite the fact that my television’s landscape format should be at odds with the grandiose high-ceiling architecture, I still periodically find myself taking a few seconds to appreciate how tall and cavernous some of the chambers can appear.

I don’t think I’m dishing out any sort of exclusive scoop when I say that Too Human is a flawed effort. But I’ve not finished my first playthrough, and I find that I’m already wondering what I’m going to do the second time around. I think that means that, for me at least, the game isn’t the bewildering failure that a lot of people wanted it to be. If I’m being honest, I was probably one of those people, at least in part. I mean, nobody wants bad games to be made, but it’s human nature to get a bit of a buzz from someone else falling on their face. Well, it is in my circles, anyway.

I guess this all amounts to a pretty backhanded compliment to Silicon Knights and the storm in a software teacup that they created. In 2008, the podcasts that Denis Dyack appeared on as part of his verbose media blitz were all filled with promises that the game was a slow burn, becoming more rewarding the longer you played and replayed (those same podcasts were also filled with the word “reciprocity”, but I digress). Guess what? He wasn’t all wrong. Mind you, with the amount of words per second he was spitting out, the laws of probability would suggest that was bound to happen at some point.

As an interesting postscript to all this, I revisited Jeff’s video review of Too Human. I draw your attention to this not for the content but the way it’s delivered. Jeff seems to be going off the head way more, the music levels are a bit off and it doesn’t seem as tightly edited as the site’s current content. While the video is still well made (it’s certainly a million times better than any video I’ll ever make) you can really tell how much Giant Bomb has grown and groomed itself into a slicker, more polished outfit. And, dear user, you can’t want much more than that kind of progress.

 A few weeks back I went to Bali to help celebrate a mate's 40th birthday. On the night of the party, there was the usual amount of drinking, eating, chatting and laughing. It was the typical fun party action and all (messy) business as usual until the dancing girls showed up. They wandered around to the beat of frenzied local percussion as they waved some flaming batons through the night air.

The lovely lasses left to be replaced with a guy in a glittering jacket, who started twirling the fire with more impressive speed and enthusiasm. After his short demonstration the girls came back, resuming  their absentminded noodlings with the fiery sticks. Normally I'd probably have devoted more attention to them -- scantily-clad Asian girls are hardly cause for me to wrinkle my nose in disapproval -- but tonight my gaze was captured by this guy:

Gallery

• Chun May and her mother both become Chun Li clones who Spinning Bird Kick all over the place
• the mother's boyfriend transforms into a Blanka-alike with the ability to turn into an electric beach ball
• Tai Hung becomes Goku and fireballs Honda
• Ti Man becomes a human missile and drills right through General's body
• the school is lucky to be standing after so much brickwork is destroyed