"The past is a history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift. That is why it is called the present."
Well, it's been a couple of weeks since my last blog so I should probably catch you lot up to speed.
THE PAST
I went to visit my parents for Christmas, leaving behind both PC and Xbox in a snap decision that I quickly came to regret. I spent about a week using my brothers laptop to scan for steam deals, none of which caught my eye, and to check giantbomb for festive shenanigans. I drove from Bournemouth, where I am at university, to my Dad's house and then, on christmas day, over to my Mums. The drive was interesting, as I had to cruise down quite a few small country roads that were pretty icy and, not having a wealth of driving experience, I was a little worried that I would fuck something up in the frosty conditions. However this journey paled in comparison to the drive back yesterday evening which culminated the elements in a nightmarish concoction of Ice, wind, rain, snow and fog. Perhaps the worst conditions I have ever driven in, so bad that I frequently found myself missing turns in the road purely because I couldn't see them. As a fresh driver I found the entire experience quite terrifying and, having arrived at my Dads house without incident, I bought myself Bad Company 2 Vietnam as a small reward for having survived. The maps contained within are fucking excellent, I might add, bringing back my love of Vietnam war films in a rapid torrent. Within the hour I was falling asleep to the legendary Hamburger Hill. Divorced parents are a bitch to negotiate between but, on the plus side, double presents! And that segues nicely into my next topic:
THE PRESENT
Or rather "Presents" as I was fortunate enough to receive more than one. My mum bought me a SatNav for my car, an item I find myself automatically referring to as my minimap. I also got given Cataclysm, which I'm not really sure was a good idea, but as my Warrior is now level 55 i'm going to need it sooner rather than later. The momentum I have for World Of Warcraft is definitely waning, though I'm finding Battlegrounds a lot more enjoyable as a Protection Warrior and i'm far from burnt out with the game. Other presents included money from my dad (enough to fund my new years eve) and a bottle of Vodka from my brother which will no doubt result in a hilariously forced drunken blog at some point in the near future. As for games i'm mostly playing Bad Company 2 at the moment, though my brother and I have played a ridiculous amount of Black Ops: Zombies over the past week - Black Ops being the only split-screen co-op game that we had the foresight to take with us while visiting the old parentals. Working as a pair we managed to get to round 15 fairly consistently, though without the other two players it made defending a single room fairly difficult so we frequently were overwhelmed. Our best strategy was to pick the downstairs route and get to the third room (up the stairs at the end of the outside bit) where one person could defend the stairs and the other would defend the two windows - though without the upgraded weapons you are almost certainly doomed to fail before you reach level 18. I think the highest level we got to was about 22, which isn't bad for 2 players playing Co-Op on a 20" screen. Ideally you get some decent weapons and then constantly stay on the move, setting off traps, auto-turrets and placing claymores and monkeys. We shall continue to strive for perfection and report back once the plan has been finalized.
THE FUTURE
I'm off to London for New Years Eve where I shall be attending a pub and then a houseparty and then probably wondering around drunkenly trying not to get hit by traffic, as per usual. Having spent far too many bones the previous couple of New Years Eves I shall be playing it fairly safe this time with a slightly more economic approach, but no doubt we shall be thoroughly messy regardless. To those of you off adventuring with the similarly inebriated I wish you the best of luck. Godspeed, young champions!
I'm trying really hard not to get too caught up in the Game Of The Year discussion again.
I have a feeling nobody appreciates me spraying my opinion everywhere like a feral tom. There were a lot of good games this year. A lot. To say that one is better than the others is fairly redundant. Starcraft 2 is an excellent game. (Opinion! See, I told you that you wouldn't like it.) I spent weeks playing Starcraft 2, watching tutorials, watching live GSL tournaments, learning build orders, the full deal. I was hooked, in a very real 5am kind of way. So, how does that stack up against Mass Effect 2, a game which, on arrival, I played for 18 hours without stopping except to eat and pee. Not at the same time... OK, maybe once at the same time. Have you ever tried eating a Mars Bar whilst taking a shit? It's harder than you might think...
Then there's Red Dead Redemption, a game which I didn't obsess over but can fully appreciate, in a pretentious kind of way. What about Halo Reach? That was a cool game, right? ....no? No, I didn't think so.
And the entire affair is completely undermined
by the fact that the game I spent most time playing this year, despite my best efforts and intentions, is World Of Warcraft. Did you see that coming? Because I sure as fuck didn't.
Then there's the multitude of sneaky games that people forget about. When you remind them they will say things like "Oh, yeah, Enslaved... that was pretty cool..." and then that's the end of that. Enslaved is an example; Please substitute for "Gran Turismo 5", "Kirby's Epic Yarn", "Super Mario Galaxy 2", or "Need For Speed Hot Pursuit" as is appropriate. All great games, no doubt. And we haven't even got started on Indie games. Limbo? Super Meat Boy? Fuck, we could be here for weeks.
Oh, and Civilization V. I'm not speaking to Civilization V right now. That filthy whore.
So I decided not to get involved in Game Of The Year stuff. There are so many great games out this year that you should play, I don't think it's fair to push one out as some kind of "Winner". That would be like comparing Eagles and Triangles.
(Triangles are always better than Eagles. End of discussion.)
We all know which are the best games that have come out this year and we all know which ones would suit us best as individuals. I'm going to stop because this is starting to sound depressingly like a "WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG?" blog. However I think it's important to point out that the best thing about Game Of The Year discussions are the discussions. The actual decision is pretty secondary. You want to stick up for Metro 2033? Good luck to you. You want to create a bullet-point list explaining why Poker Night At The Inventory is the best thing since sliced bread? My baguette disagrees!
you want a drunk vblog you got a durnk blog you fuckers ima not going to not write a blog because you think its shit isnt eve real i dont know you and im goint o keep writing bwecause it's the only thing i cvan know with my life and you disagree with me thats o k because i am ok wit tthat you can say what you feel
Whilst we like to think that our understanding of this medium transcends that of the casual enthusiast, it's a vile accuracy of society that, whether we like it or not, the majority of people who play games like God Of War, SSX, even Mass Effect 3: These people are fucking morons. Or are they? For such people the Video Game Awards on Spike TV were undoubtedly a huge success. They probably enjoyed the stupid sex jokes and flagrant humiliations of our entire medium. They don't care how terrible the script is, so long as the woman reading it has a great rack. And, in fairness, Denise Richards really does have a great rack.
(I was going to post the obligatory picture of boobs here, but you are just going to have to use your collective imaginations. Instead, here is a nice picture of Commander Shepard. He's so dreamy ^_^)
It's easy to forget
that most people playing these games don't then hold lengthy conversations online about their emotional and ethical impact on the player. Most people playing videogames don't give a fuck about anything more than chainsawing aliens in half. Most people are not us, ladies and gentlemen, and therefore they are an easy target. We like to think that we true gamers (ha!) have a deeper understanding of the games that we play. We call ourselves "Hardcore" because we read news articles and listen to podcasts, but does that really set us apart?
High-Horse meet rider. Rider meet high-horse.
But is our horse so high that we can blame the VGA's for catering to the huge audience of unenlightened goons? It's pretty ironic watching so many games journalists lashing out at how tacky the VGA's were, at the audience to which the entire show was aimed - Ironic because whether they like it or not, the majority of people reading their stuff were likely to have empathised with the VGAs a lot more than with their own pretentious attempts at journalism. The reason the VGA's cater to these people is because these people exist. You want to know who these people are? Every cunt with a Swastika or Penis emblem on black ops. Every fucker glitching out the map on Halo. Every 13 year old boy who has been given an Xbox or a Playstation 3 as a substitute for real parenting. They do not represent the entire spectrum, true, but they do embody an unhealthy majority of it. We are outnumbered. This is capitalism, mother fuckers; Supply and demand.
The world is full of people to whom Braid is nothing more than a game of Mario in a bidniss suit. For those people, there are the VGA awards.
So where does that leave us? The people to whom videogames are not simply a weapon within the procrastinators arsenal. What about the people who genuinely care about the state of the industry, to whom videogames are a culmination of ideals and shared experiences from around the world? The hordes of committed fans that litter endless forums with their opinions and shared ventures; What about the people who set their watches to a different time zone so they can tune into their favourite gaming news live, the people who spend more money on their console than they do on their car? Where does that leave us?
I have that familiar pit of guilt at the bottom of my stomach.
It's the cavernous, hollow sense of despair caused by my own lack of self control.
I have a lot of work to do. So damn much. And yet I continue developing contemptible ideas which drive me further and further from my alleged goals, almost as though I am catering directly to my own procrastination. Only the other night End_Boss and I began a multiplayer game of Civilization V, complete with the largest map size (the planet earth, for fucks sake) the maximum amount of city states and enemy AI and a modest difficulty setting. The game speed was set to standard. 6 hours in and we realised we had made a terrible, terrible mistake. Not only can you not change or alter the game settings once you have begun, you also cannot save your progress. One that ball starts rolling it rolls until the very end. Only in retrospect can I fully comprehend the awesome stupidity that was attempted that night. Who does something like that? This dumb fuck, apparently.
Having said that, we did have an awesome game. We both picked random characters. I got Siam and, due to their unique building being a Wat which gives a decent cultural bonus, I decided to go the culture route. This meant a small amount of cities but with huge populations. I was pretty lucky to land on the top right chunk of Asia so I wasn't surrounded by aggressive opponents and was mostly left to myself to expand as I saw fit. I built only two cities and let them expand at a fairly steady rate. After I while my economy was so stable I was in an almost constant series of Gold Ages and I simply had to keep producing more buildings. I didn't even have much of an army, just some footsoldiers and a few war Elephants to keep the barbarians off my shit. Cultural victory is pretty tough, but my population was huge despite having only two cities, so my production was super intense and I was never short of food or money. I was throwing up Wonders in about 4 or 5 turns, meaning I had a ridiculous amount of culture boost. End_boss wasn't so lucky. Having to fend off a large parade of barbarian attention early in the game, I think he spent the majority of the match recovering until, at 4am, we decided enough was enough. I'm assuming I won, as I was ridiculously far ahead points-wise.
I have no idea why these Romans want Newcastle so badly. It's a shithole.
The enthusiasm to which I dismiss my education can be largely credited to World Of Warcraft.
In my last blog I spoke about how the changes introduced by the Cattackalysm have greatly enhanced the gameplay and general leveling of the game, but what's truly boggling is how consistent this feeling is. There literally isn't enough time to see everything anymore. We are now at a state where an instance can give you a full bar of XP on a normal run, and each zone will carry you 4 or 5 levels. As a result I have found myself skipping entire zones purely to prevent the mobs from becoming mindlessly trivial. I'm going up levels so fast there are little kids in Chinese sweatshops paying me to leveltheir characters. Battlegrounds also give XP, which is equally great andfrustrating. I can now hop into Warsong Gulch, do a few matches, hop out again - and find myself to have leveled beyond the current strand of quests, missing out on a load of the new content. I only got to do Wailing Caverns once. What's important here is the tone. "I only got to do Wailing Caverns once". As though that's a bad thing.
I can't actually believe I'm saying this but I might have to start another character just so I can go back and fill in all the content gaps I missed the first time round. And I mean for the Horde, let's not even get started on the Alliance quests. What the fuck is going on here? I didn't even have the fucking game installed a few days ago.
IN OTHER NEWS
I'm about to hit my first prestige in BLOPS. This is slightly depressing as I have only just got my hands on the Commando, the first gun I have found that actually matches my playing style. Sure, I can punk you with my AK74U, but where's the fun in that?
I'm broke as fuck. Thanks for that, Valve.
The Walking Dead continues to entertain and frustrate in equal measure. The acting is fine, the zombies look great - but every deviation from the graphic novels slashes at my very soul.
As many of you know, recently I have been battling with my addiction and hoping that I had the willpower to overcome what is essentially a socially crippling obsession. However I am ashamed to admit that, on Tuesday the 1st of November, in a moment of weakness...
I can see you now, shaking your little heads in disappointment. As many of you know, I have been battling with this condition for a while now, desperately trying to hold out from returning to Azeroth. Unfortunately I fell into a bad crowd, a malicious and self-serving group of individuals who informed me that the new changes implemented in Cataclysm made the game fun again, removing much of the early game grinding and creating a much more concise and varied leveling experience. Not only that, I could now play as a sweet Troll Druid whose feral Cat form is a badass fucking tiger. These "friends" dragged me back into the gutter. They know who they are and I hope they are fucking proud of themselves.
Unfortunately, they were correct.
Remember that first time you started playing WoW? Ok, maybe you don't - that's fair enough, the game is 6 years old. Well, I remember. I remember being completely blown away the first time I stepped into Orgrimmar, overwhelmed by all the level 60 characters with their raiding gear. I remember promptly getting lost, too, and finding myself running up and down the drag asking passers-by for guidance. I remember my first trip through the Wailing Caverns and being completely confused by what an Instance was conceptually, let alone what I should be doing as part of the group. Flying over Thunder Bluff for the first time, running into my first Ally (and being promptly ganked), joining my first group for Warsong Gulch. These were all big moments at the beginning of my WoW career. Cataclysm is the closest I have ever come to reliving that initial impression. And it's pretty mindblowing.
The re-jiggered zones in World Of Warcraft really are pretty fantastic. Since I started playing again a couple of days ago I have got up to level 26, high enough to cover the new Troll starting zone, Durotar, The Barrens, Ashenvale, and the dramatically altered Orgimmar. Each of these haunts remains largely the same - even the Barrens, which has been sliced apart into northern and southern chunks. The difference lies in the quests. Instead of strolling into the Crossroads and being given 20 quests all at once, players are channelled down much more focussed lines of progression. You might be given two or three quests and they will all culminate at the same juncture. Upon their completion you are given a new set, or sent to a new location (usually via some form of set-piece quest where a NPC mount will physically take you there). To streamline this, there are now lots of smaller settlements and flight paths scattered around each zone. Instead of basing all operations from a single settlement, you will find yourself doing groups of very similar quests from before, though from a much more accessible location so you aren't repeatedly running from one end of the zone to the other. The quests themselves have also been addressed, removing the tediousness and monotony of many of the early quests. You will no longer be sent to find 30 centaur bracers, for example, though you may have to defend a hillock from waves of the fuckers as a jazzed up alternative. It's this kind of new set-piece interaction that actually makes the quests interesting again, giving each quest a unique feel and making the NPC characters much more involved and vibrant. I got a terrible shock the first time I jumped into Wailing Caverns only to find that the bosses had all been altered with different attacks. It has meant that although the layout of the cavern is the same, I am having to reassess and relearn how to tackle it.
Initially I wasn't too impressed by the new talent system but having discussed it with some people it's starting to grow on me. I will concede that the new layout gives each talent tree a very distinct feeling early in the game. Before Cataclysm your spec was pretty meaningless until you got to about level 30 or 40 because a lot of the early skills you could assign points to were fairly passive. The new system immediately rewards players for their choice by giving them a distinct new set of skills or abilities at level 10, when the first point is spent. As a feral druid I was rewarded with Mangle, which replaces Claw as it does more damage for less energy as the basic feral attack. I also got Cat form at level 8, which was pretty cool. Then instead of having a huge sprawling tree and awarding players a new point every level, points are given at intermittent levels and the talent trees are much more concise. It's a neat little system and it means you don't have to worry so much about having such specific builds.
I can haz blue kitteh ^_^ There's also a bunch of new stuff like tooltips and other junk which is basically just official equivalents of the most popular addons. There is now an ingame version of Quest Helper which will mark the locations of your current quest on your map and give you a little arrow on the minimap to point you in the right direction, for example. Possibly the best new feature is the ability to stream patches and new builds of the game whilst you are actually playing it. My understanding of this is that the installer will prioritise and update the most relevant parts of the game first. This has been mostly flawless, allowing me to play the game despite having loaded only about 20% of the mammoth Cataclysm update. I had a bit of trouble when I tried to teleport into an Instance that, apparently, my installer had not yet loaded - but apart from that it has been fine.
As one giantbomb intern intoned - Cataclysm basically takes the quest structure from Wrath Of The Lich King and applies it to the original game. It makes a big difference and, crucially, it's a lot more fun. I managed to get to level 26 without ever feeling like I was having to grind. At one point I hopped into an instance and, having completed the dungeon, was invited to repeat it. Despite being in a great group, I declined. There was too much other new shit I wanted to see.
As much as I hate to admit it, Cataclysm is actually fucking awesome.
Songs of the day is a Bruce thing, but I wanted to share a song without writing a load of nonsense so... uh... here it is. Found it on one of the new Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit trailers. Sexy sexy:
It's like that level from Modern Warfare 2, except way more interesting.
That's the only Pokerface joke i'm going to make in this blog. There, I got it out the way, now we can all get on with our lives.Poker Night At The Inventory is a game that needs to be seen to be believed, let alone to be enjoyed. It was with trepidation that I handed over my internet money, though not much trepidation and, indeed, not much money. Because Poker Night is cheap. How cheap? Cheap enough that you should already own at least one copy.
The beef with Poker Night At The Inventory is that it is:
A cheap excuse to get new items in TF2 and
A shitty poker game because it has no multiplayer.
I will admit, I shared these concerns.
Fortunately, on both counts, the point has been slightly missed. Sure, there are items for TF2, but you have to unlock them by winning them off the other players. The opportunity to do so is rare, and your opponents are well versed in the art of poker. As for the lack of multiplayer... the game doesn't need it. If you want a multiplayer poker game then there are many done to a better, more concise, quality. Poker Night At The Inventory is... something completely different.
It's almost as though someone (somewhere) thought "Hey, we should get together all these awesome characters and make them talk about nonsense." The card game is provided merely as a platform to allow this scenario to exist. And it works. There's a wonderful dynamic between each of the slightly surreal personalities, and as a group they operate spectacularly. The poker feels almost secondary to the mere voyeuristic nature of the entire clusterfucking spectacle. Upon being knocked out of the game the player is even offered the choice of continuing to watch the match knowing that the true entertainment value of this product is in observing and appreciating the dialogue between it's assorted cast members. This is just as well, as my poker face is absolutely terrible:
I'm sorry, I couldn't help myself.
In this sense, you win every time.
Indeed, the penalty for being knocked out of a game is that you... start a new game with all your money returned. The dismissive nature of your victories and losses may make the game feel slightly underwhelming, but demonstrates proof that the nature of the game is in it's characters rather than it's competitiveness. I often found myself losing track of the game, hypnotised by Max's inane gabbling, or Tycho's enthusiasm for bestiality.
The cast will often turn to you and acknowledge your moves, and I don't think I will ever get bored of the assorted gasps whenever you go All In. Poker Night At The Inventory makes the player feel less like a ghostly observer or shallow avatar, and more like an actual entity that has been accepted into whatever universe allows this shit to exist.
It's a lot of fun. It is worth both your time and money.
I used to keep it simple every Friday, without fail. This is a habit I would like to resurrect. Today isn't a Friday but, fuck it, i'm still going to keep it simple:
With a title as large and socially obtrusive as the latest iteration of Call Of Duty, it places the humble bloggers amongst us in an awkward position. Finding something relevant to say in the cluster-fuck of Black Ops related banter is an unpleasant task that must nevertheless be undertaken. Because, whether you like it or not, Black Ops is relevant.
More importantly, it happened to Treyarch. Which, despite their best efforts, is not the same as if it happened to say... oh, I don't know... Infinity Ward?
Controversy. Woo.
And it shows.
There are chunks (whole chunks!) of Black Ops which seem to be rehashed battles from the second world conflict, a theatre in which Treyarch seems to perform much more comfortably. There are several levels in which this disguise is even enjoyable, the escape from the Russian prison at the beginning of the game for example, though the juxtaposition is tremendously prominent during some of the more modern escapades. The Vietnam levels work well, also, due to the sheer mass of explosions, napalm, and untrained Vietcong soldiers flooding into the battleground. But the fact is, Treyarch lacks the finesse that Infinity Ward demonstrated so naturally - and the tighter levels suffer for it. It came as little surprise to me when, halfway through the game, the narrative is surrendered to a series of WW2 missions, as though Treyarch simply threw their hands up in despair and returned to the safety-net they established with Call Of Duty 3.
The multiplayer... is acceptable. If I were being a cunt (I am) I would complain that the levels seem hastily thrown together as oppose to being carefully constructed. Modern Warfare 2, similar to Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2, always had a sense that the levels had been cultivated with purpose. We place these buildings here to create a bottleneck that forces players to rush this way and gain the high ground over here. The levels in Black Ops seem fairly unremarkable, with too many empty nuclear facilities and factories that have been littered with objects almost out of embarrassment, as oppose to with a specific intention of channelling the players and controlling the flow of the battle.
And while I'm being a cunt (yep) I may as well openly object to the weapons. I am yet to find a satisfactory combination of weight and power in any of the guns. I'm only rank 18 so I will no doubt find something sooner or later but I'm not getting my hopes up.
Right.
That's all I have to say about that.
In other news, I finally got my Whiskey Media shirt. It looks, as one would expect, sexual. Observe:
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