Boing Boom Tschak

Revisiting Final Fantasy 8: Disc Three and Four

2011-11-24T05:40:00.000-08:00

So, Final Fantasy 8 is better than 13. There, I said it.

That's this post in a nutshell, since I started my re-play of FF8 just to compare the two while they were fresh in my mind.

Anyways, I will sum up disc 3 and 4 in one post since not much happens in the last disc other than utter insanity and ridiculousness.

We start disc 3 with yet another Laguna flashback, nothing of interest happens in it besides a few lame attempts at comedy. We cut to Squall who suddenly realizes he cares for Rinoa. yes, after being annoyed by this bitch he realizes he cares for her. This scene is done so badly, the way Squall's personality just flips the switch from asshole to caring carebear, you will have a hard time not laughing your ass off. Anyways we're supposed to look for Ellone now. A lot of stuff happens before you can find her, most of it random and uninteresting. Then you find out that Laguna is the leader of the most advanced civilization on this world. Yes, this poor man's Forrest Gump is the leader of guys that have a huge space station and technology beyond belief.

So after all that nonsense sinks in you are tasked to getting Rinoa to the space station. then the monolith from 2001: a space odyssey attacks everyone for some reason. Then Rinoa wakes up from the coma and she's now possessed by an evil sorceress FROM THE FUTURE!. Then you find out the moon is the home of like a billion monsters and then these monsters cramp up in a spot in the moon and attack the earth through space then you find a dead evil sorceress from the past that is being kept in the station and the evil sorceress from the future who also possessed the sorceress from the present wants to possess her now and then the space station gets attacked and then BANG BOOM KABLOOIE everything goes to shit and then squall and rinoa are left drifting away in outer space!

Did you get all that? and that's only part of the nonsense, stupidity and incredibly rushed and poorly thought-out events that happen from now on. You might be asking how can they top this? well you can bet your ass they can top it just keep on reading.

So now Rinoa and Squall, drifting in outer space, with a limited supply of oxygen. They are about to die, and you sit there, wishing the oxygen runs out and they die a painful slow death. But we're out of luck since what follows is about AN HOUR of Rinoa and squall moving at the speed of half a pixel per minute across the screen in the empty space. Now seriously I know it doesn't lasts and hour, BUT IT SURE AS HELL FEELS LIKE IT. It probably lasts around 10 minutes which is ridiculous for a scene where basically nothing happens. This scene is beyond ridiculous.

Now to my not-so surprise, people who like this game actually think this scene has some deep significance about the relationship between Rinoa and Squall. And well all I have to say to those people is that you should go watch movies with ACTUAL stories about relationships to find out how a real relationship between two people work, so you won't get all teary-eyed about this shitty and utterly ridiculous scene. And no, watching Twilight doesn't count.

Anyways there's a ship conveniently drifting nearby (I don't really think I need to point out how absurdly convenient this is, since everything that happens from now on is beyond common sense) so our "heroes" are safe for now. While in the ship Rinoa and Squall get it on and stuff. Squall sure changed his mind didn't he? he's now all mushy mushy and in love with this whore. Well that doesn't last for long because when they land on earth some guards take her away because they fear the sorceress from the future might possess her again. So much for Squall showing he cares uh.

So speaking about the sorceress from the future, I think it's about time to point out what's going on about these sorceress. See, Sorceress Edea wasn't really bad at all. She was possessed by a sorceress from the future named Ultimecia. why did she do that? well apparently she's slowly creeping her way back through time using the sorceress as hosts till she can get to Sorceress Adel, from the past, which was in suspended animation in space.

All of that sounds really interesting at first, until you realize what Ultimecia's plan actually is. Ultimecia lives in a world far in the future where apparently there's not much left because she rules all. But she isn't happy with that, oh no. See, what this idiot really wants is to trigger "time compression" She compresses time and the universe goes to shit so our heroes and everyone else dies. But here's the thing, in the future, which is Ultimecia's present, everyone is ALREADY DEAD. So what she is doing is a convoluted plan to kill the people that are already dead for her, so she can become the only living being left or some retarded shit. I mean, really?

In her time, there's not much left so she can just use this awesome power she has to obliterate what's left and be the last living being and stuff. Even then, WHY WOULD YOU FUCKING DO THAT? I mean, Kefka wanted to destroy everything, but Kefka was obviously coocoo for cocoa puffs. kefka was completely insane due to the magitek that completely messed up his mind and made him into a nihilistic maniac. That I can understand. But what are the motivations for Ultimecia for doing what she's doing? and again, WHY KILL PEOPLE THAT ARE ALREADY DEAD? She's not insane shes just "evil", so... why?. WHY? It Boggles the mind. I could go on ranting on this for hours on end. The levels of stupidity in this plot just bring my piss to a boil and I think I've nerd raged enough so I'll just say this:

Stupidest villian plot ever.

ANYWAYS, back to our "plot" Squall, in another show of bipolar disorder realizes he loves Rinoa again and goes out to free her. Now our heroes go to see Laguna to make a plan on how to take on Ultimecia. Laguna proposes that we let her compress time and destroy the universe, and if you were expecting a genious, well thought out plan from this guy then you haven't being paying attention.

For the final nail in the coffin of this game's story, we get to hear Laguna's reason for wanting to let Ultimecia fuck everything up. Since they can't travel to the future, the only way to beat her is to let her compress time so they can be in the same timeline. But how are they going to survive time compression if that's exactly why Ultimecia wants to do it, to destroy them?

Well, they will be able to survive it WITH THE POWER OF FRIENDSHIP.

And I mean literally.

No, really, literally. I'm not kidding or interpreting some metaphoric idea, no. Laguna states that the power of friendship will make them survive a catastrophic event that will destroy all time, physics, the universe as we know it. Literally, the power of friendship. All they have to do is think about each other and how much they care about their friendship. And so they do.

And if you're wondering, yes, the power of friendship worked.

I guess My Little Pony had it right, Friendship is Magic.

So that wraps up this mess. Ultimecia is defeated by LITERALLY the power of friendship and all is well in the world.

Final Thoughts

When you think about the reasons Square did the changes they did for FF8, it's obvious they were appealing to a more mature audience, with the realistic graphics instead of the cute models, and with a clear emphasis on a love relationship between the heroes. With that said, it's amazing how they botched this one up and failed so miserably in producing a good story, and it's also unbelievable how childish it turned out to be. The power of friendship saved the universe, literally. And i can't stress that enough because I just can't wrap my head around it.

In Final Fantasy 6 for the final battle with Kefka, our heroes realize that what brought them so far was that they stuck together and cared for each other and that friendship inspired them and gave them strength to fight. That sounds familiar to what we have here, but in this case, their friendship just INSPIRES them, it's not a literal power they can use against Kefka, that would be absurd. It's just some extra motivation. Also, the friendship that develops between the main cast is pretty strong and believable unlike in this game. I could go on comparing this to better RPGs, but I think my point is clear enough.

Back to my first statement, FF8 while still a pretty bad RPG, is still leagues ahead of FF13. I've actually come to appreciate FF8 more now, and while I still hate the most stupid aspects of it, i now appreciate that it still had some good thing going for it, things that we come to expect in a Final Fantasy game. bad game, but good music, good graphics for the time, and a system that while still the most exploitable system I've seen in any RPG, still lets you take choices and offers you options. And I'm talking about junction, not the drawing system, which is still completely fucking retarded.

All in all, I wish Square would go back to this style of games instead of insisting on MORE final fantasy 13. One can only dream...

Revisiting Final Fantasy 8: Disc Two

2011-10-19T04:16:00.000-07:00

So here we are at disc two. The last time we saw our hero Squall, he was being impaled in the chest by a 6 foot icicle and free-falling about 4 stories down to the floor, surely this means he must be dead, or perhaps in a very complicated coma, or worse maybe he... OH NEVERMIND HE JUST GOT BETTER.

Disc 2 is where all the plot holes in this game's story begin, and it's because it's where the game begins developing the story, which is a giant plothole in itself. For example, no reason is given for Squall's survival from this incident. He doesn't even have a scratch or a contusion, he's just fine and dandy in disc 2.

But anyway in disc 2 is where we get to know better another character named Laguna. Quite frankly he's the best this game has to offer in terms of character development. Laguna is a guy in the galbadian army and your party is constantly passing out and having dreams about him. He has two other friends, Ward and Kiros, who are with him in all his adventures.

Laguna is kind of a Forrest Gump in this game. You see his story through flashbacks, and he's also a complete idiot, but he's also likeable. He goes through a lot of tough stuff but is always optimistic about the future, and cares for those around him. It's no wonder why everyone thinks he's the best character in this game, he's got a decent story and is not an asshole like our friend Squall.

I'll go as far as to say this game SHOULD have been about laguna and not about the idiots from SeeD. Would've made for a better story with better characters and better emotional moments.

So in the recurring dreams you find that Laguna has moved to the quiet town of winhill and is kind of making a life there with his love interest Raine and a little girl called Ellone, while still having his dreams of adventure and of being a journalist. The moments you see in the dreams with him are very touching, But most of his story has nothing to do with the main story in the game so most of these dreams are filler and useless.

Anyways a lot of stuff happens in this disc to our dear group of dumbasses. They get thrown in jail, then escape, then their homes get bombarded by freakin' ICBMs! Love how this world is hi-tech but also full of monsters and magic weaving retards. You get your first "ship" which is the whole Garden you used to live, which is basically a town, that can lift off and fly using the power of... magic? technology? who knows, it's never explained.

What follows is one of the most infamous scenes from FF8, and the point where everyone (well, mostly those with a working brain) gives up on the story of this game and just says "welll fuck it im gonna finish this up anyways". Turns out all the characters in your party were together when they were kids, on the same orphanage, which was owned by sorceress edea herself, the same you're going after, but they don't remember any of it till now. This moment went down as the most ridiculous plot twist in gaming history and with good reason. Why can't they remember all that? well, MAGIC DID IT. Why? well who knows, maybe the GFs they use make them forget, nobody knows it's never explained clearly. Just like most of the important things in this game.

After you manage to get ahold of yourself after laughing histerically for ours on end by reading all the ridiculous dialog that happens in this scene, you notice our heroes have decided to go and kill what can be considered as their own mother. Well that's nice isn't it? So there we go! We fight Seifer, which is now the sorceress' Knight and is also a huge pushover through the entirety of the game, and then we fight the sorceress. After we beat those two, Rinoa falls unconscious into a coma, and it's the end of disc 2!

A lot of ridiculous stuff happens between all that, like a concert where your characters play instruments, and well Squall treats Rinoa like the whore she is all the time in this disc. This is important to know because what comes next is comedy golden. See you later for Disc 3!

New Remix up at OCRemix

2011-10-16T10:14:00.000-07:00

I almost forgot to post about this but I got a new Remix published up at OCRemix. It's a megaman 9 Remix of the Concrete man theme, I did this remix for the Concrete Man EP, a sort of companion for the recently released Mega man 9 Album.

You can grab my remix over here, also check the complete EP from where it came from, and also check the Mega Man 9 album recently released by OCRemix.

Revisiting Final Fantasy 8: Disc one

2011-10-13T11:03:00.000-07:00

So after watching the AWESOME reviews of FF8 by Spoony I decided to revisit Final Fantasy 8 again and see if its as bad as I remember. Why you ask? well after playing through the horrible vomit-inducing shitfest and sorry excuse for an RPG called Final Fantasy 13 I realized that 8 would be a masterpiece now.

So Final Fantasy 8, the previous worse Final Fantasy in my book, actually had some stuff going for it. The graphics were amazing for its time, and the way they mixed CG Movies at key moments while you could control your character through the movie was pretty impressive. I also like the art direction in this game, it's pretty cohesive and the characters don't look too ridiculous. Also, Final Fantasy 8 had some amazing music in it. Some of the best songs in the whole series are in this game. The music just got worse from this one on.

aaand that's about it.

So here's my experience disc by disc. Today, Disc 1:

In the first disc you are introduced to one of the worst aspects of FF8, if not the worse. The Draw and Junction system. In previous Final Fantasies, you could obtain magic by buying it on a store, or from espers, by obtaining materia or simply learning it from different jobs. Here you obtain magic by "drawing" it from monsters. Which sounds interesting until you realize that you will spend hours on end just drawing magic from a monster to stock them.

You want to stock magic because you can "junction" it to your stats. By Junctioning magic to stats you make the stats grow, so you want to have a lot of different types of magic, all stacked to 100, to get the most out of it. for at least 3 characters. Believe me, thats A LOT of drawing. Lots of hours just drawing and drawing from monsters. It's tedious as hell. (please watch this. That gentlemen, is final fantasy 8 in a nutshell. You can stop reading this and just watch that video)

After you get all the magic you want, you just save it there and never spend it. Yep that's right, you don't want to spend your magic because it will reduce your stats, which makes the point of obtaining it pretty useless. This game also has another fatal flaw, the monsters level as you do, so in this game, you DON'T WANT TO LEVEL UP. That's pretty backwards to everything we know about FF, right?

Since I know all the exploits you can do to this system, I can get amazingly powerful (which I did) without even ever fighting. Since I can obtain an ability that nullifies random encounters, the only fights I do are the mandatory bosses. I'm actually on the 4th disc right now, and I'm only level 18.

No other final fantasy allows this kind of bullshit. This is the most broken system of ANY RPG I've ever played. It's completely retarded that the best way to get powerful in this game is through a card minigame called triple triad than by fighting. That you want to AVOID fighting at all costs to maximize your returns.

Let me empathize this: the best way to play final fantasy 8, is by NOT FIGHTING, instead it's best to play a completely retarded card game to obtain the magic you need. Also, NEVER use the magic you obtain. Just limit break or attack the mobs all the time. It's useless to level up because the monsters will just level up with you.

You also get GFs which are the usual summons from Final Fantasy, but again, you don't want to use them except for special cases because you do more damage by just using your normal attacks anyway. The serve more as a meatshield than as a powerful attack.

Anyways that is all I have to say about the drawing/junctioning system but if you are still not convinced, please watch spoony's review. He explains in detail how broken this system is.

I got sidetracked, lets go back to Disc 1:

So after a rather impressive intro where we are led to think that Squall is actually a kickass character, we are introduced to two of the main Characters, Squall, the hero of the story, and Quistis, who has the hots for Squall and is also her instructor in this mercenary complex which is more like a japanese high school from the future.

Disc 1 is basically about introducing the main characters of the story. These are:

Squall, as I previously mentioned, the hero of the story, and one of the precursors of the emo movement. Seriously this guy is beyond annoying, but I gotta say that after replaying this shitfest my opinion on Squall has changed and I don't hate it that much now, because I realized that the poor guy is surrounded by idiots and a whore. I can now relate to him not caring about his teammates, and ignoring the huge whore that is Rinoa all the time. I would be pissed off if I was surrounded by dimwits and dumbasses.

Actually Squall isn't that much of an emo, he's more of an asshole, and yes he gets pretty emo at several points, but as I said he's more of an asshole most of the time, which I can relate.

Rinoa oh by all hells I hate this skank. This woman is a complete whore. Picture this: you are in a party minding your business and a girl you're obviously not attracted to comes to talk to you and the first thing she says is that she has the hots for you. Not only that but she forces you to dance with her. That my friends is what we call a whore.

Most annoying is that for some explainable reason all the dumbasses Squall has to hang out with are trying to force him to be with her. He even says so in a scene. Yeah, not to mention this girl is devoid of any personality other than wanting to bang Squall. Did I mention she had the hots for Squall and for another guy named Seifer at the same time? yeah... whore.

Quistis is Squall's instructor. At first she wanted to fuck with Squall REAL BAD. But then after Rinoa appeared and she saw she couldn't compete with that level of whoriness she just called it quits. We get almost no backstory on her so we don't care for her most of the time. I do pick her as a party member because well, compared to the rest, this is the less annoying character in the game and the only one that doesn't make me want to stab babies.

Zell.... oh Zell you little rascal. I so hate this idiot. This guy acts like a child and is ALSO devoid of any personality. If you ask me to describe this guy, all i can tell is that he wears silly shorts, likes to punch things and has the mind of an 8 year old kid.

Selphie is this final fantasy's mandatory jailbait. Contrary to all the other supporting cast, she does have a personality, and an annoying one at that.

Irvine what can I say about this guy. He's a cowboy stereotype, a complete pussy and always find new ways to dishonor the gun-wielders in final fantasy history. Also devoid of personality.

I guess the makers of this game wanted to focus on Squall and Rinoa's "Love Story" (I just laughed out loud at that concept) and thats why the supporting cast of this game feel like cardboard cutouts. I'm going to hell for this but hell, even Final Fantasy 13 at least TRIED to develop all their characters. Oh well.

So Disc one is about getting accustomed to the systems of this game, and meeting your team and the main villian, the sorceress. For some reason she wants to destroy the world (oh my what a surprise) and you are sent on a mission to stop her. She also has allied with Squall's school rival, Seifer, which also gets laid with Rinoa. more on that later.

Anyways in the mission Irvine pussies out, Quistis' almost fucks up her part and everything goes to shit. In the end Squall has to face the sorceress, and he gets STABBED IN THE CHEST BY A GIANT ICICLE. and we are left at that cliffhanger until Disc 2.

A lot of unimportant things happen, between the beginning of the story and that, but again, it's just filler. Except for the recurring dreams your party has about a guy named Laguna. And Laguna is the saving grace of this game.

More on that the next time, where I talk about my experience with disc 2.

The New Mortal Kombat

2011-06-13T12:14:00.000-07:00

Well color me surprised. The new Mortal Kombat is actually good and fun.

What's different this time? well for instance, it isn't trying to be something it isn't. In previous games they tried to do stuff like going for 3-d movement, or adding changeable fighting styles, or weapons, and other gimmicks. My response? a profuse yawn.

What this new Mortal Kombat is, is just what makes Mortal Kombat good. Loads of blood, Gore with a touch of ridiculousness, a 2-d plane, and simple but fun mechanics. This MK isn't trying to be Soul Calibur, nor is it trying to have the depth of gameplay of street fighter 4. It's just good old fun MK.

They did add a couple of new toys. The Special Bar allows to power up special moves, to brek combos, or to perform a devastating X-ray move. The X-Ray moves are completely awesome, they pack a lot of hurt, and you can do them over and over again and never get tired of seeing those bones crunching or those internal organs exploding.

The Fatalities are the best the franchise has seen since MK2. Gory, splashy and satisfying. Also, this game boast one of the best Story modes I've ever played in a fighting game besides some of the soul calibur games.

Some of the characters I felt they could have done away with, like that stryker who looked like a dumbass back in MK3 and still does, or Sheeva who always was a pushover and still is. But for the most part, all the characters feel good and fun to play.

If this is the new road MK has decided to take then I see a bright future for it. This game isn't on par with SF4 or MvC3, but it is close when it comes to fun factor. Worth a try.

Final Fantasy 13 aftermath

2011-06-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

So after the frustration and disappointment that was beating FF13, I decided to go back and beat FF12. I never beat it back in the days, I don't remember why cuz I did get very far in the game.

Anyhoo, I'm having a blast with it. After ff13 I guess even the worst RPG will seem like heaven, but I think ff12 gets right what ff13 tried to do and failed.

As i said in my post-mortem, the FF12 battle system is similar to that of FF13, only that in this one you actually can stop and think for a while. You can issue specific orders to you party members, or let them go by themselves and act as configured by their gambits.

The world is Huge, it's also a bit linear, but never just a straight corridor with no turning back. You have exploration, backtracking, sidequests that don't necessarily involve KILLING something, etc.

It's as if Square took the great things about FF12 and disfigured them into some Frankenstein monster for ff13.

Anyways I'm hoping to actually beat it this time around, if my time with this borrowed PS2 allows.

In other news (but on the same topic) I watched the trailer for FF13-2 yesterday. "Shaking my head and sighing for one minute" sums my reactions.

Now I raise my coffee mug , here's to the old days where a new FF used to interest me.

Final Fantasy 13 is a terrible videogame.

2011-06-01T06:34:00.000-07:00

So where do I start. Since this will be a long, looooong write, I will put it bluntly: Final Fantasy 13 is bad. It fails as a game on its own, and fails miserably as a final fantasy game.

Of course, it's not all absolutely terrible. Only most of it. Some of it is plain terrible, other things range from mediocre to bad, and the rest is garbage. But let's start with the bright side:

The Good:

Graphics:

The graphics are beautiful. They are simply stunning. The animation is very good for the most part, and the cutscenes are very elaborated. Sometimes too much, but eh I've come to accept that if there aren't 10,000 things happening on the screen at once in an action scene nowadays, be it videogames or movies, then it's "Boring".

Voice Acting:

The voice acting is top-notch, and the casting is perfect for all the characters. If only they were used for telling a good story...

The Mediocre:

Battle System:

Why are people praising this battle system, is beyond me. The battle system seems interesting at first, and I bet that the battles look awesome for someone watching another person playing the game, but the truth is that the battle system takes too much stuff from your control.

I know what they were trying to do here. They wanted to make the battles feel hectic, and fast. But this shit is going too fast to actually think of what the fuck is going on besides watching your green bars and the enemy's life and stagger bar.

This battle system in a nutshell: You go into a battle. You start beating on the mob, or buffing/debuffing, whatever the battle requires. As you do this you're hitting the x button for autofight/autoheal/autobuff/debuff or whatever it's all auto. When your life bars go down, you change to your healing paradigm, when your enemy is staggered or is about to stagger you change to your "GO ALL OUT" paradigm. You just keep changing paradigms, watching those bars and hitting that damn X button REAL GOOD.

Don't you miss those days where you actually had time to select which ability you wanted, or analyze what item to use, without the mobs beating the shit out of you in no time? Well I do. You want to customize your attack pattern? well you can select your abilities one by one, while the enemies turn you into a splatter of meat on the ground. After a while, you realize that it's useless to do this so you just hit that fucking autoattack button till your fingers bleed and let the cpu pick the abilities for you, because it's always going to be faster than if you did it yourself, the enemies WON'T STOP BASHING YOU while you pick them, and square-enix thinks you're too damn dumb to do this yourself.

Don't you miss the good old days where you had to actually THINK in a battle? I do now. This battle system does it all for you, and that's not fucking fun if you ask me. You get new abilities, new spells and stuff, but it's as if you didn't get them because you will probably never have to pick one. Remember how awesome it felt when you got Ultima for your first character in final fantasy 6? well, in ff13 I never noticed when I got my last spell. It's all the same.

So now you ask "Hey Mike, if you have so little control on your character, how about the rest of the party?" Well my dear reader, let me tell you how much control you have over your party members: ABSOLUTELY NONE.

Let's go back in time for a moment, and let's remember that Final fantasy that no one played, that a lot of purists hated, but was actually pretty good: FF12. In FF12, the cpu controlled your party members, that's true. However, you could take over at any moment, and that wouldn't give the enemy an advantage. The "Cruise control" was only there for the grind, which is part of every final fantasy truth to be told. Besides, you also had the gambits, and with gambits you could customize how your party members would react to ANY situation. You were in control all the time.

Now back to the present, in FF13 you have absolutely no control other than telling them to attack, or debuff, or buff, or defend, or heal, etc. That sounds like a lot, but in every role there's a lot of shit you can do and they don't let you control that. You can't tell the guy in charge of buffing "Oh, here, don't buff with haste first. Instead, use protect". Or tell your healer "Prioritize dispelling over healing on this battle". Oh no no no; That dumbass will always cast haste first, and your idiot healer will always heal everyone to 90% or more until he starts dispelling. It will drive you batshit insane, and it will make some battles harder than they should.

Another thing that will absolutely make you wanna stab someone in the face is how cheap some of the battles are, and most specially, how its game over when your party leader dies. Why can't they just transfer leader to one of the other party members when the leader dies? WHY CAN'T I JUST CHANGE LEADER MID-BATTLE? It's mind-buggling. In a game where there are enemies that can insta-KO you with a spell, it's fucking bullshit that you have to retry if that insta-ko falls on your leader. (BTW The last boss has one of those fancy Insta-KOs. LULZ)

Oh but you, you beat this game and you know there's an item that gives 80% insta-ko prevention. Well I know that too, but to get this item you have to buy it for a lot of cash and then upgrade it to the max by investing impossible amounts of cash that can only be attained by grinding for hours on end. Yeah NO THANK YOU GTFO.

The only reason I don't think this battle system is absolutely terrible, is because it actually manages to keep you on your toes most of the time. But that's also its downfall. It's too damn stressful to have your attention 99% of the time on the battles in fear of getting roflpwnt. Oh and believe me, if you falter for a while, you bet your ass you will get killed. For a game that requires 30 hours of grind before you can beat the final dungeon, the battle system is too needy.

The Characters:

This is more of a subjective aspect, but I didn't think much of the characters in this game. The looked interesting, that's for sure, but because the script and story is so bad, you never get to like them, or care about them. Lightning is kinda cool, I'd admit. She's tough, and she's never a crybaby. OH BTW NO CRYBABIES IN THIS FF THAT WAS GREAT. No one is emo for no reason here. I thought that was nice of them.

Snow tries to be cool, and well, sometimes you just want to punch him in the face (lightning did it like 3 times, that makes her cool in my book), but he's nice. Sazh is.. well, for me he felt the most real, but again, the story and script didn't help. He had a couple of shining moments though.

Hope is annoying at first, interesting for like an hour, and after that I completely forgot he existed. Vanille is annoying in every aspect, but not quite as annoying as the "token annoying character" in every FF game. Fang looks cool but she's.. meh.

The main bad guy? well visually he's a mix of the pope and Colonel Campbell. Personality-wise: I finished the game a few hours ago and I can't remember his name, that speaks volumes on how memorable he was.

The secondary characters came and went and they were all meh.

The final Boss looks completely ridiculous. the BAD ridiculous.

All that said, the cast isn't bad, but also isn't as good and memorable as they could have been if they had a good story going on for them. At least they weren't annoying, or emo.

The Bad:

The Character Progression:

The crystarium system is an epic failure. People compare it to the sphere system from FFX, and that's an insult to that system. The sphere system offered true customization of your characters. But due to the extreme hand holding that ff13 takes you through, you can't get to the customization part until the last part of the game, where you have to invest insane amounts of points to deviate from each character's set roles. What, you wanted to turn Vanille into a tank? well, have fun with your 40+ hours of grinding those gazillion points. Tell me if it was worth it.

Back to FF12 again, you had the license board, in which you could diverge into any path you wanted right from the start. It was awesome. But this crystarium bullshit... this is another thing in FF13 where you have no control whatsoever. Just keep hitting that X button, just like in the battles. Watch the spark slowly move through the lines while your hopes of customization fade away.

The Crystarium system is, in a word: Useless.

The Terrible:

The Music:

I know, I know. It's getting repetitive by now but: remember when Final Fantasy Had good music? You know, those awesome songs that stay with you after you play the game? Yeah those were the good days. Nowadays? well it seems that Square-enix thought that what a boring and terrible game needs is some boring and forgettable music.

This game has the most pathetic battle theme of all the Final Fantasy games. Enough said. You won't remember a single song, not even the fanfare. It's completely forgettable. Hell even bad FF games had some awesome music, like FF8. There's some great music in that game. Makes up for all the badness.

The World:

Never has been a FF so void of life, never has been a world so boring. Even when you reach populated areas, they feel completely fake because you can't go anywhere but where the game takes you.

This dead horse has been beaten before, but it's worth mentioning again: NO TOWNS.

The lack of towns kill this world. Gran Pulse is just a vast, hollow digital world which never feels real. The world from Final Fantasy 1 felt more real than Gran Pulse. Getting anywhere in gran pulse is a pain in the ass. Between loading times, no airships, sparse teleport points, Chocobos that you get too late in the game, this world is not only void but also stupid hard to navigate.

I remember playing chrono trigger. That was one world which changed dramatically depending on the year you were in. It could be said there were several different worlds, one for each time period. But you know what? after a while, you could remember these worlds like the palm of your hand You knew where in the map the millenial fair was, or where was lavos. These things you learned without even knowing because you were invested in this world.

That never happens in FF13. I found myself lost and looking at my map more than usual. Would 20 or 30 more hours of gameplay would have helped? perhaps. But I remember learning FFIV's maps on my first playthrough, as a natural thing. The lack of towns or important landmarks to identify each section makes the world feel static and hollow, and thus you never clearly learn any location by instinct.

Plus: NAMES. Oh Lordy.

In FF6, you could remember where was Figaro Castle located, and what was figaro castle. It's an easy name: Figaro. Easy to learn. Like Narshe, or Maranda, or ZoZo. Easy, recognizable names. Now in FF13, what do we get? we get this kind of bullshit: "Yaschas Massif – Tsubaddran Highlands" WHAT? say that 3 times really fast. Hell, try to say it once. How do you even pronounce that, let alone REMEMBER that? "Archylte Steppe – Haerii Archaeopolis", "Paddraean Archaeopolis", "Archylte Steppe"? what? no, FUCK YOU.

This game fails on so many basic aspects. Even in naming things with simple names people can hear, interpret and remember.

The Absolute Garbage:

The Story:

So I beat FF13 a few hours ago, and if you ask me what this game was about, I don't have an answer. And It's not that kind stories which are good but leave you with ambiguous meanings. No, this is a simple story, very simple compared to other FFs, it's just that I can't make sense or understand what the fuck was going on most of the time.

The game spends 30 hours throwing names like fal'cie, l'cie, ci'eth, and a lot of unrecognizable garbage at you mercilessly without explaining what the fuck they were or what the hell was going on about them. And even when they explained, the explanation didn't make much sense. Is as if they expected you to know all this shit beforehand, like all this information was was found a prequel, or a book or something that they expected you to have read. Seriously I have no idea.

So this doesn't even deserve a spoiler warning because I am saving you from this mess by telling you beforehand: The story is mainly about lightning's sister which gets transformed into a... something that you ALSO get transformed by a... semi-god/monster.. being which seems like exist in the world you live in and transform people into this things to do things for them or something I DON'T KNOW. Anyways she later gets transformed into crystal and then you start your quest to save her and sazh's son which had the same luck.

It seems that there are 2 worlds with their own gods thingies (they are called fal'cie, I think) that do this things to humans and the humans who fail to do what they were transformed for (they don't get told what they are meant to do) are transformed into monsters so the party is in a run against time. In all this mess there's something about some factions called sanctum and.. some rebels which I NEVER understood, and there's the main bad guy with the stupid and long name (bartholomeous or something like that) who is trying to destroy the world by bringing ragnarok through one of your friends, or so I think.

Understand all that? no, right? well I don't blame you because I didn't tell it very well, or took care to explain things right, JUST LIKE THE GAME. Final Fantasy 7 has a pretty complicated story, but I think that everybody who played it never felt confused about the basic premise, or the twists. But this story is just a huge mess and is told in the worst way possible.

Storytelling and character development in this game is absolutely terrible. There were absolutely no memorable moments of storytelling in this game. I still remember FFVI's Opera act, and subsequent meeting with setzer. Or how Kefka Destroyed the whole fucking world! that was badass, and unexpected. Everybody remembers the death of aeris, the transformation of cecil, those are some memorable moments there, and you will find none of those in this game, not. even. close.

Good stories about characters usually show the characters going through events that change who they are. It's the basic premise of a character tale. You can tell how Terra, Squall, Cecil, and Steiner went through a change since the beginning of their stories. But here, Snow is the same person he was at the start, he learned nothing, and pretty much every other person in your party was the same at the end, except for maybe hope and lightning. They learned nothing, this story changed nothing for them. There is no emotional investment in a story like this.

Tutorials, Tutorials, Hand holding... oh look another tutorial!

This is a HUGE issue with this game. The first 30 hours of this game consist of the game hiding features from you while hand-holding you through the environments and the fights. They stop you in your tracks for tutorials about EVERYTHING. Why did they do this, what were they THINKING?

You can't even change party members until you are 30 hours in the game. yes you read that correctly, it's unbelievable. You can't use the magic command till a few hours later when you do the tutorial for it. You can't use the crystarium until you do the tutorial. You can't use items till you do the tutorial. You can't wipe your ass until you do the tutorial. Tutorials, tutorials, TUTORIALS. Square-enix thinks we gamers are fucking dumb. 30 hours of tutorials and hand holding. 30 FUCKING HOURS!.

I don't remember this hand holding being so silly in FF7. There were a couple of tutorials for the materia system, which was pretty complicated and needed to be explained. But here, they have to explain the AUTOATTACK function. WHY? It's ridiculous. It's another of those aspects of the game which square enix stubbornly doesn't let you have control over, but taken to the extreme.

World and dungeon layout

Final fantasy 13 has 13 chapters. 10 of those are just one huge tutorial. But not only that, but you never get to an actual WORLD in those first 30 hours. Let's look back again: Final Fantasy 1? You talk to the king, mess around Corneria, and BAM, out world. How awesome. Final Fantasy 6? You do the intro, get out of Narshe, and BAM, beautiful, lovely outworld.

Final Fantasy 13? it's just one huge, long corridor where the only option is to go forward. You plunge through it for hours on end, straight corridor after straight corridor. Who playtested this and thought this was awesome? I really want to know.

all you can do in this game is move forward and fight, and watch boring cutscenes with characters blabbing about stuff you don't understand and ultimately won't care about.

After those grueling 10 chapters, you finally arrive to the "outworld" of Gran Pulse. And you say to yourself: "now the fun starts". But you are wrong. What starts now, is THE GRIND.

The Grind

The last part of the game is a bitch. You can't beat but the weakest of creatures, which you have to grind to be able to kill the next set of creatures in the food chain. Oh but you get SIDEQUESTS! Which are all about finding a monster and killing it. This part of the game does not forgive, it's merciless. The only way to advance is to grind, grind, and grind.

The grind has been present in every final fantasy but honestly, did you ever need to get to max level and deck everyone with ultima in ff6 to be able to beat it? of course not. After you gather your party and do some exploring and sidequesting, you were probably ready to go at Kefka, it wouldn't be easy, but you could probably beat him.

Not in this game. To be able to beat the final boss, you absolutely have to max out everyone's main crystarium roles, and deck them with fully upgraded weapons. Imagine that you had to max everyone's level and espers in FF6, and deck them with the best weapons and ultima to be able to have a fair fight with kefka. And he still manages to beat you twice or so.

You know what's that right?

It's BULLSHIT.

For all the tutorials in the game, the game never fully explains how the upgrading works. So if you end up selling your components, well tough luck. Grind away more. Also since the game gates your crystarium progression you might at some point max out your main roles and think "well, I'll invest the points I get from now on in the other roles". Only that maxing out the other roles is more costly than doing the main roles and you get meager returns for it. So you might end up like doing what I did, spending all my points on other roles, then getting an unexpected final crystarium expansion, and not having points to invest in the main roles which give me the massive bonuses I need to progress through the rest of the story.

It's ridiculous and shows how poorly thought out was everything about this game. I need the points to progress, but I can't kill the enemies to get the points.

Anyways, the game goes from a tutorialfest to a brutal grind on a whim, and it seems like there were two separate teams working on each part of the game. BTW, there are no minigames at all.

Conclusion

Final Fantasy 13 sucks ass. It's definitely the worst final fantasy ever made, and took the throne of worst final fantasy from FF8 without much trouble. FF8 is light years beyond this mess of a game. I'd rather hear Rinoa annoy squall and squall say "meh" and "whatever" over and over and over instead of playing this game ever again. Fuck this game.

Goldeneye Wii

2010-11-23T12:11:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I posted anything here.

Mostly because what I usually talk about over here are new movies I've just seen (and I haven't been to the theater in ages) or new stuff in World of Warcraft (Which I haven't played with any kind of consistency in ages as well).

What have I been doing then? well, catching up to some Wii titles, sick at home because an incredibly resilient flu, and playing League of Legends quite a bit. The game is excellent, really. Check it out.

So I heard activision was remaking Goldeneye. Activision is a company that has been famous lately in the industry for being the "new EA". Churning out sequel after sequels, milking out franchises dry until they are a carcass of their former self. This made me think this game was going to be a quick cash-in, and yet another desecration of something that has a lot of nostalgic value for some people. But, turns out it wasn't that way at all.

A little backstory: I was a n64 kid. I didn't have a playstation, so most of the games I played on the n64-saturn-playstation generation were n64 games. Some of them, I played for hours on end. Beating them from start to finish countless times. Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of time, Star Fox 64, and of course, Goldeneye.

I gotta say, I wasn't expecting a game that was EXACTLY like the old goldeneye. But if you're expecting something even closely resembling it, you will be disappointed. This game is just not goldeneye. The feel of the game, is certainly not goldeneye. The story is different, the layout of the maps is completely different, the characters are different, the weapons, etc. You can't shoot enemies in the hand and see them grab the wounded hand in pain, or the foot, or the groin. You can't see blood stains in the part of the enemy that you shoot. There are no trip mines, remote mines, laser watch, or ANY gadget from goldeneye. You can't dual wield.

This is not Goldeneye. Not the movie, not the old game.

This is Call of Duty with a James Bond license. The weapons feel like call of duty, the engine is call of duty's engine, the enemies act like call of duty enemies, The cinematics are clearly made by the call of duty team. Seriously, if you've ever played any call of duty game, you will see through the James bond cover right away.

However, this is a really good shooter.

And it's on the Wii, which REALLY lacks good shooters. The feel of a james bond movie (not goldeneye tho!) is there. The missions are fun, the weapons too, it's all very fun. The melee takedown system is really, really fun, and I was trying to sneak through the enemy lines using takedowns as much as possible because it was so darn fun.

This is a great game for the Wii. DO NOT EXPECT IT TO BE GOLDENEYE. It's just not. It was all a marketing ploy, which is to be expected from Activision. However, I didn't expect them to deliver a fun game, but they did, and that makes up for trying to fool us using nostalgia as an excuse.

A 4/5 game for me. Give it a chance.

League of Legends

2010-09-29T07:04:00.000-07:00

Initially I wanted to do a lot of updates on the beta, but things change so radically every week that a lot of the things I write here are obsolete in the next patch, or simply M.I.A. (For example, the power auras implementation is gone in the last patch. Bummer) But aside from the constant changes, I haven't played the beta a lot lately, this is mainly because a few reasons:

-Some quests are broken, impeding me to continue key questlines. For example, the goblin questline has been broken since I joined the beta, I still haven't been able to get a goblin out of the lost isles.

-I am not very interested in testing the level 80-85 content at the moment. I am an altaholic, and thus I am focusing on the different and new experiences provided for the players in the new and revamped Azeroth.

-Last but certainly not least, League of Legends and Minecraft.

League of legends is, simply put, the best free-to-play game on the internet. I'm sure tastes will vary, and not everyone is into PvP-oriented games, but the polish and quality found in this game is simply not found in any other F2P game out there.

This game has made me a hater of WoW PvP.

I wasn't too keen into WoW (or any other MMO) PvP from the start. I did play quite a lot of PvP back in Burning Crusade, but after the complete disaster that was Wotlk PvP balance, I decided to stick to the PvE part, which was, for the most part, as entertaining as ever, and in some cases it even was the best PvE ever found in WoW (Ulduar).

Now, League of Legends is not a MMO. It's based on the Defense of the ancients style of gameplay. You can pick a Hero out of more than 60 (!) found in the game, each with its own completely unique style of gameplay and unique abilities, get into a team of 3 or 5 people and play the game, which consists on, basically, destroying the enemy's Base.

Sounds simple enough, but the game requires a lot of strategy and coordination, and everyone in the team must contribute to the team fights. What I like the most about this game is that a good player can make the difference for the team, and not necessarily which character you're playing, which is something games like WoW haven't achieved yet, where flavor of the month or cookie-cutter comp wins the day everyday (lolroguemagepriest roflpwntrain)

You are able to customize your character with runes and a talent tree that you start to fill up as you gain levels, which are independent from the levels you gain in-game. You also gain IP, which are used to buy champions and runes. Each week gives you 10 free champions to try out, but as you play matches and gain IP, you are able to buy the champion you like and stick with it, or also buy other champions.

The game is free, and there's a store where you can buy skins (which are all very cool for the most part), IP and XP boosts(boost the XP and IP gain from games played), and also buy new champions which come out every month. You can do this with IP or riot points which are bought with real money. Whichever way you choose, it doesn't really give you and advantage. The store doesn't give a gameplay advantage if you use real money or not, and that's something I really really like.

The most important thing though: the game is FUN. The game is addictive, and many many times more balanced than WoW. It's lightyears away. There are certainly tiers of champions, but as I said most of the time it matters more if you're a good player or not, rather than what you play. There are no set comps that everyone uses to win. It's really cool to have more freedom on what you want to do rather of what works. All the champions have a weakness that you can exploit, and comps are based on the type of job you do (Tank, support, dps) than exactly what class you play.

So yeah, this game is great, and it's been very successful so far. It gets updated all the time, and new champions are added every month. Riot initially had some server issues, but those are being resolved and for the most part the servers are up and stable.

I recommend all my friends and whoever happens to read this to give this game a try. It's keeping me away from Cataclysm Beta, and that is an achievement all in itself.

Cataclysm: Spell Auras

2010-09-08T08:15:00.000-07:00

Time to take a break for a while from the spoilerrific posts of the new starting areas. I'd like to talk about one of the features I like the most that are coming in cata.

The vast majority of those who take raiding seriously (well, as seriously as you can take a game) know of a little addon called Power Auras. This is without a doubt the most useful addon for raiding. It's the addon that will help you the most at being great at what you do, no matter the role.

What exactly is Power Auras, you ask? Well, to explain why Power Auras is so good and what it's used for, I first need to make a point: WoW's UI is really, really bad. It's functional, but when you want to track ANYTHING useful with it, it shows that it comes from a time where everquest was king and raiding wasn't as difficult as it is now.

WoW's UI comes from simpler times, where keeping track of everyone's HP in a raid didn't matter much because you didn't have to make split-second decisions. The life of the tanks didn't depend of wether you could use a macro to bring him up from 10% to full health in 2 seconds or the Raid wipes. It comes from a time where it didn't matter if you knew that a proc was up so you could capitalize on it and maximize your dps. Bosses weren't balanced around 40 people maximizing their performance. They were balanced on 15 people maximizing their performance, 15 more doing decent to mediocre performances, and 10 more afking for half or the whole fight.

What power auras does is to give you a visual cue of your choice, exactly where you want in the screen, and triggered by anything in the game. Still don't get it? well, let me give you an example: As a Holy Priest, you must keep track of a buff called Serendipity. Now, Keeping track of this buff in the default UI is a pain in the ass, because this buff stacks 3 times and in the default UI that's almost impossible to see, and also the default UI throws this buff along all the other 30 buffs you'll have in a raid, in a frikken corner of the screen.

With power auras, you could configure this buff to show up as a semi-transparent graphic of your choice that appears AROUND your toon, so you always know when it procs. You could also add a counter on its side so you know how many stacks you have, or you could make it less transparent as it gains more stacks. You could also add a timer nearby so you know when it will expire.

Useful eh? Not only this, you could track when a trinket is ready for use, when your target has certain buff or debuff, when you have low mana, low health, combo points, runes... WHATEVER! you can track anything and everything and display it on the screen however you want. That's why this Addon is so Valuable for anyone that wants to be as best as he/she can in a raid.

This addon is, in my opinion, even more valuable than Deadly Boss Mods, because after you know the fights, it's pretty much redundant in most cases. This addon however, will always be helpful, and is helpful for everybody.

Now, the real reason I am talking about Power Auras, is this:

Yes, that's me in the beta, and no, that's not Power Auras. That's Blizzard's own implementation of power auras in-game.

Blizzard's version is much simpler than Power Auras. It just tracks certain critical spells for different classes (In this case, Arcane Missiles procs for Mages) and you can't change or modify the graphic displayed, at the moment. I don't expect it to become as complex as power auras, but this is a REALLY good implementation of the addon. I hope you can have some control and customization in the final version, because right now everything is set in stone and you can only toggle it on or off.

Anyways, for those who love power auras this is something to look forwards to. For those of you who never heard of Power Auras before, shame on you. Go get it right now and learn how to use it, it's guaranteed to make you a better player. Or you can wait till cata and check out the "Official" version. Either way, this was a really neat surprise.

(Damn this was longer than originally planned. TL;DR!)

Cataclysm: Night Elf Beginnings

2010-09-06T12:43:00.000-07:00

The Beta is kind of a mess right now. This must be one of the buggiest beta patches, because a lot of critical quests - quests that block advancement - are broken, some mechanics are broken as well, and.. well, it's hard to keep record of anything because it's impossible to see an entire zone, and in some cases, you can't even get to see any of it.

But that's what beta tests are for, right? I'm very grateful I got a beta key and I try my best to report bugs and suggestions every day. With that in mind, I'll keep posting my impressions so far, but unless we get a new (and more stable) patch things will be kind of incomplete.

Also, I was playing on a server that doesn't shows up on my list anymore, so I lost all my characters. Time to start anew, I guess!

Time for some Shen'dralar goodness.

A little lore background: You can now roll Night Elves Mages because the Shen'dralar came back to the night elves and wanted to join them again for the sake of surviving against the forces that threaten Azeroth in cataclysm. So basically if you roll a night elf mage it's either a Shen'dralar or a young night elf that is being taught arcane magic by them.

The night elf starting zone is almost the same as before. The quest haven't changed much regarding what you have to do, but they have changed a lot regarding WHY you are doing what you do. The story is much better now, it's very well told and everything has a purpose.

Some things have changed, to make some quests easier. Everyone that has leveled up a nelf remembers the quests inside the Imps cavern, or the quests in the barrow dens. Those were some really annoying quests, but now the devs changed them and they don't seem much of a hassle, and are in fact fun now.

For this quest, now you get an item that roots and kills the imps, so you are free to explore the cave and complete the other quests without worrying for respawns on these annoying fucks.

One of the biggest surprises was the change to the Barrow Dens quest. This was one of the most annnoying quests because that place is a mess and the mobs were kind of unforgiving. Now, after I entered the dens, a night elf sentinel came to my aid! but the best part is, you could ask her for directions to the 4 quest items you need from here, and she would create a green mist that would flow in the direction of the item! that right there improved this place by 1000%. They could have made the sentinel not attack the mobs with you and this quest would have been vastly improved by the green mist.

I really hope they implement this new tech in some other confusing quests and dungeons. I can see this working in The Wailing Caverns, one of the most confusing dungeons in the game.

I also found a whole new line of quests in teldrassil, along with a new area. This quest takes you to a path up the mountains inside of teldrassil to free some druids of the talon controlled by a furlborg. It was nice to see new things added to this zone.

Finally, the zone seems to end in an EPIC quest where you combat the remaining corruption on teldrassil (which is an army of demons and satyrs) by being infused with power by Elune herself. Your actionbar changes to different abilities that sound totally epic. Alas, this quest is bugged, so I can't really say how it ends, or how it goes, or take screenshots. From the looks of it and the buildup, it seemed to do justice to the zone.

I glossed over this zone but as with the human zone the experience here has been vastly improved. This zone used to be very dull and pointless, but now it's very interesting and not annoying at all. The new flight points in the zone cut down the walking you have to do, and overall it's very well tuned. I can see myself leveling up my night elves in this zone again.

By the way, I visited Darnassus, and with the changes to some of the architecture and the new graphic improvements it looks prettier than ever. Also, there's a new zone, the Howling tree, and it seems to be where the worgen will hang around. It's very beautiful.

I will leave you with a slideshow of some of the pictures I took. Enjoy!

Cataclysm: Human Beginnings

2010-09-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

As the 90% of beta testers, I created and leveled up a Worgen when I got in the beta. It's the first thing most people do, besides checking out the post 80 content. I will probably not talk about it much because the information about the worgen quests are avaliable everywhere.

After the obligatory worgen roll, I rolled a human hunter, and that's what I'm going to talk about today.

Compared to the other revamped zones, the human starting zones (Northshire Abbey/Elwynn Forest) haven't seen nearly as much changes. Anyways, as I rolled my hunter I got dropped in the same place you start right now on live, except there's a new recruiting booth nearby. Once you get your first quest, you see King Varian aproaching. Yes, now humans get recruited by King Varian himself!

Anyways the quests are mostly intact. Kill wolves, go for the troggs, "YOU TAKE NO CANDLE", etc. The only change is that there are no more Defias around. The Defias are completely gone (Or at least they make you think that!), and instead you get the Orcs from the burning steppes that are attacking the Abbey. They burned down the grape farm, btw.

After you get out of Northshire you are sent to Goldshire just like in Live. Again, the quests are the same but they have been somewhat reorganized so you don't have to walk as much as before. But you have the same quests in the Saldean farm, and well you get the point, it's mostly the same but better streamlined.

Something they changed though was adding Flight points in both Goldshire and Eastvale logging camp. This makes the questing in this area MUCH better. I remember hating that dreaded walk from Goldshire to Eastvale. I didn't find new quests in the logging camp though, it's again mostly the same as in live, only not as annoying. All of the annoying quests were removed as well, so that's a plus.

As far as I've seen, all the zones now have a theme that leads into a couple of final quests that are the climax of the zone. Elwynn doesn't have a real theme, you run around helping people and handling the trogg, gnoll and murloc problems. There's a final quest though, and it was kind of epic, and surprising!

Everyone remembers Hogger. It's one of those WoW memes that everyone inside of the game knows, and even people outside of the game know as well. Well, Blizzard saw the chance to capitalize on this and they gave Hogger his own hill in the gnoll camp. When you engage him, the fight seems like normal, but this time around, he calls minions when he's low on health, and also runs off to his hill and eats the carcasses to regain his health! Badass.

After I dealt with him, to my surprise, General Marcus - warden of the stockades, appears along with 2 mages, and takes him as a prisoner to the stockades! what's even more fun is when you turn the completed quest to Marshal Duggan and he complains about the implications of having a powerful gnoll in a jail with a lot of other gnolls.

Below I am posting a slideshow of the whole thing:

View all

Get your own

Overall, don't expect a whole new experience for the humans and their starting zone, Elwynn Forest. although it changes dramatically once you get to Westfall, the experience in Elwynn is mostly unchanged. However, it is much easier to level up here now, and the experience is less of a hassle and definitely more fun.

Cataclysm Beta: Starting Experiences

2010-08-27T10:41:00.000-07:00

So the first thing I did when I jumped in the beta was to create a worgen warrior. The Worgen starting experience is amazing, even better than the DK starting zone. The questline isn't finalized, as after the most epic quest in WoW's history there are no more quests and a placeholder NPC ports you to Teldrassil.

I wanted to create a Goblin but Blizzard blocked new Goblin characters because it was crashing the server or something. So I created a Human hunter instead. The human starting zone (Northshire Abbey/Elywinn forest) has hardly changed, except for the Defias being completely gone and the Dragonmaw Orcs from the Burning steppes invading. They consolidated some quests and there's less walking around overall, but it's mostly unchanged.

Next I created a Gnome Priest, the most epic new combination you can ever try. The new gnome starting zone is really fun, although it's really short. You can feel the fun and quirky gnome spirit right from the start. It was my favorite revamped starting zone. Plus, GNOME PRIESTS.

After that I tried a Tauren Paladin AKA Sunwalker AKA Holy Cow.

Overall, paladins are more fun now that you get more spells when you are low level. The Tauren starting zone from 1-5 has changed a lot, and it doesn't require you to dive in that dreaded quillboar maze anymore. Before you get out of the 1-5 zone, you get a very nice quest that sets up the spirit of being a Tauren and why they fight.

Then I tried out a Night elf Mage. This is the zone I found that had the less changes. The quests require you to do the same as before, and the locations haven't changed as far as I've seen (I still haven't done the whole zone, just got to dolaanar and did a couple of quests) but what has changed is the story behind the quests. It's really cool how everything actually makes sense now, and how they tell you the story of the night elves as you go, even including the recently released "Stormrage" novel.

Overall, this really feels like a huge change to world of warcraft. The new tutorials will really help new players, and the new quests are so much better planned. Also, quests rewards were reworked and the models are completely different, and they look much much better than the old ones. The game is REALLY hard at the moment. The mobs hit like a truck and your HP regen is pathetic. I don't know if it's a bug, but I hope so, because as an experienced player I died several times with some of this characters.

I will keep posting about my experiences with the Beta. I will be uploading photos to my imageshack album, you can check it our here, I will be constantly uploading pictures.

Inception! and some great news.

2010-08-26T13:10:00.000-07:00

So I watched Inception.

3 times.

I don't think I need to say anymore. This movie rocks. It's one of the best movies I've seen in a while, and proof that Christopher Nolan is God in disguise.

Most people say it's a mindfuck, and it is, in a way. But it is not a mindfuck in the way that say, Dune, was. The plot is extremely complex, but it's also extremely well planned, explained and executed. I don't think many people leave the theater feeling that they didn't understand anything about it.

The first 30 minutes or so of the movie are used to explain Inception's world, its rules, and introducing the characters. After the main plot kicks in, it's a non-stop barrage of AWESOMENESS shot at your brain every single second the movie is running. It's a movie you can't stop watching until the credits start to roll in.

Inception brought what was good about the matrix and multiplied it tenfold. It's an action flick with a brain, and with respect for its viewers. It doesn't pander to the lowest common denominator, spouting CGI all over the place for the sake of it. Instead, the special effects are used with conscience, and with purpose. In fact, this movie isn't heavy on CGI at all. Most of the effects aren't CGI, and that makes the action scenes feel even more awesome.

With Inception I've confirmed a few things. First. Nolan is a director that I can trust. Second, movies like this make me feel sad for the industry as a whole. So much crap is churned out every year... like Last airbender! (Yes I don't think I can make a review without mentioning this turd anymore), and so few masterpieces like this one, yet people still go to watch the shit that guys like M Night crap... It's mind boggling. Third: in spite of Hollywood trying to prove it otherwise with every movie released, Great action flicks CAN be made.

Bottom line: Inception Rocks, Nolan Rocks, and you all should support movies like this.

On another (GREAT) news, I got my Cataclysm Beta Key yesterday, so I'll be enjoying (And giving feedback) on all the new stuff in Cata. I'lll probably talk about it all here as well!.

The Last Airbender Drinking Game!

2010-08-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

No, I'm not done with this one yet. You see, I am still coping with the fact that this movie was so unbelievably craptastic that I've been thinking of ways to make this movie enjoyable for my friends who haven't seen it yet, or if I ever become utterly insane and watch it again.

So I've devised The Last Airbender Drinking Game!. This game has two goals:

1-Get you completely smashed

2-See if at last one can get some entertainment out of this movie

I would say this game is better played with no mixed drinks, you can pick any raw drink you like. Rum, Whisky, vodka, anything is fair game. Why no mixed drinks? SO YOU CAN FEEL THE PAIN AND DESPERATION OF THOSE WHO WATCHED THIS MOVIE!

You can pussy out of it and get some OJ in your drink or whatever, I'm willing to bet you'll get drunk anyways.

General Rules:

Take a hit when:

-Something that should be shown is instead narrated, or Shyamalan forgets that 90% of the time it's better to Show, Don't tell.

-The plot is exposed so glaringly and so close to your face you feel threatened by it.

-The CGI is so terrible you wonder if they were using the same computers used for the original Tron.

-Slo-mo kicks in

-something that isn't meant to be hilarious, is.

-Something that is meant to be hilarious, is not.

-Someone yells 'NOOOOOOO!!!"

-The editing team fails to do its job.

-Something happens without any explanation prior, i.e.: Zuko appears fine and dandy after the ship he was in was blown. In the same vein, take one hit when...

-Something doesn't makes sense

Finish your drink when:

-Deus Ex Machina kicks in

Although that should be enough for any adult man/woman to get themselves drunk, I want to add some LAST AIRBENDER special rules, as those I've mentioned before could apply to any other bad movie as well.

So, Last Airbender Special Rules:

Take a hit when:

-The name of any of the original characters is mispronounced

-Someone does an unnecesary dance to bend an element.

-The dragon from dragonball appears, instead of avatar Roku.

-Firelord Ozai appears in the scene, completely uncovered.

-You realize someone is acting as the complete opposite of their original counterparts.

Finish your drink when:

-You facepalm, you sigh, you say "Oh my god", "What the fuck" or any combination of those.

I am going to try this next weekend!. I think I'll need at least a couple of bottles of whatever I'm going to drink.

My Top 10 tv to movie adaptations

2010-07-30T07:54:00.000-07:00

Given the outrageous, utter disgraceful boodle of poopie that was The Last Airbender, I decided to remember, and arrange a top ten of tv to movie adaptations (That i've seen so far).

This list is not objective, as I'm basing it on the entertainment value I got out of them, but I can assure you that any movie I list here will be much, much more enjoyable than TLA.

10-South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut

This one will be on this list because... well, there aren't many tv to film adaptations that I can put here and won't make me look like a complete moron (most of them will only make me look like a partial moron). South Park can be funny sometimes. Sometimes they even deliver deep messages to the audience, but more often than not you have to navigate through a whole lot of bad jokes, irreverent stuff just for the sake of being irreverent, and other in-your-face contraptions.

It wasn't an adaptation per se, more like a very long episode, but an epic one at that.

9-The Little Rascals

A bunch of kids trying to act is almost always an awful experience. They're kids after all. But most of the kids here manage to stay so adorable in their roles that I can't hate them.

I used to like this movie a lot when I was younger. I bet I won't like it much right now, but I can also bet that I will enjoy it more than the likes of mission impossible, naked gun, and of course, The last airbender.

8-Wayne's World

I was born in the early 80's, but I remember the 90's the most from my childhood, and this movie practically embodies what the 90's were about.

Also, this movie was made when Mike Myers was still funny.

7-Bruno

Oh Bruno, Bruno. You are an amazing guy, always looking for the best ways to make me feel incredibly uncomfortable, but amused at the same time. This is not a movie for the easily offended, and not even for the hardly offended.

Also this movie will make you at least 30% gayer.

6-Transformers(any)
This movie should probably be lower but what the hell. Michael Bay, blah blah, explosions, blah blah, shaky camera, robots taking a leak on federal agency guys, etc. yeah yeah it's a mediocre film. But here's the thing: IT HAS OPTIMUS PRIME.

What do you say? the transformers look like crap? what? I cant hear you over OPTIMUS PRIME'S BOOMING VOICE RADIATING AWESOMENESS EVERYWHERE.

5-The Spongebob Squarepants Movie

Spongebob is completely awesome and nothing you say can make me think otherwise. Spongebob is the greatest animated troll ever conceived and for that I applaud him.

This movie also has david hasselhoff and his missile-launching pecs, if you're into that kind of thing. Also, this movie has this completely unexpected and totally awesome guitar solo. Mind = blown.

4-The Simpsons: The Movie

You can say this movie was like an extended simpsons episode, and it kinda was, but it was funny, it was entertaining, and at some times, it felt like the OLD, simpsons. Remember those, when they were actually funny and witty?

The film looked very sharp and well animated, it was good entertainment.

3-The blues brothers(Both!)

Wait, I got the title wrong. This movie's real name is THE FUCKING BLUES BROTHERS, that's right, in all caps and all.

Here are some of the mind-blowingly awesometastic things you will find in this movies:

-John Belushi, Dan Aykroyd, John Goodman

-James fucking Brown

-The Blues brothers doing a music number with Aretha Franklin

-The blues brother sing Jailhouse rock inside a prison.

-A gazillion of police cars were demolished in a single car chase scene

-The blues brothers sing rowhide in a redneck pub.

-The blues rothers doing a music number with Aretha Franklin, AGAIN. And this time is "RESPECT".

-Eric Clapton

I don't think I need to say more.

2-The Addams Family

For an adaptation of a tv show that was an adaptation of a comic strip, this movie was entertaining. It had Raul Julia, which automatically makes any movie 100% better, Anjelica Houston as the best representation of Morticia ever, and crazy time-travelling scientist turned crazy bald guy Christopher Lloyd.

The movie was certainly darker than the original series, but it retained the style of humor and the personalities of the characters. Wednesday didn't really have much character until this movie was made.

I like to watch the original series on TV whenever I can, as the original had a style of humor that was sometimes subtler than what was the norm for that time. The film adaptation is a good representation of the original, albeit a little less funny.

1-Star Trek(Any!!!... well, mostly Wrath of Kahn and the last reboot...)

This is maybe a biased choice... but hey, THEY ALL ARE!. Star Trek had the advantage of having the cast from the series available for the movies, which some adaptations like The Addams Family didn't have, but they managed to get all the elements that make the show good and pack them into a movie.

With the reboot, new territory was explored, with more successful results than failures. But Most of the movies are sucessful in bringing that Star Trek feel to the big screen, which is what everyone is looking for.

And that's it. These movies have these things in common: 1-They respect the source material, 2-They are entertaining 3-They might have bad script, bad actors, bad plot, bad directing, or 0 entertainment value, BUT NOT ALL OF THEM AT THE SAME TIME!

Picking these was hard because most of the tv to movie adaptations are pretty mediocre, but they're not awfully shitty ass bad, like, you know, some other movies.

The Last Airbender

2010-07-28T09:14:00.000-07:00

INCOMING WALL OF TEXT, SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB

I can summarize this entry with "The last airbender is the worst movie of the year and one of the worst tv to movie adaptations ever made", but if i did that I wouldn't get to rant about it, would I?. The tubes need some more clogging, that's what I'm here for.

Oh where do I start. I have no idea. Every second of this movie is so full of bad moviemaking that I could literally write an essay about what is wrong with this movie. Yes it's that bad. I would go as far as to say that is Manos: the hands of fate bad. I've talked about watching that one before.

After watching this movie, I sat down for a while, thinking about what could I say was good about this movie. My mind was blank. I thought "maybe the show wasn't that good after all, maybe I have a bad case of selective memory". So I watched the first two episodes of the original tv series that very night.

Nope, the show's still great.

So, for the hell of it, I would point out the things that weren't completely atrocious about this "movie":

-God Bless Mr Toub who worked with this trash of a script and managed not to look like a complete retard all the time, like all the other actors in this movie. Every time he was on screen I forgot I was being lobotomized by this movie.

-The Northern water tribe country was well crafted, the architecture was one of the few things well executed from the original series. But then again, walls and pillars don't have to recite an script.

-A few moments of the fight where Aang and the Blue spirit (Zuko in disguise) battle a horde of fire nation soldiers were pretty decent.

Does 1 decent actor, 1 decent set, and 1 decent to sub-par fight scene save this movie from craptastic grandeur? If you've been paying attention, you know the answer to that.

As I said, If I listed all the reasons to why this movie is a steaming pile of gorilla dung, it would be too long for anyone to care about reading.I could point out how this is one of the most hollow scripts with the most soulless dialog I've ever had the displeasure to watch, how everything they brought in from the series has been twisted, transformed, and disfigured for the worse. How Sokka is a lifeless idiot and a duplicate of Anakim, but with even less personality and zero sense of humor. You would think that a comic relief character should have some, but M. Night appears to disagree.

And then we have Katara, which went from a strong kid which was more of a leader than Aang ever was to yet another mumbling, lifeless idiot. Aang? a soulless skull of a character, a character you feel no emotion towards, in spite of the supposed predicament he's in... a disfigured parody of its tv series counterpart. Zuko and Iroh were OK i guess. Zuko worked better because in the series he's an emo kid full of angst, and that's how every major character is portrayed in this movie.

The story? suffice to say, nothing makes sense at all. We move from scene to scene with either no explanation whatsoever, or with a voiceover with Katara telling us what happened in her best interpretation of a speech synthesizer. "Sokka and the princess became friends very quickly"... oh right, I'm supposed to imagine them doing stuff that would make them become friends, instead of actually seeing and experiencing that. Well, that helps me like the characters more, I guess?

I am not going to go into detail because as I said before: if I do this would get a tl:dr tag (It's already long). But I assure you If I were to nitpick this movie, and I can, I can point out flaws in every single aspect of this movie. It's just a disaster.

I don't have to say that this movie pissed me off quite a bit because it's very apparent in this rant, and I don't think I've been this disappointed at a movie before, not even with the phantom menace or attack of the clones. I can resume my reaction to this movie with the 5 stages of grief

1- Denial: as I watched this movie, I was in a permanent state of denial. "It can't be this bad, it must get good at some point... "

2-Anger: "That's it??? is this gargantuan boodle of horseshit is the last airbender movie??" then I proceeded to nerdrage accordingly.

3-Bargaining: "Maybe the original wasn't as good as I remember, maybe if I watch the original again I will see everything was crappy all the time, yeah it will make everything ok again"

4-Depression: "Ugh... I was wrong, only the movie is absolute shit. My faith is lost, how can I trust any movie again not to take a dump on something I really like?"

5-Acceptance: "Well, it was crap, but at least I have the excellent original series that I can watch over and over and pretend this movie was never, ever made"

Final verdict: I don't recommend this movie for kids. Kids won't have fun because nothing fun or funny happens. There are no bright colors to distract them either. No playful Momo being a rascal with Sokka, no funny Appa. No careless, lighthearted Aang. No angsty but likable Zuko. Nothing at all for a kid. I don't recommend this movie to fans of the show, as it takes a dump on everything that made the original show a great series to watch.

I can't recommend this movie to people who like good movies, because a good movie, this is not. I can't recommend this move to people who like to watch bad movies and laugh at the badness because this isn't one of those movies. It's one of the movies you feel cheated and lobotomized, and feel genuinely sorry for the two actors that were actually trying to do a good work.

I will recommend this movie to the hacker that fucked me up and grabbed my wow and rapidshare accounts and tried to ran away with them. Fuck you.

Public Plea to Blizzard

2010-07-21T13:15:00.001-07:00

CATACLYSM BETA KEY.

PLEASE.

That is all.

Dissidia, let's finish this.

2010-07-16T11:15:00.000-07:00

So I wanted to go through each character in the game. Well I decided I should not because most of the characters act the same!. It's so silly..

They have slightly different motivations, but its so silly that they just seem to be slashing their way to the end of the game. They want to resolve everything with one thing: fighting. Most of the conversations can be resumed in 1-enemy appears 2-useless banter occurs 3-let's solve this by fighting!

I think this game would have been so much better with a lot less story. Yeah, it's weird to say that with a Final Fantasy game, but this is a fighting game. In most fighting games you get a couple of lines of dialog before each important fight (which is just the final one, most of the time) and that's enough. This game grinds its way through the conversations, and its all so hollow discussion and sometimes it just doesn't make sense at all. I was skipping EVERY conversation and cutscene on the last characters because I knew it was just 5 to 10 minutes of the character and the enemy taunting each other while delivering asinine comments about some silly quest or purpose.

To recap things real quick:

1-The warrior of light is an asshole

2-Firion is a pussy and wants a world covered in roses so he beats the living snot out of everyone who stands in his way.

3-The onion knight is supposed to be like a super smart genius but he falls in such silly traps and delivers lines so crappy that I ended up feeling a bit dizzy from all the eye rolling I did over all his nonsense. so stupid...

4-Cecil was actually cool, his story made a lil more sense than the others, and there was some conflict goin on with him.

5-Bartz was a breath of fresh air with his cheery attitude but the humor was a bit childish and.. not so funny.

6-Tera is as insecure as ever but I was very glad she wasn't sulking around all the fucking time like in ff6.

7-Cloud was just cloud being cloud. That is, a crappy character that is emo all the fucking time for no reasonable reason and is lusting for sephirot all the time, pissing me off to no end in the process.

8-Squall... was... *gulp* actually an interesting character! wow! what the fuck, I thought I would never say that in my life. But in this game, he wasn't emo, he was kinda badass, and there weren't ALMOST any "whatever.."s and the "I will be a stupid asshole for no reason"moments were almost non-existant! He wanted to be a lone wolf, but just because he wanted to protect the friends he cared about! best interpretation of squall, ever.

9-Zidane was as meh as ever and as interesting as the coffee-soaked napkins sitting below my empty coffee mug.

10-Tidus is cheery, brave, and all around the same character that I love in ff10 but that some retards tend to hate because he isn't emo all the time about stupid crap.

About the villains, I can safely resume them all in 4 words: boring, pointless, blabbering idiots. Except for Kefka. Kefka is great, he's the same psychotic clown that enjoys inflicting pain on others just for the sake of it, or because he's just bored. Or maybe he doesn't have a real reason and just want to see everything buring and each one of his enemies suffering while he eats popcorn and watches, literally. He's the ultimate troll. He's the same Joker on steroids plus superpowers, and I loved him for staying in character since ff6.

So there you go. Some of them I felt changed for the worst, and really, this game should have been much, much more lighter in story. Anyways, this game is still a must for anyone who enjoys FF games, even if it's not a classic FF RPG.

The boss is down, pick up your loot

2010-07-09T12:58:00.000-07:00

So the RealID debacle has ended.

In good time too, I was out of popcorn and coke already. Anyways, Blizzard took the right (may I add, NO-BRAINER) decision to not include our real names on forum posts for all the internet to see. The RealID boss is down, nerdscreams were heard, people are re-subbing.

SO is there something left to learn from this cataclysmic event?

I think there's plenty. For Blizzard to even consider doing this in the first place, it's mind-blowing. Considering how practically everyone capable of rational thinking knew this was a horrible idea it begs the question (In my best angry videogame nerd interpretation):

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

It could have been pressure from Activision. Or maybe they were testing the waters for a full facebook integration. Maybe they didn't think it through very well and went with the first idea someone sugested.

What do I think? It could be a mix of all of those reasons. I know what it wasn't though: It certainly wasn't just to get rid of trolls. It's stupid, it's complete, utter stupidity. It's an argument that contradicts itself. You are telling us that trolls who are people that enjoy seeing other people pissed off, will stop posting because they will have fear of using their real names? why would they have fear? ah, because someone can use that information against them, like how trolls always look at your armory or equipment as the first source of harassment. OH WAIT.

I want to think the people leading Blizzard are smart. If they weren't, they wouldn't be at the very top like they are now, so that argument doesn't make sense in the slightest.

Anyways, things are returning to normal, my anticipation for cataclysm has been renewed, so let's go back to business as usual. The forums will be getting an update, with ranking systems and the like, and that's something I think will contribute to better discussions.

RealID Debacle Continues

2010-07-08T11:07:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been an amusing 2 days for us WoW players. I posted before about the utter stupidity that is the new announcement about the official forums requiring RealID, posting your real, full name on each thread that or post you make. Blizzard customers aren't happy.

The thread where Blizzard is carefully herding all complains has reached over 40,000 posts in just 2 days. This has to be the fastest growing thread in internet's history. With over 12,000 unique users, and with a disaproval rate of over 90%, it has to be the biggest display of universal discontent over a new policy for any company of this type.

The media is all over this as well, with reports even from prestigious sources outside the industry like (unbelievably) the Wall Street Journal and the BBC. The question in my mind right now is, will Blizzard change its mind now that it is undeniably evident that this is not what their customers want?

Well, there's a lot at stake. I'm pretty sure that, as players themselves, the creative team behind the game are against this, but the big heads over at activision and blizzard just recently signed a deal with facebook in order to connect their games to the social network, and in turn attract more people to WoW and Battle.net.

This is just the start. Players know it, they know it, and it's been made clear that this is just the beginning of more things to come. Facebook "Likes" inside the game? instant feed to facebook/twitter accounts on game accomplishments? yes, yes and more. All of this comes with the privacy issues that currently surround these social networks.

If there's a time to make a stand against this, it is now. If this goes through, I'm pretty sure there will be no end to the things Activision and Blizzard will make with their customers' personal information. As i said before, I don't really mind from having my personal info being made public (as it is right now). But purposefully making a profit out of it when I never joined the game for that purpose? that's something I won't be a part of.

I grabbed my popcorn and I am watching from the sidelines. It'll be interesting to see where this ends.

Battle Net's RealID

2010-07-07T11:55:00.000-07:00

So there are news for us World of Warcraft players, the new RealID system that allows us to link our accounts under the same battle .net account, and also communicate with other players in-game regardless of server (or blizzard game), will now require us to use our real name on the official forums instead of our characters name.

This has got to be one of the worst idea, no, in fact, is the worst idea that Blizzard has ever come up with.

My name is all over the web, it's public at OCRemix. However I won't support this because it's a very different environment in there. Trolls will continue to be trolls regardless of having their identity shown to everyone, and the only people who will be hurt by this are the people who don't want their information made public.

Some people defend the decision saying that people can't do much with just a name, but I want to direct them to 4Chan or Encyclopedia Dramatica, where people's DoB, Address, and every personal detail are investigated by internet trolls by searching the web, and in many instances, hacking email accounts, etc.

In a game where you're supposed to be playing it to escape reality, this thing comes as quite the hypocrisy. I expect a lot of backlash and cancelled accounts over this.

Vuvuzelas?

2010-06-24T07:30:00.000-07:00

Every way you go, every website you visit, the common theme is The World Cup. Even in countries like mine, where Football isn't popular at all, everyone seems to be all over it. There's another common theme going on in the interwebs lately, and that is how the vuvuzelas are the most annoying thing ever.

I didn't know what was a vuvuzela, until I decided to look up a video of someone played them on youtube. To my surprise, these are the same kind of trumpets used in baseball games, carnival, concerts, and other events in my country. Are people really new to these loud things? There are even louder ones made of metal!. I don't find them annoying at all, I actually find them to be a part of any big sports event. I was baffled that people around the world have never heard of them! Even more, people complaining about hearing them in the tv transmission.

Anyhoo, hurray for the "vuvuzelas", for they make loud events even louder!

Toy Story 3

2010-06-23T06:24:00.000-07:00

So after reading some reviews I decided to watch toy story 3 this week. I called a friend and we went to a theater close to where I work. As we were looking for a good place to sit down I started hearing and seeing a lot of kids in the crowd, which is normal for this kind of movies, but I told my friend "Ugh, there are a lot of kids around, trying to watch the movie with kids yelling and laughing all the time is going to suck".

Turns out the kids were mostly quiet, and I was the one laughing all the time!

I don't know if I was laughing to loud or not, I didn't really care. I was genuinely having a lot of fun with this movie. And I wasn't really laughing at the cheap slapstick humor or anything, but at the silly situations created by the plot. Even little things like a teddy bear, a clown and a baby toy hitching a ride on the back of pixar's planet pizza pickup truck were completely hilarious for some reason. It was the silliness of these toys acting this deep, complex plot that created such a nice contrast for me.

I watched the two previous films, and while they were enjoyable, they can't hold a candle to this movie's deep plot. I am not going to go into too much detail but suffice it to say, this movie has everything, and everything is well executed. It's one of the best pixar films and that's a lot to say. It will be one of the best movies of this year, if not the best. As with wall-e, this is a contender for best movie of the year, but probably won't get that recognition because people apparently can't get over the fact that animated movies from pixar are most of the time better than whatever Hollywood spews every year.

One thing though: do not watch this movie in 3D. The 3D was VERY weak. I could take off my glasses and it wouldn't have made a lot of difference. But if you want a movie that will make you laugh, will make you care for the characters, and will make you wonder what's going to happen next all the time, then go watch this movie.

Dissidia: The asshole of light

2010-04-28T01:30:00.000-07:00

Badass.

So you might be wondering, is this guy as badass as he looks? well yes, yes he is. He is as badass as you think, and a little more. He's also a huge asshole.

But you might also be wondering, who the hell is this guy? in which game did he appear? and those are fair questions since his original in-game counterpart looked nothing like him. If you played final fantasy 1, you might remember this little red guy . He was the fighter character in the original Final Fantasy, and he's supposedly that awesome looking warrior up there. Why do they look totally different, even in the colors used for the armor and hair? well the "Warrior of Light" that we get in dissidia is based on Yoshitaka Amano's original concept art for the fighter. Amano's art is awesome so although I liked the old look I'm ok with them using Amano's vision instead.

The Warrior of Light (WoL from now on) is the leader of the group of heroes in the game, which frankly surprised me since I was expecting they would use some of the lame but popular FF characters like Cloud or Squall. He surely looks heroic enough to be a leader, and acts all rigid and focused on the final goal as well. He also enjoys being an asshole at every chance he can get. He's got a "cut to the point" attitude, and seems to think that anything can be resolved by slashing someone's guts with that fancy sword of his.

In the story mode he is after his crystal, like all the other characters. First thing he does, he goes against Garland which is the main antagonist in his original game and in this story (which is something that applies to all the other characters) and kicks his ass. That's fair, since garland just asked for it. He then encounters Sephirot and quickly orders Firion to get the fuck out and leave the fighting to him.

Sephirot: Hey sup. So you know that fighting me is pointless because you won't get your crystal, remember I'm from FF7 lulz?

WoL: OMFG i dun care I just want to kick your ass.

*Sephirot gets his ass kicked*

WoL: K thnx bai.

Since this was the first time I watched the WoL acting like this I just shrugged it off, but then he encounters Ultimecia:

WoL: lulz I can see you there.

Ultimecia: o hai hey I'm just gonna spend 3 to 5 minutes blabbing about stuff the player won't understand and taunting you k?

WoL: OMG STFU let's fight.

*Ultimecia gets her ass kicked*

Ultimecia: lol you can't kill me I appeared in another game.

WoL: kk lets have more pointless taunting then.

You might think I'm exaggerating, but he actually ask her if she's finished talking, a literal STFU. That part was kinda funny tho. Next is an encounter with Cosmos, the goddess of light and the guide of the good guys in the game.

Cosmos: Be careful, lots of crazy bosses ahead

WoL: It's better if they are all in one place (so he can kill them all more quickly, I guessed)

Cosmos: Dude, chill, you're being WAY too jumpy with that sword.

WoL: blah blah blah, Ok now GTFO of my way i have more fighting to do.

Cosmos: ...

Believe it or not I hardly changed the original words there. After some more fighting he finds The Emperor

The Emperor: Hey man, let's just take it easy, you know? Fighting accomplishes nothing, you know that don't you

WoL: well, I have noticed, yeah.

The Emperor: So what do you say if we just chill and hang out?

WoL: lol hell no, let's fight instead.

The Emperor: dude you're so annoying...

*The Emperor gets his ass kicked*

The Emperor: kk you won, now I'm gonna go back there and respawn, asshole.

*Garland appears*

WoL: OMFG WTF? didn't I kill you? are you a zombie?

Garland: lol u noob. I told you we keep respawning, now get this through your head: IT'S POINTLESS TO FIGHT!, now I gtg bye. *disappears*

WoL: WAIT!!! let's fight!!!

So after beating almost every boss in the game his thirst for blood is not yet quenched, and somehow manages to find Garland again:

Garland: for christ's sake, not you again... what do you want now?

WoL: well, take a guess.

Garland: Ok let me explain it to you: YOU CAN'T KILL US! we just keep respawning in this world, even if you looted the crystal from me I'll just respawn again and we'll keep battling forever.

WoL:... oh sorry, you were saying something? I was busy thinking how I'm gonna kick your ass this time.

Garland: oh geez...

*Garland explains some more*

WoL: So let me get this straight, even if I beat you, we'll keep a cycle of infinite battles, forever?

Garland: Exactly!

WoL: k... OH I have an idea, to end this cycle of fighting all we have to do is FIGHT! get ready here I come!

Garland: *facepalm*

*Garland gets his ass kicked... again*

Garland: ouch, that hurts...

WoL: lol pwnt.

*Crystal appears*

WoL: ooo shiny!

Garland: I might look like I'm disintegrating but I'll brb later.

And so it ends. I don't know about you, but for me a hero is not someone who follows a "see bad guy, beat up bad guy. No questions asked" pattern. That's something The Punisher would do. Not to mention that some of these fights he could just have walked away and go on with his quest to find his crystal. Playing as him felt like driving a steamroller.

All in all, his story wasn't as enjoyable as some of the others. As I said in the first article, this game's story isn't very good, but some of the characters and villains shine from time to time, the WoL didn't shine because he was a good, real, believable character, but because he looks, acts and plays like a badass. I like playin as the WoL, but he has a big attitude and personality problem.

If you want another (more serious) take on the Warrior of Light, check out this post at the gaming vault.

Stick around for the next post about the second story which I'm gonna call Firion: Never get between a man and his roses.

Badass x1000

Final Fantasy Dissidia

2010-04-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

So I've been playing final fantasy dissidia lately, I was never interested on psp games but after seeing my brother play for a while (and my internet being down at the moment) I decided to give it a try, and I must say I'm pretty much blown away. This is the definition fanservice. It reminds me of castlevania judgement for wii, it's a mediocre game but omfg it oozes fanservice. But comparing dissidia to cv judgement is a disservice because this game just plain rocks. It's fun, it has a crapload of replay value, its easy to play but deep at the same time, and again, it just gives FF fans wet dreams.

Of course, the game isn't perfect. Well, it kinda is. As far as the gameplay, it's really addictive, it just works, and it's fun, so the game is perfect in that department as far as I'm concerned, but the story and particularly, the characterization of well-known FF heroes (and sometimes the villains) leaves a bad aftertaste. Sometimes a really, really bad one.

So stick around while I dissect each chapter as I play them. The game has 10 basic chapters for each final fantasy, and in each one you play as the protagonist of that game (in some cases... well that isn't very clear. I'm looking at you, Firion!). Of course I'm not doing this in a single post, so for now, I'll leave you with the 8-bit perfection that is the black mage sprite:

If you look closely you can see a tear coming out of his eye. He's gazing out into the distance, disappointed, and sad. He's a sad black mage because he's not in this game.

Next up: "The asshole of light"

Interesting blog

2010-03-22T07:05:00.000-07:00

It's been some time since I blogged something, but after I read this blog I decided I should post something about it.

The blog is about Kristina, a student from USA who is spending some time in my country doing a project. She's entertaining to read and offers a view on how a foreigner sees my country and culture. I have a lot of friends all around the world, from places like USA, england, france, australia, russia, among others, and I would love if some of them could come over here someday. I bet they would fall in love with this country just like this girl did.

Help Overclocked Remix do the Sonic 4 soundtrack.

2010-02-10T05:35:00.000-08:00

Overclocked remix's Darkesword:

So, it's started out as a harmless little comment on Twitter.

Then it got picked up by a gaming blog.

Now it's a full blown movement.

OverClocked ReMix wants to do the music for Sonic the Hedgehog 4.I've mentioned before that some artists from Overclocked Remix got in contact with Capcom and did the soundtrack for Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix. Now we're starting a movement to get some publicity out and reach to SEGA, for the soundtrack of the upcoming Sonic the hedgehog 4.I'm pretty excited about this because I have done several sonic remixes over the years. 3 of them got published at Overclocked Remix, and several others at the now defunct VGMix. Plus some others that I've done for fun or for competitions. One of the most well known: Lightspeed, a remix of the Twinkle Park theme, has been very popular and I've seen lots of videos on youtube using it, and even a feature video at screwattack, so you may understand my excitement about all this because I could end up (with some luck) doing a song for this.

Of course there are still bif IFs, because this could come to fruition IF Sega is interested in doing the same that capcom did and ask OCR to make the soundtrack. And then IF I get picked to do a song among all the other really talented artists at OCR. Still, it's a possibility and I would love to be a part of it.

So I'll keep my fingers crossed, in the mean time I'll keep spreading the word about this, and hope that we get yet another OCR-made sountrack for a mainstream game, regardless of my participation on it!.

Retro Gaming... and everything.

2010-02-08T11:27:00.000-08:00

I'm a retro gamer. I'm a rare breed of geek that shuns the so-called new generation of games and prefers to sit down and play the same old ass games he used to play almost 2 decades ago. And I gotta say, it's a fucking great time to be one!

Not that I don't like new games. I play them, often beat them and enjoy them, but I can't remember the last modern game I played that I had beaten more than once and still want to play now. I mean, I remember beating F.E.A.R. several times and loving it. And I was playing super mario galaxy again the other day trying to beat it for the second time. Hmm and crysis, I think I beat that one 2 or 3 times.

So what's the difference? just nostalgia? well I don't really know. Those last 3 games I mentioned don't have much in common. I think they're just fun as hell and while challenging, are based on simple concepts. I think that's what I like about old games, specially from the NES era. Sure there were a lot of shitty games but the good ones, the classics, are simple, fun, and hard as fuck.

There's also something that I miss from old games, specially PC games. It was the ambition and scope of the big classics. Take star control 2 for example, it's a game where you can explore the galaxy, visit different solar systems, actually drop down to the planets which are different from each other, meet alien races, build a fleet, and all of this in a galaxy filled with hundreds of solar systems. The last game that tried to do something similar was Spore, and it fell short, really short.

Then there's this other game I blogged about some time ago, Covert Action. I could talk for pages and pages about how complex, yet simple and addictive this old PC game is. Then you add other games like alpha centauri... and well, it's sad that all we get today is brown and drag, blood-filled, testosterone-packed action games, and that they're the most celebrated.

Ugh, I got way too sidetracked...

Back to topic, it's a good time to love retro games. The videogame companies are following the trend implanted by hollywood lately: "Let's take and old show or movie, reboot/sequel it, and milk it to hell and back". But unlike the shit that hollywood comes up with, videogame companies are doing it right for the most part. Let's take a few recent examples:

Megaman 9: AWESOME game, worthy of being a classic megaman, and probably right up there with megaman 2 and 3. Also: Megaman 10 is coming to kick some 8-bit ass again.

Bionic Commando Rearmed: Unlike it's 3d counterpart, this game reboots the original while making it awesome and fun and again, hard as fuck. It feels a bit different from the original but it feels right.

New Super Mario Bros(DS/Wii): Some people say this game could have been more, and I agree they got lazy with some stuff (2 toads for player 3 and 4..) but still its a great, classic but modern mario game. I loved it and got all the coins and all the shit you could get.

Contra Rebirth: Digital awesomeness. It screams "silly action movie parody from the 80's" which is what contra was in a sense. Great, classic contra gameplay.

Castlevania Rebirth: Loved it. The Metroidvania games for the handhelds are good, but I love some classic castlevania. Give me a whip and some undead and vampires and I'm set.

A boy and his blob: Haven't played this one yet but I hear good things about it.

And very soon, I will be able to play a new Blaster Master remake, along with Sonic 4, which is the classic 2D sonic-only we have been waiting for.

So far I've got my favorite classic NES games remade in its classic format: Clastlevania, bionic commando, contra, and now blaster master. If I get a new classic ninja gaiden game, It would be the icing on the cake.

Tanking Woes

2010-02-01T05:57:00.000-08:00

Incoming World of Warcraft rant. If you have never played WoW reading this post will be like reading Egyptian hieroglyphs

So I've been levelling up a Blood Elf Paladin (tank spec) lately. I've always been an alliance player but things have been slow on alliance side that with my best friends not playing much and I being on a guild that well... it's a long story but I'm not really excited for being there.

Anyways since Blizzard included the nifty Dungeon Finder Tool I decided I should give it a try and use this new character as an experiment: levelling a toon using exclusively the dungeon finder. No quests, no mob killing outside the instance, no exploration. Although I've accepted and completed some dungeon quests that other players have shared, and turned them in, I'm trying to limit myself to not get anything explored.

For the most part it has been helluva fun, and pretty good xp too. Also I'm relearning all the classic dungeons that I haven't run in quite some years. As a tank, i get instant queues, because there are practically no tanks in my battlegroup.

But with all this fun comes some other things that aren't quite as fun or nice. Being a tank means that you are the leader, and you have the hardest work of the group. Healers in classic dungeons aren't as stressed out as tanks because there's not much damage going around. With that said, my dungeon experience would be much more fun if other players:

Did not pull for me. Some of them see the tank's a paladin, and think: "Consecrate, yay, lets pull all the mobs in the instance to him, because you know, he can't!". Consecrate is a powerful aoe tank tool but it's not snap aggro, so most of the time when they pull mobs to me they just pass through the consecrate right to another dps, or worse, the healer, and then blame the tank because "he can't get aggro".
Did not tank for me. So most dps warriors I've been grouped with tend to charge the mobs ahead of me, not caring about pats roaming around, or healer OOM, or me tanking OTHER things. To top it off they are bottom of the damage recount all the fucking time! god i hate dps warriors so much right now, it hurts.
Did not tell me how to tank. At this point, I have a warrior tank, a DK tank, and a paladin tank. The DK tank I have used for most of WoTLK and I used the warrior during BC. I think I know how to do this, and most of my runs are pretty quick, with chain pulls and taking the right path through the somewhat confusing old classic dungeons. Still some players feel the need to tell me to "go fast" or "do this and that" before we even start the run. And guess what comes after that? yup, they pull for me.
Attacked the mobs the right way. I mean, ok you are new to the melee dps and don't know you should get behind the mobs. I can kinda let that pass for warriors and enh shamans, but rogues? you are a rogue and are right besides me, trying to stab the mob in the face, and getting him to parry like crazy and go all out on me? geez. I have encountered only 1 warrior dps that got behind the mob to deal dps in the hundreds of runs I must have done by now, and I even congratulated him for it.
Did not /afk + /follow. It's a pain in the ass when you find that you have been running the dungeon for 5 or 10 minutes with a dps who is afk and following someone and just riding off the xp. To say the truth by now I've ignored most of the assholes that do this, and blizzard was smart enough to make the people on your ignored list be also ignored from your random dungeon groups, but still you find another one every once in a while.
Did not constantly ask for Recount reports. Because doing 500 dps in a level 50 dungeon is serious business.

What puzzles me is how all of this disappears for the most part when you do Heroic level 80 dungeons. which makes me think that players do this things not because they're new to the game or trying to learn, but because they're just being assholes.

In the end the good things overcome the bad when it comes to the dungeon finder, but I just wished I didn't get one of these players every 2 runs.

Ah... Fox News.

2010-01-28T05:57:00.000-08:00

I have a lot of friends and know a lot of people outside of my country, mostly from online communities like OCRemix, and most of them coincide that Fox News sucks. Now I don't watch TV and only read local online newspapers and seldom check CNN and BBC for international news, but I happened to stumble on this particular article and.. wow. Mind = Blown.

The ignorance and incompetence, not to mention the lack of fact checking and familiarity with context of the topic is mind-blowing. Seriously? a merge of the dominican republic and haiti? how would that solve anything? Let's think about this for a second:

First, although the island was indeed, one whole country for some part of the 19th century, it was always divided by different cultures and origins. The part of the island that is now Haiti was conquered by the French, and overpopulated by African slaves, while the other part was conquered by the Spanish, whom had a bigger representation of their government, culture and people than what the French had in their side of the island. Also there were the original habitants of the island before the colonization, the "aborigenes" and also like in the French side but at a much smaller scale, there were African slaves in the Spanish side.

Over the years the difference in culture, form of government, religion, and language only grew stronger until it ended with what we have now, two completely different countries that happen to share the same island. Stating that they should be merged is like stating that Spain and Portugal should be merged, or that the USA and Mexico should be merged.

But even putting aside these facts, what good would this fusion do? we're already a poor country, not nearly as poor as haiti but still we're not even in the top 15 most developed of latin america, so attaching the poorest country to our economy would drive it to bankruptcy. Not to mention the problems of adapting the Haitian people to our laws, culture, etc. It's a logistics nightmare that a 3rd world country definitively can't achieve.

0ur country is sending truckloads of help, raising money, our government is hosting all the international meetings and doing everything they can to get help from other countries and international organizations for Haiti, our hospitals are already overloaded with people from Haiti that needed treatment after the disaster, what else can people want? we even were helping probably more than anyone else before this tragedy happened, because before this disaster Haiti wasn't in the headlines of CNN or Fox and all they had for support were their closest neighbors.

So yeah pretty dumb and ignorant article. I bet some nations would be happy if this were to happen as they can leave all the responsibility to us, but helping Haiti or any other overly poor nation isn't the duty of just their closest neighbors, its the duty of the entire world.

Manos: The Hands of Fate

2010-01-27T08:25:00.000-08:00

So.. I watched the MST3K episode featuring Manos: The Hands of Fate.

And... well, yeah, Manos, the hands of fate... yeeeeah.

Manos! the hands of fate... what else can be said. It's the worst movie ever made without a doubt. Its just... you'll never expect... I mean, you can never be prepared to how bad it really is. And then when it's over you realize that, yes it was THAT bad.

Manos, the hands of fate. It has changed my life. I think it should be one of the best MST3K episodes ever because it was so damn hilarious, and I think I can't possibly go through the entire movie without the riffs delivered by the MST3K cast.

So, if you have 2 hours of your life to spare, and be warned that these are 2 hours that you'll forever want back, you should give manos a try. It's on google video, so go watch it!

The master will probably not approve though...

Earthquake in Haiti

2010-01-19T06:03:00.000-08:00

So, as most of the world knows by now, Haiti has experienced one of the worst disasters of the century, a 7.3 earthquake. As I live in the Dominican Republic, we felt it very hard too, but luckily we only experienced some minor damage to some structures and well, it was kind of a big scare.

The situation in Haiti, however, couldn't be worse. The Capital of the country, Port-au Prince, was completely destroyed and people are in need for help there. As a Dominican we have witnessed the poverty and calamities that the Haitian people had to go through, and now after the earthquake, well it's unimaginable how these people will get through.

If you are reading this and want to lend a hand, I suggest the american red cross, the situation is of a catastrophe and it's only getting worse, so even a little help goes a long way.

OverClocked Remix turns 10

2009-12-16T10:58:00.000-08:00

So, most of the people I know are familiar with OverClocked Remix, a website famous for hosting some of the best re-interpretations of videogame music out there. Its hard to believe that the website has been running for 10 years now, and that I've been part of it for a good 9 years and a few months.

I remember finding this little jewel back in 1999, it was this crude website which had this eye-burning orange background and where the only way to navigate through the songs was this huge combo list with the name of the songs, and you could only download the songs at certain times of the day because the songs were offline for a good part of the day everyday.

But all this really didn't matter, it also didn't matter that I had to download every song at a whopping 2 kbps, I knew I had to download every and each one. McVafee, AE, Joe Redifer, Disco Dan, Evil Horde, Virt, and the very owner of the website, djPretzel, were some of the remixers around in the day, that made some of the songs that I still listen to even today.

I've seen the website going from its humble beginnings to the big community that it is today, and I'm always happy when the website manages to go one step forward. Now this community is recognized by the very own artists they make remixes for, and has gone as far as making a soundtrack for a commercial game, which is also a remix of an older videogame, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix.

In the end I have a lot to thank OCR for. It gave me a motivation for learning music composition and software synthesis, which turned into one of my favorite pastimes, it gave me great music, and it also gave me some good friends. So although I'm not as active in the community as I was 3 or 4 years ago, I have to say thank you OCR, and thanks to David Lloyd and his staff.

Awesome Trek

2009-12-02T11:42:00.000-08:00

So, I got a bunch of movies to watch this week. Among them was the last Star Trek, which I wanted to watch when it was released but never got around to do it. After the disappointment that was the new Star Wars trilogy, I really wasn't expecting much when I popped this sucker in. Oh but I was pleasantly surprised.

This is just a good movie, period. The acting, casting, direction, everything was spot on, and really, for a reboot of an old, mostly campy space opera series, you can't really ask for more. It avoids the usual traps that remakes of old movies fall in, and also doesn't overdo it on special CG animation, the whole movie just felt really solid to me.

I never watched the original Star Trek as a child, I grew up with "The Next Generation", I was more of a Star Wars kid, watching the (still great) original trilogy over and over on my father's VCR. However I have watched the original Star Trek and I could identify all the little nods and references. This isn't really a straight ripoff, no one is trying to make a carbon copy of their 1960 counterparts, they bring the essence of the original characters, and make them their own, and unlike the horrible new star wars trilogy, the actors feel natural and most of them feel like real people, unlike George Lucas' script-reciting robots. When Spock's mom dies, you care. When Anakin's mom dies, you wonder why you are wasting your precious time watching it.

Anyhoo, two thumbs up for this one. unlike what Hollywood has been trying to make us believe by churning out soulless space opera crap-fests every once in a while, space sci-fi movies can still be done well, and it makes me happy. I think the trekkers should be proud.

Coming back...

2009-11-30T08:47:00.001-08:00

Well it's been quite a long time since I posted anything here.

I doubt anyone reads it anyways but here goes:

I have a new job now, I'm quite enjoying it, I am working with friends, its a nice place, and I am doing what I like to do.

Besides that, I've been playing a little game named Torchlight. At first glance, it looks like a diablo clone, and it is, but can you really call it a clone if its made by the people behind diablo 1 and 2?

Anyways, unlike the many other diablo clones out there, this one gets the gameplay just right. The loot, the monsters, the spells, the satisfying feel of upgrading your character, the solid gameplay, it's all just very well done. The game is small, compared to modern games that take a whole dvd, this one could fit nicely in a cd, but what it lacks on jaw-dropping cinematics or tons of spoken dialog, it boasts personality and solid, engaging gameplay. For people who loved diablo 2 and have been waiting for a game that just plays like it but looks and feels updated, this is as good as it gets, that is, until diablo 3 arrives. The game is just tight.

All work and no internet makes Mike a dull boy.

2009-05-05T14:27:00.000-07:00

So other than the internet I can access at work (which is where I've been posting shit from), I have been disconnected for like 2 weeks now. My ISP is the ultimate form of SUCK, but it's the only one that can provide the service around my area. But since it isn't working anyways, I might as well cancel it and start carving drawings in caves.

Aside from that, it has been an... interesting week. I was sick for most of the week of something that must be the ultimate boss form of the swine flu, which didn't let me sleep at night at all. I got a memo graciously telling me that for the next 2 months or so I have to work 3 or more extra hours a day to get a project done before the deadline. Then my car decided that I wasn't having enough of a rough time so he blew up 2 tires, one of them twice. Then there's this guy who thought that going up the wrong way while I was taking out my car out of parking at 2 am in the morning was TOTALLY AWESOME hit me and broke one of my car's tail lights. Oh, and my rock band 2 save file got corrupted just yesterday, right when I got my wii back after 3 weeks without playing it.

Needless to say, I'm in a GREAT MOOD. Oooooh yeah you bet your ass I am. I encourage everyone I know to call me right now and ask me to lend them money, or to do them a favor I wouldn't normally do, or heck, if you ever made out with one of my girlfriends while we still were in a relationship, this is also an awesome time to confess.

Sid Meier's Covert Action

2009-05-01T08:54:00.000-07:00

If there's one thing I like about old DOS games, is that back then, the guys who did the games didn't have to investmost of their time and resources in implementing or developing a fancy state-of-the-art 3D engine with real-life physics, complex filters and all the mumbo-jumbo that games today have to carry. It was just a few guys (sometimes even just one guy) and a cool idea.

Not to say there weren't bad games back then, or that games today are generally worse (though some may argue). It's just that sometimes games today can get lost by worriyng too much about fancy graphics, or following stablished clichés, and some other things that not necesarilly improve what is most important: the gameplay.

But this isn't going to be a rant about that. This post is a bout a little game called Covert Action, created by the genious called Sid Meier (the mind behind Pirates!, Civilization, Alpha Centauri, Colonization, Railroads!, F-15 Strike Eagle). This is one of my favorite games of all time.

I started off with the long introduction because I felt it was needed in order to explain what makes this game so great and unique. There's simply no other game like it out there, and believe me I've looked.

So what is it about? well, in this game, you are an international detective/spy, part of the CIA. Sort of like a James Bond with Batman brains. The game is divided in missions, at the start you get a few clues about the crime. It can be about what the crime is going to be about, or who is involved, or what organizations are involved, or in which city is happening, etc. After that it's up to you to find out what's going on, who's involved, and how to arrest them or prevent the crime.

The game is a mix of a lot of things. Part carmen sandiego, mixed with an action game, mixed with several puzzle games. You have several tools at your disposal, you can travel to a known hideout of an organization, or an unkown address obtained in a clue or investigation, you can decypher coded messages, you can contact other agencies, it's pretty complex.

Say for example that you have a clue leading to a known hideout. You first travel there, and you have the option to watch the building for anyone suspicious coming out of it, or you can try to tap the phone lines, or you can try to break in. If you decide to wait and someone suspicious appears, you can try to follow him/her by car, or you can put a tracker on his car and let him/her go (maybe it will lead you to another suspicious address). If you tap the phone lines you enter a little minigame that will look awfully familiar to people who have played bioshock or Fallout 3. If you decide to break in, you enter a top-down perspective and the game becomes an action game.

After the break in, you can look into the hideout and open file cabinets for clues, take photographs of files, open safe boxes, hack computers and search for a topic related to the crime for answers, kill bad guys, and if a suspect is actually in the hideout, you can take him as a prisioner and then escape the hideout. If you have enough information on him, you can turn him into a double agent, or just simply arrest him.

Describing the possibilities and all the things you can do in this game will take me pages, needless to say, it's incredibly complex but if you can think of something a spy can do to solve a crime, you can do it here. PLUS, all the crimes are randomly generated, you can never play the same mission twice, and it does it in a way that it feels like a real crime is being planned and commited because all the pieces fall in place, and as time passes so the crimes start developing.

The only flaw of this game is the action parts, because the controls are very clunky. Other than that, this game is a forgotten masterpiece. It has influenced so many other masterpieces as well, like bioshock and fallout 3 as I said before, and the randomly generated missions influenced many other games as well. This is a game that I've been playing for years now, and always come back to it for more. If you want a game that is both complex but addicting and with infinite replay value, then look no further.

If you are a hi-res graphics snob, or old games turn you off just because they are old, then GTFO of my blog you ignorant turd.

Screenshots and descriptions: http://www.mobygames.com/game/sid-meiers-covert-action/screenshots

MS Rant

2009-04-24T08:18:00.000-07:00

So in the spirit of clogging the tubes, and bringing something TOTALLY NEW to the interwebs, I am going to rant about Microsoft. More specifically about their stupid, behind the times, stubborn, slow, hell to design for, gargantuan waste of code and resources called Internet Explorer.

See, most people wouldn't notice the difference between using IE or another, vastly superior internet browser such as Firefox, Chrome, or Opera. And I don't have a problem with that. The problem is that, I'm a web developer, and when I have waste time writing the same code TWICE because MS is so fucking stubborn on not following any fucking standart out there, it pisses me off to no end.

Instead of following what everyone does, and making their products compatible with the rules and standars clearly outlined and widely known, they decided long ago that they are the fucking kings of everything and that everyone should pander to their own way of how things should be. And you know, 8 years ago that wasn't so bad. After all, they were the majority, they ruled the webspace. No one cared about supporting a web browser that was used by less than 0.5% of the population. IE was king, and their word was the rule.

But things changed. IE is still the most used browser, but that statistic is going in decline (rightously so), and in some places other browsers like Firefox are gaining the upper hand with the users.

But this isn't a rant about that. It's about how they are still fucking stubborn about adapting. IE8 was supposed to be a browser capable of competing with the previously mentioned superior browsers out there. But guess what, they failed again, and failed hard. Let's look at one brief example. Say you want to set the opacity of an element through css. To do this in any fucking browser out there, all you have to do is:

opacity: 0.5;

Simple enough right? Well microsoft said that was pure bullshit, and in previous versions of IE, you had to add this line, exclusive for IE, to make that simple task work:

filter: alpha(opacity=0.5);

And you can say, well that's not too bad. And yeah it isn't until you have to spend developing time figuring out why your crap is working on every damn browser but in ie. Then you have to figure out the little nuances, like how the code above won't work by itself because you have to position the element (even if it doesn't needs explicit positioning) to make it work.

And you can say, well IE8 promised to adhere to every standart out there, so we designers and developers don't have to waste time on finding what the fuck was that developer smoking when he decided to do things their way. Well, you're WRONG.

-ms-filter:"progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Alpha(Opacity=50)";

What the fuck?

I mean... what the fuck is this shit? come on. Throw us a bone out here. This is just but one example of what can make you want to tear your hair out. There's javascript functions tailor-made for IE, shit like the previous example in css, even stupid simple shit like XML.

I don't know what could ever be the thinking behind the turds who think that STILL going against the norm is a good idea in this day. Designers and developers hate this, and guess what, your market share is shriking, which means that probably, you will see websites that will treat you like how we treated Netscape some years ago. As the black sheep who nobody wants to support.

I'm not one of those Firefox militant assholes, nor I am trying to sell anyone to change to another browser. I used to love Firefox and use it everyday and recommend it to everyone that wanted a better internet experience, but as soon as I started using Google Chrome I changed in a heartbeat. It's still buggy, but its a simple browser packed with a lot of good ideas an functionality, and very light (in my experience). I'm just a developer who hates to waste time on simple things that should be that, SIMPLE. What I'm trying to say here is, I don't care what the most used browser is, but when the most used browser is still pulling bullshit like this on us, it's hard to not publicly burn it at the stake.

And now you're going to say...

2009-04-17T09:33:00.000-07:00

The Interwebs is huge. It's a magical and misterious place where you can find anything and everything that you can and can't think about.

So here I am sitting on my desk, thinking "What does these series of tubes need? and how can I help clogging them?", and as I took the last sip from my morning coffee, I just had an epiphany: "Clearly, what the internets need is another guy posting stuff that noone will care about, the intarwebs need another useless blog about random stuff. It needs me."

The rest, is history. Or perhaps future.