pancakes and gandalf

I picked up Far Cry 2 a while ago and recently I finally got around to it, and god damn I wish I hadn’t. The premise is that you’re in Africa and hate your life so you’re constantly travelling to arbitrary locations, either killing a guy or collecting an item – there’s only 2 quest types – and then coming back again. Where’s the fun in that?

Because I'll tell you where it fucking isn't.

Playing this game just isn’t fun. The characters are entirely forgettable, and the plot pretty much has no bearing on what you’re effectively doing. There are 4 main things you find yourself doing in the game: story quests, buddy quests, assassination quests and convoy quests. And all of them are going from A to B, killing or taking B, and sometimes returning B to A, and my god is it mundane.

Meanwhile ofcourse, while travelling to the destination of each quest you’ll find yourself constantly fighting random Africans that come out of nowhere and try to ram you off the road and fight you. I don’t get it. These encounters aren’t fun, and they’re certainly not difficult… so WHY are you doing them the ENTIRE game? Its like a horde of flies buzzing in your face relentlessly, not providing any particular challenge as you swat them away, but succeed in transforming a boring experience into a fucking frustrating one. And would it kill the game to tell me the actual name of the guns I’ve equipped so I know what I’m using and what to upgrade rather than just guessing by the icon?

So yeah, Far Cry 2, don’t play it.

I would’ve updated more frequently, but I haven’t finished anymore games lately, nor done anything that I think particularly warrants its own post, so I’m making a weekly encompassing update.

On the “game front”: The other week I posted about my “one rule” with games: trying to finish them before I buy more which I’m EXCEEDINGLY retarded at. I probably finish 1 game for every 3 I buy – I play them but I don’t usually see them to completion. I bought Pyschonauts for the Xbox mainly because its a pretty cool game and I wanted a hard copy, I don’t know if I’ll play it unless I run out of the new stuff. Also bought Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2, of which I’ve completed neither (yet). I’ve put an ungodly amount of time into Dragon Age and I’m no where near the end at all (up to Ironforge… I mean Orgrimmar… I mean ORZAMMAR!). The game isn’t without its faults, but I’ll cover them in an update once I finish the game. Mass Effect 2 is turning out to be extremely fun so far, I’ll comment on it in its entirety later. I played a bit more Lost Odyssey, again I’ll post about this later – been trying to finish this game for like 2 years now.

IRL stuffs: Its been a pretty insane week for me as its been a while since I’ve had my entire week booked out like this. On Monday and Wednesday I ran errands with a friend, Tuesday and Thursday I had work, Friday was free, Saturday I had my sister’s birthday lunch, an 18th and a 21st. Lunch was awesome as its been a while since I’ve seen the gang, the 18th was “okay” – I didn’t know anyone there bar the host and my +1, and the 21st more than made up for that in awesomeness so it worked out. And I paid $50/2 for a cab to change parties, oh well!

Uni starts this week, but my timetable is pretty light this time around – at least in terms of lectures and what have you. Vowing to be vigilant in my studies this time round as I’ve taken up a few harder subjects like Graphics Programming – which I have NO idea about, and I hear its difficult.

Mass Effect is an amazing game and, with striking contrast to Fallout 3, demonstrates how to make a fantastic RPG. Intriguing story and walls of text you want to read? Check. Detailed characters that you come to love (bar Ashley, she’s a bitch), and stellar voice acting? Check. Strategic action combat system and detailed character building? Check.

Robert Downey Jr.? Check.

This game is just superb. The premise is that humans have made first contact, and you’re uncovering a plot that could lead to the genocide of all advanced life in the galaxy. Along the way you encounter a myriad of engrossing characters, subplots, factions, races, and its insanely well written. If you’re a fan of any scifi that follows an unlikely crew around the galaxy and their adventures then this is the game for you. In terms of style this probably mirrors Farscape more than anything.

I decided to play this again for 2 main reasons: I wanted to brush up on the story before playing Mass Effect 2, and I want to play the sequel on 360 so I need a save to carry onto the next game (finished it on PC the first time). The game was as brilliant as I remembered, and I decided to do without hybrids – last time I took Wrex and Garrus, who are Solider/Biotic and Soldier/Engineer respectively. This time I chose Liara (pure Biotic) and Tali (pure Engineer), and subsequently had a lot more fun using their abilities strategically. And they’re wemmenz so I could have sandwiches whenever I wanted and they’re more interesting characters… IN BED. Har har, no really, I chose Liara as my love interest in the romantic subplot. In my last play through I neglected the romance subplot completely.

I uncovered a few cool things I didn’t find in my first play through, and missed out on some other events that I couldn’t trigger for the life of me – there’s a really moving scene with someone having a breakdown in the docking bay and it didn’t happened this time sadly.

So yeah, Mass Effect, play it. Right. Now.

Before I say anything I should clarify my disappointment is with the event itself at Fortitude Valley and not the Chinese nor their ability to celebrate the new year a month and a half after everyone else. It was alright I guess – we wandered around China Town, had some food and there were dragons.

You do like dragons don't you? 'Course you fucking do.

I kind of wish I’d taken a few more pictures than I did (read: more than one). We started with a mosy around the ton of tiny stalls selling a lot of trinkets and stuff, then had lunch at a Thai restaurant, misced around some more, saw the dragons, misced and left. Talk about entertainment.

Overall there were fewer attractions than I would’ve liked. I suspect the aim of the event is to bring people to China Town that wouldn’t normally go, meanwhile delivering some entertainment and more keyed towards a family kind of thing. Probably not the best destination for a group of 20 year old’s to rock out.

Hey, atleast we weren’t charged $15 entry like we were at Oktoberfest.

I enjoyed Assassins Creed 2, but the game was formulaic as hell. The premise is that you’re an assassin hell-bent on sprucing up his house, running and stabbing people. And the game’s fucking hard.

Fucking hard.

You’re effectively a one man army. Hell, the AI is pretty shit too – often I’d see 4 guards, stab 2 in the face (you get double assassination blades), then the others are like “!” “What was that?”, before I casually walk over, stab both of them in the face as well, and there I am covered in blood, surrounded by a crowd of people wondering who the assassin was.

For the most part the game is a collect-a-thon, meanwhile you’re uncovering a templar conspiracy by going from A to B and killing everyone in between. There isn’t that much to the game, but there’s considerable improvement over the first, such as much more stuff to do (anything to do), the game isn’t anti-fun when you decide to kill a random anymore, you can swim, and they’ve removed the “openworld-kinda-sorta” approach. The game is definitely beautiful and I did find myself just running around for a while.

Having said that, the game started to run out of steam after a while for me since it starts getting as repetitive as the first, but they compensated for this by giving you plot incentives. You can unlock a video called “The Truth” by collecting 20 fragments, which totally rocks the socks off the plot, and the ending certainly raises more questions than it answers (definitely pumped for the sequel). I clocked in at a bit under 50 hours played, but a lot of it was busywork and I’m not sure if it counted when I left the game paused. I had fun, and I recommend the game, but its not a must-play.

I have to admit I’m a bit of a Trekkie, as we Star Trek nerdians call them. Thrice a week I don myself with my captain’s uniform and sweatpants, cheering for the Enterprise across the galaxy. Well none of that’s true, but I do like Star Trek, or some of it, or one of it, the only Star Trek I maintain is any good: The Next Generation (it has Patrick Stewart, it literally can’t be bad).

It looks like a modifcation to the dylithium concord array has retroactivity sycronized the tetrion particles with the holodeck. Oh wait, that makes no fucking sense.

Its a great series though; the characters are insanely likable and you find yourself actually caring about them, and the technology, although nonsensical, is always intriguing and somehow strangely consistent. Unfortunately its hard for me to recommend the series to anyone because the first season is reminiscent of 70’s sci-fi. A low budget and situational music isn’t very convincing to anyone looking to not gouge their sensory input.

Side note: according to Wikipedia we call sweatpants “trakky daks” in Australia. If someone calls them that in front of me I’ll ensure they’re no longer the owner of a face, not even kidding.

This is money.

Recently a friend of mine has informed me that money can be obtained by getting a job, and she got me one where I turn up once a week, read a book for 4 hours and leave. Not even kidding. Well there’s something about being a support role for an autistic teenager thrown in there, but so far all I’ve done is read my book. Pretty sweet job. During the semester I usually tutor people in programming, but the demand for it usually doesn’t start until the first assignment is announced and people start realising they don’t know what the fuck a computer is.

Its true, money is a pretty cool guy.

For the better part of the last year and a half I haven’t been working on FF72DR. For the uninitiated, that’s the name for my 2D remake of Final Fantasy VII. I can’t explain it, but sometimes I’m almost determined not to work on it as I am to work on it. The sheer prospect of undertaking such a project is maddening to so many people, that I take immense pleasure from working on something people think is impossible. However, at the same time it can be extremely difficult. Coding is fine, that’s always come to me pretty naturally. But the big stumbling block for me has been the art.

One of requirements I’ve set for the game is that all the backgrounds will be custom drawn (by me at this point until I can wrangle a pixel artist with enough free time). The main reason for my determination on this factor is that its one of the things that will set this project apart from attempts other people have made. Usually in the field of snes-type remakes people opt for using tilesets ripped from popular snes games – particularly FF6, Secret of Mana, Seiken Densetsu 3 and Chrono Trigger, among others. But it makes the game look pretty shabby and uninspired unless used correctly, and if I tried to recreate FF7 with art from other games it would be barely recognisable.

My reproduction in the top left against the 2 main reference pictures

Its a slow process, but I’m finding it very rewarding.

During one of my regular EB raids I stumbled across a copy of Fallout 3 for $31, so I figured what the hell and shelled out for it. I played Fallout 3, I finished Fallout 3, and it was fucking mundane.

Fucking mundane.

I suppose I should start at the beginning: I think Bethesda are terrible game designers. If anyone knows how to make a tedious, unintuitive game its these guys. That may sound harsh, but I really don’t understand a lot of their game design choices. The game is anti-exploration. You literally have more fun if you avoid exploring for the sake of exploring. Oblivion had this problem, Fallout 3 has this problem. You’re promised a whole post-apocalyptic wasteland to adventure, people to meet and decisions to make. What I got was a bloated wasteland with 60 hours of busywork.

I have to give the game credit for tapping into the OCD part of me that wants to explore the entire map and finish everything, but the game isn’t designed to compliment this play style. At first the game is hella intriguing: you’re covering new ground, discovering details about the past, upgrading and leveling up your character. Great. But then you start to realise that every derelict building looks exactly the same, you’ve already learned about the past, there’s little to upgrade and you’ve hit the level cap.

I spent the better half of 60 hours exploring the entire map and some of it was pretty rewarding. Most of it was insanely repetitive: going from corridor to corridor collecting ammo I didn’t need and little else. There’s occasional quests but they’re extremely basic escort and kill quests with the odd decision here and there. There wasn’t even any moral ambiguity in your decisions; you’re either good or bad and that’s it.

Half the game.

But yeah, world map was twice as large as it needed to be given the level cap, which I hit 30 hours in and yet finished the game at 60.  I largely kept playing only because I’d invested so much time in it already. I really can’t recommend this game. There’s better games to spend your money on.

Bayonetta (on the 360) has been on my do-want list for sometime, mostly due to insane quality of animation demonstrated in the trailers and general buzz around the game. And hey, theres some tig ol’ bitties to be had.

Seriously, those are some massive legs.

I ordered the game off eBay, and typical of Hong Kong, it took about 3 weeks to get here. But I’m not about to complain about shipping on a game I paid ~60% of the Australian RRP. Fortunately my anticipation was met with amazing gameplay and I had a blast during the 12 hour campaign. Some of the animation is close to breathtaking and the style is VERY Japanese (fan service and jumbled story ahoy!). The story was absolute garbage though. It BARELY made any sense at all. I got it, but it wasn’t the least bit appealing. The character’s are extremely shallow also, but the cut scenes are usually entertaining atleast.

Another thing: this game is hard. And I mean really hard. And I mean really fking hard. And I mean I was playing on normal (I think there’s 2 harder settings?) and sometimes I needed 10 continues to beat a boss. However, its one of those games that’s so finely polished that you know the screw ups are your own fault for sucking so you feel compelled to try again until you get it right.

Anyway I highly recommend this game and the ending is epic.