You see, their young enter through the ears and wrap themselves around the cerebral cortex. This has the effect of rendering the victim extremely susceptible to suggestion. Later, as they grow, follows madness and death.
Full disclosure: I’m cheating this week.
That’s not a screenshot of a community level up there. I want to bring you community levels for the above-the-fold part of these weekly columns. The way I did with the dailies. But I couldn’t for this week. My PS3 went all wonky last week and refused to connect to the Play-Stay-shone Network. This happens from time-to-time. Usually I just ride it out. But I couldn’t for this week’s column because I was fixing to go out of town and needed a couple levels in the bank. So I cheated and played a story level. It was called “Invasion of the Body Invaders” and it was great. You go into the body of Dr. Higginbotham and fight infections.
Heh. That makes me think of PC gaming all of a sudden. How stupid that is! With all of those nasty viruses. Glad I switched to my trusty console. Phew! I’m sure all this PSN silliness will be sorted out by the time I get back hom—
Wait. What?
After the jump, stockpile syndrome Continue reading →
The first Final Fantasy was very different from what would be released little more than a year later as Final Fantasy II in America (and is properly known as Final Fantasy IV). People misremember how open the original was, your progress was always gated in the world by very specific choke points even if the game didn’t always tell you where to go next, or why. And while you were able to create your own party of characters, you still never made any decisions that affected the game’s outcome. Final Fantasy IV used that linearity to craft a much tighter, more resonant story. It also eliminated the character creation and substituted a large cast of well defined characters around whom the narrative revolved.
In Japan this was an evolution that took four years and four games, but for the English audience there was little more than a year between the two releases. The change was stark and shocking. By this time the Japanese role-playing game had strayed very far afield of the computer or pen and paper that had once been the inspiration. More than any game before it, Final Fantasy IV placed character drama at the forefront. The result was perhaps the most influential game the genre has ever seen.
After the jump, the primordial ooze from whence all JRPGs are descended. Continue reading →
This year will be the 70th anniversary of the launching of the final German drive on Moscow, Operation Typhoon (in German: Taifun). And it’s the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Russia itself, obviously. Don’t bogart my point, which is that this game diary entry is about Operation Typhoon. It’s probably one of the most significant battles in the history of the world, and some would argue that the outcome was decided before it started. Others would argue that it didn’t have to happen at all. The latter group would be wargamers.
Apologies to Italians, Hungarians, and Rumanians for what they’ll read after the jump Continue reading →
I don’t think Bethesda is clear on how patches for videogames are supposed to work. Ideally, a patch makes a game work better. But with each successive patch for Fallout: New Vegas, Bethesda has made is increasingly difficult for me to play the game on the Xbox 360, where Microsoft’s certification process is doing a fine job being asleep at the switch.
With the first patch, Fallout: New Vegas locked up every time I went into the main city hub. With the second patch, the game locked up every time I entered combat. Now, with the patch that was just released today, Fallout: New Vegas locks up every time I try to load a saved game. Bethesda is nothing if not consistent!
I don’t really know why I like gory horror movies. I hate actual gore. I’m squeamish about the sight of blood. After 9/11, I went to give blood and I fainted before they managed to wring even a pint out of my arm. I hate seeing people get hurt for real in supposedly funny YouTube videos. I once saw someone get hit by a car in the real world, and I was surprised at my reaction: I turned my head away. It only lasted for a moment, and I pretty quickly got my wits about me and went to help the guy. But I’ll never forget my reflexive reaction was to turn my head so I wouldn’t see what was going to happen.
But I like horror movies, on a couple of different levels. A really good horror movie is actually horrifying and cathartic and hopefully has some sort of larger message, but I won’t recommend it to most people, because if it affected me, it’s got to be pretty dire. A really bad horror movie is just flat-out disgusting and I want no part of it. But most horror movies are in between and I would characterize them as basically funny. There’s something fundamentally absurd about movie gore, and slasher films, and creature features, and so forth. That’s why I love a recent horror movie called Rubber, which features shots of exploding heads, but in the context of a meta message about watching horror movies. In its own absurd and slightly pretentious way, Rubber clarified for me why I like gory horror movies.
Speaking of absurd and pretentious, I’ll actually get around to reviewing Mortal Kombat after the jump. Continue reading →
