This is my first view of Atom-city from behind the wheel. In addition to showing me that is indeed how I’m supposed to write “Atom-city,” my opening diary entry informs me that on September 24th, 2006, there was a failure at the particle collider there. As everyone in the post-924 world (never forget!) knows, when your large hadronic collider has a “White Ring” anomaly that’s accompanied by “forceful energy blowouts”, everyone around it is either going to die, or turn into a zombie. Or, as my diary puts it, they will pass into a “somnambulic state,” which really doesn’t seem like the right term even if you are a Romero purist about what exact state of unpersonhood constitutes zombieness. It may be an accident of translation, but if so it’s a happy one–the frequently bizarre phrasing adds to the sense of disorientation from the start.
Keep reading after the jump to learn the solution to all problems. Continue reading →
After the disappointing With Fire and Sword, I went back to Warband, the previous expansion for Mount and Blade. With the benefit of a fair amount of patching, it is devoid of any crippling issues and one of my favorite games in the recent past. It was only last week that I realized I had a way to write about Warband in a relatively fresh manner.
I could create a female character.
After the jump, the fairer sex Continue reading →
If you’re going to review Portal 2, that’s cool with me if you don’t bring up Jesus. Seriously, I’m totally okay with that. I reviewed Portal 2 here and I didn’t once mention Jesus, or any other religious figure. It’s a perfectly viable approach. So why would I have a problem with this Jesusless review of Portal 2?
Because the site is called Christ Centered Gamer. I followed a link to the review because I was genuinely curious to read a Christian perspective on Portal 2. Doesn’t a game about an all-powerful being putting her hapless subject through trails resonate with a religion that sees fit to include the story of Job in its bible? Isn’t there a cute analog to the Incarnation of Christ when GlaDOS is made flesh in a potato, tormented by a bird, bereft of much of her power, and brought to a closer relationship with Chell? Do I detect something Christian in Portal 2’s vertical movement, plunged into the depths and eventually reaching into the heavens? Doesn’t Wheatley’s easy descent into cruelty say something about human sin, even if he’s a man-made simulacrum of humanity? Isn’t Cave Johnson about as big a blowhard as Paul? Okay, I’m not really a Christian, so it’s not my job to come up with that stuff, but that’s the sort of thing I’d like to read about.
Instead, I got a review that’s no different from what I could read on a boring ass secular site like Gamespot or IGN. It’s all stuff that may as well be on the back of a box. Not a shred of insight, much less Christian insight. Which is really nothing new. So many reviews are dryly observational, minus any meaningful perspective, or much insight, or even context.
I poked around Christ Centered Gaming in vain, hoping to read about how Alan Wake’s dark world might resonate with a Christian, or how a Christian might feel about the historical representation of his religion in Paradox’s strategy games like Victoria II. No such luck. Instead, the Christian perspective is reduced to an absurd morality score, explained here, in which points are docked based on the presence of occult themes, profanity, violence, homosexuality, or disrespect for family values. In other words, the only potentially interesting observations are reduced to a numerical score that equates Christianity with facile morality. I suppose it’s about as helpful as any review score.
I hope no one ran out and bought Motorstorm over the weekend because of all the nice things I said about the courses in my last entry. It’s actually become a bit of a chore to play at this point, but maybe I just need a break. So today I’m not going to tell you about how frustrating it gets to repeat the same race half a dozen times with no sense of what you’re doing wrong, how to improve, or any alternative if you want to make progress.
Instead, after the jump I’m going to talk about that guy clinging to the side of my car, and maybe Amped 3. Continue reading →
Why the Hell aren’t you people playing Yakuza 4? It’s so goddamned joyously weird it nearly defies explanation. I mean, Yak 3 was like this (courtesy of Lizard King):
There is no way to describe this game accurately in a manner that is going to make it sound anything but ludicrous for most people, but…any game where boss fights are frequently heralded by mutual shirt ripping and flexing of lavishly illustrated yakuza tattoos and you don’t run screaming out of the madness vortex that ought to create has to be doing something right.
And Yakuza 4 is Yakuza 3 turned up to 11, simmered in man what sauce, dressed in all pink and sporting a sweet afro. I am mixing metaphors because Yakuza 4 just doesn’t give a fuck.
Mew Shoes, Noire, sexy Hillary and Ambrose Burnside’s greatest victory after the jump. Continue reading →
If you haven’t had your fill of Legos or Pirates of the Caribbean, you’ll have to let me know how Legos: Pirates of the Caribbean is. I can’t be bothered to try it not just because I’ve had my fill of Legos and Pirates of the Caribbean, but because I’m already busy with two really good games.
The first is Brink. It’s no surprise that Brink is really good. It’s from Splash Damage, the folks who made Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory and Quake Wars. They know what they’re doing: making sure players are thrown together in a carefully crafted multiplayer experience. The second is Virtua Tennis 4, which has a cool career mode that puts Virtua Tennis’ tennis onto a sort of turn-based board game.
Hey nerds, you love comic book movies, right? So do we! Well, some of us. So we’ll argue a bit about Thor before going on to this week’s 3×3. Our discussion of the least bad pregnancy reveals begins at the 54-minute mark.
Podcast (movies): Play in new window | Download
Subscribe:
