Out of This World

It's worth a look just for the music alone:

Body Language

Will Wright birthed SimCity and The Sims. Spore.
And now he's looking to do a project for TV.
It's going to be entitled: Almost Real Life.
It will feature people who will come onto the show and do housework.
And, after they finish enough chores, they'll be able to buy a lamp.
Or an armchair.
Which they can then place wherever they please within the house.
They'll also eat meals.
And occasionally shower. With blurred genitalia.
Like the Japanese.
Then, a tornado will suddenly appear and fuck everything up.
Or a giant tumbleweed.
Sounds like a good fit for Fox.
I found the article on Gameinformer (which is where I find everything).

The corpse physics in Dead Space are pretty atrocious.
If you brush up against something you already plugged, it will jitter around.
Unconvincingly.
However, put those corpses in a vacuum.
And the same dead bodies animate fluidly and convincingly.
I'd even go so far as to say beautifully.
That is, if we're to believe footage from Apollo 13 and The Next Generation.
I know I do.

Here's the least irritating video I could find
(though the player's a bad shot):

Green Herb + Red Herb

I had to bring XIII back to the rental shop.
I will pick it up eventually, though.
The beauty of getting Game Over when your main character dies
Is that you actually get Game Over from time to time.
Really, in a Final Fantasy, how often does that happen?
Particularly intense boss battles.
Malboros.
Anything that turns you to stone.
And when you let your guard down around a pack of Mindflayers.
Mind Blast and whatnot.
Because when you can't control your mind, you can't operate properly.
Which is why people get hammered and immediately lower their standards.

I've never played a Tom Clancy game that had a plot I considered interesting.
What does that say about Tom Clancy?

I picked up Dead Space on a 7-day rental.
The demo up on Live and the PSN doesn't set up the game properly.
Sure it goes over commands and instructions.
Tells you what to shoot.
But the demo also undoes its' own sense of atmosphere by screwing with the game's pace.
Which, for anyone who's played it, are the game's most charming traits.
At first I thought, "Shoot limbs? UN troops shoot limbs.
I shoot faces."
It took me capping a couple of those spindly assholes to realize:
Shooting limbs can sometimes be tougher to pull off.
Anyway, I'm still early on, but it's a great time.
Does survival horror properly.
I constantly check my ammo reserve and inventory space.
And ink ribbon supply.

edit: The Gapra Whitewood in XIII was when things became interesting.
It is also the last place I reached before returning the game.
It was the first area with visuals that felt like next-gen Final Fantasy,
And it was the first place with intriguing character development.
The mutual, bitter pissiness of Lightning and Hope made for intriguing dialogue between them.
Which the game sadly lacks.

Finally?

My incredibly early impressions of XIII?
Glad you asked.
Final Fantasy is tough because you play it knowing that you like it.
But you have to rank it in the lineup, or you're not hardcore enough.
It's higher than Mystic Quest.
Which also had visible monsters.
People complain that random encounters are boring.
I consider the opposite to be far more tedious.

It's a good thing that IGN posted this blurb from SE director, Motomu Toriyama.
For those of you too overweight to check the link, he defends the linearity in the game's first portion.
Which prevents dweebs like me from complaining about it.
As of now, the game sort of plays like a giant tunnel.
And the enemies are mixed and matched.
Like nuts.
Alright. Fight two pistachios and an almond.
Now fight the almond with a cashew and a pistachio.
Now it's two pistachios and an almond again, but they have a back attack on you this time.
I'm not saying that it's bad.
But I am saying that I'd be concerned if I hadn't read the Toriyama comment.
All of his buddies call him by his last name.
I have his number in my phone.
It's a Japanese number, so there's a bunch of digits.
He calls me when he's hammered sometimes.

Anyway.
The visuals might be next-gen, but the lead character movement through this tunnel is not.
Animation, even the sound of footsteps for world exploration is taken directly from X.
Sure, it's nit-picky, but it does feel a little Savage Garden.
A little 2001.
It just makes movement feel subconsciously dated, that's all.
We'll get over it.
You know when you go out with Roman and you get hammered in GTA?
At that Russian place across from the burned-out apartment?
Well, when you're all hammered, yelling at the cabs.
That's sort of how the camera controls in XIII.
It moves sluggishly sometimes and intuitively the rest of the time.
Though full camera rotation in battle is a nice touch.
And it does so fluently during combat.
Which is when it counts.

Remember XII?
And all of the cool shit they said in XII?
Here's Basch, being all romantic and chivalrous:

"If I could protect but one person from war's horror...then I would bear any shame. I would bear it proudly."
I was sort of hoping that Final Fantasy characters would speak like this from now on.
But, much like the rapper, Snow had to come along and fuck that all up.
For any American readers out there, Snow is sort of a Canadian inside joke.
Well, he's an outside joke, too. Wherever he goes.
Snow Villiers has as much charm as that guy at the party who no one wants to talk to.
My favourite part is when he recruits Hope's mom.
Who is designed like a real tart, by the way.
She sort of reminds me of the druggie mom from the first Crow film.
Anyway, she says she wants to fight, and Snow hands her a gun.
Then he says something about being brave and so on.
And then I can't remember what he says.
But it's just as well he said:
"And babe, right now, in this chaos, you're some chick I'd like to bang."
Vanille sometimes sounds like a Japanese girl impersonating an Australian.
Sometimes she sounds like she has a speech impediment.

Okay, this is enough complaining.
The treasure chests bounce.
They're supposed to be hard to find.
Alright. Now this is enough complaining.
I may make it sound like I'm not enjoying the game.
But I am.
The paradigm system has a lot of promise for intuitive battles.
And the customization of this system looks like it will allow the player to develop character roles as they see fit.
Sorta like a job system.
Which has never been a bad thing in a Final Fantasy game.
There's my one-tenth review of the game that no one will read.
Take it away, fellas.

Birth Mark

I have rented Final Fantasy XIII.
I considered purchasing on release.
But I'm going to have a tough time playing that copy of Demon's Souls until I buy a PS3.
So I have to wait, and play by the rules of Rogers' Video.
The person working there kept trying to close the rental case.
But she couldn't.
Because three discs won't fit into one case.
Which I felt like telling her while I stood there.
But then how would she get a sense of accomplishment from her job?

Final Fantasy introduced me to role-playing games.
Which kind of sealed my fate, really.
It would have been Dragon Warrior.
But my brothers wouldn't let me play it.
Besides, for some reason, at the age of five, I found the music scary.
I have a tattoo of the series' black mage on my ribs.
Well, some of my ribs.
Tattoo ideas don't occur to me.
They dawn on me, like Newton with the apple tree.
"Of course! The black mage!
Who needs sex with women, anyway?"
Well, that depends on how long the series goes on for.

edit:
I've been told I have large nipples, gaming community.
But you probably all do as well.

Bring Out Your Dead

My Xbox 360...

...Passed abruptly away this weekend.

Just as my Dragon Age character was finally about to bang Leliana for the achievement.

Survived by myself, and my buddies who played NHL '10 with me on the weekends. Also by my warranty receipt which I cannot seem to find.

Condolences and Microsoft Point Cards welcome.

To send off your own 360 in style during the interim before you buy a new one, I strongly recommend this site.


My 360 didn't really die.
Well, not this weekend.
Then again...it's only Saturday.
I'll keep you posted.

I have finally purchased Demon's Souls.
Now I just need the PS3 to go with it.
I wanted to play it so badly that I kept watching video reviews for it.
GameTrailers had the best one.