Assassin’s Creed 2 trailer

In case you haven’t seen it yet. The first one was gorgeous and surprisingly immersive (and most stealth-based games just don’t do it for me), but got repetitive pretty quickly. Climb a tower, find a citizen in distress or a minigame node, deal with it, repeat until you’ve cleared a city section so you can proceed with the assassination. I’m a completeness junkie, so I can’t just skip through the assassinations one after another.

I’ve not been feeling too hot the past few days, been spending all my energy on work and a little bit of commenting on other people’s blogs. There’s always lots of stuff I want to write about, but I haven’t the energy right now.

Assassin’s Creed 2 trailer
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you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2

On the first networked, Unix-based computers, your gaming options were severely limited. You could play the Colossal Cave Adventure, a text adventure game (one of those text-based ones with a parser that accepts commands like “go north”, or “throw stone at ogre” or “examine your navel”); simplistic AI-based games like a chess game where you’d have to play a physical board, enter your move in chess notation, and the AI would give you its move in chess notation in return; quiz games of all stripes; or maybe even a Star Trek based game (which I remember playing on my Tandy 1000 EX, my first computer, and is admittedly pretty fun as a strategy game). In 1980, though, the first graphically represented, heavily D&D-influenced RPG came into the picture and completely blew the rest of the RPGs at the time, out of the water.

Of course, by graphically represented, I mean it used ASCII characters used to display text on the console to represent the player, the dungeon, items and monsters. Turn by turn, you’d move an @ symbol one space at a time — and for every space you move, the monsters on each floor of the randomly generated dungeon if they are awake and roaming, or know where you are, would either wander aimlessly or come after you with relentless tenacity respectively, hoping to put an end to your spelunking career. Meanwhile, you ran around grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down, like gold for points so you could get on the high score list, or weapons, scrolls and potions to make killing these ne’er-do-wells easier (thus facilitating your staying alive to get more gold).

Continue reading “you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2”

you hit the emu. you killed the emu. –more– Welcome to level 2

Hilarity from an unexpected source

Jodi was doing some digging around about The Sims 3 (which apparently just came out and both of us completely missed the launch for), and came across this passage on a message board:

ok i was just wondering if my grapic card will support sims 3 i have ATI Radeon HD 2400 PRO, and i had trouble with it with sims 2, like major grapic glitches and i got spore and i know spore has somewhat the same grapic requrments as sims3 but i was still wondering if my grapic card will support it without having problems bc its an HD grapic card and i know sims 2 didnt work well with HDs and thanks

I have no idea who this is or what it's from, but it came up on a Google image search for grammar.
I have no idea who this is or what it's from, but it came up on a Google image search for grammar.

After polishing off the remainder of our margaritas from last week, and then moving on to kahlua and vodka, Jodi couldn’t resist the urge to read it aloud. Bloody brilliant. We may do this more often, if I have my way.

That poor kid… maybe he should get a degree in English from Thunderwood College.

Hilarity from an unexpected source

I’m selling these fine leather jackets…

I just found out that Telltale Games, the gaming company behind the Sam and Max games and the Homestar Runner game series Strong Bad’s Cool Game for Attractive People, signed a deal with LucasArts to produce a five-game series called Tales of Monkey Island, AND are going to be remaking the original, Secret of Monkey Island, “Extended Edition”!

Fucking well fine by me. I normally abhor game remakes, as they strip the charm from a game and replace it with “art”. But Telltale has built up a lot of goodwill with me for their handling of both of the mentioned game series they’ve done thus far. They’ve done other stuff I haven’t yet tried, but I have every intention of playing it all. And hell, I’ll go so far as to say that if I were to try to pursue a career in gaming, I’d love to have their name on my resume.

I’m selling these fine leather jackets…

Tetris turns 25

Some games have some ethereal quality that allows them to transcend cultural barriers and even the ravages of time: for instance, chess, soccer, or Tetris, the latter in fact having just turned 25 today.

And what’s not to love about a game that almost seems like it was designed expressly for compulsive organizers, given that trait happens to be one of humankind’s defining features? Make everything fit together properly, and you can hold back the neverending series of blocks; fail to plan ahead or put the blocks in the right spot in minimal time, and you suffer the ignominy of defeat.

And it’s inspired some great Youtube videos, too — three of them below the fold.
Continue reading “Tetris turns 25”

Tetris turns 25

Gaming madness

Dude, WTF.  I love Megaman and all, but this burns my eyes.  And now yours too!
Dude, WTF. I love Megaman and all, but this makes my eyes bleed. And now yours too!

As I write this post, Megaman’s got a Jewel Satellite shield up and is sitting under two Telly spawn pipes at the end of the Plug Man stage in Megaman 9, harvesting bolts and extra lives.  In the meantime, I’m doing something productive, like writing on my blog.  This is how weekends should truly be spent — doing absolutely nothing of consequence!  And to top it off, I have Monday off for Turkey Day, and expect to be gorging myself on pumpkin pie in short order.

But before I get to Turkey Day, I’ve got two free days that I desire nothing more than to be spent playing video games.  It’s been a bit since I’ve talked about video games, so let’s catch you up on what I’ve done lately.

Borrowed Pickles’ copy of Wii Fit and played around with it for about two weeks, and while it was fun, I certainly couldn’t get myself into a routine playing it.  I’m pretty fit as it stands, though, and the game told me I was pretty much at my ideal BMI, and while I know body mass index is a flawed metric, I could have told you that I’m perfect already.

I asked Doctor Who to play No More Heroes.  This is what happened.
Doctor Who tried to play No More Heroes. This is what happened.

I also recently beat No More Heroes, as mentioned in a previous post.  The game is absolutely fantastic, and even the grind-ish parts where you have to make money don’t seem all that bad because of just how much fun it can be to run back and forth chopping people in half or killing seven or eight bad guys with one swing.  The plot, on the other hand, is an absolutely ridiculous tangled web where plot developments and twists throughout the game follow a trend of starting at one, then doubling after the fourth stage, then again after the eighth stage, and then again every stage after this.  By the time you hit the “real ending”, you’re not sure if anything that’s happened through the rest of the game was even planned out or not, or if there’s a coherent story flow.  Spoilers after the break…

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Gaming madness

Papa Don’t Preach

This is just too funny.  For those of you who think Guitar Hero is too heathenistic, there’s Guitar Praise, wherein you get to rock out… FOR THE LORD.

How long do you guys think it’ll be before they get sued by either Electronic Arts, or Gibson (bear in mind there’s still a lawsuit going on where Gibson patented the idea of a guitar video game in 1999, despite never having even tried to make a prototype)?  And if they don’t get sued, is it because the companies are afraid of looking like they’re bashing religion?

Papa Don’t Preach