Not a Political post

...or is it?

 

Posted by Captiosus @ 10:40 am EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

My Wife & Gaming, Part 2

It's the end of a very short lived era.

Back in October of last year, my wife wanted a Nintendo DS for Christmas. Overjoyed that she looked to at least expand into more modern gaming, even if it was in the handheld realm, I readily agreed and ordered her the desired Coral Pink DS and the games she initially wanted with it: Brain Age 2, Flash Focus, Mind Quiz, Nintendogs and Tetris DS.

At first, it was a big smash. She played it all the time. She took it to work to play during her lunch hour. She volunteered to go with me to the game stores in the area so she could peruse the used DS and GBA titles. In that month, she picked up Polarium, but little else. Later, I picked up Geometry Wars: Galaxies for myself for when the DS was home and I could play it.

By late December, the appeal apparently wore off. She stopped playing everything and stopped wanting to look at new and used DS titles. In early January, the DS magically disappeared. Since I only rarely played GeomWars:Galaxies on it, I never really paid much thought to the DS' disappearance.

Last week, while having one of my frequent cleaning and reorganizing fits, I found the DS packed away in a box and shoved under the bed. When my wife got home, I showed her the DS and proudly announced I finally found the thing. Her response? "Oh, that? You can have it. I don't want it anymore."

Sigh!

So now I'm the owner of a Coral Pink DS. It matches my pink X360 controller nicely. (Aside: Unlike all of my friends - and apparently my stepson - I'm not afraid of the color pink. I don't know why they get the feeling that owning something pink makes them look gay. I've had people give me grief because I have a pink x360 controller, to which I merely pull a line from Red vs. Blue: "It's not pink, it's lightish red.")

While I'm on the subject of the DS, anyone else been following the litigation between Nintendo and the makers of the R4 Slot-1 device? I find the whole situation funny because there's a lot of people out there, myself included, who didn't know things like the R4, M3 or CycloDS Evo existed, yet because of Nintendo making it into gaming news a lot of people are discovering them. While I wouldn't get one now, if this had been several years ago, I likely would have. It reminds me of when Sony was cracking down on the Action Replay Pro for the orginal PSX , a device that plugged into the back of the PSX and bypassed the bios, allowing pirated games and imports to be played. Until that news, neither I nor my friends knew there was a device that could bypass bios that didn't involve a mod chip. Within a week of it making mainstream gaming news, all of us ordered them.

It makes me wonder how many more people are ordering these Slot-1 devices to play pirated games who, until recently, didn't even know they could have done so. (Aside 2: I have to admit that the CycloDS Evo is tempting, but I made the resolve many moons ago to be fully legit in both gaming and computing simply because I wouldn't want people stealing my work and distributing it for free.)

Posted by Captiosus @ 3:25 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments

Achievement frustration.

I admit, I love the concept of Achievements (Trophies, Badges, whatever your games may call them) because, if done right, they reward skill and time invested in a game.

However, what I absolutely loathe are achievements that are tied to randomness, meaning skill doesn't play a factor at all, rather you have to be lucky to earn them.

An example would be Geometry Wars Evolved 2, where there are three achievements tied to completely random events: Wax Off, Rebound and Treaty.

For the Wax Off achievement, which requires you to run along the edge of the playable plane twice in Pacifism mode, you have to be lucky with the enemy spawns. Will enemies spawn in this corner or that corner? Will a gate spawn along the edge of the plane? Will a cluster of gates spawn and make it near impossible to move through a certain section of the plane (the orange tips will kill you like any other enemy and they wobble back and forth).

For the Rebound achievement, you have to kill 75 enemies by rebounding shots off of gates in Deadline mode (3 minutes timed). Will a gate even spawn? I've had whole games where I didn't see a single gate and then others where I'd see four or five gates.

For the Treaty achievement, you have to activate 30 safe zones in King mode without firing a single shot or destroying an enemy with your shields at the start. Like Wax Off, this relies completely on where things spawn and becomes troublesome after you've activated 25 and the diamond enemies speed up. Will the next safe zone spawn nearby, or will it spawn across the map (which you'll never reach because the diamonds speed up to the point of being able to catch up to you even if you're doing a straight line)?

Achievements that are tied to completely random occurances aren't really Achievements.
You don't "achieve" luck, it's just something that happens.

If you've managed to get these Achievements, congrats! I wish I had your luck.

Posted by Captiosus @ 1:09 pm EDT | Permalink | 0 Comments

What do you get...

What do you get when you try to incorporate:
A. Elements of a free roaming sandbox game;
B. An arcade racer;
C. No real plot?

You get a steaming pile of poo called Burnout Paradise.

I've been a big Burnout fan since the beginning of the series but this is, by far, one of the worst to come out. The reason I included "no real plot" is because when Need for Speed shifted to a free roamer, at least it added plot elements. In Burnout Paradise, free roaming only exists so you can find events, billboards to crash, special cars to takedown (which usually appear within a mile of you once your notified they're out there 'somewhere') and jumps to do. To be perfectly frank, the "free roaming" of Burnout Paradise is nothing more than a large and elaborate (also pointless, lengthy and annoying) menu system.

What was wrong with the original formula of "Pick a style, earn stars to move up the progression ladder, blow stuff up, win cars"? Instead, they turn it into a piss poor "sandbox wannabe". And, in typical EA fashion, there are ads everywhere. Not just on occasional billboards which would be somewhat realistic, but.. everywhere. I find it amazing that there are so many CompUSA billboard ads in the game when CompUSA, shortly after the release of this game, shut down nearly every retail location for good.

Showtime mode is nowhere near as engaging as old Crash mode. While it's fun to rack up a big Showtime chain the first couple of times, after that it just becomes boring. In Racing events, I don't find myself caring about taking down my opponents anymore because it doesn't really matter as long as you find the fastest route to your destination. Road Rage is about the only event where Takedowns matter anymore; If you try to takedown people in Marked Man, you just end up with a very damaged car.

Which brings me to cars. Now I have to worry about 3 classifications of cars and go to a junkyard to get the best car for an event, repair my car (trashed by default) and then drive back to the event starting area? What the bloody fuck? Again, what was wrong with the old method of getting progressively faster racing/road rage cars and progressively stronger crash mode cars? Nothing.

This entire title wreaks of EA influencing Criteron Games to make Burnout more like Need for Speed, and, in my opinion, it's an abysmal failure. If I want to spend time driving around a fictional city looking for things to wreck and things to collect, I have GTA, Saints Row and Crackdown. Burnout used to be an awesome arcade racer that you could pick up and play for a long time or play for a little and then put down but still have fun either way. Now it's a frustrating pile of crap that tries to be too much - most of which simply doesn't fit in the Burnout "universe".

If there's another Burnout title, I hope for Criteron's sake they go back to the old menu driven, takedown/destruction laden system instead of this half ass "find your own route and then go do superjumps" system.

Posted by Captiosus @ 3:45 am EDT | Permalink | 6 Comments

Politics

Let me start by saying I don't trust any of the 3 major players seeking the office of President.

Despite that I still like following politics because every 4 years when we go through this Presidential election cycle, we really get to see spin masters working their charm.

A great example is this whole "debate", as it were, on so-called Foreign Policy experience. Explain this to me.. why does this matter? Bear in mind the following little tidbit: Our last two Presidents, including the current sitting one, both became President after being Governors. What Foreign Policy experience do freakin Governors have? Zero. His lack of foreign policy experience did little to assuage people from voting for Bush in 2000 - even if he didn't win the popular vote. And yet in 2000, such experience was still pretty relevent: Terrorism was on the rise and becoming more brazen (Remember the USS Cole?), and the fragile tendril of "peace" between Israel and Palestine was starting to show its weaknesses.

So when I see people attacking Obama for his lack of foreign policy experience, it makes me want to laugh. Sure, McCain has more of said experience than him, but it was McCain's party head (read: The POTUS) who got us in this foreign policy mess to begin with. And what was with that hardline McCain took about other nations like Iran and North Korea that sounded an awful lot like Bush's "Axis of Evil"/"You are either with us or you are with the terrorist" comments. Have the Republicans learned nothing these last 4 years?

Newsflash to the GOP: Most reasonable people like the idea of pursuing every avenue of diplomacy before resorting to bombing someone to the stone age. 'Every avenue of diplomacy' is not the same as "appeasement".

Now, before anyone thinks I'm all anti-Republican, this on-going fight between Clinton and Obama is pissing me off. And what is Clinton's primary argument? She has "experience".

Folks, "experience", when said in a political context, is the same thing as saying:
"I can maintain the status quo. I know how to exploit government loopholes, accept underhanded PAC funds, and play hardball while looking out for number one. I'm a Washington Beltway insider."

I would rather have someone with 2 years of Washington DC "experience" than someone with 30. Public Service, in my opinion, was never designed to be a freakin' career choice. People shouldn't aspire to grow up and want to be a Senator for 30-40 years. People with lots of Washington DC "experience" are career Politicans, no more, no less, and like everyone else with a career, they want nothing more than job security. [This, of course, is why I'm a very staunch advocate of term limits. No more than 6 terms as a Congressman or 2 terms as a Senator - that's a total of 12 years. And if you go to the Senate from the House of Representatives, you can only serve the number of years which equal to a maximum of 12 (for example, a 2 term Congressman who takes a Senate seat would only serve one full term as a Senator plus 2 years).]

Like I said, I don't trust any of them. And if I even bother to vote (thank you, George Carlin, for your enlightenment on why voting is useless), I'd vote for Obama over McCain and even Hillary over McCain. 8 years of a Republican president is enough. I don't think anything would change with a Democrat, but lets give them a chance. They can't screw us worse than, oh, I dunno, a needless war that has been a multibillion dollar drain on our economy. Even with higher taxes and bigger spending on federalized programs, we'd probably still see a multibillion dollar drain on our economy - but maybe we'd have something more to show for it than dead soldiers and more people who want to kill us.

Posted by Captiosus @ 3:51 am EDT | Permalink | 3 Comments