You Can Do It...

So mere hours after last week's post I decided to meander over to the gym after my glorious half day of work where I promptly threw my back out. I've been couch-ridden almost since then, today being my first day back to the land of the living. This has afforded me two things: dozens of uninterrupted hours of Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen while my loved one is at work, and about as much time for personal reflection because these moments were not what I'd call entirely eventful. As such, here are some stray thoughts from the past few days. Enjoy them with your favorite cola beverage.

It seems as though I'm a minority here, but I hate, hate, Kanye West's appearances on Saturday Night Live. Part of it is probably the sentimentalist in me that demands that nobody mess with such a revered stage (and yes, haters, it is a revered stage), but Yeezy's hijacking of the environment has always come off as the worst kind of pretentious, making him look like more of an asshole than he probably already is. I'm not knocking his music --in fact, I like it a lot-- but, dammit, these performances make Val Kilmer's god complex look the opening to the Mary Tyler Moore Show. Observe last year's desecration:

 

That new Star Trek flick certainly is the cat's pajamas, no? Fun performances by the whole cast and a twist that just about anybody that's even heard of Trek saw coming made for a pretty relaxed experience, and that's counting some pretty thrilling action sequences. I guess my beef with it is that it relied a little too heavy on old lore to really "get it," and the absence of that is what made the 2009 reboot so darn snappy. But hey, if this is the way things are going, I'll hop on that train.

Dude. House of Cards. I mean, right? That Kevin Spacey sure can deliver fascinatingly cruel dialog. I'm only about five episodes in, but I'm already praying to that Netflix higher power that more's on the way. Now that we're rapping about it, Hemlock Grove wasn't bad, either. But it lacked one crucial ingredient: Verbal Kint telling me that he "loves [his wife] like sharks love blood." Spec. Tacular.

Tomorrow, a new album by The National will explode upon my ear drums. I'm pretty jazzed about this.

Ok, so Dragon's Dogma. I was putting off playing it until the price dropped, and then the announcement last year that a rerelease was coming gave me no more excuses, especially after all of the positive word of mouth that it was something of a flawed gem. Color me surprised, but I was good and smitten with it, and can soundly agree with that praise. Technical mess that it was, I had plenty of opportunity over the last few days to bum rush through the game twice (the second time is pretty short with NG+) and enjoyed the exploring and the boss combat, even though the rest of it was kind of mediocre upon recollection. Some of the larger battles were totally bogus, though. The Ur-Dragon fight (the original game's super-boss), was completely unwinnable in a straight melee throwdown, which is downright crappy design. When you have to bail out of the fight so you can reclass to a long-range character you know that someone didn't think this whole thing through.

The expansion stuff, though, was chock full of what I like to call Total Bullshit. Now, the level designs were great, and even a little inspired until the whole thing started to repeat. The Dark Souls influence was worn proudly on the sleeve here, and that alone is the key to my heart. What's baloney, though, was the arbitrary and asinine spike in difficulty when boss monsters would just randomly appear, forcing you to run like and idiot through the environments so you don't get wiped out. For a location that was obviously built to be explored thoroughly, I found this to be a cheap way to artificial inflate the difficulty of the game for high-level players. I made it through the end of the Dark Arisen stuff this morning, and I was satisfied with it, but in no way does it demand my patience for a second trip through, even though Doc Brown and his sidekick Shaniqua can probably put up with this mess much better than their first go 'round. Since I wound up with a platinum trophy in this game as a silver lining to a weekend of freakish pain, I'm guessing that DD:DA will begin it's long, glorious life as a dust collector starting this very evening. Still, if this is the direction Capcom is taking with the (hopefully) upcoming Deep Down, I'd be a liar if I wasn't down, too.

Oh, Necessity

If you've been quietly concerned about my hectic jet seting lifestyle lately that leaves no time for bloging, then great! I must have really sold it based on that Third Strike image. Honestly, I have been pretty busy lately, though, and it has kept me away from the discerning few of you that read this (god bless you). Without geting into too much detail -mostly because I'm writing this on my phone- a large side project has just hit the midway point and I'm happy enough with the progress that it may be time to share.

It's been about three years since I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's lymphoma, and a lot has changed between then and now. By that I mean that there was Dark Souls and, sure, some other stuff. I was slowly picking away at a memoir about the whole affair when life tookanother 180 on me, so the 55000+ words tthat I'm sitting on now are veering toward a new course, and I'm on track to have the first draft finished by the end of the year. It's been a long, strange road, mypeople, so I thought I'd yell you all about it.

So I'm writing a book. It's about cancer, Demon's Souls, and cancer. The probability of fierce sock-rocking is sky high, so gird those loins. More to come folks

I'm about 100+ hours into my first --and only-- Skyrim character, and I just realized after going back to it a few days ago that, hey, I'm only in the mid 50s level-wise, and have a stack of achievements left to unlock if the mood hits me. That's a lot of time, and a metric ton of extra content to see. I'm kind of proud of the fact that all of those hours were of actual play time, and not an inflated clock because I fell asleep in front of it (which I am wont to do). Still, "how do you keep at it for that long?" asks my imaginary friend that doesn't play video games. Well, here's an answer that's really not much of an answer: The jukebox in my head.

Like just about everybody, whether they admit it or not, I have some song stuck in my noggin throughout the day. Sometimes its overt enough that I'm humming it aloud, other times it's not really even there until I take a second to clear away what's right in front of me. When I play games, though, something always triggers tunes in my subconscious that bubble to the surface. It usually doesn't take much; a name of a location, the decorations on a virtual wall, the chirping of an obnoxious character, etc. Here's my unofficial inner-workings iPod for the Elder Scrolls V:

Fleet Foxes - Blue Ridge Mountains: This immediately popped to mind after a few hours of scaling the cold, mountainous expanse of Temriel. It makes sense; Fleet Foxes sell themselves on the backwoods aesthetic and multiple chiming vocal arrangements that call to mind frontier exploration and possible talk of revolution. A song found on their first full-length, Blue isn't one of the band's singles, but a quiet mood piece found near the end of the album that builds to a sweep near the middle before descending back down for a low tempo ending. Very fitting for long, lonely meandering through the dragon-filled countryside.

The XX - Try: Another slow burn from a band that has perfected the art, Try opens with an eerie warble of sound that conned me into thinking that it was going to be a different kind of track. Instead, its quiet, contemplative lyrical longing (like much of the band's other work) doesn't necessitate the need to connect deeply with the words as much as it encourages the soundscape to wash over the listener, making it another perfect track for long nights full of snowy exploring or singular moments of pause overlooking the aurora borealis. As an album track, it doesn't quite match up to the acapella majesty of Coexist's opener, Angels, but nothing can. In fairness, though, great as it is, Angels doesn't fit here, at least from what my subconscious tells me. Try, though, is perfect.

Mogwai - I'm Jim Morrison, I'm Dead: Speaking of perfect album openers, the first song on the prolific post-rock band's 8th album The Hawk is Howling is well placed to begin just about any RPG with it's deliberate, momentum-building piano that crashes into a crescendo that carries the song for several more satisfying minutes. Free of vocals that would have just gotten in the way to begin with, I can distinctly recall the final moments of my first dragon kill set to the thundering orchestra of the game's own score, but with I'm Jim still hitting my inner ears as this first monster's soul was absorbed. It was quite a moment.

I'm sure there was plenty of other music that came and went, but these were the three that always seemed to come back. Besides, Skyrim's score is perfect for the game to begin with, so the necessity for other aural distractions just didn't exist.

Image from Dead End Thrills, a site that you should go to

Django to the Editting Bay

Alright, enough of that sad shit.

I finally saw Django Unchained over the weekend, and I don't really want to get too deep into it, but I left it feeling a little less than enthused. Sure, the acting was fine and the dialog was typically Tarantino-snappy. The extreme violence didn't make me wince, but all-too-indoctrinated Samuel L. Jackson character did. I had every reaction that I think I was supposed to plus one: I was bored stupid by the end.

No question, Quentin Tarantino is a good director. He has a very distinct visual style and he certainly loves genre cinema since he's basically checking off a list of them as the years go by. But Django is simply a further symptom of the slow poison of hubris that he ingested on the set of Pulp Fiction.  His movies are too long, too plodding, and they rob his visual punch with long stretches of funny, but useless dialog. I love the characters he creates, and I'm amazed at the performances that he gets from the actors that agree to work with him (Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Michael Parks = genius), but, dammit, they need to shut up and do something. There was no excuse for Django to be 165 minutes, and if great work is made under some restrictions, then the Weinsteins need to start forcing him to exercise some restraint. Kill Bill worked as two movies, and I have seen them (more than once) back to back, but they were made into two movies for a reason, not matter what kind of BS you believe that it was against his wishes. Inglorious Basterds, meandered itself into a anticlimactic hole. And Jackie Brown, oh, Jackie Brown, should have been my generations Dolemite but turned out to college-era dramamine for how little motion there was in the picture.

I moan, but I do enjoy most of his movies. I just wish he'd just pump the breaks and stop making a Cold Roses when a Love Is Hell is right in front of him.

Rant over. Happy Tuesday

Mount Doom and the Ring

Games Journalism has broken the internet this week, no matter how little Sephen Totilo wants to admit its existence. Twitter has gone ape, and blogs from crackpots are hitting critical mass. If you don't know what I'm talking about, this started it, but you should also read this, and this, and this. Please do so now.

Ok. The point of having this blog is to be upfront and honest with people (I think), so here's the situation: I've been in an absolute funk for the past few months since 1UP has shut down. Part of it is that I was very emotionally invested into the site. Even though I came a little late to the party after its supposed heyday, I jumped ship from GameSpot to 1UP because of things they did well: engaging staff, smart writing, and the podcasts and shows. I knew that, even though I wasn't as involved with the community as I probably could have been, that was the place for me, and it was always among the first sites I would visit every morning. But it was more than that for me. 1UP represented an end point, a dream job. I've writing about games for a years now, and even a few years before I got hip to Retronauts, the Oddcast, and the 1UP Show. That was the place I wanted to work, and I wanted to do it with those people creatively starting that kind of content. It was one of the few times in a person's life when they knew exactly what they wanted and where they knew they could get it.

But 1UP was fraught with internal strife, mostly from the management side, and that caused multiple shake-ups, layoffs, restructures, etc. That didn't make it easy, or even practical, to try to move to San Francisco and hope that I score an internship or even start to work freelance for them. After I got sick in 2010, it made it that much harder to pack up and go anywhere. I still wanted to be a games writer, but I had to do it in Cleveland for the time being.

But, man, this week. Pointed criticism of the way the "traditional" model of games journalism is busted is starting to make even the layman and sometimes-contributor take better notice of what's really going on, even though I could clearly see that changes had to happen a couple of years ago. Both Ben Kuchera and Patrick Miller seem to agree that solid, investigative journalism is crumbling under the pressure of the absolute necessity of page clicks, and that the holy trinity of current games writing (news, previews, and reviews) is not a sustainable model for either good writing or even ethical practices when it's all just restructured PR.

For a long time, these were things that I was striving to do well, keeping my head in the sand that even though there are hundreds or even thousands of places on the internet that do the exact same thing, I could find work at one of the larger sites based on skill, experience, and a Bruce Wayne- like force of will. Over the past year or so, I've learned that I need to break free from that and do other kinds of work, but the perfect storm of listening to the final 1UP podcast, reading those articles, and losing out on PAX Prime tickets (which was going to be part fun, part schmoozing for contacts) --along with losing my original goal of working at 1UP in February-- has definitely given me some sobering perspective. I'm 33, married, and my wife and I have both gone through some serious issues with our health even though we're two of the most healthy people you might ever meet. I'll write about games forever, and I have immediate plans to do so, but this hasn't been the best week for Achieving Your Dreams.

I want to contribute to something that I love so much, and the mounting evidence that places on the internet to do so for a living will bottom out sooner than later is depressing. That's one of the reasons I wrote about a renewed perspective a few weeks ago on this blog, because it's time to learn new things and reform my outlook. There is great work on the internet about games, the culture of games, and the creation of games. Previewing them and reviewing them might not go away (and my gut says that I don't want them to), and the odds of so many sites doing it in the next five years still existing is almost ludicrous. But I have to shake out of this funk, even though I know not so deep down that this is a hobby and nothing more.

If anything, I can keep trying to grab freelance work, and I still have the book to write, but it's hard to give up on that down-the-road mentality, that sometime-in-the-future perspective. After Dorritogate a few months ago, I (maybe stubbornly) decided to pull myself up from the bootstraps and try harder, but it's just been one hit after the next lately. Is it time to regroup again, or is it time to get my priorities straight? If great writers like Frank Cifaldi and Bob Mackey have to do the same thing now that they were unceremoniously let go from their jobs, it's going to be ridiculous for me to be on the same boat.

Two Things of Note

First, and this is old news, but GNC has decided to change the flavors of their standard whey protein powder from "tolerable" to "sewer drainage." This is pretty low on the totem pole of world troubles, but it's still a pain.

Second, PAX Prime tickets sold out last night in roughly five hours, and it seems as though the only way you would have found out they were on sale is by babysitting their Twitter feed everyday. I find this a little bit bullshitty since I've been going to their website on and off for months and the only update about tickets for this year's Seattle-based nerd love fest was a post in mid-January explaining that ticket info will be coming out "soon."

I'm ready to flip a table over right now. I'm lucky that I can thanks to the putrid GNC protein. Still.

Assassin's Creed: Recollection: Phone-y Goodness

Here's some old stuff from my 1UP blog that I'm trying to keep track of. YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT.

There are two things that I have found I only have passive interest in: Assassin’s Creed and card games. Maybe not “passive,” I suppose. Half-hearted, maybe.

Fine; I have a half- interest in Assassin’s Creed and card games. On the one hand, running around rooftops and diving into haystacks sounds like a snazzy way to spend a hangover, which, on the other hand, I usually get by playing cards with people. Since hangovers mean queasiness, AC’s parkour-enabled killing sprees generally don’t aid the road to recovery. Plus, they’re monotonous. You can see why I gave up this vicious cycle.

Behold my surprise on how my two half-interests’ coitus birthed Assassin’s Creed: Recollections, and successfully blended them together. Something of a card-based real time strategy game, AC:R turns out to be a very addictive and competitive multiplayer battle, and definitely worth eyeballing now that’s out on the iPhone as of yesterday.

A complex game that basically forces you to study the tutorial and in-game glossary, two players melee over control of two out of three areas of a playing field. Control is given to whomever scores and maintains ten points in a given region, and this is accomplished by either playing Agent cards that can battle other Agents, or by location-type cards that score over time.

Time, though, is the great equalizer here. Everything happens in a real time countdown which lasts roughly 30-45 seconds. All cards take roughly half of this time to be usable after being played from a user’s hand, and about the same amount of time (with a few exceptions) to reconcile when placed into one of the fields. Players draw another card and earn a higher cap for gold (that which allows you to do anything. See: any government in the world, ever) at the beginning of each round. It takes a bit of adjustment before it all clicks, but the clock ticking compared along with cards played certainly lends to some nail-bighting fights.

It will also keep you pretty busy. The game comes pre-loaded with 20 story missions that will teach you the ins and outs of its systems, and has a good variety of AI opponents that use differing tactics to force you to rethink your own maneuvers. It shines with a fairly user friendly competitive multiplayer, though, with plenty of people online ready to play.

The best part is that new cards are easy enough to come by without having to shell out real cash to acquire them. The story mode will pay you a modicum of currency to buy booster packs (which hold random common, uncommon, and rare booty), but playing online bouts will net you up to $500 per day. Depending on your patience, this will either get you up to five packs of low-level swag for a day’s worth of work, or one pack of higher-tier stuff for two. While the option is certainly available to shell out the coin for quick currency, this system never made me feel as though I was forced to do it to be competitive; something I find pretty rare in cases like these.

The game looks great as far as card games go, though iPhone gamers might find the lack of real estate that iPad players have enjoyed for the last couple of months a little cramped. Just a heads-up.
As a package, it’s also got a lot of extra goodies from the full AC: Embers animated short to an art gallery. Plus, I can play it pretty well hungover. It doesn’t make me a better general, but it still helps.