Ok, A Gun Was Not Held To My Head

Ultimately, a nefarious madman sporting a curled mustache and a top hat did not magically appear in my home to tie me down, so the fault lies squarely with me. All the same, I did watch the VMAs, and whole, tangible chunks of my soul were burned away in the process. It is not inaccurate --and I am certainly man enough to admit-- that the quasi-concert-masquerading-as-a-terrible-award show is not (and perhaps never was) for me at my age and range of tastes. But that precludes that events such as the much ballyhooed *NSYNC reunion, the worst kept secret in the music bizznass this year, should not have been watched regardless of the fact that things like that are targeted to my age group. Never mind the fact that it also precludes that the other quasi-concert-masquerading-as-a-terrible-award show (the Grammys) is more my wheelhouse, even though it is the telecast joke that it is. I'd almost go so far as to say that the VMAs are more respectable than the Grammy Awards if only for the fact that they never had enough respect for themselves to lose to begin with.

But enough about truth. Let's briefly run down the events that stick out to the best of my recollection. The only way to watch the VMAs is to make sure you forget it, so I was good and drunk through most of it. I'm just going to list things as I recall them.

I'm sure Lady GAH! GAH! would approve, because her extreme close up in the beginning was made to be absolutely hilarious. Don't believe me? After the show was over, MTV immediately reran it with no break, so I graced myself with another helping of the LGG performance whily My PlayStation loaded. You don't have too look that hard to notice that she was fighting back a smile in the worst way through that idiotic nun walk to the stage. What I took away from the whole thing is that she is no longer heavy set, or something. Of course, I had Kevin Hart to remind me of this intermittently for the next two and a half hours, but whatever.

Evidently, only 10 people made it to the show this year, plus Throngs of Assholes (ToA) to make up the rest of the crowd: Will Smith and co., Rihanna, 1 Direction (whom count as a single person as they are hive mind), GaGa in her seat, Justin Timberlake's parents, Taylor Swift, and the supreme idiot that agreed to accompany her to the show. (Come on, man! Don't you know you're just fodder for another bullshit breakup anthem? Every other dude in that arena knows it; she dated them all! What's wrong with you?!)

I know it's one thing to cram as many people together on stage as possible, but I kind of feel cheated when each person only gets to sing about a third of one verse of whatever song they're currently famous for/ hawking. However, in the case of Miley Cyrus and Robin Thicke, I wanted that shit show finished as soon as possible. Let's break those down individually:

• Miley Cyrus is, and I use this term clinically, fucking disgusting. I don't postulate this because I find her about as attractive as foot fungus. No, it's the waif-ish tongue wagging and forced, putrid "sexuality." I feel bad for child stars trying to make a clean break from their past image, I really do. But I don't feel bad misguided stage productions of teddy bears and faux nakedness. It's not exactly classified information that someone from Camp Cyrus paid off Maxim to secure her place at the top of their yearly list of HOT CHICKZZ, but it's performances like this that are born just to scream "LOOK! I'M DTF!"make me (and La Smith Familia) want to vomit.
• Robin Thicke. Forever the Tony Bennett to Timberlake's Frank Sinatra. But wait! Blurred Lines! A catchy song (grumblegrumbleGotToGiveItUpgrumble) made famous by a video full of nekkid ladies! Is His Thickeness changing the game? Is he the Stones to JT's Beatles? Does pop music need distinctions like that? Too many questions. I like Blurred Lines, even though he was forced to plant his dong behind fucking disgusting Miley Cyrus while dressed like an extra from The Prisoner for the sake of it. Yes, forced. There was a sniper.

That was most understated performance of Yeezy's career. As he has shown me photos of family gatherings where he painted himself like a Maori hunter because it looked best in the lighting scheme for his pyrotechnic-heavy performance of Happy Birthday on his mother's 39th birthday, I think I have some good authority here. I like this trend of yours, Kanye. Let your music speak for itself for a while.

EDIT: Aesop Rocky is a self-serving, dim-witted fuck cheese. I can't believe that I forgot about this earlier, but don't ever stand next to the only openly gay athlete in any of the three major American sports and remind everyone that M'ALBEM DROPZ. Yes, I get the fact that you're introducing the act that won the bullshitty "socially conscious" award, and that's just as back-pattingly self-serving as you are, but that doesn't give you the right to, essentially, piss on everyone else's parade here, specifically the guy standing about 8 inches to your left with four tons worth of courage. I don't mind if the entire world hears your new album, AR. I just want them all, every single one of them, to pirate it off of bit torrents. I was drunk last night, so, naturally, today is a little rough for me. But after I flush my body of its toxins I'll be a new man in a few hours. You will still be Aesop Rocky, supreme ass hole.

Just after his 45-minute medley of hits (which was a clinic on how you Crush It), my wife calmly asked if I thought that JT was an attractive man. This gave me a little pause. In fairness, I don't find him to be Christopher Walken in Batman Returns, but if it was my gut answering, then (provided that I am either female or gay to give an accurate reading, neither of which are true) I would find him to be a good looking guy in a bar, and that's about it. We found ourselves agreeing that it was persona that has given Timberlake his attractiveness, not unlike many stars before him. But star he is, and for a guy that only has three solo albums in the last decade (placing him in respectable circles that include Peter Gabriel and Tool), he proves that quality in no way means prolific. That performance, though, holy cats. That was a lot of booty shaking, friend. I knew going into it that the whole *NSYNC reunion thing was only going to wind up being 33 seconds, much like the Destiny's Child mishmash at the Super Bowl last year, so my expectations for something dazzling from that end were reasonably low. But as a whole, I was pretty impressed, bad sound be damned.

Bruno Mars is a cool guy.

The entire night, MTV was assuring me that Katy Perry will perform her Biggest Hit for the First Time. This sounded dubious. Evidence: She wasn't around when she recorded it? She never rehearsed the song prior to both that, and tonight's main event? A pickle indeed. No matter. It was a song with wholesale Survivor thievery. That bridge in the background was quite a site, I guess.

Sigh. Maybe I'll edit this later. Probably not.

Let's Check In With Tekken Revolution

Stupid Warcraft. Ok, neglecting blog duties isn't entirely Blizzard's fault, but still. Stupid, stupid Warcraft.

Let's rap about Tekken. When I first got down with it a couple of months ago now, I indicted it on counts of being too hardcore to be a successful fee-to-play game, and not exactly easy to recommend in its thin state. But Namco has been fairly active in supporting it since the launch, so I find it ethically compelling in my own way to revisit my thoughts on how Revolution has evolved.

Maybe "evolved" isn't as fair to say as maybe "grew." Since launching, the roster has beefed up by seven additional characters, now topping the whole list off at 18 and counting. Yes, it still takes a significant amount of time and/ or cash to actually unlock them, but if you play at its most base level and not pay a dime, a new character is added to the list close to the same time that you might have unlocked the last one, which keeps the carrot dangling in front of your face. Thankfully, the Tekken universe has (actually) evolved to such a degree in the last few years that every character is completely unique, so you'll never feel as though you were just cheated into getting a palette-swap after weeks of grinding for gift points.

The grinding, though, has probably been the most impressive trait of Namco's constant support over the last few months. By that I mean that they've done their best to make it fairly painless with the constant stream of weekly events. In some weeks you may earn more fight money or experience to boost the levels of your characters, while in others it bestow a 1.5x multiplier on your gift points to make unlockables a bit easier. There have been special events, though, that keep the game fascinating. A few weeks ago, players could go through a special offline 1 player mode fighting only the training dummy Mokujin, which gave massive bonuses to fight money, exp, and gift points for each run through. Entries to this Mokujin mode were granted once per day, but further entries were winnable in online and offline matches at random. Sure, the actual mode was every bit as easy as the standard Arcade mode, but it was easy to unlock multiple character in half the time and test them out while working to open up more.

Clearly, the most welcome addition is the Warm-Up Space, which is a rudimentary training mode. While there's no way to customize it (such as choosing stances and blocking for the AI), an offline mode with no barrier for entry serves as a big leap in solving the main problem I had with the game before. New players can learn their move lists and form combos without the threat of loss and the internal struggle to either shell out for more coins for various modes or wait another 30 minutes for a  shot at the title. It's a great addition.

So, should you play Tekken Revolution now? I say yes; it a steady drip of new content and a way to practice offline solves a lot of issues with it. Learning moves offline will never make you a great player, so getting down in it and fighting in ranked or player matches is still the name of the game. But the gulf between the green recruit and the more practiced-hand can logically be reduced now, if just a little bit. That's good stuff.

Jeebus

It's 9:30 in a Sunday, and God help me, I'm installing Warcraft on my computer again. Ugh.

Tomb Dater: An End Has a Start

Yes, this is coming a little late since we finished the game over a week ago, but bear with me, internets. I wound up having to teach a class this fall, and Life of Pi won't read and annotate itself, apparently.

The final hours (but not the Final Hours) of Tomb Raider's reboot were played with both the mentality and head of steam reserved for a Big Ten college fullback with his eyes on a pro career. Once my wife found herself engrossed enough into Lara Croft and co.'s plight to quell the whims of an angry demigod and ditch the Pacific island, the game was played in long stretches and with very little in the way of exploring. Clearly, she could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and if we stumbled across the extra tomb/ puzzle or two along the way, fine, but there was palpable interest in an English girl finder her swerve as opposed to digging up GPS receivers and Edo-era helmets and wallets. I hopped along with much enthusiasm.

The downside? Playing in shifts gave way to playing toward strengths. She liked exploring, not fighting, and when cadres of samurai and island mooks started to fill the screen, the controller fell quickly in my lap to be the enforcer I evidently am. I'm actually chalking this up as a minor gripe, all things considered, when I consider the grand scheme of things. Be with me here for a second.

In the early game, it was most obvious that the biggest hurdle for someone coming to modern, 3-dimensional gaming for what might be their first time (in this case, my wife) was dealing with both a controller with more buttons than they might be accustomed to navigating their fingers around and a second stick on it that gave limited, though fundamentally important, control of perspective. By themselves, this is a pretty high barrier of entry. Had their been no combat at all, even at its easiest setting, a neophyte to modern console game methodology would have plenty to do. Sure, this toothless experience would probably get boring after a few hours without any sense of threat, but it would still serve to kind of ease someone in to the Tomb Raiders and Uncharteds of the world. Part of me, in all honesty, is happy that games like this do exist in their way, if only for that kind of population. It would have to have a bigger hook than "run around and look at stuff" to keep someone like me interested, but I casually suggested to my wife that she play something like The Unfinished Swan if she were curious about a relatively combat-free experience. I guess I would have liked it if she became more accustomed to the combat now that we've decided to play a little of Uncharted 3 to prepare for The Last of Us (both at her suggestion), but just because I was the only one in the room racking up the body count doesn't mean that all of this wasn't a positive experience.

Until that let down of an ending. But outside of all of the fun we had with the game, the opportunity to play it together, and the fascination of observing someone that does not play video games as a regular hobby, I'll let the dopey "I'm not going home" denouement slide this time.

Your homework this week is to read Chris Kohler's damning of Final Fantasy (it's two worthwhile opinion pieces). REMEMBER: Your gut might tell you to disagree with him, but Kohler's arguments are sound. Don't be an internet dick and yell at him. If disagreement is what you want over discourse, you can head on over to just about any other website for their reactions.

To other things of note: first, and for whatever reason, this blog gets the most consistent traffic from Russia. To which I say "Привет, всем!" Second, and speaking of traffic, I got my highest hit count in months from my time playing Skyrim while listening to the jukebox of my subconscious. I'm about a third of the way through Bioshock Infinite, and I'm thinking I'll just list music that pops in the ol' noggin' whenever it comes up and make a series out of it. Then again, I might be a little too far along for that. The suspense!

Tomb Dater: Picture Perfect

"Pretty," is what breaks the brief silence, one that takes place when the controller is in my hand instead of hers. I reply that yep, this is gorgeous. We both quickly agree that we're not talking about a 3D model of an English actress.

Tomb Raider was an expensive game to make, and it certainly shows. The lighting effects are pretty much perfect, and I bring those up specifically because I don't really give a shit about graphics one way or another until I find a quiet moment when the lighting gives me pause. The way the torch flickers on Lara's face. The moonlight on the icy northern edge of Tamriel. Lightning reflecting off of Batman's cowl. I'm not running anywhere, not killing anything. When I can sit and think and soak in the world around me, how it's lit has become something of a measuring stick for how I perceive a modern game's objective beauty. The brief moments of gleaming sunlight in between rainy mountain climbs and the occasional spelunking diversion are giving my wife and I a moment. Anyone with taste can tell you that graphics, ultimately, do not matter. But there's nothing wrong with taking a step back to admire them for what they are once in a while.

My wife, though, is fine with this superficiality -- at least right now (I think). I play a lot of video games, and she will occasionally watch me play them. Telling me how good they look to her passing eye is not uncommon. I liked that she was willing to make a comment on something I didn't really think interested her, so I wouldn't respond to her in the opposite when I would play something like Dragon Age: Origins (which I love, but come on. That game looks like shit). I'd like to think that by playing through this game, now in its final moments for us, that her standards are higher going forward. But the reality is that it doesn't matter to me as long as she's having fun. Which, recalling our time playing Wii Sports and its simple ball/cylinder character models, is still what she cares about most. It reinforces my stance on the matter, too.

We're close to the final confrontation with Mathias in the temple now, and she turns to me to inquire if The Last of Us is our next game together. Those standards look higher already.

I Could Sleep

As of 4:00pm EST, I will be on vacation for a week. This means that I'll finally have sufficient time to finish Etrian Odyssey IV and maybe start on Shin Megami Tensei IV. It will be saucy and nerdy. Also, I'll probably go to the Zoo.

Hopefully some book-writing will also continue as well since I'm narrowing in on a good method to finish things out. More news on this to come.

So, I suppose I'm saying that I might not post anything, but let's pray that Lara Croft's further adventures through Right of Passage Iisland are not further stymied so I can tell you all about it.

Your homework is to go to a comic book site --any comic book site-- and read about actual comic book news that comes out of the San Diego Comic Con. If you have to ask what I mean by this it means that you read far too much Entertainment Weekly.

EVOh Yes

So the internet is still aflutter over this past weekend's Evolution (EVO for short) fighting game tournament. That Hakan fight! That Justin Wong comeback! Waitadarnminute, someone ran the SFIV finals with Gen?! Priceless.

EVO has it really figured out, and you have to hand it to Mr. Wizard and the crowd he runs with for not only starting a fighting game tournament way back in the early 2000s when nobody was playing fighting games, but keeping it alive for when the genre would return en vogue. This has given EVO a unique opportunity to not only be a battleground for the biggest and best players, but also a sort of semi-conference for the non-competitive fan. Panel discussions take place. Dealer tables are on exhibition. Major game announcements. If you really dig fighting games, EVO is your annual summer pilgrimage to Mecca.

What I found most interesting this year was the unveiling of Ultra Street Fighter IV. While the internet at large knew that SFIV was getting another round of tweaks in the near future, I doubt that a lot of folks saw the addition of five extra characters to an already loaded game coming. I call that a nice package for $15 DLC, but I didn't used to think so. No, this kind of shit used to get my no-nos in a twist.

Here's why: Capcom, smarmy minx that it tends to be, is notorious for nickel and dime-ing its customers. When Street Fighter II was success, they made updates for it. When Resident Evil was at its height, they played the spinoff game until it was close to irrelevance. The point is, Capcom is a great company that has a history of not leave well enough alone. A further update to Street Fighter IV, now four years old on the console side, looks to be the same thing. Former Capcom employee and fighting game czar Seth Killian even said of the v.2012 update that they were done messing with the game, which (by no fault of his) turns out to be a bald-faced lie. So why flip sides and decide that it's a fine plan?

Two things, really: a little honesty and a whole lot of common sense, which are two things that I appreciate more than bagels and coffee in bed. Capcom has not been on its best legs over the past few years, and the last week has shown it. A company restructuring is taking place, and US senior VP Christian Svensson opted to resign amidst the round of layoffs. That could mean a ton of things, but my personal favorite close-to-the-truth conjecture is that lots of past passion projects for the company (like an under performing Darkstalkers rerelease) just didn't pan out like they thought they would, and a company rejiggering will halt development of extensions of those projects, like oft-rumored sequels. It's sad, but that's business. Plus, larger developers and publishers have to get some things finished for the new consoles that are going to drop by the end of the year, so they don't really have a lot of time and money to toss around.

Case in point, this tweet by Street Fighter series producer (and loveable kook) Yoshinori Ono:

I don't have R&D budget and staff who they're just only make USF4.RT @MC_Odd: @warmlettuce Are you secretly working on a SF V for next gen?
— Yoshinori Ono (@Yoshi_OnoChin) July 15, 2013

Straight from the horse's mouth, the company just doesn't have the cash or staff to make a full sequel to one of their largest franchises. Still sad? Sure, but again, that's the way the cookie crumbles.

Still, they are throwing resources at updating a four year old game, and it will fundamentally change it. All characters will have tweaks to their move sets, and five new characters (even though 80% of them are taken straight from another game) drastically alters the landscape of any fighting game, especially if even one or two of them is accepted as tournament-level competitive by the fan base. To me, this is a sign that the developer is going through some hard times, but they haven't turned their back on their customers. Sure, it still seems a little dumb from a casual perspective that they're adding on to a game that will be five years old when Ultra finally arrives, but from a different perspective, Ono's transparency buys him a little bit of good will. At least from me, anyway.

Today's homework is for you to read The Psychology of Steam's Summer Sale over on the The Psychology of Video Games (which is a website I've only become familiar with recently). I was just having a conversation with a friend about the horn of plenty that Steam becomes when the weather turns oppressively hot. This turns out to be eerily timely. Stay tuned for more Tomb Dater later this week. I think so, anyway...