Pre-Thanksgiving Morning Video: Dock Ellis & The LSD No-No

Obviously I won't be here tomorrow so I'm putting up this week's video this morning. I thought about trying to find a video Thanksgiving related, but this is much funnier.


-K.

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The Shadow (of the Colossus) Out of Time

There are certainly other things I could be talking about because I haven't done a regular post in a while but this story caught my eye. The PlayStation 2, the nearly decade-old system that originally launched in Japan in March 2000, is just now officially being rolled out by Sony in Brazil, for more than what a PS3 costs here. Madness.

-K.

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Thursday Morning Video: NES Left 4 Dead

A fellow named Eric Ruth is developing an NES-style Left 4 Dead demake, says he'll be done with it sometime next year. I can't help but wonder if all the amusement to be had is the nostalgic charm and that I've absorbed all the useful entertainment nutrients I can from simply watching a demo video. At any rate, it's still impressive.



-K.

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Thursday Morning Video: Monty Python's The Meaning of Life - The Galaxy Song

The mellifluous tones of Eric Idle make me feel like everything's going to be okay.


-K.

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Thursday Morning Video: Giant Bomb - V-Pain Breaks Down Today's Schedule

-K.

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Run for the Borderlands

It's no secret that I'm not the largest fan of Diablo, so when the phrase "It's basically Diablo with guns" started getting thrown around to describe Gearbox's Borderlands it's understandable I wasn't exactly chomping at the bit to get my hands on it. After spending a considerable amount of time with the game both on the PC and the 360 I can say that they're absolutely right, and it's great.

An over-the-top sci-fi action-RPG set on a distant planet in the future is not the kind of thing anyone expected from Gearbox, the studio that, while starting with an expansion to the original Half-Life, made a name for itself through their Brothers in Arms franchise, a series of semi-tactical super serious World War 2 games. The game takes place on Pandora, a desolate desert world rules by vicious creatures and murderous raiders, and you play one of four characters that are searching for "the vault," a mythical, hidden place filled with alien riches. The storyline is paper thin, you can get by without reading any of the quest text, and it doesn't really matter. The game isn't about presenting an epic world with a grand narrative, it is entirely focused on getting you to shoot guys and collect loot.


Borderlands is a shooter, first and foremost, sort of wrapped in a role-playing game candy shell. Sure, you gain experience and skill points, but everything about the RPG aspect is purely mathematical. There is no room for personal interpretation or expression; no dialogue trees, no moral choices, you simply accept quests and get on with the murder. You'll earn money and equipment for completing these tasks which you will use in turn to buy and sell more equipment. And there's a lot of it.
Their method of procedurally generating weapons and how the game goes about that process led to a fairly well publicized claim of the game having, effectively, over half a million guns. This does involve in the creation of many, many guns you will simply pick up only to sell, and guns that are almost exactly the same except for a couple point differences in accuracy or damage, but the allure of opening every weapon cache hoping to find some crazy revolver that fires shotgun shells that do acid damage is strong. But it's just neat to jump back into the game after playing it earlier, find a weapon cache you already opened before and have it give you something completely different, albeit not always useful.
It's just a fun game to play, using your most prized weapons to wade through groups of enemies, giving it that distinct Diablo feel, but different in giving you complete freedom in your movement and actions. Playing online, with up to three additional players, simply increases the amount of hostile creatures you face at any time, and while it usually makes the game more fun, playing it with friends mean you all need to leave your character untouched in the meantime, because having just one person a few levels higher means they can tear through most quests while you're struggling to keep up with their murderous pace. For the most part, though, it works, and there's nothing wrong with just going it solo.
It's a big game with a lot to do and a lot to find, with my main character only a little more than half way to the level cap after about 15 hours of play, and definitely worth giving a look.


-K.

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Thursday Morning Video: That Mitchell and Webb Look - Numberwang

A little late on the video because it's been a fucking nightmare this morning here, but it's still before noon so this counts.

Stay Numberwang.

-K.

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Big Guns and Bigger Eyes

I recently obtained a Sony PlayStation 3 Home Computer Entertainment System, and the first thing I did the morning after I got it was pick up a copy of Valkyria Chronicles, which I mentioned way back around this time last year.
It's really good.

That is to say it's mechanically really good. How it combines turn-based strategy and light third-person action is a triumph, except it comes wrapped in a JRPG presentation that carries the overwrought narrative baggage expected from the genre. Every character suffers from verbal diarrhea, complete with the standard half-hearted diatribes on subjects like human nature and racism mashed with the somewhat inappropriate feeling cutesy humor, the kind which is very often punctuated with a "Tee hee!" by one of the female protagonists. The cut-scenes are entirely skippable, but I suffer from an affliction that requires me to view them, because while it might be virtually impossible, especially at this point, to get me emotionally invested into the storyline, I like to know what's going on and what led up to a particular mission. It does help that the game has a great look to it, if I were so bold I might even say gorgeous, the way everything is presented with a painterly, watercolor look.
The short of it is that I don't really care for the story or characters, but now that we've gotten that out of the way we can talk about what I do like. When you are mercifully allowed to participate in the game proper, it is essentially a gridless turn-based strategy game. At the start of your turn you are presented with a map of the battlefield and a set of Command Points with which to move your units, selecting a unit brings the game into a third-person mode in which you move them about and attack in real-time. While they do less damage than they would during your turn, enemies can still fire upon the units you are moving, so speed and use of cover is still a factor, giving it a more action-y feel. Once your unit is in "aim mode" they have all the time in the world to pick their shot and fire, with headshots obviously doing more damage but being harder to make. Your units can only fire once per use, but can be reused multiple times in a turn, though the distance they can move decreases significantly with each use.
While the most I've ever seen allowed in a mission is 9 units, you assemble a squad of 20 from a large roster of characters in different classes, each with their own special "potentials" which can be good or bad and are only activated under certain conditions (e.g. Works better alone, not as effective in urban environments, etc.) and other characters they prefer fighting with. The experience you earn is spent on leveling up unit types (Snipers, scouts, shocktroopers, etc.) rather than individuals, which is a great relief. The money you earn is spent upgrading and modifying each class type's equipment, and you'll pick up some enemy weapons along the way, further allowing you to customize your squad.
There's a lot to chew on here and I've been taking it pretty slow, but so far it's a game with a surprising amount of depth considering it's coming from Sega. Maybe it would need to have a different context (I keep thinking about shoehorning Team Fortress 2 into this style), but it really feels like the kind of game that would do better on the PC.

-K.

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Space Asshole

I couldn't think of a funnier headline than the subject of the post itself. A couple weeks ago on the Idle Thumbs podcast they began talking about Red Faction: Guerrilla, with the PC version finally being released recently, and discussed the havoc you can wreak upon the innocent colonists, and what that turns the main character into. A few days ago Idle Thumbs host Chris Remo put together this little number, which I really enjoyed.

-K.

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I Hate Leaks

Looks like someone got ahold of the trailer for Left 4 Dead 2 and leaked it on to YouTube, or could be one of those "accidental" leaks that Valve seems to do from time to time. Sure, it might just be a cinematic, but it's pretty goddamn awesome, I especially love the twangy rendition of the theme at the beginning.

-K.

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