The Electric Haunted Hayride

All this talk of zombie invasions in everyone's favorite games with the general resurfacing of zombies as a rule during Halloween is bringing back my bizarre 10 second musings on how awesome it would be if a zombie apocalypse ever happened. Never mind that I'd probably be one of the first to go. Luckily, if my activities this October are to be believed, I'd make one hell of a zombie. In between intense readings of The Walking Dead, a comic I took far to long to read, I've taken an odd job at a local haunted hayride.

Whitetail Farm's haunted hayride occupies a bizarre space somewhere between exceptionally hokey and genuinely scary. I'd feel extremely awkward criticizing the ride if it were some sort of family-friendly wacky Halloween fun ride, but the rather gory props used and attempts at genuine scares seem like they were going for a somewhat older audience. At the same time, it plays it ridiculously safe in other areas. Is a cliche chainsaw-wielding Jason or a flying white sheet ghost really pushing the horror envelope? And that's where I come in. The ghost part. Not a zombie per se. That's the job of a friend of mine several yards down the ride, while another guy I know jumps at passers by in a devil costume between conversations with a Priest who, none too ironically, is a total pedophile. Does lusting after underage girls negate the stereotype?

There is a truly bizarre thrill to be derived from scaring a trailerfull of Missourians pulling a rope behind a tree. With the hood of my raggedy jacket down low, crouched behind a couple thin trees who's seems fairly dubious, the frightened screams from up ahead serve as a wonderful confirmation that I succeeded. It's not that I'm particularly overjoyed with my having what it takes to become a haunted house worker, if that is something to be excited about. It's just nice to be vindicated for the effort. "Did you see those punks? That's right. I scared them. Beat that, McDonalds Burger Flipper man. Damn straight I'm earning that $6.25 an hour." And let's bring that back to where we started. I'd be one hell of a zombie because I'm already doing a damn good job scaring people for minimum wage. Imagine how good I'd be at it if minimum wage was brains?

And like a preacher myself struggling to bring a story about my niece and her skateboarding friends back to the Lord, it's time to bring this exciting anecdote back to games. I've been building this weird metaphor in my head between my weekend job and Valve's upcoming multiplayer horrorfest Left 4 Dead. The game is like the virtual extension of a haunted hayride. The survivors are the paying customers ($60 dollars, in fact) on a ride crafted to some degree to scare the living shit out of you. Meanwhile, the zombies are the paid employees. Except it's like if you wanted to pay to work at the hay ride. I guess that's not totally out of the realm of possibility. There are paid internships and unpaid internships. I'm sure it can go into the negatives. Left 4 Dead is one of those fun games I get to talk excitedly about with my friends who don't happen to be internet-reading game nerds. It's a big budget zombie game coming out at just the right time, Halloween. As a result, a lot of my friends just know about. Something odd I've been noticing though is that many of them don't seem to know about playing the zombies. Perhaps it's not something sold very heavily in the advertisements?

The zombie side has me flip-flopping on whether I'm interested or not. All reports from the field make it sound pretty fun, for sure. The survivor side sounds like where it's at, though. The AI Director system which dynamically restructures the game based on your preformance and experience, really speaks to Valve's unique approach to making games. As anyone who took the time to replay the Orange Box games with commentary knows, Valve loves to focus test. But they seem to take it from another angle. Rather than dumbing down their games based on rumblings from the peanut gallery, they come up with new and creative solutions that include the idiots while keeping the more seasoned players from walking away in disgust. It'd be interesting to know the kind and amount of focus testing was involved in the making of Left 4 Dead based on the nature of the game. Valve promises restructuring encounters, making them easier on you if your ragged and beaten, or upping the ante if you're doing too damn good. It would be interesting to see how they found out when to let off the onslaught. What is too much? Hopefully me and Valve will agree on when and when to ramp up the difficulty. If Portal is any indication, I'm sure we will.

Toonami is Dead. Long Live Toonami.

And so, after more than 10 years (you better be right, Wikipedia), Toonami is finally dead. Shows over, folks. And to be honest, I'm not really sure how to feel about it. I wasn't around for it's humble beginnings of running Thundercats and Voltron. I didn't even really get cable till around 2002 (and we'll get to that.) I sure as hell didn't really stick around for the end, either. My interest tapered off around the end of 2004 due to the general lack of anything new or interesting. I had already discovered the joys of fansubs and high speed internet, and, to be honest, had no interest in the shows on at the time. I did catch on to Gundam SEED later on though, and later became a Megas XLR super fan. But that's another story.

But it was that 2002-2003 Toonami stint that I remember the most. I can probably thank those programs ran during those 2 years for ultimately solidifying my love of anime. Some of them (namely Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z) don't really hold up now that I'm somewhat older and wiser in the medium, but it was definitely a step up from what I had been watching before. As previously stated, my Saturday morning cartoon watching was limited to whatever was on the basic channels in the area. Admittedly, some of these were Batman TAS and Sailor Moon. But most of them were KidsWB throwaway cartoons that maybe aired 2 to 3 episodes before realizing that no one really cared. Pokemon, of course, was still hot then, but even then I was growing tired of it. So the switch between that and weekday afternoon viewings of Toonami was pretty staggering to say the least. "What's that you say? You guy's have got cartoons with killing and PG swear words!? Sign me up!" Ah, the thought processes of a young anime fan. At the time, I was at least semi-aware of the fact that Toonami edited their programs and that the opening sequences were by and large cut out, but it was mostly irrelevant to me. I hadn't even seen Adult Swim when I started out, much less an episode of DBZ with it's original audio. Put simply, I had nothing to judge it by.
Toonami sort of drilled into me a lot of the prefrences and tastes I have when it comes to anime. G Gundam, which debuted in 2002, was probably what made me the giant robot freak I am today. For all the flack the series gets from, well, MOST anime fans, I think G Gundam is, in many ways, one of the best introductions to the super robot genre. It really carries on many of the traits that make the genre awesome. It was a series with a borderline idiotic premise that existed for it's writers to show off how zany their international robot designs could be, and where every character always has something crazy and melodramatic to say, most notably Domon Kashu's Indigo Montoya-esque repeated battle speech. As much as I through enjoy Gurren Lagann, shows like G Gundam were doing the over the top impassioned monologues years before Gainax tried their hand at it. The action was fast and furious, without any care to outdated concepts like "logic" and "science" and "realisim". And the special attacks? Totally memorable. Despite having some of the most bizarre names ever (Bakuretsu God Finger? Hot.), using a burning mech hand to crush another mech's head is about as visceral as it gets. I was totally pumped at every new episode for the whole production of stock footage and the aforementioned impassionate battle speech, followed by the attack name screams. To say that it's stuck with me would be an understatement.


And then there was Yu Yu Hakusho. I had seen a couple episodes from it's short run on Adult Swim, but I never got fully into it until it made the switch to Toonami. I've actually been slowly trying to rewatch the series as of late. I've watch only the first 3 or so episodes, so the jury's still out on whether it holds up. The first couple episodes are, as remembered, pretty damn slow (who's bright idea was it to begin a shonen fighting series with episodes of Touched By an Angel?), but we'll see where that goes. And of course, there's Kenshin and the Dragon Ball shows which, say what you will know, where totally fascinating to me back in the day. The Big O, another classic robot series, ran a bit before my time, but when I caught it rerunning on Adult Swim, I fell in love with it's outlandish designs and obivous Batman influence.

I'm not sure really what to say. It's a shame that Toonami got to the state it did. It's really an sign of the times. Anime (and action cartoons in general) are on the out. Cartoon Network is making no secret of wanting to switch to some kind of live action dominate format like Disney Channel. I'm definetly not going to have an outburst over them betraying their name or anything ridiculous. They can do what they want, and I probably wouldn't watch their channel either way. I do fear what this will do for the anime industry as a whole however. One must assume it won't be a change for the better.

Silent Hill 3

I often find myself a latecomer to game franchises. It sort of just happens that way. For example, my first Metal Gear game was Metal Gear Solid 2, followed by 3. It's been only recently that I went back to play the first Metal Gear Solid. My experiences with the Silent Hill series have been similar. Walk in to a used game store (at least in the great state of Missouri) and there is a decent chance you'll find a $10 used copy of Silent Hill 2. You're going to have to look hard for anything else. 3 is noticeably vacant. The Room is abundant on the Xbox, but I've sworn off of Xbox games based on my prior experiences with the 360's shoddy emulation. Meanwhile, if you DO find a copy of the original Silent Hill, be prepared to pay upwards of $50. So when I found Silent Hill 3 at my local Game XChange (after me and my friends narrowly escaped death from tornadoes that turned out to not actually be there), I bought that shit in an instant. I'm sure completing an entire game in a single day is wildly unhealthy. I was surprised that I was able to finish the game in just under 7 hours. Surprised, but not really disappointed.

The two Silent Hill games I have played have kept me coming back as a result of expert presentation. The music, visuals, and story are what allows the game to vastly excel over it's often weaker gameplay aspects. One of the most defining aspects of this presentation is the music and it's relation to the events on screen. Team Silent composer Akira Yamaoka obviously understands something that I wish more composers, both in video games and in cinema, would catch on to: sometimes the best music for a scene is little or no music at all. Silent Hill 3 is a game with no shortage of tense battles and utterly disturbing moments. I think one of the things that sets Team Silent apart from the rest is that in most games, you'd expect some rousing John Williams-esque orchestral score, perhaps with some guitars and latin chanting to accompany these scenes. In Silent Hill, you're often treated to little more than a pulsating background noise. It's brutally effective for conveying the chillingly surreal, dream logic-contingent world of Silent Hill. I think Yamaoka's skills also lie in variety as well, which serves to add emotional depth to the games. He sets the intense mood for the game with the hard rock opener You're Not Here, while tracks like End of Small Sanctuary give us a break from the paralyzing horror of the game.

The variety in music definitely helps, because the game changes environments quite often. In addition to the area's around Silent Hill, the game often lapses into the "Other World", a rusted, shit covered nightmare version of the real world. You could be cynical and say that the Other World concept largely exists as a means to reuse the same maps with different textures, but sometimes great gameplay design is born from budgetary constraints. The change is often times jarring and unsettling, and I think in many ways more effective than in Silent Hill 2. For example, the hospital in Silent Hill 3 becomes a fiery red throbbing mass where you'll find yourself running against the walls in order to find out where the hell you are. As usual, Team Silent's fetish for rusted grates and fans are more than present. It all contributes to this grimy, cerebral universe that really makes the series is so great.

In some ways, however, the story is a step down from it's predecessor. Silent Hill 2's deeply personal story is, in my opinion, almost unrivaled in the gaming industry. And Silent Hill 3's is definitely an interesting endeavor. A tale of a girl with a connection to the mysterious town that draws her back in after years of absence. It's a story that definitely works, but it very rarely surprises. There aren't many twists and startling revelations to be had when compared to the original. It's a largely straight forward horror story. And that's good, really. I found myself liking Heather by the end of the game, but the same level of obscurity just isn't there. And I'm not sure that's really a mark against it. It's really just something to mention.

As I ready myself to play Homecoming, the newest entry in the series, I'm finding myself tallying the differences between 2 and 3 and 4, and wondering how much Homecoming will build upon it. But ultimately, it's really only the presentation that I'm thinking about. Much like a point and click adventure game, I'm not looking for game play advancements in this series. They'd be nice, but as long as Double Helix supplies the same interesting level of presentation that Team Silent has maintained over the last few years and hopefully takes it to new places, I have high hopes.

9/10

Game Log #8

A crash course in why I should keep these up to date:

• Played and, over the span of one Saturday afternoon, beat Silent Hill 3. This marks the 2nd Silent Hill game I've played, the other being Silent Hill. If only the other games in this series weren't so obscenely hard to find. I'll save my thoughts on 3 for my review.
• Played and, over the course of a week and a half, beat Resident Evil 4. Expect a review for that as well.
• I'm afraid I'm about to do with Persona 3 what I do with far to many RPGs: namely, I'm not going to finish it. I can't get over my feelings on this. I've put 40+ hours into the game; that's far to much to turn back now. But at the same time, with so many other, shorter games to play, and so many new games on next month's terrifying horizon (Silent Hill Homecoming, Fable II, Fallout III, and so on), it's easy to put away a game that has, by all accounts, 50 more hours to go. And I hope I don't give up on it; I'm still enjoying the game. It's the pacing that's keeping me down, mostly, and RPGs are, in general, designed to be slower-paced. It's weird how attracted I am to this genre that seems so obivously not made for me. As for my progress, I've got 4 full moons to go, supposedly. The boss fight wasn't especially challenging, but satisfying as most P3 boss fights are. As I've said before, the exploitability of the combat system is what makes the game truly unique for me. Hopefully, I'll have the game completed before Persona 4 see's it's stateside release. Is that an unrealistic goal? And even if not, will I even PLAY, much less beat Persona 4? Good question.

Game Log #7

Most of my gaming attention has been dividing between two games over the past couple weeks:

- Still chugging through Persona 3 FES with constantly shifting feelings on the game. The high points are high, and the low points are very, very low. I think what's really kept me in the game has been the combat and dungeon exploration side of the game which, ironically, is the part of the game I hear a lot of people disliking. In particular, there's a pretty vocal contingent of the internet that can't stand how exploitable the battle system is. I, however, find that the main draw. It's not the most strategic JRPG I've ever played, but exploiting the enemies various weakness and managing your 2 Persona-per-turn limit is a welcome change of pace in a genre where grinding is a central component. There's something truly beautiful in being able to drop a boss in more ways then simply leveling up for hours on end. I want to find time to tweak with the Persona fusion and weapon creation systems at some point as well.

I do feel that the game does have a bizarre difficulty balance throughout, but I'm not sure it really bothers me all that much. You could do battle with a boss weak to Zio and finish him off in a couple minutes, and a couple floors later get brutally raped by a tower boss with no weakness to anything. I do have to begrudge the game for how it handles death. I've really reached the point where it's hard for me to handle games where I can lose hours of progress by dying once (something I'll get to in my second game.) The nature of Persona 3 makes it difficult to simply leave Tarturus to save, as you would have to restart again from the last warp floor. I've found myself longing for Dragon Quest's idea of halving your gold and sending you back to the next town. Couldn't just take some of my Yen, but leave me my new persona's and gained XP?

But what really gets under my skin with this game is the story. I've come to reconcile how awful the majority of the social link conversations are. I'll just skip through them and get my next rank. But then there's the dialog that's more difficult to skip, as it pertains to the main story. And I WANT to like the main story, I really do. There's a sort of feeling of wrongness under the surface; it's the same type of feeling I got from watching series like Evangelion or Revolutionary Girl Utena. The story seems like it's going to morph into something entirely different, and I anxiously await it's transformation. But I do this at the cost of a boring quasi mini-game where I have to go hit on girls at some stupid beach.

-My handheld experience as of late has been a used copy of Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer. After hearing some good things on the game from an episode of Retronauts, I found a used copy at my local Vintage Stock and gave it a go. I'd have to say that other than a few experiences with Nethack, Shiren is probably the first hardcore roguelike I've really played. I got used to the global turn concept pretty quickly, but I'm still trying to figure out all of the exploits therein.

It's a game where dieing once means it's game over. No matter how much you have leveled up your character, it's all gone. It's not as scary as it sounds, however. The leveling up is far faster than your average RPG; I've gotten Shiren to level 15 several times, and none of my single play throughs have been much longer than an hour. There is also an element of item persistence as well. Blacksmiths in the game can level up weapons for a price, so you could find a weapon to level up, even if you loose your own.you can find warehouses in the game at which to store items. This means that you can play it safe and store your Katana +6 for a future playthrough.

Another interesting concept is that the game really encourages you to, well, die. Various characters and events, such as the aforementioned blacksmiths, can only do their job once per play through. The sidequests you accomplish stay accomplished even after your death. If helping someone allowed him to join you as a party member, he can join you again on subsequent playthroughs. So far, it's been an interesting experience. Now if only I could figure out how to keep my food reliably stocked.

Electric Bibleland: Wisdom Tree Funpack #2 (Part the Uno)

Sometimes, people make mistakes. Sometimes those mistakes involve making Christian-themed video games. Whenever that happens, we're there. This... is Electric Bibleland.
King of Kings: The Early Years
The first thing you'll notice about King of Kings is that it is a fucking cheater. This isn't ONE game, Wisdom Tree. This is MANY games. Some might even say THREE. If we're counting the title screen, it's FOUR. I didn't sign up for this shit, and neither did you, reader/listener/viewer/watcher/erotic PI (God I hope so.)

The three+ game pack is pretty common within the NES Wisdom Tree pantheon. I'll give King of Kings a 1Up over the rest, however. Why, you might ask?
That's right. Someone at Wisdom Tree realized that even the most uncultured Christian children might not be entirely cool with Wisdom Tree's majestically repetitive music and gave you the option to turn it off. Somehow, We Three Kings doesn't translate so well to the NES sound chip, believe it or not. I like to think that the man who volunteered this brilliant leap forward in game design was the sound programmer himself.

In my version of the Wisdom Tree story, his wife and children left him after he unwisely brought home the Exodus soundtrack (limited edition vinyl pressing. I own it. Do you? Loser.) And who could blame them? Could she (I guess her name is Bianca Bianca) ever truly except the MONSTER she had married? With the combination of his children getting a new daddy, and his failure to be nominated for any awards for Exodus drove him over the deep end. It's enough to make anyone loose faith in their work, especially when that work is the subversion of Nintendo children. Subversion involving 3 separate, but equally awful, video games in one truly powerful cartridge. The bad kind of powerful.

The Wise Men
The Wise Men is a game about dicks. That's what it is. It's a video game for the Nintendo Entertainment System about dicks. There's camels and exciting desert animals and scripture quizzes, but it's mostly about dicks.
In this game, you collect dildos. I'm not sure what they do, but you collect them. Sometimes they change colors. I guess that's cool.
Here's another penis. It must be some kind of Sand Penis Demon, brought into the desert by Satan himself as a means to anally violate Jesus's old people friends on their way to his birthday party. I guess that's pretty bad.
I'm pretty sure this is also a penis. If I had to choose my favorite penis in the game, this would be it. Sand penises are fantastic, but phallus cactus takes the cake. Except instead of a cake, it's actually a penis.
The Wise Men is a game about riding Camel Birdo through the desert in search of Jesus I guess. I'm inferring this from the game's soundtrack (the aforementioned We Three Kings), a song about riding Camel Birdo through the desert in search of Jesus.

The Wise Men is a shining example of what Wisdom Tree excels the most at: making games with shitty control. Every platformer Wisdom Tree laid their greasy fingers on played greasy. The controls are slippery as all hell. You remember when you'd play those old generic NES sidescrollers that all had the generic Ice Level with slippery terrain, which forces you to adjust your timing and input accordingly? The Wise Men is like playing an entire game of that ice level. You always end up jumping just a little farther than you should, something which can easily throw you off in a game filled with some pretty difficult jumps. Perhaps it was just industry standard at the time, but considering the audience that Wisdom Tree was aiming for, the level of difficulty some of the jumps reach is pretty surprising to say the least.

On top of that, you're wrestling with a Friday the 13th-esque Camel Birdo attack (pictured above) that conveniently arcs over just about any enemy in the game. You have a decent chance of hitting birds when they're right in front of you, but for just about anything else, you'll have to institute a bizarre "jump backwards and shoot" approach to any confrontation.
Lucky for us, successfully landing a hit can cause some goofy wacky hijinks, such as the above picture. This isn't even a glitch. You just fight a fox miniboss that can also do crazy fucking backflips. I guess the fox can also lay eggs. I'm not sure if that's cool or not. Anyway, it's been a wacky time, and I was planning on beating the game to see what crazy shit happens in the end. But then this happened:
Next time: Flight to Egypt, a game about being able to jump but not being able to jump on anything.

INTERNET

A recent dispute with my bank involving bogus ATM fees left me with a closed account and a recent paycheck of 300 dollars burning a hole in my pocket. Luckily, I was in walking distance of a Best Buy and, like any non sensible person would, I decided it was time to blow 138 of those hard earned (not really) dollars on finally connecting my long dormant (not really) Xbox 360 to the internet. So, wireless adapter and one month live card in hand, as well as the newly released second volume of Gurren Lagann, I walked out having spent enough cash to get a free gift card. This is money that could have, and probably should have, been spent on necessities like food, gas, saving for college. But who needs that?

The following bullshit is presented in convenient bullet point format because it's convenient and it's not inconvenient and I'm right.

• Questionable n-router purchases at Goodwill Stores can, and in my bizare case, do turn out well.
• My connection occasionally goes dead for reasons I haven't had time to analyze. It's either a problem with the router (more likely), a problem with the adapter (God, I hope not), or Murphy's Law in exciting action.
• My friends are cheap assholes without 360s. As a result, my online gaming experiences include such exciting events as listening to a twelve year old white kid talk about black people and arguments over whether Halo 3 is indeed better than Grand Theft Auto IV. Worth $100 dollars? You be the judge.
• Braid is awesome and I want Braid.
• I downloaded the Alone in the Dark demo. I could never have expected the game would involve blinking as a gameplay mechanic.
• I haven't even watched the first disc of Gurren Lagann. I haven't watched the first box set of GaoGaiGar, either, but I own it; I'll own the second box set in a few days. Perhaps I should stop buying anime untill I actually watch it? Of course not. The Otaku way is to die surrounded by more volumes of pornographic comics and 70's robot shows than any human being could ever have time to consume.
• Persona 3 is stealing all my fucking time, so I'm not watching anime anytime soon. I'm still finding time to watch Kaiba, aparently.
• Kaiba's opening theme could be a Bjork song, but it isn't.
• Back to Xbox Live: Being a sniper in 360 Team Fortress 2 is impossible and completely unfun. Is it really that big of a deal to add mouse and keyboard support to your games, Microsoft? Really? If Sony can do it, so can you.
• Much to my dismay, GTAIV's saves cannot be transferred between profiles on my Hard Drive. It's not a HUGE deal that I have to use two different profiles for playing GTAIV single or multiplayer, but it's inconvenient. Convenience is the flag I fly. Why else would you even have bullet points in this sham of an article? If I can have bullet points, Rockstar can have fucking save transfers.
• Instead of getting names with homosexual connotations banned from Xbox Live, I feel Microsoft's effort would be better spent banning white children with names like Gangstah Chef.
• My only USB keyboard is shitty and ergonomic and I hate it. I got it for free, but I hate it.