So today I wrote a baseball post AND a food post AND a video game post. So that should make everybody happy.
Because you know I believe that.
As an added bonus, I’ve finally noticed that this theme was lacking in page navigation. So I haXX3d some in, because I’m uber.
If you played Kingdom Hearts, you no doubt remember how much the beginning of the game sucked. If you don’t, or if you never played it, I’ll summarise: you spend about an hour running around on an island talking to the cast of Final Fantasies VIII and X, playing dodgeball, and having scavenger hunts. Then you answer some strange questions that will actually set unchangable options that don’t seem to be related to the questions. Then you run an obstacle course. Then you watch a few cutscenes. In all, it’s an hour of time you’ll never get back. When I played Kingdom Hearts 2, I found myself longing for that kind of gameplay.
See, the intro to Kingdom Hearts 2 is four hours long, and consists mainly of running back and forth and talking to NPCs over and over again, punctuated with cutscenes of Christopher Lee cackling ominously. But it’s worse than that. Where the first game has you go on a scavenger hunt – which is easily outmoded by the internet – this time you need to raise munny so you can go to the other side of town (which, I guess, is a pretty exclusive community), and so you take odd jobs from the job board. There are three available. You’ll need to do something like twenty to raise enough money, which means you play the same minigames over and over again until you’re done. Now, I’m never a fan of minigames, and I know how you people can be with your "oh Darien hates everything" routine, but this is a little over the line I would think even for tolerant people. I repeat: you don’t just play minigames to raise money, you play the same three minigames repeatedly.
Once that’s done, there’s some gimmicky battle arena nonsense where you basically hit the mob twice and then run away from it for two minutes and then you win. Then you do THAT again about four more times. Then you run around town and ineffectually whack at Nobodies with your stupid wooden sword until you get saved by a cutscene. Then more cutscenes happen and you go to the mansion and it gets really insulting.
Once you fight your way through all the really boring Nobodies in the mansion, you get to the White Room where you watch a cutscene that I guess is supposed to be dripping with pathos, but failed to have any impact on me since the character I was supposed to care about was somebody I’d never heard of before and wouldn’t hear of again. Then you get down to the basement, randomly destroy some expensive-looking machinery, go through one more bullshit fight, and then find Sora so you can start the real game and basically render everything you just did totally irrelevant.
Yeah, because you haven’t been playing the right game this whole time. You’ve been playing like a game within the game, where you’re this other guy called Roxas and you have to avoid succumbing to tedium before you can get to the real game. It’s bullshit, and I hated it, and I was really annoyed that the entire first night I spent playing this new game I just bought went into playing minigames so I could unlock the real game. And I know I just linked to this, but it‘s still funny. So I’m going to link to it again.
So I was on vacation last week (which, incidentally, is why I didn’t update my world-famous blog for a few days), and I had Escargot for the first time. If you’ve never had Escargot, and I assume you haven’t because I know who reads this blog, it can be a little bit intimidating; here comes this little plate looking all fancy and some little tiny forks, like the kind you use to eat lobster. There are some lovely little mushroom caps there and some roasted garlic and on top of it all are these goddamn snails, right there, in the middle of the plate, looking snaily as anything.
Your first reaction is going to be to smell the mushrooms and the garlic and the herbs and think to yourself, hey, that smells really good. Then you see the snails and think to yourself, hey, I didn’t realise they’d still have the stupid snaily eye-stalk things sticking up like that. That really makes this snail thing look like I’m actually eating snails, which is something I may not be as prepared for as I thought. Then you probably think, well, what the hell, I already paid for this.
It turns out they’re very subtle and buttery; they don’t taste snaily at all. Don’t argue with me, now – you know exactly what I mean. They’re surprisingly firm, too; I rather expected they’d be sort of slimy and mushy, but they aren’t. They’re a bit crispy on the outside (especially the freaky disconcerting goddamn snaily eye stalks), but they don’t seem to be filled with any type of goo or jelly or slime. We had them served (as I mentioned before) over mushroom caps with roasted garlic, and the whole dish frankly had quite a pronounced mushroom flavour with only a hint of snail. So, really, I’d say I quite liked it, and far and away the freakiest part was the part where you’re sitting there thinking about how you’re eating snails.
Oh, and the eye stalks.
The Red Sox have now finished sweeping the sweepiest postseason ever. I kinda feel bad for the Colorado Rockies, who, for whatever reason – pressure, layoff, Steve Bartman, whatever – were just not playing good baseball. They were not playing up to the standard they set for themselves over the last few months. But, frankly, some questionable choices were made. Like, why send Brian Fuentes in to give up runs in the eighth inning every single game instead of skipping straight to Manny Corpas, who finished the series with an ERA of goddamn zero? Why not bunt the shit out of first base and make Francona pay out the nose for starting Ortiz? Why not send Willy Taveras in to pinch-hit in the ninth, bunt his speedy ass on base, and then maybe steal into scoring position? Ah well. There’s always next year. Take it from me, there sure is.
In other news, A-Rod is a free agent again. Dave had an interesting theory that the Dodgers should sign him, since they’re an expensive club that just wants to be in the news and doesn’t really care about the World Series, which is the perfect place for A-Rod. I said Mets for about 100% the same reasons.
