Old News: Page Seven

The latest developments in the giant space war between the New York Times and the United States Army are too boring for my tastes. They're all whining, and both sides are getting defensive, and it's starting to seem more like a Lifetime TV special about the trials of adoption than the bitchin' slasher flick it should look like when somebody starts antagonising the United States Army.

Maybe I'm just biased because I work for the internet, which as you may know is the primary competitor to the New York Times in the hotly-contested "telling you people what to think" market, but I was really hoping this whole thing would get more exciting than it did. What would be cool is if the Army sent tanks into New York City and really stirred up some violence.

And the winner is Knight-Ridder, for this insane article. Did you see this? As annoying as the idea that Green Day paid large sums of money for this article to be written is, the alternative, I think, would be worse. Do you want to live in a world filled with people who write mawkish articles like that without even being bribed first?

Next week's headline: Linkin Park not only single-handedly revived seventeenth-century baroque symphonies, but also can cure cancer with their liner notes!

I did a pretty major overhaul on the GameFAGs system. Now it indicates who wrote the review you're reading, and, if you're looking at the main list, the five most recent reviews will be flagged "New." Not a very exciting update, I know. But at least 17% better than nothing.

Postscript to my Academy Award-winning update "Kickin' It." I've decided to reverse my policy on not posting GameFAGs updates in the updates column for three reasons. One, they don't really take any less work than any other kind of update. Two, it's what I'm spending most of my update energy on lately. Three, most importantly, it'll make me look less bad if I can get last year's stuff out of the recent updates. Questions, comments, and praise can go to me as usual. Complaints can go straight to Hell. With zombies.

Updates roll in to the ol' GameFAGs, and this one's notable, since they're the first five reviews written by a pd.com staffer other than me. The new reviews are for Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2: Episode One, Far Cry, and Civilization IV. Go check that stuff out and support your local curmudgeony webmaster and his evil assistants. Or we'll kill you. With zombies.

E3 is over once again, and this year was definitely more entertaining than last. We saw more of the X360. We saw - and, more importantly, heard the ridiculous name of - the Wii. We saw - and, more importantly, felt the ridiculous price of - the Playstation 3.

While I'm talking about that, take a look at this if you haven't already seen it. I imagine he has some sort of point in mind for that, but I'm not really sure what it is; the interesting thing about it from my perspective is this, though: look at that second graph. What that second graph tells us is that if Nintendo releases the Wii at the $200 price point, it will be, adjusted for inflation, the least expensive console system ever released. I doubt this little tidbit has escaped the Nintendo marketing machine, either. Meanwhile, Sony's going the path of such major successes as the 3DO and Neo Geo - the Atari 2600 was the only console that launched for more than four hundred of today's dollars and sold well. Maybe I'll give you Intellivision too, if you ask real nice. But there hasn't been anything even near the PS3's price point since the 70s that wasn't a bomb. The horrible spectre of doom hovers yet nearer.

Not that I think there aren't people dumb enough to pay five or even six hundred dollars for that thing. I'm sure there are people who'll buy the $600 version on preorder and own a big expensive shiny paperweight for the year or so it'll be before there's any software worth owning for it. No, I'm not going to let you people off easy and assume you're smarter than that; I'm still pissed at you about that whole debacle where you declared Final Fantasy VII the best game ever.

Yeah, I can't get over that incredible lapse of judgment. Neither, it must be said, can Square Enix, which continues to churn out a line of threadbare software in hopes of cashing in on that strangeness. The one bright spot I see in the lineup is Final Fantasy VI Advance - yeah, I know it's a reissue, thanks. I can tell from the title. But it's a reissue of a game that's worth reissuing, and I'm told it features improvements on the game's (already excellent) graphics and sound, and also new content. I figure the easiest way to mess this one up would be to inject more hyper thumpa-thumpa-thumpa dance beats into the music like in the recent games, more angst into the dialogue like in the recent games, and make the "new content" mean "hey we shoved Cloud and Sephiroth into this one too!" Hope shines through: I'm told that Square actually kept Woolsey's script for the PSX reissue of this game; maybe they'll have the sense to do the same for the GBA. Yuk it up, fanboys, but Ted Woolsey had more chops than any of the illiterate monkeys who translated Square's PSX lineup. And his script for Final Fantasy VI still stands as one of the best translations ever.

Of course, the real beauty of this one is that Square Enix could fuck all that stuff up and it would still be worth buying as long as the original game was intact. Final Fantasy VI stands on its own merits as one of the top games of all time, and I can think of precious few I'd rather have with me on the road. So there's that. In fact, if you discount all Wii software (which I refuse either to want or diswant until I've had a chance to try using that weird-ass thing), FF6a is probably my number two pick from E3 this year. Number one? That would be Baten Kaitos Origins. I was a great big fan of the first game - big enough that I wrote a strategy guide for it, if you'll recall - but I always said that with its weird combat mechanics, it would be well suited to the DS. What system is this new one on, now? Aha!

Highlights in brief of the rest of the show: I'm showing my age, I know, but I'm really amused by the After Dark Flying Toaster game. I'm quite amused by the title of Every Extend Extra, but I don't think the game itself could possibly be any good; that may well be just me, though. It really disappoints me that Square Enix is only releasing four games this year with "Final Fantasy VII" somewhere in the title, but I guess they're making up for that with the three different versions of FFXIII. A new Castlevania game, but I can't seem to work up the excitement I used to; the last several series entries have just been so lacklustre. Konami really needs to shake things up a bit. They can start by shaking out that whole damn mechanic of finding iron ores and making weapons. Neverwinter Nights 2 showed, and that could be fun, provided Bioware remembers not to take all the fun out before shipping like with Shadows of Undrentide. Nintendo's Super Paper Mario is on my short list of wants - New Super Mario Bros. really whet my appetite for more 2D platformer goodies, and then here comes this one - a 2D platformer on an honest-to-gosh-darnit non-portable console. Yoshi's Island 2 is also on that list. And no list would be complete without mentioning Milon's Secret freaking Castle, which is one hell of a blast from the past.

All that babbling and I almost forgot to mention that I have a new review up in the ol' GameFAGs. It's for New Super Mario Bros. Short answer: it's good. For the long answer, go here.

Lately I've been making my way around the interweb and availing myself of the free trials for every MMORPG I can find (except, it must be said, Matrix Online; I can't be bothered to register for FilePlanet again). Why do I do this? Commitment to my art, friends. And boredom. Bit of both. It does, however, lead to the first ever perfectlydarien.com MMO roundup, featuring four of the most popular current MMORPGs and pictures!

City of Villains is up first. The first impression was, it must be said, rather a negative one. After jumping through all the requisite hoops to get the trial account, I get the thing installed and attempt to run it, and I get this error. Seems that one needs to run the game by invoking the installer, which is a trifle odd. Also, nice localisation. But that aside, game is installed, game runs. That's good for a start. Character creation is hilariously fun. There are tons of options to choose for customisation. Of my cohorts, Stephen decided to play a robot made out of lava. The name Moltar was already taken, so he had to settle for Moltarus. Mina created an Ice Mage with the unlikely name of Amarachnia, thus betraying a lack of knowledge about proper villain naming technique. My powerhouse of destruction? Ramses Obliteratus IV. Yes, he's an ancient egyptian android pharaoh with psionic powers and a fat cigar. Can't get much cooler than that. But that does tie in to my first complaint (or, at least, my first complaint after I started the game): the name field toys with your emotions. It allows spaces, so multi-word names become a reality, but it's too short to accept a name as awe-inspiring as "Ramses Obliteratus IV." And, to add insult to MORE insult, it's too short by exactly one character. So my dreams of a dynasty of psychic killer android pharaohs was not to be.

After building my hopes up and then dashing them on the cruel, jagged rocks of arbitrary field size limits, I wasn't surprised when the game's UI turned out to be a pile of steaming, festering horse shit. The less said about it, the better. Combat is sort of fun for a while, but massively repetitive; CC the mobs as often as your CC powers are up, and then spam the damage powers. Moltarus tells me that melee combat has the added benefit of being extremely twitchy and refusing to admit that you're in range of the mob. Quests are generally dull: enter instanced area and kill X mobs. Maybe you'll have to click on a thing after you've killed your X mobs. There is no loot to speak of; instead, you get "enhancements" that make your powers faster, stronger, better; this is roughly 30% as much fun as magic swords. So, in conclusion, you could do lots worse if you're just in to these games to make characters and take shots of them, since it's the best character generation I've ever done. But the play is distinctly lacking in UBAR.

EverQuest II is next on the list, and I was not optimistic heading into it. I played the original EverQuest, see, and it wasn't that hawt. I was concerned that EQ2 would be basically a graphical update with the same play, which would be equally less good. As it turns out, I don't really know, since the trial version is really short. By which I mean really short. It gives you ten days to play about two hours of content. I think I haxed it, though; it definitely tells you there's a cap at lv6 in the trial, and my character - Divalnee - is definitely lv7. So beware Divalnee, because she has OMG LEVEL HAX. Divalnee, by the way, is a gnome paladin with awesome glasses, which is a major score for EQ2.

First complaint: like the original, EverQuest 2 has an incredible number of fiddly little bullshit skills that advance in an odd fashion and don't seem to be terribly useful. Next up, the quests are sort of odd and directionless, though less so than in the first game. The graphics are reasonably bland, but seem to construct their blandness out of trillions of polygons, with the net result of looking less good than World of Warcraft and taking much more work to render. The UI is tolerable though not exactly great, until you reach level 5 and try to learn "heroic opportunities," which are the most laughably poorly implemented play mechanic I've ever seen. So, overall, character creation is better than World of Warcraft, but not as good as City of Villains. Gameplay is better than City of Villains, but not as good as World of Warcraft. If you're a fan of games that aren't the best in any way, you're in luck! Fiddly play mechanics are a fucking fifty DKP minus.

Star Wars Galaxies is best known for being the Star Wars game with no spaceships. Though that's actually no longer the case; the game has spaceships now, and I'd just as soon it didn't, frankly. The spaceship controls are the wonkiest damn thing I've ever used, and that includes the regular game controls, which are a distant second. The game does not own an autoattack; instead, it works like Diablo 2: click on a mob to attack it, hold the button down to KEEP attacking it, special attacks get assigned to the right button and used that way. It's not really a terribly good control scheme. The game does, however, build excitement rather well and rather early; the very first thing that happens after you roll your character is that you get rescued from the Empire by Han Solo and Chewbacca, then you have to escape from Darth Vader in the Millennium Falcon. Props to the people who made this thing for that; they at least know exactly what people who buy a Star Wars RPG are looking for. Negative props to the people who sent me on my next mission: go into the sewer to fight goddamn rats, just like in every game ever. I mean, granted, in the year six billion or whatever they don't have sewers proper, but they have the tunnels at the bottom of the ship. And I guess instead of proper rats they're like giant Ewok rats or something. I don't really know.

Character creation is more or less like EQ2, but with one entertaining flaw. See, when I started this game, I told myself I'd break form. Everyone rolls Jedi. Nevermind that it's everybody's fantasy to be a Jedi, I was not to be suckered. I carefully weighed my options, narrowed it down to Trader or Officer, considered and settled on this. So, yeah. I know. I know that's a Jedi. So sue me. At least I didn't pick Wookiee Jedi. She is, to be precise, one of those head-tentacle dudes like Jabba the Hutt's butler there. I can't remember the name of the race. Hell, I can't even remember her name; it's some weird string of letters and I don't know how to pronounce it anyhow. Conclusion: Character creation is neat, but nobody won't pick Jedi. Sense of being in Star Wars is well-developed and that's good for some fun. Controls are not well-developed, and evidently neither is the rendering engine, since it frequently can't figure out what it's trying to paint and pops up a black cube what says "default object" on all sides. Can't ask for the moon of Endor, I guess.

Last but not least, we have Dungeons and Dragons Online. This one's an odd one, in that it doesn't play much like the rest of the lot. It plays like an odd combination of an MMORPG, a 3D platformer, and D&D. My character, Cherubina, is a halfling rogue. If you're wondering why the fixation with females, hey, the male halflings look really bad. In fact, that's a bit of a major weakness with the game: it's not at all pretty. The models are jagged and move funny. The textures are brown, brown, and more brown, with the occasional brownish-green. The voiceover "Dungeon Master" narration is neat, but it would help if he pronounced all the words correctly. For that matter, it would be nice if all the screen text were spelt correctly. WTS [Spell Checker] PST!

The game itself is pretty neat. After the training stuff, which is solo, the game consists almost entirely of groupwork in instanced areas, and it really does play like D&D rather than like a typical MMORPG. But in many ways, it can't get away from its computer game bretheren. By which I mean this. I've circled the relevant part in red. For the hard-of-vision, I've made bigger version. And for those who get off on that sort of thing, here's one suitable for use as wallpaper on your very large super-widescreen CrateStation monitor. Don't say I never did anything for you. Plusses: Group work, unconventional gameplay. Minuses: Crates, barrels, brown, ugly, no gnomes.

I fixed a bug in the way the Ghaleon pages were displaying. Don't confuse that with an actual update.

Meanwhile, it's the beginning of E3, and we just learned that the Darien was right all along when he predicted that the PS3 would cost a truly hilarious amount of money. Underwhelming sales for the PSP and the new announcement of $500 for a bare PS3 system with no options is causing the sinister spectre of doom to hover over Sony's existence in the console market.

Later this morning we'll discover if Nintendo has anything to say that's funnier than their killer one-liner: "Wii." Just when you thought it was safe to read video game coverage, some crazy Japanese dudes insert these absurd names into the market. And then some homo from Time magazine writes something like "Now I'm Errol Flynn, sword fighting with the controller, then aiming a bow and arrow, then using it as a fishing rod, reeling in a stubborn virtual fish" and ruins any inrodes gamers have made in the last twenty years toward being accepted in normal society.

Meanwhile, Square Enix has announced that Final Fantasy XIII will be released in three different collectable versions. Basically, they've discovered a brilliant way to milk the remaining fans of the once-playable series for $150 each game, which is not too shabby. Gotta buy 'em all!

Small update; Dragon Quest VIII and Castlevania: Curse of Darkness get the GameFAGs treatment. Enjoy!

A friend of mine just died. His name - or, rather, the name we all called him by - was Beasty. On behalf of the internet (of which I am the mayor, after all), I'd like to extend sympathy to his family and to all the rest of his friends. We'll miss you, Beasty.

I'm very proud of myself for meeting roughly two-thirds of my last set of promises. That's 67%, which is .67, which can be safely rounded up to 1. So, basically, my record is perfect. It takes some serious dedication to be this perfect, but that's just how much I care.

Work is finally actually begun on the new feature I announced a few years ago. Don't bother looking it up; you won't have any way of identifying which one I mean, and chances are everything I said about it was a lie anyhow. I won't give any spoilers, but I will say this: it's Sunday, Don Knotts is dead, and Greg Kasavin is still alive. Meditate on this injustice and you may reach enlightenment.

I have returned once again to this pathetic shell of a world, and have brought with me more of the wisdom you meaningless husks only wish you could attain. Go over here and bask in my warming glow while you still have time. Your absurd immigration laws may have thwarted my last plan, but I am not defeated! Soon, I shall rule again, and you all will be mining the salt that I shall use to rim the margarita glasses full of water that will be tantalisingly out of your reach! Ha ha ha! Fools.

Those new game reviews I talked about are up. This time around I have a Dragon Warrior, a Castlevania, a Dark Cloud, and a Legend of Mana. So feel free to hit those up.

Just thought I'd drop by a bit, since I own the place and all, and let all y'all know what's going to be happening around here.

First off, I'll be doing up some brand new GameFAGgotry shortly. Also, it's about time Ghaleon stops sulking and gets back to work, so I'll stop by his office and motivate him upside the damn head. The Grudge Match is due for a few dozen updates, and I'll hit one of those up also. What's my time frame for all this? When what freezes over? No, no, see, it's not like that. I'll have all that stuff done in the next week. Just you watch.

What can I do for you right now, you ask? Well, I can prattle about video games. Dragon Quest VIII's out, don'tcha know, and I'm glad to see they went back to the "classic" menus. I wasn't looking forward to the new look menus at all, but since I can't find pictures of them anymore, that may have been all in my head anyhow. The game takes a departure from the visual style of the previous seven, and while Akira Toriyama (you remember him) is still responsible for the original artwork, it's all fancy 3D junk this time around. This gives the game two major advantages over the older games. Oddly enough, this is very similar to my two favourite things about Dark Cloud 2, which was also animated by the same studio.

There's voice acting. It can't exactly be turned off, but the volume adjusts seperately from the music and sound effects, so it can be turned all the way down and you get the same result. Praise to Buddha, as they say in The King and I; the range of terrible accent work you have to listen to just in the first town is incredible.

Happy New Year, too. I'll get around to Happy New Content sooner or later. No, really, I will. Would I lie?

Merry Christmas to everyone except the forum spammers I have to waste my time deleting. So I've added user activation, which is annoying, but should reduce the spam. What's that? I have forums? YA RLY.

Updates on the site have been a bit rare the last few months, but that doesn't mean I'm not around. I've written a bunch of new game reviews, for example, and tinkered with the scripts. Just wanted to let all y'all know I haven't forgotten about you. Send me money and I'll remember you even more.

There's something important to be learned from this.

I'm not going to go where you think with this. I'm not going to talk about oppression, censorship, or fanaticism. Instead, I'm going to talk about this: "Why didn’t you put a note at the bottom telling everyone it was a parody?"

Let me explain something, in case it's been unclear. This whole site is a parody, after a manner of speaking. It exists for the sole purpose of making fun of things, making fun at things, and perhaps - if you're lucky! - making fun in your general direction. Why? Because I'm an asshole, and it's funny. Period. Not once anywhere on the myriad tripe that I've written (this one missive excepted) will you find a disclaimer that perhaps - just perhaps! - you need to untuck your head from the desert hobo turkey-roaster and try laughing for a change. Why not, you ask? Simple: It's not my responsibility, and it's not funny.

I am irritated by this idea that people must couch everything they say in disclaimers and apologies to soothe the ire of potential listeners. It's not my job to make sure you don't invent an excuse to be pissed off because I say your poetry sucks, your favourite video game sucks, or your country sucks. I have a guaranteed, unwavering, George Washington-approved right to say what I please without disclaimers and without apologies. This "why wasn't it clearly labelled as a parody" attitude is indicative of a lovely sickness in our society: the continued progress away from the freedom that defines American life.

You know what I like about being an American? I like being a member of the only fraternity on the planet that absolutely guarantees its pledges the freedom to do as they please just so long as they don't hurt anybody. What I mean is this: you're fat, you're ugly, and your mother is a French whore. Yes, I mean you, chief.

You didn't like that? Tell you what: go make yourself a web site all about how fat, ugly, and French-whore-bemothered I am. You're free to do so. Hell, send me the URL and I'll put a link to it right up at the top of this page, it would amuse me so much.

Okay, so it's not really a big secret that today's patch day. Truth is, I've been wanting to use that topic for ages, and it's about damn time I did. So there. What with the long downtime caused by the patch, there's plenty of time for me to do things other than Warcraft, such as update the site. But, in an hilarious mixup, I updated the store by mistake! Now you have two new and possibly-Warcraft-related ways to spend your hard-earned $14,990+s/h: a charming bumper sticker announcing to traffic your opinion of rogues, and a wonderful tee-shirt showing off the official guild tabard of the official guild of pd.com. Sort of, sort of, and sort of, in that order. In related news, it's good to see that cafepress has updated its notoriously-hard-to-use interface to make it more notorious and even harder to use. Full marks on that one, guys.

See? I did so update the Old News section with brand new old news, just like I said I would. So there.

On a different note, I would like to congratulate the National League on not winning the All-Star Game again this year. But it's not all that bad. We came in second! Not a bad showing, considering the overpowering superiority of the AL East All-Star team. I'm halfway surprised we didn't manage to finish third.

I notice that that update pushes the rest of them to Old News. I'll do that later. I'm too lazy right now. Just so you know, it's not a bug. So no need to go to the forums and post anything like "thank you for the priviege of paying you to be your beta tester" or any other pointless Warcraft Whining (tm).

As I feared, World of Warcraft is voraciously devouring my free time lately. To be fair, if I'm going to pay them a monthly fee to play the damn thing, I better get an awful lot of play out of it. I keep meaning to get to the site, though. Really I do. I just get distracted, is all.

The thing I understand the least about the game, though, is the culture of bitching that permeates it. Everybody who plays WoW whines constantly about everything. My class is underpowered. Everybody else's class is overpowered. Such-and-such doesn't work right. Blzzard shouldn't have updated thing X because I wanted an update to thing Y. And on, and on, and on. So, if you're a Warcraft Whiner (tm), I just want to take this opportunity to tell you this: Shut the Fuck Up (tm). If you're convinced Guild Wars is a zillion trillion times better, keen. Go play that. At least if you're whining over there, you aren't in my face anymore.

See, World of Warcraft has some issues. A lot of things weren't ready to go at launch, and, even now, it's not all there. There are some stability and compatibility issues. But you know what? The game is a lot of fun. Almost every problem I had with the MMORPG genre is remedies in WoW, the exception being, to be sure, that the other players still mostly suck. But you can't wish for the moon, I guess.

Speaking of video games, which I know is infrequent around here, I posted a couple three new reviews o'er at GameFAGs. None of them for World of Warcraft. Why not? Well, I can't decide how to review a game that's constantly changing. If I do, I probably will. Hell, I probably will eventually anyhow, just because I'm wild.

Questions, comments, suggestions, or insults? Send them right along to darien@perfectlydarien.com

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