Happy Holidays/Merry Jesusmas

Pretty much what the title says. I'm putting the blog on hold again until next year, hopefully with more reviews this time.

In the meantime, here's my favorite Christmas song. All the best.



TL;DR Version

I'm unemployed again. Best holiday gift yet. \o/

[Game Review] Samurai Shodown II (XBLA)

(Rough draft version, to be updated later tonight.)
- Later update, I accidentally deleted the review and never got around to re-writing, consider the article K.I.A.

A somewhat belated review, but with the recent release of STHD, quite a lot of people have a renewed interest in fighting games.

Let’s start, as usual, with a brief history lesson. The original Samurai Shodown was released by SNK for the arcades and SNK’s own Neo Geo home console in 1993. Immediately it became a showcase for the company’s hardware and the perfect example of how a fighting game can be inspired by Street Fighter 2, without shamelessly copying it*.

*None of that World Heroes bullshit.

[Game Review] Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix

Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix (STHD for short) could have been a legitimate candidate for the "Game with the longest name ever" award, if not for that Penny Arcade game. It is, however, the favorite for receiving the "Most often remade" award, currently numbering... Actually, I lost count.

More importantly, though, it's also one of the prime candidates for the "Most finely-tuned and balanced competitive game ever", and that one is something to brag about.

Enough fancy talk for now, though. Time for a little history lesson. Given that the first edition (oh, there’ve been a few) of Street Fighter II, called The World Warrior, came out seventeen (17) years ago, and the last version, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, came out fourteen (14) years ago, quite a few people may have missed on the behemoth that this game was back then. Not only did it shape the entire fighting genre for years to come, as countless imitators appeared overnight, it also became a new benchmark for success in the market.

At a time when videogames were still ignored by the mainstream, SF2’s protagonists Ryu and Ken were amongst the few characters alongside Mario and Sonic to be recognised by anyone except the most dedicated of gamers. SF2 not only managed to revitalize the Arcade (the what?) scene, where it created huge lines of people waiting to play that guy “that just beats everyone!”, it was also the first arcade game to be ported (almost) perfectly in a home console, in its 1992 SNES version*.

Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, it was the first competitive game to achieve such unprecedented popularity. There were games were it was much more fun to beat a human opponent than the CPU before (*2) but never before was a game so perfectly balanced for competitive play, nor had its multiplayer aspect as its focus. I’m probably going to get crucified for this, but I’ll argue that had it not been for Street Fighter II, the entire competitive aspect of gaming would have been vastly different, and games such as Quake 3: Arena and Counter-Strike might have not been as popular.

Just look at the early FPS games, none of them had anything more than an afterthought of a multiplayer. Technological issues were obviously a factor here, but competitive multiplayer in FPS’s didn’t become a factor until after the popularity of fighting game (and SF2 in particular) tournaments.

Now that the history lesson is over, let’s take a closer look at this specific version of Super Turbo. As you may have guessed, the “HD Remix” part refers to the game being redone for a contemporary audience. The graphics were redone in High Definition, from scratch, by UDON Entertainment, also responsible for the successful Street Fighter comic books, the music themes were remixed by the people of OverClocked ReMix (*3), and the gameplay was rebalanced by long-time Street Fighter tournament player and gaming developer, David Sirlin.

This means this version is a labor of love from people who love Street Fighter and “get” what made it great back in the day, and why it is relevant even today, more than a decade since its release. Their intentions, to make this new version the best possible. The result is a game that looks, sounds and plays great, even without nostalgia clouding our judgement. STHD is a great game with our current standards.

So, without further delay, on with the lists:

Things STHD does right:

- It’s Super Street Fighter II Turbo, for the HD generation. As corny as that sounds, it’s true. Gorgeous high-definition graphics, a remixed soundtrack that works wonderfully in a contemporary environment and the tried-and-true gameplay of Super Turbo, a game that’s still being played competitively today, with some enlightened changes that make it even better (*4). It’s an amazing remake of what’s undeniably a classic game, it’d be hard for anyone to ask for more.

- Another thing about the music, the folks at OCRemix managed to make even Sagat’s theme sound good. I never thought that was actually possible.

- Yet another sidenote on something mentioned earlier, the changes made to the gameplay and certain movement inputs succeed in making the game simpler (so that you don’t have to worry about actually performing the move but rather when to perform it) but never make the game simplistic. You still have to have the muscle memory and timing needed for pulling off a 7-hit combo, button-mashers need not apply.

- The online multiplayer is amazing, which is a needed change after the atrocity that was Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting on the Xbox 360. Capcom had an entire beta test devoted to getting it right, and through the use of GGPO, they succeeded. There’s the occasional laggy match every now and then, but for the most part it’s very smooth, even when playing across continents.

- You can’t see which character your opponent selects on online multiplayer. This is HUGE. So many times people would cheese it out, waiting for you to pick a character after like half an hour, so they could pick a counter-character. One of my favorite changes.

- There’s no denying it, Super Turbo is still one of the best fighting games around, and this enhanced version only adds to that. It’s intuitive, easy to pick up yet demanding enough to challenge most players when it comes to mastering it.

People that had either forgotten about this fact through the years, or had never spent any time with SF2 back in the day, now have the perfect opportunity to remember/find out what the big deal is(*5).

Things about STHD that aren't that hot:

- For all its smoothness, there’s a few bugs plaguing the online multiplayer part. The music sometimes stops abruptly and you have to restart the game, health bars have the tendency to disappear leaving you clueless as to how much life either player has, and there’s also a few random disconnects as a fight is about to start. The latter is particularly annoying in ranked matches, as it counts as a defeat. Nothing a patch wouldn’t fix, let’s hope one is on the way.

- The animation is unchanged from the original, as this would have required remaking the entire game from scratch. As a result, it looks kind of strange at times, but you get used to it eventually.

- Being a rather delayed project, means that STHD was released very close to the next real chapter in the franchise, Street Fighter IV, which is coming out in late February. As such, STHD may be seen by some as merely a prelude to SFIV. Their loss, however.

- No other single-player modes other than Arcade (Story) and training. I confess, I’m just grasping at this point. A survival mode or such would have been neat, but it’s hardly a glaring omission. Multiplayer is the game’s selling point, after all.

Things I just don't get:

- The lack of a real demo is rather perplexing. The Playstation3 version has no demo whatsoever, while the X360 version got the Ryu/Ken multiplayer-only beta version offered earlier this year with Commando 3. Not that you need a demo for what is essentially a fourteen year old game, but it could help convincing those sceptical newcomers.

The above signify that on George's Intention-Meter, Super Street Fighter II HD Remix receives of the title of:
The Genuine Article

TL;DR version:

Seriously, just listen to this music:


If you ever loved Street Fighter 2, chances are it will remind you why it was that great back then, even if you can’t quite put your finger on it. If you were never a fan, well... what’s your excuse? As I said earlier, there’s a reason why people are still playing this game, in tournaments or otherwise, and why it makes so many “Best Games Ever” lists.

Go on, try this shiny new version. You know you want to.

* In fact, it’s still Capcom’s best-selling game, even after all these years.
*2 Hell, its prequel was one of them!
*3 You can download the full soundtrack at their website, too!
*4 I can actually do Hooligan Throw now.
*5 One thing I find particularly amazing is seeing how many people this release has brought back to this game. Styles of play differ for each version of SF2, and people using them are very distinct. You can tell when somebody hasn’t played SF2 since, say, Champions Edition, and seeing them back in a SF game just brings a smile to my face. I’m weird like that.

What (redux)

Christ on a stick, November just breezed by and I only made one post. That's just sad.

I've to confess I bought the new WoW expansion, Wrath of the Lich King A.K.A. digital crack, but that's not really the reason for this extended absence. I haven't been playing a lot of WoW either, which is perhaps worrying. Or healthy.

Regular blog updates will adjust to my new schedule, and thus will be weekly, while random updates will occur... randomly. Also, the blog will focus on gaming from now on. It's not like it didn't before, anyway.

TL;DR version:

Then again, never trust the George to stick to a schedule created by himself, for himself.

Yes, We Can

I've been neglecting this blog lately, horribly so. But with a very demanding real-life job these days, finding the time and clarity of mind to write something, anything, is a difficult task.

I decided to break this hiatus though, since tomorrow is a very important day. Perhaps the most important election for an entire generation of Americans is taking place, and I've never hidden the fact that I'm hoping Barrack Obama wins, something I mentioned almost a year ago.

Naturally, something I briefly talked about in my previous post, you should never trust politicians to keep their word. "Crooks and Liars" is an expression often used for them, and it's quite true in most occasions. However, there's Crooks and Liars and then there's Assholes and Criminals. If the difference is lost on you, stop reading now.

Much like how the only romantic love is the unfulfilled one, to paraphrase a quote heard in the latest Woody Allen movie, the only ideal president is the one that never was elected, or at least never managed to live out his four-year course. I don't expect that a new Golden Age of Humanity will start should Obama be elected tomorrow (CROSS YOUR FUCKING FINGERS!). I do, however, expect that some of the liberties and privileges we took for granted until a few years ago, will be returned to us.

After all is said and done, I'd challenge anyone to dispute the fact that this man has amazing charisma, gives fantastic speeches, and can actually inspire people, by his speeches alone. Is it enough to make him a great president? No. But it's already more than what most of the previous one had.

The obligatory YouTube video link this time is a related song that definitely inspires yours truly.



TL;DR version:

Obama '08, motherfuckers!

Just never forget the following axiom:

It's not the person that defines the chair, it's the chair that defines the person.

[Gaming] Early Fable II impressions

My favorite theme in story-based videogames has always been morality and decisions based on it, yet sadly there are so few games that have explored it in a mature way that also is tied directly to the way the game plays. The original Fable promised to do such a thing, yet even its creators (as seen in the recent Edge special) believed they didn't go far enough.

I've only played Fable for about eight hours and haven't had to make any difficult decisions so far, but things seem definitely Manichean enough. However, the upcoming Fable II promises to really change the way choices and morality in games, given such examples as becoming less popular by choosing to do the moraly "right" thing, while becoming more popular and stronger by doing an "evil" deed.

Having attended the Athens Digital Week expo for two days in a row, I was able of spending some time with a playable demo version of Fable II. While a noisy expo is hardly the best place to play a story-based role-playing game, I liked what I saw.

The interface, and especially the emotes through which you interact with NPC's in the world, is a lot more streamlined and intuitive than in the original, making things much easier. Voice-acting seemed very solid from what I could hear, and combat was smooth. The graphics are quite beautiful from an artistic point of view, yet for some unimaginable reason, visual quality was seriously lacking in all games shown at the expo. The result was that from a technical point of view, Fable II looked exactly like the first game, only with a little more polish and better animation. This baffled me, but I expect the finished game to look much better, even in my sorry old standard definition television.

TL;DR version:

The newest issue of Edge awarded Fable II a 9 out of 10 score, so that's definitely encouraging.

If they do indeed nail the whole good/evil thing this time, I can definitely see this game becoming one of my favorites in recent years.

[Gaming] A different kind of trailer

A common trend in trailers from upcoming videogames is the fact that most of them are fairly insubstantial. Superficial, if you will. They usually emphasize on showing off some sparkling new graphics, combined with text promising "exciting new features" such as 512-player multiplayer and so on.

Another common element in videogame trailers is an almost insufferable amount of masculinity, or what I like to call the "RARGH!" factor. Think of the movie 300, where the protagonists apparently couldn't speak like normal people, and instead had to scream at the top of the langs, presumably because their hemorrhoids were flaring up. It's fine for a while, but it gets boring before long. Going back to videogames for a moment, it's exactly this line of thinking that lead to such cockeyed advertisment as that old Ocarina of Time which boldy declared:

"Willst thou save the girl, or play as one?"

GG, as the clueless whippersnappers say. Also, I believe it should have been "playeth" for added cheese factor.

Note that there's nothing wrong with masculinity, nor with a testosterone-filled, action-packed trailer. Hell, the Street Fighter IV trailer I praised so much last Monday is exactly that. Which makes sense in this context, since it's a trailer for a game where people beat each other up senseless. You pretty much need these elements in such cases.

But if games are ever going to evolve as a medium*, they need to provide with something more than just people on steroids killing stuff dead. You may be wondering what this has to do with trailers, yet aren't trailers usually the first impression one gets from something? Not necessarily, of course, but that is often the case. Furthermore, as I mentioned in Monday's post, a good trailer can be reason enough to get someone interested in the advertised subject, even if the person in question isn't interested in the medium, in this case videogames.

At this point I'd like to present my favorite trailers of this different kind, which are more cinematic and artsy than their mainstream counterparts. Surprisingly enough, the first trailer comes from Gears of War, a game that takes the "RARGH!" amplifiers all the way up to eleven.

Still, the Gary Jules cover of Mad World combines beautifully with the action depicted through the game engine, and the result is very solemn, bleak even. Something that can't be said for the game itself** sadly, as such somber moments wouldn't have gone amiss. Enough mumbling though, more trailer embedding:



Speaking of elements from trailers that would have made the actual games better, the following trailer from Halo 3 baffles me. It manages, in a mere sixty seconds, to tell us more about the character of Master Chief (the protagonist) than all three entire games combined have! Not to mention it manages to combine both solemnity and badassery, something the games fail horribly at.

I honestly don't get why these aspects of the storyline was never explored or even hinted at in the games, that is, both the Chief's backstory and what it meant for humans to come in contact with a different civilization, only to find out they were hell-bent on eradicating us. Instead, all we got was such hackneyed phrases as "Prepare for war!"

Still, the trailer is brilliant:



Which leads me to the most recent example of this kind of trailers, which was also the inspiration behind this post, the recent Prince of Persia trailer. I never expected I'd hear a Sia Furler song in a videogame trailer, so I was genuinely caught off-guard when I first saw this. As with the GoW/Mad World trailer, it works wonderfully, and is actually a pretty clever nudge to the new gameplay system, where the supporting character (the girl, Elika) will always save you when you miss a jump and plunge to your death, for example.

Since the game hasn't been released yet, there's no way of saying for sure if the mood of this trailer will be reflected in the actual game, but there's a better chance than the previous two games, as Prince of Persia isn't a fast-paced shooter. Instead, it seems like a more dream-like experience, a high adventure that could have been pulled straight from The Book of One Thousand and One Nights, which unsurprisingly was the main influence behind the series.

In other words, it seems nothing like the atrocity that was The Warrior Within and Godsmack (RARGH!) are nowhere to be found, and that is definitely a good thing.

As for the trailer itself, you can watch it here:



TL;DR version:

There's an argument to be made against this artsy kind of trailers, and no, it's not "OMG thiz trailurz r so ghey LOL!", shut up please. What can be argued that these trailers are rather pretentious since they're not closely related to the games themselves, and for that reason quite derivative.

To that I would offer the following counter-arguments: first of all, being a little pretentious never hurt anyone, and art and pretentiousness often go hand-to-hand. Moreover, a trailer doesn't necessarily have to give you a specific idea of what the game will be like. Instead, giving a vague feeling of what the game could be about works just as well. Isn't a trailer meant to arouse interest in the finished product?

Lastly I believe that trailers should be able to stand on their own, in the sense that if say the game they're advertising never came out, the trailer should still be awesome in its own right. This subject goes beyond a little tl;dr sidenote, so I'll come back to it another time.

*Not going to go into the whole "games as art" argument just yet

** Definitely not a bad thing though, I love Gears of War and its world for what they are, and I'll go into further detail as we get near the release of its sequel

[Gaming] Keeping "Street Fighter" Relevant

(A.K.A., how the Street Fighter series is shaping up for a spectacular comeback)

Staying relevant for a prolonged amount of time is no mean feat, for any product, in any industry. The videogame market is no exception to this, in fact this applies to both different genres and different franchises. Platformers, adventures, role-playing games, they all had their proverbial moment in the sun several years ago, and at that time, each respective genre dominated the sales charts as well as gathering excellent reviews. Nowadays, their appeal mostly limited to a niche* audience, with the odd excellent game coming out every now and then, only to remind us that every rule has its exceptions, few though they are.

Same goes for gaming franchises that used to be huge, such as Tomb Raider. Even though TR has recovered from the near-catastrophe that was the early 00’s and Angel of Darkness, it’s nowhere near the sales behemoth it used to be in the mid-90’s.

The fighting game genre is amongst the ones that enjoyed massive success initially, only to slowly wither away with the years. Starting with Street Fighter II back in 1992, which inarguably started the whole fighting game craze and also breathed life back into the arcades scene, the genre had its last massive commercial and critical success with 1999’s Soul Calibur for the Dreamcast, a game which became the flagship of Sega’s last entry in the hardware market. Since then, it’s all gone downhill**.

That’s not to say that the genre hasn’t had any worthy recent entries, games such as Virtua Fighter 5 for example are as good as any of the classics from the 90’s, if not better. However, mainstream appeal has been all but lost for contemporary fighting games, a side-effect perhaps of the merciless milking of the genre in the previous decade.

The Street Fighter franchise is no stranger to neither declining popularity, nor milking. As a matter of fact, it was pretty much the franchise that invented milking, given that SFII had five different versions of the same game, while the subsequent Street Fighter Alpha/Zero and Street Fighter III series had three each***. That’s excluding the various spin-off series, such as the Marvel Vs Capcom and Capcom Vs SNK.

With that in mind, it’s not surprising that people were eventually tired of Street Fighter. It also didn’t help that the SF games took place exclusively in a two-dimensional plane, when 3D graphics were the new “it” thing in the late 90’s.

Another factor that played a big part in the eventual decline of SF’s popularity was the eventual sequel to the supremely-successful SFII, 1997’s Street Fighter III: The New Generation. Not only did it take Capcom two years to come up with the definitive, balanced version of the game with 1999’s 3rd Strike(*4), it was such a radical departure from its predecessor that mainstream audiences felt overwhelmed with its complexity.

To make matters worse, the majority of its characters suffered from a complete lack of charisma (an unfortunate trademark of late 90’s Capcom design), which only alienated casual audiences even more. Let’s not forget that most people are more likely to choose a character that looks “cool” than a freak show, when first playing a game.

The game itself was fantastic, and inarguably a worthy follow-up to the franchise, but that mattered little when only but the most hardcore fans could appreciate it for what it was, and also the only ones that could pull off the most difficult combinations of moves.

So how do you go about making people interested in a franchise again, almost a decade after its last appearance? Firstly, you have to remind them why they cared about the franchise in the first place. Capcom succeeded in doing this about a year ago, when they released the first teaser of SFIV, which featured the quintessential street fighters, Ryu and Ken sparring as they always seem to do.

It was enough to get several people excited, but this was only the beginning. Soon after, they released the first in-game trailer with actual gameplay, revealing to us that most (eventually this became all) of the original fighters from SFII would be featured in the game. One might accuse Capcom of playing it safe, instead of creating an all-new cast as they did with SFIII, but you can hardly blame them for giving the old fans of the series a cast they already know and love.

When it comes to maintaining relevancy, it’s always important to keep your original audience. And that audience is mainly made up of people who remember E. Honda as “That Sumo guy that does that handslaps thing”, rather than the vocal minority that knows how to spell Tatsumakishenpukyakugodonlyknows(*5).

Naturally, you can’t just stop there. SFII is sixteen yeas old and SFIII is a mere five years younger, several of the people that used to play both games frantically back then have probably moved on from videogames all together. Not to mention that the videogame market is vastly different these days, the audience is almost nothing like it used to be.

In other words, you need to reach an all-new audience, an audience that probably grew up on different games than Street Fighter. The way used by Capcom to reach this audience is two-fold.

The first thing they had to do is teach this audience why SF was simply that damn good. In other words, they had to create a game that plays like a dream and is appealing to both a novice and a seasoned player. The way Capcom went about doing this was by reinventing the old SFII gameplay, doing away with several of SFIII’s features, such as the parrying system. Initially, I had voiced my displeasure over this, since I am a big fan of SFIII even though I pretty much suck at it.

Seeing where Capcom is coming from though, it makes perfect sense. As the recent Edge review so cleverly put it, for most players a combo is nothing more than a jumping kick followed by a sweep kick(*6). With that in mind, SFIV is built around a system that is far more forgiving when it comes to creating combos than its predecessor, but is still so deep and intuitive that experienced players will always have the edge over a newcomer, as it should be.

The best gameplay in the world, however, won’t mean a thing if people don’t get to actually play your game. And for better or worse, the best way of doing that is a strong presentation. If you get people excited enough through a trailer, they’re more likely to take a further look, while if they only see a generic “From the makers of a game that was huge fifteen years ago!” teaser, they’re more likely to pass it by.

In Street Fighter’s case, it’s not really that hard to make people care given its legacy. Many videogame fans may not know that Ken Masters is Japanese and not American (true story), but most of them would have a good idea of who he is, and subsequently would be more willing to play a game with a familiar character, rather than "Generic Bulky Male #11378", given the right stimulus.

At this point, I have to confess that the above paragraph is nothing more than a pretty clumsy attempt of declaring my unrelenting love over the brilliance that was the new SFIV trailer from the ‘08 Tokyo Game Show.

While certain members of the vocal minority I mentioned earlier complained about its content being composed of mostly seen-before footage, that view is ignoring the fact that this is a trailer meant to appeal to the oh-so-important masses. It is incredibly impressive, superbly edited, with the combination of in-game footage, computer-generated segments and anime working wondefully together, and the remix of Ryu's theme is phenomenal.

It is, in other words, impressive enough to appeal to both old and new fans of the franchise, as well as people unfamiliar with it.

Watch the trailer for yourselves here:



TL;DR version:

Capcom has managed to get people excited about a franchise that hasn’t seen an update in more than a decade. That is no mean feat, and more companies should take a note of how to revisit an old, beloved, franchise.

It also helps that Street Fighter II was pretty much the game of forever (there’s a reason why it’s still being played today, and why Ryu’s theme is just that good), but Capcom always managed to build on its success, even when they were releasing new versions of the same game every year.

* Oh gods, that word again

** For example, if Tekken 2 had been announced as multiplatform during the Playstation/Saturn/Nintendo 64 years, the entire Milky Way galaxy would have exploded by the amassed nerdrage. In direct contrast, the recent announcement of Tekken 6 for the Xbox 360 was met with what can be described as a collective “Oh. Cool.”

*** There was no Street Fighter EX series, that’s just rumors spread by people made out of pure evil. There was only one game, Street Fighter EX2 and it was actually pretty fun.

*4 It’s always a charm

*5 It’s Tatsumaki Senpuu Kyaku

*6 Sadly, I'm one of them

[Game Review] Too Human

Some people say there's no such thing as bad publicity. Of course, people say lots of things, and not all of them are right. If Too Human by Silicon Knights is any indication, they're wrong about this bad publicity thing too.

Too Human had been floating around as a concept for a good while now. Originally planned as a game for the original Playstation, one can only guess what that game would have been like. In my idealistic dreams, I like to think of it as a traditional isometric action-RPG, with the atmosphere of Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain and the addictive gameplay of the Diablo series.

Regardless of what might have been, the Too Human we got is still an action-RPG, only it emphasizes more on the action part, with the ability of pulling off huge combos. The analogy I like is that Too Human feels like a (clumsy) combination of Devil May Cry and Phantasy Star Online. The emphasis on gathering more and better loot is also here, similar to the Diablo games, although the various categories of loot are shamelessly ripped from World of Warcraft, with the colors white, green, blue, purple, orange and red* denoting progressively better loot, exactly as in Blizzard's game.

I mentioned bad publicity earlier, and that's what this game was getting long before its release. Not from professional gaming journalists originally, but rather from gaming enthusiasts in forums such as NeoGAF. This in turn opened up a whole different can of worms, recall the 1UP Yours podcast with Silicon Knight's Dennis Dyack if you will, but that's not something I'd like to get into right now. At any rate, this early yet very negative word of mouth was what made the release of a demo a necessity, though it's hard to tell if the demo worked for better or worse, given the game's scope and ambition.

You can't fault Too Human for being ambitious, Hell, it claims to be the first part in an "epic trilogy"** that's to be finished by 20XX, where XX stands for "God only knows". Sadly, though ambition can sometimes be a fantastic driving force, it's also a main ingredient in any good recipe for destruction. It feels like Silicon Knights got themselves into something bigger than they could handle, since even aspects where they usually excel at (voice acting and storytelling) are surprisingly mediocre this time around.

That's not to say it's an awful game that has no redeeming features, so without further ado...

Things Too Human does right:

- Loot-based gameplay is always addictive, and quite fun. The game successfully teases you with pretty items from the first fifteen minutes, and it never stops on giving.

- Online two-player co-op is fun with a friend, if you get two classes that complement each other well. Sadly, playing the game cooperatively means that you don't get to see a single cutscene throughout the game.

- Once you get the hang of it, the gameplay is pretty smooth and fun, and once you get in a rhythm, you'll be dispatching foes left and right with ease. Sadly, it takes a while before that happens, and that is rather disappointing. Which leads us to...

Things about Too Human that suck:

- The control system. It's been discussed back and forth since the release of the demo, and some people argue that a dungeon-crawler such as Too Human just wouldn't work if you just had to mash the A button over and over.

I agree with this statement, though I fail to see how tying a bunch of moves to the right analog stick works better. It's clumsy, unintuitive and takes far too long getting used to. And this is coming from someone who played 2D fighters on the Dreamcast D-pad without problems.

- The graphics are really, really bland. Not only from a technical point of view, though the rather low number of polygons doesn't help, but mainly from a design point of view. Stages are composed of huge empty corridors, with uninspiring architecture, while the characters and enemies themselves are at best completely unspectacular, while others look utterly ridiculous. My favorite would be Fenrir, which looks more like an angry chicken than a cybernetic wolf***.

- The second stage of the game, Ice Forest, is atrocious. It's far too long, in fact it's longer than the rest of the game combined. Seriously, the game took me 10 hours to complete and 6 of those hours were spent on Ice Forest alone. To make matters worse, it's badly designed, with either huge breaks in the action, or huge segments where you don't get a second to breathe between enemy waves.

- The story likes to think it's much smarter than it really is. I can't get into many details since the game is still pretty new and I'd like to avoid spoilers, so I'll be brief. First of all, the whole idea of the Norse gods portrayed as technologically advanced individuals is not as original as it believes, and it's also presented in a very superficial manner (Odin has a secretary? Really?)

Moreover, nothing really happens story-wise until the very end of the game, where things simply get messy. Solliloquies filled with self-righteousness, enough angst to rival Kratos, an ending that leaves too many questions unanswered... You get the idea. If the rest of the game was top-notch, these would be mere footnotes, but as it stands, it makes the game feel pretentious.

- While you get fancy and shiny items from the get-go, if you want to get the absolute best item sets in the game, you'll have to grind yourself retarded. And while some people enjoy grinding, given the game's short length, I'm not sure if anyone will be willing to visit the same four areas over and over again.

Things I just don't get:

- Seriously, whose idea was it to cut all cutscenes from the multiplayer campaign? I know the game is supposed to be a loot-based dungeon crawler, but that's way too fucking cynical.

- For a game that's copying so many games which are played (either predominantly or exclusively) online, the fact that Too Human's multiplayer is limited to two players is mind-boggling. Dyack claimed this was the only way to keep the game balanced, but I'm not buying it.

Hell, balance, shmalance. If you could play this game with two more people, it would have been much more fun thanks to cooperation/communication, even if you just breezed through the entire thing.

- I also don't get what happened with the voice acting. Silicon Knights consistently provided with some of the best voice acting in the field, yet this time around, it varies from underwhelming to "just okay". I guess it's a side-effect of the silly storyline.

- Don't even get me started on the Valkyrie/Death sequence.

The above signify that on George's Intention-Meter, Too Human receives of the title of:

Superfluous Monkey

TL;DR version:

Yes, in all fairness I had already declared my opinion of this game in my review manifesto, but Too Human is an interesting case that demands further investigation. It is, in a few words, a decent game which would like to think of itself the equivalent of sliced bread.

This is painfully obvious during its groan-inducing cutscenes, which feel more like punishment and less like reward after fighting yet another wave of identical looking baddies.

*Although we never actually got artifacts ("red" items) in WoW, they existed as a concept originally.

**I dream that one day we'll never get an "epic trilogy of whatever" ever again.

***Seriously, a cybernetic wolf. How can anyone fuck that one up?

[Gaming News] Blue Ray drive for the Xbox 360?

It has been making the rounds as a rumor for quite a while now, ever since the HD DVD format died I believe, but when a highly reputable and trusted site such as Gamasutra reports on it, there's obviously something here. The Xbox 360 might at last be getting a Blu-Ray drive of its own, like its competitor, the Playstation 3. The fact that it's reportedly in development by Toshiba, the company responsible for the HD DVD makes this whole thing rather deliciously ironic.

It remains to be seen if this will be used for anything more than playing movies and whether or not this is related to the incident with Id's Rage, as optional peripherals (especially the ones that cost so much) rarely become a mainstray as far as gaming consoles go. In fact, the only example that comes to mind is the 4MB Expansion Pack memory chip for the Nintendo 64, which was used in several games with varying success, but even then Nintendo had to ship it with Donkey Kong 64 rather than risk having a percentage of their customers unable of playing the game. Which of course meant that some unlucky bastards like yours truly ended up with two Expansion Packs.

Such things tend to get messy, in other words.

TL;DR version:

Figures that on the first "official" day of my new blog, I come down with the flu and as a result my mind's too messy to write a proper review/article. Oh, well.

[R.E.M. Tuesday] I also feel fine

The first time will always be special, but the second time has its own charm as well:



TL;DR version:

Best free concert ever. So good I almost felt guilty I didn't pay a ticket.

[Review Manifesto] Cruel's Intentions

A few years ago, while discussing video games, the following question came to my mind:

"What's the difference between a good game I dislike, and a bad game I like?"

Soon thereafter, I found out that this question applies not only to video games, but also to movies, books, TV shows, music, you name it. This made finding an answer even more important, completely subjective though it would be.

Then in Spring of 2007, during a Therapy? concert, the answer hit me: it's the intentions behind the game, movie, concert, what have you. You see, Therapy? weren't on a particularly good night that time, most of their songs didn't really resemble their studio album counterparts, and their sound was pretty mediocre. But they had loads of energy and enthusiasm, so even if their performance wasn't the best, I found myself having fun. Their performance was lacking, but their intentions were not. So I was a satisfied customer that night.

Therefore, since that day, the creator's assumed (as you can never know 100% unless explicitly told so) intentions with their finished product is perhaps the single most important thing for me, when evaluating something. Moreover, I feel that examining the intentions behind something is a good way of doing away with the level of sheer negativity that is so prevalent over the Internet nowadays, i.e "Everything sucks".

Naturally, even with the best intentions in the world, you may have a mediocre end product. This is why my reviews on this blog will be divided into three parts:

What It Does Right - What is it about the item in review that makes it work, what makes it stand above its competition?

Things about it that aren't that hot - Nothing's ever perfect, so what are its flaws?

Things That Make No Sense - " Why am I not allowed to change my character in Virtua Fighter 5's Arcade Mode after losing a match and continuing?", " Why did the writers of Heroes think that regurgitating the same plots and villains was a good idea?" and other things I just don't get.

Personally, I'm not very fond of scores in reviews, even if it's the first thing everybody (myself included) reads in one. Regardless, scores usually retract from the text itself, and are ultimately rather arbitrary, especially given how many different scales there are out there. 3 out of 5 stars doesn't really equal 60%, for example.

Consequently, instead of adding an arbitrary number at the end of my reviews, I will be instead adding my personal evaluation of what I perceived to be the creators' intentions with their product. To make matters simpler, this evaluation will belong in one of the following categories, in order of declining quality:

The Genuine Article: A creator's lovechild, the result of the finest of intentions and the highest of production values. Examples include:

Iron Man: As fine a popcorn a film as you can get, Iron Man combines incredible visual effects and breath-taking action with genuine characters you can relate to, and a plot that's not full of holes!

Portal: While some would argue that visually it is a very simplistic game, that would be missing the point. Portal is a very stylized game that manages to do a lot with so little, visually. Moreover, its gameplay is polished to perfection, it offers an antagonist that will definitely be quoted for years to come and also has a very deep storyline, told in surprisingly subtle ways.

Almost, But No Cigar: Something that would have ended in the above category, if not for a few frustrating issues, even if it begun with the best of intentions. Examples include:

Dreamfall: One of the finest storylines in a game, ever, with some of the best characters around, it genuinely tried to break from the conventions of the point & click adventure, and reinvent a genre. Also one of my favorite games. However, it's hard to overlook the clunky combat and stealth segments, as well as the oversimplified gameplay with trivial environment interactivity.

Heroes, Season One (excluding the god-awful finale): The first season of Heroes almost succeeded in doing what it promised: Present a story about people with superpowers in the real world, trying to live their every day lives while coming to terms with what they're capable of. Sadly, the fact that it was originally planned for only 12 episodes meant that Heroes suffered from pacing issues in the second half of the season, as well as mediocre action scenes due to its low budget.

Paving the Road to Hell: With the best of intentions. The creator of this product meant well, but the end result is closer to a disappointment than a success. Even so, it can still prove to be an enjoyable experience. A couple of examples:

Daredevil (the movie): At times a genuine try at portraying a more realistic type of superhero, with an actual story at that, it falls victim to the usual Hollywood conventions and Affleck's limited acting skills. I still liked the movie, to the bafflement of many of my friends.

World of Warcraft - The Burning Crusade: Blizzard's attempt to do away with the limited quests, huge dungeons and grind-happy nature of vanilla WoW, ultimately fails due to a variety of reasons. Due to the lack of a real storyline behind the journey to Outlands, quests feel unconnected to the world, the shorter dungeons often feel superficial, and the Endgame is even more of a grind than before.

Bad, and Loving it: While hardly top-notch by most standards, a product that falls in this category is fully aware of its quality (or lack thereof) and instead builds on this. Often a loving homage to its influences.

Kung Fu Hustle: A homage to wire-fu (modern wuxia) movies, exaggerated to the point of being cartoony, and totally hillarious.

The Powerthirst videos: Visual gags and puns so bad, they'll make you literally laugh out loud.

Obnoxiously pretentious: While there's nothing pattently wrong with being pretentious per se, when something gets stuck up its own ass, then there is a problem indeed. More often than not, something obnoxiously pretentious will take itself far too seriously. There can still be redeeming features in them, though they're usually overshadowed by liquid pretentiousness. Illustrious examples include:

Fahrenheit/Indigo Prophecy: With a storyline that degenerates from engaging to utter nonsense a few hours in, and gameplay that takes us back into Track n' Field button mashing, this game would like to think it revolutionized storytelling in video games through interactive cut-scenes. What it instead did was give people a legitimate reason for hating Quick Time Events.

Ang Lee's Hulk: It valiantly tried to re-invent the comic book movie through the use of multiple panels, remeniscent of a comic book page. Mutated pink chihuahuas and the main antagonist's transformation into a giant electromagnetic id, however, meant that the movie felt like pretentious shit.

Superfluous Monkey: Something that shamelessly copies from a variety of sources (or in extreme situations, copies an existing product completely) and has the audacity to believe that it actually surpasses them in quality. Sadly, what usually happens is that it completely fails to understand what made the originals so appealing in the first place. Eeeeeeeexamples:

Too Human: It combines Devil May Cry inspired, action-oriented combat, Diablo-style dungeon crawls and loot-based gameplay, World of Warcraft-y talent trees and storytelling reminiscent of BioWare's RPG's. And Too Human manages to botch up the majority of them.

CSI Miami: While it was created by the same people behind the original CSI: Las Vegas, in an effort to prevent other channels from making their own CSI clones, it had none of the wit and gritty charm that the original had. Amusingly enough, most the inevitable CSI clones are much better than Miami.

Cynical Cash-In: What the name (oh so) subtly implies. The lowest of the low, a product completely neglected by its creator, existing only to make loads of cash with the target demographic. More often than not, a cynical cash-in is of the lowest overall quality. Examples are numerous, but two that stand out are:

Dead or Alive Xtreme 2: Doing away with the original game's attempt at being a decent beach volley simulation, DOAX2 instead is a collection of mind-numbingly boring minigames, which only exist as an excuse for dressing the female protagonists in outfits worthy of softcore porn movies. The game's cynicism extends to the fact that its graphics (by far the high point of the original, and understandably its main appeal) are nothing special.

Spider-Man 3: A ridiculous plot, with some genuinely embarrassing moments, a retarded love triangle, a random collection of Spidey villains and visual effects straight from 2002. A kick in the nuts for all fans of the first two Spider-Man films.

[Revamp Monday] Tales of the Bored Episode V

After careful consideration* and the realization that blogs are way overrated, I decided another revamp was needed for Tales of the Bored. I'm done with the mental diarrhea-type of posts, from now on my posts will be much more coherent and polished, not to mention they'll hopefully be shorter**.

This of course means that I won't be able to stick to a six posts per week schedule, given that I'll be editing my posts a lot more than writing them on-the-fly as I used to. For that reason, as of today TotB will be updated regularly only every Monday, Wednesday and Friday, with the odd short post on other days if something interesting comes up, such as say aliens invading our planet and anally probing everyone.

Posts from now on will mostly be reviews and previews of games, movies, TV shows, books and the like, with the odd post related to obscure/heartbreaking news such as that old article about the Castlevania fighting game.

TL;DR version:

Oh yes, I'm still keeping these.

*That took roughly like 30 minutes, all in all.

**This sentence and the paragraph after it notwithstanding.

Nothing to see here folks

Not yet, anyway.

Check back on Monday.

[No Post Friday]

I haven't been happy with the direction my blog is going lately, nor have I been particularly inspired (aside from Tuesday's article, which was still kind of rough) so I'm taking a short break from blogging. In the off chance that somebody's actually following this blog on a regular basis, feel free to check back in like a week or something.

TL;DR version:

Go read Tom's blog in the meantime, he has some interesting stuff to say.

[Indie Theorycraft Tuesday] Pick Up Angry Yeti? [Y/N]

Today's post is all about inventory items, and how misused they often are in games. My emphasis will be on indie adventure games, but this also applies to big-budget commercial games. In fact, I think I'll start with an example from Ninja Gaiden 2, which I was playing earlier.

At the second chapter of the game, while inside a fairly tall building with several floors, you encounter a locked door, with no key in sight. A fairly common puzzle so far, right? So you climb a couple more floors, dispatching a few enemies along the way, and personally I was thinking I'd face a mini-boss or somesuch who would be carrying the key. Nope, I had to look for it in a weird looking locked box hidden somewhere in a corner, which Ryu Hayabusa (the game's protagonist) opened with a kick.

Now Ninja Gaiden 2 is a game that's difficult to take seriously, given its dialogs and its obsession with leather and bondage, but that occurrence just baffled me. It's so utterly unrealistic, who hides a card key in a box, in the middle of a building? It reminds me of all those statue-and-gem puzzles in Resident Evil 2, which took place in a Police department. Who the hell designs buildings like that? To make things even better, the card key in question was cracked. I'm hardly an expert on these things, but I'm fairly certain that a cracked card can't be used for its intended purposes. That is, to unlock electronic doors.

However, truth be told, such things aren't a big deal in action games. They only make the player roll his/her eyes for a second and then carry on with the game. On the other hand, in adventure games, where storyline and charactes are the main focus, and the player usually has to pick up every single item on sight and then click it on everything else, poorly-thought out inventory items and related puzzles can really ruin the player's immersion.

An example is needed to better illustrate this point, and I'll pick another commercial game again, before I start discussing indie games. The offender in this case is The Longest Journey, perhaps my favorite game evaaar. During one point of the game, you meet a certain crow called uh... Crow, which later on accompanies you in your travels. How do you make him accompany you? By literally picking him up, that is, using the "Pick Up" function on him, after which we are lead to presume that the heroine of the game fits him in her pockets. A very (unintentionally) absurd moment in an otherwise brilliant game, but I always thought this was due to technological and/or budget-related restraints* anyway.

Sooo... moving on to indie games, then. I'll have to name some names, and before I do that I want to say that I deeply respect anyone and everyone who has ever dedicated a (usually big) part of his everyday time to create an independent game, especially considering that most of them charge nothing for their games. Moreover, there are some problems with design you seemingly can never avoid. That being said, the issue of nonsensical inventory items and their relation to the characters is very evident here.

My first example comes from the first chapter (and seemingly last, since the game appears to have been abandoned) of a game still in development called House of Whispers. The game starts with protagonist Jenni L'Amour visiting her friend Daffy in a local diner. Cue a convenient power shortage, and Jenni finds herself all alone in the darkness, as Daffy is missing. Jenni (and the player) decide it's best to investigate the place to find out what happened to her friend. All is fine so far.

Then, it happens. As you're exploring the near areas, you come across a human heart stored in a fridge. If you decide to interact with the heart, Jenni happily obliges with picking it up.

Wait, what?

It's bad enough that there's no obvious place that Jenni would put the heart while carrying it around (she is not carrying a bag or anything of that sort) the obvious question is why.

Why would anyone, let alone a frightened girl who has just seen her best friend disappear, pick up a human heart in such a nonchalant way**? And what would she ever hope to do with it? From a meta-gaming point of view, I as the player obviously realize that the heart is going to be used in some puzzle at some point in the game, having played so many games with crazy puzzles in the past. But that's exactly when good ol' suspension of disbelief gets thrown out of the window.

Another example comes from a highly acclaimed (and rightly so) game in the indie scene, Prodigal. The game's protagonist, Jacob, is contacted by his brother Mike, who had disappeared two years ago. Jacob decides to find and help him and this journey leads him in a spooky forest, with a very ominous cabin nearby. Once inside the cabin, he finds blood stains all over the place, in such patterns as to imply that something really nasty has happened there.

So what does Mr. Average Joe, all alone in a very unfriendly environment, searching for a brother who is apparently in deep shit, do? What is one of his (and the player's) first actions? To pick up a pair of blood-soaked boots.

Who in their right mind would do such a thing? Hell, who would even go near a pair of bloody boots in some unknown house in the middle of nowhere? I won't even touch the fact that such an object has no apparent use in the game's setting. I would understand picking up an axe for future use at that point, but a pair of boots dripping with blood? That scream you're hearing, that's the suspension of disbelief which just got thrown out of the window again. Poor thing.

Generally speaking, when interacting with my environment in a game, I don't want to think "Oh, apparently there's a puzzle later on that requires this dehydrated piranha! Maybe I'll combine it with this blowtorch and that chewing gum!***" What I want to think is that my character's actions make sense and are in accordance with everything we have seen or at least alluded to about him/her so far in the game.

Naturally, this depends on the context of the game, so while I would expect a former demolitions expert to use TNT to blow up a wall as part of a puzzle, I wouldn't expect a 12-year old to do the same. Unless the 12-year old was some kind of weird prodigee with explosives, called Arzt.

* Then again, maybe I'm grasping.

** Unless they are a doctor of some sort. Or a deranged psycho, I'm not here to judge.

*** Rubber ducky puzzle in TLJ, anyone?

TL;DR version:

Remember, not everything wants to be picked up. Some things are just fine where they are.

Another way of putting it is this rule of thumb: If you wouldn't pick something up in real life, your character had better have a really good reason for doing so. Otherwise, your character won't seem realistic, and your audience might have trouble relating to him/her.

Did you miss these blocks of text? Neither did I.

[Gaming Monday] The Mass Effect post

I've been playing Mass Effect like crazy today and managed to reach the last area of the game, so if there were any startling revelations in the world of gaming, I must have missed them. I doubt there were, but I do believe that Silent Hill: Homecoming was supposed to be released today in the States?*

At any rate, today was a cold, rainy day. In other words, the perfect day for a Roleplaying Game. And Mass Effect is my favorite entry in the genre in a long while. Given that the game is almost a year old, pretty much everyone has already developed his/her opinion on it, so I won't bother praising/criticising it for the same things everybody else has (i.e. graphics/sound/gameworld/storyline Vs. crappy friendly A.I./too much text).

Instead, I'll focus on my favorite part of the game; space exploration. While there have been RPG's that took place in space rather than some parallel universe closely resembling England in the past, none of them did so in such detail. Solar Winds comes close, but the technology of its times (1993!) didn't allow for such niceties. At any rate, Mass Effect gives my inner Star Trek geek to actually go where no (well, a few) person has gone before. There's several clusters of our Milky Way galaxy to be explored, each with its own solar system and respective planets. And each planet is so unique and beautiful in its own way, it's quite awe-inspiring. Driving your space vehicle (called Mako) on an uncharted planet, as you're heading straight into a space storm makes for a pants-wetting good experience, trust me. Wish I had a screenshot of that.

I understand that some people complained about the planets, but from an aesthetics point of view, I could never agree with that**. I will agree that objectives on every planet were pretty much the same 3-4 missions over and over, and that the buildings in said planets suffered from a severe lack of variety, though.

Before I headed into the last areas of the game, I also wrapped up the extra downloadable mission, Bring Down the Sky. It's not wildly different than the rest of the quests and it certainly didn't feel like the 90 minute-long mission it was advertised to be (felt like half of that, really) but it does have an entirely new building which is beautiful, and one awesome and intense fight that takes part in this building. Definitely one of the best fights in the game.

In closing, while Mass Effect is pretty formulaic as far as RPG's go, the added space exploration and amazing aesthetics are enough to make it stand out from the rest of the entries in the genre. Yes, I'm wrapping this up quickly because I want to get back to the game now. Lawsuits at the usual address.

TL;DR version:

While the game is brilliant, they really need to fix the friendly A.I. in the sequel if they don't want to hear the (justified) bitching of players and reviewers alike. If I had a euro for every time my teammates stepped right in front of me as I was about to finish off an enemy and blocked my shot, allowing for the enemy to heal up, I'd have enough money to buy one of those discounted Arcade version Xbox 360's. Suffice to say, that is not hot.

(SPOILERS)

In case anyone is wondering, I boinked*** Liara, perhaps because she's a total dork. And I let Ashley die so I would avoid any relationship drama, because I'm petty and cruel like that.

* A quick search revealed it's coming next week, on the 30th. Oh well.

** Seriously, lay off the crack pipe.

*** Urban Dictionary has a hilarious entry for the verb "boink", check it out.

[Random Sunday]

I have a terrible headache today, so I can't write to save my life. That's what you get when you sleep at 6AM only to be woken up at 9AM by somebody who has the wrong phone number. Fun fun fun.

So here's a really funny video from the Chappelle Show instead of my usual blocks of text:



TL;DR version:

Aspirins, I need aspirins! Give them to me!

[Movie Saturday] Guy Richie's Sherlock Holmes?

So apparently there's another movie based on Sherlock Holmes besides the one starring Borat,* and it's going to be directed by none other than Guy "I'm Madonna's husband!" Richie.


Regarding the actors that are going to play Holmes and Watson, Robert Downey Jr. is pretty much a given as the legendary detective himself, and Jude Law is in talks for the role of Dr. Watson.

Now, as far as I am concerned**, Guy Richie has only made one good movie:

And it was fucking awesome. So awesome in fact, that a couple of years later, Richie understood he'd never make a better movie, and thus decided to remake it with a little extra something (i.e. Brad Pitt) added, and called it Snatch. Audiences, unsurprisingly, fell for it.

Cynicism aside, I'm not entirely convinced that Richie can do justice to the dry, absolutely logical world that Sherlock Holmes lives in. Richie's style is quite different, his world is one of petty criminals who make for adorable losers, and witty one-liners. Of course, this is only by judging what he has done so far, I'd love to be proven wrong as I'm a huge fan of the original novels.

Another thing I'd love to be proven wrong is this feeling in my gut that's telling me that only an Englishman could ever do the role of Holmes justice. Hugh Laurie (A.K.A. Gregory House) is too obvious a choice, but Robert Downey Jr. is a fantastic actor that really does complex roles justice with his performances. So if anyone can pull it off, I think that's him.

Truth be told, it would have worked great

As for any people that will complain about Jude Law, pull your head out of your ass before you suffocate. Watson never played second string in the novels, so it's important to have a charismatic actor for the role. Not to mention that Watson was described as a handsome man, and also that Law is a great actor in his own right, despite his "pretty boy" looks. So get over yourselves.

At any rate, I'd be thankful if the finished movie doesn't end up being like this:



* I like parodies as much as the next guy, but I honestly can't see how this movie is going to be any good.

** I haven't seen RockaRolla yet though, and that's supposed to be a return to form for him. Its name also reminds me of a Judas Priest song.

TL;DR version:

On the bright side, even if both new Sherlock Holmes movies end up sucking, we'll always have the BBC series which is magnificently brilliant:

[Internets Friday] Ahoy, maties

Yes, yes, today is the International Talk Like a Pirate Day holiday (or a parody of such). And yes, this isn't exactly an Internets thing, but most people don't dare to talk like a pirate in a place where other people will see them and memorize their faces. That place? Anywhere but on the Internet.

In recent years, this holiday (of sorts) has started gaining on popularity, World of Warcraft and Lord of the Rings Online even have a special event day for it. Naturally, this holiday (so to speak) is also a perfect excuse for certain people to make money off nonsense, and for cynics to be... well, cynical.

But meh, it's still fun. And who doesn't love pirates?

TL;DR version:

Yarrrrrrrr.

[Basketball Thursday] Gilbert Arenas -a seriously unlucky man

Arenas, the 26-year old point guard for the Washington Wizards has been injured yet again, and best case scenario, he'll lose the first month of the new NBA season. This is on top of several other injuries that made him lose the playoffs in the last two seasons, and the majority of the 2007/8 season.

This is a very unfortunate development for Arenas, as teams generally only put up with recurring injuries for so long (especially when you're their most well-paid player) and are often quick to replace players with such tendencies. Hopefully he'll recover fully on time.

TL;DR version:

This sucks. Agent Zero is my favorite NBA player, he deserves better than this.

On an amusing side note, his X360 voice blog suggests he has played more NBA 2K8 than NBA Live 2008, despite being on the cover of the latter. 2K8 is the better game though, so it makes sense that way.