Friday, October 17

[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.

Wednesday, October 15

[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

Monday, October 13

[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

Friday, October 10

[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?

Wednesday, October 8

[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.

Tuesday, October 7

[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.

Monday, October 6

[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.

Friday, October 3

Nothing to see here folks

Not yet, anyway.

Check back on Monday.