Shitty webcomic 2

Finally! Science has allowed me to make shitty webcomics.

Mega Man 9 Thoughts

I downloaded the Mega Man a few days ago. I've been a Mega Man fan for a while, starting with the X series in the glory days of the SNES. I also loved Mega Man Legends, and messed around a little with the Z series. But I had never really played through the classic mega man series untill now. I was a little nervous because I had read a lot about the INSANE!!@!#!$E difficulty of the old NES mega mans, and how this one was supposed to be that hard. However, I found this not to be so! The first play through took a couple of hours, and I recentlly went through again in 59 minutes. However, the game is all sorts of fun. Simple but solid mechanics, some very clever level elements ( fav is probably the zero-g part in one of the willy levels), and some very catchy 8-bit music. I can't seem to get Tornado Man and Galaxy Man's themes out of my head! Having beating it, I'm still interested in going back and try to get on the online leader board for a time-attack. I'm way off, some 30 seconds behind the top scores, but I'm hopefull. Overall a fun little game, worth the 1000 wii points that it cost. However, the way Capcom is doing this expansion crap is terrible. They are seeling new game modes and charcters in little $3 (I think) packages each. So dish out some money for hard mode, some money for protoman. That's no way to do that! Updates like that should either be free or all of them together for a small price, but not piece by piece. Valve does a great job a adding significant updates to it's games without charging, and each time they bring in new players to the game. Burnout paradise just released a whole new motorcycle addition to the game free. But selling a game and then selling you parts of it that should of just been in it in the first place is lazy and bad to the consumer. Go play TF2, Capcom.

Running Man

As part of my apartments tradition of watching an Arnold movie every Saturday, we watched "The Running Man". The impressive thing was how impressed I was by this movie! Sure, it was a somewhat campy 80's action film with some terrible (amazing) one liners from Arnold, but the message it sent seemed somewhat relevant to today. In a short 101 minutes, it painted a somewhat believable dystopia, showing the ridiculousness of how governments can take media, information, and television to control opinions of the masses. You get somewhat creeped out watching those people cheering for the death of Arnold's character, who they beleive murdered innocent people. Makes you wonder just to what degree this goes on today in America. Wouldn't be that far of a stretch to say it does. Also, the way the "stalkers" reminded me of mega man villians was awesome. Also awesome if the fact that I know now that The Fury in Metal Gear Solid 3 was most likely completley based of Fireball from this movie. Overall, a good watch.

Lose Lose?

If everything is within a product of former cause and effect, and causality reigns over all, then free will is an illusion.

If there are things that happen indeterminately, then we may have free will. But even if our choices are not determined ahead of time, for every choice we make there are millions more outside of our control. Chance would still play a much more significant role in shaping our lives, as the impact from the decisions that we make would be distilled in a much greater volume of chance.

So what is worse, to know everything that will happen to you is the product of all previous events or that what will happen to you is essentially the product of many previous events outside of your control?

Shift in Momenteum!?

Readers, it is with great thought that I have decided to change the focus of this blog. And readers, it is with little thought that I don't know what that focus will be yet. It has occurred to me that this blog's purpose of discussing issues in the video game industry is redundant. By going to Kotaku, Joystiq, and other well-written gaming blogs you will be getting essentially the same ideas. So it is time I branch out into my own little niche, something interesting and insightful in which to share with the masses. So after some soul searching, I will return to this blog with a new direction, new energy, and as Howard Dean said, " We're going to Washington D.C. to take back the White House!!!!! YYYYYAARRRGHHH!H!H!!!!!"

Blah blah blog

Hello, constant reader ( I can steal things from Stephen King ).  It's been a long time, and excuses aside, it's good to be back for more mispelled insights into games! First and most important is

METAL GEAR SOLID 4 REVIEW!!!!!!!!!!!1!1!!oneoen!!!

To be blunt, MGS4 was a solid (lol) dissapointment.  Where to start?  Gameplay wise, everything has been finally been tuned to a pretty solid (lol) control scheme.  No more ackward camera angles, tricky first person shooting, or pausing to change camoflauge, it's all been streamlined.  But here is the crazy shit: There is not much gameply.  I went through the game in about 16 hours, and G-d knows how much of that was cutscenes.  At least 3 I'm thinking, probably more.  And what was there fealt very unsatisfiying to play.  The sneaking portions and level design were simply not as fun and feel thought out as in previous installments.

Then there was the cutscene half of the game.  The series has always been praised for having complex themes, ideas, interesting charecters, and near movie like presentation.  While the game is graphiclly stunning, and it is very cinematic like a movie, it is not a very good movie.  The concepts that are introduced are never really developed, and the charcteres are not very fleshed out.  

So this games seems to have to parts; the movie half and the game half.  The movie part was poorly executed (apart from some amazing fight scenes) and the game half was lacking.  Overall, I really don't understand how this game could be rated 10 from Gamespot.  I used to trust them for reviews, but now I'm not so sure.  And this isn't because we disagree on one game, it seems latley like the site has simply been going downhill.

In other news, there is a sweet little racing game called Trackmania: Nations Forever the can be played free on Steam.  It's like a cross between hotwheels and... actually cars.  The result is a fun filled and easy to get into game with a great custom track builder.  I am proud to mentions that I am currently ranked 15th!!!!! in Missouri!  So suck it you meth heads.