Chuzzle

At the behest of my friend, and fellow group member, Wren I decided to check out the game Chuzzle. It's a PopCap game, so I knew from the start that I was in for a good bit of repetitive but addicting game play, but what I did not expect was a full on assault of cuteness.

This game has almost everything an e-tard could want in a game. Vibrant and colorful visuals, repetitive techno music, and a mode where you can never lose no matter how hard you try. However, I don't usually pop a few rolls when I want to sit down and play videogames (I hear that's like taking icecream scoops out of your brain) so I must say that most of that appeal is lost on me. However, what I do like about this game is that it managed to make me like games like Bejewled.

As a rule I hate Bejweled clones. I hate the original, the sequel, I hate Hexic HD, Santa Balls 1, 2 and 3. There's just not much in the genre of lineing up same colored objects that I enjoy, however there is something that I do love, and that's Rubik's Cubes. Playing Chuzzle is like solving a neverending rubik's cube that's peppered with explosions (and explosions make everything better).

So I guess I must reluctantly say 'check it out' to the Chuzzle. It's no Insane Aquarium, but I guess not every game can be as fun as feeding your pet fish.

swimming, and why videogames don't need to include this feature

The game I've planned to discuss in this entry is Mario Galaxy. I love this game a lot, it's easily the most fun I've had playing a traditional Mario game -- and I know that's a bold statement to make, but hear me out. The reason this has been the best Mario experience for me is because it's the only one I've ever had that was relevant. I grew up playing Master System (or Genesis, but honestly which name is better guys?) so I missed out on Mario 1, 2 and 3, as well as Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island. The Dreamcast had already failed by the time I got my N64 so when I finally got around to picking up a used copy of Mario 64 I was about ready to get my PS2. And by the time I found a cheap Gamecube the backlash to Mario Sunshine was so huge that I couldn't possibly have cared less.
However, none of this stopped me from rushing out to grab Mario Galaxy the day it came out. Let's face it: think of a game you like, and it's probably a Mario title. Simple as. However, there's one feature that's always been in these games that they need to remove.
Swimming.
Think back to good old Mario World. You're running through World 1-1 bouncin' on Gombas and evading Piranha Plants and then you slip down your pipe into creepy cave World 1-2 and you're running around and you hop on some eerily suspended girders and you're running along ontop of the level and you find the hidden warp zone and what level does it allow you to skip? The swimming one!
Even since the first (real) Mario game they knew that swimming was no fun. You could skip the water levels super easily in Mario World 3 as well (warp whistles were all too easy to come by in that first world). Every one of those pesky levels where the giant fish would jump up and eat you were unbearable, and they popped up relentlessly in every 2D permeation until Mario64 came along and made swimming suck in revolutionary new ways.
Now you can drown, whoopdy-fuck. If swimming is annoying in a 2D world with a fixed perspective, what good could possibly come from tossing it into a 3D world where your camera is driven around by a blind razor backed turtle base head? It's fucked up. I remember practically bashing my brains out with that stupid banana shaped controller when I had to swim around behind that douchey little eel in Dire Dire Docks.
So it kills me, it really kills me, to have to bitch about this same bloody game play component TWENTY-THREE years after Nintendo initially acknowledged that it sucks. Come on guys, shape up.

Rock Band

       So the game I happened to play to review this week is Rock Band for the XBox360, and I must say that it's everything I've ever wanted in a game. Granted I was under the infulence of many a chemical (can I say that in a school blog?) when I first tried this game out, but even if I were not I feel that it would have been mindblowingly awesome. 
       By nature I'm not much of a rythm man, so drums were right out for my first attempt at the game, and setteling for the all-too-familiar guitar controler I opted for guitar, and then bass, and then singing and once I'd had my fill of strings and things, I tried drums. 
       Not much has changed in the transition from Guitar Hero to Rock Band so far as guitar and bass is concerned, so it was quick to pick up for me. I easily blazed through tracks by Oasis and Radiohead, and once I'd had my fill of British 90s Alternative I was dragged into playing various metal and derivitive genres by my cohorts. Not surprisingly they were all enjoyable. 
       Putting down the guitar I picked up the microphone (now if Only I had two turntables...) and belted out Say It Ain't So in my best black-metal singing voice with surprising results (reassuring me that singing games will always be lame). And then I tried my hands and a foot at drumming and experienced exactly the results I had anticipated earlier in this entry.
       All in all I am definitly jealous of everyone I know that owns this game, and I wish I had it so that I could spend hours of my life sitting infront of my tele pounding little plastic disks. 

DMC4

       Now usually I try to avoid anything that starts with the initials DM. This holds particularly true for the Dave Mathews Band and the Department of Motor Vehicles; however, for some reason I felt strangely compelled to try out the demo for Devil May Cry 4. I don't know what it was, perhaps boredom.
       Amazingly enough though, the game seems solid for a fourth tier hack'n'slash. The combat was fun and intuitive, and made you feel like the ultimate bad ass, which is quite a feat considering how limited in scope your abilities are in the 10 minutes of game play you are allowed. The guns are pretty lame though, they hardly do any damage and you some how float in the air if you fire them. But what struck me as being the most spectacular aspect of the game was the architecture. It's just beautifully stunning the environments you're occupying. 
       The level design is really the only thing that stuck out to me though. Maybe it's because I haven't played but 10 minutes of the other games too, but it seemed like everything had been done before except now Dante has gone missing and you're some guy named Nero who looks exactly like Dante minus the red coat. Pretty lame.
       Still, it seems like something I'll have to rent upon its release just so I can admire how beautifully rendered the environments are. 

dig yourself

Great, TNV got pitchforked.

Whatever, bring on the backlash. Record that good needs to be heard and if it takes a corrupt hipster hype machine online music publication to get it to the masses so be it. Probably the only record in the past two years that actually matters.

why pokemon sucks

       So long story short today has been utterly excruciating. After I stumbled my way to the BA on 2 hours of sleep around 7:30 and after I finished stitching together photos manually for two hours for the recruitment books I was blessed with the kind of transcendent headache that completely numbs your entire perception of the world. 
       Needless to say I probably couldn't tell you what we talked about in Human Sexual Behavior or Principles of Advertising; but what I can tell you is that Jessie and James are far and away the least dynamic characters of any television show.
       This realization came to me as I attempted to eat my Chicken Club Quesadilla from Moes with a fork and was greeted with an explosion of chips to the face. This is a seemingly insignificant occurrence on the surface but if you probe deeper into the extended metaphor of life, this frontal assault by fried corn is representative of everything Pokemon has ever been.
       In the late 90s it was virtually impossible to be a kid and not get immersed in Pokemon culture; to paraphrase Colin Meloy, when the Pokemon came the Pokemon came hard. It was a completely unexpected import that went from a bizarre thing Japanese exchange students were obsessed with to pop culture phenomenon in a matter of days it seemed. You closed your eyes and when they opened again there were gameboy games, trading card games, stuffed animals, shirts and most importantly a cartoon.
       I remember very vividly the first episode of season one of Pokemon. I remember meeting Ash Ketchum and Professor Oak and watching him first leave Pallet Town on his coming of age quest to become the very best (that no one ever was). The first season of the television show followed the story of Pokemon Red and Blue pretty closely with the strange twist that Misty and Brock inexplicably decided to abandon their posts at the Gym to run around with a pompous little spiky haird dweeb, and it was all fun and games. This however would not have made for a very interesting television show, so they had to include the element of danger with the aptly named Team Rocket characters of Jessie and James who seem to exist in a perpetual state of failure and possess not but the singular ambition of capturing poor Ash's Pikachu.
       The fact that in every episode Team Rocket fail to capture this Pikachu would be something you could overlook if it only went on for one season, but as it stands Team Rocket have failed to capture Pikachu 520 times (look it up on wikipedia if you don't believe me). What is it about this Pikachu that's so special that these two halfwits and their talking cat just can't take a hint and give up already?
       This is perhaps the most frustrating thing about the Pokemon universe. I've not watched every episode of this show (how could I and still be a legitimately interesting person?) but I have seen probably more episodes than any 20 year old should admit, and at the end of each episode I have to ask myself "How is this still on television?"
       Everything changes from season to season, in the real world, and in Pokemon. It seems that with each new iteration of the series we get more and more pokemon added, and we're in a different world, but all of the characters are still the same. Brock, Ash, Team Rocket, Nurse Joy and Officer Jenny-- they're all still there and they're all still exactly as I left them back in 7th grade.
       Which brings me to the point of this little observation, which is that animated series always seem to exist in this weird world where there is no passage of time. Characters never age, event's never change the face of their world, and for the most part what happens from day to day has little to no impact on the state of affairs in next weeks episode. However, at the start of day one of Pokemon there were only 151 known species of Pokemon, as it stands in the Diamond and Pearl universe there are now 493.
       The only explanation I can think of for why the decades it would take to discover 342 species of animals never happened is that the writers think we're all still in comas because of "Dennō Senshi Porygon."
       In closing I think you all should probably steer clear of the show unless you'd like to play the drinking game we made to it my freshman year.

PokeCrunk

       Mix a tall drink of your choosing and sit down to watch the 3:00 poke-hour that Cartoon Network shows every day. Every time a Pokemon you don't know the name of is shown on screen, drink. 
       It's pretty simple, but who knows? Maybe you'll actually get some value from the show after a round or two.

Halo 3

       There comes a time in everyone's life, and I mean that in the most cliché way possible, when you just have to break down and do "the popular thing." To preface this statement I should probably have intimated to you all that I'm a fan of going against the mold, so to speak. I've never really followed the mainstream trends in anything, and it's led to what I would consider a pretty swell life so far. But there are some hurdles that it's just impossible to jump over when you're trying to live the Ugly American Dream, and for me that hurdle was Halo 3.
       Halo 3 is by far the ultimate consumer, mainstream first person shooter. Nothing video game in recent years comes to mind as being more of a draw for the general population than this one, and I must admit that I too have felt the sting. So I caved. I actually went out and bought an XBox 360 so that I could play this game (and Viva Piñata). And how do I feel about this?
       Awesome.
       Halo 3 really is about the best console first person shooter I've ever played. Nothing will ever take the 'best ever' title away from Unreal Tournament (though I've yet to play UT3) and I'm fine with that, but I was pretty sure I would never let anything take the console glory away from Perfect Dark, but who am I kidding? The only enjoyable aspect of First Person Shooters is the multiplayer, and if you can show me a console game (don't give me this Call of Duty 4 bullshit, modern shooters are super lame) that has done multiplayer better than Halo 3, please enlighten me.
       I think the reason that Halo 3 resonates with me so well is that it really does foster a team dynamic, without being overly forceful about it, like for instance Counter Strike, while still allowing for a variety of play experiences. Don't get me wrong, the team dynamic of Team Fortress 2 is definitely stronger, but if you're playing a ranked double team match and your teammate is just running around underneath snowbound with an assault rifle, you and his diatribe is going to be rather colourful. 
       And while I applaud this universal, un-ending desire to win, and not just win but to dominate the other team, I can't help but feel like this is perhaps the one flaw with Halo 3. The reason I don't like Halo 3 is because of how many little kids I end up playing with, and how they generally respond to me as a player. It seems every game I am greeted by a very effeminate sounding boy saying something like "I'm gonna smoke your ass," and it really scares me. If little children are starting to think like that when playing Halo 3, then it's only a matter of time until they move onto Call of Duty 4, and once placed in that modern combat world they'll start to get that kind of attitude to the enemies portrayed in it: i.e. the middle east.
       And I really don't mean to get on a soapbox about this, 'cause fuck your politics and fuck my politics, no one has it all figured out. But if Halo 3 is breeding a generation of soldiers who want to invade Iran, then I'm going to have to reverse my position and call it the worst console game of all time, and I really don't want to do that.