I BioSuck, F.U.C.K.E.R., Mesmerizing Mammaries and Feuer Frie

It's December already, and not even a week until Persona 4 finally hits store, complete with all the pre-order goodies I'll be getting with it just like you should too. I'll practically be drowned in concept art and plushies and... I'm all gay just thinking about it. It does seem like November went by quick, though. I'm sure it has nothing to do with.. y'know.



Left 4 Dead. Ok, a bit more than Left 4 Dead, but either way. I had no doubt in my mind that this game would be an instant must-have title. After the anticipation and hype, it had a lot to live up to as any game would. There was talk of a brilliant AI system known as "the Director," the binary Tarantino of the digital world, which would change playthrough every single time. There was talk of four fairly lengthy single/cooperative multiplayer maps (the higher the difficulty, the longer the experience). There was talk of thousands and thousands of zombies. Sure enough, Left 4 Dead delivered in spades, and the only gripe I was left with was that it took until 2008 for people to be able to experience something like this.

The only way to have a bad experience is to poorly choose your team-mates, and the cooperative mechanic in Left 4 Dead is what makes me love it the most. See, the Director is a huge selling point to people who're out for a fresh experience every time, but soon enough you'll be wondering why it isn't named "the Asshole" instead. One of the things that I love about L4D is the potent music. Whenever a Tank or a Witch is coming, you can hear it. Distinguished noises (voiced by Mike Patton, which no one else seems to give a fuck about. Kids these days..) give away locations so you can prepare before getting jumped. Unfortunately, the Director likes to target players who're doing particularly well, or a group who isn't being challenged enough. So, corridors that were clear the playthrough before will suddenly become a new chateau for abominations, forcing your team to adopt a new dynamic without giving you time enough to think. I'm equally glad to have that challenge as I am frustrated that it happens.


I don't think I've milked it enough yet, though. So, more on that later. Ironically, whereas Fallout 3 is definitely secured GOTY for me, I've found myself lacking the confidence to finish the game. Hours stack up by the passing day, and it's been one of the longest investments time-wise that I've had since... Well. Since Pokemon Pearl. The thought of ending my ability to free-roam in an landscape as breathtaking as the Wasteland is horrifying to me, so I've been putting it off with other games I've been needing to try for awhile now. So, prepare yourself but nothing but a list of first impressions, save for one thing: BioShock.

See, my history with first-person shooters dates back to the golden year of Unreal Tournament: Game of the Year edition's release (first and best). So, every time I load up BioShock and see that lovely marking, that it's powered by Unreal technology, I feel warm and fuzzy inside. Then, I play the game and I'm reminded of exactly why I love PC over consoles for first-person shooters. It took me a long, long time to get used to Halo's control scheme, a personal crime I'd committed after vowing never to try first-person console shooters again after trying Unreal Tournament on the Dreamcast. Naturally, I picked it up being the cunt I am and ran with it. "Press B to melee" is what's going to be marked on my silent protagonist's grave come the end of my BioShock experience. I'll find myself having accidentally infuriated a Big Daddy and strafing during a retreat to save my life before I'm inevitably put down, due to trying to whack the bastard by pressing B as fast as I can. When I realize no wrench was swung, my jaw drops and I curse my Halo 3 case for what it's done to me. I love you Rapture, just let me live long enough to get to know you.

And I don't even like Halo.

Also, I finally broke down and gave Mass Effect a try. Not that I want it to sound like a bad thing at all, but I feel compelled to say this. Mass Effect's game-play is some of the most boring I have ever endured. I can appreciate the tactical element of it, but I can't imagine how you can make a game where shoot-outs between you and a rogue alien bent on the destruction of your race becomes absolutely joyless.

On the same token though, I have to appreciate the myriad of aspects about Mass Effect that make it such a worthy addition. When I went through my Star Wars phase, the story had precisely dick to do with what captivated me. The technology and the universe(s) of Star Wars were the things that sold me. The story is similar with Mass Effect, and it really helps that it's one of the most gorgeously-rendered games available now complete with a soundtrack that's 100% KORG. Way to appeal to the scifi nerds in all of us, Bioware. I'm impressed.

Beyond that, what's got me so in love with this game is the fact that speech, unlike Fallout 3, does not sound canned at all. The options for dialog your command wheel gives you not only gives you absolute freedom to establish yourself as either the biggest cunt or saint in the universe, but it's as if the words are coming from your own mouth.

"I'm sorry to hear about what happened to James, commander."
Hm. He was a soldier, he knew what the job meant.
"It's never alright to lose soldiers, but that's what happens in a war. He was a soldier, soldiers die."
Shitting dick nipples! This hot red-headed space marine with black lipstick is me!

It may sound like an irrelevant point to make, but the strength in western RPG's is the fact that they're really role-playing games. The character stopped becoming a detached, digitized hottie at that point and became Ryan with a vagina in some weird, gender-confused universe (further evidenced by the fact that Seth Green voices a burlesque and gruff character in the first five minutes), a power that many games lack.

Outside of that, as I said earlier about Fallout 3, the survivalist aspect of the game got me interested in S.T.A.L.K.E.R. (I will never repeat it with seven periods again). The game has made me realize how unstable of an operating system Vista is, and has affirmed that I will need to build my own PC in the next few months. After tinkering with hours with STALKER's graphical setting and compatibility, there is no way that a video card with 890 MB's of video memory can so poorly process a game like STALKER. So, I finally work a matching combination by running it in compatibility mode with Windows XP SP2 and cutting the graphics all the way down with no static lighting, and it runs acceptably. However, it pains me to have such a wide open setting as brilliant as a post-nuclear Russian wasteland around Chernobyl and Pripyat readily available, but at such a low quality of graphics. Sigh.

Anyway, after starting the game, I was faced with a plethora of problems. Immediately, STALKER became one of the most frustrating games I've played in a long, long time. You start out nearly naked, your only weapon being a terrible semi-automatic pistol. Fitting of course, until you accept your first assignment. An assignment I failed for three days. At first, I thought maybe I had become accustomed to toothless challenges. I sould sight in my pistol from afar and attempt to put a few rouns into an enemy yards away, only to see my bullets veering wildly off into the distance. Seeing this attention to detail and care to make STALKER less of a testosterone-fueled Hollywood scifi-action ride and more like a fight for life was immensely satisfying, even if it resulted in my constant failure. However, I play Armored Core willingly. I'll learn, even if it involves me dying thousands of times in the process. STALKER strangely didn't seem to be getting much easier the more time I put into it. I would hide behind objects and pounce on enemies, only to empty a full clip of eight rounds in their heads to see nothing except them pulling back a shotgun and erasing my existence in two spent shells.

After one specific time I'd scored myself an AK-47, I was executed in the same style and had enough. Something was awry, so I run to town to do a little experiment. I pull out the bolts the game gives you to aid in the process of finding artifacts and start gleefully flicking them at inhabitants. 70% of the time, they would pass through the characters. That's when I realized that a good bit of my frustration is the result of abysmal collision detection. I immediately saved, shut it down and installed the Oblivion Lost mod. I don't care if it's a completely different experience, I prefer to save myself inadvertent frustration and preserve the necessary ones, like not dying in radiation-infested fields.

Another game that's been eating my time has been Mugen no Frontier: Super Robot Taisen OG Saga. Or, as us in the land of cheeseburgers and SUVs would call it when it (as far as rumors go) gets ported to America is Endless Frontier. The SRT series is notorious for making cross-over games, usually featuring mechs from anime such as Macross and Gundam. So far, only two of the series has reached North American shores due largely to licensing issues, but "original generation" means there's a good chance we could see this little gem coming to America. What makes me happiest about it is that I won't be the only shame-filled DS owner who has this game. Just look at the video.



Ass. And titties. Ass ass titties titt-erm. You get the idea.

Naturally, it'd be easy to dismiss as fanfare, but the game is fuckloads of fun. Nevermind the fact that KOSMOS finally made it to another RPG and her top manages to undo itself at random intervals, but the game-play has remaind to be incredibly entertaining around twenty-five hours in so far. Regardless of how much grinding any player can do, boss battles retain a very difficult mode to them that will have you strategizing every character's action constantly, even employing a number of mechanics used in 2D fighting games. I can only hope that the rumors are true and that Endless Frontier will see a North American release.

Finally (and strangely), I've been trying on a submarine simulator recently. Now, I'm a history buff, so it's not that outlandish that I'd try a game like this, but Silent Hunter 3 is quickly becoming one of the best surprises I've had in a long time. You play as a Nazi U-boat commander besting the odds against Allied shipping, which is historically more rough and tumble than most believed. Even beyond Winston Churchill mentioning how much he "hates those damn submarines," enlisting in submariner service on the Axis during the second World War was statistically a suicide mission. Playing Silent Hunter 3 is an almost eerie representation, specifically because of how accurate it is. You run out of air, you return for fuel, you assign crew members to repair certain parts of a damaged hull, so on and so forth.

You start out, get your boat, and you're due for training. After learning how to maneuver, it's time to test out your torpedo skills. These days, you'd be accustomed to something fancy like guidance systems. World War II wasn't the day of thhe Director AI, and Silent Hunter 3 will put you to task to make your kills and reserve yourself. You have to take into account the size of the ship, speed of the ship, angle and bearing of the ship, distance from it to you and the speed of your torpedoes. After studying this, you have to make a mathematically-based decision in order to time the trajectory just perfect to make the shot.

I failed it the first four times, totalling 24 lost torpedoes. Hitler would have been so very sad with me. Finally, one torpedo left, and I think I finally have it. I order my crew to fire as I have the test ship in my sights, and I see my torpedo barreling through the water. It's early, but it looks like a hit. Slowly, it whirrs toward my target underneath the black coat of night, and I smile widely as I see it lining up for a perfect strike on the center of the ship's hull. I can smell the burning metal I think, just as I hear a bonk. No explosions, just a metallic bonk. I zoom the camera around and see my torpedo flopping in the water towards the blackened deep. I rage my fucking face off and take my quandary to Google when I read that your torpedoes can actually malfunction. All of the frustration seemed justified, but the second I pulled off an actual hit, I practically orgasmed. It's for that sake that I refused to use the pun about submarines being immersive.

Anyway, being Christmas and the end of the year and all, let's talk about the future. Should be stocking up on some (mostly) older titles come the 25th, as well as a PSP. Along with that, I'll be checking out the mandatory titles like Patapon, Metal Gear Solid: Portable Ops, Monster Hunter 2G and what I'm most excited about, the new Parasite Eve title. It's called the Third Birthday, and from what I've read it's because it focuses more on Aya Brea instead of the events in her world. Ironically, after seeing Squeenix's 2009 schedule, this is the only thing that caught my interest. On the DS side of things, the team behind Xenogears (including composer Yasunori Mitsuda, which is a wet dream) produced an RPG already out in Japan named world destruction. Unlike other RPG's where it's up to you to save the world, the point of the game is to destroy it so you can free it from the grips of your furry overlords. Looks very promising.

I'll also be doing a bit more PC gaming, seeing as how both Diablo III and Starcraft II are slated for release next year. I'll also be checking out some oldies like Fallout 1 and 2 (which I'll be starting relatively soon) and BioShock's predecessors, System Shock 1 and 2. Also, Vampire Masquerade: Bloodlines looks pretty cool (and sexy), so I'll be giving it a shot when I get around to it.

Persona 4 in 4 days.