Oh My Goodness

Seems I've come to a profound realization.

After almost a year's hiatus, during which I've, among other things, gotten dumped / stepped on, damaged my karma in the midst of taking flight from the projected path of a hurricane, made around seventy or eighty new friends / acquaintances via the magic of dubstep and roller derby, started out on an arduous path toward refereeing the latter, sworn off of most, if not all, smokables, gotten in shape, and eliminated caffiene from my diet (though, not, I suspect, with any real conviction), I remember that I like video games. And writing.

The time for soul-searching is coming to a close. There've been plenty of changes, yes, but now is when the new gets reintegrated with the old.

I'm thereby going to be playing them, and writing about it. Hell, I might engage in plenty of other dissociative, generally nerdly activities besides.

And you can't stop me.

More to come.

Anatomy of a Board Fight

I. Subject A says something bold/sarcastic, neglects to include a smiley

II. Subject B takes offense, needles Subject A in a way slightly more pointed and direct, but not so direct as to make deniability implausible

III. Subject A shifts into an overt stance. Asks why Subject B is always trying to talk shit

IV. Having enough room to do so, Subject B evokes plausible deniability, questions why Subject A is always so quick to take offense. At this point, the tone has become condescending, with words such as "paranoid", "butthurt" seeing liberal use

V. Onlookers begin to inject snarky commentary

V. RACE TO THE HIGH ROAD! Usually, by now Subject A realizes that the rules of this particular encounter have changed. The name of the game is now to use the largest SAT words as incorrectly and awkwardly as possible in an effort to appear as the more 'rational' and cool-headed of the two. This about-face is almost always unconvincing to the audience

VI. Any onlookers who haven't begun making snarky comments by now, do so. The lifecycle of the fight approaches its natural end

VII. Sniping continues until a Subject sees an oppurtunity to bow out reletively gracefully, typically by making a comment regarding the uselessness of arguing with children

VIII. Sniping peters out. FIGHT CONCLUDED

Apologies to Mr. Downey

A disclaimer: I'm sick today. The level of inspiration that typically infuses these posts may seem strangely absent. In light of that, I'll try and keep things brief.

I saw Iron Man over the weekend, and was duly impressed. I can't imagine them casting anyone else for the role of Tony Stark -- Bobby captures the character perfectly. In that spirit, I'd like to openly apologize for any offence I may have leveled against him in my last post.

I'm sorry, Robert. Your movie doesn't ask me to believe anything utterly stupid -- relative to some other superhero flicks I could name -- aside from making allowances for the ridiculously advanced technology on display. Stark's workspace is easily as impressive as his suit, which is, thank God, a perfect little diamond of awesome.

Sorry for the harsh dismissal, Robert. You could probably kick
Niko Bellic's ass if you really tried,providing you snuck up from behind.

While we're on the subject, GTAIV continues to rock my face. It's long: I'm thirty hours in and have completed a little more than two-thirds of the main plotline, plus a few side missions. I might post a follow-up review upon completion. We'll see.

Enough of that. Here's some music, ripped straight from today's blogs and regurgitated for your benefit.

First up is Loose Shus. Every week or so, I comb my RSS subscriptions for free music and download it to my iPod, then review the latest while driving to and from work. Inevitably, I end up paring down the songs to about ten or so that I'll seriously consider from a mixing perspective, and out of that dozen or so tracks, one or two will emerge that fulfill my criteria more or less completely. Last week's winner is a track called Total Fox. The editing is just brash enough, the samples are just kitchy enough, it's dancable, not too busy so as not to be mixable, and, to my ears, nothing if not versatile. Try a taste and tell me whether or not I'm full of shit.

Loose Shus -- Total Fox

Thanks, Disco Dust. Here's an interview with Loose Shus, as well.

A close second is this track by Maral Salmassi and remixed by FUKKK OFF. Called "Fire Gem", it starts off straightforward and gradually morphs into three or four different tracks as it continues along its merry, lengthly way. I'd say more, but I don't have my iPod with me, and all that I remember right now is that I like it a lot. Told you I was sick.

Maral Salmassi -- Fire Gem (FUKKK OFF remix)

Credit for this one goes to Missing Toof, and most likely to a dozen other blogs as well.

That's all for now. I have some Airborne to drink.

Back to the subject at hand

So by now, everyone knows about the biggest media release this week, one which may prove to be the most lucrative in history. I'm speaking, of course, of Iron Man.

Go Iron Man!

Hahaha! No, seriously, GTA IV came out on Tuesday.

With predictions of 9 million units being sold on the first day, at about $60 per copy, this brings the total about to somewhere around $HolyFuckingShitMoney for everyone employed by Rockstar Studios. The actual sales figures are something else again -- I don't have the chart in front of me.

Niko Bellic of GTA IV. Not pictured: Robert Downey Jr. cowering like a bitch.

So yeah, as expected, the game's awesome, it'll change gaming forever, everyone should go buy it right now blah blah etc. There's honestly nothing I can say here that hasn't already been covered at length in any other review for the game out there. Since I won't sit here and bore you with analysis of the details that can be found in a far more polished form on a professional gaming site, I'll just do my best to sum up my overall feelings regarding the game, based on my two days with it so far.

Long story short, I would almost rather play this game than have sex, unless we're talking about me with a girl who also plays GTA and is down with having sex during. This will become less true as the week wears on. Right now, I'm enthralled.

Pic unrelated.

I'll get the obvious out of the way while covering some of the things that may jump out at a GTA veteran. Here goes.

Firstly, the graphics are good by any standard, and ridiculously good for a sandbox game; everyone's seen the shots. Physics are beautiful, and incorporate some new tech that hasn't really been seen in a title yet. Objects (including the player) are weightier and have a real, physical presense in the environment. Car physics is more realistic, with many engines responding better to a gradual increase in RPMs accomplished by applying increasing pressure to the right trigger, slowly. NPC AI feels organic and continually surprises you with its behavior. The city itself is sculpted to an inhuman degree of detail, with plenty to see and do. Gunplay is much, much improved over previous titles, with a cover system and the ability to run, crouch, run and crouch, roll, all while aiming the weapon in classic over-the-shoulder 'Gears' style. The player can grab onto just about any ledge, even while falling. Cars react to damage in a way that's far less abstract: flipping them or driving into water doesn't trigger an explosion, nor does ramming into static structures; you pretty much have to rupture the gas tank for that. When you do run into an object, the dent left in your car ends up being about the same shape as said object. There's a 'realer' feel to the game -- it's not at all cartoony like the others in the series, yet retains its distinct brand of simultaniously high- and low-brow humor. And on and on and on.

It all ties together near-seamlessly -- I say 'near' because at times you can sense the processor struggling mightily to maintain a consistent framerate through everything that's going on in the environment. That's about the only quibble I have. Everything else is straight Fun distilled to a purity I've never seen before. As a matter of fact, the highest praise I can offer this game is that it expands my idea of what video games are capable of doing. Allow me to explain.

When you've been a gamer for a certain number of years, you develop a certain cynicism toward most games that stems from a constant decrease in your ability to suspend your disbelief. Whereas you originally played games to escape into another world, you over time find it progressively harder to ignore the strings being pulled 'behind the scenes', within the game logic itself. Part of this is due to sheer familiarity with how games function. Part of it is out of necessity: completing most games requires a deeper understanding of the game at the end than you had at the beginning. Part of it's old-fashioned jadedness -- the belief that there's nothing out there that can really amaze any more, that developers will inadvertently stick to their proven formulas. You become like that asshat that gets invited over to watch campy horror B-movies, then in an attempt to sound worldly spouts off pithy, bullshit observations. "They just had sex, she's gonna die now."

For me, things had gotten to the point where I had come to believe that I'd never again play a game that could excite me the same way Contra or Mega Man II excited me as a kid. I suppose I blamed age. Turns out age has nothing to do with it -- GTA IV gets me that excited, and it manages that by throwing a curve every time I think I've gotten the mechanisms behind the game world figured out. Every time I feel as though I have a subconcious grasp of where the 'strings' are and what they're attached to, the game shows me that I still don't know what the fuck I'm talking about. This phenomenon hasn't yet stopped, and I've been playing for awhile.

The illusion of a real, living world is presented so effectively that I've stopped even trying to see the strings, and am just living the game at face value, without any subconcious awareness of any of the game's abstractions, of which there seen to be few; I think the last game to manage that feat was Deus Ex. My mind has been tricked into believing Liberty City exists with more 'realness' than any other game world I've explored, including Oblivion. The whole thing ends up being amazingly immersive, even to those who've long thought they'd lost the ability to forget they're playing a game. So yeah. I'd say it deserves the perfect 10 Gamespot gave it.

Oh yeah, and it has multiplayer.

If this doesn't look rad to you, you may want to just let your friends know that you're gay.

A Word on Obama

Let's get off-topic for a second.

I'm a Barack supporter. The short answer to why is that I feel like he Gets Me. Not enough? Here's the long answer.

The appeal that Obama holds for me is not one of 'what', but of 'how'. His message is contained within the way he talks, not necessarily in the specifics of what he talks about. The worldview and mindset that he represents carry more weight for me than his case-by-case particulars vis-a-vis individual issues.

If the attitude that underpins everything a candidate does and says is something that inspires/excites me, then all the specifics are negotiable. Trying to 'drill down' that far won't yield me much useful information. I can't predict what he'd have to deal with over the next four years, but I can make a good guess as to how he would.

Remember that Bush got "elected" on character. He was regarded as a guy who stuck to his guns, who shot straight, who had strength of belief. It boggles my mind why anyone would want to judge a candidate based on their specific, hypothetical responses to -- at best -- educated guesses as to what might happen over a four-year period, as opposed to, say, the stance toward the world that they represent.

It's not surprising that this sort of politiking has a hard time flying in the mainstream arena. We've become conditioned to think of the country as a business, and expect to be presented with some hard data, with measurable specifics. We want bar graphs and pie charts, and we want them shown to us alongside some neat graphics at Prime Time. Bush ran his adminstration with that mindset. As a result, when Obama talks, its dismissed as 'fluff' -- but there's no better evidence that he represents change than the fact that his appeal is wholly different from what we've become used to.

Yeah, its tired, but the JFK comparison is apt. We need to be reminded that an important job of a leader is to inspire and to bring out the best qualities in his people. If one can do that, many other things will fall into place on their own, but maybe not in ways that are strictly measurable. People that understand the appeal of Obama know this to be true on an instinctive level. Those opposed to him resort to dissection: they have to pull his convictions down into the realm of systematic analysis and conventional political physics, where, not surprisingly, they wither and die under the microscope, having been coldly dismembered and found "lacking".

In a way, this is symptomatic of America's disease: cynicism, an extreme brand of "rationality", an insistance that the past is the only indicator of the future -- and, by extension, hopelessness, meaninglessness, tediousness. Obama represents an opposing paradigm, one of -- for lack of a better word -- holism. Its one that can't be understood within the predominant mindset, which must dissect, divide, and categorize to survive. That's the kind of change he represents. A change in our collective outlook so fundamental that we almost are forced to come up with new ways of thinking about politics just to discuss it.

Obama is a transcendant candidate.

To me, that's a Good Thing.

Being Confident

I suspect that many of you (Larry) have already seen this, and that my posting the vid after having only recently viewed it is somewhat of a noob move. Nevertheless, if you too have been ignorant of the comedic genius of Micheal Cera, allow me to welcome you to Teh Interlink.

Impossible is the Opposite of Possible

G'Day, Mate

Today we celebrate NES-synth inspired Aussie electro, and do they ever know how to bring it. Crikey.

Here's something fun to try: download these next two tracks and mix them together, then listen to the result whilst playing Mega Man II. Can you tell that I'm smart? I said 'whilst'.

This first piece, with its quasi-trance-ish wall of sound, combines the charm of a more innocent era with the bored, glam-trash electro aesthetic a la Fischerspooner, and does so at length. This song makes me think of some hipster coming to after an all-weekend coke binge, throwing a Paul Van Dyk CD in without looking, and remembering that sometimes, when your friends aren't looking, trance can be Cool. Some have probably already heard this: it's Melbourne's own Midnight Juggernauts. It's Road to Recovery, and I am in love with its intervals.

Midnight Juggernauts - Road to Recovery

Midnight Juggernauts on MySpace

This next track is evocative of Bionic Commando and Double Dragon. There's an absolutely gorgeous retro NES anime-rock hook that first hits at 3:11. Straight out of Sydney's considerable electro/"nurave" scene, here's Bag Raiders. Now you're Playing with Power.

Bag Raiders - Fun Punch (Whitenoise remix)

Bag Raiders on Myspace

You Wouldn't Steal a Purse

So steal some music instead. Any qualms you might have are easily remedied by Courtney Love. Here's an 8-bit indie-electro blast to the face from Sweden's The Touch. While the intro smacks of Le Justice, is soon settles into a thick, chunky, chopped-up groove and stays there for awhile before bringing in the indie vox. It's a versatile track that offers varying intensities of a spacious, mixable buildup, then serves up the more traditional song elements later on, where it demands more room to breathe. Rockin' stuff. Thanks to Fluokids for the link -- stop by if you get the chance.

The Touch - Heart of the City (Stuffa mix)

The Touch Myspace

Hit the Bricks

There's not really too much to say about this, other than it'll most likely be the coolest thing I view all day. Although a couple of years old, here's FF7 in Lego, by way of Destructoid:

Best use of bananas ever. It's the identity-crisis ridden supersoldier clone with the biggest pair since Van Damme in that one movie, Universal Something. His hair's always looked like how I imagine a corrupted-yet-still-readable 3d Studio Max file would. But infused with the essence of Jenova or no, he's useless without his perpetually pissed-off protege, That Black Dude.




This model is probably the least accurate, as Barret is pictured smiling. Together with the help of Cloud's nondescript, utterly forgettable childhood sweetheart, some bead-bedecked flower-growing hippie slut (thanks to womengamers.com for the link), a foul-mouthed, cigar-chomping airplane mechanic and a shapeshifting goth amputee, they'll try super hard to save the bilinearally-filtered 3d overworld map from David Carradine.



Rad. Speaking of, that same page features the Blue Dragon from Strider (the good version). A Lego Hiryu is sorely needed.

Steal This Link

Okay, before I do this, let me say that I promise to set up a zShare account of my own and to keep my hotlinked to the accounts of others to a minimum. I'm fucking serious. This is bad form. I'm ashamed.

Alright! Now that that's out of the way, here's a little tidbit I pulled off of Discobelle earlier in the week. I'm still debating with myself whether it makes for a better opener than closer, but whatever the case, this is a track that delivers a super-smooth lounge vibe underneath rollicking, discopunky, cowbell-laden drums, straight from the suburbs of Melbourne, Austrailia.

Architecture in Helsinki - Debbie (U Turn remix)

AiH's MySpace.

Rearranging the Furniture

You may or may not notice that a couple things have changed here at KBN, depending on whether or not your name is Larry. Regardless, here's a primer on what's new.

Link lists!

There's more of them and more to them. 'Read This Instead of Working' is basically a list of sites that I review, daily, for at least one hour immediately after arriving at work. All of them are highly reccommended, and as I'm sure many are aware, superb timesinks. Digg and Stumbleupon are for developing a sweet meme addiction, while the others are just gut-bustingly funny.

All the gaming sites have been heaped into one list. That includes blogs, review megasites, and links to the pages of games that I'm 'into'. Whatever.

Local Flavor is where I support the good men and women of the Houston electronic music (Dubstep?) scene. All the people involved in what's on the other sides of those jumps contribute way, way more than I do. Support.

The present form of Music That I Steal is, for the moment, a meager assortment of blogs from which I pull a chunk of my mp3s. You'll find that they're mostly centered around that crazy electro-disco-rock music that the kids enjoy. Read them. Download the music for yourself so that, by virtue of your knowing exactly where I find my material, I'll be shamed into scouring the net deeper and wider for tunes ever more interesting and obscure. While at work.

If you don't visit, that's okay too, as I'll occasionally be shamelessly aping their links from time to time (see above).

Too Much Free Time Files: Nerf GoW Lancer

I originally came upon the following via this fine service and posted it to Houstonbeats -- just about the only place that this blog gets advertised. Upon being asked why it hadn't yet been posted here, I check my comments and was pleasantly surprised to find that readership had virtually exploded since I last wrote anything. Thanks, guys (Larry). Now, onto the meat:

You like Gears? Maybe you like chainsawing the shit out of aliens in Gears. What about Nerf guns? Did you ever shoot Nerf guns at your friends as a kid? Maybe you put out someone's eye. Did you chainsaw the shit out of them? What? No? Well shit, this next post's for you.

BAM.

One day while I was playing Co-op with my little buddy Gabriel I put the game on pause and told him I was going to make a Lancer. He asked how and I didn't exactly know. All I knew was the seed was placed deep within my brain that I needed to make one.



That seed grew into an idea. I then found that same make of toy chainsaw over at ToysRus.
I was eyeballing it and realized it could be done.
I then brought it home. After taking it out of its package I realized this was going to be harder than I thought.

If your face feels freshly rocked, that's because this is exactly what it looks like. More after the jump.

The Core is Exposed

Saw this on Digg today: apparently the dollar value of a smooth game of Crysis at maximum detail sits at around $1800 for only the video cards, plugged into what one can only assume is the Citadel's dark energy reactor. Gaze upon their works, and despair:

PC Games Hardware magazine has finally done it. They got Crysis to run smooth on very high with a Triple SLI video card setup. The cards alone cost over $1800. I didn’t even know they made power supplies that could output 1200W!

The article in its entirety can be viewed at Gemega, with benchmarks. The way things are going, Crysis is shaping up to be one of 2010's best games.

Listen All'a Y'all It's A Sabotage

Pandemic Studios (a recent aquisition of publishing behemoth EA) has had this one in the kiln for some time now. Although not much is known regarding core gameplay, Saboteur (X360, PS3) seems to be shaping up as an action-stealth-sandbox hybrid that promises some innovative graphical twists -- specifically, a gameplay element known as "will to fight". From Wikipedia:

Color will be a key-element in the gameplay, and players will experience an Okami-esque style when entering certain parts of the city. In order to make that district colored ("happy") again, players must weaken the German forces occupying the area. In doing so, that district's citizens will regain their hope, characterized by what has been called the "Will to fight" factor. In areas with low WtF, the area is dark, with color being various shades of grey (with the notable and sinister exception of several historically-accurate German Flag types, complete with swastika), whereas in areas with high WtF, the area is vibrant and with full color.

In addition, areas with a low WtF will be portrayed as being suffocatingly dense with lovable Krauts, while in high WtF areas, the soldiers will be far more sparse and mostly concentrated within bases, barracks, and -- if all goes well -- brothels.

It's always refreshing when a developer approaches the visual side of things with more than just an impetus toward prettier, sharper, and more folds per square foot being sported by character models. Given that we're already seeing the first glimmers of photorealistic fidelity in gaming, devs will have to get a little more conceptually creative to be seen as having pushed the envelope graphically throughout the next generation of platforms -- after all, you can't make something look more real than real, not unless Assassin's Creed 2 ships with complementary psilocybin. After that whole near-perfect visual fidelity banchmark is met and we all own GPUs dedicated to rendering water, we're probably going to want to see some risks getting taken.

On a personal note, here's hoping that Pandemic regals us with a little bit of that old-fashioned stealth gaming the likes of Hitman or Deus Ex, and not that craptacular alert-status mechanism made possible by what I can only assume is Altair's pager.

For the curious, Saboteur previews and screenshots can be found over at Gamespot (down, but not out!)

Goodbye to Jeff Gerstmann, and to Gamespot

If you don't know the story and have a passing interest in the gaming industry, you owe it to yourself to get aquainted.

Jeff Gerstmann was Gamespot's senior review editor until late last week, when he was canned after giving a high-profile game -- Kane and Lynch: Dead Men -- a woefully mediocre score of 6.0. I've read the written review and watched the video one, and I can tell you that the man doesn't pull any punches.

Prior to the game's release, its publisher, Eidos -- of Hitman, Tomb Raider, and Deus Ex fame -- had invested quite the pretty penny in a sitewide marketing campaign, one that featured Kane's and Lynch's ugly mugs (arguably, Kane's is uglier) smeared up and down Gamespot's bookends and across the top as an integrated banner. Users were given the option to 'skin' the site to display three variants on the theme. Naturally, it was expected that the community would be eager to climb aboard the K&L boat and set sail for Eidos' pockets.

Alas, as has sometimes been known to happen, Eidos ended up releasing what can with only slight hyperbole be referred to as a piece of trash. All the marketing dollars in the world haven't been able change that reality -- although though they should have, according to the business-school mindsets of the Eidos people. Jeff Gerstmann gave K&L exactly the review it deserved, and Eidos objected not to the score per se, but rather to the review's tone, which was admittedly of the scathing variety. The publisher's reaction was to pull hundreds of thousands of future advertising revenue from Gamespot.

Following this, Gamespot's business arm had a reaction of its own: to fire Jeff Gerstman, one of their most senior editors with ten years experience at the company and in the process send a message to the rest of the staff: give AAA games the reviews their publishers pay for.

(To make matters worse, Jeff's Myspace page lits him as a fan of MSTRKRFT and Justice, thus making his termination doubly heinous.)

Of course, none of this can be confirmed. CNet (parents company of Gamespot) isn't saying a thing about the matter, and Jeff most likely was compelled to sign a non-disclosure agreement upon his departure, one that, undoubtedly, his severance package was contingent upon. There isn't any real, solid proof that Jeff was fired over a bad review, but none of that really matters now.

As I write this, Gamespot is enduring a lynching of its own. Gabe and Tycho posted a comic offering up their take on the issue. About sixty percent of the threads posted over the weekend to Gamespot's general discussion forums have been on the subject of the scandal -- you can tell just by checking the boards; they're the threads that the moderators have locked. Community backlash has sent Kane and Lynch's user average score down toward the 2.6 range, prompting Gamespot to disable user reviews as well -- but don't worry: you can still post your own review on Metacritic, where K&L user reviews now sit at 2.2. Needless to say, Eidos has pulled the K&L advertising from the site, and it now appears that the formerly ubiquitous Mountain Dew ads have vanished as well. Over the weekend, GameFAQ's (a subsidiary of Gamespot) polls were appearantly hacked. As of now, there are no banner ads being displayed on GS, and at least one insider has come forward with information that certainly paints CNet in a very bad light. Want more? Stories like these have been hitting the front page of Digg all weekend.

Gamespot is in a free fall, and personally, I don't think anyone over there can see the bottom yet. It's a shame, because GS is the first place I've turned for my reviews in almost every case, thanks to their knowledgable, professional, and talented editorial staff and their reviews that I have -- for the most part -- found myself unable to really disagree with. In nine out of ten instances, if I liked a game, it turned out that a Gamespot reviewer liked it too, and about as much to boot.

Unfortunately, it now appears that all that's under the bridge. The community has spoken. Regardless of what exactly went down, credibility has been compromised. That little voice in the back of my mind may have not been being so paranoid when it cleared its throat upon my noticing that Assassin's Creed had been given a 9.0, one of those one out of ten scores that I did not agree with -- at all.

Welcome to the New Games Journalism. This week has been a sad time.

Let's hope that the industry learns something from this. Meanwhile, have you checked out 1UP?