I only started playing it yesterday, but I'm really mad for it right now.
Sure, it's nearly seventeen years old, but what you guys aren't keeping in mind is that it's only the second or third first person shooter that I've ever played, and that's only because I'm not sure Condemned counts.
One of the things I'm really loving about this game is that I am getting noticably better at it as I play.
There's this one bit in Office Complex where there's about eight slectricity spouting monsters and I went in there with only twenty health. After a bunch of failed attempts I managed to kill all of them without getting hit once, even going out of my way to kill two I strictly didn't need to in my pursuit of a first aid kit that a biologist refused to slip through the hole in the wall, despite my puppy dog looks at it.
But I'm a Theoretical Physicist...
By the time the human soldiers rolled around, I was so good that they haven't killed me once yet.
I even managed to wipe out an entire room of them from the vents with little difficulty.
Although that may be because they're not very bright. Only one of them seemed to realise I was in there despite me showing up in a place I could only have gotten to via the ventilation system.
My main source of annoyance with the game is that the other scientists keep running to their deaths via the American military. At this point I'm working on the principle that Gordon is mute because if he isn't why the hell isn't he going 'no, don't. They already killed Steve!'?
I also got temporarily stuck in a wall and had to reload a save when I got trapped in the locker room because a head crab zombie's foot being stuck in the door.
Yeah, I'm loving it, but it doesn't half show its age.
Physics!
Man, this gore... So realistic!
Nevertheless, as a new player to the genre, I still love it enough to suggest it to others.
You want to give FPSs a go? You can't do much better than Half Life.
Seriously, this is half the reason my post is so late today, I've been watching the crap out of this.
I'm loving it, partially because the antagonist is a dork, adorable, incredibly socially awkward and stops being the antagonist at some point in episode two or three when he falls head over heels for the heroine after she kicks him in the face.
Seriously, she roundhouse kicks him, it was sheer poetry in motion.
"Atta girl."
Our story begins with a teenage boy being repeatedly beaten and bullied because he found a red card in his locker. It ends up with him being forced onto the edge of a roof and attempting suicide before our plucky heroine Guem Jan Di, who was there on a delivery of dry cleaning, catches him and ends up in the public eye as a populist figure.
I'm sorry, did I say that's how our story begins?
Because that's not how it begins, it begins with two minutes of exposition about some conglomerate called Shin Hwa which also owns a school for some initially sentimental but now rather inexplicable reason.
The prestigious school is uber elite and ultra expensive and students just go through it without ever having to take entrance exams. Including all the way into university.
I'm not joking, one of the students is twenty three years old.
The stuff about the bullying comes afterwards.
The public lose their rag at the conglomerate because such awful stuff is happening at this school (probably because the teaching staff appears to consist of one normal teacher and a white university lecturer). In order to placate them, the evil president (she has a villain collar in her first scene, that's how you know she's evil) of the Shin Hwa group arranges for Jan Di to go to the school and here start her romantic problems, friendship problems, being bullied (seriously, two teachers) and swimming in a pool no one but her ever seems to use.
The first three all relate to the Flower Four, a gang of guys who have a lot of money and enough sense for two guys. Which happens to be in two of them, leaving nothing for the other two.
The leader of the group is Goo Joon Pyo, who starts off as an antagonist before falling in love with Jan Di, and much to my dismay it took me a startingly long time to figure out that he was Mr Darcy.
-Cough- Ji Hoo is the Mr Bingley/Mr Wickham (he has the personality of one and the plot purpose of the other) of the proceedings. He plays the violin, moons over the aforementioned twenty three year old and has bad hair.
-Cough- Yi Jung, who is a potter and seems relatively nice apears to have a thing for Jan Di's friend Ga Eul.
And then there's -fake coughing fit- who's something of a ladies' man and really grew on me as the series went on.
The latter two are the one's who managed to retain the sense they were born with.
The other two were in car accidents, so presumably vehicle related trauma robs you of your ability to use common sense.
Okay, okay.
I'll look their names up.
Yoon Ji Hoo, So Yi Jung and Song Woo Bin.
I'm really bad with names! Especially names from cultures whose names I'm almost entirely unfamilar with.
Could they not throw a few Achmeds in there? I know where I stand with an Achmed.
Joon Pyo (although transliterations do vary on that) initially serves as an antagonist because he basically holds the whole school in his thrall and they do what he tells them to.
The red card business is his doing.
Jan Di ends up butting heads with him and he pulls the red card trick on her. She manages to hold out pretty well for a while.
There's a scene where she's had eggs and flour thrown at her and Joon Pyo expects her to show up, but she doesn't because she has no intention of capitulating to him.
He looked a little heart broken when she didn't, so I think he probably started liking her by then.
However, he takes it too far by spreading a rumour (or more accurately, getting other people to spread a rumour) about her being pregnant. This is what prompts her to roundhouse kick him.
Somehow, from her yelling at him about how she hasn't even had her first kiss and kicking him in the face, he concludes that she must be madly in love with him.
Yi Jung and Woo Bin tried to let him know that he was wrong, but he was so sure that they just let it go for the lulz. This is what I mean by them having all the sense in that group.
After that, everything he instigates towards her is pigtail pulling.
All of it.
Even half his attempts to be nice or romantic.
It's adorable.
Meanwhile, Jan Di has a crush on Ji Hoo, and I've just got to the point where that's caused a huge problem.
I shan't tell you more, just that you should watch it yourself if it tickles your fancy.
I like them more than I like horror movies, and I'm not sure why.
Yes, they're more visceral as you feel like you're the one in danger, but I'm a massive wuss, so that can't be it.
Hmm, maybe if I list my favourite things that appear in the genre, it will help me work out where my love for it comes from.
Gore
I like me some gore in survival horror games. Hell, in games in general.
It's not something that scares me, frankly I'm unphased by most kinds of gore. You can show me blood, most organs, dimembered limbs and unbroken guts and I'm fine. I do get a bit queasy at broken up guts, but that's mostly because of the excrement within. I'm also not great with saliva and other people's wet hair.
I get a bit queasy just thinking about it.
I'm not sure why I'm so chill with regular blood and organs stuff, but I am, and I appreciate seeing it strewn about the place in a scary setting.
I think it's possibly the most efficient way of demonstrating that a. shit is going down, and b. you're in danger.
In movies, since there's no sense of personal peril, the inclusion of lots of gore can often feel like it's there solely for the shock factor. Which just isn't a worthwhile endeavour, in my humble opinion.
Symbolism
Especially symbolism in monsters.
It generally shows that a lot of thought has been put into a game when the monsters are dripping with sybolism.
The Ur Example in video games generally being given as Silent Hill. Usually Silent Hill 2.
All of the sexual imagery in that game is clever and serves a purpose because it's symbolic.
I love things like that, which is why Silent Hill: Downpour was something of a disappointment. There's some symbolism, but it's not particularly deep or clever.
It's also why Silent Hill: Homecoming, is frankly laughable because it picks up all of the monsters from Silent Hill 2 and dumps them in a story that has nothing to do with their symbolism. So your only choice is to assume that the protagonist is sexually attracted to his brother. Except that the average boy doesn't have a vagina, so why are there vagina monsters?!
The Silent Hill movie has a similar problem, only this time we're questioning why Pyramid Head is there because the protagonist is a woman, and that drastically reduces the probability that she has a penis!
-cough-
It's not necessary, but it is something I like to see. On the other hand, lacking clear symbolism can be a boon, because I also like...
Ambiguity
I like talking about video games.
That's why I started up this blog again.
Some ambiguity in the world, story or monsters is always appreciated because then you can spend hours talking about it.
I think that horror does this best when it comes to video games because there's almost always multiple layers to the story and the protagonist is often either presented as unstable to start with, or their situation is severe enough to knock them off balance. So we're often not entirely sure how much of what we're seeing is real or not.
Which neatly segues into...
Uncertain Reality
Madness is a great thing to cover in a horror game, never being able to trust your own senses or your own thoughts is terrifying when well executed in a game.
Going mad is a thing that a lot of people fear or have feared at some point in their lives, so living that fear in a video game just makes the story more engaging for the player.
Far more engaging than just seeing it in a movie or on TV can ever be. (Books are a funny one in this regard, they can straddle the boundary of seeing the world through one character's eyes and being a passive experience.)
I like it when you think you've entered one room, but it turns out you're now somewhere totally different.
I also like...
Hints
Like this in Deadly Premonition:
Yay! Gore!
That's a smashed up wheelchair.
It happens to look exactly like the wheelchair owned by this man:
Was the skull necessary? Really?
What does it mean?
I love stuff like this, it entertains me to no end.
Well, we've gone through some of my favourite things in horror games (apart from the obvious good story and characters), but I don't feel like I'm any closer to answering my own question.
Perhaps we can answer that question in another post.
I've liked the Animal Crossing games for a while now. I had the first one on the GameCube, and Wild World on the DS.
The real problem with the games as far as I'm concerned is that you do get bored of them. Which is the problem with all video games, really.
The great thing about these games is that if you start a new save file, it isn't the same as the last time you played.
Animal Crossing has you as a lone human moving into a town populated by talking animals.
You start off finding a place to live by taking a loan out from Tom Nook; half-raccoon, half-loan shark.
You do end up paying back a ridiculously large amount of money in order to get the largest house available.
Usually, this starts off with you taking a part time job at Nook's Cranny, Tom Nook's punny shop. It mostly involves doing deliveries and planting things.
Villagers will give you tasks too, like Annalisa asking me to deliver something to the blue alligator on screen
However, in ACNL, you don't do this. You get straight to the main financial aspect of the game. Collecting things and selling them.
The game is basically a collectathon with an important social aspect and the ability to customise a reasonably large area.
So, why don't you take the part time job?
Because you're the mayor!
Which means you have even more stuff to customise as you can commission public works projects that can add things to your town.
Like this cut out standee.
This is on top of the ability to change your clothes, hair and house, as well as plant flowers and trees and place down designs for paving in your town.
You also have a museum that you can fill with bugs, fish, fossils and art.
Now, I said that the game is different every time you play it. This is because different towns have different layouts and different villagers and more villagers will move in as you play.
This is what it looks like the day before they do.
This plot belongs to Charlise, a green bear who I had in my last save file.
She's a green bear and she always moves in right next to me.
Is this a joke, Nook?
You noted that I liked quiet solitude when I picked this empty part of town, so why have you moved all three of the new people in near me?!
I let Iggly slide, because he was cute, and Eugene was okay because he was really cool, but Charlise is not awesome enough to justify her moving right in front of my house.
-cough-
Anyway, villagers can and do move out. So I plan to ignore Charlise until she leaves and my path to the zen garden I built at the behest of Roscoe clear once again.
One of the more interesting aspects to the game is that you can share a 'dream' version of your town with other players using the Dream Suite. It's basically a copy of your town that other people can't permanently affect but can run around in and meet all of your villagers.
It's pretty cool.
I haven't unlocked the Dram Suite yet, but when I do, I'll post my dream address up so that those of you who own ACNL can come have a nose around.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some pixel art to create to make my town worthy of visiting.
If this does not appeal to you as an idea, do not buy this game.
I especially urge you not to buy this game and then complain about it on the steam forums. You earn bonus points if you also don't bring Hitler up when someone tries to explain to you why people like it whilst you're not doing those things.
It's sad that I can genuinely think of someone who did not earn those bonus points.
So, why would you want to buy this game?
Well, for starters, burning things is fun.
And for seconders, this game is very funny.
And for finallers, this game has a dark and meaningful story.
You spend most of the game sitting in front of a fire, buying things to throw into a fire, somehow getting more money from doing that, buying more things to throw in the fire, receiving letters and burning your house down.
Yes, I did just say burning your house down.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves.
As previously stated, the game play consists of dragging things into a fire and watching them burn. There, are, however, a number of ways that the game makes this interesting for you.
First of all, the game has a number of catalogues for you to purchase items from. Each catalogue has twenty items for sale, and there are seven catalogues in total.
These catalogues are:
Chimney Stuffer - the first catalogue Miss Nancy sends to you after you've finished burning the terms and conditions. It includes the item shown above.
Totally Recalled Toys - a catalogue that includes such delightful items as a rabid raccoon, light bulbs, a miniature nuclear weapon and the moon.
Snooty Foodie - a culinary themed catalogue including such gems as screaming marshmallows, severely past it's sell by date sushi and a juicer that comes free with three dead and moth eaten squirrels.
1st Person Shopper - a video games based catalogue that boasts tetrominoes, a zombie, an evil businessman and an imitation Meatboy who makes jumping noises when you bash his feet against things.
Miss Nancy's Guide To Stylish Living - which contains an old woman full of flies, a book called 'The Terrible Secret' that apparently lives up to its name, balloons and a doll that spontaneously combusts.
Shop and Awe - a manly catalogue full of manly things, like a chainsaw that triples as a set of drills and a flamethrower, a trophy of manliness, a female doll with low self esteem and a jar of protein powder that is full of sausages and syringes.
Existence, Now - a future themed catalogue that will happily sell you robot parents, a clone factory, the sun and the internet.
My personal favourite of these is the Shop and Awe one. It's full of such ridiculously manly stereotypes it makes me chuckle every time.
These items are all unique and burn in different ways. Once ordered, you have to wait a certain amount of time for delivery, but you can obtain stamps that can speed up delivery so you don't need to wait as long.
However, these one hundred and forty items aren't the full totality of what you can burn.
You also recieve letters from people, and those can be burned. The also sometimes send you items for you to burn as well.
You recieve letters from:
Miss Nancy, the CEO of Tomorrow Corp. Makers of the Little Inferno Fireplace.
Sugar Plumps, your next door neighbour and fellow Little Inferno Fireplace owner
The Weatherman, a weatherman. He keeps you updated on the horrid weather.
And the weather is really, really relevant in this game.
In the instructional video that Miss Nancy sends you (and can be accessed in the catalogue screen at any time) it mentions that the world is getting colder. A lot colder and no one is sure of the cause.
However, from what the Weatherman tells you, it's actually a pretty safe bet that the cause of the climate change is actually the Little Inferno fireplaces themselves.
Anyway, both Sugar Plumps and Miss Nancy will send you items and you can burn those items.
However, there is one item that you probably shouldn't burn.
Near the beginning of the game, Miss Nancy will send you a coupon for one free hug. If you do not burn it, you can actually redeem it and get a hug from her. No coupon, no hug.
As well as these additional items and the regular catalogue items, the game also gives you achievements that you get from burning things together.
There are ninety nine regular achievements and one plot relevant achievement. If you fill the regular achievement list, then you will receive a mouse mat from Miss Nancy that you can burn and get stamps from.
It's also worth noting that burning combos is the main way that you earn the stamps in this game.
Now, about that plot relevant achievement.
As well as her sending you things, Sugar Plumps will ask for you to send her things.
These items are all special in that the can all affect the face in the back of the fireplace.
Once you've sent her three of them, she sets her house on fire and disappears from the game until you've unlocked the last catalogue. Then she starts sending you ominous letters, one of which asks you for a pair of sunglasses.
Now, this is a really interesting point about the game that I want to bring up.
Prior to Sugar Plumps' disappearance the game seems to be moving at a pretty quick pace, more or less in real time. However, once Sugar Plumps is gone and the only correspondence you're getting is from the Weatherman and a faceless corporation, time becomes incredibly screwed up.
And I do mean incredibly screwed up.
Once you've sent Sugar Plumps the sunglasses, you'll recieve a letter shortly afterwards where she says that it feels like ages since she asked for those. After this she'll start encouraging you to burn down your house with the items you've sent her, once you do, you'll learn a few important things.
One, you've actually been playing as a character the entire time.
This fella. He doesn't have a name.
Now, this is a pretty big deal. There'd been virtually no indication that you'd had an avatar at all. In fact, during the first conversation you get into once you leave your house, you have the option to say that you'd only just found out that you exist.
Two, the items were delivered by an actual person who was just walking into your house and putting them next to you.
And three, a lot of time has passed. And I do mean a lot.
Here's a picture of Sugar Plumps before her disappearance.
Here's a picture of her after you burn your house down.
Holy crap, look at how much older she is now!
(Also, wow, I'm really impressed that they showed ageing this well in such a simplistic art style. Well done, chaps!)
This isn't the only indicator of how much time has passed. If you don't burn the free hug coupon, one of the characters will say this:
Just how long did you spend staring into that fireplace, exactly?
I think this is an excellent example of story telling. At no point does the game ever go 'you've spent years in front of that fireplace lad!', it shows you things and lets you draw your own conclusions based on that evidence. It's very effective.
So, once you're out of your house and you've read Sugar Plumps' last letter, what do you do now?
Since the only other person you know in the city is now sunning herself on a beach somewhere, there's only one place you can go: Tomorow Corporation.
What do you find there?
Well, I'm not going to tell you. You'll have to find that our for yourself. (Or watch a let's play on youtube. Either/or.)
So, remember kids, The Future is... Tomorrow!
And that there's something more dangerous than fire.
For the last week or so, I've been eating much more healthily than I have done previously.
I attribute my success to this:
What the gods go to when they grow tired of
nectar and ambrosia
I have recently become a convert to kimchi. Mat kimchi specifically, but I'm going to buy another kind the next time I head into town to stock up.
The thing is, the fact that I'll happily eat this stuff is something of a miracle, because I've got a really sensitive mouth when it comes to spicy things. I like spicy food just fine, but it hurts to such an extent that I simply cannot eat most spicy foods.
In fact, the last time I tried kimchi I couldn't eat it because of the pain.
But I think that's because I wasn't cooking with it.
This time I've had far more luck, partly because I've been persevering, and partly because I've been cooking it with other things.
It's true, the more you eat spicy food, the greater tolerance you have for it.
So, what have I been enjoying my kimchi in?
All kinds of things, I've had it with miso soup, cooked it with beans and tofu, used the juice in a lentil soup I threw together and cut it up small to put into an omelette for a filling evening meal.
If you've never tried kimchi, you really should. It's a great thing to have in the kitchen, especially if you keep around fresh spinach and spring onions.
Though you really should have those around anyway, they're great to throw into things to get your veggies in.
(I like to put them in ramen when I'm feeling too lazy to cook, so I'm still getting some of my five a day even if it is in processed food)
I'll make sure to post recipes for all these tasty kimchi meals when I've collected some good photos, so you can try them too.
Of course, if you want kimchi recipes from someone who actually knows what they're doing, you should totally check out Maangchi on youtube. She's the one who inspired me to try kimchi in the first place, and so many of her recipes look really tasty.
See? It looks so good, but the hot pepper paste might make it too much for me.
So make sure if you see kimchi, you pick it up and give it a go sometime, it'll totally be worth your while.
Oh! By the way, my new schedule doesn't include Sunday posts, but I'm going to make an exception for tomorrow. Tonight is Eurovision, so I'll be sure to make a post about that tomorrow.
No, not Faiz. If it was her, obviously I would have said she ;-)
By the black dog I mean depression and that I'm a little pretentious for referencing Churchill.
My word count has plummeted, and right now I am five thousand words behind the projected target for today, and it's just going to get worse tomorrow.
I feel like the most I can write in any given day is 2,000 words, and that's not terribly consistent.
-sigh-
Right now I'm just playing Pokemon and trying to cheer myself up.
I feel as though my stress is ninjaing its way into ruining my life again, as it's easy to miss until I feel absolutely awful and am contemplating something particularly stupid.
It's my birthday on the 14th and I don't feel like I want a birthday, like I don't deserve it.
Anyway, some cheerful news.
I've drawn in adult Joker on my fan art and I am planning an extra special Game of Thrones fanart. It's going to be amazing.
I'm also really loving Pokemon Black 2. I think it's rapidly over taking Soul Silver as my favourite Pokemon game. For the last eleven years I have maintained that Gold and Silver (and then HG and SS as improved versions) were the best Pokemon games, but now I think they have at the very least an equal, if they haven't been surpassed.
I found White something of a bore, but Black 2 took most, if not all of my issues and fixed them. Apart from triple battles, I still hate those; although they have less diverse triple battle teams so it's more manageable and I do absolutely love rotation battles.
I also found something pretty funny that I want to share with you. I'll get to showing it to you all tomorrow, for now, Genny, Tarka, Thorny, Misty, Nosey and Steve are calling me and Liza's keen to get back in the action (Misty's in training so she'll evolve).
Also, I need to work on getting Flopsy to stop hating me. Seriously, she actively hates my guts. I have no idea why, as I haven't done anything to her at all since catching her, and other Pokemon I've stored right after catching don't actively hate me.
So, I watched the Mummy just now and I really enjoyed it.
The thing about me is that I'm one of those people you don’t want to watch a movie about historical events and/or science fiction movies with. I will point out every single inaccuracy I notice because I’m usually in a position to notice them and they really, really bug me.
The Mummy, however, does not cause this reaction in me.
Sure it’s inaccurate and sure it’s not the most tightly plotted film of all time (especially when the sequel is taken into account) but it’s fun, and that more than makes up for the fact they left out so many of the plagues of Egypt and got the ones they left in in the wrong order.
Seriously, this film is riddled with historical inaccuracies and I just do not care. I love it anyway because it’s so much fun, it’s a good old fashioned adventure movie and I love it for that reason.
I really love Evolution for similar reasons. Even though it too is not the most accurate of films, it’s so much fun that it doesn’t even really matter that much.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, I love a tightly plotted film where everything adds up, but given a choice between dull perfection and fun imperfection, I’m no different than anyone else.
Honestly, I’m not sure I could do it. I get so bogged down in details some times that I forget about the bigger picture. So I respect writers who manage not to lose focus like that and make a story that’s so fun that those little details don’t even come into the picture.
I love this game so much, the movement system is terrible and the boss fights are a pain in the neck, but I love it all the same.
I think what I love the most about it was the way it made me want to keep playing. I wanted to find out what was going on, and I’d shoot through as many Joker wannabes as it took to get the answer.
You have to admit, there's a certain similarity.
I mean, we had the mystery of the murders, the red seeds, Zach and so much more.
