I know: I did that thing again where I didn't do anything. It happens.

Actually, I did some things; I just didn't run over here to mention them. But, mostly, I just kinda took a month off again.

Mostly, I've been playing videogames, really. Or wandering out to get new ones. And, in cases, old ones. So I've got a decent list of stuff to kindasorta review, most of it outdated in the world.

I've already mentioned the hell outta DeadRising; but, that being as close to the perfect game as I've ever seen, I can probably keep going on about it. In fact, let's talk about complaints, since I've got a few of those.

For one thing, I've got something like 12.5million points on it now. Which is annoying enough. I was never too thrilled with games measuring points, even when that's all they did [Asteroids couldn't even be paused; the only milestone in that thing was looping the hitcounter after whatever it maxed out with—999999, or something]. But, while I've got 12.5million points, I'm still not showing up in the leaderboards, though I should be in the top two hundred now. So I don't quite get that. Unless, for some goofy reason, I'm not showing up where I should be on my machine; I see the guy with a couple hundred thousand more points than I've got just above the guy with a couple hundred thousand points less; my score isn't there, let alone my username, which on XBox Live is Wasted Inc. If someone else has the game and can see me there [at the moment, I think I should be at something like 130], let me know about it, I guess.

As for gameplay: if I were to make a game, and we'll assume for likelihood that I'd do a zombiegame [what are the odds], it would be a lot like this one already is. With a couple exceptions, which happen to be most of my complaints. First [and the game does kinda address this, in the penultimate ending], getting bit once would Fester'sQuest your ass back to the beginning. Even granting the type of zombie seen in the game, I have doubts that zombification could be quelled at the onset by orangejuice and wine; I just don't buy it. A zombie bites you and, bestcase, you should start dying, possibly with your healthblocks depleting profusely, regardless your actions. Which of course will come up again in a minute, under a different complaint.

On a related note, first: I hate levelbosses. I even hate the term. Partly because it's a misnomer. And I say that given my history as a boss. In any given circumstance, the boss is invariably a feckless moron; if he weren't, he wouldn't really need employees. In this game especially, they guy's not the boss because he didn't hire all the zombies. Even in more related cases, like ResidentEvil3, Nemesis isn't quite the boss, since he's out there killing more zombies than you're likely to get in a single strike. But that's all kinda semantic. What annoys me here is that, in the middle of slaughtering the undead, you run into these laughably immortal morons [okay: Carlito would in a sense be a boss, thinking about it; what he wouldn't be is able to turn and return fire after being hit by anything less than the MegaMan blaster] which have almost nothing to do with anything, except that they've been somehow emboldened by the outbreak to suck as no man has sucked before. And that's just talking about the psychopaths you've got to kill in order to beat the first game: Carlito, that gotarded butcher, and whatever. About the time I had to hit a guy, presumably in 2006, when the game was released, who was having VietNam flashbacks, being therefore, say, sixtysomething, with that MegaMan cheat three or four times, I was convinced that no game I'd make would have these idiots.

I'm almost okay with the SAS invading at the end. Officially, they're SpecialForces; but the uniforms are pure SAS. Though, all things considered, I'd expect some of them, eventually, to become zombified, and harder to kill than the hardhat zombies with the bulletproofed heads. Each of these guys, which tend to appear in clusters of ten or more, is as hard to kill as Carlito in his first appearance in the foodcourt, which is annoying since their primary objective is ultimately to make you dead. At the least, I'm not sure I'd put them in a game, able to take half a magazine from a CAR15, but easily sliced in half by a katana; it's just weird.

As much fun as the cars are, I have to wonder how they got there [I won't even bother asking why they're all sitting there idling for seventy-two hours or more]: I've driven every centimetre of the gamespace, and never found a place they could have driven through to get in at all. Just to get things making sense, there should at minimum be an unbreakable gate somewhere they all coulda driven through before things got locked down. Better still, the town obviously being finished enough to support that boring and optional opening with the DigiCam and the helicopter, I'd want to be able to get out into the streets of Willamette, even if the car got shelled by howitzers every time it neared the roadblocks. Just something to think about. And one more thing, thinking about both cars and levelbosses: is it a glitch that I can kill all three convicts, empty their gattlinggun, and wreck their HMMVW, only to have it respawn the instant I go inside and come back out? Because that's just unfair.

The endgame is really annoying. I'm okay with carrying that idiot though the tunnel, even if there's ultimately no point to it [this is the same bitch trying to kill you from a motorbike a couple days earlier, after all]; but, to get through all that, only to run into more SAS, only to kill those and steal a Jeep, only to have to kill a tank with bulletproofed treads, only to have to kill a guy eight feet tall who magically made all your weapons and health disappear...this isn't a zombiegame anymore: it's StreetFighter; and I hate Streetfighter.

So, let's get beyond that idiocy to get the True Ending, in which Frank West has killed the entire SAS and finds himself sitting on a broken tank with another 53,594 zombies [the population of Willamette, and the number of zombies you've got to kill in order to get the MegaBlaster thing] learning to climb, yet he somehow survives to get the story out to the world; I dunno. That actually being the end of Overtime Mode, I've now got the optional Infinite Mode, which is badly misnamed.

It's not a sandbox mode, as much as it should be. It doesn't give you anything useful, like immortality or infinite ammo. It just starts you off from the beginning, without a way to save, with the profusely depleting healthbars I'd have been okay with as a way to illustrate that getting bit by a zombie was ultimately a death sentence. But it's not about that. It's about staying alive for as long as possible, up to, including, and beyond the seventhday achievement which, a minute in the game being six seconds in realtime, is fourteen hours of not dying while not saving while not finding a lot of food to replenish the draining healthmeter. It's actually really boring; I think I made it to about five hours before getting killed and deciding that it wasn't a game I wanted to play.

So. That's that. Decent game in general—roughly the best I've seen—for the first seventy-two hours; a bit annoying for the penultimate twenty-four; tragically pointless for the 168 hours or more in the special Infinitely Irksome Mode unlocked by killing the guy who used to beat up Xerxes from 300 before invading SouthPark. There's infinite replay value to it, just not in the mode named for the concept.

Other games....

Here's one no one expected me to consider, let alone buy, let alone do well at: SimBrothel. You may know it as VivaPinata if you haven't played it yet. Simplish game: the whole deal is building gardens and attracting and getting to mate increasingly difficult animals, all being pinatas. It's been a couple weeks since I last played it, but I'd hatched and grown the dragonache [which I naturally renamed from Dragonache1 to Poof the Magic Dragon; you'd agree if you saw the thing] and got an elephanilla to move in; there's not much left to do with it, according to the Achievements Screen, but it's an amusing timekiller and headachecauser.

DutifulKalamari. Possibly better known as BeautifulKatamari. A fairly cool game—really more Hunter's thing—in which an unambiguous pillowbiter tells you to go out and roll stuff up until your katamari is half a metre in diameter, a couple meters, or, by the end, approaching parsecs. Which of course is all that counts: once you've beat a level well enough, you can go back and play in Infinite Mode—this time meaning what it says—rolling stuff up without a timelimit, from thumbtacks and cars to continents, planets, and the sun. Total timekiller, but fun; even if being in the room with it actively turns you gay.

Stubbs the Zombie. The backwards compatability is still underway, but the XBox360Elite [and I assume the less black models] can play various XBoxSpaceHeater games, including this one. What it can't do, apparently, is get it to look right on an HDTV; it's letterboxed on the sides, which bugs me. Otherwise, it's a funnish, occasionally inspired satire: at about the time Indiana Jones was looking for the Crystal Skull, Pleasantville [or whatever the town's actually called] was a retropolitan eutopia in which people are every bit as stupid and gullible in the fifties as reported in Back to the Future, and in which Edward 'Stubbs' Stubblefield returns from the dead as a zombie, hellbent on killing and zombifying anyone and everyone, all for reasons disclosed as the game progresses. Bit of a timekiller with some slight difficulties and some really funny bitgags, from posters in the copshop [Friendly Fire! Remember: Shoot People, Not Cops!] to cinematic spoofs [Stubbs addressing the newly zombified Quakerstate Irregulars from before a massive American Flag, Patton's helmet and all: 'Brains. Brains, brains brains. Brains; brains, brains; brains.'] It's not DeadRising; but it was never meant to be. Also, the subtitle, Rebel without a Pulse, while bothersome [I'd already used that somewhere], might indicate a second game sometime; and I'd probably pick that up as instantly as I picked up Destroy All Humans 2.

The Thing. I may have mentioned at some point [I'm pretty sure I had Bennigan talking about it in Paroxysm] that the sequel to the film was functionally a game released twenty years later, six years ago. In any case, while I've got it for the PS2, I grabbed it for the XBox, since the 360 can play it, a couple days ago; the only differences between the two versions, really, are that there are no cheatcodes for the XBox, and the loadingscreens the PS2 trudged through for ninety seconds each take about three seconds on the new machine. So it's both more and less annoying, and still fairly fun to play.

The Orange Box. Kinda like with Destroy All Humans 2, I grabbed HL2.0 the day it came out. I can't stand FirstPersonShooters [no peripheral vision, that weird state of floating above clipping errors without seeing your feet], but HalfLife was curiously fun anyway. Of course, the real fun was always hacking in noclip and impulse_101 in the Wintel versions, which can't be done with the XBox [that I've noticed, anyway], so playing through without cheats is a process: I picked it up the other day along with The Thing and I've just got over the railroad tracks to whichever roadblock I was too tired by then to remember before I shut it all down. It's been a while since I played the Wintel original, but I think I'm maybe halfway through 2.0 now; can't wait to see what 2.1 is; and everyone keeps telling me I'd love Portal, which I haven't even looked at screenshots for yet—that'll probably be something to come back and talk about later....

LegoStarWars and LegoIndy. I'd had both StarWars games for the GameCube; but, the ability to go through all six films with one disc, pulling in characters I couldn't pull in before, made it worth it to grab the new version. Indy, weirdly enough, is just the first three films, though the fourth came out a couple weeks after the game did. The two are vastly different, yet oddly similar—being Legos. Also, they're just fun. Especially the part where they're almost necessarily twoplayer, and Hunter's able to play them; she can't handle games like HalfLife and ResidentEvil, especially on an HDTV, without getting vertigo, at best. Technically, she's thirty-two thousand points into DeadRising, on her account, and she can handle GrandTheftAuto; though she tends to go find some other room in the house while I'm killing zombies in a mall, if only because I keep shouting 'Don't touch me! Damnit! Stupid fucking zombies!' at the screen. Which is probably fair. You should see me in real malls, with real zombies consumers, toward the end of the calendar year....

I've got another couple dozen games for the XBox now, new and old; some of them are still sitting there unopened, to be honest. So, whatever I'm forgetting to mention, and whatever I've forgotten to play yet, I'll probably get to them eventually.

In other news, as you might guess, I'm not really any further along with Lurkers [that's a novel I'm writing, not a game I'm playing] than I was whenever I uploaded the last teaser bit. Partly because, in fact, I am further along, in the sense that I've backed away from it to work out what exactly the thing is about. Obviously, it's about a guy not much unlike me in a restaurant overnight, loosely based on the filmscript I wrote ten years ago, updated to August 2009...and that's kinda what I've got; I'm trying to decide whether to make it realistic and possibly boring, or arguably interesting but batshit unlikely; the original was more batshit, possibly because I was still writing the S97S at the time. In a way, I'd like to get back to that sort of thing, since it's way more fun to write; it might be more fun to read, too. In another way, I can't read a book or watch a film or play a game anymore without catching intrusive technical errors and focussing on those instead of letting them be fun; so, writing a book with intentionally implanted weirdness is something I'm not really in the habit of doing anymore. At least, not on purpose. And I'm never thrilled when I find an accidental one, especially after it's got an ISBN and gone to press. But that's me. Which is why Hunter's been watching me while I sleep, fondling a knife from the doorway; she doesn't think I know, but I know....

Okay: I don't know. But, it's Hunter: so I'm probably right.

See? Pedantic. She'll probably stab me for that.

Anyway: more later....

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Tags: Books | Games | Gotards | Grand Theft Auto | Hunter | Nintendo | Reviews | Writing | XBox