Oh Noes Tractor

It's still the government

A few weeks ago I received an email from out of the blue from some guy I had never met. He had stumbled across my blog while searching for Rhys Hovey. For anyone who hasn't read my previous post about him, he's an old teacher of mine from Ai with all sorts of crazy conspiracies about the government. He actually believes, I shit you not, that the government has satellites in space that can pull ASCII characters from your brain.

Anyway, this guy tells me that he used to work with Rhys at EA in California and had similar experiences with him. He and others there wanted to help, but since Rhys seemed unwilling to accept it, they just kind of watched the freak show like the rest of us. He asked if I had any other stories to share. I had a couple, but I wanted to check over the old post just to see what I had originally wrote. In doing so, I found another chunk of madness scrawled in the comments from Rhys himself.

The comment consists of several pages of the most random, crazy shit you will probably ever read. You'll read something, think to yourself, "Man, that's the craziest shit I've ever read," and then read something immediately after that blows it out of the water. I think, "There was not cum on the teddy bear, there was never a teddy bear," has got to be my favourite line.

...My god, the freak show continues. I just went to grab the link to use in this post and discovered an even newer comment from Sept 28. Apparently Rhys has uncovered proof that he is a mind control victim. Look folks, I just work here, I couldn't make up shit as crazy as what he's writing.

What I find most fascinating about this series of events is that my blog has been dormant for almost a year and yet Rhys is still compelled to add new comments to that post. Because of this, I've turned off comments on this post, just to avoid starting some fucking crazy flame war. I've said it before, but Rhys is definitely the most genuinely insane person I've ever met.

A Return

Wow, it's been a long time. I've been flirting with the idea of posting for quite some time, but having Vicki, an old friend from Kelowna, actually ask for some posts is really what pushed me into it. I have a few game reviews I want to post and a new anecdote or two, but for now, I'll just post a bit of catch-up.

I'm still working at Blue Castle Games and I'm still really enjoying myself. I'm currently working on the competitive multiplayer portion of the game called Terror is Reality. It's really exciting to be getting my hands on some gameplay and I get to work with some really challenging stuff. I find it rewarding and I'm excited to finish the game and see what the world thinks.

I'm planning on moving to France with my girlfriend Ave around the beginning of 2011. I want to get out of the country and experience a different culture for a few years and France seemed like a pretty cool place. On top of that, I don't want to sacrifice my career in any way and France has some pretty good game companies. I'm learning French right now which is going pretty well. I'm looking forward to when I can sit down and watch a movie in French and actually understand what's going on.

Beyond that, there have been a few events of note, but most of them probably deserve their own post. Instead, I will leave you with the trailer for Terror is Reality.

Video Games | Dead Rising 2 | TGS 09: This Is Reality XVII Trailer HD

XBox 360 | Playstation 3 | Nintendo Wii

Game Review - Spore

Will Wright’s latest brain child, Spore allows the player to take control of a life form all the way from a cell through to conquering the galaxy. An ambitious boast that, sadly, does not live up to the hype. While Spore does technically do all that it claims, it fails to make the journey a compelling or fun experience.

The cell stage is, by far, the least enjoyable of all of the stages. You swim around eating random bits of food until you get bigger, then you eat some more. Stage complete.

The creature stage is where the game actually has some aspect of fun involved. This is where you really get to customize and evolve your creature into some cool and unique. The stage consists mostly of looking around for new parts to evolve with and either befriending or killing other species. This quickly becomes tedious and boring as little to no skill is involved. Succeeding or failing is based almost strictly on stats and death has almost no consequence.

After sufficient evolution, your creature gains sentience and moves onto the tribal stage. The tribal stage amounts to a very simplified real time strategy game with some basic resource gathering and unit control. The stage again consists of either befriending or wiping out rival races. As with the creature stage, leave your skill at the door, your micro is no good here. Build up a pile of resources, send a wave followed by another, win.

After wiping out the other tribes and becoming the dominant species of the planet, you’ll move onto the second to last stage, civilization. In this mode, you continue with your basic resource gathering and begin building up your city. Throughout the stage, your goal will be to conquer the other cities either through social or military victory (sound familiar?). Yawn.

Having done all you can on your own planet, you look to the stars. Space, the final frontier (yeah, that was lame.) Easily the most complicated stage, the space stage seems to be where the game really begins. Unfortunately, it’s so poorly thought out and so incredibly bloated with features, it’s just not any fun. You can set up colonies in other solar systems to expand your empire. The colonies will mine spice for you which you can then collect and trade for a profit. This process is so painful it hurts (I’m on a roll.) You have to manually fly to each planet in each solar system in order to collect its spice. From there, you have to fly from planet to planet looking for the best deal. Did I mention there are multiple kinds of spice? How about that the prices change so that even after you find a good place to sell, you’ll just have to look again later? I could go on and on about this, but I think you get the point.

Finally, from a technical standpoint, the game is buggy as shit. Model loading issues, audio corruption, and even crashes. It doesn’t even look all that good.
To sum up, as with most games, it’s worth a play, but wait for the bargain bin on this one.

Game Review - Dead Space

There's a quote from a poster on Kotaku that I really like: "Hating EA is so last year." It's really true. EA saw their market share steadily decreasing after repeatedly fucking their customers in the ass and releasing shitty products and franchise updates. Realizing they needed to reconnect with their fans, EA set to work on creating some compelling titles including *GASP* new IPs. Dead Space comes as a result of this.

Dead Space is a survival dismemberment horror game where you dismember enemies to kill them by dismemberment. Got it? The game really only has one cool feature and it tends to get old before too long; shoot off the limbs of enemies and they die. Rinse and repeat. When you first start, this is awesome. I loved the game for the first few hours until I realized that it wasn't going to get any better.

As for the "horror" part of survival horror, the devs just missed the point. Survival horror, and horror in general, really, is about suspense and the possibility of danger. It's about surprising the player when he's not expected it and doing nothing when he is. In Dead Space, it's always expected. You always know when the monsters are coming and they can never really sneak up on you. The other problem with their take on horror is their lack of a safe zone. There's no area in the game where you can relax and let down your guard. Without that, you become overloaded by the input and desensitized to its effects. In short, it becomes the norm and you no longer care.

To be fair, Dead Space is an incredibly polished game and does what it does well. Unfortunately, it missed the mark on a lot of the important aspects of its genre. Overall, I'd recommend this as a rental, for sure, but pass on the 60 dollar price tag.

Uhnnnnnn

For the most part, zombie walk was nothing short of awesome. Even the fun hater Chris was unable to withstand the full force of its awesomosity. I thought there were a couple thousand people there, but reports suggest is was much less than that, possibly under one thousand. Everyone came out to have a good time and the atmosphere was great.

There were so many incredible costumes, from the clever to the detailed, and it was nice to feel like we were on the upper end. I went as High School Jock Zombie and managed to totally score by finding a letterman jacket at Value Village. Even without using anything fancy like liquid latex, I managed to pull off some pretty convincing makeup.

One of my favorite moments of the walk was just after we arrived at the art gallery. A tour bus stopped at a nearby light and almost instantly, about 30 or 40 zombies rushed the bus and started clawing at the windows. When the bus pulled away, it was covered with bloody hand prints.

The obvious highlight for me was our group's performance. On Friday night, we got together and learned a simplified version of the Thriller dance. After a few hours of practice, we managed to get a pretty solid grasp of the dance and called it a night. The next day, we did three performances, the largest being in front of around 100-200 people, and they all went off really well. There's a video of our dance on Facebook, but I'm not going to bother linking it as you need an account. When I get my hands on the actual vid, I'll make sure to post it.

The only downside of the walk was crossing the Burrard St bridge. It was 20 minutes of boredom and baking in the sun. Apparently, it was done to appease the cops so hopefully we'll be able to wander around downtown next year.

Overall, rad day. I can't wait until next year. Hmm, what to wear...?

E3 Impressions - Microsoft

I'd have to say that Microsoft was the clear winner of this E3.

I didn't catch Microsoft's presentation live, so rather than just rehashing stuff that I'm sure you could find elsewhere, I'll just discuss a few of the things that caught my eye.

Let's just get this out of the way: FFXIII is coming to the 360. Meh.

One of the big changes coming is the update to XBL and the 360 Dashboard. The dashboard has been completely redesigned to follow more closely with the look of Nintendo or Apple products. The result is a slick interface that appeals to a different audience than the previous Dashboard. I'll reserve judgment until I see the final version in action; I imagine I'll like it just fine.

As for XBL, Microsoft is adding two new major features: avatars and Live Party. The avatars idea is pretty neat and, again, targeted at a different market segment. Live Party looks very sharp, however. It's basically a way for a group of friends to connect smoothly, game together quickly, and share media easily. One of my favorite features of Live Party is the ability for everyone in the party to stream the same movie at the same time. You can basically watch a movie with someone while they're somewhere else without the hassle of trying to sync up manually.

Other than that, Microsoft didn't say much that I cared about. They talked about some incredible games coming up like Fable 2, RE5, and Fallout 3. I'm really looking forward to those.

Hopefully, I'll actually have a 360 by then.