littlemute – Page 87

It came from the wave 10/24

In addition to being the one week in the next month or so where the gaming industry hasn’t forced us to spend our hard earned cash, this weeks theme, if themeing of such randomness is even possible, would be “I MOUNT MY PLATYPUS!”

Apparently there’s going to be a micronauts film. I don’t really think this is possible, but what the heck.

Some awesome color photos from the late 30’s and 40’s. http://extras.denverpost.com/archive/captured.asp

Some dude despecialized the first Star Wars movie, i.e.: keeping as close to the original film while bringing it to HD quality.

I wouldn’t mind getting telefragged in this type of situation.

Close to the worst indy game I’ve ever played.

Beta stats for BF3. Pretty amazing how many people played. Makes you feel a bit like dust in the wind, except of course then you think again about the fact that you are a sentient being living out what is, compared to most other organisms in the biosphere, limited immortality, in a universe that is largely filled with absolutely NOTHING — then you can feel like a unique little flower again like they taught you in the 70’s.

And then this, posted in it’s entirety:

At my old house I had this old man neighbor that would wait for me to rake my yard and then come out and use his air blower to blow the leaves from his yard into my yard. I was confused the first time I saw it happen so I didn’t think much of it. I thought to myself, “Oh he’s just an old retired boob and is sloppy with his leaf blower.” the first time it happened. But then when I went back out to rake up the leaves he had blown over I saw him in the fucking window watching and giggling.

When I went back out to rake my leaves later that month, I caught a glimpse of him in the window watching me rake the yard so I was aware that he was specifically waiting for me to be done. Sure enough, as soon as I went back in the house he came back out and did it again. I was fucking pissed. So I came back out and he wasn’t outside so I went and knocked on the door but there was no answer. The neighbor that lived on the other side of him saw me and noticed my hulk smash expression and came over and started chatting with me and said that he’d been living next door to the guy for 12 years and it has been happening the entire time he lived there. His retaliation, which I got to watch in action shortly after our conversation, was to buy a leaf blower of his own that was more powerful than his neighbor’s version, and blow all the leaves back into the guy’s yard and when the guy came out to blow them into other people’s yards again he would stand out there with his more powerful leaf blower and they’d have some super fucking silly old man leaf blowing duel shooting the shit back and forth at each other.

I didn’t have the money for the leaf blower, so I just took all of the leaves and raked them up and flipped them all over his bushes and shit so he couldn’t blow them out of there. I also started pissing all over his wife’s garden every night and killing all of the flower and sleeping soundly knowing that they were eating vegetables that had grown thanks to drinking my piss.

In the winter, the fucking guy would do the same thing with his snow blower. He’d wait for me to hand shovel the sidewalk and then blow the fucking snow from his section of sidewalk all over my front porch, walkway up to my house, and the sidewalk in front of the house. I hate shoveling, even more than raking, so I wanted to slaughter him but Midge thought that maybe if I did something nice for the guy and chatted with him he’d stop doing it. So I gave it a try and helped him out with fixing some shit in house, including his broken ass computer, and the thanks I got was he started plowing in my fucking garage door back in the alleyway. At that point I had to give him a quality sensless style shouting until he went in the garage and started brandishing some shovel or ax or something at me. This just made me even angrier so I started making a physical move towards him so he ran back in his garage and locked himself in there for awhile. After that, I started taking ALL of the dog shit from my back yard, which there was a huge amount of (two black labs worth) and threw it all over his fucking yard and continued to piss through the fence all over the areas that his wife’s gardens were

BF3 preload action

In anticipation of the 25th, pre-ordererererers can get the giant download of BF3 starting today (or once you get an email from EA) . This in itself isn’t news at all, but I wanted to babble at some length about the excellent beta and other random stuff.

BF3’s beta was flat out the best I’ve ever been in. It dispelled doubts about the Origin system being crap, let us play on one map a lot and another map for a few days both of which are absolutely worth playing over and over and over as even the small one without the vehicles is supergigantic, super intricate and most of all, fun as hell. While there were bugs and issues, the long neck stuff, the dead-alive bug, crashing, not saving stats, and, of course, the servers being filled to the brim all the time, none of that really detracted from the hellacious amount of fun to be had running around, throwing grenades and just enjoying the carnival of carnage that BF3 has turned out to be. With 154 shotgun kills (and the suffering that goes along with trying to get close enough to people to use a shotgun on them) I was just going berzerk. EA is not a company I’m a huge fan of, so I went into the whole thing with a healthy skepticism born of being burned by their crappy steam-like client before (calling it steam-like is a bit of an insult to steam really) and the fact that it’s well know they want to eat into Valves electronic delivery mastery and BF3 is the engine that will lead them there. However, after a good span of time with BF2142, and a dabbling (as much as I had time for in the last year) with Battlefield Bad Company 2, I will buy every single Battlefield game made by DICE for the PC regardless of their publisher. That’s just a cold hard fact of life.

Politically, we’re looking at a huge AAA+ title about ultra-recent warfare that again has the Russians vs Americans, which is getting sort of ridiculous at this point (about as ridiculous as the USA taking on a 5th rate economy in the cold war for 40 years instead of concentrating on hegemony and dominance of other areas of the globe that are now much more threatening to everyone else’s way of life). However, if you look at the release trailer, Iran is in there as well and, of course, a good part of the game takes place in the middle east. Doing something on the middle east during the absolute height of Arab Spring is a tough row to hoe and I’m a bit afraid of what the politics the single player will try to be. We’re seeing the shitbags in power that the people of the arab world should have been burning in effigy for the last 30 years finally getting ousted or getting some bullets placed inside of them, and let’s face it, after the last year we can never look at Egypt, Libya and Tunisia the same again (and I hope we can say that about Syria and Iran soon) because everything has changed. DICE obviously has been working on BF3 for years, and I can’t imagine the panic the writers may have been going through during the tyrant shake down that’s been happening. Some of the factions they reference in the game may not even exist in the next few months. Overall, this is a multiplayer game and no one is going to care if the political landscape is changed when they are blinding people with a tactical light attachment, base jumping off half-mile high cliffs or crashing helicopters into giant wind turbines.

D&D coloring book

Monster Brains posted GIANT scans of the 1979 D&D coloring book here. I had never seen this before as a kid and probably would have ignored it. Who would spend 10$ on a coloring book when you could spend $12 on a new hardback monster manual 2 or Oriental Adventures (I never owned the latter)? The art really quite good, but it’s not Tramp or anything like that. If you have kids, these are easily large enough to print out on 8 1/2 X 11 and set them to coloring like the slavemaster you are.

While never into the whole Old School revival (of D&D at least), this is a gem.

Seven Masters Vs The Underworld reprint coming soon

fourmountans — Four Mountains Fist action will again be more possible for newb players

One of the best Shadowfist expansions is getting a reprint in the next few weeks! No more begging off people on the streets for Shun Dai, Never Surrender or Kun Lun Clan Assault cards (a common no less!). I’ll be picking up a box for sure to flesh out some of my missing rares and pumping up my uncommons. If anyone is getting a box and wants to do some trading for the stuff they need, shoot me a message. With deference to Netherworld 1, this expansion has both the best art and some of the best cards in the game, what’s more it has all but three of the cards for the Seven Masters faction, that is playable with a box and a half or so of this set. A must have.

Facebook you actually have a use…

…other than monetizing our personal connections for the engrandizement of the ownership. However that may be, noticed a post on the Cosmic Encounter facebook page about expansion 3! No details at all, just essentially a confirmation that it’s in the works with the original designers and FF. All I can say is: splendid.

Don’t know how this is going to turn out…

but I’m a fan.

RAGE – the awesome is everywhere

I spent four all too short hours with Rage in the last few nights and while the storyline feels like a minor sub-plot in Fallout so far, the environments are just amazing. Nothing repeats, nothing is the same anywhere, every polygon surface you see is different from all the other polygon surfaces. There are no patterns. It’s as if someone textured the entire world by hand (which it turns out they did). The level of detail in these textures as well is astounding, even broken bits of concrete in a dark corner have gang iconography all over the place and is crazy with details. The character models are really good, but stylized a bit (like Brink) giving them a bit of a cartoonish look. Everything looked so cool, I can’t help but continuously take screen caps, mostly of those that gots themselves shot. An absolute visual feast. I haven’t seen a ton of machinery yet, but from Doom 3, id has proven that their in-game machine creations are amazing. I’ve seen one so far, but I don’t want to spoil it.

The game play is good, weapons have a solid feel to them, and if you had any worry about the enemy AI after DOOM 3, don’t. I’ve fought most of wasteland gangs and a few hundred mutants so far and the AI is real fun to fight against. They duck, they call out orders to each other, they hide when they get shot, they run away and hide if they get scared and each gang has different tactics and specialties. After only three hours or so, I’m still in the tutorial bits where they introduced the vehicles and racing. Racing and vehicle fighting are loads of fun, it’s not the easiest on the keyboard as it feels (like any racing game) that an analog stick is ideal, but WASD works just fine. My only complaint about fighting in the wastes is that it’s a bit too easy because all your weapons home in on the targeted enemy as long as they are in your forward arc. While this works in the Rage paradigm, if you’re looking for Twisted Metal, this is close but isn’t quite that. What’s more, in races (not in the wasteland) if you get blown up you respawn. Again, this works as races are a side quest type thing, but it’s a little strange to see cars spawn into a post-apocalyptic race track (including yourself).

One warning though, both the bosses I’ve hit ran me completely out of ammo, so when you pick the game up make sure to buy TONS OF AMMO or you will end up doing the ASS PUNCHING method seen here.

Again, the story is nothing that great so far mostly because we’ve played through every possible post-apocalyptic plotline in Fallout 3, though things aren’t as bleak for the people in RAGE as the people in Fallout as they have TV’s and radios and cars and stuff, there is clean water all over. Seems like the people would be fine if they weren’t trying to kill, torture and eat each other, but then they wouldn’t need you to go around shooting hundreds of people and things. The way you get quests is pretty old school RPG, a lot like the Witcher and Fallout where an NPC is hanging out in an area and you talk to them and they give you stuff to do. Unless you are in an inside area, you get pathing on your map to know where to go. With this feature you can get to places extremely quickly, with no searching around at all. There’s good and bad about this, but it seems to be the thing devs do since oblivion. I’m playing Dark Souls at the same time and the contrast between the absolutely remorseless lack of information and the “your quest is here” of Rage (and Witcher, etc.) takes a bit of the fun of exploring. What’s more, the devs don’t have to put stuff between you and the quest to waylay you because you’re going to get to the quests so quickly, it doesn’t matter that much what’s between.

I haven’t gotten into the Multiplayer yet, but hope to this weekend. We all have some tough decisions to make with BF3 and Rage out within weeks of each other. Being and id fanboy, I preordered Rage so took the pain of 60$ a month or so ago. Of course with the BF3 beta ending this weekend, and that’s another must have title. This month hasn’t been wallet rape, it’s been wallet gang rape by the gaming industry and I’m left BEGGING FOR MORE.

rage3 — There are some very bad people running around after the asteroid hit.

rage4 — her sole purpose in the game is to teach you the wing stick...

rage1 — big jumps are an essential part of the being filled with RAGE

RAGE TONIGHT! Dark Soul’s tomorrow!

It begins. The 2011 GOLDEN SHOWER OF GAMING HITS. Midnight unlock of the RAGE on steam (we think), and tomorrow Dark Souls. Dark Souls goes without saying will be painful and frustrating and amazing. Rage is id’s first game for a long long time and I have high expectations. I expect it also to be a ton tighter than the new Frostbite engine, which, while I am loving the BF3 beta, has some poignant issues with the stretchy necks and falling through the map. MRAAAAAAK!

Battlefield 3 beta, Origin and grenades

Yesterday I cruised home over lunch to start the BF3 beta download, and for 3 gigs it went exceptionally fast. 80% by 2PM or so is no joke with that size download. I wasn’t able to get in the game right away due to a driver update download (much slower from nvidia) and the CHILDRENS, but got in late at night for a span of time. Suffice to say, this is really a must-have game for everyone that likes FPS, even if they play 10-20 hours with the singleplayer and dabble with the multi, it will be well worth it for the visuals alone, which are incredible. EA knows everyone will want and buy this because, let’s just face it, it will be awesome incarnate. Like Blizzard with Starcraft/D3, and Stardock and every online publisher, EVERYONE wants to try to take a piece out of Steam. Since BF3 is going to be so awesome, EA wants to take a big piece out of Valve with it’s new Origin system. You must have Origin installed and running to play BF3, even the single player, from what I understand. So EA is strong-arming people who want to play their awesome game to have their version of Steam installed. Wouldn’t you?

Obviously, this has raised the same type of ire that D3’s “always online” with the master servers (like an MMO) issue that is causing lag in single player games in the beta (granted it’s still a beta). What’s more, the older thingy EA did to try to mimic Steam really really sucked, so who can blame people that are gunshy after that crap was installed and polluted people’s systems? However, just like D3, everyone will buy this game anyway despite complaints and suffer Origin’s existence. Given that, after just a few hours last night, I think EA’s Origin is going to be a lot less obtrusive and annoying than Blizzard’s MMO style approach to Diablo 3– though Origin seems very strange at first because it is the game’s front end and it’s in a browser, I think interface so far is top notch, everything is very cleanly laid out, it doesn’t seem to effect anything in game, chatting is very well implemented and overall stuff is very simple to find and use. At first I was understandably annoyed, but after an hour or so with many crashes kicking me back to the interface, I started to think the Origin implementation is pretty neat. If you are a hater without giving Origin a go, you know you cannot deny that BF3 is something you want and it makes total logical sense that EA would push it’s version of Steam off it’s super heavyweight title. Just try it out. It’s not that bad.

Now onto the game: BF3 crashed a lot. I fell into the map twice and couldn’t get out until I hit a kill-brush. There was horrible lag when I was near some other players, ending in my demise via the knife. I couldn’t find a server that wasn’t full for 5 minutes or so each time I tried to play. I didn’t get on the map with the vehicles because they were all locked. I couldn’t get in a game with any of my friends. Lots of issues? Yes. Was it fantastic and would I face all of these issues to play more? YES. The feel of the game was great, grenade explosions are absolutely breathtaking (I threw one every time I respawned just to see it explode!), tracer rounds look gorgeous, the environmental damage effects are awesome, and you can go prone and, drum roll, you can get points for suppression fire!!! Fire and movement tactics not only implemented in a game but rewarded. Finally. Say you are a mid ranged, hang back and fire the LMG’s type of player– you may not kills that much but you are certainly helping your team by forcing the enemy to keep their heads down and restricting their movement. Now you get POINTS for it.

As I mentioned above, I only got to play on the non-vehicle map in the park/subway and only for an hour or so, hence I can’t write that much about the game. Despite no tanks and toys, it was absolutely engrossing– clearing halls and rooms with your squad via grenades, suppression and rush is what this is all about and BF3 does it well. I’m itching to see what else the game has in store.

Also of note, on Origin Deluxe BF2142 is in the FREE GAMES section. Can’t argue with that!

Summer Reading – Cropper’s Cabin

Yes, I know summer is over, but I finished this bad boy just after the solstice so it counts dammit! Jim Thompson– crime writer, very under-read, if not underrated. I find while reading his stuff that I have many V-8 head slapping moments of “oh THAT’S where they got that from!” El Rey from The Getaway is referenced in From Dusk Til Dawn, and the whole “son is the father of the man” thing in Blood Meridian is straight out of The Killer Inside Me (not that Thompson made that up himself). I’d say No Country for Old Men is almost a homage piece to Thompson’s style. Though there is no doubt in my mind that McCarthy is the better writer overall, a virtuoso with diverse novels like Suttree and All the Pretty Horses, but for crime novels, Thompson is the best I’ve read, blowing away even Hammett in terms of construction and language. That said, Cropper’s Cabin is not Thompson’s best, but it is a great fast read delving into the psychology of a kid that is pushed to the absolute brink by those around him, and like a powder keg, the reader is just waiting and waiting for him to implode or explode. I won’t spoil it, as it has a few twists and turns to get to the inevitable conclusion, but suffice to say it has a pace change in the middle and some horrific revelations. What I dug most about it was the window into the cropper’s (and their Indian landowner’s) world and lifestyle as a backdrop for the events. In some of the other crime novels by Thompson, the place and situation don’t matter all that much, but in Cropper’s Cabin, the cultural context is crucial to the story. I’d put the book slightly above The Getaway due to that book’s almost tacked-on ending (the El Rey bits), but not quite as good as After Dark, My Sweet. If you’re looking for an intro into Thompson’s work to see if you’ll dig his stuff, Cropper’s Cabin is a good one. Unfortunately this was last published in ’92 as part of the Black Lizard line of crime stuff so might be tough to find– but with electronic books (bleh!) it’s instantly available.