Going to close this one. P beat it a couple weeks ago and I've since lost all motivation to play further. I'm on chapter 8 I think, out of 12, and it's gotten harder, tedious too. I do really enjoy the spell-casting system in the game, but I also find the game quite repetitive. It's frantic, constantly running and clicking, a hack n slash without the hacking -- cast n dash I suppose. The more I memorize the spell combinations the better I do, but since I only play every once in a while, I keep forgetting the combinations, which can run over 5 buttons long. ASASF SEFSE QFAQFAQFR SSARR and on and on and on...
Anyway, before P beat it we played co-op a couple times, which was more fun than playing alone. We might still play some cause he says he's not done with it. He really likes it. In co-op you can resurrect each other, like SW+Spacebar or something. In single-player, if you die, you die. So in that sense co-op is more forgiving. And I don't think the enemies are any more numerous or difficult, yet it's still hard! You can 'cross beams,' which means you can enhance your spell power by crossing each other's spells...so, making an X or something. Whatever enemies get caught at the intersection get blasted big time. And you can heal one another. So us, of course, being long-time MMO players, quickly fell into reciprocal roles. He'd attack, and I'd heal him. I'd run circles and he'd lay land mines. I'd die and he'd finish the fight. Very complementary!
The game's also quite buggy. There are a LOT of things that don't work right, enemies that get stuck, weapons are really hard to click on, mechanics don't work right sometimes, fall off ledges sometimes...all kinds of random stuff that would normally be amusing, but adding up are annoying.
So, I may pick this up and play more with P sometime, but I'm done keeping it open here.
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Finished Everlands this weekend. I enjoyed it a lot. It's a fairly simplistic hex-based strategy RPG with a cute story. You lead a band of animals on a quest to find the source of the corruption poisoning the river and forest in Everlands and turning the animals into raging beasts. Most levels you meet a new type of enraged animal, and once you beat the level, you get to use the newly freed animal. Different animals have different abilities, like Hippo reduces all incoming attacks by 1, Tiger reduces all adjacent enemies' attacks by 1, Leopard and Snake are quick and attack first every time. Each animal has HP and attack and it's just simple addition and subtraction + or - the occasional modifier to determine damage.
Like I said, it's hex-based. Each battlefield is just a pattern of hex spaces, 6 sides. Each animal is on a 6-sided piece and you play one anywhere on the board each turn. Characters already on the board are "defending" and characters being placed are "attacking." Defending characters always attack first, except for Leopard and Snake. Each piece has arrows on some combination of its sides and those arrows are the direction it can attack. Porcupine, for example, can logically attack from all sides except 1, underneath its belly.
It's cool that the game adds so many characters. There are probably 15 or so by the end to use, plus the special story ones that the computer uses, which get really strong by the end! There were one or two battles that I had to try a handful of times, but for the most part they take one or two tries. The goal on each map is to get over 50% of the animals converted to your side. When you defeat an enemy animal, it just changes color to your side, so you win by conversion. Some maps have additional objectives, like save the raging hippo or something. But yeah, fun little phone game!
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I've sat down just 3 times with GTA 4 so far, and each time I've just ended up listening to the fake media in the game. Am I even playing a game? I feel like I'm on Youtube or browsing funny sites on the internet more than playing a game.
Day 1: I began GTA IV, which starts the same as the other GTAs I have experience with. You come to a new place as a nobody with a connection or two. You begin as a low-ranking person, and as you do more and more missions for people, you meet more and more powerful individuals, working your way up whatever hierarchy it is. So for Day 1, I played up until I noticed I could interact with the TV in Roman's apartment. I ended up sitting and watching all the TV shows. Since you can't select a show at will, I ended up turning off the game and just watching them all on Youtube. This was a totally unexpected, yet entertaining, first day. The shows are sarcastic, as GTA is known to be, and mostly make fun of conservatives, patriotism, gender norms, and about anything status quo. A couple particular parodies I enjoyed were the celebrity gossip shows talking about how rich and fabulous their lifestyles were. There was a hilarious infomercial about swords and knives with this crazy black woman and her more reserved southern white business partner. Then there was a hyper-masculine razor commercial for the "Excelsior Razor 9" with 9 blades for a close shave. And I remember a comedy club performance with real comedians. Ricky Gervais did a routine, and another guy who looked familiar, but I don't know his name.
Day 2: I did some story missions, met a few new characters, but that all ended when my attention was captured by a car radio program. I then sat outside an employer's house and listened for a long time to various radio shows in the game. I'm nowhere near listening to all the radio. I think I just listened to the cycle of one station if I remember correctly. I wrote all this down afterward because I was so amused:
i heard a talk show yesterday, listened through the whole cycle of it, 3 shows, probably 30-45 minutes. one was a psychic show, where they parodied spirit mediums. this woman was hilarious, and the callers were hilarious. she convinced them of all kinds of stuff, like convincing a woman she was really a man, telling another woman to leave her boyfriend and to spend $500 on sustaining the phone hotline call because she 'would soon meet the love of her life, a rich man, to whom $500 was inconsequential' there was also a political-type talk show with a dumb actor, a gubernatorial candidate, and an 11-year old genius. the host sounded very much like david sedaris. then there was one other show about the health care crisis, with a woman from the pharmaceutical companies, a guy from an HMO, and this stoned out organic medicine hippie guy, who at the end of the show, went nuts and tried to drill holes in the others' heads as a homeopathic remedy for headaches. it was bizarrely funny.
Day 3: Again, I did some missions for a while until I got to a mission where I had to create an email account. Now this was strange! Nico is an immigrant from Eastern Europe. It's interesting that it's never confirmed (so far) where he's from, though he does say he's not Russian. My guess is Serbia. Anyway, he's from a place where using the internet regularly isn't the norm. So Roman sets up an email account and the mission is to go to an internet cafe to confirm the account and finish setting it up. There's an entire freakin series of fake web pages you can browse. I uploaded some screenshots onto my Steam account. There's the Bank of Liberty City, which doesn't care about your security, promotes a Kredit Kard for Kids, and boasts about giving customers loans they can never pay off. The websites like the bank one are very satirical, and all of them make fun of their real-life sources. There's a photo-sharing site that talks about how you can post about your inane life in pictures and pester other users for comments. There's a real funny car salesman whose page mostly just glorifies himself. I stopped reading when I found a fake blog with users each with their own backlog of entries. I'll read it later. There's also a fake Myspace called Myroom that I noticed an ad for but never clicked on.
So all this fake media, it's amazing how much time and effort was put into creating it. I'm really glad it's all here and in all its various forms. One thing that bothers me though is the fact that I'm so interested in how stupid it is. I mean, it's all over-the-top, and that's why it's funny, because it's like OUR media, but over-the-top. But wait...tons of our media is over-the-top too, or just asinine. Look at the majority of social media, Youtube videos, blogs, comments on news articles, and on and on. Most of it is just inconsequential, mundane, just everyday people talking online. Yet we sit and watch it and contribute to it. Is GTA making a comment on our willingness to participate, and invest time and self, in such nonsense? Am I, by laughing at the GTA show "Waning with the Stars," which is about drug-addled and anorexic former Hollywood actors, being complicit in enjoying all the other "______ with the Stars" TV shows? Much of our media approaches the same silliness. So if this over-the-top media is set in the context of an over-the-top city like Vice City, what does that say about life in OUR cities? Is the silliness of our own lives just being pointed back out to us by the silliness of life in Vice City, where you can run over pedestrians, walk around with guns, talk about booze and women, and go on exciting motorcycle chases? Hey, all this stuff happens in real life too. It's just a bit more normal in Vice City. How far removed is it really?
There are a huge number of things that impress me about the game that I don't particularly remember from the others. First, this is a game for adults ONLY. If a parent buys their kid this game, they fail. There's a lot of language and humor and sex and violence that kids wouldn't get. Hell, the reason these games are controversial is that the language, humor, sex and violence in the GTA series does exist in real life. Even many adults refuse to believe it, and therefore they don't want it represented, even in exaggerated form, in a video game. GTA and moral panics indeed. My argument is that it's not that kids need to be "protected" from the content in GTA, just that they won't understand it, and they don't need to understand it. I think the harm comes in hiding language and things from kids, in over-protecting them, in pretending bad things don't exist and that there's only one way to see the world. So, I'm fucking impressed that GTA is as adult as it is.
Going back to the communication technology in the game, you get a cell phone, which you can answer, initiate calls, read texts, use a calendar, and take video. It's a cool addition. My favorite thing about it is this bit of realism where when the cell phone rings, the speakers start buzzing like they do! It's such a cool touch. I keep thinking that my own phone is about to ring when the in-game phone rings because the speakers make that buzzing and popping that they do before a cell phone rings.
Since you can call people, you can be one of those annoying people with a habit of calling at 1am. Characters don't like you doing this though! If you call your date (you can date girls) at 1am, she'll sound like she just woke up and tell you to call back tomorrow. If you hang out with someone (you can initiate hanging out with people to go play darts, pool, bowling, and other stuff, some of which are actual mini-games, though none too entertaining so far) and you call them to hang out again soon after, they'll tell you they just went out with you, and to call back later.
Finally, as I remember in the last GTA I played, cops arrest you if they corner you inside a vehicle or if they knock you out first. In this one, they just get near enough to you and Niko surrenders. It's more realistic, as in, Niko doesn't just kill the cop and go on a shooting spree when the cop gets in his face. This could have been in previous games, but I don't remember it well. Anyway, I like how this one works. I assumed last time I played, when I was being chased by police for not paying a toll booth (!), that I could punch the police when he came near, but nope, I surrendered and was arrested! I rather like that you can't just assault cops whenever you please.
That's GTA so far. I'm hardly into it at all, but have spent a ton of time watching TV, listening to the radio, and surfing the web. I think I remember playing a game or two with a cell phone before, and I've definitely played a few with email, but nothing with so much extra content as this. Fascinating.
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