Category: rants

real talk, part two

Apologies for yesterday’s postus interruptus; as per usual around here, I tend to get very busy only when I’m working on blog stuff, and since the first half of yesterday’s post felt particularly good coming out of the fingers, you would be correct to  assume that I got absolutely buried in work bullshit before I was able to get to the second half.  Right now, none of my bosses are even in the office, so this is a perfect opportunity to start writing; of course, I didn’t end up playing anything last night except for my two current iOS obsessions, so I’m feeling a bit detached from the Assassin’s Creed 3 rant that I never ended up writing.

Let me start with the iOS stuff first, since I’m in a good mood.  I’m still playing the hell out of Chip Chain, and now I’ve gotten my wife into it as well.  Here’s how addicting and engrossing it is – I missed my subway stop yesterday morning because I forgot to look up from my iPhone.  I told my wife as much, and to be careful on the way home.  She then missed her subway stop coming home from work, even though I’d warned her, because she forgot to look up from her iPhone.  We are both fully obsessed with it; I’ve finally unlocked everything there is to unlock, and my scores have been getting better, but I’m still not quite the zen master that I feel I could be with just a few dozen more hours of play.

Ironically, the one thing that’s helped me curb my addiction to Chip Chain (besides my day job keeping me insanely busy) is another new iOS game called Dream of Pixels (itunes, $0.99).  The easiest way to describe DoP is that it’s Tetris in reverse; a solid wall of blocks slowly descends from the top of the screen, and you have to carve a given tetromino shape out of the wall before anything touches the bottom of the screen.  I’ve never been particularly good at Tetris, and I’m sure my scores in DoP are on the low side of things, but goddamn, it’s really well made – it’s got a really beautiful and soothing art style and sound design (For some reason, the art style reminds me a little bit of Braid, even though the only thing you see are block-shaped clouds), and even though things can get hairy, it never feels as chaotic as regular Tetris.  It even gives you a nice compliment after you lose, which is quite lovely.  I think the only knock I’d give it is that it doesn’t appear to let you listen to your own music/podcast/etc., but that’s certainly not enough to dissuade me from giving it a full-throated recommendation.  UPDATE:  Turns out my iPhone was just being weird; DoP certainly does let you listen to your own audio.  Fantastic!  No knocks to give!

________________________________________

OK, so.  You may recall in yesterday’s post that I very much wanted to discuss what I’d just seen in Assassin’s Creed 3, but that I needed to get my Halo 4 rant out of the way first.  There are SLIGHT STORY SPOILERS ahead, but let’s also be pretty clear here – AC3 takes place during the years leading up to the American Revolution, and considering the events that the previous games let you be privy to, you have to assume that your character will be an active participant in certain notable events in American history.  Let me also state that even though I’ve been playing for a dozen hours or so, a lot of those hours have just been dicking around in exploration mode; I’ve not really advanced the story all that much, so what follows is still relatively early in the game.

The whole reason why I even bothered to put Halo 4 into my 360’s tray was because I’d just finished the Boston Tea Party mission, and I literally couldn’t believe what I’d just seen.

I’m not sure what the right word is to describe just that mission’s terribleness, especially considering just how all-encompassing that terribleness actually was.  It was downright farcical.  For a franchise that generally takes itself incredibly seriously (notwithstanding Ezio’s Uncle Mario, as well as everything about Leonardo da Vinci), the Boston Tea Party was a goddamned travesty.

My familiarity with the American Revolution is, admittedly, a bit rusty.  That’s partly why I was so interested in playing AC3 in the first place, though; I was really interested in seeing what these events might have looked like.

Wikipedia describes the Boston Tea Party as “a key event in the in the growth of the American Revolution.”  What the game presented, though, looked more like a frat party stunt gone awry, with just 3 dudes heaving boxes of tea off of a ship (or, at least, trying to heave boxes of tea off a ship – when I tried to do it, I was just as likely to throw a box into another box, or a ship’s mast, or even backwards), and also in a world where “awry” means the violent, acrobatic murdering of 20-30 British soldiers in front of a cheering (though utterly silent) throng of colonists.   And when it was over – when 100 boxes of tea (no more, no less) had been thrown into the murky depths of Boston Harbor, the cutscene that followed basically just showed 3 dudes walking, and the camera was actually drifting off of their faces – it looked like a bad take, frankly.

The whole thing could not have been more anti-climactic, which is the literal opposite of the intended effect, I would think.  I couldn’t believe that such an epic moment of American history could have been treated so sloppily.  And considering that this is but the first such moment I’ve come across, I shudder to think what else this game is going to have me do.  (I’ve already heard terrible things about Paul Revere’s Ride, which certainly doesn’t bode well.)

UPDATE:  not moments after I published this post, Kotaku revealed that Ubisoft is putting out an absolutely massive patch next week that should fix a lot of what’s broken.  That list can be found here, but I must also submit that there’s plenty about the game when it’s working properly that’s still a bit messed up.

a special episode of Real Talk

It’s time for REAL TALK.

I’ve been ignoring Halo 4 for the last few days, partly because I’ve been giving Assassin’s Creed 3 every possible benefit of the doubt I can muster (and I’ll get to that in a bit, believe me), but also because I’ve been diagnosed with Stage 4 Shooter Fatigue. Essentially, unless a shooter has amazing graphics, or has a really compelling narrative (or, barring that, at least some interesting characters), or at least is trying to do something different, it’s really hard for me to give a shit about shooting thousands of enemies in the face. In the immortal words of Jay Cutler: “DOOOONNNNTTTTTT CAAAAAARRRREEEEEEE.”

That being said, I listen to gaming podcasts and read all the major sites, and they all seem to really like Halo 4. And my friends seem to like Halo 4, even the ones who don’t really care about multiplayer. They assured me that the game is well paced, that it mixes up the action, that you’re never bored.

So, after finishing a major story mission in AC3 (which, really, I’ll get to, because WTF), I decided to give Halo 4 another shot. Maybe I was being too impatient; maybe I was too focused on my pre-conceived notions about shooters to allow myself to be truly objective. After all, I’d only played the first 2 missions of the campaign; I knew there was still a lot more to go.

So I started up Mission 3. I immediately got a bad feeling when I immediately recognized the form that the mission was going to take. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a ship’s outgoing transmission is being jammed, and there are 2 relay stations on opposite sides of the planet that need to be un-jammed in order to clear up the signal. Right? Like we all haven’t done THE EXACT SAME THING IN EVERY GAME EVER MADE.

But wait! It gets “better”! We finally have new, non-Covenant enemies to shoot! And some of them teleport.

Oh sweet mercy. Oh sweet sassy molassy. Oh sweet fucking merciful crap. TELEPORTING ENEMIES.

Halo 4: fuck you. All future games that feature enemies that teleport: fuck you, too. I’m officially done with teleporting enemies, the single cheapest and most bullshit tactic in games. It doesn’t matter what genre, either – it pissed me off in Diablo 3, and it didn’t exactly sit well with me in Dishonored, even though I could teleport, too. As soon as I fire on an enemy and that enemy decides to warp out of the way of my bullets and land on my head, I am turning the game off, removing the disc from the tray, and setting it on fire.

___________________________

*sigh* The rest of this post will have to wait for another day.

maybe the last RE6 post for a while

As noted here and elsewhere, today marks the release of 2 probable GOTY contenders, XCOM Enemy Within and Dishonored, which means that any plans I might have made to finish Resident Evil 6 will most likely be put on hold for the foreseeable future.  I’m sure no one will mind/notice.

That being said, I played one more chapter of the Chris/Piers storyline last night, putting me at 2 chapters into each story.  I had to fight a boss that I’d already beaten (in Jake’s story), but even though I now had a much better idea of what the hell I was supposed to do, I still had a very difficult time doing it.

Part of the problem, as you’ve surely heard by now, is that each storyline has its own gameplay style/focus.  Leon’s story is classic Resident Evil – slow, methodical exploration of scary-looking buildings.  Jake’s story involves a lot of running, jumping and obstacle avoidance.  And the Chris/Piers story is mostly combat-focused – Chris is a machine-gunning heavy, and Piers is a sniper.  That each story has its own style is fine, I suppose, but why then is each story bogged down by the same contrivances?

Specifically, Chris/Piers start each mission with very little ammunition.  This is a classic staple of the Resident Evil experience, but in this particular case it is literally nonsensical.  Considering that Chris and Piers are military personnel, why the fuck are they chronically low on ammo?  How would they expect to win any battles or kill any monsters without bullets?  (I am reminded of a similar complaint during a pivotal scene in the movie Aliens – “What are we supposed to use, man, harsh language?”) 

Indeed, if Piers is the sniper, why does he almost never have any sniper ammunition, especially considering that his other weapon is a piece of shit machine gun that requires at least 5 headshots just to slow an enemy down?  This makes absolutely no sense, and consequently leads to extreme frustration; I spend most of my time running around kicking dudes to death just to save my ammunition (even though I have not yet sufficiently leveled up my sniping skills so that it would make much of a difference – Piers jerks his scope around as if he’d drank 8 cups of espresso before heading out into the field, making long-distance sniping comically impossible).  In a way, I suppose it actually helps that the J’Avo – the mutated insurgents in the Chris/Piers storyline – display some of the least impressive AI I’ve ever seen in a game this side of 1998; they either stand in place, oblivious, or they run right past me.  (However, their snipers are better than Oswald, those fucking assholes.)

So, to get back to the top of this post – I’d already beaten this boss as Jake, who doesn’t have that much ammunition to begin with.  But I figured Chris and Piers, being military dudes with powerful guns, would be able to take the B.O.W.s down with a little more finesse.  No such luck; I had to do the same exact shit in the exact same way, still receiving no apparent feedback as to how I was progressing – and this time, without being able to rely on my weapons.  What’s the point?  I didn’t learn anything in the 2nd encounter that I hadn’t already learned in the 1st, except that I had a better idea of who Chris and Piers were (though I didn’t need to replay the boss to learn that stuff).

I’m starting to wonder, now, why I’m so determined to see this game through to the end; the more I think about it, the angrier I get.

this shouldn’t be necessary

This site might be called “Shouts From the Couch,” but I haven’t truly been angry, like shouting-level angry, in a long time.   I might get ornery from time to time, but I’m in my mid-30s, and being ornery sorta comes with the territory.  But the essential point I’m driving towards is that at this point in my life, I feel like I shouldn’t have to put up with the stuff that annoys me, and so I don’t.  If this means that I’m missing out on something important, then so be it; it’s my life, and I’d rather spend my time (and my money) on stuff that doesn’t drive me crazy.

This is partly why I don’t do a lot of online multiplayer – or, rather, why I don’t go online with people that I don’t know.  I’m a lot more competitive than I care to admit, and I hate losing; that’s on me.  But some 13-year-old kid calling me a faggot because he shot me in the face with a shotgun before I could shoot him in the face with a shotgun – that’s on him, and it makes my blood pressure boil just thinking about it.  This is also why I tend to stay out of comment sections on gaming websites; there can be – not all the time, of course, but it happens enough – there can be a level of ignorance and casual racism/sexism/hate-ism found there that simply can’t be ignored unless you stay away from it altogether.

And what pisses me off about this the most is that it’s this particular level of bullshit that tends to define the community as a whole.  None of my friends do this; none of my favorite writers do this; the gaming sites I visit crack down on this as much as they can.   But ultimately, it doesn’t matter how much money the Child’s Play charity raises; it just takes one homophobic, racist asshole in a Halo match or a comment section to spoil the party for everyone.

And if I seem to be taking this a little personally, well, it’s because it is personal.  I happen to have a very good friend who inadvertently blew up the internet a little bit yesterday, and it wasn’t even her fault.  All she was doing was giving a video review on L.A. Noire for Gamespot.  It’s a well-written, informative review, and she did an excellent job translating the written word into the video review.  There’s no controversy in that, right?  The fact that she’s transgender is totally incidental and has nothing to do with anything, except that a bunch of idiots kept writing ignorant and hateful and totally stupid comments, and that’s the part of the story that took on a life of its own and ended up on Kotaku.

She is a much better writer than I, and she has her own response to the story here.

Hate is hate, and ignorance is ignorance.  She did not choose to become transgender; nobody chooses that, in the same way that nobody chooses to be gay or straight or black or white.  You are what you are.  And considering how much bullshit she’s had to put up with even before she became a professional games writer – I mean, nobody in their right mind would choose to live a life that invited such ignorance and hatred.   I don’t want to speak for her, but it seems to me that all she wants to do is to be happy and live the life that she wants to live.   She’s not inviting anything.  That doesn’t require anything from anybody else.  The people that were offended by her video review – that’s on them.  That’s their problem.  And while a great deal of the GS community rushed to her defense and shut those assholes up, it still reflects poorly on the community as a whole.

I don’t really know what to do about this.  I’m not sure that my friend does, either.  She didn’t sign up for this job in order to be a spokesperson for the transgender community; she signed up for this job because she’s been passionate about videogames for her entire life, and she got hired because she’s an excellent writer and knows her stuff and she makes the gaming press better as a result.  If we as the community can’t deal with her sexuality, which is something that is totally irrelevant to her actual job, then we don’t deserve her.  And I think we would suffer as a result.

A quick word or two about the 3DS

I don’t have a lot of friends at my day job.  I’m not complaining, that’s just the way it is.  And it’s partly by design, I suppose, because the job was never meant to be something I actually took seriously, and so I never bothered to socialize.

In any event, I’ve become friendly with one of the mail guys; he’d noticed I was a gamer from all the Gamefly envelopes in my outbox, and recognized me as a kindred spirit, and so whenever there’s a dull moment, we talk games.

Tonight, he asked me what I thought about the 3DS.

I haven’t really given the 3DS all that much thought, to be honest.  Or, rather, I have, and it’s just that I already know that there’s no reason at all for me to get it any time soon.  If at all.  I have not bought into the 3D hype, to be honest – “Avatar” was the only movie that’s ever really gotten the 3D right, but I kept having to move my head around in order for the glasses to work properly, and let’s face it – it was a crap movie.  I’m a self-professed graphics whore, but even I know that it takes a lot more than just snazzy graphics to make a game (or movie) actually good.  (Exhibit A:  Crysis 2.)

But it’s more than just the 3D, is the thing.  For one thing, there’s nothing I want to play on it.  The e-shop doesn’t launch until May, but even then, Nintendo doesn’t really have the greatest track record when it comes to downloadable games.  (Exhibit B:  Giant Bomb’s Jeff Gerstmann has a long-running feature devoted to just how terrible Nintendo’s downloadable content is.)

Furthermore, if the original DS is any indication, Nintendo’s probably going to release a newer, smaller, better 3DS in a year anyway, and maybe by that point there might even be something worth playing on it.

There’s a larger issue, though, and that’s simply that Nintendo apparently doesn’t care about me.  I don’t fit into their target demographic.  I bought a Wii simply to experience Super Mario Galaxy, and while it was an amazing experience, it was also the only experience that wasn’t a complete waste of time.  I ended up giving my Wii to my mother-in-law, and I haven’t thought about it ever since – indeed, I hadn’t thought about it for months except that it was taking up space on my table.

Likewise, I own a DS, but there hasn’t been anything released in at least 6 months that looked even remotely interesting to me.  And it’s not that I’m some sort of snob or something – I mean, I am a snob, sure – but I just can’t get excited about Pokemon or any of the My Little Pony crap that keeps getting shoveled out every other week.  To be honest, there aren’t really any decent puzzle games getting released for it anymore, and those are the kinds of games that I end up spending most of my DS time with in the first place.

Right now, my handheld of choice is my iPod Touch.  It’s got a huge library of quality titles, most of which are under $5, PLUS I can listen to my own music and email and Twitter and Facebook and RSS feeds and all the rest of it.  It’s a much more complete and robust experience, and it clearly has the capability for better graphics, if stuff like Rage HD and Infinity Blade are any indication.

In any event, I told my friend to relax and wait a bit.  The new iPhones will be out in June; the new PSP will be detailed at E3, one would assume; and then it’s just a hop, skip and jump away from next spring, when the inevitable 3DS redesign will be announced, and we can go through this whole sordid business again.

>2010 VGAs: why they invented DVR

>I got conned into watching the VGAs, again, but at least I didn’t have to watch them live.  No, I waited until after they were over, and then fast-forwarded my way through announcement after announcement after unnecessary band performance after announcement, until I realized that there weren’t any awards given out.

I don’t know why I keep allowing myself to believe that this year, it’ll be different.  For shits and giggles, I went back and read my 2008 recap, and I might as well just cut-and-paste my main point into this year’s model.  Like so:

I really wish I didn’t have to be embarrassed about watching this show. It’s clear that Spike is really trying to make this award mean something, and I’ll admit that having all these major announcements during the show is a pretty convincing incentive for me to stick it out. But the writing is terrible and the emphasis is everywhere but on the actual game designers, which is unfortunate.

That’s the thing that’s so annoying about it; Mr. Geoff Keighley goes out of his way to promote the VGAs as something important and valid and authentic, and instead it’s a series of commercials for next year’s games, sandwiched around lame skits and pseudo-celebrities who’ve clearly never played a game in their lives, and I think they only give out 3 or 4 awards on TV, out of 20 or so categories.  It’s dishonest and misleading, at best. 

Which is not to say that the announcements aren’t awfully exciting.  2011 is already looking like the best year we’ve had in a long time, and that was before the announcements of Uncharted 3, Mass Effect 3, Forza 4 (!!!), SSX, and Elder Scrolls V.  My 2011 Lust List will require at least a bib upon reading.  I admit it:  the announcements were enticement enough for me to tune in.  I am a whore.  This is not news.

Look, Spike, I know I’m not the target demo for this show.  I’m not 15 years old, I’m not a My Chemical Romance fan, I don’t like Dane Cook nor would I ever think of Dane Cook if I were thinking about or playing a videogame.  But humor me just once.  Please.

  1. Let us know who’s on the voting panel.  If you want us to think of these awards as meaningful and authentic – and we’ll get to what the plural form of the word “award” should mean in a bit – you can at least let us know who’s choosing.  Considering that every inch of this show looks bought and paid for by PR and advertising, it would help give some credence of authenticity.  I would wager that most of the audience for this show is not the stereotypical Madden buyer – we are aware of the game journalism industry; we read magazines and the internet.  If you have game journos on your panel, let us know.  Maybe we’ll go to their websites!  Maybe we can have some synergy!
  2. Stop giving stage time to Television Personalities.  I don’t give a flying fuck about Denise Richards or whoever the fuck that was on stage, and all the people you put up there look uncomfortable and out of their element.  Here’s an idea – let the game designers present the awards.  Let us, the game-buying public, put faces to names.  
  3. SHOW SOME FUCKING AWARDS ALREADY.  There were 20+ categories and we saw, like 5.  And nobody gives a fuck about Best Performances by a Human Female.  We all know you’re going to be like Monty Python’s Summarize Proust competition and give it to the girl with the biggest tits anyway.  
  4. Stop with the skits, the bands, the montages.  I get that the product placement and the trailers need to be in there; somebody’s got to pay for this madness, and we all like the trailers.  But anything that’s not actually related to the literal handing out of awards grinds the show to a halt.  I’ve been saying this for years, and nobody listens.  So at least hire a decent fucking writing staff already.

I could go on, but I can’t waste any more of my life thinking about this nonsense.  Get it right or stop doing it.

>GT5: the other shoe drops

>I didn’t necessarily come right out and say it in yesterday’s post, but at the time I wrote it I was still feeling optimistic about Gran Turismo 5.  I had legitimate issues with how the game was letting me progress, and how inadequate I felt about picking an appropriate vehicle, but I also knew that I hadn’t really given the game a truly fair shake – I knew what I did not know, so to speak. 

And so last night I spent another hour with it.  I did some of the Special Events; I raced some go-karts, some NASCARs, and did some time trials on the Nurburgring with an old BMW.  I raised my level from 2 to 7, and raised my bank account from $6000 to over $100,000. 

And you know what?  For all of its positive qualities, GT5 is downright aggravating.  It’s obnoxious and arrogant.  It’s emasculating and frustrating.  I turned the game off because I didn’t want to break my controller in half, and because I didn’t want to go to bed angry.  A driving game should not make you angry. 

I am still in the beginning areas of the career mode, and I will apparently remain unable to participate in at least half the races available to me because I have no idea what kind of car I should be driving – and, indeed, there are a few events in this beginner tier that require cars that I don’t even have access to.  This makes no sense.  The information that the game gives out on each car might as well be copied and pasted from the sales brochure; it doesn’t actually tell me anything objectively.  The used car market does not offer any information as to what cars are available for a given event, and the process of backing out from the market to the event itself is laborious because it takes between 5-10 seconds to load each menu.  One could argue that I could alleviate this problem by going to the desired event and writing down the necessary requirements with a pen on a piece of paper, but I would counter-argue by saying that I’m playing a fucking driving game and writing shit down should not enter into the equation.  It’s one thing to write something down if I’m playing an adventure game and I need to solve a puzzle or remember where something is.  But when I put in GT5, it should be obvious that all I want to do is get in a car and drive. 

This could be a long winter.

>oh, fercrissakes.

>Eurogamer reports that EA is “testing the waters” with paid-for demos.

Are you kidding me? Wait, let me rephrase that. Are you fucking kidding me?

1. So, EA either (a) has no faith in their internal playtesting department to make sure a game is fun, or (b) has no playtesting department.

2. EA is asking you to pay actual money to essentially play a beta of a game that might never be released.

Let me rephrase my first question one more time. Are you fucking me?

>On Hyperbole

>This is the first paragraph from Adam Sessler’s review of Uncharted 2.

I’m not 100% certain when it happened. I think it’s when I had Nathan Drake atop a building in a war-torn Nepalese city, cornered and being fired upon by a helicopter, engaged in a fist fight with the screen slowly draining of color, snapping my enemy’s neck and quickly rolling into cover to reload my grenade launcher only to turn and fire upon the chopper one last time as I watched it crash and explode. I think this is when I realized that Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was the best single-player game I have ever played. [emphasis added]

Uncharted 2 has been getting great / fantastic / multi-orgasmic reviews pretty much across the board, and I don’t doubt that the reviews are genuine and sincere in their appreciation for a job well done. I personally have been foaming at the mouth for it ever since the E3 reveal trailer, and when I get my grubby little paws on it next week I’m never going to let it go. But as someone who uses hyperbole on a regular basis to describe even the most mundane events of his day, I’m a little suspicious when someone as high-profile as G4’s Adam Sessler says something like “this was the best single-player game I have ever played,” especially since it comes during the same paragraph that implies that he was still in the middle of playing it for the first time. (He himself defended his statement in this little follow-up video, which more or less lets him say the exact same thing.)

Again, I’m not necessarily doubting the sincerity of his statement. He may full well truly believe that Uncharted 2 is the best single-player game he’s ever played, and it may well in fact be true. But I think that saying something as completely audacious as that, without providing any sort of context (i.e., what other games has he played to compare it to) or self-reflection (i.e., will he still feel this way in a week/month/year) is maybe a little disingenuous.

It reminded me a bit of the post-release discussions of Metal Gear Solid 4; I recall one podcast/roundtable thing where people talked about the story and the gameplay and everything and one guy in particular said that everything about MGS4, straight up and down, was perfect. As soon as he said that, I immediately treated everything else he said as a lie, because willful ignorance in the face of stone cold facts just means you’re an idiot who loves something because you have to. I no longer trust your objectivity, which means your subjective opinions are irrelevant. And let me be clear – I ended up really liking MGS4, and nobody was more surprised about that than me. Hell, I even said it was one of the best games I’d ever played.

The difference, of course, is that I didn’t say it was the best. I was still in the middle of the post-conclusion adrenaline rush, and I had not yet regained equilibrium. At the end of the year, I said it was the best PS3 game I’d played in 2008, but consider what else came out:

  • Braid
  • Little Big Planet
  • Fallout 3
  • Rock Band 2
  • Left 4 Dead

Oh, and Grant Theft Auto 4, which was my 2008 GOTY by a landslide. I loved the hell out of GTA4. I tried playing it the other day, in fact, to get ready for the new DLC that’s coming out. I’d gotten stuck in a mission in the previous bit of DLC, and I wanted to try and get past it. And suddenly, my memories of how amazing it is came into direct conflict with my experience of playing it again with fresh eyes. For all of GTA4’s incredible strengths, it could sometimes get a little stupid or silly or needlessly difficult, and so it got frustrating, and I took it back out of the 360’s tray.

It’s easy for me to say that Batman: Arkham Asylum is the best single-player experience I’ve had this year. I knew that when I was playing it, and as of today it still holds true. This is because 2009 has been a pretty shitty year for games, and aside from Resident Evil 5 or The Beatles: Rock Band there hasn’t been much else that would make it into that discussion. That’s context.

When I think about the greatest games I’ve ever played, even now, I have a hard time picking one that stands out from all the rest. My criteria has changed; my TV has changed; my available time has changed. In fact, when I think about my favorite things, across all mediums, there’s really only one time that I was ever able to say “this is absolutely the best thing I’ve ever [——]”, and I wasn’t even able to say that until I’d finished it, and that’s because when I was reading Infinite Jest, during my junior year of college, when my own life was in a bit of upheaval in all sorts of directions, partly because of close friendships gone astray, partly because of girls that I cared deeply about and kept making mistakes with, partly because of non-stop pot smoking, and partly because I was contemplating giving up the acting life (and thus negating my 6-figure tuition that my parents had scraped together) in order to try and become a rock star, which I seriously entertained as a legitimate possibility – and but so in the midst of all this I started reading the book and ended up staying in my dorm room and not moving or talking and just lived with that book for an entire week, cover to cover, from the opening sentence to the very last 6pt-font-ed footnote; the sum total of all of that was a life-altering experience, and I could feel it happening as I was reading it. I had changed after reading that book.

Which is to say – when you care about something, when you spend money you don’t have in order to experience it in all its forms, and you obsess about it and you maybe start a blog in order to better organize your thoughts about it, and you end up getting a job in a field where you get paid to talk about the stuff you care so deeply about, and the job is high-profile enough that people you don’t know and will never know hear the things you say and read the things you write and take you at your word because you are now an authority, and then you experience something as part of the daily course of your job and then immediately call it the best experience you’ve ever had, without any sort of visible period of gestation and self-reflection, without providing any sort of context, and especially in this post-Gerstmann-gate era where you never quite know if there’s under-the-table payola being bandied about, you’d better fucking mean it.

>Things I Think About While I Wait For a Package That Will Not Arrive

>In my last entry, I mentioned that “I fucking hate UPS,” and that was before my newly-repaired 360 even left the warehouse. My 360 was supposed to be delivered today, and I’m here at home waiting for it, and yet somehow it was delivered on Friday – except it wasn’t, because the UPS driver apparently couldn’t find my buzzer even though there are only 2 buzzers by my front door to choose from, and one of them actually has my name on it. I called UPS and had the package rescheduled to today, the day it was actually supposed to be here; I’ve been tracking the package since I woke up this morning, and while it’s still listed as “In Transit,” the last update is from last Friday, and so I remain uncertain as to where it actually is, or if I’ll ever see it again.

So let me think of happy thoughts, then: let me turn to Peggle DS, which is the polar opposite of Puzzle Quest: Galactrix in that it is AWESOME. Peggle Nights is a pitch-perfect port of PopCap’s popular pachinko game (alliteration holla), which means it is exactly what I wanted it to be – a super-addicting puzzle game that looks and plays great. Where PQ:G suffered from copious, frustrating loading times and horribly implemented touch-screen controls, PN:DS wastes no time in getting you your fix, and you can control it however you want – I opt for the d-pad and buttons as opposed to the stylus. Anyone who’s played Peggle on other platforms knows exactly what they’d be getting into here, but I’d heartily recommend it for any DS owner.

On the retro-gaming front, I have been negligent with Final Fantasy 7; I’ve been really busy lately with some music projects and just haven’t had the hours available to really dive in. I’ve been keeping my PS3 busy with PixelJunk:Eden, though, and the other day I treated myself to Crash Bandicoot: Warped. My buddy Jongre and I played through the 3 main Crash games back in the day, and Warped was probably my favorite even if it was the one I played the least; it certainly mixed up the action more than the previous 2, even if it’s just as frustrating and the controls are as imprecise.

…Then again, since it looks like my 360 is in UPS limbo, maybe I will give FF7 some more time today.