ShockLobster is writing things

Of all the new and exciting things I have that I could write about, what I have right now is one of the most disappointing things for me, perhaps of all time.

I’m pretty god damn late for this, but I just found this article. It looks like a pretty ordinary career-recap / interview article with Type O Negative. Except in this one, the lead singer Peter Steele pretty much states he’s gone back to church since drug and alcohol rehab.

What compelled me to go looking for an article like that, was in listening to ‘These Three Things’ off of their ‘Dead Again’ album. The lyrics seemed quite different from their usual approach to using recognizable Christian icons and metaphors to call out and mock the hypocrisy of the religion. The song’s title alone is an obvious nod to the ‘holy trinity.’ Instead, it just about seemed like a downright preach. A complete fucking 180 to what one could usually expect. I had difficulty finding the barb, the irony. So, I went Internet-searching, and found that article.

Now me, I’m an atheist and empiricist. I make only enough exceptions to my existentialist perspective to prevent me from becoming a pure sociopath. Regardless of any of that, I have absolutely no room for superstitious security blankets, or organizations based on fear and inflated on the parasitic relationship they have with their host ‘devout.’ I consider such organizations to be obsolete, intellectually irresponsible, and a poison with only a long-term promise of keeping fear alive as a primary utility for controlling a populace and siphoning its funds (take away superstition, and you’ve got old fashioned McCarthyism and the current ‘terror’-touting patriot-acting government for modern examples).
Having one of my favorite entertainers, notorious for call-outs against religious hypocrisy and social / intellectual irresponsibility just pretty much turn around and seek comfort on the post of the carpet-monkey-mother he once taunted and reviled, changes everything. It has soured the older music for me, knowing what it culminated in. Where’s the strength to be derived from these songs, to stand against the things that the band has compromised on and succumbed to?

‘Oh fuckin’ well,’ is the expression I remember from boot camp, so many years ago.

Blizzard.com announced it today. I indulged the sneak peek gameplay trailer. Now, I don’t want to see any more, so the experience can be spoiler-free as possible.

I was watching Cartoon Network tonight. I’m playing gracious host to near-laryngitis conditions as well as a bit of a fever. I’m a bit fucked up. A commercial comes on for the show, Chowder, in which one of the characters, Gazpacho, is pitching a fake ad for his food / vegetable stand.

I was listening and thinking, ’shit, his voice sounds really famili… no way, is that fuckin’ Master Shake?’ Master Shake is… a sentient shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force, and incidentally a complete self-centered schadenfreude-fueled prick.

I looked up Chowder’s wiki entry, and sure enough, Dana Snyder, aka Master Shake, voice-acts Gazpacho on Chowder.

Those two shows are worlds different (though both enjoyed by me).

Fun fact moment, over.

YO SERIOUSLY FORBES, LIKE TOOOOTALLY PUBLISHED ANOTHER LIST!

It goes from like 1, to 100! I am not fucking kidding!

You HAVE to read it.

Unless you actually LIKE forming your own opinions based on performing your own objective research.

The motherfucking HDTV died. It is absolutely worthless now. Friday it developed a horizontal row of pixels that were out, nothing that couldn’t be lived with, but this morning, the screen is just washed all white, kind of photo-negative. Factory-resetting it via the remote control didn’t do shit. It’s fucked.

I’m so god damn pissed. I don’t have the money to replace it. I really wish I could smash the hell out of it.

Mobile

On the PSP, Disgaea still reigns supreme.
When Final Fantasy: Crisis Core came out, I played about an hour and a half of it, and I fucking resent it for very similar reasons that Dirge of Cerberus should be hated, in relation to FFVII. WOULD YOU MOTHERFUCKERS JUST RE-POLISH THE SAME GAME AND GIVE IT BACK TO ME, PORTABLE-STYLE?! Christ, they wouldn’t have to do much of anything to the cut-scenes; just beautify the non-combat sprites, retouch the 2d world landscapes, and update the textures and effects for in-combat models. Give me the same damn story. Hell, don’t even add or change a single gameplay mechanic. I think that’s what more people would buy, anyways. They’ve done it with every other iteration of FF title. This is a lot to ask but hardly too much.
Patapon is awesome but is a game that requires speakers. It’s a rhythm game, and the buttons represent ‘drums’, and how you beat the drums determines how these little 2d goony-goo-goos behave, for battling, or resource gathering, or maybe pissing them off by playing rhythms they don’t want to hear. I need to hear if I’m about to get stabbed on the bus, which is where I play the portable stuff most often, and when I’m at home, I’m either on the PC, or on a console. I really need to just get a moment to play this, some time, like maybe just before bed or something.
Monster Hunter 2. What the fuck was I thinking (even though it was on sale and I was weak). I wonder if I’ll ever play it again past the 10 minutes it took me to get pissed at it last month.

Nintendo DS- I went back and restarted Pokemon Diamond. Got kind of bored within 4 hours. Went back to Disgaea.
Final Fantasy: Revenant Wings waits me patiently.
Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles might be going and fucking itself, a while.

Console
XBox360, GTA4 still rules the roost. I only get about 2 or so hours in a night however. I reeeally try to not play when Skyler’s still awake. I can get away with putting him to sleep by driving around while he’s in my lap, just listening to the jazz and fusion jazz stations, but I avoid doing anything terribly violent, or getting a wanted level. In other words, I make absolutely no plot oriented progress. I still love this fucking game to pieces.

PS3. LOL. Were it not for the fact that it’s a cost-effective Blu-Ray player, I would wonder why I didn’t wait longer to buy one. Jon loaned me Resistance: Fall of Man, that weird alternate-history ‘what if WW2 were settled by an alien invasion’ storied FPS, this weekend. I’ll get around to it at some point, but I REALLY have a goddamn fiesta going on for my attention span.

PC

I have started another Sims 2 household, which I kind of do a running sadistic travelogue for. I believe I truly hate that game, much in a similar way a doctor can hate a disease that guarantees his livelyhood. The previous two times I had run the Sims 2 houses resulted in these two archives: House 1, and House 2.
Pirates of the Burning Sea was fun while it was interesting, but I think the whole game entirely boils down to either repetitive, albeit mentally engaging and strategic sea combat to grind on, or threadbare, bland plot missions that appeal to you if you like content delivery in the form of big blocks of paragraphed text, and then finally you hit 50, and you either go out and gank lowbies in the name of pure, sadistic cruelty, or you engage in PvP combat of varying scale but always guaranteeing you’re stuck with more than a few people either in text chat or on your chosen voicechat client screaming vulgarities at everyone being incompetent, and straying from the one true path of heterosexuality. Non-ship, avatar combat is really visually lacking, and mostly broken. Oh and you can fuck around in a very developed but pretty dry crafting system, if you’re tired of the above things but still want something to do.
I cancelled, today. I will probably come back to it when there’s more to do than just what’s mentioned above.
Age of Conan… has been installing for a fucking hour now. I think it’s just about finished, but few things make me more anxious than an under-optimized installer.

There is a dry erase markerboard in one of our high-traffic avenues amidst the cubicles, that is always adorned with some inspirational quote by some Forbes-acknowledged dickhole or another. Because this is a place of business, whoever is picking these quotes, usually puts something up that is vaporously relative towards the merits of working as hard as possible without worrying about the lack of short term reward. ‘Success’ is a word that is just about always tucked in to the quote somewhere.

The quotes themselves are always broad in sentiment, usually arbitrarily reminding someone that they need self-discipline and will power. This is shit that really should just be personally reinforced without needing the sophomoric quotes of the rich people they so desperately wish they were, as it stands. The thing that rolls my eyes and tickles my gag reflex, is that these quotes aren’t thrown up to actually help anyone personally enrich their lives; that’s an insincere gimmick to their posting. They’re there to increase productivity, with the silent reinforcement that you, the person being impressed with the quote, needs to believe that success is naturally defined by financial accumulation. I gag, and roll, at that.

I think a successful person, is someone that can sleep all the way through the night. Their parents love them, and their children love them. Friends want to be around them. They eat when they’re hungry, and feel no remorse about what they’ve eaten. They live a very long time, and die with a smile.

At this point, I’m very tempted to trot out popular symbols of shallow, obvious success… Lexus, Prada, city real estate, golf clubs and wine lists… but the thing is, it’s not the things themselves that are shallow. It’s the reason why they were bought. If someone really loves the game and worked their ass off for a good set of golf clubs, I wouldn’t judge that. If someone throws an exorbitant amount of money at golf clubs because it’ll increase their influence with whatever boardroom suited clone they’re playing with, I judge that to be pathetic. Erectile dysfunction because of a genetic problem with involuntary vascular control? Enjoy your pills, good luck with that. Erectile dysfunction because deep down you know you’re just a shadow of a real man with your expensive golf clubs and your ‘important meetings’ on the field with another vapid executive, with your churchmouse smalltown wife you’ve carefully made sure she’d never find out about that expensive Jersey fake-tit hooker you can’t even get it up with? I can only hope the pills kill you sooner.

I think people are really losing sight of the importance of sincerity, of not being hypocritical. My personal definition of success, is just simply to do the best that you can, be proud of it, and you don’t require high-profile labels for it. It’s not money, it’s happiness. It’s not what other people see, it’s what you see.

Feeling successful and content is ultimately the most intrinsically selfish thing there is. It doesn’t mean you are obligated to be a selfish dick to everyone at all, but it’s important to understand, in order to avoid midlife crisis, soft weiners and stress related heart diseases, that you have personal and total control over the definitions. Everything else, is just manipulative, controlling influence.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t accurately finish expressing myself but this is a blog, not a fucking thesis turn-in.

Over at Metacritic, GTA4 on either platform has been averaging 99 or 100 for reviewer scores. The lowest score I’ve seen is 97, and that should be plural, since I think I saw maybe three 97’s. I think all of reviews are in. Particularly, those from the toughest review sources that are loathe to divvy out anything over 95/100, for fear of losing credibility.

The nutshell impression this lends me, is that “GTA4 is the best game ever, to date, and everyone agrees.” I am definitely not going to argue against that. Especially since I agree too.

While I am not doing this to be some kind of REBEL or anything like that, I would say as of this point, with perhaps a 10 to 15 hour save file, still blocked in on the first island you get and having spent a lot of time side-questing and hunting for those fucking pigeons, I give the game myself, a 95/100. When I finish the game, I may have a revision for that number, but I doubt it, since the things that bug me are going to be there for the rest of the game.

So to get to the meat of the matter, I will explain what the hell at all I think is ‘wrong’ with the game. I’m being parenthetical here because a couple of these details are really and merely opinion-based things.

Of all the possible things that I could knock it for, that would have people that know me come back at me with, ‘how the fuck on Earth could this be a problem for you, you hypocrite,’ is how vulgarity is handled in the game. Allow me to explain and dispel some astonishment. I don’t have a problem with vulgarity in general. Like, almost running someone over and hearing them scream ’shit!’ Hell, I never thought I’d hear ’shitcock’ used in a game, but a biker I nearly ran over screamed it out behind me, last night. That kind of thing was expected though, for random pedestrians to cuss me out from bad driving..
But, and GTA SA shares the same indictment, my problem is that it is utilized effortlessly and constantly on the radio. I expected the fake adverts- both billboard textures and in-game radio ads as has been tradition since GTA3- to be chocked with euphemism and tastelessness. GTA3 and VC however maintained a very thin line that I think improved the immersive nature of the game, by keeping the public band radio stations FCC compliant. GTA SA abandoned that, and while I still found it by and large funny, I thought it just reduced the legitimacy of the world, and left you feeling it was just a game. GTA4 did it again, and while I know that they’re really just shooting for a charicature of the world with some harshly-delivered social commentary delivered between the lines of the gutter-comedy, the experience just felt a little diminished by it for me.
The enormously mitigating factor here though is that all the radio stations still are shining beacons of production value. The guest DJs will make you say, ‘oh awesome that’s HIM! or HER!’ and a lot of the returning talent from previous iterations of the game will fill you with the joy of well executed continuity.

The next nit, you can’t re-map controls. You only get one of two choices, and mostly these choices just influence where your shooting, aiming and acceleration / reverse gear buttons are at. This is not something I consider a very legitimate knock, because the controls are very intuitive in their default state as it stands. But, the handbrake button is on one of the bumpers, and long hours of Burnout: Paradise have cemented my reflexes to hit the ‘X’ button. The X button in this game, is for turning the fucking headlights on or off, or switching between high and low beams. So it is a very common occurence for me to smash into a wall or another car with my lights coming on a split second before getting disintegrated by impact.

Jumping, running and climbing, and trying to take a motorcycle up every set of fucking stairs in the game you come across, will expose you in short time, to the occasional clipping glitches. I’ve lost four motorcycles to having them clip through world geometry ever so slightly, to become permanently bottomed out and unusable. And, cars on occasion without anything approaching Newtonian accuracy can fly up into the heavens from bouncing off small shit on the ground, like a stray cinderblock. A drop light on the ground that was apparently a permanent part of the world geometry, stopped an SUV I was driving, cold. Later on, I hit some concrete Jersey barriers while running from a wanted level, and as opposed to just smashing into them and stopping cold, I flew up in the air about fifteen feet, then landed on the other side of the barrier… in the god damn water. I swam free of the car only to get machine-gunned by the police helicopter. That’s how it goes sometimes, but it only serves to get you worked up when these glitches manage to fuck you over.
These are all little things, and they are far from game-breaking. But, they happen frequently enough for me to notice and comment about, especially in that last example where it screwed me pretty sore. The ‘perfect’ version of this game, wouldn’t have any of these aberrations.

The nittiest nit of them all that I wouldn’t actually let affect any kind of ’score’, since it’s a play design decision, is that if you get on the airport tarmac at all, if you cross over into the tarmac however discreetly, you will instantly get a 4-badge wanted level and will be hounded relentlessly until you are killed. I’m bummed by this. I jumped off the light rail tracks onto the rooftops of the airport, no way anyone saw me, but I instantly got the horrible wanted level, and paid for that one fucking pigeon I wanted to shoot, with my life. But again, it’s just part of the game that works as intended, so I can live with it.

With all that laid out, I want to talk about the nits and changes I really really like.

The main character is fucking great. Not afraid to get his hands dirty, but constantly laments that immigrating to America gets them just as dirty as they were, wherever he came from. If anything, it’s the same ‘victim of circumstance’ motivation as with GTA SA, just more of a home-leaving than a home-coming, and Caucasian-fied. Even with what looks like plot-recycling laziness, I am not bothered a bit.
Nico has great off-main-story conversations with his friends and his cousin. He’s a real interesting character, with a past that I am very curious to find out about as he reveals it in conversations. Plus, I don’t know what it is about it, but I get a kick out of that Slavic accent they have going on.

Taxis have been really improved. Now, you can hail one, and pick a destination at any time! This was celebratory for me to discover last night, because I was about five minutes late for bed, and the whole fucking distance away from a savepoint. It would’ve perhaps taken me 10 minutes to drive back, myself. But, I hailed a cab, picked the safehouse destination, and was saved and heading to sleep in three minutes.

Ragdoll implementation is hilarious. No need to get into detail. It creates constant accidental comedy in any and all games it is in. I only wish GTA had it sooner.

You can watch in-game TV, you have an in-game cellphone that has it’s own ‘options’ settings, and the game even has its own ‘internet’ of sorts. There are a lot of small details that give the game fantastic depth.

‘Secret packages’ aren’t your standard collect items any more. There are now 200 pigeons hidden all over the city that you shoot. And they pop in a gratifying poof of feathers and red mist. I thoroughly expected there to be one, if not many tedious collection sidequests, but I am glad to see that the same old mechanic is getting a little fresh new innovation. The one thing about it that is a little annoying though, is that pigeons that you can reach, can’t be destroyed by melee weapons. This is only a problem for two reasons. The minor one, is that that means you always need some sort of gun and plenty of ammo when you’re dedicating yourself to the hunt. Two, is that if a cop is around and hears you shoot a gun, that’s instantly one badge of wanted level, and you have to evade them.

Getting arrested still loses you your inventory, but if you die, you will show up at the hospital with all your guns and bullets! Hooray! It costs you some money to go down that way, however, it always did in the past. Just call me Charlton, because they are never taking my ass alive.

That’s the nutshell of the good and bad I’ve got for now.

I went to a ‘midnight release event’ for my preorder of Grand Theft Auto 4, at a Gamestop in Hillsboro, OR. I was considering doing a travelogue of it, but I didn’t for two reasons. One, I figured it was only going to be a couple of hours, with maybe three or four things worth talking about. And two, I forgot something to write with, and something to write on.

The people waiting, were a pretty mixed crowd of everyone who could be expected to show up for a midnight video game release, by sheer force of stereotype. Fat guys in bowling shirts with clumpy hair, halitosis, and shy of deoderant. College kids yammering about how much classes the next day can go fuck theysev’s (tragedy magnified if the skipped class was English). Some suburban ‘gangstaz’ with name brand oversized clothes- but for what its worth, it was like the Benneton gangstaz division- one kid was black, one was white, one was hispanic and one was asian. They didn’t try to act too tough though, probably because they knew they were far out of their element. And then, there were the rest of us. A mixed bunch of uncategorizables. Normal jeans, hoodies, maybe windbreakers, out of school, lamenting that this is a game that can’t be played with the kids awake, etc.

There was one guy though that stood out a bit. He radiated ‘asshole’. He did nothing but talk about multiplayer, and revelling in the most violent moment of games past. He had disrespect for any topic of discussion that didn’t involve the multiplayer. I could only assume he lived for the shit, and it was the only damn thing he felt any superiority in. Chainsmoker voice, copstache, pot belly, pushy attitude, this was the guy you hated randomly facing on any given XBox Live! game, unless you could actually kick his ass.

By 11:15pm my copy was paid off, and by 12:10, I had it in my hands. By 12:35 I was booting into it at home.

I played till 3am, then I just couldn’t go on, as much as I thought I was going to be tanking caffeine, and a shuddering mass of sleep deprivation by this point today. I don’t have much I can offer by way of thorough first impressions; that’s going to have to wait until my attention span’s completely reassembled for one, and for two, I’ve gotten a bit deeper in the game.

A couple small things I can say for it though. Fucking Burnout: Paradise has got me all fucked up, since I got used to hand-braking on the X button. No control layout for GTA4 has the handbrake on X, nor can the controller be custom-mapped… what a bitch. Cars also have stranger behavior… steering while in reverse is oversensitive I think, and I find my front end whipping around a lot harder than I want it to. It’s much easier to do a Hollywood reverse-180-to-driving-forward stunt, but it makes just fine control reverse steering a lot touchier.

Nico’s a pretty endearing, charming character. Nothing in his commentary or behavior makes me hate him, like I did Vercetti in GTA:VC. In spite of how much people didn’t like JC in GTA:SA, I liked that character too I suppose. Hell, I’d even say they both have the same common-sense, utility-only-brute charm to me.

And while this is somewhat spoilerific, I laughed pretty good at when I got Nico laid for his first time- the camera just pans out to an apartment window and Nico’s girlfriend just yells some stuff loud to give you a vague notion that he’s knocking boots- and the achievement for it is ‘Warm Coffee’.

Ahh, the cardinal sin, the ‘quick-and-dirty’ of messageboards and blogs alike, the dreaded chatlog.

Shock Lobster: I had a weeeeeird assed dream involving ghosts
Br0ken_Perfection .: hah
Shock Lobster: I dreamed I was at my grandparents’ place in MA. it’s weird, I’ve had a few ghosts-related nightmares and they’re just about always there
Shock Lobster: and there was this door that kept swinging closed, so I propped it open wiht an object, and it kept swinging back and forth between the object and the wall
Shock Lobster: and someone else with me was going, ‘huh, how about that, that’s some weird shit’
Shock Lobster: then this thing that was kind of like a small whirlwind of very dull light would flicker on and off around the room, seemed kind of upset that I was addressing it, was complaining about nothing I oculd understand but I did understand it saying it was like 200,000 years old
Shock Lobster: and the funny thing was, I woke up and thought, ‘jesus i’d be grouchy too if I had nothing to talk to for about 180,000 years but birds and retarded mammals
Shock Lobster: course, working in the support industry, I’m not entirely convinced the era of retarded mammals is anywhere near finished

I just thought it was a fucked up dream to be sure, and had no interest in either re-typing it, which would also involve devoting some attention to proper grammar.