ShockLobster is writing things

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.

I’ve let two and a half weeks go by. I wish I had some amazing stories of adventure or hardship to validate the poor attention I’ve paid, but I don’t. Sometimes writing for this thing feels like a chore, and its hard to do things that feel like chores when there’s no ostensible reward.

The best I can do I suppose is just throw out bites of the random things I’ve been up to.

Skyler is a complete pain to potty train. We’ve been aggressively working with him on it, but of all the things he’s needed to learn to do he’s the least bit proactive with this one. So far it seems to be his personality to be very difficult with accepting new ways of doing things, frustrating with puzzling situations very easily; but once he learns the right way to do something, he takes off with it and it’s never a problem again.
I am terrified of the teenager waiting to happen there.

Michelle got me Pirates of the Burning Sea for my birthday, a month ago. It’s a pretty fun game- I haven’t been able to play it though for about a week though, I’ve kept my time free to catch Skyler hourly and throw his ass on the toilet. As far as MMO’s go, it has one of the most developed and deep player-driven economies. The best shit available tends to be only built by players, and as far as menial stuff goes, the best way to obtain even the most basic ammo, is from other players.
Combat is mostly ship to ship, pretty good stuff. Cannons thump gratifyingly, and you can see your little crew members going to work reloading, working sails, etc.

Other than that I’ve spent a lot of time on my XBox360.
Viking: Battle for Asgard really meshed well with a fortuitously-timed interest in northern European Viking- and mythology-themed death metal. The game was significantly augmented by using TVersity to media-share a bunch of Finntroll, Amon Amarth, Moonsorrow, and Ensiferum to the game. I also want to say Dethklok / Dethalbum, but EVERY game benefits from having that music piped in. Relative to the game though, unfortunately it’s a rather short one. Even in ‘hard’ mode. I’ve had it for perhaps a month now, and I already 1k’d it on gamer points. That’s not even with playing it dedicated, which some fucking games would require if you really expected to get all the base gamerpoints within a month. Here’s to hoping for some DLC.
Eternal Sonata sat on my shelf for months, unplayed. But, I really needed something one night a couple weeks ago that I could pause, and that wouldn’t twist Skyler’s mind if he was still awake to watch it, and ES was perfect. It’s a pretty typical action-oriented JRPG, similar in flavor to the Star Ocean and Tales of Symphonia games. But my good word- the colors and textures in the game are vibrant and pretty. The characters aren’t an agony to listen to. And the premise is really neat- that essentially you’re adventuring within the composer Chopin’s imagination as he lays in a tuberculosis coma. The game provides interludes that discuss the composer’s actual life too, so in a way it’s actually pretty educational.
Ace Combat 6 is a pretty safe one for Skyler to watch- he loves any of the games that have flying in them. Probably the worst thing about that game for him, is how much it inspires me to cuss. The campaign’s ’story’ is some of the absolute worst dialogue and scripting possible. The characters all act like the only training they’ve had in having pilot personalities, came from repeatedly watching Top Gun and taking hormone treatments to prevent their minds from maturing past Cold War era American middle-schoolers. GODDAMN COMMIES.

And next week comes GTA4. That’s one that I absolutely can’t play, with Skyler awake. I’m pretty confident that the vocab’s going to be mature for starters, but the visceral nature of the gameplay is what I really don’t want him to observe. I might be able to get away with some of the car / helicopter / plane racing minigames, as those tend to fill up hours of play, but, I won’t do it if I can’t guarantee I won’t have to pull out a gun.

On the PSP, I’m still playing the balls out of Disgaea. Jon borrowed my older PSP, so he’s now started up with it too. The ad-hoc mode is neat, but there’s not much to it other than a bizarre-assed auction system for ’selling’ items, probably as a preventative measure to keep someone from just passing ridiculously overpowered, game-breaking gear to someone with a fresh copy of the game, and of course direct pvp turn based combat. This is useless for Jon and I to engage in, since I have about six divine majin at this point weighing in from lv.300 to 3000

OK, wordpad that I was writing in just fucked up bigtime right here, so I’m just going to call it quits before I go and fucking demolish something in fury.

…because my kid will just bully them and take the earth out from under them.

This wasn’t a bad weekend, and it could’ve been a much better weekend. You’d think an impromptu 3 day weekend would be something to be thrilled about, but not if your Friday is mostly spent with complete nausea and a generally antisocial ennui. This bled mostly into Saturday, and a bit into Sunday as well. It was not fun feeling like hell most of the whole time.

Now, the upshot, is that this is the first weekend I’ve had in about a month and a half that wasn’t structured by some event or another I agreed to in advance. If there was ever a good weekend to shake off a stomach bug or whatever the fuck it was, it was this.

To discuss something completely different and unrelated; unsurprisingly, Dethklok works great as background music for Viking: Battle for Asgard.

Bully on XBox360… I wish I hadn’t decided I was going to go for the full 1000 points on that game. So far I have only 1k’d on two games since getting the 360, over a year and a half ago- Viva Pinata (which was real work between playing the game and minding FAQs) and Warriors Orochi (not that hard, just tedious, which is essentially the way all the KOEI Warriors games could be effectively summarized).

There are about three things I’m aware of that I have left to do to open that last, enormous 125 point ‘Perfectionist’ bonus just leering at me from behind the veil of a 98% complete save file. I have to drink 400 more sodas. This involves standing in front of a soda dispensing machine and pressing the Y button 400 times while he does it. I have to ‘fail’ five classes. I’ve failed one so far, so now I have to sit through four more and either let a timer run out, or keep doing wrong things over and over. And, 50 more wedgies… at least that will be fun.

But man. Michelle could tell you a little bit about the path of frustration that was getting all the other shit done. Playing the arcade minigames that are kind of half-assed 80’s era scoot-and-shoot type deals- some of them are retardedly easy and just boring to get into the proper score range, and some of them (Nut Shot, you son of a bitch) can be repetitive horrors to have to do. I literally punched a controller into the floor one night when I discovered it had a kind of loose, lazy (essentially broken) trigger causing me to fail the last Music class event repeatedly. I know we’re all supposed to have proper self control as adults but seriously, I felt SO much better after doing that, without any guilt at all since the controller was truly faulty.

I think I’m going to get done with all that shit and then perhaps never return to Bullworth. It was great while it lasted but with everything I can recall over the last month of playing it, I don’t think it’d be smart to tempt the gods of rage in the future.
Course I say that, and I’ll probably find out about a DLC expanded content pack that you can only exploit by starting a new game.

In other game-related news, I got Jon addicted to Disgaea. I’ve been sort of re-addicted to it since its PSP port, released since the beginning of this past November. Between busses and breaks at work, I’ve already got a 120ish hour save file. I think this is the best kind of game for the PSP- not hard to make it look good, and it really benefits from the PSP’s suspend mode, as it has a lot of things to do that can take a long time before you’re allowed to save again.
Jon borrowed my PS2 copy because he’s having a difficult time justifying the expense of a PSP (heathen). It’s fun to bust his balls on being a cheapskate, but frankly, it’s better fun to actually have someone to socialize about the game with.

Viking: Battle for Asgard is out this week. It’s like Crackdown (which is like Grand Theft Auto), except with viking battles. Apparently, the ‘limb dismemberment engine’ is state of the art… now of course, this is exciting news, but sadly, it definitely puts this game in a ‘the child HAS to go to sleep first’ bracket.

Killed and reinstalled Vista. Pretty much, it’s just as essentially painless as was with XP. They really need a service pack though.

OMG SHOULD SOMEBODY SUE A BITCH?

How about no. We’re all a bunch of god damn adults here.

1.) Don’t read the site.
2.) Either choose not to be embarrassed about the shit you did, OR DON’T DO EMBARRASSING SHIT YOU FUCKING RETARDED SHITHEEL.

I mean, if that gossip site contains any slander or libel, that’s suitworthy I imagine, but I don’t think you are entitled to anything except a hard knock lesson if someone just blows up your spot, you fuckin crybaby.