Xbox: Year In Review

So THAT'S where 2015 went. I thought nothing happened this year. Turns out I was too busy playing Xbox to notice.

These stats are from xbox.com's "year in review" thingy.


Also, here's something interesting these stats revealed, but they speak more about Microsoft than anything else:

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Stories And Stuff

One day, I want to create a story that makes you feel like you’re home. A place and people you get comfortable with, who you think about at the weirdest hours of the night. Characters and moments that become like old friends. Situations you daydream about, and spend days and weeks wracking your brain trying to figure out how it will end, and if it’s possible for a happy ending.

And then I want the end to approach faster than you can prepare for. I want an audience that almost doesn’t want to see it end at all, because it would mean saying goodbye to a place in their lives that shielded them from the horrors of reality. Maybe even strengthened them to it.


And then I want the end to come and be so perfect, so shattering, so right that you don’t know what to do with yourself for a while after it’s over. Nothing but to sit in silence and absorb what happened, how it will never happen again, and how grateful you were that it happened to you.


I guess what it comes down to is paying a debt. I want to write that story to repay the stories that did that for me. The stories that make life worth living.

I don’t know if I’ve done that yet, but I think I’m getting closer…

END OF LINE 

 ~A.H.

Bungie: Destined For Failure?

Activision recently announced that it's going to cost them half a billion dollars to create Bungie's new game "Destiny". $500 million. That's even more than the rumoured cost of BioWare's Star Wars online game "The Old Republic".

There are about 7 million Playstation 4s in the hands of consumers, and about 5 million Xbox Ones that have been sold. As has already been pointed out, the only way Destiny will be make a profit is if every single human being who owns a Playstation 4 and an Xbox One buys a copy of Destiny.

Destiny.

The game that's just Borderlands without the flavour, personality, art direction or comedic appeal.

The game where Peter Dinklage boredly tells you to go over here and shoot bad guys, then go over here and shoot more bad guys.

The game that marks the point where Bungie fired one of the great video game composers, for apparently no reason(my guess is to cut costs somewhere).

A game with no readily apparent characterization, no indicator of a compelling story, and no one talking about it. Other than how expensive it is, because why else would anyone talk about it?

"Halo 4" Review

by Alex Hill

1/5

Halo 4 is not the worst video game. It is the worst TYPE of game. An unbearable, spineless endeavour that can't even be bothered to be obscene. A design-by-committee Frankenstein's monster of cribbed video game fads, and franchise-destroying change for its' own sake. Not even Halo: Reach struggled to reconcile what its' audience needed from the most basic controller input. This is a travesty even for the people who made Windows.


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Xbox One: "Living Games Technology"

This is from Microsoft's page about their new console, the "Xbox One".

This is terrifying.

Forget about what this means for the problem of "Boosters", people who just leave the Xbox turned on so that they'll accumulate experience in online games while not contributing, thereby ruining every multiplayer game ever. There's an even bigger pitfall to this idea:

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Phoenix: FINALE

The last issue of my Halo webcomic is now online. Titled "Reborn", it's 104 pages long, split by an Epilogue. All in all, the entire series clocks in at 600 pages. After several years of production, it is done.

 You can read the entire thing at http://phoenix.thecomicseries.com/, or select individual pages/chapters from the Archives.


"Halo" belongs to Microsoft.

END OF LINE

 ~A.H.

Phoenix Issue 10: "Cross Your Heart"

The second-to-last issue of my webcomic "Phoenix" is online. It was originally going to be part of the finale, but after 85 pages I realized I'd have to chop this sucker in two. The last issue will premiere sometime in April or May, if all goes according to plan.

Which, considering recent life drama, is unlikely.


You can read any of the back issues from the archive, or you can start all the way at the beginning. Or you could not, because maybe you've got better shit to do, I dunno.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Phoenix: "Issue 7"

...is now up. 


I'm just glad all of the files survived my last computer crapping out on me. But after 3 months, I finally got off my ass and made a new issue of my stupid Halo 3 comic that doesn't actually have anything to do with Halo besides the graphics engine.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Halo 4 Wallpaper

So I get an e-mail from Microsoft telling me about "my piece of the Halo 4 puzzle". Forgive me if I can hardly contain my excitement. <_<

Well, if nothing else, the Halo series usually has some decent Alternate Reality Game promotions. Hell, Halo 2's "I love bees" practically put them on the map. This could be somewhere just barely not approaching the level of fun if I somehow found other people with other pieces to put this thing togeth-

Wait, what's this? If you open a new tab with the picture, it literally says something like: "h4_11"? And if I just adjust the numbers in there, I can get the entire picture?

So, they're confident enough to give you a vague puzzle to promote their upcoming software, but not confident enough that anyone would cheat? No wonder 99% of Reach players are console-modders. Well, I've got nothing better to do:


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PHOENIX: Issue 1-B

Open In New Tab/"View Image":

 <-First->  ~~~  {-PREVIOUS-}  ~~~  <-Archive->  ~~~  {-NEXT-}

"Phoenix" was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from "Halo 3", © Microsoft Corporation.

Additional code provided by blogdoctor.me

PHOENIX: Issue 1-A

Open In New Tab/"View Image":

 <-First->  ~~~  {-PREVIOUS-}  ~~~  <-Archive->  ~~~  {-NEXT-}

"Phoenix" was created under Microsoft’s “Game Content Usage Rules” using assets from "Halo 3", © Microsoft Corporation.

Additional code provided by blogdoctor.me

Firebird

So it looks like I'm going to have a new webcomic soon. Sooner than I was hoping for, actually.

See, it's going to be told through Halo 3 screenshots. The character-customization and level-builder is robust enough to make little stupid fan-fiction story things out of this way. I can save up to 30 screenshots at a time, the most recent of which go online at Bungie's main website for me to download. Which I do, and then I put word balloons over them and fill those balloons with crap and nonsense.

Except... see, the screenshots were hosted on Bungie.net, a company not affiliated with the series anymore. They're passing the torch to 343 Industries and thus halo.xbox.com. While the most recent game in the series "Reach" will still be supported this way, Halo 3(the game I'm working with here), will NOT. Effective April 1st, I won't be able to take any more screenshots.

So that gives me about 40 days to get enough screengrabs to fill out 7 more "issues" of comic material. There's about 2-4 screenshots per page, usually. And while the first couple of issues are around 30 pages each, that number is going to grow.


So that's what I'm going to be busy with this month. I guess this is just the kick in the pants I need to get it done. I never did find a reliable webhost, so it's going to be on this blog. It's a pretty clunky setup I've got, but I don't have another 2 years to learn the php, html, java or whatever the fuck it is you need to make a website. So this will have to do for now.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Halo: CEA": Review

by Alex Hill

2.5/5

Halo: Combat Evolved has not aged as well as I thought it would. Playing it again, it's clear to me that it was good for its time. It was the next stepping stone after the Goldeneyes and Perfect Dark of the N64 era... Wait, can games about shooting people in the face have their "Renaissance"? Halo said goodbye to all of that, and while the series focused on making the immediate "game-feel"(as Egoraptor once put it) more fine-tuned, it sacrificed just about everything else to get to where we are now:

A screeching, prepubescent cesspool, the graveyard of creativity in video games.

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Mapstalgia

"I played the hell out out this game in my youth. And now, every time that I’m stressed, I’ll play it. I find it to be very relaxing. I go through the motions of a game that I’m so familiar with. It helps me clear my head.
Honestly, I’ve probably beat this over a hundred times."

That came from a post on "Mapstalgia", a tumblr account where you submit drawings of old level maps from video games, BUT only from memory. No references.

And I think it does a great job at explaining why I play through old games I've conquered many times. Even though there's nothing new for me to see. And perhaps it explains why I was so miserable last year. I kind of stopped my yearly tradition of going through an old game I adore. Figured I'd be sick of it by now.

Well now, in addition to Kirby's Return to Dreamland, Pokemon Heart Gold, Halo: CEA and the Mega Man Zero Collection, I'm also chipping away at new playthroughs of Wind Waker and Kirby Super Star.

Courtesy of vgmuseum.com

Good times.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

Left 4 Dead Fan Film

Enjoy it now, before Youtube is destroyed by a supremely greedy and retarded bill in the U.S.!

END OF LINE

~A.H.

High Definition Sucks

That's a dead url, btw, so don't bother.

There is something really annoying going on, and it's why I don't watch as much TV or play as many new video games anymore. At some point, games and shows started just assuming you have a widescreen television. Even just a couple of years ago, a new game would give you an option to play in widescreen or full-screen. Now they just assume you have the most expensive, gigantic HD, 3D alien View-a-motron available for domestic purchase.

So now everything is cutoff. On a standard television, TV Shows and commercials do this stupid thing where half of the onscreen text is bleeding out past the edges, or half of people's faces are cut out of frame. In video games, this means that the Heads Up Display is impossible to read, as well as text. The new Halo games do this. So do the Dragon Age and the Mass Effect series'. Both of those games are ALL ABOUT reading text and determining a response... in a visual presentation that makes both of those things impossible.

Do you see where the trouble comes in?

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The Sum Of Its Parts

Jason Schreier has written an article at Joystiq.com. He's done a commendable job at explaining not only the appeal of an often baffling genre of video games, but also sheds a light on shady reviewing practices. Namely, how we dissect and rate each individual aspect of a game in a shallow checklist.

You know:

GRAPHICS: 5/10
CONTROLS: 7/10
DAVID HASSELHOFF APPEARANCES: 4/10...

When I review a game, I will go into specifics, but for me it's about the overall experience. What condition the product as a whole left me in when it was over. I find my writing isn't very helpful to those who aren't familiar with how to operate them. And to that I say... GOOD! 

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Separated At Birth

He's "The Hero". He wears a recognizable green ensemble, and fights for the weak and useless.

He has no personality. He has only one facial expression. He kills and is unkillable. He is treated like a God by everyone that meets him. His enemies foolishly charge into his attack radius, despite the fact that that strategy didn't work out for the hundreds of other enemies he vanquished with ease. He has no family, no backstory, suffers no moral crises and has nothing to say. He blindly throws away any pretense of free-will, excusing a lack of backbone with "fate" and "responsibility".

He is boring.


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Master Grief

The saddest part is that in the video games, underneath that helmet is a person who is nowhere near as interesting, likable or vulnerable as Eric Smith.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

"Halo: A Fistful Of Arrows" Review

by Alex Hill

4/5

Over the course of a year, a man going by the username "Leviathan" has been digitally painting a short fan-comic. It's called "A Fistful Of Arrows". His goal was to shed some light on the fate of a character the source material could not be bothered to care for. In the process, he has explored in unblinking detail why these characters and situations could have been something great. He took characters who were largely forgettable, and found out why they should have mattered. He wrote dialogue and events for the same characters from a multi-million dollar corporate turd, and did so with sometimes shocking precision.

One man on his own time did a better job with the same material, than people who were paid over the course of four years. Levi Hoffmeier paints circles around Bungie and Microsoft Studios. He rummaged through the hollowed-out carcass of a truly wretched game, and fashioned it into something valuable.