Smash Bros. For 3DS

Smash Bros. for the 3DS has the worst control scheme I’ve ever experienced in a video game. I say this because within the first 2 minute match, my hands were hurting from the clumsy button placement. Nothing else has ever accomplished this.


It's so awful, I almost wonder if this was done on purpose so more people would buy the Wii U version, thus boosting sales for the struggling console. I can't believe a video game in this century plays this terribly. And worse, from a franchise that was heralded for its' near-perfect precision gameplay.

Portal 2: First Thoughts

So I bought Portal 2. Still making my through. Some early impressions:

-Solid writing, although most of it has been spoiled for me by the internet parroting it all.

-I was seriously stuck dead in my tracks during one puzzle for about half an hour. And I figured it out right before I was going to surrender and look up the solution online. Figuring that out made me feel a lot smarter than I really am. Very few games have accomplished this. Most veer wildly too far into frustratingly vague territory, where you're punished simply for not having a psychic link to Tim Schaefer's schizophrenia.

-I miss when Chell was a person of colour, instead of a plastic-surgery-riddled Strong Female Character. Considering you're not even supposed to see her, and she's not even on the box, that's pretty disappointing that they would whitewash her just to appeal to a "wider audience".

-When I "rescued" the turret and brought it through the field that destroys anything you carry through it, I felt so bad I restarted from the last checkpoint and just left it before that part, intact. Just so it would "survive" my playthrough. It takes a very special game to make me care that much about the soulless robots shooting at me.

-The fat jokes get old, fast. 

END OF LINE

~A.H. 

 

Late Night Stuff

It's almost 11 pm. I should be asleep. But something is keeping me awake. The very odd feeling that I am about to do something great. I just don't know what it is yet. And I doubt anyone will notice.

I dunno. Maybe I'm just getting nostalgic reading one of Roger Ebert's books. I wish his bio-documentary was playing anywhere in Canada. I guess I'll have to stream it on Amazon or something.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

That Wizard Came From The Moon

Peter Dinklage can barely contain his excitement for being in the video game "Destiny". This is what $500 million can get you, ladies and gentlemen.

Between this, The Elder Scrolls Online and The Old Republic, maybe this will finally be the year where the large-scale multiplayer game dinosaurs finally collapse under their own weight.

END OF LINE

~A.H.

The Walking Dead: In Harm's Way

Just finished downloading this episode.

Let the heartache begin!

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?