Failure to Win (and post since December)

Kidko has chided me into updating my blog, so here I am. Not much to say, other than… ‘hello’. And the fact that a grand total of two Brikwars games have taken place in my supposed absence. One of them you can view here, on the Brikwars Battle Forums. The other never got a written report, due the fact that it took place at 3:00 Am on a Sunday morning. Basically it involved kidko’s army and mine charging at eachother, while the immobile superweapons at either end of the field attempted to blast eachother to bits. The units in the middle clashed, causing nothing but small craters and gore and all out carnage. Then, there was the last turn of the game, where my superweapon pulled off a shot at his superweapon, which promptly exploded. This, combined with the explosive shell ammunition it used, was enough to blow a crater the size of half of the battlefield (a 4×6 foot space) AND demolish his army in the process. The only thing left to his name was a useless skeletal janitor and a guy on a motorcycle. My squad ran up and shot him down, and then promptly blew the door off of an underwater-except-not bunker, for reasons I cannot recall.

The new addition to my video game collection that I didn’t mention earlier is actually a wonderfully good game. Star Ocean till the end of time. Look it up, you lazy bastards. Game review incoming shortly, after i finish making Season 2 of my podcast.

Speaking of podcasts, Season 1 of Punch Drunk Mayhem is out (this took place on the same night/morning that made the above Brikwars skirmish)! You can view that here. I put it on Youtube for two reasons:

A) I wanted to show off the cool cover art we had put together

B) I had nowhere else to host it.

I do hop you enjoy.

Slowly losing momentum, I think this will be the last thing I discuss before going and eating my fathers hastily prepared tacos. One more thing on Brikwars; I have my army theme in sight, and this will be the first landmark for me, as I’m actually going somewhere with it! My Undying Tek forces are coming out great, complete with the Mk VI Archangel Hellfire Laser, the Mk III Remora, a butt-load of skeletal cavalry with weapons, two skeletal chariots, a group of skeletal heavy weapons troops, several mounted Two-Handed Weapon Buffs (for lack of a better name at the moment), and a Tekmage. Also working on the inclusion of an MDP (Mobile Defense Platform). Basically a tank, but with less armor, more guns, and a lot more cargo room. I hope you all will look forward to pictures, as well as my first battle report with them, which should be coming up this Saturday (the 9th)!

Rolling up the world, one level at a time.

My first game review! Yay! Okay, here goes nothing…

So, there’s your Japanese Game Designer. He’s talking at a conference about his newest game, Katamari Damashii. Between sentences (or sometimes during a sentence) he takes puffs of a small, homemade looking cigarette. And guess what’s inside this cigarette? Marijuana. Lots of it. Fortunately for him, everyone else in the conference room was doing the exact same thing. Thus was the greatest game to come from Japan since Mario is born.

So, the story goes something like this:

You are the Prince of all Cosmos, son of the King and Queen of all Cosmos (Who all have hotdog shaped heads). One day, the King of all Cosmos accidentally destroys all the stars in the universe (that deserves special emphasis). Then, being a lazy little bastard, assigns his son to take a Katamari and roll up the many things on Earth so that he can make stars out of them and slowly return the night sky to it’s former glory. Meanwhile, a Japanese family down below on Earth is oblivious to the fact that the stars are all gone. All except the brother and sister, who keep seeing news flashes about it just when the mother isn’t looking. They head out to the Space center to watch the father in the family (an astronaut) take off in his rocket and land on the moon. This continues for a while, and he finally blasts off, and is just about to make it to the moon, realizing too late… there is no moon to land on. It was destroyed with the stars in the King of all Cosmos’ accident.

And there you have it. The storyline is just as messed up as the actual game is. This is about 40% of the games awesome-ness. View the other 60% below…

Controlling your Katamari: To roll it, push both analog sticks in the desired direction. Going straight forward is much faster than moving backward, and turning to face certain things is rather annoying, as the prince only circulates around the Katamari in one direction. If caught in the wrong position, you must direct him all the way around one side of the Katamari.

Musical score: One Japanese guy. One recording studio. Shove those two thing in a blender, and you’ve got most of the music in the game. Not really any instruments involved, except on rare occasions. Any noise other than this guys voice is probably techno on crack. The one exception to all of this is the one song that is sung by an American. It’s a love song, and the dude’s singing about how he wants to ‘roll up with you’ to ‘make a single star in the sky’. Exceptionally bad pun, yes?

Basic Gameplay: The game starts out rather slowly, as you are extremely tiny and can’t pick up anything useful. You roll around this Japanese family’s house picking up tacks, dice, and the occasional mouse or rat. Once you get the hang of it, you start progressing fairly quickly in the game, eventually becoming so big that you start rolling up entire housing developments just by twitching the analog sticks. And literally everything is pick-up-able, if you’re the right size. This is why the later levels are such fun.

All in all – a 10 out of 10.

The moral of this story is: All game developers should be smoking [drug of choice] while creating games. This counts especially for the Japanese ones.

New Gaming Lore!

I finally got some money, with which I decided to buy some new Playstation 2 games (Yes, I still have a Playstation 2, I’m working on changing that…slowly…), and so went to Amazon.com. I ended up deciding on Katamari Damashii and Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando. Katamari Damashii was one of those games that your friend tells you about and you say “Oh, I need it!”, and I’ve been trying desperately to follow the Ratchet and Clank series, and failing horribly, so I ended up starting from the bottom up, my first Ratchet and Clank game being Ratchet: Deadlocked, then Ratchet and Clank: Up your arsenal. While my friends reviews of The Ratchet series up until Deadlocked have been rather sad, I figured my OCD won’t let me not complete a game series. Those games should be arriving about an hour after I post this, so don’t expect to find me online tonight (except for the time between 7:00 and 8:00, where I will be on the dvorakMUSH playing a game with Kidko). I will have my personal reviews for those two games up sometime within the next week or so (forgive me if I’m late; I have a memory not unlike swiss cheese).

In other news, I (finally) finished my test weapons page for my new Stick Animation, The Fallen: Revenge (originally going to be an anime, but since the only thing vaguely anime-ish are the weapons, I can’t really call it that). More news on that later, though.