You’ve probably heard the saying that hindsight is 20/20 on Monday morning, so just imagine how well I can call ‘em two days later on Wednesday. That’s right, it’s time for Wednesday Morning Quarterback, your weekly sports round-up.
Yeah, yeah, I know I just said that this feature might go on hiatus until spring, but how can I ignore the Florida Gators making it, once again, to the BCS Championship Bowl game?
The Gators won an amazing victory against the previously undefeated Alabama Crimson Tide last Saturday, even with the significant handicap of not having Percy Harvin healthy and on the field. The team’s other players, especially QB Tim Tebow really stepped it up and showed Alabama what Florida was made of. They may have had a strong third quarter with a lead, but Tebow silenced all doubters and moved himself to top Heisman consideration with an incredible fourth quarter in which UF dominated Alabama.
Unfortunately, we have to wait a whole month (!) for the final showdown between the Gators and the Sooners due to a ridiculously nonsensical NCAA schedule that keeps the action out of our television sets until the first of [too] many bowl games begins on 20 December.
That being said, the real question is this year’s BCS game, luckily set in Dolphin Stadium, giving the Gators a virtual home field advantage. Will they be able to dominate the Sooners? Will it be close? Be sure to tune in for the final game on 8 January to find out!
The ESRB has been making a spectacle of itself in recent months. Aside from the usual rating controversies, they have accidentally been spoiling the announcement of a bunch of games by posting ESRB ratings for games that are still in development. It’s all come to a frustrated head as of yesterday as the ESRB site, despite promising to stop doing this, managed to spoil three unannounced titles to be published by Atlus.
As a result, Atlus got pissed and posted a press release titled as follows:
ATLUS TO MAKE ALL FUTURE GAME ANNOUNCEMENTS THROUGH ESRB WEBSITE
As taken from the news story at Kotaku and the press release itself, here’s an excerpt:
“Our experiment has been a rousing success,” said Aram Jabbari, Manager of PR and Sales, beaming. “Allowing information about our upcoming titles to be silently posted on ESRB’s website has been a triumph, and we’ve decided to abandon all direct, overt disclosures of our future games in favor of quietly allowing the posting of new titles onto ESRB.org.
I’m heavily inclined to agree with their complaints as the ESRB has spoiled the marketing movements of various games, including Mega Man 9. Countless man hours go into announcing and promoting these games and it’s very disrespectful that the ratings board has yet to correct this fatal flaw. I hope that they fix this soon, because it’s really not fair to keep doing this to companies, especially since they almost have no choice but to submit to the ESRB for review.
Deep from the trenches, it’s time for your Monday video feature: Embedded Reporter.
I’m sure there’s no real conspiracy here, but I’d just like to point out that Robo’s theme and Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up” sure seem to be very musically similar. The composer, Yasunori Mitsuda, had never even heard of Rick Astley before asked about it and I’m inclined to believe him.
Anyway, unfortunately embedding was disabled on this video (and all variants I found) so you’ll have to click the link to get there.
You can also click this link to read the Kotaku article.
Can you tell I’ve been playing Chrono Trigger DS?
There was a day, back in my youth, when I abhorred first-person shooters. Sure, I played some Goldeneye here and there with my friends, but I was never a Doom, Unreal, or Halo fan.
Then something spectacular happened: a company that I’d heard of, but avoided their games because of my fps ambivalence released one of the greatest games I’d ever played: Half-Life 2. It revolutionized my understanding of FPS games and instilled in me blind trust in Valve. I loved Counterstrike: Source, Team Fortress 2, and Portal.
It was a foregone conclusion that I would then get Left 4 Dead, which I’ve come to see as one of the greatest multiplayer experiences I’ve ever played. Here’s the basic premise, if you haven’t picked it up from my other posts: you have four survivors from the zombie apocalypse whose aim in each level is to make it from the starting point to the next safe room. At the end of each movie (the name for each of the four campaigns) you have to fight off the zombie hordes while awaiting a rescue vehicle of some sort.
The real power of the game is that it requires you to play cooperatively. With each survivor that you lose, you will find the game that much harder. Letting teammates fall behind or leaving them behind yourself will always result in trouble. You also strongly rely on your teammates if you get incapacitated or knocked off a ledge. The icing on the cake is that Valve encourages even more teamwork with their achievement system. Unfortunately, Valve also seriously hates you and proves their enmity with the AI Director.
The AI Director will sometimes have pity on you and give you a lull so that you can revive your teammates or heal up, but that pity is just the AI taking pity on our organic weakness. Just wait until the inevitable evolution of the AI Director into Skynet. I’m just saying, it hates humanity that much.
Versus mode is plenty of fun, allowing survivors and special infected to all be controlled by rival human teams. It’s almost too unbalanced though, as a moderately well-organized zombie team will always be able to destroy a mediocre survivor team. I’m curious to see how balanced expert teams of both would be, since special infected die from a few hits and it’s kind of easy to overwhelm the survivors.
In any case, expect Valve to keep on updating L4D and continue bringing us a stellar multiplayer experience. I wholeheartedly recommend L4D so long as you have a good internet connection. If you’re playing without the net or you’re expecting a deep single-player experience, avoid it for now.
Insert another credit, because it’s time for your weekly video game news and you’ve just hit the Game Overview screen.
With every Final Fantasy game there exists great (and not so great) teams of heroes bent on saving the world from some sort of evil force. While we could take a look at those heroes, let’s instead take a look at the evils that motivate these heroes to do what they do.
It should be noted that this feature will be full of spoilers.
Week 1 – Garland Week 2 – Emperor Mateus of Palamecia Week 3 – The Cloud of Darkness Week 4 – Zeromus Week 5 – Exdeath Week 6 – Kefka
Final Fantasy VII…
At the risk of looking like a snobbish, elite jerk, I don’t like FF VII mainly because it’s the game that everyone likes. I know, I know…it’s lame, but it stems from my love of FF VI, trust me!
The game was the first to penetrate the North American RPG market. It was a daring, risky move by Squaresoft to widen its appeal. No more swords and sorcery (so you think, it comes back a little later) and a departure from past innocence.
It does lack in many places where VI excels. Cloud Strife is a douche. He’s a jerk, he’s a moron, he’s not as cool as everyone makes him out to be. The rest of the cast is also asinine aside from Cid and Tifa.
Then there’s Sephiroth.
I will never understand the gamer obsession with Sephiroth. Ok, so he kills Aeris (there’s a statute of limitation on these things, sorry if this was a spoiler, but you were warned) and that sucks. Did I tear up about it? Naw, I liked Tifa more. It sucked cause I had just wasted time training her up to get what was apparently her final limit break. I wasn’t happy about that…
Sure, he wipes out a village or two, but how evil is he really? Kefka reshaped the entire planet. Sephiroth has mommy issues, is ambiguously male, and is all-around not that satisfying an enemy. He truly believes in what he’s doing. He’s not lusting for power or just trying to destroy existence like Kefka.
Maybe one day the world will realize Sephiroth isn’t that awesome? Who am I kidding…
Evil Rating:
Burned down a city. Killed Aeris, wiping out my progress on her character. Wanted to destroy the world. :yawn:
6/10
Cool Rating:
No. Sword is too long, hair is too long, looks too much like a girl.
4/10
Images:
Character art from FF VII Crisis Core Sackboy Sephiroth
Video:
Kingdom Hearts II:
Advent Children:
It’s been a while since I’ve talked about it, but I’m still very excited for Valkyria Chronicles. I promised my family that I wouldn’t make any purchases until after Christmas (not that I should be making any at this point), so I have to wait until at least then to hope that I get what promises to be a sweet looking video game. Enjoy the video review.
We shall see if it’s as good as it’s claimed to be by people like Shane Betenhousen and the PA guys.
Now for a bit of a digression/editorial:
This excerpt from an Action Button Dot Net review of Tomb Raider: Underworld written collectively by the staff will spearhead our topic:
“Does anyone in the audience here have the upper body strength to do one pull-up? It’s really hard, isn’t it? Now imagine doing a pull-up and then, at the end of the pull-up, pulling down so hard with your biceps that you launch your entire body six feet into the air, then grabbing a ledge and doing another pull-up and launching yourself six feet into the air. It takes roughly six hundred times the upper body strength* (*these figures have not been evaluated by the Olympic gymnastics committee) to launch yourself six feet in the air after a pull-up as it does to do a single pull-up in general. Now imagine a wispy girl doing it, fourteen times in two minutes, and with two sub-machine guns on her back (about eight pounds each, we reckon), with a pair of D-cup breasts pressed uncomfortably against the rock.
We say, the better the graphics get in these games (current status of game graphics: “Prettttttttty! Good!”) the more ridiculous these things look. You might as well just make the hero of this game a super-hero. Iron Woman, maybe. As-is, you’re kind of giving impressionable young people the wrong . . . impression.”
So yeah, I mean, why bother worrying about stuff like realism when it comes to a series so clearly based in unrealism as Tomb Raider. Lara Croft is a caricature of what a real woman is like. She is, as many have said in their reviews, a Barbie running around these exotic locales (exterminating endangered wildlife the whole way through!) that are looking more and more photo-realistic with each iteration. Her face, her character model, her proportions, they just don’t fit in any more. Not to mention how unlikely her ability to complete the actions she completes are.
Call me a nerd. I’ll take it in stride. I write a blog! It’s mostly centered around video games. I have a strong desire to make this a career. How else can you describe me? However, there is a deeper level that you don’t know about. I’m an engineer, so I am almost physically wounded by witnessing bad physics in movies and games (so long as I’m thinking of it in a real context). Nathan Drake, for some reason, didn’t bug me as much. He’s a lot less ridiculous, but he’s also able to make leaps that require ridiculous upper-body strength and grab hold to precarious handholds. The rest does seem somewhat more realistic though…although the gunplay is equally ridiculous. A shotgun to the body should kill in one hit…
Sorry, I’ve been wandering…my point is that somewhere, deep within my consciousness, I crave a more realistic experience. I want a game where if you jump from a high enough location, you break your legs. I want a game where one good slash of a sword will kill you. Bullets should be more lethal. It seems like a really bad idea, but I think they kind of do that with the Rainbow Six series (at least the first one).
Then again, how would that be fun? Say you’re playing a regular Joe in one of these games. You probably couldn’t run full speed around the whole map without getting tired. You probably couldn’t carry infinite inventory and run as far as you could before. You probably can’t stuff a giant sword into your pants to store it.
There are people who love stuff like this, they’re crazy tabletop RPG players, but that’s not what I want to do. I just want to boot up a video game and complete a cool scenario that doesn’t require me to be a superhero. I want the game to be about a regular guy, have regular physics, and just make a lot more sense. You could still have aliens, but recognize that organic life is organic life. A good bullet to an alien will still probably kill them, right?
I’m rambling, but we’ll see if something like this ever happens in the future. We’ll see if anything like this will ever be fun.
Whoa! Another WMQ!
With a sound defeat of FSU, Florida has solidified its ability to compete for the BCS championship game, so long as they defeat the Alabama Crimson Tide this Saturday, that is.
They can conceivably do it. They’re the favored team. Unfortunately they’ve also lost a very important component of their offense, Percy Harvin. His condition is still unclear as a result of spraining his ankle in the FSU game.
Should they manage to win, well, what an exciting prospect. The Florida Gators will, once again, be in the BCS Championship Bowl and should hopefully win.
Unfortunately, no matter what the result is on Saturday, we have to wait an inordinate amount of time for the bowl games. A whole month is ridiculous. We need some reform.
So, as you may have noticed, WMQ doesn’t appear as often now that baseball season is done. What’s up with that? Well, baseball is my favorite sport and I just don’t pay attention to as many sporting events when the season is over. So I’m thinking that, barring special circumstances, like next week’s SEC Championship or the bowl games, we just might have a hiatus up until late March or early April when baseball season starts up again. Filling this space will be whatever other stories I decide to post.
Anyway, I hope you’ve been enjoying WMQ so far this year! It’ll be sure to train up in the off-season and be ready to go for Opening Day (or Spring Training…).
So I’m a little obsessed with the Zombpocalypse at this point in time. Between my recent obsession with the amazingly good Left 4 Dead and my strong desires to read books like World War Z, I found myself purchasing a comic book that I heard recommended by Shawn Elliot on the now defunct GFW Radio (now known as LAN Party).
The Walking Dead was mentioned by the podcast members to be a mature and complex view of the end of the world following the Zombie Apocalypse. It’s not your typical short, two-hour movie that ends, it is, as Robert Kirkman likes to make a point of stating (it appears on the back of each book), a continuing story of survival horror. His afterward on the first volume speaks about his dissatisfaction with the ending of all those movies. About his disappointment with the lack of a critical look at how society would proceed following the end of the world.
As a result, he created this series with a short term goal of at least 100 issues, but with the intention of lasting as long as he could manage to stay in print (technically as long as he wants to keep doing it). So far he’s doing a pretty good job of it too. The series isn’t too full of cliches and it does have characters whose archetypes haven’t been fully explored in zombie movies. In fact, I don’t think that I’ve ever seen any zombie media that has children in it, for example.
The story centers mostly around Officer Rick Grimes who was shot and went into a coma only to awake weeks later alone in a hospital filled with zombies. He reunites with his family and the story continues from there.
There are a few problems that I have with the book though, basically stemming from narrative weakness at times. Sometimes character motivations are erratic or strange, but this can be explained with the all-too-convenient “we’re all stressed from the apocalypse,” which I’m still not a fan of. There is also plenty of character culling that occurs almost too frequently. I know we can’t have the characters not die or it becomes boring or unrealistic in terms of the zombpocalypse, but as I said, sometimes it happens to often and you’ll lose a character that you just met a few issues ago or there will be a wholesale cleaning out of the unnecessary cast members.
SPOILERS:
Also, with the elimination of the Woodbury now and the deaths of both Lori and Judith, one has to wonder what the whole goddamn point of her pregnancy was? Why put us through all of that, the potential illegitimacy of the new baby, and all that jazz only to kill her soon after delivery. I’m also hoping that Andrea is still alive along with Glen and Dale, but I know that if I were to pick up the comic books and not wait for the next hardcover, I could easily know right now about some of these decisions.
/SPOILERS
With that said, I do really enjoy the book and I plan to continue to read it as it is released. You’re doing a great job Kirkman, keep it up!
