New Website: It’s Coming
Finally my home page is actually accurate! I really am working on a new website design. Currently, it’s in the early development stages (i.e. moving things around in Photoshop) but now that I have a plan and a timeline, I hope to have something new up around the first of the year.
Until this is done, I won’t really be posting anything new here — even though it’s been quite a while since my last post anyway — but once the new theme and site are live, I plan on coming back with more posts, more updates and more artwork to share with you guys.
While I’m working on the site, you can follow me on Twitter to get my latest updates and thoughts, and even if my new site can’t throw knives into heaven or dip ladies’ hands into acid, like George Washington, the new website is coming.
To leave you with something opinionated — it is a blog after all — here are some micro reviews of things I would normally post about:
Bionic Commando (Xbox 360): An incredibly fun and enjoyable rental even if the story is about as captivating as an empty trash can.
Iron Man (Netflix): One of the better comic book movies. The writers got the characters right, the designs right and the story was solid. The only thing missing was a more convincing bad guy.
X-Men Origins: Wolverine: As I’m trying to talk myself into X-Men Movie-verse Deadpool, I can’t help but be bothered by the fact that there was a complete lack of blood in this movie. A group of mutants killing people with claws, swords, guns and everything else, and no blood to be found.
Fallout 3 Review: A Boy and His Dog
Most of the time when I start playing a game, if it fails to really sink its teeth into me or doesn’t seem that fun in the beginning, it ends up another discarded case on my pile of shame. With my limited free time and the never-ending stream of games to try, I don’t have the patience or hourly resources to force myself to play something just because reviewers say it’s “good“.
When I heard that Fallout 3 received multiple game of the year awards and was generally praised in the gaming circles, I wanted to give it a try. After I started looking into the artwork, gameplay and features — an action RPG with exploration and moral choices — I bought it outright, something I rarely do in this economy.
The problem was that I was so behind on the games that I had, I put off playing Fallout 3 until this past summer. When I finally got the chance to sit down with it and started my vault dweller, I hated it.
In the beginning I was having fun and I thought it would evolve into a game I could play for a while, but once I had been playing for around 5 hours, I started to become frustrated and wanted to stop. The game just hadn’t been what I had expected.
I told myself I would give it until I reached Level 10 to turn up the fun dial (another 5 hours or so). All I can say is that I’m glad I did. What started out as ten hours of mediocrity ended 100 hours later as one of my favorite games ever.
Resident Evil 5 Review: What Was That?
Even though I never had an original PlayStation, I knew people that did, and these people seemed to always have Resident Evil games. As I mentioned in my Dead Space review, I’m quite fond of the survival horror genre, and Resident Evil is no exception. I was particularly happy when Nintendo decided to re-release the original on GameCube so that I finally had the chance to own one of the games.
Over the years I’ve spent a good amount of time familiarizing myself with the games, the back-stories, the characters and (shudder) the movies. When Resident Evil 4 was released, I purchased it day one. I thought the reboot of the series and control style were very ingenious, but sadly, I never did finish that game, and it remains one of the great games on the top of my pile of shame.
After that, Resident Evil fell off the map for me and I continued my gaming life without it. When Resident Evil 5 was announced, I got excited but I also worried that it would suffer the same fate as the fourth game and become another forgotten gem. After being turned off by the demo, I finally decided to give it a shot a couple of months ago. And it is awesome.
HotD: Overkill Review: Welcome Home
Some of my favorite types of games to play at the arcade (as in the actual building kind) are light-gun shooters. There’s something about those games that calls to me when I enter these places that makes me happily jump into the role of cop, soldier, mercenary and even John McClane. That something could be that these games are generally a good time, or it could be that every other game in today’s arcades is crap in a cabinet.
House of the Dead: Overkill brings the light-gun experience to your living room on the Wii. I had already played through some of Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles, and even though I’m a huge Resident Evil fan, the game just didn’t click with me. I think RE:UC’s biggest problem was that it was trying to be a good game, and this philosophy goes directly against what light-gun games are about. The reason I enjoyed Overkill so much, and I did, was because it knew it was a bad game and had a lot of fun with being bad.
Dead Space Review: Meet Your Marker
Survival horror games are right in my wheelhouse. Whether that involves fending off zombies in an abandoned house, crawling your way through a diseased town, or fighting off the disgusting manifestations of the characters own mind, I’m in. I love being frightened while playing games.
Dead Space is a great newcomer to the genre, and with it being a Sci-Fi setting, it’s hard for me not to love it immediately. Well, almost. The demo that’s available on Xbox Live left me confused as to how a game that is essentially a third-person, survival horror space story left me underwhelmed. It’s just not good. Once you play the first chapter however, it becomes clear what is great about this game.
Everything.
Guitar Hero: Soldering
I really like plastic instrument music games. I’ve owned almost every version of Rock Band and Guitar Hero (except GH: Aerosmith because that’s just stupid). Last year when we moved into our house, I chose the Rock Band side of the “which plastic band set will you own” war. And while I am still completely satisfied with the music selection in Rock Band, the peripherals weren’t up to snuff. I used the drums because it was all I had, but I reverted to my Guitar Hero 3 Les Paul for the guitar “playing”.
Anyway, when Guitar Hero: Metallica sucked me into the GH Band setup, I decided to add the Guitar Hero drum set to my collection. I have to say that not only are those drums far superior to the Rock Band set, but it seems as if more care was put into the note-tracking so that you really feel like you could play the songs on a real drum set.
The happiness I felt for the drum set made me go and purchase a copy of Guitar Hero: World Tour so that I could have more songs to “drum” along with. I found a person on Amazon selling a used copy along with the new GH:WT guitar (which I kind of liked) on the cheap. So, I bought it and it was shipped to me in a couple of days.
I popped the game in and copied it to my HDD (a good way to test if the disk is readable) and then sat down with my new guitar to try it out. The strum bar acted a little funny in the menus, but I chalked it up to some lag and went into a song. Then I started missing notes. Almost every note. This was not good.
Deciding to go ahead and void the warranty, I popped it open and took a look at the strum bar switches. Everything seemed alright, so I used this guide to tighten the switches and try to improve the performance of the strum bar. After putting the guitar back together, it worked fine for a while, but soon reverted back to its note-missing self.
By this time, I was fed up with it, so I decided to go all-out and just replace the switches altogether. There is a great how-to on the same site as the tightening guide, so I went out and bought a couple switches, some solder, and gave it a shot.
I took the guitar apart again, heated up the soldering iron and started melting the old solder away. After an eternity of breathing in some fumes, I could finally pry the switches away from the board. I put the new switches on and soldered them into place.
After putting everything back together, the mechanics of the guitar seemed tighter, and I was getting a more satisfying “click” from the strum bar. Now it was time to test it for real. I fired up GH: Metallica and turned on the guitar. Success! At least so far. The menus responded to the clicks on the strum bar without hesitation. I proceeded to play through five songs in the game and missed zero notes because of the strum bar. I did it! I fixed it!
I’m pretty proud of myself since I hadn’t soldered anything since some stained glass in high school, and it felt good to be able to fix something that was broken. It would be nice to try to mod a real guitar with the plastic buttons, but there’s no way that would happen with my limited time. I’m just excited that I did it on my own, and I didn’t screw up the guitar beyond repair in the process.
Bulletproofing
Two important things were accomplished this weekend. The first being that the basement was cleaned, and the second was completing 50 Cent: Blood On The Sand (or BotS as it’s commonly called).
Laura wanted to do spring cleaning over the weekend, and although I was reluctant at first, it put me in a really good mood to go through all of these things I thought were a necessity and either organize them in a meaningful way, or throw them in the garbage, removing them from my life altogether. I found my baseball glove, my Haan bag (made in Home-Ec in 8th grade) full of golf balls that I didn’t even know I had, and a box of Micromachines toys from when I was really young. It was also nice to create an area for “overflow” on my video game and DVD collections, as well as one place to store all the extra cords I’ve accumulated over time.
So the basement, the final space in our house that didn’t feel put together since we’d moved in, was finally cleaned, organized and made part of our home. I did, however, bash my head on a light fixture down there, completely obliterating the housing and everything. Until I can get some advice or help to fix it, we’re doing laundry by flashlight.
Since 50 Cent: BotS didn’t feel the need to add split-screen multiplayer to its bevy of options, Mark decided to bring his TV to my house, because you have to play something like this in the same room, no matter how good those Xbox mics are. And we were very happy with the result.
If you follow gaming news, you probably already know that 50 Cent: BotS is generally thought of as a “good” bad movie. In the same way that I enjoy watching Street Fighter with Van Damme, even though it’s a terrible movie, I enjoyed playing 50 Cent: BotS. The characters are awful, the story is ridiculous, the music is atrocious and every piece of dialog in the game is idiot speak. But it’s fun. Like stupid fun. Mark and I played through the entire game in about 6 hours, me as 50 and Mark as DJ Woo Kid or something.
While definitely not a good game by any means, if you have a friend and a Hollywood Video renters card, it’s probably some of the best $8 you could spend.
Proving The Old Axiom
Two weeks is way too long between posts, but I feel like I’ve been really busy. Emphasis on the feel part. I can’t really think of a lot that’s been going on, but I know there is quite a bit that I should be doing that I’m not.
I should be working on Laura’s corporate identity. I’ve started designing the logo for her business, purchased the domain name, and installed WordPress for the backend, but that’s about it. However, I don’t want to do too much more until we settle on a logo design. I think we’re getting close, but we still need to iron out some of the smaller details and choose a color scheme.
I should be working on Nick’s illustration. Nick wanted me to design a cartoon character for his website — and I’m going to do it, I promise! — but I’m going to need to start on it soon. I wanted to wait until I finished the work on Laura’s stuff, but it seems that’s going to take a while. I may have to switch gears after finishing Laura’s logo and start on Nick’s.
I should be finishing my self portrait. I’ve illustrated myself a profile portrait, similar to the ones the fighters use in Super Street Fighter II HD Remix (sneak peek in the image above). The drawing has been inked and is ready for coloring. I want to get this done so I can post it as my Gravatar image and put it on all my websites. That should work better than stealing Ken’s.
On top of all these projects, the house needs a good Spring Cleaning, the yard needs worked on, and I’d like to spend more time with MarkMark since he’s moving to Chicago in two months. It’s so weird that all I have to do is go to a job from 8 to 5, but somehow I have very little free time. A lot of it has to do with the time black hole that is Street Fighter IV. I can’t stop fightin’ streets!
Note: I got bored and changed my blog design a little. I like the new look a lot better.
Let’s Do This
At the beginning of this month I decided to pre-order the Collector’s Edition of Street Fighter IV. Normally, I don’t do these types of things because a) I think preordering is kind of a waste of time (but with Amazon it’s cool) and b) I usually stay away from the Collector’s or Limited Editions. The thing is that I really like Street Fighter. I was addicted to Street Fighter II as a kid and Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix on Xbox is a godsend. And since I kind of regretted not getting the Mirror’s Edge or Prince of Persia Collector’s Editions, I thought, “Why not?”
It turns out that the game is gorgeous, and a ton of fun to play, but it wasn’t like that in the beginning. I don’t know what I was doing, but even the easiest setting was defeating me, and I’m not ashamed to admit that I almost broke down and sold the game — I was that frustrated with it. I thought that I was either getting too slow, too old, or just didn’t have the determination that I used to when it came to fighting games.
I’m very glad that my friends talked me down from that ledge because yesterday, something snapped and all of the sudden I got it. I have no explanation as to why or how it happened but now I’m having zero trouble with the final boss and I’ve nearly unlocked all the characters — a stipulation of which having to complete Arcade Mode multiple times, hence the frustration. I just have to complete the game with every normal character to unlock the final boss as playable.
This post isn’t a review of the game inasmuch as it’s a reminder to myself not to get so discouraged with things I’m not good at when I first start them. I’m not getting any younger and I know a lot of these situations are coming in the future where I just won’t be able to do the things I used to. I think the hardest part about not being a kid anymore is that you just don’t learn and pick things up as quickly as you could back then. That, and falling down really hurts. As a kid I could fall all the time, no sweat. Now, diving after the dog leaves me achy for a couple hours.
Anyway, if you have a chance to play Street Fighter IV, you should. If you like fighting games, it’s probably one of the best I’ve ever played. The game is incredibly fun, though challenging, and it’s a blast to play with friends. Now, if they’d just add the spectator/quarter lobbies from SSFIITHDR, we’ll be in business.