way back in the spring of 2007, i had just finished my master's degree and was floating in the resultant pointlessness of my life. i had decided to go back to ohio and see what i could scrounge up there in terms of a life while i waited for a year to go by so i could get back into grad school. i only had a compact japanese car and no money for a u-haul, so a few friends and i threw together a sort of haphazard plan that involved them coming out to pullman via airplane and renting a van that would form the second half of our caravan all the way back to ohio - over the course of 4 days we'd cover over 2000 miles and sleep on top of a mountain in colorado as well as some really STD-infested hotels.
on the morning we were going to leave pullman (and i thought i was leaving pullman for absolutely ever), i threw together a mix CD of songs picked largely from a huge crop of 80s tunes that my friend sarah had given me, proclaiming this to be the "Shitty Pizza Movie Soundtrack", referencing a conversation we'd all had the night before over shitty downtown pullman pizza about how we needed to just make a shitty movie about five guys hanging out in pullman eating shitty pizza. this CD ended up sort of being the soundtrack to the ensuing roadtrip, and i thought since i was too lazy to come up with a new february mixtape last month that this would fill the gap nicely. a lot of these songs are just really fun songs. it's worth downloading just for the bridge in "Rosanna" if you've never heard it before. but there are some pretty epic road-trip-camaraderie ballads (simple minds, don henley, journey) and of course who can resist peter gabriel's "In Your Eyes", for when you're standing on the balcony of the roach-infested hotel at 5am smoking a cigarette and watching the sunrise, thinking about that girl that it just didn't work out with? NO ONE CAN. that's why you should listen. here's the tracklist:
1. Joe Jackson - Steppin' Out
2. Simple Minds - Don't You Forget About Me
3. Toto - Rosanna
4. Modern English - Melt With You
5. Dexy's Midnight Runners - Come On Eileen
6. Katrina and the Waves - Walkin' On Sunshin
7. Inner Circle - Bad Boys
8. Don Henley - Boys of Summer
9. Duran Duran - Hungry Like the Wolf
10. Huey Lewis and the News - The Power of Love
11. Falco - Rock Me Amadeus
12. Jack Black - Let's Get It On
13. Dead Or Alive - You Spin Me Round
14. Murray Head - One Night in Bangkok (Extended Version)
15. Peter Gabriel - In Your Eyes
16. Rod Stewart - Young Turks
17. Phil Collins - Sussudio
18. Journey - Separate Ways
and here's the link.
"Sussudio" is such a horrible song.
EDIT: the reason it's "2.0" is because i changed a few songs from the original version because the original version was made in approximately 4 minutes and a few of the songs didn't really fit.
Mar 3, 2008
DORKFEST DEUX!
i actually wrote the first half of this post (which hopefully you've already read and clapped a lot about to yourself, either in your head or outloud) about a week ago, and am just now getting down to writing the second half. lest it appear that i wrote the entire thing today, let no such thought enter your head! i have lots of other things i need to do like hang out with my friends and make out with my girlfriend and be famous, which I AM!
now, on to the rest of the list!
5. Ghost Recon: Gold Edition - this game has pretty much ruined all other shooters for me. i like sitting down and blowing the fucking absolute shit out of the universe singlehandedly from time to time, just like the next guy. but for the majority of my FPS playing time, i'd like to play a game with brains. a game where you're just part of a larger world that's unfolding around you. a game where if you run at some dude with a machine gun and he sees you before you see him, he blows your goddamned face off instantly. ghost recon is that game.
it's incredibly difficult on the hardest setting, and thus especially pleasing. you die if you get shot once. always. well, not always. sometimes you get hit in the chest and then you can't run anymore even if you live. or you get hit in the leg and you have to drag it behind you. the bad guys die the same way. you don't have to wail on a dude for 45 seconds with a chainsaw before he dies. there aren't magic health packs that instantly heal your gunshot wounds, and no body armor. just you, your weapons, and your brain against lots of guys with sniper rifles and poor russian accents. you do get a lot of squad members, each able to be commanded or taken direct control of, and able to be outfitted with all sorts of different kits for different tasks. you can let a few of these guys die off if you're so inclined or if you make a mistake (the AI is actually pretty good once you learn how to micromanage it a bit), but the downside is your team carries over between levels and gains experience, so there's an incentive to try to keep everyone alive.
this is a really rewarding game that throws you into semi-sandbox situations and makes you figure out how best to survive. and it does it very, very well. if there was one complaint about the original game i could have made, it was that it was a tad bit too short (though certainly deep enough). fortunately, this situation was remedied with two expansion packs, both of which were awesome as and hard as hell.
this is actually an in-game demo, so you're not seeing it from the perspective of the player directly, but it should give you an idea of the pacing and feel of the game:
4. Baldur's Gate - this is another sort of catch-all nomination for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2. they're all fantastic CRPGs, each with their good and bad (though mostly good) points, but i played the original first, and it was the one that hooked me. this game was good enough to convince me to sit down and read up on the minutiae of Dungeons and Dragons rules (then version 2; later i'd have to learn 3 and 3.5 to keep playing...fucking THACO!!!)
before i started playing BG for the first time, i'd never played anything other than the japanese-style console RPGs, what with their linear plots, turn-based battles, flashy graphics, and simplified rules systems. pschaw. BG blew this out of the water with a much more immersive experience, lots more to see and do (BG2 claimed to be 200 hours long; i don't know about that, but it took me at least 100) and a combat system that you actually had to consider fistfuls of variables constantly and your chance of victory still often came down to the roll of a die. the thing i remember most is the great feeling of wandering through one of the forests, having no idea what you'd find (often your next goal would be as vague as "go west and find the trolls" or somesuch, which led to hours upon hours of searching, but interesting searching, as you'd always find something; it just wasn't always what you wanted to find). there was also a great sort of built-in sense of immersion in that by the time you got to the end of the game, your characters would have leveled up and accumulated items in a way unique to that particular play through the game, so you could look at your +3 Holy Avenger and say "damn, i remember when i got that from King So-and-So in the Whatchamacallit Mire".
BG and BG2 went crazy with really involved stories and lots of exploration, interspersed with good dungeon crawling, and (at the end of BG2) really badass high-level spell battles with counterspell upon counterspell that necessitated that you were actually smart enough to keep up with all the spell relationships. IWD and IWD2 were more focused on combat and dungeon crawling, with less involved plots that were certainly interesting but mostly just excuses to Fuck Shit Up. some of the prolonged battle sequences in IWD2 were especially excellent. it's one thing to try to implement the D&D universe battle rules in such a way that you can survive a 3o second battle with some drow elves; it's entirely another to be so overrun by enemies that you have to start thinking in physical terms as well, retreating to a choke point and dropping a Grease spell on a bridge so that your archers can pick off the slower-moving but powerful lizard-men in the back while your fighters hold the front of the bridge against the faster-moving Yuan-Ti, and then you have to remember to drop a fireball to knock out the trolls before turning to face the spiders coming up behind you.
the gameplay doesn't look too exciting at a glance, but here's a glance anyway (this is a pretty low-quality video, but again, it's the best i could find easily that wasn't a speedrun):
3. Doom 2 - holy shit, Doom 2. how do i love thee? let me count the ways. okay, actually not. there's been enough enumeration already. but this game scored a lot of firsts for me. first "3D" game - it wasn't real 3D, but let's not split hairs, first game that i actually had to use the mouse to play, first game i had to sneak to my friend's house to play because my dad wouldn't let me install it on his computer, etc. there is just something about the feel of this game that makes it so fun that i still make a point of playing through it once or twice a year. i liked the original Doom just as much, and in some respects more than this sequel, but mostly the sequel was just more, more, more of everything. and in Doom, that's never a bad thing. i don't know that i really need to say anymore about this one. if you don't know Doom already, you wouldn't have read this far in the list anyway.
here's a video:
2. Medieval: Total War - i had a really hard time choosing #1 between these two. i played this game so much for about a three year period after buying it that it actually played a part in influencing me to becoming a medieval lit scholar (which i have since given up on). it was such a historically intelligent, brilliant gaming experience that it was hard for me (being the nerd that i am) to not think constantly about medieval politics, geography, etc. even when not playing, and i just had to know more about the period in which this game was set. since this game, there have been two sequels, both of which have been graphically more amazing and engaging, but for me they still can't beat the original Medieval.
this game was played largely on a strategy map, a la risk. you moved pieces around, adjusted taxes, tried to marry your princesses into other empires' families, tried to make your princes into decent generals, built armies, built defenses, converted people to your religion, etc. the map game itself would have been enough to be a fun game. but then, when your armies collided with other armies, the map gave way to a full 3D battle screen, where your armies would fight it out to see who controlled a particular province, or border, etc. but the absolute best part of this (aside from the strategy of battle, which i'll get to) is that your efforts in the map game would spill over into the battle game. if you managed to finagle a fight into happening in mountainous terrain, you'd fight in 3D mountains. or plains. or desert. or the beach. in winter, or summer, etc. if you'd built up your castle and the enemy was laying siege to it, in the battle they'd be besieging a huge castle with tons of walls. if you'd failed to do so, they'd be attacking a hut surrounded by wooden poles. if your particular battle group was led by your king's bastard son that nobody liked because he was a child molester (it happens), there was a greater chance that they would, staring down the maw of a huge enemy army, just run away and ignore orders.
this game was so deep it was disgusting. add to all the play-by-play strategy the fact that you could play as 14 different factions (almohads, danes, english, french, etc.) and you could literally play through the game (conquering the whole of the western world probably took near-on 50 hours) 14 times and have a completely different gameplay experience every single time. add to all of this amazing bullshit the expansion pack, which partitioned up britain, scotland and ireland as they were during the viking invasions and centered the action around those three islands, and you have a game that you pretty much could never, ever possibly say "been there, done that". this game probably has the highest replay value of any game of any system i've ever played. ever. INSERT MORE HYPERBOLE HERE!!!
here's a movie, which will probably look pretty boring (it also doesn't have any sound, but this is the best i can do):
1. Starcraft - i've been playing this game for nine years and i love it so much that just now, as i was searching youtube for a gameplay video, i heard the terran level startup music and realized that i unconsciously had a huge grin on my face. i had a hard time picking #1, but i decided to choose Starcraft, mostly because:
1) i've been playing it forever and there's never been a time i've stopped playing it for any other reason than because i got another game that i wanted to play instead until i got sick of that game. then it was back to Starcraft.
2) it's deep enough that just a few months ago, playing through the second zerg campaign for the first time, i had only the most recent of many epiphanies concerning game strategy that pretty much completely changed the way i play the game. this happens once every 30 or so hours of gaemplay time, and i think that's pretty amazing, and really speaks to how well put together and balanced this game is.
i won't say this game originated the approach, but this was the first game to really popularize and (in my opinion) successfully execute the gaming approach that makes up the backbone of pretty much every RTS game out there nowadays. you collect resources, you build bases, and then you build an army (climbing the tech tree using your resources to learn how to do awesome things like use Ghosts to drop nukes on hapless opponents). eventually you use this army to crush other people who don't look like you and/or who disagree with your existential/religious philosophy. it's really that simple, but there are so many little details and twists happening within that formula with Starcraft - not to mention the fantastic story - that it pretty much never gets old.
the main conceit that keeps Starcraft fresh is the differences in the three races. not only does playing as a different race necessitate a very different approach to winning the game, you also have to consider how playing as a Terran requires you to respond to playing against the Protoss, compared to against the Zerg, compared to against another Terran. and Blizzard has done such and insanely good job balancing this game (they still release patches almost 10 years later, every months, containing new tweaks and adjustments) that there never is a "best" race for anything, and never an obvious achilles heel to be found unless an unfortunate player creates one for him/herself.
the more i write about it, the more i think i made the right choice for #1. and more i sort of want to play Starcraft right the hell now. in fact, i think i will. but first, have a movie. i was going to just post a normal gameplay video, but i thought it might be better to post this ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS video from national geographic about the 2005 korean Starcraft national championship, or world championship or something. this is absolutely surreal:
thanks for indulging me if you read this far. i needed to make up for my lack of madden screenshots somehow. so hopefully this'll keep my nerd quotient high for a few months until i think of something else.
now, on to the rest of the list!
5. Ghost Recon: Gold Edition - this game has pretty much ruined all other shooters for me. i like sitting down and blowing the fucking absolute shit out of the universe singlehandedly from time to time, just like the next guy. but for the majority of my FPS playing time, i'd like to play a game with brains. a game where you're just part of a larger world that's unfolding around you. a game where if you run at some dude with a machine gun and he sees you before you see him, he blows your goddamned face off instantly. ghost recon is that game.
it's incredibly difficult on the hardest setting, and thus especially pleasing. you die if you get shot once. always. well, not always. sometimes you get hit in the chest and then you can't run anymore even if you live. or you get hit in the leg and you have to drag it behind you. the bad guys die the same way. you don't have to wail on a dude for 45 seconds with a chainsaw before he dies. there aren't magic health packs that instantly heal your gunshot wounds, and no body armor. just you, your weapons, and your brain against lots of guys with sniper rifles and poor russian accents. you do get a lot of squad members, each able to be commanded or taken direct control of, and able to be outfitted with all sorts of different kits for different tasks. you can let a few of these guys die off if you're so inclined or if you make a mistake (the AI is actually pretty good once you learn how to micromanage it a bit), but the downside is your team carries over between levels and gains experience, so there's an incentive to try to keep everyone alive.
this is a really rewarding game that throws you into semi-sandbox situations and makes you figure out how best to survive. and it does it very, very well. if there was one complaint about the original game i could have made, it was that it was a tad bit too short (though certainly deep enough). fortunately, this situation was remedied with two expansion packs, both of which were awesome as and hard as hell.
this is actually an in-game demo, so you're not seeing it from the perspective of the player directly, but it should give you an idea of the pacing and feel of the game:
4. Baldur's Gate - this is another sort of catch-all nomination for Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate 2, Icewind Dale and Icewind Dale 2. they're all fantastic CRPGs, each with their good and bad (though mostly good) points, but i played the original first, and it was the one that hooked me. this game was good enough to convince me to sit down and read up on the minutiae of Dungeons and Dragons rules (then version 2; later i'd have to learn 3 and 3.5 to keep playing...fucking THACO!!!)
before i started playing BG for the first time, i'd never played anything other than the japanese-style console RPGs, what with their linear plots, turn-based battles, flashy graphics, and simplified rules systems. pschaw. BG blew this out of the water with a much more immersive experience, lots more to see and do (BG2 claimed to be 200 hours long; i don't know about that, but it took me at least 100) and a combat system that you actually had to consider fistfuls of variables constantly and your chance of victory still often came down to the roll of a die. the thing i remember most is the great feeling of wandering through one of the forests, having no idea what you'd find (often your next goal would be as vague as "go west and find the trolls" or somesuch, which led to hours upon hours of searching, but interesting searching, as you'd always find something; it just wasn't always what you wanted to find). there was also a great sort of built-in sense of immersion in that by the time you got to the end of the game, your characters would have leveled up and accumulated items in a way unique to that particular play through the game, so you could look at your +3 Holy Avenger and say "damn, i remember when i got that from King So-and-So in the Whatchamacallit Mire".
BG and BG2 went crazy with really involved stories and lots of exploration, interspersed with good dungeon crawling, and (at the end of BG2) really badass high-level spell battles with counterspell upon counterspell that necessitated that you were actually smart enough to keep up with all the spell relationships. IWD and IWD2 were more focused on combat and dungeon crawling, with less involved plots that were certainly interesting but mostly just excuses to Fuck Shit Up. some of the prolonged battle sequences in IWD2 were especially excellent. it's one thing to try to implement the D&D universe battle rules in such a way that you can survive a 3o second battle with some drow elves; it's entirely another to be so overrun by enemies that you have to start thinking in physical terms as well, retreating to a choke point and dropping a Grease spell on a bridge so that your archers can pick off the slower-moving but powerful lizard-men in the back while your fighters hold the front of the bridge against the faster-moving Yuan-Ti, and then you have to remember to drop a fireball to knock out the trolls before turning to face the spiders coming up behind you.
the gameplay doesn't look too exciting at a glance, but here's a glance anyway (this is a pretty low-quality video, but again, it's the best i could find easily that wasn't a speedrun):
3. Doom 2 - holy shit, Doom 2. how do i love thee? let me count the ways. okay, actually not. there's been enough enumeration already. but this game scored a lot of firsts for me. first "3D" game - it wasn't real 3D, but let's not split hairs, first game that i actually had to use the mouse to play, first game i had to sneak to my friend's house to play because my dad wouldn't let me install it on his computer, etc. there is just something about the feel of this game that makes it so fun that i still make a point of playing through it once or twice a year. i liked the original Doom just as much, and in some respects more than this sequel, but mostly the sequel was just more, more, more of everything. and in Doom, that's never a bad thing. i don't know that i really need to say anymore about this one. if you don't know Doom already, you wouldn't have read this far in the list anyway.
here's a video:
2. Medieval: Total War - i had a really hard time choosing #1 between these two. i played this game so much for about a three year period after buying it that it actually played a part in influencing me to becoming a medieval lit scholar (which i have since given up on). it was such a historically intelligent, brilliant gaming experience that it was hard for me (being the nerd that i am) to not think constantly about medieval politics, geography, etc. even when not playing, and i just had to know more about the period in which this game was set. since this game, there have been two sequels, both of which have been graphically more amazing and engaging, but for me they still can't beat the original Medieval.
this game was played largely on a strategy map, a la risk. you moved pieces around, adjusted taxes, tried to marry your princesses into other empires' families, tried to make your princes into decent generals, built armies, built defenses, converted people to your religion, etc. the map game itself would have been enough to be a fun game. but then, when your armies collided with other armies, the map gave way to a full 3D battle screen, where your armies would fight it out to see who controlled a particular province, or border, etc. but the absolute best part of this (aside from the strategy of battle, which i'll get to) is that your efforts in the map game would spill over into the battle game. if you managed to finagle a fight into happening in mountainous terrain, you'd fight in 3D mountains. or plains. or desert. or the beach. in winter, or summer, etc. if you'd built up your castle and the enemy was laying siege to it, in the battle they'd be besieging a huge castle with tons of walls. if you'd failed to do so, they'd be attacking a hut surrounded by wooden poles. if your particular battle group was led by your king's bastard son that nobody liked because he was a child molester (it happens), there was a greater chance that they would, staring down the maw of a huge enemy army, just run away and ignore orders.
this game was so deep it was disgusting. add to all the play-by-play strategy the fact that you could play as 14 different factions (almohads, danes, english, french, etc.) and you could literally play through the game (conquering the whole of the western world probably took near-on 50 hours) 14 times and have a completely different gameplay experience every single time. add to all of this amazing bullshit the expansion pack, which partitioned up britain, scotland and ireland as they were during the viking invasions and centered the action around those three islands, and you have a game that you pretty much could never, ever possibly say "been there, done that". this game probably has the highest replay value of any game of any system i've ever played. ever. INSERT MORE HYPERBOLE HERE!!!
here's a movie, which will probably look pretty boring (it also doesn't have any sound, but this is the best i can do):
1. Starcraft - i've been playing this game for nine years and i love it so much that just now, as i was searching youtube for a gameplay video, i heard the terran level startup music and realized that i unconsciously had a huge grin on my face. i had a hard time picking #1, but i decided to choose Starcraft, mostly because:
1) i've been playing it forever and there's never been a time i've stopped playing it for any other reason than because i got another game that i wanted to play instead until i got sick of that game. then it was back to Starcraft.
2) it's deep enough that just a few months ago, playing through the second zerg campaign for the first time, i had only the most recent of many epiphanies concerning game strategy that pretty much completely changed the way i play the game. this happens once every 30 or so hours of gaemplay time, and i think that's pretty amazing, and really speaks to how well put together and balanced this game is.
i won't say this game originated the approach, but this was the first game to really popularize and (in my opinion) successfully execute the gaming approach that makes up the backbone of pretty much every RTS game out there nowadays. you collect resources, you build bases, and then you build an army (climbing the tech tree using your resources to learn how to do awesome things like use Ghosts to drop nukes on hapless opponents). eventually you use this army to crush other people who don't look like you and/or who disagree with your existential/religious philosophy. it's really that simple, but there are so many little details and twists happening within that formula with Starcraft - not to mention the fantastic story - that it pretty much never gets old.
the main conceit that keeps Starcraft fresh is the differences in the three races. not only does playing as a different race necessitate a very different approach to winning the game, you also have to consider how playing as a Terran requires you to respond to playing against the Protoss, compared to against the Zerg, compared to against another Terran. and Blizzard has done such and insanely good job balancing this game (they still release patches almost 10 years later, every months, containing new tweaks and adjustments) that there never is a "best" race for anything, and never an obvious achilles heel to be found unless an unfortunate player creates one for him/herself.
the more i write about it, the more i think i made the right choice for #1. and more i sort of want to play Starcraft right the hell now. in fact, i think i will. but first, have a movie. i was going to just post a normal gameplay video, but i thought it might be better to post this ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS video from national geographic about the 2005 korean Starcraft national championship, or world championship or something. this is absolutely surreal:
thanks for indulging me if you read this far. i needed to make up for my lack of madden screenshots somehow. so hopefully this'll keep my nerd quotient high for a few months until i think of something else.
DORKFEST - Top 10 PC Games EVAR...
...within all of the universe!
so i was sitting here thinking to myself: "self, what's the best way that i could totally take the image of myself i've created by blogging about short stories, poetry, songwriting, and various other creatively cool things, and totally destroy that image, leaving in its ashes the image of a guy who is really just a huge loser and who desperately needs new glasses frames?" and the answer hit me like a blast from a Terran Siege Tank. i would craft a top 10 list of the best PC games in the FUCKING UNIVERSE, both uncovering my intense love (since the age of 5) for video games and my intense love for enumerating things.
brace yourself, and prepared to be browbeaten with a whirlwind of subjective enumeration!
based on how carried away i got with this list, i'm only including numbers 6 through 10 in this post. 1 through 5 will follow. didn't want to overwhelm nobody.
Honorable Mention: Max Payne 2 - i just had to throw this in there. i loved both of the Max Payne games, and a lot of people who wrote them off because they "cashed in" on the at-the-time gimmicky mechanic of "Bullet Time" really missed how well said mechanic was refined in the second game. it became a strategy; not something to make the game look cool, but something that really had to be used to keep you alive in certain situations, and intelligently conserved in other situations so that you'd have enough left over to survive the first type of situations i mentioned. still with me?
the story was great too; this game was one of the first PC games to ship in a DVD-style case, and it made it seem more like a film than a game, which in a lot of ways it is. the story plays out through a series of graphic-novel pages, actually drawn and put into the game. there are comic-book-panel slideshows between levels with voiceovers by the characters a la an audiobook. and the film noir-style story is one of my favorite narrative told in a videogame that isn't 100 hours long and is translated from japanese. some of the twists in the story flat-out floored me, and i found myself surprisingly drawn to the characters and what happened to them so much so that i was hesitant to finish the game, as it seemed certain a few of the main characters were going to die at the end. that's more in tents than backpacking.
10. Prince of Persia - i love all three of the PC games in the "new" version of this series, and part two is especially notable for its exploration mechanic and its fighting system (say what you will about the lame-ass storyline), but it was the first one that i played first, the first one that i fell in love with first, and the first one that i finished at 5am one night when i had to get up for class at 7, just because i had to see how the story ended. this game is also the reason i went out and bought an analog gamepad for my computer, which was something i swore i'd never throw down the money for. it's an incredible game in terms of story and presentation, and uniqueness of ambiance, but why stop there? it's a really hard-to-describe combination of puzzle solving, exploring, platforming (a good platformer gets to my heart faster a girl with red hair, a motorcycle and a warlock guitar), and combat that just gets everything right. there was never a point in this entire game (it's not long, but it's not short either) where i was frustrated, annoyed, or anything short of completely enthralled. all the points at which i was stuck turned out to be just a problem with me not approaching a particular puzzle correctly, and after i took some time to think things out and approach the problem from a different angle, a solution always presented itself. i honestly can't think of another game i've ever played that was as perfectly paced and tweaked (and that's counting Chrono Trigger, Starcraft, and Ocarina of Time). if i had one complaint it's that the game is so dependent on its (fucking brilliant) puzzles, that once you finish it, it's sort of hard to recapture that original magic once you know the answers. and that's not even a critique; it's more like a backhanded compliment.
here's a video of some of the badass platforming:
9. Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast - this is another sort of nod to a few games, namely Dark Forces, Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, and then the Jedi Knight 2 series. i suppose technically this would be Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, and its sequel would be Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast 2: Jedi Academy, but that makes my head explode. so i'll just call it Outcast.
this was, for me, the high-water mark of the Jedi Knight game series. there were parts in the earlier games that i liked much more, but the whole point of being a Jedi Knight is of course to have force powers, to use them to kick people's asses, and then to carve those asses in half with your lightsaber. when this game came out, the technology was finally in place to do that in a meaningful way. sure, the previous games were awesome, but it became sort of pointless to use the lightsaber even when you'd mastered it; it was essentially a melee weapon that you madly hacked with when in reality you had an arsenal of shitkicking projectile blasters, riflers, microwavers, nucleofiers, fissonators, etc. the lightsaber fights became a button-mashing affiar, and though the game was good, it just basically made me think "i can't wait until they make the next one, so you can do this, and this, and this..."
Outcast was the next one, and it hit the ball out of the park. the story was great, the shooting mechanics were even great, the force powers were actually useful, and oh my god when you finally got the lightsaber, ass-kicking was unleashed, but in a way that required intelligence, reflexes, and actually learning to use the combat system. trust me, to finish this game on the highest skill level, you had to learn how to actually fight with the lightsaber. and it was awesome. and it looked good too; no game for my money before or since has so correctly hit the nail on the head when it comes to portraying the star wars universe. Academy (the sequel) was good in parts, but focused too much on saber combat; this game was delightfully balanced and generally let you decide how you wanted to play. you could even usually manage to take down sith using your guns if you were smart about it, without getting a laser or five batted right back into your face a la that dude on the sail barge in Return of the Jedi.
here's a display of lightsaber goodness and then some force-push action:
8. Serious Sam (and the Second Encounter) - Serious Sam did for me what Doom 3 and pretty much every other shooter since 1994 has failed to do: recreate the crazy, run-and-gun feeling of Doom and Doom 2, only in a full 3d world. and on top of that, it was just funny. i got blown up so many times by the kamikazee head-bomb guys early on because i just could not stop laughing long enough to shoot them. this game and its expansion were just about the most straight-up fun i'd had playing a game for five years or so when i got them, and i haven't found anything to match them since. Serious Sam 2 was good as well, but never matched the pace and freneticism of 100s-of-ogres-running-at-you-at-once madness of the original. it's still always a great feeling standing on top of a hill, looking a mile into the distance and seeing 200 undead skeleton horses bearing down on you, noting that you only have 100 rockets left and knowing that you'll have to kill at least 100 of them with just your knife, and that it's just time to man up. good times.
here's a video. it starts off sort of slow, but towards the middle starts to show the insanity that i'm talking about:
7. Star Wars: Alliance - notable for the fact that it was the conclusion of sorts to the fantastic X-wing/TIE Fighter series of the mid-90s, and in my opinion is the best game of the series. but this selection is also a tip of the hat to X-Wing and TIE Fighter. to this day people talk about how great TIE Fighter was, and it was great. i frittered away 150 dollars on joysticks just so i could play X-wing and then TIE Fighter (there really weren't many other games that you needed a joystick for, especially when they still connected through the LPT port), and i was about 12 or so. that was not a small amount of money when i was 12. shit, it's not a small amount of money now.
but Alliance, for my money (literally) had a much better, more involved story, with tons of scripted events happening while you were flying missions (and crazy plot twists like you wouldn't believe), an extremely involved single-player campaign, ability to unlock all campaign missions and play them again piloting any craft, and then, on top of it all, the ability to set up a skirmish using whatever objectives and craft on up to four different sides that you saw fit. it was like having your own star wars space sandbox to geek over. i wanted to go along with the crowd and say "hey, TIE Fighter was the best space-sim for the PC in the heyday of great space-sims", but then i remember the first time i started the asteriod belt mission and saw the miles-long super star destroyer (which would literally take a minute or so to fly past in the game it was so big) and i remember that this was really the first game that made me feel like i was part of a movie, or some humongous adventure bigger than just my small character's part. even TIE Fighter didn't do that.
here's a video of the climactic battle of endor (awesome video, though i daresay i could take the dude easily in a dogfight...):
6. Unreal Tournament - this game holds the dubious honor of being the only game that's ever, EVER convinced me to play online. i have suffered so many comments in the vein of "u got pwned, n00b!" because of this game that i'm almost mad at it. almost.
UT brilliantly took the speed, carnage, and disregard for people without blindingly fast mouse hands of the Doom series and turned it into a sport. so many games have capture the flag, deathmatch, and countless other multiplayer modes now that it's hard to imagine that this by itself could have been somewhat of an innovation in 1999, but it was. other games had done some of these things already, but not as well, and not as prettily. and on top of the fun that came with earning the respect of your five cyber-buddies by making a clutch headshot with seconds on the clock to give your team the victory, UT also had an excellent bot system, which meant that anytime you wanted to take on any of the game's modes or maps offline, you could expect to be seriously challenged by the AI. i've been playing this game for almost nine years and i still can't beat it on the highest skill level. they're THAT freakishly good.
add to the mix a great old-school techno soundtrack and fantastic presentation values and you've got a game that i can still easily find good matches for online at any hour of the day, nine years after its release.
i tried for something like 45 minutes to find a video that recreates the insanity of online play, and couldn't find one that didn't have someone's homemade-ass techno music playing over it (or choral piece in latin for the real melodramediennes). here's the best i could do:
so i was sitting here thinking to myself: "self, what's the best way that i could totally take the image of myself i've created by blogging about short stories, poetry, songwriting, and various other creatively cool things, and totally destroy that image, leaving in its ashes the image of a guy who is really just a huge loser and who desperately needs new glasses frames?" and the answer hit me like a blast from a Terran Siege Tank. i would craft a top 10 list of the best PC games in the FUCKING UNIVERSE, both uncovering my intense love (since the age of 5) for video games and my intense love for enumerating things.
brace yourself, and prepared to be browbeaten with a whirlwind of subjective enumeration!
based on how carried away i got with this list, i'm only including numbers 6 through 10 in this post. 1 through 5 will follow. didn't want to overwhelm nobody.
Honorable Mention: Max Payne 2 - i just had to throw this in there. i loved both of the Max Payne games, and a lot of people who wrote them off because they "cashed in" on the at-the-time gimmicky mechanic of "Bullet Time" really missed how well said mechanic was refined in the second game. it became a strategy; not something to make the game look cool, but something that really had to be used to keep you alive in certain situations, and intelligently conserved in other situations so that you'd have enough left over to survive the first type of situations i mentioned. still with me?
the story was great too; this game was one of the first PC games to ship in a DVD-style case, and it made it seem more like a film than a game, which in a lot of ways it is. the story plays out through a series of graphic-novel pages, actually drawn and put into the game. there are comic-book-panel slideshows between levels with voiceovers by the characters a la an audiobook. and the film noir-style story is one of my favorite narrative told in a videogame that isn't 100 hours long and is translated from japanese. some of the twists in the story flat-out floored me, and i found myself surprisingly drawn to the characters and what happened to them so much so that i was hesitant to finish the game, as it seemed certain a few of the main characters were going to die at the end. that's more in tents than backpacking.
10. Prince of Persia - i love all three of the PC games in the "new" version of this series, and part two is especially notable for its exploration mechanic and its fighting system (say what you will about the lame-ass storyline), but it was the first one that i played first, the first one that i fell in love with first, and the first one that i finished at 5am one night when i had to get up for class at 7, just because i had to see how the story ended. this game is also the reason i went out and bought an analog gamepad for my computer, which was something i swore i'd never throw down the money for. it's an incredible game in terms of story and presentation, and uniqueness of ambiance, but why stop there? it's a really hard-to-describe combination of puzzle solving, exploring, platforming (a good platformer gets to my heart faster a girl with red hair, a motorcycle and a warlock guitar), and combat that just gets everything right. there was never a point in this entire game (it's not long, but it's not short either) where i was frustrated, annoyed, or anything short of completely enthralled. all the points at which i was stuck turned out to be just a problem with me not approaching a particular puzzle correctly, and after i took some time to think things out and approach the problem from a different angle, a solution always presented itself. i honestly can't think of another game i've ever played that was as perfectly paced and tweaked (and that's counting Chrono Trigger, Starcraft, and Ocarina of Time). if i had one complaint it's that the game is so dependent on its (fucking brilliant) puzzles, that once you finish it, it's sort of hard to recapture that original magic once you know the answers. and that's not even a critique; it's more like a backhanded compliment.
here's a video of some of the badass platforming:
9. Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast - this is another sort of nod to a few games, namely Dark Forces, Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight, and then the Jedi Knight 2 series. i suppose technically this would be Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast, and its sequel would be Star Wars: Dark Forces 3: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast 2: Jedi Academy, but that makes my head explode. so i'll just call it Outcast.
this was, for me, the high-water mark of the Jedi Knight game series. there were parts in the earlier games that i liked much more, but the whole point of being a Jedi Knight is of course to have force powers, to use them to kick people's asses, and then to carve those asses in half with your lightsaber. when this game came out, the technology was finally in place to do that in a meaningful way. sure, the previous games were awesome, but it became sort of pointless to use the lightsaber even when you'd mastered it; it was essentially a melee weapon that you madly hacked with when in reality you had an arsenal of shitkicking projectile blasters, riflers, microwavers, nucleofiers, fissonators, etc. the lightsaber fights became a button-mashing affiar, and though the game was good, it just basically made me think "i can't wait until they make the next one, so you can do this, and this, and this..."
Outcast was the next one, and it hit the ball out of the park. the story was great, the shooting mechanics were even great, the force powers were actually useful, and oh my god when you finally got the lightsaber, ass-kicking was unleashed, but in a way that required intelligence, reflexes, and actually learning to use the combat system. trust me, to finish this game on the highest skill level, you had to learn how to actually fight with the lightsaber. and it was awesome. and it looked good too; no game for my money before or since has so correctly hit the nail on the head when it comes to portraying the star wars universe. Academy (the sequel) was good in parts, but focused too much on saber combat; this game was delightfully balanced and generally let you decide how you wanted to play. you could even usually manage to take down sith using your guns if you were smart about it, without getting a laser or five batted right back into your face a la that dude on the sail barge in Return of the Jedi.
here's a display of lightsaber goodness and then some force-push action:
8. Serious Sam (and the Second Encounter) - Serious Sam did for me what Doom 3 and pretty much every other shooter since 1994 has failed to do: recreate the crazy, run-and-gun feeling of Doom and Doom 2, only in a full 3d world. and on top of that, it was just funny. i got blown up so many times by the kamikazee head-bomb guys early on because i just could not stop laughing long enough to shoot them. this game and its expansion were just about the most straight-up fun i'd had playing a game for five years or so when i got them, and i haven't found anything to match them since. Serious Sam 2 was good as well, but never matched the pace and freneticism of 100s-of-ogres-running-at-you-at-once madness of the original. it's still always a great feeling standing on top of a hill, looking a mile into the distance and seeing 200 undead skeleton horses bearing down on you, noting that you only have 100 rockets left and knowing that you'll have to kill at least 100 of them with just your knife, and that it's just time to man up. good times.
here's a video. it starts off sort of slow, but towards the middle starts to show the insanity that i'm talking about:
7. Star Wars: Alliance - notable for the fact that it was the conclusion of sorts to the fantastic X-wing/TIE Fighter series of the mid-90s, and in my opinion is the best game of the series. but this selection is also a tip of the hat to X-Wing and TIE Fighter. to this day people talk about how great TIE Fighter was, and it was great. i frittered away 150 dollars on joysticks just so i could play X-wing and then TIE Fighter (there really weren't many other games that you needed a joystick for, especially when they still connected through the LPT port), and i was about 12 or so. that was not a small amount of money when i was 12. shit, it's not a small amount of money now.
but Alliance, for my money (literally) had a much better, more involved story, with tons of scripted events happening while you were flying missions (and crazy plot twists like you wouldn't believe), an extremely involved single-player campaign, ability to unlock all campaign missions and play them again piloting any craft, and then, on top of it all, the ability to set up a skirmish using whatever objectives and craft on up to four different sides that you saw fit. it was like having your own star wars space sandbox to geek over. i wanted to go along with the crowd and say "hey, TIE Fighter was the best space-sim for the PC in the heyday of great space-sims", but then i remember the first time i started the asteriod belt mission and saw the miles-long super star destroyer (which would literally take a minute or so to fly past in the game it was so big) and i remember that this was really the first game that made me feel like i was part of a movie, or some humongous adventure bigger than just my small character's part. even TIE Fighter didn't do that.
here's a video of the climactic battle of endor (awesome video, though i daresay i could take the dude easily in a dogfight...):
6. Unreal Tournament - this game holds the dubious honor of being the only game that's ever, EVER convinced me to play online. i have suffered so many comments in the vein of "u got pwned, n00b!" because of this game that i'm almost mad at it. almost.
UT brilliantly took the speed, carnage, and disregard for people without blindingly fast mouse hands of the Doom series and turned it into a sport. so many games have capture the flag, deathmatch, and countless other multiplayer modes now that it's hard to imagine that this by itself could have been somewhat of an innovation in 1999, but it was. other games had done some of these things already, but not as well, and not as prettily. and on top of the fun that came with earning the respect of your five cyber-buddies by making a clutch headshot with seconds on the clock to give your team the victory, UT also had an excellent bot system, which meant that anytime you wanted to take on any of the game's modes or maps offline, you could expect to be seriously challenged by the AI. i've been playing this game for almost nine years and i still can't beat it on the highest skill level. they're THAT freakishly good.
add to the mix a great old-school techno soundtrack and fantastic presentation values and you've got a game that i can still easily find good matches for online at any hour of the day, nine years after its release.
i tried for something like 45 minutes to find a video that recreates the insanity of online play, and couldn't find one that didn't have someone's homemade-ass techno music playing over it (or choral piece in latin for the real melodramediennes). here's the best i could do:
mein augen!!!
this is pretty much the best thing ever. at least if you're a lego star wars fan. and seeing as how i don't remember much of last february and march except lego star wars, i guess that makes me a fan.
it's raining men
okay, no really it's raining this funky mixture of ice, snow, and rain. i suppose it's fitting that i live in a state that can never even be bothered to decide what sort of precipitation it's throwing at you.
that was a reference to my own indecisiveness. i think.
i burnt away another entire weekend, playing medal of honor (finished both the expansion packs - yeah, fuck you, nazis!) and eating shitty food that i didn't take any care in selecting or preparing. in retrospect i'm trying to be disappointed about the lost time over the last two weeks, but honestly i think it needed to be done.
i had a lot of problems with depression, etc. as a kid (and even a little later in life too), and it's one of those things that never completely goes away - you don't wake up one day and just decide to feel better, like some people like to suggest you can. it doesn't work that way. it's something wrong with the way your brain is wired, that's all. i'm largely glad of it at this point, because i've learned how to deal with it, it's gotten a lot better than it once was, back when i thought i could "beat" it, and i wouldn't have written a lot of the things and done a lot of the things i've done in the last 10 years were it not for the introspection and the plumbing of some of the dark places i've been to. but what i learned through all that is that i can't just keep plowing ahead, stomaching things that are distasteful and pretending - like i see so many other people doing - that nothing's wrong. for some people this seems to work (though i tend to avoid these people because they sort of bewilder and sadden me), but for me it's the equivalent of saying "oh, i can't feel my left arm...can i have another big mac?". i've learned that sometimes i just need to take some time and work shit out. so that's what i've been doing.
it's been counterproductive in ways to not be working on music or writing for the last two weeks, but i need a base to work from, and i haven't had that. some people write best when they are wallowing around in craziness or darkness or love or whatever; i write better on the other side of those things, when i can sit back and at least pretend that i'm looking at them objectively. so i knew what i was doing when i scrapped my plans to finish most of the rest of the new record these last two weeks. i could have done it, but it would have sucked. there wouldn't have been anything behind it other than just a stubborn desire to Finish. so i didn't. i actually thought about working a bit yesterday because i felt better, but my throat has been bugging me the last few days as it often does when my white blood cells are trying to say "son, our shit's backed up against the wall...might want to lay off". so i didn't want to fuck with trying to sing with it.
so anyway, as hard as it was to sort of exile myself from, well, pretty much everything, i don't know that i had much of a choice. i realized things had somewhat righted themselves this morning when i was sitting around with a few people from work talking and not being self-conscious about it. it was the first time in a few weeks that i wasn't having a conversation while being brutally aware that i was engaging in the mental equivalent of bleeding on the carpet of someone else's house. it was fun. now i feel better and the idea of sitting in the dark playing video games for hours or wandering the streets instead of sleeping seem sort of repulsive compared to doing real things or even *gasp* working again. so i suppose things have righted themselves again.
it's just weird to think how happy i was writing and working a few weeks ago, and mostly how i've been for most of this semester, and then - BAM! - i run into the reality of maybe not knowing what i'm doing next year and everything goes to hell. i couldn't help but wonder throughout the process if stopping doing all those things that make me really happy was counterproductive...but really, if you break your arm playing football, you're smart enough to not go play football until it's healed again. i think the same principle applies here.
and really, i got some good perspective today once i was able to actually talk to people and not just be a wet blanket anymore. just about everybody here is in a similar boat as me concerning next year. nobody's happy about it, but everybody's going to end up working something out, and it's stupid to think i'm different or frame my problem(s) in a way that makes it seem as if somehow i'm special in my loserness.
so anyway, back to business as usual, with occasional freak-outs pertaining to future prospects of where i'm getting my food and rent money from. i'm not stupid enough to think that it's going to right itself if i just act positive and smile at my eviction notice...
i'm cookin' up a few things right now, including another snobby-ass post about music stuff that nobody but me cares about and my top 10 PC games ever list, which i've been working on for a few weeks now. the life of a blogger. harder than bread that's been left out overnight.
i have a toaster. i just found it yesterday. just found it. weird, huh?
the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack is fantastic. the documentary is fantastic too, but the soundtrack is fantasticer. that seems like it should have a "k" in it somewhere.
that was a reference to my own indecisiveness. i think.
i burnt away another entire weekend, playing medal of honor (finished both the expansion packs - yeah, fuck you, nazis!) and eating shitty food that i didn't take any care in selecting or preparing. in retrospect i'm trying to be disappointed about the lost time over the last two weeks, but honestly i think it needed to be done.
i had a lot of problems with depression, etc. as a kid (and even a little later in life too), and it's one of those things that never completely goes away - you don't wake up one day and just decide to feel better, like some people like to suggest you can. it doesn't work that way. it's something wrong with the way your brain is wired, that's all. i'm largely glad of it at this point, because i've learned how to deal with it, it's gotten a lot better than it once was, back when i thought i could "beat" it, and i wouldn't have written a lot of the things and done a lot of the things i've done in the last 10 years were it not for the introspection and the plumbing of some of the dark places i've been to. but what i learned through all that is that i can't just keep plowing ahead, stomaching things that are distasteful and pretending - like i see so many other people doing - that nothing's wrong. for some people this seems to work (though i tend to avoid these people because they sort of bewilder and sadden me), but for me it's the equivalent of saying "oh, i can't feel my left arm...can i have another big mac?". i've learned that sometimes i just need to take some time and work shit out. so that's what i've been doing.
it's been counterproductive in ways to not be working on music or writing for the last two weeks, but i need a base to work from, and i haven't had that. some people write best when they are wallowing around in craziness or darkness or love or whatever; i write better on the other side of those things, when i can sit back and at least pretend that i'm looking at them objectively. so i knew what i was doing when i scrapped my plans to finish most of the rest of the new record these last two weeks. i could have done it, but it would have sucked. there wouldn't have been anything behind it other than just a stubborn desire to Finish. so i didn't. i actually thought about working a bit yesterday because i felt better, but my throat has been bugging me the last few days as it often does when my white blood cells are trying to say "son, our shit's backed up against the wall...might want to lay off". so i didn't want to fuck with trying to sing with it.
so anyway, as hard as it was to sort of exile myself from, well, pretty much everything, i don't know that i had much of a choice. i realized things had somewhat righted themselves this morning when i was sitting around with a few people from work talking and not being self-conscious about it. it was the first time in a few weeks that i wasn't having a conversation while being brutally aware that i was engaging in the mental equivalent of bleeding on the carpet of someone else's house. it was fun. now i feel better and the idea of sitting in the dark playing video games for hours or wandering the streets instead of sleeping seem sort of repulsive compared to doing real things or even *gasp* working again. so i suppose things have righted themselves again.
it's just weird to think how happy i was writing and working a few weeks ago, and mostly how i've been for most of this semester, and then - BAM! - i run into the reality of maybe not knowing what i'm doing next year and everything goes to hell. i couldn't help but wonder throughout the process if stopping doing all those things that make me really happy was counterproductive...but really, if you break your arm playing football, you're smart enough to not go play football until it's healed again. i think the same principle applies here.
and really, i got some good perspective today once i was able to actually talk to people and not just be a wet blanket anymore. just about everybody here is in a similar boat as me concerning next year. nobody's happy about it, but everybody's going to end up working something out, and it's stupid to think i'm different or frame my problem(s) in a way that makes it seem as if somehow i'm special in my loserness.
so anyway, back to business as usual, with occasional freak-outs pertaining to future prospects of where i'm getting my food and rent money from. i'm not stupid enough to think that it's going to right itself if i just act positive and smile at my eviction notice...
i'm cookin' up a few things right now, including another snobby-ass post about music stuff that nobody but me cares about and my top 10 PC games ever list, which i've been working on for a few weeks now. the life of a blogger. harder than bread that's been left out overnight.
i have a toaster. i just found it yesterday. just found it. weird, huh?
the Buena Vista Social Club soundtrack is fantastic. the documentary is fantastic too, but the soundtrack is fantasticer. that seems like it should have a "k" in it somewhere.
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