Breeeeeak

Haven't been posting in a long while. It IS summer break after all, and I'm still not even sure what's happening in the gaming world right meow.  

Rest assured, occasional readers, ill get back in the zone after I make all this money and get back in the game. 

How to Tell if You're Binge Gaming

So this last weekend I ,once again, binged on video games.  And afterwards I noticed some things that one might call 'indicators' of this not so wonderful behavior.   And a quick word or two about how you're becoming an awful human.

You've Been Playing a Lot

Firstly, and most obviously, if you've been playing a shit ton of video games, it seems like that could go without saying, but there is a clear difference between playing a contextually appropriate amount of games and binging.  You can play a lot for a night so long as you've friends there with you, but if you've been maxing out solo, you're probably not looking all the better for it. 

Haven't Moved

Well there's your primary hint right there, if you're not moving around somethings wrong.  If you're feeling a general sense of lethargy, or just a plain old hatred of the world, this is a sign that you've been binging on slothliness.  Enjoy.

Ripped Potato Bags

Call it strange, but if there is more than exactly one bag of chips or something of the like, which you have ripped a side down in order to get at the chips with more ease.  Then you are binging.   Its just deplorable behavior, and if you catch yourself doing it with frequency, you're probably not being very healthy.  Also, you're getting the controller all greasy, or your shirt if you're wiping it there, point is something is getting greased up.

Previous Meals in Vision

If you can see the remains of anything more than the last thing you've eaten from your perch, you're doing it wrong.  Likewise, if your countertop is a beer and taco graveyard, it's probably time to get out of the couch-lock and do real person things.

Fixed-Point Hedonism

This is a big one, if you can't even get up to get fucked up, you're either depressed or in the thralls of gaming or both.  If you do the things you do to yourself normally to get twerked, while sitting and not moving, they're going to lose all the things that made them twerky in the first place.   And that's a damn shame.  It's like you're sucking the reverence out of social deviancy with a plastic controller and comfortable pillows.  

Basically, the point is that if you can see everything that you've been doing for the past couple days, without moving, it's time to get up and do things.  

How Awesome it Feels to not go to Acen

FEELS GREAT.   ABSOLUTELY SPECTACULAR, THIS IS TRULY THE MOST BITTER SARCASM, all my friends went.... I'm just here, being normal.   shit.  

Mostly I feel bad because it's really cool that there can be events like that that just draw in those people, my people into the kind of social environment that they might normally avoid in order to nerd out at full power.   Which is a damn good feeling.

But a three day anime convention for 65 bucks?  nope, can't do it.  saaaaawry.   My friends even dressed up like a badass Vega and Ryu.   granted, I'm not nearly in shape enough to do that..... ehhhhhh.

CUSTOMIZE

Okay, so when you had your LEGO'S and K'NEX while growing up, how meticulous were you in their designs?  Personally, I was of the K'NEX persuasion and would lose whole days sitting in my room building and breaking apart massive structures, down to the details.  Yeah, 9 year old me didn't have lots of friends.  Anyways, I knew of my love of customization early on, so when Custom Robo came out on the GameCube and I could make my own robot to battle others?  Raw happiness.

That didn't last long however, as there's only like 300 possible creations you can make and they're all easy to remember and use.  I got pretty absorbed by it.   I later got a hold of the Armored Core series, which features some of the most crazily in-depth customization options of all time.  It consumed me.  My brother and I spent a good portion of every day taking turns on the Xbox re-tuning our mechs in order to one-up the others latest design.

You can even apply air diffusers to redistribute the weights of each part in, or out of motion.   Yeah, and then you fight them, and it's fucking ridiculous.  Annnnnnd~ there's a new game coming out this Septemberish for it.  Armored Core 5: Verdict Day.  Basically it's the best game ever because there's such a slim chance of having the exact same build as someone else, almost more certainly the same programming, or weapons, (like I said, this game is ridiculous)

But with the newest installation in the series comes some crazy new adaptations.  To the multiplayer, which absolutely needed to happen, the shittiest thing about that game was not being able to trounce every feeble human in existence with your Death Machine.  But now it appears as though they have some sort of commander position, or an overarching commander of some sort, and it looks totally badass.  

I can already tell, I'm going to lose sleep over this.

Durango Status!?

For those of you paying attention, clearly not me seeing as I just remembered, the new Xbox is getting 'talked about' like in an official context, streaming live in the next hour.   I am so thoroughly excited for it.  


Watch it here    
<streaming live at 10>


ITS THE FUTURE!  Which sounds a bit dramatic, but it totally is, the technology in that thing will be one of the most powerfully commercially available for years to come.   Squeeeee I wonder what they're gonna say!!  I hear it even has an HDMI IN port.  Like, what? you can import video into it?  I'm so curious, I'm becoming deathly ill with salivation.  imagine that.

1st Person Swordicuffs

I'm pretty dorky all around, but one of the things that makes me embarrassing to be around in public circles would have to be how excited I am about first person Melee games.

Like, that's awesome.  You can have a simulated sword fight that's all about timing, like it should be, AND knock a guy's squished up brains through his ears.

 And especially in an MMO because then you can do all sorts of wacky things with other players while murdering each other jovial.  Like this,

Mothafuckin' shield wall.  Thats actually a killer strategy, and if the chat is accurate, they cleaned up house that round, Shield Wall for the win.  

I suppose I should just take off talking about this game then, because it's a perfect example of an MMO first person fighter.  Shit, that's what it is.  It's more or less just that, but they also have objective style rush/defend objectives and a buncha cool game modes.

It's called Chivalry: Medieval Warfare, and I'm pretty sure it was made by the dudes behind Age of Empires, its a game about storming castles, sabotaging water supplies, and learning about the modalities of Medieval times!  But also about hurting people.

(mostly about hurting people)

But I like it because everyone's on the same playing field in terms of damage taken and given, skill becomes the determining factor (along with random chaos) to make a really balanced battlefield.  Where a stray arrow can actually end you, leaving you screaming bullshit at a computer.  I miss games like that, where it's as easy to kill someone in a game as it is in real life, I mean face it, we're squishy meat sacks filled with shatterable material.  We're really not as damage proof as we'd like to think, these games that stress the 'anything will kill you' ideal tend to promote a more skillful gameplay, at least in my opinion.  

HTBRFWACS and pikmin.

What a concise and non-foreboding acronym.   Well, actually it stands for, "how to blog really fast without actually creating shit.   At least creatively, I suppose this is a form of arms against deadlines.   I hate deadlines, they're usually lively occasions, those 'night before OH FUCK moments'  but now this really fun new past time of mine seems like a bunch of annoying work.  Especially since this is going to have to get nice again, but not right meow.  

Anywho, lets talk about something fun.  Did you ever play pikmin as a kid? Fun little game where you arrive on a strange planet with a broken spaceman ship, forced to repair it with the 'help' of locals.   Because you fucking enslave them.  It's wonderful how veiled in childish delight the game actually is, but much like Lemmings, the game is inherently about this:

1. You land derelict on this strange planet. 

2.  You encounter new fauna of unknown intellect. 

3. Upon interacting with the creatures, you decide that you are congenitally smarter than these creatures can possibly comprehend.

4. You enslave their whole species.  Trodding over their lifeless broken fruit sized bodies in an effort to further your goal of....getting the fuck off of the island. 

That's the fucked up part, Olimar never strays from his goal of getting the fuck up out of there, which makes the pikmin nothing more than tools in his strange, beady little eyes.  

Basically I think of Olimar as the anthropological explanation for why, if there are any pikmin left, they are very distrustful of anything that's not a pikmin.  

I mean, I haven't really played it yet, but I know in the second game you return to the planet and brutally exploit them right down into their genetic memory.  To them, the game could have been called, "Return of the Tyrant".