Word of Command

I spent the last week playing Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Single-player, it's an open-world GTA-style game. Since the original Red Faction, the series' gimmick was that you could blow up the environment - only, in earlier games, the destruction you could cause was awful limited. It was less "Blow up everything!" and more "Shoot the red boxes and they disappear!" So I was pretty happy that Guerrilla is more liberal with the wrecking. You can break apart anything except rocks and the ground; any building is ready to be destroyed, either by rockets, explosive charges, or your trusty sledgehammer.

The campaign revolves around a forgettable story about some sort of liberation from a vague evil bureaucracy. Honestly, I didn't need the fiction to be better, but I really wanted less of it. You play missions to advance the story, going through a small variety of side-missions to unlock further story missions. The formula is awfully familiar, and would be more successful if there were more to do in the world. There are buildings that you're encouraged to blow up, and you can get in skirmishes with the enemy, but I felt that the sandbox only existed so that you wouldn't merely select missions from a menu. The vehicle controls aren't objectionable, but driving around the world just isn't fun.

The multiplayer is Guerilla's ultimate redemption. I really don't play shooters online, but this one is a god damned blast. You're given a choice of power-ups with a variety of uses: cloaking, flying, earthquakes on command, wallhacking, and the positively delightful Rhino pack, which allows you to charge through walls, mowing down any other players in your path. The different gametypes work, your murder methods are plentiful, and the matchmaking is smooth like silk (on the 360, at least.) The single-player game is worth a rental, but I was late to work multiple times because I couldn't resist the lure of One More Game of deathmatch. The argot of online shooters is beyond me, so I'll put it simply: Play this game.

My Judgement: Idle Magic

Hideous Laughter

The character-shaped Macaroni and Cheese always tasted terrible. The shapes weren't right- all the junctions of the little noodles were just uncooked enough to be hard and gummy.

Oh How Happy We'll Be

My new favorite snap is "See, this is why nobody likes you." It's really only effective against a person with a certain range of insecurities, but I recently used it on a former friend, and it was pretty good. Best used on a loner or the socially awkward; I know I'd wilt if someone aimed it at me.

Maybe I'm in love with it too much. I was wondering if there was a more direct form of schadenfreude, but I guess that's just sadism, hey?

A Community of One

I'm reading this Star Wars comic right now, Knights of the Old Republic, and it's really good. Most people, if they want to write, they want to write something revelatory, but this makes me feel like I'd rather write entertaining schlock. If I could learn how to start a story, I'd be half on my way, but I haven't written even a small bit of fiction in a while.

This comic is really good though. I love the games it's based on, as they represent a sector of the Star Wars universe not fitted with the cement shoes of 30 years' baffling, sprawling, and often boring continuity. Hm ... I'm a huge superhero comic reader, so that statement feels hypocritical.

Devouring Greed

Have you ever thrown up and just felt 150% better? I just did. I'd made a late dinner of mediocre tempura (my first time making it,) and two hours later I was thrashing in my bed like I was going to die. After regurgitating a good deal of the meal, I feel even-keeled.

Life is goooooood.

Lost Love Evocation

Right now, I'm on my day off, and I'm still itching to be back at work. When I come home, I feel alone, even after spending the day with buddies. I have a couple good pals right now, but no real friends. No shoulder to lean on.

Something's lacking, but it's something new, some hole I don't quite understand and don't know how to fill. I'm pleased that I've finally started to get over my childish aversion to work, but it feels more like a symptom - an escape, an abjuration of the 5 to 9 portion of my life.

Epikairekakia

My web browsing experience would be improved threefold if I could find a way to stop myself from reading comments. I devour an article and, unsated, go to the comments so that I may have my dessert. My gluttony deserves punishment, but no crime is worth the dip into molten ignorance that the average (and even the above-average) comments page represents. I try not to be one of those "God, the ninety-five percent of people who aren't like me sure are stupid" people - who, invariably, show up halfway into most comment threads - but it's hard. The vitriol, the solipsism, the misspelled racial/sexual epithets, and then the people who correct said spelling, adding a bitchy aside about "their" vs. "they're", reclining triumphantly in their office chairs as if to exclaim "King Me!"

Afterwards, I can't help but feel diminished. Like I'm less of a person for making this trek into the collective subconscious' Thanatos.

I allow comments on here to see if anyone reads this. A counter at the bottom of the page would do the same job, but I hypocritically believe them to be a sign of vanity.

Eight Brothers' Coined Horns

I think, if I was to go crazy, it'd be a bold new direction for my brand. Like, seething, bubbling, tics and outbursts crazy. Bad-theater-student-playing-crazy crazy. Muppet-slowly-electrocuted-by-a-car-battery crazy.

Yeah.

Exquisite Replica

I've been playing Harvest Moon this weekend. I can only play the SNES version; it's buggy, low-budget, and sparsely simplistic, but it's original. Every game after that feels like a copy, and then a copy of the previous copy, slowly in its atavism regressing past its own origin - the ur-shovelware.

Most games cloak their grind with monster-slaying, or car racing, or other unusual activities that one would assume to be innately fun. Thing is, Harvest Moon is labor, in the most elemental sense of the word. To get money out of a harvest, you must:

• Clear the field of rocks and stumps
• Till the land
• Buy seeds
• Plant the seeds
• Water the crops for 7-10 days
• Throw each potato/ear of corn/turnip/etc. into the delivery box

Which, all told, takes at least a couple hours. In Harvest Moon, you work the crops so you can start raising livestock, which lets you make money in the winter so you can enlarge your house and get married to one of the townie girls and have a kid.

Honest to god, after three days straight with the game, I can't figure what the carrot on the end of its stick is. Marriage, maybe? The dialogue is all sub-English, so achieving wedded bliss is about as satisfying as beating an NES game to glean a hearty "CONGLATURATION!!" and a pixelated portrait of a misshapen princess.

I don't think I've ever played a game of Harvest Moon to its completion. Maybe it's because of the motivation problem, but it's one of those games I enjoy taking a run at without feeling a need for completion.

I can no longer tell Red Bull ads from condom ads.