That pretty much sums it up.


10 minutes ago I tried to update my m33 firmware for my PSPphat (The Gen 5.50 A+B thing if anyone knows what I'm talking about)...

Everything is going smoothly until the screen prompts me to press X to leave the install menu. FROZEN!
Switching the power off, I quickly turn it back on only to find that my beloved machine can no longer boot up. I've never witnessed the bricking of a PSP, but this must be it.

Now, I have no clue as to why this happened but I am deeply saddened. My precious Omni-device. My mobile companion. DEAD!??!?!!?!?

All I can think of is that Total Recall quote:

"DON'T FUCK WIT'CHER BRAIN PAL...IT AIN'T WORTH IT!!!"

Uuugh..

I guess I gotta play by the rules from now on. I don't use a PC and am without a Pandora's Battery.

When is the PSPGo coming out???? *single tear*




FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKKKK YOUUUUUUUU HARRRRRYYYYY!!!!!!!!!!!!

So last night my friend and I found ourselves in a rut. Lounging around with a storm brewing outside, I was drawing in Photoshop, he had Fallout 3 going. Going stir crazy is pretty common for me, and after about 4 or 5 hours of being sedentary, I suggested we dip to a nearby bar and eatery. When I heard about this place, I was overjoyed by the sheer novelty of it all.





It's called "Chatterbox" - really just a place for night owls and college crowds. You can score big glasses of beer and bottles of wine if you really wanted to. There's some decent grub, but the magic is in the money-making gimmick they present to you.

Let me start off by saying the interior of this place is surreal. Around the perimeter of the interior, it's set up like diner booths, but the center looks like your Aunt's living room from 1989. Cheesy sofas and cushions with barf-inducing floral patterns, low coffee tables, TV's with NES and Sega Genesis hooked up....

Wait, what?

Yes! For $2 a pop you can play any cartridge from a substantial list of games, displayed in the back of their menu. The prospect is amazing, if you ask me. It's like paying someone to be your mommy for the night. Needless to say, we had the poor waitress bring us Super Mario 3, and a pint each.

There was a level of guilt involved, maybe similar to how a married man would feel at a strip club. These poor young women waiting hand and foot on a bunch of drunk man-children all night..it just felt wrong.

I felt myself regress to a child-like state as I gulped pale ale and slapped buttons on that archaic NES controller. Entranced by he glowing images of my childhood, I could not even respond to the waitress when she asked us what we wanted to eat:

"Huh??! Oh! Onion rings and the quesadilla!!!"

Wow.


Chatterbox isn't a place where you go to hit on the cute women that work there. They already think you're a loser by default. It's extremely possible to burn through all the cash in your wallet at a place like this, but man, is it fun to let your inner child wreak havoc.







PS- three pints later, they closed the place for the night and we couldn't even beat world 2 :[

Anyone who isn't a gamer typically frowns on somebody who prefers to stay indoors and tinker with their Nintendo on a beautiful August afternoon. I personally see it all as a balancing act, but I refuse to shun video games as if they were a bad habit, or a "bridge to nowhere".

Throughout my life video games have been a sort of companion. They have stimulated my imagination and motivated me to do things other than simply gawking at a glowing screen for 8 hours at a time. (Typically my sessions last no more than 2, 3 hours tops.)

Well, here I am in Minnesota, on a little vacation. I brought my laptop of emulators and a PSP with me, but haven't done much gaming at all, really. I watched a friend beat MGS4 (he was dissapointed, heh), booted up Xenogears on my PSP and wandered around Lahan briefly, but alas, little was accomplished.

I'm excited to journey back, however. After watching MGS4 on an HD display, I was convinced I had to replace my SD television (which actually suffers screen burn, by the way). The ability to read text easily is essentially why I feel compelled to do this. It may seem like a trivial reason to shell out $500, but really, gaming is a vice worth investing in. This is what I have concluded.

There is more pleasure in sitting down at your leisure and playing through a virtual world that fascinates you, instead of chasing the bottom of a booze bottle and wondering where it all went once you've guzzled all the whiskey down. Don't get me wrong, I do enjoy my beverages and such, but I have realized that video games are the most reliable, and healthiest escape I have ever been exposed to.


I do lament over the stigma gamers receive. They are branded as anti-social, pasty-skinned angsty souls, but in reality we know this isn't true. The gamer is a living window that looks in to the future. We are one of the few groups of humanity to truly embrace the digital and virtual revolutions - supporting and setting standards for technological phenomenon for decades to come.

It's been a while since I played a game offline.

For the last few months I was playing the crap out of Mercenaries 2's co-op campaign. It left me with a bland, metallic taste in my mouth. The delayed DLC which hit PSN recently was pretty sub-par. I only skimmed through it's contents, but four challenge missions, a tank that might've rolled off the set of Mad Max 4 and Obama/Palin skins smells like straight up filler, to me. I knew I had the right idea when I posted that picture of a bologna sandwich in one of my previous blog posts..

I quickly forgot about Merc's glaring issues with my return to the world of Warhawk. Climbing my way to Wingman rank granted me...well, pretty much nothing. So little infarct, that I was outraged. It's absurd to think that 2500 points later, all I got to unlock was a wife beater for my Eucadian dude...insanity!!!
Don't get me wrong, I still love to play Warhawk, but since obtaining a dirty undershirt for my soldier I've been approaching rank-up differently: taking it in stride, not necessarily having my gaming time dictated by the necessity to earn another 5000 points as quickly as I can. What will I unlock next? A wrist watch? Come on...

The other day my area received about a foot of snow. It was my day off from another ridiculous work week, I had no obligations and a plate of cheese and crackers on my desk...and so I put on a little game called LOST PLANET.



This is why I miss the offline experience. It's all here in this game..

It's old, it's just another third person shooter/adventure title, but some things about this game really strike me..maybe because it reminds me of a dumbed-down version of BIONIC COMMANDO, which I eagerly anticipate..but to put it simply, it's the combination of tight controls, monster fights reminiscent of Shadow of The Colossus, mech game play and the integral necessity of obtaining heat energy. It's not a particularly dense game..but I'm the type of guy that loves the idea of being resourceful in a snowy wasteland. Exploring for those dumb spinning coins, and having a bunch of memorable, kick-ass gunfights the whole way through.

LOST PLANET reminds me that I can still have fun playing games by myself. Taking it all at my own pace, I can romp around in a virtual wasteland of snow and ice, fighting vicious beasts with gun and grenade..ah, the demons of Winter.

Note: Scroll down all the way if you think it's tl;dr



Okay, so this game's been out for a little bit of time. Some of you beat it and forgot about it, others could give two shits about its existence..well, I've been taking my sweet, sweet time with this title, and I finally finished it, playing online.

I was pretty frustrated at first, with this title. The glitches, lazy programming, textures and AI were getting in the way of what I had hoped would be a brilliant sandbox game. I continued to feel this way until my friend and I got around to unlocking the missions and vehicles for the "Allies" (Americans), and Chinese factions. Really, at this point, it truly grows into its maturity as a sandbox game.

Glitches and shortcomings aside, when you've got a big pen to play in and a lot of amazing tanks, copters and weapons, you will barely give a crap about any of the hang ups. In fact, some shitty programming makes the game all the more fun. The fact that so many vehicles are fragile to rocket fire means that you'll be jumping in and out of whatever you can get your mitts on. This was annoying at the start of the game, because all you get to play with are jeeps and a few light tanks, and really lame helicopters. It felt really restrained and redundant.

I think the "fragility" issue for vehicles goes hand in hand with the fact that even if you free fall from 30,000 feet, you will not die. Your mercenary is meant to be perceived as a super-human. With an ultra-strong melee attack and the inability to die if dropped from the sky or caught in a fiery blast, the overall feel of Mercenaries 2: World In Flames is akin to the days of my childhood when I played in the muddy backyard with my GI Joes. Lots of violent, ridiculous antics stretched through the filter of fantastical imagination.



This is the only vehicle you will care about


Really, I feel these overlooked details were purely intentional. It creates a frenzy, a mad rush of action, as if the game was souped up on lots of coffee or was diagnosed with ADD. It emphasizes the fact that this game is nothing more than a sandbox for your mind to play in. You aren't supposed to care about the story, and you never will once you get your hands on an Ambassador Gunship.

Some other things I wanted to say, though.

When it's time to beat the game, you have to choose one side to ally with. I chose the Allies, which put me up against the Chinese..I warn you, however. If you don't finish all of the missions for the various factions, you won't have the chance to do so once you complete the final few contracts. This is a load of bullshit, and really unforgivable. The recent patch did nothing about this (in fact, all it did was add trophies, right?), so that means beating Mercenaries 2 is pretty much similar to when you beat Mercenaries 1..lots of aimless killing in a big world.

Granted, there are more enemies to find and slaughter, and a lot of cool locales to decimate..but it seems like it will get boring pretty quickly. I can only hope the November DLC will add some fun in the mix, because really, the only incentive for replay is to start the game over and try to achieve 100% before you have to pick a side to wrap up the campaign.





Nuke drops, though.

This is the entire focal point of the game. I'm pretty sure the guys at Pandemic wanted to make their title relevant to the times. You can see it clearly with the UP faction, the fact that Venezuela is being ripped apart by proxy war (you don't even get money for killing Venezuelan troops, they're nothing but cannon fodder..mere obstacles) but most importantly, the necessity of the Nuclear Bunker Buster and how you get to abuse the shit out of them once you beat the game. Sure, they cost $ 1.0 million, but god damn is it worth it. Drop one on an oil rig and tell me I'm lying.

Don't think Mercenaries 2 is warning the people of impending nuclear doom? When you beat it, the Allied HQ is cut off because of a looming mushroom cloud erupting from the center of it, It's a giant, ominous landmark that can be seen in the distance, and it doesn't dissipate. This was the icing on the cake for me. When I saw this, I was convinced Mercenaries 2 earned the props that it deserves. It may be put together sloppily, it may piss you off at times because of the glitches, but the fun you get out of simulated nuclear holocaust makes it all worth it.

What a great fucking game. Renders the first one obsolete, and 10x as fun. I will definitely be playing this over again, essentially because I didn't get to unlock the Ambassador Gunship in time and the Chinese equivalent that I do have is crappy in comparison. I will close this essay with one, burning question:


WHERE DA PLANES AT, YO?!??!?!?/1/1/







TLDR:

-This game with its glitches makes for an experience much like being on speed as a child while playing with GI Joes.
-Pandemic says nukes are bad yet we all love and worship them
-Beat all the missions before you choose Allies or Chinese at the end because I was stupid and now can't buy any Ambassador's.
-Planes for DLC please

Thank you for your $65...idiot!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


Well I'm about 36% in this game and I really haven't been playing it that much. Between a few sessions of online co-op and some offline play, I've managed to reach the cuff of this game's half-way point...WTF?

I think we can all conclude that this game isn't truly a next-gen app. Fair enough. It's still wicked fun despite glitches and PS2 physics, but what the fuck is up with the depth of this game? Aside from challenge/betting games (which, IMO, are pretty boring), all you can really do is make sure you bomb all the targets, kill or capture all the HVT's, find the hidden red boxes and unlock all landing zones. Come on, that's lame..there's no way that is gonna be enough meat to satisfy a gamer that lusts for the sandbox.

Not only that, but the map of Venezuela is sooo deceiving!!! It seems large, and I know the first Mercenaries had two average sized maps separated as "hemispheres", but it was chock-full of residential or industrial areas.

75% of the Mercs 2 map is all hilly landscape dotted with ferns and palm trees, with an occasional broken down shack. This game's world map is like a shitty bologna..a little taste, all filler. The scale of it doesn't really impress me when all I'm doing is flying over it or speeding through it.

Starting to get let down, 2 weeks in to this game. I still dig it..but I should've waited on snatching this up.