Demon Souls: Lost Journal of Necrozen the Unwise

Hello fair souls, it is I, Necrozen the Unwise. I am here to share the tales of my many journeys within the universe of the PS3 Game Demon's Souls. You will see this world through the dark tinted glasses of an evil being. It isn't easy being a dark soul surrounded by so many white knights, thirsty for your blood, but I make the best of it. The few of us who remain are subject to much hatred, humiliation and suffering - or perhaps it is just me, for my name does not lie. I am forever cursed to be unwise.

So for those Dark Souls out there, bent on invading and raining on the parades of the goody little two-shoes, let these papers before you serve not as a guide of what to do, but rather a manifesto of what NOT to do. I may not always know where things went wrong (I refer you back to my name) but even if I don't offer great detail at times, you can at least get a hearty chuckle at my expense. It would warm the cockles of my cold dead soul to know that my death meant something to someone, even if it is just a joke!

Day One
Location: The Archstone of the Shadowmen, Adjudicator Archstone
Current Mood: Hungry for Chaos!

And so it began!!

I ran down the steps of the first arched exit and kick-turned off the landing to face the dark hallway where I planned to do my evil bidding. Once inside, having narrowly escaped the large stinger of a creepy flying stingray thing, I stopped full, found a good spot, and dropped my Black Eye Stone. As I sat and waited, that familiar feeling of excitement vibrated down my spine. I knew I would wreak havoc on the fool white-hearted bastard on the other side of the portal, it was just a matter of time!

I vanished in a puff of nothing and appeared back at the entrance of the Adjudicator (what the hell does that mean anyway?). I made my way down the steps, off the landing and as I turned my head toward the long hallway, I saw two white-lights coming toward me full tilt. I grasped the hilt of my Soulbrandt and pulled the Tower Shield closer to me. TIME FOR CHAOS!

The one who hit me first was in body form, my target, and he dealt a heavy blow with what looked like a Demonbrandt, although it is hard to tell the brand of sword when it is slashing at your head. A quarter of my health fell away immediately. I quickly went for a full moon grass, but it was too late. The blue mage my mark had summoned earlier cast some kind of ground-explodey type spell and it wiped me out with one hit. I gasped and fell to my knees. not only was my pride wounded, but so was my soul.

Note: Avoid mages who know the powerful magic of the ground explodey spell!

...and by gay I mean happy.

I've got to talk about this crap and get it off my chest.

We all know the situation, they made a viral video, last five seconds it says that it was brought to you by Fight Against Grenade Spam blah blah blah I don't need to give the details, you already have them.

I don't agree with it and it did piss me off, but I'm not going to rave about that. I'm going to talk about all the reactions I saw, which bugged me even more than the original mistake!

I haven't talked to anyone in the flesh about this, so I have to base what I know on the forum responses. The annoying ones come in a couple of flavors. Ive seen people say things like "Who cares, what's the big deal?" Or "I'm not gay, but if I were, I wouldn't care!" Or the ever popular "Ï have friends who are gay and THEY don't care so why should I?" And of course there are those who don't even attempt to mask their homophobia and just make some kind of rude remark to be "SHOCKING".

Ignoring the outright homophobic, I think those are all poor excuses.

Who cares, what's the big deal?

The big deal is that the word had and still has a hateful connotation and is used by hateful people in an attempt to subjugate a lifestyle they disagree with. These are the same people who tell gay folks they can't get married or adopt. The same people who hide in alleys near gay clubs and jump them as they pass by. You think those days are over? I have a few friends who would disagree. I know not everyone lives in places like this, where gay people are still abused or forced to hide who they are in fear of harassment or physical harm, but some people do.

I'm not gay, but if I were, I wouldn't care!

That may be true, although I doubt you could really know that without being in the situation, but I'll give you the benefit of doubt and say that if you were gay you wouldn't care. That's fine. But you aren't everybody and in this day and age it seems the route we go is that even if we aren't personally offended by something, if there are those out in the world who are, it is in bad taste to bring it up. Not only in bad taste, but hurtful! And this goes double for something like a derogatory word! It isn't even necessary or clever. It's just the easy door to a laugh at best. But honestly, no one I know would laugh in the first place.

Ï have friends who are gay and THEY don't care so why should I?

There are a couple of holes in this kind of logic.

The first is that perhaps your friends really are insulted, but they don't say anything because that's the first sign of weakness. One of the reactions to living around a sizable group of people who believe that you are the spawn (and or future resident of) hell is that you develop a thick skin to deal with it. Speaking as a pagan, I remember for years I pretended that it didn't bother me when the Christians came to pagan pride day to protest us and call us devil worshipers. I laughed it off. But it did hurt me. Now when they show up, I tell them how I feel right back - I don't toss insults, I explain my feelings.

The other possible situation is that they really don't care. For that, see the above section titled "I'm not gay, but if I were, I wouldn't care!"

So lets wrap it up

The point is that any use of the word, even in jest, can give the word power because those idiots who really believe that being gay is wrong may be standing by listening to you and they might think you are serious. That adds another soldier, in their mind, to their crusade of hate. There's no need for that. Using the word as a joke doesn't take power away from it. Not using it takes the power away. The less people use it, the more the people who do use it stand out and feel dumb for speaking that way.

At any rate, that's how I feel about it. I don't expect change over night, but I just felt the need to voice my own opinion, thanks for listening.

While attempting to beat their own length record, Necrozen and Noby Noby boy get into an argument about
the obvious sexual imagery in the game. Necrozen believes that the game is so thick with sexy stuff that it
was obviously done on purpose. Noby Noby Boy believes differently.

Will the two ever see eye to eye? Watch the video to find out.

[Note: In order to see the text, you will probably have to go to the actual video page on youtube, because
when it is embedded its too small to read. Just go
here, if you
can.]

If you haven't played Noby Noby Boy, you may want to step out, as we'll be discussing stuff that you'll
probably want to discover on your own.

Ok, now that we have that out of the way, I want to talk about the Girl character in Noby Noby Boy.

I should say, before we start, that I haven't researched anything on this game, so I may be completely wrong
or maybe I'm right, or maybe this is shit that people already know, but I was thinking about the girl character in
the game and where she is going.

The little fairy dude says that Girl is traveling to other planets, right? And she grows by adding up all the
growth of all the people who play the game, right? So I was wondering, what happens when she gets to a
new planet? I noticed that there is a "Visit Planet" section in the menu. Does this mean that, once we all work
together and get Girl to a new planet, we will get to visit the planet as well?

I may sound totally crazy, but I'm under the influence of no sleep, a fucked up game, and a number of other
things.

I was wondering what other people think about this. It seems that we, as players of the game, are headed in
a direction collectively, at least with our progress all adding up to a cumulative progress.

Am I totally crazy, or is there more to this than we see on day one?

Apparently, not only does Noby Noby Boy, the new PSN game by the designer of Katamari, eat weird looking
people and giant basketballs and reindeer and robots, but he eats time too.

You'll have to excuse me, much of what I am about to say may not make much sense. I'm under the influence
of digital insanity, but it's not the bad kind.

I swear I had been playing it for maybe 20 or 30 minutes, but the clocks tell me differently. "One and a half
hours!" They say. WTF?

I don't have time to go into the game deep because I have this sudden hunger that I much quench with either a
ham sandwich or maybe a bicycle, but I will say that, in my opinion, Noby Noby Boy is a must buy, but the
weird thing is that if I tell you why, or talk about it too much, it won't be the same for you.

And for five bucks?

The great thing about the game is just exploring it. Everything is charming. The tutorial at the beginning. The
game manual. Every inch of it is drenched in this curious coating of fun. Weird, bizarro fun, but still fun. And
the gameplay is just amazing. The rules are set out in front of you, but not everything is dropped at once, so
you have time to come to terms with how the game works at your own pace. I love how they let me tinker
with things, it was so much more rewarding than telling me what to do and then I follow the directions.

I will say that the community aspects of the game were a complete surprise to me. I wasn't expecting the "lets
work together" attitude. The idea that everyones progress is added together is really neat, and I like that I don't
really know what that means just yet, or where things are headed.

Or where Girl is headed. She wants to connect the planets, apparently, but I think secretly she wants to
connect us as gamers and that is really interesting.

I'm not going to say any more. Go explore it for yourself. Trust me, it is worth the measly five bucks. They
could have charged ten for it easy, and I would have been totally satisfied. It's really cool that they gave it to
us for cheaper.

Also, if you have the game and want to be noby noby friends, add me, PSN: NEScrozen

[Before I start, I just wanted to say that if you are sensitive and you don't want some of the cute little surprises about the new LBP Metal Gear level pack ruined, you probably shouldn't read this.]

I'm not accustomed to my partner Amanda keeping tabs on PSN updates. If it's a new Aquarium simulator on the Wii, she's got you covered, but she wouldn't know what a Crash Commando was if it jumped out from behind a crate and bazooka'd her in the face and I believe she thinks wipeout hd is a skiing game. So needless to say, when she got home and handed me the credit card, saying “LBP. New levels!”, I was a bit surprised. It wasn't that I didn't know about the new levels and costumes, believe me, I knew. But I figured I couldn't get them because I blew 70 bucks on PSN last week (two of their gift cards, a $50 and a $20, we finally got them at target around here), and even suggesting that I wanted to buy something else would be asking for “that look”.



It's funny too, because the new levels and costumes were MGS4 related – not exactly a game she's been known to pop in and play on a whim. Of course, she did watch many of the cut scenes with me, and I think she even squirt out a tear or two during the more heart wrenching moments, but I don't think her thoughts on the game went much further than “Oh, it's sad that all that bad stuff keeps happening to the old man with the bandanna!”



So it was nice to have her support on the download. To have her be so demanding about a game that wasn't WiiPuzzle Number 36 was sweet. The real question is, how did she like it and of course, what did I think about it. Well, first off, she didn't like it. She LOVED it. In the last 2 hours we've played through the entire set, not getting all the stickers, but completing all of the 5 new levels, and we stopped only because she has to get up early in the morning and the rule is that we have to play it together. Which I don't mind because playing with her actually adds a challenge – but don't tell her I said that.

So what were my initial reactions? I was a bit tickled with the direction they went with the story, lampooning the ridiculous number of Trophy levels on LBP by suggesting that Liquid was busy polluting the Little Big Planet with them using some kind of overly complex machine. It was actually pretty funny, and the final scene was really engaging. We got down to our last life, and just barely made it by the skin of our teeth. A GOOD boss fight on LBP? YES!



The weird story line wasn't the only surprise the level pack had in store for me. I mean, I fully expected the new guns and familiar aesthetic of MGS4 to freshen things up – even the music, but I have to say that the stealth gameplay completely caught me by surprise. It's funny too, because with the 3 layered playing field of the game, it's perfect for hiding from the search lights that sit at the top of the level. The first time we hit a search light and heard that familiar alarming sound, and the doors dropped down trapping us so that we were materialized by the turret – well, I jumped out of my seat and I also got a warm feeling in my heart. I knew this little level pack was going to make a game I already adore EVEN BETTER! Which, if you asked me a week before I even knew this level kit was coming, I would have told you was impossible.

So aside from the surprises, how did it play? Very well. Each level, even the introduction it seems, offers multiple plays. Similar to the pack-in levels on the disk, they use sticker triggers to have you play through more than once. A sticker you may need at the beginning of the level could be found at the end, so you have to play through once, get it, and then go again and place the sticker on the trigger to get the reward. The difference here, which I first noticed with the VR Mission, is that, with the placing of the acquired sticker, not only did I get rewards, but the entire level transformed, becoming a new, harder level. Turrets appeared where there were none the first time, the floor dropped out in certain places. It become much more challenging, letting us utilize the new shooting and dodging mechanics we'd learned our first go through.



My girlfriend, who really isn't into shooting games, had a little trouble with aiming and fighting with the guns at first, but I was there to get her out of trouble most of the time. And soon she was running and gunning like no tomorrow! Speaking of the shooting, I loved the way they handled the aiming, very similar to the aiming in Crash Commando – R1 shoots and you aim with the right stick, giving you a full crescent range of motion.

So the real question is, is it worth it? Hell yes. I'm actually surprised they didn't charge the usual 10 bucks this time around. I suppose we can chalk it up as a christmas gift, although no one will notice. Most people seem to only want to complain when gaming companies make mistakes, but they never want to give them props when they are nice!



Anyway, if you own LBP and you haven't picked up the expansion yet, what are you waiting for! And if you've decided to wait on getting LBP altogether, the shear range of possibilities this download offers is definitely the nudge you've been waiting for.

If you're on LBP, my PSN is NEScrozen. Lets do a time run on the VR level together. The name of my character? Solid Sack.... Yeah, I know.