At least a couple of other bloggers have laid claim to Miss Newscaster, but none of them have seen to give any reasons. I, however, have constructed an infallible case, albeit with fewer images than those of my staffing predecessors.

She is a she, and therefore has lady legs:

Being a lady, one can only assume that Rochelle has legs, and there is a better than average chance of her knowing how to move them. I have been told, on good authority, that I have excellent drag legs, and my calves have garnered the envy of several women, therefore, these would be easy shoes (and pants) to try walking in.

She is wearing a pink shirt:

While pink is unerringly associated with femininity, and therefore fitting for a woman such as Rochelle, such affectations cannot sway me from my claim. I am secure enough in my masculinity that I wear an entire spectrum of purple shirts, one of which is magenta, the color that gets the balance right between purple and pink.



Her pink shirt is a Depeche Mode shirt:

Clearly a sign of impeccable taste, Rochelle's choice of music fandom lends itself well to my impending portrayal of her. Depeche Mode's library has long been intertwined with my own life as it has Rochelle's, from my early confusion at my first viewing of the video for Policy Of Truth, to figuring out how to make my Pocket Pikachu's alarm play the opening strains of Just Can't Get Enough. In this case, a great mind and a fictional one clearly share the same strange love.

She's the one with the axe:

And, given her lack of an X chromosome, she is clearly the one wielding the frying pan most of the time. Between her skill in chopping and familiarity with the kitchen, it's just a matter of time before Rochelle builds a new life in the ruined, civilization-free world that will be left once the zombies have come and gone, and the landscape is changing. My relative experiences in the Boy Scouts and as a cook, respectively, make me the clear choice to control her when the undead arrive in force.

She is tolerant and accepting of all:

Not only does she prove to be Nick's personal Jesus, buy grabbing his hand in order to save him from the overly creepy clown-type zombies, but Rochelle even seems to be willing to enjoy the silence when hiding from a spitter with Ellis. She's even slightly friendly toward him in her reassurances in the face of an endless, undead horde. Rochelle has something that helps her understand that people are people, and it's called a heart.

She's not Ellis:



It doesn't matter that I admire Rochelle's ability to deal with Ellis, but it's only because it reminds me of how I've learned to mostly ignore the backward, unwashed, bedsheet-wearing masses that you encounter as soon as you travel more than an hour outside of Philadelphia. Seeing as how I live just an hour outside of Philadelphia, you may understand why I would not want to become the thing I hate, even if it's only a game.

Man, fuuuuuck Ellis.

I seem to have neglected making an introductory blog post. Let's make up for lost time.

My name's Chris. I was born in Jersey, but spent most of my time growing up in Pennsylvania suburbs steadily further from Philly. I fell into gaming fairly early, with some light arcade and Atari 2600 exposure (from restuarants and relatives, respectively) in my first few years, and getting curious about stuff like Number Munchers and Oregon Trail on the Apple IIgs computers we had in the library's computer lab. Still, I'm more of a console gamer, and it started with the Christmas of 1987, when I got an NES.

Back in the day when the Zapper was still grey, and Super Mario Bros. and Duck Hunt came on the same cartridge in the box, I tossed all that aside and popped in the shiny gold game that we'd gotten as a side gift. Thus began my love affair with the Legend Of Zelda series, which continues to this day.

Years burned on, and I grew up Nintendo, getting the Game Boy, SNES, and Nintendo 64 for Christmas on the years following each system's release. Thankfully, my brother and I had friends with Sega stuff, so I developed an appreciation for both sides of the early console wars. It's a viewpoint that's helped a lot, given the evolution of fanboy rabidity alongside the growth of an internet that gives said fanboys more people to scream at.

Flashing forward some more, I ended up with a PlayStation not long after my N64, and from there, my system acquisitions were my responsibility. I've had a PS2, Xbox, every Game Boy besides the Pocket, and a Gamecube since then, with a Dreamcast thrown in there towards the end of its life, a Saturn tacked on waaaaaaaay after those died out, and a Virtual Boy that's mostly a display piece right now. I early-adopted when the PSP and DS first dropped, but beyond a DSlite, I haven't gone that far with the whole handheld hardware realm as of late.

I rock a 360 and a Wii when it comes to consoles, with a PS3 hopefully joining the shelf around year's end, now that the slim dropped. PC, I dabble in on and off, but I've mostly sworn of MMOs since two bouts of recovering from World Of Warcraft, and the last non-MMO I can remember playing remotely seriously was Age Of Empires III.

But what do I do outside of gaming? I'm a cook by trade, with a side job running trivia nights at the bar I cook for, and a hobby there trying to work through their rather expansive selection of small-label and import brews whenever I'm done for the night. Two cats, a steadily growing music collection, and the books and films people keep lending me tend to keep me busy most days. Besides food and drink, I like to dabble here and there with writing and doodling, and occasionally get sucked into cosplaying at anime conventions by my friends. Never dressed up to get better at any games at home, though. That's just weird.

I ended up finding Dtoid via HAWP, which I found delightful, but ended up sitting on my account for several months before actually posting in here or on the forums. I'm really glad I found this place, seeing as how my own weak attempts at game blogging weren't really anything or anywhere that would garner an audience, and the crowds from other places where I'm active weren't nearly as into discussing gaming in any depth as regular posters and most of the podcasters here tend to be. So it's nice to feel like I can ramble every now and again and expect some sort of discourse, even if it's people telling me to shut my typehole.

Here's hoping I can avoid boring or annoying too many of you to death. Pleased to be here.

Story time, children! Everyone pull up your cushions and sit in a semicircle!

Once upon a time, there was no such thing as a massively multiplayer online game. No, really. No one had figured out how to make pictures move with button presses for a bunch of people at once, but they did have words. So, some guys found a way to let people type letters and words to help play pretend with other people on their computer screens.

The first iteration of these were called MUDs, short for multi-user dungeons. Essentially a cross between a D&D game and a choose your own adventure book, these games used relatively simple commands to allow players to explore a world, collect items and equipment, and actually party up to kill everything that moved. It wasn't that far removed from today's World Of Warcraft or EverQuest, but with more reading, more difficult mapping, and the convenience of just rolling a striking character, setting up a macro to follow the party's tank, and letting everyone else do the work while you went and had a sandwich.

Fun, but monotonous, MUDs eventually grew up into more interactive and creatively stimulative forms. Their names varied based on their coding, but MUSEs, MUSHes, MUCKs, and MUXes were pretty much all the same thing.

MUCKs were the first particularly popular spin-off of the MUD, but I never played on any MUCKs, and they're traditionally chock-full of furries anyway, so we'll move on to MUSHes. MUSH, which some backronym to stand for multi-user shared hack, it was originally just a play on the word "mud," much like its brother the MUCK. Gameplay on MUSHes was a lot less structured, primarily taking the form of "pose" roleplay.

Characters would act out whatever they were doing, and then it would be up to the other characters in the scene or being interacted with to pose in turn, until everyone got angry at everyone else and logged out in rage. Then it would all be adopted as the MUSHes' overarcing story canon! Hooray! Most MUSHes, at least that I ran into, were loosely themed after existing fictional universes (Pern, anime in general, Battlestar Galactica), so imagine a horrible cross between LARPing, bad fanfiction, and an AOL chatroom, and you've pretty much got the gist.

MUSEs and MUXes tended to be a little more structured, with systems and commands in place on many of them to facilitate dice-roll or other stat-based roleplaying systems, making them a major draw for tabletop roleplayers. Those more inclined to Dungeons & Dragons still stuck to the MUDs, which were still going strong, but MUSHes based on games like White Wolf's World Of Darkness series, the Battletech universe, and many a permutation of GURPS were easy to find and easy to play.

The neat thing about the post-MUD MU*s (and some later MUDS) was the level of user input they invited, if not demanded. Game worlds, including all the items, locations, and non-player characters, were all created and coded by real people. Getting in on the ground floor of a MUSE could almost guarantee you a job writing something, be it actual code or the easier job of typing up the descriptions people saw when they looked at things or entered a new room. Essentially collaborative gamemaking, it was kind of a shame when things got prettified and dumbed down once Ultima Online rolled onto the scene.

Some MU*s still persist to this day, if you feel like tracking down a client to play them, but for the most part, their value lies in little more than nostalgia. They're still furry hives, too, for those furs who haven't found Furcadia or DeviantArt. Explore at your own risk.



(Every kind of picture I could think of that might have been relevant to this post literally made me feel ill. It didn't help that about halfway through the article, I was listening to the part of this week's HAWPcast with the furry/inflation talk and I just started hating the internet and everything in it after remembering the times I found each on my own.)

Word on the street is that some folks are unhappy with Halo 3: ODST's price point being that of a full game, when initially it was hailed as a "standalone expansion." While I do agree the backpedal to a full-game price point, after statements were made that it would not be so, was a less than savory move, I'd have to say there's enough content to justify the switch.

For starters, let's discuss the biggest hype magnet on the two discs, Firefight mode. Similar in many ways to Gears Of War 2's Horde mode, this new multiplayer co-op experience pits you against wave after wave of Covenant with up to three friends, scoring you based on your kill count, what was killed, and in some cases, how you killed it. It's refreshing to see a more interesting, team-based experience than the "grab some dudes and play the story again" co-op that's been a staple in previous Halo games.



Firefight also comes with its own set of maps which, while not playable in Halo 3 proper (yet?), seem well-tailored to the experience. It's nice to see some new locales, especially ones that will be familiar to anyone who plays through the campaign mode, rather than relying on existing multiplayer maps which may have presented problems, even keeping within one size range. There have been some groans about the lack of a matchmaking mode in Firefight, but honestly? In a situation where I'm trusting three other people to watch my back and be complicit in mass murder of an alien onslaught, I would much sooner check my friends list and send some invites than put my life in the hands of some prepubescent with a penchant for calling everyone else a "fag" if things start turning hairy mid-wave.

Since we're already on the Gears comparison track, let's continue by comparing the campaign modes of these two games, with their similar themes and similarly rabid fanbases. Many of the complaints of overpricing stem from the fact that ODST's story nets you an experience from six to eight hours in length, depending on how much extra stuff you do. Reports say that this is about the same amount of game time in Gears 2 outside of multiplayer, and plenty people paid full price for that and Horde mode without complaining. Hmm.



Playing as an ODST in and of itself is refreshing without being too jarring for those who've already spent many an hour in a Mjolnir suit (or Sangheili battle armor, if that's what rubs your rhubarb). The stamina/life bar system is more reminiscent of the very first Halo's health setup, which is almost as nice a throwback for series oldbies as the return of the pistol's dominance. Still, being a mere man being pitted against some of the Covenant's heaviest hitters gives players incentive to rewrite their standard playbook.

The story itself is rewarding as well, especially for those prone to fanwanking over Halo's backstory and universe, and while there are still some holes left (what did Buck ask Dare that morning, anyway?) once things wrap up, and your teammates besides Buck are pretty much just there for flavor, the vignette as whole fleshes out what happened in New Mombassa rather nicely. Additionally, the description for the "meet the characters" vidoc mentions that Buck survived Reach, so I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see him show up, even briefly, in that forthcoming Halo title.

Then there's the second disc that comes with ODST. When they say you get the full multiplayer package, you get the full multiplayer package. All of the matchmaking capabilities, maps, game variants, filesharing, and Forge mode from the original Halo 3 are on the disc, as well as every single map pack available as downloadable content, and the last three whose achievements have been teasing players for quite some time. That's $40 worth of material, if you count both halves of the Mythic pack, three maps apiece, as costing $10.

Some players may feel cheated by this, having already downloaded the maps before, but such is the price of early adoption. Did you have fun playing those maps when they came out? If not, feel free to feel hosed, but otherwise, shush. Really, it's like yelling at any company that's released a GOTY edition of their game with extra content a year or more after the game's initial release. If anything, having all the maps on one disc frees up some room on your hard drive, which never hurts. That, and no worries of re-downloading things in the rare case of hard drive failure.

So to recap, what you're getting may have originally been dubbed an "expansion" and estimated to cost $40 rather than a full $60, but it comes with $40 of maps, and to top it off, a ticket to the Beta for Halo: Reach when the time comes. Even without the dulcet tones of Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, and Tricia Helfer gracing the player's ears, you'd be getting more than your money's worth.

So please, tell me what the problem is here.



...though I will concede that having nothing more than a pretty controller in the "Collector's Edition" is a slap in the face after all the sweeter Collector's versions of previous Halo games. Had the figure Toys R Us was offering been thrown into the bundle, with a sweeter box, I might have considered it.





...and If they're going to keep hiring Firefly people, can we please get the rest of the cast in on this? Jewel Staite and Morena Baccarin as more sexy AIs, or even just female Spartans in Reach, please.

Hey D-babe

Parents are away for the weekend. Christen their queen-size with me? Hit me back ASAP.

- Lawr


~*~


Davey,

I don't know what's happened, but why have you stopped returning my calls? Are you avoiding me? I haven't seen you at any of our usual meetup spots, either. One of the guys at GameStop said he saw you come in and browse the PC section for a bit a couple weeks ago, but he had to get something from the back, and when he came back out, you were already gone. Let me know what's up, I miss you.

Your Laur-bar

~*~



Dave:

Still no word from you, so I tried your friends, and they've been no help. Are you hiding something from me? Is "raid" a code word for some weird sex thing? Or someone else you're having weird sex with, instead of me?

They mention these "parties" all the time, but just blink, mutely, when I ask if they're going to just have cans or bottles, or if someone's bringing a keg. I tried looking up directions to one of the places Rick mentioned, but there's no "Gnomeregan" or "Mulgore" in the area, nevermind in this state.

I was thinking they could be the names of residence houses on one of the area college campuses; I know at my school, we've got houses named after all sorts of weird, obscure philosophers, and their names get pretty crazy. Where are you? I think we need to talk.

- Laura


~*~


Seriously, Dave?

I got your reply to my last email, finally, about how I was getting aggravated by your crap. Thing is, I can't make heads or tails of the thing. I'm going to assume "pally" is some ironic throwback term for "friend," but what exactly would any of my friends do to "tank" for me, and how would that help this situation at all?

It's like you're speaking some sort of crazy new language you just made up. Try again, in English, and we still may have a chance to work this thing out.

- L


~*~


David, I'm done with this.

I'm tired of these games, and your unwillingness to try and resurrect what we had rather than having to drag yourself all the way back to where you started. We're through. I hope you're happy with this other woman (women? men?) or whatever, because I know I'm going to be a lot happier without an invisible boyfriend who isn't around to stick his invisible penis in me because he's never there. Not that it was all that visible when you were. Go to hell.

No, really. I don't like you at all, and I don't want to talk. Not that you do. Delete my number from my phone and forget about responding to this.

I hope I never see you again, but somehow, I don't feel like that's going to be an issue.

What do you do when a genius tanuki steals the key to your gold stash, and puts into motion plans to turn the entire world's population into tanuki?



Simple. You put on a bunny suit, hop on a dragon, and kill anything that moves.



The Sega CD, like many Sega systems, was a decent home for shooters in its day, but none released at the time were quite as... peculiar as Keio Flying Squadron. Set in feudal Japan, the whole idea was that your family, guardians of this ancient key, lose said key to a tanuki with a 1400 IQ. Enraged, and threatened by your mother that no dinner will come for you until the key is retrieved, you throw on a "battle suit" (the bunny outfit) and hop on your dragon, Spot (aka Pochi, in Japan and Europe).

Challenge level was reasonable, but it was the cast of characters that gave it charm. Besides the core I already mentioned, there was a wide assortment of cute legions in Dr. Pon Eho's (mister 1400 IQ's) employ that spanned the range of Japanese mythological creatures, including this recurring fish-dude who piloted several boss thingies.

I say "thingies" because I have no idea what to call this:



Gameplay was pretty straightforward, scrolling shooter fare, with the option of acquiring up to two additional mini-dragons to assist you (a la Tiger-Heli, but sideways), but it was the game's charm that kept players coming back. That, and vaguely unwholesome thoughts about Rami, the main character, who could not possibly have been an adult given her birthdate according to the story, despite the American manual saying she was.



Unfortunately, charm was not enough to gain much ground for the franchise here in the States, so all we got in North America was the first game in the series. Later on, a sequel dropped on the Saturn that made its way to Europe, but murdering things with Pochi was only an occasional gameplay element, now that things had taken on more of a platforming (and still murdering) bent.

I'd love to suggest trying to pick a copy of Keio up if you can find it, but considering I just saw a copy of the Japanese original on eBay asking for $300, no. Don't. I may have fond memories of the brief time I had playing this on a friend's Sega CD, but no one game is worth the price of your (or someone else's) first-born child and fifty cents.



Good night, sweet princess, and may legions of forest creatures with magical genitalia send ye to thy rest.