Because they helped get me a PS3 in return for nothing but hours of essaying on Silent Hill 2, which is the kind of thing I spend most of my free time doing anyway.



When this package arrived, I came. I came so hard that it required several buckets to clear out the great mounds of semen which forcefully ejected out of my pants. I am now up to date on videogames, and I feel great that I get to enjoy the variety of titles that are now available for the PS3. So, this post was mostly just to glorify this moment and remind everyone that mracles can happen. I now want to get a true surround sound setup in my living room so I can fully enjoy the PS3's incredible audio processing, and from what I've read developers on the PS3 are taking full advantage of its' capabilities.

I'll leave this with a quick rundown of the debilitating gaming I've engaged in for the last two weeks.

Fallout 3- Loved the originals, this one is like them with more violencegasms.

Portal- HOLY FUCK! Better than having eight hundred orgasms.

Skate.- It's so smooth and realistic that my semen managed to clog the wheels on the skateboard.

Critter Crunch - I came rainbows.

Half-Life 2 - pretty good, it's got guns I think.

Fat Princess- was alright until the experienced online players started jerking off on my dead body.

Playstation Home- may be more pointless than drinking horse semen.

Oddworld came into existence at a fantastic time for gaming. The shift from 2D to 3D was still stumbling about, and the industry had just come out of the incredible streak of games released on the Genesis and Super Nintendo. The makers of Oddworld: Abe's Odysee called themselves Oddworld Inhabitants, and they created a game which was beautiful, bizarre, odd, and highly innovative. The game shines in every single aspect of production, but for now; I'm concerned with the game's sound and its sound alone, and there's plenty to get in to.



The most innovative feature of Abe's Odysee is the voice of Abe and the other stumpy Mudokons which you encounter. You are able to make Abe say a few different prompts by holding down an L button and a face button including: two different whistles, a hello, a giggle, an angry hiss, "come here", "wait", and a glorious fart. Each sound is used in a game you play with other Mudokons, which is virtually just a game of Simon Says which joyfully ends with a fart every time. The most endearing sound in Abe's voice is the boyish giggle he makes after he lets one loose.

Back in 1997 this kind of sound interactivity was almost unheard of, although PaRappa the Rapper was released in the previous year. The game's Simon Says tasks fall into an audio category which Karen Collins, a game sound author, calls "adaptive audio". Adaptive audio is any sound in a game which reacts to a players input; like gunshots or in our case, a cute little fart. The difference between Oddworld's approach and previous examples of adaptive audio is that the skill of memorizing the sequence of sounds creates a slower and more methodical feeling, and the ultimate effect is that you truly feel like you are talking to the other Mudokons with a special language which you and them share. This conversation illusion is evident at the beginning of every encounter, where you must reciprocate the other Mudokon's "hello" before they start to speak with you. While PaRappa the Rapper used adaptive audio to create a purely technical challenge for the player, Oddworld uses the input of the player to immerse them in a foreign world, while also maintaining a technical challenge to keep it fun and realistic.

An interesting thing to note before I get into the other voices is that ALL the voices in ALL the Oddworld games were voiced by one person. Lorne Lanning is his name, and he's a badass. But Abe's Odysee only includes one other fully voiced character within the gameplay, and it's the Sligs.



Sligs are vile, nasty creatures with snouts that look like an ill fitting glove. The sligs are mean as bees, and their voices portray this with a mixture of croaky mumbles and grumbly exclamations. The points in the game where you can control the sligs allows you to talk as one, but it's much more satisfying to make them shoot eachother. The sligs have a ton of attitude, and they're at their most crude when one kills Abe and lets out oa few victory croaks.

The last character voice I wanted to note isn't really a character at all, but a horse-camel-kangaroo dinosaur thing called an Elum. The Elums are very obedient and sweet, and it makes my heart flutter every time I hear one make a mournful moo-howl whenever you ask it to stay behind, they're just adorable.



ATMOSPHERE! This game has loads of it, and it is conveyed through a few different ways. If you're inside the slimy metallic factory setting of Rupture Farms, there's grinding noises and a general soundscape of what I can only describe as mechanical tedium. If you're in the desert setting of Scrabania, there's a lot of animal noise in the background, with an abundance of half cricket-owl noises throughout. These sounds were nothing revolutionary in video game sound design, but they were presented with such detail and care that still today they outperform other titles in the depth and imagery contained within them. The real experiment going on in Abe's Odysee was it's adaptive score.

In video games, an adaptive score is a musical arrangement which changes based on the player's actions. A recent masterpiece of an adaptive score was Shadow of the Collosus, wherein the music would begin as suspenseful and minimal, then slowly build in intensity and OMG-ness once the player had mounted the colossus. In Oddworld, the score will add in exciting drum fills whenever Abe was jumping a particularly treacherous cliff or if he had unwitingly alerted a nearby Scrab of his presence. The drums can get a bit annoying at times, but when they are implemented right, they add a dramatic tension to several segments of the game that make the tedious trial and error gameplay into a much more tolerable, and downright exciting gameplay experience. Adaptive scores have been around since the speeding up of the music at the end of a timer in Super Mario World, but Abe's Odysee really stepped up the whole concept by making it into a more spontaneous effect.

That's it, with science.

So I've played about 9 more hours of love since the last post I made, and I have now pretty well wrapped my head around the gameplay. This game is a bit unclear in communicating to the player what you're supposed to do, but fortunately, it's kind of fun figuring out how the different elements work together.

In order to play LOVE to its fullest, you have to deal with routing power from around the world into your settlement, which requires two people to really get it done. Someone has to go and collect a token for the power generator, and another has to build walls and reinforce the settlement so that the AI won't attack your precious home. The design of settlements involves a lot of interesting elements, because you have to be able to defend from incoming AI that will steal your tokens, making you less capable of developing your settlement. This usually involves having simple entry points and large walls, but my settlement uses a slightly more elegant method.

Our monolith is on an island, with one steep bridge leading up to it. I built one extra large tower on a corner of the island which allows me to leap across to the cliff that's nearest us. That's pretty much the only way out, and the bridge is the only way in. While we were building up our settlement, we obscured any work we were doing from passersby by building extra large walls so they couldn't see us. The AI is very intelligent, and it doesn't cheat, so if it can't see you, it won't know you're there. This allowed us to build up to a relatively defensible and advanced state without any attacks, though we always keep one person on guard, watching the bridge.

Once you get power and possibly some better building tokens, you become more visible because enemies can see power beams heading into your settlement. This forces you to develop at a careful pace, and it also forces you to be careful about stealing tokens from enemy settlements, because they will try to find you, and if you're not equipped to defend against them, your settlement is over. It's a very well-paced experience and it's a lot of fun sneaking into other settlements and stealing their tokens, then rushing back to your own home, deftly hopping around the unpredictable world.

That's enough for today, but I would like to add one more thing.



<rant>Online gaming veterans stand out like a sore thumb in LOVE, because they're jaw-clenchingly obnoxious. I was part of a ridiculously over built settlement, which had about 12 people in it and about five entrances. The AI started attacking on a regular basis, and during a firefight, I accidentally shot of a little friendly fire. I looked in the chat screen and saw "WHO'S THE GRIEFER!" "I DUNNO, FUCKING GRIEFER!" "I THINK IT'S MINTAKON GRIEF GRIEF GRIEF". Then some pompous turd said "well, I'm chatting with the dev right now, so I'll tell him."</rant>

Now I can't access LOVE for the time being. These kind of things are why I don't normally play online games, because people play for 8 hours straight and their primate brain takes over. Hopefully I can resolve this without wasting too much of Eskil's time, because this is not the kind of thing he should have to deal with. Seriously, next time, instead of throwing a hissy fit over a griefer or someone who is supposedly ruining your gaming experience, just pull your doughy little face away from the monitor and take a moment to reflect on why your parents always make that sighing sound whenever they look at you.

If you aren't familiar with LOVE, it's an online game not quite massive enough to be considered a Massively Multiplayer Game like World of Warcraft. It's a novel new online game where you build settlements with other people, and occasionally there's baddies that will kill you. I've been participating in the alpha test of the game, and I felt like sharing some of the stuff going on in the LOVE servers during this phase of the game's development.

When I started playing LOVE, I was instantly awed by how beautiful the game looks. The game runs fantastically on a cheap graphics card, and the whole visual style of the game is incredibly satisfying to watch. Your basic actions involve moving and jumping, which also involves a double jump you can perform off of solid objects, giving the game a very subtle platforming element. You can also shoot a little energy ball, but it's mostly useless. The first task given to a player is to find a settlement in the game, which you are directed to by a compass at the bottom of the screen.

When I started, I began to run towards where the symbol was pointing, and I immediately found myself hindered by an incredibly diverse landscape. Huge canyons rip through the world, and all manners of outcroppings and geological formations make navigating a very thoughtful task. The world is spherical, and I quickly found that I could chase the sun or run into night time with a few minutes travel. Every single vista looks like a painting, a visual style lilting between Monet-like splotches and indistinct forms, but the world also has a feeling of familiarity in many of it's features. Ice is blue-white, grass is green, water is dark and undulating, and the sky is in what feels like a perpetual sunset.

Now, the real test of a game is its gameplay, and if you thought LOVE was just a cheap randomized world created to showcase some pretty mountains, you might just piss yourself when you get into the actual stuff you can do in the world. When I found a settlement, the first thing I noticed was another person who was building a wall. When I say "building a wall", I don't mean he was placing some brick templates onto a 3d block. That's what all those other games do. This guy was pulling earth up out of the ground and strategically morphing it into a shape and size which not only seemed to make a sturdy defense against the baddies, but it also seemed to express his personal aesthetic preference for how the settlement should look and feel. I can't really elaborate more on that other than to say it is revolutionary for videogames.

I have since explored the world more, and I 've built my own personal cliffside walk around that showcases the gorgeous views which our settlement has. Another thing which is slowly dawning on me whenever I boot up the game is that the world is morphing by itself. Rock slides seems to happen, and the AI enemies are changing and building new structures in their attempt to secure more power.

Soon our settlement should find a weapons token, and once we learn how to build a gun, I'll do a write-up on the battle mechanics in the game.

If you ever visited your local GameCrazy, it's likely you had a fairly nice experience. At my local store, the employees were incredible and the used games always had a few cheap gems to be found. When I heard that all three of the GameCrazys in Reno were being shut down, I decided that it was a good opportunity to go and buy some totally dubious used titles that I'd always wanted to give a shot. The result was a batch of six PS2 games for $20, and playing these games was every bit as horrible as it was refreshing and wonderful.

So here we go, it's Bargain Bin Meltdown!! Six game reviews in one post, hold on to your ovaries and your balls!

1st game I nearly enjoyed- Onimusha 2:Samurai's Destiny



This game is fucking incredible to look at. I've never played another Onimusha game, but a Capcom game with samurai sounded awesome to me. It operates like a mixture of Final Fantasy VII and Devil May Cry, with ass-kicking samurai. The pre-rendered backgrounds are very moody and well drawn, and the fighting is strategic and violent. But the game's hugest flaw arrives in its most promising element. Instead of buying items, you trade little trinkets and other knick knacks for items, you get better stuff in return if you give another character something they particularly like, so you have to be strategic in how you trade your little found objects. This would have been brilliant, and I was enjoying the entire game, until I found myself in a long stretch of the game where there was absolutely noone to trade with. To top it all off, there was a "fake-out" battle at the end of this stretch which required me to survive as long as possible against a character who was ridiculously stronger than me. This little bit of attrition made me turn down the difficulty so I could proceed in the game. But the there WAS NO WAY TO RESET THE DIFFICULTY. Bullshit, because the game was painfully boring in easy mode. I had tons of loot, but it was worthless because the designers decided that instead of implementing their awesome new mechanic in an effective way, it would be easier to just piss, shit, and rape the eyeballs out of their great little idea. I give this game a slimy tapioca flavored turd, because I know it's not that bad, but I just can't swallow it.

Next game- Summoner 2



I should have seen it coming. I played Summoner because it was a launch title for the PS2 and I bought all of those at the time. I actually remember enjoying it, but my memories mostly have to do with little graphical wonders which would soon become commonplace. Summoner 2 sucks. It's so mediocre that I was shocked. It has no really special qualities, it's derivative, it's clunky, and the characters were so boring that I turned it off after 2 hours. That's all there is to it. I would give this game a "meh" but it drained so much energy out of me that I don't think I can muster the strength.

Next Game- Winning Eleven Seven International (soccer)



I had once heard someone say this was the best soccer series out there, and I have to agree. The problem is that soccer games are incredibly boring. I always wished I could get into a soccer game because it's kind of like hockey, but with more Spanish commentators. This game is pretty good, it has a nice tutorial and a huge roster. After a few hours of play, I decided once and for all that soccer games suck, unless you really like soccer. This is a niche game, and it delivered what was expected. I give this game a "br-r-r-r-r-r-aaahaaa!" because I played as the Mexicans.

The Game which makes me love everything is next. I can't wait to get more into it.

Turok: Evolution



Dinosaurs are about as awesome as dragons. In the Turok world, this remains true, except the dinsoaurs have automatic rifles, which puts them a click above your average fire-breather. This game lets you play as a badass Native American warrior, who fights for a WWII-esque group called the Allies who battle against the Slegs, which are the forementioned dinosaurs with guns. This game exists in a universe all its own, and I enjoy it thoroughly. It's especially fun for me because I study Archaeology, and I am now expecting to find a chain gun at my next pre-historical dig. This game makes me realize how fucking dull the whole plot to Jurassic Park was, because virtually all of that book was justification to have a bunch of dinosaurs raising hell. In Turok, I was killing all the dinosaurs I wanted within seconds of the game starting, and to me, that's much better. I give this game one decapitated head of Micheal Crichton.

Wow, this is getting long.

Front Mission 4



Is awesome, big bipedal tanks shoot eachother and there's a smoking hot French woman. I give it a big mechanical boner. This game is totally my bag, and I am going to be playing the bejeesus out of it.

Dual Hearts



I just got this one because I knew it was worth 300 Goozex points. Cha-Ching!

If you are a breathing sentient being, it's likely that LOVE is a game that should appeal to you. It's a procedurally generated MMO that has been completely designed by one person. The game is in its first stage of testing, and anyone can now join the Alpha run of the game. Just go to http://www.quelsolaar.com/love/join.html and follow the instructions. It appears the Client for LOVE can work on LINUX and Macs as well as Windows.