My New Hobby

"Excuse me, do you have a minute for (gay rights/the environment/NAMBLA etc.)?"

If you live in New York, you know this routine well. Groups of people spread out over a block or two with clipboards asking you to sign a paper and give them money for changes to occur. Usually, headphones or a good ole 5 mile stare into the distance beyond them is enough to get you safely through this human labyrinth relatively undisturbed. However, as I left a campus meal hall today, I accidentally acknowledged one of these annoyance's existence. In doing so, however, I stumbled into a fun new game to play with these people, allowing you to both not have to listen to their long-winded, guild-inspiring speeches, and giving you that warm fuzzy feeling most people get from kind of acting like assholes. Here is how you play:

As you approach, make eye contact with them. Provide a subtle head nod or perhaps a moderately friendly smile to encourage them that they do in fact have your attention. In giving it some afterthought, this works best with nonverbal cues. Ideally they will start to approach you. Maintain eye contact. Continue to walk forwards and right as they are about to open their mouth, break eye contact and keep walking.

Some may say that this is just being a dick for being a dick's sake, and they're absolutely right. My view on the matter is this: If you claim to not get off on being an asshole to people that annoy you, you are a liar.

On (Virtual) Morality

Hey, I'm updating this fucker again! neat!

Anyway, I'm just gonna dive back in here and start rambling about video games. My latest flames have been (and this is no surprise to anyone who has interacted with me in any capacity for the last month) Mass Effect 2 and Bioshock 2. Actually before that it was Assassin's Creed 2. And before that, Left 4 Dead 2. This was not a strong year for developers that WEREN'T pumping out something with an extra digit attached to it (or in the case of L4D2, a couple extra digits. Makes you wonder what happens when they get up to the 4th installment). But this is all a massive digression. I'm not even looking to talk about AC2 or L4D because they don't contain the elements I wish to examine.

The hot trend in gaming over the last few years has been presenting players with so-called "moral dilemmas" in an effort to enrich your experience by allowing you to develop your character as a devil-may-care badass, saintly saint, or completely schizophrenic. The problem with a lot of these mechanics, however, is that the options pretty much always boil down to "save orphanage" or "light orphanage on fire". Some conundrums are so absurdly black and white that the choice can be difficult not because of any moral quandaries that may arise, but rather because both options are so undesirable that you can't decide which one you dislike more. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that most gamers are capable of telling the difference between things you do in real life, and things you do in video games. So while I myself would never blow up a town full of innocent civilians because some random guy in a suit made a cryptic offer of maybe being rewarded, you bet your sweet ass I will do it in a heartbeat just to see what the explosion looks like on my kickass computer. The point is, that these situations cease to be dilemmas on any moral level and I simply view them as option A and option B. One will be tried on the first playthrough, it's converse on the second. They will both be attempted with the exact same attitude of clinical curiosity, rather than a nail biting "Sophie's Choice" scenario.

So what does this have to do with my latest addictions? To be brief, Mass Effect 2 demonstrates exactly why this gameplay element does not goddamn work, and Bioshock 2 shows how, with just a little tweaking to the formula, it can be one of the most effective narrative driving tools ever. But because I love pointing out fault in things, we'll start with Mass Effect.

The second installment of the game has the same "paragon/renegade" meter that the last one had, with small boosts coming from the chosen dialogue options and larger boosts coming from character actions (how you choose to complete a mission, do you let the factory full of workers explode etc.). Getting higher scores in one or the other opens special paragon or renegade dialogue options that can get you special outcomes. These outcomes, however, are exactly the same whether you choose the red text or the blue text (I'll let your big brains figure out which is which), with one garnered because you're a charmer and one because you held a fucking gun to the guy's head. This means, however, that mixing nice and mean dialogue options (you know, like a normal fucking person would do) you split the points you gain in each category. For example, if half the time you're nice and half the time you're mean, you'll have a theoretical score of Paragon/Renegade at 50/50 but only have them at half strength, meaning the majority of special options are still closed to you because you chose to dabble. If you only pick one every time, you'll have 0/100 or vice versa, but more special options are open to you total. This forces the player to just pick one attitude from the start and fucking commit. Then you just kiss everyone's ass or treat everyone like shit so you can max out your scores. It's not morality, it's fucking math. And what do I care if I hurt someone's digital feelings? I need those points to get better dialogue options and that is fucking that.

Now, I'm going to completely change gears and start singing some praises. I'm also going to point out that THIS PORTION CONTAINS SPOILERS OF THE PLOT FOR BIOSHOCK 2. I REPEAT, IF YOU DO NOT WANT PORTIONS OF THE GAME'S PLOT RUINED FOR YOU, DO NOT READ THIS PARAGRAPH. Bioshock was a game that arguably did not need to have a sequel. However, being that they made one anyway, I'll go out on a limb and say that holy shit this game is so fucking awesome it hurts. Gameplay-wise it doesn't differ too terribly from the first installment. Some mechanics were tightened up, enemies rebalanced, the awful fucking hacking minigame was changed to something not retarded, but all in all the game plays a hell of a lot like the first one. This is in no way a bad thing. Now, the first one too, had morality plays in the form of "save or murder the little girls you find wandering the underwater city". This comes back in Bioshock 2, but there is a twist. Rather than just changing your end cinematic based on whether you saved or killed all the little sisters, points in the last few hours of the game play out very differently based on your save/kill numbers and how you treated the NPC's with whom you can interact. How does it change? You rescue your daughter who has been psychically observing you for the first half of the game. Her world view is formed based on how you acted, but you have absolutely no control over what she does. My first playthrough, I saved all but one little sister (I was tired and didn't want to lead her all over the level, which you have to do when you save them) but killed all but one of the NPC's I encountered. This taught her that people are tools to be used and nothing more, effectively making her a psychic, sociopathic killing machine. This sounds really cool until you watch helplessly as she fucking slaughters an entire nursery of innocent little girls. This was not what I had been doing throughout the game, and I had prided myself on the fact that, apart from one bout of laziness, I stuck with being a generally nice guy, only killing the people who asked me to or the ones who deserved it (granted that was all but one). I felt actual sorrow for the monster I had created, wanting to break through the glass of the nursery and stop this crazy, out of control bitch who I had apparently fathered. I experienced literal horror as I watched her calculatingly murder everything in her path. And at the end of it all, she came for me, leaving me with the final choice to save or sacrifice myself. And in taking the noble route of sacrifice, she realized the error of her ways and the monster she had let herself become. As she mournfully strode into the world alone, no longer with a father to guide her and memories of the things she did in his name, a literal tear came to my eye. I fucked up raising this little one and didn't even know it, but managed to put it right.

And that, dear reader, is the crucial difference. While Mass Effect, Fallout, Dragon Age etc. all let you choose your own path and determine what kind of person you want to be, you are always in control and if you don't like an option, it is always your choice simply to not do it. Thusly, any consequences you may be faced with can easily be circumvented or outright ignored. Bioshock 2, however, offers you no such choice. Your actions have been performed, observed, and interpreted and are now let loose upon the world in the form of a force over which you have absolutely no control. Don't want Eleanor to kill her mother with a harpoon? Well TOO FUCKING BAD because you have a front row seat and the game is going to make your ass watch it happen as the gravity of your decisions sinks in and you realize that this once innocent girl is the product of your own machinations and nothing more.

What's too bad is that now that this trick has been done, and done incredibly fucking well, we're probably going to be in for scores of imitators until it too loses any semblance of depth and developers are forced to once again come up with something innovative for a goddamn change.

Or they could just start appending everything with higher numbers.

Not Hiatus exactly, but Hiatus-ish...

I'll keep this short.  I'm going to Russia today for the next two months.  I started a new blog specifically for this occasion.  http://donutgoestorussia.blogspot.com.  You'll follow it won't you?  I'll also be contactable by email, facebook, etc. but with what frequency I'm not entirely sure.  This doesn't mean don't try, just don't be offended if it takes a couple days to get back to you.  Anyway, see you all around.

On Racism

Resident Evil 5 comes out on Friday. I might-ish have a pre-order for it (the release date snuck up on me and I didn't realize it until pre-orders had closed) in the sense that one of the many awesome people at the Union Square Play n' Trade said he was pretty sure he'd have a copy of the game for me, and hopefully will call tomorrow to confirm so I can get it at midnight. Play n' Trade fucking rocks. Had I gone to a gamestop, they'd tell me I was too late, then demand I sell them my games for a dollar apiece so that I could preorder something else instead of, you know, what I want.

(Edit: Showed up at midnight, had a copy of the game with my name on it sitting in the box of preorders. Seriously, Play n' Trade fucking rocks.)

But i digress. What i really wanted to talk about was controversy, because nowadays it seems like no game can be released without some kind of big issue being broached by, well, idiots. The hot button issue for RE5? Racism. Wait, fucking what? Racism? Are you fucking kidding me? You kill zombies and fight an evil corporation who is evil for the sake of being evil. Pretty standard fare for an installment in the Resident Evil series.

Oh wait, back up: Did I mention the game is set in Africa? Did the "uninformed media schlock" alarm just go off in your brains? Do you see where I'm going with this?

Yes, people are accusing the game of being racist because you kill black people. In Africa. Say, wasn't that the name of the continent where like, there are a fuck ton of black people? Hell, there were so many of them that out of the goodness of our hearts we took them to America to live on biiiiig plantations so that they could chill and get out of the desert. Of course, then Abraham Lincoln kicked them all off of the plantations and they had to get jobs. At least, that's my knowledge of the situation based off what I skimmed on Wikipedia. My point, however, is that the game is set in Africa. You know what I would find a lot more jarring? A game set in Africa where there was nary a black zombie to be found (incidentally, if Rob Zombie and the guy from In Living Color teamed up, they should totally call their band Black Zombie). Shooting zombies that happen to be black because the infection hit in fucking Africa isn't racist, it's the plot of a fucking videogame.

I found an article on the Wall Street Journal via Joystiq that seems to sum up the problems with the allegations of racism in one particularly poignant line:

"the zombies hardly seem zombie-like when they control machine gun turrets and steer watercraft. Aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles, the zombies look like everyday African people, albeit ones that are trying to kill you"

Let's look at this a little closer, hmmm? "aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles"? Aside from? That seems like a pretty big detail to simply cast to the side when you're asking whether a game that's been in the works for years is denegrating an entire race. Also, if they look like Africans who are trying to kill you, wouldn't you be remiss if you didn't shoot them in the face? Also, I know Africa isn't the greatest place in the world to live, but if even the majority of citizens resembled the zombies in this game, then Africa would have been foresaken as a lost cause long ago. Christ, the spaniards didn't throw this much of a temper tantrum with RE4. Is the moral of the story that places that aren't predominantly white aren't allowed to be in videogames because if bad things happen to minorities it automatically means its racist? Hell if that was the case all crimes against minorities would have to be classified as hate crimes even if the crime had nothing to do with race, but that'd be sill... what? oh shit.

Fuck TBNYU right in their stupid fucking asses

I simply cannot come up with a good introduction. I want to, but I'm so fucking livid right now that my thoughts can barely maintain some kind of coherent train. Let me dial it back about 17 hours or so to 9 PM last night, when our neighborhood friendly student activist group, "Take Back NYU" decided to "occupy" the 3rd floor of the kimmel center in protest of... stuff. I'd be more specific, but their list of demands is so all over the place it's like they took random passages from the anarchists cookbook and fed them through some kind of mad-lib machine. Their demands encompass everything from re-banning Coca Cola products on campus, to a flat and lower tuition rate, to student-led financial oversight committees, to 13 (yes, they specified a number) scholarships for Palestinian students, to making the NYU library available to the public, and of course, the usual request for amnesty for all involved. After all, a protest wouldn't be fun (that is the point of protests, right?) if people actually got in trouble. You can find their pitiful sham of a website (and I hesitate to post this link because then it means people might actually click through and give them the attention that they want) at http://www.takebacknyu.com where you can find their full list of "demands" and a half assed justification for their retarded actions.

So let's look at the things I've got the biggest qualms with. First off, the involvement of any demands related to palestine and "using our excess funds to rebuild the university of Gaza". What. The. Fuck. Are you fucking kidding me? Since when is TBNYU the fucking PLO? It's like they couldn't get enough people to support their stupid fucking demands so they tacked Palestine on to make it seem like they're culturally aware and oh-so-sensitive. This also makes their list of demands look like the aforementioned anarchist mad-lib.

Next up: re-banning Coca Cola. Come on, are you fucking serious? Do you really think Pepsi is the paragon of human rights in their south american bottling plants? Fuck no, they're just good at hiding it, and apparently were better than Coke. If a company has shit set up in the third world, they're probably abusing their workers, so stop treating Coke like they're the worst of the fucking crowd. Striking workers have been mowed down by the dozens in banana plantations, but does NYU ban Chiquita? FUCK no, so let it go, you fuckers finally lost.

Scholarships to Palestinian students? Look, I have very little opinion on the Israel/Palestine thing simply because I don't feel I'm informed enough to have an opinion, but answer me this: I get almost no financial aid from the university in spite of the fact that my family in addition to paying for NYU is still paying off my sister's education (she graduated last year). So why is some person based solely on their ethnicity more entitled to help from the university than I am. I am going to be paying this shit off until I'm about 108 if you count grad school. So FUCK you, you TBNYU fucks. If you care about solving problems for NYU students, why don't you try to make it fair for ALL of the NYU students, and not just 13 of the ones who happen to also be middle eastern.

Full disclosure of all the school's financial allocations with approval by the students? Is this a fucking joke? What do you think that our higher ups do? Believe it or not, John Sexton has a hard fucking job that makes him WORTH the six figure salary. NYU has done great under him. He is not some malicious overlord sitting in the top of some crooked castle spire counting the millions of dollars he's embezzled from the wide eyed youths of America. And full disclosure? DO YOU FUCKS EVEN KNOW WHAT THAT WOULD ENTAIL? Even if it did get released it would be literally thousands upon thousands of pages of pure financial jargon and do you know why? Because we have tens of thousands of students paying upwards of 50,000 dollars per year. That is a lot of fucking money, and no one, especially not an oversight board composed of the same fucking jackoffs who compiled this idiot manifesto in the first place would be able to make heads or tails of it without advanced accounting degrees. Guess who does that? The people whose salary you are paying to WATCH WHERE OUR FUCKING MONEY IS GOING. And the system works. How do I know? A guy in my office was laid off in fall 2008 for embezzling. They catch this shit, they are on it. You occupying a fucking cafeteria of all things solves fucking nothing you stupid dipshits.

The grand point I'm trying to make here is this: Thanks to the jerkoffs at TBNYU, this will now be the face of the student body at an institution that I am irrevocably bound to for at least the rest of the semester. There has been moderate press coverage, but only of their side, and it is not clear that while (according to the website, so its probably a lie) "over 200" (read "probably 50 or so") students are in fact functional fucking retards, the remaining tens of thousands of us do not agree with this bullshit and do not care to be represented in this retarded half assed wannabe revolutionary way. FUCK SHIT DICK COCK PISS!

That is all.

P.S. Including this sentence, the word "fuck" or some variant thereof appears 25 times total in this article. Can you tell I haven't slept in like 28 hours?

To keep my mind off of the all consuming nausea

So it's been a bit since my last post, and what with one of my best friends leaving the university, the start of classes, and some devil-illness that caused me to vomit for 2 days straight (and still be unable to really eat solid food) I've been a bit busy, so this post is a bit dated. Anyway, I got me a pretty nice haul of video games this christmas and thought I'd share some thoughts on them.

Mirror's Edge: This game really got panned by the critics as not living up to the awesome-osity that was the demo. After having had plenty of hands on time with the full thing i can say that while many complaints about this game are valid, they simply don't hinder the gameplay THAT much. The biggest complaints were about the confined and confusing indoor areas, and the appalling combat. And while the combat would never be acceptable in any kind of FPS, it is important to note that mirror's edge is decidedly NOT an FPS. In fact, I liken it to a first person Prince of Persia (Sands of Time, of course, not the awful sequels), and if anyone remembers Sands of Time, they would do well to note that the game succeeded in spite of the combat mechanism, and after a few hours of play, you could figure out the chuggy and painful mechanics enough to beat the system out of forcing you to waste too much time on the battle sequences. The same can be said of Mirror's Edge in that when there aren't any enemies on screen, figuring out the running-jumping-sliding-etc. puzzles is a god-damn blast. The plot is kind of superficial (futuristic 1084-esque dystopia with government conspiracies out the wazoo), but provides a decent enough setting for your character's actions to make sense. It won't be taking home game of the year for me (that'll be Fallout 3 this year and every year until something better comes along) but I can promise one of the most unique experiences available on the 360 to anyone willing to overlook a few minor pitfalls. 7.5/10

Left 4 Dead: I feel like part of the experience of this game still has to come through for me because I don't know anyone who has a Live account and owns this game. Thusly my only co-op experience has been split screened, which is fun, but you really start to wish you had more screen space when say, you're getting reamed by approximately 50 zombies hungering for your brains or other innards. I don't have quite as much to say about this as I did about Mirror's Edge simply because as far as gameplay mechanics go, there isn't a lot there, but not every meal has to be gourmet quality. Sometimes you have a hankering for some McNuggets and goddamn if they don't hit the spot just right. If you ever wanted to know what "28 Days Later" the video game would play like, this is it. Fast, frantic, loud, gorey, and a lot of fun if you can get at least one other person on board to play with you. I'd say it gets roughly a 6.5/10, losing points only because the missions, in spite of varying enemy sets, the missions feel very interchangeable and samey, and the campaigns feel just a little too long at points. Still though, for a half hour of mindless zombie slaughterin', look no further.

Prince of Persia: I, um... Well, this is awkward because this game was so bad, so insufferable, that I sold it within 3 days of getting it after playing for approximately 90 minutes total. The characters are static, obnoxious, saturday-morning-cartooney stereotypes (wisecracking anglicized yet inexplicably "persian" Prince, mysteriously hot sorceress who is also a total cunt, evil sorceror reviving dark gods for some reason never fully made clear). The combat is even more insufferable than any other PoP title, featuring quicktime instant failure events at every goddamn turn and attacks that, while pretty, you never feel particularly invested in the execution of (pressing "B" will vault you into the air to hurl the enemy down with this spinning flair that seems almost too effortless to even be fun or visceral). Also, no one in the history of gaming has ever liked having to scavenge for 50 bajillion of one kind of item (light seeds, in this case) in between every mission. Remember finding the 100 hidden packages in GTA III? Imagine that half of the game was that. And your character never shut the fuck up. And the disk was printed on poop so that when you put in the drive your console burst into flames. 2/10, and it only gets those 2 because parts of it are kind of pretty.

Musical Superlatives (2008 edition!)

It's getting to be the end of 2008 and you know what that means: I cram my musical tastes down everyone's throat in my top 10 albums of the year. But don't take my word for it... no, no, DO take my word for it. Moving on...

10. ObZen - Meshuggah
Every time Meshuggah releases an album I always think to myself: "why bother dividing this into tracks?" But the thing is, their hour long fiddling with spastic time signature changes and attempts to see how many more strings they can add below a low E continue to impress me. Is it as good as Nothing? No, but it's damn fine and they pull out plenty of riffs that will surprise and impress.

9. Fortress - Protest the Hero
Their initial effort (Kezia), while technically very proficient, suffered from really shitty mixing. This is a problem when you do really high, technical riffing and coheed-esque wailing (in a good way, but it's still really high) and forget to put any bass into the mix. Fortress fixed this problem, and the songwriting as a whole has stepped up a notch. Sometimes incredibly disonnant, sometimes very melodious, but very tight, fast, and technical. A promising act.

8. Shogun - Trivium
This is more of an award for improvement than for releasing a spectacular album. It's certainly no Ascendancy, but the way they removed everything I disliked about The Crusade, it's like this album was a personal apology to me, and that says something.

7. Watershed - Opeth
Opeth takes their usual sound here, but adds a lot of proggy little tidbits to distract from the Death Metal assault that their songs have a tendency to dissolve into. On the whole, this album feels more balanced than anything they've done in a while, which proves that even the most established death/prog acts can be subject to maturing once in a while.

6. Reason to Believe - Pennywise
These guys have kind of been phoning it in for a while, but this album gets them back to some silver age style Land of the Free type shit. It doesn't hurt when they just give the album out for free for the first two weeks of its release either. Point is, this feels like the first album where they've put in any effort in years, and it is a reminder of how great Pennywise CAN be. Now if someone could only convince them to play any songs from after 1995 in concert...

5. Rise and Fall, Rage and Grace - The Offspring
It has been 5 goddamn years since these guys have done anything, then out of the blue they came out with a full album and much to my surprise, it was really good. Like, at least as good as Splinter. A few too many slow-ish radio sounding songs, but the faster SoCal punk tracks completely make up for it. "Shit is Fucked Up" is probably one of the best songs they've done since "All I Want"

4. Agony and Irony - Alkaline Trio
The problem when a band's most recent release is your favorite is that the subsequent release is almost guaranteed to disappoint. This album, however, had me astounded at how fluidly the guys picked up from where they left off with Crimson, and keep moving in a new and fresh direction. They've gone in a less minimalist direction, but it's nice to see that they acknowledge that sticking with a minimalist sound stagnates quickly. Just another solid release in an ever improving series.

3. Appeal to Reason - Rise Against
You know, I have this written down as my number three, but coming up with specific reasons is hard. Rise against is one of the few bands where I like how relatively static their sound has remained, so the reason I liked this album so much is that it was exactly what I was expecting: More of the same, but a little tweaked for complexity's sake. This is a pretty subjective pick, but fuck you, you don't like it, write your own damn blog nobody reads.

2. Want - 3OH!3
I can't even begin to describe how much I love this album. I wish I could defend myself by saying it's an ironic love, but it has surpassed that. The songs are catchy, trashy, shamelessly self promoting, and probably the most fun ANYTHING I've heard in a long ass time. 3OH!3 is literally the only thing that I have a remote amount of Colorado pride for. Fun! Trashy! Catchy! Delightful! ETC.!!!!!

1. If - Mindless Self Indulgence
I mean, did anyone not see this one coming? Within 2 days of the album's release the top 15 on my iTunes "top 25 most played" were the tracks from this album. It exemplifies everything I loved about their last album, but even more so. I mean, MSI is totally one of those bands that you either like the sound or you don't. If you like MSI, you'll like this album, if you don't, you won't. I personally LOVE MSI and thusly would bed this album in an intimate manner. Several times. Consecutively.

And here is the rest of the crap that aaaaalmost made the list:

Scars on Broadway - Scars on Broadway - This was nixed because Daron is a bitch, no matter what captain "anonymous" says a few posts below. Also because half of the songs on it are shit, but the other half are really really awesome.

All Hope Is Gone - Slipknot - Maybe if Corey hadn't decided to make a new Stone Sour album featuring guest appearances by Slipknot, I would still care that this album existed. As it stands, it didn't bode well that when I went through the "list of 2008 releases" on Wikipedia, I saw this album and said "oh right, they DID come out with something this summer".

Death Magnetic - Metallica - A really solid effort. I just can't bring myself to honor James Hetfield or Lars Ulrich for anything. They are insufferable whiny bitches who just happened to make good music in the 80's and very early 90's, and then one more time in 2008.

Midnight Boom - The Kills - This album is really quite good, and their singer just has a very sexy sound (yes their singer is a girl, wiseasses). The problem here was that it was a little too samey and the sound never got quiiiite interesting enough to justify the samey-ness.

Well, that's that. See you kids around.