In the Bearracks

Though it long coveted the Russian's bear cavalry during WWII, Poland did have access to some of the very solid bear infantry. I can't believe this story is real, but it's amazing. I have no idea how a bunch of soldiers managed to domesticate a wild bear, but I can think of few things I'd rather have guarding me at night.

Ow, my childhood...

But it's too goddamn funny.

Another neat thing to do with your Wii

Last Blood

Vampires have to save their food source - last group of humans on earth - from a planet full of zombies. Interesting concept and a good comic...read it, good sirs and ladies.

Let the games begin

Well, I can officially take 22 five-year-olds in a fight, but I can't tackle one block of HTML in Blogger. By deduction, Blogger is made of at minimum, 23 five-year-olds. In any case, now that I'm certified as safe from more than a score of midgets (which is good, there are an unusual number of kids around the library tonight), I can safely review a couple of my recent freeware/browser game finds:

Battleships Forever: Easily the best of the free offerings I've come across so far, this is a top-down space strategy game. It has superb graphics (for freeware) and excellent gameplay. The look is quite stylized and almost wireframe, but not as rough-looking. The weapon and explosion effects are great, and seeing the ships split into their constituent chunks is immensely satisfying. The gameplay is a mix of standard RTS movement/attack with an emphasis on positioning - for instance, lots of ships have deflectors, which make certain parts of the ship completely invulnerable. So, you have to get behind it, or flank it, all while outpacing the ship's turn rate. The only flaw I'd say is that it actually goes a little too fast for a game with as much tactical depth as it has; I'd like a game speed bar. Still, I highly suggest this one.

Warning Forever: Neat little arcade-style game that was the stylistic inspiration for Battleships Forever. I got bored after a half dozen levels, but then I do with pretty much all arcade games. Warning Forever's neatest feature is the fact that each level is basically a progressively harder boss fight, with the catch that each level, the boss adapts to the way you beat the previous boss. Also, you have the option to change your ship's arc of fire, which is a very nice feature.

Really Rather Good Battles in Space: They're really rather not. Granted I only played the first three missions, but that's half the game and then I stopped out of a combination of boredom and frustration. The ship designs are kind of cool (they're weirdly organic), but as far as I can tell there are all of two kinds, and both of them would suck absolute ass in any approximation of a real space battle. There's the carrier, which has a few squads of fighters and bombers, and then there's the frigate, whose only purpose seems to be to fire ineffectually at the strike craft before being blown to pieces. Seriously. If you like carrier battles, and I mean if you have a serious fetish for them, you might get farther than me, but I kind of doubt it.

Endless Zombie Rampage: Not quite as solid a zombie slaughterfest as Boxhead, but good for a change of pace.

Flash Portal: This came to me highly recommended, but I just don't like it that much. The control scheme seems far more fickle than that of Portal itself, and when a flash game is harder to handle than a full-blown Valve-spawned FPS, something is wrong. Still, it's a good puzzle game and you guys would probably like it, especially if you don't have Portal.

Travian: My browser-based strategy game du jour, it's been good so far. Nothing revolutionary in form: you build up your village with warehouses, walls, markets, and soldiers as you expand your resourcing operation and defend against attacks. I managed to stumble into a pretty active alliance which definitely improves things. The mechanics do encourage cooperation though, with a lot of trading and mutual defense options. I'm on there as Blackfish on the 3x (triple speed) server, if anyone's curious.


Well, that's it for now...I'll save the rest for my next bloated post. Oh, there is one thing of note: I've been asked to stay on here at the library for another year. This requires some good old-fashioned pondering.

The Healing Begins

So my poor waffle-based place of employment has been shut down since last Sunday, when the ceiling bubbled and proceeded to spill lots of dirty rain/snow water down in the kitchen. According to the owner (who's also my old professor - I enjoy having connections, even if they're just to the waffle industry), they'll probably be closed down for another month. Which isn't the best news for my bank account, though it does give me even more free time, not that I need it. Ah well. Every massive water leak has a silver lining. Or at least it does if its not your main source of income, and you're not financially invested in it. Unless that silvery color is mercury...hmm. Though mercury IS the sweetest of the transition metals.

But I digress. My life is largely unexciting, at least from a blogging perspective...I can only chill with Hillary and my friends and enjoy living quietly up here so much before it fails to be interesting to read about. For instance, I think it failed to be interesting to read about before I even started this post. So without further ado, I turn to probably the only interesting thing in this blog, my staple content....hard core nudity! By which I of course mean talking about games.

I can see in myself the signs of getting over the MMO syndrome, at least a little. I've recently beaten C&C3 which, while good, left me wanting more (which may be forthcoming with Tiberium), and I've started Gears of War and re-started (for probably the fourth time) Homeworld: Cataclysm, the only member of the Homeworld series so far that I haven't glomped onto with a child-like glee at first go. Each time I get about half a dozen missions in and then lose all my steam for some reason.

Part of me wants to blame the fact that it wasn't developed by Relic, the geniuses behind Homeworld, Homeworld 2, and Dawn of War. Then again, Barking Dog is apparently what turned into Rockstar Vancouver, the "respectable" arm of the company responsible for all the GTA nonsense. Additionally, it sounds like at least part of the Barking Dog crew is behind Sins of a Solar Empire, which has me even more excited than Homeworld 2. Cinematic capital ship battles with individual maps spanning across multiple star systems? Yes please (I just hope I can run it at any decent level of settings). So in any case, I'm giving Cataclysm another try. It's certainly aged pretty darn well from a visual standpoint, considering it's seven and a half years old at this point.

Can you tell I've been reading a lot of games' and developers' Wikipedia entries lately?

But it seems like the general lesson of the last couple weeks of getting out of a gaming funk is that lots of smaller, more easily accessible free games are the salve for my otherwise neurotic gamer at the moment. As Todd pointed out, the "problem" I may have with non-MMOs is that they end and then there's not anything ostensibly to show for it. As such, I'm a little leery of even starting them. So I've been playing old games and finishing off some ones I was in the middle of to show myself that I can still get enjoyment out of them. In terms of storyline this is amazingly true, especially with Okami. But I'm still a little reluctant to start into all the new content I've found.

But with the help of the good folks over at the Great Games Experiment and an absurd amount of time poring through pages of freeware, I've downloaded or bookmarked a good two dozen free games, or browser games, and a couple more sites that seem to want to be the Facebook for games. I've been able to delve into these a lot more readily since I have absolutely no investment in them, especially if a single round of play takes five or ten minutes. At the very least, they're free (which is always good).

So in the coming posts, I shall share with you the fruits of my free time! At the very least I can point you guys towards some good games, and maybe reviewing them will be an impetus to play more and get even further out of this funk, such as it is.

Contemplative, if long, musings on single-player gaming in the age of MMOs

So I finally finished Okami. I started playing this back in...let's see. March. Well, comps sort of killed that, and then a summer of not having the PS2 hooked up to a TV. Then, WoW kind of ate all my gaming time. But I finally beat it!

All I can really say is, holy shit. Okami was amazing. It's one of the prettiest games I've ever played, but more importantly is has one of the best storylines and cast of characters that I've ever encountered, in a game or really anywhere short of a good book. The game's about 60 hours long, and there's a lot still left to do - I'm told it's very much like a Zelda game in that respect. But more importantly, the game consistently sent chills down my spine, and I have NEVER seen a more beautiful game, either in form or in spirit.

I wrote a little review for it over at the Great Games Experiment. The GGE was something I signed up to about ten months ago but never got into because of time constraints - I guess it's part game review and database site and part social networking tool. It's apparently in something of a recession at the moment because Garage Games, the people behind it, haven't been paying much attention to it in the last couple of months, but I see it as having a lot of potential. Hopefully they'll get back to supporting it at some point, but in the meanwhile there seems to be a small group of people who're sticking it out, so we're seeing what we can do to revitalize the community, if possible.

And speaking of revitalization....I'm in need of a bit of that myself. Only in terms of gaming, mind you. But now, after a couple weeks of being happily WoW-free, I've realized just what WoW has done to my gaming style. I still think that WoW is a great game, whether or not I want to devote the time to raiding and whether or not the damn thing spent the last two weeks of play time crashing every ten minutes because Blizzard can't keep its code straight. But WoW has done really weird things to the way I game, and I don't think I like it.

Basically, now whenever I spend more than an hour or two on a game that isn't WoW (or, for the sake of argument, any other MMO), I have this nagging feeling like I'm wasting my time. It even creeps into conscious thought sometimes. But like it or not, at the moment part of me seems to believe that if what I'm playing isn't contributing to some kind of perpetual, global world that everyone can see, it's less worthy of my free time or gaming efforts. Intellectually, I know this is absurd - I'd say that my most enjoyable gaming times came out of Okami, Homeworld, Half Life 2, and Dinopark Tycoon (when I was but a wee gamer lad). Those are the pretty much the peak of my gaming experiences, when I've felt most connected with the world, or the characters, or so damn engrossed that I can't put the game down.

And yet lately, I have a tough time picking up something like Okami, or getting back into God of War, or starting up Gears or War or anything like that. I've spent much of my time procrastinating, looking for a good browser-based multiplayer strategy game (which I am still looking for) or going through reviews of games I don't have and really shouldn't even bother looking at until I've finished more of those that I already have. That's when I realized that some part of me - the part that made me procrastinate - had come to dread gaming a little.

Dread it! It makes no sense at all, but there it is. Part of me was afraid to play games that weren't persistent, multiplayer grindfests where there was some kind of definite goal and reward, however probabilistically distant it was. Now I don't want to fall back on the popular pastime of WoW-bashing, because ultimately I still like the game, but when it stops being fun, even temporarily, what does it say about the genre (and about me, for that matter) that I can't just slip into some amazing single-player games that I've been waiting months to play?

Why is the variable-schedule reward schema of WoW so damned rewarding while the storytelling and characters of the game are, admittedly, about as deep as moderately-sized puddle? With Okami, which I can now safely consider my favorite game yet, I routinely get shivers up my spine from the story and character and music and raw visual beauty of the game, and yet it was tough sometimes to boot up the PS2 and just get going. Once I was playing there was no hesitation, but leading up to that....

So what is it that makes WoW so easy to pick up and come back to, to monopolize your freetime, even after you've stopped playing? Will this weird nagging complaint in the back of my mind ever shut up and let me get back to my old, free-flowing gaming self? I've always been very slightly neurotic, but this is a bit much.

This is "emotional"?

Saw this being touted as a big news story : Hillary tears up.

I'm sorry, did anyone see any tears? Because I didn't. I did hear emotion creeping into her voice - ZOMG EMOTIONS! People do have them, you realize. She's definitely not my first choice, but it kind of pisses me off that some media are taking this and trying to insinuate that its shows feminine weakness or something like that.