Format Change

I'm changing the format of Blogsothoth. I'm not going to focus exclusively on games. Instead, I'm going to post about whatever the hell I want. Starting...Now!

So what I want to post about is the progress I've made in painting some models for the board game Invasion From Outer Space. So really, the blog is still about games.

Awkward box art!

 http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/42939/invasion-from-outer-space-the-martian-game

The game comes with a bunch of models that are exciting monochrome plastic! A friend of mine owns a similar game by the same company, but zombie themed, and he did such a good job painting his models I was inspired to do the same. It makes the game a lot more fun and interesting to look at.

After reading a bunch and watching videos on the internets I decided to paint using a "dip" method. That is a method where you paint your models normally then once you are finished you dip them (hence the name) into a polyurethane varnish for a nice looking finish without having to go to the trouble of painting the models with any real skill or precision. Perfect!

I've done a little bit of modeling in my day. The problem is when it comes to painting I've always been embarrassingly ham-fisted. Part of the problem is that until now I never once used any primer on the models. Mistake! So I started by priming all the models. I used grey primer found at ACO. Nothing special, just a basic indoor/outdoor paint primer. It made m models look something like this:

Boring!

Note the girl on the far right who is tilted at almost a 45 degree angle. Questionable design, Flying Frog, she stands on one thin little foot and is heavy on the right side. Oops.

The lesson I learned from priming is this: just mist the models with the primer. Don't try to coat them, because they'll get covered in a layer of primer that will obscure all the fine details that you want to smear paint on later.

I'm in the process of painting all these little dears now. I just got basic Testors paint, for about a buck fifty a bottle from Michaels, a local craft store. All of these can be found at your local hobby shop as well, and as much as I'd like to support local hobby shops, they usually have too great a markup for me to justify shopping there.

I started with some of the easier models with less detail and colors. This is the story of JoJo the dancing bear:

He's very brown

There's not much to tell here. I slapped on brown paint.

Aww, bear in a tutu

Now JoJo has a pink tutu, black eyes, and a tiny black nose. All that's left for JoJo is to color his base, a tiny final bit of touch-up, then a dip in the polyurethane I choose: Minwax PolyShades Antique Walnut Stain. I haven't done any dipping yet, so more info on that process will be forth coming.

Green!

Marvel at the imperfections!

Base coat on the "Yard Beast", then some detailing. He is ready for the dip, but I prefer to wait until some more models are ready to begin that process.

Today I did some painting on the hero models. They're in a state of about half done. Once full done they will need just minor touch ups, then dip.

I'm certain they'll look less a mess later

 As you can see, they look pretty rough right now, but finishing the paint job and doing minor touch ups will go along way. The game comes with about 12 martian models (shown in the first image). Since they're all pretty much identical I'm saving them for last so I can just run them like an assembly line. I'll be doing 1 or 2 more posts about this showing the models as they plod on to completion.

Colossal

Ico and SHadow of the Colossus, in HD, on my TV. It would be in 3D if I has a 3D TV, but I don't.

I've gotten several HD collections now. I started with Metal Gear Solid which has MGS 2, 3 and Portable Ops. It's ok, not wonderful, but I just wanted to way to play MGS 3 again and again. Next I tried the Silent Hill HD collection consisting of Silent Hill 2 and 3. I was VERY underwhelmed by that. I think Silent Hills just were never that great of games to begin with. Ico and Shadow is the best collection that I've played so far. Ico does not really hold up that well. There is still a lot I admire about the game, but it's just not really all that fun to play anymore.



Ico is a really atmospheric game where you control a little boy who is left to die in a HUGE ancient castle. Along the way he meets a strange girl who is being chased by shadow creatures and is also a prisoner in the castle. You attempt to escape from the castle by navigating a bunch of puzzles while dragging your new friend around by the arm. What makes this game a classic is it's very non-traditional approach. There is no HUD to the game, so no menus, no life bar, no super-power meter, nothing. Its just you and the environment on-screen. There's very little music in the game also. Much of the time all you have for audiological company is the echoing of the boy's footsteps and gusting wind on the exterior areas of the castle. All in all Ico is a very interesting place to visit, but after all these years it's become sort of a 1 trick pony. It's is definitely worth checking out if you have never played the game before.

Onto the main event, Shadow of the Colossus. This game holds up completely. Since I got my PS3 this is probably the game I've spent the greatest amount of time with. A game that I already finished multiple times back on PS2.


The whole game consists of little more than 16 boss fights. Between the boss fights you need to go out and explore a large and very well designed world. Ico and Shadow both succeed in giving their respective worlds a very real, almost tactile, feel. In Shadow the design of the world is second only to the design of the Colossi. Most of the colossi are these towering monsters that you need to climb up and stab in certain "weak points". Each colossus is like a complete level or environment on its own and each one has different behavior and tricks you need to do to take it down so that fight also has an element of puzzle-solving to it.

Unlike Ico, Shaodw of the Colossus makes use of music a lot more. Not only is the music all very good, the soundtrack also changes dynamically as you fight the colossus. Meaning that as you're fighting a boss the music will switch tracks, usually smoothly enough to not draw unpleasant attention to itself, so that when you piss off the colossus by stabbing it in the face it will start to thrash its enormous body around. While you're holding on for dear life a really exciting and epic song will start to play.

Shadow of the Colossus, and Ico in it's own way, were both benchmarks in game development. You don't see a whole lot of games like these, but I think they both left their respective marks on game development and there will always be diamonds in the rough striving to be more like these games. At least I hope so.

Got a PS3...finally

I treated myself to an end-of-the-semester...treat. It was a PS3 and so far it HAS been a treat indeed. I haven't tried the Blu-Ray player yet, but that is really the second least interesting feature on the PS3. I usually like to talk about the good first, then poke holes in it, but I'm gonna complain first and then say what I like to see if makes it seem more up-beat.

So the least interesting feature of the PS3 is "PlayStation Home". This thing is a mess and I'm not sure how to really even describe it. I guess it's a lot like Second Life. I could do a whole post about how little I like Second Life, but I don't want to alienate any potential readers out there. PlayStation Home is a large 3D environment that you can walk around in using a personalized avatar. And if you've got a personalized avatar, you've gotta have somewhere there you can buy "cool" or "silly" clothes and costume pieces. So there is a virtual mall you can go shop in. Since I couldn't be bothered to even set foot in a virtual 3D mall I have no idea what sort of currency you use to buy whatever it is they sell there. However, I can imagine it uses whatever sort of "PlayStation Bucks" or points the PlayStation Store uses to sell DLC and downloadable games. Home also has an interesting little area that serves as a chat room of sorts. You just go to a big fenced in area with a bunch of weirdos in strange costumes and start chatting with the most sophomoric people you can find gracing the internet. There are also some free games you can play with some of the charming specimens you were just chatting with. I don't know if they always have the same games available or if there is a rotating catalog, but I got the sense they were all equally ill-conceived and under developed. I do know, however, that they've all got some purchasable little trinkets and doo-dads if you can cough up more of the all powerful Playstation Bucks. To be honest, that is as far as I explored before losing all interest entirely.

My only other real complaint is the sad sad representation PS2 has in the Playstation Store. PSOne has a respectable amount of old titles available, but there could always be more. But the PS2 has maybe 20 games. There are SO many good PS2 games I could hope for. Clearly there must be a problem with the PS2 emulation, but whatever it is I hope they fix it, because PS2 has a HUGE library of really awesome games. Or at least games that seemed awesome at the time and are hopefully still awesome.

Its nice to use the dual shock controller again. I've been almost exclusively playing XBox 360 and PC games for in excess of 5 years. Wireless controllers and Wi-Fi enabled are nice. I didn't have to lift a finger to network to my PC so I can stream from the computer. I like the Amazon Prime tie in because we dropped netflix and are using Amazon Prime now. I don't care for the interface. I find it un-intuitive, but I guess that's just personal preference.

I see now that I say the positive first because I revel in talking about what's wrong with things in great detail.

So, despite the fact that I have a half page dossier on whats wrong with it and 5 lines mostly about what I like about it, I'm enjoying my PS3 very much.

The games I got to start with are Little Big Planet, ICO/Shadow of the Colossus HD collection, and Metal Gear Solid 4. I won't go into more detail now, I'll try to post about them later.

Spider Sense is Tingling

Sandbox games, like Grand Theft Auto or Crackdown, only have a finite amount of greatness they can achieve. I enjoy these games when the urge strikes, but they'll never be remembered by me in the Hall of Favorites. That's not to say that early on these types of games didn't alter the face of videogames, but by the very nature of the great sweeping open-world you limit the emotional impact the story can have. You can't have an amazingly thrilling conclusion when at anytime you can go punch random people in the face or scour the city of hidden collectable pick ups.
    But they're fun! Sometimes. What I enjoy most is the various modes of transportation. Grand Theft Auto has the dozens (hundreds?) of different cars. Yawn. But it also has motor cycles, helicopters, airplanes, boats, and, yes, sometimes, jet packs. Prototype had it's share of military vehicles which were farily fun, but I'm a sucker for people that can jump 100 feet in the air and glide halfway across the city on weird bio-matter glidey-wing things. Now I'm approaching the point. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows.
    The last Spider-Man game I played to completion was Spider-Man 2 for PS2, so I don't touch these games often. That's mostly because I don't think they're very good. Spider-Man 2 was really flawed for reasons that no one cares about anymore. It's like 10 years old. But what they did correct was web-swinging throughout what I assume is a fairly accurate model of New York city. Web of Shadows kicked Spider-Man 2's web-swinging's ass! The combat is pretty tight too. All in all I was pretty impressed with Web of Shadows but in a fairly trivial way. I was wanting to go out and buy Prototype for a second time. Instead I got Spidey and was very fulfilled.
    The story is not great and it's fundamentally flawed. They used Venom and the Symbiote (if you don't know what a symbiote is go ahead and stop reading, you won't care) as the major villians, but they screwed Venom up entirely. In the game Venom assults New York and tries to turn everyone into monsters. In the comics Venom just hates Spider-Man, but is all about protecting the innocent...not turning them into monsters. Regardless, the bottom line is the Spider-Man: Web of Shadows is really fun, if you like really superficial games.

Pigs In Space!

Angry Birds. That's the topic.

Generally speaking, I don't like Angry Birds. It's fun...ish, but in a time-killing sort of way. Stick with me, the whole post isn't going to be Bird bashing. I admit that I play it, but I resent the ridiculous hype that it gets. Angry Birds is a flash game. Weather or not it's actually made using flash is incidental. It has the same complexity as any other flash game. There are hundreds of the exact same game out there. It's just a physics based catapult-destory-the-things game. All it has going for it beyond that is a unique artistic appearance and really good marketing. So I'm pretty emotionally chilly regarding the game.

     Now for the good stuff. Basically none of what I just said is true about Angry Birds: Space. I am really impressed with the game. I takes the root of the previous games. It uses the same birds (with a few tweaks and additions) and more or less the same physics. But instead of the same flat levels most of the levels are in space. If you don't know this, there is no gravity in space, so if you shoot something, say with a slingshot, it just keeps going. Nothing to pull it down to the ground. But there is gravity around celestial bodies such as tiny meteors and planteoids covered in pigs. So you've got these objects in space with a gravity well around it. You can fire a bird just right and it will enter a planetoid's gravity well and orbit the little rock 2 and sometimes even 3 times being slowly pulled down. That, or you can shoot a bird directly into this aura of Newtonian physics and it will plummet straight to the planet's surface.

    The gravity is definately the star of this game (no pun intended). What I find very gratifying are the wood and stone structures built around these tiny planets. If you destory these structures just right you can instigate a wave of destruction as the entire structure around the planet collapses in on itself. Crash after satisfying crash. Or if you're a fan of Star Trek you can use the gravity well to whip around the planet in a new direction much faster than you were going before. Or you can use gravity wells to weave in and out of smaller planets to reach your little green target.

    They also added Boss battles! Instead of an incredibly irritating level that requires the most ridiculous degree of precision to kill the "King Pig" you now get to shoot birds at space junk, attempting to deflect it at a pig piloting some ridiculous "space machine".

    But not all things are good. I am playing the game on my android Samsung Galaxy S II. So I was pleased when I finished a level and saw that, instead of being locked, I was able to play the next level that appears to be available only to people using a current gen high-end Samsung device. And I'll tell you, if I didn't have that I would have been Righteously indignant. Luckily I do.

Massively Effective

I played Mass Effect 3 to completion a couple days ago. I have one very important thing to say to all the people "hating" on the Mass Effect ending: "Get a Fucking Life!". The Mass Effect series has been a Huge part of my life over the last  4 years or so. It is probably my favorite game. Ever. Considering that Mass Effect has de-throwned Chrono Trigger and Metal Gear Solid as "My Favorite" should add some amount of legitimacy to what I'm saying .I didn't LOVE the end to Mass Effect, but I had no inherent problems with it.It was very Okay.

***There may be Implicit spoilers ahead, but I will not include any Intentional spoilers...careful***

    The ending could not have been whatever you cooked up in your wildest Mass Effect dreams. That's just logic talking. Whatever specific things YOU wanted to see, I likely wanted to see them too, but didn't (or did) but you can't please Everyone. That is a fact. But people are pissed off that you couldn't "choose the ending". They feel that your choices are not meaningful. Here's my issue: The whole series is about Commander Shepard fighting the Reapers. The end of the game could not have ended with him/her letting the Reapers off the hook, so that ending should be off the table from the get-go. If we can agree that the Reapers should not be free to rule the galaxy with impunity, what else can be done?! Did it get (maybe) a little too esoteric at the end? Yes... I think. However, the majority of Star Wars fan seem to be unhappy with Episodes 1-3 but I never saw an on-line petition to George Lucas to re-make the ending of Episode 3. Grow the fuck up. Seriously. I feel a sad emptiness inside now that Mass Effect is over. But it's not because the ending is not everything I ever dreamed it could be, it's because a thing that I love is over.
     I've read/watched/played the ending of many things that I hoped had ended differently, but my wish for them to end differently has not changed that fact that THAT is how they ended. I'm not writing petitions because I WISHED Anikin had thrown Obi-Wan into lava. Just stop. I hate you. I really do. Your hating of the ending took away from my own enjoyment of the Mass Effect 3 ending and I hate you for it forever. Forever.