The Moon Sliver

To celebrate Halloween in my own personal way, I decided to drop 3 bucks on the Steam Halloween sale and pick up The Moon Sliver.

It was a fun, and a little creepy, 29 minutes.

This is another of the increasingly popular style of first-person games that has the player explore an environment, and piece together a narrative from the junk lying around. Similar to Dear Esther, Gone Home, Penumbra (minus the puzzles), or Amnesia (minus the pant-crapping level of terror, and horrifically disfigured monsters).

I can't say a whole lot about a game that took just under 30 minutes to complete, despite the hour the game advised I set aside to complete the game in one shot, as there is no save feature to the game. The interesting mechanic The Moon Sliver adds is a finite flashlight battery that needs to be charged at power stations scattered through out the small deserted settlement you are exploring. The story is an interesting mystery to piece together that implies a greater back story, as though we are seeing just the final few days of a much larger tale which seems to begin with the end of the world, the loss of all modern knowledge (except for flash light related technologies, and instant battery recharging), and four survivors getting increasingly bored and depressed over the whole "everyone on earth appears to be dead" thing. The music, environmental effects, and a well timed horrible monster sound at one point, all make for a fun little deserted settlement to explore with a slight creepy vibe. Though at one point, whilst exploring a complex maze of tunnels with scant few charging stations, I did begin to worry what would happen if I were to get stuck in this maze sans-flashlight with only the really cool shifting gloom visual effect as my companion. The end of the game, while pretty ambiguous in my opinion did leave me delighted. A delight that increased as I gleaned from the credits that The Moon Sliver seems to have been made entirely using free textures, sounds effects (and possibly music?), and a game engine. This is a really good example of what (appears to me to be) a single developer with good vision and not a little ambition can accomplish.

My only legitimate complaint (other than the length) is the text presentation looked unpolished and was slightly off putting for me. That very small complaint aside I feel like the roughly 9 cents per game play minute was well worth it. While composing this I went and pain a small amount to download David Szymanski's previous game, Fingerbones.

I downloaded Fingerbones here

But this is the link to the game I've been talking about: The Moon Sliver

Silent Hill 2: The Fourth Hour

Having just narrowly escaping Pyramid Head by running around in circles for five minutes and waiting for him to get distracted, I exited the apartment building to find myself in the alleys of down town Silent Hill. I immediately ran into the little girl from the apartments who had kicked away a key I was reaching for through a gate and I had failed, thus far, to shoot in the face with the gun I had scavenged. I tried calling her on her shit but she was being a snotty little brat, as is her M.O. She had been reading a letter when I approached. It was absolutely none of my business, and had no reason to believe the little girl's letter pertained to me in anyway whatsoever, but I decided to ask her about it anyway. She told me it was none of my business, really the most likely scenario in retrospect, and said I never loved "Mary" anyway. Mary?, I thought to myself, that is my dead wife Mary's name too. It must be a letter from her. She ran away from me, as though a near stranger had never approached her in an empty alley and asked her questions about her personal life. I metaphorically shrugged and proceeded to Rosewater Park, which is the next destination I imagined could be the "special place" mentioned in the letter I got from my dead wife, asking me to meet her. Why she choose not to be more specific about this meeting place I'll never know. Because she's dead. And can't explain what she wrote in letters. Or write letters. I reached the dock in the park overlooking Toluca Lake. And there was Mary! Or a woman who looked somewhat like Mary, so my first thought was that it had to be her! It wasn't her. Meet Maria. Her skills include dressing provocatively, making sexually suggestive remarks toward strangers, and housing keys to various establishments in her undergarments. I explained to Maria that I was looking for my dead wife. She took it pretty well and didn't ask any awkward questions about my current psychological state. Plus she reminded me that the Lakeview Hotel might have been the "special place" Mary was talking about. As I left to visit the hotel Maria freaked out on me for leaving her alone in a city full of monster. As if her safety is my responsibility somehow. As we left the park she nagged and nagged about me trying to leave here in the park where it was "not safe" because of all the "monsters" and suddenly I didn't miss Mary quite so much as I did before. On the way to the hotel I found a bowling alley! Awesome! I love bowling! I had to go in. Maria, the bitch, waited outside. What a nag. In the bowling alley I heard my new friend, Pukey-Eddie, talking to Laura, the key-kicker. Apparently Eddie is guilty of something or other, running away from someone for doing something. It was all pretty vague. Laura took off when I showed up. I decided I had to chase down Laura because of all the "monsters" in the city. I didn't want the kid blowing up at me the way Maria did a few minutes ago. I took a second to berate Eddie for eating pizza while the town got overrun by monsters, then I hoofed it back outside to chase down a little girl in a foot race through the streets of Silent Hill. I grabbed Maria on the way out and she pointed out which way the girl ran. We tracked the girl to a small alley that was too narrow for us to go through. Maria pulled the key to a near by "gentleman's club" out of her bra, and we cut through the strip club. Back on the streets we tailed the frightened little girl to the Silent Hill hospital. We followed the little girl into the vacant hospital. I with my gun drawn, Maria with keys stuffed in her underwear for no apparent reason.

Quickly Ending Nightmare

Neverending Nightmares was a very enjoyable 80 minutes.

Whilst I prepared to volley verbal shots at the game for its short duration, I realized it was pretty much exactly what it should have been. As much as I enjoy a good scare now and again, the fact of the matter is that a good horror game, that does its job correctly, is stress inducing. And Neverending Nightmares does do its job correctly with an atmosphere of dread, a soundtrack composed of frightening ambiance mixed with the screams of unseen tormented souls, and startling and gruesome imagery served up from beginning to end. From the very beginning I felt the desire to make Thomas run through rooms and hallways of the various environments, but with such a small amount of run stamina I felt compelled to slowly trod through the gloom, saving my stamina for the times I would actually need it.

The game had a good mix of disturbing imagery, a hallmark of quality horror in my eyes, and the sporadic boo or jump scare. The boo scare is an important tool in horror that is often overused. Lesser quality horror equates, or even defines, the boo scare with horror. Thankfully, NN does not suffer from this problem, and uses suspense and startles in a tasteful way that didn't leave me in a constant state of stress the entire game, but able to look at and enjoy the creepy environment filled with items such as dolls with shattered faces, paintings of a persons shoes through various stages of a hanging, or dead animals spilling their entrails on the ground. :)

What NN doesn't excel at quite as well is variety. About 20 minutes into the game, after the first big change in environment I found myself mostly trying to game the run stamina to get though rooms and hallways as fast as possible. Not driven by fear, but a bit of tedium. The middle, and to some extant the end, of the game suffers from many long hallways that look an awful lot like the previous 3 hallways you just jogged through with little going on and a very limited variety of the same handful of props scattered throughout.

All in all I was happy with the game, spending my 14 dollars on more of an emotional experience than a video game. I purchased the opportunity to be made uncomfortable, stressed, and slightly repulsed, which is why I enjoy horror games in the first place. And I got a little thrill at the end when, after the credits rolled, the game showed me that a small amount of branching pathways and alternate endings exist. However, this revelation was somewhat soured by the fact that I have no idea what influences these alternate pathways. Are they random? Does selecting a different door lead to different paths? Would I have gotten a different ending if the psycho with his eyes sewn shut had torn my throat out less often? I suppose a subsequent play through might help clear this up, but having just finished the game I do not get a strong feeling that replay-ability will be one of Neverending Nightmares strong suits.

Silent Hill: The Third Hour

Today was the day for meeting new friends.

After I claimed my prize from the smelly old garbage chute I decided to do a sweep of the first floor again. What I found was an abandoned apartment building with vacancies and all the amenities one could hope for. I'd already spent significant time poking around the laundry rooms and garbage chutes, but I had no idea the Wood Side apartment complex also hosted a drained swimming pool filled with monsters! I climbed down into the monster-filled pool and found a baby carriage holding another of the strange coins, this one showing a picture of a snake. I was starting to think there might be something more significant to these coins than purchasing power at the local Happy Burger.

I left the pool of monsters and tried all the doors to the apartments on floor numero uno. This is where I met my first friend of the day. While exploring another stranger's home without permission I heard noise I was sure were coming from a monster. I took a quick peak around the "foyer" and saw a man that appeared to have been killed by having his upper body slammed in a refrigerator door. Seeing nothing remarkable in the kitchenette of horrors I decided to check out the rest of the apartment. The monster noise turned out to be a man vomiting in the toilet. Like, a lot.

Turns out the toilet puker's name was Eddie. His first priority was to explain to me, between salvos of vomit, that he "didn't do it". I inferred that he was claiming innocence in regards to murdering Refrigerator-Boy. Eddie alleged that he ran into this apartment because he was scared of "the weird lookin' monsters", but he seemed pretty calm, other than the constant torrent of vomit escaping the man. Anyway, we said about all we had to say to one another so, after he explained that he was not from Silent Hill, I left him to his toilet puking.

Somewhere along my schlep through the apartment complex I'd picked up a key to the second floor fire escape. Having looted all the places I could get into I decided to check out the fire escape, since I still had not found a way to exit on the other side of the apartments. The "fire escape" turned out to be a door with a sheer drop to the ground outside. But it also happened to line up with the window of an adjoining set of apartments. Luckily the next apartment building was built about 18 inches away from the Wood Side Apartments so I just stepped over the opening into a second story window.

I found myself in the Blu Creek Apartment complex. The architect must have given a discount on these two buildings because the rooms were all setup roughly identically to the Wood Side apartments. Casing the first room I hit the jackpot, there was a wallet floating in the filthy toilet! I didn't even hesitate, just crammed my hand deep into the rust colored toilet water and pulled that baby out! Unfortunately, all I found was a scrap of paper with some numbers on it. I pocketed it anyway. This turned out to be a great idea since the main room held a safe. I turned the dial to hit the numbers on the scrap of paper with monster-shit scented hands. Open sesame, and a horde of ammo for my stolen pistol tumbled out. I locked, I loaded, and I prepared for some more good old fashioned breaking and entering. The room also had a sort of desk with some circular divots on it. It was engraved with a really thinly veiled riddle involving the coins I was finding. I placed the old man coin and the snake coin in there appropriate slots, but I was still missing a coin showing a woman.

I wanted to take a bottom-up approach to this building, which was significantly smaller than the previous apartment complex. Luckily, in the stairwell I found a complete map of this building. Using my trusty red crayon I began scribbling all over it so I could track the apartments I'd already broken into and looted. On the ground floor the only room of any interest had a mirror that was one entire wall. There was a small end table and some posters on the wall. And a lady laying on the ground, cradling a knife with suicidal enthusiasm. After a second I recognized her as the crazy girl I met in the cemetery earlier.

She introduced herself as Angela, with a dejected I-want-to-kill-myself sigh. We chatted about where her "mama" might be, after she suggested that I also want to kill myself and that we deserve to die. But Angela flipped out on me after I suggested her mother lived in the town in which Angela was roaming looking for her mother. Seemed like fairly straightforward logic to me, but she was acting like I was some kind of stalker knowing that her mother lived in the place that Angela said she was looking for her in. She also treated me like some kind of frightening head-case when I told her that the wife I was here looking for was already dead. Finally, Angela left. She offered me her knife as she left, but then brandished it at me like I was a sexual assaulter when I moved to take the knife she offered. In the end she decided to leave the knife on the table and run away saying "I'm sorry, I've been bad, please don't". I did not say goodbye. I did take the knife though and I found a coin with the image of a prisoner on it. Time to go back to the coin table.

Back in the coin table room I remembered that the desk didn't say anything about a prisoner coin, it referenced a coin of a woman. Not analyzing that fact too deeply I put the prisoner coin in the last slot. I found yet another key, this one for an apartment down the hall. I went to that apartment, crossed over to the next, locked, apartment, and found a key to the stairwell that would, presumably, let me out of this convoluted maze of apartment buildings.

I ran to the stairwell and threw open the door. Then I threw closed the door. Then I saw the extreme error in judgement I had made by failing to survey the room before entering and closing the door. There was pyramid face and he had one of the monsters bent over and was doing...something to it. He quickly lost interest in doing whatever he had been doing to the monster and started to come for me. I tried the door I had just brazenly swept through, but it was now locked. Of course.

I shot at triangle face, but it just made a dull THUNK sound that communicated to me that, despite 10 bullets being enough to dissuade him during our last "encounter", now bullets did not affect this big fella whatsoever. After realizing that the stairway had somehow been flooded with 3 stories worth of water I decided to run away and cower in the corner. For the next 3 to 3,000 minutes I ran from corner to corner to corner as red cone head shambled after me, swinging his Cloud Strife sized sword every couple minutes. In truth, it got a bit boring. After awhile I heard a siren ring out throughout the city. This seemed to be some kind of signal to triangle head, cuz he abruptly began lumbering away, down the stairs, through the water. Soon after, the water inexplicably drained from the stairwell and I followed the stairs down and out of the damned Silent Hill Apartments.

Silent Hill: The Second Hour

I used my gate key to get past the locked gate outside of the apartment complex. It was pretty much deserted, like everywhere else. Where the hell is everyone? The door leading to the apartments on the first floor was locked, so I decided to check out the second floor. It's dark as hell in here. I found a map of this apartment building, like it's a goddamn tourist attraction, but it's too dark to read the damn thing.

Luckily, I still have my busted-ass old timey radio. That comes in real handy when it starts to squeal and shit while the weird armless monsters come up and start puking shit on me. I beat them all to hell again with my trusty stick. After I dealt with the creeps I started to systematically check the door to every apartment. I didn't knock or anything, I just tried to waltz in like I owned the place. If anyone was home and wanted to give me shit, well...I had a big fucking stick to deliver to them, address: Their Face. 

First, I decided to check out the laundry room. I took a peek in a garbage chute because why the fuck not? There was some trash stuck in there. I couldn't reach it, but MAN I really wanted that trash! I figured I could find a bowling ball or a six pack or something to throw down there and knock the trash free. I started to find some rooms on the second floor that were unlocked. Finally, we're getting somewhere. But these places were Fucked Up! These people lived like animals. Furniture was all smashed up, blood was everywhere, and not a bowling ball or six pack in sight! This one room had this mannequin just sitting in the middle of the room. At least someone left a flashlight sitting there, BONUS! Now I can see and read maps and- HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!! Right there behind the mannequin was another mannequin, but this one was freaky as fuck! Oh yeah, and it was moving. It had no head (of course) and seemed like it was made entirely out of legs. I wasted exactly zero seconds bringing the Stick of Obliterating down on THAT fucking thing, I shit you not. 

I felt a little weird after my mannequin encounter so I decided to pick up the pace here and walked faster as I methodically checked each and every door in the building. The next room I found had one main room which was empty, and a room off to the side with a grandfather clock. I saw scratches on the ground that seemed to indicate the clock had been pushed around before. That seemed like a good use of my time, so I decided to give it a push too. But the damn thing wouldn't budge, and it was NOT that heavy so...I dunno, maybe I'll come back later and try to push it again. When I left the clock room I saw that the hallway going further into the building was blocked by a metal gate. But not like a normal security door or anything, just a series of vertical metal bars like some medieval prison. I decided I'd seen all that floor two had to offer and went back to the stairwell and went up to the third floor.

Most of the 3rd floor was inaccessible because of another prison gate, but I DID see a key on the ground just on the other side of the gate. I went to reach for it when this snotty little girl shows up and laughs in my face as she kicks the key just out of my reach! The girl ran off, which was lucky on her part as I was about to see just how far my pal Mr. Big Fucking Stick could reach through the bars. The only room I found I could get in had a shopping cart sitting in it. I was about to leave when I noticed that someone left daddy a present. I did a little shopping of my own and pocketed the 9mm pistol I found. Now it is on. I decided to go back down to the 2nd floor. Maybe I could find another way up to the 3rd floor and introduce that little girl to my new friend, Glocky the 9mm. Thankfully this apartment must have been full of NRA nuts, cuz there was 9mm ammunition everywhere! 

As I was aimlessly wandering the 2nd floor I heard a noise up by the clock room. As I approached I saw some dude standing on the other side of the gate. The guy was covered in blood, but he was also wearing some huge red cone on his head. I dunno what his problem was, but he gave me the creeps. But he wasn't doing much of anything, so I went about my business, and he, presumably, went about his. 

Now I know I went into this room before, but now there was more shit in the room now. An armchair was now in the room and a television showing nothing but static. Oh! And some dead dude too. He was just chilling in the lazy boy, large quantities of his blood painting the TV set. I also found a key on a shelf next to Chuckles and The Blood Tube. It looked like a key to the first floor so I went to check that out. Maybe I'd find something there to justify me creeping through this damn apartment building.

The only room worth a damn on the first floor was that of an avid butterfly collector. The bedroom not only had a wall full of pinned and framed and dead butterflies, but also a bunch of alive butterflies flying all over. I immediately wondered what butterflies ate and how much they pooped. There was a completely not-creepy hole in the wall, so I decided the prudent course of action would be to shove my hand in it and grope around. After all, there was about a 0% chance of anything uncomfortable happening in this strange deserted apartment building. Meh. Just a key for the grandfather clock. 

Back on 2 in the clock room I opened the clock face. I checked the wall where someone scratched a message that was a thinly veiled hint of how to position the clock hands. I didn't have a clue why I was here in a nearly-deserted apartment complex playing with some stiff's grandfather clock, but I imagined maybe I could still find that little girl and teach her what happens when you fuck with a stranger with a gun. 

The clock could be moved once the hands were in the right position. Not real sure how exactly moving the hands of the clock made the clock go from the weight of a dying star to pushable time piece weight, but whatever. I went through a hole behind the clock and came out on the other side of the gate where the cone head had been standing earlier. Nothing to see here so I headed upstairs. 

I found an open room on the 3rd floor. When I walked in I found the cone head fucking around with a couple of the freaky mannequins. He seemed real busy, so as to not bother him whilst he tried to forcibly insert two sentient mannequins into a garbage disposal I decided to see what was inside a nearby closet. With the door closed. Apparently I did not move to the closet expediently enough because cone head decided to come have a look-see in the closet once he was done playing with the mannequins. I decided now would be a good time to point Glocky at the closet door and pull the trigger a dozen times. 

Cone head did not seem to really mind the bullets that much. But I must have hurt him emotionally because he decided he wasn't welcome and strolled off, presumably to put more living things into garbage disposals. I came out of the closet (ha ha) and found the treasure I'd been looking for all along: a six pack of juice! I sprinted to level 2 (again) and tossed that six pack down the garbage chute so hard.

I headed down to the first floor, a grin of complete bliss on my face, finally I would get that trash from the garbage chute! I found the trash in a small alcove on the outside of the building. My hands, trembling, rested on the pile of trash I had dislodged from the second floor. It smelled of garbage and fulfilled dreams. In it I found a coin with an old dude on it, probably a president or something, and an article about a murderer, a Walter Sullivan, who had murdered two children. When arrested he claimed that he was forced to commit the murders by a "red devil" who was trying to punish Sullivan for unspecified reasons. It may sound strange, but just then I was reminded of Mr. Cone Head. Mr. Cone Head's cone was blood red, and he certainly had a taste for administering punishment, but usually more of the garbage disposal variety. Anyway, Sullivan committed suicide in his jail cell after being arrested, so no skin off my ass after all. Once I get out of this apartment building maybe I can go spend my old man coin at the Happy Burger down the street. Get a nice milk shake.

Silent Hill 2: The First Hour

Hello, my name is James Sunderland. I recently received a letter in the mail (snail mail) that was handwritten by my wife. She asked me to meet her in the town of Silent Hill in our "special place", whatever the hell that was supposed to mean. So I decided to go to Silent Hill.

Now let me stop right here and explain, to the best of my abilities, the multiple things already wrong with this picture. You may wonder why my wife is sending me a letter to invite me somewhere, rather than just discussing this over dinner, or while watching some Netflix, or something. Well, that's because she's dead. Yep. Died a couple years back. Got sick, died, I had a real big sad after that. But then I got a letter from her, in her own handwriting. I know that, in the normal course of events, dead folks can't handwrite letters, let alone get the required postage, but I figured "What the fuck" might as well go to where she said to meet her on the off chance that she un-died and is keeping up on old relationships and marriages via the U.S. postal service. So I hopped into my blue car and drove to a rest stop on the outskirts of Silent Hill.

Once I arrived I got out of the car because I had the powerful need to make a pee. I didn't even close the car door because why the fuck not? And that is how I came to be standing in a filthy, graffitied rest stop bathroom staring into a mirror, talking to myself about my dead wife and the letter she might have maybe sent recently and totally wasn't an old letter, from before she died, lost in the mail.

I left the bathroom and decided, despite there being a perfectly good road and the fact that I wasn't even remotely close to my destination, to walk the rest of the way through a winding forrest path. As I walked I heard ominous rustling in the forrest around me, but I was confident that since I'd not happened upon a discarded weapon along the path that nothing dangerous would jump out and confront me.

Just as I was starting to question the wisdom of walking this way I found an old abandoned well with a red piece of paper at the bottom. I took a look at the paper and felt the strong sense that I had accomplished something of note by walking down this path and finding a red slip of paper. I silently congratulated myself and walked through a gate leading to the yard of an old church.

I knew the church was old because churches are always old in settings like this. That and it had a graveyard in it, like no real churches ever have ever. There was a woman just hanging out in the graveyard. That could be construed as the behavior of a crazy person, but I was feeling chatty, so I struck up a conversation. I asked for directions to Silent Hill, but I was just fucking around cuz I had grabbed a map that I had laid across my car's driver's seat. The door to my car was still open, by the way. Hope no one takes anything! Anyway, she told me how to get to Silent Hill, then told me I shouldn't go to Silent Hill. I guess it's, like, dangerous or something. I told that crazy bitch to fuck off! James goes where James likes! And I did!

I walked through some more dirt roads, heard some creepy noises that I promptly ignored, finally arriving at the town proper. Even though I had a pretty clear objective of getting to Rosewater Park, I decided to do some urban exploration down some alleys. While walking down one alley I heard some radio static. I located the source, a portable AM/FM radio that was probably pretty popular among kids circa 1960. Finders keepers! I had to crawl through some construction scaffolding to get it, but I really wanted that free radio that didn't seem to do anything but emit static noises periodically. As soon as I wiggled through the scaffold and grabbed the prize some fucking monster comes out of the shadows! I shit you not! It was humanoid, but missing arms and a head. It's had a large...orifice on its chest and moved all weird like monsters in a Japanese horror film. That thing was all kinds of messed up so I grabbed a stick and got ready to beat it to death. Before I could bring my stick thunder down upon old no-arms the thing puked on me! It. Was. ON. I beat that mother shitter to a puddle of goo. The radio finally stopped all the static shit too. I saw all I cared to see of these back alleys, so decided I should get back to trying to get to Rosewater Park.

The streets of Silent Hill are fucked. I'm walkin' all over the place and they've got collapsed streets, some streets are covered up entirely by plastic sheeting, locked gates for no apparent reason. Oh yeah! And there are monsters everywhere now! But it wasn't such a big deal though. I'd already seen a monster and clobbered it into soup, so it was kinda like "Been there, done that". I found this abandoned trailer just sitting out in the middle of the road. No one was around, so I figured I'd take a look and see if there were any "gifts" in there for me. There wasn't shit in that crappy trailer but a note. The note said to come out to the bar, and since I didn't really have anything else going on I figured what the hell.

The bar was right across from a Happy Burger. I might hit that place up a little later if I maybe find some cash laying around in the street, who knows? The bar sucked. It was all dark and there was no one there! All I found was this map some kid had scribbled all over. I was disappointed that the bar was a wash, so I figured I'd go check out where the scribbles were on the map, just for the hell of it. I run down this alley full of garages and see some dead woman just laying there. Blood was everywhere! Well, I assume she was dead anyway. Didn't actually check. But she was holding a key to some apartment building gate. I decided right then it would be totally awesome to check out that apartment. There had to be so much shit I could swipe!

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.

Fus Ro Dah!

The beauty of neglecting to update your blog with any sort of consistency is that when something exciting happens there's no real drive to follow any thin veneer of consistency.

Skyrim:
Skyrim is rocking my world. Much like it's rocking the world of thousands (hundreds of thousands?) of other people.

This image no doubt depicts a character in Skyrim having a friendly chat with an undead sorcerer. "Chatting" has lethal results when you talk in dragon speak. The player can learn to speak in dragon language and these "words of power" all have unique magic-like effects and where from slowing down time, or summoning animal companions to, my personal favorite, unrelenting force. This causes your character to project a powerful shockwave throwing anyone unfortunate enough to be in front of you while you scream nonsense words into the air. Ideally, the unfortunate enemy ( or friend, or horse, or bunny) will be standing on the edge of a massive cliff, but one can't always be so fortunate.
     Excluding the chronic poor choices of playing various MMOs, Oblivion (precursor to Skyrim) is the game that holds the title of Most Hours Played (in a single play through anyway), so I was eagerly awaiting the release of Skyrim. I queued up at my dubious local GameStore I looked upon dozens of crazies who came out to pick up a video game at midnight! Get a life! So I got my copy around 1 AM. And what a night I had!

Skyrim has delivered in every way I wanted to, and more-or-less no ways I didn't want it to. The previous Elder Scroll games were very micro-manage-y about how you built your character and you could "screw up" your character by poor choices leveling and allocating skills. Skyrim has simplified the system quite a bit. If I absolutely had to lob a criticism it would be that through their attempt to simplify the leveling system we lost some of my favorite skills, such as acrobatics (jumping really high) and athletics (running a long time and fast). And I'm not trying to convey this as some mythical "perfect game". It's buggy as hell. I've encountered some disappointing boss fights where what should have been an epic battle (with me dying alot) turned into the boss running around like a maniac, but refusing to actually attack me as I planted my sword into his head over and over again. All in all though, this has all the trappings of being a new favorite game for me.

The Last Imagining

Final Fantasy XIII on the whole was a travesty.

That being said, it did have some amazing aspects to it. The battle system was like nothing I've ever played before. They shed the micromanagement of your party that has always been inherent in a FF game. Instead of telling party member 2 to cast fire 3 and party member 1 to beat a baddy over the head with a sword, you directly control only the party leader. Even using the term "directly control" is a bit misleading. You can select each individual attack for the character to carry out, but the battles move so fast that that type of game play is a recipe for destruction. Instead, you find yourself constantly selecting the "Autobattle" option. This will make your character carry out the most effective attacks against an enemy. The strategy comes from assigning your party to "paradigm" roles. Like 'the guy who hits stuff' or 'healer' or 'magic-dude'. So the battle system I found to be really fun. Not really a "final Fantasy" battle system, but really fun and exciting none-the-less. The music was really awesome also.

Here's the bad. I did not give one single shit for the characters, who were the same tired old archetypes from every other FF game. The game was too long. I finished the game in about 60 hours. That's WITHOUT doing the tedious hours of super boring extras. It also takes roughly 20 hours before the game finally takes off the training wheels and lets you start playing the way you want to play. The game is also completely linear, but that's less of a complaint from me than it would have been 10 years ago. It's more of a statement of fact. But here is the complaint. The character progression takes the form of a "Crystarium" which is this game's version of the "Sphere Grid" or "License Board" from FF X or FF XII. The trouble with the crystarium is that it is almost completely linear for each character. You do have some modicum of customization,, but it's pretty much a cameo.

I could go on about Final Fantasy XIII, but I won't. I hit the major points, and that's all I care to go over.

Funny "I'm Back" themed title here

I haven't posted in 3 months. Whatever. That's all I'm going to say about that. Class + Laptop = writing a new post.

I've played the entirety of Final Fantasy XIII and Bastion since the last post. I also promised more details about Magika last time. Here are those details, probably much shorter than I originally intended because I just don't care anymore. Magika was a very unique game. I'm sure some one can say "no it's not it's just like ____" but I don't care. It's a funny game. Or rather, it's a game that tries to incorporate humor and it succeeds to a moderate extent. But yer a little wizard dude, excuse me, a non-gender specific wizard running around casting magics. You have 8-10 elements you combine to make spells. The game and concept are super-fun, but the game loses almost all credibility because of shoddy programming that makes the game run slow as hell. Additionally, I don't know if I've ever played a buggier game, with exception of possibly Fallout New Vegas which is also rife with bugs.

Thats all for now. Class is over.

Screw Up

I've been dropping the ball lately, hard. I'm gonna give a fast and dirty update on the games I've been playing, but I think I will give some of the bigger titles posts of their own shortly. Dragon Age: Haven't touched it. I'm getting close to what I perceive to be the end, but I'm got one last hump to get over. That hump is called "Going into another huge-ass town". I'm confident that will require having to do all the tedious walking around, gathering 10 new missions, talking to all the appropriate people to get those done blah blah blah. I'm even boring myself with this story.
The new stuff I've gotten is Final Fantasy XIII, Fallout: New Vegas, and Operation Darkness. Oh ho! But tose are just the XBox 360 titles! I've also acquired Magicka and Defense Grid on PC (thanks Steam). I highly recommend checking out Magicka, despite the performance problems that seem common to the game, and Defense Grid (but only if you like tower defense games). Apologies, I did not go into the usual amount of detail on this post, but I'm trying to get a post up really fast so I can go play Magicka. More details will be forthcoming.

Long Time Coming

     I haven't posted in a long time. It's because life got pretty hectic for awhile. Whatever. Games:
I've not played anything to speak of other than Dragon Age. The more I play it the better it gets. The most recent discovery I made was the Tactics customization. "Tactics" bascially means that the characters you don't directly control, instead of running around doing whatever they feel like in combat, are bound by rule sets. These are conditions like "When surrounded by 3 or more enemies:" do ability A or whatever. I ignored the option to customize all these things for over half the game simply because it's alot of information to process. There are at least 50 (probably over 100 actually) different choices you can make for the condition that will trigger a certain ability. In addition to that, you also have to have some idea of what each ability does for each character. I've got about 8 different characters, give or take, and each one has no less than 6 different abilities. You do the math and figure out that's alot of information to process.
     But now that I finally decided to mess with Tactics, it's a game-changer. All the characters now do things that make sense and combats have become a lot easier. When I play Dragon Age again, as I undoubtedly will, I will be sure to use tactics from the beginning that time. One final thought on DA then I'm done. The level of character customization in this game is incredible. It's exciting to me that two people could play through the game, choosing the same class like rogue or warrior or mage, and end up with completely different characters. With mage in particular there are so many different options and schools of magic that you can have a different game experience every time you play. Exciting!

Frustrating Ninjas!

***WARNING***THIS POST MAY CONTAIN MILD SPOILERS REGARDING NINJA GAIDEN II ***END WARNING***

     I finished Ninja Gaiden II yesterday. It's not something I was playing diligently, I would pick it up every once in a while. For the most part it lacked some of the ridiculous difficulty that the first game had. For the most part, I said. The last two levels were filled with somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 boss battles. The frustration come in two parts. Number one Ninja bass battles are Hard...usually. That is to be expected with this game though. The second, more frustrating, issue is that I thought I was fighting "The Last Boss" no less than 4 times. I could expound upon how irritating that bosses were, but I feel that would just be belaboring the point.
     I've been playing a little bit of Dragon Age, but I've stalled a little on that game. Dragon Age deserves it's own post, so I won't go into detail right now. I finished Gears of War since my last post and started Gears of War 2, but am taking my time with it. I really want to play both games' campaign as co-op, so I sent feelers out on the Fear the Boot forums for some people to help make that happen. I think playing that co-op will be a game-changer.

   















   
     Finally, every 3 - 4 years I try to play through Final Fantasy III (that's VI if you use the original Japanese numbering system) and I've gotten the itch to try it once again. I've never actually finished FF3/6, not because it is especially difficult, but because I hit a certain (optional) dungeon in the game that I really want to finish, and that dungeon (the Magic Tower, for those who have played it) is especially difficult. Since I always get hung up there, at the very end of the game, I've never actually beat it. But hey, 8th time's the charm.

Cogs of War

Real-life has been interrupting postings the last week. I'm updating because I've got a minute to spare, but I haven't advanced the cause of gaming too much recently. A few days ago I picked up the Gears of War pack that includes Gears 1 and 2 and much if not all downloadable content for Gears 2. I've played the single player campaign before, but I'm sending out some feelers to hopefully find a co-op partner to play with. The only other remarkable moment has been getting to play Last Night on Earth again. Always a treat.

 











I've been playing some multiplayer recently, because it's easy to pick up for a bit then put down. In most cases it's very easy to put down. Anyway, I'm not bragging about my "mad skilz" but I've gotten to the point that in most multiplayer matches I play (not game specific) I usually end up in the top 3-5 players in the match. Gears of War is the exception to this. I've got a couple theories, so get ready! #1- I'm just not good at Gears of War. This is possible, but it feels like an easy answer. I prefer theory #2: Each Gears match provides significantly less opportunity to hone your playing skills. Most multiplayer games allow for and are based around respawns. Some dude explodes your head with a sniper rifle, you wait about 8 seconds, then you're back in the fight to get said head exploded again...in seconds...by the same douche bag. Many of the Gears of War multiplayer games don't allow that. Once you die, you're dead for the match. Clearly, for many of the games that means, as a new player, you run out, get killed and you're done. Quite a 180 from games like Dead Space 2 or Halo where, if you're tenacious, or bad, enough, you can get killed again and again, racking up as many as (possibly) 20 deaths. So you have opportunity after opportunity to try to not die. I can't think of any verbose ending to this post, so I'll just end it abruptly here.

Aftermath

I waited a few days before posting anything new. I wanted to give myself time to let it sink in that the vast majority of my previous game collection is gone. It has. I don't miss it. I was holding on to a bunch of crap titles that I had finished and kept around because I told myself I'd go back and get those last few achievements. Or for the mythical time that I "got into" the multiplayer. Well no more. A game surfaces in my head every few days that I miss for about 5 minutes, then I'm over it.
     Now: Portal 2. It was great. Finished single and mutliplayer. It was short, but I was anticipating that. It was also really fun (also anticipated that), but I think the multiplayer was stronger than the single player game. Some downloadable content is supposed to be out "this summer", whenever that is. And best of all, it's going to be free. Don't believe me? Check Joystiq!
     When I was talking about Dragon Age I had not yet given the game a fair shake. It is awesome! I am more enthusiastic about Dragon Age then I am about Portal 2. It's so good, and so similar to Star Wars: KOTOR that it makes me think: if I had KOTOR on console instead of PC, maybe I'd actually finish the game, instead of finishing the first 8-10 hours and never picking it up again. Wow. I really need to go back to that game once Dragon Age is done.

I also picked up Star Craft 2 for PC. I've played 3-4 levels of it and am overwhelmed with my lack of an opinion. Not that it's bad. It's probably really great, but I'm not feeling the Real-Time Strategy right now.

Last, and certainly least, I started playing the free trial of Warhammer online. I'll describe the game like this: World of Warcraft. Same thing. If you've ever played WoW you know exactly what to expect. I'm not criticizing the game; I haven't played enough for that yet, but I've already been there. Done that.