waypoint

deadline monkey rises again

stolisomancer — Tue, 09 Sep 2014 20:11:46 GMT

In an attempt to shock myself into greater productivity, I have begun blogging over at Blogspot.

I've never been much good at keeping a regular blog, but this is part of an attempt to bring myself up and forward into a new stage.

the unsolved murder of deadline monkey

stolisomancer — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 22:06:32 GMT

I have been hard at work for weeks on the official strategy guide for Disgaea D2, and now there is a contest for it.

Apparently it is my lot in life to end up writing about this series.

deadline monkey vs. the world

stolisomancer — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 20:25:48 GMT

I wasn't expecting to write one of the most positive Resident Evil 6 reviews on the Internet, but then again, here we are.

Man, Chris's campaign is such a slog.

deadline monkey runs for president

stolisomancer — Wed, 19 Sep 2012 17:49:56 GMT

If, for some reason, you actually wish to hear me and a bunch of melodramatic guys from the UK blather about Resident Evil: Code Veronica for the better part of three hours, here you go.

itchy, tasty

stolisomancer — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 01:05:06 GMT

Screw it. GameFAQs isn't playing ball.

Spread the link and tell your friends:
http://sites.google.com/site/stolisomancy/replot/replot.txt

deadline monkey's triumphant return

stolisomancer — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 06:17:09 GMT

I'm not sure why I stopped updating this thing. I think I just got distracted.

In the event that there are individuals who still check LJ and care about such things, I've just submitted a new version of the old Resident Evil plot guide to GameFAQs, where it is sitting in the submission queue just waiting to ruin some content checker's day. I've actually tried to update it once before now, but it ran afoul of the Byzantine process that GameFAQs currently uses to update its guides.

In the meantime, I'm back to getting 1000/1000 in Resident Evil 5 and waiting for A Bunch of Possibilities to become At Least One Certainty.

deadline monkey's sarcasm overdose

stolisomancer — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:52:37 GMT

HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS

I'M PLAYING SINGULARITY AND IT HAS HEALTH PACKS

IF I TAKE DAMAGE THE DAMAGE JUST KIND OF STAYS THERE UNTIL I HEAL IT

WHAT IS THIS STRANGE AND FRIGHTENING NEW WORLD IN WHICH I FIND MYSELF

the oppressive existence of deadline monkey

stolisomancer — Fri, 25 Jun 2010 21:40:35 GMT

One of the things about nerd culture that has always mystified me is the generally conservative atmosphere. As a general rule, the silent majority of science fiction fans seem to want more of what they already have: familiar characters, new takes on old scenarios, etc. For these people, nerd media - even with its heavy focus on fantasy, possibility and wonder - doesn't function to challenge, inspire, or innovate; instead, it's something like a warm bath in a familiar room.

I suppose that's fine as far as it goes; it's a big, weird world, and whatever gets you through it sane is probably a good thing.

What's frustrating is that the silent majority is where the money comes from, and they tend to recoil, hissing, from anything they don't already know. (That is, unless they're hit with a multimillion-dollar, multimedia ad campaign, on the level where it's less a marketing initiative and more the PR equivalent of the Visigoths sacking Rome.) You see a lot of this just about everywhere; the examples that come readily to my mind are "Firefly," Beyond Good & Evil, and the recent Sarah Polley movie Splice.

The mainstream comic book industry is worse about this than just about anything else, which is part of why both DC and Marvel are stuck in constant crossover mode. Both have made good-faith efforts to launch new or at least new-ish comics over the course of the last decade, and very few of them have reached the point where they're even a qualified success. Marvel in particular

At the moment, DC's drawing fire for inadvertent racism, high levels of violence, and the deeply weird decision to kill off a gay supporting character in Birds of Prey in the middle of LBGT Pride Month. (To be fair, Gail Simone's said that there's more to the story than it looks like, but I'm not sure how the timing on that could have been any worse.)

For a while, Marvel looked like it might have avoided the controversy. This week, however, they released the early art for their Women of Marvel tie-in covers, and Storm is the only non-white character in the bunch. They included Jean Grey, who's actually still dead somehow, and a character who appears to be the Golden Age Blonde Phantom, but didn't think to throw Monica Rambeau, Armor, Surge, Nico Manoru, Arana or Misty Knight on there.

Oops.

It's a tricky situation. On the one hand, both companies make their living using holdover characters from, at best, the early sixties. While both companies have relatively high-profile non-white characters, both companies are also stuck with a central cast that was mostly created before the civil rights movement. (Marvel has a very slight edge in this department, mostly because of Robbie Robertson, but they didn't have a black superhero in his own book until 1972.) A lot of the newer fans that they so desperately need are clamoring for equal representation in these superhero universes - more non-white heroes, more gay heroes, etc. - but both companies are hamstrung by their dependence on the older fans' goodwill. Give a new character his own book (or even an older character who was created after 1965 or so) and it sinks without a trace; give a new character too much of the limelight in a team book and the fans bitch in droves.

What interests me about the discussion, though, mostly has to do with Greg Pak's work at Marvel. Pak's Korean, and got his start writing a bunch of miniseries that nobody really seemed to care about, like Rise of the Imperfects. Since then, he's written some high-profile stuff like World War Hulk and Incredible Hercules.

In a lot of Pak's work so far, he's managed to very subtly work in non-white and female characters without really drawing a lot of attention to it. He created Amadeus Cho, who's one of the more successful new characters to come out of Marvel in the last decade. Pak's War Machine run rehabilitated the extremely '90s character Suzi Endo from, of all fucking things, Force Works, in a book that also featured James Rhodes and Bethany Cabe (who's probably one of the most obscure, yet awesome, characters at Marvel).

Pak didn't sit back and write angry letters to somebody until he got the characters he wanted. He started as a student filmmaker and eventually wound up at Marvel. Once he was there, he rolled up his sleeves and got to work. Sometimes it's really fucking blatant, like that Korean SHIELD guy in Phoenix: Warsong (who is, seriously, only one or two steps above an author avatar, and who Pak later partially redeemed by making him a sort of well-meaning fuckup in War Machine), but Pak did it right. He created the change he wanted.

The other writers in the new crop at Marvel - Jeff Parker, Paul Tobin, Fred Van Lente - are all similarly adept. Tobin mostly writes the Marvel Adventures books, but did a pretty good turn with Venus and Namora recently in Fall of an Avenger. Parker is best known for shoehorning the Agents of Atlas, which are led by a Chinese guy, into absolutely everything he possibly can. Fred Van Lente introduced the half-Indian Jackie Kane in Marvel Zombies recently, and created the new Scorpion, Carmilla Black.

To some extent, I think these are decent examples of how to effectively diversify the character lineup in mainstream comics. You have to trick the audience into it, introducing one character here, pulling one out of obscurity there, gradually refining the universe until its supporting cast more effectively resembles the world outside the reader's window.

The important thing to remember, though, when discussing the issue of race in comics (or anywhere else, for that matter), is that progress is actually being made, if only a little bit at a time. We are moving forward.

The problem is finding a way to be part of the solution, but at least that part's relatively easy. One of the morals of the twentieth century, which we seem to conveniently forget a lot of the time, is that change doesn't happen by asking other people to change. Change starts with you.

If you want to see characters in fiction that look more like you, then roll up your goddamn sleeves and write that novel. Learn to draw. Go to film school. Make what you want to read. That's what I find useful about Greg Pak's work at Marvel so far, and what I find frustrating about the ongoing debate concerning race. If half the motherfuckers complaining on the Internet went out tomorrow and decided to add their own culture to the mixture, we'd be living their dream in a decade.

sportscenter

stolisomancer — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 05:54:00 GMT

It turns out that when my life depends on the outcome of the game, basketball's actually pretty exciting.

The Lakers won tonight and Los Angeles feels like it's under siege. The street outside my hotel smells like expended gunpowder and police cars are moving in tight groups of six. If the Lakers had lost - and they were getting shellacked right up until the third quarter - I'm not sure I'd have made it back from dinner.

This is kind of fun, really.

deadline monkey and the infinite sadness

stolisomancer — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 15:24:57 GMT

So yeah, I have a certain degree of earned cynicism about Sony at this point, so maybe I'm not the guy to ask this question, but if you watched their press conference yesterday, did it seem really fucking weird to anyone else?

I don't mean Kevin Butler up there on stage worshipping a golden calf or whatever the fuck it was that he thought he was doing. I don't mean that sassy black kid that's going to be the new face of the PSP brand, although that was somewhere between amusing and cringe-worthy.

Mostly I'm wondering about how they packed the room. The audience response seemed far out of proportion to the actual value of what was said, pretty much at all times, even when someone on stage was saying patently ridiculous things. I cannot take a man seriously when he claims his company is an industry leader and font of boundless innovation when he's got a fucking blue-balled Wiimote in his hand.

what man can kill me

stolisomancer — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 07:01:17 GMT

Well, I've just been in my first earthquake.

I really don't know why I keep coming back here.

a ridiculous apocalypse

stolisomancer — Thu, 20 May 2010 21:43:21 GMT

I get up, raring to face the day, and then I read about the BP oil spill and trainwreck syndrome kicks in.

This is perhaps the dumbest possible ecological disaster and I cannot look away.

i am the rocket messiah

stolisomancer — Sun, 09 May 2010 04:02:34 GMT

I have a job interview on Monday that, knock on wood, would put me in a position I have always wanted to be in, doing a job I have always wanted to do. I am somewhere between trying not to get my hopes too far up, lest disappointment destroy me, and carefully extrapolating a future career path that begins here, and ends in my triumphant ascension to god-emperor of the known universe.
I really wish I could put my finger on what it is about Left 4 Dead 2 that isn't quite as satisfying as the original. I think some of it may be the fact that joining a "quick match" at any time of the day or night is like hopping an express train to abject failure. "The Passing" is a pretty nifty scenario all told, but I have yet to see a group of random players who can handle the finale in any way. Usually, they forget what game they're playing and scatter in three directions. I didn't think anything about L4D could be more irritating than the cockmongers who played the first one like it was Counterstrike, but I do believe that's been trumped.
Since there are some people wondering about this in the corners of the Internet, I do still occasionally pull out and poke at the Resident Evil Plot Analysis, but it's a cursed project; it kills email accounts (my game-over.net account has been inactive for a while due to sheer weight of accumulated spam), destroys fan communities, and was actually trapped on a dead laptop for a significant span of time. I'm sort of thinking if I post an update, Mt. Fuji will erupt.
It's always a surreal moment when you're mentioned by name on TV Tropes. Which one of you did that?
In a weird confluence of events, the parts of the comics-fan blogging world that I pay attention to, like the new Scans Daily and Chris Bird's blog (I find myself in the weird position of being able to say, re: Bird, that I "knew him when"), have all been reading DC the riot act over the last couple of days.

Bird talks about and links to a decent essay about DC's weird relationship with its own fanbase, which is a point well worth making, and s_d was the first place I saw people discussing the weird racist subtext in Brightest Day and in DC as a whole.

I don't have a lot of useful things to say about the discussion, really. I read Brightest Day #1, and as I say on the s_d thread, the violence of the book struck me before the racial content of it did. Geoff Johns has always struck me as a really fucking strange writer, because on the one hand, he's a continuity-embracing Silver Age fetishist, but on the other, he mows down random bystanders like wheat. I remember opening a TPB of his Flash run and reading a plot that involved a cult knife-murdering everyone Wally had ever saved, including a female police officer who got stabbed in the back while trying to protect her infant son. Blackest Night had an innocent-bystander body count in the thousands that no one at DC seems interested in discussing. Now, Brightest Day starts off with a hearty dose of white slavery and random stabbing.

You can't have it both ways, you know? Blackest Night tries to have an ending that involves the absolute victory of good over evil, and life over death, and Hal Jordan as Not Jesus Really, but I can't get over the sheer amount of bloodshed that led up to that point. I don't care how big the win is, but half the nonpowered DC Universe is lying dead in the street.

I'll also admit that I get a little fanboy grin when I see people comparing DC to Marvel right now. I'm not a huge fan of everything Marvel does, and "Brand New Day" left a bad taste in my mouth that has yet to quite go away, but I guess you have to dance with the one who brought you. It feels like my sports team is winning, somehow, as stupid as that is.

claw marks on the wall

stolisomancer — Sat, 01 May 2010 20:13:45 GMT

I found myself with time to kill a couple of days ago at the Palms in Las Vegas, so I decided to check out the new A Nightmare on Elm Street. My inner thirteen-year-old demanded it.

It's getting kicked up and down the block by film critics right now (15% on Rotten Tomatoes), but that's more or less par for the course. I'm not sure something like this was ever going to be a critical darling, particularly when you consider that it's a remarkably faithful remake. It pulls the same protagonist bait-and-switch that the original did, for example.

The important thing, though, is that it keeps the scares relatively grounded. While I dug the hell out of them as a kid, the later Nightmares all rapidly devolved into special effects sequences, starring Freddy as a sort of homicidal Ray Harryhausen with an infinite budget. Sometimes they were effective despite that, like parts of Dream Warriors, but something was lost.

The remake is fairly sedate by comparison. The nightmares have a familiar dream logic to them, where one place is abruptly another and all places are always Freddy's boiler-room hell, and Freddy himself is given a slightly more complex personality and motivation. It's a largely better-written movie than the original was, and it's an overall more watchable film, especially given how poorly the original movie has aged.

There is one thing I'm a bit irritated by, though, and that's going to require some spoilers to discuss.

Watching as many horror movies as I did growing up, I've got an abiding interest in the concept of the "final girl": the last designated victim standing, who for whatever reason is smarter or luckier than the rest, and who's usually the one who takes out the antagonist.

The original Nightmare on Elm Street has Nancy, who's pretty much the defining example of the form. Watching the movie again now, it does seem mildly unrealistic that she's as together as she is; she manages to set up a series of improvised booby traps, including that really vicious light bulb bomb, over the course of less than ten minutes.

Just the same, though, watching the remake and now watching this, it made me realize that Nancy's been my go-to standard for horror movie heroines ever since I saw this movie as a kid. Whenever I watch a horror movie now, and the final girl is hysterical to the point of being useless, I find myself annoyed by it. (The first recent movie that comes to mind is Quarantine, where the final girl spends the last twenty minutes of the movie or so with her hands clapped over her mouth so she doesn't scream. That's about all she does, too.)

In the Nightmare remake, Nancy is still the final girl (and she's played by what appears to be Felicia Day's stunt double), but she's not the force of nature she is in the original. She's smart enough, but Quentin (who, I suppose, is the equivalent to Johnny Depp's character in the original film) carries at least as much of the mail.

It's odd, really. Twenty-six years later, in the post-"Buffy" era, you'd expect a remake to have Nancy kicking even more ass. Instead, she winds up having to share the spotlight. It's not a marginalization by any means, but it takes an atmospheric, satisfying climax and vastly waters it down.

today's scheduled distraction

stolisomancer — Mon, 22 Mar 2010 14:13:33 GMT

I do actually have things to do today. Rather a lot, in fact. Out of nowhere a bunch of irons caught fire simultaneously last week and now, by my math, I need to beat a game every six hours until Friday.

What's going to make that tricky is my desire to patrol the Internet looking for new, exciting protestations of socialism concerning last night's health care extravaganza.

Whether it's elderly seniors protesting that nobody else should get anything vaguely like Medicare, or would-be military veterans promising armed insurrection over the fact that somebody else may get Tricare someday, it turns out that watching ill-informed people cry can be remarkably entertaining.

It almost makes me want to turn on Rush Limbaugh. Almost.

sigh

stolisomancer — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:42:38 GMT

If absolutely nothing else, Neal Stephenson's Anathem is worth reading for the concept of Diax's Rake.

It seems like something that should have been invented a long time ago.

the happiest place on dead earth

stolisomancer — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:23:47 GMT

Zombieland's a weird movie. It's a funny movie, but it's oddly plotless. I almost don't like it.

The title is telling, because it's a zombie apocalypse as an amusement park. None of the protagonists have lost anything truly valuable (there's an exception which would constitute a spoiler); the main character is a self-admitted paranoid shut-in before the zombie outbreak, whose first real contact with another human being ends with lethal self-defense. He has no real contacts with the outside world and thus feels as though he's lost nothing.

The characters almost never run out of ammunition, never run out of gasoline, and have a knack for finding exactly what they need exactly when they need it; they're so unconcerned about conservation of resources that they spend a lot of time shooting randomly into the sky. It's an entire movie set during that part of Dawn of the Dead where the characters are fucking around in the shopping mall.

Of course, it's a comedy. It doesn't even go for the slight elements of horror that were in Shaun of the Dead, where most of the cast actually does die horribly; instead, it's an apocalypse that came and went and happened entirely to other people, leaving the protagonists virtually untouched.

Then some stuff happens to those people, and it's funny, and then the movie ends. Anyone you've seen online bitching about how little actually goes on in Zombieland actually has a very valid point. It's the least epic journey imaginable, in a genre that's usually characterized by every little thing the characters try to do being punctuated with violent death.

mirrors are a cowardly and superstitious lot

stolisomancer — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 04:34:18 GMT

I wound up with a copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum out of nowhere today, so I just played a bit of it. It's probably the best Batman game ever, but to be absolutely fair, that is a very low bar. LEGO Batman is probably its closest competition, and after that, you're going straight back to, what, the Genesis Batman and Robin?

The bigger problem I'm having is that Rocksteady went for a photorealistic look to the game, which does Batman no favors. They're trying to literally translate the comic-book Batsuit to that environment, which means that nine times out of ten, Batman doesn't look like some kind of brooding avenger of the night. He looks utterly ridiculous, like a pro wrestler in a cape.

Then again, I hate that Superman and Batman are the last two superheroes in the business who still do the panties-over-bodysuit costume.

This has been your generally irrelevant aside for the day. Next up: I solve world hunger and teach a child to read.

the slow nightmares of deadline monkey

stolisomancer — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 22:44:24 GMT

Little King's Story is an odd creature. It looks like the typical post-Miyamoto dream logic game, but turns it all back around on you by the end and goes back to making an odd sort of sense; it begins as a childishly simple Lemmings sort of game and actually gets fiendishly difficult by the end. It's not perfect, of course, but it's interesting, and now you can go buy my guide for it.

I've been in a work coma post-E3, really, either writing about stuff for OMG or Worth Playing or reviewing a couple of things for Game Over or working on guides; right now I'm putting off screenshot organization for Phantom Brave on the Wii.

When I'm not doing that, I've been poking at WoW some more, and good lord, Ulduar's tough. Seeing it as a shadow priest is kind of laid-back and mellow; seeing it as a healer is really not like seeing it at all. Seeing it as a tank is watching text onscreen that says somebody just got hit for 15,000 damage by a normal attack and realizing it was you.

deadline monkey in a cowboy hat

stolisomancer — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:32:32 GMT

Damnation is presently getting worked like a speed bag by gaming reviewers, and for the most part, it's justified. It's not the product of talented people; it's incoherent, glitchy, and utterly without challenge. There are a couple of ideas in it that are worth exploring, or so I thought until I realized that everything I liked is more or less taken straight from Uncharted, then dropped into Gears of War. Sort of.

(I fucking hate reviewers or writers who describe a game or movie in terms of what other products it most closely resembles; it does a disservice to the original work by portraying it as shamelessly derivative. That said, when something clearly is shamelessly derivative, like Dante's Inferno, there's no reason not to call it on that.)

Plus, this shit is officially ridiculous. I mean, look at this character design.

I'm a man who enjoys breasts, even fictional ones, but this is supposed to be a hard-bitten guerilla fighter, trapped behind enemy lines in a nation gripped by steampunk civil war. Even better, if you see her in-game, they took the time to adjust her model so it looks like she's realistically sweating, which is about twice the effort they put into the gameplay.

Enemies in Damnation behave sort of like mobs in WoW, where they don't realize you're there unless you get close or you shoot one of them. Their "patrol pattern" is about five feet wide.

Why am I bringing this up?

Because Damnation is the comedy hit of the year.

I don't know who wrote this game, but they're going for inadvertent comic genius with every line, aided by some really wooden voice acting and a completely batshit plot. I'm only on the first level and I've already heard lines like:

"Make his death painful. I want him to remember it."

I'm going to update this post as I go, but seriously: this is just getting funnier. At this point, I'm in this for the chuckles.

(Said out of nowhere, without context, during an elevator ride.)
"Prescott has a new weapon."
"A weapon? But they are civilians."

the contents of my brain

stolisomancer — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 05:44:09 GMT

Last week, I was in Seattle proper for a job interview. It was over by 2:30 and I didn't want to go back to my apartment just yet, where soul-crushing deadlines awaited me, so I explored for a while.

It turned out that unless I wanted to go clothes-shopping there wasn't a goddamned thing to do in that part of Seattle, but I did see something I wish I'd had a camera for. (A real camera, not the pretense thereof mounted on my 'phone.)

This might've been on Pike Street. On a bank of newspaper machines, most of them empty, someone had posted a long letter, handwritten on typewriter paper, in block capitals. It wasn't very well-written, the editor in me noticed; it might've been the work of someone not quite fluent, or someone with an incomplete education.

It appeared to be a diatribe by a young woman (presumably, from the handwriting; it could've been a man, discussing a man; the twenty-first century is hell on gender assumption) to her parents, concerning her black significant other. He wasn't a bad man, she wrote, just beaten down by the world. He'd had more than his share of bad luck, and there was no reason for them to hate him.

If it was some kind of viral ad, then it failed for that purpose; it didn't even hint at what it might've been advertising, and it was handwritten; had it been mass-produced, I might've figured it for some kind of theatrical ad.

I'm not sure what made her post the letter on a random street corner in Seattle, but I've been thinking about it ever since.

it didn't fit anywhere else

stolisomancer — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 07:58:36 GMT

One of the reasons I read the Something Awful forums is that it's one of the linchpins of the Internet. Sooner or later, everyone seems to show up there somehow.

On their thread about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, a poster purporting to be a former employee of Climax talks about making Silent Hill: Origins.

It was a fun development though, we were all big Silent Hill fans and very keen to work on the game (especially after Ghost Rider). We had great tools and a fantastic engine coder who did the full shadowing torch and other SFX. It was rushed towards the end however, and there was literally no time for balance, which is why you end up with 50 portable TVs by the end of the game. Oh yeah and the game timer code is bust, so it stops updating when you are looking at your map, the inventory or any game objects. This means most people's playthrough times displayed on the end screen were as little as half the actual time spent playing, giving rise to a lot of reviews saying 'This is only a 3 hour game', when it's more like 5-6 hours. That hurt us I think. Also that awful sound bug where all music and sound stops playing sometimes... doh.

Of course, it could be somebody lying to feel important, but it's not ridiculous enough to immediately disbelieve. It does make sense, though; Origins very much felt like a rushed fan production, and in the end, what do you know; it was.

overspecialization

stolisomancer — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 22:39:46 GMT

In what may wind up being a slightly overconfident move, I have joined the staff at the Seattle Examiner. I am writing about MMORPGs, a genre that I am by no means expert in.

I guess we'll see how this goes, huh?

tag team, back again

stolisomancer — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 00:04:01 GMT

I wasn't initially planning to go to E3 this year. It was a month earlier than it was last year, for one thing, and for another, I'm hip-deep in deadlines for two separate strategy guides, particularly Phantom Brave: We Meet Again.

Then Rainier called me up and told me he needed another person on the ground at E3 this year. I told him I'd do my best to be free if I could, but didn't know if it'd be an option. I immediately threw myself into PB for about five days, burning through the new scenario. Fortunately, it's not that long and doesn't have its own unique postgame.

On the Friday before E3, NIS America sent out a press release - at eight-thirty on Friday night - saying they'd pushed Phantom Brave back two months so they could add a Japanese voiceover. That rather authoritatively cleared me for takeoff, so I spent the week in Los Angeles.

E3 2009 wasn't quite the madhouse of the 2006 show, but the same feel was there. I came back from 2006 feeling like I'd been mugged, as every Gamestop clerk in the country descended upon the Staples Center like a locust swarm, prying up anything they could to auction it off on eBay. There were less people at E3 2009, but there was almost as much activity on the show floor; there were plenty of booth babes, giveaways, contests, guest appearances (want to meet Eliza Dushku? Great. Don't fuckin' blink), and playable demos, complete with EA's twelve-foot Doom Speakers.

We're now comfortably in the middle of three major consoles' life cycles, so there wasn't anything that set the world on fire; of course, Team Ninja's Metroid, the new Castlevania, Bethesda picking up Wet, and Brutal Legend all look pretty phenomenal, and I enjoy being an utter cock to the other players in New Super Mario Bros. Wii. I also wound up keeping most of lynxara's appointments for her, and because she's weird, I got to talk to quite a few people about their free-to-play Korean/Chinese-style MMOs.

I also got seriously creeped out by David Cage as he discussed Heavy Rain (the first game I've seen where you get to fool a guard into going away by opting to loudly fake an orgasm), and managed to get in to see Star Wars: The Old Republic.

the eternal search for monies

stolisomancer — Mon, 20 Apr 2009 19:24:19 GMT

My quest for gainful employment continues.

In the meantime, read previews: Saw and Spore: Galactic Adventures at Worth Playing, and a lengthy bitching about Silent Hill: Shattered Memories at OMG Nintendo.