games!
apparently, if you turn on your playstation 3, that's what happens. games. i did, and three happened to me... in just one night!

i am just going to cut this post now. this post covers three games in varying levels of detail. of course, there's always hidden omake and fanservice in these posts, so you never know what you're missing if you don't click, for...

GAIASEED! a rare playstation shooter that costs upwards of ¥25000 in akihabara now!
KILLZONE2! a depressingly common playstation 3 shooter that will cost $5 in gamestop in 2014!
BLAZBLUE! a relatively attainable game that will probably be like $20 once asw farts out one or two minor upgrades.



ok. gaiaseed.

gaiaseed is one of three playstation games by the rather obscure technosoleil. of course, of the three, only the boring-looking puzzler came out here. the other (the rapid angel) can go for up to $100 in japan. i bought that one last october. it's weird.

since gaiaseed is a 2D shooter, it's worth even more. dcharlie sold his copy for like $140 and now the fucker costs like $250. dcharlie am cry.

but in fortunate news, the fruits of technosoleil have fallen into the hands of hamster, and hamster likes to whore shit out to the playstation network. i bought gaiaseed for ¥600 tonight. after spending MAD CASHES (ok, a combined total of like $75) on real PS1 copies of little ralph and angel eyes, this made me feel very happy. or as ray would say, "score!"

gaiaseed:





gaiaseed ain't the prettiest game in town, but it does have some genuine charm. the intro is hilariously bad: it's subtitled in japanese and narrated, in english, by a japanese guy whose accent makes kojima sound like ian mckellen.



i am not kidding. "a whoah."

anyway, get beyond that, and you get a competent 2D shooter with decent graphics (some nice big piles of not-that-great-looking sprites thrown around, scaling and rotating objects, etc. etc.) and swell music. i suck like fuck at shooters, and even though this one has a life bar, i still sucked it up, credit feedery little loser that i am.

i haven't really striven to get better at a shooter, gradually, in that way that you're meant to, since, um, gaiares. i don't think RS counts because we played it 2P all the time on saturn mode and eventually just earned as much as learned our way through it.

i think it's better than kyuuin, though, which i also bought, for like 45 bucks. so. though the idea of it costing twice as much as radiant silvergun makes me kinda fucking lol.

the powerup system seems really meh, for one, and it really does send a lot of bullets at you. i mean, it's not a cave game, but it's definitely from that period right before shooters were about to dive over the cliff into crazytown.

if you have a japanese PS1 account, download it and laugh at people who paid $250 for it.

now, a pause.

before i talk about KILLZONE2!, a disclaimer. even though i have long been a professional reviewy person the opinions below are just my off-the-cuff (well, i have some notes scrawled down, actually, but) personal casually-written sarcastic comments on my personal blog and i am sorry if you made the game and you are butthurt by this. console yourself with the fact that nobody really cares what i think, and i am five months late. i have talked to some people who worked on this game and they were very smart and nice people.

let's back this up a second. i started playing gears of war 2, finally, this weekend, co-op, with lucretius77. i really enjoyed the original game, but i kind of thought of that as a fluke. it's not a fluke; i like gears of war. i don't love gears of war, but i for-fucking-real like gears of war. it's got great art direction -- anything with a head excluded -- and it's fucking fun, and, um, the characters... are large. very large. it feels great. you shoot shit and it dies and then you walk for a bit and then you roadie run and you get nauseous and then you walk and then you chainsaw some thing and then like, yeah. fun. bro. dude.

so since i promised i won't play it anymore till we can finish it together, but i still wanted to shoot things, when i went to my shelf to grab blazblue i noticed something else. sony sent me a copy of their biggest game of 2009 (thus far) and it had been sitting around. so i put it in. yes. i put in killzone 2.

i had like no fun with killzone 2.

killzone 2 is an entertainment product made by the dutch to make the dialogue and story in the gears of war series seem really, really good.

the best word to describe my state of mind during my playthrough of KZ2, as it was, is "annoyed". i was almost constantly annoyed by the game.

i was annoyed by the unskippable opening cutscene (until the pretty space bits.) i was annoyed by the dialogue. there is too much ambient immersive shouty man dialogue where men act like dicks to one another in a show of, um, cameraderie? i was annoyed by the one room i was pinned down in from three different angles for like 10 minutes while helghast poured into it like three our four different times (set times) (because it's expensive to build rooms. value for euros.) i was annoyed by the vague jankiness of the game in terms of NPC behavior, disappearing shell casings, weird AI (you're going to hide in FRONT of the barrier? okaaaaaay) and whatever else. it is the jankiness i sort of think of as "PC game jankiness", that i think of as characteristically whitey. it's sort of ineffable. i don't mind it in good games.

i was annoyed when i noticed the animators made a specific really nice animation for shooting a dude in the small of the back (!!) because i know how much money and time that costs and really, i like those kinds of details, but i was really just annoyed by then.

i was annoyed by the shitty fucking weapons that spray to fuck and go all crazy cockamamie. bullets wooooo! i guess people who play COD, which is everyone who bought this game, are used to this sort of thing, but i am not. i probably would have got used to it and modified my tactics, but i will never play it again, so.

i was annoyed that the helghast don't really have red eyes; they're actually just a race of sarcastic brits with alopecia. it's like a race of the actor in the darth vader costume when you really wanted to be killing james earl jones (though, i mean, not literally. i don't want to kill james earl jones.)

the dialogue, again, to remind you, is extremely annoying. cliche-ridden, sexist, puerile (wait, i mean "gritty"!) particularly charming is the ambient conversation your tough pal has with a military superior where she tells him the leader of the enemy forces must be taken alive and he's like I DONT LIKE NOT KILLING PEOPLE HURR. man. so bad. willfully stupid. stupid on purpose.

a lot of people complained about the weird height issue in the game; you feel like you're playing as a midget. it's weird and they're right. you have to jump to look out of a window your AI buddy is kneeling in front of. i am not kidding.

jumping to look out the window annoyed me.

what really annoyed me, though, was not really killzone's fault. it has a similar difficulty setting to other games, like gears: normal is for those who have "some familiarity with FPS games" or whatever. i beat half-life 2. much more recently, i plowed through the first half of gears 2 on normal without really batting an eye (co-op, granted.) so i picked normal and soon wished i had not. there is no way to know these things in advance.

but more than the difficulty adjustment, what i want is sega arcade mode for this game. i don't care about the fucking immersion. i really don't. i know i am playing a game. so make like crazy taxi and give me a BIG GREEN FUCKING ARROW pointing at shit i need to pay attention to. DING DING DING when there's some shit i need to kill. show it to me. ("what the fuck tank is he talking about? what the fuck is shooting me? oh, i'm dead. again.") RED FLOATING ARROWS PLZ. i mean, the game already has all sorts of obviously scripted things. when you kill all the guys in a room, you trigger a dialogue event cos everyone suddenly knows it's magically safe to move. so why not just put a giant pointing finger with the word GO! floating in the air? save us the trouble of finding the damn door.



i am NOT kidding.

rather than making dudes take fewer shots, i want a retard mode that tells me what to do and where to go. if you are going to build big boxy yet somehow convoluted grey rooms full boxes and dirt, just tell me what to do. i don't love your game as much as you do. i know very smart and talented people spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to design levels to lead the eye of the player to walk where the player is supposed to walk, but the player is not good at your game, in this case, and is annoyed, and kind of bored, and just wants to go go go.

i almost quit before i finished the first mission, but i was like, no, i need to finish the first mission. so i did, and then i quit.

i liked resistance 2 a lot more. it kinda makes me wish i'd stuck with resistance 2 a little bit longer, instead of playing this. but mostly, it makes me in awe of what $20m (more?) buys you in production values and reinforces my general disinterest in the shooter genre. i like what i like, and what i like is the dumb console gaminess of gears of war and the smartypantsness of bioshock and HL2. (they're different sorts of smartypants, but they're smartypants.) my next experiment will be call of duty 4, which reputedly does do interesting stuff with story, because kenny bought it and will soon be bored with it.

killzone 2 made me realize that we put up with a lot of bullshit in games. i mean, i know that we all know that. but most people don't really think about it; they just bitch. we don't, that often, step outside of the bullshit that we like. unless we're reviewers handed a game in a genre we don't like, and then we somtimes write, "why didn't this game revolutionize this shitty genre i hate?" but i digress.

i think a lot of people actually, too, do have a high bullshit tolerance. (i am here reflecting on the conversation i had this evening with jarrett about the irritating cop-out amorality of prototype. it don't faze him none.)

people think FF is a lot of bullshit. i love FF. but, get this -- FF is a lot of bullshit. but it's my kinda bullshit. killzone 2 is also a lot of bullshit. and it is so fucking not my kind of bullshit.

bayonetta? that's gonna be a big ol' pile of bullshit. i'm just hoping enough of it's my kinda bullshit. killing angels? YES! vag cam? NO! and, of course, that the highs are high enough. dig?

speaking of my kind of bullshit...

BLAZBLUE

you have no idea what a relief it is to throw in a game and see some fucking pseudoevangelion cutscenes (i hesitate to call them "anime"; hi-tec storyboardland, maybe) after killzone 2. really. nobody farted out a one-liner about fucking anybody else's mother during the whole thing.

man, this game is gorgeous. it's even less comprehensible than guilty gear. story mode is relaxingly dumb animu with decent voice acting (para nihongo of course) and i... don't have much to say. i threw that fucker in and was like sigh.... my bullshit.

i like, fought some (CPU) dudes and read some text and was really not sure what the hell i was doing. at all.

but i'll be back. and i'll try the training mode. i'm already more interested in it than i really was in SFIV, go fig.

i fucking suck at 2D fighters so bad. you really have no idea.