Webcomic reccomendation: Romantically Apocalyptic

There are three main reasons I have found to love this hidden gem of the internet.

First is the glorious artwork. the maker somehow combines live-action photographs (of abandoned areas in the real world and actors in outfits), hand-drawn art, props, and Photoshop to create the most jaw-droppingly beautiful post-apocalyptic scenery I have ever seen.



I have a special thing for this sort of thing, being a fan of stories set after the nuclear apocalypse (I avidly play the Fallout games, and plan to pick up S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl somewhere down the line) but I don't see any reason why anyone wouldn't like what this work has to offer.

The second reason is the humor. Perhaps surprisingly, this is something of a comedy. Said comedy mainly comes from the sheer insanity of the cast of human survivors. The Ca-that is, ZEE CAPTAIN simply has to be seen to be believed. My favorite would have to be Charles Snippy, the most sane least insane survivor, who deals with his hellish life and insane company with a put-upon expression and a delightfully snarky attitude.

And the third is the story. Yes, it has quite the story. To begin with, the comic is really just a set of aimless wanderings through the bleak beauty mixed with silly-but-fun humor, with the odd lemonade cult thrown in. then, things start to pick up. New characters are met (human and otherwise), the exact causes of the the apocalypse are slowly brought to light, we learn some interesting backstory on the characters, and the characters are faced with truly terrifying antagonists. It's deep, convoluted, and exciting stuff.


Seriously, there is no reason not to check out this work of art. Take a look. It's free, and it's awesome.

A Mass Effect Journal: Entry One

I am loving this game so far.

As of now, I have finished the prologue of the game. So far, there's been an attack on a human colony world by a hostile machine race, and the introduction of a sly, conniving villain.



Not only does he get a great introduction, but I can just tell that Saren going to be driving force behind this story. He's responsible for the machine invasion and is involved in a mysterious plot involving the technology of a long-dead race and their destroyers. And yet, he covers his tracks entirely. So, your first mission is to find evidence to incriminate him, leading you into the seedy urban underbelly of the galaxy. Which turns out to be the perfect setting for a rag-tag group of various species to assemble from different directions.

On another note, I'm pretty impressed by the setting. Bioware has created a world rich with so much background detail, there's an in-game mini-encyclopedia for it all. Said encyclopedia is pretty dry, but hearing it first-hand from the characters you meet is very interesting indeed.

There's a certain note of optimism to the whole thing. It feels sort of like reconstruction of the old-fashioned starry-eyed space operas that viewed the future as exiting and filled with adventure, spaceships, and laser pistols. It's actually pretty refreshing considering that so many settings out there try for a darker mindset (particularly this web novel I've been reading, but that's another story for another blog entry).

Basically, this game is everything I have been looking for. I wonder if will be able to keep this quality up?


Off we go to save the galaxy!

A Mass Effect Journal: Entry Zero

I've played my fair share of video games, and can name quite a few gems. But unfortunately few the kind of character interaction I've been looking for. I want characters worthy of a good book, who change and develop along with me and treat me differently depending on how I behave. Deus Ex: Human Revolution fell flat here, despite the rich and thoughtful setting. Dust: an Elysian Tail is something of a slog in terms of story. Portal had a fantastic story and characters, but was strictly linear in gameplay and story. Telltale Games usually offers what I'm looking for, but it's going to be a while before they release their next installments of The Walking Dead and The Wold Among Us.

Hold on...what's this thing at the bottom of my Steam library? Something I picked up during the Steam Christmas discount sale, apparently. 

What's that you say? Play as a space marine, assemble a ragtag team of various intelligent species, go on adventures round the galaxy and eventually save all of galactic civilization?

A set of different characters that escort you and have their own interests, who change with the story and with my choices?

Sounds exactly like what i'm looking for!

Off I go to save the galaxy!

Video Game Reviews: Q.U.B.E.

Video Game Reviews: Q.U.B.E.


The short version: Q.U.B.E. (that stands for Quick Understanding of Block Extrusion) is short, sweet, and pretty satisfying as puzzle games go. And...it's not much else, really.

The long version: This is very much a puzzle game, something to tax the brain. The gameplay mechanics are a little tricky to explain, since I haven't really come across anything that can be drawn up as comparison (which means that this game gets bonus points for originality). Basically, you are put into a blank white-tiled room which has certain fixed features that you can manipulate with your weird glowing gloves. Red tiles can be popped out ("extruded," so to speak), yellow tiles can be made into staircase-like patterns, certain sections of walls can be rotated, that sort of thing.

To it's credit, the game manages to do many different things with this fairly limited tool set. In one section, you might be popping out blocks to jump across a gap to the next area. In another, you have to spin around a set of light refractors to direct coloured lasers to hit a target. In yet another, you have to shove around blocks and walls to direct cubes and spheres. It's clever, it's inventive, and it's satisfying to solve.

But for all it's strengths, Q.U.B.E. is something of a throwaway experience, something you won't really feel inclined to play more than once. It's not very long as games go - I finished it in just under 4 hours in total - and once you've solved all the puzzles, that's pretty much it. Plus, there's no real narrative to speak of.

Which feels strange, because it often feels like there's the bones of a story. Your silent and unknown character wakes up in a mysterious sterile white-tiled environment, learns to use the strange and wonderful tool given to him/her, and navigates in a linear pathway through puzzle chambers of increasing difficulty. There's a vague, sinister sense that you are being controlled and shepherded towards an unknown fate. But little ever comes of it. It's very difficult to ignore the similarities to the wildly popular Portal games.

All the trappings I just mentioned are there. People who have played Portal will know exactly what I'm talking about. People who haven't can just ignore this paragraph. But the difference is that Portal had a brilliant, captivating story behind it, while Q.U.B.E. just doesn't.

The short short version: Pretty good at what it does, but Portal does it better and is up for the same price on Steam. Get Portal.

Final score: 8/10

Movie Reviews: Anchorman

Oh god. that's two hours of my life I will never be able to get back.



That's Will Ferrell in the lead role. How is this the same guy who voiced Megamind in Megamind? Megamind was a truly awesome comedy movie. Anchorman is a truly rubbish comedy movie.

I'm getting a little ahead of myself here. Let explain the premise behind this movie. Roy Burgundy, played by Will Ferrell, is a successful 1970s television anchorman for the San Diago news. The world he's in apparently runs differently from the world we live in, because the top story of the year, which the climax of the film takes place around, is...wait for it...a Panda giving birth at the local zoo. Is this a joke, something we are supposed to laugh at? Difficult to tell. None of the audience I was with laughed, at any rate.

Things change when a new worker arrives to shake up the world of Roy and his eccentric crew of friends: a woman, Veronica Corningstone (played by Christina Applegate). Predictably, the men of the station respond with over the top outrage, then try to seduce her. Their leery approaches are met with swift rebuffs and an occasional punch to the balls. Because, getting punched in the balls is always, unfailing funny, right? Right?

And as for Roy? Why, when he first meets Veronica, it's love at first sight...
...and from there, any hopes of this movie being remotely original fizzled and died in me. From there, anyone with a passing familiarity with romantic comedies can predict the plot twists with their eyes closed. Yep, there's the initial awkwardness/frostiness between the lead man and woman, which quickly develops into full-blown True Love. Yep, there's the plot twist that drives them apart and causes hostilities . Yep, that's them making up and kissing at the climax of the story, almost certainly to marry and live happily ever after. Yawn.

The trite, cliche, by the numbers plot wasn't the only problem with this movie, though it was a glaring one. the lead character, Roy Burgundy, was not very funny or compelling at all. He's supposed to be a lovable idiot, it seems. The movie opens with of a montage of him muttering and shouting inane lines, as if his LOUD BLASTING VOICE automatically makes said lines funny. Funny thing, it doesn't work like that. Sadly, this pretty much sets the scene for the character and the movie. I have a hard time remembering the name of anyone. None of the supporting characters have very much to offer, humor-wise or plot-wise. Veronica starts out potentially interesting, but quickly degenerates into the love interest, the satellite character we have all seen a million times before.

Ultimately, the problem with this movie is simple. It bills itself as a light-hearted slapstick comedy but it just isn't funny. It's pretty hard to find anything actually good in this movie, or anything truly horrendous in quality. I can count the number of times we actually laughed on one hand, and that just isnt enough for two hours. This movie was a chore to sit through, it was mediocre, it was boring.

Final verdict: 4/10. Don't bother with this film. It is highly unlikely to be worth two hours of your life.

On being outdone by others

My father wrote a blog. He got the idea from me.

I've read it. It is well written. It makes for and interesting read, and provides food for thought. It touches upon complex subjects such as the Singularity. And it puts everything I have tried writing for my blog to shame.

I never even finished my second blog post. It was supposed to be about my first visit to a nightclub, as it happened on Halloween. But it was so trite, so boring, even I couldn't finish writing it. It was an experience countless people have had, but the post would not have made it fresh. It was nothing more than a dry summarization of events.

No, I take that back. The truth is, I couldn't feel bothered to finish it. My father on the other hand, he speedily wrote three or four times what I was planning to write, but never did. It's somehow a whole new layer of humiliation to know that your one-upper is actually more motivated than you were. My failure to sit down and write something has been at the back of mind taunting me for years now. My few real attempts ended in unfinished, unbaked pieces that I couldn't bear to continue. And now, to be so savagely outdone by the one who keeps insisting that I am "a good writer?"

There are a few feelings I have around that, none of them good. Anger and hopelessness are the two big ones.

So now that I have written down how I feel fairly concisely, I feel some of the feeling slipping away. What happens now?

In an hour or two, I will no doubt forget my troubles by sinking time into one of my video games. Or reading online works of literature that put to shame anything I can create. So what can I write until then.

I suppose I am at least writing something. It might be little more than a chronicle of petty jealousy towards someone who can do better than me, but it is at least written with feeling. But that I am feeling, well, less of those feelings, where can I go from here?

Perhaps I can speculate in typed words about how to continue this flow of writing and turn it to other things. Granted, I do it a lot in my head and nothing has come of it yet. But whatever.

It should be noted that all my previous works have been written under duress, not because I wanted to write them. In all cases, I enjoyed writing the piece but wouldn't have written them if I wasn't forced, if I hadn't had a deadline and someone else pushing me on. That includes this blog entry; I am writing this so that my beloved computer (which I may or may not marry some day) is not confiscated.

So...is that the answer? Arrange for an external pressure to make me write? I suppose it is a start. It has turned out this post, which is something.

And now, how to end this? My time is running short. I have heard that endings are difficult. It seems fairly accurate. Maybe I can wearily throw up my hands (metaphorically, of course) and declare hopelessness, which would be in keeping with the first half of this blog. Perhaps I can make it a flourish, something like "Signing off, and keep watch for my next aimless ramble!" Only somewhat cooler. Maybe end on a note of hope? tempting, but perhaps cliche. I suspect I don't like writing happy endings anyway (Just read my Turtle story).

Endings seem difficult, and I don't feel like putting the effort into a rigid and definite ending, so I will just leave those thoughts up there. Fitting, I think, for this is supposed to be a recording of my thoughts.

Oh, and I might as well leave this here.

FIRST POST

Finally, FINALLY managed to set up my own blog. It's not on tumblr as I would have liked, but at least it exists. I had to jump through a ridiculous amount of hoops to get exactly nowhere.

Little tip: NEVER create a new account for anything if you only intend to use it for the one little thing then completely forget about it. It will cause you untold pain down the line.

Well, I need something to post about. I'm about to play Deus Ex: Human Revolution - Director's Cut, a gritty cyberpunk noir shooter-stealth-rpg hybrid with heavy trans-humanist themes.



Should help give me a few ideas.

Oh, and I also have a new idea for a profile picture. Involving my game boxes and my prized model dinosaurs.