B is for Bastion

Holy crap you guys.  Bastion.

So there was another Steam Sale where both Dustforce and Bastion were offered for about $5 and $7 respectively.  I was interested in both games, but as I believe I have established before, I am broke.

So broke I can't even afford to show this guy's face.

So I asked Facebook about which one I should get, and anybody who was even remotely interested in indie games recommended Bastion.  A couple people even chimed in that they heard the game was amazing from people who played it.  I remembered it getting some hype when it came out, but I had no idea if it was good or not.  So with my friends' recommendations, I bought the game.  I figured that I've spent $7 on worse things, so what was the risk of buying a game that is by all means critically acclaimed?

So the game is a kind of top-down action RPG, but angled so you have a diagonal perspective.  That sentence is a nightmare, so here's a picture:

You control a kid who has survived a disaster we only know as "The Calamity."  The world is in shambles, but something draws up leftover pieces of ground to make a path for you.  It's a very interesting take on linear gameplay, and you really know the limits of what you can explore.  This was nice for me, since I have that little voice that demands I explore every corner of the world for hidden items in every game I play.

But what really sold me on Bastion was the way they created their world.  As you play as The Kid, a voice narrates your every move.  It's not The Kid's voice, but a removed one, telling your story as it happens.  So as you come up to that plaza in the picture above, that voice asks, "That another survivor?"  Then as you enter, you meet that blue ghost and the voice answers its own question, "No ma'am, it's a Gasfella," naming the creature you just met.  The whole game is narrated like that, as if you were listening to an old man telling you a story by a campfire.  The narration goes on, even including tidbits of the war between the two nations of the game, Caelondia and the Ura.  It's really gripping, and I've never seen or heard anything like it.

The action part of the game runs very tightly, too.  The game features many weapons which support different playstyles, and are found throughout the game.  On the first level you play, you gain access to three: a hammer, a repeater, and a bow.  They have unlimited ammo, but you have to worry about reloading and making your shots count (except for the melee weapons, but duh).  So right off the bat, you have this chance to maybe not carry any melee weapons and fight a ranged battle.  Or maybe you like to get up-close and personal, so you bring a hammer and your fancy new machete to a fight.

This game is just polished to a mirror shine.  The music is incredible (you can get a taste of it here), and I bought the download for it just to be able to take it with me.  The art is beautiful, and it really brings this new world you're exploring to life, even in the throes of its death.

I really can't recommend this game enough.  You can buy it on Steam (for Mac and PC), directly through Apple through the App Store, on Xbox Live Arcade, through the Google Chrome web store, and a bunch of other options you can find here.   Take my word for it: this game is worth buying.

Fighting for the Skull Heart and Your $15: Skullgirls

It's rare that I get to hop on a game right after it releases, and I am glad that I chose to do that with Skullgirls this Wednesday.  It's a 2D fighting game, with the 2D part pulling double duty: it's a two-dimensional fighter with a 2D cartoon art style.

I won't dance around this: the game is beautiful.  I love the visuals, the music, the presentation, all of it.  The game's spirit is great, too.  The characters are memorable, and when they fight there is just enough "What the hell is going on?" to keep me interested without overwhelming me.  They also sit wonderfully on a vertex of originality, parody, and homage.  Peacock (my fighter of choice) is a wonderful example of this:

She's the one calling in a bomb flying an airplane.

Click the picture for full-size; the picture here doesn't do it justice.  You can look at her and see exactly what she's supposed to be: an homage to old-school cartoons.  The top hat, dress, gigantic bow, puffy-gloved hands, and blacked-out eyes all point to it without shouting it from the top of a building.  But look at her smile (a character in the game asks if she brushes her teeth with metal polish), combined with those creepy eyes on her arms and you can see a hint of something darker.

And then we see why her name is Peacock.

Same thing, full-size this baby up.

In her story, she is found near-death and given two parasites, the Argus (the eyes and peacock thing) and the Avery (a reference to cartoonist Tex Avery), the thing that gives her those crazy cartoon powers.  Probably.  It's not heavily explained.  I'm pretty okay with that, because it's one less thing to distract from the actual fighting.

And like most reviews for Killer 7 will show you, it takes more than a slick style and amazing art to be a successful game.  Unlike Killer 7, though, Skullgirls is getting pretty good reviews all around, especially for a new IP.  It has a small roster, but so did the first Mortal Kombat.  And Skullgirls comes equipped with two decades of fighting game experience (including knowledge of what works and what doesn't) with it.  I love the option of choosing a team of one to three fighters, something I remember from watching my much more skilled friends playing Capcom vs SNK 2.  Tight controls are absolutely necessary for any fighting game, and Skullgirls nails it; when you lose (like I do, a lot), you don't feel like it's the game's fault.  Unless it's the final boss, because GOD DAMN she lives up to the expectations of ridiculous boss fights set forth by the likes of Onslaught from Marvel vs Capcom and Gill from Street Fighter III.  And it feels very good when you win.  After thirty tries.  Not even playing on Hard difficulty.

Parasoul has elite guards whose specialties include diving in front of...bowling balls.

In short, Skullgirls is a very good fighting game with a style that sets it apart.  The all-female cast (it's called SkullGIRLS for a reason) of unique characters and the hand-drawn art style makes me want to keep coming back for more and more.  I have a couple issues with the online mode, but that has more to do with my internet speed and the fact that no one wants to play with someone with my ping.

Should you buy Skullgirls?  I'd say yes.  At $15, it's hardly a life-changing purchase, and this is quality gaming for a budget price.  If you like fighting games or want to get into them (their training and learning mode is very welcome), I would like to point you in this direction.  It's a much cheaper investment than Super Street Fighter IV Ultra Turbo Director's Cut Arcade Edition and Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and while I take nothing away from those games, both of which I love, I have no hesitation in naming this as my new fighting game of choice.

Super Meat Boy, VVVVVV, and the Attraction of Difficult Video Games

I'm checking my Steam stats right now because I would hate to be inaccurate.  On my Top 10 games as far as play time, Super Meat Boy is in fourth place at 28.5 hours, Cave Story + sits in sixth place with 21.7 hours, and VVVVVV is in tenth at 15.8 hours.  My complete list (including my shame at not having played some of those games yet) can be viewed here.

So why talk about these games?  Well, I recently picked up (downloaded) a copy of Tough Sh*t, Kevin Smith's new book (Kindle copy for me) about how shitty life is.  Just kidding.  Kind of.  But in between the good life advice and cum jokes (there is no shortage of them here), I read a detail that hit home for me.  This is kind of odd, because I listen to SModcast nearly every week and I've heard this story a couple times, but reading it made it click differently I suppose.  The short version goes like this: Kevin Smith hit a funk after Zack and Miri Make a Porno did... less than spectacularly in the box office.  He locked himself away in his office, smoking weed and watching a collection of unwatched DVDs that would likely make many gamers look like amateurs.  

Hmmm... Something doesn't quite seem right here...

In his pot coma, he watched a box set of DVDs called Hockey: A People's History (I think I'm linking the right one).  And for about 10 pages or so (I'm reading on a Kindle, so your so-called pages are irrelevant to me) he goes on about hockey and Wayne Gretzky with such fervor that Jesus might be asking Zeus where he hid those lightning bolts for a smiting.

It isn't the weed I related to (never smoked in my life), nor the idea of watching a box set of sports history, which sounds just... long and never ending.  I've been to like two hockey games in my life, and while I had fun, I can't imagine watching THAT MUCH HOCKEY.  But I did relate to experiencing that one thing that just clicked.

In my younger days, I was practically raised by a Super Nintendo.  Not because my parents were neglectful or anything like that, just because I loved playing video games.  But I was like five and had no subscriptions to magic video game magazines, and the internet was just crawling out of its dial-up phase to get to a place where you could have something as potentially unpopular as a blog, especially about video games.  So my parents bought mainstream Super Nintendo games for me.  Luckily, they were almost always great: Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, Mega Man X, great stuff.

Pictured: A video game hall-of-famer.

And that last game I mentioned is important.  Even though I would miss out on crazy-good games like Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, Mega Man X was the game that set the tone of a lot of my life.  I was playing Mega Man X with our neighbor, a fourth grader, while I was in second grade.  I looked up to him, probably because he was older and more experienced than I was and he could kick my ass at Chess, a game which I love and have never been good at. So we were playing Mega Man X, specifically Storm Eagle's stage.  I can go back and play that level over and over, get every hidden item, and overall wreck Storm Eagle now, but then?  I was having a really hard time with it.  I had heard a rumor that there was a helmet upgrade for X somewhere in the level, and I was searching and searching for it.  I don't remember the details of the conversation, but what stuck with me was this generalization he told me: "The harder a game is, the better it is."  And me responding without even thinking about it, "Yeah, definitely," representing maybe one of my two (three, tops) moments of stupid bravado in my life.

That conversation stuck with me though, at first to live up to it, but later because I began to feel it become more and more true.  So let's fast forward to today. Super Meat Boy is a whole new level of difficult.  If you play each level just right, you can beat just about all of them in under 30 seconds.  Hell, I'd wager that you do a majority of them in under 20.  Each level is a small puzzle that you need to solve, working your way up to get to the end in the most efficient way possible.  But there is a difference between this game and other puzzle games like Portal 2.

See, In Portal 2, an excellent game, when you solve the puzzle, you can move on.  Now this has some exceptions and I am overgeneralizing like  madman, but at its core, you are trying to solve the puzzles that GLaDOS has put in front of you.

Alternate Box Art

In Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV, you are similarly given a puzzle.  And that puzzle in Super Meat Boy?  The one that you should be able to beat in 20 seconds?  It can take you hours to execute it correctly.  Every course (SMB) and room (VVVVVV) presents you with a simple puzzle.  We'll look at an example using a VVVVVV screen.

At this point in the game, you know that those lines reverse gravity.  Now, since the whole game works around that mechanic, you know that you need to reverse gravity from the starting point and then pass through each line without hitting the spikes.  It's a pretty simple puzzle.  But the game says "Oh neat.  You know what to do.  Now let's see you do it."  Mess up the timing even a little, and you'll go straight for the spikes.  Move too slow, spikes.  Move too fast, spikes.  And this is a pretty easy room for VVVVVV.  Now let's take a look at Super Meat Boy.

As you can see, this is a fancy pants visually-appealing level in Super Meat Boy, but with the magic of Microsoft Paint, I can highlight the hazards and the path towards victory.

The blue circles indicate saw blades, which will kill you, the yellow indicates rolling lava balls that bounce and roll like barrels in Donkey Kong (which will kill you), and the green is Meat Boy and the path you have to take to get up and save Bandage Girl.  And because Team Meat is a sadistic duo of death and sadness, pretty much everything is perfectly timed to kill you as you make your jumps.  Those two saw blades in the middle move, too.  Like I said about VVVVVV, there is a puzzle to be solved here: "How do I make it to the top?"  The solution is easy to say: "I jump past the saw blades, dodge any lava balls, and wall-jump my way upwards until I get to Bandage Girl."

I played that level for sessions of about a probably an hour each over the course of multiple days.  When completed, it took me about 9 seconds to beat for the first session, and about 15-16 seconds if I got the bandage hidden in the middle of the level.  This level wasn't even 100% necessary to beat the game; it was in the optional Dark World.

Hell, that's another thing worth mentioning.  I beat Super Meat Boy a long time ago.  I defeated Dr. Fetus and saved Bandage Girl (this all must really sound weird if you have no familiarity with the game).  I took a screenshot of my victory on September 28, 2011.  According to most measures of winning games, I was victorious in the story mode.  The Dark World offers levels similar to the regular Light World, but increases the difficulty.  You'd be shocked at what the addition of two more saw blades can do to your perfect run.  And yet I can't stop trying to beat these levels.

Part of it, I think, it the promise that I can beat them.  These levels were designed as part of a video game which is meant to be completed, so there  HAS to be a way I can.  Even more diabolically, Super Meat Boy gives you a Grade A+ for beating it under a certain time.  So now you have an already notoriously difficult game telling you, "Yeah, that was pretty hard, but that guy over there did it in nine seconds."  And so my inner ghetto goes AWW HELL NAW and has to beat them.

And I think that's the key of it.  We see this thing that says, "This other guy did better AND I THINK HE JUST SAID SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR MOM."  And you aren't going to take that lying down.  After probably a thousand deaths, I beat Super Meat Boy.  The same figure goes for VVVVVV; I died with a three-digit number, but just barely.  I clocked in my first playthrough of VVVVVV with 998 deaths.  About 200 of them were made because a shiny trinket (a collectible which might not even do anything) was placed in front of a tiny wall.  A nearby computer monitor said that no one would be able to get that trinket, and I was committed from there on.  There was NO WAY some punk ass monitor placed by a Swedish video game maker was going to get the best of me.  An hour of flying through about six rooms, landing on a disappearing platform, and going BACK through those rooms in one jump with hundreds of deaths later, I had my trinket.  It was glorious, even if I was the only one celebrating.

I lost many hours of my life fighting this block, and it was worth it.

In video games, we can be David fighting Goliath.  And the bigger Goliath is, the greater the glory.  Kratos fighting Kronos was an incredible fight in God of War III, but Captain Viridian vs. the four-pixel high block might be the most epic battle I have fought.  And I came away victorious.  One of those Vs has to stand for Victorious.  And if it doesn't on your game, it does on mine.

Oh, but Cave Story can suck a dick because goddamn that last level to get the good ending is hard.  My soul breaks every time I play it, which is pretty goddamn often.  It's like a spicy food challenge; you know it's going to be awful, but you suit up and fight because you JUST might be able to beat the odds.

I JUST GOT HERE THERE ARE SO MANY DEATH SPIKES HELP :(

Freddie's Best Value Games List 2011-Style!

Something that is kind of dear to me right now is saving money.  Mostly, this has to do with my state in life right now, where college loans are devouring about half of my hardly disposable income (depending on the hours I get per week at my job).  I do, however, try to stay on top of these fantastic devices called video games, which are notorious for being quite expensive.

On launch day, most PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 games run around $60, and Wii games follow up at $50.  Depending on the game, some might release for as low as $40, which is remarkably low for a high-profile release.  Indie games, being developed largely by smaller studios, tend to retail for about $15.  This makes indie games much more viable for people in a tight money situation except for one major problem: because so many are unknown to the public, it can be hard to find a solid recommendation.

So this is for all my poor homies out there who'll sacrifice eating ramen for a week to save up enough money for a new game (or maybe they just eat a lot of ramen; gamers are not a remarkably healthy bunch).  I'm listing games that I have been playing last year (some into this year) based on their price and how long I have been playing them.  I heartily recommend any game listed here, and in fact encourage you to purchase them if you get the chance.

Heed my instructions and you can feel like this every day without purchasing this game, which would make you feel like the opposite of this.

Firstly, we have my #1 Value Game for 2011, But Probably Ever: The Binding of Isaac.  You may remember it from that time I ranted about it for waaaay too long.  You can read it here if you so wish.  But let me update it with this:  I purchased this game in a Humble Indie Bundle for $5.  The game's full price is $5.  With the (amazing) soundtrack, it's $6.  I have played this game for 61 hours now, and there are still a couple of power-ups I haven't reached yet.  Objectively, this means there is still more for me to explore in this game after a little more than two and a half straight days of playing a $5 game.

The best value in gore around.

Nextly, we have Cave Story + which comes in at $10 on Steam.  So here's the thing, if you play through it once, you may not get a huge value out of it.  It's a little short and the way to the hard mode is paved through  frustration and sadness.  But if you're up the the challenge (and for restarting your game over and over for the super hard ending) Cave Story offers excellent Metroid-style shooter/platformer gameplay, a solid story, and most importantly, bunny people that go into a rage when they eat a certain plant.

Oh and puppies who sit on your head.

Team Fortress 2 is a given because it is FREE YOU GUYS FREE OH MY GOD IT'S SO GOOD. (It came out in 2007 but it updates pretty frequently so that counts.)


Cthulhu Saves the World.  For a certain amount of you, reading those words has made your brain say "Who do I give money to in order to put this game on my computer!?"  And the answer is Steam or the Xbox Live Marketplace, but we'll get there.  The game runs like an old Final Fantasy game, complete with 16-bit graphics and the "Attack Magic Item Run" type of menu.  It's a very solid RPG that doesn't quite break the mold of "Healer Fighter Thief Mage," but it does bend the molds of each class.  The main draw here, though, is in the story and the writing.  It's very easy to sigh and be cynical about a game that takes Lovecraftian mythos and attempts comedic writing.  The jokes might be lame, or dumb, or the characters might be flat.  I had those same fears.  They were assuaged about the first ten minutes into the game.

And the minute you see this in a game, you know your money was well-spent.

Finally, a game that you can probably grab for a reduced price online if you look hard enough, Skyrim.  Now, unfortunately, I cannot personally attest to the game, as I have not played it.  I know many people who have, though, and I have never heard the complaint, "It was good, but it's just too short."  It's a game to get lost in.  If you have money to invest in a game that you know you are going to be playing for a long time, Skyrim appears to be the way to go.  Even a full-price game seems to be a value in terms of money-to-gameplay hours, and that is amazing for a game that does not rely on multiplayer to provide hours.


Now, all of these are clearly subjective reviews.  I can't guarantee you'll like these games more than I could any other game.  But based on the money I paid for them combined with the fact that I loooved each of them, I can suggest them as things to look at.  Besides, most games have free demos available so that you can get a feel for them before you buy them.  I highly recommend looking into each of them.

"But Freddie," I hear you asking (I am a little psychic) "I don't know very much about computers or video games, how do I find these wonderful treasures you have shown me?"  Well, Mystery Reader, first I suggest you download Steam.  It's a free service from Valve, a video game developer, that allows you to digitally download games straight to your computer rather than deal with any physical media.  That in and of itself is pretty awesome, but the sales these people have.  Good lord.  I can only suggest to you that you set aside some money for games and remain stalwart in that decision.  $20 bought me 8 games in one sale.  It's scary.  I still haven't played some of them.

Terrifyingly accurate.

There's all that and the fact that occasionally these games are only available via Steam.  I know this to be the case with The Binding of Isaac.

Another route to take is through consoles.  Xbox Live and Sony both have marketplaces where many great games get overlooked.  Cthulhu Saves the World, for example, is ONE DOLLAR ARE YOU SERIOUS!?  I paid triple that amount and thought it was great!  One dollar.  That's all you need to pay to play an amazing game.  If you have an Xbox 360, pick it up.  Some fast food hamburgers are more expensive than that.

There are a couple of other ways to get some great games that I would be very sad to forget.  One is in offers like the periodic Humble Indie Bundles which are offered from time to time.  You can pay what you want for a number of great games while helping charity.  I really can't endorse it enough.  In fact, as of this writing, you have a week to purchase a super duper Android bundle.  Get on it!  The other way notable way to get some amazing prices on top-notch games is through Steam's sales.  There has been a history of a Summer Sale and a Christmas-Time Sale which is the bane of wallets everywhere.  With some self-control, though, you can come away with some solid games at an excellent value.

Any Questions? Recommendations? Strong Objections to any of my choices? Wanna say Hello? Leave 'em in the comments!

Edit 2/7/12: Oh my lord I forgot Minecraft!  I've been playing since it was in Alpha, and I forgot that it officially released in November.  Before I go lock myself in the Shame Chamber, let me explain something.  Minecraft is great.  It's not a game as much as it is a toy, really.  The game just drops you in a world and leaves you be.  You can punch trees to get wood from them, then make a pickaxe to get rocks and make a better pickaxe, and, well... no one has really told a Minecraft story more typical and wonderful than Yahtzee.  Watch the linked video, and you have a solid explanation of why Minecraft has made Creepers (called Suicide Shrubs in the video) famous.  Then buy the game and learn to fear them.

I always break the world's water physics, though, so squids normally just fear me.

Free Fallin'!! (A Skyward Sword Review)

Okay.  I just beat Skyward Sword. Just... let me get myself gathered up in order to write this.


HOLYCRAPTHATWASSOGOOD I CAN'T EVEN BELIEVE ALL THE THINGS THAT HAPPENED...GAAAAHHHHH


Okay now that that's over.  When I brought the game home and played it, I wrote down some of my reactions to some of the moments in the opening part of the game, and I'll be peppering them through this review as the become appropriate.


Before that, though, I'm going to cut right to the chase. A lot of people have been throwing things around along the lines of Skyward Sword being the single greatest Zelda game ever.  Now look, this might change in the coming years as the newness of the emotions presented by this game fades, but I might call this the single best Zelda game ever made.  The ONLY game that makes me question that title is Wind Waker, which up until now, was by far my favorite in the series.  Now the two are very, very much on the same platform with each other, and at the moment, I think Skyward Sword edges it out because of the system it was made for.

Quote from First Day #1: "Okay, I just did the obligatory practice training for the game.  Combat feels great.  I can’t wait to try it on some monsters."

No you cannot wait, past-Freddie, because fighting monsters feels great.The motion controls are spectacular.  Fighting with the Motion-Plus is unbelievably satisfying, because you are doing so much more than just hitting A to swing your sword.  YOU are swinging your sword.  You have full control over the direction that you swing it, and this is important because your enemies know how to block your swings.  Not only that, but they can counter if you don't strike them properly, and that prospect is terrifying for someone just learning how to fight.

Quote from First Day #2: "Oh my God I am way too impressed by looking around.  This is my first Wii Motion-Plus game, but I feel so in control of my every movement that it’s hard not to get ridiculously excited."

Maybe that needs a little explanation...  When the game first starts, you wake up in Link's room at Skyloft's Knight Academy.  As i got out of bed, I acquainted myself with the speed of Link and tested some of the basics out.  I entered the first person looking-around mode that we have seen in many third-person adventure games since Super Mario 64, where you stand and look at your surroundings with a 360-degree camera..  Using the Wiimote to look around the room, I found myself subconsciously wanting to use the Nunchuck to look.  I tried it out, and Link started moving while still in the first-person mode.  I was floored.  So much so, that I wrote this down.


Quote from First Day #3: "WHAT I AM MOVING AND LOOKING AND MOVING AND LOOKING."


Note that I also said that out loud.  I was discovering this incredible game little by little, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that I was learning a completely different playing style than I was accustomed to.  See, many of the Wii games I have played, even the greats like Super Mario Galaxy, could have been Gamecube games.  They had some new features, like Galaxy's way of collecting the star bits, but the core of the game was running and jumping the same way that we have been doing since 1985.  Even Wind Waker, the game I previously held as my favorite Zelda game, played very much like Ocarina of Time before it.  In short, if we took graphics and processing power out of the equation, I could have played those games on any system which came before this generation.  Skyward Sword changed that for me.

And not just because of this BITCHIN controller.

The combat was the core of this game.  Remember in just about every Zelda game ever where you used the item you got in that dungeon to kill the boss of that dungeon?  I think that happened once, maybe twice in Skyward Sword.  You seriously have to brush up on your combat skills, because the focus has shifted away from Link's gadgets and made its way to Link's constant companion: his sword.  You better hope that all the fighting you're doing makes you better, because even the bosses can and will block most of your strikes.  Flailing isn't an option; you need to make precision strikes.


Quote from First Day #4: "Link, I believe you will be friendzoned for eternity. But D’aaaaaawwwww Link and Zelda are adorable.  Seriously, the characters are so full of expression, it’s great."


The entire world of Skyward Sword is one of the most compelling game settings I have played in.  Skyloft, the main hub of the game, is a lovely little community, and each of the characters has a lot of personality.  There is so much detail that it really reminds me of Majora's Mask, a game which was almost 90% side-quests for the people of Termina.  Even the shopkeepers had prominent roles in side-quests, and Skyward Sword continues that in a slightly less overemphasized fashion.

Skyloft is no Clock Town, but they are similar in all the best ways.

Every character is visually unique, too.  I noted in my E3 Blog that Zelda took me aback a little: 

But the art style gives these characters a great array of emotions.  Link carries a lot of expression in his face, which really carries his role as a silent protagonist.  One character that seems like a throw-away bully in the opening keeps a larger role than you would think, and eventually becomes a welcome sight.  Fi, your new companion, carries zero emotion, but is visually striking compared to the dots that normally represent your companions.

She's also like, a robot spirit thing, so the emotionless thing is excusable.

Quote from First Day #5: "Okay I have to stop talking because I want to stand and play this game.

[2 minutes later]… Okay minimize talking.  I love the music."

This should be no surprise for Zelda, a series with such a beloved soundtrack that my special edition came with a 25th Anniversary Symphony CD.  The music still carries the high standard set by Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, Wind Waker, and Twilight Princess.  

Quote from First Day #5.5: "…and the phrase 'slickest pompadour in town.'"

Comedy and ridiculousness are in full effect, and there are a couple of moments in the introduction of the game that almost break the fourth wall.

If your first response isn't "OH NO THE OWL'S BACK!" you need to replay Ocarina of Time.

Thank you for reminding us again, Nintendo.

I could keep going about how great an experience this game is for much, much longer, but I'll try to hit all my other points quickly for the sake of article length.  The flying feels very nice, especially when you figure the damn system out (I missed an important line of instruction, but found what i was missing anyways).  Jumping from your bird and going into a free-fall to the world below is exhilarating.  The set-pieces of the game are amazing, too.  When you stand back and reflect what you have just done, it's hard to not be amazed.  The final battle blows away any other final battles I have been a part of, in terms of what I did and in terms of the set-ups leading to them.  The story is incredibly well-paced and moving.  At one point, I welled up about as bad as I did to the opening sequence of Up.  Well maybe not that bad, but pretty damn close.

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword might be my favorite entry in the series.  It has so many moments that had me floored that it's hard not to compare it to a game like God of War or Bayonetta in terms of amazing moments.  The difference, I found, was the way that I connected with Link because of the Motion-Plus.  I fought the monsters.  I found the Triforce.  I braved diabolical dungeons.  I saved Zelda.  If Skyward Sword had come out at the beginning of the Wii's cycle to show developers how it's done, I feel like we may be looking at a very different world of gaming for this generation.

A Recently Graduated Student with a Bachelor's Degree Writes About Occupy Wall Street

So there's this little event going on that you may have heard of called Occupy Wall Street.

Most of you reading this have just brought up some kind of connotation just by reading those words.  A lot of you, my friends who recently graduated or are still in college, have strong feelings supporting the protests (which extend much farther than just Wall Street).  Some of you may frown upon the protests, if my Facebook home page is to be believed, with all of the cannon fire about the protesters being entitled brats that demand the world be handed to them.

Both sides are pretty militant, and I've really tried my hardest to stay out of that battlefield because I don't like talking about subjects that I have no personal impact on.  I have never been to any Occupy Wherever protests, but that has more to do with the kind of person I am than how I feel about them.  As with most complex issues, I can really relate to both sides of this debate which so many people see as a completely one-sided issue, one way or the other.

I won't dance around the issue here: I do support the efforts of Occupy Wall Street Etc.  I too think the system that we live in has changed a lot faster than we have, and it really shows in the way the world is now.  My generation, these whiny college students who demand a better way of life, has kind of been doomed from the start.  For many of us, our parents fought for us to have a better life (mine included), and encouraged, if not demanded, us to go to college.  I wrote about this a while back in a previous blog post, written in the dark dark days of my unemployment.  If you don't have the time to read the whole post (and I don't blame you), here's the summary: I was (and still am) mad because after being promised that college would lead us to a life of a great career, many of us are left with minimum wage jobs which make no use of the degrees we worked so hard for.  And that's if we are lucky enough to be employed at all.  So many of us have gone to college that the market is flooded with intelligent students like me who aren't really needed; the job market really doesn't have room for us.

This comic is relevant again.  Credit goes to The Trenches. (Click for full size)

Obviously, this is producing a lot of anger with those of us who have had the futures we worked so hard for gone.  We have been told one thing all our life only to find that it was a lie: a college degree means practically nothing when everyone else has them.  To paraphrase from the movie The Incredibles: "When everyone's special, no one is."  We (and by we I mean dissatisfied college students, whether we are protesting or not), have worked incredibly hard for pieces of paper that are not doing what they were supposed to.

HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT.  I was asked by a good friend a few weeks ago if I wanted to go to Occupy LA.  He asked my the very week I got a job (after five extremely frustrating months of looking), so I said no.  As you may know of me, going to a protest is not my style anyways, and I may have declined even if I could go.

You read earlier that I support the movement of Occupy Wall Street Etc.  The things I have trouble supporting, I think, are the people of Occupy Wall Street Etc., and their methods.  Now that is far from a universal statement.  There are a lot of very strong-minded and opinionated people at Occupy Wall Street Etc., and I'm sure the movement would not be where it is without some level-headedness.  However, there are most definitely people in all of these protests that really do not know what is going on.  People protesting just to protest because they are mad.  And while that may be valid on a small scale, it really just hurts the chances that something good could get done.  This article does a great job of highlighting the people I'm talking about.

What also gets me irritated about the movement is that it is very hard to take seriously sometimes.  I understand that there is a desire to get everybody's voices heard.  That is a very noble desire, indeed.  But how much can you get away with doing that is a question that I'm not sure anyone is looking for an answer to.  This Youtube video shows the main way that Occupy Wherever protests take a crowd consensus: through hand signals.  There's no way to say this without looking like a douche, so I'll just say it: you look like you have very little idea of what is going on when you do that.  It looks ridiculous, it is very (I think overly) politically correct, and you know what you just look like a class of kindergartners when you do that. It brings out the worst in what I see as a movement that I really could respect.


But my biggest problem might be that the lack of organization is really starting to show.  The lack of any kind of date of departure is only going to leave a bad mark on your protests.  A quote from an Occupy LA press release: "As for a time stamp on our departure, there is none. We are resolved to continue our peaceful occupation. As occupiers across America are bravely and against great odds and obstacles exercising the right to have their voices heard in a public forum, we stand in solidarity with our brothers and sisters around this nation and around the globe."


That's very valiant, but hardly realistic.  And hardly a way to earn respect from the people you are trying to get it from.  Because you aren't trying to please the people who support you; we already do.  You need to gain the respect of people that don't or are on the fence.  That's really the only way that you are going to take the momentum you have and turn it into what you're looking for, which is some kind of change.  What kind of change that is, we don't know, because there is no real goal for the protests.  That about sums up the reason you will never see me at one of these things: No goal and no departure date.  There's force there, but it has no direction.  I can't really get behind that.


HAVING SAID ALL OF THAT.  You know the really, really annoying people are in all of this?  Anybody who is on their high horse about this protest.  The smug people who sit on either side (and believe me, both sides have them) and caricaturize the opposition.

This is funny. Humor. Comedy.  This OBVIOUSLY does not represent all of the 1%, but some people have a hard time understanding that.

I have defiled my hard drive by saving these pictures to share them with you.

Some people call this bullshit, some inspiring.  I call it, "Get this crap off my Facebook page."

I think the worst case is when somebody posts one of these pictures with a caption, "Food for thought?" or "Hmmmmm..." as if this is just something that they are casually posting.  If you're going to make your statement, make it without being smug.  Be respectful of your opponent (if you even want to call them that).  99%  of the time, you didn't even think if the slogans or take the pictures you're sharing so much.  The egos on either side of this debate are astounding.

I'm sorry you had to see this.

Occupy Everywhere protesters: Not every business owner is a cartoon supervillain that takes pride in how much you suffer.  Yes, that even includes the big ones.  God, I hate having to type those words.

To those that think all the protesters are whining about nothing: well, if you haven't figured out why that's false, no amount of explaining from me is going to change your mind.  But it is a load of crap.

This isn't about being liberal or a conservative.  This is about ending this "Us vs Them" attitude about an incredibly complex problem that we should be looking for answers to.

If you've stuck it out this far, thank you for reading this.  This is an article written by someone from the generation ahead of mine which discusses the horrible emotions that brought on this whole debacle.  I recommend reading it.  It inspired this blog.

The Binding of Isaac

Hey do you remember when I used to actually review games?  Goooood times.

Anyways, The Humble Voxatron Debut came out a few days ago, run by the amazing people who bring you the Humble Indie Bundles.  If you are reading my blog and have somehow managed to avoid any explanations for what the Humble Bundles are, then fret not, amazingly new reader:  the Humble Bundles are pay-what-you-want bundles of video games that are released every so often.  In general, it's a great way for an indie-developed game to get a lot of exposure very quickly, and on the consumer end, to get multiple games for one low price and to give some money to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and/or the Child's Play charity.  (As of this writing, you have a little under 10 days to buy the Voxatron Debut, and I highly recommend doing so.)

And I may have actually let Voxatron fly under my radar if my good friend and editor of 8-Bit Banter [name redacted] didn't tell me that they added The Binding of Isaac to the debut.  I had heard of the game, what with its being developed by Edmund McMillen of the fantastically frustrating Super Meat Boy, and after I had heard that it was added to the bundle, I researched the game for its design influences and play-style.  Just kidding, I went to the Humble Bundle website and bought the game as quickly as I could type.

If you were to ask me for a short, bare-bones description of The Binding of Isaac, the first words that would come out of my mouth would be, "the most fucked-up version of The Legend of Zelda that you have ever seen."  The format is very very similar to The Legend of Zelda (the original one), but with no overworld.

Your only weapons are your tears.  I really cannot overemphasize how fucked up this game is.

A short version of the game's story: Isaac's mom hears the voice of God tell her to sacrifice her son.  Isaac escapes into his basement, where all sorts of terrible creatures reside.  That's really all you need to know on that note.  For a more atmospheric introduction to the game's world, though, I recommend watching the trailer. In fact, I highly recommend it.  Stop reading and click that link.  This review can wait.  It's only like a minute long, click the link.

Okay, did you click the link?  Good because there's a quiz.*

One of the main draws to The Binding of Isaac is that the dungeons are randomly generated.  Out of my dozen or so playthroughs (so far), I have never run into a moment of "Oh this is familiar."  I have maybe gotten a duplicate item twice.  Maybe.  On that note, though, I should mention this: when you die in The Binding of Isaac, you lose everything.  Progress, items, everything's gone.  You start anew every game.  It can get a little frustrating, I suppose, but it really gives you a reason to fear death.  In addition, there are so many items and collectibles in the game that having to start all over feels about right.

Well, as right as anything feels in this game.

I've only run into a couple moments of complaints with the game.  Like Super Meat Boy before it, the game does not seem to run properly on my machine all the time.  It was much more obvious in Super Meat Boy,

but the Slowdown Monster may show up and bog things down a little.  When this happens, I suggest taking advantage of it and dodging what projectiles you can with your improvised bullet-time.  Pretend you're The One, or something like that.  In addition, if you're all about backstory for items and reading descriptions, you're going to see remarkably little even in the way of instructions and uses for the items.  I was one of the guys who wanted to scan everything in the Metroid Prime games do that I could learn about the world, so I was a little disappointed that each item didn't come with a little description or something.  I can get behind it, though, seeing as this is a (terrifying) mystery world for Isaac and the player.

Do you like gore-splattered games?  Play this.  Do you like loosely-interpreted Biblical overtones in your games?  Play this.  Do you want to maintain that little shred of your innocence which hasn't been destroyed by the dark corners of the internet?  Maybe steer clear of this one.  But really, for five dollars, it's hard to get a game with a higher replay value.  I'm going to be looking for unlockables for months on this one.  I recommend picking it up while it's bundled with Voxatron and Blocks That Matter (purchasable here!), but even if you're reading this and the Humble Bundle offer has expired, $5 is a very low price for a game this good.

*Of course there isn't a quiz; what are you, nuts?