For sale
One soul
Slightly used
Still in working condition
Price negotiable

Landscape with sheep

Darksiders

Did I talk about Darksiders yet?

The word is spectacle. Spectacle, spectacle, spectacle. I think the main point of the game is just to look really cool.

There's this beefy dude with ridiculous armor, and he bashes demons with his enormously oversized sword. It's moderately hack-and-slashy, but the combat's not particularly great. It's just flashy and over-the-top.

Here's the story. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are supposed to come riding down when it's time for the Apocalypse. Unfortunately, War gets duped into riding down too early. Gasp! Now there's all these angels and demons having this big ol' apocalyptic war and all the humans are dead, and everyone is mad at War because they think it's totally his fault. War's superpowers get confiscated and he has to trudge around Earth until he can find the real culprit and clear his name. There's ten gazillion plotholes in this premise, but it's mostly just an excuse for the hacking and slashing and the spectacle.

I heard good things about this game before I started playing it, so I had high hopes. I'm disappointed to say that it didn't meet my expectations. It's not that it's a bad game, per se; it's certainly passable, and it definitely provides lots of spectacle. Being pretty to look at is fine, but Darksiders fails to impress me on gameplay, and it comes down to the combat. The combat just kind of...sucks.

There's a combo meter, for example, but it's not actually clear how it works—from what I can tell, it drops the combo count for no reason. I'm still attacking, I'm still hitting enemies, I'm not taking damage. What more does it want? Am I timing my attacks wrong? Am I pressing a wrong button? I don't know, because there isn't any sort of feedback system to tell me. Does the combo count even mean anything? I have no idea.

War also has very limited ability to dodge or block attacks, so in most fights, there's not much tactics beyond mashing the attack button. Coming to Darksiders from games like Bastion and Batman: Arkham City, it's a woefully inferior combat system—a flaw that's difficult to forgive for a game that consists almost entirely of combat. Maybe this changes later on, but I'm two hours into the game already; it wouldn't be much of an excuse if it did.

From what I've seen so far, I'm unimpressed with Darksiders. My rating: Meh/10.

Look, I don't know. I just drew the first thing I saw, and it was the icon bar in MS Paint, okay?

Pumpkin Pi

Warp pi-pes

The MS Paint icon

More doodles. Just the first thing that caught my eye.

By request

Didn't come out quite right...

The doodles continue

Sigma Team sale

Hey, remember a while back I wrote a blog entry about Alien Hallway and said it was a cute distraction that's worth maybe a dollar or so? And how I also wrote about Alien Shooter, and Zombie Shooter, and said they were fun?

Well, for a few days, you can go to Indie Game Stand and get all three of those (on Steam) plus a fourth game called Theseus: Return of the Hero (which is a sort-of sequel to Alien Shooter) at an attractive price point of, like, a buck or two. Or just Alien Hallway (not on Steam) for twenty-five cents. I think either deal is good value, and I endorse the mini-bundle.

There are a surprising amount of these games, by the way. Alien Shooter, Alien Shooter 2: Reloaded, Alien Shooter 2: Conscription, Zombie Shooter, Zombie Shooter 2, and now this Theseus thing. It's a pretty solid concept, so I suppose I shouldn't be shocked.

But yeah. Check out the bundle, blow up some aliens and/or zombies, and all that good stuff.

A drawing of a roll of toilet paper

American Pi

Pi-neapple

Pi-keman

Pi-kachu

Oh man, I forgot that I had class at 9 am. This schedule is sooo awkward. All the classes are on Tuesdays and Thursdays, except for one MW class that keeps me from sleeping in because it's at 10 in the morning. And to a one, they are lit classes. I am going to have a lot of reading on my plate. I don't know how I'll get through it all.

If I had gotten into all the classes I wanted, it would have been much tidier. Blech. Not as if I can drop a class to make my schedule easier, either—it would put me under the minimum units. And I couldn't have waitlisted a class as backup because I would have gone over the maximum units.

I've got this awful runny cold, too. Mucus everywhere. You know the kind.

Anyway, this is just me griping to the internet before I shuffle into bed.

Pokémon X and Y

Guess what? Nintendo just announced the next generation of Pokémon games.



And I've realized it's over for me.

Pokémon was a big part of my childhood. I've played through every generation. I remember Red Version being one of the first video games I ever played. I sank hundreds of hours into Silver Version when I was in the second grade. Even more hours into Sapphire Version—it was the first time I finished the Pokédex, and I even went so far as to get the full four stars on my trainer card. Did you know that unlocks an alternate dialogue at the Pokémon Center? It's true. Nurse Joy congratulates you, and from then on, she skips the small talk and goes straight to healing your Pokémon when you talk to her.

I delved just as deeply into Pokémon Pearl, training a bunch of Pokémon to actual competitive levels with the breeding for the IVs and the training for the EVs and the training to lv100 and everything. And I even fully completed the entire National Dex.

I played through Black Version. I bought it the day it came out. It was fun. It was the same game I knew and loved. It was Pokémon. And it was easy.

After Pearl, I just felt done. I had beaten Sapphire, but never quite finished the National Dex. When I did (in Pearl), that was it. Closure. I beat the game, I beat the postgame, and I even explored the metagame.

I played through Black Version. I bought it the day it came out. It was fun. It was the same game I knew and loved. It was Pokémon. And it was redundant. I'd beaten the first gen, the second gen, the third gen, both GameCube side games, the fourth gen, and here I was playing through the same old story yet again. The difference was that I'm just not invested anymore. I don't care enough to memorize another hundred new guys and their stats and types and movepools. I don't care enough to scour the world yet again in search of the 100% completion. I've done that schtick enough times already; it's old hat.

I know a lot of people think that Pokémon has jumped the shark. It's true that it's no longer a worldwide mega-fad engulfing the entire consumer market like in the 90s—but it's not as if the product itself is getting worse, the way Sonic the Hedgehog did. It's mostly static. You could call it stagnant—tomayto, tomahto—but the fact remains that the core of the franchise is the same now as it was then. What's changed is me. Pokémon is still there, but I've turned into the kind of person who doesn't care about Pokémon. That's more or less what my poem from before was about.