Half As Witty As Any Of Your Professors

I was in the shower and decided it would be a good idea (it isn't) to come up with actual lecture titles for that course on the Three Kingdoms I was offering

Occupy Luoyang: Class Warfare and the Yellow Scarves

Getting Away with Murder: The Life of Lord Guan

All in All You're Just Another Dick with No Balls: Eunuchs and the Imperial Court

"Liu Bei is a Worthless Twat" and Other Observations

Fool Me Once...: Why Lu Bu Surprises No One

Cao Cao and Bugs Bunny: A Comparative Psycho-analysis

Bigotry in Motion: The Short Reign of Sun Ce

Sun Quan: Jerk or Complete Asshole?

Every Sperm is Sacred: A Brief Look at the Cao Family

Hardcore Poetry Slam: How Kong Ming Befuddled Dumb People

"Never Make Political Decisions with Only Your Penis" and Other Lessons Cao Pi Never Learned

Liu Shan and Other Grievous Mistakes

You Are A Bad Person and No One Likes You: The Sima Family Then and Now

Shin Sengoku Musou Gaiden: Folklore, Opera, and the Mythologizing of the Three Kingdoms

Updating Eventually

Okay, so first I was going to talk about everything that went wrong with Bloodforge. Obviously that was going to take a while. Then I got Dynasty Warriors 7 and I had to figure out how to review it without turning the whole thing into a 3-credit (transferable) lecture course on the Three Kingdoms era. While I was figuring that out I went ahead and got Skyrim. And we all know how that eats up your hours. So I'm posting this just to let people know that this blog isn't dead. It's just really really delayed.

Argharest

The Xbox 360 still works. I tried a game called Record of Argarest War. I'll be returning it tomorrow because it isn't very good. It's a strategy RPG ala Final Fantasy Tactics. It tried to do something different and had some good ideas, but the implementation sucked.

Combat is boring, which is a fairly important part of a strategy RPG. Argarest attempted to implement a system where positioning your characters in a certain way would allow you to perform powerful combo attacks. The problem is their implementation removed any and all relevance of strategic movement or positioning from combat. Battlefields are extremely small and perfectly flat, combo attacks essentially have infinite range and automatically move characters where they need to be at no expense, and movement happens simultaneously with the enemy so you can't really react to how they move. The result is that you just position your guys for combo attacks, let the enemies fall where they may, and then just kill everything that came in range.

The game also looks surprisingly dated. Its graphics are, to be honest, only slightly better than the original Final Fantasy Tactics. Considering we're two console generations removed from that landmark title it's odd that the production values would be so surprisingly low. In many ways Final Fantasy Tactics actually looked better, since it didn't recycle the same battlefield every time you fought in a forest.

The story concept is novel, but it isn't good enough to carry uninteresting gameplay. Supposedly it's an 80 hour title spanning five generations of characters (descendants of the first character you play and your choice of various female heroines you encounter along the way), but as considered the countless hours ahead of me I quickly lost interest.

So I title this post with a clever (not really) pun and declare this game "meh".

So Much Sakamoto It's NSFW

Seriously, it's NSFW. I didn't write this, but by God does that actually sound like the actress in Other M. Then again, it also really sounds like the writing in Other M.

Shameless Plugging

I'm not posting this to plug Space Marine. It's a good game in my opinion, but not a great game. I'm not plugging Niggurath's Let's Play of the game either. What I'm shamelessly plugging is my guest commentary like the attention whore I am.

It Could Have Been Worse

There are plenty of reasons that this is one of the few console wars where I have no regrets about my decision. I've never had my credit card information stolen from XBox Live. The XBox 360 actually has games I care about. And, at the end of the day, it just looks better.

Truth is Stranger than Arnold

Apparently Kindergarten Cop took place in Silent Hill.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/gallery/view/26/115208/612.6