Sorry for the long time between updates. This time I actually mean it. Do you remember Crimson Skies? The Cable Brothers sure as fuck do. Enjoy their new video review!
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Sorry for the long time between updates. The Cable Bruddas have a new video review, and this time it’s for Chrono-Trigger.
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So I’ve finally finished the last DLC offering and here’s what I’ve got. I should also note that I really wanted to try out all the new perks so I installed the Perk Every Level Mod and the Sprint Mod for good measure. This was my third or fourth character and I started out with melee and explosives, but by the end of Lonesome Road I had enough skill points to be 100 in everything but barter and survival.
Dead Money:
I played this one months ago so everything’s a little bit fuzzy. Here’s what I do remember.
I actually kind of liked this one. The main complaint everyone seemed to have was the hologram stealth parts and finding the instant death radios, but I counted a total of 5 holograms and I thought running into a room, taking a quick look around, and running back before my head exploded was a good break and kept things tense. I also didn’t mind losing all of my stuff at the beginning of the quest and actually started storing all of my gear before heading into the other DLCs, just to make things fair and try out all the new guns.
Anyway, this one has you running through a dead city filled with poison gas, tons of traps, and reanimated spooky men with gas masks who you need to dismember to kill. The story is that Veronica’s old mentor went batshit and started kidnapping people to help him break into Charlie Kane’s private vault full of technology and heavy ass gold bars you can sell for 10000 caps (which you’ll need for the other DLCs). The new weapons are pretty basic, except for a holo rifle that’s pretty sweet, but I didn’t have enough energy skill to mess around with it so I stuck to my bear trap gauntlet so I could rip guys up.
Like I said, I liked the whole spooky survival horror thing they tried on with this one and I enjoyed the whole stealth and frantic collar beeping. I loved the new characters and thought Elijah was a great crazy villain. They also managed to make the city a huge confusing maze that completely negates your little compass friend and lets you feel like you’re really exploring. My only complaints are that you can’t go back after you finish and the final part is a bit bugged (can’t sneak out with a stealth boy, have to take the long way around no matter what). Other than that, great add-on, but like I said lots of people hated this one.
Honest Hearts:
Ugh. Boring as shit. The story is Caesar’s old bloodthirsty general and some other pacifist Mormon are babysitting two tribes and trying to deal with a third tribe of assholes. This one mainly adds tons of recipes and brings in tommy guns (yes!). Other than that, you’ll be exploring a barren park killing geckos, bears, and assholes. If you were ever really interested when people from the regular game would talk about the Burned Man or wanted to learn more about how Caesar came to power then go ahead. Other than that, I can’t really recommend this one. The end is pretty cool, but I feel like they did this just to add tribals and give themselves some cred.
Old World Blues:
Hell yes. Even if you hate the idea of DLC and everything it stands for, this is just something you have to try out. It’s heavy on the dialogue (It has Doctor Venture as a disembodied brain! Walking eyes!), but it is all gold. The entire quest is just a giant, campy sci-fi map with science gone amok. The weapons are all amazing (A minigun with a dog’s brain that barks and growls when enemies are near! A super stealth suit that auto-injects med-x and increases your sneak speed! Energy axe that freezes robots!), there’s some sweet bosses, tons of mini bosses and places to explore, and the characters are great. It also ties into Dead Money and Lonesome Road a little bit, so you can pick up Elijah’s super powered laser rifle and go to town on reanimated medical suits and robot laser scorpions.
You get kidnapped (again) and have your brain, spine, and heart removed and replaced. It’s your job to gather the tech to get you into the FORBIDDEN ZONE so you can smash the evil doctor and save your brain. Like I said, the story is campy and ridiculous and is probably the only time this game really got me to laugh.
Lonesome Road:
A little bit weird. This one actually gives your character (and ED-E) a backstory and all the stuff that should have been included in the game in the first place. Another courier named Ulysses wants you to see how you fucked up his life before he kills you. It’s not BAD but it’s just a little too late to be telling me exactly who my character is after I’ve already conquered Nevada. There’s a fun little mini-quest where you need to find a bunch of warheads to explode with your laser pointer to open up secret areas and kill crazed legion/ncr and a lot of room to explore and check corners for special items.
There’s not that many new weapons, but they are awesome. There’s a sweet rapid fire rocket launcher the game almost forces you to use by shoving ammo in your face, a copy of Legate’s sword, an insanely strong deathclaw gauntlet called Fist of the North Rawr (hell yes) that just ruins everything, and auto-stims. By now I was level 49, so I spent most of the time throwing mines everywhere and sniping people with rockets (it was awesome, but having 20 explosions on screen makes it almost impossible to aim after you start shooting). ED-E also gets some amazing upgrades (free 50% weapon repair once a day, free ammo once a day, anywhere workbench/ammo loader) and they do their best to make him adorable.
The quest ends with a pretty sweet boss fight and then opens up 3 optional full on combat areas (one of them has about 10 deathclaws and 20 underlings that all rush you and your rockets). It’s a pretty good DLC and feels way more satisfying than the Hoover Dam battle, but it’s still a slap in the face for the game to start telling me who my character is all of a sudden.
Quick Summary:
Dead Money – Positive
Broken Hearts – Negative
Old World Blues – Positive!!!
Lonesome Road – Positive
Let me get this out of the way right off the bat: the first FEAR was a better game. The enemies seemed smarter, the weapons felt deadlier, and the overall level of difficulty was unquestionably higher. FEAR was hard but fair, and the Achievements reflected this: one required you to beat the game without dying, another demanded you find every hidden collectable along the way (missed one? tough, start over). I played all the way through it three times, and I still don’t have the Achievement for using less than 500 bullets in the entire campaign (that one is a little finicky, as the way the engine handles shotgun shells causes each pellet to be counted individually). Even the controls were demanding, forcing you to click in the right analog stick to aim – a conceit that was grudgingly tolerated in exchange for some of the best gunplay you could get on an Xbox.
FEAR 2 isn’t like that at all. FEAR 2 is the friendliest shooter in the world. For one thing, the checkpointing is excellent, never requiring you to replay more than a single encounter – though you might never know it, since even on the hardest difficulty, you’ll only ever die in a handful of places. (Contrast this with Call of Duty on Veteran, where you’re expected to die at least once on every checkpoint just to figure out which way you should be sprinting to reach the next trigger volume.) And unlike most spooky haunted shooting gallery games, the corridors in FEAR 2 are (relatively) bright and colourful, while the rooms often fulfill recognizable human purposes (such as laundry, or waiting), making it difficult to get completely turned around the way you might on a sufficiently-advanced spaceship.
The use of colour and brightness extends beyond the environments. Activating bullet time (called here… hmm… bullet time, I guess?) causes enemies to glow and pulsate. Item pick-ups are framed by a colour-coded “you-can-interact-with-me” square that’s visible even through walls. Even the collectable story-expanding text logs are not so much hidden as placed to encourage exploration; I finished with 69/70, and finding the last one was a simple matter of consulting the mission select screen(!), which displays the number of collectables in each level(!!) and tracks which ones you’ve found across playthroughs(!!!). (Of course this is all stuff that platformers have been doing for twenty years, but most shooters still tend to treat their collectables as an afterthought – something to be wedged in dark corners to fill out a features list, and yet another way for the level designer to punish you for not being clever enough to think exactly like him.)
FEAR 2 is a game almost completely devoid of rough edges. You’ll finish it in a weekend, completing every optional goal along the way, and you’ll have a reasonably entertaining time doing it. It’s unrelentingly earnest and cheerful in the way that Dead Space is unrelenting bleak and disgusting; it saves its obligatory subway tunnels for near the end, and when it finally makes you climb on a turret to fight off waves of baddies, it at least has the decency to fire up some generic heavy metal gun-shooting music for accompaniment (not a patch on the industrial track that played as you shot a hundred ghosts in slow motion at the end of FEAR 1, mind, but appreciated nonetheless). Monolith has been treading the same ground – ruthless corporations, unethical pseudoscience, blood-stained urban slums, gigantic sprawling parodies of real buildings, faceless soldiers working hand-in-hand with unexplained zombie guys – since at least as far back as Blood II, and they’ve clearly got it down pat by now.
Verdict: If you like Doom clones, this one is on the high end of mid-tier. Positive!
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Jerry Whorebach
Editor’s note: Did you know there’s going to be an extra-gritty, realistic take on a new Mortal Kombat movie? It’s by the guy who did some version of GLEE. The author of this post was too lazy to in-line the fake trailer, and so am I, but you can see it here. When that gets removed from Youtube, try searching for “Mortal Kombat Rebirth.”
Jerry Whorebach was consulted on what roles the characters ought to take. Before he was deported, this is what he presented.
LOU KANG
– Louis “Lewey Kay” Kang
– Earthrealm fashion designer
– travelled to Outworld in search of new materials
– found instead the perfect models – crucified human slaves
– fights to free “his people” (as in “Have your people call my etc.”)
JAX
– Abel “Apple Jax” Polanski
– granted the power to choose any form he desires
– chose “black guy with bionic arms” as it was most physically potent form he could imagine
– although posesses the capacity, has never attempted another form (“Once you go black etc.”)
JOHNNY CAGE
– comes from a future where Johnny Cage never died, instead going on to win the tournament and procreate more than any man in history
– as a result, everybody in the future looks like Johnny Cage and is named Johnny Cage
– this Johnny Cage had only moments to escape in a time machine before the temporal disturbance caused by Johnny Cage’s death rewrote the timeline
– still a tragic character, knows even if he wins he will have to fuck 10,000 women, any one of which could be his own grandmother
– did I mention he’s gay, bam double tragedy
KINTARO
– originally conceived for MK II as half-man, half-tiger
– final mixture was closer to 99% Goro, 1% tiger stripes
– apparently prototype fursuit “looked retarded”
– my design: 98.5% babe, 1% tiger stripes, 0.5% bikini
– bikini number possibly too high?
BARAKA
– is a Muslim now
– everything else pretty much the same
– has potential to be most controversial change
– should be handled with sensitivity
LEX LUTHOR
– not technically an MK character
– so well-integrated into story and gameplay of MK vs. DC, it’s now impossible to imagine a new MK without him
– possible trademark violation
SOME NINJAS
– tag-team of six colour-coded elemental masters who live in a van
– must return to van to “tag out”
– mysterious; may in actuality be as many as six guys or as few as one
Editor’s note: The year is 2003. Web comic creator Roop Dirnup developed Melted Brain, a MMORPG-based strip that used, for the most part, actual posts by prospective MMORPG fans as comic dialogue. Thought lost in time, Caltrops will be posting a Melted Brain strip every Friday for the rest of the year. Click for the huge version.
Roop
Diamond Mind Baseball is a text-based baseball sim. I’m going to explain why I like it so much, but I should state that I’ve been in a league with seven other guys for the past five years. I’ve played 84 games a year and the game hasn’t become stale yet.
Hey there, I’m famous. To put it in terms more palatable to the audience of this site, I’m as famous as Erik Wolpaw was when he wrote that he was as famous as John Stamos. And, to clarify, I’m as famous as Erik was then, not now, after he made two of the greatest things in the history of computer games: Portal 2 and Jonathan Mak confused.
No, I’m just kidding, I’m not famous, or even Internet-famous, not like this goddamn cat. I’ll tell you who is, though — that cat’s owner, and one of my favorite independent film makers: Jason Scott.
Full disclosure: I was in one of Jason’s movies. But it was about text adventures, and it’s not like there’s this huge potential cast list there. He wasn’t exactly going to be able to interview Bob Saget and an Olson Twin, for instance. Although I’m sure Bob would have figured out a way to make “Leather Goddesses of Phobos” dry heave. So please let me table the transparent conflict of interest for a moment: while my childish desire for attention would have had me agree to be in one of his movies if he were stirring up a batch of frottage-fueled shag porn, many of my colleagues would have declined if he wasn’t fair, dedicated, talented and meticulous. Oh, and if he didn’t make great movies.
And he does! Look, I love documentaries that are thinly-veiled, vicious character attacks. I can’t get enough when it comes to Bluray transparent smears. Everybody loves watching Billy Mitchell be made an asshole, even though it’s probably unfair, because everything in “The King of Kong” was as fake as “2001: A Space Odyssey” or the NASA moon landings, depending on how you roll. Everyone is going to love Michael Moore ripping whoever the next Republican president is, assuming the six Navy SEALs guarding him don’t slice him up like a tauntaun after what’s sure to be a mild and unassuming winter. But the tar-and-feather doc is the documentary equivalent of a popcorn flick.
But sometimes a well-researched movie pays off. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe the opposite of a popcorn flick. Looking at Rotten Tomatoes, there are movies with made-up words like “Colombiana,” which sounds like something even the Eragon cretin would have turned his nose at. But whatever those proper documentaries are called, Jason makes them, and he’s launched a Kickstarter to make three more. One on Arcades, one on the 6502 processor, and one on the medium of TAPE.
I think these are great ideas for films. I used to be an Assembly programmer for Cyrix, and together, we had some good times making you finish last in Quake. I’d put my arm around you if a processor from 1998 that lacked floating point math could “do” arms. With that in mind, programmers who worked in Assembly for systems that families actually enjoyed, like the 6502-based Apple II and Atari 800, are dying to tell their stories. The arcade documentary is about the spirit of the place, not necessarily arcade games themselves. I’m trying to purchase the cut footage of Robert Mruczek’s expansive vagina frescoes from the makers of “Chasing Ghosts,” but Jason’s replies back must have been accidentally flagged by gmail. I don’t know anything about magnetic tape, except that after the Nazis invented it in 1928, they’ve finally made enough of it to completely encircle your mom.
I’m confident that you’ll want to support these films as you learn more. Jason releases his movies via a Creative Commons license. They’re impossible to “steal.” An agreement he made with Thom Henderson let Thom host an episode of one of Jason’s previous movies, BBS: The Documentary, on-line. Click here and then click on the link that gives you the episode. I initially avoided watching the episode on PKZIP because I thought it would be the most boring story ever told, except for every episode of “Star Trek: Voyager.”
The PKZIP one is actually the best episode of the bunch. If you don’t think so, that’s cool, but if you dig it like I think you will, well, this film maker is going to create three more documentaries with proper funding. He doesn’t get anything through Kickstarter if the full amount isn’t pledged. At $33 grand each it might sound like a lot, but he’s just a guy, not HBO here. He needs to fly to find these people. There’s other stuff, as well: he funded an excursion to the actual cave that “Colossal Cave” was based on for GET LAMP. For all I know, for the TAPE documentary, he’s planning on going to the building where Watergate happened and where you liberal scum effectively stabbed America to death. I don’t think these expenses are that crazy for the product we’ll get. I put up $250 in the name of Caltrops Dot Com to support him, and I hope you will find it within you to pledge funds, too.
Ice Cream Jonsey
There’s no time for an opener! The Cable Brothers are going to tell you if The Legend of the Mystical Ninja is still worth playing in 2011.
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