The Pixel

The Pixel isn’t being updated any more. Most likely forever (or at least a long, long time.)

My new website (which IS being updated) is The Disc One Cliffhanger.

http://disconecliffhanger.tumblr.com/

Jeeeesus, I was rambling on something awful way back about how I wanted to have a Rog Blog, and when I get one (although technically I’ve had a livejournal for yonks…) I never EVER update it. I tweet all the friggin’ time but most of those could easily stretch out to a full post. It’s just past 1AM here and my headset is broken so for the first time I’m hearing — above my Zune blasting Huey Lewis — how loud my damn keyboard is. Whoo-wee, that old set must have been good at compressing outside sound. But anyway, let’s go check out my recent tweets and elaborate on them. Let’s see, the most recent five should do. Let’s get started!

(on a side note, I usually try to make my tweets exactly 140 characters long so they’re a bit longer than the usual ‘took a shit, ate a sandwich’ ones you get.)

1. Valkyria Chronicles is good fun, but I’m not very good at it. Almost anything tactics-like is like kryptonite to me, I just can’t handle it.

I can’t play tactics games. I got to the second-to-last level in Advance Wars, but that’s it. I couldn’t get any further in that game and every effort since to play it or any other tactics game have resulted in a truly epic failure. Bacon suggested that people try and play a genre they don’t usually think about playing over the summer, and I have to say I feel like I let him down on my end. I haven’t actually heard much of how this scheme has gone for him, but his Xbox achievement list hasn’t exactly ballooned with Japanese RPGs, so who knows? Anyway, Valkyria Chronicles. I really was willing to let this one slip under the radar until the combination of Lovefilm’s game rental service and 4chan’s video game board discussing it convinced me to give it a try. It’s great for me, since it doesn’t treat you like a genius or an idiot, it manages to slide you into a comfortable spot where you’re moving your characters around, taking cover and using some strange shooter/RPG mashup to attack enemies. It’s a bit like Fallout 3 in that regard, but while in Fallout you could play it sharp-shooting gunslinger style if you wanted, in Valkyria Chronicles the tactical micro-management thing seems to yank on your cape a few too many times to allow you to ignore it completely. Without upgrading your weapons’ and characters’ accuracy stats, they miss shots that any human person would blow clean away. This does make the sniper class incredibly frustrating when you have to waste like three commands on one sniper because even though you put the curser RIGHT BANG on the enemy’s think kettle the shot goes wide like a third-division striker was behind it. Blimey, that was a lot on that. Number 2!

2. My headphones are fucked up something awful. They only come in stereo if I eff about with the wires and hold them in a specific place. Lame.

I often make the silly mistake of leaving my headset on my head when I get up to leave the room, which causes the wires to jerk about like they weren’t designed to do. It happens so often I’m surprised I haven’t made a conscious effort to avoid it, but that’s how I roll baby yeah! Now there’s a big threshold for punishment and I have to commend the headset for it, but eventually signs of wear begin to show. It starts with the occasional drop to mono when you move your head in a certain way, and it escalates until you can’t get sound out of the thing unless you contort the cables like some carnival sideshow and eventually it just dies. That’s when you rip the device apart and throw it in the bin. C’est la vie.

3. It’s like Disgaea 3 is TRYING to make me turn the PS3 off and send the game back to Lovefilm as quickly as possible. This is almost painful.

Another Lovefilm rental. Unlike Valkyria Chronicles, /v/ never had a solid opinion on this one. Occasionally you’d get threads about these games, but they were pretty roughly cut to segregate the Japanophiles from the… japan… the people who really hate Japanese gamer culture. I’ve dabbled in the Nihonese arts, sure. I sampled their cartoons, chocolates and catgirls with giant penises that shoot tentacles at schoolgirls that are also, actually boys. But this game boots up in a way to make you question whether or not you can ever even say the word Japan again without a look of disgust across your lips. Keep in mind that I’m not savvy or particularly interested in tactics games and I have absolutely NO knowledge of Disgaea or any associated works (okay, I know that Prinnies are penguins that end sentences with ‘dood’, but that’s it.)

The disc goes in, and I start the game. I decide to let the attract video play out. It’s an anime music video with giant subtitles across the bottom half of the screen with the usual J-Pop nonsense and broken english talking about how cool it is to be evil or some shit. It’s lame, but I let it go through all the way. Eventually I hit the main menu. The “continue” option is there, so I click it. It tells me I don’t have any save files. How about you get rid of the continue option then, game? I make a new save file. It jumps right into a cutscene where some white-haired kid with a stupid voice and stupider personality is reading comic books while Prinnies call him a dude and tell him to go to school. After the incredibly drawn-out and unfunny scene passes, you (the same white haired kid who you pray to be a supporting character) are dropped into the hub world and just let loose. You can talk to people, but as usual they have nothing to say. You walk about aimlessly for a bit until you reach a guy who tells you to get your arse in gear. This takes you to a screen where you choose what chapter of the game you want to play. There is only one chapter even availible, since it’s the fucking start of the game so this screen does nothing but baffle and aggrivate me. I select chapter 1 and it presents me with a level to play, just one: the tutorial. Great! I get to learn how to play the game. Maybe you could have skipped over the tedious bullshit that preceded all of this and just load me into this. The opening cutscene did next to nothing to establish the universe or story of the game, or even tell me what I was supposed to be doing at that very moment. I just walked around until I talked to somebody who took me to the level select screen. So you load it up and it’s a tactics RPG, you move your guys and attack, spells and items, yeah yeah yeah. I can picture in my mind there being like ten trillion characters that PROBABLY have a lot of differences but you’ll never care enough to try and find out what they are. You begin with like five party members (who get teleported in with no introduction, by the way) and you just have to ride out the tutorials while the characters talk up some contrived shit that you can’t even understand because they’re using all these meta-terms the game hasn’t bothered to teach you. Repeat this for two more tutorial stages until I’m back at the hub world. I have some money and people are telling me to ask the zombie character for info on weapons. This should be simple, right? He shows me a dummy screen of a weapon with its stats and shows me how to equip it. Fuck no, not in this game. He brings you up a big list of topics to ask about, such as “sword weapons”, “axe weapons” and “staff weapons”. Who gives two shits and a fuck about what type of weapon it is? I’ll equip what makes my numbers as big as possible you fucking dolts. Forget the zombie, let’s head to the shop. There are a bunch of weapons (both in increments and types) and all manner of numbers flying at me. I try buy an axe, in my stupor I can’t tell if it’s equipped or who owns it or how many I need for everybody. I played through a lot of games in their entirety that I was seriously frustrated at. Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts was just not fun to play. Bionic Commando was motononous and brainless. The less said about Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard, the better. I finished all of those games, but I quit Disgaea 3 barely after the tutorial stages were done. Hell, there might have been more of them! But after what I went through, I decided that I don’t need that shit in my life. In the envelope, back to Lovefilm.

4. Well, that one’s back in the envelope. Not sure what I was expecting out of Disgaea but it sure as Hell wasn’t what I ended up with. Yeeesh!

Oh, well, just read that last paragraph again. As I said, tactics games aren’t my bag, but after Valkyria Chronicles lit my fire I thought maybe I could see it through. Nope. With Halo Wars gone after the first chapter, I’m 2 for 1 on tactics games. At least VC is good…

5. How many Goddamned headsets do I go through? Can’t someone design a set that doesn’t stop working if you pull it wrong like one single time?

This was just after I had ripped the headset apart and briefly considered how the single remaining piece could be fashioned around a hat like the Scout from Team Fortress 2. I spilt the milk, so I don’t really have the right to cry about it. But damn these things should be indestructable. I played my old Mega Drive (Genesis) recently and although the controller pad wire casing was split open at parts, the rainbow of exposed wires still sent Sonic to safety without hiccup. Sure, the actual wire for that pad is almost as thick as my fingers but damnit it still works! I bet there are wireless headsets out there that don’t cost like ten trillion pounds but I don’t have money to wish away on luxury audiophones. But, renting shitty video games I can do.

Heh, all five of those tweets were exactly 140 characters long. Working like a machine on the Twitter front! You can subscribe me here.

Even the most basic of web design is lost on me. It’s actually kind of funny how many times I manage to fail with the most basic of actions. Dropping everything in the “uncategorized” catagory, it turns out, makes everything uncatagorised and thus the site can’t determine which posts are comics and which are blogs. D’oh!

I’ve got it sorted now (hopefully) but there’s still that big box at the top of the blogs reserved for the most recent strip. Ah, it’ll be fine.