My Dick Hurts - June 16th, 2011

I only play Valkyria Chronicles 2 when I take a shit and I don't feel like reading a book, which is partly why I haven't beaten it yet despite the months I've had it. It's also partly because I wish horrible, deadly anguish on every fucking character in this stupid fucking story and their stupid fucking faces with their stupid fucking voices that are stupid fucking stupid. I'm hinting at the fact that I dislike the direction they took the story in this sequel. As I said in an earlier post, the original Valkyria Chronicles didn't have an amazing story, but I'll take mediocre over annoying and stupid fucking stupid any day. I may get into spoilers, but I don't care and neither should you.

I've detailed what I think of the main character already. What you may not know, however, is that nearly every goddamn character has absolutely no business being anywhere near a military institution. Mister Annoying Fuck Protagonist's main squeeze is a field medic. She is also deathly afraid of blood. Perhaps this is not the profession for you, young lady. Oh, and she's also completely color blind, which is not only a detriment to her success in the field, but also renders her phobia of blood completely fucking retarded. She's is not afraid of blood, she is afraid of liquid. It's good that I only play this game in small increments, because there's a lot of gameplay here and it gets pretty redundant. However, even here in this blessed sanctuary of mediocrity the stupid fucking stupid story creeps in. One character is an artist and also a bitch. Randomly, she will refuse to take orders. She gets "moody", and thinks that this is an excuse to stop being in a war. No, bitchy artist. If you wanted to be a bitchy artist, be a bitchy artist. The fuck are you doing going to war?

I'm at the point where there's a bunch of man-made super-saiyans running around in the rebel army, which you'd think would have come up at some point in the first game but whatever. They apparently took over in a ten second cutscene, which was a little sudden for a group of people who get their asses kicked by a bunch of incompetent children led by a severely autistic boy with an eating disorder on a daily basis. The sexy doctor lady who I still hated but is a sexy doctor lady so it's okay left and Big Tits (I actually can not remember her name) died, so there's really nothing left for me here.

Mortal Kombat got a big patch, and the few games I played online were ACTUALLY playable. The problem now, however, is it takes an average five minutes to find a match. I got up to ten minutes once, and that's just when I gave up looking. I realize fighting games require more precision, but a proper online experience is really keeping the genre down compared to other competitive genres. RTS games, particularly Starcraft and LoL/HoN, are ridiculously more popular than even Street Fighter as e-sports, and a big part of that is the fighting genre's seeming inability to evolve past the arcades. The community is certainly doing their best to get the games out there (even if the vast majority is focused on Capcom), so I think it's really up to the developers to push the genre forward. Mortal Kombat, with its gradual balancing patches, seems to be at the forefront in this, but still. Ten minutes.

I realized today that I have never actually beaten either Dragon Age game. I've gotten the the very end on both, but I long lost interest by that point and never go all the way. Hopefully the less-than-positive reactions to Dragon Age II starts showing more people that there are other western RPG developers than Bioware. Don't get me wrong, Bioware as a mainstream developer is a golden corn nugget in a sea of brown shit, but to me they've never even come close to succeeding Baldur's Gate 2, despite (or perhaps because of) their tendency to just copy characters or plot elements wholesale from it. But competition is good, and I think competition will bring the great back out of Bioware.