My Dick Hurts - June 27th, 2011

My 21st birthday was on the 22nd, and apparently that means I have to drink something alcoholic. I was forced into drinking a "buttery nipple", which is some kind of shot that supposedly tastes like butterscotch with a terrible name. I didn't recall butterscotch smelling like gasoline, so I adamantly refused. It didn't help that "just hold your nose" and "you have to drink it really quick" were the arguments towards consuming this nipple. It felt like when I was a little kid and my parents kept trying to get me to take some foul tasting medicine, and it ended with similar results. After twenty minutes of arguing I put the most ass tasting liquid I've ever tasted in my mouth and subsequently into the sink.

I do not wish to drink anymore nipples.

I just now started playing Final Fantasy XIII... which I'm aware I'm kind of late on. Despite posting my conflict with this game a long time ago, my better judgment won and I did not purchase the game. But I saw it for twenty bucks and decided to just fucking give in already. I've played it for quite a while now, at least fifteen hours, and am starting to wonder when this game will actually start. I've met all the player characters now, and they consist of Cloud, Emo Who Gets Cripplingly Hard Boners, Retarded Australian Girl, Hot Australian Girl, Mr. Punchy, and Sazh. I call Sazh Sazh because he is an honest-to-Tiamat likable character and I am trying my hardest to hold onto him for as long as I can. They put a black man in a J-RPG who is not a horrible parody, AND he has amazing hair. He has problems just like every other character, but they are ACTUAL problems and he reacts to them like an actual person.

Cloud wasn't so bad until she spent so much time with Boner Boy. Remember how they ruined Final Fantasy XII with Vaan? Yeah, they did that exact thing again only now he's a major focal point of the game so far. He spends the vast majority of his screen time on the ground, which I assume is the game's way of showing me he is weak but it was really unnecessary for it to do that. So I just think he's popping boners at everything that excites him and move on. Retarded Australian Girl has spent most of her time with Sazh, and I believe she has been significantly less annoying than she could have been directly because of that. Hot Australian Girl hasn't done much, but she's hot so it's cool. Mr. Punchy also hasn't done much but punch things and get punched (which is much better) and ride a motorcycle made of two interlocking ice-women. I think he's the traditional hero of this story, and I think that because every line of dialogue from him has reassured me of that fact.

This game is not written correctly. Dialogue is rather mediocre, but just in terms of explaining to the audience what the fuck is going on this script is a colossus of confusion. There are so many terms just thrown about that aren't explained till about ten hours in, and none of them are capitalized correctly for no goddamn reason and it pisses me off. There's a "data log" that kind of explains everything, but there's a lot in it... and forgive me if I don't feel like committing all that much to a Final Fantasy game. I found out, in fact, that a lot of this shit is explained in summaries that pop up when you load a game. So yeah, just reload your game every twenty minutes and you'll understand everything PERFECTLY! Don't know why everyone's so upset about this game.

Honestly the story's a bit better than I expected, but I really, really did not expect much. I have Sazh and his beautiful hair so I haven't given up yet. The combat, however, is absolutely dead. There's nothing really here so far. You have an "auto-battle" option during combat, which automatically selects the most effective skills for whatever situation you're facing. It's as if they realized they haven't really made any innovative encounters for years, and just decided they'd do it for us. I don't really mind games that don't actually let you play out the combat - hell, the Ogre Battle games are some of my favorites and you couldn't really do a damn thing in combat. If you're going to go that route however, you have to give the player sufficient variables and tactics they can plan out before combat. This game has not yet given me anything substantial whatsoever that I can so much as tweak to give my characters an edge in battle. Some of these fights can take, like, five minutes and it's just pressing the "auto-battle" command and occasianly changing a character's class mid-battle. I don't get any choices when leveling up characters, there's only two stats for me to modify, and I have no control over my party beyond the leader (which is essentially controlled by the auto-battle command). I actually enjoyed the Gambit system in Final Fantasy XII because I had to set that shit up. Here I'm not sure why I'm even needed.

It's a very pretty game though. Music is terrible, but it's purty.

Dreamhack came and went, and League of Legends got up to 200,000 viewers at one time. Granted the game's stream was promoted a lot more than any other game's, but it's a little sad the game got far more views than other games that were being played. I've already pointed out that LoL is a very fun game, but its skill ceiling is simply too low for it to be a major e-sport. Hopefully all those viewers start looking beyond LoL and support e-sports further, if only because I find LoL boring as shit to watch.