My Dick Hurts - June 8th, 2011

I MAY (may meaning "for the trillienth time I will say I 'may' do this but actually won't do anything of the sort" here) make a return to making YouTube videos in the coming months... but with a different direction. The "plan" is to keep "rants" here, and use YouTube as a "fuckin' around" venue of expression. I might do LP's, I might do Vlogs (though, uh, my pretty face is just too pretty for vlogs... yeah), or I might just review pornography (you'd watch it), I don't know. As I said before, I don't really do... this, what with talking to the internet, for the attention. If I did I'd consider everything a massive failure. I do it because it's fun, and I had fun fuckin' around on YouTube. So I might go back to that. Besides, vidoes of me just fuckin' around got upwards of 20,000 views, whilst those I actually put effort in were lucky to get 500. So it seems even other people like fuckin' around more.

L.A. Noir was, like every Rockstar game since GTA IV, a mixed bag of great writing, awful narrative structure, great characters that are never given the time they need, and terrible gameplay. The game looks better than trailers and commercials made it; textures aren't great but serviceable, and the faces aren't nearly as out of place as I thought they'd be. Every so often you'll catch a face going into an "idle" state after some kind of expression and it's... disarming, to say the least, but other than that it really is a progression towards photo-realism in gaming. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you.

To my knowledge you can skip pretty much every driving/shooting/action sequence in that game, and the reason behind this is because it's all terrible. Your on screen character controls even clunkier in this game than Red Dead or GTA, and cars are... well, it is the '40s. The meat of the game is in the investigating and questioning sequences, which play out as an Ace Attorney game. Just... yeah, this game is basically Phoenix Wright if Phoenix Wright was a lot easier and a lot less dumb (snap). The game holds your hand through-out almost everything, even when it doesn't seem like it. It's hard to explain while avoiding spoilers, but let's just say even when you have to make a choice it doesn't really matter. The game ends up the same way regardless of your input.

When questioning a witness or suspect, you're given three choices: you can assume they're telling the truth, doubt that they're telling the truth, or call them out on a lie if you have proof that they are lying. The problem is that Cole Phelps (who you play through-out most of the game) has a loose interpretation of what those three things are. The "doubt' option is more of a "be a dick" option, and calling someone out on a lie can completely change what you thought the conversation was about. In fact, after I figured out what it was doing, I'd call EVERYONE out on a lie to find out just what the game thought I thought this person was lying about. You can just back out of a "lie call" anyway, so even the "difficult" calls are made easy. Until I got to that point though, the game was very meta. I never really thought "is this guy lying to me about being at the DixGarage last night with Fernando Poohola?", but rather "what does the game want?". It breaks the immersion the face technology and setting establish and could have been handled much better.

I can't say I didn't find any enjoyment from the game, though. For the majority of the game the plot is interesting and kept me playing. It did that Rockstar thing, however, where characters seem interesting but are never really given the development or even backstory that they seem to deserve. Cole Phelps seems like a genuinely flawed yet likable character, but the last three or four mission aren't even played as him. Instead you get this fella who you knew about, but only showed up in a few flashbacks and just takes over the story like he knows a 'ting or two. There seems to be an interesting story to tell here, but the writers were too afraid to tell it. It's also hardly "noir". The closest it gets is in the beginning, where some guy you meet near the end of the game narrates before a few cases, but that quickly goes away. It's more of "GTA IV in the 40's" than a noir crime drama.

My foray into Heroes of Newerth has been... mixed. On one hand, it's still very much like this. Do not heed the disclaimer in the beginning of the video. That is how one first experiences HoN. The game itself, however, is actually quite fun. Comparing it to League of Legends, there is a much higher skill ceiling and that skill comes into play almost immediately. If I do well in HoN I feel like I contribute much, much more than if I do well in LoL.

Someone let me borrow Crysis 2 on the PS3 and it looks like shit. I've seen it played on the PC and it looks fine, but the "best looking game on consoles" tagline on the cover is a goddamn lie of Satan's balls. Normally I wouldn't really care if a game had sub-par graphics, but here they actually get in the way of the game. Texture work and image fidelity is so low I can barely make out the enemies from the backgrounds (and this is on a 50' HD TV through an HDMI Cable), even the big fucking alien dudes who run all over the place. Normally I wouldn't comment, but it's just so weird to see the fabled Crysis name on something that looks so awful.

And finally, E3 came and I gave nary a fuck. That is all.