My Dick Hurts - July 30th, 2011

Not much to report on in Final Fantasy XIII. I've simply had better games to play, and that is a long goddamn list. I don't even know what the twenty hour introduction was for. It's like half of the design team wanted to make a shitty movie and the other a shitty game, but the publisher thought that was too much shit to be in one place. So they just let each design half the game. There's very little story for the fifteen or so hours I've played past the introduction, barely any of it makes any sense, and none of it is interesting. Final Fantasy XII felt like an MMO because it had a similar philosophy to this one, but instead of change that philosophy because of fan backlash they just removed what made that philosophy work. I'm now free to "wander" the "world" and do "side-quests", which I tried to do. I really did, but the fact is the gameplay is pointless. Leveling up characters just makes it go by faster and lets your characters get past the next boss fight. Notice how I said "characters", as you have no real say in it.

There's something called the "Calvary". That's... that's it, it's just something. I have nothing else to go on, the only impact this... thing has had is make people say its name ominously. I'm sure if I looked in the datalog I'd find out what it is, but I simply don't care enough to press the X button. The main characters have simply stopped interacting aside from the occasional unbearably awkward "flirt" scenes between Retarded Australian Girl and Boner. Hero Guy has gotten hurt a couple more times, so at least that's been good. Aside from Sazh and Hot Australian Chick every character is an annoying fuck-pot just aching to regurgitate the next emotional revelation that is impossible to give a crap about.

Caught the top 32 Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition matches at EVO last night. Despite the game's obvious balance issues and honestly being boring to watch, there were some very hype matches. We won't be seeing a rematch of Daigo and Justin Wong this year, as Wong is obviously fatigued with the game and was knocked out fairly early (for him). Seeing only two Yuns (that we know about) in the top 8 is nice, and getting to see a Poongko/Daigo match will be a treat. I'm personally pulling for Wolfkrone to take it, though he's got an uphill battle. I'll eventually watch VoDs of the Mortal Kombat matches, but it's hard for me to enjoy watching that game. I know far less about it since the online is dreadful and there's not an inkling of a scene in my area.

I finally got Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines to work on a modern computer, and this game feels new every time. This is seriously like my eighth playthrough and I didn't get bored once. I believe it's currently on sale on Steam, and if the unofficial patches work with it I highly recommend getting it if you haven't already. If you (for some strange, sexy reason) want the perfect example of a game that I love, check it out.

Saw the last Harry Potter movie, and it was good. This series, like the books, really grew with its audience. The first two movies were really just kids movies, nothing special and not what I'd call "good". Then there's the middle/highschool cliched bullshit that ruins everything set in a school. But here there's blood, brutal murders just barely concealed, death, sexin', and all kinds of things that warrant the PG-13 rating. I stopped reading the books after the fifth one, but I'm thinking about going back to them. They aren't the best things ever written, but hey, it wasn't a bad movie.

Kinda've a short post, I know, but the only other things on my mind are tragedies that I'd rather not post about since they're all tragic and what not. It's not really my thing to talk about world news, but I'll just say the horrible events in Norway are important and should be analyzed by everyone.