Everything Old is new Again...Incredibly Late Gaming Reviews Aimed at Nobody in Particular

Pretty much, due to delays in the production of The Skull Base and a particularly strong case of writers block on Currently Untitled Novel, I find myself back here writing for the single digits worth of people who have come here from a google search gone terrifyingly right. As such, I feel it is my right, nay duty, to opine on the latest in video games...that have been out for over a month and in some cases set the internet on fire with divisive rhetoric not seen since probably yesterday. There will be mild to heavy spoilers. You will see the most succinct review of a video game ever. We will all learn something. Mild twitters may effortlessly escape the larynx. Key word is may. Without further obfuscation of intent, we shall begin.

Mass Effect 3

It would be overly facile to excoriate Bioware on the conclusion of this game. That being said though, it was ungodly irksome. Rgardless of this well worn conclusion, overall, I would say that Mass Effect 3 was a fitting conclusion to the series. Past characters returned and there was a true sense of grandeur that can only be found in galactic carnage. Former decisions did matter throughout the game's narrative in instances like when the Rachni Queen that I let live for reasons that currently escape me, 2010 blizzard drinking. My earlier decisions in regards to the fate of the Krogan popped back up. There were legitimately resonant character beats and moments, especially with Garrus, everyone's favorite character. Then, much like my favorite whipping boy (not the book) Lost, everything fell to shit in the last act.

The reason for this being that ,like in the third Matrix film another favorite butt of nerd rage, something totally out of left field comes which crushes the narrative under its imperceptible weight. The main reason that this was so infuriating is, of course, that Mass Effect, like other Bioware titles, lives and dies by the illusion of choice and significance that the player's decisions are weighted by. Massive left turn aside though for 95% of the game these decisions do seem resonant. In the final act, all of these choices and galactic skulldrugery are all decanted into a differing space battle cinema and one of three choices. In the end, it does not matter that I chose to be a dick for three games because my friend Happy had the same options after three games of paragon play. While the ending cinematic was scant and the conclusion left me hollow, the game itself was still engaging. However, as the terminal game in the series it left me wanting on the most fundamental of levels as I had become invested in the characters over the last half decade. If anything though, the vitriolic excoriation of the developers by their ardent fanbase is just a testament to how wildly invested we all are in their creation. Also, Multiplayer was kinda meh. I mean I enjoyed it, but I didn't enjoy being forced into it to get the best ending. Also the maps were scant as far as number but that has been remedied. Also, people use your fucking medi-gel. Why are you hoarding it?

While this may seem like nothing more than base recriminations of shoddy work, it is not. The game actually made me feel bad about things I did (even though I just kept clicking the trigger for the renegade action/ I wish Tali was like, "Stop it, stop it; he's already dead.") which has not happened since KOTOR (when I made the wookie kill his Twi'lek companion at the end). It is not glorified rock, paper, scissors and fake sounding Asian accents like Jade Empire. The DLC while partially on disc was as enjoyable as any other Mass Effect DLC and worth my ten bucks. The fact that my levels carried over from 2 made Vicious Shepard a force of destruction from the start (if you go vanguard level biotic charge all the way first you get 100% shields with every charge. It perfectly compliments my reckless play style.) I mean look, Bioware made an amazing franchise which unfortunately falls the fuck off the wheels in the last half hour. And while the RPG elements get diminished with each iteration, they mainly got rid of the most annoying elements of it (scanning planets for hours/ broken inventory system/ THIS IS NOT A SPACE TANK SIM). I was truly engaged and excited for everything but the end which after years of disapointment from games (Yeah Zanarkand is a dream/ you just played 5 hours of blitzball for a character's final weapon, a character you don't use/ Everybody not named Zell or Laguna in FF VIII/ This is getting off topic/ Grand motherfucking Pulse/ Maybe I don't like Final fantasy anymore? That's a bummer. I enjoyed the half of XIII I played, to a point/ Wait I maxed the game clock on FF-X 2...Marijuana is a hell of a drug.)

Anyway you've already purchased this game if you were going to. If you haven't played the others first, you should you're really missing out if you haven't (mainly on blind rage/ fluid shooting/ fully realized characters/ FUCK KILL HATE!/ one of the most engaging IPs in the last decade regardless of medium.)

On the DLC - Yeah Day 1 DLC is kinda shitty, but you don't have to buy it. From the download size it seems that it wasn't completed when the game went gold (this assumption, like many things relating to video game discussion, is based on errant speculation). I felt that it was worth it. I mean I can understand why people are cheesed about spending an additional ten bucks at release. I also understand how used games are diminishing funds available for necessary and ever ballooning production costs which make things like this semi-essential. For the record, if you're that concerned about said ten dollars you have things you should be focusing on instead of Mass Effect DLC. On to the next one then.

SSX

It's a new SSX game that does not have skiing. I don't know if I'm as up on it as I was SSX 3. You either enjoy SSX, or you don't. That's all.

On the DLC - If you want to pay to not play the game so be it.

Street Fighter x Tekken

On the one hand, I thoroughly enjoy this game. I find the art style works well to encompass the feel of both franchises even if it is squarelf routed in SSF4AC-etc. I find that the combo system has found a nice place between the comparative rigidity of non MarCap Capcom fighters and the more intuitive timing based combo system of Tekken games. Due to this though, I don't know if it will be a hit on the competitive scene which is fine for people like myself who do not have the free time or inclination to get to that level. While some people may lament the inclusion of the gem system and its changing of game mechanics, I would say this: calm the fuck down.

If anything, crushing online play is probably the greatest detriment to the fighting game industry; more to the point though my argument is such: people don't like to know that they're shitty at video games. If anything, many of us use them as a brief respite for the overwhelmingly shitty way we lead our lives. More to the point, I will now recount my first online fighting experience. Years ago, I thought I was awesome at DOA. It started with heated bouts on the Dreamcast in college. It culminated with me getting a perfect on my old roommate while having a phone conversation and smoking a cigarette. I then took these purported, and illusory it seems skills onto DOA Online on the original Xbox where I was repeatedly juggled to death by the most cutthroat middle schoolers in Japan. This trend has continued. I constantly got metaphorically sodomized on MarCap 2 online. While I could actually beat people in MarCap 3 online (Ultimate or vanilla), I fear that my skills have regressed since that one weekend in March 2011 when I was on fire. The point being is that some people get rather put off by getting continually brutalized online, and fighting games are no longer at the acme of genre dominance as they were in my youth. I feel that making a popular and mechanically inclusive game is probably the best thing that could be done. (This is the internet; my opinions are lar. If you don't like it, *gay slur* *challenge fandom*)

However, this does not mean the game is without fault. Offline modes are a little bare bones, but it is a fighting game, to the point that it doesn't even have traditional standards like survival mode and the mission mode only clocks in at 20 challenges. I'm not entirely enamored of having to use set teams in Arcade mode, but I certainly understand the issues involving the generation of cinemas and such given the large cast. While this may seem like a cursory and shallow list of grievances, well, it is. The core game is fantastic...aside from one glaring and monumental issue. The severity of said issue is grand and a threat to the core beliefs that I as an American consumer hold dear. This is no mere hyperbole. I must shout it from the rooftops, "I am super pissed about the on disc DLC."

On the DLC - It is infinitely more difficult to defend a third of the content being locked on disc due to wanting added content for the handheld release on the PS Vita. It is not the ungodly expensive and occasionally nifty bonus costumes: it's all the characters. There is no feasible way to justify this. Certainly, Capcom have taken the tact that this virtual partition has saved the consumer the inevitable and always necessary turbo hyper or championship edition of the game. At the same time though, what? I can't believe I'm saying this, but I would actually prefer the dreaded online pass in this situation even though the main reason that I bought the game when I did was because it was used and slightly cheaper and saved ten whole dollars. I don't know it's maddening. What is even more maddening though is the fact that I know I will give Capcom their 20 American dollars to play as Bryan Fury and the rest. Nothing else really on the topic aside from it being a vicious cycle. Much like with everything else, the combined passion of a million enraged fanboys will amount to a wet fart, blind submission, and the rest.

Here we are again: Thoughts on Lost "Dead is Dead"

So, here we are again. All in all I would say that the episode was a success...except for one little thing. That little thing was, yes, the special effect with Ben and the whole "Lion King" flashback inside the smoke. It was, dare I say it, a Heroes level special effect, but it served it's purpose and I can look past it. And a lot of other business went down. Firstly Ceasar bit it. I guess he wasn't working for Widmore, but what's her name obviously is, the had a freaking code...la le lu li lo. And I think we're about to, at some point, see one of them finally get shot by Juliet...eventually. And the smoke monster showed up as Alex this time. Who is a dead person on the island. And it was trying to protect the island and...Christian Shepard is the smoke monster I can't harp on this enough. And, hey, Ben did the right thing for once by not offing Penny, and getting his ass beat by Desmond. Who I guess isn't going back to the island. Can't win them all. We got to see Ben steal Alex. Which was actually kind of easy really. And we got to see that Charles Widmore looked like with hair. And that he very well may be the bad guy. Although the fact that it took them so long to realize this seems a little suspect. What also seems suspect: Ben's total lack of knowledge that James Le Fluer was Sawyer. It's probably some sltered reality time travel shit that they do in comics, but...I don't want to explain this as it is both time consuming and any conclusion I come to will be unsatisfying. And I'm also more curious to see how the writers explain it...it will be more elegant then the explination I would give...hopefully. So what have we learned this week? Precious little really. Ben didn't kill Penny, which was a fifty fifty proposition anyway. It did show that Ben has a soft spot for the kinder, which would be obvious given his own less then pleasant childhood. Ben feels guilty over Alex's death...which he sould. That maybe he didn't plan for Locke's ressurection. But he kind of said he did in 316 so... He's a hard character to read what with the lying and the quality of acting. Oh, slight side note: the hair only adds so much to making Ben look younger. And Ethan looked kind of rough for being 27. He was born in 77 and died in 2004. It's small, but I'm just saying. As for next week. Looks to be a lot of Miles working with Marvin Candle (I forget his actual name and...you know who I'm talking aobut) Could we finally see that Miles is Marvin Candle's son? I'm going to say yes. And, maybe, just maybe, we'll see Farraday again...someday. He may be one of the dead people Miles talks with. I just don't know. And the future: Well, apparently the theme for this season finale is the fork in the outlet as last year was the frozen donkey wheel. So, I guess the time travel is going to come from the 70's and someone is probably going to short out the time travel pod in the Orchid. (You know people were freaked out by the polar bear at one point. How quaint.) Although Locke may set some wheels in motion in the present as well. I assume that he's going to have to do something with that wheel. Or at this point I don't even know really. It just poils down to that. They could discover just about anything on the island that would meet the purpose of time travel thus and such. So, yep that's about it. Good episode all told. They seem to be hitting the late season stride that happens just about every year. On a Matthew Fox side note: I saw Speed Racer the other day on Cinemax. I, honestly, don't understand why it was universally panned for one major reason: It's a movie based on the Speed Racer TV show. Have you ever watched a full episode of Speed Racer? It isn't exactly King Lear. It's actually kind of silly and nonsensical. And the movie was intentionally silly in the same vein so I thought it worked. That's about it really. And granted, they could have gone after the traditional Speed Racer viewers of old, but unless the movie came with free weed I think a lot of the older fans of the original show would wonder why they watched it in the first place. That is all.

Portraits in Douchebaggery: Reflections on Lost's "Whatever Happened, Happened"

Well, now we know what Jack came back to do. And that was not save kid Ben. Simply enough, that's really it. And it's pretty funny too to see that the two characters who were in the top three castaways for getting fucked over by Ben Linus were two of the three people that made him into the utterly entertaining douche bag that he is. Those two people being Sayid and Jack. Had Sayid never shot him he never would have needed to be saved. Had Jack saved him he would never have needed whatever psuedo mystical life saving soul sucking technique that the others use to stave off mortality. It's kind of funny really.

Also, I do have to admit that I am in fact loving Jack's fall from the messianic alpha male douche to the pill popping desperate douche that he has become this season.

Aside from that not a whole hell of a lot happened this week for my dollar. Hurley and Miles addressed the time continuity issues that we've all been asking since they went down this road to amusing results.

Kate showed just how bad she is at keeping secrets. And mothering. I mean it's kind of a mind fuck for a three year old for their mother to take off in the middle of the night and then some, I'm sure nice, Australian lady wakes up up telling you that she's your grandmother and that your mom will be back soon. It just seems that the right thing to do would be to simply tell Aaron what is going on...I mean he's going to know something's up.

Sayid is...somewhere. Doing something. He seems to be up shit creek really. Hope he doesn't get killed, but at this point....It's hard to shoot a child and be a sympathetic character on a TV show.

Charles and Ellie running the show for the others...Makes sense. I still wonder why Richard is always the number 2, but I'd like to think that the question will finally be answered next week, or not. Whatever.

Best moment on the show: definitely when Locke said welcome back to the land of the living at the end of the episode. Part of me wants to say that Ben was nt necessarily 100% certain that Locke would come back...given his facial expression. But given the 316 episode it did kind of seem like that Ben was well aware of the coming ressurection.

So, I think that really covers the main thrust of the episode. As for next week, Ben is going to be judged by...Christian Shepard (The Smoke Monster)...or maybe Jacob will actually show up but...at this point I think they may have built up the mysteriousness of Jacob a bit too much. I mean, if he's just some guy it's going to be a bit of a let down. Even if he's Alovar Hanso or one of the many mentioned, but never seen members of the Lost mythos it's going to be a letdown after all of this time. Even if it's a time displaced John Locke. Which is actually kind of likely. Granted I'm basing this only on my theory that A) It'd be pretty cool B) Who the fuck else could it be at this point? C) I got nothing else. There you go. Jacob is John Locke. Why not. I'm not putting a lot of faith in this, but you heard it here first...possibly.

Yep, that's about it really. Excited for next week's episode with the John Locke and the Ben Linus and Juliet shooting someone else on the other boat...maybe...probably. It'll be fun. Peace.