I've been talking a lot about how I don't think the new Kinder Egg designers understand what "fun" is. I don't have the presumption that any of them will ever read this, but I got to thinking about what actually makes a thing fun or not. Certainly, 'fun' is largely a matter of personal taste, but I do think there are a few points that most people could agree on.
Gonna take a moment to sort of freewrite/brainstorm here.
I like Zelda-style games. I prefer the top-down ones like Link to the Past, Link's Awakening (best of franchise imo), and the more recent DS releases to the 3d ones like Twilight Princess and Ocarina, but those are good too. I quite liked Darksiders, though I was pretty tired of the God of War-style combat by the end. I guess that's unavoidable. You shoot a lot of beams at octoroks in Link to the Past.
Digression: "Darksiders" was a terrible choice of name. It takes me like a minute to remember it every time I want to refer to that game. What's the justification for calling it that? The word is never used during the game; nobody is referred to as being a "darksider". What does it even mean? Nothing, as far as I can tell.
"Time to name this game we're making. What do we call it?"
"Well uh, it's dark, you know, in tone? A bit grimdark. We could call it Dark Something."
"Dark Pact, Dark Warrior, Dark Seals, Dark Storm, Dark Siders..."
"I'm bored. Let's just use whatever the last one you wrote down was and go to the bar."
It's a great game, though. Underappreciated. People ragged on it for basically being a grimdark godpocalyptic* Zelda clone. Hellooooo? Zelda games are awesome, grimdark stuff is awesome, angels vs. demons is awesome, what the hell are you complaining about? What the hell is wrong with you?
Thing to avoid:
1) Getting five wisdom teeth and a sinus-cavity cyst removed all at the same time.
2) Following this up with a food/medication combo that results in the worst heartburn ever and recurring fits of hiccupping that prevent sleep in greater than 20-minute increments that night, all night.
3) Following this up with a food/medication combo that results in the next day being spent in a constant chorus of the most absurd gut-blasting sound effects ever. Seriously It was ridiculous.
I think I've narrowed 2) down to the spicy thai soup, and 3) to the ice cream. I wasn't previously lactose-intolerant, though, and the notion that I can no longer eat a big-ass bowl of ice cream without becoming a symphony of intestinal detonation is just about the saddest thing ever, so hopefully it's actually ice cream + antibiotics or something like that.
I am still on the Percocet, because my jaw is still sore, so I'm not gonna worry much about editing this for rambling or spelling.
Didn't play much Pokémon Black; decided I should finish Radiant Historia instead. I did play Pokémon as far as beating the first gym, though, and my mini-review is:
I am now 36 hours into Radiant Historia, and have uncovered 170 out of 236 of the little time-map nodes. One thing I am starting to have a problem with is the increasing difficulty of finding which node you need to be in in order to do a side-task. The timelines are getting confusing, and the map doesn't give enough information on where a given node will put you, under what circumstances.
Also -- and this is vital if you intend to play this game -- I cannot believe that they don't actually say 'Push START to skip cutscenes' anywhere. If I hadn't found that, I would've given this game up as unplayable long ago. You can hold down X to fast-forward through dialogue, they tell you that, but you still end up basically watching the scene, and you will just go mad if you try to play that way. There's a node I go back to over and over because it's early-game access to a convenient inn; there's like three long cutscenes when you warp there. Every time you warp there, you have to watch them again, if you don't know to push START. Jeez.
Percocets are nice, but they make me scratch at my arms like a junkie.
Played a trial-run game of Mansions of Madness last night, to see if I knew the rules, could explain them to someone else, and then actually play a game while hopped up on prescription narcotics. It went okay, but it was a good thing we did a trial run, because I learned something very important: MoM is not like Betrayal at House on the Hill, in which the "Investigators" and the "Traitor" know different things and can be surprised by things that they don't know. It's more like D&D, where the Keeper knows everything and plays according to that complete knowledge. See there's these Clue cards which the investigators are hunting, and I was under the assumption that a) they were entirely flavor text, with no rules or game event activations on them and b) that it would be more fun, as the Keeper, to not know what was on them until they were discovered.
It turns out that some of those cards have important things to know on them. "Wait... I think I just lost. Was that madman you killed the named one? Was that Walter? I don't see anything anywhere that says how many madmen there are and which ones have names?" And then I had to find and read all the little cards I should have read when setting up. But hey that's why you do a trial run.
Actually, I don't think I've mentioned this game here previously. It's a boardgame. It seems pretty fun. It's certainly very evocative of HP Lovecraft. There's a trailer for it here somewhere... here you go.
I am eager to play a game of it some time, without my brain wrapped in cotton-wool. I'll do a for-real review of it when we do.
So ummm yeah. That was oretty much my entire weekend: Radiant Historia, percocets, and farting. More-or-less normal service will now resume, though it's still going to be a little incoherent for a while.
Welcome to the shiny new Minimum Safe Distance, powered by Posterous.
I've been increasingly annoyed with Tumblr -- it is constantly going down, the html editing tools just don't fucking work, and it's been like that for ages with no sign of improvement. Oh but hey, they have a funny new picture for their "Our Server Is Down" page! Look, it has cute little monsters, and they're -- ha! ha! ha! -- they're eating the servers!
FUCK. YOU.
See that? That was the last straw. There it went!
I am liking this shiny new Posterous thing, though. It converted the whole Tumblr site in minutes, seems to have set everything up beautifully, I like the new visual theme a lot, and the editing and posting tools seem way slick. Plus it has integrated comments instead of having to deal with whateverthefuck I had to use on the Tumblr. Which means that comments on all the old posts are lost, but... oh well. We'll make some new comments, right gang?
I might, if I get really bored industrious, even go back and add tags for all the old posts. It seems pretty simple! Remember the "tags under construction" in the sidebar in Tumblr? That was because it required some crazy bullshit I don't even remember or care to go look up.
Anyway: the blog is dead! Long live the blog!
