Art: Part 2 and Black Ops Tarot

Time for more Black Ops emblem fun.  First up is an idea that came to me one night lying in bed trying to sleep, as the best ideas often do:

The P0wn Shop

(Open for business)

I was pleased to no end when I got that one to work!  I also had the desire to make a more aggressive emblem that would put forth the enormity of my bad-assedness.  But I wanted to do something a little more high-brow.  Then I thought of this:

Death

Look familiar?  It's my interpretation of the Death card from the classic tarot arcana. "What the hell is that"? you might ask.  You can read about it here.  Each tarot deck has a little different image for each card but all of them are variations on the same theme.  Basically this depicts death trampling a king, and shows that death comes for us all.  Now that I've made this I kind of want to do one for each major arcana.  I'm up to level 29 first prestige so I've got plenty of cash for a project like that.

Why Brink Sucks

1. Implementation of menus:

They really tried to reinvent the wheel here.  My biggest problem is that it's too hard to figure out what's going on.  In campaign mode if you are at the mission select screen you can see little dots next to each mission.  If they are filled in it means you completed the mission.  That's great but there is nothing to tell you what difficulty they have been completed on, which is important since they put an achievement in the game where you have to beat every level on hard or in adversarial.  The challenge menu doesn't even tell you which challenges you have beaten.

2. Speaking of challenges:

In order to unlock any weapon or weapon related attachment you have to complete challenges.  Each challenge has three difficulty levels.  Levels one and two unlock weapons and attachments while level three will unlock the privilege of being on the leaderboard.  Wow, I get to be on another leaderboard where I can be 349745th?  Sweet.  That's a great incentive to sit through this frustration.  The challenges are punishingly hard.  You really have to level up your guy a lot before you can do well in them.  That's not the stupid part though.  Brink is a game designed to be multiplayer co-op.  The challenges can be played with friends and are much easier if you do so.  But you don't unlock anything unless you play solo!  What the hell.

3. Multiplayer implementation:

Playing the game with other people is actually fun.  But getting the game set up right can be tricky.

Here is how the rest of the world does it:  Start a multilayer lobby, invite your friends, pick a map/game mode, the game then matches you with other parties and individuals, play the game.

Here is how Brink does it:  Pick a map/game mode,  load into a match, bring up the lobby menu, hit the "invite party" button, realize that you are already in a full game and your friends can't get in, back out to the main menu and try again.

4: Bots.  Oh sweet Jesus the stupid, stupid bots:

This isn't a problem with just Brink.  A lot of team based multiplayer games have this problem.  You need bots to fill in when you don't have other people.  Bot's are great at doing exactly what they are programed to do, which never includes strategy or thinking intuitively.  This is a problem in a "thinking man's FPS" as Brink likes to style itself.  FYI bots, if I'm sprinting towards an objective to get there before the enemy does and you are supposed to be escorting me, it might be a good idea if you sprinted too!  And I don't know, maybe get BETWEEN me and the enemy while I hack the door or whatever, you know, so I don't get shot?

Brink isn't a bad game necessarily but it's designers made some decisions that were questionable at best.  I do enjoy and applaud the character creation.  It's deep an well executed.  I was running into a bug though were my friends an I were seeing default models instead of our own for about half the match.  Even so, well done on the characters.

Art

I've been meaning to post some Black Ops emblems for a while now.  Here are two that I made.

I was rocking this one for a long time.  I didn't set out to make it, it just kind of sprang fully formed onto the screen.

Donky Kong

This is the one I'm using now.

DJ Barebones

That one also just kind of came together out of no where.  I have some great ideas for future emblems.  If and when they come to fruition I will post them here.

Oh I Almost Forgot...

...I am now employed in the game industry.  The next step on my journey to total awesomeness has been taken.

I think I'm now at TOTA.  Only 12 more steps remain.

Saw That Comming

I beat Castlevania: Lords of Shadow today.  The ending was fairly epic.  As I mentioned before the story is very well written and has plenty of twists to it.  I knew there was supposed to be a big plot twist at the end because of a Game Informer article about the top ten moments in 2010.  Number one on the list was an entry for LoS subtitled "Didn't see that coming".  I immediately screamed and shut the magazine.  I HATE spoilers or even hints about spoilers, or even knowing that there is something to spoil.  I'm rarely surprised by movies/games/etc. and I like it when I get the chance to be.  I had a feeling I knew what it was but I wasn't certain.  About half way through the game I started to get a feeling about where certain things were headed.  But then I accidentally found out who the last boss was which would have been a great surprise!  I thought maybe that was what they were talking about.  Turns out there are two big ending surprises, and the final boss was not the big one!  It also turns out I was right.  I love being right.

Vampire Killer

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is turning out to be a really good game.  I have discovered that the key to its enjoyment is to play on the lowest difficulty.  I was originally playing on "warrior" but I was pulling my hair out with frustration, so I dropped  down to "squire".  I know, kind of embarrassing to be a mere squire but that's how it is.  The difference as far as I can tell is how much damage enemies do to you and (most importantly) how much life you restart with after a death.  On warrior if you restart at a checkpoint you have as much life as you had when you got there.  The problem is that I was being pushed into boss fights with 30% health and dieing almost instantly, over and over.  Add in the fact that I had to look at a goddamn load screen and have to pause and select "skip cut-scene" every time and a controller throwing event was imminent.

Lords of Shadow handles health in such a way that the better you do the more health you can recover.  Let me see if I can explain.  Initially, the only way to heal is to find a health shrine and absorb all of its glowy green goodness.  These are few and far between however so in the beginning of the game you're really playing to survive between these shrines.  This wasn't too much trouble though because they place them before major encounters.  Then you get light magic which you can use to heal yourself but it's not as simple as just casting "heal".  Here is were it gets complicated.  For most of the game you have two gauges, one for light magic and one for dark magic.  These magics let you perform certain moves and abilities buy activating the magic and then performing the move.  You have a limited amount of magic and you have to replenish your magic by absorbing neutral energy orbs. These orbs are dropped by enemies and can then be sucked up into either magic gauge with the left and right stick buttons.  The problem is that you can't just defeat the enemies, you have to have a high focus.  Focus is yet another gauge that fills up the more you hit enemies without getting hit yourself.  It fills faster if you use a variety of combos.  The higher the focus the more orbs the enemies drop.  If you want to heal you have active your light magic and then hit an enemy.  Some of the damage you do will be converted into health.

See the problem yet?  If you want to heal yourself, you have to hit enemies without getting hit yourself long enough to make them drop orbs, stop to absorb the orbs (which makes you vulnerable for a second), then active light magic and hit some more enemies to actually get the health.  And no, enemies hit while light magic is active will not drop more orbs.  So you can see where entering a boss fight with low health and no light magic would be an issue.

Anyway, on "squire" the game feels right and balanced.  All that bullshit I just explained above flows more naturally and is actually kind of fun.  A lot of people point out (our maybe even complain) that this is a God of War rip off.  I can see why people would say that, both games are overhead action games involving a chain weapon.  But that's like saying Sonic the Hedgehog is a Super Mario Bros. ripoff because you run from left to right and jump on enemies' heads.  God of War doesn't own the bloody action game genre.  I would also point out that Castlevania has been around since 1986 and has always involved a whip.  So who's copying who?  Another comparison people make is Shadow of the Colossus.  This is because of the Titan bosses that you have to climb up to defeat.  I think it's also an apt comparison because both games are beautiful!  Really both GoW and Shadow are great games so who cares if LoS is similar?  That to me it's a good thing.

I do want to mention the story before I wrap this up.  Much like Black Ops I didn't expect the story to be as good as it is, but finding out what happens next has become a real motivation for me to keep playing.  Just like Black Ops I feel like I know how it's going to end, but at the same time I'm not sure.  It seems like anything can happen.  Lost did that very well, baiting you with little bits of subtle foreshadowing that you knew were somehow important but it wasn't clear how.  I watched that show rabidly.  I wanted to find out if my theories were correct.  We've reached a point where more and more video games are able to deliver that same kind of storytelling.  Having read comments from others I know I'm in for some surprises with Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.  I can't wait to see what they are.

February Made Me Shiver

Almost a month since the last post.  School has been kicking my ass.  I really bit off more than I could chew with this semester and I've already had to withdraw from one class.  So that's more of my money that Wake Tech gets for nothing.

Last month just kinda sucked.  My new (to me) car broke a week after I got it and it's been in the shop since, getting one transmission part or another replaced, my mechanic's shoulders hung in a perpetual shrug.  Then my computer got fried.  Like the mother won't boot to BIOS fried.  On the up side I bought this to replace it:



Samsung RC512.  I spent waaay more than I wanted to but my desire to finally have a machine that could handle everything I needed outweighed my usual obsessive thriftiness.

I'm sure there was some other January bullshit but I'm too tired to remember any of it right now which I suppose is good.  The TV and headphones (see last post) are awesome.  I had heard some recommendations against the wireless version of the X11s but I'm kind of wishing I had gotten them.  The cord is really long which is awesome but it gets in the way sometimes and I end up bumping the volume knobs accidentally.  Also I have to take them off to go make a sandwich or take a bathroom break.  That's right, I used to party chat in the bathroom.  It happened and I'm not sorry.

So despite all the work I have to do I've made plenty of time for my habit.  Lords of Shadow is an impressive game but it's god-awful hard.  I have yet to turn that game off in a fashion that didn't involve screaming.  The free download of Symphony of the Night was way more fun.  I'm still trying to beat the game as Richter.  Difficult but not to the point where I want to stop playing.

The last couple of days I put my borrowed copy of ES4: Oblivion in and quickly sacrificed some hours of my life to its beautiful altar.  It really is a fantastic game!  I never want to turn it off, to the detriment of sleep (always badly needed at this point) and food.  I don't even know who's game it is.  One of my wife's co-workers lent it to her months ago thinking she might play it (yeah right) and I tried it out.  Thinking they would want it back I didn't let myself get too into it but it's been a while and they never asked for it back so... YOINK!  Maybe It's like the monkey's paw, and they were just trying to get rid of it on some other doomed soul with a wish in their heart.  A wish for awesome video games.