From the Brow of Zeus

To promote the new Ghostbusters game, they're giving away free Ghostbusters sound effects .wav files. There's a proton pack blast, a PKE meter, and two Marshmallow Man roars. Reminds me of 90s-era IRC, when everyone played their favorite/sound clips. I even had a Babylon 5 computer voice rigged up to my FTP program: "Transfer of data complete."

Oh man, I am such a nerd.

There's a new Level Up - Video Game RPG Podcast online. This time it's about a subject dear to me: RPG Sidekicks. Yes, we cover all the delightful weirdos that have nothing better to do than find a brave young knight and his lady fair and then glom onto them for the rest of the game.

Episode 006: RPG Sidekicks
Warning: this is a we-hate-Yuffie zone. Yuffie fans, prepare your tear drop anime emoticons. ;_;

Level Up - The Weekly Video Game RPG Podcast has been updated. We discuss our favorite MMORPG moments (Googleshng loses his pants, while I was lured into the woods by a creepy foreigner), recommend MMORPGs for beginners, and talk about the games we would, in no way, recommend for anyone other than ironic consumers and digital masochists. (Not that they aren't all in Second Life, anyway.) Plus, Silkenray totally spoils Forumwarz, and it's all good. All that and more more more, in! Episode 004 – MMORPGs Part 2.

eMusic trials are fun. 50 mp3s, plus an audiobook? I'm there, dude.

The dirty trick is to hand pick singles or find albums with really low track counts. I love They Might Be Giants, but I'm not going to blow half my downloads on a single 23 song album.

So, there's this album called The Bees Made Honey in the Lion's Skull. I previewed a track and immediately liked what I heard. Slow, heavy, southwestern rock, with no lyrics.

Let me put it this way: When you walk into a room, and everyone turns to see who's standing in the doorway, this is the kind of music you want playing.

Just out of curiosity, I checked out Amazon's reader reviews. Skimming down, the lowest review (3/5) I could find caught my eye:

"Sounds like a score to a post-apocalyptic western"

It just goes to show that however ambivalent or negative a review may be, it can still -- sometimes accidentally -- help people decide to buy the product. That "average" review sold me on it more than the five-star gushers. Any time I play this album for my friends, I'm introducing it as "post-apocolyptic western music."

Hey, me and Googleshng started a video game RPG podcast when I wasn't even looking. In all the excitement, guess I forgot to mention it here.

Well, here I am, mentioning it:

Level Up - The Video Game RPG Podcast

Episode 001 is about the elements essential to RPGs. Any name for the topic is open to misinterpretation, from "Defining RPGs" (which could be taken as, yo dawg, we're DEFINING this shizzit) to "What is an RPG?" (which sounds like a question posted in alt.fan.final.fantasy around the launch of FF7), but we went with the latter.

And released just today, Episode 002 - PC vs. Console. It's not as controversial as some would like: There's no bareknuckle boxing, accusations of payola or insulting the other's ancestors. But I think, over all, we pretty much get it covered.

P.S. And yes, it is hard to get "Roleplaying game" and "Video game" in the title without sounding all redundant, but "Video Roleplaying Game" just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Dane Cook has been accused of ripping off jokes from fellow stand-up comedian Lewis CK (who you may remember from the Everything is Amazing, Nobody is Happy rant on Conan O'Brien).

Mr. Cook went so far as to tell my favorite Louis CK joke, the one about seeing a guy on a bike who's about to get into an accident and not having enough time to yell out a proper warning. (More details can be found in my upcoming docu-drama, The Cook, The Thief, His Jokes, Her Laughter.)

Well, I just caught Louis CK's latest act, and it's genius. The entire thing is about what a big pathetic out of shape slob he is. Every joke is about his wretched body, inability to pass up a cinnamon roll, weighing as much as two people, etc.

When I pointed out that he was coming up with jokes Dane Cook couldn't possibly steal, my brother's face lit up and he said, "It's like Dane Cook is playing the, 'I'm going to copy you' game, and Lewis CK is saying, 'I'm an idiot! I'm dumb!'"

Poor Trent Reznor. Seems like just yesterday he was nailing monkeys to crucifixes. Now his cataracts are so thick he's resorting to things like Twitter and random Grand Theft Auto accusations.

Bands (including Nirvana) tripped over themselves editing out words, changing album art, etc to meet Wal-Mart's standards of decency - because Wal-Mart sells a lot of records. NIN refused, and you'll notice a pretty empty NIN section at any Wal-Mart. My reasoning was this: I can understand if you want the moral posturing of not having any "indecent" material for sale - but you could literally turn around 180 degrees from where the NIN record would be and purchase the film "Scarface" completely uncensored, or buy a copy of Grand Theft Auto where you can be rewarded for beating up prostitutes.

Yes, and if you play NIN backwards, you hear the devil.

Look, I'm not saying there's no monetary gain for beating up prostitutes in GTA, but just like in 1950s crime movies, no bad deed goes unpunished. If you get caught robbing a hooker of her hard earned GP, every cop in the area will be after you. It's not like some 360 achievement or PS3 trophy is unlocked.

In real life, if you beat up a prostitute, she might have some money on her. Is this a reward? God's way of telling you to kill prostitutes? Or is it just a fact of life, sort of like vengeful pimps and assault and robbery charges?

Crime in GTA has its risks and its rewards, and going around saying that GTA rewards you for beating up prostitutes is about as accurate as chanting, "Crime doesn't pay" or "Winners don't use drugs."

With Herculean effort, I put the finishing touches on a story that took way too long to edit. I feel like that guy at the end of "The Raft", who swam to shore, looked back at the lake monster and screamed, "I beat you! I beat you!"

Granted, that was right before the flesh eating blob jumped out of the water and swallowed him whole. But for a second there, he was pretty dang happy.

Right now I'm editing a short story I originally wrote back in 2003. It's about a man who wakes up to a world that is somehow horribly changed. His girlfriend looks the same, and children still play in the streets -- albeit not quite as nicely as before. But now there's nothing reassuring about their smiles, and everyone around him has gone inexplicably hollow.

It's a fun story, short and scary, just the way Rita Perlman likes 'em.

"This is so bad it's almost good. "
"This is so bad it's gone past good and back to bad again."
- Ghost World.

As a confessed ironic consumer, I buy things that no one in their right mind would actually want. Today I picked up something that will no doubt send your heart fluttering, provided you're a teenage girl from 1987.

Kirk Cameron: Dream Guy. Tagline? "The Real Story of America's #1 Heartthrob!"

The look of surprise, then horror, and finally sorrow on people's faces when I show them the book is totally worth it.

I'll be back later with KIRK'S VITAL STATISTICS and, if you're nice, KIRK TRIVIA. But if you want KIRK'S WORDS OF WISDOM, you'll have to buy the damn book yourself.

Labels: misc

Rock, Paper Shotgun has a fun rant about locked doors in video games:

Locked door, I hate you.

I hate the way you are resistant to knives, to guns, to sledgehammers, to rocket-propelled grenades, to weapons that rewrite the very laws of physics, to dark unearthly magic, to punches that can knock a man’s head clean off.

...

I hate the way I’m expected to give up trying to open you when I see the words “this door has been locked from the other side” or “this door opens elsewhere”, as though they’re a command from God himself.

...

I hate the way you so often lead to nowhere, how you are nothing more than decoration for a wall.

Labels: videogames