showing stuff off

IM POSTING!

Supreme Commander 9.99, Titan Quest 7.50, Stalker 5.00

Gamestop has Supreme Commander, The critically loved, large-scale, continent spanning RTS  that I couldn’t get into is on sale for 9.99 and maybe you’ll like it better than I did.

Also Titan Quest, aka Diablo 3 in greece, and its expansion is on sale for 7.50 if you can’t afford borderlands to fill your loot whoring fix.

http://www.gamestop.com/browse/ProductMerch.aspx?groupid=652&affid=3000&WT.mc_id=102709nl

 

Also S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a critically hailed semi-open world FPS with a few RPG mechanics that I never could get into either, is on sale over at steam for $5 (75% off)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/4500/

CRAZY DISCOUNTS: THQ Week Steam Sale, Day 4 Saints Row 2 75% off $7.50! Dawn of War games 50% off

CRAZY DISCOUNTS:  THQ Week Steam Sale, Day 4 Saints Row 2 75% off $7.50! Dawn of War games 50% off

All This week Steam has been having massive deals on THQ games, but you have to be quick because they only last 24 hours!   Today, Saints Row 2 is on sale!  Saints Row 2 offers a wacky alternative to Rockstar’s gritty and realistic Grand Theft Auto 4.  If you wish GTA 4 stuck with the insane, stupid fun tradition of GTA: San Andreas, then you will definitely be interested in this title.  Pick it up for only $7.50!

Yesterday’s Sale actually extends also all the way to next Monday, with all Dawn of War titles being 50% off.  This includes Dawn of War 2 which you can pick up for a mere 20$.

Check out the deals on the Steam home page, or right here: http://store.steampowered.com/publisher/THQ/

FREE STUFF: Host Master and the Conquest of Humor

Free Stuff:  Host Master and the Conquest of Humor

Legendary game developer Tim Schafer has a new game coming out called Brutal Legend and to celebrate its release I thought I would share this little adventure game that was made when Tim Schafer was a speaker at the Game Developer’s Choice Awards in 2008.  This flash game is a throwback to the kind of games that made Tim Schafer famous; a genre that once dominated the PC gaming market. Tim Schafer was the creative mind behind classic adventure games like the Secret of Monkey Island, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle and this tribute to the old ways is definitely worth toying around with if you’re looking to kill a few minutes.

The game has you play as Tim Schafer who procrastinated and forgot to write any jokes for the Game Developers Choice Awards.  You have to look around his dressing room for jokes to tell before going on stage.  Can you find all 22 jokes and unlock moonwalker mode?

After playing Host Master and the Conquest of Humor, you should definitely check out Tim Schafer’s latest game, Brutal Legend!  It stars Eddie Riggs, (voiced by and modeled after Jack Black) the greatest roadie to have ever lived, who is hurt in a stage accident and then transported by the fire beast Ormagoden to a vast heavy metal landscape inspired by the unrestrained, awesomeness of old heavy metal album covers, where humanity is enslaved by demons.  You have to raise an army of head bangers and metal heads to take back the land from demons and weird goth kids.  A constant flux of gaming genres and clever writing makes for an awesome ride through a love letter to heavy metal.  Brutal Legends comes out Rocktober 13^th (aka 2 days ago) and while 60$ is a bit much for my cheap blood, look out for a rental review in the coming weeks.

http://www.doublefine.com/games/host_master/

Mirror’s edge for 7$ on the pc.

I nearly threw up when I saw this.

http://www.amazon.com/Mirrors-Edge-Pc/dp/B00198ZHC8/ref=pd_sim_vg_26

Crackdown Review

Review: Crackdown (360)

Or

Super Cop Playground

Crackdown is an open-world game.  That’s it.  It’s not a living world.  It’s not a breathing world.  It’s not a world that feels larger than the player nor is it a small world.  But, Crackdown has a world, an open world, and you do play in it.  Playing Crackdown is a lot like visiting a large building that is still under construction in the middle of the night.  It’s eerily quiet and the air is still.  You can still see the scaffolding wrapping around its exterior and the intestinal piping and wiring line the hallways, exposed through gaps in its unfinished walls.  You could really do just about anything here because you feel alone, truly alone.  Isolated and away from the prying eyes of judgmental observers, you could run screaming down the bare, empty corridors.  You could curse up a storm, throw things against the walls, get on the roof and enjoy the view, or do something else completely inane like opening all the windows and closing all of the doors.

Crackdown feels incomplete.  Like our barren and isolated building, the world of Crackdown feels like the frame of a world under construction.  The structures and layout are there and dime-a-dozen carbon copy cars and “people” wander the streets aimlessly.  Interchangeable “bad guys” sit at street corners and seem more like yellow-shirted place holders than violent gang-bangers out causing havoc.  And then there is you, the only dynamic character, the only thing that breaths in this barren cityscape.  The world of Crackdown is quiet and without music, and the fact that most of the noise in the game will be generated by your character’s leaps and grunts, gunshots and detonations, and squealing tires and revving engines emphasizes the fact that you are the only living entity in Crackdown’s cardboard cut-out world.  As a result, Crackdown winds up feeling very much like a game.

In Crackdown, you play a super-soldier cop who evolves at an incredibly fast rate.  Your character is part of a crime-fighting organization known as the agency, which is headquartered on an island in the center of the city.  The agency is the last vestige of order in a city overrun by crime and it is your job to take the city back by any means necessary (read: kill everyone).

The city itself is made up of 4 islands with a designed order of how to tackle them, with each island being progressively harder than the next.  You can access all the islands from the beginning and you can go to the harder islands early on to try and get some more powerful weapons to help you in the beginning.  All of the islands can be accessed from the agency island, which serves as a central hub in the game world.  You can also pick up one of three special agency super vehicles here: a super car, a SUV, or a semi-truck.  Each one of these vehicles is designed to blast through traffic in a certain way.  The super car goes under cars, knocking everything in your path up in the air as the angled hood of the car slides underneath.  The SUV drives over everything like a monster-truck and the semi-truck barrels down the road like an unstoppable juggernaut, going through traffic and smashing everything to pieces.

The cars are fun but you’ll definitely be spending most of your time on foot.  Your super cop is able to leap to superhuman heights rather effortlessly which helps you climb tall buildings and traverse the cityscape by jumping from rooftop to rooftop.  This is encouraged by the game’s main driving force, the leveling system.  The leveling system makes this game and it is the only real reward you get when playing.  You have 5 different stats: strength, firearms, agility, driving, and explosives.  Firearms, explosives, and strength level up by killing people with guns, explosives, and punches to the face, but agility and driving are leveled up a little differently.  To increase your agility, there are 500 agility orbs scattered across the city, with the higher ones giving you more agility than the lower ones.  These are easy to see (they are bright green and float up and down,) and once you are on top of a roof, you’ll often see several agility orbs on the roof next door and think, “free exp. Why not?”  You quickly find yourself getting side tracked jumping from roof to roof grabbing orbs.  Driving is the most difficult stat to level up but it is the most rewarding.  In order to increase your driving ability, you have to rundown bad guys in your car (that sounds kind of nasty on paper actually.)  The benefits from increasing your abilities are what you would expect for the most part.  Increasing strength allows you to lift heavier objects and throw them farther and cause your melee to do more damage.  Explosives makes your grenades and rockets make bigger explosions (which doesn’t make much sense at all really, but when you see cars getting blasted sky high followed by a towering inferno, things making logical sense just doesn’t seem to matter as much anymore.)  Firearms lets you aim better and agility allows you to leap higher and further and run faster.  Increasing your driving skill however, actually has a physical effect on your agency super vehicles.  Not only will your handling be a thousand times better and you’ll be able to pull off more complex driving maneuvers, your agency super vehicle transforms into something stronger, faster, with bigger tires and more fire shooting out of the exhaust.

Your super cop starts the game feeling rather mundane, and not much tougher than your average cop, but by the end, when your cop is fully leveled up, you become almost invincible.  At the height of your powers you will be kicking garbage trucks 50 feet and sniping people from 100 yards away with a SAW machine gun.  Every grenade goes off like an A-bomb and the structures of the city look more like a set of stairs than towering sky scrapers.  Your agency super vehicles also get enhanced at maximum level.  The super car gets machineguns on the hood, the SUV gets a jump button, and the semi-truck gets a turbo boost.  The incredible amount of power your character gets makes the fact that this world was designed specifically for you stand out more and more.  You eventually realize, this isn’t a world but a playground.

You see, Crackdown relies on you making your own fun for yourself.  The missions and objectives in the game feel like they are there simply because that’s what people expect.  All of the missions are the same; you run into the enemy stronghold and shoot everyone till you find the leader, then you kill him too.  After this, you say, “well that was fun,” rinse, and then repeat.  There are a few side things to do, like driving races and rooftop races.  There are also several supply points on each island that you can “liberate.”  Once liberated, you can teleport between supply points and spawn there.  Also if you bring weapons that you gathered in the field to a supply point, you will have access to them every time you are at a supply point.  That’s really everything the game gives you to do though.  Most of the fun you will have with this game will be derived from getting your awesome powers and then messing around with them.  The game’s achievements reflect this notion with achievements like, keep a car in the air for 5 seconds using explosives, kill 5 enemies in a single jump, or harpoon 5 enemies to the same car (you need the DLC for this last one.)

The game also features a 2 player multiplayer mode.  You can only play system link or on Xbox live though.  I had to play the multiplayer in the demo because I didn’t know anyone else who owned the game and I didn’t feel like playing with a stranger.  We had a blast though.  One of the cool things about it is that it has a generalized multiplayer.  It is sort of co-op by default but if you kill your friend, it starts keeping track of the kills and so you can have a death match until you get sick of killing each other if you want.  Also, if you start one of the vehicle races or rooftop races, it will be a competitive race between the two of you.  It’s fun to play around with if you have a friend who also has the game.

In the end, this game is really more of a playground than a world and if you get a kick out of just messing around and doing stupid stuff you’ll have a lot of fun with this game.  I also found that it was pretty enjoyable to play while listening to a pod-cast or the radio or something, as it’s fun to play but it doesn’t require a high degree of focus to enjoy.  If you are looking for an adventure and an exciting experience this isn’t it.  But I found whacking a gang-banger upside the head with a dumpster and watching a bunch of colorful orbs fly out of him to be really satisfying for some reason.  I definitely feel like I got my 15$ worth.

Is it worth 15$? :  Yes   Rating: B

Why I Actually Enjoyed Transformers 2

A friend of mine asked why someone would actually like Transformers 2.  I had a few thoughts on the manner.

If you go into it expecting Schindler’s List, you’ll hate it.  But Transformers 2 is the definitive pop corn movie. It’s fun, fast, and pretty in a way that is a joy to watch if you can just bring yourself to not give a damn about the ridiculous nonsensical plot.   You can tell the writers were having fun with it, even acknowledging a plot hole at one point in the dialog.

“Wait! what about this thing that doesn’t make sense?”

“er… I don’t have time to explain, just forget about it and lets go!”

The movie is pure spectacle. Hot girls, fast cars, and giant robots shooting lasers everywhere and blowing shit up with corny jokes abound. If you know how to simply enjoy the ride you’ll have a great time. But if you believe that narrative is so key to a film that its absence utterly negates the great strides taken in camera work, audio, and visual splendor in a piece, then yes, you will hate this movie.

I for one though, sometimes simply wanna enjoy some big dumb fun.

FREE STUFF: Peggle WOW!

FREE STUFF: Peggle WOW!

Or

Dragon Ball P

Love Peggle but too cheap to buy it?  Well lucky for you, Popcap and Blizzard Entertainment have teamed up to provide this free promo for their Peggle and World of Warcraft games.  Just as there was an Orange Box themed version of Peggle released with the Orange Box,  Popcap has now released a World of Warcraft themed version of Peggle.

For those poor souls who have never heard of Peggle,  Peggle is one of the most fun and addicting puzzle games available.  In the game, you are presented with a field of multi-colored pegs placed in various patterns with obstacles to get in the way.  You shoot down balls from the top of the screen and try to destroy all the orange pegs on the screen by bouncing the balls off various things.  There are also green pegs which allow you to use a special ability which differs from character to character.  If you manage to get rid of all the orange pegs before you run out of balls, you win.  It’s simple, quick, and it’ll suck you in.

The game has several game types.  Adventure mode has you play through a series of stages which are connected by a “plot;” any level you beat in adventure mode is unlocked for the other game types.  You can also play competitively against a friend or the computer to see who can score the most points.  The game also offers a challenge version of each stage with different (and typically more difficult) victory conditions.

Peggle is a fantastic casual experience that you have to try at least once and this World of Warcraft promo is the perfect opportunity to do just that.  You can get it here: http://www5.popcap.com/promos/pegglewow/

Good Morning America!

Good Morning America!

It’s a beautiful day on our nation’s birthday and I got a not-so special not-so holdiday themed blog post for ya.  We got a decent amount of content up on the blog this week and I hope ya’ll have been enjoying it! You might of noticed I threw ya a curve ball and put up a review of Battlefield: Bad Company instead of the promised crackdown review and you have my sincerest sympathy!  Unfortunately (but not too unfortunately!) Battlefield: Bad Company was the first game I’ve reviewed that I decided wasn’t worth the money.  You can rest assured that I’m not merely throwing out a frivilous opinion with these reviews because I put my real, limited,  hard-earned money on the line and if I say a game is worth the money, thats some bucks out of my own pocket going into it.

Since Battlefield: Bad Company wasn’t worth the money, I only had 7 days to evaluate and review it before I had to take it back in time for a refund.  Rest assured though,  the Crackdown review will be laying down the Smackdown come this thursday.

We also had our first INDIE SPOTLIGHT, a little showcase of a little known developer who deserves some BIG praise.  The gist of it was, Trine is beautiful.  Speaking of which, it just released for the PC a few days ago!  You might wanna hold out for the console versions to be released however, cause it will be half the price on the PS3 and 360!

Also a first was the first of few philosophical ramblings that may make it on here.  If you see any problems with the argument presented, please let me know.  The more I’ve thought about the paper, the more it bothers me.

Now, I’ll bid you adeau with a glimpse of whats to come my home skillets!

First up, sprouting tomorrow will be our first ever Community Questionairre!:

“Community Questionairre: Surviving the Battlefield”!

After playing battlefield Bad Company, I had a little discussion with the game’s community and have compiled a large list of tips, tricks, and general principles of how to not get your arse blown off, courtesy of the very friendly Bad Company community.  If you dare trek where I have turned away, then you won’t wanna miss these!  A fantastic introduction of core concepts!

Also coming not too long after will be a quick blurb, 69 Games that make the PS2 worth owning!  If you’re bored and poor or perhaps just behind on the times and looking for something to breathe some fresh life into your dusty old PS2, you might wanna take a look at the list for some ideas.

This week I picked up Final Fantasy 12 for a mere 12$! I’ll be playing it and prepping it for review this week, expect the actual review a week after the crackdown review!   It’s been… odd.

Finally, I been itching for a fighting game, so I may rent BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger, the hit new fighting game that is a spiritual sequel to the fantastic Guilty Gear games.  If it’s anything like Street Fighter 4, I’ll be playing the unholy hell out of it and I’ll probally be able to have a review up for you before the Final Fantasy one.

Possible articles that may hit the fan:

A Defense of Bullying, Stealing, Murdering, and Eavesdropping

Or why Assassin’s Creed’s Mission Structure is Important.

and

Why Online PC Games are Better than Online Console Games

or

It’s All About Community, Son!

Enjoy the blurbs and drop some knowledge on me in this week’s poll!

Don’t be shy now folks, be heard!

Philosophy Nonsense: Do People Have a Moral Obligation to Be Martyrs?

Do People Have a Moral Obligation to Be Martyrs?

or

You Don’t Joke About the Holocaust

I was milling about with some friends recently and we were discussing hypotheticals.  I brought up a classic situation and asked my friends what they would do and I heard an interesting answer that I hadn’t heard before.  I’m sure this goes by many forms but the one I offered went like this:

Suppose you are trapped in an elevator with 5 other people (so there are 6 including yourself.)  There is only enough oxygen for 5 people and you have a gun. If you kill one person then everyone else will live and escape.  What do you do?

Someone said he would shoot himself.  I hadn’t heard this before and it actually caught me off guard.  Certainly it was a very noble thing to do but was it necessarily the right thing to do? Or in other words, would the man with the gun have a moral obligation to shoot himself?  Should he be condemned for not doing so?

I thought about this for a bit and I believe that you do not have any moral obligation to shoot yourself, or in other words, be a martyr so that others may live.  I also believe that you would be justified in killing another person in the elevator to save the rest of you.  I know it’s bad form to just lump these two different assertions together but I believe my reasoning may apply to both.

I base my argument on the intuitive assumption that it is ok to kill in self-defense.  If a man were to come at you with an axe you would be morally justified in killing him to save yourself.  I believe this scenario parallels the hypothetical in question.  Although the other individuals in the elevator are not aggressors, I believe they can be classified as what philosophers call innocent threats.

A situation that demonstrates the idea of the innocent threat is that of Jews fleeing Germany during the holocaust.  Imagine that you and your family are attempting to escape Germany during the holocaust.  During your escape you have to evade patrols of German soldiers.  Unfortunately, you have a baby with you that starts crying while you are trying to bypass one of these patrols.  If the soldiers hear the baby, you and your family will be found and most likely killed.  The baby in this case is seen as an innocent threat.  As unfortunate and horrible a situation as this is, one could harm the baby as a form of self-defense.

The other individuals in the elevator are akin to the baby.  Although they are not aggressors themselves, their presence will result in your own death.  I believe that killing one of these people could be morally justified as self-defense and thus not morally reprehensible. In summary, the argument is as follows:

Premise:

(1)It is ok to kill something that threatens your own life.

(2)Innocent threats threaten your own life.

(3)One of the individuals is an innocent threat.

Conclusion:

Therefore, it is ok to kill one of the individuals.

Now this question gets interesting when you expand the situation.  Suppose there was only enough oxygen for 4 people and you had to kill 2 of the individuals to save the rest.  You would still be justified on utilitarian grounds, that you kill 2 to save 4.  Suppose there was only enough oxygen for 1 person and you had to kill all 5.  Only one person gets to live anyways, why should any of the others have any more reason to live than you?  Now let’s get really interesting and suppose that for some strange reason (maybe you are just a really big guy or something) there is only enough oxygen for either you, or the 5 of them.  Either, you kill all of the other people in the elevator, or you die and the 5 of them live.

I believe at the heart of this question is how far does the principle of self-defense go? And, is it ok to value yourself more than other human beings?  I believe that the principle of self-defense does suggest at least to a degree that it is ok to value yourself more than other human beings.  In the situation where a man is coming at you with an ax, when you decide to kill that man, you are making a value judgment.  You are deciding that your own life is worth more than the ax murderer’s.  Otherwise, if you believed the ax murder’s life was worth more than your own, you would choose to let yourself die in his stead (since it’s a life or death, you or me situation.)  If you thought the ax murderer’s life was equal to your own, there would be no need for a principle of self-defense, after all, why bother defending yourself if it doesn’t matter who dies?  Since it is ok to accept the principle of self-defense, I believe it is ok to value yourself more than another human being.  This idea is also reflected in the fact that we are not morally reprehensible for not giving up luxuries, such as T.V., computers, or even electricity and toilet paper, so that we may donate the money spent to aid the poor in third world countries (despite what somebody would have you believe.)

So the question is, how much more valuable is one’s own self than other human beings?  I believe from the atheist point of view, or the atheist-leaning-agnostic point of view, that one’s self could be seen as unmatchable in value by any number of human lives.  Admittedly, this is frightening to suggest.  The reason for this though, is that to the atheist, the self is the end all and be all.  Death is akin to the apocalypse, the end of all things, and the complete and utter negation of existence.  Essentially, life is not something an atheist can afford to lose.  I believe the situation is different for those of faith however.  By the religious, death can merely be seen as a time of judgment.  Whether your soul is going to heaven, hell or purgatory (or maybe even being reincarnated,) death is something one can endure.  The soul goes on, perhaps even to greener pastures.  It is for this reason, that I believe the situation is different in the case of the faithful.  Depending on one’s own beliefs, one’s own life may not be worth more than another, or perhaps martyrdom would become a much more viable option.  At the moment, the justifiability of a faithful individual’s actions in this situation is a bit beyond my scope of reasoning.  However, I am lead to believe by this argument that the destruction of almost any number of lives in an act of self-preservation by an atheist is justified.

Now with this assertion, I do not mean that it is ok for an atheist to take advantage of others for material gain or to benefit himself in all manners.  Just because the self is unmatchable in value for an atheist, does not mean it is ok for an atheist to steal or murder or torture for his own amusement.  When the stakes do not involve the life of the atheist, the scope of the decision decreases greatly.  An atheist can afford to go hungry for a week; an atheist can afford not to mug someone in a back alley.  The difference in value between a life of poverty and a life of luxury is infinitely smaller than the difference in value between a life of poverty and no life at all.

I believe this argument may have significant consequences in that it may justify the actions of a soldier who kills innocents under the orders of a superior officer (where the alternative is being court marshaled, followed by death.)  I believe it may also help contribute to the justification of much larger scale actions, such as the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan in WW2 (although there has been a lot of discussion on this matter and the depth and breadth of the discussion is far beyond me to make a proper judgment on it.)  I am sure it may apply to other things as well.

I would really appreciate some feedback on this argument (perhaps some counter-arguments) because,  frankly,  I’m not sure I like the conclusion very much.  Ultimately though, I am infinitely thankful that these situations are EXTREMLY rare and will most likely never occur in one’s life.  I consider this kind of hypothetical to be the stuff of nightmares and very much hope that it never actually occurs.