Video game reviews #2 - Life is strange (part 1 - Chapter 1)

No it isn't.

Life is strange is a visual novel (IN 3-D!) that sold a huge number of digital copies (limited edition digital copies to boot!) for some reason. As the first chapter was free and I mainly play video games for ShiTEAM achievements now (as I'm done with all the endless-type online games I used to play in the last 8 or so years for various reasons), and I was searching for a point & click adventure anyway I picked it up (as much as you can pick up a download - which is not at all because it doesn't physically exist!).

So in LiS you run around (or rather walk at a snail's pace - the couch potato main character clearly never exercises.) a small town campus. The main character, Maxine (wtf is that name?!), is studying photography MAYBE - I know nothing of the American university system - well, at least that is the only class she ever visits (1 out of 1 in the first chapter). Movement isn't the only thing at a crawling speed in this game, as gameplay consists of 25% walking (no kidding!), 25% dialogue cutscenes with various NPCs and 50% listening to Max describing various objects, landmarks and whatnot. Even with such a limited degree of interactivity, the controls are really not very good, as is typical for each and every console port I've ever played (granted, that's a very small number...). Invisible walls are really restrictive - there certainly is no exploring in this game.

Setting:
Loner hipster girl 18-year-old Maxine Caulfield (note the really unsubtle and irrelevant reference to Holden Caulfield of The catcher in the rye fame) - wait does that make any sense? Being a hipster doesn't make any sense if you can't show it off to your hipster peers. Anyway, she is a massive photography nerd, exclusively using a Polaroid camera (which would clearly never be allowed at university). Her hobbies include not contacting her best friend, getting bullied and standing up for pathetic losers she doesn't have any relationship with in the first place (that is, if you let her do that - this IS an interactive novel after all. You can make some limited choices... but more on that later). She really isn't too interesting, but not offensively loathable either, and that already beats most women (both in fiction and in reality) by default. Also she got a pretty good body - however this is rendered pointless by the fact we don't see anything in that shower scene. BOO. In fact, it's quite hard to ever see her feet outside of cutscenes cause the camera is really rigid. Some fanservice really would've worked wonders there.

Anyway, so Max goes to class, lives at a dorm, has limited social interactions with her nerd and loser friends and uses social media. Note that "taking selfies" isn't on that list cause you can ONLY take "selfies" with a "smartphone" - and not with a Polaroid camera (don't listen to the game's lies). And BAM suddenly she develops the magical ability to rewind time to a limited amount. However, instead of using that power in a sensible way to e.g. take over the world, she merely uses her rewind to impress her hipster teacher (who she naturally has a crush on) and protect her loser friends. In fact, there is no reason for this supernatural bullshit to be in the game in the first place. It's a stupid gimmick that adds little to nothing - especially as your choices are really not important in the first place as they are way too limited in the moral sense. You can't kill the stupid bitch bully, you can't tell Chloe (again, WTF IS THAT NAME?! that's one of the stupidest non-black names in existence!) to FUCK OFF, even when she tries to make you take the blame for smoking a joint IN FRONT OF THE INSANE SCHOOL SECURITY GUARD (which probably would cost Max her scholarship), you can't even do small things like outright telling the pathetic CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALIST loser queen to leave you the fuck alone. So if you can't make meaningful (= moral) choices anyway, what's the point of being able to reverse them instantly instead of via reloading...?! Possibly the rewind gimmick will pay off later, but I can't see right now how it would be able to convince of its necessity in the story.

Story:
The storyline can be summed up in one sentence.

Characters:

So we got Max, which is, like I said above, not too bad. She is actually interested in something useful (namely photography), and that's quite a likeable trait.

Chloe: is a massive bitch. Implied to be a vegan subhuman, doing nothing but blaming Max for not contacting her (note: that always goes both ways...), daddy's girl (too bad her father died in a freak triple penetration accident), confuses smilies for emojis (seriously, are the writers of this game that stupid?!) even though smileys predate them by 20 years, fake hair colour, nail dirt, hipster punk cunt. However even with all of those traits I don't actually *hate* her - something in this game actually works quite excellent, but I can't put my finger on it yet. Certainly it has to do with the high productions values. Oh and she gets murdered by one of her drug dealer peers at the beginning of the game but unfortunately you can't not reverse time there (as you can have EITHER full voice acting or large-scale branching in a visual novel. Guess which one I prefer...).

Bitch: rich bitch with short hair that likes to make fun of poor losers and outcasts. However, she doesn't do that with style so she's quite annoying. Maybe we can kill her in one of the later episodes...

Not too hard to figure out the inspiration behind the Bitch character...

Christian fundamentalist girl: one of the worst characters I've ever seen in video games and sadly you can't tell her to get lost once and for all. However I'm keeping my fingers crossed I can drive her to commit suicide in the course of the story.

Other characters don't matter in Episode 1 and never will.

Summary:

Life is strange is doing many things wrong, but all in all it is quite playable. Ep 1 is really short though. At the end I expect a payoff that even might fill me with a slight warm and fuzzy feeling. LiS really only works as a visual novel as it doesn't have the substance to even fill a TV show. Technically it is really well made, graphics and sound are good. The music is godawful though (I especially HATED that "American girls" song!). In my eyes, the format works even if the content really isn't that good, and I can imagine much better games made with the same sophistication of production values. For example, imagine Higurashi married with this technology! Who says visual novels have to be static pictures for all eternity! Life is strange Chapter 1 at least disproved that idea for me once and for all and for that I'm glad I have played it...

PS: yeah, the title makes no sense. Nothing in this game is strange whatsoever. And while most of the references in this game mean nothing to me, some made me chuckle. Nekromantik, lol. And that literally one day after I had watched a different Jörg Buttgereit movie (namely Der Todesking)!

Garfield explained #2

1978-06-20 - #2

Jon, whose nose is so huge it puts most jewish noses to shame, tries to make his overweight cat exercise in one of his rare sensible moments. Garfield, whose life revolves primarily around feeding and sleeping, however devours the rubber toy, musing how salt would improve the taste, implying his regular diet includes salt.

Fun fact: Average-sized cats need about 21 milligrams of salt per day (so Garfield should have no more than 100 mg a day). Common signs of salt poisoning include walking drunkenly, vomiting, diarrhea, excessive thirst or urination, and seizures.


1978-06-20 - #2

Garfield unsurprisingly is too immobile to chase after a live mouse (or rather rat, based on its relative size compared to Garfield compared to Jon), instead preferring to feed on human food and plastic toys. Naturally his owner Jon is to blame for his sad state of fitness, highlighting the issue of whether mentally handicapped people living on their own should be allowed to own pets.

Streak of food-themed Garfield strips: 3

Garfield explained

Garfield explained

Inspired by this guy: http://marmadukeexplained.blogspot.com/2008/04/marmadukes-impotent-neighborhood.html. Shitty comics, just like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, have spawned great derived fandom/hatedom material in the past. A more well known example of this phenomenon is Square Root of Minus Garfield (http://www.mezzacotta.net/garfield/), another I came across recently is xkcd sucks (http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2008/11/comic-505.html), but obviously there are tons of projects wringing fun out of unfunny source material out there, including my own webcomic Charlie Down. Basic idea of this project is to get me to work on my blog more than 1-2 times a year again.

So ideally I would tackle Marmaduke (since the guy above just randomly dropped off the face off the earth eventually), but I wasn't able to find any online archive of the strip reaching back to the 1950s (or even to the last century at all), and for me beginning at the beginning really is the only way to do things, so the next best thing (or actually one of the few comic strips I even know) is a fellow member of the unholy trinity of pet-related comics... Garfield.

So after this hideously jumbled intro (I got rusty...), let's start with the very first strip. I'm afraid old Garfield is a lil better than what it became after the redesign however... but I really only read the first 5-10 strips so I have no idea what will await me.

So... Garfield explained in the vein of Marmaduke explained by Joe Mathlete.

1978-06-19 - #1

Jon Arbuckle, a cartoonist displaying pupillary distance hinting at a genetic disorder like lobar holoprosencephaly owns (and, in a juridical dilemma, is owned by) an enormously fat and unnaturally orange cat which has cheeks that put a hamster's relative oral storage capacity to shame. Jon's rambling to unseen forces and him imagining his pet talking can only be explained by his devopmental delay.

Note that the lamp from panel 1 goes missing in panel 3, indicating a sloppy start of a cartoon that isn't particularly hard to draw to begin with.

Why I dropped #2 - Monster manga

Monster by Naoki Urasawa

Monster starts out alright by introducing the main character, young genius brain surgeon Tenma, who lives and works in Germany. He lives his life until he decides to disobey an order of his superior and saves a random young boy's life instead of keeping the mayor of the town or whatever the hospital is in alive, resulting in obvious trouble for his superior.

*facepalm*

I call bullshit.

A children's life is not worth more than that of an adult, but actually LESS. First, while an adult has numerous social connections, a circle of friends, a partner perhaps, a child is only really loved by his parents and grandparents (if at all). Children's so called friendships are flimsy as fuck, so they clearly don't count. Teachers generally hate children - and that is pretty much the entire periphery of a child as children aren't allowed to interact with any other grown-ups in this day and age because those could be creepy pedophiles (so let's treat all adults as such because of a small minority. Logic yay)!

Second, adults generally have a job and hence contribute to society in some way or another (unless they are coppers or politicians or some such wastrels) - while children are in school and thereforae are a COST to society until they become old enough to work.

Third and unnecessary to even mention, the world is cruelly overpopulated. At a certain point in time, an adult might already have had the audacity to spawn his seed into the world in a purely selfish way, while a child decides on whether or not to breed only later in life. In other words, the mayor in the example above pretty likely already had sired children if he had the wish to do so, essentially preventing any ADDITIONAL burden to mankind. Saving the life of the boy means he might put additional burden on mankind later.

So for any logically thinking person, saving the mayor's life as per the order of your superior would have been the morally right and sensible choice. However as the mangaka feels he has to degrade himself in order to appeal to the sickening sappiness that blots out reason in the deranged minds of the general public, Tenma is of course an IDIOT and saves the child, called Johan. As some sort of cosmic comeuppance or divine justice, that mistake turns out to quickly ruin his life, costing him his girlfriend and promotion. However, Tenma's enemies are ruthlessly killed, causing an excentric police investigator (who has a really stupid gimmick) to try and pin the blame on Tenma somehow.

Now this is where I initally stopped reading a long time ago (6-10 years) because I had seen Death Note right before and I really couldn't take another criminal vs policeman logic battle story then. However, Monster isn't actually about any of that but about Tenma and Johan's twin sister (who initially seemed an ok character, but it turns out she was the one to shoot Johan in the head and from then on everything goes downhill) chasing after Johan who is actually a split-personality serial killing motherfucker responsible for many many murders (for example Tenma's bosses and many of his and his twin sisters' foster parents even - who ironically adores Tenma for saving his life when he was a boy!

That storyline is bearable for some time, but at some point the author randomly decides to throw the laziest and most uncreative villains possible into the story - Nazis (*sigh*) - and the bullshit spirals out of control. So the Nazis plan to burn down Little Turkey in some German town - of course the author handles all of this in the most stereotypic black-and-white way (evil Nazis, good Turkish immigrants - he even invokes the dreaded "hooker with a heart of gold" trope) and never asks himself what right hordes of Turks unwilling to integrate have to occupy a foreign country in the first place. Clearly Urasawa couldn't have pulled that stunt in a story set in his native country (the Japanese themselves would never allow great numbers of foreigners to settle in their country). By the way, Hitler himself declared the Japanese (his allies in the war) "honorary Aryans", so the Nazis beating up Tenma wasn't really the smartest thing to put in the manga (well maybe they just didn't know that tiny tidbit, huh). I'm certainly not claiming the Nazis were any kind of good guys but to just put them into a story as a generic villain whose motivations aren't even explored the slightest bit is just the textbook definition of laziness. And to not look up the situation of Turks and their unwillingness to drop their primitive and harmful beliefs primarily motivated by their cancer of a religion - Islam - is doubly insulting. But of course that bullshit sells stories and wins awards cause it doesn't require any kind of thought on the part of the left-leaning reviewer or manga reader - right?!

So of course the FIRE storyline turns out to be utterly useless - nobody dies, at least some of the Nazis are arrested (they weren't important to the story in the first place... yay), the Turks are left free to further spread the boundaries of their parallel society in a Western country, Johan murders some guys - the "good guys" neither win or lose even the slightest thing (and the morally ambiguous smuggler sidekick Tenma picked up even has to lose the expensive carpet he stole so that "evil isn't rewarded" *facepalm* - And guess how he loses it: a 100000 DM carpet is used to extinguish a fire in lieu of e.g. Tenma's shirt *double facepalm*). At this point, I gave up on this asinine timewaster and looked up the further development of the plot on Wikipedia. That was around chapter 40 of 100.

Turns out that the rest of the story is just a REPEAT of events happening earlier! Johan kills people, the "heroes" chase after him, and in the end Johan's sister shoots him in the head AGAIN and Tenma, complete fucktard that he is, operates on Johan AGAIN and saves his life AGAIN, only to allow the murderer to escape from the hospital AGAIN (allowing him to probably kill even more people in the future).

*facepalm*

So this manga really was little more than realising you have gum stuck in your hair, a storyline that turned useless as soon as a boy decided that his life's work was to kill a lot of mostly random people for no reason and COULD actually execute that, a setting that is first established just to be discarded chapters later and a total bullshit nonsense ending.

On the plus side, the German names mostly were well chosen, having a brain surgeon main character was actually quite interesting, the drawing was also quite well done. And on a side note to the author, women in Germany do NOT all wear skirts at all times (because skirts are stupid). From reading the mangaka's Wikipedia article, it doesn't look like he has ever lived in Germany for longer periods of time.

Avoid unless you really like your main characters behaving in the most illogical ways, going out of their way (!) to keep the FUCKING POLICE from solving the murders and catching Johan (I mean it kinda is their job, you know! They aren't ALL about waylaying drivers) and your villains as - well fuck it, those two points are enough to make a super sane man cringe and review a truly shitty manga.

Interactive fiction review #14 - George

George by Cody Sandifer

A hoax demo

George is an extremely short game set in a zoo. Apparently it was part of a hoax, which explains its duration and abrubt, unfinished end.

The plot involves two friends (or lovers), who appear to be drugged up and ready to embark on a dangerous mission (which is a combination always good for netting one a Darwin award). The game text breaks the fourth wall in one or two places, referring to the non-existent full version.

If this was but the beginning of an author's debut game, George would be a promising venture, but in its existing form this game is not worth the time it takes to download it.

2/10

Interactive fiction review #13 - Tears of a tough man

Tears of a Tough Man by Brian Humphrey

A debut title - and it shows

Tears of a Tough Man by Bruce Humphrey is a short mystery murder memento game in which you are meant to restore your main characters's memory by wandering around and triggering his recollection by doing various things. What might sound interesting is held back dramatically by writer's inexperience and ineptitude.

In a forum post, the author stated that he planned to implement multiple features missing from the final version but couldn't (for some reason) - it shows. (Spoiler - click to show)(e.g. multiple endings) Grammar and spelling errors, whilst not overabundant, distract. Some of the puzzles are made unneededly tedious by poor syntax and logic. The in-game environment feels unnaturally constructed to the point of being ridiculous. Likewise, quest-important items just happen to be lying around in your path. The ending (Spoiler - click to show)(if you'd like to try this out, the point you're likely to miss is "x stains") does not really reveal or conclude anything.

To sum things up, Tears of a Tough Man is an author's debut work that does show some promise but in its ineptness cannot be salvaged even by mending and polishing.

2/10

Retroachievements update #5 - Retroachievements? Go to hell!

Scott is somebody I really hate. FUCK him.

After years of using (and advertising) retroachievements.org I have tonight finally been convinced to rid myself of a project that is no longer in a useful state and shows zero promise for future improvements (same as Path of Exile, by the way, which I'm pretty sure I'll never play again due to the utter futility of playing it).

The terminal problem of retroachievements.org? The utter lack of leadership.

In any closed system, be it a game of chess or the laws of a country, rules and logic have to be intrinsical. If people don't play by the rules, there can be no meaningful competition.

Case in point: idiots adding achievements to already completed sets for no rhyme or reason, therefore deducting points from people who have already beaten achievements in that set. What's infinitely worse, however, is the REMOVAL of achievements that players have already cleared, again, for no rhyme or reason! I've spoken out against these things time and time again, to no avail. The final straw was the removal of many Super Tennis achievements, which I had spent weeks on clearing. I noticed that just tonight and it didn't take me a long time to make the decision that retroachievemens cannot be any longer in a state that allows for a meaningful competition. Hence, it's a total and utter waste of anybody participating there for a rank on the leaderboard.

Scott, the useless asshole who created the site (quite the example of a blind hen finding a grain of corn), didn't manage in 5 years to establish any system that prevents anarchy (not to mention answer PMs. And when he allowed donations after years of people begging to be able to donate, he did it on fucking Patreon. *facepalm*) In a closed system, you obviously can't have anarchy, cause see above. The paragon of incompetence, after he disappeared for literally years, did nothing to fix the state of anarchy. What he actually did was to break all emulators (I didn't even bother to re-download most of them, cause setting them up again was an infinite pain I literally lost hours of my life on).

Losing retroachievements is a shame. The original idea was a spot of genius, and I've had many enjoyable hours of playing games for achievements and chatting with people on the site. Could I have made #1 eventually? Probably not, because I've never in my life managed to dedicate my efforts to one single thing. It's still a sad moment for me. But I'll make sure to erase my memory of using that site just like the achievements I (and in some cases, ONLY I!!!) completed were erased.