Just a small update.

There is a sequel to Cate West.

God fucking dammit, there is a sequel to Cate West.

I fucking hate the world sometimes. It's probably going to be another 5 years before we have Half Life 2: Episode 3, Shenmue's story remains unfinished and GOD DAMN EVERYTHING TO HELL AND DAMNATION, THERE IS A SEQUEL TO CATE WEST.

That crazy lady who lets me call her my girlfriend has just purchased it and the game has finished installing. This is a terrible mistake that will haunt us both for years to come.

Regardless, I really do enjoy writing these posts and I need to start back up again. A few friends and I plan to spend a full night playing ObsCure II together from start to finish, so I'll be finishing up that review before summer ends. But really, I haven't played any games that I find are really ripe for mockery. I don't give a shit about Lux-Pain anymore, Bioshock 2 was pretty great, inFamous was REALLY fun, Assassin's Creed II was awesome, Uncharted 2 did not deserve game of the year, but it was still great... I could probably tear into WET, with all its glaring flaws, but it's just so balls-to-the-wall ridiculous, I can't bear to.

I'll find something for you guys.

Cate West: The Vanishing Files (Part 2)

Let's talk about the bible.

Except not really. I kind of want to talk about the trend of pulling from mythology, Christian or otherwise, for other works of fiction. But there's nothing wrong with that, as long as you are a competent writer. And really, most people who completely rely on outside sources for their story... are not competent writers. That's why that they need to rely on existing sources. Now, I'm not going to say ALL people who do that are bad writers because that's simply not true. The amount of bad writers who base their stuff on mythology are probably equal to the percentage of bad writers who use completely original material. But that's not really the point. In fact, I started watching old episodes of Justice League midway through this paragraph, so I kind of forget what the point is.

But anyway, Cate West. Upon further thought, I realize this will probably be shorter than I'd like exactly as long as normal and not longer but... there really isn't much plot in the game to go on. Every little bit of the plot is like a stepping stone to more gameplay. Incredibly dumb stepping stones that make you feel like an idiot whenever you hop on them. And not just an idiot, but a bad person. That is the power of these stepping stones. But anyway, plot.

You're Cate West. You're a novelist in America... like, Rhode Island or something. General New England area. I'd like to point out that, since you are a novelist instead of an attorney, this actually makes you less qualified to investigate crime scenes than Phoenix Wright and that's just funny.


It really is.

I know the police sometimes employ psychics to solve murders, but to my knowledge not dozens of times in the same month or two and god dammit, they look for actual evidence, not just the psychic's word. Do you have any idea what kind of legal system that would be? It would be freaking madness. I'm honestly kind of fuzzy as to why they even brought her in. I think it had something to do with her father being killed years ago or something... and now that I think about it, I don't recall that plot thread ever being resolved. But yeah. Game starts off, you're Cate West and
YOUR PARENTS ARE DEAAAAAAAAAAAD!!

Or at least your dad is. I don't recall any mention of your mom. Your mom being Cate West's mom, but I think this review will go funnier if I just keep pretending that you are Cate West. Indulge me, I'm a funny man. Anyway, you're at your book signing and you meet this guy who kind of looks like Captain America without the costume. Blond hair, blue eyes, all American. Well, he would look like that if the art wasn't kind of meh.


Captain America apparently thinks he's Superman.

Anyway, there's this "fateful moment" kind of deal that has been done a million times before, will be done a million times again, and is nothing special. Your BFF Wesley (more like Star Trek Wesley than "As You Wish" Wesley), who is basically your equivalent of Larry Butz in degrees of lameness and uselessness, but not even close to as funny. He's basically a completely worthless human being, who is also the only thing that drives the plot of this game into full-blown-retarded. But I'll get to that later.

Anyway, there's a photo or some crap and you're like all "MY FATHER DIED HERE" or something and somehow convince Steve Rogers up there (that's Captain America's real name for the non-nerds.) to let you investigate while you dump Wesley and the book tour to find out about your dead parents. Like Phoenix Wright, every case is a murder case. Okay, apparently not. There's robberies and arson too. Which is nice, actually. Except there's no quirky/interesting characters. Or really, any characters. At all. I think there's some Asian girl that you're also BFFs with but I honestly can't recall and like hell am I playing through this again. If you can't tell, I'm using the term BFF as ironically as I can in text. Which isn't very. Also, this game is so obscure that there really isn't anywhere on the internet that I can find to refresh myself on the plot. No one cares about Cate West. With good damn reason. Damn good reason, even.

But apparently, in this world, people should care about Cate West. She can fucking solve a murder in the bay by finding a hackey-sack in the financial district. And somehow THIS IS EVIDENCE. Did the murderer have the hackey-sack? No. Did he ever see the hackey-sack? Again, no. Has the murderer ever been in the same room as the fucking hackey-sack. NO. FAR BE IT FROM ME TO QUESTION YOUR INFINITE PSYCHIC WISDOM, CATE WEST, BUT EVIDENCE SHOULD TIE THE CRIMINAL TO THE CRIME. *FUME FUME*

So you solve a bunch of murders and there's some strained and painful dialogue about how they have nothing to do with each other and the subjects are all talking about voices in their heads. The voices in their heads thing is important, so remember it for later. Apparently there's this mystery guy referred to only as W. He's dark and mysterious and murderous and the villain of the game, appearing perpetually in shadow even when he's in broad daylight. He'd be hilariously contrived if they put even the slightest bit of character into him. Just the slightest bit. But nope. He's just "mwahahaha evil"


Kind of like this, but you see that chocolate? That has more character than W.

So W is somehow responsible for all these murders despite not being the one who actually did them. We already have a psychic, so clearly we can't rule out "Magic," "Death Note" or "Alien Abduction". Hey, I do not throw away my cards until I am absolutely sure they are worthless.

But anyway, eventually you meet this old lady. Who, by virtue of being an old lady and getting more characterization than "Where are my pills?", is the coolest person in this game. She gives you clues or something and then her house burns down. Hooray! Cate is like "OH SHIT, IS SHE OKAY?" and the cops are like "WE CAN'T FIND HER." So they move on and never, ever mention her again.

Anyway, you solve all the murders and put the murderers in jail. Then W kidnaps Wesley and your Asian friend. Oh noes! You and Steve Rogers go to try and confront W and it turns out... W is Wesley! ... ... Yeah. Your best of friend of multiple years is actually a crazy killer guy. I know the W = Wesley thing is obvious when you put it right next to each other, but this seriously has no real build-up and comes completely out of left field, flying at your face and shattering your windshield. Yes, your face has a windshield. You're Cate fucking West, god dammit.

Anyway, he then shoots Steve Rogers. But Steve Rogers is fine, because he's Captain America god dammit.


Shut up, Stark.

And then Wesley explains the plot. Apparently you, Steve Rogers and him are all descendants of the three Magi, Melchior, Balthasar and Caspar. And they each have powers. You (Cate West) have Psychic Powers, Steve Rogers is invulnerable (good thing for a cop to have. You'd think he'd have realized this sooner), and Wesley can control people's minds. Yes, those voices in their head? Wesley. So he mind-controlled them into committing murders. He said he wanted to gather the children of the Magi together. And that's it. They arrest him.

That's fucking it.

They don't say WHY he wanted to gather them all together. What happens then? Does the world end, does Amenhotep rise from the dead, does Jesus come back and they all go out for beers? WHAT?! TELL ME, GAME. TELL ME! Also, they gathered. They were all in the same room. He didn't seem to have a ritual in mind. Although there must be, because they were all within 5 feet of each other in that book store and noting happened then. Unless Jesus bought a copy of Cate's book. Maybe for his Holy Coffee Table. But they don't fucking explain it. Also, you're no closer to solving the mystery of your murdered dad. HOORAY. DEAD PARENTS ARE COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE STORY!

Oh, and one more thing. Remember all those people who were mind slaves and controlled to do crimes? They never get mentioned again. Which means they're still fucking in jail. Cate West, you have wrongfully imprisoned like 20 people for various crimes. Their lives are ruined because of you. RUINED. OVER. WAY TO GO, YOU GLEAMING EMBLEM OF HEROISM. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

I hate you, Cate West. I hate you so much.

Cate West: The Vanishing Files (Part 1)

There is nothing good about this game. Nothing.And I have bestowed upon myself the loathsome task of making you people laugh about it. Go me.

Now, to begin, there is a PC version, a Wii version and a DS version. I bought this game specifically because that crazy lady who lets me call her my girlfriend saw it in a Gamestop and thought it looked cool. I went with it. I tend to go with my gut on obscure little games like this just because. The reward of a good purchase on gut instinct is satisfying. But the bad purchases, in my experiences, are the worst of the worst. I got the DS version, because I like making my tasks needlessly difficult (the PC version had digital downloads and the Wii version didn't exist yet), but also because it was a gift for my lady and she loves her DS.

It took a week of searching Gamestops for it before I bought it off of Amazon.com. It eventually came something like 2 weeks after her birthday and I held on to it for a month or so. It was a used copy, so it was opened already and had a save file on it. As I recall, there was no total play time listed on the game file, just a score. It was large and meant nothing to me. I later found out that the person couldn't have played past the first case. It was an easy tutorial level that explained the gameplay. If only I had understood the signs.

Now, the gameplay. I should say something first. I greatly enjoy iced tea. Now, I should say something relevant. Judging by the description on the back of the box, both my lady and I were expecting a kind of Ace Attorney style of gameplay, except you were a psychic detective. So, you know, someone actually qualified to investigate crime scenes. What I got was a hidden item game with "spot the differences" levels. This was a casual game.

Now, casual games should are not bad things in theory. Even real gamers can enjoy casual games. Pretty much everything Popcap puts out is digital crack cocaine cut with fun.


"Peggle" or "Oh God, When Did The Sun Come Up?"

But casual games kind of have a stigma - rightfully so, at this point - for being designed for idiots. Most mainstream games have the benefit of its target audience having gamer logic. Gamer logic, to those who have it, seems like common sense. It comes from past experiences that "everyone knows about". Gamer logic is a complex thing, but can range from "touch the spikes, you die" to more complicated things, like button awareness. Things like "Right Analog Stick moves the camera" and "Press X to Confirm". This kind of gamer logic can be genre specific and even game series specific. For example, First Person Shooter logic dictates that the best gun will have the least amount of ammo available and Metal Gear logic dictates that a cardboard box with legs is the least suspicious thing ever.


Did you know a man escaped from a French prison like this? It's true!

But anyway, my point. Casual games must be built completely without gamer logic and assume the person playing it has never, ever played a video game before. This doesn't have to be a bad thing. But the thing is, most casual games seem like they're designed for (or possibly by) complete idiots. They're overly simplified and god help you if it has a plot. God help you. Cate West's deranged, mutant offspring of narrative will be discussed in the second half of this review. I'm mainly focusing on the gameplay right now, because I have a lot to say. I'm fucking verbose, remember?

The gameplay. Like I said, it's a hidden item game with spot-the-differences levels. Nothing else. There's actually four kinds of gameplay. There's spot-the-difference, find this list of items, find chunks of these items, and place objects to make both sides match. There's also a "find the culprit!" thing. It's basic stuff. It's like a digital version of family restaurant menus. Here's the thing. The plot has you finding these items to help with murder investigations... but uh... none of the items you find have ANYTHING TO DO WITH ANYTHING! They are all completely pointless. Hell, my favorite example is with the find chunks of these items... each level, you have to find like 12 chunks of an item. But you see, most things can't really be cut into 13 recognizable chunks, so there's 4 chunks you have to find like 2 or 3 times each. Thus creating scenarios where you have to find 3 and a half pockets watches and 2 and a third pairs of shoes. And then, after you find these, they form into the actual clue, which will never have anything to do with any of the items you found. Hand to God, I had to find a trumpet and a crab... and the clue turned out to be a GUN!!. TRUMPET PLUS CRAB DOES NOT EQUAL GUN!


See? Math agrees with me!

The entire process is stupid. And the other problem, as odd as it sounds, is that the art designers for the hidden object games are really good. A lot of the stuff almost looks like it was taken from photographs. It's very detailed. But uh, here's the thing. This is what an average screen looks like in the game.


Wow. Just... Wow.

Jumbled as hell, isn't it? Very busy, lots of stuff. Visually confusing? Yeah. One more thing. This is a screenshot from the PC version. Imagine this, crunched down and compressed for the DS version. It's a pain in the fucking ass. God damn, I hate it. I hate it I hate it I hate it I hope it dies in the fires of Mount Doom, banished from whence it came. It's agonizing and there's something like a 14 cases in this game with like 5 levels of shit like this each. It was painful to go through.

But it's not BAD gameplay, if you... like this sort of thing. I suppose. But the story... oh god, the story.

I will save it until next time.

ObsCure: The Aftermath (Part 1)

This game. My god, this game. My original intent was to talk about Lux-Pain (which I seem to have lost. It shall be spared my derisive comments... this time), but this game... this game. I do not even know what I can say about it. It's bad. It's bad on a level I have never before experienced. I kind of joked about The Bouncer being "So Bad It's Good," but this... this is so bad it's horrible. And the only way I even remotely gained any entertainment value out of this is because of my love of terrible movies. The only kind of person who would enjoy this game is the kind who has Plan 9 From Outer Space on DVD next to their copy of Jesus Christ: Vampire Hunter. I am one such person.

Let me start off by telling you what I know about this game. It is a sequel to a game in 2004 that was just called ObsCure. I have not played this game, nor do I care to. This game was released for the PC, PS2 and Wii. I played the Wii version. This game was given to me by a friend. After showing her this blog, she commented that I might enjoy ripping this game apart because it is so bad. I played it with her and that scary lady who lets me call her my girlfriend. The absolute stupidity that was displayed on the screen made this an enjoyable experience. She gave me this game, because she doesn't want it and like hell would I ever PAY for this.

Now, let me tell you about the plot. There isn't one. Don't get me wrong, there are some people, and things happen to them, but the coherence of storytelling that the word "plot" implies is far too generous for this game. But there are some stupid college kids who start making drugs from this random, never before seen plant that just showed up on their campus and take them. It's beyond me how none of the faculty notice these plants, because they are HUGE AND CONSPICUOUS, growing on the walls of Frat Houses and random dorm buildings. I will gladly accept that the first thing frat boys would do with a mysterious plant that starts growing is smoke the fuck out of it and see what happens, but I would think some faculty would show concern for this mysterious organism and, I don't know, call the CDC or the FDA or something. And as it turns out, this plant makes you have nightmarish acid trips that make you think you might actually be in a good game. And then, it turns you into a horrible monster. Some of them look like these big angry dog things with Cthulhu faces, while others are SO INCREDIBLY FAT that they put Left 4 Dead's Boomers to shame. And the only way to stop this transformation is, apparently, energy drinks. If you drink an energy drink in the early stages, you don't transform, which is why most of the cast is still alive.

This makes me wonder how ANY of the monsters come to be in the first place. Because, uh, on my campus, the ones doing the drugs are also the ones chugging down Red Bull and Monster like caffeine was the only thing stopping the spiders from coming back.

I should mention, ObsCure is supposed to be a Survival Horror game, which is not a favored genre of mine, but also not one I am unfamiliar with. Survival horror games are meant to isolate you, make you feel alienated, uncomfortable and crush 99.9% of hope, while preserving that one sliver of light at the end of the tunnel to get you through the game, even when everything seems hopeless. The crucial part of survival horror is not exactly to scare you right out with things jumping out from around corners, but to unsettle you and make you uncomfortable, slowly building up to the fear.

To add to that, enemies in these games tend to be scary because combat in Survival Horror games is not really your first priority. Your first priority is to SURVIVE, which usually means avoiding enemies, if you can. Games have different approaches to this. Resident Evil, probably the most well-known example of the genre, gives players guns but limited ammunition. The fear of running out of bullets when a zombie dog is staring you down is a good way to do this sort of thing. Though, they kind of stopped the limited ammo thing with Resident Evil 4. But anyway, getting off track.


Resident Evil 4 isn't a survival horror game. Because how can you possibly scared when you're playing as Leon Scott Kennedy?

Another important aspect of these games are the characters. Silent Hill games tend to have average, everyday people tossed into the hellhole that is Silent Hill. Resident Evil tends to opt to make the player a member of Elite Special Forces or some such thing. Regardless of what the game picks, you have to like the character because you're stuck with them. Even if there are supporting characters, they can frequently be killed off and leave you by yourself. The short of it is, the major part of Survival Horror games is making the player feel vulnerable and alone.

I have gone into such detail with these aspects because I feel they are necessary to understand why everything about ObsCure: The Aftermath is so goddamn wrong. First off, it's a two player game. Yes, you read that right. You can play by yourself with the computer, but there will ALWAYS be someone with you at ALL TIMES. You are NEVER ALONE in this game. You always have a partner beside you and frequently have to switch to use their unique "skills". For example, one guy is an acrobat and can jump and climb to higher places, while one girl can "hack" just about anything, regardless of how little sense it makes. One girl has "decryption" which is totally different from hacking. Totally. It doesn't exactly sound like it should be, but she can basically just see patterns in things to help solve puzzles and determine where to go. And for many sections of the game, you can go back to an area and switch one member of your two-person party out for another, to use their skills.

Yes. They are using a goddamn RPG Party System. Ugggh, there is SO MUCH WRONG HERE. But I shall press on.

The characters. Oh, the characters. In video games, there's only really a few kinds of protagonists that work well and that pool is even smaller for survival horror game. Survival horror, after all, needs you to feel exposed and vulnerable. So they have to be someone you can either identify with and sympathize with... or they have to be engaging in some way. Silent Hill tends to have the former, while Resident Evil has the special forces. Yes, they're cops and badass ones at that, but for the most part, they're still not mentally equipped to deal with the living dead. Granted, by the time Leon Scott Kennedy is spin-kicking Parasite-Infected Spaniards in the face so hard, their heads explode, this is not exactly the case. But then again, Resident Evil 4 is not survival horror, so moving on.

In ObsCure, your party consists of a bunch of bland and utterly generic college students. They're all stoners, have personalities lifted from an after-school special, and are, frankly, far too dumb to live. I'm surprised their brains even have the ability to process the chemicals needed to experience a high, because I refuse to believe they have more than two functioning brain cells among their collective group. They are all bland, uninteresting, unoriginal and STUPID. They are stupid, stupid, STUPID. They are so incredibly dumb, I find it hard to believe that any self-respecting learning institution would actually accept them. I guess it's a community college... in Stupidville.


I don't feel like I need to add anything to this.

My best guess is that they were going for a slasher movie feel. Like Friday the 13th, where Jason Voorhees comes out and slaughters all the teenagers, because he is secretly a supporter of eugenics and is on a god-given mission to cleanse the gene pool of all the rampant STUPID before any of them have a chance to reproduce. At least, I'd like to think so. But yeah, that's the feel I get. And that brings me to another problem.

Have you ever in your life been watching a horror movie, specifically a slasher flick, and looked at the jock or the cheerleader, about to get a machete through their stupidly pretty faces and thought to yourself "Gee, I'd really like to be in their shoes right about now."?

The answer to this question is no. No, you have NEVER wanted to be the stupid teenager getting murdered by the lakeside. No one does. But that's what ObsCure does. It puts you in the shoes of the idiots who are only good for getting killed and god dammit, it doesn't even kill them enough. As of writing this review, I played through about 2-3 hours of the game. I intend to write more of these as I play through more of the game, but I can only take so much of this at a time and thus they will be fairly sporadic. But anyway, yeah. None of them died. In fact, there was only one thing that got me to keep trudging through this game.

The fact that you can beat the shit out of your partner. Most of the weapons you use are melee weapons. You can pull them out whenever. And you can beat the everloving shit out of Player 2. And the noises they make are HILARIOUS. When I was playing this, my girlfriend was watching me and laughing hysterically whenever I found new ways to brutalize the computer. An observer to this might have made the mistake that the game was actually fun. Now, beating up the other player sounds sadistic, but think about it. You watch a movie like Friday the 13th to see Jason stab some teenagers, so why shouldn't you enjoy something like this? And the best part is, they take no damage! When you get the chainsaw, there are buzzing and revving sounds as you BZZZZZ and whack them with it, but they only fall over and say things like "Ow! You're such a jerk!". There were many more funnier ones, but they escape me at the moment. This, plus the laughably bad dialogue and C-Grade voice acting make it enjoyable for the sheer spectacle of stupidity. It's what I was playing for.

There are so many other problems I could go into that just make this a truly bad game. The graphics are pretty terrible, even by Wii standards. They remind me of early PS2 games during game play and the pre-rendered cutscenes (which are horribly, horribly compressed and make the game look like I'm playing it on an TV/VCR Combo from the 90s, even when it's in 480p on a plasma screen) are more like late PS1 pre-rendered cutscenes. They're ugly and the people are stupid looking and move unnaturally. The enemies look and move stupidly and are just badly designed. The flying harpy things are almost impossible to fight without a gun and they ALWAYS come in packs from 3-5, which will almost always drain all your ammo despite how weak they are. Oh, and by the way. These harpies? They... it's like they have a mouth where their crotch is and it has teeth. And they fly at your face. And their legs also have teeth. My girlfriend called them Vagina Harpies. Yeah. And still, they're not scary because of how STUPID that is. Nothing is scary in this game. It's all just stupid.

Oh, and the controls. I have been waiting this entire review to mention these. This being a Wii game, it makes utterly unnecessary use of the motion controls, which is par for the course. But... and this is what truly made me hate it... the Wiimote controls the camera. Where you point the Wiimote is where the camera aims. It will ALWAYS do this, sometimes even when you're swinging to hit things with a bat. It's ungodly. Also, it puts a little mote of white light where you're pointing, which I like to circle around their little heads while going "Hey! Listen!". It amuses me.

But that's about all for now. The next time I do this, whenever that may be, I will go into more detail on the stupid events of the game and ObsCure's sad attempt at a Pyramid Head.


Yeah, I wasn't getting through this review without mentioning Pyramid Head and we all knew it.

Halo Addendum

So, small addendum to my Halo rant. I need to add this because, honestly, I completely forgot I had this until just now.


I also found some other stuff

The Halo Graphic Novel has four short stories in it and a lot of extra art (the Brute image from the previous entry is from it). For the most part, they're all terrible and actually are REALLY good examples of how the Halo canon is so inconsistent among different media.

The first story, The Last Voyage of the Infinite Succor, is actually a well-written story. My only complaint really here, which is likely the smallest of complaints, lies in the art. This story focuses on Rtas 'Vadumee, an Elite Ultra who players of Halo 2 will remember as "That alien with half his mouth missing". Among other things, it shows how he got this wound at the hands of The Flood. Rtas 'Vadumee, by the way, is a cool alien name. Unlike the Brutes, which all have Latin names. Which makes NO SENSE! Screw you, Tartarus. You were the worst final boss ever.

The Flood, parasitic creatures who take over host bodies and turn them into twisted, zombified abominations of their original form, are actually one of my favorite parts of the Halo Universe. The only issue with this story involving the Flood is... they don't LOOK like the Flood. The Flood have a certain putrid, decayed look to them with a sickening brown and yellow color scheme. That certain tint to the air in an area heavy with flood in any Halo game sends shivers down many a player's spine. These aliens, who are clearly supposed to be the flood, have a sick green and purple color scheme to them. They don't give off the same vibe as the flood. They don't FEEL like the flood. The feel like some other weird parasitic infectious race. This is not a minor quibble. Consistency is important in a large universe because each group has their own feel, their own aesthetic. It's like if Superman suddenly started running around in Orange and Black instead of Red, Blue and Yellow. It changes the feel and messes with the aesthetic.

The second story, Armor Testing, I have the most problems with. It's another Spartan II(besides John-117, The Master Chief) testing a new variant of the MJOLNIR armor they wear. It's well done, up until the end. The Spartan removes her helmet and HOLY SHIT IT'S A WOMAN! Which is fine. There were female Spartans. My favorite Spartan, Linda-058, is a female. As the name Linda would suggest. But my problem here is that she says the following. "I don't regret retiring to start a family."

Wrong. Wrong Wrong Wrong Wrong WRONG.

Every last Spartan was hand picked at age 5 for the program. They were trained rigorously, day in, day out. They underwent so many physical augmentations, including a massive list of musclemass enhancements, things with names as long as your arm, metal-bone coating. At age 13 they were physically the size of 18 year olds that had already been in the Marines. These are BIG people that have had their body chemistry fucked around with so much the notion that one of the females still having a period is laughable. That and their sex drive has been massively suppressed to the point of nonexistent due to pituitary gland implants. They have no sex drive. And even if they did, they are fighting a war for the survival of the whole of Humanity as a species. When you are raised from age 5 in a military background, the mere thought of leaving the military is insane. They have no basis for the outside world. Nothing but the UNSC. They have never lived a civilian life. They have no concept of it.

Coupled with their lack of a sex drive, this makes it insane to think any of the Spartans would EVER retire to start a family. And even then, it's crazy to think the female soldiers in a Supersoldier program would be able to have kids. No one wants a soldier with the strength of ten super-strong marines in a suit of powered armor to be PMS-ing on the battlefield. And all the steroids, growth hormones and physical modifications were administered at age 12 or so. The female spartans have likely NEVER had a period ever. Also, consider the following. The musclemass enhancements make them incredibly strong. A single, weak punch from one of them could SHATTER your bones to powder. They have insane strength. Imagine having SEX with one of them. Have you ever read Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex? It'd be a lot like that. Potentially much more horrifying, because the woman in this case would be the super strong one.

Even if she, say, adopted (and married some random guy with whom she could never have sex and probably never even desire sex), hugging her kids would kill them. And that still leaves the big hole of "leaving the military in the middle of the greatest struggle humanity has ever known" coupled with a military childhood. It simply doesn't make any fucking SENSE. It's stupid. They should have used one of the other living Spartans for this comic, like Linda for one. Whoever this Maria-062 chick is clearly fails at logic of this universe. Or hell, they could've used Anton-044. He was still around after the Battle of Reach, right?. He was awesome.

Although I think if they implied that Linda had kids, I might have shot someone.

The third story, Breaking Quarantine, is by Japanese artist Tsutomu Nihei (he gets named because he is clearly the best one of this book) and shows Sgt. Avery Johnson escaping the Flood during the events of the level 343 Guilty Spark in the original Halo. It has no words, besides sound effects in Japanese. I assume he didn't speak English. This one is awesome and there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. I wish he did the entire book.

The fourth story, Second Sunrise over New Mombasa, I don't feel I should comment on. It's a civilian aspect of the Halo universe, during the Covenant invasion of Earth, near the beginning of the events of Halo 2. As such, it is radically different from the rest of Halo. The art is... interesting. Bright, colorful, cartoony. I don't feel it's bad, just not my cup of tea. It fills me with much less rage than Armor Testing.

I am also aware of Halo: Uprising, a comic series printed by Marvel and written by Brian Michael Bendis. I saw this in a store on Thursday. I looked at it. It looked at me. I put it down and said "No." We won't be hearing about that again.

Something that occurs to me. Excluding the art pages in the back, there are no Brutes in this book. That makes me smile.

I Hate/Love Halo - Part 2

I will be completely clear on something. I am very fuzzy on the plot of Halo 2. I recall the general gist of things and, if I wanted to, could almost certainly lay out a fairly accurate path of the events of the game. But I don't want to.

Because after I beat Halo 2 the first time, I sat through the credits to watch the final post-credits scene. Then I stared at the title screen for about 3 minutes. I then ejected the game, turned off my Xbox and put the game in the shiny plastic-metal case thing (I got the collector's edition. Go me.) and stared at it for a few seconds. I then pointed my finger and glared. "Never. Again." I then put it away and have not played it since.

This game hurt me on levels I did not know I was capable of being hurt. The plot was terrible, the gameplay was tedious and annoying, all the new weapons were TERRIBLE (which I find hilarious in retrospect, because the Spartans in First Strike briefly commented on the superior design of the new weapons), many of the old ones had been removed and the new enemies... the new enemies...

The Brutes were a sign of the end-times of Halo for me. In the original game, there were four basic Covenant enemies. Grunts, Jackals, Elites and Hunters. Grunts are these things that look like bipedal midget dogs wearing portable iron lungs on their backs. They breathe methane. They're hilarious and like to run around and scream. In the original Halo, they spoke English when yelling at humans. My interpretation is that their respirators also had translation devices in them, which the covenant established as having advanced real-time translation... stuff... in Fall of Reach. The Elites yelled in their alien tongue (which was actually just English, sped up and backwards, but it sounded cool) and the Jackals spoke in this high-pitched, bird squawk thing. The Hunters, to my recollection, made no noise besides semi-audible grunts. Now, this I liked. Because Aliens speaking English always irritates me without proper explanation, no matter how stupid. Dammit, I will accept a freaking babelfish, just TELL ME THERE IS ONE! It's like my one button when it comes to Science Fiction. It's that one thing that always pisses me off, which is why despite it being one of my favorite shows, I can never truly enjoy an episode of Stargate (the new one kind of looks like it will be BattleStargate Galactica, by the way. But that's neither here, nor there.)

Which brings me to Halo 2. Of course, ALL the aliens in Halo 2 speak perfect English, including the ones that clearly have nothing covering their mouth or automatically translating. But whatever. I can let little things slide. But you see, the Brutes are not a little thing. They are a big, hairy, smelly thing and they slowly integrate themselves into the Covenant over the course of the game, usurping the position of the Elites and by the end of the game, taking their place and causing an uprising among the Elites. The Elites then join the humans and fight the Prophets of the Covenant, who are basically big floating Space Popes that look sort of like those worms from that one episode of Futurama.


Kind of? A little?

Now this is all well and good. Except that this means that you don't fight Elites anymore. Now, this is a problem for the following reason: The Elites are GREAT enemies. They are tough, they're the right size, they're visually striking and distinctive in their armor (without their armor, they kind of look like big worm-puppy things)and they move in a cool way. They're such a good enemy that I DON'T WANT TO BE FRIENDS WITH THEM! I want to shoot them and I want to feel cool doing it! In the novels, they're all depicted as being on-par with the Spartan IIs and fight hand to hand on a few occasions. They're awesome and they're good enemies. Good enemies are imposing and you feel good about taking them down. When you bring down a cool ba dguy, you feel even cooler. This first becomes a problem when you play as The Arbiter in Halo 2, who is an Elite. You fight alongside other Elites and for his early levels, you fight Elites wearing stupid-looking armor. It's hard to not shoot your allies in these levels, but it's made easier because the Heretic Elites look so ridiculous you really, really want to shoot them. Although honestly, playing as the Arbiter was lame and you didn't really like him that much in Halo 2. Which makes it incredibly weird, because when you can't play as him in any story-relevant way in Halo 3, he's suddenly awesome and you WANT to play as him. I'd call this "Raiden Syndrome," but I really don't think it happens enough in video games to warrant its own name.


This is awesome.

Now, the Brutes. Oh, the Brutes. The Brutes are giant gorillas. Not like giant gorillas, they ARE giant gorillas.


This is not.

Look at that. It's like Mighty Joe Young had sex with a Wookie and beat the child with a bat made of steroids. They don't feel alien, they feel like if there was a dark and edgy 90s version of Donkey Kong, with guns that shoot bullets instead of coconuts. I hate fighting them. I hate them. They are stupid. The only thing that they bring to the table is the gravity hammer in Halo 3, which is quite possibly one of the coolest weapons in video games. But enough good things, I'm still angry. They're just NOT good enemies. I hate fighting them. I LOATHE fighting them. They're stupid and I'm glad they're not in the original game. This is a problem I have with them though.

In First Strike and Halo 2, it is implied that Brutes have never been seen before in the war against the Covenant. They are new players. Eric Nylund makes a note of this by introducing them near the end of First Strike, the Master Chief implying he has never fought them and Cortana saying there is no prior record of them. This makes sense because in Fall of Reach, they list off and show holograms of all known Covenant species to the Spartans, including the Engineers, which never made it into the final version of any of the games (besides Halo Wars, apparently) because they were non-combatants. Which makes me sad because I like them. They're cute.


Oh, the fun we could've had.

I want to make that clear. There are multiple instances that have made it clear that, before the events of Halo 1, Brutes had never been seen by humans and had not been encountered until shortly before Halo 2. Never. So, in Contact Harvest, which is Humanity's first contact with the Covenant, there are Brutes. Not Elites, Brutes.

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU, BUNGIE? WHAT THE FUCK?!

Why do you have such problems sticking to your own damn canon? It's YOUR CANON! It's a good one! Stop changing it! Oh, I also discovered while searching Halopedia for images that Brutes are ALSO in Halo Wars, which is set before the events of the first Halo.

GOD DAMMIT, BUNGIE! What the hell is wrong with you? This is my BIGGEST PROBLEM with you. Seriously.

You have writers capable of crafting a fine story. This much is clear. You do this with great frequency in the novels you put out. They craft a great world. Why do you insist on fucking that up? Are you incapable of weaving this story into your games? I think you are. Because of this great, layered plot with events across galaxies, organizations, species, what have you, none of this comes across in your games. I don't get this at all.

I'm actually pretty sure at this point, by the time the time the graphics engines of the games are done and its time to start working on the story, all the writers are too busy playing Capture the Flag and Slayer to do anything. I mean, god dammit, Red vs. Blue has a better plot than Halo 2 and 3. And the ONLY Part of Halo 3 I enjoyed was that little Easter Egg with the Red vs. Blue guys on the second level.

That being said, I'm going to buy Halo 3: ODST when it comes out. And pretty soon, I'll probably buy Halo Wars too. Why? Well, besides the fact that I clearly have no sense of pattern recognition, I still have hope. I will always have hope. I will hope and wish that you can tell your story in a half-way competent way. After playing Half-Life 2 and Bioshock, I now have VERY high regard for storytelling in video games. Games are capable of GREAT things and it pisses me off when people squander that. And I hate you for it, Bungie.

I Hate/Love Halo - Part 1

I hate Halo. I also love it.

Let me explain. Actually, let me build up to this first. When I tell stories, dammit, I tell them fully and completely, including every last insignificant detail!

Halo was a special thing for me back on the original Xbox. It still is. In fact, I'm listening to the soundtrack to the first game right now. In FLAC format. But for a time, it was my absolute favorite game. It still has a firm grasp on my heart, as you can tell by the following photo.


Not Pictured: Todd MacFarlane Custom Brute Xbox 360 Controller, because I can't find the damn thing.

My world view was admittedly still pretty small back then. I had never played Half-Life at the time, or even heard of it, to be honest. The only reason I ever even heard about Halo was through my cousin, one of my only friends at the time. Not a very good friend, but I didn't develop any of those until about my sophomore year of high school. Those guys are AWESOME. But anyway, he had an Xbox, I had Gamecube (we both had a PS2). We had pretty much always had different systems. He had a Playstation, I had an Nintendo 64... actually, that's as far back as it went. We both had a Sega Genesis (anyone who calls it the Mega Drive is a Communist). In fact, I'm pretty sure I was born with the controller to one in my hand, as impossible as that would've been time-wise. And the logistics are simply... oh right, Halo. Anyway, it was something to us both. I assume it also had an impact on him, as he recently joined the United States Marine Corps. I can't say with CERTAINTY he developed an interest in shooting things until they died because of Halo, but I can say that regardless. Also, he probably really wishes he could call himself a Space Marine. Maybe someday. I'm getting off topic again. You should get used to that.

When I first played Halo, it was something special to me. Like I said, my world view was small and this was new. I adored the game. I played it with him endlessly. It was a point of pride when we beat The Maw on Legendary together and got the little bonus bit in the ending. I convinced my parents to buy me an Xbox for the sole purpose of playing Halo myself. Yes, I bought a console for the sole purpose of playing this game. It was THAT important to me. But what really got me going for Halo was when I was in a Barnes and Noble one day and I saw a book. Halo: The Fall of Reach. My little 12-year-old brain was intrigued. I read the back description. "A prequel...? ... MORE Spartans? My god." I had to possess it. So, I poked my Mom in the ribs and demanded she buy it for me, because I was a tiny annoying brat when I was twelve. And my Mom, being the saint that she is, bought it for me. I immediately went home and read it. And it blew my mind.

I am not going to try and argue that it was a deep, meaningful book. It's not. It's entertainment, plain and simple. Events happen. They are awesome. You are entertained. It's not deep and symbolic, but it's engaging and you want to know how the story goes. I absolutely loved it and I still enjoy reading it to this day. As soon as I was able to, I bought the second book, The Flood. This book is still my least favorite among the 5 Halo novels I've read (I haven't gotten around to The Cole Protocol yet. Odd, since I bought it on release day), but it was still cool. I wanted more. And then I heard the news.

They were making Halo 2. Holy shit.

It was during the time I had truly discovered the internet and thus, was on top of the hype like crazy. Every time something new was announced about the game. I HAD to have this game. I treasured my copy of Electronic Gaming Monthly that previewed the game like it was made of gold bouillon and the mark was going through hyperinflation. I don't care if no one gets that joke, it's funny to me. Beyond that, I still view my greatest failure on the internet is not finding out about the ilovebees alternate reality game sooner. This game was going to be the greatest thing ever.

Now, anyone even remotely aware of Halo can assure you that Halo 2 was far from the greatest thing ever. It sold like crazy and in fact became the fastest selling anything ever in history, until Halo 3 which broke that record in its first day. But this game... this game traumatized me. This game is what gave me my first taste of true disappointment. You know the kind I mean. Maybe as a kid, you didn't get the toy you wanted on Christmas. Maybe you threw a fit. Maybe you were let down. But odds are, if you still got anything you wanted, it wasn't true disappointment. No, true disappointment is like finding out that Santa isn't real by seeing the fake Santa at the mall remove his beard and take a shot of whiskey. While fucking your mom.

Okay, maybe not that extreme, but you get the picture. And my condolences if that actually happened to anyone. That's the gist of it, though. Something that fundamentally changes you and makes you realize the world isn't the bright, sunny place you thought it was. Something that makes you realize that people aren't perfect and sometimes, people do terrible, terrible things. I imagine The Phantom Menace was like this for many adults, as well. "Gee, the world may suck, but at least there's still Star Wars."

But moving back to Halo 2, it was a massive disappointment in my eyes. Prior to the game, Halo: First Strike had come out, which filled in the time gap between Halo 1 and 2, and also brought back MORE SPARTANS! They weren't all dead after all, including my favorite from The Fall of Reach, Linda. Because I have always found female snipers to be the single most awesome thing alive. Sexiest too, but that doesn't really apply when they're dressed in full combat armor. Also, judging from the descriptions in Fall of Reach, they'd be anything but sexy. That leads to my first real complaint about Halo and will begin the long, long descent from there. The Halo canon is INCREDIBLY inconsistent between mediums.

The first sign of this comes when comparing the end of First Strike with the beginning of Halo 2. First Strike ends with the alien conglomerate of species, The Covenant, finding Earth. Earth, at this point, is the last human-settled world with something like 10 Billion people on it. Earth makes contact with Master Chief and his team of Spartans and tells them that the Covenant have found Earth. And the book ends there. Well, it ends a few pages later after some foreshadowing of Halo 2's plot that makes no sense until you've played the game. But anyway, my point remains. The book ends with the Earth under attack by Covenant, the Master Chief and multiple other Spartan IIs off in space somewhere and they head back toward Earth to fight the Invasion. Remember this. It is important.

So Halo 2 begins on a space station above Earth, with Master Chief arriving back with Sergeant Johnson, the only black man in the entire United Nations Space Command. Also, the closest thing to a badass normal the games get. Anyway, they Chief gets into his new armor (in-game reason for the obviously different armor the graphical enhancements allowed) and they're both about to get all kinds of medals and stuff for the events of the first game. "But wait!" you might exclaim, "Why are they having an award ceremony during the middle of an alien invasion?" A fine question! And the answer is "they're not, because THE INVASION HASN'T HAPPENED YET!". That's right, they retconned the book. The Covenant haven't hit the Earth yet. So already, they have fucked with their own canon. And it's not like the book was outsourced. To some novel-writing factory in Taiwan (do they even have those?). No, Eric Nylund, the author of 3 of the 6 Halo novels is on the Bungie staff and in fact is one of the lead writers for the games. I mean, I can understand if they didn't want to start the game with the Covenant being on Earth, but if that's the case then GOD DAMMIT DON'T PUT IT IN THE BOOK! I mean, the man had to have been in the Bungie office frequently while he was writing the book. And even if he wasn't, 5 minute phone call. Tops. It's fucking worth it for consistency.

The tragedy only begins there and I will continue this in my next post.