21st Century Digital Boy

This is pretty freaking awesome. Reduced the amount of space I take to store all of these Tesco bags (which I use as trash bags) massively, and they’re easier to get to than “in a large plastic bag below the sink” as well.

So I had a bunch of old breadrolls lying around that I was going to throw away. I had already opened the bin when I realised - wait, no, bread dumplings! The recipe of which I shall now share.

Dumplings (6-8pcs)

• 6 dry breadrolls (a day old is good, works with older ones as well)
• 1/8l milk
• 2 tbsp chopped parsley
• 1 medium onion
• 2 large eggs

Cut the breadrolls into thin slices. Heat up the milk and pour it over the bread slices. Cube the onion and slightly stew it in a pan with about 1tbsp of butter. Add parsley to the pan, mix it with the onions, and dump the mixture onto the bread. Add eggs to this, then leave the whole thing to soak for a few minutes. Then stick your hands in it (hope you washed) and mash it into some semblance of dough. The finished product will look rather nasty (as shown).

Season with salt, pepper and nutmeg and form dumplings out of the dough. Roll dumplings in flour, then drop them into near-boiling water and leave them to cook for about 20 minutes. Try not to let the water cook too strongly, as this has a tendency to make the dumplings fall apart.

Mushroom sauce (metric fucktons)

• 600g closed-cap champignons
• 1 medium onion
• 3 tbsp butter
• 2 tbsp chopped parsley
• 2 tbsp flour
• 0.5l stock (stock cube + water)
• 0.2l cream

Clean the mushrooms. This is done by grabbing a paper towel and rubbing the mushroom’s hat so the outer layer comes off. You might also want to cut off the end part of the stalk, as this tends to be very hard and dry. Chop both the mushrooms and onion, then stew them in 1tbsp of butter. Season with salt and pepper, add parsley.

In a saucepan, melt the remaining 2tbsp of butter and add the flour. Stir this a lot so it doesn’t clump too heavily, then add the broth. Mix well until it starts to thicken and have it boil once for a moment. Add in the mushroom/onion/parsley mixture and cream.

Put both on plates together. Don’t be afraid to literally drown the dumplings in sauce - they soak up a fairly large amount of it. Enjoy (I am :D)

Right, I’m getting sick of shit like this:

“Germans Cut Suicide Bombers From C&C3″ ZOMG CENSORSHIP!!!1

No. No, no, NO. For fuck’s sake, NO. Games aren’t censored by “the Germans” or “the government” in Germany. There are no laws that require the removal of stuff like that. None. At all.

The replacement of humans with robots, blood with green goop or oil, and removal of gibs is NOT enforced by any authority. Doing this is a choice made by the publishers and/or developers, and ONLY them, to achieve a lower age rating. Nowadays, age ratings are legally binding in Germany - that is, it’s a felony to sell a 16+ rated game to a twelve year old. Hence, lower age ratings = more sales = ALL BLOOD MUST GO LOL.

On top of that, which is what’s commonly being mistaken for “banning”, there’s a process called “indexing” for excessively violent or pornographic games - a title that’s been “put on the index” of such games may still be perfectly legally sold to adults. It just mustn’t be displayed or advertised in places accessible to minors anymore, and obviously not sold to them either. The BPjM (formerly BPjS), the authority managing the index, used to be rather twitchy and trigger happy, but with a recent (2003) rework of the law for the protection of minors, their abilities to index games have been reduced and their general attitude about putting stuff on the index has gotten quite a bit more relaxed since the “large amounts of pixelly blood = instant awesome” binge in games of the early 90s. Additionally, media may be re-evaluated and taken off the index again (which happened to e.g. Golden Axe), or are automatically taken off the index after 25 years. The BPjM is also required to make available a statement explaining the reasons for a game being put on the index. Do keep in mind that throughout the whole time a title is indexed, it can still be legally sold by stores and bought by adults.

There is an actual “banning” process of games in Germany, which involves the attorney general finding a game that spreads anti-constitutional propaganda (ie. displays swastikas and Fuhrer pictures), and formally declaring the title “seized” - from this point on, sale, purchase and import of said title in Germany are prohibited. Educational material is exempt from this process as far as I know, but anyone who tries to argue that Wolfenstein is educational will probably be laughed at.

There is a grand total of five or six games in all of video game history that this has been applied to - most notably the original versions of Wolfenstein 3D and Return to Castle Wolfenstein (because of their distorting depiction of the Nazi regime and their rather liberal application of anti-constitutional symbols), the non-German versions of Commandos 1 (again for slapping a swastika on everything that holds still long enough), and Manhunt - the banning of which was a rather controverse decision because it doesn’t fall into the ZOMG SWASTIKAS category. Instead, Manhunt was banned for its blatant disregard of human dignity (paraphrased from memory). I think these are already all games that have been actually banned in Germany, as opposed to indexed.

To reiterate: It’s not “the Germans” or “the German government” who decide that the suicide bombers in C&C need to go for the German release, it’s Electronic Arts. It’s not the Germans who have forced Capcom and Epic to not release Dead Rising and Gears of War in Germany, it’s a decision they’ve made themselves. The rating authority refused to rate the games - they could’ve been released nonetheless, but unrated games are treated the same as 18+ rated games and are also likely to be indexed ((a game that has an age rating cannot be put on the index anymore). In short, all of these games would be perfectly legal to buy and sell without any changes at all, they just wouldn’t have been allowed to sell them to minors, and, if they would have become indexed (likely), advertise them in public. They decided not to bother and just skip the release altogether. In the case of C&C3, it’s not even sure that the rating authority would have denied a rating had the suicide bombers stayed - EA just decided to cut them to remove as many chances of that happening as possible. All to get a lower age rating and more potential sales.

Whinge whinge whinge, bitch rant complain. I could do this all day. Sorry to Kotaku for bitching about them like this, but their post just happened to trigger this. ;)

In short: don’t get pissed off or laugh at “those silly Germans”, get pissed off or laugh at the publishers instead. Nobody forces them to do it.

This is fairly old by now, and I’ve been throwing it around on IRC and IM for a while myself, but I keep finding myself coming back to it, watching it, and grinning like an idiot. It’s just so supremely, beautifully, deliciously evil.

So, yeah, just to update - after having moved to the UK in July last year, I’ve finally also gotten myself a hoster based in this country. Which is why my blog is here now, and will probably stay just there for a fair bit.

1up reports (emphasis mine):

According to the Famitsu inteview with Kazunori Yamauchi, Gran Turismo HD will have two SKUs on the PS3. One of these games will ship with no cars, all of them will be purchased via microtransactions.

The other, Gran Turismo HD: Premium, will ship with two courses and 30 cars, with an additional 30 cars and an additional two courses online at a later date.

[...]

A complete copy of the game will cost gamers somewhere between $426.50 and $975, and that’s without factoring in whatever Sony decides to charge for the menus (since that’s all you’ll get with GT HD: Classic).

Thought Bethesda had balls for their downloadable Oblivion content stunt? Think again.

WHAT HAVE THEY DONE

WHY :-(

edited because Konami redid their website and now require registering to view screenshots ffs

So I finally finished Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay last Friday. I can only echo the sentiments that so many others have already voiced - it’s a refreshing change from the rule in that it’s a movie tie-in game that’s actually pretty fucking good. On the other hand, it doesn’t really have much to do with any of the movies, but is rather just an episode in The Misadventures of Richard B. Riddick - then again, this holds true for the rest of the franchise as well. The actual plot of the game is rather short and thinly spread, and in retrospect most of the things that happen between the introductory parts and the endgame feel like filler material. Funny enough, they don’t do it while you’re playing, or at least not nearly as much.

What impressed me is that, according to the game’s (ridiculously long) credits, Vin Diesel took quite a bit of involvement with this game beyond the voice acting - including production and design involvement. My respect for the man, which was barely even existent at first (I used to make horrible jokes about how Vin Diesel and Van Damme having the same initials), grows with just about any new project of his.

Okay, let’s gut this sucker. EFBB is pretty much a standard modern FPS, but it has quite a few things of note. One - it looks pretty freaking good, even with the low-res textures on the Xbox. We’re talking “puts up quite an impressive fight against HL2 and Doom3″ good. Two - the stealth is good as well. There’s not overly much of it, but it feels natural, good and is quite a lot of fun. Props to the design team for making this work so well. Three, and most importantly, at least the first third of the game - while being just as linear as the whole rest of it - has quite a few adventure-y elements. Different factions to align yourself with, side quests to do when you’re bored with the main plot, the whole shebang. Again, while it’s not excessively much, it feels like it just belongs. Even more respect to the design team.

There’s a few bad sides too - mostly, as I said, the mediocre and thinly-spread plot with lots and lots of filler material. It’s a bit like Half-Life in that respect, trying to tell a story but apparently not quite knowing how to. It feels less forced than it did in HL though, and the disjointed feeling of the plot with not only itself but also the rest of the franchise is more of a general problem of the Riddick franchise than a flaw in the game. Remember that biomechanical beast in Dark Fury that served no purpose at all but was pretty kickass when it showed up? Butcher Bay is basically like that, only that in Dark Fury it didn’t take you a couple hours of gameplay until you got around to wondering what the fuck that was all about anyway.

Other than that, the selection of guns isn’t exactly huge, and the guns are more tools than toys. Remember Doom’s shotgun and chainsaw, or Turok’s tree-felling triple rocket launcher and Cerebral Bore? Those weapons are toys, ie. insane fun to plough your way through the enemies with. Riddick’s weapons are - sadly - a lot more utilitarian than that; on the other hand, this helps the non-shooty elements of the game come into focus better (and boosts sales in the simulationist part of the target audience). Also, the hand to hand combat has a few very good ideas, but doesn’t work as well as it probably could. It’s cool and pretty complex for an FPS, but somewhat hard to willingly control.

Next on my mental list, the endgame has a few pacing problems. Not of Arx Fatalis proportions, but quite noticable nonetheless. The last half hour of gameplay has a sort-of climax, but a short and not exactly satisfying one. And that climax is not the final boss fight, which makes the pacing near the end of the game seem even more hell yes this is awesome oh hey there what the fuck is going on here wait what it’s over already what happened where’s my epic asskicking. This is sort of amplified by the insanely long credits, which give you about three hours of time to reflect on the game - and of course particularly on the part you just played.

Finally, it’s sort of missing the oneliners and “that’s totally badass” moments that the movies had. The tea cup/can opener from Chronicles, the fire extinguishing system and knife-burying threat from Dark Fury, that kind of stuff. Aside from Riddick, there’s less than a handful of even remotely memorable characters, and even those are… well, they’re in there somewhere, at least.

Oh, and: there is a final cutscene after the credits. Which you will have to sit through if you want to see it. Have fun.

To summarise my main points about the game with a (slightly expanded and horribly “I need a girlfriend” nerdy) oneliner that came to my mind when talking about it on IRC: It’s a bit like sex, only every time you look at your partner it’s somebody else and you don’t quite come in the end.

Nevertheless - if you haven’t played Escape from Butcher Bay yet, you should probably give it a spin. A few parts of it don’t quite know how they should do what they’re doing, but once all punches are pulled it’s a pretty damn good game. And that’s what counts.

I just found a DVD of Six-String Samurai while I was shopping for groceries.

HELL YES.

For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, 6SS happens to be pretty much my favorite movie of the past, oh, I don’t know, ever. Kickass music, glorious camera work, and a premise that is made of crack and awesome. Because I’m a lazy bum, I’ll just copy&paste a short review of it that I’d written someplace else when I’d first seen the movie.

So I had a vid night with some of the mates last night. We watched The Iron Giant, Seducing Doctor Lewis… and the one I’m going to recommend.
Six-String Samurai.

Think Lone Wolf and Cub meets Mad Max meets 1950’s Rock’n'Roll.
The basic premise is a wee bit wacky, but stick with me for a moment.
In 1957, the Cold War escalates and the Soviets end up nuking and invading the US. Hilarity ensues, Elvis (yes, the Elvis) gets crowned King of the remains and takes seat in “Lost Vegas”.
Fast-forward forty years. The King Is Dead. Vegas needs a new King. Road Rockers from all over the place start flocking towards Vegas to claim the throne as theirs. Among them Death himself, incarnated as a postapocalyptic version of Guns’n'Roses’ Slash. And, of course, the unnamed protagonist whom everyone just calls “Buddy” and who looks a very slight bit like Buddy Holly would after having survived the Nucular Holocaust Of Doom. I think.
Thus, Buddy sets out equipped only with his trusty six-string electric guitar - which conveniently happens to have a katana taped to it - his postapocalyptically torn-and-dirty tuxedo, his broken glasses and a battered parasol, for he has “a gig in Vegas”.
As we join him on his journey, he encounters a group of badlands wildmen chasing after a little kid and his mother. They kill the Mom, Buddy arrives and disposes of them with a little help from his awesome Rock’n'Roll Kung Fu (and his katana). The Kid sits there, pokes his Mom with a stick a few times, then bleats at Buddy who passes him by.
Buddy tells him to “Float away, little butterfly, just flutter away”, the kid stalks him. Buddy tells him a bit more directly to back the fuck off, but the kid just bleats and continues following anyway. The beginning of a wonderful friendship fo sho’.
The two travel through the desert heading for Vegas, kicking some wildman ass in a breakneck 15mph car chase, getting caught up with the Postapocalyptic Sitcom Family From Hell, running from guys in badly-taped space suits, and slaughtering the whole remains of the Red Army along the way.

I love it. This flick is stuffed to bursting with various pop culture and rock’n'roll references, from the lead character, his nemesis, a cameo by A Guy Who Looks Suspiciously Like Clint Eastwood, the whole Samurai Tale concept, a bunch of Spaghetti Western spoofs, the all-pervasive Mad Max style, up to the store in a town called Fallout (seriously) which is owned by a Gangsta Midget who quotes The Wizard of Oz (yes, seriously).
Oh, and the soundtrack is played by a Russian-spawned Rock’n'Roll band called The Red Elvises.

There’s a trailer and ad blurb here. Six-String Samurai being a rather Indie production from 1998, it is somewhat hard to get regularly now, but can still be acquired through the usual intarweb outlets for decent prices.

(German original and pictures)

“That is not dead which may eternal lie…”

After my visit to the nether hells, I am glad to be still alive, but nobody believes what I have to report. The fools - they don’t see what is going on in front of their very eyes; they’re too closed minded to recognise the things waiting for them just outside of their field of view which is so constricted by the blindfolds of their concept of reality. But I can understand… had I known the horrible, unearthly terrors that were waiting for me, I’d have turned back at once. And it all just looked like a game in the beginning…

Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!

Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is the first part in a planned trilogy of games and tells the story of Boston cop Jack Walters and his encounters with the unseen things beyond our reality. It all starts out harmless, with his job being finding a missing store manager in the small coastal town Innsmouth. Walters soon finds out that there’s something more going on in the village - the inhabitants are uncooperative and hostile, rumor has it that there’s a bizarre change going on with them, and the whole town is overshadowed by an ominous religious cult. In first person perspective, the player explores the town and discovers its secrets, puzzle piece by puzzle piece. In the beginning, the whole thing is very much like an adventure game - you walk around, talk to the locals, find hints about what has happened to the missing guy and what’s going on in the town in general every now and then. Soon, the uncooperative behavior of the local folk turns into direct attempts at impede Walters’ investigations, and a bit later into a hunt aimed at getting rid of him once and for all.

Sadly, the gameplay follows this change: Dark Corners of the Earth takes a few hours, then mutates from a First Person Adventure to a shooter with adventure elements, which makes the otherwise excellent presentation of the nicely wrought plot suffer a bit. It’s particularly not very Lovecraft to have the main character shoot his way through loads of horrible creatures to advance the plot. Nevertheless, the latter part of the game still sports a brilliant atmosphere worthy of the Cthulhu title. The plot in general is also very fitting in its basic concept and execution, but still has a few points where it runs slightly to massively against the typical style of the inspiring tales. It’s hard to tell more about it without spoiling massive parts of the plot, which is why I’m not going to do so; uncovering the events is just as much part of the game as the gameplay itself. The inventory has a notebook used by Walters to write diary entries explaining his thoughts and feelings on the events and to collect the many small and bigger bits and pieces of information he finds. These are often relevant for puzzles, so they’re worth reading closely.

On top of that, Dark Corners of the Earth takes not necessarily new, but at least little-used paths even in the First Person Shooter department. There’s neither a gauge for the main character’s health nor a crosshair or an ammo gauge - the inventory shows how many bullets of every type you have in total, but you can only guess how many shots you have left in the loaded clip. To make hitting enemies easier, you can steady the weapon and take aim - but holding the gun in front of himself for too long makes Walters’ arms tire and start to shake. The physical health of the character is only indicated by various rough hints: his breathing grows ever more shallow, colours start fading to grey and his vision blurs slightly as he takes damage. Combat is rather deadly as it is already - even a single hit from a gun will usually massively hamper Walters’ agility, and three or four hits will more often than not put a premature end to his investigations. Wounds need to be treated with the contents of first aid kits, not unlike Metal Gear Solid 3 - if you leave them open, they constantly cost more health until they either heal by themselves after some time or Walters has bled to death. Taking care of your wounds also takes a moment in which you’re completely helpless, so there’s not really a way to heal up during combat. In case of emergency, the inventory also holds a syringe of morphine, which you can use to keep death at bay for a moment longer and which will suppress the shaking caused by injuries; using it does impair vision via a lot of blurring and tunnel vision though.

In addition to physical health, you also need to take care of Walters’ mental condition: he can’t just die of wounds, but also just go insane due to continued exposition to unnatural or just plain traumatising things. There’s no gauge here as well, just a couple of factors indicating his state. Normally, you’ll hear Walter’s heartbeat speeding up, accompanied by rhythmic vibration of the controller. Looking down from great heights will make him sway slightly and give tunnel vision. Examining a rotting corpse or looking at monsters for extended amounts of time will generally blur his eyesight and fill his surroundings with various weird noises. The effects aren’t executed in as much detail and creativity as in Eternal Darkness on the GameCube - which Dark Corners of the Earth has quite a few things in common with in general though - but fulfill their purpose by enhancing the atmosphere and giving the player an impression of the character’s mental state. Proper hallucinations or other concrete results of insanity sadly aren’t there; only occasional scripted visions that warn of potential attackers or just build more atmosphere.

From a technical standpoint, there’s a few less nice things to report: the game has quite a few bugs already known in the developer’s forums which have been encountered by a number of players - usually resulting in a deadlock of the Xbox and sometimes even reoccurring in the same place after loading the latest savegame. At least one of these is related to a certain save point and cost me my save during testing; after loading, the game keeps running for about a second more and then reproducably locks up at the same point, no matter what I do. There are a few other scenes that had some user reports of reappearing crashes - in general, the game is running stable and without problems, but apparently there’s a few places that have potential for fatal, game-breaking problems like this. Seeing as how Dark Corners of the Earth doesn’t use Xbox Live - for obvious reasons - at least the Xbox version probably won’t be seeing an update either. To make sure you won’t fall victim of such problems, I’d recommend using several save slots at all times. On the Xbox 360, the game is playable, but has two known problems in addition to the ones already present on the Xbox: the intro and epilogue videos aren’t shown, and the emulation will crash if one of the bosses uses a certain attack of his. The gameplay has little to criticise: some puzzles aren’t exactly obvious or depend on tiny details and need some trial and error or just plain and simple a quick glance at a walkthrough to find the proper solution; occasionally there’s also places that need some searching to find the next piece of the generally rather linear path through the levels.

Graphics: Hallucinogenic substances

The graphics in Call of Cthulhu are excellent both atmospherically and technically; while some of the character models seem a bit coarse at times, the game is quite pretty and the levels detailed and believable. Adding to this are all kinds of nice special effects: irregular glass will distort what’s behind it, there’s a moment of adaptation when moving between light and dark areas, sources of light don’t have any sharp borders, the usual bag of graphical tricks. The consequences of insanity on Mr. Walters’ eyesight are of note as well, as are the distortions and places of blurriness in his occasional visions. A bit more creativity in the hallucinations would’ve been nice, but they’re decent enough and create a nice whole together with the rest of the graphics work.

Sound: Smaller and bigger language barriers

For a game relying so heavily on atmosphere and horror like Call of Cthulhu, sound is particularly important. Headfirst Productions deliver an excellent performance in this department - the game sounds glorious, in quality and style alike. Proper music is really only there during menu screens; in the game its place is taken by mostly melody-free atmospheric instrumentation. Environment sounds vary heavily in amount and detail. Sometimes, the silence is only filled by the game’s replacement for music, at other times there’s not much to hear of that and the environment itelf is alive with all kinds of sounds - footsteps of people walking around, cultists mumbling in bizarre languages and other, weirder noises. On the whole, the sound in the game creates tension and discomfort quite effectively - and that’s what a game in Lovecraft’s world should do.

The language Call of Cthulhu is running in is being determined by the Microsoft Dashboard’s language setting - although this only changes the language of the subtitles; the voiceovers are always in their original English. Thus, if you’re not used to reading subtitles and aren’t very trained in English, you might run into some problems. On the other hand, players who speak the language well enough can enjoy the game completely in its original language by just setting the Xbox menu language to English. The translation occasionally changes the meaning of the original text and particularly struggles a bit when there’s idioms, but is understandable and fitting in all important parts. Seldom there’s also passages that were apparently overlooked as the game was translated and are still in English even if the language is set to German; while this is a bit of an annoyance and doesn’t exactly testify a thorough checkup of the translation, the lack of a German version of these passages shouldn’t prevent even players completely illiterate in English from getting ahead in the game.

“… but with strange aeons, even death may die.”

Call of Cthulhu may not be quite what you’d expect from a game set in the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft, and it isn’t what the first couple hours of gameplay might make you hope either, but in spite of quite a few flaws in both areas a title of good quality both technically and in content and a refreshing change from the usual “hey, let’s send some monsters through the windows with a lot of noise all of a sudden and give the player as little ammo as possible” material in self-proclaimed horror games. Personally, I hope that Headfirst will get the chance to continue their trilogy and pick up and improve upon the points of criticism the first game has. It remains to see whether the PC version - which is still without a release date - will iron out the technical problems or if we’ll be seeing a direct, unchanged port of the Xbox release.

Tech Specs

Platform: Xbox
Publisher: Bethesda Softworks
Developer: Headfirst Productions
Genre: Shooter/Adventure
Release: Xbox already released (26.10.2005), PC announced
Web: http://www.callofcthulhu.com/
Age rating: 18+ (PEGI), M (ESRB), 16+ (USK)
MSRP: EUR 39,95