Wherein I talk about the ending

Every night for the last week I've contemplated doing a post or two but then I get tracked by things that are you know, fun or worthwhile (okay I'm lying about that, nothing I do is worthwhile).

Part of the problem is that the times when I'm thinking about post ideas (eg while showering, while trying to fall asleep) are not times when I can easily do something about it.
In addition, while I am thinking up the myriad of posts I will not post, my ideas and concepts seem so very much more sensible and clear. Unlike my paragraphs which frequently change topic jarringly but rather flow from one to another like shining threads of thought (that imagery made so much sense in my head, on the screen it's just retarded).

A lot of this stems from the fact that although I think in complete sentences, I leave out all the detail and grammatical filler. Imagine a movie where all the subtle character development/interaction was omitted and you were left with all the dramatic gestures and profound statements. That's how I think; I don't need to be introduced and become attached to the characters/ideas, I already know everything there is to know and can cut to the chase.

On a side note, if people every develop psychic powers it will either revolutionise all fiction....or destroy it utterly.

Funny, what was meant to be a brief intro somehow turned into four paragraphs (although by now it shouldn't be surprising to me given the state of many previous posts). Anyway tonight I will be discussing the ending of Borderlands.

It goes without saying-

(think about)

The plot of Borderlands is a thin is it can get; if it was ice I would caution you not to walk on it. You play as a treasure hunter/mercenary who has just landed on the planet Pandora, a place that is post-apocalyptic in every way except for the actual apocalypse.

Upon arriving at some joke of a town (pop. 23) a mysterious looking woman talks to you in your head as a distorted image of her flickers in your vision. This is the 'guardian angel' and she urges you to search for the Vault (a rumoured treasure trove of alien tech). Throughout the game she points out where to head to next and politely but insistently tells you to hurry and find it before it opens.

Borderlands supports listening to inner voices

Naturally one assumes there's going to a reveal, twist and/or betrayal by the angel at some point. That's what all but the best and worst fiction in the world does. Further more, having played plenty of games I knew the Vault wasn't going to just be full of treasure and end in smiles and rainbows.

While wasting time on TV Tropes I accidentally came across some spoilers for Borderlands and although I tried to avoid reading it phrases along the lines of 'face full of tentacle rape' tend to attract attention.

From these partial spoilers I assumed that the angel was a small scale cosmic horror trapped in the Vault and trying to trick you into freeing it. Then I got up to the end. And was disappointed.

So what actually happened? Well the Vault turns out to be a portal from this emerges:

Yes we all know what it looks like, get your mind out of the gutter

The angel then informs me that the Destroyer is vulnerable in this world. I kill it, am informed that it's gone for another 200 years, and then the camera zooms out to reveal a satellite with the word angel on the side.

What's annoying is that at no point was there any indication that a god-like being from some other universe was going to come through a portal. I was expecting a twist or some craziness at the end, even before reading the spoiler but I was expecting there to be some foreshadowing and for it to involve previously introduced characters and elements.

Also the last boss was kind of a pushover.

There was one bit of foreshadowing. The planet was called Pandora and I was trying to open a Vault. That should have set off alarms in my head but instead I just assumed it was a case of a random mythological name being used cause it sounds cool. After all, I was playing as Lilith the Siren who specialised in going invisible and elemental attacks; I had good reason to think there wasn't any meaning present.

What I can't decide is if calling the planet Pandora was genius or unimaginative. Did they use the name because they couldn't come up with anything subtle or clever, or did they very sneakily double-bluff me and all the other gamers by making us think that they wouldn't do something so obvious.

And because there can never be enough mentally unbalanced characters played for laughs, here's Patricia Tannis who in my opinion stole the show.

I wouldn't have cared if the entire game had been shoot bandits whilst Tannis goes off on non-sequiturs. Hell I would have loved it.

Clip Show

Several months ago I finally got around to turning clips from my various DVD's into GIF's. It had been an intention of mine for quite some time.

Like usual the simple idea turned out to be a complex endeavour that consumed far too many hours. In the end I worked out a 4 program system to do it......and I also filled my computer with viruses. One stolen account and reformat later I decided to put off GIF making.

But Present Me scoffs at the silly precautions of Past Me and decided to try again (no malware detected yet which could just mean it's well hidden). And so now I've encountered another problem; a problem I have met before with Garry's Mod. I don't want to do anything I can do, and what I want to do I can't.

Theoretically I can make videos, GIFs or just take screenshots, and from these I could make all sorts of potentially funny videos and so forth. The internet is practically founded on humorous stuff made with copyrighted material (that and porn).

But in actuality making something halfway decent is a lot of hard work for very little reward. Look at this blog, the amount of time I invest in this is way more than the amount of enjoyment people (assuming this is read) get out of it (assuming they enjoy it).

So basically, I've once again risked my computer for the ability to do things I don't need to do.

P.S. Here are some awesome screenshots from FLCL:

Don't mind me, I'm just chilling out.

Even in context this shot is both brilliant and wrong.

Sanity? Who needs that when you have got a shotgun-guitar.

Final Flawed

I wasted several hours this morning getting my ass handed to me repeatedly in Dissidia, so it seems like a good time to follow up on bad recurring elements of the Final Fantasy.

Unbalanced Enemies

Character customisation is a staple of a lot FF games and other RPG's. The more choices and depth the better right? Wrong.
Developers find themselves in a fix when they let their players have too much freedom as it becomes hard to design challenging enemies; what's challenging for a team of fast hitting melee characters will be different from a team of healers who slowly whittle down the enemy.
So what is the solution? If you answered make the enemies so hard that it doesn't matter what you do then not only are you correct but you are also a bastard.

This is most noticeable in the case of bosses. Since the player may have powerful status effects (petrify, death, confuse etc) many bosses are completely immune. Naturally the bosses will not hesitate to hit you with the same status effects, often several at once. This is by no means the only dirty trick; bosses frequently take free turns, use one hit kill moves, casually hit your entire party with AoE or possibly all of the above at once.
Examples? Pick any FF game. I'm sure that there will be at least one boss, if not more, that enters this definition.

If you do want to be specific in Dissidia computer opponents cheat newly constantly. They react faster than humanly possibly allowing them to block and dodge nearly perfectly. Further more they use abilities below the allowed level and they can equip items they outright aren't allowed to.

Unnecessarily Long Animations

I'm not going to on about long cutscenes as the actual gameplay provides enough fodder. Summons and ultimate attacks are present in most of the FF games. Unfortunately they normally come with a five to thirty second animation which may not be able to be skipped.

FF10's 2nd last boss fight has two magical stones which heal the boss. Both stones act at the same rate as a normal speed character and if you kill them they comes back several turns later. While the healing animation is only several seconds long it adds up to a considerable amount of time over the course of the brutal fight.

In FF7 there's a conjoined zombie monster or something. One half counters whenever you attack it. This counterattack takes the form of 7 or 8 seconds of seizures followed by an attack. Since this happens ever time you attack, this fight is dragged out for much longer than it should be.

Another Delay to Previously Promised Posts

Long ago in the depths of history I wrote at length about some of the things about L4D2 (summary: too soon). Having just minutes ago played the demo I'm going to voice my complaints about the more minor details.

Given that only the demo has been played and presumably Valve are still working on the game itself even now it can be assumed that several of the below issues will be worked out before release or soon after. In addition, people have also conjectured that the demo is using console standards (simplified graphics, gameplay etc) and/or has had features removed to minimise the size of the download.
This raises the debate of whether a free demo is supposed to be an accurate representation of a game or essentially an open beta test. But this is beside the point as this post is all about complaining about details that annoy me as if I was a person of relevance.

-You no longer can look down and see your feet. This probably seems fairly minor (and it is) but since the first game had this feature it's hard to come up with a reason to omit it.

-The gun's take up far too much of the screen. This is one of the things people are talking about as console elements (you sit further from a TV than from a computer screen hence bigger guns), and most likely will be fixed for computers at some point.

-The general gameplay and handling feels clunky and slow; it feels like an alpha version of L4D1. This could be another demo issue that will be fixed, or it could quite possibly be my imagination as I unconsciously try to find more flaws to validate my dislike for the game.

-I don't like the new music. For those who don't know particular music cues are used to indicate certain events such as tank attack, horde approaching, witch nearby. In the original the music was adequate, it wasn't the sort of music you'd ever sit down and just listen to but it got the job. In L4D2 the cues are.....different (festive, jovial, instrumental, I don't know enough to describe it well) and it creates the wrong atmosphere for me. They may as well be playing Yakety Sax.

-Another atmosphere destroyer is the time of day, at least for the levels present in the demo; It's a nice sunny day and the only noises are insects chirping. Now you could say that the peace and quiet juxtaposes the devastation and horror, but I say that it produces the wrong tone. Instead of feeling like a group of desperate survivors facing terrible odds I feel like a band of action heroes as they stroll through the ruins causally picking off the undead. Dark nights and stormy weather may be very clichéd but that's just because they create the sense of hostility very well.

-I'm not fond of the Jockey, one of the new special infected. The Spitter is similar to an idea of mine as I've said before, the Charger fills a role well enough, and the 'uncommon common' infected something I had been wanting since I first heard about L4D1. But the Jockey annoys me both visually and conceptually although I can see the gameplay reason for it. In game the Jockey jumps onto a Survivor and 'steers' them towards danger while the other Survivors try to knock it off. Conceptually it doesn't feel like a zombie and visually it is a short hunchbacked guy with no interesting features.

That's about all that comes to mind at the moment without having to go into the whole Australian censorship issue so I guess it's time to end abruptly.

Wherein I talk about everything but the ending

It's like an art student's orgasm

I finished Borderlands last night.

At first I was a little irked by how short it was seemed but Steam's log quickly showed that I had played almost 25 hours (WTF?!).

So what did I think of the game?

The Good

Visually the game is brilliant. The cel shaded style supports the game's tone of black humour and causal murder, and helps distant it from people screaming about it being a Fallout ripoff (not enough though).

Much to my surprise I really enjoyed the loot. In most circumstances I don't see the appeal in paying much attention to your character's gear and whenever someone starts bragging about their virtual weapons I'm like 'whatever fag/noob/commie/humorously-irrelevant-demographic.'
But not in Borderlands. With a disregard for sensibility and a love of fun, the game contains hundreds guns that run on pure awesome such as the shotgun that fires rockets, acid shooting machine pistols, 5 missile burst launchers and revolvers that have shotgun-spray.

Patricia Tannis. There's always a place for well done crazy people.

The Bad

The gameplay, although fun, is repetitive, easy and linear.

The missions are all MMO staples like kill 10 rats, which are just tolerable in MMO's because you are working towards a long term goal in an existing community.

Dying is just a slap on the wrist with a percentage reduction of your cash. But this is okay as horribly punishing deaths would take away from the casual fun nature of the game. What isn't okay is that as you the player get stronger the enemies go from challenges to speedbumps. It's a design that allows people who aren't doing well from being unable to progress but it also means that people who are doing well get rewarded with...no challenges.

Linear probably isn't the best choice of words; the game is an open world to an extent. Closed, empty or futile could also describe the situation. Like many other open worlds there is nothing to do in apart plot and side missions so the world turns into a scenic timesink. The status quo never changes in any way that matters and the only choices you'll get are whether you want to progress or not.

The Neutral

The plot is could use some more depth. I don't expect depth or brilliance for a non-story driven FPS but I'd like something more that 'collect the keys to get to the treasure'. As for the last hour or two, well that's the subject of a whole other post.

The Conclusion

I can't judge Borderlands completely as I only played some of the early parts with friends (oh did I mention the game is supposed to be co-op, cause it totally is) but from my mostly single player experience I can say that although it is no masterpiece Borderlands is much better than a lot of the FPS's out there. And if it weren't for the gameplay flaws mentioned above it probably would be a masterpiece.

MicroReviews #1

Whenever I write I find myself alternating between two states: unable to effectively explain my views adequately, and talking at length about minor details.
In an attempt to avoid these issues (the second one at least) I'm going to try my hand at doing several smaller reviews instead of one sprawling behemoth. This way I'll avoid bloating in favour of an unsatisfying lack of depth.

Paranoia Agent

Combines the unexplained surreal style of Serial Experiments Lain with the rotating roster of characters of Boogiepop Phantom. Unfortunately the meta-plot and in particular its conclusion let down the how which starts so promising. The visuals are definitely a strong point as the animation style varies in certain scenes to illustrate a point, such as becoming more stylised to reflect a character's delusions.

3/5

Dennou Coil

A rare sci fi gem; a series that introduces futuristic technology and then actual shows some of the effects it has on the rest of the world rather than leave everything else the same (eg most DC and Marvel series'). Dennou Coil follows several kids as they live in a world with virtual reality googles. The tone is fairly light for the most part, although it does get darker by the end as the protagonists unravel the conspiracy. Like Paranoia Agent the ending is weak and for the same reason; some of the characters are directly involved with the mystery and everyone else become irrelevant. Unlike Paranoia Agent though, it doesn't bring down my entire view of the show, it just could be better.

4/5

Ergo Proxy

It's been a while so I can't remember what I like about this series. Set in a post apocalyptic world where cities exist in domes the story is about Re-l Mayer's mission to discover the truth about the mysterious Proxy. Despite the meandering plot, absence of non-grey colours and the overuse of pretentious pseudo-philosophical phrases I still look back on this work with fondness and actually find myself liking the characters rather than just tolerating them.

4/5

Blue Gender

A post is not complete until I complain bitterly about something. Yuji wakes up from cryogenic sleep to find that a mysterious race of nigh-unstoppable monsters have wiped out most of civilisation and that what's left of humanity fight a losing battle with power armour. The flaws are numerous: the action scenes are boring, most of the characters exist only as devices and plot points, and the final aesop is horrible. Not even the frequent breasts make this series worth watching.

0.5/5