Tag: video games

Beauty is symmetry, beauty is consistency

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

One of these is not like the others.

It is my goal to have my own copies of every Left 4 Dead poster that Valve makes, because I like Left 4 Dead, and I like the artwork in general. For that matter, I already own ten of these posters, and four of them are already framed, and hanging in my house. As for the others, there simply isn’t any aesthetic room in my house for them to go, but it goes without saying that one day, I’ll have every poster framed and hung, arranged in some sort of clever, aesthetically pleasing fashion.

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IT’S REAL

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Imagine coming home one day, and the power went out, so the electronic garage door opener isn’t working.  Because you’re accustomed to entering through the garage, you typically don’t carry keys to the front door.  Now that the garage has been incapacitated, how do you get into your house?  No problem.  Squirt a little omni-gel onto the locks, and voila – shit pops unlocked, you’re free to enter.

Imagine one day, your dad kicks the bucket, and among his estate is a locked safe, that nobody has the combination to.  Smear a little omni-gel on it, and the mystery is solved.

Imagine playing against me in Left 4 Dead, and get so frustrated at repeatedly getting beaten to death by me, that you throw your Xbox controller on the ground, and break it.  Instead of going out to Wal-Mart and dropping $40 on a new controller, coat it in omni-gel, and be back on the horse to pwnage in no time.

Imagine driving down I-285 through Forest Park, and spontaneously getting caught in the middle of a gang fight, and your car takes massive gun fire, catches fire, and begins to reach critical mass.  As soon as you can reach safety, pull off on the shoulder, and have your tech-specialist start pouring some omni-gel all over the car, and in no time, you’ll be back on the road to the next relay exit.

I can’t believe that omni-gel really exists!

You have received a new message at your private terminal, Commander

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last night, I finally beat Mass Effect 2.  It is officially the finest game that I’ve ever played.

As much as I love and play the hell out of Left 4 Dead and all the Resident Evil games, I can’t honestly say that I like them more than Mass Effect 2.  They’re either too one-dimensional, or their stories are too cut-and-concrete, one direction only, whereas Mass Effect provides options, paths, and a large variety of factors that tweak and customize the game into the player’s choice.

But in the end, the biggest factor for me is the storytelling of Mass Effect 2 that put it above and beyond from any other game.  Sure, a lot of it has to do with the personalities of the players themselves, but the fact that the game can change on a whim based on the decisions of a player’s emotions or thinking is brilliance.  The raw emotions conveyed by the characters and supporting cast of the game are a testament to the superb acting behind the story.

I can’t wait to play through it again, but as my imported super-heel character from the first Mass Effect, and I’m going to go all renegade up on the galaxy.

 

More ambitious villain: Chaos or Reapers?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Seriously, I don’t know how ideas like this pop into my head sometimes.  But I got to thinking about video game bad guys, and wondering simply who was the most ambitious?  Most of the time, video game antagonists really aren’t that ambitious if you were to stop and think about it; often times, they want to “take over the world,” or “kill Chris Redfield,” or something unoriginal like that.  And in the end, I’ve deduced my comparison down to two evil entities, who are similar, but not quite the same in their motives – Chaos (or Garland) from the original NES Final Fantasy, and The Reapers from Mass Effect.

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Nothing can be done about it

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

When playing Left 4 Dead, one of the biggest pleasures in the game is when you’re playing as the infected, namely the Smoker, and you manage to capitalize on a situation where the survivors must traverse an obstacle to where there is no returning once crossed, and you get that one perfect smoke, capturing one of the players, basically stranding them from the other three, and there is nothing that the other team can do, except accept their loss of one teammate as you watch with glee as your Smoker strangles the player to death with the satisfying neck snap sound at the very end.  There are many places in which this kind of scenario can take place, and it is one of the best feelings in the world when executed correctly.

I’m currently working an assignment now, for a company that I freelanced with back in the winter of 2007.   I was reluctant to come back here, because the work wasn’t all that glamorous, and most importantly, I didn’t like the notion that freelancers weren’t permitted internet access, thus cutting off my channel to the rest of the world; I work fast, and I like to create my own downtime, to which I like to use to chat, email, and occasional surfing.  But the pay rate at this place is among the best I’ve had in recent years, and since paying the bills and having beer money is pretty essential, I took it.

However, this time, I have an ace up my sleeve, and in fact it’s here while at work that I’m posting this clever analogy.

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Mage Designers

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Unless you’re a player like me who really likes to go through RPGs with as little reliance on magic as possible, then you probably play your own Final Fantasy games with a good enjoyment of spell-casting. Preferably, I like to fight; give me a cast of four Black Belts and after one turn, I will have hit the ogres about 72 times for close to a billion HP damage, terminated.

But today, I’m going to talk about the class that I don’t really use – the Mages, and then make a brilliant analogy about how it relates to my career and I.

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Behavioral studies of dorks

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Last night’s trivia was a wash, but I’m pleased that I have remembrance of certain obscure knowledge of like what brand of shoes the Heaven’s Gate suicide cult wore when they 86’d themselves, and that Pietro Maximoff, AKA Quicksilver, is the brother of the Scarlet Witch.

But anyway, the story for the day isn’t about trivia and its disturbing regulars that consists of lolitas, but simply a behavioral observation of dorks.

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