Because of this, I have always wanted to play Megaman X7. I needed to hear X go, "I'm through fighting, I'm going to look for a peaceful solution." It isn't on youtube (Or I couldn't find it.) The actual delivery of the line isn't as awful as you imagine it to be. It's delivered as lifelessly as the rest of the game.
After the second level I looked at myself in the TV, blacked by a long loading screen and said, "You could be playing a good video game."
Maybe Surfing H30 is that video game. I don't know. It doesn't work with component cables on a PS2. I got a demo video and then a black screen while sounds of me failing to be radical played. The demo video made the graphics look terrible in the way early PS2 games all do. I'm still going to buy the Japanese version if/when I find it. Also if I bother to learn what the Japanese version's name was.
I bought it for $1.99 because the premise of the Japanese version is AWESOME. Meteors are wrecking havoc on Earth so aliens from across the galaxy come to Earth to catch the wickest waves. The US version kicks that idea in the junk in favor of generic xtreme sports game that was so common at the time. It was published by Rockstar of all people, so I can't even understand why they would change after they made Body Harvest (N64). Body Harvest which asks you to find the TOLL MASTER not 5 minutes into the game.
I was going to put it off, but let's go ahead and talk about GTAIV:Episodes from Liberty City before I forget what I thought of it. First, it's exactly what I want from a GTA game and everything I hope GTAV is. I want that game to be 6 interconnected 10 hour stories that have the whole world unlocked from the getgo. Episodes is 2 12 hour stories with a bunch of bonus stuff that I felt okay not playing. They are also devoid of what made me quit GTA IV about 4 hours in.
Any game longer than 10 hours better be fun/challenging/entertaining all the time. It should starve off thoughts of my own morality. If it is a bad time for more than 5 minutes at a time it is making me a worse person. It is lowering my life quality.
While I'm no doubt years behind the rest of the internet on this, all the base bonus content in GTAIV is awful. More that it requires you play it to advance the story/make the game easier or more fun. The man-dates/real dates are all draining terrible wastes of anyone's time. The reward for the real dates is offscreen sex. In The Ballad of Gay Tony you can call a girl at any time to have off-screen sex with. Sometimes she even calls you.
I was trying to seq-way into this but it went somewhere else: The pool in GTAIV is awful. The pool in Duke Nukem 3D is better. Hell, the pool in Yakuza 4 is EXCELLENT. I guess it says something more about me how much bad pool minigame bothers me. In TBOGT they don't even bother to make a golf minigame any representation of golf. You aim your cursor exactly where you want it to go and if you hit X correctly twice it goes there.
In general improvements to GTA, IV helped with mission-checkpoints, immediately restarting missions, and keeping your weapons if you died. I stopped San Andreas on the "fly the terrible fucking plane under bridges but if you touch the water you ARE FUCKED". Which easily required 10-15 minutes of my life to get back to the starting point to fail again. I think I've tried that mission 3 separate sessions.
Let's actually talk about the game now! It's pretty good! The stories are easily a thousand times more swallowable than Niko's. I could never reconcile "I needed to get away from all the killing" with all the killing Niko does immediately before and after saying that. I've heard people argue for this, but it never makes sense in the face of him saying that he is tired of murders and then commits hundreds of murders.
At least The Lost and The Damned mentions this, "Look at this, I hope I never have to fight that Niko guy. He is psychotic." The Lost and The Damned has you playing the VP of a Biker Gang right when the President gets of prison. You've been making deals, keeping the peace, and making sure everyone has money to live. The President is a little more carefree about this lifestyle and immediately pisses off a rival gang and drives half the city to fucking hating you. I liked the cast and missions even when I didn't like the cast. It has a more expansion pack feel of the game as the levels are spread out across all 3 islands. Most of the missions in TBOGT are centered around GTA's Manhattan.
TBOGT's story is about the exact opposite of what you would think the title would imply. You play Gay Tony's straight business partner/clean up boy. You're never involved in the actual business, but you are always in-charge of cleaning up his messes. You're also a "self-centered greedy killer." Excellent, a GTA protagonist that knows exactly what he is! "I don't man, I kill for money." His self-awareness is really refreshing.
That doesn't have anything to do with being gay though. The game treats homosexuality like it treats American conservatism. Being gay is pretty weird! Almost every character in the game calls Tony a faggot, insinuates that you have sex with him, and they MIGHT be a closet homosexual. Your character takes it in stride, but Gay Tony is never shown being gay. He can never decide on his accent. It does show onscreen heterosexual sex at least twice, and has the possiblity for off-screen sex at any time (see above.) It even has a female character whose entire existence is to complain that you won't have sex with her.
The whole is someone going, "I'm not gay dude. It's just the title, but I'm not gay." Tony has a boyfriend who exists to be an asshole and get murdered. It's amazingly heterosexual despite the title. At least there's a rich Arabian man-child who misuses American slang wonderfully.
Much like everything the video I linked two paragraphs ago shows everything that I have been trying to explain and kills my wish to write more.
Next time, I'll talk about something that isn't video games!
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