Coming soon, 2 compelling photo essays: walking to work; walking the dog. My ongoing quest for photos to fill out a currently non-existent one entitled "The dog and the cat snuggle and are totally friends" is not gong well. Jones is constantly stalking and tormenting Jupiter, and Jupiter is constantly trying to snack upon his fat belly. I think somebody told her it is rich in nutrients.

Destructoid is doing a series on how to avoid embarrassing yourself in Team Fortress 2. Lord knows I could use it. Also, if you read this blog and you play TF2, the power of Christ compels you to tell me so.

Hey, while we're on the subject, my sweetie working a lot of extra hours (she takes the morning train, and then works from nine till five and then also takes another home again to find me waitin' for her) + a Gamefly membership = video game reviews!

skate.: Around the age of 12-ish, my folks delivered unto me a skateboard as a birthday present. I cannot remember why, maybe I had nagged them for it, maybe they thought I needed the exercise, maybe they thought it was a 'not gay' thing I could do? Who knows what goes through the minds of a skateboard giving parent? I was useless on the thing, I could make it go forward, I could turn, and that was about it. Never figured out how to ollie, no matter how I tried I couldn't crack that puzzle of exerting pressure here, then releasing pressure here, and moving yourself just so and so on. A lot of stuff came naturally to me as a kid, but not this. How frustrating! A few years later, a good grammar-school friend of mine came into possession of a little plastic toy skateboard, about as long as a ring finger, and he would 'ride' this thing around practiced and practiced and eventually worked his way up to the ability to ollie with this thing. Just like the real thing, where the upward motion of the board made it 'stick' to his fingers as he jumped it through the air. And what jumps, from desk to desk, from desk to chalkboard ledge and other equally impressive jumps. Try as he might to teach me the trick of this, I just could not pick it up. Now comes skate.: the skateboarding video game, whose main claim to advancement over Tony Hawk: the skateboarding video game institution, is a control scheme where in order to perform an ollie, instead of pressing a button you wiggle an analog stick around, down then suddenly up, or up then suddenly down. Presumably this is meant to mimic, at some abstracted level, the way you would move your body to perform this move in real life. All of the tricks in the game proceed from this mechanic, move the stick over here, then do some other thing with it, move it through a partial rotation, or move it suddenly in one direction at a particular angle, that kind of thing. And this is vastly appealing to me because it makes me feel like at some level, I am in on the magic trick. Anyone can press a button but only we, the members of the magic skateboard trick club, can move a joystick over here, then suddenly over there. Therefore, I am in favor of this game. As a fun way to spend ten minutes here, twenty minutes there, two hours over there also, it's a winner.

Heavenly Sword: It's the Andy Serkis game! Where you are the attractive lady with the red hair swording folks! Gosh it's really hard to not like this game, it tries so very hard to be a big step forward for storytelling in games,  and big and epic and 'cinematic', but it just doesn't come off. On the positive side, the gameplay is piles of fun, and it looks amazing, and the character performances are excellent, and just about any single element taken on its own deserves a list of superlatives a mile long. But it ends up being so much less than the sum of its parts, it is 100% sunk by the spots where technical limitations, or in some cases just necessities of game structure, crash into its attempts to ape cinematic tropes. And I think what's going on there is something like: this is a fantasy game (fantasy in the fantastical fanciful swords and magic type fiction), striving to be a big piece of fantasy cinema that you! control! But cinema of this nature requires sustained immersion, and does not hold up well when subjected to repetition. Botched lip-sync breaks immersion. A loading screen between a narrative-advancing cutscene and a resultant gameplay sequence breaks immersion. The first time through a boss fight, the bombastic orchestral score strikes an appropriately dramatic note, and the villain's diabolical dialogue helps sell the character. By the tenth time through same, the dialogue rings false, and the music seems less dramatic and more manipulative. Although I guess those are two different words for the same thing. Anyhow. It's like so...

You know what I mean?

The Orange Box: Just incredible. If you are able, get your greasy mitts on it and play the gently caress out of it. I have no more to say, other than all the things that Heavenly Sword gets wrong in its storytelling approach, Half Life 2: Episode 2 gets right.

Also HAHAHAHA.