AP:  Yesterday I finally got my bike out of mothballs for this season.  After barely riding at all last year because I had a pinched nerve in my foot, and after an unusually long winter season here in the midwest the chance to FINALLY ride it again was awesome.  Finished up the day with a barbecue/bonfire and cigar.  Spring is now officially here.

Darksiders is dragging.  I normally like longer games but the way this one flows makes it seem super long in a bad way.

Flashback: Quest for Identity on SNES. Pretty cool for its time, but it's really easy to pick out some really bad game design. I just beat it tonight, and Christ, even on easy the last few levels were very stressful.

That used to be one of my favorite games back in the day.  There was also a ridiculously hard sequel on the PC I couldn't finish.  It was an early 3rd person 3D game as I recall.

Just had a super vivid dream about ghost hunting in a sewer system.  It started out pretty basic, trying to capture some EVP, and just kept worse and worse.  Getting lost, seeing and hearing things, this steadily increasing sense of dread.  It took us two days to finally get back out again and when I woke up I was completely disoriented because the dream seriously felt like it was two days long including taking powernaps in shifts which included their own nightmares.  Wtf?

I started with 3 and it is awesome.  HK may disagree though.

For me a C is an average score.  For example I gave Homefront a C because it was firmly average in it's gameplay and presentation along with some dumb plot devices and a short campaign.  I enjoyed RCR less than Homefront and the smug presentation of bad gameplay on purpose rubbed me the wrong way.  It's not a total loss, it's even worth playing for free/or cheap.

EDIT:  Actually getting past the bitterness over some of the late level assbaggery and doing some more of the free roam stuff I'll bump it up to a C+.  But that doesn't remove or reduce the rant .

Just beat Retro City Rampage (review up in the review thread) and I'm continuing on with Darksiders.  I've been wanting to jump over and start playing the Dead Space games but I'm forcing myself to stay on track and finish Darksiders.  Also I've been waiting for Microsoft to drop the price of the Dark Souls DLC so I can buy it and go back to playing it.  If it doesn't drop soon I'll probably go back to playing it anyway.

[Recently Completed:]

 Recently Completed: Retro City Rampage
System: PC

Time Spent: About 10 hours (for the main story and a handful of challenges, still lots of stuff to do like free roam and beating arcade games.)

The Story: You are a crazed thug sent through time to experience more 80’s video game and pop culture references than you can shake a stick at.  Seriously, the whole thing is made entirely of references to other stuff.

The Good:
+ The chiptune soundtrack is top notch. 
+ The graphics not only look like they are straight from a real NES game, you can customize the scanlines and even color mode (like let’s say you want to make it look like you’re playing on an ancient computer monitor or game boy.)  These first two points might seem minor but they really do help the nostalgia factor a ton.  I could almost believe I was playing it on a NES.
+ Good weapon variety.   There are nice little touches like the lightgun obviously sampled the sound of someone pulling the lightgun trigger (which makes it jarringly out of place with the rest of the chiptune sounds but it’s the “you beat the game god gun” so I’ll let it slide.)
+  Good vehicle variety.  Though with the sprite size it’s often difficult to distinguish between pedal bikes and motor cycles which causes frustration when you jack a pedal bike when trying to outrun the cops.  PROTIP:   Bicycle escapes are a bad plan.
+  A lot of challenges, some of which are fun, some of which are throw your controller across the room hard. 
+  I bet you’re expecting me to say 80’s references are part of the good right?  Let’s explore that more in the bad.
The Bad:
-  As cool as it is to see an 8-bit GTA clone (and the top down view is very old school GTA) the execution is marred by the fact that the sprites of the people are too friggin’ small.  They’re serviceable but they make the extensive customization for your character (tattoos, haircuts, hats, glasses, etc.) almost completely pointless because the detail is lost on the tiny sprites.
- References… yea… The first segment of the game is seriously fun.  I was really enjoying the goofball story (Bill and Ted’s phone booth, Doc Brown’s Delorean, crazed gunplay, whee!) and the gameplay pieces ripped straight from other games but eventually two things happened.  1.  I realized that, sort of like a Wayans brothers movie, the game has nothing original to offer.  2.  As the game went on they relied on worse and worse references.  For example, way back in the misty dawns of time I was the only person I knew who actually slogged through the painfully difficult original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle game.  If I ever enjoyed the game that enjoyment was completely overshadowed by the frustration and anger I eventually felt towards it as I ground onward until I finally beat it and guess what?  I never fucking touched it again.  Early on in the game there was a segment where you had to defuse bombs at a dam in a very obnoxious swimming segment.  As “homage” Retro City Rampage recreated that level but instead of defusing the bombs, you’re placing them.  It was like a traumatic flashback to have to replay that damn level.  I get that they wanted to reference “classic” games but choosing to replicate shitty game mechanics and calling it retro is bullshit.  You don’t go and recreate the worst that the era had to offer and you especially don’t add in another even shittier water level later while cleverly saying “oh no, another water level”  Being self aware that you’re being an annoying prick doesn’t make it better because you’re still being an annoying prick.  Haha, you cleverly pointed out that you’re using a clichéd concept and intentionally bad design but it’s still clichéd and bad.  Also out of nowhere there’s a series of driving levels at the end that are just as bad if not worse than the ones in The Adventures of Bayou Billy (another bitch hard NES game I beat and never touched again.)  If you want a retro game that recreates the 8bit era warts and all that’s fine but bad design should never be a “feature” in my opinion.  Also of worthy of special mention is an arcade game that features Super Meat Boy.  Inexplicably it’s a road racing game and even more inexplicably it’s a faux virtual boy game.  No one played the virtual boy because the red and black graphics are migraine inducing and unsettling.  Guess why I didn’t play the virtual boy “homage?”
Better Than/Worse Than: It’s difficult to quantify this because it’s not really fair to compare this game with its built in analog controller support to real old school Nintendo games and there were no open world games like this on the NES anyway.  And you certainly can’t compare it to GTA 4 or Saint’s Row Three or even the original GTA.     
Overall: C-  It was fun at first but got increasingly annoying, sort of the like the bad NES games that have not aged well at all.  Still there’s a couple bucks worth of fun in there, if you can nab it on sale (five bucks or less) give it a go but don’t even think about paying the full fifteen dollar asking price.

Feel free to use my Katie and the Hobo strip :p

Actually nevermind, I never did get around to cleaning it up and coloring it.

Just started Darker Than Black, seems good so far.

That sums up most of the internet Yut.  

I always wondered why they refused to leverage any property that wasn't Star Wars.  And I'm not sad at the closing as much as the symbolic end of an era.  The glory days are long gone and all the old talent is long gone.  TellTale has Monkey Island and Sam and Max, I just hope to see Full Throttle make its way back to Tim Schafer and a good Indy Game like Fate of Atlantis would be nice to see again.  It's just sad how one of the best studios became a crap shovelware outlet.

If you haven't seen Trigun, Cowboy BeBop or Samurai Champloo those are must watch shows.  (Not sure what Netflix has for anime so not all of these may be on there.)  Martian Successor Nadesico is fun, anything by Studio Ghibli, I liked Claymore but the ending was disappointing, Ergo Proxy is worth watching, Rahxephon was good but don't watch the movie before the show, it'll spoil tons of the plot, Gundam Wing is consistently good, the original Macross saga, Black Lagoon is some of the best post Cowboy BeBop gun slinging action around, Blade of the Samurai is very faithful to the original manga which I loved, Excel saga is hilarious (possibly skip the last episode, it's way over the top offensive on purpose).  That should keep you busy while I think of more and I'm sure HK will gladly toss some ideas into the mix as well.

Well yes, but what interested me about it was that it was supposedly going to be an M Rated star wars, never had one of those before.

That could be anything from a few f-bombs to a brief glimpse at naked booty (though I think that is pretty much a thing of the past based the reaction to it in the first Mass Effect) or just really excessive gore.  I doubt we're missing much.  Other than Full Throttle 2 which I'm still waiting for...

Since I got Darksiders 2 (which I can't wait to play) I'm trying to plow through Darksiders as fast as I can.