Just Roll A d20 For SAN Now

All right, so, I’m awake. Given that last night I finally beat Halo for the first time and made the mistake of listening to the soundtrack to celebrate- and combined with the fact that I’d had a goodly amount of coffee soda earlier in the day- I was in no condition to sleep when I finally got to bed. Stupid adrenaline. The fact that I’m awake now is a bit of a minor miracle, but I’m up and I’m functional and I’ve been on the job for more than an hour already.

And now, as others have done before us, ( we return to Wolfenstein. )

I will be working on my Wolfenstein review later tonight, possibly alongside my next Rise of the Fallen stuff for milliways_bar. But for now, please enjoy my rendition of The Second Half Of Last Night's Game Of Halo: Combat Evolved, Which Camwyn Is Attempting To Play Through For The First Time Ever.

HOW THE HELL DO I GET OUT OF HERE
SERIOUSLY, MY OBJECTIVE IS ‘ESCAPE!’
OH SHIT I JUST FELL DOWN TO THE LEVEL I WAS TRYING TO BYPASS
HAVE I BEEN THIS WAY YET, I DON’T KNOW
SINCE WHEN DO THE INFECTION FORMS HAVE GUNS
OH GOD I HAVE BEEN THIS WAY ALREADY
WHY CAN’T I JUMP UP ON THE BOX, SERIOUSLY
DAMMIT THERE’S A WHOLE SWARM OF RED DOTS BEHIND ME ON MY RADAR
WOULD IT KILL THEM TO PUT A DESTINATION ARROW ON THE GODDAMN RADAR
OH GOD THE INFECTION FORMS HAVE GRENADES NOW TOO
I DON’T REMEMBER THE LAST TIME I SAW A SAVE POINT
OH THANK GOD THE ELEVATOR
OH CHRIST THEY FOLLOWED ME ON BOARD
YAY LIVE MARINES
BOO JUNGLE
WTF TELEPO- oh hai 343 Guilty Spark.


... thenk yew.

Or, welcome to the latest installment of Camwyn Stinks At Videogames. Today's entry: Wolfenstein.

( This part isn't spoilery. It's just my history with Wolfenstein; skip if you like. )

All of that is basically TL;DR for 'Played Wolfenstein 3D, loved it, got ill from the graphics, never did get to kill Chaingun Mecha Hitler, sob sob'. Beyond the next cut lies the actual first bit of gameage.

( Spoilers beyond. )

I'm still getting used to this whole 'online gaming' thing that everyone else in the universe appears to have twigged to about five years back. Given my lack of prowess with video games in general, this should come as no surprise to anyone. I have yet to ping anyone for a Halo 3 ODST game, largely because my current online friend group consists of jeditigger and I've usually already been in the middle of wrecking the Covenant-occupied areas of New Mombasa when I've gotten the online notification there. I tend to skip right over the parts of game reviews that talk about the ONLINE MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE, or the IN-PERSON CO-OP EXPERIENCE. I'm still a geezer in that regard; for the most part 'multiplayer' means 'okay, I died, here's the controller, give it back when you die'. It happens.

I'm also not really entirely used to downloading video games. My brain still wants the box, the box art, the paper manual, and the CD. It can, however, be persuaded to let go of these childish demands for a downloaded game demo, largely because it seems like the games I'm interested in have cost $50 to $60 since my senior year of high school. (The first video game I bought for myself with my own money was a first release copy of Civilization, and it cost $55.I know I bought something else for a similar price at the time but I'll be buggered if I remember what.) $60 is too much to pay to find out whether a game is going to interest me or not, so if I see a demo available for something that looks interesting, I'm gonna download it and give it a whirl. Last night I finished two demo downloads, and so sat down to give them each a try: Brütal Legend, and the most recent incarnation of Wolfenstein.

I wanted to like Brütal Legend very much. I really did. The storyline has you as Eddie "Voiced by Jack Black" Riggs, a deeply dedicated roadie stuck working for a skinny little nu-metal band whose members think nothing of asking him to build them a set 'more in line with our tween demographic' before going out on stage and claiming to be heavy metal. When a disaster happens on stage, Eddie gets transported to another universe that gives the appearance of having been derived from heavy metal album covers, and immediately has to fight off a bunch of creepy skeleton guys in crimson robes, all armed with long wiggly swords and general demonic imagery. He gets a double-headed axe and his guitar Clementine to do it with, and this is where the game fell apart for me. I knew, I knew, that if I persisted I would get to the storyline about the evil demon emperor and the enslaved rockers and the musical rebellion, etc. etc., and I wanted to get there, believe me. I truly did. But... well, it's a fighting game. This part, at least. Press X to use this weapon, press A to use the other one, press A + X together for the combo move that brings down the temple, press B to block attacks, that kind of thing. And while I used to play FPSes and not do well because I sucked at them, I played fighting games even less. I'd mostly just watch other people play Mortal Kombat or what have you. Never could get myself out of the button mashing stage, or get myself into the mindset of thrashing the enemies who just kept coming in from just off stage. By the time I got rid of the red guys and encountered the screaming weird demon chick (Eddie had some great lines during that encounter), I just knew it wasn't gonna be for me. Someone else is going to have to play this and have fun with the story line. Sorry, guys.

Wolfenstein, now... Spear of Destiny was my first FPS. I was horrible at it. I got motion sick playing it. And I loved it. Yes, it was cheesy as hell, with the early 90s graphics and the restoration of health by randomly placed turkey dinners or chicken legs and the enemies screaming "MEIN LEBEN!" and the dead bodies whose feet were always pointed at you no matter what angle you were looking at them from- all of those things. But it was the first game that I played where I wondered what must be going through the protagonist's head as he got battered as hell, or how feral and half-crazed he must have been by the end of it (anyone who could consume that big of a turkey dinner that quickly had to be ripping it apart with his bare teeth, and you can't tell me that fighting those Frankenstein guys in the upper levels wouldn't mess with his head). I owe the Wolfenstein franchise for that. I pulled down the demo with fond memories in my head, fired it up, and...

... oooh, pretty graphics ....

... very nice cinematic fight animation...

.... the hell. THE HELL. How did- BJ, where the HELL did you get half of the Orb of Aldur? It was round, it glowed blue, and when he was about to be shot down by no fewer than eight Nazi soldiers it suddenly induced a NO SKIN FOR YOU, MR. NAZI! moment, followed immediately by YOU DON'T NEED BONES EITHER. What are you doing with-

Okay, gameplay's starting, it looks like the shiny is part of the whole 'this is a universe where Hitler paid the Occult Bureau good money and got good results' schtick, and oh, hey, you have the Resistance to join up with, and at least you start off with a gun instead of that little stabby knife from SoD, and OH MY GOD EVIL NAZI PROTON PACK. Okay, it looks like it's just a gun and it may be freezing things, but it's still huge and bulky and steampunky and it shoots a wiggly stream of bright shiny stuff that (now that it's in YOUR hands) makes really bad people explo-

WHAT THE HELL JUST HAPPENED TO THE GRAVITY IN HERE, SERIOUSLY, I'M LEVITATING-

Oh. Okay. I got through the building having died and restarted from checkpoint about eight times and the demo is over. That's okay. I'm good with that. I, uh, have to go to Gamestop, I think. Yeah, the reviews from users are all 'nothing new to the shooter genre' and 'powers make it too easy' and 'these are all guns from Battlefield 1942: In the Glorious Company Of Bands Of Heroic Men, Who Are Also Brothers', but you know what? Don't care. I don't play those games. I don't want to play those games. I want to play this one.

So, if you're like me, and I know I am: Brütal Legend, not so much. Wolfenstein, hell yes. Further verdict will have to wait until I've played the game for realz, yo.

Meant to go and see 9 either Monday or yesterday. Didn't really get to, esp. since yesterday I picked up Halo 3 ODST. When I got home and turned on my Xbox, I glanced through Video Marketplace to see if there were any new Halo or Mass Effect trailers up. Not so much… but I did run across their rent a movie service, and since I had already prepaid a small amount, wound up renting The Mutant Chronicles.

Um.

I rather enjoyed it, but it was more for the sake of ‘interesting aesthetic choices’ and ‘wow, I like your cast’ than anything else. The storyline was like the Dark and Grim and Gritty sibling of Fifth Element- a vaguely explained ancient evil from Outside, an order of monks left over from a long time ago keeping the information about the evil thing, and the need to get someone modern with guns and stuff to fight it. The statement one of the monks made that life, all life, came from God and that this was the Enemy of all life and of Man and that it was from Outside- they used that word a lot, and you could hear the capitals- made some of it a little easier to handle, because then it could be nudged in the direction of either Mythos tinges or the C’tan Void Dragon from Warhammer 40k. But… well, they had trench warfare, muddy rainy 1916 style trench warfare, in what was supposed to be the year 2707. And people got pulled out of the trenches when their position was overrun- by hovering, very obviously not aerodynamic at all and therefore blatantly based on antigravity tech futureships. And the world was ruled by four corporations. And ‘mutant’ was used to mean ‘people who have been taken over by and completely subverted by or controlled by the creepy extradimensional machine’ rather than a reference to, y’know, genetic mutation or anything.

On the other hand, it had Sean Pertwee, Ron Perlman, Tom Jane, the woman who played Princess Nuala, the woman who played Miho in Sin City, the big black immensely civilized fellow who played Lennox in the ’98 Macbeth done by Michael Bogdanovich (I thought at first that I’d seen him in GI Joe somewhere but then he spoke with a British accent), John Malkovich, and Benno Furmann, who played Inspector Detector in the live-action Speed Racer and whom I consider the live action face of Gordon Freeman. And any one of them other than Malkovich was guaranteed to have at least one awesome moment of shooting or sword use, or occasionally both (Furmann got a really nice shot or two of gunning down mutants with two submachine guns, then throwing the empties away and whipping out a broadsword). And they were all really good at what they did. So that was something.

I have a feeling 9’s going to be a better movie, but this one was at least entertaining, if nothing else.

I then went on to Halo 3 ODST. Somewhere a fanboy is crying because someone has leapt directly into his beloved franchise feet first and is asking questions like “The little Covenant aliens that look kind of like leafhoppers and scream ‘We’re DOOMED!’ when you start shooting really well, what are those? Also, what are the ones belching green plasma fire at me? I'm not comfortable with green fire!’. However, the game so far is a lot of fun, and it doesn’t hurt that three of the voices are familiar… Nathan Fillion as the squad sergeant, Adam Baldwin as the squad heavy weapons guy, and Alan Tudyk as the demolitions expert who squees with joy over getting to drive a tank through the streets of New Mombasa. It'll be a long time before I play it on any level other than Sissy-Boy (the difficulty description for 'Easy' said 'the game practically plays itself'), but I'm enjoying it so far. And as far as multiplayer mode goes... well, allow me to sing you the song of my people: ahahahahahaha.

Not unless everyone else in the group is as much of a goob as me, anyway.

When last we saw our heroine, she'd stumbled ( into spoilers for Fallout 3. )

When we last saw our heroine, Ellen was sixteen years old and had just received her GOAT scores. As I mentioned at the time, that was the point when the screen went white for another timeskip, and that's ( where we begin now. Spoilers for Fallout 3 ahead. )

There we go, then. Our next entry will be Springvale.

Okay, first things first: I understand that the Fallout franchise has a pretty big fandom and that they're only marginally less terrifying than the kind of people who can read Transformers: Kiss Players and come out the other side thinking they've had a really good comic book experience. Allow me to state here and now that I've never in my life played any of the other Fallout games. Not the original, not Fallout 2, not Tactics, not Brotherhood of Steel- none of them. My entire knowledge of the games comes from Tvtropes, some glances around the Fallout wiki, and the comic series that the Penny Arcade guys did for the official Fallout website. I went straight to Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 because the wiki indicated that 3 wasn't a narrative sequel. I’m good with that. I'm not really interested in the other games just yet- I mean, I figure I'll play them one day, but right now I'm good with what I've got.

Also, I bought the strategy guide for the game. I've read some of it. I've deliberately avoided the parts that talk about the central plot and anything, anything marked with spoiler warnings, other than an accidental blundering into some of the background info early on in the book. I don't want to be spoiled for this game; I want to blunder through blindly. The character is, after all, sincerely and truly out of her element and it's more immersive this way. At least if I get completely blocked I have the book to turn to- and probably more save files than previously believed to be humanly possible to fall back on. In the meantime, if y'all've played the game or read the info, I'd appreciate it if you refrained from spoilers. Or at least put them in whitetext so people have to check the spoilers on purpose. Thanks.

That being said, on with the show!

( Cut for length and spoilers. )

So I acquired Fallout 3 for the Xbox 360 while I was on vacation this time. I started playing it at daniidebrabant's tonight. I will, I think, be alternating between it and Half-Life 2: Episode 1. I need to write up the Half-Life episodes for y'all, but I definitely want to do a Camwyn Stinks At Video Games run on Fallout 3. I've bought myself a strategy guide and read over some of it, but I'm making a point of leaving it at my place when I go to play, so that I get the full flailing experience.

I have decided that while Gordon's response to his in-game situation was "And that's when I knew Baby Jesus didn't love me any more", and Jack's in Bioshock was "I just wanna go home and work on the Kennedy campaign!", the Vault 101 Dweller's- at least so far- is "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH BIG BLUE CEILING BIG SHINY THING IN CEILING WHAT THE HELL." After all, neither she nor anyone else she knows has ever actually been outside. She's got a worse case of not recognizing the real world than most gamers. And I get to periodically stop when she's wandering around the Wasteland, look up at the sky, and RL scream "AAAAAAUGH BIG BLUE ROOM WITH NO CEILING AIEEEE." Agoraphobia's a bitch.

This is gonna be fun.

Sorry I haven't posted much lately, folks. I've had RL to deal with, and thanks to SEC regulations, a lot of stuff that goes on during the day is Stuff I Can't Talk About. Working on getting my passport, though, for whatever that's worth.

For those of you who liked the Camwyn Stinks At Videogames writeups, I'll be starting HL 2 Episode 1's writeup soon. I've also made stabs at my other three Xbox games so far. Bioshock I've played all the way through, Prince of Persia I've played for a little bit, and Stranglehold I've cleared one level and made it through two or three more missions beyond that. I'll be writing them all up as long as people like them, but I think I can safely say that so far Stranglehold is really my favorite. (Although I absolutely adore the Prince, and Stranglehold's control scheme left me screaming in frustration a few times.) I've downloaded some games from Steam as well, specifically HL: Blue Shift (yay, Barney!) and X-Com 2: Terror From The Deep. Blue Shift I might write up, because I love Barney Calhoun. X-Com 2 is for pure nostalgia value; I played it and its predecessor on my college computer, but it's not an especially narrative game, so any write up I might do for that would be rather different.

I'm considering one other game that I only know from several Half-Life fans' fanart, though. Can anyone here tell me anything about S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl?

Since I've got one entry left to write for Half-Life 2 and then it's on to the Episodes, I thought I should gather all the back material I've got so far here. Clicking the entry tags is all very nice but sometimes it's just easiest for me to have the links in one place.

Half-Life write-ups, aka the Homicidal Evil Space Chicken Reports:

Part 1: Knight of the First Crusade
Part 2: TENTACLES WHUT
Part 3: "Whoever wrote this episode should DIE!!!"
Part 4: Ho Ho Ho, Now I Has A Rocket Launcher
Part 5: The Final Apocalyptic Battle Of- Oh Hell, I Lived
Part 6: TESTICLE MONSTER. WTF.
Part 6a: An Interlude Upon The PS2
Part 7: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH

Half-Life 2 write-ups:

Part 1: WELCOME TO NEWARK
Part 2: WHOA WHOA WHOA NOT THE BATMAN
Part 3: NOT YOUR GODDAMN KWISATZ HADERACH
Part 4: STUPID CHOPPER, YOU GO SQUISH NOW
Part 5: RAVENHOLDM. U SUDNT COME HERE. With bonus links to the opus of Squirrelking!
Part 6: COME BACK WITH MY CAR
Part 7: BUGS BUGS BUGS IT'S ALL BUGS
Part 8: ATTACK OF THE TOCKLAFANE
Part 9: WELCOME BACK TO NEWARK
Part 10: MAKE THE SPIDERS GO AWAY

I should have part 11 done tonight, and then after that there'll be write-ups for Episodes 1 and 2. I do, however, have a question. I bought an Xbox 360 specifically so I could play other video games without having to upgrade my PC. Right now I have three games in the queue, and I’m debating which one to go after next. Are people interested in more game write-ups?

Poll #1223746 Game Writeups: Y/N/Which?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 50

Do you want to see more video game writeups from someone who stinks at videogames here?

Which of the following games do you want to see played and written up next?

Let me know. Thanks!