Jeff Passan has an interesting article up about Mark Prior and his run of season-ending injuries. He goes into more detail than I’d previously been aware of about Prior’s early days and training regimen. Turns out, Prior was basically scientifically engineered as an experiment in creating a pitcher who would be faster, stronger, and better (though, sadly, his salary peaked at $3.6M, far shy of the six million dollars I can only imagine they were shooting for). The fact that Prior broke down so early and so thoroughly is evidence that there’s still a lot we don’t understand about pitching, and a lot we don’t understand about the stresses that such an unusual and demanding activity can place on somebody’s arm.
Though there is a lot we do understand about what a dumb fuck Dusty Baker is. A lot of the blame for Prior’s health troubles can and should be laid squarely at his door, alongside the blame for Kerry Wood’s career as a starter ending prematurely, the blame for Derrek Lee’s should-have-been 2005 Triple Crown not being, and the blame for turning a team that was this close to the World Series in 2003 into a lumbering last-placer once again. So, yeah, we understand what a shithead that guy is. Unless, of course, we’re the Cincinnati Reds, who inexplicably hired him even in light of what he did to the Cubs.
March 12th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
2 comments
Warhammer 40k Dawn of War II has been out for a while now, but I still haven’t picked it up due to my preference for waiting until games cost thirty dollars and buying them then. So instead of that, I’ve been replaying the original Dawn of War, fucking up some chaos demons and greenskins and goddamn irritating space elfs.
Dark Crusade was really up my alley. Instead of a weird story mode with arbitrary restrictions on what you can build and what troops you can field, it just gives you a planetary map to conquer, and every battle plays a lot like the skirmishes, but with cumulative results and rewards and things. That’s the exact play mode I want in these games, since one thing I’ve absolutely hated about every RTS I’ve ever played is how few options you have for most of the game. It’s like, hey, I know there are Terminator Squads in this game. How about you let me goddamn use them sometime before the very last level?
So Dark Crusade was great about that. It was also great about letting you play whatever faction you want and not sticking you with one or two "campaigns" while all the other factions are just for the CPU to play with. But you know what I didn’t love about Dark Crusade? Invisible units. I know, "but Darien," you say, "lots of games have some type of stealth or invisibility." And that’s true — lots of games do. But very few games make it work the way Dark Crusade makes it work. The invisible units in Dark Crusade can’t be fired on by anybody ever unless you have a way of making them un-invisible. And you know what doesn’t make them un-invisible? Attacking.
So, yeah, they’ll just stand there plinking away at you, invisible as the day is long, and you can’t do a fucking thing about it. No automatic reveal when they attack, no option to blind-fire in the direction of the shots and take a huge hit penalty, no AI that’s smart enough to make the troops fall back when something they can’t see is killing them — nothing. You know what’s the least fun thing in the entire world? When you’re nearing the end of sacking an enemy base, and the battle’s finally turned in your favour, and then you realise he’s reinforced with invisible units. And all your servo-skulls — which are the only unit that lets you see invisible, and which take up the valuable attachment slot where you could put a Librarian or an Apothecary or some other unit, and which have all of maybe 70 HP — got killed in the firefight. So now, even though you finally won this kickass fun seige, all you can do is retreat because your enemy’s just decided to bring in the magic unhittable units. That’s not very much fun there, game.
So what I’m saying is that I’d appreciate it if Dawn of War II is as much like Dark Crusade as possible, except without the terrible goddamn invisibility mechanic.
March 12th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Games, Warhammer 40k |
no comments
So I promised myself I wasn’t going to care about the World Baseball Classic, but, as usual, I’m a damn liar. I couldn’t resist cheering on Team USA as we beat the late Team Canada to a bloody, lifeless pulp, and then again as we defeated the forces of international villainy with our 15-6 win over Hugo Chávez’ Team Venezuela. But I won’t lie: the big draw for me has been watching the incredible antics of Team Netherlands, the unstoppable defensive superpowers that eliminated the mighty Dominican Republic to earn themselves a berth in the second round. No less a personage than Dominican manager Felipe Alou, who has certainly been around the baseball block once or twice, said of the Netherlands that "they played practically perfect baseball," which is quite a compliment given the fact that Team Netherlands is made up of Sidney Ponson and a bunch of amateur Dutch kids.
So, yeah, I got sucked into the WBC after all. Sue me.
March 11th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Baseball |
one comment
Psychonauts: It’s a few years old, yeah, but I heard that Psychonauts was the previous game worked on by Erik Wolpaw, and that was enough to make me want to look into it. The demo opens with a long-ass cutscene that isn’t Portal-funny or OMM-funny, but has a few laughs. Then the game finally begins. That’s where the trouble started, since, as is my wont, I opened up the menu straight away, and I saw this and this. A whole screen full of goddamn collectables, and a scavenger hunt list. I would like to take this opportunity to announce to the world at large that I do own an N64 and I have played my fill of 3D scavenger hunt games. From now on I am adopting a policy of immediately ceasing to play any game that presents me with a scavenger hunt list.
Ceville: It’s an adventure game, yeah. I do at least one adventure game every demo roundup. This time, though, I’m going to change it up and actually say something nice about it. Insofar as the demo goes, at least, it’s light on the terrible adventure-game-ness and pretty heavy on the style and humour. Ceville himself is a fantastic character; the despotic ruler of a stereotypical fantasy realm. His dialogue and antics provoke a good amount of laughs, especially once the paladin Ambrosius gets involved. If the game can keep up the funny and keep down the bizarro adventure-game logic, it could be a good time. But it’s not worth forty bucks to me to find out. At half the price, I’d probably pick it up.
The Graveyard: It’s pretty common that I’ll refer to some stupid adventure game, or maybe the latest Final Fantasy bore-a-thon, as being completely without gameplay. In retrospect, that was probably careless of me, since it’s devalued the term; when I tell you that The Graveyard contains no gameplay whatsoever, you’ll just think I mean it’s like Xenosaga: Episode One, which in fact has considerably more gameplay.
Now, to be fair to The Graveyard, it admits right upfront that it doesn’t have any gameplay. That’s not a surprise. You see, this isn’t a "game" in any conventional sense — it tells you right there in the Steam listing that it’s "an experiment with poetry and storytelling but without words." If you’re not in the demographic that lame shit like that appeals to, this game is not for you. I, however, happen to be in the coveted "pretentious twits" group, so I went into this thinking it might actually be pretty good. Unfortunately, it isn’t technically solid enough to pull it off. The whole game consists of walking an old lady to a bench, sitting down, listening to a song, and then walking back out. It’s a bit difficult for it to develop a real mood, though, because the animations are so limited; when Nintendo wanted to make a brooding meditation on mortality, they had the balls to put Mario in it, and had you jump on turtles in front of brightly-coloured backgrounds while they lectured you on life, death, and the meaning of free will. Tale of Tales didn’t have that kind of testicularity, and just built a pretentious, brooding facade to mount on their pretentious brooding. But, as I say, the animation isn’t up to snuff; it would never occur to me to complain that Mario only has one walking animation that plays over and over again, but that’s because, when I’m playing Mario, I’m doing something other than just watching him walk. When you’re playing The Graveyard, you really aren’t, and so the fact that the old woman only has one looped walking animation, and the fact that her feet don’t quite match up with the movement, thereby giving her an odd "floating" appearance, and the fact that she doesn’t have a proper turning animation and just sort of rotates, and the fact that she loops one simple "looking around" animation through the entire duration of the song… well, it all adds up to being really distracting.
On the subject of the song, it’s awful. I mean completely, magnificently awful. The lyrics are in German, and for all I know it actually works in German, but the English subtitles are laughably bad. Not that either English lyrics or German lyrics seem to blend well with the description of the game as "an experiment with poetry and storytelling but without words" — It sure goddamn does have words. The song is so long and there’s so little else that it doesn’t just have words; rather, I’d say it’s completely dominated by words. Honestly, if the song didn’t have lyrics, the game would probably work a lot better. Though fixing the technical issues should also be a priority; at the very least, they should make it so you can’t walk off the side of the screen. If you do that, the camera won’t follow you, and then you have to blunder around blindly trying to get back. That’s just poor.
Planet Busters: What the fuck is this? Guitar Hero Tetris? I spent about two minutes fighting with the bizarre controls and then quit. So I don’t really know.
Mystery P.I.: The Vegas Heist: Much like Samantha Swift and the Hidden Roses of Athena, which I discussed last roundup, this is basically Where’s Waldo with minigames. Samantha Swift’s visuals worked better for me, though. Also, some of the hidden objects in Mystery P.I. are just downright strange; I have no idea what a car suspension looks like, for example, and what they called a pylon doesn’t look a thing like any of the pylons I’ve ever seen. Not to mention sometimes they outright cheat — I was supposed to find a number 5 at one point, and it turns out that they were calling the S on the end of a sign the 5. That’s kind of bullshit. Even so, it was pretty fun, but I always liked Waldo.
Pizza Frenzy: Another Popcap game. This one’s about delivering pizza. You have to bring the right pizza to the right dudes before you run out of time. Like most Popcap games, it’s fun for a little while, but it gets really dull before too long. I understand that’s kind of the point, though. Also like most Popcap games, I’d pay five bucks for it, but at ten it just seems a bit too expensive.
Age of Booty: Capcom develops PC games? I didn’t know that. This is kind of a weird pirate RTS, and honestly it seems pretty repetitive and bland. The graphics and sound are appealing, and everybody loves pirates, but the gameplay appears to consist mostly of waiting for very slow things to happen.
Virtual Villagers — the Secret City: I don’t know quite what to think of this one. At first it frustrated me, since it seemed to take absolute ages for anything to happen, and there was fairly little I could do to influence things. After I got used to it, though, I began to realise that that was intentional; this is less a game than a virtual toy, and you’re only supposed to play with it every once in a while, while your villagers continue to work and improve while you’re not there. In that regard, it has some appeal. I might look into this one a little more.
World of Goo: The internet’s favourite indie game ever of all time. I didn’t love it. I mean, don’t get the wrong idea; it was cute, and it had some fun moments, but it seemed to rely a bit too heavily on really fiddly positioning and speed-mousing to suit me. You drag your goo balls around to make a big long goo ball chain, and then you connect it to the pipe and win big. Then there are different types of goo balls, and so on and so forth. Another game I might get into at half the price, but twenty bucks just doesn’t work for me. Of course, it was on sale this past weekend and I didn’t buy it then either, so maybe not.
March 11th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
no comments
Anybody else? You know, that was the E3 where Sony was going to show off its revolutionary new handheld game system that would totally crush that stupid two-screen nonsense Nintendo was rolling. In all seriousness, though, around about that time, it really did look for all the world like Sony was just about to crush all the competition out of the console market, and once they entered the handheld market, it was only natural to assume that they’d conquer that, too.
How the mighty have fallen. Sony has announced that it will post a loss of nearly three billion dollars this year. Now, it would be unfair of me to allege that the poor performance of the PSP and PS3 are wholly to blame for this — they are not. They are, however, largely to blame, which I never get tired of pointing out, since I was the one who predicted that maybe Sony wouldn’t get much love for a handheld much larger, more power-hungry, and more expensive than the DS. Maybe that’s just because I remember the Game Gear and nobody else does.
Nintendo, incidentally, showed a 5.5 billion dollar operating profit for 2008. So I was right, and the rest of the world was wrong.
March 7th, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Games |
no comments
I’ve been thinking for a while about how I don’t really want to get all political on this blog. I know I did during the election season, but before and since I’ve tried to keep that under wraps a bit, and just keep focused on lighthearted sweary stories about video games and food and baseball and bigfoot. But sometimes I just want to say something about current events, and the crazy slide toward totalitarian insolvency Emperor Stupid is leading us down. So I came up with a plan.
I started another blog. That one is all political, all the time, so if you’re interested in listening to my crazy thoughts about how maybe more government isn’t always better, you can check that out, and this blog can stay just about fun topics. Except that every so often I might post here anyhow if I feel the need to swear about something; that blog (as you’ll have noticed if you looked at or clicked on the link like some type of crazy man) is off-site. It’s hosted by Campaign for Liberty, and they have certain content guidelines, among which is "no swearing." I’ve read them through pretty carefully, and I’m fair sure I’m still allowed to use the phrase "Emperor Stupid," though. "Emperor Dipshit" would be entirely out. On account of the shit.
March 1st, 2009
Posted by
Darien |
Bullshit |
3 comments
