Monthly Archive for December, 2007

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Let’s get this straight

Published by Cody on December 11, 2007 in Rant. 4 Comments Tags: Christmas, holiday, Rant, religion.

This is the holiday season. It’s not the Christmas season. Indeed, Christmas occurs within the holiday season, but it’s not the only holiday. Both Hanukkah and Kwanzaa occur during the holiday season, as do Festivus and Chrismahanukwanzakuh. Multiple holidays = holiday season.

Honestly, I don’t care if you wish me a Merry Christmas. I happen to celebrate Christmas, so it doesn’t bother me. However, it wouldn’t much bother me if someone wished me a Happy Hanukkah, either, just because I’m pretty easy-going like that. And it certainly doesn’t bother me when people wish me Happy Holidays. They don’t know what holiday I celebrate. Maybe I’m an atheist who wouldn’t tell his kids that Santa Claus exists and would take offense at being wished Merry Christmas when I don’t celebrate it. Better to be ambiguous than offensive, wouldn’t you agree?

Seriously, though, I wish I could have one year without having to hear about people whining that they were wished Happy Holidays instead of Merry Christmas. There’s not just one holiday here, people. This isn’t The Hebrew Hammer and there isn’t a militant Santa trying to eliminate Hanukkah. Get over yourselves and get back to celebrating commercialism, er, I mean Jesus’s birth.

Oh LaRouche, you silly sod

Published by Cody on December 7, 2007 in Rant. 2 Comments Tags: conservative, crazy-people, LaRouche, liberal, politics, strange.

I didn’t think it was possible, but the LaRouchies on campus have gotten crazier. For the uninitiated, the LaRouchies are members of the LaRouche Youth Movement, and followers of Lyndon LaRouche, who’s been running unsuccessfully for president of the United States for the past 500 years. Both LaRouche and his movement (some may call it a political cult; I may agree) are known for their rather…er, odd views on things, especially the economy. For instance, nearly everything wrong with the United States today is in some way a direct result of the nefarious actions of some long-dead British author or perhaps group of authors. I’m dead serious.

Anyways, the LaRouche Youth Movement is known for its presence on college campuses where lunacy isn’t yet banned. They’ll often have a little bench set up with posters on the side invariably calling for vice president Dick Cheney to be impeached. Or for him to receive a blow-job. Again, I’m serious here. Cheney’s also the anti-Christ. Or the devil. They also appear to dislike Al Gore and anything regarding global warming. As a result, I’m really not sure where to put them on a political spectrum. I suppose LaRouche might classify as a paleoconservative, but I’m not certain.

Read up more about LaRouche and his cult–er, movement–and you can see just how out there they can be. You may even ask, “How could they be worse?” I’ll tell you: by blaming the apparent death of the US economy on a conspiracy headed by MySpace, Facebook, and violent video games. And the cult of Wikipedia. Uh, what?

Continue reading ‘Oh LaRouche, you silly sod’

Reruns

Published by Cody on December 4, 2007 in Asides. 5 Comments

No new House this week or next week. It’d have been nice to know that before I planned on watching it.

Exclusivity sucks

Published by Cody on December 4, 2007 in Gaming and Rant. 1 Comment Tags: BioWare, computer, console, games, Gaming, multiplayer, Rant, Star Wars, video games.

I’m unintentionally continuing on my gaming post trend. I was watching G4 earlier and saw some stuff about a new action/role-playing game called Mass Effect developed by BioWare. It looks pretty interesting, and I’ve played games by BioWare before. They tend to have a big emphasis on story-telling, and I love games with an engaging story.

Unfortunately, the game was released only for the Xbox 360. What’s worse is that BioWare has no plans to develop the game for the PC. Another good game ruined by what I see as a lazy developer. I mean, the PC is still a good gaming platform. Why, then, do so many developers come out with games exclusive to certain consoles? I don’t want to buy a freakin’ Xbox. If that means I’m not going to buy a game like Mass Effect, then that’s the loss of the game developer. Ignoring an entire (and rather large) portion of the video game market is about the best thing you can do to get people to dislike you.

BioWare used to develop games for the PC, too. Even the most recent game they developed before Mass Effect, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was made for both the Xbox and the PC. Before that, they were PC-only, since no one thought an RPG could really work that well on a console.

I really don’t have anything against consoles. They have their uses. I don’t want to be forced to buy one, though. I already own a decent computer. Buying something else that only plays games is a bit…redundant. And to have to pay for multiplayer? Seriously, no thanks. But it seems like PC gamers are being left behind, especially now that gaming consoles can look better than high-end PCs without costing nearly as much. Of course, if you add in the gigantic HD television set needed to fully appreciate the look of console games, the cost can go up quite a bit. Realistically, though, the PC gaming market isn’t dead yet. It’s not even close. But when good games are made for consoles and not for PC, it can be just a little bit irritating.

Dammit, that G4 review is really making me want Mass Effect. It looks like a sweet game. Curse you, BioWare! You might make me buy an Xbox 360, but I won’t like it… I know, I’m weak-willed. Sometimes.

Arcade games

Published by Cody on December 2, 2007 in Gaming and Rant. 2 Comments Tags: arcade, computer, Dragon's Lair, games, Gaming, old school, Pac-Man, Rant.

I don’t know why video games today are popular. I mean, look at where they started. The original video games were all arcade games like Pac-Man and Asteroids. Boring and hard. When they got stories, the dropped the boring part, but some of them were still freakin’ impossible. A very good example of that is the game Dragon’s Lair. It’s an old game, but you can still find CD-ROM copies for the computer. I recently discovered my dad still had a copy, so I’ve been playing it. Well, trying to play it is more accurate.

Dragon’s Lair is seriously the hardest game I’ve ever played. When it comes to gameplay, it’s rather simple. You don’t always control the main character. You don’t need to know where to go. The trick is the timing. It’s a rather fast-paced game and if you screw up, you have to start over. You start off walking over a bridge. Your character falls through and these tentacle things start moving toward him. You have to mash down on the spacebar to make him swing his sword and then frantically push the up arrow to get him to climb up through the hole in the bridge while the tentacles are distracted. Easy, right? Wrong. If the timing is off by even a second, you’re dead. This sort of action does not stop any time soon.

It’s even worse that you only get 5 lives throughout the entire game. You don’t always start over at the beginning if you die within that limit, but once those 5 lives are up, you have to do the entire thing over again. This would make anyone go crazy.

I just don’t understand how games got past this point. In all honesty, I would have stopped playing after half an hour of a game like Dragon’s Lair if that’s all there was. Even Pac-Man can really piss me off. Games today can actually save your progress and have adjustable difficulty levels, but these old arcade games have nothing of the sort. They all had one difficulty level: impossibly hard. And yet video games survived. Boggles the mind.

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