Freshly Buried: Paperless Billing

I was watching the TV a few days ago, something I rarely do, and I noticed something that pissed me off. It was a commercial, more specifically, an esurance commercial. It had something to do with a mechanical tree monster eating a forest, and a cartoon insurance saleswoman somehow thwarting this monster with the power of sex appeal, once again saving the world and her do-nothing love interest from danger.

This was a pretty stupid notion, but I wasn’t too bothered. It’s just a cartoon, afterall. But then, something happened. Something very, very stupid. These two cartoon characters had the balls to suggest paperless insurance sales were saving the environment. Disgusting. There are so many things wrong with such a claim, it borders insanity.

It was, very obviously, a shameless attempt to coerce environmentally conscious, but still dumb as shit consumers into buying their product. Seriously? I couldn’t believe it. Paperless billing saving the environment. Imagine that.

Buying insurance on your computer does NOT make you pro environment. Hell, even owning a computer makes you part of the filth you like to separate yourself from. Computers use a shit load of power, and what the hell do you think powers computers? All natural soy grass? No, wake up, stop living in the all-natural dream world. Your computer is powered mostly by fossil fuels, and nuclear energy. If you think Carbon Monoxide and Depleted Uranium are acceptable prices to pay for the convince of a computer, then a few dead trees from a tree farm (Not the fucking amazon, you idiot. Trees are farmed, not clear cut. If you want to blame someone for receding tree lines, blame poor Latino farmers who slash and burn forests for farmland to feed their families.) is a right decent price to pay for the convince of paper.

Esurance doesn’t give a shit about the environment and neither do you. Esurance is just looking to cash in on whatever idiots will buy their shit; and you’re just a self righteous moron. You buy food and products identical to non “eco-friendly” alternatives at insane prices because you think you’re saving the environment. You lobby foreign governments to require all natural food products, forcing millions of pariahs to starve. Your life is filled with bullshit and lies, and you try to hide your hypocrisies every chance you get, but you can never really escape the truth. The truth that you’re just a lying pig, and so are the people you buy your mud from.

/rant over.

Freshly Buried: Telltale Games

http://www.telltalegames.com/

In this age of realistic graphics, rhythm games and overhyped products, it seems gamers have abandoned a once glorious genre. Point and click adventures have seemed to disappear from John Q. Gamer’s radar and now only the hardcore remember old heroes like Guybrush Threepwood and Roger Wilco.

I have always been a big fan of point and click adventures. I would guess that I have played every point and click adventure worth playing, and certainly every one with any kind of renown. To a fan like me, the state of the point and click industry was depressing, to say the least. In the past, I thought the poor sales of newer point and clicks (Grim Fandango and Psychonauts (Another unappreciated masterpiece by Tim Schafer, but not necessarily a point and click.)) had all but murdered the genre. Apparently, I was wrong.

I first heard about Telltale Games when I heard someone was continuing the classic Sam and Max game. This prospect breathed a breath of fresh air into me and I immediately got my hands on the new Same and Max game. I had not played for more then 2 minutes, when a tear struck my eye. The introduction alone was absolutely beautiful. Telltale Games had done it. They didn’t simply remake the old Sam and Max games, this was no clone. They brought point and clicks into the next millennium.

As I played the game more and more, my jaw swung lower and lower. The game was very impressive, and It made me feel like a socially detached kid again. I could not stop playing. I ignored my friends, my family, and a couple of drive-bys in a majestic return to my obsessive youth. Yes dear reader, Telltale Games is the new face of point and clicks.

The writers of Homestarrunner.com have recently announced their collaboration with Telltale Games to produce a Nietzsche-esque supergame. An episodic homestar runner point and click. Read that again. A friggin’ homestar point and click! Soon, very soon, my new favorite game studio will unleash a game of epic proportions, and I will be there to tame the titan. Will you?

Modder’s Mound: Elemental TD

Mods are, more often than not, incredibly awesome things. The good ones tend to build a sense of community and promote longevity amongst users, while the bad ones are usually really fun to insult.

Personally, I have a great love of mods. It’s game design made easy, which makes the creative neurons in my brain dedicated to fantasy very happy. Often, I find myself heavily involved in a game’s modding community, as a user and a creator. Because of this, I’ve decided to dedicated a series of articles to mods, showcasing the many interesting custom games I’ve encountered in my digital travels.

My first mod is not a very elusive mod. If you’ve spent any amount of time playing Warcraft 3 on battlenet chances are, along with DotA, you’ve played it to death already. This article was not written for you; this article was written for those poor empty souls who have yet to experience it’s majesty. “What majesty is that?” you may ask, with your soon-to-be fulfilled lives, Elemental Tower Defense is that majesty, dear reader, rivaling spangled banners, twilight’s gleaming, bursting bombs and corn dogs. It’s even made a name for itself outside of battlenet as a flash game, and the reason for this is simple. It kicks ass. A lot of ass.

Time to renew your faith.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with tower defenses, let me take a moment to explain. They are a class of strategy games born from Warcraft 3. The standard objective of a Tower Defense, or TD, is to destroy several waves of creeps traveling through your maze of towers, before they reach the end. Every creep kill yields money, which you must use to upgrade your towers to thwart newer, tougher creeps. Some TDs throw in unique objectives, but almost all adhere to these basic elements.

EleTD is one of the most professional Tower Defenses available. It’s very clean and very polished. There are a few imbalances, but they aren’t too terrible. But now, let’s get down to gameplay. What makes EleTD so unique is the presence of “elementals” that influence your tower upgrades. Choosing the dark elemental allows you to create dark towers, the light elemental allows light towers, and so on.

Once you’ve gotten threw a few minutes of gameplay and you’ve chosen a few elementals, you can combine them in groups of two or three to create special towers with unique abilities. There are 41 abilities total and 123 possible towers, adding leagues of strategic depth.

Like most Warcraft 3 mods, EleTD has a multilayer component, allowing you to compete with anyone on battlenet. There are a few game modes to elevate your level of challenge, like race mode or insane mode, adding more length to the already long thread of replayability.

Anyone who owns Warcraft 3 and has not played EleTd, should pick this mod up immediately. It’s entirely free and incredibly fun. For those of you too lazy to look, I’ll provide a website link and a download link, should the website should ever go belly up and some future reader gets blue balls franticly searching the net for a copy.

Offical Website: http://www.eletd.com/

Akolyte’s Unofficial Download: http://www.savefile.com/files/1695716

(If both links die, please write my email (Kwaichangkaine@gmail.com) with the subject of “ElementalTD” for a copy)

Games From the Grave: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri

Global Politics

Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri is a turn based strategy game and the technical successor of Civilization II. What separates Alpha Centauri from Civilization most obviously is the heavy science fiction influence and the inevitable deemphasis on reality. There are a slew of new features in this game, which all add to the already high level of engagement.

You start a match by choosing a faction to play as or creating your own based on one of the standard political groups. There are a few to choose from, and they all differ greatly in ability and aesthetics. Like Civilization, every society has a leader who you can help, hurt, or manipulate. You can place military vendettas on those who you dislike, coordinate a defense with those you do like and grease palms with money, technology, or might.

There are elections for planetary governor, bills which can be introduced and voted for, and U.N. Sanctions for unorthodox and atrocious behavior. Military capability is based on research and resources, like most strategy games, but unique to Alpha Centauri is the ability to create your own vehicles and infantry based on your society’s knowledge, which can also be traded between factions.

Warfare is based on attack and defense points, where two troops match up and effectively trade numbers. Troops are constantly outdated as your faction grows and ages, and must be updated or recreated least you fall into severe military vulnerability. The combat is almost identical to Civilization, the only difference being a technological mask.

Also in Alpha Centauri are the detailed political systems from Civilization. Individual towns have Nutrient, Mineral, and Energy needs which must be fulfilled by you. The workers of a city will starve if there is a lack of food, and will grow restless without diversions and police supervision. The land around a city may be manipulated by “Formers” that can create roads, mines, forests, farms, and other types of enhancements.

The graphics are classic. Personally, I am a big fan of the 2d look and this game does not disappoint. The sound is also classic, and adds a very pleasant ambiance. Overall, the game has a dark, brooding, lost in space atmosphere, which I deeply adore.

This game is a personal favorite of mine. It incorporates a lot of my loves into a single game. The only thing missing? Zombies. But I’m willing to look past this gaping error and suggest it to anyone who likes space simulators, or strategy games in general.

Games From the Grave: Conker’s Bad Fur Day

Charming

Conker’s Bad Fur Day is a traditional platformer with a strong cartoon influence, much like Banjo Kazooie, Chameleon Twist, Glover and dozens of others for the N64. What separates Conker from the rest, however, is that Conker is an adult game. A very adult game. The humor found in this game definitely borders what some people might consider “tasteless” “woeful” or even “vile.” That said, I thoroughly enjoy this game. The humor, the characters, the situations, they’re all wonderful.

Our protagonist is Conker, a red squirrel with a taste for alcohol and destructive decisions. He sports a baby blue hoodie, running shoes, gloves for those cold nights, and of course, no pants. His quest is an epic one, to be sure. His goal? To find his way back home after a night of excessive drinking. Yes, this game is that awesome.

The quirkiness is hard to understand if you’ve never played this game. It’s very deceiving. You see a cute little squirrel doing cute little things, almost aimlessly. You might recognize this theme from early-morning children’s programming. But minutes of gameplay reveal the cuteness to be only an illusion. Our innocent little game is caked with dirty language, coarse characters and random acts of naughtiness.

Here is a brief slice of the game’s oddity. Early in the game you are tasked with assisting an anamorphic steel block, who is being crushed out of fear by an even larger, female block from a rodent menace, who plagues our geometric friends with onslaughts of gas emissions. The rat, who is cross-eyed, bucked toothed, and speech impaired cannot simply be smacked away. Oh no, dear friends, our enemy is apparently a closet masochist. Even under conditions of significant pain and blood loss, his quest to pester is not interrupted.

To help our metal pals, you must journey to a “cheese” pen, where wide eyed cheese wedges bounce happily in the morning sun. Their merriment is cut short, however, when you clobber them with your frying pan, kidnap them, and feed them to the gassy rodent, who’s hunger is so great he simply cannot be content eating merely one screaming, pleading cheese-person. Instead, he eats until he can eat no more and then, he eats some more. The vermin expresses a single regret, which not surprisingly, is that he has eaten too much. He then explodes in a fantastic and gory display, emitting a final fart from his dismembered tail end. In exchange for our murderous and genocidal errand, the friendly block thanks us for our assistance and gives us a snippet of advice. Joy.

A little later in the game, you convince a sunflower to “pollinate” by using swarms of bees with a penchant for tickling to immobilize her. Afterwards, she is so thankful you forcefully invaded her flowers without consent, she allows use of her large and supple breasts as a springboard to jump to an almost unreachable platform. I say again, this game is that awesome.

There are a few flaws, though. Our furry little friend is, for some reason, very slippery, which makes some of the more detailed platform work very frustrating. Thin strips of walk-way will be your biggest foe in this game, as even the slowest of movements can end in disaster. Though there aren’t many occasions where precision is necessary, when it is, you’ll find yourself repeating and rerepeating them, cursing squirrels for their poor taste in shoes.

Aside from that, the game is very enjoyable. The humor is slightly British, but thankfully not outdated. The biggest charm of this game is definitely not the platforming, it’s the abundance of strange and unadulterated humor. Anyone who enjoys a unique game should check it out, if you haven’t already.