To Make Us Whole
Catch my essay on Flower at Spawn Kill this week! Link is here.
Review: Resident Evil 5
Belated but no less the worse for wear, my Resident Evil 5 review is now up on Spawn Kill. Check it out!
Passing Without Honors
Hello, everyone. You can catch Tuesday’s article at Spawn Kill. Click here for the link!
Procrastinating Already?!
Nay, I say to you. Nay. The reason you have nothing to read here today is not because I have not been writing. Because I am uncertain as to how well my PLAN B may or may not work, I don’t wish to say more, but for now it is enough to say that you should be getting something like a barrage of my writing later this week, one way or another.
Compromised Vision
It was not until partway through Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth that I realized H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology extends far beyond Lovecraft himself. Lovecraft Mythos, it turns out, is rather a complex and intricate web of story-cycles. And I had fancied myself “in the know” after only reading a short (and by no means exhaustive) collection of Lovecraft’s works. I hadn’t even scratched the surface. Therefore, I can’t rightly comment on how faithful the game is to its mythos. Perhaps I am not even its audience. Nevertheless, I was still subject to chills, and in that I must say it is a successful homage to Lovecraft.
Update
Sorry for the lack of content here, folks. The fiancé and I are cooking up something rather special for Two Bits. As a result, I am saving up a bit of content for the upcoming project. I’ll be sure to drop some updates as we go; we should be ready to show something very soon.
Thanks for reading!
UPDATE: We haven’t changed our plans, but I have decided to start updating again, twice-weekly! The first article went up today (20 March).
Incoming
A few more articles in the works. I’m going back to World of Warcraft again, this time to discuss why so many people play MMORPGs… alone. Also, I’m playing Metroid: Zero Mission right now, and my fiancé and I are playing the original Metroid on the Virtual Console. It should be an interesting comparison, and it will be Metroid mania here for awhile, because I aim to get through Super Metroid after that. I might also do something on Beyond Good & Evil, since I finished the game with the 1UPFM Backlog last December.
There are big things in the works for Two Bits, my friends and dear readers. Keep watching…
Prince of Persia and Stockholm Syndrome
Ideas do not exist in vacuums. It is a principle that holds true for poetry, prose – and video games. So if Prince of Persia is released at a time when the Nintendo Wii regularly sells out in stores, it will be difficult to examine its intentions without stumbling over phrases like “dumbing down” and “the casual gamer.” After all, the game seems to play itself at times, and the boss fights (which comprise the majority of the combat) are literally impossible to lose. How is Prince of Persia not aimed squarely at the “new” gamer? How is it not a simplified platformer meant to draw in a new audience at the expense of offering any real challenge? The discussion usually begs the question: is difficulty really the bar by which we measure a game’s quality?
Dragon Quest VIII and The Triumph of Tradition
I know I promised that I would write about the new Prince of Persia, but I just finished my first Japanese RPG – no, my first single player RPG – in something like 7 years. That is enough, in and of itself, to get me writing. Do not worry, though. I already updated my Facebook status to read, “Mike just finished his first single player RPG in 7 years!” You, dear reader, are going to receive a little more, because Dragon Quest VIII was a sublime, heart-warming experience. It was also a boring, mind-numbing one.
The Pain of Mediocrity
I went to the Halo 3 party tonight pumped. I was all set to shoot some fools and rock some heads. I returned downtrodden and beat down. The problem was not that I got rocked. I did alright. Sure, in my frustration, I insisted that I “sucked,” but that was not really true. I consistently held my own against players who far outmatched my experience and talent. The problem is I never won – except when I was on a team with the best player against a team that outnumbered us (a boon when you are playing to a pre-determined kill score). After awhile, I became frustrated with my inability to break past the glass ceiling of 4-6th place, and I had to stop playing.
