Free Realms

Two days ago, Free Realms, a MMO went live. Basically, it looks exactly like World of Warcraft if it was designed by Disney, and considering how much Warcraft rips off Disney (magic brooms), it looks a lot like a Disney game. It should, though because it’s made for kids. You’ll see lots of flying pixies, and puppy dogs, and cake. Beyond that though, is the actual gameplay. Like many MMORPGs it hinges on a job system. You have your choice of a variety of jobs that you can move between freely. Unlike Warcraft, you’re not just stuck in the one class for the rest of the game, which is infinite, and unlike other games like FF XI: you don’t have to make a three-hour trek back to your moghouse just to change jobs. You change jobs AUTOMATICALLY when you start specific job quests, and you’re also able to change any time in your scroll bar. Each job also has it’s own outfit, which you can customize, so you have as many different pre-set outfits and equipment as you have jobs.

Free Realms “free”ly rips off every other game you’ve played. Warcraft’s the most obvious from the outset, but there’s also Bejeweled, Cooking Mama, Nintendogs, Mario Kart and Yu-Gi-Oh. These mini-games crop up whenever you try and do a job quest. If you’re a Chef, for instance, you have to play a Bejeweled-style game to get ingredients to cook food in a Cooking Mama game. While it lacks in creativity for the minigames, the way they’re used in the game itself is much fresher (in a Puzzle Pirates sense) than Warcraft, where you kill X number of targets to get X number of ingredients to make X number of items. You can actually have fun while playing. As for the fighting part of the game, you can play for years without having to enter a battle. If you want to be a Chef, you don’t have to go off and kill every living thing. You can stroll from town-to-town without having to deal with constant attacks from monsters and other players. The only way you enter a fight is by selecting an attack target, then you enter a separate game space where the battle takes place. This is the only area where aggro takes place. In there, however, it becomes exactly like a Warcraft Dungeon battle.

Free Realms is actually free to play, except if you want to try certain jobs, or want your own pet, or more gold coins than quests give out, etc. Then it gets into that whole subscriber bullshit, but what you’re given for free should be enough to sate most people. If you’re curious and want more, it’s 1/4 the price of Warcraft a month. A lot of people are going to fall into the ,“OMFG I want to be a Wizard,” trap, and they’re the ones keeping the site going, so good for them.

Like I said, it’s for kids, so theoretically there shouldn’t be all that B.S. that goes on in other online games. Problem is, when it’s not 30-something dangerous shut-ins living in their parent’s basements causing all the frustration and drama you see in Guild-orientated MMOs, it’s some 12-year-old with a potty mouth. Expect heavy-censoring in Free Realms, which is actually a good thing.

Lego Batman

LiveJournal Tags: Lego,Batman,360,games

I finally got around to renting Lego Batman for the 360, basically because it’s all you’d want to do with that game. It’s a kid’s game, even if it’s rated 10 and up. It was my first introduction to the Lego video game series based on movie franchises. Lego Batman is a video game based on a toy product based on a comic book/TV/movie series. In it, you can input secret codes found on McDonalds Happy Meal toys, which are based on the video game based on the toy based on the comic. It’s a game that’s made the top of the list for parents angry about cross-branding marketed towards their children. There’s no prize involved in that, but there is a prize in your Happy Meal. You’re supposed to walk away from the game you purchased or rented wanting to eat at McDonalds, go to Toys ‘R’ Us and buy the $100 Lego Batman Arkham Asylum playset and accessories, then immediately buy up every comic book, actions figure and DVD of Batman you can lay your hands on. It’s a costly affair.
There’s no dialogue in Batman, for some reason. Adam West and works cheap, so there’s no excuse for not hiring voice actors. Every cutscene involves Batman shaking his head at something stupid Robin did. It borrows from the cartoon and movie. Harley Quinn is a key figure, having originated in the cartoon. while the final stage is set in the Cathedral from Batman staring Michael Keaton.
Batman doesn’t kill: except when the people involved are made of Lego. Then he murders them with his bare hands and harvest their blocks for points. The point of the game is to destroy everything that can be destroyed and collect the Lego pieces, which fits in more with the Lego theme than the Batman one.
What’s the deal with all the Lego games? There’s a billion of ‘em for the PC. They’re even making a Lego MMO, which blows my mind. Have they given up on real Lego, considering that most Lego kits have been priced out of the availability market as they’re in the $30-$120 range? For that price you can buy REAL model kits and not some half-assed block version that doesn’t look anything like the thing it’s supposed to represent. The games are cheaper by comparison.

(S)wine and Di(n)e

Two people in BC have the swine flu, the hastily named disease that kills you dead in five days. I mention this because BC is a magnet for any outbreak of a new and rare disease. Previously, there’s been avian flu, S.A.R.S. and mad cow disease, all within 70 to 5 k.m. of where I am at any point. Several turkey and chicken farms in the Fraser Valley have had to be quarantined and the livestock culled because of avian flu. Considering how there’s over six billion people in the world the odds of a disease making it’s way from China or Mexico to one localized area numbering in the millions are small. Somehow, these disease bags are able to make that continent-spanning leap as fast as they can. No sooner will some pox emerge in a small village in rural China than it magically teleports to downtown Vancouver.
People cough on me all day, no matter where I go. Sometimes, their spittle, thick with lung butter, will leap from their mouths and enter my own. When they turn their heads and cough, they turn their heads in my direction. I will see people walk by with their children in strollers, and their children with have some form of terrible pox. In these situations, the townsfolk decide to take their diseased offspring out of school so they don’t infect the other children and instead take them to wherever they can find the most people in a crowded space, like shopping centres, sports arenas and airports.
If some life-obliterating disease eventually sweeps across the land, I’m fairly certain that it will make it’s first appearance in my backyard, and I don’t even have a backyard. I don’t even have a front yard, but still some hobbling, jilted freak is going to come uncomfortably close to me in a wide open space and proceed to spew out his infectious bodily fluids upon me in some vile manner, and that will be it for me. My town, my country, and my world are all conspiring to kill me.
I bet before it’s all over, a Rabbi will come out say, “That’s why God says, ‘Don’t eat pork.’” It will be the punch line to thousands of years of religion.
As for Mexico: you can’t drink the water, thousands of people are brutally murdered in drug wars every years, the air is virtually unbreatheable, you’re Catholic and now your pigs are killing you with their flu virus. Who did you piss off? I bet their name was long and unpronounceable, and some fat white tourist is taking a picture on top of his statue’s head right now.

The Legend of Douchebagger Vance Part II

So what was the purpose of me sitting in a gymnasium and listening to all this bullshit about the Canucks? It wasn’t just propaganda, it was peer pressure: the very thing all the faculty and Saturday morning cartoons and the Fresh Prince of Bel Air were trying to tell us was bad. If you live in Canada, and you go to school, the peer pressure to like whatever local hockey team everyone is rooting for is enormous. It fills every conversation. You could try and talk about your weekend and someone will cut in and say, “Yeah, I watched the game this weekend,” and someone else will pipe in, “Me too!” Then you’d have to sit back and listen to these fuckers go on about their inept opinions about what player should have done what and when.
Before Pokemon, people traded hockey cards in school hallways. They use to have hockey card scrambles where some asshole kid would throw all his unwanted cards in the air and everyone would run like he was throwing fifty dollar bills. Kids would get injured trying to nab some reject card he already had five of.
There was no need to have a school assembly talking about the Canucks. It was like calling in all the Hitler Youth after a rally. Let’s say every kid in school like the show Lost, back when it was popular. Based on that, should they then hold a Lost rally in the gym? WTF?
I wasn’t going to start liking the Canucks based on the say-so of my least favourite teachers if everything else in our hockey-centric society had failed. It was like a last-ditch effort to brainwash someone before sending them off to the death camps.
Back to the subject of douchebags, I was thinking more on the segregation of classes back in high school, and realized it wasn’t merely based on grades, but race as well. All the Natives and non-white kids (excluding honour roll Asians) were in the dummy class. You can say it was just happenstance that these children were in the “retard” class, but who’s giving them the grades? The teachers who put them there. So they’re being singled out under the pretence of academic achievement.  Let’s say you’re a C+ student, and you’re First Nations, or whatever “Injuns” were calling themselves at the time. You find yourself placed in a class for other “under-achievers,” and you notice that most of the kids in your class look like you. Meanwhile, there’s this white kid with about the same grades as you over in the “smart” class,” and save for a dash of yellow, all the other kids look pretty damn pale to you. Isn’t that racial segregation?
This was all for a teacher who made his class listen to Bruce Springstein, so obviously he’s a sadistic racist.

The Legend of Douchebagger Vance Pt.I

LiveJournal Tags: douche

I was thinking this morning of the pep-rallies I was forced to go to, or risk detention, back in high school. “Pep,” does not exist in nature, and “rallies,” are usually fascist affairs that end with someone being placed in an oven. Together, these two words describe an event of macabre fascination. Pep-rallies were usually held to bolster the confidence of people who already have too much, like the school sports team. Being popular was not enough: the required worship akin to Gods. Others were held like over-hyped prayer sermons for the Canucks. These were the worst, especially for a child like me who had no interest in hockey whatsoever. A hockey game was just something to be passed over while flipping idly through channels in search of brief glimpses of boob in the pre-internet days of the 90’s.
The entire concept of a pep-rally for the Canucks eluded me. These men were paid in the hundreds of thousands -if not millions- of dollars to do their dream job and went home to their overtly attractive wives in their McMansions to eat steak. They didn’t seem in dire need of my attention, or praise, especially in a group setting. The combined excitement for “our” team was somehow supposed to be able to magically transform from orchestrated shouting into raw vigour for burly men in sweaty uniforms hundred of miles away, who had no idea what we were doing for them. This resembled the beliefs of the “wackier” religions who felt that prayer in their mass sermons somehow amplified their wants and desires to a cold and unfeeling God. Let it be said that I am not magic: I cannot make things happen by willing them to happen. It takes some form of direct physical contact for me to do something. Furthermore, my implied intent extracted through duplicitous means will not gain you your vicarious glory. Why then am I being forced to sit in a crowded gymnasium and made to watch my school’s less-than-adequate cheerleaders fumble through their tumbling performance?
Who orchestrates this madness? Why, the biggest douchebag on the faculty.
But who could that be? The principal? The vice-principal? Both are firm candidates for biggest douchebag, but no, they can’t reach the heights of douchebaggery that this man has achieved.
The biggest douchebag of course, is always the gym teacher. This closeted homosexual who carefully crafts plans that involve young boys stripping down in a locker room he can observe through a window in his office that looks directly into the shower.
My first encounter with this man basically told me everything I needed to know about him. A high school is a large place, and it’s as segregated as it can be without directly violating any major laws. Based on your Grade, there were places you were expected to avoid, unless you wanted some dirty looks, or even a fist to the gut. Thus, you might not venture to the third floor, reserved for the older students. One time I was asked by my teacher to go to the upper storage room to retrieve some books for the classroom. I went up, following her instructions, but went to the wrong door. The key I was given opened into a computer room. A man sitting at a computer desk turned to me and asked me what I was doing quite gruffly. I told him I was looking for the storage room. He asked me, “Does this look like a storage room?” as rudely as possible. This was after the major offense of poking my head through a door into a classroom in my school, a class that was not currently in session. The door I wanted was across the hall, and looked identical to the one I had just passed through in an underfunded, due to be torn down, sort of way. Didn’t I feel stupid!
This was Mr.Keane, looking for all intents and purposes like Wayne Gretsky.
As a Gym/Journalism/English/History teacher, he was unavoidable for anyone trying to pass themselves through the school.
I mentioned segregation before: let me expand upon that. Mr.Keane was a firm believer in segregation. He separated classes based on their grades. If your grades fell below an “acceptable” level, you were moved to a different classroom, much as if you had special needs. This could happen for any reason: if you missed an assignment, or didn’t meet the Bell Curve average, or if he just plain shit didn’t like you. You were to be “educated” in a different sense than book learning. You’d be taken away from your fellow classmates as if you had a disease. Now: this was a man with some pretty bullshit assignments. Plus, he convinced the PTA and school board to combine classes. Math, Science and English class overlapped for group projects, which drained huge time and resources for students. These group projects included building shit like catapults, despite being dangerously unqualified for such tasks. Why do I say that? Because someone got hit in the head with a catapult. Not the projectile: the actual catapult. What did catapults have to do with Science, Math, or English? Nothing, but you were expected to say the opposite and stretch it out for eight pages in your final assignment You had to feed their egos, after all.
I can go on endlessly about how much I hated this man, or how creepy it was trying to change into my gym short with him around, but I’ll try to keep it to a minimum. He kept me out of Journalism class because he thought I was a loser and he never bothered to look at my writing. He considered it to be embarrassment to have a Peter Parker-lookin’ motherfucker like me interview such prestigious figures as the mayor of Chilliwack (no relation to the band Chilliwack). Ah Chilliwack: the town that had the Guinness Book of World Records record for most churches per capita: now a rural haven for grow-ops and crackheads who grew weary of pot. Surely, a lowly Eighth grader like me should never brush elbows with a God-like figure as the mayor of Chilliwack. What questions could someone like me ask, aside from, “How pathetic is your life?”
With a Journalism credit, I might have been able to advance my writing beyond this bullshit blog. Oh well.
This fucker, Keane, loved pep-rallies, and he loved the Canucks.
There is nothing positive to be gained from pep-rallies. They do not bring schools closer together. There’s no such thing as school spirit. It doesn’t exist. A school is a cold and sterile place you go after waking up too early in the morning. “School spirit” is the organized hatred of the rival school. You know, the one where all the available girls who aren’t dating your friends or are super-Christian/ugly go. The one where there isn’t lead in the drinking fountain water. After a pep-rally, the assumption is you should go to the rival school armed with baseball bats and do what you may like you were in Clockwork Orange. Their mascot is to be bukkake raped, and the remains put up on a pole.
A school assembly is just another place for a kid to avoid eye-contact with his bully. No one on the school faculty seemed to understand that, or how intrinsically gay assemblies are. There was never any need to host an assembly with regards to the Canucks when every kid in school was already talking about them ad-nauseum. It was unavoidable on TV, newspapers, radio, and in the school halls. I had alienated myself from virtually everyone with the mere act of not watching the game the previous night, or any night before that. I never watched hockey. It was boring; even the fights. Pulling a shirt over someone’s head wasn’t interesting unless that someone was a large-breasted female.
I had “friends.” They had friends. That meant I had to hang out with my friends’ friends, who were even bigger douchebags than my friends. Which meant they loved the Canucks, traded hockey cards, and considered anything not hockey gay. So, I had to listen about hockey and contribute nothing in every conversation. Then, I had to file into an assembly and listen to further B.S. about a B.S. team. Hooray.
The Canucks winning or losing does not affect my life at all. It only affects the douchebags I have to deal with on a daily basis. Will they be loud and obnoxious, screaming things like, “Yeah we did it!” or will they act like prissy little girls on their period? This is my conundrum.

Technorati Tags: douche

Stop Doing That

So your team won the big game and you’re excited. Why are you honking your horn? Why are you out, listening to the game on the radio in your car if you’re so obsessed over it? Shouldn’t you be at the game, or watching it on TV? At the very least, you shouldn’t be mobile, because if I know one thing about being Canadian, it’s that when there’s a big hockey game on, it’s completely dead outside. Imagine tumbleweed blowing down the streets. You could drive a tank through town and no one would notice.
For two hours last night, I had to listen to people honking their horns, solo and in concert. People would drive by each other and see a similar Canucks flag on the top of their car and honk like they’re having a wedding. This isn’t even in Vancouver, home to the Canucks. This is three towns away.
This wasn’t even the Stanley Cup, this was one of the final games for the Stanley Cup. Meaning: the excitement will get larger should they actually win the Stanley Cup.
I remember the last time Vancouver was in this situation, they lost the final game, and there was a riot. People were being shot with rubber bullets in the streets by riot police. They were smashing store fronts and burning shit.
One thing is true of Vancouver, which is true of most places, that people go apeshit when their town gets any kind of honour or mention. I’ve read front page articles from the Vancouver Province about the city getting some kind of ranking from some previously unheard of archive saying it’s the most liveable city, blah, blah, blah. When a city like Vancouver wins a big game, which happens to be the favourite local sport, they go completely insane. It’ll be like the Berlin Wall coming down.

For Your Consideration

For your consideration: here is my list of movies whose titles would not have to change should they become gay pornos. Some are quite lazy, others I barely get. I present them in no order.
Glitter
What About Bob?
The Fast and Furious
2 Fast 2 Furious
The Fast and Furious: Tokyo Drift
Fast and Furious
Star Trek: Insurrection
Pokemon: The Movie
Troy
The Crying Game
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
Meet the Fawkers
I Love You Man
The Soloist
Home Alone
Frost/Nixon
17 Again
State of Play
Sin City
X-Men
XXX
The Passion
Max Payne
12 Angry Men
Watchmen
The Third Man
The Pianist
Jaws
Strangers on a Train
Cool Hand Luke
8 1/2
The Grapes of Wrath
The Thing
Toy Story
Ed Wood
In the Heat of the Night
Good Will Hunting
Iron Man
The Iron Giant
The Wild Bunch
Little Big Man
How Green Was My Valley
Rear Window
Singin’ In the Rain
Show People
Some Like It Hot
South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut
The Great Dictator
Paths of Glory
Double Indemnity
Seance on a Wet Afternoon
Peeping Tom

Bullshinema

Hollywood has awards for everything, from Best-Actor to Best Sound-Editing. They even have Razzies awarded for the worst movies. It’s like the Special Olympics, where everyone gets an award for any accomplishment, no matter how small and insignificant, but what about awards for sheer bullshitery? Moments that make audiences want to stand up and declare loudly to the screen, “That’s bullshit!”
Here are my nominees:
Fast and Furious:
The scene:
Riddick is racing down a hidden tunnel along the Mexican/American border that was somehow constructed in complete secrecy despite the fact that the only way to reach it is at night, in complete darkness, while racing along a desert plain as fast as a souped-up muscle car will carry you before a border camera pans back and detects you, and the slightest sign of a disturbance will launch a helicopter after you. He being chased by dozens of cars down this treacherous, narrow path, and there’s another car beside him. There’s a wall up ahead, and he can’t pull away. So he reaches out the door of his car to the car next to him and pulls open it’s passenger door. Then, while traveling at ludicrous speeds, he jumps from car to car, pushes out the driver of the second car, and proceeds to take the wheel. His old car explodes as it hits the wall, triggering a cave-in/car-pileup. The guy he pushed out is run over. He explodes out of the tunnel, and revs the car so it rears back on it’s rear wheels. While he’s doing this, he’s being shot at by a guy without enough sense to get out of the way. XXX crushes him to death between his car and a wreck.
The Matrix Reloaded:
The scene:
Trinity is falling backwards out of a skyscraper window, in slow-motion bullet-time with glass shards raining down all around her. An Agent has jumped out after her, and he’s shooting down at her as she shoots up. One of his bullets actually hits. This is all part of premonition in Neo’s dream of something that happens in a virtual world. He later alters the scene by flying like Superman at speeds so fantastic they rip cars up off of the ground in his jetstream. He snatches her away before she hits a car and proceeds to remove a bullet from her chest by phasing his hand into her chest. This brings her back to life in the real world.
Also nominated: Everything else in the Matrix.
AVP:
The scene:
The Predator and the Woman escape a nuclear blast on a rocket-sled flying up a tunnel bored through hundred of meters of ice leading from an Egyptian pyramid buried in the Artic Circle. They’re flung from the sled at speeds that would easily kill a normal human being upon impact with the frozen tundra above, but they roll away unscathed and proceed to run on foot from the blast, jumping not once, not twice, but three times from the nuclear explosion as it tears apart the ground underneath them.
Also: I’d like to create the category for Worst Post-Credits Surprise-Twist Scene.
Nominated:
Every Marvel Comics movie in recent memory, such as the scene at the end of X-Men: Last Stand, where Professor X comes back to life by psychically controlling a comatose boy, but as for the worst?
The upcoming Wolverine movie apparently. Wolverine’s in Japan, drinking, and talking to the hostess. Nothing happens aside from a little bit of dialogue, making the scene a waste of time.
Also: the scene at the end of Max Payne, as if any human being could make it through the entire movie. It basically sets up the sequel which, God willing, will never happen.

Knightfall

I don’t really understand what’s going on with DC Comics. They cancelled four underperforming comics series such as Nightwing, Robin, Birds of Prey and Catwoman, and then put all the characters from these series back into the original Batman comic series that spawned them. Only: there’s no Batman. The single most popular character in the DC Universe is dead. Let’s say you like Coca-Cola. You like drinking Coca-Cola. So what does the Coca-Cola company do? They force all these other flavours on you like Vanilla Coke, Coke with Lime, etc., and what happens to good old Coca-Cola? It’s replaced by New Coke. People don’t like New Coke. They like the old Coke. So they bring back the old Coke, call it Coca-Cola Classic. It’s the same with Batman. You know there’s a 100% chance old Batman is going to be brought back to life through the miracle of bullshit. No one’s so retarded as to throw out their licence to print money, coupled with the fact that currently the Batman family comics are completely overrun with characters who were completely dead, such as Spoiler, and are now magically alive, despite the fact that the writers who killed off her, and others like her, eft no wiggle-room to bring her back.
This has all happened before. Remember when they killed off Superman? Do you remember how huge a story that was? People were pissed OFF. Teachers were talking about it in schools. Those comics were worth CASH money. This time: did you even know Batman was dead? Can you name who killed him? Did it make any sense? Is he even dead, or is he a caveman?
Superman was briefly replaced by a group of imposters/impersonators (there’s a difference). The same thing’s happening with Batman. This will go on for a few months until DC looks at how much money they’re losing and then give up and bring original Batman back.

You Don’t Have to Love This Town

So I bitch a lot about the town I live in, since I believe it’s justified. I never seem to run out of fodder to hurl against my insurmountable enemy. Yesterday, the rocks I found seemed larger than before.
I was driving my girlfriend’s son to the park, when, not a hundred feet from my apartment building, I passed five cop cars with shotgun wielding police officers. I didn’t know what was going on, all I knew was that they had their bandoliers out, and it couldn’t be good. By the time I even realized how bad a situation it must have been, I was already driving my vehicle through it. I’m not sure what the risk factor was, but considering how close a loaded shotgun was to the side of my car door, I’d say it was pretty high.
At the park there was the obligatory homeless man sleeping in the middle of the field, which of course went unnoticed until I had kicked my soccer ball over in his direction. Of course I could be wrong about his state. He could have been a blanketed corpse.
Later, when I picked up my girlfriend at work, I found she had been forced to sell a suit to one of the Bacon brothers, who are in the news every second day for being the target of hitmen. Police have issued numerous warnings that anyone in their proximity isn’t safe, because of the risk of being hit by stray bullets. I can think of at least two murders in the past few months that have been linked to rival gangs trying to take them out. So, to summarize: my girlfriend could have been shot because some asshole walked into her store.
I’m basically trying to raise a family here, and I have to worry about shit like stray bullets and stepping over homeless drug addicts. This is all happening in a town that doesn’t even have an Applebees. There is literally no advantage to my being here, and the disadvantages (such as being shot, or having your family shot) are huge.
Of course my family, my girlfriend’s family, etc. all live in the Fraser Valley, so even if I move one or two towns over, I risk being cut off from them. If you drew a radius for where I could move to and still be conveniently located in the proximity of our combined families, I’d still be living in a crime infested shithole filled with rednecks, and I’d still be no closer to an Applebees. So, I’m stuck that way. Also, I’m broke, and can’t find a job in the area that pays for shit, meaning I’ll never get the funds to escape anyway, so I’m stuck that way as well.
Joy.