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Spider-Man: Web of Shadows

If you’re looking for a web slinging video game fix, Spider-Man: Web of Shadows might be what you’re looking for.  On my quest to find good games cheap, I ended up picking up Web of Shadows on Amazon used for $12 or so.  Being a Spider-Man fan and looking for a new game to play, I decided to give it a try.

Most of the Spider-Man games I’ve tried in the past were pretty pathetic really.  Usually just trying to leech off of the success of the Rami movies.  In fact I don’t remember a good Spider-Man since Sega Genesis.  So it was pretty surprising that Web of Shadows actually turned out to be pretty fun and well done in most areas.

First and most importantly in my opinion for a Spider-Man game – the web slinging is actually well done and interesting in this game.  That was the first thing that immediately caught my attention.  It’s pretty damn fun just swinging around in the city beating up criminals.  It’s very acrobatic and cinematic feeling and my favorite feature of the game.

Web of Shadows let you play the game with some moral choices affecting the game.  You can either use the black (symbiote) suit or the classic red (and blue) suit.  You also are prompted to make different decisions at certain points of the game and you can either choose the black (evil) response or the red (good) response.  I choose to play through the game as “good” although there were a few times when the choice was pretty hard to stick with.  I’m finding that my moral compass in these decisions doesn’t always match up with my intended play-through.

The combat is pretty damn good.  It’s very fast paced and the differences between the black suit and red suit are noticeable.  The red suit is more classic, fast, acrobatic style Spider-Man while the black suit is much more aggressive and powerful in it’s attacks.  Both suits have their uses in the game and while I liked the flashy moves of the red suit by about half way through I was favoring the black suit’s “get over here” move to much to really use the red suit anymore.

There are a lot of aerial, fighting above the skyline fights in the game that make things pretty fun to watch and play.  Overall, between the swinging and combat style of the game, it’s worth it alone.

The story starts off seeming decent but quickly gets drawn out and predictable.  Also, Mary Jane appears to be a complete hoe-bag now also.  Kind of strange.

There are some issues with the game.  Twice the game became unplayable for me.  One time in my wolverine fight, my Spider-Man just froze in place and no buttons would respond anymore.  I just had to wait for the bad guys to kill me off and reload my save.  The other time, Rhino got stuck in the wall and wouldn’t move.  Had to reset the game and reload my save point.  Besides these few bugs and the camera being pretty wonky at times I found the game to be good overall.

Worth picking up if you want some web slinging, fast paced fighting.  I’ll keep an eye on these developers for any other games I might want to pick up.

Exploring the Capital Wasteland

Last November I decided to revisit single player RPGs and to try and catch up with the rest of the gaming world and had heard about a couple different games that were good, Mass Effect and Fallout 3.  I ended up ordering both of them and started playing through Mass Effect initially and my first impressions were going well but decided to give Fallout 3 a spin just to make sure the disc and such worked (I buy used games usually – no way in hell I’m forking over $60 for a game unless it’s AMAZING beyond belief or it at least tricks me into thinking it is.  Right Tekken 6?  *grumble*).  Well, my Mass Effect disc was probably pretty lonely for the next 35′ish gaming hours because I played Fallout 3 pretty exclusively on my Xbox from there on till I finished it.

I did end up choosing the Xbox version over the PC version for the ability to sit around on my couch and felt I could enjoy the game more playing in my living room instead of sitting at my computer desk.  There is a mod SDK for the PC version which gives it some more variety and options over the 360 though so I’m not sure if I made the right choice there but I enjoyed the game regardless so I wasn’t too worried about it.

Story

The story of Fallout was pretty compelling for a video game and the ability for your decisions to affect the outcome of some things in the game is a welcome feature.  There’s actually a consequence for being a saint in a disturbing wasteland or being a complete douche.  I opted for sort of a middle-ground, slightly “good” character but didn’t really take shit from the NPC’s either and my moral compass did slip a few times and got impatient with something and just slaughtered someone to steal a quest item or objective or whatever.

The main story line seemed like it was in line with my “good guy” attempt at playing the game and while there was some predictable events through the main story, some of the events were pretty damn cool also which left a pretty fulfilling story experience.

Graphics

The graphics in Fallout 3 were just plain good.  The weapons, characters and everything was well modeled and looked great.  I thought I’d get pretty tired of the wasteland themed desert look and it turned out I was right but it took a lot longer than I thought to reach that point so it beat my expectation there.  I haven’t really ran into many new games that have bad graphics and it seems one of the main reasons for the huge budgets of these games these days.

Gameplay

More aiming on a console controller.  This was one of the other reasons I started second guessing my decision but Fallout’s new VAT targetting system makes the console aiming pretty bearable for my PC gamer roots.  The VAT’s targeting system allows you to sort of pause the fire fight and lock on to specific parts of your enemy, like shooting their leg to keep them from running from you or towards you, etc.  I found myself using this system quite a bit through the game.

Conclusion

Overall, Fallout 3 was an excellent RPG experience and am now looking forward to Fallout New Vegas which is coming out soon.  I may get around to trying the DLC’s for Fallout 3 before then also if I can get through some of my backlog of games.  If you haven’t played Fallout 3, what are you waiting for?

Shoryuken!

Street Fighter IV was one of the first games that I picked up when I got my Xbox 360 last year and one of the main reasons I wanted the 360 in the first place.  I used to love playing fighting games with my childhood friend Taurean and there was a lot of nostalgia behind my interest in the game.  I still remember playing the original Street Fighter II for a quarter in a little grocery store by were I grew up.  That store has been torn down and turned into a parking lot for years.  That along with all the arcades within a 50 mile radius being out of business, Street Fighter 4 has given me a little flashback to different times in gaming.

I’ve been playing Street Fighter quite a bit since I picked it up and while I am not at competition/tournament level, I have a pretty solid foundation in the game and enjoy it a lot.  There’s also a very deep community around it that has sparked quite a resurgence in the fighting game genre’s popularity – and in turn caused some pretty terrible games to be released to try and leach off it’s success. *cough* BlazBlue *cough* King of Fighters XII *cough*.

Besides the nostalgia of playing Super Street Fighter II with my old friend; over the course of the last 5 or so years and being mostly focused on MMO games, I have grown quite discontent with the competitive PvP aspects of MMO’s.  Quite honestly I don’t find them to be good “competition” at all – well at least the theme park style ones like Aion, WoW, WAR, AoC, etc.  I have some different opinions about the open systems of games like EVE/Fallen Earth but that’s a different topic.

Most PvP in those themepark style MMORPG’s is heavily dictated by equipment (and level of course) thus the main influence is time available to spend playing the game and “grinding” gear.  Now this doesn’t mean time spent practicing in a fighting game isn’t a factor.  It certainly is.  However there’s a difference between taking the time to practice combos, game mechanics, matchups vs. the taking time to “grind” equipment.  It removes a major portion of the human element from the competition and replaces it with game dice rolls and chance.  If I practice PvP (execution/strategy/etc) on my frost mage for 2 weeks and am wearing mostly green gear than I will likely still be killed fairly quickly by a fully geared gladiator rogue even though I may have superior skills in PvP.  This is an extreme example in many ways.  While it may be technically possible to kite the rogue 100% of the time if you got the jump on him and kill him due to game mechanics, your margin for error is incredibly small and in most cases you’ll be 2 shot by the rogue in reality.  There are dozens of variables on why someone wins a fight in both MMORPG’s and fighting games but ultimately in a fighting game it comes down to who is better at it.  While PvP in an MMORPG comes down to who has more time.

Now I’m not ragging on people for spending a lot of time playing games because if I was, I’d be struck down for being a hypocrite.  My point is in a dice roll combat system heavily influenced by stats/gear; a major portion of the fights control is taken out of my hands and decided by the game’s mechanics thus I no longer consider MMORPG PvP to be competitive or fulfilling.  I have had fun with it as a meta game within the larger scope of an MMORPG but to play an MMORPG for the sole purpose of PvP competition I find to be pointless and unrewarding.  Did you win because you’re better or because you got a lucky crit and they didn’t?  Did you win because they were wearing their PvE gear instead of their PvP gear because they’re out mining?

Now there are advocates that “war isn’t fair” so who cares if they’re lesser geared (i.e. don’t have as much time to play as me).  I still won!  Well I suppose you can look at it that way but to me it seems like you’re trying to sell the griefing session to yourself as a victory.  These type of people are usually also the first to complain about lag, an exploit (that doesn’t exist) or some other excuse when they loose; and it comes down to a simple truth.  They’re not playing to be competitive.  They’re playing to feel superior to other people or in the case of battlegrounds/arena; they are playing as a alternative way to grind gear.

Any form of skill brings with it an inherit sense of arrogance and pride.  That’s human nature and to deny it is to be untruthful.  The issue can resonate in two ways.  People that feel inadequate so they feel they must “conquer” other people to feel satisfied and people that have exaggerated egos and arrogance and can not handle the emotional impact of failing (and in turn crushing that ego).  These two situations usually result in camping, griefing and other unpleasant acts in MMORPG’s that I just don’t find in fighting games.  Now there’s bad losers in everything; I should know as I’ve gotten my share of hate mail on Xbox Live from sandy vagina’s in SF4 but even with that, the sportsmanship is still on a whole other level than what I’ve experienced in MMORPG’s.

Of course the amount of PvP that takes place in the open world, at least in World of Warcraft is small compared to arena/battlegrounds.  However the same issues apply in regards to gearing/stats/dice rolls taking priority over player skill.  There is one aspect of MMO PvP that fighting games don’t capture and that’s of teamwork.  Fighting games are mostly 1v1 scenarios.  However I would prefer an FPS over an MMO for a team style PvP game even though my FPS skills are pretty mediocre.

In conclusion, PvP is best served where player skill is the dominate factor over dice rolls and gear stats but that doesn’t mean MMO PvP can’t be an entertaining side game at least some of the time.

So I kind of got into a hurry making a post for 2009.  I wanted to spend some additional time talking about some things in more detail.

Gaming

I spent a lot of time exploring different interests in gaming through the year.  In 2008, I covered my interest in this a lot better, and I want to get back to that.  A quick look at my Raptr profile shows I’ve been pretty busy:

http://raptr.com/XingYuen

There’s some games there I finished and need to review, some that are an ongoing interest and some that I’ve stalled on and need to get around to finishing.  One thing I do want to point out about my reviewing; that is that I am a cheap ass for the most part and it’s very rare for me to fork over $60 for a single player game I’d probably beat once and never come back and play again.  Couple that with the fact I’m still years behind on the console gaming scene means the stuff that I’m playing and is new to me, will be old news to most people.  Don’t say there wasn’t a warning.

Games I finished in 2009 that I am going to review for sure:

• Warhammer 40K: DoW2
• Left 4 Dead
• Fallout 3
• Titan Quest
• Torchlight
• Plants vs Zombies
• Marvel Ultimate Alliance
• Company of Heroes
• Burnout Paradise

Games I’m still playing that I will write something about at some point:

• Street Fighter 4
• Tekken 6
• Left 4 Dead 2
• Guitar Hero series
• Mass Effect
• Assassin’s Creed
• Various 360 Arcade titles
• Borderlands
• Halo 3
• Bioshock

Other topics of interest:

• Various MMO experiments
• Call of Duty series and why they can suck a goose egg
• Hellgate London (die already!)
• Steam and digital distribution
• MMO’s in general
• More up to date progress in WoW/EVE (yeah EVE)

As you can see, this will give me plenty of subject matter over the year.  If I can get half of it done, it’ll be a huge step in the right direction.

Music

Quite honestly, I have been completely stagnant on this interest for the past couple years mostly.  I grew pretty tired and uninterested in the digital sampling production methods I had been using and felt blocked creatively.

I’ve thought about trying to pick up an actual instrument of some sort and explore that interest.  We’ll see where this goes.

Professional Life

Things in my professional life are going well.  I am working for RestorePro in Sandusky, OH.  They are a disaster damage restoration company and have been kind to me and given me a great opportunity to support their IT infrastructure from within the company and help develop some marketing solutions all while trying to keep up with the insane speed of web technology development.

Personal Stuff

As for personal stuff, I keep this pretty simple on purpose.  As always, I despise drama and bullshit in my life so this is pretty straight forward.  Sorry, no Springer to be had here.

Going on two years with my wonderful girlfriend Michelle.  Things are great on that front.

Got a new Jeep Liberty in the fall to get ready for the frozen tundra that is Ohio during the winter months.  So far this has been a good investment as last Saturday’s 4 foot snow drift in my drive way proved.  Fuck you snow drift.  Jeep > Snow Drift.  The downside of course is the thing sucks down gas like a crack head on the first of the month.  Guess that’s the cost of not pushing my car through a Blizzard.  So be it.

I started a weight loss regiment 6 weeks ago.  Down 30+ lbs so far.  Not too bad.  Moving into the IT industry 10 or so years ago did a number on my health but I’m going to fix it while I still can and so far things are progressing as intended on that front.  I’d like this to lead back into picking up my training in martial arts where I left it.  Still got a ways to go.

That should just about do it for now.

Started getting this error today while working in Dreamweaver.  Turns out, there was a pretty simple fix.  Just delete the WinFileCache-7A9586CB.dat, MacFileCache-BFE7CE2E.dat, or FileCache.dat file from the Dreamweaver user configuration folder.  File name may vary slightly.

Was located in: C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Adobe\Dreamweaver 9\Configuration

Well, another year in review.  I only managed to produce like 3 posts since my 2008 review.  LOL.  Pretty terrible use of a blog.  In any case, I do plan to make more use of Orboro.net this year (not that I have said that before or anything).

2009 went by fast, but not fast like the 7 or so years preceeding it where time was just a massive waste and blackhole but rather fast; because I pretty much enjoyed it.  I am still together with my wonderful girlfriend Michelle who has been supportive of me and all my strange quirks and personality.  My friends still kick ass and are true.  I have a better job now which has been motivating, a new Jeep (Justin 1 | Snow 0) and I’ve been setting things in motion to get back into shape.

Going to keep this short and sweet.

Shooting Zombies in the Face is Fun

Okay, this update is coming WAAAYY late, I know.  Better late than never right?  I ended up buying an Xbox 360.  I haven’t really been into console gaming since Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo – yeah, that long.  I owned an original Playstation and a Playstation 2 but never really played it much because I was into PC gaming by then and consoles seemed to limited.  I’m sure I missed a lot of great stuff along the way.

Resident Evil 5 is the first Resident Evil I played from start to finish, not because it’s the “best” one I played but because I never played the other ones really.  I seen the first couple back on the original PS in passing at friends houses or whatever but I never bought it/rented it or otherwise.  With no expectation other than shooting African zombies (I killed the white African zombies also, let’s not go there), I walked into Resident Evil 5 with a pretty open mind.

The game looks very nice.  I’ve been pretty impressed with the Xbox’s graphics, seeing as my last console experience was like playing with construction paper and dull Crayola compared to the stuff out now, most people probably already know it has good graphics so talking a lot about that is pretty pointless.

The game follows our protagonist, Chris Redfield, the whiniest zombie slayer I’ve ever witnessed whimper around the ghettos of African towns and villages slaying mutant zombies, mutant dogs, mutant tar monsters, mutant bats, mutant spiders, mutant praying mantis’, mutant sea horses – you get the idea.

Controls were strange to say the least.  Aiming with a analog stick on a controller was pretty hard for me to get used to after years of PC gaming.  At one point I would have compared it to jabbing a razor blade under my finger nail while submerged in salt water.   Once I got the hang of it though, the controls seemed reasonabily responsive and intuitive.  The knife was always sort of clunky to use other than breaking open stuff for herbs and ammo.

Speaking of herbs in Resident Evil, what the hell does gnawing on a tea leaf have to do with repairing half my brain being eaten by a rabid zombie?  The health sprays didn’t really make any sense either.  I get a spear thrown in my gut by a satan spawned tiki man and our hero’s solution is spray on a little Paul Mitchell?  Whatever.

The game was pretty short, but fun.  Not huge on quick time events being thrown in randomly but I guess that is pretty common nowadays on these games so it’s probably best I just suck it up and get used to it.

By far, the most annoying thing about the game was my stupid sidekick Sheva.  I wanted to kill her more than the zombies through most of the game and I’m pretty sure that’s not inteded.  Half the time I’m running away from her instead of the monsters so she doesn’t blow one of our Christmas colored “special” leaves on my 2% missing health that I just happened to get playing chicken with some thing that looked like a Starcraft Mutalisk.

Other than her, the inventory system is the remaining failure of the game.  Someone might want to apply some basic common sense.  500 rounds of ammunition taking up less space than a moldy egg?  Do the devs want to get anthrax mailed to them?  What the hell are they thinking?

Overall, I had a good time with the game and while I am not too keen on replaying it just to dress the characters up like clowns for alternate costumes it was at least worth 1 solid play through.

More fun Xbox 360 gaming is in my future I think.

I’ve updated the site to WordPress 2.7 and added a “lifestream” as the new default home page to the site.  The updates in WP 2.7 are pretty nice.  Especially like the Google Gears addition.

In passing today at the office, the discussion came up regarding Barack Obama’s stimulus package and how it may (but won’t) help our struggling economy.  During this conversation, I mentioned that you can not simply solve a economic problem by creating more money out of thin air (one of the root problems in the first place).  This seemed to create some confusion amongst my co-workers, and it struck me just how little people understand about our banking and monetary system, especially the Federal Reserve.  One guy actually told me that the money was backed by gold still.  Oh boy…  We’re in trouble.

Getting into this is a little off the normal path of where I was going with this blog, but what the hell.  This issue has bothered me enough that I feel really compelled to write about this and try and make some progress with this subject among my friends at the very least and at best maybe someone will pass by this and decide to do some of their own homework.

First of all, people have to understand that our “money” has no value outside the fact that our government has ordered that it must be an acceptable means to pay debt.  That’s what is called a “Fiat Currency“.  It’s backed by nothing accept the word of our government that it’s worth something and the belief of us that it is.  That’s a little scary in itself, but it’s pretty much the standard in monetary practice today.  However, now we’re going to combine this with our banking system being a “Fractional-reserve” banking system and things really start to look messed up.

This was explored exceptionally well in Zeitgeist: Addendum.  Some of the transcription is here:

A number of years ago, the central bank of the United States, the Federal Reserve, produced a document entitled “Modern Money Mechanics”.  This publication detailed the institutionalized practice of money creation, as utilized by the Federal Reserve and the web of global commercial banks it supports. On the opening page, the document states its objective: “The Purpose of this booklet is to describe the basic process of money creation in a fractional-reserve banking system”. It then proceeds to describe this ‘fractional-reserve process’ through various banking terminology. A translation of which goes something like this:

The United States Government decides it needs some money, so it calls up the Federal Reserve, and requests, say, 10 billion dollars. The fed replies, saying ” sure… we’ll buy 10 billion in government bonds from you.”

So, the government then takes some pieces of paper, paints some official looking designs on them, and calls them ‘Treasury Bonds’. Then, it puts a value on these Bonds to the sum of 10 billion dollars, and sends them over to the Fed. In turn, the people at the Fed draw up a bunch of impressive pieces of paper themselves, only this time calling them ‘Federal Reserve Notes’…also designating a value of 10 billion dollars to the set.

The Fed then takes these notes and trades them for the Bonds. Once this exchange is complete, the government then takes the 10 billion in Federal Reserve Notes and deposits it into a bank account…and upon this deposit, the paper notes officially become ‘legal tender’ money, adding 10 billion to the US money supply. And there it is… 10 billion in new money has been created. Of course, this example is a generalization, for, in reality, this transaction would occur electronically, with no paper used at all. In fact only 3% of the US money supply exists in physical currency. The other 97% essentially exists in computers alone.

Now, Government bonds are, by design, instruments of Debt and when the Fed purchases these bonds, with money it created essentially out of thin air, the government is actually promising to pay back that money to the Fed.

In other words… The money was created out of debt. This mind numbing paradox of how money, or value, can be created out of debt, or a liability, will become more clear as we further this exercise.

So, the exchange has been made and now 10 billion dollars sits in a commercial bank account. Here is where it gets really interesting, for as based on the Fractional Reserve practice, that 10 billion dollar deposit instantly becomes part of the bank’s Reserves, just as all deposits do. And regarding reserve requirements, as stated in Modern money mechanics:

“A bank must maintain legally required reserves, equal to a prescribed percentage of its deposits. It then quantifies this by stating: under current regulations, the reserve requirement against most transaction accounts is 10%.”

This means that with a ten billion dollar deposit, 10% or 1 billion is held as the required reserve, while the other 9 billion is considered an excessive reserve and can be used as the basis for new loans.

Now, it is logical to assume that this 9 billion is literally coming out of the existing 10 billion dollars deposit. However, this is actually not the case. What really happens is that the 9 billion is simply created out of thin air, on top of the existing 10 billion dollar deposit. This is how the money supply is expanded. As stated in Modern Money Mechanics: “…of course, they (the banks) do not really pay out loans from the money they receive as deposits. If they did this, no additional money would be created. What they do when they make loans is to accept promissory notes (loan contracts) in exchange for credits (money) to the borrower’s transaction accounts.”

In other words, the 9 billion can be created out of nothing, simply because there is a demand for such a loan, and there is a 10 billion dollars deposit to satisfy the reserve requirements.

Now, let’s assume that somebody walks into this bank and borrows the available 9 billion dollars. They will then most likely take that money and deposit it into their own bank account.

The process then repeats, for that deposit becomes part of the banks reserves, 10% is isolated and in turn 90% of the 9 billion or 8.1 billion is now available as newly created money for more loans. And, of course, that 8.1 can be loaned out and redeposited creating an additional 7.2 billion…to 6.5 billion.. to 5.9 billion etc.

This deposit-money creation-loan cycle can technically go on to infinity… the average mathematical result is that about 90 billion dollars can be created on top of the original 10 billion. In other words, for every deposit that ever occurs in the banking system, about 9 times that amount can be created out of thin air.

So that we understand how money is created by this fractional reserve banking system, a logical, yet elusive question might come to mind:

What is actually giving this newly created money value?

The answer: The money that already exists.

The new money essentially steals value from the existing money supply… for the total pool of money is being increased, irrespective to demand for goods and services, and, as supply and demand finds equilibrium – prices rise, diminishing the purchasing power of each individual dollar. This is generally referred to as ‘inflation’ and inflation is essentially a hidden tax on the public.

The problems of our economy is the system itself.  Now bankers and very large corporations have a lot to gain from this system so it’s never really brought to light by many of our politicians.  The very few that do are shunned or simply ignored like Ron Paul.

If you think any of these economic problems will be solved by bailing out banks, auto companies  or giving out stimulus packages, I suggest you do some real homework on the Federal Reserve and how it operates.  I would also suggest doing some research on the Amero and North American Union.  Stop relying what you see on CNN and Fox News for god sake.

I’ve been neglecting the ol’ blog a big, but things have been busy.  I’ve also been sort of stuck at figuring out a “focus” for where I am going with this site but on reflection, maybe that is just an excuse for me to procrastinate writing more.

Gaming

Not too much going on, been playing Left 4 Dead on PC.  Always fun shooting legions of zombies in the face.  Trying to catch up on the many single player games I let rot over the last year.  Watched a few MMO’s come out and fail (WAR/AoC).  Others shutdown entirely (Hellgate/Tabula Rasa).  By the way, I still hate Richard Garriott.  Otherwise gaming has been pretty quiet.

Music

Haven’t been writing much for a while now.  Mostly because I feel like I hit a wall in creativity and have just been recycling what I know over and over.  I really want to explore this more the next year with something truly different.  We’ll see.

Technology

Didn’t get to learn as much as I’d have liked.  I have pretty much completely moved away from Microsoft and ASP.NET and work mostly with PHP now, nothing much has changed other than some syntax.  The reason for the change is mostly because of accessibility and I just like the direction the open source community is going and didn’t feel that .NET was embracing that correctly.

Personal

My personal life started off as a bit of a mess last year but ended up turning around for the better.  Lost my job.  Ended a seven year relationship.  On one hand, it feels like a lot of wasted time, but on the other, I can’t even begin to measure how much happier I am.  Not really sure why it’s necassary to say bad things about each other now, but it appears I missed some type of memo that that’s what we’re supposed to do.  Ah well.  Some people need justification for the things in their lives while others can just accept them and move on.

I’ve been doing IT consulting/web development for Accurate Business Machines here in Sandusky, OH for a while now and that’s going pretty good.  If you need good deals on your office supplies/ink/toner, hit us up.

I am in a new relationship now and things are going great.  Got a new apartment which is a little bigger.  Overall, things are looking pretty good.  Now just to update this thing a little more this year.