Board Game Corner: Epic Spell Wars Of The Battle Wizards: Duel At Mt. Skullzfyre

This is a real game.

Honest.

This is most certainly a real thing.

First off, this game is not really a children's game.  While bright and colorful, the game also has some humorous, over-the-top gore involved.  In fact, the art style of this game is very reminiscent of the art style of the show SuperJail.  Continuing on with the whole "Not for children" thing, this is the first paragraph of the rules booklet.

Once upon a time, there was a world filled to the brim with radical magic.  And not pussy magic, like rabbits in hats or shit like that.  No, it was kick-ass magic, where one guy blows another guy's head off with like, a fireball or something!  You know, BALL-ROCKING MAGIC!

The background of the game goes on for a few more paragraphs, but you get the idea.  While yes, some would think this kind of violence and language is juvenile, well, they're probably right, but it's still presented in a way that made me laugh out loud while I read it.  A rule book for a game has never done that before.

The premise of this game is pretty simple... Construct a spell from cards in your hand, and kill the other players.

At the start of each round, each player draws to their hand limit, which is by default 8 cards.  They then set one, two, or three cards face down.  There are three main types of cards in this game that'll be in your hand: Source cards, Quality cards, and Delivery cards.  When you play your 'spell' of cards, you can only play up to one of each.  So a spell can contain an S, Q and D, or just a D, or any other type combination.

You play the D.

The turn order is determined like this: The player who played the fewest cards plays first.  Any people who've played the same number of cards determine the order by the number on the Delivery, in this image, 16.  That's your initiative.  If you don't play a Delivery, you have an initiative of 0.  A 0 of two cards though is still faster than an initiative 0 of three cards.

We'll take two example spell here from the internet...

Sir Lootzor's Mysterious Dragon-Horde.

Hagatha the Heifer's Crushazorian Godstorm.

This game sounds like it could be used to create a metal album...

Anyways, in these two examples, we see that all three cards share the same glyph typing.  The glyph is the symbol in the lower left hand corner.  So this means, that for each power roll, you get a die for each card that share a typing with it.  For for the Godstorm, you get the one minimum, and you get one for each of the other two cards.  If you flipped the delivery in the two spells, you'd only get one die per delivery, since no other cards in the spells share a typing with it.  Wit treasures, and added cards to spells through effects, the maximum number of dice you can roll on a power role is four.  

The cards are all designed so they  reasonably fit together design wise.  You always resolve from left to right as well.  Now before, when i mentioned initiative, I said that there's a way to get 0 initiative with your delivery, which is normally never the case.  There are cards though, that act as wildcards.  They're called Wild Magic cards.  They can take the part of a Source, Quality, or Delivery.  If used as a delivery, they're considered initiative 0.  What you do then, is reveal cards from the top of the deck until you reveal the part of your spell the Wild Magic is replacing.  Then resolve the spell as normal.  

The Sir Lootzor card above mentions treasures, so let's dive into those next.

Why yes that's a Shit Wand.  Yes, it IS terrifying in game.

So we're going to look at these three.  The middle one is actually pretty scary, despite it's name.  If you're playing with just one other person, it's pretty useless, since, well, once they die, the match is over.  But in a larger game, you could be adding +2, +4, +6, or even +8 to your power roles.  If you're rolling two dice or more, that's a guaranteed max damage or effect on your delivery.  Another important treasure type is the shoe category of treasures.  There's one shoe treasure for each glyph type (Arcane, Nature, Elemental, Dark, Illusion), and the shoe treasure acts like an extra glyph in all your spells.  This means, if you have the Dark shoes, and a spell of three Dark glyphs, you get 4 dice.  If you have a card that says "Deal 1 damage for each different glyph in your spell", it counts as an extra glyph, and thus extra damage.  The effects vary but almost every treasure is useful.  One of my favorite treasures gives all your spells +10 to initiative.  Now, the highest, naturally occurring, initiative is 20.  Normally, stronger spells have slower initiative scores, so having this treasure could jump your initiative 2 spell to an initiative 12 spell, which could mean the difference between you getting blasted and you wiping out a few pesky opponents.

The last card type is called the Dead Wizard Card.  These cards don't affect the current match, but the next one.  When you are killed, you draw one of these.  Each time a new round in the match starts, all the dead wizards draw another Dead Wizard Card.  The point of this is to give you a handicap for being killed.  The longer you've been dead, the more of these you accrue.  The effects of them are things like starting with more HP, drawing a treasure at the beginning of the next game, adding a Wild Magic Card to your hand... or even having nothing happen.  There are only a few cards that go into spells that let you draw Dead Wizard Cards, so they're usually reserved for the deceased.

When I play, normally we play to 3 wins before declaring a victor, but you could almost play this game as long as you felt like.

The game ran me $30 at retail at a local gaming store, and I got the above Hagatha spell as a promotional extra.

All in all, the game is tons of fun, and something that has a decent balance of skill and chance to keep it interesting.  If you have any more questions about it, feel free to leave a comment and I'll try to answer as best I can.

The Deus Ex Effect

This post is going to be twofold.  First, it's going to be an in-progress review of Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  Following that, it's going to be a small expansion on one of the main themes in the game.

First off, I'm going to say that I'm a huge fan of the Deus Ex games I've played, those being the original, and now Human Revolution.

"What about..."  No.

Smarmy jabs at Invisible War aside, the series has always been great at a few things: Alternative paths through levels, options to fit a vast array of play styles, and absolutely nailing their setting.  

So, for the uninformed, the Deus Ex series is a hybrid First Person Shooter Role Playing Game.  The original released in 2000, and is a graphical mess by today's standards, but it was an ambitious game at the time.  When I play Deus Ex games, my first playthrough is always as a hacker who opts for non-lethal takedowns, and tries to stay out of view.  Granted, sometimes I fall on my face in the attempt, but you get the drift.  The main setting of the series is a dystopian future, where cybernetic augmentations are all the rage, and conspiracies are abound.  

The timeline goes Human Revolution > Deus Ex > Invisible War, so the prequel is what I'm in the midst of playing now.  

So far, what I like about the game is a few simple nods to how the technology will advance in the series.  In Deus Ex, all grenades can be tossed or thrown as normal, or they could be affixed to walls or floors and become mines.  In Human Revolution, the grenades have to be combined with a mine template in order to be used as a mine.  Second, we get to see the rise of augmentation in the series, as it played a plot point in the original.  In the original, you play a new type of Augmented soldier.  You are more biomechanical then mechanical.  By that I mean, you don't have gaudy metal limbs, and you look more human than machine.  Because of this, other members of the military organization, UNATCO, despise you because of it.  In fact, when you fight those two older edition cyborgs, you can defeat them using their deficiencies instead of in straight combat.  

The augmentations in Human Revolution are very obvious, yet they are extremely practical.  I don't the augments in Human Revolution are more advanced than the ones in Deus Ex, but I suppose some continuity issues must be accepted for gamplay changes over ten years.  

The biggest hiccup I've come across in this game has been the boss fights.  Now, in the original Deus Ex, there were usually some alternatives to figuring out how to beat the bosses, but in Human Revolution, the first Boss Fight I've come across was purely a single's combat with a huge mercenary with a giant assault rifle.  This forced me to do more cover shooting that normal, but this guy wasn't completely stupid.  He could throw 1, two, or even 3 grenades at once from his apparently inexhaustible supply of them.  Because of my habit for playing shadow-lurky, hacky, non-lethal takedowny character, I had some issue here.  It took me about 10 attempts to finally get a plan that worked (which was exploding gas barrel followed up by a few grenades), but getting around the room to get all that stuff was really difficult with his eagle eye.

Apart from that gripe, the game is absolutely absorbing.  I find myself reading emails that have no bearing on anything, I read some of the materials that are just lying around, like the newspapers and eBooks.  This does a great job of making the world feel lived in.  You see emails for maintenance work, or ones about inboxes being full.  You see actual employees wandering a building and carrying on work, and personal conversations.  It doesn't feel like people are spouting the same two lines over and over automatically.  

So that's the review portion of the game.  You should play it, if you're a fan of engrossing worlds and a fairly fun plot.

I really want to talk about human augmentation though.  Throughout the course of the game, you'll find people are split on the issue if human augmentation is either the next step of human evolution, or that it's an abomination to the natural order of things.  You can kind of see that happening in reality too, if augmentation technology advanced.  You can even see this a little bit today.

For example, in the last Summer Olympics, there was a sprinter who had prosthetic legs.  Oscar Pistorius had both of his legs amputated below the knees when he was a child.  The issue with him running with people who have natural legs, is that studies showed that his prosthetic legs provided an advantage to him over other runners.  His legs used less energy than a meaty limb would use, and part of that was attributed to less vertical movement when he ran.  You know when you run, your body bobs up and down a little, with the lifting and falling of your legs.  With his legs, he didn't have to use that extra energy, so his endurance went further.  

Now, some people supported him because he was this inspirational story that someone disabled and who suffered a tragedy when he was young is beating able bodied people.  Others feel like his running with other people isn't as impressive, because his limbs give an advantage.  Some people might even be worried that if people with prosthetic are allowed to use these technologies with non-augmented people, that it could lead to a slippery slope where people are cutting off their own limbs to get more efficient limbs for athletic competition.  

It's a fine line to draw, between how much of your performance is due to the person's skill, and how much is due to the technology.  This is a predominant issue in sports, but imagine it like this.  Imagine if you're working a data entry job, and you can type about 40 words per minute.  Somebody gets hired with a prosthetic hands that can type 90 words per minute.  If your typing speed is the sole basis for your performance, then you would be obsolete.  

I really can't say which is the right answer, because there's merits in both.  Do we make separate leagues for augmented athletes?  Do we prevent people with them from working certain jobs?  If we do that, will they be able to press discrimination issues?  if the augs aren't affordable enough many people to get them, then it just becomes another way for the rich to become more powerful, in a sense, than the poorer.  I'd like to hear some more opinions on this interesting topic, if anyone is willing to share.   

Warning: Disturbing Content - Silent Hill

Whew, back to vidya games. It feels good man, it really does. Been playing a lot of video games lately. Not like it makes a difference I guess, but I've been playing them a lot more than usual. Going back to Marvel vs. Capcom for the arcades, to Spider-Man on PSX, Castlevania... Some off shoot PC games like I Wanna Be The Guy, which if you haven't played it, you should. Sadists would love it instantly, being mind-numbingly difficult as it is, but there's a certain addictiveness about it that keeps you coming back for more, even when it becomes so frustrating that you'd rather nail your hand to the wall.

No, there's no picture for that. I'd rather not check.

Anyway, I remember part of my childhood just getting into playing Resident Evil: Director's Cut on PSX, and being terrified of it for months. It was something I had never experienced before. The atmosphere of the old mansion was perfect, and hearing any kind of noise made me jump like a little girl. I played the sequels after adjusting, and still, every time, those games would find a way to creep the living shit out of me. Eventually, I got used to it and bested those games because FUCK YEAH I KNEW I COULD!

Fuck. Yeeeeeaaahhhhhhh.

Until I rented Silent Hill.

I wish I had known at my tender age of 9 that this game was not meant for children. It's incredibly scary, and not in a "there's a scary monster down the dark hallway hurry up and shoot it" way, but in the "what the fuck i don't even" way. I honestly don't know how to describe the fear I felt experiencing that game from start to finish. It's definitely nothing normal and not something a 9 year old should be playing.

But my mom didn't give a shit. She rented it for me and single handedly fucked me up for life. Maybe that was her plan. Maybe my mom is evil. MAYBE MY MOM IS SILENT HILL. How fucking creepy would that be?

Well, if you haven't played any of the games in the long running series, then you wouldn't know. I'll start with the first entry, and hopefully I'll retain my sanity throughout this writing. Hey, did you hear something?

Silent Hill - Playstation - 1999 - Please end this madness for Christ's sake!

Am I being too liberal with titles already? Anyway, Silent Hill marked Konami's entry into the Survival Horror realm that had long been dominated by Resident Evil, and boy did it really put it's ugly foot in the door. Resident Evil had a cheesy plot, cheesy characters, cheesy dialog... it was just cheese. As revolutionary as it was at the time, Silent Hill came and took it so many steps further.

For starters, the game doesn't use a fixed camera and pre-rendered backgrounds. It's all rendered in glorious, blocky 3D, courtesy of the Playstation's limited hardware. However, for the time the game was pretty amazing. It's one of the first games I know of to use dynamic lighting, and do it incredibly well. One minute you're in the foggy daylit streets, and the next minute you're in engulfing darkness with a flashlight illuminating the way. I CANNOT STRESS THAT ENOUGH. The atmosphere that little flashlight builds is absolutely crazy. It really makes you question what is around the next corner.

Yep. 9 years old right here.

 

Building to the atmosphere, we have the radio. Basically, it emits white noise when there are enemies around, but it's enough to make you stop in your tracks. It starts as a small little noise, but as you get closer to your enemy, the fucking thing starts going crazy, getting louder and louder. It's one of the reasons this game still scares the living piss out of me. If I ever saw one in real life and it started making that noise I would probably die from shock. It's just one of the mainstays of this game and one that would go on to the later games in the series.

If Resident Evil is the king of horror games, then Silent Hill surely takes the cake for psychological horror. It explored new avenues that made it stand out. Fans still theorize about the game's story, but the general consensus goes something like this:

Silent Hill has a way of summoning people to it. In this case, it happens to be Harry Mason and his adopted daughter Cheryl. While driving to Silent Hill, a girl appears in the road and causes Harry to swerve off, crashing somewhere into the town. Cheryl goes missing, and Harry sets off to find her, meeting a few characters along the way. I say summoned because, 7 years before this all takes place, um, fuck this I'll just paste the wikipedia entry:

"Harry Mason had woken up in a cafe and meets police officer named Cybil Bennet--an officer from Brahms, the next town over. Cybil Bennett and realizes that Cheryl is missing. Silent Hill is deserted and foggy, with snow falling out of season^. Harry also meets Dahlia Gillespie, who gives him a charm she calls the "Flauros"; Doctor Michael Kaufmann, director of Silent Hill's Alchemilla Hospital; and nurse Lisa Garland, who worked at Alchemilla^.

Harry encounters a symbol marked throughout Silent Hill; Dahlia tells him that the girl from the road is a demon spreading the symbol, and urges him to stop her to prevent the darkness spreading with the symbol, and thereby save his daughter. Harry later encounters Cybil, who is possessed and attacks him. The player may be able to save her if they retrieved a particular item earlier, but if not they are forced to kill her or die.

The girl appears again, and is put under Dahlia's control by the Flauros. Dahlia arrives and explains that she manipulated Harry into trapping it, since only he could approach it. It is a phantasm of her daughter Alessa, who possesses vast supernatural powers. Harry awakens in a logicless void known officially only as "nowhere". He encounters Lisa, who realizes she is dead and begins bleeding; Harry flees, horrified. Her diary reveals that she nursed Alessa during a secret forced hospitalization of the latter in Alchemilla.

Harry soon finds Dahlia along with the apparition of Cheryl and Alessa, charred. Seven years earlier, Dahlia had conducted a ritual that impregnated Alessa with the cult's deity through immolation; Alessa survived because her status as the deity's "vessel" rendered her immortal. Alessa's resistance to the ritual caused her soul to be bisected, preventing the birth^. One half of her soul went to baby Cheryl, whom Harry and his wife had adopted. Dahlia then cast a spell that would draw it back to Alessa. Sensing Cheryl's return, Alessa manifested the symbols in the town to prevent the birth. During the endings in which Cybil survives, Dahlia reveals these symbols to be repellent^. With Alessa's plan thwarted and her soul rejoined, the deity is revived and possesses her."

 

...Did you get all that? Can we agree that Silent Hill goes much farther than Resident Evil ever has? And guess what?! The game has 5 endings depending on what you do. While Silent Hill certainly doesn't please in the voice acting category, it still does it much better than other games at the time did. All the characters sound the way they should; Harry being the "everyman", he sounds like it. He's clumsy, he's soft-spoken, and he says "Huh?" a lot. The more devious characters, again, sound perfect for their roles. It's a pretty well-crafted game for a first release.

But damn is it fucking twisted. There is gore, and lots of it. Silent Hill takes gore to a new level. When the world changes and goes to what fans call the "Otherworld" is when the game really shines. Walls turn to rusty, bloody, fecal (?), fleshy counter-parts of their regular forms. The floors change to rusted steel chain link fencing, or something else that isn't right. Here's a video of it, happening at only 5 minutes into the game!

You will also notice the music, if you want to call it that. It's more of an ambient rhythm. Sometimes you will have music, but most of the time it's either silence (hur hur hur) or some kind of heart-pounding, disturbing... ambiance. I don't really know how to explain it. All I know is it freaks me the fuck out. It took me until I was about 17 years old to play this game from start to finish because of all of this shit. It just fits together in a nice visceral package. It has to be played and experienced. It begs you to play it.

 

If you can handle that sort of thing.

Silent Hill 2 - Playstation 2, Xbox  - 2001 - Turn the mind fucks up to 11.

A Spinal Tap reference in this kind of post? How dare me! Anyway, released 2 years later on the much more powerful Playstation 2, Silent Hill 2 returned to once again scare the living fuck out of gamers worldwide. Except the Japanese. Nothing scares the Japanese. They probably play Silent Hill 2 when the family is all there, like a little bonding moment.

Silent Hill 2 doesn't continue the first. If we were to piece the games in chronological order, you wouldn't be able to. The first and third games go together loosely, and the second and fourth games go together loosely. THE SERIES ARE IT'S OWN MINDFUCK. Anyway, Silent Hill 2 stars James Sunderland as he travels to Silent Hill to find his dead wife Mary. Sounds pretty sketchy already doesn't it? Well, that's for you to find out as you play along.

Silent Hill 2 is a classic. It's even better than the first one. Not only are the graphics much improved to make the experience that much more real, but it's story is much better. You'll meet a new cast of characters this time around, and they all have their own issues that go much deeper than the first game. For example, the first person you meet is a girl named Angela. She seems pretty shy and a little afraid at first, and explains she's there to find her parents.

Why is this relevant to you? Because you find out that her father raped and abused her numerous times. There's even an enemy that hints towards this. And the place you fight this enemy?

SEX. EVERYWHERE.

Those holes? Yeah, a metal rod goes in and out of them. Notice the fleshy textures of the walls and floor. That's just a little taste of what you can expect from Silent Hill 2. It's that fucked up and it doesn't hesitate to let you know.

And lets not forget Pyramid Head, the game's villain. If ever there was a fucked up design for a monster, this one certainly takes the cake:

Wait a second, do I really need a picture? Everyone knows who he is! Even if you haven't played this game or watched that shitty movie. He's the ultimate punisher. He wields the biggest knife I've ever seen. He's just plain creepy. Oh, and he rapes a monster. Yeeeeaaaahhhhhhhh........

Graphically, the game is gorgeous. The locales this time around are much more sinister. The sound department did a great job in making you jump out of your seat as well. Here's what you can expect from this game. Little moments like that fill this game, and are bound to make you uneasy, or just frighten you to death.

The music is also something to behold. Silent Hill 2 is widely recognized for it's soundtrack, which is just excellent. You'll find some eerie tunes as you explore a hospital, a hotel, and an apartment building, and all of them are so unsettling that you'll want to escape as fast as possible.

All in all, from the atmosphere, the locales, the characters, and the best graphics yet, Silent Hill 2 marks the go-to title if you want to mess with your own head. It also has 5 endings that fans have argued about, and still do to this day. Just reading about the theories behind them is interesting and extremely disturbing in itself. A must for any gamer. It's that damn good. Also, it has a side scenario which adds to the story, and it's pretty interesting too.

Being one of my favorite franchises, Silent Hill still manages to make me uneasy. Just having me explain this to you doesn't do it justice; you need to play these games and find out for yourself. Think of creepypastas you've read, or whatever thing that scares you the most. Silent Hill evokes that feeling and does it so well. Just talking about it is making me uneasy here in my dark, quiet, empty house....

I just heard that noise again....

I'll be talking about more Silent Hill in the future. Don't worry, I'll cover three and four, as well as the newer ones!

3 Things I Hate About The Restaurant Business

This post doesn't even need all this text really. Anyone could just read the title and figure it all out. Restaurants suck to work in. It's a fact. However, they are awesome to be fat in, and spend money. Chinese restaurants are great bang for your buck.

In more ways than one.

You can spend about 15 bucks and eat until you're fatter than fat, until they start asking you to work there to be Buddha. Then you might want to consider a different career path than eating like a slob.

If they offer you an actual job, by all means take it if you absolutely have to. Otherwise, I don't recommend it. In any restaurant for that matter. AT ALL.

This is funnier if you are a chef.

Not every restaurant is bad. Chain restaurants are much more stable and steady. I work in a little family owned restaurant and these are 3 reasons I dread it sometimes.

3. Your boss is usually an asshole.

You could argue this about every job, but in the restaurant business this is usually what you deal with, especially in little mom and pop joints. Not only do their moods swing on a dime, but they are also always looking to save as many as possible. (C WAT I DID THER??)

For example, my boss would insist on paying me under the table, because fuck waiting for payday. Sure it's convenient because you get your money now, but not when he fucks you for some of it. If you work 5 hours for $7.25, you should make about $36. Not if he fucks you over. I've been shorted as much as $30, which I might have well have just worked for free.

Its overcooked! You're fired!

I'm not saying every boss is like this, but in the places I've worked in, that's how they roll. They care more about saving a couple bucks by selling 3 year old hotdogs (true story by the way) than buying new ones. Or by sorting through rotten long hot peppers and saving any good parts of it, then serving them to customers (also a true story).

Is that not fucking horrifying? I could go on and on but I'd be typing here all day and I can only waste my awesome talents on you people sparingly. Not that I would ever run out, but I don't want to take the chances.

2. Your customers are usually assholes too!

Wow! Everybody is an asshole! Well, again, like the boss thing, customers can be incredibly rude for what I believe is the stupidest reason. It's like when they walk into the place they get this assumption that because we are waiting on your every demand that it gives them reason to act like they are your master or something.

Fuck that. That's not what that means, in any way, shape, or form. Yes, we are here to serve you a nice dinner. That does not mean we are robots that you can bark orders at.

I asked for a white zinfandel. YOU HAD ONE JOB.

Yet, there seems to be this ignorance barrier as soon as that asshole comes in. "Oh, were in a restaurant. These people serve for a living, so might as well treat them like servants." It's people like that that should work just one week in the restaurant business and see how it is to deal with asshole fuck head pricks.

The worst thing about these types of customers is that they often leave you nothing after the bill is payed. If you wait tables for a living, then you know that tips are your fucking life bread. Your actual pay rate might as well get donated to starving children because it's jack shit compared to making tips. So say you serve 10 asshole customers out of 40 and all 10 leave you a shitty tip. Congratulations, you've made almost nothing and worked your ass off to please a stranger who could care less.

And the best part? You have to split those tips. If you work with 3 other wait staff, you can dwindle that money right down. It really doesn't seem like a big deal, but the contrast between a good night and a bad experience is so great it borders on morbid depression. If you add to that the horrible days business is slow, you have a really shitty job.

1. There is no room for growth.

There's a slight room for growth, but it's nothing too contrasting. For example I used to wash dishes and finally I worked my way up to head chef. Oh, yeah, I forgot the part where I did both at the same time for $7 an hour by myself with no training.

Basically, my boss thought we would be slow, so he got rid of the dishwasher and told me I could handle both jobs at the same time. Let's get one thing straight here: I'm now in charge of a full dining room, which could easily fill up faster than you can work. I have to keep track of a broad range of inventory, and wash every dish that comes back.

For someone like me to start that fast cooking and having that much more responsibility than "wash this dish, put it away" it's pretty fucking daunting. I'm also 1 of 2 people who's had to do that at my work. That's the only growth you get. There is no management position. You can do dishes, bus tables, wait, or cook. Each pay exceptionally shitty, especially in mom and pop joints like my work, and each have their own headaches.

Also, be prepared to do a lot of things out of your job description. As a dishwasher for 2 years, I also helped prep a bunch of shit you don't even realize. It's cool to some extent because you get to learn a lot of new things, but in the end you don't get anything for it. So what you prepped food and desserts for a party of 150 people. So what you got it down like the back of your hand. You don't get any credit! The boss does, even when he didn't do a damn thing. The best part is the whole time you were making it happen  he was ordering you around like you've never done it before.

This happens regularly where I work. Say we serve a party and they want for example, chicken, sausage and peppers, and pasta on a buffet. I can do that all day long like it's nothing. Does that mean I get to do it and ensure it goes the way I want? Not at all. Every little fucking detail, right down to boiling the fucking pasta will be OKAYED by my boss first.

"Make sure that pasta goes in the water in about a half hour, because the party is eating at 5." NO FUCKING SHIT. It makes me feel like a retard, like I'm incapable of handling my job, and it happens all the time.

THIS. Someone out there shares this exact pain...

It's probably more personal angst than anything, but these are my reasons I hate the restaurant business. Don't get me wrong, I love cooking and I'm glad I got to learn it as a trade, but there's better places to use it. At least I have a job I guess...

I hope my boss doesn't know how to read a blog.

A Take on RPG Classes

So I've been bouncing between Final Fantasy XIII and XIV lately, and a thought occurs to me.  I love the ability to change your character's class.

In Final Fantasy XIII, for those who don't know, you can change your characters from one "paradigm" to another.  A paradigm is a preset class set for your characters.  For example: Tri-Disaster has all three of your characters in their Ravanger roles.  Relentless Assault has One Commando and Two Ravangers.  The point of this allows you to alter your battle strategy mid-fight, in order to heal, rack up damage, debuff, etc.

The downside to this system is that you have to A) Preset your paradigms beforehand, B) Have a limited number of slots for paradigms (not that bad though, since it covers a wide spectrum of possibilities), and C) For a good chunk of the game, some classes are locked to certain characters, so say, character B can't be a commando.

All in all, it's a very interesting combat systems, and it keeps things interesting.

Onto Final Fantasy XIV, and how it contributes to this topic.

In Square Enix's latest MMORPG venture, you have a class that is determined by what type of weapon you are holding.  Holding a spear?  You're a lancer.  Holding a sword?  Gladiator.  The benefits of this is that it allows you to change what you can bring to a group immediately, instead of running back to town and changing your class there.  Actually, other, non Final Fantasy MMOs I've played lock you into your class at character creation, which is a huge bummer, and just forces you to have multiple characters, thus pay more, in order to see different playstyles.  In addition to this fluid class system, you can also equip some skills from other classes you've leveled up.  This means, you can have a Lancer who has Cure and Fire spells queued up to deal with monsters in your area.  The trade off of this is that it might not always gel well, what with Lancer's not having amazing spellcasting stats.  I'm willing to trade optimal synergy though for flexibility with my characters.

So, I kind of want to hybridize these systems with a few alterations.  I want you to have set classes you can level to learn the abilities, but then, after you hit a certain level, or reach an arbitrary story point, you can create your own class.  You could choose what stat bonuses you wanted for your class, so you can sort of spec your class to mimic main ones.  So for example, if the default Black Mage class gives you a bonus to Magic Damage and Magic Resist, you could make your homebrew Mystic Knight gain a bonus to Magic Damage and Vitality.

to determine your abilities, you would either have a set number of resource points to spend on abilities, or limited slots, either or could work.  Take some abilities from your Warrior class for an HP boost, ability from Thief class for increased Critical Hit Chance as passives, then take Thunder, Ice, and Fire from Black Mage, and then Guard, Provoke, and say, a special blade attack from Warrior to craft your custom class.

Do this for all your characters.  And now you add the Paradigm system from Final Fantasy XIII, and you can now flow between preset classes, custom classes, and other things on the fly.  This will allow the enemies to either be more difficult to compensate for increased player coverage, and you could even introduce new things like locking a character into a class as a status ailment.

This is just something I thought up.  I know the programming and implementation for this would be tricky as all hell, but it's something i could see people sinking tons of time into tinkering their characters to match how they like to play.

Enthusia Review

In 1997 one of the first console racing simulators, known as Gran Turismo, came out for the original PlayStation. The physics were, for the time, amazingly realistic, to the point where its tagline, "The Real Driving Simulator," didn't make people chuckle. From then on Polyphony Digital ruled the PlayStation's racing game world, but their throne was not uncontested. In 2005, the same year Gran Turismo 4 was released, a new game crashed into the scene from the likes of Konami. But unfortunately, not a single person noticed.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen. You're looking at the cover for Enthusia, the greatest console racing simulator that nobody knew existed. This game does not have nearly the amount of cars and tracks that Gran Turismo 4 has, and Polyphony Digital easily outdid Konami in the graphics department, but what this game lacks in content and graphics, it easily makes up for in gameplay. There are a few major aspects I want to discuss, so I split this review as such.

Enthusia Life

Enthusia life is basically the name of the "career mode". It is very different in that instead of a monetary system like most other games in the genre, you have "enthu points". Enthu points are sortof like your health; if you collide with a wall or cars, go off course, etc., you lose Enthu points. If you lose all of your points, you have to miss the next race. You can also obtain experience points (calculated from your enthu points) which you use to upgrade your car or your driver (upgrading your driver allows you to hold more or gain more points). You obtain cars via a "lottery" of cars that you have beaten in a race. Overall it is a very unique system.

There was also speculation that the game was initially planned to have an actual story. This rumor is fueled by the intro sequence, which would be easier for me to show via a video than explanation.

Driving Revolution

Driving revolution is probably my favorite mode in this game. Konami is well known for their Dance Dance Revolution series, and they actually managed to incorporate similar gameplay mechanics into a racing game. I am not joking. In fact, to prove I am not joking, here is a video of one of the stages:

This game mode is an awesome twist on the license tests in the Gran Turismo series that is equally challenging and occasionally frustrating. There are these gates that you have to drive through (which may or may not be on the optimal racing line) and they have little bars that go up and down based on your speed. You have to match the correct speed when passing through these gates. You're given points for each gate based on how well you match the speed, docked points for missing gates or hitting barriers, and if you gain enough points you move on to the next stage. Utterly brilliant! I have spent countless hours in this game mode, particularly on the challenge level. The challenge level is unique (unique level in a unique mode in a unique game. uniqueception? We must go deeper...) because it has you complete 4 tests where it has the car going full throttle and you cannot use the brakes (though on two of them you do have access to the e-brake). These were a bitch to complete, but it felt so great once I beat them. I love this mode, and it alone makes the game worth it.

Physics

As much as I love Polyphony Digital's series, this game drives much better than Gran Turismo 4. GT4 has an issue where there is too much rear grip, which induces understeer (some drivers refer to it as "tight") in cars that don't actually have it. Enthusia essentially nailed the grip balance compared to other console racers of the era. The other thing that gives Enthusia an edge is the force feedback given to racing wheels. Force feedback in GT4 was poorly implemented. In the turns it felt fine, but at very high speed on straightaways the wheel simply rattled back and forth in a very unrealistic fashion. Konami did not do such a half-assed thing, and it really makes the driving experience so much better. It also actually penalizes you for driving like a dumbass. If you hit something or go off course, it knows and tells you "hey, you screwed up". In these days, damage was not a major feature to consider, but this was definitely a step forward.

Content

I did say Enthusia lacked content. It did.  Compared to Gran Turismo 4's astonishing 722 cars, Enthusia makes you feel like a kid looking at a grown man's hotwheels collection when your mother only occasionally bought you one or two at the Target checkout line just to shut you up.

what an asshole. I would have played the shit out of those

However the catch is that a lot of Enthusia's cars are not in Gran Turismo 4, and these "exclusives" were some damn good icons. BMW M1, De Tomaso Pantera, Bugatti EB110...
Right. The game also lacks tracks, especially real ones, but the fantasy tracks that it has are pretty cool and are just as fun and interesting to drive as the competitor's offering, so there isn't too much problem there.

Final Thoughts

So what Konami did was create a damn good racing game engine, infused elements from RPGs and music games, did it really well, and not promote it hardly at all. The result is an amazing game that will never see a sequel (apparently a sequel was in the works at one time, but never actually came to fruition). That said, the masterminds were not suddenly lost. One of the physics developers from Konami has their name in the Gran Turismo 5 credits, which explains why there was so much improvement in that aspect over 4. I'm going to give this game a rating of 8.5/10. They nailed the physics and made the game very unique, but the lack of content and unappealing graphics compared to competitors brought the score down. This game really did not get the popularity it deserved, but it has become a bit of a cult classic, much like old Volkswagen Beetles and Reliant Robins are in the automotive world.

Ingress Review

I'm not sure how many people can relate, but I used to be a very secluded person. I would wake up, go to school, come home, and go straight to my room to play video games and do other stuff on my computer, only coming out for the bathroom and food. I had a small, close-knit group of friends, and overall I didn't get out much. That changed when I got my requested invite code to Ingress in late January.

Ingress is an augmented reality MMO game for Android phones (official iPhone port is apparently in the works, though there are some unofficial ones) which some people may consider like "geocaching on steroids". It was created by Niantic Labs, which has a tie to google of some sort (I forget the details on that, you can look it up yourself). The game has little markers scattered around everywhere known as portals. These portals are associated with public attractions and other places of interest. This includes things like statues, historical buildings, murals, historical markers, etc. The whole point of the game is to gain mind units for your faction, which is done by capturing portals and linking them together into triangles.

The game itself, like many other MMOs, consists of trying to level up so that you can be more useful, and "farming" for supplies. The backstory for it never really caught my attention, so I don't have an opinion on it. I've heard mixed thoughts on it. But that's not what makes this game awesome.

What makes Ingress well worth trying to nab an invite for (it's currently in a closed beta, but they've been giving out invite codes like crazy to people; more on this at the end) is that it can really change you as a person. As I said, I used to be very secluded and stuck inside my shell. This game is great to break that, because often times, especially just starting out, it's hard to do things solo. So you get a chance to connect with people that are just as nerdy as you are and interact with them in person.

this was from an event some local faction members did. Long story...

The other benefit to Ingress is that it's almost a fitness game without trying to be. You have to actually get out of your house and visit these locations (which can also cause you to get out and find something new, regardless of how long you've lived somewhere). Admittedly, some people tend to play from their cars, but in many cases it's easier, more legal, and a lot more fun to actually get out and walk from portal to portal. I actually lost 15 pounds in my freshman year of college because I really got into this.

I would give this game a 9 out of 10 simply because while they do still have bugs and balance issues to work out, it's a damn good idea, a damn good game, and it is still in beta so they have time to work it out.
If you want to play (it is free!), first try requesting an invite code to your email address at their website

If that doesn't work after about a week, get onto Google+, join the Ingress community, and make a post asking if any local players have an invite code for you to play. Chances are you'll get plenty of responses from people that want you to join under the condition that you join their faction (either enlightened or resistance). As I said, this game is well worth it, so give it a shot.

Agent belisario93, signing out