A Weekly Rant: 04/06/10

Contains strong language, drug references and sexual references. This article is satire and does not reflect the views of TheSixthAxis or myself. If there are too many big words you don’t understand, consider trading in your 360 for a PS3.

Those with timepieces may notice my rant is a tad late today. To be honest it’s only sheer bad luck that I’m still alive at all. Allow me to explain.

Wednesday

I have a home office full of servers and a work PC that I do my writing on. Wednesday morning started much like any other day. No, actually it didn’t, because for a start I got up before 4pm. I waddled into my office around 8am only to hear a disturbing silence. No jet engine-level fan noise = no PCs running. The automatic fusebox had triggered athough the rest of the house was still happily burning fossil fuels on folding@home and keeping my beers frosty.

I reset the fusebox and turned on my servers without incident. When I came to turn on my work PC, it literally caught fire the instant I turned it on. It’s under a wooden desk surrounded by some thousands of pounds-worth of equipment and project work, plus I’m not used to my house setting on fire, so that kind of scared the shit out of me. One epic sprint to the kitchen and back with a wet towel later and the problem was luckily quelled. The schedule for the day was packed to the rafters so I didn’t have much time to really think about what happened or inspect the damage, and I bolted out of the door for my therapist meeting.

Let me set the scene for you: I was hungry to the point of severe nausea due to not having time for breakfast; my wisdom tooth is being a bit of a bitch lately so that was giving me grief; I was desperate for a smoke in my continuing effort to quit and grumpy from that; finally I made the mistake of trying to look “pretty” by putting on some cute new boots I got, which proceeded to destroy my feet much like a hungry boa constrictor would, squeezing the life out of them. It reminded me why I rarely bother with make-up or classy clothes or hairdos: being pretty costs too much in time and discomfort. I’d rather be spanking n00bs in MAG. Girl gamers, are you with me or are you with me?!

Now, my therapist isn’t particularly good at analysing me. I am on the face of it just too complicated for her feeble little brain, and she is more like a playback device than a psychoanalyst, sort of repeating everything I say just in case I didn’t hear my own words. She’s mostly just good for the sex. So generally I waste taxpayer money toying with her and trying to get her to slip up, but nevertheless I am usually pretty polite. I mean, if I had to face me in a therapeutic context I wouldn’t want to get into a conflict either. This morning though, the combination of her uninformed retorts and my general tooth tummy cigarette foot exploding PC anxiety pushed me over the edge. I described a problem I was having to her and she came up with this absolutely genial response:

“So, what are you going to do about it?”

I’m sorry, what? I’m not having trouble buttoning my blouse up or deciding what kind of frozen pizza I want to eat tonight, I think I can handle those issues myself. If I knew what to do about it, I wouldn’t be asking my bloody therapist for advice would I? The whole point of a therapist is so you can offload responsibility for all the serious stuff to someone else, avoiding the need to think through complex problems yourself, and then blame the consequences on the therapist when you follow her advice, it all backfires and the shit this the fan. All pathological narcissists know this.

So I gave the only reasonable reply:

“What are they paying you for again? If I knew how to solve my problems I wouldn’t be sitting in this f*cking room would I? I don’t know what to do about it. What the f*ck do you want me to do about it?”

The first time I ever swore at her in anger. I know you’ll find that hard to believe but I do have a politeness ethos in real life.

So the day started badly and continued downhill. I went to pick up SBK X for review and it had been delayed for a week. I went to get some groceries and ran out of money. At this point my stomach was murder so I trudged with my shopping to Subway to get some breakfast – and they had closed down. I limped home, amputated my feet, stuffed myself with cookies, popped some painkillers for my tooth and consoled myself with some cigarettes (whoops), then spent the rest of the day screwing around trying to get my PC to work again. I finished my work that day at 1am – ie. 17 hours after I had started. Do not want.

How TSA Should Review Video Games

Now for an anti-rant. There’s been a lot of talk about review scores, how games are reviewed on TSA and what a review actually means. Well, forget everything you’ve read, because this is how we should be reviewing games:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHA8nCM4DCc

That review was so good on so many levels I think I watched it half a dozen times. We seriously need to get Miss Hungary doing reviews at TSA – we could learn a lot from her.

If you think we’ve gotten a bad rap the last week though, check out my no. 1 reviewer Ryan Clements over at IGN. He has written prose that has literally made me puke out of my eyeballs. Ryan is the master of glib, poorly-researched reviews that somehow consume 2 pages but tell you nothing about the game. This is the man who said White Knight Chronicles sucked because you had to wait for the re-use timer to fill before you could execute your next spell. So you’re a big follower of RPGs then Ryan?

He also gave Red Baron Arcade a 2, and while I would never be so audacious as to suggest Red Baron Arcade is a good game, 2 is a little harsh on a game that is basically functional with no particular flaws; it just isn’t particularly entertaining either. Ryan’s fanbase actually consists entirely of people who just read his reviews so they can criticise them in the comments, and rightly so; I suspect he would be more at home in a doll’s house.

Steve Pope

For those of you not following along, Steve-o is a world class psychologist (https://www.thesixthaxis.com/2010/05/25/2-hrs-of-killzone-1-line-of-cocaine) who suggested last week that playing Killzone 2 for two hours is equivalent to shooting a line of cocaine. He didn’t mention how many grams of cocaine I needed to test this theory out and I think I might have used a bit too much because that was one hell of a trip during my last Noby Noby Boy session. You could actually eat cows on Mars and fart them out – surely you’d have to be tripping out on something to believe that could actually feature in a video game.

Last week I may have made an, ahem, “analysis”, which caused my remarks on Mr. Pope to be edited out, so I’ll rephrase.

Editor’s note: oops, the Steve Pope section had to be cut again… I’ll let Katy publish it next week if enough people donate to our legal fund.

ModNation Racers: Part Deux

How can I put this politely? Oh yes, like this: the online is shit. That’s the polite version.

  • On the European release date, the servers weren’t switched on
  • Most of the time your friends list doesn’t actually show your friends, making inviting impossible
  • Max limit of 16 people per ModSpot means most of the time you can’t join another friend in their ModSpot, although the menu never actually tells you why
  • You can’t invite friends to XP races
  • Searching for an XP race invariably creates one instead of joining an existing one
  • Since that happens to everyone else too, it’s almost impossible to get a full room and get a race going
  • The maintenance window is when everyone in Europe is awake and the main target demographic of the game – students, unemployed people and desperate housewives – will want to play (1pm-3pm Monday-Friday).
  • The online is region locked to provide.. ehm… “better performance”, according to the developers

An impressive list of features I’m sure you’ll agree. However don’t worry, we’re still going to give it a review score of 10: Sony have told us it would be good for the last year so they must be right.

Personally, I’m loving the region locking. Face it, there are few things more annoying than foreigners, especially the ones who start every conversation with “Parlez-vous francais?”. Yo, is the game in French? Are all the people around you talking French? No, they’re not, so shut the fuck up and speak English, or keep your mouth shut.

My other favourite foreigners are the yanks, though fortunately they only crawl out of their holes in the late European evening time, so with a bit of deft time management they can be swiftly avoided. The problem with Americans on PSN is that they are all 12-year old kids who have been provided with a stock of 18-rated games, headsets and Ritalin by their responsible American parents. Did you know that 80% of American children now have ADD? And in an unrelated statistic, 80% of American parents are now irresponsible and lazy? Food for thought is it not? What I find suspicious about that is that these same kids have no problem focusing and concentrating on Modern Warfare 2 for several hours at a time, pulling off huge killstreak after huge killstreak; yet they can’t concentrate on 10 minutes of homework? Uh-huh.

But I digress. The list of moral transgressions ModNation Racers has made in its online mode are obviously too numerous for me to pick apart individually, so instead I thought we would draw comparisons with some incomparable games.

The Big Racing Game Comparison

New releases: Split/Second, Blur, ModNation Racers, Anarchy: Rush Hour. I’ve played them all and they are all 3 out of 10 games. But how good are they?

ModNation Racers Split/Second Blur Anarchy: Rush Hour
Does it suck? Yes No No In offline only
Steering wheel support No No pedals No pedals No pedals
Time from XMB to game main menu 2 minutes 39 seconds 46 seconds 39 seconds 41 seconds
Fool who reviewed it nofi cc_star Tuffclub Yours truly
Score 9 10 7 7
Was score correct? No No No Yes
Graphics No, not really Yes but due to a bug only 70s colours (orange and brown) are visible Yes but cars look like cheese wedges Meh, no not really
Game of chance? Yes No No No
Fun to play? No Yes Yes In online only

So what can we coclude? Nofi likes poorly presented boring games of chance, so in future should be consigned to reviewing products such as Puzzlegeddon and Thexder Neo. cc_star hasn’t played any video games for the last 5 years or he’d know Split/Second wasn’t worth a 10, so we need to bring him up to speed with some classics like Burnout Paradise, MotorStorm Pacific Rift and ModNation Racers before we can trust his scores. Tuffclub seems to have got the right idea except for not being able to spell his own name correctly, and obviously my analysis was perfect because obviously Anarchy: Rush Hour is as good as Blur *looks around conspicuously*

Epilogue

TSA reader tonycawley told me a couple of weeks ago that he was such a Sony fanboi that if they manufactured boys he would turn gay. I had promised to quote him on that so make of that what you will.

Pros:

  • Steve Pope section was quite funny
  • Content less likely to get censored than last week

Cons:

  • Written in a rush so lacks some humorous finesse
  • Not enough gay jokes

Overall, this article was ok but I feel it didn’t exploit its full potential. Hopefully the sequel will be better. Now if you’ll excuse me I have a stupidlol amount of articles to write. Have a good weekend!

7/10