I downloaded Steam and it downloaded my soul
So for all the PC gamers out there, I totally recommend downloading Steam. Sean was trying to get me to do so for the longest time and I never did, but for whatever reason, today I decided I *needed* to play around with Garry’s Mod, so I downloaded Steam and verified my old Half-Life CDs.
It’s pretty rad.
ALSO I can now play Deathmatch Classic, which is like my favorite thing ever. I also totally own at it, too.
Today’s song: End Love by OK Go
10 Reasons Why Everyone Should Love Quake
Quake rules and here’s why:
10. When you’re totally out of ammo, you still get an axe
Almost as good as the crowbar in Half-Life (though nothing will ever beat that), when you’ve exhausted all ammo (Shamblers, anyone?) you’re left with a little bloody axe that you swing like a dork. It’s freaking great.
9. Scrags
I love Scrags, and I’m not really sure why. I remember we had to make soda bottle water rockets in 5th grade, and I managed to decorate mine to look like a Scrag (obsessive much?). There’s a level that’s almost entirely Scrags; I like to go into God mode and just play with them. Yeah, I’m that cool.
8. You kill the final boss by waiting until a purple spiked ball floats through her
To my little first grade mind when I first played through Quake, this was so freaking amazing. You had to time it so that you went through a teleport gate as the little spiky goes through her body. While you’re surrounded by Shamblers. And lava. Yay.
7. Story line? Pfft.
That was the good thing about mindless FPS games back in the early nineties—they were mindless. I like shooters, especially when there’s no other point than to see how good you can be with strafing while shooting. When (actual) story lines are developed, it loses some of the genre’s charm.
6. Cheating is super fun
No clip activated in water + God mode = JESUS FLIGHT! I always used to fly up and out of the map, or into the weird little ceiling textures above some of the upper levels. It was great. I really need to play more Quake.
5. The Nailgun(s)
DUDE I LOVE THESE. I got my gamer name (Nailpit) partially due to these guns. There’s nothing more satisfying than firing a crapton of nails at stuff. Except maybe being Gordon Freeman.
4. Shamblers
These things scared me when I was little. I really, really didn’t like them. They shoot lightning bolts from their hands and make this awful guttural growl. Plus they’re one of the hardest enemies to kill.
3. Quake is perfect for speedruns
Quake Done Quick and The Rabbit Run are two very nice speedruns through all the levels of Quake, proving that with games like these, run-throughs can be done at a ridiculously fast pace. Pretending to be good at doing so is pretty fun, too.
2. Quake begot Half-Life
And we all know how awesome Half-Life is.
1. The fact that you can play it effectively with just arrow keys, a spacebar, and the control button
This is my favorite component of Quake. It has a y-axis, but you don’t really need to use it. “Aiming” is essentially accomplished by pointing your weapon in the general direction of the enemy and firing; there’s never any real need to look up or down, unless you’re paranoid about platforms or possible enemies on floors above.
I guess I like it ‘cause you don’t need a mouse to play it, just a bit of finger dexterity on the keyboard. That appealed very strongly to my first grade mind, and now that the majority of games I play are on the Xbox 360 or are PC games that require the use of y-axis looking, I really appreciate the simplicity of “up, down, right, left, spacebar jump, control key shoot” gameplay.
Woot.
Today’s song: Caramelldansen by Caramell
Waiter! There’s a dead and alive cat in my box!
Here is a fun game I used to play like four years ago. I just rediscovered it because I’m cool.
Sorry, busy day.
Today’s song: Insomniac Olympics by Blockhead
+50 Bovine Damage
Haha, WoW is fantastic. I made a cow (a Tauren, but they’re cows) and his name is Hruck. I found another cow named MooMoo and we bowed and waved to each other all night.
I think it’s also pretty damn funny that Sean, Megan and I were all in their house playing WoW on our computers and chatting over the servers rather than in person.
Technology dependency, anyone?
Fun times.
Today’s song: Caught in the Crowd by Kate Miller-Heidke
Claudia vs. Chess
I have never played chess.
I have no freaking idea how to play chess.
But since Vista is stupid and decided to break up with Pinball, chess is really the only interesting game to play since I lack internet at my house.
I think part of my problem is that I can’t tell which piece is thequeen and which piece is the king…I don’t know if that’s my fault or if Vista also thinks that my getting involved with Chess is about as bad an idea as getting rid of pinball (can you tell I’m bitter?).
Anyway.
I’m playing on level 1 out of 10 and I’m still sucking royally (HAHA CHESS JOKE).
The end.
More Fallout 3 Insanity
HAHAHAHA.
So I chose this perk called “Black Widow” for my new character. This perk unlocks special dialogue choices with male NPCs. I met up with this rather crazy lady who wanted me to go get her 30 Nuka-Cola Quantums. So I oblige, but before I can leave her wannabe “boyfriend” tells me to quit messing with his girl (does he assume I’m a lesbian?) and gives me the option of getting him the 30 Quantums so that she will “do the horizontal bop” with him. Things obviously aren’t too different in Post-Apocalyptia.
Well anyway, one of my dialogue choices is to tell him that if he gets me some Quantum, I’ll have a threesome with him and his girl. He goes for it, and he happily runs off with his little shotgun to the Nuka-Cola Factory. Within thirty feet he’s crippled by a Radscorpion and dies a few minutes later after he tries to punch a Mr. Gutsy to death. It was hilarious. I tried to get him to stop, but he says, “lemme go, beautiful…I’m gonna go get us some Quantum!”
I really enjoy this game. It’s awesome. It’s as if Leibniz were Xbox 360 compatible, that’s how awesome it is.
Ahem. Anyway.
Shall I compare thee to a bed of nails?
OH GOD IT’S ANOTHER LIST WHO WOULD HAVE EVER GUESSED
Hi people. Today I shall provide you with (gasp!) a list of my favorite games of all time. I’ve been gaming a lot lately, due to the fact that school has yet to begin up here.
Quake
I grew up on this game, so it has become part of my soul. This is one of those retro early ‘90s FPSs with no story and horrible (read: awesome) graphics. I was so damn good at this game when I was a kid.
Rock Band/Rock Band II
This game is for crazy people like Sean and myself who take it way too seriously. This game is for all college students who, despite having way too much to study for, are able to somehow play in a fake band for 4 hours straight every Monday-Saturday. In other words, this game is awesome.
Fallout 3
The most recent addition to this list, Fallout 3 is half FPS, half RPG, and it is for those reasons that I love it. It’s also got a lot of humor (threesome offers from soda enthusiasts and love letters from people who want to blow up your city, anyone?) and there are a lot of different ways to “make” your character. Awesome.
Oh, and Button.
Button rocks.
Cosmic Osmo
OH GOD RETRO! Another of those early ‘90s/late ‘80s games, Cosmic Osmo is a Mac (Macintosh, back then, I guess, eh?) game that’s entirely in black and white, which allowed for the world to be HUGE, especially for back in those days. Totally a kid’s game, totally awesome. It’s really hard to find now; apparently eBay copies are selling for like $300. It also can’t be played on Macs nowadays, which blows.
The Sims 1 and 2
The Sims is great. I always made my Sims as replicates of people I knew in real life, then I married people that I thought would go well together, and sometimes I would kill my enemies. Then I got a metric ton of mods and my Sims became orange, giant babies, 500-pound fat guys, skeletons, floating torsos, and were able to have ridiculous amounts of children (FOUR HUNDRED BABIES!). Fun times.
Half-Life
Gordon Freeman is like the Chuck Norris of video games. Alternate univerise alien creatures show up, Gordon’s all, “not in MY research facility, bitches!” Then he whips out his crowbar and weilds it in a way only an MIT graduate could. I wonder how bad his PTSD was after this incident? Like, every time someone mentioned the word “rotors,” did he start spazzing and chucking crowbars at fellow scientists?
That would be a great alternate sequel. “Half-Life 2: Mental Breakdown.”
The Neverhood
So have you ever seen a game made entirely out of clay? Well then you’ve obviously never played this. It’s sort of a puzzle game, in which you play Klayman, a clay dude (durh) who has to somehow get the true king Hoborg’s crown back from the evil Klogg. The music is rad, and the little touches this game has make it awesome.
Gears of War
Because “I ON DA COLE TRAIN!” is the best thing to shout in any situation. And because I like shooters.
“Dude…Mr. Turtle is my FATHER.”
So I finished Fallout 3 today. I must say, it really surpassed my expectations. I thought I’d get bored scavenging through stuff, but I really didn’t. I would strongly recommend this to everyone. It’s technically a FPS, but there’s so much more to it than that, so I hesitate to call it that.
I’m definitely going to play this again. Next run through will be my evil character, than following that I’ll go through as if it were me (which will be interesting—I don’t know if a character with my stats can survive in the Wasteland).
And don’t forget Button! Button owns.
The Best Part of Fallout 3 (so far)
So I was having a really crappy day today so instead of being useful I decided to play Fallout for a few hours.
I was on the “Stealing Independence” quest, which meant that I had to go into the ruined National Archives and retrieve the Declaration of Independence for Abraham Washington (a guy in Rivet City) so he could add it to his history collection.
So after killing about 30 Super Mutants I finally get to this room in which I find a Protectron wearing a powdered wig. This alone had me laughing for like ten minutes:
This robot claims that he is Button Gwinnett, the second signer of the Declaration, and that it is his sworn duty to protect the document with his life, even if that means fighting me to the death. My dialogue options included:
– Killing him (more of an action than a dialogue, but still…)
– Finding some ink to forge a copy of the Declaration, proving that I’m not one of the “red coats”
– “I’m Thomas Jefferson and I’ve returned to liberate the Declaration!”
Luckily, I have a high Speech score so was successful in convincing him that I was good old Thomas (after just sitting there and laughing for another ten minutes). He relinquished access to the document without much trouble and, since I told him he deserved a rest, just sat there while I also took the Magna Carta.
And the last thing he says to me is: “Do give my regards to Sally.”
This freaking made my day.
Oh, and I also have Button’s wig now.
Where the flip-flying hell is Pinball?!
What’s this crap?
I was bored this afternoon and tired of messing with my far-less-than-adequate internet connection, so I thought to myself “I’ll just watch some Futurama and play some good old-fashioned Windows pinball.”
Yeah, turns out that’s not happening. Apparently, PINBALL ISN’T ON VISTA. What FREAKING GENIUS thought that crap up? “Here’s Vista, which kinda sucks on its own. Let’s remove the ONE GAME that was consistently fun, consistently operational, and consistently time wasting. Hooray for Microsoft!”
So at the moment my pinball total is asscockshitrapeFUCK and I’m pissed about it.
At a loss for words?
Yeah. I was, too.
How I missed “by,” “or,” and “will” is beyond me. And I could have sworn I typed “him,” but I guess not.
Fun, though.
Freaking Sean
I guess I have to concede and say that he was right on this one: Portal is an amazing game. Play it. It’s incredibly funny. It’s also a very spatial game, so that makes it even cooler.
I can also see why Sean wants to marry GLADoS.
And the Aperture Science vs. Black Mesa presentation slides going on in one of the rooms makes me happy.
Oh dear
This thing is fun. I quote Aaron: “Napalm! Buckets and buckets of napalm!”
He made Lanky the “Plant King” and created for him a lair. Then he used…guess what…napalm to see if he could blast him out.
Yeah.
EYEBALLING
This is frighteningly addictive. I also suck at the circle one.
I am Andrew the Zeppelin Master…and this is my story.
So I found this game the other day on Abandonia called Zeppelin: Giants of the Sky. You play a young and dapper (or old and slightly menacing-looking, it depends on the picture you choose) entrepreneur of the early 1900s who, for some reason or another, has acquired a sum of $1 million and has decided to start a zeppelin company. From here the story develops. I will describe the gist of it to you.
You start in the year 1900 with one zeppelin. One. And it will crash. Probably on its way to Venice or something. Or, it will survive sixty some-odd flights and as you’re bringing it home to Berlin (because that’s apparently the Zeppelin Depot of the world and it’s the only city in which your zeppelins can be repaired) it will be on that journey that it will crash. When your zeppelin crashes you’re basically screwed, unless you’ve managed to preserve it until you’ve acquired enough money to buy—gasp!—a second zeppelin!! Now you’re in control of two Hindenburg-esque air mobiles…that will both crash as soon as you think your dreams of being a zeppelin tycoon are within reach.
Now, I never got to this stage, but rumor and the number of zeppelin slots on the top of the screen indicate that you can also by a THIRD zeppelin. Hell, just one more and you could have control of all the cardinal directions!! But good luck getting there. I played this for like five hours today and restarted no less than 20 times, mostly due to bankruptcy and the fact that no one in 1900 would pay more than $1,000 to go across the Atlantic Ocean in a zeppelin (could you blame them, though?).
I’m not kidding. Watch your money or you’re screwed. Make sure every other trip is a trip to Berlin’s Zeppelin Les Schwab to get that hydrogen-filled giant of the sky repaired, before it’s a burning pile of ash on somebody’s front lawn. And good luck delivering cargo successfully. If your zeppelin can’t handle a passenger load of five people (hint: it can’t), it sure as hell can’t handle an extra ton of stuff you need to deliver to Cairo within the next 24 hours.
Yeah. Suffice it to say, this is the hardest game in the solar system*. Other fun activities include watching, buying, and selling stocks (I never made it past 1902, so I didn’t know what happened when you reached 1929), getting loans every five minutes due to the fact that it’s virtually impossible to not go bankrupt, and chasing some chick named Roseanne around the globe (the single greatest cause of my zeppelin disasters—how she can motor from London to San Francisco in less time than I can get my battered airship to Berlin from Venice is beyond me).
*I can’t really claim the difficulty level past this reach of space. Perhaps some earth twin planet somewhere in another star system has developed a similar game (“Zarpoons: Xnoblins of the Sceelia Spherion” or some such) that is substantially more difficult than Z: GotS, how should I know?
I don’t even know what a Zarpoon is.
If you want to eat an apple pie, you must first consume the universe
http://jimspages.com/States.htm
Getting Nebraska “we’re the anchor of nowhere” state as the first one to play was enough to throw my score so that I had 7 error miles left at the end.
Also, Pennsylvania can suck it. I can’t remember the other two I screwed up. I think I put Rhode Island a few miles off or something.
The Rabbit Run
HOLY LORD!
So remember that blog a few days back when I was talking about Quake? Well, these guys apparently hold the record for finishing the whole game: 10 minutes and 58 seconds. It sounds pretty impressive, but wait until you see them play it. I have three words to describe them: Lords of Quake.
I have the utmost respect for these guys.
Oh, and by the way: this was done on Easy. The record on Nightmare (the hardest) difficulty? Just a minute slower.
Damn you, StumbleUpon, DAMN YOU!
Not only is this super fun, but there’s awesome banjo music as an accompaniment!
Short but fun blog
Sean showed this to me.
Warning: it’s very addicting. While it starts easy, it gets super hard.
COLE TRAIN!
So today Aaron and I were playing Guardian on Gears of War. I was Cole, as usual (of course). His character is usually really talkative, but for some reason he was unusually quiet today. So I go, “you okay, Cole Train?” And INSTANTLY he goes “Good to go!”
It was AWESOME.
You called KEVIN?! Why would you call KEVIN?!
HaHA, bitches!
100% on expert singing Boston’s More Than A Feeling. Finally.
But of course, nobody was in the house when I did it.
Oh, well.
Yeah, I’m bored.
Yeah, this goes on for about the rest of the month
Because I just beat Horde and Gears of War-related comics are few and far between.
Or possibly non-existant.
Those are Grinders, that’s why it’s funny.
Even more Gears of War insanity
Hahahaha…this is the game Aaron and I have been playing incessantly, cut down to 49 seconds. It’s really pretty accurate. Please note that I will be shouting “WHERE’S MY WIFE?!” a lot more.
DO YOU WANT TO WASTE SOME TIME?!
HOLY SHIT, ME TOO! Now that I finally can…
I recommend:
Fulfillment
Upkeying
Primetime
Constellations (this is my favorite)
Fuck It
Eigenblogger 