There's Too Much M in UMD

It's March. I guess I'm supposed to be mad or something. Let's see, is there anything I can be mad about? Technically, this March celebrates my one year anniversery of ceasing to be the Do Nothing Man. I can't really complain about that; even though I'm employed, I still do plenty of nothing.

The fact that the PS Vita isn't getting the UMD transfer passport program in the states kind of pisses me off. I mean, makes me mad, march mad. Too much M.

Anyway, I have a decent UMD library. And I bought what will probably be my last UMD PSP game this week from Amazon. That makes the count twenty games with three UMD Resident Evil movies for a total twenty-three part collection.

What about another type of madness? What if the UMD had actually succeeded? Knocking off DVDs and CDs as perfered media, there would be packs of ten blank UMDs and a special drive for computers (or you could take the stupid plastic shell off the disc). Car UMD players and special visor sleeves. Out there, occupying the infinite space between the atoms of our universe, exists another universe where the UMD dominated. Think about that. That's madness.

Eventually the physical disc format will completely die, but I wish the UMD had caught fire and lived until the age of the Blu-ray. Blu-UMD? Think of all the crazy data we could've squeezed onto those cute little discs.

Black and Blue and Zombified

I feel like I complain a lot in this space. Whine. Whatever you want to call it. This post starts in a whiney way, but stay with me.

Magic: The Gathering has always been a fun pastime. Most of the close friendships I have now began in my basement with the neighbor boys playing video games or trying to play MTG. We knew the basics of the 6th Edition but our misunderstanding of more complicated rules led to weird "house rules" and we still play that way when we're just having fun. Undead mode was my favorite; when your opponent hit zero life or below he got a special undead bonus and you couldn't win until he reached negative 15 life.

These days, we pack our decks up and head to the local card store for Friday Night Magic (yes, FNM is a thing). It's competitive. Kill or be killed, a go for the throat mentality. I like the competition, but I hate the seriousness. I'm the guy who built a rat deck during the Kamigawa block (it's still one of my favorite decks to play even though it hardly ever wins).

Lately, I haven't taken Type 2 seriously at all. Innistrad? Gothic horror setting? Vampires are red now? Where are the goblins. I swear, if the vampires sparkled I'd probably burn all my cards and never think about Magic again. Thank God they haven't crossed that line. But, for the sake of having a legal Type 2 deck, I made list of all the zombie cards in Innistrad and Dark Ascension. The plan is to build a black/blue zombie deck with no creature card duplicates. There's even a zombie cat now. Seriously. I may exclude that one out of shear principle. It's a cat.

Because my friends and I share cards like basement communists, I probably won't have to buy that many. Check the creature card list below.

4x - Diregraf Ghoul
4x - Black Cat
4x - Walking Corpse
4x - Highborn Ghoul
4x - Diregraf Captain
1x - Armored Skaab
1x - Ghoulraiser
1x - Headless Skaab
1x - Mikaeus, the Unhallowed
1x - Relentless Skaabs
1x - Sightless Ghoul

1x - Army of the Damned
2x - Cellar Door
1x - Curse of Echoes
2x - Endless Ranks of the Dead
1x - Heartless Summoning
2x - Moan of the Unhallowed
1x - Rooftop Storm
2x - Zombie Apocalypse
2x - Zombie Infestation

6x - Island
14x - Swamp

Sweet. Anyway, this deck faired well in its debut weekend. But I'm open to suggestions. It could certainly use some tightening up. And I'd like to get rid of the zombie cats.

Destroy the Secret Raccoon Civilization! Oh wait..

On Tuesday, during my lunch break I jetted over to Best Buy to pick up my reserved copy of Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (the special edition) which I will, from here on, refer to as RE:ORC because its short and orcs are awesome. Anyway, I did my best not to check out any reviews of the game, but I did inadvertently skim the beginning of the joystiq review while scrolling down their post line up. Sorry. That was my bad. I've quarantined myself from the Internet so I can play the game and give my unadulterated opinion on the long-awaited return to Raccoon City.

Clearly, every Resident Evil game should include hidden taxidermied raccoons from here on out.

After three days of killing and being killed in RE:ORC, I can say that I'm enjoying the game. This game won't pull the foul-mouthed children from their Halos or CoDs (which is a good thing in my opinion) and therefore RE:ORC won't explode in the world of online multiplayer. The problem though, is that there's not enough campaign meat to justify the weak multiplayer effort.

The campaign is lackluster fan service to say the least. I've only played up until the beginning of the 5th mission, which is where you watch Leon and Claire crash their police car into a wall. Then you watch the trucker zombie run over their crash with his semi. "Command" immediately says to kill that cop. And now I'm chasing Leon through a series of parking garages. But the journey to this point was good; it wasn't bad. As far as shooters go, the missions are straight forward with plenty of flesh bags (infected and regular) to kill. The humans that get in U.S.S.'s way won't be getting awards for their smarts, but they make up for this lack of intelligence with hit points. They are stupidly hard, like three-shotgun-blasts-to-the-face-and-still-kicking hard. The zombies and monsters, on the other hand, scale in difficulty: zombies are the easiest and hunters are the hardest, which holds true to the classic Resident Evil style. Plus, it feels good shotgun zombies, lickers, and hunters all in one game. RE:ORC feels like a Resident Evil game, in that respect.

Who leaves incendiary grenades on a fire truck? That's just wrong.

Unfortunately though, most of the game doesn't feel like a Resident Evil game. There's ammo and health sprays everywhere. It's like the currency of Raccoon City was ammunition and you get to take every zombie's wallet after you kill it. Random attache cases and ammo boxes also pop up, so every U.S.S. team member has infinite ammo. The amount of health, sprays and herbs, is significantly less than the amount ammo, but to a Resident Evil veteran, RE:ORC has a veritable forest of green herbs. The game never frightens, let alone horrifies, (although there are parasites that look speciously like face-huggers and face-huggers are effing terrifying) and survival doesn't seem difficult. So, I can't in good judgement, call this game a survival-horror game.

I also have some reservations calling this game a squad-based shooter. Yes, there are three computer-controlled teammates, but there is very little squad control. If you've unlocked all the different abilities and weapons, you can equip your squad with goodies, but that's it. The good news is that your three squad mates are significantly less stupid than the gun-toting humans who get in your way. Imagine a competent Sheva divided equally into three people, well that's your squad. They're dumb, but not completely useless. You can sit back and let your squad do everything, but it's more fun to kill stuff yourself and it's much faster (besides you get more xp, yay). The U.S.S. squad will deal damage, but they can't clear an entire room. And they die, either by a tyrant playing patty-cake their skulls or by turning into a zombie themselves (then you get to kill them). As soon as they're dead, you can run up, hold a button, and BAMF! They're back.

So, infinite ammo, near infinite health, and infinite lives for your party. This doesn't sound like Resident Evil at all. And it's not. But for that brief moment, when I'm unloading shotgun rounds into an un-phased tyrant while he lifts his fists to smash me into the floor, I hold the controller just a little tighter, and remember the good times.

Boss Button

Really? REALLY?

Men's College Basketball has never driven me mad.

I entered a bracket in our office pool just for the fun of it. Historically I've been terrible at picking brackets, so I decided to throw D20's for my picks. I sure-as-hell don't care enough about the tournament to do research.

I checked yahoo recently and I noticed something.

A Boss button. You click the button and it takes you to a really crappy screen that's supposed to look like an email client. Definitely doesn't pass for Microsoft Outlook. This makes me sick. Look people: own the fact that you are doing nothing. Don't be ashamed of it. Don't hide it. Own it. Reap the rewards and suffer the consequences.

Go upsets!

Gravity-Bending Astro Cats and Lip Rings

While browsing through a GameStop yesterday, my curious fingers found a wall-tethered display PS Vita with a demo of Gravity Rush. One of the two games I care about on the PSV right now. So I settled in and started the demo (I really hate that I have to touch the touch-screen and can't arrow-key through the "home" bubbles and hit X to make a selection) it was quick to load and quick to start. No complaints there. The demo's control tutorial guide was even a cat. Not just any cat, mind you, but a gravity-bending astro cat.

You can't go wrong with gravity-bending astro cats. I wouldn't want to meet a pack of them in a dark alley. But you get my drift.

Once the movement tutorial was over, the fighting tutorial started and I was gravity kicking little blob monsters, which was fun. Well, that apparently pissed off a larger blob monster. The tutorial boss seemed easy enough; I started landing hits on it immediately. Then, suddenly, I wasn't able to deal damage to it. I couldn't figure out what had changed, because I was just spamming gravity kicks the whole time. Annoyed, I hopped back to the Vita's bubble home screen and walked away.

The demo hinted at a story with the introduction of a pathetic police officer and a stuck-up, anti-gravity chick with a raven. An astro raven, to be exact. But other than that, I couldn't glean any juicy story details.

Right now, to me, the game is pure eye candy. The city looked big, expansive even. A place that I want to see and explore. Other than that, I can't say much more.

I'm no fan of GameStop; however, I reserved Xenoblade Chronicles (apparently a GameStop or Nintendo Online exclusive) which is why I was there in the first place. Honestly though, I do like this store's location (on the way to my grandmother's house) and I was surprised by one female employee who actually has opinions about games. She caught be off guard enough that I had an intelligent conversation with her about the Persona series (I don't go to GameStop looking for intelligent conversations) which I've never played.

Anyway, this encounter made me realize that I enjoy discussing what other people play and why. Plus, a spoken endorsement is worth millions more than an online review.