Friday, August 31, 2012
I Hate August
This is what I think of August:
It's too hot to do anything.
August is when I start the count-down to Halloween.
School starts in August
There are no good holiday's in August.
No good games come out in August.
August is for slackers.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
My Fantasy Team: Pawns, Points, and Munchkin
This fall marks an unprecedented moment in my gaming life: I'm playing fantasy football for the first time ever, ever. So far, I've been pretty hands off (I let the yahoo robots draft my team) and things seem to be going well. I don't think I could have done better had I drafted my team in person.
With very little connection to these players, I'm just viewing them as pawns. That seems too generous. These players are more like energy sources; their statistics a numerical fuel that produces points. Points? Ug. I hate points.
The top point sources are my nine starting players, plus a defense. Then I have seven players who are "sitting on the bench," but I'm thinking of them as unequipped or stored in my stash. Honestly, these nonstarters are pretty crappy; trash items in gaming terms.
Now I'm thinking of my players in terms of equipment...like in...
Yes! Fantasy football is Munchkin! It all makes sense now.
I'm strapping players to my body as armor and wielding players as weapons. Each player provides an undetermined amount of points that count to my total. At the end of the week, my opponent and I tally our points and go head to head using that point total. The person with the equipment that generates the most points wins. It's that easy.
The truth is that I'm having a lot of fun imagining Drew Brees as chainsaw or fruitcake. Too bad he's not on my team. Instead I have Michael Vick. I guess, as a piece of equipment, he could be a spikey dog collar (+3 against Animal Rights Activists).
Keeping with the fantasy theme, I have a douchey-looking white wide receiver named Eric Decker and I've already started calling him Eric Deckard Cain.
Did I mention that I don't give two craps about NFL football? Or its players? I barely give one crap about college football. It was the NAU Grease Rats that got me caring about football at all. In memory of that NCAA Football 2007 college team, I named my fantasy football team The Grease Rats. Perhaps it will bring me luck. Greasy rats are lucky, right?
Friday, August 17, 2012
A Summer Sans PS3
August always signals the end of summer for me. Yeah, schools don't start for a couple more days, but by the middle of August, summer is basically gone.
After flipping through a couple older posts and looking over my gaming notes (yes, I have gaming notes), I arrived at a shocking revelation. I have not played my PlayStation 3 at all this summer. My gaming time consisted of the following:
Diablo 3 (PC)
Tribes: Ascend (PC)
League of Legends (PC)
Saint's Row 3 (Xbox 360)
Just Cause 2 (Xbox 360)
Pokémon Emerald (GBA/DS Lite)
Yep, that looks about right. I'm almost finished with Emerald and I'm a complete noob on League of Legends, but Diablo 3 and the sandbox games have kept me pretty occupied. Receiving the most ink, though, are Diablo 3 and Pokémon because I just enjoy writing about demons and pocket monsters.
As an avid PlayStation fan, I feel I must explain my summer of transgression. Excuse number one is that I moved and it's taken time to get things set back up. Lame reason. Excuse number two is that my PS3 currently has no sound. During the move, I decided to commit my surround sound speakers to my gaming PC for demon slaughtering eargasms. This left the PS3 with no audio device and me with an excuse to explore the world of surround sound headsets. And I haven't found a pair that I like.
I've never been an audiophiliac, but recently, I've had an unusual appetite for video game audio and becoming totally present in a gaming reality. That means tuning out the real world and tuning into the game world; the complete immersion of self. And listening to a game through sound cancelling headphones seemed like the best way to accomplish such immersion.
The plan was to pick up a pair of headphones for my PS3. The problem is that one does not simply "pick up" a pair of gaming headphones. Maybe I just don't know enough about quality audio, but between Turtle Beach nonsense and Logitech fluff, I'm not really sure what I'm doing.
The minute I decided on a pair, the Tritton Ax Pro, I read about a new pair coming out this fall; an updated or upgraded version of the Tritton Ax Pro. I really wish the name was Tritton Axe Pro, which sounds like a wicked combination of two-handed melee weapons.
Monday, August 13, 2012
The Nostalgia Sell: Resident Evil 6
The Resident Evil Anthology: at first glance, this looked like an amazing deal. Then my common sense started tingling.
Wait a minute... This contains six Resident Evil games. Three of my favorite games (the first three) and three that I'm not all that crazy about. Wait a minute... I already own all of these games (in disk form) except the 6th one. Wait a minute... Resident Evil 6 costs $59.99 alone, which means they're charging thirty bucks for the five other games. Wait a minute... That means Resident Evil 6 is insanely over-priced. Nostalgia clouded my judgment, nearly causing me to make a bad decision. Touché, Capcom. You almost had me there. Marketing strategy suggests that when we look at this bundle, we think we're getting all this awesome stuff with the new game. The reversal (and maybe closer to the truth, I fear) is that Capcom is re-selling what made Resident Evil so great and tacking on RE5 and RE6 like the backwards little runts that they are. Kind of like the Indiana Jones 4 Pack. Nobody's going to buy Kingdom of the Crystal Skull by itself. So they have to bundle it with the other three good movies.
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