Simulated sales.

I just saw that there is now a "sims complete" box for sale in wal*place. wanna know what my first thought was when I saw it?
did I think

• Wow, about time!


• Man, that's both convenient and efficient!


• I bet that takes up a ton of hard drive space.


• I wonder why they waited so long...

I didn't think any of those things, at first.
No, the first thing I thought was:
Maxis is a bunch of greedy bastards.
They're sucking the last tiny drops of profit from a title that should be ages-dead by now. I'm aware the sims is a great game, but it's been surpassed by the sims 2. and the sims 2 is about to get a THIRD expansion pack. so they decide to push all 7 expansion packs, and the original game, into one box and sell it for 40 bucks, like it's a new game. Well, they already tried that a few months ago when they released the expansion packs in 2 packs. you merely had to spend 20 bucks 4 times and have the whole thing. and before that, there were the "sims ultra mega super wowee deluxo big fat edition" which had 4 expansion packs, and then one before that with 3, then 2 then 1. I bought the sims when it came out, between my friends and I we bought 4 of the expansion packs before one of us realized we had spent over a hundred dollars on a goddamned game.
They're doing it again. I have decided, officially, that I will no longer buy any sims 2 expansion packs. I bought "nightlife", the second pack, and it came with a slip of paper advertizing the goddamned third expansion pack. an expansion pack is supposed to be just that - EXPANSION. this filler crap they keep putting out with one or 2 minor features has pushed me past my limit. Rugs. The second pack introduced the amazing new rug. yeah, sims had that in one of the packs. They released sims 2 wih what feels like a pretty limited amount of stuff. So of course you have to buy all the "expansion" packs, which contain the rest of the game content that they should have put in the game in the first place, and you end up paying 200 bucks for a game you paid 50 bucks for. Neat trick, but I can see the wires, and I ain't buying it.

music of the moment: "can't truss it" by public enemy. Must be a nasty hernia if you can't truss it.

work of the moment: truss And here I thought chuck d was smart...

we're all doomed

See, I don't have a TV and I don't go to Yahoo, so I tend to miss out on movie promos. So the other day, when I saw something about the new Doom movie, I was psyched. I played all the dooms, all the way back to the shareware version of doom 1, so naturally the thought of a movie seemed kinda cool. It's not cool. It's a goddamned travesty is what it is. I haven't seen it, nor will I ever see it. If somebody tries to force me to watch it, I'll throw the TV out a window. If I can't remove the movie, I'll gouge out my eyes, put my fingers in my ears and scream LALALALALALALALA for 2 hours. They took the basic concept of doom, killing demons, and somehow managed to make the worst action movie of all time. This movie will make people die from suckiness exposure. It will send a shockwave of sucky thru all space and time and make everything everywhere everywhen suck a little more. Here's why: It has a guy in a wheelchair. A movie about space marines killing demons has a guy in a wheelchair. a space wheelchair that's cgi'd to his torso, but a wheelchair nonetheless. Guy in a Wheelchair is the dead canary in the action genre coal mine. You have a bunch of intrepid racially balanced people killing whatever, and there's this one plucky eccentric in a wheelchair who somehow manages to not get eaten by the thing that ate 4 guys with huge guns and combat training. If your action movie has a guy in a wheelchair, your action movie sucks. Doom also stars The Rock, who is a better actor than an actual rock, usually. It has The Now, in the form of a story change. In all the doom games, there was a reserch station working on dimensional portals to speed travel. they somehow manage to open a portal to hell and demons come out, killing everybody but you, the player. In the movie, they just mapped out the last 10% of the human genome, at some point in TEH FUTURR! on a research station in TEH SPAYCE! and TEH MONSTARRS! happen. Doom is a movie about a dynamic and racially balanced group of people with fancy hi tech stuff in space in the future. I'm sure there's a big "I'll kill anything, grr." guy, a green cadet who did really well in the simulator, a guy who's a scientist or civilian and hates guns, a wirehead who can fix hack or unlock anything, and a woman wearing a dirty tank top and no bra. Oh yeah, and a kid. A little girl who starts off real scared of the monsters and ends up sticking her tongue out at one after it gets killed. Doom is a movie based on a video game, which is a strike against. Doom is a movie with a guy in a wheelchair, which we already discussed. Doom is a movie starring the rock, which, I'm sorry, just kills it. Doom is going to suck. Mark my words. The Doom movie will suck hard, and die fast - just like a Filipino hooker.

I have 3 erections.

So I'm playing Prince of Persia: Warrior Within, Lord Of The Rings: Battle For Middle Earth, and Half-Life 2. That's right- there's the spot... right there, baby.... oh yeah...
Ahem.
All three of those gamegasms are stunning. I've played the first few levels of the newest Prince of Persia game, and it just blows the original (which was a work of art with bad AI) away. Now you don't have to just run up a guy's chest and do a 2-hit combo on the way down. Now you can do like 18 different things after running up his chest. You can drop and behead him, you can drop and throw him, you can do a divebomb attack on him, you can flip out and away from the battle- you can run up his chest, flip out and away to the wall, then divebomb somebody else from the fucking wall! And you're being chased by the Dahaka, an unstoppable beast spawned from the swirling vortex of time itself, spawned specifically to hunt you down and kill you. When it chases you, you fear it. these tentacles lash out at you, and as it gets closer, the world starts going all sandy-grey, and if it gets close enough, it kinda sucks your essence dry and kills you dead.
Lord Of The Rings: The Battle For Middle Earth has a very long title. And it's a good game to boot. I about popped a woody when I watched the intro, which is basically the intro of the first LOTR movie- done in the game engine. This game is one of those role-playing RTS games, like warcraft 3, only with cooler orcs. And speaking of orcs, my horde of them overran those pussy Rohirrim in no time, with a bit of help from a couple mountain trolls and a certain fallen human king on a certain fellbeast.

And then there's Half-Life 2.
You know, I just don't know if they've made any words yet to describe how great HL2 is. I'll try: It's Fangoddamntacularstic. It's better than that. It's headcrabs and striders and that glorious gravity gun. I will never get tired of chucking filing cabinets at soldiers at a couple hundred mph. and that bugbait is the shiznit. I also like grabbing manhacks with the gravity gun, then flinging them at the soldier that just fucking launched them at me. And you go for like a half hour in that game before you even pick up a crowbar. Half an hour of intro, of walking around, of seeing the world without it shooting at you. It's Fangoddamntacularstic.
And GTA: San Andreas isn't even out for PC yet. Damn you sony, damn you to hell.

Music Of The Moment: Winamp is cruel. It's "neutron dance" by the pointer sisters, but only because the song before that, which I skipped past, was "pump up the jam" by technotronic. While your feet are stumpin, and the crowd is jumpin.

Link Of The Moment:World Against Toys Causing Harm. I always liked tossing my 12-pound steel Tonka truck off the second story landing of the stairs, at family members standing at the foot of the stairs.

Again with the AI.

Goddamn stupidass no-sense-of-self-preservation having useless no-aim-having pissant totally-critical-to-forward-plot-movement lame fucking AI NPC's! FUCK 'EM ALL!
angry now. post now.
Ok, so I'm playing prince of persia: sands of time (motto: we didn't think there were enough games with colons in the title.), and I actually really like it. it looks good, has a good soundtrack, the play is fairly fluid- minus a little hassle from the camera, the battles are top drawer, the puzzles are clever and difficult- but not so difficult that you are constantly pulling your hair out and stomping around the room like a jackass. The part that made me stomp around the room like a jackass was Farah. Farah (yeah, like the slacks) is your teammate/love interest/smart-mouthed counterpart. She has 3 main talents: mouthing off, wriggling thru cracks obviously put there for her which let her get to a switch that you couldn't otherwise get to, and getting dead. The getting dead part is the part I'd rather she not be so good at. If she put some of that effort into learning an instrument, she'd be fucking Chopin. So in any case, here's the basic scenario: you get into a puzzle or something, and she finds a crack and vanishes, because she'd never make it thru this puzzle. You do your swinging around and wall-jumping whatnot, then you find the last door, and exit right into the waiting arms of Farah, and a bunch of these bad guy monster things. They move like, real slow, but they can fucking teleport for some reason, and they are all really good combatants, even the ones who used to be bakers and stable-boys. So you'll be off killing these guys, in a really fantastic battle, and one guy- a guy with a hammer with A HEAD THE SIZE OF A GODDAMNED SAAB positions himself right the fuck next to farah, who is armed with a bow, and proceeds to literally beat her to death, very slowly. The whole time, she's calling out for you to help her, but you kinda have problems of your own- problems with swords. But then you see she's about to die, and if she dies, it's just like if you die, so you have to save her. Oh yeah- those guys who are trying to kill you? They follow you. Then they are trying to kill you AND her. She pays no attention whatsoever to her attacker, instead focusing on the guys surrounding you, while she gets these gifts of massive blunt trauma, over and over again, from a guy she could drop before he got his hammer up. Fuck.


Music Of The Moment: "Counting Bodies Like Sheep To The Rhythm Of The War Drums" By A Perfect Circle. Very angry, very anti-war. Not a good song to listen to after stomping around like a jackass.


Word Of The Moment: Bastard- I was once kicked out of a chat room for saying the word bastard. Those bastards had this bot that was configured to kick anybody who cursed. I then proceeded to have a 30-minute conversation with the resident Op of the channel about just what made a word offensive. I mean, what if somebody wanted to have a serious, normal conversation about medievil weaponry, or 16th century cannons, or hell- maybe we want to talk about illegitimate children? I mean, just because somebody says a word like bastard doesn't mean they are calling you a bastard. fuckin' bastard.

You know, I just realized that a lot of those goddamned AOL "users" read that I was in a chat room, and went "whats a op", because people on aol can't spell, and don't have any punctuation on their keyboards. An Op is the Operator of a channel on IRC. The Op is the guy you bitch at if you get kicked out of the room for spurious reasons. And people in the IRC channels I frequent not only don't have user names like "snake888584"- they don't tolerate such people. If you can't come up with a creative enough name to avoid having a 5-digit character appended to it- stay offline. And just stay off AOL anyway.

Things I Hate, Vol. 7,042

(insert disc 1)
(files copy)
Please insert disc #2
(files copy)
Please insert disc #3
(files copy)
Please insert disc #1, again.
(nothing happens)
Please insert disc #4
(nothing happens)
Would you like to register?
(click no)
(registration screen pops up)
Please insert disc #1
(files copy)
Please insert disc #3
(ad/preview movies play)
Please insert disc #1
(play menu pops up)
(click play)
Please insert the play disc, labelled disc #4
(grit teeth)

What's the 'I' stand for again?

I just got, and whupped up on, the demo for tribes: vengeance. the demo was one of the lamest demos of all time. well, I mean, the actual gameplay, weapons, and whatnot were top-shelf. It's just that it was a 400-odd meg download, and there was this one map, which was a round arena with almost nothing in it, and it was like 200 feet across, and all you did was fly around with your teammates and hand out beatdowns to all the bad people who came in from these doors. Well, *I* handed out beatdowns - my teammates got in the way and died a lot. Over 400 megs for a demo I installed, and beat, inside of 15 minutes. It should take longer to play than it does to download, people. Hell, Quake was only like 150 megs for the whole damned game - and Quake was one of the best games of all time. But back to my dumbass, no skills having, cannon fodder, blind, completely useless, poor excuse for a team. They suck. They are lameasses. It isn't their fault, tho. Game developers have developed themselves a really low standard for game A.I. games that advertise - no - feature this fantastic A.I. that completely surpasses everything else that has ever been ever - have A.I enemies that see you and run toward you, even if you're holding a DeathDealer X-4bajillion, with new and improved Kill-O-Matic action. These games also have - almost all of them have it now - a Team. Team A.I. is even worse than enemy A.I. With the enemies, there are lots of them. Millions. You generally have 3 or 4 teammates, and if they die, which they do a lot because they suck, you generally have to start the level over. And you usually end up having to protect them because they suck and can't fend off a fucking Guy with a Stick, who sits there and slowly beats them to death while they keep saying "I'm all alone out here!" or "Need a little help here, boss!" Meanwhile, you've been killing the mutant alien robo-dragons, which shoot lasers from all 60 eyes and breathe black holes. You know, if the game developers made the A.I. so it emphasized the 'I' part, and perhaps gave my teammates the ability to, oh I don't know - HIT THE BROAD SIDE OF A BARN FROM INSIDE THE FUCKING BARN WITH BARN-SEEKING MISSLES, maybe they'd be a bit more useful. Ok, better now.

Music Of The Moment: It's actually a really lame cover of Devo's "Whip It" by some crappy band who sucks and has only played at that one bar, but they're gonna make it someday, but I'm gonna change it now. Hey, now it's "Corporate Cloning" off Fear Factory's newest album, "Archetype" I like "Slave Labor" better. it includes the lyric "god help me pour this gas on me" which isn't really grammatically correct, but cool nonetheless. It's not like I'm ever grammatically correct. Or politically correct. Overweight people are fat, women are bitches, jews are lazy, and people over 65 are fucking old, fucker. Vote for me in november, kiddies. Speaking of kiddies - you see the tits on that 14-year-old? Shit, dawg. Vote for me.

Word Of The Moment: Archetype, Which is the original model of something. Like jesus was the model for hippies, and bands like the beatles and elvis were the archetype for the radio format known as "FM" - oh, wait, I meant "classic", but once you count everything up, the classic stations really take up enough of the dial that the rest can just be eliminated and called the 'margin of error'.