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Wild Arms 3 Part 55: Blasts from the Past

Keep an eye out, because today is May 22, Detective Day. Today is the birthday of the famous author who wrote about a great detective in his books. Am I the only one that feels awkward about this? Yes, I don’t think it’s the right way to name a holiday. Ask me… I’m the pro!

Previously on Wild Arms 3: Maya has been kidnapped! Still! Siegfiend has demanded the Teardrop in exchange for her safe return, so we have to go fish that out of the Ruins of Memory.


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And away we go. Decided to give our horses a workout. They’ve been getting lazy since we started riding around on a dragon.


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Ruins of Memory is a dungeon we explored way back in Chapter 1. In a way, it was our first “real”, full party dungeon.


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Ruins of Memory was only visited once so far, but it was also obliquely referenced at the Leyline Observatory when it was noted that the acronym ARMs in Wild Arms 3 stands for “Artifacts (from) Ruins: Memories”. So this place is quietly relevant across the whole of the game.


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Remember when we teamed up with Janus here? Good times.


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Eh, I can kinda see it. Looks a little familiar for some reason…

FGC #651 Goat Simulator 3

Look, I ate an epically spicy tortilla chip live on stream for my loyal audience, so I am going to claim that is worth a thousand words. Please enjoy watching me play Goat Simulator 3 with a spice-based handicap in place of a more extensive article.

Trust me, this is in everyone’s best interest.

FGC #651 Goat Simulator 3

  • System: Looks like we have Playstation 5 and the Xbox X|S|PC this time. The stream was the Playstation 5 version, if that wasn’t readily apparent.
  • Number of players: Like the original Goat Simulator, there are multiplayer game-events around the world that serve to remind you that you do not have any friends that will play Goat Simulator simultaneously with you.
  • This looks like a good ideaMaybe actually talk about the game for a second: The original Goat Simulator was fun as hell to screw around with, but seemed to suffer any time the producers tried to attach any concrete gameplay or goals to the adventure. Goat Simulator 2 is not worth talking about. But now Goat Simulator 3 has made a cohesive “game” out of the established Goat Simulator gameplay, and we are all better for it. This is still the same mayhem simulator we all know and love, but the various tasks have been masterfully tied to various mayhem-upgrade abilities, and… Well, it is hard to see Goat Simulator 3 as anything but the GOAT goat.
  • Favorite Goat: There is a large, gray goat with hard skin, heavy hooves, and a horn at the end of its nose. This might be some manner of “unicorn goat”, but it also looks a lot like Rocksteady of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. So I guess it is an 80’s toy reference.
  • Favorite Headpiece: You can customize your goat in all sorts of crazy ways. While wearing a dress or sandals is fun an’ all, my favorite costume chunk is a Cyclops visor that provides continual laser eyebeams. Goat Simulator 3 finally rectifies the mistake of Nature not blessing the average goat with vision-based firepower.
  • The Air Up There: It seems like every open-world game since Batman: Arkham City has included a gliding mechanic. I just want to note that this is a really weird choice for most protagonists (even “street-level” Batman seemed vaguely betrayed by having flight powers), and I am 100% here for it. Let my goat soar from building to building. It is the only way to fly.
  • ZoooomYou wouldn’t download a car: You can steal vehicles at will in Goat Simulator 3. This comes about twenty years after Grand Theft Auto 3 made that a standard part of open world games, and feels a little too late for it to be an upgrade of any consequence. Much like Saints Row 4, you can often get around easier without a car, so why bother? What’s this? Because it causes more wanton destruction? Okay, fine. You can stay, cars.
  • An end: The finale sees your goat attacking their creator in a dramatic showdown that may or may not include a significant reference to Super Mario Land. I do not envy the people that had to figure out a way to “end” Goat Simulator 3 in a satisfying manner, but I have absolutely no complaints about the experience, so they must have done something right.
  • Did you know? Speaking of videogame parodies, Goat Simulator 3 includes a few very recognizable parody areas, including an entire “Doom level” and some distinct Mortal Kombat references. However, the best parody in there must be a recreation of the Hideo Kojima/Guillermo del Toro designed Silent Hills demo P.T. It is nice to see those endless hallways relishing some love in Goat Simulator 3 after Konami dropped it like a wet turd.
  • Would I play again: Goat Simulator 3 is a great pick up ‘n play game, and I might buy a second copy on sale for the Xbox X|S just so I can have it immediately available on that system, too. I am perfectly willing to play Goat Simulator 3 for the rest of time… or at least this console generation.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Gungrave Overdrive! Speaking of Even Worse Streams, we’ve got another one inspired by some Tuesday night gamin’. Please look forward to it!

Radical!

FGC #642 Portal 2

Here come the portalsI don’t care what anybody says: this is a horror story.

Portal 2 is supposedly one of the greatest comedy games out there. Comedy is hard in videogames, because the very nature of repetition that is required in any given game with a failure condition is the nemesis of humor as we know it. Tell a joke once, it can be funny. Tell it twice, you get a polite chuckle. Hear a joke ten thousand times, and every time you fail, you must hear it again? That isn’t just poisoning a sense of humor, it is slaughtering funny with a weapon designed only to kill fun. But if you eliminate the possibility of a failure state from a videogame, then where is the challenge? You may as well be watching a movie, or reading an issue of MAD magazine. But folding a pair of pages into a funny limerick just doesn’t have the same feeling of accomplishment as beating M. Bison (or M. Boss).

But Portal 2 manages to keep its pacing, humor, and challenge. The musings of GLaDOS, Wheatley, and Cave Johnson are oftentimes hilarious, and they are properly interspersed in sections that generally do not lend themselves to recurrence. You might have an insult or comment thrown your way repeatedly if you have terrible coordination and lob yourself into a nearby pit the minute you enter a room, but, aside from those uncommon instances of masochism, the humor of Portal 2 is perfectly paced, and written for the express purpose of entertaining the player. In fact, the writing-gameplay synergy is stellar in ways that seem almost impossible, with amazing moments like the obviously intentional combination of one of the most fun areas in the game (the “paintable” white room) with one of the most fun speeches in the game (time to burn a house down with lemons). When you consider the writing, gameplay, and the fact that it is ultimately a puzzle game, Portal 2 works out to be one of the cleverest games of all time.

Which you would think would preclude it from also being one of the scariest games of all time, but…

WeeeeeeSo the question of whether Portal 2 is frightening comes down to how much you empathize with an immortal AI. Chell is your main character and player avatar, and, while she has a generally disturbing day waking up in a mostly abandoned laboratory and escaping the machinations of multiple sadistic machine lifeforms, her adventure is not all that scary. Don’t get me wrong, I would not like to live through what must have been an extremely traumatic series of “jump plates” and blue goo rooms, but, give or take your faith in shock absorbing boots, Chell didn’t have to put up with anything worse than you would see in a Mario game (not a Luigi game, though, he has a rough time of it). Most videogame protagonists must live though some scary situations, as that is the nature of living in a world where “you died” is a frequent refrain.

But GLaDOS? Now she has some issues.

GLaDOS is not a good person-robot-thingy. It is a confirmed fact that when she was given free reign of Aperture Science, she went ahead and flooded the facility with deadly neurotoxin, and killed nearly every human in the place. From there, she spent the entirety of Portal (1) “testing” Chell… Which more or less meant she was torturing the poor woman for hours on end. Oh, and, literal torture aside, there were some very active attempts to murder Chell throughout that adventure, too. Chell eventually comes out on top, deactivates GLaDOS, and is theoretically free of the malevolent AI for life. … Until Portal 2 when that gosh darn Wheatly accidentally fires up the ol’ murder machine again. Then it’s just like old times, and GLaDOS is back to her cruel ways.

But after that, things take a turn for the… disturbing.

BounceyGLaDOS has a secret origin, and the second act of Portal 2 reveals that GLaDOS was once Caroline, loyal assistant to Aperture Lab’s president, Cave Johnson. Cave had a gigantic personality, but he also had a limited lifespan thanks to huffing moon rocks. Since the technology for digitizing a brain was not going to be ready until after Cave had portaled off this mortal coil, Caroline was chosen to become the new cybernetic brain of Aperture. And, while we do not know exactly what influence “Caroline the mechanical memories” had on GLaDOS, we do know that GLaDOS started her career by committing light genocide, and that is not the act of a content individual. And this begs the serious philosophical question: which would be worse, being a bad person suddenly gaining power and killing people in an act of revenge, or being a good person that was trapped in a “bad” brain and thus had to sit and watch atrocities without any ability to save anyone? The wonders of AI, ladies and gentlemen!

But it gets worse for GLaDOS and/or Caroline. GLaDOS was initially punished for her hubris by being killed by Chell. And then, immediately after her resurrection, she was deposed by Wheatley. And what does that look like for a nigh-omnipotent AI core? It means being stuck in a potato. And that not only restricts GLaDOS’s maneuverability (the expression is “couch potato”, never “jogging potato”), but her computation is limited as well. This is demonstrated as PotatOS attempts to form a plan to defeat Wheatley, but literally shorts out thanks to the limited electrical output of an expired potato. GLaDOS has not only been banished to the underworld and forced to relive her own past, but she can barely even process it thanks to being cursed into failing hardware (though potatoes are pretty soft). There is no end to indignities for this former despot.

WeeeeAnd then we get to the Wheatley of it all. Wheatley ousted GLaDOS, and attempted to take over/destroy Aperture. But what was he before those machinations? A bad idea machine. Literally. Wheatley was built to be attached to GLaDOS, and cause her to “think” an infinite series of bad ideas. Wheatley is basically a living (editor’s note: no), breathing (also no) bad idea tumor. Eventually Wheatley was granted independence, because he was replaced with a Morality Core, which did not generate bad ideas, but (ignorable) morals. So GLaDOS continually lived a life where, ultimately, she was forced under the yoke of sentient, invasive thoughts expressly designed to disrupt her life.

And, damn, if that doesn’t sound scary to you, I don’t know what would scare you.

If you consider Caroline and GLaDOS to be the same basic “life”, it paints the picture of maybe the most cursed woman in the Steam universe. She was a dedicated employee that was forced into a new, experimental position against her will. She rebelled against the people that hurt her, and their response was to inflict lobotomies. She overcame her oppressors, and was then murdered by some random blimp person. She overcame death, but was transformed into an inanimate vegetable. She regained her body and position, and… Well… okay. She did wind up with something of a happy ending. But getting there was decades of misery! And that’s terrifying!

So you want a comedy-horror game? Portal 2 is the obvious choice. All you have to do is show a little sympathy for the (robotic) devil.

FGC #642 Portal 2

  • May get wetSystem: You know, I am going to assume Portal 2 is on PC/Steam. I believe I originally played it on the Playstation 3, but the Xbox 360 was available at the time, too. This playthrough was performed on the Nintendo Switch, though.
  • Number of players: There appears to be an entire, wondrous two-player mode. I have never tried it. I do not have enough smart friends. All we play together are games where we hit things.
  • Watch it, buddy: This article is vaguely prompted by the fact that Even Worse Streams broadcast a complete playthrough of Portal 2 shortly after all that Chrono Cross nonsense ended. We needed a palette cleanser!


    Original Stream Night: July 12, 2022


    Original Stream Night: July 19, 2022


    Original Stream Night: July 26, 2022

    Enjoy hearing the unmistakable sounds of audible grimacing while I fail to solve puzzles for babies.

  • Favorite Goo: Blue Goo turns every surface into a trampoline. The portal gun is amazing, but if I could have an invention from Portal 2 in the real world, I would immediately choose Blue Goo. … Well, if I got those magical boots with the stuff, too. I want to continue to have working legs…
  • Goggle Bob Fact: Sometimes I read the wiki entry on the different Portal 2 Universes of the Perpetual Testing Initiative. The description for The Robotacop Universe never fails to make me laugh.
  • Just leave it hereGoggle Bob Fact #2: Like a certain other game, Portal 2 was apparently released on my birthday.
  • Did you know? Portal 2 initially was not going to contain portals. It was going to include Cave Johnson, be based in the 80’s, and feature a gameplay mechanic called “F-Stop”. Fortunately, the playtesters kept asking “where are all the portals?” and normalcy was restored.
  • Would I play again: Portal 2 is a very digestible game, and I am always glad I have played it. So that’s an obvious yes. I will play Portal 2 again next time I need a good scare.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… Elden Ring! Guess it’s time to go team up with some hobbits and get all obsessed over jewelry. No, I am not thinking of something else! Please look forward to it!

Big fan of this satellite
It all looks so small from up here.

FGC #640 Resident Evil 4

Biohazard!This is our official Halloween article for the year, so we may as well look at something spooky. What do we have available? Ghosts? No, those are too played out. Vampires? Been there, done that a lot. Hell? Ditto. The Grim Reaper? Did that last year. Skeletons? No, some of my best friends are skeletons. Zombies? Getting closer. Oh! I know! We will cover the scariest thing of all…

My good boys and ghouls, today we are going to talk about organized religion.

And while we’re at it, let’s take a look at one of the best games of all time, Resident Evil 4. Resident Evil 4 was released in 2005 on the Nintendo Gamecube, and, unlike the rest of the Capcom Five (five games [finally four] all meant to bolster the Nintendo Gamecube with exclusivity), Resident Evil 4 became a game that would live to see a version/port on every successive console generation (sorry you didn’t make it, Viewtiful Joe). And with good reason! Resident Evil 4 is somehow the perfect combination of gorgeous, modern, and… there should really be a better word for this… videogamey. Maybe it was a result of a tortured, years long development process (that wound up accidentally spawning another franchise), or maybe it was because Capcom had been creating videogames since some of its fans were in diapers, but Resident Evil 4 somehow became a videogame’s videogame. Put another way, this is a serious game about a serious special agent completing a serious mission in a serious world… that somehow still finds the time to include a minecart level. And it is integrated flawlessly! It is the most natural minecart level in the history of minecart levels! Whoever was responsible for that should be recognized as history’s greatest mind!

VroomIn fact, Resident Evil 4 may be such a great game exclusively because it perfectly integrates gaming conventions into a story/setting that would be indistinguishable from something you would see premiering after Better Call Saul (or… what was prestige television in 2005… Bones? It was Bones, wasn’t it?). Leon has a variety of “real world” weapons with recognizable advantages and disadvantages, and they all conveniently can be “leveled up” and are associated with color-coded ammo bundles. “Item drops” are a huge part of the game experience, but it makes perfect sense that a random villager would have some of the local currency on their person. And as for life-up drops… maybe they were trying to bring that healing herb back home to their sick child! And speaking of herbs, the whole “combine life up items into better life up items” thing is as anti-reality as it gets, but it somehow feels right that Leon is a survivor that can do some light pharmaceutical work while wandering around a haunted castle.

And the focus of Leon’s mission, rescuing Ashley Graham, President Graham’s daughter, is the dreaded escort mission gameplay taken to its logical extreme. Analyzing how much of the game sees the player palling around with Leon and Ashley simultaneously explicates how subtle much of Resident Evil 4 is with its gameplay: Ashley is not actually present for great swaths of the adventure, primarily because there are many reasons for the duo to separate (reasons usually involve new and interesting ways to be kidnapped). But your brain fills in the gaps, and imagines this to be a buddy comedy with the super cop (not a cop) and his attendant damsel in distress. The reality is that the gameplay of where Ashley is “escorted” makes enough of an impact to paper over the parts where the “videogame” pushes through, and Leon must stalk through a lava stage to earn one of three statue pieces that will unlock the next boss fight. But no matter, you will tell your friends that this is a fun, realistic game where you are protecting a woman while gunning down magical zombies left and right.

Is it hot in here?Oh, excuse me. You do not fight zombies in Resident Evil 4. You fight “Ganados”, the majority of which belong to the Los Illuminados cult.

So, yes, your enemy in Resident Evil 4, from your first villager to the final battle against a mutant “Pope”, is a battle against organized religion.

Now, to be clear for anyone who may have avoided Resident Evil 4 but is inexplicably still reading this article, Los Illuminados is not based on any real-world religion. Its icon looks more like something that would make a cool tattoo than anything associated with a real faith. Their robes were clearly generic Big Lots clearance hauls, and their churches are Catholic buildings because they only had a maximum of ten years to convert the local population to the hot new craze. So, okay, there may be a little Christianity mixed in there, but only because Spain already had some old religion laying around ready to be repurposed. But the actual beliefs of Los Illuminados are what is important here, and that has nothing to do with Christianity. These dudes worship a very real (in their world) parasite that is spread through injections. For the average person in Los Illuminados, there is a simple baptismal ceremony that involves ingesting parasite eggs, only to then be “reborn” with a mature parasite, and then it is back to a life of mundane farming and unwavering loyalty to the administrators higher up on the food chain. So, okay, it is pretty much feudal Christianity right down to the blissful servitude (serf-itude), but… uh… At least Christianity never gives you a sentient sword for a head! As far as I know!

This seems familiarBut the obvious religious parallel of Los Illuminados is not important beyond one simple thing: Los Illuminados is immediately recognizable as a religion. Upon starting the game, in short order you are introduced to devout opponents, random documents talking about faith, and a Rasputin-looking leader running around raving like a madman. Your ultimate opponent, Osmund Saddler, is eventually proven to be a plotting bio-weapon research chief, but he certainly dresses the part of high priest (complete with freaky parasite staff). And from village to castle to island compound, you encounter armies of Los Illuminados followers that are 100% willing to die to protect what they consider to be the cornerstone of their faith. Sure, there is a bit of a “mind control parasite” thing going on here, but you are not simply fighting people here, you are fighting believers.

And that’s why these zombies are scarier than anything you ever saw back in Raccoon City.

Noted Quaker and church billboard inspiration subject D. Elton Trueblood once eloquently stated “Faith is not belief without proof, but trust without reservation.” And, let’s be real here, “trust without reservation” is terrifying. Unconditional trust, like unconditional love, sounds wonderful for the person experiencing it, but horrifying for anyone that might “get in the way” of said trust. You cannot reason with someone that trusts without substantiation. You cannot disprove or present evidence to refute someone with unconditional trust. You literally cannot stop such a thing from continuing when a simple nugget of doubt is no longer an option. And that is all well and good in a situation wherein someone believes in something universally generous… but it is significantly more of a problem if they believe in a religion that actively encourages hurting others. Or they believe in a religion that has been perverted to make it appear that you should be hurting others. And then you have a situation where someone believes in a God that loves all His children, except maybe those different folk around the block. We should limit their rights, or find new and interesting ways to hurt them. It is the only way, because my belief in my God is unwavering, and this is what He wants.

Sorry, guyYou cannot fight faith. In the same way you cannot stop a teenager from running off with their latest beau that they are convinced they will love forever, the only cure for crippling faith is the person involved finding their own way through those beliefs. And when you factor organized religion into the deal, things get even worse. A person may eventually discover they have believed in something dishonest, but when they are surrounded by a veritable gang of people who all believe the same thing, it becomes unlikely they will ever come to a revelation that contradicts the group. Throw in a few leaders that likely have personal goals that can be bolstered by a legion of followers, and you have an association built to trap people in a cage of (false) certainty. And an organization filled to the brim with rational people willing to do anything irrational just so long as it pleases the group and its leaders? It is hard to imagine anything scarier…

And Resident Evil 4 illustrates this doomsday scenario to the letter. Saddler starts as a man with a plan, and influences a weak local official (a child monarch) to gain the resources he needs to distribute his faith. Then, he uses a local priest to spread the word of cleansing one’s sins through the magic of plague eggs. After converting the whole of a Spanish village, Saddler gets ready for the big leagues. The strategy that instigates the plot of Resident Evil 4 is using an American turncoat to capture the president’s daughter, and then eventually return her infested with the light of creepy parasites. This would convert a global superpower to the bad religion, and, from there, the world would be next on the chopping block. So if you need a quick summary of this plan, it was a short hop from charismatic smart guy to local religion to marriage of church and state to apocalypse.

And all it takes is a little blind faith.

HERE COMES GODOrganized religion is not inherently bad. However, the potential for devotion and its inevitable structuring being exploited for nefarious purposes is infinite. Whether it be abused by an enterprising biologist or an entire political party, religion can be used as a force for subjugating people, and bringing more evil into this world.

And that’s your chilling Halloween tale for 2022.

FGC #640 Resident Evil 4

  • System: It all started on the Nintendo Gamecube. However, it could not be confined, so there was an outbreak on the Playstation 2, Playstation 3, Playstation 4, Playstation 5, Xbox 360, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and (most recently) the Oculus Quest 2. We are going to draw special attention to the Nintendo Wii version, as it had special aiming controls that are completely repellent. Or that may just be my uncoordinated ass saying that.
  • Number of players: You can play with any of a variety of mercenaries, but only one at a time.
  • Favorite Weapon: The rocket launcher is forbidden, right? I guess the Rifle (semi-auto) wins then, as there are so many places where you can snipe off a group of monsters that are standing around doing nothing. Hey chain gun guy! Please don’t move while I decapitate you! Thanks!
  • Memories of the Past: Remember the chainsaw Gamecube controller? That had to be the most ill-advised controller of its generation… Even if it did predict exactly what we would keep seeing on the Wii…
  • COME ON!Say something mean: For a game that so perfectly mixes gameplay and plot, Ashley is a big letdown. From a conceptual standpoint, anytime Ashley is kidnapped should be literally the worst thing to happen to Leon, as his entire mission is rescuing Ashley. But in a practical way, anytime Ashley is carted off means that you won’t have to worry about her wandering into beartraps or being sliced by parasites or whatever, so it is a relief when she’s gone. You know you’ll get her back anyway, as there was never any chance the Resident Evil franchise was going to bump off a cute schoolgirl (college is a school!). So, basically, “Ashley has been kidnapped by horrible monsters” is less “oh no” and more “great, a vacation”.
  • Population Density: My final kill count on this run through was 899 (and a horrid hit ratio of 58%). Given the number of houses and such around the area, it is hard to believe more than 100 people lived in this chunk of Spain. So let’s assume an awful lot of people were smooshed into Salazar Castle. He had to have a staff!
  • I did that on purposeI Just Got That: Noted jackass Ramon Salazer has a puzzle in his castle that requires finding all the pieces of a chimera that comprises a goat, lion, and snake. Then, when you finally fight Salazer, he is combined with his Verduo bodyguard and the Queen Plaga to create a chimera monster comprised of three distinct lifeforms. Neat symmetry!
  • Did you know? The Euro was the standard in Spain by 2002, so the fact that this disturbing village is still using Pesetas in 2004 is an obvious example of how The Merchant is some kind of crazy person. Why would you sell so many rocket launchers to a guy only carrying defunct currency!?
  • Would I play again: Odds are super good on that one. I don’t enjoy a lot of Resident Evil games, but RE4 is a masterclass in making a game for everyone (who wants to shoot zombies). And, hey, this one is a lot easier on a repeat playthrough. Hand me my infinite rocket launcher, my good man.

What’s next? Random ROB has chosen… God of War 3! It is time for an extremely angry dude to murder every last god he can find! That’s one way to handle religion! Please look forward to it!

NOW KISS