Ho Hum…

Another quiet lull. I always seem to have more fun when I have nothing to talk about. Finished the “Dante Scenario” of Devil May Cry 2. The game is, largely, a disappointment. While the graphics are undeniably an improvement over DMC 1, I take serious issue with the dumbed down gameplay, and the really, really bad camera control. It’s a bit annoying when 75% of your kills are done off screen and you don’t even know what you’re shooting at. Which is another big problem, the weapons; the swords aren’t quite as funky as the first game, and are largely useless anyway. Upgrading your weapons doesn’t seem to yield any vast improvement in damage. But more importantly, why the hell do I want to use swords when they give me weapons like Uzis and rocket launchers? And all the cool moves are, again, rendered largely useless by the guns. Yeah, it kicks ass that Dante can run around on walls, but since he can’t shoot or fight while he does that, and since he doesn’t run long enough to manuever around enemies (Since they’re off-screen, so you have a looooooong way to go…) what’s the point? And I miss being able to actually select which new killer features you want for your weapons as you upgrade. It’s gone, the greatness is all gone… And instead, I get what feels like a pre-quel in terms of gameplay mechanics. This is what DMC 1 should have been and it would have blown me away, then moving onto what DMC 1 actually IS would have been the evolutionary improvement. Ah, Dante… you had a good first run… maybe third time’s a charm.

I’ll see what happens in the Lucia Scenario, which I’ve read is shorter anyway.

The Writing Thing

Proceeds apace. Little bits and pieces of paragraphia are added to Serial Jen on a daily basis. So far this story is being written the way I’d hoped it would be, although it’s still pretty early in the proceedings, as I’m only a couple of pages into it. Suckage at titles also continues. Also, I got right back on the horse and sent Famine & Pestilence Go To Dinner off to a fiction website called Elysian Fiction. We’ll see what those guys think of it.

The current plan is finish off the serial killer story, then start on either my Jen n’ Suzy team up story, or else move onto the much more fun story codenamed, Young Tolkien In Love, which is my riff on this whole revisionist, “What if young artists had their works directly inspired something bizarre” tangent that’s been happening with Shakespeare and the great George Lucas short film parody. Except in this one, Tolkien as a boy meets up with his friend the Jack, and a some elves, Gail, Umber and Sang and some icky dwarves as they all go off to slay a dragon. I’m wondering whether or not I should make those two stories the last ones in the anthology, since, with the inclusion of Alicorn, the book now weighed in at 344 pages, which is pretty hefty for a collection of short stories, and I already know that YTIL is, in all likelihood, going to break 100 pages. Book 3 will most likely see completion this year…

Geek Life

On and off for the last few months, I’ve been throwing around the idea of doing for magazines what IGN, the coolest website ever, does for the internet, combine all the geeky fixations you might ever have, comics, geek movies, DVDs, games, SF/Fantasy/Horror stuff, consumer electronics like home theater set ups and DVD players and such and throw it all in one convenient, easy to read place. The mag would indeed be called Geek Life, and assuming I could keep the sassy attitude and find other writers with a similar sarcastic/funny bent to them, would just cover all the things geeks care about in order to deny the ongoing horror that is Real Life. I keep wondering if such a thing is actually doable, and people in the magazine industry here insist it is, it’s a great idea, and would probably survive for quite some time, assuming that I stick with the niche market (ie, geeks) instead of trying to be a big, accessible mainstream mag, which is usually what kills most magazines in Singapore. I still don’t know if I’m sufficiently enthused enough about this idea to pursue it (Although the prospect of all that free shit for review is tempting…), since I have no head for business, and have NO desire whatsoever to deal with clients/advertisers/what-have-ya’… but it would be fun to actually be paid to play games, watch movies, read comics and then get on my soapbox and rant about it to anyone within earshot. Hey, I do that for free as it is… Mm… being a reviewer means never having to say you’re sorry when Acclaim gives you a sucky game for free and you trash it…