Level Grinding Has Nothing To Do With Skill

I have heard more than a few times that RPGs don't require the same level of skill as other games do to complete. I disagree with this, the difficulty of a traditional RPG is hidden in the long term planning. Taking a team through a quest for 50-80 hours, micro managing items and stats and planning ahead can be hard, and the good role playing games make you prove your long term planning ability with an endgame that tests it. However, grinding levels has absolutely nothing to do with skill or ability, and losing a boss fight because I'm under leveled makes me angry. Walking around a dungeon, intentionally fighting the same group of mobs over and over just to increase my stats a little is mind numbing, and absolutely a relic of gaming past.

I'm playing through FF3 right now, and even in the early stages of the game, the grinding required of you is unreasonable. Up top here is a picture of the boss Salamander. He is brutal. Salamander attacks twice a turn and has a fire breath attack that has a dmg range of 175-250 WHICH HE CAN CAST TWICE A TURN. His speed is higher than yours can ever be at this point in the game, so he will go first every round, and his HP is around 4500, meaning even with 4 Blizzaras cast per round (his weakness) you still have to survive 5 turns with this fucking guy. I've read the message boards, I've dug through the internet and every single gamer who has completed FF3 says the same thing, you will spend half of your play time grinding levels. 

I did finally beat the Salamander boss after grinding in the Molten Cave for 2 hours and resetting the game every time he cast fire breath twice in one turn. The game immediately follows Salamander with this guy, Hein. He also attacks twice per turn, and can switch weaknesses on the fly. He can do this mid turn, unlike you, who has pre-selected every move. He will kill a player each round, and with no life spells and unpurchasable Phoenix Downs (you can only find them in dungeons and shit), you will need to beat him before your supply runs out. According to the inter webs, I'm in for another 2-3 hours of random battle after random battle if I hope to beat this guy.

Obnoxious level grinding is a thing of the past, and while I expect it from early FFs, there is no place for it in modern gaming. One of the reasons we all embraced the western RPG movement was because it did away with all of those silly "rules" that JRPGs forced on us. Why does the protagonist have to be a teenager? Why are there always so many dragons in outer space? How come I actually have to dedicate time to grinding levels just because your boss fight difficulty doesn't increase at a similar rate as my party? 

Addicted To Destiny

Just like Rust, Destiny is a social experiment that I have fallen head over heels in love with. There has never been a game quite like this one and since I have put a significant amount of time into building my character, I am starting to experience the true substance of Destiny. As soon as you hit level 20, the game completely changes, altering the way you level up and unlocking exclusive high level factions and missions. 

Now that I have hit the higher levels, I've been noticing that my PvP results have been improving. Completing Crucible bounties is getting easier, and the multiplayer is fun and addictive when you aren't constantly dying. 

I found a soccer ball just resting in an obscure corner of the Citadel. I can't find any mention of it on the message boards or Destiny Wikis. I kicked it around for a while, I certainly hope it wasn't important.

The Destiny experience is made better by their iOS app. I joined a group specifically for dads and you can read all of the extensive lore that the game offers.

I am hopelessly addicted. Not quite as life consuming as Fallout or Skyrim, but Destiny is getting 100% of my game time, and I love it when a game demands your full attention.

Ha. Cracks scanned.

P.T.

The first thing I did after turning on my PS4 for the first time was download the P.T. demo. Hideo Kojima has made Silent Hill my favorite horror franchise with his understanding of how to make a video game scary, instead of just making a horror movie that you can play. Now Kojima has released a demo of the Silent Hill game still in production that is also being written by Guillermo Del Torro. It is fucking horrifying.

What makes Silent Hill games special is that they embrace the medium. Silent Hill is a video game, so the scares it provides are based on the fact that you are sitting on a couch controlling the character's movements. Resident Evil on the other hand, makes a cutscene with some gore in it then tries to scare you with jumps, just like a movie. Silent Hill games never act like a movie, instead they fuck with your pause screen, read your memory card, and give you long tension filled environments that the player must find the courage to explore. 

P.T. continues this ideology, giving the player an endless loop through a series of hallways inside the home of a murdered family. Everytime you arrive at the end of the hallway and open the door, the loop repeats with an ever escalating number of terrifying mind-fucks each time. This little demo looks great, is genuinely disturbing, and pure Silent Hill.

Silent Hill protagonists are usually bad people. The player may take control of a man who has murdered his girlfriend, or is responsible for the loss of his daughter. The town and magic of Silent Hill is cryptic but seems to serve as punishment for those who have committed horrible acts, and this P.T. demo puts you in the shoes of a dad who has murdered his wife and kids. You suffer with him, just like every game in the series, but what makes Silent Hill so unique is that while your character suffers and descends into madness, you know they deserve it. I can't wait.

Hermits And Cults

I spend a lot of time reading and thinking about hermits. I always read stories about people who have encountered one and I am always very interested in what psychologists have to say about why certain people are drawn to a life of seclusion. I am also addicted to any and everything to do with cults. When The History Channel or A&E run an hour long special about Jonestown or Aum Shinrikyo I am a 7 year old with candy. I have no idea why I am so captivated by stuff like this, I am super squeamish with no desire to live in the forest (they don't have video games there) and to boot I am utterly devoid of religion or any sense of a higher power whatsoever. So why am I so eager to learn about people who either devote their entire lives to a dude with nice teeth who thinks he might be Jesus's dad or completely remove themselves from society completely?

I read an article on Gizmodo today that I think every person who is even remotely interested in modern cults should read. Here is the link to the article itself written by Ashley Feinberg, where she reveals that the infamous Heaven's Gate cult still has a website that is STILL maintained to this day. This was the cult that believed a spaceship was behind the Hale-Bopp Comet and the only way to board it was to put on Nikes and drink some arsenic. You can email the two people who are still alive and still members who run the site, and they will actually respond to all inquiries. The article is overstuffed with things I never knew about Heaven's Gate including responses to Feinberg's questions from actual Heaven's Gate members. 

Michael Finkel wrote a story in GQ this month about the Maine hermit that was captured just a couple years ago. He had been living in the forests of Maine for 27 years without any human contact whatsoever. During the harsh winter he stole supplies he needed to survive from the surrounding recreational campsites and homes. The community was aware he existed, every citizen of the town of North Pond had been robbed by the hermit, but nobody could catch in the act or find him. The short summary of the article;

"For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest"

They found him. He was arrested on a bazillion counts of burglary and put in jail to await trial. A man who hasn't spoken a word to another human in 27 years was now being housed in a jail among dozens of other inmates. The article is about Michael Finkel interviewing this man in jail, and about just how odd a conversation can be when your interviewee says that Chernobyl is the most recent world event he knows of. You also get to witness the hermit fall into a sad depression as his wilderness life is taken away from him. He truly was happy out there, alone. Here's the link;

The Strange Tale Of The North Pond Hermit

The Rundown

Dwayne The Rock Johnson is a hero of mine (he ranks below Shatner but above Kel Mitchell), so when he decided to stop wrestling and pursue his acting career, I vowed to support him. Beginning with The Scorpion King, I have to date seen every single Rock movie. None of the people that I get to see personally every day seem to care about The Rock's acting career like I do, so I decided to satisfy my need to rant about DTRJ here in a series of reviews of his films. Let's start with The Rundown.

The Rundown is by far my favorite Rock movie, despite it being only his 2nd film ever. While not as violent or gory as some of the other wrestler-turned-action-star movies, The Rundown has awesome fight scenes. There's a fight with an entire college football team in a hip night club that involves The Rock sliding a bus tray under a fat guy's foot so that he will do the splits, and later there is a fight with a hispanic midget with a whip. Also, The Rundown has the triumphant return of beloved character actor Ernie Reyes Jr.! In The Rundown, Ernie plays a pit fighting South American leader of a rebel militia, but you may remember him as.....

The Korean pizza boy from Secret of The Ooze!!! Added to the delightful turtle nostalgia, The Rundown also has in my opinion the best Christopher Walken scene ever. I started my streak of Rock movies with the best one, which was great at the time, but of course it could only go downhill from there.

The Rundown also has a sweet Schwarzenegger cameo.

Wild & Crazy Kids

I'm 27 now, and I've started noticing all of the more successful people younger than myself. I was reading an article this morning about an accomplished NASA scientist who was just 25 and I immediately thought, "It must be because he doesn't spend his days off binge-watching hours and hours of Wild & Crazy Kids."

Phoebe had a doctor's appointment Wednesday afternoon where she received two shots. Her pediatrician said that she would probably sleep that night and most of the next day too because of the medicine. Yesterday, I was left alone in the house with a sleeping baby for 8 hours and instead of studying astrophysics or building rockets like successful twenty-somethings, I drained a bowl and sat down to an uninterrupted 4 HOURS OF WILD & CRAZY KIDS. I had a great time and this man here has a playlist of every single episode in order, but why? Why is this something I desire? How come whenever I am presented with a significant amount of free time I immediately run to early 90's Nickelodeon youth-centered game shows? Somewhere deep inside this puzzle lies a great atheist statement, perhaps it is further evidence of the absence of God due to the pointlessness of my life experience. Why would that God guy make me if I'm just going to watch a young Omar Gooding's career with all of my spare time? Perhaps that is my purpose.

My New PS4 And The First Few Hours Of Destiny

Amazon promised me that my white PS4 Destiny bundle would arrive the day it was available in stores, and at 9:05am Tuesday morning, there it was. The startlingly pretty box stood out in the middle of my porch like an elegant Prothean beacon. I was just the tiniest bit annoyed that my mail carrier placed a box with a 500$ price tag unguarded right in front of my brown drug dealer neighbors. My Amazon settings clearly state that I would prefer to sign for my packages. I am not trying to be a diva, but I STILL don't have my Dez Bryant jersey because some cokie lifted it off my exposed porch.

The PS2 came out in the winter of 1999, and in Chicago it was near impossible to get your hands on one. Despite the release date being early December and having the money and desire to purchase one, I didn't get my hands on it until the morning of December 31st after waiting in an outdoor Best Buy line for 7 hours. Opening the PS4 yesterday kinda felt the same way. I have waited and waited, patiently and responsibly not spending that significant of an amount of money so soon after Phoebe's birth. That feeling of turning on a Playstation for the first time after waiting for so long, to be delighted in how futuristic it feels is an experience I think only Sony can provide. I missed the millennium because I was on a 24 hour straight PS2 launch game binge, and last night I stayed up until 3am playing Destiny as if I didn't have two kids to take to and from pre-school today. 

Destiny is great. I'm hesitant to start listing any complaints because I'm only at level 4, but so far I don't feel like a part of any community. Not yet. Kotaku has a great list of tips for new Destiny players here, and IGN has a very detailed description of each class here. If you happen to give a shit about my opinion, then I suggest not branching out of the story missions until you hit level 4. Nothing is available you you in those first 3 levels and exploring on your own is a waste of time. You need a ship, decent armor and a little story progression to unlock the different stores and locations. I picked Warlock and went with a look that screams American in a world with no countries.