Gorgeous Hair's review of Playstation's HOME



im in this room
and i have some couches
and there's nothing else in it
so i throw my couches around
but it's not fun
so i go out on my balcony
and i can't jump off it
so i go out the room, and it says loading lobby
so i quit
and will never go back in a gain
i want to say "dear playstation home, do you realize you made crap ?"

Good at Games

Does it matter, getting good at games?

You can argue that J0h@n@+han "Fatal1ty" W3nd311 profits from being good at games. He makes a decent salary. That makes game playing his job, however. I know a lot of people with better jobs because they decided to get good at things other than video games, so the argument is somewhat moot.

Bionic Commando: Rearmed is the last game I had to make an effort at. It wasn't a significant effort. I spent an extra day scrounging up every last free man and patiently beat the last level. I'm pretty good at BC:R now but I have no interest in playing it on hard mode or anything else at this point. I have no idea what was the last game I worked hard to master. Even with Tekken I get by more on my accrued skill over the six games than any concerted effort to master my wall game or something.

And what's the point really? Most games out there currently require zero skill. This is every RPG, MMORPG and everything else. Sure Omega Weapon was hard, but it's a numbers game, not a skill game.

Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox was the last game I had to get good at, from scratch and properly. I even got most of the way through the Hurricane Pack, but then too, at a certain point I asked myself, what is the point?

An Aside About Post-Campaign Replay

My decision to stop playing both Disgaea and The World Ends With You came for a similar reason. In both cases there's plenty of game after you've beaten the "final" boss. What killed TWE for me was the "black planet" pins, which are the best weapons/items in the game. The problem is that to get one of them, you have to fight the hardest enemy in the entire game, making the use for them rather moot.

So what do you do with them? Re fight that boss only it's easier now?

The longer you play something post-game, the more you ask yourself "what is the point?"

With Eindhander, my quest to get the Selene led to me getting much better at the game, but in RPG's you the game player never get better; your characters in the game get better at playing it. That's a weird meta-situation right there if you stop and think about it: You're watching people play a game. Your involvement is only to be there to tell the characters to get back to work. It's as though there was some sort of God telling me to keep playing Einhander till I was leveled up enough to beat the game on Hard without continuing.

That's some weird business right there, now that I think about it.

Dead Space

I haven't played it, but I just talked to Gorgeous Hair on the phone about it. He's been playing it and called it a solid 3 star game but was waiting till it was over to see if it held up. Hopefully he'll get around to writing about it himself, but for now, i'll paraphrase:

Last level sucks, Last boss is cool, ending is a slap in the face

2 stars