It's called playtesting

The newest game from Rock Star, the folks who brought us Grand Theft Auto, is Red Dead Redemption. It's a western sand box shooter/adventure game. It's on my radar, but only when it comes out for the PC.

In any case, there have been a few dedicated fans that have uncovered a few glitches. I'm not talking about invisible walls or bad cameras, I'm talking about things like flying bird people, talking dog gunslingers and viscous cougar men.

What kind of play testing did this game actually get? I have no idea how much time Youtube user Wheredabootz spent to find these glitches, but it still seems like a playtester should have found them first.

While they're all slightly creepy, this is my favorite:



WTF?

How many words are in BASTARD?

A while back DrHeimlich introduced me to WordMix, available on the Droid phone. It's an incredibly addictive little word game that is one of the few apps I've actually purchased. Wordmix scrambles a six letter word, then asks you to find all the possible words. My wife loves it just as much, she always wants to borrow my phone to play while we're driving. I find myself playing a round or two almost every day, certainly more than I should be. This is certainly TMI, but it's almost a necessity in the bathroom now.

What's arguably more disturbing, is that it has started to affect my reading. Thanks to this gorram game, I can't make it more than a few pages without dissecting a six letter word I come across looking for other words. I've caught myself staring at a word on the page for a few minutes before realizing I was actually reading to read the book. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten so bad that I feel the need to put the book down, pick up my phone and start playing....YET.

In the end, I feel I must send a large nod of thanks for introducing me to this game, and an even larger nod of hate to go along with it...

Multitask Hell

Here's a "fun" little time waster. Multitask is just that, how long can you go while the game adds various tasks to keep track of.

It starts easy - balance a ball with the left and right arrows, then avoid spikes with the up/down arrows while balancing the ball. Next comes moving a square to a target in using the wasd keys while ball balancing and spike dodging, and so on....

So far I can't get above 61 seconds - about a second into the fourth "task"...

Pickup Cookies

The "fortune" found in my cookie after we ordered Chinese for dinner the other night:

We've apparently completely abandoned the concept of fortunes. Now I get pick-up lines, and not even a good one.

For those who like to wait

Lately we've become pretty addicted to the Bertolli Skillet dinners. They're tasty, quick, and can be fixed in a skillet or in the microwave. Of course microwaving it usually only saves about two to three minutes, then there are the occasional meals from Opposite Land:

I have to wonder why microwaving this meal takes up to twice the time in a microwave...

Massively Underwhelming

A few months ago, Bioware released Mass Effect 2, a highly anticipated sequel to Mass Effect. I managed to finish it a while ago and my final impression was a very palpable, "Meh."

As with all Bioware games, the story is awesome. You can event import your character from the first game to get little NPC nods about your prior achievements.This has some interesting effects, if you happened to keep your Mass Effect save game. "Who the Hell did that?", you may ask and I would be right there with you. Fortunately a few people have created a database of all the possible save games available. Unfortunately, these nods are literally that, nods. A character may make a reference in passing to your first game experiences. That's it, no actual storyline changes, no impacts on the game, nothing. All things considered, it was pretty weak. Also, as with all Bioware games, there's tons of possible sex - though this time in a ABC family theater way. It was really pretty lame this time around.

Gameplay is lack luster. Each mission is a Xerox of the one before it. While there were minor story differences, the missions all had the same basic feel; Go Here-Fight-Go There-Fight Some More-Go Back. Rinse and repeat. While some of them had an interesting moral choice, most had the same vanilla feel about them. The most "interesting" thing about the missions were the ridiculous number of times that I got stuck on invisible walls or crates. The collision detection is horrible. Four or five times I found myself stuck on top of a barrier that I couldn't jump off of, forcing a restart of the mission. It was frakking irritating, especially since this is a basic issue that should have been caught in testing.

In Mass Effect, the player had to land on random planets and drive around in a Tonka/Weeble wobble car to collect resources for upgrades. In Mass Effect 2, the player has to mine minerals from various planets around the galaxy. This is interesting for about 24 seconds. After that it becomes one of the most tedious things I've ever done in a game. At one point I actually fell asleep doing this. I'm. Not.Kidding.

Plus, for some reason, Bioware decided to take a step away from the traditional RPG weapon comparison/selection. In ME2, you have the same basic weapons, and earn upgrades as the game progresses (see previous chapter). During all of the upgrades, however, the game never tells you the actual stat differences. You never know which weapons are more accurate, or do more damage.

In the end Mass Effect 2 was extremely disappointing in almost every way. The storyline was awesome, but I could have gotten that from the wiki page, and should have. Unlike the other Bioware games, I had absolutely NO desire to replay it and see the other endings, again Wiki was just fine with me.

Let me tell you, I can't wait to not spend my money on Mass Effect 3...

Aw, aren't Doc Brown's kids just the cutes....What the HELL?

The Back to the Future movies are some of my all time favorite movies. Thanks to those hyper-observant people on the interwebs, part three has a whole new meaning to me. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen the three movies, but have never noticed this:



Is it a request for a pee break or is Little Verne asking Elizabeth Shue for a Journey to the Center of the Earth??