My Top 5 gaming experiences

Video games are cool. And these days, they can REALLY deliver some powerful experiences. So, here's my very subjective list of my personal top 5 gaming experiences. Naturally, the descriptions below contain spoilers, consider yeself warned.


Number 5: The nightmare-level in Max Payne 1

Endless corridors with children's room wallpapers. A baby crying somewhere, always just out of sight. Max himself running in slow motion. And then the trail of blood hanging over a pitch-black abyss. The nightmare levels in Max Payne 1 were fucking creepy. The video below is short, but it's the only one I could find where you can actually see anything.




Number 4: Free Bird

(I told you this list was subjective....) My number 4 experience is the first time I FINALLY beat Free Bird by Lynyrd Skynyrd on expert in Guitar Hero II. I find it hard to believe you haven't heard of the song, but just in case: The song is about 9 minutes long and the last 4 minutes of that is simply one of the greatest guitar solos ever recorded. It's the last song in the game and (excluding some of the bonus tracks) also the hardest. Even the game itself considers you to be awesome if you beat it on Expert. Yes, it actually says: "And, uh, seriously? That was awesome."




Number 3: The final mission of Grand Theft Auto IV

GTA IV as a whole is an awesome game and for the most part it at least tries to be sort of realistic. But of course, the final mission pretty much goes as much over the top as possible. My favorite bit is when you're on a bike, riding on a beach, following the bad guys who are on a speedboat and you ride your bike to this huge ramp, jump up in the air and grab the landing gear of the helicopter your buddies have stolen. Awesome! (For more awesome, the latter add-on, The Ballad Of Gay Tony pretty much goes all out in all the missions.)

Note: I can't remember, but by googling a bit, it seems you need to take the revenge-ending instead of the deal one to get the bikeride sequence. Anyway, the video below has the jump a little after the 8-minute mark.




Number 2: God Of War III

I don't own this game. I don't even have a PS3. But at a LAN-party some time ago, I got a chance to play this on the big screen a bit and it blew my mind. I'd never played any GoW -games before, and no one really explained the controls to me very well, but nevertheless I KILLED FREAKING POSEIDON. I can't even explain how awesome the game looks, so have a video instead.




Number 1: Red Dead Redemption and riding into Mexico

Sooo.... You thought you'd go to Armadillo, get Williamson and go back to your family. Then it turns out Williamson has gone to fucking Mexico. Aww fuck. You take a very dangerous raft-ride cross the river and find a horse waiting on the shore. As you start riding, suddenly the ambient sounds turn down and Far Away by José González starts playing. Whoa.



So that's my list. Feel free to disagree, I don't really give a crap. :P

This is not the greatest blog in the world.

Today, during an english lesson in our school, our teacher used JUST ONCE, the phrase "It's a matter of opinion." From that moment on, for roughly the next eight hours (and counting) the song Tribute by Tenacious D has been playing over and over and over in my head.

This is not the first time something like this happened. It actually happens quite often. So, what I was thinking is, I should write it down EVERY SINGLE TIME something like this happens. Then, when I die, I can put it in my will, that I want to donate the complete archives of the texts (which should by then take up the space of a decent-sized library) along with my brain for science. (FOR SCIENCE!)

Then, some brave scientist can analyze the data and finally, fucking finally, come up with a cure for this. The future generations will thank me for that. And the scientist, I'd imagine, will win a Noble Prize. Come to think of it, not just one. He's going to get all of them.

Chemistry and "physiology or medicine" (their term, not mine) are pretty self-explanatory. Peace prize is also pretty easy. Anyone who's watched the rebooted Doctor Who these past years knows, that The Master (a really really bad guy, world domination etc....(Don't believe he's evil, just look at this picture.)) was only an asshole because he couldn't get the DU-DU-DU-DUM, DU-DU-DU-DUM drum sound out of his head. Just imagine what was playing in Hitler's head. (Timewarped to the 80s and back as an infant, his brain was simply not ready for the horror of Rick Astley. Without the necessary safeguards, the chorus of Never Gonna Give You Up was permanently engraved in his brain waves, with tragic results....)

The literature prize comes of course from writing a feel-good book after his adventures in curing people around the world suffering from this terrible ailment. The physics prize is a bit harder. Probably some other haunted soul cured by his medicine will go on to build a working spaceship hyperdrive and then offer to share his.

Peace.

I had a day

Wow, almost a year since my last post. Guess I haven't had much to say. Today, however, I noticed a couple strange things, that combined would make one hell of a long facebook-status, so here you go. (Noticing strange things seems to be a side effect of reading too much Douglas Adams in a short time, which, co-incidentally, is exactly what I've been doing since I bought the omnibus containing all 5 hitch-hiker novels (and the Young Zaphod bonus story).) Anyway. Here are the things, numbered and in roughly chronological order:

1. I was taking the train back home from school and looking out the window, when I noticed a van, of the sort plumbers, carpenters etc. use to get places. It had a six-word slogan (in English, no less), grouped into three groups of two words each. It said:

THERE ARE


NO PROBLEMS


ONLY SOLUTIONS

What I (and hopefully you too, at this point) started thinking was, if there really were no problems (a highly dubious claim in times like these), then what on earth were the solutions FOR. And how would they even be recognized as solutions, when the problems they supposedly solved didn't exist to need solutions in the first place.

2. I went to check out a new pizza place (in a town with close to a dozen pizza places, opening a new one doesn't seem like a very sound business idea to me), with the imaginative name 1453 (no idea why). The pizza itself was OK-ish, but what quickly started bothering to me was the muzak they played. (Think Careless Whisper but without ANY catchiness at all). Each time the song ended, I hoped something better would start. Even a DJ chattering nonsense would have been welcome. But no, it just all seemed to be the same kind of stuff over and over. Until I realized (much to my horror) that it wasn't simply that they played only one kind of music. They were actually playing just one song on infinite repeat. Just. One. Song.

(To be fair, that song was everything a good rock tune isn't, so even with about a dozen listenings through, it left pretty much no impression in my mind at all.)

3. There isn't actually a third thing. But a numbered list of two items would seem silly.

Vagina Diologues

Today I got such a weird piece of spam e-mail, that I just have to share it:

The Vagina Diologues: A Dildo Queen Comes Clean

It is true what they say, so yes, I must confess that
I can not help myself; I am addicted to the one.

I crave the satisfaction of the one. The one calls me
several times a day and I can not stop until I
orgasm 4-5 times each time it calls me.

The one fills me and satisfies me like no other.
The one is inside me and outside of me, pleasuring
me completely until I am spent in orgasmic bliss.

So, yes, I must confess. I am addicted to the one.

But I ask you, could anyone actually resist the
the temptations of such mind bending pleasures once
they have experienced them?

Could you?

This Way "To The One"

That's...poetic. It's even kind of beautiful. Well, not counting the fact that it's trying to sell me a dildo, but still...

Sniper fire and revelations

Ok, so last night's post was like a minigun and this one is a sniper rifle. (Admit it, you like this analogy already.) Last night I was tired and annoyed, so I took the biggest gun in my arsenal and let rip. A minigun looks cool and makes a cool noise. Also, after a few rounds you can be sure there's no one standing. The wise will have ducked down as soon as the first shot came and the less wise would be dead. However, I'm now raising my less flashy, but ultimately more effecting sniper rifle, to CLARIFY my statements in the previous post.

Atheist Bus (Ateisti-bussi)

I'm a christian myself, and more than anything this to me is incredibly funny. People are donating like all hell (see what I did there.... one guy donated 666 euros to the finnish bus though...) to the costs of getting a bus to ride around yelling "There is probably no god!"

SyFy channel

I'm just gonna quote the article:

“We spent a lot of time in the ’90s trying to distance the network from science fiction, which is largely why it’s called Sci Fi,” Mr. Brooks said. “It’s somewhat cooler and better than the name ‘Science Fiction.’ But even the name Sci Fi is limiting.”

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Black Entertainment Television and the guy who wrote this

I'll take a leaf from Dr. Cox's book and say this really slo-who-who-who-ly:

There. Is. No. Such. Thing. As. Positive. Discrimination. You people are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. What you should be doing is integrate with people of other colours, not create more boxes and labels for yourself. OK?

The second part of the title of this post is revelations. The next part is gonna be cliched and sentimental and all that, and quite frankly, if you're irritated by that, fuck you, I'm not writing this for you, I'm writing this for me.

I've had some revelations lately. Some of them are good, some are bad and yet others are not publish-able here at all. Ask me personally, if you're interested. One of the bad kind of revelations is the fact, that even though I've long thought I'm quite open-minded to different kinds of music, that's just not true. Specifically, I seem to be allergic to music played in most bars near where I live. Those places are all way too expensive for me to get really drunk in, way too noisy for me to have any kind of meaningful human contact and to top it off, I usually can't stand the music at all, so I end up having a miserable time. So, if you wonder why I'm reluctant to go to bars, that's why.

There's also good kind of revelations. Like the fact that I've made a completely wicked piece of weird music, that'll be at phann.org in about a month, after it has had it's official premiere at our school's lan party. Another good revelation is the fact, that even a cynical bastard such as I can yell in joy when watching the latest Doctor Who ep. (I'm talking about last year's christmas special, The Next Doctor and the big robot and the "tardis", you'll know if you've seen it.)

What else, well it looks like I'm gonna be Interrailing this July, so look out. With that, good night and peace.