Shamus

It's been almost five years since I last haunted this place. Wasn't it only yesterday that I last visited here? And now I turn around and it seems that RGR is dead, MW has morphed into this crazy vBulletinized swiss-army knife and Shane's off doing $DEITY knows what...

Wow. Seems that I have a lot of catching up to do...

Side note: Shane willing, this blog will host more, shall we say, deeper concerns than gaming/movies/television. Ground rules will be posted then.

And since that's the case, I thought I'd share some random thoughts that I had while reading some older threads so I won't piss everybody off by inadvertently resurrecting dead threads.

Well, OK, I'm thinking about just one: The Force Unleashed (XB360 version). I really wanted to like this but just couldn't get into it. Putting aside the moral dimension (really, y'all, I just don't understand you people who enjoy getting your 'evil' on--I just don't), it just wasn't, well, what's the word I'm looking for here? Oh yeah, fun.

I think by the time I had gotten into the droid junkyard (the part where you have to pull down strips of metal in a sheer walled metal canyon to jump on them to advance), I was tired of the lousy control and cheap deaths which were all too easy to come by.

Now here comes the obligatory background: I come from a tradition of playing FPSes on a PC with a mouse and keyboard--the way it's supposed be done. Starting with Doom, going through Dark Forces and the Jedi Knight series, even going the Half-Life series (let me tell you--those first Half-Life games gave me a serious case of motion-induced sickness the likes of which I'd never experienced before or since), I've played my fair share of them. And I just don't grok the FPS on the console. It's really an impossible thing: No matter what you do, you just can't get the same accuracy from an analog joystick that you can with a good mouse.

Now I know that it's possible to acclimate oneself to the console controller, as witnessed by my nephews who smoked me over and over again in FFA matches of Call of Duty 4 over the holidays last year (did I mention? Not fun). But, at the end of the day, it's an inferior input scheme. If I had been playing COD4 with my nephews on a PC with a keyboard and a mouse, I guarantee that I would have been the one doing the smokin'. 'Nuff said.

Now I'm sure there are those people out there who will say Yer Doin' It Wrong because you didn't play it on the Wii. Well, my response to that would be bull****. I've played the Wii (my brother has both a Wii and an XBox 360) and I am most definitely not impressed. The frickin' wiimote is like a mouse with a severe case of caffeine withdrawal--and this is true pretty much everywhere I've ever played one. In a word, it sucks. It may be a neat gimmick for a while, but in the end, it just doesn't cut it. Again, it just isn't fun to have to fight with an input device.

Getting back to TFU, I have to say that it does look pretty, but I was surprised that all versions that I've looked at seem to have a severe case of the jaggies (yes, even the PS3--WTF is up with that?). Not to mention that while it was shiny, it wasn't all that impressive. I really expected better, especially after seeing all the hype that LucasArts built up around it.

I wanted to like it. I really did. But it just wasn't fun.