»17th October 2007

Rants and Unoriginality

Like so many times before I thought I'd do something productive to salvage the remainder of the day after a particularly bad failure or period of extended idleness. So I'm going back to the time honoured tradition of a lazy cut and paste job for a blog update. That's right! You can now enjoy yet another series of unconnected streams of my own self-aggrandising bullshit. This is the equivalent of an end of series clip show of a series you missed because it was on at 2am on BBC2 sometimes on mondays, perhaps on sundays, whenever we feel like so you miss it!
Ahem, sorry about that. Anyway, I might as well roll on with the show before I turn into Barry Norman.

First off, seeing as there aren't enough rants on here, and because I feel like offending and alienating as many of you as possible I'm going to reiterate my rant from ETS about bands I dislike. This was from the thread aptly titled 'Shit on Music'.

"All those four-piece, two-telecaster, minimoog bumming, Clash rip-off motherfucking indie bands that are pissing all over the charts today can just go and die. You know who you are with your 'eclectic' influences, your sound which is exactly the same as any four-piece two-telecaster minimoog bumming band from the late 70s-early 80s. Stop playing the same old tired, post-punk, indie, pop shit. Your vocals all sound the same because you've all got NMEs cock rammed down your throat. Why is all your equipment the same? Why do you all look the same? You make me want to drill my ears out.
Kaiser Chiefs
The Editors
Casabian
Hard-Fi
The Killers
Arctic Monkeys
The Young Knives
Bloc Party
Snow Patrol
The Zutons
The Shits
The Unoriginals
The Predictables
The Clones

I may have made those last few bands up. Though there's a good chance there are bands with those names who play the same horrible, horrible shit."



Okay, hopefully I've wound some of you up now with my bigoted dismissal of 'contemporary' British 'indie' 'rock'. Ho ho ho.

Now that I've cleared the objective which I put in my todo list which was basically 'post ETS shit bands rant'. Now this directionless update can spiral out of control. Random IM quotes awaaaay!

[23:07] Geon: i sat there, reclined in my chair slightly, puffed on a pipe, finished off the port and said 'i'm going to rape this'

[23:20] Geon: i'm trying to write a blog update but i'm not in the best mood. my opening sentence was, 'blah blah blah blah blah shit shit shit shit shit' until i decided to start over

[00:31] Geon: i'm unashamedly fishing for blog quotes by the way

[21:47] jk: well, of our last 300 visitors. half are you and me, one quarter are people (you) on your forum and the last quarter are people accessing my avatar from a web forum i visit

[21:17] Geon: my solution to global warming is to fire nuclear weapons into the earth's atmosphere to regulate global temperature through controlled nuclear winters

[21:24] Geon: my solution to the arab-israeli problem was to build a giant gold dome over the holy land and not let anyone in

Now that I've thoroughly bored any of you brave enough to stay the course this far now I can get down to the real hardcore nonsense. Whilst writing this crap I started to wonder about how the hell I'm going to illustrate this as one of my rules for the blog is that I try to always include some kind of picture to break up the text, and it's always better if it's in some way relevant to what I'm banging on about.
I suppose I should talk about blog-like things (ever a sure indicator I'm scraping the barrel) like 'what are you doing now lol?' and things like that. That is, things that blogs are supposed to talk about, hence the reason why they universally suck and are horrible, horrible wastes of the internet which the news feels some bloody reason to tell us about. I can sort of understand why they talk about 'bloggers' in places like China and Burma with such reverant tones because clearly they're all history graduates in the media and they see what is possibly an emerging society of letters harking back to enlightenment France. Which also relates to how the aforementioned countries still cling onto medieval social ideas and generally suck. But really, there isn't any more I need to say about bloggers outside of those oppressive dinosaur-like states which hasn't already been said. Pretentious, not legitimate sources for the media to talk about or address. Just ignore them for God's sake.
This update has finally collapsed in a heap on the floor, wheezing and gasping from a lifetime of non-content flooding it's lungs. I hope never to inflict this sort of sub-par shit on you again. Maybe I'll write some crappy high-school-creative-writing-standard fiction for you to mock?


Welcome to the 17th October Blog Update 1.09c Patch!
This patch resolves several critical issues users experienced with the retail version. Namely lack of direction, terrible pictures and a lousy netcode.
Patching...
Patch Success!
Your Blog Update is now v1.09c!

This was a dire update, this is me trying to plug the gaping holes in a rushed and ill-conceived update sell out.

I'm going to deceive you now like the dumb television audience that you are (that's right, I watch Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe (and enjoy it)). This isn't adapted from an IM conversation, do you think I'd treat you with that much contempt?


I managed to get my friend at Nintendo to email me this design sheet from the prototype stages of the Wii.

I wonder if i could be any less interested in consoles? The last console I liked was the Sega Saturn, I got a Dreamcast and that was already past the crest of the hill. I've never played a Playstation or PS2 game I'd want to pay money for, they all feel totally soulless. I've never played a Gaycube or Piss (does he mean the Wii?) game I'd want to play even whilst drunk and I've never played an XBox game period. Admittedly there were a couple of good games on the Dreamcast, mostly Soul Calibur, Resident Evil: Code Veronica and Capcom versus SNK, but they didn't feel special at the time. How I lament how consoles have gone down the shitter. I blame all you idiots.
I'm sure you're going to tell me that this game is fucking awesome and that I'd really enjoy it but I'll just tell you back that either the PC version will be better, the PC version will be a horrible commercialist conversion (proving the game wasn't any good to begin with) or it won't get a PC release (because it's shit without the swinging your arms around with flailing abortion of a gimmicky controller that you need JUST for that game). Just so we're clear, I do like lightguns and I really want one for my PC.

"Oh I get it, this guy is taking a swing at the Gamecube."

Now just hold on a minute, you don't think I'd be so careful as to only insult the most childish and superficial of the consoles do you? You don't think I'd restrict myself to berating a console which most people only ever played that time they were completely shitfaced at that party at that guy's house. Why would I only target a console with a hard-on for propriety hardware and a penchant for one-off controllers that make you look like a dick when you play the horrible games? Why would I do that when I could just insult ALL consoles.


The infamous 1985 poster campaign for the PS3.

To be fair to Nintendo, the Gameboy SP isn't bad. I have a second hand one and a bunch of games for it namely Shining Force, Breath of Fire, Castlevania and Advance Wars 2. It's way too small for my grasping claw-like appendages (or hands as they're known outside of Japan) and it's completely un-fucking-ergonomic (those sharp corners really dig after an hour of levelling the pathetically shit support classes on Shining Force. However, it is basically a portable 16-bit console which has phenomenal batteries. So it's not like I'm totally averse to console shit, I'm just extremely old-fashioned and afraid of change (when it's for the worse). To bring this aside to a close, and to make sure there's no confusion, Nintendo are still heaped piles of shit.

Anyway, this is supposed to be a rant. Back to my wonderful insight on the cascading travesty of the next-next-next-generation consoles.
The PS3 is really ugly it looks like some mid-80s console. I'm thinking a Master System or Spectrum. And the Wii? Well it's like some devil-sent attempt to destroy gaming forever. The comparison I used before when talking about why I hate the Wii was that casual cinema goers and hardcore film nutters can both appreciate The Godfather. The Wii patronises the former and ignores the latter in gaming terms. You're too stupid to understand gaming! Here's some more drinking games and retarded information-super-highway market-led tat to distract you with! Do you want to know the weather report? Turn on the fucking radio or TV you cretins. And Dr. Kawishima's flash game can fuck right off, I don't care if you managed to drug Nicole Kidman and thrust the game upon her in her drugged stupor. Before I finish with the Wii I might as well note that it's only distinguishing physical feature is that it sort of looks like an CD-ROM drive that has been skewed in MS Paint. That's actually how they designed it. Really I could die of boredom if I merely glanced at a Wii for longer than eight seconds.
The XBox 360 looks like an air con unit, is there really anything else I need to say? Oh, well okay then. Erm, 360 degrees of shit? Did that make you laugh? The XBox is what you're PC would be like if Microsoft made the hardware too? More?
Consoles don't need hard-drives, they started to go shit when optical drives were added and real men don't need memory cards. I'll thank the XBox for finally bringing cheap, decent joypads to the PC which let me play Megadrive games I bought on cartridges back in the day and arcade games I'm never going to see ON MY PC. That's right, my PC which breaks, is about four times more expensive than your average console (not the PS3, mind) and takes up an entire room. But said PC can also (with a little persuasion) play every PC game since circa 1990 and probably some earlier ones with a bit more persuasion. Which is just great.

Do you know what's even better? I can record my stupid music on my PC, I can talk to my friends, I can write this horrible website for you to mock, I can look at porn, I can watch films (the ones with actors in), I can do loads of stuff. I could even do that on my old PC and my laptop, probably not the even older PC in the loft (but that still has DOS on it, swings and roundabouts). Can your console do that? Oh right, you wouldn't want it to, of course, and you already have a PC to do that on, yes how silly of me. So your console is sat under your TV clogging up the room with more wires. Where are your old consoles, also clogging up that valuable TV-peripheral space? You sold them to pay for your new console? Oh, so you still play them on the emulator on your PC? I see. I couldn't go another update without mentioning it, but have you played Dwarf Fortress? It's really cool. Do you know what you need to play it?


You don't have to dig deep on the Microsoft site to find this.

Here's a great game I recently purchased, it's been out a few years now, but it's still pretty good, it's called Super Apologist Tournament Edition. It's a great game, you start off by telling a console kid (and they are children after all) that consoles are (obviously) for kids, you then watch as they perform amazing acrobatics with their arguments as they try to justify their defence of consoles. In terms of gameplay it's very similar to Metal Betrayers: Shadow of Burton the late 80s RPG where you controlled a party of Metallica apologists trying to stop the prophecy of Metallica BETRAYING METAL coming true. You might be able to pick that up as freeware now, I recomend you seek it out.

The Elder Scrolls totally ripped this game off.

Before I get an angry email from someone telling me how wrong I am (this will of course never happen), I would actually consider myself a Metallica apologist. They didn't betray metal, metal just returned to the underground where it belongs. Also, grunge is a fucking myth and the early 90s idea of what 80s metal was was distorted by bands like Guns 'n' Roses who aren't metal. Hard rock is distinct from heavy metal you morons. However, I really can't explain Load & Reload in my little Metalliphile conspiracy theory. I've not heard them and I don't want to spoil my perception of the band. Anyway, Metal Betrayers is really good. The skill system is fucking genius and the main story arc and sub-plots are actually interesting (a particularly awesome side quest involves defeating a talking riddle-wall and defeating the evil sorceror who ruined Megadeth's output in the late 90s). There's some fucking awesome midi metal music too.

note: I hope this goes some way to repairing the damage done at launch. I told Will a Christmas release was way too early, that R&D weren't happy with the OS yet, but you know what he's like. Not that this will make any difference anyway, but I think we need to give the fans what they deserve. It's not as if there's anything wrong with the hardware anyway. Hopefully doing this will attract some more third-party developers.


Extar, over, out.

Like metal, gaming is better when it's underground.