Penis Ribbons

Happy May Day, everyone.

I wanted to post a clip from The Wicker Man but all the clips on You Tube have embedding disabled and are loaded down with advertisements. How much you want to bet the people milking it for all it's worth had nothing to do with actually making the movie?

They're all uploaded by different people--I thought the comment for this clip was pretty funny; "saw this movie the other day with my buddy mills. i think it was the basis of resident evil 4. I dont think it was a musical, but it has a lot of the most bizarre sing and dance pieces." You don't think it was a musical? Don't you know? Didn't you just say you saw it? And of course what could distinguish the movie more than being the basis for Resident Evil 4?

The popularity of the Resident Evil games has always perplexed me a little. From what little I've played, the game seems to derive its scares from the fact that you can barely move your character as she's generally pinned in by narrow paths of invisible barriers, made more difficult by remarkably bad controls. It kind of artificially creates situations where slow moving, mindless zombies are actually a threat.

Speaking of video games, I watched Tim play the Guild Wars 2 beta over the weekend. It seems quite simply to be the ultimate MMORPG. It does away with the standard quest giver system to be composed entirely of dynamic events. Instead of getting a quest to collect X number of random items, you get open ended things like agreeing to help so and so with his farm, which could involve tending crops or protecting it from giant worms or bandits who may or may not show up. And there's no limit on how many people can participate in a dynamic event while still receiving credit--the game simply scales the number of enemies for the number of players present in the area. It automatically encourages more cooperation, and Tim told me it was really refreshing not to feel immediately irritated when he saw another player, an indication he would have to compete for a mining node or something that might only spawn once every ten minutes or so.

The game features the most customisable character creation screen I've seen for an MMORPG, it's better looking than any other MMORPG, and, on top of all that, it's subscription free. You buy the game once, and then you never have to pay anything else ever again. If I were of a mind to play an MMORPG again, I'd play this one. Though I think I finally figured out I need a game with a more hands on style, the strategy game point and click thing is just too disconnected for me. Anyway, I have enough things on my plate.

But even having no particular bias, I'm hoping to see Guild Wars 2 trounce all the competition if for no other reason than pure non-partisan schadenfreude. The sweetest thing would be seeing World of Warcraft crash and burn, particularly since its newest add-on, Mists of Pandaria, has such a vulnerable lousiness. I mean, you control panda people. It's so delightfully stupid. World of Warcraft is poised to become the rodeo clown of the MMORPG industry.