[chat] and Tonic

It loves you just the way you are.

Free Speech and Death Threats

So I really like this.
'Godless' Billboard Moved After Threats Against Owner
I wonder if God told the person to send death threats?
Love thy neighbor, as long as they believe what I do.

Nostalgia

I was going to wait until I finished Nostalgia to review it, but fuck it. I would rather eat this game than finish it.

Actually, Nostalgia is a rare treat for me. It is exceptionally difficult to have a pure experience with a video game these days: one where the game reveals itself at its own pace, untainted by months of advertising, magazine previews, and trailers. I had never even heard of Nostalgia when I picked it up and all I knew was what I saw in the first few pages of the strategy guide. A guy with a sword and a girl mage were flying around in an airship in a game called Nostalgia. That's all I needed to know to be convinced that this would be worth the money.

Hell, I didn't even flip the box over to see if it was 2D or 3D. This was going to be pretty great.

If any of you start talking about purifying crystals I'm crashing this thing into the nearest mountain

The Good Parts of Nostalgia

1) The World of Nostalgia is Earth

I am entirely in favor of this. Some details in the geography and especially the topography are a bit creative, but otherwise the layout is pretty familiar. When the townsfolk start dropping hints about how maybe you should check out New York, it's pretty easy to know exactly where to go next. None of this wondering around like a tard looking for some made up town.

2) All Overworld Travel is in an Airship

After like twenty years of coming up with dumb reasons for preventing you from having an airship, Nostalgia just gives you one right away and makes it the only way to travel between towns and dungeons. You don't even have to pay for it or do a quest for a leering pedophile airship captain. You just get one. It's genius.

3) Mage Weapons Actually Do Physical Damage

The black mage uses blunt weapons like clubs and hammers and the white mage's staves tend to have sharp edges. This keeps the white mage from being relegated to a rechargable herb dispenser, and allows for some longer dungeon runs since the black mage doesn't have to choose between using MP and wasting a turn.

The Bad Parts of Nostalgia

This is the most generic RPG anyone has ever bothered to let someone else think up for them. The young hero, sword in hand, goes to the sewers to gut some rats because the adventure guild told him to. There he meets the loner thief with a sketchy past and they sail the skies in search of more sewers with bigger rats or something. And then they encounter the strong-willed black mage girl who has a strong will and develops an abusive relationship with the loner pretty much right away. Then they meet the white mage with amnesia and I had to put the DS down for a little while. Since the title of the game is Nostalgia and the characters are so flagrantly reminiscent of any number of other RPGs, I thought certainly the developers would be having some fun with the cliches and we could all enjoy ourselves.

Instead, they completely embraced the cliches and regurgitated them with absolute seriousness. It's like they don't even know that Final Fantasy, Wild Arms, Skies of Arcadia, et others were widely available and played by other people. If they had gone the tongue-in-cheek homage route, they could have rewarded everyone for having played these games, but they would much rather punish us with their hopelessly boring shit.

The white mage is a mysterious girl with amnesia for god's sake. And she is able to interact with the ancient artifacts no one else can touch. Seven artifacts. Oh my god what if she is a princess from the fucking mythical land of happiness fairies and bears an amulet that activates the lost technologies!! Oh my god what if?!

Ooh and she and the main character could fall in wuv and have cutscenes together.

Shit, but she could actually serve a dark purpose!!! Maybe she is the harbinger of our doom and will one day have to fulfill her destiny but then at the last second choose not to even though she has been brainwashed by the mysterious cult!

That would blow my mind completely raw.

Unfortunately, I'll never know how Nostalgia ends, because it had fifteen hours to reach a conclusion and it flatly refused to. Patience over, get out.

Miley Cyrus: Party In The USA

And a Jay-Z song was on.
And a Jay-Z song was on.
And a Jay-Z song

was

on.

2012: Apocalypse BUKKAKE

This review of 2012 shall henceforth serve as the template for all movie reviews, ever:

You know who I love? I love anyone who hated this movie because I would like to fight them to the death for being wrong as balls. Fuckouttahere. I wanna be on the 2012 thrill park ride, playing 2012 on my Nintendo DS, eating the 2012-branded chocotaco and watching this movie at the same time because I am greedy for this brand of INCREDIBLEBANANASINCREDIBLE. Everyone who says otherwise may as well have written their reviews on their faces in marker because they are obviously batshit crazy and should be ignored.

That is some military-grade hyperbole. I miss writing like that.