Talking Arm

I added this. I’m also working on something, the beginning of which can be found here.

While playing Call of Duty 4, a game I am probably addicted to, I noticed something. When I plug my iPod into my 360, I used to just set it to a certain band and listen to every song of theirs I had. Now I’m starting to get into this whole “shuffle” thing, and have begun randomizing my music. Doing this in foobar2000, and on my iPod itself is pretty nice. Yet when I want to do this for my X-Box 360, here’s what I get:

- Songs that start with a symbol.

- Songs that start with a number.

- Songs that start with the letter A.

- That’s it.

Songs that start with B (Buddy Holly)? C (Ch-Check It Out)? Z (Zbogom Marija)? I might as well not have them. Randomizing my music only gives me a ton of ambient songs, as well as the entirety of The Clash’s London Calling (since, you see, the filenames begin with a number). I have no problem with ambient sounds, obviously, but not while I’m playing Call of Duty! London Calling is one of my favorite albums, but not when it’s played over and over again and again over the course of a single Sabotage (another song that won’t get played) mission!

Thank God for this Next-Gen tech at work. I can see now why the Turbo Boards get so fucking jizzy for this system, as this thing does EVERYTHING!

Nintendo is for gays.

Sony is for stupids.

I see now!

LONG LIVE THE 360. It does what Nintendon’t, what Dreamcan’t, what Playtoostupidtodoanythingexceptlaunchnuclearmissilesatsegatasanshiroripneverforget.

It is the Alpha.

It is the Omega.

The beginning and the end.

It is everything and nothing.

It is Zen at it’s most Zennest.

The Mario and the Sonic.

The Street Fighter II and The King of Fighters.

The Solid Snake and the Sam Fisher.

The Phoenix Wright and the Zero Wing.

The Halo and the Braid.

The Pizza and the Hamburger.

Yin and Yang.

Fire and Water.

WHO IS YOUR GOD NOW?

WELCO
METOT
HENEX
TLEVEL

Please fanboys. Please continue telling me how dumb and primordial I am for owning different video game consoles than you. Maybe one day I will listen and evolve and begin walking upright on two legs!

Just don’t take my lunch money in the meantime!

I took this picture on my crappy cell phone while sitting in the online lobby for Call of Duty 4.

I still have no idea what it means.

This will be a short and sweet entry.

If I reviewed games based on a score (a real score), Braid would be five stars, a ten out of ten, one hundred percent and five exploding Gamepro heads. It wouldn’t be a 7.687453412357235623456 because of a lack of online co-op and having to pay fifty dollars a year to be called the N-Word by a spoiled nine year old playing his big brothers’ gaming system.

Braid is excellence in a field of broken dreams prematurely aborted by some unfeeling executive who occasionally feels human when he eats a bad order of Chinese take-out and has to take a major hurricane shit in his private executive washroom. The same broken, inbred industry that will never accept my ideas for the perfect video game that actually features original ideas (one is like Snake Eater meets Metal Wolf Chaos, while the other is like Dragon Quest V meets Cowboy Bebop) or the original ideas of other geniuses who are then kicked out of programming school for not conforming to the preset rule list of The Man, man!

After Braid, one wonders why they have ever played video games, or if they should ever play them again. Braid Jumped the Shark for the gaming industry, in that nothing will ever top its sheer magnitude and genius. I mean, what else is coming out? Gears of War 2? Oh boy! More jock-itch inspired bull shit made by a vicious army of assholes bent on destroying my brain! Now I can curb stomp aliens instead of just shooting them with a giant laser gun, isn’t that something?

Christ.

Jesus Christ.

You people make me sick.

Fuck you!

It is all your fault that people can get away with this! You there, holding a new copy of Generic Soldier Bullshit That Sells More Than Psychonauts II’ Special Champion Edition that you picked up from the local Gamestop (POWER TO THE PLAYERS! 15% TRADE-IN VALUE!) or downloaded from (Main)St(r)eam, this is all because of you! I fucking hate you. Why can’t you get what Jon Blow attempted to do with Braid? Let’s read this quote here:

“There are some people who get the game, or at least significant parts of it. And there are some people who don’t seem to really get the game. What’s interesting is, as the author, you don’t ever necessarily expect the audience to get the same thing out of an artwork that the author put in, right? But there are definitely highly significant things that I’ve put into the game that have very specific meanings to me, and looking around on message boards and forums, I’ve seen individual people find most or all of those pieces, and say, “I see this, you know, and here’s what this means to me, etc.” I haven’t necessarily seen one person put it all together.”

WHAT IS THE PROBLEM? Can nobody figure out what Braid is about? Are you too stupid? Obviously, otherwise I wouldn’t be hawking pre-order cards for Resistance 2 at my job. Yeah dawg, now the aliens are bigger! True Story: My boss picked up a copy of Jenga for the Wii to play with his wife.

What the fuck.

Why?

Why Jenga?

FUCKING JENGA ON THE WII FUCK

Oh God now people are probably going to be all like, “oh hey wii fuck that’s a great idea” just all those slobs who wanted to know if you can have sex in The Sims. Why not have sex with a real person? Why not fucking die?

In the end, it’s for the best that Braid Month at TALKING ARM DOT COM comes to a close. Because really, I don’t waste a lot of time talking about “the industry versus independent game developers” because I think it’s obvious whose mentality, in the long run, will have more to say to our culture.

May God have mercy on us all.

May Jonathan Blow have mercy on us all.

Good night and Jon Bless.

I wish YouTube (or an equivalent video streaming site) had the Spongebob Squarepants episode, The Sponge Who Could Fly. If you thought Nickelodeon couldn’t get anymore shameless with Rock Bottom, think again!

As there are no clips, I will have to summarize to the best of my abilities. Before the episode begins, Patchy the Pirate (played by Tom Kenny, the American Steve Blum) is given a map (via a brick through his window) revealing the location of a long-hidden “lost episode.” Patchy and his parrot companion then go on a journey to find this lost episode.

Obviously someone at Nick liked the idea of a man tormented by a loss of some sort (Tim in Braid is haunted by the loss of his Princess, while Patchy is an obsessive fan who needs to find an episode that is supposedly “lost”). And it is also obvious that someone at Nick likes taking someone’s ideas and not giving the proper credit. Patchy’s journey to the local playground was aired Friday March 21, 2003. Braid was in development for 3 years. Do the math.

There is a scene which I alluded to earlier in which Patchy reaches a children’s playground (referred to as “The Seven Trials of Monkey Lagoon”). The final trial has Patchy getting spun around on a merry-go-round by a group of local kids.

A merry-go-round is round, like a circle. So is Tim’s ring in World 6. Fuck.

After some surrealism for surrealisms sake, Patchy and his parrot come home, lost episode in hand. After a (slightly) humorous minute long sequence of Spongebob walking cycles, Patchy throws the type of temper tantrum usually reserved for a Call of Duty player who’s just been killed five times in a row and teabagged after each death and seriously man if you’re going to be enough of a chump to run around with a Noob Tube and an RPG you should probably know how to fucking use them, douchebag. I mean I’m sure you thought that having perks like Juggernaut and Last Stand were great ideas until you realized that Martyrdom was much more annoying, you prick. AND THE BOX SAYS M FOR MATURE 17+ DID YOU GET YOUR OLDER BROTHER TO BUY THE GAME FOR YOU OR SOMETHING?

It is only after the tape continues (with the “real” lost episode) that Patchy reconsiders his anti-Spongebob crusade and, I shit you not.

Shit you not.

Patchy the Pirate reverses time to the point before he had his temper tantrum.

Complete with sound played in reverse.

I was in shock when I saw this episode this morning. The lows that a major network would stoop to in order to provide “entertainment” to young viewers made me violently ill. Will someone think about the children for one Goddamn minute? Of course not. Exposing a kid to Spongebob ripping off a double-major student like Jon Blow today makes it easier to lead them into loving Bill O’Reilly and John McCain tomorrow. It takes a genius to understand Braid (I will gladly plead my ignorance for not truly getting Braid, Mr. Blow). It does not take a genius to understand Spongebob Squarepants. What is there to get? “Hey kids! It’s okay to not have an original idea in that small, uneducated brain of yours! Copy off of your peers! Cheat on your tests! Leave your loving, caring, passionate boyfriend for a wicked, evil, monstrous monster who will end up treating you like shit and making you give up your dreams to raise 2.5 greedy and needy children shoved into a tattered pair of pajamas featuring the likeness of Spongebob Squarepants and fuck you Stacy okay.”

Boycott Nickelodeon. Tell them that you will not stand for their EA-like tactics, their shyster show producers or their total mind control over the nations kids (a tactic most likely lifted from the American educational system). Fight back, and never forget Indie Spirits!

Do NOT buy Bionic Commando: Rearmed! It is yet another stupid, gritty shooting mainstream game, only it tries to disguise itself as being “indie.” Capcom is not indie, as I have said before what with their practice of constantly making both sequels and ports.

Where are the art games? The games that make me feel smart, and not like some Halo prole? Do they not exist? Is some money grubbing Scrooge McDuck high up in his corporate tower pressing the wrong buttons and telling his employees (overworked slaves) to make yet another fucking football game?

This is about as sad as Cave Story on the PSP. If I’m going to play an indie game, why would I want to play it on an evil mainstream system with a shitty controller and whose first generation of hardware is suspect at best? Exactly.

An interview with Jonathan Mak (Everyday Shooter) at Shacknews:

Shack: Do you have a goal of even making commercially available games?

A lot of it is sort of discovering how accessible I want the work to be, and recently I’ve been discovering, yeah, I want people to play my game. That’s not crazy. Before I was like, “If you don’t get it, fuck you. Go play your whatever game.” But that’s stupid. I want people to play my game.

It seems Mr. “I sold my soul to Sony for a few bucks” here has no idea how the Indie Gaming community really works.

And it seems that men that were once considered Gods have no idea how the Indie Gaming community really works, either!

Oh, how the mighty have fallen!

The following are a series of interviews Jon Blow did to promote Braid, and to expertly critique the gaming industry. Some people may find his views to be obnoxious and egotistical. Personally, I find his views to be both electrifying and entertaining. Maybe you will feel the same way? Enjoy!

Once again the mass media is giving nothing but attention to the mainstream while struggling indie developers languish in obscurity!

And if you look carefully, you’ll find a familiar character giving a hilariously backwards “fair and balanced” report, much like he will later on in his career!

I have come to a decision. A very hard decision.

You see, I could just continue to talk about how great and amazing Braid is (and it is!) for a month by myself. Or, I could open up the floor for you, the other fans of Jon Blow’s creative genius. So, with much trepidation and slapping myself in the forehead for not figuring out how to do this sooner, I have brought back to life from a one year coma, the Selection for Societal Sanity. Ignoring the board’s previous history of me being a complete asshole to everyone on the face of the planet, we can make some sort of poorly thought out return to the olden days when we were all so sociable.

So, let’s post! It doesn’t just have to be about Braid, but who wants to post about anything else?

A while back I went off on some fans supporting the mainstream with their Mega Man fanvideos. I may have been a little harsh (but not by too much) on these guys.

After all, they do not hold a candle to the real perpetrators of terrible music in video games.

No, the real culprit is, in fact, the mainstream itself!

When Jon Blow put together the soundtrack to Braid, he took great care and precision in finding only the music made by people who actually cared about the sounds they were making, not in “pushing units” and watching numbers go up like some disturbed RPG. The mainstream is all about pushing remakes and ports and sequels onto the willing faces of the uneducated and poor people of the world, and their music only helps to support this.

Here then, is a small list (a real list would have every song ever used in a mainstream game) of some of the worst music used in a game lacking in artistic conscience (you may surprised to learn that the mainstream has games that aren’t all sports games and first person shooters!):

Dunk Dream (SNK)- 3 on 3
SNK, known for such games as Dunk Dream ‘98- Dream Match Never Ends, Dunk Dream- Maximum Impact for the Playstation 2 and Joyful Road- Wild Ambition, really outdid themselves with this. It’s bad enough that they made a basketball game, then they had to go and fill the game with a rap soundtrack. Did these idiots ever realize that rap music has no soul? It’s all “bling-bling” (whatever that means) and “dolla dolla bills y’all” and having “ho’s in different area codes.” Whatever having more than one girlfriend has to do with bouncing a ball (I must admit I know nothing about sports; I’m too busy working out the muscle between my ears) I’ll never know.

Sonic the Hedgehog (Sega)- His World
Sonic the Hedgehog, the living embodiment of the cynically marketed “mascot era” of the early 90s made something of a comeback back in 2006. Rather than act like a cute cuddly animal with an XTREME in your face attitude, he became a beacon of hope for all the Nu-Metal bands finding themselves quickly losing their star power and stranglehold over decent music everywhere.

I never played this new Sonic game (I never played the old one, either!), so all I know is that it, like every other big name schlock-fest released for the XBox 360 (God that system is such a joke), it got nines and tens all across the board. Score one for selling our souls to Satan!

Wario Ware- Touched (Nintendo)- Ashley’s Theme
The beginning of Nintendo’s decent into “all-access” mini-game-a-thons. Since Nintendo’s core audience is apparently made up of people who buy ringtones for their cell phones and watch football, I’d say that this song is a pretty nice theme song for the upcoming fall of western civilization. And we can all thank Microsoft and their love of money for that!

Korn- Got the Life (on the Halo 3 soundtrack)
Now you may be asking me, “James, I dropped out of high school, so I think that playing Halo is a-ok. And while I was playing it and sending text message smileys to my ’shorty,’ I never heard Korn anywhere in the game!”

First of all go back to your LAN party and stop reading this site. It’s obvious most of my genius observations would go over your Mountain Dew addled brain anyway.

Second of all, considering the amount of retarded fanboys playing Halo and blaring Limp Bizkit’s “Rollin’” and “Got the Life” on their custom soundtracks, it might as well be considered part of the official soundtrack, even if Bungie didn’t intentionally put it in there.

If anyone reading this thinks that a mainstream game actually has some good music in it, please let me know so I can laugh at you and call you a complete liar.