Ace Combat 6

Jet fighters are basically designed to be awesome incarnate: fast, loud, destructive, and invincible to any other form of war machine.

In fact, the only problem with making games about jet planes is this: how does the game designer portray the godly power of these planes while still presenting a meaningful challenge to the player?

Ace Combat 6 dances that line admirably with its level design. While the player's jets are exaggerations of their real-life counterparts, the scenarios the game provides for them require the use of every bit of their physics-defying power.

Unlike Ace Combat 5, AC6 utilizes its fictional Emmerian Air Force in a somewhat believeable fashion-- as support for its ground forces. A large-scale attack in this game involves several concurrent operations, with groups of allies approaching their own objectives. The player is not tasked with winning the war by himself, but rather to assist the effort as a whole.

Unfortunately for the Emmerian military, these multi-operation missions are designed such that providing enough support for every operation to be successful is deliberately made to be impossible.

Though the player has the godly ability to easily destroy many targets from kilometers away, there will always be more allies praying for assistance than he can attend to. With great power comes even greater responsibility, indeed!

This level design philosophy forces the player to make decisions on who to support and who to leave on the wayside, i.e. to concede to his inability to win the war by himself. Creating this emotion inside the player is a triumph in level design-- while other flight action games communicate the worth of a multimillion dollar war machine through sheer destructive force, AC6 sends the same message by making the player understand that there are never enough of these machines to go around.

Brand Loyalty

College was a time for new things-- for me, new facial cleansers.

The smells of Neutrogena reminded me of high school in all the wrong ways, OXY annoyed me with its wannabe minimalist branding, and Clean and Clear were two adjectives with which I could not relate.

Then there was Nivea For Men. I couldn't really vouch for "Nivea," but "For Men" was pretty easy to understand. Clearly, it was the one brand available that was actually meant for me.

(aside-- I wholeheartedly believe that it is completely sensible to judge vanity-fueling products by wholly superficial standards.)

I started off with their Energizing Cleanser, which is of course discontinued because it was too awesome. After my great experience with their solutions, I began to try their other lines.

This is how a tragedy unfolds.

Nivea For Men's lip care products are the worst excuses for self-pampering items in all of Duane Reade. The effectiveness, longevity. texture, and even packaging are completely half-assed. There is no excuse.

I'm on that Blistex now, thanks.

Warrior Princess

I don't like iTunes. I don't like how long it takes to boot, the bloated internet connectivity, the limited playback features, its arcane organization / file copying schemes, all of it. But I figured it's the most appropriate way for an internet thug like me to support musicians that I like.

Amazon MP3, though. Here's where it wins:

• "Preview All" button to go through all the samples of an entire album. When buying music online, this is clutch because it's always a toss up whether or not to buy more than one song for the better deal.
• DRM-free MP3 files. No brainer. Sucks to be you, Apple!
• I always have a browser open anyway.

Hooray for Amazon MP3!

Why I Like Blazblue

Non-physical competitive gaming, when not luck-based, basically comes in two main flavors: Chess-type and Poker-type.

In a Chess-type game, the entirety of a game is laid out for all to see, which every element's possibilities known beforehand. Since there are so many possible actions to take, the onus is on the players to utilize the predetermined legal actions to overcome his opponent, while he mindfully watches his opponent attempting the same thing. Having the right pieces in the right positions at the right times is not an important objective in chess-- it is the only objective.

On the other hand, in a Poker-type game, the elements of the game world are hidden. Neither player has any way of knowing what cards the other has, nor any influence on how the game will unfold. The only thing these players have to go on is each other-- a pro poker player and a scrub will statistically get the same number of fantastic hands throughout their careers, but the pro player will be able to win more through means other than simply having better cards.

Fighting games can really go either way. On one hand, the legal characters, their attributes, and abilities are all predetermined and known fully by all involved, similar to the way everyone knows how chess pieces are allowed to move. This is of course at the theoretical highest level of play.

Unfortunately not everyone can reach this level of gaming prowess, and the game changes. Almost regardless of the game, the adage that allows absolute beginners to begin to improve is, "When in a position where one option is to block, then block." It it similar to poker-- in a high pressure environment with limited information on what the opponent will do, it is often a very good choice to simply do nothing. Statistically speaking, the game will reward the player for opting not to play.

Just as the cowardly poker player will simply fold out every time until he's dealt a killer hand, many fighting games reward players that do nothing until a braindead opportunity. In Dead or Alive, I'm not sure there is a single feasible move that will result with frame advantage on block. This results in the two DOA players simply guarding, hoping the other person opts to play the game (to attack) possibly out of boredom, statistically putting him at a disadvantage.

Blazblue is cool because it, through many game systems, favors the attacker in almost any situation. Although the relentless pressure capability of Guilty Gear's False Roman Cancel is gone, a player pressing buttons has an easier time winning than one that doesn't, which is a refreshing change.

I like pushing buttons.

Happy Birthday from Youtube!

50 new subscribers in a day? Just what I've always wanted. How did they know?

Eureka

It's 6:00 AM. Didn't sleep last night. Too much excitement and planning for a business venture of mine. Ran out of notebook space to scribble on, and had to go to the Duane Reade (24 hours!) to buy new notebooks just now. And for the first time ever, the streets of New York smelled refreshing.

Right now, I must be the happiest I've ever been for my entire time in the city.

No Rest for the Weary

Well, maybe a little rest.