horse the band is your new bff

You should all listen to horse the band. The are a rad metal band that has many songs about video games. Their older album "The Mechanical Hand" has songs about being frustrated playing mega-man call cutsman. Also Bird-o will change the way you view the mario universe. I never pick anyone but birdo in mario party now just because this song endured me to that pink fat but awesomeness

illustrator sucks

[14:37] dalebot 5317: dear illustrator
using your program is awesome i feel like a hacker because i have to trick your program into doing what i want
[14:38] mike @ work: hahaha
[14:40] dalebot 5317: seriously this is whats happening
[14:40] dalebot 5317: hey dale make these dots bigger
[14:40] dalebot 5317: sure why not how hard could that possibly be
[14:40] dalebot 5317: highlight dot drag corner hold shift?
guess shift doesn't work in illustrator
[14:41] dalebot 5317: highligh dot alt-apl->
[14:41] dalebot 5317: nope that doesn't work either
[14:41] dalebot 5317: shift-apple >
[14:41] dalebot 5317: nope that also doesn work wierd
[14:41] dalebot 5317: guess i will manuall have to change the height and width of each dot
[14:42] dalebot 5317: ok h=.16 w=.16 hit enter look at boxes and it says h=.1507 w=.1507
[14:42] dalebot 5317:
[14:43] dalebot 5317: but i hacked the system and when i put .17 it changes it to .1601
[14:43] dalebot 5317:
[14:43] dalebot 5317: i can just imagine what the hand book for illustrator says
chapter 1
go fuck yourself and eat shit you piece of shit mother fucker.
chapter 2
oh still here eh fuck off and die
chapter 3
we just drove to your house and ran over your mothers head

Too Human is Terrible (part 1)

=Early Thoughts= (originally written August 21)

Dale and I purchased Too Human yesterday. Actually that is incorrect, Dale purchased it about 2 or 3 months ago via pre-order and has been counting down the days and screaming at me about it every day since.

In case you don't know anything about it, it's an action-RPG co-op adventure game with tons of loot and insane gear upgrades. It's also got a storyline based on Nordic mythology (Baldur, Tyr, Freya, etc.) in a super-technological/robotic world. Kind of Diablo meets Mass Effect meets Beowulf. (It's actually had a lot of comparisons to Diablo 2, Champions of Norrath, Baldur's Gate, etc.)

We played it for about 8 hours last night and I have to say - I have no fucking idea what is going on. Not because the story is poor, or convoluted, or even poorly constructed. No, I am completely lost because we played it co-op multiplayer, and apparently in co-op there is no storyline. At all. Literally.

This astounds me. I've never seen anything like it. I cannot think of a single game that has a co-op campaign mode without the storyline. Halo 3, Champions of Norrath, Diablo 2, Army of Two, Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom...all of their co-op campaign modes had the regular storyline. Granted, sometimes the NPCs would only acknowledge Player 1, while Player 2 had to stand there admiring the scenery or entertain themselves by jumping around in the background, but the storyline was still there.

But Too Human...you play through the same levels and everything as in the single player mode, but the designers actually removed all the cutscenes, dialogue, even the NPCs. There's no one to tell you why you are in this place, or why you are now in that place, or what the point of your quest is. There's nothing. It's just random, directionless fighting. I am utterly confused why they would lobotomize the co-op mode. They took what could have been (and in single player, still might be) a great, epic adventure and turned it into hours of mindless smashing robots and taking the swords and helmets they were carrying around.

(Now here is where you might say "Well what about games like Call of Duty 4? That multiplayer has no storyline! And you like that game so what the hell?" Well if you thought about it for a second you would realize that COD4 and similar games are VERSUS games, where the objective is quite simply to defeat other players. There is no storyline necessary - you are not playing through a campaign. Now shut up and keep reading about this horrible wasteland of a game.)

Let me describe to you how our game went. We started it up and were immediately in some metallic/stone cavern. No idea what it was, but hey, pretty soon some little golden robots showed up to smash! So we smashed them. We then just wandered around the place, smashing every robot we found, for about an hour.

Eventually we found a weird green glowing altar. We used it and teleported to a lush, healthy grove of trees and bushes, completely different than where we were. We also had no weapons. After a few minutes we got the ability to magically "push" things...but only in "cyberspace" which we figured was the plant realm we were in. We pushed open a door and it showed us a metal door opening back in the original world. I don't know why we couldn't have just thrown a switch instead of entering cyberspace, but maybe there will be a reason later? Seems kinda pointless though.

We finished the first level, after destroying a robot that punched us. Once again, I have no idea why it was punching us, or why we needed to destroy it, or why it enjoyed the act of punching, but we killed the would-be mechanical pugilist and finished Stage 1.

Before Stage 2, we got to choose to focus on either "human" or "cybernetic" which led to various differences in growth, though I was skeptical about how valuable these differences would be - the cybernetic got things like "better explosives" and "increased healing", while one of the human-side "benefits" was "highly customizable armor." :\

Stage 2 took us six hours. SIX HOURS OF DOING NOTHING BUT SMASHING ROBOTS. There are many things that are terrible about this fact.

We also entered cyberspace numerous times and pushed rocks or lifted trees or some other pointless crap, but since every one was exactly the same (enter cyberspace, use MAGICAL CYBERSPACE POWERS to do something - aka throw a switch - and then return to the real world.) I am trying to forget they ever happened.

At some point in stage 2 Dale's armor started flashing red. We deduced that this meant it was in need of repairs. After some menu searching and consultation of the instruction book, we learned that to repair our equipment we had to do this in "Tyr's Armory." This might have well said "on the purple fairy planet of Zygora" because we had no idea where Tyr's Armory was. So we continued on, Dale's legs and shoulders doing a wonderful imitation of a stop light, hoping to stumble across the famous Tyr's Armory.

Also during Stage 2, while distributing skill points after a level up I accidentally hit the shoulder button while in the skill tree screen and discovered that we had gotten an entirely NEW skill tree for Human/Cybernetic attributes. The game never mentioned the fact that we had received this second skill tree, and we had already leveled up about 5 times since we apparently unlocked it. Fortunately the game has a "skill reset" for a small amount of money which kept this from being a gamebreaker, but it was still extremely shoddy. Maybe in the single player game an NPC mentions this to you, who knows. But in co-op it was ridiculous.

After slaughtering hundreds of robots for hours and hours, we were shocked to see a human show up. He shouted something along the lines of "Fools! You thought that would work on me??" and started shooting us and laughing. Keep in mind we had not seen another human being in the game so far, let alone this guy. But we shrugged and chased him around and started fighting him. He also started using ruiners, which are the special "big explosion that kills everything around you" move that we could use. I didn't know why he could use them, but then again I didn't know why we could use them, so I guess it's a moot point. Anyways we killed him, no questions were answered, and we returned to the lobby.

We were ready to call it quits for the night, but we had noticed a "Return to Aesir" option in the pause menu that we hadn't used yet. So we started Stage 3 and selected it, and it brought us back to the pre-game lobby, which we then discovered we could run around and explore. Apparently the lobby is Aesir. No people, of course. It seems that we and the angry Stage 2 boss are the only human beings left in existence. We did however find a library with a bunch of computer monitors, each one with a different game tip (like how to use combos or how to air juggle).

We went down a hallway marked with crossed swords. Surely this was going to be the gear repair place? It was! We were overjoyed, and after figuring out that the robot arm by a workbench was the weapon shop, we repaired all our broken weapons as well as perused the weapons for sale and bought some snazzy new armaments.

You will notice that I said we repaired our weapons. Yes, we were not able to repair our armor there. So off we went again poking around the ghost town.

We got to the library again and Dale was reading some of the tips he hadn't read earlier. While I was waiting and walking around, I stepped on a circle in the center of the room and noticed the option to enter the shop. Yes, THIS was the mysterious Tyr's Armory. A circle. IN THE LIBRARY.

It was at this point that The Rage reached a boiling point within me, and after quickly repairing my armor I shut the game off before I threw it out the window in frustration.

I was all set to trade in the game the next day, but then Dale found out that the game is only 4 levels. So I guess I will endure it and see if it gets any better.