Good or Blog Audio Program 8

Teemo is my favorite.

Whoa whoa whoa. I switched co-hosts AGAIN? That's right, yet another changing of the guards takes place down at the GorB headquarters when John skips town and Taylor's parents are crazy. Instead we get Kailean and other John (a previous guest of the show) to talk about Fallout New Vegas, VANQUISH, a bit of Dead Rising 2, and an impromptu philosophical discussion about HAWX 2.

Then John takes the reins in the new segment: free game of the week by telling us about this League of Legends nonsense and how it is awesome. Then he gets cockblocked and doesn't get to talk about Poke mans. Sorry John. Maybe next time (nope).

Finally, the last segment walks in the footsteps of Patsy Cline and falls to pieces, volumes get messed up, phone calls fall through, and people yell at me on the internet as I scramble to keep just about everyone in the world to entertain. If you want to know what it sounds like when a man loses control of his destiny and considers only madness his refuge, head on over to segment 3.

As always, here is the link, don't spend it all in one place.
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=NFOH3OJ9

Good or Blog Audio Program 7

First off, another very merry birthday to Good or Blog! Last week was the 1st year anniversary of the first blog post on this humble little site, October 14th to be exact. Hard to believe it's been so long. But even harder to believe I haven't gotten bored and completely forgotten about it!

To celebrate... strippers.

In case I don't say this enough. I want to thank everyone for supporting me. Even my lazy ass friends who I have to practically shoot in the knee caps to get any sort of effort out of. Without you guys, this site would just be my bilious opinions and bad MS paint images. Also god help me if I ever have to do an Audio Program on my own. I think I will cut my own throat if it comes to that.

Speaking of which! Here's the seventh edition of our grand program! We can safely take it out of the car-seat and give it a seat of its own. Congratulations Audio Program, I am confident in your abilities to take an airbag to the face.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HB1VW89O

This week we briefly celebrate this glorious 1st anniversary, then we talk about all those brand new games that everyone but us are playing, including Super Scribblenauts, Final Fantasy: 4 Heroes of Light, Medal of Honor, and Sonic 4: Episode 1! That's exciting. Trust me.

We also discuss the merits of nostalgia and if old games still hold up. Also something about EVE Online. I guess those guys are douche bags.

Then we tear ass through our weekly segments because I suck at Pokemon!

Finally me and Taylor unleash the secrets of our porn folders, and talk about some classy ass music. It's fun, I swear!

Spyro the Dragon

Spyro the Dragon

Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage

Spyro: Year of the Dragon

Genre: Dragon

Lands Scorched: Multitudinous

Lives Forsook: Innumerable

The night was calm, with slight, shifting breezes cooling the otherwise humid air. The quiet mood of fantastical lands was marked by the docile snores of fainted dragons, and in this quiescent setting a disaster occurred. Suddenly, without warning, the dragons were statues. Myriad scaled forms instantly petrified, all except the littlest dragon. He arose, amidst the doomed forms of his comrades, and I took control.

You must be this tall to be a statue

In a matter of seconds, everything was on fire. There were things with weapons, and I torched them.  There were scampering sheep, soon to be alighted by the boiling fires of Spyro's belly. Littered about the starting area were the statues of the dragons I was now meant to save, as soon as I finished up breathing fire on them. And an adventure began, full of harrowing environments and chaotic settings, each in turn to be traversed by me to save my fallen family.

An example of a harrowing environment and/or chaotic setting

And save them I did, though it seemed of no real consequence whether I did so or not, since not a single dragon managed to help me even after I released them from eternal torment. This most likely resulted from the bubbling jealously they harbored within, the pure abject scorn felt towards me for being their savior even with my obvious inferiority.

I will save you, though I do not want to.

Minish Cap Review

There's always going to be alternatives to what's most popular. The way I see it, there are three different ways to do anything worth doing. There's the popular way, i.e. Mac, Firefox, Abercrombie and Fitch, Facebook, Microsoft Word, etc. There's the less popular, sometimes better way, i.e. Windows, Google Chrome, internet, Myspace, OpenOffice, etc. And finally there's the criminally underused way, that has problems but deserves more attention than its getting, i.e. Linux, Opera, make your own damn clothes, orkut, Google Docs. I see this pattern just about everywhere, and the items in it kind of switch with the times. The Zelda series is really no stranger to this phenomenon because the only ones I ever see people talk about are Ocarina of Time, Majora's Mask, and (my personal favorite) Wind Waker. Everyone has their favorites, but I think this way of looking at things tends to leave some very good games out in the cold.
Henry has already weighed in on Link's Awakening, which I had previously considered the best handheld Zelda, and the Oracle games for the Game Boy Color are fine games as well. The DS games are er... serviceable... I suppose... Okay those are pretty crappy. But the one game that I rarely see brought up is The Minish Cap.
Minish Cap came about near the end of Capcom's handling of the Zelda games. After bringing some fresh perspectives by way of the Oracle games as well as the Links Awakening/Four Swords remake, they settled into the Game Boy Advance and churned out this little gem, wherein Link discovers a magic hat, turns tiny, fights evil, blah, blah, blah ZELDA. What Capcom couldn't do in terms of substance (being imprisoned by the whole Zelda franchise thing), they did in style. With the move to GBA they could afford to upscale the sprites, and make them generally pretty awesome. I would go so far as to call them some of the best made sprites on the console. But, I think the reason these pretty little pixels aren't celebrated from the mountain tops are because most screens of the game look like this:

Pfft. okay, so it's a Zelda game.

But what you don't see is Marin bobbing her head to bubbly music.

D'awwwww.

The whole game is rife with neat cartoonish touches.

Good or Blog Amazing Fantastic Audio Program 6

Don't my tits look amazing?

Seriously, MS Paint is like my favorite thing. Anyways! Returning with the triumphant numerical episode structure comes Good or Blog Audio Program Episode 6! By the way, we're in a supermarket because somebody though it sounded like we were broadcasting from a supermarket. I can't imagine why. There are quite a few crazies out there.

*fanfare*

As pictured.

This week you're in for a treat as me and John conduct the first ever Bro-Op podcast while simultaneously pulling off the first official episode recorded Live at KANM, the College Station of College Station. (Listen at 1580 AM or http://kanm.org)
We talk about the new Jungle MMO handheld, Final Fantasy 14, Sad Games, my first phone call (which you can contribute to at (915)996-1048, just leave a message!), and nostalgic Tony Hawk songs. And that's just scratching the surface. So listen in, and as always we love to hear your feedback.

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=P5NU97AU

By the way, because of the switch in format, this episode is quite possibly in the highest quality we've ever recorded in, and it's just one long segment. If you want the old multiple segment format in, by all means let me know.

Minecraft Review

Minecraft for PC

Minecraft is kind of a hard game to review. But, it's out there, with a 15 dollar entry fee, and I feel obligated to weigh in on its polygonal expanses. For the uninitiated, Minecraft is a first-person sandbox game almost completely without a point. Seriously. This game ain't got no point. Framed in the primary single player experience you are Block Blockington, dropped in a mysterious world where skeletons and exploding zombies rule the night. During the day you rely on just your square fists and kickass goatee to harvest materials that will let you craft tools, harvest more materials, and build. Most of that is made up because I need some kind of context or else everything seems completely inconsequential.

Is... is the whole game this dark?

And that's pretty much Minecraft's M.O. throughout. You get only what you put into it and not a single block log or block pig more. It's probably the truest to the whole "sandbox" concept I've yet to see a game get short of MS Paint or, heck, an actual sandbox. No matter what, Liberty City will always be a sprawling cityscape, Sims will always be their yammering vapid selves, and the Wasteland will always be a blasted wilderness populated by mutants. But whatever world you're randomly dropped into in Minecraft will be just a bunch of trees and a beach unless you put fist to tree and begin to make your own story (my story took a while to get started, it took me a whole hour before I realized that you need to punch trees before you start actually making progress. I know. How silly of me.).
But seriously, the whole 15 dollar package here is pretty sparse. Granted, the game is currently in Alpha, but its also been that way for months. Any instructions, goals, and stories have been generated by individuals and the community that has taken this thing and ran with it admirably.

Seriously, some of the things I've seen while researching the game are fucking magnificent.

I've never really enjoyed the sandbox style approach to video games. Partially because I see it as a lazy way to extend the length of a game (unless used well like Just Cause or Oblivion), but mostly because I tend to find the freedom paralyzing. When the given the option to do literally anything, I can't choose and end up doing nothing. Whatever this says about me as a person, it keeps me from enjoying Minecraft. Could it be that this stems from a distinct lack of imagination or patience? It's certainly better than some ADD Call of Duty regurgitation, but that's really two ends of the spectrum, either too much story or none at all. Can't there be a happy medium?
It really bothers me that the thing keeping me from enjoying Minecraft is its greatest appeal. But at the same time, it also bothers me that Minecraft isn't really more than a 3D sprite editor at the moment. I need purpose. I need goals. I need something to make me care about this or my brain writes it off as a waste of time. I like the design and I like the concept presented here, but I just can't enjoy what amounts to shifting sand in a sandbox.

But it's one hell of a sandbox.

Minecraft gets a zero out of one.