Hoes Before Bros: Building Meaningful Relationships in Harvest Moon

In Mid September, myself and many other farming simulation fans will be picking up the first installment of the Harvest Moon series to come out for the Nintendo Wii system. If you pre-ordered the game, you will also be receiving a stuffed cow, an offer which is too good to pass up (he's smiling!). Stuffed cows aside, playing Harvest Moon is much more than just toil and hard work...planting little seeds and watching them grow into beautiful plants, showing the whole goddamn town what you're made of and proving to your father that you can make it on your own, it's so much more. At the heart of every Harvest Moon game is the village you now live in, filled with people you will grow to love. You can get the guys in the town to confide in you regarding girl troubles, and then use that information to romance the girls for yourself.

This is always where I had the most fun in Harvest Moon games. My femininity allows me to be excited about this, but playing as a male character changed the dynamic a bit. When I played the N64 version of the game I found myself becoming the biggest sleaze ball ever. Was it enough to have one girl fall in love with me? No, certainly not. I wanted all of them to fawn over me. Even after my character was married, I continued to give the other ladies gifts daily, while my wife stayed at home ( My real-life gameplay audio excerpt: “...In the kitchen, where she belongs! It took alaaaaata lumber to build that kitchen, doll-face.”) In the Wii installment you can choose to play as either a male or female. I will be forgoing the privilege to play as my own gender in this game. Even in the wonderful world of Harvest Moon, the double standard still applies: If you have a lot of guys as a girl, you are a harlot. If you have a lot of girls as a guy, “eeeeeeeeey!”.

Eventually you will have to pick one of these ladies to be your wife, and I intend to help you make that choice. Let's take a look at what good 'ole Waffle Town has to offer.




Anissa: The gentle female farmer. She will most likely be the most useful on the farm. She'll also stick by you even after you come home from the milk bar high on beef Endorphins and beat her with a fresh turnip in a tube sock.



Kathy: The local bar-maid. She's tough and resilient. She answers to no man. Be the first to break her fiery spirit!



Candace: Only you will know whether the quiet weird girl is into the freaky stuff... like cross breeding watermelons and bananas.



Leena: She loves animals. She loves them so much, she'll hardly mind sleeping in the barn when you have your buddies over for poker nights.



Mai: She loves food more than anything! Make sure to constantly remind her where those cupcakes are going (the thighs).



Phoebe: She's an inventor. After you get married, you can force her to work many sleepless nights on complex Rube Goldberg machines that complete pointless tasks that would normally require minimal effort.



Roomi: She's eight (going on 30)!



Shiela: Her hips are like "BLAM"!



Juli: This is a DUDE! DO NOT HIT ON!


Now that I have given you an overview of the ladies you have to choose from, go forth and be fruitful. And don't forget to put whatever you want to sell in the bin before 5pm, that's when the buyer comes. But not on holidays.
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The Dramatic Conclusion of 'LittleBigTrouble In Paradise'

(click to enlarge)

The mild irony of this epilogue (not to imply it was justifiably episodic) is the sheer anguish that went into its conception. The initial notion of copulation between Evan and I's efforts into what you see above you was nearly innocent at my end... if he was aware of the harrowing consequences of those 2 minutes in which we mutually consented (to a comic), the gestation may never have occurred.

What I mean is, I never in my wildest brooding expected the light hearted vengeance to blossom into something so evil, the very attempt at describing its foundations would bring about untold misery to its architect. I couldn't say who is to blame for it, it may be me, it could (probably) be photoshop, but in the end, are we not all doomed to make the same old mistakes in new ways?

In any case, I hope my demoralized compatriot can be coaxed (or tricked) into something similarly nefarious again. Until such the time, enjoy the tips (there were some suggestions for the devs in the toolkit and you inquisitive individuals), and my high hat is off to you Evan.

-BH Continue?

You Can Point-And-Click Me Anytime, Babe.

I have a laptop I use this laptop for various things. I got it for school. I edit things on this laptop and type papers. I do not want this laptop to have too many things on it. The first thing I did when I connected my laptop to the internet is download Audiosurf. That's a lie. The first thing I did when I connected my laptop to the internet was do a Google search, then I downloaded Audiosurf. (The Google search was for “boobs”. This was to insure everything was right on the internet). I vowed Audiosurf would be the only game I got for it. Alas, it was a vow that was to be broken. There was another gaming mistress waiting for me there on the internet... not your World of Warcraft or your new fangled, dime a dozen (free-a-dozen) flash games, but something older, somthing much more special.

Her name is SCUMM, and I loved her before I knew her name.
What does a 5 year old know of engines/programming languages? All I knew was that there was a something beautiful placed upon a platter in front of me, and boy, did it glisten. Let's go back to that sentence. When I say “platter”, I really mean “computer running Windows 3.1”, and when I say “glisten”, I mean “blow my goddamn mind”. I downloaded ScummVM soon after I made my vow so that I could once again play my beloved adventure games. Lucas Arts Adventure Games were really the first games I ever got into. My cousin was more of a Sierra person. She played King's Quest and I respected that (no I didn't), but who wants to worry about dying when there are puzzles to be solved*? This was long before my household had the internet so we were very much on our own when it came to playing these games. If we got stuck, you better as hell believe we would move our character through every possible place using every item with everything until we found a way. I believe I was keener then, before reality TV would dull my mind and game guides would hand me forbidden secrets. I was very young, but I understood the wonderful feeling of achievement when Indiana Jones finally told me that he can use these things together (Kerosene and a wall carving).

So now I can play these games again; I can re-dig, The Dig, time travel in Day of the Tentacle and punch Nazi's in the face and steal their belongings...in real life. I'm content to play them on my laptop, but I long for something more. I have seen the future, and it is good. I'm of course talking about those tech savvy modders who are able to port these games onto the DS or Wii. I want that too. Why can't I have that? Is it because I can't figure out how to do it? Well, yeah that's precisely why, but I still want it. Luckily, Tell Tale Games games has decided to release Season 1 of their Sam & Max series on the Wii. I can literally point and click. Literally. It bothers me that it has taken even this long to utilize so obvious a function as POINT and CLICK. Are there not enough people longing to play Adventure games anymore?

There is nothing I want more than for new life to be breathed into the genre, and I remain extremely optimistic in light of a few games. The popular Homestar Runner web series, paired with Tell Tale released their venture into Episodic Adventures onto the computer and Wii Ware, and I trust it will do well. Tell Tale is really carrying the torch here, keeping it safe and dry away from the rising tide of apathy and the falling rain of indolence (Someone should kill me now). I give them snaps for supporting the genre, although I would love to see a whole game produced at once rather then this episode business. I end up just waiting until all of them are released at once. It takes about an hour for the gears to really start turning when I play an adventure game, and I would hate for the present adventure to be over before I really get to use them. I can't really complain though, they are making really top notch games. I must say though, I am very excited about Daedalic Entertainment's upcoming “The Whispered World”, which looks like its going to be gorgeous in the very least. They recently announced that they are looking to port the game on the Wii and DS, also promising a few more adventure games are in the works . This makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, like simultaneously hugging a puppy and a kitten while being fed a cupcake by a Cappucin monkey wearing a frilly dress.

It is my fondest wish that more and more people will want to play adventure games. There is something so charming about them, something that no other genre can replicate. Not only do they reward you with feelings of accomplishment, but they also offer you amazing stories that you more or less get to play out on your own. I used to wonder how much work went into writing all the possibilities on their dialog trees and responses. It's a whole lot. Those Lucas Arts adventure games were packed with so many witticisms it was mind boggling. We are all very fortunate that you can still find them floating around the internet and can still play them with help of ScummVM. Of course I've long since memorized what to do in every game, so I need some new challenges. I have yet to complete Beneath a Steel Sky, which is free on the ScummVM site (with voice acting! I turned it off because the robot Joey's condescending tone was getting to me). My adult mind fails to see the simple solutions a younger me would have been all over. The game is wonderful though, I would pay to play it if I had to. Other than that, I've been playing the (also free) games that famous game cynic Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw has created. They're worth a look for the price (free).


I'm going to close by telling you to go play a point-and-click adventure game. Go do it right now. I need people to be excited with. If its not your “thing” for whatever reason, at least play Professor Layton, or Braid. These will also make you feel like an intellectual giant, in different ways of course.

It's important to not give up when playing these games. Even if you really want to, don't. There is a solution. You're brain may begin to leak out of your ears as your stare at the screen, confused This is normal. Put it back in and try something else, ass.




*This is not to say playing King's Quest reminded you of your mortality, but rather that you could die in the game, which made it a lot less fun (for me at least). The ability to die wasn't included in majority of the Lucas Arts games, and if it was it didn't make you want to kill everybody. Okay, maybe it did a little.
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Hook Me Up With A Puzzle Piece, Son: A Braid Tale

I think the moment was when I was perched upon a chandelier, with only one horn left upon the beast’s head resembling a creature from the adult noir novella "Where the Wild Things Are." I cut the rope and took the mighty creature down knowing I was close to saving the princess, who was no doubt, achin’ for some firey man meat. I was only a few levels away from her, and I had to tap that ass while the getting was still good.

Jonathan Blow’s Braid was created by a star-infested threesome. Mario and the Prince of Persia were already tangled in a web of love and let’s just say Banjo arrived in the nick of time for the facial finale.

The main mechanics of this platformer are straight out of the first Super Mario titles. The jumping ginger truly wishes he was an overweight Italian stereotype with a mustache even Tom Selleck would envy. Braid even has its own take on the classic Goomba. In an impeccable comparison, Sir Evan Griffin so vividly describes their appearance as: “a disgruntled piece of cauliflower that won a Danny McBride look-a-like contest.” Hell, even at the end of the level it says: “Sorry, the princess is in another castle.”

The goal of the game is to collect puzzle pieces to complete portraits, which, in turn, unlocks the final stage where you save the princess. Most of the time, collect-a-thons resulted in me killing everyone’s first born, (permitting that there was no lamb blood on the door.) But Blow blew me the right way. A welcome change to the tradition of Nintendo 64 Rare titles like Jet Force Gemini, Donkey Kong 64, or any other fucking game that did not allow you to progress to the damn final boss of the game until countless hours are spent collecting every last fucking gizmo and gadget this side of go fuck yourself, In Braid, collecting is what’s fun about the game. Think of them more as stars from Mario 64 rather than those goddamn Jingos from Banjo-Kazooie. There are twelve pieces of the portraits in each level, but you can complete the tasks to get them in any order that you want. Surprisingly, the game’s progression reminds me of Professor Layton and the Curious Village. The puzzles are similar in the way that there is usually a trick to them rather than the straightforward answer you think you see at first glance; where you are welcome to pass on most of the puzzles in the game and figure them out at a later time, a welcome change to the foreboding sodomy of Dr. Quandry.

The only downside to this structure is that you always leave the hardest puzzles for last. This is the same problem with many platformers. For instance, the last 2-4 hours of Super Mario Galaxy was essentially the equivalent of attempting a Rubik's cube with a lobotomy. At one point, I was at the last puzzle of stage 5 and I was literally staring confounded at the television for a half hour. I decided that haphazardly guessing and checking the solutions was the best course of action. However, this flaw came with its perks. When I finally completed this seemingly impossible task, it felt as if I had just found the lord and savior Jesus Christ, and he told me and only me, that I was his chosen child, a perfect being... or at least that’s what I imagine it would feel like. This game is another among the few and the proud that makes you “think with portals.”

What Portal accomplishes with the controls of the first person shooter; Braid accomplishes with the premise of a 2-D side-scrolling platformer. You play these games like no other. They teach you their basic rules and you push them to their limits. In Braid, each world has an individual set of rules that you need to follow. This keeps the game consistently fresh, unlike most of the overpriced $60 green packaged pieces of shit that have come out for the Xbox 360 this summer. It really starts Jonathan Blowing your mind (sorry, had to) when you get to world 4; all the creatures in the level respond in time with you. If you move forward, so do the enemies, even the music goes to your redheaded lad’s speed.

The only aspects that were disappointing within Braid were the boss variety and the length. There were only three bosses in this game, which is only a problem because the bosses are awesome. One of them you had to fight twice which is a bit of a lame cop-out and the other was more of a final level that felt like a legitimate boss fight. If every level had a boss that was as well designed as the others, this could have been my favorite game of the year. Secondly, I wish it had followed in Mario’s footsteps and had a total of eight worlds. I wanted a wee bit more from the lad. I was fine with the fact that I completed it within a day (I played it in two sittings), but it was so uniquely presented and illustrated it left me hankering for more. It was not quite like in Portal, where I felt the length was perfect, due to the manageable pace and level design, despite being short for conventional gaming standards.

In the final will and testament of my previously stated buffoonery, or if you are one of those shit eaters that only reads the first and last paragraph of an article and then posts as if they know what the fuck they are talking about, Braid was well worth the $15 (1200 points in Xbox annoying peso pounds). For those delinquents who think $15 is too much of mommy’s money for a live arcade game, go play your copies of Dark Sector and Turok, leading the industry to continuously regurgitate such “original” and “well designed” characters as Master Chief and Lara Croft, rather than investing in intriguing, innovative pieces like Portal and Braid.

Goddammit.
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The Shameless Art of Marketing Seduction: Part 1

Over the past couple years I’ve grown very fond of tech demos. I can’t recall why, but one day during my daily three hour long interweb trolling stint, I decided it would be a good idea to watch a demonstration of Boom Blox (at the time it was just called Blocks). Neil Young presided and spoke of Wii play dates between Steven Spielberg and Shigeru Miyamoto and how Spielberg’s next game, with all of its impactful images of dead birds and solemn characters wearing hoodies, will have an epic story and apparently bring tears to the collective dry eye of the gaming community. But the meat of the demo came when he showed off Blocks. With each Jenga skyscraper demolished and every “character” bombed (rectangular cows that waddle around absentmindedly apparently qualify for character status these days), he let out an artificial whimper of awe, even producing a guttural squeal (similar to what one might hear when veal is being made) during the collapse of a small, short-lived block city. Oh, anonymous block city… we hardly knew ye.

This video has kept me amused for some time, and now it will hopefully titillate all of you… if there really are any of you out there. I’ve made my own little trailer for Boom Blox. Check it out below.



A special thanks to Gametrailers for turning all of their videos into digital bouncers through code, and apparently Final Cut Pro is NOT on the list. I spent about 3 hours figuring out how to thwart this absurd safeguard. For anyone who also wants to figure out how to do this, all you have to do is download a video converter, I recommend Vilisoft, and convert it to something else so you can them import into FCP. AVI worked for me. So, you guys at Gametrailers own the work that other people put into making the presentation you filmed? You own the playthrough your shitty testers had with a game demo? I think basically what this comes down to is you own the super fuckin’ sweet, super fuckin’ loud, super fuckin’ obnoxious motion graphic at the beginning of all your videos, the hard drives that store the direct feed footage, or the cameras that filmed the demo. God forbid I should import one of your videos into an editing program for the sole purpose of vandalizing your sweetass motion graphic, like cleverly changing ‘Gametrailers’ to ‘GAYtrailers’. Who do you think I am?

The next video features MGS creator, Hideo Kojima speaking English. I have to warn you, it is rather disturbing. It’s not that I find this video funny because of Kojima’s broken English. It’s not like “look at the little, funny, elflike Japanese man trying to speak the only language that matters!” It’s his forced, manufactured inflection, overly exuberant and strangely reminiscent of Scooby-Doo. I’m not sure whether this was Mr. Kojima’s idea (possibly inspired by a Scooby-Doo episode he saw earlier that day) or if some Konami rep shot him full of uppers beforehand, but little did the rep know, his suppressed stomach acids made it possible for Kojima to swallow balloons filled with helium. As with most Kojima-related things, I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt… but it’s becoming a weary, apprehensive habit by now. We may never know the answers to these questions, but they’re fun to ponder while watching.


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Shoot First, Have Children Later

I fondly recall frosty mornings in the winter of last year, getting up at 5 am, hopping in a friend's car and then driving off to the local "Everything -You- Could- Ever -Want" store to wait with three other schmucks in a dark parking lot for a Wii. My diligence and persistence were paid off with nothing, nothing, a claim ticket for a PS3, and finally a Wii. How joyful that day was. My whole family played a game of Wii Sports Bowling that night. "Look at us," I thought "Just like the commercial, minus the old people and multiculturalism". What a wonderful night that was. I believe it goes without saying that night would never be repeated. We would never get everyone together like that to play. My mother was not swayed by the Wii's cutsey allure and my father ... well actually my father loves it. Even after I grew tired of the spastic flailing, he continued to play at least one game of bowling a day. It would be cheating him to say he got better. He practiced and became great. The funny thing is he manage to boil down the movement needed to throw the ball into one quick wrist-flick, ignoring the full form throw idealized in the commercials. He did stand up whilst playing though, and that has got to count for something.

Wii Bowling was a breach of my father's normal gaming protocol. He has grown very fond of first person shooters and after he bowled a 300 game, he proclaimed "It was only going to go downhill from there" and took a hiatus. I convinced him to go in halves with me on an Xbox 360 a little down the line and he agreed after I showed him some trailers for upcoming FPS, mainly Bioshock. My Father is not the type of guy who cares about plot. He would opt to skip through cut-scenes in even the most emotional of stories and get to the killing. He is impatient and easily annoyed. He hated Portal purely based on GLaDOS' voice, getting up and leaving the room after Test Chamber 2. I don't expect to hear him start a conversation with me about a game unless it's to ask me what to do next. We have talked, albeit briefly about Half Life 2's virtues, but at the end of the day he would prefer games like Black. That's why his reaction to Bioshock came as a surprise to me. He, to this day has not defeated the final boss. This is not because he can't, but rather because he won't. He says it's because he doesn't care when you ask him, but I don't believe him. There was one time we were driving home and I asked him why he never finished, and he said in the most sincere tone I've heard, "You don't understand. I love Rapture." and I swear, it brought a tear to my eye.
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Journey to the Center of the Mirth

Recently I had the pleasure of watching Brendan Fraser’s well-defined acting muscle flex vigorously in 3-D. Oh, excuse me, “Real D”. I am speaking of Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3-D. The film was shot on a state-of-the-art stereoscopic 3-D camera that was designed in part by James Cameron. This camera is also being used to shoot Cameron’s upcoming iris-exploding 3-D epics, Avatar and Battle Angel, which sound promising and don’t have anything to do with the Titanic, thank god. If for nothing else, this movie was a great indication of what gifts the hallowed harbingers of technological wizardry are going to bear in Cameron’s next films. However, the journey itself inspired a personal discovery that lead deep into my own center of untamed thoughts where gargantuan, harebrained species of musings prowl and prey on reason and logic.

The opening credits were shot into our faces like pearl bullets from a merciless bukake firing squad. Nearly everyone in the theater, myself included, waved their hands around in front of their faces for an obscene amount of time, pawing the buttery bile-saturated air like cats swatting dangling string. There was a prevailing, unifying atmosphere of kinesthetic comradery in the theater, where everyone reacted in unison and taught sinews made synchronized flinches in an attempt to lunge backward and escape as Brendan Fraser spit out toothpaste onto our grills. It was strangely reminiscent of the first Lumiere films screened in 1895 where theatergoers reportedly fled from the theater in hysteria, anticipating the barreling train on the screen to come crashing through the wall and flatten them all. Now, a mere 113 years later, our reactions and the cinematic manipulations aren’t that terribly different. Instead of trains we now have anglerfish, tape measures, and Brendan Fraser’s biceps.

Overall, the film was just one clay plate being fired after another. I haven’t had that many things thrown at my face since I was reprimanded by my parents for gambling away most of my earthly possessions in a Pokemon card trade. Brendan Fraser was larger than life as always, as were the immense pauses he made between words. “ Ladies. And. Gentlemen. I. Give. You. The center. Of the. Earth!” “ A. Paleolithic. Dildo?” “ Giant. Fossilized. Mushrooms?” Well, one of those lines isn’t actually in the movie. Let’s make a game of it, guess which one!

I must say though, my one real gripe with the movie came during a somber scene between Brendan Fraser and his nephew when they discover (SPOILER AMBER ALERT!!!) that Brendan’s brother, the father of his nephew, died during his stay in the warm, chocolaty center of the earth. They embrace each other tenderly and start weeping, but I was left wondering why the camera didn’t switch to an extreme low angle so their tears could thrillingly plummet onto my tongue (which was already extended out in anxious anticipation). Speaking of crying, Reid was almost driven to tears by the sheer number of Newton’s Laws that were being systematically drawn and quartered throughout the movie, with only their lifeless, severed limbs left to twitch beautifully in 3-D. Despite the hulking venus flytraps hissing violently on-screen and Brendan Fraser dealing out haymakers indiscriminately to them, I was completely transfixed by Reid’s despair and sat there wishing to myself that I could appreciate it more in Real D. The absurdity of this idea followed soon after, realizing that we see in 3-D as it is. But this brought up a tantalizing possibility. We may see in 3-D, but do we see in “Real D”, or more appropriately, Surreal D©?

Conventional 3-D vision is so banal. I think the next reasonable paradigm shift with vision is Surreal D. I don’t get the visual foreplay from someone pointing at me like I do in Journey. In Journey, the subtlest of gestures becomes an imposing declaration of war on your body and comfort zone. As the film demonstrates, a tape measure or Brendan Fraser’s saliva can be turned into an effective, entertaining weapon against the audience. So, what if Surreal D technology was applied to everyday life and vision, vision 2.0 if you will? Let us conveniently ignore the logistics of this technology and instead focus on the benefits.

I think people would devote so much more attention to certain things and appreciate them tenfold, no mater how pointless, ridiculous, or tediously boring they are. It certainly worked for this movie. Just picture employee training videos, wakes, sports, motion graphics-riddled commercials, raising children, spanking said children, community service, purgatory, bathing, election coverage, and church in Surreal D. Storytime at church would be accompanied by flying sheets on strings whenever the holy ghost is mentioned, and a massive payload of blue bouncy balls would be released from the ceiling upon the slightest mention of The Great Flood. I think this futuristic concept can be very succinctly illustrated by the song “Your Own Personal Jesus” by Depeche Mode, you really will want to “reach out and touch faith.” The body of Christ being extended toward you would truly be a feast for the eyes. On a side note, whatever the hell are those Christ crackers? I always wondered as a boy if priests open up new boxes of them to eat if they happen to have a biblical appetite at the time.

Maybe they would begrudgingly sacrifice a lamb or some small, defenseless animal every week to satiate the bloodlust of parishioners who want to see blood flying past them in Surreal D. Perhaps they would even go a step further and save up a month’s worth of sacrifice blood and on one Sunday have it rain down on the congregation from sprinklers while they all rave, grind, and crack cross-shaped glowsticks, all to honor the Sabbath of course. And I guarantee when the collection basket came around, at least 3 or 4 times in each service someone would slap it up into the air just so everyone could enjoy the spectacle of coins raining down. With vision 2.0, you can get God 2.0 and next-gen Jesus for no additional cost. Consider how much more stimulating, appealing, and sexy church could be with just a simple plastic frame resting on the bridge of your nose. But I still wouldn’t go. I don’t think this would be a good idea for Baptist churches though. That would just be horrifying. The swaying of hips, the incessant clapping of hands. You would either be unequivocally converted or driven to madness.

We can all learn a lot from Journey, our modern day messiah, Brendan Fraser, and even Doom 3 that the advent and application of new technological veneers can make old things new every time. Continue?