Best of the Wings

So a question came up over at DobberHockey, asking people to post the best all-time lineup of your favorite team. I came up with this for the Red Wings.

Brendan Shanahan – Steve Yzerman – Gordie Howe
Pavel Datsyuk – Sergei Fedorov – Tomas Holmstrom
Ted Lindsay – Alex Delvecchio – Henrik Zetterberg
Kirk Maltby – Kris Draper – Darren McCarty
(Igor Larionov, Bob Probert)

Nicklas Lidstrom – Vladimir Konstantinov
Mark Howe – Red Kelly
Chris Chelios – Vyacheslav Fetisov
(Paul Coffey, Larry Murphy)

Dominik Hasek
Terry Sawchuk
(Chris Osgood)

Pretty damn solid if you ask me.  Now I just want the Wings to take a risk with Nikolay Zherdev for this coming season. I think Datsyuk could set him straight and the Wings could have a 30 goal guy on the right wing.

Evil drugs in Fallout?

Today I read a cool article about how feasible the Fallout games are. Check it out here. Anyway, when I was done with the article I came to the comments and immediately saw this gem:

I actually never got into Fallout, simply because of their rampant abuse of evil chemical drugs – its a big turnoff to me.

Disgusting game.

Wow. Yeah, because no one in reality ever used any drugs. The hilarious part is that this person has 420 in the username, which makes it painfully obvious why it is particularly “chemical” drugs that are evil. Because “natural” drugs are completely harmless. Yeah. Also, saying that Fallout rampantly abuses drugs is about the same as saying that Mass Effect contains graphic sex that the player can control.

I’m fine with people calling the game disgusting, but I would expect them to call it that because you can blow people heads off in a very graphic fashion. But drugs? Fuck off.

Gathering the crew

I don’t know exactly how long I’ve played Mass Effect 2 by now, but if I had to guess, I’d say that I’m about 25% through the game. I have two more squadmembers to find and I’ve only completed one loyalty mission so far. I’m in love with pretty much every aspect of the game. So far it’s practically perfect. I’ve just started playing the Lair of the Shadow Broker DLC.

I should write more about this, but it seems like I could write a whole novel about all of my impressions. It’s just perfect. Pity I can’t experience what’s in this screenshot because I don’t want to mess anything up with my love interest from the first game going into part three. That’ll have to be with my next playthrough, when I play with my renegade femShep, as opposed to the paragon maleShep I’m playing right now. She’ll go after Thane for sure. He kicks ass. Or should I go for Garrus? We’ll see, I guess. I could still make a save and then have a little hanky panky, load up the save and turn Miranda down and I’ll still be safe with Ashley Williams. Kick ass!

I know what I love the most about the game. It’s the consistency. This is as pure an experience that I’ve ever had with a video game.

Call of Duty: BlOps sucks

I just finished a session with my Xbox 360. First time in about a week that I sat down and actually played something. Busy week. I played three games. Call of Duty: Black Ops, Outland and Peggle. Let me comment on each of them.

Peggle. Plowed through the Peggle Nights expansion’s adventure mode and I am officially done with that game. Electronic crack and I’m staying far away from it. Fun while it lasted.

Outland. Just tried the XBLA trial and bought it on the spot after that run. Didn’t play it anymore after I bought it, but my initial impressions are that it’s a cross between Castlevania, Ikaruga, Braid and Limbo. Four games that I loooooove. Outland’s ambiance and general feeling is just fucking awesome and I want to play it more soon!

BlOps. Fucking. Sucks. Call of Duty is a game series that has been tiresome ever since I started playing World at War. I don’t think I finished the first level of that game. I barely pushed through the campaign of Modern Warfare 2 as it was a very frustrating experience, same as World at War. I played through a couple of levels of Black Ops tonight and it’s the exact same thing as all the other games. Knock your head against the wall over and over and over again until you bleed. You enter a scene and you have X amount of checkpoints to get through. Each checkpoint has enemies attacking you in droves and the game’s supporting characters are screaming at you to haul ass. Well, if you haul ass and hurry up, you will get shot to bits and restart at the latest checkpoint. Most of the time you won’t even know who killed you and you won’t have a chance at dodging the bullet, grenade, exploding car or whatever else is killing you. You just go back to the drawing board and try something else, most of the time you lower your pace, which results in more annoying screams from your AI pals. Well, you know what? I’m tired of this concept. It’s outdated and tiresome and it doesn’t matter one bit if your game has the most impressive graphics ever, because the game still sucks. I’m done with the CoD games.

I think I broke it

I think I just broke Game Dev Story. At this point in the game, every game I develop becomes a hall of fame game and sells enough to get the #1 spot on the sales charts.

That’s why I decided to try something. My development team is pretty good right now, with several of them having traits in the 300s, if that tells you anything. Bottom line, my guys and gals are awesome. That’s why I decided to try and make the worst game I could. I picked two unpopular genres that I had never made a game with before, making me level 0 for each of them. With C popularity instead of A, the two genres I decided to use were Racing and Detective. Yes, I got a comment that it was a strange combo and that it potentially wouldn’t sell at all.

Then I outsourced the scenario writing to the cheapest and worst possible person, because none of my own people were bad enough. I did the same with graphics and sound design and didn’t use any boosts. Oh, I also used the Speed plan to speed up development, costing me quality. The reviews I got was one single point from getting into the hall of fame and when I got word about the first week of sales, it had, surprise surprise, ended up in the #1 spot. Yes, I can’t fail in this game even if I make an effort to. Bummer. The only thing I have left to do is to get a game of the year award. I usually take home all the other awards except that one.

So maybe I’m done with that game soon. But I paid something like 3 bucks for it and I’ve spent around 12 hours on it. Pretty good value for those 3 bucks if you ask me. And the developer apparently has two more games on the way. One is a direct sequel and the other is a game where you run a game store instead of a developer studio. I’m getting both as soon as they are released. You should too.