Genericide Update: My True Calling

Hello again, faithful viewer(s)! You’re probably expecting me to do the same thing I always do and start this update apologizing for how long it’s been since I’ve updated. But I’m going to do things a little different this time. For you see, I have good news for all of you. Soon, I think I’ll be updating the blog much more often than I have been. There’s a good reason for this, which is as follows:

An Unrestrained Ramble on the Forging of Words

Well well well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? As is becoming an embarrassing trend with this blog, I seem to have gone a fair period of time without updating it. I’m sure my readers would be very disappointed in my long absence were it not for the fact that I talk to all of them like every other day. My hefty hiatus has been horribly heinous, but fear not, more content is on its way. But beyond that, my good reader, I must say I had a really good and not at all fictitious reason for not updating, which I will now describe to you in excruciating detail.

Our story begins several days after my last update about impressive organs. It was a dull, average afternoon of me practicing my chainsaw juggling routine. I was right in the middle of doing the tricky bit with the behind-the-back on-a-unicycle portion when suddenly I stopped, causing only minor property damage in the process. For you see, my Blog Sense was going off like something that was going off with an unprecedented amount of vigor! Focusing my Hyper Sensitive Blog Alignment Temporal Determinant Sensor know to some as “knowing about the passage of time”, I realized that it had been too many days without updates for the world to handle without resorting to cannibalism or whatever it is you people do when you go too long without hearing a random individual make jokes about butts in between talking about decades old video games.

Some Top Video Game Songs with Organs in Them

            So the other day I was thinking of a video game song in my head (because this is the sort of thing I do often) and accidentally confused it with another video game song, because both of them involved organs. Spurred by this thought, I tried to think up all the video game songs I could involving organs and came up with a surprisingly high tally. Deciding that there are far stupider inspirations for articles out there (which I will assuredly act upon later) I decided to compose a list of some top video game songs with organs in them.

Pictured: Sufficient inspiration for an article, apparently.

A Paper on Environmentalism

Earlier today I was struggling with an assignment for an unnamed class in which I had to identify a problem related to the class being green and offer a solution. I was not fond of the assignment, so I did something I've done once or twice before to amuse myself: I wrote out a fake, comedic version of the essay. Normally I only write these for my own amusement, but upon showing it to a friend they said I should post it on the blog. Given that school and my own laziness is keeping this blog as empty as usual lately, I figured why the hell not. So here, presented for your amusement, is some unedited, off-the-cuff madness from a bored and frustrated paper writer:

Mega Man Battle Network 2 Review

            This week on Genericide, I review a game that isn’t over a decade old! AHAHAHA! I had you going for a second there. Seriously though, today I’m reviewing an old Game Boy Advance game you quite possibly have never played or care about. Because what do I look like, some kind of normal person who lives in the present?

All of the cool kids are stuck decades in the past, man. That and people with malfunctioning time machines.

Sonic Adventure 2: Battle Review

            So over my holiday I’ve been submerged in a sea of older games, even with enticing new titles vying for my attention, mostly from the holiday steam sale. If this seems silly, it’s only because it is, but I can’t say I haven’t been enjoying myself revisiting past titles. One such title is one I already owned but lost track of, so I bought it for five bucks during a sale and became instantly obsessed with it again. That game will be obvious to anyone who read the top of the page. That’s right; I’ve been playing a considerable amount of Bill Hatcher and the Giant Egg Sonic Adventure 2: Battle.

            Sonic Adventure 2 was released for the ultimately doomed Sega Dreamcast console in 2001, but due to the whole doom thing it was later re-released with extra content on the Nintendo Gamecube less than a year later. This was the version my smaller self owned in the somewhat distant past, and I quite liked it at the time. I’m happy to report that the game holds up in my eyes today, but it’s still not without its problems.

The right image is the copy I remember from my childhood. The left image is the copy people with poor purchasing luck remember.

Paper Mario: Sticker Star Review

[Note: As I was finishing writing this review I had noticed a prevalent trend. Although I don’t regret it because this a blog of my opinions rather than a completely impartial outlet, here’s a fun drinking game I’ve devised: take a drink every time I compare Sticker Star to other Mario RPGs. Good luck.]

            So I return, metaphorically jumping out of the casket at a comical moment to inform everyone that I am not, in fact, dead. This past month of academically induced radio silence holds the new record for longest amount of time I’ve spent without updating the blog. So now that the honeymooning period of updates every week or two is over I’ve moved boldly forward in the realm of not updating, soaring to new heights with the new lows I’m willing to set. Um, that is to say that, I’m like, reaching a new low in actuality, but I’m using the phrase new heights to refer to the new record in lows I’m setting, which on reflection is kind of confusing. I mean, it’s sort of like the lows are the lowest because they’re the highest speaking in terms of lows, sort of like if gravity were flipped upside-down and flying high in the sky would actually be burrowing underground, but oh wait that would mess up the low part of the analogy. Er…

Okay I can figure this out, lemme just get out my tape measure…

Golden Sun Review

            So once again we arrive at our regrettably bimonthly update. College continues to limit my time spent with the games of video, so there are really only two games I’ve played in the last couple weeks. The first is more World of Warcraft, and the second is GBA RPG Golden Sun, which I started (and finished) another playthrough of on a whim. What’s that? You say you want to see more of this game I speak of? And you wish to do so by way of an informative and/or humorous internet review by some random blog? Well that just so happens to coincide with what I planned on doing, Suspiciously Informed Theoretical Inquirer. How exactly are you so well informed? Are you theoretically stalking me?

I’ve had it up to here with your theoretical shenanigans! Get the hell out of my theoretical house!

On Random Chance

            Greetings to hypothetical readers, self-deprecation as a result of slow update rate, etc. You know the drill. So I have been rather busy lately, which is partly responsible for the lack of updates. The other reason is the fact that since I haven’t had much free time, the only video game I’ve played in like 3 solid weeks is the pet battling system from World of Warcraft.

Above: What obsession looks like

An Average Day for the Stevensons

[So sparse updates have been sparse lately. In an attempt to alleviate that, today I'm going to present you readers with something a little different. I'm currently in a Creative Writing course that I had to write a short story for and this was the result. It's an easy way to fake content give you something to hold you over until I write a proper update, and I think it's the type of tale the internet might approve of. The rest of this update is the aforementioned short story, unchanged but for a few formatting edits to make it more readable in an online format]

Final Fantasy Tactics Advance 1 & 2

            Many years ago, when I was but a wee lad, there were a series of very popular JRPGs. It so happened that one year this series wanted to branch out and make a game in a slightly different genre. Rather than their usual style of game they instead opted for a more tactical one, with grid based combat similar to what one would see in, say, Fire Emblem. They brought their own flavor of individual character progression and classes to the table and the result was considered a rousing success. That game was called Final Fantasy Tactics. I…did not play that game.

Pictured: The game I’m not going to talk about

Let’s Play Sphinx #7: Pokemon Sphinx/Mummy Version

            Ancient legends tell of a treasure, lost to the annals of time. They tell of a sacred text that was buried beneath the sands for untold generations. Some weeks ago, our world’s top archeologists unearthed these very ancient texts. They marveled at them, estimating that they’re surely dating back to thousands of years ago, at least! They carefully placed them in an exhibit at a local museum, and news spread and eventually reached the papers. Some days after, a young man was browsing through the newspaper when an article caught his eye. “Oh”, he said, “they’ve found the Sphinx Let’s Play series. I should really consider updating that again.”

Hey! Do you get it?! Do you get the joke?! Do you get that the joke is that I haven’t updated in a long period of time?! Huh?! Do you?!

Genericide Update: Return of Revenge of the Son of Genericide

            So you may have noticed that it’s been a long time since I last updated this blog. Like, a really long time. I last updated Genericide four weeks ago, almost a full month. It’s been the longest hiatus the site has endured since its inception. I can only imagine the type of chaos and mass panic the outside world has been enduring at my absence. To the people of the world I offer my apologies and a glimmer of hope for your previously grim futures. Inform your neighbors, your friends and family, your governments, shout the good word from the rooftops. Genericide has not stopped updating, the end is not nigh, my hiatus was not an early start to the Mayan Apocalypse! I know this has been a tragic and grueling time for you are, but a bright future lies ahead.

You have my official permission to pick up your shattered lives and begin society anew

Some Top Video Game Lasers

            Dictionary.com defines a laser as a device that produces a “…coherent beam of light [caused] by exciting atoms to a higher energy level and causing them to radiate their energy in phase”. So basically lasers are just beams of light created by some science-y means. Most of them aren’t weapons or even that harmful so long as kept away from the eyes. That dinky little laser pointer manufactured purely to annoy your pets counts as a laser. And of course they are often fairly small and thin, because a huge, wide laser would probably be ridiculously impractical, not to mention pointless. Lasers aren’t really weapons, there, now that’s out of the way. So that being said…fuck that shit!

Erm, not literally though. That probably wouldn’t end well, even if the laser itself wasn’t harmful.

An Unrestrained Ramble On the Nature of Time

            So when I started this blog I made a solemn, concrete promise to not hold myself to any promises about updating. By all accounts, I have succeeded in upholding this noble goal. In other words, my rate of updating has generally toed the line in between “somewhat inconsistent” and “taking place in a dimension completely unrestrained from human understanding of time”. Though it is kind of impressive that I was able to apparently bend the time stream to my will purely for the purposes of updating out of schedule, it isn’t necessarily a good thing. Because although the Genericide update calendar may be a twisted, gnarled husk of temporal confusion, my internal guilt clock runs on a tight, consistent schedule.

Every Game I’ve Ever Owned

[I made this list while I was packing for college earlier today. If you ever need to see if I've played a game, you can just check. More importantly it makes me feel smug. Actual blog content coming...some time. Oh, and this disclaimer isn't counted in the word count]

***

This list consists of every video game I have ever owned or played as of 8/14/2012.

Current Total: 350 games, 315 played games

Systems Owned: 12

Words in this Document: 1,491

Games Worse than Final Fantasy X-2: 0

 Though I don’t really return or sell back any games, this does not necessarily include games I’ve rented, that I’ve seen people play, that I’ve heard of, that I owned but forgot about and lost, or that I’ve played but never personally owned. Basically, this is more of a rough estimate.

* = Game I own but haven’t played, ^ = Game owned by a sibling

Exploration in Video Games

            This is a topic that has been on my mind a fair bit lately, and I had previously mentioned I might go into while discussing 3D platformers. Video games have a lot of potential as a completely unique medium to do things that books, television and movies never could. Of course I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with games doing the same things that other mediums do, like using text or cinematics. But as an interactive form of media games have access to some unique things that only they can do, and among those is the ability to explore.

Even if Deus Ex: Human Revolution was a movie, you still could see this cool shot of the city of Hengsha. But you couldn’t then explore the city at your own pace.

            Movies and books may be able to show all sorts of side details and interesting aspects to the world that help flesh it out or reveal new information, but they always have to be directed by the creator. There’s no way to go off the rails of a story if it’s a linear experience, but when interactivity comes in you can simply present the audience with a world and let them go nuts. Games are in a unique position to more accurately exhibit the feeling of free will and exploration more than any other, and it’s one of the reasons I love them. It’s also one of the reasons some of gaming’s more recent AAA titles haven’t enthralled me as much.

Mini-Reviews: Vessel, VVVVVV and Mystery Game

            So because I’m terribly, horribly bad a pacing myself, my guilt overdrive has exploded at the lack of posts and after weeks of zero/sparse content I’m going to throw two articles at you at once. I’ve been playing a lot of games lately, as you’ll no doubt be so surprised to know. Basically take that huge list of games I was playing this summer a while back. Then add 8 games from the Steam Summer sale. Then lightly sprinkle on a few old games that I decided to add to the list of those I’m revisiting. Oh, and drop in a handheld game I bought before going on vacation. Mix together lightly and put in an oven pre-heated to 375 degrees for 15 minutes. After, let cool for several minutes before glazing on a layer of honey. Sorry, what was I talking about?

Orcs Must Die 2 is apparently delicious with a pinch of nutmeg

Let’s Play Sphinx #6: The Mummy Formerly Known As Prince

            Well it’s been a while, hasn’t it reader(s)? I actually played this segment back before I even posted the last entry in this series, so given that historians have yet to uncover intelligible recordings from that era I think we could all use a refresher on what the heck is happening. Sphinx had recently discovered from Mojo Monkey Man that via a magical artifact, they can temporarily revive the dead prince and have him scout out the enemies fortress. The Man of Monkey Magic then uses his powers to…give sentience to a basket, because that’s apparently the only way to transport items to and from the dead prince, via poorly explained teleportation magic. We can now return to our regularly scheduled Let’s Play that I’m sure my obedient legion of readers has been positively clamoring for.

Pictured: Obvious visual gag denoting inferior number of readers despite previous comments to the contrary

Shadow the Hedgehog Review

            So I return triumphant, or at least existent, from my brief vacation. During said vacation, the Steam Summer Sale occurred, netting me several more games to add to the huge list I elaborated on before I left (and keep in mind those were just the ones I’d already played). While I try to juggle playing everything from every time period at once I figured it’d be good to get some content in without too much of a wait, so I’m going to capitalize on something I played before I left for vacation. As a reward for waiting for content you get…a crappy game about a human sized mammal making a laughable attempt at attitude.

If you guessed this…who am I kidding no one would guess this, even though it fits the description. Funnily enough, this is an eco-friendly rip-off of the series containing the game I am talking about.