Let's Ban Hydrogen

 For the vast array of Liverpool fans across the globe, it will be a surprise this matter is not all about one man – Rafael ‘Zorro’ Benitez. It will be less of a surprise that it is in fact about Xabi ‘the missing link’ Alonso.

Whispered in a hushed tone over a quiet pint, Alonso’s moniker has become akin to that of ‘he who must not be named’ in the Harry Potter series. There are several, pertinent reasons for this.

Many will point to the gaping hole his talents have left between the sides defence and attack as the most predominant, while others cite the clubs poor treatment of such a key player. A less popular yet significant point is it’s yet another example of the clubs bungling in transfer market. Having already earmarked Gareth Barry as his successor the previous summer and with the knowledge of Alonso’s intentions evident to all, the club failed to tie Barry down despite the attraction of Champions League football and a £30m bargaining chip.

Whichever reason you might pick, there is no escaping the man from Tolosa will remain a lightening scar on the face of Liverpool football club for many years to come.

I’ve been wanting to try out this game and feature it in a post here, but I haven’t had the chance to up until now. As the title may suggest, Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online is an MMO set in the world of the MegaTen games. This means that thinks like negotiating with demons are available alongside the traditional MMO gameplay.

After you create your character, you get to do a neat story based tutorial that feels like something out of a console game. It’s pretty enjoyable stuff, and I hope there’s more like that later in the game. Upon completion of that, things turn into the more standard quest based gameplay that’s associated with MMOs. The controls aren’t too different from the other MMOs I’ve played, and were pretty simple to pick up. Playing with a summoned demon is pretty similar to being a warlock in World of Warcraft.

Instead of choosing a class, the game lets you basically pick your own class by choosing what stats you want to level up and what skills you want to level up and improve. For my current character, Ione, I’m doing a basic fighter character. When I have a bit more experience under my belt, I may try to create a magic user.

Shin Megami Tensei: Imagine Online is free to play, but offers lots of pay content like hair, weapons, and armor. As long as you’re okay with that, you can download the game here. I’m Ione on Cerberus (which I think is the only server right now). Hope you say hi!

This week’s edition of Free Game Friday is a bit of a cheat. I’m not posting all of Umineko, only the first chapter, which is available free and legally as a demo. And Umineko isn’t exactly a game- it’s a sound novel, which means that it’s WORDS WORDS WORDS with some pictures and music thrown in. The only “gameplay” aspect of is trying to solve the game’s many mysteries.

I’ve posted this in spite of all that for two reasons. Firstly, I’ve talked to several people here about playing this game, and they’ve expressed interest. Secondly, the English translation for the game’s 5th chapter is due out any day now, and I am so psyched about it that I feel compelled to do something, anything, that’s Umineko related.

Without giving too much away, Umineko no Naku Koro ni is a murder mystery that takes place during the Ushiromiya family conference on a small, secluded island. The island is rumored to be home to a witch named Beatrice, and also rumored to be hiding 10 tons of gold. Underneath a portrait said to be the witch, there is a mysterious epitaph that contains a riddle. It is said that whoever can solve the riddle will receive all the gold and become the new head of the Ushiromiya family.

As the screenshots I’ve posted may indicate, the art the game uses might be off-putting. I personally found that I got used to the game’s art very quickly, especially once I’d gotten involved in the story. There is some incredible music, and it’s excellent at setting the mood, especially once the game starts to get a lot creepier. This chapter of Umineko also gets off to a bit of a slow start. Most of the beginning is made up simply of dialogue and character introductions. After the first night though, things really start to pick up, and the time spent developing the characters really pays off.

Since this game uses an English patch, downloading is a bit more complicated. You can get the demo itself here. You can then get the English patch for the game, courtesy of The Witch Hunt, here for Macs, and here for Windows. Unpack the patch and move it into the folder your demo’s in. Make sure it’s in the same folder as ONScripter specifically.

If you’re using a Mac, hooray! You’re all done. Start up ONScripter to enjoy the game. If you’re using Windows, you have a little more work to do. You’ll have to set your computer up to work with Japanese. You can see how to do that for XP here and for Vista here. Once you do that, things should be good to go. Run ONScripter to start the game. If you have any additional problems, let me know and I’ll sort this out.

If you do wind up playing this and liking it, please let me know. I would love someone to discuss this with. If you’re interested in playing the other chapters, pm me on the forums or in the chat, and I’ll show you where you can get Chapters 2-4 and Chapter 5.

Hey everybody, welcome to Free Game Friday. For this week’s edition, I’ve taken some inspiration from the awesome movie UP and have chosen “Higher!”. Higher! is an addictive little browser based game that has a pretty basic goal- to get your house higher.

To play Higher!, you click on balloons you see while dodging balloon bursting bombs. You have more options than just hitting your left or right arrow key, however. You can drag bombs into each other, which will cause them to explode and give you plenty of coins as a bonus. These coins can be used to purchase all sorts of upgrades for yourself, like defense for your balloons or more “up power”. As the amount of balloons you attach to your house grows, the surprise meter fills up more and more. When it completes, you get (surprise!) a surprise.

It’s pretty easy to pick up how to play this game, and once you do, there’s plenty to draw you back into playing for just a few more minutes. If I had to name one drawback, I’d have to mention the game’s music. It isn’t offensive by any means, but I thought it got a bit irritating after playing it for a while. Other than that though, there’s not much not to enjoy about Higher!. If you want to play it, click here.

Before anything else, I want to go ahead and apologize for not being so good about these posts the last two weeks. I’ve had two extremely hectic and stressful Fridays in a row, and I haven’t really had the time to play and compose a post. Since I feel like I could’ve easily managed this just about any of day of the week, I’m going to try to just write these earlier in the week and then schedule them to post on Friday. If I run into a situation where I don’t manage to get my post up on time, I’ll go ahead and backdate the post.

Now that that’s settled, I’d like to tell you a little bit about Self Destruct. Self Destruct is a neat little shoot em up game that lets you play for 10 minutes before you self destruct. You have to make it through as many waves of attacks and rack up as many points as possible before that time comes- if you can manage to stay alive until then.

Even if shoot em ups are not your forte (I am terrible at them), this is a pretty addictive game. Because each game is so quick it’s easy to say “oh, just one more try” over and over again. For those of you who are skilled at the genre, there’s an online leaderboard that you can try to get on. The music and sound are fun and really add to the experience, and while things are pretty simple, the game’s art looks nice.

If you’d like to download Self Destruct, go here.

Dragon Age: Origins is a new Bioware RPG set in an exciting fantasy world with a bunch of elves and dwarves and dragons and stuff. I’m not sure why, now that they’re making a game not based on D&D, they didn’t decide to go with something creative. They could maybe have even made a race that’s like elves and is just called something else.

The plot is excellent. You play as an unlikely hero who is charged with defeating an ancient evil horde of creatures, who derpy derr. It’s full of insane twists. At one point, I discovered a character I thought was a good guy was actually evil, and ugly, to boot. Then, later, a character I believed to be my ally turned out to be a villain. As I continued onward, I discovered a twisted, unpredictable tale was unfolding in which the forces of good and evil derpy derp derr derr derpy derp dum. Also, everyone talks in an English accent, except I met a couple of Frenchies, too. Unfortunately they did not refer to my mother as a hamster at any point.

My character is a young lady elf with short red hair, and she’s very cute if I may say so myself. She never says anything, which feels silly after playing Mass Effect, but she does have hair roughly the same color as Crono, which helps it feel a bit more normal. She’s a mage, although as soon as I level up I’ll be able to take the Arcane Warrior subclass, which will be awesome. I plan to shoot a large fireball at some Evil Men, which will explode and, in addition to knocking them down, light them on fire, which, from what I am told, Hurts. By the time they get up I will have begun to hit them really hard with a sword. A magic sword, by the way, engraved as it is with mystic runes of Hurting. In this game you can get a mentally retarded dwarf to use runes you find to enchant your weapons. Everything I said in the sentence preceding this one is literally true.

I have to give the developers kudos for resisting the likely tremendous urge to fill every name with “ae” and “wyn.” There is, however, a point in this game where a man says something like, “Dragons are no joke.”

This man is right. I woke up the dragon he referred to and it killed me. I had to start over from my last save. It definitely wasn’t a joke.

Overall, I rate this game “Decent For Helping you Hold Out For Mass Effect 2” Out of 10.

It’s just about Halloween, which obviously means that this week’s free game will need to feature zombies! There are quite a few good zombie games out there, and it took some thought, but I ultimately decided that my first Halloween edition of Free Game Friday should feature Deanimator.

Deanimator is a really neat flash shooting game inspired by the works of H.P. Lovecraft. The gameplay in this one is pretty basic; you click to shoot down zombies and reload your gun. If you don’t slay the zombies before they get close enough to grab you, they’ll kill you in an entertainingly gruesome way. As you progress through the game, you’ll unlock the ability to use a shot gun, which takes less shots to kill a zombie but longer to reload. You can use the shift key to cycle back and forth between the two weapons. I personally prefer using both weapons to using just one, but your mileage may very.

In spite of this game’s simplicity, it’s a lot of fun. I love the feeling of dread you get when you’re not sure if you’ll manage to reload in time to get the shots off in time, and it’s really satisfying when you pull off a miraculous comeback. The game’s graphics are fairly plain, but I think they look great. I especially enjoy some of the death effects. This one’s browser based, and it’s easy to give a quick playthrough, so I suggest that any fan of killing zombies check this one out.

If you’d like to play Deanimator, click here.

Yes, this is a real, official Barbie toy from Mattel. Yes, “Palm Beach Sugar Daddy Ken” is his actual name. You can order him here at Entertainment Earth. Have you ever seen a toy more utterly PIMP than this?!

Cool sophistication in breezy Palm Beach! Sporting a dashing jacquard-patterned jacket with a light pink polo shirt and crisp white pants, Ken doll is ready for Palm Beach social season, sunning by the pool and a stroll with his little companion. Fashion designed exclusively for the Silkstone Barbie doll body. Includes Ken doll, jacket, pink polo shirt, white shoes, dog with leash, swim trunks and accessories, doll stand and certificate of authenticity. For the adult collector. Order yours today!

Daddy, I finally know what I want to be when I grow up!!!

And I’m back. It’s funny, for the first two thirds or so of 2009, I thought it was a really dry year for music, but it turns out that all the best stuff is just coming out in the last quarter or so. Particularly of note in this entry are Jemina Pearl’s first solo album and the new Tegan and Sara, which I’ve decided to make the recipient of my brand new “TK’s First Choice” award.

Don’t forget that you can stream the entirety of all these albums once by following the Lala link under their title!

Read more…

For this week’s edition of Free Game Friday, I’ve chosen the adorable puzzle game Red Remover. I think most of you will be happy to know that it’s a browser based game, so nothing to download.

The concept of Red Remover is pretty simple: Green blocks are good. Red blocks are bad. In each of the game’s levels, you must figure out a way to take out all the red blocks on your screen without damaging the surprisingly cute green ones. The way that gravity in the game is implemented is consistent, so solving each level is skill-based rather than luck based, making it a lot less frustrating than similar games I’ve played. Red Remover also has a level editor, so you can create your own puzzles for your buds (or fellow shriners).

The only real complaint I have about the game is that a lot of the levels are just way too easy. It gets a bit harder as it progresses, but I would’ve enjoyed it more if they’d made it more challenging, especially since you aren’t penalized for retries and walkthroughs are available. Nonetheless, it’s still a great way to pass the time.

To play Red Remover, click here.