So a few of you may be saying to yourself, 'Hey that lazy git of a Synchro went on vacation and said she drew a ton of stuff but has been missing the past few days without any posting!' To wit I reply, I did! But that's not to say I have any of it scanned, which I don't. I don't know if anyone remembers me complaining about my pens giving me trouble, but basically all the pens I used that were suitable for the inking I did unceremoniously DIED on me, at the same time, so if you noticed that the lining in the past few strips has been pretty shoddy, then no, it isn't just you.

I will, however, be updating to comic 100 today, as well as doing a double or triple update tomorrow, so nyah.

But that's only half the problem. The other half is that I got two games! I wont say new games though, because one is from 2001, the other from 2005, so meh. But they're new for me dang it! So here, I'll pass along my impressions to you guys. Psychonauts and Black & White! Let's get to it.

Psychonauts -Double Fine Productions, Majestico Entertainment
PC, Playstation 2, Xbox

This is an absolutely lovely game. The style is inventive and different. It's nice to see a change from all those pretty boy Final Fantasy graphics every once in a while. All of the characters are memorable, from the hilariously witty (yet surprisingly random) serious German scientist, to the 'special' kid who talks to squirrels and periodically blows the critters up. The story is pretty solid (and off the wall), the powers are varied and useful but not overdone, the voice acting pretty well all fits in with the cast, and the level designing is odd but not entirely awkwardly so (in most cases).

You play as a kid named Raz (short for Rasputin, age 10-ish?) who escapes from the circus to become a psychic freak. ...I mean, international secret agent. A Psychonaut! He's discovered sneaking into camp and tries to come off casually by being completely overly dramatic in front of everyone, before being sentenced to staying in a kids cabin until his father comes to pick him up. Raz managed to impress the right teachers though, and ends up immediately being accepted into the general daily grind of the other students, as well as many extra curricular activities, before finding himself stuck in the middle of a brain snatchers conspiracy involving dentists and lungfish, with nothing but his powers and a piece of bacon. Amusingly, the bacon is sometimes more useful than your own skills. Game play around the camp and the insane asylum is in reality, while most other levels are the manifestation of peoples mind-scapes after you've jumped into their heads.

My complaints about the game, and believe you me I have a few, are mainly about the controls. The best examples would be in Milla's Dance Party and Boyd's Nightmare.

Milla is a Levitationist, and she teaches you how to be one too. Levitation in this game isn't defined as making things float, that's what your Telekinesis badge is for, and I'll get to that in a minute. In this, Levitation is the manifestation of a ball of psychic energy that traps air inside it which can be compressed to allow you to jump higher than normal by 'bouncing', as well as glide down from a jump. It also lets you move rather faster than normal. This level was particularly difficult due to the fact that most of it was reliant on the levitation ball, which as stated is great for moving fast and jumping, but absolutely terrible for precision and control in any sense of the words.

You're expected to do a lot of platform jumping, and because this is rather difficult most of the time on a levitation ball, the platforms are cunningly designed like retro flower decals which fold the petals inward when you land on them to prevent you from rolling back out. Unfortunately the programming of this wasn't fine tuned, so half the time you jump from your platform successfully, a quarter of the time the platform petals are registered as hindering you and shorten your jump so that you fall to an annoying 'Start it over you doofus' position, and the rest of the time the petals register as a sharp edge that pierce your bubble and negate your levitation ball as you attempt to jump, which causes you to jump straight over the edge of your platform without near enough lift to make your target area, sending you straight to the doofus insult again. I mean, if you were going to have a bubble that could get punctured, why lack on safe guarding your jumping platforms from that occurrence? Argh.

Another rather erk-some feature of this level is several rooms where the floors are sloped, sending you straight off into a 'it sure would be nice if I could see and/or stop running around uncontrollably in this channel-like ravine' or 'Why don't I have a locked camera if I'm trying to run straight back and forth across the bottom of a sphere-based room?' train of thought. You end up chasing your psychically manifested tail around in little circles when what you really want to do is manage one of those impressive off the wall snowboarder jumps. Not to mention that the levitation ball doesn't jump straight up off your flooring, but at whatever angle your flooring is tilted, so you end up gracefully smashing your face right into a parallel wall when you meant to launch vertically half the time. In theory this is all gravy because you really only need to get from point A to point B, C, D, and E on the levels of this game, but you're also trying to collect these things called Figments.

Figments are basically crayon doodles that your thirteen year old did and scattered all over the floor before walking off. If you collect enough of these, it's one of your many ways of leveling up. In the 3D environment of someone's mind however, these things aren't only on the floor, but suspended in the air, stuck to the walls, and in some cases floating about the room waiting for you to pinpoint their trajectory so you can head it off and snatch it. This will generally extend the time it takes to complete a level by maybe three of four times as long if you're as control handy capped as someone like me (I don't use my hands on the keyboard like I should to coordinate movements well in most cases). One reason for this is that they are about 50% transparent and easy to miss sometimes, as well as being completely 2D, so if you see it from the side, you don't see it at all. This forces you to pander all around a room to catch a Figments location sometimes. You could, of course, just ignore them, but then you miss quite a lot of character leveling, which will easily hurt you later on.

The camera can be a pain in the aft quite a bit of the time, but overall they did a decent job of programming the thing unless you find yourself making a jump from an object smack up against a wall, which they make you do on more than one occassion. BUT~! Onto Telekinesis, which I promised I would rant about a few paragraphs ago.

Telekineses is, by far, the most cumbersome power to use in this game. So cumbersome in fact that I think the game developers knew hardly anyone was going to use it on a regular basis, therefore it made sense to them to force you to use it for four boss fights in a row on one level. Now call me an ingrate, but this is absolutely frustrating as all heck. Currently I'm in the middle of fighting a minor boss, who in theory is insanely easy to defeat. The only thing is, is that to kill it you have to use telekineses to lob a bomb it itself generates back into it mouth. Sure it sits there for ten or so seconds, giving you a completely unguarded shot to do this, but I have failed so many times to line up a successful throw that it's embarrassing. When you fail to lob the bomb into it, it resets itself like you've just started the fight. If you get close to attack this thing, it will damage you 95% of the time, so shooting it from a distance works beautifully.... until you run out of projectiles to throw. Then you get very dead pretty much no matter what you do.

I asked one of my friends who started playing the game around the same time as me and he says it took him about an hour to kill the thing. Once. You have to fight this jerk twice. They don't even bother changing its attack pattern for the second round because chucking the bomb back in its face is more difficult that most of the main bosses you fight up to this point. I mean, give me a break. I've gone to teleporting myself back to previous, less grudgingly frustrating levels via snot bubble to enjoy this game right now, rather than face that dumb sod of a sub boss a second time. I'll get to it eventually, but right now I have a cat sitting on me and don't want to get into the mood of wanting to punch the nearest thing. (No, I wouldn't actually ever punch my kitty. D: )

So all in all, I recommend this game, and I would definitly buy it again given the choice. Just expect to get angry at your controller on more than one occassion. (I will note that I got this game for PC, but it is also available for Playstation2 and Xbox, so maybe these problems have been corrected on those? Eh.)



Black & White -Lionhead Studios, EA Games
PC

You are God. Seriously, you're the almighty. You have villages that worship you, a temple in your honor, and a large, later to become very large, totem Creature to help you accomplish tasks in the physical realm. Whether these tasks help people or rend their towns to a smoldering and terror brimmed sunder is entirely up to you.

Okay, so in theory this is a really interesting game. In theory. Unfortunately I'm having so many technical difficulties with the thing that I can hardly enjoy playing it. First off, it has this crazy notion that my computer is running on -1333 MHz, which I find pretty ridiculous, as well as impossible, but it causes the thing to quit 75% of the time on start up. So I sit here trying to open the game for ten minutes, and when I finally can I have to go spelunking for my save file.

Call me crazy, but generally I like to have some game start options. This thing launches you straight onto a menu screen where you have no 'Load Game' or 'Start New Game' options if it detects any save files at all on your system. I find this to be very short sighted and damn stupid myself, especially if you consider the fact that a long involving simulator game like this has a high chance of having multiple accounts for different players going on at the same time if there's several gamers living in the house, but heck, whatever. So you have to click 'Continue Game' and then get into your temple and get into the 'Save Game Room' and then select the game file you want if you're sniffing out a file that wasn't the last one accessed.

However, I'm having an ungodly amount of trouble with the save function anyway. I disabled the auto-save feature because, thankfully, in-game quitting isn't a major problem (does still occur every now and then, but not so much since I lowered the image quality), but the game still seems to love saving. I wanted to check out what the skirmish feature was from the main menu, and it automatically saved my game before showing me any description for it. The same goes for starting an online game. The same thing goes for quitting your game. I did some really stupid things before quitting my game once because I knew I was going to be quitting my game. So when I told the game I wanted to quit, it asks, 'Are you sure you want to quit Black & White?'. I said yes, and it saved my game. No 'Are you sure you want to save?' or ' Progress will be lost' messages, just auto-save. So I said to myself 'Well dammit. Let's fix this.' So I spend ten minutes getting back into my game and getting back into my temple and back into the 'Save Game Room', only to find that ALL THREE of my save files had been overwritten with the automatically saved quit game I had no intention of keeping.

Not only that, but it seems that some of my current save files have become some kind of odd bastardized hybrids of one another, so I have all the quests of one game completed with the creature stats of another file that are undesirable for that line, but what the hell, I've pretty much given up trying to keep it all straight at this point. Logically the programmers should have included something in the game patch for all of these blatantly obviously annoying save functions, but apparently they didn't think it was important so there you go.

I would just start over, again, if it weren't so damn annoying to start a new game. Really, redoing missions, especially the first ones, isn't a problem because they're so mind bludgeoning easy. But there's no way to skip the tutorials. Even if the game sees you have thirteen save files, it will still force you to spend twenty minutes doing tutorials on how to zoom in and out and look side to side without any options of having completed it before or would you like to skip. Not only that, but it's pretty much useless to attempt speeding up character dialog, because even if you do you still have to wait for the camera to zoom to whatever position the game is happy with it being before it lets you continue on, which is generally timed with how long it would take the characters to speak. You not only have to sit through the character dialog every time, but just to kick you in the pants they have visual demonstrations of what they were talking about after every function as well. I ended up sitting at the keyboard with a book when starting this game myself.

So finally, finally, you get to game play, which is still basically the learning curve of trying to drive a semi-truck unlicensed while simultaneously being shot in the foot. Seriously, they may as well not even have a tutorial and just throw you into things with signs posted around that you could read the same information on. And when you get the creature, the thing is about and clever as a scorched brick. I've had countless times when it frolics through town, grabs a villager, and eats it. Immediately I go in and beat the living daylights out of the thing to give it the idea that it's a bad thing, so that when I zoom out it cowers and whimpers and immediately decides that eating another villager is a good idea. To wit the cycle repeats, and I have a very VERY bruised and battered creature whom I finally give up on and leash to a tree before storming off to do some godly quests in hopes that it will learn its lesson in the temple of solitude.

But aside from the Creature AI being insanely inconsistent overall (I find that it's much less likely to go round killing things after you've taught it some miracles and things), the leash itself is incredibly buggy, which does no good because that's the only means you have of restraining your half retarded pet.

One game I leashed it to my temple, shortened the leash, and went off to do my mightier than thou work around the countryside. I came back to find that the leash is glitched when attached to my temple and can't be shortened, so my pet had gone and made a snack of half the village. I loaded up my previous save file, replanted a tree in the temple courtyard, and leashed my pet to THAT before shortening the leash, which worked, so I then went off doing good for the little folk of the island (because this was my good file). I came back to my temple to find my creature gone and having made a snack of the villagers again. I discovered that, by way of ANOTHER glitch, the leash casts itself into non-existence after you complete missions, so you have to continually reattach the thing if you want to keep tabs on your monster. So I load back my file and replant the tree and leash my pet onto it and shorten the leash and go off to do STUFF while continually coming back to check that my creature is still restrained, when I find out that villagers periodically came up to the temple to gather the food that I left there for my creature to eat, but he was eating the villagers instead.

At this point, I was pretty much trashed on the idea of starting over AGAIN, so I just beat the living daylights out of my creature, who then proceeded to eat another villager. And to think, this is with the Fluffy Leash of Compassion on. Sigh.

Beyond these glaringly repulsive errors in recognition failure, it can be insanely difficult to interact with specific objects. Like the creature leash. Generally you end up clicking the ground around it, or some other object nearby just because the system hot spot for the leash is so thin. If you're holding the leash, it is very difficult to activate one shot miracles unless you put the leash on something else or dissolve it, which means you have no control over your creature for that period of time. The camera can also really be a pain in the butt, considering it doesn't seem to have any compensation at all for niggly things like terrain or structures and relies on you to position it decently about 90% of the time rather than helping out at all. Plus there's no way to pivot the camera left or right from on standing position, you have to pan around in a sweeping arc, which at times makes it very difficult to stay focused on one specific thing

Also, playing an 'evil' campaign is very much like locking yourself in a dark room while rocking back and forth giggling to yourself. Sure it's amusing, but it makes it very difficult to get anywhere when compared to being 'good'. When you complete a quest benevolently, you get a miracle dispenser, which gives you an unlimited amount of a particular miracle which you can use however many times you like as the villagers of your green earth revel in your glory and merciful bounty.

However, when you're 'evil', and you complete the missions maliciously, you get nothing. The system registers that you were a bad puppy and should be hit with a very large roll of newspaper, which one of your conscience characters likes, but you still get absolutely no reward for doing so. Would it really have been that difficult for the programmers to have the miracle dispensers pop up then too? The system obviously recognizes that you've wrecked the mission beyond proper completion, but it's still been completed. For a game where 'there is no right or wrong', it seems pretty unfairly one sided. Considering that, when you're on the tutorial island, if you're 'good' you can teach your creature miracles and load up on a bunch of power-ups that will help you later, and when you're 'evil' you have to wait while you're on the second island to do all that while you're trying to learn village construction and managing, swaying other villages to believe in you, and fend off opponents trying to kill you. It's a bit less complicated to do it beforehand.

Back to the tutorial complaint, when you get to the second island, you're still having to put up with nothing but tutorials. It just really seems like it will never end at this point when you consider all missions up to this point have been tutorials in leash control, camera control, grabbing control, resource gathering control, miracle usage, and general game progression. It seems more like reading through and interactive technical guide than an actual 'just for fun' game. I haven't gotten past casting fireballs (which I'm terrible at. The throwing function on this is based entirely on mouse movement rather than silly things like 'targeting' and 'lock on' controls.) and I'm really not sure I will. This game has had me backtracking and cursing so much I can't really imagine myself having much fun playing it aside from watching my creature. I must say that there isn't much that can rival a fifty foot tall tiger break dancing for a group of whooping Native Americans. But you know, novelty versus practicality. I have better things to spend my time on than lighting virtual wheat fields on fire.



~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Blargle is my best excuse to be an idiot. Seriously. There's no point to this thing, I'm just giving myself an excuse to draw and be dumb at the same time. I hope it entertains at least a few of you guys out there though! I started this comic a while ago, then didn't touch it for darn near a year, and now I'm attempting to do daily updates! Some day's I'm not home at all, so I'm kind of spotty... but I try to make up for it with multiple strips on other days! Most coloring is done either with colored pencil, MS Paint, or both. Have fun!

Check out my actually gallery: