With a Chainsaw I'll skin your rear RAW!

A chainsaw is wonderful tool to prune trees, take care of lumber and the occasional dismemberment. Something a collections of developers have embraced wholeheartedly. Much to my great annoyance. That said, some serious spoilers ahead if an enemy encounter can be considered that. It all started around Resident Evil 4, the game that takes place in not Spain, within the wacky world of Bio Hazard. One of the most beefy, irritating and dangerous enemies to contend with in the game is a man, just a man with a bag on his head. A pesky peasant welding a chainsaw, one that can instantly decapitate Leon if it gets too close. Of all the weak spots an enemy can have, you’d think that the chainsaw would be a major weakness, since it’s a flimsy tool that is prone to clogging, having the chain snap and running out of gas. Yes he can take a lot of bullets to the head, but honestly the chainsaw should really be Dr. Salvadors greatest weakness, a couple of bullets into that machine and it should go bust. But no, that is not how it works the chainsaw is indestructible and cant even be used by the player. To add salt to the wound, there are several other such enemies throughout the game, such as the giant one with a burning chainsaw in the mercenary mode. These fiends are essentially minibosses that takes a serious beating and can pretty much only do one thing and that is if they catch up to you.

Come to think of it, the madness probably started around the Dead Rising series. Which takes place in a location where such a tool is easy to find. Or was it gears of war with it’s chainsaw bayonett that inspired a bunch of these games to have such enemies.

Resident Evil 5 have some chainsaw foes as well, as the Resident Evil 6 if I recall correctly. Where they are just as annoying, one track minded and deadly. Regardless the madness of the control scheme, limited ammo and all of that jazz, it does not end there. Because the director went to make the otherwise excellent Evil Within 1 and 2. Survival horror games with yet another instance of instant death chainsaw minibosses, coming to murder you in a small corridor, while being interrupted by infected zombie like enemies. I never found it scary, I never found them fun, or interesting. I see them as a major irritation that causes more frustration than fear.

Zaceron signing out!

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Jurassic Burgers

After watching too much Jurrasic World, the weird wonky and very Hollywood sequel to the Jurrasic Park movies there is a plot point that has been bothering me quite a lot. Be wary spoilers ahead, if such a story can be spoiled. Regardless science brought dinosaurs back and a rich man built a park with dinosaurs with the backing of a shady mega corporation. Then things goes wrong because an underpaid employee is bribed into stealing research samples and shuts down the security system during a typhoon. Years later the part is rebuilt, and reopened elsewhere on the island and became successful. However the oversized featherless birds did not make all the money in the world, so evil rich man decides to make a better raptor, naturally somethings goes wrong and everything goes to hell in a hand basket, again.

The movie after that deals with fetching dinosaurs and ferrying them of the island as the volcano is going critical, instead of saving them, evil corporate greed man decides to do the dumb money scheme built around selling the dinosaurs to the highest bidder, then make a super raptor again to use for war purposes. Which is very silly all things considered, because drones and tanks are ultimately better and less squishy. Without the ability to go berserk and tear allies to shreds. In the end it leads to an epic fight between an intelligent emphatic raptor and the enraged super raptor, the good guys wins and the evil bad business man die along with most of the other guests at the locations, plus some unforgettable scientists. Heroes saves the day and the handsome white hunter and raptor trainer survives to be badass in an inevitable sequel. Ranting and poor plot summary of Jurrasic world aside.

Imagine this; Instead of making genetically engineered war machines and park attractions, there is clearly an untapped market for huge slabs of sizzling tyrannosaurus steaks, people would pay through their nose to eat this exclusive meat. Not to mention being able to breed creatures at that impressive size could do wonders for the meat industry. Since being able to grow anything of that mass is very impressive. Thus I can only conclude it is possible to grow unintelligent meat made from cultivated cells, bypassing the whole ethical dilemma of taking a life and you know co2 pollution and excessive energy usage.

Yes, I do believe it would work better as a plot point to serve dinosaur burgers, than to sell a dinosaur soldier.

Zaceron Signing out and do enjoy my ongoing fantasy story.

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Langrisser 1 & 2

Langrisser is an interesting game series that takes place in a generic fantasy kitchen sink. What do I mean by this? Well, every hero on either side of the conflict between light and dark wears impractical shoulder pads and armour that protect very little, if anything. Combine that with an interesting selection of outlandish units. Like faeries, angels, zombies, slimes and everything else I could expect from this world. Killing the evil power hungry emperor, that invaded the peaceful kingdom of the protagonists with a swarm of pixies is fun though.

It seems like a hentai artist designed the characters, so that might explain the exposed midriff.

Apparently the holy sword Langrisser more or less means lung ripper in German, or so I'm told. Which brings up another fantasy trope, German sounding names that may, or may not be made up gibberish. The leather z and f is very exotic in Japan after all. I can't fault them for that though, nor should you. For some reason fanatical anime fans are very hung up on name accuracy, despite it being a one way street.

Anyhow, the game is about turn based be series where each hero hire several mercenaries to fight for them. Each of these units gets a solid stat boost by being within range of the unit commander.

What really sets the series apart is choice and the various endings. My most satisfying moment in gaming history is to ditch the bland and boring heroes to join the evil empire, that want peace through power, by colluding with the forces of darkness., then betray them and join the overlord, only to backstab him as well, then fight the goddess of light, like a true magnificent bastard. I laughed long and hard about it.

It's refreshing to actually play a properly translated version of the game, I'm not very good at Japanese and aside from Warsong no other product in the series has been released across the sea. The mobile game is not quite the same experience, in fact it is a bit rubbish, even if it expands the characters a bit through excessive grinding and gifting.

The one bad thing about Langrisser is the AI, it's pretty much only capable of mindlessly attacking with its units, regardless of outcome. Sure the officers uses spells here and there, but that does not stop them from tossing men into the meat grinder. The imperial guard would be proud. Get it on steam today, the package includes the first two games in all its glory.

And in case you wonder, the soundtrack dlc adds more ingame music type options. Because the game comes with both chip tune and hair metal versions of the tracks.

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Zaceron signing out!

Piracy protection is a Scam

I firmly and wholeheartedly believe that piracy protection in games are a scam, that takes advantage of gullible publishers by prying on their fears. No sales person wants to lose potential revenue, with some exceptions. The idea is sound and sensible. If someone can make an illegal copy of the game that other people can download for free, no money is made, so in order to prevent this dastardly deed from occurring a sinister software is added to authenticate the product upon start up, or in the background while the software is running. Lets use Monster hunter world as an example, Capcom, has implemented a software from a company called Denuvo which uses precious system resources to see if the game is legit. Since this occurs the only one punished are legit owners like me playing it on Steam. Because the software uses a lot of cpu, which causes some lag, long loading times and general instability. A friend of mine has it even worse, Denuvo causes too much stress on the processor and it causes the computer to reboot. This happens despite his ability to run the game without any problem. Due to the piracy protection causing problems for the service it causes a general loss of revenue, due to people demanding a refund because the game runs like crap and to add insult to injury, buying the license from the company itself cost money, that could have been earned through legit sales.

In fact, games are cracked in less than a week after launch, be it an online or offline game, this has been going on since digital entertainment has been around. It never works and it is a pain in the buttocks to deal with. One of the most vile and old examples I can recall is a nefarious software known as Starforce. It came with a couple of games among them was Worms Mayhem. Starforce is generally known to throttle and destroy disc drives inside the computer. Install that worms game along with the malicious software and suddenly out of the blue the cdrom drive is not working anymore or just runs very slowly.

If I where to go further back, the Amiga 500, a wonderful pc with many great games that run on noisy and slow booting floppy drives also had pirate protection. To prevent users from copying the content onto another floppy and thereby ending up with an extra copy of the game.

Since space was limited, developers usually added key words into the manual, such as in Monkey Island, where I had to look up what grog was made of in the manual to get past the first screen. Hackers cracked this the moment they got a hold of a legit game copy. Pirate copies was apparetnly very easy to aquire even back then and the service providers often included a fancy animated logo with a custom sound track, proudly proclaiming that they are the ones that hacked the game. Every now and then they even added a trainer to make the game easier to complete. In the end the only one punished was anyone without the manual, that actually spent money on the game.

To summarize: A game developer uses money to buy piracy protection. 

Hackers break the protection in a couple of days.

Legit owners get the shaft.

The developer and publisher loses sales.

Only the piracy protection software provider wins.

Zaceron signing out

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