Happy Birthday to Me!

It's my birthday, and because my family members have jobs and work Mondays we celebrated it yesterday by opening the presents.
My sister got me a red Ramones t-shirt. She jokingly said that because she knows that I'm a fan of the Ramones and read a lot of Donald Duck comics she'll be buying me Ramones and Disney stuff for gifts for the rest of my life, but I have nothing against that.

My mother got me two DVDs and two PS3 games. The films were Hirttämättömät, the old Finnish comedy-western that I have talked about in the past and actually started creating an English translation for (which never went past the 10 minute mark because I didn't get the subtitle file to work right in Media Player) and The Last Action Hero.
Hirttämättömät was quite a found. I've been looking for it for the past year whenever I've been  in a store that sells DVDs but haven't found it, and then my mother just happened to bump into the lone copy of it in the store two days before my birthday. Apparently the stores around here don't consider it to be very popular and they had only ordered one copy. A big and very positive surprise was hiding inside the wrapping this time.

The two games she got me were Fracture and Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare. I don't really know if I can like Fracture for what it is, because I know my mother must've paid way too much for the game than what it's actually worth and I think it'll distract me when I try playing it. I'm not bitching about not getting something different instead, I'm just sad about the money my mother wasted on it and I would've preferred only three gifts instead, that's how much I hate the general idea of paying too much for crappy games. If parents keep buying their kids overpriced games, the game developers and especially publishers will never get the message we're trying to send them about the drivel they pile on us not actually being worth the 60 dollars (US) and 70 euros (EU) that they cost. Stop making such shitty games you assholes! I don't know if Fracture actually is shit, but I'm not expecting anything great from a generic shooter where you change the terrain in twelve different ways. When I feel like digging ditches and making molehills, I take a shovel and go play in the sand outside.

And then I got more presents today from the most wonderful person I know: me. If you don't buy presents to yourself on your own birthday, then where on Earth do you think you'll be getting them?
So I went and spent all the cash I had and bought Mirror's Edge, Splinter Cell: Double Agent and Assassin's Creed 2 for PS3, Black and White 2 for PC and State of Emergency for PS2. Didn't think I'd get B&W2 and State of Emergency, because the store has listed them wrong online and when a few months back I went to buy them they were actually State of Emergency 2 and Black and White, not the other way around. Had to buy the games now that I saw that they were finally the correct titles, and I had both on my to-be-bought-list, and they were cheap. Funny thing, judging by the pricetag marks on the cover of State of Emergency, I'm the fourth or fifth person to buy this particular copy. Hope it's not defective. The disc itself looks to be in mint condition despite so many previous owners, nice to see not everyone tries to eat their games.

Double Agent on PS3 is a relatively rare find, may have something to do with the Sony hate some devs and publishers have expressed more or less obviously in the recent years, maybe back in the day they decided to not release too many copies of DA on PS3 just to fuck people over (it's Ubisoft, they're all varying degrees of evil). And the game's probably just as underwhelming as I expect it to be, but 10 euro sneaking game is a 10 euro sneaking game. It's fucking Splinter Cell, I'd even buy Conviction just to complete the series if it was on PS3, which it isn't. I suppose it's for the better that Conviction isn't on PS3, because then I'd be tempted to get it and regret it for years to come. My uneducated opinion on Conviction, based on walkthroughs and LPs, is that it sucks. Best story and controls (at least from what I can tell) in a Splinter Cell game ever and it has to be such a stinker. Awful. And some people think it's the best one in the series. Yuck.

Yes, I gave in and bought Assassin's Creed 2. The first game was probably the most overrated piece of shit excuse for a game of this gen in the previous decade, with crappy, unskippable, endless story and no actual game anywhere in the less-than-10-hour adventure, but I still remember Derek telling me that my hate towards the sequel is unwarranted as AC2 is apparently actually good. After some research online I came to the conclusion that he may have been right, as it seems AC2 is the game the first one should've been. It was kind of risky of Ubisoft, those bastards, to release AC and tell us they're making it a trilogy from the get go when the first game was so lacking, but I suppose it's not a big deal after all if the series does get good. Still, the trilogy stuff puzzles me, because right now there's three AC games out already. Can't they count at Ubisoft, or are they telling us that AC2 is just half of a game with Brotherhood being the second part? Or did they decide it's better to forget the first game entirely and give us the good trilogy they originally promised us with AC2, ACB and AC3?

Mirror's Edge is Mirror's Edge. It was relatively cheap. That's about the story behind that purchase.

I'm also actually a bit pissed off right now. I tried my best to be in a good mood today, but skipping the boring and overdramatized story of the day's events I'll just say I finally got tired of the crap when the bus I was getting on sped off and left me behind to be laughed at by complete strangers, and so I walked 6 miles home in that shitty weather cursing my bad karma, the noise of the traffic and the awful city planning all the way. Of course I'm largely to blame for my own misfortune and especially for choosing to walk home when I could've caught another bus, but still. You just can't let a bad day be only half bad.
Yeah, yeah, so maybe 6 miles in any weather isn't that much for you youthful joggers out there, but the past year I have mostly spent sitting down indoors, which is very unhealthy especially for someone who was released from the army for basically being a tired little weakling, so a 6 mile walk just like that out of nowhere is a bit surprising.

Anyway, I suppose I have to go play video games now.