I am a YT Partner

 Achtung!

I haven't proof-read this blog post that I wrote in a hurry so it most likely has hundreds of typos

and half-done sentences that make absolutely no sense! Keep this in mind just in case.

I haven't felt like doing anything this whole month and I just didn't feel like writing blog posts before that, but I suppose I have to try and pretend there's still life here and give you, one person, the general jist of things that have been going on before I receive a delivery of my own copy of The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and lock myself away again for a few weeks.

This past month all I've wanted to do is sedate my brain with video games and movies and forget everything else for awhile, and I tried out some games I've had sitting around for a long time.
I finally managed to install Jagged Alliance 2, after a few failed tries, and played it for a few days. I have to say I was expecting a little bit more from it, possibly out of desperation to find a new awesome game to keep me occupied for weeks, but it's still alright. It's a bit like Fallout in a non-apocalyptic (debatable) setting if you replaced majority of the quests with straight up firefights and added in this mercenary business element you have to keep in mind.
One of the reasons I was eager to play Jagged Alliance 2 was that I really loved having firefights in Fallout and Fallout 2 and JA2 is just more of that basically, but I quite frankly didn't like many of the areas I ended up having fights in. I really enjoy shootouts indoors in rooms and corridors and with stuff I can take cover behind and strategize with, but during my first 24 hours of play I only ever saw open areas like airfields and not-so-dense forests. The few times when a fight could've taken place somewhere with stuff, the enemies always stayed in the wide open where I couldn't possibly get to them without having my ass shot up. Seriously, my healthy mercenaries with 85-95 (out of 100) marksmanship armed with rifles (long range weapons) couldn't hit the enemies as often as the enemies armed with revolvers (close range weapons) hit me when firing from great distances, so trying to attack enemies standing in an open space was ridiculously dangerous considering the circumstances. I eventually became too careful with my moves, only moving an inch at a time with the entire squad and as the battles got slower and slower the fun drained out. The movement speed both in battle and out of battle is soooooooooooo slow even for the fastest characters that it really got tiring.
When I realized that my first owned mine could actually run out of ore and stop giving me money, and would actually do that soon, I decided to stop playing. I was just trying to learn what everything does for the first time ever and threw money around like it was nothing once I took over the mine, and if I wanted to continue playing I would've really needed to start a new game and play better, and I just couldn't be bothered to spend another two-three days redoing the fights in the open spaces.
But, it's a fun game and I understand why some people love it so, and I know that even I have times when I could really get into it. Just not right now.

I also finally downloaded Team Fortress 2, because I can't say no to free stuff even if it's from Steam and takes a quarter of a day to download.
I can definitely see why it's a hit. The gameplay is fun and hectic and any way you want to play it, you can, because there's a class for everyone for every situation. What I really appreciate is that they also added in an offline practice mode, which I think is rare for full online multiplayer games. I know there usually tends to be a quick tutorial mode in every game to teach you the controls, sure, but TF2 has an actual offline battle mode that has a really good AI for the bots and feels almost the same as the actual game with people. This really great because one of the problems with online multiplayer is that once the game has been out for a while new players have a lot more trouble trying to fit in with the old crowd that has already learned all the tricks and make fun of all the people who haven't, and TF2 is especially difficult to get good at because there's so many classes and each one is so different from the others, but with a practice mode you can hone your skills in private without the fear of everyone calling you a noob fag in the chat because your repeated failing at a backstab is the sole reason tyour team lost. I can personally vouch that the offline practice mode helped me get in to the game faster AND it was fun to play.
Over the course of two days I played on two servers, one Finnish server which seemed fun and friendly although there was very little chat activity, and the Video Games Awesome! server that had much, much more talking and clearly most of the people were good sports, but there was one guy who talked smack to people he thought weren't good enough. Didn't say anything about me, but being a noob fag myself I take offense on behalf of the other people.
So, can you expect to see me playing TF2 a lot from now on? No, for one very good reason: my graphics card is crap and whenever the there's a lot of movement onscreen, which is all the time in TF2, it gets a little bit choppy even at the lowest settings. Not so much that it would ruin the fun entirely, but it's annoying nevertheless and I could never be able to play a spy, a sniper or a scout like that seeing as how those classes demand speeds and precision around enemies. I might still play on occasion when I really don't have anything else to do, but really not going to be very often and the only thing I will ever play as is the demoman, or sometimes the medic. And I never know when is the best time to release über as medic, although I haven't had any complaints so far.

I also played Fighting Angels for PS2, which I'm sure is all of your most favourite video game ever. It's a Japanese budget title originally from the Simple 2000 series, and it's a bit like a really crappy version of Rumble Roses. It has no voice acting, it has no story, it has really only one arena, all the outfits are shared between all the fighters so there's no differences between one fighter or the other, the controls are awful, he idea that some matches in this wrestling game are to the death and allow you to use a M16 is ludicrous BUT sadly the game is not ridiculous enough because the M16 deal is the ONLY funny aspect of the game, and what's really the last nail on the coffin is that the game covers far less fetishes than Rumble Roses.
If you want to jerk off to a video game about Japanese women wrestling in silly settings, get Rumble Roses because it has most of the types of sexy fantasies playable, whether it's an almost naked ninja girl, an obviously underage school girl who "officially" is 18, a sexy teacher, a sexy nurse, a latex devil, a biker in a black leather catsuit... well, you get the idea. All Fighting Angels really gives you is almost identical bikini chicks.
Trust me, you have to be really pathetic to buy Fighting Angels as it's worth nobody's money despite it being a budget title.

And yes, I am pathetic for buying Fighting Angels, but I had a good reason to get it: I collect Simple 2000 series games as a joke. I actually like some of them.

I also played Commandos: Strike Force for PS2. Commandos 2 is really the best isometric real-time strategy game I have ever played and I actually prepared a big review post of it months ago that I never actually completed, but it's always questionable how well a game like that translates to a first- or third-person viewpoint. I'd say it works really well in Strike Force, I actually liked it. Of course, the game really isn't anything like Commandos 2, as you have much, MUCH smaller missions, much less characters and much more shooting action. In Commandos 2 you infiltrate these ginormous installations patrolled by a couple of hundred enemies and it can take you several long hours to complete a single level, so some of the missions from Strike Force seem like Wario Ware games in comparison, but then I suppose that's always the case when comparing a little more action oriented 3rd person game to a point-and-click strategy game where action usually means game over.
The only things that bug me and bug me bad about Strike Force are the horrid controls and the damn loading times on PS2. I don't know about the PC version, but the controls feel a little clunky on the controller and what stopped me from playing the game further was the fact that whenever you fail you have to start the ENTIRE mission over and suffer through the awfully long loading screen again, and repeating sections of the missions just gets boring.
But, I do think I could enjoy it on the PC if some of the problems don't exist in that version. I really liked Death to Spies, and Commandos Strike Force is a lot like a Death to Spies lite with it's sniper/spy oriented stealth gameplay sections where you strangle people dressed in a disguise and sabotage equipment or sneak in bushes and stab enemies in the back when they go off alone and then snipe some other guards from a distance.

I have also played The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion a lot recently, and I do mean a lot. I decided to give it another go to see if it's really any good and if I should think about getting Skyrim. You may be aware that I didn't think very highly of Oblivion in the past, and I have said such things as "the level up system is designed ass-backwards" and "it's time consuming in a bad way" because while I have put a few hundred hours into the game I never got much entertainment out of it. It always just tricked me into doing chores in hopes that I start having fun soon and before you knew it I had leveled up too high and became weaker in comparison to the ever-growing-in-power regular enemies and had no fun fighting stuff with my abilities because almost every common enemy at that level can take anything you dish out to them.
Well, having played a stealth based, almost full-thief/ranger character and then a full mage character with no effort put into blades or any of that crap, I at first had tons of fun roleplaying a character. I had exciting battles where I almost lost and sometimes easy ones where I dominated, and I started to regret everything bad I've said about the game. I thought I began understanding the logic behind how the level up system works and how the leveled loot and enemies make sense, but again, once I reached level 20 or so, which was really soon because I followed the game's ass-backwards recommendations to how to build a character, the fun was gone again. I could turn the difficulty down but that's not really fun either after a while. I don't want everything to be easy, I just want variety in the encounters. On normal difficulty I kept running into these behemoths of adversaries who can soak 400 points worth of damage, and having literally a dozen of those 3-5 minute long battles during the travel from one city to another got tiring, especially since they're supposed to be sort of easy, and in comparison to quests that take you into tight spaces they are. When kiting a Minotaur Lord around the forest and blasting at it with poisoned daedric arrows with a daedric bow with 100 marksman  (and 100 alchemy + expert equipment for the poisons) for 5 minutes becomes your most common "random" battle, the game gets DULL as all hell.
Seriously, this is a well known fact and I can't stress this enough if you ever want to enjoy Oblivion: make your major skills something you NEVER would use and then stop leveling up at around levels 12-16 if you really want to feel like you actually grow in power. If you take the game's own advice on what kind of character to play as, you become WEAKER over a very short period of time due to the constant use of the skills that raise your level.

I couldn't have gotten tired of Oblivion (again) at a better time because although I already made the choice of not getting Skyrim, after watching Angry Joe's review of it I reversed that decision immediately. If what the reviews say is true, Skyrim fixes every problem that ever stopped me from having fun in Oblivion, and really I don't think Oblivion sucks that horribly either, just the level up system screws you over bad if you get too carried away playing instead of counting skill points for hours.
I really hope Skyrim, which I should have in my hands literally within the next hour, really is as good as advertised, and while I am a young curmudgeon who hates everything I hate to admit I am really excited about playing that fantastically awesome piece of shit game from the lovable incompetent people at Bethesda. I'm just joshing of course, developers like Bethesda, despite their occasional bugs and design mistakes, don't really deserve hate. It's too popular to be hateful of big titles these days, and when an exaggerating hatefilled little cock like me says that, I think it means something.

Maybe it means that Christmas spirit has crept into my black heart. Now that I think of it I have had some heartburns lately...

I also watched the Fred Astaire film The Band Wagon last night. It was fun.


Oh, yeah, and I'm a YouTube partner now thanks to the kind people at Fullscreen.net and their seemingly limitless patience with me and my doofusness with worng email addressess and whatnot.
This means I will be putting more effort into the YouTube channel than ever before, which really isn't a lot, and not until I get my share of Skyrim. Also means that people don't have to keep repeatedly asking me why I haven't been accepted as a partner yet despite my thousands of crappy videos. I am a partner now, happy? No? Why not?