NOM NOM NOM

As I am now sitting here, procrastinating. Not writing about how price discrimination is a viable option for profit maximizing firms in certain tourism industries. I get hungry. Which then leads to this. FOOD AND VIDEO GAMES.


Food has been in games for a very long time. IN THE BEGINNING... BACK WHEN NINTENDO ONLY MADE HANDHELDS... THERE WAS BACON. Wait what? Bacon? Yes, the crazy ass japanese made Game & Watch games. There was a bizzare little title known as Chef. Where you juggled various food objects in a pan. And.. that's all you did. Those were simple times. Kiddies today may know Game & Watch prominently from it's character in the depressingly popular Super Smash Brothers Brawl/Melee. Kids these days. Young whipper shnappers need to know their roots damnit! Anyway. This is the one of (if not THE)first time food was a central theme of a game.


Pac-man. Now there's a mother fucker that needs to go to weight watchers. Not saying that I'm any better, but come on. All that basard does is eat shit. He eats the little dots, which i assume taste a lot like marshmallows. He eats the fruits and pretzels and shit. Then he eats the fucking steroid dot thing and starts eating ghosts like they were fucking soylent green. Imagine justwalking around then this big fat fucking yellow guy is like "WAKA WAKA MOTHA FAKKA!" and tries to eat you. That's some fucked up shit.


Lets take a look at the most legendary food ever introduced. MUSHROOMS! Yeah, mario did it. He ate shrooms and was like, "Dude, I'm fricken HUGE." Mario was a very drugged out game. But we still love him anyway. We just don't ask the questions. We just sit here and DANA NA DUH NA NA! DUH! Dun dan dun da duhh da duh and what not.


Domino's Pizza had a game. Back when their mascot was this wierd fucker in a red suit. I think it was called a Noid or some shit like that? Now that I think about it. What the fuck did you do in that game? You like... Collected pepperoni slices or some crap like that. Wait... WAIT! Doing research on this stupid fuckin game. Here we go. God i love wikipedia. Ho ho ho... Way to go localization in the late 80's and early 90's. Just like Super Mario Bro's 2. It's like, HEY nobody in the US will care what this game is. Lets use something they do know and just call it something else. There we go. GG


Bubble boble. YEYAH. I fucking love this game. Little godzilla dinosaurs that shoot friendly bubles instead of fire. And they're going to go save the princess! Aww aren't they cute? SO CUDDLY WUDDLY! ... ... I think i grew a vagina for a second there. So you shoot bubbles to capture enemies. Then pop the bubbles and the enemies miraculously become food and gems! Holy goddamn soylent system bat man. But hey... Lets not care, cuz they're cutesie little cuddly... AHHHH GET THEM AWAY FROM ME!


Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater. Take a wild goddamn guess what you eat in this game? Welll.. Snakes would only be partially true. You can eat all sorts of wild life. Snake. Birds. Alligators. It's like playing an episode of Man vs. Wild. Get all Bear Grylls on that shit. Of course you can always eat your standard yellow block of "Ration." Which I think are goddamn delicious. I used to eat those all the time while I lived in japan. Just because it made me feel like solid snake. WHAT!? It's great fucking product placement people! Those guys at Calorie Mate got my demographic goddamnit.


Speaking of product placement. Just about every RPG under the goddamn sun has a type of Potion or some shit like that. Dose guys at Square-Enix. They know what to do. Fucking make a real life version of it and sell it during the launch of the new game! Final Fantasy XII launched along with Square-Enix's new "Potion" drink. If anyone's played FFXII, you can burn through a lot of potions playing that game. You know... I need to get my hands on some of that stuff. WHAT?! I'm sorry. But the thought of DRINKING ACTUAL POTION makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Of course there's a level of sadness right below that.


Of course, if you go a "Potion" you also need a Mana potion. Yeaahhhhhhh!!!! Inspired by world of warcraft and other MMORPGS, some guys thought it would be a god idea to make one of those crazy ass energy drinks and call it "Mana Potion." Now that's fuckin genius. I'd buy it. If they fucking shipped out to Hawaii those goddamn bastards! *RAAAAGGGGEEE* I'm oom out here. How r holy supposed to heal? STFU, I'm not going to stack spir and mp/5! Nurf dat! GIMMIE DAT POT! Srsly. EY! Christiansen, can you ship me down like a 12 pack? I pay you back... Sometime.... Maybe....


And finally, if you watched that wonderful video at the top of the article. I'm sorry. I love Team Fortress 2 soo goddamn much. The art style just makes me happy. And I love the videos they make. That item, is a real weapon you can use in TF2. You eat it, and you make that loud obnoxious NOM NOM NOM noise. And everyone in the game knows what you're doing. And it heals you too! NOM NOM NOM! Sandvich! It's probably the only reason I play the Heavy class right now is to try and get that SANDVICH! Just so i can be completely obnoxious and stand around and eat it while people are actually tryin to do stuff. NOM NOM NOM!


And that is just a SUPER tiny glimps at food in video games. Meng... I'm pretty hungry now.

VIP Tour of Blizzcon '08

This is what I will be seeing in a few short months. That's right this holynub (holy paladin to be precise) is going to Blizzcon baby! There has been a lot of controversy over the ticket sales for this year's con. Apparently the influx of people wanting to buy was signficantly more then Blizzard was prepared to handle on their store site. People were only able to buy tickets in short windows of time, before either the site would crash again or Blizzard manually would take it off line.

Recently the opt-in for the lottery of the remaining 3000 tickets just ended. You needed to have created a Blizzard store account to be eligible for the opt-in, which was nearly impossible if you were trying to do it while people were buying tickets.

A lot of discussion has been going on about the many problems involved with buying tickets. One of them being online ticket scalpers. There are a lot of factors to consider. 1. Ticket scalping is not illegal in California, which is the state in which the event is taking place. 2. Blizzard claims that the tickets aren't intended for resale. However, policing everyone's badges to make sure it matches their ID is going to be both incredibly annoying for everyone involved and logistically impractical. 3. The tickets are being sold at absurd Hannah Montana prices. Should Blizzard raise the initial price of the tickets to meet the demand and stifle the profit of these scalpers? 4. The largest am0unt of tickets that one could buy was 5, but does this allow scalpers to buy too many tickets? If blizzard lowered the number would it be able to handle the traffic to their site next year?

Anyway, swish that around in your noggin for awhile. Meanwhile, I will be going to Blizzcon with VIP status and bringing you pictures and interviews. Bringing you the latest news from Blizzard after everyone else.

How do we kill that which has no life?

This article has been floating around the net for the past week or so. If you don't want to click and read it, I'll sum it up. Final Fantasy XI has a Notorious Monster(NM) boss that a guild spent 18 hours trying to kill. Now, this is just for the boss fight alone. This isn't doing other trash pulls and what not. To give you a little idea of how NM's play out in FFXI, I give you a comic by Penny Arcade.



This event has drawn many comments from all facets of the gaming community. Most of which are people just saying that such an encounter is absurd. 18 hours is pretty unreasonable. However, I began to ponder a couple things while reading some of the other readers comments.

First off. Did anyone in that raid ever stop and think that maybe, JUUUUST MAYBE, there is some sort of gimmick to the fight that makes it doable? I mean, I know Asia is known for mega grindfests for games, but requiring people to work as a group for a single encounter over a marathons length of time sounds a little off. I mean, granted Square-Enix did do Final Fantasy XII with bosses that did take over 10 hours of gameplay to defeat. BUT! They at least had the decency to give you a save point right next to the boss so you could save while fighting.
I found this interesting post from petfoodalpha.com. The one part I'd like to point out is:

"... it has been deemed that the combative techniques for weakening these NMs are too difficult. As a result, some players have engaged these enemies using unanticipated methods which led to extended battle times."

This sets of an alarm in my head. Does that mean that this fight is a gimmick fight? Were people just too stupid to figure out how to debuff the boss in such a way that it would make it killable? Or was it that the way to weaken the boss was never explored/explained/occurred to anybody in the game?

If it was a lack of research, I don't really blame the players in FFXI. For example, World of Warcraft new instances and encounters get player tested and ravaged to all hell and back. Guilds sit in the same instance and wipe for nights at a time trying to figure out how to beat a certain encounter. Final Fantasy XI players aren't given as much of a luxury. A single wipe in FFXI is insanely unforgiving. Chances are you'll de-level and you'll have to grind your way back to cap before you can attempt a boss again.

Most comments were pretty much along the line of "That's an unreasonable amount of time for a boss in any game." But I did read a few comments from wow raiders. I saw a few saying things like "Oh my guild raids 8 hours a night every night and we kill Illidan and blah blah I like dicks." Most of them didn't say "I like dicks" but I usually think that it's implied when you write crap like that. Then again, I'd say that would be more insulting to Homosexuals. First off the comparisson between games isn't even close. It's like comparing assholes and oranges. Secondly, You don't fight Illidan for 8 hours straight. If you did, then you'd be called a retard.

And I'm spent for this rant.