Sam and Fuzzy: Is mostly about ninjas and demons

I KNEW IT! I KNEW IT ALL ALONG.

Happy new years from Faceplant!  May your year be full of enough movies, video games, comics and books to drive a man insane.  What?  You want more than that in 2011?  Food?  Absolutely not!  Get back to your computer screen and start searching for something awesome THIS INSTANT.  Okay, well, you can read this first.  See?  Compromise is what 2011 is all about.

I was going to bust in the new year by doing something a little out of the ordinary for me:  reviewing a movie.  I’m not much of a movie watcher, but I figured a new year means to get into new things, so I plopped down in front of the tube and browsed my Netflicks ques for something worth reviewing.  To make a long story short, I ended up turning off GI JOE about 22 percent of the way in, because it was awful.  So instead I’m going to review Sam and Fuzzy, a long running comic by creative mastermind Sam Logan, which chronicles the adventures of a sociopathic bear-thingie, and the sad sack, weakling twig of a man who is stuck with him.  Which is totally what GI JOE should have been like.

Demon’s Souls….yes, it’s supposed to be plural

A surprisingly accurate cover

Remember back in the day?  When games were on enormous cartridges you had to blow into to make work?  Developers were wily then, because they realized something.  “Hey!  Our game isn’t very long because it’s not the future yet!  How can we make this short game longer?  I know, let’s make it really god damn hard!”  I’m looking at you Super Ghouls and Ghosts.  (Side note:  That is the one game my dad became mildly obsessed with for no apparent reason.  I rented it, he saw me playing it, and in a total out of character for him move asked to try.  Two hours later he was swearing at poorly animated ghosts and being super upset that when he got hit his armor would fly off and he would just be a naked guy chucking spears.  He then NEVER PLAYED VIDEO GAMES AGAIN.  Total mystery!)  So dying ten thousand times just became common practice in gaming land.  Soon, as technology evolved and games could get a bit longer, the difficulty curve began to go down.  If you think of the current generation of consoles, what is the last game that REALLY made you want to throw the controller because of the difficulty?  I played Enslaved recently on hard, the first time through, and though I died some for sure, I never felt like the game was overly challenging.  An enormous challenge to just get through the game is rarely present anymore.  So that brings us to Demon’s Souls.  Developer From Software decided that us young whipper snappers were enjoying this whole “living” thing too much.  So they made the god damn hardest game on the face of the planet.  And it’s actually pretty good!

What I want for Christmas from video games

I’m angry.  I was never a Scrooge before.  Holiday time!  Trees! Presents! Santa!  But not anymore.  Oh no those magical childhood days of unicorns and guitar playing chimpanzees (my childhood was freaking great ok) are over.  How can I tell?  I don’t want new video games for Christmas.  Games worthy of our duckets come out every single month of the year now.  What I want heading in to the new year is some stuff to CHANGE.  Games are great, we write about them, you guys come here and read about them (that isn’t totally true, we definitely write about them but most of you come here to check out the pictures of hot chicks from Blizzcon, but whatever) and everybody is happy.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t  some fantastically stupid things going out in the land of interactive media though.  What do I want for Christmas?  I, much like our President, want CHANGE.  Not in a healthy country affirming way, I don’t have time to worry about that.  I want the experience of being a gamer, be it the games or how we play them, to change.  So let’s get on it developers.  Let’s make 2011, which looks like another enormous year for gaming, a step in the right direction.  Or, let’s at least stop being stupid.

Post 100- Everything you want to see

Okay, this is it!  The 100th post of Faceplant!  Enosh, Elrood and I are pretty excited about it, though that’s mainly because I’m pretty sure all three of us never actually expected to be able to keep up the 3-post-a-week schedule that you guys have come to expect out of us.  It’s been a trial, no, a journey, and I don’t think we’re done quite yet.  The three of us decided that we need to do something unique for our first sketchy foray into triple digit posts.  Elrood suggested we actually do a second General Mishmash podcast (god forbid!).  Enosh…  probably suggested something else when I wasn’t paying attention.  Unfortunately for all of you, post 100 lands on a Tophat Monday, so instead we’re going to take a look at YOU GUYS instead, interspersed with my awesomely awful MS Paint skills.

XBLA4: This one’s mostly out of spite

In addition to your mom being a crazy snake lady, she's also from the 1920s for some reason.

Well, it’s the holiday season again.  You’re not really sure how that happened, but unfortunately you are poorer than a hobo with no socks.  There have been a lot of good console games to come out in the past few weeks, but who wants to shell out $60 for a game when you know you’re just going to have to run to the store and buy your mom an entire crate of voodoo dolls before the those pesky Christmas shoppers clean out Mojo Hut again this year.  Every year you buy that woman a ridiculous number of voodoo dolls, and every year she plows through them, with that creepy gleam in her eye that people find so unsettling.  The neighbors are starting to talk.  Well, the ones that are still alive, anyway.

ANYWAY, I could write all day about your mom’s crazy voodoo practices.  No really, I could.  But I really don’t think I need any more poisonous marsh snakes showing up around my apartment at three in the morning, all speaking in English and hogging the shower.  So I’ll just write about some Xbox Live Arcade games instead.

Schlock Mercenary: Live long enough to get paid

There aren’t too many people who are keen on running into a room, dodging plaz fire and battle tanks armed with nothing more than a standard military rifle and some very flimsy looking power armor on a planet hundreds of light years away from Earth.  Though, it should be noted that’s only because humanity doesn’t have the means to get there just yet.  This isn’t an issue in Schlock Mercenary, written and drawn by Howard Tayler.  Over the past ten years Tayler has been constructing an elaborate picture of a possible future, filled with aliens, political conspiracies, while stressing the importance of living long enough to make sure you get paid.

Erfworld is all about the little things

Hail to the king, baby

There are two very different worlds of popular culture out there, and most everyone seems to subscribe to one or the other.  The first is the regular pop culture, filled with information about which celebrity is banging what, popular music, movie quotes and trivia.  The second is internet pop culture, filled with horrific images from 4Chan, hilarious videos of stupid people getting hurt in stupid ways, and mighty gems, like the majestic keyboard cat.  Erfworld draws heavily from both worlds to create a deep and involved, self-referential world that doubles as the ultimate gamer’s paradise.  If you’ve got a finger on the pulse of either world, or have spent a few days involved in table top or console gaming, Erfworld might be right up your alley.

Girl Genius: Adventure with a 50% chance of blowing itself up

I'll learn the organ! Then they'll see! THEY'LL ALL SEE.

Whoever said ignorance is bliss probably wasn’t standing on the edge of a crater that used to be a small village, nuked into oblivion by a mad scientist’s botched experiment, but you know what?  They should have.  Girl Genius, by Phil and Kaja Foglio of Studio Foglio, is one of the most  immersive webcomics you can find on the net, complete with believable characters, bizarre situations, impossible science, and a massive world that gives you the feeling that you’re only seeing a fragment of the madness.  It’s what the 1800s would have been like if people in the 1800s knew how to create gigantic death robots and society was filled with mad scientists.

Lara Croft and The Guardian of Light

Microsoft certainly did some weird stuff for the summer of arcade this year.  I’ve previously hit on Limbo and how different it was from your normal platforming game.  While Lara Croft (or Guardian of Light, GoL, which I’ll use from now on because I’m very lazy) isn’t quite that strange overall, it definitely is a different perspective, literally and figuratively, then any previous Tomb Raider game.  A designed co-op top down shooter for Lara?  What?  Much to the credit for developer Crystal Dynamics, they have crafted one of the more enjoyable XBLA games in recent memory that makes the new look and feel of Lara Croft one definitely worth visiting.  Of course, it has been a LONG time to get there, which is why I’m reviewing a SUMMER of arcade game in freaking NOVEMBER.  It is a tale of woe and sadness for me and Tophat, read on to feel our pain.

Fallout New Vegas: A wasteland, a platinum poker chip and one dedicated courier

This does not bode well.

A lot of games are scheduled to come out as we take the forward plunge into the holiday season, but for some reason the one about the horrific, irradiated desert surrounding the ruins of the sleaziest city in the United States was the one that caught my interest the most.  Fallout: New Vegas puts a bit of a western spin on the established franchise and gives us yet another look into how the rest of the country is surviving the apocalypse.  Sure Washington DC has seen better days, and man California is a total wasteland, but seriously who cares about that?  Did all the prostitutes survive?  Oh god let Vegas be okay.