The Black Mesa Cafe

GOALKEEPER II – Week One – Start

That Awful Nick — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:46:35 +0000

Well, it’s October 11, 2010. 10/11/10. It’s about time I got back on track with writing, gaming, losing weight, eating right, all that stuff. So this week is it. This is the big one. Week One. A repeated metamorphosis. The previous GOALKEEPER was an astounding success. Over the course of some 12 months, I lost 70 pounds, saved a lot of money, got into grad school, and moved to a new home. GOALKEEPER II should aim for some similarly fulfilling achivements. Like cutting out a majority of my soda consumption. Or limiting the amount of money I spend on food per week. Besides, I need to eat all the damn food in the cabinets before it starts going bad. Oh Christ, I just realized I need to vacuum. This week is already starting to look and sound terrible. And it’s only a little after noon on Monday.

Speaking of Achievements, here are the video games I intend to work on for this month (when I have time).
Xbox 360:
- Halo: Reach (Finish a playthrough on Legendary solo, plus finish the Weekly Challenge.)
- Red Dead Redemption (Finish the game, get 100% Completion, do some of the gimmick achievements.)
- Sonic the Hedgehog (Finish the game in under 40 minutes.)
- Fallout 3 (Finish the story missions, don’t forget to get the Energy Weapons bobblehead, then grind out the DLC.)
- Operation Flashpoint: Dragon Rising (just slog through the whole worthless thing and get it over with. 1000/1000 stuff.)
- Call of Duty 4 (Veteran playthrough, plus some collection stuff. get 1000/1000.)
PC:
-X-Com UFO Defense (racking up hours and hours of gameplay in this on Steam is an achievement unto itself. e-cred.)
-Star Wars: Dark Forces (finish up the raw gameplay for the LP.)
PS3:
-Metal Gear Solid 4 (actually play through the damn thing.)
-Killzone 2 (finish the game.)

Change in Plans

That Awful Nick — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 21:16:33 +0000

Okay, so it looks like constantly embedding YouTube videos on the front page isn’t going to work anymore because it fails to display the most recent video. So, from now on, I’ll be linking the videos instead of actually embedding them for watching right off the page. Probably a good idea anyway.

At any rate, this Monday’s Random Music is an awesome ambient/electronic piece from Kasabian called ID. Hope you enjoy it.

Sweet Mother…

That Awful Nick — Thu, 12 Aug 2010 20:32:40 +0000

I’m still working on cranking out some Let’s Play goodness, but I keep getting distracted because as I play these good, old games that I seem to still remember so well, I find myself switching from one franchise to another in an excited fit of “oh man, this is cool, but THIS game’s got this part where…” and so on. Because I’m still in the middle of wrapping up my playthrough of Star Wars Dark Forces before I start on anything else, I thought I’d use this Thursday Youtube Theater to showcase one of the most prominent cutscenes that I remember from my childhood: the Intro to Command and Conquer Red Alert 2. The cutscenes in Red Alert were fantastic (everyone I knew as a kid thought General Von Esling was the shit), but Red Alert 2 upped the ante by featuring Ray Wise (Twin Peaks) and Barry Corbin (WarGames) as they stood powerless to halt the coming invasion of the United states by the power-hungry Premier Romanov. While I’ll be playing Red Alert’s Allied campaign long before I get around to Red Alert 2′s campaign (and then, later, I’ll do all of the Soviet Campaign missions too), girocraz posted the intro on his YouTube and I thought I’d toss it up here for you to take a look at. Enjoy.

An Autotuning Crime

That Awful Nick — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 15:46:46 +0000

No one is locking up T-Pain for popularizing autotune, and the Auto-tune the News series gave the phenomenon its second breath. From schmoyoho, the original Auto-tune the News pioneer, comes a new song with twice the hilarity of the popular series thanks to the relative seriousness of the topic combined perfectly with the over-the-top hilarity of a man(ish) scorned by his sister’s attacker.

Enjoy watching this 8000 times. You can’t watch it just once.

Yeah, let’s do that…

That Awful Nick — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 16:49:30 +0000

Because of my recent Fallout-induced Post-Apocalyptic infatuation, I’ve been enjoying anything/everything nuclear-holocaust related, including the abysmally awful 1977 film Damnation Alley, which is a lot of fun to watch despite the terrible acting and even more terrible special effects. As a result, I found in a Recommended video on YouTube this little gem of a video, which includes a Congressional Representative lobbying the people of the United States to support his plan to nuke the ever-loving shit out of Korea during out Conflict there. The music (which I admit thereby qualifies this as more of a Random Music Monday entry) really makes the video, but I really loved the way the film was edited together as well, and all-in-all it reminded me of something not unlike an intro film for a classic Fallout game. Because of this, it’s our Thursday Youtube Theater experience for this week.

Also, as a Let’s Play! Update, I’m going this weekend to see “The Other Guys,” with Will Farrel and my personal hero Mark Wahlberg (okay maybe hero is the wrong word). Afterwards, probably on Sunday, I’ll be working on playing through Dark Forces at least to the half-way point, and then sometime this week I’ll probably record my commentary and/or edit together some title sequences and info-breaks and then upload them to the good channel. I’m also still trying to decide whether or not the concurrent Let’s Play should be the absolutely mind-numbing Star Trek The Next Generation: Echoes from the Past for Genesis, or if I should maybe start an LP for Fallout 1. Since I never finished it, though, and it’s such a great game, I may decide to save that one for later on, when I have more time to dedicate to making it a really, really good LP instead of something half-assed like I’m sure Echoes from the Past will end up being.

It’s also a good drink…

That Awful Nick — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 22:12:59 +0000

I am taking a break from Modern Warfare 2 this week to continue on my idiotic quest to finish some of my other games and to get my money’s worth out of them by playing them for more than fifteen minutes per year. Kim joined me on the couch to help me crunch my way through the absolutely awful drudgery of finding all of the Alien Logs that I needed to find for the Alien Archivist achievement in Mothership Zeta, the more odd-ball expansion for Bethesda’s soul-crushingly good (though it’s caused more than enough spergin’ from the basement dwellers at No Mutants Allowed) Fallout 3. As someone who will literally play anything that even barely attempts to portray a post-apocalyptic world, I’m of course infatuated with this now-aging gaming goodie, and I’ve been getting more and more stoked over the coming sequel – Fallout: New Vegas. It isn’t enough, of course, that it returns us to the original wastelands of California, nor that it brings us back to fighting those old iconoclasts like the NCR or Caesar’s Legion. No. One of the other things that really gets me about the Fallout games is the music. And Fallout: New Vegas doesn’t disappoint so far, featuring Frank Sinatra’s Blue Moon in its first trailer (which is by now also pretty old news). So, for this Monday’s random music treat, here’s some Sinatra, with a side of post-societal irony.

Silos Needed

That Awful Nick — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 15:12:40 +0000

I am, and always will be, a huge fan of the original few Command and Conquer games. The 2D graphics were simply phenomenal when I was a kid, and even today the games look pretty good on a decent, high contrast monitor. The thing about the original Command and Conquers were that they were fun and had a pretty decent degree of fantasy to them (Tesla coils? Attack dogs? Laser Obelisks?) but were also sort of gritty and realistic. At least in their time. So for today’s Thursday Youtube Theater I present you the first video in a complete playthrough of my favorite video game of all time, Command and Conquer Red Alert, as played by YouTuber/Let’s Play-er OnlyKurial, who’s one of the few sane, down-to-Earth LP’ers out there. The in-game music has been muted, and there’s no commentary to talk over the in game sound effects. So, by all means, enjoy the sounds of simulated gunfire and explosions as they were meant to be enjoyed: untainted, uncovered, and in the spotlight.

Chronological Divergence

That Awful Nick — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:28:38 +0000

Today is not Monday, but is in fact Tuesday. Imagine my surprise. Anyway, you’re getting a Random Music Monday because I am not renaming some other category Random Music Tuesday just to make it all fit together properly. Because of my love of Pembroke Welsh Corgis, today’s video will feature good music AND an awesome dog. Ignore the Kill Bill music at the beginning of the video, the good stuff, Amon Tobin’s “Always,” gets started about a minute into the video. Enjoy an awesome dog video, people, because once you’ve seen Truman the Corgi, you’ll never want another again.

Corgis 4 lyfe.

Insanely Twisted

That Awful Nick — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:23:57 +0000

Fuck it. It’s been a bad day, so I’ll keep it short. This week’s YouTube Theater is actually the trailer for a pretty sweet looking game. The lead animater for the movie The Iron Giant has teamed up with an indie development team to produce Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, a Pixel-Junk-Shooter-esque sidescrolling action game that honestly looks like it could be as fun as it is gorgeous.

But don’t take my word for it. Check it out. (From their official channel.)

Data Systems Compromised

That Awful Nick — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:12:41 +0000

It’s lunch time, so it’s about time I got around to this week’s Random Music Monday as well as a quick update of my weekend gaming activities. I didn’t get in much gaming this weekend because, in a random fit of mad productivity, I actually managed to accomplish a bunch of stuff that I should have wrapped up weeks ago. When I did get time to sit down in the dull glow of my monitor, I tapped into the amazing gameplay of System Shock 2 for a bit. I had forgotten how much I love this game (and how awful it makes BioShock look in comparison), and especially the bits in which Xerxes is usurped by Shodan. I’ve always had a “thing” for synthesized corruption of speech, so when the screeching, debuffering voice of Xerxes announces “Hostile AaAAaaaaaaaIIIIiiiiiiiiiii” it’s so goddamn eerie and so freaking cool at the same time.

Anyway. My friend Dominic just posted a piece of music he composed recently to his YouTube, and as I was listening to it I was reminded of another song I hadn’t heard in a long time. After a little bit of annoyed thinking, I was able to find the song I was thinking of. By the incomparable Michael Giacchino, “Arnhem Knights” is a song composed for the soundtrack of Medal of Honor: Frontline for PS2, and was played during the level in which you run through the rubble of the city of Arnhem during Operation: Market Garden as the allies and nazis literally level the town in their attempts to destroy one another. I particularly remember turning down a back alley in an attempt to get to the top of an apartment building where machinegunners are cutting my team to bits just as the high point of this song hits, and I recall it being a rather powerful emotional experience at the time.

Anyway, here’s the music.