I love the look on that poor customer’s face.

I’m still trying to decide if I should get Modern Warfare 2 or Bad Company 2. I played Battlefield 2 a ton and I definitely like the Battlefied series, but I don’t know yet. I played some Modern Warfare 2 online and I didn’t do very well. I’m guessing it just takes practice. I love the levelling system though, and my FAMAS. Anybody know what the levelling system is like in Bad Company 2? I know you at least unlock weapons and stuff, like other Battlefield games.

I tend to go days without posting anything on Twitter, and then I think of ten things to say all at once.

Two discs?! Crazy! I even heard that Final Fantasy XIII has THREE dics. Unbelievable!

Meet the new store manager, whose name I will withhold until I know I’m 100% happy with it. I’m not confident about his colors just yet. Expect his hair to wildy change color throughout these coming comics.

Well, maybe not. That’d be silly.

Vince Zampella and Jason West, the creative heads behind the Modern Warfare series were fired recently. Activision cites its reason as insubordination, due to the fact that Infinity Ward has had yet to receive royalties for Modern Warfare 2 and may have held meetings with other game publishers; a breach of their contract.

One of the things that has always bothered me is the fact that ever since Activision began pumping out quick CoD sequels there has been a distant stink to the series. Each of Infinity Ward’s games were exceptional, but after its heels came the Treyarch interpretations that seemed…stale. It always makes me angry when people refer to World at War as Call of Duty 5. It’s multiplayer is a WWII interpretation of the system Infinity Ward established with Modern Warfare, only instead of shooting with M16A4s you’re using Springfields.

The same people that claim it is Call of Duty 5 are from the same crop as the gamers who claim that Rock Band “copied” Guitar Hero. They are immensely ignorant to overall background of the things they play. I’m not asking you to lurk on Wikipedia, I just wish that you gather some intel before you voice an uneducated opinion like that.

In all aspects, I must dreadfully speculate that the Call of Duty series is dead. What will be shoveled into our faces will be pieces of what was once a great work. It will become a meat puppet, a husk marionette whose strings are pulled by fools who only desire money and have no passion for the work that they create.

When you remove the heart from something, Activision, don’t expect it to operate the same way that it did before. And don’t expect that fans won’t notice the gaping hole you left behind. I hope that Infinity Ward can pull it together, join up with someone else, and bury your mediocre rehashes under the superior might of a Work of Passion.

Locke

UPDATE: Vengeance is a swift angel! JUSTICE!

Quick filler comic before we continue the story arc.

It’s really distracting to have Lord of the Rings on when you’re trying to make the comic.

Turns out the Imp didn’t actually know how to run a business.

I posted the sketches for this comic over in the forums, where you can peruse them at your leisure, if you’d like. I haven’t posted anything there for a long time, but I usually try and show previews of upcoming comics and such.

I’m starting to realize that the plot in most games today spend a lot of time focusing on impending doom, or an antagonist of incredible power that must be stopped. This is why games like Bioshock 2 are a breath of fresh air.

The first thing that struck me in my first trip to Rapture was the Father-Daughter relationship shared by the Big Daddies and Little Sisters. It wasn’t a creepy relationship at all. The doting father would protect this little one as it set about its morbid mission; collecting Adam. It would allow you close to the sister, but as soon as you got to a range where you could harm her, he steps in and gives you a warning. He is even lovingly pulled by the hand by the little sister. Hearing her cries whenever I defeated a Big Daddy often made me kind of guilty, despite her being brainwashed into being this monster.

Bioshock 2 places you into the shoes of the first Big Daddy searching for his Little Sister. The kind of fatherly devotion that was a curiosity in the first game is now placed center stage in the sequel. Its an interesting take. The last time I saw a game that had that kind of love portrayed was in Silent Hill. What a father would go through to reunite with his child is endearing, something that many older gamers can associate and appreciate.

There are many times when this theme of love in the center appeared in games like Ico. Final Fantasy 8 sets this theme in very high regard. Not only does love transcend death, it transcends the borders of reality itself. The game in itself begins with a promise of love that you don’t recognize as a relevant until the fourth disk of the game. The love in friendship appears in Kingdom Hearts and other games of the sort, mostly JRPGs.

What do you guys think? Do you think that we should have more of these themes in games? Or should we try to focus on different unexplored topics?

-Locke

I should have drawn a coffin in there somewhere. That would have been perfect.

I’m still working on my quest through Final Fantasy games, as detailed in an earlier blog post. I’m playing Final Fantasy IV on the DS right now. It can be fairly challenging at times, especially when you open a treasure chest and a crazy strong monster pops out, completely catching you off-guard.

Current musical selection: Dancing Mad by the Black Mages.

Anybody know about how long Mass Effect 2 is? I THINK I’m getting towards the end, but I really have no idea.

So far, I like it a lot better than the first one, but I wish they didn’t scrap the majority of the RPG elements. There’s a lot fewer ways to customize your characters, but it doesn’t make the game any less enjoyable.

Sonic 4 is the newest of games to be branched into this kind of marketing. Although it seems like a ploy for Sega to make us pay for the same thing four or five times, it ends up great for us because this time it seems that Sega has finally lived up to their word. Fanboys however have already begun screaming heresy at the game, even thought it is turning out to be exactly what they wanted.

I personally loved all the sonic games to some extent, even the 3D ones which I will admit were poor examples of the franchise. There were moments of win glimmering in the dust, however, that made the games fun and memorable to me. Yes they had bad cameras. Yes they introduced us to some annoying characters. Yes these games are plagued with annoying bugs. But when it boils down to it, Sonic Adventure, and every other game after that was fun for me.

Episodic gaming gives us the chance to try before we buy. I don’t think that someone out there will be conned into buying two episodes of one series only to be foiled and hate the third. There will be no raging fanboy screaming about how Episode 3 ruined the game. It’s all going to be the same quality if not better through-out the game. People will be able to complain about Episode One and give time for the developers to address these issues and improve it by Episode 2 or 3 without having to wait two or three years. I’m looking at you Valve.

Allspice is ground from allfruit which grows from the mighty allspice plants of Allland, the realm of perfection.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t taste very good on cereal.