I don't think it's too bad a spoiler to say that the new Pokemon game - the new Pokemon game, for God's sake - asks questions about the franchise itself at a fundamental level. Yeah, it does it in way which tracks with the continuum of Pokemania, and as robust as its core mechanism is, these games must make themselves available to the young. Even so, it's rare. It's a rare game that has the pluck to question its own thesis even while it is actively enslaving you with same.
The only other one that comes readily to mind is Bioshock, and by the time that fucker turns on you, Ken Levine can be heard laughing halfway around the world.
On Friday, after almost two full weeks, I finally got Killzone working. I am still shaking my head at the solution, which was beyond stupid and may even be dumb. You know what it was? The insurmountable issue that made it impossible to record statistics from any round?
My clock was fast.
Somehow, the system had gotten the idea into its head that it wanted time to be set Manually, and not by an omniscient time robot on the Internet. My system thought that it was May, and not March. This time was wrong, but I didn't care, because I don't turn on my Playstation to see what fucking time it is, I turn it on to shoot a motherfucker. Apparently this was all too much to handle for the Killzone server, even though the server knows perfectly well what time it is, because what's crucial in a time like this is making absolutely certain that a time traveler isn't trying to play from the future.
I've also been trying to get the Crysis 2 demo to get any Goddamn place past the menu, virtually since the moment it was released. Assuming that my inability to log in was a function of robust demand, I tried several times over the course of the next few days to get in, both with the credentials I had created using the in-game tool and (just as a long shot) my GameSpy ID. I don't know! I thought I saw the logo in there somewhere. When this failed, I flirted with references to magic doors from Aladdin and The Lord Of The Rings. I also tried "please" in the username field, populating the password section just below with "ohfortheloveof," judiciously avoiding caps, even though the caps were well and truly on in my secret heart.
It kept telling me that my name was invalid, even though it was a perfectly formed nibble of alpha with no numerics or grammatic sigils. I wondered if the account had been corrupted at the moment of its creation, a damn'd thing, and so after several fruitless days I decided to make a new account, but all my e-mails were used up. You don't actually verify these accounts with anybody, though, you can put in any old thing, and thus was born the Horvathian. Watch out for him; teeth everywhere on this guy. He's, like, ninety percent teeth.
Anyway, he got me in. I played part of one round and then went immediately to bed.
(CW)TB out.
