[Games] Haiku Review: "God of War"

Five hours turned seven
By spinning blades, balance beams
But fun none the less

Last night about 1:30am, I beat "God of War" by SCEA. Overall, I found it to be a very fun, visceral experience. The team wanted to make a game that was all about combat, and they succeeded.

My biggest issues with the game were the button pop-up portions of battles ("Okay, I want to throw this guy now...oh, shit, he had a circle over him...now I have to hit these damn buttons as they pop up or I lose my combo and get damaged."), the balance beam portions ("Step, step, fall, X, X, X, X, X, X, step, step, fall, X, X, X, X, X, X...") and the spinning blade puzzles in Hades.

The spinning blade puzzles in Hades deserve some special comments, as those three segments took two hours of my time. I'm at a loss to describe the frustration involved in these sections.

First off, the horizontal spinning blade section is one of the first areas where you are essentially required to jump towards the camera, so you have't acquired a way to gauge your jumps from far to near yet.

Second, most small hits by the horizontal spinning blades were instant death. ("Ouch, I jumped against the flat side of the blade...for some reason, the flat side of the blade is making me spew blood like an anime character with high blood pressure...oh, the recovery time made me fall to my doom...restart from last checkpoint...repeat thirty times.")

Third, you get to the vertical pillars, and the only way to advance is to know that you can jump up faster than you can climb up, although that particular piece of information is never taught to the player.

Fourth, the blades on the vertical pillars were often just close enough that a vertical jump would cause you to hit a blade, fall down, possibly juggle between three or four different blades, and smash the ground, forcing you to start over....thirty times or so.

Fifth, when you finally get past the vertical pillar, you beat up some guys and then you have to do another pillar with blades!!! I don't swear all that often, but when I saw the second set, I screamed at the television, "You have got to be fuckin' kidding me!"

So, while I loved the game, if I ever get the chance to meet David Jaffe, there is a very high likelihood that I'm going to kick him in the crotch and say, "That's for the spinning blades, asshat!"

[Code] WTF in my life...

http://www.thedailywtf.com/forums/62973/ShowPost.aspx

I actually had something similar to this happen to me, but it was the scorecard code in "Microsoft Golf 2001 Edition" and my manager at the time. Led to a bit of embarassment on my part...

[Personal] When it rains, it pours...

So on top of all of the stuff I've already had go wrong over the last week, I had the primary drive in my server crash today. 300Gb of fairly critical gone...

Fortunately, I had backed most of it up recently, and I had a local copy of my mod source, but I lost a lot of data, and now I'm going to be losing even more time trying to restore my backups.

Joyous rapture and harmony...

[Comics] "Avalon" is back

After nearly a two-year hiatus, "Avalon" is back.

Glad to see you're going to finish what you had started, Josh. You have some interesting characters, and I look forward to a proper conclusion.

[Personal] Audited...

WARNING: This post eventually devolves into a bunch of emo bullshit. You have been warned.

I found out today that my Utah state taxes were audited. Utah's state taxes are very simple, so I generally don't have to worry about making any mistakes. For my 2003 taxes, I actually owed $4, so I paid it and all was good...or so I thought.

I got a letter today saying I owed an additional $330. Fortunately, I've got my taxes from previous years here on my machine. Turns out that the audit was correct. The tax software that I was using used my full federal tax responsibility instead of half as listed in the instructions. Check their support, and find out that the patch to fix this issue was released about two weeks after I filed my return. Contact their support, and find out their guarantee only applied if you filed using the fully patched version of their software.

So, I've got a month to come up with the extra $330 before they start applying additional penalties. Joy. It's bad enough that I owe $150 on my federal taxes, worse that even though I was only a Utah state resident for 2 hours last year, I'm not getting a refund on my Utah state taxes for last year, and it's even worse that I still haven't been able to deduct my mortgage insurance, but this extra $330 couldn't have come at a worse time. At least my federal return was error-free.

I made a choice late last year to try to knock my debts out quickly. As a result, I'm paying a lot more each month, but my debts are dropping at a significant rate. However, that reduces the amount of liquid funds I have each month down to a pretty small amount. This amount has been squished even more because of the power bill increase down here and the higher-than-expected rent increase. And of course, my trip to Utah back in January so I could try to take care of our home up there and so my wife could see our granddaughter tapped my buffer.

So in this case, I'm living with the consequences of my actions. I just find it ironic that my efforts to eliminate my debt have made it so that an unexpected debt can kick my ass.