Sarcasm.com

Splitting Kill Bill into two movies made a shitload of money for those in a position to profit. How much more? Considerably more. Hundreds of millions of dollars more when you count home video and cable and everything else.

In terms of raw value I’m of the opinion that both Kill Bill films had more in them to see and to like than the vast majority of well funded studio releases. That in and of itself isn’t exactly saying much considering the vast majority of well funded studio releases are pieces of litter floating by your passenger side window as you fly down the road, but, point being: neither of them felt like you got totally jipped exactly. It wasn’t that you were getting less per se, it was that, in the opinion of this moviegoer, you weren’t getting a complete experience/flick/thing either time you plunked your ten bucks down.

How important completeness is feels like a fuzzy personal matter. I don’t think this is the time or place to broach this particular Pandora’s box but let’s say for the sake of argument that it’s real important—which I believe it is. How are we to feel when Tarantino and company ask us to pay twice for two incomplete experiences. Hey Seth, this is show business, show business. There’s no show without the business. OK. But how fucking far does that go. Commercial art sure, it’s a balance right? But selling two halves of a whole without ever feeling the satisfaction of a complete experience is in my mind: criminally unacceptable. From an artistic perspective. Balance yes, absolutely, but this wasn’t it. In contrast I’m sure the bean counters loved it. Went home and played with themselves under the covers staring at an excel printout with a flashlight loved it.

For punctuation to this story of artistic degradation Tarantino again toe in toe with his money grubbing benefactor (and currently towards the end of a free fall of failure) Harvey Weinstein recently released their new film Inglorious Bastards (one volume this time) at the Cannes film festival. How did it do? My favorite entertainment reporter Anne Thompson named it 10th on her list of Cannes Ten Best Films and it didn’t win no Golden Palm.

This story is probably old hat to most of you but try this on for size: Valve Software is doing almost the exact same thing with Left for Dead except this time the halves aren’t even full size. You’re actually getting two fifty minute segments of kung fu over here and expected to pay full price twice.

Those who know Valve know they like the idea of episodic content. Seems like a good idea right? They tried it with Half Life 2 and it didn’t seem to work out so well in the sense that, well, they never got around to producing the episodic content in a timely manner which was supposed to be the whole point of it really. At least for the time being it looks as though they have given up on the Half Life front as they put their weight behind Left for Dead.

When Valve released Left for Dead Vol. 1 at the full $60 console price no one could deny it was light on content. The multiplayer and AI was so good though it was mostly forgiven. But now, here’s the kicker, they’re releasing the rest of the game, exactly one year later, and though no pricing details have been announced I bet dollars to fucking doughnuts it’s going to be full price again. You know what else they’re thinking of doing? Releasing the original LFD campaigns with the ‘sequel’ so you’ll have it all on one disc. Makes sense right?

No one makes a full release AAA first person shooter in one year. It simply doesn’t happen. The standard even for assembly line sequels from behemoths like Activision is two years. Only sports titles dare to expect you to pay that much dollar per incremental addition and they are only able to get away with that due to the nature of their domains. Bean counters get stiffies thinking about sports franchise revenue spreadsheets I’m sure.

Valve still likes the idea of releasing episodic content. Only caveat is they want you to pay full price for each release. Taking a page from the film industry playbook they are likely to ask you to pay for the same content twice, including the first half of their game on the same disc as the second half. You tell me dear reader, is this reasonable? This is a capitalistic system right? Who is anyone to judge them for trying to make as much scratch as they possibly can? Maybe I’m seeing it all wrong. For the moment from where I’m sitting it looks like a bullshit money grab from a company that isn’t known for pulling bullshit money grabs.

Me: Feverishly trying to get the Completionist achievement but constantly thwarted by my lovable dog’s lack of Backflip ability. I don’t like to get up early, so I missed getting to the Pub for happy hour.

You: A compulsive gambler with an extra book to teach my canine, or just a collector of 25-digit tokens. You fancy yourself in Spartan Armor, but are not part of the exclusive club.

FR: Minimalist360

Let’s meet near the bookstore in Bowerstone and fulfill each other’s dreams!

You can also contact me here. Looking forward to meeting you!

So I payed the $10 (800 Microsoft Points (is this a real currency at this point? like do they trade it in currency markets?)) to get the E4: Every Extra Extend Extreme.

First off, this game should probably be called something like Ten Times Toomuch Telemetry because holy wow is there a lot of information on the screen at one time. Combo counts, multipliers, multipliers of multipliers, clocks counting up and down, and the scores make late-edition pinball scores look low. I’m not religious, but Jesus Christ.

The game has 4 modes, E4 timed, E4 untimed, S4, and R4.

E4 is chains and multipliers on steroids, coupled with an almost anti-shooter game mechanic. You detonate yourself to blow up all kinds of crap on the screen, and the groups of crap release icons which give you something good. The something good depends on the color of part of the crap, and it can be extra time, quicken (speeds up the movement and introduction rate of the crap, not to be confused with the bookkeeping software), bonus, and something else I forget about. Did I mention you should also detonate yourself on the beat of the accompanying music for additional multipliers? Yeah it’s insane, and kinda cool, you have to do a lot of balancing and it’s got a good feel.

S4 is just E4 but to your own tracks – you rip a CD on the 360, then in the game you pick a track and the game does some Amiga demoscene/medtracker looking crap to try to determine the bpm, and then you play to that. It doesn’t really work, especially if your song changes BPM.

My favorite mode is R4: Rhythmic Rolling Revenge Revolution. This is like a complete different game, and it would be like if someone took Warning Forever by Hikoza.T.Ohkubo and threw it in a blender with Mu-cade and rRootage by ABA Games. In other words, quality. I thought I was going to explode when I played this, and I will likely be playing it until I get the level 100 achievement.

So Guitar Hero III and The Orange Box are all lonely because of E4, so I guess that’s $10 well spent, as long as the others don’t get too angry-jealous.

So I discovered a bug in the Xbox 360 version of Puzzle Quest that allows you to cheat, pretty significantly. Here’s how you do it.

I played until I was level 49, then I quit and I deleted the game from my console. I then downloaded the trial version of the game, which caps your level at 7, until I had enough experience where I would be moved to level 50. Then I hit start, unlocked the full game, and immediately jumped to level 50, receiving the Legendary Hero achievement. The bug is that in the process, I gained 176 skill points that I could apply to my character. (50 – 7) * 4

So I did that and then immediately was able to defeat Lord Bane to get the Master of Death achievement.

Looks like a bug when the next level is figured out when you unlock. The developers should patch this, so if anyone knows how to get this info to the developers, please do so. I’d imagine that this will work for any level change, like 40 to 41, etc., but I haven’t tried it. All you’d need to do is take your level X character, get him close to level x+1, then quit and delete the full game. Download the trial, play to get your experience up to the next level, then unlock the full version of the game.

What I really wish I had a cheat for is the forge godlike item. Anyone have this achievement? Update: I picked up the final achievement (Master Craftsman) this afternoon while on a conference call, and am now 200/200.