I would like to thank mastercard for providing us with what is probably the best 3 lines of advertisement when trying to spoof something.

Project Natal

On to project Natal.  Lets take it back a couple of years, before everyone was going ape-**** for Wii's and every ******* movie released in the theater was in ******* 3D (WTF Texas Chainsaw Massacre has to be butchered by this 3d bull**** now to?).  Anyways, when I first heard about the Wii I was less than unimpressed.  Motion control was always one of those things I thought would be cool, but could never see myself enjoying for more than 3 minutes once the novelty inevitably wore off.  Once the Wii was released, everyone and their uncle bought one, and now most Wiis sit on the shelf next to Dreamcast collecting dust.

And now, because originality is like finding a unicorn nowadays, both Sony and Microsoft are planning on releasing motion control console addons.  Sony has its *****, I mean Wand, and Microsoft has project Natal.  Because the *****, I mean wand will inevitably fail like everything OSny ****s out does, lets focus our attention on Natal shall we?  Natal introduces a relatively new concept the to motion control genre with full body mapping.  Thats right you're no longer going to be forced to buy 8 billion controlers just to get your legs to move, but instead the new system hopes to be able to do that right out of the box.  As a geek, this excites me as its a pretty good leap in advanced technology (the technology has been around for quite a while but never really comercialised) but as a gamer it pisses me off.  Here are a couple of reasons project NATAL is stupid:

1.  Gamers are for the most part lazy, and typically out of shape.  No one is going to want to be bouncing around for hours on end just to play a video game they could play on a different system sitting down.  The reason people play video games is because they require a low amount of physical activity for a large amount of mental stimulation.  Jumping up and down while waving my arms around isnt very mentally stimulating.

2.  Whatever happened to the concept of a controller?  I mean the controller has been a quiet little buddy just tagging along with the console throughout history, who's decision was it to just toss out that relationship the gamer had with the controller?  Imagine some ******* came to your house and took your television remote away and said that instead of using it you had to flap your arms like a chicken every time you wanted to change the channel up, and then smash your head against the wall every time you wanted to go down.  You would say no, politely punch him in the face, take your remote back, and escort him out of your house.

3.  You know what else I can control with my full body?  My ******* body.  If I want to control a person driving a car, im not going to sit in front of a TV and turn an imaginary steering wheel, no im going to go drive in my real car. 

In conclusion, I think motion control is one of the stupidest things to hit video games since the Virtualboy, its cool for 15 seconds before the novelty wears off, and then it just becomes a burden.  Its sad that video game developers are forced to give in to these stupid gimmicks to appeal to the ever-growing casual video game market. 

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HoN Players Are Douchebags

So I picked up a beta key a couple of weeks ago and have been playing the game regularly since.  I enjoy the fact that there is no grind, and you can become good simply by buying the game.  One thing I have noticed however is that the game comes with a certain type of player, the likes of which i have never seen before.  I didnt play DOTA, so i dont know if it was the same way with that game, but HoN seems to be flooded with an abundance of egotistical ********.  I dont know if its the fact that each player has statistics tied to his account like kill/death or win loss, or if with every copy of HoN people are sent a glass of ******* sauce that somehow got lost in the mail on its way to me.

I'll talk about one run-in in particular because its pretty recent and therfore fresh in my mind.  I was hosting a 3v3 game with two of my e-friends and we got to talking about the movie Zombieland (I know, everyone of my last 3 blogs mentioned this movie, deal with it )  Anyways, this guy joins the lobby and says that he cant wait for a good version of the movie to be released on Piratebay so he can download it.  Now im all for pirating certain things, I feel a lot of ****ty movies only get made just to make money so as far as im concerned pirate those movies out the ass.  But when someone takes time to actually make a good film, I think they deserve the $10.  Anyways, I brought up Transformers as a movie that is piratable because it was a piece of garbage, and he got all defensive saying that Transformers was one of his favorite movies of all time, and that he wanted to "shove it in Megan Fox's ass".  Right there I should have clued in to the fact that the person I was talking to was an idiot.  But anyways, lobby filled, and we started the game.

I usually host games as single draft (the player is given a choice of only 3 heroes as opposed to all heroes) because like any game there is a lot of imbalance in HoN, and I like to have to play different heroes.  Low and behold, the dumb ****, in all of his dumb **** glory, lucks out and gets Arachna.  Now if you're not a HoN player, let me try and relate Arachna to WoW.  Arachna's closest WoW equivalent would probably be 3.0 Ret Paladins.  Basically at high level you can kill your oponents by autoattacking and using what is quite possibly the best ultimate (each hero has an ultimate, it's their most powerful ability) on the shortest cooldown of all other hero ultimates.  Anyways, I picked Soul Reaper because I had had some success with him in the past, and enjoyed playing the hero.

I go mid, and much to my dismay am met by Arachna.  The game progresses and Arachna in all her OP glory racks up the kills.  Which is fine, I can deal with dying because of imbalance, but its when the person killing you rubs it in your face each time they do so, acting as if they outplayed you left and right.  (This guy was not a good player, he once ulted a creep and then ran away).  Anyways, we're losing, he continues to **** talk, I try to ignore him, but it becomes increasingly difficult to do so.  Im all for a bit of trash talk, I think its an integral part of sport and competition, and I dont see anything wrong with taking a jab at someone when you've bested them.  But this was the equivalent of Shaq dunking on Verne Troyer and then slamming him to the ground and just teabagging his face off. 

Anyways, I digress, I play a lot of video games, and never before have I seen such a cocky, ******* of a player type.  Thats not to say that all players are like this, I have met quite a few nice, level headed guys, but for the most part the HoN player is a douche bag.