New Vegas Bugs

Well fiddle-dee-dee, have I been lazy or what? My Chinese spam machine readers will be happy to know that I am alive and just not blogging. I've been busy. I'd mention with what, but instead, I'm gonna get into the shit that really makes me mad: bugs in awesomely hyped games. Take, for instance, Fallout:New Vegas, a great sequel to a great game, only problem is both games were glitchy as hell.

On the topic of glitches: I would go so far as to say that a glitch is such a deal-breaker that it ruins the game for me. I played Fallout 2 and was really enjoying it (long ago) and then random crashes happened if I, say, picked up items in the "wrong" order. New Vegas, hilariously, has glitches that I will document here.
I haven't seen the best ones, like old head flipper down here, but that's because I just started playing with the new patches. That means that, supposedly, the bugs should be fixed in the version I'm playing. Without further ado:










1. No-Clipping issues. Whether it's a coyote that looks like it is under the ground, a caravan trader inside a rock, or a person stuck in a wall, Fallout:New Vegas has it all. IDCLIP has been slapped down most characters in the wastelands of the Mojave desert. Nothing is more frustrating than watching a companion character keep shooting at an enemy they can't kill because the enemy is surrounded by solid rock.


2. Crashes. I would be expecting this if I were playing a video game on my 486 in 1995, but I am not. I am playing a Playstation 3 in 2011, so this shit should NEVER freeze. NEVER!!!

3. Spider spasm characters after dying. This is just weird. I found an idiot on the internet that managed to record the same glitch. Unfortunately this person puts their retarded commentary on top (warning: not funny). Just watch for the sake of seeing what I am refering to here:

Hilarious guy flying into the sky video on YouTube.

I was out in the desert and these raiders jumped me. I was all "You done messed with the wrong mother-" but before I could finish my badass one liner, the raider started doing the herky-jerk and flew up into the sky! I thought the game would crash (see point 2) so I ran away! I never waited to see the person fall back to the ground. I will probably be walking around in some town and the guy will come plummeting out of the sky. Weird.

4. Stealing from dead people... Basically the "legacy" that the dead leave behind. Bear with me. I know there are these little good/evil mechanics in the game that change how people behave toward you and I know how they are supposed to work. If I kill a nice old lady people will think I'm mean, not because I killed her, but because I lost "karma" and they will not like you if you have low karma. They don't even need to know what I did. I get it. However, check this shit out:

Scenario: I am chasing down a crew of baddies that slaughtered a whole town, including these military guys that are supposed to be keeping the peace in the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout, and some gang members. They also took prisoners. So I follow the baddies to their camp and lay waste to their pathetic defenses. Then I went and freed the hostages, who were gang members (of a gang that I am not on good terms with in-game), so they ran away.

After dispensing this street justice I felt that I should be entitled to some pillaging. I go to the foot-lockers and storage boxes of these city-killin', slave-takin', freedom-hatin' baddies and start taking bullets and health kits, and the game says I lose karma for stealing! What the fuck?! I am stealing from some bad bad people whom I murdered, but stealing is wrong. Whatever. What's worse, after killing the guards, my reputation with the group they belonged to fell. How is that possible? In the middle of the desert I killed 3 guys, who went back to HQ and said "Watch out for BFG9000, he is kicking our asses out there!"? I could kill ever member of a town and my reputation with that now non-existent group would be "vilified" which doesn't make any sense.

Anyway, the game is awesome and fun, but the bugs (of which there are many, ask the internet) really ruin it for me. But I guess the crashes are the game's way of saying "enough fun for one day."

Ant War Part 1: Battlelines

It started off as any other move-in. I was re-arranging all of my possessions in my new place and thought “Hm, there are quite a few ants around here.” I lay a few traps and figured the people that used to live in my rental unit were lazy when it came to destroying intruders. “They won’t last the winter.” I foolishly thought. This was in 2009. Lo and behold, the spring of 2010 dawns and I start to notice the odd ant in my place. Then I found what I thought was a lone outpost outside my front door. No biggie, obviously, I can just run down to the old Home Depot, get some ant traps, and problem solved! Right? Wrong. The insidious ant knows no decency and the ant hill thrived in the face of my $3.99 poison delivery system. This meant war. And killin’ ants is nothing new to me. But let’s start at the beginning.

The first line of defence was probably my greatest mistake, since the senior BFGonia advisers didn't take the risk of ants seriously and bought these crappy things.

August 2009 – Operation Homefront

Upon moving in and discovering that the ant had decided to try and call BFGonia its home, I undertook a basic “homeland security” approach. Token defences included stomping the odd ant to make an example of it for the sake of the others or putting down traps. Needless to say, it didn’t matter, since the Calgary winter kicked in and negotiated an uneasy peace between the Ant Kingdom and BFGonia.

Aoril 2010 - Operation Surgical Strike

After a quick trip outside I noticed some ant colonies. No bigz, I thought, let's use that liquid ant killer stuff and just ice these mothafuckaz like it ain't no thang. The poison was applied, and nothing happened. I threw it all over their hill. The one hill I DOUSED was abandoned, probably because I made the soil basically poison as opposed to actually killing ants, but the remainder were treated too, and they grew more powerful.

Exhibit A - An enemy soldier.

May 2010 – Operation Toxic Embrace

A history lesson is necessary at this point. BFGonia is split into two allied nations: Main Level is the major economic and democratic engine of BFGonia, a region that is ruled by a wise king whose name is leant to the great BFGonia nation due to his benevolence and appeal to the ladies. Back Apartment is the seedy underbelly of BFGonia, where lawlessness and poor hygiene are the rules of the day. The identity of the slumlord that rules Back Apartment is forgotten by the wise BFG, for he has more pressing matters to remember. Anyway, the previous slumlord, while slumly, had an active interest in gardening. The trade agreement between Main Level and Back Apartment was that lawn maintenance would be exchanged for snow maintenance, and there was prosperity for the two regions. Upon the usurping of power by the new slumlord lawn maintenance had fallen by the wayside. Despite the negotiation of an identical treaty to that established before, Back Apartment labourers did not fulfill their part of the deal. This is why one day, no longer able to stand it, the king of Main Level took it upon himself to cut the grass.

What the good king discovered that day has since been immortalized by legend and song. Ant hills, many of them, at least 6, as far as the eye could see up until the fence. When they were run over by the cheap lawnmower supplied by Sze Corp., hardware supplier to BFGonia, the grass seemed alive in a writhing black mass. The king was overwhelmed by ants at times, but muscled through their tiny assault and continued the economic progress until the lawn was shortened. Initially, the front lawn outposts were thought to be the only stations that the ants used to assault the house. Upon inspection, it was clear that a large colony had been set up in the back and drastic action was needed to fight off the scourge of the Ant Kingdom.

King BFG is a peaceful man deep down, thus when he needs to murder mass quantities of living creatures he goes to the hellish wastes of the internet for the good of his people. His first general, General Murder, decided that the plan of mixing borax and sugar would deliver a dose of slow working poison that the ants would take home with them, which they would eat, AND THEN DIIIIIE!!! Unfortunately, after full application to the hills, the damage was zero. In fact, BFGonia scientists believe that the added dose of sugar lead to expansion of the Ant Kingdom.

BFGonian propaganda poster urging citizens to stomp them before they can stomp you!

To be continued.

Housesitting

I hope my boss wasn't too attached to his ice cream sandwiches or his ice cream in general. His washing machines are AWESOME! They clean my clothes so well it's like having new clothes. These machines could launch rockets, they're sooooo cool.

In other news, he owns a Wii. On one hand, I really appreciate what the Wii has done for making girls less likely to diss video games because they remember that time they had fun playing Wii Bowling or whatever. On the other hand, a lot of Wii games are total shit. To link a few. And the controls are kinda lame for most games. For some games they work, but I chalk my hatin' on the controls up to me only wanting to move my thumbs to attain maximum sedentary action!

Holy shit we beat Super C

This happened last week but I only got a chance to inform the greater planet at large now.

All must bow before our greatness. We don't even use our real names anymore, we refer to each other by our Contra names Corrigan and Ramierez. I'm Ramierez. Goddamnit me and Corrigan been through more shit than you'll ever see in your lifetime.

We also deliver wicked one liners like "See you at the party, Richter" and "It's a bomb!" and "Cohm wis me if you want to live" and "GOOOO! GEHT TO DA CHAAAAPAAAA!"

In looking for these quotes I found out that Arnold also gives out serious economic analysis to those who would question the American free market.

Hypothetically Speaking

Let's say you were getting married and you invited your friend who lived two time zones away. Your friend, at great personal expense, decides that they will fly back to their home town, bring their wedding-clothes, get you a gift, and blow off time at work because goddamnit you are friends and this is what friends do for each other when major life events occur. So, your friend RSVPs instantly for 1 guest, then a few weeks later asks if they can bring someone because they became involved with someone in the meantime. Your wedding isn't for 4 fucking months, so you should, presumably, be able to find an extra chair by then.

IN THEORY this shouldn't be a big deal. IN THEORY you should probably acknowledge that (a) your friend is coming back home FOR YOUR WEDDING, (b) your friend is spending a lot of money on that flight (P.S. you are a cheap motherfucker, that's why you would notice this) and your friend doesn't have a real job so they don't make real job money, and (c) it's early enough notice that you can help out your friend who was being pretty cool by letting you know so early.

Would you, after considering all this, opt to say something like "I hate to say this but we're pretty tight for space."? Would you really say that? YOU FUCKER! I BET YOU FUCKING WOULD!! Even after your friend had be all awkward and invite the person before contacting you after dating them for only like 3 weeks, since the person they invited has a batshit-crazy schedule and needs to plan shit months in advance and had to know today if your friend had any plans for the summer. SHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAME!

Insane Clown Posse

Ok, so, ICP has been around for years. Decades maybe. I think in 2 years they will be 20 years old. For 18 years they have been getting fans from the Grade 9 to Grade 11 cohorts of disaffected high school students. After Grade 11, the cohort moves on but there is a new crew of 14 year olds to hear ICP "tell it like it is." These guys used to be kind of badass, I used to like it when they came on Loud because they had novelty value, like GWAR, except not infallible. Even when they were being dumb (this can't be serious, the beat sounds like it took all of 30 seconds to think up) it was kind of funny in a "it's 1997, I don't know no better" kind of way.

Now they came out with this Miracles song... What the hell? They went soft and just kinda let everyone know how stupid they are years ago, but what is this shit? This is why bands that suck should NOT be allowed to stick around, their dumb true colours come through. I was never a big fan, but this is just kind of sad to see. No matter how much novelty value they have, they should have quit and taken their legacy of being mildly interesting with them instead of just giving it all up and running out of ideas.

Deep-Frizzlin'

I deep fried a turkey last weekend, it was pretty awesome. We were at a party and thought shooting a .22 rifle and deep-frying a turkey would be a good idea. Turns out we know a good idea when we hear one.

Academics need to stop trying to have their cake and eat it too. When doing some sort of statistical analysis people are quick to point out "Oh, my estimates aren't causal" or "This is just an association, not causation." The rhyming is intended to scare away white people (90% of academics) so it normally lets them get away with it. Fine. But then they make a conclusion like "Since X and Y have this relationship, let's give people more X to make them have a more desirable level of Y." This implicitly means that they are treating X as causing, in some manner, Y. After saying "This is not causal" they go ahead and make causal recommendations on policy, etc. The irony would be delicious if it weren't something I am served up daily.

Causation, nooooo!