I'm goin' to grad. school in the fall!!!!!! YEAH!!!! uhuh uhuh uhuh! I just got my acceptance letter yesterday and I honestly thought I was going to be sick as I was opening it. But it was alright because I GOT IN!!!! I'm going to be earning my masters in the Simmons college dual degree program for history and library/archive management! I'M SO INCREDIBLY PUMPED RIGHT NOW!!!!

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Everywhere I look I see reviews for how great Tomb Raider: Underworld is. I have played this game, I was so excited to get it, and yet I felt so disappointed that I'm considering selling it. My absolute favorite x-box game was the prior installment in the Tomb Raider saga - Tomb Raider: Legend. This game had pacing, character, very cool environments, fun moves, awesome level design, engaging music that I WISH I could get on itunes, just enough hostiles to make the game feel like it wasn't holding out on the main draw of the action/adventure genre - ACTION! Underworld, on the other hand, relies almost completely on its new and admittedly cool environment generation that it pretty much sacrifices everything else. The two redeeming factors of this game are that the puzzles are harder and allow the player to go about solving them via a various number of routes. Unfortunately this is most visible only in the first level of the game in which the platforming options allow you to take one of several routes to reach your goal. After that it's pretty much copy and paste for the rest of the game - do you jump around to pull first the left lever all the way up on that remote ledge and then the right, or do vice-versa?

In terms of the fighting the enemies are so spread out that the encounters feel forced and contrived. "Laura's been jumping around for a while so.... lets throw in some random mercenaries!" or "They have spiders in Thailand right? Well, whose going to notice if those same exact spiders show up in snow covered mountains or in Laura's basement ?" I kid you not, you fight a total of about 8 different AI as follows: big "yeti", little "yeti", enormous tiger, enormous tiger painted black to be a panther, mercenaries, green giant iguana/"naga", red giant iguana/"naga", and sharks.
While in Legend the dialogue flows smoothly through a barrage of bullets, acrobatics and creative takes on old action/adventure environment classics (i.e. swinging and jumping through the heights of a sprawling city (usually in Japan or China), and the old, abandoned Buddhist/ martial arts monastery high in the snow covered mountains), in Underworld Laura's dialogue in presented as her "documenting" her findings while she uses a video camera to record her surroundings. Throughout all levels there is little to no in-game communication between Laura and her posse. This is odd since in Legend we are entertained and sometimes helped in all levels by Zip and Alister who communicate via Laura's headset. Having this back and forth helped provide dialogue, move the story along and strengthen inter-character relationships, not to mention the secondary characters' personalities which, without this dialogue, appear as ancillary and largely uninvolved. In Underworld we have to take Laura’s word that Zip and Alister are helping her and are worried about her obsession. It would be like having Batman present Lucius Fox with the machine that uses all cell phones in Gotham to project a sonar grid, telling Lucius that he can communicate to him out in the field and help him find the Joker, and then never hearing or seeing Lucius again until the scene in which he self-destructs the display. SERIOUS INCONSISTENCY HERE!

Speaking of inconsistencies, at the end of Legend Laura is in possession of Excalibur, in all it's kick-ass glory, which she has just used to defeat Amanda. The game ends showing her telling Skip and Alister that it's not over. She and Amanda are officially enemies since her ex-colleague was the cause for the disappearance of Laura's mother (which is shown in the intro). Laura is now determined to find Avalon and prove to herself that her father was right about her mother not being dead. Then Underworld picks up. The first warning light is that there is no mention of Excalibur at all. Who has a weapon like that and trades it in for a pistol that needs a million shots to take down a mercenary? "Okay", I tell myself, "maybe they are going to do some gameplay taking place in the past like in Legend and explain what happened to it." Nope. There is never any explanation. It’s just dropped. The second warning light is that Laura is, within the first level, introduced as being on a completely different mission of discovery involving Thor's hammer this time. The leap of logic here is really hard to grasp. If there are many portals to Avalon all over the world, each of them using the same type of sword (as explained in Legend), why is Laura all hopped up on jumping through hoops to find and assemble the pieces to a new super weapon which requires a completely different kind of gate in order to get to Avalon? Again, I tell myself that it's only the first level, and there is sure to me some explanation right? Again, nothing of the sort is offered save for the fact that her father though Valhalla and Avalon were the same thing and that’s good enough for Laura to go globetrotting. The final warning alarm appears near the end of the first level in which Natla makes a sudden and completely out of nowhere appearance. Apparently she's been in cahoots with Amanda all this time and is using her to get closer to Avalon for some reason. Laura, amazingly, seems to not be very surprised at all and basically says, "That explains everything. It all makes sense now!" Um, no it doesn't. When a game begins recycling characters from its previous attempts at resuscitating the franchise then it's time to just call it quits and go back to the fanfiction.

At this point I saved, exited the game and took to the internet. Apparently Tomb Raider: Anniversary set what was supposed to be a trilogy in motion with Natla and Laura fighting over the initiation of the seventh age or whatever. The idea to make all three games interconnected must have occurred well into the final stages of Legend at which point rewriting the story would not have been an option. On the release of Anniversary it was presented as a rehash of the previous games so that the new developer could rekindle the interest of the public in a series which had, over the years, followed Sonic and Final Fantasy into the dank dungeon of piss poor story and crappy character development. It had its flaws, but did fairly well. However, most gamers who had been around during the first round of Tomb Raider (including me, who used to watch my dad play) didn’t necessarily think that a rework of previous games was something worth buying for about the same reason that some people don’t like what Lucas did to Star Wars 4-6 and what Spielberg did to E.T. Now, it is important to note that not only was Legend touted as the beginning of a new adventure for Laura, but there was nothing save for Natla's company logo on some of the boxes in Legend that would indicate any continuing connection between Anniversary and Legend. And yet these games are supposed to lead into one another? I mean, it's like the teams were at separate poles of the earth while one worked on the moon and none of them even bothered with a phone call of an e-mail. Anniversary, Legend and Underworld are on completely different plot lines here. Without playing Anniversary all the information you need to know in order to jump into the story of Legend is presented in a succinct intro video in which Laura is traumatized for life and begins her long suppressed desire to know what really happened to her mother. From there the story builds on itself in pleasant bite size pieces like candied chestnuts – savory and chewy but ultimately leaving you with a desire for another one guaranteed to be just as satisfying. With the release of Underworld someone coming off of their Legend high expects to be sucked into a story that smoothly picks up where the previous cliff-hanger left off. Instead it’s like reaching for a chestnut and getting a chocolate covered cherry that’s green and fuzzy. While it still has it’s Tomb Raider chocolate covering the substance of the item is cultivating a colony of things that are unpalatable and will most likely put off your appetite.

I know I'm nit picking on this next point but what the hell. Maybe I'm just old fashioned but only offering two types of weapons that are pre-equipped at the beginning of each level and not interchangeable during game play? Come on! Once the secondary weapon is out of ammo that's it. You still have unlimited ammo for the pistols, but the option of finding or picking up other guns or even more ammo for your shotgun, harpoon gun or whatever your pick is not offered. That, among other things, was a major hindrance in the flow of the game. The developers touted the game as offering more interaction with the environment, but when Laura takes down an enemy who was using the same gun as her she doesn't bother turning him over for equipment?

Frankly it makes far more sense to think of Legend as a sadly incomplete Elsewhere story and simply play Anniversary and Underworld back to back. Tomb Raider: Underworld, which seemed so shinny and cool, tragically fell prey to poor level design, character presentation, and a plot that was written as though it had too many writers all doing their own thing. Keep Legend close to your heart as an example of what a good game is (albeit one in need of a sequel). Keep the environment rendering of Underworld as a resource for future games, but throw the rest in the bin next to Greg Hastings' Tournament Paintball MAX'D and Turok: Evolution.

Proud member of

The end of the year was kind of crappy since I lost my journal which contained all of my sketches, fanfic notes and phones numbers from the last 5 months On the upside it's a new year and the way I see it, like with my laptop when the hard drives died, I can rewrite my notes and make them even better the second time around. It still sucks that I lost my notes in the first place, but I am somewhat comforted by the fact that I transcribed a few of my notes on my desktop. My goals for the new year are several fold. Most of them involve projects due at the end of January, but still.
1) This J-term I'm taking a non-credit course for those who want to participate in the National Novel Writing Month, which basically means that it's a group where we peer review each other's work and are taught techniques for becoming more dynamic writers. Besides brainstorming in general, I'm going to make my main project "Terminate the IdiotBoys". So, by the end of January (baring unforeseen disasters) I hope to have 50,000 words of Terminate the IdiotBoys on my computer, external hard drive, and flash drive (just to be safe). ^-^
2) I want to rewrite my Psychonauts fanfic. notes and possibly start rough drafts for the first chapter.
3) I want to add fancy templates to my Journal and Gallery pages on deviantart. I'm currently taking a J-term crash course in XHTML, HTML and CSS here at school and my teacher has been really helpful in my endeavor. He's totally awesome, and if he sees this I just want to give him a thumbs up and a sincere, "THANK YOU!" For anyone else who has a subscription and wants to pimp out their pages go here --> [link]

Mass Effect
***I was so excited to get this game, yet at the end I can't help but feel disappointed. There was a true glimmer of genius here that could have been easily brought out with more work. However, as it now stands on the market the jerky pacing of the game combined with a lack of immersion makes the whole experience feel uncomfortably constrained and rushed. First of all we're told a lot of things about the various alien cultures and traditions, but we don't get to see or experience any of it. Where are these migrant fleets of the Quarians? If the Krogans are so scattered and desperate for work how come the only ones we see are Wrex and the lab grown ones working for Saren? I was also discouraged to find out that the game didn't allow you to visit any of the species home-worlds within Council space. In fact there are only a handful of developed places that you can explore (the Citadel,Therum, Feros, Ilos, the interior of the Normandy, Eden Prime, and Noveria) but even these have constricted areas due to the linear way in which you must complete your main objectives. All other worlds consist of a drive in the Mako with occasional stops to survey some minerals, excavate a downed probe or ship (which you can't explore), look down a mine shaft and investigate one of two kinds of bases. There is supposed to be this great feeling of being involved in an expansive and dangerous galaxy, and while the dialogue tries to convey this your character's movement and interactions through said galaxy are so narrow and essentially isolated from any NPCs not on your crew that it's impossible to feel like a part of it all.
***Which brings me to another point. I found the crew, including Tali, Garrus, Ashley, Kaiden, Wrex and Liara, to be very difficult to connect to. It not that I didn't try, I even envisioned my custom female character to be bisexual so I would have more reason to hang out with Tali and listen to her talk while all the time I was staring at her boobs. It didn't work. It's like the characters just drop out of nowhere and suddenly you're working with them. They all have background, which they will tell you if you ask, but other then Wrex, Ashley, Joker, and Captain Anderson the other crew mates feel like they just filed onto your ship with flimsy reasons why they should even be there and why you should care about them at all. None but the characters I mentioned above are essential to the story, which leaves me thinking that they were just placed there to give the player more lessons on the alien civilizations and politics. If that was their objective however, I would have to advise that the editors either cut them out or somehow revamp them into main characters. Otherwise they're not necessary to any of the dialogue, they don't add to the story (unless you play as a female character and want to sleep with Garrus or Kaiden), their presence is not necessary since their skills are available through yourself, Ashley and Wrex (the useful characters), and they just take up space and gun modifications.
***Dialogue is another thing which I felt needed improvement. If you want to tell us a ton of information to flesh out the various species that's okay, but for God's sake break it up. Trying to cram that much knowledge into your head the minute that you are given control of your character breaks the flow of the game and feel more like the game is trying to cite something that the player should already know but is too thick to remember. Maybe an even better metaphor would be to compare the relationship between the dialogue and the player with a student trying to cram an entire history course the night before the final exam. One idea would be to parse out all of the background through the side missions so a) the side missions don't feel like annoying distractions from the main quest (which the plot would have you believe you must urgently finish, thus making side quests a form of procrastination from your responsibilities as a specter) and b) the player feels like they are being rewarded for learning the environment of the game rather than being forced to quickly absorb reams of dialogue in order to earn some measly XP and feel like they can actually be a part of the plot. Another idea would be to pimp out the citadel to make it feel more multicultural and thus visually give the player a hint that there are various tastes and styles out in space. Another thing that tripped me up as I was starting to get into it was when I noticed that there were no variations in gender among the species (except possibly for the Elcor and Hanar whose gender is unkownable). There's no explanation given for this either! All Batarians, Volus and Turians are male and all Asari are female. Either they all reproduce by budding or change gender when it's time to increase the population again.
***Overall I'm giving it a 6.5 out of 10. Some of the side missions are a lot of fun, the main quest (while feeling waaay too short) pulls you in, the inventory is easy to use and the biotics are fun, but like I said above there should be a wider range of space with other aliens in it that you can walk around and explore, the dialogue needs to be spread out, we need to get a better idea of the other races without monologuing, and the cast needs to be tightened up.
This doesn't mean that I have no interest in Mass Effect II. I'm still going to buy it when it comes out. My optimism prevents me from ever learning >.<

Fanfiction is a wonderful field that allows for people to practice their writing skills and receive peer reviews. It also has no deadlines except those you set for yourself, so for those of us who take forever to complete a long term project *cough* it's a fantastically liberating set of guidelines. Unfortunately, it can also become an addiction. Such was the case with me. My social and school lives were suffering so I had to take a break from fanfiction to realize creativity on a different front. I made a plague mask, did some paintings of irish wolfhounds for my grandmother, and stretched my proverbial sea legs in an artistic manner. However, I think that I'm ready to start up the fanfiction again. I just turned 21 on Oct. 15th, and the gift of Mass Effect has reawakened my love of intricate Sci-fi universes with expansive depth and character. All in all I'm pretty pumped, and ready to write!