This Green One

Well, in hindsight it was probably all over well before tonights pathetic loss to West Coast. At a record of 6-7 it is going to be difficult for the reigning premiers to sneak in to the top eight.

There is only 9 games left and Hawthorn will need a good 6 wins from those 9 considering their poor percentage. Unfortunately, those 9 games include games against the unbeaten Geelong and St Kilda as well as The Bulldogs, Collingwood, Essendon and a trip to Adelaide to face Port. It is unlikely the Hawks will win any of those games going on this seasons form.

Might be time to start tanking, Hawthorn. It’s a pity they’ve already notched 6 wins. A sincerely disappointing season. I’m glad I wasn’t one of the 52,000 odd chumps who went out an bought a membership.

Can you guess what the following acronym means?

If you can’t, the answer is here.  But have a decent crack at it first!

A thought occurred to me earlier today as I was glancing over some new marketing releases for the upcoming game Assassins Creed 2.  The protagonist, Ezio Auditore de Firenze, looks like such a badass in that game in such an awesome kind of way.  He just looks like such a cool character.

It’s not enough to just create a badass character though.  No.  They also have to have a coolness about them and the guys down at Ubisoft have a knack for making these badass characters feel awesome.

Suddenly, it dawned upon me. It was hoods.  The most awesome badass people and characters always seem to wear hoods! I started googling around.  It seems no one so far has caught on to this explosive secret, save for George Lucas and the guys at Ubisoft.

Let’s examine the evidence:

Darth Vader

Sith lords are badass and none are badder than Lord Vader himself.  Everybody knows this, it is a fact.  But before Obi Wan scorched the flesh from his cranium, rendering him helmet dependent and unable to adorn his kick-ass sith hood any longer he looked like this.  The biggest badass in the old republic.  And it was all thanks to the hood.

 

Darth Maul 

Before Vader however, when Anakin was still a child, there was Darth Maul.  I remember about 10 years ago just before the film was released when there was much pant soiling amongst the nerd fraternity over how awesome this particular character promised to be.  When The Phantom Menace finally came out, this badass was the coolest thing in it, despite his few and infrequent scenes.  The likelihood of Darth Maul pioneering the dual-bladed lightsaber is somewhat diminished if his appearance is degraded by the absence of his badass hood.

 

Darth Revan

Ok some of my readership may begin to see a pattern here, but I did disclaim that George Lucas is one of the select few to have picked up on the badass hood phenomenon.  For anyone who played Knights of the Old Republic, this badass was without doubt the most awesome Star Wars protagonist ever to grace any entertainment medium.  If you haven’t played it, I won’t spoil it.  Go get a copy though.  This guy was awesome personified.  Hang on I think I may have just spoiled it…

 

Altair

Perhaps Ubisoft picked up on the hooded character game from their Star Wars connections? Who knows.  But this brings us out of the Star Wars domain and square into the assassination game.  And no one gets it done better than our next hooded badass, Altair.  If the dual-bladed lightsaber is the coolest weapon of all time, then the hidden blade comes a close second.  Just another of the many reasons I could list why messing with Altair is a bad idea.  He is awesome though.

 

Ezio Auditore de Firenze

This agile little bastard might look a lot like Altair, but rest assured he is not.  Believe it or not, this hooded badass assassin wields two hidden blades as he leaps and maims his way around renaissance Venice.  How cool is that?

 

Alex Mercer

Once done with the Star Wars and Ubisoft guys, I wondered to myself who else was out there that could substantiate my bold claim.  I didn’t have to look far, as I had just finished the game Prototype, and lo and behold the main man of this game was one huge hooded badass mofo.

It’s difficult to imagine any previous (or future) character being as powerful or as capable of as much wanton destruction as the sociopathic Alex Mercer.  This hooded shapeshifting freak is directly responsible for causing enough trouble to erupt in Manhattan that the authorities decided their best bet was to nuke it.  Nice going.  The enormous axe like blade his arm morphs into wouldn’t be nearly impressive if it weren’t for his choice of stylish headwear.

 

Aragorn

By now you’re probably wondering if I have any evidence outside of video gaming to back all this up.  I do, so we’ll now jump from the video game screen to the silver screen.  What better badass to start with than the slayer of orcs, goblins and dweebs than the Lord of the Rings hard-nut, Aragorn.  Notice the hooded disguise as he stalks his prey.  He’s definitely about to strike with unstoppable fury…

 

Dexter Morgan

Speaking of unstoppable fury, there are few people you’d want to get on the wrong side of less than Dexter Morgan, Miami Metro’s resident serial killer.  If you do happen to piss him off though, there’s no use calling the cops – he is one.  But I’d rather have this serial killing badass cop on my bowling team, or bringing me a morning donut, or even a poisoned piece of pecan pie than any other I can think of.  And it’s all thanks to the slick headwear.

 

Robin Hood

The classic badass.  This guy could pick you off sitting on the other side of town hungover on a Sunday morning with unmatched precision, before or since.  Not only does this bow-and-arrow wielding badass wear a hood for extra badass effect, it’s also part of his name.

 

Jason Bourne

This bond-like badass shirks the wit and charm of his British predecessor in favour of a icy and dark facade only an aimless, identity-less trained assassin could pull off.  Improvisation and showy assassinations are the name of the game for this badass.  Grossing about a billion dollars at the box office world wide over three films suggests this particular badass was pretty popular too.

Conclusion

So there you have it.  The evidence is irrefutable.  My advice is to heed it if you plan on writing a book, producing a film or developing a video game.  Badass protagonists are awesome.  But they must wear a hood to back it up.

Dammit I thought today was the 23rd.  That’s one less day to do stuff with.

I haven’t been very productive this week.  I’ve tried to work, but just can’t seem to get into it.  It is now the 24th of June, which means there is exactly 37 days left until I leave for the UK.

I have written 2 thesis chapters, one of which I’m about to have a meeting with Torab (my supervisor) this afternoon.  That means I have 5 chapters left to write at a rate of about a chapter per 6 days give or take.

Combining this with 92 exam papers to mark, Scott and Emily’s wedding, 2 bucks weekends, Tracey’s 30th amongst other upcoming shenanigans, the chances of me finishing this bastard are diminishing rapidly unless I start doing some very serious work.

I’m hoping Torab tells me this afternoon that chapter 3 is fine and nothing needs to be redrafted.

It looks like I’m going to have to either submit from London or come back at this stage

Get a move on me!!

I finished the game Prototype the other day.  Most of the pro gaming review sites were scoring the game pretty high and it’s been selling like hotcakes at least here in Australia.

 

 

In my opinion, the game is good.  I enjoyed playing through it right to the end, so I’ve decided to list some of the more noticeable good and bad points I encountered when playing this game.

The Good

• Extreme bad-assery.  If there has ever been a game before this that makes you feel as powerful as Alex Mercer, I’m yet to see it.
• The game gives you a lot of freedom right from the get go.  You can explore at your leisure right from the start.
• Great boss fights.  A couple of the boss fights are simply awesome.  Even though you feel invincible, some of the boss battles do require some strategic thinking in order to get past them.
• Good, intuitive controls – at least on the Xbox 360.
• A replay option with all your powers active.  This one is important. One of the things that annoyed me about Assassins Creed 1 was that I wanted to go back and enjoy some of the early assassinations but I wanted to do so with the abilities that I had unlocked and gotten used to such as the grab break and the counter.  Prototype facilitates this.
• The action.  Sometimes the action taking place on screen can border on the insane, all without a drop in frame rate.  Other people have criticised the graphics in this game but I don’t think it would be possible to experience the same level of action with hundreds of entities on screen at once without a little drop in graphics quality.  The game doesn’t look like GTA4’s Manhattan, but I’ll take it.

The Bad

Not trying to nitpick here, but a few of the small annoyances I found are listed here as well as some of the aspects to the game I felt could have been done a little better:

• Zombies. I hate zombies and can’t understand how anyone could like them.  Why do so many game and film companies think its cool to have some sort of viral affliction that turns people into mindless flailing losers who can’t even run?
• Web of intrigue.  Good idea, but I don’t really want to watch 130 short epilepsy inducing trailers that clarify almost nothing.
• The citizens of New York.  This was actually done ok, but Assassins Creed did it a lot better.  Especially during the early stages of the game when the city is relatively clean, the people don’t react enough like real people.  In Assassins Creed, the people used to stand back and make comments if you did something odd such as run up a building or smash an ornamental jar.  In Prototype I can jump off a skyscraper and land harmlessly while pedestrians don’t bat an eyelid and simply step over the smashed concrete I had just sent flying right in front of them.
• Bad and unfinished storyline.  I don’t get what Alex’s goal really is here, because at the end of the game he’s in the same position he was at the start.  Nothing is resolved.  The city is still infected and the military are still after him.  And what happened to his sister, Dana? And what happened to Karen Parker, his ex-girlfriend who betrayed him? None of this is resolved.
• More responsive AI.  I think that if the military see me sprinting down a street faster than the cars, or running up the side of a building that this should twig that I might be ‘Zeus’ as they say.  I realise this would make the game much harder but still.  The soldiers are a little dumb.
• Targeting.  The left trigger targeting system is both a blessing and a curse in this game.  It lets you target enemies at ease but precision is left waning, especially in hectic battles.  If a tank is shooting at you and you desperately need a civilian to consume for health it is quite frustratingly difficult to target one because the targeting system almost always defaults to the tank.
• Short.  Took me only about 10 hours to finish this game.  Some of the events are fun but most are not really worth bothering with.  I mainly stuck to the mission objectives and hence it didn’t take me very long to finish.

Well, almost.  The students have done it now and there were no complaints.  I still have the joy of marking them all and I can’t wait to start.

Almost bought a digital camera yesterday.  I’m thinking I’ll head back to JB-HiFi this week and get it.

Flights have also now been sorted out.  Looks like Josh and I will be leaving Melbourne on the 1st August 2009 for sunny London at 3pm.  Lots of thesising to do before that time comes though.  That amongst other things.