GreyPawn.com

Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009

Dear GoDaddy

Dear GoDaddy,

I was sorely disappointed to see your advertisement during the Super Bowl this year.  I have been a loyal customer for the better part of a decade now, and I am shamed that a company I rely upon for my domain registration needs has stooped to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Please inform your marketing department weasels that the reason you have been a success in the industry is due entirely to your attractive low prices, fast service and customer-based word of mouth about both.  It is not due to giant jiggling plastic titty-monsters in the softcore porn you insist on airing video of.

If you want to grow your already considerable market share, target your actual user demographic.  You will find most of your users are likely middle-aged technology enthusiasts rather than kegger-slurping fraternity jocks that your commercials seem built to appeal to.  Sure, the old adage is that “Sex sells”, but this generally applies to traditional consumer products like beer and sunglasses.  You wouldn’t try to sell term life insurance with a set of giant perky tits pressed against cold glass, and neither should you be hocking domain names with an unmitigated quantity of scattered ass.  If you want trendy, use the Aqua Teen Hunger Force as mascots, or hire some of those internet celebs from Weezer’s “Pork & Beans” music video.  Either or, get a clue.

Sunday, February 1st, 2009

Loathing Football

It never fails to astound me how absolutely ridiculous this country is when it comes to what we call “Football”.  It has got to be the absolute dumbest, over-hyped over-teched excercise in grunt hostility ever conceived of. 

Football is a drain on our country, most especially at the school level.  The stupidest redneck jock in your entire school was typically on the team, a team funded likely through deep cuts in drama, music, art, debate and every other possible extracurricular venue available.  Schools that can’t afford textbooks nevertheless pump hundreds of thousands into outdoor stadiums to train the home team.

Think back to your High School Football Coach.  If you were like me, and went to a school that glorified the sport even more than conceivable, there were actually three coaches.  Each of them an asshole of an asshole, trumping even each other in dickish clipboard-toting self-importance.

Football takes the dumbest, largest idiots in the whole academic system and ensconces them firmly on pedastals to be admired and cheered for.  These miscreants have their coaches massage and pressure true academics, teachers beholden to a system of self-serving “school pride” to go easy on the grades and ignore absence.  School, a social environment which should function as a meritocracy, instead functions as a duracracy - rule by the physically strong.

Men, unidentifiable within their facemasks, bulky from the weight of their shoulder pads, padding, equipment just shy of light body armor, line in formation as an oblong brown sack is hurled through the air.  The hulking masses drive into one another, panting and huffing, attempting to defend the one guy on their team selected for agility rather than actual strength.  The agile one attempts to run past the clash, trotting at full speed down a vast green rectangle towards his objective.

In the interim, there are ridiculous rules and tenets which must be obeyed, such as knees and the ground, ground gained, timing and not to mention the strange rules of off-sides and “the punt”.  All of this is to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that our retards are bigger and stronger than your retards.  Despite the wholesale and outright trading of hulking retards from team to team at the professional level.

I’ve never actually managed to figure out why someone roots for a particular team in football.  “I’m from there!”  Yes.  And?  None of the guys playing on your team are from where you are from.  Even the more pastoral Basketball has the same team pride, but do these people literally think the Swahili 8′ footer Minut Bol gives a shit about your quaint little American city?  Something to be proud of, right?

The worst is the announcers.  Madden has absolutely lost his mind.  Listening to him talk is like listening to someone try to explain to a comatose person the legal ramifications of a fixed term life insurance policy.  His baby words aren’t the result of talking down to the audience for all these years, but rather having been a coach responsible for the administration of reta…football players.

I don’t get the pride aspect of it, and I suppose that’s why I don’t get “it” at all.  What’s the point of cheering if it doesn’t matter which team wins, since they are essentially all the same?  There are color differences on the uniforms, and the mascots are certainly varied, but the players don’t vary drastically from big and dumb to big and dumber.  Or fast and dumb, in the case of the quarterback.

I don’t actually know of anything else my fellow countrymen invest with such wild emotional abandon that equates to the success or failure of a particular team.  What precisely is the fan’s stake in either outcome?  The team isn’t going to dissolve.  There isn’t some horrible fate that awaits the losing team.  So you lost.  Big whoop.  GENERIC TEAM A lost against GENERIC TEAM B.  The Muskrats beat out the Potato Shuckers because their dudes were bigger and more retarded.  Gosh darn it, but oh well.

Don’t talk to me about skill.  There is no skill involved.  EA itself has proven this through approximately 900 or so Madden 199X/200X games.  Hey, guess what.  The rules of the game haven’t changed in several decades.  The latest EA Madden experience isn’t going to be that difficult from any other EA Madden experience.  And playing it involves no greater skill than rote memorization of which of the gorillas available are bigger and more retarded than the ones you are going up against. 

“Plays” don’t matter either by any mathematical account.  You may as well be playing blackjack or poker, you’ve got the same chance to analyze and counter the opponent.  Ultimately, I firmly believe it is the same mentally atrophic inclination that makes football enthusiasts fans makes people addicted to The Weather Channel.  91 degress in Phoenix today, hoo boy, that’ll be a scorcher.  *click*

Tuesday, January 27th, 2009

Real Estate Rage

I desperately need to rant about the first-time homebuyers experience that I’m going through at the moment.  Sweet jesus, and I thought the Health Insurance industry was arcane and obtuse.

Finding the perfect house is an excercise in mental endurance.  Currently, we rent in a city called Melbourne in Central Florida on what is known as the Space Coast.  Melbourne is a suburban area situated between a vast bedroom community called Palm Bay, and the rich golf-course riddled region of former grazing land known as Viera.  Our initial forays into home searches kept us glued to the Palm Bay area, where it appears developers may have created more homes than actual people to live in them.  We were nearly ready to close on a home in Palm Bay when Forbes released an article saying with no uncertainty that the area known as Palm Bay was going to experience a solid 41% drop in value by the end of 2010.  Holy crap.

Now, I can’t tell you how many homes we looked at that could have been “it”.  Our real estate agent has served somewhat as a sherpa in the frozen wasteland of foreclosures.  Oftentimes we would stumble upon a beautiful looking mansion, priced at the cost of a Big Mac, only to find out it was in fact classified as a “short sale”.  Short sales, for those uninitiated, means that the owner can’t pay anymore and is trying to sell the house at a price worth less than they bought it for.  It requires the aloof approval of a bank to do so, and there are usually a half-dozen agents, brokers and inboxes the deal must go through in order to move at all.  Short Sale is synonymous with “fishin’ for offers”, as unscrupulous brokers attempt to incite bidding wars by starting at outrageous lowball offers, the bank as owner remaining clueless to the tactic.  Short sales can go on for half a year without coming to a close, and usually end in tears on all sides, with a big fat Foreclosure.

Brevard County is riddled with short sales.  They are a plague upon this land.

The MLS, or multiple listing system, an online catalogue of available real estate in the area displays a set quantity of features for prospective homebuyers.  The advanced features are not available to regular users, rather, they rely upon the technical proficiency of the Agent you are fortunate or misfortunate enough to have.  Ours has had decades of experience, invaluable yes, but he is somehow certain that his fandangled cellphone operates on microwave power.

The contract to buy is riddled with possibly ten to twenty potential epic screws to the buyer.  If we don’t close on X date, you get to pay $160 per day until we do.  Property is As-Is, hope your inspector checks the walls in the back bathroom!  Seller can terminate at any time they like, buyer must consign $1,000 of his own money in good faith as well as several drops of blood to be used in retalitory black magic as a sympathetic link in the case of a breach.  A good 20-30 pages of “Seller can do no wrong.  If Buyer blinks out of order, we’ll sue him senseless.”

Then you get to figure out what to offer.  What’s an insult, what’s not?  How many times can one counter before going insane?  Can you counter a counter that has been countered?  If you do, seller has to agree again, even if they counter.  If you counter, you are obligated to fulfill that counter.  If seller counters, you accept, then seller has to accept.   But if you counter and seller accepts, then you have already accepted and cannot counter your counter.

And then there’s the money.  If you offered $160k, and surprisingly they accept, the agent and the mortgage rep will sit you down and go over a fun little check list of things you get to buy.  First up, the downpayment.  FHA fixed rate 5.7% 30/yr minimum downpayment is 3.5%, so your loan amount is actually 154k and you get to pay $5,600 cash.  But there’s also PIM and MIP, which is $1,200.  And tax docs which runs $400.  Also millage which for you is 15.27% or $3600 per year non-homestead, paid in arrears.  Let’s not forget that if you move in on the 15th, you’ve got 15 days to pay of interest at $20/day so that’s $300, plus a home inspector at $120, termite inspection at $80, FHA inspector who is seperate is $50, and there’s doc stamps on the dollar, which is 2.25% so that’s roughly $2,000.  Oh, and a Loan Origination Fee, usually 1%, so $1544, and the Underwriting Fee at $495.  Then there’s your Earnest Money Down at $1,000 and title insurance at $1150.

All told, it’s about $15,000 in taxes, junk fees, “why the hell not” charges.  And the fun thing about it is how they are itemized to specifically prevent a thrifty buyer from shopping around.  Think that 5.7% was a bit high?  Check with Mr. Mortgage Broker down the road.  He’ll give you 5.0% and a grin, with a giant sack of hidden last minute fees tucked behind his back.

It is eminently clear to me now why the real estate business in this country has gone so belly up.  The general practices and procedures are organized in such an exclusionary way as to almost make a priesthood of the Agents and Lenders.  Their own language, rife with acronyms like ARM and PIM, overflowing with words like ammortization and lis pendens.  The entire system seems orchestrated to mercilessly screw the consumer in every way possible.

Friday, January 23rd, 2009

UO’s Aging Population

It is remarkably telling that at current, on one of the most populated shards in Ultima Online, a 1st Year Veteran reward is equivalent to an 8th Year Veteran reward in cost. 

Meaning, the average account age falls roughly within a 5-6 year mark.  So few new accounts exist that it makes selection of a 1st year veteran award prohibitive for marketability, reducing supply and increasing demand. 

Wednesday, December 24th, 2008

A Look Back at 2008

So I’m sitting here chewing on a Mrs. Prindable’s candy covered apple that the mother in-law sent down, and I’m thinking, this has been quite a year.  I don’t think I’ve the energy for a retrospective at this point, but I’m remarkably thankful this year came and went.  Talk about change.  For me, things went from being the worst they’ve ever been to the absolute best they have ever been this year.

This year, I had the opportunity to move back to the black hole that is Brevard County, and I lept at the chance.  At the time, it felt more like a forced choice than a conscious one, but in retrospect it was a choice I really wanted to make.  Before he died, my grandfather tasked me with keeping my family from falling apart, as his had when his parents died.  Proximity is everything when it comes to family, and I’ve transitioned into the role of keeper, patriarch-in-training.  I have a feeling that’s probably why Pop forced me to carve the turkey the last few years before he passed away.

Being close to my brother has also been important this year, as he went through a divorce after being married for something like 8 years.  I feel that he is a better person and certainly happier being out of a destructive one-way relationship.  I’m glad that he’s around, there’s a comradery we share that went lost during our later formative years that has returned.  We’ve dabbled with being roommates earlier in the year, and it was successful enough an experiment that he’s going to move in with us.

This was also the year I got married.  It isn’t legal as far as the laws of this state go, but it is as real and bonafide as ever marriages ever have been.  It is a comfort to finally be able to answer the pesky question “Is there someone out there perfect for me?” with a definitive “Yup.”  The whole “better half” thing took some getting used to this year, and lord help me I still struggle with pronouns.  Our instead of My.  We instead of Me.  Anyone who knew me beforehand would likely find it amazing that I was able to get over a raging fear of intimacy and defensive pomposity to let someone closer than arm’s length, but fate and love wins out.  I was always afraid of becoming a “They”, but as of this year, I am content to bask in the warm glow of codependency.

Which, I think, has altered me somewhat.  In least in respect to my friends.  Great segueway into the friends retrospective, they are the second point of reason I moved back to Florida.  Friends, the very hint of their existence provides a support structure that doesn’t exist otherwise.  Flat tire on the freeway, eviction notices, and boring Sunday nights are all potential disasters that friends provide insurance against.  I make friends SLOWLY, and I make them for life.  Jay and Dan may not be aware, but they are in large part why I moved back.  Same goes for Dean, Andy, Kevin and even Nat.  Friends are the bulwarks we build against horror and calamity, brothers and sisters that we get to pick and commiserate with.

Career-wise, this was a weird year.  It started decently enough, with the continuance of the historically troubling doubling of my salary couched in a fleeting disaster.  My first year working remotely, and I am truly spoiled to the concept.  I have never gotten more work done in a day’s time than in the earlier months this year in VMK.  With no interoffice politics, I can get crazy amounts of work done.  No stupid producers leaning in my office doorway talking mindlessly about patching and the latest problems with the publisher.  If it’s important, it goes in a bloody e-mail and I action it.  I’m tempted to keep the community growth percentages I achieved in VMK a secret, as there’s only a handful of other remote-style CM/Director level types in the industry now.  Hah!  That would SO TOTALLY explain Eve Online!  Holy crap!

Moving on though, closing that damned game was… eh.  Traumatizing?  It was emotional, that’s for sure.  I’m just glad I was able to help most of my employees find work before the end.  And I’m also pleased that the community continues to survive in some fashion in another virtual world.  That really makes it worthwhile to me, that promise of continuance.  I chalk the whole experience up to providence.  The past few months have been weird.  Moments of boredom in the limbo of being on retainer punctuated by spurts of community creation.  Working on the genetic code of a new international online community is thrilling, but the continued unsatisfied anticipation is SO damned anticlimactic.  Previously, I’ve only been the symphony conductor, stabbing my wand this way and that to build crescendo and pace the rhythm, but now I’m writing the effin’ sheet music.  It’s slow going, but I expect the reward will be intoxicating.

Also in 2008, I found myself becoming more political than ever.  I got involved in a local campaign to replace the Sheriff, which ultimately failed, but not before I culled what lessons I needed from it.  Obama gave me hope, and I’m eager for the change.  I’m also willing to become the change I wish to see in the world, as the old quote goes.  After looking at the numbers and seeing the abysmal selection of candidates during the primaries this year, I decided that in 2010 I would attempt a run at Congress.  Seriously.  I’m going to give it a shot.  Sure, it’ll be state level.  Likely Representative, but I haven’t ruled out State Senator.  After looking at some of these other jackasses and absolute buffoons making a run for it, why the hell not!

So that’s it for my look back.  Later if I have time, I’ll go over the games that came and went.  Tootles!

Monday, December 15th, 2008

UO: Sosarian Setbacks

Ultima Online has failed me for the last time.

Over the years, I have, for the most part, kept my tongue about the fickle and aged mistress that is UO.  I’ve defended it as the rightful progenitor of the MMO, espoused the replayability of its brittle, but ancient interface and I’ve even gone to such lengths as to interpret the core religion of its imaginary world into a practical ethos for handling communities.  At this point though, I’m essentially done.

For a long, long time, the UO design team has been excruciatingly tunnel-visioned.  So much energy and effort has been expended on rewriting and updating the user client, each effort has failed MISERABLY and CONTINUES TO FAIL.  Third Dawn.  Kingdom Reborn.  And soon, Stygian Abyss.  I can’t even begin to imagine the kinds of discussion that goes on amongst the design and production teams when discussion of building a new client is broached.

“Hey, let’s build a new client.”

“Oh, like the last several ones we did that were epic failures where the overwhelming majority of players continued using the legacy client and we were forced into maintaining multiple codebases for art resources?”

“Yeah, let’s do that again a few more times.”

“Sounds good.”

This infinite ad naseum pattern of blinding stupidity is only trumped by the barebones, skeletal committment they’ve had to their “live team”.  They’ve touted “Live Events” for a few years now, which are essentially the most miserably assembled pieces of scripted crap you’d likely ever see in a virtual world.  There are communes of furries in Second Life who can and HAVE directed better, more immersive events in one-eighth the time it has taken this distended, bloated carcass of a “team” to hoist into Sosaria.

Let me scream something very pertinent at any who might dare brave the depths of design or live events for an MMO in the near future:

COLLECTING TRASH ITEMS TO TURN IN FOR POINTS IN A CONVOLUTED REWARDS SYSTEM DOES NOT COUNT AS IMMERSIVE OR ENGAGING GAMEPLAY TO ANYONE, EVER.  And for that matter, doing it six or seven ways, ultimately tying a “grand master plot” that has been “professionally written” to a SPRING CLEANING DATABASE OPTIMIZATION SCHEME does not equate what most would consider prime fiction. 

At current, Ultima Online is in the midst of what has been called the “Warriors of Destiny” arc of prime fiction.  This is actually touted as a Feature on the Stygian Abyss website, as though you might actually find something relating to the six or seven paragraphs of poorly written lore in the actual game.  Alas, no such luck.  For those unfortunate ”active” players, you’ll have to wait a conservative 6-8 months for the next stage of development in the storyline, because, well, that’s how long it will take the design team to figure out that one problem with the special effect that functions as a roadblock to every other possible road to storyline continuance.

Moreover, and this is where I really napalm the bridge… EA/Mythic’s dedication to community has, let us say… waned substantially since the departure of the iconic Sanya Weathers.  After bringing on Robert “Bob” Mull, (who, if you haven’t heard of, don’t worry, no one else has either), community for EA/Mythic seems to have become merely a worrisome afterthought. 

Here, let me link you to the official UO forums to show you.

Oops, they don’t actually exist.  Well, maybe the official forums of UO’s more popular, younger sister Warhammer will shed some light on the direction the community has taken.  Ah, oops.  My bad.  They don’t exist.  As a subscriber to both games, I’m SURE GLAD I have a line of communication in case something (massive lag) happens to (balance issues) go unnoticed (housing bugs) by the skeletal live team.

As of this writing, due to layoffs at EA, UO and Warhammer are splitting a Community Manager.  Now, I may just be playing the part of the typical UOer that hates change and misses the good old days, but I don’t quite get the impression that the new person… entirely… knows what UO is or is about.  After having been CM for Star Wars Galaxies, I do realize the blazing irony of this statement - but at least I gave it a good college try, damnit.

This brings me to the Event Moderator program.  I’m a staunch advocate of live, hosted events in-game.  Their value cannot be overstated, and I will champion the creation of an events team in whatever project I work on until I go to my grave.  I’ve seen the kinds of growth they can bring, and it’s absolutely undoubtedly worth it, every time.  The UO EM program, however, has a fundamental flaw and a deep curse that is going to doom it to yet another fizzled out failure.

The problem isn’t the people - the problem is hierarchical.  The previous EM program lacked dedicated support and any semblance of leadership.  It was essentially a pocket arm of customer service, run by a single GM who was daily driven mad by a dozen unique requests AND tasked with tracking.  Now, as I understand it, the EM program is to be answerable to production (god help us), with the same tunnel-visioned miscreants responsible for Live Events steering the ship.  It will still lack leadership, any qualitative control or examples, and most likely the raging mediocre of the assembled team will be rewarded for their immersive minimalism.

Haha.  Hoo boy.  Sorry, I laugh because while they announced openings back in November, I’m betting no one even sees an EM until late February, if even then.  They’ll cite legality, but really it will be the simple politics of the mildly interested.

In the interim, it would appear the new designer Sakkarah hasn’t burnt out or jaded yet, and she’s become a single-woman content factory for the game.  That provides some hope, but lordy, I have to say, it’s just not enough.  Mages still wear armor.  Mages don’t wear leather armor, guys.  They just don’t.  They wear robes.  It’s December, where’s the snow tileset that everyone loved?  Turn that on, would you?  For the love of god, decorate some of those hideous rooms you’ve taken screenshots of on the Stygian Abyss website.  There are trailer-park houses in Malas with more eye-candy than those things.

I’m cancelling my Warhammer account.  I’ve promised too many people that I’ll be in Sosaria till they turn out the lights to cancel UO, but for the first time in a long time I am very sorely tempted.

Monday, December 8th, 2008

Death to the Big Three

Back from the honeymoon cruise!  It was way too much fun.  Those Norwegians sure as hell know how to have fun on a boat.  *boong!* “Theese eez your Captain spee-kink.”  I’ve got a fair number of cool stories to tell about the trip, but that’ll come later.

So, uhh, about this bailout stuff.  Am I the only one content to let these multi-billion dollar corporate criminal conglomerates writhe and explode?  As a taxpayer, I unequivocally do not want my money going to some stop-gap measure to fund the furtherance of retarded, wasteful, gigantic American cars.  The “big three” are the same big three that made the SUV one of the most popular gas-guzzling monstrosities, and I have to dodge screeching soccer moms on cellphones in their SUVs everytime I venture out of my suburban hidey hole.

Has Ford actually made anything lately that wasn’t a big ass truck?  Have you actually seen the F250 on the road?  Usually they are driven by testosterone-ladden rednecks with little to no actual towing necessity short of a jaunt to the local Walmart.  I saw one of these CEOs on CNN the other day who actually had the gall to mention the EV-1 as part and parcel of the failings of the car companies.  The EV-1 was a fully functional completely electric car that one of the big three put together.  They killed it mercilessly despite owners going to almost criminal lengths to try and hang on to them.  This was like 10 years ago.  Then they claimed “lack of interest” in cancelling production.

I don’t care how many millions of jobs are lost.  I don’t care whether or not Detroit is wiped off the face of the planet as a result.  The auto manufacturers of this country have been culpable in nearly every possible worst way at aggitating not only our addiction to oil, but resistant to safety concerns and environmental standards.  They need to die and be reborn as something modern.  Maybe the ultra-billions the pansy-ass Democratic leadership in Congress right now are wringing their hands over should go as full grant subsidization of fuel cell or wholly electric cars.

Thursday, November 27th, 2008

Test of Taste

I figured out a foolproof method of determining whether or not someone has horrible taste.

1. Do you like movies with the actor Jason Statham starring as a lead role?

A. Yes.

B. No.

If you answered “Yes”, then you can rest easy, as you have absolutely no taste whatsoever.  Jason Statham is the most horrifyingly bad thing to happen to cinema since J.J. Abrams crawled out of the ocean with a god damned shakey cam and cgi rig.  I hate Jason Statham with an unbridled passion.

Why, I hear you ask?  The accent.  If you discard the fact that he has “starred” in row after row of formulaic action thriller drek, somehow PRETENDING to be a sex symbol, the accent stands out as the most hideous grating thing I’ve ever had the displeasure to aurally receive.  Normally, I love English accents.  Posh, Cockney, West Country, Scouse, hell, even Welsh with its ninety-five useless “L’s”.  But whatever the hell Statham is spitting out of his face I do not like.

When Statham talks, it…it sounds like someone gave the voice actor of the recent Beowulf a peanut butter sandwich with razor blades in it.  “MAOIH nayme is Chefv CHAYE-oss.”  Try saying that with your mouth displaying as many possible teeth as you can while uttering the syllables and you’ve pretty much got it down, except for the unjustified confidence that borders on the Kevin Federline side of things.  Ugh.

Wednesday, November 26th, 2008

The Heterosexual Questionnaire

Saw this and just had to add it here.  This questionnaire was created back in 1972 to put heterosexual folks in the shoes of gay folks for a brief moment.  Many questions and assumptions about gays that are unfair are reversed in this and asked instead to a hypothetical straight person.

1. What do you think caused your heterosexuality?

2. When and where did you decide you were a heterosexual?

3. Is it possible this is just a phase and you will out grow it?

4. Is it possible that your sexual orientation has stemmed from a neurotic fear of others of the same sex?

5. Do your parents know you are straight? Do your friends know?  How did they react?

6. If you have never slept with a person of the same sex, is it just possible that all you need is a good gay lover?

7. Why do you insist on flaunting your heterosexuality… can’t you just be who you are and keep it quiet?

8. Why do heterosexuals place so much emphasis on sex?

9. Why do heterosexuals try to recruit others into this lifestyle?

10. A disproportionate majority of child molesters are heterosexual… Do you consider it safe to expose children to heterosexual teachers?

11. Just what do men and women do in bed together? How can they truly know how to please each other, being so anatomically different?

12. With all the societal support marriage receives, the divorce rate is spiraling. Why are there so few stable relationships among heterosexuals?

13. How can you become a whole person if you limit yourself to compulsive, exclusive heterosexuality?

14. Considering the menace of overpopulation, how could the human race survive if everyone were heterosexual?

15. Could you trust a heterosexual therapist to be objective? Don’t you feel that he or she might be inclined to influence you in the direction of his or her leanings?

16. There seem to very few happy heterosexuals. Techniques have been developed that might enable you to change if you really want to.  Would you be willing to give such a thing a chance?

17. Have you considered trying aversion therapy?

Friday, November 21st, 2008

Quick Review

Quick review - after playing this game, I absolutely must recommend it to everyone.  World of Goo is so damned elegant, there aren’t any comparisons short of Portal.  Best game I’ve played this year so far.  Five freaking stars.  The music is wonderful, the art style is something out of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, the puzzles are ingenius, and the narrative is a smattering of dark humor.  This is a gem of a game and not to be missed.