Play relevant month: Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon

There's not many games or releases or concepts I get hyped for. We live in something of a two pronged gamer assault world now - God, what does that sentence even mean - somewhere between the shitpipe that is early access and the other, shittier pipe that is triple A hype machines. We are constantly being blasted on the two sides of our faces. Yet games are largely all about the same level of quality, with a few stand out gems, but most are "fine" or even "fun but flawed". Yeah there's a couple really obvious stinkers, but usually if you don't like a game in this day and age it has more to do with genre and intent. So why get excited? There's going to be 2-3 more entries in that genre, that very year, in case you don't like a given individual game.

But Blood Dragon ... Well, for one, I had zero excitement for Far Cry 3 itself. The only excitement I get from Far Cry games is when I forget they're not Crysis sequels or whatever, but then, I wouldn't even get that now that Crysis 3 was the joke it was. However you take a brand new engine like Far Cry 3 and you commit to giving a DLC pack with some far out 80s action, I'm going to take notice. That first trailer really sells the idea. Then you announce it's going to be a cheap standalone attempt at a more experimental style of game? I won't lie, my ears perked up. Admittedly, the experimental side of Blood Dragon lies in the less than mainstream or at least less than modern mainstream because that really is quite the hammy 80s production. Or a 2013 production through the eyes of being an 80s production? Layers and layers of obscured tropes here son. It's cyber-boots on a human skull all the way down to the turtles here.

The actual resultant game almost has a sense of meta awareness to it, a box inside a box feeling of both playing and the game itself. It's petulant and juvenile on both levels, with weird quirkness that extends beyond the Play button on Steam. There is also this odd rub of being almost a truly indie production, with odd little problems and screw ups in design that surprise you given the pedigree of both the studio and the core title this one is based off. I mean I've read Far Cry 3 has terrible, terrible writing but I never heard anything about it being a bad game from a design stand point.

It's also sort of weird in that Blood Dragon almost feels intentionally mediocre at the start, luring you in with a rather bleh starting point then - When you stop expecting anything awesome to come out of the lumpy beginning and the oddities of uplay - actually gets really, really good. At everything. All of the things. And the voice actor is a wizard.

Of bad ass.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Gravi

Puzzle, or more specifically torture platformers are not "for me". I take some solace in the fact that they're not really for most people, though there is a very vocal minority who clamour about them and I guess buy them. So I'm willing to admit, Gravi isn't for me but in spite of that it's actually still pretty neat. I don't mean that in the sense of They Bleed Pixels, though I guess mechanically it was pretty cool too. I mean Gravi is a neat take on a puzzle platformer that uses different mechanics as opposed to adding different mechanics on top of the base.

Gravi, which is also the main character, can not jump. Instead he can project matter onto surfaces, and that matter (depending on the size of the projectile) will attract him. There are two different projectile settings, either shooting a fifth of his load at a time, or all of it at once, which changes the range of the attraction as well as shrinking Gravi. Sometimes you want to be smaller, and sometimes abruptly becoming too big will kill you as well.

In other words Gravi isn't based on pixel perfect jumping, it's based on looser physics based trick shots and has an odd feeling to it that almost feels like playing pool, but with jumping puzzles? It's hard to articulate the exact strange feeling of the game, and while the difficulty isn't exactly level it fits in with the strangeness. It's mechanically different and while physics based puzzles have been a thing for a long time it's just its own sort of weird I guess. Also, Gravi doesn't adhere strictly to being a puzzle platformer - Sometimes a set of hazards are to be overcome with slapdashing forward, or precise timing, or a mix of all three, which creates a looser feeling in my mind that helps keep the "torture" platformer feeling from setting in. It's not always that you're failing the jump by two pixels, it's sometimes that you haven't figured out what you want to do and sometimes you need to let go, jam the directional stick forward and just blind luck your way through.

However, while I was hoping to get through a decent chunk of the game before just writing it off, Gravi is ultimately just another torture platformer, albeit it does have its own sense of flow and style that makes it a bit more interesting for a while. I eventually brick walled and received an achievement for dying too many times, which just prompted me to close, then uninstall, the game. Torture platformers have an element where you can tell the level development just went through a process of adding spikes or other hazards hap-hazardously and willy nilly to "increase the challenge". The problem is, honestly, you play torture platformers to overcome the difficult moments. No one is going to feel a sense of accomplishment over not twitching 2 pixels too far to the left and dying at a point the developer just randomly slapped some spikes onto "because um spikes go in torture platformers hurk". It's just brain dead design.

The game is pretty charming for a while, and as you can tell, I got a good hour of chillout gaming from it before it just spike walled me off from the rest of the content. While I know I'm not the target audience, having realized somewhere between They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters that PC platformers aren't for me, I'm actually not sure how good this game is as a torture platformer. The controls are weird and loose, and while the music is fantastic the graphics are a bit unnecessarily drab, which doesn't make for a great presentation. It is physics based, and while that's neat in places, Gravi is kinda hard to control at times which may turn off fans of the genre. Without that I'm somewhat at a loss as to who this game is aimed at.

I also had a lot of issues with Gravi's hit box, which feels oddly shaped, and several of the pinpoint movement sections seemed to kill him out of hand. I also couldn't tell if shrinking reduced his hitbox. The screenshot on the right is where I gave up on the game, and while I experimented with using the size changing and different mass shots to try to squeeze past, I couldn't determine if I was messing up the precision jump or if I needed to be smaller. Because I died most often to the incidental shit around it, I couldn't nail it down and just ended up getting sick of the sloppy controls then deleting the game. I don't think this is how puzzle platformers are supposed to work and like I said, it just feels like brain dead design.

I don't mind dying a hundred times to a challenging part. I'm not going to enjoy it, but I don't mind it conceptually. I do mind dying 80 times to incidental garbage for no reason to get 20 decent attempts on the jump. So, like I said, I'm not sure who wants to play this and I'm not sure a game that could have been a sweet chill out title didn't lean back a little on the stupider pinpoint precision jumping puzzles.

I got Gravi through a groupees greenlight bundle. The soundtrack is really good.

Steam Sale!

The holiday Steam sale starts a few hours, at 1am EST or 10pm PST, or at least so everything seems to point to. I wrote a detailed analysis of how sales work here but for the sake of brevity in a time of crisis I'll go over the five simple rules to steam sale by. Also, I'm not going to talk about amazon or gamersgate or whatever else. They all have sales too.

1. Don't just look at the front page - Almost everything is on sale.

2. Don't buy things unless they're a flash, daily or vote deal!

3. Exception to 2: Unless the sale is almost over, since maybe it won't get a daily deal. The larger catalogue sales often end the day before the end of the sale, and because of repetition they probably already had a flash or daily sale if they were ever going to.

4. There will be a metagame, it looks like it's about the same as last summer - snow globes to make into badges. If it's anything like last sale, sell them right quick, because their prices tumbled and never recovered. You can finish the holiday stuff at the end for a quarter what it costs at the start.

Granted I might be wrong, but I doubt it.

5. When you go to buy something, ask yourself "Am I going to play this in the next six months?" Remember - stuff goes on sale over and over again. It's not a one time thing.

Now if you'll excuse me I have a sobbing wallet, already beaten and bruised from Christmas shopping, to prepare for sale time. Don't worry boy, this year I sold cards all year to get ready, so it won't hurt so bad.

Also if you have a SA account, feel here to join the ongoing sale thread here!

Play Relevant Month: Call of Juarez Gunslinger

Cowboys, conceptually, are not a style I particularly feel overmuch affection for. I'm not a big fan of pistols or duels or anything of the like, or ridiculous hats measured in gallons, but I do consider the Old West environments a thing of beauty. I didn't quite recollect this here thought until I fired up this game and thought my goodness, this here is a pretty gosh darn title.

But no seriously, there really isn't enough variety in the art styles of modern gaming, when you consider how immensely varied the world around us actually is. Think about all the backgrounds and ideas you could do, then thing how similar most shooters or platforming games are to each other. CoJ:Gunslinger, or just Gunslinger for short from here on in, is one of those under-appreciated motifs in action. Even from the get go I have to say I love the stylistic variety, chickens running around, bright red bandanas, dried yellow grass against the blue sky, old wood hammered together - It's gritty and not especially pretty by any stretch of the imagination, but it's different and man shooters could use a great deal more different.

Gunslinger also reminds me, as anyone with half functioning brain will probably note, a great deal of Bastion in its good ways - A slick narrator chatters through much of the game and improves the experience immensely. Narration has always had an odd transition - It's so awful in movies, but it's so underused in games. I really like the narrator in Bastion and I really like the narrator here. Especially since the narrator isn't just concealing the story from you to lead you playing forward, he's an unreliable old chap who has had a couple to drink.

And who wouldn't enjoy a story as told by an old drunk cowboy?

Better than expected: Sacred Citadel

I picked up Sacred Citadel for less than a dollar when I grabbed the Deep Silver Humble Bundle. The game was recently released, but also didn't review especially well and I guess was considered something of a right off by the publisher for it to be slammed into the bundle. (right off? write off? Am I making a pun? Yes, unless you hate puns, then gosh no that's a typo) The bundle also had like, Risen 2 which I am willing to try for a dollar, and Sacred 2 which I've heard is actually pretty ok? So Sacred Citadel was just some like, throwaway 60~ metacritic game I almost didn't bother to even add to my steam list. But I did, since you get XP for your steam level and blah blah the metagame.

Sacred Citadel is a brawler, standard 2d style. I haven't played a brawler in a couple years, other than trying out Golden Axe on an emulator and finding it a bit too stiff to be enjoyable. Sacred Citadel is, I think, very close to Golden Axe, other than having what I imagine are more recent innovations to the genre. I am fully aware "more recent" can extend back something like twenty years here, yes sir.

In terms of presentation Sacred Citadel kinda surprised me out of the gate with its music. The music and game sounds are actually quite good, nothing too epic but suitably catchy to mix in with the gameplay. The art style as well is quite pleasing, it's very rounded and simple, but I'm a massive fan of 2d sprite style work and this is one of the nicest. I can understand that this is a matter of my subjective tastes, but when I'm playing a relaxing pick up game I like the screen to feel comfortable and visually simplistic.

There's lots of variety in the visuals as well - the game takes place across quite a few different landscapes, although they are mostly just a level plane with a pretty background, you do see some set pieces and the odd bit of jumping puzzle. The game also has a sense of humor and isn't some serious production, with a campy goofiness to it that definitely works with the art style and the game's status as a punchy brawler. If you want to just pick up a game to play for 5-10 minutes, I think Sacred Citadel does a pretty solid job of being a light hearted murdering spree. Some of the enemy designs are really creative and neat to watch in action, lots of personality in the art style.

Combat is - And now we get into the downsides - Pretty hit or miss. The controls are very simple and on the most part quite responsive, but your character can feel a bit floaty. For one, a button mash issues a combo, and your character (to the best of my knowledge, I only tried out two) doesn't really seem to care if there's anything to hit. As with many games the developers decided your character wants to move with the button mash sometimes, so you end up wondering where the idiot is going when you come out of a dodge roll and turn the wrong direction. The other issue is that enemies tend to knock you around nonstop, and you don't feel very steady on your feet. Enemies also have massive amounts of health as you get further into the game.

I don't really understand the appeal of being stunlocked all the time, so you end up feeling like you're supposed to dodge around and block a bunch. That's fine, but between the slightly off controls you end up with a great deal of wiggling around, not having fun. Enemies don't take well to being led, either, but then go down a bit too easy once they do. This might be a product of playing a Shaman, who is a light looking lass in a pink leotard. I don't know, because the last time I switched characters, it reset my other character and I don't plan on going back through the game with everyone if I can't level them in parallel. No idea why this is missing, maybe it isn't, but I can't figure out how I reset my ranger otherwise.

Regardless - Enemies have way too much health for this, probably as a component of the leveling system but I've found in some boss fights I end up fighting the added spawns what feels like nonstop, since you can't really get in to punch them down in the middle of also dodging a boss. There's also a couple enemy attacks that just shouldn't be in the game - one of the act 3 enemies yells and tosses a grenade into the air. It doesn't do much damage I don't believe, nor is it aimed at you all that well, but it's very hard to visually track in a busy screen and it knocks you down.Again, and again, and again. Especially when you're trying to focus on their caster bodies, who also knock you down...

Outside of stunlock, hit boxes are a little off on a couple enemies, and there's maybe too many lines of depth. Some aerial enemies can be oddly precise to hit while other foes are not. It lends a somewhat slapstick feel to the game and while it does sound nitpicky you need to bear in mind brawling is about all you do in this game. They really should have nailed down the feel of it. Getting knocked and bonked around the screen just doesn't work for me.

The voice acting in the game is outright terrible, though I'm not entirely sure that isn't intentional. It's very campy and silly, and the story is also pretty campy so maybe that's what they were going for. It doesn't bother me and I did chuckle here or there, so I'm not griping, just being level. The sound work is excellent however - hits sound solid, enemies chant and warble and everything has a bunch of wacky noises. I have no idea what the chant the orcs make it supposed to mean but they end up with way more personality than you'd expect.

Sacred Citadel also suffers a little for its RPG system - Which is to say, half of it is really obvious and cool. I'm totally good with gold, potions, gambling and loot. Those are all enjoyable things to put in a game! But there's some other stuff that the game doesn't really seem to want to explain. The B button on ye olden xboxen controller does some sort of special and I can not quickly determine which special I'm getting or what precisely some of them do.

I assume it's like golden axe where your special box picks what you do, but I'm not quite certain. There's also some sort of crystal system that does ... Something? I have no idea and it's completely unexplained in the in-game help files. Whether they're like materia or a temporary bonus or whatever, I have no idea and can't figure out how you even access them. (I actually googled it - Apparently, you just equip them and then they tick down whenever you're in combat. That's it. Why couldn't it just say that on screen? Is that hard to explain?)

You can argue it's probably documented somewhere, but shouldn't a brawler meant to be enjoyed with drunk friends be more or less an instant pick and play title? Seriously the one vendor offers you shit and doesn't say on the screen 'equipped and activated immediately, lasts for the duration giving a bonus for that time'. Like sure it's magic and she ain't gotta explain shit but ... No, no way, the game should explain itself.

Overall, Sacred Citadel doesn't hold tons of lasting appeal and is a pretty shallow title, but it looks nice and is easy to pick up and play. I think it's intended for a different sort of market - This would be a great game to fire up big picture mode and blast through an hour or so playing with buddies, maybe with some sort of drinking game involved. I think you only need one copy in that case, so it's probably worth grabbing on sale if you ever see yourself making use of that, but otherwise it isn't really as good a title as it should have been. There's real no reason to have every enemy in the game chain stunlock you and a bit more work on the "heft" of the gameplay would have really helped.

I wish more games were as easy on the eyes as Citadel, though. As 2d games go I haven't seen one so soothing in a while.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ether Vapour Remaster

Man, I just don't know. What makes for a good shmup anyway? I want to say visibility and slick design make for a good shmup, but maybe I'm totally wrong or I'm just super awful. Well no, I am super awful at shmups, but they (I think?) mostly fall into the domain of really twitchy "challenge" games like torture platformers where I am completely not the correct audience anymore.

This is actually the fourth shmup I've played in recent memory - I played Jamestown in 2011 and liked it, but I'm hesitant to spend a long time getting good at twitchy games when I have so many other, more rewarding games to play. Then I tried Syber Arcade, which I reviewed as "good but short", and after it Satazius. After hitting the play button for Satazius my headphones begin uttering a sound I would describe as the sonic hybrid of a cat hissing and a wood chipper being run through a blender. You can assemble and re-assemble that sentence however you'd prefer, but basically it sounds super insanely awful and I just didn't play that.

I'll come right out and say that I liked Syber Arcade more than I liked this game by a pretty big margin. Ether Vapour is visually just not very distinct, which can really get irritating when the screen is covered in crap, and relies much less on tactics and much more on rote memorization. I do enjoy the fact you have three different weapons, rather than an upgrade system, but the lack of an upgrade system always takes away from shmups for me. That's the child in me, sure, but the gradius system of ridiculous power ups as you can momentum in the game is just thrillingto me. The other thing is that the game gives you very little wiggle room in bursts of fire, which is very difficult to deal with and maybe I'm just shitty but it kinda feels like I'm supposed to know better from replaying the game.

On top of that, enemies can be on other planes along any axis, meaning you can't hit them and it can be really difficult to quickly discern between a group that is, and a group that is not. Syder Arcade did this as well, but far less often and the art style there was more distinct. It just feels kind of messy and gross - enemies can be off your plane and firing at you, but you can't hit them back? It just strikes me as innately unfun. The one weapon allows you to 'lock on' and fire homing missiles, but this doesn't really have any intelligence in its targeting - You can shoot at enemies you can't fire on with other weapons, but it's only useful in boss fights since with multiple targets they seem to just shoot whatever you could hit normally anyway. The weapon also has lag in targeting and firing, which I just don't get. It seems to do less damage so it doesn't feel like it would be universally useful since enemies flood the screen if you don't kill them at a brisk pace.

The game allows you to turn on hit boxes, which is a great feature and it's amazing how tiny your hit box is compared to how big your ship's graphic is, but it isn't much help when you're avoiding enemy ships ramming into you. The effective area of the screen comes off as very, very small but also not very distinct. That lovely feeling of dodging and weaving between life threatening but very clear objects? Pretty rare, though it did crop up a little in the city level.

nice headband

Anyway, like I said, the graphics are a bit muddy and washed out, with plain backgrounds. The city level is just a blur of buildings going by. The buildings are grey. The enemy ships? Grey. The end result: Blargh, god I miss sprites. Watch someone play Blazing Star or any of the other Neo Geo shmups made when dinosaurs walked the Earth and yeesh. I know it's not all about graphics but this game looks like it could have been released before Shadow of the Beast, let alone a Neo Geo game. The audio is fine, the music the pretty usual fare. It does seem to stutter a little, and my system while being a year old and featuring a 460GTX is not at all below par. I don't really know if I'm just absolutely awful at shmups or if Ether Vapour is just entirely for another audience, but I didn't really care overly for the game. I'd settle into the groove for a bit, but it's hard to keep up with grey on grey on mushy grey then I'd die. There's also super anime as fuck story pages between levels, but I doubt it's going to do anything more than 'mysterious hero is mysterious, pew pew, bullets go into enemy FACE' so I turned that right off.

Frankly, maybe I'm just terrible at shmups, but what do I look back on playing other shmups recently as fun whereas this is just a chore?

Ether Vapour Remaster is the third game in a bundle I bought off Groupees for $2.25 that has cards. At this stage, I've actually profited on the exchange, which soothes the fact Satazius and Yatagarasu didn't really work. Dysfunctional Systems: Learning to Manage Chaos is such a sweet name for a game, though I don't think I'll ever get around to that one.

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Ring Runners Flight of the Sages

If you caught me on a good day, when my memory actually works and asked me which game from my childhood I wish I could play as a child again with all the full delight of childhood I wouldn't answer Baldur's Gate, Sonic the Hedgehog or Final Fantasy IV. I'd likely answer either Herzog Zwei or Inner Space. Inner Space is something of a rare gem, a cute little "indie" title that offered an experience that mixed many genres, but was more or less built around Star Control style action with a rogue star fighter sort of deal instead.

Ring Runners reminds me a great deal of Inner Space, which isn't too surprising given there's probably some shared DNA in their ancestry, though I'd be surprised if the developers or anyone on the planet besides me has ever heard of Inner Space.

Regardless, after an hour of playing Ring Runners I had escaped from some essentially unknown facility that was never explained, which explodes, given a good ship, lost the good ship and was then assigned to pick up garbage for a while. Then the garbage king arrived and, in the garbage ship, forced me to do battle in some sort of trash related gladiatorial games. I had previously turned down the difficulty to get through a mission that felt bizarrely out of sync with the game's earlier difficulty in the hopes I could figure out later what I was doing wrong, but couldn't turn it back up, so I was sort of thinking if I had to spend another five minutes doing garbage gladiatorial games I would probably fall asleep at the keyboard.

The gunning in the space ships stuff is amusing enough, though not great, but fighting people in an arena in a garbage collecting cruiser is just fundamentally not something I ever want to be doing on easy. Or at all, but on easy I'm being punished for not understanding the one mission. So I dug around the options and found no way to turn the difficulty back up, but did find out I was playing 'the tutorial'. I thought to myself, of course, it's using missions to explain to me the mechanics, but certainly this will open up a more interesting, Inner space like experience right? Let's just skip the tutorial.

And then it just started vomiting increasingly larger piles of dialogue at me until I closed the program - Actually, I alt-F4'd, since you're not allowed to close the ring selecting map screen that doesn't really make much sense to someone who skipped the tutorial because it involved fighting in a garbage ship. And yes, I'm blaming the developers for that. You get one mission with the goofy garbage collecting ship to explain the mechanic - Not three in a row!

Ring Runners looks like a game I would have enjoyed immensely as a 12 year old, but the writing is really wooden and the inertia based 2d ship combat even after an hour of playing just felt jarring and way too zoomed in. I swear I've played Star Control 2 (Ur-Quan Masters) recently, on a notebook keyboard no less, and I had way less difficulty with the controls in that game than this one. I understand that if you continue to apply thrust in a direction in zero gravity without anything to cause friction or what not around you, you'll eventually have to apply an equal amount of force to negate that inertia but that's not a fun gameplay mechanic. At least I think that's what they're going for when you spin your ship three hundred and sixty degrees, apply afterburners and still ram into an object. You actually do have air brakes in space but that just begs the question as to why flying is such a damn chore if you're going to follow physics some of the time?

Also there's just too many buttons. I had less buttons in UQM, but felt more in control of the ships I was flying.

Anyway, in conclusion, I played Ring Runners for an hour and found it interesting enough that I'm not griping about the play time but it really didn't grab me at all. Quite liked the music though, and some of the more peaceful bits were super zen. The game felt pretty good when I had the sweet ship at the start, but then it took it away, put me in a garbage scow and then ... Do I need to keep going? Why would you do this? Why would you program in a mission to collect garbage?

You can tell they really wanted to jam dialogue based on the length of the title. Just go with Ring Runners! What's a sage? No, never mind, I don't want to know.

What a Skill Tree: Path of Exile

This isn't really anything beyond a moderate depth look at Path of Exile simply because I don't quite have it in me to truly master another ARPG. I suppose if this were a Blizzard game, well, I'd have less issue claiming mastery - but PoE's gearing and skill set up system is an arcane mystery in its own right. Since PoE is innately free to play with a reasonable f2p model, I don't necessarily feel like a deeper review is fundamentally necessary regardless - If the game sounds interesting at first blush, why not give it a try? The only upfront cost is a 2.7 gigs (on steam) download, which should be reasonable for most.

I downloaded this primarily because I'd sort of considered it, discussed it with a friend and then he was like "hey you want to give it a try?" after it hit steam and again, why not, it's free. I can talk for ages about how different and wild legitimate f2p gaming is but really, there's just something to be said for this process being somehow both more and less enabling than buying software. Anyway, Path of Exile is an ARPG in the vein of Diablo 2. Like a true Diablo and/or Torchlight game, it apparently had a seven year development cycle. In many ways it tries to do one of two things: stay unreal close to its roots and then get as far away from them as possible.

At its core, as with all ARPGs, Path of Exile is a smashy/clicky  gameplay model. You hunt into the wilds for pants, using a variety of furious mouseclicks to get there then you acquire pants. In terms of its combat model, PoE feels much closer to Diablo 2 than Torchlight 2 - which is to say it's pretty nimble but not quite as zoomy fast as Torchlight 2. Combat is not as visceral either, but again, this ties it closer to Diablo 2 than its fellows. As such the core gameplay is very close and there's really not much I can say. It's akin to describing the word 'like' to someone who doesn't speak english - It's just too embedded in my sense of gaming. It's very solid as far as ARPGs go, feeling more responsive than Torchlight 2 except for issues of netcode which we'll get into.

Whatever else I'm going to go on about in this discussion, it's worth noting that Path of Exile is essentially and utterly a sequel to Diablo 2. It expands on the gameplay elements, but it carries so much of D2 throughout its DNA that you can straight up say - If you liked Diablo 2, and you're not a blizzard fanboy, you'll like this. I have encountered a couple weird opinions where people still in love with Blizzard just spew weird rationalizations at me for hating it.

I mean, don't get me wrong, there's still lots of things wrong with this game. But it shares almost all of them with Diablo 2 on the most part, so if you played hundreds of hours of that the only real excuse should be 'I think I've seen enough ARPGs for one life, thanks'.

The Secret to Success is Card Work: Syder Arcade

This is going to be a weird one just on the back of things not working out as expected. See, like many steam users, I've got too many games and many of those games come with cards. Cards are nice, since they sell for a dollar or two in total but they encourage me to idle games using a program that reports to steam the game is being played. But I like to lead a review with my play time and idling prevents that from being useful. And sometimes, I just don't really get grabbed by a game but I don't want to badmouth it either. It just goes on the back of the list.

Anyway the idea here was going to be - I would play a game til I got the card drops, then move onto a couple other titles with cards I probably won't get around to writing full reviews of. It's not as serious a process, but I could preface it as such! One problem: Syder Arcade appears to be too short to obtain all four of its card drops. I'm certainly willing to admit maybe I just missed a mode unlock or something, but eh, we'll get into it...

I have a real soft spot for side-scrolling shooty ship games and graphically this game is a joy to look at.  The engine is pretty smooth, the ships all look good, the characters (all four of them) look great during the little silly pseudo cutscenes and the enemy ship designs are visually pleasant. There's sort of a weirdness to how they seem to be two very distinct styles of design, but whatever I don't think thematic linking is all that necessary in a shmup. While I have a soft spot for spaceship bullet hell games I am not fundamentally any good at them - I might have been decent as a child, but I don't have the visual responsiveness necessary to be any good now. So I played through 'the campaign' on the 2nd up difficulty, which was a bit too easy in parts.

The art assets really shine on the HUD, it just looks quite nice to me and information comes readily. The game also does audio alerts and the announcer voiceovers are good, but not spammy. You fight some giant bug monster stuff and then descend to an ice planet, with a sort of mediocre boss fight...

Then, abruptly, the game just ... Ended? A little credit bit starts playing and one of my big issues with the game comes up - I can't quit the game! So it's just rolling along with these credits and I quickly tire of watching names, so I alt-f4 and flip through the campaign menu, realizing these are all just levels and not individual campaigns. Which is sort of a bummer. And seriously, I hit every button on my keyboard and gamepad. Is this an amiga reference? I have no idea.

The game does come with a survival mode, which I gave a couple tries to, but the fact of the matter is - to me anyway - the enemies are way too bullet spongey. So I'm basically focusing all of my efforts on dodging enemy fire, not really killing anything and then the screen is covered in enemy units. This works pretty nicely in the campaign since you end up dodging around against a limited number of foes, but in survival it reminds me of playing a RPG and wandering into a zone you're too low level to do. Just sitting there, plinking away ineffectively. Maybe that's something shmup lovers are big on, but it didn't work for me.

The music and audio clips are excellent - Well, I think one song wasn't so good, but I generally quite liked what was hitting my ears. The game also does this neat thing where you can flip directions and turn around, which is pretty neat in the campaign and again really unenjoyable in the survival stuff. Again I'm not sure if this is common as I haven't played so many shmups, but it's new to me.

So, to conclude, I liked the game and I was given it so I'm not fretting too much, but an hour of play time for $10 is probably too much. Maybe pick it up cheap, or maybe the devs will add some content later on? Hard to say and hard to recommend as such, but the complaint "there isn't enough" is not so bad a complaint when it ends with "because I wanted more!"

Scary Games Month: FEAR 2 is a game about diet cola beverages

Time for another horror game, as it is scary games month still, the even more bizarre sequel to the rather bizarre FEAR, which is an acronym for "First Encounter Assault Recon" which I guess works well enough. Fear 2 (there's no way I'm capitalizing every usage of the word Fear in here, I hope you don't mind) is sort of an odd sequel because Monolith sold then regained the rights to the Fear series somewhere within development, resulting in (supposedly) some of the oddities in the story. Regardless, the original is from 2005 while the sequel is from 2009, but I'm not entirely sure it looks it.

Fear is kinda noted for three different things: One, slow-mo bullet time! Hard Reset has some of this too but it's way better in Fear ie actually useful. I think bullet time was supposedly pretty common at about the original Fear's era of development but the mechanic has mostly fallen off. I kinda like the mechanic since it offers you another resource to ration out in combat, though I admit it's basically a pale shadow of the Crysis suit's tactical options. For those uninformed, during slow mo you move somewhat faster and enemies move much slower and you can toggle it on or off as you go.

Second, Fear is a little unusual in being a consistent running horror fps series. Most horror games are over the shoulder third person, or are less reliant on gunplay, which makes for an odd dynamic. I have to admit straight up that I didn't find the original Fear all that scary if at all as opposed to Doom 3 which did get me a little bit here or there. But I'll talk about that more later.

Third, Fear is notable for having a story that appears to have been crafted in the most bizarre, brainstorming think tanking flow of thought manner. And by that I mean the story has conceptually solid moments but upon reflection the combined narrative is less plot more shambling gestalt. The words "cohesive" and "consistent" are completely missing from Fear, with Fear 2 likely going even a step further since it's apparently the product of some odd IP losing and gaining process.

The original Fear centres on the adventures of THE POINTMAN, who over the course of the game is blah blah who cares. There's a couple twists but they're all so far from removed from a connective context that you blink at it then shrug. The plot also centres on ALMA, who is not ATMA, a little girl who has psychic powers and they never really explain much of this. The source of her powers, which are far closer to Warhammer 40k Chaos warper stuff than any vision of 'psychic' I've ever heard of, is never really explained. Also she isn't really a little girl by the time she "dies" but they juxtapose the ideas around so as to make you think they somehow impregnated a seven year old. Multiple times. While she was in a coma. She could still talk and yell while in the coma though, since the word coma is entirely utilized for the purposes of making it sound even worse.

But it only gets worse and man oh man, I'm pretty sure Fear 2 isn't going to disappoint. What's even funnier is that for all the attempts at making the story sound heinous and "horror", I actually find the setting outright mundane. I'm not sure if this has to do with the complete higher brain function shut down necessary to absorb the science fiction elements from the story without going into convulsions or if its the general detachment of the horror elements from the primary gameplay which is shooting the bleep bleep bleep out of many dudes.

(note: there are more spoilers than I would usually drop during this review!)

Scary Games Month: Doom 3

Ha, oh man.

Turnabout is fair play, right? If I'm going to talk up Doom the First to the detriment of modern games with modern engines, I should certainly be willing to play Doom 3 right? It is scary games month and what's more scary than the slow, sickening decay of everyone who worked on Doom? You're thinking about Rage, right? But remember, Daikatana ties into this process as well! Daikatana is like a game version of the star wars prequels. I mean, the actual movies, not pod racing on your kinect or something. That analogy doesn't make overly much sense... Doom.
 
Anyway Doom 3 is a 2004 release into the Doom series and an actual new game as opposed to Doom 2, which was honestly just an overlong map pack with some additional small features - but no stage maps, and the lack of maps seriously worsened the game for me. I have no idea why that's such a big thing - Look at it, it's nothing! But Doom 2 didn't have it and I was sad as a fourteen year old. It kinda goes back to how world building mentally works when you're young, but it's entirely a thing.

By modern conventions Doom 3 would probably just be titled Doom, given its status as a remake of the first game. There was a lasting complaint back then that Doom 3 was a horror game out of nowhere, but that just comes off as an issue of gamers not really comprehending what is horror at all. The original Doom maybe doesn't feel spooky when you're a hardened veteran of shooters, but show that shit to most people and it's pretty damn horrifying. I mean episode 1, episode 3 had entire walls made out of screaming people and so on being you were actually in Hell. Mind you Doom 3 went to horror school and picked up all of the tropes, but stuff like jump scares and lights going out when you picked stuff up were in the original game. Shit just moved so slow and randomly I guess people didn't really pick up on it so much as a horror thing. Maybe it's totally a gamer thing though. I see blood sprayed fire hose style across the walls and I think "did the demons like, do that intentionally? It seems like it would be a ton of effort". Whereas a little old granny would be like "AAAAAAAAAAAAAA"

It does go to show you how silly it seems to complain about developers and publishers addressing new games with their original title; Doom 3 isn't, on any level, a fundamental sequel and just calling it Doom would simplify expectations a bit. Or combine both elements and title the game "Doom: Horror Manshooter" then everyone would have known what they were getting into. Maybe just "Doom: Horror manshoot starring tiny flashlight"

Steam Sales: An attempt at a comprehensive End User's Guide

It's October now and that means the biggest crunch of Steam Sales is rapidly approaching us. This is a handy-dandy guide to understanding how the Steam Sale structure works for you, the end user, and to buying a giant pile of games you will fundamentally never play but as inexpensively as possible. Ahem.

For reference, I'm going into my fourth year of having a Steam Account. I got an account to get into a sale and that's basically how I frame my entire experience with buying off Steam. In these three years I have accumulated about ~300 Steam games at an average cost of 'give or take' $2. Steam Enhanced gives a figure of $415 spent, but that number is a bit complicated, since I've gotten Steam keys from all over. Anyway, let's begin!

this remains the most honest macro of all

Shootember: Hard Reset

 Expectation is a hell of a thing.

Hard Reset was introduced to me as "an old school" FPS game. For me, that means Doom and ... This is not Doom. I'm just saying that right out because Doom is a piece of nostalgia to me that should not be invoked unless a game really feels old school. Maybe Hard Reset is middle-school, which I think is fair to it. It reminds me a bunch of Quake 3. I think this took a ton of my enjoyment right out of Hard Reset's hands, since telling me I'm going to experience Doom again is just so unfair to any game. I'm generally pretty good about nostalgia, having replayed many of the old games I once remembered fondly. But Doom man, Doom just is.

Doom to me is very similar a discussion as the early Sonic the Hedgehog games, with a wealth of features people can't seem to successfully weave together. Lots of callbacks and references, but they never seem to get there. Doom is essentially a 2d game pretending to be 3d, which is in and of itself a big part of why it works. It also features health packs, key cards, ammo attrition elements, back tracking, secret doors, a "lighting engine" that actually does something and a banging sound track that all add up to a surprisingly easy to mentally integrate atmosphere. Demons from Hell, stuff happened, you are shoot man, go forth and SHOOT. What Doom lacked in story, it made up in sentiment. Shoot man wanted to shoot his foes and felt a sense of accomplishment in trekking through each treacherous environment.

I could go on about Doom for hours, but it was fast, it was fluid, it didn't go out of its way to punish you but attrition kept the game tense. Even many modern elements would work fine in Doom, but the atmosphere is what I miss. I also miss, more than anything, the feel of bleak openness - I honestly think the open world sandbox games are much closer in design to Doom than most modern shooters. The games care less about aiming, more about movement and you feel way more powerful in Saint's Row 3 than you do in most FPS games.

If it sounds like I'm being hard on Hard reset in this comparison, I'm not really. I don't know that it's something they intentionally marketed their game to be or if the gaming press just picked up the idea. If there's one thing media loves, it is to A) bash modern fps games since they're the largest or at least most hyped up market B) Decrying the new school, they flip out and claim everything is old school that isn't a big budget AAA shooter.

Which is bizarre - There are different eras of shooters. Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Blakestone Aliens of Gold and a fair number of other early titles represent a fundamentally old school design. There's also middle ground between now and then, with many of the 'old school' elements actually being stuff from middle era or later games. The first Crysis for example barely feels like Doom but it doesn't feel like a chest high man shooter cinematic set piece game either.

Anyway to summarize what I mean, Hard Reset essentially feels like a middle ground shooter. There are attempts at weaving some Doom like elements into the game, but it also feels like it has many modern elements as well. So like I said, expectation is a Hell of a thing, but once you get past the idea it was aiming to be a mix of all three eras you get a better sense of the game and judge it a bit more fairly. You stop thinking "why aren't I playing Doom, I was promised Doom" and instead think "I'm playing Hard Reset at least, which is better than Rage anyway..."

Belated Shootember! Splinter Cell Conviction OR Adventures in uPlay

choke 'em out UNDER THE CLOWN

I didn't buy this game, but I've wanted to try a Splinter Cell thingie for a while, so when my friend offered to give me a free copy generated via a nvidia promotion I was all excitebike. Or, well ok, not so much excited as vaguely interested. The promotion was for the deluxe edition of Splinter Cell: Black List, but for some reason also came with a free copy of this game, which is pretty nice given I hadn't played any of them. It's pretty weird that a deluxe edition (ie, purchased by the game's core audience) would come with an extra game but hey that's really nice of them.

uPlay though, man oh man is uPlay a thing. I have two experiences previous with uPlay: One, I installed it to add a key from one of the Assassin's Creed games. I think Brotherhood, or something. The key was generated via a pricing error, so it was eventually revoked. I'm not upset about that, but it's worth pointing out that Electronic Arts had a pricing error that gave up hundreds of thousands of copies of games and they didn't revoke a single one. It worked too, that's why I have Origin and have actually given them money for Origin titles - Kingdoms of Amalur through Gamersgate, but certainly more of a success than nothing. My other experience is installing uPlay to figure out what I actually had on the account and the entire process being a bit well into irritating.

This latest experience is just a hassle. My friend gave me the code amazon had spat out. This code then goes into the nvidia website, which requires a webform. That gives me a coupon code for the ubistore, which uses my uplay account credentials. But it isn't uplay, really, because upon finishing the checkout process after getting all my ducks in a row (and it changing my address to a US postal code matched to Alberta, Canada which is a place I do not live in) it spat out ... An email. The email gave me the Conviction code, which I would then I have to input into uplay myself. But there was no Blacklist code!

No, that code shows up later, because this was before the release date. My word, there are so many more steps here than if it was on Steam. And most of them involve using outdated storefront software and gee wilkers mister ubisoft, get your damn shit together! Later it gave me Blacklist anyway and emailed me to let me know, but there's just so many things about this whole experience that gives me the feeling uplay is a year too early. Then an Installshield Wizard popped up and I honestly thought I'd traveled back in time.

I don't know overmuch about Splinter Cell, beyond the main character having a name I like and something about Tom Clancy which to my understanding is like a kiss of death? A friend of mine read spy novels by the dozens and Tom Clancy apparently upsets him. But this series has been going on long enough that something about it must be worth playing, right? And then the voice actor for Sam Fisher becomes apparent and it's the guy who played Ultra Magnus in Transformers Prime. UM was a space cop in the IDW run, and it's hard not to connect everything in my head and it's just so awesome. Sam Fisher, duly appointed enforcer of the awesome accord. Hells yea.

And then I remembered this is this VA's last game and damn it now I get why people were mad!

Mark of the Ninja: An actual ninja game

"Stealth game" is a confusing and often contradictory path to follow down in any gaming discussion. You will often hear of it in extremely mixed tones. Forced stealth section is uttered by some gamers in the same way a lad or lass might discuss their latest date getting food poisoning mid-way through coitus. On the other hand, stealth genre done right is spoken in low, reverent whispers, like finding the holy grail and its hot sister, the holier grailia. There's also a middle ground, which is generally made up of high pitched whining. Reviews of DX:HE often shrieked about how sometimes you couldn't manage to not kill someone and reading people discuss Crysis games has always been unbelievable. The usual complaint being that the Crysis suit powers were "too wimpy", because turning nearly invisible before point blanking someone with a shotgun is a really wimpy power.
 
Mark of the Ninja is a stealth game, and thankfully sold as one, so people didn't begin shrieking like a wounded squirrel at it. You would think that a ninja game would advertise that alone, but for generations ninja has basically meant 'samurai who kicks people and throws smokebombs'. I can't even fully blame Naruto with its brain damaged orange jump suit wearing lead character, as the West has had Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles going for almost my entire lifespan. There's actually a fair bit of common ground between the two eve. Given ninjas might be very well made up in the first placenesides...

I digress. Mark of the Ninja is about a ninja of the assassin-y type, which is actually not as cool as I would have liked. It has a pretty tight revenge for the Clan plot which ... Honestly, I wish you just did ninja missions megaman style. You know like, steal Woodman's grain, swindle Metalman's strongbox, leave Gutsman's corpse swinging by his robo-innards in the temple gate... I'm getting off track here, but wouldn't that be cool? Regardless, Mark of the Ninja is a 2D platformer and good lord does that ever fix so many issues with stealth games. Admittedly many of those issues could be fixed but Mark of the Ninja straight up equates sound traveling distance, sight lines and patrolling paths in a really tight way that almost surprises you in how robust it is.

Almost like they really did want to make a ninja game or something.

Rest in Peace you crazy THQ fellows: Darksiders 2: Death Lives: This title makes no sense: Attack of the Colons

It's kinda hard right off the bat to take a game seriously when the title is just so grimdark. I feel like it's the most evident flaw in the game's marketing. Tell me I'm in for a treat when I play Darksiders 2, the prequel sequel to a nice looking new IP? Alright! Tell me I'm in for a treat when I'm up to play Darksiders 2: DEATH LIVES and my mouth does that thing where I try to sound out the words because they were so stupid in the air a moment ago. It's just a struggle.

I mean, are we going for Lovecraft here, twisted eons, even death may die? Probably not. It's just an odd looking marketing blurb, but hey we live in an era where Microsoft knowingly marketed into a press release where people came out of it going 'Ah yes, the Xbone' rather than giving their console a name that didn't shorten into a phallic reference. C'mon guys, it isn't hard. You just look at the words and go 'can this be shortened into a penis joke?'

Then again, it worked for Nintendo. Maybe dongs are the new hotness. Or wait, maybe they were when the Wii was burning up sales they were and now Microsoft is riding coat tails of a dying trend? I'm getting sidetracked here. Darksiders 2: Death Lives. Terrible title. And honestly, after finishing Darksiders itself, terrible sequel concept. I mean right from the get go you end with this super bad ass moment and instead you swerve, make a U turn, and get to work on a Death-centric parallel prequel? Death the guy, not Death the concept, which is centric in like 99% of video games.

It's not all that difficult to look at stuff like this and realize why the game was, to my understanding, a bit of a failure. I'm not trying to rag on the Vigil boys, because they seem like cool dudes, but rather the marketing team that dreamed this one up. Ugh. Seriously, Death Lives? Death Lives where? Detroit? The other decisions rapidly scale up to form a game more cobbled together, less unified, but none of them really stand out like that.

But this is probably the last true Darksiders game, unless the IP ends up back in Vigil crew's hands over at Crytek. Granted, that doesn't mean the next game will be bad - Assuming it exists at all, which it probably won't. I guess Death doesn't live. (The Nordic guys did comment here here but that's well into the territory of All Well and Good, But)

They Bleed Pixels: They Sure Do

I don't know if I like indie games. I certainly buy indie games, but I don't think I've played more than 10% of the ones I now own. Between bundles, more bundles and the odd nice looking little title I end up buying lots of them. They litter my backlog. I've reviewed only a handful.

One of the games I don't like, but did play, was Super Meat Boy. There's lots to like, don't get me wrong, but SMB falls for me on two issues. One, I find it pretty outright boring. Two, it's just ugly. There's care and detail put into the sprite work, but the puerile love of raspberry jam upon every surface just felt like something a 13 year old would dream up. When I was 13 I thought rare steak was icky cuz blood came out! At this age, that protein saturated solution - Not blood, by the way - Just looks very dull indeed. I've read it's a really popular indie game, but I have a feeling it's popular in that way that doesn't matter to me. There's games people like, and there's games people like but talk about. You'll see a common thread in the latter group are, from time to time, that they feel accomplishment in finishing a difficult game.

I don't care if you've ever done anything in any single player game ever because it was difficult. What you do in your own time, man.

Anyway, I have no idea why I'd want to buy They Bleed Pixels. I thought the game's art assets looked neat, but I knew full on it was described as "like Super Meat Boy, but there's some combat". Does that sound good, knowing I didn't like the other game in the mix? Does adding combat to anything you don't like make them good games?

But then they added steam cards to They Bleed and it went on sale on GMG (which finally works with my visa, I don't know what changed but hurray!) for a price that when you get like 50 cents a card ends up mostly paying for the game. I think I'll try anything at twenty five cents. Hell I bought the RIP trilogy for a dollar and I can't even amass the effort to be mad at that.

Oh hells yea the summer sale is on, I wonder what's on sa....

Oh, oh right. Better luck in a couple hours I guess.

Magic 2014: Title mysteriously different and shorter

I haven't followed the Magic on Steam games too closely, so this is my second one that I picked up. I picked this one up almost entirely on the back of selling steam cards in the beta. I'm not quite sure why people pay as much as they do for steam cards, but it net me about $30 to blow on games, and the free scavenging ooze is something I want for my cube anyway. If that sentence makes your head hurt, welcome to Magic, mid-tier nerdery and gateway drug to worse things.

Magic 2014, released in 2013, stars Chandra, daughter of Chandler, a cast member of Friends who also showed up in the Magic set Homelands back in 95 or some other year I can't be arsed to look up for the purposes of this joke. Chandra is a smoking hot fire mage with quantum freckles that she does, or doesn't have. She's woefully generic and archetypical, just like the rest of the cast - Garruk, who like to lift bears. Liliana, a goth with an infinitely boring troubled past. Ajani, a furry and lastly Jace, every under 17 nerd's repulsive super dork id. Would wear a fedora if he wasn't a magician, I'm sure. The storyline is essentially Chandra wants you to help her catch some mage that really boils her blood. I mean, more than usual. Like higher than a low simmer.

Magic 2014 features a sealed deck mode, which bizarrely people refer to as deck building as some sort of odd victory towards the eventual build your own decks mode that will never happen and a new title. Seriously, wasn't it called Duels of the Planeswalkers or something before? What happened? It also features lots of art of Chandra, who remains so astutely hot that she is actually either on fire or smoking in most of her imagery. I am never going to get tired of those puns.

fuel for the pun fire

Never, ever, ever. Now you're cooking with puns.

This isn't a full review in the general sense I like to do reviews. I like to either feel like I've finished the totality of a game and then show my played time, or at least feel like I absolutely hate the game and don't want to suffer anymore. In this case, this is a review of the product 'as is' just after release. I'll probably do a smaller totality review in six or eight months or however long it takes to release the mini-expansion and the new deck packs, and then put them on sale.

An Old Gamer take on E3, or Oh good it's the MS presentation, nap time!

Another E3 has come and gone, or is still going on, or something and you can probably guess my sentiment pretty quickly from how vague I sound.

Not pictured: Me napping

I read discussion of maybe half the Microsoft E3 "thing" which may or may not count as 'advertising' or 'razors marching up the street' depending on your personal perspective of game giants getting on stage and announcing some stuff that may or may happen in the upcoming whatever period of time. E3, like all gaming long con advertising - And that's all I'm going to call it, seriously - is mostly just announcements of vague promises and then some demos running on hardware that might not exist, or of builds that may never exist, or just other things.

care potato

None of this crap excites me and yes, I fully realize, can articulate in simplicity and totality: It literally and figuratively is Not For Me. But reading through people slamming Microsoft, the schizophrenic house divided org chart like trenches in WW1 company it is, two very real things did actually occur to me. Two actual "feels" in an otherwise long yawn at gamers desperately trying to earn cred with their peers by figuring how to best summarize the atrocious rape joke MS scripted into its, uh, Killer Instinct presentation? MS is boring, and people talking about it is boring, and yes I'm boring too. Also please never mind the bit where people got excited MS is running games on the Win7 kernel, or how companies that don't have production hardware don't demo it on prototype hardware, or all that other false excitement press where we monkey around about things that Can Not Ever Actually Matter.

The biggest thing I think about whenever I dip my toe into gaming media and mediums outside actually moving the bits and bytes in my personal computer is a friend of mine talking about Blizzard about for years back. Though the sentiment is nothing new and nothing exclusive to Blizzard by any stretch, it resonated with me. He essentially painted all Blizzard convention appearances as gleefully clapping your hands and cheering as various dudes got up on stage and then lied to you about ideas that they probably wouldn't be putting in a game you wouldn't playing any time soon, and if you were playing the game it probably wouldn't be patched in within the remaining time before the heat death of the universe. As such, it basically boils all E3 and media con convention advertising panel presentation stuff as a long

picture this

blog-post from a

teenage girl about what she'd like to do to [Popular pop star] assuming she got her hands on him. The tone is breathless and excited, with lots of gaps and pauses as description fails to really conceptualize anything that ever will happen.

And that's it. It's all dreamy and lovely, a perfect white wedding fantasy, but really it doesn't amount to much of anything. And I'm specifically using teenage girl because I want you to picture something willowy and sweet, not what teenage boys generally think of which is more what the general fanboy populace has going on in their heads. We'll talk about that now, and please forgive my usage of gender stereotypes - They're cultural, not biological, I'm not a hater.

Which segues into the next sentiment I get, something newer and more interesting to me. Gamers are slowly waking up to the fact that the industry isn't really doing them any favors, and you see little dribbles of this at the edges of certain topics. I don't necessarily want to present that as a vast unified paradigm shift, but rather a very individual yet group comprehension as gamers by themselves kinda (but never totally!) clue in. You're allowed to talk shit about EA, or Sonic games, or whine about always on DRM or certain other topics but on the most part we as gamers generally just keep our heads in the sand. And other parts of the metaphor are, in fact, up in the air...

We buy into something and then you see this weird bias crop up as teenage boys try to work through two emotions in parallel: The fact they love gaming and what they game on, then the sordid reality that gaming doesn't usually love us back. Not as much as we love it, anyway. A feedback loop of resentment burns a hole between the two topics and you're left with a bunch of negative energy you want to direct somewhere. And oh boy how they ever do so! Fanboyism has raged so hot since the time of nintedo vs sega and only gotten more absurd as the anon structure of the internet brings us new ways to take out our grievances on the world. Fanboy debates are essentially how I imagine the clown college debate team would look, all spilling out of tiny cars and honking at each other with nothing meaningful to say.

In turn, the gaming giants of the world have come to an inverted conclusion: All this whining doesn't amount to anything. All this hurly-burly yell at MS about imagined slights and real ones is little more than barely influential upon their bottom line. If the Xbone or WiiU fail, it'll come down to the relationship the manufacturers have with game development and not really how gamers feel about DRM or the kinect watching you watch porn. We are given negativity in spades and then allowed to fire hose it out at convenient meaningless points. Then, as studies have shown (or just the fact D3 kept selling while it's meta critic score was in the toilet and the servers didn't work) once we're spent we open our wallets to them anyway. Feel free to watch this, too, if you want http://www.slideshare.net/bcousins/paying-to-win

I just find it really boring. They advertise. We rage and/or geek out. Then we spend. The loop continues over and over. We might not give them our money, but it won't be because we were boycotting it, since if you're emotionally invested enough to be angry you probably want it. And then you probably buy it. You know why? Because Gaming is actually still pretty great and still amazingly cheap. It costs $12 to see Iron Man go being boring on the big screen, for $12 I've bought 3-10 games on average! That's like x100 the entertainment!

Granted, like I said, it's all not for me. I don't buy new games, and no it's not because I'm some elitist snob who doesn't blah blah NEW GAMES ARE UNCREATIVE or whatever nonsense. I buy games off Steam and honestly? I'm just so far behind on my backlog I can't assemble the enthusiasm to buy anything new. You can easily see how many games I've finished this year and I've bought double the number more in that same time-frame. I have a problem. And no, several of them are excellent titles I'm eager to get to - Spec Ops the Line, The Last Remnant, Gianna Sisters: Twisted Dreams, Kingdoms of Amalur and my friend bought me Dark Souls which good lord I really should be playing. It's a damn flood of interesting gaming! I'm drowning!

The funniest thing for me though was watching this guy over here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzerU6PVTV8 which is a video from March. The funniest thing about this -  It's a long complicated diatribe with a lovely voiced dude probably about my own age, and then there's 13 year old kids screaming at him for wanting loving from the xbone or that he 'should have waited for E3'. The video from March. Should have waited for E3. As if it diluted the message any.  It just made me laugh and laugh. The fanboys will get mad at you for saying consoles in general aren't that exciting. The resentment, even if taught by their peers to boys not angry about anything, is running through their blood. Why get mad? Why not just say, fuck you buddy, I'm going to game and I'm going to like it. Oh, that's right, because...

I'm not saying I agree with the bunnyhop show guy's point, just that I enjoyed the video and even more enjoyed reading the comments month later where people flung spittle in his direction. Although the PC gaming master race stuff, oy~

How do people seriously use the term from this ancient video and actually not realize "PC gaming master race" is a sarcastic term describing an unnecessary schism between two dopey groups of gamers? And what is that guy even saying? Amazing sports car? Have you ever been outside? Hello did you know Yahtzee was trolling? This is like when people use that damn slow clap gif, isn't it? Why are we so proud of being consumer whores?

Anyway, if you enjoyed E3 and there's hot new shit coming up, please don't tell me because oh god I need to idle for cards now too? Steam is actually giving me money for owning games to spend on other games? And the steam sale is in less than a month?

I will never be free. (and it's great, praise be the holy gabens)