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)

Rest in Peace you crazy THQ fellows: Saint's Row 3

I talked about this last year when I was playing through Just Cause 2: I've never played a GTA game. I can't recall if I mentioned that GTA came out on PC back when I was a youngun with a friend who tried to sell me on it. I'm still not sure why he successfully got me into Master of Orion and X-Com, but not GTA or Fallout. It's a mystery for the ages. Mind you, GTA was a top down game that was a bit of a letdown from Carmageddon. I don't know if they came out at the same time, but Carmageddon was way more interesting. You know, because I love murder. He played the shit out of both of them though...

His sister was very pretty. I considered making a misogynistic comment here to help set the mood for talking about Saint's Row 3, but the game is into some sort of bizarro land where the very concept of misogyny or misandry fail to deliver enough punch to what the game is like. Saint's Row 3 is nonchalant and almost inoffensive in its vile tendencies, simply for lack of anything connecting to real life response. There should be some level of revulsion to using a stripper as a human shield before throwing her into the pool and taunting her, but the game is so far gone into clown college territory your brain just can't make the connection. Like you know those words should hold meaning but the game is just one big crazy bear show.

This game hates humanity. Loathes it. Even if you play very tightly, drive safe around civilians and refuse to kill cops, they'll end up dead. A burst of gang warfare sees traffic around you freak out, with passing grannies plowed over by desperate fools who spin their car 360 degrees before moonwalking into a curb that six people happened to be standing on. Hell, sometimes you can just see traffic screw itself up without any input from you. Someone will walk into a car, a body will go flying, people will panic and then there's just death everywhere.

this it not ever going to be mature

Once you get away from the ridiculousness of its parade of buffoonery the real game lies beneath and ... Actually, that game is pretty good. For an effort that is tied very intimately to the death of a publisher and its years of excess, Saint's Row 3 is neither desperate or ugly. It's an attractive game, a mad men murder simulator, in which you take your sharp dressed gangster and plow into a cadre of opposing thugs in a garbage truck before leaping out from your flaming wreckage to benny hill your way into the distance. In theory you can dress your guy or gal in whatever outfit you like, but I just can't get over the idea of dressing as some sauve motherfucker as I barrel through city streets with barely any idea what I'm doing before t-boning a truck in traffic and dying in the resulting three car pile up explosion. Death and carnage follow in your wake, leading me to feel like you should dress for a funeral, because holy fuck people die.

And once the heavy weapons come out? Only the dead can know peace from this circus. Murder time fun time, indeed.

Tower Defense Expertise: Defense Grid, the Awakening, the Oodles of DLC

Way way back I got talked into getting Steam at the beginning of the winter sale season. 2010, I think, the year I gave up the WoW and returned to the fold of the glorious PC gaming master race, gpu under one arm, keyboard the other, mouse dangling from my twitching hands. Glorious discount gaming master port gaming race. Blargh. The first game I got was gifted - Shatter, which is a nice little game - but the first one I really got into was Defense Grid. I think I paid 2.50 for it originally, with all the (then) DLC packed in and I've given them money twice more for DLC. Hilariously enough, this is the first tower defense game I'd ever played and probably the first time I'd really gotten into the genre. I think I'd played maybe ten minutes of it on a mod or something. I was never big into RTS games, and then I played WoW and Magic for a couple years, so I'd missed a fair bit of the middle years of gaming.

So Defense Grid was my introduction to tower defense. Since then I've played two of those Orcy games, Sol Survivor, Plants vs Zombies, Sanctum, Dungeon Defenders and perhaps some other shit I've forgotten about. Of all of those ... Defense Grid is the only truly pure TD game. Sol Survivor is close, as the interaction is limited, but the other ones all dumb down the TD mechanics in exchange for more action elements, for better (Orcs Must Die) or worse (Dungeon Defenders, ugh). Ironically, or not, there's a reverse bell curve in action; the more action game, the worse. Then the better!

Defense Grid is very, very pure TD. The tension doesn't come from running around or fighting Orcs, but in very carefully aligning the load balancing of the grid. Doing a fight well requires increasing amounts of precision, on two planes. First, when and where aliens die impacts your "recovery" rate, which is both in terms of interest, access to interest and a couple other little things. Second, the way your towers are structured - the build of the maze - relies on committing to the plan and guiding it as it goes. A couple towers spin into a maze, and then the maze's parts align together to do force multiplication until you have killzones that dispatch ten times the number of aliens the towers would if they weren't working in tandem. I'll talk about this again in a moment.

It's not a visually stunning game, though its art direction and conveyance is pretty solid. The locales are extremely varied, lending a ton more flavor to the game than it would possess otherwise. Maps include icy canyons, various high tech installations and the edges of future cities. The audio direction is really good. You're paired with an AI that ... Well, honestly isn't much more than a cheerleader, but he talks and rambles, gives some back story to aliens being pew pew'd by towers.