Amateurs

So I was checking out the Beth Blog for new info on Skyrim today and saw them touting a new preview by G4 TV, so after clicking the link and discovering I needed to disable Adblock+ in order to view the content, I was then bombarded by a retarded promotional video telling me to preorder the upcoming assassin's creed game, after that I was bombarded by adds telling me to save Africa. After ignoring all these pleas for my hard earned money, I finally was graced by the glorious content I had been waiting for; at least that's what I would have said if the video hadn't stuttered to shit due to amateur encoding, if they hadn't reused stock footage like someone had hit the endless replay button, and if they hadn't gotten two filthy, gas huffing street urchins to take the place of the two people who were supposed to preview the game.

The commentary for this video was like baby's first pod cast. Inane ramblings from two people who sound like they're either high or have the mental maturity of a 14 year old kid who was locked in a closet until recently. I didn't even mind that they didn't know the terminology about this particular game, it's that they seem to be totally oblivious to anything but what seems like a fleeting experience with games in general. These two come off as the kind of people that played a N64 game for 15 minutes one time and now consider themselves experts on the subject.

I would continue by saying that this is what it would be like if I got my non gaming father to comment on a 3 hour preview, but I give my father more credit than that, and even if he just sat there in silent awe of this game's depth and scope for 11 minutes and then proceeded to utter the single word "wow" under his breath, it would be vastly better than what I just listened to.

I can only assume that Bethesda sent an invitation to G4 for the preview, but everyone was too busy or high on ether to go themselves, so they selected two interns or parking attendees, gave them the address, and then shoved them out the door with bus fare and a couple of bagged lunches.

The link is below in case you loath your ears and want to punish them.

View at your own risk

Business is getting too serious

It seems no one online has a sense of humor any more. I just got a 45 day suspension from gfaqs for having the words "Gfaq mods are small bundles of sticks." in my signature. Well, it was there for about two months before I got slammed into purgatory for it, so I guess that speaks to the level of intelligence most mods over there have. But as they say, all good things come to an end, and it appears someone with a brain figured out what it meant.

Another time someone was whining about homophobia in games and was asking if Saints Row 3 would have the same level of "homophobia" as the other entries in the series. Now lets set aside the fact that just because a game does not endorse the bumbing lifestyle does not mean it's homophobic, it just doesn't cater to faggots, and focus on the fact that I was banned for responding "One can only hope". It seems it doesn't matter what you actually say these days, just so long as someone can interpret it as offensive.

I'd go into details about how other gaming sites are more up tight and sensitive than a constipated person simultaneously suffering from chronic hemorrhoids, but I already ranted about the Escapist a month or so back, so that's been covered. I'm pretty sure the only gaming related place I haven't been suspended or banned from for speaking my mind is Kotaku, so go figure.

This really reaffirms my opinion that the only easy going sites on the net are ones related to or accepting of porn, because it seems most gamers are way too up tight to just live and let live.

(HUD) Heads Up Display

Static HUDs and fixed control schemes, yee fucking haw...

It's 2011. Games look good enough that I don't want to be forcibly pulled out of the immersion because 1/4 of my screen is the hud. What I'd really like is being able to decide which icons show up on the hud and the individual placements of said icons. Fallout 3 and NV came pretty close to this, as you could change color and opacity of the hud, if not move individual pieces around independently of each other.

Some games move hud elements about 10% closer to the center of the screen than they need to be to compensate for overscan. Divinity II: DKS is a good example of how shit huds can be if not designed properly. The developers of this game, or at least the team in charge of the console port, were either too fucking stupid, or too fucking lazy to bother making a hud that works for both widescreen and full screen displays. What we get is all the hud elements crammed towards the center of the screen like they thought we were all using T.Vs from the 90s. Notice how the PC screen shot doesn't look like a compulsive neat freak tried to put everything in the same spot.

While some hud elements are handy and perhaps even necessary, I don't need a bright blue static health meter for games like Ninga Gaiden 2, which caused burn in on my old plasma display. How hard can it possibly be to make a fading or customizable hud, when even Fable fucking 1 had the option to change opacity? This archaic practice is almost as absurd as fixed control schemes with no alternatives. The recent Deus Ex: Human Revolution is another good example of both of these practices. These were both great games, brought down by niggling aesthetic problems.

Escapist Magazine

Escapist Magazine is a great site, really it is. It has great content, is home to Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee Croshaw, and even has reliable gaming news, but sweet fucking Jesus, are their mods ever a bunch of overzealous draconian cock suckers!

Post an on topic picture, get a warning, answer a question with too few words, get a warning, disagree that it isn't the "best gaeming site evar", get permanently banned. I've seen some pricks flaunting power in my time on the web, but until I started posting on the Escapist I thought that gfaq mods took the cake.

It wouldn't be too bad if they had enough brains to take things on a case to case basis, but infracting someone because the rules told you to just shows what a mindless fucking robot you are.

Here's an excerpt from an email I got today after disputing a mod decision.

Pulled directly from our code of conduct:
"Low Content Posts
This could be anything from *answering a question* to posting LOL. These forums are used for discussion and low content posts halts discussion."

If you had discussed it at all, or opened it up so that other people could, it would have been fine. 

This might have been acceptable had the argument held even a drop of water, but 94 people posted directly after me, and some of their posts were only two words longer than mine.  Halting discussion my ass...

Next time you trundle through their forums, take a moment to look for the greyed out posts.  These are posts made by users that are currently on suspension, banned, or posts that have been deleted.  You can follow the link at the bottom to see why they were banned or suspended in the first place.  Chances are it was some totally absurd reason or just some mod gunning for someone he didn't like.  Oh yeah, and mentioning software like noscript or adblockplus is an instant suspension.  If you mention piracy in anything but a negative light you can kiss your account, no matter how well behaved you've been, goodbye.

You know that whole "With absolute power com es absolute corruption." thing? Well, it holds true even in the lowliest of mod positions. People tend to lord whatever power they posses over whatever people they view as lower than themselves. Remember what your teachers were like back in school, or a boss that had it in for you for some totally arbitrary reason? Same thing here.

You can almost see them sitting there shouting "Bow before me, you lowly fucking peasants!" from the comfort of their lazyboy recliner, trying not to rage too hard, lest they stand up and let all the Cheeto crumbs fall from their stained pokemon t-shirt.

Of course there is a percentage, a very small percentage, of mods who use their power responsibly, it's just that jading comes on prematurely when you're dealing with complete morons day in and day out.

PSN Welcome Back Is Online

The Welcome Back package is finally online, though I had to wait a week for the servers to stop smoking before I could actually download anything from them. Nothing says welcome back like giving your members free versions of games they probably already own. This annoying detail aside, I took their offer and sold my physical copies of Little Big Planet and Infamous. Of course I got less than $20 dollars for both of them, but hey, what can you expect from games that are nearly 3 years old. What eats me is that the second I'm out the door they get put on the shelf for twice to three times that amount. Corporate greed at its best.

I didn't walk away completely empty handed from Sony's plea for forgiveness though. Since I had my standard account, plus one for the EU store and one for the JP store, I actually got six games out of this deal, 2 months of PS Plus added to my main account and a free month for both the EU account and JP account. It's just a shame that my Credit Card and personal detail had to be plundered from Sony's servers to receive this deal. Makes me wonder what Sony would give me if my PS3 gained awareness and tried to strangle me in my sleep. Probably a free PSN mini...

PSN is back and fully functional...No, for reals this time!

It's been well over a month since the hacker and corporate negligence caused outage began, and PSN is finally back and fully functional. With the return of the PSN we finally get our promised two free games and complimentary PSN+ subscription as part of the Welcome Back prog... Wait, you mean we're not getting them yet?

Oddly enough, the meaning of the term Welcome Back seems to have been entirely lost on Sony. I blame the language barrier. I realize that Sony is inherently a Japanese company, and that things are often lost in translation, but in this case they weren't just lost, they must have been abducted, shot in the back of the head and burried in an unmarked grave on the outskirts of town. Perhaps they should think of a new name for this program. Maybe they should use the one I came up with in my last blog post. It's certainly more accurate if nothing else.

Oldfags and Sony

These days, wherever I go online, I'm constantly witness to an ongoing battle between old fags and new fags. One thing the old fags tend to do relentlessly is attempt to belittle the new fags by saying that they're greedy kids, and expect everything to be given to them on a silver platter free of charge. This pathetic argument usually rears its head on gaming sites, when people who spend $60 on software expect it to include what it was advertised by the development team as including. This is where the old fags come in swinging their dusty nuts and saying things like "When I was your age we payed $100 for an 8-bit game that was 2 hours long, and we liked it just fine!". The entire spectacle reminds me very much of that old Weird Al song where he goes on for several minutes about how rough shit was when he was your age.

This timeless, classic argument usually coincides with the new fags getting bitter over on disc dlc, or features that were advertised, then quietly removed before release only to be added in at a later date for a "small" fee. Though this "small fee" is generally 10% of the value of the "full" product. It pretty much all boils down to our old friend fanboyism. People standing up on their soapbox with their "I love big business" sandwich board and crying at the top of their lungs about how the greedy consumers are killing developers and console giants by demanding too much for their money. It's shocking the kind of things some of these people will attempt to defend. Just this week I saw someone on Kotaku telling everyone to calm down, because gosh darnit, Sony is really trying their best to fess up and make amends for having security that is akin to a piece of swiss cheese. When a company like Sony fucks up bad enough that someone gains access to their "secure" systems, resulting in the theft of over 77 million peoples personal information, and the best they can do is a halfhearted apology where the heads of the company bow for a few seconds, trying to defend their incompetence just makes you look like the corporate scrotum cleaner you are. I mean really, the heads of this company are Japanese, getting them to bow is about as difficult as getting a fast food attendant to ask if you want fries with that. Though to be realistic, it's likely that 20 million or so of those accounts were using fake info.

Lately, during this security clusterfuck, I've even seen some people that think all the fuss is about not having online access to their games for over two weeks. These people are likely mentally incapacitated, or twelve, and don't realize the gravity of having nearly all your personal information short of your sin card and picture ID stolen. In all fairness, though, Sony is offering all basic PSN customers a free month of PS+, and they might even grease their palms with a free PSN mini! This totally makes up for having to get your credit card replaced, and the knowledge that no matter what you do, some pale, malicious fuck out there has your full name/date of birth/country/city/street address/zip code and PSN ID.

Hmm, I seem to have gone off on a bit of a tangent there. Where was I? Oh yeah, old fags should shut the fuck up.

The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile

You'd smile too if you were this awesome.

Sequel to the hit 2009 Xbox Live arcade game, Dishwasher: Dead Samurai, Vampire Smile follows the blood trail of Yuki, the Dishwasher's sister. Without spoiling too much of the story, I'll just say that it's an atmospheric mind fuck of a game, with grungy, dark visuals and epic guitar riffs throughout. The combat is smooth like platelet laden blood, and will take a good deal of mastery to make it past even the default difficulty. While it's not as brutally unforgiving as the first game, it will test your reflexes and determination from start to finish. The game has some light RPG elements, and you will find unique "Beads" that will endow you with certain handy abilities. The weapons are far more balanced this time around, and switching between them for combos works well. One thing I'm sure you'll be pleased to hear is that this game is damn easy on the wallet, being one of the few games on XBL that goes for 800 points these days, and boy is it ever worth it. Screen shots really don't do this style justice, so check out a vid or two on youtube to see if it's up your alley. After the intro you can either continue the story as Yuki, or the Dishwasher, and each has a 3-4 hour story. In addition to the story mode, there are 50 arcade style challenges to complete. Oh, and it has full co-op, if you're into that sort of thing. Also, remember that all demos are free on XBL, and it's only 125MB, so you owe it to yourself to at least try it out, unless you're a pussy. You're not, are you?

So what the fuck are you waiting for? Grab your blade and straw hat and get to chopping!

Fuck You, Mozilla

Funny how the new Firefox 4 "upgrade" is in all actuality a downgrade.

Upon checking for updates this evening, I was promised greater stability, increased performance and speed, and an intuitive new layout with Firefox 4. What could go wrong, right? Well, for starters I had to download no less than 5 new add-ons just so it would be half ways usable for me. If you go to the Mozilla forums to state such an opinion the faggots come right out of the woodwork like they were laying in wait and tell you that with progress comes change, and that you should get used to it in a few hours. Guess fucking what. 6 years of hard wiring my brain to open tabs by right clicking and going to the second option cannot be undone by spending a few hours with a shitty new rendition of a good browser. Aside from this, the progress bar has been changed into an epilepsy sufferers worst nightmare. Instead of being able to monitor it constantly, it flashes information at you when it feels like it, which is more than a little distracting. Buttons have been arbitrarily moved around due to what can only be described as developer cranial trauma, and the options menu seems to have been stripped down so as to not intimidate the idiots they are hoping to snare with this glittery, substancless update.

What fucks me off the most about all this is that I like to be up to date on security and shit for obvious reasons, but this is just way too aggravating. Of course Mozilla will be supporting 3.6 (Which I have already switched back to) for a "while", but whether this will be months or mere weeks remains to be seen.

In short, yiff in hell, Mozilla, you cock gobbling retards.

The Masks We Wear

All the hate for anonymous makes me sick. You stand up for peoples rights in the real world and you're a hero (Or a martyr, depending on how things turn out). You stand up for peoples rights online while making good use of internet anonymity and actually take the offenders down a peg, and you're labeled an internet terrorist. What a fucking world we live in. Case in point, anon's recent "attack" on Sony. Anonymous steps in and suddenly everyone forgets any instance of Sony treating it's users like shit because of their inherent disdain for anon.

To the intelligent, the internet provides instant access to a wealth of information. To the idiot, the internet is just another convenient tool for media to brainwash you with. Grasp a sharp blade and give yourself a big pat on the back. You're whats wrong with the world.

inFAMOUS 2's Moral Choice Blunder

The first inFAMOUS had it's flaws, but was a good freeroam superpower sandbox game with an above average story. The moral choice system, however, was shallow and flawed. Well, inFAMOUS 2 has decided to change that, but whether it's for better or worse remains to be seen, but after watching this video, I'm betting it's the latter.




Okay, you've seen it, now let me chime in with this week's rant.

This is the first I've seen of the moral choice characters introduced for inFAMOUS 2, and I'm not impressed. The choice of good and evil won't even feel like a choice to me, because the black chick is so incredible stereotypical that I'll be forced to side with the white chick just so I don't have to listen to her.

Now I'm sure some moral fag is going to jump on this post and go on about how I'm racist and discriminatory and need to be more tolerant of ethnicities other than my own, but fuck that. Discrimination is simply the act of liking one thing over another, and if you're given a choice between siding with a woman who is bland, and one who makes you cringe every time she opens her fucking mouth, of course you're going to choose the former, no matter how overwhelmingly bland she is.

As has been asked in other threads, posts, tweets, and various forms of internet communication, why does evil now equate to a Haitian person with dreads and excessive amounts of tribal tattoos who looks like they practice voodoo?

This seems to be something that is all too common these days, developers adding token black people to movies, games and T.V shows so no one calls them racist for having an all white cast of characters. If this isn't the reason for the character's addition, then kindly forgive my paranoid assumptions, but she's still unbearably fucking grating to my eyes and ears, and probably sense of touch as well since this is a PS3 exclusive and you just know Sony is going to cram that shitty motion control gimmick of theirs in somewhere so they can justify the existence of the Sixaxis and Move tech.

I swear to god, if at any point during the story she waggles her finger back and fourth while moving her head from side to side and says "No you didn't", I will personally travel to Sucker Punch headquarters and smother the character designer responsible with a moist towelette soaked in Tabasco.

(Disclaimer: I have no intention of traveling anywhere or doing anything to any member Sucker Punch or anyone else on this planet. This message has been written to appease the Coalition of Uppity Naive Tossers, or C.U.N.Ts as they are more commonly known.)

Where are all the Dutch women at?

Okay, the title may be a little misleading, but still.

I received an email the other day asking the reason behind my sometimes sporadic updates. Well, sometimes I just calm the fuck down and can't find anything entertaining to rant about, and sometimes shit comes down all at once, leaving me with a lingering sense of inspiration to fly off the handle. In this case, it's more of a "holy shit, this is awesome" kind of inspiration, instead of the usual, "die you miserable pig fucker", kind of inspiration.

Knotrust is an Austrian crossover band, meaning they know a few different languages and use them all in their music, which is surprisingly awesome.

I first heard of Kontrust when Hentai Palm went down about a year ago. Hentai Guru Numbus posted the video to Knotrust's hit single, Bomba, as a place holder . At first I just loled, but then found myself going back to the downtime page again and again just to listen to it. After a while I tracked down a couple more of their songs and came to the conclusion that this is a band I would actually be willing to pay money to listen to, so I digitally cantered on over to itunes and bought Time to Tango, which is their latest album. After listening to that for a while I started to crave more, so I went and bought their previous album Welcome Home. While not as awesome as Time to Tango, it was still pretty good. I then tracked down their first album, Make me Blind, through other methods as I couldn't find it for sale anywhere, which is probably a good thing as it was shit by my standards and appears to have come out before they got that hot female lead they currently have.

Here is a link to their official video for Bomba. If you don't get a lol or three out of this there is probably something wrong with you. If you find it strangely compelling as I did, I suggest you find some place to squander your money and get yourself a copy, be it digital or physical.

Kontrust on itunes

On Ignorance and Slander

Oh boy, here we go.

Recently, Fox News aired a segment on Bulletstorm, giving it the title "Is Bulletstorm the Worst Video Game in the World?" due to its copious amount of severed limbs and skill shots named after sexual slang. In this segment, they massacred comments made by Scott Steinberg, CEO of TechSavvy Global, and M2 Research’s Billy Pidgeon. Their unaltered comments can be read here and here along with some more back story on this media clusterfuck.

The fuss seems to revolve around the fact that many of these "skill shots" have been humorously named after sexual acts and slang. Rear entry is when you lovingly give your enemy a lead enema. Topless is when you not so delicately remove the top half from the bottom half of your enemy. And Gang Bang is when you wrap a flail grenade around your enemy, then proceed to kick him full force into his companions, detonating the explosives when the moment is just right.

Let me start by saying I'm not posting this rant in defense of Bulletstorm, since Bulletstorm doesn't require defending. In case you missed my earlier post about it, Bulletstorm is a balls to the wall, over the top FPS developed by People Can Fly, a polish developer currently under the employment of Epic studios. They are best known for their 2004 balls to the wall, over the top FPS: Painkiller.

It's already been established that Fox News is shit, and is entirely staffed by scaremongering cockbags who constantly falsify information to make entire mountain ranges out of mole hills, and that they are known for altering quotes from the interviewees that actually have the intelligence to not just tell them exactly what they want to hear. However, they do often find people with such incredibly uninformed opinions that they are akin to sparkly diamond mines in the eyes of Fox. One such person is Dr. Carole Lieberman, who provided Fox with deliciously slanderous statements about upcoming game Bulletstorm.

Dr. Lieberman is a known criticizer of violence and sexuality in video games, stating that "Video games have increasingly, and more brazenly, connected sex and violence in images, actions and words. This has the psychological impact of doubling the excitement, stimulation and incitement to copycat acts. The increase in rapes can be attributed, in large part, to the playing out of such scenes in video games.". This is of course, a baseless statement and complete and utter bullshit, but that doesn't stop her from spinning her wheels while referencing studies that never occurred.

Dr. Lieberman has admitted to never playing video games, so its a little hard to understand how she might feel that she is qualified to say anything about them aside from that they come in a plastic case and might include instruction booklets.

I don't deny that there are individuals out there that may take what they see in any medium, and act it out in real life, but these are individuals with inherent mental defects that would act on these ideas no matter where they saw or heard of them, including their own delusional fantasies. Such individuals are often in the spotlight when it comes to reports on video games, because news about calm, collected adults who enjoy video games in privacy of their own homes don't get the same kind of reactions as stories about terrorists that use outdated games as a unrealistic ground for training. Likewise, psychiatrists see the worst of the worst, since mentally healthy individuals do not seek out help for such issues. If you search for news about violent offenders who have at some point in their lives played violent games, you are almost certain to find such examples, and if you are pigheaded enough you will probably disregard any evidence you find that sits contrary to your beliefs.

Half the comments against her and her book are so saturated in sarcasm they're dripping. The rest likely come from people who are at a loss for words due to the anger they are feeling. She states that she would need to look through her records and check online for something to back up her claims, which makes it seem that she has really been winging it the entire time and if someone is going to put her on the spot and question her ideals she would like to have the opportunity to do some actual research.

It seems to me that if you've been bombarded with angry people emailing you, and reporters questioning your statements, you may just want to get your shit together so you can defend yourself. If after this amount of time you don't have your shit together, it becomes undeniably evident that you didn't know what the fuck your were talking about in the first place.

Video games are of course the media punching bag of the new millennium, though the baseless criticism started about a decade earlier, it has done nothing but escalate these last 11 years. It does seems rather ironic then that politicians and the like use video games as a target, when their own country constantly glorifies war and military service, and often carries out operations that are an absurd waste of taxpayer money in an attempt to hold back the unwashed hoards of dirty foreigners that allegedly attempt to attack this hypocritical nation of fat, uneducated cannon fodder who haven't yet been drafted by their local military recruitment center. And to think I was listed as being patriotic after completing one of those online tests...

Cage The Elephant:Thank You, Happy Birthday

So I bought Cage the Elephant's new album today, thinking "Fuck yeah! These guys were awesome in their debut album". Well, I was right on one aspect. They were awesome....

These songs fit together about as well as a square into a circular hole. I was honestly taken aback by how bad most of them were. It litterally assaulted all my senses. I felt as though I had been touched by a roofie slinging date rapist, who invited you out for dinner and dancing but then took you to a run down car park and violated you against a concrete barricade covered in fresh hobo piss. The album art assulted my eyes around the time I returned to the download page thinking I had somehow got the wrong files. With all the screaming that proceeded to fill my home (His, not mine) I thought the lead singer had been taking pointers from Jonathan Davis. The bad smell might have been attributed to a burning disc had I not purchased the album from itunes. And the entire ordeal left a bitter taste in my mouth.

All in all, listening to this album was a lot like bad sex. It left me feeling drained, pissed off, used, and a little guilty, like I had just went home with the fat chick at the party after an entire 26oz of Smirnoff Blue Label.

If you're like me, and discovered this band through their stellar opening song used in the intro to Borderlands, I can almost guarantee you will hate all but 4 songs on this album. You won't like the 4 songs either, you'll merely be able to tolerate them, as though someone had been stabbing you in the eye with a piece of splintered wood soaked in lemon juice and vindaloo sauce, then switched to something slightly more bearable, like a rusty icepick...

Call of Duty: Bullets and Loathing

I've never been an online gamer. I first got online in 2006 on a pathetic dial-up connection, which was the only option at the time. By 2007 I was on a semi highspeed connection with a tremendous amount of lag, and still am to this day. It's because of this that I can take an objective standpoint and muse about the Call of Duty series and all the famboyism and hatred surrounding it, and do so with little bias.

To me it's never been more than a semi-realistic, though admittedly rather short, polished single player FPS. The gaming sites that I frequent often have members spouting such idiotic things like "Well, it can't possibly be worse than Black Ops" or "Iron sites have ruined the FPS scene". Now let's get one thing stright, there's no way on this polluted, used up little planet of ours that iron sites can "ruin" an entire genre of games. Things can always be implemented poorly of course, but that can be said for any feature in any game ever. The CoD series has done it particularly well in fact, and it is always left as an option. As for things being worse then Black Ops, well sure they could. Granted, I wasn't as blown away by Black Ops as I was by Modern Warfare, but at the end of the day it was still much better than most of the disposable shooters of the last ten years.

When you have a popular, highly functional franchise like the CoD series, one must start to wonder why it attracts so much disdain. I mean, why would you hate something that at the best of times could be considered one of the most accessible shooters of this console generation, and at the worst of times an abysmally short single player game where your avatar can soak up more lead than the clay hill behind the local firing range and still continue fighting? Well, if you take a standpoint where you are neither willing to sell the rights to your first born child for a copy of the next iteration, nor march on your local government office demanding that a bylaw be made making it punishable by death to make another entry to the series, you may start to notice that much of the hatred is unexplained and maybe even unwarranted.

As one anon said, "Haters gonna hate", but that still doesn't really answer the question. Were the hater's mothers once violated before their very eyes by a service-man holding a rifle snugly to his shoulder? It's unlikely, though knowing our country's military record, not impossible. I can then only come to the conclusion that perhaps it's not the game, nor the mechanics of the game that draw so much hatred, but the apparently rabid online community, allegedly filled with foul mouthed 12 year olds with absurdly over developed fast twitch muscles and hand eye coordination, or perhaps the hackers and cheaters that plague the game's servers. It's not too far fetched to assume that maybe some people just don't like to be one upped by others, or just can't get into the game.

Perhaps we'll know the answer to these questions for certain some day. Right now, though, my money is on the stupidly vulgar people that infest an otherwise ordinary competitive community of gamers to such an extent that they spill out onto the rest of the internet allowing anyone with a functioning pair of eyes to see their seething hatred for what it is: the knowledge that no matter how hard they try in life, they will never create something as awesome as Nestle Flips.

Bulletstorm

I wasn't particularly interested in this game when it first reared it's head at last year's E3, but after realizing it came from the same guys who made Painkiller, my interest was sparked.

You play as Greyson Hunt, a space pirate that wears combat armor made from recycled Fords and old biker jackets and carries enough firepower to reduce the entire city of Detroit to smoldering rubble... more so than it already is I mean.

I do find myself wondering why he says he's a "Space Pirate", though. Do pirates on earth say they are "Sea Pirates"? Does he pirate space itself, and if so, who is he pirating it from? Maybe those people who have shelled out thousands of dollars for a square km of the moon...

Anyhow, the game's primary feature is the ability to "Kill with skill", which means that you are constantly reducing the enemies in the game to mangles giblets using the aforementioned excessive fire power and your time displacing gravity tether. Using the tools at your disposal and your trusty boot, you and your ragtag team of mercs traverse the ruined world of Stigia, which if I recall correctly is an abandon vacation planet inhabited solely by psychotic cannibals. The only way I can think to describe the gameplay is by saying that you are essentially the roided up relative of Neo from the first Matrix movie, only lacking the ability to shut the fuck up while killing people. Honestly, the one thing that bugs me about this game is the absolutely childish one liners that are spouted by Greyson. It makes Duke Nukem's one liners seem like nitrous oxide infused gold. As far as voices and dialogue go, I would rather have had someone of Baird's caliber from Gears of War and his cynical sense of humor than Steve Blum going on about poop chutes and dicks, but I suppose you can't win them all.

At this point I'm pretty sure the demo is available for download from XBL for both gold and free members, but if not I know for a fact that anyone on PSN can grab it. The demo shows a mode called Echoes, which allows you to play thorugh a timed section of the game while attempting to rack up as many skill points as possible. I strongly suggest you check it out and see the carnage for yourself. Oh, and if you preorder now you get into the Gears of War 3 beta, if you're into that sort of thing.

There are also leaderboards for the demo and I'm currently ranked at 284 out of over 80,000 with 18165 points. See if you can beat my score ;).

And we're back...

Well, I'm back. You may have noticed things have changed around here. It has come to my attention that the best way to get the wrong kind of attention from the wrong kind of people, i.e people with more money and better lawyers that you, is to have an anime blog that supplies links to projects they allegedly have purchased the rights to. So from now on this blog will be used to host the amusing thoughts and ramblings that usually manifest themselves around the time I'm trying to get some fucking sleep. First up, the plight that is recent anime.

You know, the more I watch anime and frequent sites like Sankaku Complex the more I grow to hate the Japanese and everything in their current culture. Every single thing they churn out is a fucking cliche; the fact that keywords on sites like anidb lead to thousands of different shows is evidence of that. Every show inevitably has a sudden girlfriend or harem, and every male lead will act like a socially inept tosser who shoots blood from his nose if a girl so much as rubs up against him, which of course will get him beaten nearly to death by the twinkly eyed cock wallet of the moment. Remember kids, violence against women is wrong, but they can beat you and stab you and sell your possessions to spite you because that is what equality is all about. The Orwellian future is now, only it's feminists and equality that are imposing their control on us, not government (Will save the rest of that rant for the next time I let my inner misogynist out).

Some may say I take these things too seriously, and that it's just anime. But what of the select few shows where people react to these events in the way you'd expect someone with a functioning brain to react, you ask? Or shows like Mushishi or Saraiya Goyou in which the events just don't take place? Well of course the shut-ins that compose 50% (Made up figure) of Japan's population refuse to watch it and it gets canceled or receives one short season and then fades into obscurity because there weren't 15 excessively naive virgin girls fighting over some skinny androgynous teen who develops a fatal bleeding condition the second he looks at a girl. Of course if it isn't hotties and idiots, it's robots and children, or teenagers and superpowers, or one of the other redundant things the Japanese can't seem to free their creativity from. Though at the same time western entertainment is no better, it just has a different heap of samey bullshit it grinds up and pours into a new mold every time the drug bucket starts to get low.

Another thing I just can't wrap my mind around is how idols and celebrities are treated in Japan. People getting fired from news anchor positions because they were holding a box of condoms while fully clothed in a photograph that was somehow uploaded to the web, or voice actresses and idols receiving death threats because they "betrayed" their fanbase by having sex with their partner of 3 years. It's enough to make one facepalm hard enough to break bones.

The only thing in current Japanese culture that doesn't seem tainted at this point is porn. Because let's face it, the story takes a distant back seat to it's essential purpose: getting your rocks off.

Perhaps I'm just inherently jaded, but I feel it best to abandon this sinking ship that is mainstream anime before the rats start clawing at your ankles in an attempt to escape the rising water that is generic moe and bullshit.

Stay tuned for my next rant when I tear into whatever it is that is currently eating at me like a starved anteater, or perhaps I'll just make a calm observation about something interesting in life.