Rogue Ops sucks, Champions Online is cool,my new chair sucks, Minecraft is still cool

Not a lot to talk about. I started playing Rogue Ops and it's taking me quite a bit of time and energy solely because it's so goddamn boring. Seriously, I've only finished the first two levels and they've actually been relatively short and easy, but I feel like throwing the game out. There have been so many things wrong with it so far I could really write an angry post about it already, but I think it's better to see the entire game through and then be even more pissed off.
When I uploaded those PS2 demo videos way back when and just rushed through the Rogue Ops demo because it quite honestly sucked ass I was still willing to give it the benefit of doubt, especially after people sent me messages about how big of an idiot I am and how much I suck for not playing the demo properly and realizing that the game is actually quite fun, more fun than what the demo would make you think, but the demo is in fact an honest representation of the actual finished product. The demo's a little better, though, because it's shorter and came free on a disc with other, better demos.

Like most of the girls I've dated in my time,
my Minecraft world also looks better in the dark

I've been building a city in Minecraft a while now. My intention is to create a shop for every possible resource and item, and then build a home for every "store owner", then build a harbor and a castle. It's going a bit faster now that I chose to turn the difficulty to peaceful and don't have to hide half of the time or rebuild stuff Creepers break, but it could still be faster if I could get a mod that allows me to spawn items to work. It's supposed to enable chat in single player, but doesn't for me.

It may look like crap, but... try it!

I also tried out Champions Online for a bit after seeing it on LordKaT's stream and finding out it's free and fun. If you're interested in a fun superhero MMORPG that's free to play and has the most amazing and easy to use character creation I have ever seen in any game, try out Champions Online. I've created myself, Garret from Thief and Snake Plissken from Escape From New York so far.
Only reasons I'm not constantly playing Champions Online is that my graphics card sucks and really have to play on the lowest graphical settings, and simply because it's an MMO. MMO's need to allow the player to access all sorts of shit at all times so there's tons of different crap I can't be arsed to shift through, I don't know anyone else who plays it and all those damn items and powers and their stats are confuddling to me. What the hell do I do with Ego? Is high Constitution good? Where the fuck do I buy better items?
But, I do recommend you to check the game out yourself if MMO's are closer to your heart than mine. i just like the character creation. I wish all games that allow customised characters had character creation like Champions.

I'm also very annoyed. I broke my old chair's legs with my weight yesterday and of course needed a new chair. So my mother bought me a new cool looking black chair, but it sucks for sitting. It's... shit. It's already optimized for "office work" by the looks of it, there's no way to adjust the position and it really hurts. I have been sitting on it for four hours now and already have pains. I can't lean back even a little bit or I end up pushing my ass off of it, it's really uncomfortable. I don't feel like complaining about it to my mother and make her buy me a new one, though, so I think I'll just stop sitting infront of a computer entirely and find a life.
Who was the idiot who thought that people must sit in 85 degree angles and constantly lean towards their desk? Find him for me, and kill him. By making him sit in his own chair.
Oh, agony.

That's it for now.

Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure

So, after playing Batman: Arkham Asylum and finding it to match my high expectations I was excited to to try out the other game I specifically went out to buy,  Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Contents Under Pressure. It may have been a bit of a let down.

Marc Ecko's Getting Up is a simple game to describe, really. It's a linear 3rd person beat em up platformer where your main goal is to scribble your name on walls and be proud of it. Now, it may not seem like a game majority of people would care much about, but in theory it is a game that I, due my uncanny taste, would find very enjoyable. Not great, but enjoyable.
First off, I like beat em ups and Marc Eck... MEGUCUP's combat isn't total shit. You have your punch and kick attacks that you can alternate to make three-move combos  with a possible power-move at the end. You have a grapple move that after a bit of struggling with your opponent let's you punch, kick or throw the poor sap around a bit. Blocking and targeting is assigned to the same key, which isn't unheard of, and you also have an evade move that allows you to do a cool looking roll that usually let's you quickly dodge attacks while at the same time allowing you to pick up health and weapons from the ground. There's also some sort of taunt moves that allow you to verbally assault your opponent while he's down, though I never used those much. The combat is very simple and once you learn to use evade instead of the useless block it becomes easy to beat just about everything by rolling on the floor between the punches. So you can get by with the combat controls, but the amount of fights and the time you spend handing out asskickings to the various losers each time does get pretty boring pretty soon.
What I like about the fights is that stuff does break here and there, which crappier beat em ups (bmups?) rarely do. Bathroom stalls do break, and immediately disappear, when you're thrown through them, and kicking a guy into pipes or walls does make the pipe shoot out water or make some flakes of paint fly off the wall. I'm not saying the destruction is that detailed and this certainly isn't The Warriors, but little things here and there make the constant smacking of guys a little bit more bearable, feels a little more like you're hitting stuff when you see shit break.

Trane

The sneaking aspect of the game is crap. You press crouch to walk sneakily and occasionally you'll get a chance to bonk a guy in the head and one hit KO him, but it's relatively rare. Most of the time, as far as I can tell, the areas are built and the enemies are placed in such a manner that there's no sneaking to be discussed and walking silently could've as well been removed from the game entirely. The few times it's sort of an option, whatever fight you would skip is something you really don't need to, and the area you'd have to pass by tends to have bonus objectives to complete.
Furthermore, the walking controls are very loose and they're somehow, in a really weird way, tied to the camera's point of view when the game feels like it, so every now and then your controls may be inverted in the middle of moving if the camera decides to go to  a fixed position, and you'll hit a wall. Then you'll hit the wall again since the game itself has problems realizing when the camera and controls have changed. What I'm saying is, there are a few points where choosing the right direction to walk to is just guesswork and controls slightly suck.
Climbing is a big part of traversing the levels, and it's simple and works. You want to climb a pipe or something, walk into it. Want to hoist up ledge, jump to it and press up. Everything's simple to do, and although the places you can climb up don't stick out from the rest of the scenery much you'll have no problems figuring out the right route if you just look at your objective and what's around it.
Speaking of looking at objectives, Trane, the main character, is very intuitive and can use his Intuition, by pressing the F key, to see all objectives in the level relatively nearby. This works only part of the time. I intended to finish every single bonus objective during my short-lived playthrough and the Intuition mode refused to show me some objectives until I had died and started the level over. What if I hadn't been the obsessive F-key tapping gameplay sucking nut I am? I would've missed bonus objectives in this video game and cried! It's serious shit. Well, point is, the game's objective finder can be rather problematic.

Trane

The painting and tagging and whatever you happen to call doodling on walls is relatively simple. Smaller stuff that you can do everywhere is as difficult as choosing the tool from a menu, then holding down the middle mouse button and picking one out of four styles you chose from your blackbook prior to entering the level, then choosing a color from a few different ones that mostly don't stick out that well and then clicking left or right mouse button to place your mark on the wall. Larger pieces, your primary objectives, demand a sort of a minigame where you keep holding the middle mouse button, press and hold left or right mouse button to spray and occasionally stop spraying when the pressure drops to shake the can all the while using movement keys to move Trane left and right and the paint can up and down around the outlined area to evenly spread the paint and create your masterpiece. To score maximum amount of points you must avoid drips, meaning you avoid painting continuously on areas flashing red, finish the piece under a time limit and go big, meaning you choose the larger version of the graffiti. You also get points for heaven spots, but this is something you can't control since the available spots for graffiti are preset. Early on in the game you also get the option of painting faster than normal, but this also has the drawback of causing drips more easily, and with the normal painting speed you have more than enough time to finish anyway.
If you're wondering if the painting is anything at all like The Warriors tagging, no, it's not. It's actually just simple enough for being something you do a LOT in every single level, as it is the main focus of the game, but not too simple to bore you outright. At first it may be a bit of a challenge, but once you learn the correct rhythm to moving the paintcan around it gets easier, which fits well with the game's story of an aspiring toy writer slowly getting bigger. On mouse and keyboard the controls for tagging are generally way too clumsy, though, and it doesn't help that the menu for the smaller stuff resets back to whatever tool the game thinks should be the default, that usually being marker pen, so you may eventually just give up everything but the marker tags and main objectives as choosing the tool over and over again becomes a little cumbersome.

What's his name again? Oh, right, Trane.

The selection of choices for what to paint is a tad disappointing. First of all, you can only choose four different images for each type of doodles for each level at a time, which is explained by Trane not carrying his blackbook around with him even though he really does, and even then there's not THAT many good choices to choose from once you have everything unlocked. I know, because I had to use the unlock all levels cheat and it also unlocked everything in the blackbook, and I went through all of them. You would basically get the same results if you just wrote a random word in Microsoft Word and copy/pasted it in different font styles, that's how sad writing the same word, Trane, everywhere is. Just slightly different curves on the top line of the T.
The game also always has one specific graffiti locked in one of the four slots for every level and it's usually the one I liked the least, and painting only three of my own choices annoyed me. I would understand if it was to ensure that you have at least one graffiti selected so you can actually finish the main objectives in the levels, but you can't empty any slots out anyway and even if you could, forcing you to choose one before letting you move onward would be a better way to reach the same goal. Why limit choices further for no reason?
The other graffiti artists in the game must also be a bit out of ideas, as you end up seeing the same shit wall after wall in each level. You'd think a game about graffiti art that includes apparently legendary graffiti artists as in-game characters would focus on the creativity and art side of the graffiti artistry, but hey, maybe imagination in our time is overrated anyway. Let's just go beat up and kill a lot of competing artists that paint the same thing over and over again and just paint the same thing over and over again over their repetitive pieces, who cares? Well, I do, for starters.
On a closely related note, the game also missed a chance at letting the player create their own graffiti. Even Tony Hawk's Underground and THUG 2, two games not about graffiti but skating let you combine a couple of preset  images from a rather large library to customise your board and tags. MEGUCUP doesn't, and on the PC I can't even edit the image files to replace them with my own creations. Apparently I'm too creative for this game about 'art'.
Must kill creativity.
Must conform.
The game does allow you to choose basic letters and numbers for stencils, but since you can only pick four different ones at one time, all you could write are words with only four different letters and even then moving Trane only slightly is so incredibly frustrating that within only one minute you will definitely give up trying get the letters ART to follow F instead of going over it and messing up the message.

"Camera is within a sector that is not in memory!"
I see...

The music in the game is pretty good. It's nothing that I frequently choose to listen to on my own, but it is something I don't mind listening to when available. Voice acting is miss and slightly less miss. The main main characters like the game's protagonist Trane himself sound alright, but everyone else, especially the graffiti legends sound like... me in my Mortal Kombat LP, just scripted. I didn't have a script, so I'm more pro.
The story starts out meh, drops to blah, and then jumps through eh to yeh, and it seems like it could become a real urban epic before the end despite the slow start. I'm actually very sad that I can't experience the promising story myself. Why can't I see it myself? Well...
There's one BIG problem I have with MEGUCUP, a problem so big I can't finish the game legitimately, probably not by cheating either. The problem is that I have the PC version, and the PC version is a port. A very BAAAAD port. At least I hope it's just a bad port, or it's a very shitty game on the consoles.

Trippy. Looks like I got hit by a syringe from Postal 2: AWiP

You can tell that the game wasn't made for PC specifically because the mouse isn't supported in any of the menu screens and the control scheme is absolute crap for anything but a gamepad, but the biggest problem is the camera. The camera is bad, very bad. I don't mean bad like it gets hung up a few times or is hard to move, I mean bad like it shows you either a black screen or spins around you and shows you about 30 different, distorted viewpoints per second. No, seriously, look at those last three screenshots, two of them I took during the camera-spin of what-the-fuck and the black screen one is from the action level where Trane rides a train (Trane on train, funny). Apparently the train goes so fast it leaves the camera behind, but the camera also once got stuck inside the train where it shouldn't even go in the first place and I saw only the passengers.
I can forgive almost every other problem the game has, like the insane skips and... well, horrificly insane skips, but the camera actually prevents me from seeing anything so I can't possibly finish levels. I can't tag because I don't see where to move the paintcan, I can't fight because I can't see the opponents or avoid their attacks, I can't even see some levels at all, and after hours of searching online I didn't even find any fixes, official or unofficial, nor did I find any mods. All I could find were people posting about various problems they had with the PC version and complaining that they couldn't finish the levels. I resorted to using the unlock all levels cheat in order to skip over levels I can't finish, but the problems persisted level after level and actually got worse, and it was even more disappointing to see all the graffiti art that the cheat unlocked as well and find out there wasn't that much to see, so I am not going to try playing the game again.

Ummm...

I'm pretty angry. Well, I'm not that angry anymore, because I started writing this post three days after playing the game and have been writing it slowly over the course of the past three days, so I've mellowed out, but I really think I could've enjoyed the game a lot if the camera just wasn't a broken piece of shit. I really thought the story was going somewhere interesting.

If you want to know whether I recommend the game or not, for the PC absolutely NOT. Consoles, I can't tell. If I ever see MEGUCUP for the PS2 for the same 4,90€ I paid for the PC version I think I might buy it, but the PC version is definitely something people should try to avoid because although you could be a lucky winner and be able to actually play the game, is a mediocre beat em up platformer about graffiti art really worth the time and trouble? I don't think so, and I actually like the concept.
I could endure every other problem the game has, but not being effectively blind. If I must draw the line somewhere, I better be able to see it.

Dear Lord, Batman: Arkham Asylum is absolutely excellent!

Well, I already knew that Batman: Arkham Asylum was good when it was released and everybody were surprised at how good a Batman video game can actually be. I certainly were surprised, because I remember watching the early demo videos at PwnorDie back when the site was a video host and thinking to myself "that game is NOT going to be a hit". Well, I was wrong.

The game is just about, if not completely flawless in every major way.
The gameplay is mostly beat 'em up and sneaking combined with a bunch of running and platforming around with Bat-gadgets. Batgets? The sneaking is a lot of fun, since with your detective vision, gadgets and ability to enter airducts the size of a man you're basically a predator hunting for prey. Don't take it the wrong way, sneaking around isn't way too easy since guns in this game hurt, at least on Hard difficulty which I played on from the start since I'm so great, but the game gives you the necessary tools to let you be as awesome as Batman himself and take the goons out one by one, and sneaking does get a little bit more challenging later on when the amount of armed thugs increases and Joker takes away your best friends in stealth, the gargoyles that conveniently exist in almost every room in Gotham.
The only problem that I can see with the stealth gameplay is that there's not enough of it and the sneaking sections all seem very "artificial" in the sense that everytime you enter a large room with gargoyles on the walls and six to eight armed guards walking about the place, you know you've entered the game's "sneaking challenge", and once the last terrified guard hits the ground you know the sneaking section has been completed and it's time to drop stealth until you enter another large room with gargoyles everywhere. So basically 95% of the sneaking is just you completing the predator challenges from the game's challenge menu, only you're doing it during the actual game. It's not bad, like I said taking out the henchmen one by one and listening to them getting more and more nervous is a lot fun, but the sneaking sections just clearly stand out as specifically crafted for a short sneaking moment.
Other than the stealth challenge rooms standing out, the game flows onward in a perfect way and at a perfect pace and has nothing too much or too little. There's just enough of walking and running, beating up thugs, saving guards, chatting with the villains and platforming to move the story forward without making the game all about one single element. You do end up having hand to hand fights most of the time, but it's not at all like clearing out one room after another full of thugs, you do enough of all the other things in the game between larger bouts that it wouldn't be accurate to call it a beat 'em up game. I would rather call it an adventure.

It looks boring here, but remember that there's probably
20 guys unconscious outside the borders of this image

Talking about the combat, when Arkham Asylum was released, the freeflow combat was celebrated as innovative by both the developers as well as the critics. Now, from my experience, when a game supposedly innovates it either poorly copies something that is already a common mechanic used in games or is indeed something that hasn't been done before but for a good reason. In beat em up games the most common "innovations" have been the ability to redirect punches in the middle of combos, counter-attacks and using your right stick for attacking in all 360 degrees. I wouldn't dare to call Arkham Asylum's combat innovative myself, because with my luck someone would then point out a game for the PS2 that did the same thing seven years earlier and people will call me an idiot (again), but if someone else does claim it to be innovative then I am not one to call it bull.
The combat in Arkham Asylum is ingenious in it's simplicity. Regular beat em up games that do anything right give you a dodge/block move, a heavy and a quick attacks (or punch and kick) and a grapple, and then you do []+[]+Δ combos to punch punch kick one guy's health meter down and move on to the next. What you'll get here, though, is an attack, a stun, a dodge and a counter button, along with quick batarang and quick batclaw moves that I never found that useful for combos to be honest, and then you apply each move where necessary in order to move from one guy to another seamlessly until you get openings to finish them, with attack for when enemies are idle, counter for when someone tries hitting you, stun for guys with knives and dodge for cattleprod guys as well as for continuing combos. You also have two unlockable unblockable special moves that come available as you reach high enough combos, allowing you to instantly take out any of the more dangerous goons and get through the crowd a little bit faster. Combat in this game is basically like a more evolved quicktime event where you press the right action button at the right moment, but you choose your targets and move around freely, and you don't get icons popping on the screen all the time. I don't know if it sounds that great, but it does work really well in practice.
The way enemies are hurt is relative to how many of them are standing. A group of ten guys take a lot more regular beating before going down, but the last guy standing will go down in one punch no matter how little attention you've paid to him during the fight. I find this quite neat of an idea, and realistic as well. I mean, if you just saw Batman take out nine of your pals in one flawless freeflow combo, wouldn't you hit the ground immediately as well? I'd probably just punch myself out at that point. It's detrimental to morale, you see.
I'm not entirely sure if I make the combat sound exactly like what it is, but trust me, it's fast and great, and it's also challenging to master. Like I said, I played on Hard and got game over five times in a row in the VERY FIRST FIGHT. Alright, I might've sucked some at first, but that changed later on. When you time actions right and start getting those 60 hit freeflow combos and just outright murder those poor thugs (figuratively speaking, as Batman doesn't kill anyone (although it's debatable whether those goons I dropped down the bottomless chasms actually lived)), the combat doesn't just look good, it feels great. Few things are as satisfying as calmly walking straight up to a group of thugs and beating the crap out of them in one flawless series of strikes without giving them a chance to hit back.

You get to glide down to kick people upside the head

I think I'm starting to lose steam here, but I'll try to just list what else the game does right, which is just about everything.
The level designs are great. The areas look good and have a very dark atmosphere, like an asylum currently under the control of Joker located in Gotham should be. The obstacles in your way to the objectives are well thought out and I may have found it a bit too exhilirating whenever I was able to easily maneuver around a roadblock with the help of batgets and batskills.
Another great thing about the areas is that they're (almost) seamlessly connected, the game doesn't have loading screens other than when you die and restart from a checkpoint or when you play the challenges, and even then they're quite short. The game loads in the background, or during a quick animation of Batman going through a door (I really don't know when the game loads, I'm just guessing), and getting from, say, the botanical garden in East Arkham to the medical facility in West Arkham doesn't take long at all, which  I noticed when I started hunting for the last of Riddler's riddles. Well, admittedly sometimes when you travel a long distance off the main story path, the game does have the audacity to load for up to a whopping three seconds between locations. Can you believe this bullshit? Three seconds! That's long enough for me to take a bite out of a sandwhich if I have one prepared. How on Earth do those bastards dare to waste my precious time once every 8 hours like that? Yep, it doesn't really load for that 3 seconds very often.

The transitions between the real world to Scarecrow's fear gas induced nightmares are very nicely done, I must say. The first nightmare may take you a minute or two before you realize it's not real, and the third one's transition is pretty funny if you don't know it's coming. I had a vague memory of it from when I watched a complete walkthrough of the game a long while back AND I knew it was coming at that moment, yet I STILL went "WTF?!" for a brief second. And the actual nightmares are quite well done, although I think the platforming in the nightmare levels could've been a tad more exciting.
The sound work is pretty great. I haven't watched Batman TAS in several years now, quite frankly I think I was about eight years old when I last saw it, but I did still recognise the main voices, and hearing Mark Hamill's Joker making announcements throughout the game and hearing his henchmen mutter something in reply was just too entertaining for me to really get into Batman's state of mind in the sense that he'd probably not like hearing Joker joke. The music did it's job, and the sound effects were fine. Only problem I have with the sounds is the rumble that the breakable walls make when you use the upgraded Batclaw on them, it's far louder than any other bit of sound in the game and always makes me jump.
I like how the game's character designs for the villains aren't just direct copies from any pre-existing Batman designs (as far as I can tell), but they look perfect for the job anyway. So the villains are recognisable but in a way also original, setting the game as a stand-alone story better.

She may excrete deadly toxins from her skin, but that's what
the film The Naked Gun invented full-body condoms for

The detective mode is quite useful, in fact a bit too useful as I ended up spending about half of the game with it on, and it does give you the good feeling of having the upperhand when you can see enemies through walls and ruin whatever surprise those poor disguised or hiding goons think they have for you. While jumping into Batman's shoes and getting to actually experience the job of world's greatest detective is fun, it is, however, also a bit disappointing how simple all the detective work really is. All you do is turn the detective vision on, spot the clue and follow the trail, with the mode doing all the work for you, sniffing the whiff of alcohol in the air and scanning fingerprints from a mile away and even recognising the DNA of blood stains. I would've liked slightly more challenge in that department.
But it's only the main story "detective work" that I would've liked to be more challenging. The Riddler riddles were just perfectly easy for a video game collectible objective. The riddles, Riddler trophies, all of the Joker teeth and majority of the Arkham spirit slabs are just easy enough for anyone to find on their own without help if you just pay attention to the surroundings in each area and keep an eye out for any weak walls and grates, and even if you do start getting frustrated with trying to find the last trophy, the Riddler maps make that problem disappear. It's just great extra fun looking for them and hearing the Riddler get more and more pissed off, and I laughed at the final call. I certainly wouldn't want the next game in this (hopefully long) series to have collectibles as braindamagedly awful as finding and shooting 200 pigeons in a place the size of Liberty City. How the hell could anyone possibly be so insane as to try and find all of them without any help from the Internet when it took me like 5-6 hours even with maps and images at hand? Rockstar may churn out stellar games but some of the smaller tasks they put in those games just suck rectum, like the Auf Wiedersehen Petrovic trophy. They definitely overestimated the appeal of GTA's online mode there, aye? A hundred billboards to photograph around the city instead of the pigeons would've been much more... not poo-ey, and just nix all online trophies from now on, ok? Safer that way.

Anyway, back to Arkham... Well, I forgot what else I meant to say about the game when I got this sudden but familiar urge to stab a Rockstar developer in the eye with a pencil. Rockstar, not Rocksteady. I have nothing against Rocksteady, those guys know how to make a great, FUN, not-at-all-frustrating, enjoyable game.
Oh, right, Arkham Asylum's cinematic gameplay experience demands praise. You know how some video games do the cinematic experience thing so well that it basically hurts the actual gameplay in a way? Batman: Arkham Asylum is a perfect, and I repeat that, that, combination of gameplay and cinematic moments. Really, it's astounding how well the gameplay and cutscenes work together. I mean it, it's great. Just having the credits roll during the walk inside the asylum at the beginning is great.
What also demands a mention, I guess, is the single worst element in the game as a whole: the boss fights.

Spoiler: this is the only real boss fight!

Neal already mentioned in one of the comments a while back that the boss fights are, and I quote, "horrible pieces of moldy ass waste with putrid skunk cunt on top". Well, I took the liberty of slightly misquoting him to get his ass brutally beaten if anyone ever sees him on the streets and his original comment might not be quite as colourful, but let's nevermind it.
I have noticed that an increasing amount of people seem to have problems with many of today's games' boss fights. I have never read a single positive comment regarding the boss fights in games like Arkham Asylum,  MGS4, Turok, Stranglehold, Dead Rising 2, Bionic Commando, Overlord, Prince of Persia, Borderlands or Resident Evil 5, only to name the few games I have actually personally kept a close eye on. All I ever hear about boss fights in games these days is that they suck, and in RE5 and MGS4's case them having "the worst boss fights in the entire series". I don't have that big of a problem with the boss fights in any of those games and although I have grown to absolutely loathe MGS4 I still think the Laughing Octopus, Metal Gear and Raging Raven bosses were quite exciting even compared to the earlier, better games in that series.
Arkham Asylum's boss fights aren't complete shit, but they are largely... nonexistant or just lacking in ways. The only real boss fight you ever have in the game is the Poison Ivy fight. The Joker fight is mainly about beating the regular goons, Bane is like any ordinary titan fight, Scarecrow fights are actually platforming sections with a bit of fighting against goons, you never really fight Killer Croc and you never fight Harley Quinn. I don't really think the game is lacking something with it's unremarkable boss fights, in fact if my opinion is worth anything I think the game might actually work better as it is now than if it had more classic boss fights as storyline milestones, but still, I am able to understand that if you go into it waiting for big brawls against the villains then you'll be disappointed, and in that regard the game would be missing something big.
Lastly, the challenge mode is suprisingly fun for such a simple feature. At first I thought the challenges would be annoying to complete for the trophies and that I'd just end up breaking another controller in the process, but no. I spent two hours straight trying to get gold in the final combat challenge and never even thought about there being a small chance for the possibility of perhaps pondering about maybe losing my temper by accident, and now I've got the platinum trophy. Only thing the game could use would be some sort of a survival challenge mode where an unlimited amount of thugs appear until your health is completely drained, although that would mean the mode would definitely eventually end with Batman losing, which would not feel right at all.
Just to clarify, though, the challenges, while fun, aren't really as engaging or long-lasting as Mercenaries mode from RE4 and RE5 (although I personally never cared much about Mercs). I have also not downloaded the Joker challenge maps yet, but I suppose they're fun. You beat guards as the Joker with his unique moves and strut around arrogantly in the "sneaking" challenges, what's not to like?

Scarecrow's cool. I sort of hope he makes a return in the sequel

In the end,  Batman: Arkham Asylum is easily summarised: it's just downright fucking awesome, period. It's greatest strength is that everything from the freeflow combat to silently gliding behind enemies and knocking them out to using gadgets and solving the many problems in Arkham indeed makes you feel like YOU are the goddamn Batman! Every critic I know has said that and I hereby join the choir. The style and mood is all correct and there's no way any person in the development team was thinking about just cashing in with the title, and the most annoying thing about the entire game is that it doesn't last longer, although as it is now it's of acceptable length and never starts dragging. If there was still a website a man could safely upload walkthroughs to for everyone to see, Batman: Arkham Asylum would be one of those  games I would've started recording immediately upon completing it the first time. I could even imagine making it an exception for my no walkingthrough rule and upload it anyway for the fun of it if my computer wasn't so full of clown-on-cow porn.
The game and it's character bios of Batman villains managed to raise my interest enough that I may think about trying to start reading (older) Batman comics, and the game definitely sold me the upcoming sequel. If Batman: Arkham City is indeed five times larger and does indeed add things like interrogating criminals (and hopefully other detective stuff as well) but still retains the overall quality of the first game, then it could, in my opinion that few agree with, be the best game this year (or next if it gets pushed). Only announced upcoming new title I think could possibly rival it is L.A. Noire.

I were going to say that Arkham Asylum might be in the top three best games I've played this year until I realised that it's already 2011 and it's only the second game I have played this year, making it THE Best Game I Have Played This Year So Far, but if we count 2010 in as well to make it fair, then... shit, I played the entire Hitman series, Fallout 1 and 2, Red Dead Redemption as well as Conker's Bad Fur Day (emulated) in 2010, so the competition would be rather rough. Horrible, it's only been one year since I played many of those awesome awesome awesome games for the first time. I suck.
And yes, Batman: Arkham Asylum easily beats Fallout: New Vegas, even if it is much less time consuming in the end. It's actually very odd what happened when I started pondering which one I liked the best. I can not, for the life of me, remember that much about New Vegas anymore. It's been only four days since I ended my THIRTEEN DAY long playthrough and it's like someone has surgically removed all memories of it. I only recall vague images of sniping Deathclaws, the roulette wheel of that damned loading screen spinning and a frozen screen of the Hoover Damn battle only minutes before the game would end. I suppose New Vegas was a bit more meh than I thought, although looking at how little I could say about the game in the three blog posts do make me wonder how much I really ever had to say about it in the first place. That's why I specifically chose the words "time consuming" above instead of "longer", because I can't be sure I enjoyed Fallout: New Vegas. I thought I did...

Thank goodness that Batman was here to save me!

Finished with Fallout: New Vegas

Alright, I am now done with Fallout: New Vegas, even got the platinum trophy. It glitched one too many times for my liking, or to be more precise it froze on me three times within one hour, so I stopped roleplaying and just hurried through the trophy related tasks and story quests using fast travel, and I dropped the difficulty and turned off Hardcore so that I didn't die from the fast travel. Funny enough, Hardcore mode is actually a pain in the ass only if you fast travel a lot since you'll constantly get dehydrated and miss chances to get more water and food during the travels.

This may look like a static image at first glance,
but it is actually moving video footage of the game.

I've already spent majority of post space in two blog updates just listing various glitches I've come across in the game so I won't do it again, but trust me, I could easily write a third list and many of the glitches would be something that lead me to reloading a save. The game, even with the current patch, is so broken that any article about New Vegas in the Fallout wiki is mostly just information of any bugs the player might experience when dealing with whatever character, location, item or quest the article in question is about. I'm serious.

I do have to say that as far as the quality and quantity of the quests and the ending of the story go, New Vegas is a HUGE improvement over Fallout 3. Back when Fallout 3 was just about to be released there was quite a bit of talk on how it was going to be the first game ever that REALLY has hundreds or maybe even thousands of diffrent endings (not that any sensible person would've believed it), and when it was released it really only had four that were at all different, and what type of ending you'd get depended solely on some minor choice in dialogue and overall karma.
New Vegas goes back to the original Fallout style, telling more specifically how you affected the different companions, factions and locations, and they're often further changed based on which of the four major Mojave-changing paths you took.

Something I don't like, though, is how little danger there is in the Mojave desert. Running from the Mojave outpost to the Nellis AFB is nothing to fear, and those locations are at the opposite corners of the map. Really, I faced more danger during my one mile long walk from home to school back when I was a kid than I ever did while walking from Jacobstown to Primm in this game about a dangerous post-apocalyptic world in which mutants and raiders are ready to kill you at every step, and it also took longer. Hell, you literally encounter more danger in Fallout 3 just by walking from Megaton to Rivet City, and those two places are relatively close to each other on the map. Sure, you could make some argument about how cramped Fallout 3's world is with enemies at every corner, but that doesn't take away the fact that New Vegas is also cramped, but Fallout 3 delivers the feeling of a inhospitable dystopia better. Between New Vegas and Nellis, the only aggressive enemy you can see is literally the mad Brahmin in the Mole rat Ranch. New Vegas' map is a lot smaller, feels even smaller due to a lot of space being locked out of or filled with mountains, and how friendly the world is just further emphasizes the size.
It also annoys me that there aren't any random encounter spawn locations. Only place where the type of enemy I faced changed was the small "town" to the south and slightly east of Red Rock canyon, where I first killed some raiders and then later on some Cazadors. And although I was hinted at possibly getting jumped by any factions that hate me, I never was. Often factions that hated me just let me pass through their territory without any trouble at all.
The Mojave is a boring, hospitable place where a trek from one end of the map to the other is comparable to your averige shopping trip, just a bunch safer.
Also, when I wrote the first impressions post I said that I liked seeing creatures fight each other. I did, while I still saw that they fought each other. From Novac and beyond, the only fight I ever saw was between Fiends and Giant Fire Ants, largely due to there being so few places in the desert where creatures roamed at all.

So, in the end I have to say that some reviewing cunts online just have shit for brains and Fallout: New Vegas is not Fallout 3 repackaged, both in good and bad. Fallout 3's biggest problems are the story, quests and total length of any adventure you'd have in the game no matter how you roleplay, but it's strength is the entire world. It feels like a post nuclear shithole where life sucks. Doesn't sound like something positive on it's own, but you must understand that it's a video game about a post nuclear shithole where life sucks.
New Vegas' strengths are the story, quests and the possiblity of role-playing through the quests, and the fact that thanks to Fallout 3's existence the smaller gameplay elements have been tweaked for the better, but it's biggest problems are the INSANE AMOUNT OF GLITCHES AND BUGS and the lifeless map. I know, it's a post nuclear desert and it feels as empty as a post nuclear desert, but it's a bit TOO post nuclear desert for a video game you play for entertainment.

I also can't quite comprehend why I'm not just able to recycle my empty bottles and fill them with purified water from lakes or water taps. I mean, it's a world where there is, supposedly, a huge problem with water being irradiated if it's even available at all for most people while the land is literally littered with hundreds upon hundreds of empty bottles and large masses of radiation-free water (which is why the lack of water sounds odd). Put one-plus-two-plus-two-plus-one together man, and go live like a king as a water merchant!
Why'd you have to eat the empty plastic bottles after drinking the water from inside them, anyway? They must weight like 0.05 pounds when empty, you could carry a hundred of them to Lake Mead! IDIOT!

I'm now somewhat relieved that I'm done with Fallout: New Vegas, instead of slightly sad like I usually am after finishing a game I've enjoyed. The glitches made me so mad a few times that I almost destroyed my now one and only working controller, and despite looking forward to re-role-playing it earlier I actually don't want to anymore. It's too buggy and dead to warrant another run anytime soon.
I'm going to stop now, go eat something and then start playing Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Three months later, a relapse

After three months of not buying any new games myself I got a bad itch in my wallet and went out to spend the money my grandmother sent me for Christmas.
I checked my regular joint's website for any titles I have been on the lookout for in the past, and sure enough I did indeed spot a few that raised my interest: Marc Ecko's Getting Up: Content's Under Pressure for PC, State of Emergency for PS2 and a used copy of Batman: Arkham Asylum for PS3.

I did find Marc Ecko's Getting Up and Batman: Arkham Asylum and bought both, but to my disappointment the State of Emergency I saw they had was in reality State of  Emergency 2, which is not even a distant cousin to the first game, so I left it on the shelf. Because I have this addiction problem with buying new (old) video games I couldn't just leave with two titles, so I also bought Rogue Ops for PS2 and BloodRayne for PC.
Batman: Arkham Asylum has you sneaking around Arkham as Batman, Marc Ecko's Getting Up has you sneaking around spraypainting shit and having fistfights with armed people if you fail at sneaking, Rogue Ops has you sneaking and hiding your magnificent ass inside pottery and BloodRayne has you running around in tight leather giving the nazis some sexy hickeys, so that's three more games giving me the chance to sneak around.
I'm just sad that the game where you're a flexible creature of the night infiltrating nazi bases and getting up close and personal isn't a sneaking game.
I might write something about these new games once I get to playing them, but right now I'm still preoccupied with Fallout: New Vegas, a game which consistently introduces more stuff to like immensely and more glitches to prevent it from being the great title it should be.

My mother also bought me a new game for PS3 soon after Christmas because the price tag caught her eye: 4,90€ for a brand new, sealed PS3 game. Hell, it costs me more than that just to take the bus downtown and back when I go buy games, and larger stores around here don't sell new games that cheap even if they're shitty PS2 games with damaged covers.
Although it's easy to understand why it was so affordable once you read about it online, as the game in question is Stormrise. Judging by the reviews it's a shitty game. It's a shitty, broken game with bad design and it got 2.5 on GameSpot. Well, according to Metacritic it also got some better than averige scores from other major review sites, but I trust GameSpot in this. Many of GameSpot's reviews may be full of crap but from my experience they're less full than some others.
I suppose I should play it myself before giving it a good bashing, but to be quite honest the GameSpot review frightens me too much, and it's real-time strategy. Only RTS game I have ever liked, that I can remember at the moment, was Dungeons & Dragons: Dragonshard, and I gave that game a much too positive review just because it surprised me how much fun I had with it.

Also, when I went to buy those four new games I mentioned earlier, I sort of gave in and spent a bit of money on a microphone. A real microphone that looks like a microphone, not a cheap headset that crackles, like the one I used to record the YouTube LPs and which broke soon after. I tested it and it works and the sound quality should be at least decent. There was a bit of static, but I think that can be easily fixed just by adjusting the sound settings, because everything's still set up for the old headset.
I'm just telling you this in case you're one of the two people who want me to do more LPs, because what this means is that I have basically no good excuse to not do LPs as far as lack of recording equipment goes, and if I don't actually do LPs then I have just wasted a wad of cash on yet another piece of junk electronics that I'll never use. You should know how much I hate wasting money (on anything other than games) so I'm now forced to try and get my money's worth out of this microphone.

Third, fourth and fifth impressions of Fallout: New Vegas

Alright, so I've now played Fallout: New Vegas even more, and I'm getting somewhere. I've reached the Strip, killed Benny and gotten the chip back, and now I'll start just exploring the wasteland for all the side stuff I missed, because seeing the way NCR,  the Legion and Mr. House are acting and looking at the quest details and which quests reward trophies, something tells me the main questline is coming closer to an end, or at least a point of no return regarding faction loyalty, and I believe the game just ends with the last quest so... yeah. Punisher Blues will continue to bring scum to justice until I feel like it can all end. After this first playthrough is done, I'll be playing an evil female character and see what the other side of the coin in New Vegas has to offer.

This is pretty much what I do, but wearing a Sheriff Duster

I have to say, the game hasn't turned into Fallout 3 yet, but glitches it's had a plenty. Glitches I forgot to mention or hadn't encountered yet when I wrote the last post include absolutely horrendous textures where stuff, mostly the ground, is partly a blurry mess. Like when in games, like Fallout 3 for example, the "close-up texture" loads a little slow and all you see is the "distant texture" for a few seconds and then see it suddenly change, but instead in New Vegas it stays permanently blurry. In some places it's REAL bad and looks like if you just woke up and still can't quite focus on anyhing.
Creatures have also dropped through the ground a couple of times and gone to hell, especially visible when the kill cam follows. I suppose you could say that they... fall out in New Vegas.
There's been occasions where the quest marker on the map has pointed me to a wrong spot, and it's not a that I would've been on a wrong floor, since it has been outside.
People have been turning hostile against me despite the fact that I haven't worn any faction armor since the first session. First the NCR tell me I'm doing a great job and suddenly every one of them, in a blink of an eye, start shooting at me. I thought that maybe they just have something against my companions, but when the attack companions THEY ATTACK COMPANIONS, not leave them alone to attack me. They would also attack companions immediately upon setting their eyes on them, not wait around for a while.
Sometimes people have been knocked unconscious by nothing. Nobody attacked them, they just fall on the ground. I guess even NPCs like to have a bit of a kip sometimes. Maybe they're narcoleptic.
The game has frozen on me several times. Several. Most often in Freeside, but a few times elsewhere and during loading screens. Freeside has also been extremely choppy.
Companions have gotten stuck a few times. It's always fixed when I reload a save, whether they were stuck already when the game saved or not (I suppose the game just checks whether I have companions or not and teleports them to me at load), but still. It's good, though, that reloading any save unsticks them, because in Fallout 3 when companions got stuck they were permanently stuck.
In the Kings' mission when the Kings' member tells the King about what Pacer is doing, the gang member appears from thin air next to the King and gets stuck, and since it's in the "talking mode" the game gets stuck. This happened several times in a row despite my best efforts in making Rex move out of the way. Why does the messenger have to teleport in so close? Every other time anyone is teleported in for a conversation, they teleport further away so that you don't usually see them drop in.
The game has also gotten stuck in a few transitions out of conversations, allowing me to move the camera and press start and little else. Usually this has happened when two characters have tried initiating a conversation with me at the same time.
The 10th NCR ghoul never spawned in the sidequest "We Will All Go Together" and now I have a quest permanently incomplete. By the time I gave up and read about the quest to find about this problem, I had already saved over every one of my safety save while looking around the entire southern portion of the map for the little shit and couldn't go back in time to the moment before talking to the one sane ghoul.
I have also gotten stuck in the terrain a few times, luckily mostly outside so I've been able to use quick travel as a method of fixing the situation, but one time it also happened indoors and all I could do was to reload an autosave.
Yesterday night I quit playing because the game quit playing. I thought that I hit the remote for my TV or something when the screen went crazy, but it was just that the game, on it's own in the middle of a fight, quit itself and returned to the PS3 main menu. So now the game is telling me when to quit? It was 2 AM and I was getting headache, alright, but I decide when I go to bed, not you game! I'll die playing you if I want to and you can't stop me!

But, for some good points, the game's quests have been quite a lot of fun for the most part. I've liked the snooping around for the culprit type of stuff, and some of the quests have brought to mind the Hitman series with stuff like sneaking into hotel rooms to silently kill a guy, drugging wine bottles, killing cooks and dragging their bodies into freezers out of sight, smuggling in weapons past security checks and dressing up in faction clothing to fool people a bit. Hitman games are some of my all time favourite video games, with the exception of Hitman 2, so... I like. You know I am a fan of sneaking games in general, in fact out of the four new games I bought last Tuesday three have stealth gameplay in them (yes, I bought more games again), so the fact that in New Vegas I actually get a lot out of the sneak skill is great. In Fallout 3 the sneak skill was mostly just to get sneak crits indoors against unavoidable mobs of enemies or for pilfering everything in stores, but in these New Vegas quests stealth has some actual use.
I, suprisingly, like playing Blackjack and Caravan in New Vegas. Going for the few trophies related to these games doesn't hurt, which is good.
I also like being able to carry a fucking deadly "one-hit-kill" arsenal for once. It took me quite a while of playing before I could feel safe trading away my more common good weapons and ammo, but now that I dared to spend some caps and sell all the junk I've been hauling everywhere I feel a bit better, and lighter. I dropped my precious modded .357 magnum and my precious suppressed Varmint rifle and my precious shotguns and my precious repeaters and bought an Anti material rifle with 111 damage. Doesn't matter that the ammo is a bit more scarce and expensive, it'll kill everything with less bullets. I'm also carrying my Hunting rifle with 45 damage for "smaller" kills that need a rifle, a Hunting revolver with 50something damage for close-up death and .44 magnum with around 40 damage for all the tiny critters whose brains I splatter just for kicks. In comparison, most other regular guns widely available do only 35 and less damage, so I'm well prepared. I'm also wearing the 1st Recon beret for +5 crits.

So the game is even more broken than it was in the beginning, but although the scales between fun and glitches have turned slightly more even towards the end, I am still having enough fun to play on.

First and second impressions of Fallout: New Vegas

I have played Fallout: New Vegas now for a total of, let's say, 16 hours. I haven't even gotten to Novac yet, so my views on the game at this point are limited, but I have managed to burp up a few mental notes about the game already.

Let me get this over with first: New Vegas is NOT a direct copy of Fallout 3. I've read a couple of (amateur) reviews of New Vegas while looking for some information about the game and some have stated that supposedly New Vegas is a new setting in name only, and that all it does to differentiate itself from Fallout 3 is adding a few new weapons and armor and the Hardcore mode. What the flippin' fuck is wrong you guys? Are you dense? Do you want to be a professional critic so bad that you criticise just about everything in new games without scrutiny?
Back when I was young, and I still am only pushing 22, long-running video game series worked like this: first game set the base mechanics and to a slightly lesser extent introduced the story, the setting and the characters. The sequels would then retain the base mechanics, the whole reason why people could safely purchase the new games knowing they'd still like them, and only change a certain few things about how the game is played in each new entry while mainly focusing on continuing the overall narrative and/or the... I don't know what it's called, the "soul" of the game? The thing that can make completely different games seem related, you figure out the correct word.
If the series suddenly and drastically changed between two games there was a more or less valid reason for it, for example the evolution/change between platforms, change of developing studio, or simply just the artistical incentive when the sudden change in gameplay was to further drive in the significance of the drastic changes in the story. In some rare cases the people behind the games may have even wanted to conquer new audiences and drop the "dying" fanbase. (Some examples of changes: GTA2-GTA3, Fallout2-Fallout3, Spyro3-Spyrowhatever, Jak & Daxter-Jak2). In fact, games most often get criticised when they fail to stay loyal to the series as they piss off the original fanbase even if the change isn't for the worse. Remember the cries when they showed footage of the first Splinter Cell Conviction? That game didn't look too much like shit, it was just completely different (and had stupid distraction methods. Stealing phones in a crowd to divert guards, what?) and so the studio SCRAPPED THE WHOLE PLAN and remade Conviction from scratch, final product being the thing they released last year. You could say Splinter Cell series has been the same game over and over again, but the skulking in shadows and the trademark moves are exactly why people continued following the series.

Don't look like no DC ruins from here

My point here is, the crucial differences in games are more often than not very small in the larger context if you really think about them, and New Vegas changes almost everything it possibly can from Fallout 3 without risking alienation of a large group of fans. So far the game looks completely different, with the setting being far closer to that of a classic wild west where people are rebuilding life than the grim post-apocalyptic rubble-filled hole of DC where life just sucked until you died. I recall Fallout 3's base colors being gray and worn brown, New Vegas has so far been sun scorched yellow and sky blue.
The story (main quest), at least so far, seems more cinematic, better paced as the main thread to follow and more importantly it's definitely the most fresh set up for open adventure the entire Fallout series has seen so far.
Fallout set you up as a guy from a vault, a closed community, sent out to find a water chip to save the vault while at the same time fighting with the BoS against the rising army of super mutants. Fallout 2 set you up as a guy from a small village, a somewhat closed community, sent out to find the G.E.C.K. to save the village while at the same time fighting a little less with the BoS against the rising threat of the Enclave. Fallout 3 set you up as a guy from a vault, a closed community, on a mission to find a G.E.C.K. to save DC while fighting with the BoS against the rising threat of the Enclave. Tactics set you up as some guy from BoS fighting some new rising threat of something, and in Brotherhood of Steel, the shunned PS2 game I never got my mittens on, I'm guessing you were a BoS recruit set out to fight some rising threat in the wasteland. Again. Don't correct me if I'm wrong.
New Vegas sets you up as a courier who has lived outside and at least starts out with the mission of getting payback against people who shot you in the face and stole your package that you are still responsible for, while the NCR is fighting the rising threat of the Legion. See the pattern and how it changes in New Vegas?
Ok, I haven't played that far yet and maybe soon I end up fighting with NCR to defeat the Legion and the contents of the package is the key to saving the wasteland, but the beginning of the story at least has been far more interesting than what Fallout games have come up with in the past. New Vegas also has faction status system that would seem to allow me to befriend "the enemy" if I so wished, something no Fallout game has done to this extent before.

At this point, while writing the post, I took a break and watched Murder on the Orient Express as it was on TV, so I lost some of my original points regarding New Vegas' originality, but you get my drift anyway. The game is different, has new content and several things regarding the game mechanics have been tweaked for the better, but what made Fallout 3 Fallout 3 and a good game can also be found in New Vegas, the good stuff has just gotten slightly fatter. Saying that New Vegas is a copy of Fallout 3 is only about two notches less insane than saying Fallout 3 is just Oblivion with guns, but still stupid and neglectful. So, a large RPG is played from first-person viewpoint, alright, but what else was same about Oblivion and Fallout 3, huh? What? Yeah, didn't think you had an answer either. New Vegas is, by my standards, only as close to Fallout 3 in terms of content as a sequel should be. It's new, but familiar.
Of course, if the rest of the game quickly takes a turn for the worse and it's just Fallout 3 all over again I promise I'll put someone's feet in my mouth, but until then you better come up with examples of the things you would've changed about New Vegas if you want to make me believe New Vegas is just more of the same.
And besides, even if it was, it's still good. I mean, look at Fallout and Fallout 2, or Thief 1 and Thief 2, or Spyro 1 and Spyro 2 and Spyro 3, or Jak 2 and Jak 3, or.. well, any game that backs me up, really (but none that contradict my point).

Sometimes I just like to sit here for hours,
watching the hardworking ants... well, work hard

Anyway, I love Fallout: New Vegas so far. I like the feeling of a western the game has had up till now, I like how the main quest leads me onward while constantly giving me the chance of completing other quests without having to illogically break the pacing, I like Hardcore mode and how it gives some real use for the normally useless food items and how it doesn't allow me to carry 5000 bullets for a gun I never use, and I like the ability to really play a role and choose sides and have good as well as bad results for my actions, even being able to fail quests.
I like being able to mod a rifle with a silencer to actually have a silenced gun that doesn't completely suck ass. I like not having to pray to God that the game drops me another gun of my chosen weapon type just so I can repair the little piece of broken shit, as I now have weapon repair kits that I can use on any weapon. I also like being able to craft the weapon repair kits myself, because now I have even more reason to sift through random junk instead of just the old caps, ammo, guns and stimpaks. I like how I can create ammunition for my chosen guns if I can gather the necessary parts, as it allows me to use one type of weapon a little more and not constantly be afraid of running out of ammunition before I can reach the next merchant. Basically I just like to tinker, and New Vegas lets me tinker, which I like.
I like how the world seems more like a living place , where animals and gangs seem to have much more of their own territiories and occupy certain spawn points of the map more realistically, as animals seem to have their own "nests" that they defend. I like how ants for example don't attack unless you get too close to their home or attack first, and only hiss at you when you're getting too close, making the world more... realistically inhabited. I like seeing different critters of the world battle each other more often, so it doesn't seem like everyone's just plotting against me. I like being able to jump gangs that I have just witnessed surviving a rough battle with radscorpions, and start taking potshots at them from a good vantage point so I can collect the loot. I also like the crows that appear everywhere, and I like how they blow up into little red bits when shot.

I have accidentally aggravated these nature's little wonders
and must now make a hasty retreat to avoid upsetting
the delicate balance of the ecosystem

I also like the card game Caravan, although I still don't fully grasp it's rules and can't understand why it's supposed to be challenging if you have a good enough collection of cards.
All I can really say is that Fallout: New Vegas is like a mixture of the various good bits from Fallout 3, Fallout 2 and Red Dead Redemption, and some.

But, alas, the game also follows Black Isle's and Bethesda's Fallout series tradition, being badly broken at it's current state. After only 16 hours of gameplay and with the latest patch installed it has managed to cause me enough headaches to partly negate all my perhaps much too positive first thoughts and hurt my excitement.
First of all, the most noticeable problem is that game has continuous hiccups. It stops for a brief half a second every 10 seconds or so when running about, as if it was loading something. Why? Does it really load something? Shouldn't it be able to load without getting stuck constantly? Am I asking too much when I expect it to play smoothly? It's not the end of the world, but it is indeed very annoying, and I don't particularly enjoy getting annoyed when playing games.
There's also problems with visuals. Creatures in some cases, when appearing, appear as giants and only shrink once they get close. More of a funny occurence than  a problem and as far as I am concerned this relatively rare bug doesn't even need a fix, but still...
Items appear from nowhere a lot more than they ever did in... any game I can remember, really. GTA Vice City Stories for PS2 suffered a lot from this problem (well, all 3D GTA games did to some extent), but not as much as New Vegas does, large objects just... pop in and pop out like I was hallucinating. Just aiming can reveal a large wall of crap infront of me that I am unable to see again once I release the L1 button.

Meet Jacklyn, my packass. She came on to me,
so I laid her on the ground and stuffed her with my junk

Items and people also disappear. Corpses vanish in some cases within a minute if you don't stare at them and even if you DO stare at them, which I witnessed especially close when using the corpse of Jacklyn to transport several hundred pounds of goods (as dragging a corpse is faster than walking overburdened or making several trips), but some have yet to disappear although I killed them first thing when I started the game. I've lost lots of loot from dead raiders this way.
I've also witnessed several objects like armor and weapons turn invisible, yet still have their names pop up when I point the crosshair to where I last saw them.
In some cases enemies are able to shoot through walls.
Often I supposedly miss clean shots 20 times a row in situations where it is impossible for that to happen even if there was a considerable spread. I know you think I just suck and make excuses, but just take my word for it sometimes the gun just doesn't seem to fire. Although, this reminded me of another point I actually like about the game: using the crosshair and iron sights is truly the preferable method of aiming in New Vegas as V.A.T.S. isn't as accurate and bullet spread is lesser than in Fallout 3, where V.A.T.S. was just king. I do still use V.A.T.S. but only when dealing with fast, more deadly enemies at closer range.
Anyway, back to the glitches I was talking about before my train of thought was derailed by the realization that New Vegas also has good things to counter the many technical problems. The game doesn't always notice that you have taken off your faction armor, so people like the NCR that like me may start shooting without provocation as the game thinks I'm still dressed in Legion armor even though I'm wearing a Sheriff's Duster.
In aiming mode, the gun may completely disappear and not let you aim with it in first person, although you can quickly fix this by switching weapons, aiming, and switching back. Annoying in battle anyway.
I forgot some glitches since there really are many, but for the last, my second session ended because Fallout: New Vegas froze permanently and I had to turn off my machine. Freezing once every 16 hours is better than what Fallout 3 did unpatched, but come on, this is patched AND it still has a dozen other problems. Now me and my brethren are eagerly anticipating whether the developers drop the DLC stuff for a second and release another fix, and whether it'll do anything good. According to reviews I've read, installing the patch after having started the game actually fucked up the save games for some users.
It's hard being a PS3 gamer as we are at the mercy of game companies. PC gamers have PC gaming communities and their fine people who provide unofficial fixes for games fast, doing the developers' work for them. Unpaid.

I don't care who that is, he gunna get it!

So far there are very few things about the game I dislike that aren't glitches, but one of them is how the trait "Four Eyes" isn't clearly explained at the beginning. The traits normally have both a positive and a negative effect, so when the game told me that with "Four Eyes" a character has -1 perception without glasses but +1 perception when wearing glasses, I understood it as getting a +1 effect on top of my original base Perception value along with the regular eyewear bonus, and since I thought my character called Punisher Blues, a vengeful vigilante on a mission from God, would eventually start wearing sunglasses at all times I'd get a free bonus point to perception.
What the trait does in reality, however, is lower your base perception value by one instead of it being only an effect -1, and then give you +2 perception effect with glasses. So because my base value originally was 6, with the trait the game counts it as being 5 and makes me ineligible for certain aiming related perks that I would've gotten without the trait, but I also don't get any bonus to compensate for the loss as the +1 effect only covers the originally lost base point, meaning that although I have perception of 8(=5+3) I would've had perception of 8(=6+2) anyway without the trait. So in reality, this trait just gives you TWO disadvantages and no advantages: having to keep the relatively rare eyewear at good condition at all times (because if it breaks you can't wear it) and not being able to get certain perks you'd normally get with the stats you have.
Sucks, and it's a good thing I'm playing a role here and just have to accept whatever shitty disadvantages I get or I'd go murder me some more devs. Hey, I punch doors and throw controllers in fits of madness, you don't want to mess with me!
I'm actually contemplating starting from scratch while I still can without screwing majority of the experience. I think I'll flip a coin when I start playing again tomorrow or something.

He dun gotten it! Just like his buddy,
who died due to lack of head five days prior.
Hey, I undressed that guy only to check his pulse!

Anyway, in the end it's true what some professional critic once said, although I can't remember which one or what the exact words were: Fallout: New Vegas is both an incredible experience you shouldn't miss out on but it's also bugged up the rearshaft like nobody's bloody business. The various technical problems aren't reason enough for you to pass up on this awesome game if you have any reason to believe you'll like it, but you shouldn't expect a bumpless ride. Buy it and play it, but get ready for some painful crap.

Note, however, that I have no fucking idea what the game is like beyond the first hours and few starting quests, so don't take any of the words above seriously. In fact, just forget everything I said for now. Alright?

Dead Rising 2 is dead fun

Alright, so I have now done everything there is to do in Dead Rising 2 apart from the co-op playthrough and various minigames that only reward you with small cash prizes.

Dead Rising 2 is quite fun. Using the large amount of objects scattered here and there to kill off zombies never gets old, to me anyway. I never get tired of using the lance to pick up zombies and throwing them over the rail in Palisades Mall or trying to keep zombies at bay just with the bow and arrow. Creating combo weapons is also fun and useful for the majority of the recipes, which I found slightly surprising because generally when video games offer some sort of create-your-own-weapon thing it's just to make the game sound more appealing, and the effort you have to put into scavenging parts and creating the weapon doesn't match the usefulness and/or coolness of the resulting item. In Dead Rising 2, however, the parts for each combo weapon are pretty much always in the same general area, so while you're casually going around punching zombies you might suddenly get the notion of creating a Freedom Bear or a Blitzkrieg just because all the necessary items happen to be there, and it's worth the short sprint between a pitchfork and a drill motor in the Food Court just to stick zombies on the end of the Auger and watch them spin around while limbs fly off in the air, and weapons like the spiked bat or knife gloves are your go to crowd control and psycho beating partners. Hell, I even like the drill bucket that so many others find waste of data space.

Ooh, yeah! I love gore!

Another zombie falls prey to the deadly airborn swordfish

The gore from the zombies looks quite nice. Since there's so many of them on the screen at once you'd think hitting them with weapons would just knock them on the ground with a little blood spurting out, but no, dismemberment and mutilation of zombies is, for the most part, very detailed in the game. If you happen to swing a broadsword at a zombie while it's in a little different position, like getting up from the ground for example, the cut-off point of the loose bits that fly off is according to the swing of the blade unlike in many games where the area is only an estimate on which section of the body out of six sectors was hit closest. I like how zombies react to losing body parts as well. Often they do just go down gurgling the instant you hit them, but sometimes they lose an arm or a leg and bleed profusely everywhere while desperately trying to still get to you before finally going down. Seeing a fat zombie have a large swordfish sticking out of his chest for a second before he actually falls always makes me feel happy. I like the carnage in Dead Rising 2. One might say that obsessing over detailed violence and gore and blood spurting everywhere is something only a troubled individual would do, but if you're telling me I'm troubled I'm gonna ram a splintered table leg through your guts and eat your children! So don't.
I also like freezing zombies just for the hell of seeing them stuck in the middle of funny animations. Well, that's really the only use of freezing them, but it's fun all the same. As a quick note, the screams and moans of the zombies also sound nice. I shot the legs off a zombie with a shotgun once and the death scream was surprisingly appropriate and kind of scary, and that's what made me pay more attention to the sounds in the game.

What I really don't like about Dead Rising 2 is it's fire related animations and how much shit is on the HUD all the time. The fire is really lackluster and using weapons like the molotov or flamethrower isn't nearly as exciting as you'd think, in fact they can be downright boring, and flaming gloves is just... bah. Flaming gloves is my least favourite combo weapon.

Since fire in the game sucks, this is the best
thing you can do with the fire extinguishers

The HUD, well, you can see just how cluttered is in the pictures I took. Only your inventory closes, everything else stays on the screen the entirety of the game. As you can see, missions are always listed on the right hand side of the screen, and there is no way to turn them off if you don't give flying moose bollocks about them. Even if you complete all possible missions as fast as they pop up, the game STILL shows the upcoming case files on the screen despite the fact that it's too early for you to actually begin them. If I can't do anything story related yet, why must my screen be so obscured by pointless info? And that radio icon on the bottom left, it pops up and stays up whenever you have new unchecked missions or you get a call regarding the story. It continues to stay on the screen if you answer a call and skip the dialogue, and the game goes as far as to call you back over and over until you have spent some specifically vague amount of time reading about Katey needing Zombrex at 7 o'clock for the fourth time. I know what she needs and when and I'm in a bit of a hurry now, which is precisely why I skipped the dialogue for the third time in 5 seconds. Stop calling me already! Well, to be honest the HUD isn't that bad looking and the calls aren't at all constant, so... forget what I just wrote. Far less annoying than you'd think.

The story of the game is something I expected to be more of a nuisance, and it can be a bit if you just start a new story to slice zombies since the beginning of the game is two minutes of cutscene starts and loading screens even if you skip them, but I was surprised how well everything came together moodwise when I finally decided to finish all cases and beat all psychopaths and save all survivors, in the fifth runthrough. When I played the role of a guy in the middle of a zombie apocalypse looking for medication for his kid while saving people and trying to uncover the truth instead of a jackass that lets his kid die just to spend three days throwing flower pots and LCD monitors at zombies uninterrupted, the game got a very different but all the same a really good mood. The feeling of it really being a dire situation where people are fighting for their lives and in some cases going insane really did come across to me quite well when I had less time to place servbot masks and stuffed toys on zombies' heads, and psycho battles started to feel more like natural occurences in the world instead of boss fights specifically put in your way. Admittedly, if the game didn't offer the possiblity of freely running around and going nuts with drill buckets and plate launchers while dressed as a cowboy the story alone wouldn't be able to sell 10,000 copies, but it's still more than just a tacked on loose plot thread.

And they let kids play with these, you say?

I must mention that although a large amount of the "mission" of the game is escorting somewhat helpless people around, it never gets nearly as annoying as some other games' escort missions. Biggest trouble is getting a large amount of survivors through a loading all at once, but other than that they usually hold their own against regular zombies just fine, and aren't completely stupid.
I also quite enjoyed the detail, references and humour in the game, but I won't talk about those more. I do still wonder, though, who else provided Jared with Zombrex, since during the 4 days I only gave him two shots... there's a huge plothole there, if you save Jared that is. I let him die four times and killed him myself once.

Oh, that's nasty. It's all mush in there.

The online mode and trophies of Dead Rising 2 are something that made me hurt myself and my controller. Reportedly the game has problems tracking your progress with clothing worn and melee weapons used so when I had trouble getting the collection trophies for those I was almost certain the game fucked me over, and all my frustrations I accumulated over the course of six days and six playthroughs caused me to snap a bit when Randy, one of the psychos, killed me by cheating and sent my progress back another 20 minutes in the final run that I had to start only because one stupid piece of clothing is hidden in the Tape It or Die crew's HQ that's only open for a couple of in-game hours on the third game day IF the game has room to spawn four more survivors, and if and when the place opens up the game doesn't actually inform you of it in any way so you MUST read about it online to even find it exists so it's all just horrible bullshit on the game makers' part! Well, anyway, when Randy killed me I got so mad that I punched my bed, my shelf, my wall and my closet door, everything very hard and very fast. I think the neighbours thought someone was killed, but they have no right to complain after all the racket they've been making over the years. At least I went insane in the afternoon, not at 2 FUCKING AM BLASTING SHITTY POP SONGS AT FULL VOLUME! I'm not really built for hardcore brawling so I naturally hurt my hand pretty bad. Don't think anything broke, though. Well, now that I'm calm I can admit that the game only fucked me over with the firearm trophy, everything else actually worked fine. I just forgot to use the training sword and wear the beachwear from Americana casino. My bad.

I do still think that Zombie Genocide Master trophy is one of the worst ideas for a trophy in a while. To get it you must kill 72,000 zombies in one playthrough, but the mechanics of the game make this a rather crap trophy idea. Trying to get it legitimately, you MUST spend the entire game, from start to finish, just driving around and killing huge mobs of zombies while every 5000 zombies or so using save/loading to replenish your car's health and the mobs of zombies (cheating with a co-op partner, you can either do it faster or remove the time limit). That means several hours of boring grinding WITH the likely possibility of actually FAILING to reach the magical number in time and having to START FROM THE BEGINNING if you don't have a clear strategy from the very beginning. You CAN NOT get the trophy by any other means legitimately, no matter how fast you create tesla balls, so it is definitely not a trophy you'd get from a regular playthrough, and it's not a regular grind trophy because of the possibility that you're sent back to the beginning if you're too slow.

Watch out, this man needs a doctor!

I personally think trophies and achievements are more a way for developers to encourage trying out things in games that people might pass up on otherwise (trophies for playing a match online or completing side tasks in games) and to reward more dedicated fans (trophies for playing a game for a certain, large, amount of time). Spending the entirety of a game to drive up and down the outside area for nothing BUT the trophy? Insane. This is a trophy that once again separates the people suffering from OCD and idiocy from the regular people who know what video games are, or perhaps used to be, all about. And yes, I got the trophy. I am an idiot, although a somewhat more respected idiot among the idiot society now that I have the stupid trophy to brag about.

Playing the online modes lead to another case of a sudden outburst of anger. I like the online mode, though it's not very... group event friendly if you get what I mean. If you don't, well I mean that it's an absolute shit idea if for example somebody set a DR2 online event up at bonersgamesforums. It doesn't work, the mode's so fucking casual that you only play it to get more money for the story mode.
Anyway, I managed to snatch the first two trophies in the very first episode I played very easily, and win in another two game types in the second episode I played. Then problems arrived. I kept getting Ramsterball and Zomboni rounds in every episode, and those are two modes I won in already. Slicecycles is ALWAYS the last round and I already won that in the first episode also, and so I got frustrated. Not only is it annoying to be playing these modes just for the trophies (yes, trophy hunting's the hobby of idiots, I admit) but sad thing is that I happen to like Ramsterball, Zomboni and Slicecycle matches the LEAST, so I didn't even have fun.

I can still fix it. Get me some duct tape and a hammer.

The rare times when I did get to play the other modes I was either disconnected from the other guys before winning or there was someone who just absolutely crushed everyone else, giving me no chance to win. After two hours of this shit I got so mad I sort of, casually, very calmly, in orderly fashion, threw my controller on the floor, breaking it, and now I'm still missing two screws and a triangle button. Not that big of a loss, it was the controller I've hated using because the left stick and R2 and L2 buttons have trouble registering actions, possibly being the largest cause behind my losing streaks because the DR2 online games only use those buttons. I've only used  the controller whenever I've had to charge the better one, as I wasn't even able to perform certain tricks in Skate with the broken one. What was worse than the controller breaking was the fact that I threw it with the same hand I hurt punching stuff earlier, so I damaged the hand even MORE.
But, letting out some steam and changing controllers worked in the end, because even handicapped I then managed to win every single mode I hadn't won in yet first try AND I won almost every episode in a row until I was done. And now I'm not going to go back to the online mode ever again, because it has no staying power.

You see, zombies?! You see what you
get when you mess with the living?!

So there, despite some stupid shit Dead Rising 2 is absolutely one of my favourite games on the PS3, largely because it actually reminds me of my all time favourite video game The Warriors, and it's odd that it was the first game to ever make me so mad as to get me to hurt myself and break an expensive controller. It's never happened to me before, which is surprising looking at all the games I have played and suffered through in the past. Maybe all the repressed negative feelings from 21 years of my life are finally coming out? Who knows, before it's too late to stop the madness.
Still looking for someone I can do the co-op playthrough with, though. From my PSN friends list only tekkenfanaat has the game and I don't know if he actually likes it, he just happens to have every single PS3 game ever made it seems

I were going to write about my first impressions of Fallout: New Vegas, but I think I'll start separating different blogging topics into their own posts, start writing about New Vegas some other day and go watch the fireworks. Oh, and happy new year of 2011, only one more year till the end of the world!

Happy New Year 2011!

All images, except for game cover, taken and edited by me. For once.