HEY!

Are you looking for a game with EXTREME visceral combat, AND you’re a freaking CYBORG NINJA!?

Well look no further, ‘cause Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance is the game for you!

A spin-off of the classic series Metal Gear, Revengeance takes a new route in the franchise. Yes sir, this is a full-on, no-holds-barred action game with plenty of twists and turns to keep you simultaneously engrossed yet befuddled by the profound interactions and events the explosions happening around you.

Wait, did I mention EXTREME VISCERAL COMBAT!?

Well in case you think your eyes are deceiving you, yes, I DID.

See that guy over there? Yeah, him. Guess what? He’s not that swell of a guy. He did some things with child brains or…something. Who cares. Freakin’ SLICE HIM UP, DUDE! Yeah, just like that. Guess what else? You can slice him up ANY WAY YOU WANT! Just hold left trigger and GO BANANAS.

AMAZING!

Oh, what? You thought this would be a cakewalk? Pft, haha, dream on, sucker. You can only hold left trigger for so long before you run out of juice. Oh, and it’s called Blade Mode. Hmmm? You wanna slice n’ dice your enemies into cubed meat ALL the time? Well, okay, but I have to make it interesting.

To REGAIN YOUR JUICE, all you gotta do is CUT OUT THEIR SPINAL CORDS, BRO! They’re filled with delicious and nutritious fluids, not quite sure why though. Honestly I only found out because of my cannibalistic tendencies.

wait what

…oh

ANYWAYS, pretty sweet, right man? Alllriiight. But I can’t forget to mention this oooonnneee teeny tiny thing that you may find an issue with.

You uh…sorta kinda can’t block, I guess? But you can do this SUPER COOL parry thing that works roughly 70% of the time. It’s no biggie, I swear. Just wait until you get surrounded, it works perfectly bro, I’m telling you.

But yeah, that’s pretty much the run-down dude. Get out there and buy yourself a copy, you won’t regret it.

And in case you’ve forgotten;

AMAZING!

VISCERAL!

BANANAS!

I've beaten Metal Gear Rising in 4 and a half hours, and I just beat DmC Devil May Cry in like 5 or 6, both on normal difficulty.

Either action games these days are rather short in length or they've just gotten easier.

Great games, mind you. I plan to replay them on harder difficulties soon. 

After a few more hours spent with the game, I've gotten used to the kinda awkward mechanics, though I still have a few bones to pick with it. 

The interactibles are incredibly over-powered and they shouldn't be unblockable. While they are nowhere near as unbalanced as the random items in Super Smash Bros., it's hard to take Injustice as a serious tournament fighter (which I assume it's trying to be) when you can take off nearly a quarter of your opponent's life bar with the press of a button. Granted, none of them are unavoidable, but it's pretty damn hard to avoid some, if at all in certain situations.

Then, of course, you have some character traits that are clearly better than others since they're applicable to more situations. Grundy's for example allows you to multiply your power or defence by 2 (or whatever the actual value is) if you complete his chain of throws, and the effect lasts for the duration of the whole match, or until you decide to use a different effect. You can then use this to your advanatage and create set-ups that do over 70% damage or you can significantly reduce damage done to you. 

Compare the previous trait to say, Ares', which basically acts a projectile and/or combo extender that has cool down time and doesn't really offer *that* much more of a edge over your opponent.

While the idea of specific character traits is interesting, they seem more like gimmicks than ideas that serve the core game play (The Flash can even initiate bullet time - and that's something I just find ridiculous).

Also, while I'm not all that into memorizing frame data for fighting games, it's a nightmare for those that do because after some research and watching a good number of tutorial videos, turns out the frame data displayed on the command lists are wrong. Not much of a complaint from me personally, but I understand why this would be problematic for the much more dedicated players. 

But with these few complaints (and a few more that I'm too lazy to write), is the game good fun? Well yeah, it is, once you get comfortable with the controls. But it is definitely in need of some patches. 

Injustice: Gods Among Us is an incredibly stiff fighting game, riddled with gimmicks and loads of input issues. 

That's it, really. 

...Kinda wanting my $80 back. 

So I've been catching up on old titles that I've yet to play. I've borrowed quite a few games from several friends, and right now those are: 

• Mortal Kombat Komplete Edition*
• L4D2*
• Darksiders*
• Crysis 2
• Deus Ex: Human Revolution
• Dante's Inferno* 
• Dragonball Raging Blast 2*

So far, Mortal Kombat is the only game I've kept coming back to, out of the ones I've tried out so far (the ones marked with an asterisk). L4D2 is only really fun if you're playing with a friend (or people with a normal number of chromosomes), and Darksiders and Dante's Inferno are just 'meh' to me, though Darksiders is definitely the worse of the two. I managed to play up to around 4 hours of Dante's Fern and 2 and half for Darksiders. I couldn't quite put my finger on why I couldn't enjoy these games until I sat down and thought about it, so I figured I'd share.

Dante's Inferno

A 2010 release that is a shameless GoW clone. I'm fine with games re-using successful formulas as long as the final product is just as good as the source material. However, Dante's Inferno just isn't that great, despite its rather impressive intro. 

The main problem I have is that enemies just take far too many hits to kill. It may sound like a silly complaint but if you've played the game then you probably know what I'm talking about. Even the weakest enemies (which are meant to be defeated easily) take at least 2 of my most powerful, drawn out combos to kill off on normal difficulty. Given that you get surrounded by these dudes frequently, the game quickly turns from a fun experience into a chore. The much easier way is to simply grab and kill them one by one, but it's a methodical snore. 

"Would you like to punish or absolve this one? Absolve? Okay. Mash B."

It's the most dull, repetitive activity I've experienced in a long time, to say the least. And on the point of mashing B, who's bright idea was it to have to mash a button to open almost every door and every single treasure chest? It's annoying in GoW, and it's annoying here. Stop it. My thumb hurts. 

The Other One

...I really don't understand why Darksiders is seen as good. I mean, sure, if you endure the incredibly sh!tty first few hours I suppose it'd be decent, but I'm not the kind of person to do that; the notion of keeping to a certain game, TV show or book because someone else said it gets much better later on is just weird to me. Exposition in both story and game play elements should be what entices a person to keep on going in whatever it is you've created - if you do a piss poor job of it then your audience is only going to lose interest. 

But I digress, my main problem with Darksiders is mostly the combat. It just sucks. If it's not bad enough that you only have access to one combo at the beginning of the game (that only uses one button), the control scheme is just unintuitive. Blocking is something that actually requires effort to do, which is just plain silly in an action game; you can only block while being completely stationary. Why? Because some idiot thought it'd be a good idea to map block and dash on the same button. So half the time when I try to block, a dash comes out, and it fxcks me over. It also doesn't help that there's input lag on jumps and that the very first mission after the intro is a fxcking fetch quest. 

Oh, DB Raging Blast? It's good for drunk fun with friends, can't say much else about it. 

I just hope Deus Ex: HR and Crysis 2 don't disappoint. 

So I've been busy as of late and meaning to be more active on here because games are my first love, but I just don't have the time. Between school and commitments with friends and other things of the sort, it's hard for me to find the time and drive to sit down and write about games, as much as I'd like to. But anyway, what I really want to talk about is a debate I had recently with a friend of mine regarding Goleneye and a few other things.

So I was chillin' with some buddies and one of them was playing Halo 3, while my other friend and I were kickin' it back and gushing over our favorite games. Goldeneye came up in the discussion and things went south pretty quickly in terms of agreement. 

Basically, my main point against Goldeneye was that while it was a huge hit back in 1997, the game has aged terribly and it's hard to look like a sane person if you try to say that it still holds up. Apparently this isnt true according to my friend however, because he still has fun with Goldeneye when he plays it. That's not really relevant to my point though; it's perfectly possible to have fun with a game that has sh!tty controls (i.e. any survival horror game ever). For some reason my point was misinterpreted as hate towards Goleneye when in reality all I was discussing was the objective aspects of the game relative to how FPS's have evolved since then, because now controls are far more streamline and precise. It probably didnt help that my previous statement was Perfect Dark is an improvement in a lot of ways over Goleneye. That and we both hadn't had any sleep in over 35 hours. 

Yeah, other than that, in terms of games I haven't really been playing anything new. I'm currently 12 hours into Dragon Quest VIII and I'm loving it, though if my previous save file is any indication, it's a long-a$$ game and I'll have to work around my schedule if I plan to beat it. Also, the music is fantastic. The orchestral composition is just fitting, and complements the aesthetic style of Akira Toriyama superbly. Despite this, micromanagement isn't exactly streamline and since this game came out in 2005 it still has some out-dated JRPG concepts like random battles, but they're easily overlooked since the atmosphere is just enthralling. 

Fighting game wise I've borrowed a copy of Mortal Kombat: Komplete Edition. This is actually the first time I've been impressed with a Mortal Kombat game since MK3. It's been a running gag of mine over the years to scoff at anyone that says they play Mortal Komat :P "HAH, who even plays MK in tourneys amirite!?" But with this game, a valiant effort has been put in and it is by far the most balanced MK game in the series. The story mode is a bit of a snore and a tad depressing, but I never play fighting games for the story anyways. Been playing for a couple days and I'd say I've become some-what proficient in it already, so hopefully I'll be climbing to the top of the leaderboards soon. :cool:

SO GUESS WHAT? I won the tournament.

awwww yeahhhh son

This has to be the sweetest $500 I've ever earned. WATCH OUT EVO, I'M COMIN' FOR YOUadsfhasjdkfab

But in all seriousness, it was cool to finally participate in a tournament, and I met some pretty chill dudes.

And, I can put Tekken to rest and get back to Street Fighter, my true love.:oops:

Living in Bermuda, it sucks being a 'hardcore gamer' because there aren't that many people that are passionate about the medium.

That said, one of my life-long hopes was for fighting game tournaments to be held here, because it's one of my foolhardy dreams to become a pro and play with all the big guys like Poongko, PR Rog, Daigo, and what have you. I'm absolutely enthralled by the skill of such players and the community they're a part of.

So to my surprise, I've been invited to a Tekken Tag 2 tournament that's happening on the 26th, offering a $500 prize for first place. This is kind of a big deal for me, because I've always wanted to enjoy the tournament experience. While Tekken isn't my game of preference (well, it used to be, but Street Fighter's my lover now) it's still an opportunity I can't pass up.

Now it's time to practice, practice, practice. 17 days and counting. :)

So yeah, 2013 has begun.

This blog would be longer but I'm too busy playing Far Cry 3.

Verdict: GAME'S FXCKING GOOD MAN.

Recently I've been playing Street Fighter III: Online Edition. Though I'm not even close to being great, I still have a lot of fun playing it, which is amazing since it just hit me that it originally came out back in '99.

I got a hold of Super Street Fighter IV because I didn't have a copy and I remembered having a good time playing SF IV when it was first released in 2009. Luckily I didn't have to pay for it either, so I nabbed the Arcade Edition DLC for $15.

I can't say I share the same love for SSF IV as I do SF III. Mostly because it spends way too much fvcking time wasting yours; while I appreciate the graphical feats of the game it's just frustrating to watch over the top animations over and over and over and over again while I'm fighting. That and when you win or lose you have to wait for a rather long-winded victory pose, let it save, and then you can decide what to you wanna do after a match (this only applies to online by the way).

SF III on the other hand is far less frustrating because battles go by quickly and there isn't an onslaught of people that do literally nothing but spam fireballs and do wake-up ultras. IV is boring in comparsion to III in almost every way; the only upside it has is the bigger roster, with all of the classic characters included. But that's simply not enough for me to look over time wasting bullsh!t when I want to experience fast paced battles and be able to search for the next in a heartbeat. There's also an overwhelming priority system in IV that's not so prevalent in III, so there's a load of nonsense that goes on that you have to mentally prepare yourself for.

Maybe I'm just biased because I've been spending so much time with III for the past month or so. Either way, IV still puts way too much effort into being flashy for my liking.