TOO MANY DAMN GAMES! AAAAH!

First of all, I'm still alive. This blog has been inactive for much longer than usual, due to shitloads of work (yay!) and way too many great games and friends who want to play them (boo!... kinda). So yeah... check this out:

This might make me a bad person, but I grew up on Sega and never cared much for Nintendo. But then I noticed how well old Gamecube and even Wii games can be emulated today. The Youtube video doesn't really do this game any justice - I can run F Zero GX on 1080p with antialiasing, multisampling and all that fancy graphical shit, which makes jaggies disappear and textures a little less blurry. Not only does the whole thing look a LOT better than on the original hardware, but I have to actually limit the maximum FPS or the game ends up running at 200% its original speed. That's not how you want to play F Zero, trust me.

I'm not a huge fan of the Wii, let alone the retarded Wiimote controls, but since that emulator is able to mimic said awful control scheme with a mouse, I could play the Metroid Prime trilogy with mouse+keyboard, the way god intended FPS games to be played. In full HD, which the actual Wii cannot pull off. On the nice, big LED screen. Oooo the temptation!

But wait, there is more:

Black Ops 2. I wasn't going to buy it. Ever. And I didn't. But a friend gave it to me for free. The nice things people do for you when you're a witty writer. In fact, I've cranked out a nice review for him in return. I guess that makes me a ghost writer. I compared the AI baddies to Imperial stormtroopers and in a direct comparison to boobs, the stunning scripted events on Black Ops 2 fall short by quite a bit. It's a shame I'll never see my name and face under such a kickass article, but I love my free game and I'm having waaaay too much fun with it!

Most importantly, though, there's still Guild Wars 2. The game I thought I'd get bored of after 2-4 weeks tops. Holy fuck, the amounts of content and actual game play I keep getting on there for zero monthly fees!

The game looks *that* good!

A little while back, there was the kickass Halloween event, which included a scavenger hunt for a really cool item reward, a mini dungeon, an epic boss battle, costume brawls and some minigames and fun activities on top of all that. Compare that to hunting down a certain headless horseman and the world's most popular MMO falls rather short after all those years.

Oh and I got a nice new weapon for Halloween, as well. In fact, I'm using that one and ONLY that one now. For good. Me and my weapon. Happily ever after.

BWAHAHAHA! *foams*

There was also the incredibly laggy, frustrating, dull, not so cool event, which introduced a new area to the game. Which wasn't all that great in itself, sure, but it brought a whole new lot of fun little mini dungeons, the so-called 'fractals' with it. Rather than fighting a whole lot of ludicrously powerful enemies and respawn-zerging bosses like in the regular dungeons (which are being fixed right now), players have to beat clever dungeon mechanisms and puzzles for the win.

For instance, there is one fractal, where the group fights its way through a whole lot of ice and snow, taking more and more damage over time as they get colder and colder. Players need to light fires on the way and warm up to remove the debuff and avoid an icy death. Problem is, the fire also attracts all kinds of freezing baddies, so while a certain amount of warmth is necessary to survive, you'll inevitably get in a lot of trouble while hanging around for too long. Each fractal features gimmicks like that, which you have to figure out and defeat on the go. The more complicated ones involve stuff such as killing enemies with a massive hammer, which kills the wielder after a certain amount of time and deals rather lousy damage. Each kill charges up a special attack, which is required to break magical seals. You have to break all the seals in order to free a giant, who is being held by them. Players have to take turns using the hammer if they want to avoid getting killed by its debuff. It sounds atrocious, but our fun little guild group is doing a rather amazing job getting through all of that stuff.

As I mentioned earlier, the regular dungeons are also being rebalanced and re-tuned. I still don't like them a whole lot, but there are some truly great moments in some of them. The final boss in one dungeon crushes the party with flaming boulders. The group needs to seek shelter behind a magical barrier, then grab the boulders' searing chunks to throw them back at the boss, all whilst dodging more boulders and taking fire damage from the hot rocks. This is what it looks like:

So now I'm working on F Zero unlocks with Claire, prestige levels on Black Ops, fractal levels with the guild and as if that wasn't stressful enough, there's still Mass Effect 3. Claire is officially hooked on that game's online multiplayer and she's making some nice progress. She started off being rather slow and clueless, but now we're taking down wave after waver after wave of bad guys without much trouble. Problem is, she's getting waaaaay too addicted to the whole thing.

Duo with Claire on ME3

She has never played any shooters on a PC before, the whole thing feels new and exciting to her, but now that she's scoring all the super-fast kills and knows how to aim for the head and all that... well, I think we need to step it up a notch and get her on Black Ops 2. The game is hideously expensive and I don't think we can get her that game anytime soon, but it's definitely something to aim for. Because fighting large waves of AI-controlled aliens is nice and fun, but you haven't truly experienced multiplayer shooters until you've shot a real, whiny 12 year old, who questions your sexual orientation on voice chat.

-Cat