Deck The Halls With Bloody Corpses

During the past week or so, I've tolerated Christmas music. I don't enjoy Christmas music by any stretch of the imagination, but I can see why it's part of the whole thing. Setting the mood and all that. But holy fuck. The lyrics to these songs are so completely stupid and primitive, any idiot can come up with a Christmas song. Which is probably why they all did. And they're making money with that shit while I still have a real job (playing video games *cough*). Christmasing...(sp?) Christmassing... with you? Or something? I'm sorry, we've detected a Christ-mass in your lung and you only have three months to live. On the bright side, you're pregnant! Oh...

People love to complain about "today's music" a lot. Heck, I'm not even excluding myself here. But when they play the sheer stupidity which is Culture Club, Big Mountain, Rick Astley and just about everything ever released by The Killers, I'm starting to think that music has always sucked throughout the ages. And the more I hate a song, the more it just sticks to my brain in some kind of infinity loop. Since when does a day suddenly change into night? Fireflies possess no magical power that makes them shine. There's nothing manly about Boy George. And I'm pretty sure being human and being a dancer doesn't have to be mutually exclusive.

On a happier note: Warframe. Been a few months since I've played it and now there's more of everything. More characters ('Warframes'), more weapons, more gore and dismemberment and more visual variety all around:

It's another one of those games I keep pushing for a review, but nobody seems interested so far. Because hey, god-awful shit like Battlefield Heroes and stuff that never gets finished like Firefall! Cyber ninjas in space? Naaah, nobody cares about weird stuff like that, right? Too freaky and animé-inspired and people hate that. Or whatever the logic was here.

Seeing how popular cooperative shooters like Left4Dead and Borderlands 2 are, you'd think Warframe deserved more attention, especially since it's one of the very few free2play titles out there, which are exactly that. Free to play. You can buy all the different playable warframes and most of the weapons, but you can also just earn them by playing. You actually can and it doesn't require a lot of effort.

Many f2p-games give people a lot of horseshit about how "you can earn everything by playing" and then make doing so practically impossible. Take Neverwinter, for instance. An epic mount on there costs over 20 Dollars. Theoretically, you could earn the cash shop currency required to obtain one of those mounts by just playing the game, which would require you to log on and play for several hours each day. For over 80 consecutive days. This is why many people hate free2play games. This is why they won't go anywhere near them. Shit like that gives f2p a bad name.

A new warframe costs about five Dollars. It doesn't come with a time limit like costumes or weapons on many f2p games, it won't be outdated and obsolete two weeks after purchase, you don't have to buy any extra character slots for it. And if you hate the idea of spending five Bucks on pixels, all the crafting components necessary to build your desired warframe are dropped ingame by mid-level bosses, which are constantly getting farmed. They're usually very easy to solo and if all else fails, finding a group to farm your boss of choice usually takes less than a second. Literally. Can't afford an item you really, really want? Farm for an hour or two, not several fucking months! To be fair, the actual crafting process comes with a 3 day timer attached to it, but they have to add at least some incentive to actually buy stuff from the shop.

Looks a million times better than CoD: Ghosts and runs at insanely high frame rates.

I can't remember the last time shooting stuff has felt so incredibly satisfying. My shotgun has such a massive boom to it, you can feel how powerful it is with every shot - especially when it results in severed heads, limbs and random intestines flying all over the screen. Even the pistols are fun! Dirty Harrying the living shit out of some unsuspecting space marine never gets old.

Warframe goes out of its way to make you feel badass. You infiltrate starships, space stations and mining facilities to assassinate certain baddies or to just plain eradicate every last living being on the map. It's you (or you plus up to three other people) vs hundreds of bad guys. They swarm you, attack from every possible angle, hide, take cover and even lock up entire sections of a level to keep you away from them. Mind you, Warframe is not a cover shooter - the AI will hide, shoot around corners and crouch behind just about every convenient space-crate they can find, but there's no cover-mechanic for players. It's balls out massacre, take 'em down by the dozen and leave no one standing. You're the boss-monster and they're all just fodder.

It also has one of the coolest weapon upgrade systems I've ever seen in a shooter. Basically, you can pick just about any weapon type in the game and, with the right upgrades, modify it to boost the gun's strengths even more or work around its weaknesses. Your sidearm might pack a massive punch, but suffer from a small magazine or low accuracy, so you can enhance it to reduce recoil or increase magazine capacity. Or fuck all of that balancing and fixing crap and make it even more powerful by adding a multishot mod, which lets you fire two bullets instead of one. Still not powerful enough? Add incendiary ammo! Or toxic ammo! Fuck, just combine 'em, make em radioactive! It's like a trip to your average American middle school.

We've just started building our two-man-dojo. We've named our clan 'Double Dragon' since there's really just the two of us and it seemed rather fitting, given the game's theme and style and everything. Claire wants to set up research facilities for rare weapons and I can't wait for our sparring room to get done, so I can kick her ass. I've also uploaded a clan emblem to display on our warframes, which is a bit of an awkward, tedious process. You pay a certain amount of cash shop currency before you're allowed to upload an image, which then gets reviewed for approval. If the image gets rejected because it contains copyrighted material or your cock or something, you'll get an email telling you what's wrong with the clan emblem. What you don't get is a refund. So right now I'm sitting and waiting for them to approve our emblem, which probably won't happen over the holidays, and then they'll have to upload the emblem with the next hotfix. It's all a bit over the top, but I suppose it's the only way to prevent what Counter-Strike has going on with its spray-tags.

The double-dragons are still under construction and somewhat phased-out.

It's nothing most sane people would play for months on end, unless you're obsessed with farming upgrades and taking on more and more baddies all the time. It's a lot like Diablo, really. Kill shit, loot stuff, upgrade, kill stronger shit, loot stronger stuff, upgrade some more and so forth. But the Diablo-esque formula gets so much better when you add some flashy next-gen 3D visuals and headshots to the mix. How very delicious, indeed!

-Cat