"I wanna move to Mass Effect!"

"Dear diary..."
Seriously, that's what this blog seems to be turning into and I'm sorry. Originally, this whole thing was really just supposed to be a collection of rants and smartass comments on various games, things that piss me off, the kind of stuff that I assume brought my 20 or 30 regular readers to this website in the first place. Yes, I've been checking the statistics and on a boring blog I get roughly 30 hits, the more popular ones can reach anything from 70 to triple digits. So I'm not exactly internet famous, but I seem to have a small, yet dedicated reader base. Makes me wonder. Who are these people? Are they real people at all or is all this traffic related to the annoying spam bots, who love posting their garbage in my comments section all the damn time? Heh.
Still - seeing as we live in a day and age where people deem it necessary to post Tweets about their breakfast and/or morning shit, my feeling of guilt regarding all those diary-style posts has its limits. And that's the sweet thing about the internet: You can always stop reading this entry right now, go back to watching porn and come back later, when I post another funny one. Whee!

2013 is only a month old and thus far, it has been nothing short of awesome. Job wise, these past few weeks have shown me that I can do some amazing shit, such as creating huuuuge articles based on tiny fact sheets and snippets of information, whilst keeping them fun to read. I didn't know I could do that until I had to. You see, for the most part, my work is pretty simple and straightforward. Somebody tells me to play a game, take some screenshots and write one or two pages about it. The first time they requested two pages rather than just one, I felt absolutely terrified. How the hell do you write a 5000+ characters preview on a game, where all you do is build little huts and raise an army to fight bad guys? I'd sit there for hours and hours, trying to come up with a new paragraph, hoping to figure out what to talk about. I hated those dreaded two-pagers for the entire first year on the job.

The nice thing about experience is that you get more confident with the stuff you do. My writing had begun to improve the moment I was no longer afraid to fuck up. The moment I quit thinking, "Can I really say that? I bet nobody is going to understand that. They're gonna fucking hate this article!" and began to just fucking write, I could actually focus on little puns and jokes, making the whole text more entertaining, making it fun to read. Basically, over the years I went from shitting myself to getting my own little magazine section, where I can write whatever the fuck I want and people give me money for it, because they think I'm funny. Two page previews? Pfft!

Still, there are things about this job, which will always be scary to me. Anything that involves picking up the phone or answering Skype. I'm not afraid of people. I'm not afraid of most things. But I genuinely look up to the people I work with. I grew up playing video games. I've been reading all those gaming magazines since my early childhood. Those guys were the coolest people in the world to me, with the most awesome job. Now I get to work with them. This isn't like a dream come true, it is the actual fucking dream! So, even four years into this job, when "the office" calls, I still sound like a complete idiot on the phone.
And it's the same with PR guys, publishers and just about anything that involves press events. Those guys invite me to their test servers, show me all the cool raids, bosses and other features on their games, whilst talking to me on Skype answering all my questions. I've met some incredibly cool people and community managers that way. They have one of the toughest jobs on earth. You can't possibly pay them enough. Dear publishers: Hug your community managers today. Appreciate them. Show a little love.

Yesyes, they all just wanna sell off their product, they're trying to bribe and coerce me, blah, blah, blah. Thing is, you can tell when they really love their game, when they identify themselves with it, when they're proud of what they're doing. I love that enthusiasm just as much as the special treatment, the early access, the whole VIP thing, just because I'm some guy who wants to write about a game. You gotta love those perks, man.
Anyhow. I've completed my biggest, most challenging articles this year, it feels like a huge achievement and the extra pay doesn't feel half bad, either. After several months of frozen and canned "food", it's nice to enjoy some fresh meat and vegetables. Home-cooked meals. And it's a lot easier to find sleep when you don't have to worry about the rent, unpaid bills and overdrawn bank accounts. Life is good right now and I intend to fully enjoy every minute of it. The next phase of frustration and bullshit is already lurking around the corner and I'll be damned if I don't appreciate the happy days for as long as they last. Our pets look rather happy, as well.

In other news, we're back on Mass Effect, Claire moreso than I. She said she'd live in that universe if she could. Come to think of it, I'm not sure if any other game universe has ever fascinated me so much, if any. As a Sci-Fi setting, I enjoy it even more than anything Star Trek and/or -Wars, though that comparison is probably a tad unfair. Mass Effect gets you emotionally involved, makes you feel as though it told your personal story and that's something a tv show or a movie simply cannot do. Friends and enemies, entire species live or die depending on your actions and decisions, you make love to sexy blue-skinned alien chicks and, ideally, you unite the galaxy against a common enemy. What's not to love?
Seeing as there is no RL quicksave button or a possibility to reload and undo untimely deaths and bad decisions, which doom entire planets, I'm not entirely sure I'd want to be Commander Shepard for real, though.

Still, no other game has ever "stayed" with me for that long, if that makes any sense. I have finished Fallout 3 and forgot about the whole plot ten minutes later. Skyrim? Epic game, dull story. Heck, I still remember most of the Ultimas and Wizardries, but looking back at those, all I feel is a certain sense of fond nostalgia. Mass Effect, on the other hand... man. The music, the characters, it's all still there like I played it five minutes ago. Realistically, it was about a year ago and that's not a very long time, but thinking about the Normandy and her crew feels like thinking about some old friends. Remembering how some of them died along the way still makes me sad. The first time I saw the shocking ending to Mass Effect 2's 'Project Overlord', I was overwhelmed. I didn't think a game could ever rouse such strong emotions. And coming from somebody, who laughed out loud when Aerith got stabbed by Sephiroth, that's probably saying a lot.

Of course, if you've never played the trilogy and you have zero connection to any of these characters, watching the above video will probably do nothing for you.

I don't wanna play the whole trilogy again. I know the story. My version of it. I'm happy with that. Claire wants to replay it over and over again, but I'm just happy knowing she's having so much fun with it. We are, however, still fighting our epic multiplayer battles. Which is surprising, really. Basically, all you get in ME3 multiplayer is a very simple horde mode. You fight waves of enemies, which constantly increase in numbers and strength, until you either die or defeat every last one of them. No death match, capture the flag, cooperative story mode or anything. You just gather three friends, fight side by side and face almost impossible odds, that's all there is to it.

It also has the worst unlocking system I've ever seen in any game of this kind, featuring a ridiculously heavy focus on "micro"payments. You start the game with a bunch of very basic, human characters. There's your soldier, your engineer, an infiltrator (sniper) - you get the idea. They're all good classes and competent at what they do, but they're not very cool. The character roster features the hulking krogans, who can headbutt a ten ton armored Cerberus battle mech into submission, epic fighting robots, which somewhat resemble Ikea desk lamps and a quazillion other incredibly cool toons, yet you're stuck being a boring human. So what do you do? You kill shit, earn credits, spend credits on upgrade packs and get random rewards out of them. Kinda like buying a booster pack for your favourite trading card game.

And you know how those work. You know exactly what you want, but you can't buy it directly, so you're at the mercy of the powers that be. Fucking RNG. You want an epic new shotgun? Enjoy your new sniper rifle! You want to be a Turian Sentinel? Well, you're getting a Salarian engineer and that's that. Sure - by giving you all kinds of random stuff you wouldn't normally play, you end up enjoying combinations of weapons and characters you normally wouldn't dream about using. I always wanted to play a Krogan and just beat the shit out of everything, but the RNG turned me into a kickass Turian sniper. It's a dumb system, which is strangely fun.
Thanks to the completely randomized rewards, I'm now an infiltrator (aka stealth-based - ME! WTF!) sporting a massive machine gun. I top the scoreboards on all difficulty levels, so I guess I'm making it work. Claire is an Asari Valkyrie, which is funny, considering they're her least favourite species in the game and she always wanted to play a Quarian. In fact, she finally unlocked the Quarian she wanted so much last night, but never played it, because she's too damn hooked on her Asari now.

They're not handling unlocks that way in order to make you try and appreciate unlikely combinations of characters and guns, though. They're doing it to make you spend real cash. Because buying those upgrades costs shit tons of credits, getting the stuff you REALLY want can take what feels like an eternity. In fact, there's a fair chance you get the same unwanted stuff multiple times, even though you already have it. It's perfectly possible to "unlock" a character you already have, even when they're at the maximum level and with all customization options fully unlocked. Same with guns - they all come in ten upgrade stages. You didn't like your Black Widow sniper rifle? Enjoy the Black Widow MKII, which you've just spent 99,000 credits on! Of course, this also works the other way 'round. You've finally unlocked that one gun you've always wanted, more than anything else in the game? Well, it's a lousy MKI. Good luck getting it nine more times for ideal stats!
And since the upgrade packs can also be bought with real money, well... you can see where this is going. If you're after one particular item, you can spend well over 100 Euros and still not get it. Thanks, Electronic Arts!

I don't know why exactly it's so addictive, despite all that crap. It probably works a bit like Diablo. Remember Diablo? Grinding away for hours and hours, getting shitloads of really awful loot, but every so often, you'd find a piece of gear, which would provide a small upgrade to your stats. Reward! Feels good! In a way, the upgrade packs on ME3 work like that. You unlock a new armor-piercing mod for your favourite gun and start shooting baddies through cover. You luck out and roll an upgrade, which raises damage on all assault rifles. You get that camo you wanted for your favourite toon. There is no instant gratification, no "I want this weapon and that character maxed out right there and now", but there's constant progress, small baby steps, getting a little stronger one upgrade at a time. Of course there's also a downside to it - you might be the most talented player in the world, but if you don't have the gear, then the higher difficulty settings simply aren't for you. Also a bit like Diablo. But when was that ever about talent?

-Cat

Monster Power, Monster Vomitting, Derptiles

Imagine it's the weekend, you're supposed to compose ten pages about a game you've never played, you're not getting any access to the game and the only bit of information you have is a fact sheet, which lists four distinct features, along with a rather shallow description. You can't postpone it, the deadline is final and to make things more interesting, you're throwing up, suffering from intestinal cramps as though you were giving birth to 1600 children and you've got a killer headache because you're not getting more than 3 hours of sleep a night. And that uneasy feeling that something might be wrong, because your piss looks a lot like coke. Welcome to my world!

Holy fuck! I can't remember the last time I've had such a god-awful weekend. Amazingly enough, I got the article done on time and it turned out pretty good. I never had to do anything like that before, so I wasn't entirely sure whether or not I could do it, but what do you know - sometimes stuff just works out for ya. Of course now I have another 24 hours to re-review nearly half a dozen games to update some older articles of mine, but after what I've just been through, I'm almost looking forward to something so easy. I probably would have freaked out over this kind of task just a week ago. It's almost like I'm enjoying the pressure. I'm like that little guy who got crushed to death when he had sex with a fat chick. Except, I'm still alive and I'm receiving rather handsome amounts of money for this kind of abuse. Bring it on!

You might be wondering why there haven't been any reptile videos as of late, particularly those involving our newest addition to the club, our savannah monitor. Turns out batteries are one of the first commodities you'll stop buying once you run so low on cash, you're no longer sure you can afford the next rent. That's all a thing of the past now, what with the huge amounts of work and everything, but we had hit a bit of a rough patch and... well, you get the idea.
So here's what you have missed: The monitor bites. A lot. He's still pretty small, but his serrated teeth are starting to poke holes through what used to be a set of awesome kevlar gloves and he hisses and tail-whips a whole lot. The good thing about his brand new confidence is that he no longer shits himself when we pick him up.

It's not as bad as it may sound, though. Once he's been picked up, he holds relatively still now, he's not trying to run away as much and it shouldn't take much longer until he'll last through an episode of Coronation Street or something. If I have to suffer through that shit, then so does he! He's probably the most interesting and fascinating pet I've ever had. Don't get me wrong, I like our cats and lizards and the snake and all that, but that monitor is in a league of his own. Not only will he be bigger and a lot stronger than the cats, but he's also rather intelligent. He has learned how the sliding glass doors on his tank work and is trying to push them open. We have to wedge them shut now. Part of me feels a bit retarded right now. There's this huge animal in the room, which hates me and is trying to kill me and it knows how to operate doors and I'm talking about how cool it all is. Ha! Right, I'm exaggerating, of course, but... you know.

As you can imagine, I don't get much time for any "fun" (aka non work-related) gaming, but my enthusiasm towards Black Ops 2 has somewhat waned, now that I have seen certain things. I know this kind of shit is happening in just about every single game out there and there's absolutely nothing new about it, but actually seeing this crap and just how incredibly lame and cheap it is makes me lose all hope and motivation. But hey, human nature, right? Whenever there's a competition, when people fight to win, there will be cheaters and exploites, be it sports, videogames, what the hell ever. Offline gaming just got a little more attractive again.

Also, Diablo 3. Inferno difficulty. Monster Power 10, aka as hard as it possibly gets. I'm doing it. I'm totally doing that. Right now. With a mere 24 paragon levels my DPS isn't anywhere near high enough to do any efficient farming on there, but I can kill the elites, survive huge packs of trash and I can do an entire playthrough without suffering too much. And with another 76 paragon levels to go (in other words, 228 strength or 228% extra damage), roflstomping my way through the deadliest legions of hell is only one massive XP grind away. What else can I say, now that I've played the game up to that point?

First of all, the whole "play any class and any build you want" thing still works, at least up to the lower monster power settings on inferno. It does NOT work that way on the absolutely highest settings, which is FINE. That stuff is meant to be as hard and as challenging as it gets, so if you could just waltz through there with every possible spec and setup, it would pretty much defeat the purpose of the whole thing. Most casual gamers probably won't touch it and frankly, there is really no point at the moment. Sure, the monsters grant extra gold and experience, there's a slightly higher chance for better loot, but in turn, killing stuff takes so much longer, it's just not viable for leveling up. Farming, sure, but only if you're close enough to the end of the long road to paragon 100.
That said, just joining any random group of people to do a bit of inferno farming will team you up with folks of all possible classes and builds, from super efficient to borderline useless and they can all hold their own, some more so than others. It's nice to see the occasional witch doctor here and there, as well. With the upcoming 1.7 patch, monster power can be raised for public games, so things might change a bit from there. But for now, people of all specs and skill levels are present.

Of course, once you look at the folks who go for the toughest challenges available right now, you see the exact same stuff you see on WoW and just about any game of this kind: Flavour of the month, cookie-cutter builds and people copying the first guy who killed a boss naked or reached level 100 on youtube and shit like that. Because that's just how it works. In every game there is just that one build, which outperforms every other combination of gear and skills, and since we all want to be able to beat even the toughest baddies, we go for that exact kind of build and fuck individualism and personal play style. Of course this also screws up the whole unique character appearance thing Blizzard had going here. Everyone is picking the exact same legendary items, which have a fixed appearance, which cannot be dyed or customized in any way, so if you see nothing but characters wearing the exact same shoulders or headgear in every inferno game you'll ever join, well... don't act too surprised.

My one big problem with the whole game right now is repetition. Yes, I know. All we ever did in Diablo 2 was kill Bhaal. And nothing else. And I never want to kill Bhaal again. Ever. But with huge parts of Diablo 3 being premade and scripted and no real randomised dungeons, well... I'm getting bored. I want those 100 paragon levels, I really do. I wanna find legendary items and sell them for real money. But by now I have memorised every possible layout of Arreat Crater 2, I know every last pixel inside the Tower of the Damned and even the 30 million gold coins in my stash no longer make me happy enough to help me ignore the fact that I'm doing the exact same crap over and over again up to a point, where even the WoW faction grind looks fun and anything but time consuming in comparison.

This is something every handheld Japanese Diablo clone had solved years ago by adding some kind of endless or 99 level dungeon, where every floor is generated from scratch. Random layout, environment, music, monsters, traps, you get the idea. And with every level, stuff gets a little more difficult. Even Wizardry on the old PS2 had that. Or the Item World feature on Disgaea. Heck, even Guild Wars 2 is doing something similar with the new fractal system, although those aren't generated at random, but picked form a pool of a mere 9 or so pre-generated ones. It's still a step in the right direction. Why can't we have that in Diablo instead of forcing us through the same old story, the exact same locations, dungeons and quests over and over again? It's a shame Blizzard only read my shit when I create massively overblown newsposts about them...

I crave ham. I think I'll go have some ham. I deserve ham after so many days of sickness.

-Cat

The Bitch Queen from Hell and Fucking for Dummies

Joy. Snow is falling in Nottinghamshire, after a fucking 8 degrees on Christmas. If it stays on the road, I'll piss my name, address and phone number in it and post it here on this blog.

We're still playing Diablo 3. Not a whole lot, because there is still so much work to do, but whenever I get an hour or two. I still like the new "female" Diablo. For looks, anyway. Apparently, the new design has inspired some fascinating drawings on dubious online porn sites. Diablo is glowing out of just about every orifice. Which makes sense - in a way, they're all little portals to hell or something. Probably one of the more original things to get off to.
Speaking of internet filth: Some poor girl had to sell her only dress on eBay and made one silly mistake when taking the photo. She deleted it straight away, but some perv managed to grab it before it was gone, sharing it with the whole world. I like the internet ♥.

Reminds me a bit of when the police knocked on our bedroom window to ask about one of the neigbours one morning. "If you don't want to see my cock, now's a pretty good time to turn around." We sleep naked. We're that tough.

Anyhow, Diablo. I never understood the whole drama and whining about how you have to be online to play, even if you play all alone. We live in a day and age, where even the god damn refrigerator is online and sends tweets when its out of fucking milk!

Seriously. When's the last time your PC was fucking OFFLINE? Yes, sure, there's a principle involved, "but I wanna play on my laptop" blah, blah, fuck you. So much for the theory.
In practice, the game has been out for eight months and every so often, I find my character rubberbanding all over the screen (during singleplayer sessions!), basic functions such as the auction house are disabled and/or returning error messages more often than they are functional and thanks to the glorious whirlwind disconnect bug, I get kicked off the game every 30 minutes. Basically, this thing kicks you out of the game for using the barbarian's (aka my main character) signature ability and the techies at Blizzard suggest disabling VSync and playing in Windowed mode to fix the problem Because hey, fuck fixing the actual problem, right?

And while I find the new Diablo a lot cooler-looking than his previous forms (and myriads of creepy nerds with questionable sexual urges and fantasies agree with me here), "she" has also got a female personality now. That of an eight year old, at best. "Nanana you will never destroy my hell rif... oh shit. Fine, didn't need that stupid hellrift anyway, pfffft~!". All the fucking time. What the hell happened? Does anyone remember what he said before the final battle in Diablo 2? Only one of the coolest things any boss baddie has ever said in videogame history! "Not even death can save you from me!" Because yeah, you're in hell, he's the boss, he'll get you dead or alive and all that.

So how did we get from there to: "Lalalaaa you've destroyed my army, broke all my toys and you're about to kick my ass, but I don't care, because all your friends are dead and you suuuck"? Yeah, let me draw you naked and in an unflattering position and put you on a porn site, because you're cool and I respect you so much! They wouldn't have done that to the original Diablo!
Though there's probably a whole lot of gay macrocock porn out there to prove me wrong. Muscles, spikes, some people are seriously into that kinda stuff. I don't wanna know.

Isn't it fun how all this stuff is so readily available on the 'net, though? If I wanted to see boobs as a teenager, I had to hope for one of those African tribal documentaries on tv. People didn't have 200something channels back then and when there were programmes about how these fun-loving nature dwellers hunt and dance and drum and paint their faces, then people watched that shit. Thank god! I think all the boobs I have ever seen before I had my first girlfriend were black. And the weirdest thing was - my parents didn't care when we all watched these weird shows, because they were "educational". Show tits or some awkward, staged sex-scene in any movie and all the kids were sent to bed. Tits of all ages, shapes and sizes in a documentary? Bring it on! I had to burn all of these images into my brain, because they'd ususally have to last me for several months. Sad times.

No, not like THAT!

When you can hardly imagine what a tit looks like, it does not bode well for your early sex life. At what age did you have sex ed in school and what was it like? In my school, they waited until most of us were 18 or older. Right. Because that's not too late at all. Most of all, they really just taught us the basic stuff with a couple diagrams. "Put that in there, wiggle around for a bit and eventually, you'll provoke it into spewing out babies. The vagina's natural defensive system." Or something like that. They don't actually teach you how to do it. How to do it well. Because it's akward and a completely stupid taboo. To make up for that, we usually ended up buying retarded magazines for teenagers, where readers sent in their made-up stories about the first time they had sex. It was always fantastic, magical, perfect, that kinda crap. All the guys would brag about how they're doing it and they're oh so good at it, when in reality we all just knew boobs from tv documentaries.

The truth is usually a different matter, entirely. I feel sorry for my first ever girlfriend. She's a lesbian now. I respect that decision and take some credit for it. Go be the best lesbian you can! We were so incredibly bad at it! Traumatic experiences, which make condoms the least desirable choice of protection until this very day! Neither one of us had ever been with someone before, she was a virgin and I... well, I don't mean to brag, but...

He calls me daddy. If you know what I mean...

So yeah. There wasn't much proper "intercourse" in the actual sense. More like... imagine you're the UPS guy and you really want to deliver a parcel. But you can't get in, so you just bang against the door a bit and leave a sticky. And with lack of success comes frustration, which leads to a certain amount of deflation and that's when we realized that the condom had gone. But where?
We begun the search in what we assumed to be the most logical place at the time. Well, I searched, because there clearly wasn't enough room for two in there. But poking around brought no joy, so we thought maybe I could see it somehow. She put her legs on my shoulders in a semi-headstand and when I still didn't find anything, we highlighted the area in question with a fucking desk lamp. It genuinely looked like I was about to interrogate her vagina. "Where have you been between 9:10 and 9:12 and where did the fucking condom go?"
It was on the floor the whole time.

Sometimes it's easier to take things down a notch, get hang of the basics and wait with the pro stuff until you know what the hell you're doing. So the next time we were together, I kissed her Australian style. You know, like French, but down under. When I woke up in the morning, she had disappeared. Without waking me up, without saying a word, just like that. To make things weirder, there was blood everywhere! On the sheets, the covers, everywhere on the bed... one look in the bathroom mirror revealed it was all over my face, as well. Holy fuck, I ATE HER! Well, not exactly. Turned out she got her period that exact same night and got embarassed and ran off.

-Cat

Lalala I'm working, I'm working!

One problem when writing articles about certain browser games is that gameplay is often a bit slooooooooooooooooooooow. You know, the kind of games where you construct buildings, gather resources, wait for your underlings to accomplish certain tasks. And you're doomed to watch, take notes, pass the time with all kinds of stuff that has nothing to do with the actual game, waiting for a chance to make your next click or two. Lunch break games. Hide in a browser tab in the office games.

Many other games can be finished in 1-2 ten hour sessions, MMOs allow you to grind and there's usually a friendly guild around to show you dungeons, raids and the like when you tell them you need their help to write an article. Videogame critics - we're fucking rockstars!

Let's be honest here: When the deadlines are super tight and you're not exactly reviewing an AAA-title, you won't always play all the way to the level cap before reviewing something. But it's mandatory to experience every aspect of a game, be it dungeons, pvp, trading with other players, the whole thing. You can't just describe and rate these features based on a fact sheet or the official website. Does that stuff actually work as described, is it fun, is it innovative? That shit is important. Now, when you play a slow-motion browser game... hoo boy!
Right now I'm waiting 2-3 RL days just building stuff. If I'm lucky, I'm gonna see some actual combat tonight. I can't just skip that and crank out my article. There are other features, which I probably won't unlock before the weekend. To pass the time, I'm currently downloading another game I'm supposed to review, so I'll probably take care of that whilst waiting for things on the browser game to come along. I hate multitasking!

Speaking of hate - our new monitor lizard can be one hateful little fucker when it's dinner time! I don't mind him jumping at a box of locusts, grabbing it, dragging it into the tank before there's even a chance to open it and actually allow him to get what's inside. It's another thing when he goes straight for my hand. He bites it, tries to drag it deeper into his tank like he does with food and he won't let go for several minutes! He's still small, but he's incredibly strong and you can feel those teeth right through the kevlar gloves. It's not very pleasant.

Also, Diablo 3.

This isn't even my final form!

If you've played a melee character to the level cap just after the game was released, the whole thing looked pretty much like this:

Normal and Nightmare difficulty were no challenge whatsoever, Hell difficulty was a little tougher and your freshly unlocked 'Inferno' mode has regular zombies one-hitting you. All the fucking time. In order to beat Inferno, you need to collect shitloads of gear with "resistance to everything". And that stuff only drops on said Inferno mode, where you can't fucking kill anything. Of course there's always the auction house, but buying the insanely overpriced crap on there means having to farm Hell difficulty for gold, making absolutely no progress whatsoever. This is where I (and most people I used to play with) gave up.

When I got back to the game the other day, Inferno was still pretty much unplayable without resistances, so I checked the auction house again. And lo and behold - what used to cost hundreds of thousands of gold is now dirt cheap. So I went with the most basic and straightforward setup a barbarian can get: Strength, vitality, all resistances, done. From crap to godly in under 100k gold. Which is absolutely nothing at level 60.

I have finished basic Inferno mode by slapping random attack buttons with my cock. And nothing else. The whole thing was so easy, it was like playing Nightmare all over again. I know what you're thinking - what's the fucking point in having a super tough difficulty setting if you can just buy your way to victory with a little gold, right? And that's where 'Monster Power' comes into play!
Monster Power is a new setting, which allows you to make the bad guys a lot tougher. Raising monster power increases the overall health and damage ratings for Diablo and his shambling buddies, whilst granting an equally generous boost to your drop rate and experience points.

This simple, yet brilliant little tweak makes the whole D3 experience a lot more interesting. Wanna create a new toon, but you're bored with the stupidly easy starting difficulty? Give those enemies 200% health and damage and receive twice the amount of loot and experience! And stacking only your main attribute and resistances won't get you through Inferno with added Monster Power! If you wanna go all the way up to the toughest setting, you're gonna have to check on stats such as crit rate, crit damage, lifesteal, attack speed - you get the idea.
And progression doesn't just happen through ever more powerful gear - you can now gain another 100 (Paragon-) Levels, raising your basic attributes and gold and magic find stats with every new level.

Claire and I doing a bit of Inferno, Monster Power 2

The way this system works, is actually more enjoyable than the boss-farming treadmill in Diablo 2. Gasp! BLASPHEMY! *monocles*

And here's why: Once you were at a high enough level to beat Hell difficulty on Diablo 2, you'd repeat endless battles against the final boss and hope for good loot. People didn't mind, because there was always a fair chance to get a nice gear upgrade out of it. Or at least some nice item they could trade for something they want.

On Diablo 3, you hunt down packs of elite monsters for good loot. Boss encounters are still a good source for loot drops, but the good shit is no longer exclusive to the prime evils. And fighting lots of monsters in your favourite areas is simply more fun and offers a little more variety than going after Bhaal 300 times in a row. Sure, it's all repetitive and it all gets old after a while, but in its current state, D3 is less repetitive and the possibility to crank up the difficulty some more whenever your toon gets stronger, keeps things interesting. If you're really lucky, you'll end up collecting all the bits and pieces necessary to create the new 'Infernal Machine', which lets you fight ultra powerful bosses for even more loot.

Now, you may argue that the auction house eradicates most of the progress, gathering better and stronger gear all the time, trying harder and harder difficulty settings. But the really good gear costs millions! You can't just pop into the auction house and buy all the good shit without actually making significant amounts of virtual cash. So you have to fight for your stuff, one way or another. Collect rares and legendaries and sell them for tons of gold, that kinda stuff. And if you still hate the auction house - do you even remember what Diablo 2 was like? The trade spam in chat, at least half of all open games were only for trade, people wanting to exchange gear all the time? People bitch and whine about the auction house, saying at least on D2 you still had to earn your gear. Wake up! Trading my shit on D2 or using the D3 auction house, it's all the same thing. The latter is just more comfortable.

And while I'm already at it - same goes for RMT. Yes, if you're really desperate, you could spend a few Euros on the real money auction house to skip past all the farming and get all the good stuff right away. Because hey, that neeeeever happened on Diablo 2! Not "legally", anyway. Diablo 2 is infested with bots, which keep spamming the URLs of 3rd party online shops, where you can kit out any character with all the best stuff for under 20 Euros. And I'm sure they keep invading every unprotected session and flood public chat like crazy because these shops generate absolutely no revenue at all. 

Of course there's no total revolution of gameplay happening. You fight, loot and upgrade, then raise the difficulty setting a bit, fight loot and upgrade some more and so on. The basic formula never changed. They just made the steps in difficulty smaller and more enjoyable, keeping things fun and challenging for as long as you choose to play. Ya know, make it harder as you get stronger. As opposed to the launch difficulty settings of "too damn easy" and "too fucking hard". If you got bored after finishing Normal and Nightmare, the recent updates and changes won't do anything for you. But if you enjoy the item and looting treadmill, which Diablo has always been about, then these new settings and the 100 new paragon levels will keep you busy for a few weeks per character.

-Cat

Back to hell with Coke and hobbits

Ahh yes, The Hobbit. Finally! My grandmother gave the book to me when I was about 15 years old. In German. Der kleine Hobbit - "The little Hobbit". Didn't sound like much. And hey, a granny book? I didn't even wanna read it! But when I did... holy fuck! Ass-kicking dwarves, dragons, mithril chain mail? It was just like some of my favourite computer games! And my grandmother was into that?

Not gonna bore you with details about the actual film - if you care about it one bit, you've already watched it or at least read everyone's opinion about it and I have nothing new to say. Just two small things: Too much CGI of the whole group falling into random pits. And no blood. At all. Severed heads and limbs, but no gushing blood, no bloody weapons and armor... what gives?

Of course I'm nitpicking here. Having a bit of a retarded day. Started with me drinking half a bottle of water before the film. And one of their XXL coke cups during the first 30 minutes. The thing's what, 3 hours long? I NEVER HAD TO PISS SO BADLY IN MY ENTIRE LIFE!
So stupid of me. After the first 30 or so minutes, I couldn't stop thinking about how badly I wanted the film to be over. And when it was... dude! Holy fuck!

It just didn't stop. It was comical. Cartoony. Naked Gun! I had three people coming in while I was there, starting, finishing, washing their hands and leaving and I still wasn't done. You probably didn't care to know that. I could have got up in the middle of the film, but I probably would have missed half of it.

Ah well, nice movie, I survived the soda and now it's weekend gaming time. And we're back on Diablo III, one of the most disappointing games I have touched all last year. Getting my ass to the level cap was moderately fun, but too quick and easy, then there was the ridiculously tough, near-unplayable Inferno mode, which forced people to farm gear with shitloads of resistances and switch to the most defensive play styles available with pretty much every class. And very little else. No sense of progression, no motivation, no fun. Sure, decent game and all, but... come on. It's supposed to be fucking Diablo!

Then I read something about the 100 new "Paragon Levels". So technically, one could now get to level 160 rather than just 60. I didn't like that a lot. So in order to beat the stupidly difficult inferno mode, people were now supposed to just outlevel it? Where's the fun and the challenge in that?
But what do you know - they've also added 10 difficulty settings to adjust monster strength, allowing people to make things a bit more or less challenging, depending on personal taste and play style. Better drops on tougher difficulty settings, faster leveling and all that. Doable Inferno mode on lower monster strength settings. Me gusta.

I just switched back from full defense to the setup I used to beat the first three modes and it's actually playable now. And fun, from what I have seen. There might still be the odd pack of asshole champions about, but if all else fails, I can just crank up monster strength on a hell session for a few hours, farm a few Paragon levels and go back to Inferno. Not the manliest way to do things, but definitely an option. Instead of "too easy" and "too hard" with nothing fun to do, I can now fine-tune game difficulty to my liking and level up a bit. Not sure if that's gonna entertain me for long, but we'll see. It sounds fun. :)

And if I still can't get myself to love this game again, there's always Ragnarok Tactics on the PSP. Tactics makes poor use of the Franchise's visuals (and very little else), but it's a fun game of its own rights and since Ragnarok had been my first ever MMO (aside from a few moments of UO and Everquest), it was rather easy to bait me with the stomach-turningly cute style. Could have done without so much male nudity, though. Ah well.

I feel very little desire to "upgrade" to a PSVita. All my favourite homebrew and emulator stuff works on the ol' PSP and without a regular dayjob or the annoying train and bus trips, which reaching said dayjob usually incorporates, there is very little need for modern handheld devices of any sort. In fact, even my regular PSP is usually hooked up to the PC, allowing me to use my gamepad and the big screen to enjoy my "mobile" gaming sessions.

-Cat

Yay 2013!

Where I'm from, New Year's Eve is kind of a big deal. Friends and/or family gather together, they all watch the silly countdown shows and there's always at least one asshole who wants to watch 'Dinner for one'. They show it every year, every public channel, always been that way for as long as I've been around. It's pretty funny, but once you've watched it well over 20 times (I'm well over 20 years old), it gets a bit stale. Ah well, tradition.

Around here, well... I think I may have heard a gentle 'poof', caused by Forever Alone Guy and his solitary bottle rocket. And the telly showed 15 minutes of fireworks in London. Then some guy with a seriously weird accent cracked jokes about Saturday Night Fever for 2 hours. He wasn't funny. At all. But thousands of people sat there in the audience, laughed, probably paid a handsome amount of money to see him. Makes me wonder about my line of work. He's boring, sports a weird accent, talks about stuff that has never been relevant to me in any way and compared to me, he's probably filthy rich.

Lousy telly and lack of fireworks aside, we had lots of fun. Worms Revolution. Dude! I never liked any of the modern, cartoony Worms games. Loved the pixellated DOS-based ones, but everything that came after... bleh. Didn't like the style, didn't like how the weapons went from funny and over the top to just plain stupid, but Revolution and its dynamic water, poison, class-based team setups and the cool 3D look just does it for me. We had a four player deathmatch, all of us sharing just one computer, which was awkward, but hysterically funny all the same. Good times!
A very early, incredibly noobish duel between the Bear and my grumpy self is being uploaded here.

There was no money in the bank account to pay our rent, so they offered us a 3000 Pounds credit. Weird shit. We're not gonna take that, of course, and rent will have to be paid a little late (for the first time, ever), but I like our high credit rating and everything. Debt is never a fun thing to have, but knowing there's at least some kind of temporary safety net isn't so bad. Of course, if you can't even pay your fucking bills, then paying off a damn credit ain't gonna work either, but... ya know, state of mind and all that.

Not everyone is having a good 2013 so far. At sometime around 4 in the morning we heard screaming and banging and then the upstairs neighbour was running through the corridor shouting, "Get away from me!" and then she disappeared again and a door slammed shut and apparently somebody was beating the crap out of her. We had a very similar situation about two years ago, where I phone the police and it took them about 15 minutes to show up, they let everyone get away and I had to spend the whole next day at the station so they could write down everything I heard. Didn't seem like the most attractive option at the time, but seeing as it was 4 in the morning and I wasn't wearing any pants... you don't perform heroic deeds with your cock out. Ever. It's the law. So I put some pants on and by the time I was out there to help, it was all over. She didn't want me to phone the police, wished me a happy new year and ran off. Weird shit. I like this neighbourhood and all, but every once in a while, you get to witness some crazy stuff around here.

WARNING: I'm about to talk about intercourse. If you're one of our relatives (or just prude), you'll want to skip the next two paragraphs. You've been warned. Everyone else, feel free to email me for links to our video channel. :P
Not a single fuck will be given this year. Literally. After the negative side effects caused by the implant, negative reactions to the fuckpatch have become so intense, they're no longer a tolerable method of contraception. And since we both don't like the jizzbags... well. Our roly-poly count has gone down from up to 5 times a day (don't look at me like that!) to zero. Maybe we're gonna get into Golf or something. Besides, it should only take another 20 years or so until this problem is gonna disappear the natural way. In theory, there's also weird crap like a vasectomy, buuuut... well, we don't really want children, but we don't wanna eliminate the possibility just yet. And you don't just cut off the baby juice. I mean... you know. It's all gonna look and feel the same, but nobody enjoys shooting blanks, right?

Like all people, we love to fuck. A lot. It has been a few months now since the last contraceptive patch. But we love each other more. This may sound cheesy and strangely out of character, but if you truly love somebody, then you'll be with them, no matter what. Even when they grow old and they lose their youthful looks, even when they get health issues and even when at some point, for some reason, you can no longer put it in there. Generally speaking, of course. We're in perfect health and the Bear still looks 12 years old. :P And I've always been ugly, so there's not really an issue. And we both still have a total of four hands to choose from, so there's plenty of variety. Haw!

January has shitloads of work and therefore shitloads of money in store for us. Can't wait! For both the work and the money. Don't get me wrong, I love sitting around on my fat, lazy ass, but in some crazy, masochistic way, having to write impossible articles with often impossible, inhumane deadlines is strangely thrilling. I hate it like any sane person would, but some small part of me also enjoys it. Somebody once said that, in order to make me write the really good stuff, all you have to do is put me under lots of pressure. And that's probably true. When I get too much time for my work, I usually end up slacking off. It's a bit like going back to school. Remember that paper you were supposed to finish over the course of two weeks and you're getting started the night before you're supposed to hand it all in? That's how I work. I'm not sure it's wise to admit that, but then again, there are rarely any complaints about the results and that's what really counts.

And with this year's first blog post out of the way, it's time to get back to regular everyday life. Have a shower, go buy some cat food, find some lame excuse to avoid cleaning the dishes for another month or two and play black ops till it's bedtime. Yay!

-Cat