Dem Middle Ages

When my user handle is already taken somewhere on the 'net, I usually add "81" to it, because that's the year I was born. And when I see people on the internet, who were born in the '90s, I tend to picture them as annoying twelve year olds. Then I do the math. Some of these kids are legal adults. I had one of those "holy shit, I'm an adult!" moments this week, which threw me off a bit. I mean, when I was a kid, I kinda just assumed that becoming a grownup kinda just happens over night. When you turn 18 or something. You know, one day you wake up - BOOM: Adult. Instant beard and/or appropriate bodily hair.

Yeah. That's not really how it works. Maturity creeps up on you. I was tricked by Capcom when I took care of gaming-related news. Capcom have released a statement to their investors, telling them that the waning popularity of Resident Evil has nothing to do with the poor quality of their recent releases. It's the target demographic, which has slowly turned into decaying zombies over the years. Resident Evil is 17 years old now, it's drinking, driving and shagging other teenage games. The lucky bastard. And Capcom revealed insights such as: "Fans of Resident Evil are in their late 30s and 40s now and some of them have outgrown games altogether." Stupid bastards. If anything, I have a steady income now and can afford all the games I want. Outgrow gaming, my fucking ass.

Anyhow. Apparently, they seek to appeal to a younger audience by advertising in fashion magazines and opening Resident Evil themed restaurants. Because the sight of rotting zombies makes most normal people want to eat. Or something. I got a bit annoyed with all that bullshit and, after sharing the news, commented on how the younger generation of gamers isn't a bunch of idiots and they're insulting "us old gamers" and younger gamers alike.

Those fuckers got me by appealing to my elitism. I can't be somebody who played the very first Resident Evil back in the day and a young gamer at the same time. So I teamed with team retirement, without even thinking about it. It's a bit weird. I used to consider myself relatively... well, young. You know, some tv ad saying, "Hey! Young people!" and I'm all ears, even if the advertised product doesn't appeal to me at all. Because, let's face it, nothing ever appeals to me. That's not because I'm too old for new shit, I just find it generally difficult to like things.
The truth is, however, that I'm old enough to be the father of many of my readers. I'm not just old enough to be some teenage gamer's dad, I am a teenage gamer's dad! Eep!

It's easy to hate a bunch of 16 year old smartasses, whose entire gaming experience consists of Mario Galaxy, some stuff they quote from Wikipedia and a bunch of Youtube videos. It's fun to hate young gamers. Because our generation is better. Superior. We still used dialup modems! Stupid kids with their DSL and Cable and fibre optic broadband! Stupid generation CoD. Right. What did we play before Call of Duty (which we also play, like all the stupid kids do)? Counter Strike. Because that was so much better. It's also our generation that first came up with camping, aimbots and less sophisticated stuff such as spike models. So let's not start pointing fingers.

You kinda had to be there.

Yes, yes, I know. Quake. UT. Server browsers. No stupid matchmaking. Certain things have changed for the worse since then. But how much of that can we blame on younger gamers and how much of that is the industry's fault?

I think what really gets to me is how everyone is a fucking "gamer" these days. Back when I was a teenager, gamers were social outcasts. Like an exclusive group of sorts. We didn't have gatherings of hundreds of thousands of people, who celebrated a strange culture of dressing up and writing disgusting fan-fiction and what not. Maybe I'm also a bit annoyed that it's not about the actual games anymore, but the stupid cosplay, special edition consoles sold at three times the regular price because there's a fucking triforce on it and what not. That the actual games, the stuff we grew up with, fade away and become underappreciated.

What a load of horseshit. Lots of people love "retro" gaming, no matter what generation. My son collects ancient consoles. I gave him my own original Gameboy Classic for his birthday. It hurt to part with it, but it stays in the family. He'll never know what it's like to wait a whole minute for some god-awful Angelfire website full of stolen animated .gif files to load. He probably prefers matchmaking to a good server browser. The ignorant fool! But you know what? He appreciates the Game Boy's very first Super Mario Land, Turtles in Time on the SNES and the Megadrive version of Golden Axe as much as I do. Because he played that shit.

Many younger gamers treasure all of our old crap. They're curious about it. There's a reason for all those retro-looking indie games today. Low budget and lack of talent, mostly. But, you know, some younger gamers aren't total dipshits, who don't know shit about the games we used to love, even with their urge to dress up in shitty costumes and everything. The gaming industry is still fucked if there's no end in sight for countless reboots, prequels, sequels and the exact same shit we've been "enjoying" with the movies for way too long now, but that's a different story. There. Look at me. Going all, "Ooo I totally get it now, they're not so bad" and shit. Brrrr!

Oh well. On to more Warframe! That game

looks

too

fucking

amazing!

Warframe is the number one reason why I absolutely detest so-called "next generation" garbage like CoD: Ghosts or NFS Rivals. Rivals looks kinda pretty and teaches us that next-gen means moist cars, Ghosts looks absolutely disappointing, both of them perform like shit.

Warframe looks so insanely good, if it was a girl, I wouldn't even fantasize about fucking it, because it's so far out of my league, I'd feel pathetic just trying to fap to it. AND SWEET FUCKING JESUS CHRIST, THE PERFORMANCE! The damn game runs so incredibly fast it melts my brain! How does a gorgeous game like Warframe perform at a solid 60fps (or higher if your screen handles it), while relatively unimpressive stuff like Ghosts dips down to 15fps and less in multilayer?

Meh.

Unfortunately, we've reached a point in the game where we're slowly running out of stuff to do. We've killed the game's current biggest, final boss and now we're just crafting and leveling up more stuff.

Warframe simply isn't overly difficult at the moment. Any weapon in the game can be powerful enough to one-shot most baddies with the right upgrades and modifications. Some gear is a bit more difficult to obtain, some weapons are ridiculously powerful out of the box, but it's entirely possible to stick with your lowly level 1 starter rifle, upgrade it as you go and beat every single mission with it when it's fully beefed up. Which is a good thing, because you're not forced to obtain certain items in order to succeed, but it ultimately makes the whole thing a bit pointless. I've recently replaced my "one shot kills everything" shotgun with a "one shot kills everything with even greater damage" one. Makes me feel good, but there really wasn't any reason. Probably still better than being forced into constant replacing.

-Cat

Dat Xmas

Here's a fun story about what we did when we visited the family for Christmas this year: We brought the dog. We took him to McDonald's before, had him out shopping, but never had him with us all day long when visiting someone, so it was an experiment of sorts. We brought his favourite shoe for him to chew on, but he was too busy exploring the house, hogging the cat's food bowls and sleeping in everyone's laps. He really likes being rubbed behind his ears. He leans into it and everything. They were all happy to have him, everyone spent lots of time petting and cuddling him and we've all hand-fed him prawns and turkey and other goodies. He didn't make a mess or bite anyone and really behaved himself.

Sounds like absolutely every other dog, right? "So what, he behaved exactly the way you'd expect a good dog to behave" and all that. Absolutely right. But in case you're new around here - this is what our "dog" looks like:

Woof!

Tame as a puppy

Our dog happens to be a 4ft monitor lizard. And yes - he ran around the family's house, with two cats around and people feeding him treats by hand. It is quite a sight to behold. You see, he tends to be a bit vicious around feeding time:

Seems insane to offer him food with your bare hands, right? Especially something tiny like a prawn.

It was a lot more terrifying for the shrimp, really.

I know it sounds unbelievable, but Hugo Bosc was ridiculously careful and gentle. He grabbed the food in slow-motion, practically gumming it, carefully avoiding people's fingers. It was just as amazing to behold as the fact that everybody was brave enough to even try hand-feeding him as though it was perfectly normal.

Hugo is tame, housebroken, friendly with people and other pets and he never ceases to amaze me. It's so incredible what these clever monitor lizards can do and what awesome pets they make when you spend enough time with them. Reptiles are a lot more intelligent than we give them credit for, which is slowly becoming more apparent through recent research. 

One big difference between a monitor lizard and your average dog or housecat is that cats and dogs have been domesticated for an eternity. They've been around humans for many generations, many of them are bred to be pets, whereas monitor lizards are often caught in the wild and then sold in shops. They're only just starting to breed monitor lizards for pet shops now that they're becoming more popular, but when you buy a monitor today, there's a pretty good chance you're getting a wild animal.

When Hugo was a baby he was terrified by people. He'd run, hide and, if everything else failed, attack anyone who would get too close to him. And a monitor lizard tail-whipping you or clamping down on your hand is a pretty painful experience. Most people keep monitor lizards as a status symbol of sorts, something cool to look at and to show off to friends, and feed them when necessary and watch them from outside the cage where it is safe. They tend to be aggressive when you don't spend any time taming them and even then, some of them just aren't very friendly and may never be tamed at all. 

So what we're doing with Hugo is actually pretty new, rare and special. There are a few other people with tame monitors on Youtube, but you won't find an awful lot of really tame, friendly ones on there, which aren't grossly overweight or reported dead by the people posting these videos. There's one guy out there who takes his bosc monitor for walks around the park with people's dogs and even sets up toys for him and everything, which is really fascinating to watch, but he seems to be a rare exception.

This one behaves a lot like our Hugo. Hugo likes playing with shoes and will do a tug of war with you, so monitor lizards really seem to be a bit playful. Who would have thought? 

I like to believe that 50 or so years from now it'll be perfectly normal for people to have a monitor lizard around the house like a cat or a dog. Hugo is living proof that it's perfectly possible if you take the time to tame them. And hey - we've done it before it was cool!

Our other main source of entertainment this Christmas was the Xbox360 owned by Claire's aunt. For two reasons: Red Dead Redemption and Xbox Kinect. You'll be well-aware that RDR is an absolutely amazing game, which I've only avoided because I hate console exclusives, especially when they're made by companies, who have been known to release their games across all platforms. But since it was already there and running... and owned by Claire's aunt, of all things! I was seriously surprised!

I've played a racing mission of sorts, where I had to steer a horse and carriage across a race track against a bunch of AI opponents, which were all easy enough to beat. The controls, however... the whole thing usually ended with me wrecking the damn cart or getting my horse stuck in some bush. I managed to win it eventually, which was pretty fun. There was a similar event where I had to steer a cartload of corpses around the place whilst fighting off a bunch of bandits, who kept torching the damn thing. Took me a while to figure out how to shoot those fuckers with a controller, but I got the hang of it eventually.

But then... Kinect Sports. Fuck! Dear god!

Claire's aunt wanted to show us Xbox golf. So she had to tell the Xbox to launch the game. Actually fucking tell it. See, that's the thing people forget when they watch Star Trek. It actually feels pretty fucking awkward when you're supposed to talk to your hardware, especially when people are watching. Let's just say that it all ended with half a dozen people shouting "Xbox! Golf! Xbox, play golf! GOLF!" We gave up in the end. Nobody managed to even launch the damn thing. To be fair, watching how much it sucked and how it was downright impossible to do something that would have taken one or two button-presses with a controller was more entertaining than any game could possibly ever be. 

Also, Warframe. They've released a cat-themed berserker warframe. How fucking funny is that?

Cat ears, cat claws... pretty neat ass for a space ninja cyborg thingie, too!

The new warframe is pretty broken and shit, but given my online presence and everything, I can't just ignore this one.

Christmas is over. I'm a bit sad. I had lots of fun.

-Cat

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

Fuck yeah, Chivalry!

Ber-Sir-Kerkitten

The Street Fighter Video is up - next game on the list is UT3, which I could entirely do without. But hey, I've got a bit of a lead now, so I suppose I can slack off for a while. Behold!

Real men wear a fedora

Also - Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior. Another one of those games I'd fucking love to review, but all people ever want to read about is World of fucking Warcraft. I'd love to review more action games, shooters, racing games and the like, but seeing as my #1 employer focuses mostly on RPGs and MMOs, it ain't gonna happen anytime soon. Ironically, more and more magazines, websites and publishers contact me, asking me to write for them (yaaay!) and then they always start off by telling me they're looking for an MMO guy. "You play MMOs, right?" I don't particularly enjoy MMOs, I've declined all work involving Elder Scrolls Online and WildStar, but unless an action game goes F2P, they won't let me write about it. 

Figures - an MMORPG is a fucking pain in the ass to write about. You need to look into pvp, raids, community features, events, dungeons and a billion other things, meaning MUCH more research and actual play time and much crappier pay per hour than any action title. I mean, compare writing a review on, say, Call of Duty to writing one about Elder Scrolls Online. The average CoD campaign is a matter of five hours - if that. Add another couple hours of multiplayer and you know everything there is to know. Play an MMORPG for seven hours and you're what, level 25? Good luck writing that review. I'm in the fortunate position of being able to cherry-pick. Most freelancers can't - and being paid only for the amount of pages you write, rather than the amount of hours you put into an article hardly seems fair.

Naturally, if you're good at your job, reviewing an MMO will make you an expert at the game, meaning you can create in-depth guides about classes, dungeons and certain features, which are always in high demand and get rewarded rather handsomely. But doing so requires a certain amount of love and dedication towards the game in question. You can't just jump in, finish the whole game in one or two sessions, write your article and get paid all in the same week. So, all those publishers only looking for an MMO guy? There's your explanation.

Oh well. Just because I don't get paid to play Chivalry (yet), doesn't mean I can't still write about it for the heck of it. Also, moving pictures:

Hilarious. There's just something about a game that lets me yell SPARTAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA whilst launching a spear into some guy's eyesocket. Then I grab my sword, decapitate another guy or five and keep screaming the whole time, because screaming is important. What a great game!

Let's be honest here: We've all wondered who would come out victorious if you put a medieval knight, a ninja, a samurai, a Spartan, a pirate and a Viking into an arena. If you haven't, then you're an idiot and quite frankly, I want you to get off my fucking planet.
What makes this game awesome is its fantastic combat system. What looks like a lot of random hacking and slashing in the above video (it's my 2nd day, I'm a noob), is a surprisingly deep and complex mix of stabs, thrusts, feints and parries. You can cancel an attack in mid-swing, causing your opponent to parry thin air, then poke him in the eye with a surprise attack. You can speed up or delay your swings, causing enemies to mess up their timing. It's unforgiving and deadly - a single mistake can easily get you killed.

Of course you also get your usual amount of nerd rage and inflated egos. Other games with toxic communities, such as the later Call of Duty titles, let you disable text chat. Chivalry does not, as far as I'm aware. Basically, everything you successfully use to kill another player is OP/broken/for noobs/requires no skill. Which, ironically, speaks volumes for Chivalry's balancing. Spartans are fucking OP, ninjas are for pussies, Vikings are for noobs, knights require absolutely no skill - you get the idea. By that logic, Chivalry must be the easiest game you'll ever play. The fact of the matter is, though, that the classes are all decently balanced. The quick and agile ninja moves across the battlefield as a silent, stealthy killer, who gets to throw shuriken at the tap of a button, but he's also incredibly fragile. Knights make up the other extreme and can take large amounts of abuse, but they're slow, heavy and their crossbows aren't very useful, should you choose to go for ranged attacks in the first place. Pirates can deal devastating amounts of damage with their muskets and flintlock pistols, which, in turn, require an eternity and a half to reload. All classes feel unique enough to stand out on their own, which is good, because otherwise there'd be no point in featuring all those characters to begin with.

Deadliest Warrior's one big weakness lies in its crappy game modes. Ironically, Chivalry: Medieval Warfare was awesome in that regard. The original Chivalry features objective-based multiplayer battles. One team might have to slaughter the royal family, while the other team has to defend them. One side needs to protect a bunch of trebuchets, while the opposing side has to destroy them. You get the idea. This stuff is so good, because it gives both teams an incentive to stay and work together. But there is no such mode in Deadliest Warrior. Instead, you get pointless, mindless free for all deathmatches, team-deathmatches for up to six different teams, which may sometimes prevent you from playing the class you want, as well as the boring and frustrating 'last team standing', which rewards you for running away and hiding until everybody else is dead. No respawn on this one.

Modes like 'hold the banner' give teams more incentive to work together, as your side literally has to "hold" a banner in order to win, whilst annoying you with different limitations: The particular match might be limited to Knights vs Ninjas or, worse, Ninjas vs Ninjas, defeating the entire purpose of having six goddamn classes in the first place.

On the plus side there's the Unreal Engine 3. And that means solid performance, decent visuals and a fucking browser for dedicated servers and no stupid matchmaking system. Because it's not a damn console port!
Fighting animations aren't the most impressive ones you'll ever see, but it's incredibly satisfying to watch a pirate missing his shot, then turning to run away in a disturbingly Jack Sparrow-esque fashion. They also get to drink rum to regenerate health, so running isn't just funny, but potentially life-saving. Sucessfully playing each class also increases their rank, which unlocks more weapon types and customization options. This may seem strange to the younger ones among you, but competitive multiplayer games used to have free, purely cosmetic customization options, which didn't come out of a fucking paid DLC pack. It's a good thing!

Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior is brutal, unforgiving and incredibly punishing and difficult to get into. It's tempting to charge into the fray, repeatedly mashing the left mouse button, which usually results in your untimely death, as well as the deaths of your surrounding team mates, who will happily let you know how they feel about it. If you're looking for a game you just casually play for an hour or two after a long, hard day at work, this isn't for you. If you're willing to spend a few days getting your ass handed until you master the difficult combat system, the results can be insanely rewarding and oh-so cool-looking! There's nothing quite as fun as decapitating several enemies in one swing and reading those chat insults.

Besides - fucking server browser! Dedicated servers! No matchmaking! Customization! No damn bacon camo DLC pack for 3 Bucks! And no fucking zombies, nazis or terrorists! Now, if the developers would kindly add Medieval Warfare's best maps and game modes to Deadliest Warrior, I'd be so happy! Still, if you're looking for a very skill-based, old-school pvp experience, then Deadliest Warrior is an absolute no-brainer. Especially now that the Steam winter sale is on and the game is cheaper than pants.

-Cat

Generation Zzz

Ahh, Christmas! So much gaming to do and so little time! I gotta take care of the online news coverage over the holidays, which is probably not gonna be as dramatic as it may sound, but someone's gotta do it and they may just appreciate me enough to pay a little extra. Call me weird, but I'm always available for even the most awful jobs if people are willing to give me money and things.

Anyhow. Christmas. We've been to the Christmas market thingie in Nottingham last night. Kinda spontaneous. Just wanted to buy some cat litter, but then we somehow ended up taking the bus to town and there we made friends with the awesome ham lady, who put crispy, delicious, if somewhat overpriced ham on soft rolls. Mmmm! She was into it. Soooo into it. The way she smiled when she cut that stuff. She was one with the ham. She looked like a fucking ham with her glazed, rosy pink face. After six or so weeks of healthy, carb-free food, this is probably gonna do more harm than good, but that's the problem with this whole festive season. Family's gonna bury us under a mountain of chocolate next week and there's gonna be beef, turkey, gammon, prawns and god knows what else. Dafuq am I supposed to do? "I'll have some broccoli and a fat free yoghurt, please?" Fuck that. Gotta start all over again. Sigh.
We're bringing Hugo with us when we go meet the family. Which seems appropriate, given he was last year's present and all.

As for gaming, everyone I know has gone batshit insane. But let me start at the beginning. Maybe you've seen the little youtube video I linked here the other day, when a friend challenged me to a match on King of Fighters XIII. That whole thing is turning into a regular event of sorts. East vs West (he's Asian, I'm not, so that's where that came from), the two of us competing head to head in various games. We played Super Street Fighter IV last weekend and I'll post the results as soon as the video has finally finished uploading, converting and all that shit. We're gonna play SFIV shots around the holidays, which basically means that after every match we'll have a shot and get gradually more drunk as we go. Should be interesting, especially since I never really drink anything. At all.
This week's game is Unreal Tournament 3, which is gonna be genuinely difficult, because I haven't touched the series since the release of UT3, which I simply didn't enjoy very much. I'm practicing against godlike mode bots as we speak, the results of which can be seen here:

We've got a whole ton of games planned for future East vs West videos, ranging from Need for Speed to fucking Star Stable, so there should be plenty of humiliation for everyone. One thing that won't be on the list is CoD: Ghosts. Still no dedicated servers, the top 50 or so players on the leaderboards have several hundred billion kills (some of them at zero deaths) and while nobody at InfinityWard seems to give a shit about cheats and hacks, they've now introduced the first paid DLC, which lets you summon a wolf in multiplayer mode. Because that's what tactical military shooters are all about. I'm still waiting for a shaman class, with totems and a Bill Shatner commercial and everything.

There are much better games out there. Chivalry: Deadliest Warrior, for one. Lewk:

I've played Chivalry: Medieval Warfare for some time and this expansion adds arsetons of cool new classes and fighting styles. The combat system is absolutely fantastic and purely skill-based. My only gripe with this game lies within the absolutely awful game modes. Chivalry had objective-based multiplayer modes, where both teams had to stay together and work cooperatively in order to win. Then there's Deadliest Warrior, which has stuff like free for all deathmatch, team deathmatch, multi-team deathmatch... 90% of the time it's really hust a huge clusterfuck of people beating the shit out of one another, up to a point where you spawn and get instagibbed by a guy who spawns behind you a split second later. Too many people per map, zero coordination, very spammy.
To be fair, it's all still in a very early stage and I really hope they'll implement some of Medieval Warfare's more interesting game modes. Right now, it's difficult to appreciate the great combat system, when you always end up in the middle of a dozen people, all of which just wildly hack away at each other.

But my real problem with all of these games, Street Fighter, NFS, UT, Chivalry and what have you, is something completely different: I have no play mates, because all of my friends are old, tired and boring. You're probably not going to understand this if you haven't been around when Unreal Tournament, Quake 3 Arena and Half-Life were still new. People actually still played back then! We'd meet in school, agree on a game for the weekend and then 5-10 of us would play Counter-Strike, Age of Empires, UT or whatever the fuck we felt like playing at the time. Maybe we'd gather at someone's house to play Street Fighter. Point being - we've played everything together and we all had some great stories to tell. I remember spending entire nights playing AvP2 with a bunch of friends from school and I was so into it, I wanted to fucking write about it! And no, not dirty fan-fiction or some shit. The whole thing ended up becoming my damn job!

Today? I can talk about King of Fighters and UT on Facebook all day and I'll get plenty of responses from people talking about the good old days, about how they used to play these games to death, about how good they were or even about how they still play now and then. And that's about it. Do we ever get together and play? Bah! They're busy, they're tired, they had to work all day, they have family, they just don't have the fucking time.
Sure, many of these games are still being played online, they have their communities, their server browsers and stuff, but honestly, playing against random strangers on the 'net is about as entertaining as fighting the AI. It's just not very satisfying if the person whose brains you're splattering all over the walls and ceiling isn't somebody you know and love. Playing with friends means comparing dicks with your tribe and sporting the biggest schlong makes you their chief. Random matchmaking is like comparing dicks at the public urinal, which is creepy, wrong and should only be done in secret. What a horrible analogy!

Oh well. Looks like those days are all over now. Everyone's old. Everyone's tired. You wanna know what my friends are all playing now? You wanna know what the strange new hype is among "gamers" at my age? Look at this shit:

I'm not making this up. Fuck, I wish I was! Over the last few days more and more screenshots and videos of this game have appeared in my feed and every moron, their mothers and their dogs are playing fucking Euro Truck Simulator 2! People are "too tired" to play King of Fighters after eight hours of Angry Birds at the office, but they're all in the mood to drive virtual fertilizer around Europe and getting stuck in fucking pretend traffic jams.

Claire played it last night. She tunes in to BBC Radio Nottingham (game supports RL radio streaming) and drives tomatoes from one country to another. Always tomatoes. I don't think she cares about the route or the pay for as long as she gets to drive tomatoes. Ironically, she had to stop after a while, because she got carsick. I'm not joking. Driving gives her motion sickness IRL and for some fucked up reason this simulator is realistic enough to make her feel ill up to the point of throwing up.

Now I've seen it all. I guess I'll just go back to fighting the AI on Street Fighter or I'll get myself stuck in another pointless clusterfuck on Deadliest Warrior. Sigh. I need a playmate...

-Cat

Quasi Cyber Bullying

Ladies and Gentlemen - the King of Fighters 2013 is yours truly. And hilarity ensued. I don't think you have to be able to understand the language to appreciate this one.
Next game on the list is Super Street Fighter IV Arcade (yay!), followed by Unreal Tournament 3 (meh). Not sure what we've got planned after that, maybe some UT classic or Quake Live or some shit. I dunno, maybe we should try Worms at some point. Or Tron and Tetris. :P

Speaking of trying out games - I had another look at Path of Exile (PoE) a year or so after I reviewed the closed beta for buffed magazine. And it's quite easily the best, fairest F2P game I've ever played and quite possibly the only one that actually deserves to be called "free to play". The cash shop offers animations, dances, cosmetic pets, FLUFF and nothing but. You can't buy power. Heck, you can't even buy power through shady 3rd party websites, because the game features no currency. There is no gold. And no goldspam. I know it sounds strange, but it really works and it's actually pretty fun when you can't just buy your way to victory like you could with a certain other hack'n'slay title until just recently. Sure, they probably just sell the items directly now, but the whole thing works remarkably well without any real form of currency. Helps the dark, semi apocalyptic setting, too.
Of course the real fun lies in PoE's multiplayer mode, where I get to team up with Claire. Like so:

I've just finished my normal difficulty playthrough and am about to get started on 'cruel' difficulty. And for the most part, this game is pretty fucking awesome. I love the class system. Sure, you start out being a clever witch or an agile duelist or a hulking marauder and what have you, but nothing stops your stealthy character from picking up a few spells along the way. And the witch may very well pick up a sword or even a warhammer. In fact, that's exactly what I did - I tried to create a somewhat unique and unlikely character. Or so I thought, but more about that later.

The problem with spellcasters is that they're squishy and they prefer to attack from a safe distance like cowards. So I ditched the robes and the fairy wand and went for full plate and the heaviest fucking maul I could find. In the little video above you can see me combining elemental melee attacks, fireballs, lightning, as well as countless minions. I get to turn fallen enemies into spectres and zombies, summon skeletons and animate weapons. Yes, with the right skills you can turn weapons and armor dropped by monsters into companions, which float around and beat the shit out of your enemies. How cool is that?

I know it has been said countless times, but it's true that this game is everything Diablo 3 should have been - and so much more. And that goes for the setting, as well. Look at this (spoilerific if you haven't played it yet):

This is the kind of stuff that made the first two Diablo games great - and then some. You know, before Diablo 3 turned the antagonist into such a girl. Literally. Which, admittedly, made for some interesting fan-created porn drawings, but the whole thing was just so damn... I dunno, tame? Harmless? I mean, compare the final act of Diablo 3 to this gory mess up there.

There are rivers of blood. Mountains of corpses. I'm not even exaggerating. Screams echo through the countless winding corridors of that dungeon and grotesquely disfigured creatures attack you with tentacles made of their own spines and intestines. Also noteworthy: Nudity! Yaaay! Some of the baddies and statues have boobies and peepees. Finally! I mean, for fuck's sake, we have M-rated games out there, everything is mega violent, but god forbid if there's a nipple! Everything on here is tiny and pixel-sized, but it's there, as it should be. I'm a fucking grownup, so lemme rejoice over full-on digital nudity like a twelve year old, dammit!

Of course, nothing is ever perfect, which is good, because I get to do my fair share of bitching. First of all, the seemingly endless possibilities to develop your character really boil down to just two or three viable options for most of the classes. Those minions I've used in the first video, during the game's earlier stages? Yeah, good luck using those after the first 30 or so levels. As you can see in the second video, I've ditched most of the minions, the fireball and most of my other casty stuff for a tanky melee build. And while the majority of witch players I've bumped into so far were traditional casters with robes and (sometimes dual-)wands and stuff, the whole tanky witch thing still wasn't exactly rare.

Of course there's some blue car effect involved here. You know, like when you get a new car and it's blue and suddenly everything you see around you is fucking blue cars. People play all sorts of characters and the item system theoretically accomodates all skills and play styles. There's gear for strength, intelligence and dexterity-based characters as well as hybrids and everything is viable in a way. Unfortunately, difficulty picks up so rapidly after the first two thirds of the game, some builds just can't solo the last bit without some serious grinding and over-leveling. And that's my biggest, my only real problem with PoE.

See, I don't mind difficult games. I'm tired of all that casual crap and handholding seen in all the blockbuster titles today. What I don't like is a sudden jump in difficulty from mildly challenging to "inch forward or die in a split second without ever knowing wtf just happened". Alright, it's not that bad. At first. But by the time I got to the final boss battle, or the buildup thereof, going from full to zero HP in under five seconds, capped resistances, 50% damage mitigation, shield, ton of life and everything, I couldn't help but wonder what the fuck those guys were thinking when they came up with that on the starting difficulty level and decided it was "just right".

Yes, sure, you can just join a group of players and everything gets a lot easier. But I wanted to solo that shit. Which worked out in the end, but caused much more frustration than it was worth. Two useless yellow items, a bunch of blues and the ending credits to a story, which made no sense whatsoever. Interestingly enough, going back to act 1 on my freshly unlocked cruel difficulty level feels like the proverbial walk in the park in comparison. You know, during the day, without the drug dealers, rabid hobos and drunk teenagers around.

Some other, smaller issue I have is repetition. First off, there simply isn't much variety when it comes to baddies. Undead guys, bandits and beasts, that's about it. Okay, add a few living statues and ribbons (I don't even fucking know), but fighting entire legions of bandits and monkeys in act 2 gets old fast. Zone size is another one for the repetition department. Having areas three to five times the size of your average zone in Diablo 2 may sound awesome on paper, but spending an hour or so fighting the same three monsters over and over again whilst looking for a waypoint or a fucking map transition isn't really all that fun. Most of all, though, the game recycles items even more than Diablo 2 does. Got your awesome shiny endgame battleplate at the end of your first playthrough? Well, prepare to replace them with a bunch of the same fugly old rags you wore during the first ten levels of the game, but with a slightly different name and a much higher item level. Every piece of equipment gets reused at least four or five times, so you go back and forth between knight of gold and medieval hobo a lot.

On an unrelated note: Check the balls on that soft collie, falalalala... tree! It's as crude and 'special' as everything else in this house, so we're satisfied.

"My ass hurts..."

-Cat

Sigh... SFIV>KOFXIII

I remember buying Street Fighter IV a few years back. Heck, that game was one of the reasons why I got an Xbox360. And I fucking hated it. The crude, completely exaggerated 3D characters and their stupid facial expressions, the ridiculous, over the top super combos, which took so long to animate, you could go take a shit or two, have a sandwich and pick up your controller for round two (where the same damn thing was gonna happen again) and it simply didn't feel like Street Fighter to me.

And why the fuck does Ken Masters suddenly cosplay as Angela Merkel?

Back when my brother and I were kids we'd play the shit out of SF II Turbo every day, countless hours, all the goddamn time. Ryu vs Ken, axe kicks, hadouken, beating the shit out of each other till our hands fell off. Then we continued playing with our feet, because that's how dedicated we were.

We also painted each other's toenails.

SF IV still uses the same basic fighting system from SF II, but adds a lot to it, making it incredibly deep and complex. Problem is, the game doesn't exactly go out of its way to explain the new system, so I constantly found myself getting my ass kicked by AI opponents, who just kept on spamming the same shit over and over again. And when I ragequit, I ragequit like a pro. Let's just say that the first one or two hours I've played this game on my Xbox have also been the last.

With tomorrow's beat'em'up challenge coming up, I agreed to install Super Street Fighter IV Arcade on my PC. My buddy is a huge fan of the game, fight stick and everything and he's also sending me some weird messages:

Apparently, shit just got real.

We've agreed to play King of Fighters XIII (my territory) followed by Super Street Fighter (his specialty). You know, keep things fair and all that. So I've practiced a bit, roflstomped the AI on the highest difficulty setting, fought the ultra cheap final boss and the even cheaper real final boss and then defeated 28 out of the 35 characters in survival mode. Which isn't so bad, considering I haven't touched the series since the release of Garou: Mark of the Wolves.

And the game still looks, feels and plays like King of Fighters. Yes, they've added some new cancels and gauges and shit, but nothing to completely throw me off. I wasn't all that bothered by the pixellated 2D sprites, either. Or the incredibly stupid, confusing story mode. And the cheap, shitty bosses, well... in some fucked up way those are KoF tradition. Boss battles on SFIV were just as cheap, as far as I was concerned. Which is wrong, but the rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia hid that from me. Until we had our first sparring match and the shitty netcode resulted in half-second input lag. Two people playing a 2D beat'em'up. I download shit at 8,5mb/s and I couldn't host a session that wasn't plagued by severe, nigh-unplayable lag. Not fun. Well okay, I kicked ass, so it was kinda fun, but it's frustrating to fuck up even the simplest combos because your character feels like he's somehow moving through jello.

Oh well. Laggy or not, KoF is a pretty safe bet in my favour. So I had to do something I hate and... sigh... practice some SFIV. I couldn't even make it to the boss without using a bunch of continues on medium difficulty. To be fair, fighting him also made me realize that said boss may be using a combination of every character's single-most annoying special attacks, but he wasn't filling up the entire screen in a non-stop barrage of projectiles like the boss on KoF. There was nothing unfair, cheap or game-breaking going on. I was completely wrong about that guy.

I've also taken the time to read up on the new fighting system. The gauges, revenge meters and all that stuff. Up to that point I had managed to touch the very basics of the system, but there was a lot more beneath the seemingly shallow surface. I also started to understand why just about every fucking AI opponent seemed to have a higher priority on their attacks than I did.

I've been a fucking idiot all along!

I'll never like the cartoony 3D-models. Or the insanely annoying SF II techno remixes. Or the complete lack of a proper survival mode. But now that I understand how this shit works and I finally had the pleasure to fight folks like Akuma (who still isn't KoF-cheap, he's just good), I'm not just having fun. SFIV is the better game in just about every aspect. The way I understand it, online play is usually lag-free and a lot more pleasant than anything seen on KoF. The fights are fast-paced and allow for a huge amount of comebacks and surprises and they simply look a lot more exciting than anything I've seen on KoF. Which hurts to admit, because I'll always love that series, warts and all. And I'll get that 35 survival victories achievement eventually. But right now I think I'm gonna work my way up towards Evil Ryu. Surprising.

"Told ya!"

-Cat

Silence of the Cat

A dog will fetch, play dead and roll over because it wants food. And possibly because dogs are playful. My cat will sit on the worktop while I'm cooking and scream at my face because it wants food. And definitely because cats are assholes. 

Trust me, I wrote a book about them.

You don't train a cat. You catch a cat doing annoying shit and make it stop. For as long as you're looking, anyway. One fun, efficient way to tell a cat it's not supposed to shit in the laundry, sleep in the washing machine or sit on top of the fucking kitchen door, waiting to jump you the moment you walk in is the Super Soaker.

If you think this is funny, wait for the damn thing to declare your back a designated landing zone.

Shooting the cat with a water gun is hilarious, painless and it stops the cat from doing whatever the fuck you don't want it to do. A less fun, yet even more convenient way to stop the little bastards is by shouting something. I just shout "ey!" and the cat knows it has fucked up. Claire's cat trying to kill my cat is an ey, cat trying to sneak out the bedroom window is an ey, cat jumping on the fucking worktop while I'm dicing meat is so an ey!

No, not like that.

The first step in my daily routine, right after getting my ass out of bed, leads me directly to the cat bowls. Today was an exception. Claire got up before me and fed the little shits. Which, of course, didn't stop them from screaming at me for food when I came into the kitchen five minutes later. Because it's my fucking job to feed them. It doesn't count when Claire does it. Not in their world.

So I'm trying to fix myself some breakfast and they wouldn't shut up. Meow, meow, meow, ISAIDFUCKINGMEOWASSHOLE, meow etc. - which is a major ey, of course. So what did they do? Did they go away? Did they leave me in peace? Nope. They just sat there whispering, breathing every meow from that point on. No voice. "Hchhh! Hrgk!" Unfuckingbelievable. Cat logic. I'm not making any noise, you can't ban me from the kitchen. Silent meows.

A really awesome year is coming to an end. When I got started in this job, I had to ask around for work all the time. But this year I actually had to turn down a few articles here and there, because I simply didn't have the time to write all the stuff people wanted me to write. We can afford a real goddam tree this year! Which may not sound like a big deal to most of you, but it is to me.

You see, for the past 15 years or so, Christmas with my family back in Germany has been rather depressing. The last time I actually got something for Christmas, my parents gave me Wing Commander Prophecy and a 16" crc monitor. Yes, that's how long ago that was.
Yes, I know, it's not about the presents and all that. Reality check - sitting around not exchanging any gifts whatsoever isn't very fun. And kids don't get all hyped up for a chance to spend time with their families during that time of the year, either.

Thing is, my family has never been all that great in the whole get together department, anyway. Well, "family". Basically, my newly-divorced father fell in love with the widow next door one day and they decided it would be a great idea to "merge" and get married. My brother and I, the neighbour, her kids. Random teenagers and two horny old people. And eventually it was decided that I had to refer to my new stepmother as "mama". Because you become a proper family by forcing your kids to do stupid shit like that.

My brand new combination of parents were a bunch of tyrants. Basically, I had to do everything "because I said so". You're 15 and you don't believe in god? Go to church twice a week for the next two years and get baptized, because I said so. I tried everything to get out of that shit. Told the priest I didn't want any of this and my parents were forcing me. He said I was very brave to admit that. And didn't do shit. Whenever I didn't agree to something they wanted to force upon me, they threatened to send me to boarding school, military school or whatever other kind of stupid shit they could come up with to get rid of me. I was about 18 or 19 when my girlfriend back than had her first apartment and when I went to visit her for a few days my stepmother showed up with a van. All of my stuff was in there. I was officially moving out, whether I liked it or not. I was still going to school back then, I didn't have a job, I couldn't support my girlfriend and my parents didn't think to ask her first, because fuck that, he's finally gone.

Christmas was the exact same fake, forced load of bullshit pretense everything else was with this family. My stepmother would torture the everyone with her god-awful Rock Christmas collection, cranked all the way up and don't you dare roll your eyes or ask for that shit to be turned down a bit, lest you'll be confined to your room for the rest of the day. We've also been forced into church the first couple of years to keep up appearances with the neighbours. I seriously hated Christmas. Everything about it. And then we stopped exchanging presents.

I'm skipping your house this year, bitch! And next year! And the year after! Ho ho ho!

Thanks to scary amounts of death and disease, my newly acquired stepmother was loaded. Former hubby died of cancer and 90% of his family died along with him. Also cancer, mysterious plane crashes and other weird shit. Lots of tragedy. And money. Got lucky at the stock exchange and all that. Then she hooked up with my dad, we all moved in together in their house and we could have lived happily ever after. As millionaires. But they had to have custom-built cars. A whole fucking custom-made house. We had magazine people coming over to take photographs of our fucking designer bathroom. Couldn't take a shit without somebody trying to take a picture. I imagine that's what living in Japan must be like.

Their decadence and urge to show off reached grotesque new levels when they built that new house. It was in the middle of nowhere. No cinema, no McDonald's, no other kids - I had to get up at 5:30 in the morning if I didn't wanna be late for school. And our new home was directly oppositve of the local graveyard. I shit you not - if you looked out the window in any of the children's rooms, you'd see a fucking funeral. Did I mention that my stepsiblings' father had just died of cancer? That's the kind of selfish, cold-hearted fuckers I'm talking about when I mention my parents.

I tried to have a talk about all this with my father once. He actually said he was sorry, but with a major but attached. "...but that's the way it always has been. My parents did what they wanted and it didn't matter what the kids wanted." Well, that makes everything okay, doesn't it?
There's a lesson here, people. If you're sad and lonely and you feel that there's something missing in your life, a ton of money is not the answer. They wasted it. Every last penny of it - and tons more. When all the money was gone, they started spending my stepsiblings' inheritance. And when that was gone, they went from their unsuccessful self-employed work to regular dayjobs and a modest, humble lifestyle they could actually afford.

Haha, fat chance! Loans, friends, family! And for what? To move from the custom graveyard house to a slightly smaller house. To trade the Range Rover for a slightly smaller SUV. The weekly steak dinner came from Aldi now. They looked at the stuff as though they had to eat dog food. And my stepmother would be sure to remind me that my old man had ruined her life and that he had also ruined my stepmother before her and my real mother before that one. And that he ruins the lives of everyone he gets in touch with. Actually, I've heard that from a lot of people, including my uncles, grandparents, friends of the family and a few others, but it's not really the kind of thing an 18 year old wants to hear from his stepmother. Every day.

She also made me wear dresses.

Anyhow. No money + fucked up priorities = depressing Xmas. Apparently, we needed a gas-guzzling SUV, because "I can't be a real estate manager and drive my customers around in a shitty compact car." Turns out that appearances and impressive cars alone don't sell anything. So Christmas had to go. Eventually, the "gift" for everyone was sitting together at the dining table until my dad would get up 20 minutes later to go on a guild raid. Because he gave up on all things real life and moved his affairs to Azeroth. I'm not even kidding! He once failed to pick me up at Frankfurt Airport when I got home from the UK after midnight with a ton of luggage and no train tickets and left a message on my mobile, telling me he was on WoW and I should just grab a taxi or something.

I could spend another dozen paragraphs derailing this entry by moaning about how my family broke apart a little more each day, up to the point where I packed my shit and left the country and most of them couldn't even be bothered to say goodbye. It took my stepmother two years to respond to my emails, asking me to stay in touch, asking to send a couple photos and stuff. She didn't even say why it took her so long. She didn't apologize. And you know what? Go fuck yourself. With a rake.

So when I pay for the shitty little roof over my head in the UK, when I go place my own god damn Christmas tree in my own living room, when I pay for all the decorations and fluff and presents with my own money, which I've earned through my hard, honest work, based on a business I've started from the ground up, when I fucking celebrate Christmas, it's not because I give a crap about tradition, Christian holidays or any of that shit. It's because I fucking earned it!

We can't afford much, but it's the thought that counts.

See, something else had happened when I moved to the UK. I had a chance to hang out with Claire's family for Christmas. A few times now. Those guys are slaving away day and night to make ends meet. The family business has to run all day, every day, including Sundays. The car breaks down more often than not and if there's no money for the bus, well... nothing better than a nice, long walk home after an all-day shift at the shop. They don't eat steak twice a week. Or once. Or ever. And if there's no money for the monthly Age of Conan subscription, well... time to play something else for a while.
They have the most awesome Christmas celebrations.

It's funny when you think about it. They have just about enough to eat and pay most of the bills. They never skip Christmas. Everybody gets something.
They all chipped in to get us our new pet last year. You know, Hugo Bosc, our monitor lizard. Not just the actual pet, but a tank, light, heating, the whole thing.

"Don't worry, he won't get much bigger than that!"

"...oops!"

We're sending back and forth a list of who needs what, everybody helps out the best they can and everyone gets something. And there are no fights, no arguments, nobody slams any doors and nobody runs off to play WoW. I'm no family guy, I prefer to be on my own and a day or two full of Christmas-related activities will be more than enough for me, but I'm actually looking forward to it all. Amazing what you can do when you give a fuck. When you care enough to do something. Christmas used to be happy with my family, too. A long while ago. I'm not completely sure what happened.

Oh well. New home, new life, new everything. No point dwelling on the bad stuff. May as well go all the way and get our own tree and all.

Oh, speaking of changes: We've survived our first month of healthy eating! We did go overboard with the unhealthy shit again on my birthday the other day, but other than that it's mostly vegetables, some tender beef or skinless chicken and lettuce, fruit and all that. No bread, rice, pasta, potatoes or anything, no cream, cheese, bacon, pepsi, crisps, puddings, yoghurts or any other fun stuff. The first two weeks were hell. Constant cravings, feeling hungry all the god damn time and you can only eat so much broccoli until you finally crack. But not only do we fit into some old clothes again, but for some strange reason I also have amazing skin all of a sudden. No bumps, zits, spots or any of that other shit I should have left behind with my teenage years.

And there's no daily coma. Not too long ago I'd hit a certain low point every day, where I'd be more dead than alive. Sleepy, not in the mood for anything and ready to take a twelve hour nap, followed by a nice, long day in bed. Right now I could totally go for a two hour walk. Which I won't, because why the fuck would I exercise when there's a perfectly functional internet connection in the house, but the point is, I totally could. Without falling asleep on my feet. 

We've also reached a point where we're going a little easier with the whole thing. We're gonna have some junk food this weekend. We crave it, it's been much too long without it and it's right back to leek and bell peppers and salad the next day. But having one or two days a week where we eat whatever garbage we want isn't so bad when the rest of our weekly diet is healthy.

This can be risky if we aren't careful, because it's easy and very tempting to cheat. Our change of diet can't just be a phase, something we do for a month of two. This is for life, because otherwise it's pointless. If we go back to "whatever we want, whenever we want it", we're gonna undo everything we've achieved so far, probably two-fold.

So that's what we're going with now. Pig out every Saturday and/or Sunday and other than that it's still a massive NO on carbs, fat, sugar and just about everything else fun. And I think we're actually getting used to it now. Once it becomes routine, once you've spent several weeks eating only stuff you've cooked out of low-fat yoghurt and greens, it gets a little less depressing each day. Ironically, I'm actually feeling pretty bad when I look at all the cheese and bacon I'm gonna put all over tomorrow's dinner. It feels wrong. It's been ages and it's not gonna kill me, but it'll ruin a day of healthy eating or two. But I guess I didn't feel guilty enough to not buy that stuff in the first place.

There's no chocolate in the house, no ice cream, no crisps. Just apples. Heh.

And since I don't exercise, I have to be extra careful not to cheat and fuck myself over. I do exercise one thing, however: My fingers. King of Fighters and Street Fighter this weekend. Grudge match. A friend and I will battle to the death, voice chat and everything, put it all on the 'net to amuse the common riff-raff. It's been years since I've done anything like it, I have no idea if and how the whole thing is gonna work over the internet lag-wise and everything and I have no idea how good or bad my friend is at the whole thing and whether or not I'll be able to keep up. But there's no point overthinking it. We just want to have a bit of fun and that's what we're gonna do. I can't wait!

My life is happier than most of you could ever imagine.

I'm still playing STO with Claire, too. I kinda wish I could get her into beat'em'ups, but I don't wanna push my luck. Besides, playing MMOs together is one thing. Playing Street Fighter ruins relationships. It's probably best to keep that between myself and my buddy. I'll share the result here if we can get the whole thing to work. Watch this space!

-Cat

My Day Off

You may find this hard to believe, but I used to be a worthless maggot like you, having to spend my own money on video games, MMO subscriptions and premium content. Now that people are afraid I might bash their shitty games a little too hard, I have it all - money, press access and everything else I could ever dream of.

Bitches!

There's another thing I have in abundance right now: Time. I've slaved all weekend long, finished every due article, column, screenshot, video and newspost and now I can kick back and relax for a while.
Unfortunately, my favourite play mate has to work all day at the family business, so I'm all by myself.

Well, almost. I don't have to play Star Trek Online on my lonesome, because there's still our bearded dragon, Ensign Nomnom, our Bosc Monitor Dr. Hugo and my tactical officer, Commander Jiji. Together we shall travel space and go places, where no one has gone before. Well, at least not recently. Content is still a bit thin and all, you know...

Can I have a yellow shirt instead?

Captain Kitten: "Alright everyone, we're heading to Starbase 24 to fight off an invading Klingon fleet and grab all the loot before any other noobs show up! Ensing Nomnom, plot a course!"

"I'm really more of an auto pilot."

Ensign Nomnom: "Do a what now? I think I'm just gonna take a shit on the printer."
Captain Kitten: "What? Nooo! We're playing Star Trek! People don't shit, they just beam it into sp... HOLY FUCK it stinks! Stop! Abort! Evacuate!"
Ensign Nomnom: "What the hell do you think I'm doing? Oh god, two dozen locusts, I think I'm gonna explode! Aaaah!"
Captain Kitten: "Stop shitting on the god damn printer!"
Ensign Nomnom: "Fine, I'll just casually crawl away and leave a trail of crap all over the carpet."
Commander Jiji: "Are you still eating that?"
Captain Kitten: "Stop eating lizard shit! Argh! Abort mission! I need to clean this up!"

15 minutes later...

Captain Kitten: "Alright, everyone. The Borg are invading the Pi Canis sector. Ensign Nomnom, pl... you know what? Fuck it, I'm gonna do it myself."
Dr. Hugo: "This is stupid. When do we eat?"
Commander Jiji: "Yeah, when's dinner time?"
Captain Kitten: "Silence! I will not tolerate this insubordination! We can eat after the mission!"
Dr. Hugo: "Screw that, I'm just gonna eat the stupid cat! *chomps*"
Commander Jiji: "AIEEEEEE!"
Captain Kitten: "Stop eating the damn cat! Let go! ARGH! Stop tail-whipping me or you can go back in the tank!"
Commander Jiji: "I don't feel so good..."
Captain Kitten: "Nooo! Not on the carpet! Go throw up in the kitchen!"
Commander Jiji: "Ugh..."
Captain Kitten: "On the TILES, damn you! Not the kitchen rug! Stop! AAAH!"
Ensign Nomnom: "Yeah, I think I'm just gonna shit on the printer again."
Captain Kitten: "Starfleet Operations, this is Captain Kitten. Listen, about that Borg invasion, there might be a slight... NOT IN THE GOD DAMN PAPER TRAY! How can a single lizard shit so much? Fuck it..."

They really need to make this game a little more casual-friendly. Maybe I'm just gonna ask around for some extra work...

-Cat