Pokkén Tournament DX - Crushing The Spirits of Little Girls

I know neither shame nor guilt

If you've grown up gaming on consoles somewhere between the NES and the original PlayStation, there's a fair chance that the beginning of online gaming was a bit of a bitch to you. Let me elaborate: Back when I was a kid I was better at videogames than anybody else I knew. I'd beat all friends, siblings, neighbours and anyone else I knew at Street Fighter. Until this day everyone I know refuses to play Steet Fighter against me, because they don't enjoy losing all the damn time. Somebody was stuck in a boss fight, couldn't beat a level or had some other problem with a game, they'd call me to take care of it. You probably know what I'm talking about, unless you're a little shit who started gaming on daddy's PS3

It's nice to think you're the best, but if we're being honest, it's not very hard when there's no internet. If you owned a console and your friends didn't, chances were you'd beat them simply because you had more opportunity to practice. Maybe you beat them at games they didn't have or simply didn't care about as much as you did. Even if you were genuinely better than all your friends and siblings, your circle of rivals probably wasn't any bigger than the amount of weekly recurring Batman villains.

Surprisingly, The Penguin really knows his Tetris.

When online gaming became a thing you'd fire up a game assuming you're the best at just about every game, ever, because that has been your reality up to that point. Aaaand then you'll learn that there are millions of people just like you everywhere around the world, who were all better than their moms, dads, siblings and aunts and it turns out that it doesn't mean shit. I can fire up an online match of Street Fighter and there's a decent chance I'll lose. I can still destroy my friends, but I had to learn that I'm not winning because I'm the best in the world. I'm mostly winning because I'm slightly less terrible at the game than they are. But there's a fix and it's Pokkén Tournament DX.

See, one cool side effect to my new job is that I suddenly have money. And like everyone with money, I attempt to fill the gaping void in my soul with a lot of materialistic shit I don't really want or need. So I went and bought the Pokémon brawler on the Switch, even though I think Pokémon are stupid. Yes, at some point I said that the Pokémon games on the 3DS are good and I stand by that. But Claire tried to get me into the tv show and it's all retarded horseshit. Now look, everyone is entitled to their opinions and it's okay if you like Pokémon. That's your opinion and you're free to have it. It also means your opinion is wrong, stupid and inferior, but you're still entitled to it.

Still not as annoying as MLP.

So Pokkén is a game where a bunch of Pokémon beat the shit out of each other. Well, I suppose that happens in every Pokémon game, but this time it's an actual 3D fighter with real-time button mashing and combos and shit. There's only 21 playable characters to choose from, so I picked the one I recognized from the DS game I played. It was this fox thing, which screams something that sounds like 'WHAT THE FAAAAWK'. In Pokkén it's easily the girliest playable character around, prancing around and farting rainbows and shit.

This is my fucking ultra combo.

I think I like this game better than Street Fighter V, because it had more fucking characters than SFV straight out of the box and IT ALSO HAS SOME FUCKING SINGLEPLAYER CONTENT! Yes, the story is as cringeworthy as in any other game about these furry fuckers, but I get several leagues and tournaments full of AI assholes to pound into the ground, whilst constantly unlocking new titles, costumes and other fluff. You know, the kind of shit Capcom sells for 4 Quid a pop in fucking Street Fighter these days. The cunts.

Still, it looks alright for a portable game, the fighting is relatively solid and it's piss-easy, so I've button-mashed my way through every single league and game mode within a day or two. Nothing left to do but ranked online matches. And it's fucking glorious! I have a win-rate of 98% and end matches in a double-perfect more often than not. Most of the people I played against had female avatars with rainbow-hair and star-shaped sunglasses and while I'm sure there's the occasional creep among them, I genuinely believe I've just spent a day murdering the characters of little children. IT WAS SO FUCKING COOL!

That's right, bitch, assume the position!

It's the sickest, most beautiful thing I've seen in a long time. There are these kids with their little girly avatars and their cute little pikachus, they're happily prancing around and then I show up with this equally girly, prancy furry fuck and rain fire and brimstone upon their singed corpses as half of them log off in despair before the match ends. I got a kid to turn off his game at the last second because he didn't want to see his pikachu getting his ass kicked. Welcome to online gaming, you little shit!

Sure, it's basically a fun torture simulator for anyone who hates children as much as I do, but it's also a pretty decent fighter. If you're looking for some good punchy fun on the go and don't mind the stupid avatars and the fact it's full of goddamn Pokémon, you may want to give this one a try. I feel it's seriously underrated.

Now I am become death, destroyer of kiddiewinks.

Still not getting into Mario. To me, every level feels like a random collection of minigames and jump puzzles and not like a proper videogame level. Here's some small thing you can do for a moon, here is another and there is some more. There is no structure. Judging by how absolutely everyone loves the absolute shit out of it, I'm clearly wrong and I don't understand what a good game is, so hey, more power to all you Mario fans out there. On the subject of being wrong, I actually quite enjoy Fifa 18 on the Switch, even though it's clearly the weakest version out there.

I don't care for Doom on the Switch, because it looks and runs like ass and if I really crave Doom on the go I can just play Brutal Doom with a mouse and keyboard on my GPD Win. I don't care for LA Noire or Skyrim on there, either, because there's no way in hell I'm paying AAA money for six year old games, which somehow look worse than they did back in the day. Again, I already have a fully modded Skyrim in my pocket and while LA Noire is tempting, it also eats up ALL of the Switch's internal memory and then some.

Do some scores, footie people!

I'm not the world's biggest football fan. I've maybe owned 3 or 4 Fifa games and I'm really not great at them. But even I can see the appeal of having Fifa on the go! So what if it doesn't have the story mode from the other versions? It has all the clubs and all the players and it's fun just dicking around with Notts County, because fuck yeah, Nottingham! Sure, it's not as pretty as the versions on the other platforms, but I wouldn't recognize most football players if they stood right in front of me in person. And bringing the Switch 'round for Xmas to hook it up on the big TV and have up to 4 people play Fifa for the heck of it? I'll pick that over going to church any day! Hail Satan!

The Elder Scrolls is for Porn

Ahh, Skyrim! A friend of mine wondered whether Skyrim has so many fantastic mods, because the game is actually rather bland and uninspiring and the plot a bit shit and generic. Perhaps they see Skyrim as a blank canvas? While I agree that Bethesda games are far from great in the story department, I believe that it's actually the other way 'round - the plot is so bleh, because mods. They know people are gonna buy their games because open world, easy modding tools, people are gonna modify the shit out of everything, so spending a massive amount of resources on a fantastic, moving plot may actually be financially bad. People are gonna buy it anyway, so why waste time and money on a good story?

I believe these games get so many great mods because modding them is possible - and it's easy. People would still do it, even if the game had an amazing story and a completely immersive world right out of the box. Case in point: Fallout - New Vegas. Seemingly endless possibilities, a deep, memorable story and people modded it like mad, simply because they could. Because it's fun. And because many 'role-players' want to play exactly the characters and stories they have in mind, so they'll just create stuff on their own if it isn't already in there. Of course what starts modding in pretty much every game isn't even the desire to create, to tell a story or to make the game better. It's the urge to get off.

No exceptions

The first mod for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was a nude patch, which removed the tattooed-on underwear from female characters. Turned out there were real 3D-modelled naughty bits underneath, which were hard-coded into the game. Yep - the modder didn't even have to create any of that stuff, all he had to do was remove the bra and undies and everything was pretty much as it should be underneath. And because nudity is terrifying, the release of this mod caused the game's ESRB rating to go up a notch. Because it had 3D tits in it, even though they could only be accessed via a 3rd party hack.

You might wonder why the artists decided to put boobs in there to begin with, but nudity wasn't exactly a new thing in The Elder Scrolls. Rewind time to 1996 and you could completely undress your characters in Daggerfall, the second game of the series. As a teenager I was eternally grateful for that, because I had no internet back in the day and the only boobs I had access to looked like this:

Actual screenshot from Daggerfall. Khajiit had human faces back then.

There was no Google image search back then. Heck, even if there was, it took five minutes to properly display a website, let alone several images. I couldn't hide any magazines under the bed, because the maid would find them (spoiled rich kid here). So to me, Daggerfall wasn't simply the best damn RPG at the time. It gave me boobies when I was lucky enough to be alone. I shared the room and the computer with siblings, so on top of trying to figure out female anatomy from a bunch of blocky pixels there was always the risk of getting caught. It may sound hilarious now, but back then nothing was better than knowing the family was out and I could have five minutes to myself with Daggerfall. Who am I kidding? Twelve seconds was all I needed. Had I yanked it any harder I'm sure my dick would have caught on fire.

Here's a funny story - today the first bunch of mods for Elder Scrolls games always add nudity. Daggerfall has naughty bits by default, so there are mods to get rid of them. Fans probably did something similar for Battlespire, which in its default state features some of the most pointless droopy nutsacks in RPG history.

It wasn't a very good game.

Over the years, Elder Scrolls tried to become more family friendly by getting rid of nudity and adding brutal decapitation, instead. There was, however, one more reason for outcry caused by naughty bits in an Elder Scrolls game. The horse buttholes of Oblivion:

Yep.

This is not a mod. The horses in the release version of Oblivion had assholes. I'm not a particular fan of assholes of any kind and such details don't usually bother me. But riding in Oblivion meant you were constantly staring down the eye of Sauron. This bothered people so much that someone ultimately removed horse buttholes in one of the earliest mods for the game.

Depending on where you get your mods from, you may even get some unintentional nudity. It always bothered me how all the werewolves in Skyrim look the same. They're all black. No grey, white, brown or multicoloured ones. The mod nexus didn't have any interesting fixes at the time, so I fired up Google and ended up on some Russian site that promised "more diverse" werewolves or something to that effect in cyrillic. So I went and installed it, everything ran fine, I played the quest where one of the Companions turns into a werewolf aaaaaaaaaaand he's got his dick out.

The new texture is great, but it's difficult to unsee the cock once you've spotted it.

It's not a game breaker and the devs decided that all your clothing should magically disappear when you shapeshift, but it feels a bit weird. I'm a werewolf, I'm on top of a bandit, I've got my wang out, where do we go from here? I feel that this removes a certain level of professionalism when you're really just out on a quest to kill a guy. Sure, he won't live to tell the tale, but impressions are important in any business and you should not meet a business contact without any pants on, even if the ideal outcome is that one of you will be dead by the end of the encounter. I want the bandit to think, "Oh my god, he's a werewolf and he's about to eat me." I feel that, if we're taking pants out of the equation, I'm sending mixed messages.

I don't need these bits, because I consider myself a fighter. Others walk the path of the lover, however, so they may decide to slap a bunch of extra nipples on their Khajiit ladies. Or how about a spiky kitty cock for your boy Khajiit? The mod also comes with Argonian lizard wangs, which retract into a skin fold, much like with real lizards. "The argonians carry their balls inside, being cold-blooded, so their balls don't show at all. The fully extended schlong is fully animated." That's in the mod description. People put some real thought into this.

And with companions like this, who wouldn't want functioning bits?

Judge my teenage self all you want for defiling a sock over a pixellated drawing of mammaries. But some people want to become fully immersed in their game. They want to be their characters. And if that means rocking a spiky, furry or scaly wang and/or half a dozen nipples, then they'll go there. They'll absolutely go there. Good for them! To lots of people, playing an RPG isn't just a fantasy where you murder damsels in distress and rescue dragons and monsters. Some folks want to conquer the opposite sex. Or the same sex. Or all the sexes. And elves. And aliens. I feel BioWare always understood this much better than Bethesda. All that boning in Dragon Age and Mass Effect is there for a reason.

Also, the Skyrim Special Edition is highly moddable now, it's a lot faster and more stable than original Skyrim and I actually quite enjoy putting all those mods on it. Perhaps one day I'm actually gonna play it, too. I heard it's pretty decent.

Also...

Fucking play Brawlhalla. Or at least watch me and the GF play:

Afterlife

Sometimes I just want the world to end. You know, just wait for that orange dipshit and whatever the fuck it is that he's carrying around on his head to push the button that will ultimately eradicate us all. There is so much hate, lying and bullshitting going on everywhere around me, I'm quite terrified of everyday social interaction, because I can no longer tell what's real. Take shopping, for instance. Every so often one of the cashiers at the local supermarket will pick out any random item of mine while I'm just waiting to pay for my shit and she'll act all amazed by it. "Wait a minute. White asparagus? What do you even do with that?"
Yeah well, I was hoping to take it out to the movies, maybe have dinner afterwards and if I play my cards right, perhaps it'll blow me. We'll see how it goes. What the fuck do you think I'm gonna do with it?

I reckon most sane people will immediately forget this sort of interaction, because it means nothing. But I see that same cashier around town, in the streets, walking around, going on her errands, doing normal people stuff and she'll put on the frowniest, most miserable face you're ever going to see. And I can smile at her, nod, hey look, I'm the asparagus guy and she'll go out of her way to avoid noticing me. Because she doesn't give a shit about me or my shopping. She's forced to pretend, because some asshole in marketing figured out that customers get a better experience when the staff pretends to give a fuck about them.

I feel that most everyday interaction with people works like that. I had office jobs where all my coworkers were super friendly to each other until the moment somebody left the room. "Man, did you smell that? I think he's completely drunk again!" "What the hell was she thinking when she bought those pants? Her ass is way too fat for that!" Always makes me wonder what these guys had to say when I wasn't around. Neighbours are a lot like that, as well.

We've all been there.

Again, I understand that most people don't really give a fuck about these things, but when I hear people laughing, I tend to assume it's about me. And when people are being nice, I often wonder if they're just phoning it in and they actually really hate me. It's nothing I lose sleep over or anything, but it can make things a bit awkward in what should be perfectly simple, harmless interactions. Like going out for dinner. How much of a smile is pleasant and when is it creepy? I hate being a dick to anyone in the service industry, but how much is a generous tip and when do I look like an asshole trying to show off? At the end of my dinner I'll spend the rest of the night re-playing every instance in my head where I think I fucked up or seemed weird, when realistically that same waitress is gonna have another dozen customers, half of which are gonna act like genuine cunts, while I'm just awkward and overthinking shit. She's not gonna remember me in particular. I know that, but these situations still freak me out. I don't know how to be an adult.

I find it difficult not to assume that all people are assholes and everyone hates everyone when I look at the comments sections everywhere around the internet. I posted a funny message on Tesco's facebook site earlier, because I get bored easily and then I entertain myself by making everyone's day a little more surreal. Nothing malicious, just a little bit of fun. I don't like it when people fly off the handle over stupid, pointless shit all the time, so I'm always trying to be nice with customer support folks. It's not their fault and they get to put up with enough cunts all the time as it is.

"Go fuck myself... die... in a fire... my whole family, too. Noted. Is there anything else I can do for you today, sir?"

So while I was already on their profile, I had a quick look at what other customers were saying. One apple in a bag of 12 was mouldy, fucking outrage, there were six people in front of me at the till, I'm never shopping here again, blah de blah, also this mother here...

It's always mothers, who are more annoying than anybody else.

Things got drastically less funny when I tripped over a bunch of "how dare you" posts, because apparently they also offer halal meat, which is clearly labelled as such. And then there's this guy:

Notice how I don't hide people's names on this shit? They're posting on a public page for everyone to see, so fuck 'em.

To be fair, this guy isn't trying super hard to be offensive. But I got curious and searched for the offending ad on Google, the first result being this link here.
Basically, it's just one of those generic Xmas ads where you see a bunch of families eating together, exchanging presents, you know, all the stuff you do with family members whose presence you try to avoid any other day of the year.

Turns out one of the families in that video is brown and apparently Muslim. And some people are absolutely losing their shit. And by 'some people' I mean stupid racist cunts. I mean, how many of you fucks are practicing Christians, really? Do you go to church every Sunday? Because here's the thing - I don't care whether or not there's a god or whether he somehow managed to get a girl pregnant some 2000s years ago. Or, you know, maybe we're basically celebrating the stupidity of history's most gullible boyfriend. I don't care for any of that crap, you won't see me anywhere near a church in this life and when I'll finally kick the bucket a few years from now they can give my body to science for all I care. Tell you what, though - I actually quite enjoy sitting around with the family, exchanging presents, eating stupid amounts of food and generally acting like a pig. Christmas can be fucking fun, even if you're not the religious type.

This is me, is what I'm saying.

So how very dare they show a fictional Muslim family enjoying the festive season, right? You stupid, irritating, racist hypocrite fucks! First you bitch about how "they refuse to accept our culture and traditions" and how they "don't want to fit in" and now you're flying off the handle at the idea that some of them might actually enjoy Christmas? The fuck is wrong with you?
It's almost hilarious, when you look at the ad, how they're singing about love, peace and understanding and how a bunch of utter fuckwits, who love to believe they're all about family values and tolerance can get so pissed off at the very idea that a bunch of brown people might eat a turkey or how - gasp! - the poor thing might be halal!
Don't you ever just want to reach right through your screen, grab these idiots by the back of the head and just smash them face-first into their keyboards a few times until all the stupid just runs out in a mushy red puddle?
It's shit like this, which makes me think about death a lot. Not because I crave it or some shit (I don't), but sometimes I do wonder how nice and quiet it must be. Nobody trying to get you to prepare for Christmas in October, nobody hating anyone for having the wrong skin colour. And nobody remembering you. Not the real you, anyway.

It's a strange thought. When people die we love to tell ourselves that people will never truly be dead for as long as we remember them. But we only remember the stuff we knew about them. Sure, I remember my grandparents. Or my father. But I only knew them as well as they let me. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff they've said and done, which has already been forgotten and nobody will remember any of it. At the end of the day, all we really remember of a person is how they made us feel. And maybe that's enough.

I'm about to grate the cheese here. Flee while you still can!

We have this strange power over people, which most of us don't seem to be aware of. I can make your day with an honest compliment or completely ruin it by being a dick. I can play it safe and do nothing, which is probably a good idea in a time where everyone is outraged about everything. This is another thing I presume most sane people don't think about, because duh. But it fascinates me. Because at the end of the day, the main reason why I even bother to keep getting up, to keep paying my bills, working at a job I don't understand one bit, try to weasel my way around a society I'll never manage to understand in the slightest is a small handful of people, who make me feel really, seriously good.

I have this friend, who, by the laws of reason and logic, shouldn't be an acquaintance of mine in any scenario. He proudly shows off his MLP bedclothes. His favourite colour is pink. He posts more pictures of his cats than even somebody like me could stand, and kittens are in my fucking brand name and online identity - I'm a cat person for all intents and purposes! And he sends me fucking unicorn postcards. I detest absolutely everything he likes. And he'll never understand how grateful I am to know him, because in a world full of hateful assholes, racists and bigots, there's this one insane guy, who is so stupidly friendly and innocent and silly and pure. There isn't a shadow of a doubt I would have beaten the crap out of him had we been to the same school in our teenage years. He's also proof that not everything in the world is completely awful. Well. He's a bit awful, but not in a bad way.

This is so stupid!

I have this friend, who decided to be a music teacher to young kinds in school and they love him to pieces. He's been through a lot of shit, most of his family treats him like crap and sometimes he struggles with the world. A lot. Because everything is shit. And then he spends most of his time being the most awesome music teacher a kid could have apart from maybe Jack Black.
One of my friends had been struggling for years to find a job in this awful economy. The guy suffered the same levels of crippling povery I got to enjoy for the past decade. When he heard that the one thing I missed from Germany more than anything else was malt beer, he sent a massive parcel full of the stuff to me. Without asking. Or telling. Or wanting anything in return.

One friend sent me a jar of sauerkraut and a graphics card when mine went up in smoke (the GPU, not the kraut). And for as much as I love to bitch about the gaming press, I have met some of the craziest, most wonderful, lovable people there. From a dear friend to told me my shit was too good for the amount I'm getting paid when others constantly put me down and kept telling me "there's no budget" and I'm "just not there, yet." To another dear friend, who seems to keep coming back to this blog, quotes all of my own crap to me and keeps wasting her time with my nonsense no matter what a creepy failure of a human being I am. To friends who say they hope I'll eventually change my mind and come back to review more stuff someday, after I've been shitting all over the job, because I'm feeling so fucking burned out by everything. To a special someone who slaves away night after night after night, looking after the weak and the handicapped for absolute slave wages. I may not always show it, but I couldn't possibly respect and admire you and what you do any more than I already do.

I don't mean to make this all about myself, but at the end of the day, all self-proclaimed 'artists' and funny people are broken, messed-up egomaniacs. I think what I'm really trying to say is this: Nobody will remember you when you die. Not the real you, anyway. They remember the idea they have of you in their minds. Most of all, though, they'll remember how you made them feel. What you do touches people's lives. Whether that's in a good way or a bad way is entirely up to you. And for as dumb as it may sound - if it wasn't for the handful of genuinely good people in my life, I'd see no reason to carry on. Life is so dumb, depressing and boring and full of shit and hate and lies. It's you very weird and very few, who give my life meaning, who give me hope that not absolutely everything is awful. You're making my life better. I'm not even gonna link this on social media, because it's the corniest garbage I've ever written. But it's nice to have it out of my system.

Sonic Forces is Alright

Sonic the Hedgehog is easy to hate. Heck, Sonic the Hedgehog is fun to hate! Between the Megadrive games and Sonic Mania, there have been so many abysmal Sonic games, my first impulse when looking at trailers for yet another modern Sonic game is to roll my eyes and think, "Great, it's another one of those!" I'm pretty sure that the only reason they haven't put Sega's mascot out of his misery years ago is the legions of angsty fans, who desperately want to fuck him and his furry friends. I mean, somebody must still be buying all this crap despite the terrible review scores and when I look at DeviantArt I get a pretty good idea of who that crowd might be.

Not sure I want to know...

But it's not just the creepy fandom. Ever since Sonic and friends started to talk, things just got a little too cringeworthy. It's more annoying than any of their weird stories and settings. Sure, they had crazy shit ranging from the legend of King Arthur to werewolves to borderline beastiality, but modern Mario went from watersports to space to cities full of talking hat... spirit... things. All of that stuff worked out fine for Nintendo, but Sonic kept getting worse and worse. Mario doesn't talk. He doesn't have a fucking attitude, he doesn't tell people about how he rolls and his friends and enemies usually just grunt a little or give you a bit of random videogame gibberish and speech bubbles. They're far less annoying than Sonic's squeaky-voiced two-tailed sidekick, who never shuts up about how fucking awesome Sonic is. But hey, remember how annoyed we all got at Luigi? Of course not, because that never happened. Unlike Tails, Mario's brother has some fucking personality!

Then Sonic Mania happened and reminded us of how much we used to love Sonic when there was no ridiculous story, no awful voice acting... and no 3D, I guess? I gave it an 80 on GameStar, many other reviewers liked it even better than that. Easily one of the better 2D Sonic games out there, if not the best.

What's going on with his bright new colour, though?

That's when I saw a trailer for Sonic Forces and immediately hated it. More 3D, more cringe, another edgy villain, get this shit away from me. And Metacritic confirmed my gut feeling - at the time of this blog, 'professional' metascores are in the high 50s to low 60s, depending on which platform you check, with user ratings in the low to mid 70s.

Of course all critics are snobs, so when I saw this game for 30 Quid I decided to pick it up and give it the benefit of the doubt. After all, Sonic Forces uses the same mix of modern 3D levels and classic side-scrolling gameplay most people liked in Sonic Generations, so it seemed a bit odd that Forces scored considerably worse with reviewers. Then there's the main selling point of Forces, which is the ability to create your own playable character. And yes, they're obviously trying to appeal to the whole [Your name] the Hedgehog community of terrible, annoying die-hard fans with that, but why the hell wouldn't they? I couldn't care less about the fandom, but playing a custom character still felt fun. It's something lots of people like about games such as Warframe or Skyrim, so I'm not gonna knock Sonic for it.

Forget shitty fan characters like [You] the Hedgehog. Meet Fap the Wolf!

During my first hour or two with the game, Sonic Forces did little to win me over. Stages were 1-2 minutes in length, I did an absolutely terrible job completing them and still scored mostly S-ratings. The game grades you from A to C when you complete a level and gives you an S for being super awesome or something. It's mostly boosting and homing attacks like in other 3D Sonic titles, with the occasional quicktime event (mash X or press A at the right moment) and lots of action sequences, where you can see the characters do lots of super awesome shit while the game basically plays itself. It looks great, but it's also super easy and requires very little user input. You know, the kind of stuff that gets Call of Duty its annual 90% scores.

Gameplay with a custom character is only slightly different to playing Sonic. You still get a homing attack, but with the help of a grappling hook, which looks slightly different and plays the same. Instead of a boost or a spin dash your character gets to choose from various weapons like a flamethrower or a giant drill. I picked a lightning whip, because it felt the most fun to use and had a cool special ability, which let my character zip across the stage from one ring to the next at a hilariously speedy pace. All the weapons are massively overpowered. Forces is probably the easiest Sonic game I've ever played.

You don't have to be a die-hard fan to enjoy seeing your own character doing cool shit.

You get the occasional side-scrolling stage with 'classic' Sonic. While homing attacks will occasionally miss or not respond at all in 3D, classic Sonic controls like a charm. You get to visit classic zones like Green Hill or the Chemical Plant and there's some nice oldschool background music, which sounds almost exactly like a Megadrive track. Most of these stages are significantly easier than they were back in the day or in Sonic Mania. You also get infinite lives - if you murder Sonic, you get a 'Try Again' pop-up and respawn at the nearest checkpoint. Of course, dying several times and taking longer to complete a stage will hurt your overall rating, which may result in fewer rewards. Completing a stage will result in the game throwing a ton of clothes and items for your avatar at you. An S-rank will get you more stuff than a C. You get the idea.

I switch to Bastard the Cat if I want to mix things up a little.

There's a total of 30 stages (plus a bunch of hidden levels and bonus stages), but the first 20 or so are an absolute cakewalk. The later levels get a little more challenging, with one or two terrible side-scrolling bits, which feature your custom character, who controls like shit. The avatar is fine in 3D levels, but platforming in the pseudo 2D stages feels like everything is made out of soap. Your toon takes ages to speed up, walking almost on the spot for the first second, only to suddenly accelerate like crazy, which makes it borderline impossible to control your jumps. I got used to it after a while, but that particular segment was a pain in the ass, after classic Sonic behaved so well in his sidescrolling stages.

Chemical Plant Zone. Sadly without the original BGM.

The bits of the story I haven't skipped were unusually dark for a Sonic game. Forces begins with Sonic getting his ass kicked so hard, he's presumed dead and the entire world is taken over by Robotnik. There's no blood and gore or anything, but you do see a lot of generic characters imprisoned and caged as opposed to the usual bunch of cuddly bunnies turned into slightly less cuddly robots and the like. They've also dumped about every Sonic character ever in there, apart from Mighty, Cream, Blaze or Big the Cat and I'm a little embarrassed for noticing.
It's all still cringy as fuck, with the occasional joke that's so dumb it's funny again. Sonic to classic Sonic: "It's been Generations since we've last met!"

There's a whole lot of "We win, because we are friends and you don't even have friends, so ha!" bullshit happening. The vocals for the music of the 3D stages are pretty awful, as well. They're not 'Sonic R' levels of awful, but they're most certainly 'Live and Learn' levels of awful. Still, it was fun to see Fap and Sonic buddy up in some stages, where you get to control both characters like in Sonic Heroes. You even get to pick a voice for your toon, though they never really get to talk. It really just changes the way they grunt and scream as you get them killed repeatedly in each stage whilst trying to dodge a bottomless pit or a bullshit final boss, who creates these pits by lasering the shit out of the stage around you.

Sonic & Fap, BFFs

I've finished the story after about six or so hours, which isn't an awful lot of game for your money. That said, there's a bunch of daily missions, there are five or so hidden collectable items in each stage, you get extra rewards for finishing levels with an S-rank, then there's a bunch of little bonus challenges and extra stages, so there's still a fair amount of post-story content for you to play if you're into that sort of thing.

Much of the game feels more like baby's first platformer than a challenging Sonic title, which doesn't really bother me all that much. I don't need the levels to be super difficult when I just want to shave a few seconds of my completion type for a better rating and some more rewards. It's a bit stupid how much of each stage happens in spectacular cutscenes, where you don't really do anything but watch. Still, that stuff is pretty spectacular and Forces is a decent-looking game, which still maintains a steady 60FPS in 4K on my i7 and a GTX1070.

It runs remarkably worse on older hardware, though.

I had fun with it. It was a bit short, it's a bit easy, it plays itself a little too much and there are one or two annoying, frustrating bits, which suffer from shitty controls. It ain't perfect. But it's actually not terrible. So that's something. You know. For a 3D Sonic game.

Why The Fuck is Nobody Reviewing Brawlhalla?

Some years ago I had to beg various employers to let me write about Warframe, because nobody seemed to give a fuck and the few media outlets that did, mostly did a shit job at reviewing the game properly. "It's too weird", "it's got no content", "it's just another F2P title". Yeah well...

It's currently topping GTA V in the god damn Steam charts, you stupid cunts!

By the time someone was finally smart enough to let me do a proper review about the whole thing, most other magazines already spent their 20something minutes looking at it, telling people it was nothing special. The game has its own annual fan convention, peaked at over 120k consecutive Steam users a couple weeks ago (not including users of the standalone client or the console versions) and keeps getting bigger and more popular by the day, but hey, let's not fucking cover it, because it's certainly nothing special.

I'm currently noticing something similar about another indie gem, which is certainly never going to be as big as Warframe, but it's easily one of the most popular fighting games on Steam - and has been consistently popular for as long as it's been around: Brawlhalla.

Right, let's get the obvious crap out of the way - that trailer looks a bit shit. You can tell there's a small team with an even smaller budget behind this game when you look at it. But here's the thing: Brawlhalla maintains a steady 9-12k consecutive player peak day after day. For comparison, here's a massively overhyped Street Fighter V struggling to maintain 1,500 consecutive users, with Mortal Kombat X having even fewer users and Killer Instinct may as well not exist at this point. Same for Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite and the latest KoF. To be fair, I can't tell how well these fighters are doing compared to Brawlhalla on consoles. One may also argue that Brawlhalla is simply a different type of fighting game and can't really compare to these other titles, but Brawlhalla's main game mode is all about 1vs1 ranked matches, it's a 2D competitive fighting game and you can go suck it.

Here's my character punching 3 other players at the same time. I'm still losing, but I'm doing it with style.

You can tell straight away that Brawlhalla is closer to Smash Bros. than it is to Street Fighter. And there are snobs arguing about whethter Smash Bros. should even be a thing at fighting game tournaments, because it's more "noob friendly" or some shit. Because a fighting game can only be good if it requires you to memorize 38 button combos in order to stay competitive. I'm sure the folks competing for the $100,000 prize pool at the Brawlhalla World Championship really care about what you think.

So yes, at first glance this game shamelessly rips off Smash Bros. You get your triple jump, walljump, your light and heavy attack, then weapons, bombs and other shit will spawn in the arena and players use them to weaken the other fighters, hoping to smack them off the screen to score a point. It's the Smash formula minus the popular Nintendo characters and, sadly, minus any decent music. Seriously, the one thing that genuinely bothers me about this game is its dull soundtrack.

Some of the more boring characters look like something out of an old Penny Arcade strip.

Brawlhalla seems deceptively simple at first. Each playable legend (read: character) uses two out of the 11 weapon types in the game. At the beginning of a match you'll be using only your fists. Weapons will spawn into the arena a few moments later, then combatants start hacking and slashing away at each other with claws, swords, axes and all that sort of thing. Each weapon and fighting style has its own strengths and weaknesses, they all come with their own range, damage and speed. In a nutshell, you use light attacks to weaken other players, then finish them off with a heavy attack. These vary depending on your weapon and character of choice and whether you use neutral attacks or use them whilst jumping or in combination with a directional input.

Getting into it is really easy. But it'll take lots of practice to get the right distance and timing in order to counter each fighting style. Ideally, you'll slowly go from spamming random attacks to leaping all over the arena whilst kicking people off the screen left, right and center, throwing your weapon at them to finish them off, then picking it back up mid-flight. You can do some seriously cool shit on there.

It's not as Viking-themed as the title may imply.

You can compete in the aforementioned ranked 1vs1 matches in order to unlock cosmetic weapon and character skins and colours and ranks for bragging rights. There's also ranked and friendly 2vs2, free for all brawls for 4 players and custom matches for up to 8 people. There are 30something legends available right now, ranging from vikings to pirates to ninjas and medieval knights and there's also a gangster and a cowgirl and a minotaur and a lizardman and about a bazillion alternative skins and appearances for each legend. You can turn just about every legend into a mecha-version, a dark elf, a zombie, an anthropomorphic animal or some other crazy thing if you dislike their default appearance. There are unlockable colours and fighting styles, which may make your legend a bit tougher, lets them attack harder or swing their weapons faster at the cost of some other stat. There's a ton of customization in Brawlhalla. Granted, much of that cosmetic stuff costs real money, but I'd rather spend a fiver or two in order to customize my favourite character in an otherwise free game than spend 60 Bucks on fucking Street Fighter V, then 40 on the fucking season passes, then another 8 per fucking costume and then I still only get half a game.

Brawlhalla is free. There's a rotation of free trial legends, which changes frequently. There's also a practice mode, which lets you experiment with every legend for as long as you want before you decide to unlock them. You can do so simply by playing the game and earning ingame currency. Alternatively, you can throw some real money at the screen and get any character you want for pennies. Or buy the All Legends Pack and get every single current and future character unlocked for life, which will cost you $20 or whatever the fuck people in your country use in exchange for videogames.

Free for all brawls are a bit of a pointless clusterfuck. Just how I like it!

Brawlhalla is currently sitting on nearly 55,000 user reviews, 85% of which are positive. The game came out of early access a couple weeks ago and is mostly ignored by the games press for some inexplicable reason. If you like fighting games at all and you're not completely put off by the cartoony visuals, give Brawlhalla a go. It's seriously good.

WoW: Ramblings of a Holy Cow

I'm extremely lazy and a bit weird. Since launch day, I've only ever really played a single character on WoW - my warrior. I've created the odd random character here on there on the side for shits and giggles, but none of them ever made it past level 25. I really like just having one character to gear up, to "master", to do stuff with. That's the lazy part. As for being weird - WoW is an MMORPG. I like consistency. I'm a warrior. This is me. This is my avatar. That's what I play. I'm not this guy and that guy and that chick, I'm not also a hunter and a mage. I'm a warrior. I punch things. It's what I do.

Thanks to Argus and an extremely helpful druid taxi, I managed to get my old warrior from level 85 to 110, with his first legendary and an item level in the 900s over the course of just a few days. Getting there was alright, but to be perfectly honest, I'm bored enough to uninstall now. I've seen all the new raid content, I've seen the dungeons, we've even completed a bunch of mythical dungeons as a 4 man group with no healer and one 'DPS' who struggles to maintain 230k, also known as "40% of what the tank is dishing out". I don't mind, we still get it done, everyone is having fun, it's not a competition, whatever.

I'm sick of killing these fuckers now.

I top the DPS charts in guild runs again, I top the scoreboards in BGs, I've got semi-decent gear and I have absolutely zero desire to run any more LFR shit or to repeat the same stinking dungeons over and over again now. I went to the Halls of Valor for fun the first time around, went there for a zone quest the next time, went there for a guild achievement afterwards, now I'm supposed to go there for a class quest and at this point I'd rather shove a hedgehog up my urethra than do yet another fucking playthrough of that place. The problem isn't WoW, it's me. I don't care about repetition. I don't care to join another big fucking raid guild. I don't mind running silly little mythic dungeons with the guild in those rare moments where everyone is actually available. But I can totally stop doing that and not miss it if it means I'm no longer paying a monthly subscription fee.

Back in the beta I really wanted to play a paladin, but friends told me that only cunts played paladins. They were considered broken and overpowered and generally awful and my young self gave into peer pressure and picked the next best thing, which I felt was the warrior. It's a bit funny how paladins turned into a complete joke back when people started raiding in vanilla, because they were so useless. Meanwhile, my friends played rogues. Who's the real cunt here, fellas?

That awesome T2 set, though!

My favourite race were the tauren, because unlike most other races, they weren't super keen on all the warring and shit and really wanted to be left alone. This may not be super accurate with the lore, but it's how I interpreted their description at the time. Besides, I didn't like most of the alternatives. All male humans looked like middle-aged janitors. I mean, for fuck's sake, the majority of their hairstyle options were bald, balding, Captain Picard and skullet and they all came with creepy handlebar mustaches. I like dwarves, but I just can't see myself playing a little bearded fat man with a Scottish accent. Gnomes are tiny old people with pink hair! That's not warrior material! And then there's the male night elf, also known as the missing link between man and ape.

Things weren't much better on the horde side of things. Scrawny blue hunchbacks with tusks and Jamaican accents, the Iggy Pop fan club, butt-scratching cows aaaaaaand.... well...

You can tell he's a great thinker.

I'm not super into cows or anything, but I figured that as a tauren at least they'd see me coming before I stomped them into the ground. I also liked how they get high and chase after spirit coyotes and weird shit like that. And then my family joined the alliance, so that was the end of that plan. I did what absolutely fucking everybody did at the time and rolled the only decent-looking thing on their side - a female night elf. It was perfectly normal back then to end up in dungeon groups consisting of nothing but female night elves.

Anyhow - that shit is about 14 years in the past now, so let's fast forward to the bit where I roll a tauren paladin. You've read the fucking title of this post. It's what I did. Boosted him to 100, am level 106 now and going.
Now first of all, I don't get faction pride. Lots of people have characters on both sides and you get the same cunts in both factions. To me, the alliance and the horde may as well be the US and North Korea. Alliance gets all like, "Oh look, Sylvanas retreated, she must have totally planned to leave us here to die." Horde is all, "Shit, all our leaders are fucked, we gotta fall back. Alliance will probably understand." Aaaand they're at each other's throats again, because fuck talking. They coulda sent letters or something. "Hey, they killed our king because you cunts fecked off!" - "Yeah, sorry, they offed our faction leader after just one expansion, so we had to hearthstone out lol". All cleared up. But noooo, we need some forced conflict here. For what it counts, I think it's pretty awesome how both factions get different cutscenes in that Broken Shore battle, showing only their side of the story. You need to play both parts to understand what's going on.

Fuck the story, everyone just raged about her slightly less slutty new clothing.

That was actually quite fun. "Oooooh, so that's why she didn't help! I had no idea!" And then I started paladining hard. Prot spec, not because I'm oh so desperate to tank random LFP shit, but because I have a bulwark and I'll be damned if I ain't mogging the shit outta that on a paladin! I just char... wait, no. I casually walk into groups of enemies, because I have no charge or a heroic leap and my mounted charge is always on cooldown. Then I turn the battlefield into a giant pinball machine by throwing a bouncy shield at baddies, which whacks everyone in the face before it comes back to me. Fun.

I can soak up retarded amounts of damage. I can bubble up. I can self-heal for days. And I can still kill shit at a reasonable pace, which feels new. As a prot warrior, you'd only see stuff die of old age. Mind you, I haven't played since Cataclysm, so maybe tanky warriors are really awesome now. I wouldn't know, I go fury. And then something weird happened. Some random player appeared, fought some of my mobs with me, then sent a private message. "Need any help?"
-"Nah, I'm good. Thanks", I responded and he went on his merry way. Probably just a coincidence, but I don't get random whispers on the alliance side, unless it's gold spam or when somebody wants to tell me I'm a cunt because I killed a quest mob or some other shit.

The toxic community turned Jaina into a total bitch.

I also can't go anywhere without getting spammed to death with fucking guild invites. Right, different faction, so no guild here. I should probably set this to auto decline and worry about it later. But there's more weird shit happening that I'm not used to. I'm in a quest hub, completely surrounded by guards. Some night elf watches me for a minute, then onehits me, because a fully geared-up level 110 probably considers a level 105 in leveling gear a challenge or something. The fucker gets completely eradicated by guards in seconds, probably thinking, "Worth it!" Earlier that day Claire and I were getting corpse-camped by a level 110 alliance death knight for the better part of two hours while we were trying to get our quests done.

I'm not saying these things don't happen when you're on the alliance side, because of course they do. But I didn't get repeatedly ganked by the other faction when I leveled my worgen from 100 to 110, especially not when completely surrounded by guards and friendly NPCs. For some reason, folks on the alliance side seem a lot more aggressive towards my horde character and I get murdered all the fucking time. Such a cool idea to have forced pvp with players several hundred item levels above me, with literally ten times my DPS and health. Dunno what I expected when I picked a pvp server all those years ago. Again, I still think you get the same shitheads on both sides, but right now I hate the alliance.

Both sides are shit now, anyway. Fucking pandas.

Surprisingly, I'm having way more fun than I expected. Do I wish it was mandatory for every player to connect their genitals to a car battery, which will shock them every time they behave like a cunt? Of course I do. Does that shit still completely ruin my day? Nah. Yes, getting ganked a dozen times in a single quest is annoying as fuck, but that's really the exception, not the rule. Most shitheads onehit you once, then fuck off. Of course I'd like it better if that wasn't a thing, but then I did pick a pvp server. People don't want fair pvp. They only attack you when you have absolutely zero chance to win. I have never been attacked by a player who was at my own level and/or didn't have at least two friends with him.

Apart from that, though, it's actually pretty great. A dozen enemies at once? Let's fuck 'em up! Random rare elite baddie? Let's tank that fucker and solo it! Group play is for pussies, anyway. I'll be 110 in the coming days, then get that purple item level next weekend. Claire has rolled a holy cow of her own. I'm pretty sure we'll be able to duo mythic dungeons once we get a bit of Argus gear. One of us can tank, the other one can heal or deal damage. Maybe we'll both go as tanks. Our 3.5 man mythic alliance group doesn't need dedicated healers, so why should we? Maybe we'll both tank up and make people's lives miserable in the arena. Frankly, the only thing I really miss about the alliance side right now is my legacy pvp title.

I'm pretty sure this will get old fast and is doomed to become just as boring as my warrior's daily Argus trips. But right now I'm having the most fun that I had ever since coming back. It's probably just the novelty of it. Strictly speaking, I'm still doing the same shit, just with differently-coloured buttons. I don't know. We'll see. All I know is this - in the unlikely event that I won't just uninstall after my sub runs out, I'll be too lazy to play more than one character. I honestly don't know which of them, the warrior or the paladin, will come out on top. Gonna be fun to see whether I'll still enjoy being a cow a week from now.