A Buncha Stuff

I've got some shit on my mind. Batten down, hold on tight to something heavy, and prepare for a messy brain dump.

Good music.

• I like bullet points. Well, mostly. They suck in PowerPoint presentations, especially really dry ones during which the presenter does nothing but read them to you. Presenters like that should be shot before they reach the third slide.
• The new album from The Indelicatesis incredible. In fact, it's possibly the band's very best work. Packed with emotion, sometimes aggressive and sometimes tender, Diseases of England should be recognized as the art it truly is. Okay, yeah, there is a song called "Pubes," and it is about pubic hair on the internet, but The Indelicates are, well, not very delicate. Buy it now, tell your friends, and request songs from it on good, indie-friendly radio stations.

Logitech G710+ Mechanical Gaming Keyboard

A mechanical key switch.

Mechanical keyboards are all the rage lately; they're an idea whose time came, left, and has deservedly returned.

Loghtech has entered the mechanical keyboard market, and that is a good thing. The G710+ has its advantages over mechanical and non-mechanical keyboards alike, but first, you should understand the difference.

Computer gamers often would rather be dead and buried with their keyboards and mice than forced to play a first-person shooter with a gamepad. There are two reasons for that: One, first-person shooters really suck when played with a gamepad (Halo included). Two, the precision with a mouse and keyboard cannot be matched with a gamepad, even if the gamepad jockey thinks he's really, really good.

Blast from the Past - Red Faction: Guerrilla

Excuse me while I perform necromancy upon this blog. POOF! There, that should do it.

I'm fittingly making the first post since Obama's first administration about a game from, in terms of technology, a few yagrillion years ago. Released on Steam and other platforms, and unfortunately festered with Games for Windows Live, Red Faction: Guerrilla started blowing shit up in 2009. Volition designed it for publication by the late, spectacular THQ.

A well regarded sequel to a pair of somewhat troubled Red Faction titles, Guerrilla capitalizes on a concept introduced by its predecessor, and does so with far more success. The idea was to include massively destructible environments, and the original games focus that idea on cave walls, the ground, and other dirt and rock type stuff. The sequel doesn't feature terrain that can be blown apart; it instead makes structures, like buildings, bridges, and vehicles, susceptible to damage and destruction.

Why write about it now? Three reasons: I'm filled with insomnia and boredom, it's a hell of a fun game, and most importantly, Guerrilla is cheap. Steam offers it for $20, and if you look around Ebay, Half.com and other discount sites, you can find it for even less.

Three Games that are Totally the Shit and You Should Play Them: PART I

If you are not playing these PC titles, the first of which I'm covering is Sleeping Dogs, you are a worthless, steaming pus sac.

Three games. No more, no less. Well - more, maybe; I could include Worms Revolution, but I haven't played enough of it; or Borderlands 2, but I've already played plenty of Borderlands and, let's be honest here, there's not a hell of a lot new in the sequel to lure me away from porn.

But the three I'm about to write about - wow. Even Metacritic, that infallible bastion of completely informative opinion aggregation with which developers are simply in love - even Metacritic, that site frequently mistaken for the binary Rotten Tomatoes in that gamers, in all their unfathomable wisdom, read it as if 80 or more equals GOOD, 79 or less equals CRAP - even Metacritic agrees with me. That doesn't mean I've sunken to the level of Metacritic, merely that I've discovered Sleeping Dogs, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and Dishonored and I totally dig them - so much so that I can't imagine writing this crap any further instead of playing them some more.

But for you, my reader, I soldier on. But not too soldiery do I soldier on, because that would mean I'm somehow not lazy. Thus, I'll divide the three reviews into equal parts, to be published once a week. Hell, who am I kidding? I'll publish them in random intervals depending upon how much sleep I've recently gotten and how much I've had to drink that morning.

Darksiders II

It's Darksiders, But Newer!

What's more frigtening than the Grim Reaper, what with his big, nasty scythe and his skeletal body adorned in an intimidating black cloak? How about a pastel colored dude who rides a glowing, green demon-horse and wields two scythes?

I'm not sure if Death and the Grim Reaper are the same person/demon/thing or not, but in Darksiders II, you play the Horseman of the Apocalypse creatively named Death (John the Revelator evidently wasn't much for names), and he doesn't really look as scary as the legendary, big, hooded dude. That doesn't mean he's not ninja as fuck, though, because he lays waste to pretty much every being that crosses his path.