GTFO the Road!

On Wednesday, Jeff came into the office and told me that he noticed my car door appeared to be open.  Not wide open, mind you, but not shut properly either.  Frowning, I went outside to look, and indeed it was open a tiny bit.  I shut the door again, and it appeared to be fine, and I thought nothing of it until I went to lunch later in the day.

When I got back from lunch, I instinctively paid attention to the door as I closed it, and it did not shut properly once again.  I mucked around with it a bit, and could not get it to close.  It was as if the latch on the door was broken and failing to catch.

So, I called the dealership and scheduled an appointment for Thursday.  This means I got to work from home, which is always a welcome change to the daily routine.  It turns out the lock on the door was faulty, and the dealership fixed it.  My car is still under warranty, so it's all good.

That was sort of a boring story, I realize, but something interesting did happen on my way to pick up the car that night.  It was around 10:30 PM, when my sister and her husband were leaving to return home.  (It was the monthly poker night for my Dad, in which my brother-in-law participates.)  I simply rode with them to pick up my car, since they live only about a mile away from the dealership.

It was snowing pretty heavily at this point -- the ground wasn't covered yet, but it definitely wasn't going to be long.  The cars all had a thin layer on them.  So we're driving down McCaughtry Run road, which is the road I live on, heading towards the highway.  We round a corner, and please keep in mind these three things:

1. It was fucking cold outside.
2. It was snowing very hard.
3. It was 10:30 at fucking night.  As in the DARK kind of NIGHT.

So we round this corner, and there in the middle of the road is some maniac with a flashlight.  He was out for an evening stroll.  Yes a stroll.  At 10:30 at night.  In a fucking blizzard.  In the middle of the damned road.

We all gave a collective, "ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT, IDIOT?"

The rest of the drive was rather uneventful.  

But I Want to Slay Dragons...

I've discovered a bit of a flaw in my current raiding schedule.  Specifically, raiding on Tuesdays sucks because that's when new games are released.  Heh.  Dragon Age 2 comes out today, and I won't be able to play it until probably Friday.  (Tue-Wed = Raiding and Thu = Poker Night)

Bah.

But, if there's one thing I've learned very well, it's the art of patience.  (This is mostly due to two things:  First, that I'm in a relationship with someone who lives thousands of miles away, and second, he does not possess any patience whatsoever.  *grins*)

In any case, Dragon Age 2 is out and I already know it's amazing because I read PC Gamer's review on it last week.  I also read something interesting this morning:  Bioware has a "high-definition graphic/texture pack" that you can download from their website and patch into your game to make it even look more amazing.  The patch is 1 GB (holy shit).  I haven't seen this done since Valve patched the original Half-Life into their (then) new Source engine shortly after the release of Half-Life 2.  It'll be interesting to see just how good the game looks with it.  

Give Me a Damn Gun!

I recently purchases Dead Rising 2, because I heard from a reliable source that it is quite an excellent game.  Now, while I will most certainly agree that it is an excellent game, it is unfortunately not MY type of excellent game.  The reason for this is quite simple.  When I kill zombies, I like to shoot them in the head.  It's really that simple.  Therefore, the melee-heavy play-style of DR2 just doesn't do much for me at all, sadly.

However, I think that the construction aspect of the game will sort of make up for the lack of firearms.  I just don't know if I can tolerate the game long enough for me to get to that point -- I've been playing an hour already, and all I have for weapons are an axe, a broom, and a pair of scissors.  Ooh.  >_>

My Wall Was Thirsty

I had a bit of a disaster at work yesterday.  It was one of those more humorous and entertaining spectacles, thankfully, and not the stressful kind.  I prefer the former. 

I went to lunch with Danielle and Matt, and we ate at Arby's.  As and aside, I haven't been to Arby's in at least a half a year.  It was a nice change of pace from the usual lunches I have.  In any case, we at there and I bought my drink back to the office with me.  It was a large Dr. Pepper. 

We get back to the office, and I return to my desk.  I set my drink down beside me and start going through all the emails that had come in since I'd left.  One of them was an email from my boss, requesting that I go see him after lunch.  Having read that one, I stood up, grabbed my drink, and turned to go see him.  As I turned, I caught my drink on the corner of my cubicle.  This simultaneously popped the top off of the drink and knocked it out of my hand, sending it spiralling towards my wall, where it landed and exploded.  I had Dr. Pepper on the wall, on my white-board, chair, keyboard pad, floor, and just about everywhere else.  It was running down the marker tray of the white-board like a mini-waterfall. 

I was in such awe in how much of a disaster that one cup made, I just stood there looking at it for a while.  Danielle was outside at the time, and she came back to her desk (which is right in front of mine) while I was standing there gaping at the destruction.  She looked at me, then looked at the mess, and just said, “What…how…the hell?”

Then, she helped me scrub down the wall. 

Now playing: Two Door Cinema Club - Eat That Up, It's Good For You

I'll Kill Your Dicks!

As a continuation of my obvious fanboying of Bullestorm from yesterday, here are some more screenshots with commentary.  Enjoy!


So, riding along this train while being chases by a giant wheel, gyrocopters, dune buggies, and another traincar.  Fun stuff.  In this shot, I'd just blown up the enemy train. 


Yes, I'm controlling that thing.  Yes, he's huge.  And yes, it was fucking awesome.  I have my own personal Godzilla!


The evil bandits are being massacred by even eviler cannibalistic bandits.  Oh noes!


Eww.


Yes.  She said, “I will kill your dicks!”.  That line is so stupid and so irreverent…but still, I laughed my ass off.  And him REPEATING IT…


“What?  What does that even mean?  You're going to kill my dick?”  I…have no words.  Bahahahaha!

Ok, so, now I should explain the part of the game that made me squee like a little girl.  I walked into this area with a sniper, took him out, and naturally grabbed his sniper rifle.  I then took aim through the scope and shot at an enemy rather far away.  I expected that to be it.  Instead, my camera started following the bullet, and the game informed me that I needed to control the bullet with the mouse. 

GREATEST.  GIMMICK.  EVER. 

And that is all. 

Now playing: The Fray - Absolute

Bulletstorm

I can't remember the last time a game made me squee louder than a female tween who just saw Edward from Twilight walking down the street.  And that's a pretty fucking loud squee.  I'm quite glad no one was around to hear it. 

Bulletstorm is a game that takes everything fun about a shooter, condenses it into a nice little package, and serves it to you in one big serving.  Covered in chocolate.  With whip cream.  And sprinkles. 

You get the idea.



Ok, first the premise.  The premise is that this game is so much fucking fun who gives a shit about a premise?  But if you insist ––  two guys crash land on a planet after driving their spaceship through a larger spaceship, and they now have to escape while also maybe perhaps at the same time seeking revenge for assassinating innocent people on the orders of some old, ugly guy who swears more than Richard Pryor.

But none off that really matters when your shooting bad guys in the ASS with a SHOTGUN.  And getting rewarded for it!

The whole gimmick of Bulletstorm is that the gain rewards you with skillpoints for performing certain “skill shots”.  These range from simple (perform a headshot), to utter WTFuken complex (Stun a boss then go behind him and knock off his armored helmet before shooting him in the ass). 

You can then buy cool stuff with these skill points from Dropkits that are so plentiful that a spaceship the size of Neptune filled with the things must have crashed on the planet.  Once, I totally restocked on ammo at one of them, then got the next one before firing a single bullet!



Not that I care.  I was having too much fun shooting people in the ass.

And getting chased BY A HUGE METAL SPIKY WHEEL THING!  WHILE BEING CHASED BY CARS.  AND HELICOPTERS!  AND TRAINS!



If there's one thing this game is good at, it's going utterly over the top in every thing it does. 



The game is also gorgeous.  It uses the Unreal 3 engine, so it has that…unrealistic sci-fi…look about it.  (The kind that makes you look at it and say, “Wait, that's not how that's supposed to look…”)  But it's still damned pretty. 

And yes, the pistol in the above screenshot is my favorite weapon.  I'm quite certain I was a gunslinger in a former life. 

Or a future one.  Depending on your point of view. 

In any case, I'm tired.  I'll have more to say about this game tomorrow, including the moment that caused the above-mentioned squee.

Now playing: Green Day - Know Your Enemy - Winamp *** 1619. Green Day - Know Your Enemy

Painkiller: Redemption

Several years ago, I played (and subsequently blogged about) a first-person shooter called Painkiller.  This game was one of the first games of its kind — a hybrid shooter that combined arcade-style elements with the realistic physics of a PC game.  I affectionately remember the Stake Gun.  Ahhh, I spent many an hour impaling demons onto just about every hard surface you could think of.  Concrete, wood, dirt, stone, and even other demons. 

That was circa 2004. 

I knew that a sequel was made.  Actually, it was more of an expansion pack to be honest, and it was called Painkiller: Battle out of Hell.  That game was soooo bad that I just basically ignored the series from that point forward.  Painkiller: Overdose and Painkiller: Resurrection followed, and I never played either of those games. 

Well, it just so happens that tonight I was in the mood for a mindless shooter, and Painkiller: Redemption was on Steam for $4.95.  Even if it was utter crap, I couldn't beat that price.  And this add-on is NEW.  It was just released on February 25^th, 2011, and it's only $4.95.  Yeah, I knew what I was buying, and what I was getting myself into.  But I didn't care! 

Ok, for starters, I should provide some back story.  This will be really simple.  A guy named Daniel dies and goes to Purgatory.  He then becomes a bit of a hitman for God in order to cleanse his soul so he can be re-united with his dead girlfriend in heaven.  That's pretty much all you need to know in order to understand the plot of all these games.  Really. 

So you may be asking yourself, “Why has this series lasted so long?”

That's actually a simple answer.  Basically, this game has perfected the art of “LET'S THROW 10,000 ENEMIES AT THE PLAYER AT ONCE AND MAKE HIM FEEL LIKE A BADASS AS HE WIPES THEM ALL OUT!”. 

It works.  You do feel like a badass and the game does get you pumped up.  It's very fast paced, and it's a hell of a lot of fun. 

When I first started the game up, I found myself playing this demonic-like character with very long fingernails, holding a strange cube that looked very much like the Lament Configuration.  I could use this to either “Primary Fire: Spinning Blades to chop enemies to pieces”, or “Alternate Fire: Throw the box and punch the shit out of enemies”. 

I went through THREE LEVELS of this, and was started to get INCREDIBLY bored and wondered when the hell I was going to get a real weapon.  Suddenly, though, I realized that I had been picking up different kinds of ammo for quite some time now.  Finally, just out of curiosity, I pressed Number 2.  And I switched to a shotgun.  Wat. 

Yeah.  So, apparently I had all the weapons in the game from the get-go, and just needed to pick up the ammo for them to begin using them. 

/facedesk

Moving on.  So now that I knew I had weapons, I started using them.  A shotgun, with an alt-fire that slows down enemies.  A machine gun with a rocket launcher alt-fire.  A cross-bow with a AoE exploding arrows alt-fire.  A severed demon head that shoots a laser beam out of its mouth.  Wait, wat? 

In any case, I keep dying on the third level because I suck.  It's wave after wave after wave of baddies, and I just keep getting my ass handed to me, so I am thus taking a little break from the game right now. 

But it's good mindless fun.  Nothing that I would rate above a 6 or 7 out of 10, but it's just what I needed tonight, and I'm enjoying it.  That's all that really matters. 

Now playing: Awolnation - Sail