DmC: Kill monsters and pose like a badass

When I first heard about DmC, the Devil May Cry reboot, my initial reaction was skepticism.  I had not played much of the original games, but I knew that Dante was a white-haired, red-jacketed, ultra-cool demon-slayer. Who was this punk kid they were calling Dante?

Well, I'm glad I got DmC, because I really enjoyed it. I ended up liking this new Dante a lot, and I found the gameplay hugely enjoyable. The game is designed to make Dante look like a badass at every chance, and as a result, the player feels like a badass, too. Every fight ends with a slow-mo shot of the final blow, inevitably ending with Dante in some awesome pose. That's why I came to think of DmC as a kill-monsters-and-pose-like-a-badass-simulator.

This review contains some spoilers, but you're probably not playing a game like DmC for the plot anyway!

How voice acting made all the difference with two Mass Effect characters

A lot has been said about the different voice acting choices made by Mark Meer, who voices the male Shepard in Mass Effect, and Jennifer Hale, who voices the female Shepard. I like them both, but I wanted to share my thoughts on some other voice acting in the series. Specifically, I would like to share two occasions where a character who looks bland on paper became much more interesting thanks to the way the voice actor portrayed the character.

When I first read about a Zaeed Massani, a new DLC squad member in Mass Effect 2, I was not impressed. It sounded like his whole character was defined by being the galaxy's best bounty hunter, so I immediately wrote him off as a Boba Fett ripoff. The picture they provided didn't help much: scarred, tattooed, and wearing asymmetrical armor, his design was a mess. When I met the character in the game, he made a bad first impression. Shepard comes across Zaeed beating up his previous target, so it seemed like the game was trying too hard to make him look cool. When Zaeed immediately offered to join my party, without any sort of recruitment quest, I was even more let down. If Zaeed were worth having, I thought, he wouldn't be so easy to recruit.

Then I started talking to him.

One Epic Knight: A fun, hilarious endless runner

When was the last time you played a free mobile game that was genuinely fun, made you laugh out loud, and was endlessly enjoyable without spending a single cent? One Epic Knight is a free endless runner from Simutronics featuring a wise-cracking knight venturing forth into a dungeon to collect loot, fight monsters, and avoid traps before inevitably dying hilariously. If you own an iOS or Android device, there's really no reason not to check it out!

Broforce: Liberating the world with bullets

The art for Broforce is like a collection of movie posters for the best action movie of all time

Do you love...
FREEDOM?
EXPLOSIONS?
DEMOCRACY?
HIGH FIVES?

If you answered "Yes" to each of these, you are awesome!

If you answered "YES" while pumping a fist in the air and chanting "USA! USA!" then you are BROSOME and you BRO it to yourself to check out BROFORCE!

Warhammer Quest: My Kind of Quest

My guys cut their way through a pack of Skaven

Warhammer Quest is a mobile game by Rodeo Games based on the Warhammer Fantasy Battles setting by Games Workshop. It is a turn-based, single player game where you take a party of four warriors through dungeons in search of loot, gold, and experience points. Loot makes you tougher, gold can be spent on loot, and experience points allow you to level up and learn new abilities. That's pretty much the whole game.

And I love it!

The Room: A Gorgeous, Spooky Puzzle for Your Mobile Device

Imagine receiving a note from a friend who urges you to come over at once. When you arrive, you find that your friend has disappeared, leaving behind only a safe and a mysterious note. You open the safe to find a beautiful, handcrafted box inside, with intricate locks and mechanisms built into it. As you begin the task of opening the box, you start to wonder what sort of research your friend was engaged in...

If that description captures your interest, and if you own a mobile device or tablet, I recommend checking out The Room by Fireproof games. It is, simply put, the best mobile game I have ever played, and I cannot recommend it enough.

Saints Row IV: Even better than Saints Row the Third, which was great

You know I'm born to lose / And gambling's for fools / But that's the way I like it, baby, I don't want to live forever!

I've been meaning to write a review for Saints Row: The Third for a while. So long, in fact, that in the meantime, Saints Row IV came out and I loved it so much that I decided to review Saints Row IV instead. I will still talk a bit about Saints Row: The Third, because it is a great game. They're both great games. If you want to play a game that tries as hard as it can to make sure you're having as much fun as possible at all times, you should check out these two games.

I try to avoid spoilers in this review, but there is some info that you may find slightly spoilery.

Happy N7 Day

Today is N7 Day (because it's November 7, so N-7), so today is a day to celebrate Mass Effect. There's only one problem: Mass Effect 3 came out on March 6, 2012. The final DLC, The Citadel, was released March 6, 2013. So it's been a while since we've had anything new to talk about.

So I was sitting at my desk, wanting to post something Mass Effect-related for N7 day, but unable to think of anything new to say. MLW suggested I write about why I love Mass Effect, and why I'm still so into it. I tried to think of what to say that I had not said before in my many posts about Mass Effect, and then MLW asked me if I had seen the N7 Day video above. I had not, so I watched it, and I knew what I wanted to write about.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed is better than you'd expect

The game's marketing pushed the physics engine, and how enemy characters react to being tossed around.

** Contains Some Minor Spoilers **

Star Wars: the Force Unleashed is a fairly old game, having originally been released for the XBox 360 in 2008 and the PC in 2009. I had heard mixed things about it, so I never bothered picking it up until this past Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you), when all the Star Wars games on Steam were on sale. It was only a few dollars, so I grabbed it. I was pleasantly surprised by what I found: the gameplay was quite fun, and the narrative, while not great, at least made an effort to tell a new, interesting story.

Brütal Legend: A review with many images

Prepare yourself for a world of heavy metal

I have many reasons to love Double Fine Entertainment: They made Psychonauts, one of the best and most unique 3D platformers I've ever played. They're a Bay Area company, so they're local boys. They are run by the immensely likable Tim Schafer, and they used to (but no longer) employ Scott Campbell (and Scott C did a large chunk of the concept art for Brütal Legend). I recently added one more reason to like them: they made Brütal Legend, a game that allowed me to spend more than 20 hours exploring, fighting in, and ultimately saving a heavy metal world.

Brütal Legend is famous for a very mixed reception at its launch. Commercially, the game was a failure, and it led to Double Fine shifting their focus from AAA titles to smaller, less expensive projects. Gamers didn't know what to make of the hybrid tactical/action game, which combined elements of Real-Time Strategy, open-world exploration, and hack-and-slash fighting.

I had the (somewhat dubious) advantage of waiting several years before playing the game because it took that long for a PC port to come out, but that meant that I had a good idea of what I was getting myself into. I played Brütal Legend on its own terms, and I found myself loving almost everything about it. It's not a perfect game, but it's so relevant to my interests that I don't even care.

(Brütal Legend has such a cool-looking world that this review called for a lot of images, some of which are a little spoilery but presented without context.)

Things that make me frustrated with video games (and why I shouldn't let them)

Nobody wants to be this guy
(If you don't know who this is, look up "angry german kid" on Youtube, but turn down your speakers first)

Normally I love playing video games, but there are times when they make me very frustrated. The scary thing about frustration is, you're often not aware of how frustrated you are or how you're displaying that level of frustration. Recently I was playing a stage in Double Fine's Brütal Legend and, though I didn't feel like I was exceptionally frustrated (I certainly wasn't swearing, shouting, or pounding the keyboard like the angry German kid), it was unpleasant and frightening to my wife. That got me thinking about the reasons I get frustrated, and the ways in which I can get over them and enjoy the game without losing my cool.

XBox One: Playing a Bit of Devil's Advocate

People act like what Microsoft did with the XBox One's intended policy for game ownership was a transparent cash-grab that came out of the blue. In truth, we already have virtually the same system in place with games on PCs. Since consoles are really just PCs in a smaller box, why the different system? If Microsoft would have said "Every user has to buy a unique CD key to play a game," people would have understood what Microsoft was trying to do. They want the ownership of a game to be tied to accounts (ie, individual people) rather than to a physical copy of a disk. Instead, we're going to continue to have a system with two different methods of ownership:

1. the disk-based version will continue use the physical presence of an official disk to make sure the company got paid for the game (meaning you have to have the disk in your system to play, even if the game is installed on your hard drive).

2. the digital version will be linked to account ownership, meaning everyone who plays it on a different account will have to buy a unique copy (since it's the only way to make sure people using torrents or file hosts don't just share the game with ten thousand of their closest friends without the company who made it making a red cent from it).

So to everyone saying that they don't want to have to pay separately for every account (ie, every person) to play a game: you're already doing that for digital games. The only difference is Microsoft wants (or, I suppose, wanted) to extend that system to all games, regardless of the physical presence of a disk. They don't want to continue with two different methods depending on whether you installed the game from a disk or through digital download. (And maybe, just maybe, we could have gotten to the point where we could play on a console without having to have the disk in, meaning no more disk-swapping.)

The Walking Dead: Telltale Games' Masterpiece

I remember back when 2012's video game awards were coming out, The Walking Dead seemed to be dominating. Then, a friend got me an iTunes gift card for the holidays, and he encouraged me to buy all five episodes of the game with the gift card. I bought the game, and from the first time I played it, I was pulled into the story. The best thing about the game was its characters. At first, I wondered how the game was going to make me care about a cliched relationship like the tough guy protecting the little girl. About five minutes later, I was ready to do whatever it took to keep that little girl safe.

The Citadel DLC: A Curtain Call and a Fond Farewell

The best mission objective in all of Mass Effect?

**I'll try to avoid major spoilers, but this review does contain some minor spoilers.**

Mass Effect 3: The Citadel is the final DLC mission in the Mass Effect Trilogy. It's been an amazing ride, with some memorable characters, epic moments, tough battles, and hard choices. The Citadel DLC isn't so much a conclusion as it is a curtain call. It's one last opportunity to take your ME3 squadmates (and Wrex!) on a great mission, and then kick back and party with your space bros.

When I heard that the final DLC would be a party, I knew I had to buy it as soon as it came out. I had been less than impressed by the Leviathan and Omega DLC that came before, though, so I tried to keep my enthusiasm in check. I figured the writing would be cheesy, but I was okay with that. I also knew that the DLC would begin with a combat-focused mission, which I expected to be a throwaway plot to add some token combat.

I needn't have worried. The writing was top-notch. Sure, it was cheesy, but also heartwarming, nostalgic, witty, and genuinely hilarious. And the combat half blew away my expectations, with a well-crafted mission against a compelling villain. There were great set pieces, interesting combat, and more squad banter than you can shake a pyjack at.

Discovered on the Intertron: Two Best Friends Play...

So recently, I stumbled across a series of YouTube video calls Two Best Friends Play.... The premise is simple: two dudes in their twenties record themselves talking while playing a video game. It's all about the hilarious banter, usually revolving around making fun of the game, making fun of each other, and hilarious tangents they go off on. Matt is has a gentle, kind of naive soul, and Pat has anger management issues. Naturally, they're both playing up these personas, but the clash of personalities is comedy gold. I should warn you that the things they say are at times misogynistic, vulgar, and crude. Some of their jokes are about harming women or are blatantly racist. That genuinely bothers me, and if they wouldn't go there, I could enjoy their videos much more.

I first stumbled across the videos when I was doing my usual search for ponies, and I found this:

Squids is now available for PC!

Squids was one of the first games I picked up for my iPad, and it remains one of my favorites. It deftly combines a colorful aesthetic with adorable character designs and simple but enjoyable gameplay to create a satisfying casual game that is perfect for handheld devices. The Squids website quotes the Escapist as saying Squids is "The adorable spawn of Angry Birds and FF: Tactics." Even though I have never owned either of those games, it was all the incentive I needed to try it out. Today they announced that Squids is available on PC, and it was already available for iOS, Android, and Mac, so there is no reason not to own Squids!

Mass Effect: Artor Perinax's Inspirational Words

Move your asses, soldiers! Hut hut hut hut hut!

One of my favorite classes to play in Mass Effect 3's multiplayer is the turian soldier. In fact, before ME3 even came out, I wrote a character bio/fanfic for a turian soldier named Artor Perinax. Perinax is a career soldier, combat veteran, and a born sergeant. When the war against the Reapers begins, Perinax is a drill sergeant whose job it is to prepare turian soldiers for battle. He wants to do his part to fight the Reapers, so he calls in some favors and banks on his experience and knowledge to get himself appointed to Special Forces.

You can take the sergeant out of the boot camp, but you can't take the boot camp out of the sergeant. So what is it that Sergeant Perinax says to motivate his teammates when they're fighting to save the galaxy? Well...

Mass Effect: I Did It My Way

 We must live with the choices we make.

Much has been made of the romance options in Mass Effect. There has been speculation and rumor about whom you can have a relationship with, arousing all sorts of responses from fans. I used to think this was just about fanboys getting their kicks. Now I'm not so sure. I'm starting to think that it's a reflection of something else: just how deeply we get into the act of participating in storytelling.

Quick, Slightly Spoilery Thoughts on the ME3 Ending

Shepard's not feeling so hot. I hope that's not too spoilery

If you're a Mass Effect fan, you probably already know that the ending to Mass Effect 3 has been very controversial among fans. I'll say one thing: it's certainly got people talking. My wife and I finished the game together, and we spent the rest of the evening discussing what happened and what it meant.

You should buy the Mass Effect 3 "From Ashes" DLC

The "From Ashes" Tarantino shot

It's all Mass Effect, all the time over here, but I don't feel guilty. For one thing, Mass Effect is amazing, and if someone doesn't want to hear about Mass Effect, I don't much care what that person thinks of my blog. For another, I know who the regular readers of this blog are, and I know that almost all of you play Mass Effect.

There was a lot of controversy surrounding the "From Ashes" DLC that was released for Mass Effect 3. Anyone who bought the Collector's Edition automatically received the DLC for free. Everyone else, including me, has to pay ten dollars for it. It comes with a mission, which was pretty cool and took me about an hour (though that's just an estimate; I lose track of time pretty easily when playing Mass Effect). But the real reason to get the DLC is to get the squad member it comes with. Is it worth it?