Bryce's Pipe Bomb Survival Guide*

I know there's maybe five people that actually read my blog, and of the one of those people I actually know, I know they're already playing Warframe, but allow me to try and sell you on it anyway. Warframe is something I've been waiting for, for a long time, it's a free to play, online RPG, that's not focused on competitive player vs player combat, and it doesn't punish you for not spending money on it. What's the premise of Warframe? In the far future, humanity has spread out through the solar system, and various factions of post-humans are engaging in all-out warfare over the various resources of the solar system. You wake up from cryogenic stasis, a member of the Tenno faction. Tenno have access to biotechnological suits of armor, called Warframes (Think Iron Man, but rubbery... Rubber Man?). Warframes are rare, but they are powerful, which of course suits a videogame quite well. You can obliterate swarms of space baddies like you're mowing the...

Way back when, say, ten years ago, I had a dream of making a game. At first I wanted to make it a videogame like a JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, etc.). Then it was going to be a pen and paper RPG (Dungeons and Dragons). And for many years, it kept bouncing around, back and forth between the two, I thought I was so very creative and clever. Eventually I started to realize that I was never going to be able to do anything like this on my own, and that neither I, nor any of my friends, had the time or energy to put into learning the necessary technical skills for a videogame, or simply the desire for a tabletop game. Still, I really liked brainstorming ways that different elements of a setting would interact with each other, whether it be a game system, a fantasy world, a system of government, or a military force. Sometimes I'd write this stuff down, but more often than not, I just day dreamed about it. I think it was kind of like therapy. I still wanted to do something wit...

So, a friend of mine recently started getting back into console games, and one of the first things that we did was play some Saints Row 2 in coop. I had already beat the game in solo play, and I got pretty far through with another friend playing coop, before a DLC incompatibility stopped that dead. Firing it up again reminded me of just how much I loved it. Rockstar pretty much created this genre when it released GTAIII on the playstation 2. Sure, there were two GTA's before that, and there were probably other games that could be said to be sandbox action games like it, but GTAIII was the first one that really brought an entire city to life, at least for me. Not only was it a living, breathing city, but there were lots of things for you to do in it. There are typically two different ways of approaching the game that people seem to go for. One is to do all of the story missions and "beat" the game. The other is to just leap into the world and see how much chaos you can cau...

I believe that Metroid Other M is the worst of Nintendo's core franchises that has been brought to the Wii. I say this, not because it's a radical departure from the past installments (it is), but because it is a bad game. While I have enjoyed most of the past installments in the series, I would not considered myself a hardcore Metroid fan. I played Super Metroid back on the SNES, it was a very minimalist exploration game, with virtually no storyline, and a large world to wnader through, with each new upgrade letting you access more of it. When they announced the first Metroid Prime game for the Gamecube, a lot of people were worried that it was going to become a first person shooter, lots of straight up action without the exploration and isolation aspects of the original games. This turned out to not be the truth. Sure it was a first person perspective, but instead of frenetic shooting action, it was more slow and deliberate. The exploration and sense of isolation were still p...

Over this last weekend, I downloaded Dead Rising 2: Case 0, which is sort of a prequel to Dead Rising 2, but a digital only title. Quick review: If you liked Dead Rising, Dead Rising 2 seems to be everything it was, but better. $5 for more Dead Rising? I'll take 5! I started to notice my screen was kind of flickering green while playing though, I just assume it was a bug, since it was a new game, and that I'd be getting a patch in the next few days that would fix it. The next time I turned the 360 on though, it would turn on, but no video would display. I tried all of the standard stuff, switching cables, hooking it straight up to the TV, trying a different source on the same cable. In the end, it was toast, and I could pay Microsoft $100 to repair, and risk something else crapping out after 90 days, or I could buy one of the new slims, and I did have $150 in Amazon gift cards. New 360 it was! Okay, so, I got the new 360, it's not really "slim" but it is qui...

So, long before there was an utlimately forgettable pair of AVP movies, there was a comic published by Darkhorse comics, who held the license for the Aliens and Predator comic properties. The concept took off like wild fire, two of the biggest alien baddies from 80s cinema meeting on a battlefield with humanity in the crossfire. I have no idea how many crossover comics there have been at this point, but I'm pretty sure they come out with a new one every few years. The premise is that the Predators have a surprisingly ritualistic hunter culture, and one of their traditional prey is the Aliens. Rebellion first made an AVP first person shooter for the PC back in the 90s, I'm fairly certain it wasn't the first AVP game, but it was the first that let you play as any of the three races in the universe, and this game is Rebellion coming back and doing their thing for a second round. With some success. I only tried out playing the human and Predator campaigns before I'd deci...

I purchased a Playstation 3 on Saturday, because White Knight Chronicles finally pushed me over the crucial "there are enough games on it to warrant ownership" threshold. The UI is essentially a blown up version of the same one used on the PSP, which is okay, I don't know the greater public opinion on the interface, but it works. There are a number of things about the console that just make it feel like Sony doesn't want you to actually play games on the damn thing. After bringing the console and game home, I set about getting it all hooked up, probably took about 45 minutes to an hour to get it all plugged in, which is just a testament to the awkwardness of my home theater setup than any difficulty with the console. Once it's finally fired up, it autodetects the resolution of my TV, and settles on 1080i, while my screen technically supports that resolution, it's really only a 720p screen with some fancy software to convert a 1080i signal. So I have to go i...

As anyone will tell you, I like me a good old school RPG. Which isn't quite what Magna Carta 2 is. It kind of feels like another iteration of a single player RPG trying to emulate how an MMO works. You run around the various areas, and when you come upon an enemy, you hit a button to enter combat mode, at which point, whatever character you have selected as the leader, is under your control, and the other two characters are in the hands of the computer. You select and perform your attacks in real time, and you can switch between characters at any point. This has a slightly different twist on the classic formula, by giving you a stamina bar, every action you perform fills up the stamina bar, fill it up completely, and then you get a few seconds to perform attacks in an overcharge mode where you deal more damage, once that's complete, however, you overheat, and can't move for a short while, as well as not being able to attack for a longer while. This gets a little frustrating...

Well, it's been a few weeks since I took Brütal Legend out my 360 in frustration, and I just haven't felt like going back to it, so, here's my review: For some background, Brütal Legend is the latest game from Tim Schafer, who comes from a background of making some of the greatest adventure games ever at Lucas Arts, and is also responsible for the simply amazing Psychonauts, although I never finished that one either. You take on the role of Eddie Riggs, the greatest roadie the world has ever known, Riggs is so metal he just can't stand the modern music scene. During a freak accident, he is killed, and wakes up in a fantasy metal world, where music is power, and everything has spikes. The setting is really where Legend rocks it to eleven, the entire world looks like someone magically brought to life every metal album cover from their high school music collection, the animation is almost on par with a Pixar movie, which is a little incongruous to all of the gore and ...

What can I say about Red Faction? It's been out for quite awhile now, and it was actually the game I was playing the night I got blown up, so understandably, I took quite a break from it, but I just finished it the other night. Guerilla is actually the third Red Faction game, the first two being FPS's, their claim to fame was the "Geomod" system. With Geomod Red Faction was able to give environments a level of destructability not seen before in a shooter. Famously, you could take a rocket launcher, and use it to blow out tunnels through the rock. I played the first game for a short while, before ultimately finding that the action wasn't really engaging. With Guerilla, THQ decided to shakeup the basic gameplay model. Now instead of being a FPS, it's actually a third person sandbox, meaning that instead of progression of levels, you are dropped into a small city, much like the Grand Theft Auto, Saints Row, and Mercenaries games, except you're on Mars. ...

So, the general internet consensus is that this game did everything right that the first game did wrong and it's hard to argue with that statement. It's a beautifully polished game, and for the most part, the entire amount of time I was playing the game I was having fun. The feel of being an assassin is still very visceral, and by the end of the game, the array of ways at your disposal to destroy your enemies is staggering. A few of the new weapons that you get in this game is having two hidden daggers, one on each arm, which at first seemed really silly, and it is, but there's no denying how awesome you feel when you walk between two guards and just put your hands out and stab each one in the neck. There's also the ability to kill an enemy while hanging from a ledge, you reach up, stab him, grab him, and yank him off. My favorite new ability though, is being able to fight barehanded, and steal your opponents weapon, then kill them with it. You're also able to ...

Even after completing the main story mode in Borderlands, it has demanded my attention more than other game at my disposal. I've barely started Brutal Legend or Dragon Age: Origins, not to mention I still have Red Faction: Guerilla and Prototype both begging to be finished. The trauma of being blown up still prevents me from going back to Dead Space just yet, and similarly Bioshock is off the docket until I've had more time to recover. They're both just so immersive, intense and scary, spending more than a few minutes with either of them makes me feel like I'm about to have an anxiety attack. Borderlands has lots of action, doesn't require a lot of thinking, but it still gives you the compulsive desire to play just a little more, get one more gun. Because of it's quest based gameplay, it's very easy to just pick it up and play for ten to thirty minutes. Even if you don't have time to complete a quest, you still will get plenty of loot to sell at the...

Super Robot Wars is a videogame series that has been going on for a very long time in Japan, but due to licensing problems, very few of the games have ever been localized for North America. I think it's fairly obvious that the games are pretty much about giant robots smacking the ever loving snot out of each other. Typically the games are in the form of turn based tactical RPGs, although there have been a couple of fighting games, and some other genres represented throughout the series. The licensing issue that I mentioned are all because of the various games' cast of robots. Instead of creating a cast of entirely original robots, the SRW series has traditionally pulled a lot of robots from various animes, with permission of course. This becomes an issue when they try to import the games because while they've secured the rights from the appropriate holders in Japan, the North American rights to those same properties are often held by different companies, who also want t...