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...

I am an unashamed fan of the Saints Row games, I talked about the second game in the series a little bit in a previous post . The third game is everything completely over the top about the second game, and more. Talking about the Saints Row games in any kind of intellectual fashion is always kind of hard, on account of the subject matter. Unlike the Grand Theft Auto games, you play as the psychopathic leader of a gang/organized crime ring called The Third Street Saints. The games managed to keep from being too disturbing by keeping things pretty cartoony and comical, for instance, in the third iteration, one of the melee weapons you can get is a giant purple, phallus shaped bat; it's veiny, and wobbles... I'm sure if you meditate on the extreme crudity and tastelessness about that, you can see the dilemma. If you can just laugh and shake your head at things like that, you'll find an amazingly open world, with an unbelievable number of weapons and abilities for you to unlock...

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...

Finally I managed to beat Bioshock. The first few times I played it, I was really smitten with the setting, and liked the idea of the variety of powers and weapons you get access to to, but I was always turned off by having to worry about whether I had enough money or ammo. But I kept going back, eventually I just turned it down to easy, and decided to enjoy it and beat the damn thing. Having the options of setting enemies on fire, electrocuting them, freezing them, sending swarms of angry insects at them, etc. was extremely gratifying, but the world is very sparse and lonely, sure there are plenty of people running around to kill, but there's so very little else that it still manages to feel empty. I'm sure that's kind of the point, but even Dead Space, which setting wise, was a more empty setting, managed to feel more full . So, the last bits of the game are definitely a slog, but once I got the ending, I found a surprisingly rewarding end scene, I don't want to rev...

My relationship with PC gaming has always been pretty tenuous. Up until a year or so ago, I always maintained a desktop computer, and while I never invested in the latest and greatest video cards, I typically had one that was only a little behind the times. There is certainly a core group of PC gamers out there that constantly upgrade to maintain game devouring rigs that can play any game with maxed out settings, but that's never been me. Once the Xbox 360 came out, game makers had finally figured out how to make shooter controls work right on a console controller, and the graphical difference was never that much of a factor for me. So most of the time I would play a game on a console, rather than on the PC, it was just more comfortable, especially after my leg injury in 2009, sitting at a desk just wasn't much of an option, for a very long time. So, after awhile, I got rid of my desktop computer, or at least the desk (I now have three computer towers just sitting under a table...

Time to take a break from the toy reviews. So, I preordered Dragon Age: Origins for two reasons, one, it was the same guys who made Mass Effect, so I was expecting a kind of more dialogue heavy role playing experience, with a more action-y combat system, and streamlined ability/stat progression. DA:O is not that game, and I really didn't like it at first. The other reason I preordered it was because it gave you a code to unlock exclusive armor in Mass Effect 2, and I was totally down with that. A year or so later, and Dead Space 2 is released with an unlock code for exclusive armor in Dragon Age 2, so I preordered DA2, because I'm a whore like that. I was determined to get back into DA:O at this point, and they just happened to have a huge sale on all of the DLC and expansions. I'm dragging this out more than I intended, but the bottom line is that I managed to find a game that I really liked in DA:O. I turned the combat difficulty down, and just worked from there. Enter Dr...

It was interesting to play this game in such quick succession after Majin. Both games fit into what I call the "partner game" genre, but at the same time, they're radically different. First off, whereas Majin had you exploring an open world, with the ability to go back and forth to prior locations with ease, Enslaved is very much level based, meaning once you've beat one level, it just shunts you along to the next. The other is the relation between the two partner characters, you play as Monkey in this game, who is both a powerhouse, and an incredibly agile climber. Trip is your partner, who is a relatively unskilled fighter, but she has a great amount of technical ability, as well as a number of useful gadgets. Okay, I'm going to stop comparing this game to Majin now, because it just doesn't seem that interesting anymore. So, premise: It's the far future, the world has been wrecked, cities crumbled, and the native life has reclaimed much of it. It...

One of many games that I received as a gift for Christmas, and which you will be reading subsequent reviews of. Majin is an adventure/puzzle game, where you play a guy raised by animals in the forest, with the rare ability of actually being able to talk to animals. He sets out on a quest to rescue the kingdom from a dark gooey plague that's slowly taking everything over and transforming it. The secret to achieving this goal is to find the legendary Majin, who ate all of the darkness in the past. Really, the Majin is the star of the game here, but you don't directly control him, you control the animal talker, which is coincidentally an ability you need to have in order to understand the Majin. The Majin is slow-witted, innocent, and powerful. After freeing him, he will follow you around like a lost puppy, and happily smack on any enemies that trouble you. You can also issue commands to him, ranging from telling him to wait in a particular spot, to lifting a gate, or using...

I'm typically willing to put up with a lot of design flaws, or poor design decisions in a video game, if there's enough there that's really entertaining. Lost Planet 2 is an example of a game that is simply phenomenal in many ways, but because of one design decision, I can't keep playing it. In Lost Planet 2 you play a snow pirate, who wanders around a desolate, frozen, alien world, scavenging weapons and equipment, while killing the local fauna to harvest thermal energy and keep from freezing to death. For the most part, it plays like your average third person shooter, you can carry up to two weapons, and one flavor of grenade. One of the things that is exceptional about it is the variety of things you'll be shooting at. You have other humans, of course, as well as the myriad alien life forms, all of which are hostile. You've got delicate flying guys, that come at you in swarms, and die by the dozen, you've got spider things the size of large bears that...

Front Mission is a long running series from Square Enix (from as far back as when they were Squaresoft). Evolved is the series' first foray into the current generation of consoles, and is also a drastic change in game style. Traditionally the Front Mission games have been turn based strategy games, where you're in control of a squad of soldiers, each one pilots a mech, and the mech can be outfitted with all kind of different parts. The most standout aspect of it was that each of the mechs was completely customizable. You can replace the legs, and arms, as well as choose what weapons to equip in either hand, as well as either shoulder. Evolved keeps that same level of customization, but instead puts it into a third person shooter. You now play as just one man, driving a mech, kicking butt and taking names. Your mech, or "wanzer" as they're called in the game, is a formidable piece of hardware, easily a match for most tanks, helicopters, and other traditional ...

I really enjoyed Singularity a lot more than I thought I would, considering I really hadn't heard any buzz about it. It's a first person shooter with a bit of a scifi twist. I'm definitely in the camp where shooters start to feel old without some sort of cover system, and this game certainly didn't change my thinking on that. Which is not to say that there aren't a lot of things that it does very well. The premise is that back in the fifties, the USSR found a new element on some tiny island, and started experimenting with it. It held the potential for very large energy output, but after some horrible accident, the island was abandoned, and forgotten about, until in 2010 a spy plane passing overhead gets hit with a massive pulse of radiation. You play as Captain Renko, a member of a squad of US soldiers sent to investigate. After an EMP takes down your helicopter, thinks kick off with you wandering through the abandoned facilites, reading notes and listening to ...

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 don't know how common the knowledge is, but the Mario Franchise has a surprisingly robust history of quality RPGs. Starting way back on the Super Nintendo, with Super Mario RPG, the series has a history of going light on the RPG elements, and featuring gameplay that's heavy on timed inputs to increase the strength of attacks, or to avoid taking damage. The Mario & Luigi series started on the Gameboy Advance with Super Star Saga, and took a slightly different approach to controlling the characters. Instead of gathering an eclectic cast of original characters to join Mario on his journey, you instead control only Mario and Luigi, for the entirety of the game, and each is assigned to either the a or the b button. In battle, you use the B button to select Luigi's actions, or to evade or counter attack, Mario is assigned to the A button. This is expanded upon by giving them special attacks that they perform cooperatively, for instance, one attack has them kicking a tur...

The latest installation in Square Enix's flagship series, Final Fantasy XIII does a number of really cool things. I don't want to take a lot of time going into the mechanics under the hood, but you need to get the basics in order to get a feel for the game. The battle system is real time, the battle constantly goes on even while you're deciding what to do, you're only in direct control over the party leader though, keeps you from being overwhelmed, the other two party members are only controllable only insofar as you can dictate what class they use. Class management is an important part of the battle system, only commandoes can physically attack enemies, and ravagers deal elemental damage, along with a myriad of other classes, each character starts off with access to a small selection, and by the end of the game will have extensive access to three classes, as well as marginal access to the remaining classes. Which classes you use are determined by paradigms, sort of pre...

Now that I've got a PS3, I've been able to add in a bunch of games to my Gamefly queue that I've been hearing about, but previously unable to play. Here's some random thoughts on some of them: Last Rebellion, published by NIS America, who seldom do wrong, this is one of those seldom times. I'm sure there's a good game in there somewhere, for someone, but either I didn't find it, or it's not for me. The story and voiceacting were so terrible that I actually skipped all of the cut scenes, just because I stopped caring what was going on. Which is unforgivable for a JRPG, it's okay to have a cliched storyline, but if you're going to be spending a lot of time listening to the people talk, at least make the story or the characters interesting. Combat was kind of interesting, with you being able to attack numerous different body parts for each creature. Each attack leaves a "mark", and if you attack the body parts in the right order, the marks...

I might be giving up on No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. Which makes me very sad, because I really liked the first game. I really enjoy the character Travis Touchdown, just because he's so against the grain of your typical videogame heroes. He's not a selfless super man, and he's not a brooding anti-hero with a dark secret. He's just a guy... with a lightsaber... who happens to be a badass. His mission to become the number one ranked assassin in the world is motivated by two things, he wants to prove that he's a badass, and he wants to get into his agents pants. That's it. Thankfully that aspect carries over into the sequel, there's still plenty of fourth wall breaking again, and they've opted to change most of the mini-games into 8Bit style arcade games, which I think is brilliant. Sadly the bosses are kind of a weak point in this one, in the first game every boss had a long conversation with Travis, which was really the high point of the g...