Update? YOU SHALL NOT PASS!

Greetings once again internet!

Alas sadly this blog died after my initial post as i was blogging elsewhere, but due to unforseen complications (see: incompetent asshats) I have returned to my adoring fanbase of me. :D

Hopefully i shall keep this up to date and interesting, but if not, A jolly big "blow me" to all of you.

Spent the past few days cleaning up the war zone that is my two rooms (known by me as "Nerdhala) for i believe the first time since I moved to this house the place is in fucking order! I mean..shit..also i have come to the conclusion i have too many boxes of warhammer/magic/d20/computer related crap. But if having it makes me feel sexy, then bring on the mess!

I ventured out into the forbidden wastes known as the general public the other day to take in a cinematic adventure. Under the guise of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland.
I was rather impressed, as I always seem to be with Burtons work. Great storytelling and keeping enough refferences from the book while undertaking what seems to be the "right" mix of creative lisence. Depp seems to have an affinity for playing batshit crazy characters, so without going in depth he was impressive as expected. Now what took me particularly was Mia Wasikowska's performance, honestly I had not expected such a lovely performance from her. But god damn did she deliver. Perhaps my biggest complaints (and I am nitpicking here) are that I was rather surprised that it got away with a PG rating, and people were taking there 5 and 6 year old kids to see this film (it was surprisingly dark for the PG rating, but hey thats a good thing) The other would be that the 3d in some parts of the film seemed rather distracting and unfocussed, but the rest of the time it is solid.

If anyone here were to give a damn about my opinion (and let's face it..you all should) i would take the time to go see it.


Now onto what I have been playing lately, and that is to use the term "playing" loosely is a title that since its announcement I, and my nerdly cohorts have been rubbing ourselves raw over.

Alien versus Predator

Now as any sensible person would do when such an exciting event comes to pass, we consecrated this (hopefully) most holy of games via a launch day LAN. And much merriment was had by all, or was it?

Now i'm not saying that it wasn't going to live up to the series previous installments, but they had high expectations. The inclusion of a DX9 and DX11 client were firstly favourable (even if the DX11 client was superbly crashly on some pcs) but after a few hiccups the 8 of us got on and the menu was loaded by all.

Apart from a clunky menu interface which had me and one or two others reluctantly sink in our hearts believing this would be nothing but a token port from console, it was to my everlasting gratitude not, however the menu interface is REALLY FUCKING BLOCKY! but the advanced pc settings were all there and easily fixed not like you know..GTA: Mars where they give you the option to change display screen but keep the bastard locked *glares @ Volition*. Now I may have not mentioned this yet, but the game launched without dedicated server support but it was promised to be on its way asap. so being a LAN we fired up a local server via the "player match" option. Now on to the gameplay I was quite impressed actually, the IFF of the marines motion tracker, the 2 Predator vision modes (you are able to see preds via the thermal mode) and the variety of game modes. We had much fun playing around with these all and initially even the trophy and stealth kills were fun, until later you started to notice the massive "Press E to Win" trains and the aliens just circling a marine spamming E until they stealth kill you. The Melee system while beautiful in its idea, with the introduction of finishing moves, just turns it into another E button fest. The Blocking and heavy/light attacks were a great idea, but it all came down to heavy attack, e button, win. My Marine comrades were dissapointed at the inclusion of only 4 weapons, and the flamethrower being beyond useless (though if you manage to actually score a kill with this on an Alien, it blows up. makes it worth the 3 clips of ammo you used to kill the prick)

After a time we realised "hey, lets try ranked so we can actually unlock some of these skins and not all be the same bald white guy!" so we did, and were appalled to discover the exclusion of a server browser, and the matchmaking system is horrible, FUCKING HORRIBLE!!!! combine this that even now that the beta of the dedicated server software is out, you can only and I mean ONLY play ranked matches via P2P..this truly leaves me with a sad face, you must choose between playable servers, or dying from laggy stealth kill trains until you unlock skins. After this dissapointment (I will admit we did have a couple of decent ranked matches, by purely the chance we had people who didn't lag or leave straight away) we finally decided to try our hands at the Survival mode. Now it's not bad, but not good either. Only 2 levels, one of which is a big square with pillars..i mean..who the fuck holds up in a big fucking dark square with fucking pillars everywhere? you could have at least put a door to show how the fuck we got in there even if you kept it locked. the difficulty curve of the waves increases like a bitch, we found it quite hard to get past wave 5. So at least we liked the challenge, even if it did lack a "Fall back into the compound!" scenario. In the end people left the LAN satisfied, but only because we had enough people to enjoy it over lan, and we actually tried to use the other weapons beside the "E" button. but I can only imagine the sorrow anyone playing solely online must feel. Later that week I played through the single player campaign, the difficulty was shoddy at best, nigh impossible for Marine on hard, but nightmare for Alien and Predator was a cakewalk (see: E button) the Alien campaign was beyond dissapointingly short. Though the story arc over the three was done well and leads it open to an expansion or sequel, providing shit is done right down the line. I believe rebellion have indeed "fucked the pooch" on this one, even the inclusion of dedicated software in its BETA several weeks down the track has proved too little too late, and I for one believe this suffered more from poor developer decisions and what felt like a lack of budget than anything else, what could have so easily been so much more has my vote for "Dissapointment of the Year" award. Truly my epeen went unsatisfied.


Well after a much longer than anticipated game review (or just bitching, oh wait thats what reviewers do these days unless your under gamespys payroll!) I bid all you scrubs farewell and whatnot. May the gods of pantslessness watch over you...also cocks.

Quilled electronically by the Dungeon Master of your hearts

Zenhurak - "for the lolz"