So, I've been doing this since the soft relaunch of Ranking of Fighters earlier this year, and I think now with some minor discrepancies, I figure it's worth sharing to the world.

Here's the list, current as of episode 0021 (9/10/2018). I try to keep it accurate to the show, but it seems they've made a few mistakes, such as accidentally swapping Battle Fantasia and KOF '94, as well as Sonic the Fighters being the worst fighting game compared to Deadliest Warrior: Legends.

There's also tabs that show where the games have been standing show-by-show, as well as some interesting records. Did you know they've ranked 11 PS1 fighters, yet only one Saturn fighter?

I'm doing this also so members of the staff can see the errors in their mistakes so the next ROF episode has the correct rankings, as they should be. I mean, even Jeff had to take Sonic the Fighters out of consideration if it was better/worse than Doomsday Warrior. Someone's gotta realize something ain't right here.

I don't know how many read my list of conquered games, but I noticed a strange trend in the games I've beaten lately: Doom, Doom II, Wolfenstein 3D, Dark Forces, Quake...

Somehow I got myself into a throwback FPS kick this month. Some of these games like Doom, Wolfenstein and Quake hold special memories to me since I was a kid. Playing lots of the shareware versions of these games and having a blast. I decided to randomly pick up Ultimate Doom on late February, and then it kinda snowballed from there.

However, there was one game that really caught my interest more than the greats, and I never thought I'd like it considering I don't care much for the source material, but I really liked Star Wars: Dark Forces.

I picked up a bunch of the Star Wars FPSes on a Steam sale many months back, and I decided to pick up Dark Forces since I was on a retro FPS kick. Man. This game is awesome for many reasons. Mainly because it did some cool things that not many FPSes were doing at the time, like being in a 3D space, interesting puzzles, and taking the Star Wars franchise and somehow making it into a good FPS without having to rely on using lightsabers or the Force all the time. (I heard they changed that in Dark Forces 2, which I hope is just as good.)

However, the game is balls hard on later levels. The game doesn't use a quicksave/load function, opting for extra lives and checkpoints. It takes a little getting used to, but nothing sucks more than dying right at the end of a stage and having to redo about 20-30 minutes of progress. Eventually after going through the complex and elaborate final level only to die right at the last level, I kicked it down to Easy. It's a pretty tough game.

If you haven't played it, you should. You don't even have to be a Star Wars fan to understand what's going on. Oh yeah, there's one more cool thing about it:

The other retro FPS I was playing was Serious Sam 2. It was on sale, and it recently got a Steamworks conversion about ten years after release. I heard great things about the first and second encounters, even Serious Sam 3, but somehow this one got put by the wayside by fans. I wondered why.

I played through the whole campaign in co-op, because it feels weird to play Serious Sam solo. It's style and gameplay is built for co-op fun, and I fully believe any game, no matter how mediocre, is fun even in co-op. Then as me and my buddies played along, it became obvious why.

This game is very random. The first few levels take you through an island place, then you're suddenly in a small garden (shown left). Eventually go to deserts, stereotypical asian lands, volcanic worlds, ice worlds, futuristic space worlds, and so on. While the locations are diverse, it doesn't really fit well together. Unless the cutscenes explain everything, which are disabled in co-op except for the ending cinematic.

Croteam also tried to experiment with interesting mechanics. There's several vehicle sections, rail shooter levels, item hunts and defending areas. Of course, there's the usual big-ass boss fight, but it seems lots of members at Croteam had ideas, and rather than stick with one that could make Sam II interesting, they threw them all in. There's a lot of strange gimmicks, like the ice world requiring you to be near heat sources otherwise you lose health, or a later stage where suddenly you in a game show arena fighting for your life.

In addition, there's a lot of strange weaponry. A lot of the weapons are futuristic like the weird rotating barrel shotgun and rocket launcher, but then you have space Uzis, miniguns, and Sam's default revolvers. The whole game is confusing, and it's a shame.

On the bright side, we're playing through Serious Sam 3 now, and while it's a bit more corridor-shooter than previous Sam games, it's a lot, lot better than this. Now I totally understand why people forgot about Serious Sam II: It's kinda crap.

I really wanted to get into some other old-school FPSes like Heretic and Hexen, but since March is just about over, I might actually go back to playing normal games again so I can tackle my large and burgeoning backlog.

On the bright side, I did try a few games like Dead Rising 2 and Titan Attacks, but I haven't played either enough to really give good enough thoughts on them yet. If only the co-op worked fine in DR2 and didn't disconnect me and my friend constantly...

Yesterday, I decided to casually watch a tournament for the humans vs monster game Evolve. I’ve watched tournaments before, many Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournaments, an International or two, but this one was different.

This one was called “The CHAPPiE Challenge,” sponsored by the upcoming movie of the same name coming out in theaters this week. A standard tournament for Evolve where a team of four will fight one chosen player from the other team as the monster, and either the objective must be completed by the monster or the monster must be defeated by the humans. Winning team nets $15,000, which is not bad for a tournament.

(As for Evolve the game, I thought it seemed interesting until the whole fiasco involving the many editions and DLC packs the game has. That, it didn’t seem like it was worth the $60 price tag to me, and they didn’t even bother making a five-pack for the PC version.)

However, something that they were advertising really put me off. The winning team would not only win the cash prize, but would do one final match with “CHAPPiE” himself. Naturally it wasn't the robot from the movie, but merely a developer of the game playing as him, with occasional cuts of CHAPPiE taunting or getting angry.

What makes this especially weird is how they played this off as it was really happening. CHAPPiE was there and fighting against these actual people, he only knew what he learned of the game from “playing it for a few hours,” that sort of thing. In-between games they were doing trailers and featurettes for the movie. This tournament was clearly a blatant advertisement for CHAPPiE, with Evolve taking a backseat for this silly event.

Now, I’m used to sponsored events. CS:GO tournaments are always advertised by online casinos, snack chips and Razer gaming hardware. I fully expect a sporting event, whether it be something like Football or Baseball; or an eSports event like this to have corporate sponsorship of some fashion. But Evolve and “The CHAPPiE Challenge” just felt incredibly gross for me to watch, even from a spectator’s point of view.

Had they omitted the dumb fight against CHAPPiE, I would've been okay with it since then it would be a standard tournament. But they pushed it just over that line that it just felt weird to me. Am I the only one who thinks this, or am I just old and jaded?

Hey, GB community. I know we don't talk much (sorry!), but I think you guys are cool dudes. So I'm gonna try to post a bit more on here.

So I've been playing games in January, most of them pretty old, but it's been a nice mix of stuff. Some of these I beat, others I poked around in, and some are strictly multiplayer affairs. Here's how I feel about them in a few paragraphs each. I'll also start putting some of these in my "Conquered Games" list that I've been doing for years since I beat a few of these.

Let's see what I played....

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

This has been my “go-to” game for the past few months. I've been occasionally participating in the Operation Vanguard “DLC”, where you can play six community maps and complete contracts to unlock bonus gun skins or crates. (I have 18 of the damn crates this whole operation!)

Thankfully you don't need to pay the $6 to play the maps, they're free to play and occasionally the Vanguard cases drop while in game, so it's really only there if you wanna have something to do besides play loads of Competitive Dust II.

I used to play a lot of CS during the pre-Steam and early Steam days, and even bought the mediocre Condition Zero for $40 just to play Counter-Strike: Source early. I still enjoy CS, and CSGO is a pretty solid game in spite of the mixed opinions of the community.

Borderlands 2

I've been tackling the game's DLC with friends lately. We finished Captain Scarlett late last year, quashed Mr. Torgue's Campaign of Carnage, played a little of Sir Hammerlock's Hunt before going over to Assault on Dragon Keep instead.

Borderlands as a game is a fairly average Diablo-like with shooter elements. As you finish missions, you get better guns, better shields, better powerups, and eventually level up your dude so you can be more powerful. I firmly believe any game is more fun in co-op, even the most mediocre ones, and Borderlands 2 is no exception.

I don't quite get the hate for the writing, though. Mr. Torgue is funny as hell, Tiny Tina isn't nearly as annoying as everyone makes her out to be, and at times it likes poking fun at itself and other game tropes, especially during the Assault at Dragon Keep DLC. I do want to finish all the DLC and tackle the Headhunter missions so I can put this game to bed and eventually play Pre-Sequel before the next big Borderlands game hits.

Trackmania 2: Stadium

I played Trackmania Stadium Forever many many years ago, and it was love it or hate it for me. I was annoyed I wasn't passing races, but I couldn't stop playing. It was like a drug. Trackmania 2 is similar but pushes Nadeo's Maniaplanet system, making it a general hub for all the Mania games. It's a shame that the three TM2 environments (Stadium, Canyon and Valley) are basically three separate games and you can't mix and match between servers. It's a bit annoying, but not a real dealbreaker.

If you never played Trackmania, give it a spin. For a limited time, Nadeo made it so you can play Trackmania 2 Stadium and Shootmania Storm free in its entirety until April, and Trackmania 2 Canyon/Valley in a more limited capacity. I'm enjoying the free period, but I'd certainly buy this if given the opportunity.

Ziggurat

It's like if The Binding of Isaac had sex with Heretic/Hexen and made this. It's a procedurally generated shooter where you're given characters and weapons to mess with, and fight demons with magical spells and powers. As you progress, you can unlock upgrades like more health, damaging barrels give you health, all that jazz. Since it's similar to Rogue “lites”, expect to die a lot and make only minimal progress until the RNG gods come in and cut you some slack enough to conquer the enemies with ease.

The only other complaints are the enemy variety and how taking damage, no matter how much, acts like you took heavy damage or you're on the brink of death. I hope they fix that and maybe bring some more locales to mess around in.

Ziggurat isn't quite amazing, but for $7.50 I can't complain too much.

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light

I heard really good things about this one. An isometic perspective co-operative action game in which both characters have their strengths and weaknesses. It's got pure action much akin to a twin-stick shooter, but it has a lot of puzzle solving.

Me and a friend of mine went through the entire game in co-op, and there were a lot of headscratching puzzles and frustrating parts, and pure speed sections that were quite annoying to play through. It was really weird to hear Totec and Xototl voiced by Jim Cummings of all people, and I think that was a bad casting decision.

The best part about Guardian of Light is how they have separate character DLC. Kane & Lynch as well as Raziel and Kane from Legacy of Kain are available as playable characters, replacing Lara and Totec. The gameplay is still the same – One has a grapping hook, the other has a shield and spear – but the dialogue between the characters is different, where Kane & Lynch have truckloads of swear words (granted they're censored completely considering this is a T-rated game).

I heard Temple of Osiris is a good sequel but not nearly as amazing as Guardian of Light. Still wanna get that, though. Guardian of Light is recommended, definitely.

Duty Calls

I wrote about this at length on the Secret Area, my goofy random games blog. It's a pretty spot on Call of Duty parody that was right place, right time. CliffyB was a sneaky bastard.

Gauntlet (2014)

Disclaimer: I had never played a Gauntlet game. Never touched the original, never tried the 3D spinoffs like Dark Legacy. So I came into this only knowing some stuff about it.

I had some dumb fun with new Gauntlet. Each class has a unique playstyle that's kinda fun. Warrior's pure action, Valkyrie is more defensive with shields, Wizard is a magic combo sort of guy, and Elf is the obligatory twin-stick shooter part.

New Gauntlet is very simplified. Each class's features are pretty much laid out from the get go, special powerups are universal and not unique to each class, and there's only three chapters of missions to play through. What really makes it nice and interesting is that every time you do something, from killing enemies, to getting gold, to even shooting food, it counts towards a stat that may give you more gold, more damage, etc.

Basically new Gauntlet is almost arcade-like in nature. It's built for replaying over and over again. Alas, most of my friends weren't nearly as impressed and abandoned it after beating the game once. It's a shame too, because I thought its arcadey nature made it a good pick up and play sort of game.

I'm hoping that WB Games and Arrowhead keep releasing new content for Gauntlet. Ideally I'd like to see new environments outside of the Colosseum stuff, which is basically horde mode. New classes are a take it or leave it sort of thing, but I certainly am not paying $5 for a Necromancer character. I want new areas to roam around in and complete instead.

FORCED

After playing new Gauntlet, my friends recommended this, which is similar in scope – a four player class-based co-operative medieval game – but plays somewhat differently.

Players in Forced can choose classes before any mission, unlike new Gauntlet where you have to do that before you get in the game. Completing certain goals, like beating the stage under a certain time limit or beating a miniboss under certain conditions give you gems where you can unlock an additional skill or power for your classes.

There's a lot more strategy to Forced. For one, there's always a magical orb that players can ping to a certain target, like killing a monster spawner, or lighting up torches. It's a bit more puzzle-like in that regard.

I wanna write more about Forced and Gauntlet in depth on the Secret Area sometime, just need to coax my friends into playing Forced a bit more to do it.

CTU Marine Sharpshooter

I also talked about this on the Secret Area. A budget military FPS made by a developer notorious for bad budget military FPSes, such as Navy Seals: Weapons of Mass Destruction. This game was frustrating, and totally unrewarding. But it's a budget FPS, I had my expectations set very low.

The Darkness II

This game ended up being the first game I beat this year, by plowing through the game's co-op mode with friends in a short hour and a half. Then I hopped into the equally short campaign and started shooting dudes while occasionally grabbing enemies to replenish health or use as a shield.

I didn't play the original Darkness, so I can only gleam what the series is like from this game. The game rewards the player for doing unique tricks like killing enemies with spikes or car doors, or using your Darkness powers to wreck whole rooms. Eventually you can spend these Darkness points on upgrading Jackie, such as giving him deadlier bullets while in the dark, or having swarms or gun channeling last longer. In a way, this game reminds me of Bulletstorm's Skillshot system, in which a lot of the same rules apply.

The Darkness II is a very underrated gem. It's not a classic, and for a game based on a licensed title it's merely above average. But I really enjoyed this game. We'll never get a Darkness III, but I totally wouldn't mind playing another “score attack” sort of shooter.

Speaking of co-op, my friends and I need to hop back in and finish the Hit List. Because I had fun with the co-op, where each character had a unique Darkness weapon.

For the first month of the year, the games I played were pretty diverse. Though, I do need to stop buying games like Chrome, Fable III and Legendary and, y'know, actually play them. :P

Also, I apologize for some of the shameless plugging for my stuff. I'll try to minimize that in the future.

Alternate title: Jason Brody's transformation from party animal to jungle psychopath.

Man, the Far Cry games have gone through this weird identity crisis over the years. The first game was a mostly linear, extremely difficult action game with aliens, Far Cry Instincts made your character become a mutated alien with superpowers, and Far Cry 2 was a promising game with too many stupid mechanics and probably the dumbest story to come out of a big-budget action game. To this day, I still don't understand why people praise Far Cry 2 to the high heavens.

But Far Cry 3 has nothing to do with the others. Seems to be par for the course for Ubisoft: Instead of making a cohesive story/saga with the series, just make them like Call of Duty games where they're mostly standalone and different, with the only similarity being a jungle theme. It seems to be working for them.

Far Cry 3 was one of my many purchases during the Steam Summer Sale this year (along with Tomb Raider, Dark Souls, the BioShock trilogy...), and I bought it knowing that after the disappointment of Far Cry 2 that it could only get better from here.

Warning: Minor plot spoilers within.

When I started Far Cry 3, I was welcomed to a video montage of a bunch of dudes partying out on some island, having fun and being idiots, all set the tune to M.I.A.'s Paper Planes. It's like something out of a horror movie. Then it cuts away to our hero Jason being captured with his brother Grant, who eventually escape, but not without the villain Vaas deciding to kill Grant and leave poor Jason fighting for his life. Afterwards, you're found by a guy named Dennis, who's part of this jungle tribe called the Rakyat and then you go through the steps of trying to save everyone and get out of the island alive. Eventually it leads to a revenge plot, where Jason eventually wants to kill Vaas and his boss Hoyt while helping the Rakyat tribe.

While Far Cry 3 does share a few elements from 2, such as the free-roaming world, outposts, and fire propagation, it got rid of the bullshit that made the game annoying: No longer having to find malaria medicine, outposts can be cleared for XP and convenient fast travel with no respawning enemies, no bullshit faction trust that meant nothing story-wise, and side missions that are actually useful. It's got the trappings of a modern open-world action game, basically.

In addition to killing dudes, Far Cry 3 added stuff like skinning animals and cutting plants to make materials. I wonder if the designers were influenced by Red Dead Redemption, because that's what I immediately thought of while doing most of this, complete with the protagonist acknowledging that skinning animals is disgusting but he does it anyway. When you skin animals, you can use their skins to upgrade everything from how much ammo you can carry to how big your wallet is. It is essential to do the “Path of the Hunter” side quests so you can get some of these upgrades conveniently. By the time I got to the other island, I had pretty much crafted everything and didn't need to find any more animals save for the last few Path of the Hunter missions I had to do, which were for pretty crappy rewards.

As for the plants, you use them to craft syringes. Some are useful (healing, fireproof, being able to stay underwater for longer), others are only effective for hunting (repellent, increased damage to animals, know where animals are), whereas two of the syringes are literally “god mode” and “one hit kills.” With so much fauna in the world, it's easy to craft a whole bunch of these syringes and basically be unstoppable. I like the idea, just not the implementation: there's two you can add to quickly use at any time with the 7 or 8 key, or you can use them in the crafting menu which is inconvenient. I'd rather there have been a quick use menu, as well as a quicker way to craft the syringes I wanted to use.

As for the story, very few games ever tackle having a protagonist who isn't already a military mercenary do all the killing. I can applaud Ubisoft for at least trying with Jason Brody. In the first few minutes of the game, you have a fight with a knife-wielding guard who you plunge the knife into, which Jason panics, realizing he just killed a man for the first time in his life. Jason also gets hesitant over doing things like killing people and skinning animals in the beginning, which at least makes him somewhat human.

Alas, this doesn't last, because once you get further into the game, Jason starts becoming just as bad as the people he's fighting against. I won't spoil exact details, but Jason decides to put his trust in working with the Rakyat and the mercenaries on the island instead of the friends he has to save. It doesn't help that the game exacerbates this problem by adding challenges and skills that further convert Jason into this Rambo-like character, such as giving you takedowns where you can chain kill enemies or pull the pin on an enemy's grenade, or the “Trials of the Rakyat” which are basically score attacks where you're killing swaths of enemies for leaderboard superiority. It's a weird disconnect, and while Ubisoft does acknowledge Jason's quest of being a jungle warrior towards the final story missions of the game, it doesn't fix the inconsistent tone.

Tech-wise, this game screams “console port.” The radial menu is clearly meant for a 360 game pad, and instead of having multiple keys for the different purposes, you have to hold the use key (E) to do everything. With having one key have multiple purposes, it does lead to many unintentional deaths. (Because I totally wanted Jason to hop over the top of the radio tower and fall to his death instead of grabbing the zipline above him.) It doesn't help this game also throws quick-time events at many opportunities, switching you between mashing E, Spacebar or Control while occasionally hitting the mouse buttons to do things. There's also the map bound on a key that's hard to reach in normal play (M instead of the unused TAB), among other things. I know the 360 and PS3 makes beaucoup bucks for publishers like Ubisoft, but at least make your PC port not feel like you slapped on mouse and keyboard controls to a game built on the 360. Despite that, the game looks gorgeous and has fairly robust graphic settings. It's definitely a looker if you got the PC to handle it.

Far Cry 3 is also buggy at times. When doing Path of the Hunter missions, there are times where I swapped my flamethrower with the bow that the mission required, but when I opened the radial menu to check what syringes I had equipped, it switched back to the flamethrower I previously tossed, causing the bow to disappear. I had to restart the mission to get the bow back. It was either that or said mission required weapon somehow appearing in my arsenal while I was trying to clear an outpost, or appearing while doing a story mission. Yeah, I totally wanted to toss my cool assault rifle for a bow, thanks Ubisoft.

As for multiplayer, I only dabbled in co-op with some friends. I liked the more team-focused action, but didn't like how it was disconnected from the main story. I wouldn't mind Ubisoft making a standalone Far Cry co-op game with the unique characters they made for this. I *am* a sucker for co-operative games like Borderlands 2, Killing Floor and Payday 2. I can't say anything about the regular multiplayer, but I assume it ticks all the boxes of a modern-day multiplayer focused shooter.

Other than that, Far Cry 3 is a first-person open world action game set in a jungle where you stop evil men doing bad things while saving your friends. I paid $7.50 for this during the Steam sale, and it's a fairly competent action game. Better than FC2 by a long shot, but hardly the best game out there. It does make me mildly interested in Far Cry 4, though I hope they actually build the PC version from the ground up and not do some dumb “best on PlayStation 4” or some bullshit marketing thing like that.

IF I HAD TO SCORE THIS: From the average gameplay to the weird bugs and the tonal shift, I think this is about a 6, maybe a 7. There's not much here that makes it stand out from the others.

Other random observations:

• I wonder if Far Cry 3 was the trendsetter for the “year of the bow” that permeated a lot of games in 2013. It's a damn shame the bow is useless in this game, though.
• If you're a completionist, Ubisoft made most of the collectables reasonable. Stuff like memory cards and lost letters are easy to find and collect, and there's not a lot of outposts, radio towers or side missions to do. The only collectable they screwed up on were the relics, where there's 120 of them strewn all around the islands. Funny thing is, even they realized how worthless they were because there is an achievement is for finding only half of the relics, and not one for finding them all.
• You get XP and money handed to you like candy. Some of the special takedowns give you ridiculous amounts of XP (up to 500-750XP per kill), and there's loads of money everywhere. By the time I got towards the last few missions, I had fully maxed out everything, and still had plenty of money to spare. (Here's a challenge I thought up: Try to play through the game doing just the story missions and none of the side stuff. I wonder how much progress you could make.)
• There's dumb bullshit stealth segments where you have to walk past enemies while getting to an objective, where being spotted counts as an instant mission failure. Considering this is from the same company that brought us Splinter Cell, this makes no damn sense, plus these kind of stealth missions have never, ever been fun.
• Vaas is one of the more underrated shooter villains, his crazy demeanor and attitude fits perfectly with the crazy jungle atmosphere. (It's a shame he's replaced by some asshole in a purple suit halfway through the game...)
• On a side note: uPlay seems real useless. One time I had the game constantly nagging to check the "Far Cry 3 servers" while playing single player, presumably to update some things. It kept checking every few minutes, and there was no way to cancel it or go into an "offline mode." The only upsides uPlay has are redeeming credits for bonus content, and being able to stream through Twitch. Why Steam hasn't done the "stream your games to the internet" thing is beyond me.
• This is a problem not just with Far Cry 3, but with many other games over the past few years: Shorten your freakin' credit sequences already! FC3's clocks in at 25 minutes, and it's ridiculous to have such long credits. Can't we take a few pointers from movies and make them short and sweet, please?

Hey GB. I don't post often, but I thought it'd be interesting to post a video I made a few weeks ago about a Mortal Kombat controller I got. For $3, hours of headache and learning how to take apart things the hard way, all culminated in this.

Is there any kind of controllers you have that are bad/good/worse?

I wrote a dumb thing about Snoop Dogg in video games. Because I could. I was honestly expecting to have this done by the time Way of the Dogg came out, but things came up.

I don't know if anyone really reads these blog entries. I like Giant Bomb, but I don't know if I can engage in the community, I've always had difficulty with being a part of certain communities.

Props to Ryan for introducing me to Dogg's Turismo 3. It's the dumbest song I've heard in a while.

Deus Ex is a pretty awesome game. The game is so good that it has a thing called the "Deus Ex Effect," in which if anyone talks about, mentions, or waxes nostalgic about the first Deus Ex, there is someone bound to grab their CDs and reinstall, or buy it off Steam.

Deus Ex is great because it gives choice, and a lot of it. You can kill everything in sight. Go for the pacifist approach and avoid killing anyone. Pull out your Prod Charger and knock every enemy unconscious. This was also apparent in every single level, even the last one at Area 51 has choices in some way.

There is one thing I have to knock about it, and that's the combat. I played it on Realistic, and it was a pain to have an enemy get a lucky hit in the torso or head and kill me outright, negating my progress a few times. I think if you're gonna tackle this game, play it on Easy or Normal. You're here for the choices, the experiences, and the strategies, shooting and stabbing dudes is not what makes this game great.

Now that I finished this, I might actually crack open my copy of Human Revolution just to see if Eidos was able to duplicate that formula even without having Warren Spector or Harvey Smith. Maybe I'll play that fanmade DX mod called "The Nameless Mod." Maybe I'll actually try out Invisible War. Okay, I'm kidding on the last one.

Deus Ex is a game I replay almost every year, because I still find new things about it, including strategies and easter eggs. That, and this old classic.

I hope the Deus Ex effect is happening to you. You can thank me later. Make sure you get past Liberty Island, though. The game has such a strong beginning that it makes the rest of the game, even the duller parts like some of New York and Hong Kong seem less cool in comparison. Now to tackle games actually in my backlog, like Uncharted 3...

I'm still writing stuff on You Found a Secret Area, for those interested. Lately I posted an article about a 1999 Nintendo Power catalog. Why? Because I can. I usually hate advertising my blog on places like this, because I feel like I'm just using Giant Bomb to spam my stuff. Hopefully it's just me being paranoid...

I'm gonna be honest, E3 didn't really wow me too much. Yeah, hey, the Wii U looks pretty cool and Ubisoft's Zombi U might be a cool game provided it isn't like Red Steel.

Perhaps this is just me, but this year was the year of pessimism. Every game that got featured was nothing but hatred and depression, people not really getting "hyped" for anything except for maybe Watch Dogs, and just an overall lackluster feeling all around E3. That's not to say it's not warranted -- I can understand being sick of the Medal of Honor/COD types -- but some of the games like Halo 4 and a handful of the Wii U offerings seemed cool. Maybe not "OMFG GOTF," but still pretty darn cool.

It's clear we're at that point in the generation where it's getting long in the tooth. Here's hoping we see new Xboxes and PlayStations announced by next year. At least could we try to be somewhat happy about video games in spite of this year's showing? All the depressing comments made ME depressed.

Hello, all 15 of you whom actually follow me in some way. I guess I should give you guys an update.

So I started a new games-oriented blog called You Found a Secret! which talks about obscure gaming crap. My most recent article is one about budget game title WWII: Iwo Jima. I've been posting other things there, so give it a look.

I mentioned this in the past and it bears repeating: There's so many freakin' sites with a blog function that I can't post the same thing to every spot. If there was a mass blogging program that could make me mass post this to every major gaming site, I'd use that instead. But alas, that has yet to be made, so here you go. That's why I don't post much here.