Well, you could read about it before, but never like this! For your viewing pleasure I put all three impressions on one page (linked, of course). Check it out! 
 

• Mass Effect 3
• Dead Island
• Batman: Arkham City 
• The Darkness II 
• SSX

The trilogy of Comic Con blogs ends with this one, loyal readers, and boy is it a doozy. With its ads adorning everything from skyscrapers to banners, its merchandise spawning toys and comics, and its panel drawing a whole heck of a lot of people, Batman: Arkham City had a pretty big presence at the show. And why shouldn't it? The previous game was a perfect example of what a comic book game should be: dedicated to the comic book's fiction, not the movie's, with innovative and fun combat and one hell of a personal story. The sequel looks to continue this trend of excellence, and the demo I played was a blast.

Then why didn't it blow me away? Maybe it was a case of overblown expectations. Maybe the demo didn't fully showcase what the full game has to offer. Maybe I played the demo wrong. Either way, I expected it to be an evolution over Arkham Asylum, a Red Dead Redemption to the originals Red Dead Revolver.

What it turned out to be was just a lot more Arkham Asylum. Which isn't a bad thing by any means! Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed Asylum, but I guess I expected the flow of the game to be a bit different. It still follows the basic pattern of walk into a large room/plaza, battle some dudes, go inside, solve puzzles/fight more dudes, go outside, go somewhere else, see the Joker do some craziness, ect. Maybe they're sticking it safe with the demo, but in any case I was a bit underwhelmed that they didn't take more advantage of their larger open environment. Asylum's world was pretty big too, remember.

But even if it's not a GTA2 to GTA3 thing, this is still the Batman we know and love. The combat's great - it hasn't changed - the detective stuff is still a strangely fun pixel hunt, and the traversal is better than ever. Soaring between narrow alleyways and over rooftops is an absolute joy, and grapple-hooking to ledges and whatnot is as cool as it used to be. The mission design also seems to have expanded somewhat, with, if the demo is any indication, lots of time for mid-mission traversal of the city itself. And what a city it is! Arkham Asylum was one of the best looking games when it came out (and still looks great), and Arkham City looks even better. The grimy, rainslicked streets and dramatic sky really ram home that "Batman" feel, and although Catwoman sounds like she's trying way too hard to sound both tough and sexy at the same time the rest of the voice crew is pretty fantastic.

One interesting thing I found going around the demo as a button of the ground, enrgaved with a giant green ? and flanked by two baddies. The baddies went down easy, the buttom less so. I stood on it for a few and nothing happened. Also, I spied a few Riddler ? floating around the enviroment, though I didn't have time to check them out. The things they're doing with the Riddler Challenges from the last game seem very interesting, but, once again, they weren't immediatly present in the demo.

I think this game will be better than its demo. I do. And, as we know, you can't judge a game by its demo. This demo, however, did a poor job in showing one what the final game would be like, and if Rocksteady would do good on its lofty ambitions.

So yesterday I posted  a fun little blog about my experience waiting for and eventually playing Mass Effect 3, but that stellar piece of craft was not the only game I played at Comic Con! Not even. I also played the long-in-development Dead Island, which is apparently getting released pretty soon. Rejoice? 
 
Hold on to your horses, honcho, because Dead Island is a, let's say, flawed experience. It's got some pretty fundamental problems. Then again, it's also a psuedo-RPG, a four-player-co-op-extravaganza, and a gore-filled splatterfest. And they are zombies. Did I mention that? 
 
The demo I played at Comic Con was a short taste - a five minute taste, to be exact - so obviously I haven't had the time to see how all this stuff pans out in the full game. Also, it's worth mentioning this may have been an older build, and the game certainly hasn't gone gold yet, so there's still time. Still time for what, you ask, feverish. Let's just say that this is the first game I've ever played where I walked away feeling nauseous. 
 
Now, I sat through the demo of Mirror's Edge quite a few times without breaking a sweat, but for some reason the first-person melee combat in Dead Island had my stomach a-rolling. See, each time you swing your weapon, your head bobs. Whenever you get hit, your head bobs. Whenever you throw your weapon, you head bobs. This, on top of an over-sensitive default movement speed, left me disoriented and queasy. It reminded me of what Jeff (or Brad, I can't remember) said in the recent Call of Jaurez: The Cartel quick look: jittery aiming, and sluggish movement. Funny that those two games are developed by the same company, Techland. Hmm.... 
 
Which is sad, because Dead Island looks like it has a lot going for it. The combat, when you're not confused on whats going on, can be satisfying, tactile fun. Watching a zombies head explode like a melon when he hit him with a late-in-the-demo hammer is a joy, and the kick button, mapped to the LB, has a nice crunchy feel to it. You gain xp from every zombie you kill, which then governs what looks to be a pretty extensive skill tree, and soon you're leveling up and battling tougher zombies (who have levels as well). One of the coolest things was the mission structure: you head to the safehouse, where a quest giver then gives you a physical sheet of paper (bloodstained of course) that shows the difficulty, objective, and xp gained from doing the mission. Very MMO like, and I thought it was pretty darn cool. 
 
If only the gameplay could match what surrounded it: a Borderlands-esque escapade in a lovely island getaway, filled with a suspicious number of on-fire zombies and wooden paddles. Lots and lots and lots of wooden paddles. 
 
Oh yea, and those human faces looked HORRIBLE. Just horrible.

Comic Con happened. Well, it's still happening, but after seeing the triple-whammy of Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, and Andy Serkis (some of my biggest heroes) I'm not sure anything could top that. So after I went through post seeing-famous-people-in-the-flesh depression, I wandered over to the Bioware booth in the Hilton Gaslamp and decided that, yea, Mass Effect 3 was worth waiting for. Plus, we all got sweet blow-up Omniblades! Hoorah for stabbing dudes in the face! 
 
Anyway, once I got past the lawn entrance we were ushered up to the main Bioware area, with a stage for events and a long, long, LONG line for ME3. Lucky for me, however, I arrived just in time for Casey Hudson, who's ME's creative director and all around cool dude, to give an onstage demo of the...demo and answer a few question. I got to ask him what his definition of an RPG was (on live TV, no less!) which elicited a pretty interesting answer. The rest of those Q&As are up on Bioware's website under Bioware TV, so check that out if you want some of your non-spoilerly questions answered. 
 
Anyway, after another 2 hours (no joke) I finally got ushered in to the ME3 area (after some Bioware guys were trying desperately to get people to play their Dragon Age 2 dlc demo, to, of course, no avail) and was led through 2 short briefing videos to catch us all up to speed. Interestingly enough, EDI, who presented them, did so in a dossier format a la ME2, which leads me to believe that the fractured dossier style of ME2 is making a return to ME3. Now, to the demo! 
 
One thing that struck me immediately was the new music. The composer on ME1 and 2 got replaced by Clint Mansell, who has did the famous Requiem for a Dream soundtrack, and it shows. The music is more epic, sweeping, and at the same time emotional, though it'll still have a hard time beating the Suicide Mission music from the second game. Beyond that, the demo encourages you to spec out your squad, returning to ME1 style upgrade screen and a few branching paths. It definitely seemed to remedy the problems in ME2, but I didn't have much time to mess around with it as I wanted to get along and start shooting. 
 
Initially when I first saw ME3 demoed, I was skeptical on the new emphasis on making the shooting great, while not really mentioning the story (my favorite part of the games). Well, let me tell you: the shooting in ME3 is leaps and bounds better than ME2, with incredibly satisfying implementation of rumble and a great new sound design. Bioware was working with DICE on the sounds of the guns, and damn it shows. Firing the default assault rifle had a real edge to it now (although I found the submachine gun to be a little whinny). Cover is now more easily gotten around, as handy-dandy holographic arrows now allow you to roll around from cover to cover.  And the new melee stuff looks AWESOME. I played as an adept, and my powered up punch move was a giant telekinetic-infused fist that disintegrated guys left and right (each class has its of special melee animation). 
 
The one detriment found was the much-talked-about gun customization. Now, there wasn't much to customize in the demo, but what was there had such a small impact on the gun I was firing that I wondered why it was even there as an option in the first place. Granted, it did remind me of ME1, but the worser aspects of that game, not the better. 
 
All in all, I came out of there happy and relieved that ME3 still looks, plays, and feels like the Mass Effect we all know and love. The delay looks also to hammer out some rough spots (the frame rate wasn't so hot), and the shooting is definitely better than the series has ever been; now it's just got to deliver in the story area.

I feel like I just stepped out of a half-broken time machine. Instead of depositing me safely in the 1100s so that I could convince Pope Urban II to never do a Crusade, it sputtered and belched black smoke and instead deposited me in the seedy world of 2005, where everything had a weird plastic-like sheen and where mine cart levels were still a-ok. By now you probably guessed: I was playing Duke Nukem Forever, and more specifically, the demo. Now, I have no doubt in my mind that thousands of others everywhere around the world are sharing their thoughts on this bizzare piece of metaware, but I thought I'd add my two cents in anyway, for ego's sake.  
 
The demo starts off in a spa, where Duke can, yes, pee in real time and scribble on white boards. In addition, he can was his hands and dry them on a hand dried! Interactivity! The scribbling on white boards actually yielded some amusing results, as after I erased the whole battle plan the guy near by waxed poetic about Duke in a way I wont spoil (as it was the high point of the whole demo). This environment leads to a large arena with a slightly smaller but still huge alien who proceeds to shoot rockets at you. Good thing Duke has rockets as well. Circle strafe and hammer the trigger until the life bar becomes 0.  Excellent. 
 
After I punted his eyeball for a field goal, I hit another bizzarely long loading screen (this being on the 360) and found myself behind the wheel of the Dukemobile, an oddly proportioned monster truck that looks more like a toy than anything. I got to drive and avoid falling rocks. Excitement! Soon however my gas ran out, and Duke had to resort to running and gunning on foot. Soon I found some beer that made Duke stronger, at the bereft of the screen, which turned into a sickening haze. Edgy! I reached a cave, which had the aforementioned mine cart, and used my sunglasses to see in the dark. Irony! Some mine cart antics later, I was out in the sun and the demo was over. 
 
So once I got the basics off my chest and I'm safely back in 2011, I can begin to compare. It's crazy how far the first person shoot business has come since CoD 2 and its heavily scripted "thrill ride." The days of  circle strafing was over; cover was all, and death was everywhere. You weren't invincible, and to compensate your gun had a wide but precise range. That's the biggest problem I have with Forever; the shooting feels like a bad port job from an early FPS like Quake. It's far too precise. The reticle is tiny, the hit box small, and the aim assist negligible. This late in the console FPS game, I expect at least a little help when shooting; Forever offers none. As such, I can be a few feet away from an enemy, armed with an eviscerating shotgun, and still miss. A first person shooter lives and dies on its shooting; Duke dies. 
 
The design, in general, shares this last-gen thinking. Mine cart levels? Really? This is 2011, people! I thought we got over that obsession. Beyond that, everything from the animation to the battle tactics feels like it was ripped from a dead era which, to its credit, it was. The opening credits display a grand total of four studios who have worked on this game over the years, and damn does it show. Bosses have changed, mostly, since those giant-life-bar days. Action's been sped up. The scale's increased. Duke just can't keep up. 
 
If it had been released when it had been intended to, I have no doubt that Duke Nukem Forever would have been pretty amazing. Now, however, all those years late, it's already-old, a bizzare relic of years past that should show just how far we've come.  
 
That humor, though, is still pretty damn funny.

              It’s been just over a year now since my musical revolution happened. For most of my life I rode with the same three bands: Tool, Disturbed, and System of a Down (if you cringe at these, have faith). I played to the heavy metal crowd, dabbling in Slipknot, God Smack, and all the rest of heavy-hitting mainstream metal. I basked in the pop-punk starlets of Blink 182 and The Offspring, and delighted in the singles from Rage Against the Machine and Rise Against.

              Then something changed. The beginning is easy to find; at a local record store, I picked out both “Crack the Sky” by Mastodon and The Beatles “Best of” Collection from 1967-1970. This was the first time I had ever bought a Beatles record, and, like so many others, it changed my taste in music forever, sending me on a violent, tumultuous journey to find my genre again. Every few months now I have to find a new vice, swinging wildly from Snoop Dogg to Imogen Heap. In this blog I will try to retrace my steps, starting with my first exploration and leading up to what I am listening to now.

              Listening to it now, I hesitate to call it...boring. Because that’s what it feels like, these fourteen months later. It has a slow start until it picks up with “Actor Out of Work,” and then stumbles through a plain of good and not so good tracks. The problem with these dull tracks is that they can be, at times, so floaty and translucent that they’re barely there. Take “Black Rainbow,” for instance, the track after “Actor Out of Work.” While it may have a lot to love up to, it doesn’t even try to match the energy of the latter song as it lulls you to uncaring with soft strokes of the violin until the final buildup of horns and blares. It’s followed by “Laughing with a Mouth of Blood,” which is a fine, sinister track of violins, again, this time slipping and sliding from ear to ear in an excellent fashion.

              Then comes “Marrow,” which is fantastic, enough said. “The Bed” is next, and this is where the album pulls itself again into a bemused state of sleepy boredom. Pianos, violins (again again), war drums, and what sounds like bassoons can’t help just how inarticulate St. Vincent is with her lyrics, how she lets long seconds of bizarre psuedo-buildups petter out into nothing. The last three songs, with the exception of “Just The Same but Brand New” continue this sad trend., with special note to closer “The Sequel,” which is the worst track on the album and simply a drag to get through. But hold up. “Just The Same But Brand New” went unexplained in that last sentence. Let me elaborate. “Just The Same But Brand New” is the best track on the album, hands down. It finally, after so many misfires, captures the twilight beauty that St. Vincent is going for, that dreamlike quality that probes your mind and reminds you of a warm, fuzzy bed in the middle of a forest. “Just The Same” is a triumph, combining all the right pieces to create a deep,moving love song and an enjoyable listening experience (something few and far between on this album).

              So there you have it. My first truly experimental album of my “revolution.” It doesn’t hold us so well, but at the time it was a seminal work for me. So... I’d give it a 4/10. Some really terrific work, but four out of eleven isn’t the greatest, either.

              It’s hard to imagine that it was just four years ago when I, a skinny, pale teenager who didn’t see a whole lot of sun listened to Radiohead’s “In Rainbows”. And I hated it; absolutely hated it. I thought it overly long, boring, and repetitive. Now, as a skinny, pale adult who doesn’t see a whole lot of sun, they’re my favorite band. I’ve got all of their albums (sans the outlier “Pablo Honey”, their first) and seen them twice in concert. I’ve let their wide span of electro-acoustic hymns and bleeps wash over me for many cumulative days. They’re genius; they can do no wrong.

              Or can they?

              The first time I listened to “King of Limbs,” their latest and eighth studio album, I was ready to admit that they had lost it all. The slim, not-even-forty-minute collection of eight floaty, indistinct songs struck me for all the same reasons I hated “In Rainbows” all those years ago. Now I recognize “In Rainbows” as one of my absolute favorite albums, but back then, as a Radiohead virgin (gasp), I thought it was dull. “King of Limbs,” on the first go around, is dull. All the great drum beats Thom Yorke (Radiohead’s main singer and visionary) dreamed up for his solo album “The Eraser” are replaced with streams of unchanging drum machine as music wafts through the background and Yorke croons about sweet nothings. It doesn’t start well either: track one, Bloom, is perhaps the dullest song on the whole album, a repetitive mess of literally nothing. The other tracks are hardly recognizable as Radiohead; even when they experimented with electonica on “Kid A” and piano-driven pop-ballads on “Hail to the Thief,” they still retained that distinct Radiohead flavor, be it from Johnny Greenwood’s stellar guitar work or the cacophony of layers that spread exotic sounds over many levels.

              Compare, for a moment, that opening track Bloom with the opener for “In Rainbows,” 15 Step. 15 Step immediately pulls you in with an infections drum machine beat and Thom Yorke’s hidden vocals. Bloom, on the other hand, opens with a looped harp, followed by looped drum sound, then another and another, growing into something quite different before Mr. Yorke comes in, commanding you to “Open your mouth wide.” Here, he instructs it; with “In Rainbows,” it happened naturally, your jaw already firmly on the floor as 15 Step rocked out of your speakers. The slow nature of the rest on “In Rainbows,” contrast with the almost constant slowness of “King of Limbs” (there are no “rock” songs, per say), is offset by its beautifully emotive lyrics and visuals created by the combination of the entire Radiohead crew; everyone from the guitarist to bassist is given their due somewhere in the album. “King of Limbs,” on the other hand, feels so much more like another solo album for Thom Yorke, as the sounds of the rest of the band are replaced one by one with electronic stand ins. Some songs, such as Give Up the Ghost, were even performed by Thom Yorke, solo; when I saw him at Coachella, he played that song in an encore set, without the band that played with him on the other songs. It begs the question: how much of Radiohead is there actually in there on “King of Limbs?” Are the other band members still there, or is it that after their twenty-five year run Yorke is the only one with enough creative energy still in him?

              The album is not an entire disappointment, however. On subsequent listenings, it has grown on me, and sports a latter half that is much stronger that it’s first four songs. Codex is perhaps the best song on the album, with its somber piano melody and morbid lyrics hearkening back to Pyramid Song of “Amnesiac;” the aforementioned Give Up the Ghost is also excellent, an utterly haunting song where Yorke harmonizes with his looped self and strums an acoustic. These all, however, fall in the latter half of the album (starting with the album’s single, Lotus Flower); the first half is much worse. Most of the opening tracks are simply repetitive slogs through failed experimentation, with Feral offering chopped up sections of vocals cut with what seems like a drum beat to eternity and Morning Mr. Magpie (a title that sounds like a lost Beatles song) repeating its guitar riff over, and over, and over again until all of its charm.

              And yet I cannot stop listening to it. I don’t know why. Maybe I’m hoping that it will suddenly reveal itself as a brilliant piece of artistic exploration, maybe I just like it. But I can’t tell. One day I’ll love it and the next I’ll hate it. In short: if you’re thinking of getting into Radiohead now, as I was four years ago, don’t get “King of Limbs.” Get “In Rainbows.” Get all of Radiohead’s other albums. Listen to them. Enjoy them. Then maybe get “King of Limbs.” Who knows. Maybe you’ll love it.

As I move Steam from one hard drive to another in anticipation for Civilization 5, I thought I'd talk a bit about something that's been on my mind a bit lately. I started playing ME2 again over the weekend (mainly thanks to the high praise rightly heaped on the Shadow Broker expansion) and have come to the conclusion that ME2 is quite possibly the greatest game ever made. What is interesting about this claim, I feel, is that it is amazing for reason that are not exclusive to video games, and yet implements them in a way that only video games can do. Confused? Let me explain.
 
 

The Grand Mass Effect 2 Theorem (Spoilers for the Main Game Follow)

 It's cool now to comment on the subscription price, so here's my two cents. 
  Really, GB commuity? REALLY? It's five dollars. A month. You can buy a chipotle burrito for 6.50, a movie ticket for ten, and a two hour podcast for about one dollar sixty cents a week. Compare.
   Yes, some things that were once free are now not, and yes, that does hurt, but as Ryan said, these guys are independent and like all independent things they need money! I mean, remember the days of magazines? 6 bucks or so a month for far less content than GB offers, no video content, no audio, and no quirky personalities. These people are not made of money. They need it like everyone else. And when any of you are part of, say, a gaming site one day, maybe you'll understand.

Street Fighter 4 WAHOO!