Dead Robot The space between gay and straight, stupid and smart.

Steam Gets It. You Can Too.

Half Life 2, that is!

Thank god for Steam/Valve opening up all these games for the Mac. Jobs may not be impressed with gaming on Macs, but I certainly am.

How To Make SharkBoy Squeal

Easy! Just show him this video:

(At 1:45, is that a homage to Gay Tony??)

Heavy, Heavy Rain

Pores and mores!

Will the movie theatre experience/medium die? Will video games erode and ingratiate themselves into the mass market that Hollywood has taken a century to create? Will we be "playing" movies in the future?

What do I look like, some sort of turban wearing, fair ground, side show seer? I don't know! I will venture to say that I am currently moving into a deep fascination with open-ended, non-linear video games, the ones that play very much like a movie, interspersed with game elements, resulting in multiple endings. I've noticed that my most satisfying game experiences come from these kinds of games - Silent Hill, BioShock (One and Two) and even FallOut 3. All these games have open-ended game play where the outcome of the game might be different due to certain choices made through the game.

I've just finished Heavy Rain last night and I have to say it's the closest to actually playing a movie I've ever experienced. Every piece of literature that has been written about this game boasts that every choice, every conversation, every missed step (or decisive move) ripples out to the end result of the game. I ran through the game from Wednesday night and had finished it within a few hours over these 4 nights so the game isn't a 20 hour epic like the others I've mentioned, since the designers have to cram all the different endings/scenarios, unused, into one disk. While the shortened game-play is an obvious limitation to this kind of genre and it's hardware, HR makes up for it by engaging you with such heavy atmosphere that you'll swear David Fincher himself had a hand in creating this game. Armed with the knowledge that I could have saved "this person" or wound up with a different result by not "doing this action" I'm more invested to re-play it, changing my direction.

After all this gushing, I have to say the game isn't perfect. Moving the character involves pressing the R2 trigger and the left analog stick, which results in weird pirouettes and filthy swearing shouting at the screen when the character doesn't stop in the place where you want them to go. Camera angles can be changed by a press of a button and I found myself forgetting this fact and probably missing a clue here and there. Choosing what the character is thinking as they're walking through a crime scene is a bit distracting and really should be shunted to slower moments within the action. Minigames require that you mash a series of buttons in accordance with what's on the screen: to climb a muddy embankment you need to press and hold the Square, the Triangle, the R2 trigger and then the R1 button in succession. Different, but fun, nonetheless.

Overall, I'm impressed. If this is the future of entertainment, the evolution of movies, then I welcome it.

Fallout: New Vegas

Uni-balanced Robots with pincey pincher thingys?! I'm so there!

A Model Salarian

I'm now at hour 13 of Mass Effect 2 and it just threw me a curve ball. My favorite character of the game, a speed talking, nerdy alien named Mordin reveals his love for showtunes:

Gotta love the big awkward pause at the end.

Let’s Talk About Our Feel-HEADSHOT!

You looked hotter on Facebook.

I'm about 5-6 hours into Mass Effect 2 and I'm 1 part amazed and 1 part bewildered.

If you haven't heard, ME2 is an "open sandbox" game that runs a lot like one of those "Choose Your Adventure" kind of books - You remember them as a teen: reading along, your character encounters a fork in the plot. Do you... "Go to page 23 if you want your character to pick the glowing fruit of STIs or choose page 45 if you want him to slay the dragon of apathy. Maybe."

The game is Mass-ive (See? See that?) with controls and modifiers that affect the game outcome, popping out of the ying yang, controlled by multiple button mashing. Literally everything in this game can either be customized or upgraded as you play long ensuring OCD kids will keep their asses on couches during game play. As example you start the game by having your lead character undergo facial reconstruction after a vicious battle, effectively letting you off the hook for trying to remember the exact eyebrow arch you designed for your character in Mass Effect 1 (though it does let you import your construct if you've played the previous game). Regardless, things like this make me take notice as to how good the game design is.

Speaking of design, the characters are rendered so sharply your eyes will bleed. I can only describe the prop/alien design as being rather satisfying - when aliens are introduced, something inside me says "Wicked! That's exactly how I'd render it!" (like I could operate 3D Studio Max...pffft). The look of the game resembles those 70s style impressionist science fiction artists, rendered in three dimensions.

However...

The game play is like watching paint dry after you blasted a wall with the coolest high pressure paint shooter, evar. I've never experienced more hurkeyjerky game play flow. One second you're killing 6 eyed aliens with impunity and then suddenly you're stopping to chat with survivors, choosing a multitude of story branches through real-time character conversation options. It's like practicing yoga with a room full of really angry pitbulls effected with narcolepsy.

And what kills me the most while I'm trying to remember how to call up weapons menus (LT+A button, rotate Left stick, Press A to choose, and *PEW PEW*!! Oh CRAP!) is that you're thrown so many story options at once, trying to remember to complete them all gets me stressed out a bit.

So I'm torn. Much like Borderlands, ME2 looks amazing but the game play has massive valleys of meh so deep it divides my geek-gasm in twain.

Would You Kindly Watch This BioShock2 Trailer?

(Via GayGamer)