Yes. Everything Is Rubbish.

Back when we saw those Bioshock Infinite trailers of Elizabeth running around with her titties heaved out in a corset, opening open portals to the 80's and using telekinesis to bring together a ball of plates and pottery, we all had a bit of a soft spot for Elizabeth. But once you get to play Bioshock Infinite , you may fall in love with her and become obsessed with finding out just what the deal is with her, her mysterious powers and her finger. Elizabeth's story is tragic. Being locked away in a tower, treated like a guinea pig and being denied a normal life. You develop a strong level of empathy towards Elizabeth before you've even met her, due to what you see along the way left in the wake of those who had met her. So when you finally do get to meet her, what started off as a selfish act to wipe a debt, becomes a selfless act to better her life and her understanding of the world. Bioshock Infinite is pretty much an escort mission - but Elizabeth is so likeable, self su...

I'd never played the original Bioshock . For all of the praise that game received and all of the wonderful things my friends had to say about it, I'd never played it. I didn't even have the slight desire to play it. I'm wary of first person games in general. The last FPS I recall playing thoroughly, enjoying and completing multiple times on various difficulties is Perfect dark . The amazing N64 version. Not that horrid overly specular shined mess released for the Xbox 360. I've not been too enamoured with any FPS which has released since. And 'Yes', that includes Call of duty and Battlefield . They may be part of your holy grail, but there aren't part of mine. I'm just not an FPS type of guy. At least not any more. I like my shit third person. A preference which has become cemented as I've gotten older. But despite my viewpoint preferences, Bioshock Infinite caught my attention in the same way it did everybody else's when this amazing trail...

I've slaughtered thousands of men. Run along the side of a building. Flown on thebacked of some winged thingy. Played cowboy samurai on the top of a moving train. Leapt from missile to missle and sliced a stealth bomber in half and yet...I can't say I'm having fun playing this game. It's difficult to get excited about a game which is going through the motions and throwing you cliché after cliché and doing so with no particular amount of flair or style we haven't seen before. Bayonetta was a complete cliché, but it was fully aware of the fact that it was and this was the charm. Every cut scene, beat down and outlandish physical act from Bayonetta was so over the top and stylish that you couldn't help but become captivated and fall for how ridiculous and self aware the game was. And underneath all of this it had a pretty solid combat system to back itself up. Then you have Rising , which is doing what every other game has done, but about 2 years too late. As the...

Metal Gear Rising was never a game I was going to buy. I can't give concrete reasons as to why. But there was just something about the game that didn't have me overcome with the desire to throw money at it. But a friend of mine kindly gifted me with a copy of it on Friday, so I now have the game. Upon hearing that Platinum games were taking over production of the Rising and seeing the trailer of Raiden running on walls and throwing a Metal Gear Ray with his bare hands, I thought what many did; that this game was going to be a palette swap of Bayonetta . To say the game is just this discredits much of Platinum's work. But even so, it's not vastly far off save for a couple of mechanic changes here and there. I'm not cut up (Geddit!? *Hugh Hefner wink*) about this, as I loved Bayonetta . And the chance to go to town on some bitches as Raiden in cyborg ninja mode is something we all yearned for since witnessing his epic confrontation with Vamp and the Gekko's in ...

After being controversially cut from the first game (much to the dismay of the fangirl and gay community), Male Shepard is able to embark on a romance with Kaidan Alenko in Mass effect 3 . You know I love me some Kaidan, so of course I pursued that n***a like a stalker from the second I saw 'PRESS START'. Visiting him in every 10 minutes, taking him bottles of wine, making him treat me to steak and Batarian wine. I wanted Kaidan in my private quarters. And I wanted him to have suicide mission sex with me. All slutiness and crassness aside, Kaidan and Shepard's relationship is very well done. It doesn't feel like an after-thought and it doesn't feel awkward or break either of the characters. It feels right. It feels genuine. It feels normal, as any functional gay relationship would feel. Shepard has a bit of a reputation for being a whore and pointing his penis at anything that moves. Having sexed half of the females in the Terminus systems between Mass effect 1 and...

We all love Garrus. And if you don't love Garrus, you can go kill yourself. Garrus is amazing. Garrus is everything. Garrus is that n***a. Garrus needs his own spin off game on 3DS. Is there a fuckyeahgarrus tumblr yet? If not, I'mma make one. I don't have many recollections of Garrus in Mass effect 1 , despite having played through that game for the second time a couple of months ago. I can't even remember how he becomes a part of your party (I recall some shit about C-Sec...Citadel...suttin') But my love for Garrus went balls deep during his fly ass reveal in Mass effect 2 . BALLS DEEP! In the space of that moment I was not only filled with the joy of seeing a member of my crew from Mass effect 1 , but suddenly realized..."Garrus is a bad ass!" He always fucking dies when I make him part of my squad, but I love that n***a. Garrus plays a pivotal role in Mass effect 3 which differs greatly from every other character in the game. He doesn't dive off ...

Is 'Within every moment of crisis lies a fleck of hope and happiness' a saying? Or am I a profound individual who made that shit up? Either way, this feels like the case with Mass effect 3 . It was only coming off of a fresh  Mass effect 2  play-through and having  3 to compare it to that I realised how dark of a game it was. The locations, the sound, even the colour of the menu screens being rusty orange evoked a feeling of tenebrosity. Every other mission in Mass effect 3 has you witness somebody die. And if you aren't witnessing somebody dying, then you'll be having a conversation about people dying. With dialogue options branching off into subjects about...more people dying. Paragon dialogue options have you give sympathy towards the dead. Renegade options have you kill somebody. Mass effect 3 deals with a whole lotta death. But for all of the talk of that D word, Mass effect 3 isn't overcast with bleakness. There are moments when the shit...

I had decided to stop playing through Mass effect 3 and return to Mass effect 2  last week. I wasn't particularly happy with this given that I had bought Mass effect 3 , started playing it and all of my friends are currently plowing through it. But it had to be done. Why? Because of that racist skank Ashley. It wouldn't be a problem if she opened her legs and not her mouth, but she has to have her mouth running and her legs open like Lamborghini suicide doors. She makes me sick. You see, the first time I went through Mass effect 1 I decided to be chivalrous and save her in that adventure defining moment on Virmire when you have to decide the fate of one of your most trusted team mates and friends. Mass effect 2 came around, I bumped into her, she was rude, disrespectful, still a racist. Mass effect 3, the bitch is back. Rude, more disrespectful, still racist, giving my favourite blue hoe Liara side eye. I got sick of her stank attitude, so I decided to put an end t...

Freedom. It's been so absent from the past few Final Fantasy games that I don't know what to do with it when it's offered to me a plate. XIII-2 gives you freedom and lots of it. But sometimes at the expense of leaving you confused. XIII held your hand in a vice like grip until your circulation cut off and you were unable to even play the game...or what there was to actually play . (It's up for debate whether hammering the A button in battles with the occasional LB press is playing a game). We all complained. We all hated it. So Square Enix said "Fuck it. Do what you like and make your own way through this shit" and gave us XIII-2 . This new-found freedom is a welcomed thing, which harkens back to the days when we could blimp it from location to location as we pleased. But the freedom often comes at the expense of being provided with very little direction. I've found myself at odds  on where to go and have had to just meander around and explore unti...

I do not give a shit about this game. I have the pad in my hands and I'm playing it. But I'm not caring about the experience. I just want it to end so I can say I've completed it, lay it to rest and try to break Bioware's epic by having Kaidan declare that he loves me. Giving Mass effect my undivided attention is my motivation for completing this game. If you were to ask me whether I think XIII is a better game than XIII-2 , I honestly wouldn't be able to give you an answer outright. A slight 180° from when I first started playing the game . I could talk for a solid hour on what I think about the game, but I would not be able to decide as to whether  XIII-2 is better than XIII . And I really don't care whether it is or it isn't. Because at this point it's clear that Square Enix still aren't sure where they want the story and the world of XIII to truly go and if they truly care about it any more than I don't. I stopped caring about this game w...

The first 20 minutes of this game are better than the whole of XIII . Or at least I think they might be. The smokes and mirrors have placed me under the illusion that I am playing this game to much more convincing degree than XIII managed to muster at the very least, which I guess is something, right? Within the first 20 minutes you witness Lightning acting more of an absolute boss than you thought possible. Riding a robot horse. Stopping a meteorite from destroying the world. Kicking some n***a who looks like a white Rick James through walls in a sequence I can only describe as Dragon ball Z meets Soul Calibur meets Inception . More robot horse flying. Serah's clothes transform into some hoe get-up without her questioning in. Watch a bit of the ending to XIII . Watch Serah break down like Rachel Crow on The X-factor and fight a shit ton of battles. It's a lot. And the game has barely even started yet. I'm unable to truly decide at this point if I prefer it to XIII . But...

Skyward sword  does something which no other Zelda game has done to date and that is to introduce Zelda to the player as a true character. Over time she's become fleshed out by Nintendo's standards (which is but barely) and has even proven a bit useful, albeit in a predictable role of arming herself with a bow and some light arrows. But  Skyward sword  is the first game in the series to introduce Zelda as  an actual character.  You get to know her and interact with her as Zelda. Not Zelda in a guise. Zelda as a pirate. Or Zelda as a ninja. Or even Zelda as a princess. But Zelda as Link's childhood friend. A regular girl. Nintendo pushed Link and Zelda's relationship a touch in  Spirit tracks  and we even managed to get  a  moment in the games' ending. But the feelings between Link and Zelda have always been unspoken and left to our imagination. Or in some cases down right non-existent.  Skyward sword  lays their feelings o...

I went into Skyward sword the same way I always go into a Zelda game, with expectations set from the game which came before and not so much those set by the reviews. It was hard not to go into this game expecting 'the best Zelda yet' given this was a tag line many reviewers had over used a week prior to its European release on November 18. But at the same time, this isn't something you're going to to be able to make a judgement on during a groggy 1 hour Friday night play through. By the time I'd switched this game on it was 11 o' clock at night. I was tired. I was fed up having had a shitty day at work. So I wasn't in the most joyous of moods to truly take in the opening experience of Nintendo's latest epic tale of green floppy hats, swords, princesses and ginger nut-cases on a hunt for gold triangles. It might just be me, but the opening to Zelda games are never that great. It's easy to be completely oblivious to how boring the opening to a Zelda ...

Arkham asylum is currently exposing the flaws in my gaming abilities. Bringing to light that I might be a little bit rubbish at games. Rubbisher (I just butchered English and I isn't sorry) than I thought. So far Arkham asylum has exposed that... I have no patience . The game wants me to sit on a gargoyle for ages until a goon is on his own, glide kick him to the floor and then head on back up to the gargoyle for another unsuspected foe. I'm not down with this waiting around shit. So I decide to just run into the room and try to beat each of the guys up. I fail. I end up dead. I really do have NO patience . Despite the gargoyle perching, glide kick and repeat plan being the only way to clear a room successfully. I keep running into the joint, fists swinging, batarangs flying...and ending up dead. I'm stupid . All because of my lack of patience and inability to see that the game will not let me pass with my pig headed "fuck the stealth" ignorance. Jebus knows ho...

I tried really hard to like this game. Honestly, I did. But L.A Noire is my lost cause. I can't stand the game. I think I may even hate it. It's rather odd, because there was actually a point when I rather liked this game. But after being bored to near death with some of the most monotonous gameplay I've not experienced since Jebus knows when; I began to tire of this game and just want shot of it. I YouTubed the ending a week ago, because I just couldn't take playing the game any longer to complete it and view it after a hard games' graft. I have never forced myself to play a game I can't stand and then decided to just throw in the towel so close to the end, but there's a first time for everything. And Rockstar and Team Bondi have certainly popped my cherry with this one.  L.A Noire spun itself into such a tired and medicore mess of formulaic gameplay, that I just had no desire to finish the game, and I stopped caring. The problem (one of many) I had with...

I love me a slow paced detective style game. Shove all of your car chases, slow mo double gun wielding dives and your bullet time explosions. Just let me loose in a place with a trusty note book and let me faff around, picking shit up and observing it in my hand for 10 minutes. Needless to say I was in my element in Shenmue and Hotel Dusk . These games were like heaven for me! But games like these are an acquired taste. They come along once in a blue moon. And they tend to sell so damn badly that they rarely get sequels. I doubt Hotel Dusk  will get a third installment. And well...we all know the deal with Shenmue 3 . That shit got sent through an Omega 4 relay with no IFF the day Yu Suzuki slapped down his resignation. So to hear Rockstar would be going the detective route with their next big game, I was sold! Even as I write this, I've not read a single review of L.A Noire and have watched nothing of the game other than the official trailer. The official trailer of which was...

Once you hit that 9th level of the Crystarium, crystogensis gets real expensive. But that's okay. Because... POW! Snow and Fang have been on the back seat for a while. Lighting, Hope and Fang were my wonder squad. But then I switched in that ho Vanille to make use of her Saboteur skills (Deprotect an enemy and watch how quick their HP drops once your Commando goes for them). I'm not sure why I didn't bother leveling the Sentinels up. Because even though Sazh has been dead weight in my party since hitting Gran Pulse, I still worked out his Crystarium. I'm a creature of habit, so I like keeping the same squad. I don't think I've switched out Lightning or Hope once . I didn't even switch in Snow or Fang for Sentinel duties, because I made Lightning one a good while back; and a mighty fine Sentinel she is too! Her Elude ability is a God send. I could not have done C'ieth stone mission 46 without it. She's pretty much untouchable. Kinda like my party rig...