Halo: Reach

I normally find myself responding to the release of a new Halo game in the same fashion, with a resounding "Ughhhhhhh...", then remembering that I should not be surprised at the fact that people who like their games as bland and unoriginal as a cinder block exist, and exist in force. Since 2001, we have all been drowned in the mediocrity of Halo and it's crowd of middle schoolers corpse-humping people between shots of Ritalin pills administered by parents too lazy to notice that their son, whose balls have not dropped yet is thoroughly telling a grown man off who just wanted to unwind after a day of work, and instead has to listen to some little pissant go on about fucking his mom in all the octaves that Justin Beiber will no longer be able to reach once the hormones for his gender reassignment surgery take over and he will finally be a real boy. Ten fucking years and that boy still has somehow not grown up, or he has cloned himself ad nauseum into some sort of barely pubescent army that has infected the world of online gameplay. Honestly this type has been around since before Halo. But somehow the union of console online gameplay and the console first person shooter have made some sort of scary singularity that pulls in all the dickheads with a headset and brings them directly into the realm where a normal sane person just wants some time to face other players in a competitive game. Fuck, nowadays it is a risk playing Uno on XBL. Uno...really?

Katamari Forever

So I got a PS3 for Christmas. And since I got a PS3, this opened me to a whole world of exclusive games that I have always wanted to play, but haven't had the chance to. My current plan is to still use the Xbox for games that go on all platforms, for a very petty reason. I am invested in achievements as opposed to trophies. Switching now would be like switching my main in WoW. All that work down the toilet, no thank you. So yes, my PS3 will be seeing a lot of play, just not exactly as much as my Xbox. But anyway, I have started a few games on the new system, most notably God of War. The first one, yes I have dabbled in the game, but never really plowed through it, so I am hoping to change that, and when I do, I will review the trilogy as a whole. For right now however, I am going to talk about one of the games I was most excited for, one of the reasons I really wanted this system. Hit the jump to see me babble about Katamari Forever.

My games of the year

My friend Steve made a short Facebook (It's a little weird that word is still considered misspelled.) post the other day about the games he has played, rating them and then saying what his favorite game of the year is. I meant to copy him, doing the same thing with the games I have played this year, but then I realized why don't I just take this chance and return to my blog with some game of the year talk. So I am gonna do something I am not always fond of doing. I am going to apply number grades to the games I talk about. Everything will also get a brief review, colored through the lenses of hindsight, as I am not gonna sit down and play these games again simply for this article. Alright, let's get started, well we'll get started after the break.