Category: PC

Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin Review

I can’t remember if I finished the original incarnation of Dark Souls 2, and I’m not really sure why. I really (really really) loved Demon Souls. I thought the original Dark Souls was amazing and added so much to the Souls formula. For whatever reason, though, I never really got into Dark Souls 2. Turns out skipping that entry was fine because Scholar of the First Sin improves on many aspect of Dark Souls 2‘s gameplay, adds in all the previous DLC and makes it an overall amazing experience.

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I Think the Site is No Longer Hacked

After a traditionally long absence I’ve decided to randomly start posting on Awesome Radical Gaming again. Because, why not? I was inspired by Will Smith, long story. I think I also fixed the very much hacked RSS feed. I don’t understand how it is that WordPress always gets hacked. The plugins? I don’t know, or care, but it’s a major pain in the ass every single time. Going forward I’m going to use Github for revisioning and backup the site regularly so this kind of thing won’t happen again (or if it does, I can easily restore it).

Other then that I really have nothing exciting to say, except that you should check out this video for Chroma Squad, a manager game with japanese-style super heroes. From the people that brought us Knights of Pen and Paper.

You should also know that I’ve become much more obsessed with board games lately, mostly due to Kickstarter. And that I’ve been collecting SNES Rom hack carts, or Japanese ROMs that were patched with English translations, then put onto a cart. It’s the shady underworld of SNES collecting.

Super Meat Boy Review

Super Meat Boy is a platformer about a boy without skin named Meat Boy who must save his girlfriend, Bandage Girl, from Dr. Fetus. Aside from having the best story ever it’s also hard. Very, very hard. I’ve died over 3,000 times (which isn’t an exaggeration, the game keeps tracks of deaths) and haven’t completed the game 100% yet. But just because it’s hard doesn’t make it any less fun. The sense of accomplishment that comes with beating some of the harder stages is priceless, especially considering how easy some games are today.

Game play is fairly simple. You navigate Meat Boy to Bandage girl at the end of each level while dodging all kinds of spikes, lava, bottomless pits, rotating/flying saw blades, salt (which instantly kills meat, obviously), rockets, globs of purple goo, lasers, deadly piles of (used?) syringes and about a million other different death traps I can’t remember. Wall jumping is a staple of the game with nearly every level having you jumping up vertical shafts at one point or another. The abundance of instant death obstacles means you’re going to die, a lot. But death isn’t treated so much as a punishment but more as a learning experience. If you die, you instantly restart at the beginning of the level, ready to try again. The key to getting through the game is learning how to precisely control Meat Boy, with levels boiling down to memorization of timing and what path to take.

Super Meat Boy is broken up into roughly 350 stages spread across several different chapters. You start each chapter playing through the light world levels. If you beat the par time (get an “A+”) on a given level you unlock the dark world version of that level which is generally a much more difficult version of the original. Additionally there are tons of warp zones spread throughout the light and dark world. These warp zones each feature 3 different levels and, to make things just a bit more difficult, you only have 3 lives per level in warp zones. Then, there are special warp zones where you can unlock new playable characters. On top of all that, each chapter has a special “glitch” level, unlocked randomly if you reach Bandage Girl and she’s “glitching” like would sometimes happen when trying to play NES games (the blocky textures flashing and displayed in random patterns on the screen). Oh…and there are bandages on some of the levels which you can collect to unlock even more playable characters.

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Bulletstorm E3 Walkthrough Trailer

The guy playing the game is great.

“Right, so you hit him in the family jewels, he’s in pain…”

“…leash the guy, kick him in the ass, shoot the ass, and get the fire in the whole reward.”

“Sir, you need to die. Thank you.”

February 22, 2011 can’t come soon enough.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II E3 Trailer

Probably the best trailer I’ve seen out of E3 this year. I didn’t play the first game and had no intention of playing the second until watching this, which kind of sold me on the idea. Did Vader really expect like seven storm troopers to kill him?

Gears of War 3 Beast Mode E3 Trailer

Horde Mode in Gears of War 2 was pretty fun. Fighting wave after wave of enemies with three of your closest friends is always a good time. But Epic was all like “What’s even cooler?” How about playing as waves of bad guys trying to kill the good guys? Pretty awesome. There’s a level up system that allows players to unlock higher level bad guys as they gain more experience. And just because you’ve unlocked, say, the Berserker doesn’t mean you can start the round playing as one. You use tickets, gained from killing COGs, to choose which type of enemy you want to spawn as. The tougher the bad guy, the more tickets it costs.

I don’t know why they didn’t have it as four humans playing the COGs vs. four humans playing as the Horde, which would take it to 11.