Ghosts 'N' Daimons

Hello The People I Pretend Read This:

Logged many a hour of afterwork vicarious violence on the vidja game front lately.  I have come to certain conclusions lately.

After showing a gamer friend the joys of loot farming on Borderlands 2, I realized that somebody at Gearbox is a damn troll.  As part of their Loot Hunt contest, they periodically altered certain loot drops from certain bosses, sometimes altering drop rates, sometimes adding a new rare drop.  Unfortunately for me and my friend, the drop altered yesterday was the legendary drop for the Warrior.  Some humorous soul decided that the guaranteed drop should be a Flakker, a nice--but situational--shotgun.  I would be ok with this, if this wasn't the Warrior, the home drop for the Conference Call!  This is arguably the best gun in the game, and has extra appeal for me personally since it's a shotgun that shreds things and therefore appeals to my redneck blood (GRARG!  *banjo music* BAMBI SAUSAGE TIME!) and does cool tricks to appeal to my nerdy brain (GRARG!  *Nightwish song* EPIC GUN TIME!).  The Flakker is close but is still no substitute.  In practice, this means that you got lots of Flakkers but no other legendaries at all from the Warrior.  May whoever came up with this nasty little trick be made to write Gungan-oriented fanfics forevermore!

On the cheerier front, I did some more randomness on Dragon's Dogma, and I still really like the game.  I want to babble on about the Dark Arisen expansion they came up with.

First, random comments on Bitterblack Island establish that the world of DD has a moon and pawns know what a moon and moonlight is.  This means that the main area of Gransys is either stuck in a perpetual new moon or even all-out lunar eclipse.  Whether this is a sign or part of the game's events, I don't know.

Second, somebody at Capcom Europe wants to do a modern Ghosts 'N' Goblins really badly, and came up with Dark Arisen as a DD take on the whole thing.  The entire quest is a macabre romp through spooky places with really nasty enemies (especially for low-level characters) that isn't truly finished until you complete the dungeon twice, with the second playthrough being even tougher.  There are some little touches here and there that also point to this, with others being nods to other franchises like Dark Souls and Castlevania.

Finally, the hilarity of setting a bigass zombie dragon on fire with a delayed action incendiary RPG never gets old.