Beware, I Live!

Gwahaha!  You spambots thought you were rid of me!  >:D

Been busy with the holiday drama at work.  The customers have been decidedly more pleasant this time around, even accounting for the fact that I don't get to play with a chainsaw and slaughter trees in public.  There are a few idiots in the bunch.  Note to our customers:  We are not Amazon, we are not Overstock dot com.  There are things on the website that we do not have in physical stores.  Spew your petulance at management; that's what they're paid for.


Been avoiding the XBox, mostly since I don't feel like being all social right now between shifts.  No offence to my online buddies.  You don't deserve work-induced vitriol, and all I really want to do is smash evil and set fire to their fortress.  This phase will pass.  The clarion call of trundling death has finally breached the miasma of meh I have going right now.

It got me thinking.  I've done a good deal more smashing this year, and I want to share my thoughts.  I believe that I've played more hours overall in the past two years than most of my post-teen life, as well as the most varied overall games.

Borderlands 2.  Get off my plane and everybody gets a bullet.  Honestly, shooters have never really enticed me until this came along.  My brother loves the first two Medal of Honor games, and I have good memories of Battlefront 2 and Goldeneye from back in the day.  But this monster lured me into something I never expected:  pouring ridiculous amount of time and energy into lobbing almost enough dakka against advancing hordes of random sociopaths.  The loot and leveling systems actually made me look forward to mashing right trigger and pwning bastitches like a boss.  WE LOVE YOU MARCUS!

Star Ocean:  The Last Hope.  Dammit, Square Enix actually did it to me again.  I think I an in the tiny minority that actually likes this damn game.  The protagonist is the biggest whiny bitch this side of Advent Children Cloud for a good part of the game.  The battles are badly unbalanced in one way or another.  The soundtrack su-huh-ucks!  But it's just plain fun somehow.  Welcome to a JRPG where a paladin archetype doesn't suck mechanically.  Welcome to a place where you can hang out with the anime cliche/fetish of your choice, and it works.  Welcome to Bacchus D-79, a space elf Robocop that can summon killsats, mecha, and frickin BLACK HOLES.  No Welcome to Sarah, though.  You deserve to be left in ignominy forever, the only escape from which involves a vore furry dressed up like Bubsy.

Skyrim.  Holy shit is this awesome.  Tearing about being Nordic on my undead horse that is surprisingly nice and well-behaved.  Killing random moronsand stripping their corpses bare as a warning to other tards.  Going through dank dungeons toight undead viking wizards with Jedi powers!  The only fit music for those fights is produced by Manowar,  Setting the undead viking ninja wizards on fire with a sun-powered sword of +1138 Undead Ignition known as Dawnbreaker.  Punching angry grizzly bears to death like a boss.  Smashing dragons is fun, but somebody else did it better.  I put this game down for the next two, but I will come back eventually, to snag the the +9001 Bow of Summoning Anti-Undead Killsats and kill a Dracula Wannabe.

World of Tanks.  Wow, a freemium game I like and want to play.  Tearing about in a WWII tank, making other tanks miserable, and building a stable of vehicles that would make the Top Gear guys go crazy (well, crazier).  Showing people that Hetzers gonna Hetz, and that ramming stuff with a Stuart makes for hilarity.  I've thrown way too much money at this thing, plus it;s a online game that makes me actually want to play with strangers.  CoD can join Sarah.

Diablo 3.  I.  Don't.  CARE.  What other people say.  This shit's awesomesauce.  Another genre entry-drug for me.  I've now discovered hack-and-slash RPG goodness, and it is beautiful.  Whether it's smashing faces with a barbarian, going ninja crazytown with a monk, or bringing the dakka with a demon hunter, it just doesn't get old in Vanilla.  Then frickin Reaper of Souls came, with more mooks to smash, an angel with a frickin Holy Avenger Rocket Launcher with a altfire Keen Vorpal Flamethower, and the Crusader.  Holy crap.  My build for this guy involves hammers.  Lots of hammers.  Enough hammers to run a thousand hardware stores.   Oh, and the Crusader/Templar bromance is funny as hell and strangely endearing.  Let's Smite Something Together.

Well, I need to go, I'm getting incoherent.