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Don’t get me wrong – I’m not one of those jerkoffs that goes around insisting we have to watch our mouths lest we hurt someone’s feelings over something so irrelevant as pigment…

… but there’s something just wrong about this. If you moused over the image, you read correctly: his name is Mr Wasup and he’s an NPC in this goofy little MMORPG a few of us have been messing around on called WonderKing. He enjoys talking in horrendous ebonics (both the “double-click sound effects” and his NPC text), beat-boxing and presumably gang warfare with oversized hammers against an eastside group of cacti.

His form is grossly caricatured and basically everything that was wrong with racist cartoons of yesteryear (or today if you’re one of those unfortunate enough to be on the fax-to list for racist cartoons), in fact you’re almost left wondering why the artists and designers didn’t go whole hog. Negotiate product placement for some Kentucky Fried Chicken and some Black and Mild cigars and make some money off the whole thing.

Nope, I’m not entirely sure who’s idea it was, but I just don’t think it was such a great idea. I am, of course, going to hell for laughing when I first saw him.

“Fastin‘ yer britches and getcher guns ready!”

Perhaps it’s because I’m Australian, but the “cowboy” fantasy thing growing up was never really there – the only real exposure I had to cowboys was that my dad was a huge fan of Mel Brooks, so I saw Blazing Saddles at an age that was most likely far too early.

That lack of cowboy hysteria growing up didn’t stop me from enjoying Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood though. Nope, what follows is an interesting story (even if a little far-fetched) that spans from the civil war onwards. The civil war parts are actually pretty cool – they show how fucked up it must have been for both sides, without taking the southern-apologetics stance that pisses everyone off. Nope, Barnsby is every bit the racist southern scumbag we all love to hate.

As a first person shooter, CoJBiB ain’t terrible. It’s not awesome, nor is it gorgeous for showing off the PS3’s capabilities in the same way as say, CoD4… but it’s solid and I had a good time playing it. The story’s a bit far-fetched, but hey, what good cowboy story isn’t – and it kept me up until 4am one morning playing it.

If it’s starting to sound like I don’t have any real complaints about it, well, think again. First of all the most aggravating thing is that the game freezes for a half second or so at every checkpoint – the way it does this doesn’t make me think it’s intentional.

The controls are also not very customizable, with you only having about five choices for control schemes and no ability to change anything manually. That’s fine in the instance of say, MAG… who’s controls closely mirror the standard used in CoD et al. But if you’re going to change things up, you bloody well better have a way to change them back.

At first the weapons-select thing pissed me off, but I quickly got used to it and it actually worked out pretty well, particularly when you have an inventory full of weapons.

My final gripe – this game suffers badly from assuming you have a great new TV: the Indians in the mountains of Arizona are almost impossible to see at times, so you basically wave your reticule around until it turns red. I’m not sure how badly it affects those with HDTVs, but my SD CRT turned into a nightmare on that level.

The gunslinger duel portions of the game are pretty intense, depicting really well the nervousness that must have gone into the whole thing – though I’m not entirely sure why everyone waits for a bell to draw in the game. They can get aggravating if you’re not good at them, but once you start figuring out the best place on the screen to keep the enemy and the perfect spot to keep your hand you can breeze through them most of the time. Barnsby, who’s supposed to be really really quick on the draw, was down for the count on my 4th try on medium difficulty – which didn’t seem too terrible to me.

Online Multiplayer in Bound in Blood is “there”, and there are some clever additions such as bank robberies and western-twists on the whole “marked man” thing but it’s not exactly a dynamite experience, and it’s also a bit of a ghost town at the moment (though you can definitely find a game, unlike F.E.A.R.2).

I think I would have been upset if I’d paid full price for this game, on account of it wouldn’t have kept my attention for very long at all. But now it’s down under $20 used, I think it’s worth a play. When it drops down below $15, without question pick it up.

The “Horror” game genre is pretty much not much younger than videogames themselves, and it’s had a few notables along the way in the field of horror-FPSes: Corridor7 took the Wolfenstein 3D engine and turned it into a space-horror game to moderate success. Doom, Doom II and to a greater extent Doom 3 all dabbled in the horror element.

But F.E.A.R. took it in a completely new direction being one of the first (that I can think of) popular games that genuinely scared the shit out of most folks on a regular basis. F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin was the much-anticipated sequal to this, and doesn’t disappoint in the horror department.

I’m by no means an expert in the FPS deparment – I’ve said this before – so take my reviews of FPSes with a grain of salt… but F.E.A.R.2 is a reasonably solid FPS in it’s own right.

When I go to scary movies, I don’t usually jump much. Every so often, sure – fuck sometimes if I’m not paying attention I’ll jump at shit that’s not supposed to be scary and just happens all of a sudden. I’m also pretty much a skeptic when it comes to ghosts and such. But this game just generally freaked me out on a good few occasions.

The story mode is a solid adventure, starting out set in the moments briefly before the events of the original F.E.A.R. and continuing outwards. It progresses nicely, and doesn’t really contain any aggravating sections which just completely piss you off because of how hard they were. On the hardest difficulty I found the game’s progression a good solid slog and never really hit a cement wall, which is exactly how a game should be – as opposed to games like Call of Duty 4 and Modern Warfare 2, who have several parts that are just straight up hurdles and then other parts of the game that are smooth sailing.

On the whole I felt satisfied when I got done bashing my way through the story mode, I didn’t pick apart the holes in the story or do anything else I usually do with horror storylines. The campaign didn’t suffer from the “abundance of ammunition” problem most shooters do, it was nice switching between several different weapons just to make it through the mission.

It’s pretty reasonable on the trophies too, but some of them require multiplayer (so forget about platinuming it)… which brings us to:

The downsides? Multiplayer is an absolutely ghost town. If you’re lucky enough to sign on at a time when you can find a game, expect it to be no more than three or four people at a time and for one of them to ragequit at some point. Most of the time when you sign on you simply won’t find a game, or you’ll find one with one other person who AFKed looking for their eczema treatment and won’t ever ready-up.

Given that this game has now dipped down below the $15 mark used, it’s well worth the money for the single player campaign. There’s also one piece of DLC that I haven’t tried yet, but have heard good things about it. It’s a worthy addition to your budget collection.

So I basically straight up ran out of shit to do on Borderlands – which sucks because I was really enjoying it… alas, until The Secret Armory of General Knoxx is released, it’s on the shelf.

Since Tidler’s on his California adventure/job search, which currently isn’t going so well, we’ve done quite a bit of gaming. Borderlands platinum trophy in about a week bit of gaming. So we decided to jump back into MW2 – he’s been playing it with other friends off and on so we figured we’d bang out some of the special ops in the hope I could add a second platinum trophy to my collection.

When I first played Modern Warfare 2, I thought the special ops was kind of… well… garbage. A rip-off. A cheap way to add a little extra content to the game without actually adding much in the way of extra content.

It actually adds quite a bit though, it’s a surprising amount of fun. Teaming up with another person against a computer army is a huge blast – in fact I think that’s maybe why I didn’t like doing it at first, because I was flying solo. Now we’ve got three ops left to ace, and I’ll have my 69/69 stars. Then it’s just a few-skill based trophies that should be pretty easy to do on regular difficulty, and I’m home free.

So the other day, it arrived. I finally acquired a copy of one of but two (at the moment anyway) games that I absolutely have to have – Borderlands. Here’s a checklist of features required to make an awesome game:

1. Post-apocalyptic-style survival: Check;
2. Robust FPS interface: Check;
3. Comic-book character design: Check and double-check for the rendering in general;
4. Diablo-style RPG mechanics: Check (though not a long, “swooping” check, more of a “meh, I suppose so” check);
5. A smattering of black humor: Check!

That’s pretty much a running list of things that makes Borderlands great. Seeing stills of the graphics doesn’t really do them justice – the “stroked comic-book” rendering has to be seen in motion to really get the concept of how gorgeously it’s pulled off.

The idea of being on some shit-hole planet looking for a vault filled with treasures (plz o plz o plz jewels and gold bullion) that may or may not exist is just a fun time.

What’s not so great? First of all, the story is a little flimsy in places – I believe another reviewer’s called it “paper thin”. I can live without this though, because I grew up with video games where the only story was the short blurb in the front of the manual, or a short scrolling message on the screen.

The most annoying thing is the slow-down on the PS3. It is possible my PS3 just needs cleaning, but I somehow doubt it. A good PC will run it flawlessly obviously (though it’s a pity I can’t afford one), and cross-platform games generally tend to suffer on the PS3… admittedly the slowdown didn’t happen too often, but when it did it was pretty annoying.

A far more common manifestation that I experienced is the voice chat getting choppy while the game is loading each area – the game will throw you into an area without fully loading it (which is nice, because of the shortened load times), then load the full-res textures while you’re running around. The only bad part about that design is that while the textures are loading, voice chat goes to hell. On the whole though, the voice chat is far better than that of say, Modern Warfare 2 – which somehow manages to show off their voice codec’s handling of packet loss all the bloody time.

Why are the RPG elements “meh”? The builds for the character classes I’ve played are reasonably well done – there’s no right or wrong way to build-out your class and you’re free to pretty much do whatever suits you. I have a rather spread build for my Siren, which leans heavily on my class-mod for two skills and works pretty well for my playing style (by the way, the skill builder flash app on the website is a really great touch). It’s also nice how you can reset your skills at any time for a modest cash-sink, so you don’t have to re-roll if you “screw up”.

The only downsides are that there’s really only one “active” skill for each class. Sure, Lilith and Brick can modify their respect skills for different approaches and using melee attacks adds a little something extra to it… but for Roland and Mordecai, it’s pretty much a case of just deciding when to use it, then waiting for it to cool down and repeating the process.

The game’s also quite short, and IMHO I found the difficulty curve to be backwards – the game’s first few bosses were quite difficult because of my relatively low level… and I found the final boss fight rather easy even though I made it there at what most people consider to be the “average” level (level 34 Siren). I soloed the boss only dying once because I screwed up and walked off the edge.

There’s very little strategy on most of the bosses as well – pretty well it consists of finding the weak spot and hammering on it with everything you’ve got.

The game’s longevity is helped substantially by heaping helpings of DLC. MediaMolecule take note, this is how your DLC release schedule should be! I’ll probably be picking up the first pack any time I have a spare ten bucks. Since the “arena” modes didn’t really appeal to me I’m not so sure about Mad Moxxi’s – the “bank” mode would be nice to have but I’m not entirely sure that’s worth $10.

The next expansion, due “whenever” is looking fantastic though. They’re going to be raising the level cap, which will be great – if it goes to 70 like the rumors say, given the XP curve I’d guess that’s about twice as much game… assuming there’s quests enough to get you there.

A new class wouldn’t go astray in the future either.

Finally, this game was the first game I got a platinum trophy in, and it’s the last game I bought at the time. I’d had the game less than a week – it’s ridiculously easy to platinum if you play it through to completion… honestly there’s no reason everyone couldn’t do it.

On the whole, this game’s worth the money. If you’re not prenatally poor like I am, it’s worth the $60 if you’re looking to pick up the DLC as well. If you’re in my boat, try to pick it up on Half for around $30 and you won’t be sorry if you like the things in the above list.

It’s pretty everything I thought it’d be… “Call of Duty” meets “Diablo 2″.

With Mr Tidler finally picking up a copy of Burnout: Paradise, I finally got to experience a decent game online… I’d dabbled in it before with complete strangers, but unfortunately I only ever managed to end up in 1v1 races with the other person always getting butthurt after I’d win, and leaving. So it wasn’t much fun.

The online “Easy Drive” mode seems unintuitive at first, but once you get the hang of it it’s actually a blast. We completed a few challenges, not realizing that they’re actually cooperative instead of competitive (we tried to beat each other off the roof of the parking garage for the first two-player challenge, and wound up failing it the first time).

Exploring Paradise City with at least one friend is a huge amount of fun, and I’d imagine the fun goes up exponentially with more friends. If you have a PS3, Burnout Paradise and a Microphone, feel free to add me on PSN. I like that the Billboards in the game are actual advertisements (I think the online maintainers make money off them, so it’s a cute and un-intrusive way to offset the costs of maintaining servers) and there’s nothing quite so fun as crashing through a billboard for weight loss supplements or Plasma TVs a fraction of a second before your friend does, because unless we were doing it wrong they don’t get credit for breaking a billboard that you jacked them on, so they’ll have to come back for it. ;D

The racing was fun too, once we opened our lobby up to the public it quickly filled up with 8 drivers completely and utterly whipping our asses for the most part (my best was third I think). The easier filling up could be to do with that my WAP is now DMZed, so UPnP works as expected and my PS3 is now capable of opening ports up for itself.

On the whole, I had a really great time and I’m looking forward to doing it some more. There’s a huge lack of Burnout players who actually have mics, so we mainly just banter to ourselves.

I finished this game last night, and I’m not entirely sure why I bothered to – I think I have a problem, because quite possibly the only reason I finished it was to get more trophies.

When you first start playing it, it seems fun. The “Darth Vader” prologue is awesome, messin’ up wookies on their home planet like you just don’t give a hoot. But because Vader’s so over-powered and the level is so easy, the few little annoyances are hidden from view until the next few levels.

The target system straight up sucks. For the most part, when you’re “force throwing” an inanimate object (only some of which can be picked up and chucked around) you don’t really have to aim, the game take’s it’s guess at what you want to throw the object at and you pretty well hit consistently.

However when using your other force powers, such as lightning, aiming requires your character to be physically facing the item. The camera direction is irrelevant, so basically you have to walk in the direction you need to be facing… if you’re like me (a chicken, hiding behind cover from AT-STs) it often means your dumbass winds up walking out from behind said cover trying to aim right.

If you don’t get the little square reticules on the object first, your lightning will just go off into the atmosphere. During the “Imperial Raxus Prime” level, right after you used the big fat burners to shoot holes in the shipyard, you have to shoot down TIE fighters with your lightning – a frustrating experience if ever there was one. You see they can fly right through your lightning unaffected, unless you aimed it at them before you started.

I thought there was a giant plot hole, but it turns out it’s explained away in the story’s only canon ending… yeah, if you want to be evil and play the “Dark Side” ending, you get a movie that doesn’t mesh at all with the original three movies (the second trilogy).

My other gripes? With the exception of the Emperor, the boss fights seem to almost get easier as you progress. The level’s puzzles and problems are extremely formulaic, and things like force-blasting through a doorway is an inexact science at best.

I guess if you’re like my cousin, who was a complete and utter Star Wars fanatic, “The Force Unleashed” is probably rewarding. If not, I guess you could have some fun with it.

I’m thinking I might play some TF2 tonight, for the first time in ages. I hope my PC will still play it, it’s been steadily getting worse – anyone happen to have a spare DX9-capable AGP graphics card laying around? My graphics card was hot shit 7 years ago, but not so much any more.

Sidenote: Do you think the Sniper’s motorhome warranty covers damages caused by small arms fire?

Anyway, yeah I think I’m gonna go jump on it. This stupid canadian who’s too good to play Modern Warfare 2 is bugging me about it.

If you’re like me – “HURR I NAED TROFEEZ” – but you haven’t the cash to buy a bunch of brand new games, you’ll appreciate this list of cheap, trophy-enabled games courtesy of half.com (I checked them on PS3Trophies if I don’t have them, so don’t blame me if they don’t actually have trophy support):

• Unreal Tournament III – ~$9
• Tom Clancy’s EndWar – ~$9
• Mercenaries 2 – ~$9
• Shaun White Snowboarding – ~$10
• Warhawk – ~$10
• Alone in the Dark: Inferno – ~$11
• Battlefield: Bad Company* – ~$11
• Mirror’s Edge – ~$12

* ANNOYING AS BALLS WARNING: BFBC requries you to play the game through twice to get the different difficulty trophies – this made me rage, because I’m used to playing a game through once on the hardest difficulty and collecting all the trophies at once.

So apparently some idiots on forums are touting Modern Warfare 2 as “game of the decade” (I can’t find a link, I just heard it somewhere and was so overcome with rage fits that I stopped paying attention) – where the hell do they get this stupid idea from?

I don’t think the campaign in MW2 is as great as CoD4, though admittedly the multi-player is “much improved”. That’s not saying much though, a shit sandwich probably tastes better with a bit more mayonnaise. Who would’ve thought people would have liked such gems as host-migrations, or the ability to join a friend online without waiting for party invitations.

Sure, MW2 is “flavor of the week” at the moment, and I happen to enjoy playing it online… but like I tell people all the time: it’s not a great “FPS”, but SOCOM is the benchmark for how the community/matchmaking aspect of an FPS should work. The lobby system for SOCOM 3 and Combined Assault is almost flawless. With Confrontation the clan system is great and the clan match calendar is sensible.

…and it’s awesome how if you’re offline (say, a kid at school) you can set up clan events and matches, and recruit folks, all from any web browser.

Yet you’ve got the XBL-playing fratboy assholes jerking off over the “much improved” multiplayer of MW2.

My personal vote for GotD would have to be either Half Life 2, or Team Fortress 2 – but I admit I’m a little biased.