We're Not Hosting an Intergalactic Kegger Down Here

X-COM! What can I say about this wonderfully FRUSTRATING addictive series that has not been said already? With disgusting news from a year or three ago that the series was going FPS, I was ready to toss my favourite franchise aside.

Jesus Christ, how horrifying...

How bonerrific was it when X-Com: Enemy Unknown came out of the blue and blew my mind away? On a scale of 1 - 10? Eleven. Shit is pringles. An amazing throwback to the original series, Enemy Unknown is one of the few recent games that has kept me awake at night just thinking about it's awesomeness. 

Story's straight and simple: HOLY SHIT ALIENS! The world gets attacked by aliens and were all like "Holy shit, I'm getting sick and tired of these Aliens. LETS THROW MONEY AT AN ORGANIZATION TO FIGHT THEM FOR US!" And thus X-Com was born. You are the newly appointed commander who must lead your rag-tag group of soldiers, mechanics, pilots, scientists and janitors to victory!

Right from the getgo, you must select from five continents to set your base of operations. Each one gives you a bonus that helps your organization out. For example Africa goes all in and increases your money income by 30%. and South America has "their ways" to make alien autopsies instant.

Sexy ways.

The game continues until the alien threat is eradicated or if you suck at the game like me and lose all world support and the earth itself. Simple to understand, difficult to master. So how does one save the world? Well it's simple, you send a small squad of 1 - 6 soldiers to fight your battles while you sit comfortably and safely at home giving the orders.

If you've never played an X-Com game and don't understand the concept of TURN-BASED strategy, I'll explain it as simple as possible. You and the bad guys take turns moving pawns around a map to complete objectives. Aliens either have to kill you or a VIP, while you kill them all, defuse a bomb, escort civilians and vips out of the area or survive. It's like a ridiculous game of chess actually now that I think about it. 

On the PC it controls well enough, but on the console (which I played this game on) it can be a bit cumbersome until you learn it. A major gripe I had with it was the inability to take back my action, a mulligan if you will. Partly 'cause I'm terrible at these games, but enjoy them too much to quit. Unfortunately though it's easy to accidentally move a character to the wrong location or end the turn without meaning to.

Shit Andy, I didn't mean for you to 

burn down that orphanage!

Each turn you can order your soldier to move twice. Once in a safe distance, outlined by a blue zone, and once more into dashing territory. You can omit moving twice and just dash pass the blue zone and into dashing territory. The vital difference between these is moving once inside the blue zone will allow you to have a standard action... Shooting, reloading, tossin' grenades, using equipment or overwatching. Moving twice or just straight up dashing is considered one full turn and can sometimes leave you vulnerable without any way to react. The most important strategy in this game would be the simple 'slow and steady wins the race' playstyle. Instead of dashing all over the place in an attempt to find/kill your objective(s), it's significantly better for you to instead move your squad in small increments, setting them on overwatch mode which allows them to attack any enemy that moves within their line of sight, or with a certain skill, allows them to fire back at attacking aliens.

Many who are used to the fast-paced run and gun feel of shooters or those who are not accustomed to a thing called strategy would probably be bored to tears at the snails pace to victory. Frankly though, as your soldiers improve you become a little attached to some badasses you have honed to killing machine perfection. Having the best damn sniper you've had since the beginning of the game die in one miscalculated move really draws you into the game and vow to never lose another soldier again. You will though. If you suck really bad, you will lose thousands and every single one of them will make you pissed off at the adversary.

As you win missions and as your pawns earn more kills, they will level up and earn a class. This can be very infuriating with a badass rookie who was taking out scrubs left and right half a mile away suddenly turning into a shotgun wielding assault. I wished there was a way for you to respec soldiers into a more preferred class or at least give us the option to select what class each soldier graduates into.

Gary, you're going to be a ballerina 

for the squad. 

Each class gives the soldiers a set skill and skill tree that helps you win butt-clenching matches. They range from snipers, assault, support, and heavy. Every time they level up, you can unlock more talents for them to use in battle, such as the assault ability Run and Gun which allows them to attack after dashing. Unfortunately, the more you play the game the more you prefer giving every class the same talents. This is due to some talents being more preferable than others depending on your playstyle. I found myself looking at the same soliders with the same talents, but with different looking faces/voices. This isn't really that bad as again the combat will really draw you in with all the tension of a fat kid riding a bull.

Missions aren't given to you right away though. First off you must manage your base off operations. Right off the bat you are given one level to excavate and build structures in, with additional layers to unlock by excavating downwards. From science labs to weapons factory and power plants to power them, the building portion of X-com helps add to your strategy. You'll have to make sure you have enough scientist to research faster or enough engineers to build your weapons of mass alien destruction. In this screen you are also given the chance to sell some of the alien technology or bodies to different governments for funding. You can also fill requests given by various countries for money, scientists, soldiers, engineers or to even calm them the fuck down.

In the battleroom you are given a globe of the world and you fast forward through time until alien activity is spotted or if a UFO happens to fly by a neighborhood with a satellite watching over it. When the latter occurs, you send out interceptors and watch a nice little animation of it and the UFO shooting back and forth until one or the other is brought down. Afterwards you can investigate the crash or ignore it like a fool. When alien activity is brought to your attention you are usually given a choice between three missions with randomized rewards usually resulting in more money, soldiers or engineers/scientists. The last type of mission you can receive are council missions. 

Remember that huge conglomerate of countries supporting the X-Com project? Sometimes they want you to specifically do something for them. These range from bomb missions to the VIP escort missions I was explaining earlier. Luckily the escort mission actually allows you to control the VIP. So if they die and you fail, the only person you can blame is your own damn self. The most horrifying version of these missions are Terror Missions and they are exactly as they sound. These missions usually involve you going against a massive onslaught of aliens while rescuing civilians or disarming bombs and HOLY SHIT DO THEY SUCK. In a good way though. You will literally fight for your life in an attempt to finish these missions as they are probably some of the most intense gaming in recent history.

As with any game, you will always be at a disadvantage in the beginning. But as you progress you'll be able to research newer weapons and armor to level the plying field.

O. M. G. ACCESSORIZING!

Your first playthrough with the game will likely end in failure as well, but with the addictive nature of the series you will go back through again and do a damn better job at it until you fail again. Then you pick yourself up and go again and again till you win.

Graphics wise the game looks fairly good running on the Unreal engine, unfortunately it still suffers from texture pop-ins that the engine often does. Each alien type looks interesting and varied with their features highlighted to show their unique abilities. The game sounds amazing as well with blasts and gunfire rattling my system. The voice over can be a little distracting with canned responses repeating often and some over the top accents from your advisers.

The complaints I have for this game are few. The most glaring issue for me was the incomprehensible logic for attacks. How can something that has a 90% chance to hit miss, while an alien firing from the fog of war a mile away can directly hit and CRIT my soldier who was behind full cover? This artificial difficulty made a couple matches turn from knuckle burning, controller gripping fights of attrition to bullshit OH YOU LOSE 'CAUSE I SAID SO events. The learning curve for the game is rather steep and can put off playthroughs until mastered. Being persistent is key in enjoying the game, a strange request for modern gamers who are used to the game holding their hands. The end results after successfully completing a terror mission is exhilarating and the "One more mission" feel will overwhelm you as the game continues.

Overall, I personally enjoyed the challenge and enjoy the hell out of micromanaging. The more drawn into the game you are, the more fun you will have. If you want to play something different and don't mind a good challenge, you would probably enjoy the game. My recommendation would be to rent it first if this review wasn't too convincing. If you are a fan of the series or the genre, why are you still here reading this and not playing this wonderful gem. GO OUT AND BUY IT NOW.

I give it 9 out of 10 glaring alien heads.

47: The Number of Times I've Replayed that Checkpoint

First and foremost, allow me to start this review off with me telling you HOW MUCH I FUCKING LOVE THE HITMAN SERIES. Conceived at the start of this millennium, I didn't really pick up Codename 47 until two years later when Silent Assassin came out, but from the get-go I was hooked.

Part of my love comes from my perfectionism and the other part from my love for being stealthy as shit. The Hitman series has always sated my thirst for both and I can safely say the hundreds of hours I have spent on this series alone has been deeply satisfying.

With that being said, let's proceed to the first Hitman game that's not a Hitman game.


Das Story

Absolution takes place sometime after Blood Money ended, Diana your handler suddenly goes rogue, blows up the Agency you work for and steals some very important stuff. 

Cool your shit Diana.

Of course the Agency don't take kindly to their employees blowing up their shit. So they send in The Hitman. In this first mission, cleverly disguised as a tutorial, you are tasked with killing Diana. After doing so, you find a girl that Diana had kidnapped liberated from the Agency. 47, being an assassin with a heart of gold, attempts to fulfill Diana's final wish of keeping this girl safe from the Agency. Sounds sane right? Well after that, the story goes balls to the wall mental.

While the previous games had some kind of story thrown in the mix of an assassin simulator, Absolution is all kinds of serious about its story. The unfortunate downside to this though is how ridiculously over the top it all comes out to be. Filled with semi-memorable characters and doused generously with cheesetastic dialogue, you can't help but feel the immersion slipping away as you kill too-serious-for-their-own-good caricatures. We got your sadistic looney who enjoys killing random people for the hell of it. A crazy and omgsorandum westerner guy who to me felt almost like the Texas Guy from The Simpsons.

In-game Model

The hits you have to take out felt slapped on as well. One moment I'm evading cops, punching hippies, and eating donuts while dressed up in a chipmunk suit. The next moment, I'm suddenly trying to kill three random guys who... wants to kill my new Asian handler for some reason? In all honesty, if you don't pay fairly close attention, you'll probably miss out a lot on the ongoing story. But even when you do pay attention, it still feels like a middle school creative writing piece with tropes thrown about all willy-nilly.

Dat Gameplay

Writing about the gameplay for Absolution is a conundrum for me and will probably sound confusing to you. I love hate love hate love hate love hate love the gameplay. Controlling 47 can either be enjoyably smooth or OMGSTOPCROUCHINGYOUDUMBFUCK frustrating. The button layout is familiar, but my only complaint was the placement of crouch with the right thumbstick being clicked in. Sometimes during frantic firefights, I'll accidentally stand up and get shot to kingdom come.

New to the series are the ability to take cover and instinct. In olden times, hiding behind something just mean crouching behind a low wall or behind a corner. Now you just press B and 47 will stick himself to the wall like fly on flypaper. This is a godsend when attempting to be stealthy in Absolution. Sometimes when an enemy sees you from a quarter-mile away, simply dodging behind a car will make them turn the other cheek. 

The new instinct mode comes into play when you hold down the right-bumper. While its held down, the world slows down to a molasses crawl, everything gets slapped a blue hue and (if you're playing certain difficulties) important items and people will have a nice sickly yellow or blood red glow to them. 

This mode will also allow you to bypass people who are trying to see through your disguise. How you ask? Simple, 47 will put his hands near his face, looking as suspicious as possible. Years of training has proven that this signals to other people that 47 is not shady as fuck.  

One last ability one can pull off in this mode is the ability to pull a Sam Fisher by tagging as many targets as you can and then letting loose an opera of gunfire. Simply put, you tag people and when you are done, you will systematically shoot whoever or wherever you tagged, all before the enemy can react.

The excuse the game makes for this EZ-MODE is that 47's years and years of hitman-ing knowledge allows him to be Neo for a short while. He'll miraculously know what patrol path enemies will take, and he'll even know that his target (again, glowing bright red) is a mile away, eating some donuts. 

To the right of your health bar is your mana instincts bar. This drains when you do fancy things like being shady and Sam Fisher shooting. Seeing important people (again, based on the difficulty you're playing), hints, items and people's patrol path is free. This mode feels a little cheap and completely different from what you'd expect in a Hitman game, but as much as I would like to say it's optional, I can't. There are certain frustrating segments in this game where you will have to use at least a little bit of your instinct to bypass. 

Which brings me to my first complaint. While there are a few, rather large open maps, Absolution detracts from previous incarnations by throwing in very linear missions. Previously you are plopped down in a level, given a picture of what your target looks like and the game says fuck you figure it out. Now we get a nice armful of levels where your objective is get from Point A to Point B. Every now and then the game goes OH SHIT I'M A HITMAN GAME?! and throws you some contract kills. It's during these missions where the world gets bit more open ended and you are rewarded with how creatively you can kill your targets. 

To help you get closer to your target or reach Point B, you can wear a disguise. Wearing disguises has always been a staple for the series, but this time around the system has been reworked for the better and unfortunately, for the worse. When wearing a disguise, you can bypass some restrictions and blocked paths. For example, wearing a cop uniform lets you keep a gun out and allows you to access areas normally off limits for civilians. Sounds awesome right? Wrong. It works well, but wearing a disguise will make anyone who is wearing that uniform EXTREMELY paranoid of you. Wearing a chef uniform in the Chinese new years mission will make Every. God damn. Chef. suspicious of you, and great oogly-moogly there's a lot.

They actually say stuff like this.

This is where instinct helps you. But it really honestly shouldn't be necessary, unfortunately it is. I understand there has to be some difficulty in the game, but it's stupid when you can't blend in with other professions just 'cause you're not part of their union. What's worse is how overly dramatic guards can be. Cop asks the guy in the chipmunk to back up? HE'S NOT COMPLYING?! SHOOT THE FUCKER.

Another issue that comes to mind are the checkpoints. Previously we were given limited saves that we could place anywhere, usually before attempting a big and elaborate plan that had a high failure rate. Now you can find player-activated check points throughout the levels, or on higher difficulty, you will just have to start back wherever the game felt like checkpointing. The horrendous thing about checkpoints is they are placed so far apart, that if you fail and wish to fix you failure, you would have to do every other thing leading up to your last failure. This is annoying and it's frustrating. There were moments when I wanted to switch to an easier difficulty, but chose to stick to the one I had selected. Previous games did not do this, even on the hardest difficulties when you are given just one, it wasn't so mindblistering difficult to know when to use that save.

The last thing to complain about is this: Do you remember (for those who've played it) in Mirror's Edge and how much fun it was being taught to don't get in firefights and how it's better to run away and reassess the situation? Then suddenly the last ending missions had you constantly fighting for survival. Absolution kind of did this to the series. Previous games, 47 would not last long in a firefight and more often than naught, one would usually result in mission failure. This time around, shooting your way through a mission is viable but will give you a horrible score.

One saving grace to this game though is Contracts Mode. In this mode, you can create new contracts within the levels of the game. The process itself is fairly easy, press Y to mark a target, kill them with any weapon wearing any disguise and then make your way to the exit. Afterwards, it'll create a base score depending on the extra actions you take like not changing disguises, using a specific weapon, not being seen, ect. You can then upload this contract or send it to friends for people to play.

If you want interesting challenges, you can also play other people's contracts and figure out the best possible way to maximize your score, doing so awards you money to buy weapons, upgrades and disguises. This mode is very enjoyable, and some of the contracts I've played rank next to some of the more difficult contracts of prior games. 

Presenting the Presentation

I will admit this, the game looks and sounds really good. I don't know of anyone who picks up a hitman game for the sake of graphics, but this time around it's easy to appreciate the graphics while waiting for your target to show up in your crosshair.

The entire game runs smooth and very rarely hiccuped or had its framerate drop. The wizards at IO did a fantastic job of drawing crowds. Some models are reused in these crowds, but at first glance it really appears varied and busy. One of the best set pieces in the game was escaping from the cops by waiting at a train station for the next train. During this time there are literally hundreds of npcs just hanging out and cops weaving in and out of the crowd searching for you.

During my playthrough, I did take note of how wonderful the game sounds. The ting of a silenced pistol going off, or the brutal sound of a knife plunging into the back of your victim was all so satisfying. The voice acting, even for the over the top characters, were well done and delivered with enough gusto to be believable. The conversations you can eavesdrop on were humorous at best, ignorable at worst.

OverallshittyOpinion

Despite its many flaws, the game itself is still fun to play. If you can overlook the frustratingly broken disguise system, it's still a blast sneaking around looking for your target or the exit. If you're a long time fan of the Hitman series, it's kind of a coin toss. You'll either like the game or you'll absolutely hate it. For a newcomer to the series, you're probably best of sticking with this and any future iterations, because going back to the older games will knock you on your ass and I highly doubt you'll enjoy the experience.

I'm giving it seven and a half angry glaring bald guys.

If you have the time and consider yourself a pretty cool guy/girl, then visit my friend's blog and read his review on the same game. DO IT NOW. 

http://thebabyatemycontroller.blogspot.com/2012/12/hitman-absolution-aka-wet-dog-fart.html

What's in a name?

Until you make your own blog, or have your own kid, or feel like naming your genitals something special, you probably don't realize how difficult it is to come up with a name that sticks. Personally I believe its because of my obsession with trying to be hip, new and cool, I ended up putting off making a blog for days weeks months years.

I like knowing what other people think would be good. So I tossed up a question on the good ol' Facebook. And frankly I was very pleased with the turnout. Everything from  "All we are, are Farts in the Wind" to puns of my last name. I felt like the prettiest girl at the ball, so many choices! I couldn't just choose one. So I used this as an excuse to not start up the blog.

A damn fine shame that was, I totally had opinions for a couple of things that have arrived since then. Call of Duty Black Cops 2, Prometheus, and others have kept me fairly preoccupied and I couldn't help but think to myself... Damn, you know what I should do? I should buy a boat. Then write a review on this boat. It's been like that for weeks. It kind of sucks.

But hey, this blog exist now and all is right in the world.

The story of how the title finally came to be is quite a silly one. You see it was Thanksgiving and I had just returned from eating Thanksgiving dinner with my girlfriend's family. To say it was delicious would be a massive understatement and quite honestly should shock and appall all who were involved in making such a delectable meal. During said meal though I had one or two (just one) Blue Moon which is honestly the only beer I actually enjoy.

Once the GF and I got back home, it was time for her to sleep so she could prepare for the Madness of Working Retail in Black Friday. This gave me all the time in the world (about two hours) for me to play some of that Magick The Gathering I bought from the steam sales today. That was fun. I also got in some play time with Scribblenauts Unlimited which I feel really deserves a review. But now's not the time nor place for that.

I logged into my last obsession for the night, World of Warcraft. Around this time I was trying to get my death knight to level 88, which I've put off 'cause I've been busy doing nothing. One of my guildmates, Shathri, was attempting to say something intelligible, a feat that happens once in a great while. He meant to say something about showing off a cool hat. But somehow that pesky e found its devilish self into the end of the sentence. I don't know if it's that one beer (it wasn't) or the two hours of magick (probably not) and scribblenauts, or if I'm just crazy (99% sure on this one).. I just could not stop laughing at the mistype.

I declared to Shathri that it will be the title of my new blog and ten minutes later this sad little blog came to existence. Looking back, it really wasn't silly.

I'm just crazy.

Ex Nihilo

The year was 2012. The month was November and the day? The 23rd. Day after Thanksgiving/Turkey Day. A day commonly referred as Black Friday. From this hellish day an idea was finally brought to reality.

I started a blog.

To be fair, I've been toying with the idea of a blog since forever. I had once dabbled with blogging back in high school and I was damn terrible at it. Filled with grammatical errors, spelling mishaps and stupid ideas only an angst-riddled teenager would think was good. This time though I feel like I can do it right, or at the very least better than I have ever before. Of course, if you give me a couple years, I'll come back to this hell hole and realized my blogging skills were sub-par at best and at worst, something only an angst-riddled twentysomthing would have found amusing.

About 80% of this blog is a chance for me to exercise my terrible growing writing talents. Another 60% of it would be devoted to throwing up tin-foil hat opinions about video games, music, books, television and movies. Entertainment in general will be torn apart for my own and hopefully (I highly doubt it) your own amusement. The remaining 20% will be dedicated to figuring out how to math.

Some people in my life have called me funny. I feel sorry for those people's learning disabilities. I guess if you laugh at something I posted, you really should go take a shower and rethink your life for a few. If you want, you can go do that now. I won't be peeking, pinky-swears.

...

Got it out of your system? Good. You're looking good by the way. Now I'll try to be funny, but if I fail feel free to call me out on it. I'll probably lose like... ten seconds of sleep from your constructive criticism. If I do somehow succeed, then... yay? I'm not trying to be funny, I'm just going to write whatever my brain poops out.

If I offend you in someway, go ahead and look at yourself in the mirror and think long and hard about how much it stings you that some guy across the internet does not share the same opinion as you. If I'm genuinely offensive like in terms of racisim and how Asians are bad at most things except stereotypes, then go ahead and call me out on it. That one will probably cost me thirty seconds of sleep. Trust me, racism is at the top of my list of things that keep me awake at night. Too bad I really love sleeping.

This blog will hopefully keep me motivated to actually getting around to doing two things I absolutely love in this world and would like to turn said loved things into a pretty profit for comfortable living. One, I'd like to get some reviews in. A chance for me to get some journalism chops in there 'cause I feel like selling my opinions for Doritos and Mountain Dews sounds like tremendous amounts of fun. The other is possibly posting a short story or excerpt or two on here for everyone to read and then soon after mock. I want to be a famous author of some sorts, or make a damn good story that I could sellout and live like a god damn king for the rest of my life on. If only J. K. Rowling had not taken my idea of a boy orphan who later became Luke Skywalker.

I guess if you've read this whole post, you really need a hobby or something. The other guy on my shoulder's telling me I should thank you or something, but thanking people was sooo yesterday.

That's why we call it Thanksgiving.

Mind = Blown.