Favourite Things Of 2011

Earthquakes. Tsunamis. Nuclear Meltdowns. Mega Man Legends cancelled. Terrorist attacks in Norway. Deus Ex: Human Revolution. My cat died. Failed two personal projects. Lost all contact with friends. The Occupy Movement. A month-long medical emergency at the end. 2011 was one soul-crushing disaster after another.

WORST.


YEAR.


EVER.

Because it was a non-stop parade of horseshit flying in from every direction, I'm going to be a bit more lenient with my unwritten "rules" for eligibility. Namely, it doesn't have to be something that was completed in 2011 to qualify for this list. It just has to be something that provided some brief respite from the biggest piece-of-shit span of 12 months I can remember.

(Otherwise I wouldn't really have enough to fill out a Top 10 list).

And remember: This isn't a BEST OF list. These are my Favourites. Things that I know aren't the best in the history of whatever. But for whatever reason, they helped me survive another year. If it's not on this list, either I haven't played it yet (Arkham City, Minecraft), or it's overrated bullshit (Deus Ex, Bastion).

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"Red Vs. Blue Season 9": Review

by Alex Hill

2/5

I try not to review individual seasons or episodes of TV shows or web-based content, but I think this is a special case. The folks at Roother Teeth are the poster boys of Machinima (machine cinema, animating pre-made video game content for the purposes of fan-fiction). For eight seasons, they trotted out the same characters in similar situations, but have always managed to draw entertainment from the well. It was almost always amusing in a juvenile way, and the dialogue was always a fast-paced collapse of logic in the face of stupidity. If you didn't like a joke at first, they'd build and build on it, and a new one was always around the corner.

This is also the second season featuring Monty Oum's frenzied choreographed fight sequences, utilizing motion capture and other assets not found in the Halo series these guys normally work with. But they happen to a completely new cast of characters, in a different time period, in scenes that appear randomly and out of order inbetween the machinima parts. They don't overlap or compliment Church's exile in any way, or vice-versa.

Season nine of Red Vs. Blue has identity issues. It's two barking heads on the same shoulders.


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Bungie, Part II

Part I is here.

I remember many years ago reading an article about how Bungie started playtesting their games with, I kid you not, actual soccer moms. Unfortunately, Google can only locate snarky forum posts that use this sort of information as ammunition. That's the kind of things 12-years try to use as an insult for a game someone else likes. Maybe Marcus Lehto is trying very hard to pretend it never happened, like George Lucas with the Star Wars Holiday Special.

Can you imagine priorities this stupid in another medium? That's not even selling ice to an eskimo. That's marketing a white-supremacist romantic comedy to Spike Lee. That's selling a book to a Tea Party rally.  If Bungie were a car dealership, they would be trying to appeal to the armless demographic by making every steering wheel a bear-trap.

Halo 3 stands today as the single most hyped anything in the history of consumerism. If Jesus comes back, he won't have as much build-up as this insipid swill received. It didn't fix much of what was wrong with the last game. It was still a confusing series of bullshit confrontations where it's impossible to tell how much damage has been inflicted. It still lied about the functionality of its weapons, in a genre where that's kind of important. And there's still virtually no engaging story or characters to speak of.

But at least it was pretty to look at again, and had a good soundtrack, so it was only mostly a failure. And more importantly, it revealed that the folks behind the games actually WERE good at something:

Community pandering.