Welcome all

Hello all and welcome to my blog (this is one of the nicest things you will ever here me say), in which i will whine and be cynical about different things until you'll either want to put a bullet through your head or drown yourself in your own piss.


I am now Jooseman, the Artist formerly known as Jonith, and I have stopped using the name Jonith regularly (however do still have many accoun named Jonith, so go by both) as it got confusing, So call me Jooseman or Joose or whatever. Call me TwatBucket if it pleases you.

Our Youtube Channel
Rants up on this blog on Friday if I've done one, just too add a little bit of schedule here.

Anyway thats all from me, and also check out Rofling Officer Productions. He is a collaborater of mine.

Saturday 28 January 2012

The Darkness 2 Demo Rant

Again, as January has less game releases than a monk has mistresses and due to the fact that I have still not had time to finish L.A Noire (or stomach the thought of having to play the Battlefield 3 campaign, for a rant (Hey I've put it off for a while now, don't judge)) I have decided to review another one of these big demos which have arrived on Steam and this time, it is The Darkness 2.

In possibly the most shocking revelation since David Beckham was revealed to be the anti-Christ and subsequently kicked everybody's pet tortoises to death and pissed on there bodies, The Darkness 2 is a sequel to a game called The Darkness (Shock, horror), a game even more amazingly based on a comic named... You guessed it, The Darkness. There are so many surprises here I bet you wouldn't care if I told you that God existed and his whole purpose is to give out STD's.

You play Mob Boss/ Japanese tentacle porn creator, Jackie Estacado, a man who wields something sinister called The Darkness, and involves some other organisation trying to get this off you, headed by a man who looks like a cross between the Hunchback of Notre Dame and a cupboard.

Other than a bit where I am being crucified by this guy, the demo starts with him being walked through a restaurant with about as much interactivity as a wooden floor. As you walk through you hear more Italian Americans than in The Godfather if it was written by Super Mario. After a while of walking through this area, I'm shoved into what seems to be a section which is more on rails than Stevenson's Rocket, as you are dragged through the area while shooting at a rival gang.

So after having more excitement sucked out of me than a man with erectile dysfunction being offered a blow job, I finally get to control my character with his aforementioned tentacles. Shame that, due to the controls being more fiddly to control than a buttered up piece of butter, you can never see how fun they actually are. Instead they are more annoying than having a deer kick you in the balls continuously. Pressing middle mouse button and then swinging you're mouse around like a cat on ecstasy also leaves you disoriented in the same way that spinning around on a crashing car may do.

Even then, that is before mentioning the terrible game mechanic of having to shoot down the street lights. It is a jarring change of pace when one minute you are ripping apart crime like a psychotic Batman, when the next you're shooting down lights like a 5 year old hoodlum. And there is little way around this when, if you don't, it takes away you're power. You're basically a shit Superman, but instead of Kryptonite, you just have a phobia of streetlights.

However if the game decided to send more than three enemies at me (remember this is the demo, it'll probably be different in the actual game) or isn't wrenching control from me like a clingy 3 year old, then you will be able to see the amazing violence in the game. It seems to have been left over from the point when the developers decided to remove all the fun parts out of the game. The more and more bloodthirsty ways to kill people seem to have come straight from the mind of Jason Voorhees after he stubbed his toe on a nail. They get pretty shit when they repeat though, and it becomes the equivalent of watching a wall dry on repeat.

Another good point is the cell shaded art style, which really isn't a style I like in games, for example the Prince of Persian re-boot... However that may be because that game made me feel like I was hammering a nail through my spine. It suits the game really well.

The camera (i.e. you're view) bobs about more than a boat in a hurricane. It makes the game sickening and horrible to play, and I would rather have somebody piss down my throat than have to endure that again. It gave me a bigger headache than the time I slammed my head onto a railway track when a train was coming down. It also makes it harder to aim than it is too make a cake after having both your eyes torn out with ice picks. This is also not helped by the limited FOV.

So overall I wouldn't recommend this game from what the demo shows, unless you happen to like the taste of sucking on your own balls, as I would recommend it more than this piece of shit.

Or you could just ignore this whole rant and buy it on the sole reason that there is a cockney monkey/imp thing that says "God save the Queen", possibly the most redeeming thing in the entire demo.

Monday 23 January 2012

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning Demo Rant

Due to being busy, along the lines of a man who sits in a bath full of porridge getting sucked off by a hoover may be considered busy, I have not had much time to play any game this week other than Minecraft, however a demo I saw did catch my eye. The one for a game named Kingdoms of Amalur, so I decided to download that and review it.

Kingdoms of Amalur is an upcoming Role Playing Game, with the lead designer of one of my favourite games, Ken Rolston working on it. He made Morrowind, he also made a game which I would rather have caught SARS from an infected Snowman than play, Oblivion. It was also written by R.A Salvatore, who I have heard is a good writer, but writer doesn't count, Black Ops had the same writer as Batman Begins and The Dark Knight, in the biggest drop in quality since Winston Churchill applied for the position of sex slave. So for this review of a demo, which is like reviewing a film while watching it through a man hole cover, I will split this into different categories starting with... *play epic music*

Story

In the game you have the choice to play as Humans, More Humans, Slightly Grey Humans, and Even Greyer Humans. At least in the Elder Scrolls I get much more of a choice, in this it's the equivalent of having to pick if you want to watch Disaster Movie or be raped by Squirrels.

The Game starts with a cinematic which couldn't be more like Lord of The Rings if it had a top on saying Peter Jackson can I give you a back massage. The narrator is basically Galadriel, and there is even a bit which looks suspiciously like The Last Alliance of Men and Elves, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't. The again I'm not sure why I subject myself to this crap, so don't listen to my opinion.

After this I was greeted by a screen of blackness, because the people who made this game couldn't optimise it for an ATI card, but I turned off post processing and it worked, only to be met by the faces of two midgets, who both looked like they were about to start dancing wildly that they had struck oil. They threw me into a pit full of more bodies than... Well any joke I make here will be ridiculously offensive. It's just a shame that all the dead bodies look like sex dolls after a holiday to the bottom of a river, taking away more seriousness than having a man do the Charleston at the back of a news report on mass homicide.

The whole plot is harder to get into than a brick wall, and seemed to jump more jarringly between subjects than a Bi-Polar raccoon, leaving me confused, but it doesn't bother me at the moment, it could become better later on into the game not in the demo. But it's fucking shit anyway. (More uneducated opinion by me.)

Combat

Let's start with the melee combat, which feels slicker than an oil covered eel. The maximum gameplay which involves melee combat may just be you spam clicking whatever button it is like you are trying to give yourself arthritis, but at least it feels better than the one in basically any Elder Scrolls game. It is however, supposed to be a combination of both an Elder Scrolls game and a God of War game, and it completely fails at the latter it may as well have fallen out of a building onto a brick floor. It's average to good though.

I feel like I should give a quick mention to the blocking though, which involves you pulling out a shield which you conveniently managed to store at the back of your arse.

Then we have the stealth, which is also ok, but nowhere near as good as the one which is in most modern games, like in Skyrim or Deus Ex Human Revolution. One thing it does have like these games is the awful stealth kill animation, which as always is more jarring than the scene in The Pianist where everybody in the Warsaw Ghetto stands up and starts singing In The Navy.

Now we have the worst part of the combat, the Archery, which has an aiming system like they had got a blind man to create it. It flickers about from box to box instead of that obviously less threatening spider in my path, which leads me to believe that the plot twist will be that all the boxes unite against whoever you are fight for and try to take over the world for the Holy Boxyness. So all in all, the archery leaves me feeling annoyed, like a turtle had just pissed on my head.

Movement

All I have to say about this is that my character runs about like they have had a spike shoved up there arse, and that the game has taken away my ability to jump. They may as well have taken away my hands at the same time. I hate games which remove the ability to jump, it feels like they have removed all sense of freedom I had in the game.

Also the camera positioning is terrible, like it had been designed by a person with a nail through there jaw... I don't know why that would affect camera positioning but the point stands anyway.


So overall, I will not be getting this game, as it is terrible, especially if you compare it to some of the other RPG's on the market at the moment. However I'm pretty sure at this point last year, we were getting Dragon Age 2, which it is better than.... Then again that is like contemplating if you should be infected with AIDS or having a glass bottle shoved down your throat. If somebody asked you to buy this game, I'm pretty sure this will be your reaction. (Ignore the fact that, that TV program is also terrible)

Anyway to end on a lighter note, here is a Turtle trying to fly... Also I'm probably on crack.

Wednesday 18 January 2012

Editorial: SOPA and PIPA blackout

John: As anybody who hasn't had his head stuck down a hole filled with rabid chipmunks should know, yesterday was the SOPA and PIPA blackout day, with many big sites such as Wikipedia, Reddit, and Rock Paper Shotgun as well as big youtubers such as Total Biscuit and Yogscast all blacking out. What did I do, I hear three of you ask, well I blacked up.... I mean blacked out as well, well as much as it is possible to on Blogger. This blackout lead to 10 senators dropping support for SOPA and 10 for PIPA, including one of its co signers Marco Rubio

Now you ask, why did I do this? Well I'll tell you this, I believe that the internet is an amazing thing, encouraging art, from you're pictures of cats getting annoyed at cheeseburgers, to people playing music instruments, and everybody should be proud of this. It has changed everybody's life, challenging and deposing of murderous regimes, and questioning business practices. It has created a free market, a place for anybody to achieve success if they want to, the new American Dream.

SOPA and PIPA however, will destroy this huge empire of freedom. They want this amazing thing to be controlled by the large corporations, reducing all our freedom. It is irony, that countries like the United States, are planning this bill, while at the same time criticising the North Koreans, Iranians and the Chinese for their similar regulations. Supposedly these bills will stop piracy, but it won't, all it will do is harm the general user. It is like DRM, people still find ways around it to pirate games, but the customer is stuck with a permanent annoyance whenever they try install or even use their game. Yes piracy is bad, but this would be like releasing murderers to stop thievery.

It is a mockery to all what the western world supposedly stands for, all due to the big corporations who need help because they feel they can't survive. That's not capitalism, that's corporationism (or Corporatism), an ideology which means that the corporations stay with the most power by having a corrupt government themselves take down competition. No, true capitalism gives everybody an equal chance, it allows the big companies to fail, and the small people to think of something creative and earn their fortune... It allows a Free Market

Now I don't like doing these serious posts, I'm just a man, on the internet, who wants to write about and watch people play the things he loves, games, however when this and the freedom of the internet is threatened, I do not believe I can stand by. This is why I, and many other people, blacked out, or campaigned against this bill. If you are in the US contact you're elected officials here (http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml) and if you are out of the United States (and if you're in it) sign here. (http://www.avaaz.org/en/save_the_internet) Well that was my opinion on this blot on the internet, now to get back to normal work.