Far Cry 2 is ridiculous in so many ways.

If your car gets damaged you can get out, open it up and tweak the engine to fix it. This would make sense except it fixes all the bodywork damage too. And it only takes two or three turns of the ratchet to do that. Clearly the protagonist kicked the shit out of mechanic school.

Your character has malaria so you need to take a pill every 30 minutes or real time. This is not immersive. It's fucking annoying.

Even though it's on the Dunia engine it still looks like shit. But that might be because we've just finished Killzone 2 which gently caresses your eyes with it's overwhelming beauty, making every other game ever look like a crayon drawing done on a napkin by a 3 year old quadruple amputee.

There's a dude at one point with an assault rifle on his back. He's not wearing a shirt. He's not wearing a bandolier or a holster. It's just stuck to his back. Like he's glued it there to look cool or something.

And here's the big one boys and girls... What the FUCK is up with the voice acting? I mean, really? Everyone speaks with zero emotion at 200 miles per hour. You can't understand them most of the time because they all have South African accents which (I'm sorry South Africa) just sound like people trying to do Australian accents and getting it wrong. But the speed of the speech is truly terrifying. I didn't know humans could speak that fast. It sounds like they gave the script to someone who can't speak English, removed all punctuation and kept the first take.

It's laughable most of the time. Tragic otherwise.

My esteemed colleague FB and I have just finished the Borderlands DLC known as The Secret Armory of General Knoxx. It went very well, thanks for asking. But after completing the primary storyline and defeating the General himself, we were handed a bonus mission for a secret final boss called Crawmerax the Invincible.

They weren't fucking about when they named that one.

We have just spent nearly an hour trying to put even the slightest dent in it's health bar only to be rewarded with a peasant's death every 30 seconds. We were killed by the Craw Maggots, the shittiest of it's minions, more times than we had been by some of the biggest bosses in the whole game. One time the lift glitched and dropped us to our deaths. EVEN THE LIFT KILLED US.

I'm just a little upset really. I was all chuffed with my evident bad-assery after kicking the crap out of Knoxx and his giant mech suit, and then I was swatted down by a giant angry lobster thing. Why is the lobster even angry? Why does everything on the planet of Pandora want me ground into a fine paste and used as some sort of fertiliser?

Although, that said, this game is like crack. Can't wait for the next DLC. Even if it is full of giant angry lobsters.

TS

I've been playing a disgusting amount of Borderlands lately, enjoying the simple pleasures of exploding psycho bandits with rocket launchers that fire acid and looting their charred corpses for trivial amounts of money and rusty shotguns, but i've noticed a troubling fact...

Everyone on the planet of Pandora shits ammo.

Now maybe it's the alien physiology of the locals, or the mystical beings from another dimension having some effect, but every time I open a toilet lid on this dusty rock I find not the proverbial fudgecake, but a fresh clip for my SMG. In some cases the term "droppin' bombs" becomes all too appropriate and I find rockets in the bowl. Rockets. Honestly. Good luck squeezing those out.

In all fairness you can see where the developers were going with it. You have guns. Guns needs ammo. Ammo can be stored in toilets. Bingo! But the story behind it just doesn't add up. I mean, they bothered to throw in story about the wild Skags that roam the wasteland eating the bodies of bandits and adventurers, guns 'n' all, and then pooping out what they can't digest, therefore giving a likely means of finding weaponry in poo. But having good old human folk pooping out 12 buckshots for my shotgun is just plain weaksauce.

Oh, and for those who have completed the game, let us unite in a rousing chorus of "Really?! Are you shitting me? Not even ONE weapons crate? No, no that's fine, the squid monster will cover it. Really. Fuckers."

TS

...and all through the house, nothing was stirring, not even a mouse.

And especially not me as I was up eating pizza and designing a website til 4am. (You can view that HERE, please donate to this guy's cause, s'all for the good of man and such.)

In other news, the audio uploader is faffing me about... I've got some more lovely tunes to share with y'alls and it's flat-out refusing to upload them. Most upsetting. Work on that later.

Anywho, have a good Christmas you lovely people of Newgrounds, and the happiest of new years. Let's hope 2010 is at least a billion times better than 2009. It soundspretty cool, so we can only hope.

Oh, and I watched Star Wars: Episode 1 the other day, just in case I was being prejudiced towards the prequel trilogy and had actually overlooked a good movie... I had not. Big pile of shit. I sat through two bastarding hours of Jar Jar Binks being a cock just to see the lightsaber duel at the end. Hardly worth it.

Take it easy sugartits,

TS

Now we all know that Bethesda, as a developer and saviour of the world, is staffed entirely by ninja wizards with eighties sunglasses and other such artefacts of ultimate win, and this is how they came to create such modern-day interactive holy texts such as Bioshock, Oblivion and Fallout 3... But what the general populace do not know is that Bethesda have delved into the realms of creating more than just video games...

For example, the brand new Bethesda Toaster not only toasts bread to perfection, but also butters it, applies your favourite preserve and hands it to you on a golden platter with a side of caviar.

The Bethesda Asthma Inhaler not only cures asthma entirely, but turns the user into a herculean super man capable of lifting mountains and taming lions with a mere whisper.

It was recently announced that Bethesda would be re-releasing every game ever made, thus improving them all one hundred billion times over.

Needless to say if Bethesda was a single human being (and not a coalition of deities) I would marry it and forever bask in the glow of it's beautiful genius. But until that day I will have to rely on the brand new Bethesda Girlfriend. She comes in a variety of styles and sizes, and comes bundled with The Shivering Isles expansion pack for Oblivion. What more could you want in a woman...

I just made a pancake with Cadbury's Caramel melted into it, with sugar, golden syrup and Carte D'Or Madagascan vanilla ice cream on top. It's the greatest thing ever made.

From this day forth I shall endeavour to create more pancake related masterpieces. Next stop: Pancake with steak. I call it the Pansteak.

That is all.

TS