So about a week and a half ago, I turned the ripe old age of 30 years old. While I was dreading reaching this “over the top” age, I have to admit that it ended up being one of the best birthdays I have ever had. I have been meaning to share stories and post some pictures from the celebrations, but things have been crazy busy since then and I just haven’t found the time. Well my life has finally slowed down just enough for me to right this blog, so sit back and enjoy as I tell you about what it’s like getting old.

So for my birthday, my girlfriend Nicki and I decided to throw a huge party. Now when I say huge, I’m talking like 45 people, which for us is probably the largest party we’ve ever thrown since we graduated college. Just for the record, the actual biggest party I ever threw was around 300 people back during my senior year of college. Now that was an epic party, but you know, it still wasn’t as good as my 30th birthday party.

So what mainly made my party so great was that almost all my closest friends came, including my parents and my girlfriend’s parents. That was actually the first time our parents ever met, and from what I can gather, it went well between them (fingers crossed!). Besides all the people, there was a TON of incredible food, which Nicki, our friend Mel, and I spent all day cooking. There were also a million desserts to choose from, including a pot of dark chocolate fondue we made.

Did I mention the beer, because there was a ton of beer. Besides a homebrewed keg of Belgian wheat beer my buddy Rhys made, we also had about 240 bottles of around 40 different types of beer. We also popped open a couple of bottles of wine and Champaign, but that was later in the night during a period I don’t remember very well.



So gaming wise, for my birthday I got the Renegade Version of DJ Hero and Ghostbusters for the Xbox360. I also got a bunch of Best Buy and Target gift cards, which I plan to use to buy a bunch more games, like Assassin’s Creed 2 and Dragon Age: Origins. Hopefully at some point soon I’ll actually find the time to play these games, but recently my life has been consumed by the Modern Warfare 2 multiplayer. I’m just so good at killing fools that I can’t seem to stop playing. :-P

Ok, so the final thing I want to tell you all about is the office prank my coworkers played on me for my 30th birthday. You may, or may not, remember this, but last year I completely tin foiled another of my coworker’s offices for his 40th birthday. Since then he has vowed to get me back. Well over the weekend he and a bunch of other people came in and blew up 600 individual balloons, which they piled into my office. They also threw confetti and glitter everywhere. When I got to work on Monday morning I was pretty dumbfounded.

Suffice to say, it took me all freaking day to clean up my office. What made it worse was that they put glitter and confetti in the balloons, so when I went to pop them, the shit went everywhere. The guys were at least nice enough to come in and vacuum it all off the floor.




The only thing that sucked about my 30th birthday was the hangover, and the fact I didn’t get to meet Yojimbo. He was supposed to make it to my party so we could finally meet, but unfortunately family issues caused him to not be able to make it. That’s totally cool, and I completely understand, but it would have been great to meet the guy and hang out. There are a ton of you out there who I would like to meet as well, but that’s just gonna have to wait until I can make it to PAX!

So to recap, turning 30 wasn’t really bad at all. I expected it to be horrible, and instead it was one of the best birthday’s I ever had. I’m really an extremely lucky guy. I have an incredible girlfriend who loves me, a large group of friends who I really care about, and a great family who live right down the street.

Ok this turned out being much longer than I thought. If you actually read it all, more power to ya. For those of you who don’t like to read, here are a bunch of pictures to look at.

When it was decided that I would be the writer at Gamer Limit.com who was reviewing Borderlands, I immediately opted for the PC version. While I typically play most FPSs on consoles, this was a game I really wanted to experience on the PC, especially since the developer stated this version would be the best one. Unfortunately it got pushed back a week from the console version, so all I could do was bide my time and wait.

While I waited, I got to see all these great reviews pour in for the Xbox 360 and PS3, so it got me even more excited. The game finally arrived, and that very first night I didn’t play a single second of it. It’s not because I didn’t have time, or because my PC wasn’t good enough to run it. I couldn’t play the game the first night it came out because a couple of my buddies and myself couldn’t figure out how to get the damn game to connect online to play co-op.

We spent two hours trying to get Borderlands to work online before we finally gave up and called it quits. I was so angry by that point that I didn’t even want to try single player. I just said screw it and went to bed. The next day we figured out that to host a game online we had to go into our router and forward a bunch of specific ports. Are you fucking kidding me? This is 2009. Why do I have to do something as archaic as forwarding ports at this point in the life of the PC. It’s fucking pathetic.

So this brings me to the whole point of this blog, which is that I have discovered my review score for the PC version of Borderlands is the lowest on Metacritic. It’s the lowest because I found lots of problems associated specifically with the PC version which really brought the score down for me. I’m not sure why these don’t bother any other reviewers, because some of them are pretty serious. Now if you want to read my full impressions of the game, I recommend you go check out my actual review over at Gamer Limit. I’m only here to talk about the negative things that really bugged me about the PC version.

I’ve already mentioned that to host an online game you need to forward ports, but that’s not the only problem with this game. A major issue that exists is that the game is obviously a poorly done direct port of the console version. I mean Gearbox said that they needed the extra week to get the PC version ready, but I’m not sure what they were doing during that week. It feels like they got some intern to simply port the code from the console version over and call it ready to ship. I'm sure this is not the case, but it's obvious that the developers put no extra time into making the PC differentiate itself from the console version in any way.



The first sign that this is a poor console port is that the menu screen is freaking huge, with large fonts that make reading very painful to the eyes. Now I understand that when you play consoles you sit 15 feet from your TV, so you need large font. You only sit about 2 feet from your computer monitor, so you don’t need the excessively large font.

You also don’t need the menus to be the size of the entire screen. Have those guys over at Gearbox even played other RPGs on the PC? If they had they would know that plenty of other games use small menu screens that allow you to play and look at the menu at the same time. This would really come in handy when you are trying to decide if you want to pick up a gun that just dropped and you want to compare it to other weapons in your inventory.

The menu screens are also pretty difficult to navigate on the PC. I mean it isn’t that hard, but you can tell the menu navigation was optimized for the console and not the PC. How hard would it have been to modify them just a little so that it’s easier to navigate using just a mouse. I can’t tell you how many times I tried to click on something on the menu with my mouse and discovered I needed to use my keyboard instead. I should never have to use a damn keyboard to navigate a menu screen.

Another huge problem with the PC version is that the in-game voice chat is horrendous. Not only is the volume to low, but there is no menu option to adjust the volume and there is no option to turn it off. It’s just on all the damn time. In order to turn it off you have to actually go into the code and switch a variable. In order to chat with friends I’ve had to jump on a Ventrillo server or use Skype. How do you launch an online cooperative game in 2009 without a working voice chat feature? How? Someone tell me how! Please!

There are other little nagging problems, such as the large amount of lag that can appear from time to time. There are also a bunch of typical menu options missing, which you would normally find in other FPSs, such as disabling mouse sync. You can modify a ton of options if you are willing to look up how to modify the code, but I’m not a damn programmer. I don’t want to do that. I simply want to click on the options menu and change things the easy way. The way every other FPS lets me change things.

So I gave the PC version of Borderlands the lowest score on Metacritic. Do I care? Not really. It’s not like I set out to do that. I didn’t even realize it until after my review was posted on the site. What shocks me is why none of these horrible problems bothered anyone else. Did these people not play the PC version, and just use their console version score as the PC review score, or were they just able to look past the problems because the game is so kick-ass? Maybe they were, but I wasn’t going to be so nice. Gearbox needs to learn how to properly port a game over from the console. Maybe they’ll read my review and it will have an impact. I can only hope.

If you had asked me a couple years ago if any game deserved a perfect review score of 10/10, I would have said no. Every single game that I'd played had some type of flaw that warranted the deduction of some amount of points. Therefore in my mind, a perfect score of 10 was always something to strive toward, but never something that was possible to achieve.

The last few years though the quality of games released has gone through the roof. Thanks to titles like GTA 4, Bioshock, and Metal Gear Solid 4 I've started to reevaluate my position on the subject of perfect review scores. This all came to a head recently when I was given the opportunity to write the official Gamer Limit review for Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.

After discussing it over with some of the staff members at the site, I decided to give the game a perfect 10/10. Feel free to read to my actual review if you like, as it will provide a lot more details about my reasoning then I'm about to go into here. Simply put, in my opinion Uncharted 2 is the best game released on the PS3 to date. Naughty Dog has created such a memorable masterpiece that it represents the pinnacle of game development for this current generation of consoles. How could I not give the game a 10?

Now something I found very interesting about Uncharted 2, which I point out in my review, is that it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done before. The cover and shoot gameplay mechanic isn't anything new, the tomb raiding puzzle/adventure gameplay style has been done to death, and the multiplayer combines elements from many other games already existing on the market. If this game takes lots of ideas from so many other titles out there, how is it that it could possible deserve a perfect score?

While it is true that Uncharted 2 doesn't do anything new, it does do a lot of different things, all of which have been polished to a level of quality that is extremely rare these days. The single player story is better then most of the action movies released so far this year, the multiplayer is addictive and extremely diverse, the colorful cast of characters are accompanied by some of the best voice acting heard in years, and the replayability is through the roof.

How often do you find a sequel that manages to keep everything good from the previous game, while solving all of the problems that nagged the original? Not only that, but add in a multiplayer mode that rivals, if not beats the pants off of other games who have been doing multiplayer for years like Gears of War 2. Everyone was worried that Naughty Dog might stumble and trip over themselves by attempting too much, but instead they managed to hit a home run and show why they are on e of the best developers in the business.



I think that if a game manages to do a multitude of different things extremely well, and doesn't half ass a single part of the entire package, it deserves a perfect score. Uncharted 2 does this, so in my mind it should get a perfect 10.

Not everyone agrees with this line of thinking, as is evident with the recent GameTrailers Uncharted 2 score fiasco. A great deal of commotion erupted when the site decided to give the game a 9.3. As you watch the entire review it appears that the score it going to be in the high 9's to possibly a 10, but then in the end the review score of 9.3 is shown and a lot of people were shocked.

In a later episode of Invisible Walls, the reasoning behind the lower score was explained. According to the reviewers, while the game was extremely good and did a lot of things right, it did not attempt to do anything new and hence does not deserve the acclaim of getting anything higher then a 9.5.

When I read this I was very disappointed in the site. If you take a look back at many of the games that actually try to innovate, you'll notice a pattern of shitty games. Mirror's Edge and Assassin's Creed are two recent examples of this. They both tried to innovate and create something new and unique, and they both had major issues that really brought the gameplay experience down.

A majority of the best games ever made are not ones that try to innovate. They are the ones that take already existing gameplay formulas and mechanics and try to perfect and polish them into something that's actually fun and entertaining to play. COD 4: Modern Warfare and Bioshock are two great examples. Neither of these games did anything new, but they both took a lot of elements tried in previous games and perfectly melded them together to create an excellent experience.

My point is, games like Uncharted 2 shouldn't be punished because they don't attempt to innovate or try something new. They should be celebrated for getting so many things right that other games could not. Perfect review scores like 10 should be rare, but they shouldn't be impossible to get. There is no such thing as a perfect game, and there never will be, but games can come extremely close to perfect. Uncharted 2 is one of these games, which is why I think it deserves a perfect 10/10.

Many of you know me as a long time Dtoid community member, but what most of you don’t know is that I’ve recently become a senior writer over at Gamer Limit (gamerlimit.com). I’ve only been writing for them a couple of months now, but I’ve tried reviewing as many games as I can, hoping to get more experience so I can get better at it. Lucky for me, most of my reviews so far have all been for really good games like Shadow Complex and The Beatles: Rock Band. That all changed recently when I volunteered to play and review a new Xbox 360 game titled Darkest of Days.

When I first volunteered to review this game, I knew that it wasn’t getting good reviews. I hesitated at first because of this fact, but eventually I decided that I shouldn’t let other people’s opinions of a game effect my own judgment. After all, there are plenty of games other people have hated which I loved. Star Wars: The Force Unleashed immediately comes to mind. I also knew that I liked the general premise of Darkest of Days, and that I’d been interested in it for a while, so I decided to volunteer to review it after all.

What I soon discovered was that it was not only a horrible game, but one of the worst games I’ve ever played. If you want to read my review of Darkest of Days you should head on over the Gamer Limit and look it up, but I’m not going to link it hear because Yojimbo will give me lots of shit for pimping my articles through the Cblogs. What I will tell you is that there were many occasions I seriously considered not finishing the game because of how horrible it was. It only took me 10 hours total to beat it, but it was 10 of the most excruciatingly painful gaming hours of my life.

When I had finally concluded the game and put it back in its box, vowing to never play it again, I discovered that I had created a list of negative notes that were multiple pages in length. I knew it was finally time to begin my review, but I honestly wasn’t sure what to do. I knew I wanted to give it a bad score, but I wasn’t sure how bad that would be. I decided to turn to my fellow writers over at Gamer Limit and ask for advice. They all told me to give it whatever score I wanted, and to not worry about what anyone else thought.

You know, we bash games all the time here in the Cblogs, and we never really think twice about it. After all, it can be fun to take a game and completely rip it apart, finding every little problem with it and driving a game into the ground because of them. Developers of those games don’t typically come to the Dtoid cblogs and read what we have to say though.



Things are quite different at Gamer Limit. When I write a review, we actually mail that review directly to the publisher so they can read it themselves. In this case the developer, 8monkey Labs, gave us a free copy of Darkest of Days, so they were expecting a review from us in a short period of time. When the review you write is going to be sent to and read by the actual people who made it, it makes you stop and think about exactly what you want to say.

These people spent years of their life creating this game, and even though the final product might have ended up bad, you can tell that they put a lot of hard work into it. When someone has spent so much time on something and put so much of themselves into it, it can extremely hard to crush their spirits by telling them how bad of a job they did. It’s happened to me before and I can tell you it sucks! Unfortunately for them they just didn’t make a good game, and I couldn’t allow my feelings to interfere in the matter.

The other problem I had writing a bad review was I didn’t know how it would affect Gamer Limit’s relationship with the developer and publisher. This is another reason I asked my fellow writers what I should do. My editor-in-chief specifically told me to not worry about the publisher and to just write exactly what I thought of the game, not letting anything else influence me. He let me know he would take care of the relationship, since that kind of stuff is his job after all.

I decided that the best thing to do was the give them a really bad score, but to make sure I backed up all my reasoning without being childish or immature. I can honestly say that I didn’t enjoy writing this review. When I was done, someone I know asked me if I enjoyed tearing down the game. My response to that was an immediate “no”. I simply could not take pleasure in destroying what someone else had created.

The thing I regret the most was that I spent so much space writing about the negative aspects of the game, I ran out of room to write anything really positive. There actually were some good things about Darkest of Days, but if you read my review you wouldn’t know it. That’s mainly because the positive things are extremely overpowered by all the negative things. I felt like if I was writing such a bad review, I needed to make sure I included as many negative points as possible. This was just one of those hard decisions I discovered I had to make. It sucks, but it is what it is.

As you can see, my first experience writing a bad game review for Gamer Limit was not a very pleasant one. I thought it would be easy, but ended up discovering it was not only hard, but painful as well. It’s just not easy to tell someone that all their hard work didn’t pay off, and that they created what essentially is a horrible game. I made it through though, and now that I’ve done one I’ll be more comfortable writing another bad review when the next piece of trash comes along. That’s not to say that I’ll ever enjoy it though.

Today I decided to sit down and figure out exactly how much money I'm going to be spending on all the games I was planning on buying this Fall. In order to exercise some level of "control", I decided to only include games that I was 100% sure I wanted to play. What I quickly discovered was that my list was much much much larger then I thought.

Below is the complete list of titles I came up with, along with release dates and prices. As you can see, if you add all those dollar amounts up you get $780. Add in the 7% North Carolina sales tax and it brings the total up to $835. I don't know about you, but that is a whole hell of a lot of money.

I'm honestly starting to think that I need to reconsider whether I really want some of these games. Not only is $835 a lot of money to spend, but there are just too many games on this list to physically attempt to play in the alloted time. Just check out October 20th. There are three games coming out on that same day I want to play, and all of them are probably 40+ hour games. What the hell was I thinking when I made this list?

On another note, weren't a lot of games supposed to be pushed back to 2010. Looking at this list, you wouldn't think any games had been pushed back at all. Damn video game developers and all their stupid creative genius. I wish they would just take a break for a while.

So how much money do the rest of you plan on spending this Fall on games? Anywhere near the insane amount I plan on spending?

Sept. 22
-Halo 3: ODST- $60

Sept. 29
-Dead Space: Extraction- $50

Oct. 13
-Brutal Legend- $60
-Uncharted 2: Among Thieves- $60

Oct. 20
-Borderlands - $50
-DJ Hero- $120
-Forza 3 - $60

Oct. 27
-Ratchet and Clank Future: A Crack in Time- $60

Nov. 3
-Dragon Age: Origins- $50

Nov. 10
-Modern Warfare 2 - $50

Nov. 17
-Assassin’s Creed II- $60
-Left 4 Dead 2 - $50

Q4 2009
-New Super Mario Bros. Wii- $50

I might be a little late to the party, and everyone might be sick of these by now, but damnit I need to tell everyone why I love Destructoid. You see, when I first joined the Dtoid community well over a year ago, I came for two main reasons. The first reason was because I needed a place where I could meet people who were as passionate about video games as I was. I have a lot of friends who play video games, but most of them aren’t passionate about them. Yeah they might play some of the big name titles like MGS4, GTA4, and Madden, but that’s about it. They don’t play any of the lesser known titles and they don’t pay attention to what’s going in the industry.

Because of this, I could never really talk to any of my friends about video games the way I really wanted, and that bothered me. I needed a place where I could meet people just like me, who I would actually be able to have real conversations with about the video game industry and all the crazy games coming out. I realized the best way to do this was to blog, and out of all the websites I looked, Dtoid had the best community blog section. This was the place I needed to be.

The second reason I joined Destructoid was because I was hoping it might be a way to get a job as a video game journalist. At the time I absolutely hated my real life job, and I wanted a change to something I was passionate about. Since I was passionate about playing and talking about games, I thought being a games journalist might be the best fit for me. Unfortunately I had absolutely no experience at all, so no one would even consider hiring me. I of course didn’t blame them. I then thought that if I started blogging and writing about games, maybe someone would think I had talent and might hire me. At the time the idea seemed extremely farfetched, but when you have a dream and a goal you have to start somewhere right. If you never even start toward your goal, you won’t get anywhere.

Well it’s been 1 year and 3 months since I joined the Dtoid community, and what I’ve gotten out of this site has just exceeded every expectation I ever had. First of all, I found exactly what I was looking for, a place I could fit in perfectly. I have had so many incredible and in-depth discussions about games here that I never thought I would have with anyone. Besides that, I have met tons and tons of incredible people, from every walk of life and every part of the world you can imagine. I’ve even forged some bonds of friendship with certain people which I hold very dear.

As for my hope that joining Destructoid might help land me a job as a video game journalist; for the longest time I tried and tried to write good pieces so that someone would notice me, but no one ever did. After a while I sort of gave up and submitted to the fact it would probably never happen. I never lost all hope, as I’m a very optimistic person, but the dream faded more and more with each passing day. Then one day I got an extremely unexpected email from an unexpected source, offering me a chance to write for a new and upcoming gaming site. After checking out the site I accepted the offer, and I’m now proud to say that I’m an official staff writer for GamerLimit.com. If you get a chance you should check out the site. I write under my actual name: Shawn Evans.

Unfortunately, being a writer at Gamer Limit has reduced the amount of time I can spend writing for the Dtoid cblogs, but I still visit the site as much as I can, and of course I'm still part of the Cblog Recap Team. Most importantly though, my heart still lies in this community. Actually, it’s really the community that makes Dtoid so great. There simply is just no other video game centric community like this on the entire internet. There is a reason I visit this site 20+ times a day, and that’s because of all the incredibly awesome people here. Everyone from the staff to the community members make Destructoid a special place. Thank you, to everyone.

Destructoid …. I <3 You!