I think it's best to evaluate things as what they are, and as what they're intended to be. Most of my contention with the modern gaming media and gamers themselves comes from the inability for people to separate themselves from preconceived notions of what something, in this case a game, should be be and to actually look at it. It's for that reason that I am beginning like this: Necromorphs are not zombies. They are not even individual creatures. They are extensions of a hive mind that act with varying degrees of intelligence, from a chunk of meat on a bulkhead that swipes at whatever comes near, to raptor-like pack hunters which circle and strike when Isaac isn't looking. Each "unit" has always attempted to avoid it's own destruction, but they have more in common with insects or elements of an immune system than they do with zombies, and will sacrifice themselves with little hesitation. They are completely expendable if it means survival of the whole. In fact, since they're made of the mutated biological matter of things they've encountered, Necromorphs are basically the Zerg (or Tyrannids, if you prefer) with less bug and more dead. I have seen more than one "zombies with guns" comment and I really have to wonder how much those people were paying attention. My guess? Not very much, because they still think necromorphs are zombies.



As long as we're on the topic of the necromorphs, I love their new, more active, mutations. It could be compared to the lambent enemies in Gears of War, but Gears' enemies were just redoubling their bulletsponginess by changing in predictable and even manipulatable ways. These are much more The Thing and being in the snow only adds to that. At one point, I was being attacked by a legs topped with lashing tentacles, a shambling miner armed with picks, and a dismembered torso with a couple sets of chunky spider legs. They all attacked and behaved differently, though they all were out for my blood. The old dismemberment system was cool, but it was a bit simple. Taking off an arm and a leg guaranteed that the beastie was dead. Now? I have no idea. It seems like they start as human and become more alien as you lop bits off and those parts are replaced by the corruption hiding inside them. Oooh, horror. There's probably still a formula there, dictating how you take them apart and what happens, but it seems to have more options and I haven't figured them all out yet. Yeah, ok, there are necromorphs with guns. It is a thing that happens. These horrible. disembodied heads slither around and jam tendrils down the necks of corpses, much like one of the special death animations from Dead Space, and then they stiffly jerk around to aim at you and they don't really seem to know how guns work because they're tendril-powered baby heads. There were already dart-throwing babies, standard necromorphs with a rare spit attack, and things called "pukers" that do exactly what it sounds like; ranged enemies are not a new addition, but the presence of Unitologists as actual enemies means there's no shortage of people getting turned into dead bodies with guns in their hands.

Graphically, it's pretty as hell. Lighting is good, scenery is pretty, environments are varied just through the indoor, outdoor, snowfields, and mining facilities seen in the demo. I like it because it feels like moving through a mostly realistic place. You go into a building, come out in a different place, the buildings are different on the inside. It's like having bathrooms on the Ishamura. I don't need to step out into a different reality every time I go through a door, but they just need to feel realistically different. They do, I'm happy.



Now, weapon crafting. My first thoughts when hearing "weapon crafting" in relation to Dead Space were about how out of place it seemed. But it isn't a Call of Duty-esqe slapping of extra bits onto guns. You have parts and can assemble them into something that suits you. I initially just threw some things together and ended up disappointed, but then I broke them apart again and assembled them into something I liked more. I found a heavy cutter much like the Line Gun in previous games, so I put that onto a frame and broke the Force Gun off of the default paired weapons and put them together. What I had then was a gun that allowed me to blast things away and cut them really hard, though neither function repeated fire very quickly. Also, I broke them apart again! How nice is that? It's almost like things are made of parts that don't need to be annihilated to be removed. The upgrade system also comes with more options to weigh, balancing clip size, damage, and reload speed into benefit and penalty circuits. I can handwave the ability for Isaac to fashion whole new weapon frames and nozzles from scrap as functions of the bench rather than him crushing them into shape with just his hands, Ferrus Manus style. It is the industrial space future and it's a fine thing to use my "suspension of disbelief points" on if it means I can take things apart and bolt them together as I please as though highly qualified engineer Isaac Clarke has some sort of job skills or is at least competent with technology of the industrial space future in which he engineers things for a living.

Universal ammunition is a thing now, but you know what? That's just the game not bullshitting you. If you always hauled around 4 different tools in the previous games, you might not have noticed that, aside from what I think were predetermined ammo drops, Dead Space has always given you ammunition for the weapons you're holding. Making everything run on the same batteries is just the developer acting like you're smart enough to notice that. Try it, if you don't believe me. Go out with just the plasma cutter or ripper and you will end up with a million billion extra ripper blades or plasma cutter... plasmas, whatever the hell they were. Carry one weapon and you will overflow with whatever it consumes. You are always given what you need, but now what you need is one type of thing. If anything, I'd criticize them for just calling it "ammo" and not making up a better name for it.

Overall, I loved it. Yeah, there are jump scares, but it's still got good sound, a good score, and foreboding enough environments that those jump scares aren't uncultivated. You've been prepped for it when things spring up, and it makes the springing more effective. As always, having effective combat and movement controls makes it possible to have aggressive and dangerous enemies. Even the much-lauded Resident Evil 4 had enemies that would charge up, slow to a crawl, and sidle around so you could run away or shoot them by way of lousy controls. If both enemies and player controls are made good, it's even more intense than fighting with bad controls so dumb enemies seem dangerous. Dead Space is still Dead Space, so I'm pretty excited.

Best Game: The Last of Us
I knew this one had me at the end when I didn't want Joel to shoot that guy. I had a little chat with some friends and they had felt the same. It's hard to say it isn't glamorized with its presentation as a video game and all, but I wasn't cheering for people getting their faces blown off. It isn't the easiest thing to explain, but suffice to say that we can be entertained by and enjoy things that would constitute constitute a normally negative emotional response because we know they aren't real. We like it like being scared by horror movies.I think that's what's going on. Naughty Dog has a good record of having characters respond the same way I do, and if both the fictional Ellie and the real I think Joel might have gone too far there, I think they've created something special. It's right up there with "we were almost in that" but so much darker.

Biggest Surprise: Watch Dogs
It has the same flavor of dystopian future as Robocop or Max Headroom, where "cyberterrorists" can actually be good and they try to keep things pretty grounded outside of their central conceit of cyborgs, literally brain-melting TVs, or city running computer networks. Sure, I have some concerns about it, but this came out of nowhere and looks like it has lots of potential.

Neatest Idea: ZombiU
Zom-bew is another zombie game and, to be honest, I was getting a serious Dead Island vibe from it. It has a spectacular CG trailer, unconvincing simulated gameplay, and then it looks like Skyrim in a zombie suit. My skepticism aside, I like what they're doing. Making your old protagonist character into an enemy when they die is a much better way to make things feel like the zombie apocalypse. That's how it would work, wouldn't it? If all your actions are not undone, it will be just like getting another life or a checkpoint, but with that organic, movie feel where the character you follow stumbles onto someone's bunker that they never made it to, only it's a backpack.

Best Presentation: Resident Evil 6
"Hello. We're going to show you Resident Evil 6." They show the game. "Thank you very much." They leave. Regardless of what you thought of the game itself, I don't think you can disagree that the best way to present a game is to let it stand on its own merit.

Most Predictably Liked: God of War: Ascension
I like God of War. This is more God of War. It looks as good and over the top as ever. I usually don't like "if it ain't broke, don't fix it," but the God of War games show significant evolution through the series, and, really, it's not something I want them to mess up. Evolution is preferable to revolution. To put it in the same boat as movie adaptations: don't change anything unless it will actually make it better.

Most Unexpected Gameplay: Assassin's Creed 3
Speaking of boats: Boats! Cool. Ship to ship combat is the last thing I thought I would see in an Assassin's Creed game and it looks intense. I wonder if you can select the shot you use and where it's targeted. I saw them using chain shot to take down masts and rigging in there.

Most Improvement: Splinter Cell: Blacklist
I've never been totally down with Splinter Cell, but the amalgamation of stealth and action here is already doing a better job than in Conviction. Metal Gear has always been really self-aware with its ridiculousness; it exists in a world where all those kooky government experiments about ESP and whatever else actually worked. Splinter Cell was trying to be more real, it always resorted to kind of gimmicky moves like the hanging takedown and split jump that were seldom useful. Now it's back to spies, has something that works for the whole game, and you can maintain your stealth by striking at the right time and in the right order. It's like Space Marine's health, but for sneaking: encouragement to keep going instead of planting your ass in a corner.

Most Electrifying: Metal Gear Solid Rising: Revengeance
Huehuehuehuehuehue! Really though, it looks awesome.

Video games!
Video games! :D :D :D :D :D

Don't complain about pictures. I would have embedded all these videos, but they took that away A YEAR AGO under the pretense of giving us something new and then forgot the cblogs and community existed. "By gamers. For gamers." indeed.

Good work if you read that in the correct announcer voice! Before we get started, there are vague spoilers for Shadow of the Colossus and Journey in here, in their respective sections, and those are two games I wouldn't want to diminish for anyone. Now, here we go...

We generally understand that video games are interactive entertainment. At their core, they're toys we play with. They can be dressed up with interesting characters and stories, pretty pictures and sounds to draw us into the environment they create, making them more exciting, but the goal is always the same. We collect all the McGuffins and shoot all the guys. Why? Who cares? Doing it is fun and we win when we do it. There's nothing wrong with this. In fact, I think it's a sort of video game purity. There will, presumably, have been no focus on anything but making the mechanics solid and deep and the game balanced and fun to play. It is the origin of games as we know them.

The "art game" doesn't necessarily have any difference, mechanically, from a "normal game". There is no reason for them to be different at all mechanically. In short, art games can work well and the idea that they are inferior gameplay experiences, justified by other elements is ridiculous. The real difference is in the presentation. An art game isn't about collecting all the stuff, but why the stuff must be collected or the ramifications of collecting it. For all blockbuster games want to talk about a "cinematic experience", they fail to capture what that really is and end up being video games with flashy camera work. Art games, seldom advertising the same, really do. They are about the story, characters, and journey instead of doling out teh cheevos for shootin' all the mans or gettin' the lvls.

NMH vs. SotC



It was suggested that No More Heroes and Shadow of the Colossus were the same, on the criteria that they both feature an "over world", and that the over world was barren. The claim was made that because they are the same, they must be evaluated in the same way; both must be good or both must be bad. I'll get this out of the way: this is a really stupid thing to say. It's both shallow and myopic. It's comparing things at their most vague descriptions; intentional ignorance, in her case, to fulfill some agenda scolding everyone for hating Wii games just because they irrationally hate Nintendo.

No More Heroes has an overworld. It's barren and lifeless as a message that Travis Touchdown doesn't care about anything but games and what he must do to get them. It represents us as gamers, working menial jobs so we can pay exorbitant prices for violent entertainment, then toiling away again for our next fix. That, however, is as far as the message goes. After the thirty or so seconds of interest that message provides, you still have to trek through this boring, poorly-rendered maze on a motorcycle with shitty controls to get upgrades and new moves. It doesn't evolve in any way and it's message does not continue to be relevant past that first "ah ha" moment. That's why it didn't review well. It is momentarily clever and perpetually annoying.



Shadow of the Colossus, technically, has no overworld. There is no area you traverse to enter into level-like instances of anything. It has an open world, a subtle difference. That aside, the barren, seemingly lifeless Forbidden Land changes as it is navigated; while always empty save for lizards and a few birds, the landscape varies from plains to mountains and forests to deserts, which is a great deal more than can be said for No More Heroes' convoluted hub world. You aren't meant to suspect the voice leading you may be evil, and if the countryside was littered with vicious monsters it would be obvious why it is forbidden to go there. It is wide open and empty to help you form a bond with Agro, your only companion. The feeling of isolation is not a momentary, self-referential quip, it's a lasting part of the experience. The expanse of land that was exciting to ride across before becomes more and more daunting as your health fails, only enhancing that feeling.

Some may complain about the way Agro is handled, but the subject of their complaints is what makes Agro a character and not simply a conveyance. A much more lifeless example is your horse in Skyrim. If you want to charge off a cliff, the horse will do it. Gigantic, fire-breathing monster shows up? The horse will fight it with approximately the same AI as villagers, town guards and, occasionally, feral wolves. One of my favorite moments in SotC is the first time I whistled for Agro when leaving the Shrine of Worship and he just lifted his nose from the grass and looked at me as if to say "Look, dude, I am like ten feet away from you." For that moment, my equine bro was having none of my shit. We rode off, after I walked over to him, and occasionally he swerved to avoid something or maybe just because that rare tree was pretty. Or maybe he stepped on a lizard, which happens now and again. He didn't throw himself off cliffs just because I held the go-button. When we faced the next colossus, he would charge underfoot to pick me up when I needed him. When I thought him lost, I was hurt. He isn't a flashy motorcycle with twitchy controls, he's a NPC you can sit on. He's, literally, your only friend in the world, and would give up his life for you.

This endurance is the (or at least a) difference between "art" and "normal" games. It's not as simple as finding a single, vague way they are the same and demanding people feel the same way about them.

Flower & Journey



Before Flower has even started, soft music plays and the screen changes to be bright and colorful. You're given simple instructions that end with "relax, enjoy." If you are trying to do more than sit back and chill out with Flower, you're just doing it wrong. Areas of dead grass are revitalized, the sun sets and the grass sparkles with dew--more or less, a bunch of pretty stuff happens. The game itself is little more than Snake or Pac-Man, with the goal of guiding the representation of yourself through the dots to collect them. In Flower, this plays a little tone and adds a petal or two to the stream trailing behind you. It is just a nice thing to experience, and I'm not sure I've ever ended a session of Flower-ing without a yawn, which I consider evidence of it's relaxing nature. To call it pretentious is to miss the point, or to try too hard to find one. There are some levels which evoke an emotional response, but you can just roll on through and play as you like. There's a daydream quality to it, as the level select is choosing a sad-looking houseplant and then flying through some imaginary origin for it. You're free to call that pretentious if you want, but it isn't the story of Flower. In fact, I just made it up, and you're just as free to interpret the game as you please. Being pretty and vague don't make something pretentious by nature though, and I don't think I've ever heard someone quantify exactly why they find it pretentious, just say it is. I guess I'm sorry they can't just sit back and enjoy something without guffawing at dick jokes or the like.

Undirected jabs aside, I am actually curious about it, since I never saw Flower as more that the relaxing diversion it appears to be.



Journey is very different, and the spark that started this whole thing. It was dismissed as a boring, walking-around simulator by someone who hadn't played it, is sure she wouldn't like it, and had formed this entire opinion by looking at a picture or two. I'm sure there's some dope out there that bought Journey, raced through it without looking for or scarcely at anything, and got mad he paid fifteen dollars for it. Well, he did it wrong. You could also get a movie from Netflix, play it, mute it, and watch YouTube videos until you spot the credits in the corner of your eye and complain about wasting the rental, and there would be no question of why people are telling you you're an idiot when you rant on for hour upon hour, day after day, about how everyone who liked said movie was wrong (and also a pretentious hypocrite who was attacking special-snowflake you because they wanted to oppress you and rob you of your right to an opinion. Then you can spend the next few days doing the same thing, but on the topic of how nobody likes you and everyone is mean, only annoying them further by ignoring what they say, making asinine strawman arguments, and demanding people say things the way you want them said.)

Journey is something you need to go into without the intention of just holding the stick forward. You need to be willing to go look at that thing over there, turn the camera around and look, and most of all to be friends with the people you meet. I can't think of another time I've gotten fan mail in my PSN inbox. I went through the entirety of Journey with one person, and they sent me a message thanking me for sticking with them, and to do that they had to type my PSN name in, not just pick me from their list of recently met players. To go into it with the mentality of "I'll finish it but I'm sure I won't blah blah blah" only ensures you won't enjoy it at all. You won't explore, you won't find all the story glyphs, you won't play with the porpoise-like cloth creatures swimming over the dunes. You will probably realize you can't actually die or fail, and so plow through threats, however menacing, with abandon. When the going gets tough, you'll probably just whine about walking more slowly. You won't look or listen, and you'll miss all of why Journey is good. That is what makes Journey an art game. It's not about completing it, it's about the journey itself.

So get to the fucking point, Trev

To call something an art game is to label it as an experience and not a challenge. You don't go watch a movie, however brilliant or terrible, as a challenge of your watching skills. (Ok, I take that back, some people that are generally unbearable to be around do this after they have half a semester of a film class in college. I'm not counting them.) You'll never win at movies.

The label of "art game" is not pretentious, it is simply aware of video games' origin as digital challenges. It is the opposite of film and photography, which are labeled as educational or instructional when they deviate from being art. It says that the composition isn't the point, teaching you how to do something is. Art games, likewise, are identified as being about playing instead of winning, and about bringing story and emotion together with gameplay, rather than hiding the former elements away in cutscenes. I don't think there's anything pretentious about that.

And you can't act like a goddamned psycho for four or five days and expect people not to get sick of you.

I'm not entirely sure if this should carry a [NVGR] tag, not being strictly game related, but it's about things which are about games. That's close, isn't it? Only two degrees of separation, and that's thrice as close as Kevin Bacon. I may omit the names, I may not. I haven't decided on that three sentences in, but I can tell you this much: I won't be sending traffic their way with a link after the treatment I was given.

It started innocently enough with a message over the PSN. I know someone on their staff and that was the method they had to contact me. I won't say it's professional, but it's functional and this ain't that highfalutin germes gerbalisms or anything. It's just a blog. Sometime over the course of playing games with this person, I've mentioned my profession and they would like me to ply my trade gratis. While I'm not falling all over myself to give up my free time, I know that contributing to what I would consider an actual website rather than a business' half-forgotten advertising screw-up would be good for my portfolio, so I say I'm interested in hearing more about it but can't commit until I know how much they're looking for. I have a job, I like to game and cook, and I might be an insomniac but I at least like to try to get a few hours of sleep in a night. I think, most of all, I just don't like making commitments I can't keep. Unfortunately, this is where everything starts to go wrong.



They want something "firm". What the hell is "firm" beyond "tell me what you want done and I'll tell you if I can do it or not"? I can't tell you how many times I asked what work there was to do, I wasn't counting, but the back and forth went on long enough for my voice to start getting rough on one occasion. Is there some part of repeatedly requesting a list of things that need doing that doesn't indicate I want to do them? Oh, and remember this, because it comes up again later. Eventually, I need to stop pulling my punches on this one, so I just go ahead with the gist of things:






I decided that I wouldn't include "So stop wasting my time and tell me what you want so I can get to work." The first step is planning, after all. I could have at least been brainstorming while they made up their minds. Hell, I can already post here on the dtoid cblogs and I barely do that outside of the Friday Night Fights posts because I either don't have something worth writing about or leave it rotting in Google Docs until I don't care. Oddly enough, that part of the email goes over just fine and another part is interpreted as sounding more upset than it was intended. I'm aware I can be blunt, but I don't like to mince words. Writing professional-sounding, businesslike emails for work is one of the hardest things for me because I always feel I'm hiding the actual message. This isn't an issue here because this is me doing them a favor and not me at work, and everything is talked out in the end with no bruised feelings. A nebulous intent of setting up a Skype meeting was stated and that was it.

Then the website is snatched away from them. While I am privy to some details on that, they aren't relevant here. What happened was the people I was interested in working with had to get a new site, and so they did. Also to note, is that no one bothered to tell me this had happened until weeks had passed and I asked out of curiosity.

A new website was created and I was asked if I was still interested. As I happen to love programming (nerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrd!), I told them I was and another meeting was set. The time for this meeting comes and goes and their Skype contact stays offline. That night, prior to the meeting I added them and sent an email to the address I was given to confirm that it was me attempting to add them, just to cover the bases. In the end, this would turn out looking like an issue with the piece of shit that is Skype, which would have been an excellent answer to the question I would ask in the future.

Nearly a month passes. No follow-ups, no emails, no PSN or Skype messages are sent to me. Sometime in there I check the "Team" page of the website they're on and the person I had been in contact with isn't there any more, which turns out to be in error. My thought is that since they have nothing to offer me other than entertainment unless their website becomes the next Destructoid or Joystiq, they would be interested in contacting me about the free programming I was going to do. Turns out I was wrong about that. Last night, I finally sent a message to ask about the apparently nonexistent meeting. Then things got really hairy.

Them:
"Wendesday at 9... Just be on Skype so we can all discuss."

Well, that doesn't really answer the question about the meeting, and I asked specifically about it, so I respond.

Me:
"So what was up with the meeting that fell through before?"

Them:
"It's probably going to have to wait once again... right now we still need to acquire a business license and a new web host."



Once again, my question is brushed off. All I'm really looking for is what happened with that meeting, but after a month without contact and the above, I finally don't care. I just bought Skyrim. I'm not going to have trouble filling up that off-hours web development time.

Me:
"I'm out. I don't like getting jerked around and still don't know why I was blown off for the last meeting, even after asking directly a couple of times."

Them:
"This will be the last time I discuss this business with you. To be honest I'm not really surprised by your reaction. I understand where you're coming from, fully. However, I don't think you get where I or anyone else stands. We needed something firm, and last time I checked we did schedule a meeting over Skype, we had the meeting, but you weren't online, so we just went on without you. You don't understand how accommodating we've tried to be with our offer. We needed you to give us something back."

"Think of it this way: I offer you a job, knowing how many extra things you have going on, you accept the job under the agreement that you don't have much time, but even before you get work you don't show interest. You asked me twice about the meeting that was weeks ago, but only since yesterday. Does that prove your interest level? You have to put something in to get something back. Lastly, I've told you dozens of times that this will take time, Also, telling you to meet us on Skype once and cancelling is hardly "jerking you around." This won't get in the way of my personal ties with you, but I think that's the end of our business together."

It's like he wants to sound professional without acting it. I have to put something in? You mean like the free web development and site content you were set to get?! They've been accommodating? Their offer? I was offered nothing and they really have no choice but to accommodate because, lookie here, I already have a blog with no responsibilities which I control. They can't really beat that. They didn't even have the courtesy to follow up their meeting with an email and there was no contact for a month! What the would have been the problem with saying that the meeting went on without me the first time I asked? Moreover, they cancelled? Now it's just getting confusing because I thought it went on without me. It takes a couple more messages to finally get the response I was looking for, though it's only incidental and doesn't really explain things.

Them:
"I'm not sure how specific I needed to be about the work I asked you to do. And who did you email? You're one of my contacts and I have 2 messages from you, one pertaining to your Skype name and the other is an image. That's it... <- there's your reason, by the way."

So, because they have my Skype ID and email address, they were unable to contact me the night of the meeting? That makes so much sense. They also implied I was lying to them! On top of all that, in response to my asking if anything I said was in doubt, I get "let's not talk about lying..." Really?

/RAGEDUMP

I think I won't be doing any work for them. I'm glad I won't be doing any work for them. Even if they manage to come back with an apology for all this, they've burned that bridge. In fact, I doubt I'm going to attempt doing such work for anybody in the future. I'm sure there are some fine gaming blogs out there (we're where, again?), but I have a job already and FNF is chore enough each week. I guess I've sparked it a bit myself with this blog post, but oh no! Will people not come to me expecting me to prostrate myself in gratitude over the chance to work for free? I can see how that will be terrible.

Really. So terrible.

P.S. Dark Brotherhood 4 lyfe.

I've been considering writing a post like this for some time, and here it is. Lets not waste a bunch of time screwing around with a "friendly" intro when I'm going to say how crap a lot of things are.

Content/Sidebar


Why is this not consistent? There is a different amount of right-side padding on the post looking at the same area in the main blog view and an individual post. And here's the kicker: both are bad. The sidebar has too much margin either way, but at least in blog view the padding on the post isn't uneven as well.

Profile Color


This doesn't work at all. You can set it, and the value saves and is reloaded when viewing the profile page again, but changing it does nothing. It seems like this one died after reverting from the beta site, which doesn't make much sense. It's like it was rolled back, and then back some more, taking away not just the added functions of beta.destructoid, but some that were on regular old dtoid as well.

Broken Links


I don't think this tab has ever worked. It just goes to the "Gadzooks!" page because it's missing the "elephant" directory in the path. I know there was some other link or form submission that had similar results, but this isn't a hard fix. That it's sat broken for months is kind of ridiculous. I think there are one or two more things that are mispointed as well, but I haven't been able to find them again.

Toidlets


Toidlets are 2 things: Broken and worthless. The groups of the old beta.destructoid.com site had much more functionality and didn't require the one person that made the group to manage all the members. If I recall, it even said who owned it. When that was scrapped and toidlets were created, Red Veron created the PS3 FNF toidlet and I didn't track that down and get added for a couple weeks.

In the end, that didn't matter anyway, because the list doesn't appear to be displayed in any particular order. I guess that's fine for just a collection, but it's junk for anything else because it means that finding a specific post means scrolling past them one by one until you find it. Doubly worthless for FNF, which a chronological sort would be much more useful. I'm tagging them as PS3 FNF mostly as a formality at this point.

Neglect


The cblogs are generally like this. It seems like a few changes have been made and no one ever followed up on them. This should take a single viewing of any CBlog page to show that it isn't coded correctly. I get the impression that the attention was focused on the front page and no one even looked at the cblogs after modifying this.

BBCode
Why does all (or at least most) of this not work in the cblogs? With this, the only thing stopping the forums from being better blogging tools than the actual blogs is the lack of a fixed width.

Youtube
This was removed a couple months ago now, I think. The rumor I heard was that "there is something better coming". Well that's slick, Destructoid. But why did you take away our ability to add youtube videos before that better thing was available? It doesn't make sense to me because if you just left it as is (or was), it would have been less work. Someone had to go in and modify things to remove it.

Beta.Destructoid
The beta.destructoid site, also known as "newtoid" was just a better site in general. I didn't like that the entirity of the forums were removed, but having forum and blog logins crossover was good, and as a whole the layout was better. It had great functionality with groups and was the first facelift the Cblogs got in years.

It also had a WYSIWYG editor for the cblogs (CKEditor, I believe) and a multi-image uploader. Honestly, it was buggy for a while, but it seemed like it got taken down just as it was running smoothly. Things were fixed and then it was gone. We were told it would be coming back sometime in the future when the kinks were iron out, but we seem to have some gradients and rounded corners crap instead.

Seriously, lets take care of repairs before we move on to improvements.

Every now and then, a game comes along with a combination of things I like that usually isn't brought together. In the line of Double Fine games, Brutal Legend was a combination of real-time strategy and hack-and-slash combat. It was actually quite reminiscent of the game Sacrifice. I can't think of something else quite like Trenched, but it has the same style of feature combination. Here's what you get:

Mechs
Do you like building robots? I like building robots. Trenched is about building robots. There are 3 varieties of chassis, each with a couple models and each of those with their own stats and properties. The same can be said for the legs on which you'll be stomping around, giving you stomp, sprint, or deployment options with certain bonuses to each. You can even slap some nifty paint jobs onto the whole thing.



The equipment of weapons on your "mobile trench" is handled without weight restrictions, relying on the number of available weapon slots on a given chassis. Some weapons take more than one, and these are generally more powerful.

All-in-all, the customization gives you plenty of options and creates roles to fill, but doesn't get bogged down with needless technical stuff as some dedicated mech games can. It is even worth coordinating with other players to ensure all the armament bases are covered.



Unlike Armored Core, you won't be boosting around, jumping and flying (or wall-jumping off buildings, if you've seen that sexay new Armored Core V gameplay). You will generally be plodding around in a MechWarrior style that makes your positioning an important part of the gameplay. While feeling restricted arbitrarily in movement is something I would normally dislike, in this case it fits with the gameplay. If you could race around, there would be little point in building turrets.

Tower Defense
To compensate for the somewhat sluggish movement, players can drop turrets onto the battlefield just about anywhere. These come in three varieties: light, support, and heavy. Light are guns in the standard style, such as machine guns and anti-air flak; support emplacements don't damage enemies but can slow their movements, collect currency automatically, or heal friendly players.



The gameplay itself is built on the tower defense model. Increasingly difficult waves of enemies appear and move to attack a central structure players are tasked with defending. There is a decent variety to the enemies and paying attention to the pre-mission warnings ultimately proves to be quite important.

Loot
One of the things I enjoy the most in games is a feeling of progression. I like getting new stuff, and one of the things that creates that feeling is loot. Loot from bosses, loot from rankings, loot from random enemies. You'll almost always get something worth upgrading to. It's a little bundle of joy that you race to collect.



The new equipment comes in quickly enough and with enough variety that you'll almost always have something new to try or waiting for you, free of charge, maybe after a level increase or two. There's not as much as in dedicated games like Diablo 2, and it isn't randomly generated, but until you've got six of everything you'll probably always be pumped to see a shimmering loot box pop out of something.

Co-op
Competitive multiplayer is great and all, but I almost always have more fun playing cooperatively with people. Trenched balances its multiplayer in a fairly effective way. There are extra enemies, and everyone splits the income from defeating them. This stops it from being an unbeatable field of turrets and makes working together on equipment more important. It's a quick road to failure if, between four people, you can't handle a certain enemy type like air. There's no way you're going to get a good ranking, and will just be stuck plugging away while they tear down the building you're supposed to protect.



Adding to the cooperative fun, there are also regiment challenges. Everyone you play with gets tied into your personal regiment listing, and so you all work together to unlock parts and customization items for your marine. It's a little extra something that rewards you just for playing with other people.

All these elements blend together quite seamlessly in Trenched with little to no confusion other than some convoluted menu layout. It's the kind of game that's spent weeks making me say "just one more level" hunting for the last bit of equipment or trying to get a good ranking and sucked up hours of my time in the process. Trenched, in the end, obviously isn't more than a $15 downloadable title but I have received well more than my money's worth out of that exchange.