the background noise

Well I was going to do a recap of 2013 as channelled through my own peculiar mind but given work, play and a recent spike in alcohol intake that is unlikely to occur at this hour. Something for the new year perhaps when my brain is less addled and my typing fingers are more capable.

Well its time to put the blog down for a day and wish you a merry Christmas or Xmas or your cherished celebration of choice. Its less a white Christmas than an apocalyptic one outside around these here parts with torrential sub-doomsday levels of rain. Truly its that special time of year again.

Witness this videogame cover from way back in the day. Its too real, too authentic, too legit to quit even. It's the reality of street life as filtered through some sanitised early 90's daytime television drama and then plastered all over a videogame box in the hope it will overwhelm its audience with its sheer grit.

So with one momentous accomplishment done and done in Hotline Miami I find myself ever closer to its prized platinum trophy. That'll be the trophy you get when you get all other trophies in the game. Doesn't happen very often and until I recently I wasn't going for it here but I'm so close now damn it. Just got to get an A+ grade for every level, this is going about as well as you'd expect.

Just got back from two hours watching a film starring a special effect purporting to be Orlando Bloom and a charismatic dragon who just wants to be left in peace to enjoy his bling. So yet another startling day of zero gaming accomplishment you could say.

Been watching these guys as they fly high on a never ending, ongoing overdose of testosterone today. Yes the assembled videos of Bro Team might not be the most productive use of your time today but they crack me up something major. Essentially envision if you will two guys talking a little louder than they need to in a comically exaggerated parody of your average twenty-something male gamer overspilling with anger issues. No that's not quite it, no imagine a non-stop stream of thought but instead of actual thoughts its a torrent of unyielding prejudice directed at just about everything and everyone. Yeah that's more like it.

My brain is mush after today's dose of so-called real life, that period of non-gaming activity that happens between sessions of gaming. As such words and thoughts have not conspired to help me put together a blog entry tonight. So all you get is this admission of my brain epic failing on me.

The PlayStation Network's store made another raid on my wallet this evening after reeling me in with an enticing offer for the 'director's cut' of Lone Survivor . A self-consciously retro Silent Hill lost in an alternate dimension of ambient terror rendered in the sweet graphics of the Super Nintendo Entertainment System. As initial impressions go then, its good.

So my ongoing mission with XCOM: Enemy Within proceeds with gusto. Naturally by that I mean I'm repeatedly hitting the same wall albeit at new and exciting speeds. My aforementioned allusions to the difficulty curve very much apply here, my squad members are often to be found decorating the scenery with their insides.

Cower in fear at the might of the Rooster Uppercut! For it will lay waste to all that stand before it! With the power of the Rooster Uppercut the luchadors punch becomes a registered weapon. A weapon that brings its enemies all the unlikely power of the Rooster packed into one fist. 

Spent most of the day getting my ass handed back to me playing XCOM: Enemy Within today so not much in the way of a blog update tonight unless you want me to repeat random profanities for the next few hundred words. Yes you wouldn't think it but I'm actually in my happy place playing this game.

As you may know I temporarily lost my mind to insanity whilst purchasing my PS4 and in my moment of fleeting madness I found myself purchasing a PlayStation Vita as well. Presumably I was acting on some latent urge to own one but that's probably rationalising my thought process to an absurd degree, assuming of course there was a thought process involved and not a mindless impulse to own more stuff. After owning one for the past few weeks I think I can now form my thoughts about it into an easy to digest blog format. Here goes.

  Now that's how you sell a game to me, with ridiculous overconfidence. Downloaded Velocity Ultra for my Vita a few nights back in the ongoing Xmas Sale on the PlayStation Store. Bought it on a total whim and thus far I am thoroughly enjoying it. A variation on the arcade twitch fests of yesteryear, you pilot a ship capable of transporting itself instantaneously all across your screen in a bid to save humans and avoid obstacles. Resogun tickled the bullet hell nerve recently and I've been casting a cautious eye over the Vita back-catalogue for just such a game.

Done and done. Completed Killzone Shadow Fall last night and the final verdict? Well in the spirit of truth and honesty its not a bad game, its somewhere between okay and good,  often threatening to get great but then  rarely making good on its promise. Its absolutely, resolutely somewhere better than adequate.

I've talked about it before but Guacamelee! has to be one of the most joyful games I've played in a while. A colourful, funny utterly charming platformer where you take on skeletons as an undead luchador risen from the great thereafter to save the woman he loves. Because that's how he rolls. Seriously though this feels like a game made entirely for me. That of course raises the possibility that somewhere out there someone is tracking every move I make for the purposes of catering to my every whim, which is something that should terrify us all really.

Okay so maybe, just maybe, in an entirely contradictory yet typically expected way, Killzone Shadow Fall might be growing on me, might be, just a little. Ejecting out of my spaceship in the upper atmosphere and sky diving through the ruins of a dead planet I can appreciate its makers are trying to mix it up. It's not all boom, shoot, boom! Even on that front, I gotta appreciate the sound design in this game. When guns go off in Killzone it punctures the air with a resounding bang. Feels like you're blasting holes in reality itself. Granted there is still no story or characterisation to write home about, nothing to tie this medley of kick-ass moments together but it'll do until I'm done with it.

The 1980's truly were a different time weren't they? You may have noticed they feature quite predominantly in the meandering mess that is my brain as featured on this very blog. Truly not many era's can lay claim to this, an Atari advert for Pole Position wherein a godly hand descends from above to rescue a family of yuppies from their everlasting peace of mind. All the while an off-screen voice, presumably God, casually berates them from afar for daring to live a life devoid of Pole Position . Then as so often happens in these situations he shakes them out of their car and out of their humdrum existence into wildly misleading footage of real race cars exploding all over the place intercut with underwhelming in-game footage. Quite simply, words cannot express the joy found within.

So yeah, I'll just let my monumental victories in Retro City Rampage speak for themselves. It's a hard life playing a generic street thug who time travels from the 80's to the now only to be promptly misunderstood by a well meaning professor as your standard hero of destiny. But the accomplishments therein are momentous. I mean, bubble gum by god! Oh well best be back to the action, you can't build a time machine without a three-headed monkeys paw, apparently. 

Slim update tonight. The gaming content of my day was somewhere between five and minus five percent, I forget which one of those is probable or even possible. In any case I'm sure my day today didn't contain the full twenty four hours and I'll have to have someone look into that. Read something once about people losing time due to UFOs and what not, long story short it doesn't end well and I should curb it now. Anyway I'm finally home and may engage in some sort of gaming-like activity shortly but my brain is definitely not co-operating with me to put together anything longer than a paragraph together this evening. The off-switch is not turning on. Still though, could be worse.

  Taking a break from the fidelity of beautiful next-gen graphics to play some Retro City Rampage on my Vita. Its basically Mario channelled through the original Grand Theft Auto by way of a love letter to 16-bit gaming. It also contains time machines. Also rocket launchers.

'We need to shoot the train off the rails!' Day 2 of Killzone Shadow Fall and I shit you not, that was an actual line uttered by an actor channelling superhuman powers of indifference towards the material he has to work with. Don't get me wrong though, in its own big stupid way that line made me grin and hope that in some way this game is aware of its own stupidity.

Ah all the beauty of creation... KILL KILL KILL IT IN THE FACE! Killzone , a series where the peace loving people of somewhere or other are besieged on all sides by the faceless glowing red-eyed hordes of the enemy. Yes its generic sci-fi war at its most indistinguishable from any one of the countless sci-fi wars fought in modern gaming. A blast filled exploda-fest that does little to capture the imagination.

AAARGH MY BRAIN! Relatively game-free day today so this evening I took a break from body slamming the undead to play some more Resogun , one of the introductory offerings on the PlayStation Plus service. A blistering light show still burned onto the surface of my eyeballs it manages the double trick of being a showcase for the new system as well as being an insane twitch-fest.

Can't talk. Playing Guacamelee! on my PlayStation Vita, an utterly charming platformer about a guy who rises from the dead with lucha powers in order to save the woman he loves from skeletons.

Mr Charlie Brooker's face was doing its thing all over my television screen last night in a two hour gaming retrospective on Channel 4. A countdown of the 25 most influential games in the history of the medium.  As these sort of lists go some of the greats were always going to be left out but what we got was refreshingly legit.