Bulletstorm came out and since I didn’t have many games to play I decided to give it a whirl. The first thing I noticed is that even though it poked fun at many modern day FPS cliches, it certainly employed them to some effect. You remember that Duty Calls parody game, right? Well, Bulletstorm is not that different. You can only have three weapons on you at one time, the story isn’t great, regenerating health, and so on. These are the guys that made Painkiller, so what gives?

Okay, besides that moral dilemma, the game isn’t that bad, and the ‘skill kill’ system is sort of fun. Sometimes. It’s worth a playthrough, but not the money.

Portal2 is out for preordering on steam now. -10% off now, and it’ll come out in April. You’ll also get a  free copy of the first Portal, but heck, who doesn’t have that game.

Late as hell but there was an update to the TF2 beta that modifies a lot of weapons and adds a few. The pyro can also flarejump in that beta. Betcha that’ll get you playing.

Edit: Man where that title at?

I wouldn’t normally talk about the exclusive TF2 things you’d get for preordering RIFT, but apparently the afterburn on the new axe lasts forever due to a bug. Or it’s intentional. The good news is that we’ll be able to craft the new items after March. The players who preordered the items will get a ‘genuine’ tag and a green name on them. The funny thing is that the genuine tag goes away if you trade the item.

Late edit: As you might’ve read in the comments, the items don’t lose their status after being traded. Not like this is a good thing.

There’s been a few nice games coming out on Steam, and since TF2 doesn’t have anything interesting going on around it right now I gave a couple of them a shot.

Magicka is sort of an RPG, but you don’t exactly build your character. You start out with 8 magic elements, and different combos yield totally different spells. There’s a ton of combinations and the game’s pretty much built on satire. You can play it solo, but the best way to do it is to play with up to 3 other friends. The game doesn’t hold back on ways to die, since FF is permanently on in multiplayer and your teammates can quickly revive you with a two-element spell. It was rather buggy at launch but they’re patching things as they go.

Monday Night Combat also came out recently, it’s like TF2 with mashed up classes and DOTA mechanics. I kind of like it, but if you’re on a team where nobody’s got any clue what to do you’ll get irritated rather quick. At least there’s other ways to entertain yourself. The devs also seem to have picked up Valve’s style of offering free DLC in the future.

Now the last two games are around 10-15 dollars each, which makes them a rather nice investment considering they’ve got good replayability. Dead Space 2 came out, and after playing it I realized it’s just DS1 with a new set of missions, items and monsters. Somehow they expect people to pay 60$ for that and some half-assed ripoff multiplayer. The game was okay if you want to follow the storyline, but crap if you were expecting more of DS1′s atmosphere. I just don’t see how they can justify the pricetag.