Oh Jesus, you guys, what do you want? (The Walking Dead season 2 finale, Mass Effect 3, and I'm sort of lazy)

I apologize but this is going to be more of an assorted bit of rambling on a couple of different subjects. School has absorbed more of my time than I expected this semester so I've had no real time to write, besides that I haven't even had time to play many games, and when I've had free time I feel like an idiot spending it replaying games I've already beaten time and again, not because I dislike replaying old games, just because it seems there are better things to do with what limited time I get. SO ANYWAYS. Number one is I've finally stopped putting it off and am now writing my novel. Thus far I have about 50 pages typed out, unedited of course but I'm fairly happy with all of it so far. I know what you're thinking, "no free time to write? How'd you write 50 pages then?" well I'll tell you, you observant perceptive bastard. For 2 days I just didn't really sleep. Not because I simply said, "I'm gonna stay up all night and write this." but because I got so absorbed in what I was doing that I neglected the passage of time and found myself staring blearily out at sunrise. So regardless, that's happening.

And now the rant section.

So I've been a pretty huge fan of "The Walking Dead" (I did not read the comic books) since it first aired. It was the thing that the zombie genre really needed after the influx of B-movies and just general crap that hollywood has been farting out to capitalize on the momentous increase in the genre's popularity. They focused on the human element, and the zombie apocalypse essentially formed a backdrop for this group of survivors and their struggles, it focused on how the apocalypse would test their humanity, how much they could take. The mistake so many make is focusing on the zombie part itself. That just gets boring. So as I sat there last Sunday, excitedly watching the season finale, I was really enjoying myself. *SPOILERS FROM HERE ON OUT BTW* Hell it even looked like they might kill off that turbo-cunt Andrea. Everything built up to it, she was cornered. Then the show took everything that made it so good, so wildly successful, and threw it out the window. But not before taking a dump on it. And we were left with one of the most over the top, stupid, nonsensical scenes I have seen in any show. Andrea gets saved. By a ninja. With 2 pet zombies. And a katana. Now I'm told, that this character "Michonne" is pivotal to the comic books, and yes I do get that this series is based on comics. But the thing is, they (the show) need to decide which approach they want. Do they want to use the comics as inspiration (which they have done so far) and then build around that foundation? Or do they want to go with the over the top often goofy style of a comic book? Which is not to say that the comic book style is a bad thing overall, but it just doesn't fit. And if they wanted to do that they should have been having crazy shootouts, and everyone in the group should have been a professional martial artist, rather than taking this really brutal honest approach to this circle of desperate people, and then randomly throwing a super hero into the mix. Also I really really feel like the writers just somehow know that I hate Andrea and her intense case of man face (and uncontrollable urges to convince everyone in the world to kill themselves) with a passion because I lost count of how many times they built up to her being killed only to pull the rug out from under me. Fucking Deus Ex Machina.

On to the next rant.

I fucking hate Bioware. There, I said it. In my eyes they are many millions of miles past the point of no return. I refuse to even buy Mass Effect 3. I've read about it. I know how it ends. I wouldn't pay for that if it were 5 dollars in the bargain bin. It's a piece of shit action game with a piece of shit story. Enough said. I'm just gonna keep pretending Bioware ceased to exist just after Dragon Age: Origins was released. But that isn't what this rant is about. This rant is about video game critics and how blatantly corrupt they are. You don't really need to look farther than metacritic (averages reviews from all different sources if you dont already know about it) to know something is wrong. The critic average is a 90. The player average? is a 3.5 out of 10 (on the pc version, xbox is something like 4.5, still real bad). So what's the deal? Are we not playing the same game? Or is it perhaps something else? Maybe EA is a huge company and bought them out? Or maybe the critics tend to be the same meat-heads that keep going out and buying COD after COD even though they know it's going to be exactly the same right down to the pixels on the guns (that's one definition of insanity by the way, in case you guys didnt know). And that's disheartening to me. Not that I've ever bought a game solely due to critic reviews, and you shouldn't either. If anyone ever told me they bought something just cause I gave it a good review I'd just see where all that wool was hiding and be on my way. But the thing is, every year the numbers seem more and more artificial, great games get slammed in reviews, generic trash pulls perfect 10's. Look at games like Rise of the Argonauts, personally I loved the game, critics almost universally slammed it, most frequently referencing "too much walking and talking" as their chief complaint. Basically, this isn't an action game, it's got too much smart stuff! We don't want it! It's got a 54 from critics, a very low score, and a 7.5 from players, (based on an admittedly small number of players) the only honest complaint I could level on the game is that it has some nasty technical issues. But the critics prolly weren't being bribed by Liquid Entertainment. Hell, recently I even discovered that back in the day, a certain Jeff Gerstmann, from over at Giantbomb.com (a great website with great critics, including Jeff, by the way, you should check it out) was fired from his position at gamespot.com for writing a bad review to a sponsor game (Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, I think it was). And if that doesn't speak volumes on the industry I don't know what does. Anyways I'll crank out the rest of my review for Deux Ex: Human Revolution either tonight or tomorrow night.

Alex Jenkins 2012