And then?

And then I bought Shank 2 on steam last week, so a small part of my weekend was spent slashing up foes and spreading blood and guts all over my pc.

Action platformers are a staple of the indie games scene, but few have the class that the Shank games deliver. Developer Klei entertainment did a great job of following up their 2010 release with a polished action adventure that stays true to the first game, while adding tweaks and adjustments which make the whole experience fresh and grander.


Overall the game feels a lot closer to the famous Metal Slug games and the awesome additions to Shanks deadly arsenal (like the throwing knives) lend a lot more variety to the already outstanding combat system. Here's an awesome Review of the game over at Joysticq.

My girl friend and I also came across a new TV show over the weekend. The River which is created by Oren Peli of Paranormal Activity dame and produced by Steven Spielberg who has nothing better to do than to throw money at every other TV show that's out every month. It's an interesting series that takes place in the Amazon. OOOooOOoooo

It's about these guys that go looking for a missing nature show host whose gotten himself lost in the Amazon, but what they find is that this guy was into some weird shit. Like... evil sprites and looking for demons kinda shit. What follows is Paranormal Activity kinda jumps and scares, but packaged for TV. Though I'm not the biggest fan of the 'Para' series of movies, this show is actually kind of intriguing.

A lot of it is fueled by ancient Amazon folklore and myths which is the kind of stuff that I love. Things from Tribal cultures that we all scoff at, coming to life and ripping our faces off. The show sort of has a Paranormal Activity meets Apocalypse Now kinda feel and I'm down with that.

Extended Trailer HERE.

The first two episodes where enough to get us excited about the third show, and it's nice to have another horror themed TV show to watch every week. (While waiting for Walking Dead to return)

We got dinner out on Saturday Night just so that we could get out of the house and muck about. When we got back we messed around on Shank 2s multiplayer for awhile before chilling with a few old horror movies.

On Sunday morning I had a game of Squash with my boss. That was a lot of fun. There was a time when I was at the Squash court every other day, but now I'm rusty as fak at it, but my boss is a real pro so he gave me a few pointers and we're planing on making it a twice-a-week gig.

Surprisingly I played very little Dark Souls over the weekend, mostly I just got on and PVPed for a bit. I did an awesome killing spree of 4 or 5 invades before being pwnd a few times in a row, which kinda made me almost bust a vein in my forehead, and it's hard for me to play with an almost busted vein.

The afternoon was later spent working on another WWF, which I handed in this morning.

I also got my hands on a new Anime series. This time it's an awesome fantasy/ horror (very slight horror) show called Fate/night sky and it's prequel Fate/Zero. This is yet another show I got because I read that it reminded people of Dark Souls.


If the stars align in my favor then my Demons Souls order should get in today and I know that's going to be a lot of fun.

Today is also my Girlfriends birthday! So we're gonna grab a few drinks and then head off to dinner. We're also gonna have a Valentines/ Birthday dinner with her family and mine tomorrow night. My mums making a massive pot of Beef Pallow which I can not wait to dig into :D

All in all it was an awesome weekend and with the Sun up high today it looks like it's going to be a great week.

my Dark Souls screen shots

This has to be the suckiest thing about my ps3, the fact that I can't take screen shots with it. But I really wanted to show you how bad ass my Dark Soul toons look, so I took these with my camera.

My first character :D

My second toon RPing as Death

sir Issac without helmet.

Sir Issac defensive Death

Enough about Dark Souls!

Ok that's it. No more talking about Dark Souls.

I know you're probably sick of me going on and on about this amazing game, so I've decided to not bore you with it any longer. Even my blog is cluttered by it. With the back to back posts of the game I might as well change my blog name to "Zen and the Art of Dark Souls."

click to enlarge

But thank you very much for putting up with it. I know I can get carried away sometimes.

This could have very easily been a post about how I've started my 2nd character in Dark Souls, because I want to focus on building a toon with the sole purpose of PVP. I'm not gonna bother getting into the details, but I rolled a Knight this time around, because I thought he would be a perfect starter character for the PVP Death God I wish to create.

On my first play through one of my favorite weapons quickly became the Lifehunt scythe. A weapon that bleeds the enemy for a shit load of damage, but also hurts you a bit too. So to use this monster effectively against another player, it helps to level your toon accordingly. Now my new guy has massive bleed resistance, a shit load of hit points and he hits like a truck.

o and his name is Sir Issac. He was a noble knight who had given away to the hollow that's consuming Lordren. So he ventured forth to find some sort of cure for his horrid fate, but instead the dark deaths of the world changed him. Turning him into that which he tried to fight against. Now he travels the land, hunting others who were once like him.

Issac's a bad ass. Knowing the game mechanics now and the ins and out of stats and stuff has allowed me to fashion him into a very effective killing machine. I was particularly surprised when I fought Dragon Slayer Ornstein and Executioner Smough. This was a very tough fight the first time around and even on New game+

But when Sir Issac took to the fight with his duel scythes he shredded the shit out of the two bosses.

What also amazed me was that I found some new areas this time around, even though this is the third time I'm going through the game. But what down right made me feel like a noob was the damn chracter creation screen.

If you read my first Impressions post for Dark Souls I was complaining about how you don't have much freedom when making your toon. Man that turned out to be bullshit because as I was creating Issac I saw a little tab which once clicked, opens up a whole mess of options and adjustments. The face creator in Dark Souls turned out to be pretty damn awesome. Maybe not as robust as Fallout3, but with more than enough tweaks to customize your character however you want.

Sir Issac is a pretty boy. With his long silver hair and chiseled good looks.

As I was creating him I couldn't believe I missed this feature the first time around. My 1st toon looks like hideous.

I also spent a few points to get myself some decent spells. So Issac's not just a melee toon, he also has some nice Pyromancy spells and miracles that make invaders cry.

I could really write up an awesome post update on what's happening with the game right now, but I'm going to spare you the details and just say that a 180 hours in and Dark Souls is still every bit as entertaining as the day I got it. It will be more than enough to hold me over till Demon Souls gets in this week.

Lollipop Chainsaw: pre-order for sure.

There was a time when I would have played just about anything with a zombie in it. No matter how shit or how obscure... if it had a re-animated corpse somewhere in the equation, then add me to it.

But then the gaming market had a sudden surge of zombie games, and not all of them good. Like the messed up virus that creates these beautiful ugly wretches, these rotten games clogged their way into every genre and soon I was avoiding them like a zombie bite.

Every now and then however, you get a game that has the right formula for a fun zombie game and for Lollipop Chainsaw that formula involves lots of zombies, a chainsaw and hot cheerleader as your main character. It's also interesting to note that the story is penned by James Gunn the guy who wrote the very cool 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake. ( One of my favorite zombie movies)


This game had been on my radar since I first heard of it, but the urge to buy it struck me like a machete to the skull today when I found out about the freakin awesome bonuses you get if you pre-order it.

Basically you get skins, alternative costumes for your heroin. And one of them is an awesome Ash from Evil Dead Skin!

Sort of looks like Tina Fey dressed as Ash

Evil Dead is the shit, and Evil Dead 2 will forever be in the top 3 of my all time favorite movies EVER! This bonus makes an already sweet game ever sweeter. Will definitely fork up some cash for this soon.

Check the awesome Ash skin in action as well as some other hot outfits and mad zombie killing in the video below.

And Then?

And then I didn't go to work yesterday because I had a horrible pain in my chest :O

I was up all night tossing and turning because it hurt so bad that I couldn't go to sleep. It was weird because I haven't had a smoke since last Friday, so maybe it was some sort of crazy withdrawal symptom?

Or it could have been heart burn or a more likely scenario, it could have been a xenomorph growing inside my chest cavity. My chest is still intact which means .... it's still in there.

I'm all better now though so that's cool. I spent the day at home watching 30 Rock and PVPing in Dark Souls. But the later was kind of slow, maybe because all the kids I'm normally harassing were in school, so most of the day was spent lying in bed feeding my face and tripping on Tina Fey.

I also started watching Gantz, which is a pretty F'ed up anime with lots of blood, gore and occasional attempted rape thrown in for good measure.


It didn't grab me like Death Note, and the gore wasn't as fun as in DeadMan Wonderland, but it's got a huge following online so ima give it a few more episodes to see where it all goes.

The night before I was out looking for more horror/anime titles and came across a sweet little anime short called Kakurenbo which was about these little kids being chased by these crazy looking mechanical demons. It had a really nice atmosphere to the whole thing, and I wished it was more than 30mins long.

Kakurenbo

As I mentioned I did a bit PVPing in Dark Souls as well, I pretty much spent the morning parked out side the Boss chamber in Anor Londo, which is this really tough battle that a lot of people are left open to invasion for. I my self had been ambushed here heaps of times, so it was only fitting that I returned the misery :P

I also visited the USP bookshop yesterday afternoon to check on an order I made back in October last year. I went in fully prepared to kick up a very small stink and ask for my money back, but the book was in. So now I'll have to go back tomorrow when I get paid to clear the balance and pick up the book. The order was a collection of short stories by Harlan Ellison called I have no mouth and I must scream. Now this guy writes some fucked up Sci-fi, and I'm really looking forward to wrapping my head around it. Sci fi short film script soon to follow.

After that I visited the WWF office to hand in a video I had been working on. I'm doing a bit of volunteer work for them and as my first project I put together a short video on some of the projects that the organization is currently working on. It was very rewarding to have the WWF crew like my video because I have never cut anything like it before. Most of my work is commercial stuff so to work on something that's meant to raise awareness and pull support for a cause was interesting. I'm looking forward to the next project, they've even offered to take me along on their field trips so I can have a better understanding of what they do, that would be pretty cool.


Tomorrow I'm hoping to place an order for Demon Souls (PS3 Exclusive Spiritual prequel to Dark Souls) over at MightyApe.com, as well as pick up Shadow of the Colossus HD from a local store. I keep hearing about how Demon Souls is so much harder than Dark Souls and I really just want to muck around in the "souls" world some more. I've already clocked like 100 hours on my current character and it's as exciting as ever.

Shadow of Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus is another PlayStation exclusive title that I've heard so much about. When talking to most people I know about their favorite games on the PS, this game is always on the list of top faves. It's similar to Demons/ Dark Souls in the way that the main gameplay emphasis is on killing bosses, but in "Shadow" this idea is taken to the extreme with the entire game just being a massive journey to a boss fight. No baddies in between... just a horse ride to the boss.

Now this might sound sort of 'meh' but it surely works because the game is praised as an epic adventure, and I've heard that the story is meant to be a real tearjerker.

To top off my fun day at home, we had a power cut last night which resulted in my PC not starting up again. So this afternoon I'm dragging my buddy Mike up to my place to have a look at it. Normally my PC being down would cause me to have a small aneurysm, but lucky I had Dark Souls.

Plus I got to spend some quality time with my girl friend.

Speaking of whom, it's our 4 year anniversary this Saturday, so I'll need to plan something for that!

Wonder if she'll like Shadow of the Colossus.