MuffinZone

HERE.
This is where you will be fighting Commies.
With hover tanks.

Ok, some of you more... 'cultured'... readers out there may have heard of a game, released sometime in the mid/early 90's called Battlezone, and no, I'm not talking about the arcade game that looked like Tron and Doom drank a bottle of Black Velvet, did some LSD and then produced a child who would one day forge the one ring and have dominion over Middle Earth.  That's the wrong Battlezone.  The one I'm talking about involves fighting the Russians on the Moon with hover tanks during the cold war.  And no, that shit I'm actually not making up.

The official 1980's view of Russians courtesy
of capitalist America.
And yes, doing this on the moon would be a poor choice.

Now, to start off, this game was made in the 90's, so, it's old, but, contrary to popular belief these days, that does not mean it's shit.  It still looks presentable, the gameplay is still unparlleled in its genre, and the story is, well, it's still a story about America fighting Russia in space during the cold war over alien tech with hover tanks and mechsuits.  That alone should sell you on the game, oh, and one more thing, the word 'sell' isn't exactly appropriate here, since the game is, how do you say in America... FREE.  So, there's really no reason for you not to play this game, unless you have a crippling fear of joy, happiness, being American, or the empty void of space and decompression (in soviet russia, atmosphere decompresses you), in which case I think you may have a valid point.  But, for everyone out there who celebrates the fourth of July like a patriot and won't let a silly thing like a lack of breathable atmosphere hinder them from kicking commie ass throughout the solar system, then this, this is a game for you.

Ah, I love the smell of decompressing Russians
in the morning.

Onto the actual game.  It's a blend of a RTS and an FPS, you control your soldier or hover tank from a first person perspective, but also manage building a base, ordering other units, collecting resources and building an army, from said first-person-perspective.  That sounds a little... unwieldy.  But, in practice, it's not.  Harvesting in largely automated, and the menu system for building is quite streamilined, many modern games could stand to learn something here.  The unit commands also work well, although it is here that the FPS nature does hinder the game a bit, but, the strategies needed are not terribly complex, and with a little prep work some nifty tactics are pretty easy to accomplish.  The only main complain here is the A.I. which is, well, mid 90's A.I., which is to say Ham-Shit, no, not just 'shit', Ham-Shit, the shit that you get after eating a holiday meal with the family where your only escape from uncle bob's conspiracy theories is more ham, and that ham has nothing but malevolence for your digestion, and the shit which that ham ferments into is nothing more than pure, distilled, 150 proof evil.  That said, it doesn't break the game, it's still enjoyable, just be prepared for some frustration with pathfinding and targeting.

Anyway, I don't want to give away the story, because, well, surprising as it may be, a game about fighting 1970's era Ruskies on the moon actually has a decent plot, one worth playing though.  So, no spoilers for you.  Onto my arbitrary rating system:

Graphics: If you don't want to lower your standards you might need beer goggles this time, but hey, at least you don't need Black Velvet goggles.
Gameplay: patriotism at its best, only capitalists could mix RTS and FPS this well
Story: grade A ++, no utter fucking nonsense, no amnesia, just a giant ass government cover-up that miraculously doesn't sound like you estranged uncle who insists on wearing an aluminum foil hat at thanksgiving.
American-ism: we fucking won the cold war didn't we.
The Moon: still a bastard
A.I.: this is where you may actually want the Black Velvet goggles.

Overall Verdict:  your only valid excuse not to play this game is a crippling fear of enjoying life and being american, which is only a valid excuse if you a.) like in New Jersey or b.) are Fidel Castro.

New Jersey:
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.

Bordermuffins

Borderlands is an interesting combination game, almost like the Elder Scrolls series, but with guns. It has a Fallout feel to it, but it isn't quite the same. A first person shooter RPG makes for an interesting mix, but it gets pulled off quite well here. A few things got my attention, mainly the names of a few achievements that made me smile, but the game overall is pretty good.

The gameplay itself is entertaining to say the least, though it lacks an option to customize weapons, which bugged me a lot. The special abilities for the different classes you're given to choose from do make up for it, as each one kicks respective ass. The Hunter has a hawk that attacks your enemies on command, the Soldier has a turret that blows shit up, the Siren can run really fast by phasewalking and it hurts others, and the Berserker does just that, goes berserk. Each has numerous other skills that upgrade the ability, or you in general, and lets you kick more ass each time.

Moving on to the story, or what little it has in that manner. There's one overarching objective throughout the entire game, and that's to get to the Vault and open it. Easy enough. Except that there's countless completely arbitrary tasks to do along the way. Though the tasks are pointless, they are fun and do give you a metric asston of experience and money, so they're worth it. Each one associated with the plot is interesting in its own way and has an increasing level of difficulty that makes it near impossible to just do the plot missions and get through it with any sense of ease. Just like a game should be.

The RPG elements are lacking aside from the aforementioned abilities and skills. You can change your characters clothes colors and name, but that's it. Each class has a specified look and gender, and there's no getting around it. The FPS elements though are thoroughly drowned in the sprawling maps and environments that you are forced to navigate through for almost every mission. They don't all look the same though, which is a nice change of pace.

I thoroughly enjoyed this game, and the different style it had to offer from most of the other games that I play. It has good replay value, despite spoilers, and you can't play it the same way with each class. Changing class requires a change in tactics, which is another refreshing aspect of this game. Bravo 2K.

>Ryft

Muffin Wrench

This is a bit of an older game now, with no shortage of reviews out there telling you that's it's great, game of the year, a life-changing epiphany waiting to happen, possibly the cure for ebola, or just a game worth sinking 12ish hours of your life into. But, I like this game, and I have a witty title that ties into the gameplay and muffins, so I'm writing it whether you like it or not. Even if you don't like horror games, play this, it's not horror, it's awesome, you can't help but like it, and if you don't, you may be a communist, and since this game has a retro 60ish feel to it, that means that by default you'll be exiled by your friends and neighbors and that the local gas station won't serve 'your kind' anymore, kinda like C3P0, yes, not liking this game would make you that annoying. But, if you're reading this, I'll assume you're not a commie, and you're not annoying, mainly so I can sleep at night knowing that the dirty reds aren't being entertained by my writing nor are they being guided through the capitalist petri dish that is America, rather that they are floundering around out there, trying to figure out why the hell radioshacks even exists, but, then, the average american might not even know that anymore. But I digress.

Though on a related topic similar to communism and broken down reactors that make entire cities uninhabitable, for some odd reason, we as human beings seem to have a strange fascination with wandering around a failed dystopian society whilst being the lone sane person left alive and killing everything else. And if this fantasy is one that you have every day at work, on your drive to wherever the hell it is that you decided to go, or simply when you're around other people, then Bioshock is likely a game that will fullfil your deepest desires and leave every other aspect of your life feeling comparatively empty. Is this to say that the game is a dream come true? Well, maybe, maybe not; while it will certainly fuck your dreams over with a steam powered blender and to a 50's era soundtrack just like in your twisted dystopian fantasies, it does have some drawbacks. It has no multiplayer: no co-op (which would have been awesome, like, crawling around Chernobyl fighting mutant commies awesome) , no versus, no CTF, nothing. To me that's a missed opportunity. But would you really want to share your dystopian fantasy world with your friends? No, of course you wouldn't, it's your dystopia, and all the miscreants in it are your bitches, and you're not in a sharing mood. Sharing is for commies anyway. But the lack of multiplayer is, sadly, not your perfect dystopia's worst flaw: the save system is. While it's not the horrendous holocaust grade trajedy that was the password system of old, it is something akin to finding out that the hot girl you just drunkenly hit on was your sister, or worse yet, your mom's sister; it's bad, game-breakingly bad. It makes dying more of an inconveinence than anything, or, in some cases, even the prefered method of playing the game. And only the commies prefer to play games by dying for mother russia; Americans survive, like McGyver, or Chuck Norris: we don't die like those commie death whores.

Oh, and you play Pipe Dream as a minigame; I'm not joking. I thought that had died with Windows 3.11, but, i guess if you're gonna have a minigame you can at least pick a classic and give it a slightly shiny new coat of paint. But it is a lump in an otherwise smooth and creamy milkshake of gaming goodness; but hey, some people like lumpy milkshakes as is their right, in America: but in Soviet Russia, milk shakes you.

Now, the good about this little, personal, communist free apocalypse. For one, it's beautiful; the Unreal 3 engine does a superb job of rendering this game, especially for the 360. It's not the prettiest game, especially not for the PC, but everything fits together perfectly. The art style is, well, art. This game could be put in a museum and, not only would it be the most badass piece of art there, but it would piss on the mona lisa and scare away the small children; basically, it's the perfect piece of art and a general improvement to society in general. But not only is it beautiful and a functional scarecrow for the elderly and the infantile, it's gameplay is fast paced (usually, with a few rare exceptions), well balanced, fluid (ok, the system's a bit clunky, but it works beautifully), atmospheric (the first five minutes of this game draw you in as nothing else before or since in my experience), stays fresh for the entire game (really, the game never gets old, and rarely repetitive), and is some of the most satisfying combat in a FPS game (possible exceptin being the Condemned games, but they're different, lets compare apples to apples here, or at least toasters to stainless steel toasters). But really, one of the greatest points of this game is it's plot, and the way it's told; you can't get this in any other medium: not movies, not books, maybe comics, but that's a stretch. It's phenomenal, I can't spoil anything for you, I won't, only a communist would do that; and if you have a friend that did spoil it for you, they're a communist, and you should email your state's governor to have them hauled off to a commie-camp, or at least start telling people that this friend has the herpes, everywhere, and is contagious, all the time, so that way people will avoid eye contact with them and treat everything they say as meaningless herpes induced alphabet vomit.

Essentially, if you enjoy, life, freedom, happiness, cars, and the right for every random person you meet to potentially be carrying a boomstick in their pocket and a miniature poodle in their purse, then you'll like this game, or at least enjoy it more than licking Oprah's fat rolls.