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.

Muffiny Haiku Muffins from the Great Land of America Muffins

So, I said we'd be back, and we are.
Also, this is a new post, a new post occuring less than one month after the last one.
You didn't expect that now, did you?
Which leaves it at me:1 and your expectations of me:0
And this also leaves this post resembling a really bad haiku.
Like, a haiku that a dyslexic amnesiac would write.

I think this haiku is about a loan shark
and a fishing expedition gone horribly wrong.
but no one can be sure.

However, just to ensure that I remain the WINNING party, or BI-WINNING, should you prefer.
Let me set some things straight about what you can expect about the update schedule here:
Look at your calender.
Notice all those nice, even, measured intervals.
Those intervals have trained you.
Trained you to expect things at those intervals, in sequence, in a predictable manner even.
Well.
Fuck.
All.
That.
Bullshit.
We have no schedule.
Why?
Because we're trying to help you.
We're trying to help you overcome all that mundane bullshit.
All those safe expectations about what to expect and when.
We're breaking you of habits
Habits you didn't know you had.
Habits that are eating your life away, forcing you to live like an automated drone.
Instead of a human being: spontaneous, free, and full of good ol'
AMERICAN FREEDOM.
CUZ THIS IS FUCKING AMERICA.
FUCK YEAH.

Yeah!  This place.
Well, most of this place.
But, um, mostly just the middle-ish bit.
well kinda lower-middle-ish
and the one bit in the top leftish corner area.
But the rest of those places: fuck 'em.
I didn't even know it was legal to put Russia
 on the same map as America.

Or,
at least that's what I tell myself.
But really,
Lets see you be creative
ON A SCHEDULE.
You'll fail.
And when you do,
you should come back here,
and maybe appreciate this fucking faux-haiku.
And Power-Rangers.
They're definitely underrated.
Respect the Zords.

Or they'll find you.

Room With A Muffin

I said we'd be back.

I told you.

I fucking told you.

And we brought the fucking robot dinosaur viking king.
Why?
To kick your ass if you ask too many questions.
That's 'Why'.

And I would also like to appologize to you, and to start this new season (you didn't know we had SEASONS on this bitch now did you?) off on a classy foot- a SINGULAR classy foot because the other foot is too busy being pants-on-head-retarded and yelling about how it's toes are Daniel Craig's grand kids or some shit.  So, now, on to the appology:

First off.  I appologize for never spelling 'appology' correctly.  Ever.  It's not going to happen, so sit down, shut up, eat some glue sticks and enjoy the nice squiggly red lines that are all over my fucking screen.
And that brings me to point number two:

The less I know about what goes on with these
fuckers, the better.  

I would also like to appologize for all of the motherfucking snakes on this motherfucking website, I assure you that I.T. is looking into it, or eating burritos on company time, or, maybe the snakes are eating those burritos now, but in any case, the burritos are not your problem.  And for the future I just wanted to assure you that I have a dream, a dream where white people, and black people, and even all them chinease people, can visit a blog site, and read utter nonsense, and not have snakes fuck their mums.

So.  There.  I appologized, for everything, or at least everything I could think of at the time; NOW ENJOY THE APPOLOGY.

Cuz it's the last fucking one you're going to get this season, and I assure you, some fucked up shit will be said, and if it offends you- too damn bad, you shouldn't have read it.  It's not my fault that future you isn't successful enough or smart enough to have built a time machine to come back and warn you not to read my shit.  That's not my fault, so stop blaming me for your inadequacies, man up, and maybe please your girlfriend for once so that maybe she won't notice how unfortunate future you will be.

So, if you're the type of person who enjoys this kind of fucked up shit, then by all means, RETURN, READ, and feel SUPERIOR to your fellow man or ameoba.  I make no guarantees; this will not make you uncomfortably energetic, you will not gain electrolytes, this has no nutritious value, you will not run like Kenyans, or, knowing our likely reader-base, you likely will not even run like blind triple amputees with third degree burns covering 50% of their body, but it is....

...MADE WITH REAL LIGHTNING!!

This is what I found when I searched for 'Real Lightning'
Does it make sense?
No.
Do I care?
Even more no.
Do I give a shit that that didn't make sense?
I assure you:  I have precisely 0.00 shits to give.

 

FINAL Muffins

Ok, so, most of us are college students, that was kind of a secret, not really, but, if you're on the lower end of the normal IQ distribution you may not have noticed, and that's what I was counting on.  Anyway, it is now, or will be soon, FINALS WEEK.  The week when everything tries to kill you.

Appearance of peaceful serenity: yes
Will it kill you if you drop your guard: yes
Are there hidden polar bears: yes
Do these bears have lightsabers: yes

EVERYTHING.

You think I'm making this up?  It snowed.  Mother Nature turned the entire outdoors into a frozen, ice coated deathtrap filled with friction dependent multi-ton, motorized steel monsters, commanded by complete ass-hats, roaming about- just for us squishy, organ filled pedestrians.  This isn't even survival of the fittest, this is survival of the lucky bastards.

And the least squishy.

Garfield is made of LIES!!

It speaks only Truth.

Your own body even tries to kill you; with sleep.  You don't have time for it, you body demands it.  And yet, if you sleep, you die a horrible accademic death and go to burger king hell which is like the mortal form of purgatory if purgatory sucked more ass than your mind can comprehend; or, you don't sleep, and you avoid that festering grease wasteland but, you catch the crazies instead.  Now, 'the crazies' isn't exactly one of my normal scientific terms, the reason for this is simple; you don't catch a single scientifically quantifiable type of crazy, you catch ALL of the crazies.  You hallucinate, you become paranoid, you freak the fuck out for no apparent reason, you eat a box of pancake mix, you start singing Ke$ha, you become irritable and depressed, you pretend to be a veloci-raptor from Jurassic Park and leap around in kitchens chasing small children on into bread cupboards.

This is how your profs
view Christmas.
No sissy mistletoe for
these motherfuckers.

You do not want that fate.


But, everything is still trying to kill you.  Your professors want nothing more than to see you spontaneously combust during their final; they get a Christmas bonus for every student after the 3rd to combust with another bonus if they catch a nearby student on fire as well.  To them, you not catching fire is ruining Christmas, so that makes them pyromanic bastards and should not be trusted unless they're impersonating Elvis.



Even your food is trying to kill you.

Most trustworthy burger a man could ever hope for.

Yes, even that well-done slab of dead cow nestled neatly between those plump processed wheat grain buns coated in MSG laden artificial tomato product, even that is actively trying to kill you.  And how?  Well, not on it's own, on it's own it wants nothing more than to nurture you into a nice, comfortable adulthood complete with the Apple-Pie edition Genuine American Dream.  However.... there are terrorist plots at work here.  IN YOUR OWN LIVER.  Yes, stress hormones are turning that innocent, benign cow slab against you; they're corrupting it, teaching it the dark magics long ago forbade by Dumbledor and the council of wise elders with the approval of the Power Rangers Review Board.  That benign, peacful slab of dead cow is now actively seeking to turn itself from good, nourishing protein, into deadly Elven Death Fat of the Defiler +2: Bonus to Unclogged Arteries.  Fucking dark elvish liver terrorist.  That cow slab was INNOCENT!!!

You will miss them more than you
can possibly imagine.
Just like the Deathstar.

Now, there is, of course, more stuff trying to kill you, but, i've lingered here too long, if I stay they'll find me.  I've helped you all that I can.  BEWARE THE VELOCIRAPTOR BEARS.  They will find you, in your dreams, and steal all your fantasies, and feed them to their young, then eat your socks.  ALL OF YOUR SOCKS.


Oh, and toasters, fuck toasters, they're always trying to kill you, finicky little slot-loaded bastards.  They eat not just all of your toast, but all of your electrics too... electric bastard mongrels... and then, and then, the arrogant sons-of-bitches, they feed your toast back to you after they've eaten and burned it, like some sick, twisted cyborg bird tethered to the electric line regurgitating food back to it's young.  And you thought you were in command, all because of the turny-buttins, but it lied to you; that son of a bitch cyborg bird toaster lied to you, and you believed it, all of those years... you'll listen the next time the dishwasher tries to warn you now, won't you?

...Won't you?    

Cheerful looking son-of-a-bitch, innit?

Standing Like a Muffin

Ok, so, I was pondering humanity again.  And I was doing said pondering while walking, and, while walking an interesting phenomenon occurred.  This phenomenon is one that, I can scarcely call a 'phenomenon' in that it happens all the fucking time, but, what occurred was that the person who was walking in front of me just stopped.  Stopped.  In the middle of the fucking sidewalk, the middle of the crowded sidewalk, the sidewalk that other people, namely ME, were trying to, lets see here, WALK ON, and they were STANDING in the middle of it, completely oblivious to the idea, the concept, the very possibility that there may be other people in existence that may, possibly, want to use that same sidewalk as them, and, again, what were they doing?  Standing there, having a motherfucking conversation.

Yes, I've finally found the problem with humanity, the reason we don't have flying cars and robot espresso machines, the reason the future hasn't come yet.
Them.
The time-space continuum doesn't even like them.
They are the problem.

This is what you're looking for.
I'm not sure how it's gonna work, but that's between you and the car
I don't want to know.  

And, if by some unfortunate circumstance, you find that you are the problem then there are two things you can do about that.  The first is to go fucking play in traffic, and don't take the word fucking as an adjective either, it's a verb, and that's how you get to remove yourself from the gene pool, by engine fucking a passing '86 mustang being driven by Sir DoucheCunt McFagBags at 88 mph with Oprah riding shotgun.  The second option, is that you simply don't stop in the middle of the damn walkway to have a conversation while everyone else has somewhere to be, somewhere where they contribute to society and progress humanity farther from the dark ages where dumb-asses like you would still have us standing complacently in the middle of sidewalks wasting civilization away while the barbarians sack Rome and Skynet nukes the shit out of Australia and your dog.

Oh.  And guess what.  I can back my vindictive, righteous anger up with SCIENCE.  Yeah, that shit that you failed in hight school and the reason you're working at Burger King, it's coming back to bite you in the ass.  Because YOU are what your body would consider to be a HEART ATTACK.  YOU are what causes ischemic strokes.  YOU cause necrosis.  And how does this connection make one iota of sense?  Guess what causes all those death-type illnesses (death types have a bonus against healthy living abilities, but are weak against anti-coagulant type medications).  Blood clots, but not just a blood clot, a blood clot that was circulating through the blood stream, all nice and normal like, but the it stopped in the middle of an important artery and RUINED EVERYTHING JUST LIKE YOU.  And not the 'ruined everything' that your parents told you  because you were a drunken accident they couldn't put up for adoption.  You are the social analog of a heart attack and a stroke- you are everything that's wrong with society and your degree of ignorance about other people will be what brings about the end of civilization as we know it, so, when we're being raped in the ass by motherfucking alien pterodactyl sex monsters with tentacles I'll blame you.     

YOUR FAULT.
You dumb walking fail cunt.
Go fuck a toaster.
And make sure it's plugged in.
And set to "Hellfire"

Oh, and seeing as it is now the Holiday Season, if you do that 'stopping thing' in a crowded mall...
They'll cancel Christmas, and all of the sad orphans in the world will blame you.
And Santa will send you and all your relatives uncaged Ebola Monkeys on Christmas morning.
Ebola Monkeys.

Merry Christmas.

Enjoy Dissolving.

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.