Burke's Joystick

Is it too early to start queuing up some entertainment for Halloween?  Just a bit.  Regardless, I find myself doing just that.  Part of the reason is that summer for my region never really arrived.  Instead of the requisite heat and humidity, we were treated to largely cool, dry days.  Really, it has felt like little more than an extended late spring or early autumn.  As a result I have found myself yearning to get autumn underway as there isn't any point of continuing this useless summer.  This is why I have been looking forward to Halloween: it is THE holiday of autumn! But in addition to that, two games have recently awakened in me a love for the horror of "urban fantasy":   Shadowrun Returns , and The Secret World .  As I detailed here , those two games have hit a home run with me, and made me reconsider the whole horror genre - a genre I never particularly cared for seeing the low budget "torture porn" tripe coming out of Hollywood...

This is going to be a first for me: I am actually going to review some anime!  I never really thought this day would come as I am not "otaku" for anime (the Japanese equivalent of being " cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs" ).  Truth is, prior to this show, I've only ever watched TWO complete anime shows in my life, the first being the superlative Cowboy Bebop (in my opinion, one of the finest pieces of science fiction to ever grace the small screen - when will we get that live action version ?!?), and the sadly mediocre Claymore (it started off great with a dark and gritty tale about monster slayers, but then lost its way and became a mindless monster mash).  And that is it.  Truth is, I find most anime to be little better than the after-school cartoons I watched growing up as a kid...an experience I have no desire to repeat at my age.  So this is why I am amazed to hear myself utter the following words (and by "utter" I mean "type"): Girls un...

It is one of those things where one game leads to another, which leads to another....  In this case the instigator was Red Orchestra 2 .  As I detailed here , I've been having a blast with the Rising Storm expansion.  Well, after playing on a bunch of servers that also hosted the core Ost Front content, I started to notice that maps which favored armored warfare were coming up quite infrequently in the rotation.  Truth be told this is no big loss as I hate how RO2 restricts armored vehicles to players who choose the role of crewman/tank commander.  As someone who prefers to play infantry, I rarely get a chance to hop in a tank because of this restriction - how I wish Tripwire would ditch this limited class thing and embrace the more open system used by Dice's Battlefield 3 !  Regardless, even though I do prefer gritty infantry combat, I did become wistful for the chance to slug it out in some armor. So I started looking for a replacement and remember...