Ronin Dojo Community College DX concludes, and it was a good ride. ForTaxReasons really captured the spirit and maladjusted personalities of all the gamers and Otaku we put up with as nerds and geeks. If you haven’t watched all of their episodes and shorts, we recommend you take a look at them, they are great for a laugh, even though when you laugh at Mark and Barry, you’re really laughing at yourselves.

In some unrelated news, the Champions Online Open Beta begins in two days, so grab those open beta codes while you can. You can get them off FilePlanet or D2D, Gamestop no longer has any codes to give out. Open beta will run from the 17th to the 24th and the Headstart weekend starts the 28th.

We’re at a loss for words… Okay maybe we can think of a few. Like these: HOLY TOO-MUCH-TIME-ON-HIS-HANDS BATMAN! This guy actually built a probably 1/3rd (estimate) scale Tumbler Batmobile out of a (if our Go-Kart knowledge is still up to date) a Kawasaki Arctic cat. It’s got real big ol’ front tumbler tires and will guarantee, the moment you sit in it, that you never experience sex again. We’re positive that this guy had to forefit every last shred of attraction to the opposite sex to make this Tumbler complete. All we know is?

Check out the jump for some math and our dreams!

This:

Plus this:

Equals all of our dreams coming true. Problems arise though. He is selling the PLANS on ebay, but not the actual BatKart, and we’re an incredibly lazy and poor bunch of nerds. So our dreams to be Batman shall be put on hold… Maybe we’ll be Spider-man… all we need is a bunch of spiders and a microwave…

Okay, if you don’t want to sit through the whole explanation (which we recommend because it’s actually pretty damn cool) the actual gameplay starts at 1:55 in. And if you skipped the whole thing… then you’re a jerk. What? The videos we find aren’t good enough for you? Fine, that’s fine, we’ll explain it. Waterloo labs shows us all how to play Half-Life (well, a flash version of it) using some Accelerometers, a big ol’ board, a bit of programming skill and some guns. Alright, despite being completely pointless because you could just as easily use a light gun for this sort of thing, it’s completely fucking awesome. Thinking about it though, imagine the possibilities of this! We could use this as training device for the military! Or even just put it in arcades! Who said that playing video games are just murder training simulators?!

Oh… wait…

Our bad!

I met Nintendo Christmas morning under a Christmas tree when I was 6 years old… He was only 64 bits back then but I thought he was so cute, we started playing and instantly became inseparable. I loved all our little games, rescuing the princess, flying spaceships, and even fighting! My favorite I pretended to be a little boy in little tunic rescuing a princess, and as we grew older I thought that Nintendo would be my one true love, always full of a youthful joy and wonder.

Learn about Brett’s love and loss… after the jump…

Cartridges became disks and we still were madly in love. Still playing our old games but in our haste to grow up we played more mature fair, guns and violence, but still Nintendo kept that beautiful sparkle that made me fall and love. Then I noticed some changes, he got thinner, more active but still seemed like the same Nintendo so I accepted him with love and open arms, and in the beginning it was just as beautiful as ever, we would stay up all night hanging out and smiling but soon… he started to change… he was losing that sparkle instead asking me to do things I just wasn’t comfortable with, and instead of our grand adventures he wanted to play cheap, throwaway little mini-games… I felt so dirty… but I couldn’t tell anyone…

Filthy Bastard...

So I kept my shame bottled up as Nintendo exploited me. He started fooling around with more casual types, almost ignoring me completely at times, occassionally coming back with that little glimmer of hope, and I came running back only to have him beat me down again and leave me crying… I was so stupid… I just wanted him to be back to what he was, to be innocent again… but now I realize that he’s over me… he doesn’t need me anymore… and all those years we spent together meant nothing to him.

I’m with a nice PC now… strong… I think I need that… and I have my 360 for support… but I know… the minute I see that little spark again… I’ll come crawling back… I just can’t help it… I still love him.

Let us start off by saying we’re pretty big followers of Destructoid and we all hope that one day our little blog here gets to that sort of status among gamers, and while we agree with Anthony up there, we think he’s also incorrect about a few key things.

Hit the jump to see our opinion.

Yes, it’s true, the state of games at the moment is grim, I want you to think of the last game you played today or yesterday. It’s okay, go ahead. Alright, got it in your head? Excellent. Now be honest with yourself. Was it a tarted up murder simulator? Was the main point of the game “See these dudes? Kill them dead!”? It’s okay, it’s okay, we’re not mad at you. The last game we played was Team Fortress 2. There is no other point of that game other than killing dudes dead. Our line-up of games lately has consisted mainly of Team Fortress 2, Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 and BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger. All of those games are considered crazy murder simulators… some a bit more insane than others.

Seriously, this is Taokaka... she tried to eat a woman's breasts because she though they were food... That sounds like Art to us.

The problem we see in Anthony’s argument is he isn’t looking quite hard enough for what he calls “Art”. While he states that artistic games should really “Speak to the human condition” and talk about important issues, not all art is or will be this serious fair. Now, we love serious topics in games, Bioshock was indeed a “serious” game. Full of Objectivist philosophy and visuals that knew how to tug at the heartstrings of gamers who still have some feeling left in their jaded hearts that isn’t foaming at the mouth ready to plug a slug into the first moving thing they see. Sadly though, for every Bioshock or Half-Life you’ve got games like Halo 3 and Gears of War. The ratio of games that actually want to say soemthing that doesn’t come off preachy or hamfisted.

HAY GUISE... WAR IS BAD.... WANNA KILL DUDES DEAD NOW?!

No… wait… that doesn’t seem quite right…

DUHURR....

Much better. The fact of the matter is, is art makes you FEEL something. Whether that feeling be joy or sadness, hate or strife, love or longing… art is something that speaks to your soul and makes you react in a way that you wouldn’t had you been looking at something else. To discount games like Bioshock, Half-Life or even… Psychonauts as games of art, merely because they feature killing people in creative ways… well then you aren’t looking deep enough into them. That would be like saying Cubism isn’t art because it doesn’t have proper human forms.

Or to say Jackson Pollock isn't art because... Nope, we're wrong, this isn't art.

Games like Blazblue: Calamity Trigger and Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 have their own artistic merit. Blazblue combines striking and beautiful visuals along with a solid fighting mechanic to bring people together not just for the prospect of pummeling each other with bizarre characters, but to be better than one another to come together in fighting. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2′s recent XBLA release has welled up the feelings of nostalgia from gamers everywhere, hearkening us back to our roots, making us pine for those days of growing up in an arcade, memorizing combo after combo to dominate the machine. Sure we lost a lot of quarters… but it was worth it, just to feel that thrill and quell the summer doldrums. The point we’re trying to make is, you have to look closer to see the art in things… just like life. Beauty is something we don’t see much in the world unless we try to find it, and the same goes for gaming. Whether it’s smiling at the teamwork in Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead you just don’t see in other games, or shedding a tear at James’s death in Fallout 3.

No! No! He'll come back to life! He's Asland! HE HAS TO COME BACK! OPEN UP THE CONSOLE! I'M BRINGING HIM BACK EVEN IF I HAVE TO SPIT IN THE FACE OF GOD!

Sure, at the moment, the industry is immature… but it’s still relatively new! Cinema has a good century on it and print… well… a great man said that Print is Dead.

Look at that pimp grin.

So… give it time, the industry is still in its adolescence… it seems obvious that in this stage of its development it would be about guns, murder and chicks.

The Back story.

In the not so distant future (somewhere in time and space!) Nuclearites have done… something, we think they blew up the moon, and this caused irreversible damage to the planet… so somehow this race of mutant humans was created and forced into slave labor, but under the leadership of Dr. Huxley, the mutant humans or the “Alternatives” start a race war against the humans, fighting for mutant rights.

That sounds pretty familiar, bub.

Check out our breakdown after the jump.

The Good

We’d like to first start out by saying that Huxley is an blend of interesting concepts, and really stupid crap. As per format though, we’re going to start out with what we like.
PVE: Player Vs. Environment is, for lack of a better phrase, pretty damn fun. Since Huxley is an MMOFPS the old standby of “click monster to make dead” is gone… okay well you still click it to make it dead but it plays much more like your standard shooter than an MMORPG which makes killing monsters a much more active experience. Hell if you can circle strafe and shoot, you’ll pretty much be able to take down anything, but you’ll feel like you actually had a fight, not a click off.

Pictured: Clicksticuffs

Visuals: we played Huxley on the highest settings offered but just for fun we bumped it down to the normal settings to see how it looked and ran. We were surprised to see that a Free to Play game running on such great settings. The environments are slick and impressive, and character animations are well done. But, those are really the only things that we enjoyed with Huxley, it had promise but it just doesn’t execute all of it’s ideas well enough and ultimately comes up short.

The Bad
Questing: We thought since the PVE was so different and enjoyable, the questing would follow suit, but it somehow manages to be even worse, it’s like they combined every mission that people hate from First Person Shooters and all the pointless grind from Roleplaying Games. We actually found ourselves grinding in an escort mission an ESCORT MISSION. No one likes escort missions! You want to know why? Because AI is stupid… No matter what game it is in! Because it’s AI.

Case and point.

Selection: Huxley has your pretty standard fair of weapons, ranging from your shotguns to your grenade launchers and sniper rifles… and that’s the problem… there isn’t anything different or new about the weapons. Sure your sniper rifle is essentially a bolt of lightning, but it doesn’t function any different than a sniper rifle from any other game. Even the armor is generic. It’s no secret that in MMO’s you really don’t start to look that different from everyone around you until you hit the much later levels of the game, but in Huxley… you pretty much look the same as everyone else… all the time. So much so that we spent our first team deathmatch killing our own guys because we couldn’t tell the difference between which hulking mass of testosterone to make go boom.

This. All over again.

PVP:That segues nicely into our experience with the PVP. Now normally we would have ignored the PVP completely because everyone knows that the only remotely fun FPS to play online is Team Fortress 2, it’s a scientific fact, but to get more higher level equipment you need these things called “Battle Markers” which you gain by participating and winning PVP matches called “Skirmishes”. Our experience with PVP, as usual, was awful. There are massive amounts of lag, the match types are your generic fair and it’s non-new player friendly, but you can’t just avoid it because as we stated, you’re forced into the multiplayer to progress in the game. It’s like torture.

The Ugly:
Character Creation: This department is severely lacking, compared to games like Aion, Global Agenda and Champions Online coming out that boasts and delivers such expansive character creation systems, Huxley is really coming up short. How you play the game is actually DEPENDANT on your race and sex so picking a faction holds no bearing other than to tell you how to play the game, not that it matters what faction you are on, whatever side you pick your goal will be “See these dudes? Kill them dead.”

See these dudes? KILL THEM DEAD

So if you want to be a character that specializes in speed? You’re going to be a female Alternative. You want to maximize your equipment potential? You’re going to be a male Sapien. This wouldn’t be so bad if every male wasn’t a beefed out muscle-mass and every female wasn’t a busty vixen. We’re small and pathetic nerds here at the Squadron and we’re completely aware of that, so most of us make characters who reflect us, like sneaky rogues or fat loudmouth dwarfs. We understand that this isn’t a fantasy MMO but we do like some options.

Every character is also ugly as sin, we were trying to get a helmet as fast as possible just to stop looking at our own ugly face.

Breakdown
Is Huxley: The Dystopia, worth the… well… it’s free, but is it worth the time? We’re going to go with a No. The factors against this game far outweigh what we enjoyed. The PVP is awful, the character selection is lacking in all factors and the weapons/armor selection is minimal and uninspired. In short, Huxley is a bunch of good ideas… mixed with a steaming bowl of halfass. What do you expect from an Free 2 Play game though? Our advice is to wait it out and spend the money on one of the better MMOs coming out this fall.

“Tribal” armored space marines? Scantly clad but somehow also armored women? Aliens? No no, you’re not playing Unreal Tournament. You’re looking at Huxley: The Distopia, the new F2P MMOFPS CS WTFOMGLOLZBBQ. God damn we love the Internet and it’s crazy acronyms. In English for you not with the times: Huxley is a Free to Play, Massively Multiplayer Online First Person Shooter. Should you care? We don’t know… It just seems so generic.

Check out our comparison after the jump

Look how big my armor is! But don't you say a WORD about the size of my penis.

Look how big my breasts are! But don't you say a WORD about the size of my penis.

That would be Huxley on the left and Unreal Tournament 3 on the right, showing off a few space marines. I guess if we had to blame anyone for the huge armored space marine look we’d blame Warhammer 40k, but the Squadron is far too in love with them to be mad.

We just can't stay mad at a face like this.

But we’re a fair group of nerds and we’re willing to give Huxley a shot! And you can too! All you have to do is sign up for a Fileplanet Account here. And an Ijji account here. Simple as that and totally free. We’d love to get you guys playing and hear your thoughts on it, we’re certainly going to give you ours… Some might say this is a cheap substitute because we didn’t get into the Global Agenda Beta… and those people would be right… we’re just trying to fill that hole okay!

Checkout the mainpage for Huxley: The Distopia, here.

http://www.twilightthevideogame.com/

That’s right. A Twilight videogame. It seems that every sight we try to get information from has a different rumor and we just can’t seem to get a straight up answer to all our questions. Is it an MMO? Is it a console game? Digital distribution? Will there be vampire sex? Why would a loving god allow this?

"Let there be PG Metrosexual Vampire Pornography!"

Read more after the jump.

So we’ve been hunting all gorram day to get some info about this blasphemy. And we actually got some straight up answers. You want to know how? WE ACTUALLY READ THE INFORMATION FROM THE WEBSITE. BrainJunk studios is actually creating a NON-COMMERCIAL Twilight game. Not an MMO as every other site would have you believe.

This game is being created for academic purposes, and as such is a non-commercial venture for everyone involved in the project. Once the game is well polished and of the highest quality all the materials related to the game will be surrendered to Summit Entertainment. It is their decision if they want to publish the game or not. Everyone on the development team understands that they are a non-paid volunteer, and this includes the game director as well. This project isn’t about money. This game is about the passions of everyone involved in the Twilight Saga.

Was that really that hard you guys? Reading a fucking paragraph? Oh, and the MMO rumors are addressed as well.

The information being reported that we are developing an MMO is incorrect. Any information that isn’t on the website should be regarded as a rumor.

Once again! TWO SENTENCES. Sentences that dispel all the rumors you hear! Learning is fun! Alright, lets get to the loathing. That’s what you came here for isn’t it? Well since the Squadron got wind of this project. Four of us are hanging over our computers, another three are trying to “Cleanse the world by fire” a few are just crying under their desks and me? The one typing this little update? I’ve got an ass ton of C4 and I plan to take the government by force in an attempt to stop this.

Pictured: One metric Ass Ton of C4

Let us be specific in our hate. Despite what we have against Twilight, its characters devoid of personality, its stories so shmaltzy and sugary we got diabetes from the first chapter, the shoddy veil of PG it puts over all the lust and sexual tension. What we hate most? Is what it does to industries.With a fanbase of screaming socially rejected fangirls there is no way that it can have a positive impact on anything it touches? It’s a media cancer. It destroyed the perceptions about decent literature of MILLIONS of teenage females, it had a similar effect on movies we’re sure and it will NOT be a forward step for gaming. Hell, along with Anne Rice, Stephanie Meyer has essentially destroyed vampires and werewolves. They used to be MONSTERS people, things to be feared. Feral beasts who sucked your blood and eviscerated you just for looking at them funny. They were not whiny, brooding metro-sexual heartthrobs. That sickens us… but we’ve accepted that there is nothing we can do… Other than burn and destroy, but that’s only a temporary stall. A band-aid for an axe wound. Twilight is a juggernaut of fangirlish lust.

"JACOB IS SO MUCH CUTER THAN EDWARD! I'LL FUCKING CUT YOU"

So we sit back, and we suffer. We watch what we love be destroyed by hyperactive, chocoholic, lonely women… After all that misery we need something good to cheer us up.

Okay... that's pretty fucking cool.

You can really taste the topical irony in the drink.

Aznz888 also made some fancy custom logos to go along with your drinking experience, so you can feel just what it’s like to drink a soft drink in a horrible post nuclear apocalypse!

See the logos after the jump!

Nuka-Cola Recipe
1/3rds Cream Soda
1/3rds Coca-Cola

1/3rds Mountain Dew(or any other caffienated drink you like)

Nuka-Cola Quantum Recipe
Two drops of Blue food Coloring
Two drops of Red food Coloring
One Foosh “Seriously Caffeinated” Mint
1/3rds Sprite
1/3rds Mountain Dew
1/3rds Squirt! soda

Aznz also talks about making some Fallout 3 food like Mirelurk Cakes. We vote for cooking up some “Strange Meat”.

Okay! That looks pretty awesome! It looks like Noitu Love or something. What is it called? Muramasa: The Demon Blade? Cool, it’s coming out on Xbox Live Arcade right? …No? Playstation Network? No? Just plain old Xbox or Ps3? No?! STEAM?! What else is there?! …Th-the Wii? You liar! The Wii only makes mini-game collections now! It stopped making games for actual gamers by the time it had a pile of money so big from selling shovelware they could pay hookers for 24 hour blowjobs while they smoke cigars and laugh at us poor Hardcore gamers starving out in the cold.

Haha! Look at those starving fools! ... I didn't say stop, you gutter whore!

Still, we’re not entirely convinced… A Wii game that won’t actually suck? We’re not supposed to be biased here… but the Wii hasn’t given us much to work with. We’ve heard a bit about Muramasa, the creators claiming that “Wii owners haven’t had a hardcore game in quite some time” but game developers tend to be full of empty promises…

"Please sir! You promised us another Starfox if we preformed sexual favors for you!"

Alright, no more orphan jokes, we promise. We’re just skeptical as usual. We always want good things, but in this industry it’s hard to tell the good from the bad without actually experiencing the game. Muramasa: The Demon Blade hits September 8th this year.

(Editor’s note: When tryping “Orphan” into google image search, we got pictures of starving African orphans, we had to specify “Cockney Oprhan” to get the amusing one… what has this world come to?)