Quintumply

THOSE CRIMINALS.

Yes, it’s true, a couple of teens on hallucinogens broke into my house (the one with bright green paint and sporting racing stripes) and stole my keyboard, thus rendering my blog-writing skills useless.  I’m 89% sure that the break from blogging will have affected my performance, in a negative way.  I 100% hope not, however.

‘Wait a second, Quintumply,’ Says the collective you, ‘if your keyboard was stolen, how are you writing this blog post?  EXPLAIN YOURSELF.’

It’s quite simple.

I bought another one.

Hello and hi, I’m back, and it still smells wonderful in here.  Almost as nice as it smells in my red Nissan Micra.  It has an air freshener in it.  Thinking about it, air freshener is a bit of a con name for the device.  It does not freshen the air, it simply masks it with a stronger, yet more pleasant, scent of something floral.  I shall inform my superiors.  Glade shall fall!

Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk about.  Having said that, I don’t really have much to talk about at the moment, apart from Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction and The Orange Box.  I bought these two gems a number of hours ago (roughly 72 if you want a more specific specification) and have been enjoying their offerings.

Let us begin, then, with Ratchet and Clank.  It is a game.  Ratchet is the name of Ratchet, the Lombax, and Clank is his robot-companion.  It combines the genres of shooter and platformer with exquisite results.  The bright colours and extremely fluid animation bring Pixar or Dreamworks to the forefront of my headbox, and the game is equally as imaginative and fun as one of their films.  Only more fun, really, because it’s a game, and games are more fun than films.

The gameplay is brilliantly devised, with an effective and addictive weapons upgrade system, among other chips.  As you use a weapon, it builds up xp, and eventually upgrades itself.  Tasty.  But you can also manually upgrade the weapons at handy kiosks.  Very tasty.  Probably the tastiest thing is the weaponry itself, which has a wide array of swivery.  The Groovitron, for example, is a grenade-like device that makes all enemies within range dance uncontrollably.  Genius.  The Plasma Beasts are gloopy creatures you fire at enemies, who go ‘RAWR’ and inflict severe damage.  In fact, there are too many to go through, and all of them deserve a mention, so I won’t bother.  Rest assured, however, that the guns are fantastic, and you’ll want to use them in every game you ever play.

Including Modern Warfare 2.

The Orange Box is a menagerie of shooters, but not only shooters, good shooters.  Half Life 2 (including Episodes 1 and 2), Portal and Team Fortress 2 are all present and accounted for, and all are just spiffing.  Half Life 2 is, of course, a PC classic, so revisiting this golden oldie for no other reason than to reminisce makes this worth the purchase.  Portal is a short, but very sweet, little shooter/puzzler in which you fire, oh yes, portals at walls and ceilings and floors in order to progress.  So you fire one at a wall in front of you, and one onto the back wall of a high platform you need to get to.  Walk into the portal and you walk straight out of the other.  Yay, science is fun.

There are buttons to hold down, firey balls of doom to re-route and robots with laser sights and automatic weaponry to avoid, and it certainly gets the cogs working.  The difficulty level is judged very well and, though you may get stuck a few times, the experience is certainly worth the minor frustrations.  Portal is an absolute diamond and needs to be played, if you haven’t already.  Worth buying the Orange Box for.

Team Fortress 2 is the online segment of the medley.  Seemingly inspired by old fashioned cartoons like the Looney Tunes, the art style is to die for and is truly beautiful.  The gameplay is exactly the same as HL2, only more online-ish.  Don’t expect lagless games, because there’s lag.  The game is strictly class based and pits two teams – red and blue – against each other in capture the intelligence briefcase and territory type games.  Needless to say it is lots of fun and quickly becomes addictive.  For those among you who enjoy getting sucked into online shooters, this is another one to get sucked into.  I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.  Worth purchasing the Orange Box for.

Well yes, I am fully aware that both of these games are old news, and that I am far behind the times, but I do not care, for I am happy.  And so are you.  I bet you are.  If you aren’t, then cheer up.

Miserable lot.