Metacritic: The people have their say

If you're anything like me when it comes to choosing on which games to spend your hard and bitterly-earned cash, the first place you'll head to is Metacritic.com for the lowdown. Why wait for demos that never come, or for your friends to cough up their own feeble critiques? Why bother placing any faith in your favourite gaming publication when you can get right to the heart of the matter with a quick glance at a reliably jumbled metascore?

Since I've missed out on reviewing anything for the past year and a half, I'm certainly not going to bother backtracking in the traditional sense in order to slap arbitrary numbers on every single blockbuster release that has passed me by. Instead, I'll take the easy way out and source everyone's favourite rating site for the goods. I'll even go one step further - since this is a site dedicated to words, not numbers - and provide the finest mash-up of bipolar user reviews for your prejudging pleasure.

In no particular order:-

Crysis 2

"Pheonomenal! Looks terrible, bored of it within 4 hours of an incredible great experience. A disappointing effort from one of the most finely polished, well-designed, and fun-to-play Crysis games. However the story is very weak. Less so than the usual run-n-gun and it takes a few times to get past the graphics.

Crysis2: An utterly disappointing sequel with a bad case of greatness. DO NOT BUY."

Mafia 2

"The game's plot is basically a mixture of the Godfather and long winded driving sections. This is supposed to be entertainment, and the strength of this game comes from its laggggg laggg freeze screen crash. The best game i have ever played hands down, great storyline, cheesy story line. How worse could it get?

Mafia 2 is good as movie, but as game it's BETTER THAN GTA! Poor Game Play, Worst Story, No Replay Value, Far Too Short. This is a great game!"

Dragon Age II

"After reading all the negative user reviews, I assumed people were dragons and dragons make me happy when i play my games. All the kissing is a significant improvement over Origins. I mean honestly, I enjoyed it more because its main character on the poster looks like Gordon Freeman. I feel cheated out of my silent awkward animations while talking. Females (even parents) are ridiculously sexed up in order to serve EA and Bioware.

Simply the best RPG but it is no Dragon Age. IF it was called something else it might be a good game."

Mass Effect 2

"Practically perfect. You press some buttons and that's because this game is EPIC. Can't stop thinking about playing it when I'm pulling you in as commander Shepard. Simply the best depth to be experienced even after hours of clunky repetitive movements. You'll yawn, and you might even cry. It gives me pretty much everything I could want but it's terribly overrated."

Well, I think you'll agree that the merging of these insane minds is pretty bloody decisive. Based on the above, I can categorically report that the 2010/2011 period of virtual fun has been the best-worst yet! What an unsustainable amount of digital frolicking! What a fantastically, brilliantly shitty bunch of wonderful games!

If you must have a number, I shall award all of the above -100% for effort, enjoyment and pure entertainment in equal measures of despair and flatulence. You have my word on that.

Botched cryonics: The Dead Pixel lives!

The plan was, of course, that this blog would reactivate several hundred years into the reign of the third order of Tra'al at which point those misanthropic bastards would have completed approximately 90% of their planned decimation of the human race. The Dead Pixel would knock the shit out of the Tra'al, no problem, and go on to claim the entire planet for itself.

Obviously something went awry. The whole project thawed. And here we are.

As it stands, Earth is still in very much the same lacklustre state as it was 21 months ago when the last post of this fine publication was fired forth from the cannon of despair into the face of who-the-fuck-reads-this-thing-anyway. The penny dropped, the trickle of strained gaming commentary subsided and my experiments to find out whether or not I was much more lazy than I had ever previously conceived were at an end. I tested positive. Laziness killed the blog like a slow rot when I had always hoped it would expire in much the same way that Sharon Stone did in Total Recall; I wanted action, a prolonged fight scene, a bullet to the brain and a postmortem quip. I received none of these.

But I digress. As always. I was intending to keep this swift.

In short, the blog is back in action on the condition that there are no conditions. I'm opening it up to cover all aspects of life in the hope that having my fingers in multiple pies will prove far more successful (and considerably more tasty) than gently prodding some stale tart with one malodorous digit. The gaming coverage will continue but remain limited only to those things I give enough of a shit about to put mind to matter. There will also be fiction. And facts.

Has it really been 21 months? Has it? Really? Has it? Yes. Quite.