I AM... ACTING!

So sorry about that folks. I had a whole lot of malfunctioning equipment. But now my laptop's back, my 360 is brand new, and I am 20 years old.

Yes, you heard that last part right. My birthday is today!

Being 20 is weird though. It's like... I feel like a teenager, but I know I'm not. It creates some absurdly conflicting emotions that can only be remedied by watching bad movies.

But anyways, I promised you guys some reviews and GOD DAMNIT I WILL DELIVER.

First, we have a single demo.

Bayonetta - First Climax: I've been more or less following this game since its announcement. I haven't played a lot of games like it, my only real experience being Devil May Cry 4. I enjoyed that game, and I gotta say, Bayonetta was a really fun play. There are a lot of elements that I'm gonna need to play the full game to understand, but the gameplay was at least fun.

Did I mention the titular heroine has guns attached to her boots in place of high heels?

Now, for the biggie. Left 4 Dead 2.

The first Left 4 Dead really was a fun game. You + 3 friends running and gunning through hoardes of zombies with the occasional Boomer, Smoker, Hunter, Tank, or Witch breaking things up and causing everyone to go CaRaAaAaAaAaZy! The characters were charming and gameplay was fun.

Left 4 Dead 2 improves this TENFOLD. With the same tried-and-true gameplay and characters just as charming, it not only improves the formula but brings plenty of new to the table.

Let's begin with the new boss infected. You've got the Jockey, who latches on to a player's back and steers them around (possibly into another hazard), the Spitter, who spits a toxic acid that will break the team up, and the Charger, who plows through groups of tightly-packed players and picks them up, slamming them into the ground. There are also some "Uncommon" common infected: the Hazmat CEDA zombies who are resistant to fire, the clown zombies whose squeaky shoes alert other zombies, the mudmen zombies whose attacks obscure your vision, the construction zombies who... um... glow in the dark, and the SWAT zombies who are invulnerable to gunfire from the front.

The narrative of the game is improved too. The first game left a lot to the player's imagination in terms of what the shit went down in the city and surrounding area and also leaves the happenings between campaigns to the player's imaginations for the most part (Crash Course excluded, as it came out as DLC much later). In 2, each campaign leads into the next, sometimes with similar props and characters from the ending of the previous campaign or with a simple line that explains what happened.

The characters introduced include Ellis, a young mechanic, Coach, who is a... well, you can probably guess, Rochelle, a TV producer who travelled south to cover the initial outbreak, and Nick, a con man and professional asshole. We've also got some secondary characters, like the gun shop owner (who sends you on a FETCH QUEST of all things!), the ferryman, who picks you up at the end of the third campaign (you refill his boat's gas tank in the fourth campaign and he drops you off at the beginning of the fifth), and Keith, Ellis's friend who Ellis keeps telling stories about and who I really hope made it out of the infection alive because he sounds like such a cool guy. Maybe we'll find out at some point.

All you need to know about the weapons is that there are more of them and you'll never use the pistol because it's so satisfying to bash in zombies' heads.

So, yeah. Totally get this game. It gets the ~SANE-INTOLERANT stamp of approval!

Also: the next game review will, in all likelihood, be of Silent Hill: Homecoming. Stay tuned!