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I missed a shit load of stuff at PAXEAST this weekend, but Dead Space 2 footage is probably the thing I would have came hardest over in person. I dug the fuck out of the original. In fact, it’s in my top five for this generation, and up there all time. So when I saw this footage, I threw rope. Wicked hard.

[source : all games beta]

In the last few weeks, I’ve turned the Friday Brew Review into a child’s birthday party. The normal group of friends, at the behest of the hosting mother, have been accompanied by those random kids from the third grade class that no one usually talks to. There was the poor kid who makes goofy faces when he thinks nobody’s looking. There was that kid who always brags about how his uncle works for Nintendo and hooked him up with an Ultra 64. And then there was that sweet little girl who always kisses every boy in class. Whore.

Party’s over, motherfuckers. Time to get back to the mainstays of the posse, the crewmembers who’ve proven their worth time and again. This week, I’m sippin’ on a stout.

Island Creek Oyster Stout, to be exact.

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Microsoft announced that they’re going to add support for USB flashdrives! Hey, that’s fucking fantastic! No, not really. My PS3 allowed me to do that like nineteen years ago. How about you let us use fucking external drives.

Via Kotaku

Starting April 6 Xbox 360 owners will be able to use USB flash drives to store profiles, game saves, demos and “more”, Microsoft confirmed this morning.Posting on his blog, Xbox Live’s Larry Hryb said that the company has been testing the feature for a few weeks and that he thinks it’s is “great.” A system updating hitting April 6 will allow us all to see just how great it is. The update will support flash drives that are 1 GB to to 16 GB in size. While USB hard drives “may work”, he adds, you will still only be able to use 16 GB of the drives spaces.

Wait, so you can only use flash drives, or your external hard drives can only be utilized for 16gb of their space? I wonder why.

Hard drives for the 360 are the biggest fucking rip-off going. For $120, you can get a 250gb hard drive. They’re fucking our wallets with thorny cocks. I got a 350gb hard drive for my PS3 for seventy-five dollars. And I’m sure they’re way cheaper now.

How about you douchebags at Microsoft stop raping our wallets and allow us to use the full scope of any external hard drives we may have? ‘Cause I have a 1 TB external hard drive that I paid a hundred bucks for, and that makes a lot more sense to me than getting raped by your proprietary bullshit, okay? I love your system, I already bought the 120gb hard drive like a fucking asshole, I pay for XBOX Live!, c’mon, do me a solid.

I know it may sound insane, given all my proclivities for the profane, but I can’t jack the wang to video game characters. For all my proclamations about how god damn sexy Bayonetta’s ass is, or how hot Yeoman Chambers makes me, I can’t take the final step. I can’t go from “Man, she’s hot as fuck” to “I’m unzipping my fly and mashing it.”

It’s weird.

In the world of masturbation, I’ve pretty much run the gauntlet on fetishes. I’ve exhausted every one. I’ve tried everything, and left it behind in pornographic ennui a million-zillion gigabytes later. So I am definitely born to stroke it to oddities. Oh lord, sorry Mom. But yeah, I really am. The thing is though, I’ve never actually wanted to masturbate to a picture of a video game character. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I haven’t.

Sorry those of you who wank to Na’Vi porn, I can’t join your club. And I sort of want to.

I bring this up, because half of our hits at this den of debauchery come from people looking to rub their buttons or titillate their phallus to naked video game characters. Ever since I made the obvious observation that Vanille sounds like a Japanese porn actresses, that post has been crushing it as far as traffic. I mean, you’ve seen the search engine results. “Vanille Nude”, “I Wanna Bury My Face In Bayonetta’s Ass”.

Real people, typing these things.

I actually think it’s sort of cool that people get so geeked up over fictional characters. Maybe it’s because even though I don’t ejaculate to polygons, I am demented. I just picture someone sitting at their keyboard, so fucking horny, and all they want to see is a picture of Lightning from Final Fantasy XIII with the hilt of the Buster Sword up her butt. Or maybe Chris Redfield from Resident Evil making out with Leon Kennedy. I can’t help but be amazed by that sort of shit.

Not appalled. Amazed.

I’m not going to judge the people who are into it, whatever gets your rocks off. If I don’t want people to demean me because sometimes I like to queue up some bisexual lactating orgy, then I’m definitely not going to hate on them because their one desire before they go to bed is to orgasm to the notion of Batman batfucking Superman.

I just can’t imagine the jump though. I was talking Bags, the dude who does all the coding for the site. You can imagine since he’s allied with me he’s also a pervert and a degenerate. You’d be correct. And the two of us, even with our combined perversity, can’t imagine rocking our rocks out to Yuna.

There may have been one time when I was seventeen when I masturbated to a picture of Faye from Cowboy Bebop. I distinctly remember the possibility that it occurred. A decade later, I can’t recall if I had the intent to, or if I actually did. Whatever the case though, those days are gone, like leaves upon trees in winter.

Hats off to you who can, though. I admire your imagination, and ability to take your libido where even I can’t. You are in a rarefied state, and I don’t judge you, but only can praise.

[gag films youtube via all games beta]

This is utterly fucking ridiculous. I love it.

What The Rock wants to know is what fresh hell is this?!*

*I’m having way too much fun reliving my childhood through wrestling experiences on Youtube these days.

Pulphope, holding in his hand the first one hundred pages of Battling Boy. I’ve been waiting for this book for a couple of years now, so to see such a tease pop up on his Flickr got me all sorts of hot’n’bothered.

The general premise of Battling Boy: the son of some sort of god/superhero has to come down from the mythical mountain to beat monster butt. Fairly simple story, with art to make the jaw-drop. The artist has hinted that this is going to be an unrestrained opus, with fight scenes taking up fifty pages at times.

Mr. Pope, feel free to bind those pages and send them to me via FedEx.

[images & words is the comic book pick-of-the-week at OL. equal parts review and diatribe, the post highlights the most memorable/infuriating/entertaining book released that wednesday]

Spoilers Ahead. Forreal.

In a strange way, I had hoped that Nemesis wouldn’t end up getting the Images & Words spotlight. The reality is that I’m a Mark Millar fanboy and so is Caffeine Powered. On top of that, we’re particularly fond of the writer’s collaborations with Steve McNiven, such as Civil War and Old Man Logan. With these comic book Mega Powers reuniting, we’ve been ranting and raving for months about how sick Nemesis is lining up to be. Which, to be completely candid, calls our objectivity into question.

Hell, the OL wad might’ve already been shot — there’ve been two posts about the comic before I could even get my grubby, powdered-sugar dusted hands on it. With this much hype, picking Nemesis as the week’s top comic seemed like a foregone conclusion. And I didn’t want to know which comic released on Wednesday was best before reading them. I wanted to sit down with my stack of funnies and say, “Let’s see who wows me!”

In fact, I even said, “Maybe Nemesis won’t even be that good. Maybe Millar’s played out. Maybe the new Streets of Gotham is going to rise to the occasion. Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have acted a damn fool.

The first chapter of Nemesis is fucking awesome. As promised, Millar delivers an ultra-violent, wonderfully vulgar twist on the billionaire-superhero archetype. The reader gets to see what would happen if someone had all of the resources and ambition of Bruce Wayne, but not a single ounce of his altruism. Matt Anderson is the end product of replacing the philanthropic sentiments with sheer lunacy, and then stripping away every good intention so that they can be raped in the bathroom of an abandoned bowling alley. He is the Nemesis.

The titular character hunts for sport. But, as a maniac, he conducts his very own rendition of The Most Dangerous Game; he finds the best law enforcement officers in the world and then sends them a card that tells them exactly when they are going to be murdered. This game that Anderson plays is both incredibly cerebral and shockingly destructive. Not only does this predator toy with his prey, savoring the moments leading up to the killing stroke, but he makes sure to make a spectacle of the event as well.

In the opening sequence, Nemesis reminds a Japanese inspector of all the recent crimes he has failed to prevent. He then informs his target that the men coming to the rescue are on time, but two miles away — in a hotel that Nemesis has rigged with explosions. Then, in a grand twist, the inspector realizes that he is bound to a chair that is on a train track; not only is he killed by the oncoming transport, but the train derails as wreckage from the hotel bombing interferes with the train line. This is the undiluted, masterfully-executed plan of a homicidal genius.

Opposing Nemesis in this series is Blake Morrow, the thematic equivalent of Jim Gordon. The reader is introduced to the Washington D.C. Chief of Police as he shotgun blasts a bunch of crack-heads that have taken hostages in their attempt to hold up a convenience store. This dude is the archetypal old man bad ass, the aging dude who has paid his dues but still isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty. Take for instance, this exchange with younger officers;

Officer: What the Hell? How’d you even get in here, Chief?

Morrow: Well, crack-heads tend not to count their hostages, son. I just wandered in the back door wearing a baseball cap.

Sergeant Lee: You are something else, boss. I had your job, I wouldn’t come near this shit.

Morrow: Language, please, Sergeant Lee. We’re supposed to be an example here.

Of course, Morrow isn’t one to piss his pants when he gets the death-sentence card from Nemesis. Instead, he remains calm and decides to put together a plan to take on the world’s only supervillian. Which is even more impressive when the reader realizes that this is an impossible task — to prove his dominance, Nemesis hijacks and crashes Air Force One. He then televises his challenge to Morrow, informing the public that “It’s time you hailed your new fucking Chief” as the President of the United States kneels before him beaten and whimpering.

Thus far, the most intriguing aspect of Nemesis is that I’m not sure who I’m rooting for yet. I’m not even sure if the reader is supposed to favor one character over another, as Millar introduces Matt Anderson as Player One and Blake Morrow as Player Two. Perhaps this is all just a game to sit back and enjoy, not worrying ourselves with getting too invested in either side. In effect, both players can be lauded for their respective supremacy.

Yes, Matt Anderson is a fucking lunatic whose atrocities would never be praised in reality. But this is comics. And moreover, the character has a swagger about him, exuding a confidence and fuck you attitude that most of us wish we had a little more of. And to top it all off, Millar intimates that Anderson has some sort of troubled past, as the character declares,

“Washington shall suffer just like Tokyo before it, but my new campaign has a personal touch. Call it revenge for a stolen childhood. The black sheep of the Anderson family has returned to burn these idiots who believe that you protect them.”

Even if you end up hating Matt Anderson, I have a feeling that you are going to love to hate him.

I genuinely think I could read Millar’s script and be on the edge of my seat. Fortunately, I don’t have to, as the mighty Steve McNiven rocks that shit out of this book. The highlights include three splash pages, two of which I foresee becoming requisite posters for every comics shop. Seriously, within the first issue McNiven’s visuals help convince the reader that Matt Anderson is a bad, bad man.

The only other note pertaining to the art is that I perceive a slight difference between Nemesis and McNiven’s other work. In this book, some of the art seems to have more lines. It’s not as sketchy as Leinil Yu’s art (which I adore), but keeps a sincerity that is sometimes inked right over. The art speaks as though it is proud of itself, and not as a comic that desperately wishes it were a movie or television show. Again, I know very little about formal art, so take that for what it’s worth.

Nemesis #1 is a sick book. You should read it if you like any of the following:

Superheroes

Supervillians

Explosions

Die Hard

Swear Words

Sick Art

Guns

Old Dudes Who Beat Ass

Condemnations of Society

Crack-Heads Getting Shot

Ultra-Violence

Cool Shit