After the horrific events of the previous chapter, Return to Barrow gives us all-new characters and a whole new terrifying event in Barrow. If you thought what happened wasn’t bad enough, there are crazy people still living there, even though it’s the main target for vampires. A new sheriff moves into town with his son. Due to the events of the past volume (where the original survivor writes a book exposing vampires), the vampires are now leaderless and want everyone in Barrow exterminated.
I honestly have to say I feel this chapter is a cop-out. Why do we have to return? Sure, I can understand that the vampires want to wipe everyone out, but why fully concentrate on this event again? It feels like a re-hash, and even though these people are better prepared, it was the frightening concept of everyone not knowing what was going on that made the first chapter so memorable. I like the new characters, and the tension is there along with the dialog among the vampires (these guys are vicious bastards).
If you’ve read previous chapters, go ahead and read this. There are actually decent fight scenes, a lot of tension, and a surprising amount of atmosphere oozing out of this series. I also have to appreciate the continuous flow that a lot of comics tend to forget to provide.
BloodRayne hasn’t received the attention or props it deserves. The video games were mediocre, but they contained great characters and a memorable story. Rayne is one of the most recognized and sexiest video game characters ever created. Why has there been no BloodRayne 3? Majesco has been having financial problems for as long as anyone can remember. A PSP game was canceled, and a 3DS game was as well. The last game, BloodRayne: Betrayal, was a 2D platformer but received low sales. To satisfy everyone’s bloodlust, Rayne Digital Webbing released 26 issues of BloodRayne, which ran for a good 3 years and ended in 2009. The series has a fantastic story and really shows Rayne’s weaknesses and strengths. However, the series falls flat in the art department.
With mostly one-shots, BloodRayne does surprisingly well for itself. Rayne is trying to uncover the truth behind the Brimstone Society, an ancient secret cult that set out to kill all vampires and mythical creatures that endangered mankind. There is deception, deceit, betrayal, and mistrust running through the whole series. Just when you think things are going one way, they greatly shift to another, and it keeps you reading and tearing through issues.
The three mini-series are great as well. Plague of Dreams is all about Rayne’s half-brother, who’s threatening the world. Red Blood Run is set in China, where a secret cult is harvesting young women and turning them into vampires. This is where the story makes the biggest twist and the climax starts. The final mini-series, Tokyo Rogue, has an interesting encore/sub-plot of the years after the events of the original Brimstone Society drama. It doesn’t directly tie into it, but there are elements that point to it. The writing is very good, despite Rayne’s battle taunts being a bit cheesy. I loved the characters and got attached to many of them.
The art was inconsistent throughout the entire series. Several issues looked downright ugly, including disproportionate anatomy, Rayne looking like a man in some issues, and her body shape constantly changing. Some issues looked brighter and more vivid, while others lacked any detail at all. This is a crying shame because Rayne is a gorgeous woman and deserves the best attention when drawing her. I liked the various outfits she was in, but the art just really threw the series off.
Other than the art issue, BloodRayne is a great series for fans and non-fans alike. If you have never played BloodRayne, I suggest you try it after reading these comics. I know I want to dive back in and sink my teeth into the first game.
It took quite a while for a DLC to come out for Skyrim, but here it is. Vampirism is where this one will take you, and while it is a fun ride, it is quite short and a bit lacking in content. You can choose to side with the vampires or Dawnguard, but the main storyline is the same. I found all the quests fun, with some beautiful new locales, but I really wish this DLC was more.
You start by hearing about a rumor of a castle off Solitude. Once you arrive, you are greeted by vampires, and the lord of them all asks if you want the gift or not. I, of course, chose to, and I am glad I did. The new vampire form has its own set of perks and skills. Using melee to attack or magic spells is fun, plus the bat teleportation spell is great to use. The vampire design in Dawnguard is fantastic and stays away from cliché looks. They look more like beasts than the typical Hollywood vampires. I chose to side with the vampires, so I can’t tell you how the Dawnguard quests went. The side quests are fun and vary greatly in what to do. The same goes for the main quests, but I have one major complaint about a particular main quest.
One quest has you trying to figure out how to get Auriel’s Bow from the Snow Elves, yes Snow elves, and this is one confusing quest. You have to pass through 5 different portals that take you to new areas, but the quest marker doesn’t point to them all like most quests. You really have to figure out where to go and this quest will take almost 2 hours to complete. It takes you through vast areas such as icy caverns, phosphorescent caves, and Falmer territory. Because these areas are so vast (probably more vast than any other interior area in Skyrim), you will get lost easily. I spent most of my time trying to figure out where to go because there were so many branching, confusing paths. Some people may like this, but at least make the quest marker point in the right direction.
The DLC is also extremely buggy, with quests that you can’t complete, items that won’t appear or drop, and many other things. I had to advance some quests using the command console because a bug prevented me from moving on. The story is a disappointment as well, because you feel like you’re just the middleman in some family dispute. Serena is a great companion, but the other characters are hard to like because you don’t visit them very often except to get quests. There weren’t any crazy plot twists or anything like that. I honestly felt like this was something that could have just been kept in the main game as a faction quest. For the high price point ($20), there isn’t much loot that you can walk away with and feel satisfied with. The biggest loot is Auriel’s Bow, which is useless for people who aren’t using archery. There are a couple new enemies thrown in, but overall, this DLC doesn’t feel like it is worth $20.
The most important thing is that it is more Skyrim, which is what people want. There are more quests that are fun and allow you to continue leveling up your character and looting. Skyrim may not ever have a Shivering Isles-type expansion, but let’s hope that the future DLC will be more enjoyable than Dawnguard.
If you loved Super Meat Boy, you should check this game out. Will you love it as much? Probably not. TBP is all about a little girl who picks up some mysterious cursed book that turns her into a demon in her dreams. The game has a Lovecraftian style but the same 8-bit graphics as Super Meat Boy. The game features twitch reflex platforming and combat.
The platforming is simple enough, with abilities to double jump and cling to walls, but the game requires mastering the controls to maneuver through nigh-impossible paths that require pixel-perfect timing. The combat is actually what brings this game down so much. The developers tried to make it too complicated. Hitting the attack button doesn’t really do much damage to enemies, which is stupid. You also don’t get a multiplier if you use a standard attack. They want you to be “creative” and use the dash attack, knock them into obstacles, and use the high kick. I know these kinds of moves don’t belong in this kind of game. The combat system is convoluted and requires too much thinking for a game that relies on instinct and muscle memory responses. After a platforming section, I start wailing on an enemy and realize I have to think about this combat system. It hurts my brain and really messes with the momentum of the otherwise solid platforming and controls.
There is a neat checkpoint system that allows you to put it wherever you want. If you get enough purple orbs, you can fill up your checkpoint meter and stay still for a while. This will place a checkpoint at that spot, allowing you to save them for complicated platforming sections. This alleviates the frustrating combat that leads to some cheap deaths. If you do well enough on a level, you can unlock special stages that are from the iOS version and user-created.
With all of this combined, They Bleed Pixels would be great if it weren’t for that combat system. You just can’t stop and think about fighting when you are on a good platforming run. The custom checkpoint system helps remove some of that frustration, but in the end, I just want to hit an enemy a few times and be done. Even having to do the complicated moves just to flip switches is pretty annoying. If you can look past this, you will enjoy this game, but most people will just stick with Super Meat Boy.
I remember when the first BloodRayne came out. I stared at the ad and drooled. I never knew vampires could be so sexy, and right there, she became one of my top 5 favorite female video game heroines ever made. Of course, being younger, I wasn’t allowed to play such games, so in the end, I never got the chance to play the first BloodRayne. When BloodRayne 2 came out, I had to play it, so I rented it for my PS2, and it was great—not amazing, but pretty solid—but now, well, time ages things.
BloodRayne 2 has you playing as the half-human, half-vampire Dhampir Rayne, who is trying to kill her father Kagan (who survived the first game) and kill all his children and demon spawns. Through this escapade, Rayne runs into his new minions, Kestrel, Ferril, and Ephemera (who hate each other). While they are almost as sexy as Rayne, their attitudes make up for it. BloodRayne 2 has pretty decent voice acting, and Rayne’s attitude is just something you have to love.
BR2 is very gruesome, with lots of dismemberment and gory death traps. There are two types of enemies in the game: unarmed weapons (that you can freely feed off of to get health) and armed enemies with melee weapons that will push you down if you try to feed. You just knock their weapons out of their hands before doing this. Yes, I realize there are only two enemy types, but this is why the game could have been better. The designs for them are neat, and they look cool, but seriously? You will run into sub-bosses an awful lot, and most of these are just elite henchmen or giant minotaurs. This is where one of my biggest gripes comes in, and that’s the fact that boss fights are all luck and no skill. It doesn’t help that the game is a button masher and there’s no skill involved whatsoever. You just hit X for blade attacks and B for kicks, and that’s it. The blocking never seems effective, and you are constantly relying on your powers.
Powers range from astral feeding, temporary invincibility, time freeze, and aura vision. These take up a lot of power, so you have to constantly kill them to keep your meter up. You can level up to extend this, but it never seems enough. You also have your Dragon Pistols, but you can’t level them up, and you only get very little ammo, which feeds off your health. You have to kill to keep your ammo up, but this thing never seems effective until you get different ammo types.
You also have a harpoon that you use to throw enemies into deadly death traps to unlock different parts of levels, but later on, enemies in Twisted Park can block this, and you have to use your time freeze or super speed to get behind them, but sometimes THAT doesn’t work. See what I mean? The game is so frustrating later on—so much, in fact, I had to use God Mode through the last 25% because they threw way too many larger enemies at you and not enough people to feed on. There are some acrobatics involved, such as sliding down rails, swinging, and climbing poles, but this is troublesome since the mechanics are so finicky and everything has to be aligned perfectly.
Don’t get me wrong, BR2 is worth a bargain bin purchase; you just have to look past its many flaws. When it comes to graphics, the game is decent at best. The characters look good, and so do the environments, but the pre-rendered scenes look cheap and crappy. There is also a lot of slowdown throughout the game when too much is going on on-screen. With button mashing, no skill involved in fighting, unbalanced everything throughout, and weak acrobatics, there is just something about this game that makes you want to keep playing, and it’s probably Rayne herself.
thebinarymessiah.com 
Yep! The fact that I forgot about this game until you made a comment proves that.