In the very near future, I will be leaving Destructoid and going to work at Gearbox Software as a full-time writer.

A few people have asked me how this will affect HAWP and my other side-stuff (Rev Rants, etc), so I’ll answer all of that stuff after the jump of this post.

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Boosh.

If you own Sleep is Death (which you should) and want to use the resources Ashley Davis and I made in your own stories, you can download them here. Just copy the resourceCache folder into SiD’s “importOldCache” folder, and you should be good to go.

Seriously, though, you should buy Sleep is Death. Even if you only tell (or are told) one or two stories with it, it’s still an incredible experience that you simply can’t get from any other game, or any other sort of collaborative storytelling.

I just completed the co-op campaign of Splinter Cell: Conviction, and damn. I thought Far Cry 2′s ending had shown me the true extent of UbiSoft Montreal’s world-weary nihilism, but I was dead wrong.

I won’t spoil exactly what happens, but I will say that if you want to experience the co-op campaign’s ending as intended, do not look up a full list of Conviction’s achievements.

Even though I wish there was an option to say “no” to the ending, to refuse to participate, the sheer cynicism of what you are forced to do is so refreshing that I kind of don’t care.  Mass Effect teaches us that everybody can get along and survive, so long as you’re charming enough. Final Fantasy (pick one) teaches us that friendship is eternal, and good triumphs over evil. Far Cry 2 and Splinter Cell Conviction’s co-op teach us that the world is a harsh, stupid place where brutal people do awful things for dumb and horrible reasons.

Regardless of whether or not you buy into that, it’s a philosophy that has every right to be explored and examined through interactivity as any of the ludicrously optimistic “muscle and determination will conquer all evil” stuff that makes up pretty much every third-person shooter I can think of.

I played a round of Sleep is Death with the game’s creator, Jason Rohrer. I wrote up my thoughts, here.

I link you to them here for two reasons: firstly, because Jason’s game deserves as much press as it can get, and secondly, because I’m going to write a second preview where I talk about my experience of telling a SiD story to Ash.

You can visit the official Sleep is Death site here.

Fucking nice.

That’s not a dig at the game’s difficulty level, or anything; on the whole, BioShock 2 is an unquestionably more difficult experience than its predecessor. Gameplay-wise, it’s also a much more enjoyable one. I just happened to meticulously plan out every little fight and carry around a shitload of health packs to the point where, at the game’s finale, I realized I’d never actually seen the inside of a Vita-Chamber. And that was awesome.

More after the jump.

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I recently wrote/shot a few editorials about Mass Effect 2 for Destructoid. I took a pretty fatalistic stance on the ending, and the fact that the entire game was one hundred percent winnable if you cared about your team enough. Rather than being able to simply get everyone out alive by choosing your team correctly and getting everyone loyal, I argued, it would have been less dramatically self-defeating if people had to die — if you had to make choices that, directly or indirectly, resulted in the deaths of NPCs whom you loved.

It wasn’t until I rewatched this great video that I fully understood why I felt that way. (Vague spoilers for Fable 2, Mass Effect 2, and Dragon Age.)

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I’m going to be on a panel at GDC. I’ll be talking — as I tend to — about Far Cry 2. If you’ve beaten the PC version of the game and still have your save files lying around, I could really use your help.

ENORMOUS SPOILERS FOR FAR CRY 2 AFTER THE JUMP.

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Just because you can make a game harder, doesn’t mean you should.

The very first major fight of Bayonetta – not the introductory one in the graveyard, but the one featured in the demos — is incredible. You simultaneously fight many enemies of varying size, strength, and attack speed. As a good deal of these enemies don’t have very much HP, the battle has an immensely satisfying rhythm to it: you use area attacks or brutal directed assaults to kill one or two guys, quickly dodge an attack from a larger guy (hopefully activating witch time), and eventually work your way up to the most powerful dude in the room.

The moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying not just because of the ridiculous attack animations, but thanks to the fact that you’re given the opportunity to lace together brilliant and brutal combos with some degree of relative ease. The demo fight is easy, yes, but it’s also flashy and well-paced and smooth. At one point, I chained together three kills in ten seconds, the last of which was a torture kill. Magnificent.

A few hours later, however, things get less awesome.

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