It’s true enough; we do have Vita software, but no Vita hardware, which is alternately worse and better. If I were creating a social media site about this phenomenon, I would call it “tantalizr.” I would register it, but the device comes out next week. There isn’t really enough time to do the IPO.

I wonder what sort of stimulation this “cartridge” might generate if I pressed the contacts to my tongue.

The Multiplayer portion of the Mass Effect 3 demo told me it was locked until the seventeenth, but then I tried to go in there anyway because I am an iconoclast. It worked, because apparently redeeming an Online Pass for Battlefield 3 is all you have to do, and I did that, and millions of other people have as well. This thing is no bullshit, and I was up way too late playing it.

The Single Player portion of the demo is just stuff I’m gonna have to play all over again, so I wish I hadn’t. The second bit has super interesting shit about Krogan society, which I thought was worth checking out, but still: you could restrict yourself to the multiplayer and still have gotten an excellent demo. The game comes out March 6th, so I mean… You could conceivably hold out. No? That’s fine, me neither.

Ths multiplayer, though. Holy shit. “Horde Mode” is an insulting characterization. The characters you create in this mode accrue experience and invest in skills just like a single player character would, except here you’re earning money that you use to buy what are essentially CCG style Booster Packs of varying quality. These packs contain single use items to help you through tough rounds, weapons and weapon upgrades, along with alien races to play as. It has many, many barbed compulsion mechanisms affixed to tentacles which dance and sway.

Traps for the reptile mind can only get you so far, though, and what surprised me the most about it is how well it comports itself as a shooter. It’s not just a weathered sidearm resting on an ornate doily. It’s very “heavy” in my own estimation, methodical, a more nimble version of Resident Evil that retains that series’ omnipresent gravity. It had dodges, and cover, but when you traverse an area the sense that you are committed to it is impressed upon you. I didn’t entirely know what to think when they announced this portion; the rumors I’d heard were that it was intended as a stand-alone product at some point. I tried to imagine what universe such a thing would be desirable in. This universe, actually; it is desirable in this universe, as soon as is humanly possible.

(CW)TB out.

we’ll be singing