AteBit

Not actually a song.. but continues on my retro theme from the previous post.

Pepe Deluxé - Go Supersonic A retro-infomercial video. Just the song...

Lots of talk about Darksiders 2 at the studio I'm now working for. Looked into it, and it looks like fun.. so seeing as the stories will overlap in some ways, I decided it would be best to blast through the first game before it comes out. All I remembered of the news/hype for Darksiders was that it was heavily compared to Zelda, which is a good thing in my books. Combine that with the new gameplay trailers for Darksiders 2 and that's what I had going into this. Darksiders ended up being a pretty straight forward brawler with, as advertised, a familiar Zelda-like item-based exploration/progression structure. I was happily surprised at the amount of puzzle solving and lever switching there was. It definitely made up for the less than spectacular "arena" rooms where you get locked in and have to fight increasingly hard waves of mobs before being allowed to continue. Lots of back tracking, especially when you get a new toy like the hookshot err... abyssal chain or the void*portal gun*walker. One of the highlights was easily the horse. Though pretty limited in it's use, the mounted combat bits were some of my favourite parts. The ending was pretty good too. Makes me a bit angry about the second game. The whole reason for me playing the first one was because the second happens in parallel to the first, but after seeing the end of the first... I want to see the continuation of the first storyline. By far one of the best features in Darksiders was the quality voice acting. They didn't really have much of a story to tell, but what they had was executed flawlessly by the voice actors (Mark Hamill being one stand out). The most annoying part about Darksiders for me was that finishers are always the same. When you beat down an enemy to near death you get prompted to hit a button and finish them in some brutal way. Which is cool until you realize that each mob type only has one finisher animation... and you have to kill hundreds of these guys. Pair the lack of animation with the fact that the game slows down for a finisher... it gets frustratingly repetitive to watch. Plus the fact that they give different rewards for a finisher kill than a regular beat down kill. You are incentivised to watch the same finishers over and over (in slo-motion). You just have to roll with it. They didn't have time to make hundreds of elaborate death animations, I got over it eventually. If you haven't played the first Darksiders, and are interested in the second. I recommend you hack and slash your way through the first game. It was loads of fun. Total play time was about 23 hours. Could be less if you aren't as obsessive about finding every last hidden chest as I am. Looking forward to Darksiders 2. Just pre-ordered my copy on Steam.

Castlevania II: Simon's Quest Bloody Tears OG OC-Remix

Outwitters (iOS) by OneManLeft Turn-based Strategy. Free. http://onemanleft.com/games/outwitters/ This game has been a long time in the making, and it shows in the polish. It initially comes with the pirate-fish team, with the robotic, and cutesy teams as pay to unlock extras. The teams are all mirrors of each other with the super units as the only differentiators. The pirates have a like long range mortar shellfish super unit (think Siege Tank). The robots have a cyber brain who can permanently turn units to it's team (!!!), but leaves them with only 1 hit point. The cutesy team has a narwhal who teleport a friendly unit to neighbouring hex. They put a ton of effort into making a league/rank system a-la SC2 (which I have yet to delve into), and features 1v1 as well as 2v2 leagues. It's turn based so I haven't played enough of it to get a good feel for it, but I'm currently playing a few friendly (unranked) games vs random opponents, but wouldn't mind playing a few of you guys. My Game Center name is AteBitGeneral. Feel free to challenge, and humiliate me at your turn based leisure. If the game is fair enough, and it turns out I don't suck to much (or maybe just enough) I'd like to try some 2v2 league games. Expecting the wait times to be horrible in a 4 player turn-based game, but it's a small price to pay for team play.

Beat VVVVVV today. :tup: Thanks again to Elmuerte for the free Steam copy. Final stats... 20 Trinkets (w00t Secret Lab unlocked) Time 4:49:04 (mostly lots of dying trying to get that one trinket, you know the one) Flips 6033 Deaths 2343 Hardest Room 213 Deaths (damn that trinket). Initially the graphics, and lack of animation was a minor turn off, but the music was able to carry me past that. Once I got into it, there was just the next trinket, the next crew member, the graphics didn't matter anymore. I was surprised to find that it was a Metroidvania style game, seeing it usually paired with Super Meat Boy I assumed it would be level based. I liked it a lot, but I'm probably not going to play through the unlocked time trial, flip, and/or no death modes. Getting those last two trinkets was enough challenge for me thanks. Highlight of the game. Successfully navigating the 6 screen slalom of death only to forget to hang right on the last screen. I landed on the wrong side of the nub, and had to spend another half-hour trying to do it again. The funny part was that it took me about a minute to figure out that I had just botched it because I was to busy celebrating having survived it.

I agree, it has quite a bit of polish but not much depth to it. I was expecting more from this title. The ladder and ranking though it had issues at/around launch, is quite a good implementation.

As for sand generator operation... Please be aware that there is a delay between the pressing of the button and the starting/stoping of the generator. Press once to start it up (notice the delay it will be the same when shuting down). Press once to stop. Pressing multiple times won't break it, so don't panic! Count to 5 to make sure it isn't shutting down already before hitting it again. Pro Tip: The Wizzing Minecart. When you hit the button a piston retracts releasing the minecart which runs along two detector rails before being caught on the other side, the offset triggering of these detectors is the desired timing of the rapid piston pulsars. The more you know.

My feelings exactly. Your partner turned on you for protection. He didn't have any faith in your planned asault.

I wish that was possible. The super fast one I built is broken due to the piston speed change, but the gravity block duplication bug is still there. Slower duplicator designs still work. You don't go to the nether much? Also... I missed the MC livestream (is there a thread I'm not seeing about these weekend streams?). I looked it up after reading about it here. I would have totally dropped in on that had I known. It was fun watching you guys tour the server.

You might be waiting for a while. The current version (1.2.5) has been out for a long time, and many mod developers have suspended updating thier mods until the official mod API is released. If it's not out yet, that is probably the case for Technic. The mod API was bumped to 1.4 much to our collective chagrin... no idea when that will be out, but can't be soon since 1.3 hits August 1st.

More fun to watch him "play" it out in real time.

Finished episode 2, and I'm unsettled bordering on disturbed. So thank you, and fuck you. Looking forward to the next episode.

Mojang put up an unlisted gameplay video of Scrolls on their YouTube channel. http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=Tsaix5q3VEU

Another one you've probably seen before.

Just watched the first episode of HBO's The Newsroom. Opens strong with the university outburst/meltdown they showed in the trailers, slows down when they hit the newsroom, then kicks it into high gear when the breaks and they all scramble to piece together the story. The fact they went with real news instead of making up a proxy was surprising to me for some reason. Aside from that it was a lot of explaining who's who, throwing out of the old news team, introducing the new faces.. a necessary evil of a first episode, which they managed to get through well enough. It passed the first episode test, and will remain on my PVR's record list. EDIT :: What happened to the Blackout style spoilers.

Being able to make quick evaluations is key in the competitive scene. Player/Unit customization can be really annoying, even abused if not done well. Client side options to override customization features is a must. That reminds me of the old Quake days, we used console commands to turn off all the player customization. We used to force a red self illuminated hitbox-shaped skin on all opponents, combined with reducing wall textures to almost solid colours. Negated all the morons who had over-sized/under-sized skins to mess with our aiming (since the hitbox didn't change), super high poly skins made that would slow down slow computers (fuck you giant kiwi bird with individual feathers), or all black skins for shadow lurking campers. We don't have control like that anymore.

To compete, or spectate?

Sounds like a plan.

Funny animated short. An awesome throwback to 80s cartoon opening titles. The best part is that it has recently been optioned for series development. I hope, for their sake, it gets green lit. Space Stallions http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=5Otaq2tmNMM

It finally showed up today.

It's not the monsters you need to worry about, they are predictable. It's the other players you need to be worried about.

More for fans of Nobunaga's Ambition games and/or the Pokemon characters/brand, than for fans of Final Fantasy Tactics/Tactics Ogre. It's a cross over. In Japan is it straight up called 'Pokemon + Nobunaga's Ambition'. It was developed by Nobunaga team over at Koei, and published by Nintendo. Looking forward to Nintendo piggy-backing on other big handheld Japanese franchises... 'Pokemon + Monster Hunter' anyone?