Frenetic Pony

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=jpm7L-oPLrY So, an actual gameplay demo of Killzone: Shadowfall. It... it looks good. On pure technical terms it looks better than any previous shooter on a console. It's art direction is, well it's there at least. Some nice and bright and sunny areas and clean high tech shit and what have you. It just looks totally uninspired in terms of gameplay. "Triple A shooter Model 2013". Every time any "feature" is shown off, it doesn't seem really terribly fun or inventive or like it would even change the gameplay almost at all. The alarms, the climbing, ziplining to stab dudes in the face. It just looks like it was designed around a series of checkboxes based on other games ideas, "oh yeah, gotta have that!" All the more reason not to buy a PS4 at launch, not that I'm going to buy an Xbone at launch either.

See this is the problem, right here. "It has to be totally different, yet exactly the same." I've played on plenty of 32+ player servers, still a lot of fun. If you just keep thinking that way, there really won't ever be a sequel. But if you keep thinking that way, what's wrong with just playing the game you already have, if that's what you want?

I have a ton of ideas, since designing games in my head is a thing I do. Character movement could be more human like, being able to clamber up walls appropriately high walls and crates and etc. Having the physics objects specifically play into the game, doors that can be opened and closed and even locked, filing cabinets shoved in the way as barricade could be more effective and far less frustrating. Even things like cars in a car park, being able to open doors for cover in an emergency, or even putting a car into neutral and shoving it as mobile cover. Weapons ballistics could be a hell of a lot more realistic, with bullet drop and etc. Destructible environments and bullet penetration at all places appropriate, along with ricochets, would give a lot more thought to weapon selection and a lot more punch to machine guns. Teamwork could be encouraged in CS maps with things like hostages being worth a lot more money for the CT's when brought back, and even deducting money from the T's even if they win for being brought back. Speaking of which, with technical limitations of 1999 out of the way maps could be bigger, support more variation, and more players. A farmhouse complex surrounded by a big field, and then a forest as an example. No cover from bullets but from sight while sneaking through the wheat would be interesting, just as an example. New play modes, better sound design could have gunfire echoing down the right corridors appropriately, telling you where action is. With modern lighting good night maps could actually be a thing. What if there was a mode where you could respawn somehow? A kill the VIP mode, where the CT's have to extract a VIP through a map? That was a really cool mod for Half Life who's name I can't remember. There's a lot that could be done, but I guess people at Valve are interested in other things. As "Concerned" put it, probably frequent raves. Unfortunately Google has failed me in finding the specific comic, but you should really just read the entire thing: http://www.screencuisine.net/hlcomic/index.php?date=2005-05-01

I just find it way too samey and that not a lot of people play it. I wanted Counterstrike 2. And considering what Valve usually does, Counterstrike 2 is what would have been produced. It's probably the most uninteresting, unexciting release Valve has ever done. Even Day of Defeat Source was more interesting, and that was essentially free for a lot of people.

This is why I lost all interest in "The Forest" the second the monsters popped out. Horror isn't my thing. I was super excited for a good looking foresty survival game and then "BAM!" survival horror. Well at least there is "Sir, You are Being Hunted" coming out soon. Also "Everyone's Gone to the Rapture" which is apparently delayed till next year to make the game even bigger, though I don't know how much "survival" they were planning on, if any, versus pure exploration.

Picked up CS Go, for no apparent reason, I don't know why. I know it wasn't made by "Valve" but it's still their first real failure. When does Brave New World go on sale? That's all I really want to be honest. Being able to play an interesting late game Civ sounds like a revelation for the series, but at the moment I can't bring myself to $30 for it. By the way, if you haven't played L.A. Noire you should pick it up for $5. It was a really fun concept that was executed just well enough for some solid enjoyment and to make you wish someone else would pick it up and really nail it.

I've never expected more out of Del Toro, in fact I expect less, Pan's Labyrinth seems a nigh fluke considering much of his other films. Still, glad to see it's exactly what I was hoping for. Independence Day except in giant anime robot form, though perhaps not with Jeff Goldblum and Bill Paxton. Also, I saw Videodrome tonight. Man, Cronenberg definitely gets weird right. It was fun watching James Woods freak out though, and the FX work was mostly fantastic for the 80's.

I mostly agree, though what that "non critical" path is can vary a lot so far as I care. I never did bother with the TV or stand up clubs or whatever in IV because they were boring. Other open world, or open worldish, games had much much more fun activities than that stuff from. But the main thing I question is, why have a critical path at all in some games? What if you just got rid of it in an Elderscrolls game? You aren't the whatever, you're just a dude that can go about his business. I know a lot of people might say "but some people love that stuff and that's all they do!" But it's all they do because they lack the imagination to try other things. I can't count the number of people that thought Fable 1 was better than 2, but never bothered learning you could dress up like a pirate, or be a rich land baron, or get into a drunken threesome in 2. But I also suppose you can't force people to explore and have an imagination if they don't want to.

Nah, my sister wants to BUY games after watching Let's Plays, pretty sure most people do. Nintendo's leadership hasn't much of brain left between the whole lot of them, they don't care about third party support, don't care about indie developers, still don't care much about online play, never cared that their great new controller was just a worse tablet, something more people the in the world already had than will ever have a Wii-U if it was the best selling console in history. I've not much optimism for the survival of Nintendo. If the rumors of yet more competition in gaming hardware from both Apple and Google play out over the next year I wouldn't be surprised if Nintendo... I honestly wonder if they wouldn't fold altogether. Their investors are just as clueless as their execs, a recent meeting had concerns raised over, not the dismal Wii-U prospects, but the quality of their cafeteria. They'd better get their shit together, I want that new Zelda damn it!

Jesus fucking Christ. the H is for "fucking" That's about all I can say concerning that trailer.

Well that was a letdown. Not Despicable Me 2. That had minions. And reminds me of the time the guy from the original husband/wife time behind illumination entertainment or whatever it is went online and ranted about how his wife was a bitch and tried to take everything just as Despicable Me was opening and... I wonder whatever happened to that? Regardless the Despicable Me 2 had minions, which were hilarious, and incidentally another Backstreet Boys joke, which is the second time that was funny after This is the End in as many weeks. No, what was disappointing was Wrath of the Titans. I mean, if you pitch it to a Hollywood exec it goes: Ok, you've got Greek mythology right? A setting that has endured for thousands of years with tons of great stories and characters and wars and beautiful women and everything! Oh, and for the climax of the movie, you've got Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes as Zeus and Hades battling the Titan Kronos as a fucking five hundred foot tall lava giant! How awesome is that? And you greenlight it, and give it a huge budget and all the special effects in the world, and you turn up to watch the completed movie a year later and... And, ironically considering ancient Greece was one of the only cultures in history to have its stories celebrate cleverness and ingenuity regularly, you watch a movie that makes a Michael Bay transformers flick look brainy. There's no story, there's no regard for setting, there's no... anything. I'm surprised they bothered to name the characters, for all that happened. "Oh look, it's the McGuffin of whatever, everyone in the universe now knows its name instantly! Also there's an old man being dragged into a war camp from nowhere. Obviously that's Zeus himself in the flesh, everyone knows that! Oh, you wanted people to have a vocabulary similar to one that might be used circa several hundred BC eh? Well too bad because your main character is going to talk like someone from 2011-12 when this was filmed. And your characters have to face an impassable labyrinth? Oh well, after ten minutes of action scenes the director must have gotten bored because they're out now having done nothing but stumble around for a bit." The entire movie is like this. Now at least the action scenes, which is literally 70% of the entire runtime, are good right? Well there were... 2 good ones. Constituting about 15% of the movie. And then the end... how do you mess up making a battle against a five hundred foot lava giant? How do you not make that cool? And yet there are twelve year olds out there that could have made the big finale cooler than what I saw. Kronos spews a few fireballs against people we don't care about that are usually over a hundred feet away from the camera itself so we can't even see them die, then wrecks a city we never knew existed until that moment in about ten seconds from an aerial point of view so high we don't even know if anyone even lives there, and then is promptly defeated and explodes with the camera being placed like a mile away because we wouldn't want to actually get too close to the action, you know? The movie was over before I knew it, thankfully for that. I amused myself by imagining how I would have filmed it instead. Thankfully there's no time wasted on plot or characters or just about anything, the only thing the movie seemed to be in a rush towards was to end itself. Oddly enough it's not the worst movie I've ever seen, not by far. It's just stupid and boring, which almost makes it a greater crime than something like Avatar: The Last Airbender, which can at least live on in infamy.

I ask of ye a boon that is double: First, a place to find ye old timey internet radio streams and a good piece o software or even a website on which to listen to such. Used to use Itunes for this, but really, fuck Itunes. Second, a music recommendation site. Me tastes in yonder art of the heavens and airwaves known as music are both eclectic and yet highly selective, and any such music recommendation I've tried such as tuneglue and pandora has turned up what may be called a steaming pile of bullshit. I have however found that Goodreads.com seems to actually work well enough for finding novels I might enjoy, and so have hope a similar site may recommend music with as much veracity. And so far, by the way, Youtube has actually been the absolute best music recommendation site I've hit upon.

You know, I was a huge, huge, huuuuuge fan of Smash Bros. Hundreds, no, over a thousand at least hours logged onto the first and Melee. I bought Brawl, kind of enjoyed it, but it was also something of a letdown compared to the snapiness of Melee. I think logged maybe, maybe a hundred hours at most on it. Probably less. And I'm not feeling this one so far either. Of course I've yet to play it. But I've become the jaded cynical bastard that thinks, just because it looks like smash bros, and just because it's called smash bros, doesn't mean it's going to feel as good as Melee or the first. And I'm already bothered by how it looks. The colors feel under saturated and the visuals disappoint, I know it's a Nintendo system but the previous entries have always managed to pull out some visually incomparable games for the systems they were on. Of course the 3DS version looks great, so I don't know what's going on there. But, it's more than just that even. The big super move item is back (final smash). Didn't like that in Brawl at all, really the opposite of what Smash Bros is about, but at least you can turn off items. But where's Sonic? That I did enjoy from Brawl, and where's Tails? And Wii Fit trainer? I know, wacky. We've had Rob and Mr. Game and Watch. But neither of those characters were actually enjoyable to play beyond their amusement factor. And the one thing I really missed from Melee was the huge variety in stages. Where's stages like Big Blue, and Pokefloats, and etc? Crazy, weird, fun stuff. I'd much rather have crazy, weird, fun stages than characters there solely to be odd. I'm far from convinced yet

God's, you can just stun lock everything to death less than halfway through the game. I quit after I broke the combat system. But I still enjoyed it immensely. I'm terribly sad they were tied to that nightmare of mismanagement disaster of 38 Studios or whatever it was. I'd have pre-ordered any Kingdom's of Amalur sequel pretty much instantly. Regardless, I just beat Journey. It's one of the reasons I bought a PS3 to begin with, and somehow never bought this game yesterday. So... best game I've played this year. Falling off a bridge back to the beginning of an entire section in the snow, and having the random stranger purposefully fall off at the same point just to make it back up and to the end with me at the same time was simply amazing. Not to mention the game looks amazing, and is just amazing in general.

I watched Network. ... Wow. This does not just have the best speech in all of movie history by far. It has the best THREE speeches in all of movie history by far. One two three. It's one of the smartest movies I've ever seen. Right up there with Primer. It takes all the Hollywood lowest common denominator stuff and doesn't give a shit. In fact that's what it's attacking often enough. Straight into my top ten movies of all time, and considering I've counted over 300 movies watched in my life that's pretty high.

You know, I have this fucking game because it was gifted to me and I've yet to play it. I should, I know I should. But I've got Lego Lord of the Ring's to play through on co-op. And I want to replay The Witcher 2 with the new combat mod because I never finished my first playthrough for whatever reason, and Shadow Run Returns comes out in a few weeks, and I've yet to buy The Last of Us, which I know I'm going to buy. Someone convince me I should install and play this. I don't need much convincing but, you know, just like "it's awesome" would push me over the edge.

Gunpoint I appreciated some of the humorous dialogue, and how easy and slick the controls were. But for the most part it felt like an inanely easy puzzle game with only one real trick per level and no atmosphere or anything else going for it. I got through it, playing about one mission at a time. Then I'd go to the next, ask myself "ok, what's the one single trick on this level?" Realize I'd stopped caring, and save the rest for another day. Overall Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep I've got the Borderlands 2 Season 1 pass, so... there we are. And... I think I'm just sick of Borderlands 2 at this point. I'm sick of the brown, dark, environments. I'm sick of the art direction. I'm sick of the combat mechanics. The writing continues to be amusingly funny, and in this DLC you're stuck playing as characters in a D&D like campaign. Which made the occasions when you get to here Tiny Tina be a DM with the original vault hunters playing quite funny. And Torgue is back! That guy is just hilarious. He gives you a quest to blow up the ocean, yep, just blow up the damned ocean, because. But unless you're really, really, REALLY into Borderlands 2 there isn't much here to recommend it beyond the humor. Beyond the writing it just feels like yet more Borderlands 2 with a few new models and textures slapped here and there.

Why's it so hot? Dear Thor it's even hot indoors in an air conditioned building. We're all going to die of methane and carbon dioxide. Quick! Everyone quit breathing, no more exhaling CO2, that'll solve the problem!

Woot! Partial photonics seems like it could work for destructive interference in "single photon" systems pretty much perfectly. I've eventually go to do the math for these so called "probability waves" but it's either that or ftl collapse so far as my initial impressions go. Possibly moving in a direction that would prove Einstein wrong feels like gearing up to defeat the final boss in physics Or maybe it won't work. That's always the problem. That and it'll be years before I prove it one way or another and there are already people with similar ideas, so I might be beaten to the punch. Ohwell! Instead of worrying about it I'll just watch "Enemy at the Gates" for no apparent reason.

Now I'm starting to suspect my brother is a bot too, Starfox Adventures is his favorite game of all time and he's beaten about 8 times now. How do I tell guys, is there a test?

Why can't everyone Trength things up? I assume it involves injecting a mix of caffeine and ketamine directly into sleeping devs. I don't know why this would be and have no basis whatsoever for my guess, but it's still what I'm going with.

Yes.

It's a huge Hollywood blockbuster rated PG 13, I refuse to believe that anyone that didn't guess the ending is worthy of a spoiler tag!

I've seen this argument everywhere, and understood it mostly as utter paranoia. "They're gonna take our games away!" And invite their entire business to crash as people abandon the platform immediately and en masse to avoid such things. And yet, now that I think about it, there is indeed precedent. If you bought Too Human, could that court order wipe out your purchased copy digitally? Amazon has certainly been guilty of deleting peoples books off their own Kindles. I guess it does come down to the amount of trust you place in the system. And while most every single one of the doomsday scenarios seems utterly paranoid, I guess I can say that from the perspective of me gaming on a PC. Any game I have is always "backed up" by pirates. I've happily downloaded Baldur's Gate 2 off TPB when I lost one of my BG2 cds. But of course, that's a great example of how your "physical" media can be no safer or more secure than, or even less, than a digital copy. If you break or lose your disc you are completely SOL; which is something you don't have to worry about with a digitally purchased game.

The good guys win! Seriously, that's the spoiler. Beyond the opening there's no particular story to speak of. But, hey if people want that I put a thing in there. Also, it's hard to imagine how utterly shite Foresters original cut must have been to have this be the result of 8 weeks of re-shoots. For those that don't know, World War Z was supposed to have been released a while ago; and as another note it almost utterly impossible to get shut out or "fired" in Hollywood. Like, you can walk down the street naked and doing cocaine and no one bats a fucking eye. Hell Hollywood gave Shamylan another job after the Airbender movie (a top 10 worst movies of all time kind of flick). But never the less Marc Forester, the guy that made possibly the worst Bond movie ever in Quantum of Solace, was given World War Z. And then after the entire movie was shot, was basically fired, or rather removed from all editorial control and replaced as director, for an entire 8 weeks of reshoots, almost enough to do an entire other blockbuster movie. I'm supposing the opening and any actual semblance of a plot came from those reshoots, and considering the opening was breathtaking rather wished that guy had done all the movie to begin with.