Frenetic Pony

MAYBE? There's a definitive chance they could "help". As in, if she wants to move to America. Otherwise... they aren't going to do anything to even poke the middle east with a fifty foot stick.

I feel WEIRDLY GREAT! Didn't get any sleep for three days straight, went home, stayed in bed for eighteen hours, been 24+ hours since I've eaten anything. Jogged two miles in sixteen minutes, almost passed out, and am now eating stuff. It's weird but if you're really hungry you can feel really REALLY good. At least I can. Did that all the time when I lived in Arcata. A weird, tiny town in northern northern california that's filled with crumbling houses, hippies, potheads, and the homeless. I ended up being underweight after living for four months there, mostly because I walked everywhere. Usually around 10 miles a day. It was bizarre and a little depressing, yet easy to enjoy in hindsight. There's enough there to write part of a movie, something I'll do if I ever get me first screenplay sold. It's been three months and not even the agencies have emailed me back!

I'm not sure this is any "Indy" studio. He's talking about already having a team, using Cryengine 3 for a quasi MMO. That's definitely not "Indie" in the traditional sense. I take this as a way to prove that there's interest for something investors and big wigs had written off a while ago. A chance to use crowdfunding to prove out the idea for investment. It's definitely ambitious and a new strategy, which I like automatically. Why should kickstarter be "indie" only? It all sounds great to me.

Playing the last mission, and yeah I'd agree with Scoops et. al. (latest podcast, people on here, etc.) You know what? The stealth in this game kinda sucks. IT SUUUUUUUUUUUCKS! I tried uber sneaky totally non violent for so long. And then I just said, screw it, I'm going as fast as I can with everything I have. And it's better without a doubt! The very fact that they even put the "non violent play through" in at all basically ruined parts of the game for me, as if they designed the game to be fun that way when they didn't. Now, at the very end of the game I've finally switched to "just screw it" and am blinking around like a mad man, sleeping everyone and everything with possession and sleep darts and choking them out, and the game is definitively, tangibly better. I can only imagine I'd have enjoyed parts I didn't like before by just doing this. Do not, DO NOT be tricked into playing this game like a ghost. It's not designed for it.

And what about the tongue? Have we no consideration of it's role in the world of experiences via the mouth and eventual transition into the digestive system at all???

So I'm pretty sure I'm at about the end of this game. It was both pretty fun and a mixed bag at the same time. I enjoyed it for being an open-ish game with multiple ways to complete objectives. There's plenty of ways to sneak around and paths to go on, but it bothered me that a lot of the level design felt so "game"ified. You want a path specifically to sneak around this obstacle? Here's a convenient series of pipes and ledges to do exactly that! Rather than trying to figure something out because it wasn't obvious, like I've had to do in say Assassin's Creed, the "alternate paths" are usually clearly broadcasted as such; removing some of the fun of discovering them for yourself. I also enjoyed the constantly changing gameplay. There was always some new scenario, new mechanic, new enemy, new power to get or etc. throughout the entire game. I never really felt like I was just repeating the exact same thing over and over again, at least not for too long. Certainly this and the detailed nature of these environments were fun. An amalgamation of fun I've had before. A mix of thing like Dark Messiah, Deus Ex, Thief, Hitman, and etc. But an almagamation of so much that I never thought I had really done any of the things I was doing specifically before. It's just too bad a lot of my enjoyment had caveats. Putting up with the story was one of them. And by putting up with it I mean exactly that. I'm usually one to pay attention to the story, to read the scattered bits of extra lore in the form of notes from characters and etc. But here I just ignored the story whenever I could, and wished it would hurry up when it was taking too long. The characters are empty, the setting an incoherent mishmash, the presentation spotty. I didn't care for it. I also didn't enjoy the difficulty curve, or lack thereof. The beginning of the game, as I was learning about all the basic mechanics, was fine and I was enjoying myself. About halfway through the game, on "hard", playing non violently and with no alarms I managed to complete an entire level be teleporting (blink) through the entire thing in a matter of minutes. I wasn't having the fun, once I'd learned the basic mechanics the game felt like it could be completed sleepwalking. To challenge myself I decided I'd not use blink and not reload whatsoever while keeping my promise of no alarms, no kill. I've managed it so far, and it's definitely been more exciting. Watching a guard walk into a closet type room where I'd stashed one of his buddies, now sleeping, caused a tense moment of panic I'd not have gotten otherwise and ensured I had to get out my sleeping bolts as quick as possible to put him to sleep as well. Much more exciting than simply reloading! Yet another caveat was the morality system. You can get different outcomes based on how many people you kill in the game. But the actual system for such is haphazard and unrewarding. The game has a lot of fun seeming combat mechanics built into combat only "spells" you can get, stuff you'll never see if you want the "good" ending; instead you're stuck with a much, much more limited and not as interesting stealth only abilities. The rationale behind the "good" and "bad" endings is also weak at best. The more people you kill, the more the plague is supposed to spread. But there are so many dead bodies and plague already that Nathan Drake and Max Payne put together could hardly make a dent in the body count. The non-lethal methods for eliminating your targets also feel incomplete and generally less satisfying than I imagine just killing them would. And even the mechanics for tracking how many enemies you kill are screwed up. On mission complete screens I've gotten several "kills" almost every time; which my best guess is attributed to people being killed by the environment itself, such as plague rats wandering around or the guards killing the infected. Either way I know I didn't kill anyone, despite the game saying I did. But despite all these caveats the good portions of the game still stand out enough. It's a fun, enjoyable game with elements of exploration and puzzle solving and stealth and etc. that I'd recommend to many.

About 50. For a year I got hooked on Steam Sales. "It's only $3, how could I pass that up???" I was like a crack whore who just wanted to collect as much crack as possible, regardless of whether I actually smoked any. So now I never buy a game unless I would play it right then and there.

Ok, I just tried it without Blink. Wow, this game feels so much more badass than with it. The Royal Physician mission, and I ended up coming up through the watermill underneath and jumping off to sneak inside. Before I probably would have zapped around and knocked out every other guard in the place (non violently of course) while going up some BS roundabout route with no challenge whatsoever. I could, I suspect, just bump it up to Very Hard. But I doubt there'd be enough guards with enough AI to make it a challenge. I suppose I could try, but I feel confident in saying that not playing with Blink made the entire thing a lot more engaging. Having to drag down the physicians body via a series of discovered ledges, hoping I wasn't going to die, knocking out several guards with sleep bolts before they could raise the alarms. Before I'd have just blinked down some place and been done with it. This just seems like another example of showing that it's near impossible to have a stealth game combined with any sort of high level power fantasy. They're just at opposing values with each other; and is the reason I really didn't like Mark of the Ninja or think it was a stealth game at all. It's the difference between being a badass stealthy assassin sneaking around a heavily guarded place and being fucking Nightcrawler, popping into everywhere "oh hey how's it going" and popping back out like you were taking a jaunty mid-morning stroll down a London park with tea in your hand and wondering what the geese are up to. Edit- To make it clear, I'm doing this on hard with no alarms and no kills. I'm not sure why I'm finding it so much easier than others to use blink without any trouble, but it seems I am. Just like I'm not sure why anyone has found Borderlands 2, even on New Game+, to be difficult. Then again maybe it's because I've not found the story of either to be totally engaging and thus am concentrating on being as efficient as possible in completing the actual challenge involved, instead of losing myself in the game like in stories that I do like.

I think my biggest problem with this game is Blink. If they didn't have Blink, at all, it would be a much more interesting game. As it is, I can just bypass the entire level using it most of the time. It feels like a cheat, but I feel bad not using it. Maybe I'll try to stop and just never use it at all. Might make the game a lot more interesting.

So here's the recording: http://www.gamespot....c_panel20121010 All I can say is "Ooooohhhh" I'm interested in a damned MMO! I had huge grin on my face watching the trailer. And then watching the talk, and all those panels swing forward in the cockpit gave me another huge grin. It's kind of like the game I've been waiting for since Tie Fighter. Definitely happy to see where this is going. Edit- AAAAND Here's the pledge site: robertsspaceindustries.com Already in for $30.

I'm not minding the look either, though as usual a much better sound design could have helped pretty much everywhere. That first real mission, where it's raining, is the classic video game example of "let's put a few trickley noises when your in whatever bounding/map thing that triggers the rain particles" as opposed to something that might have been more atmospheric, like hearing the pounding rain on the tin roofs. But otherwise it looks nice and the voice acting is, while patchy in some places, still solid in others. The only other thing I'd question is... it's not so much that I'm expecting the combine to come out at any moment, as that if a bunch did it might take me a few seconds to realize anything at all is out of place. Even the painterlay look, which I don't mind at all, can't hide the "Oh god it's Half Life 2" of Dishonored.

I'd be in both. Then again, there are plenty, PLENTY of stealth games that feel just fine without non-diegetic stealth/non-stealth indications. I never, EVER had a problem in Splinter Cell, or Thief, or Deus Ex. But I do have a problem with it here, which is a fair complain I'd say considering those 3 series I've mentioned have had his down just fine through all of their games.

Been playing it up, So far it definitely follows the pattern of both Deus Ex and Dark Messiah. You're going through defined missions with multiple paths, with the option of decent seeming first person combat. Speaking of which, the first person stuff is definitely enjoyable. Leaning around corners feels like a good substitute for a third person view, and I've found the climbing and jumping up on things incredibly easy. Much easier in fact than Mirror's Edge. That being said there is a reason I'm here writing this and not actively playing the game right now (though I intend to resume shortly). This game reminds me of how much I dislike enforced morality systems. The second it says I get "dark" ending for killing guys is the second I realized that I'm not killing anyone at all in this game. It's a personal thing, admittedly. And has a tiny bit of rationale behind it, the more bodies you provide the rats the more the plague spreads. But there's so many people dying I doubt even Nathan Drake could add significantly to the body count. I'd have much rather been given a choice based on what I felt about the npc's in the game and what I wanted to do, rather than some obviously video game style system presented to me. There are also some other foibles. I remember now how hard it is to make a great stealth game. Combat is much easier to make interesting, because it's been done a hundred thousand times. You've got the changing geometries and speeds of you and your enemies, timing involved and even the sheer act of aiming is a large analog area of control. This is not to imply that in comparison the stealth is terrible. I'm still having some fun with it. But how and when enemies can see you, in terms of distance and lighting and etc. feels odd and a bit frustrating. There are obvious "stealth" paths carved out everywhere, which also annoys me. It reminds me how good an open world hardcore stealth game could potentially be, or at least makes me want to play something made by more dedicated and experienced teams and games like Assassin's Creed 3 (please be good!) or Hitman Absolution (pre-ordered). And then there's the story. While the setting could have been interesting the story itself is a flop. You are mute character with no explicit background other than you might have been doing it with the Empress. A character, along with her daughter, that you're supposed to care about after all of two minutes of interaction and about five lines. You're also supposed to want the bad guys dead, except I'm not really feeling them as bad guys. Oh, and there's the art direction. And while some of it's interesting and good you'll also hit in the face with the fact that Half Life 2's art director worked on this. And by hit in the face I mean like an anvil. I'm sure I'll enjoy the rest of it, it seems to have promise in areas so far. But I'm not totally into it like I was with Borderlands 2 initially or Icewind Dale 2 when I'm playing it co-op (currently).

I saw this, and just had to come into portray this scenario into your minds: A darkness sits in front of you, a yawning emptiness of fear and the unknown. From its depths comes a voice to make the heavens tremble "Halo... Halo never changes. From the dawn of the year two thousand and one you have been an unstoppable force of reckoning against the alien hordes. Your terrible onslaught has never stopped against the enemies of things that happen to conveniently be in your way, that are also possibly some sort of threat against a vague notion of futuristic humanity as a whole." Out of the mists comes a variety of Covenant, brightly colored and talking gibberish. "You have slain the mighty Covenant. An alien alliance seemingly incapable of devising new tactics or strategies whatsoever." Then comes the hordes of Flood, trying to look as annoying, mindless, and pointless as possible. "You have slain the terrible Flood. Another alien race, thing... they're zombies or the zerg or something, but aren't as interesting as either." Then come the friggen Forerunner robots. "You have slain these robot things. Thousands of them. All the same." And then comes, the man himself, Master Chief. Striding out of the mists as a god among the puny mortals of ultra repetitive gaming franchises. "And this Winter, you will do exactly that... again. Because Halo, Halo never changes." End trailer. The audience cheers and lines up for pre-orders. You are left awestruck at the sheer power of, whatever the hell it is you just witnessed.

Just not feeling it. Now, if say Lord British himself showed up, and said he wanted to make a spiritual sequel to the original Ultima games. Then I'd "shut up and take my money!" But I never played Anachronox or Wizardry. Though as I understand it Wizardy bears similarity to Might and Magic series, not a series I was particularly fond of; even if my experience with them was limited too before I was twelve. I still enjoyed Sonic and Tie Fighter and Sim City in that same time period, so I'm not putting any stock into "maybe it's better now that I'm older!" either.

I've got a similar amount, but they just sit in a bin I need to get rid of. If I want to play them again I pirate them, as I already bought them anyway. You can argue about the "morality" of this a lot, but what you really need to think about is economic incentive created in total, a complex mess involving researching the current state of the publisher with the rights, the developers of the original game and their current rights visa vis royalties, the impact this may or may not have the future development of games and economic incentives therein, and etc. In other words, the actual issue of piracy is far more complex than any argument so far made and has to do with products that are partially governed by post scarcity economics, an idea not even addressed by current economics research and something I someday hope to win an Nobel prize for in my dreams. Of course I'm also riding around on a unicorn in other dreams, but hey genetic engineering will get to be pretty damned cool in thirty plus years. For now I just take the view that the piracy of truly old games will ultimately result in an atomistic consumer approach. As in if the game is old enough most publishers aren't going to consider its profits (of say, the original Fallout) as having any impact on games they currently greenlight, and so it wont have any real impact. Of course they may, at an annoying discount rate, consider the longtail profits of newer games. But newer games are things I've bought digitally and can download at any rate, and so don't need to pirate. Of course this is just my view. If you feel different about really old games that's a perfectly cromulent part of your own equation.

Oh I completely agree that something can be funny and grim, or funny and serious, or etc. It's just harder to pull off than a single tone, and Borderlands 2 doesn't really make it work. Which is one of the things that make it an odd game. It enhances a lot of the great things about Borderlands 1, but doesn't really grab any opportunities that the first did nor even eliminate some of the gripes. Just finished, and the end boss battle way another boring shrug of the shoulders in terms of climaxes. Great animation and look, and yet we sat in the corner and just pulled the trigger until it was dead, no real tension or excitement except when it burst like a pinata and showered guns everywhere. There were more problems than that though. The guns and their rarity system were nonsensical. I got 1 damned orange (highest tier color) throughout the entire game, at the very end when the boss died, and it was worse than my green SMG I'd gotten several levels ago. The colors had almost no bearing whatsoever on the actual goodness of a gun, or other equipment, and I ended up using a cornucopia of whatever happened to be there. They also missed out on the idea that there'd just be a ton of crazy guns to go around. One or two with the red "special" tags for their stats did something truly interesting. It was fun to see the guns that were tossed as grenades, and doubly fun when I finally found a rocket launcher of the same type that goes off like a rocket when depleted. But they're still missing a lot of stuff just in how guns work. Beam weapons, stuff that overheats, takes time to spin up, slows you down or makes you faster. That's what I'd have like to see, and would like to see along with much more variety in how classes move and jump and what their skills do along with other stuff in Borderlands 3. And there is going to be a 3. Borderlands 2 was one of the most pre-ordered games ever right? I mean the end cinematic obviously implies a 3 (not even really a spoiler to be honest). And what Borderlands 2 ultimately did was take much the same gameplay formula and try to hone it and add more numbers. It was fun, but if I'm buying 3 it's going to have to change up the gameplay somehwat.

Only me and one other. And I'm not finding enemies to be bullet sponges. My guns KICK ASS, constantly. Even enemies two to four levels above me die easily. I find guns I use for 6 levels or more without finding a replacement. Which is why money is useless to me, as I never need to buy anything at all.

Yep, I'd love to see the inevitable continuation of Red Dead be written by someone else. I'm not a terrible fan of westerns, but Red Dead Redemption is in my top about, 15 games, of all time. And "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly" is in my top 10 movies. So there's definitely some sort of room there for me to enjoy something story wise. Just as long as it's not Dan Houser and his "I'm a good man that hates violence, now excuse me while I murder about a hundred people in a row." schtick.

Borderlands 2 has, for me, been a journey of a game. The first time I sat down to play it (co-op) I went for eight hours until it was about four in the morning. It was a game with a beautiful and unique art style, a clever sense of humor, very solid shooting of everything in sight, and a very good clip of introducing new types of enemies and weapons and even the occasional puzzle. Since then the clip of newness has gone down steadily. The routine of finding new and better weapons has exhausted itself, and I now have two dozen different arrows to compare with two dozen other different arrows on eight different possible items I can equip which is not to mention leveling up and "badass" tokens. The once gleeful process of improving my stats has now turned into a morass of comparing any number of arrows to each other every five minutes only to be disappointed most of the time, or unexcited at scratching out the barest of improvements for the hundredth time in one of the arrows. The combat and "story" have both taken a turn for the worse. The worthlessness of money has made its collection equally worthless, which has in turn made death itself (for which you are punished by the removal of money) utterly pointless. The constant intrusion of a story that doesn't know whether it wants to be a self serious pie or delicious hilarity cake has necessitated itself into my playtime thanks to enemies being constantly below my own and my co-op friends stats level, thus we try to slam through it to get to a real challenge and back to the sidequests and their all delicious hilarity cake all the time. As for combat, the lack of any challenge has caused any marked difference between enemies to become pointless. Combined with the horrid design of boss levels and boss event types being nothing more than a slog through vast waves of identical enemies and/or fighting a boss with enough health to drain our entire ammo reserves combat has become a morass of flashing lights and mind numbing exposition by characters that lost their chance to interest me story wise long ago. Perhaps, if I slog enough, there will be a light at the end of the tunnel. Perhaps, if I cut enough corners I'll be able to get back to challenging combat, which will allow me to go on the hilarious, reference filled quests I want to do, allow me to care about my multitude of stats again because I'll need them, allow me to care that the AI seems to be changing tactics because they'll be hard to kill. But right now, at what is about 18 hours in, I'm not really having fun. Instead, I'm fighting for the hope of having fun at some point down the line, and have the feeling that there could definitely be a better game out there that I'd be playing instead; if only this game season's release dates were not so spaced out from each other.

Go to a park, walk around. Just walking helps a lot, walk walk walk. Also, I've been doing well enough to look into applying for a patent. Patent attorneys charge A LOT, but it seems they do so for a decent reason. Lawyer-ese turns out to be very hard to write in. It's the most literal and yet broad description English (or I assume any other language) allows you to use for each and every single word, carefully constructed such that each sentence is simultaneously as broad and yet literal as possible. Just look at this stuff: http://patft.uspto.g...uery=PN/6997384

Bigger and Better is good enough for me. As long as its more coherent in things like its setting and comedy then I'll probably enjoy the hell out of it. I played hours and hours of Vice City, completely ignoring the missions and instead driving around the airport, listening to the hilarious talk radio shows and going off jumps. Not that the story missions were bad either. There was a whole lot of ridiculous 80's stuff and Tommy Vercetti is by far my favorite GTA (or even GTA alike) protagonist. Every other protagonist in any of these games ends up being highly conflicted (which doesn't work with random violence) or mostly mute, or generic and annoying (Saints Row 2). Tommy Vercetti was the only guy that felt like he belonged as the guy that was chasing around random people on the street with a machete. Heck, one of the first things he says is "Pricks, I'm surrounded by pricks". If they can bring that back, the attitude and just the right amount of bizareness, as if you're guy is the only one that recognizes how ridiculous everything is, then I'll probably love it. Saints Row 3 was just way too over the top for me, I didn't really get any kicks out of messing with a world that was already incredibly messed up.

Got this yesterday. Eight hours straight with my brother, and I'm pretty sure we're not even halfway done. This is the sequel almost every average video game fan wants. The same and yet bigger and better and more in every way. More guns, more skills, more art, more vehicles, more enemies, more upgrades, more more more. If you liked Borderlands 1 (and still think you would) there's probably a good 95% chance you'll like Borderlands 2. I'm going to get back today, and probably play for another eight hours straight, and maybe even tomorrow as well. Game of the year for me so far. Not because it's phenomenal or groundbreaking or etc. It's not really. It just delivers exactly the mostly mindless shooting/co-op/loot collecting violence it promises, with some neat looking art and a very good sense of humor on top. And for whatever reason that's what I happen to really feel like playing at the moment.

Well I've just about gotten bored of it, gets far too repetitive for my tastes. Think I'll download a save to get me those locked ships and give maybe one more run through. Still, I played for hours and hours and had the most fun I've had with a game in months. There's definitely an entire universe of room for an FTL 2. Other "missions" besides being chased. Going down to planets, being able to customize your crew more, making the ship to ship combat more interesting, bigger ships with customized room layouts. There's just a world of things that COULD be fun. So I'm definitely there if and whenever the sequel hits.

So this mod, well game really, is excellent in a lot of areas. It looks beautiful, really really pretty. It's obvious a lot of the artists on this are professionals. But there's something missing, and when trying to place my finger on it, I realized it was that a lot of little things were missing. The voice acting isn't terrible, but it's not as good as Half Life's original stuff. And it's amazing the impact that can make. Even in just the opening of the original, well you really feel that despite the amazing stuff your seeing its kind of a typical day at work. The voice acting helped sell this in the original "Good morning Freeman." or etc. helped sell the world to you. Heck, as did the layout of the level. It didn't FEEL like a video game level, it felt like you were wandering around a super secret lab. Black Mesa doesn't quite nail that. These kind of "not as polished" little things are all over. I keep seeing doors I think I miiiight be able to go into, and then can't. Or the way the G-Man is handled. Just his placement alone in the original, the way you walked into a room, one you knew didn't have anything that was going to kill you in it. And the first thing you see is him, looking totally out of place, and you see him because the door itself steered you so that you are looking directly at him and then watch him walk away; and you say to yourself "Who the hell is that guy?" While in Black Mesa they have him walking away sort of, out of where your natural line of vision would go, and sometimes while you're even in danger. The effect is dramatically lessened. That being said there are some neat additions. The conveyor belts, little interactions with the NPCs that you didn't have before. The way something on fire sets off the sprinklers, and etc. It's definitely worth playing; but it just doesn't have that Valve feel of incredible polish and trying to think of everything. Speaking of which, if you want that feeling by all means go play Mission Improbable: http://www.moddb.com...sion-improbable . It's not perfect either, and you'll need Episode 2. But it feels a lot more like something Valve would have made, like it could've slotted somewhere into Half Life 2 without much trouble. Little things like how they set up and teach you about a puzzle, and you say to yourself "wow that's clever" if you even notice it, thanks to the little clues being so well placed that you don't even realize they're clues.