Zeusthecat

Them trengthening their internal development studios seems to have paid off.

I played a bit more over the last week and managed to make a decent amount of progress. There ended up being a lot of new characters introduced with a lot of dialog so my apologies if I misremember some of the details. After wandering around for awhile, looking for a way to obtain a boat, I eventually stumbled onto the solution when I talked to Elaine. This time when I talked to her, I was able to bring up the fact that I needed a ship and she gave me the Governor's Seal as proof of my authority. From there, I left the mansion and went straight back down to the docks to show my new credentials to the government lady. Once I showed it to her, she took me to my beautiful new pink ship. My crew then joined me and we headed off for Lucre Island. After arriving at Lucre Island, I eventually made my way towards the lawyer guys to talk to them about the situation. On the way there, I happened to sit on a random bench and witnessed the most cringe inducing Forrest Gump reference I have ever seen in my life (Ben X, you were totally right on this one; even with my juvenile sense of humor that was just painful to experience). Once I made it to the lawyers' office, I explained the situation and they responded in some incredibly fucking weird ways. Somehow I was able to convince them to help me and they ended up giving me Elaine's father's will (I think that was how it went down). The will mentioned some kind of deposit box at the bank so I headed over there to check it out. I should also mention that while I was going through the town, I picked up a bottle of grog, an empty spray bottle, and a bottle of cologne (and probably some other things). Once I made it to the bank, I went into the vault and grabbed all the contents in the room. There was a lot of random crap including a bunch of sponges, a music box, a sword, a handkerchief, a duck (or maybe I picked this up outside somewhere) and I think a couple other items. I probably picked up a total of around a dozen different items between the bank vault and the town within a couple hour time span so I'm finding it hard to specifically remember where I got each one. After (or in the midst of) picking up all of the items, the vault door was slammed shut and I ended up getting trapped in there while someone pretending to be Guybrush Threepwood robbed the bank. With my options severely limited, I had no choice but to get to work trying to open the door. As I went through all of my items, I found that I was able to break off the lower door hinge with the sword (which I think broke the sword, or maybe it was already broken) and then stick the broken sword into the door crack to open it a bit. Unfortunately, I had no way to break off the top door hinge so I was forced to toil for a little while to figure out how to get the door open the rest of the way. Eventually, after I exhausted most of the item combination possibilities, I discovered that I could put all of the sponges along the door crack and then pour some grog down the door frame, causing the sponges to expand and blow the door open (I don't feel like this was a very good puzzle; kind of random and illogical). I was then mistakenly arrested for robbing the bank and got sent to jail. Luckily, Lucre Island apparently had some pretty lax policies because I was able to easily convince the jailer to let me wander around the island to try to prove my innocence. So I waltzed out of the jail house and proceeded to go into each building and area around town, picking up every item I could find and talking to all of the characters. There were quite a few areas with a lot of dialog and a lot of things to interact with so this is pretty much as far as I got. At this point I think I have talked to everyone in the main town and picked up all of the items (and opened a manhole) so now I just need to explore the rest of the island and find a way to prove my innocence. Hopefully, as I spend more time on the island, all of this stuff will start making more sense. But as it stands right now I have a wealth of random ass items and I have talked to so many different characters that I'm a little overwhelmed with how much is going on. I suspect when some puzzles emerge, everything will start to fall into place and things won't feel quite as chaotic.

I think a good companion album to this episode would be "Survival" by Bob Marley and the Whalers.

I figure my dreams are basically just my brain pooping while I sleep.

Is that a Cesar Millan simulator?

I finally got around to finishing Infamous. It started out a little slow but after I had unlocked a decent number of powers, everything came together and it ended up being a really fun game. The story was okay and I think the stylized cutscenes went a long way to bolster it but it was hard to ignore how much of a gravelly voiced emo cliche Cole was. Overall though, I think the positive aspects of this game far outweigh any negative aspects. I think what I enjoyed most about Infamous was how well all of the powers were implemented and how much fun it was to just fight dudes and blow a bunch of shit up. Having the powers doled out slowly throughout the game meant that I ended up getting pretty proficient in the usage of each one and by the end of the game I was having a blast unleashing all of my powers in different ways to take out big groups of enemies. I also ended up playing through on hard and I think it provided a consistent level of challenge without ever getting too frustrating (except when I had to defend the prison; it took me like 2 hours to finally beat the part where two big ass conduits show up).All in all, very fun game! I also played through Journey again and finally got my white cloak and most of the other trophies. I imagine I'll play through this yet again sometime within the next couple weeks. I just makes me feel good every time I play it.

This has been quite an excellent conversation to read through. Thank you to everyone involved for making such thoughtful and intelligent observations about the circumstances surrounding this horrible event.

Yes, that was some good stuff and we cleaned that campaign up pretty quickly (around 5 hours or so by my count). The thing that stood out to me the most while playing through this game again was how stellar the soundtrack is. Probably my favorite soundtrack in the Halo series.

I haven't seen a single mention of any Xbox 360 multiplayer gaming in quite some time so I figured I'd cast a wide net in the hopes that somebody has a desire to get their game on with a fellow Thumb on the 360. Here is a list of games I wouldn't mind playing sometime if anyone is interested: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood Assassin's Creed Revelations Battlefield 3 Co-op or Multiplayer Borderlands 2 2nd playthrough Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 Special Ops Gears of War Co-op Gears of War 2 Co-op or Horde Mode Halo 3 ODST Co-op or Firefight (I think that's what it's called) Halo Reach Co-op or Firefight Left 4 Dead 2 Resident Evil 5 I'll be starting Resident Evil 5 here in the next couple days since it's one of the last games I have left to complete so let me know if you'd like to join me. But I'm always up for any of the other games too!

Thanks for joining me in ODST JonCole, that was a blast. At this point, my 360 backlog is completely cleared and my only motivation for jumping back into any 360 games would be to nab any missed achievements (hence the updated thread title). A refresh on games where I still have some cleaning up to do are: Halo 3 ODST - Firefight Halo Reach - Legendary co-op campaign and firefight Assassin's Creed Revelations - Multiplayer Resident Evil 5 - Co-op new game plus Gears of War - Co-op top two difficulties Gears of War 2 - Co-op top two difficulties, horde mode Modern Warfare 2 - Special Ops Borderlands 2 - 2nd playthrough

I hope I'm not out of line in saying this, but I think this thread has officially been Waluigi'd.

Since I've been pretty good about keeping my gross shit to a minimum for quite awhile now, I'm going to once again lift my self imposed moratorium for a moment to tell a quick story about something really horrible I did when I was 10 years old (and yes, Thrik's post in the Life thread is what inspired me to finally come out and share this one). This shit is gross and if you've been put off by the dumb shit I've posted in the past, please do not click the spoiler. Edit: Ouch, the worst post for a new page.

This is making me seriously nostalgic for my first few months on these forums.

Oh man, I'm right there with you. And for me, each car has a personality. I think Lexus's and Mustangs are usually assholes, Hummers have severe self esteem problems, and most standard sedans are probably decent and I wouldn't mind hanging out with them.

I know I'm a little late here but I just want to say that based on what I've seen, I think Dr. Wookie is an alright dude and I don't think he really deserved such an outpouring of harsh comments. I can understand the initial apprehension but it seems pretty clear to me that he means well.

OUCH-YA!!!

I don't recall running into any recognizable pop culture references yet (although I might have heard that Barry White one you mentioned) but I have enjoyed a lot of the opening dialog especially with all the references back to the previous games. I do tend to enjoy dumb humor though so I suspect the shitty jokes and aged references won't really bother me too much when I do run into them. We'll see. Regarding the graphics, I actually kind of like the look of the game more than I expected to. It doesn't hold a candle to Curse's style and doesn't work as well as the polygonal models in GF but it works well enough for me and I especially like how vibrant and colorful everything is.

I'm a little confused as to how that works. Does that just mean that the Ouya storefront would be incorporated into the MadCatz thing? I thought I remembered hearing pretty much universal disdain for the way that stuff worked on the Ouya. At this point I guess it just seems weird to me that people are still chasing this "Android game console" concept. Maybe there is market research to suggest otherwise but it seems like there is very little interest in these kinds of devices.

YA!!!! I couldn't resist reviving all three of these to ask two simple questions: What the fuck is going on with the Ouya? Did it fall off the face of the planet or did it ever find some kind of decent user base?

U

O

Yeah, I talked to her but it did take a bit for me to figure out the whole "pulling the middle finger" thing. And I guess the additional verb would be another thing that I'm still struggling to get used to. In Grim Fandango, I used the numpad and all of the verbs were right there within reach ("Ins" for inventory, "Enter" for use/talk, "+" for pick up, and "5" for look at). It looks like in this game they broke out "Use" onto the "U" key so now I keep my left hand on the keyboard and have to keep reminding myself to press "U" with various items since "Enter", "+", and "5" don't cover every possible interaction any more.

So I started the game Sunday evening and managed to make a couple hours of progress. Upon starting, I found Guybrush tied to the mast of the "Honeymoon" ship from the end of Curse. The ship had been boarded by pirates and Elaine was fighting them off as Guybrush mused about recent events in his life. After gaining control, I found that I could shimmy around the mast that I was tied to and interact with a number of nearby items. Before long, I was able thwart the pirates by knocking over a brazier and kicking one of the hot coals towards the cannon on our ship which lit the fuse on the cannon, causing it to fire and sink the enemy ship. We then continued on our journey, and before long we arrived at Melee Island. Immediately after landing and seeing that there was no fanfare for her return, Elaine became suspicious that something was amiss on Melee Island. This was further confirmed when we approached Elaine's mansion and found some douchebag using a catapult to hurl boulders at the mansion. After talking to the guy, we discovered that Elaine had been declared dead and he was just carrying out orders from the new (likely) governor-to-be to destroy the mansion. Elaine then took off to take care of some business or something and I was tasked with stopping the destruction of the mansion and then sailing to Lucre Island to talk to some lawyers about the situation. From here, I spent a good amount of time venturing around the various Melee Island locations and having a bunch of lengthy conversations with a number of characters. As I went around shooting the shit with people, a few puzzles started to reveal themselves. First, after running into Carla and Otis (who were both quite hilariously traumatized from the shit I put them through in the first game), I learned that they would be willing to join my crew if I could land them a cushy government job. Then, while investigating the Scumm Bar and talking to the various patrons, I got into a conversation with the owner of the bar (I think his name was Ignacious Cheese or something like that) and was able to convince him to join my crew after beating him in a game of insult arm wrestling. Next, I tried to grab some pretzels from a passed out drunk guy but was thwarted by his sudden drunken movements each time I tried. However, after another brief conversation with some dudes who were playing darts at the front of the bar, I was able to convince one of them to throw a dart at the drunk guy's birthday balloon which caused it to pop and startled the drunk guy, somehow making him completely catatonic in the process. I was then able to steal his pretzels and continued on my way. After I had conversed with everyone in the main town, I made my way down to the docks where I found a stern talking government lady who was adamant about not letting me leave with a boat until I could prove that I had authority to do so. While I was down there I picked up a deflated inner tube and based on my conversation with the catapult guy from earlier and some of the observations Guybrush had made while I was in the mansion area, I had a suspicion that I knew what I needed to do to stop him. From there, I headed back to the mansion area and gave a pretzel to the catapult guy. He then walked away for a couple minutes to eat his pretzel, leaving me an opportunity to mess with his catapult. Once he saw what I was doing, he came back and shooed me away before re-calibrating the catapult to aim at the weird two-pronged cactus near the mansion. After I saw how this sequence played out, I ran over to the cactus, put the inner tube around it to turn it into a makeshift slingshot, and repeated the process with the pretzels. This time, after he re-calibrated, the boulder he launched landed right in the 'slingshot' and bounced back, knocking the catapult over the cliff. With the catapult guy finally gone, Elaine headed into the mansion and I followed suit. There wasn't a whole lot for me to do inside the mansion but I did manage to obtain a government employment contract and a cushy government contract, both of which I gave to Elaine to have her sign. After I finished poking around there, I headed back to Otis and Carla and convinced them to join my crew by giving showing them the cushy government contract. And this is about as far as I was able to get. At this point, it seems like I have all the crew members I need and I just need to obtain a boat. I've tried giving the other employment contract to most of the other characters I've ran across and so far I haven't had any luck. I haven't spent too much time on this yet though so I think my next course of action will be to run through each area again and see if there are any objects I missed or any characters I haven't tried giving the contract to yet. My initial thoughts on this game are pretty positive. The music and voicework both seem as solid as ever and I've already gotten a few chuckles out of some of the dialog I've heard. The controls aren't bothering me much at all and actually seem somewhat improved over Grim Fandango. I guess my only minor gripes at this point are that some of the dialog is a little on the lengthy side and it is sometimes hard to get in the exact position and angle necessary to detect items in some of the areas. But overall, I like what I've experienced and I look forward to seeing where the story goes from here.

Wow, and less than 2 weeks old. How the hell did I miss that?

I'll put together a post tomorrow on my first couple hours with the game. So far though I am really liking it and the characters have some pretty well written and funny dialog.