GavinTheAlmighty

Axiom Verge! I destroyed this game over the course of about three days. I haven't played a decent Metroidvania in ages, and I'd heard wonderful things about this game. I don't want to go all-in on this post because I dumped my thoughts in the AV thread, but it was well-crafted and a lot of fun with an incredible soundtrack, but also quite a bloated game and one that rewards trial-and-error - it is not as streamlined as it should be. The final boss was a pain in the ass and 2/3 of my total deaths came against two bosses. If you're a Metroid fan, you would do well to try it out.

I just finished AV last night. I played it over the course of about three days - I just absorbed this game in my life like a sponge. It was excellent - definitely a lot of fun, but I do have some criticisms, most of which have been mentioned in this thread already. There are WAY too many weapons, and yeah, you barely use the majority of them. I picked up 10 of them and felt that that was too many. Apparently there are 20 or so. I uncovered 86% of the map but only recovered 50% of the weapons, and I spent a lot of time trial-and-erroring many of the spaces, which means that some of these must have been really well hidden. Unfortunately, I'm at a point in my life where trial-and-error gameplay is supremely uninteresting to me, so that was a mark against. I didn't like the Edin boss - the giant hornet - because I couldn't get close enough to use the weapons that I had without opening myself up to the really damaging stinger attack, which seemed to come out randomly. Also, the final boss was super-cheap. Apparently it's much easier if you have the Orbital Discharge (According to a walkthrough), but I have no idea where that is. I used the Kilver to take out the satellites quickly, and if one would get hung up right in front of the vulnerable tile, I'd switch to the Intertial Pulse, which would blast straight through the satellite and also damage the tile. Once I found the Lightning Gun and the Shards, I almost exclusively used those. The alien lore seemed useless to me because I had no way to translate it (is there a translator that I missed?), I didn't use most of the weapons (hell, I didn't even find most of the weapons, and I entered the Secret World by accident, left because Elsinova told me I shouldn't be there, and then I couldn't find the entrance again, so I missed some valuable stuff, like the Heat Seeker. I spent a ton of time trying to get back west from Kur, only to discover that the game purposefully traps you there until you get the item that lets you double-tap to jump further. I needed a walkthrough to figure out what to do once I got to Edin, because I just couldn't figure it out - there was a door that I missed. So all in all, I did really like this game, but it felt like it has a lot of bloat. Weapons are key items and in my opinion, shouldn't be hidden the way that the game hid them. Also, the soundtrack is outstanding.

I tried it out, played for a few hours, and then gave up on it. It just wasn't my thing at all. I've been suffering from a bit of Zelda exhaustion. By the time I stopped playing it, I had played 8 Zelda titles in 12 months. I was pretty burnt out by the end of Skyward Sword, the final title before MM, but I needed something to play on my commute and a friend had the game. Absolutely nothing in MM clicked with me. I hate the idea of the timer in the game; the very presence of a timer makes me experience in a game less enjoyable because of the inherent stress they present - not operating on my own schedule reduces my enjoyment unless it's for limited periods of time, like the timed sections in Super Metroid or Metroid Prime. Anyway, I was blasting through the early part of the game, just messing around and doing whatever I wanted to explore, and the timer just about ran out before I even got into the first dungeon. So, I reset the timer and promptly lost my progress and the stuff I'd picked up. I had to re-do simple things in the game to get back to where I was, and it just felt like the antithesis of fun. Games shouldn't be work, and that's all that MM felt like. If it works for someone, then good for them, but good lord did I ever run out of patience with that game quickly. I suppose it doesn't help that I'm a MUCH bigger fan of the 2D Zelda games than 3D. I similarly ran out of patience with Wind Waker last year. Navigation was just getting to be a chore with having to stop and play the song to change the wind any time I want to change direction, and the fact that there was an element of luck in getting the fast sail that eliminates that requirement all combined for a quick death for that game. I know that it's supposed to be great, and I don't begrudge anyone who loves it (obviously), but it just wasn't working for me. I need a bit more direction. Burying heart pieces or other important items behind these labourous side quests has been going on for a long time and I just can't abide. I also recently quit Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. I tried so hard to get into that game (my first AC game), but it just didn't work for me. I started and stopped and restarted that game three times and while it's an interesting setting, I just couldn't help but shake the idea that if I wanted to play a Ubisoft stealth action game, there's no universe where I'm not picking up Splinter Cell first.

As a non-American, season 2 appeals to me because I know next to nothing about Bergdahl's case. It's a name I heard a few times in the press, but I honestly and legitimately thought that it was something to do with the Benghazi thing. So, it's good for me. I will say that Serial 1 theme music >>>> Serial 2 theme music.

I was just given a copy of this yesterday and loaded it up on my 2011 Lenovo y570 laptop with an Nvidia GT555M. End result: it ran terribly at low settings, 1920x1080 resolution in fullscreen mode. So, I kept the details low and ran it at 1366x768 in windowed mode, and it was much smoother. I'm going to play around with some stuff to see if I can get it working a bit better, because windowed mode is difficult to follow sometimes when there's so much happening on screen, but that's how I got it running. It's a fun game, but I find it very easy to get totally overwhelmed, between friendly fire, enemies that sound the alarm a second after coming on-screen, and just a general lack of spatial awareness on my part. I'll usually deploy an M-94 machine gun right away and keep that with me, then deploy a turret whenever I'm searching for ordnance to defuse, and then keep one turret for the final extraction. I'm only level 5 though.

Steamworld Dig is a fantastic game combining elements of Metroid, crafting, and dungeon exploration! Highly recommended.

I just ordered Yoshi's Woolly World last night. This has been on my list for quite some time now, and I'm glad I found a good deal. Canadian Thumbs, if you go to Amazon.ca and search for Yoshi's Woolly World, there's a vendor linked from the official item page that is selling it for $49.95 plus $5.54 shipping, but I didn't get charged any tax sales. The whole order cost just shy of $20 less than what Best Buy is currently charging for the game, after tax.

I finished it a couple of a months ago on Wii U after playing the vanilla version on PC, and I have to say that the Wii U version really was the definitive version of it. The game pad added a valuable and worthwhile contribution! I hear you on inventory Tetris - that definitely did get old. But I NEED those remote mines! I also finished Child of Light on Sunday. I picked it up for the Wii U in the Ubisoft August sale - I'd heard good things about it, but hadn't had a chance to dive into it until this past month. I was blown away by how beautiful this game is. The art style is tremendous - it's like playing a Disney hand-drawn animated game. The music is fabulous, standing out at the right time and blending in at the right time. I was wary of a game with a turn-based battle system, but the active battle system was engaging enough to keep me going. There are mechanics that add a level of strategy to each enemy encounter. It doesn't outstay its welcome, but I'd be lying if I said I wanted more of that game. I played it on normal difficulty and I have to say that it was pretty easy - if you explore enough, you'll be so well equipped with potions and bonuses that most fights won't pose much trouble. Near the end of it, only the bosses have much challenge - the enemies themselves fall quickly because your team is really powerful. There are a lot of playable characters, probably too many of them. I stuck with a core group - there was one character I never used at all. I really can't say enough good about how beautiful this game is. Still shots don't really do it justice. It's a beautiful, colourful game!

I am fortunate enough to be in a position where I have a good, stable, permanent full-time job. However, I've been curious about what else is out there, so I applied to a similar job at a local hospital. Went through the interview process, hiring manager brings up salary, and it's a substantial and significant drop from what I currently make. If you're posting a job and you are in the public sector, please also post the salary so that people know whether or not it's worth their time. It will also give people who are familiar with the industry a sense for how much you know about the industry and how you're likely to treat your employees.

Only two Torontonians? That surprises me!

Steamworld Dig and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory is probably the best stealth game ever made, and it's one of my top-ten games of all times. I cannot say enough positive about this game. The only thing I actively dislike is the massive difficulty spike in the Bathhouse mission, but other than that, it's a game generally without appreciable flaws. If you have any interest in stealth/tactical gameplay and haven't tried this, it is incumbent upon you to do so. Steamworld Dig is a cheap little game that I picked up from the Nintendo Humble Bundle a few months ago. It’s a fairly short game – I finished it in just shy of six hours. It’s something of a Metroid-like in that you explore an area and unlock new skills that help you explore additional areas. You play as Rusty, a robot miner who must dig down below his town to discover the world and the enemies beneath it. In each playthrough, the mining area beneath the town is randomized. I had zero expectations for this game because I knew literally nothing about it except that I owned it, and I was very happy to experience it. I probably don’t need a sequel though. The game allows you to dig in all four directions, but you cannot jump and dig at the same time, so you’ll only ever be able to “dig up, stupid” one tile. Good for resource mining, bad for movement. This creates significant navigation difficulties, but since the game allows you to buy resources to move up one tile (ladders are purchased for a pittance), it’s obviously a deliberate design decision. I found that approaching the game in that manner was a bit slow-moving for my tastes, so eventually, I determined my strategy such that that would not be an issue. The various tools and implements at your disposal help you work around this as well. There are a lot of competing systems and metrics at play in this game, and it creates a game of significant depth (sorry, bad mining pun). I’m happy that it didn’t go on longer than six hours because it could easily outstay its welcome, but all in all, it was a worthwhile experience.

Electoral reform was a big promise. Right now, it's a typical first-past-the-post system. Both the Liberals and New Democrats promised electoral reform; the Liberals promised to conduct a study and go with a recommendation, and the New Democrats promised proportional representation. That should really change how a lot of ridings are decided, and should hopefully mitigate strategic voting. Under Stephen Harper, a lot of policy was driven by ideology, not facts. Expect a return to a more rational approach, things like the re-implementation of the long-form census (the elimination of the long-form census was one of the most baffling and embarrassing things that Harper did), which every public service uses to plan its service delivery models. We may also see a less aggressive foreign policy and less overt racism from elected government (though to be fair, the Liberals did bring in Bill "Carding works" Blair as a star candidate, so they're not exactly pure). Also, I would be surprised if our environmental stances didn't improve significantly. Harper was a disaster for the environment.

Another happy Canuck here. Stayed up to watch the speeches, so I'm pretty wiped today. Nice to see Harper get the boot - the man was dangerous for the future of the country and made Canada the laughing stock of the environmental world. Once Atlantic Canada and Quebec sent their regards, it was basically over. His concession speech was one of his better speeches, but I thought it was pretty cowardly to give that speech without mentioning that he was resigning, which he advised the press in a simultaneous press release. A lot of good NDP members paid the price - Megan Leslie, Andrew Cash, Peggy Nash, Howard Hampton, Olivia Chow, they all hit the bricks in favour of the local Liberal candidates. It was most assuredly a referendum on Stephen Harper, not a ringing endorsement for Justin Trudeau. Harper's non-stop attack ads really fired up the anti-Harper population. His string of infantilizing "Just not ready" ads set a stupidly low bar for success for Trudeau - all he had to do was not overreact and act as though he was ready, and he'd come out the winner. Plus, the style of those ads really struck a chord with young voters, who actually appear to have somewhat voted, as 67% of the eligible population voted. "Hey young people, do you remember all the job applications you've been sending out that you never heard back from ? Let's make an advertisement that reminds you of that and makes you identify with our political opponent. Do you suspect that old idiots are blocking you from working for stupid, superficial reasons? It's true. We're those old idiots." (stolen from Reddit). My riding was decided by six votes in 2011; it was a Liberal blowout this time.

Hurray, Canadian election day is here! I don't know the political leanings of members of this forum, so I hope that I'm not too out of bounds when I say that I would greatly appreciate it if another party could come in and knock the Conservative Party of Canada out of the big chair. It's been a very acrimonious election cycle here, and I'm looking forward to having a party in power that actually believes that climate change is a thing, that doesn't hate Muslim people, and just generally is more driven by policy and facts, rather than crazy ideology.

There was one level that I just couldn't crack without the help of a walkthrough. The Disused Module had four buttons and four doors, and for the life of me I just couldn't figure it out. A lot of people complained about the one with the coloured lights, but the Disused Module was my hell in an otherwise sharp and well-desigend game.

Aw. I loved Splinter Cell: Blacklist!

Definitely the best. I don't claim to understand how Humble and their chosen publishers organize the bundles. I wonder if it's an issue with different publishers and distribution rights and whatnot. No comment on the multiplayer as that's not my jam. I just like the Splinter Cell and Rainbow Six games!

The Humble Tom Clancy Bundle is an amazing collection of fabulous games. The entire Splinter Cell series (except for Pandora Tomorrow, which doesn't have a good PC port for Windows 7+), Rainbow Six, and others. It's all for Uplay, not Steam, but nonetheless, a great deal. I own all of this already but grabbed a bundle for gifting purposes.

Just yesterday, I finished a playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword. It was my second time playing through the game. I was a staunch defender of the game when it was first released and praised nearly everything about it, in the face of some of the criticism the game received. Upon replaying it, I need to temper my praise a bit. I apologize in advance for the wall of text, but I have a lot of thoughts I want to put down. Also, possible spoilers for the game. Last time, playing on the Wii with the Motion+ thing added to a regular remote, I had zero issues with the controls. Everything generally worked smoothly, I had no problem with playing the harp (apparently this was a big thing back in 2011/2012) and I pretty much always slashed where I wanted to slash. Now, I don't know if the integrated Motion+ controller is different or if my skills have declined, but I really had trouble with some areas. I could never get the game to slash where I wanted it to slash, and that damn harp was a nightmare for me this time. Thrust strikes, which are integral to several enemy battles, were really difficult to pull off for some reason. The game is still very slow to get started, much slower than most games to which I am accustomed. You probably spend a good hour or more in the opening hub world before you can get down to "the action". Fi, your companion for the game, is annoying. Like really really annoying. I think I might have been impressed by "ooh shiny!" the first time that I played it, but this time, every dialogue interruption really started grating on my nerves. "I calculate an 85% chance that you should go to this area next". It's just obnoxious writing for me, with these silly percentages and whatnot. Further to that, the game's text boxes that come up every time you pick up an item on a new play session get really tedious. This was a huge complaint back when it first came out, and it bothered me then, but really bothered me this time. In addition to following the regular Zelda tropes, I didn't realize just how much SS relied on a lot of lazy conventional gaming tropes. Some of them were integrated well, or at least logically consistently (the powerless sections, the forced stealth section), but the mandatory escort quest is brutal. I'd completely forgotten about it after I played it the first time, so it was quite a frustrating and unwelcome surprise when it came up this time. For those who aren't familiar, Skyward Sword’s world is a series of navigable areas connected by a sky overworld. You fly around on your giant bird and drop into these areas on the ground. You start at one point on the ground and make your way around the ground areas. At each save statue (there are a handful throughout the area), you can fly back up to the sky, and you can select which statue you want to drop down to – a modified, slightly slower fast travel. At one point, you need to extinguish a giant fire in one area with a basin of water from another area. Your robot sidekick, who’s an absolute asshole to you for no reason except that the writers thought that it would be funny (NB: it really isn't), hauls the basin away. However, when you drop back down from the sky to the volcano, the game doesn't let you choose which statue you want to drop to. Instead, the game forces you to the bottom of the volcano for seemingly no reason. So I get to the bottom of the volcano and Scrapper, that little piece of shit, he tells me that he won’t carry the basin up to the top because it’s too heavy (even though he was able to lift it from Lake Floria and carry it into the sky), but that he’ll haul it if “we play a game” and I escort him up the volcano while protecting him from damage. It’s such a hackneyed trope, but more so than that, it’s so forced and lazily awkward that it’s ridiculous. “You can drop to any save point on the map at any time, except for this one time, but there’s no good reason for it.” Combine that with a stupid robot that won’t get out of the way of enemy attacks and it’s obnoxious. Fair play that Scrapper has a good amount of health, but nonetheless, there’s no logical requirement for this escort quest. It’s just crammed into the game for literally no reason except to have Scrapper continue to be a piece of shit to you. To that end, characters being turds to you happens a fair bit. One of your main allies, the Water Dragon, whom you save from injury earlier in the game by going on a long and irritating hunt for the necessary cure, holds part of a song that you need to learn to open up the final dungeon. However, despite the fact that you nursed her back to health and saved her lake from monsters, she won't teach you the song until you prove that you are the real hero by going on a long fetch quest in the wooded area that she flooded, swimming through the area to collect notes for the melody. It's a really annoying requirement that just seems to impede your progress. You also need to fight the two bosses three times each - Ghirahim and The Imprisoned. Now, I quite like Ghirahim as a character - his writing is definitely the best in the game. But the battles are just obnoxious and require motion controls that are not at all intuitive, especially not the first time you face him. Needing to face the two bosses three times each, with only minor changes to the battles themselves, was just so very lazy. Also, I just hate hate hate the Scervo battle. Scervo sucks. Now I don't want people to think that I'm super down on the game. I'm definitely disappointed as my memories were best left alone, but I did still replay the entire thing, for over 40 hours. The game's highs are wonderful - when you're successful in combat, it really does feel like an accomplishment. Dungeon and overworld design is top-notch, the music is fabulous, boss fights are wonderful (I really loved Tentalus, even if it looks like a creature from Monsters Inc), item use feels good, and the story is interesting and deep, while still being straightforward enough to follow. It's just that the game's lows are really bad. It's a bloated game, much longer than it needs to be, and now that I have much less gaming time than I did three years ago, I'm very protective of that time - games can't be bloated or unnecessarily huge. Things like the Silent Realm powerless areas, the forced stealth and stupid escort quest areas, the flooded fetch quest, they could have been ditched in favour of more or beefier dungeons, which would have been welcome. Ditch the crafting requirement. Don't make us fight the same boss so many times. Things like that. I think I'm suffering from Zelda fatigue. In the past 12 months, I've played seven titles from the series. I'm not at all excited for the next one, and that needs to change, because they're still good games. tl;dr still good, but not nearly as good as I remembered

Good lord, people are brilliant.

I played literally my first ever DOTA match last night, first as Lion and then as Sniper. It was chaos. I had no idea what anything was, how to do anything, or what the point of anything was. I bought everything I could from the courier and then didn't pick up my gear. I had a 0-25 K/D ratio. My friends were using words that I'd heard in English before, but didn't know what they meant in this context. I destroyed a tower and thought I was an unstoppable Jesus. Died two seconds later. 10/10 would make my friends hate me again

Nah, there's a ton of them in here that I don't know. I'm reading this and I'm like "Yes. As long as there are no follow-up questions, I definitely played Halo "

A bit later! Surface Tension comes right after Questionable Ethics, which is where Freeman makes it back to the lab complex after the ambush. The military shows up first in "We've Got Hostiles!", a few chapters before. Surface Tension is the one that takes place almost exclusively outdoors, starting with the dam and ending with the air strike. I love the variety of the environments and the variety of the dangers. You face all kinds of enemies, there are good puzzles to solve, and it just generally has a good flow to it. You feel close to escaping, but by the end of it, you realize you can't get out and you need to keep fighting through it. By this point, you're capable enough to take on groups of enemies, so you feel confident, but not cocky. Oh man, the Raven boss was amazing. Such a simple idea, fixing the player as the reference point rather than the environment, and it was just fabulous. One of the best boss fights I've played in gaming. Come to think of it, all of the urban hubs in DE were a lot of fun. There's a lot to do in NYC, Hong Kong has the canals with the creepy music and the mazes and the sense that something is hiding around a dark corner (not to mention the cool little escapade to Jock's apartment), and Paris had a wonderful tone of resistance and defiance to it. It's also the only urban area with enemies that default to attacking you in a regular non-combat zone, so trying to subdue them without alerting the police was actually quite tough!

Man, such a tough question. It's really hard to pick from a list of some of the classics. At any given time, it could be one of these: Phendrana Drifts - Metroid Prime Naval Yard/PRCS Wall Cloud - Deus Ex Surface Tension - Half-Life Mine Cart Madness - Donkey Kong Country Bathhouse or Seoul - Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory The Sandship - Zelda: Skyward Sword BLIZZARD!!!, Yoshi's Island It's funny though, it's hard for me to pick a favourite level from some of my favourite games of all time in Super Metroid, Zelda: LTTP or Illusion of Gaia. Yet I would still have no trouble rating them as some of the best games I've ever played. I'm sure I'm going to sit here all day, thinking of other awesome levels.

I regret that I don't have much to offer on the long-distance-relationship front. It's tough, and I wish anyone going through it the best. I've just recently come back from a holiday overseas, which was nice. I went to Paris for the first time to see the sites, and then went to visit my grandmother in a small town in Scotland. I love visiting her as she's a wonderful woman, but it's also incredibly bittersweet. She's 98 years old and is obviously in the winter of her life. She's fairly independent and is in decent physical health (as decent as one can be at 98, anyway). She lives by herself and has personal support workers in twice a day to help out with bathing, personal comfort, etc. They're wonderful people. It's sad to visit because her short-term memory is going, so sometimes she'll mistake me for my father (she usually snaps out of it pretty quickly) but also she can't take decent care of her house anymore. She has particular habits, such as closing all of the doors all the time, and never opening windows (mostly because I presume she can't anymore), so the air is very stale in her house. The worst manifestation of this is in the bathroom, where there's wallpaper. There's a lot of black mould there, which is obviously very dangerous for someone her age. I was only there for five days, so I couldn't fix everything. I'm hopeful that my dad will be able to convince her that she needs a professional to come in and take care of it, and to have an air exchanger installed. As I said, I love visiting, but I also dislike it because that means leaving, and every time I visit, it is increasingly likely to be my last visit there, which is absolutely heartbreaking. As much as I'd like to convince myself that she still has a decade left, she likely doesn't. I go as frequently as I can, which right now is once every two years (international travel is expensive, yo), but I'm really hoping that I can improve that for 2016. I hate it because every time I leave, I have to say goodbye to her forever. My sister doesn't visit as often as she should; I hope she doesn't have any regrets when the worst happens.