Jake

I think the place to buy the soundtracks is Japan.

please notify me the next time you plan to play defcon during american business hours.

Attention tardtoblix: do some research. Those MIDI ones were in fact just samples/scratch tracks. The full live recordings are now out and available on many websites.

While the Myst and Riven games don't have an art style 'overlaid' on top of everything (things aren't drawn to appear painted, or super-distorted, or monochromatic, or whatever) - they're pretty photorealistic - those games are dripping in unique and inventive architectural art direction, which is a very different story from Crysis, which is a game basically attempting to replicate an island with guys and some buildings on it. You see art and architecture in Myst and Riven that you would never see in another game or film because it was designed to be visually unique even while striving for photorealism. Crisis is just going for the photoreal part.

21 / 840 Good enough for me!

Is your avatar a kevin smith character? I've been meaning to ask that for ages.

It likely means Harmonix will be pidgeonholed into doing only Guitar Hero forever, regardless of what they want to do, plus we'll probably be getting something hilarious like Hip Hop Hooray Hip Hop Hero and other needless spin-offs which are branded "Harmonix" but developed by completely different teams who MTV can get away with paying less.

I like what people are attributing to "according to Telltale." That blog of Emily's didn't actually say all that much, but people are reading a shitton into it. More clearly stated information can be found here.

I occasionally read Kotaku and Joystiq, but neither of them are actually all that good at anything beyond pointing out random shit they find. I wouldn't mind that, except for the fact that everyone who writes for those sites seems to be under the impression that they are in fact actual journalists. Their absolute lack of fact checking, getting quotes, sourcing stories, or even just Googling for something before shitting out an editorial brick pretty much proves they have no idea what they're doing. Blogs are fine, and bloggers can do a good job of reporting news, but bloggers aren't inherently journalists. I don't really think Kotaku or Joystiq are good journalists or good bloggers (they're better at the latter than the former), but they seem to think they excel at the whole shebang. It's really tiring. It's so painful to see some patently inaccurate story on their site, to write them a correction or added fact that would make it correct, only to be ignored, with a piece of wholly untrue "news" sitting festering on their front page with people commenting on it as if it's fact. God. As far as gaming blogs go, I do like 4 Color Rebellion a bit. Unlike most other semi-large-size gaming blogs, they are more focused on fun and pointing out interesting things, not on claiming to be some sort of voice of fact and real information, when they're really just some schmoe with a login to Gawker's CMS.

i design webpages and user interface stuff for an adventure game company! woo

Half Life 2 is an action game full of enemies who shoot at you, but there are plenty of puzzle-type situations throughout every Half Life game, and it's not much of a stretch to see the sort of physics-engine-inspired puzzles from Half Life 2 take a turn for the even more ridiuclous (and fun) with the portal gun involved. The fact that you could conceivably fight monsters by flinging them through portals which then smack them against walls or drop them off cliffs is fairly intriguing.

Valve's already said its part of the HL2 universe, so no use wasting hopes on that.

Welcome to the Idle Forums. PS: Both of those trailers are insane and awesome. HL2 was already a guaranteed buy for me but now it's pretty much off the charts anticipation-wise.

The Hellboy animated stuff is using a slightly different character designs and visual style than Mignola's comics, at least from what I read/saw a few months back.

* Mike Mignola * Bryan Fuller * Portrait of Abraham Lincoln with rapidly rotating mouth slot to simulate talking. If this doesn't get picked up I will be very sad.

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed Pirates of the Caribbean 2. It was a pretty shady movie all around, poorly edited, too much going on yadda yadda yadda but man it was really fun. Also the third film is clearly going to be a Monkey Island festival.

Except it's not a remake. It's a re-release. It's just Sonic 1 with a bonus move. There have been retro throwback Sonic games for ages (since right after the GBA launch), so "remakes of classics" are old hat for Sonic.

Not to nitpick but TFC still pales in comparison to the original Quakeworld Team Fortress. TFC always felt clunkier to me, more rigid Given the visual appearance of TF2 I'm hoping clunkiness won't be an issue though.

I'm reading this right now. It's a pretty enjoyable pirate adventure novel.

Idle Banter != Games

So far this weekend I've played a little Pikmin 2 (multiplayer) and failed to get enough sleep.

Yeah Doom 3 tech is hit or miss, but blah. I had a lot of fun with the demo. And yes, the atmosphere in that whole opening scene was so damn good. The jukebox callback at the end of the demo pretty much sealed the deal. I'll definitely be buying Prey.

That's why I love steam. I replaced about 70% of my PC's components 6 months ago. Right before I went to bed the night I set it up, I installed Steam and signed in. I woke up the next morning and my entire Valve software library was sitting there 100% ready to go. So awesome.

Alternatively, submit a full-on miniature podcast audio rant of your own so Spaff and Marek can make fun of you, or send in just one half of a point-counterpoint - maybe someone somewhere will rudely fill in the other half for you. The sky's the limit with podcasting!

I'd love it if someone made a half-size GBA cart (to fit in that half-size gba slot on the lite) containing basic PDA functionality. It would never leave my DS, and I'd have a device that did calendaring and contact management that I'd actually want to carry around with me (because it would be primarily used to play new SMB, mario kart, etc).