Jake

Nope, I forgot! I could create some sort of dramatic reenactment, but the original state of my PS3 is lost, and it's reintegrated into my stack o consoles.

Why would we joke about a thing like that? Are we animals?!

Hotel Dusk looked great but was unplayable. I completed it, but only because I'm an idiotic self-flagellating self-loathing retard. AKA an lover of fine adventure games. I have strong fear of this sequel, only because I might be dumb enough to buy it, and complete it. I usually read a book before going to bed, but the prospect of an adventure game on a handheld console is sometimes too much for my weak self to resist and take precedence, even if its an exercise in frustration and bad design.

The sequels aren't as good or as fresh as the first one by any means, but they have some good bits if you really want to play. The sequels both get better as they go, too. The latter two cases are far better than the earlier ones in both games. I didn't check out the fourth one (Apollo Justice) because it looked like it amplified my least favorite parts of the games. I like Phoenix Wright the best when it's almost a straight detective story, with just a little oddness or goofiness thrown in (and a billion gotchyas and plot twists, etc, of course). The further it gets into magic, and characters who are completely batshit insane wacky design city from the moment you meet them, the less interested I am. Both sequels steered in that direction, but in the later cases I felt balanced the convoluted stuff with the fun I had in the first game of the pure investigation, barely pulling it off and obliterating people in court. All the stuff with locks and magic stones and stuff, man I didn't care for that at all. The distinction between hidden object clue hunting, and the inventory- and dialog tree-driven courtroom stuff was really clean and distinct in the first game, and they got muddier with it as it went. I... Maybe I'm old. Edit: re-reading this thread, Rodi's post reminded me of Godot, the prosecutor in the third game, who is in fact great, and does elevate that game quite a lot. I remembered thinking "the third one's far better than the frustrating second one," and that's definitely why. As the third game starts to close out with its final two cases, if you've invested anything in the characters/world of the game and want to see events happen on the more marco level, it almost feels justified playing through both sequels to get to that point. ... Not to a "slag through a game you hate just to see the end that makes it worthwhile" level, but if you're getting something out of it in general that compels you to keep playing, the end of the third game is rewarding. For posterity, here's Godot's extremely anime-detective theme as performed by some sort of jazz combo that Capcom commissioned for an album.

The visual design of this game is stabbing my eyes every time I play it, but the fun of actually beating my way through a 2D Mario game is winning out. If this game had the solid visual cohesion of Mario 3, World, or Yoshi's Island it would be the best ever. Instead it's a pretty good Mario platformer with the aesthetics I'd expect to ese in a freemium casual web MMO which runs entirely in banner ads across the web, or something. Also the midi "AAH, AAAAH!" choir samples are just as lame and ill-fitting as they were in the DS version. The game's great though. I just died a few times on the World 2 minifortress and stopped playing for a while. Looking forward to getting some 2-4 player in.

When I read this thread's title all I could think of was

The Giant Bomb guys seemed to find the controls ... "different" than classic Mario controls, which might mean they have some of the DS wobbliness, which I guess would be too bad. The koopa shells move in DS-style slow motion, I noticed (and they commented on), which is too bad, but there's so much other great stuff going on in that video that I can deal. The "World [coin]-1" and "World [coin]-2" levels in the multiplayer coin challenge were both great. I love it when Nintendo takes their iconic stuff (eg the level layouts to Mario Bros. and Super Mario Bros world 1-1) and plays with them.

New 2D Mario game = exciting. Watching Giant Bombs multiplayer quick look and various videos of = mind explode. I'm sure I'm not alone in always wanting to be able to have "2 player" in a Super Mario game mean that both Mario and Luigi could run through the levels together, and it looks like they've taken that to the most extreme extreme possible. The stuff in the latter half of the Giant Bomb video is pretty amazing.This re-awakens my wish for Nintendo to have a real online play system. Being able to get friends into a lobby and then jump into a SMB game together would be so good. Alternatively, I wish I had more friends.

"Cool Cool Coolgame: Ask for him by name." (They didn't. But the mention of Goldblum in that comic immediately made me think of Thumbs.)

it's totally in the blog! glad you enjoyed it

A Space Cop Adventure in Space "Space Boss; The Lord of Space" We play catch-up this week, clearing out both our backlog of nearly-current games, and our overflowing bag of reader mail. Also there's a blog now. Games Discussed: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Spider: The Secret of Bryce Manor, Spider Solitaire, Time Donkey, Wander Donkey, Mass Effect, Gratuitous Space Battles, AaaaaAAaaaAAA!!! - A Reckless Disregard for Gravity, Novint Falcon

sweet.

Oh god I got it today. Amazing!

He surely just squeezed.

We were joking about fake Nick-less podcasts, and that was one that came up that particularly cracked us up. If you haven't noticed, we have a tendency to come up with a single idea, become temporarily over enamored with how it strikes us at the time, and run with it nonstop for about 45 seconds, and then find it irresistible to make passing references to it for the next couple of minutes/hours/weeks.

LeChuck was

I have not received a cross-stitch! Hopefully it arrives tomorrow! (Monday.)

I kept hearing Twin Peaks out in the jungle this episode, which was weird. Someone on the Telltale forums ripped and edited together 18 minutes of music from Ch 4 and its quite nice for those who like the tracks in the game.

Yeah that, except there's no actual reference to that in the IGN Game Scoop podcast that I could find.

Little Big Adventure 2 prolly

I just some listened to some of their Scoopcast to try and find a reference to that but couldn't either. Disappointed!

Buggy Saints Row is a great great thing. I wish that guy would do more songs.

Photos demanded!

There's that gross monkey statue outside the hut in Monkey 2.

Blargh I was probably fooled by pre-rendered cutscenes popping up, even in the environment I was already in. I thought that maybe they had their vert count low enough on screen at a time to accomodate rendering two scenes at once (which many games have to do, eg if they support split-screen multi), and were using that to their advantage... but just dropping into a very lightly compressed captured video of an in-engine cutscene is a lot easier. I work on games which are so small that a multi-minute HD-res rendered cutscene would often occupy a foortprint similar in size to some of our smaller games, so I tend to not ever think in terms of them.