Marek

Deus Ex 3 was actually confirmed... probably half a year ago, when the new Eidos studio was announced. Back then it was widely speculated to be part of a "loss leader" strategy. I.e. they don't expect Deus Ex 3 to be enormously succesful financially, but it will attract talent and help get the new studio off the ground.

Hi! You look like someone who could use an adventure game! This is actually a blatant plug, but over at AdventureGamers.com we've just introduced a download portal just for point-and-click style adventure games. It's a collaboration between the site and a company called Lezard Electronic (which takes care of the order processing and logistics). This is something that I worked on a lot during the past 2 months and it's great to have it finally online. More details are in this article. There's currently 23 titles on the shop, including three games you can't find in stores yet: Darkness Within, Sherlock Holmes vs. Arsène Lupin and Cleopatra: A Queen's Destiny. The latter two probably won't see an English-language retail release until 2008, so they're pretty much exclusive to Adventure Shop. More titles will be added to the catalog over time. We hope to have the Ankh games, the Longest Journey series and Bone on there pretty soon, and with more to come.

Update: some of the games use StarForce, specifically StarForce Frontline, which is a version of StarForce that will activate games by verifying a serial key. That's a different piece of software than the one that caused such a ruckus about two years ago. Developers can choose whatever basic protection they want to include in the games, but nothing that will cause problems with your computer.

To be honest I'm getting kind of confused by the huge number of projects that the Cylons apparently have going on (the farms, the experiments shown in Razor, the attempted destruction of humanity, etc.), as well as the huge number of entities within the Cylon mythology (male Hybrid, female Hybrid significant seven, final five, Hera). I'm basically getting less and less interested in that part of the show. That said, Razor was pretty interesting in a fairly understated kind of way. Nice of them to paint in some more details before going forward in season 4.

I wasn't ware of any of the games using StarForce. I'll look into this tomorrow. Most likely it's just a developer having forgotten to remove the logo somewhere, though. StarForce works by actually checking a physical property of a physical disc that is usually lost when copying and burning it, so that wouldn't even make sense for a download.

I just noticed this on that website: "4 wireless (plus 3 wired controllers via USB)". How the crap are you supposed to play rock band with 4 wired peripherals then? Can you add a USB splitter?

I have no problems with the elevators and haven't noticed any framerate issues, though I rarely notice framerate drops anyway. The aliens look amazing indeed. I have that big guy in my team all the time just for the small chance of seeing another closeup of him during a dialog sequence. Shephard on the other hand looks like an action figure.

Heh yes that would be great. But it would also be nice to just see a space opera that doesn't explode all over the place plot-wise. Mass Effect's cliches would be a lot more tolerable if it just started out with you preventing Saron (sp?) let's day... wanting to assasinate one important diplomat or something, without you yet knowing what's really going on. Star Wars starts out slow too, with basically just a farmer kid on a ranch doing stuff.

If you play the occasional shooter you should have no trouble with the combat. I set it to normal and it's fine. I've done the first mission now and messed around in the first large area (the Citadel) up to the point where you get your ship. So far it's been 90% dialog and like 10% combat. In fact, for a large part it feels pretty much like an adventure game.

I'm a few hours in (still messing around in the Citadel). So far I like it, but don't love it (yet?). I think the dialog sequences are great. Hooray for close-ups and subtle camera movements! Hooray for an excellent dialog system! (One that allows you to make dialog decisions extremely fast.) The characterizations aren't too terrible so far either. When a game does a lot of things like that right though, it makes the shitty parts all the more obvious. Like the cliche sci-fi / video game plot. Sure, all games do this, but when a game like Mass Effect does it, it's twice as annoying. (EARLY-GAME SPOILERS AHEAD.) One moment you're on a mission to retrieve some ancient but rather unspectacular-looking interstellar beacon mcguffin and next think you know the fate of the entire galaxy hangs in the balance. Characters immediately assume that the beacon holds the key to hundreds of years of technological progress. Deceases could be cured! Because it's, like, a beacon, and it's super high tech! Then some dude shows up and kills some other dude, and it's automatically assumed that this character will destroy everything, break up The Alliance, and end humanity as we know it. The main character also has a vague beacon-induced nightmare and everyone is like... OMFG. Then the beacon explodes and I guess nobody cares about it anymore. I mean, sure, I don't mind a story about the Fate of Humanity and the Destruction of the Galaxy, or whatever. But could we please ease into it a little? What if it wasn't a beacon but like ... an ancient intergalactic sandwich maker? Calm down you idiots. Anyway, whatever. I'll continue playing.

Just a serial number. No DRM.

I played it for a little bit on Friday and then watched as other people played it some more. In short, I expect the story to be underwhelming, based on what I saw. The sci-fi element of it is pretty lame and clearly created as a convenient but pretty out of place framework for future sequels. I also expect the missions to be somewhat underwhelming. But there's something about the game that does seem like a lot of fun. There are GTA-esque elements in there (find hidden packages on rooftops, kill x number of templars, and just fucking around and climbing onto things) that should be very entertaining. The atmosphere of the game is wonderful.

Yeah I randomly wondered about GGE like a week ago too. I haven't used it in ages. It's not really delivering, is it? If they can't get it to where it needs to be, maybe they should scale down and make it a 3rd party app for OpenSocial.

Hi. My name is Marek and I lost my entire iTunes library in a computer crash.

I'm in a similar position as my Powerbook G4 just died due to a little... unfortunate accident. Thank you for mentioning that Wii thing. I didn't know that and it's just what I need right now.

Well, there's nothing wrong with doing a blog for a while and then wrapping it up when it runs out of steam. It's what 'JC Barnett' with Japanmanship and it was probably a good move. But his blog is still archived and all of the great posts he made are still there.

Nice, Duncan! Will definitely read! For me it's a matter of not wanting to post utter crap on my game blog. I do have a secret personal blog somewhere (it's not actually secret, it just lives inside a Dutch social network) and in that case, it's a lot easier. On my personal blog I can just blab about how I saw a pigeon on the street with a slice of ham draped over its back, or that I think Superbad is funny, or that I spoke with a girl who claims to work in a buttplug factory. That shit is easy. Writing at least semi-intelligent pieces on gaming or the game industry is not.

Chalk up a vote against The IT Crowd for me too, thnx. It's unbearably bad.

Brutallegend.com is DF-owned (Caroline Esmurdoc listed in the whois is the producer of the game).

Miffy is indeed master of the Guitar Hero universe. My score is alright, although my skills have totally plateaued. I just can't finish the last 6 songs on hard. I think it's Psychobilly Freakout that's keeping me from progressing further.

Radiohead are using the donate-whatever-you-think-it's-worth-to-you model though, so if you want to get the MP3s for less than a CD I believe you can.

Haha whoops I thought I'd never told that before.

Hey, fun fact. You know who else is into progressive house? American McGee. A long time ago he gave me access to his private FTP with proghouse mixes which is really nice of him. Also a buddy of his runs Proton Radio apparently.On another topic, if anyone knows good latin music other than Buena Vista Social Club, Ibrahim Ferrer, or that Rhythm Del Mundo cover CD, please let me know. I need some for salsa and merengue practice.

Suggest questions here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=193159

GAF is like a giant shit-filled cave, but if you dig deep enough, there's some diamond encrusted gold chalices of awesome in-jokes and photoshop threads to be found. I let other people do most of the shit digging.