toblix

I'm genuinely surprised that not everyone here has the same taste in music.

Good to hear! I'm betting they're not interested in another internet thing where everybody is angry at them for being stupid.

This is brilliant in a profound way. The gameplay makes more sense than QWOP. My current best is 14,2m

That game is the motherfucking shit. What has Chris Sawyer been doing the last six years anyway? WORKING ON A SWEET GAME?!

Maybe, but i really like the 3D effect. It's not straining my eyes in a painful or annoying way, it's just that it's very obvious my eyes are not used to this weird new world where everything is in focus all the time, and it's more mentally straining than physically straining on the eyes, I guess. My explanation, she is terrible.

I can feel it straining the eyes a bit, and so I think I might play it in shorter sessions, but it's not like I played any of the other DSes for long stretches of time anyway. Although the software is very polished in terms of how much of it is included and how many fun little details are implemented (like the face-napping UFO and detecting people's faces when you point the thing around everywhere playing AR-games), the whole thing seems a bit prototypey. I don't know if they could've made the 3D screen any better with today's technology, but the zone in which you need to keep you head perfectly still to avoid the graphics becoming a mess is just barely good enough.

I've added the three of you – my stupid code is 2578-3121-9334.

You have better think again if you think I'm going to spend a weekend in a sweaty tent full of naked men and fishing poles.

I'm such a huge idiot, adjusting the difficulty never even occured to me. I never pick hard in any game because I hate getting frustrated and rage quitting. However, it is the most obvious thing to do in my case. Thanks for pointing it out. And yes, there's an option for it right in the main menu, so maybe it even does it in real-time.

I got mine today, and it's pretty sweet. I imagine the 3D effect will stop being so fascinating in and of itself, and that it'll end up getting about as much use as my DS Lite (i.e. not much at all) but at least I've now seen proper 3D without glasses. It's almost as good as if you look away.

So this is almost out, this game over here. Anyone know if it's good? I hear there are reviews coming out, but I'm not seeing anything anywheres. Also, PC has been the platform on which I intend to purchase this title. Anyone know some reasons why maybe I should reconsider this?

Wouldn't hurt to have some friendly music playing in the background to put you in the camping mood. I'm sure there's a jQuery plugin for that.

I'm just in the beginning parts of the game (all the powers haven't even been introduced yet) but it seems the stealth is super powerful. I can move around while cloaked forever, and I only need a couple of seconds for myself to fully recharge for another leg of my unnoticeable journey through the military compound, killing soldiers left and right. To counter this super powerful ability I imagine they'll have to do the Splinter Cell thing where the enemy guys eventually go and buy whatever goggles they need to see me. It might've been a bug, but at least once a guy has found a body, become really agitated and started investigating, but seconds later go "it was probably nothing." Maybe an artifact of early-game difficulty adjustment?

As a side note, reading that design doc when it was released, I found myself incredible offended that they list schoolchildren as the first example of pedestrians that can be run over by cars. I don't know if they chose themselves not to include children, or if someone else had to tell them not to, but I'm quite happy they did.

So it went a little bit like this: A couple of days ago: noticed someone (Chris, I think) saying something positive about Crysis 2. Hadn't really thought about it, but I had played a lot of console stuff, and could use a game that lets you aim at people's heads like only the PC can. So, I preordered. I was excited. Today I thought "cool, I'll play Crysis 2" and clicked Play in Steam, which didn't load the game, but instead a slowly progressing dialog telling me Steam was decrypting the game files. Disappointed! After leaving and coming back, it was done decrypting. I clicked Play again and... it installed a bunch of stuff. More disappointed! I started the game proper, and the screen changed resolution to something out of 2002, with a blurry up-scaled 4:3 image and a screen telling to me to press start to start or something like that. Very disappointed and ready to rage about consoles destroying PC gaming. I had to register for an account or some shit, and clumsily enter the serial key by Shift+Tabbing back and forth between the game and the Steam overlay, and manually adjust the screen resolution back to the native resolution of my monitor and operating system. At this point I was seething with offended nerd rage, and was composing sarcastic little 140 character messages about what a total and EPIC fail this joke of a game was. I started the game and was blown out of my face and ass by the super-smooth graphics that are so good you're constantly wiggling the mouse around to confirm that it didn't just cut to a pre-rendered clip. I ran around an empty warehouse throwing lighting equipment around because it just looks so God damned beautiful, and there's so much effectery going on I feel like buying the computer was a fabulous decision! The combat feels very solid, and there's nice touches like auto-leaning over cover, which makes it feel really modern, I guess. The rapist voice that tells me what my suit can do is a little disconcerting.

Although the game is not up my particular alley, I just felt I had to say how good it makes me feel to look at a good, crisp, PC interface where the text is small, things need to be clicked with a mouse, and everything is sharp and nice and not upscaled from 720p.

Knowing Nintendo they burned the friend code bullshit deep into the CPU with the most powerful laser in Japan.

I can be the beta tester who leaks every release.

I'm almost ashamed to admit how addictive the game is. It's hard to explain why I have to restore every little corner shop, especially since there's not even an achievement for it. It's just that... there are these icons, and when you restore a shop you get some more income and closer to those hundred per cents. I watched the Assassin's Creed 2 talk from GDC 2010, and was surprised by how ice-cold and factory-like the whole thing was. They were tasked to produce a commercially successful, award-winning game with this and that feature in this exact period of time with no room for failure and no room for changing direction at any point. There wasn't any talk of creativity or having fun at work or any of the things I would sort of expect to hear at a games developer conference; instead it was about using testing metrics and getting developers to work hard even though what they were working on was peripheral to the core game play. The whole thing made Ubisoft seem very much more like a game mill than, say, Naughty Dog. Yes, multiplayer was surprisingly fun. Walking around like the ice-cold Code 47 hitman, brushing against your target in a crowd and then bam! stabbing his head was pretty fun.

I watched Chahi's (and a/the programmer) GDC Europe 2010 presentation on this, and holy volcano does this thing look good. They did some really smart bit-twiddling stuff to able to process all the information on PC, Xbox and PS3, and found whatever common ground they could to be able to code once for all of them. I hope the PC version will take advantage of whatever hardware is there, though. Anyway, if you can, check out the presentation (the same video might be available elsewhere, too). The way the terrain displaces water as it rises out of nothing is fucking majestic.

I noticed Risk is available on iPhone. What with Words with Friends and Carcassonne already going on, would anyone be interested in this?

I auto-ignored the game based on the prefix Ghost Recon, not because Ghost Recon is terrible, but because I have this notion that portable versions of bigger games are all terrible, and I imagine low-res men running around barren fields doing a limited subset of whatever the original console game let you do. I'm sure I'm wrong, but that's what made me ignore Shadow Wars anyway. Maybe they should do a two-pronged marketing thing where one focuses on the bro segment, and the other did the "From the makers of X-COM: Terror from the Deep" appeal to people exactly like me.

This is near Stavanger, Norway, right?

The very same. He's also done some other stuff – I think he said something about working on a Ducktales game. Anyway, yes, it's the Epic Mickey Logo Guy.