toblix

If you need 12 players just to start the game, and don't mind a player who's short-sighted in his decisions and refuses to role-play his character, and if time is running out, add me or whatever.

Apparently the new Lara Croft game is fun. Tim Schafer plays it with his daughter or something.

Actually, after ranting about Trillian's shitty UI yesterday, I got a PM about the beta of the next version, which looked really nice. So I bought that.

I don't know – whenever I look up strategies to defeat the bosses they're all "you need to be level 50, and you should have two secret glitch burning bar stools and seven melee magazines, and obviouslyBrad, Jeff and the guy in the mecha from the secret final level should be with you, carrying hand-made bazookas. You'll need to stand on one exact spot to keep him from reaching you and then shoot for forty minutes and I'll stop my stupid exaggeration now, but you get the point. I'm up for playing co-op, of course, but I've no longer any hope of actually finishing the game.

That was one of my usual rage-quit posts, but I was so tired of spending so much time running from the last save spot to a boss that's just annoying to fight, and then I spend so much time trying out some different tactics – none of them actually working – and each time I fail I have to run all the way from the fucking save point toilet, and all the while I'm thinking that it won't get easier, only harder, and I think about having to fight many more bosses, each one more frustrating than the last, and I think about restarting the game again, and then it hits me that I'm only having fun when I'm making progress, and one of the core tenets of this game's design philosophy is making the player invest a lot of time in making progress and then just shitting a huge shit all over it. I know it's not a bad game, it's just not for me. And it makes me sad, because there's so many great things about it, and I would like to have a good time playing through the story.

Holy shit, I fell in love with this instantly. Well, first I hated it because the insidious install program wanted to set up ten kinds of toolbars and adware for me, but when I launched it I fell in love. Not only does it look good – it looks like Live Messenger without all the ads and crap, and it's customizable in all the right ways. Thanks!

O.M.G I just found out this game was a fucking piece of shit!

Oh, did I say electronic entertainment distribution platform? What I meant was instant messaging.

Yeah, it may be complex and deep, but apparently there are hidden or random connections and variables that make it completely impossible to have any sort of strategy. For an employee you have levels, stats, jobs and energy, for a game there's platform, type, genre and direction. Some of these parameters are clear, but it's not nearly clear enough how these work together and affect the stats of the games you make. It's quite possible I'm being fooled – that nothing affects anything, everything's completely random, and the game is based on the player imagining connections between all these numbers. Still, if I just try one more combination, that might be the one...

Ah, fantastic! Thanks! Now I won't have to release any more of those damn checkers games.

Okay, is there any way at all to determine whether my man will do a damn fine job when doing his part in making a game or if he'll complain about having to do it again, other than trying to remember? For a while I thought it was linked to energy, but it seems it's just a simple flag without representation in the UI. So far I've made sure by creating cheap "buffer games" where I make sure to outsource everything so that I can use my own highly trained staff for the big hits, but I don't think that's how they do it in real life.

Sure, but this post probably defines the lower bound of his potential pretentiousness, as far as I'm concerned.

Really? I didn't think he came off that pretentious in that particular post.

I was pretty impressed at how the first dialogue sequence managed to not suck horribly, even though the premise was so crazy. It might've had something to do with them not just saying tons of shit.

Yeah, my badly stated point was that I initially ignored it because it sounded like DLC, and then haven't un-ignored it since.

I really liked FO3, but with the modern trend of DLC, I automatically ignore everything that sounds like it. I did this with Assassin's Creed Brotherhood or whatever it's called, too. I'm not even sure if any of these are full games or add-ons or what.

Got this today. Only played the first chapter, but Jesus! The torch mentioned above and the sequence where you're heading towards the skyscraper were so good.

It's pretty incredible. I played this on and off for about a year after launch. Never played the expansions, never joined a guild, never got higher than level 46 or thereabouts. Still, all this talk of destroying the game world gets my panties in such a bunch, and all the memories start to surface. I don't remember the gameplay itself as being incredibly fun, but I do remember the locations and characters, and I feel strangely attached to them now that they're being all destroyed. I almost want to start playing again, just to revisit the old starting areas, Westfall, The Crossroads, etc before they are lost. I really wonder if players will one day be able to wander around in the pre-Cataclysm world, like a museum.

Yeah, there's no obvious point to the film itself, and it's purely a challenge to the viewer. It's the director who introduces the context of being "molested by the Serbian government."

I'd say that If you can watch the Saw movies you can watch A Serbian Film, though everything packs more of a punch since this isn't cheap Hollywood slop, but what appears to be more of a serious political statement. Everything is shown, the camera doesn't pan away. It begins slowly, but by the end they've covered pretty much everything people can do one another. My biggest concern is what the child actors actually saw and heard during the production, but in that regard I thought Kick Ass was worse. edit: Just to be clear – this is not a fun movie. Read this.

I found it interesting, but a bit confusing, especially as the game appeared to start me in a tutorial, but then stopped giving me hints on anything. So I did some ringtones and made a mystery puzzle game called Battle Rapper, which got mediocre reviews. Seems fun enough, though I'm not addicted (yet).

Cool, if you tilt your head it sort of looks like a dick!

Cool, but if you tilt your head it sort of looks like a dick.

Yes, but you'd still like a relative difficulty as you progress too, right? I didn't even think Deus Ex 3 would be open-world enough for that to make sense...

Watched A Serbian Film earlier today, and while I wasn't really shocked by the contents, it was slightly disturbing to see it in such a well-produced film. I always expect "shocking" films to have low production values and be slightly dodgy, but this could've been any thriller or drama from anywhere, but then (and this is a spoiler →) Anyway, also saw Repo Men, which ended disappointingly, but had some good violence, by which I mean it showed most of the murders as being gruesome, not just anonymous men falling, grabbing their vests. Also, did anyone else have problems sympathizing with the main characters, who were depicted as huge assholes at the start?