Erkki

I played a bit of the demo yesterday. It seems like a better Far Cry, of which I only played the demo, though. Runs quite nicely on 8800 GTS / Dual Core Opteron 185 (2,6GHz) / 2 GB RAM -- but I haven't looked at the settings yet and just played with the defaults.

Happy birthday, Spaff! (oops... only 2 days late)

Heh, somewhy I always thought the player was an android. But being human makes more sense.

Some of his previous games were pretty cool. Especially 5DAS.

This was the first one I didn't like. Could it be just my mood or lack of interest in the game reviewed or was it somewhat boring for you too?

Just finished it the second time, this time with Developer commentary on. I wholly agree with this being one of the best Half-Life experiences yet! The last battle was especially awesome the first time, when it felt really overwhelming and I hadn't learned all the tricks yet.

Sokoban?

Redwall, I agree about Minerva. I think some action at the bottom was cool too, but the first level was the best. Most of the middle parts of the game I could have done without. Also, I too have HL2 and Ep1 to give away.

America! Fuck yeah!

Getting back to the title... I didn't like it at first, but it's starting to grow on me. I think it's very fitting actually.

It's a heavy metal comedy/parody. I can't imagine it not being extreme. I used to listen to heavy metal a lot as a kid (only a few bands actually, mostly Manowar). So far this game seems frighteningly close to what I've imagined a heavy metal themed game would be like.

Anyone remember SCRAMM?

Please invite me too: http://steamcommunity.com/id/villane

Holy shit! This is going to be totally awesome!

Possibly the best ending ever! Or at least one of the best.

I'm thinking about getting SingStar. Which version would you recommend? The store with the best selection here only has "Rocks!", "Legends" and "Party".

Cool. IMHO something like the wiimote should become the default remote control for anything that has a screen attached -- TV,VHS,consoles,DVD players,Digi TV boxes etc. all could be controlled with something like this, with occasional on-screen keyboards, instead of having N remote controls, one for each machine (ok there are universal remotes, but they can be clumsy). It's pretty cool that nintendo has made the wiimote somewhat standards compatible so that people can connect it to PCs and play with it.

I was being half ironic, but also just letting off some steam, don't take what I said too seriously. Lets just say that Russia has caused a lot of anger in these parts lately (and not just lately, but actually always), and is trying to use the fact that it controls a lot of energy resources as a wedge to get its will through in other areas. Soon they are going to increase their military/espionage in the Baltic Sea a lot with the excuse of protecting the gas line that is going to be built. You may have heard, recently Russia started *unofficial* (officially they can say "there are no sanctions" but in fact there are) economic sanctions against Estonia, and attacked our embassy in Moscow, also "unofficially" through a youth movement under Putins command, because we moved a statute honoring fallen USSR WW2 soldiers (who proceeded to occupy the Baltics after winning the war) from the center of our capital to a military cemetary in out capital.

I hope if China ever becomes hostile it will conquer parts of Russia and Russia becomes a small unimportant country. That would teach those bastards a lesson. Of course, that would create another problem... Anyway, it seems that Russia can never become a democratic country. Some semioticians who have studied Russia think that the the Russian people can never* accept anything else but a despot ruling over them. For China, there may be some hope. ----- * maybe never is a bit strong

Does it support OpenID? I'm really excited about OpenID. Estonia started a ID provider that allows anyone with an eID card to have a semi-official openID with two-factor security. For example, mine is http://open.id.ee/erkki.lindpere_NNNN (and the NNNN numbers will be gone once my certificates are updated to a newer version). A later version will allow anonymous ID-s as well, but still guaranteeing that it belongs to a real Estonian citizen or resident. (but OpenID is not quite secure enough for online banking, elections and stuff) Something like this in every country could enable all kinds of cool things with social networks and stuff. For example, online petitions could have signatures that are almost certainly from real, different people, even if using anonymous ID-s. And different social networking services could interoperate better -- I've never used Facebook, but I understand that it also allows that -- but you have to give Facebook control of everything. With OpenID, control remains in your hands. But there are privacy issues with this, of course.

I know here at thumbs we are all supposed to think that review scores suck etc., but I must confess that overall I really like GameSpot's review system. Sometimes, nothing beats a good textual treatment that doesn't try to sum it up in numbers -- like the reviews at Idle Thumbs. But most of the time, I'm simply browsing around and don't have time to read that much (it may also be because I'm a relatively slow reader). That would especially be true if I wouldn't even know which sites/reviewers have tastes similar to my own so I would have to read a lot of reviews instead of blindly trusting one. So for these cases, I really like the short summaries that provide a lot of info that fits on one screen, for example the attached The Darkness review summary. And I like that I can see all of this without even scrolling to see the text, and that I can sort games by the review score etc. That doesn't mean that I think the score is necessarily a good indicator of the game. Actually, I almost never agree with GameSpot's scores, but I do think they are not too much off. I can sort a list of games by the score and there's a good chance that games I like are near the top, rather than near the bottom. With exceptions. As for their text reviews, I haven't read them for a long time, because I think they are mostly worthless, but I like the video reviews (although the text in them is probably the same, just shorter) because they show you the game and sum up the reviewer's opinion at the same time, and in less time than it would take me to read the text. It seems they've introduced some new features, giving various medals/badges to games that deserve them (see attached example again). My first impression is that I really like this (if it ends up being representative) and if games would be searchable by this, that would be especially cool. Mostly I think of GameSpot as a huge database, that probably has something about most of the games that I want information on, and trailers and videos, and somewhat indicative scores. There certainly is a place for both such databases, and sites like Idle Thumbs that never want to become a database and take the contents of the review more seriously so that they are always a good read. I'd actually like to see more of the latter. Note: probably similar things can be said about several other sites, I just brought up gamespot because Thumbs and GameSpot are almost the only gaming related sites I visit these days.

Thanks for pointing that out, Marek. I actually didn't notice all of the changes and even forgot that there used to be separate scores for graphics, sound etc. (never looked at them much).

I didn't actually read much of this thread before my previous post or click any links... but now I did and... Damn, I want this game! I'm tempted to get an Xbox 360 just for this (and Gears of War, and I think GTA4 is coming on the Xbox first?).