Erkki

Man, I got busy with other things and almost forgot that I wanted to get into painting minis. This equipment list looks really cool, Codicier, now it's on my mind again. Maybe I'll start during

I just finished it and yeah, I like it a lot more than Amnesia. I also think it's one of the best sci-fi stories told in video game format lately, perhaps ever. I liked that it had less of the monster-bits, but one of later ones did frustrate me enough because I didn't figure out the pattern or the monster just repeatedly spawned too close to me. I felt kind of distanced from the psychological horror, though, but I put the error more on my side than the game's. Maybe should have gone for headphones, huddled close to a monitor, instead of big screen & slouching on the couch.

Typical British short-sightedness. Is nobody thinking of Christmas 2017?

The Martian is really good! Everything seems believable (mostly, I'd be curious to see comments from someone at NASA), and visually it's gorgeous. There were even several important female and black characters.

I just got myself a Logitech Harmony Smart Keyboard, to replace the almost-excellent K400. Well, IMHO K400 was the best thing there was. The K400 Plus is likely better, but wasn't available in Estonian yet. So I discovered the Harmony Smart Keyboard, that it's very similar to K400/Plus and even though this was also not available in Estonian, I decided to get the German one. So the initial setup took a bit of fiddling, some dead ends and a few device restarts, but now it seems to be able to switch between activities such as PS3, TV, PC. I never actually watched TV before because the remote was somewhere put away, but maybe I'll start now. It can also turn my Haiku ceiling fan on/off, and the keyboard seems to be functioning nicely for both the PS3 and Windows PC. My devices: BenQ W1070, PS3, Motorola TV box, MonoPrice HDMI switch, BigAss Haiku ceiling fan. It managed to connect all of the devices on first try (most difficult part was looking up the serial number from the bottom of the HDMI switch), no problems there, but I think the hub somehow messed up the states of the devices in it's brain-thing. Only after a restart of the hub (power off-on) did it start correctly switching between activities. And the keyboard just didn't work for a while, dunno exactly what made it start working.

It's out! And for some reason I'm typing on a DS3 and it kind of works! Ok, sorry for the distraction, switched back to keyboard - was trying Controller Companion's radial on screen keyboard -- kind of works but still 10 times slower than a real keyboard. Anyway, what does work surprisingly well with a controller is SOMA. I played Amnesia and the Penumbras with mouse & keyboard, but lately am prefering DS3 for most games (playing from couch), so it was good to find that it works. Even pulling the drawers open, picking up stuff, is not too weird with it, although with a mouse still feels more natural. The game itself is awesome! It's like they have distilled the essence of the kind of games they make and left out the cruft. At least that's what it seems like so far. From the first moments you are interacting with physical things a la Gone Home or Amnesia and it looks great (besides the human characters maybe) and things are introduced at a great pace. The voice acting is not super awesome, but there's not that much of it. Maybe I'll switch to Spanish, try that out (I'm learning it)...

Dick of the Year!

Feist is weird. On one hand, it seems like a filler game. I have been playing it between longer sessions of Life Is Strange and others. But it's really intense for a filler! And I think that's why it is one for me: it's too intense to play for very long. The physics-based combat is really well done. The controls may be a bit floaty, but I like them after getting used to them. And it's actually a hard game. It combines combat and puzzles in a way that bears some similarity to Hotline Miami, and this means you are going to fail and fail and fail some more difficult parts. I'm not THAT thrilled about this repetetive failing part, but on the other hand I enjoy having a real challenge for a while, especially between longer sessions of lighter games. Thankfully, there are also some parts you can just rush through if you are lucky. I really love the look and feel and the physicality of things. It's really solidly designed.

So I finally also started playing this game and finished Episode 2 today. It kind of feels ok in this game to be able to rewind and redo some choices. Overall it has a more exploratory feel than Telltale's games, in which it felt best to play so that you never load and always live with your choices. But something is bothering me in how this Bad Thing at the end of Ep. 2 was handled: PS. I concur with the wish that you could take your own photos since this game is so much about the photography. It's been well done before e.g. in Beyond Good & Evil. Of course it may have complicated things here or destroyed the pacing if you would just keep shooting everything, but it would have made so much narrative sense.

GROW HOME, holy fuck, I just spent seven hours straight playing this. Even though it seemed like a 2-3 hour game at first, when I completed the main mission.

After my statement I kind of felt bad for YA so I googled something like "best young adult movies" and at the end of a list there they had put "The Fault in Our Stars", which stood out from all the others. I guess this doesn't qualify in the same YA category as Hunger Games (being not fantasy?), but it seems pretty good based on the first 15 minutes!

I CAN'T FEEL IT!? Am I dead outside? The first movie was kind of watchable, but not something I'd seek out. Should I see the others? I'm not sure if I have a stomach for most of this YA stuff. Maze Runner seems to get OK ratings, but to me it was AWFUL. It disgusts me to see people saying it is their favourite movie

Drop some wovels and it's just a crusade. Anyway, I'm now kind of curious about Sub-nautica, and sad to hear that wolves ruin The Long Dark I guess I might have to give Don't Starve a try after all.

Wow, has it really been this long? I was looking at some previous trailer here, thought it was new, realized it was from 2013. I guess the game has been mostly done for a while considering Blow seems to spend a lot of his time on his programming language project?

No, it's an English word, look it up.

Yeah, not that sure myself that it could be a reference, just reminded me of it. Here's a comparision of a few frames:

Hmm, dunno. In Estonian it's Robinsonaad so I found (guessed) the English term from that. I haven't also actually seen the English term used much. I even googled it and didn't find anybody put this word together with the survival genre games, so I even thought about changing it to something else for a second.

Whoa, I just watched it. Pretty cool movie in some ways. I wonder if the scene following "What a lovely day" in Fury Road could actually be referencing the ending of Goodbye Pork Pie?

Downloading Goodbye Pork Pie and just watched a chase clip of Shaker Run on YouTube. Not going to watch that whole movie, but the chase was kind of ok. I didn't think of any that I really liked immediately, but there's The Cannonball Run. I recently saw The Fast and the Furious (1955) There's also Cannonball ('76) with David Carradine, that I haven't seen.

I'm a big fan of the movies, even have a Blu-Ray set of the three. I didn't like Mad Max 1 as a kid, but adored Road Warrior and Beyond Thunderdome. When I saw Mad Max 1 again this winter, I appreciated it more. I think the music in that film is a bit annoying, though, which makes it harder for me to enjoy. I really liked the moment in the game when you finally get a V8, it feels like now your car is getting really bad ass.

And now I finished it (at leas the main story). I'm not sure how I feel about the ending. As you can imagine there's a car battle at the end, but by that time I had upgraded my Thunderpoons to the max and I had 15 of them so it was easy to take down all the escort cars. I think generally the thunderpoons are a bit overpowered -- all the convoy takedowns become easy when you have them. As for how the story ends: I'm now probably going to watch Mad Max 1.

I've played for 50 hours now. The game is actually more and more reminding me of Far Cry 2 as well as Far Cry 3 (which mostly has similar base conquering). It touches on the madness of war similarly, the respawning in some enemy locations is similar (but better done here), though you have better means to deal with the interruptions (car combat). The layout is kind of similar, with each area having a central hub where you get missions and which is basically your base in that area (ok, in FC2 the arms dealers were more important than the story hubs). Very similar to the diamonds and tapes that encouraged you to explore, this one has scrap and "history relics", which tell the tale of the world going mad. Mad Max also has this permanent threat reduction that FC2 didn't have (taking down snipers and scarecrow statues) and what is required for upgrading the car. FC2 also had convoys that you could take down! Overall, I'd say the exploration feels rather similar in ways -- going after the bleep of the diamonds, then just exploring without any clear purpose, finding a bunch of bad guys and loot. Gradually getting more and more badass with the help of weapon upgrades. And the ballons are not exactly the same as the Far Cry 3 radio towers -- they actually don't show you things automatically, you have to look for them yourself and the binoculars are not that great for actually finding the hidden things. They mostly just give you a general overview of the area. Of course tonally they are very different and this game also makes quite horrible use of tropes vs women.

Yay! I'm not alone. I'm close to done with upgrading everything. It's getting a bit easier now, but I don't mind so much, it makes sense because the story is also about upgrading the car. I just did the worst part (all of the mine fields) first and now that's out of the way, I'll focus on the story missions and remaining random stuff. I gotta say yes I'm having fun doing all the side thingies, because each time there's something different (well, ok, not with the mine fields and the statues). In Assassin's Creed I would get bored way sooner.

What the fuck? http://kotaku.com/assassins-creed-rogue-the-kotaku-review-1661801416 A big Assassin's Creed game released at about the same time as Unity and nobody knows about it (was mentioned in Idle Thumbs 185) Although, I remain rather skeptical as the writer seems to think that playing the Abstergo bits is interesting, the role reversal does sound somewhat interesting.

I think I also forgot The Witcher 3 when thinking GOTY, and the fact that this is perhaps only the 5th or so game I've played this year.