vimes

I enjoyed the first streamcast, and - would you know it - it gets better and better! Awesome!

It's a good game, but I'm afraid I'm not man enough for it : I can't get past the level in the demo that features a gap with water at the bottom and razor sharp teeth(?) at the top. And it's only the demo, so I'm not sure I'll enjoy the full game, if it's even more difficult than that.

I didn't mean to sound offended because, well, I wasn't ... and who gives a fuck if I am anyway : it was funny.

AHah, my bait worked. Now, that you're here, entertain us. It's been a while.

Being a Frenchman, I endorse this statement. (now, you're listening to me, ain't you ? ) Though, I think LaBeouf can be good in some of his roles (like in Indy IV, for instance), most of the time, both he and his directors are just too fucking lazy to pull out anything than subpar acting.

By the way, is it very different from the first game ?

.. sorry, Yufster

If I understood your description, then I'm a bit disappointed that love and relationships in general are exclusively driven by minigames. I find it also strange that they provided a form of feedback as clear as icons to tell you if someone is ready to get married or shagged : I thought the dog was an eternally faithful companion to return to if you failed your relationships with people; so, I expected that human relationships would be demanding and inherently ambiguous.

It looks like it's going to be a sequel (the grown up Little Sister, the barnacle on the logo ...). I am the only one to believe this is the most obscure choice they could make in terms of storytelling? What kind of interesting use could they make of the now deserted Rapture? Pronostic of premices : "lead by a nostalgic or still brainwashed Little Sister or out of pure luck, a bunch of scientists/adventurers discover or stumble onto Rapture and, subsequently, a conflict arise : some of them (including governments) decide to use Rapture technology for evil, others want to use it for good and the rest think they should not use it at all since the circumstances that lead to these progress are stained with inhuman intent"

I call dibs on this Allard for the avatar system :

So, is Brütal Legend alright or not? Do they retain the IP because Blackley manage to pull out this feat in the original publishing deal or is it because of a weird-ality in the contract like kotaku (yeah, I know, not the bet source) mentioned ?

Remo's article is good but the post from Stardock is a million time superior; in fact, its the first article about piracy that isn't streching some numbers/truth or making far fetched assumptions.

No amount of tight female bodies and luscious womanly stares can replace Kari Wuhrer in my heart...

Legend was good but I wish they'd completely give up on the shooting part : what was really fun in Legend was the environnemental puzzle, the acrobatics ad the risky exploration ... not killing people Chow Yun Fat style. Edit :I agree with Lobotomy

God, that sucks... I wish you to find a new fantastic job soon.

I'm pretty happy in the game industry right now, but then again, I'm not a game designer or a writer.

Shame on you for not reading his blog.

First, there were the Olympics, then I got a freakin' interesting yet tiring day job.Most of all, I don't feel that I've got a lot of interesting things to say about games recently. Except, of course, that Crysis on Delta is awesome and that dynamic stories are stories are coming to games but most studio will fuck it up, I tell you. Wait, what-man wouldn't be this miserable! Get a hold of yourself!

It's also 70% hand-animated since they need to create 'key' state for the artificial face.

Apparently, the alternate shotgun is a sandwich that gives you 100HP.

Interesting... I always thought that the most interesting moments of Payload were the choke points. Something must be wrong with me.

THREAD REVIVE! Man, I was so eager to love this game : I remember playing CoD2 and loving it, and a few weeks ago I was craving for an awesome Hollywood roller coaster. The first act does deliver that, despite the infinite spawning of enemies and the progression based on location triggered script which were getting a bit on my nerves. Yet, it was really minimal, forgettable and ultimately forgivable but entering the second act, this became a fuckin' hindrance that raised my frustration and rage in a way that only a few titles can pretend to. You see, even lowering the difficulty, CoD4 felt far too 'random' in why it grants success in some part and indecipherable as to how to succeed when faced with failure. This isn't a game that you can beat by being skilled at aiming, tactical reasoning or resource (ammo & allies) management; the infinite respawn and location based script forbid that. It's in fact a game that you outsmart by knowing by heart the patterns of respawning, the scripts and by rushing forward while hoping noone will appear and kill you from a 1x1 shed you just cleaned. You outsmart the designers, not the opponents and yhis kills the Hollywood feeling that this game is supposed to create. That is failure on its part, not mine, so I gave up just at the end of the Tchernobyl mission.

The first episode and the second are out on Gametap : A Boy Learns What Fear Is is free and Little Red Riding Hood will be free for 24 hours after its release. Judging on the first episode, it's a very derivative project ... which doesn't mean it's all bad. The art design is very reminiscent of Katamari and Flipside. The obvious Katamari influence is the one that annoys me most as I think it's possible to create a naive environment without using the same palette or cubist approach. On the gameplay front - and if this episode represents the whole 'depth' of it - we are treated to the exact intersection of the PC version of De Blob and Katamari : you run around corrupting the environment (De Blob), raising your nastiness in the process and the higher your nastiness the purer things you can corrupt (Katamari). It's amazing as it is not any simpler or any more complex than that. It turns out to be a very laid back mechanism with no challenge whatsoever, even though uncorrupted people are supposed to give you a hard time by cleaning the mess you created. In reality they are forgettable and if the game wasn't constructed in short bursts of ever growing power, it'd be pretty boring : with no puzzles or gameplay diversity you can pretty much turn your brain off for the half hour it takes to complete the game. The presentation is however a pure delight : the design is grand, the animations are top notch and the music is excellent. It is pretty remarkable how, in this instance, the episodic format didn't seem to undermine any of McGee's ambition in this area : the audio and graphical effects triggered upon corruption are really up there in terms of fluidity, timing and originality. The writing is good, if sometimes a bit heavy on the fart jokes, but is surprisingly minimal for a game that tackles the tale genre. What's most striking about McGee's Grimm is that, outside of the darkest picks of its tone, it is a very conservative game : you've got a timer, hidden treasures, a completion percentage, some mandatory platforming section ... it gathers known element without ever adding the innovating or risky aspects that would help the title create is own gameplay identity. It even is old fashioned in the way the reward comes : at the end of it all Grimm tells the corrupted version of the tale in an FMV. It is very enjoyable but I though that kind of thing was now secluded to the adventure genre. Oh well. So but maybe the second episode will bring a bit more flesh in terms of gameplay to the table, making American McGee's Grimm one more successfull episodic project to follow. For the time being, it's a tad bland.

So the new episode 'A Fisherman & His Wide' is out - it's free for the next 24hours - and while McGee's promised in his blog new gameplay mechanisms using power-ups, you've got only one of these and it has a useless dash effect. They've planned 3 seasons of 6 episodes but I hope they didn't dilute the gameplay across all of these, because it's going to be a long walk until we're getting something really meaty.

I had fun the (short) while I stayed... more Thumbeteer would have been welcome but it was done in a bit of a rush. I'll try to set an event up on the Thumb Steam group for next week-end.