Thrik

Oh god, I loved the original two Commandos games (and the first one's expansion thingy). It was kind of a top-down Metal Gear Solid for me with regards to the actual play mechanics: cones of vision, alarms, absolute reliance on stealth, etc. I don't remember Commandos 3 being too bad, though. Not nearly as bad as Commandos 4, anyway.

Just finished it after five hours. I really enjoyed the whole experience, and the series as a whole already sits well above EMI for me — although unsurprisingly it hasn't managed to shift my nostalgia-fueled top-place positioning of the first three games. What I like most is the fresh take on the story, with the whole Guybrush/Elaine/LeChuck formula really being turned on its head. Both episodes thus far have been entirely unpredictable, and I was routinely beaming at the various scenes with human LeChuck. Some criticisms: The speech compression format sounds genuinely grating at times through my home cinema set-up. I don't know what's going on here because even a 128kb/s MP3 doesn't sound this bad, although the nastiness only seems to occur with certain sounds (mostly 's'). The model re-use continues to be obvious. I'm sure we can all speculate about why this is done, but still every time I see it I can't help but sigh a little inside. Some really obvious copy/paste action going on in the jungle. Seems like a bit more testing would have been beneficial. Quite often F4 didn't do anything for no discernible reason (it should highlight hotspots), sometimes Guybrush's orientation would get messed up between scenes while moving with WASD, and when I revisited the area where after he'd gone his music was still playing rather than the jungle music. Great overall though, and naturally it's left me very much looking forward to the next episode!

Yeah, it's the nuggets of extreme awesomeness in Fahrenheit that keep me optimistic about Heavy Rain. I mean, if they'd literally just released the demo as the final game it'd have gotten rave reviews and been a classic. Probably a bit harsh, actually. I did enjoy a lot of Fahrenheit, with the Dance Dance Revolution sequences being the only things that really pissed me off. The 24-style scenes were superb — I can't think of another game that had me feeling as tense as when the cop was walking to the door in the diner — and I enjoyed the general adventure game-ish stuff too.

I'm very glad I never got the 'achievement bug'. I feel absolutely no compulsion whatsoever to achieve them, but I can very easily see how having such temptation would adversely affect my enjoyment of the game.

I can't find any information about this at all other than its new premiere trailer: http://video games.yahoo.com/events/mini-ninjas/mini-ninjas-videos/1280250 ... and its corresponding caption: Looks like it has a lovely art direction though, and it's by IO Interative who are capable of making games that're good and not bad.

Only played for like half an hour, but very impressed so far! So mental that they keep using that bloody speech compression format, though. Listening to Elaine is ear-piercing when she pronounces an 's'.

I don't think that works does it? The embed code uses different syntax to invoke the higher quality modes, so you can't use the same trick as you do on YouTube itself — or at least I couldn't on my site.

Well... yes.

Check this out: http://www.miwiki.net/Escape_from_Monkey_Island#Plot God, the art direction in that game. Even those screenshots of the chapter screens piss me off.

I'm so glad Grim Fandango didn't get the budget treatment with its pre-rendered art. It may have been expensive, but it still looks so good today. In related news, new blog post from Purcell today featuring another piece from the Monkey Island movie random movie he once did concept art for: (Holy shit!)

It's a lot more expensive. Maybe the PC version will have the option though, like Doom 3.

Really good trailer. I think it's fair to say those opening shots are pretty epic. Couldn't help thinking of Indiana Jones when I saw that newspaper about the ark, though! As for the obvious Fallout 3 comparisons, I expect the way the missions and story unfolds to be a lot more controlled than what Bethesda is known for, and the world itself to be more linear — and on a personal note I prefer the look and feel of this world. From what I've seen, anyway!

Based on Molyneux's own history of releasing pretty fucking risky game concepts I'm reluctant to be too hard on him for this. He did come across pretty badly, but then I think we all know Molyneux's at his best when he's locked away working on games rather than talking to the press.

Yes, he should have used Photoshop CS4's fancy image resizer!

LOL! WTF? Has someone at Lionhead been visiting Idle Thumbs?

Just finished both the second series of The Wire and the first series of Dollhouse. The Wire was excellent! I have no idea what those earlier series two criticisms from some of you guys were about. Granted it did leave some things very unresolved, but I think that kind of resonates well with the general realism of the show — in the real world this kind of thing often does end in such a way. Series three starts next week so definitely looking forward to that. Dollhouse is also something I'd give an overall thumbs up. It does have some cheesy moments, but I'd say these were mostly concentrated towards the beginning as things were being set up. The character development is what really makes it so gripping, but sadly when everyone was introduced they kind of all came across as shallow dicks — which changes. I'd say that endeavouring with the series beyond the initial so-soness is absolutely worthwhile as some episodes are truly terrific. During the later half of the series the 'Echo gets imprinted and goes on a wacky adventure' formula completely fades, and the final episode (Which weirdly hasn't aired on US TV yet?! Download it or something if you haven't seen it.) that depicts 2019 takes the series to downright epic proportions.

I found it pretty easy on the PC, using a keyboard and mouse. Definitely harder than the other jumping sections in the game (pretty much no margin for error in many parts), but not too much for me to deal with.

I'm not seeing what you're seeing. I am assuming you know Ron Gilbert was involved with Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island, though.

Lo!

He's done quite a considerable amount of texture work to fill in the gaps. This is especially noticeable in the Voodoo scene. You do need to be pretty damn good at this stuff to pull it off, for sure. It's not a quick trick.

Time to literally wet yourself:

I don't know if my computer is just wrecked, but is it me or have the thumbs emoticons not been working for like a month? I see the 'tup', 'tmeh', and 'tdown', but there's no image.

And so in conclusion: make Kingzjester an admin again.

What, no love for Corpse Bride?