Oath

Very erotic. You should film some stuff for the good of the Thumb. No matter if it's bad or stupid, everyone loves video content these days!

I'd like to add that the prints look very good and would consider having something like that 'round here. Is it something you did yourself or is it possible to purchase a high quality print from the game (perhaps even concept art) somewhere?

Post (in full) your favorite article that the Thumb could have written this past year!

Yeah, it'd be nice to reach two or three pages so that you could get an overview of the forum users. Maybe some people are a bit intimidated by the fact that there's a level of quality that has to be maintained. Pictures, formatting and paragraphs and so on. That's good though. Having people spam the shit out of a thread like that leads to nothing of quality. You should make the other staffers post though, since you're not doing a feature this year.

Please indoctrinate new users to only post the big heads so they get to see some use too. Also, please rename : miyamoto : to : dancin :.

I have no idea. Since there's no news reported on the Google tracker for that date it could possibly be a split, that each share became two and the price was halved?

Do I sense a black eye or two? Nothing like domestic violence this time of year...

As a preface I'm just going to say that I'm limiting myself to games released in 2006 in PAL territories, mostly. Half-Life 2: Episode 1 This is dumb as hell, getting the first reply and then stating that my favorite game this year is the same as that in the original post, but I can't help it. I'm terribly addicted to Valve at this point and Episode 1 is essentially a summary as of why. The whole experience is so smooth and rewarding throughout that it just blows everything else I've played this year out of the water. The ending, just as that of the main game, left me gawking. And when you're done, when you've managed to get your jaw back in place, it's time to go at it again, with commentaries. I can't wait to play the next episode, which is something no other game left me saying in 2006. Shadow of the Colossus Big as hell. That's the summary for SotC. Everything the game is about is big. Big emotion, big score, big fights. However, it doesn't sweep you of your feet, even with all that grandeur. Instead it sneaks up on you and mesmerizes you in a completely different way than you were expecting. The controls are a bit so-so and the running animation is stupid as fuck and the game stutters a lot, but none of that matters. It left me a big memory, that's all I can say. I'm including a screenshot here too because I feel bad about having picked the same game as Marek earlier. Sorry. Gears of War Very good gameplay and so much effort in every other aspect that you just have to overlook the meatheaded design they stuck on top of it. Actually, the style they went with sort of works. You never feel any empathy at all for any of the characters but that sort of thing might actually be out of place here. Anyway, I liked it a lot. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Justice For All Adventure games on the DS you say? Very good adventure games on the DS? Why, thank you very much. I love every little piece of word play, every stupid cross examination that they've put in there. So many hours of fun and frustration on such a small cartridge. Crap I wish I hadn't payed money for Can't be all positive here. Remember, it's still Idle Thumbs and we have to bitch at something. Dreamfall: So flat. So drawn out. So much terrible "gameplay" shoved in. Children of Mana: The sprites are pretty decent. That's it. Everything else is terrible.

I don't have Gold at the moment, but I'll either get a subscription for Christmas or buy it myself soon thereafter, so I'm up for a few games between the 25th and the 30th I guess.

From NeoGAF (yeah, I know): Sony loses another console exclusive as Virtua Fighter 5 gets confirmed for the 360.

Tekken 5 and Virtua Fighter 4 if you like that kind of thing. Should be very cheap by now too.

I've only seen third party advertising for the Wii, so there hasn't been a direct campaign by Bergsala here, yet. I think the indirect advertising they get from being the focus of the Raving Rabbids commercial, for example, is something they'll have to rely on here.

Metroid Prime should have been mentioned in the first post, perhaps earlier.

So, heh *nervously glances at camera* ... another award thingy? *begins sweating profusely, occasionally giggling* They're just soooo awkward.

I wouldn't be complaining either if this came true. I wonder when something like this would be announced though. I'd at least expect MGS4 to stay platform exclusive until after launch and then announce that Konami are working on a port some months after that, when initial sales have died down. Honestly, I'm not sure if I think Sony deserve more kicks in the face already or not.

... or you know, not succumbing to illness, but still being vulnerable to getting hit by a train or something else that completely demolishes your body. Living on even though you're scattered over an area the size of a football pitch probably isn't that fun.

I didn't see that. Sorry. As far as was reported here about the Pirate Bay situation (quite a bit), they weren't heavily armed and were mostly used to transport computer equipment away - around fifty policemen if I remember correctly. I don't remember reading anything about excessive force either, but that might have been the case. The thing that was mostly wrong about the Pirate Bay take-down was that it was instigated by private groups, one of which was from outside of Sweden as well.

You should probably mention somewhere that he states that the raid happened in 2004. I had no idea things were like this (or even anywhere close) in Germany. Yeah, it's just his personal view on things, but there's bound to be a grain of truth in there. Perhaps a few. Of course, the whole media bit, with even somewhat respectable magazines printing utter shit to get reactions and awaken fear is something that takes place in a lot of countries today. That shouldn't come as a shock. However, you always hear about stupid shit like games released in Germany getting their blood textures replaced with green ones and so on, but this is on such a completely different level that I'm left a bit stunned. Over a hundred armed officers to raid a software studio? There seems to be a large gap between some people and reality in todays Germany, should that be true. Censorship gets me all riled up inside.

The thing is that the thumb is too blunt. You want a finer edge to it to get that precision control going.

Good.

It'll be a little while before I can get my grubby mitts on a Wii, but just to keep my hope alive: does Raving Rabbits have the same level of humor and energy as the ads?

Besides it being "Road Rash", everyone knows that the superior motorcycle game for the Mega Drive is Super Hang-On - no violence though. My favorite two player game for the console is probably EA Hockey (NHL Hockey in the US). Such glaring AI problems yet so much fun. It's just a basic hockey game but it has very good controls, as far as I can remember.

The part of Sweden you're thinking of is flooded at the moment, so that's not really speaking in our favor either.

I think that maybe at some point in the far future, what is currently just "games" will have branched off in to "interactive experiences" and something that's still "games". Possibly. I have no real basis for this though, so don't press me on it. The comic industry still makes it's money from that kind of work, so I'm not sure if that's supposed to be a damning thing to say about games or if that wasn't intended. Also, I wouldn't say that games having their own conventions is something negative at all. If anything, it creates an strong identity for the whole product grouping. I think this statement sort of contradicts what I quoted in the first part of this post. Of course, if the general public in no way connects to the gaming conventions (which could possibly be argued both for and against) then maybe those conventions need to go or just be shifted. Maybe I'm just reading it wrong. When you say that the conventions of games are shallow and insulated, do you mean in terms of gameplay mechanics, general gaming experience, story wise, visually or something completely different?

Sweden has a nice supporting warm water flow courtesy of the Gulf Stream, so just live close to the ocean (like Stockholm) and it'll never be unbearably cold. Probably not anyway. We also have pretty good summers because of this (I think so at least). We're having the worst winter ever though, it's still over five degrees warm outside! God, I love posting about the weather for some reason.