Oath

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Oath

  1. Posted

    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?

  2. Posted

    Fourth'd. Quality thread. Maybe the Thumb can even wring some nice wrap-up article out of it, digesting our picks-of-the-year into actual new content.

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

  3. Posted

    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.

  7. Posted

    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.

    screenshot3mp6.jpg

    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.

    shadow20of20the20colossts7.jpg

    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.

  9. Posted

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

    virtuafighter5200605210mt5.jpg

    STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN (December 21, 2006) – SEGA of America, Inc. and SEGA Europe Ltd. today announced that the highly anticipated arcade fighting game, Virtua Fighter™ 5, will make its way onto the Xbox 360™ video game and entertainment system. Virtua Fighter™ 5 is scheduled for release on Xbox 360™ in North America and in Europe during late summer 2007. The game will also be available for the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system on February 20th, 2007 in North America and will be available in Europe simultaneously with the system’s launch in March 2007.

  14. Posted

    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.

  15. Posted

    ... 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.

  16. Posted

    I said it was a while ago

    I didn't see that. Sorry.

    When they raided the pirate bay they also used excessive force. [...] You really get the idea that they expect them to be armed to the teeth.

    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.

  17. Posted

    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.

  18. Posted

    Do you really need the thumb strap? I don't really get it. Can't you just use your thumb, strapped or not?

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

  21. Posted

    Road Rage (beating guys with batons)

    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.

  23. Posted

    Games are clearly a medium in their own right (Though the label "game" is troubling when you get onto virtual worlds, etc.), but it's important that they borrow from other media.

    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. :shifty:

    The conventions of games so far built are pretty shallow and insulated from the rest of culture, so people's concept of a game is often equally shallow. Comics wandered around in the same wilderness for decades due to the superhero and horror cliches that early popular work relied on.

    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?

  24. Posted

    The scandinavian countries are amazingly cool, but too cold. UK is nice, but too rainy.

    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.