Roderick

Is this a PC thing? On the Xbox I had no trouble with either feeling like an invincible predator (I did play on Normal, not Hard), just like in Arkham Asylum, or zipping around town. The AR challenges ranged from really easy to hard, but were all of them fun and a matter of skill.

Two movies are of interest: De Heineken Ontvoering (The Heineken Abduction), a Dutch crime movie about the real life abduction event of beer mogul Heineken. It's pretty good, our country is on a roll with great crime movies. A few weeks back we got De Bende Van Oss (The Gang of Oss), a gangster epic about a provincial city in the 1930s. Really good stuff. Oh, in the former movie, Heineken is played Rutger Hauer. That should get some of you interested. The Adventures of Tintin: this was unexpectedly good! I really wasn't sure about the art style, but it works fine in the movie and once you accept it you're in for a great, typically Spielbergian ride. This movie is a way better Indiana Jones than the fourth Jones movie was.

My parents visited a castle in the Netherlands yesterday, Doornenburg, and lo! There was the wizard, bless't with a powerful cantrip causing the camera to be unable to focus on him, instead getting a razor sharp image of the tractor in the back. Truly, the wizard is a powerful fiend!

Birthday!

When I replayed Psychonauts last year, I found Meat Circus decidedly less hard than I remembered it. Maybe it's the difference between PC and console? First time I played it on PC, then on Xbox 360. Could be.

You know we're fans here.

You probably aren't entirely serious, but I think the whole point of something like this is doing it the hard way. With digital trickery you can cheat at basically anything. Part of the art is the amazement at how this is done by hand, in the most excruciating way possible

Great job on the make-up. Are there prosthetics involved? There are some great tools to make scars and whatnot.

Oh, you're totally right, the structure has run its last course. I remember being really disappointed at Red Dead Redemption (an otherwise great game) having the same 'go to trigger point, start mission' GTA structure. I would've loved an Elder Scrolls type thing where you can talk to people or do some other interesting, interactive stuff with the world besides these super-insular, cocooned missions. Arkham City is doing a far better job at this. It has trigger points as well, but for some reason it feels very different and more natural than GTA did. Maybe because the scale is relatively smaller, so that the density of 'stuff' in the world is much higher? An amusing thought: to progress GTA, they should roll back the size.

Ha, yeah, maybe with SafeSearch on!

Even though qua hype, LA Noire was the biggest letdown in years, I'm willing to bet on GTA V. Honestly, I had a blast with IV and don't expect this next one to be any less cool. Obviously, I'm not buying into anything before I see more than the title. GTA IV had a really cool announcement trailer with Philip Glass's Pruit Igoe and cool time lapses on Liberty City. Looking forward to what they'll do with this one.

Oh sure, there are tons of reasons and moments to point out where Warcraft jumped the shark. I'm not saying Mists of Pandaria tipped the bucket, it's just plainly symptomatic, a real eyecatching 'there you have it' moment. Everyone will have their own. I'm not so much bothered by the enormous amount of wacky stuff in Warcraft. Goblins riding rockets, or giant zeppelin turtle stuff, why not? Where it becomes a drag for me is how goddamn serious Blizzard takes all of it. They can't just let a Goblin on a rocket be a cool thing, nooooo, it has to be completely incorporated in the lore and made really serious and intense. That's a disconnect between what is happening in the fiction and how Blizzard is treating it. That's why all the brooding orcs from cutscenes being super serious with the most trite oneliners is so awful. If Blizzard would just simply own the fact that this is all grade A pulp, it wouldn't be so bad. But they're treating it like it's so great and profound and that's painful to watch.

The ending.

Don't forget the inexplicable Mass Effect 3 live action trailer. They're trying to infuse their game with a sense of realism and perhaps appeal to a non-gaming public. But, yeah, I think you could best stay within the graphic style of the game. I have another gripe with cinematics by the way. Recently there have been mulitple instances of games that had the most GORGEOUS cinematics created by studio Blur, for instance for Mass Effect 2 and Arham City. But for a reason I don't fully understand, these trailers aren't included in the game itself. Why? Why would they not do that? Why spend thousands of dollars on getting a company to make a gorgeous ode to your game and then only plonk it on Youtube and GameTrailers? It makes zero sense.

Will the Shitty Wizard return in Torchlight 2?

Kroms, are you saying movie 1 and 3 are awful? The general consensus is that the third movie is really good. I'm actually surprised at how awesome this entire series has been, despite a few lulls here and there.

Yeah, I loved it and it was chock full of good stuff!

Well hurry up goddamnit.

Anyone play it yet? As 'luck' would have it I'm home ill (legit) so I've been able to play all day. It's really good. The roster of villains is a lot better to my tastes (big Freeze fan) and the open world gameplay makes the game basically... Assassin's Creed but with Batman. Without foregoing the tightly paced inside environments that offer all the riches of the first game. The street environments are densely packed with challenges and interesting scenery and the game is really, really smartly written. Multiple times characters have said exactly what I was thinking at the time. I look forward to this game surprising me further.

This idea of 'teenagers suck' can quite easily be made to hold for just about any phase of life. I am often all too aware of my suckitude, and the notion that in five years time I will feel stupid for my current thoughts. Sometimes I feel this might be the reason that at 28 I still feel immature, not in the sense of being crass, but not having a strong adult character. Had I less awareness of how my relative dumbness ever shifts further into the future, I might progress quicklier and with less doubt by sheer force of arrogance alone. Thesis summary: the unknowing arrogance of youth/teens/whatever age might actually help people mature and do interesting things with confidence.

Wizaaaaaarddddd. That is all.

It's incredibly neat. Of course, the -166 degrees Celsius requirement for the superconductors is a bit of a bottleneck. Could toys come prepackaged with liquid nitrogen?

The emoticon is the period! The period is the emoticon!

Fucking A, Tanu! Do your best getting that job, it would be swell.