Roderick

That all sounds very sad =( My day was

I'm currently watching the French (but English language) miniseries Napoléon on DVD after having seen it first on tv a few years back. It's really quite good, with an excellent cast of actors. John Malkovich is great as the famous diplomat Talleyrand and Christian Clavier makes the most charming emperor ever seen. Fantastic stuff.

And there you have it!

That... kicks ass

Superb article. I did miss a step in the logic of Bilal Wafaa's thinking though, when he called it 'hypocritical' when the US deemed the anti-Bush game propaganda and the anti-Saddam game not. Yes, it is technically hypocritical, but the implication is then that context is meaningless, whereas context is everything. Changing one little thing can make all the difference in the world in terms of how a game (or anything for that matter) is perceived and experienced. That's how humans work. That doesn't make his points any less true, but it's another example of how video games are approached from a rather facile angle; 'you shoot someone so it's bad, m'kay', disregarding context entirely.

The chilling this is, this actually makes sense. Well put! I have no way of knowing if this is a reasonable viewpoint, but it sounds perfectly logical.

Yes, I finished it, multiple times. There are two or three very tricky levels, but apart from them it's easy sailing. With those particular levels the key is unfortunately just repeating them until you know what the enemy will do and until you've figured out your optimal strategy in terms of deploying which troops where. I think I might have an idea of the level that gave you problems; is it the one where the enemy musn't capture any of the seven or so missile bases on the map? That one was a bitch.

I liked Dual Strike, and I'm kind of miffed that Dark Emo Conflict doesn't have cool characters that you can upgrade, special abilities, etc. I know a large part of the community disliked those unbalanced, overpowered abilities and are happy with a return to a purer game, but I always like it if I'm overpowered and godlike.

I just wanted to say I bought Orange Box for the 360 and yesterday night I start playing Half-Life 2 for the first time. I didn't know what I had to expect, except the praise it had received over the years. And I have to say I quite enjoyed myself! I'm in about three or four hours, I just finished the vehicle segment. I particularly like the atmosphere. It's so weird that all this alien scientist Black Mesa stuff is happening in a totally ordinary suburban setting, at broad daylight. It makes it unreal and creepy, and pretty unique. The first hour of the game was particularly well structured. I had to run from the Combine agents and despite my having no knowledge of the map or where to go, I seemingly always took the correct route when jumping across trains or crashing into people's living rooms. The game probably set up a dozen little subconscious hints at where to go, but never became explicit, so I felt really smart and the experience was seamless and exhilirating. And hell, even the vehicle race across sewers and canals was fun, because they deftly kept it not too difficult and pretty linear. Even so, there were two parts where I became extremely frustrated, which happens ever so swiftly when you're operating a pregnant tank. At one point I got stuck between two logs, and the second time I couldn't find my way fast enough and it turned out I needed to find an obscure hole in a container and blow the lid off. The helicopter face-off was cool, but not really epic. For some reason it didn't work very well; I never felt like I was really doing anything but randomly shooting in the air hoping the automatic targeting reticule would lock onto the enemy. It just goes to show, even with a vehicle segment as polished as this, you'd better be damned careful what you do and give players enormous amounts of slack and benefit-of-doubt. I quit for the evening at the Black Mesa lair of operations. Now I'm in front of some uber-spooky abandoned tunnel which was excellently set up with exactly two lines of dialogue; nothing more needed. I'm scared.

Hahaha, yes, the same thought occurred to me; I too saw A Man Escaped in film class Good movie by the way, I totally enjoyed it despite having massive tooth ache which would later turn out to be a giant abscess. But I digress. I am incapable of being a douchebag, by the way. I hate conflict. So I'm probably a very mediocre artist.

Nice article, and humorously, Bioshock was also the game that came to my mind about good and sparse use of music. Frequently, you don't even realize there's suddenly music playing when it does. The use of crackling music through old radios is also powerful. The Toonstruck music is from old cartoons, eh? I thought they were stock music because that's where I found them at one time. I've heard some of the songs used in programmes on tv and elsewhere. But it worked brilliantly to give that cartoony, dopey vibe to the game.

This should amuse some here: it's a video from a Dutch programme a few years back where Rob Muntz dressed up as Hitler and went about in Austria to commentate on the rise of the extremist right politician Haider. In typical over-the-top fashion, of course

Well, it's more a feeling I get than really a set of rules that applies everywhere. Let me reverse-engineer it with my favourite example Morrowind. Morrowind would be the perfect example of a game that's buggy and flawed and lacks a lot of polish here and there. Most of the time you don't know what you have to do, no one ever explains how fundamental elements of the gameplay work (alchemy or enchanting are especially arcane), the levelling system is mysterious with seemingly random modifiers and stuff, and it's all just a complete mess. But it's awesome. You get a real sense of accomplishment just by learning all of this. The rough edges of the game help you love it because there's a sense of pride in scaling a totally inaccessible game. Now take Partners in Time, where every move, every battle, every collectible and basically every aspect of the game is very thoroughly demonstrated and explained through usually long cutscenes (that are entertaining, but that doesn't make them not long cutscenes). If you look at the contrast, you see that PiT is missing that whole inadvertent meta-game. This is usually the case with every well-produced game that takes its user into account, but PiT takes it further by somehow giving me the feeling that it's playing the game for me. It's been a while, so I don't have examples, I just remember feeling that a few years back. You get a cutscene, you get sent into a walled-off level and you return for another cutscene. I missed the part where I had to figure out something for myself. It felt like a rollercoaster ride; it can be exciting, but ultimately you're not really doing anything yourself.

I think I've mentioned this before here, but the game didn't fall very well with me. To me it has become (perhaps slightly unjustifiably, but only marginally so) the example I always use when I explain how too much polish can be a bad thing. Partners in Time was to me a bit of a frustrating experience because the game was constantly taking gameplay away from you by showing you what you had to do instead of letting you figure it out yourself. In my head it's probably worse than it was, but it all felt way too slick and overproduced. Sometimes the rough edges around a game can add to its charm, and Partners in Time stands to me as a game that had been completely sterilized by its overproduction. Its predecessor got it right by offering a bit more freedom in movement.

This looks interesting. Tim Curry is always a good pick, no matter which role. No matter which. But really, I don't watch any television anymore. It's just too static.

The newest Videogaiden has a very moving review of Lost. Truly a great piece of gaming journalism. Props to Rab!

A friend brought it to my place this weekend to play on my import US Wii and we had amazing fun. I actually like the Subspace Emissary. You should just see it as a really, really, REALLY nice extra to the game, not as a singleplayer game in itself. That's the blatant error sites like IGN made when they complained about it. They perceive it as something that competes with a 'real' singleplayer game (in which case, obviously, it's not up to par) instead of as this astoundingly awesome bonus feature to a great fighting game. I did play rather conservatively with Link, simply because he's a good rounded character that I was already familiar with. A newcomer I think is really good is Lucario. He has some powerful attacks, awesome range and an interesting feature where he becomes more powerful the more damage he has on himself. Great stuff. On a higher level, I think the additions especially of the Final Smash ball and the Dragoon parts make the game intensely more fun, because there's now this whole new way of dealing with your opponents. It may appear artificial (just another item appearing), but I love it.

Finished it today, in exactly four parts of roughly 4 hours each. I thought it was great. The ending was weird but sweet, very to the point and no overblown melodrama. Very much in line with the game. There were some things that could need clarification. On the whole I was always confused while going through the game. I know HL2 is hardly the game for huge plot exposition through talking characters or -god forbid- cinematics, but it did leave me puzzled about what was going on. Never having finished HL1 I was only roughly aware of what happened at the end with the G-man, but even so I couldn't quite extrapolate what had happened to the world. Why is City 17 important? Why are the Vortigaunts suddenly allies? Were the Combine introduced in the first game already? All things that weren't very hard to fill in myself, but they did remain somewhat obscure. I also love how the easy mode is exactly that -very easy. There were a few nice slightly challenging things, but on the overall I never had to worry about dying, so I had all the room to play leisurely and pay attention to the details and the atmosphere. Ha, even se the game freaked me out a couple of times. Very nice! Looking forward to playing Episode 1. Hopefully the G-man won't remain such an utter mystery forever!

Wow, I'm pretty much opposite here. For the past few months I've loved games enormously. Right now I'm playing Oblivion and Half-Life 2, both a few years old, but also the new games of last year are superb and managed to tickle and excite me. Portal, Bioshock, Assassin's Creed, all exciting =)

I'm about halfway now after another run and it's still awesome. I got through Ravenholm (damn scary at times!), then the mines, and my god was it a relief to see light at the end of the tunnel and suddenly find myself in a suburban setting again. I love the schizo oscillation between this lazy afternoon sun citylife atmosphere and the insanely claustrophobic alien/zombie horror areas. Then came the drive over the antlion beaches and I really got that Half-Life vibe again when I had to scale an enormous bridge, negotiating my way across perilous girders. For some reason, exactly that is what Half-Life is to me. Finding an obscurely placed path leading to the underbelly of some massive bridge and you constantly have the feeling of straying off the path and doing something you're not supposed to be doing and it's absolutely gorgeous. I did get stuck again with my buggy though But thankfully you can blast it free now with the gravity gun.

Episode 15: Conflict features some heavyhanded gay scenes Fun game: am I talking about the show's storyline or the Army of Two review?

That was weird and nice.

UPDATE: I've shaved off the area surrounding my goatee because nothing grows there anyway except fluff, and because I need to trim everything for my Godot cosplay. So, I must confess the moustache is gone as well and only my chinbeard remains. I'm sorry. But it's all so frustratingly slow and shitty =(

Already made it my desktop. Pretty awesome, but it's stupid his agents have turned it down. I don't get it. Colbert is known for his passion for pop culture like this. Turning it down is weird and mysterious.

Thanks. But isn't there an easier solution? Damn Windows.