Roderick

Why is everyone complaining about the bosses? The bosses were absolutely fantastically exhilirating. A lot of his arguments are pretty moot, anyway, except for that it can indeed be tricky to foresee where Mario will run to if he's hanging upside-down underneath some donut. Everything else seemed a bit farfetched and dragged along to continue the air of Ebenezer Scrooginess. I mean, who cares that Mario has been around for a long time, when his games continue to be this good? It's just looking for stuff to complain about, but Galaxy's the wrong address for that =)

Cat Soup is short and sweet. No text, just strange adventures with cats. Very hypnotizing. Those liking Paprika should look into it.

Nice article, Tommy =) Quick additional question to those I wrote above; is there any crossover possible between different consoles with any GH guitar? Probably not, but it would rock if I could use my future 360 guitar on someone else's PS3.

During the new year's celebrations there was much Singstar and Guitar Hero III, and me and my girlfriend want to buy it too, now. We experienced some nastiness on the wireless guitar though; one of the buttons was 'clicky' and unresponsive. I don't mind a wire, so is it a good move to buy a GH2 guitar somewhere, possibly with the game itself while we're at it? Or is the busted controller a fluke? To keep on-topic; Rock Band seems awesome, but a bit cumbersome with all the instruments. Too little room, I'm afraid! Would like to try it out sometime, I'm particularly interested in its combining karaoke Singstar stuff with instruments. That's pure gold, right there, because you're humming the songs along anyway while you play GH.

Have a great 2008 everyone! Happy new year!

Satoshi Kon is at this moment one of the most inspiring anime-directors in the scene. Millennium Actress was great, Paprika is at the very least very interesting and visually arresting, with a great soundtrack, and his other work I have unfortunately not seen yet (Something Blue Something, Tokyo Godfathers).

The thing that is most awesome about Batman is that everyone can constantly give their own, new, fresh view on who and what he is. That's what keeps it fresh, as opposed to Superman who has been the same for the last five hundred years of his existence. That said, I just saw the Transformers movie, and it was atrocious. I wasn't bothered at all that it wasn't in the slightest like the cartoon Transformers. Rather, it was just such a mediocre film. It didn't work on any level. Even visually, though superficially attractive, it didn't work. The designs were far too detailed; on any normal scene the robots would blur into gray masses that had no contrast and were indistinguishable from each other. I should also not fail to mention how completely unsympathetic all the actors were. I wished all of them bad things and couldn't relate to any of them. The teenagers were all punks and skanks, the adults either burly army men or comic relief governmental agents. Then there was no depth at all, not even the slightest hint of a theme, and the plot was horrendous and illogical. Their life force is suddenly deadly? Why does the Allspark only produce ravenous Decepticons? What what what? It doesn't make any sense! Kill it! Kill it now!

Oh for fuck's sake, and now they put Mario Galaxy in the same bracket as Assassin's Creed and God of War? I hate it that they lump everything, whether it's platformer, freeroaming kill-em-up or hack 'n slash buttonbasher, into something as impossibly wide as 'action-adventure'. Action-adventure means just about half of every game that comes out and is severely flawed as a genre on its own because it's just too stretched-out and general a definition. What's wrong with the old genre definitions? At least there you had a sense of the games actually being in the same category

It's an adventure game with lots of puzzles, but the bracket was clearly meant for 'casual' parlour games, not any full-blown adventure. As it stands, it's the odd one out.

A month or so ago I plowed through the first season and I'm downloading the second as we speak. It's a very nice show, and I noticed you got the books for Christmas, Yufster. Good for you. Good for you. Are they good? Do they detail all the things that happen in the series, season by season?

One of the few really good third-party games on the Wii, Zack & Wiki, got put into the 'puzzle and parlor games' bracket in the Gametrailers game awards for 2007. Jesus I didn't know where else to put this, and a new topic would have been excessive.

Episode 4 and the TV Christmas special are out. It's pretty clear what we can expect for the entire run of the series now. The small episodes are nice, though they never reach season 2 levels of awesomeness. It's become a bit more like Consolevania, but without the extremes, it seems. Nevertheless, quite fun of course. The Christmas special I didn't really get. There were some fun ideas, but stretched out over half an hour, they became a bit dull. I'm sure it's a lot more fun of course if you yourself have fond memories of Dominic Diamond and actually know all the guests that arrive.

Well, just like last year, there were no presents for our family except for the small token ones I bought for everyone. Some candles. It was nice enough, but next year I want presents again! Enjoy all of yours

I'm not particularly stressed, though circumstances forced my hand in having to shop for some presents on this shopping sunday. Let me be frank; where normally large crowds draw little more than amused loathing from me, now I was tempted to go on a killing spree -being in my opinion the only proper way to cope with such a lumbering mass of zombies packed together.

I call them unter-argumensch.

Our arguments are often nice here, but this one does seem a bit brittle and pointless =) Someone drop the H-bomb and get it over with!

I hate those political machinations that pose as science. It depresses me. Those people just want to sow doubt to be able to continu raping the environment. It's so easy. It's so depressing.

Well, to be honest, there's always a difference between reading a book and watching a movie. It's really a matter of taste, though it's pretty weird to say they were bad movies. You don't have to like a movie to be able to appreciate the craft of its techniques, editing, dressing, acting, etc. In those respects, The Lord of the Rings was a hallmark trilogy. For myself, it was a revelatory experience, seeing the first movie in theatres. Since then we've grown accustomed to incredible vistas with thousands of soldiers marching and waging war, but such a scale was unimaginable before then, so to speak.

That'd be awesome, of course! Though I doubt there's much will to post regularly on the Thumbs site anymore. Someone would have to look every day for new blog posts worthy of publishing, and that sort of effort.

A new rant every saturday on http://www.captainaugust.com from me!

Very funny! I laughed out loud multiple times!

That teaser was terribly amateurish. There's nothing wrong with camp, but this isn't it. This is just plain bad stuff. Unless camp nowadays stands for doing a bad job simply because you can't do a good one Jesus Christ, that voice. Was it this bad in the original? Times have changed, and the Duke didn't change along.

I bought it yesterday and played through it in one evening, co-op with a friend as per plan, and I thought it was quite good! Haven't played the solo extra missions, but it's a lot of fun to shoot up zombies with a buddy. The game felt quite solid, and has just the right amount of depth in the shooting: you get a little flexibility with the camera, you are encouraged to blast every bit of scenery (because of unlimited ammo with your standard handgun, the lure of higher scores and hidden pick-ups), and every enemy has a very precise weak spot that you can hit for massive damage. This is no picknick however, because the areas you need to shoot are often very petite (the second frown from the top on the zombie's forehead) or dependent on the situation (gorillas and other jumping animoids are only vulnerable in mid-flight). Then there's also the continuously moving camera of course, so it becomes a great challenge to get a few nice, clean, gory exloding headshots. We nevertheless found that with some practice and luck we were able to rack them up respectably. The ability to upgrade your guns with earned currency is also great and works as a huge incentive to do your best and retry levels. The bosses range from a bit bland in design (not just their visual appearance -mutated animal kingdom inhabitants- but also their attack patterns which were stereotypical or didn't give enough feedback on whether you are doing something right) to quite nice, with all of the above flaws absent. The game is nicely doable, until it hits the final three (of disappointingly only nine) levels. Raccoon City. Suddenly, the difficulty spikes as you are surrounded by incredible numbers of zombies in this hellhole of a town. And my god is it a riot. We died so many times, but kept coming back until we finished it. And the final level is a complete blast that I won't spoil. So in short; Umbrella Chronicles is well worth it if you like a nice lightgun game and you can get it, like I did, for a nice price like 39 Euros. A willing friend to help shoot up the zombies comes very recommended. The added reticule and movement makes precise aiming more difficult, but the fun explodes to tenfold the singleplayer experience.

(((( ))))

I never lost faith! And I'm sorry about your freezer repair guy.