syntheticgerbil

I don't think I have played one thing actually released this year. So I'm going to pick things I remember randomly that were good since others are doing it: Metroid Zero Mission - Geez, can't believe I held off on this series for so long. My first Metroid game and it is absolutely amazing. I was continuously marveling on how well constructed every area was and how jam packed it was with secrets. Iron Brigade - I finally got an Xbox Live subscription this year and I played this game yesterday. The amount of fun I'm still having with my buddy and survival modes is a bit astounding. There's a few bugs and annoyances, but those only become readily apparent after playing it to death. Splosion Man - Also started because of the Xbox Live. Really late on this game, but it was motivated by waiting until I could do multiplayer with a friend. A lot of people have said this game was hard, but I never felt anything was unfair outside of the zappy flying robots and even then those aren't so bad. Finished hardcore mode and felt pretty satisfied with myself. Enslaved - Hot damn this was a good chunk of game that never got frustrating, buggy, or cringeworthy. Just a great story and tons of great art through and through. Gameplay was incredibly smooth. Bonus points for that fucking awesome DLC. Tales of Monkey Island - Hahaha, yes, extremely late. Always fun to continue the adventures of Guybrush and many fan faithful choices were made by the developers. Walking Dead - Nothing much else to say. I kind of hate that that shitty DLC kind of capped it off with a bad taste in my mouth though. Ratchet and Clank Up Your Arsenal HD - I really did enjoy this game, but I had to play it nearly four times (standard is two with a Ratchet and Clank) because of an obnoxious game breaking bug introduced in the HD version that corrupts your save and you cannot finish. If I do my best to separate that horrible experience and look at the game as Insomniac originally released it, I can see how well constructed it is and how fun the variety and weapons were that was not apparent in the first two games in the series. Rabbids Go Home - I love collecting garbage, obnoxious songs, and screaming at babies! Do you? Journey - Another game where everything has all been said. Nice to see tons of people are still playing co-op the whole way through though. That certainly says something. Lollipop Chainsaw - Sultry costumes and lots of stupid and crude humor. The style is oozing in both level design and graphics. Supposedly the combat was boring for everyone, but the amount of combos and attacks to learn was well suited to a noob like me.

So mean.

More complain time. I've now applied to so many jobs that I have started accumulating junk calls to my cell phone and scam or bait and switch low wage e-mails. That's what I get for trying I suppose and trusting job sites to apply. They steal my info and sell it. I'm at the end of my rope, I haven't even seen anything I'm very eligeable for in months besides the Retro job, which isn't happening if their silence is to be trusted. I think next month the emergency unemployment benefits which I have lapsed in to will be cut nationwide. Time to go back to the jobs I was doing when I was 17. Nice to see I wasted nearly a decade of my life.

Well that all makes me feel better about the show, thanks for the write up. I think I'll wait until the DVDs or Blu-rays or whatever before watching, but hopefully the show doesn't decide to fall in some creepy pit near the final episode.

Concerning Christmas decorations, most hooligans in Texas seem to be content with leaving the light up deer mounting another deer. I have sadly been involved in such shenanigans once.Thing is we only have one T-Rex, so he's just going to have to get himself off with those tiny arms.

I just love the situation of bothering him so much to try it that you just purposefully stab yourself a billion times because you ARE SO BAD ASS.

How come in the photo it's not plugged in? The cord is somewhat short which is annoying.

We have that T-Rex and are putting it out this year.

Geez, October last year. Wonder what I had going on then where I missed that. Thanks Thorn!

Gotta make sure those labels are facing outwards. Also nice they managed to make the fries not sweating in a pile at the bottom for once. I wonder if they were allowed to eat any of it?

Wait what? Did I miss this Full Throttle playthrough? I remember he started a Day of the Tentacle playthrough and it was never finished.

Jobs and love and dates! Congratulationerssrsr!

Well, were they to port all of the major Gamecube exclusives to HD or something on WiiU, I'd transfer, but for now I still need it for Luigi's Mansion, Warioworld, Warioware, Mario Sunshine, Skies of Arcadia, MGS Twin Snakes, and Four Swords Adventures. There's probably others but this is me trying to remember off the top of my head. I also used that Zelda collection disc to play all of the major Zelda games through and through when I first bought my Gamecube brand new. I'm hoping for a Majora's Mask port though. Really though, any time I can get rid of an old console is for the best, but it never seems to happen 100%. There's always a few stragglers that will never get ported or updated.

Ah fuck, I was just about to give them some money before I realized it was already over. I think this game looks beautiful and I hope they finish it one way or another. Damn, that sucks it wasn't funded, they weren't even asking for that much.

Is this where we put our WiiU usernames? Funsizegirl? Anyone?

I really just wish I could choose what to transfer over from my original Wii instead of dealing with the transfer deleting everything off the original Wii. I will never get rid of my original Wii because of the Gamecube stuff and the need for the Homebrew channel for a few things. I do have $5 worth of Wii Points sitting there I'd like to transfer and that's about it.

Well, I only play them if they have a story, beginning and end, and they have to have been developed by a first or second party Nintendo company. So there's a lot of skipping, especially with stuff like Mario Party or Mario Kart. But I include Yoshi and Wario games in the same timeline. I don't know, I can't really explain it, I apply it to all game series, and it really has nothing to do with the story. For instance, I won't be playing Metal Gear Revengeance until I get my damn friend to play Peacewalker with me sometime next year.

Looks like Nico upgraded to an iMac

Hmm, it's an OCD thing. So I still have a bunch of other Mario games to go through in the Gamecube and Wii era first, even though I will eventually get to 3D land. Same thing with Rayman, although I only have to beat Rabbids Travel in Time and then Origins to get to Legends. Also can't do Pikmin 3 until I finish 1 and 2 first (sad secret of mine). My friend is really wanting me to play W101 with him online and I would love to play the Wind Waker remake (since Zelda seems to be a series I usually stay caught up on), but I can't find those two games for good prices at the moment. I searched around multiple stores on Black Friday looking for a deal on either, but no luck. Since I only have regular free local TV, the TVii has very little to offer me, even though it will try to tune in to certain shows that come on locally. Only problem is, it completely fails to go to the channel it wants because it types in something like "59-2" in to the channel instead of "59.2." Dashes don't work on my TV so the WiiU is incapable of changing the channel. Wouldn't ever use it even if it did work though, I hardly ever watch anything on local TV and just use Netflix and Hulu when needed.

Well I just got the WiiU as a birthday present last Sunday from my fiancee. I don't really have anything to play on it yet, since I can't get to the Mario games without playing them chronologically (I was last on Tetris Attack :/), but I should probably be able to get to Rayman Legends soon. I went ahead and downloaded The Cave, as I think I'll be making that my first game. I also have Nintendo Land, but I'm not sure how involved I'm going to even bother to get in to that. For now though, I have to say it's been the worst experience setting up a console ever. Upon starting, I had to download an update before even using the damn thing and it took two hours before it had an error. Then it wanted to force me in to making an ID and I was so confused that this did not refer to my Club Nintendo account, so I went back and forth with that for a while. Then I started the system update again, gave it another 3 hours to do it's thing. While it was updating, I looked it up and apparently the first update is about 5 gbs. Way to go Nintendo. Once that was done, starting every app required more updates usually around 10-20 minutes each. Total bullshit. Also, this is a WiiU deluxe with New Super Mario Bros. plus Luigi on one disc that only just premiered this month. Why the fuck can't Nintendo ship it with up to date firmware? As it stands, it will probably collect dust for a while until I catch up a bit. The actual apps on the console don't seem very useful and way less interesting than the 3DS. The chat is idiotic since it still doesn't exist as a convenient way to message someone with text and looking at the Gamepad looking straight up your hulking face into nostrils is incredibly unappealing. TVii seems like broken shit and I wish I could delete that from the title menu along with parental controls. The message board thing is fine I'm supposed but I've already been warned four times about swearing.

Oh yeah, that File-o-matic was pretty bad too! Man, everything from that prothetics shop was just a big headache. I like to think Mike Stemmle and Sean Clark learned a lot from Sam and Max. The Telltale episodes I've noticed directed by Mike Stemmle have been great as well.

Even though Ninja Theory definitely wanted a big scary robot dog, he's not anywhere as frightening as an awkwardly moving walking table.

I gave up after 100%ing Loco Roco 1. It's sad but it took me months of struggling to finish that bullshit game to realize how badly designed it was. Sure the mechanics and premise are great, cut, inventive, fun, etc. But in order to unlock everything and have the game register your 100% you have to run through the levels prefectly the whole way through. While obnoxious early on, it isn't so bad until the levels start taking 30 god damn minutes. One screw up on the 25 minute mark by missing some item you didn't have the right momentum for and you have to start the whole fucking thing over. Now times the amount of levels like this by 50 or so. Would it really have been that hard to just have the game save your item forever the second you collect it like most proper collectathon games? I feel like I wasted a bunch of my life on fucking Loco Roco that I could have dedicated to much better games. Fuck that series. However, Metal Gear Acid and Metal Gear Acid 2 were fucking amazing. The first one was a little bit rough and the card collecting system there was a bit grindy in order to collect them all, but MGA2 was just solid and amazing. I really liked that they deviated from the usual Metal Gear art style and especially loved all of the little side missions and wide variety of weapons to try out. There's so much depth in both of those I that I didn't realize until near finish that I sank 180 hours between the two (although I think there's probably 20-30 hours racked up by just leaving it sitting in the menu). What a disappointment to play the garbage that is Portable Ops after the amazing Acid games. Americans aren't allowed to have that game (though I imported one). No one outside of Japan is allowed to have the second one apparently.

Well if it's any consolation, probably the first chapter is the worst you'll ever see on frame rate. The rest seems to all center around the large dog robot you'll encounter later on.

I don't know, I played Escape from Monkey Island last year, and while there are some more obscure puzzles, I feel it's pretty solid in design. There's actually some very clever ones there, like the parrots and the rocks or the Mysts of Time sequence. The prosthetic organs from the shop in EMI, while fun, cause major red herring design issues. Kind of forgot what Curse of Monkey Island is like on puzzles as I haven't played it for maybe a decade or so, but I don't remember it being difficult enough to use a strategy guide more than once (it came with the big one with the concept art, interviews, and storyboards). Don't know if Zeus is going to branch out in to Telltale after this, but ToMI is pretty solid outside from some annoying maze parts.