syntheticgerbil

Even though I've probably been negative at inappropriate times and I'm not the biggest fan ever, I've listened completely through each and every episode of both podcasts and was really loving the newest incarnation. This was a well deserved award as the hours of entertainment given nearly weekly were priceless.

I feel like I'm beating small things and not paying attention... Some weird thing that Joakim Sandberg made long ago called Dr. Dot was beaten. It was super short, frustrating, yet mildly addictive for an early puzzle game. This is after I gave up trying to beat his released but still abandoned Mina of the Pirates. Both share an early hardness by a punishing designer. Kirby's Block Ball done in full. I think it was satisfying. As usual it feels good to win in a Breakout game when you are, but is extremely frustrating when you lost control of the ball and it's just kind of doing whatever. There's powers that make it way easier. I guess it's just another nice unrelated sidetrack in the Kirby series. I could imagined enjoying this more if I didn't always feel so pressed for time. Yoshi's Island (Mario Advance version) was finally finished after chipping away at it for a few months. The game was great for picking up and playing a level and moving on, but the later levels could take an upwards of an hour to get 100%. Especially the secret and extra levels. The game had such an intuitive way of getting me to continue exploring and the bosses and characters were all ridiculously charming. Nothing better than a satisfying boss battle in a platformer. Sooner or later, I guess it'll be time to get on to the next Mario game I missed out on and look seriously out of date for not playing long ago. And last, out of sort of a bad curiousness, I played Conker's Pocket Tales. I don't really like Rare games outside of Conker's Bad Fur Day, so this one pretty much summed up a lot of the junk that was just unnerving about their sort of design philosophy, even though I know Pocket Tales is probably on a very low rung of their game ladder. There's a bunch of pointless crap to collect that doesn't help much, the game's characters are all upsettingly bland, there's some idiotic health system where you can only get a finite amount of health to refill per game, and there's some needlessly hard and poorly designed minigames that are unanimously required to finish in order to finish the main game. The game was sort of fun eventually though, after mastering the clunky controls and getting past a certain island that was designed by sadists. The funny thing about the game is, out of OCD, I played both the regular Game Boy and Game Boy Color versions on the same cart, and they are nearly separate games. The level layouts are in many cases completely different, many enemies are added in the Color version while missing some at the same time, many secrets are discovered in different manners, and nearly all of the sliding block puzzles are no longer the same. The Color version is also immensely easier than the Game Boy version. The asshole island with minigame hell has a lot of things to soften the blow of forced terrible minigames like a more idiotic CPU to compete against as well as different controls on two of them. My theory is that the regular Game Boy version was ready to ship long ago, even before the Game Boy Color's premiere, as all of this stuff is based on the original happy and bright game that Bad Fur Day game from, but that a Color version was asked for and tweaked at the same time (someone probably revamping many of the serious design flaws). Guess it ended up more of an interesting precursor to the big Conker game than I originally thought. Chipping away at a few other games simultaneously when I have time otherwise.

This is about all I can bother to follow right now, but I think this sums up pretty nicely how I feel as well.

Haha, I just remember another thread where people were claiming the same thing. It was just strange for Armchair to stick around and be friendly and helpful at the same time he was being accused of stealing a couple of thousand dollars. I WILL NO LONGER PRESS THE ISSUE. And this is what happens when I don't come on often enough anymore and just cherry pick threads at random until the next time.

The two you mean are the learn Japanese one and the costume one for the prostitute right? Those were both pretty annoying just for being ridiculously not obvious (although I would have done the costume one anyway with my OCD tendencies). I had looked ahead of time as I usually do with trophies or achievements just to save myself the grief. Learning Japanese could have easily have been done without stopping at the boss and turning all the way back around to get a book at the library that only becomes available suddenly at that point. Why not make it available earlier? They could have also lumped up some of the costumes. Found it strange that two convoluted and weird easter egg type situations were highlighted by trophies. The other situation though where you demolish a path for the train tracks for that trophy was pretty funny to me. Such a long and drawn out cutscene for nothing!

A friend sent upwards of $25 or more for this and he said he received Samorost 2 for free in addition to these games for donating so much. I don't know if this happens every time.

Goodness, I need to see that on home video someday soon. There was so much cause and effect type stuff that I was missing seemingly important links of logic by blinking or looking away. Incredibly jam packed and I think all of the associations from where the characters follow one clue to the other weren't paid enough attention by me on first viewing. A friend asked me to buy that for him two Christmases ago and it was pretty great. I think probably the cult thing got somewhat meandering, but I love the way the main characters play the story out. The whole thing was pretty sweet overall suprisingly.

my ears

I haven't finished Sly 3 yet, but I finished 1 and 2. There was some stuff to dislike about them, but I found them all immensely more enjoyable than Infamous. Sly 2 was especially good except for the collectothon parts in the stupid Sandbox hub. That was lame. Then Infamous took that part and made it almost the whole game. Idiocy. Sly 1 was just sort of boring, but it got better as it went along. The one hit kills I suppose were annoying, but that one was so easy that I wasn't bothered. If you are not into the Sly series, SpeedyDesiato, I'll buy your free copy for cheap!

I'm sort of confused why you are feeling conflicted, but my thoughts are that the HD releases of everything on one disc is great. I'm planning on importing the PoP disc from Europe. What I'm more concerned about is remakes or upconverted ports seem to have annoying problems or things not ported in the best fashion. For instance, they only went with the PS2 versions of the Sands of Time games so none of the extras from the other console versions were included. Then I saw someone complaining about how many of the graphic filters were missing in comparison screenshots plus sharpness filters tend to make older graphics look groddy, moreso on cut out planes. These are pretty minor though, it's nice for me to personally move games up a console generation and reduce the amount of discs on my shelf. So more retro collections! People are crying? I preordered the newer All Star pack a few months ago with a gift card, but it seems to already be gone now. I was sort of confused on why it's such a hit, since it is indeed pretty barebones for 25th anniversary release. I was at least expecting a nice set of manual scans, movie clips, image galleries, or whatever other crap much like the Sonic collections last generation or maybe similar to the Legend of Zelda collection for Gamecube. Still no big deal, I really just wanted to get the best graphical versions of Mario 1 and 2 (Japan). All of the good versions to play of the rest of the games were better covered in Mario Advance than All Stars, so the lack of World is not too harsh I think. You get more levels playing the Advance versions of the games.

Thanks Toblix, got the card! I think it's some kind of hash brown (like the kind they gave us in our grade school cafeteria) smoking and playing videos games in the nude. He seems to have been branded on his chest as well as having a lot of pubic hair and sweat stains. It's also copyright by Disney, making it extra valuable. Merry Christmas! I also didn't get around sending anything back, but I just decided to send you something whenever, when you least expect it. I hope that's okay.

Did Armchair seriously fuck over a group of you guys? I'm really still confused about that. I thought the problem for Snoogle was that he is still getting seizures even when limiting game time. I guess it's just so much compounded computer usage?

Well as long as it's actually happening at some point, I'll be happy. I had already traded in my Xbox copy in preparation a few months back.

It's separate but it's probably recommended to play Thongs of Virtue second since the original Deathspank as envisioned was cut into two. Thongs of Virtue should have that DLC dungeon and the extra second player character available to purchase separately though.

Crap, that's no good. What's all the science behind it that makes it hard to cope and still play games?

Any more information on the HD version?

Ah I see. I guess just be sure to use a walkthrough ahead of time on that part of Grim Fandango.

Still no digital photos of this card! Must see!

Rewatched Triplets of Belleville today. Still tons of fun, although at this point the cell shaded 3D on the mechanical stuff is looking super outdated to me. Maybe if they had dropped some of the frame rates or textured pencil outlines on the objects (like the moving characters) instead of straight black lines it would have made a world of difference. That dog is still amazing to watch.

If an adventure game had a flashy cutscene, might it still trigger a seizure? I don't think there's many that do that anyway, though.

Beat is the Law about 80s Sheffield bands is somewhat interesting. There's another one called Live Forever about the 90s britpop fiasco I thought was okay. Really I just saw these for the Pulp factor, but they were interesting and well made either way. There's another full documentary on the creation of the Gorillaz called Bananaz that shows a way different Damon Albarn than the one in Live Forever, but I guess you'd have to be a fan of the Gorillaz first. For the anglophiles, I suppose.

That's the second biggest shoe phone I've ever seen? That's the second longest hallway of doors I've ever been in?

I guess it's just weird as it seems the last three or four games (speaking as someone who doesn't even play Tomb Raider and really shouldn't be in this thread) have gone to great lengths to distance themselves from the strange looking big breasted polygon woman of the late 90s who appeared regularly in all the game and non-game magazines, sprung an entire series of idiotic nude codes kids loved to make up and post on cheat sites, had trashy T&A comic book spin offs, and had trashy T&A real life model shoots with multiple models which all led up to a presumably bad series of movies. I guess the brand recognition is important for Crystal Dynamics, but there seems to have been a lot of work done to get away from the original obviously flawed character that made her so famous in the first place and establish a new more acceptable one in her place. Almost seems futile to me to keep trying to top the separation at this point. Maybe someone could do pornographic fan art of The Hand? What?! I feel compelled to check this out but I really shouldn't goofing around right now. I recall the voices files on the first two Kyrandia CD versions were easily accessibly.

That Idlethumbs UK video was great. It was strange and I did not laugh, but would like some more.

In late response, didn't they already reboot Lara Croft only in 2004/2005? I am guessing they do this so that everyone gets confused about which game they are talking about, making it harder to get criticism out there. I guess by that logic it would be hard to praise the rebooted game with the original name as well. Zanthia will always be my only 90s strong female protagonist first and foremost. (Also typing Zanthia into Google image search is nasty.)