Duncan

I'm in for 3rd/4th (probably)

Please invite me! I used to post here. I was once like you ("duncanf")

I was genuinely surprised and thrilled that for the first time ever, a) an email from Telltale went to my inbox and not my spam folder, and the game actually downloaded the way it was supposed to and I didn't have to deal with the client crapping out and activation codes. The sad part is I'm pretty sure that was the best thing that happened to me all week.

You communist

I think we're all a little surprised that GameLife's popularity turned out to be temporary.

Oh, if only we had known it was this easy. We were doing it wrong the whole time! http://www.joystiq.com/2006/12/03/marcus-fenix-is-bender-bender-is-marcus-fenix/ I am in a bad mood.

I'm glad I remembered my watchdog thread! So I like Eurogamer but this might be the most vapid interview ever conducted. Please prove me wrong if possible. Okay, I'm done.

HOLY SHIT EVERYONE GET DOWN

Seriously. I have never been prouder.

...without any eyes!!

I realize I should have done this from the beginning: this is the Bloodlines theme. Yeah, unfortunately this is all the case.

I know they're gone! I was making a joke!

The best headline I ever saw (from a major newspaper) was five, six years ago about a failed kidnapping attempt, and there was an injunction preventing the name of the target from being printed. So the headline was, literally, "WHO IS MR X?" Yeah, life was good back five, six years ago when it was a 50's mystery serial.

Here's a secret unlockable thread for the three, four Thumbers who played this game. If that many. For some reason, miffy is coming to mind but no one else. Here's the thing. This is easily a better game than LSW1, if only by virtue of an extra layer or two of collectable shit/customization/interactivity. The vehicle levels, for a change, are not terrible (except for one, not coincidentally the closest in design to LSW1.) But I liked the last game more. It is not rational. Objectively, LSW2 is the better game and I would easily recommend this one to anyone who hadn't played either. I think the problem is that I played the last one. LSW1 was new and exciting and this one isn't. And no, that isn't really fair, especially for a sequel which is only trying to improve on the first game. But there it is. It's why I'd recommend playing 2 first. It is staggering to me that they could make all these miniscule improvements but not even touch the co-op camera or the single-player AI. This may not be accurate but the camera seemed WORSE in this one. And it's these two things which make for an incredibly frustrating game. And these were both problems with LSW1. But I could forgive that, because, hey, it's the first game. In LSW1, the cool new stuff was enough to outweigh the bad. In LSW2 it's not new anymore. It's slightly improved. And that doesn't forgive the same bad stuff. And I have a NEW problem. I think I hate the cutscenes. Using the Sims-style "dialogue" is a massive cheat, and it doesn't even seem particularly necessary. The "comedy" is pretty fucking tortured. Trying far, far too hard for what came naturally in LSW1. And I really think that this game does a worse job of actually representing the movies than the last one. The pacing on ROTJ is bizarre. For adaptation games like this one, even if the story is well-known, I think there still needs to be a concerted fucking effort on telling the actual story. (I complained about this a year ago with King Kong, too. At least I think I did.) You don't get from this game that Luke and Leia are siblings (spoiler alert!) and you don't know Yoda dies until he shows up as a ghost at the end (for some WAACKKY comedy.) The way the game tells you that Vader is Luke's father is so obscure I didn't even get it at first. The game is mostly improved, I have to say. I mean, the gameplay is what it is, and people who didn't like one game aren't going to like the other. I like it, though. The unlockable stuff is better. Practical, even. I would not be going through the whole thing to try for 100% if it wasn't for some of these extras. I thought it was great that you finally get to use the minikit vehicles from the last game, even if it is in an uninspired minigame. And I'm at like 90% completion right now, and I have to say, the reward for 100% better be fucking worth it. I am really working for it. I don't even want to tell you how many hours I've put into this game. If you've finished it, please tell me if it's worth it. The reward for 60/99 gold bricks was most definitely NOT worth it, in case you're wondering. Also, you don't have to write a post this long.

I think the place you are describing is known as "the entire internet."

The scale of Morrowind and Oblivion? Not even. (I don't think anyone's said that in ten years) Dark Messiah is barely an RPG. Not at all actually. It's Half-Life 2 with an inventory and a skill point system. I wouldn't have even thought to compare them; they're not at all alike. DM is a far more limited, linear, smaller game than Oblivion in every respect except for the combat system. You can't get as deep into DM as you can in Oblivion. No way.

Now, I may be the richest man in this Dickensian hamlet, but what good is my money if it cannot buy happiness? Here's a little story. The completion/reward system in LSW2 goes like this. You get 100% after you have completed everything, unlocked everything -- characters, cheats, hints. You collect studs (money) to unlock things. For each "achievement" you also get a gold brick, and these go toward building secret things. There are 99 bricks in total and basically they build two things. At 60 bricks you unlock one thing, at 99 bricks (in itself not 100%) you unlock another. The reward for 60 bricks is a tedious scavenger hunt, the reward for which is a bonus 100,000 studs with every additional gold brick. There are a couple of items on the unlockable menu which are well out of your price range -- like 20, 30 million. One pass through a level might net you something in the high five figures. When you've got all 99 bricks, these items are the only things left before you are done with the game. What's the reward for 99 bricks? It's a fountain of infinite studs! Well I never! Now it is relatively easy to raise the cash to buy these last items! But what are these last items? They're stud multipliers. And they get ludicrously high -- almost 4000x at the end there. In five minutes you can make more money than you ever had in the whole game. Too bad there's nothing left to spend it on. Maybe, though, it'll tie in to whatever the reward for 100% is. And what is that reward?

Hahaha. Oh man. I am so glad I found out about this now. I didn't think this super story challenge could get any more frustrating.

However, the post-patch norm is "no problems for anybody."

That sucks; what's the bug? I haven't had any issues actually. It's really too bad that the DS version blows, 'cause as far as I remember it's the only one that allowed up to 4-player co-op. Your party gets large enough pretty often, it would rule if you weren't just dragging around three other characters who don't do anything. Though the camera is bad enough with 2 players sharing a screen, 4 players would be a fucking nightmare. Wifi or online would be the way to do it. In other news, I am one gold brick away from completion. I couldn't help it. I have to win. All that's left is powering through ROTJ on super story mode. Ohh Lego Star Wars you are making me work for this. Don't let me down.

I liked it a lot ("liked" even though I'm still technically playing it) but I understand why it didn't do gangbusters with the scores. The first half (maybe) of the game is really great but all the appeal starts to wear off after a while, I found. I'm on the last level and I cannot motivate myself to finish it. Games like this, which dazzle you with all this cool stuff at you at the very beginning, need to find some new stuff eventually. It can't just be like, eight hours in, here's a slightly more powerful sword. The kick is a really great feature, though. I actually can't play a melee combat game anymore without wondering where the kick button is.

Live E or Die

It's not a drastic facelift but that is because I am afraid of change. Also commitment. And expressing emotion. And women. And dinosaurs.

internet heaven

I don't think it's too unreasonable to have needed to play the first game, other than the fact that it's six years old, has dated badly and is hard to find. Still. Probably no developer/publisher will ever admit upfront that you might need to play the previous game, though. But I agree with pretty much everything you wrote, and could add a further page or two full of complaints (I actually probably have already.) Even so I think I might be in for a Dreamfall 2, even though I don't like the series all that much. I tend to think of Dreamfall as less of a game and more like The Longest Journey: The Complete Second Season on DVD, and that kind of helps.