miffy495

In my apartment I have about 6 and a half feet (2 and a bit meters) from the TV to the couch, and that's enough room for me to play some Kinect Adventures. If I want to play two player or Dance Central, I need to move my couch, which will give me about 8 feet (the aforementioned 2.4). My apartment ain't that big, so if you're willing to move furniture you can probably make it work. It is a pain in my as to move my couch and coffee table to the sides of the room just to dance around though.

Man, your intro got me interested enough to load up the Steam page before reading the rest of your post. Curses!

The greatest detriment to my taking part in these things is my lack of a home internet connection. Otherwise, yeah I totally miss the games. It would be nice to get things going again, but I need to get the infrastructure first. I would be happy to get in on Magicka, DoWII (and want to get the expansion), GTAIV (360 or PC), Dirt 2 PC, etc etc etc, but have to get around to that internet thing. Hopefully something will start up and then I'll be able to tag in late.

Good word, but I propose "unexpurgated." My new favorite word, as seen on the cover of a copy of "Tropic of Cancer," and the most pretentious way to say "unedited" that I've ever seen. *ahem* UNEXPURGATED.

Jack is definitely more my type than Miranda, but her presentation still didn't bother me. Miranda was overly-presented as "YOU NEED TO BE ATTRACTED TO THIS LADY. CHECK OUT OUR CAMERA ANGLE SHOWING BOOBS." while Jack was just sorta there. As a result (and the fact that if you took off the tattoos, she'd look quite similar [read: as close as a video game would get] to my girlfriend) I was able to connect much more with her as a character and actually get into her story. The "suspenders as a shirt" thing is still a bit much, but at least they don't linger on it. Bioware in general has issues with female characters, largely because they're always emphasizing "AND YOU CAN SLEEP WITH HER TOO. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED." That said, Jack was probably the one who bothered me least out of all of them.

Ask and ye shall receive:

I thought it was pretty worthy. Haven't played that much of it, as I went in too soon after finishing RDR and burned myself out on it a bit, but it was fun enough and I really want to go back to it. I liked the humour and the missions seemed good, but the territorial battles from San Andreas looked like they were back, and those were my least favorite part of SA so I tapped out for a while.

Well, it's out. Grabbed it up at work today, as seems to be the trend when a big game drops on a day when I work. Only played the intro bit so far, but I gotta say it really impressed me. Actually being born as your character, deciding what you'll look like "when you grow up" was a really interesting way of doing the customization. Then learning to walk with your father and celebrating your 10th birthday party. Just a really cool way of handling the tutorials. I always found it weird when a game has to teach a grown person how to walk, and this really impressed me. Oh and

So stoked on this that I took my xbox to someone's house last week and downloaded it on their Wifi. Going to start playing tonight. Happy!

This summer (look earlier in the thread for full impressions) I played FO3 and all of its expansions. I found them all totally worthwhile, and mostly for different reasons. I'd go for the expansions myself, but then I haven't played NV yet, so take that into consideration. Just finished Metroid: Other M this afternoon. I'm not entirely sure how to feel about it. It was actually a really good game, and the story turned out to be really interesting and develop the Metroid universe quite a bit. At the same time, this good story was almost completely ruined by goddamned horrible voice acting. It's kind of telling that the credits listed Nate Bihldorf and Leslie Swan as actors. For those that play a lot of first-party Nintendo games, those names may sound familiar. That's because they're two of Nintendo's in-house localization managers. The people who do the translating were the ones doing the acting. What the hell? If you're going to have voices in one of your big marquee franchises, you should probably get actual actors to do it. The fact that the story is actually pretty good (aside from one really irritating thing that I'll spoiler out), especially by sci-fi game standards, makes the voice acting even more frustrating. So, how about a good points/bad points breakdown? The good: - The visuals. Holy hell is this game a looker. I didn't know the Wii could put out graphics of this calibre. There are jaggies here and there due to the fact that it only goes up to 480p, but with the hardware they had they made an amazing looking game. It looks as good if not better than some 360 games I've played recently. I don't know how they did it, but this game is simply beautiful. - The controls. Yeah, the controls. I was sceptical at first about using the NES-style wiimote as the only means of control, but they made it work. I never felt like the controls were holding me back from enjoying the game, which was something I had been very worried about. Frankly, I can't imagine playing the game a different way after completing it. Let's face it, as gamers, our thumbs move fucking fast. Having the thumbs do all the work felt way more natural than having my left thumb on a nunchuck and my right thumb and forefinger alternating for attack and jump. Even switching to morph ball was great. In older Metroids, you'd have to double-tap down on the dpad. Now you slide your left thumb over a bit and tap A. It's the same thumb, so it still feels natural, and because it's a single tap to get it to work, it's actually more responsive and accurate. Great work on the controls. - The story. It's interesting, though not particularly deep, and does some cool things with the Metroid fiction in general. My one issue with this is That aside, Samus is written as a strong, competent woman who will fuck you up if you cross her. Actually, it's kind of neat that the majority (read 3 of 5) of the principal characters in this game are female, and I can't recall a time when they get all sexed-up. That's pretty fucking cool, and really unexpected considering this is Team Ninja we're dealing with. - The feel. I'm not sure how else to put this. The game feels like Metroid. Even though there are other people on the station, with only a few exceptions you're mostly just discovering their corpses. When I read that Samus gets incorporated into a military squad to search a research station for survivors, I got worried that there would be too much interaction, not enough exploration. This is incorrect. The exploration is toned down a bit, but not too much. I'd say you're given about as much direction as you were in Metroid Fusion. That is, you're told there's something in Sector whatever, you go to sector whatever and get locked in, but then you go all over that sector. There's a good deal of backtracking, and one of your abilities you don't get until the final boss fight, so I'll be heading back in for some post-credits exploration now that the whole station is open to me. In short, it gets the exploration and isolation about as well as Metroid Fusion. As Fusion was my personal introduction to the series, I'm happy with that. - The combat. What can I say? Fighting feels right. Charge shots, wave beam, gravity suit, screw attack, etc. They're all here and they all work just like you want them to. The bad: - The acting. Oh my fucking god this is the worst thing in the game by miles. When a character is (vague, hopefully not tag-worthy spoiler) (spoiler complete) It's just bloody awful. Those lines didn't have to be terrible, but the delivery made them worse than as written. Given that the story is good, it felt kind of like watching a grade-school dramatic production of a pretty good sci-fi play. Just baffling how that could get through. Did no one on the production staff have ears? - The final boss. So you're playing this really good, challenging in all the right places game for about 8 hours (that was my completion time, anyway) and it's really fun. Suddenly you get to the last boss, which is a great idea in principle. It really does a good fake-out, making you think you're going off to fight one thing and then having you fight something totally different, and surprising, but also appropriate and cool. Then this fight is way harder than anything you've encountered to this point (to the point where after my sixth try I turned off the game for a day) and forces a level of precision on you that the controls aren't actually up to. The only problem with the controls is that it can be a bit sluggish when you want to switch to first-person, but up to the final boss, this has been masked by the game never requiring you to do this particularly quickly. Suddenly, the final boss is totally dependent on this ability. Said boss also has three phases. The first is mind-numbingly twitchy and frustrating, the second is easy as hell, and the third is impossible if you're not aware of something very specific that the game never informs you of. I'm going to write it here without spoiler tags so that everyone may know. Up to this point in the game, you've been gradually unlocking Samus' abilities, and every time that one of them is unlocked you are given a notification onscreen that you have to button through. Going into the final boss, you still don't have your power bombs. They are required to defeat the final boss. They unlock, without fucking telling you, when the third phase begins. They also don't tell you how to use them, so go into morph ball and hold down the 1 button until you're charged up, then release. It would have been fucking nice if the game had told me this in the first place. I had to look it up online. Any boss fight which requires one to consult a FAQ is automatically terrible, let alone when the reason is because the game doesn't let you know that you can do the thing that you need to do to defeat it. Man, I should have put the good points second, as there are way more of them. That bad just looks overwheming right now. Let it be know that Metroid Other M is a fucking great game, and it is only the final boss fight and abysmal voice acting that keep it from being a part of my top 5 of last year. It's rad, check it out.

Fuck I need an internet connection. I want this so bad.

Yay! Sombre! (juxtaposition is fun!)

I'm with Snoogle on this one. I think that individually, I'd really enjoy either just reading the thing or just looking at the art, but together I don't know if they work so well. It feels a bit off. That said, the art is goddamned spectacular and I'm going to keep up with it.

I found the Master Sword from Zelda. This made me very happy. The shadows keep fucking up for me, making the world flicker a bunch. That aside, I'm relatively bug-free. I wish they could get their shit together a bit more on that front, because otherwise this game is incredibly fun.

Anyone who uses the term "alpha male" with any kind of seriousness (unless they are actually talking about wolves or something) has automatically dug themself into a hole as a helplessly old-fashioned, likely sexist idiot. After seeing the term "alpha male rant" I'm kind of curious as to why you'd bother to continue reading in the first place.

Whoa. Shit, that's rad.

Happy birthday, other Pete (that I know of)!

I think the quotes Nappi posted are a bit more subtle than that. It's more of the "if we pretend to be something enough, it will eventually begin to influence who we really are" sort of thing than a "take everyone at face value" sort of thing. I do think this is a very true statement. It's not that it's impossible to be sarcastic, have a character, or be facetious, but more of a warning that if you spend too much time inhabiting said character you will adopt portions of that person as part of who you actually are. This is really something to be cautious of, and something that I think a lot of media personalities fall victim to. From what I've gathered, this Jim guy may be a case of that. Also, this has reminded me that I need to read more Vonnegut, having only read Slaughterhouse Five. Anyway, I withdraw back to my original position of not knowing who either of these people are and just getting grossed out by both of them while passively reading this thread.

Yeah, it was the Dog. That thing was a total bummer. I get that she scanned it so that I could fight it at all, but man I would have expected it to be able to hit me at least once. Then later, when , all you need is to catch up to it and hit it once? What the hell?

Without having seen True Grit, you're missing what I personally would call the best movie of the year, so you should probably get on that. I was thinking of award-nominees in general I guess, with Nicole Kidman and Michelle Williams both being up for best actress for the two movies I mentioned. Fuck Rabbit Hole mostly because I'm sick of white suburban problems being what draws all the nominations. Everything I've seen of Rabbit Hole looks like the kind of thing I already saw from Little Children which, while a fantastic movie, kind of filled my quota of suburban white movies for the next several years after. There's just so much more that's interesting out there that I can't be bothered to see those things as much. The Kids Are Alright took that kind of setting, but did so much more with it by making it about something that I hadn't seen approached in a mainstream film. Anyway, Blue Valentine: What a good film. Such a bummer, but really nice in how realistically it portrays everything. I thought I called the ending when it was about to hit, but then was proven wrong and was very happy for it. I also really liked that neither of the people in the doomed relationship were at fault, they were just totally different. It was really good, really subtle, and really well made. That said, the camera is jerky as hell, so if you're prone to motion sickness as my girlfriend is, you may want to take that under advisement. She had to close her eyes about every 5 minutes to keep the nausea under control.

Way to roll with your conscience, or whatever it was, man. Nothing like getting out of a job that just doesn't feel right. Happy for you!

I'm downloading Duty Calls right now. I really want to check that out unspoiled. The idea of it is hilarious to me. Can't wait to give it a quick run through.

It was 28 below a couple of days ago. As a result, my bus was 10 minutes late. Nothing else about my day was impacted. Listening to people in the Southern US talk about weather is hilarious to me.

Saw the King's Speech on Sunday. It was really, really good. In my mind, the best picture of 2010 is a dead heat between that and True Grit. King's Speech is definitely more academy-bait though, so it will probably win. Handled with far more humour than I expected. People should see this movie. Only best picture nominee that I still need to see (besides Rabbit Hole, because fuck Rabbit Hole) is now Blue Valentine. Hopefully will be going tomorrow. Whoo, movies!

Magus, just sign up again after we purge every user with your birthday on suspicion of spambotting it up. Otherwise, happy birthday!