miffy495

My boss thought this was hilarious, so my theater opens the exclusive Calgary engagement early next month. I will be putting this thing on screen. Shame.

Mafia. In anticipation of the sequel in a couple of weeks, I blasted through the 8 year old first game in about 4 sittings. I'm a bit torn about it. Holy shit is this game old and clunky. Part of it is probably that the graphics were actually very good for their time (looking slightly better than San Andreas, which was a couple of years later) so the mechanics being as dated as they are is even more off-putting. The difficulty peaked somewhere around mission 10, which is halfway through the game. This had me swearing like hell at my computer (I really can't remember being this pissed off at a game in a long, LONG time) for a while, then finding the last half of the game really easy. It's that messed up difficulty curve that is probably the worst thing about the game. The rest of it I enjoyed quite a bit. The voice acting was hit and miss, but the story was generally pretty good. It was also really refreshing to play a prohibition-era game. Smuggling whiskey was a really damn cool thing to have the player doing, and really helped remind me of exactly where and when I was. Also, the epilogue was really good. Except for I really liked this game, but it came with more frustration than I'd ordinarily have put up with. Beware, those who are considering playing it. Still, a good experience overall.

Yeah, it was the pokemon. This is why I thought it was relevant.

Awesome dream. I didn't realize you were an Ottawa guy. Beautiful city, and one of the few that I really want to spend a decent chunk of my life in. A week and a bit ago was my third anniversary with my girlfriend. We both said we weren't going to buy each other anything, but lied about that. I got her a DVD of Beyond The Valley of the Dolls (she loves old exploitation movies and had been trying to find it for a long time) and a promise to hold a big screen showing for her an all her friends. She surprised me with a hand-painted mug that had a picture of Koffing on it. Written on the bottom of the mug are the words "KOFFEE TIME!" I love my girlfriend.

Yay!

If I remember correctly, the problem wasn't so much that Toblix couldn't get his account back, it was that the person who'd jacked his stuff had also used cheats in Counter Strike or something. This meant that in addition to having to get his account back, 'blix was VAC-banned. Getting the account back probably wasn't the problem, but being locked out of any multiplayer ever was. Apparently, it's much harder to get your multiplayer permissions back than it is to get your account back.

I was at a buddy's wedding last night and sitting at a table populated by my board-gaming friends. I haven't been able to go to games night since May, as it got changed to Tuesdays and I work every Tuesday night. Two pieces of good news came out of this. First, games night will be moving to Thursdays, which means I'll be able to start hanging out with that crew and playing board games again, which I have done most weeks since Middle School (That would be about 10 years now. This is a pretty tight group of friends we're talking about here). The second is that one of their number had bailed out of going to PAX, leaving an empty seat in the car, and empty bed at the hotel, and an abandoned ticket. Long story short, Miffy is going to PAX! This will be the first time I'll have been in the States without at least one of my party being under 21, so I'll even be able to attend any Thumbs bar meet-ups! Another one of my crew is a listener, but I don't think he's on the forums (Dylan, if you're reading this, it's Pete. Say hi for fuck's sake). Still, I will be at the panel, as well as any post-panel celebrations! Hells yes.

No, often I'll forget to throw the laptop into offline mode until I'm already at work. Steam doesn't care. It just goes "oh, well you were online when you signed in, so ok."

If it helps, I do most of my gaming via offline mode. It works fine as far as I'm concerned.

Yeah, the race almost made me give up on the game entirely. Now my buddy Superfly keeps getting deaded real quick while I'm trying to go through an abandoned service station to mop up some punks. He runs straight into a crowd of 5 guys with nothing but a baseball bat, gets raped in half, and I have to reload the game. I think I'm starting to hate this game. I'm on mission 7 of 20, and still want to go through it, but god damn.

Bioshock 6: System Shock.

Stick around. This community has survived the website dying, the website coming back, the website dying again, the website being relaunched as a podcast, the podcast dying, and the podcast coming back. No reason to expect that the podcast dying again will slow us down. Welcome aboard.

Just having a conversation with Patters in Steam about this, and rather than try and re-type everything, I'll just copy and paste my thoughts here: [Thumbs][FU] Patters: Disappointed at the title. Miffy495: Yeah, that's a bummer. Disappointed that it's another FPS, honestly. Miffy495: I know exactly what to expect from a Bioshock. FPS with some light (INCREDIBLY light) RPG elements in a weird setting with sad-looking robot guys to shoot at. No Freedom Force for me... [Thumbs][FU] Patters: I really hope that the game isn't all go kill that guy [Thumbs][FU] Patters: Why does it have to be Bioshock Miffy495: I dunno man. I liked Bioshock, but not nearly as much as some people seemed to. I thought it was a reasonably good game with one great twist, but not a GREAT game all the way. I really had my hopes higher for this. [Thumbs][FU] Patters: It was all about the aesthetic for me Miffy495: It can only trade on that for so long though. Every time you got to a new place there was a great feeling of "holy shit cool" but afterwards you'd explored it. I'm sure Bioshock Infinite will have the same feeling, but it takes way more than that to make a game. [Thumbs][FU] Patters: I really hope it isn't after everyone has gone mad/died [Thumbs][FU] Patters: I'd love to explore it before that Miffy495: There were a couple of people in that trailer. The guy at the record player and the wizard lady pulling you through the air. I take that as a good sign. Who knows, maybe it'll be an RPG set in a living city... (COMPLETING MY THOUGHT) It won't be though. Everyone went kind of Bioshock crazy when it came out, but it always seemed to me that it was a pretty average game that did a couple of things (twist and atmosphere) very well. That was it though. The sequel I still haven't finished, but it felt very similar to that to me, except so far no twist. To be fair, that is of course not Irrational so it shouldn't count to the track record, but still. I'll still play this, and I'll still like it, but count me among the disappointed. Looks like Ken Levine was "freed from having to work on another Bioshock" so that he could work on another Bioshock...

I had no issue with the driving, actually. Everyone complains about the driving, so I can understand why you'd assume I have a problem with it, but I saved for the night right before the racecar thing and haven't had an issue with that yet. The cars are old and shitty. Getting up a hill faster than 20mph seems impossible unless you have a bloody huge running start. That's just what they are though. There's nothing bad about them, apart from the fact that, just like they're supposed to be, they're really freaking old cars.

Happy birthday, Rodi! Hope you're doing something ridiculous right now!

Just spent a few hours getting through the first 5 missions of the free copy of Mafia 1 I got with my preorder in anticipation of this game. I'm not entirely sure what to say about it, to be honest. I can see that there's a great game underneath all the clunkiness, but goddamn is it clunky. First, the bad. The controls are completely non-standard, leading to my car not moving when I tell it to in the first mission of the damn game. I had to remap every single interaction in order to make the game feel familiar. The horrible camera when you're on foot is laughable, planting the main character's shoulderblades directly in the middle of the bottom of your screen at all times, making his head look like the pistol from the early bits of Doom. The graphics are mixed at best. I really like how animated all the characters are, especially in the face (holy crap! Mouths move in a GTA-style game from 2002!), but either textures get reused way too much or there's actually a Boy's Grill restaurant and a Rose's Bar on every corner of the city. I don't think franchising had taken off quite that much in 1932 (the year I have reached in the game now), so I've got to assume overused assets. Now, the good. The story is really drawing me in (despite some voice acting that belongs in the above paragraph) and feels like it's done in a pretty interesting way. I also really dig the way that despite running around and killing people in secret, you actually do have to keep up appearances. The speed limiter is brilliant, and actually keeps me thinking about blending in with the world rather than just blowing it up. Most of the mechanics feel dated, but in an 8 year old game, of course they are. Contrasted with GTA3, which I remember everyone comparing it to at the time, they feel great. I don't get the GTA comparison at all though, as despite a similar look to screenshots, they are completely different games. This world is not open at all. You go from mission to mission, always with an arrow telling you exactly where to go and a clock ticking down making sure you're going there. I don't mind this a bit, but I can definitely see why people were disappointed when it came out. I'm going to make every attempt to beat this game before Mafia 2 comes out, but again, damn is it clunky. I really like it despite that, and can see that it would be worth suffering through the bits that are either really dated or just bad to begin with, but fair warning to anyone else who may be thinking of doing the same thing. This game has simply not aged as well as many others.

Thus my spoiler. Isn't anyone allowed to be sarcastic anymore?

That'll do it for Dawn of War 2. I think I'm going to start on Mafia 1 before doing the Chaos Rising stuff. Between DOW and Starcraft 2, all I've been playing lately is strategy, and I'd like to try and play Mafia before the sequel comes out in a couple of weeks. I should at least be able to put a good dent in it. Oh, and completion time for Fallout 3 and all expansions was just over 66 hours, for anyone considering doing the same thing. I promised earlier I'd mention how long it took, and had forgotten to.

HAWX 2 is out next month... Did you find anything particularly objectionable about FF? Is it just that the throwback cheesy comic stuff isn't your thing, and you don't really dig squad-based tactical RPGs? I found the game design great and well balanced, and thought the notes that the story hit and the overall tone were brilliant, but I can see them not being your taste. Finding anything really [/i]bad[/i] about it seems weird to me though, as even if it's not your style I think it's still at least solid in every respect.

From what's above, it looks like it'll be open world in the same sense that Arkham Asylum was open world. You can go anywhere at any time, but can only actually do things at one place. Of course, this is just my guess, and kind of my hope, but I can see having a few potential missions at a time, a la GTA having 3 letters on your map to start different missions.

Freedom Force and its sequel are two of the best games ever. Play them before slagging them. People keep saying it'll be a new IP, but I don't know where that source is coming from. If this game is not Freedom Force 3, I will be devastated and hide under my blankets for about a week.

I had no trouble at all with driving, actually. Felt really good. I've played through the demo twice now, once on my desktop, once on my laptop. It really told me that I need to upgrade my desktop's graphics card, and soon. Chugged like hell and made playing the game near impossible. Smooth as butter on the laptop though, so fears that the game I paid money for would be unplayable for me are put to rest. Felt really good and I now can't wait to play it. Soundtrack was perfect, too. I hope it's more than just a few songs, because it really felt right. After all my time in Fallout 3, I'm acutely aware of games that do a great job licensing music but then only license like 6 songs. I hope Mafia 2 is not one of those.

Downloading the demo now. I hope it's good, as I put in my damn preorder already. Whee, consumerism!

I use 2, GOG and Steam. I don't mind that at all. The overlap is minimal, and the GOG collection is well worth it for what it carries. It's incredibly easy to use and really nice about just keeping everything you buy together for as long as you may want to download it. Also, optimization for Windows 7/Vista is nice.

Dibs was first. If he wants, he's in. If not, I'll take the slot.