miffy495

Do they not sell Wache anymore? I bought that back in the day and wore it to the launch of the Wii in my city. People fucking loved it.

I've seen them live 3 times now, and they've always come off really generic and boring to me. They just always seem to be playing festivals that I happen to be attending. In fairness, I haven't heard their studio stuff. Maybe it's really good? At any rate, their live show is a dissappointment. JUSTIFY YOUR BSS!

Dude, get back in on GTA. We all suck. That's why it's fun. I didn't realize it was as bad as you're making it out to be now, so I didn't say anything before, but count me in on the "support" train. Get in on some games. GTA for sure, and Forza and Perfect Dark if you have 'em. We got your back. Best thing you can do is keep reminding yourself that your drinking makes you yourself uncomfortable. I'm glad for you that you seem to have realized that pretty clearly.

Yeah, I've been loyal to Sennheiser for all my sound needs for about 7 years now, and I've never been let down or felt like I've overpaid. Excellent stuff.

Yeah, from what I can tell all of my issues come from the porting job that was done to the PC. All of this said, the mouse and keyboard controls do their job really well. I'm only having problems because I think this is a game that wants a gamepad. If I had started off with mouse + keyboard, I never would have run into a single issue. And from what I hear, other people are having problems where the game won't display the keyboard controls at all, so there's that too. Looks like the majority of the performance killers relate to sloppy controller implementation. Here's hoping they patch that soon.

Sweet! Just Cause 2 discussion! Excited! Somehow I've already put more than 5 hours into that game, with homework kicking my ass and everything. I don't understand...

My crappy little pack-in mouse from my laptop died on me on the weekend. It did ok for gaming, but was just a basic optical logitech laptop mouse. After talking with Patters in Steam chat, I was informed that Razer makes a laptop mouse. I have never owned a Razer product before, but Patters is an excellent salesman. It was about $20 more than I intended to spend, but it arrived today and I couldn't be happier. I am now the proud owner of a Razer Orochi. Holy shit this is the slickest peripheral I have ever owned. It's ridiculously ostentatious for a laptop mouse, but it feels amazing and performs so well. I am now tempted to buy a DeathAdder in the hopes that it's anywhere near this awesome for my desktop. The Orochi is silky smooth, has a detachable cable (it can be used in wired or bluetooth mode), is incredibly portable, and remarkably comfortable. As it is a laptop mouse, it is smaller than I would normally consider comfortable (that logitech one was about the same size and cramped my hand up something fierce) but is designed in such a way as to accommodate spillover. Whoever designed this thing knew that a hand was going to be too big for this thing, so it's made so that your fingers and palm are supposed to run off of it a bit. Brilliant design. For anyone who does their PC gaming primarily on a laptop as I do, this is the one. Consider me a newly forged Razer fanboy. Damn you Patters, this is going to end up costing me money.

I switched over to mouse and keyboard controls. I still feel like this is a game that was designed for a gamepad, but that glitch I was describing earlier where the tooltips on the screen will change to keyboard controls when the analog sticks aren't being pressed and back to 360 inputs when they are appears to impact more than just what shows up onscreen. See, every time that that change happens, the frame rate drops for a second. This makes driving a vehicle incredibly jerky and damn near impossible, as every time I touch the stick to turn, the frame rate drops to half and then switches back. When I let go of the stick because I'm at the proper orientation, it does it again. Driving has become the most frustrating thing in the game thanks to this. So I decided to switch to mouse and keyboard, and no such problems. Oh, and the aiming is fixed when I'm hanging off something by my grappling hook. So now I'm using the control method I'd really rather not, but at least I can play the fucking game. I don't think there has been another game which I've put up with so much buggy bullshit to play. I don't count Far Cry 2 because it's actually been too buggy to let me play it so far. As a game which I've actually played, this is the buggiest. And yet I still enjoy it. I don't know, hopefully this control switch will make it better. More positively, I'm absolutely loving all the James Bond craziness, the terrible voice acting is spectacular, and the music is great. I love hearing the swelling brass spy music as I parachute off a mountaintop. Also, the mountains in this game are fucking BEAUTIFUL. Like, I am constantly being impressed with the visuals this game is giving me, particularly when I'm in free fall or parachuting. The snow caps, the lagoons, the forests, the cities, fucking everything looks like it was designed to be as gorgeous as possible from the air. It's less impressive when you get up close, but some of the vistas are almost photorealistic from the air. Fantastic stuff.

That's true, I could. On the other hand, this really looks like it was meant to be a PC game, and I spent forty goddamn dollars on it only to have it fuck up on me four times in four different ways now. I'm going to play that game one day, I just wish they had figured out how to make a game work when they made a game.

Ahaha. No, that has not happened with pokemon before. There have only been two gaming sessions that led directly into things of that nature that I can think of. Pokemon will be a purely innocent bonding experience.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that this game had monthly fees. Confirm/deny?

I plan on picking up Soul Silver and playing through it exclusively with my girlfriend. She's not a gamer, but goes nuts for pokemon. We're going to have a cooperative playthrough, always playing with each other and trading the DSi back and forth. Unfortunately when I went to get a copy they were sold out, so I have to wait a bit.

Given the crossover of two of the favorite topics of Idle Thumbs (being video games [not capitalized, therefor the medium, not Jake] and the Moon) I figured I'd throw up this link. It appears that Richard Garriott may have a legal claim to 40 kilometers of the moon's surface. Discuss.

If it were just a bit more ridiculous and just a bit less polished, I'd be saying this is the new Earth Defense Force 2017. I get the same kind of vibe from them. The "oh man, this is really fun in spots and completely infuriating in others" that I felt constantly while playing EDF is definitely front and center. I have some crazy fun times, and then die from not adapting quickly enough to control jank and get sent right back to the beginning of the mission (checkpointing in this game is ridiculous. I think there may only be "not in a mission" or "start this mission" points). I pull some move that has me giggling like hell just by virtue of how fucking crazy it was, then drive through a bush that looks just like any other bush but this one catapults me 50 feet from my motorcycle sliding my face along the ground. It is by turns fantastic and frustrating as all hell. I still like it. I actually like it a whole lot. You really do need to fight the game in order to do so though. Know what you're in for.

Played for about 45 minutes now. This means the two intro missions before you get to save for the first time. First off, I need guns that have more ammo. I pulled off a super badass thing where I blew up one helicopter while hanging from it, then grappled to another one while falling through the sky and hung off the front of it. I went to shoot the pilot and ran out of ammo after two shots. This meant that I had to give up on being a badass, go back down to the ground, hunt around for some ammo, and then get back up to the helicopter. Kind of hilarious in an emergent "oh shit, what if James Bond actually had limited supplies" kind of way, but also really threw off the flow of my badassery. Also, playing on PC with a 360 pad introduces just a hint of jankiness. First off, aiming while clinging to the side of a building is goddamned IMPOSSIBLE. As soon as you line up a shot with the right stick and stop pushing the stick so that you can fire, it re-centers itself and you're staring at a fucking wall. Also, unless there is an input coming from the controller at all times, it displays the numpad keys for bomb disarming and QTEs and the like. This means that during the "hijack a moving vehicle" QTE, I have to hold the control stick in any direction in order for the game to display the controls that I have in my hands. I wish there was some option in the menu to just say "I am using a controller, please only display those inputs and not the keyboard" like in Red Faction Guerrilla or Bioshock PC, but alas this does not exist. Still, I can see this being a ton of fun. It's ridiculously boilerplate, but that's part of its charm. The only asian character I've run into is a woman named "Jade Tan" which is hilariously 007, and they straight-face lines about how being sent in to kill the man who mentored you is a "bitter pill to swallow" but that's what you signed on for, so man up and do it. In short, so stupid, sorta janky, but very fun. If you don't already have the preorder savings, you may want to wait for a more substantial sale, but I'm definitely going to enjoy blowing shit up for the rest of the week.

Yeah, I've exclusively played it lying in bed late at night while winding down. It's great for that. If you need to relax, do it.

I've been playing off and on for the last week or so. Gerbil, I remember you were curious a few months back what my impressions would be when I got around to it. I'm using it primarily as a way to calm myself down after getting frustrated doing way too much homework lately. I freak out with stress, and play ABAHB to decompress my brain. I've only finished the first set of levels (that is, I beat a boss) but from what I've experienced it's just a very whimsical, simple, pleasant game in all respects. The puzzle design is clever enough without being frustrating, the checkpoints are generous if there's a tricky jump coming up, and I like that they give you only the jelly beans that you'll need to complete each level. It's nice to have a defined set of tools for each challenge. So yeah, go for it. It's not the most engaging or exciting thing by any means, but if you'd like a game to help you relax it's wonderful.

My bus driver to school on Mondays and Wednesdays looks just like Daniel Plainview. He's incredibly nice, but I always get just a bit freaked out when I get on the bus and see him. True story.

I believe the idea is that it goes back to some still-standing colonization law. Basically, because he owns a robot which has explored 40kms of the moon's surface, and this territory does not belong to any government, he has the right to claim it as his property. It may not stand up, nor may he or anyone else ever actually take it seriously, but it's still a weird and interesting thing. Dude could at least make a defensible case in international court for owning a chunk of the moon. What other private citizen could say something like that?

Alright, the download has begun. It's only 5 gigs, which is much less than I thought it would be. Kudos to Eidos on that one, I guess. I should already be in bed of course, so I won't be playing tonight, but I should have it ready to go by the time I wake up. Yay!

I can succeed at it, so it must be.

As I indicated, I have preordered it. When it comes out tomorrow, I intend to play a fair amount. I'll let you know afterwards how it went. Excited! I'll be downloading it tomorrow while I'm in class, and playing as soon as there's some downtime at work. I'd play in the afternoon, but c'mon, Grand Thumb Auto.

I've noticed at least three other thumbs on my friends list playing this, so I figured I'd create a thread. I've only played through the DataDyne intro missions so far, but I'm really impressed by how this game has held up. In HD and with the higher polycount characters, it looks almost on par with Halo (1) and still plays surprisingly well given the way they've attempted to keep the feel of the N64 controls while modernizing them at the same time. I haven't played this game since I was 15, so I started on Agent difficulty just in case the game started kicking my ass. I'm completing all the Perfect Agent missions while going through the early levels out of habit and getting confused that it's not saying "objective complete" when I do a thing. I guess I'll have to bump it up sooner or later. I don't know if it will become a mainstay multiplayer game, but any thumbs up for a nostalgia deathmatch or something, hit me up. I got the expansion pack for my xbox, so I can play with more than 2 people at a time and everything.

Totally in.

This. That's pretty much why I didn't play Bayonetta. A bunch of people were saying that the fact that it was so crazy made it commentary and thus more justified, but it made me feel just as sketchy and embarrassed as I would have if it were serious. Makes me sad NMH may have gone this route, because I was really looking forward to it.