miffy495

SuperYaris is go! To all those who don't believe, I give you my beautiful supercar, a turbocharged A-Class Yaris with a Performance Index of 595 and a custom paint job to boot! She just took the opening round of the A-Class world championships at Sebring very handily. The game actually didn't even present upgrading the car from C into A class as an option, so I had to back out to the main menu, tune the fuck out of her, and take her into the final myself. Who's laughing now? Here's a video of my new baby in action: Or there WOULD be a video if the video upload hadn't fucked up. Has anyone else tried uploading video from Forza 3? I've tried twice now (first when 'blix, Jon, and Infovore flipped me over, and now with my superyaris) and neither has worked. Fucking thing. Anyway, she needs a formal online coming out party. An A-Class race in this Wednesday's Formula Thumb, hatchbacks allowed? I'm not that great, so I probably won't win. But goddamnit, I WILL compete.

You're Wrestle's friend from Forza on Wednesday, right? Welcome aboard!

Oh, I thought it was a one vote per computer thing. (although I did use the work computer to vote as well, so I guess it counts twice.)

Made it to Reality 2.0 before the Steam sale, and my PC gaming has been overwhelmed with newer purchases since. One problem I'm having is that Telltale's system requires me to be online to authenticate before I play and most of my gaming on PC is done on my laptop during down-time at work. There is no wifi at work, so I end up always playing something on Steam in offline mode. I started the retread because I wanted something I could play while lying in bed using just the touchpad, so when I have a mouse available to me I'm playing something else as well. Not a bad idea to go back into it though. At the moment Forza has its hooks into me pretty bad, but pretty soon I should be good for another night of Sam and Max.

I have a break from noon to 3:15 on Wednesdays, which means that I'm in when I don't have lunch plans with friends or such. Which means I'm in for this week. Jon, are you on EST (I don't know what time zone Florida is in...)? When Wrestle says 1pm Canadian, he means Mountain Time, which is 3 Eastern Standard and noon Pacific Standard. Groucho: I know fuck all about cars, and honestly have never cared to. I've never owned one in my life, and have only driven borrowed or rented vehicles. All of the fancy talk on this thread does nothing but baffle me. You probably know far more about cars than I do. That said, I've always enjoyed Forza and this one is no different, fun-wise. Last week I remained pretty much in the middle/bottom of the pack the entire time, but still had great fun. If you have the game, I'm sure you'd feel comfortable racing with us. Despite the car talk going on here, during the race it's much more relaxed. Jon and I were saying things like "the blue snazzy one" to describe vehicles last week and it was no issue. Join in if you can, at least to give it a shot.

I voted. Did it do anything? I'm not sure what the emoticons next to game names mean...

Unless it was a GBA game, good luck with that. You'll need a GBA or older to play it. DS doesn't support anything pre-2000

Remember when everyone thought Rayman Raving Rabbids was going to be an incredibly offbeat and awesome platforming game, instead of the incredibly offbeat and awesome minigame collection it ended up being? Then a bunch of people got pissed off at the minigame collection, even though it was one of the best things on the Wii at the time? Well, Rabbids Go Home is the platformer that they were screaming for, albeit without any actual Rayman in it. I don't really know what I can say about this game aside from that I've played through 3/5 of it now and anyone with a Wii and a sense of fun needs to buy it. Badly. The control is hard to describe, not in a "this button does this" sort of way, but in a feel sort of way. All the inputs are really simple, but everything just constantly feels seconds away from being completely out of your control. I don't want to say it feels as though you're fighting the controls, because that's often used as a negative way to describe things. It does feel like you're wrangling them however. As if you have a very spastic dog on a too-long leash and you're trying to keep it from flipping out. For the game and the Rabbids, it's perfect. The game is a bit over the top in it's anti-consumerism message, made all the more odd by the Capri Sun product placement, but the sheer goofiness of it all makes up for it. What otherwise could have gotten old quite quickly is easily redeemed by the personality exploding from every pixel of this game. It's so goddamned charming. I really want to try out Dead Space Extraction, but I can't bring myself to take this game out of my Wii until I've finished it. Wii-owning Thumbs, get this game ASAP and rejoice.

Yeah, TV party was Rabbids 3. Rabbids 2 was a minigame collection, and Rabbids 1 was a game in which the rabbids kidnapped Rayman and forced him to play minigames in some kind of gladitorial competition. Still minigames, but you were Rayman for them.

Long story short, a Yaris is one of the few cars I've actually driven in my life. Rented one to drive to Edmonton a while back. It's a really low-end Toyota hatchback (though surprisingly comfortable) that is one of the few cars that the game will let you have completely for free when starting. It was the first car I got in the game, and I have now upgraded it to the point that it can compete against reasonably good sports cars. Not just compete against, but obliterate. I'm very proud of my little starter Yaris.

Seems to be the consensus. I too am concerned, but much more interested in the game given the brilliant reception it's had. Luckily, I have so many damn games on my plate right now after all the recent ridiculous sales that I can afford to wait until the price drops a bit. I still refuse to pay $70 for a game. It's the principle of it, dammit.

I was saying to Wrestle and Patters before the last session that when it's possible, I like to win games in ridiculous ways. My example was a cultural victory in Civ IV by having the entire world convert to my polytheist religion and give up their belief in one true god. It can be hard to do this in a racing game, but I do recall that Wrestle was particularly surprised by my claim to have a class C Yaris. Turned out I was mistaken and it was a D, but I can now say that I have achieved this goal. My class C Yaris (PI:424) just won the first round of the year 2 class C world championship more than 45 seconds ahead of the car in second. It's also the first car I've had that I've taken over 200km/h. Yay!

Zelnick!

I was on 360 as well. By the end of the game, I wasn't having any difficulty with getting where I needed to be, but adding in a timer that necessitates moving as fast as possible while doing it was what ruined things for me. When you're in that much of a hurry, the controls go from passable to broken. The tombs were particularly bad about this. The one under Santa Maria Novella was beautiful, excellently designed, and had no time constraints. I completely fucking loved it. Basilica de San Marco was the last one that I did, and I already related my experience with that one. Dear developers: No more timed platforming, please. Regarding stealth, one thing I really missed was the "blend" option from AC1. Being able to mix with any crowd you wanted was nice, but it seemed like if you weren't doing that guards would be after your ass just for walking down the street. At least in the first game I could just hold A when guards were around and they'd leave me the fuck alone. Artificial in a different way, sure, but at least you didn't get chased around just for happening to walk near a guard. (And yeah, every time I got even a bit of notoriety, I went and tore down the nearest poster. I played the game with as little reputation as possible.) I'll probably go back and replay AC1 sometime soon now that I've got the itch. It was a lot of fun to get back into that world and now it seems like a good idea to revisit some earlier plot points.

That was actually the opposite of my intention. You have one of the best defined personalities I've seen on the internet and many of my favorite forum moments have been your ripping apart a game that you don't enjoy. Keep it up. I have never had that issue with graphics, but some seemingly minor quibbles with pacing or controls or difficulty or even a bad menu system are things that I really need to struggle through even if the rest of the game is completely amazing. I love Borderlands. It's amazing. But the menus on PC are goddamned horrible. To the point that I once accidentally dropped my amazing shield unit in the middle of a firefight and couldn't get it back because navigating the menu was so counter-intuitive. It took me two weeks to go back to the game after that despite everything else being fucking amazing. All it takes is one thing. I need to let games get away with a little bit more shit, because it's turned me off some great experiences.

So at about 4pm today, I had just finished Rabbids and decided that for my last full day off before going back to school on Monday (I work Saturday and Sunday) I would continue playing games. I loaded up AC2 with the intention of playing through memory sequence 8. At 2am I stood up again, realizing that I was very hungry. Also, the credits had just finished rolling. That means chapters 8-14 were just played by me in a sitting. I guess the back end of the game is pretty motivating... Here's the thing: I didn't really like the gameplay that much. Ezio was fucking suicidal. I would tell him to jump one way and he would fling himself off of a building rather than jump to the perfectly logical rooftop a foot to his left. It may just be nostalgia, but I don't remember having any of those problems in the first game. Anything with a timer made me want to break my controller in half. The tomb under the Basilica de San Marco was fucking brutal, as it was 4 timed puzzles in order to open it up. This meant that 4 separate times I struggled to get Ezio to where I needed him to be rather than where he wanted to be, swearing all the while as he jumped off at ridiculous points and forced me to redo large sections, just to have the lever that I was jumping to retract into its casing while I was in mid-jump. Motherfucker that was frustrating. The races too. In fact, any time Ezio actually did what I intended him to do I am willing to chalk up to happy accident rather than the controls fucking WORKING. It was like steering the horse in Shadow of the Colossus but without the fact that the horse was supposed to be cumbersome. As I'm fresh off both experiences, I can honestly say the PSP game controlled better. And yet I kept playing. The narrative was that involving for me. It was really cool and had plenty of "what the fuck" moments that kept pulling me in. I can say without any reservation that I will gladly pay full price for AC3 in 2011 or whenever it comes out just to see what happens with that story. Hell, it could be a minigame collection and I'd still go for it. I am sorry to say though (looking at you, Jon) that I don't see how anyone could consider this one of the best games of 2009. One of the best game stories, sure, but the gameplay itself seemed like it was trying at every turn to get me to hate the fucking thing. Then the story would convince me to keep playing. I still overall had a positive experience with the game, but I came way too close to a ragequit way too often. And once I ragequit, I'm typically done with a game for good. EDIT: The following spoiler contains details of the final boss fight. You have been warned.

It's probably just that you need to be here for long enough that this is commonplace. NOTE: This post was created by doing a forum search on threads started by Toblix. You're fucking awesome, 'blix. Never change.

Yeah. The reusing tricks thing was what I was getting at with the helicopter example, and I don't get a feel for any of the characters yet. When No Russian happened, it was only the second time I'd been in the shoes of the character (can't even remember his name now) so I had not reason why he wouldn't be totally comfortable slaughtering all these people. I did it without thinking, mowing down anyone who crossed my path because I try to roleplay things like this and for all I know that's exactly what the character would have done. This is still not to say the game is of low quality though. The moment to moment action is incredible and reason enough to keep me playing. As anything other than a string of setpieces though, it's bloody ridiculous. Asking me to care about anything going on is silly given the context they're giving me. I'm enjoying this game a lot, but in the same way I enjoy Serious Sam, not the same way I enjoyed CoD4 or Half Life. I gather they were going for the latter, so in that regard, it's an utter failure.

I don't know if there's any kind of storyline whatsoever. Rayman is completely out of the picture now, at any rate. Now it's just bunnies yelling and wrecking shit up. I'm a total sucker for that though, so it's all good.

My dad shipped over here from Australia in the 70s. He lived in Kingston though, which is relatively warm. Moving to Calgary was the big mistake.

Still not buying Activision, but I got this for Christmas, so I didn't have to break my code. I'm playing on PC as well, though not that often. It's installed to my laptop for gaming on the road and such, but that also means I don't play it much at home. Last level I finished was the one that ends with a rooftop run to a helicopter in (I think) Rio. I quite enjoyed what I played, but it is sort of overwrought. I can't help feeling all the best bits are just rehashes of CoD4 as well. For instance, the aforementioned helicopter jump was really exhilarating and crazy, but afterwards I started thinking about it and remembered that that was exactly how the first mission in CoD4 ended, but with a sinking ship instead of Rio. To the point where I think they may have been able to use the same "grabbing a rope ladder at the last possible second" animation they had in 2007. Still, as I said, exhilarating, so I can't complain that much. So yeah, I'm enjoying it but I don't think I'd classify it as one of the best of the year. At the very least, glad I didn't pay the $60 (on PC!) myself.

I dunno, I liked Diddy Kong Racing.

Just finished it. I'd intended to complete a game before going back to school for the winter semester, but I didn't expect it would be Rabbids. Very glad I did though. Anyone who starts playing this game, you owe it to yourself to finish it. The final cutscene had me laughing way too hard. It has some surprisingly dark moments for an E game as well. During a hospital level, I went off the beaten path a bit and stumbled into a morgue. Dead bodies and all. Shocked the hell out of me given how happy everything in this game was. Also, occasionally when you pick up a dog, one of your Rabbids will start spinning its head around like a noisemaker, something there is no way it could survive. Weird.

Depends on the print. Back for halloween, we had one of Nosferatu that had been kept in excellent condition and was actually a joy to put on. Sometimes we'll be lucky enough that they'll reprint something as well. Tuesday night we showed Vivre Sa Vie (technically only 48 years old, but we made it part of the series) and the print was only a year old. It was completely beautiful. The worst prints I've ever dealt with have been from the 70s and 80s, where the movie is old enough to be classic but not old enough to have been reprinted. Midnight screenings of things like Wrath of Khan and (of course) Rocky Horror have had terrible quality prints. Wrath of Khan was so bad the entire film had been tinged orange from age. You could never tell if the Enterprise was on red alert or if it was just the print. I don't know if Harold Lloyd's stuff was ever reprinted due to him hiding all his films in a vault in his house until his granddaughter decided to release them. As a result of his neuroses, the prints are still in remarkable condition, but I think they may actually be originals. For old timey stuff, the worst one I ran was actually my first silent show. It was an old Chaplin short (about 30mins) where he played a stage hand. Can't remember the title. It broke 4 times during the screening, but crowds for shows like that are usually pretty understanding so it was not a big deal. As for 39 Steps and Night at the Opera, they're on the shortlist too. Good to hear interest. I'm with Nevsky on having only seen one Elvis movie (mine was CLAMBAKE! which I posted a trailer for somewhere on the forum due to hilarity) but I actually quite liked it. It was dumb as hell, but so fun. And Nevsky, if you do happen into Calgary and stop in, say who you are. Due to restoration cinema not being the most lucrative business, we only have 2 people on staff at a time, one who runs the concession and cleans the theater between shows, and one who handles the box office and does all the projection work. I am the latter, so I'd be selling tickets as well. Thumbs in good standing get a free pass in my books.

Not a specific (ie: one-day) one, but it was $7.50 or something instead of the regular $10. I picked it up and have been really enjoying it as well.