miffy495

Heh. I heard your letter to the GWJ podcast, and was secretly hoping you would get a DS instead, as you seemed to not care as much about the phone features. Oh well. That said, the stuff I recommended in that thread still mostly stands. I really love Jelly Car. That would probably be my biggest priority of recommendation.

I fact, they do! One for the Wii, one for the DS! I really like the portable Zeldas. I've actually always preferred them to their console brethren. As much as I always look forward to the latest big Zelda release, all I ever really need are the handheld ones.

I like that you're confusing "a fuck" out of them. As though you just keep on confusing them more and more until finally they feel like they need to go have a smoke.

It's the twin that the parents actually loved. The one that goes off to be successful while the other twin is lying drunk in a gutter somewhere trying to forget that it exists.

Well, I'm an idiot. I take back this post. After picking up the game on Friday(ish?) I absolutely love it. This is fantastic. I never thought I'd be so damn proud of those little AI heroes when they pull something off. I'm finding that priority whenever I start a level is Clerics Guild, Market, Defence Towers, Rangers Guild. After that, just build whatever seems necessary. When you have a decent squad of Clerics to keep health topped up and a couple of high level rangers to open up the map, the rest just flows beautifully. I really wish this game were $20 regular. At that price, I could easily recommend it to everyone. The $10 I paid feels like a bit of a steal, but I would have difficulty saying anyone but a huge strategy fan should pick it up for the price it is. $40 is too much for this game, honestly. $20 (maybe even $30) would be ideal. Still, if you're a strategy person, give it a shot. I'm not at all and I still love it.

See? Dead Space really is terrifying! ...Sorry I don't have anything useful to say.

I don't know about the new Ratchet and Clank, but if you like it, I can certainly recommend the old one. I also found the Resistance series to be a whole lot of fun, even if they're nothing that innovative. I actually like the first one better, I think. The setpieces are less cool and the environments are more bland, but you have the ability to carry all of the weapons at once rather than only 2 at a time, meaning you're more encouraged to experiment with them. Given that the same people designed these weapons as designed the Ratchet ones, that's a huge plus. Infamous is bloody great as well. In light of Borderlands wreaking havoc on my productivity lately, it's no longer my goty 2009, but it came really close. That is a game I beat twice within 6 days, and would gladly go back to again should there be a dry spell for releases. Metal Gear is good if you're in it for fan-service, but don't look for an introduction to the series if you're new to it or haven't liked it before. The real gems are the ones that you won't be able to get to until you have some consistent online. The Pixeljunk games, Noby Noby Boy, fl0wer, and Everyday Shooter are the ones you need to get right away. If you're down with Gran Turismo, GT5 Prologue is a lot of fun. WipeOut HD was my introduction to that series, and though I suck at it pretty bad, I've found it to be pretty good for pick-up-and-play sessions. Have fun with that thing, man.

That's very true. I would still obviously prefer that region coding never existed, I just feel it is less of an issue than it was last generation, for example. It's at least now a pretty safe bet that a game will be released in your region, whether in a timely manner or not. Obviously it's a bigger deal for the UK folks where things take forever to come out.

As this seems to be the place where Lucidity is discussed, I'm going to add that I have now played it some more, using both the keyboard control scheme and the mouse, and can confidently state that the way the game controls is broken on some fundamental level. The controls (not necessarily the game, Tanu) are fucking awful. It seems like it could be an ok (read: mediocre) game if the controls were fixed, but as it is it's simply infuriating to try and get where you want to go. The little girl was running straight into a wall like a Quake 3 engine game's broken AI character for a full 45 seconds while I was throwing useless pieces into an upper corner of the screen looking for something that would make her jump over a goddamn 2 foot high thing. I'm done with this game.

I direct you here, sir.

Region freedom is seeming less and less necessary in modern consoles, honestly. I'm sure there are still some gems that I'm not seeing, but it feels like ever since Katamari Damacy struck gold in North America, publishers love bringing quirky Japanese games over in the hopes that they'll make it big. Demon's Souls is actually a good example of this. Weird, distinctly Japanese, doesn't look like a successful game to bring over. They do anyway, bam, tons of money. A few years ago, I imported a bunch of stuff for my DS, PSP, and GBA. Now even that is fading. I was crazy psyched about Rhythm Tengoku for the GBA, so I imported it. The sequel had a moderately successful North American release anyway, so the need was gone. See also Osu Tatake Ouendan becoming Elite Beat Agents. And Gitaroo Man for the PSP eventually getting a release over here. The releases that I'd really like to have a chance to play are ones I wouldn't be able to understand if I did, like that Captain Rainbow thing for the Wii that sounds incredible. I would love to play that, but it requires Japanese language competency that I just don't have. (Also, a Japanese Wii, but that's beside the point)

I'm now level 19. According to Steam, I have played Borderlands for 7.6 hours since buying it three days ago. I have had a paper due in the mean time, as well as more than 2 hours of GTA today with Thumbs, and spent yesterday afternoon with my girlfriend. How in the hell I've spent 7.6 hours with this game I have no idea, but I love it. I still haven't made it out of the first zone (Badlands) for god's sake. In 7.6 hours, I would have beaten another game. This is insane. Crazy ass game is eating my life. It's so damn good. For reals. So that this is not an entirely slavering account of how much I love every part of this game, I will add a negative here. The menu system feels ported directly from consoles, to the point where you need to use the arrow keys to scroll down because the scroll wheel does fuck all. Ugh. Despite this, I still want to have the game's babies. So, y'know, it's not a deal-breaker.

Well, yours at least...

And just like that, Ossk became one of my favorite internet people.

Let's face it, it's what you're best at. ...I pray we never meet.

Fixed. Also, MATHS is another favorite new GTA moment. Now I can't stop laughing again.

Zeno Clash is $5.10 today on Steam! I bought it. It's something I've been meaning to try for a while now and was disappointed that it was not up for sale in the Black Friday thing they did. This totally makes up for that omission. Haven't installed it yet, but I'm psyched to try it.

YES! ...also, it's not Black Friday anymore, but there's a midweek thing going on on Steam where Zeno Clash is $5.10. It's the one game I was really hoping to see go on sale last weekend, so I'm overjoyed. The "games I am interested in that are on Steam" checklist is almost completely covered now.

That whole round was probably my favorite in a long time. I wasn't paying attention when the mode selection happened, so the round started with me not knowing what kind of game we were playing. This resulted (to paraphrase): Me: "Wait, what's the objective here?" James: "It's diplomacy. We need to negotiate peace between ourselves." Me: (deciding to play along) "Oh, cool." (Cue two minutes of me running straight at people with no weapon in my hand yelling "WE MUST MAKE PEACE!!!" as they shoot me in the face) Patters shoots me. Me: "That is not how you make peace." (watching the kill cam, I see something I have never witnessed in a Thumb game before) Me: "Did you just teabag me, motherfucker?" I then proceed to go on a murderous, teabagging induced rampage, eventually climbing my way up to second place in the match by virtue of running over James in a helicopter and then flying away safely. All the while, I'm pretty much unable to breathe because I'm laughing so hard. Incredible match all around. On more than one occasion I could not stop laughing. The destruction derby that resulted from a 10 minute melee weapons only deathmatch was another high point. We must do this again sometime.

I'm sure if you're going to be giving money to Runic either way they don't really mind what you do with the rest of your money...

While I was playing Red Faction: Guerilla I somehow got "Truckin'" by the Grateful Dead stuck in my head. I rolled with it and just kept singing the song as I played. It was a good day.

Jesus, if this game has multiplayer we'll need at least one GTA: Old West session to give it a spin. That would be amazing. I'm thinking Train Robbery mode, with a group of players on horseback trying to jack a train away from a group defending the train.

Wait, what? I specifically said I love cute games. Lucidity's problem is not that it's cute, but that it's entirely textbook cute. As if they looked at things people thought are cute and said "right, do that." As a result, though the graphics are stylized in a way to evoke "awww" responses, and the narrative is as well, all told it comes off as a cynical marketing cuteness rather than a genuine wish to make a game with a heartwarming style. Obnoxiously cute may be the right term, but it leads to confusion where it may be read as "so cute it's obnoxious." What I mean is "cute in a way which is also obnoxious." And Syntheticgerbil, I'll probably be waiting until after christmas to get ABAHB, just in case someone gives it to me. My birthday is a week before as well, so I pretty much just can't buy things in December on the off chance a relative or the girlfriend goes for it.

Agreed. Listening to the GWJ interview with him this week where they were talking about how his review may have been slanted because the 360 version is harder than the PC had me practically screaming at my iPod. "No! Don't go back on your statement! It's valid! IT'S VALID!" Not enough to make me hate the game, but enough to make me think that something went wrong during production. All his complaints seemed legitimate to me. Whether they bring your opinion of the game down as much as they did his or not is a personal thing, but the complaints stand.

Man am I happy I bought this game. It's fucking awesome. I'm doing all the sidequests that I can, and am at level 15 having That was a hard damn battle, considering I went into it at level 13. Somewhere along the way I picked up an astoundingly good electro-shock shotgun, which I just kept blasting at the baddie's head with. It was such a rush when I took him down. Doubters, this game is excellent. Awesome loot drops, dripping with style, and the leveling system makes you feel legitimately powerful. Things that I was terrified of earlier I can now take out with a single melee swipe, and it feels great to do so. The most rewarding moment so far came right after the fight in the spoiler tags. In order to get to that fight in the first place, I had to fight my way through a huge gauntlet of enemies, clinging to my hitpoints as I went. Three times on my approach I was downed and had to kill an enemy to get my second wind. Three damn times. After fighting through that gaunlet, I had to go through a mini-dungeon, and then finally the crazy hard boss fight. During that progression, I leveled twice due to my fighting enemies significantly stronger than me. With my new strength, despite the fact that the enemies had respawned while I was in the dungeon, my emergence back into daylight was something from the crescendo of a Tarantino film. I walked into the light, headshotting enemy after enemy and taking each down in a single blast. I felt invincible after my ordeal in the dungeon. Best feeling I've gotten from a game so far this year. If the rest of the journey to level 50 is packed with situations like that, I think I may be forced to call Borderlands my 2009 goty. God damn. That said, I'm on PC (thank you, Steam sale!) and anyone from the Thumb who'd like to co-op with me should let me know. I'm playing as Mordecai, and have most of my points so far invested into things that give me crazy powerful crits. My Gamespy name is the same as my forum name, so look me up. I'll be playing as much as I am able for what will probably be a while.