miffy495

I have found the Wallace and Gromit games to be fantastic if you're a fan of the shorts. Highly recommend the first episode if you're looking for a free thing to get. It's the one I got, and then I bought the other 3 afterwards just because they're awesome.

Ugh. If you've ever watched a relationship disintegrate in slow motion, you'll have some idea of how my night went. If the two people involved are two of your best friends, you'll have a better idea. If you also found out that one of them may have cancer, you're almost there. Excuse me while I go drink myself to sleep. I'm already pretty drunk as a result of the evening, so this drinking will be done with hot chocolate. Nice, comforting hot chocolate.

Taris is a wonderful intro planet and really feels alive. I think people just resent it because it's more obviously linear than the rest of the game. I also think it's damn good though.

Yay! It would be weird to be somehow penalized for having bought too much of your stuff...

Me too. I'm just saying that the last time I tried to boot it up (about two months ago) it was much less so. It was a damn impressive game for 5 years ago though, and I don't want to discount the achievement that Bioware accomplished with it. I know from the rest of your post you weren't talking about this aspect specifically, but to all those who hold this opinion based on the side planets being just height-maps, I would like to point out that ME had just as many fully fleshed out planets as KOTOR, with side planets also there if you wanted to see them. Regarding your actual complaint, I do think that's fair. The thing with the Asari consort didn't bother me too much, personally, but I can see how it could be an issue. Really, the only Asari who was any different from the others was Benezia, unless I'm mistaken. It made sense to me that her powers would be mental rather than shown in some physical manifestation. After all, this is a race which is highly dependent on biotics, not on physical prowess. As for the little drone-guys, I never found the last one, so I just considered it an unfinished thing from my playthrough and didn't see that. I thought Kashyyk was pretty cool actually, but that may have just been because I really like Jolee. I hope you do as well. It really is one of my favorite games of the last couple of years, and I'm a guy who traditionally has very little patience for RPGs. (despite that, I still at least try to play all the big name ones in the hopes that I'll "get" them. Bioware always seems to find the right spot with me, so I look forward to whatever they do.)

I already own all the Telltale episodes. Do I still get a prize? Will I be able to hold onto my coupon code and use it for some future thing?

My friends and I don't play spoons anymore. The battle for the last spoon always got waaaay too intense. Last time we played, we broke the table. For real. There's been a ban on the game since.

And I think you're wrong. Oh well, that's life. To qualify: I have played both KOTORs through twice, and have just started a second play of Mass Effect in anticipation of the sequel. I've never been much of a Star Wars guy, honestly, finding the movies to be far inferior to the games in my own opinion. It just seems like it was a universe made for games. The best of these are action, as well. The Jedi Knight games, the flight simulators, et cetera. While the KOTOR games worked amazingly well as RPGs, and certainly rank among my favorite games, I think nostalgia may be playing a much bigger part than a lot of people are acknowledging. Mass Effect, while certainly flawed, is engrossing, has (largely) believable characters, and has many more game-changing moments. While very few games allow their stories to branch organically without the obvious binary choices (the original Jedi Knight and a few JRPGs like Chrono Trigger come to mind) at least Mass Effect gave you a bunch of them. A game where it is possible (but not required) for a significant portion of your team mates to not survive the story has balls, you need to at least admit that. I guess that KOTOR had a similar thing with but ME seemed so much bigger than that. I also found the combat infinitely more satisfying (playing as a soldier, granted) and the conversation system to make the world so much more real. Loading times on 360 aside, everything about ME seemed so goddamned polished and well constructed. In KOTOR it was much easier to see the seams. In ME you had to look a lot harder if you wanted to find something disappointing. It would be ridiculous if Bioware could go 6 (?) years without applying a significant amount more polish to their games, and they did. While KOTOR was great for its time, compared to its little sibling, it seems inferior to me. I'm sure ME will seem the same way compared to whatever Bioware comes out with in 2012.

I don't need a root canal! I got an official invite to the Film Festival's opening black tie gala with an open bar! (My girlfriend will be appropriately dressed, but has a blue mohawk at the moment, so this should be interesting) Everything at work broke tonight, meaning a ton to do, lots of stress, and me actually having to put out a (literal) fire! So, y'know. Hit and miss. EDIT: I just realized I structured my life as a Thumb! Thumb! Thumb! review, but don't have the thumbs to back it up.

Dang. Well, I guess I just really agreed with it then. I think it was what I was intending to say and then I noticed that another dude had already written it. My bad.

I don't think I've mentioned Pueblo yet, which is a nice uncomplicated one for when you've got a bunch of people who don't have much patience around. It's sort of like building a Jenga tower while trying to screw your opponents out of points. Very entertaining.

How late? HOW LATE??? I must know! Well, ok. Really I'd just like to load up the cast before I leave the house tomorrow morning so I have it for all that public transit to university. Is this going to happen, or shall my journey be thumbless?

Or do. It's not like we'd be able to tell. *********!

Yeah, except at the end where Seriously, how does finding little question mark statues in any way help that to happen?

Yeah, Dwhty, what the hell was up with that? "The Boss has reached the escape vehicle." The boss then sits there for a few minutes until Thunderpeel shoots him in the head. Gah!

Hey, it's all good. It just seems like memes tend to wear out their welcome about the same time they get itemized. There's a very great temptation to do that anyway out of appreciation for the source material, but sometimes they're just better left alone. Anyway, you've been a part of the intelligent stuff too, so all is forgiven.

Yeah, I do agree that this kinda takes the fun out of it. I liked the references to thumbs of old that Noyb added, and tried to contribute one of my own, but I saw those as playfully mocking the intent of the thread. Maybe don't kill it, but leave it to die? I was already beginning to feel that the forum is becoming too quote-dependent and less focused on original thought and discussion, and that this thread exists makes me a little sad.

Finally got around to listening to last week's cast. Damn, I'm glad you guys liked my dream so much. Unfortunately, never did get to meet Allard though.

High praise indeed. Also, I just discovered that the game contains an invisibility cloak. No anesthetic, but it does recognize "anesthetist," which will spawn a woman in a lab coat who will go around sticking people with a needle that puts them to sleep. I used her help in sedating security guards while I stole one of those star things from a museum.

Yeah, there were only four of us this week. Still, Hangman's NOOSE went well (read: I got smeared by Thunderpeel in a SWAT van, but we still won) and the two on two Cops and Crooks was great. I actually think that having only a couple of people for that game mode may be optimal. Anyway, enough of overcrowding the gamertag exchange with talk of GTA. Give it it's own thread, I say!

Grah! Controls infuriating! Everything else too awesome to make me hate it! This is a really interesting dilemma to have with a game. When every part except one is unbelievably cool and that one part that sucks is so crucial to gameplay, I don't know if it's more or less forgivable. Why oh why can't I just move my guy around with the Dpad? And then I have a moment where I drop some poison in a kitchen to help get rid of rats and the chef finds the poison first. This then ends up going into the dish he's making and kills everyone in the restaurant. When I get rid of the rats and complete the level, I'm given a "bioterrorist" award. God! I kind of wish I could just decide whether I hate this game or it's my favorite thing this year, but it's such a crazy back and forth I can't say either way...

Balls-kneeing robot.

No, I think you have a very reasonable point. I always feel far more enthralled by a game I've never heard anything about that one I've bought into the hype for. Compare, for example, a few recent PS3 releases: When I saw Noby Noby Boy videos, I had no idea what the fuck they were. I didn't bother to look at more than a couple, and decided that I'd just trust Takahashi and pick up the game when it came out sight (mostly) unseen. I love that game, and every time I fire it up again (every month or so) I discover something new that I could do and love it even more. Flower I got after hearing people talk about how great it is, but had never seen so much as a screenshot before I started playing. It totally blew my mind as I played and discovered more and more interesting things that the designers had come up with. While I was playing I was doing nothing but discover, and despite the game being beaten in a sitting, I still think back on it as one of my favorite experiences this year in games. By the time I bought LittleBigPlanet, I'd been watching trailers, gameplay footage, and pretty much anything I could get my hands on. I was actually drowning in hype. The game just hasn't stuck with me as much as it should have. It's a fantastic game, don't get me wrong. I just had this sense as I was playing it that it didn't have anything new to show me. I don't know if I can entirely articulate it. It felt like I was replaying the game, not like I'd just set out on an adventure. I still love that game, but I can't help thinking that I soured myself somewhat on the experience by following the prerelease stuff. Anyway, I picked up two DS games today after (I think) successfully ignoring all that stuff, so we'll see what happens with them. I have confidence that both will be good, but that's about all I know.

UPDATE: Shooting the cat works. Weird...

Aw... That was hilarious but the game didn't recognize it as a success. I was meant to reunite a girl and her kitten which was trapped on top of a house. Using a catapult and a flamethrower, I destroyed the house and brought the kitten to the girl. They were both happy, but it was counted as a failure. Poo... So yeah, I picked up my preorder today and got my rooster hat. It's a pretty sweet hat, and the game actually seems really fun so far. I'd say it's probably worth the $35 just to support the developer and have some fun tooling around with the system. If it were priced the same as a new first party game, maybe not, but for the budget thing, it's rad. Of course, I'm only halfway through the first world, but whatever. I will say that the biplane controls are shit, but the zeppelin handled pretty well. 'Blix, given how psyched you are for it, I'd say this week's choice is definitely Mario & Luigi 3 (which I also picked up but haven't started) but if you've got the cash to spend on Scribblenauts, it seems really fun from the half hour I've spent with it.