miffy495

So, trying to avoid spoilers here. I'm working my way through the DVD sets right now. I saw them on the cheap a while back and decided it was finally time to get into this show. I'm coming to the end of the 2.5 set, and have a question. I hear the Season 3 set has a string of webisodes called "Resistance" included as a special feature. Continuity-wise, when should I watch these for them to fit into the timeline? Any tips?

This is surely a momentous occasion! Our own chairman of blowing things up and shooting bitches now once more has an xbox! All are welcome. I'll be on from 2 until 4:30-ish this week (2100 to 2330-ish GMT) and am psyched to play for a while. Have a massive paper worth half my mark in a course due about an hour and a half before game time, so expect me to have a bit of aggression and stress to vent. See you folks then!

Oooooh shit. I'm dumb. Forgot that was this week. That would explain a few things. So are games now starting at 3:00 my time? That would mean I can actually get there when they start, rather than 15 minutes late!

Yes, yes it was. I just got home from work and am about to jump back in. Very excited to!

Honestly, I only noticed when my girlfriend started giggling at it. If I hadn't known it was there in advance, it probably wouldn't have even registered in my mind. I know opinions are divided on this one, but put me in the "pro-Watchmen" camp. The changes that they made are things that worked in the book but probably wouldn't have in the movie. The characters were perfectly cast. Jackie Earl Haley's performance was excellent. There was some cheesy dialogue, but in many cases is was quoted verbatim from the book, so I don't know if I can hold that against it. The costumes for the original team were fantastic, looking sufficiently homemade and old-timey. Really the only problem that I was was that they all seemed to have super strength when they're supposed to be regular people. That, and that they have My Chemical Romance covering Bob Dylan over the end credits.

It's a tough call given how much I'm enjoying Umbrella Chronicles right now. I'd say Overkill is probably the superior game, especially if you have a friend to play through with. It really depends what you're going in for though. If you're a fan of Resident Evil, UC is great. Lots of back and side-story. And as I'm discovering, genuinely fucking scary at times. It does a really good job (with me at least) of always keeping me about two swipes from death. Always panicking, looking out for the nearest green herb. Praising numerous gods when I find a can of first aid spray. Shooting out every light fixture in the hopes of finding some more ammo for that life saving automatic pistol. Really tense, great atmosphere. But does require an enjoyment of the franchise to really get into it. Overkill on the other hand is just balls out fun, and I completely respect that. You just can't avoid loving a game where you blow the heads off of cartwheeling zombie clowns while riding a roller-coaster. The fact that I've now beaten it 3 times definitely speaks to my enjoyment of the game. Get it.

Man, this thread is like almost becoming just a blog where I talk about light gun games. Does noone else play them? I'll shut up if that's the case... In the meantime though, I'd just like to announce that I'm almost done my first playthrough of Umbrella Chronicles, and really enjoying it. This is why I'm so happy that this has been announced: Hells yes. Light gun goodness for the missing RE chapters that UC didn't cover. Psych-o-meter starting to fill up, and there's some shooty fun on the horizon beyond Dead Space.

Best electronic representation of pure, unbridled joy?

Looks like the sort of thing I'd dig. Thanks for the tip! ...Also, good first use of the youtube tags. Aside from Mr. Bronstring, of course.

Oh man, SimTower was the first Sim game I ever played. Played it more than SimCity, actually. Bloody brilliant game.

Sounds like the fun continued after I left. On the plus side, I saw Watchmen, which was excellent. Kinda too bad it took an hour to get started, but I had a good time once we'd passed that point.

She's in her first year of Biomed. Have another older sister who lives in Cambridge nearby, so the close family thing was a draw.

Where the crap is everyone?

When I was 9 years old and had just landed the final blow on Ganon at the end of Ocarina of Time after hours of trying, my younger sister unplugged the Nintendo 64. Not sure if I cried or not, but devastated? Hell yes.

We make fun of everyone, but never really do it seriously. Civilized discussion always welcome, so feel free to break the lurking now and then.

Cool, my sister is at Waterloo right now too. Good school. If/when I come visit her at school, I'll buy you a beer.

Hell, it's baseball. Does anyone really care if we let them have it?

Actually, this sounds quite a bit like the combat in the latest Prince of Persia. As disappointing as the combat of that game was, it did use a system similar to this. The problem was that you'd find a very effective combo and just spam it until the enemy died. Still, it was an interesting start.

Good to have you back. See you Tuesday?

I'm kind of in a weird situation about "cunt." I tend to substitute it for "fuck," say, when I stub my toe or drop my phone or something. Fuck just doesn't have the impact it used to, and cunt still has the power to make people pause. My girlfriend has no problem with the word. Actually, she thinks it's fun to say. What she does object to though, is using it in a negative sense. So though I'm free to say "cunt" whenever I want, using it in the way that is instinctive at this point just makes her ask me "Why the hell are you using that as a curse? Unless you have something you really need to reveal to me, I thought you liked cunts..."

You knew as soon as you said it that someone would do this, right? First time I've used photoshop in about 5 years, and even back then I was strictly amateur for my own amusement. I guess it shows. Embarrassingly, this took me quite a while. Oh well. Maybe I've found myself a new avatar!

Umbrella Chronicles has arrived! Though I have a paper due at midnight, I used a half hour-ish break to play through the first two levels. Initial thoughts: Pros: - Takes itself seriously, and actually seems to merit it. - Lots and lots of things to find. Seriously. The "press z to pick up this item!" thing is always popping up. Shooting lightbulbs will occasionally even yield a document giving very detailed RE backstory. - Guns, grenades, knife, etc all handled very well control-wise. Keeping the nunchuck available as part of the Zapper config was a good idea, letting you use the Z button as an action modifier and the C button to swap out your weapons. Well done. - Reloading done by shaking the nunchuck. While this could have been a negative if I were using the Zapper (nunchuck and remote both locked into the same shell) rather than the Perfect Shot (nunchuck in your off hand, doesn't mess with aim), with the gun I am using it works great. I never need to move my reticule when I'm reloading, saving precious aiming time for zombie headshots. Cons: - Even on easy, I died on the first boss. Had some instant-revive First-Aid Spray (think: a fairy in a bottle in Zelda) so I still made it through the fight, but this seems much harder than I'd have expected. Still, I made it through the second level without incident, so maybe I just needed to adjust myself. - No calibration screen. Seriously? What the fuck? Why not? It seems pretty well configured off the bat, but no option for fine-tuning the aiming controls exists. Really dumb move. Especially considering that the available competition (pretty much all Sega. HotD 2&3, HotD:O, Ghost Squad) has the option to configure your aim. - The pacing feels a bit weird. Boss fights kinda come out of nowhere and there's little to no build up. - Quick time events. Why? Sure, they worked (sorta) in RE4, but do we need them in rail shooters now too? Why not just go with the tried and true method of shooting a dude while he's building up his attack? Add in that the prompts to press the Z button and the B button look way too similar, and we have issues. Fairly substantial list of pros and cons there, but this is only after 30 minutes, so don't take my word as gospel. It's really interesting for me to be seeing the story of RE played out from this angle. Especially as RE:0 is the one that I haven't played and the first one you go through in UC. The enemies are varied, which is nice. Slow zombies, fast mutant baboons, not-very-frightening-at-all leeches, and of course, the obligatory bats-that-fly-at-your-face-for-no-real-reason are all in attendance. As much as I loved the over the top silliness of House of the Dead, I'm also finding I quite like the serious storytelling of Umbrella Chronicles. It's still B movie stuff, but it's good enough to stand on its own without the gags, and I'm glad they're letting it. The on-rails camera actually fits the series incredibly well. It allows the game to build suspense at just the right moments by restricting your view. Sure, there are lots of cheap "boo!" moments as well, but that's what this genre is all about anyway. Well, I've now killed another chunk of my writing time by making this post, so I should really get back to work. After all this light gun gaming fun the past month or so, I'm really stoked for Dead Space: Extraction. My only worry is that I can't think of another game in the genre that's been announced. What I really want is a Time Crisis for the Wii. You've got your gun. You've got a balance board for that thing you step on to duck. What more do you need?

Is getting shit done well considered perfectionism? I pride myself on accomplishing what I set out to do as well as I can, but I've never considered myself a perfectionist. I'll stay up until 9 in the morning working on something if need be, but that just turns out to be how long it takes to get something done right. I've always considered my biggest problem to be that I can't work in installments. If I can't get something done in a solid blast of work (or at least a complete section of something. Say, a chapter of a very large paper.) I just don't get back to it. My energy needs to be focused entirely and for the complete length of time to finish something if I'm going to make anything worthwhile. I can't start, take a break, and get back to it later. Still a student, so I don't know how screwed this will make me for the workplace. Fuck it though, I'm in academia. Isn't the whole point to have great ideas in short bursts of genius rather than a long string of adequate?

Also a toblix vote. It just speaks to me somehow...

Holy crap, we've been doing this for 15 weeks. Anyway, I'm working on the assumption that the game will be running at the usual time this week (4pm EST/1pm PST/2100GMT) and Lost And Damned is a good thing to have in your possession. I myself will need to duck out after the first hour, as I'm giving an hour long presentation to my class on Wednesday morning and need to prepare for it, but hopefully with ysbreker back online there will at least be more people than has become the norm for a while. Standard invitation applies. If you're a thumb, online at that time, have one of us on your friends list (I can confirm that I'll accept invites from anyone I recognize from the XBL Gamertag exchange thread, if you don't yet meet that requirement) and want to play some GTAIV, sign the hell on and join up. It's all relaxed, actual competition is one of the last things on our minds, and it's just a fun way to kill an afternoon/evening. Hope to see some of you folks tomorrow!