miffy495

Actually, that's one thing about the Vita. Sony finally got the d-pad right. It feels great. Which is weird, because the PSP's is one of the worst d-pads I've ever used.

I remember it being a bit of a thing in Alberta, but Alberta is backwards as fuck by Canadian standards. Still, we did it with the rest of the country, we just complained loudly for a while and then got distracted by something shiny. Or oil. Probably oil.

Yeah, I didn't address loading times, but it doesn't seem like an issue on PC. My laptop loads a song faster than my 360 loads a Rock Band track, so it's fine for me.

Yeah, I want to keep my left trigger for the grenades. That's how Halo is meant to be. I'm fine with the CoD thing of putting melee on there, as typically when I'm put into a situation where I'd want to use melee it's a bit of a shock anyway and my hands just naturally clench a bit, which triggers an accidental but helpful melee attack. Intelligent control mapping can make a big difference. That said, the sticks are easily the most misused "buttons" in control design, and I think that with very few exceptions I'd consider them a detraction from my gaming experience rather than a benefit.

So I finally managed to get a copy of this. Amazon decided that it was too hard to actually ship me a game, but eventually the Steam sale meant that buying a cable separately and just paying the $14 or whatever for the game on Steam was cheaper than finding a bundle somewhere. Spent two hours tonight messing around with it, and I totally love this thing. It's really cool how it gradually scales up the songs, and I've had a great time quickly getting up to a difficulty level that suits me. My guitar playing has been mostly rhythm guitar and chord focused, so learning lead parts is going to be weird for me, but I've had a lot of fun with the 10-ish songs the game has given me so far. Something that I'm quickly noticing however is that it's not going to do much for my picking technique. Playing "Go With The Flow" by Queens of the Stone age, I found that my arm was pretty much dying, so I tried to switch to alternate picking. Up-strums are nothing weird to me, being a dude what's played folk guitar stuff for a long time, but doing so on individual strings or pairs of strings rather than across all 6 at once is a level of precision I've never had to deal with from my right hand. I just don't have that skill yet, and developing it is going to have to be a priority for me if I don't want to keep dropping notes and losing my rhythm on songs like that. Still, it's super fun. I bought the "Cliffs of Dover" DLC for $3 in a fit of optimism to give myself something to one day shoot for. I fully intend to keep up with this as much as possible. After returning to guitar last summer from a 5-ish year hiatus, this year's one and only resolution is to not let that slip away again. I'd started to get a bit tired of just learning different progressions for the same chords (though it's still lots of fun to have sing-along-y things just strumming away) but was intimidated by looking up harder stuff. After two hours, this feels like exactly the middle ground I needed. So fun, really helpful, and feels way more natural than I thought it would. My girlfriend has been thinking about taking her dad up on his offer of an old bass, and I'm considering picking up a second cable so that we can learn a couple of songs together. 'blix! I saw from the fact that you're the only person on my friends list with the game that you had put about an hour and a half into the game months ago and then gave up quickly. If you've already made the investment, try and pick it up again. It really is an awesome little thing from what I've seen. I'm really excited to see where this all goes. Major props to Ubisoft for making this thing real, that cable just feels like magic.

Oh man, I didn't even think to wear the wedding suit after that mission. Good call.

Ha, yeah. I had a kid in the fifth grade class I worked with last April ask me (when he found out I was a gamer) what I started with. When I told him the first system that I owned by myself was a SNES, he said "Is that like, a different name for the Nintendo 64?" My reply "No, it was the one that Nintendo made before the N64" absolutely blew his mind. I didn't even try to tell him that games hadn't gone 3D yet.

Wow, I honestly didn't know that Quadratus . I'd always just beaten him the way that you described as "cheating". Weird. Anyway, stoked to move on to the third colossus, but school has completely kicked into high gear this week, so I ironically may not get to. Going to do my best to find a chance.

I absolutely hate thumbstick buttons. I'm always hitting them by accident and fucking myself up in some way or another, and can never get them to work properly when I need them. The worst is Halo, where it's the scope for rifles and such. Trying to aim while also clicking in the thing that you're manipulating to aim means that those guns are completely useless to me in that series. Can't agree more with the "lose 'em" sentiment. In fact, that the GCN didn't have them made me like that controller even more. While we're on that: I remember Rogue Leader made pretty good use of it. If you pulled the right trigger to the point of click, but didn't click it, you'd coast at your top speed. If you clicked the trigger in, you'd enter a boost mode that closed your X-foils but deactivated your weapons for quicker manoeuvring. I really liked that. I'm sure there were more games that used it, but can't remember. I think maybe Mario Sunshine? Don't recall exactly what for though.

Absolutely one of my favourite movies. Didn't know they were making a sequel. I had to resist the temptation to pick up the phone at one in the morning and wake up my girlfriend to share the news. I guess that can wait until morning...

Fatalities? Low. Highway fuckups and horrible delays? High. We plow some things some times, but the street outside my house (which intersects a MAJOR route through the city) is never plowed. Now and then I'll see a sander truck go by, but it's infrequent. We also have godawful public transit that is some of the most expensive in Canada. This is a city that takes great pride in massive eyesore trucks, and penalizes those who don't drive them by way of infrastructure.

Man, seriously? Calgary got that much in like the first hour of a full day of snow last week and the difference was that my drive to school took 25 minutes instead of 20. And for whatever reason, we never plow our damn roads. Nut up, England.

Ha, I did that too. One was a sniper and one was a heavy. Seemed like a good balance choice to me...

I love love LOVE Sleeping Dogs. Playing it throughout December was so much damn fun. The two DLCs of consequence, TP, are Horror in North Point and the Zodiac Tournament. HiNP is a completely separate side-story that you access through the main menu, but it does take place after the end of the main story, so if you're super sensitive to spoilers ("spoilers" in the sense that "oh man, I'm going to kill that guy that I'm obviously being set up to kill the second I meet him") you'll want to save it. The Zodiac Tournament is a side-story, but also one that happens at any point in the main game and is accessed through a ferry that just appears in the Central district, so you can do that one any time. If you're thinking of value for money, ZT is about an hour of content for $5, but presented really well and quite fun, while HiNP is about 3 hours of side-story for (I think) $7. HiNP is definitely the better of the two, but I liked both. And yeah, I got 100% completion for everything in the game. I may have been totally hooked on it just as the fall term was ending.

Also, good luck, Subbes! You can handle this shit, plus you get to be with Shammack again in a week!

I just put in my graduation paperwork! Yay! Soon I will have two degrees and be working at a Starbucks! ...man, I'll be really gutted if the school board doesn't hire me.

Great, now TP can't make any more posters. Way to reveal his secret, youmeyou.

My PS3 copy just arrived from Amazon. Looking forward to giving it a shot, honestly. I loves me some Platinum.

Also, Nintendo.

I am so, SO excited for Tearaway. I got Gravity Rush free on PSN+. but am holding off on starting something new until I finish AC:Liberation. Liberation is actually really good. First off, game with a female black protagonist, awesome. Second, the adoption of various personas feels more assassin-y than anything else I've seen the series do. If you're dressed as an upper-class lady, guards will leave you alone and you can charm people, but roof-running is out. If you're dressed as a slave, you're pretty much invisible to white people unless and until you do something unusual, at which point they freak the fuck out. If you're dressed as an assassin, you can't get notoriety under level 1 due to people being aware of what the clothes mean, but you're much better equipped for fighting and can actually use a sword and gun instead of hidden blades and a blowpipe. It's really cool. Also, New Orleans and the Bayou are great places to have an AC game set. If it weren't for the fact that the framerate really chugs, this would be a fantastic experience (playing all the other AC games on PC has spoiled me, I think, as the series on console is not exactly known for smooth framerate either). As it is, it definitely feel like it's trying to do more that is interesting than other games in the series. It's actually mixing up the mechanics in meaningful ways, and while not everything is successful, I respect that.

Hiya, new folks!

Also, their "Vita will make a comeback" is fleshed out as a "please please please let this be true" rather than an actual prediction. All in all, Gamasutra doesn't seem to think the games industry will exist by the time we get to 2014.

How did you get my photo of Nick?

I've been playing a lot of Vita over the last while, completing Touch My Katamari, Mutant Blobs Attack, Soundshapes and LittleBigPlanet Vita. Hey guys, this thing is pretty good. In particular, everyone should definitely play LittleBigPlanet Vita. It actually finds a good use for the rear touch! It also shows where you're touching really clearly, which is an issue that a lot of things have when they use it (I'm looking at you, Soundshapes level editor). The credits on LBPV are running right now (and have been for almost 20 minutes. What the hell, guys?) and I wanted to post while it's still fresh in my mind. It's not a reason to buy a Vita, but between this and all the other stuff I've been playing (ported over my save from Persona 3 as well. Only two months left to go in the story!) I already feel like I got my money's worth. I'm really impressed with this little system. One caution, if you don't have a PS3 there are some really frustrating decisions made with the PSN store. I have Um Jammer Lammy, MGS1, and MGS Peace Walker on my account, and they work fine on my PS3 and PSP, but I can't access them through the PSN store on my Vita. I have to load up the store on PS3, download them to the hard drive there, and transfer them over to the Vita using the data utility. Once there, they work great, and even have extra options like FSAA and assigning PSP button presses to the right stick, but for whatever reason you can't get them on the system without moving them from a PS3 first. Really odd choice, and I'm pretty curious why that is. That said, assigning PSP buttons to the right stick is bloody great, and you can fully customize the controls on any PS1 game. First thing I did when I loaded up Persona 3 Portable was to assign the L and R buttons to left and right on the stick, giving me camera control in dungeons on the right stick. Same with Peace Walker, although there you set the right stick to be the face buttons instead. Works great, highly customizable. Good stuff, Sony. Very good indeed.

Yeah, the main reason I wanted to play Revelations is that I'm really attached to the Altair character. I just love him in concept, and even played the not-so-great PSP game twice because he's the star. Getting to follow up on him, especially the later flashbacks where he's actually a feeble old man, is awesome.