miffy495

"If you throw down your controller in frustration, we've completely failed." ...yeah.

Yeah, I'm reaching the end of the standard edition and everything feels complete to me.

If at some point a character refers to me as "dearest of all my friends" I'm in for Max Payne 3. I know it's kind of a dumb thing, but that would be enough to twig my nostalgia-buying reflex. Also, fun fact about Max Payne 1: When I played it the first time, I was 13 or something and couldn't cope with the end-game stuff. I played through pretty much the entire third act with God Mode enabled. This caused the adaptive difficulty to freak out in all sorts of "HOW IS THIS NOT KILLING HIM???" ways, and meant that essentially every enemy ever was carrying a rocket launcher and had a ridiculous amount of health.

Yeah, the permanent save states (or the "mulligan button" as I've been calling it) are what are allowing me to get through Gargoyle's Quest without ripping my hair out. I'm holding off playing Metroid until those have been added to it, as I believe they will make the game a hell of a lot more enjoyable to play. That said, I still don't hold it against Nintendo for not having them there at release.

Holy shit. Suddenly I'm happy I live in a freaking cold part of the world. Except even here it's about 30 Celcius outside. I can't imagine your crazy Texan temperatures.

I actually only had to try the second boss once. I started loading up a heavy rifle with all the upgrades I can find and took someone's advice to get the EMP-resistant skin. Blew out her cloaking device and then unloaded two clips of heavy rifle ammo into her. Fight over. I had lost the "don't kill anyone" achievement early on in the game, so I did just recently decide to With the exception of that one setpiece and two early kills, still have yet to murderize anyone. I like that this is a completely viable way to play the game. Hell, I can't imagine playing it as a gun-crazy dude at this point. That just wouldn't be a game I want.

I'll concede that getting to the games by going into your "previously downloaded" section on the eShop is a pain in the ass and I wish they'd do something about their store's front end in general, but that's the only point in all of this where I feel Nintendo has actually dropped any kind of ball. Even that is minor. The emulation is fine, and adding save states later isn't by any means something they're required to do, so it's awesome they're doing it at all. I can't see getting angry over any of this being worth the effort though.

True, but they didn't build their own spaceships. I think Rodi's problem is more with "These things are obviously organized and intelligent enough to create a far better form of space travel than anything we've ever come up with. Why are they drooling monsters?" Note his use of the term "Spacefaring Aliens".

A gross exaggeration. Balloon Fight and Donkey Kong Jr are great little arcade games. Zelda 1 & 2, Metroid, and Super Mario Brothers are fantastic games, albeit ones I already own. Wrecking Crew, Yoshi, and Ice Climber are games that I have nostalgia for but, on replaying them for the first time in a long time last week, turn out to not hold up too well. Golf is golf, but hey maybe if you like golf games you'll like it. The only one that I probably wouldn't have dropped money on to at least try would have been Golf, so I feel pretty good about getting these games for free. And as I have said a few times, the main event here is the GBA games, which will be out soon enough. I do kind of wish that the games had restore point functionality, but that's all that they're lacking and that will be patched in. The games from this set that I have purchased on Wii's VC don't have restore points, so I don't see why there is any reason to expect that they'll be in there at all. When Nintendo said they were adding them, I was happy enough that it was happening at any time, so I don't feel bad about them taking an extra month or so to do it. Still feels like they're doing it right to me.

Since you bring up Sony, here's the way I see events since April: Sony horribly compromises the security of my identity through lacklustre security measures. I have to go everywhere across the internet changing my passwords, get a new credit card, and carefully watch every transaction through my bank's website for a long time. They say "Our bad, have a second copy of LittleBigPlanet and some zombie game you'll play for 20 minutes and forget about." I agree to give Nintendo $250 for a 3DS. A couple of months later, they decide that more people would buy the machine if they asked other people $80 less than I agreed to give them. I feel like maybe I should have waited, but have already enjoyed the time I had with the system so don't worry about it too much. They say "Thanks for supporting us out the gate, here's 20 pieces of software for your machine that we will probably get away with charging more than $100 for later down the line. Not everything is there yet, but it will be fairly soon." Do you really feel like Nintendo is the one that should be taken to task here?

It still feels like entitled bullshit to me, regardless of where you think Nintendo is going right now. If you don't like their direction, don't buy their product. If you buy their product, then accept that the decision you made to put your money down is yours alone. At this point, it's starting to feel like Nintendo would have had fewer people complaining if they hadn't made a goodwill gesture at all. Sure, dropping the price after 5 months is unheard of, but you know what else is? Giving early adopters 20 free games just for being early adopters. The quality of the games doesn't even matter at that point, but that at least half of them are really good (between the NES ones that are worth playing and the announced 5 GBA games) and the others are at least worth a look is fantastic. Long story short, the internet is whiny and irritating.

Yeah, as I've said, the GBA games are the real "reward." The NES ones are the same "classic" games they've re-released 7 million times by now, the GBA ones (the announced ones, anyway) are uniformly fucking amazing games that I can't wait to load onto my 3DS and play the shit out of. If you've never played Mario Kart Super Circuit, you've never played the best Mario Kart game, and now you're going to get it for free.

Exactly. 3 days after I bought the latest New Vegas DLC, Steam had it at half price. Did I feel dumb? Sure! Did I blame Steam? I'd kind of have to be crazy to do that.

Hey folks. I've been out of the PC building game for quite a while now and have no idea what cards are good anymore. I got my current desktop waaaay back in '07 and when trying to run DXHR on it, I am made very sad. My processor is still capable, though not the best thing ever (intel CORE2 quad-core at 2.4GHz), but my 8800 GTS video card is gasping for air. I don't have a bunch of money to spend, but am thinking that an upgrade may be in my price range. I have completely lost the thread on what is good these days though, so I turn to you folks for advice. What is a decent mid-range video card these days? I'm looking to hopefully spend less than $200. EDIT: Some quick (uninformed) searches make the GTX 550 seem appealing. Any thoughts?

Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay is fantastic.

At least in the short term. Long term, death by overexposure to sugar water seems entirely possible.

So I opened up the case, unplugged everything, and reassembled it to make sure that everything was connected properly. I even gave the video card extra breathing room by moving my XFi (yeah, I have a dedicated sound card. I like living in the late 90s) a couple slots lower to increase airflow around it. Booted into Windows just fine, but I'm afraid to run any games now lest my card poop itself forever. Can't wait for the new one to arrive.

Ye gods, go outside sir! ...wait. I've apparently put 13 hours into Deus Ex in the last week. I guess I'm not one to talk. In my defence, I was playing on a laptop, so I could move it around as I played! Taking my games from work to home and back (especially with the wonders of Steamcloud between desktop and laptop) means I will only buy a game on console if it is exclusive to it.

Ok, so now something has happened and I'm looking for different advice. I was just messing around on my desktop, seeing what I could do with the current set up in anticipation of the new card arriving and decided to load up Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit, as it's something of a looker. Played it until about halfway through the first race when my desktop experienced a hard lock-up. So, damn, right? Thing is, I now can't get it to boot back up. I can turn it on and it will make all the regular whirring and air circulation noises, and all the proper little blinky lights on it will blink, but no signal will get to my monitor. I can even open and close the DVD drive with no issues. It seems like it booted up, but I can't get a video signal to confirm this. After a while of not being able to log in, it shuts down again. Did my old video card just completely poop itself and die, or is this something else? With a new card on the way, it wouldn't be the end of the world if the old one gave up the ghost the day after ordering its replacement. On the other hand, if something more serious happened I'd be kind of choked, especially given that I just ordered a new bit of hardware for it. Any thoughts? EDIT: After looking at Thunderpeel's thread from a couple of months back, it seems his card (exactly the same card I am replacing, actually) died in the same way that (I hope) mine just did. Mine does not make the Windows log in chime that I can tell, but it may be stuck on an earlier screen. Still, it would be nice to hear from some informed thumbs about what may be the cause of this sudden trouble, and maybe hear some worst case scenarios as well.

Steam has it on pre-order sale for a buck cheaper than XBLA. I doubt that's a huge barrier for a potential customer though. I just wanted the PC version more.

At the risk of repeating myself, you devious bastard. I now have a Toronto Maple Leafs souvenir glass full of sugar water, a bit of soap, and dead fruit flies. Thanks for the mass-insect-murder tip!

Yeah, I pre-ordered it on PC a month ago. Excited for next week when it launches, especially after watching that Giant Bomb QL. Does anyone know if the PC version will support local multiplayer? I can't find an answer anywhere, but admittedly haven't looked very hard.

Wow. Those blu ray discs are totally on their way to my house at the moment anyway, just 'cause I wanted to own the set on blu ray, but that's still pretty bad.

Where they've got their arms stuck out making them look like a "T"? I don't know. If not, we should come up with one.

Sweet. Things have been chugging for a while now, so I'm looking forward to this. Last time I played a big release on my desktop was Starcraft 2, and I was cranking down pretty much every setting on it. When I loaded up Human Revolution on it this afternoon, I couldn't believe how nice the game looked compared to my laptop, but then I tried moving forward and there was crazy screen tearing and horrible frame issues. Immediately went back to the laptop where it looks worse but runs so much more smoothly. I then got an email from my landlady telling me how much they were reimbursing me for having to live out of my apartment for 4 weeks and decided that I could afford a video card.