miffy495

Awesome. Happy birthday, El Muerte!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!! (gasp) AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!

Oh shit. Why did you have to put that idea in my head?

Well, this is good news. No always no DRM for From Dust.

As for scaling, I have never really had a problem with it. DS games aren't the greatest lookers anyway, and anything I've tried to play on my 3DS so far has looked just fine to me. I think you'd really need to be looking in order to get put off by it. If the GBA games remain exclusive to early adopters, I'm actually pretty happy with the free stuff we'll be getting. I was just recently thinking of ebaying a copy of Mario Kart Super Circuit, so getting a copy of it on my 3DS for free is a totally awesome proposition. Also, Mario vs Donkey Kong 1 is a game that I've never played but have wanted to check out for a long time. Throw in an Advance Wars somewhere in those 5 unannounced games and I will be the happiest. The NES games thing seems like a weird choice, as I was under the impression that those would not be coming out on the portable VC, but I'll take it. Hell, no GBA games being announced for the VC was my biggest problem with it, so hearing that not only is it happening, but 10 of them are going to be free for me does feel kind of like overcompensation when I think about it. As an early adopter, you take a risk. I did, and it turns out I'm getting burned $80 about 3 months after I took it. That's a bummer, but now I'm getting 20 free games, including the GBA version of Yoshi's Island, a game that (every time I complete a user survey on Club Nintendo) I whine to Nintendo about bringing to the Wii's VC constantly. From the press release: All 5 of those games (the 4 I've played, at least) are fucking amazing and some of the best things on the GBA. I'm getting them, and 5 others, for free. And it's exclusive to early adopters. I think I can say with some confidence that Nintendo is making picking up one of these things before the price drop was announced worth the $80. The 10 NES games will eventually come to the VC anyway, but this is some awesome shit. Also, remember Excitebike 3D, the game that was free for the first month of the eShop being open? All told, for buying the console before August, Nintendo is giving me 21 free games to play on it. When I read the headline of the price drop, I felt burned. Now that I've seen all this, I freaking love those guys. EDIT: Almost missed this: Fuck yeah you will! High five for loving Rocket Slime!

It's too bad the facial expression visible on one of the buddies in that shot is the most benign one. There are 3 that it randomly chooses from, and one of them looks exactly like he's in the middle of sucking on a lemon. It's always funny to have a stream of those guys flying off the back of your vehicle.

Haha. That streaker video isn't bad. I'm actually impressed how unfazed everyone is. The weather guy offering his clipboard to the naked dude to cover himself up with is classic.

I actually did get a bit of that vibe from the GB quicklook, now that you mention it...

I didn't realize this was a Summer of Arcade joint, as the other games that are releasing on it are ones I'm waiting for on PC. This looks pretty sweet though. I'm tentatively pumped.

Speaking of ugly little buggers willing to give up their lives, I just beat Cargo! the Quest for Gravity. I did it in two sittings over two Wednesdays, as I promised the girl that I work Wednesdays with that I wouldn't play any more without her watching. That was an awesome, though sometimes unwieldy, game. The endgame in particular, where you're trying to power up the large hadron collider by throwing tornadoes at it, is fairly obtuse and took a while to figure out. In a weird way, it felt like it was making a statement about gaming culture in general right now. The main antagonists are giant machines who are concerned with nothing but ways to produce more and more fun, with no regard for how this is accomplished. As such, they attempt to impose rigid rules upon you and believe that these mindless "buddies" that they have created who know nothing but pure giddy excitement and thrills are the perfect beings. In order to subvert the machine-gods wishes, you need to diligently harvest the fun and spend it in order to restore gravity to the planet. Taking the alternate definition for gravity, it seems to be a pretty straightforward objective. Pure fun doesn't do you any good, gravity must be brought back to the world. The more I thought about it while playing, the more I found it to be an indictment of the "games are for fun and only fun" crowd, especially knowing the pedigree of dark and twisted games that this developer has. This made the game way more interesting to me. I got it for $10. For that, I'd whole-heartedly recommend it. I think it's $20 at regular price, and it may be a hard sell at that. If it goes on sale again though, check it out. If I didn't make it sound interesting before, this also happens:

ANYTHING.

I'm waiting on the PC version either way. Even if the console controls work fine, (hell, if they work better) I can still just plug a wired 360 controller into my laptop and do that. I can wait a month, easy.

Holy fuck, that was 2 years ago? Dang. Anyway, I think you should apply regardless of what you end up able to do. Open that door at least, and as it sounds like a rewarding experience you'd enjoy, go through it when you feel like you can do it. If it turns out you can't, nothing lost by applying now (unless they charge you to apply or something). Go for it!

A Mr Saturn seems kinda indirect to me. You need to play for around 6 hours at least before getting to Saturn Valley, as I recall. It's not like you got "EARTHBOUND" written across your chest or something. At any rate, sweet tat, Jo! Also, welcome back and stick around!

Britney would totally be Grandma Ben.

That's not entirely fair. The art direction is a personal thing, so if you think it's shit I can't really contradict you, but I like it just fine. The vehicles look really good, the penguins are surprisingly expressive, and the robot gods I think look fantastic. The least appealing part of the art is the buddies themselves, but their oddness is a big part of what gives the game those sinister undertones I was talking about and I think is necessary. Again, if you don't like it I can't say much about that, but also don't sell it too short. That trailer really is godawful and nothing like the game, and I think it does have a cohesive style that evokes certain feelings. As for the jankiness, that's again a matter of taste. It's weird and a bit clumsy at times, sure, same way that Nuts and Bolts could be. The first vehicle that you get is a little raft with a single sail that you can barely control and you begin to think that everything will control like shit. After a while though, it becomes apparent that it was just the raft that controls like shit and any vehicle will be exactly as driveable as you design it to be. Keep them balanced and fairly streamlined and you will never have too many problems. It also hasn't crashed on me or anything, so stability is good. My only real complaint about any interface stuff is that it's way too easy to click on "quit" by accident and there's no "are you sure?" prompt, so I've lost some progress to quitting the game accidentally when I just wanted to exit the pause menu. Otherwise, it's far less janky than a lot of games I've played. If you've been through Earth Defense Force 2017, you've seen WAY worse than anything this game has to offer, and EDF was still rad. Again, there's a demo. Basing anything on the trailer is an incredibly bad decision. This game demands to be tried at least once before making any judgements.

Don't expect it to make any sense. There are two mechanics to the game: Creating vehicles, and abusing tiny naked masochist dwarfs. Abuse these dwarfs enough and they will explode into bursts of flowers and rainbows, increasing your FUN income. Occasionally, giant cranky penguins will try to kill off your dwarfs in ways that mean they CAN'T be respawned from the central volcano on the island (which your dwarf-popping methods allow for) and you must run into these penguins with a spiked car until they fall into the sky. There's a free demo. Try the demo. I just watched the trailer and it's awful. The game is way better than that, but I think it's something you have to try, not see. Again, DEMO.

Thing is, they're still showing more integrity than most. They've been up front about their relationship to Kasavin at every step of the way and after watching all their stuff about Bastion, they seem more relieved than anything else that it's turned out to be what looks like a good game. I dunno, I think that GB has fully done right by this one. There is so much depressing about games journalism, it seems strange to me that this is something people can get worked up over.

Oh. My. Fucking. God. This was $10 during the Steam sale, so I bought it. I just put a little over two hours into this game (got through the first Winter) and am completely in love with it. It's janky as hell, yes, but also amazingly fun. I have no idea what I can say about this game. Really, no fucking clue. It's good though. I suggest that everyone in the world plays it. It's mechanically similar to Nuts and Bolts, which was already my favourite game of 2008, but the atmosphere sells it so much more. The buddies are amazing, the robot gods are incredible, everything is oddly sinister, but you can't put your finger on it. Then a guy dressed as a pirate captain flies in leading a flock of robotic birds to an igloo that you just smashed with an ice floe full of dancing naked dwarfs and you can't stop smiling no matter how hard you try. I haven't had this kind of feeling from a game since Katamari Damacy. Play the damn thing. Please.

Hey all. Here's the situation: I have a nephew who is 9 years old and on the cusp of becoming an awesome geeky kid. He loves board games and his Wii, but has very few opportunities to play the former. I play a bunch of board games as well, and have a great fondness for coop games like Pandemic and Arkham Horror in particular. I would love to introduce him to these and be his guide to the world beyond RISK, Scrabble, etc which my sister and her husband (both significantly less into dorky shit than me) can't expose him to, nor do they even know exists. Trouble is, he lives in a suburb of Toronto and I live in Calgary. For those who don't know Canadian geography, there's a LOT of space in between us. About 4 and a half hours on a plane. I've heard of sites in the past where one can play board games for free over the internet with others, but don't know any myself. In particular, I remember Thumb people talking ages ago about one with a german-sounding name. Can anyone suggest some good sites through which I can play games with this kid? All of my other siblings and his own brother are much more sporty and less nerdy than he or I, so as the adult gamer in his life, I want to show him that being a geek can be pretty fucking cool too. He's been reaching out to me on facebook lately, and this is something I'd really like to do.

I honestly feel kind of bad for her. After seeing The Runaways, the girlfriend and I were quite impressed by her and she looked into her stuff. By all accounts, she's quite talented but feels incredibly awkward in any kind of "live" situation and gets incredibly nervous during interviews, leading to the behaviour being mocked in that vid. It makes me sad that the Twilight association will dog her career for all time now, when apart from that she shows quite a lot of promise as a legitimate performer. I then remember that she may be set for life thanks to starring in Twilight and feel less bad for her, but it still seems kind of cheap to just take potshots at her like that, especially for something like being nervous with interviewers.

Ok, THAT one is excellent.

Before this gets crazy obsessive about lady-link, THIS was just brought to my attention: Hey, horse bag, you just got DISSED.

Equal amount of credit to Swindle, I think, since the same people made it. EDIT: Also: BEN! GET TO POSTING! WE NEED DETAILS, MAN! DETAILS!

Actually looks quite similar to Privates (which I'm basing on nothing but the screenshots. I'll probably eat those words after reading the ones on the linked page), which was fun and had a nice art style, so I'm down with that.