twmac

Although I hated Stepbrothers I have to say that was a nicely written piece. Also, agreed, John C Reilly is awesome.

A lot of my time last year was spent despairing over the crap that people were playing. I would say that I spent waaay too much time going in the opposite direction trying to play the 'B' games rather than the 'AAA' games. I am also extremely prejudiced and refuse(d) to play games on Sony consoles (the SEGA fan inside me never wants to forget the Dreamcast) and avoided all PC gaming. After a rather hefty argument with a guy at work I conceded to playing Modern Warfare 2 and I will admit that although not a perfect 10 there are many things that game does well. This brought me to an epiphany of sorts, the only person who is missing out as a result of my strong opinions is me. So at that point I decided to set myself a challenge, I would play 12 games before this Christmas that would be recommended to me by 12 of my friends. The rules were as followed: - I couldn't have played the game before (there was a little bit of cheating here) - My friends had to actually believe that there was merit to the game, that I would get something out of it (I requested written proof for a few of them) - I wouldn't have to spend 100s of dollars to play the thing So now I have the following games on my list: - Half Life 2 - Fatal Inertia - Ico - StarSiege - Shadow of the Collossus - Tales of Vesperia - Kingdom of Loathing - Yakuza - Ion assault - Star Wars: Obi Wan - Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Crysis And before you say anything about Obi Wan, I know, I'm still going to try and play it and enjoy it. Anyways, I just recently finished Half Life 2 and Fatal Inertia and I am about half way through Ico. I'm planning to blog about it or something in that vein in the coming weeks.

I have started writing a bit about some of the Indie games that I have enjoyed on my Blog. The first post is about Beat Hazard. I am trying to interview some of the guys who made the games so I'll hopefully be posting those later on. As an aside Dopelganger, Platformance: Castle Pain and Protect me Knight are both worth playing. Dopelganger is a nicely drawn defender clone, Platformance is a punishing platformer which uses the Castlevania zooming effect and Protect Me knight is a 4 player tower defence game with leveling up features

It all becomes apparent why Chris discouraged the filming of the podcast. In many ways I kind of find it interesting. The peak of what I am aiming for right now is to write about video games while remaining in QA (indefinitely). It feels like the thumbs guys who all wrote about video games are now a part of video games. That is certainly something you don't see as often in other media, usually people do the thing first then succumb to just critiquing it, in this industry it seems arse-backwards.

I played Kameo, does that count? Have finished with Zelda (got horribly stuck and bored and wrote a childish review of it which I won't link here) and spent two and a half weeks with Kingdom of Loathing the most charming and casually MMO there is ever likely to be. Wrote a review about that too, it is much nicer. I am on Tales of Vesperia now, having played an hour of it so far I have some serious fear on how this game is going to pan out. I actually like it visually and it isn't bothering me (too much) how all the guys look like girls. But the story is so painful along with the unskippable cutscenes...

I'll stick to playing Frontlines: Fuel of War thank you very much.

Okay what the hell is that game about? I had never heard of it before and I was instantly baffled. Will try and play it again when I recover.

Ah fuck, not again. Congrats Chris. On an aside, Montreal is one of my favourite Cities in the World, it is why I keep coming back here.

"I would like to go to this games event, you can come with if you like. You'll probably be bored though." I find that works.

The game is beautiful, subtle and lends itself to so many Film ideas. Foremost the one of horror inside your own head. Many people walked away from the original showing of Psycho thinking that the shower stabbing scene had been in colour. Limbo does similar things in its death sequences, the simplicity allows your imagination to run wild. Loved the 4 hours I plugged into this game, will probably play it again soon.

Your preview changed my opinion of this game from dismissive to hopeful. I liked the characters but hated most of the game.

Yeah, I just don't find using a mouse and keyboard relaxing. The other thing I mentioned about HoMM3, well I do a lot of writing on my Laptop and if I had distractions like that 2 clicks away I am afraid that I would never get any work done. I re-read my post and the last sentence seems a little stand-offish. To justify it, gaming for me is a rather consuming hobby as it is. The last thing I want is for my last bastion of defence against me spending even more time gaming, to be overrun.

I am almost entirely a console gamer. The only recent games I have played on PC were Kingdom of Loathing and Crysis: Warhead. I am not fond of PC playing, regardless of the responsiveness of mouse and keyboard, I much prefer the laid back nature of console playing (I sit at a desk and computer all day, the last thing I want to do when I get home is repeat that experience). I started out on a BBC Micro Computer in 1984, my Dad was a teacher at a school that got closed down so he got the parts for cheap. I pretty much stuck with that until around 1990. Me and a couple of friends did some monkeying around with programming but the time it took to create stuff just bored me. It is funny because I just finished reading a book called Extra Life and I can draw a lot of parallels with it. More specifically when the exact point was that I could identify not being interested in making games from an architectural perspective and only interested in games from an aesthetic point of view. It was about the time that I first started playing the NES at my buddies' place. Soon after I got a Megadrive with Altered Beast, Sonic and Quackshot. Very much like everyone else here, I didn't get more than one or two games a year so it took hours of studying Mean Machines SEGA to decide which one I was going to go for. I become obsessed with bullet hell type games and hard as nails arcade ports. I was living in Portugal where the arcade scene was reasonably vibrant and would practice at home before going to the arcades to show off. By contrast my friends who had mucked about on the BBC, got into the Amiga (and introduced me to Speedball 2, Secret of Monkey Island and Chaos Engine) then PC (introducing me to Dune 2) and much later went on into programming. My parents got a PC in 1995 (pentium 133) and for about two years I played PC games until the number of patches and updates required to play anything current turned me off gaming until near the end 1999. For the next couple of years I played Dreamcast and Neo Geo Pocket colour exclusively until my parents bought me a laptop to work on my novel. It was then that I played Heroes of Might and Magic 3. I loved it but it was way too time consuming so in the end I had to delete it from my hard drive as I would literally end up playing for 8 hours straight without a concept of time. Since then it has been console only and I aim to keep it that way.

Hahaha. The thing is, pretty much everyone I spoke to who also interpreted my words as a bunch of garbled noise all admitted that it had been at least 5 years since they had played the game. Those 5 years have clearly not been kind. I tried to play the game on its own merits but so much of its level design is now obtuse. The talks in the adventure game thread and also on Rock Paper Shotgun mirror my own feelings about this game. When I was younger and had more time, I quite enjoyed exploring every nook and cranny of a game and invariably wandering the same area for ages not really knowing where to go until it just clicked. But now I have so many other games to play that doing this for more than an hour resulted in gamefaqs browsing. I also hated the music and turned that down after a couple of hours the lost woods was particularly grating.

Yeah but the may fly lasts longer than most X360s so that isn't really saying much is it?

Ugh, Legend of Zelda was terrible. I got as far as meeting Zelda and got bored with the whole thing. Seriously, not my kind of game in any way. Playing Kingdom of Loathing now and it is pretty interesting as in it is a witty time waster. There is no skill to it nor real reason to continue playing it but if you want to waste 15 minutes a day there are worse things to do. Like play Ocarina of Time... Awful, dated game.

fuck, you guys read my email about Fallout 3 (don't call me Jim). I hadn't thought about it being a particular of the weird 90's game transition into mainstream Tony Hawks bullshit. I did actually play XCom and did not like it the way I liked Fallout (2 in particular). XCom wanted to crush your balls at every step, Fallout would at least let you get through the first hour before administratively raping you through the pants.

Unknown as of yet. I can't imagine it being brutally hard though, unless the multiplayer is broken or like Lost Planet 2. Will post on the multiplayer thread as soon as the reviews start coming in (if the reviews are positive)

Toblix, would a 6 player castlevania game do? http://www.computerandvideo games.com/article.php?id=254678 It is out at the beginning of August and looks like a possible 'Idlevania: Harmony of Thumbs' multiplayer jaunt.

It is interesting you should say that Xeneth (the overwhelming nature of the GWJ forums). Having been in these forums exclusively for over 5 years now (I had never previously posted in another forum before I have not done so since) I wonder what would have happened if idle thumbs.net had exploded. Would we have been inundated with crazies? Would I have stopped coming here? ...At the same time I hope idle thumbs does continue to be at least modestly popular as it is always nice to see new people who enjoy the same things as you do (not saying you should bugger off or anything sorry if that seemed implied)

It scales, but I would recommend buddies for the Secret Armory DLC, those suckers get really, really hard.

The fact that the teacher points out that the main character has been in his class for 2 years but is only now asking how to perform basic combat moves? The long winded explanations for how to 'Press A' to activate everything, the gay love story (and by that I mean there is an unrequited Yaoi love story), the constant references to the main character's powerful right arm that is meant as innuendo for wanking... There are more but those are the choicest.

I just finished Yakuza, and yes, I see the similarities. I actually really enjoyed it despite some of the archaic visuals on PS2. I must say that I am glad not to be the OCD type as the sheer number of random shit you can do would have destroyed me.

There is some interestingly worded parts to this PlayStation Plus stuff. They say that basic online multiplayer will not be affected. What constitutes 'basic online multiplayer'? Would it be that this shifts as time goes by, or will this offer genuine benefits (for example being able to setup dedicated servers for your favourite game)? Right now, not that I am a PSN guy, I can't see the appeal but I can't imagine that Sony would let it remain this way as they would clearly want to capture all of their audience and not just the people who want to rent games for free.

Well if you want something from the last decade [REC] is definitely a good place to start. To be honest, there are some really good Korean and Japanese films that have been out in the last decade that trump pretty much everything else (can't remember where it is from but the Monster movie 'The Host' is top notch) For modern horror set in the west that feels distinctly of this decade rather than a throw back to seventies slasher flicks or 80's video nasties: The Descent 28 Days later 28 Weeks Later Some others that are definitely worth checking out: Midnight Meat Train Dawn of the Dead (remake) Personally, I thought the 90's was actually one of the worst times for horror films. There were a couple of good mainstream ones but generally they were too caught up in ironic 'post horror' scene. We weren't allowed to just be scared of stuff there was always some need to wink at the audience while it was happening. With the exceptions like Candyman, The Cube and Blair Witch Project (which was very late 90's) there wasn't a lot of psychological horror, just cheap jumps. I found myself watching stuff like 'Pi' to get my horror kicks, and that is definitely a different type of horror.