Nappi

I finally right click spammed my way through Torchlight's main dungeon. I don't think I need to go back there for a while. The game could have ended at least five dungeons earlier, if you ask me. Still, I was surprised how much I enjoyed most of it. Can't wait till the holidays to be able to play Diablo III.

The background music felt pretty sad actually. Probably because of the whole "end of the human era" thing I gathered from this video.

OK, "The Incredible Donkey-Lady!" and "The Outstanding Gunslinger-Dog!" are pretty retarded bugs. How can they even exist? Are 360 and PS3 versions equally buggy or does one have more of this weird shit? I'm still really looking forward to playing this next weekend. I even watched a western last night only to realize I had already seen it in Japanese a couple of weeks ago.

Yes, we did play that. Quite a lot too. That is the one we got the furthest, I think. I don't remember being able to skip certain puzzles, though. How did that work? Were these some sort of optional puzzles that rewarded you with something that wasn't necessary to complete the game or was there some kind of mechanism that could be used to skip the puzzles? I have no recollection whatsoever. Admittedly, part of the reason why we sucked at those games was that we were so young and our English wasn't that great back then. Is Leisure Suit Larry 5 worth giving another try now?

Holy shit! That's fucked up. :( Were those threats.. erm.. to be taken seriously* or was someone just trying to scare you "a bit" or something? (sorry if you prefer not to talk about it) Nice to hear that, apart from that issue, things seem to be getting better for you. *I guess they should always be taken pretty seriously.

My friend had a collection of Leisure Suit Larry games and we played those quite a lot as kids because of all the and . The only game we ever finished was the first one. We always got stuck in the other games and simply couldn't figure out what to do. Did we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the problems? Yes. Did it help? No; I already mentioned that we didn't finish those games. Would it have felt amazing to finally figure out the puzzle after a month of so of bashing our heads to the walls? Probably not, since I'm fairly sure that we were either missing some important pixel or that the puzzle was simply unfair. Would we have welcomed a walkthrough of some sort? YES. So when I later started playing Lucasarts' adventure games on my own, I wasn't afraid of using the walkthroughs. Most of the time I was stuck because of some item or interaction I had missed. I don't think I ever thought "Well, that was completely fair" or "I should have thought of that" when I saw the solution. What really annoyed me, though, was that I often saw quite a bit more than I wanted. So yeah, having some kind of intelligent hint system in the games would be great. In Machinarium, I liked that instead of searching for a walkthrough on the internet, I could use the illustrated beauty within the game. It even had a fairly tedious mini-game so that people wouldn't use it all the time. It was broken though, as it only showed you (everything) that you had to do in a certain area. Because of that, I used it probably five times before I found out the thing I was missing. By that time it had spoiled parts of the future puzzles for me quite effectively. I, too, like the hint system in Telltale Games' games, especially in the new Sam & Max. I have the hint level set to 1 and Max seems to give me vague hints just infrequently enough. The future vision in the first episode of the latest season was an interesting addition in the hint arsenal and I was wondering if they dared to include it in the subsequent episodes as well. However, it had its problems: In order to complete some puzzles (or for them to make any sense, at least), you had to use the thing. Because you couldn't (I couldn't) figure out what were the things I needed to be looking through those goggles, I used it on a lot more things than necessary. It doesn't show you much but I had rather not seen anything at all. I can't quite agree with bbX1138 that a properly written adventure game doesn't need a hint-guide. People are different and people think differently and unless you make the puzzles super easy someone will always get stuck at some point. Couldn't come up with a good example so here is a old and poor one: the monkey wrench puzzle in Monkey Island 2 was probably a lot harder for people who don't speak English as their first language. Furthermore, some people don't like getting stuck but would still like to finish an adventure game. Hell, a friend of mine played through Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade using the walkthough all the time and apparently still enjoyed it. If the story permits you to have someone close to the main character giving him/her hints whenever necessary or if you think it doesn't bother players that the character he/she is controlling gives him/her tips on what he/she should make him/her do next, that's fine. But unless the character will start yelling things like "I think I need to PICK UP that STATUE TO get to THE SURFACE"* at some point, someone will still be needing a hint-guide. By the way, did this thing really exist at some point? Did anyone use it? *I'm pretty sure not that many people got stuck in that particular puzzle, though.

I just finished Uncharted 2 after probably 2 or 3 months of not playing the game at all. Didn't enjoy the final part as much as the rest of the game because of its heavy focus on combat and also because of the , but it was still pretty good and there were only a couple of scenes that were really frustrating. I really had to force myself to play this game again yesterday and today, because I had quit just before an annoying part the last time I played it and because I could guess there was just more combat ahead. After I had decided to finish the game and before I started playing it, I actually couldn't help but thinking how much I would hate the whole experience. In reality, it wasn't all that bad of course. It felt awesome to actually finish something and I'm really glad I did. I have no interest in completing Uncharted 1, though. It's amazing how much Naughty Dog managed to improve on a game that was already really impressive.

brkl's avatar is from Sam & Max The Tomb of Sammun-Mak. Looks great. Also, Deadly Premonition seems very interesting in a way. I should probably try watching the endurance run or something like that since I'm sure as hell not going to play this game.

I seldom bring my laptop with me on lectures or exercises. Taking notes (even copying everything the lecturer writes on the whiteboard) helps me learn and I can't imagine writing the equations or copying the diagrams on my computer. I still use computer a lot in my studies. That doesn't meant I'm gonna get rid of my pencil or notebook anytime soon, though. I don't see how whiteboards would be improvements over chalkboards at all.

Thanks guys! Happy birthday to Thunderpeel and all other who have had their birthday lately!

Congrats! That's what I meant before.

Yes. Sorry, I wasn't even aware of that shortcut and I guess I didn't accidentally hit it either while I was bashing the keyboard. Still, it would be nice to be able to cmd+tab to other windows (say, when you have been stuck for two hours, and would like to take a peek at the walkthrough). Not sure how difficult that would be to implement, though. PS. It would also be nice if the game automatically lowered your the resolution setting according to your screen res. 1920 on 1440 looks a bit strange. I don't know if this problem exists in Windows version as well.

Ahh.. Didn't took me that long then.

Did the last part actually require any timing at all? I didn't have any problem with it once I realized what I had to do. I mean The scene certainly was nowhere near that LeChuck thing in terms of frustration.

Does anybody know how to close the Mac version if you can't get to the main menu? I was in the Tomb asking about the curses and selected which was grayed out (although I'm pretty sure I hadn't talked about that before) and it brought up a new speech menu with no items and no way to go back. CMD+Tab and other usual stuff didn't work and I was forced to slam my keyboard until it activated Voiceover and I got sent back to the desktop. I don't understand why I can't go to the main menu anymore during cutscenes or speech sections. They could have just have left out the save/load part.

In a way, that would be pretty awesome actually. Not so much if something like that happened to you personally, I guess, but still. At least, you could be all like: "Fine! I'll take it to someone who's smart enough to appreciate it. You'll see!"

Still a lot to do I suppose? My math professor told us once after hearing a lot of complaints about the course book he had written: "Thesis - moment's embarrassment, pride for a lifetime; Book - moment's pride, embarrassment for a lifetime." Something along those lines anyway. You probably never have to look back at it unless you want to after those 23 hours. God damned, I'm citing professors now. Sorry.

I have only played this one for an hour or so, but so far so awesome!Still very fresh! Fantastic start for the new season. Seems to run much better now with my Macbook Pro (the one with two Nvidia chips). Everything is pretty smooth with graphics quality set to 6 but 7 is a bit too much. Did you guys already figure out how to get the realtime shadows thing working on Mac or is it still in the making?

I got a bike!

Call of Duty: Modern Asshole

I think the prince will have some control over all four elements at some point. At least I vaguely remember that being mentioned in the Gametrailers preview.

He's new to me, at least.

Now that's a completely obvious use for that symbol. Thanks for that, though! Would probably have googled it myself but I figured it was probably not that important.

I started playing Tropico 3 today and I find it very interesting despite all its flaws*. I really enjoyed how, in the first actual mission, my country was immediately exploited by a multinational corporation, how my people were forced to life in shit while I was taught how to transfer some of the nation's money into my personal Swiss bank account and how I was advised to hold a bit less free elections if I know what they mean just in case the other candidate might win. Semi-random events such as a llama flu epidemic that decreases the number of tourists and American expedition gone missing are really nice touches as well. Plus I was able to (eventually) make a shitload of money by investing everything I (the nation, I mean) had on tobacco for a while when my people were pretty much starving. That is always nice! So yeah.. With that price I can heartily recommend the game for its satirical qualities alone. *The roads, for instance, can be really difficult to get right. Plus, I still don't know what the sun symbols on top of buildings mean or what I really should do when there is a rebellion.

You're lying.