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Only played the third game, which I recall as having more sokoban puzzles and stealth than adventuring. Might pick this up after working on my backlog a bit.

Played through on single player Heroic. The friendly AI was so pants that I started relying on the hologram powerup just to be able to flank enemies. Ground battles were as fun as ever, though they started getting tedious by the end, apart from . For the final section, I kept getting destroyed... Might just be me, but the constant switching between first and third person in the cutscenes really undercut the immersion of the CoD-style first person "events."

After hearing the Kain & Lynch 2 discussion, I really want there to be a two-player co-op game where one player is playing a third-person action game, and the second player is playing a first-person adventure game but also acts as the other guy's camera.

I was going to be snarky about how he believes that divine intervention is what's behind the random number generator finally going his way, but he seems so genuinely happy about getting a palette swap that I feel terrible for thinking that way.

Finished Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney: Investigations. Not a bad entry. The writers are getting rather good at explicitly making clear what you're intended to present at each item prompt. Though for a game with a dedicated logic button, it's disappointing whenever the logical links are Goldblumesque. The way the baddies executed their plot in the last case was so absurd and sloppy it's a miracle that it actually worked. Also, the writers don't know the proper use of "begging the question." Also beat Shadow Complex. Fun popcorn Metroidvania, but nothing I'd want to replay again. Plot was terrible in writing and execution. Level design really needed more connections between sections, and it seemed like the game really didn't want you exploring or backtracking until you got . Scott Pilgrim. This is really, ridiculously fun once you get over how poorly it telegraphed that leveling up doesn't level up your stats. Sam and Max Season 3. Quality bar was set really high this season. Loved every minute of it.

Have you ever wondered what IGN's corporate site looks like? Wonder no more. It's quite a bro-verload. (via Chris Hecker)

There's actually a fair number of optional forms and bosses in Aquaria. Pretty sure GameFAQs or some good LP would show you where to find them.

Definitely write about IF! It keeps falling in and out of my consciousness, and I have no idea what the current state of the genre is. There's probably some awesome and impressive stuff hidden away there. We had a collaborative interactive fiction subforum going where posts were translated to moves that got sent as commands to a server-side Z-machine parser, so you're bound to find an audience here. Adam Cadre's work is amazing. I'm also a big fan of Pacian's IF, which are also pretty open to newcomers. I keep meaning to play more of Emily Short's stuff, too.

Especially when they start requiring the purchase of DLC map packs to enter most ranked matches.

Obscure commercial adventure games... Anyone else played Tony Tough and the Night of Roasted Moths? The first-person edutainment adventure game Operation: Weather Disaster? I still remember when Rincewind

Goddamnit, the Rock, Paper, Shotgun RSS feed spoiled their designs for me with a before-the-jump image.

Most of the old games should run great using ScummVM.

Played and finished (with varying degrees of youthful strategy guide abuse) all but The Last Crusade, Maniac Mansion 1, and Zak McCracken. Legitimately own all but Zak. To be fair, those are the older ones with a more Sierra style love of killing the player, as far as I remember.

Increpare is the man. Dude does some of the most fascinating experiments in gaming I've ever seen. He also just got laid off and is holding a donation drive to try and go indie full-time. Some of my personal highlights of his huge collection are below. Not definitive or complete by any means. If you're at all interested in games as a medium or art form, it's well worth playing everything he's got to offer. The Rose Garden - Whale of Noise - The Terrible Whiteness of Appalachian Nights - very NSFW Queue - noninteractive story about waiting in line told in the style of a text adventure Starfeld - Mass Effect 0 Sub/Conscious - (NSFW) Therapy Game Theatrics - puzzle solving based on narrative tropes Home - Trigger - 2d lock-on shooter with great enemy designs Judith - atmospheric first person retelling and reframing of Mirror Stage - oddly beautiful story told with fractals Opera Omnia - puzzle game about Lady Boy Love Collection - Mega Man as a one-dimensional, two button game.

As a point of reference, the soundtrack I have from Good Old Games has in-game dialogue on it for a few songs. Must be a better version somewhere.

True fans prefer the 2006 incarnation of The Idle Thumbs Podcast with Ben, Spaff and Marek. Just kidding, it's all quality. Best of luck to Chris at Irrational and whatever you all decide to do with Idle Thumbs in the future!

Beyond Good & Evil, " " was heartbreaking the first time I heard it in-game: (There's a major spoiler in the video title, so I won't embed it)Mother 3 had some really bittersweet songs. Here's one of them: km8fiyKC0Bs Terry Cavanagh's flash game Don't Look Back has a melancholy synth string soundtrack that turns uplifting by the time it hits the last track: http://distractionware.com/blog/?p=690 Outside of games, The Mountain Goats' album Get Lonely is a quintessential sad album. 6vXfq1L9Mtw

I liked Bioshock mainly for the story and the atmosphere. Didn't get much enjoyment out of killing dudes in different ways since I was mainly playing to explore the world. I took a mostly pragmatic approach to the combat, and didn't much care how I took out the crazy people trying to kill me. That said, I did appreciate how , giving you temporary a taste of the different powers and forcing you to switch up your tactics. I guess I really am boring...

Maybe it was because I was playing on normal (without vita-chambers), but the emergent bits really didn't seem necessary or have enough of a payoff for the amount of effort it took to set them up.

IDES + SPACE ASSHOLE + WIZARD + PHAEDRUS = ???

Jesus fucking christ. He's still at it. http://nisamerica.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=1778 Cross Edge. A Nippon Ichi game. The developers took down the official site and even renamed the bloody official forum. Langdell is now saying on his site that they're releasing the game under license from Edge Games, while it's looking like NIC is cutting their losses and dropping support for the game entirely in North America. :frusty::frusty:

Update! Everything was going relatively fine for a few weeks until I let my only suit be worn to nothing. No one wanted to let me work in my underwear, I couldn't afford new clothes, and I didn't have a good enough job to get a loan. Ran around town in my underthings and lounged around the apartment until a relative took pity on me and bailed me out. Used the opportunity to enroll in the local university and get a decent education. Now I'm an assistant secretary at the local bank. Am I correct in seeing that this port has online multiplayer?

I got stuck in a dead end job cooking at a burger joint, was turned down from every other job I applied for because of lack of experience and poor work history, and had trouble affording $40 fries and my monthly rent. Fun! No sarcasm intended. Never played it before and the design is really interesting.

This, except I picked it up after my original Xbox died at the point in time when there was still hope that Microsoft would make everything backwards compatible through regular software updates.

Are you talking about this ancient Scumm Bar article? http://www.scummbar.com/resources/articles/index.php?newssniffer=readarticle&article=2