Noyb

Every action has a consequence? More like press X to not die. Not like I was getting much of a photorealistic vibe from the admittedly pretty visuals before the action sequence, but those controller cues really take me out of it.

They have such a detached, affected writing style in their blog posts that sometimes that I can't always tell when they're serious or not. I don't think they're serious this time.

Neat idea. I like the atmosphere. You still have the negative "more to beat your high score" bug from your previous games if it's your first time playing or if you beat your high score that round, though. Does your cloud generator work for every sprite you feed it? High was 320,840, not like that's anywhere near the leaderboard scores.

Finished it tonight. Still trying to wrap my head around the epilogue to decide how much is intentional symbolism and how much is vague arbitrary pretension. It was an instant buy after seeing that the first level was named after a Richard Feynman lecture. I love the puzzles, which have less an "aha" moment than a "holy crap, that was awesome" moment, and the world which forces you to think of space and time as equivalent is absolutely amazing. Fairly short, but satisfying enough that I am beginning to hate all those brats online whining about the price after only playing the demo (and probably not solving all the puzzles in that world to boot ).

Mystical Ninja Starring Goemon: One of the weirdest N64 games I ever played. The plot revolved around a pipe-wielding ninja, a fat pervert who can shrink himself at will, a ninja mermaid, and a mechanical robot who can use his hair as a weapon all trying to stop a popular music group from abducting all of Japan to be a captive audience in a non-stop concert. The best part: whenever you summon the giant robot Impact for boss fights, that hilarious musical number plays. Final Fantasy 6: : : The opera scene. Classic. Never played it, but I remember this from a magazine a while back. Wiki puts it best: "Rhapsody, along with its sequels, are considered musical RPGs, meaning in place of FMV cutscenes, there are musical numbers, complete with vocals." And Rusty Anchor may well be the best secret ever.

Just finished it last night (and by finished, I mean the credits, not the additional treasures). I don't think I've played a game that so requires and punishes curiosity since the original Gobliiins, although I felt a little better after I stopped caring about my score and started using the extra lives on some of the longer levels. Overall the puzzles were clever, although there were some issues I had with the cursor not necessarily being Zak's hand:

I've got the movement system done if anyone wants to check it out (same link). Spent a while building an outline of the items, characters, and puzzles I want, so if this engine is solid enough then it's on to a save system... then building the game itself. My crappy pixel art "skills" would love it if anyone wants to donate backgrounds, characters sprites, or item sprites. From the nature of LotL, I'm not worrying at all about wildly conflicting art styles within the game (as long as they're not direct rips like my preliminary backgrounds). Aww, thanks, but I'm sure there'll be so many more awesome games. Heck I'm not the only one doing a LotL demake, although it seems like mine is gearing more towards a traditional adventure. I love you guys.

So, I started making a Limbo of the Lost parody game for a demake competition. Got a basic engine (apart from movement, but you can use the arrows to test the crappy walk animations) working. It's in a simple adventure game format, with left-click to interact and right-click to examine, with a few lines spoken by yours truly (hoping to do voice overs for the full version if I have enough time). There's not much to do in the engine test, apart from talking to one of the characters and combining two of the random inventory item placeholders, but I'd love to hear any feedback on the engine itself. Download Engine Test (774 kb)

http://weblogs.variety.com/the_cut_scene/2008/07/brutal-legend-d.html

I tried out the demo, which just had a three minute timed deal. It seemed like they fixed the completely unbalanced difficulty curve of the last game. This time, it seems like the difficulty increases dynamically based on how many enemies you kill in a life, with a slight drop in difficulty whenever you die. Far cry from the first game with its annoyingly long early game, followed by decent midgame, all-too-quickly capped by a brick wall. Pity the game doesn't have online multiplayer, although I do see how hectic it would get to actually implement well. (btw, Braid next week makes me very, very happy)

Just finished it. Mostly enjoyable, although I felt like it was lacking something. In the first game, it really felt like I was playing as Phoenix Wright. His epic bluffs were my epic bluffs, Edgeworth's word twisting were infuriating in the best possible way. But with Apollo, I don't feel any of that. I'm not sure whether it's because the cases are easier, the game gives more hints, the near-constant stream of flashbacks to important moments, or maybe just that I've become jaded after four games, but I didn't feel much of a sense of unfolding surprise. There were some clever bits, though. Hmm... maybe my problem is like the poorly flagged hints in the first season of Sam and Max. Telltale made Max give out hints in conversation, but they also incentivized going through his dialogue trees to hear jokes. Maybe something similar is going on with my desire to hear all the conversations from pressing each statement? Then again, I was playing the same was as the first games, and I never felt that strong before. What I liked about the previous games was that it felt like a murder mystery that forces you to figure it out as you go along, but these scenarios (only four cases this time? ) mostly played their cards far too early. (spoilers for last case)

I don't have a ps3 to try it out, but the gameplay in the video reminds me a lot of Wik, at least the jumping on the ground by pointing an arrow and grappling to the environment in midair. Neat abstract style, though. bit Generations?

Hooray for form letters from underpaid interns with no critical reading skills nor compassion nor the likely ability to do anything if they actually did have the former qualities. I guess they're so bombarded by dumb freaks like the one who stole your account begging for their own account to be unbanned that they just don't care about trying to sort out legitimate complaints from the chaff (chavs?) anymore. I'm pretty surprised there's no three strikes system or temporary bans going on, since as you've noted, multiplayer is a huge part of Steam both in popularity and revenue. So they can't even move single player games from banned accounts? Geez, that's ridiculously harsh for something that wasn't your fault. Have you tried calling tech support and politely-but-forcefully trying to climb the ladder of call centers until you get a manager? Maybe see if the Consumerist will give you a public pity play, although that might be a long shot even with the utter hilarity of that guy's photo. Hope you can work something out.

Toblix, did you use that random ASCII character that makes you type backwards or have we entered into Bizarro world? I really like the idea of the game, but it's the kind of thing that I'd need to actually try out to really form a good opinion. The videos remind me a lot of Breakdown, which I mostly enjoyed despite an overall feeling of clunkiness and missed ambition. I guess I'm skeptical since I've only ever felt natural platforming in an FPS with the Metroid Prime games. I do like their claim that the game can be beaten without firing a bullet, although that is significantly different than the implication that violence isn't needed (guns vs. fists as opposed to violence vs. pacifism).

The Japanese version is out by the end of the month. No clue about the localized versions. I was actually a mouse click away from importing it when I heard the E3 announcement, but I guess I'll just be boring and wait for the American version.

I think he's reading his stage directions, too.

Not entirely new, but a poor soul has been documenting his playthrough of Limbo of the Lost, just finishing last week. So, yeah, apparently the game aspect of LoL isn't up to snuff either. I've got a feeling that the former Mojoers and adventure game fans here will cringe at the illogical puzzles and pixel hunts he endured for the sake of entertainment. I don't think I've seen such a slow descent into madness since that youtube Let's Play of I Wanna Be the Guy.

People can't find porn on the internet themselves? I knew there were stupid people online, but daaaamn. On a more serious note, is it possible with this forum install to block people from posting links until they hit a post threshold? Or at least to delete all the posts from banned users, since a ban and embarrassing custom title don't do anything to hurt their still-present revenue-generating links?

Being a fan of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, I was looking forward to Assassin's Creed. From the wildly contradicting reviews out, I'm not sure now whether I'll pick it up just yet or wait until this insanely packed season is done. My title is a bit misleading, because I do want to play this game eventually. It just dropped a bit down my list at the moment. Eurogamer - Liked the general combat and free-running gameplay, but felt that the meta aspects of each mission got very repetitive. What struck me as odd was that they thought the hit missions played like an inferior version of Crackdown of all things, when I was expecting a more Hitman-style mission structure. About the assassination missions, they said: IGN - I dislike IGN's reviews/editorial standards in general, but I'm linking to them because they echo many of the same gripes and praise as Eurogamer. Gamespot - Glowing review. Unlike the above review, they love the story (which they spoil nearly completely using the excuse that the major plot twist occurs early in the game. Dicks.) As for repetitiveness, they say that it's "endlessly entertaining." What is odd is that the reviewer says that the PS3 has better framerates, but the IGN review makes a point of saying that the PS3 version's framerates drop down significantly in the last 1/3 of the game. Although looking for that quote right now, IGN apparently redacted it, then restored it again, so make of that what you will. This is by no means comprehensive, but I normally trust Eurogamer's reviews, so that alone gives me pause. Anyone manage to play it yet?

Misse & Murre in space? http://www.idlethumbs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=460

Oh, jeez. I smell multiple scandals in the making with this game. First, Neversoft decided to "innovate" by adding in drums and vocals to Guitar Hero 4. However... So they added a drum pad and changed around the configuration to ensure that the existing Rock Band drumsets are incompatible. What. the. hell. Unlike the earlier guitar parts of Guitar Hero, Activision is the latecomer in drumming (comparing just the two brands, and not any earlier Bemani games which don't play into compatibility). Are they completely clouded by dreams of hefty markups on plastic instruments? I don't see GH4 offering that different an experience from Rock Band to justify buying a completely different set of peripherals *again*, especially since GH3 was an exercise in tedious masochism with repetitive songs, arbitrarily difficult notecharts, and unbalanced battle modes. Granted, they are trying something different with promises of song creation and sharing, but I really don't see that turning out well. Activision has to keep on the good side of the record companies to have them continue to give them rights to songs. When given any arbitrary filesharing system, users will inevitably gravitate towards submitting content they don't have the rights to (see: the internet). Activision doesn't want to get in trouble hosting and distributing rightless media files belonging to the big record companies, so that gives them two options. One: keep it peer-to-peer, making it difficult to actually find any good songs without going through the rigamarole of begging for a limited slot in someone's xbox live's friends list. Two: Keep it server-side, but completely regulated, which means Activision would keep employees to review all submitted songs for copyright infringement, slowing down the whole process, not to mention that this isn't taking quality of a notechart into account either.

Nice find. I love it! I made four creatures already: Symmetrical Duck Giant Ant Wasp/Seahorse Guess Who? Hope you recognize the last one. I was having trouble painting its underbelly a separate color and couldn't figure out how to recolor his eyes. I'm surprised by the limitations of the paint tools, especially since people are already making penis monsters with this. Edit: changed pictures to links since I apparently overran my bandwidth. Probably because of the indie games contest I'm in, but just in case...

It's more like the combat is harder at the beginning. Around the middle of the game, you'll outclass the enemies so much that they won't pose any challenge at all, at least on the default difficulty.

Not having a PS3, I think I have an even longer painful waiting game until (a) Konami decides to port it to other platforms (looking unlikely at the moment) or ( enough other big titles for me (Team Ico's next project, possibly the Quantic Dream one and umm...Echochrome) come out to justify spending a crapton of money on a new console, or © I find a gamer friend that has a PS3. (Oddly enough, those that I know in real life are mostly PS2, Wii, or 360 owners. This summer seems likely to change that, though.) Thanks for the tip about major gaming sites. Already had a few key moments in Bioshock ruined *before the release* by assholes online when I was looking for tech support on the demo, and I'm not likely to play this one anytime close to the release date.

Ah, crap. An intermittent problem my Les Paul was having with the orange fret being flaky stopped being intermittent. Anyone know if Red Octane is able to fix/replace launch guitars, or am I just going to have to get a new one? (Yeah, I know, I should have had it fixed as soon as I saw it had problems. That's the problem with intermittent issues. You never know when they'll get worse. ) Edit: OMG. Did that guy just full combo Through the Fire and the Flames? Wow.