Wrestlevania

I bought it a while ago. I found it quite repetitive in my experience and the perception of strategy appeared to be something of an illusion; once a player started to get the upper hand in a game, their victory seemed pretty much assured. Could just be the people I played against though, and I'm happy to play some games with you if you wanted--my player name's the same as here. I've yet to find other good asynchronous turn-based multiplayer games though. I'm disappointed that quite a few great games only seem to support local play (like SpellTower, which is ace).

...so there's more stuff in addition to the Enhanced Edition? (The free backup on GOG was also a nice touch, too.)

I didn't see that in the PC version--could it just be for consoles? I don't really understand why you would be. I've not found anything that isn't consensual, and apart from the usual "high fantasy = deep cleavage" outfits, the female characters all seem to be wilful and intelligent. And saved games seem compatible btw; picked up my months-old original game where I left off and continued with no problems. This and the big graphical performance increase are the best aspects of the Enhanced Edition for me.

I've had this since release, but only really 'ploughed' (eh-heh) into it since the Enhanced Edition was released. Completed it yesterday and I've really enjoyed it on the whole. The story-telling is excellent, and it's interesting to find out how the story lines for the numerous different characters - big and small - unfold based on your choices. I particularly liked that the dialogue feels more natural than I've seen in some other action-adventure games. It also feels like a grown-up and complicated story. There's a lot going on and whilst it tries not to bog you down too much within its politics, it's still capable of drawing you in enough that you feel like you're making informed decisions. I did get a bit confused in some of the latter parts of the game, as so many names and factions are flying about that I lost track of some details when things got particularly frantic. But then this only added to the experience for me; it's a big, complex war and shouldn't be simple to follow if it wants to be believable. Aside from the dialogue and story-telling, I found the combat to be generally good and enjoyable. The swordplay is largely fluid and gracefully executed; scything through a group of several knights is fun and satisfying, and you get a good amount of control over numerous different moves. I did find myself mashing buttons a bit on some of the lesser fights, but I enjoy that sort of brutalist gameplay anyway so it wasn't a negative for me. When you're not fighting humanoids is where the sword fighting falls apart somewhat. It doesn't seem to translate the close quarters melee combat into the sort of big, precise attacks you'd expect to use . But it's a minor gripe and didn't spoil the experience overall. The main point of recommendation for me is the story that The Witcher 2 involves you in. It's meaty and twisting, without taking dozens of hours to unfold, and without any apparent padding beyond the games introductory couple of quests that help you settle in. Really great game, and I can't wait for the third one.

I've reverted to buying boxed copies of very large games once again lately, because I'm on an incredibly slow (~1.3Mbs) and unreliable connection* at home. I very much hope that having the whole install footprint on-disk from the start is going to make these latency problems a non-issue for me... That still won't get around the inevitable cavalcade of patches, but I hope Blizzard take to parcelling those into "download first" updates rather than streaming (at least) content improvements as you reach the affected areas. * I haven't even pretended to try the beta because of how crappy my connection is.

Any other Thumbs fancy a bit of hot Twitter action? It's kind of like group instant messaging -- but without any shit software from Microsoft. I've been using this in "real life" with a number of industry colleagues and it's a larf. Let all Thumbs twit together! http://twitter.com/wrestlevania I'm Bamblesquatch on Twitter nowadays, cos nobody outside of gaming gets the Wv thing.

It's a cross-continental service, so it's cheaper and simpler for it to just say both and cover either English-speaking audience. Stop staring at my NERD badge.

I've had a couple of goes now, and I think it's very well done. The way it's had fun with some of the themes and mechanics fit really well inside the Doom universe, . The mouse controls work well, too, once you get used to the contextual clicks: Left-click to move Right-click to shoot Left-click your character to open inventory Left-click your character when standing on something to add it to your inventory I like the different equipment mods that have been added to the game as well, .

...from the point of view of an off-hand recommendation of RAGE to someone if you knew they already liked Borderlands. I'm not saying they don't look very similar, but they're quite different in terms of variety and depth. I couldn't think of a more eloquent way to make that point (and probably still haven't).

I picked this up for less than £5 (~$8 USD) on my way home from work, and after ~3hrs of gameplay I'm crushed. What an overwrought and joyless experience this thing is. So much of the core mechanics are so simplistic and outdated, I'd go so far as to declare it embarrassing. Perhaps even comedic, given the (rapidly declining) pedigree of its developer. Patronising in the extreme, it holds your hand and badgers you into moving the "plot" forwards at every step. As already mentioned, however, there simply is no apparent plot. You're just aimlessly wandering from charred pillar to post-apocalyptic post, accruing more and more junk for condescending skin-coloured automatons who (rightly) treat you like the doe-eyed village idiot you clearly are. It's not like you can even forgive it this trite "glue" in light of the actual gameplay that it drags you to, because that's merely drab as well. The enemies seem to offer no challenge whatsoever beyond their erratic movements and the wavering accuracy of your chosen weapon, and the environments you fight them in merely bulky, twisting corridors filled with odd angles. Some just happen to have clouds floating high above them. The icing on the cake is that the game welcomes you by apparently being snobbish about system specs, while still having the audacity to look like someone left their beautifully hand-painted textures out in the rain. Six months after launch and constant pop-in still prevails, perpetually destroying the sense of place and immersion as distant details flicker in and out at the edge of your player-character's vision. The only other thing I'd add is that comparing this to Borderlands is superficial and naïve. Borderlands is fun and varied; a couple of hours with id's latest and it's clear that RAGE can't even hide how badly thought-out it is as an actual attempt at entertainment. It's fucking awful.

For anyone else who loves concept art, Khang Le is featured on the excellent Concept Ships blog at the moment. Khang is one of the lead artists working on Hawken!

So I keep reading. But I'm done with Rapture after finishing the second game, it just doesn't interest me any more.

You've reminded me that this has been sitting in my Downloads folder since Derek posted about the latest version some weeks back. Wish me luck...

[bump] Picked up BioShock 2 recently and finished it a couple of weeks ago. To be blunt, I'd been putting off playing it for so long because neither the player character or the setting appealed, having been captivated by the first game. But in practice, playing as a Big Daddy was less gimmicky than I was expecting (and pretty much irrelevant by the end, once you've powered up everything). For a game that consists entirely of combat, the balance and progression isn't particularly great. All the weapons initially feel unexpectedly weak and insubstantial, and it felt like a very long time (10+ hours) before I properly determined what each weapon was best at and what I wanted to spend upgrades on. Once I had settled on a couple of weapons and about 4 offensive plasmids that suited my play style, I was about two-thirds of the way through the game and hadn't really enjoyed it much. Overall, I wouldn't describe the combat as particularly fun for the most part. It's gritty and spluttering, often feeling completely out of your hands in terms of manageability, regardless of what you were facing or how many there were. Sometimes you could take on a whole group of enemies and come out with barely a scratch. Other times you could just be fighting one or two common Splicers and feel completely overwhelmed. To its credit, the variety of settings do force you to be tactical. And the weapons and powers in the game feel more tactical than the original. I enjoyed setting up traps and ambushes and watching them work. I also enjoyed mopping up if things didn't go to plan. The tactical play in and of itself is probably some of the best from memory for an FPS, it just doesn't really start to reveal itself until quite late on. The story is pretty bland. It's a thin facsimile of the original Ryan "grand visionary or homicidal dictator" except with an even more pretentious main character. The whole thing descends into repetition and sideshow by about the mid-point and doesn't do anything interesting or surprising. One promising character early on even seems to suddenly disappear entirely just as they're beginning to get interesting. And that's pretty much it. I don't regret playing BioShock 2, or resent it for the time it took to complete. It's just not much to write home about. In some senses the sequel had huge shoes, so it was inevitably going to fall short in places. It just doesn't feel all that cohesive or interesting in the shadow of the original. There's skill and talent on show nonetheless, and the combat is fun once your arsenal powers up. But it's not a particularly convincing whole.

Just finished this (took less than 12hrs, and I got all but a couple of the collectibles, including all the special armour) and have been hooked from the start. Really fantastic. I liked the combat very much, though it can get repetitive if you chose not to mix things up with the myriad of different moves you can unlock and then power up. But that's entirely up to you, same as any other roaming beat-em-up. The puzzles around the middle part of the game I didn't particularly enjoy at first - The Ashlands' stuff seems particularly tedious and repetitive - but they became more interesting and varied as you moved into different areas. Speaking of varied, the art style is great--particularly the myriad of different environments. At a very basic level, they all revolve around the same two themes - ruined beauty for the Earthly settings, and floating citadels for the Netherworld stuff. But it's executed with such detail and variety. The world mechanics are also nicely varied, too, gaining new skills and being able to open up new areas you couldn't get into before. I loved revisiting earlier parts of the game, both to soak up the atmosphere of the beautiful levels, and also for how satisfying the mechanics are when you work something out for yourself. Thoroughly enjoyed this, and it's going for next-to-nothing at the moment. I'd recommend it to anyone, and if you like Metroidvania games don't hesitate to get this. Very interested to see what the sequel does, particularly as it looks like Death will play with much greater variety: K_t7uV92HdY

Teaser for Star Wars: Episode VII is out... m8rzkCkFIus

This is slightly confusing, but I feel congratulations are no less in order. Congratulations. I shall now ingratiate myself fully by downloading 3MA's Alpha Centauri casted pod forthwith.

Sorry I didn't see this before the session started. Hope you got some game time in.

So, finally, after owning a 1st-generation 360 for about 18 months, the dreaded 3 lights finally decided to turn up whilst I was playing Burnout Paradise last night. Switching the machine off and then back on again didn't work the first time. But pulling out the power lead, leaving it for 10 minutes (whilst I registered the console on service.xbox.com) and then plugging it bag in again seemed to bring it back to life. At least, for about 20 minutes or so. So I called the MS support line, pretty much got straight through - rather refreshingly - and they talked me through that "X, X, LB, RB, X, X" voodoo in the System menu. This seems to have fixed it; some hokum about LIVE downloading tiny software updates that can build up over time and fuck up the DVD drive's firmware. Sounds like bollocks but it is working again. For now...

This may only be amusing to those of you familiar with Terry Wogan (or UK pirate radio): GcfLzuBQADs

When the corpse starts frothing at the mouth, it's usually time to stop. ...too dark?

It's a nonsense word, doesn't mean anything--there's nothing to parse out in my mind, no "sticky" words. When I started on Twitter, it was mainly for gaming and as a real-time extension of here (Thumbs). That's not been the case for a long time now, so I figured I'd change it.

Holy sheeeeeeeit!! I had no idea this was going back to the Clan Wars--that's funking amazeballs!

Followings! Also, I have updated the OP as I changed my Twitter username many months ago.

The other thing about it looping around immediately is that you don't have that disorientation when you hit the ground in the first mission. You can also rip through the hordes - even on the increased difficulty - a lot more effectively than you did with the peashooter you originally started with. It's a game I can see becoming more satisfying the more you play it. Really looking forward to next week already.