Wrestlevania

Admit it; your viral marketing scam has backfired horribly!

At long last, I got to try Rock Band last night and appear to have finally made a breakthrough in music games: don't give me an instrument. In fairness, I found the singing a lot of fun. But it's not what I was expecting to be best at when it comes to games like these. Tried drums and was excruciatingly pathetic, much to my annoyance--drums was what I was looking forward to the most. I've never progressed above Medium for many of the original Guitar Hero and GH2 songs either, but was mysteriously able to belt out Creep, More Than a Feeling and Black Hole Sun on Hard last night and score 90%+ on each of them, first try.

Force Unleashed just isn't very exciting to play; horribly predictable game design, repetitive baddies and spammy, cheap bosses.

Why not? I'm not ashamed to admit I was gob-smacked by Halo for the first few hours, but the repetitive nature of its level and character design is what took the shine off. I still have fond memories of Halo 3, truth be told, and that was pure pap from both creative and story-telling view points. I think it's the vats of polish Bungie was able to cover the series in that makes me forgive it its two-dimensional scripting and wretchedly clichéd settings.

Personally, I think the description for the networking forum should simply read: "Stop playing with yourself!" Job done.

Mine's had sporadic disc read errors, but only with specific games--Forza 2 mysteriously being the only repeat offender here.

Do we really want to drive that kind of traffic to Thumbs anyway??? I think it's not unreasonable to say almost everyone who drops by for Pokemon friend codes are just drive-by posters, not interested in critical/bitchy Video game design discussion, who pretty much never come back again. I mean, FFS, will we be getting upset about turning away WoW gold spammers next?!

First stills from The Road are here and they look almost fucking perfect--can't believe it! The only crticism I have is that it looks much too light compared to the murky-twilight-at-best conditions described in the book. Still, I'm really, really excited now. Ecstatic to see The Wire's Michael K. Williams breaking into Hollywood via something so prestigeous too; that guy's fucking amazing.

Just registered random weirdos.

If I can help in any way with anything even remotely webby, just ask. Very sorry to hear this for you all. I've been through the redundancy mill twice now and it's awful for such a spectrum of reasons. I hope your luck picks up, all of you; you deserve better than this.

Jesus, that sounds pretty miserable, making some gross sweeping assumptions about the post(s) you were looking at.

The limitations of the original TRON reflected the limitations of technology at that time. And look at how far tech has advanced since 1982. At least they weren't flying around--it was still unmistakably the TRON setting as well. Quite excited by the rumour that Pixar might be heavily involved, too.

Have we discussed (the unfortunately titled) TR2N yet? I just stumbled across a bootleg of a recent TR2N preview trailer and it looks wonderful.

Mine's toblix.

Eh? What happened to the all-singing, all-dancing saviours of Lara Croft, Crystal Dynamics?

Nothing wrong with a bit of house-keeping. Aye, sez I!

It's also worth pointing out that Video game development in Canadia is undergoing something of an atomic explosion in terms of expansion at the moment. Lots and lots of jobs going over there, so much so that I went to a free conference in Bristol hosted by a conglomerate of Canadian developers looking for British talent to export. Seriously, look up!

3rd'd - adding in sub-forums of sub-forums will fragment (and confuse) really quickly. Just out of interest, though: is there really a necessity for an "online" branch at all? I thought gaming was gaming on Thumbs, regardless of context..?

I'm assuming that lead I sent you ended up being fruitless..? Just out of interest: what about heading north? By all accounts, you've a rather wonderful country off your northern borders. So much so that I've spent the last couple of years day-dreaming about emigrating there myself.

Let me guess: the whole rohan, right?

Mate, that's not hair grease...

No, no, I insist you still go! It's a life affirming experience!

Went to see Hellboy II: The Golden Army last night and I heartily approve. An excellent comic book romp, very well realised - and played - by all concerned. Definitely see this over anything else at the moment (except for Wall-E if you've still not seen that).

Change your forums sig! Add a link to Rolfopolis around the "notice" image on TGF. Otherwise, good work. No point linking to my blog as I've still not updated it for a while. This should change, with any luck at some point soon (new 'proper' PC set up is coming; rather knackered, old, lap-breaking, wrist-hobbling notebook retiring).

Fair enough, perfectly reasonable. Computer Exchange (CEX) shops tend to be the fettid bunghole of the Video game retail world, staffed by obnoxious/disinterested pricks who spend all day handing over cash for blatantly just-stolen mobile phones. I'm just a tight git, who noticed they were stupid enough to give me what I thought was a lot of money for two games I no longer wanted. Example: they gave me just £1 less for Rainbow Six Vegas 2 than I paid for it brand new. I very much doubt I'd have gotten that good a return elsewhere (e.g. eBay).