Horticulture Tycoon

So a friend of mine recently discovered an Atari 2600 in her parents' attic, and I spent a good hour yesterday playing things like Combat and Chopper Command and Asteroids... Man, I forgot how mind-numbingly simple Atari games were. I mean, I still really love old arcade games like Pac-Man and Galaga, but those Atari games don't even hold up even on that basic level of pure, mindless fun. The games I tried, anyway. Very disappointing.

Although Pixar goes to great lengths to deflect all directorial credit to itself as a studio and away from its actual directors, the truth is that it's mostly Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton who know how to make things awesome. Pete Docter? No thanks.

Pixel-art: cool. Cube-art? Kinda misses the point.

Sgt. Pepper's came out today, and there wasn't a single horse dancing a single waltz in it. Fuck this game.

They use their feet all the time: to run. As a sidenote, I've been playing a lot of Madden lately and any time I see that one of you UK folks is online and potentially looking at what I'm playing, I feel just a tiny bit of shame.

Chris -> studies the science business of video games

Isn't that exactly what happened?

I was skeptical of all this hyperbole before I finished the game, but now that's I'm done... Wow, that was pretty great. Also, !

Come on guys, Steve Gaynor's not that ugly...

Apparently Nick is traveling through time as well, because it's still Daylight Savings time. I haven't expressed my sadness on the boards yet because I was planning to call and leave another wizard voicemail, but I got too lazy so lemme just say ditto what everyone else said. I'll miss the cast, and remember it fondly.

Maybe now that Jake's got way more time on his hands...

Favorite: Grim Fandango Best: Super Metroid Desert Island: w7uBeRLMrDo Enjoy playing Civ 4 in the sand, suckers!

I... agree? If you're saying that one of the multiplayer factions is , then yes that is definitely disappointing. And odd. Also, I hope that goatse-esque was unintentional. Double Fine seems too classy a joint for something like that.

Just finished, and I'm mildly disappointed. Disappointed as in I was possibly setting my expectations too high, not disappointed as in "this blows", but still... Although I enjoyed much of the game immensely, I think it's safe to say Brutal Legend is my least favorite of Tim Schafer's games so far. And I actually like heavy metal. Simply put, the RTS battles just don't work that well. Since it's nearly impossible to give individual orders to units, you have no choice but to command your army around in one big group. So every stage battle turns into my giant army fights your giant army, and the winner of that first skirmish takes control of all the resources and digs in. This is slightly mitigated by the fact that your player character can pretty much lay the entire enemy army to waste by himself, and also by the unit cap. But generally speaking, the stage battles all play out the same way almost every time, and unless people start coming up with some crazy out-of-the-box tactics in multiplayer, I can see it getting dull awfully quick. I was getting pretty tired of it by the end of single player, since I more or less knew if I was going to win or lose the battle within the first five minutes, and the rest of the battle was just a long slow march to its inevitable conclusion. That said, you don't finish a triple-A game in under 3 days unless you're enjoying it, especially if you're me. And saying that Brutal Legend is Schafer's weakest game is still to say it's superior to most titles out there. I do have some misgivings about the story, but I'll save those until more people finish.

I've had similar frustrations fighting the , but I think it's just a case of the game relying too much on the tour book to explain which enemy unit does what. Most RTS games (I know Tim says it's not an RTS, but it totally is) introduce units one at a time so you can learn what they do, and Brutal Legend does that for a while with the Ironheade units. But some of the enemy units they just throw at you all at once without explaining what they are, I've only gotten far enough to be fighting the