gdf

Had I won the Cyborg I'd have refused to move until it arrived. It can cook for you, right?

I do Usually in the context of "some hot birds over there bud" or something to that effect.

Sounds rad!

It really could have done with some AA. I never finished it, but liked it enough. It was sort of lovably lame, even if it did like to think it was Shrek from time to time. Ceville the character was awesome.

Haha Miffy, your posts always balance out with some moderately good things at the start and then a generally shit thing at the end. All of the parts for Xbox repair should be here by next week, so I'll have fun tearing that apart. Not that I'll have any time, freshers' week starts on Monday. Actually looking forward to it now. Kind of wanted to just not go, work full time at the new local Tesco that's being built and concentrate on writing, but decided I needed to get out a bit more. Plus I'll just join the gaming society and hang about with all the neckbeards for a while until I make some proper new friends.

"ja2ke's last update: made a lot of ego edits recently. Yeesh."

This cast is out.

This is now £3.50 on Steam. Should I get it?

I'm the same. It sounds like the future. Lines like this - "It's basically an preprocessor marco that implements insertion sort of a dynamic array." - make me question whether I really do know how to use computers.

Played the demo and even wrote some words about it a couple of months back. It was good, sort of annoyed I didn't act in time to get TWEotW deal, but I'll grab it when life calms down a bit.

Sorry for being a douche guys

I think half of the reason I play a fuck ton of indie games is that often, all you'll see is the title screen and a summary of what it's about. Flower was used by Stephen Poole for one of his Edge columns. He rightly says it's nothing like a "poem", and was glad that he just played it without listening to any of thatgamecompany's guff about it - I believe the phrase he used was "I just thought "wow" instead of "what is this conceited bullshit?!". No disrespect to them of course, Flower is good, but that's a tangential example of where the developer creates their own hype for their game and plants these preconceived notions that may not be true in the audience's mind. Sort of unrelated, but relevant because you brought up Flower, Miff Miff. I agree with the point on exploration vs. hype, though. Sometimes it can work in the opposite direction too - well, I suppose the direction the publishers intended. Far from being disappointed because I'd seen it all in previews and trailers, I thought the world in Assassin's Creed was a bit shit because what I'd created in my own head from the limited info was far more exciting and awe inspiring than what was actually there. I'll agree with Scoops' fundamental point about exploration, though. I think that's why people loved Oblivion so much; it treated the journey, the discovery, as an end in itself. Others hated it because it had poor mechanics or "dumbed down" the RPG, but I'll keep making this half-baked point until I can one day flesh it out into a proper article. Pen and paper and tables and dice and stats were there to help the player imagine a fantastical world, with video games, these systems don't need to be employed on the frontend. Oblivion's lack of focus on abilities and decent combat geared it straight to exploration, and that was an absolute joy. I'd argue that gameplay doesn't have to be treated as an end in itself all the time, despite many a gamer's insistence that mechanics are the only part of the experience that counts. Tighter, more linear experiences often struggle to offer the same sensation. Wonderment at Ocarina of Time as a kid was partly fueled by my thinking about it every waking second. My schoolwork suffered for months because I just sat and daydreamed about what was coming next. What was in the desert? What creatures inhabited the mountain? What could I find at the bottom of the lake? I even spent hours just imagining what lay beyond the world boundaries. I was particularly fascinated by the bit behind the windmill because the terrain continued for a while. I don't know where I'm going with this. Previews, then, can spoil the joy and in more ways than one. We always like to think of the best possible experience from our games, and we never fantasize about running down corridors forever or repeating the same structure near-verbatim nine times over, but we want the most awesome, user defined shit in the world. We can work against ourselves by buying into hype, and I think Remo's spoken about it on the podcast before - undiluted entry into a game and discovering it's an awesome experience is the best way to do it. I try not to buy into hype, but it's difficult. I've made a pact with myself that I'll do my best to avoid videos or even too many screen shots in the lead up to the inevitable TESV.

"Suckbox! Suckbox! Crapbox!"

Gah fuck, the cheap refurb Xbox I got off of ebay RRoD'd (a gamble admittedly, lasted two weeks and seemed problem free until I tried to turn it on this morning). It obviously has no warranty, but my Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts is stuck in the disc tray. I'm currently ordering up some thermal paste and machine screws, going to have a crack at taking it to bits and fixing the innards using a few online guides. Even if I don't succeed, it'll at least have been fun (very expensive fun, but I'm hoping to recoup some of that by flogging the parts) and I got to play TLAD. I've a very seriously broken one that's still under warranty, so I'll send that away to Microsoft like I meant to beforehand.

No, I took ages writing them all down!

Oh shit, I vaguely remember that explanation! Will change to a ? for now.

Idle Memes Warning - Still WIP, a sweet WIP Format: Meme - Time of origin: Episode Name Major, very frequently recurring "video games", "Video games" - Since inception: Various Major, frequently recurring "Far Cry 2" - Episode 4: The Fable of Love [Addendum: may have appeared earlier in non-insane form] "Baboo" - ?: An Episode Break "IGN.com" - Episode 5: The Wizard "The Wizard" - Episode 2: The Fanboy's Lament, Episode 5: The Wizard "Horse Bag" - Episode 38: Up On this Boss "Tears", "Weep", "A game will make you cry" "Level seventeen"- GDC 2004: Neil Young, Episode ? "Peripherals" - Various: Post E3 2009 Minor, infrequently recurring "You gotta have spice!" - Episode 37: You Gotta Have Spice "'Bargo" - Episode 26: Raising the 'Bargo "MmmPuffinth" - Episode 23: At the Mountains of Money "Citizen Killzone" - Episode 18: Citizen Killzone "Year of the PS3" - Episode 15: I'll Kill the Last Alien "Pikmin 2 multiplayer" - Since Pikmin 2's release: Various "goty.cx" - Late 2008: Various "J Allard" - Since a douche appeared: Various "Cyborg" - Podblast 26/02/09: With Saitek Cyborg "Explode Mode" - ? Minor, very rarely recurring "Put on the top ghost" - Episode 22: Put On the Top Ghost "Gotta use the kid to kill that snake" - Episode 22: Put on the Top Ghost "Turrets" - Since design became lazy: Various Unintentional, recurring Remo: "Jake is currently [something retarded]" - ? Rodkin: "[something retarded]" - ? Breckon: "Well, it was just... Pff, I dunno!" - ? Remo: "People are closing iTunes as we speak, this is terrible", "Our subscribers are currently dropping like flies, this is terrible" - ? The readers: "We can't tell your voices apart" - ? Remo: "[unintentionally nerdy "ha!", sounds ironically close to parody anorak voice]" - Since inception: Various

By the way Miffy, your dream was fucking rad.

I like A Life Well Wasted, Out of the Game and Talkradar when I can. Used to listen to the Giant Bombcast, but it really pales in comparison to Idle Thumbs (it was ironically GB that led to me checking this one out with Brad in Episode Six). I'll have about two and a half hours combined travel time each day when I start uni next week (it's only ten miles away, but bussing to Aberdeen takes a good 40 minutes and I grudge paying a further 70p when I get there to save a twenty minute walk to campus, so I'll probably try to scrape as much material as I can). Not too keen on RPS for some reason, it rarely holds my interest. Occasionally I'll chuck on X360's one if I'm really stuck. I also listen to The Guardian's Politics Weekly, that'll be back soon when parliament resumes. Reasonable Doubts as well, it's a great little show for religious sceptics. How Stuff Works' "Stuff You Missed in History Class" is worth a listen too, but it can be a bit hit and miss.

I'll admit I wasn't sure when you pointed out your issues with the mechanics, but it was a suspiciously bot-ish post

Somehow I think Pfactor's account may have been jacked.

Yeah, I think health was an issue, but did you have access to the passive modules or whatever? You can put a bunch into what you want to be good at, so if you want high health and speed you can jack those two up and leave the rest. Anyway, I loved sprinting around. Out of interest, are you playing it on PC or 360?

There's a second area? What the fuck?

I got to play it during the closed beta and thought it was surprisingly great.