mikemariano

I said I was going to quit Pillars of Eternity but I recently completed Pillars of Eternity. It was good!

I'm a liar. I gave Pillars of Eternity one more chance and beat it tonight. I enjoyed the story; I only like high fantasy when it connects its lore and worldbuilding to its characters, and Obsidian did an OK job of that. Ninety-Three, that is an accurate description of combat in this game, though this time I got to say: "Hmmm, it's the final fight; let me finally use all of the priest's different spells!"

I watched a Let's Play of Sonic Dreams Collection. Thank you for adequately preparing me for the nightmare. But I was also put off by the process it would take to actually play the game. First download some random .exe and ignore a ton of security warnings. Then play it on a Windows-only machine. And the game is two-button-plus-scroll-wheel-mouse-mandatory, too; the button combinations for Sonic's camera are impossible to recreate on a trackpad. I guess most games are like that, but it's weird to be reminded of that when I play so many first person games on a MacBook with the trackpad.

Pillars of Eternity crashed over a hundred times for me, and I think it's finally crashed its last. Here's what I just posted in the official forums:

:chaste:

Wow, it's taken me 4 months to get from the beginning of Act II to something my save game files call "ENDGAME." But before I jumped into the endgame, I wanted to finish up other quests, like the Endless Paths! But I can't.

I can't wait for the next James Bond villain to stick a glowing blue ring into 007's mouth and wait for the fuel pump to find its target.

Tegan it's great to have you back in the forums; we missed you! It's a shame about the job, though from their delay in getting back to you it sounds like it would be a disorganized place to stick around.

Congratulations on your baby Bubsy!

I don't want to oversell it, but Nick with his dad might be the greatest origin story in the Western Canon.

Welcome, Captain! There's another reader who uses the same exact avatar that you chose. Maybe they changed it by now because I can't find it. Otherwise one of you will have to be the doppelganger Coop!

Thanks for the link Guts! Apparently there is also a literary YouTube series called "Thug Notes" that is gimmicky, but does a really good job summarizing and discussing this novel:

Oh wow, that screenshot proves that Grim Fandango was an FMV game all along. For some reason, Don Copal and Lola only exist in cutscenes. This really confused me when Manny would be talking about Don vs. Dom and Lola vs. Lupe and I would have no way to see both characters to figure out which voice belongs to which face belongs to which character. (And Sal's the freedom fighter! ¡Viva la revolución!)

Upthread I said that I believed that Valve will never release any game ever again. This video is yet more evidence! Also I like how they avoided mentioning a certain hashtag movement when describing the awful behavior of gamers. And that their source believes that fellatio metaphors are universally applicable to all Half-Life fans.

You should try and sell the black and white television by claiming it has even less latency than a color TV, that it offers the same benefit as playing Quake without textures.

Also I have internalized VVVVVV to such an extent that when Chris described the flip mechanic at the heart of the game, I thought, "huh, I always just called that 'movement'..." Although my Super Gravitron record is like seven seconds so I am unworthy of this game I love.

"Should I kill a pregnant woman to win favor with the guy in the Pope hat?" sounds like one of Nick Breckon's Crusader Kings II stories. Except with Nick I guess we know what the answer is. Also Nick Breckon's name was mentioned countless times, Jeff Goldblum's was mentioned twice, and Danielle's was mentioned zero times! (At least at the 50 minutes mark I'm at now.) I miss Danielle! I guess I miss Sean, too, but I just assume he's sitting in the next room and is with you all in spirit.

Oh no! Eric da Re has gone full Kenny G, while Lara Flynn Boyle looks like she's being forced to replace Lady Miss Kier in Deee-Lite.

When did THIS [brown thing] become hotter than THIS [pinky demon]?

Story-wise Portal Stories is just "more Portal 2," but puzzle-wise it retained the looser feel of Portal 1 and some of the insane difficulty of the best-slash-worst Perpetual Testing maps. Towards the end you are in unfinished test chambers and I spent a half-hour bouncing around, trying to get to a button that wasn't attached to anything. Fun times!

After I purchased the game through Steam's overlay while in-demo, I decided to stop and quit the demo. When I did that, I saw that the demo had been removed from my Steam Library with no full game to replace it. I was showing "Installed" games only, so I switched to "All" games in my library, found The Magic Circle, then had to install it from scratch. Luckily as promised, the game continued from when I left off in the demo. I'm not sure if what I went through was a fluke or a victim of Steam Logic or what.

This is true, even if some of it was intentional misdirection (like Caleb's secret plan inside of his secret plan!). I didn't like the film much, either; all of these spoiler tags play more intelligently with the characters than the film did. Garland wrote the films 28 Days Later and Sunshine, the latter of which was one of the worst betrayals I've ever experienced in cinema. But luckily Ex Machina lowered its expectations early enough to let me down easy. Isaac's performance especially said: "This is all you're going to get out of this movie, so let's have some fun with it!"

FYI, the demo for this ends with you entering a System Shock 1-esque space station underneath Stephen Russell narration. I have never whipped out my credit card faster than tonight.

Man, I still can't get over Dota Strikers being a click-your-guys-around-the-screen game. WASD is permanently relegated to the less popular e-sports.