mikemariano

The New Games Journalism, everybody!

You're not pessimistic enough! I fully expect this MMO to kill The Elder Scrolls as a series. There will be no Elder Scrolls VI. NOTE: There is absolutely no evidence to back up my dire prediction. In fact, by keeping the MMO and Bethesda completely separate, the only available evidence is against my prediction. But I stand by it anyway!

"Mike Mariano just checked in as Emperor of Cyrodiil on Foursquare!"

Sno, that's really well-said, but I do fear that this will adversely affect any future Bethesda Elder Scrolls game. Ultima Online is essentially the end of Ultima as a storyline. The Warcraft story has died with World of Warcraft. The Elder Scrolls has played well with Redguard and the cell phone games, but an MMO will demand far more attention from both the audience and the "keepers" of The Elder Scrolls. It's up to you, mod community, to keep The Elder Scrolls going!

I played through Bioshock and loathed every minute of it. But I kept playing, because I convinced myself that the game would "come together". Instead, it amplified its most frustrating aspects—longer hacking! The same enemies I already fought with more health! A lame boss fight! Since then I have dropped a game immediately if it is not at least a little bit fun, even at its most boring. I am currently collecting 20 bear pelts in Oblivion. It's the worst kind of fetch quest, but as I'm doing so I'm discovering new locations in areas I thought I thoroughly explored. So I keep playing.

Congrats, Steve! Guess I can't quit Kickstarter just yet...

I can't wait to hear Remo sing this!

Something that bothered me about Dishonored was that I couldn't think of a good insult for it. And by "good" insult I mean something terrible, like these: "More like Ass Effect..." "More like Unfarted..." "More like Dork Souls..." But nothing was out there for Dishonored. Until I saw this: You can't have a forum thread without cheap, juvenile insults. Now I can feel confident that Dishonored has everything a game needs to become a success.

Very good answer. I remember swinging a crowbar into the face of a now headcrab-less zombie in Half-Life 2, just to see what would happen. The texture of his face turned into an unrecognizable, bloody mess. Like DoomMunky, I was disturbed by this level of detail. But then I thought, "Wait, I'm the one who decided to violate this corpse; this is just the consequence of my action." As far as Dishonored goes, I hope we are able to play it so it isn't about slaughtering everybody. But how else do you get "revenge" that "solves everything"?

I believe Also, Wrex is by default dead if you start Mass Effect 2 with a clean slate. Is that the case for Mass Effect 3—? —augh, forget it; I told myself I'd stop caring about this game. Stop caring about tough lady space pilot Jane Shepard. Stop caring about whether Kaidan and Shepard can make it in this crazy universe. Stop caring about... ...Wrex...

Whoa, this guy also did Shadowgate and Deja Vu? That's awesome! I skipped out on the Consulting Detective series back in the day. There are certain "rules" to it that seem to be different than what most adventure games have, and I see now that it's based on a tabletop game. If I stayed away from Sewer Shark, Night Trap, Gabriel Knight II, etc. because of a prejudice against FMV, is Consulting Detective a good place to jump in?

I just beat a Flash-based spin on VVVVVV called MMMMMM . It's a bit more direct of a puzzler than VVVVVV and adds a new mechanic: by falling onto a diagonal surface, you have the opportunity to flip against that surface and fall diagonally. So instead of falling up or down, you can now fall in eight different directions. And there are still spikes everywhere! I liked it!

Tales from Monkey Island and the Monkey Island 1 and 2 remakes came out around the same time. These titles might not be seen as competing with each other. Did Serious Sam Double D eat into Serious Sam 3?

Only characters who talk all the time are believable! Gordon Freeman is the worst video game character ever! This seems like a really cynical mashup of two past Xbox Live Summer of Arcade hits: Shadow Complex and Limbo. You're even jumping past ruined neon signs! Maybe it will be fun?

OFF TOPIC: I'm disappointed to discover that I am now old enough to know the answers to ALL the Leisure Suit Larry 1 Age Check Questions without looking them up. I always did good enough to pass when I was eleven, but now it's just depressing that I have the pop culture IQ of a 50-something American male.

I love Shadowrun! I played the SNES game multiple times, the Genesis game for like five minutes at my cousins' house, and read many of the novels. And, er, I never played the original role playing game. I'm surprised they secured the rights from Microsoft to get their old property back. And I'm also surprised that their first instinct was to do a computer game, rather than an under-the-radar pen-and-paper game or something like that.

That poor man.

Uhhh, OK? I read the "free sample" first chapters of Freedom and was horrified by the fact that the described character was a complete stereotype. Franzen was heaping on biographical detail and run-on sentences, but it was all in service of "LOL FAKE LIBERAL". If it affected your worldview, Chris: good! It should! But Franzen started throwing in easy stereotypes in a way that made me distrust him to flesh things out later on if I decided to read the whole book. Reading sucks! Down with bookcasts!

As a lowly Mac user, I have been clicking on games and getting excited when it's a Flash game or HTML5 game. I've been getting disappointed more often, but what do I expect? At least there's a lot of video!

Nope! It's straightforward: this is a game jam made up of people that are just showing up and making games—and there doesn't seem to be any exclusion or lack of representation of any kind. Many other gatherings are heavy on straight white males—sometimes this is just what happens, but it always means you have to call into question if the event is exclusionary or unrepresentative in any way. I've always been bothered by the fact that this is nearly an all-male forum even though it doesn't seem like this is a hostile environment. At least we're international!

It seems from the Kickstarter page that this will expand the original game somehow. Sort of like Leisure Suit Larry: Zero Mission, I suppose? He's got my money already; I'm a Kickstarter addict!

I want to see this mashed-up with tI3tsWus2KQ "Man, the graphics are so...realistic..."

I have refused to enter ANY age verification checks for about two years now (since Mass Effect 2 came out). It's insulting. It's unnecessary. And—most unforgivably—it will never end. Steam knows how old I am. EA knows how old I am. Yet when I visit their sites, I am asked for my age again and again and again. They save this information for my account, but refuse to use it for these obnoxious dropdown menus. So when I wanted to find out Mass Effect 2 DLC dates, I would go to the Bioware site and get blocked out. Essentially, I stopped visiting developer and publisher sites altogether. Then this weekend I discovered that I can't add the New Vegas Collector's Edition to my wish list on Steam. Instead I quit the program and wrote an angry letter to the ESRB. (Assuming they're responsible.) Why do we put up with this?

Three Moves Ahead needs theme music! Bumpers! Stingers! It's your responsibility, Chris!

As of April 1st, the film site Flixist is now in control of one Jeff Goldblum. Goldblum: Everybody loves Jeff Goldblum!