mikemariano

FYI, watched the Cheetah video, then had a nightmare about it. It was probably more of a video game nightmare, though, because after I escaped the office building with the Cheetah's patrolling it, I ended up sneaking outside of a farmhouse. The farmer's wife detected me, pulled a knife from her apron, and ran after me. Then I woke up. I need to increase my Sneak!

Looks like my knee-jerk reflexes are as sharp as ever!

Whoa, I just watched that Eurogamer video and had to stop it where the guy started talking about "We were inspired by Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces..." That's so generically "inspirational" that it could only make me hate a game I don't think I'd hate. But I'm too much of a skinflint for a PS3, so hey! PS: There have now been several games where I said, "I like it, but I'm not going to buy a PS3 just to play Journey/3D Dot Game Heroes/Ico/Shadow of the Colossus/The Last Guardian..." So instead I use my Xbox just to play Oblivion.

"This is how it feels to control a poem with a controller." -- IGN.com Ben Kuchera

Thanks everybody for making me never want to play Skyward Sword! I don't know why I had such fun with the DS games Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks. They are similarly handholding and constrained, but I guess I just liked the controls.

Your friend who gets shot comes back as a Trigen and you have to re-kill him.

This video has got me super-hyped for Super Mario Sunshine.

Semi-related: Here is a series of articles about stealth in the Zelda games, which does not include the original.

I can't endorse Thompson's love of "Bomb every tile!" "Burn every bush!" to find secrets. But I strongly agree with this: Zelda barely has this anymore; the map is yours to explore only at the end of the game. Even if the games should follow a linear progression, a game world only becomes meaningful as a world if we can explore.

Yay, SoulChicken is back! These videos are hilarious; I wonder if the Stranded trailer is completely out of context from the actual game (a la Dead Island). Maybe we don't have to play as Captain Hair Gel. I hope the video camera makes it off the island. Maybe there's an achievement where you collect all the cameras. And dubstep mixtapes.

Hmmmm, I don't have the context for this, but I like this explanation better than my handwringing worrisomeness.

Hey, the is on YouTube!And there's also 20 minutes of some random mission! Luckily, it looks like more Mass Effect! Yay! All of the crazy co-op and Action Mode discussion can be swept away and we can just crouch and shoot monsters as we wanted to. I wonder why we only see one biotic blast in that entire opening sequence. How "reset" are Shepard's powers? The fact that Earth is under attack is handled about as well as it can be, if that's what they want their plot to be. There's still hope, even if . So yeah, this game probably won't be completely terrible.

Well played! UPDATE: Beat Nick.

Kickstarter inspires some bad habits in me because it lists all donors in the order in which they donated. So now I get to gloat because I supported the Double Fine Adventure before such luminaries as Chris Avellone and Notch. But I got beat out by Greg Kasavin and Felicia Day. (And the Idle Thumbs crew, probably.) Are you listed earlier than page 26? If so, congratulations, you're hipper than I am based on this meaningless metric that no one finds important!

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I had the opposite experience: the appearances of SA-X jolted me each time and kept me nervous each time I entered a new screen. You're right that the encounters don't happen often, but they happened often enough to frighten me. Look at me, falling directly into a game developer's expectations! PS: I wonder how it would be to replay Metroid Fusion after seeing how its plot ties into Metroid Other M...

Aliens: Colonial Marines! EfOOOAN9e9w So if this completely content-free trailer uses the music from Moon, does that mean that the movie Moon is in-universe with Aliens? Is Sam Rockwell's boss Paul Reiser?

Here's another game I thought was coming out years from now that is actually coming very soon: Quantum Conundrum! Ni6X80JvcIA Test chambers and pressure plates? Kim Swift? Some wall-mounted robot head thing with a big tongue? I'm in!

Some guy on DeviantArt made this. (Assuming it shows up and isn't hotlink forbidden or something.)

As your resident Bioshock killjoy I'd like to remind all of you that the much-hyped moral choices in the game made zero difference in the number of cybernetic modules you were provided and how you were able to build your character. Unless Levine means that you will be limited to two weapons or something (which sounds more like 2001 Halo Mode), this feature seems like pure hype to me. It seems 1999 Mode will turn off the Quantum Bio-Reconstruction Machines, a feature that people have been asking for since System Shock II. So that's something.

You can do this; the ePub format is the one used for iPhone/Pod/Pad books. Apparently there's an updated version of this file. If I had bothered to scroll down on that page I would have noticed this.

Here is our monthly dose of rage against Bioware concerning Mass Effect 3: A commenter with a Manny Calavera icon asks below: That may not be what Zeschuk actually means, but it's certainly one way to interpret it. I don't mind all this "bad" news about Mass Effect 3, but I would like to have something to get excited about.

Thanks for the replies, everybody! And actually it was the fiction of The Elder Scrolls games that got me interested in playing Daggerfall and Oblivion in the first place. Someone ripped all the books from Skyrim and put them in an e-reader format. Apparently they overlap between games, so I've picked up some books in Oblivion, shrugged and said "read it", then tossed them away. My BOTY in the Elder Scrolls series is The Argonian Account, featuring the adventures of lazy bureaucrat Decumus Scotti.

I picked up Oblivion: Game of the Year Edition over the weekend. This is my second Elder Scrolls game after playing the first five minutes of Daggerfall and dying repeatedly. So far, Oblivion is OK! The environment is ridiculously overstuffed—I took one step out of the opening dungeon and walked right in front of an imp cave. But that's OK; as in the Fallout games it's fun just to walk around. Stealth works well (so far), but I hate the combat. I repeatedly tap the fireball button and run backward for most fights. Though it was fun to use a bow and later pull arrows from a dead wolf. I'm really disappointed by how many fetch quests I've been given. I like the endless dialogue boxes and weird options of the Fallout series. In Oblivion, each quest is exactly what it seems to be starting out. What has me concerned is an Action Button review that suggests that Skyrim has retained (and amplified?) the things I don't like about Oblivion. Veles Svitlychny states flatly that combat is still terrible and the quests are still weak and meaningless. I guess this is a discussion for the Skyrim thread, but is this true? If I am slightly underwhelmed by Oblivion, will I be further disappointed by the new game? Anyway, I'll be back with my initial thoughts on Skyrim in 2018!

Kotaku's goofy links and creepy stories about Ashcraft's wife are less of a problem than the overall Gawker ethos, where it is acceptable to lie, troll, and deceive to generate linkbait. I have no faith that Kotaku Core will avoid any of this and I will continue my boycott of all Gawker sites. (Some of you might think this is no big deal, but Kotaku really doesn't treat you, the reader, with respect. Demand respect!)