mikemariano

I played the Xbox demo for From Dust tonight. There is nothing here that I like. It doesn't play like a God Game, but so what? I don't mind that it doesn't play like the game we had in our head from watching the trailers. But unfortunately, it doesn't play like much of a game at all. I should have guessed that—coming from the Out of This World guy—that there would only be one way to get past every obstacle. There are also more cutscenes than Metal Gear Solid. A tsunami appears in a cutscene. You gain control back for two seconds, then another cutscene occurs when the tsunami almost hits your village. Ridiculous. In between the cutscenes you get to sweep dirt from a pile on one side of the screen to a predetermined spot on the other. It's the best vacuum cleaner-based game since Luigi's Mansion! Nothing interesting happens when you try to drown animals or your villagers. Plus the camera angles are terrible. Everything is too far away in normal view and zooming in on villagers doesn't help you tell where they are. Completely zoomed out is OK, but you'll be picking up the wrong element all the time. To contradict my previous comment, I don't see a mouse making any difference in gameplay. (Unless you get more control over the camera.) There might be enough here for some people, and it's pretty, but it's a game that imposes itself on me too much and ask for too little player input. I'm not interested in that.

Yay, a new Bethesda podcast! Congratulations, Nick! It has nothing to do with Skyrim? Congrats Nick!

As the most elderly poster on Idle Forums, I love my DSi XL. I can play my crossword puzzles without getting a hand cramp, and Zelda games are bright and colorful, really benefiting from the bigger view. I will have to break down and buy a 3DS whenever the new Rocket Slime game comes out. Hopefully it will be big by then!

Did you see the Giant Bomb Quick Look for From Dust? It was played on Xbox and you could tell that this game was made to be played with a mouse. I guess the controller can allow you to change the rate and size of your globs of earth and water, but it doesn't do a good job of picking up the exact glob you want. Since I am an Xbox-only gamer, I will download the demo, get frustrated with it, and never buy it, even though I'd probably like it if I had a PC. Yay, video games!

IGN, reviewing Catherine, goes back to the basics: "In many ways, I was completely blown-away by it." -- IGN.com "The drunker you get at the bar, the spryer Vincent will be in his dreams." -- IGN.com

It looks like we should be prepared for some weak swordfighting. Oh well. Someone was complaining about this in the Skyrim thread, too. Melee combat is really stale. Sharp and blunt objects should feel dangerous! But I guess we haven't seen many melee innovations since ....

Game Informer is teasing all of us with information that won't necessarily get us to buy their magazine: Um, that's quite a grab bag of stuff. Optimistically, this could turn out like a Deus Ex, where going crazy with the game mechanics is the whole point. It could also end up like that game I hate where the powers have no place in the game world, no matter how poorly they are written into it. Alas, it seems like there will be no place for of Arx Fatalis.

I want to roll Ken Levine's head around like a Katamari Ball. BIOSHOCK HATER ALERT! I only watched the first gameplay segment, but I truly believe that everything that wasn't scripted was terrible. The menu for rifling through drawers, etc. takes up half the screen and stops the gameplay cold. I know: every game does that, but it holds no meaning in Bioshock—you're always going to take everything. And once you get a gun, you're waving it in Elizabeth's face until a scripted moment decides your arm needs to be elsewhere. And...that's about it for gameplay, wasn't it? Could you have ? What would that accomplish? This is like a AAA version of Dear Esther, which wants to be gorgeous, but doesn't especially want to be played. Bioshock Infinite goes further and seems to be a game that hates to be played. It is bad for games to treat this like a good thing.

The studio that made Arx Fatalis + Harvey Smith + the Half-Life 2 art guy? I'm sold! I'm not sure about that promo art, though. I don't think that goofy mask will be as iconic as the designers think it will be.

As an OCD gamer who almost forgot to drink water in order to play dress-up in Diablo II, I applaud the Skyrim developers for preventing me from succumbing to this horrid temptation.

Ha, I remember buying Kirby's Dream Land at the mall and beating it in the car before getting home a half hour later. And Link's Awakening might be my favorite Zelda game; it might have the best ending of the series; there was even a weird callback to it in the end of Phantom Hourglass. I have never played Link's Awakening in color. I wonder if it would sully my memories...

I was playing a lot of Bully and was having a moderate amount of fun with it. There are minigames everywhere, and the changing of the seasons is done well. You can run around in your underwear in the snow! But I put Bully aside for Portal 2, and then months and months of New Vegas. I will have to get back to it eventually.

New Rock Paper Shotgun review! I can't wrap my head around the thinking that: "the puzzles are easier than Professor Layton," therefore: "the game is worse than Professor Layton". In Puzzle Agent, I appreciated the simpler, more tactile puzzles for what they were. Let me just echo what Jake said about the same reviewer's Poker Night review:

Hey, a Wired interview with a Bioware person gives a little more detail. Bringing back weapon modifications is a good thing. Mass Effect 1 had surprisingly useful mods when fighting against synthetic vs human enemies. Every story detail still sounds silly, though:

Playing Bully made me realize I never want to play a pre-GTA IV Grand Theft Auto. I knew from YouTube videos that Vice City and San Andreas were big and comparatively empty, with unnaturally jittery movement from the characters. Bully probably improved on the engine's physics and it still was too twitchy for me. Give me Niko Bellic slowly turning around while getting shot any day!

I like how a song that peaked in 1996 is more relevant to this girl than a game from 1998.

This game will make me Super Monkey Puke. I love these ball rolling games, but I am so terrible at them!

FUN FACT: Jon St. John is not working with Valve on a DotA game. He is now the voice of Gordon Freeman.

I wanted it, so I drew it:

WARNING: I have nothing useful to add to this thread. This afternoon a phrase appeared in my head for no reason: "dolphin riding minigame" I thought to myself: OK, in what? "Hitman" Instantly an image appeared in my head of Agent 47—in trademark black suit, red tie, and humorless expression—riding a dolphin across the waves. I cracked up in front of my co-workers. Sadly, I don't think I will ever play Hitman: Absolution because it can never live up to my secret desire.

AaFamedaS1g Stuck-up Daggerdale punks! Think they're too good for me...

Yeah, the loading screens bothered me and were absolutely not what I expected from Valve (not even after Team Fortress 2 or Left 4 Dead). A few loading screens appear in the middle of escape sequences, killing all momentum. Even Gordon Freeman racing down Highway 17 kept that momentum going during loading.

No, it's just difficult to talk about or have faith in features that don't respond to or improve something we've seen before. We just have to cross our fingers and hope the Mass Effect team knows what they're doing. Based on Mass Effect 2, we can proudly say..."sorta!"

More bad news!