mikemariano

"Peace Walker is phenomenal at dangling carrots in front of your face." -- IGN.com Hmmm, not "IGN" enough... "Peace Walker is phenomenal at dangling carrots in front of your face." -- IGN.com Much better.

Oh, IGN.com, you've lost that in-your-face spirit. Your pull quotes aren't what they used to be. Nier "Thanks to the copious amounts of blood that spew from the father's shadowy enemies, I found a fair amount of satisfaction from the Nier battles." - IGN.com Puffins: Let's Roll "It's repetitive, boring and a bit straining on your hand over time." - IGN.com

I played Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption a decade ago. It was decent. It had a hokey storyline and weak, Diablo-style combat, but the developers put a lot into it and seemed to really like the "World of Darkness" they were using. I liked the medieval scenes a lot more than the present day last half of the game. I was very intrigued by the multiplayer aspect of the game, which was very influenced by the pen and paper game. It allowed someone to be a dungeon master and construct scenarios for others to play in. The game included a murder mystery sample game that I never got all the way through. If there is still a multiplayer community, then I think this would be an excellent purchase. The main game is good enough, but kind of lightweight.

Oh man, I can't even imagine trying to pick Final Fantasy XIII up again after a long absence. It really doesn't seem like a game that will reward your patience in the slightest. Halo 3 has some rewarding combat, but don't expect any crazy plot twists or satisfying resolutions that the weirdness of Halo 2 seemed to promise. Plus there's still way too much Flood! The game is skippable if you're not inclined to pick it back up. I don't know about ODST.

JonCole, Spirit Tracks is solid DS Zelda and I had a lot of fun with it. Meanwhile, I just watched the YouTube videos for Metal Gear Solid IV and even that felt like a waste of time. Meanwhile I have a huge backlog; I have to stop buying games: Wii Metroid Prime Trilogy Sam & Max: Season 2 Castlevania: The Adventure - Rebirth Mega Man 10 Xbox Fallout 3: Broken Steel and Point Lookout That Mass Effect 2 expansion that looks really stupid. DS Scribblenauts Chrono Trigger Final Fantasy V Final Fantasy VI What I'm actually playing: The New York Times Crossword puzzle on the DS GTAIV Achievement Whoring (I have to get Brucie and Packie to like me at 90%!)

I don't agree much with this Lament of a Fallout Fan, but he makes a good point about VATS in New Vegas: I do think it's absurd that Fallout is so brown. Any modern picture of Chernobyl will show you creepy abandoned buildings surrounded by green forest. That's what Fallout needs: more trees and fewer senior citizens! Cancer rates should be through the roof!

I'm trying to play Fallout 3 again without using fast travel. The biggest allure of Fallout 3 is exploration. The environment is gorgeous and detailed, and it's fun to be extremely careful walking around. Enemies are a big drawback to this, though. Combat gets tedious with every single enemy on the horizon making a beeline for you from half a mile away. I stopped exploring primarily because combat took so long and was never optional. Now that I have the Animal Friend perk, I'm trying to break the habit and explore again.

Actually, I paid less than I would have for a new copy. I paid $45 in May 2009. Fallout 3 had been out for a while at that point, but it was still selling for $60 new and $55 used everywhere I looked. And this was for the regular, non-deluxe copies. Then Amazon had a sale for this Limited Edition, knocking it below the regular edition's price. I decided to go for it and bought the lunchbox. Even though my Vault Boy cannot stand up on his own, he's still cute. I only bought two other Limited Edition games: Halo 2 and Mass Effect 2. I bought Halo 2 used at an insanely cheap price. For Mass Effect 2 I used a gift certificate. I'm such a skinflint!

They sent me a broken Vault Boy. I'll never buy a Limited Edition again!

There are no puffins in any of these screenshots. No hatched ones, anyway. What a gyp! I guess this is just an enhanced version of that snowball rolling game in New Super Mario Bros. DS?

Hi, I'm here representing Idle Thumbs listeners who don't like Starcraft. We've drafted a statement; here it goes:

Q: "Is it going to blow us away?" A: "Did Other M blow you away? Did Galaxy 2 blow you away? Did New Super Mario for Wii blow you away? Our goal is that everything we do blows people away." - IGN.com, Q&A with Reggie Fils-Aime PS: The Twitter page hasn't been updated in more than a month!

I played the Xbox demo. I wanted to like it more than I did. I found nothing wrong, but nothing engaging. But, what I think isn't important. What is important is that the game is gorgeous. Every game should be gorgeous! Good job!

Don't hang up on me. It's rude. I don't think you should worry about rescuing every survivor. Many died for me before I encountered them at all. I knew them only as names on a rapidly shrinking bar graph. I made it to "Overtime Mode", but stopped playing Dead Rising after that. Zombies are fun to kill, but is too hard!

Did anyone else play Halo 2 multiplayer last night? The game has now been "un-LIVEed", so it was your last chance. I almost never play multiplayer anything, but I dug out the game, went through all the updates, and really got into it. Especially fun was the all-rocket-launchers-all-the-time mode. One weird thing I noticed---nobody melee attacks! I got a good amount of my kills through this process: I see another guy and we shoot at each other until we run out of rockets. He runs away. I charge at him and smack him with the rocket launcher. He dies. There are plenty of stupid things about Halo, but they created fun multiplayer modes that have aged well. FROM THE IDLE ARCHIVES: "Halo, what a waste of time?" --- in which Jake defends Halo 1 and 2 against WASD-loving snobs!

Here are some review quotes! "If games were women, Mound and Blade: Warband would be that girl with a hormone disorder that made her have kind of a beard. But like beard-girl, Warband has a really good personality and if you close your eyes when you kiss you can pretend that the facial hair is just a scarf or something." "It is very similar to the Elder Scrolls games, except not even remotely technically groundbreaking." "The complexity of the combat doesn't detract from the brutality and the feeling of impact that you usually experience when you swing your blade at some poor dude's face." "Horse sound effects get a little annoying after a while." All quotes courtesy of---well, you guessed it.

The Halo single-player maps range from decent (New Mombasa) to soul-crushingly terrible. Seeing them smushed vertically split-screen makes areas like the human ships a lot less fun. I ran into many corners that should have been doors, much to the annoyance of my friend. NOSTALGIA TIP: Marathon: Durandal is on Xbox Live Arcade! Its level design is even worse than Halo's.

Best of luck, Steve!

Hmmm, how could a film version of The Last Express remain true to my experience playing the game...? EXT. TRAIN - DAY ROBERT CATH climbs to the top of the speeding train. The SERB stands, waiting for him. CATH stands, ready to fight the SERB. The SERB SLASHES CATH with a knife! He dies. SFX: A CLOCK RUNS BACKWARDS. CATH stands, ready to fight the SERB. The SERB SLASHES CATH with a knife! He dies. SFX: A CLOCK RUNS BACKWARDS. ...Repeat this part for ten minutes... CATH, having defeated the Serb, returns to the train and attends to an injured PASSENGER. CATH: Oh, by the way, I'm a doctor and for some reason I didn't mention it until now.

Say what you will about Bioshock 2. Based on , Bioshock 3 is going to be awesome. <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Nt0iAu3qw&hl=en_US&fs=1&"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3Nt0iAu3qw&hl=en_US&fs=1&" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object>

This is incredibly terrible. On the bright side, it has produced this headline: Warhammer Actually Costing Players $40K In the grim future of credit, there are only erroneous charges. (Here's where you tell me that WAR is separate from 40K.)

Thank you for doing a quick history of Idle Thumbs at the end of this podcast. You mentioned AdventureGamer.com as an ancestor of Idle Thumbs. I had forgotten about that site---and I contributed a review to it! In late 1998 I sent an e-mail to Adventure Gamer saying "You guys are cool, can I help?" This led to me writing a review of The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes: The Case of the Serrated Scalpel. (MobyGames overview) My review is on Archive.org, and I'm not sure it's worth revisiting. 18-year-old me seemed to want to make as many gratuitous Sherlock Holmes references as possible. The most shameful part of this review is that I wrote about the game entirely from memory. My copy of the game was on 5 1/4-inch disks, and in 1998 I was about two years removed from having a computer with that size drive. After I submitted my review, one of my contacts at Adventure Gamer wrote back. He said my review was good, but asked if I could take screenshots for the site. I confessed I could not, but offered the tiny, official screenshots from the developer's website. The man from Adventure Gamer wasn't thrilled, but said he'd use them anyway. That man's name? Marek Bronstring. Now I'm doubly embarrassed because since discovering Idle Thumbs and seeing Marek's name, I only thought, "Oh, I've heard of Marek Bronstring. He's a cool Internet dude." I completely forgot about our brief e-mail back-and-forths a decade earlier. That's a long story. Sorry I was so lame in 1998. It's cool to have reconnected with you wonderful adventure game-loving people.

Oh, Rock Paper Shotgun, that's some quality trolling. I really lost my breath for a minute. But it does make me sad for Penny Arcade Adventures. I played the demo for the first one, and though it wasn't a game I would have fun with, it was really well done. The atmosphere was perfect, and...I guess the battle mechanic was all right in that Final Fantasy sort of way. It's too bad it didn't last. Did anyone get into these games? Did Episode 2 end on a cliffhanger?

Bioshock 3: Turret Daddy

Through liberal cheating, I completed every game in Retro Game Challenge last night. This is considered the final challenge of the game, at which point you finally get a proper end credits sequence. Cheating is the only tolerable way to beat Robot Ninja Haggle Man 3 and Guadia Quest. The games become way too unbalanced as you play. There are almost no ways to heal in the later Haggle Man levels, and the last dungeon of Guadia Quest is a seemingly endless tower. No fun!* These problems didn't factor into the earlier challenges, because you didn't have to play too far to complete those. But as full games, these imitation retro games aren't quite as good as they should be. Ironically, my favorite fake game was Rally King, critically considered the worst of the collection. I thought it was a clean and simple racing game, and its wiggle-boost made good use of my Mario Kart DS skills. DISCLAIMER: Please keep in mind my strong anti-JRPG bias.