mikemariano

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Everything posted by mikemariano

  1. The Big FPS Playthrough MISSION COMPLETE

    Welcome to the UNN, soldier.
  2. WIZARD JAM 2016 // Welcome Thread

    Hey, I'm unemployed right now, too! I am bad at everything but I'm willing to team up!
  3. What happened to Sean on Idle Thumbs?

    Ha ha; that's basically what they did for Nick for a few months.
  4. Day of the Tentacle Special Edition

    Wow, really? I pressed so many function keys, convincing myself I forgot which they were.
  5. Day of the Tentacle Special Edition

    The Double Fine artists retroactively threw a Grim Fandango reference into the game! I kept trying to pick up those gold flakes so I could give them to Manny so he'd set off the metal detector!
  6. Recently completed video games

    I had that feeling, too, but less about Schafer and the history of adventure games and more about the saga of getting Broken Age made. Act I contains all the Kickstarter promise of a Double Fine Adventure! Act II contains the delays, the frustration, etc. Just started Day of the Tentacle Remastered! I haven't even solved any puzzles yet. I've just walked around talking to Founding Fathers. I am laughing hard at all the lines I remember and harder at the lines I forgot.
  7. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    These are similar to jump cuts and are speaking film language pretty well, so I bought them. They also prepared me for the abrupt beginnings and endings of the "Days" for the remainder of the game. But that's a good point that it's kinda weird to use the otherwise non-interactive backpack as the introduction to interaction.
  8. The threat of Big Dog

    "Panic, a software company based in Portland, OR, announced today that it will be purchasing Boston Dynamics from Google's parent company, Alphabet, Inc..."
  9. Give it to dium! I'm interested as well but I'm in the exact same situation of not being able to play it right away.
  10. The Next President

  11. Fallout 4 — Boston Makes Me Feel Good

    Right on! The only justification for why the game doesn't offer you pretty building materials is because then they'd have to justify why none of the NPCs slapped a coat of paint on anything in the last 200 years.
  12. Life

    I got rear-ended in a similar experience and everything health/repair/insurance-wise all went OK, so I hope it's the same for you, Miffy! Definitely keep an eye on how you feel in the next few days, but early signs seem good!
  13. Day of the Tentacle Special Edition

    FYI, US Gamer released an oral history of Day of the Tentacle today. I'm one paragraph into the five-page article!
  14. The Weekly X Files Rewatch Thread

    For no reason, here is a 1998 Computer Gaming World interview with Gillian Anderson about The X-Files FMV game. There is also a transcript at a fan site. At the 3:11 mark she starts talking about the games she has played, including Tetris, Myst, and a Tetris clone called Tortured Souls? "It's like Tetris, but with the eyeballs and stuff coming down. I really like that." Does anyone know what this game might be? I can't find it by that title.
  15. Idle Thumbs 252: Jonathan Bro

    The fun counterpoint to both these situations is Monopoly, where the written rules and the house rules (no auction) both result in a grim, endless endgame.
  16. Idle Thumbs 251: Signature Moves

    Turn it into an eleven minute 70s space disco track!
  17. Idle Thumbs 251: Signature Moves

    Ha ha, the death of Nick Breckon in XCOM 2 was amazing. One of my favorite Idle Thumbs stories is Nick's dad refusing to play NHL hockey with him. Now they're in a video game together—he finally gets to play with his dad! And he shoots him.
  18. Gunpoint

    Just found out I owned this game and beat it. It was fun! It was a lot lighter both in play style and narrative than I expected.
  19. I had to look up what this was, which led me to this amazing custom-sweater from a Russian clothing manufacturer:
  20. Recently completed video games

    Wild; I'll have to check that out. Apparently it was never released on my continent. And I'll have to do this:
  21. Firewatch Spoiler Thread | Henry Two Hats

    I needed to be her! Gone Home was one of the worst experiences of my life, primarily because Katie Greenbriar doesn't exist. I have actual life experience of coming home from college to a house I've never lived in, in which my younger sister was adjusting to a new school. But everything I brought with me just slid right off of Katie. I dumped real emotion and experience into a black hole. I think player perspective is extremely important. Even if Henry was a mute with no backstory, and even if he wasn't the subject of the story (as you argue Katie isn't), the game still needs to acknowledge that the player has done things. That a player is even there. Maybe I'm totally wrong—does The Witness do this?
  22. Recently completed video games

    I just completed Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness Episode Three, the first of two Zeboyd Games Rainslick games and the only one available on the Mac. I am eagerly anticipating Zeboyd's Cosmic Star Heroine, so I decided to give this earlier effort a try. It was decent, and Zeboyd made a good effort to try and mix up the way you battle (at no point is spamming the Attack button a good option), but it did get just a little repetitive. The Interrupt system (where some of your abilities decrease your opponent's ATB bar so they don't get to attack as often) wasn't as dramatic as I thought it would be, and there were no real combos, either across characters or with the job/class system. It's good that Zeboyd was thinking about all these systems, though, and I look forward to seeing what they come up with for Cosmic Star Heroine. It was also interesting to see the Penny Arcade characters look and act consistently and be given real character arcs. The strip never aimed for that, but Krahulik's art has become frighteningly grotesque over the past half-decade. Constraining his art-style to SNES dimensions makes it much easier to look at. Does anybody have any 16-bit-style RPG recommendations for a cranky old guy who doesn't really like anything except for Chrono Trigger?
  23. System Shock: The Third

    I'm a Navy man for life! Though I guess I should join the OSA. Do you think System Shock 3 would be better or worse putting in career paths like this? I don't think they're necessary.