Korax

Evil Cowards released a new album a little while ago. I don't like it as much as their first, but it's still pretty good. Gotta love their music videos. And I hope I'm not the only one excited by new Daft Punk.

Dog-tor Octopus?

Cool Cool Cool Town. Also, I just learned that the whole "Z because zombies!" has been taken to its logical (dumb) conclusion with the board game Zpocalypse. Nice one, dudes.

Sweet magic eye I also somehow missed this: I can only say that if I can't open the door and fiddle with the inner switch that makes the light go on and off, it's the worst most interactive refrigerator.

YOU JUST WANT ME FOR MY SWEET ASS- I MEAN SHIP KEY Nah, it's cool.

Somehow I still have one sitting in my inventory, so first person to hit me up on Steam gets it. I don't care about getting anything in return, so you need not concern yourself with that. I'll edit this post once it's claimed. EDIT: NOW CLAIMED

Just finished it. Turns out you can get to the exit room a lot earlier than I did, but I likely didn't see it because of my tired state. Five minutes in with a relatively fresh brain, and I went through the ending sequence pretty handily. I still didn't get to one of the undiscovered connections on my map, so there's that to ponder over, but it's also good to know that you don't necessarily need a lot of exploration in order to "beat" the game.

Is that the one with the grid of lasers and a few blocks floating around in it? There's at least one other puzzle that will teach you the mechanic, but... I like how the various mechanics are true throughout the entirety of the game, so even if you haven't necessarily been taught something, you can still figure it out through brute force experimentation as long as you have the right version of the brick gun. I spent a good twenty minutes messing around with the puzzle that locked me out of a gun upgrade, solved it with what I first thought was an exploit, and then found the simpler puzzle that was supposed to teach me how to do that very thing in order to solve it. There's also a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff in it. Not like Portal's Ratman dens, but rooms filled with concept art and design models. A decent chunk of the dead ends on that map are those sorts of things. I can't wait to get home after work to beat my head against those last few rooms.

I'm so close, but so tired... http://steamcommunit...s/?id=124244872

I've got a gift copy that's been sitting in my inventory for a while now. Hit me up on Steam, etc: http://steamcommunity.com/id/lordkorax EDIT: Copy claimed!

PHAEDRUS OUT

Prometheans become a degree more bullet-spongy on Legendary than the Covenant units, from my experience. Grunts still die with one headshot, Jackals still die after a staggering shot/headshot combo, and once their shields are down, Elites still take one headshot to down. The laser dogs will explode after a headshot, but the Knights and gyrocopter things take about twice as many hits to kill, even if you take out their shields. I started to have the same "Looks like I'm just going to be out of ammo" reaction that Chris did every time they showed up.

Love that movie so much.

Bioware talked about redesigning Ashley, but when I first saw it I laughed because all they had really done was change the shape of her nose slightly and let her hair down, like some sort of bad 90's teen movie. If she had only been wearing a pair of glasses in the first two games, the transformation would have been complete.

Only if it's the gift of awkward family moments and obesity! :rimshot: My one complaint about episode 5: Other than that, tears. One of the best games I've played of late. And worst. Fuck you guys.

http://images.wikia....f_cortana-2.jpg Halo 1-3 improved with fidelity, but kept the generally thin, high-cheekboned look to them. 4 makes her more noticeably rounded and curvy, including a much more round face. 1-3 also kept her "skin" more patterned and abstract with transparent circuitry through it, and 4 just makes it a solid texture, making it look much more like a nude woman in body paint or something. I can recognize who she's supposed to be just from general look, shape, and (mostly) voice, but she's definitely not Bungie's Cortana any more.

AI's in the Halo fiction choose their own appearance when visually manifesting. That makes it kind of feasible that the way she looks could change, but everything was tweaked just enough that my mind still refuses to fully believe that it's really Cortana. I think it was an odd choice considering how iconic of a character she has been throughout the series. Also, for Sean & Jake's sake: The skulls in Halo 4 are all unlocked and available right from the beginning, and not hidden anywhere in the game. There's an option screen when selecting campaign levels that has all of them in it.

I was not at all surprised to hear JP's pitch come out of his mouth. I do think that the word "ace" needs to be somewhere in the title, though.

I use that one, too, and I believe it's Recon. Starting with Halo 3, they've switched up control schemes pretty much every game because of things like dual-wielding, equipment, and armor abilities, and I always have to switch to the one that I find is the closest to the original. I almost never have problems learning new control setups for all sorts of games, but when there's a series that I'm used to a specific style on, it's hard to adjust. I still sometimes sprint in Halo 4 when I mean to reload. I start to have the Jake Problem in most stealth games, but after a minute or so of observing the patrol patterns and trying to plot out a course of action, my brain starts to get bored, says, "Fuck it, let's see if I can get to that part twenty feet away before a guard notices me" and I just bolt through the open space hoping for the best. This isn't so much of a problem in things like Deus Ex or Dishonored, though, because there are enough catwalks/vents/crawlspaces to allow me to be on the move fairly often without being seen. I got through both of those without raising alarms or killing anybody except targets/bosses with minimal quickloading.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/11/16/fullbright-on-the-90s-how-many-guns-gone-home-has-ready-for-scheduling/ Man, all these interviews/previews are making me want this game even more. Also, Phaedrus.

I'd have to go and read the Halo 3 terminal stuff again to be sure, but even if you assume that finding the terminals and learning those tidbits about the Librarian and the Didact are story canon, there's still nothing that explicitly links the pieces together. And the Halo 4 terminals. Damn it. It was dumb and irritating to not be able to actually access them in-game and watch them without loading up Waypoint, and then it was maddening to see that they were a bunch of shitty motion comic bullshit. They could have completely re-made the Halo 2 boss fight, shittiness and all, and I would have preferred it to what they actually did.

Lots of game site people were talking about how it seemed like 343 took to heart the whole "Heroic difficulty is how it's meant to be played" and rebalanced it so everything was harder. It took me about 6 hours soloing Normal, and about 8 soloing Legendary. I found it to be one of the easier games in the series. Overall, I enjoyed it, but there are a few things that have bothered me. 343 seems to be so entrenched in the Halo lore that they sometimes forget when they have or haven't explained something. When the Didact shows up, he says something menacingly ambiguous and then takes off. Nobody gives any sort of explanation, but in the next level, everyone knows who he is and just starts referring to him by name. Similarly, during one of the more Covenant-focused levels, a new Covenant ship is introduced and referred to as "unidentified," but a couple parts later, characters just start calling it a "Lich" without any sort of prompting. The addition of the Lich also sort of sums up my perception of 343's work on the game. Most of the other Covenant vehicles have names that are ghost-related: Ghost, Banshee, Spirit, Shade, Revenant, Wraith, Shadow, Spectre, Phantom. A lich is sort of a returned undead spirit, but it's not quite as ghost-y as all the others. It's like they recognized the pattern, but didn't pay quite enough attention to it to get it completely right. And the ending:

Yeah, part of the Spartan-II program was finding children with genetic adaptability to the consequent enhancement and cyborginizing, stealing them, and replacing them with flash-grown clones that would end up dying of "natural causes" soon after. That skull reveal does happen in the game, but at that point, the Prometheans and their rad skulls are glowy blue, not orange. As for other skulls, the Marathon gametype that Oddball became was called something like "Kill the Man with the Skull." In Halo: Reach, they added a multiplayer mode where killing someone would cause them to drop a skull that could be collected and returned to a scoring base, with the risk/reward that more skulls would give you exponential amounts of points, but if you got killed, all the skulls you collected would also pop out for others to collect, and there were flaming skulls all over the place. There was a similar mode in Tribes 2 with flags, and one with skulls in Quake 3 Team Arena.