Korax

Just finished it, and I've had a couple "emergent gameplay" moments that stick out in my mind: During an assault on one of the various strongholds, I bail out of my car and send it crashing into a few guys and a couple of other cars. As I start shooting at the enemies, one decides to get in one of the cars and try to run me over. As he starts the car rolling, he pulls right into the path of an unseen rocket, causing all three vehicles to explode, the burning wreckage of the manned car flying across my field of view, five feet from my face. While driving along a stretch of road, I pass through a checkpoint, causing a couple of trucks to start trying to run me down. I ditch my car, sidestep the first vehicle, and gun down the men inside. As I reload, I hear a second engine suddenly revving up. I look to my right just in time to see the second truck slam into me. As I slump to the ground, my vision going red and then fading to black, I think, "So that's what it's like to get hit by a car." It was kind of distressing. Fortunately, a buddy was around to rescue me. I was sad to reach the ending, not because it meant not having any more sandbox play, but because the ending was horrible.

Yeah, but people are so afraid of losing viewers/listeners/sponsors (mostly sponsors) that they don't want to take the risk. Also, the FCC has no say over media like podcasts, so it's really just up to the people in charge of the show.

From Penny Arcade:

Way Beyond Good & Evil Far Beyond Good & Evil A Far Cry (2) from Good & Evil

Agreed. While I was lucky enough to only have encountered maybe two or three bugs over the entirety of both STALKER games, they did feel and look kind of unfinished. Same with VtM:B. I don't remember suffering any bugs, but boy, did that game show its need for polish. Heterogenous?

My anticipation's a bit mixed. I played Fahrenheit, and had an interesting time with most of it. I find it weird that people are claiming that Heavy Rain is "inventing a whole new genre" or whatever, because it looks like Fahrenheit with better graphics and a slightly different QTE UI.

Yeah, that's good. I've also played with another one that creates voice channels between an infected player (hunter, jockey, smoker, charger) and the survivor they're pinning, for taunting and such.

I'm giving it another try. I rented the Xbox version, and played just beyond the south area opening up before a glitch corrupted my only save, at which point I said, "Fuck this!" and returned it. I have since bought it, and I'm keeping a couple rolling saves in case one gets ruined. I'm also re-listening to the podcast while playing to get the true, full FarCry 2 experience.

Definitely. Improvements to everything, including the bullet time effects, make it that much more of a good game. After wracking my brain and looking up lists of games, there are a lot less games included in that "few" than I thought there would be. I would have to say FEAR and Painkiller are really the only ones that I thought had a good use of bullet time. The use was integrated enough into the game mechanics so that it didn't feel like a tacked-on gimmick, but limited enough that it didn't feel overused. The Max Payne series is still the only one that handles the constant use of bullet time well. As for Red Faction 2... ehhhhh... While I can't really say whether or not I would have liked it when it came out, I can say that it's been rather disappointing so far. The graphics seem to be worse than RF1. There's also this weird bad-action-movie vibe I'm getting. And not even a "so bad it's good," b-movie bad. Just bad bad. Pretty much anything anybody says is bad in some way, either because of terrible voice acting or terrible writing.

I recently re-played both Max Payne games, and I'm happy to say that they hold up quite well. The voice acting is a little cheesy, but it kind of fits in with the noir atmosphere. I'm also of the opinion that Max Payne is one of the few games that implemented bullet time effects well. It never got old, in spite of constant use over the course of both games. I think my favorite thing, though, is the persistence of bullet casings. Even with the powerful gaming platforms today, most games either make casings disappear after a few seconds or just use particle effects in order to preserve whatever tiny chunk of memory they take up. Max Payne keeps every single casing, magazine, and shotgun shell dropped from your guns. I'm still amazed when I look back at room and the floor is covered in brass. Right now I'm re-playing Red Faction, and it's doing pretty well. My only gripe so far is that once you start to get enemies that are carrying the rail driver, it gets a little trial-and-error. Getting one-hit-killed through a wall by a dude you didn't know was there is a little frustrating. After that, it's on to Red Faction 2, which I haven't played before, so we'll see how that goes.

Any mouse small enough to fit in the palm of my hand is too small. It needs to at least cover halfway up my fingers. It's also a bit too skeleton-y. It looks like I could break it by pinching it too hard.

I agree that a couple of the points I had were more of a design problem, but they were really just the cherry on top of the glitch-sundae that the ending turned out to be. And I hate cherries. Those types of things can usually be shrugged off. Poor boss AI or bad arena design are usually things that you can say, "Oh, those developers! Should've done a better job!" to. But when the most basic mechanic of the game, the point-shoot-kill system, stops working because of some flaw in the code, you can no longer complete the majority of FPS games. Incidentally, I figured out how to reproduce the lock-on bug. If you're in the middle of locking on, and the boss hits you with his freeze ray, but not enough to kill you, you will thaw out after 15-20 seconds, and the locking function no longer works.

Yeah, Blue Shift was a big disappointment. The only really good thing about it was the "high definition" model pack it came with.

I played Eat Lead and enjoyed it. It's like a good B-movie. There's a lot of love and effort, but not quite the production value that they may have been hoping for. At the very least, it's been a while since release, and didn't receive much acclaim, so the price has probably been cut drastically by anyone who still has it on their shelves. Taking the risk won't be too big a dent in your wallet.

The parts I was talking about were when the entire room was bathed in bright light (inside the Citadel, where everything is awash in fluorescent white). The change is just so drastic that it takes a while to adjust, and you never really spend much time in those areas. It was familiar to me, at least, because I spend so much time avoiding the sun that when I go outside, I'm practically blind for the next 5 minutes. I'm glad to see that someone else agrees with me about rendering lens flares. Any time I see it in a game, it bothers me that something so obvious to me (someone with a barely-more-than-passing knowledge of cameras and their construction) but apparently never crossed the minds of people who work in visual media professionally.

Well, I just finished playing through using the Update mod. The HDR effects are nice, although there were a couple points when bright light washed out detail and made it a bit hard to see. I suppose it's probably "realistic," but that's the sort of thing that shouldn't happen intentionally in a game. I can't really comment on the facial animations, though, because I've played so many times that I already know what's going on and just ignore most of what happens during dialog scenes.

Also, NWN's expansions and NWN2 + expansions. Hey, without the video game industry telling me what I do or do not like, how am I supposed to know what to spend my money on? I refuse to start thinking critically now; it hasn't served me very well so far.

A nice little game that was part of this week's North American DSiWare releases. It's sort of a combination of Bust-a-Move and Arkanoid. You get a field of blocks, with certain ones designated as "enemies." You're given a set number of missiles to take out the enemies, and then you move on to the next level. Looks like there will be quite a few levels, too. You start out in "Bronze"-class levels, of which there are 30, and there are 4 more class menu options to unlock, and I assume 30 levels for each of those.

I just unlocked the "Silver" skill level, and it has 50 levels, and as-yet-unintroduced power-ups and special blocks.

It's from Q-Games, the PixelJunk guys, and it's going for 500 DSi Points.

I've played a few different versions of the Cinematic Mod. I liked all the improvements done to everything but the character models. While it was interesting to see a little more variety in the citizen/rebel models, all the main characters were completely ruined. Eli looked like a white guy with a really dark tan, Alyx was replaced with that travesty of a character model, and Mossman was just the Alyx replacement with a sweater. Barney and Kleiner weren't bad, but they were different enough from the original to make it feel weird. The only good model replacement he had was an up-rezzed version of Alyx's original model and textures, which he's taken out of the last couple of releases.

The Vort effects were changed when they revamped the particle system for Episode 2, but I think that the healing pulse that was shown may have been his own creation.

I thought that I had bought a lot more than I apparently did: I guess there were just a lot of great deals on games I already owned or had no interest in. Though I keep thinking, "Ooh! STALKER's really cheap right now!" right before remembering that I already have it.

Yeah, that part was a bit of a groan. As soon as Alyx said that, my immediate thought was, "I wonder how long I'll be kept here until I'm forced to go through Ravenholm?" That said, by getting past Water Hazard, you're clear of the major hump in the game, and Ravenholm is an awesome part. It really does a good job of conveying the inhumanity of the Combine.