Korax

It sounds like Eliza Dushku wandered into the wrong video game studio while working on Wet.

As long as it doesn't deploy a crawling perimeter wall that slowly takes over your desk, I think you'll be fine.

Sure, it sucks that you can't hijack a Wraith, but I never found it hard to destroy one. I even punched one to death because I had no grenades left when I grabbed it. An ODST may be more fragile, but that's kind of the point. You're not supposed to just jump in and kill everything without batting an eye. It requires more care and strategy.

Just finished it. While having multiple endings is cool, making the "good" endings that actually explain what the hell is going on dependent on finding a secret stash is disappointing. If I hadn't known about them, the ending I got would have nearly ruined my opinion of the game ( ). Guess it's time to fire up Clear Sky.

Not that I know of. Coming from Bungie, the exclusion of matchmaking would have to be intentional, for whatever reason. It's far too big of an oversight considering their massive online community. I'm sure there are all sorts of internet petitions for it, but you know how those turn out. It could even just be the way the matchmaking is set up. Firefight is essentially just a variant of online co-op. It could be that, as a "non-competitive" game type, their system can't treat it in the same way.

The campaign was fun and an interesting change from the usual Halo style. My one complaint is that Firefight has no matchmaking. Not too many people I know have ODST, so arranging a game is a bit of trouble.

I think the game is revealing disturbing things about the inner workings of my mind. So far, I've found that you can summon a bomb, time bomb, atom bomb, napalm bomb (I haven't seen anything particularly "napalm-y" about it, but it is a distinctly different design), smoke bomb, grenade, dynamite, freeze ray, stun gun, molotov cocktail, and kill all sorts of things with a knife. And there's an invisibility cloak, but it's useless because the cloak is still visible. Again, it's frustrating that some interactions work, but some don't. Vampires die in one hit from a stake, a monster hunter only kills monsters, the Chupacabra only kills goats. But a beekeeper won't do anything to a bee, a bomb shelter won't protect you from a bomb (well, a nuke), and a glob of glue will only stick to certain hard points on an object. I've never been of such mixed opinion about a game.

Was it? I'm pretty sure Faith and her sister were outlaws long before it happened. I suppose that rescuing her was a fairly major event, but the sniping sequence itself wasn't stand-out or challenging.

Yeah, I just had one of those moments. I had to get rid of a bunch of rats without harming the other animals, so I summoned a Pied Piper. He proceeded to walk around and do absolutely nothing. Now that I think of it, maybe giving him a flute would help... Nope, didn't work. On the plus side, I got Santa to kill himself with a rocket launcher.

Ah, shit. I forgot about that part. Guess it wasn't memorable enough to warrant... remembering.

I burned the house down with a flamethrower. I can't forgive the poor controls, but there's the potential for all sorts of unexpected interactions. In an early level, you have to clean up garbage in a park and get rid of a fly. I spawned a can of bug spray and killed the fly easily enough, then decided the best way to clean up would be with a flamethrower. As I torched the garbage, I exploded the bug spray and killed myself. Also, I beat someone to death with a baseball bat for no reason other than to see what would happen.

Even in that part, you don't have to. If you do a bit of creative running and dodging, you can get the enemies to shoot the... objectives before you take them out. I was able to complete the game without firing a single bullet. I highly recommend Condemned. As an early generation title, the graphics don't hold up quite as well, but it's got a great creepy atmosphere. And while the ending of Condemned 2 did get a bit ridiculous/off-tone, it was still fun.

The hope of some sort of "Virtual Handheld" is pretty much the thing that keeps me holding on. The GameBoy was the first real video game system I owned, and it would be awesome to revisit all my old favorites.

I love the story about Bel-Air, but Scoops forgot an important part of the narrative that helps explain that the cab ride was actually very short and he didn't have much time to develop a relationship that would require much more than a "Yo homes, smell ya later!" After his mom told him he was moving to Bel-Air, he begged and pleaded with her, day after day, but she packed his suitcase and sent him on his way. She gave him a kiss, and she gave him his ticket, he put his Walkman on, and said, "I might as well kick it!" First class, yo, it was bad, drinking orange juice out of a champagne glass. He thought, "Is this what the people of Bel-Air are livin' like? Hmmm, this might be alright... But wait, I hear they're prissy, bourgeois, and all that. Is this the type of place where they should send this cool cat? I don't think so, I see when I get get there. I hoe they're prepared for Hot Scoops in Bel-Air!" The plane landed, and when he got out, there was a dude looked like a cop standing there with his name out. He wasn't trying to get arrested yet, he just got there. He sprang with a quickness, like lightning disappeared. It was then that he whistled for a cab. The ride was only from the airport to his auntie and uncle's house. Don't ask how I know this.

The intros and outros of the different scenes usually show a couple cuts from security cameras before diving into the action. It seems to imply that the Rookie is somehow accessing the security footage in order to figure out what's going on. In the audio logs, the girl's father has some sort of special access to the Superintendent and programmed in a subroutine called "Vergil" that is tasked with watching over and protecting the girl. I thought the logs gave a nice back story, but they were extremely cheesy. I enjoy radio-drama-style audio storytelling, but it didn't fit the tone of the rest of the game. Odious Tea on Ledge 'n' Dairy isn't too bad. The only parts that gave me trouble were the Firefight-style arenas that had you fight off waves of baddies before you could go on. And the highway section at the end. That was a bitch.

I'm willing to take the risk. Plus, talk from other sources that have similar taste in games have displayed a pretty positive attitude towards it.

PictoBits and BoxLife are pretty fun. Doing some of the R&D levels helps to show you all the different shapes that you might not realize will work. Mighty Flip Champs is a cool concept, but I haven't played it enough to see how the game turns out. It could just as easily be an exercise in frustration as a clever puzzle platformer. I'm on the edge of wishing I hadn't spent the money on it. I have both an original DS and a DS Lite and decided that the DSiWare would be worthwhile enough to justify it, but all the "Express" games and themed clocks have made for a very poor software library.

I was similarly amazed. I love documentaries about games and technology, and I found myself wishing there was video to go along with it.

I enjoyed the first one, but this one seems too dependent on co-op. I like to play things by myself the first time around so that I can experience the story without having to deal with another idiot running around and screwing things up. The AI for the extra characters in the demo was terrible. They did nothing but die and leave me to kill the salamander thing by myself.

They killed his daughter. Fuck' em. What they show doesn't match the brutal melee combat in the Bourne Conspiracy game Putting a guy's head through a coffee table before snapping his knee the wrong way around was awesome.

I've already got a pre-order in on the Xbox version, but all the talk of the vast gap in graphical quality might be enough for me to break down and buy the PC version, too.

Activate early adopter snobbery! Yeah, I played it right after it first came out, before people started talking about it. It's just not the same now that the mainstream bourgeoisie have picked up on it. Anyway, I always thought that you were getting your instructions from some sort of AI rather than a person. I guess the fact that you get all your objectives through text doesn't help.

It came out for other systems? Huh. Also, in looking for other info online, I found out that a third STALKER game is scheduled for release later this fall. Looks like I'm gonna have to put Shadow of Chernobyl and Clear Sky on my priority list.

Go to the "Podcasts" list, and there's a button on the bottom-left labeled "Settings." You can set it to keep only a certain number of recent episodes. It's a global setting across all podcasts, though.

I'd read some good things about it a while ago, and was trying to justify buying one. The recent wizard discount gave me the perfect excuse. I just got it today, and I must say: holy balls. I played Half-Life 2 for about 45 minutes, and was thoroughly impressed. I originally thought that it would only be providing some weapon recoil and force-feedback when getting hit. Not only does it do that, but it gives objects "weight" when you pick them up, and jolts the control around when you bump into things like walls or land after a short fall. It made the beginning escape sequence that much more frantic. I was trying to sprint down hallways to safety, bumping into objects and walls and getting shot at, my control being thrown off while I tried to correct for it. And it's great being able to feel the impact of my crowbar on a Civil Patrolman's head. My one disappointment (so far) was the first time I used a turret. Part of the point of a turret is that the gun is supported by its mount; the user doesn't have to worry about recoil very much. As soon as I fired, however, my hand was thrown back by force, and it was difficult to aim at anything. Fortunately, you can hotkey a haptic feedback toggle, and turn it off at any time. Did anybody else take advantage of the offer? Any thoughts on the Falcon?