JonCole

If by "there's a very good chance" you mean "there's a 100% chance", you're right on the money.

And $150 to get a monitor for my bathroom? >.>

I might buy this dumb Nvidia console handheld thing if it's reasonably priced ($200 would be nice) - Why? Because it potentially allows for remote access (within the home, fwiw) to your PC, meaning I could have another avenue to actually play my ridiculous 400+ game Steam library.

Directory usage stats for Android - DiskUsage An excellent tool for those of you with Android devices that have low internal storage and thus limited ability to install apps.

Just beat Puzzle Agent, pretty neat game. I've actually played the first hour twice before on both the iPad and PC, only to come back now to beat it as I'm in the mood to beat some stuff. For some reason noticed that Glori Davner was played by Melissa Hutchinson, as I heard a little bit of Clementine in Glori. Eager to jump into Puzzle Agent 2!

Sleeping Dogs is temporarily 91% off, or $4.49 in the US. Grab it before they fix the probable misprice. Edit: already dead, lame.

I've played a decent amount of Dead Trigger recently... I don't really know if I can recommend it, but it's definitely the best executed first-person shooter on the platform. The gameplay is as boiler-plate as it gets - essentially arena/wave-based zombie killing. That said, I wasted a good deal of time on it while I was on the road with nothing to entertain me but my tablet so I'll give it a perfunctory plug.

Yeah, the 6670 low-profile should fit in any box and keep your dad covered graphics-wise for quite a while longer.

Well, it certainly wouldn't hurt to put in a discrete graphics card - just don't bother with anything too fancy and try to stick with an AMD card as not to have any conflicting drivers (which can cause some nasty issues on its own). You can get a Radeon 6450 1GB on the way cheap (30 USD, probably?) and it would probably run just fine with the likely piddly PSU in that Dell desktop.

Yeah, he's right. Before anything else, I'd do a full clean install of the OS. The only hardware you could potentially change and have a positive effect without basically rebuilding the whole machine is the RAM or HDD, both of which would also require a full clean install. But yeah, clean install should do it.

Tropico 4 is going for a pretty relaxing $5.99 on Steam, now would be the time to pick it up if you're interested. I certainly might after reading some of what you guys said.

Don't get me wrong - Mass Effect 3 was my game of the year, so I have plenty of respect for and fun with games with branching narrative. I'm just saying that for instance having a binary choice isn't necessarily more interesting than seeing your character make the right or wrong choices without much of your input. I think there's been a lot of stones thrown at games with a linear storyline in recent years (easily paired with takedowns of JRPGs, really), but Spec Ops essentially packs a linear storyline with a few ultimately minor choices along the way and is more interesting as a result. This whole conversation couldn't have happened if the didn't happen, and neither of those allowed for your intervention.

I generally think short in games is good, but that may be due to the fact that I'm still not used to paying full price for games. $60 for a 4-6 hr campaign is a hard sell for most people, as far as I can tell, unless it's a familiar franchise or has a multiplayer aspect. The thing I alluded to in my earlier post is that I'm still not completely sold on the idea that gamers are interested in a story like this, considering Spec Ops didn't sell well and all those indie games that Tycho mentioned didn't really blow up either.

Well, in this case of this game I doesn't really seem like a programming nightmare at all - in terms of the actual gameplay, this was no more complex than any generic 3rd person Gears of War-type shooter. It seems like a more deftly written story would be much easier to produce, "resource" wise, than the choose your own adventure type of narrative. Of course, the former requires much more creativity and has a much greater risk, but the fact that Spec Ops created a more narratively interesting story than for instance Mass Effect 3 for me makes it seem like a worthwhile risk if "story" is what gamers are actually interested in.

Maybe I'm just the eternal pessimist, but I don't really think this a sign of how awesome the game is, though I do agree that this level of discourse does say something significant and positive about the game as a whole. Rather, it says more about games' general lack of willingness to explore a complex narrative structure. Even the games with the "best story" this year really don't do anything more than offer you decisions that amount to a choose-your-own-adventure book. I wish more games would adopt mechanics that are more directly tied to story and stories that make people think about the game beyond "should I pick A or B".

Re: choices -

Turns out Thirty Flights was David Jaffe's GOTY, cool beans -

I'm the idiot who saw the Wii U and decided to run out and buy a Wii. So... I don't know what that really says about my experiences with the Wii other than I haven't had too many, though I am a bit excited to go back and fill in some of the holes in my experiences this generation - Skyward Sword, Galaxy 2, The Last Story, Xenoblade Chronicles, Donkey Kong Country Returns, and some other junk.

Game of the Year - Mass Effect 3 While not nearly as good as Mass Effect 2, this game practically wins on franchise power alone. Bioware still knows just how to tickle that sweet spot for me and it doesn't hurt that the actual gameplay mechanics got better this time around too. Number 2 - The Walking Dead Easily one of the best game stories ever. TWD executed just about perfectly on everything it attempted to accomplish. The only thing that held it back from that number one spot was lack of depth of mechanics (I understand that the dialogue is the game's primary mechanic, but it wasn't viscerally satisfying in the same sense as I'm referencing mechanics here) and general technical issues. Number 3 - Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 Yeah, I'm that asshole. Call of Duty continues to have the most finely tuned, satisfying multiplayer around and it certainly benefited from having the best campaign since COD4. I'd like to have my head in the clouds and knock this down a few notches, but ignoring a game that I've already put 75+ hours in ~one short month would be stupid. Number 4 - XCOM: Enemy Unknown My girlfriend thought I didn't like XCOM because I didn't put nearly as much time into it as other games I've played this year. Honestly, I enjoyed XCOM immensely but my only issue with it is that strategy games are far from my comfort zone so it's difficult to strike a balance between enjoyment and challenge. On the normal difficulty, I essentially steamrolled the game; I don't think I'd be comfortable upping the difficulty too much further due to what I've heard from other players' stories, and ironman doesn't seem too appealing since I only loaded an earlier save once in my original playthrough. It's a weird conundrum that's kept me from revisiting the game sine it originally came out, though I'm sure I'll pick it back up and ravenously burn through it again sometime in the future. Number 5 - Far Cry 3 This almost seems like an honorary pick because I've put a fairly nominal amount of time into FC3 thus far. That said, I can already see that the gunplay will keep me going for a while and the open world aspects of the game are like Assassin's Creed 2 collecting crack plus Skyrim exploration crack rolled into one. I may revisit this down the road, but for now I'm fairly comfortable jamming this into my top five. Honorable Mentions - Halo 4, FTL, Borderlands 2, Tribes: Ascend, Spelunky 2012's 2011 Game of the Year - Terraria Man, this game consumed about two weeks of my life this year. Simple exploratory fun that goes great with a podcast going in the background, plus appeals to that OCD "gotta build the perfect, symmetrical structure out of LEGO blocks" part of my brain that games don't often access. 2012's 2011 GOTY Runner-up - Rayman Origins Delightful game that really reactivates platformers as a genre I'm interested in. The art is absolutely beautiful, the platforming is challenging yet fluid, and the general tone makes me feel good while I play it. Not to mention that all I've played of the game thus far has been co-op multiplayer, which is really the way this game is meant to be played. Backlog Games of the Year - Bioshock 2, Metro 2033, Zeno Clash

SOTC HD is $13.99 on the PS Store right now, and $9.80 for Plus members like myself. Would be a great time to pick it up if you live in the US region.

I actually made the potential mistake of playing Revelations earlier this year. I call it a mistake mostly because the general cohesion of the mechanics (as plentiful as they were) in Revelations trumped 3 at every turn and really made me take a look at what I was getting in this newest version. Sure, the stakes aren't nearly as high narratively but at some point I prefer iteration in gameplay rather than just throwing together a bunch of systems haphazardly without context.

Let's be a little more precise with words here. Jailbreaking isn't an issue here - root access does not necessarily support or promote piracy directly, so it's not worth speaking in the same breath as piracy as a problem with the Ouya. With that out of the way, piracy will almost certainly be a problem with the platform as piracy is so solidly entrenched in mobile platforms already. Consumer expectations will create a demand for games being free, whether or not they should be. The (admittedly super-ambiguous) dialogue about how games will be sold for the platform seems to fight piracy through free-to-play systems and some kind of authentication system to upgrade from widely available demo versions of games and paid versions (ie, the "all games are free" message). That last part rides on a lot of faith, which can only be played out as games are actually created, released, and consumers have their way with them.

Totally fudged that, meant to be responding to the guy you were and simply noting Tegra 3 rather than Tegra 2 on your post. Sorry for the confusion. That said, I have the same general concerns about retail; these games aren't even selling "well" on platforms that have literally tens of millions of units on the market, so what makes Ouya any more prepared to do so? I prematurely feel sorry for anyone who develops games directly for the platform rather than Android in general.

For what it's worth, Tegra 3 on both not Tegra 2. I should also say that you're speaking about Tegra 3 as though it's some unproven standard, but Tegra 3 has performed at 1080p handily on devices like the Asus Transformer Infinity through games like Shadowgun and Grand Theft Auto 3. While these certainly won't stand up next to consoles running games like Gears of War 3 and Grand Theft Auto V, the fact that this particular mobile chipset has a track record of games running smoothly and sometimes quite beautifully at 1080p is nothing to scoff at. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=RErBWa-ibKQ