JonCole

Bringing this back from the dead to ask for some recommendations for cheap and two-player capable games. It's pretty easy to find the latter using websites like BoardGameGeek, but there's no easy way to search for prices alongside that degree of specificity. Obviously prices aren't going to be the same everywhere, but I just mean relatively inexpensive stuff. The main reason I ask is because 1) I'm an unemployed college student and 2) my interest in board games is limited to just an activity with my girlfriend. Given that criteria, I hope there's something out there for us. I've played with the idea of just buying a few premade Magic decks and trading them back and forth to create some variety. I also recently picked up Forbidden Island, which is a surprisingly basic yet potentially complex game that's pretty good with two and supports up to four players. I grabbed that one for only $12, which is definitely in my financial wheelhouse. While that's a pretty high expectation budget-wise, I wouldn't mind paying... maybe $30 for something quite good.

I got stuck on a level with "Dark Avatars", which apparently do like 2000 armor-ignoring damage. I ground levels as much as possible but still couldn't face them, so I installed some balancing mods but it still put me back ten hours or so.

I'm pretty sure that I'm going to quit Torchlight... I've already put like 50 hours into it and I'm still not done. It takes a lot to keep me into a game much longer than that.

It's been a little while since I plugged this, so I'll give it another go. I've been doing a podcast for a little while with the guys from CastMedium.com and we recently changed the format of the show. Instead of being primarily news oriented as we've been in the past, the show is now dedicated to a single topic every week in games and tech. We try to keep it fairly topical, though we've left a lot more room to be creative. Anyways, here are some of the shows we've done since the change (and I'd appreciate feedback, of course) - CM Podcast 069 - Sony NGP CM Podcast 070 - Multiplayer gaming CM Podcast 071 - Mobile World Congress (webOS, Nokia, and Sony Xperia Play)

The King's Speech left me breathless. I now see why there's so much hype surrounding it.

Arthur Gies was saying that Bulletstorm actually manages to... kinda justify the superfluous ridiculous language to some extent, for whatever that's worth. Honestly, the only thing that I'm feeling nowadays is that a shooter has to be pretty good for me to run out and check it out. I'm feeling worn out on the shooters, nowadays.

Man, I love that game. It seems like a pretty good time to make my annual pilgrimage. If you liked that one, you should probably check out Zero Mission and Fusion on the GBA.

I have it on 360, which is why there was an economy on hard drive space.

I had like 300 saves... I cleared many of them at one point because I realized that like 3-4 gigs of HD space was being taken up by FO3 stuff.

I wasn't really thinking about it much until I read this post, but now I'm considering going back to grab those last few achievements I need to S-Rank FO3. It's just such an enjoyable game for me... I have this uncanny ability to not give a shit about any of the bugginess in Bethesda's games, from the 360 version of Morrowind to the earliest New Vegas versions. Unfortunately, I have some of the most annoying achievements left... namely level 8 w/ Neutral Karma, level 14 w/ Neutral Karma, level 20 w/ Neutral Karma, and level 20 w/ Good karma.

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Point Lookout was definitely worth the money... the rest were fairly enjoyable too, but I'd put New Vegas over them as far as overall enjoyability goes.

Happy nth Birthday, Wrestle!

After watching a of some guy illustrating the duel between X and Launch Octopus, I decided to dig out my Gamecube and copy of Mega Man X Collection to beat the first one once again.What a great game. I feel like the bosses are some of the most... reasonable and memorable in the Mega Man series, as far as naming and design are concerned. Beyond that, it reminded my how much I love the game's music. I can pretty much recite every track from memory, which made this a way more nostalgic journey than I thought it'd be. It caused me to hunt down some MMX cover music, which I found some great success with in the X Hunters. Anyways, I'll probably check out at least X2 and X3 while I'm at it, mostly because I heard some of the later PSX entries aren't really up to snuff.

Eccentric?

I think you might be right. That puzzle in particular, where you basically had to piggyback on each subsequent jump to get higher, seemed like it was probably easier than it should be... I seemed to be going higher with each jump than I should go and I could take my time with no consequence. As far as controls go, I actually kinda like running it with the controller more than a keyboard/mouse because I didn't get into that frantic screen flying around that happens when I lose track of where I'm looking at any given moment.

I've been playing the Orange Box on Xbox 360 and it's definitely cranking out some of the best achievements I've earned in recent history. Yesterday I got "Targeted Advertising", which was earned for shooting a guard on a billboard with a crossbow, suspending his corpse for everyone to see. That's some funny shit! In a similar vein, hitting a dude with a toilet from the Gravity Gun is another achievement. Valve also figured out some rad challenging achievements to throw in which kinda force a particular intensity of gameplay... the last one I finished in this light is completing Ravenholm exclusively using the gravity gun. It certainly wasn't easy, but it actually made me use all of the traps that Father Gregori set and practically every gas tank/exploding barrel/circular saw/screwdriver/paintcan/concrete block/shard of wood that I could get my hands on.

Forgive me, I wasn't sure of the breadth of the "group"-type features... as far as I can tell, all we can do is make a shared leaderboard. I went ahead and did that for all the people you listed, Thunderpeel. Anyone else who joins up, feel free to join the leaderboard (I believe it also works like a "wall", where you can post messages exclusive to the board). http://www.trueachievements.com/leaderboard.aspx?leaderboardid=2483 Wait, I'm not sure if I was very clear on what boosting is... it's just an effort to hunt down achievements rather than just run into them in the normal course of gameplay. If two players want to boost on Halo: ODST, them might meet up and run a gamut of Firefight rounds for all of those particular achievements. Also, in a similar vein to what you mentioned, TA is running a "viral month" where everyone gets together around viral achievements and plays together to get otherwise difficult to earn/random stuff.

I'm like... 4 achievements away from completely finishing Fallout 3. It'll just take a few more hours to get there, I imagine.

I absolutely love achievements. It lets me get the most out of games I love by giving me motivation to hunt down obscure ways to play or master gameplay elements that might be out of my normal comfort zone. As for achievement tracking, I absolutely love TrueAchievements.com. It lets you track your achievement progress and compare it to not only your friends, but also gamers in your region as well as user-created groups. Since the community is achievement-minded, users can arrange achievement boosting sessions to help hunt down that toughie that a handful of people want to grab. They also created something called TrueAchievement score, which weighs the points of achievements based on the completion ratio of the community as a whole. The less people who earned a specific achievement, the greater the TA ratio that's multiplied to the original score to dictate the weighted value. It's kind of a neat way to not only see the value of an achievement based on the whim of a developer, but also to see the value of an achievement in terms of subjective skill. If enough people are interested and join up, I imagine we can make a Thumbs group on there to better compare achievements and maybe even boost. Just let me know.

So, I'm sure everyone has heard by now, but Sony finally announced what they're calling the Next Generation Portable (Joystiq's coverage here). The hardware itself is pretty amazing, with a high-resolution OLED touchscreen, dual analog sticks, 3G support in certain models, GPS, and a load of other stuff: Beyond that, the games in development look pretty damn promising, pivoting key third-party exclusive franchises as well as stuff like Call of Duty into a strong lineup: To wrap up, I'm definitely into this product. It seems to be taking many of the improvements that you might expect from a "next generation portable", combining those with the innovations poured into mobile devices, and supporting all of these things with strong software. Knock on wood, but it looks like 2011 might actually be the... *sigh*... year of Sony. Any thoughts?

Splinter Cell and Prince of Persia HD trilogies coming March 22 on PS3 Blu-ray disc The following bolding is for the sake of anti-tldr: I'm pretty excited, actually. This might be the way for me to play the Splinter Cell series at this point, since I just never had an interest at their initial release.

Just beat Portal on the 360. It's been a while since I first beat it, but it was nice to go back and give it another try. Not to mention gamerscore!

I don't really want to get into this, but the popularity of certain iOS games is yet again even more dependent on zeitgeist than games in the more traditional format. Considering the fact that the most important metrics for deciding what games to buy are the top free/paid apps lists and Apple's editor's lists, the most popular games only get more popular while more niche games fall by the wayside. So... it's not really fair to compare the success of Angry Birds or Doodle Jump to games on the DS or PSP.

That's kinda self-fulfilling prophecy territory, though, considering the fact that the DS's catalog of games was strong from the very beginning (at least by comparison to the PSP, where I was stuck with the fun but niche Metal Gear Acid for months and months). The reason that a lot of people play the DS is because a lot of people played the DS at its inception, while the PSP didn't gain enough traction for critical mass. People simply didn't think of the PSP as the prominent portable device, so it thus wasn't. Regardless, the DS shouldn't really be the ruler by which we measure sales success. If a handheld has to proliferate multiple demographics with incredibly consistent sales to be considered a winner, I don't really think the 3DS nor the NGP will fit that at all. All I'm trying to say is that the NGP might have the initial offerings and impressive hardware to capture a solid audience that'll keep it afloat, unlike last generation's PSP.