George B

OOF!!! Where are my 3 hints, mr. El Layton? edit- also: that's awesome!!!

Would you say that these games are worth playing even if you don't follow the webcomic or anything penny arcade related for that matter?

*acheivement unlocked: a year in the life of a thumb* another great episode capping off a great year of podcasts, I wish you all countless more years of comperable wizardry!

As I recall on the Joystiq podcast, it was Ludwig Kietzman who had an opposite opinion, he found that playing it on a harder difficulty made the game much more fun because you had to plan out your attack strategy for individual goals more fully. With the difficulty set to high you have to pick your spots, stay incognito as much as possible and then when you need to, you rain holy terror down on one small section of the map before making an escape... like a real terrorist would! Not that I condone terrorism... nor excessive paraphrasing... anyway, it's interesting that this game has many disperate opinions coming from either extreme in terms of difficulty and fun corresponding with each other!

Crackpot savant rapper, Ghostface Killa's new album: Ghostdini, the Wizard of poetry (in emerald city)!?!

In my continuing effort to be one generation behind the forums, I just picked up Red Faction for the PS2 (along with Killer7)! Pretty sweet so far, but after hearing so much about Guerilla I seem to have a serious case of Ostrich hammer envy.

Yes I did go steam right now and put bundle in cart... I've had too many experiences (3) where I buy a game on steam and then it is put on sale that very weekend, so I'll wait a day before I click on paypal

ahey, I can get advice from you guys!! So I got a PS2 just recently, and have been going through some of the best games on that system (there are a ton). One of the games was MaxPayne 2, but after playing the first mission I took a break and haven't gone back. I found the controls to be really annoying and imprecise. There's a whole section where you are walking on catwalks outside a building and I kept falling down I've always been a PC guy and it could be my evolved ineptness with dual analogs that made MP2 seem so painful to play... Should I play Max Payne 2? Or go on to the next game on my list: Splinter Cell: chaos theory. (playing RE4 right now, what an amazing game... I LOVE it's controls... wrote a whole blog post about them sweet babies)

DEMO now available

Hot scoops re: the new shit being dropped... I sure am glad my studio bathroom poo story got a callback!? Great show, as always

wow this looks right up my alley! Pre-ordering... NOW!

"the big daddy Kane of video games" -ign.com "who let the dogs out? this game did, cause it's soooooo bitchin'" -ign.com

Decently funny Christian Bale spoof? Please and thank you. Where's the problem?

Anyone playing this baby? I have been looking forward to a sequel to RTCW for a long time. As a stalwart wolfenstein: enemy territory player, I know that myself and most of my community/clan were hoping for a new multiplayer game to latch onto seeing as Quake Wars never seemed to take.** Well, so much for that... the MP had a fork in it almost out of the box and despite the efforts of a few mod teams, it looks like it's back to W:Et andTF2 multiplayer for me. But... it is a fun franchise, maybe the single player will be fun... and it is... kinda... There are a few annoying things, I guess I can start with them. The gold collecting mechanic is crappy... the level design is pretty good and you generally feel like you should keep pushing on, but to do so is to risk missing out on valuable hidden gold stashes... so you go from a dramatic combat moment to walking around an empty room for a minute knocking over every crate and barrel, looking for cash. Of course, you could ignore the gold but then how would you buy upgrades? The game frequently reminds you (text pop-ups during loading screens mostly) that a) weapons are no good if not upgraded and that there is not enough money to buy all the upgrades so choose carefully... so to increase my ability to play through and enjoy the game, I have to interrupt gameplay after every nazi closet to do a gold sweep... Solutions? Why limit the amount of cash in the game? Maybe to 'incentiveize' (not a word?) additional playthroughs? Why not have the nazi's you kill during random encounters in the city drop gold, or have a bounty system set up where the various resistance groups offer you cash for killing off nazi officers during these random encounters? That would add some weight to the multiple random encounters you fight through while navigating from one level to the next with in the central hub of the city. The game also suffers from 'not being far cry 2 syndrome'... why do I have to press tab and wait for my map to load up, interrupting the action, the music and gameplay! Boo! I want to look at it while I run from veil pool to veil pool... The story isn't that great, seems to me that it takes itself too seriously. They should think about taking the game in the direction that red alert went... you already have silly nazi occult monster thingies, and you have the square jawed american stereotype, why not take it all the way and add some humour... it might make me more interested in listening to all the v/o that I began to skip over heartlessly after sitting through a few... geez the guy's name is B.J. after all, have some fun with it!! Played a level last night, the cannery, and it had a bunch of little traps you can spring on unsuspecting nazis: a falling tank, a set bunch of steam valves, a giant fan to blow them through a vent etc... problem is, by the time you reach the cannery you have played enough that you have gotten into the groove of fighting from the entrances to each room to limit the number of bad guys who can hit you, so by the time you get to the trap's triggers, you have already cleared out the room... boo! What's good? The veil powers are lots of fun and add a nice twist to gameplay. Using the "see enemies through walls" upgrade is pretty sweet, it's comperable to what Shadowrun was trying to do it taking aimbot/wallhack mechanics and incorporating them into the game proper. Trying to manage your Veil meter while using the shield and other abilities to their fullest is fun. The weapons are pretty solid as well, you get your standard mp-40/43 and also you over the top magic death ray tesla cannons... I'm about 2/3 of the way through (I guess) and it's a solid but wrote first person shooter. Also: it looks good, and "it will blow your mind" ** a classic case of "we just want our exact old game but with a graphics overhaul and a bunch of new players to kill"... in other words, a design quagmire for any dev team working on MP (in this case, endrant studios)

I agree entirely. I finished it last night and it was terribly underwhelming... The AI is ridiculously bad throughout the game. The whole escort mechanic was basically only useful as a demonstration of how awfully the AI worked. The levels look good but you spend so much time in 'veil' mode that all that texture work is for naught. I will say I found the sound design to be especially good. And the whole veil combat mechanic what with the empower, shield and mire effects are really fun, also there are some neat-o weapons in the game (you have to try zapping a nazi a quick jolt of the tesla coil to enjoy his electrocution dance). It is fun to play a 1998 game with good graphics, as long as you ignore everything that happened since 98. Which I was able to do for short bursts, but as soon as I began playing critically again the game fell apart... Feels like maybe the whole Id/Activision break-up might have affected the game's development, and it will certainly negatively affect the chances of any expansions or fixes to the multiplayer being released... Someone take this franchise and make a tongue-in cheek noir shooter occult thingy, or bury it forever... good riddance, B.J.Blazkowicz.

and I'd have started such a thread with the sole reason of posting this photoshop I made...

This week our chapter of the IGDA had Lulu LaMer come in and talk about the change that took place in borderland's visual style. She talked about how the art style change was proposed, which was interesting. It was the design team at Gearbox that came up with the new look, the same folks who had been working on the old look for a year+. They got Gearbox pres. Randy Pitchford to give them a few weeks to give the game a makeover, they did so and presented it to him. He then took the new look to 2k and was able to show them the changed design at the same time as he proposed it. The old art ambush. Luckily everyone involved saw how the art really worked much better than the old style, and this is how it changed with 9 months to go! (paraphrasing to the nth here, I just scribbled down some notes). What made the decision easy, from 2k's perspective at least, was how the new visual style was more true to the "aesthetic contract"* implied by the gameplay... Over the top combat, 87 billionty weapons, etc... and a photorealistic style?? Doesn't quite work. Once this aesthetic contract was met new design decisions seemed much more easy to make, an example she gave was of oversized bad guys, who had seemed out of place in the photorealistic world, but looked great in this new stylized one. Here's a direct quote from my notes: "You discover your game through change." -L. LaMer She talked a lot about communicating change to differing groups, how the language she uses when talking with designers, producers, publishers, and especially marketing people and 'buyers' is necessarily different. She can't use the language of formal design tools to explain to a firm how to market a game... she communicated with them in terms they could understand and wouldn't make their eyes glaze over. In the case of borderlands she had to describe it as "more white trashy" before they caught the drift of how to market it. The game looks pretty fun, but time will tell, seems like it might be a nice placeholder while I wait for another post-apocalyptic stylized shooter to be released (hello Brink!)

Well, I did some crappy cut/paste work in PS to double up the baboo O, but the Thumbs from Balls was a bit more tricky... the M for example, is two pieces of A tied together. Just trying to pay my dues

as part of my 'welcome to the internet' orientation I made a youtube video via google image search. I had fun making it, though dealing with windows media maker is frustrating <object width="340" height="285"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfYPQcgDmw4&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfYPQcgDmw4&hl=en&fs=1&color1=0x402061&color2=0x9461ca&border=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="340" height="285"></embed></object> file under: rap, sexual innuendo.

True, 'tis a good cast as well. Another games one I might mention: First Wall Rebate, which while occasionally painful to listen to (as they sometimes tip toe towards articulating their points), they do have interesting topics and guests.

Gamer's with Jobs is one I enjoy that hasn't been mentioned yet... for the non-video game p-cast I go with The sound of young america the Long Now foundation's seminar series Comedy Death Ray and a myriad of the CBC's podcast offerings #geez... waiting on much compiling leads to forum spam I guess, 'pologies

me too... I waited and waited for L4D to go on 50% sale, I gave in and bought it full price and then that same weekend it went on sale... never again! is there any chance l4d2 is released at a reduced price point, something in-between an expansion pack and full game release price?

little late to the show on this one... when I got those emails I was curious as to why they would do this as well... looks like they still got what everyone wanted, but why take a page out of the John Grisham playbook to do so?

Gameloft really has been squeezing out a surging mass of clones... I can appreciate how blatantly they are doing it too, it's almost as if iPhone development is the old west and they are making the laws up as they go along. Essentially Gameloft is Al Swearengen to the iPhone's Deadwood. Fun fact: Gameloft is run by Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot's brother - *the more you know* Now how does one go about winning that copy of RE5?

I picked up Carcassonne and a few expansions earlier this year, it is lots of fun, easy to get into yet there are some complicated strategies that emerge. Too bad most of my friends don't have the patience for games Anyone ever try and play a game over a message board? It might be fun, no?