juv3nal

for your hyping needs: http://www.vg247.com/2011/07/19/bastion-reviews-rounded-up-ahead-of-tomorrows-launch/ http://killscreendaily.com/articles/reviews/review-bastion http://twitter.com/#!/bradshoemaker/status/93320627120910336

I dunno how many of y'all are into electronic music, but if you are, you may be familiar with Phoenecia (who also run the Schematic label). But before that, they were known as Soul Oddity and did funky electro which I generally like much better than their later Phoenecia stuff: 9AHdtp5sk-c

I'm a huge Borges fan. I have this collection. I would not characterize either T,U,OT or Menard as "essays on forgery" but I may be prejudiced because I first encountered them in the context of being fiction. Incidentally, Bioy Casares from T,U,OT was a real person and he and Borges collaborated under a pseudonym.

I'm in (also added to the google doc).

Doesn't bother me. Having linked upper and lower will presumably let them do animations more easily (i.e. without as much odd clipping) and if they deliver on their promise of more distinct looking sets of armor, I can only see that as a net plus over the ability to mix and match tops and bottoms. They need a better face-maker though. Oblivion/Fallout/NV were all awful in that regard. A billion different options, but no way to make your character not ugly (well, without mods, anyhow). Seriously, a single fixed face model for each gender/race would have been the superior option if the one face they gave you wasn't deformed looking.

Did some marathon Trenched coop playing with the free XBL Gold over the weekend. Still missing a bunch of individual/regiment challenge unlocked stuff and some rare drops. Farming rare drops is a drag though. They need to make everything buyable in the store; I have ~$200k and nothing to spend it on and the last 5-6 times I've run a level to try and get the "king" artillery has given me "princes" and mr. pancakes. I think I'm done unless they give me some easy way to see the cool/rare toys, not that it isn't a great game/good value for the money.

Oh man. I was SO not planning on picking up any 360/PS3 motion control silliness, but...but... 8EfjJeRzQ5M

omg omg public beta incoming

SPOILERS, dude.

I'm kind of on the fence with this. I don't really trust them to make the kind of game I'd want them to make, but at the same time, I do trust that even so what they end up will be fun and worth my money, even more so if they aren't gimped by weird scheduling/budgeting issues (looking at you, DA2, and your 18 month turnaround time).

They vary by desk and by time of day. If you've done all the ones for a desk it'll tell you with a little text message when you load up free roam for that desk. Otherwise just drive around until it gets dark (or light) and something should show up, just check the map every once in a while as I don't know how granular it is (whether it's just night/day or night/dawn/day/dusk).

Well, there was this on the European front a few days ago.

Weird that this thread has activity just now; coincidentally I got to borrow a friend's copy recently. The white matrix wall of "you can't go here yet" is really pissing me off. I just want to take out Borgia towers and play monopoly, why cap the amount of that I can do without progressing the story?

As for reading people, the "tells" do seem to get subtler as the game progresses...it helps to a) turn off subtitles if you have them on (if you're reading text you're not watching faces) and watch them for a longer period of time because sometimes the tell only slips out after you stare at them for a while. Also, there are a few exceptional people who look completely calm while lying. In those cases, I think you're supposed to be able to figure out just by the evidence you've got whether to doubt (if the evidence you have goes against them, but is all circumstantial) or accuse them of lying (if something you've got directly contradicts what they said). I don't think this is much of a spoiler, but...

Little Big Adventure 2 was AWESOME. It had a KISS cameo. And sausage paratroopers. And that spinny wushu move he does when he gets the sword is adorable.

via twitter:

That I specifically DO remember and I thought it was a neat way to do things. In the same sense that you wouldn't expect a novel written and set in the present day to explain what a telephone or television is, it presents these bits of tech as commonplace and trusts the reader to pick up enough from context to keep on trucking. I think that lends the telling an immersiveness that you lose if you explain them. That's just with regard to tech though, not to say anything about exposition/lack of exposition with regard to plot points which, frankly, I don't remember as clearly.

What do you mean by this, that there wasn't enough of it or too much of it? I didn't feel either to be the case with Neuromancer.

I'd like to see more "traditional," deeper experiences on my phone. Not so much in terms of action titles (which, if you wind up having to go to an onscreen dpad generall isn't going to pan out particularly well), but adventure and turn based strategy & rpg. The device is certainly capable of it as there are decent titles of those types, but they're way outnumbered by all the physics based puzzlers. cut the rope/angry birds type games are probably cheaper to make so if one flops, it's a smaller hit to absorb, which would make them the safer choice for a small company to develop, but personally, they start to all feel kind of samey (which is not to say that they're bad games, just not as appealing to me).

I'm juv3nal

So I just finished last night ~38 hours on easy, doing pretty much everything. The criticisms I've read are generally all valid and I still think it's strengths make it good enough that I don't regret the purchase or time spent playing it. On top of the criticisms people have already mentioned, one thing that seems to have been skipped over is that I do miss the puzzles you had in the first one (both in the fade and as you were busting into the circle after it gets taken over). I know the fade is not everyone's favorite part of DAO, but I think it's important to have something to do other than beat stuff up.

I wouldn't have been so peeved about this if they updated the minimap to account for the inaccessible areas, but they couldn't even be bothered to do that.

If you're into quirky Japanese stuff, Steambot Chronicles for the PS2 is worth a look. It's a cartoony open world mech-game with rhythm/music, stock market sim, and dating sim minigames. Also, if you like soccer games, I'm a big fan of the Winning Eleven/Pro Evolution Soccer series on both platforms. The series is actually one of my "desert island" picks because in the latter iterations building the best-team-evar can kind of be played forever as your stars will age and decline in ability and you'll have to replace them. FIFA has kind of left them in the dust presentation-wise on current gen consoles, but in the PS2 vs Xbox era, I think they were superior games. The one knock against them if you were a soccer fan being that they didn't have the license to use many of the real team/player names. edit: Also, Disgaea for both platforms. The original, I think, had more charm than any of the followups. To get the basic ending is not onerously grindy, but be prepared for some completely nuts grinding if you want to get some of the alternate endings.

So apparently, if you have Dragon Age II for any platform, EA is giving away Mass Effect 2 PC until the end of the month