juv3nal

I'm in Canada, and there's definitely a demo on PSN for me. Under "new releases", there's a deathspank entry which, if you push x on it opens up a sub-menu thingy letting you pick either the demo or the full game.

I see what the problem is: see, regardless of what it means in the US or UK, on the internets, hate with respect to something the person speaking likes or feels positively about means anything less than positive regard/opinion. Which includes, for instance, indifference. only half serious

Invulnerability orbs are pretty overpowered. Limited supply in that you can't buy them from stores (don't know if they're farmable off grunts. if they are, it's a really, really low drop rate), but they can turn super tough fights into cakewalks.

Yeah, the way they've done the angular thing just looks as if they're trying to save polys to bump up performance. That's not "stylized" in any good sense of the word. I think an angular look could be done well, but this isn't it. Edit: But this is probably just a case of something being shown too early/rough...look at the ground texture (the blood splatter) in that second shot and tell me that's going to make it into the game.

Well I think it's pretty awesome. At one point I was 60-something out of 2500+ on the leaderboards (which basically just tracks how many things you've killed) which might give you some indication of how much I liked it. If it were a full priced game, I'd have some nits to pick, but at $15, they're not even worth mentioning.

Early reviews are not great, but I'll be grabbing it when I get home anyways because I'm in the mood for some mindless loot gathering hack and slash. But as far as I know there's demos for PSN and XBLA both so don't let a bad review or three steer you away without giving it a go.

Just finished & Agreed. The sequence felt particularly formulaic. Also I think I missed the Sam & Max interplay banter .

To clarify, I don't think DA2 is going to be the second coming of Planescape Torment or anything, but what it boils down to is that I've yet to play anything by Bioware aside from Neverwinter Nights (original campaign anyways, some of the user generated stuff was great, but way too much work to sift through the chaff) that I haven't liked. I even liked Jade Empire. So whatever their marketing folks have decided that their customers like has been generally better than ok by me. Given that DA:O outsold ME2, they're probably clever enough not to tilt the needle too far in that direction.

So I borrowed this from a friend, ploughed a bunch of hours into it (lord is upgrading your swords grindy) and then consulted an faq because I got stuck somewhere only to find out I got locked out of a sidequest from not having talked to some dude waay earlier. RAGE. Moral of the story: never consult an faq when playing this game, or have one open from the get go. Also, it's (as pretty much everyone has already said) very much 2d zelda (which I don't mind at all). Pretty fun actually, if you don't mind grinding for sword upgrades.

from http://gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2010/07/09/five-facts-about-hawke-in-dragon-age-ii.aspx Admittedly, "Who is the Champion of Kirkwall?" isn't as catchy as "What can change the nature of a man?" but it seems to be pulling in the same direction.

I don't really get all the pushback against a predetermined character. Planescape Torment didn't let you choose race/appearance/gender and that didn't hurt it any.

I ended up getting away with just CIV IV Complete. Although I was tempted on that big bundle that includes Titan Quest. In the end, I think prudence won out over OMG AMAZING DEALZ because unless it's turn-based so I can play it while I'm half-watching something on TV, I do most of my gaming on the console these days since my only computer is a non-hardcore gaming laptop. I even prefer Sam and Max on the console. (Although Mr. Remo's twittering on the matter has made me think about that Alienware M11X for my next computer, but it is kinda ugly lookin'.) Edit: Oh, hey there, Chris, how's that M11X treating you?

I'm pretty sure this is not true. The only thing I play with regularity on my PSP is PES and I might have bit on a pspgo if it were available, but it doesn't look like that's the case.

I don't think the internet completely ignored it. I'd heard of it before. The reason you haven't heard of it recently is because, in internet terms at least, it's pretty old (2005). Personally, I had a look at it way back when, but didn't stick with it because the art style just wasn't my thing.

Auditorium and Fractal are 4.99 each. I gather this is something of a discount although I have no idea what they were originally charging. That would be something of a jedi mind trick, huh? Making a blog post saying "my game is now on sale for x dollars!" and tipping blogs off to it when the price was actually x dollars all along. note: I do not actually believe that's what's happening here.

thx.

So I bit on the Civ 4 bundle despite already having played the heck out of Civ 4 vanilla. I understand colonization is it's own separate thing, but of the other expansion/add-on things, which is the latest one that includes all the additions from the previous ones or is that stuff all bundled in no matter which executable I start up?

If you have an interest in tower defense and like grinding for upgrades/levelups (understandably, this is not everyone's cup of tea), Protector IV is pretty great.

I finally go around to beating episode 2 when I saw that ep. 3 had showed up. I got stuck for a bit in a way that I didn't with episode 1, but with some persistence muddled my through it. There are hints for things that seem obvious in retrospect, but are really not so obvious at all when you don't already know the solution. For instance, .

http://www.vg247.com/2010/06/25/ancel-bge-2-being-developed-with-as-few-people-as-possible-to-maximize-creativity/

Voodoo Funk has hours of mixes that are the results of 3 years of crate diving in Africa. It helps if you like funk, soul, and/or disco.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/06/monkey-island-2/

That's understandable. Flower is neat because what it does is something so few games do. But you need to be something of a hard core gamer to even understand that it's something that few games do (and to consequently find that appealing). I think they have said exactly that if you look at the various articles online. Only minus the MMO part. From what I gather, it's a kind of filtered multiplayer experience so that while there may be massively many people online at once, you're only ever going to encounter at most 1 other person at a time. Flow was kind of wonky, but in Flower, I can't think of a better implementation of motion control on the PS3. Obviously this is going eventually be done better with Move and whatnot, but it still counts as being "more polished than other developers" in my book.

Oh man, there's some straight up crazy in the comments here courtesy of one Adam Coate

ragdoll tennis is pretty great.