juv3nal

Maybe a more appropriate metaphor would be a store that, if your router reset while you were eating your already-paid-for foodz would send out a swat team to bust into your house and pump your stomach to remove any foodz already consumed and then prevent you from eating any of your purchased foodz. And then once your connection was restored, they'd make you eat the stomach-pumped foodz first before letting you get to any of the rest of it. Ok that got a little gross.

Deus Ex: Invisible War on Steam for $5 (also deals on Deus Ex plus Hitman stuff) http://store.steampowered.com/app/6920/ Tempted, but it got a lot of bad press in comparison to the first one, worth it or no?

Blah blah blah review scores don't mean anything blah blah...Destructoid guy gives it a 10

Baby-peanut weak? Your mom's baby-peanut weak. It is ON, Mr. Owl dude.

I've never understood why people criticize Braid for being pretentious. What Blow says about Braid, I can absolutely understand, but the game itself, why? Because it puts some cryptic text in between levels? Having said that, I love ambitious projects/designers/etc. and to say that someone or something is pretentious is often only another way of saying that they were ambitious and failed to achieve their goals. It never strikes me as a valid criticism. Just laziness in place of articulating how they failed to meet those goals.

I don't know what bearing it has on the game, but it's not just any old "horrid poem".

Oh incidentally, in case anyone wants to read for themselves: http://www.gamegrep.com/photos/29933-la_noir_gameinformer_scans_leaked/ The adventure game vibe, I get mostly from the description here: http://www.gamegrep.com/showimage.php?pos=7&newsid=29933 continued here: http://www.gamegrep.com/showimage.php?pos=10&newsid=29933 Not that reading scanned magazine text is a load of fun or anything.

Actually, from what I've read, it sounds like more of an adventure game with dialogue trees and stuff. Which makes it way the heck more appealing to me than the GTA/Godfather type stuff.

Haven't listened yet (I'm saving it. for later. preciousssssss), but let me just say: yay!

That makes sense. I guess my paragon conditioning just stopped me from using my team as cannon fodder. I have no problem directing them when there's cover for them to use.

Finished it. Did absolutely everything I could find (100% exploration across the board). Clocked at 46 hours and change although that easily could have been less seeing as I had spare resources left over. Some more thoughts on it: 1) Unlike most other bioware games, I found with ME2 that I liked to mix up who I was going to take with me instead of finding 2 and sticking to them. The only npc that didn't get a turn was Jacob (aside from the beginning when I had no choice plus his loyalty mission). I think this is because the party acquisition was spread out throughout the game instead of being something you do at the beginning so up until the endgame, I was still trying out various party members to see who I preferred. 2) The story suffers a bit for not having a stand-out villain character like the first one. 3) The super quick cooldown on slam is awesome. Sure it's no good against stuff with armor/shields/barrier up, but against husks, you barely have to shoot. 4) Miranda may be dull as a character, but in terms of abilities she rocks. Warp plus Overload on one character plus her party health/damage bonus ability. 5) Played the first time through using my ME1 save as infiltrator which was what I'd used in that one and when I restarted, I did it a few times to try out different classes and I came to the realization that while the infiltrator abilities are nice and all the main reason I took it the first time around (in ME1) was to be able to open/hack/bypass, which everyone can do now. Biotic animations with dudes floating around everywhere are just more fun. 6) That bit when you're sealing the basement when recruiting archangel. That really tight corner with the flamethrower dude behind two cover/barricade things (the left path of the 3 you have to seal). WTF. I've somehow muddled my way through it both times, but is there anyway to do that bit without nearly dying?

code for early demo access is available if you're willing to jump through some registration hoops and play a bit of their promo web game thing: http://kotaku.com/5464839/want-the-heavy-rain-demo-right-now-heres-how

I take it you haven't encountered the Gilbert & Sullivan scene?

Well,...

As a baldur's gate fan, can I just say how awesome it is that ?

If anyone else is wondering, it goes on 1 more step to "depleted." Also in the way of a critical response: I'm liking it, but I can't help but feel that if they took the shooting from this one and slapped it into ME1 (the faster cooldowns and firing off powers without going into the menu are great), I would like that a lot better. edit: and I don't really care about the ammo thing either way. Unlike the vast majority of the internet, it seems, I liked the tank bits in ME1 and scanning planets for resources is a slog. Just tell me how many credits it's going to cost me (for however many probes it takes, possibly fuel to get to/from the nearest fuel depot) and hand over my minerals. Grar!

Finished infamous a couple of days ago. Sidequests were a bit filler-y and I wish there was more puzzly find-the-next-handhold-platforming like the climb up Arden's tower, but decent overall. I do wish bioware (I'm looking at you, both DA:O & ME2) would pick up on the aggressive checkpointing style that I saw in infamous and uncharted 2. I know people complain about the regen thingies in bioshock and all, but as someone with not so much free time to play games, only having to redo the last 5 minutes when I die instead of the last 25 is a real boon.

when you're scanning a planet for minerals, how do you know you're "done"? Do you just keep going until the planetwide scan status says "poor" or is there another step past that?

Is still in production! http://www.vg247.com/2010/01/14/ubisoft-beyond-good-evil-2-is-still-in-production/ Yay! That is all.

Yeah, I'd thought there was one and tried to search for it, but "beyond" was deemed too common by the search engine and "good" and "evil" showed up in just about every thread. If admin/mod wants to merge, that would be super.

http://nifflas.ni2.se/index.php?page=1001Saira

Had a crack at it last night but not really sure where I'm supposed to go in the nearest star system to the one you start off in. I'm fiddling about on some world where there's a bunch of things I can interact with but they all seem like they're frozen solid or something(?). I don't like how the flying charge runs out so fast; it's tough to figure out where you need to use it sometimes and to have to run back and recharge not because I tried to use in it in the wrong place but because I didn't run to the right place quickly enough is annoying. It is pretty visually appealing though and flying charge thing aside the platforming has not been excessively difficult.

I'm not far into it and I don't think it's my favourite PSN thing ever, but certainly worth the asking price.

Not to burst your enthusiasm bubble, but you can't do this without the assistance of mods. For one thing, dwarves can't be mages. For another, mages all have the same mage background (no noble/commoner split).

The most interesting thing about it is that it appears to be playable in both the torchlight kind of zoomed out view and in the closer over-the-shoulder view more common to mmorpgs. But I'm not really a mmorpg kind of guy (even when they're free, although I've given a fair number of free ones a try) and what they've shown doesn't really change that.