Salacious Snake

Phaedrus' Street Crew
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Posts posted by Salacious Snake

  1. Posted

    Hey, the ESRB wrote back to me!

    Hmmm, so Steam and other sites don't have to use a broken cookie system for everyone; they can use their (possible also broken) login cookies!

    I'm also surprised that "age-gate" is the real term for this concept.

    I'm glad that's the policy, at least.

    I often question the value of game ratings, but I do enjoy perusing the ESRB blurbs. Re: Kid Icarus: Uprising:

    This is an action game in which players assume the role of Pit, a winged warrior tasked with saving the world. As players run, jump, and fly through colorful levels, they use swords and energy bursts to defeat fantasy creatures (e.g., one-eyed blobs, giant snakes, mythical creatures). Players can engage in ranged and melee-style combat, sometimes using crosshair targets to shoot down enemies. Combat includes brief explosions, cries of pain, and slashing sounds. During the course of the game, one female character wears a tight outfit that accentuates her cleavage/buttocks. Some scenes also reference suggestive material (e.g., “[Y]ou better not be thinking of anything . . . naughty” and “Someone's overcompensating.”/“Feeling a little inadequate, Virindi?”). The dialogue contains brief references to bathroom humor: “[This environment is] actually pretty cute. Especially when you compare it to his . . . bowels” and “Well, there's more than one way to get rid of a bad chicken nugget. Maybe I should just expel you [from my body] the old-fashioned way.”

    I wasn't going to buy Uprising, but now I just might.

    edit to be slightly more relevant: I sometimes flub the date entry, and have locked myself out of websites for extended periods of time. Sometimes I put in my month and date of birth, and then just put this year, like "it's my birthday!" rather than putting in the year of my actual birth.

  2. Posted

    I expected to smugly brush off the Internet response and not give a damn about the game's ending, but holy shit, it really is dumb. It's super dumb.

    I thought the story in Mass Effect 2 was poor, but I held out hope that the payoff in 3 would make everything ok. Unfortunately, it doesn't. It still has effective moments throughout, and for someone who is somewhat invested in the characters, it is absolutely worth playing through to see them. The broad arc is awful, but the incidental stuff is still good.

    It seems like the people in charge of the franchise don't understand why people like the first game so much. The best drama comes from the characters, not from the threat of the explodotrons from beyond space, nor from half-baked philosophical rumination on the relationship between organic and synthetic life and all that other claptrap.

    The end of the game leans pretty hard on elements of the fiction which haven't been properly developed. It tries to cash in a bunch of gravity that hasn't been earned. It's weird.

    [ending spoiler]

    Also, fucking ghost baby, what the hell is up with that. Utter nonsense.

  4. Posted

    Is there anyway to change my address for the pledge? I was poking around the site and couldn't find a way.

    Based on my prior Kickstarting experience, you'll be asked for a shipping address when the funding is complete, assuming you're asking in regard to the receipt of physical items. If you mean that you want to change your billing info, You can click "Manage my Pledge," and then select the option to change your billing method.

    As of this moment, you haven't been asked for a shipping address.

  8. Posted

    From what I hear it has moments where it tries to be edgy and cool, but just comes off as really dumb, but that it doesn't affect the gameplay at all. The motion comic story stuff I saw, and the introduction videos to the various ranges looked pretty painful.

    Yeah, I've skipped every single one. From what I've seen in videos online, it's all awful stuff.

  9. Posted

    Might be a half-Native, half-Italian? I'm sure it's not out of the question. After all, Disney's Pocohontas!

    I thought that was too improbable, but this is Assassin's Creed we're talking about.

    "Nothing is true; everything is preposterous."

  10. Posted

    As I said before, the idea of a native character that's actually handled (hopefully) well is so alien to games already that I'm excited just to see that happen.

    Isn't he most likely a descendent of Ezio? That would kind of rule out him being a Native American. He does clearly carry some nativy trappings, so he likely has some kind of contact with them.

    I do hope that any such characters are treated respectfully. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that at some formative point he stays with them for a while and they train him in the arts of whatever.

    To clarify for anyone who isn't familiar with AC, the central conceit of Assassin's Creed involves genetic memory (which is an idiotic concept, but let's not linger on that), and the protagonists have to be in a direct ancestral lineage for it to work. They could potentially break from that, but it would go against everything they've set up so far.

  13. Posted

    I've been playing the heck out of this. (gamertag: XButts 360)

    It's a bit inconsistent. Some of the survival events (the "deadly descents") are terrible and unfun. In fact, the whole World Tour mode is a bunch of garbage.

    The difficulty curve is all over the place, and the items are pointless, and the story, hah, well…

    On the other hand, doing random crap in Explore and Global Events is fantastic. It's a terrific game, but it's front loaded with some badly designed content (which can be ignored).

  16. Posted

    I'm happy that they're doing another setting that's not often explored in games (aside from grognardy strategy). Aside from the kinda half-assed continuing adventures of Ezio, that's been one of the major strengths of the series.

  17. Posted · Edited by tentaclesex

    A little bit of stereo separation in this type of recording creates a huge improvement in the listening experience, and all it takes is panning each channel a tiny smidgen on the mixer or in the DAW. You can do this once and never have to adjust it again (unless you have a guest on or something).

    edit to explain further: a benefit of doing this is that when people talk over each other, you have each of their voices somewhat preserved. You can hear them both at once, without the audio information getting all muddled up. Using some separation will reduce the amount that the signals step on each other. It's all very technical.

  22. Posted

    I don't agree with this article whatsoever. I don't see how the design of burning every tree and every rock is good design or even fun gameplay.

    He's not advocating a return to that design, but lamenting the loss of the sense of discovery that went along with it. It would be great for the smarty-pants designers to find away to recapture that.

    I agree wholeheartedly.

  24. Posted

    Did anyone here play Far Cry Instincts? It was the console port, but it made a significant addition in giving the protagonist trigen-related superscientifical powers. I wonder how that panned out.

    It's a huge cliche at this point, but so is everything in video games, and it looked fun.

  25. Posted

    I'm a little worried about some reactions I'm seeing to the game now. There seems to be a percent of people on the internet, and I don't know how big that percent is, saying that the game is less interesting now because the protagonist and his friend are "bro's." Which I don't think is correct at all. I mean, yeah, they seem like college guys or whatever, but they aren't Pauly Shore'ing all over the game.

    Now that's a game I want to see. Far Cry 3, starring Pauly Shore… You could have an achievement for "Weasing" all the juice on the island.

    "Bro" in the sense that people are using it is a term for mainstream college guys who are into sports and polo shirts. It's a way for nerds to lash out at the cool people who picked on them.

    Anyway, I think the protagonist as portrayed early on seems like a reasonable fit for the "ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances" archetype, but I hope they explain how he suddenly becomes a total badass.

    I'd be satisfied with a training montage.