Garden Ninja

I finally beat Oblivion last night. That game is awesome, but there is almost too much stuff to do. I had been working on it, on and off for the last 3 years. Like I'd play it for 10 hours on weekend, then not touch it for months. A few weeks ago, I decided I was just going to run through the Shivering Isles content, and go through the main quest, and it still took me 30 more hours. The play clock is just a bit under 80, but this is also my 4th character; I had put ~30 hours into 3 other characters, but kept restarting. Since the GOTY edition is $20 on Steam, I'm thinking of selling my 360 copy, and rebuying there if I want to play it again.

I just read another article on the topic on RPS. I'm glad the fucker is finally getting his comeuppance.

Weird. I'm playing BG 1 now, on a Vista machine, and it runs fine. Do you have the latest patches from BioWare's site? I had a plain install, then recently I installed the Baldur's Gate Trilogy mod, so I could play it with the BG2 engine, and it still works fine. I remember there being problems when I tried playing on an XP install, I think a combination of the latest patch, and a mod I was using, but there it wouldn't even let me start the game

I have seen several people, here and on other forums, get all giddy about Baldur's Gate finally being available on GOG, like that justifies this nonsense. You guys do realize that the 4 in 1 boxset has been available for a few years now, right? For example, Amazon has it right now to $15. Wait until Planescape: Torment is available to get excited. Be upset with their shenanigans or don't, but if you are upset, then BG is a silly reason to forgive them.

They posted an update today: So, seems like not a marketing stunt, but still not handled particularly well. Ditto. Not that we actually know anything about what "business and technical reasons" means, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were related to license rights with publishers. Making some money on games that wasn't making them anything at all seems like a win-win, but considering the usual publisher attitudes and responses to piracy, they've shown themselves to be incredibly short sighted.

It looks gorgeous, and "Zelda/Diablo" is enough to get me interested, but I'm going to wait for more gameplay details before I get excited about it. I see what you mean about the background vs. foreground, but it doesn't bother me personally.

I beat BioShock 2 on Tuesday night. Overall I thought it was quite good . I got a chuckle out of Schrödinger the cat and the cans of Gaynor Peaches. I played on Normal without Vita-Chambers, so early in the game I dreaded the Big Sister fights. Later on, after some research, and plasmid and tonic upgrades, they weren't as tough. Similar for the Alpha Series. The fight near the end was pretty intense. Some people have complained the audio logs in this one are all about the main story, whereas the first BioShock had some logs that were incidental to the main story. I don't really have a preference either way (both ways have their merits). Regardless, what was their was very well done. Hearing peoples earlier motivations, then meeting them and seeing how they've changed was interesting. I have zero interest in the multiplayer, so I didn't try that, and the protector trials doesn't sound terribly interesting either, but more story would be cool, so I will probably pick up Minerva's Den when it's out.

I hope so. A co-worker mentioned liking the more constrained setting of Arkham Asylum, and hoped that this doesn't become Grand Theft Batman. I think Grand Theft Batman could be pretty sweet if they do it right.

Well, yes, obviously someone was lead game designer. I thought Tim Schafer filled that role for both games. Perhaps I should have phrased it as "better game designer". Psychonauts was mostly good except for the Meat Circus and all the collection stuff (though at least that was optional). They are very different games, with different design goals, but insofar as they can be compared, Pyschonauts was a better game than Brutal Legend. Brutal Legend, as I said, tried to do too much. The combat was OK and the driving was OK. RTS has never been done well on a console, unless you take the Pikmin/Overlord route, so while not great, was no worse than the competition. Rather than do all 3 merely OK, they could have focused on 2 of them great. For me personally, the great writing will more than make up for the OK gameplay (especially at an XBLA price point), but there is no reason we can't have both. These games already have a smaller audience than the next big shooter, or whatever, due to their quirky setting, so not polishing the gameplay as much as possible will unnecessarily limit your potential audience.

Not sure how I feel about this. I didn't play his LucasArts adventure games, so I can't speak to those, but based on Psychonauts and Brutal Legend the writing will be fantastic. The gameplay, on the other hand, probably won't be great. Psychonauts was mostly OK, except for the Meat Circus level, which was just short of broken. Brutal Legend tried to do too much at once, and didn't do anything particularly well. I really enjoyed both games, largely based on the writing, so I'll probably play this too. At the same time, I feel like Double Fine would benefit from hiring a game designer, and let Tim Schaefer focus on the writing, and world building.

Sorry, I should have been clearer. I saw that he will be working at Irrational. I wasn't sure if he posted what his actual job will entail.

Meant to pop in here earlier. Congratulations, Chris. As much we'll all miss you guys casting pods in our face, you deserve it. I may have missed it: have you announced what you'll be doing?

I beat Jade Empire yesterday. I have the Limited Edition, so I played with the bonus character, Monk Zeng. The story was excellent . The characters were all really interesting, and most of the side quests were fun. I only skipped a couple of quests. One was for Closed Fist alignment only, and I played as Open Palm. The other one was part of the main quest. At one point, you could either compete in the Arena, or engage in some subterfuge. I chose subterfuge, and didn't go back for the arena. Combat was OK . I specced a magic user (Spirit), and more variety in spells would have been nice. Later in the game I used Spirit more for Chi-healing than actual spells. I did like that Demons were really the only enemies with immunities to support styles. For most of the easier groups of enemies I just bounced around, casting Stone Immortal (Stone projectile spell). Near the end of the game with groups of harder enemies, I started using Paralyzing Palm a lot, which let me deal with them one on one. The last two boss fights I most just switched between Paralyzing Palm, Leaping Tiger (melee attacks) and Spirit Thief (Steal Chi). Paralyze actually worked on them, which was good, but they both had gigantic amounts of Health, which made it seem more tedious than badass. Overall, I thought it was excellent. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who hasn't played it yet.

I beat The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom on Sunday. It was shorter than I thought it would be, but still very good. I liked that each stage had a slight variation on the basic game mechanics. The last stage was the best, especially the last couple of levels Definitely worth picking up if you haven't played it already.

I played Abe's Oddysee on PC and Abe's Exodus on PS1. The shoulder button based system worked, but was kind of awkward. The PC version has dialog on the number keys, which worked much better. If you haven't played them yet, they are like $6 each on GOG.com. (I keep meaning to pick them up again myself, but I keep putting off in favor of stuff I haven't played yet.)