Raff

I have strabismus and can only use one eye at a time. Down with 3D!

I've played Minecraft on and off since, I think, February. I always get tired of it prematurely due to the absurd rarity of iron.

Cool. Can't wait for Big Dog edition.

There's a bottom to the world, but horizontally it's made on the fly around you as you travel. I'm not sure if there's a roof.

There's a german developer who makes (I'm told) pretty-but-shit shooters for neogeo (as in actual massive cartridges) and then ports them to DC, one of those came out recently I think. There's always been a steady trickle of scrolling shooters on the 360, xbla and discs. Raiden Fighters Aces is out soon in the UK.

Yeah, looks like they have an 'art director' this time who's doing his best to space-marine-it-up, but I think it looks ok overall. 3 player online co-op! One of the best things about 2017 was the squad banter which I can't see being carried over, which will probably be a shame. 20km underground surrounded by giant acid-spitting ants: "Let's head back and grab a bite to eat!" We'll see. EDIT: oh, I see, it's actually being made by Vicous Cycle instead of Sandlot. That is a bit more worrying. Nothing against them, but still.

Trailers with nothing but cutscenes are almost as big a turnoff as trailers with QTEs.

Have they explained how this will actually work? Pretending to press a lot of air-buttons doesn't seem particularly apealing...

Just seen that they're also doing Bangai-O HD for XBLA. Never played that one. Japan is back!

There's a KoF shooter? never heard of that! *googles*

Ah, thank god. Kinect is optional for the Panzer Dragoon thing.

Hmmm... yeah I'm enough of a sucker to buy these again at budget price. I hate losing access to my games when I have to retire a machine. Luckily PC PS2 emulation is getting quite good, another year or two and it'll be spot on. God Hand already runs pretty well. Saturn emulation is quite advanced now (SSF), and apparently there's a reasonable Dreamcast emulator that's gone open source which should help that along. N64 emulation doesn't seem to be moving very fast but those games mostly aged horribly. What I really miss are a few Xbox games which were never given 360 support. There's an Xbox emulator making progress but apparently emulating what is basically a weird PC is really hard.

Video Games. DFZszOo4M60

I don't think I like this idea. Multiplayer FPS games may be using a lot of the same modes as they did 20 years ago, but anyone who's played a few will know that the good ones vary massively in their mechanics. If I'm going to play a multiplayer FPS at all it'll be a ground-up specially designed one with its own unique mechanics. Why would I want to play an inherently generic husk of a game with Metro 2033 themed hats in it? It is a valid issue you're trying to address, but I don't think it's a massive concern. More and more singleplayer-focused FPS' aren't bothering with multiplayer, and there are still quite a few multiplayer-only shooters coming out despite a lot of high profile flops.

I've imported SMT Strange Journey (DS) on a whim, in a desperate attempt to get some use out of this wretched machine. I'll let you know how it goes.

Just been watching the live demo of this on Giant Bomb. Looks unbelievably good! The narration is a nice gimmick that hopefully endures rather than becoming annoying, but the actual gameplay looks really solid. The graphics remind me of the beautiful high-end 2D games from the Saturn/Playstation era, but at a nice resolution and with modern scaling. Really exciting!

Don't worry, I'm here too. I finished 2017 the day it came out in europe. Part of the fun is also controlling two characters (one with turrets) on your own to farm armor...

My mistake, maybe it will be funny having them there then.

Went to the first one + the RPS event and various other fringe things, the fringe and festival in general seems basically absent this year which is a shame. Not sure if it's woth the traveling. It's also a shame that Train2Game is a partner...

I loved Bioshock but thought the whole Little Sister/Big Daddy system was very crude, and hearing that BS2 does even more of all that I decided to skip it (can't play everything!). This DLC thing seemed practically built as an alternative to BS2 for me so I was determined to play it now that BS2 is cheap everywhere. Having not played BS2 yet, I was going to hold out for a PC release of the DLC and get it all on steam, but apparently BS2 on PC doesn't have a walk button (again), so I just bought the 360 version a few days ago and skipped straight to Minerva's Den. I'm about half way through the second level I think. Liking it a lot, great setting and characterisation and a really nice balance of non-linearity to the levels. I like that the OCD systematic thoroughness of my exploration and looting can get me one steop ahead of the actual tasks (aha, so that's what that's for!) although again I'd rather lose the BD/LS nonsense... it actually feels a little grindy rescuing them and then harvesting the bodies to get the maximum adam, even with all the plasmids to mess about with in the process. I'm munching A LOT of health packs, my health just drops immediately if any enemies appear, but I'm glad that it's still manageable on normal for a BS2 virgin, and the help system is rightly assuming I need reminders about everything (that stuff could be a little more discrete on the screen though).

NJTJlOnkxFI EDF3 is the OutRun 2 of this generation. Please let EDF4 be the OutRun 2006! I will cry if the new one's not on 360 with online co-op. EDIT: looks pretty likely that it's 360 considering some guy on twitter knew about it in July.

I hate adventure games. I forced myself through Grim Fandango for the aesthetics. Tried the monkey Island remake more recenlty and it was terrible. Marginally enjoyed one of the LA Indiana Jones games when much younger and also played and hated TLJ at some point in my life.

I'm not sure I'll be working in book/mag/news publishing ultimately, I see it more as something I find interesting with useful skills to learn along the way, wide relevance and decent potential job connections if I do decide to go after them (UK publishing industry is still a big deal, unlike a lot of other industries...). It's a good time to be studying it because the print industry is right in the middle of adjusting to the internet, print on demand (anyone can write a book and put it out for sale like a cafepress t-shirt), ebooks, standards, readers, drm etc. A browse on here will give a better idea of some jobs than I can describe: http://www.thebookseller.com/jobs.html The industry is largely made up of huge publishers who do most stuff inhouse and who have been consolidating a lot over the last few years, plus lots of small niche outfits that rely mostly on freelancers.

Seems like it was marketed as a tech demo more than anything else, and didn't run very well in its launch state. A bit like how the massively under-rated 2007 Shadowrun game was marketed as a cross-platform DX10 game instead of as a brilliantly designed and refined class-based multiplayer game before class-based multiplayer games were cool.

I was doing French and Publishing combined. Did well in both in the first year. In second year publishing goes on hold and I did an internship in Paris which I can't really complain about. The work (or rather the distinct lack of it day after day in an isolated office) was boring as hell but well paid enough that I lived entirely off it for the whole year which is unusual. I won't bore you with the many many additional reasons why I changed, but the straw that broke the camel's back was that the couple of projects I was set to do during the year were the most pointless pathetic drivel, which depressed me a lot and made me realise how uninspired the previous year had been as well. To give some idea, my tutor said to me in person a month before one of the projects was due that they wouldn't be using the same book again the next year because it was irrelevent. But of course I still had to use it. Publishing (book & news/magazine publishing industries) on the other hand, which I'd pretty much chosen on a whim as an accompniment to French, had been a revelation with really interesting well resourced lectures, guest lecturers from the industry almost every week etc. It's just a world away from the experience of studying French which is just the same shit as GCSE and A-level. I'm not taking on £15k+ debt and two more years of my life for that while all my friends graduate and move on. I didn't meet any interesting people studying French, I met tons in Publishing. I can speak, read and understand French to a level I'm very happy with and there aren't really that many language jobs for mother-tongue english speakers unless you go to a much more advanced level than I think I ever can. All the linguists I meet speak 3 or more languages, I only speak English and French and don't have the stamina to study more languages and do translation Masters etc. I got screwed out of being able to also learn Spanish at school due to timetabling bullshit. I looked into the practicality of changing and it looks like I'll only have to trail one missing module so it'll almost be like starting the second year of a normal 3 year publishing degree. Good luck Murdoc! No idea how the systems work over there but like the others I'd definitely suggest asking about bursaries/scholarships. It's what they're for and I'm always hearing about people getting them somehow. In the UK, generally anyone who gets into higher enducation can at least take out interest-free (not inflation-free ) loans to pay for the institution and a maintenance loan each year that covers about 4-5 months of rent. People from 'Lower income households' have varying amounts of that loan as a grant instead. You only have to pay back the loans once you have a job and earning something like £15-20k a year. Until a few years ago the government paid the institution fees.