Raff

The petermolydeux twitter account was taken down a couple of days ago and not many people seem to have noticed, due to the nature of twitter I guess. Hopefully outrage ensues soon. I only noticed because I follow the guy who does it (he didn't take it down himself and hasn't been contacted by anyone). Quite an odd situation, will be interesting to see what happens. He was always pretty careful to make it clear that it was all a parody. There was a great video the other day if you missed it: LcDgaUKBRZE In other slightly related news, Rab from Consolevania is working on a new thing about games: http://www.forum.consolevania.com/index.php?topic=4321.0

Got a bit frustrated with my 80 hour character last night and started afresh for the third time and am up to blight town again. Have refined my build down to socery + dex weapons. There are heaps of NG+ players around now, has made my first few attempts at invasions a bit shit. I won't be done with this game any time soon, and I'm really tempted to go back to Demon's afterwards.

Windows Media Player. It's lovely.

Well WC3 was a charmless husk compared with 2 in my rose tinted eyes (though I played a lot of multiplayer mods) and then WoW barely had any perceivable connection so I never played it. Always hated the blurry photoshop low poly graphic style as well, which was an imprisonable offence back when there was still a buzz about that game.

It's quite a well known exploitable glitch. I was looking for some legit advice on killing the dragon besides sniping it from below for 10 minutes (again) and mostly just found people suggesting that.

I'm hopelessly addicted to this. Adam Jensen has been waiting for me in a brothel in shanghai since Friday, the sucker. I really like the changes they made, especially the seamless world and the humanity/tendency overhaul. I've had great multiplayer experiences unlike my wretched asian Demon's Souls tribulations. I've even killed an actual invader! (no not an NPC one!)

Oh I didn't even try to attack him, just squeezed R2 by accident. I've not used my Demon'sSoulsStation 3 in about 3 months.

I somehow accidentally attacked the NPC that happens to be the only guy who enables you to be forgiven by NPCs that you accidentally attack (Oswald of Carim). Fuck. Really considering starting from scratch, I kindof like whipping through stuff again when I know exactly what to do. Plus I've learnt some lessons on stats with my cleric.

Went to a great concert with these guys in Amsterdam a few weeks ago and the CD is also good. http://www.reinierbaas.com/?page_id=25

And it was on DotEmu before that.

"Cowboys, vampires, and sexy dead girls are fun in parties, but not so much alone."IGN.com on Darkwatch (2005)

This is the first game I've pre-ordered in ages. I must have made about 20 characters in Demon's Souls, never really took any of them very far though (despite loving it). The PvP stuff was pretty messed up (guys jumping in and destroying all my gear with magic etc) and I never managed to get anyone to help me out with anything. I hope that stuff is a tad less obtuse in the new one although I appreciate the mysteriousness of it all as well.

So Treasure are finally porting this to XBLA for Spring next year! I made myself a naughty copy of it for Saturn a few years ago (MkI Saturn disc swappin' yo), since it's so expensive and only released in Japan. It's a really nice game, A LOT more fun than Ikaruga. If you have even a passing interest in scrolling shooters, this is the one you need to play. The gimmick is that you constantly have about 10 very different guns/attacks available (including a sword!), rather than just the one, all mapped to their own buttons. This works much better in practice than you're probably thinking! What's also nice is that unlike Ikaruga, it uses a normal 4:3 screen orientation(even the original arcade version), so you won't need to rotate your screen to play it as intended. Great music too. Can't wait! EDIT: Oh my god I just saw that Mr Panzer Dragoon is making a Panzer Dragoony thing for Kinect. Now I might have to buy it.

The second analog stick is important because Monster Hunter. rveC8emubkw

I can't play this for another month and even then I have to think about building a new PC for it.

I really wanted to like RoF and played a fair bit of it but my god it's a grind and there's only really one strategy to win every fight. It didn't help that the plot didn't appear to be going anywhere at all after hours and hours, though I appreciated that it was at least trying to do that differently to the usual.

I played this over christmas. Really liked it overall. It acknowledged some of my biggest annoyances that makes JRPGs (because it's a JRPG at heart) such a chore for me to play (but may seem frivolous to others). For example, just that you can move around like in a proper action game. Being fast and agile and having a jump button makes wandering back and forth through towns and landscapes so much less laborious. Best of all is that they didn't do the usual attrocity of carving everything up with invisible walls. You can jump over pretty much everything you'd expect to be able to jump over to take a shortcut. Fences, walls, ledges. It was such a relief and made everything feel so much more solid and convincing. I also liked the overall 'spoke' design of the world with the village at the centre. The scope of it is spot on. It's not a true open world but it feels more open than the usual. I liked the 2D shooter-esque bits, and the zelda-like bosses (and when both those things combine). I honestly don't remember much about the story or the ending but I think I liked it enough. Some of the characterisation is needlessly garish. The MMO sidequests were shit, like everyone says. I find it odd that the soundtrack is so popular. It's above average JRPG music but incredibly repetitive in the game and not particularly unique in its style. Sometimes I suspect that some people confuse 'epicness' with quality... Composers seem to score a lot of points by including a lot of dramatic chanting.

They literally couldn't have marketed this game any worse towards me. It's a miracle I still want it.

I didn't know it was out so soon either. Last time I saw it it they pretty much just had the art style and it didn't look very interesting. Looked like yet another one of those IGF games that wins awards but never actually comes out. Looks pretty cool now and I love the sound.

Ask a German, they'll do anything in return for gifting them an uncensored steam game in my experience.

The supernatural stuff is dumb and many of the already atrocious 'gameplay sections' mess with the scenario making it come accross a lot camper and more incoherent than it needed to be, but overall the mystery concealed and revealed itself in a satisfying way. The characters, their interactions and some of the themes surrounding them are great and way way above a lot of highly regarded video game tripe. I've not heard of many people who start playing DP and get fed up of it half way even in spite of the terrible gameplay sections, the story somehow manages to pull you through all that. I also think that a lot of the stuff that people percieve as wacky and hilarious might not be as bizarre in the grand scheme of things, just in the context of the incredibly limited body narrative video games with more than one good idea or source of inspiration. If it could ever be remade without the bad stuff and some more polish here and there it would be really special.

Yeah that's silly. Luckily I never look at that kind of stuff anyway. In other news, I love Swery's twitter. http://twitter.com/#!/Swery65/status/95415828748566528 Also, since I don't think I've posted in this thread before despite finishing this about 6 months ago: Deadly Premonition is genuinely one of my favourite games. In addition to being a well written, captivating story, the real-time open world stuff and all the unnecessary fluff is right up my ally. It's full of stuff that I want but always gets cut from games in this current era. Hardly anybody tries to make ambitious stuff like this anymore and none of it makes it to release. It's like a forgotten game from the 1997-2000 golden age.

I'll be suprised if it doesn't come out here eventually through Ghostlight, RSG or even someone bigger given all the attention it's had. There's probably a bidding war going on already. Not that I think it looks very good mind...

I'm a total sucker for nice looking packaging, books etc but to be honest games rarely get nice enough looking editions and I don't seem to have that much. Most stuff is awful (I love seeing stacks of misguided Killzone 3 cat helmets in shops) and often they turn out to be very dissappointing (like the dreadful Bioshock one with its bewildering Moby CD.) I have imported the odd fairly cheap game from Japan for the sake of the nicer packaging. I like Gamecube games in dinky little boxes with card sleeves, and if they include a mic or something, boxes with embossing and foil. I'd have bought the shit out of some of the cool stuff Sega Direct did with PS2 remakes if it was sold here: _2YpL4sOFyc Why does Japan get so much more stuff like this? Is it just much cheaper for them to import from China? Also cool - Standard Rhythm Heaven for GBA (with tiny stickers!):