CaptainFish

I thought I remembered LAN being announced around the PS3 launch. The first teaser was 2006, so that's way before GTAIV came out.

I'll take any excuse to listen to a podcast, even if it means awkwardly alt tabbing, or listening to my Sansa Clip+ which I can pause easily. Some games are definitely built for it though. I found Just Cause 2 was a decent choice. None of the dialogue is important, and when you're just tooling around causing chaos it's a great time to listen to stuff. I also listened to most of Idle Thumbs in my second playthrough of ME2 while scanning planets. A weird one was DeathSpank, once it came down to long traversal sections or light grinding I would pop my headphones on with my sansa. I definitely wanted to catch all the dialogue, so I was pausing a lot. Light co-operative multiplayer is also a good choice. I've played some Monday Night Combat or Killing floor with randoms with casts playing. I could even see doing it with TF2, but not L4D.

Oh man, that gypsy Egyptian (Egypsyan?) pirate lady wanted to have sex with my character*! I didn't even have to say anything, or give her a cake my dog found! GoTY. In all seriousness, the combat did seem similar. I would've liked some waypoints, so you could, for example, move to flank, and then attack in the same pause. It was kind of hard to get a good handle because of how fast everything moves. The camera kinda sucked. Instead of just pulling out to show the battle and allowing scrolling (DA:O did have scrolling right?), it's too close to each character such that you can't line up spells until you've moved in. Positioning and attacking was super awkward, because when I moved for flank the camera would move with my dude. I honestly don't think a zoomed out semi 3rd person view is best for a game that is about tactical battle, let me pull it all the way back. The dialog stuff seemed alright. I like having a voiced character. I assume in the full game (or in a manual) they'll actually describe what each tone icon means. One of them was just a purple gem. Does that represent greed? Or a gem of a line? An offer to play Bejewelled? I'm wondering if this game will have a campfire/Normandy hub equivalent. * Did I mention my character was a lady at the time?

I would much rather play a unique action puzzle game than another JRPG. I might just be burnt out on those long experiences, although there are a few JRPGs I love.

My friend just purchased Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days on sale, and I already had it so we decided to play through it in co-op. We started last night... ... and finished it in about 4 hours. That game is short. I kinda liked the first game, and it was interesting for me to see those characters again. There's a nice variety of locations, and a pretty freaky moment. I loved all the digital camera effects and camera shake. We had some pretty bad syncing issues in co-op though, I was hosting, and my friend kept getting jittery animations on enemies. Sometimes he would see NPCs that weren't there, and a couple times we desynced to the point that he was standing in one spot, shooting a wall on my screen while he was killing enemies on his screen. I'm still hopeful for the multiplayer aspects though.

I still think straight mechanically the Magicka Wizards win. If we're talking cool Wizard characters... ...Zanthia is my favorite.

There's already a Magicka thread.

I think the loss for me would be on the spell side. This game has the great Starcraft micro, high APM feel when you're just banging out spells at full speed. It pretty much accepts the element inputs as fast as you can type them and the only delay between spells is the casting animation (which doesn't prevent loading of the next spell). I can't see myself ever doing my Water Freeze Earth Freeze combos, where you can maximize the damage by charging the Rockball, while needing a quick freeze afterwards to keep the enemy locked.

Quick Look Road Show with the developers leading the way! Edit: Looks kinda Heavy Rain-y? Edit 2: Deaths!

I wonder if Telltale making a King's Quest game is like Bethesda making Fallout. Will they make a game that falls in their wheelhouse, with the same tone, but different mechanics? Basically, will there be deaths and hard fails in Telltale's King's Quest? I'm not a huge fan of those Sierra games, so I don't really have an opinion one way or the other.

I also stopped playing GTA IV shortly after Playboy X. I had bought it during a steam sale at least a year after release, and it never performed like it should on my machine. I really liked the story stuff but didn't actually want to do any of the stuff in between. Checking steam I did put a solid 44 hours into it, and enjoyed a lot of that time, but that was me trying to mainline the story as much as possible. Partly the fault of a shitty pc port, but the action wasn't great either. Weirdly enough I only put in 40 hours into Just Cause 2, and that was dicking around in the open world for about 20 hours, before rushing through the 'story' missions, just so I could mess around for another 15. I've been thinking about getting back into it at some point, whereas you couldn't pay me to play more GTA IV.

I started playing that a few months ago and took a break. I actually got to the part where enemies come at you and fought them off, but that didn't make me want to play it anymore. It might be the pacing. Portal broke the puzzles into nice chunks and had rewarding monologue for each one. The Ball has huge levels that are a little bit too large for the puzzles they contain for the sake of atmosphere. I'll probably finish it, but I don't know when. I'll usually play one game at a time, but sometimes I'll get distracted and switch gears. Other games I'm on break from include: PS2: Odin Sphere, Viewtiful Joe 2, Druaga and The Warriors, PC: Super Meat Boy (not yet 100%), Fallout New Vegas, DoWII: Chaos Rising and Torchlight . Wii: Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Sonic Colors (still need to 100%). For me the biggest one I can think of is Dragon Age: Origins. First off, I just want to say that not finishing it is entirely my fault, the game itself is amazing. Also it's been a while so I may be misremembering some parts. I bought it at launch, got through the intro section and did the chantry level (or was it the wizard tower?) first. That level has an amazing set piece section where the combat changes in a nice way. Then it went back to huge group battles that are kinda stacked against you and I lost steam. There was some worry that maybe I had incorrectly specced my dudes, and my love of the companionship stuff meant I always had my dog there to find gifts. I also had Morganna (Morg-something) who didn't have any heal spells, but if I brought the other wizard I didn't have enough tank with just the dog in the party. It was clearly the wrong way to play, but didn't want to change. The particular spot where I stopped was a point where you're supposed to be ambushed. The enemies are apparent and surround the triggering NPC. Knowing it was an ambush, I sent a dude to deal with the wizard and got nice positions before talking to the obvious trap starting NPC. A cutscene runs and then your party is repositioned altogether in front of the NPC. It really seemed unnecessary, especially in a game that is all about positioning and taking out key threats early. I felt really bad about stopping, because I long for difficult games, and this was one that delivered. I just felt all the story content was at odds with the gameplay in a weird way. You just have to play that game mechanically, even if that means using characters you don't have a ton of affinity for. Or I'm just terrible at it. I'll definitely go back to it, but I'll either have to shamefully play it the way I'd like to on easy, or struggle through it on normal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_zombie_video_games There are definitely more in recent years (2009 takes the cake). I think zombies just work because they are an easily recognizable enemy. When someone says you're fighting zombies, you expect a lot of enemies trying to grab you an attack you. They don't need to tout the amazing way the AI knows how to hide behind cover or flank you. Nation Red, Dead Nation, Killing Floor, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead, Zombie Driver, CoD Nazi Zombies, Crackdown 2, and RDR Undead Nightmare have action that is almost immediately understood once you say zombie. I just comes down to how you like that action to be handled. I had a big post about how the older preview stuff looked kinda meh, and my general disappointment, but this Destructoid Preview renewed my hopes. It's a bit more in-depth and has larger images. It seems this game will be more Fallout-esque than I thought, with lots of sidequests and story driven content. Also, at one point it mentions an assassin class. Before I though it sounded like Zeno Clash with health and attack speed upgrades, but it seems more nuanced than that.

This sounds interesting from the IGN write-up. The sum up: 1st person action, melee combat, found weaponry with durability, rpg elements and story focused co-op/single player campaign. It's also a scheduled 2011 release (360, PSTriple and PC ). It will be interesting to see if they find a way to have the same emotional weight of the trailer in-game. If it were like SOS on the snes, where you try to find survivors while escaping a disaster, I could see lots of room for actual loss of important cast in gameplay. Maybe they'll do that and have co-op companions as well as escorted survivors. I'm excited to see more.

Man I bet this game won't even come out on pc. I mean I guess that might be cool for babies, but it seems like another game that proves that the Kinect isn't for me.

I can totally see why that line would cause instant facepalms and dismissal. I think they oversold her tough persona. It's also pretty poorly written.The way they load it with one-liners is dumb. I do like the entire character progression arc as a whole though. I think I enjoy her character because of your dialogues on the ship. I felt like every time I finished a conversation with her, I felt better about her as a character. I've thought about it some and a lot of my disilke from Miranda probably comes from her appearance. You see her first, and she's got a physique that completely eshchews the proportions of every lady in ME and every other lady in ME2 (save for Samara/Morinth). She had levels of TnA that surprised me compared to how subdued ME was. I was literally taken aback when she was shown. It's the same aesthetic that seemed to represent every woman in Dragon Age, even the ones that are supposed to be chaste nuns (in tight fitting dresses ¯\(°_o)/¯). I know Miranda's appearance is explained through the story, but it just bummed me out. And the cheesecake camera angles don't help. I know Jack is also very cheesecake-y in design, but at least she didn't remind me of the Everquest box cover girl. Geez, looking over this post I may be over-thinking this. The whole dickwolf fiasco has me in this mindset.

I just beat Shadow of the Colossus again using a fresh save (I couldn't find my old memory card). That game is still great, and the main reason I'm wary of claims of games with unwieldy/animation heavy controls being terrible. For anyone who hasn't played it, I would strongly suggest waiting for the PS3 hd thingamabob, because the frame rate gets rough in spots. I assume they would fix this issue in the updated version. Regarding Mass Effect 2, Miranda is still my least favorite character. Not from a "not well realized" standpoint but from a "I would not like this person in real life" standpoint. Her not-superior-enough inferiority complex and gratuitous booty shots bugged me way more than Jack, who I didn't mind at all. I didn't see all the ridiculous Jack promotional material, so maybe that's a big part of that.

I enjoyed sneaking through all the weird ruined factories, but I would only call a couple parts of fallout 3 unmissable. The black and white sequence, and oasis.

Nice "dumb" adventure game heroes.

There was a thread, but it got pushed off the fold. http://idlethumbs.net/forums/showthread.php?t=7246& Anyhoo, Fox News thinks this game's writing is worse than I do, but it's probably still really dumb. It won't cause rape, but if I hear "dick-tits" again while being asked to buy their game, I might punch someone.

There's a great diablo reference in the swamp forest level.

What if you want to play games on the platform that play to the control strengths without caring about portability? I haven't played that much handheld stuff, but I did play Metroid Fusion and it was compartmentalized and directed to the point of being kinda rote.

Of course, how could I forget?

Seriously the best part of this whole thing can be summed up in two images. This first one... ...And this response.

"He was crucified for your reviews!" -IGN.com