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Just beat Portal on the 360. It's been a while since I first beat it, but it was nice to go back and give it another try. Not to mention gamerscore! :shifty:

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Had Dead Space 2 from Gamefly since tuesday, finally finished it Sunday. It really is a fantastic game. The thing it does best is maintaining the fast paced feel of many modern shooters, while somehow also maintaining the tension of old school survival horror games. The types of weapons you have access to, their creative alternate fires modes make you feel like a badass, but you're always low on ammo and health. It's just perfectly paced the whole way through.

I'd also have no problems reccmending this as a purchase because of the improved new game+ mode, the multiplayer, and the new hardcore mode for you masochists out there(three saves in the whole game, no checkpoints. You die, you go back to your last save)

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Just beat Portal on the 360. It's been a while since I first beat it, but it was nice to go back and give it another try. Not to mention gamerscore! :shifty:

Does it play well with a controller? I've always been scared to give it a shot on the 360.

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Does it play well with a controller? I've always been scared to give it a shot on the 360.
I played it on PS3 and I think it plays fine with a controller. Especially considering that you don't need to make a lot of quick movements. It's all about solving the puzzles but once you do, you don't neccesarily need a lot of quick jerk movements to complete them.

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Fuck me is the boss of Donkey Kong Country Returns ever hard. Like, 30 lives. What a bastard. Anyway, it's done. I have now seen the credits of DKCR, so it can be considered complete. I still plan on going back to unlock the Golden Temple (done by collecting the KONG letters on each level in a world, then completing the 8 bonus levels that that unlocks) so that I can do whatever is in there, as there are only 4 levels I don't have all the letters for and only 3 of those bonus levels I need to see. Whether I'll have the persistence to go through that, who knows. I may have finished it as much as I'm going to, and I did see credits, so on the list it goes!

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I played it on PS3 and I think it plays fine with a controller. Especially considering that you don't need to make a lot of quick movements. It's all about solving the puzzles but once you do, you don't neccesarily need a lot of quick jerk movements to complete them.

I remember it getting really twitchy in the PC version (the bit where you've got to aim at the base of other platform as you're bouncing through Portals, in order to get higher and higher, springs to mind. Maybe using a mouse makes it harder?

Good to hear it's easy to play, though.

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Yeah, I finished it on the X360 too.

That part you mentioned was the first game to give motion sickness in a long time, but it is playable.

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I remember it getting really twitchy in the PC version (the bit where you've got to aim at the base of other platform as you're bouncing through Portals, in order to get higher and higher, springs to mind. Maybe using a mouse makes it harder?

Hmmmmm, I've only played Portal on the Xbox, and I was sure Valve was "massaging" those jumps for me. "You don't really have enough momentum to make that jump, you silly console gamer. You're also aiming the wrong way!"

But maybe Valve gave everybody that gimme...

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Hmmmmm, I've only played Portal on the Xbox, and I was sure Valve was "massaging" those jumps for me. "You don't really have enough momentum to make that jump, you silly console gamer. You're also aiming the wrong way!"

But maybe Valve gave everybody that gimme...

I think you might be right. That puzzle in particular, where you basically had to piggyback on each subsequent jump to get higher, seemed like it was probably easier than it should be... I seemed to be going higher with each jump than I should go and I could take my time with no consequence.

As far as controls go, I actually kinda like running it with the controller more than a keyboard/mouse because I didn't get into that frantic screen flying around that happens when I lose track of where I'm looking at any given moment.

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Me either, that was the most frustrating part of Portal to me. The idea of having to deal with that with a controller sounded like a nightmare, but it seems they must have come up with a decent solution.

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Just finished Enslaved. Good game overall, but what the fuck was up with that ending?

So everybody is in Andy Sirkis' version of the matrix? The hell?

That said, I enjoyed the game quite a bit when the clumsy-ass controls or frustrating camera weren't getting in my way. The animations seem to have been getting a lot of praise for this game, and they're certainly good, but it feels like maybe the developers went a bit too far towards making the game look good in favor of making it control well. Monkey looks great running around, but is really unweildy as well. The characters and story, up until the mind-blowingly inconsistent epilogue, were quite good, though not the best I've seen in games. At one point, Pigsy says "What could possibly go wrong?" and it made me cringe. A while back on the podcast, it was pointed out that one of Uncharted 2's strongest points was that it could deliver that overused line without sounding terrible. Enslaved did not pull that off. It was good, but uneven. It's been getting a tonne of praise, which I'm not quite understanding now having finished it. It was a very good game, but it felt lacking in so many ways. The traversal felt like Uncharted, but rougher. The combat felt kinda like Beyond Good and Evil, though still kinda rough. Everything was good-to-great, but nothing was particularly outstanding. The first big boss fight in particular was ridiculous. They built it up so much, having the thing chase you around for almost a whole chapter, and then when you finally fight it all you have to do is shoot it with a stun shot and then wail on it until it gets up. Shoot again, wail again. It never even fucking hit me. For something the game was trying to tell me I should be in complete mortal terror of, that was pretty weak. I played through the game on Normal, and while it wasn't a total cake-walk, the only times I actually died was when the camera was looking at a wall and I was being blasted by enemies I couldn't see, or if I wandered too far from Trip and she activated the "you're too far off the critical path" death headband.

This is sounding more negative than I wanted it too. Enslaved was good, but not as good as I'd been led to believe. Make of that what you will. I'm certainly interested in trying out the Pigsy's Perfect 10 DLC when I get some internet hooked up at home, as the game left me wanting more. It feels like a perfect opportunity for a "original game was pretty good, sequel is goddamned astounding" situations (see also: Assassin's Creed, Uncharted, more that I can't think of right now) so I really hope they keep going with it.

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What boss do you mean? The Dog? I don't think it's the same dog you encounter at the bridge.

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It was a very good game, but it felt lacking in so many ways.

All of the praise I've heard and given myself has been in line with this. As for the dog, remember that Trip

scans it after you pin it in the opera house/theater

so it makes sense within the game, just not necessarily outside of it.

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Yeah, it was the Dog. That thing was a total bummer. I get that she scanned it so that I could fight it at all, but man I would have expected it to be able to hit me at least once. Then later, when

she gets taken by one

, all you need is to catch up to it and hit it once? What the hell?

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That was because that Dog was badly damaged.

I hated those chase segments in the game.

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Finished New Vegas. Spend close to 2^6 hours in the wasteland. Visited every location, completed as much quests as possible. In the end, I didn't really like the way everything was developing. There was no ending I really liked.

New Vegas sure had a lot of game breaking bugs, but at least it didn't have the quest shortcut bugs of FO3, i.e. there was no way you could accidentally skip a bunch of quests in the main story.

One thing I quite missed in NV were parts that were really decoupled of the main world. In FO3 there were a few quests/areas that stood quite on their own. There were a few vaults out there, but nothing really special going on in there. And eventhough there were VR machines, no simulations at all. That's a real shame.

Also no interesting or remarkable things in the world. The H&H Tool Factory was presented as being something special, or mysterious. But it was just dull as hell. The star cap thing, nothing special. The radioactive rocket toys, nothing... And the list goes on. So many missed opportunities.

Ok, there was one mildly interesting thing. The vault with the sacrificing plan. But it was so short, and so un-mysterious.

Anyway, considering I put almost 64 hours in this game would suffice to say that it's worth playing. So, :tup:

ps, they should really make a game about VaultTech. That was one fucked up company. Or at least, what was with all those experiments going on in the vaults you encountered in FO3 and NV. Clearly there was more going on that providing a shelter for the nuclear war.

Edited by elmuerte

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Sadly, that's pretty much how I feel about New Vegas as well. FO3 is one of my favorite games of all time, and when I started playing NV the first time, it felt even better because of the writing. That play through quickly stalled when I reached the late game, as did my current play through. There's greater dissonance in this game than 3 because everything is connected so well, the NPCs aren't in awe of me as they should be. And because everything is connected, and there's fewer unique weapons, there's no where I can just wander off to in search of loot, which definitely helped create a late game for 3.

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I think I'll wait on a nice steam sale and lots of patches sometime this christmas before I bite into New Vegas, despite loving Fallout 3.

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I picked up my copy for ~20 euros at an online retailer, they are usually cheaper than Steam (unless there's a sale).

Anyway, I doubt there will be more patches for NV. A lot of the scripted bugs are already fixed by the community. But the engine bugs are still there, specially the performance drop with certain number of NPCs is annoying.

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I finished Costume Quest I think a week or two ago when it was on sale for $7.50. It was a very quaint game. I suppose that's a bad thing in many ways as it was incredibly short and did come off as sort of a one trick thing, but I did enjoy the atmosphere and tone over all else. I wish I had played it in preparation for Halloween because I was zoning out and thinking it was autumn again many times during the game. Very good on hitting the nostalgia heart strings.

I still think the art direction in terms of the characters was pretty bland. The best part was the costumes you could gather and the anticipation in finding out what they were but it sucks they all had two moves only. The biggest problem was that the turn based RPG gameplay was all simplistic and not incredibly varied. I know that's all turn based RPGs really come down to, but I would have at least like more moves as that equals more animation.

I found an article where Tasha Harris was saying the RPG design was aimed towards younger players, so that's probably where I'm mixed up. I don't have a problem with games being made for kids, as this is probably an awesome game for a parent and child to play together, but I guess I would have found it less jarring if I were given a heads up first. Maybe I didn't read the press releases right?

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It's a game about a child's imagination about trick and treating... isn't that a hint enough that it's a kids game?

Anyway, you finished CQ just in time. 'Stacking' will come out today iirc.

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After watching a

of some guy illustrating the duel between X and Launch Octopus, I decided to dig out my Gamecube and copy of Mega Man X Collection to beat the first one once again.

What a great game. I feel like the bosses are some of the most... reasonable and memorable in the Mega Man series, as far as naming and design are concerned. Beyond that, it reminded my how much I love the game's music. I can pretty much recite every track from memory, which made this a way more nostalgic journey than I thought it'd be. It caused me to hunt down some MMX cover music, which I found some great success with in the X Hunters.

Anyways, I'll probably check out at least X2 and X3 while I'm at it, mostly because I heard some of the later PSX entries aren't really up to snuff.

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I beat Hydrophobia... I got while it was on sale and updated... It did get a bit annoying at some points, but it wasn't terrible...

Just how much did the update change?:erm:

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