Noyb

As if Miis weren't already surreal, someone made a random Mii generator online that creates some especially frightening faces. http://miieditor.com/

The discussion on game characters displaying signs of autism reminded me of a recurring theme in Douglas Coupland's work (Microserfs, jPod). He seems to believe that most programmers suffer from autism to some degree. I'm not too sure I believe that, but if true it may be a case of the art reflecting the artist. You do make a good case for the application of the uncanny valley phenomenon. The closer something gets to appearing human, the more the little deviations freak me out. I never got a chance to try out Facade, due to a hard-coded minimum CPU requirement that literally won't let me play.

Oooh. Free Radical as in Timesplitters and Second Sight? Must keep that on my radar as well. Braid looks very clever, although I'm reserving judgement until actually playing it.

For the future, those games are in my sig. For the present, I just got a huge haul of used games I always wanted to try (Breakdown, Advent Rising, Call of Cthulu, Phantom Dust, Lego Star Wars II, God Hand, Rez, Shadow of the Colossus, Rygar, and the still incompatible Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath), so I'll be satisfied for a while.

Thanks for the comparison. When I played the 360 version for a song, my fingers were completely lost, even though I'm on the last setlist on expert in GHII on the PS2. I guess I'll get used to it when the new one comes out in fall. (Way too many games coming out this fall. ) Very nice job on X-Stream.

I imagine a Hollywood movie based on the Sims to be a thriller about a group of roommates who discover their lives are not entirely under their control. A mysterious smoke detector inexplicably appears after a freak electrical fire that consumes one of the friends. Another struggles to make enough friends in the small town in order to progress in his career. A couple have a baby despite the mother never delivering. In the final scene, the cast all fall in love with each other, because of the amount of talking they had done trying to find out who is controlling their lives.

I just tried out the xbox version after playing with the original GH1 controller for a while. That controller is tiny. It looks like they fit all five frets in the same area as the first four in the original controller. Did they cave to consumer confusion about having to move their hand too much, or are my fingers just freakishly large?

Somehow envisioning Angelina Jolie as the animalistic, hairy, grief-ridden Grendel's mother made me burst into laughter.

He also wore a Kochamara t-shirt on American Idol recently: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3w6csQUFPqE&mode=related&search=

Realnoyb:

I'm having fun with the beta, but then again I guess you can call me a fan of the multiplayer. (Bungie.net records me as having played 3,800 games of Halo 2 online ) The most fun I've had with Halo comes from playing multiplayer objective matches with a team of friends I know well. Something just clicks for me when I'm on a team that's communicating well, covering each other, adapting to the changing combat situations. It's much less enjoyable playing with random, profanity-spewing wankers online. After a certain skill level, a good bit of strategy is needed to succeed online: knowing the map, proper positioning, base assault/defense tactics, weapon strengths, etc. To be fair, I was only into Counter-Strike for about half a year. I tried going back into it after Source came out, and got completely massacred, only killing about 4-5 guys in an hour of playtime. One thing Bungie got right in Halo is the matchmaking system, which matches you against another team at roughly the same skill level, which makes for tighter/closer matches after a bit of calibration period. I like that Halo is a bit slower, less twitchy than Counter-Strike or Unreal Tournament (which I also liked for a bit, but didn't stick with for nearly as long). Of course, by that same reasoning, I should be absolutely mad about Gears of War multiplayer. Didn't really give it enough of a chance, possibly because by that time Halo had been so comfortable and familiar to me. I agree, Halo's single player is pretty weak both in terms of repetition and story. The first game was infamous for monotonous levels that were recycled heavily in the endgame. The second one tried to tell a deeper story involving religious dogma and civil war, but still fell into the old trap of hoping that the gamer will mistake vagueness for profundity. Not to mention the "ending" which wasn't so much a buildup to the sequel as it was waiting for the next level to load and seeing the credits instead.

I decided to be snarky and refuse to save the world three times in a row. The game then showed me the game over screen, and I had to replay the entire intro over again.

Oh, I think he's talking about the locked lunar lander puzzle.

Minish Cap was one of the easiest Zelda games I've played, the only one I actually beat without dying the first time through. Fun while it lasted, though.

Whoa. Is this an official sequel? The originals were brilliant, if a little frustrating in regards to trial and error. Hope it gets an English release.

Jeez. I knew GameLife was frightening, but never like this.

I loved Bust a Move 2, 4, and that first PS2 one. The multiplayer chaining system for 4 was so crazy. Basically, if you drop a bubble and it can complete a triplet, it does. Makes for some epic comebacks, but all within the player's control. I haven't tried any of the more recent ones. What don't you like about the new one's multiplayer?

Glad to hear that. Hopefully the tight timeline won't mean that the translation will be rushed. There was a significant difference between the early and late case translations in Justice for All. The writers definitely know how to tell a good story, regardless.

Anyone try out the demo for this on Xbox Live? It's like unfocused DDR, with button cues coming from anywhere on the lower half of the screen instead of four straight columns. The presses are timed to aspects of the song like Elite Beat Agents, but seem more random than most good rhythm games. The demo songs didn't seem to get as hectic or fun as most music games, even the included hard song. I'm usually a sucker for music games, but this doesn't seem worth the price. It costs 800 MSP ($10 American) for just 10 songs. Since EA is publishing it, I'm expecting that future songs will be overpriced as well. I was hoping that since the maker was Bizzare Creations, the publisher of the original great deal on XBL (Geometry Wars at 400 MSP), it would be at a fair price. I guess the title should have been Boom Boom Dollar. IGN's review isn't that helpful, but is good for a laugh:

George Lucas stopped rocking around the time he came up with the prequel trilogy and Lucasarts put out a vendetta on adventure games.

But Knuckles can glide, Tails can fly, Yoshi has that creepy double jump, and Peach can float with her parasol. Lot of possibilities for cheating there.

Well, that's the name of the main character in Rare's Perfect Dark series, so it might be a coincidence.

There's a time when I would have been excited. Now? Meh. Hopefully the gameplay will be fun. Whose idea was it to pit a fat plumber against a speedy hedgehog in a contest of athletics?

As a Yank, I had the chance to play episode four of Sam and Max on Gametap already. I'll try and be vague so as not to spoil the game for others. Short story -- it's now my favorite so far. It was significantly longer than the others, and I was even stumped a couple of times. The length seems satisfying because of the way this episode is structured: you have more interlocking small puzzles at any one time than just three, separate large puzzles making up the bulk of the game. This episode also has more inventory items that can be used to get funny responses out of the characters, which brought back memories of Psychonauts. The writing is sharper than ever. The jokes are more motivated by politics than pop culture this time around. Some of them are amazing, some fall flat, but there's plenty of character and situation driven humor left over. The mayhem you can cause is astonishing. Anyway, I highly recommend this episode. Telltale has been listening.

You're on a constant time limit, where the world will be destroyed in three days time. You can save at owl statues, which requires that you quit the game after saving and delete this save when you resume. You can also save permanently by returning to the beginning of the three days, which resets pretty much everything except for your items (although your rupees go to zero, but you can store them for later in an anachronistic bank).