thl

bump a bit because the second episode was just as good as the first in my opinion. I heard the ratings haven't been solid (something terrible like a 50% drop-off from it's lead-in, the mega-epic miniseries The Pacific) but they already renewed a second season. After the second episode I couldn't be less concerned with plot because I really like pretty much all the characters and just want to see more of them.

I watched it last night. The first episode is 90 minutes long and feels kind of like a movie except there's no conflict or climax. Certainly the filmmaking is top notch. The acting is authentic and the music gave me chills several times during the show. I've never lived IN New Orleans but I live kinda close to it and have soaked up a tiny bit of Louisiana culture and this show seems to me to be the first to really capture its spirit rather than either a) exploit it just for its location or tell you how great it is to live there but make you feel like you'd never understand if you didn't go there. I'm a tiny bit worried about the show's progression. I'm guessing it's going to be very character-based and ultimately end up going wherever it goes. Sometimes that works (Deadwood), but other times it doesn't (John from Cincinnati). I guess it's just that with The Wire You had such a clear proclamation in that first episode that this is what it is: McNulty chasing after Barksdale. With this, the first episode, while still totally engaging and it had me worried about when it would stop, just kind of establishes the characters in a one-day-in-the-life fashion and doesn't really incite any action. Of course, the way The Wire worked was that you thought the show was really slow at first until you got to the end and then you realized how important the things in the first episode were, so I'm just eagerly awaiting more to find out! I'm curious to hear what ThunderPeel thinks since I know he's a fellow David Simon fan.

Their S-Ranks include steam games with achievements as well though! I always knew hunting for all those grubs and dragging that damn garden gnome around would pay off in the end...

The radio is actually one of the things I love most about GTA games, GTA 4 & DLC included. I think their musical selection is always impeccable when it comes to describing a time and place. And they put significant new additions with both TLaD and TBoGT ("I change shapes just to hide who i am but i'm still i'm still an animal!") but eh, music is subjective. I also personally thought that the DLC got better and better. I liked TLaD more than Nico's story and I liked TBoGT more than Johnny's story. It helps if you watch that show Sons of Anarchy when playing Lost and Damed though... really get into the biker gang - excuse me, motorcycle club - attitude. Ballad of Gay Tony brought a bit of the extremism from previous GTAs back, but it's still pretty grounded in reality. You just have some more colorful characters (along the lines of Brucie) and... a solid gold heli. btw I killed Playboy X. Dude had bad taste in interior decorating but I liked how Dwayne always understood when I had to call him to cancel man-dates.

SCUMMVM makes it pretty easy to play all the great classic adventure games, which I attribute to key moments in my PC gaming life (Monkey Islands, Day of the Tentacle, and Full Throttle are my favs of those although the Indiana Jones games (and the first Sam & Max game) are also pretty fun. Grim Fandango is my favorite LucasArts game but wasn't written with SCUMM). Also, I know it's old but the Doom and Doom 2 maps are still some of the best-designed old-school shooter maps out there IMO. I forget the name but there's a really solid opensource engine that adds mouselook and colored lighting and sprint interpolation to the old data files so you don't have to play at 320x120. And everything else everyone else already said.

Thanks for resurrecting this thread! Now I can derail it by saying that the Jimi Hendrix stuff that came out last week is pretty amazingly fun to play. the Beatles game is still fun too though. I miss backing vocals on RB2 now, especially in party situations (it's way easier to get people to sing if you are there too backing them up) and all the little gameplay tweaks they made, plus the visualizations and I've grown to love the rooftop stuff perhaps the most.

you don't have to if you don't want to…

Haven't fooled with it yet but I think this is a pretty sweet idea. I remember way back in the day Redwood's Quake page (or was it Stomped?) had a monthly contest where you'd win a game if you were the first to find the Redwood (or Stomped) graphic hiding out on one of their more obscure pages. I "won" Heretic 2 (but never got it Anyway, I have to say I check out my achievement profile on GB regularly. Knowing which ones are rare appeasing some statistical ubergeek within me and having a D ranking on a game shamefully reminds me which games I've been neglecting.

so let me ask you guys who have done the main story missions. is there some world-altering events that lock out the faction missions or make the whole world hate you like in GTA? part of me wants to advance the missions but another part is afraid that i'm shooting myself in the foot.

has anyone registered on their site? Shacknews had that story with the global stats (i'm always a sucker) but, you know, hard to check it out at work and whatnot... i'll have to look into it tonight

I actually really appreciate that as well. With the demo it took me a while to figure out how to hold onto the explosive barrels that shoot up in the air and i'm still not very good at the plane or driving mechanics but i like that there's a bit of learning curve for all the cool things you can do. Makes it feel a bit more earned or exploratory since it never explicitly tells you to start scaling mountains with your parachute or whatever (although the achievement is a nice hint). I spent way too long holding onto a just because it made me feel good.

have you guys found the snowman yet? "Hello, Mr. Snowman" hilarious!

I'm a half hour away from getting to play more. I have to say... I'm really loving this game. Last night I had about an hour so I grabbed a military helicopter and went hunting. The vertical scale in the game is pretty crazy so it makes hearing far-off explosions from my rockets carpet-bombing military bases 1000% satisfying. Every time another heli came by and tried to ruin my good time, i just targeted it in free-fall, hijacked it, and continued my good times. just cause!

I had an amazing moment last night that I'm sure was intended... it involved and it gave me exactly the kind of feeling I want from this game. It led me to believe I was hotter shit than I actually was so I waltzed into another military base and got my face shot off with one hit from a sniper rifle. ouch! One little touch that I'm pretty impressed with is how the map is actually 3D even though it's fixed in top-down position. It's a very subtle effect but zooming in on the mountains and whatnot gives it away. It gives me a feeling of like... the Gettysburg museum's diorama of the battlefield with little lights wired into the topography to show key points. Pretty cool I think considering I check the map pretty often just to remind myself how fucking huge the place is. Sorry to hear about your difficulties, Miffy. I'm playing on xbox and obviously haven't had any of the keyboard mapping issues. Sucks that it sounds like they let the PC gamepad support slip through buggy though...

At first I was a bit disappointed by all the story going on at the beginning (only had time to play the first mission last night so haven't encountered the frustrations miffy's experiencing... yet) but it's just... so... bad... that it's good. It's kind of a video game equivalent of an exploitation film, except not at all in the Grindhouse, House of the Dead: Overkill vein where it's a conscious decision. Luckily, the gameplay (so far) is ludicrous goofy fun so it's not painful like it could be. Huh, handy to have a flak cannon here! fun times!!! also, double hooking two dudes together and watching them flop all over each other is hilarious.

bought. Just cuz...

I really appreciate how the entire story of the Just Cause 2 demo goes like this: girl: so... i hear you like to blow shit up dude: yep girl: cool

I'm starting to worry a little bit. I hope there are no hombres that you have to go on hombre-dates with. I also hope there's no smoke signal system where you constantly have to stop and answer or your hombres will like you less.

Having just finished Fable 2, I can attest to the frustrating nature of a lot of the systems they had in place there. Basically, doing anything more than once sucked ass. Entering redecorate mode for one house was kind of fun, but it's not even considerable to do it the dozen times you'd need to in order to dramatically effect the town's economy. Similarly, just raising or lowering your rent was a huge pain in having to go engage each property individually. And don't get me started on buying 5 potions at the store and wanting to drink them all right away. Why should that take me 3 minutes of repetitive menu navigation? But on the flip side, there were a lot of systems that came off more tedious than entertaining. The jobs thing was kind of a neat idea but having it boil down to hitting the A button 800 times is not fun. The no-doubt complicated relationship system in place sounds neat until you realize all you need to do is buy a nice shirt and dance 3 times in front of a crowd and the whole world loves you. It's an unbalanced mixture between oversimplification and way-too-much-effort. My guess is those >60% people were aware and semi-understood the features but chose not to bother with them because they weren't implemented or integrated particularly well. In general, it was funny to me that Fable 2 was labeled as "open world." I guess every RPG ever is also open world then, right?

Yeah It's kind of deflating, although i think maybe some form of conventional official announcement had to happen somewhere so I can't say I'm surprised. I'm just much more excited that hopefully the next Portal will be more than a 3 hour game!

gah! thanks, Nappi

This is pretty lame, but my work firewall blocks shacknews but not the shack RSS. Does the story say anything after: Just can't wait 5 hours to get all the details!

yep! new ending! (spoilers obviously) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7lgqS-yq88

yeah, good for another 15-20 minutes or so. pull those levers!

Yeah, you can use your "U" points or whatever to buy a higher throwing knife capacity and the original Altair robes (both of which don't really add much IMO) and you can also unlock the "Auditore Family Crypt" which is kinda like one extra Assassin's Tomb with an extra dish of family history. That's worth going through I thought. I think it's pretty dumb that you have to buy the DLC to get to 100% completion in the stats screen, but still have to say that this game was a great experience for me. Had lots of fun playing through it.