Cyber Rat

Magicka is now green. The game is awesome and well worth the full price, especially considering how long the levels are on the first playthrough and that it has multiplayer. Some screenshots from multiplayer with fellow Kotakuites.

I'll be honest, I had no idea of any of these ripoffs' existence during their time (except for Primal Rage). Looks like their failure stateside was big enough to never reach this part of Europe. Can't say I feel sorry. And "Ultra Vortex Annihilations"? How can you make a game with such an awesome name and have it look like crap?

Legless victory? Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

OH YEA HOT FUZZ!

I can beat Alex Kidd in Miracle World and Shinobi for the Sega Master System without losing one life.

I thought the same before I had my art teacher actually explain that to me. It's not a matter of "anyone can hang a blank picture with a dot and call it art", it's about how it's a disintegration of reality. If you follow the progress of painting through history, you would notice it got to its peak at one point regarding mimicking reality. There was nowhere to go from that point, so artists started destroying reality through their pictures and it started going from impressionism to basic objects and finally that dot on a blank canvas. At the moment though, I don't believe there is any clear art direction in our world, so drawing that dot on a blank canvas doesn't serve any purpose because it has already been done and it fulfilled its purpose. The person who did it first though, he didn't do it because he couldn't draw better, he did it because he understood painting quite well. (this was just paraphrased, but I hope you get what I mean) The point I'm kinda trying to make is that because you get inspired by a muffin, doesn't mean the muffin is a work of art. A lot of people use "random lines/blank canvas" as their argument how art is subjective, but I think that argument is flawed for the reasons I mentioned.

Games, as any creative output, can be art, but don't have to be. Both music and movies are considered art, but compare the amount of popular "fun" stuff to real "art" on a yearly basis? And that's not a bad thing, not every movie needs to inspire a person. Entertainment and art are both equally important in creative forms. That said, very few games have any artistic merits and I think gamers try to push gaming to be accepted as an art form because they want all their time wasted playing games to have the same acknowledgement as, say, reading books like crazy your whole life. But it gets really awful when companies like EA or Activision start using the phrase "games are art". There's nothing wrong with making entertainment for the sake of entertainment. Oh, and here's a good response from the article Dean linked:

Favorite commercial.

OH MY GOD WHAT IS THAT?!

Ok, you have three types of "instances" in Oblivion you can find in the wilderness. Caves, dungeons (as in, brick walls and such) and Ayleid ruins. Each of these have a few different layouts, I think 4 max and while I'm not sure whether they are always randomized, I know that there are far less layouts than there are actual instances. This is, of course, excluding special instances for side and main quests. So, if you go doing quests, you'll see these "Unique" dungeons most of the time. If you go random exploring, you'll eventually notice the pattern. Morrowind didn't have that. All caves, while looking samey, were different. Some had nothing, some were special. The only things that were samey were burial caves, and that made sense. Actually, Ayleid ruins being similar also makes sense, it's the caves and dungeons that irritated me. If you didn't notice that, well, I can't really help you there. As for the size, it doesn't matter that it takes you half an hour to walk from one end to the other. There was very little to find regarding "instances" and there was little risk to exploration because of the level scaling (until level scaling says fuck you and then everything is wearing Daedric armor). As for comparing it to Bioshock's opening, yes, I thought Fallout 3's was excellent because it was interactive (which all games should do) and it really set the mood. Bioshock's opening did the same. It let you see everything and have full control at all times. Very few games do that and those that do don't pull it off that marvelously. And finally, I brought up id because I wanted to use something video game related as a comparison as to why I don't trust Bethesda with Skyrim. At least I think it's a better idea than using a food or car analogy. You said it yourself, D3 and Q4 sucked. So did Oblivion and FO3 as far as I'm concerned. Hence why I don't expect much from Skyrim. I want it to be good, it's the same people who made Morrowind, but I'm very careful regarding it.

Look, I know that I'm just a lame-ass newb because I never played Morrowind, but myself and millions of others think Fallout 3 and Oblivion are fantastic games. Perfect? Of course not. But those games should increase one's confidence in Bethesda, not detract from it. I'm sorry, but just because millions of others liked Oblivion and Fallout 3 doesn't mean I'll magically not get bored of either of those games when playing them. It's not that I despise either of those games. Oblivion had some good stuff like the feeling of throwing fireballs at opponents and Fallout 3 had one of the best openings right there with Bioshock. But I got bored of Oblivion and while I did make it to the end of Fallout 3, the ending (vanilla one which I played) was the worst case of railroading nutkicking I have ever witnessed in a game (next to Throne of Darkness). I bloody hell want Skyrim to not be awful and boring, but after those two games, I'm really not getting my hopes up. It's the same reason I'm extremely wary of RAGE because id's recent track record (Doom 3 and Quake 4) hasn't been reassuring. Also, I didn't call you a lame-ass newb or judge you for getting hyped for Skyrim, so relax. I'm just saying Todd Howard and Bethesda in general aren't worth my faith or trust. Oh, and trust me, I've played Morrowind 1.0. "Not perfect" is the least of my complaints about Oblivion. And didn't have 50 copies of 5 dungeon layouts.

I lost faith in Todd Howard after Oblivion was released. Fallout 3 only made matters worse.

Started playing Amnesia. Sadly, the game doesn't seem to like the LiveStream program and crashes whenever I use it :/

It's in HD and offers more customization, but has less weapons and only 4 worms per team. It's good for short burst like any Worms game. It was also pretty console-y when I last played it, maybe some patches fixed it up. My suggestion is getting it when it's on sale if you like Worms in general.

That isn't really relevant to how he acted between cutscenes compared to the actual cutscenes?

He admits near at the end that he's a monster. I've played it a long time ago, but I remember the way he acted in the cutscenes didn't really fit with what you did in the game.

Very well put, good sir. I really loved how Isaac was done as a character. Compared to the soulless husk from DS1, I could actually relate much easier to this game's Isaac.

I would like to record it, but I have no idea what program to use for that. FRAPS takes too much disc space and I have very little. I could try livestreaming, I guess and then just linking the saved stream to everyone? Also, I only had the last level of A.R.E.S. left so I finished that. Pretty short game (I heard it's supposed to be episodic) and lots of Engrish. Don't think it was worth the full price, but oh well.

So, kinda inspired by Ethan's thread, I'm gonna try and finish up all the stuff I've bought but never played on Steam and post my thoughts on them. This is to prove that I can defeat the evil Steam Demotivator: Here's the list of games I have. Red means barely or never played, orange means played but not finished (or not played enough in case of MP games), green means finished (or played a lot in case of MP games), purple means I played it a lot beyond finishing it. A.R.E.S. Amnesia: the Dark Descent And Yet It Moves Audiosurf Beat Hazard BIT.TRIP BEAT Champions Online Chime Dark Void Zero Droplitz The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind Eversion Freedom Force Freedom Force vs the 3rd Reich Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved Gish Half-Life Half-Life 2 Half-Life 2: Episode 1 Half-Life 2: Episode 2 Half-Life 2: Deathmatch Half-Life: Blue Shift Half-Life: Opposing Force Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis Jolly Rover Left 4 Dead Left 4 Dead 2 Lumines Madballs in Babo: Invasion Magic: the Gathering - Duels of the Planeswalkers Magicka The Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom Monday Night Combat Monkey Island 2: Special Edition Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus Oddworld: Abe's Oddysee Osmos Plain Sight Portal Puzzle Agent Puzzle Dimension QuantZ Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale RUSH The Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition Serious Sam HD: the First Encounter Serious Sam HD: the Second Encounter Shatter Super Meat Boy Team Fortress 2 Team Fortress Classic Torchlight Turba Worms Reloaded Any suggestions where I should start? I intend to play TF2 and MNC when given the chance. But a lot of stuff is SP.

Finished the game last night. Vast improvement over the first and I cannot believe that the main character is so likeable. HE HAS COMMON SENSE! I have not seen that in a very long time. And I liked the ending. I pretty much liked everything about the game except how objects I was carrying kept vanishing during zone transitions. I finished the game with using almost only the plasma cutter and stasis. I think I used maybe a total of 12 detonator mines and 6 lines from the line gun. ThursdayNext's strategy still seems to work. You almost only get ammo for weapons you are carrying and there seems to be a very small chance for stuff you don't own. Sold linegun ammo during the whole game and upgraded the Rig, Stasis, Plasma Cutter and Detonator to the max.