toxicitizen

Yeah, like I said, couldn't find anything conclusive. I think I came across the same blog post, though. And yeah, when I saw the ads when I first installed it, it did kinda raise a red flag but I just shrugged it off. Probably shouldn't have... What sucks is it worked pretty flawlessly in all the games I tested it with. Kinda tempted to reinstall just to see if it really was the source of the infection. :/ But after spending all evening doing windows updates and reinstalling drivers and everything, I'm not taking that chance. Although, now that I think of it, I guess I could sacrifice my laptop. For science...

Well, I can't be 100% certain MiJ was the cause, but I really can't think of anything else that might have caused this. I haven't done anything out of the ordinary or installed any other dodgy app recently other than MiJ. Anyway, here's what happened. I played Darksiders with my ds3 for a few hours this afternoon and stopped to eat dinner. Not long after, MSE gave me a warning about having detected something and needing to restart. Then it shut itself off and wouldn't come back on. Did some googling but nothing I tried worked. Then I realized Windows Firewall was also off and wouldn't come back on either. Didn't take long to confirm I had a trojan after that. Then MSE started forcing a reboot every minute or two unless I was in safe mode. I spent about two hours trying to get rid of it but nothing I used to scan could completely remove it so I just said screw it, backed up my stuff and formatted my windows partition. I didn't have much that needed backing up since I keep most of my important stuff on a separate partition from my windows install but it was still fucking annoying having to reinstall everything. I did some more googling but I couldn't find anything conclusive. For every story I find about someone having had a similar experience, there's 10 other people saying they've had no problem with MiJ. :/

Well, had a bit of "fun" the past few hours... Think I'll be staying the hell away from Motion in Joy...

That's possible, the driver not being signed definitely sounds familiar. Wow, that's bullshit. It was definitely not just the game in my case, though. The game seemed to recognized my "generic" pad as the 360 one. But I tested it with a bunch of other games before setting up MIJ and it was all over the place. Worked fine in one or two games but most of them detected it but had the problem where the camera would keep moving to one side. And I know the sticks were calibrated because when I checked in the gamepad's settings, everything was centered and responded properly. Then I tried an NES emulator and after binding everything some buttons still wouldn't work. But everything worked fine with an SNES emulator... including the sticks. That's when I got annoyed, unplugged the thing and put it away in a fucking drawer. Now it'll never see daylight again.

Just installed MotionInJoy. It was pretty easy to set up and everything seems to work so far, including 360 emulation. Thanks for that suggestion. I'll stick to that for now and see how it goes. I hadn't really considered this because I remember trying some dualshock 3 driver a few years ago and it was all kinds of shit. It was a huge headache to set up and never worked right so in the end I just gave up and bought the gamepad I have now.

I've been thinking about getting one for a couple of months. Also, just tried mine with Darksiders. Get this: it's automatically detected and I don't need to bind anything, but I also can't rebind. So far not that big a deal. Then I press A to load my game and am asked if I really want to quit. What. So I mess around a bit and realize that some of the face buttons are mixed up. B doesn't seem to be doing anything, A behaves as if it were B and X as if it were A. Yet Y seems to work normally. D-Pad does nothing but clicking one of the sticks brings up the weapon selection, which is what the d-pad should be doing. And speaking of the sticks, one of them isn't calibrated properly or something and causes the camera to constantly go to the left. Ugh, this fucking piece of crap...

Yeah, I get that. Personally, I don't find this worth skipping a game that otherwise looks amazing over but I can't really blame anyone for getting fed up and drawing the line. That being said, with all the crap already surrounding the game's launch (what is it, like 6 different editions, each with its own exclusive content), I'm surprised that this one is what annoyed you enough to consider not buying the game.

I doubt it. PS3 getting exclusive missions in Assassin's Creed games is nothing new. AC Brotherhood got that Copernicus Conspiracy DLC and none of the other platforms ever got it, not even the PC version that came out months later. The Copernicus one was pretty pointless, too. An average mission that just happened to feature an historical figure that had nothing to do with the game's story. So yeah, not too bothered by it either.

Yeah, it seemed like a game that would need one. Problem is mine isn't the official 360 one and some games react weirdly to it. And my experience with x360ce has been pretty hit-or-miss. :/ But I'm about six hours in now and it controls surprisingly well with m/kb. I struggled a bit at first but once I got used to hitting left-alt with my thumb I didn't have any problems. I also replayed the original Assassin's Creed on PC recently and it handled much better than I expected without a gamepad. I wasn't yet 100% sure if I was gonna switch to PC for ACIII but now I am. Yeah, I also got one of them for free on GOG a while back.

Already owned them on GOG but I always prefer to have my games on Steam. Finally got a good enough deal that I didn't mind double dipping. GOG is the only place where I don't mind doing that, though.

What, you didn't like the twist about the vault?

I'm tempted do that as well, mostly to see how I like the mouse and keyboard controls. I'm just worried that if Darksiders II ends up being not much of an improvement, then replaying the first one right before it comes out might affect my enjoyment of it.

Green Man Gaming currently has 25% off the pre-order until monday. Adding my leftover store credit and trading in the free games they gave away the past few weeks, ended up costing me about 32$. Not bad at all for a game that doesn't come out for another week GMG have such amazing deals on pre-orders that now I'll pretty much always buy from them if they give a Steam key. I'll probably be getting Hitman Absolution from them as well. They've already had similar deals for it multiple times.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure there will be a bit of a break after the special. Hopefully that means the special will actually tie into the season arc. I hesitate to say any of them were downright bad but they're usually the episodes I find the least interesting because of their self-contained nature. I get that the idea is to make a christmas-themed episode but the last one with the forest... that one sucked.

Weird, I usually just copy-paste from the url bar and never had this problem before. Oh well. And yeah, I seriously doubt Amy's anything other than unconscious there. And according to Wikipedia, 6 episodes are airing in 2012, including the xmas special, and the remaining 8 will air in 2013. So the special will actually be right in the middle of the series.

Oh God. This can't come soon enough. edit: uh, seems embed doesn't work so here's a clickable link

I was on the lookout for it during the summer sale but its base discount was shit and it never got a flash or daily deal as far as I'm aware. Glad I gave it a pass then cause now it's 75% off

Botanicula It's a bit like Machinarium, only less puzzle-y. Some of the "puzzles" basically boil down to clicking everything and watching what happens until you get the right one. At times it really feels like an interactive animation film more than a game, which would be a problem if it didn't ooze so much charm from every pore. You gotta hand it to Amanita, their art style is unique and beautiful. It's only about 3 hours long but it feels just right for what it is. 10 bucks feels a bit overpriced but I think I paid 3 bucks for it during the summer sale and at that price it was entirely worth it. edit: no point making two posts in a row so I'll just edit this one Batman: Arkham Asylum GOTY I'd played it on PS3 when it first came out but this was my first time playing it on PC. Some moves were a bit tough to combo and it was annoying trying to move precisely during some sections with weird camera angles (mostly the Scarecrow bits and the Poison Ivy boss fights), but other than that it controlled much better than I expected with mouse and keyboard. Kinda made me want to invest in a proper 360 gamepad for Windows, though. I tried using x360ce with my current one but it was a bit of a pain to get it to work, it made the game more unstable than it already was and the sticks were kinda floaty and weird.

Machinarium. Was much shorter than I expected. Figured I was about halfway through when I stopped playing last night but I only had about an hour left. Don't know why it took me so long to play it but that game is fantastic. Everything about it is just insanely charming.

Gemini Rue. As far as gameplay goes, it's standard point-and-click fare with a basic cover/shooting system. It also doesn't require any crazy moon logic, so the puzzles aren't frustrating. The few times I got stuck were because I was overlooking something obvious. Like most point-and-clicks, the story is the main draw. It gets kinda predictable near the end but overall I thought it was very interesting. Also, the atmosphere and soundtrack are just amazing. I'd definitely recommend giving it a shot next time you feel like playing a point-and-click adventure.

Hardly feels like "beating" the game, but last night I finished the short campaign in Shogun 2. Short my ass, damn thing took me about 20 hours. A significant portion of that time was spent trying stuff, reloading and generally learning the game, though. But I also auto-resolved most of the fights so I've no idea whether that was particularly slow or not. I'll probably be going for a long campaign in the near future. Also really glad I impulse bought that Total War Mega Pack during the Steam sale now. If they're all as much fun as Shogun 2 then it was a 12,50$ well spent.

Beat Puzzle Agent 2 a few days ago. It was eh.. okay, I guess. It's like a bad version of Professor Layton. It goes for a cool Twin Peaks/Fargo-style setting and plot but doesn't really pull it off. It's worth a shot if you're aching for a puzzler and you can get it for less than 5 bucks, I guess. But otherwise I wouldn't really recommend it. I think the most entertaining part of it was the Steam achievements. By the time I finished the 3-4 hours story, I had earned 50 out of 52. They literally give you one for every single puzzle you solve. It's fucking ridiculous

Ended up going for it. I regretted not getting it every single time it got a flash or daily. So yeah, that should be it now. Did some math and overall I spent around 110$ for about 360$ worth of games (at full price). Not bad at all. I actually thought I'd spent a bit more than that.