Playing Shadows of the Damned.

It's a pretty idiotic game, and nothing even vaguely reminiscent of a worthwhile experience, but I'm finding it just tolerable in all areas to not pull it out of my xbox and throw it against the hardest nearby wall. I guess I can chalk this up to unpredictability and diversity of location, because I'm not finding the game terribly funny and find the way the game feels just north of cumbersome.

This game has all kinds of important INDUSTRY VISIONARIES and shit in it(some of whom I actually think are rather good) but it feels like nobody really gave a fuck about this game during development and were just throwing shit together hoping magic would happen. I really only am playing this game for Suda 51, since he's probably the best the industry has to offer at this point, but you could tell he didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about this and fleshing it out and went more for odd and surprising than for something earnestly creative. It's kinda vaguely funny at times, but I have a hard time calling this a humorous experience. I'm not a prude as far as toilet humor goes, but there is such a thing as good toilet humor and bad toilet humor, this game falling more into the latter. It's bold I guess, but that doesn't really make it good.

Then Shinji Mikami and Akira Yamaoka are involved in this somehow, but I already don't give a shit and now give even less of a shit. I don't like Shinji Mikami. Apparently he did a lot with Killer 7, which is seriously a LEGITIMATE game and one of the best ever, but I'm not sure how much credit I should be giving him for this as I've uniformly disliked every single fucking game the man has released, and haven't enjoyed anything he's done in the last decade. I liked Resident Evil 2, but I was pretty young then, hadn't grown tired of games like that, hadn't really seen good survival horror at that point, and could say with some honesty that I didn't know any better. I like Akira Yamaoka though. I can't get into Silent Hill at all, but his music is great. I don't know if it was a bad sinus headache I had for most of my playthrough of Shadows of the Damned but I actually can't remember any of his music and what parts I did remember felt less like music and more like the recordings of somebody accidentally dropping makeshift musical instruments in the doorway of the recording studio.

However, despite a lack of basic enthusiasm I'm able to muster about what they did with this game, I do find myself strangely compelled to continue playing it. I would liken the experience to the first time you see some horrible internet video, one of those ones that renders you shocked or appalled or just physically disgusted(somehow Rebecca Black comes to mind here), that you feel almost supernaturally compelled to watch to the end, despite the constant plea of all your senses. It's Grisly Car Crash: The Game.

This is probably only a slightly better summary than "THIS GAME GAVE ME AN EPILEPTIC SIEZURE WHICH CAUSED ME TO BITE OFF AND SWALLOW MY OWN TONGUE" so I would advise anybody on the fence to turn the other way and just play something else or do something more productive with your life. I'm playing this game for your sins so you don't need to. I will absorb all the shame in your stead, so you don't need to be struck with the profound embarrassment of your main character screaming TASTE MY BIG BONER over and over for half a fucking hour, likely loud enough for everyone in an earshot to hear and gravely misinterpret.

It goes without say Uncharted 3 Dragon Slayer will agree. I'm also doing a Let's play of it. Here is a link to my channel http://www.youtube.com/user/DDayDark

I tried Duke Nukem Forever, less because I wanted to play it but more because a friend of mine left it at my house and said TRY IT YOU WILL LIKE IT, blindly assuming that such a terrible act wouldn't result in me tracking down everyone and everything that means anything to him and destroying it all in the most gruesome method imaginable.

I didn't really like the game at all, but I ended up leaving the game(unfinished after a couple hours) kinda confused and irritated. This game got a lot of grief from pretty much everybody, and while it didn't appeal enough to me to actually finish it(I didn't like this shit when I was fourteen either), it strikes me as pretty idiotic that this game got the reviews that it did.

Fundamentally, this is really the most anybody could possibly have expected from this game. It's really just a current generation port of Duke Nukem and if absolutely nothing else, I actually am kinda impressed at how well they were able to give this game a really distinct duke nukem feel in a completely new technological context. The gameplay generally works sometimes, the game looks reasonably polished, the locations are kinda vaguely interesting, and then there's the humor of it, which you probably need to just ACCEPT if you're actually going to play this game at all. I personally got lost here because I just never liked the feel of Duke Nukem. Independent of my bias, I would not call this an overwhelmingly bad game. It's dumb and kinda outdated, but what the hell was anybody seriously expecting from this game?

I don't expect, or frankly care, if anybody agrees with me on this or not, or sees it as a valid comparison, but I completely fail to understand how this game got loads of grief while something so fucking vapid and excruciatingly painful as Gears of War remains popular. A lot of the criticism of Duke Nukem Forever is aimed at the story, yet people seem perfectly capable of accepting Gears of War as something worth encouraging. The totality of Forever doesn't really work, but there was a slight degree of thought put into how it works, and I can give it points for unpredictability and doing an unusually sound job of keeping the feel of the original game intact. I don't have one positive fucking thing to say about Gears of War. This isn't really praise for Duke as it is saying that they games are roughly at the same level of abject stupidity and emptiness. Duke is next to zero, Gears is zero. I guess I find the two interchangeable because of the load of dizzyingly intrusive machismo both games blow in your face. I'm more inclined to give Duke a pass here, or something resembling one, because while the humor is terribly low-brow of the Family Guy variety, at least there is some semblance of awareness that what they're doing is ridiculous. It bothers me that Cliffy B and his band of merry assholes have no fucking clue whatsoever that they are phenomenally uninventive people that happen to have a couple pretty competent coders at their disposal, and it just worries me that the populace possesses no more of this awareness.

This is probably fairly SAVAGE post, but I don't think you can really approach this subject matter with any degree of intelligence. These are two extraordinarily stupid experiences without really anything in the way of real creative merit, even when judged by the vacuous standards of the game industry. I guess it just strikes me as hypocritical that the industry has the gall to decide which barely discernible brand of alarming stupidity should best represent it.

Fuck, why do I even play videogames?

a noble savage...

Fuck, why do I even play videogames?

Maybe you find something worthwhile in that experience of playing a game (or variety of them), despite feeling that almost every game in the existence is a pretty horrible capitalist nightmare/ultimately is just hollywood entertaiment garbage?? I've had this feeling for a long time that i like how game experience feels sometimes but you hate most of the content and focuses of games or rules. you like the vehicle, the depth and possibilities of the bare skeleton but you hate all the drives/you realize that nobody ever will or seems to get to the core of the things you find good? that there is never proper discussion about this or good ideas about this?
idk it feels like movies, you know what you'd like to somebody to EXPRESS with the MEDIUM in a certain special way but you loathe the general consensus of what is thought as a movie and what construction or forms are expected from the medium.

i guess i'm saying that i can relate and i'd say that while comfort plays some factor then idk i think of a principle that there is propably some profound reason why you do something or why something seems important to you precisely. I can't explain my view on why i think nes chinese bootlegs and the feel in them is important properly, especially since the common discussion and ABSTRACTIONS is either saturated to ghana poster - fascination of distortion and/or pointless brutalism or whatever. or by popularity of some fad, pitchfork or tigsource or vicemagazine featuring outsider music.
or why those old 80's vhs my parents recorded - with all those 80's ads tim and eric use extensively as a source of humour - why those vhs seemed idk PROFOUND like uh like there is some deep, mysterious quality hidden somewhere in the sound and esthetic of things or the worldview or whatever. or why idk getting behind that princess peach door in mario kart seemed like the most important thing in the world. RAGNAR ABSTRACTIONS.

Basically, i'm saying that unique perceptions are hard to discuss upon as you may not share common abstract terms or language with other people. you can't also explain how you feel about that stuff as it's just your DEEP EMOTIONS. when you add that you mostly react to things with gut feel or you have some faint idea or a vibration that how things should be done or what you see in midst of everything...

idk this is how i've felt about almost everything about games (and i bet the problem is that the really creative/artistic people haven't really taken the loose medium of games as a form of self-expression) and a lot about movies.
I also made those two mixtapes i put into the dumb stuff - topic and really, the point of those mixtapes - while kinda mapping my musical progress and process and where i have come from and where i might be going - were kind of drawing allusions/parallels between those variety of songs... idk COMMUNICATE how i see something important in music, some deep profound quality that is really hard to nail down or determine and suprisingly in retrospect a lot of that truth seeking overlaps on my childhood experiences of those nes bootleg games and vhs games. i'm inherently part and product of my generation yet i feel like an outsider to it... barf...drool....


sorry, rambled in a slight brainfog/fatigue. Hundley, if you want a good idk EXPERIENCE or expression in general then find Arthur Russell's "World of Echo" album. Or i can upload it you real quick if ya want it quick.

I only played the demo of DNF and it just felt like a really generic shooter, On the same kinda level as Halo (just without anywhere near the level of hype as that snoozefest of a series). I can't see how duke got rated badly compared to other games, because you just know that if he was a SPACE MARINE it would be better recieved.  I didn't like it, it was imature, but you kinda take it as that. I had no expectations for it and so wasn't disappointed.
It reminded me of the N64 south park game which was... Generic shooter with toilet humour.

I've been really replaying the hell out of GTAIV lately (and got a mad boner from the GTAV trailer) and lately I've just been taking time to EXPLORE. Like walk really slowly down the streets and take it all in, get into a fistfight with a drug dealer, then run away from the police on foot. I am having more fun doing this than I did when doing the missions. I'm always discovering new bits and like suprised by how much character there is in Liberty city. Roman is just a great friend.

Just Beat Uncharted 3 and It was amazing game only gripe with it and minor spoiler since in involves no plot at all is there is not a end game boss like the last 2 or I don't take him as a boss since he wasn't anything special.

Been playing old school games. I'm amazed that dos games have so much complexity in their games.

Right now I'm trying to finish Live A Live, it's an snes game never ported to usa. so some fans translated it to english. it's pretty cool, andhave a pretty unique take on the jrpg. Highly recommended for anyone

Currently playing skyrim and enjoying every minute of it. It does have it's problems like the god awful fps drop when you turn around and it has to load all the data (it should already have loaded but oh well) and sometimes there are these wierd AI things like when i was trying to nail a buck from across the river with an arrow and it kept going back and forward, i think it was stuck or the pathing algarithm wasn't able to see everything properly.
 The graphics are Oblivion but better, much MUCH better but compaired to other games on the market it kinda falls short, not that i'm botherd as the game is Hugely satisfying.
The one thing i hated in oblivion was that sometimes enemies took AGES to kill and it felt like a boring slugfest and that you were kinda weak no matter how much stronger you got; now enemies don't die instantly but fairly quickly but with enough of a challange that if you arn't carfull you will die but it's not a boring slugfest.
I love the attention to detail as well, like when I when I raided a barrow for a new dragon word i found an imperial helmet on the otherside and couldn't help but wonder, how it ended up there as no one has been in there for AGES or so i thought, maybe some poor sod did get through and died and became a draugr or somthing.
As for any problems that occour that arn't engine related I can live with becuase i can garruntee a mod will fix it or improve it or it will be patched later, same with the graphics.

all in all I'm WANTING to keep playing it, even if I have other things to do :P

Duke Nukem Forever feels like a Half Life 2 sequel more than anything. The terrible monster truck level felt like a retread of that boat level in HL2, especially since you had to get out of the vehicle every few minutes in order to take care of something. Then came the Hoover Dam levels, which really screamed out HL2; nothing interesting about them at all.


Speaking of popular games with terrible sequels, I've been playing Sonic Generations and it's really good. How did they manage to mess up the core design of "blue spiny animal, it goes fast" for so long before making a good one? The present adaptations of the early games were really good, so where the past versions of later games. It really made it seem like I was going fast rather than the terrible nature of previous sonic games.

All they needed is a star light zone and I would of got the game. I won't lie it was one of my favorite zones. As whole the game was well made I just wish they did every zone from all the first 3 sonic games and also sonic and knuckles and my life would be complet.

I'm playing skyrim right now. It's pretty good. It fixes A LOT of what was wrong with Oblivion (Bad voice acting, bland art design, boring incidental music, dead expressions, voice acting cast of seven people, etc.)  It still has the problem of most of the outdoor locations looking the same and all objectives are super far away, and though they clearly put more effort into the main quest this time around they spit out expository monologues poorly explaining the backstory and it's both hard to follow and not exciting enough to be the center of your focus. I also think it's kind of bizarre how much detail they allow you to put in your character considering it's a first person game or a third person game that follows behind you.

Also I should just keep my mind on this game, but all I'm thinking is "Man, Fallout 4 with this engine is going to rule."

Also I should just keep my mind on this game, but all I'm thinking is "Man, Fallout 4 with this engine is going to rule."

I didn't think about that but your right, fallout 4 would rock.

The only games i've purchased with real money (aside from dlc's) over the last few years have been Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas. Right now im in the midst of beating Oblivion. 63 hours in game and I think im near the end. As soon as I beat it I'm heading to gamestop for Skyrim. I hope there arent fps issues on the x360 version. I've been way too excited over skyrim :/

It is literally the same engine as every Bethesda game since Morrowind though. Bethesda admitted that it was really just renamed Gamebryo.

Also fuck giants. One randomly waltzed up out of nowhere, punched my horse to death and walked off again. Goddamn dick.

Ah, I didn't know that. Can't say I'm really surprised as Skyrim just feels like a souped up, gritty reboot of Oblivion. Still... Fallout 4... even though I kind of hope that they give it to Obsidian again now that Tim Cain is working there, but I know that's not going to happen.

apparantly it is based on the gamebryo engine like all the others but they re-write so much of it's code that it could hardly be called the gamebryo engine so they call it the creation engine, whether that's true or not i really don't care as the game rocks, enjoyed every quest so far and i think the ballance is just right, you only die if you do something stupid like piss off a giant or don't take health potions and so on and enemies don't take forever to kill any more also I think this game would look AMAZING with tesselation.

apparantly it is based on the gamebryo engine like all the others but they re-write so much of it's code that it could hardly be called the gamebryo engine so they call it the creation engine, whether that's true or not i really don't care as the game rocks, enjoyed every quest so far and i think the ballance is just right, you only die if you do something stupid like piss off a giant or don't take health potions and so on and enemies don't take forever to kill any more also I think this game would look AMAZING with tesselation.

Really? Because I've thought that some of the opponents were unfairly dificult in comparison to others. There were a couple parts where I was dying A LOT and then I'd do the next quest in the set and go unscratched. I don't know what quests you are doing or character build you're playing with or whatever, but I definitley wouldn't say it's hard to die unless you do something stupid.

And to go on a rant, the decision to make the Greybeards at the top of 7000 stairs (or whatever number, that's what some NPC said) was a dumb fucking design idea. I don't know why they thought climbing up stairs for 10 minutes would be fun and engaging, but if failed miserably.

All I remember about Oblivion was walking up endless stairs and neverending fucking hills

I Tried playing Skyrim and I can't see the good in the game at least in Oblivion I could be a bad guy without everything tiring to kill me now in Skyrim everything wants a piece of me and it's bullshit.

But I will try once more.