huh didn't even know that was released yet. 

Loading time aside (installing to the 360 seemed to shave around eight seconds off), I'm really enjoying the game. It is basically the closest thing the world is going to get to a straight modern tech remake of the original. It was clearly made by people who understood (and loved) the first game, although the first boss encounter did leave me a little cold.

I'd been playing a strictly hack and evade build, so I didn't like getting forced into a pissing contest with a fully combat auged boss. It felt like there should have been a way to circumvent it, a la the original's penchant for side-stepping the traditional boss encounter. To be fair, there might be, and maybe I just didn't find it in my first play through. In any case, I had been picking up a lot of weapons to sell back at the hub (I cleaned out the entire Detroit PD armory and sold their gear off to the arms dealer in order to keep myself in a fresh supply of praxis kits. I was disappointed to find out you can apparently only buy two per limb clinic) so I had some heavy hardware on hand to deal with the boss, aside from the generous load out they provide for you in the boss room itself. I just felt like I shouldn't have had to.

Also, there is something wonderfully fun about making a silenced, laser sighting, combat rifle packed with damage and rate of fire upgrades before finally slapping a mod on that works like the "repeat button" from that gun in Fifth Element. Paint a target's head, get into cover and blind fire around the corner... with perfect accuracy. You can even draw the curve out to catch targets between you and the one you marked.

I remember Jamie and Hundley talking about Alpha Protocol a couple months ago but don't remember what their general conclusion was. What do you think of this game? I know you're a huge fan of the Splinter Cell spy games Hundley, how does Alpha Protocol compare? I've never really played an espionage game before so I have no idea how this is in comparison to some of the others, but this is also much more of a James Bond simulator than a stealth game. So far I really, really like this. The way the missions are structured and levels are designed are very, very good and the writing is mostly very good as well. The way the game responds to everything you do, the way you complete your missions, the choices you make, the people you talk to, even the clothes you wear, is fantastic and I love the fact that there are consequences for everything and you sometimes (often) have to make extremely tough choices. It is definitely the most 'role playing' role playing game I've ever played.

Did anyone notice that Thorton is Chris Avellone??

I'm playing Super Mario Galaxy. Wow, what a mess. Mario really dropped the ball on this one. Include me out.
 
I'm just kidding... You were fooled... The above is how I felt from playing the opening 15 minutes but it's a feeling which mostly dissipates once you enter the actual levels... There is this weird gap between the individual "galaxy" sections and the overworld connecting them. The overworld parts are mostly garbage and extremely strange. Everything has this kind of horrifying uh glossy / glazed aesthetic like even Mario gleams weirdly at all times. The video Bonzi posted is a good example but another one could be the star characters in the game. The designers tried to make them look friendly and nonthreatening by rounding off the traditional star points and making them all puffy and fat and squeaky and so on. The overall effect is extremely horrible and depressing. Disgustingly organic, wriggling pieces of gleaming lard which coo at you constantly, it's dreadful, RIP Bubsy Bobcat / Bloodlust Software ive seen the future and dont like it.......
There are a lot of characters and they all have something to say to you for some reason. At the start of the game you see cutscenes about mysterious stars above the castle, and then the princess gets kidnapped, and then Mario is sent to some kind of uh star planet thing where he meets the Star Queen and is told about eg the eating habits of the stars and what their motives are and the need to find more stars and the way to unlock star locations and how you can use star power to spin by shaking the remote thing and the use of star cannons and such. This stuff is all gone into at length and it's pretty offputting, like your instinctive reaction is to go ok collect stars blablabla i dont need to hear this NO (game leans closer and holds extremely stern, serious eye contact with startled thecatamites) You NEED To Hear This and then it starts saying the same dumb shit as before. The level design in these parts is pretty boring too like Spyro The Dragon garbage / lots of useless claustrophobic sterile design stuff.
 
The actual levels are pretty good tho just because nearly all of this stuff is absent but ALSO! It's a game about space! and it does that pretty well. Except instead of openesque flat spaces like Mario 64 this one is obsessed with uh closed, circular object-spaces. Like the little spheroid planets you can walk completely around in any direction, or hollow balls to run around in, or plastic capsules with shifting gravity. That part's pretty fun. During the overworld bits I was distressed at the thought that I might have to care about these stupid cartoon characters in order to enjoy the game so it was cool to see some of the levels almost go in the other direction by detatching you from Mario. Here he becomes a tool which you can use to remotely explore these odd, busy little objects. Combined with the remote thing the impression is of some kind of experimental medical tool which was ported into a kids toy... Mario is a probe.. Mario is an artificial sensory organ... You can point the remote at the screen and fire star things which seem to come from outside the screen rather than from Mario, which also helps the sense of distance towards what's happening. Most of the planets are just treated, aesthetically and design-wise, as these ridiculous little toys for you to explore and 'feel' via the M.A.R.I.O. interface (Manually-operated Applied Research & Investigation Organism) and I like that.
 
I'm not too far in but there are some more traditional levels too, although these can be fun & surprising sometimes (the uh gingerbread level with the cut-out shapes) as well as boring (surf level! bee level!). It would be nice to be able to free-aim the star cannon things and the little collectible stars are kind of obnoxious but whatever. There is also this excited list of achievement things you get when you complete a level (You got [7] coins! Wow! Your coin record has been broken! You got [7] star fragments! They have been added to your Star Total! New Galaxy unlocked! New event unlocked! You have completed this Galaxy) which is p gross but again whatever.
 
That's my preliminary report on this years-old glossy mario game....

I upgraded my PC last month hohohoho.

I have a year old standard HDD and the loading times are okay on DX. I can't complain. I'm playing it on the hardest setting too so I see them fairly often.

Enjoying it immensely so far. I think we can safely call this DX2. We'll ignore the previous abomination.

if not anymore, spyro was pretty good at the time. the ps1 spyros were the earliest 3d games I know of that really tried to create an explorable 3d world that actually felt like something or somewhere, and they had their own spyro logic/aesthetic too. this is a reinterpretation of what I thought of those games back when I played them, because I haven't gone back and tried to play them since. also everyone here talks about all those unplayable n64 games why mention nostalgia now...

official crash bandicoot fan club

I remember Jamie and Hundley talking about Alpha Protocol a couple months ago but don't remember what their general conclusion was. What do you think of this game? I know you're a huge fan of the Splinter Cell spy games Hundley, how does Alpha Protocol compare? I've never really played an espionage game before so I have no idea how this is in comparison to some of the others, but this is also much more of a James Bond simulator than a stealth game. So far I really, really like this. The way the missions are structured and levels are designed are very, very good and the writing is mostly very good as well. The way the game responds to everything you do, the way you complete your missions, the choices you make, the people you talk to, even the clothes you wear, is fantastic and I love the fact that there are consequences for everything and you sometimes (often) have to make extremely tough choices. It is definitely the most 'role playing' role playing game I've ever played.

I actually never played the game. The idea sounded solid, and I really like Obsidian's games a lot more than I probably should, but everything I read about it suggested the game was a major failure. Maybe this isn't the case though? I'll give it a try sometime. The game is dirt cheap now.

I started playing Shining Force. I played it a little bit when I was about ten, so it's a bit nostalgic. I really like the battles, but I wish the whole JRPG "Go around town and talk to people and shit" part was a better implemented than it was. I think they really had the potential to bring some interesting things to the table in the towns, like sidequests and some interesting NPCs, instead of just being a pit stop for weapons and herbs between battles. I haven't played any of the sequels, so I don't know if that's improved.

But I love me some tactical battling, and I enjoy the fact that death isn't perminent like in Fire Emblem.

I actually never played the game. The idea sounded solid, and I really like Obsidian's games a lot more than I probably should, but everything I read about it suggested the game was a major failure. Maybe this isn't the case though? I'll give it a try sometime. The game is dirt cheap now.

Yeah, I think I posted/irc about playing it and liking it. So basically that was what I ended up thinking about it - cool game. There were a bunch of difficult choices to make throughout the game and the whole like/dislike system was cool and a lot more interesting than paragon/renegade...I'll probably play through it again someday because I know I made a lot of choices I wasn't 100% sure I wanted to, I just had to do it quickly, and I know there are allegiances that can change depending on what you do, people who live or die, who ends up being on your side, and all that kind of stuff.

The dialogue could occasionally go way too far into action movie zinger territory, and so could some of the characters (I don't like Stephen Heck), but apart from that a lot of it just felt pretty alive and well thought out and I ended up caring about what happened to a lot of the characters and how the whole Halbech thing turned out. Actually holy crap - I didn't complete it. I just realised this. I got to the very end and I think I got distracted with another game...wow, I'll maybe complete it after I complete deus ex human revolution.