I started playing Twilight Princess (GC version on the Wii) and I like it. Feels good and Zelda-y. Although now I see that the Wii controls would be garbage.

I remember I got the Wii version of Twilight Princess and gave it up before I got to the first dungeon. The controls basically took out any enjoyment for me; I remember the fishing especially being terribly implemented. I should see if I can get ahold of a Gamecube version because it didn't seem too bad besides the Wii controls.

I didn't mind the wii controls too much. Once you get used to it, its pretty easy to just swing the controller for basic function. I did however stop playing twilight princess once I got a glitch on my game save when facing twilight dragon argorok. Everytime I'd grapple hook onto his tail the game would glitch the fuck out and I would be just stuck there, in mid air, not even touching his tail, while the dragon kept having the flying animation (though he wasnt moving from his spot). That made me give up going any further with it :/

i'm a sucker and dropped ten bucks on the last new vegas DLC lonesome road.

definitely the most disappointing one of the bunch. they did a couple things right and a lot of things really wrong. there was a couple kinda vague, overarching ideas, but apart from the basis of the story(probably about 10 minutes of actual substance) virtually the entire DLC was just filler. the filler wasn't always empty, and there were some rather sharp ideas as far as level design went but it's insanely linear(INSANELY) and legitimately lacking in worthwhile moments or even that much stuff to do.

i will give them credit for having unusually strong level design. even though there really isn't a whole lot to do in the areas, they were composed effectively for the most part, mainly in the early sections. they went with an interesting idea where pretty much the whole area is unusually bombed out and most of the buildings are actually at an angle, so when you stand perfectly still looking forward you get this pretty disorienting film noir effect. i can't think of many examples where they really did much with it, or it was employed all that effectively, but it was a really good idea and something they should have thought about sooner and implemented at certain points through the main game. beyond that, there were a couple really good little location/scenario ideas throughout, but in between was a lot of rather empty fighting and trudging through various sorts of bombed-out rubble. probably what hurt the design was more the fact that the story had no factor in it, and gave you very little to do outside of neat things the level designers could think up. the composition was pretty good, and they made the most of it a few times, but they didn't really have a whole lot to work with. the story literally treats everything you do before reaching the final room as a buildup and very little more. not a particularly good idea, as anyone playing this dlc has already wandered aimlessly around hollowed out buildings for 100 hours. impressive that the level designers did anything with it, but it still wasn't enough to save the experience.

so yeah, the story is where it lost me. it's not fundamentally bad, and it has a fairly neat premise, but like i said earlier, it was pretty much about ten minutes of real content spread haphazardly throughout the dlc. a couple conversations with two characters and that's it. and it wasn't really inserted into the game well either, as they just kinda interject something at arbitrary points on the map. i'll avoid spoilers i guess, but i found the primary NPC of lonesome road really uninteresting. they employed a distinct style for his dialogue, and while i appreciated the effort, i found the style deeply ineffective, sometimes coming dangerously close to the point of being effectively unintelligible. it was almost as ineffective as the voice actor who stumbled through the lines as if he'd never done voice acting before, or just couldn't make sense of the garbled mess of dialogue he was given(possibly a mixture of both). it was rather painful to even go through it, and i found myself skipping lines of dialogue after i'd read it but before he had finished speaking them. it's exceedingly rare that i need to do that with a game, or find myself that frustrated with it. the idea they were going for was pretty neat, however, they just completely dropped the ball on making it the slightest bit effective.

i'd be inclined to talk more about the positive things it did, but it's really hard to do that without spoilers. i will say that the choice you get at the end of the dlc is pretty neat. not really mind-blowing, but generally good stuff. you do kinda need to play this to get the full new vegas experience, sadly, as it renders a reasonably pertinent footnote to the story. it's just a shame that everything that leads up to the conclusion doesn't really work terribly well.

summary: yeah, this is a lot fucking worse than honest hearts. no question. this is only useful if you absolutely NEED more new vegas to play and you didn't find enough ways to fuck the ncr and caesar's legion in the main story. what's pretty frustrating(and typical of obsidian) is that this could have been extremely good. the ideas were there to make this the apex of the entire fallout story, but they never really came close to reaching that point. just kinda sits there. eating my ten dollars.

it is kinda sad that i just use saltw as HUNDLEY'S GAME & FILM REVIEW EMPORIUM

should probably try talking about something pertinent sometime?

it is kinda sad that i just use saltw as HUNDLEY'S GAME & FILM REVIEW EMPORIUM

should probably try talking about something pertinent sometime?

it's much better than [long ][/long], and i like reading it. maybe you should 'blog' this stuff... welcome to the 21st century internet...

they always succeed in getting me excited about the new vegas DLC, which is kind of an accomplishment given how terribly DLC is handled with so many other games. none of the F3 DLCs seemed even vaguely interesting at all, besides maybe the Pitt, but when reading about it you find out it's just more slavers and mutated and destroyed shit and you'd probably be better off not wasting your time. it might be worse that they get me to care to begin with because I'm getting fed up with how stupid and ineffectual all this garbage is. lonesome road is the one I was waiting for, but after beating the big empty I started to fear that for all their buildup of the great myth of U. and the Divide, it'd end up being nothing worth waiting for. just like the myth of New Vegas or the Fort or Red Rock Canyon all end up being these dead, hollow spaces with nothing of interest and none of the care, detail and life they put into the locations you happen across earlier in the game. and I had hoped that in shifting to something a little more linear, they'd finally be able to handle making a game without leaving it feeling broken and unfinished. but apparently the best they can do is leave their customers with the feeling of "well, this could have been good! maybe the next one will be better/finished and not so stupidly designed/written/executed"

I got the pirated version of new vegas for this computer, so I'm gonna try and get a torrent of lonesome road and consider buying the steam version if it's any good

don't blog leave it here. we're in like a dot com bubble of blogs now. my sister is paid to write blogs advertising and promoting shit

it is kinda sad that i just use saltw as HUNDLEY'S GAME & FILM REVIEW EMPORIUM

should probably try talking about something pertinent sometime?

I come into these topics looking around for your posts about things from time to time. do what you want to do but i like reading them especially since you are usually writing about things i've recently played or watched.

it is kinda sad that i just use saltw as HUNDLEY'S GAME & FILM REVIEW EMPORIUM

should probably try talking about something pertinent sometime?

Nah man, your posts on this thread are a lot more insightful than most. It's too bad about Lonesome Road because I was seriously considering downloading it. I might get all the DLC's I missed when there is an inevitable price drop.

yeah uh theres not much point in reading this topic if it werent for your ramblings hundley...there would be only maybe earl or jamie left (and they don't write too much)...

besides rambling owns so! also fuck blogs why not fill FORUM with individual thoughts...

idk any post about game content and not just "beat vvvvv, moving on to braid and machinarium" is valuable to me, though I'm generally on the same page as hundley

Finally got round to playing Far Cry 2 this week, old but I am not much of a gamer these past years. It is an enjoyable arson simulator, and that is all.
The story is non-existent and the missions consist solely of the 'go here and kill everybody' variety. So you kill a bunch of black people and get paid, which can be used to get more weapons, which is useless because they jam after five bullets so it is much easier to sticking with stealing the weapons from corpses. You can throw a moletov a mile away and still the fire will cross mountains and barren desert and still creep up behind you. Yet while it is fun to burn grass, because it lacks the sophisticated physics of Crysis, it all amounts to nothing other than visuals and temporary 'damage tile' spaces.
The visuals have less variety than space invaders. Yeah it has very pretty graphics, but when everything looks exactly the same as everything else and nothing has any shred of character, it's snoozeville. Also all of the characters lack any sense of character.

It feels like it's been made by some guys who've watched a bunch of action movies (all of which have this dull greyish brown grading thing going on, because realism is brown) so we have this very monotone game with very monotone characters all speaking in gruff or hushed voices because that's how everybody whose ever held a gun speaks these days, a (lack of a) plot which i don't care about.

Actually, the landscape is set up in a kind of symetrical maze, and you run round this maze collecting things (be it diamonds, tapes or kill counts) and powerups(weapons, cars) while being chased around the maze by enemies (on cars)... IT'S FUCKING PACMAN!!!

new Vegas seemed to take what was good about FO3 and shove it in a very very linear way(though the story which feels like a bunch of mmo sidemissions put together like a 20 hour rendition of Moira's wasteland survival guide, and creature placement which flat out dictates to you which direction to go in). It has some great points and some real neat design in places, however the places that're meant to BE SOMETHING often seem to have less character than the places which are wasteland in 3.
Ultimately while you're given a more structured experience, you lose a lot of freedom in it because everything is so set in stone. Despite the addition of a more realistic mode, it feels way more like a game than FO3 did.
Even a heavily modded NV doesn't have as interesting a feel as FO3 did unmodded.

just beat dead island it will be EP 41 on my let's play (but ep 40 is still uploading that about 1:50 long and that will take some time to upload) now I need to get dark souls on the 4th and bam my new drive is on.

new Vegas seemed to take what was good about FO3 and shove it in a very very linear way(though the story which feels like a bunch of mmo sidemissions put together like a 20 hour rendition of Moira's wasteland survival guide, and creature placement which flat out dictates to you which direction to go in). It has some great points and some real neat design in places, however the places that're meant to BE SOMETHING often seem to have less character than the places which are wasteland in 3.
Ultimately while you're given a more structured experience, you lose a lot of freedom in it because everything is so set in stone. Despite the addition of a more realistic mode, it feels way more like a game than FO3 did.
Even a heavily modded NV doesn't have as interesting a feel as FO3 did unmodded.

I'm in the minority that thought Fallout New Vegas was a lot better than Fallout 3. I really liked how different the game was depending on what faction you chose to associate with and that you could finish the main story line in so many different ways. I think Fallout 3 had the exploration thing down a bit better, but you really didn't have that much of a say in how the game's events rolled out. Also, if you are into the first two games like I am, New Vegas feels a lot more Fallouty than the 3rd one does. 

And tristero, stay with it. The beginning is kind of dull but it get's a lot better once the story get's rolling.

New Vegas was only linear up until you start to get near New Vegas itself. I think it's better that way than just dumping you in the middle of a kind of generic wasteland or whatever the world might be. Like take Oblivion - I have probably spent a couple dozen hours playing that game over the years, but I've never felt like I have made any real headway. I get to a point in the main story, lose interest, and just quick warp to some other town and do a couple quests there before losing interest again and just kind of wandering around aimlessly for an hour or two then getting bored with the whole thing. There isn't any thrust to it at all, it's just a bunch of locations you can wander between, none of which are really that interesting.

I suppose if New Vegas actually was just a bunch of generic locations except this time in a straight line, that wouldn't be much better, but by the time I got to New Vegas I felt like I had seen enough of the world and was invested in it enough that wandering around became much more interesting - and I'd say the linear path part is only maybe the first 1/3 of the game. They give you a set of locations with an actual rhythm to them - and I think some of them are pretty interesting - and they make sure you get a good sample of all the different elements of the world and how they interact with each other.

Also, the placement of enemies above Sloan stopping you from heading to New Vegas probably encouraged me to play for longer than I would have if I could've just made a beeline for the main attraction right away, because for one: I don't think la vegas as an idea is aesthetically or substantially interesting, just sad and lame, and secondly, it made me feel like the world had some depth to it. It wasn't just a flat here's a cave here's a town here's another similar town they all have the same stuff in them and the same people etc. I guess fallout 3 had some varied gimmicks to it's locations too, but to me the world feels flat and uninteresting compared to new vegas's slightly more structured and tiered world. You can't just run up to the super mutant village right away, you've got to earn it a little bit, and that makes it more rewarding when you actually get there (if you think a super mutant village is a really interesting idea just in of itself) because when I was climbing up that mountain and whoah it was getting snowy! I've been playing for 30 hours and I haven't seen snow yet! nearly there! I did it! and all of that kind of stuff.

You've got to take your time exploring, and I feel like new vegas gets you into the habit of that by making it very difficult to go to certain places right away and kind of tunneling you along for a while. I think of fallout 3 and I think of a pretty much uniform wasteland and then the capital area, and that's pretty much it. There is differentiation between the wasteland locations I guess, but they kind of happen to you all at once and it feels aimless to me. When I think of the new vegas map there are different phases of the world, there is the critical path segment, then new vegas, then the outer reaches of the map, and then taking these end stage parts and then interacting them with the beginning again and then there are the little areas full of deathclaws and super mutants which are geographically right next to the beginning of the game but were way beyond what you could handle back then. Go back with your super mutant granny and the robot dog and deal with it now, see what's up there!

rambling but I think I said what I meant to