Aram

The robot's death basically ruined whatever emotion I was supposed to get because, if you think about it, the guy basically makes the robot sacrifice himself for selfish reasons, the robot's last words are "i'm not really important, I'm just a robot" which is a way of thinking forced on him by this tyrant that built him and is now forcing him to die so he can wear his dismembered corpse so he can live 5 more minutes and see some elephants. It made the guy completely ****ing evil. What the hell.

You know, I don't know if I'm supposed to be right or left or what--both sides say stuff that seems dumb as hell to me and both sides occasionally say things that make plenty of sense. One thing I notice is no matter what side they belong to, the politicians chosen to represent these sides, the supposed champions of both parties, are hopelessly ****ing useless. We just got done with eight years of the Republican party ****ing us and everyone in the ass. I voted for Obama if only because he wasn't Republican, as though that might mean he'd go to lengths to be the opposite of Bush. The Democrats should have more or less had all the support they needed to do whatever **** they wanted. If, the god damn day Obama had sworn in, he had said "Okay here's what we're doing. We're going to arrest and charge every mother **** who had anything to do with starting a fraudulent war and we're going to put everyone involved in the torture, rape, and murder of prisoners in jail. By the way, next time you go to the hospital, we're paying for it, and we're paying for it by taxing rich people. Deal with it, ****ers." If this had happened, I would vote democrat in every election from now until I die if only because we finally had somebody in charge with some god damn principles. I honestly think that the reason he didn't see anyone put in prison is because politicians, like dirty cops, don't like to go against their own kind. If one politician can go to jail for being corrupt, they all can--so they let things go. On health care reform, the Republicans naturally pissed and moaned and completely made up a bunch of bull**** reasons why we should too. But that's just the same old ****. Everybody knew they would do that, because by nature they're supposed to be against free and altruistic stuff like that. The question I have is why the hell are they getting any say in the matter? They just ****ed up, again and again, for eight years straight. Their opinions shouldn't matter at all. Regardless, we end up with the same bill democrats have been proposing in one form or another since I can remember--a neutered, mostly useless pretend bill. A bill that will probably mean more money for insurance companies and a few small changes that might even help a few people before it gets repealed somewhere down the line. Even if the bill passes, as it exists now, and the democrats stand up and shout "victory!" it's not going to make any significant difference. Everything the democrats reach for, as far as I can tell, seems to be a carefully calculated series of dives and compromises that, when successful, look like they mean something but really don't, so they can get credit for passing revolutionary new reforms even though they're not revolutionary at all. **** like the "assault weapons ban," which didn't really ban anything but but certain cosmetic attributes that manufacturers got around by selling the same weapons with minor cosmetic changes--even if you're for gun control, you'd have to be a moron to think this was a law worth passing. We're in a country in which it is more likely for a determined president to declare war on a country for little to no reason than pay for poor people to go to the hospital. That's ****ed up. I'm going to say it--George W. Bush by all measures seems to be a more competent leader than Obama. With only the rubble of a pair of buildings he managed to start a massive bloody criminal war that still hasn't ended. With the conceptual rubble of an entire economy and every bit of self-respect Americans have left, Obama can't even pay poor people's hospital bills. We may as well have elected a tree. Perhaps a peach tree. Then at least we'd have some peaches.

I liked Ray more and the best weapon combo was a prime shotgun or prime scoped rifle and dual prime rangers. Managing the reloading tactically was half the fun. Just throwing it out there but the guns were totally incorrect for the dates given. Did anyone else think they tried to make Thomas look like Christian Bale? On Monkey Island: For some reason the British love the first two but really hate CMI. I guess it kind of makes sense.

Figures. Black and White was basically a monkey spanking simulator.

See what I lacked in quantity I more than made up for in quality.

It's playable. It's not scary--it's more like they tried to create horror and just got gross most of the time. The characters and plot are pretty bad. It's a playable shooter, though. Twenty dollars seems fair.

You can finish it in one sitting. I've played through it at least three times, and picked up on something I missed each time.

wow that jingle is really catchy

or something from Henlin given he's got the friggin award named after him. ???

That's probably Neuromancer.

Pynchon's Inherent Vice might be one of my new favorite books.

The Dark Eye. Easily one of the weirdest games ever made. I guess it would most likely fall under Adventure game but there aren't actually any puzzles. It's point and click, first person--you just sort of click around looking for the hotspot that will advance the story, so really it's more of an interactive fiction, I guess? The story itself is equal odd. You go around this house in which certain objects will take you into the plots of three well known Edgar Allen Poe stories, in which you can choose to either take the perspective of the killer or the victim. A fourth, unique to the game, plot takes place in the "present" and it's just freakish as hell. Playing the game is like watching some bizarre Impressionist film or David Lynch's Eraserhead. The characters are some kind of terrifying claymation and the environments like a nightmare. The game, as a sidenote, features voicework by none other than William S. Burroughs. It's hard to call this a great game, or even a game, but it is absolutely a very unique experience you won't find anywhere else. Oh wait yes you will. You can also have a similarly trippy experience playing Bad Day on the Midway, created I think by the same developer. This game is notable for having one of the greatest titles for anything, movie, book, song. Bad Day on the Midway. How can you not play that. Playing the game, I imagine, is probably a lot like doing acid. Again, you don't so much play as just explore. You explore a nightmarish carnival, meeting some freakishly disturbed people. As in Dark Eye you can switch perspectives at any time, by clicking on the eyes of any character you meet, thus completely changing which character will serve as the game's protaganist. Every time you play is different, as characters are in different places at different times, and each play through is not about finishing so much as learning all of the intertwining stories for each character. There's also a psycho murderer loose in the carnival. I can't even really explain this one.

This is a game called Nuclear War. Honestly, it's only worth playing a few times. Each game is split between making nukes and launching them at the other player's cities. The only strategy is in trying to take so few hits yourself that by the end you'll still have at least one small city left so that you'll technically "win." This is actually very difficult as once you deliver the killing blow to an enemy, all of his remaining nukes are automatically launched in retaliation, so 4 out of 5 games, you'll either lose or end in stalemate. If you actually do manage to "win," the end game screen features the character you chose standing in the middle of an apocalyptic wasteland, alone, doing a victory dance. Wacky, cartoonish, and clearly satirical.

Not on Steam. You can apparently play it on Gametap along with some other games that deserve to be in this thread. The best bet is probably ebay or Amazon if you actually want to pay for it.

The Last Express. This is one of the most unique gaming experiences you're likely to find, certainly one of the most unique adventure games. The game takes place entirely aboard a train, The Orient Express, in the year 1914. The train travels from France to Constantinople in real time, making regular stops appropriate to the map, with lapses in time happening only when the protagonist is unconscious. As the train runs along its rails in real time, so in fact does every character aboard it. The characters each have minds of their own. At lunch time they'll go for lunch, at dinner time for dinner. In between they'll leave their compartments occasionally to smoke or interact. Characters have conversations when they want and if you're not there to hear them when they happen, you simply don't hear them. Much of the game involves handling time strategically, waiting for your chance to sneak into compartments when they're out, sneaking to the front of the train when the conductor is announcing the latest stop. There is a very powerful feeling, as you play, that you are in fact aboard this train, that it's going to get where it wants whether you do anything or not. The plot concerns a hopelessly uninformed American in Europe, wanted by the police, climbing aboard a train based on a telegram he received from an old friend begging him for help--clearly influenced by The Third Man, no doubt. When he arrives he finds his friend dead in his compartment. In order to get to the bottom of what's going on and who killed him, the American, Robert Cath, conceals the body and assumes his identity. The plot is very complicated--it's very clear that powerful forces, far more important than Cath, are involved, pitted against each other with Cath in the middle, very dangerously meddling in extremely volatile events. This game is finely crafted, well polished, with some of the best voice acting and most beautiful screen art you'll ever find. You're the only (living) American on the train--the rest of the cast of varying nationalities, German, Austrian, Russian, French, and Slavic, their accents very real, and the only time most of them speak English is when they're speaking to you. The rest of the time they speak around you, thinking you can't understand, even though the Cath secretly speaks many languages so we get plenty of subtitles. The only time we don't get subtitles is when he overhears Slavic or Arabic, which he does not understand. The train interior is rendered in 3D with a very, very close attention to detail, based on real period correct Orient Express train cars. Characters are rendered in a sort of 2D, Rotoscopic Art Noveau, in which real models are used but then are painted over to resemble cartoons. The only part of this that feels at all dated is that the characters movements are shown in frames rather than real animation, but it's very easy to get used to this. The game was created in, I think, '98, with a very high budget and very long development, by Jordan Mechner of Prince of Persia fame. The game was apparently one of the largest flops in gaming history which is a shame on many levels, its lack of success mostly attributed to Broderbunds completely inane marketing, which makes Mechner in my mind a sort of Orson Welles of the game industry. There are numerous ways one can still get the game, and it is well, well worth at least a playthrough.

These "Top #" lists are kind of a dumb concept--they're always someone's opinion and it never matches anyone else's. Not to mention that most of them are so popular we've already played them, so what are we really learning? A better concept would be "# Games you need to play before you die" or something. Then you can put some really obscure **** in there, not because it was the most popular or got the highest review scores, but because it's actually a unique experience and everyone should give it a chance. Games like The Last Express and Dark Eye that even when new were largely overlooked. Maybe we ought to try to write up a list like that--sort of a Criterion collection for vidjagames.

film of warcraft is balls

I read about an experiment performed on someone whose bridge between the two hemispheres of his brain had been severed. They had him look at a word with a sheet of paper held in front of his nose such that each eye could only see one half of the word. They then asked him to write the whole word with his right hand, and he wrote one half of the word. They asked him to write the same word with his left hand and he wrote the other half. Unless tested this way, it was almost impossible to tell there was anything strange about him. That's two identical but wholly separated consciousnesses. That's weird.

I was always confused about where the player was getting some of the item descriptions--how a 3 intelligence, 0% science or energy weapons character can identify the make, model, and even designer of a plasma pistol.

If I had control of an RPG and a million illegal immigrants on typewriters I'd have a different, detailed description for every different object you can find, even otherwise identical objects. "This shotgun has someone's name carved into the stock. What an ****." "This particular pistol used to belong to a famous lawman. It's no better than usual, but it's definitely got some bodies on it." Why not, that's why.

:(

I've always secretly wanted to take a shotgun to the beach or somewhere with a lot of pigeons.

In a related story my Porsche 356B is, after something like 8 years, very close to being drivable.

In fact, I think that CMI itself was split into five very different chapters.

A man in drag would be wearing a dress. Hah! Owned.