Raithe

To continue with my nostalgia kick.. a few hours on a lazy sunday afternoon with a little Tron 2.0... ahh, monolith productions, they always seemed to hit the spot..

Alan Parker- 4 Albatross- 16 Conrad Marburg- 11 Henry Leland- 12 Hong Shi- 12 Konstantin Brayko- 14 Mina Tang- 8 Omen Deng- 18 Ronald Sung- 7 SIE- 21 Scarlet Lake- 23 (+1) - Her mom was an intelligence agent outed by her own government, she turned into a freelance assassin.. What's not to like? Sis 23 (-1) - She just didn't have any decent lines.. Steven Heck- 20

I'm running it on PC, and I had texture popup issues happen once that was noticable...(during the entrance into the aircraft junkyard).. apart from that single instance... if it happened..it was so brief as to pass my attention... Apart from that.. I think I had a case of disapearing enemies on reload about..three times over the course of 4 playthroughs. Oh, and about half the time when I exited the game and closed it down.. I'd end up with the small popup in windows of "error in closing".. but since that didn't effect gameplay it was basically negligible... So..mostly bug free for me.. at least for anything that interfered with my game play and enjoyment of the game..

Hm, I'm not sure how well DLC would actually work well with the AP storyline.. I mean, there's so much put in the background to cause consequences in later missions and with other characters... Making DLC that would fit into that seems a bit more then the casual DLC "fit in anywhere" approach that Mass Effect and Dragonage can do... Plus the cost effectiveness of all the voice work for it.. That is, if it were extra missions rather then just simple "guns n gadgets".

Heh, I reinstalled Alpha Centuari a couple of months back because I was feeling nostalgic. I suddenly lost a weekend.

The Karate Kid.. Entertaining in it's way. On it's own it's a decent film of the type. Jackie Chan is more..hm, avuncular and outright comforting then Mr Miyagi ever was.. I think I missed the slightly snarky Miyagi attitude. That and that for a film titled "The Karate Kid" there is no Karate whatsoever, it's all Kung Fu. I mean, it makes sense storywise, but eh, they might as well have given it a different name for the reboot since they went with mainland China and Kung Fu.... But if you enjoy the whole.. training montage sequence and classic sports style film of untrained underdog set against bad attitude "elites".. you'll probably like it. Hm, and on the Leonard Nimoy thing.. I'd thought he'd just retired from doing anymore Star Trek, not a complete retire from everything...

It's kind of interesting to note all these post-E3 "reviews" seem to start off with the whole "after the letdown of IW, we weren't really expecting anything overly great now"... then promptly turn into gushing over the demo shown... Although it's nice to see the "that cool bit from the trailer? that was done in game and still looked awesome.." that gets mentioned by a few people.... So maybe the whole "cinematic trailer that has nothing to do with gameplay" isn't so significant with DE3...

Some ridiculously cheap slightly old game via Steam.. Ghost Master.. a nicely humerous "strategy" game where you control the ghosts and try to deal with those pesky humans..

"We will kill until no Harkonnen breathes Arrakeen air"... Smashing. The Sci-fi miniseries version they did some years back was rather good as well...

Frustrating can be a game that has you playing through 10-15 minutes of gameplay that you can do in your sleep, throws in a cinematic, then immediately has a section of gameplay that is difficult... And everytime you fail and need to reload you have to play through the same 10-15 minutes of easy and wait through the cinematic before you can get to the "challenging" bit you're having issues with.... When it happens a handful of times in a row.. it can turn an otherwise good game into a feeling of serious annoyance/frustration... especially when it turns out that the "challenging" gameplay turns out to be about 40 seconds of specific activity....but you didn't pick that out until the 5th attempt...

It was.

A brief poke at DE: Invisible War... Just to remind myself on the contrast to Deus Ex....

Ignored as much about the World Cup as possible... Given the silliness of various schools and businesses arranging to finish early so people could go watch the match...

We know it's going to involve mass conspiracy storylines.. there's going to be a couple of twists thrown in there somewhere.. Apart from that.. we're all still stuck in the "wait and see" seats. As for the game system.. apart from that short demo at E3 which you can't really see much of.. again..too little information to really justify love or horror about it. <shrugs>

Nearest upcoming.. Mafia 2... I'm curious as to how Max Payne 3 will turn out to be like... Now that I know the new Tron game is a pc platform as well that's got to be one to try... Then it swiftly goes to the games coming out on the crux of 2011.. I mean, I'm bound to try at least a month of Star Wars Old Republic just to satisfy my inner-star wars geek... and the hankering to see which side of the border Deus Ex Human Revolution falls on.. DE or IW.. (and so far the sepia gold/brown pallete seemed more for the screen shots of Detroit.. the Shanghai ones didn't seem to have the same tone..)

Heh, just caught the last half of "Twister" on tv. Entertaining in it's way. Although damn, it makes me feel old when I look at when it was made. - cow flies through the air on tornado winds - "Look out, cow!" - a minute later, cow flies in from a different direction - "Another cow!" "No.. I think it's still the same one.."

Hm, and all this Deus Ex talk is making me want to re-read my old Shadowrun books and doodle up some ideas...

Hm, the way I'm reading it.. you get your augmentations.. which all have basic abilities.. but then as you earn xp you can choose to learn new abilities/increase skill at using abilities within those augmentations.. And you won't be earning enough xp to max out all possible options.. so you'll have to decide on your playstyle... So there's a skill system.. it's just part of the augmentations rather then being the "Pistols, Environmental, Hacking" as was used in DE.. It's not following the strict augmentation only of IW. (and I mean, you could chop and change your augs in IW to fit the situation you rarely got stuck with just the one style..) So it might work better, I'll wait until I can see more about the system before I fully say yay or nay over it..

Alan Parker - 10 Albatross - 11 Ali Shaheed - 10 Conrad Marburg - 10 Grigori Pazinhov - 7 Henry Leland - 10 Hong Shi - 11 Konstantin Brayko - 11 Mina Tang - 10 Omen Deng - 14 Ronald Sung - 10 (-1) - Because damn it, if you have evidence of the one aspect, why the hell won't he believe you on the other? SIE - 12 Scarlet Lake - 14 (+1) - A sneaky femme fatale with some good lines. Always golden. Sean Darcy - 6 Sergei Surkov - 7 Sis - 13 Steven Heck - 15 Yancy Westridge - 8

Hm, I actually liked the look of that.. I think it fits into the style quite nicely.. And seeing that ventillation grill was definitely nostalgic What's interesting is that in a couple of those interviews they've thrown out the word "reboot" a few times. Makes me wonder just how far they're planning on running with it if this is successful...

A little multi-player Civ IV between friends... Although I do have to say, much as I like the game..when you spend about 80% of the time staring at the "waiting for other civilizations" message.. it gets just a touch tiresome...

no... NO... NNNNNOOOOOOO.... they got like EVERYONE wrong. Deadpool is not a combination of mutations, he's the merc with a mouth who got an extreme healing factor to deal with a cancer that'd kill him, but it also messed with his neurology to the point where he was basically insane. Sabertooth and Wolverine don't really have a filial connection between them, just a former working relationship that went bad because Sabertooth became feral. I was more referring to Wolverines backstory, but even that has some inconsistencies like the Weapon X program being in the US when, iirc, it was Canadian. I did like that they faithfully showed how he was created and some of the things that motivated him, like the "death" of his woman. I didnt know Sabertooth wasnt his brother, I thought that part was accurate. I don't think they really went into his backstory... at least until REALLY recently. That was one of the reasons Wolvie was so popular was that he didn't really have much of a backstory but you got constant hints over time that were so tasty. And yes, the WeaponX program is Canadian, although I think that Wolverine was also Codenamed WeaponX. The woman who's able to influence people was competely fictional IIRC, and the whole malarky about "rescuing" all the mutants from weapon X was specific to the movie. Basically he went rogue on the government and was only made human after spending a LONG time with the founders of alpha flight (a canadian superteam), he still dealt with rage issues well after that although I think most authors forget that when they're trying to make him badass as possible. I could never quite make up my mind if the whole sideline of Wolverine learning intense martial arts & samurai code was a nice touch in an attempt to control his inner "berserker" side... or just the 80's jump on all things "Ninja!!!" related..

If Invisible War had been a stand-alone game it would have been recieved a lot better then it was. Unfortunately it just didn't quite follow in the footsteps of Deus Ex well enough. There were a lot of things I enjoyed about IW, but the whole never really seemed to gel together.. Ah well, here's to hoping it works for Human Revolution.. One of my key issues with IW was how they'd talked up and hyped the idea that there were seperate factions and that you could take missions from them, betray them to the others, and then deal with the consequences... then I got the game, played it , and was like wtf? Consequences basically zero. Hm, on a slightly different note, one of the latest E3 interviews... Following the "critical path" DE3 should be finished in 17-24 hours of gameplay, but if you take the time to explore the world and do sidequests it should take you around 30 hours.. Although I haven't seen anything yet on how gameplay is going to be set up... different hubs or something else... Curiousity and anticipation build.. (and that trailer had some damn good music)

Hm, well in several playthroughs now, i've had various weapon skills, and when I did the stealth & pistol playthrough I had none of those problems you've complained about.. aimed shots within the right distance would easily take enemies down. Sure, if it wasn't a headshot you'd normally need 2 or 3 on the torso but they'd go down. The Moscow Embassy ending sequence took me about 4 attempts before I developed the knack for it, but it's not that horrible.

Having a break from the repeated AP playthroughs, and having a bash on the Kotor2 restored project...