[always]

Grabbed the GreenMan Gaming deal.  The site was hammered this morning when I first tried.  It was hanging up after the card authorization, but never got order confirmation.

FWIW, it always hangs at that point for me. Always. The little green dots light up in sequence over and over and over. I eventually give up and refresh the page and it moves on to the next step like nothing was ever wrong. 

So my nephew got a Wii U and I noticed on the main screen there's people posting pictures and comments.  What prevents people from posting "penis penis penis"?

That part is easy, it would seem, as they do all kids of evil word detection right now. Penis drawings on the other hand, that was the tricky part.  

That article is awesome.  I wonder how many times Toad gets censored in Mario drawings.

Ran across this investigative report which made me harken back to this subject.

Interesting. I too could end up double-dipping on this if the damn boss battles are fixed as noted. And if they do something creative with the gamepad. 

Definitely play Uncharted 1 before Uncharted 2.  Just know that the second game is leaps and bounds better than the first (better than the third, too, IMO).

Also, Uncharted hasn't had guys who are bulletproof in a thin shirt since 2, and much like Tomb Raider, both games have heavily armored men that can soak up damage.

3 felt like a return to the lousy combat from 1 for me.  Not quite as bad, but not as good as 2.

I seem to remember them trying something new with the combat but after getting enough negative feedback about it patched the game so it would allow you to switch back to the old style. As an option. Or something. 

So did anyone pick this up?  I ended up holding off after learning that I wouldn’t be able to download it without an add-on hard drive. 

Don't think it's actually out yet, next Tuesday could be US release date and Thurs in Europe/UK due to the Bank Holiday weekend.

Just picked it up at BestBuy.

So did I. They had copies there yesterday but wouldn't release them as today (Wed the 20th) was the street date in their system. 

Thanks! Good to see that information coming from an official Amazon rep rather just some random dude on CAG. Now I just need to decide if I'm going to double-dip on this one like I have for the other Bioshock games, already having this coming Premium-style for the 360.

[Spoiler]

I did actually LOL'd at one of the scenes at the end with the bad-ass blonde getting cornered by KB. Spoilered just in case...

Spoiler for the showdown:

"Drop the weapon!"

"And if I don't?"  (turns slowly around with gun over head)

"Then I will shoot you dead."

"I don't think you have the"

<bang! bang! bang!>

(walks away)

[(excluding BioShock Infinite, BioShock Infinite Season Pass, and games available for pre-order)]

looks like Amazon's $30 2K credit can be used towards Infinite's season pass after 30 days has passed.  I think I'm going to wait and grab it then since I reckon the DLC will take longer than 30 days to hit.

To redeem your credit, simply return and purchase a 2K Games digital download (excluding BioShock Infinite, BioShock Infinite Season Pass, and games available for pre-order), and the discount will be automatically applied.

the 30 day thing is from Amazon.

Curious where you are seeing the 'after 30 days' bit on Amazon, CeeKay. That would be a critical decider for me as there's no 2K games I don't already have that I'd want to apply the $30 to.

Trying to decide what to do with my bronze DSi XL now that I have a 3DSXL. It's in perfect shape and I'd rather find a home for it here than someplace like eBay or trade it in to Amazon. Any interest? I could probably be convinced to throw in a couple of games as well.   

I hope there are slightly bigger tombs next time

Embarrassingly, I misread this the first time. 

Your choice of console with free shipping or so it says here. At the time of posting there was 1 day and 6 hours left for the deal.

WoL helped me realize that I'm no longer a fan of the old school, base and unit building RTS formula, complete with build orders and unit spamming.  That level of micro feels like work to me.  Starcraft 2 does the old school RTS formula well, it's just not for me anymore.  I played through WoL because I wanted to see what happened, not because I was really enjoying the RTS experience.

I seem to have fallen into this same camp. Picked up a copy of WoL when it came out and pre-ordered this many moons ago. Never really clicked again with the game and cancelled my pre-order some time ago. Maybe the eventual uber-sale but for now I'm fine with being StarCraft-free. 

Sweet! Pre-ordered.

We're starting a complete remodel of our kitchen and a big-ass fridge was right up there on my wife's priority list. Ended up picking a KitchenAid French Door freezer on the bottom unit. Won't have it in the house for several months so we'll see!

Funny, there's a menu option for "early access" to The Last of Us demo. I kinda figured early would mean like... now. However, it just brings up a countdown timer that tells me early access starts in 78 days.  D'oh! 

[and Nier on board as well]

...with some of the creators of the original Drakengard games and Nier on board as well.

Neir?  You have my attention.

 

A Maxis employee told RPS that the connection is not needed. This is all EA folks.

To expand on that a little, saw this on Blues News today, check there for links in the quoted text:

A few details have come to light in the question of how difficult it would be to make the new SimCity playable offline, a conundrum that confuses even EA, as they have indicated this would both possible and impossible. Kotaku writes of pulling the plug on the game and having it play on for about 19 minutes before crapping out, seeming to contradict the notion that a significant portion of the game's calculations are taking place on the server side. Likewise, Notch tweets: "I like how you can keep playing Sim City even when it notifies you that the servers are down. (But I thought it REALLY needed them?)." This plays into a report on Rock, Paper, Shotgun talking with an anonymous engineer the site says they've confirmed worked on the game. He discusses the most difficult part of playing the game offline would be how gameplay is based on interactions between regions, but the source says: "It wouldn’t take very much engineering to give you a limited single-player game without all the nifty region stuff." As for the server being required to play the game, he tells them SimCity does no significant game simulation on the server side:

The servers are not handling any of the computation done to simulate the city you are playing. They are still acting as servers, doing some amount of computation to route messages of various types between both players and cities. As well, they’re doing cloud storage of save games, interfacing with Origin, and all of that. But for the game itself? No, they’re not doing anything. I have no idea why they’re claiming otherwise. It’s possible that Bradshaw misunderstood or was misinformed, but otherwise I’m clueless.

Sweet! Loves me some good slow smoked tri-tip. 

And here I was thinking I found a thread to share the fun that we're going through right now - after 20 years we're ripping out everything from the kitchen for a complete remodel.

I got up to the point where they show you the cover mechanic and then decided to start over. Looked back over my stats and realized I was woefully inadequate in exploring before moving on... went back for 100% and hunted out the areas, shot all the dang totems, found all of the documents and relics (didn't realize what the rumble meant the first time) and am now back getting shot full of arrows trying to find cover with my hands tied behind my back.  

FYI - I think they've done a great job with this 'reboot' of the franchise.  

Um, you can go back to any area from the campfires.

Also, there's one area that you can't complete the first time through.

Ah well... figured once I went through the big-ass gate that there was no going back. No biggie. Now I knows! 

I got up to the point where they show you the cover mechanic and then decided to start over. Looked back over my stats and realized I was woefully inadequate in exploring before moving on... went back for 100% and hunted out the areas, shot all the dang totems, found all of the documents and relics (didn't realize what the rumble meant the first time) and am now back getting shot full of arrows trying to find cover with my hands tied behind my back.  

FYI - I think they've done a great job with this 'reboot' of the franchise. 

Under no circumstances visit the other wiki, called Lexicanum.

LOL, which of course was the first thing I did... yikes! And then took a dip in the forums and what's right on top of the "Technical" one?

Can you please change the background color for more clarity?

Starts off with a perfectly reasoned post and goes straight downhill from there.

 

Tomb Raider and Castlevania.

This.

Particularly the murder channel,

Fox News?

I don't know what the channel is called. The logo in the corner is "ID" (Investigative Drama? something like that.) Whatever it stands for, it's all true crime sagas all the time. I'm told that women love that kind of programming. I'm also sure that my wife is now an expert on all the nuances of killing a spouse.

Please remember this post if I unexpectedly stop posting.

We might be married to the same woman...

Mine loves that stuff, too! Every time there's "nothing on" she's watching something on that dang channel. That or Animal Planet.

I watched "Robot and Frank" last night which I thought was excellent, check it out if you get the chance. It wasn't on Netflix so I Redbox'd it and had an interesting issue that you couldn't have with Netflix. Their disks are checked by peoples when returned while RB movies just get stuffed back into the machine. This one had a hitchhiker under the official disk, a DVD-R with (after I tracked down one of the quotes) a copy of "30 Nights of Paranormal Activity with the Devil Inside the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" burned on it. Not sure why someone would do that, at least make it something worth watching. 

Just saw the commercial for this, looks like it might be very interesting.

No wonder I got stuck so near the end. That body of the Many level was just brutal. Had to turn the difficulty down to easy to get the final brain thing down. But at least I finished. Always bugged the crap out of me that I never had. The early creepy levels were some of the finest moments in gaming,imho.

Welcome to the club. Me, I had to go God Mode. 

Saw on Blues News that this will be a movie rather than a game.

wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be both. 

What did surprise me is that Blues News is still around.

Yup, still pumping it out... I check it pretty much every day. 

Saw on Blues News that this will be a movie rather than a game.

Thanks to Namco Bandai's "generosity", rather than having a Wizard's Edition of the game I now have in my hands a shiny new sealed copy of the Strategy Guide. Problem is I'd already gone out and bought the dang thing for myself. So it's now free to a good home... well, not "free free" but for the cost of shipping and possibly a very small handling fee in order to talk the wife into boxing the 4lb guide up and running it to the Post Office for me.  

Let me know if there's any interest.

<sold>

Etrian Odyssey IV is on the way...

I just did the 12GB Vanquish download and install thing, I have no idea how long it took as I always just let it do large ones like that 'overnight'... put it on auto-install-and-shutdown and then go to bed. Ready the next morning.

Seems to me that some of the speed is related to the hard drive in the unit and the generally slow bus speed on the PS3. Glad to hear they're re-architecting that. I put a new drive in my launch 60GB and it certainly seemed to be faster overall. My new slim has the stock 250 in it and it sure seems slower to me or at least what I think it remember... any time I come back to the menu it spends way more time spooling up all of the icons than it seems like it should. Keep playing with the idea of swapping out this drive but probably won't.

Oh.. and PS+ ? Totally worth it IMHO. Doubly so if you have a Vita as well. 

- The Blu-ray drive is now 6x instead of the PS3's 2x. This will help a lot!

When i watch a Blu Ray on my PS3,its very slow,it takes so long to get to the menu's,i have that Blu Ray logo loading thing as well

is this normal for all Blu Ray players or just the PS3?

This is a normal BluRay thing AFAIK. It's connecting to the internet, doing Java stuff behind the scenes, sometimes even downloading recent movie previews to dazzle you with. Even without the internet connectivity there's all that JVM startup that needs to happen. I believe.

Certainly not the exact same thing but relavant. Last night night I was browsing the PS store on ps3 and it was slow as hell. Buttons not responding for numerous seconds etc. usually not like that at all for me..

There was a PS3 update quite some time ago (before the new store) where that started happening to me all the time. Any time a button had to flash it ended up doing it really... really... slowly. It was painful and required much patience but eventually they fixed whatever issue caused that and it mostly went away. Mostly. I just recently had something similar crop up again this week as well where one basically got 'stuck' for a period of time.

Hey, is there someplace official where one can make suggestions to Sony / Playstation, maybe an email address? Meaning someplace where it won't immediately get lost in a sea of mostly worthless messages.

Back in the day when Activision was releasing "Heavy Gear 2" they had a contest where they were giving away an autographed "gold master" disk of the game and a bunch of other swag that I don't recall.  I won. 

God knows where that disk is now...

Thanks Grue.

I'm wondering why the battlegrounds seem to have a square or two with sparkles on it? Couldn't find a mention of it in the manual. 

If one of your characters ends a turn on a sparkly square, they get a bonus (item, XP, etc.)

Cool... thanks.

I'm wondering why the battlegrounds seem to have a square or two with sparkles on it? Couldn't find a mention of it in the manual. 

clover

did anything happen?  I only have 29 seconds to spare.

Nope, nothing... wait... what? Holy crap!

Working for the DoD gets me all Federal holidays off... no matter how far behind our projects are.  

clover