Based on everything I've read in this thread, I'm not super surprised to hear that "hella fun" doesn't really mesh with the larger whole of Watch Dogs.

Excellent: I'm definitely pro-people enjoying things!

And sadly, they all seem to agree that it sucks.

Or maybe something less pithy?

"Maybe I'm getting old"

This is probably a more accurate way to put it. But even so, I bet it will be a few more years before developers are really making the most out of those extra bullets.

A right tricky-changeup they pulled on him, they did!

Wellll, with Nintendo I think it was something like "finally get somewhere in the ballpark of console graphic capability, while trying to bring the two-screen gaming we've pioneered on handhelds to the console experience, opening up new possibilities for asymmetric multiplayer and immersive single player."

When this game was announced, it sounded thrilling. I was picturing myself approaching some massive, secure compound looking to retrieve some MacGuffin. I open up a layout on my WiiU gamepad and start planning my ingress: do I hack some security cameras and a lock in order to sneak in a service door in the back? Do I…

It seems like the late 90s must have been a painful, painful time to be a Sega fan, like the company was constantly spitting in your face for supporting it.

It's definitely getting released eventually on WiiU! That's about all I can tell you: any hype and anticipation I had for a AAA third-party title on WiiU has been thoroughly ground down by every single announcement they've made about this game since the first one.

Great article. One quibble, though: you say that Mannix started as something "less high-concept," but then you describe its original conception as "Man versus machine: Joe Mannix was John Henry and the steam hammer was a computer."

This sounds right to me. One of the main things that prevents me from wanting to try these big open world games is that I know I'd feel some obligation to fulfill the main story, but when people talk about them it's almost always to criticize the main story and hype the sidequests!

All I need is for some sort of break in the time-space continuum to transport me to a dimension where my mid-20s "underemployed with nothing to do" phase runs concurrently with my late-20s "having an awesome girlfriend to play multiplayer JRPGs with" phase.

Do you get a completion flag for every character in a level-run, or just the one who gets the flag? If it's the former, perhaps some multiplayer could ease the tedium of replaying all the levels?

Imagine how it feels to be a WiiU owner!

This killed me in Xenoblade Chronicles. I just wasn't used to open-world games, and I managed by about the midpoint (I think) of the story to have leveled up to the point that I could kill any boss in the main plot with minimal effort. At the same time, I had barely managed to build a reputation in any of the…

God damn most of those bosses! So hard, and worse still because they're never cheap: they're just so long, and your hit points so few, even a near-perfect run can fall apart in a matter of seconds if you make one false move.

Mario Golf and Wonderful 101 for me, in between rounds of the substantially less fun game Transcribing Interviews for My Thesis Project.

I am quite happy for non-WiiU owners to get Rayman Legends, but I do wish they had released it for the WiiU closer to when they said they would. The challenges app was a fun consolation, but the result was that by the time the game came out I was well past peak-excitement for it, and was even kind of bored of playing…