Oh man, I was in Odaiba (area where this is held) on Saturday. It was a freaking nightmare. I was transformed from a human into a sweat monster. These guys are pretty dedicated. For a second I regretting missing it. But then I realized: being crammed into a convention center with tens of thousands of other sweat…

Yeah, I never got why so many people dislike XIII. I mean, I get that people don't like how linear it is, but I guess open world-ness was never one of the defining aspects of FF for me. I like the plots, which were always basically linear. And I found XIII to be well written, with compelling characters. Their…

The Sonic Adventure 2 theme was pretty good too:

I was thinking the warthog run at the end of Halo 1. Maybe I'm remembering it wrong, but I thought it took one of the themes that had been used in the game and did a metal guitar rendition of it. I remember thinking it was pretty awesome at the time.

Yeah, I used to hold myself to a strict no "cheating" policy and would pride myself on not using walkthroughs. But then at some point, maybe when I started having less time to play games, I realized "screw it, I don't have the time to spend hours bumbling around trying to figure out what I'm supposed to do." So now…

In Japanese cafeterias it's common to share a table with people you don't know. This just means that you don't have to stare across at some stranger while you eat. It's not sad, like some people seem to think. They already have these things in lots of cafes. I'm not even sure why this is news...

I never understood why people think natto is smelly. I don't think it smells particularly strongly. And it's pretty flavorful, you can just plop a serving on a bowl of rice to make a quick meal.

CPU and GPU are important and all, but where you really need to research brand and models is your HDD. We don't think about it since they're fairly uniform in terms of price and performance, but nothing else can cause the disaster a HDD failure can. If your RAM fails you can just swap in a new DIMM and be good to…

Wait.... what's the horizontal resolution? The article doesn't say. Is the whole screen a 16:9 1920×1080? In that case each eye is only getting 960x1080, right? I guess that's a lot better than the 640 x 800 it had before, but not quite "HD" as most people think of it.

This. These are the only games that have ever actually scared me or creeped me out.

The virtual theater itself is kind of silly, but delivering a movie theater big screen experience to people at home could be huge. I would never go to the movie theater again!

Not totally sold, because I still want to see reviews and such, but art has definitely strongly drawn me towards a game.

So characters can have more flaps of fabric hanging off now! Wheee...

This looks like a pretty good game, and probably the kind of game I'd actually enjoy... but I'm just getting tired of post-apocalyptic settings. It's been so overplayed. And from the screenshots this game seems to follow the unspoken agreement that everything in the post-apocalypse must be grey and brown.

Man, I wouldn't mind playing more games like this. I love full 3D worlds, but these games were artistic and gorgeous and interesting. And fun! I bet they cost a lot less to make too.

Hmm, a lot of this is probably driven by ratings boards. Having a tobacco or alcohol or sexual reference can get you bumped up into a more mature rating. And if a developer is on the edge of a rating, naturally they'll want to try to nudge their game into the more kid-friendly rating in order to broaden their…

It's not that I care less about games as I get older, it's just that my interest has become much more focused. I used to try to play EVERYTHING: everything I read about, or a friend recommended, or was popular or whatever. And I used to try hard to get good enough to be competitive in multiplayer. Now I have a much…

Some of these are OK actually. The egg vs. eggs on face one is trying to explain plural usage. Japanese only rarely uses pluralizers so it can be confusing; the illustration shows what an native English speaker would understand if you say that, which is why it's absurd.

I always had Wrex along, and Wrex is hilarious, in a deadpan way. He's like a homicidal Eeyore. The elevator rides were a bit long, but almost every time there was something that made me laugh.

I love JRPGs, but I think they'd be a lot more palatable if they would just get rid of the "zoom to battle" (loading the separate battle map) and "victory" (counting up loot and xp, and reloading the field map). It's just a few seconds each time, but over the course of a 40-50 hour game you fight a LOT of battles,…