Hehe. Nicely done.

"...designed to look like the dialogue boxes from Final Fantasy III on the SNES."

Hey don't go dissing Sequence. That game was amazingly good for its price, and the combat system was legitimately interesting and challenging both as an RPG combat system and as a rhythm game. I've been hooked on music games since the first time I played the Parappa demo on a demo disc so I picked it up out of…

CK2 today is a sweet deal. Just don't get the complete pack; it's cheaper if you buy the base game and then add all the DLC separately.

It's pretty common to group sci-fi and fantasy under the umbrella term "speculative fiction," and I've always been fond of that description because it brings the thing that I love most about it to the forefront: take a what-if and explore what that means. Mass Effect definitely tries live up to that.

Me too! I think I like the world of the codex more than what you actually see in the game. So many fun ideas in there.

There's a reason I excluded "everything eezo touches" from the stuff that makes sense. It's an inherently incredible concept. Better than midi-chlorians, I guess... but then what ISN'T better than midi-chlorians?

Any additional size they added to the file was in the form of /pure awesome/.

They did their research though. Most of those little descriptions of random planets are consistent with what we know about astronomy. One example: NASA released a depiction of what a certain type of slowly dying star would look like. The Illusive Man's hideout orbits a star that looks uncannily like that NASA…

The whole "pay money for in-game currency" thing has me a little gun-shy. If they expect people are going to want to pay real money to skip parts of the game, why should I think the game itself is going to be fun to play?

You do realize that the "S" in "FPS" stands for shooter, right? My beef is not with the "first-person" part of that acronym, it's the "shooter" part. If the point of the game is fighting zombies instead of talking to people, then it's a misuse of the TWD franchise. Period.

Hehe, I'm the opposite. Given the option I almost invariably roll a mage, or whatever variation of high Int, low physical ability class is available in the system.

Mystic Quest was bad in the same way that Kirby's Epic Yarn is bad. It's a babygame. It's not made for adults to play and be challenged by, it's made for kids who don't know anything to be able to brute force their way through.

Portal 2 is most certainly not an FPS. It's a first-person puzzle game. Obviously I haven't played it yet because it's not out, but my impression of The Unfinished Swan is that it's not a shooter either. Come to think of it, I was unaware that there was disagreement on these two games up until now. There's no reason…

Really? You came up with "a good game is a series of interesting choices" all by yourself a year ago? There aren't any gaming luminaries who have their name built into a beloved and long-running franchise that you might want to give credit to? Somebody named Sid Meier, perhaps?

I think part of the problem is that high-level itemization isn't that interesting. The only qualitative improvements you get in the game are from leveling. Gear is purely bigger numbers of the same, and even those numbers aren't super interesting. You want resists, main stat, vitality. Which is kinda okay, but the…

This. All they have to do is release it as a Vita-compatible download and they're golden. It's also less risk because you don't have all the overhead of manufacturing and distributing a physical thing.

The lack of Vita messaging at E3 was even more baffling because the Vita sizzle trailer was rock solid, and there's some great-looking stuff on the horizon. But they'd rather talk about some interactive book that nobody past their tweens is going to give half a shit about. Whatever.

In a follow-up post to the one I posted (thanks @ctorre!), a Blizzard designer asserts that the game was not balanced around the auction house. That seems plausible to me up through Hell. My experience was the drops were generally sufficient if I buckled down and played smart at the beginning of act 1, when there's a…

Interestingly, the auction house itself encourages compulsive behavior. By jumping too many standard deviations up the loot curve at once, it means that you're suddenly much less likely to get a useful drop, which in turn means that there's an even bigger incentive to go to the auction house for your next upgrade…