Busy busy busy of late. I've not managed a round of FTL all week long. It's been NBA playoffs (go Portland!), work, and Rocksmith 2014.

Yeah, Gamecube F-Zero rocked.

I watched some video of Goat Simulator, and was seriously dismayed at the complete lack of any serious Goat Simulation. Where is the desperate search for enough grass, or cloth, or tin cans, or anything even vaguely chewable? Where is your calorie-count health meter? Where is the rumination mini-game? When do you…

For me, the martial arts quest was pathetically easy . . . because I played that game as a punch-specialist. I almost never used a weapon, any weapon, from the very start, and had an unarmed around 200. The game was clearly not expecting someone with my level of bare-fisted badassery, because anytime there was a…

I could, but it would be awfully hard to code the drinks into the game, and I'd probably have to work out a licensing arrangement with Amazon to have them automatically delivered by heli-drones at the right moment.

For those interested, see my even longer discussion of Betrayer at my wordpress blog, Something Interesting. Betrayer Keeps you in the Dark

For FTL, no matter what ship you start with, by the mid-game you kinda have to go with what you find. Lots of good beam weapons? Well, you're kind stuck with a beam weapon run. That kind of thing. You just can't choose your layout with any certainty, because you never know what you're going to get. As a result,…

I've been working my way through the StarCraft 2 Wings of Liberty campaign, and have completed all the vaguely interesting side-missions and am now getting close to the end game. It was more interesting, tactically speaking, at the beginning, but it's not terribly towards the end.

Venture Capitalists demand it, to cash out their investment. If you get early backing from VC, you're going to go public this way, because that's what they want you to do.

Yeah, the whole thing is pretty cliche, but somehow the gameplay just works.

On my first playthrough, I'd gotten almost halfway through it. I think halfway, as I'd done a lot, but still hadn't found a boss. Then I had to stop playing that game, and re-start entirely once the PC version was released. It's all be re-do since then, but I'm pretty nervous about actually moving forward. Blarg.

Not only is it beautifully strange, but the game was really happy to follow through on the consequences of your character design decisions. I played a dumb as bricks warrior dude, and at the end of the game, he understood very little about what had happened, and probably wasn't all that happy about where he ended up.

No, it didn't, because you were never allowed to really see Caeser's lands, and how things were sorta okay there. You heard rumors here and there, but never saw enough to know anything first-hand - well, except for all their awful points. You saw those pretty clearly. While on the other hand, helping the NCR felt…

I hadn't thought of that at all, but you're totally right. Damn, that setting is so ridiculously insane.

I'll be continuing with the StarCraft 2 campaign. Amazingly enough, I'm still liking it. The Campaign is not at all the same game as "real Starcraft," the PvP melee modes, and that's a big strength. It's an interesting and enjoyable thing in and of itself, and I think they'd have had a much better time selling and…

These guys drew the wrong inspiration. Instead of remaking Gauntlet out of the bones of Diablo, they should remake it from the bones of Dark Souls.

Oh, and as for what I'm playing this week? I've got a whole lot on my plate. Thanks to some of the tips from last week, I actually got Dark Souls working, and managed to remember how to play it and make progress again. Yay! It seems like a lot of people here are playing Dark Souls this week, in prep for Dark Souls…

Living in Japan, I've dealt with a fair number of console titles in Japanese. Now, I'm not stupid. I would only buy titles that were action-oriented, because moving and hitting stuff are usually pretty easy to figure out. I know better than to get "In-Depth Story RPG 18" in a Japanese edition because I won't be…

I find that the question of "game length" results in some seriously non-comparable situations, especially when it comes to strategy games.

Yes, I too found that the right hat was especially important in NV. I knew, from a min/max perspective, that I should wear the combat helmet that I found, but it just looked stupid, and I wanted to wear . . . just about anything else.