The Pulse Rifle from the original, ancient Alien vs. Predator game was the single best gun I can remember using in any FPS. Good fire rate, next to no recoil, accurate, kick-ass under-barrel grenade launcher, and aliens popped when you hit them. This was one of the very few futuristic FPS guns I can remember that…

Old School, motherfucker!

I have been playing the exact same games as last week, because I'm really busy IRL. Offworld Trading Company Campaign is bloody hard. Mostly, beating the damn Sabotage companies is hard. Grr. Space Run, the tower-defense spaceship game, is still a lot of fun. And Dungeon of the Endless is great.

Far Cry 2. Everybody was trying to kill you, in an awful place, where people were doing incredibly awful things, and where you were profiting by messing up their awful plans yet making things even worse in the process.

I never owned a NIntendo console until pretty late, and was entirely unaware of Kirby until I encountered the character in the N64 Smash Brothers in the college rec room. I instantly picked him, because he seemed so utterly and perversely wrong. An evil pink balloon whose power grows by consuming the souls of the…

If it's a game I plan on replaying, then I think of a defining characeristic of what I'm doing this time, and choose that as my name. Then I add higher numbers.

That would really need to be an Oculus Rift launch title, billed as the first video drinking game.

Yeah, the new schedule is really bumming me out.

So as usual this is a day late, because they keep moving the post time around just after I get it figured out for my bizarro-world Japanese time zone. For a brief, glorious period, it was routinely up for comment during my two-period break on Friday afternoon, perfect time for commenting. Then it moved up to just…

As someone who both enjoys sim-games, and who never under any conditions every experiences motion sickness (12 foot swells on a small boat? Not problem! What's for lunch?), I am totally stoked to get an Oculus when it's properly released.

I don't understand the two-ply fetish. They're more or less the same, but one is a vastly better deal, and less likely to clog the toilet.

I do suppose that it fits with the fiction, though. Mages are supposed to be super-dangerous and all, so it makes sense that they kill in combat. Also, the old-school RPG influences push things in that direction as well - in AD&D 1st, 2nd, and 3rd edition, mages are horribly OP.

I haven't played much recently, as sucking horribly at real life has been taking up a lot of time.

Permadeath FarCry 2 would be a lot more fun if the game wasn't so goddamn long.

A mid-stakes RPG where there is no giant world-ending quest, and rather a bunch of "important for ordinary people" sorts of problems, would be really cool. Problems that veer from crime-story type rivalries of money and love, to political wrangling involving the main character and party members, to a simple focus on…

I'm not normally one for puzzle games of any sort, so it was cruelly ironic that the one puzzle game I can remember getting into had a thoroughly awful ending that seemed like it might have been sponsored by an off brand I'd never heard of.

In my opinion, fast travel is a blight on the genre. Too many games try to make events and settings seem huge and epic by creating a huge map, but then minimize the feel of that map by allowing the player instant and consequence free travel across it. However, it is a blight that is a gameplay necessity so long as…

That would be similar to the "strategy wargame" version of DAI that I fantasized about while playing it.

I actually ran up into the building and tried to save him from the ghouls. I failed.

Tow truck logic, as in "we can just move those cars with a tow truck, and save everybody?" I love that shit. I tend to think in a direct and often brute-force manner about puzzles, leading to an eternal frustration with most adventure games and a fair number of RPG's, when they set up stupid problems that could be…