Is that what was going on there? I remember a long panning shot over the hellscape, but could never figure out what the heck was going on … when I re-watched the movie in my late teens or early 20's.

I dove back into XCOM2. I added the Long War enemies pack, the Long War classes pack, and the Long War interface pack, along with the Shen's Last Gift DLC. I'm also playing on "normal" difficulty. The game is substantially different right from the start, and I am totally enjoying it. These were the first…

PC gaming has been a wash this week. I've been all over the place trying to find something to fill the aching gap that XCOM2 left in my life, especially since it's now summer break and I do not have the monotony and routine of work to fill the hours, leaving the lonely pointlessness of my life bare to see.

Oh, and my Let's Play series on the Memoir '44 boardgame got, like, at least a hundred hits, so there!

I really enjoyed the scanning minigame. I know it was silly padding, deep down, but it FELT like something a space captain might do - or at least delegate to a space underling - and it felt like "Space Science!", so it really added a lot to the game for me. But I'm a sucker for that crap.

Interesting. I had totally, completely different hopes for the final DLC, and was rather disappointed in what I got. I would have been happy to have Solas off moping in the woods, bothering no one — I really didn't care much at all about his story. What absolutely fascinated me was the thought that Corypheus had…

Oh, come on, strategy is not a dead genre. It's more alive than it's been in years. It is not a big genre, or a mainstream genre, but strategy games are being made in reasonable quantity and of great quality.

This has a serious puzzle game tacked on to it, with text-coding as its primary method of interacting with the world. So, mechanically, it is nothing like the previous games.

Sigh … Level 1 …

Yeah, Halo really nailed shooters for the console. Goldeneye worked, but it was awkward and Nintendo. Halo was the model followed forever after.

I found the combat really interesting, but there was JUST TOO MUCH of it, all the same, over and over. It's clearly setting up a problem of character survival and management, except you can always just start new heroes at level 1 and grind them up to snuff again, meaning that all problems eventually just reduce to…

Good luck with Call of Cthulhu! I found that I was far, far too lenient of a GM to run the game, which meant that my players were routinely spared the depths of cosmic horror. May your game be truly horrific, and kill everyone in truly random and meaningless ways, representing the utter pointless of human existence…

We don't let books get away with it. If a book follows a strong plot, and than just ends without resolving that plot, there is a problem.

I loved XCOM2. Great game.

I disagree, at least somewhat. Yes, the gameplay should have been a worthwhile experience in and of itself, so that reaching the end is not the goal but rather the finish line. Yes, of course.

I beat XCOM2 last week, and have been at a loss of where to go next. I want to take a bit of a break before playing through the game again on a real difficulty level (I played my first game on Rookie, because I heard it was hard. I enjoyed myself, so mission accomplished!), so I've been looking for something else to…

No. Golden Axe revolutionized the brawler genre and added all kinds of cool new stuff. This game was just awful.

As predicted, I finished Hadean Lands. Wonderful game, but the ending was a "I want to be artistic so I'll make an ambigious ending that implies the eternal cycle of life without actually doing so for real, becasue that would be telling" sort of thing, so oh well.

Or homosexuality. The book is incredibly vague.

I am just about to finish up Hadean Lands, the space alchemy interactive fiction game. It has been absolutely incredible, and is the first puzzle/adventure game I can say that I have found truly enjoyable. As I have said many, many times — I normally hate puzzles, but there is something about the straightforwardness…