Oh yeah. They made so many little choices that seemed totally new, but they all held together well enough that it's like playing a game from an alternate universe of game development. I love the way they handled tech levels/trees, diplomacy, mini-quests, heroes/troops, etc. etc. etc.

I would love to see a Kilmerenaissance, personally. The man's an amazing actor.

I adore EL. I never did beat it with every faction, every ending—but the fact that that was my first impulse when I started playing it says something about how I received it. The funny thing is that Endless Space didn't do that much for me; I enjoyed the spare, lonely feel to it, but there just wasn't an endgame…

Been gone for a bit because I've mostly been playing Take Care Of Our New Baby, which has deeply unrewarding gameplay on paper but is still oddly addictive in reality. Mother and baby are both healthy and DJ JR2 is hyuuuuge—at two weeks early, he weighed 8 lbs 9 ozs, and he's consistently been gaining weight 15-30%…

And how comic books aren't just for kids!

You weren't kidding. That was a great read.

Wow. Okay then. I hadn't heard any of this, and it puts his career meltdown in a whole new light. Do you (or does anyone) know what he was like to work with on Seinfeld? Weird Al said he was a machine on the set of UHF, and it sounded like a good thing at the time.

Holy crap. So not just control freak, but actually mentally unstable. Heh, that does tend to reduce the need to dissect the show's failure.

The weirdest thing to me about all of this is that I never once got the impression that Jenner actually wanted to live life in front of the camera, despite going to the effort of constantly doing so. When he was Bruce, he never seemed thrilled about that part of life with the Kardashians, and when she was Cait, she…

I was going to quote the exact same passage.

"Also apparently behind the scenes—Richards was a control freak who frequently clashed with his writers because he didn't like the tone of the scripts he was reading."

I've wondered that, many times. So often, the laugh track is dialed up to eight on a line that I literally didn't register as a joke.

I honestly don't remember/know. I tried the first level three or four times and by the second try, I was forcing myself to even launch the game. It really, really didn't go well, is what I'm saying.

Agree 100%. I was thunderstruck by RE4 on Gamecube, and when RE5 was scheduled to hit Steam I was plenty geeked—but the controls, the look-and-feel, the everything about it was just cut-rate. My anticipation was high enough that I was confused about why I never actually wanted to play it for a surprisingly long…

I'm torn on the point, because if you show me a really large game like Just Cause 2, I could poke around forever without having any sense of how far the game itself goes. At the same time, your point is fair: knowing there's something out there I missed changes how I play the game, for sure.

Shadow of the Colossus is the very first thing I thought of, too, reading this article. It uses so much empty space to establish its tone: by turns lonely, awe-inspiring and sad. In a way, it reminded me of the opening of Star Wars (Ep. 4), where the small ship flies overhead at least partially to give us a sense of…

I wonder if some inherent exoticism in the setting invites a closer look than it might otherwise get. If this was called Los Angeles, 1984 with the exact same gameplay, maybe expectations would be lower?

I think that quite of few of those games use the pixel style to replace or avoid clever/skilled art design, to their detriment. Zelda for SNES still looks wonderful to me, as a point of comparison.

That's actually what I think of with Final Fight, too. Not just the turnaround speed, but the speed in general: you punch fast, turn fast, etc. Everything feels effortless from a gameplay perspective. (So, basically the exact opposite of playing Resident Evil 5 for PC, where I felt like everything I did happened…

Pon Farr: Because when you need it, you need it now.