I need to get on that Desert Skirmish exploit. Right now I'm stuck on the battle with the Evil-Nazi-Valkyria woman when she's got a giant M60 for some reason. It's tough stuff.

I know I'm buried way down at the bottom and I'm super late to the party but I'm enjoying the fluff out of Hotline Miami 2. I'm about half-way through and while the rhythm of the combat is a bit different, it's still the best ultra-violence sim on the market by a long shot. Nothing like throwing an empty shotgun at…

As someone who hit the end game of Valkyria, saw all the grinding required to advance and said "Naw, I'm good." I'm wondering where you get the strength to muscle on?

I'm about 2/3rds through Valkyria Chronicles and am still enjoying it. It's got great gameplay but moves at a pretty glacial pace, seeing as you have to watch enemies do every little thing on their turn. Still, there's a lot of different factors to take into consideration during gameplay including ones that I'm…

You read that interview with the Far Cry 3 guy on Rock Paper Shotgun right? God, did that guy come across as a twat. He basically pulled the "No, I *meant* to fall flat on my ass!" line. It was such a shitty story and there wasn't an ounce of satire present. It's one of the few interviews with a creator where I…

Final Fantasy Tactics for the PS1 is even better than it's amazing Advance cousin. There's a higher amount of jobs available for your team and the storyline is somehow even crazier than FFT:A's wacky "kids traveling through a storybook" setup.

Wipeout's appeal for me is 50% amazing aesthetic 50% what felt like white knuckle fast gameplay at the time. I played it on the ol' PS1 so at the time it was like something from a hyper-sleek future. I'm sure like the early Resident Evil games it now is a relic of the past but at the time it felt like you were…

I wish there was a way to cut the Oscars out of the cultural conversation. Pretty much anybody who cares about movies knows that they're a joke and in no way reflective of a film's quality (usually more reflective of Harvey Weinstein's ability to badger people), but here we are talking about how they suck for the…

Yeah, "illusory choice" is an insult that is often unfairly hurled at Telltale's Walking Dead Season 1. (Haven't finished Season 2 so don't know if people say that as well). But to address your point, you're right, a lot of people think they want a game that splits off into hugely different stories based on choice,…

Paragon is basically the "can you handle a team mate being briefly annoyed at you" choice every time, and I'm glad they had at least one instance of it backfiring. I played mostly Paragon on my fem-shep run (aside: it is always weirdly disconcerting seeing what other people's fem-sheps look like. My brain always…

Mine is to buy fewer games. I'm one of the people who treats Steam like a game itself where the goal is to hoard as many games as possible and every steam sale I walk away with games that I will likely never even install, and that's not to talk about the stupid amount of bundles I buy.

A delightful game with a surprisingly affecting story. Also one of the few games that has interested my decidedly non-gamer wife.

I watched last year and enjoyed parts of it but this year haven't had the time (I saw they were doing Metroid Prime too…).

I was gonna suggest you pickup the Orange Box for PS3 which has TF2 (dead serves now), Half-Life 2 and Portal but it looks like it's hit "collector's status on Amazon. Still maybe you're local gameshop has it cheap.

It might be that I'm just addicted so I have a pavlovian response to the celtic acoustic licks in the Hearthstone soundtrack, but nothing goes perfectly with a glass of wine and a card game where I routinely get my ass handed to me like upbeat celtic music.

One of the first I ever bought was the PS1 Adventure game Heart of Darkness. I remember being sold on it's rapturous tv ad (https://www.youtube.com/wat… which mentioned that the game took 5 years to make! Being a young succeptible kid, I thought that obviously meant it was the most important game ever made and…

I'm sitting on a big ol' bountiful backlog so of course I bought Valkyria Chronicles and Volgaar the Viking in the Humble Store yesterday. Luckily I will be away from my main gaming pc during the holidays so I won't binge spend on games I won't play for years during the Steam Sale.

Yeah hackneyed isn't the perfect word but it's such a fun word to throw at bad books. James Woods, in his scathing review for the New Yorker, touches on what you mentioned with it being over writtern, by pointing how all the characters make "Christmas Cracker jokes" and over-stylized descriptions leading to all the…

Did you ever feel that it suffered from cliches or shallow characters at any point? I loved Cloud Atlas and Thousand Autumns so was pumped to get to Bone Clocks, but I found that the writing was so cliched that it hurt the experience greatly. Especially the second section, with the sociopath undergrad. One minute…

The Bone Clocks is really bad. It was so bad that it made me reconsider the opinions I had on Cloud Atlas and the Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet. It's characters were so shallow you couldn't drown a puppy in them. It's writing was so cliched and hackneyed I had to literally put the book down and walk away mid…