The Dishonored thread has been really pleasantly chatty, without about as many total comments as our last 3 games combined. Good job, team!

What happens is that it descends into even further nonsense. Somehow, Time Compression takes beer's place as the cause of and solution to all of life's problem. What is time compression? NOBODY KNOWS!

Big thumbs up to XCOM, as Cheese & Monk noted. Other options:

Sounds about right, but the HMS Abnegation would just be a stagecoach that gets driven into the ocean.

My usual point of reference is St. George, wherein the dragon is just an asshole that eats pretty girls. (Basically the same as in Okami.) Not exactly the ambitious god-mode mover and shaker that modern fantasy likes to paint the beasts as.

So is it made better or worse by suggesting that Tifa is just riffing on Sandra Bullock's character in While You Were Sleeping?

I have the same problem with "dragon," which I think is part of why I've generally preferred JRPGs to WRPGs. I'd be fine if they were just big, nasty, fire-breathing lizards, but so often it feels like they're presented as gods, ancient wizards, or otherwise super-smart schemer types. Just make them bears with scales,…

Knowing how to break FF8 wide open is the one thing that tempts me to pick it up on Steam to give it another try. I don't think I could sustain that interest for an entire 50 hour playthrough, but gaming the junction system for a world-destroying Level 1 playthrough feels like a juicy prospect for my inner powergamer.

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I mostly liked X, but I found the Sphere Grid much better in theory than practice.

Maybe, but that creeps in on old-timey hockey logic, wherein you try to eliminate brawls by having a bunch of your roster be dedicated brawlers. Players are not going to police themselves to ensure their opponents' safety, and the threat of further violence as revenge is not a meaningful one when you're in the heat of…

The worst part of the Witcher sex cards is that it really is a decent idea - make one nice image instead of an incredibly silly animation. (See also: Dragon Age Origins, Fahrenheit/Indigo prophecy, et al) If they had been less porn-y (and sex itself been less of a vending machine format) it would've been perfect. This…

For SR3, a friend of mine played with the skin tone settings to make his character a giant golden Buddha statue. Combined with the zombie VA, every cutscene was amazing. (Or amazing-er, I guess)

It's kinda funny, if there's one gameplay-related issue that sticks out to me, it's that you get shown how much money you could have collected at the end of a level. And a little part of me is like "Oh no, I missed 2000 coins!" But in reality that involves killing and looting every enemy and civilian in the level.…

I'm enjoying chipping away at Dishonored as part of the Steam review club. I spend way too long trying to 100% things - which due to the game's screwup-resistant design means that I'm really just acquiring the same clues 3 different ways - but I'm having a grand old time with it. Somewhere along the way as I blinked…

And even Wynne is kind of iffy. At least in Origins, she talks constantly about being too old, but she's only vaguely wrinkled and still uses the standard Barbie doll character model.

I've only seen excerpts, but I really appreciate how different they were willing to make the 2099 line. The 90s were a boom time for comics and added a ton of new characters across the board, but I have to appreciate any time the Big 2 try something legitimately new, even if they have to couch it in existing brands…

Sort of. Most notably, "Now we are all sons of bitches" is a famous Manhattan Project quote that actually appears in the game. And doesn't catching the princess at the end trigger a bomb noise? Anyway, my point is that the basic references were never really that hidden.

It's difficult to get too much into detail for fear of spoilers, which almost feels like a spoiler in and of itself. But the original Deus Ex treated augmentation as somewhere between elaborate gauges/piercings & elective Tommy John surgery. It was a thing you could do, with upsides and downsides, but it was pretty…

Deus Ex: Human Revolution leans on this theme particularly hard, if you haven't played it.