Every time I pick up SotC again I get weirded out by the controls for a while, it takes time to adjust.

The gameplay gets more involved as you progress, having to figure out each Colossus' individual weakness and then use it to your advantage.

I'd say the game's a slow burn and you should try to enjoy the atmosphere and mood rather than the textures. Maybe playing the original would have been better.

Pretty much every HD remake I've played so far paled in comparison to SW HD. SotC was one of those games I could only play once. Every time I try to replay it I run out of steam by the third or fourth Colossus depending. It's a pretty game and the controls are one of the things about it I'm fond of, but it's got minimal replayability.

I just finished playing OFF, some game made in RPGmaker years ago that was apparently just translated in english from french recently. It was okay, I guess. Didn't like the combat system, but the puzzles were pretty fun. The character designs were nice, too. I want to say I liked the story, but really it just feels like something I've seen time and time again but with different visuals and character names so it doesn't come across as anything special.

This game made me feel really ill. I liked it, it was well made and the music ruled but something about it made me want to throw up and at one point I actually did. No joke. So I'd recommend it.

I've been playing Metal Gear Solid 4. It was pretty much the only reason I wanted a PS3 in the first place and while I'm glad I'm finally hunkering down to complete it there are WAY TOO MANY cutscenes and the whole thing feels like a bunch of bastards taking advantage of Snake for really stupid reasons. Despite the fact that the last time he let someone inject him with a mysterious needle in resulted in his body getting more fucked up than anything imaginable he still lets a complete stranger inject him with even more shit so that he can buy guns from that man on a SNEAKING MISSION for absolutely no reason. And I don't know why there is an autistic child hanging around a sexual deviant and a diseased old soldier but this whole narrative has really overstayed its welcome. MGS is great for having the only stealth gameplay I actually enjoy but having to sit through hours of plot for like 30minutes of actual gameplay is getting REALLY fucking old. Just makes me want to play Peace Walker and kidnap people.

@Mac - Not taking the piss, just curious: How can an RPG make you puke? Was it motion sickness? Something to do with the way it was made, or the graphics?

The guy who made MGS would make a great politician judging by how his games ramble on and on seemingly about not very much...

Anyway, for those people wanting more Half-Life 2, today I played through the directors cut edition of the HL2: Ep 1 mod, MINERVA: Metastasis. Shame I missed it back in the day, but it's recently been released on Steam. It's such high quality and lasts long enough for it to feel like an official chapter of HL2 rather than a mod. No wonder the guy who made it ended up being employed by Valve.

It's very much worth playing, give it a try. :)

Already played MINERVA ages ago, yeah it's a pretty fun mod. Very detailed and well designed, it's like a missing HL2 chapter.

I've been playing Poker Night 2. I'm terrible at poker. either that, or I'm just very unlucky.

Poker Night 2 is hilarious, GLaDOS makes the game for me.

Still playing Fez. The novelty has worn off quite a bit now and while it's still addictive and fun, some aspects of it are getting a little tiresome.

Still playing Fire Emblem Awakenings. It's pretty much perfect and I'm currently late-game tweaking my team. My most powerful units are Nowi (My personal second favourite), currently a level 15 Gryphon Riding immortal dragon. Donnel (Her husband), currently a level 20 Hero farmboy. Nah (Their immortal kid from the future), a level 21 Manakete and Lucina (My personal favourite), a level 5 Great Lord already tweaked to have that gamebreaking skill where you can move twice a turn if you kill an enemy. Also Nintendo of America sees fit to suggestively censor innocuous butt shot in game where there are at least five ways to commit incest and you can marry your best friend's daughter from the future less than half an hour after cooing over her as a baby girl.

I also 'acquired' Mother 3, which according to a lot of people is the Best Thing Ever. It's very charming and off to a good start on that.

I've been playing World of Warcraft vanilla on a private server with some friends. Fun stuff. Very nostalgic. Strong community, too. It's nearly identical to the Blizzard servers from 2006 if you get past the minor bugs.

Oh yeah, a girl I like talked me into starting a free-to-play MMO called TERA. It's pretty terrible, but by no means the worst thing I've done to get a girl's attention.

There's literally only one thing I know about that game and I bet you can guess what it is.

It's TERAble?

It got caught in a censorship scandal over its use of anime-inspired oversexualised little girls as a playable race. With bunny ears.

I'm not suggesting there's an 'appropriate' level for pre-teen girls in media to be sexualised, but the developers could at least exercise some subtlety. In the original Korean version they ran around in bikinis and fishnet stockings. In the American and European versions they're legally obligated to wear shorts. They still wear skimpy dresses and stiletto heels though, as well as having idle animations that more resemble lapdancing.

The silliest thing is that they were originally just the female members of a fluffy raccoon-people race. Then someone on the development team remembered they were selling this game to slightly asocial young Korean men, and the dryad-like "perpetually youthful guardians of nature" image got thrown out in favour of nekomimi and maid costumes. Apparently the idea of little girls getting down-'n'-dirty with jovial rodents didn't fly with their alpha players, because now we've got two purportedly seperate races with the exact same stats and abilities, living in the same area of the map.

Oh yeah, and they're only little girls from the waist up; they've got the curvaceous thighs of a grown woman. Pretty creepy.

My brother played it for a while and according to him they have creepy quotes too.

Actually, I find their terrible voice-acting to be their only redeeming feature. I think they were supposed to sound simpering and waifish, but they turned out more like doddering old grannies.

"Make sure you get enough to eat, dear."

Oh right, it’s that game. I remember the rather negative reaction when it was first unveiled.

... Hang on, why is a girl you’re sweet on playing this? And why are you going along with it?

Because she's much, much more of a nerd than I am,* and considers herself something of an MMO conniseur. Apparently TERA has the most fluid and dynamic combat of any MMO, whatever that means. This is the only one I've played for more than two hours, so I wouldn't know. All I know is it plays a little like Skyrim in third-person mode; You actually have to point your crosshair at the things you want to hit.

She actually plays as one of these magical lolita things; Apparently she's used to this kind of weirdness in MMOs and nowadays just finds it funny (Literally our first conversation in-game was about the constant Gainaxing of High Elf NPCs). She plays tank, so I can see a sort of humour in a frail little Barbie doll shrugging off fireballs and axeblows for a living.

As for me, it's a chance to exchange sweet nothings in the party chat. For those wondering, my avatar is some kind of grumpy old man wearing emo facepaint. And made of stone.

She also plays the trombone.

*She enjoyed Thor. Unironically.

I also tried TERA at one point. Considering how bored I usually get with MMO after a relatively short amount of time, I enjoyed TERA to some extent. To me, this was the first MMO where combat wasn't just targetting and pressing icons, so combat was slightly more interesting, but it didn't really sell the game to me. Melee combat was pretty satisfying, I would recommend going for a brutish character with a huge axe, that worked pretty well for me, so that was good while it lasted. Graphicswise, it looked neat, about as much cheesiness as I could endure.

I gave Papers Please a go. Free demo available for it, pretty addicting for a game in which you check people's passports and other documents, look for discrepancies and stamp DENIED on their visa before throwing all the papers back at their faces. That, or you allow them in to your country - not all of them try to cheat their way in. And at the end of each day, you are told how much money you earned that day, and you have to distribute it between four family members, and the money isn't always enough for everyone. Game's kinda gloomy, but I think that was the goal of the design anyway.

Far Cry 3. So far there seems to be much more direction than FC2, which was really the biggest problem with 2. I’m not sure how I feel about the RPG elements they added, but other than that the gameplay is really strong.

There’s actually a semblance of a story as well, which again is a massive improvement over its predecessor. Vaas in particular is a fantastic character.

A lot of Abe's Oddysee for my playthough. It's been a good few years since I tried the Stockyards return section and boy, It was hard. However the problem was more down to me making stupid mistakes and not timing it right; plus when I do commentary, it acts as a distraction. So for a lot of parts I just didn't talk at all. I may be able to get the good ending, we'll see. There's a lot in Rupture Farms so I should be fine.

Also playing more of Dragon Quest 8 and finally got Jessica in my party. She's pretty cool but she is seriously underpowered compared to the Hero and Yangus. Guess I'm grinding for the next few days.

She also has a skill called 'Sex Appeal'...Needless to say I've put all the points into it. :pipe:

Also, try to figure out the Bunny Suit in the Alchemy Pot. It's one of the few items that will actually change a character's appearance ingame.

Jessica is always weak. Once she starts learning some better spells she becomes much more useful. Whips are her best asset at the start, and can almost replace the Hero's boomerang after a few skill points.

If I remember correctly the difficulty stays rather stable until you return to King Trode's castle at the end of your round trip across the continent. Then the difficult starts to exponentially increase to the point where it gets a little ridiculous really.

Trodian Castle is pretty ridiculous if you don't have a million healing items, or dedicate Jessica to being a healer and pray she doesn't get killed herself. the fact that this is the first place you can consistently find metal slimes adds insult to injury. I remember going back to Trodain castle after leaving and leveling up for a while to farm metal slimes, and was pretty shocked that I'd managed to fluke my way through it before. I think I was actually KOed more times revisiting it.

The biggest jump for me was when you continent hop for the first time after getting your boat only to start encountering sabrecats, and the killer fish you find up north in the ocean. this is realyl making me want to go back to this game, but i will probably wait until my Christmas break, once I've finished school for good.

Dear Phil Fish: Arranging a puzzle so it dispenses collectables when the system clock is on the correct minute of the hour, the correct hour of the day or the correct day of the week is not good level design.

TF2 on 360, there is a small, but dedicated fanbase. There are usually at least 10ish games going on whenever I try to find one, at peak times there are upwards of 20.

There is even a smaller fanbase on the PS3 version. I find it refreshing to go back to the original TF2 sometimes :)

Okay, so since thanks to Phil Fish's marvelous level design I won't be able to get the final anti-cube for another six days, I'm going to say I've essentially finished Fez.

It started off strong, but it got very stale. I'm disappointed.

Also it came with no epilepsy warning (The first game I've seen in ages not to) and the glitch room nearly gave me a seizure and did give me a migraine. Thanks, Phil.

I think that it probably constitutes trolling more than anything.


You can change the clock on your computer/console, though.

Hahahaha!

Fuck yeah, Phil Fish!

I also finished Fire Emblem yesterday and I'll be finished Corpse Party and starting Persona 3 tomorrow.