The Bard

You mean contradiction? Anyway, bad stuff: I've fuck all to do since uni finished, and I moved back to Manchester, which due to three years of neglect, doesn't seem to want me anymore =(. Also, my parents moved to Saudi Arabia, so I genuinely don't have anyone to hang out with/ abuse. I'm slowly forgetting how to speak. Halp.

Yeah, take everyone elses reccommendations if you like the generic create as many units as you can and then send them en mass to your oponents base type of RTS which was outdated the very day Company of Heroes came out. CoH is so amazing because there is a multitude of responses to any given situation; is your command post being besieged by enemy tanks? Well then, call in a Howitzer artillery bombardment, or upgrade your infantry with Panzershreks, or set up a minefield, or flank and attach C4 to the rear of the tanks, or set up a mortar team, or make tank traps. Everything in the world of warfare is available to you, and its perfectly balanced. So yeah, take Starcraft, if you like flat battle plains in which you partake in not much more than a complicated game of rock-paper-scissors, or take CoH, in which there is actual verticality, and a sort of tactical emergence that really doesn't exist in any other RTS, where after a match is done, you look at your battlefield and see the outright carnage you caused as the blown up tanks and burnt out tenements give you an actual sense that something happened here, and you were the cause of all that badassery.

Shorty is being overly charitable. This game has its tongue firmly stapled to the butthole of bad game design and taste.

I think my arc over the time I've been here has left me perhaps a slightly more sympathetic character than I started off as. Or maybe its all in my head. I think recently I've made an effort to come across as I really am, although with the limitations of text in mind. Weirdly, even though recently I've spent less time on these boards, there are people on here who I like to think I'm "friends" with, alhough it might be difficult to tell since I think I have a bit of a dry manner at times.

I think I'm just a bit difficult to get to know. I give off the wrong initial impression, and then when people think they know me I let all the crazy out. A pretty face can only compensate so much

I think its mostly because ReZ infantile brain can't handle the logical awesome contained within those games .

Logic fail on my part. Anyway, looking forward to seeing y'all again. Maybe we should hold off on the liquor in order to make the inevitable trip to Trocadero more eventful/ memorable. Although last years larceny/ Street Fighter fail was great.

People just don't like things that make them ruminate, or that hold up a mirror to their ugly, banal lives so that they can confront and contemplate their depravity. In other news, Lost in Translation is my favourite movie, so maybe I'm not licensed to make that call.

Wait what? Why is this ish cancelled?

I miss my ex a great deal, but we we're inevitably going to break up since she's moving back to Singapore. Intimate relationships are weird. Sometimes just by being with a person you bring out the best in yourself, maybe because what you do and what you are is held accountable to not only yourself, but will affect someone else, who you often care about more than yourself. Anyway, I've been having difficulty with women recently, mostly just the fact that I can't seem to take to any of them without the internal caveat that it will never go anywhere because I have a very... particular personality. Although there was a fucking fiasco at my mates uni formal where me and one of his friends got a bit too "intimate" behind the smoking reservation. I was well drunk and got a bit... handsy, which was fucking embarrassing when a dean walked around the corner and caught us. I think I'm traumatised for life.

I'm always sceptical whenever someone responds to a question regarding preferences with the idea that they like "everything" or are "open minded," since the structures of our brains are designed to foster an increasingly embedded series of predispositions. The older we get, the more entrenched and encultured our minds are. Open minded with severe inherent limitations would be a better description. I like to try things, sure, but I often make up my mind very quickly upon first exposure - to a food or a band for example - although I'm not disrespectful of other peoples predispositions, unless they're glaringly small minded. ...more vagaries.

I think they look great, a step up from Fallout, even though I played that game on full settings on PC. The true improvement is the fact that your character looks and animates like he has some real physical connection to the world, rather than the shit poor collision detection, stiff and robotic characters, and the way you seemed to just slide over the land as if on traction resistant roller blades. Lets just hope that they continue with the theme and don't just populate the world with clusters of blatantly autistic people. The amount of times you hear "Hail" and "Well met!" and other such bullshit makes the game seem like it was written by a mentally addled member of the society of creative anachronisms.

All you Starcraft 2 Hoes can stfu, its a rehash of a 13 year old game. If you want to play pretty well the best RTS every crafted, go and get Company of Heroes.

That's cool, your interpretation is completely valid, and I guess thats the thing with videogames even more so than other media; one persons experience can differ wildly from anothers, especially in a game that tries to offer something in the vein of non-linearity and a large open world. I guess some of the things that you really appreciated about it were the same things that I thought could have been more refined.

I don't think it was that rich and detailed, rather, it just rode on the fact that its easy to make an undeveloped jungle environment look varied, whereas to me it looked more like a muddle of repeating textures and tree models, with messed up enemy AI that somehow had hawk vision without even facing your direction. I guess thats a Far Cry tradition, but still, in 2008 it can fuck off. It also made the actual gameplay devolve into a binary Snipe from far away, or go in close for all out full automatic warfare. Not to mention the overwhelming tedium of having to return to the faction bases to turn in your quests, as well as the mind numbing journeys to and from locations, that were only made worse by your jeep's tendancy to start smoking and subsequently explode after so much as a gentle brush with a tree. On top of that, there really was no political choice you could make, since you had to complete missions from both factions in order to progress, essentially making the theme of choice or player agency completely moot. It was over-long, the shooting was unrefined, the most interesting mechanic - that of fire - was made useless by the fucking awful enemy AI and all in all, yeah, it was an interesting place to visit, for a couple of hours, but it was not somewhere you would want to stay.

I think between this, Battlefield 3 and Bioshock Infinite, its time for a PC upgrade. And Gaggle, FC2 was promising, but the mission structure and faction war stuff was so janked it sorta hampered the experience.

All you need to know. This is gonna stink something fierce.

Funny as in humourous, or funny as in "ooh that's a bit funny..."?

Fucking finally. Looks like they're fixing everything that was busted about the Elder Scrolls games =D.

"In the interest of time..." Hilarious way to indicate that your game is boring as fuck. Next time, just skip the whole thing.

Yeah man, it was straight up dick. Imagine a modern version of Duke Nukem 3D except without the benefit of nostalgia or the initial novelty of flushing the shitter and shooting pool with demented physics and getting a kick out of it. On top of that, it, graphically, not to mention in terms of art design looks about on par with the Serious Sam games, and has no place in this decade. Gearbox's otherwise pristine rep is being beshitted by association with this malodourous turd of a game. This is the problem. Duke Nukem is from the era when Bart Simpson was offensive. Fuck all that.

That demo was such a piece of shit. I hope this game tanks.

I'm mostly just looking forward to new announcements (Half Life 2: Episode 3 has to be there. Regardless of the fact that Valve sent out a press release that they're not gonna be showing any games), but as far as games I already know are gonna be there; 1. Bioshock Infinite 2. Batman: Arkham City 3. Battlefield 3 4. Skyrim (I've always actively disliked the Elder Scrolls games, but this, just from the trailer, looks like it will be rectifying everything that I considered to be faulty with the series). 5. Gears of War 3 - almost entirely for the multiplayer, which I know that I'm going to be getting massively into, hopefully with whatever community of N-E players that springs up around it. 6. The Darkness 2 - Through the original was a very well told story, even though it was mechanically pretty awful. Starbreeze aren't on it any longer though, so I have some reservations. 7. New Tomb Raider. Looks HOT. 8. RAGE 9. Street Fighter X Tekken 10. Whatever ancient dregs the fucknuts at Nintendo come up with and repackage at a premium, for that useless blue brick I've got sitting in my bottom drawer 200 miles away.

Oh fuck yes. This is gonna occupy at least 80% of my soundscape for the next week =D.

Oh fuck that, Family Guy is awful.