The Bard

Was a massive fan of the first two games, the second especially since they complicated it a little bit more and made it even more dance like. Skipped the third and throught the fourth was pretty junky, especially since by that time I'd moved on to the far far superior VF4 and Street Fighter 4 was around the corner as well. Hopefully Namco capitalise on the resurgence of the genre and put lil bit more effort into it, because a good Soul Calibur game would be so sweet.

Yeah, well if you've listened to Splash Damage's head, Paul Wedgewood on an old GFW or something, the dude blatantly has ADD, so the game was always going to be a little scattershot.

ReZ, are you having genuine beef with an eleven year old?

Hey ya, brohemes, first time I've been drunk in about a month. Yah rememeber the days when I'd be in the meaningless post thread posting incomprehensible babble after having my motor functions impaired by a lil booze. Anyway, what do you have to do to show a girl that you really like her? I just don't remember, although its not like I ever knew in the first place, being that I've always been too much of a pussy to ever ask anyone out. Edit; not that I really care about any given girl, just bored being single. In conclusion;

Yeah man, and it took me about half an hour to figure out how to kill that thing. In any other game, there would be some sort of feedback to indicate that your bullets were doing damage, but STALKER has that special eastern european charm, and it doesn't give a fuck

Nah, Neither Penumbra (any of em) nor Amnesia have anything on just the atmospherics of STALKER, I'm in such a nervous state at the moment. If you've played it, rememeber the part where you have to go into the underground lab, after slaughtering an entire camp of bandits for the key, and in the lab there's all this insane supernatural shit going down, backed by absolute silence apart from this really insidious low humming sound. Combine that with the fact that you're always on the fringe of panic since it takes so little to kill you, and lethality is around every corner. It really freaks me out man, never been so scared. I've already got everything that's been on the EA sale so far. I've been playing a bit of Bad Company 2 as well, its really really good, really need to get someone to show me the ropes on multiplayer, being that this is my first Battlefield game (I had BF2, but never really got into it).

Since I got my PC fixed and returned to me four days ago, I've racked up a horrendous 48.1 hours on Steam. I feel absolutely filthy. Can barely remember how to speak, and on top of that, I'm really antsy and on edge because I decided to download STALKER again and give it a spin. Without a doubt the most terrifying game I have ever played.

In the meantime get Company of Heroes. You will not be disappoint.

I don't really follow any websites. Rock Paper Shotgun is good for perusal since they have some interesting editorial, but for news, I just get it through the grapevine that is the N-E forums, and then alternate between picking up Games Tm/ Edge from the news stand every month for a delayed appraisal. Works for me.

I will. I get pretty much every worthwhile shooter for PC. Hit me up for Multiplayaaaaarz.

True, but I'm mooching one off a mate who doesn't have a Steam acc, so he's just gonna connnect his PS3 to mine.

Nah, I mean the spare you get with the PS3 version . I wanna save this for when I have a whole day set aside to do nothing but play Portal. In the mean time, I got Crysis 2, which is absolutely superb.

So, er, anyone wanna sling their free copy my way? =p. I've still yet to get it, but I'm gonna get it on PC so long as I'm sure there's people willing to give co-op a go. Any takers?

Dyed my hair, but for some reason it doesn't seem to look very red in the photo =(. Got some horrendous Steve Buscemeyes going as well.

Ah, I figured you for another posh grammar school kid . Nah don't recall those names, although I try and forget all I can about the place.

I went to Manchester Grammar School. Not far from the Manchester Uni campus actually

I did well academically, but it was still parallel to hell. I went to pretty much the poshest school in the northern part of the country, and I stood out like a sore thumb, mostly because I'm a loudmouth miscreant, and was consistently in some sort of trouble with the authorities. Also; it was an all boys school.

Yeah totally. I mean, its not a big deal in itself, except each website and publication has its own internal average and median. The fact that metacritic tries to somehow reconcile these differences shows that they understand little about the process. Then again, Metacritic is useful as a compendium of every notable opinion on a given game/movie etc. And you raised another point; I think the whole breadth of the scale should be used, rather than the vast majority of games being limited to 7-10.

No. I could see where you'd be right, if say, getting 96% would be a quantitive signification of the fact that you got 96% of whatever quantity of criteria "correct," but with game reviews, there is no such thing, since reviews are subjective, and therefore have to conform to a rubric that is imprecise and more intuitive than anything else. Maybe I should explain this in the vein of university marking schemes for Sciences VS Humanities, where in the sciences, the average grade would be located at the top end of the scale, because the students are expected to get a certain grade - which has a precise degree of quantifiability and a ceiling score ie. getting all the questions right. What I'm saying is that game reviews are more like arts essays, where there is no ceiling score, and any given batch of essays are firstly compared to the scoring rubric (which is altered through time depending on how well the students tend to perform) and secondly with each other, in order to regulate average scores - keeping them around 50%. They can do that, because there is no quantifiability. Same with games. So, we have to ask ourselves, why do the majority of games score over 7? It makes no sense to me. On top of that; most people who read reviews aren't looking to be told anything interesting, or any cool ideas and ways of looking at the game, which really begs the question, why the fuck do they read reviews in the first place. And the answer really lies in the fact that a lot of people use reviews either as a sort of proxy for their ridiculous console war mentality, or a series of bullet points regarding what the game does. The sort of thing you can get off a press release. These people would really be better off going to forum discussion, or asking their friends, since they're ruining what should be a thriving discussion about gaming.

I'm really excited to see what use they put Retro Studios to with the advent of the new hardware. Genuinely one of the most talented studio's Nintendo have under their wing.

Man, come on, be reasonable; the words in those two sentences are something you'd expect to come up in a SAT exam. I'm fairly sure, you being (I assume) fairly smart, can understand everything said in there without any difficulty. On top of that even if you haven't encountered the words before, it doesn't stop you from being able to contextualise them and infer what they mean. Also, we're not confusing the distinction between average and median; what we're saying is that often times, when reviews in the body of the text portray a game as being mediocre, even tedious, and then plaster a 75% at the end, it gives cause for bafflement. This is, as I've said before, an abstraction, since a score that would numerically signify mediocrity (ie. averageness) should veer towards the center of the scale. The fact that it doesn't for some publications, and does for others completely throws off any attempt to come to an aggregate. Pretentious, ie. Pretending to something. You're not pretending when the language reflects what you mean, sincerely, and that you're more articulate than your audience should be a given when you're a writer.

Neither of those summaries strike me as even remotely "pretentious," I think that word is bandied about so frequently that people forget what it actually fucking means. Those summaries make perfect sense to me. The fact that "a reviewer like that wouldn't be in business long" is more emblematic of the fact that the majority of people that read videogame reviews are borderline illiterate.

Confirmation bias.

And all is well with the world.

Does anyone have the skinny on what old Gameboy games they're planning to release via the E-Store?