Club409

g? 2 is going to be free-to-play not sure how i'll be able to though looks like it'd be a bit much for my i3 laptop with integrated graphics...hmmm

black mesa was released it's a fan-made mod that let's you play a game from 1998 with technology from 2004 ok that's a simplification but you can play a big chunk of the orginal half-life with the source (half-life 2) engine the rest of the game is supposed to come out later but this mod has been in development since 2005 so most people thought it would never be released but here it is most people are saying it's pretty good i actually never played the orignal so i'm looking forward to it esp since i think half-life 2 is one of the best games evar

did i ever mention extra credits? it's a video series by a video game designer/professor that talks about game development and offers critical examination of video game stuff like a game's mechanics or a monetization scheme rather than just reviewing games i think a lot the principles from the videos could apply to most consumable media and i find them informative

Looks like I know what to get Drew for Christmas

Batman: Arkham Asylum - Beat this a couple days ago. It's really well crafted and I can see why it got all the good reviews it. There was a lot of attention to detail which maybe they were able to do since they kept you in a relatively small area for the whole game. It never felt cramped or too small though. I think the area was appropriate for the length of the game. Sometimes I think they're making big expansive areas for the sake of big expansive areas. They're not really adding anything to the experience except a sense of expansiveness. And usually detail suffers in that case. The controls were good and snappy. I enjoyed tracking down the hidden stuff. The story was OK. Joker is up to shenanigans and you have to stop him. The one area they really needed to polish up was the voice acting mainly for Batman. They apparently just mapped speech to the mouth and not the whole face and the voice actor sounded pretty disinterested the whole time. Batman's interactions were either "What happened here?...OK stay here where it's safer" or "I'm going to stop you". Also I would've liked to have been able to stalk and snatch up bad guys a bit more. You could do that every once in a while but a lot of the bad guys were clumped together so you have to just go balls to the wall brawl mode which was fine. After a while though you just wish you had some sort of AoE weapon to stun a bunch of dudes at once. There's some challenge modes that might be fun like how long can you last before you die or how quick can you take out this many bad guys but I'll prob just leave them. 4.5 out of 5 "NO just stay here"s. I've got the sequel Arkham City ready to go. I think I'm going to try the Assassin's Creed series though.