The most fun I had in this version of the game is finding all the secrets. Some are quite well-hidden, and while the game is suffering from sequalitis, it's still enjoyable. Actually when it came to the previous Mario game on 3DS, the 2D/3D platformer hybrid Super Mario 3D Land... it suffered from the lack of secret levels IMO.

And it's challenging enough to not be dull, I was actually worried it would be too easy. Even if it hands you 1-ups like candy but nearly all Mario games suffers from that anyway.

____________________

Valve does it right.

Make me feel part of the world, do not make me feel that I'm watching a movie. In Valve games control is rarely stripped off the player, and when it does it's cause of your player character being helpless by one reason or another. Sure sometimes the freedom is a illusion, but it tend to work better than watching a movie.

Most of the time the ingame cutscenes aren't completly jarring, but I do admit there is plenty of scenes in games like Deus Ex Human revolution that could as well be done as ingame conversations.

____________________

Posted by Marzen the Red Nosed Liontree

---

You want to know what the worst thing in the world is? Or maybe how I say the worst way people handle something is? Passwords. Passwords are the biggest bullshit ever.

---

I came to realization of this while searching for jobs hilariously, some jobs want you to sign up to a job application website first and some of those have the most annoying password rules ever.

Or when there is a ridiculously low character limit, which is what my bank have, max six characters! Thankfully all you can do with a password is seeing the account balance and move money between your own accounts so the worst someone who breaks in can do is denying you interest I guess, but I can't help but think the low limit is there for some legacy backend reason. For anything more proper you are required to use a "Security token" anyway.

____________________

I love how you're balancing a potentially unfair enemy by just making it steal coins. Certainly makes the encounter with said boo less frustrating, but still discourages you from letting him touch you.

Posted by DahrkDaiz

---

I said fuck it and ramped up the difficulty. The game was getting boring to create for so I decided to hell with people who will whine, I want this game to be harder than typical Nintendo fare.

---

As long it's stays fair I don't mind. When a game is hard for the wrong reasons it just turns dumb and frustrating (like having to make blind jumps).

____________________

Since I'm mainly a PC gamer, next-gen for me means that games that are ported amongst all platforms would at least pressure my computer a bit more. Though there are already a few games that uses more high-res and high poly assets on the PC port than other versions to take care of the additional horsepower (Far Cry 3 and Skyrim comes to mind).

Sony will probably still hype about their next-gen consoles being used as supercomputers or something as usual (for that matter, PS3 has been considered pointless to run anything processing intensive for years now, your average cheap 50 usd gpu does a way better job now). Sony kinda screwed up the current generation of console, though they did somewhat mend it in the end and have allegedly passed x-box 360 sales now?

The Touchpad thing I'm eh. Touchpads were kind of cool when the DS used it as few people had a handheld with touchpad save for people with PDA's. Nowadays it's pretty much everywhere thanks to smartphones and isn't as novel anymore (I see this reflected in Nintendo's advertising with the less emphasis on touch). I can see it work if it's combined with a LCD display, but it would also make the controllers more expensive.

Wii U is something I want to pick up at some point for the 1st party Nintendo titles. For everything else, I honestly tend to find on PC anyway.

I'm curious about Valve's SteamBox too, which will be basically be a "easy to use" PC, probably a nice hybrid between the console and PC scene, with hints towards it would be basically a "open" platform meaning that anyone could make their own. So far Big Picture mode for Steam and Steam Linux are two things that came out of the Steambox thing. Linux is far preferable for Valve to use as a base as it saves them license costs, at least that is my suspicion seeing how much they're pushing Linux right now.

This generation of consoles have been unusually long so they all have been way behind tech wise. When Wii was first released, not having HD wasn't a big deal as just a few enthusiasts had it, now nearly everyone have a HD LCD TV at home, and SD CRT TV's are good as dead nowadays.

____________________

Posted by Scrydan

---

So there's this issue where my sound would randomly go to 0. Turns out there's as really stupid DEFAULT setting that "attempts to be helpful" by lowering sound if it detects communication.

---

That "feature" is in Windows 7, and probably (but i'm just guess) was in Vista as well. So it's not really a Windows 8 specfic issue. Sure is annoying but not exactly a new problem, and you can at least disable it.

From what I heard, Windows 8 isn't too bad as long you just ignore the metro UI. Maybe it's something I grab when I get a new computer, but I don't see a point in upgrading from Windows 7 for the time being, especially with it having mainstream support for two more years (btw Win XP will stop being supported fully next year so if you're still using that, it's time to look into upgrading).

____________________

The advantages over using other architectures over x86 is less nowadays than before, which is why you're seeing Sony moving over it to not (and same reason why Apple ditched PowerPC in favor of it, probably saving a ton of money on it at the same time). Especially the x64 instruction set is apparently quite competent I heard, but since I don't do assembly on the x86 architecture I wouldn't know for sure.

Wonder if the next X-box would go back to x86 as well.

PowerPC was obviously intended for the PC market, so I find it a little funny how it hadn't been there for over a half decade now (Unless you consider workstations a kind of PC).

____________________

Not using adblockers at all here. Ads never bothered me too much, and most of the sites I visit don't even use ads much.

Noscript tend to block most malicous ads indirectly anyway.

____________________

Motives are usually involved in terrorist attacks, sooner or later someone gives the claim. Then again sometimes false claims have happened before, such as the Oslo bombings that happened awhile ago.

And regarding sheeple...


____________________

Lately Victoria II was on sale and to have something to do until Europa Universalis IV is released, I decided to pick it up. Each Paradox Interactive game is very similar when it comes to basic combat, so it was easy to get started. This one is focused on the time period between 1830 and 1930 so a lot of the focus is on the industrial revolution and the politics of the time. It's not as deep as Crusader Kings II though, but then again that might be their deepest grand strategy so far (yet ironically probably the easiest one at the same time).

I also been playing AoE2HD lots too, despite some annoying performance issues in the port it's still fairly fun. And I managed to get my sister addicted to Civilization V so I been playing that with her too.

____________________