The first hour: "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat"
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CALL OF PRIPYAT, the most recent entry in the Stalker franchise was released last Friday, but only on Amazon. The earliest delivery date would have been Wednesday, but the end-times snow storm made that date less likely.
So in my despondency, I put off the purchase. I'm glad I did. Call of Pripyat came out on Steam a week after the official release date, and it's a bargain. The collector's edition is all that's available through Amazon, and it's already priced pretty low at $40. But Steam has it at $30, and they're running a loyalty promotion that drops the price to $20 if you have either of the two previous games, Shadow of Chernobyl or Clear Skies, in your Steam games list. I think that's a promotion that developers or distributors should run more often.
Call of Pripyat is far more stable than either previous game was at launch. It hasn't crashed on me yet. It's not the prettiest game, and it still has some odd bugs, but I'm glad to return to the irradiated Russian back-country. So let me take you on a tour through the first hour of the game.
Warning, there are a lot of images after the jump.
Gnathus' Top Five: Live shows of the decade
My biggest hobby, besides video games obviously, is music. I play a few instruments, I've been in a few bands, and I go to lots of shows. And in all my musical discussions over the years with friends and as a member of Asylum at Penn State and as a moderator at musicianforums.com, I found that I had a slightly different opinion of what makes a band great live. I feel that, for most people, the music makes the band. And because they love the music, they love the band when they see them live. This was true for me when I started out listening to music and going to shows.
My first show was Jimmie's Chicken Shack. I hadn't heard of them, but being part of a crowd as it became more and more excited during the set was thrilling, and I thought that it would be even better with bands I knew. And for a while it was. Over the next year I drove all over Pa and Jersey chasing bands.
But over time, I realized that most of my favorite moments were coming from opening bands I'd never heard of and from bands whose music I didn't care for. When I went to see Guttermouth, it was Authority Zero's CD I took home. When Big D and the Kids Table and Mustard Plug shared headlining duties, it was the Plug that I preferred, even though I find their music boring. And the River City Rebels make dismissible punk with horns music, but demand the audience's attention. The surprise is so much more satisfying than a sure thing, and that's why my favorite live bands all came from an unexpected place.
Obviously this isn't a perfect list. I never got to see the Suicide Machines outside of Warped Tour, and I still haven't seen Gogol Bordello or Mischief Brew. And I'm pretty sure I caught World/Inferno Friendship Society on an off night. So this list of great bands probably applies only to me, and only to the moments I saw these bands. But I hope you learn something anyway.
30-Second Review: Half-Minute Hero
HALF-MINUTE HERO is a PSP game from Marvelous Entertainment that boils jRPG tropes down into easily digestible chunks. Looting and level grinding are still here, they just take seconds instead of hours. It's based on the freeware game 30 Second Hero, and playing that gives you a good idea of what to expect from the game's title mode. When it sticks to the formula of short, self-contained RPGs, it works beautifully.
Unfortunately, the game deviates often, breaking up play into four separate modes. It tries to simplify the RTS, shoot-'em-up and escort styles the same way it does with the RPG, but with varying degrees of success.
Hero finishes off a dark lord.
Each mode has a goal that must be completed in 30 seconds. The hero has to defeat a dark lord. The knight has to make sure nothing distracts the sage while he casts a spell. The evil lord and the princess both have curfews for some silly reason. Each mode ranks you by how fast you're able to complete the level. If your overall rank is high enough for the mode, you unlock a harder enemy in a later mode, sort of like the Weapons in the Final Fantasy series.
This Black Friday, I'm Thankful for Free Indie Games
While everyone else is out there dropping mad dollars on mega deals, and because there's little interesting coming out till after the holidays, I've been checking my indie sources for stuff that's worth playing. Here are two that stole some of my weekday hours this week.
WE WANT YOU
We Want You is a procedurally generated platformer, which means the levels are generated as you go along. Or fall along, in this case. You play an unnamed soldier who's dropped in a war zone. Your goal is to survive. As you fall towards your ultimate destination, a friendly base, time passes. The longer the war lasts, the more dangerous the enemies strewn across the landscape become. At the start they just sit there waiting for you to pass through their crosshairs, but after the first year they start coming after you.
Not looking too healthy.
As you play, headlines from back home appear on the screen, letting you know which generals are involved in scandals and how many men you've killed so far. The game isn't quite as polished as Spelunky, another procedurally generated game, but it's controls are a little more forgiving. You have unlimited mines, which are used to destroy terrain. You can pick up armor and a lot of weapons, though you'll still spend most of the game bleeding on your pistol.
LEVEL UP
Another 2D platformer for the list. Level Up is inspired by UPGRADE COMPLETE, a vertical shooter where everything, from the weapons to the title screen, have to be bought with points earned in the game. Level Up applies that idea to a lesser degree. The main character's attributes, jumping, running, healing, all improve through use.
Yay! Now I heal better.
At times the game feels like simplified Metroidvania. Large parts of the map are only unlocked after you max out your jump skill, and you can learn a double jump from one of the two tribes populate the world, elephant people and square people. Each group sells upgrades for your main attributes. The square people sell the attributes for full price, while the elephant people sell them for cheap if you can pass a test. But I only completed one quest for the elephant people because gems aren't hard to come by and the challenges were pretty tough.
NEWS
Gaming Day at libraries was a big success, though I guess it's not surprising that games are a good way to get boys in the library. In other library news, Sony donated a thousand PS3s and copies of LittleBigPlanet for Game Changers to libraries and community organizations so kids can make content that uses science, engineering and math skills. Game Changers is a competition that's part of Obama's Digital Learning Initiative.
Square Enix thinks the network is the future of home gaming, though, the guy with the download-only system says otherwise.
Nintendo is really popular with the ladies.
And finally, cactuar!
Jumpman Review: "New Super Mario Bros. Wii"
I missed Mario. Sure, there's been a great Mario game on each of Nintendo's last three consoles, but it's just not the same when he's in three dimensions. Mario is the one character that I don't want to see punching bad guys in the face. NEW SUPER MARIO BROS. WII gives me the chance to stomp on goombas again.
Not much has changed. Bowser has stolen Princess Peach, again, and Mario will stomp on any residents of the Mushroom Kingdom who get in the way. And if you haven't played a Mario game since SUPER MARIO WORLD was released nearly 20 years ago, don't worry.The title character has a few new costumes, and he's learned how to jump off of walls, but he's still Jumpman at heart.
In addition to the fire flower and super mushroom common to all Super Mario games and the tiny mushroom that showed up in the Mario for Nintendo DS, New Super Mario Bros. Wii introduces an ice flower, a propeller suit and a penguin suit. The ice flower lets Mario freeze most bad guys into blocks of ice. When in the penguin suit, he shoots ice, swims quickly and can slide on his stomach. In the propeller suit, Mario can shoot straight up in the air and float down. Unfortunately, to get Mario to spin, you have to shake the Wii remote up and down, which isn't precise or very natural. It's not going to kill you often, but it is going to happen once or twice.
The propeller suit is handy, but handles poorly.
But aside from that one irksome control scheme, New Super Mario Bros. Wii oozes polish. Most levels are short, tightly designed obstacle courses that can be dashed through at full speed if you have the skill, and confidence, to jump at each right moment.
Three big coins are hidden in each level, and the coins can be traded for movies in Princess Peach's castle in the first kingdom. These movies are worth unlocking. Some of them reveal the big coins you haven't found yet, some of them reveal secret level exits, but the most interesting ones are the super skill videos that show off amazing precision work by people playing the game. The skill videos are fun to watch and give you ideas for how to up your game, which is important for the multiplayer portion of the game.
Players can work together to play through the game in coop mode, they can compete for scores, kills and coins in free for all, or they can compete for coins in coin battle
Luigi controls the lights while everyone else plays the level.
No mode works well well with two players. My roommate and I did little more than send each other to our deaths when we tried to help each other in coop mode. And if one player has more experience with the game, coin battles and free for all are lopsided and frustrating for the other player. A third or fourth player makes each mode more chaotic. That detracts from coop, but evens the playing field during coin battles and free for all because weaker players can conspire to doom the better players (like Luigi, the jerk).
It's a testament to Nintendo's polish that neither single nor multiplayer mode feels tacked on, and it's hard to say which style of play is more enjoyable. Among the multiplayer options, coin battle is the clear winner for me, but my solo playthrough was only broken by sleep and work. If you have access to three friends who want to play the game, use them, but it's not a big deal if you don't. Either way, "New Super Mario Bros. Wii" is an ode to the two-dimensional side-scrolling plumber platformers of the 8- and 16-bit consoles, and I couldn't be happier.
No dragons yet, but I'm full of hope
In the past two weeks I've been playing a lot of Dragon Age and a bit of Borderlands. But mostly Dragon Age. Cause it's pretty great, and I hear there be dragons.
BORDERLANDS
Ben and I did the first co-op lap around Borderlands. For a while he had a pair of game-unbalancing revolvers, and I'd have one kill for every three or four of his. But things had mostly balanced out by the last hour or so of gameplay. The end of the game surprised both of us, but that probably has something to do with our tendency to take quests without reading them very carefully.
My only real complaint with the game is that I wish I had more target variety. I killed so many soldiers and bandits. There's little aggressive wildlife besides the skags, and Eridians are rare until the end. There's great variation within the groups, but once you figure out a group's dynamic they're pretty easy to pick apart.
This is me. And this is my gun.
I'm playing through by myself as a berserker. I'm going down the punch-things-really-hard skill tree because I prefer shotguns to rocket launchers. I can take quite a bit of punishment before going down. The play dynamic is very different. I spend very little time hiding behind things now. I just run into the middle of things and hope I can knock everybody out before my meter runs out.
DRAGON AGE
I want to put more time into Torchlight and Risen, but the only game able to pull me away from Borderlands this week has been Dragon Age, a fantasy RPG from BioWare, those guys who did Baldur's Gate.
A lot of what made Baldur's Gate great is in Dragon Age. You have to worry about what your party members think of you (or at least have gifts on hand to soothe the feelings of your evil companions when you do good things). Characters of different alignments argue about what the group should be doing while you wander around towns looking for quests. Combat is an exercise in micromanagement -- complicated by friendly fire and area-of-effect spells, but that's nothing new. I like the changes Dragon Age brings to the table; I'll take mana pools over spell slots any day.
I want to be the guy on the left.
And there's the well thought out world, only this time it's pretty original. Sure, there are dwarfs and elves and orcs (though they're called hurlocks for some reason), but the fantasy basics are tweaked enough that nothing feels ripped out of Tolkien or Dungeons and Dragons. The presentation has been excellent. When Alistair shield-bashes one of the darkspawn, they topple in very fulfilling way.
The story has been pretty engaging, and I haven't had to think this hard about dialogue options since Fallout 2. Options are rarely black and white and rarely redundant. The voice acting is good, but knowing the escape key skips spoken dialogue is essential because I don't have that kind of time. Unfortunately, one of the first important cut scenes is tied to the last line of text in the scene before it, and if you skip that line of text, you skip the movie as well.
The AI is also unfortunate. Your party members aren't bright, but at least you can take control of them. Your enemies have no such luck.
NEWS
Microsoft has cracked down on piracy, banning about 600,000 consoles from Xbox Live. The consoles run modified firmware, which lets them play backup copies of Xbox 360 games, even on Xbox Live. Of course, not every console is modified for piracy, but the Gameodactyl will have to weigh on on whether there's any reason to modify an Xbox 360 to play imported game.
Holy crap, Modern Warfare 2 sold a lot of plastic discs. And PC gamers aren't happy. Kotaku rounds up how it did against other forms of entertainment.
Chris Kohler leads us through the life and times of Nintendo as a video game company. A fitting history lesson for the days before New Super Mario Brothers Wii comes out. Sadly, no mention of why Nintendo release games on Sunday.
It feels like 1996 again
This week felt a lot like 1996. There's been lots of colored loot, lots of mouse clicking and lots of time spent pouring over skill trees.
BORDERLANDS
My mild fury at having to wait a week for a copy of Borderlands where you can actually aim was tempered a bit by knowing that everybody toiling on the console versions got bug-ridden copies of the game. Sure, my game has crashed a few times, but I haven't lost any specialization points and my phase strike ability worked from the start (well, once I reached the right level).
This skag doesn't like fire very much.
I don't have much to add to what Benji said about the game. It's a sick FPS with simple, solid RPG elements. I play an "invisible ninja chick who wields a shotgun" and various machine guns, and I haven't had this much fun shooting people in the face since Half-Life 2. The randomness of the loot system is a bit annoying, and mediocre guns often have silly level requirements, but I'm willing to look past that.
My biggest problem is that I can't play as much as I'd like. Benji and I are playing together, and we have to stay the same level or the game gets unbalanced pretty quickly. We played for a while when I was only two levels behind him, and I couldn't damage the bandits the game threw at us.
But Borderlands has made me happy, both when I'm alone and when someone's got my back. It's exactly what I expected, and it is good.
TORCHLIGHT
If, while playing Torchlight, you get a sense that you've delved deep underground in search of sweet loot before, don't be alarmed. A small developer called Blizzard made a very similar game in the 90s called Diablo. In fact, some of the people who worked on that worked on Torchlight, which might explain why it's so much fun.
Hanging out with my imp, puppy and golem.
Torchlight plays like Diablo, only with better graphics. Not much else has changed. Scrolls still reveal the identity of mystery drops and take you back to town, minibosses still surround themselves with weaker versions of themselves, and there are plenty of gems to fit onto your stuff. The only additions that are new to me are a pet that holds your stuff and basic spells that every character class can use, including your pet.
There are three character classes available. The destroyer hits things, the vanquisher hits things with arrows, and the alchemist has a marketable profession to fall back on if this dungeon crawling gig doesn't work out. I picked the alchemist because they're basically a cross between a mage and a summoner, and I like to sit back and cast ember lance while while my imps, wolf and golem engage the dungeon denizens. It's been a lot of fun, but it's also been really easy on normal, so I'll probably start over on hard. I'm not sure if I'll pick a new class. I like having minions do a large portion of my work, but the other classes have some pretty cool skills.
There's virtually no story and little quest variety, but if you're playing this kind of game for that, you're doing it wrong. This game begs to be played with the TV on.
WIDGET TD
Take control of towers in WidgetTD.
I also played the demo for a pretty simple tower defense game from Graybox Games called WidgetTD. Like any other tower defense game you build and upgrade defensive structures and hope they're enough to keep wave after wave of attackers under control.
The only mechanic WidgetTD adds to the mix is the ability to take control of any one tower. This brings up a first person cockpit view, and you can aim for the enemies you want. For some towers, this isn't much use, but from the cockpit, your basic gun tower can hit anything on the map. The difficulty seems a bit out of whack though; creeps' hit points ramp up far faster than you can upgrade your towers. Otherwise it's a strong entry for the genre.
NEWS
Here are some of the things we'll be talking about in this week's podcast.
Leigh Alexander talks about Demon's Souls in a Kotaku feature defending hard games. She says hard games aren't necessarily frustrating, and that a good hard game will explain why you fail and offer a road to mastery. But really, I just want to hear more from Rex about Demon's Souls, because everything I've read and heard about the game makes it very hard to not buy a ps3 right now.
David Carlton at malvasia bianca asks why we divide games into genre by their point of view, and not their content, and suggests we define Beatles Rock Band as a non-fiction game, not a rhythm game.
And finally, I feel bad for gamers who paid real money for legitimate copies of Borderlands before the street date, but couldn't play until the online verification servers came online Monday. Someday those servers are going to shut down and the only way to play the game will be with a crack. That's the real problem with licenses.
If you've got something else you want us to talk about, comment here or send me a message @gamegnathus
Über review: "Brütal Legend"
BRÜTAL LEGEND is the story of Eddie Riggs, a roadie sent back in time to save humanity by teaching it how to rock. It starts as a brawler, then incorporates some racing and ends up being a real time strategy game conducted as a general on the field. The elements almost work together, but the highs of the story and the good parts of the gameplay are held back by some pretty bad design decisions. For instance, Benji was unimpressed by the final hours of my time with the game, but it left me with a pretty good feeling, even though the ending felt rushed. But that feeling was crushed moments later after a visit to gamefaqs.com, which defines my experience with the game.
I went to gamefaqs.com to find out how to free the bound serpents, the statues strewn around the game world. There are more than a hundred of the serpents spread around the world, and I thought unchaining them unlocked concept art or some other kind of bonus material. Nope, they're the only way to increase your heath -- something rather important.
Now, I'd like to start over and check the tour book, which tells you about things you find in the game, to see if it tells you how to free the serpents when you first encounter them. I made it through the game on brutal without freeing a single one, but I'd like to confirm that I'm not a moron, there's no way to start a new game without saving over the old one.
Long story short, I confirmed that the game doesn't tell you how to free the bound serpents until after you've done it the first time. All it cost me was my save.
Hint: The bad guys wear pink.
The game witholds all sorts of necessary information from you. It's hard to tell when enemies have died because they have no health bars and tend to keep moving after they're dead. This is especially bad for the emo kids, because they can lose their heads and still come after you. That's bad enough, but a second problem with the lack of health bars is that there isn't an easy way to tell what ax and string upgrades are best. The only way to test their effectiveness is to count how many swings it takes to take an enemy down, which seems like a lot of work.
The worst design failure is the short rhythm game you're forced to play to summon your car or play a face-melting solo. When there's no one around, they're just annoying, but they're broken when a lot of character models are on the screen because the game starts to slow down, which turns the process into one settled by luck, not skill.
The last annoyance I'll talk about is the dodge move, something you'll never use it because it takes three buttons. You have to lock onto a bad guy, block and then press the direction you want to dodge. There's no reason to require a lock-on to be part of my defensive strategy. It's just mind boggling that one of the playtesters didn't go "you know, Tim, this dodge mechanic is really awkward."
Brutal Legend does get some details right. When you're driving, your next destination is marked by a tower of light that glows in the distance, but when you can't see that, your car's turn signals glow to indicate which way you should turn to get on the right path, which is both cool and intuitive. And I really enjoyed the way your allies represent the various members of a stage crew and how most of the bad guys come from eras where metal lost its heart.
And the action/RTS hybrid works, more or less. Your best strategy is to carry around the rally flag and surround yourself with troops, then lend support fire where needed. If you do this, the game becomes pretty easy. It's pretty sad I played the game on brutal with no health upgrades and the only really challenging part of the single player mission was the last five minutes of the RTS battle when both sides can summon all units. The more RTS battles I fought, the more I liked them, and I wish there had been more stages where every unit was available to each side. I enjoyed them. Benji did not, so your enjoyment will vary. It's a shame such a large portion of the game isn't included in the demo.
When the characters are on the screen and the controller isn't in use, Brutal Legend does very little wrong. The tale is epic and original and ties the various worlds of metal together in some pretty cool ways. Jack Black adheres to the roadie mythos and plays Eddie Riggs with cool reserve, Ozzy Osborne is surprisingly entertaining and lucid, and the rest of the voice acting is solid. My only issue with the story is that the pacing is pretty screwed up. There are three big bad guys, but you split 90% of the game chasing the first two around. The third guy shows up right after the second one is finished, and you're done with him pretty quick.
The art and sound are pretty much pitch perfect. Eddie Riggs looks like a jacked Black, and the character's movements help sell the humor in Tim Schafer's words and Black's delivery. Your allies are caricatures of headbangers, bouncers and sound guys, and they seem at home on lands based on metal album covers. My opinion of metal is usually eh, but I enjoyed the tunes coming out of my car, so unless you change the station when Black Sabbeth come on (radio references aren't outdated right?) you'll be ok.
Brutal Legend can be summed up with one word. Disappointing. I expected a lot from Schafer and Double Fine. There's a good game here, and it's paired with a great story, but fumbling of some basic game mechanics tarnishes the final product. Rent, don't buy, because the story is worth it.
Playing Friday: Dhampirs, Heroes, Blobs and Metal
I picked up a used PSP this week, so I spent a good portion of the past seven days experimenting with the system. Word of warning: Don't buy a game on the account of the guy who owned it before you and then reset the settings so you can set up your own account.
The first thing I did was download Castlevania: Symphony of the Night from the PSN store. I had been playing through Dawn of Sorrow on my DS, but the PlayStation classic takes precedence over any of its spiritual sequels. It is just as awesome on a tiny screen as it was on the television in my brother's room in high school. Or Benji's room at college. Or in the other four or five places I've played through it.
Then Brutal Legend, A Boy and His Blob and Half-Minute Hero came out on Tuesday and halted my Castlevania retrospective. The only one of them I can recommend without reservation is Half-Minute hero.
HALF-MINUTE HERO is an absolute joy to play. It's divided into various games that breed traditional RPGs, shooters and RTSs with WarioWare titles. It all started with a flash game called 30 Second Hero, where you have to discover your purpose, level up, buy weapons and save the kingdom from an evil lord in less than 30 seconds. And that's basically what you do in the Hero 30 mode.
In Princess 30 mode, you fetch items for your sick father and shoot bad guys with a crossbow. In Evil Lord 30, you summon monsters and throw them at bad guys. Hero 30 is the most fun, probably because that's the concept that launched the game, and the other modes are afterthoughts. The Evil Lord 30 mode is cool, but it's very hard to tell what's going on, and Princess 30 suffers from a lot of repetition, but they're both still quite a bit of fun.
There are three other modes I have yet to unlock. If the rest of the games on the PSP are this good, I'll shoot myself for putting off the purchase for so long.
A BOY AND HIS BLOB is adorable, but it's also surprisingly thin. I played the original way back when, and it was inscrutable and frustrating and virtually impossible for a small child of my age to play. The remake is a game only a child could play. The game holds your hand through all of the first world's 2D platforming stages, telling you what jellybeans to feed your blob and where to do it. Hopefully things will change after the first world, and the platforming and puzzles will become more interesting.
I would never have thought to use the parachute to fall down that cliff safely without that sign.
And finally, BRUTAL LEGEND is a joy to watch someone else play. It has a great story, mediocre controls and an RTS component where you play as a general on the ground. I think that mode has a lot of potential, but I handed off the controller to my roommate right before the first of those missions. So I need more time Brutal Legend's to determine for myself if that works.
Eddie Riggs prefers not to suffer the heretical practitioners of hair metal.
Some of the news we'll be talking about this week:
A gamer's wife describes the benefits of being married to a console slave and living in an entertainment hub.
Mario is dead.
Gamefly has been having some trouble with the USPS lately. And a lot of trouble with the USPS lately.
I've Been Playing Lucidity and AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!!
We here at Gameosaurus have decided to keep the viewing public updated on what we're doing in between podcasts. So, here's what I've been playing.
What I've Been Playing
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! A RECKLESS DISREGARD FOR GRAVITY - Do you know anyone who says "you can't judge a book by it's cover"? I hate that person. Covers are all I use to judge nearly all of my purchases, and the practice has served me well. AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! -- Like Day of the Tentacle, I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 and Robot Dinosaurs that Shoot Beams When They Roar before it -- demands your attention with a ballsy name most developers don't have the guts to attach to their clearly less classy games.
AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! is a first-person base jumping simulator by Dejobaan. You throw yourself off buildings and score points by hugging walls, crashing through point windows, spray painting buildings, waving at or flipping off fans, drinking coffee and landing in the designated landing zone. Controls are a little loose, but I imagine that's on purpose. It's fun in a hectic, too many things are going on kind of way. Plus the music is pretty good and fits with the trippy visuals. It's defiantly worth the $15 they're asking for it on Steam or Direct2Drive.
LUCIDITY - Lucasarts brings this children's story to life. A girl falls asleep and you have to help her get through her dreams safely. The girl walks to the right like she's in a 2D sidescroller while you place stairs, flooring, slingshots and other imaginary platforms that guide her through each dream level. The art is gorgeous, but it would be great if you could hurry the girl up on subsequent playthroughs. There are fireflies strewn throughout the levels, and you have to go through most levels more than once to catch 'em all. You don't need the fireflies to open new levels -- that happens every time you finish a dream -- you need them to open bonus level. The bonus levels are a pain to unlock, but they're worth it.
I picked this up on Steam because I wanted to play with the mouse. I thought it would be easier to place items, but the pointer often got stuck when the camera scrolled up or down, so I switched to a controller and now wish I had picked it up on the Xbox 360. Pick it up for $10 on Steam or 800 points on Xbox Live Marketplace.
Podcast News Preview
If Brutal Legend fails, it will be because EA's marketing department is full of jerks who want to see it fail. How many Monday Night Football watchers are metal-heads who bought 360s for Halo 3, Madden and Guitar Hero: Metallica? I'm betting it's quite a few, but I'm also betting they don't read the gaming press. So for the only chance EA has to reach out to this demographic, they chose to use the same pop-metal musicians that the game trashes in the first 5 minutes to write the commercial's song. No gameplay. No humor. No metal. Good choice EA.
Ars Technica let me know what coats, salves and unguents I should add to the next pair of glasses I get from whatever discount website I order them from.
Also from Ars, they guys who are putting all the cut material from Knights of the Old Republic II are nearly done reinserting all the material into the game. Obsidian only had a year to put the game together, and they started a lot of things they couldn't finish in that timeline. These volunteers have gone back and finished a lot of the material that Obsidian started, about 90 scenes in total. An unfinished version of the game mod can be found here.
If you have any news you want to see discussed, leave a link in the comments or sent it to @gamegnathus.