Such Nintendo

Wrapped-up Ghost Trick; it's awesome, so play it.

Got my Wii U, Mario Kart 8, New Super Mario Bros. U, Nintendo Land, and ZombiU. The system's setup wizard was annoying because it wouldn't let me see the unit's MAC address, so I chose to set-up WiFi later, then it asked me to add my existing account, but needed to connect to the Internet to do so, so I disabled my MAC filter, but it wouldn't let me go back to the WiFi settings, and then wanted to do a system update, and I can't remember the exact details now... I'm tired... The point is, I had to create a dummy account just to get started, only to delete it later; not the end of the world, but kind of annoying. Regardless, the system is friggin' sweet.

Also picked-up Mario Kart 7 and burned through it pretty quickly. Fun.

Annal

Picked-up Mario Kart 8 just in time to capitalise on the free game promotion; Wii U should arrive today; in the meantime, I played through a 50cc circuit on every Mario Kart game I own.

• Super Mario Kart was simplistic but still fun.
• Mario Kart 64 was just as good as I remembered.
• Mario Kart: Super Circuit was even better than I remembered.
• Mario Kart: Double Dash!! has aged incredibly well; probably my favourite of the bunch.

I haven't actually played Mario Kart DS, Wii, or 7, so I'm willing to bet 8's gonna feel kinda fresh.

P.S. Ghost Trick rules.

Fate

Finally sitting-down with Ghost Trick on DS; four chapters in, and I'm stoked to see the rest. There's so much character, and the visual design is incredibly stylish... It's also available for iOS, and totally worth your time.

Tried Band of Monsters on Android because it was free... I'd read it was a solid Pokemon clone... It's not. The translation is actually painful to wait through, and the basic battle system doesn't impress.

Bought Paper Mario for N64, OlliOlli (which is rad) and TxK (which is awesome) for Vita, The Last of Us: Left Behind and Rain for PS3, and Wonderful 101 for Wii U because I dunno why.

5

I love id Tech 5. I wish RAGE had a better ending. Wolfenstein: The New Order is awesome and cheesy and over-the-top and still awesome. Play it.

Bought a Wii U because I found a better deal than the Mario Kart 8 bundle. While that bundle gets you ~$75 worth of free stuff for $350, it was brought to my attention that a factory-refurbished Wii U plus Nintendo Land is only $200... So that plus Mario Kart 8 plus a Wii Remote Plus plus this $5 coupon for Target will get me $90 worth of free stuff for $300! I don't get the plastic steering wheel, but I can live with that :)

Also, hey, speculators, the only thing unique about that Mario Kart 8 bundle is the box; it is NOT worth $500 :(

Power!

Posting this from my new old 1.8GHz G5 iMac; got it for free. Installed OS X 10.5 and 2GB of DDR400 RAM. Web browsing is a little sluggish and it can't seem to handle HD video streams... That is to say, playback is chunky and the whole system tends to power-off under stress. Wheee!!!

More Raven!

Before digging-in to Wolfenstein: The New Order, I figured I should finally track-down a copy of Raven's 2009 Wolfenstein... I'd heard it wasn't very good... It isn't very good. It's not bad, but it is incredibly rough. The cutscenes look cheap, the voice acting is cheesy, the character animations are awkward, the open world is a chore to navigate and doesn't add any real kind of immersion to the experience, and this is on id Tech 4!? DOOM 3 looked much better :( Still, once you get the rhythm of the game, it's not a slog to finish.

Also, Phantom Hourglass is now the second Zelda game I've officially abandoned because its gameplay just wasn't fun for me; the first was The Adventure of Link. Making me blow on and yell at my DS isn't very fun when I'm on the subway or late at night; an option to do otherwise would've been swell. I hear Spirit Tracks is more of the same... No thanks.

Summer Sale

Steam Summer Sale purchases thus far:

• BattleBlock Theatre
• Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons
• DeathSpank: Thongs of Virtue
• Deus Ex: The Fall
• Transistor
• The Walking Dead: Season Two
• The Wolf Among Us
• Wolfenstien: The New Order
• X-COM: Enemy Within
• Year Walk

Also, Stick It to The Man was great and I highly recommend it, Reaper of Souls is a hell of a lot of fun, and Half-Minute Hero II is a satisfying sequel to one of my favourite games ever.

Titanfall is super fun and pretty and yeah... But I'm also still just not that into online gaming, apparently :\

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a good time and looks great, but it also feels kinda stale and the two-worlds cliché is weak... I expected more from Zelda... So upon completing the game, I immediately jumped-into Phantom Hourglass, and ARGH! Piss-poor writing and gimmicky controls! Again, still fun, but what the hell, Nintendo!? My top three Zelda games remain Link's Awakening, Minish Cap, and Majora's Mask :p

Poor Raven :(

I finally got around to playing Singularity! Later the next day, I had nearly completed Singularity. While it's not an overly-long game, it's not too short either; I was actually just so into it that I kept coming back. It looks good, the story's interesting, the action is tense and visceral - Raven did it again... Almost. Is it a BioShock clone? Yup. Do the expository setpieces break the flow of everything else? Oh yeah. Is the upgrade system pointless? Uh-huh. Are the NPCs dead-eyed and unpolished? To a T! I heard there might've been some serious cuts to the production of this game after Wolfenstein failed to perform as expected, so that might explain what went wrong - but it's still totally solid and worth checking out.

Also, did anyone else notice that Singularity's story shared quite a bit with the new Wolfenstein game?

Also, does anyone remember how AWESOME Raven's Heretic II is? Too bad it was released next to Half-Life :(

Minority Report

Bought a Kinect for my 360 for, like, $25 with The Gunstringer, Kinect Adventures, Kinect Party, Kinectimals... Now with Bears!, and Once Upon a Monster. They're all solid experiences, but motion controls and voice commands are still stupid in lieu of controllers... In conjunction with controllers, however, we can talk.

Started Stick it to the Man! on Steam, and it's pretty awesome, especially considering the $3.75 sale price at the Humble Store! Kentucky Route Zero Episode Three is next, with bouts of Half-Minute Hero II (finally!) throughout... Then I figure I should get into Reaper of Souls 'cause I paid full price for it :\

Arkham Origins has yet to keep my attention :(

Let's see if I can remember everything...

On Vita, I wrapped-up Ys: Memories of Celceta, and it was wonderful. Every post-Napishtim entry in this series seems to be an instant classic and has yet to disappoint... Though I've yet to play Ys Origin. Then I ploughed-through Tearaway, and OH MY CRAP! While the feeling didn't exactly hold-up through the entire experience, I was immediately ready to add this to the hallowed halls of truly great third-person platformers alongside Psychonauts, Beyond Good & Evil, and Super Mario 64. Tearaway is overflowing with character, and the production values are incredible! I was a little disappointed at how dark, barren, and weird things got by the end (the verdant settings felt a lot more interesting), but I was still satisfied and will likely go back to 100% this thing. Tearaway is so much more than a tech demo; it absolutely deserves to be a system seller with a vibrant UGC community!

Moving on, Sonic Generations on 3DS is a great companion to its PC/console counterpart, and Sonic the Hedgehog 4 Episode II (PC) is... Well, it's not as good, so far. Thankfully, I've gotten back into the groove of Shin Megami Tensei IV. Bascially, I'm saying the portables are killing it right now :)

Speaking of PC, Outlast is a fantastic experience that everyone should endure, BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea - Episode 2 is a fine (if somewhat unnecessary; the two main games stand-up well on their own) send-off to a beautiful series, and Dishonored: The Brigmore Witches is exactly what I want from that franchise - more of the same :) I've never been huge on stealth games; I refuse to play them in any way other than non-lethal and I can be a notorious save-scummer, so they'd damned-well better have a good story to tell and a vibrant world to explore.

And to wrap-up, Quake Epsilon is totally sweet, the newest Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit was an absolute steal during its recent Steam sale, and Batman: Arkham Origins + its season pass on sale for $15? Yeah, I can do that.

Ohhh... I get it!

Polished-off A Machine For Pigs... Creepy as hell, but I think I had a better experience with The Dark Descent. Still, worth your time!

Getting back into the new Ys, and then Shin Megami Tensei IV... And The Brigmore Witches in between.

Of the three PCs affected by the storm, two just needed new PSUs; the other was mostly toast, so it's now salvage... Whatever usefulness I can get out of an old Sempron rig, anyway. The good news is that I recently came into a 3.2GHz HT Pentium 4 machine with 2GB of RAM and a Vista license, so that'll do nicely as a replacement :)

Back It Up!

Stalled on A Machine For Pigs and Ys, but wrapped-up Burial At Sea (good stuff!) and the first act of Broken Age (also good stuff!).

Saved a company ~$10,000 by recovering/rebuilding an old Windows 2000 machine that was running the only copy of their ancient HVAC control software, and put a system in place that can resurrect the machine (should this happen again) in ~15 minutes.

Lost three computers to a recent power surge, despite being connected to a surge protector and a UPS... Damned epic ice storm. So far, it looks like only the PSUs were affected, and they're nothing fancy, so cheap will do.

Celceta for Vita... Shells and Cheese?

Picked-up Tearaway and Ys: Memories of Celceta for Vita, but haven't had a chance to spend any quality time with them yet, which is especially sad because I hear Tearaway is incredibly good and Ys is the reason I bought a Vita :(

Got to try an XBOX ONE though; Forza 5 and Killer Instinct; very pretty, but nothing groundbreaking during my short time with them. I like the UI better than the PS4's, and the controller's fine... But yeah, that's about it.

Ooh! Rayman Fiesta Run on Android! Really cool, but why must I submit my Google account just to play? :\ Also, Type:Rider... Pretty neat :)

More Newishness!

PS4: Contrast is kinda cool; FIFA is... FIFA.

Wii U: Wind Waker HD was fine; Super Mario 3D World is awesome; and Sonic Lost World might be kinda fun to watch, but I don't think I ever want to play it again... Maybe the 3DS version is better.

Nexus 5: Yes.

Bought Ni no Kuni, new, for $20.

Greatness [Still] Awaits

Played a PS4 demo unit the other day! The physical system looks great, the controller feels great, the demos were... A lot of stuff I'd seen before. Spent the most time with Knack... Which, I have concluded, is a pretty shitty demo.

Saw an XBOX One... It was large.

Bought Bangai-O Spirits complete for $5!

Ridiculous Fishing is now on Android!

Android 4.4 is alright, I guess!

Using batch files and Visual Basic scripts to automate domain printer updates feels kinda silly, but I'm doing it anyway because Group Policy Objects weren't propagating quickly enough for everyone last time I tried that.

More books... Less time with handhelds.

Gonna focus on A Machine For Pigs and Burial At Sea for now.

Oldschool!

Got sucked-in to the 2012's Death Rally remake... I'd read so many negative reviews and consequently avoided it, but it was recently deeply discounted, and I had to see for myself. Well, it's not awesome - certainly not as awesome as I remember the original being - but it's pretty fun and rewarding... And kinda short.

Also snagged the new Rise Of The Triad on sale, and it's supercrazygonuts! The original was really interesting, but never really held my attention beyond its initial moments; it was just too ridiculous... The new is just as ridiculous (that into cinematic is so awful), but feels a lot more solid... Like it has a foundation rooted in reality; much more organic that the first one.

Ooh, and Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs! I'm just getting started, but it's already so creepy! The implications of the journals and setpieces! The way the house shudders! Can't wait to see how pants-shittingly good this gets :)

Then, Outlast.

The Wise Man's Fear

Took a break from games and read a pretty big book.

While reading said book, there was a smattering of Puppeteer (which looks gorgeous), and I managed to plough through the main campaign of Rayman Legends (which also looks gorgeous) on Vita. I'm not sure how I feel about the Back To Origins section (like, why did I even play the first game?) and I've yet to see the Invasion Mode patch, but on the whole, I'm really glad the game exists :)

Now it's back to Shin Megami Tensei IV (I think I'm a little under halfway through) and Borderlands 2 (so much content!), but I'm really tempted to dig-in to the new Pokémon game... The fact that there's a new Ys game coming in a few weeks is what's really holding me back. I've never played more than a few hours of a proper Pokémon game; I get it, but I just haven't taken the time.

Damnit.

Promised myself I wouldn't after Persona 4 Golden, but here I am, a few hours into Shin Megami Tensei IV... And I'm hooked.

Where was I...

Dragon's Crown just gets better and better... Some of the earlier dungeons can be a little tricky, but once you start taking-on sidequests and really filling-out your party, it all comes together nicely and you get to be a very well-drawn (and well-animated) badass.

Persona 4 Golden was awesome. Play it. Stick with it. It's like nothing else.

Borderlands 2 gets really good, and then about halfway through it gets absolutely overwhelming; if you're a neurotic completionist (I'm not, thank goodness), this game will ruin you.

Electronic Super Joy is a lot of fun; some really clever level design in there. Mercenary Kings has one of the worst control schemes I've ever experienced. The Swapper is downright gorgeous, though it does get a little obtuse toward the end. I still love Hotline Miami a lot. Oh, and Don't Starve is pretty cool.

Kid Icarus: Uprising has lost me for the time being, so I tried The World Ends With You, but its battle system really turned me off; too chaotic. Now I'm on to either Project X Zone or Shin Megami Tensei IV. Attack Of The Friday Monsters was incredibly good, by the way.

And I finally found an english-language (EU) SNK copy of SNK vs. Capcom: Cardfighters' Clash! I only had the NA Capcom version, and had only found Japanese SNK versions until the other day.

On top of everything else, I've been playing a lot of Tetris DS and EA's Tetris for Android... Like, a whole lot.

I love vanilla everything...

Dragon's Crown and Muramasa on Vita look incredible. Almost done Persona 4 Golden. Kid Icarus: Uprising is really pretty, but it's just not the best thing ever, y'know? Borderlands won me over by the end, but the PC port crashed on me so many times in Old Haven and The Zombie Island of Dr. Ned that I just gave-up and moved on to the sequel... Whose more complete characterisations have served to shed a harsher light on the franchise's crass humour; I'm talking Duke Nukem Forever territory, here. *sigh* Dead Space 2 is still pretty awesome though, and Gears Of War: Judgement is, well, Gears Of War but less interesting so far.