hexogen

Yup. I'm enjoying it more than my other two playthroughs thanks to my slowly acquired knowledge of all the game's mechanics (through my previous playthroughs and my Oblivion loving friend). I still don't care for the combat. It's clunky and responds so slow that I just can't get a feel for it. But I can turn down the combat difficulty and just mash my way through that stuff, so it's not a deal breaker.

Sounds exactly like I expected it to--that is to say, a typical sequel to a great game. It iterates rather than innovates, but that's fine with me. They have a good foundation, now they're going to build upon it for as long as they can.

This just makes me want to play Burnout Revenge (or 3) instead. I'll have to see more of the game before I write it off completely, but I'm not a big fan of the top-down perspective.

These just get better and better.

They don't bother me. All the ads I've seen require a mouseover for 3 seconds or so before they actually expand or start playing audio. Maybe your ads are different.

This guy worked on some great titles, so I'm excited to see what his new project is, even though the announcement is at least a few years off.

I bought this game as an Xbox Original, and despite the fact that I never finished it, I really liked what I played. I may go back to it if I run out of games to play this summer.

People who are big enthusiasts of something also tend to be the biggest critics of it. Especially with stuff like video games and tech, since those companies love to demo their stuff early. I think a lot of people get super excited as E3 approaches and think they're going to be blown away every year, and while there's nothing wrong with setting their expectations high, I think they're just bound to be disappointed most of the time. And this being the internet and all, kneejerk reactions take priority over rationality.

Yup.

I did not too long ago, but now that these cloud storage services are becoming a thing I tend to stick to digital formats. Particularly Amazon, since any MP3s you buy through them can be stored in their cloud service for free. I stayed away from music downloads for the longest time, at first because most of them had DRM, plenty of them did (and still do) have dependence on a full-featured media player to be able to use the store, and most recently because sites like Amazon MP3 didn't offer redownloads of already purchased songs. But now I'm totally on board. Prior to that I mainly purchased CDs and immediately ripped them to my computer.
 
CDs can still be convenient for the car, since I have no way to satisfactorily play songs off my phone on the stereo. But it's so cheap and quick to burn CD-R's these days that I tend to do that over purchasing a retail CD.