LaserJesus

I'm going to process Eastern European immigrants for 25 hours straight in Paper's Please!

http://www.extra-life.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=donorDrive.participant&participantID=54268

http://www.twitch.tv/lasermessiah

Everything about Earthbound is amazing. Best SNES game of all time.

I read the news at 2am this morning before going into work and it was the hardest shift of my life to get through. The internet, and the world, is a worse place for not having Ryan. I never had the opportunity to meet him in person, but his passing hurts me as much as if a close family member died. And I know what that feels like too.

Made a region named La Bomba Gigante, 16 city region. PM me with your origin ID if you want to join. My ID is TheLaserJesus.

My answer is not there, the original endings were boring and anti-climactic, just kind of being like "YOU GOT TO THE SPOT IT'S OVER NOW" and the extended cut, while fixing that problem, added a whole ton of other problems. Like how in the middle of the final charge to the beam, with a goddamn reaper shooting shit all over the place and people dying left and right, your squadmates get injured and Shepard's all "Time out! Time out from final galactic fight! Main characters slightly wounded! Normandy, I know you're doing really important work up there fighting the Reapers and every ship counts, but you should disengage from the fight, and fly down right next to a fucking goddamn Reaper so you can extract 2 soldiers from the battlefield. Oh, and hang around a bit so I can tell Tali that I love her. Again."

Both endings are kind of bad, for different reasons, but neither offensively so. Also, the ending doesn't invalidate all the good stuff that is in that game. The genophage and geth/quarian conflict questlines are both great, and honestly, considering the scope of trying to pull together 3 games of choices into a coherent story where those choices felt meaningful, they didn't do an awful job up until the very end of the last game.

So in short, Mass Effect 3 is the worst of the Mass Effect games, but still a good game.

EDIT: Honestly, the one thing I HATED was all the stupid dream sequences with that fucking kid. What a shitty thing to force on the player. Depending on your choices, you could have caused MULTIPLE alien races to go extinct, killed an Asari Matriarch just because you think her daughter is kinda hot even though having sex with her will kill you, and all other sorts of bad shit, and one stupid kid in a vent that is too dumb to go with the soldiers to safety is enough to give that kind person nightmares? Hell, my Shepard had the sole survivor background. Where were the nightmares of his whole squad being ripped apart by thresher maws?

Xbox: Laser Muhammed

@Shivoa said:

Apparently this isn't Apogee Software of old (the one that used the 3D Realms name for a long time before implosion making DNF) as they spun it off a few years ago as a new company side-publisher to leverage the old 3DRealms IPs. At least this is how Wikipedia explains how these same guys are using the same name but aren't hiding from 2K lawyers looking to recoup those lost DNF funds.

Yeah this is accurate, though as a weird side note 3D Realms never stopped legally being known as Apogee Software, Ltd. The new company is Apogee Software, LLC. Looks like Jeff is going to have some more database headaches.

Also, this is the same company that published that Duke Nukem DS game last year.

After reading Rise of the Videogame Zinesters (great book, by the way) I've been wanting to mess around with free game software and make a few quick and dumb games. I figured it might be interesting to get some ideas for small games from the community here as a springboard. The dumber, the better! I'll set up some sort of blog (tumblr maybe) with links to the games.

For me, it was the whole part where Bruce was stuck in the Pit. My favorite thing about the movies was the exploration of Batman's psychology and motivations. That's why I enjoy Batman Begins the most. (I'm weird, I know)

@Homelessbird: I agree that going in with that expectation is definitely at least a bit naive, but to be expected. I would guess that the most vocally angry people are those that have that "game I'll play for the next decade" are the ones most vocally angry. I wasn't kidding about the wanting to tear your face off part, though. That's pretty much exactly how I felt going through act 1 inferno and act 2 inferno I just said "Screw this, I'm done." I however went in knowing that would happen at some point, as I get tired of grinding fairly quickly. I just didn't expect it to be after a month. The inferno experience has left such a bad taste in my mouth that I haven't even wanted to try out the other classes all that much.

Really my biggest issue is just really infuriating gameplay at the endgame. It's just excrutiating. The amount of kiting you have to do (on a pet class, no less! I have my own TANK for crying out loud!) is just not fun for me, and the heavy dependence on getting better gear just to survive makes it that much more frustrating when they rebalance the drop rate because people are gaming it with item find gear, making me either have to grind more or pony up real cash money for new gear. And that grinding is even harder when they increase the repair costs to ungodly levels, making it so if I have some real bad luck, now all my stuff is broken and I don't have the money to fix it. Well, guess I can't play anymore! Thanks!

Oh, and another thing that just drives me insane: when the enrage timer runs out on champion enemies in inferno, it gives them 100% reflect damage. And since champion enemies have far more health than you unless you're geared for vitality and any heal that you have is on a cooldown, it pretty much makes them unkillable. I wonder why they didn't just make it so you instantaneously explode into mist when the timer runs out. It'd serve the same purpose.

That got a little more ranty than I meant for it. Normally I'm not the kind of person to take to the internet about things that annoy me in games, but I felt that laying out specific criticisms is important for those wondering why people who've spent so much time playing the game are so upset. The end game is just that frustrating. But I'll leave the pitchforks for the rest of the mob, and I won't demand my money back or anything. I'll just grumble and shake my head at their baffling design choices.