AsKo25

LEGO TT games are the absolute worst. I love playing them, but some of those puzzles are crazy confusing.

I'm talking about the times where you were trying to find a solution to an obstacle for hours, only to discover you were doing something fundamentally wrong the whole time and it's much easier than you thought. It happens to all of us, even the best of us who think we're beyond it.

Case in point: I was playing Voodoo Vince yesterday, and I got to a section where 3 moving platforms are rotating around in a puddle of water. You die if you fall in the water, so you have to time the jumps so that you hit the platforms as their rotation faces you. I just could not manage to do it, I spent a solid hour getting mad at the game for being seemingly poorly designed, having this extremely difficult section right at the entrance of a new area. It doesn't help that the GameFAQs guide I ended up consulting also stated that the jumps were very difficult, validating and amplifying my frustration.

However, it wasn't hard at all. I had just forgotten that you can stay in the air longer if you do a spin attack after your second jump. Once I remembered that, it was piss easy and I felt like a goddamn moron. That's what happens when you are playing a game on and off for 12 years, I guess.

damn, i guess all the people telling me Geralt was like a "mature Link" were being totally facetious. I guess Rise of the Tomb Raider is the closest I'll get.

@cptbedlam: I'm the guy who loved Skyward Sword.

Sorry, I started writing this asking if I should get this over Yakuza 5, which would be a General Discussion topic. I decided I'm gonna buy Y5 regardless lol

I know, it's a weird question. I have The Witcher 2, played about 10 hours of it before I decided that it wasn't for me, but I really do like the story. I just found the combat a little frustrating, and the world felt really tight and compact. I'm aware that the latter is definitely not an issue for 3, but I'm still a little hesitant despite it only being $30 right now. I'm really craving a good, long, satisfying action-adventure experience like Zelda, and Witcher 3 seems like the closest thing. Is my assumption correct, or should I be looking elsewhere?

Wow, a lot of great suggestions here, thank you guys! I also discovered that James Pond 2: Codename: RoboCod also takes place during Christmas and looks pretty festive at times.

I'm a big Christmas guy, and I always wish I could find more seasonal gaming for the time. Halloween is easy because we've got Costume Quest and a myriad of horror games, but Christmas hasn't always lended itself well to gaming. I've got Christmas NiGHTS and I like playing the snowy levels in Diddy Kong Racing, but I haven't found much else even after searching. Are there any cool Christmas/holiday motifs in other games that I'm not aware of?

I saw the marathon today, and man it was fun. Was a great journey going through all the movies and finally seeing 7. There is conflict within me about this new one though.

• It is almost a shot-for-shot remake of A New Hope, just with more modernized sensibilities and a Stormtrooper dude. A droid carrying plans, a Death Star, scrappy kid in the desert who is actually a Jedi, a fucking "Sith" guy with a mask who kills an important character in front of another important character.... it was infuriatingly similar at times.
• Maybe I'm just butthurt, but Han Solo's death felt unearned. We barely know anything about Kylo Ren in this movie (or most of the other new characters tbh), aside from the fact that he's not as cool as Darth Vader but he wishes he was, and oh Han Solo is his dad so he has to kill him because that's what happens in Star Wars. It felt cheap, but at least Han is awesome in every scene before that.
• On the bright side, the dialogue and action are spot-on in terms of what you want out of a Star Wars film. None of the pointless filler from the prequels, every set piece and character interaction is important to the overall plot.
• I like the new cast, though as I said we don't get to learn too much about them. In A New Hope, all of the main cast have these rich, interesting backstories even without taking sequels into account, whereas there is very little told about Kylo Ren, Finn, Rey, and especially Poe. It's a younger cast, so I guess we're meant to be seeing their history unfold in front of us, but I felt they left a little too much for the other movies.

Overall, it was pretty good, certainly more thoughtful than the prequel trilogy though oddly not as ambitious. The prequels are bad, but they were a lot more experimental, even if most of those experiments failed. The Force Awakens feels like Disney showing people that they are 100% aware of what was good about the old movies, while adding almost nothing of their own design, but in the end it's better off for it. I really hope there are some surprises in Episode 8 though, and that we learn a lot more about this new cast.

I bought it, and WOW! I'm seriously impressed with this game. I played through the first 3 cups on the Novice difficulty, and I was giggling like a schoolgirl the whole time at how fun it is. The colour-shifting trope works really well in this game, adds a lot of strategy. You can also takedown other racers, Burnout-style, by boosting into them. The final cup is a bit too tough for me right now, the first track goes full F-Zero with broken floating pieces of track that you have to almost FLY your ship toward in the air just to land. One issue I had with the game when I saw the first footage was that the tracks would be too simple, but that is definitely not the case, the courses are crazy and I cannot imagine how hard it is on the faster difficulties.

A lot of reviews have complained about the AI, but I actually love it. They are fully competitive, you can't just hold the lead like in Mario Kart, you have to fight for it for the entire race. There's more than enough boost on the track to catch up if you fall behind too, provided you are also driving well.

$20 is asking a lot considering there really isn't much content outside of a few unlockable vehicles and the racing, but the gameplay is stellar, and probably the closest thing to F-Zero that any of us will get for a while. I went back and played the Joker cup in F-Zero X after putting down NEO, and it warmed my heart to know that Shin'en did such a great job replicating that gameplay while adding their own spin to it.