beatnik11

"people that seem to be immune to Mario Kart’s (and Smash Bros.’, and Mario Party’s…) undeniable charm"

I havent had a Nintendo system since the SNES and even still I am constantly baffled by how dismissive most of GB is when it comes to these really enjoyable franchises.

Dan is the best thing to happen to GB this year. He just has an awesome innocent love for games that much of the crew has lost

I am glad they are doing this, but I would rather they just not release a broken mess of a game. I hope Ubisoft learns a good lesson from all this and cleans up their act.

While I am bummed that Vinny is moving he certainly has good reasons and I remain cautiously optimistic that along with Alex GBNY can turn into something interesting. I am fairly certain that Danny will become an official GB member to take up Vinny's place as a sort of light hearted jokester.

The problem is that Patrick seems to only partially understand the backlash. The whole kids who think they are investors on Kickstarter are just dumb kids and not a real issue. The idea that somehow Oculus would not be courted by suitors who were eyeing their goose that would lay golden eggs was a pretty safe assumption. The shock, disbelief, anger, and disappointment comes solely from the fact that it is Facebook who bought them, a company that has continually treated their users with disrespect and have ruined everything they touched because they force their social nonsense into everything. Even Instagram which Patrick brings up was bought because Facebook was scared of what Instagram was becoming and they could see that in the future it would become big enough to directly compete. So Facebook buys the potential rival and then stunts any innovation that might have happened independently.

Even worse is right off the top of our heads there are companies that have great relations with their customers that would probably treat Oculus with more respect. Who knows who else was interested in buying OR but I would have been completely happy if it were Valve, Amazon, or Google who jumped in. All three are great at purchasing companies and then seamlessly integrating them into their ecosystems often making them better in the process. All three of those companies would have given time and flexibility for the Oculus team to get the hardware right. Although Facebook says the same I just cant trust them to be true to their word and I fully expect that it may get rushed out the door sooner than it should be and that in a few years time they wont be able to resist getting their grubby social hands all over it.

I know it all sounds doom and gloom and maybe it wont turn out bad, I just have such little respect for Facebook that I have a hard time believing that this isnt one of the worst possible outcomes

Here is the thing, although the always online nonsense was a bad problem with the game, I felt a lot of people missed the forest for the trees by focusing on that. Always online or not, the real issue is that Sim City is fundamentally a bad Sim City game at its heart due to core development decisions, the tiny plots, the fake "simulation" of sims, region map, lack of terraforming, lack of real modding, and just overall shallow gameplay. Everything that made previous Sim City games awesome and made them last for over a decade was gutted from the Sim City reboot. There is no amount of patching that can fix this game.

If you want to play a real Sim City game then pick any of the older ones, they are all superior to this turd

Drew, you are a fantastic member of the Giant Bomb crew and your writing is pretty good, I can absolutely hear your voice coming out of your words. Its also great to have someone pushing for racing games, I hope you keep it up and keep contributing for 2014

Its just a reminder that life is a fragile thing, you can be on top of the world one moment and then all of a sudden its taken from you. Ryan was loved and will be be missed by the whole community, he was part of the heart of GB and that void can not be filled by anyone else. My heart goes out to his friends, family, GB crew, and most importantly his wife

Once again when it gets to Q&A everything goes downhill. Its always filled with people trying to be funny with GB related inside jokes, opinion statements framed as questions (the guy who asked about game violence really just wanted his opinion confirmed), and there is always at least one sad and pathetic guy so wrecked by nerves that they cant even form a coherent statement. They are lucky to get one or two decent questions during the entire thing. All in all the GB crew handled it really well by running with the questions to make them interesting, but next time I think they should take written questions at the beginning on the panel so that when Q&A comes they can choose good questions and streamline the whole process

Its not so much the "puzzles" that get in the way its that its just that the mechanics do not work very well when you are in an action sequence and need to rush. I also died in the train station when I needed to pop the zombie in the head with my gun, I knew exactly what to do but since the head was moving around so much and the hit box was rather small it just wouldnt give me the prompt to shoot. It may seem counter intuitive but it isnt the actual "gameplay" so to speak that creates the visceral and intense moments in this game, its the way the story is paced and how it unfolds, the actual action scenes almost seem to take you out of the game

In other news, kids on the internet do not have their priorities straight