neurotic

Well, this came from left field. Best of luck in your future endeavours, Patrick. I look forward to reading/watching them. You have produced some of my favourite content on this site, Bioforge and Spelunkin' chief among them. Time to watch those again and go through the Spookin's I missed. All the best, Scoops.

I've thought about this a lot and have wondered whether it means I'm a pervert or have identity issues or a bit of both. But I think it's simpler than that. I have never tried to make a customisable player character look like me or be an idealised version of me. I play video games for escapism, why would I want to look like me even if it is an idealised version? I can understand why someone would but it's not for me. Playing as a female character is a part of that but not strictly necessary. I enjoy the different perspective you can get. I think I'm also just bored of the standard male protagonist so if I can, I will not choose to play as him.

@darji: I was determined to beat it without magic and after my 5th unsuccessful playthrough, I decided to plan the whole thing out using the wiki. Basically my Elodie was a super military/naval genius and the magic king never made it past the ocean. She was also a total gossip and more than a little paranoid and surrounded by bodyguards. That's how you win without magic but I'm not sure how anyone could do it without a guide to meet the stat requirements to survive some events unless they were some sort of savant.

Vinny should write some articles sometime, he writes well.

The 3DS has had a killer year, I've spent a lot of time on that thing. I guess I'll make A Link Between Worlds my first Zelda game.

I can say without hesitation that I prefer Persona 4. While I really like the characters in Persona 3, they do have a bit too much of the melodrama touch about them for me (with the exception of Fuuka, incidentally my favourite P3 character). I liked that the Persona 4 characters had more relatable issues and also that they felt far more like a group of friends than the Persona 3 characters did. I know that's kind of the point, SEES is a very forced arrangement but I really like the camaraderie you get in 4.

I see a lot of people hold P3's story above P4, but I think it's important to note that for a good long while, you're just killing Shadows for the hell of it and even after you get some semblance of a goal you only do it cos Ikutsuki tells you to. It's only toward the last months that the story gets really good whereas I feel that Persona 4 remains more consistent. Persona 3's endgame and final boss are better than Persona 4's in my opinion but that doesn't discount the 70-odd hours preceeding it.

Music is just purely down to taste and both soundtracks are excellent as I'm sure most of you will agree. Again though, I find that Persona 4 has a more consistent selection of tracks I like whereas a lot of the tracks in Persona 3 I grew sick of like the dorm theme, the city theme and the Tartarus theme. Also, I'm not as big a fan of Mass Destruction as a lot of people seem to be. I vastly prefer Reach Out to the Truth. Having said that, Battle for Everyone's Souls in P3 is my favourite piece of video game music ever.

Gameplay-wise (excluding Portable here), it's absolutely no contest. Persona 4 streamlined a lot of tedious things about Persona 3 such as not having fast travel, not controlling party members, having to talk to them separately to equip them, having to talk to them to use their healing spells. And I will concede that these things gave Persona 3 a sense of identity from other RPGs but I don't think they needed busywork to be different from other RPGs, I think they accomplished that already. Of course if you include Portable under the umbrella 'Persona 3' then a lot of these complaints cease to exist (and so does some of the character stuff). There are some things I do miss about Persona 3 in this regard though such as getting up requiring a turn, multi-hit spells not giving a '1 More' if it misses one enemy or an enemy isn't weak to it and Fusion Spells. I feel missing these things out took quite a lot of strategy out of Persona 4 although it doesn't bother me too much. On a smaller scale, the menus in P4 are FAR more responsive than the menus in P3. Good god are the P3 menus slow as molasses. And then there's Tartarus. Fuck Tartarus is all I'll say about it.

So there, I've had my say. I will add though, that it's really easy to bag on Persona 3 when answering this question but I still love it. Persona 4 is my favourite game ever and Persona 3 is probably number 2, so really much of my criticisms of 3 come from a good place and are kind of nit-picky.

Attack on Titan is shonen, just a little darker and with good production values behind it. It's not revolutionary or ground-breaking except that it doesn't do a lot of the tropes that people are sick of in most anime, preferring to do tropes that people *were* sick of before we got fanservice tropes. I went in expecting to be indifferent cos it was overhyped and the Titans look fucking ridiculous but it won me over. The characters that they bother to spend time on are interesting and I like the setting. Although the Titans still look fucking ridiculous and the 'twist' after episode 7 or whatever was dumb and I would've immensely preferred it if they'd kept it away from the transformation crap (and kept Eren dead, the little pissant). Calling it the best anime in however long is an entirely personal statement but it's not revolutionary by any means.

Kung Pao and L1 R1 (shoulder buttons on Vita)

I have several.

'There's a giant dog in that intersection, there's a giant dog in that intersection, there's a giant dog in that intersection' - Deadly Premonition Endurance Run

'Balls of sadness' - discussing Duke Nukem Forever on the Bombcast

When he unexpectedly turned on Saint's Row The Third in the 2011 GOTY deliberations. And while we're at it, his whole 2011 GOTY segment.

'WHAT. ARE. YOU. SAYING?!' - to Will Smith on his mispronunciation of executable

The Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood QL.

His stare-off with Freddie Prinze Jr. in the Wing Commander TANG.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'll be watching all of TANG.

I feel like I've been punched in the gut. We'd never met and were never likely to meet and yet this must be how it feels to lose a friend. My thoughts go out to his family and the rest of the crew. RIP Ryan, we're gonna miss you, dude.

I wish I could contribute to giving the game a bigger fanbase but after 5 attempts at playing it (across emulators and the PSP release), I just can't deal with the gameplay. The same goes for Persona 1. Whoever decided that it would be a good idea to double the number of battles you need to fight (to get cards for fusion and experience, can't get both in one battle) in order to be adequately levelled was sick in the head. Oh, and EP will never be released in Europe cos Atlus so that's fun :)