Shamoozal.com - Smorgas Board

Having a mini love-affair with my PS3 this week. Downloaded a few of the PS+ freebies (LBP2, Saints Row 2, Infamous 2). I also dove back into MGS Peacewalker last night. Really enjoying that game. Comfy couch gaming is in full effect.

I downloaded Virtua Fighter and Tomb Raider but who knows when/if i'll ever play them. I managed to squeeze in 20 minutes of Catherine though. I basically hung out in a bar talking to people the whole time and then got drunk.

Sounds like a reason not to get your butt kicked by me. Heh

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I played the Guild Wars 2 beta most of the weekend. This game is fucking awesome. SWTOR, Rift, Aion better go F2P as soon as possible or just pack up shop. This game is the "Every MMO not called WoW"-Killer. I love it, but I fear what its going to do to me.

Also played a bit of Lara Croft & the Guardian of Light for Game Club. I rike.

Playing through Rayman Origins w/ my daughter. It's a fun game to turn off your brain and play.

Really loving Binary Domain.

BIG BOOOOO!

Vinny Caravella approved.

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Yeah it looks surprisingly good. I don't think anyone was expecting more than crap.

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Yeah that's the word on the street. What do you like about it?

Shooting feels good, love the story/characters. Some sweet scenarios so far. I mainly love the japanese story but the gameplay isn't at all offensive, hahaha.

Quantum Conundrum, play it bitches.

Looks neat.

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Way ahead of you, broham. Enjoying it a whole bunch.

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Started playing Bomb Monkey (3DS) for EG review. It's pretty good! It's a straight up drop the block puzzle game without many bells and whistles as far as modes go. You get Endless and a few other score attack modes, plus co-op or battle on the same DS (a screen for each player). Like a lot of these games you drop colored blocks, but the only way to make them go away is to blow them up with a bomb which appears at random. So if you blow up a yellow block and it has yellow blocks near it, it'll start a chain reaction and get rid of those. There are other types of blocks that pretty much blow up the whole map.

Anyway, digging it so far.

So I did my Bomb Monkey review for Elder-Geek. I gave it a Worth Buying and a 3/5. I actually don't like giving number scores to games, but Randy enforces it. I tried to get away with it in the beginning but it was getting frowned upon by him and a few others, so I gave in.

Anyway, I thought it was a fair review. To me a 3 is very good, a 4 is great and 5 is saved for the really really great ones. So I tweeted my review of the game to the dev after it went live. I later tweeted him about my high score (I'm apparently the #1 Bomb Monkey player at the moment) and during the exchange said I really was enjoying the game and hope he liked my review. He tweets back saying he felt like I gave him a 6/10 and that it wasn't a good score.

I was a bit put off by it. I thought I did my job well and fair. I hate how the whole review hinges on those god damn numbers. The numbers on EG are even almost hidden, tucked away under a bunch of facts well after the review. It still had a "Worth Buying" on it, which I think is really what matters. The thing that kills me is that what I really dinged it on was the fact that it didn't have any leader boards, online or local. Well he put together an old style Top 10 leader board on his site where people send in their top scores through way of snapped photos that you can email or tweet to him. I find it kinda funny that I'm the top player at the moment. All these other people have given the game higher reviews on average and yet it looks like I'm the dude that actually played it for more than 2 hours. Also, if he put together a board in this way the day after launch, then he obviously know that not having a leader board was a bad move.

I don't know, just kind of annoyed. Probably shouldn't post this here, because I do like the devs work a lot, just sucks. I kinda get why all the pro game critics out there are always going nuts over scores now.

Oh I tried the Rhythm Thief 3DS demo last night. Sooooo good. Wasn't expecting much but ended up really enjoying it. It has three songs on there with three different ways to play for each. One was about sliding in directions on the touch screen, another was about tapping the right icon (sorta kinda simon-ish) and the other was either tapping the dpad or a button at the right time. I got some serious Space Channel vibes from it. I'll be looking out for this one when it hits the bargain bin.

Don't tell me Rhythm Thief is good, I'm just about to get Theatrhythm! Oh well...

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RT is 10 dollars cheaper than Theatrhythm!

I just read that inbetween songs in RT is a Layton-like game. Not sure if that means puzzles but man it sounds good.

Yeah Phil reviews are weird. It's almost like 8+ is good to great, 7 is average and anything lower goes from bad to horrible.

Also at least it isn't a 10 point system. 5 is the way to go if you have to have an actual ranking and not a play/do not play.

5 is like:

1: Terrible game, unplayable (for example Steel Battalion for Kinect)
2: Bad, just a bad game
3: Good, either a great idea/story with some glitches, mechanical issues and stuff or a perfectly designed game with a weaker story, or just overall average
4: Great, at least one aspect is fantastic while the rest are average
5: Absolutely fantastic, a must buy



It's hard for me to rank games, either I like them or I do not.

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Yeah my views on the 5 star system are on par with yours. But yeah, I'd rather just be able to give the game a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

Man you see thumbs up thumbs down then if you want to know more READ THE REVIEW!

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http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html

I got 3.5 meters. I think I almost had it figured out.

Man, this guy is gosu

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"If you always put limit on everything you do, physical or anything else. It will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them. "

Took PTO days to get some stuff done and work on the short (girls are at the sitters). Took a short break to play some SNES games I've been sitting on. I played StuntRace FX. Holy shit is this bad. It was bad back in the day and it's worse now. It's a racing game using the SuperFX chip so the HUD is like more than half the screen and the game runs at maybe 10fps. It's possible it's less than that. It's impossible. You can't see shit, it plays like shit and it runs like shit. I'm kind of amazed Nintendo released this. Easily one of their worst games ever. I made it for less than 10 minutes before I turned it off.

I briefly played through one stage of Goof Troop. I remember this game being good, but I didn't remember it being Zelda-lite. Actually it's a lot like Four Sword Adventures. Each stage is sort of like a simple Zelda dungeon. The whole pot throwing mechanic from LttP is your main method of attack. Key items can be held two a time, and there are lots of push block puzzles and shit. It's neato, I might go back to this one and play a stage here and there. I remember beating it over a weekend as a kid.

Yo Theatrhythm is pretty damn good. Not the most challenging rhythm game, but fun and with a good soundtrack. I think I may have beaten it, but like most rhythm games, it's all about replay value. Gotta get those unlocks.

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Spec Ops: The Line is pretty decent. At first I was kind of "meh" on it because the shooting and cover mechanics seem kind of average but the story is getting VERY interesting and there have started to be points where I have to make a decision and I have wound up regretting the one I made a few times. There was one part where you pick how to deal with a very large group of enemies and my choice led to a pretty fucked up conclusion.

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