It’s amazing how much you can learn about caring for twins in four months. You can go from a complete novice afraid of breaking his children and hopeless at diaper changes to a complete novice afraid of breaking his children who changes diapers like a champ.
If you’re also a gamer, you can pick up a few tips along the way to help you squeeze in a little more screen time and maximize your enjoyment. Consider these best practices for the baby set, whether you’ve got multiples or a singleton on the way.
After the jump, three tips for choosing the best games for your new circumstances. Continue reading →
There is no face with proportionate palm expansive enough to express the internet tactical error repeatedly committed by rajah sulayman, a hyper-defensively sincere yet profoundly naive photographer of cute homeless girls, himself, and puppets (no really, puppets ). Sorry raj , the internet has a will and way of its own and internet bullying has always been this bad. “Was (impending forum) ‘rape’ the first thing to pop into your head?” It was when I read the titles to all of your threads, man!
More schadenfreude after the seitesprung! Continue reading →
I’ve had Dissidia 012 for about a month now, and I’ve put in probably fifty-odd hours on it. This in itself isn’t unusual; I tend to play every Final Fantasy game to unhealthy levels. My Final Fantasy X final save came in at 140 hours, at least 60 of which were spent playing the Blitzball minigame. I have yet to finish Final Fantasy XII in under 120 hours. I’ve beaten it four times.
But Dissidia 012 is a little different for me. It’s a fighting game. I don’t really like fighting games. Is it just the fanservice that’s kept me playing it?
After the jump, it’s past time for hustling middle schoolers Continue reading →
I’m on the Nurburgring sprint circuit, trying to set a record in an Aston Martin with a V12 engine. A V12 seems a bit excessive. It’s four more V’s than the last of the V8 Interceptors! But I’m having a hard time because of something that isn’t the driving.
After the jump, why I hate the fans in Shift 2 Continue reading →
Wait, really? Has it happened? Crap, I think it has: I’ve reached the point where I’m thinking more about other games than I am about this one. Damn. It’s not uncommon for me to become more interested in something else before I finish a particular game. My playing time is pretty limited these days, and once I feel like I’ve ‘gotten’ a game, it’s hard for me to keep playing it if there are newer, sexier, more interesting games available.
But I really want to finish this one. I want to put a bow on it and feel closure with my Stalker experience. But…when will closure come? It’s not like a book, where you can see you only have a hundred pages left. Games are pretty damn opaque, cues-wise. I’ve made it to Pripyat, the third (final?) area of the game, but have no way of knowing how much more game there is. My Steam game page says I’ve played for 16 hours (holy cow!), and that’s a bit less than the total time I’ve heard others report, so I should be wrapping it up soon. I think I’ll focus on critical path missions, and ignore side content.
After the jump, my issues are back Continue reading →
I’ve been eying with curiosity a copy of Nascar 2011 for the Xbox 360 sitting here on my desk. Not that I’ve ever played a Nascar game, but my recent wheeltime with Shift 2 has me wondering if I’m missing anything. Millions of fans can’t be wrong, can they?
However, it sounds like the game might be in slightly rough shape, based on a press release about an upcoming patch. The list of fixes is one of those lists that makes me wonder why those things have to be fixed in the first place. They released it like that? Of course, I don’t really know Nascar, so I can’t make heads nor tails of some of that stuff. For instance, one of the fixes:
Ensure only Carl Edwards performs a back flip
Driver unique gymnastics moves! Among the bugs being addressed:
Truex Jr. & Bill Elliott being corrupt during celebrations
Sauron, man.
Section 8: Prejudice goes live this week on Xbox Live Arcade. It’s not much of a wallet threat, because it’s only $15*. But it is much of a wallet threat because Section 8 is so awesome. There’s plenty of new stuff in here to satisfy us Section 8 junkies, and plenty of core awesomeness to satisfy anyone who plays shooters. Graphics whores need not apply, but they’re probably still marveling at shiny things in Crysis 2 anyway.
You’re probably psyched for Portal 2, and you should be. It loses a little of the first game’s heart by going bigger, longer, and deeper. But Portal minus a little heart is still a fine game. Stay tuned here for a special guest and something not unlike a game diary.
Mortal Kombat: No Subtitle or Number Needed is also out this week. You’ve been playing the demo, right? Me either. SOCOM 4 goes live. The single player is nothing to write home about (“Dear Mother, other than the annoying stealth missions, it’s business as usual on the front — heavy scripting, bad story, unremarkable guns — but at least my teammates are competent.”). I do look forward to seeing how the multiplayer shakes out; developer Zipper Interactive’s last game, MAG, was a work of genius.
Get your heiny** to Mars in Pinball FX 2 this week. The Mars table is old news for folks who play Zen Pinball on the Playstation 3, but it’s a good table, with great sci-fi flavor and a forgiving layout. Next week, we get a whole new table with Sorcerer’s Lair. Paranormal — one of my favorite Zen Pinball tables — is due out “in the near future”.
Finally, Conduit 2 comes out if you’re that rare breed of shooter fan who only has a Wii. Why do you only have a Wii? Well, at least you’re finally getting a game with a proper multiplayer horde mode.
* do your own spacebuck math
** Pinball FX 2 is rated E for everyone
Patapon used to groove. Now it just sort of generically rocks out.
Thumbs down.
The irony is that the death of gaming came immediately after one of the biggest gaming booms ever.
My wife’s pregnancy was, not to put too fine a point on it, hell on earth. We had just recovered from the shock and awe of finding out that we were having twins when she was hit with an unrelenting wave of nausea that lasted four months.
Four. Months.
Think about that for a second. Take your worst hangover, multiply it by 120, and then imagine choking down meals for the benefit of your unborn children even though the thought of food makes you violently ill. Whoever coined the phrase “morning sickness” should be shot. Or, at least, sued for false advertising.
No sooner had the nausea started to wane than the searing, roiling heartburn kicked in, making her next four months an absolute treat. Add in the other trials of pregnancy — joint pain, back pain, constant bathroom breaks, lugging the babies on board up to our third-floor apartment — and you can understand why all she wanted to do was sleep. Each evening, she would wait until I got home and stay up just long enough to ensure that she didn’t wake up bright-eyed and bushy tailed in the middle of the night. She would crawl off to bed around 7 p.m. and try to escape the horror her life had become in the arms of a restless, fitful slumber. On the weekends, she would try to stay unconscious for as long as possible, only rising when she could no longer stand feeling like an invalid.
All of which left me with a lot of alone time. So what’s a gamer to do?
After the jump, feast, famine, life, and death. Continue reading →
It would have been easy to half-ass Dissidia. Slap some characters together, give them a couple of special moves, put in a lot of old music, and call it a day. Instead, Square Enix created a unique fighting system, crafted an immense (if ludicrous) story, and put real thought into the characters. Dissidia is a love letter to the fans who have been playing Final Fantasy games for almost twenty-five years now, and as such Square Enix has packed it to the brim with fanservice.
After the jump, more in-jokes than you can shake a moogle at Continue reading →
The first Shift did a great job tracking your friends’ performance in different races. It compared your best time to the best time from your friends list. Using these times, it assigned “ownership” to an event, and then it tallied the number of events you owned in any group to assign ownership to groups of events. When you played Shift, it provided an immediate visual cue to how well you were doing compared to your friends playing the game.
But Shift 2 uses Electronic Arts’ Autolog, a Facebook-inspired bit of social bloat bolted onto the side of the game.
After the jump, I will try really hard to hate Autolog Continue reading →
You spend a lot of time alone in Stalker: Call of Pripyat. It’s a lonely world, with wide expanses of abandoned land, ruined buildings slumping slowly into the swamps, and strangely mutated creatures running in packs through the tall and rustling grasses. I’ve been running back and forth for a while now, completing standard tasks for an assortment of indistinguishable hardasses. Go find his missing tool chest. Place these detectors inside of anomalies. Kill all the mutants in this lair. And I’ve been doing it mostly alone.
So when I get to team up with people, it’s pretty exciting. Hanging out with Grouse, as described in a previous entry, wasn’t that great. But a mission to rescue a stalker hostage from some bandits was surprisingly fun. I had the option to convince his buddies to help me attack the bandits, negotiate with the bandits, or deal with it my own way. I chose the latter option.
After the jump, me and my new buddy eff some bandits UP! Continue reading →
Usul, we’ve got wormsign the likes of which even God has never seen.
This week’s community level is my favorite non-pinball pinball level I’ve played so far. You know what? Include actual LBP2 pinball levels in that, because I’ve yet to play one of those that works. This one is easy. It’s clever. And it’s worlds beyond any of those. The level is called Magnetic Fields. Isn’t my little magnetic spaceshippy thing up there nifty?
Now then, ready to have your mind blown with a full-on essay-length breakdown of this sweet little level?
After the jump, now for something completely different Continue reading →
I have a favorite character in every Final Fantasy game. I think everyone who plays a Final Fantasy game has a favorite character. They stay in the party all the time, they get the best weapons and armor, and they get all the top abilities. Your least favorite character is lucky to even get a seat on the airship before you take off, let alone get in the active party. If you look carefully at that picture, you might be able to figure out which of those characters I like and which I hate.
After the jump, maybe he’s a lion. Continue reading →
Finland’s involvement in World War II includes one of the great David vs. Goliath stories of all time. Invaded in November 1930 by Stalin’s Red Army, the woefully outnumbered and outgunned Finns humiliated the Russians, inflicting heavy casualties, and initially thwarting all their objectives. The lightly armed Finns conducted a clinic in mobile winter warfare, typified by the Battle of Suomussalmi where two entire Soviet divisions were annihilated while trapped on a forest road. Finnish casualties were fewer than 500. The war introduced the world to the untranslatable Finnish word sisu: a national strength of will that exemplified the performance of the country’s military. The Red Army eventually overcame this heroic resistance through a combination of improved leadership, coordination, and mostly just overwhelming numbers. But the Peace of Moscow signed in March 1940 fell far short of Stalin’s initial goal of the conquest of the entire country. The war captured the world’s imagination (although secured virtually no material assistance) and has been recounted in multiple books in many languages. Former PC Gamer columnist and wargaming guru William Trotter wrote an excellent account, Frozen Hell, almost twenty years ago, and a classic popular history, White Death by Allen Chew, was recently reprinted after initial publication way back in 1971.
After the jump, the darker side of the story Continue reading →
