Gate Crash pre-release.

Went 3-2 in Two-Headed Giant and won two extra packs.

Got the red/green shock land, which I promptly traded to a friend for $9, (less than it's really worth, but hey I'm a nice guy),
a holo Whispering Madness,
a couple other holo nothings,
a Dimir Keyrune,
a Dimir Charm,
a Simic Charm,
an Orzhov Charm,
Mind Grind,
Biomass Mutation,
a Boros Reckoner,
a Giant Adephage,
and two Consuming Aberrations.

And a couple Thespian's Stages, not that they're of much use to me.

It was a good day.

Started playing Path of Exile now that it's in open beta.

This game is everything that Diablo 3 should have been, and more. Virtually every aspect of the game is different form traditional dungeon crawlers in the way your character grows, the way get loot, and even the way you pay for things. It feels like you need to put serious thought into what you do, even when it comes to selling items you would normally consider vendor trash.

The one thing it could really use is the ability to totally respec your character. Right now, you can get a handful of points to respec a few skills, but the character skill tree is epic, and it can be a little annoying to find out you misspent a point on a route you released you didn't want to go down two levels hence.

I'm still gradually playing Assassin's Creed III. Right now I'm also playing The Unfinished Swan.

Actually I looked at some videos of Landstalker's gameplay and minus the isometric perspective, it is indeed incredibly similar. A girly young elf runs around doing awful platforming, dungeon-crawling and hitting shit with his sword. Mild RPG elements. You should play it, Nick. Allow me to reiterate that it is a measly $5.99 US Dollars on PSN, and perfect for a portable system like the PSP or Vita!

Speaking of Matrix software, I finished out my Final Fantasy collection with FF3 on the DS. People were telling me what a grindfest it was, but I've found it's only that if you're bad at RPGs. Don't get me wrong, it is hard as fuck, but the job system allows for a lot of strategy and if something doesn't work you don't have to go out and gain 5 levels, you just have to change your shit up. Example: if a boss is kicking my ass with strong physical attacks, I can make everyone a mage, stick them in the back row, give them two shields each (yes you can dual-wield shields, it's awesome) and have them all spam whatever element the boss is weak to while he's plinking away at the party for double-digit damage. That's a favorite strategy actually, especially for dungeons where you have to go through the entire thing afflicted with Mini (no physical attack power and shit defense). There are a lot of those. >:

I can't wait to get the Viking class, which is built around turtling like this and has an ability that forces enemies to attack it. It's like Sentinels from FF13, which I actually thought were a cool concept and used a whole bunch.

One thing I hate is that you can't buy goddamn Phoenix Downs, and they're so rare as treasure that if someone in my party gets killed, rather than waste one of my three precious extra lives I'll just reset or go all the way back to the overworld and find a revival fountain, which takes at least 10 minutes after the point when all the dungeons start having a minimum of 8 labyrinthine floors. It's nice that you get fully restored after winning a boss battle, but I'd prefer to just have the resources to end them with everyone alive so the experience is spread evenly. I steadfastly refused to let anyone be a lower or higher level than anyone else in 1 and 5, and that shit ain't changing now because it drives me fucking insane. I'll suck the dick of whatever merchant finally sells me Life.

Not to mention there are no save points, ever; if you die in a dungeon, you have to do the whole fucking thing all over again. What I've started doing is going through the dungeon once, collecting all the treasure and fighting every encounter I get, then when I find the boss room I turn around and go back outside, save and refresh my guys, and go back through it again just running from every encounter so that everyone's on top-form for the boss. Thank fuck Thieves have an auto-escape command. I don't see why Matrix didn't just add save-points to make the game slightly less goddamn psychotic; that's fake difficulty from bad NES-era design and I don't like it.

What I do like are the Anime Kewpie Doll graphics; I thought they were really out of place in a serious (?) dramatic drama like FF4 but they work in a lighthearted NES game like this one and look pretty bitchin'. The re-tooled music is also great as usual, although the new boss theme is definitely worse than the NES version.

Supposedly they're working on a remake of FF5 in the same style, which is probably good since 5 has never really had a perfect release (SNES isn't in English, PSX translation is the stuff of Engrish legends, GBA lags like a bitch and the music quality is a turd on the floor) but I hope instead of doing an unnecessary remake of FF6 next they'll instead do FF2, which is important enough to narrative development in games that it should be played, but actually playing it is beyond fucking horrible and even grindier than Dragon Quest. If any Final Fantasy literally needs a huge full-on revamp, it's that one.

path of exile is also rad as hell in 3D with iz3d drivers

i got a neat 50" projection from freecycle and also bought some more consoles and games



then yesterday I added RCA jacks to my new turbografx because fuck RF switches



so i guess i've been playing HR giger pinball and bonk lately.

Have you played DayZ yet? :D

Ni No Kuni and Dead Space 3.

Ni No Kuni is really a relaxing thing after all that Final Fantasy 13 Bullshit, beautiful game, good characters, not a big fan of the battle system and most of the music though, still very very good.

Dead Space 3...yeah well, we knew what would happen to that franchise, but the game is nowhere as "bad" as a lot of reviewers make it out to be. It´s a great game, you build a shitload of cool guns and shoot up Necromorphs while following a good story. What´s not to like? Sure, some people at Visceral played too many Facebook-games and included optional Microtransactions and timer-based ressource collecting but fuck it, it´s still fun.
Haven´t played Coop yet though.

The ending

What about it?

Fire Emblem Awakening is seriously my favorite strategy RPG. Double Up and Team Up actually drastically change how you play the game and build your troops. And they way classes are handled now is really smart. I wish the battle animations were a little better, but looking at the maps in 3D is very impressive. I love anytime something flies overhead, or when they use particles.

Also, it's probably the first cast since FE7 that I actually liked, which makes pairing them up and marrying them all the more fun. Especially once their kids join you.

The new neverwinter mmo is fun. Its free to play.

If you give $200 though you can play as a drow from menzo.

$200

$200

nah

200 buckeroonies.

started playing dark souls, pretty fun.

Yup, made it into my personal Top 5 of all time somehow. Still playing it, SL1-Run and Some weird kind of Challengerun where I can only use Daggers and nothing else...

Not playing Aliens.

Thankfully.

Colonial Marines must be pretty horrible from all I´m hearing...what was the last good one from that franchise...AVP2?

AvP 2000, but some of the level design was something horrible. Everything is so sparse. The lighting engine was awesome good. Still good, honestly.

The Colonial Marines advertisement has one of the stupidest lines I've ever heard.

"They said in space no one can hear you scream

[pause]

They were wrong!"

You know that's a play off the original tagline for the movie films, right?

Yes, and the clever thing about the original tagline is its allusion to the concept that sound cannot travel through a vacuum. It is literally impossible to hear someone screaming in space.

Does this new Aliens game redefine the laws of the universe?

is it even possible to actually scream in the vacuum?

No, but you'd probably sweat really hard.

Due to various accidents, (because it'd be unethical to test for it), people've found that vacuums aren't instantly lethal, anyway. As I heard it, you could be there alive for many, many seconds.

I read somewhere that the most instant threat is that of a sunburn as you have no atmosphere to shield you.