PixlBit

I was blogging heavily when DNF came out, and that's around the time that I started a series called Reviews After the Hype. When games come out and have a lot of hype or expectation surrounding them it always feels like they're either the best game ever made or an atrocity and offensive to everyone. The truth is usually in the middle. Duke Nukem Forever isn't a good game by any stretch, but it's also not the travesty that people accuse it of being. It's a decidedly low-tier shooter that would have been mind blowing had it come out 4 years earlier.

Good luck on those underwater levels towards the end, though.

I'm just surprised at everyone complaining about how little was shown. Don't you remember how these things go? I was expecting the event to spend about 30 minutes on Vita and PS3, and then give the new system name, show a controller, a tech demo or two, and maybe a trailer for a single game. As it was, I was surprised that they showed as much as they did. I think they could have cut David Cage and Square Enix because they didn't really add anything to the proceedings, but otherwise it was a satisfying display.

I adore this game. Yeah, the ending goes off the rails and some of the QTEs are superfluous, but I love how you can see the prototype for Heavy Rain in the DNA of this title. My biggest issue with Indigo Prophecy is that I feel like the game never realizes the potential of that opening scene. Playing the diner from the perspective of the hunter and the hunted is so amazing, and I feel like they lost that dichotomy as the game went forward.

Yeah, it sounds like Knights of Pen and Paper on iOS, which I have Jesse and Mike to thank for.

I got a total of 19. I was able to roll for everything except for LARPing, but I had a critical failure on the d20. 

Have you tried Double Dragon Neon? It's a little slow and kind of cheesy, but it's pretty fun and has what may have been my favorite soundtrack of last year.

Does this mean you'll finally stop bringing up the Epic Mickey games on this show? Because that would be swell.

And the PixlBit award for best comment of the year goes to Michael117.

Personally, I wouldn't call Jonathan Blow arrogant. He's been accused of being pretentious by a lot of people (including me), but now I see that it's just part of that indie mentality that I mentioned in the show. I hate that mentality, and if I ever start making indie games I'm going to be damned sure to not start walking around like I'm so much better than the rest of the industry because I don't work for the "machine".

I'm taking a hardline stance and not buying any games for at least 6 months. This is going to kill me, because I truly believe that 2013 may be one  of those legendary years in gaming, like 1998 and 2007. BioShock is going to be the killer, because I know people are going to be talking about it for months on podcasts and eventually I'll get a sense of the whole story by putting things together. But hey, maybe I'll reward myself with a launch next-gen system...

So yes, I'm going to be attacking my backlog between reviews. I decided today that I'm going to write all of my games down and put them into a hat and choose three. It's the only way to approach it, because I'm way too indecisive when I look at the 40+ games sitting on my shelf.

Did these games sell to anyone but the hardest of the hardcore? It's not like Nintendo or XSEED did much marketing. I got the sense that the people who wanted these games already knew about them long before Operation Rainfall.

I definitely saw plenty of nerd rage type comments in regards to this little experiment. Not nearly the levels of of Mass Effect and DmC because as you said, these are niche games within a niche.

I'm not saying it's not great that these games got released here. I'm just hesitant to award all the praise to an internet petition movement. That gives them the victory. Victory leads to empowerment. Empowerment leads to entitlement. Entitlement leads to petitions. Petitions lead to me rolling my eyes.