PixlBit

One of the more interesting games of 2005 was Haunting Ground, a game made by Capcom as a successor to the Clock Tower series. It had a panicky heroine with few means to fight back other than her dog (and you could mistreat the dog badly enough to where it wouldn't help you), plus a lot of gruesome off-camera deaths.

Resident Evil 4 would have been my GOTY 2005... if Dragon Quest VIII hadn't come out in 2005. That game is still one of the best I've ever played. My new wife, myself, and my stepdaughter all played the game to completion and had our own save files.

Is it true that you paid Stormy Daniels $130,000 for her silence?

It was actually Zero Mission where I was referring to the hand-holding, and the statues that told you where to go next weren't skippable. Still, loved the movement mechanics of the game and the fact that you didn't have to spend hours re-finding the Ice and Wave Beams every time you wanted to change them.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2 is my alternative game to BotW. Great game, but like BotW, it gets punishing at times and at random. Odyssey is just awesome.

I'm tempted by Fire Emblem Warriors, but I really hope Nintendo brings out the Fire Emblem SRPG soon. That's what I really want, a console Fire Emblem that we haven't seen since Radiant Dawn on Wii.

2004 sucked for me, too. It was probably the low point of my adult life up until then. My only consolation was video games, specifically Tales of Symphonia, which is a game I still dig out every once in awhile. I also played MGS: The Twin Snakes, but I'm not a huge MGS fan the way a lot of other people here are. I did enjoy the Psycho Mantis sequence, since I had saves from Wind Waker on that memory card.

Metroid: Zero Mission was an interesting beast. On the one hand, it was too linear and hand-holdy. One of the points of Metroid for me was always exploration, and when the game tells you where to go it takes a lot of that out for me. On the other hand, the controls and graphics were really nice. The original Metroid is one of my big classics from childhood, but it is a really rough play these days just because of the controls. Super Metroid remains my gold standard for Metroid games. Metroid Prime 2 I didn't get into as much as the first game.

Activision really ran Tony Hawk into the ground, didn't they? They did the same thing with Guitar Hero a few years later.

Until they got called out on it, EA used to pull this crap where they would suspend people's Origin accounts for trolling on EA's forums (especially the Mass Effect forums), and the people whose accounts got banned ended up losing access to any games that were tied to their Origin accounts, even if those games were physical copies. I think they fixed it after people started calling them out publicly for it, but it was still a shitty thing to do. Being a jerk on a message board should never be an excuse to lose access to games you've paid hundreds of dollars for.

And companies are charging the same amount of money for digital games as they do for physical copies of the same game. Sometimes digital ends up being more expensive.

I remember a point in the first Gears of War. There was a checkpoint right before a boss that was giving me major problems, and every time I got killed by the boss, I'd have to listen to the dialogue over and over again. I really got sick of it after the first two or three times.

Nena was the original artist behind "99 Luftballons." That song, incidentally, was a protest song released during the 1983 nuclear standoff in Eastern Europe. I

West of Phoenix is Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station, which is purported to be the largest nuclear power plant in the United States. I guess it supplies Phoenix and a lot of Southern California with power. It doesn't look like a stereotypical nuclear power plant, and since water is a limited commodity in the desert, it uses waste water, i.e. sewage as a coolant.

It looks a bit like Magician Lord, a game I saw on a lot of Neo-Geo arcade machines and is available as an ACA Neo-Geo game on current systems.