PixlBit

I really like this instumental song and all the guitars, keyboards, choirs, and orchestral sounds. I like to listen to this album when I play Dark Souls because it fits the mood pretty well. I listen to a general mix of Cradle of Filth I made as well with lots of older songs before Thornography like from Nemphetamine and At the Gates of Midian I think they're both called. If I got that wrong you'll know what I mean since you certainly know your Cradle of Filth lol.

I really like the picture of the female Osprey you got. They have a pretty nice nest going there it seems. I've always wondered how they put their nests together. Do they go collect downed branches and sticks from ground level and fly them up to the nest area? Do they kind of hover over the area and drop things hoping they'll stick or do they cling to the tree and gently place things around trying to make those nice layered apparently somewhat interlocking structures?

Some of the branches and sticks seem pretty big too like they could be extremely difficult to hold and get airborne. Maybe some of those are part of the tree, but how big of pieces can they pick up, or how big of pieces do Osprey generally like to use? Nest building seems like a pretty neat thing to learn about of which I know practically nothing about at the moment. Birds nest building as well as beaver dam building are all pretty interesting to me and I like to see how they do it.

On that list I voted for Mirror's Edge. I've played through it a few times already but I'd like to play it with everybody again since it's one of my favorite games. It's a short enough game to work for the type of schedules everybody has and it might end up being a fairly topical game to play and good time to play it since E3 isn't far away and we might hear about Mirror's Edge 2 before long since it's been in development over in Sweden for a while now.

Yes I love that the D option was added back during the poll, it ended up winning! It's a really good design I love Kirby in the center, the lettering, the background, and all the colors. Whomever gets some of these shipped to them are going to be some lucky ducks. I'm 24 so I could qualify but I really shouldn't because my doctor wants me on a gluten free diet because my immune system reacts very badly and since he's tested me for all the major stuff and come up negative he suspects it could be an undiagnosed gluten allergy based on everything he's heard from me. Most beers seem to be made from barley and other core ingredients that have the stuff in it.

I'd like to get my hands on Alice Returns some day too, I like what Ben (BrokenH) had to say about it when he did a review of it back on 1UP.

The next games I'm hoping to get my hands on are Mass Effect 3 since I still haven't played it, I'm going to get it and all the DLC. I also want to get Dragon's Dogma, Tropico 4 Gold edition, maybe Port Royale 3 since leeradical here did a review of it and it looks like something I could get into. I also really want to get the new Silver Star edition of Sniper Elite V2 with all the DLC. I'm obsessed with the demo of that game and it's super fun and the bullet time sniper stuff is great so I really want that game.

In Jesse's PC gaming feature he did not too long ago I let you know that I planned on investing in PC gaming during this next generation so I can both play and build, but I was still going to get a console. On the console front, since Microsoft hasn't showed anything yet I don't know what I'll end up getting but based on everything I've seen I wouldn't have much of a problem going back to Playstation for the next generation. I really enjoyed most of what I saw at their press event, and I'm sure more nice things will follow come E3. During the PS2 generation I owned all three major consoles at one point but my PS2 was my most beloved. Then in the next generation I went over to Microsoft, invested my gaming money into the 360, and never got around to saving up for a PS3 or Wii.

The Wii U is a sad story for me because I actually like the tablet and I want to play ZombiU and then all the 1st party stuff pretty bad but like you guys said in this episode the Wii U is more like the extra console. For me it just won't fit in and I certainly won't even be able to think about buying one for years. I already have a PC to build, and a PS4 or nextbox to think about and all the investment and time that comes along with that. The Wii U just won't work into all of that even though I want the games. Unless I can land a pretty sweet job in the near future and have much more disposable income, the Wii U will get left out for a very long time and maybe even completely ignored. Hopefully not, I hope a day will come when having the extra console is something I can work out.

The PS4 made a pretty decent argument to me at that conference. I want to play those Last of Us and Beyond exclusives. The Witness will be a timed exclusive and that's a system seller for me personally, I want that as fast as possible, PS4 has it first. Bungie's Destiny is multiplatform so I don't have to rely on Microsoft to get the new game. Watchdogs is multiplatform. I like the new PS4 controller and the triggers it has, it's more like the 360 controller and that one is my favorite. Eventually like you guys said Minecraft will end up on Playstation at some point (Minecraft is one of my favorite games) so I shouldn't have to rely on Microsoft for that.

The biggest things that can keep me with Microsoft are Halo and Fable, those are the only two exclusives they have anymore that I care about (I stopped playing Gears after Gears 2). I really love Halo and Fable so they'll have to sell me hard with not only those but lots of other stuff if they don't want me going with Playstation. I really enjoyed my experience with 360 and the games library I've built up with it. 360 has great games and a great controller so I had a lot of fun. But I've never been in love with Microsoft or the Xbox division so they still have to actually convince me to stay instead of just expecting me to. It won't break my heart to take a PS4 instead if I have to, back in the day my PS2 was my favorite console I ever owned.

As far as the game of the generation conversation goes I really can't choose, it's hard for me to even look at games in that light. I can never rank games or make lists, I can kind of do that with music sometimes but even music is too complicated and diverse. There's a song for every mood and moods fluxtuate so favorites fluxuate as well. The most I could ever do is make a big list of games that meant the most to me over the generation and taught me things or allowed me to have great experiences whether it's narrative, action, puzzle ideas, tech, or anything else. Portal 2, Half Life 2 episodes 1 and 2, Halo 3 co-op, Halo Reach Forge, Minecraft, Oblivion and Skyrim, Civilization Revolution, FEAR, Condemned, Mass Effect 1, Team Fortress 2, Bioshock 1 and Infinite to name several. They're all pieces of a larger puzzle that made this generation really great. This generation that is ending was a really good one, it's the generation that made me want to make games and gave me all the hope I have for the future of design.

I'm happy to start getting back into Dark Souls, it feels like the right time. You're planning an awesome video walkthrough, I'm trying to finish the Dark Souls Diary, it gets me excited to get back into the groove of DS combat and dungeon crawling.

Far Cry 3 is really really fun, but there are a couple things that will get frustrating. The two biggest offenders are that the story isn't interesting, and the other big one is that some of the side quests seem broken or easy to break. There's lots of main quests, and various types of side quests. The side quests have animal hunting missions, pirate leader assassination missions, and then they have these fetch quests that usually reward you a lot of money ($500). Those high reward fetch quests are appealing because they're easy and you get paid a lot, but a lot of the time they get broken or the items you're suppose to find are stupid hard to see or they don't sequence properly. You don't have to do those broken quests though, you can just choose the option to abandon them from the pause menu and they will go back to where you were before you started the quest. You can always try the quests again and they may work, but they aren't essential. You can make money other ways too.

For the most part it's a fantastic game though, it's some of the most fun I've had in a shooter this generation. The guns are all great, everything looks, feels, and sounds great. The stealth is a ton of fun, running across wild animals and pirates is fun, running around the wilds is great. The skill trees are good and offer a lot of useful upgrades and new mechanics. You can use hang gliders and sail across areas of the islands, driving works well, and seeing the fire in action is awesome. Fires spread really fast and you can use them to your advantage by setting fires with fire arrows, flare gun, or straight up with the flamethrower. The flamethrower is sweet, you can go through a pirate camp and set fire to everything and watch it sweep the whole place down. It's crazy. There's a lot of fun stuff to do and crazy stuff to see in Far Cry 3.

Sorry, I got distracted and started talking about all the combat. The environmental puzzle ideas and keys you were talking about are really cool. It'll be great to do some environmental puzzles and have more elements and interesting things do in the levels with variety.

Fallout 3 has some really amazing side quests and writing but the game itself isn't very enjoyable for me, and I'm a big fan of first person games and shooters. I just don't like how Fallout 3 feels and is paced as a shooter and action game. It has one of my favorite beginnings to a game ever where you see your character from birth to highschool and you get to craft him/her and their personality and traits. I love the beginning of the game, love the sidequests and characters, but the act of playing the game itself gets really boring or even frustrating for me. Even with that said one of the games I'm most looking forward to hearing about at E3 this year would be Fallout 4. I really hope the next Fallout game is in development and we see something about it this year.

Civilization challenges me and engages my brain but it calms me and focuses me all at the same time. I don't ever feel stressed out when I play CivRev, but I feel engaged and challenged. It's such an amazing game, Sid Meier really knocked it out of the park when he designed CivRev.

Those keys look cool and I'd like to see them create environment puzzles. The combat itself has always been a puzzle and that's one of the reasons I've always loved it. You have to have patience and be observant in order to survive in Dark Souls. All the combat is animation based and AI programming is consistent so that is distances itself from hack&slash games. You see new enemies, you study their attacks, you adapt accordingly. Attack at the right time, run, block, roll, strafe, backstab, arrows, firebombs, everything has to be calculated and you can't hack&slash your way through dungeons if you want to survive. If you die you just use it as part of the learning process and you fight to go collect your souls where you died and you learn from mistakes. The combat puzzles are a lot of fun in Dark Souls and the smallest battles can make you feel like a million bucks when you win, especially early on in the game like around Undead Burg when your low-level and just learning the ropes of the game.