PixlBit

Welcome everyone and thank you so much for coming! The circumstances of your arrival are no doubt grim, but as Director of a budding site, it's absolutely invigorating to see so many new faces descend at once. I can't wait to establish a rapport with you all and have you as an active part of our community.

If there's anything at all that I can do to ease your transition (including site enhancements), please, feel free to let me know. I've added a follow system that I hope works out well tonight and I predict a number of other enhancements will come in the near term to improve our organically grown blog section.

In any event, welcome once again, hope to see you all around!

I literally just added this feature for you guys. The blogs have grown somewhat organically, so there aren't a ton of features that should probably be there.

With all of your help, we'll get this ship pointed in the right direction! Let me know if the following system works out for you guys and if you have any questions on it. It's a little rough around the edges, but I'm hoping it works pretty well.

So, I'm pretty much caught up with you now, Mike. However, I haven't done either of these areas yet. I decided to take on The Duke's Archives, Crystal Cave, and Tomb of the Giants first. Once I get done with these areas, I'll have all of the Lord Souls and I think that sets me up for the end game battle.

Starting to get excited at the prospect of beating the game and moving on to other stuff. It's been a wild ride, but it's starting to get depressing exploring this dark and gloomy world. I've got Ni No Kuni waiting for me on the PS3 and that bubblegum atmosphere is the exact change of scenery I think I need.

At some point I'll probably tackle Demon's Souls, but I've got a bunch of other stuff waiting for me first.

This sounds just as awesome as I hoped it to be. Sold.

Oh man, fuck Blighttown. Just finished that terrible place a couple of nights ago and man am I glad to be moving on. Now that I've got that out of the way, I went and cleared out The Undead Asylum and I'm setting course to finish off the rest of Darkroot. Hopefully shouldn't be too bad and I'm looking forward to farming some sould for leveling.

I'm really enjoying these entries Michael. Saw the next one starts with the Catacombs, so I'm going to refrain from reading any until I get past it all, but I'll be sure to comment over there once I make my way through.

After hating Demon's Souls, I'm surprised that I've been so immersed in Dark Souls. Something about it is different and it's definitely for the better. I'll probably give Demon's Souls a shot again after I finish this one, but for the time being, I'm deeply enjoying my passage through this dark adventure.

I'd say that I almost entirely agreed with Jesse's review, with the exception of controlling Zoya's grappling hook. I didn't have any issues with that and using it was one of my favorite parts of the platforming.

More importantly though, I bumped the game up in score for the added content. The game was practically made for the Wii U, despite coming out before the system's release. Furthermore, the levels that were the Goblin Menace DLC on the PC are really fantastic. They have so much more going for them thematically and in terms of design, they're leaps and bounds better than the rest of the content in the game.

If I were to rate the main game, I still think a 3.5 is appropriate, but the Goblin Menace DLC would've definitely earned a 4.5 on its own. I figured the middle ground of a 4 was just right.

I think this is an interesting take on it, but in the end we have to ask ourselves, what is a video game then? I have yet to play The Walking Dead, and I probably never will, but it seems unfair to remove it from the category of "video games" and establish a new form of entertainment when there's not really a clear declaration of what a video game is.

According to Wikipedia, a video game is:

"A video game is an electronic game that involves human interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a video device."

If we adopt that description, I think The Walking Dead definitely fits. It's not quite in the same genre or subset of genres that games usually are, but you most certainly interact with it and this generates visual feedback. The feedback may be completely canned, but in a way, so are all games, there's just more complex actions to create the canned feedback.

As for the whole business with the VGAs, The Walking Dead seems like an odd winner. Worse, the whole show seems to celebrate blockbuster games and high profile titles. Some truly fantastic games have come out this year, but they're so under the radar, most people haven't played or even heard of them.

If we compare it to the Oscars, it would be like seeing Transformers and The Expendables show up in the running for best picture. It's not that these are horrible movies, they're just not really the types of movies that film enthusiasts embrace, nor do they feature any of the subtleties that define artists of film. The VGAs are pretty ridiculous and they're certainly not indicative of what a show like that could and ultimately should be.

VGAs aside, I think I ultimately disagree with your assertion that The Walking Dead is not a game, but I do think that we need to understand as a community that such games are narratively-focused and they are inherently built to evoke emotions. If we simply judge games on their ability to evoke emotional responses, we're not fully considering the scope of what games can be. I think that's a part of what happened with The Walking Dead and probably with Journey too, but to a lesser extent.

So much for meaningful discourse. *sigh*

This is somewhat reassuring, though I have to wonder if you can have multiple NNIDs per system, or if it's just the one. I don't think it would be a big deal for me if it were just the one, but I have to imagine that in a family situation with some older kids, each one would want their own to go online with.

I guess we'll see come this weekend. Of course, we still have to verify that online play even works alright, but I'm hoping that's a given.

I felt that the game had more incremental difficulty spikes. However, each time it happens, the game informs you that the car you have is inadequate and prompts you to upgrade it or get a better one.

Furthermore, the game informs you about general areas where better cars are hidden in the environment and urges you to go get them. Generally speaking, once I was able to either retrieve a better vehicle or upgrade one of the ones I already had, the difficulty evened back out.

I'm not the greatest at racing games, but I tend to be pretty good. I was finding this one to be too easy at first and then the difficulty starting coming up to par after the first set of events. In some instances, even after the game urged me to upgrade my vehicle, I kept it the same and was still finding success in the races. I'm guessing the difficulty is going to vary from person to person depending on their experience with the genre.