around this time, maybe should've mentioned E3 in the title as well.

GTA IV (yes, I'm behind the times), Lord of Ultima.

GTA IV sucks. Lord of Ultima is interesting, but not sure it's my thing. WIll stick it out for a bit to see what happens.

E3 should be great this year.

Looking forward to what the name change with EA's NBA titles will bring.

Playing Red Dead, matching up online is rather difficult. Managed to find one player (once) and shot him dead by accident so he left. Never found another player online again.

love this new thread smell!

playing red dead too. loving it.

i'm ps3, btw, and i'd like to say how much this new generation of gaming is shitting me. I don't have as much free time on my hands to play games as i used to so it shits me to no end when i put in a game i'm hanging to play, like red dead redemption, and i have to update my system then load in a bunch of trophy information and all this other bullshit i'm not interested in. it's not that long ago that you could put a disc in a console and be playing a new game within 2 mins. what happened to those days? sorry about the rant.

Has anybody created a park on Skate 3 yet?

couldn't stand skate 2 so no.

my little diatribe aside i do like playing buzz on the internet

Still on Dragon Age and Torchlight over here. Gotta love replay value.

I'm playing Portal, InFamous and FFXIII at the moment. Good times.

I've gone backwards. Playing The Operative: No One Lives Forever on PC. OLD but still kinda fun. Gotta love $2 Vinnies finds.

Looking forward to heading home and hunting armadillo's, breaking horses in and getting myself into duels with douches who I shoot 12 times before they even pull their gun out of their pocket.

so I'm 26 hours into FFXIII now (playing it slowly because of uni commitments, but uni is over now..) and it has finally opened up into a free roaming game. It looks spectacular, and is actually quite a lot of fun. I just wish the characters didnt suck so much, and the story wasnt so confusing.

What part are you up to k2? I gave up in some machine like area or more specifically where the black dude and the aussie girl have to press four buttons to get through a door. Much more past that? I'm considering selling it.

im up to Gran Pulse - chapter 11 I think. I got stuck for ages on this boss guy Cid Raines. I seriously dies 10 times trying to kill the fucker, but finally did it after changing many battle team combos and paradigms. Seriously, I feel like the game just started. At least I can grind for a bit now and get my levels and weapons up. I'm doing missions at the moment too.

So the true FF game is yet to come still? I've all but hated every second of it so far. So restricted.

playing half life 2 ep 2 on osx right now, it's awesome

Red Dead and Mirrors Edge, both on Xbox 360.

In between these I'm in training for my Sonic The Hedgehog Marathon for Charity

If you guess how long it will take me to beat Sonic 1, 2, 3 & Sonic and Knuckles on Mega Drive in one sitting you will win a Sonic Prize pack and a $50 donation to a charity of your choice. No shit.

If anyone wants to host this at their venue it would be much appreciated. Otherwise it's my lounge room.

RDR - just saw a bloke ahead of me on a dirt track get off his horse and run into the field and stop. I followed him to see what he was doing. He was taking a piss on a rock. Yellow stream and all. Then when he's done he gets back on his horse and continues about his way.

This game is amazing.

haha. if you see that in your city you'd be disgusted. yet now they're putting it in games y'all loving it.

haha. if you see that in your city you'd be disgusted. yet now they're putting it in games y'all loving it.

That just put an image in my head of happycow running up to some guy pissing in the street, watching intently, then saying ''this is amazing, there's a yellow stream and everything''.

hahaha!

yeah, dragonscale armor is light. I made a set last night, pretty nice. Definitely go up the left hand of the smithing tree if you do light armour.

Oh ok. Ignore me hc. Btw I just got a great dragonbane one handed sword.

THANKS K2. I GET SO MANY EMAILS I CAN'T REPLY TO THEM ALL BUT REST ASSURED I DO READ THEM ALL :):):)

(I did miss that)

How to counter diminishing returns: Prioritize spending souls in this order: (Early on) level stats only to reach a reasonable weapon, once you reach requirements then stop leveling stats and begin the process of upgrading your weapon THEN upgrading your armor.

Yep - pretty much this. If you're playing online overlevelling also puts you out of range for jolly co-op but you'll still get invaded as you can be invaded by anyone under your soul level.

A good shield's also worth upgrading - Hollow Soldier Shield you can get early on, otherwise Tower Kite Shield or Spider Shield (this especially when you hit blighttown) is great - more stability == less stamina drain when blocking.

Good to know. I'd have kept on leveling up. I've leveled up a bit of gear so far, but not much, and I'm not sure if it's gear I should bother leveling up (Wanderer starting armor, Knight Shield). Then again, if I don't spend my souls on something I'll inevitably lose them all :)

+5 whatever you like using as it's pretty cheap to buy Titanite shards. If you've given the Large Ember to the blacksmith you might want to be a bit choosy on what to level past +5 as Large Titanite's a bit harder to come by.
Knight shield's not too bad but has pretty crappy elemental resistances when things start throwing firebombs and magic at you. Wanderer's set is ok - Black Leather set is a little bit better and lighter if you have picked that up.
If you chose Master Key as your starting gift or you've done Moonlight Butterfly that key you get opens the locked door below where the Taurus Demon is. Dude down there has an awesome ring that boosts your equip so you can carry/wear heavier/better stuff :)

Didn't chose the Master Key, got the stupid ring that gives you a small health boost. I've been gradually finding the keys for the areas so will get to it eventually.

In the news, remember the personality core from Portal 2 who dreamed of going to space? (and eventually got it's wish).

It officially ends up landing in Skyrim.

So err, who likes crowdsourced adventures games?

Still playing Counter-Strike: Source most nights! Steam username is the same as my username here. Add me.

I am actually working on a game at the moment. Very early stages and very small team (4 people, 3 americans and me). Will prob be more of a tech demo or very small game, but is a 16-bit style action/rpg. The project is on github but there isnt much there just yet.

oops, forgot the link:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/66710809/double-fine-adventure

1 million dollars raised in a day.

anon - thats awesome. Would be great to follow the entire dev process.

on Saturday i pick up my Streetfighter 2 arcade machine :-D

Wow. I looked at the Double Fine Kickstarter project last night and they had just gone over their target. Now they've more than doubled it! Absolutely amazing. This is a great test case for how crowd funding could change game development world for the better.

This is a great test case for how crowd funding could change game development world for the better.

Yep, opens the possibility of making all kinds of fringe / art-driven / lost-genre but still semi-decent budget games. Great stuff.

some discussion on it here

I think he's right in saying that doublefine isn't just two dudes with a idea, so it may not work for everyone (expect a lot of copycat kickstarters happening soon though)

They have a pitch your game type thing at PAX too, where Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft hear game pitches from the audience.

(different obviously, just mentioning other sources of funding for start ups)

I reckon we'll see another Psychonauts out of this.

Just a few days ago they were throwing around the idea of Notch (Minecraft) maybe funding Psychonauts 2, it but it was just thoughts turned into words. I can't see how they wouldn't go down this path to definitely make it a reality now.

The Sonic CD remake was crowd sourced by Sega too - a guy had already done it independently on iphone, and rather than cease and desist him, they employed him to make it an official product.

http://toucharcade.com/2011/12/14/sonic-cd-review/

Story here if you don't wanna read the whole fanboyish thing:

''Fast forward nearly 16 years to a curious question that Sega posted to the iOS community. Previously, Sega's efforts on the App Store were limited to decidedly mediocre games, centralizing almost entirely around emulated Genesis games wrapped in an emulator that really wasn't that great, and still isn't that great. They asked gamers what they'd like to see on the iPhone next, and literally a day later Christian Whitehead revealed his idea. Check out the video from 2009:

While that video might not be that entirely impressive now, remember at the time we were busy wagging our finger at Sega for continuing to release emulated Genesis ports that played poorly, performed even worse, and just weren't any fun. Then Christian Whitehead comes along with not only a port of the best Sonic game, but also running at 60fps? The emulated Genesis games barely ran at a quarter of that. Our minds were beyond blown, but like all cool things utilizing IP of a larger company, we didn't expect this fan-made Sonic CD project to wind up anywhere other than in a cease and desist letter fired off from Sega's legal department.

We quickly got together with Whitehead, and conducted a fascinating interview where one thing started to become crystal clear: This is a project motivated solely by love for the game. Christian built an entire game engine specifically for porting retro classics, and he had aspirations of working with Sega to actually get his version of Sonic CD in gamers' hands. Following that, things went dark. The fan-made Sonic CD web site vanished and the above video disappeared from YouTube. We assumed the worst, as it seemed reasonable that Sega's legal hammer came down on the project.

Jump ahead another two years, and out of nowhere that Sonic CD was coming to iOS. We quickly confirmed that this was in fact Christian Whitehead's Sonic CD, and we couldn't have been happier. Sure, the particulars such as release date and other things like that weren't in the open yet, but it was coming, and that was enough.''