Did you stay after the credits? There's another scene once they end. 

yeah, I watched it all. I was feeling pretty good when I finished the game so I just read through the credits and listened to the music. Prey 2, eh... Let's hope we can bet on the Duke before Prey 2. 

I think you mean. 

WOOOOOOW. I know it's only psuedo-mind bending, but this game really has a great transition from 2D to 3D. This is like the Prey of Mario games (or 2D side scrollers, really.) The levels are witty, and the game is just plain fun. It's just crazy how they could imagine this stuff, let alone do it so well. I've only beaten the first chapter (out of 8 worlds so far) but this game has already got me hooked.

Hurray Wii! 

There is a Super Paper Mario? Gotta grab that as soon as I see it... thanks Zwiffle! 

I played it on my PS2 last evening. It was a long time I didn't switch on the console: Quake mapping has eaten my "playing time". Crash Bandicoot was in its time a fucking good game, but still enjoyable to play. The more I love is the "tornado" move, and the apples concept...
Still have fun with it :P 

I stayed at my parents' house the last week and my dad has a gamecube (huge racing game fan :-) so I got pretty deep into Battalion Wars.

It's a 3D realtime strategy game, without the resources part. You're given a number of units and an objective, and when you lose all units, you usually fail.

The cool thing is that you can "warp" into any unit in your battalion; you can become the rifle grunt, or the gunship, or the heavy tank. The missions are varied, from defend-the-flag to storm-the-castle to destroy-all-radar-stations so you can start a bombing run. The scenarios are HUGE, and the landscape is varied. There is a number of cool vehicles to drive, and many different unit types. You can assign tasks to every individual unit, or to a unit type, or to all units.

The graphical style is comicky, and the game's factions are caricatures of the USA, the Russians, the Germans and China or Japan (didn't encounter the last one.)

You can have frantic action, or chess-like tactics. There are multiple ways to complete your objectives. There is lots of air-to-ground and anti-air combat. There are counter-units to pretty much anything. There are even faction-specific units (the "Germans" have Giftgas (chemical weapons) and Panzerfaust troops, for example.)

Every faction's units are looking differently, from tidy green ("Western") to rusty and Sputnik-like style ("Russian") to field-grey and brutish ("Germans").

Every faction gets different background music and sounds; each has a band of "typical" leaders and officers who are really funny. I found the Western officers slightly annoying over time, they're real smartasses ("Enemy checkpoint... don't stop to show them your papers!") The Germans are just hilarious: "Expendable! You're all expendable! Ver arr my gunshipps?" Funny.

Literally all controller buttons/directions do something important; the game is demanding (you really need to RTFM here) and once you get the controls down, very fun and addictive. My dad, who is perhaps a typical "grown up computer user", couldn't get past the second mission because there are so many controls and he didn't bother to RTFM.

I couldn't put it down for days. Really, really cool game. You get to play all factions, too.

The other game I played was Need for Speed Most Wanted, which was very cool in the beginning but failed to keep my interest in the long run. Like all racing games. It all feels the same, you compete against a number of faceless blacklist drivers, and 80% of the cars are crap anyway. *shrug* Too simple, not deep enough, not enough replay value. But not bad for a racing game I guess.

Mario Kart was more fun, because you could play with 4 people, you had to work together and there were power-ups and stuff. But not enough tracks. A track editor would have been cool (like in Tony Hawk 2, which is by far the coolest console game I ever played.) 

what about Marc Eccko? 

I just finished playing this and it's rather good actually. You guys should all buy it. 

GET OUT 

I'll buy a copy when you release it on PC (or Wii) 

main character is Trent Reznor! 

No it's not, it's Mike Patton, who owns Trent's voice anyday. Actually I'm not sure if he did the voice for the main character, too lazy to check.
Looks like a nice game anyways, too bad I have no 360/ps3. =( 

an old native from our flat brought in an xbox a month or so ago, and people have been playing some nhl hockey games. It's quite dull. The Sega 2k5 version isn't any better than the EA one.

I guess all hockey games since NHL 94 for PC or so have just required one-timers for instagoals and never any from breakaways or straight shooting.

I guess I'll buy more memory for my comp and start playing ufo2000 again some day. When the internet starts working. The apartment company fucked it. Well, it's summer anyway so who needs it. 

http://www.gametrailers.com/player/21742.html

Nice and high-res video showing mario galaxy gameplay. Looks cool, and the video is nice and high-res.

P.S. Why do the narrators of these videos always sound like morons? The guy is basically describing the game in the terms of a 5-year-old. "That is colorful." "I can jump from place to place." "I want the shiny thing."

I wonder if it's the same problem as when you try to have a conversation with someone playing a video game, where most of their brain is paying attention to the game, so they aren't able to put any real thought into what they're saying. They should probably get a second person to do the talking while the first guy plays. Maybe an actual designer instead of some associate-producer-drone guy that doesn't really understand WHY the game was designed the way it is.

"I wiggle my hand to climb the thing. It's real real intuitive and feels real good." How about "Older consoles have arbitrary commands mapped to buttons that all interact the same way, but the wii controller allows us to finally break from that and create a system that involves more muscle memory. So we use as much gestural input as possible, and tried to map distinctive hand motions to the most analagous in-game activites." Or SOMETHING. 

Yeah Mario Galaxy looks really nice, can't wait.
About commentators (that a word?), yeah they always sound silly, some of the presentations for E3 this year have been really bad, like the girl describing Assassin's Creed, just bleh, where do they get these people? 

what does look nice about it? the 2001 5-year-old-style?

ps. metl, that age group seems to be the target audience? :P 

What looks nice about it is the gameplay mechanics, the level design, the amount of imagination present, etc. The general stuff that makes mario games good. I like mario games.

Oh and just the fact it isn't a super-lossy-compressed 200x120 youtube clip, that's nice too.

The target audience for press shows at E3 is adults. Also, just becuase a game is designed for kids (i'd say more like 10-year-olds in this case) doesn't mean it can be designed by kids. I'd rather hear about the philosophy and the decisions that went into the product that the most superficial play-by-play of what we're already seeing. 

i was just provocating a bit. i never had fun playing the mario games, so im in the 1% that's not the target audience.

but seriously? Gameplay mechanics? it looks like it's still:
-jumping on top of enemies to kill them
-dodge/avoid enemies
-08/15 jump and run

but they added a flying mode� YEAH! ;) (no doubt everything will be finetuned to play nice and all) [wasn't there something with a feather that turned you into a flying fox in earlier games?]

Level design? ok, i guess the goodie/secret stuff might be interesting, and maybe how they use that kind of a setting to pull off attention spots.

imagination? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_the_Bee

hehe, guess this is just a matter of taste. 

It looks like most FPS games are still about shooting rockets on enemies... can you give some better arguments? In my mind there are lots of similarities between the mario games and quake like games - both have a simple physics based ruleset that allows for complex scenarios and interesting ways of moving around the game world. 

Super Mario World levels, that is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TED_JqcRaVE 

here's a link to a "playlist" that makes youtube play them all:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TED_JqcRaVE&feature=PlayList&p=DBA0F1B3B93370D5&index=0&playnext=1 

0.o 

"Automated Mario. Uncredible!"

laff 

^_^;;