sea bass with butter and broccoli
- sea bass
- butter
- salt
- broccoli
7 minutes : 39 seconds
pork chops with tomatoes and mushroom
- pork chops
- thyme
- rosemary
- olive oil
- 1 can diced tomatoes
- 1 whole onion
- handful of thinly sliced crimini mushrooms
- chopped red bell pepper
- sea salt
- pepper
21 minutes : 48 seconds
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Review: Borderlands (PC)
Just beat Borderlands with Paul Haile. Review:
This game is everything Hellgate: London should have been and totally wasn't:
Diablo loot, progression and COOP + WoW quest loop + FPS
Plus (in order):
- COOP: Thank you God, for making more COOP games this year.
- level design: really varied and a lot of fun in the quest areas. I'm certainly no expert in this area, but it really stood out to me as enjoyable.
- classes: only 4, but I think it was a good thing because each felt really powerful in their own way. The talent tree was also fairly simplistic, but again, I think this played in the game's favor considering the audience and scope of the game.
- random items and weapon variety: done really well, really varied in feel (not just stats) and it was fun to get new crap all the time. The guns were really useful for different situations and I found myself switching all the time.
- characters and voiceovers: this really was where all the personality was in the game, and I can't even say that many games have much of any personality. A++++ for Scooter... made me lol at least 5 times.
- landscape: very impressive, and the game is very interesting to look at when looking at huge vistas or corridors. They struck a really nice balance between vast open spaces and confined areas.
- cover: thank you for giving me PC-FPS style (crouch to) cover and not a stricter Gears of War style system. Granted, I like faster paced games and I felt this made the game, well, faster paced.
- platforming: you can jump really high in this game and that leads to a lot of fun things hidden in hard to reach places... and it was fun for me even though I normally hate (and suck at) platforming.
- achievements: fun to get, and I got about 60% of them through a normal playthrough.
- gibs: now makes me feel I want to add chunks of doods in my new game.
Mixed:
- random item stats: varied enough to make it interesting enough to stop and do a lot of comparison. A lot of people aren't into this though, and it doesnt help that the item compare mechanism sucks. I didn't put this in the negative pile, because I'm a stat head and love this crap.
- vehicles: really glad they had (a) vehicle because the zones were huge. Gets mixed review for the frustrating collision handling. It'd be fun (though unnecessary) to have some vehicle variety as well.
- mob variety: was good enough, but it would have been nice to see a bit more here. Hey, at least it had more than Resistance.
- loot pick-up mechanic: I can see why they did it this way (so you have a chance to read the desc and decide before you pick things up, also good for games with strangers), but the reality is that you just run around spamming E all the time while looking 30% down from the horizon = PAINFUL. Plus I've only played with friends so it was purely a pain. It would be a good Host option to have loot on run-over.
- almost too much loot (yeah I said it). This played a major role in slowing down the pace of the game, which isn't necessarily bad, but it was the main thing that made me feel repetition in the game.
- toon shader: great for characters, but you honestly rarely see the closeups. They could have just done the awesome character intros in the shader and I would have accepted it. The rest of the time, you see a mess of tangled black edge lines on mobs, and added with the constant FOV changes can be quite dizzying.
Minus (spoilers):
- PC port: thank you for having it, but it was painful. Ask anyone who's had to host a game. Tony discovered a workaround where you can host a Private game if you try to host a Public game first. It's really surprising they didn't find / fix this bug before launch.
- last boss: easier than a normal mob... wtf. At least it looked pretty crazy (about 65% of a God of War boss).
- still dunno wtf is in the stupid Vault.
Overall, definitely in the top 5 games I've played this year. It completely caught me by surprise and I had not heard anything about it until I saw 15 ppl playing it on my Steam list. Finally, Paul Sottosanti recommends a good game.
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Review: Dungeon Hunter for iPhone
So I don't consider myself much of an authority but I thought I'd share some notes on some games I've been playing. More than anything, these will serve to remind me about what I've played when I forget by next year :)
I just got an iPhone a few weeks ago to catch up on some of the fancy pants apps I've been missing out on. Sadly, most are pretty weak sauce or are too similar to each other to stand out. However, the following game has undeniably filled my Seattle flight time and the hour or so before bed a few nights in a row. Here's a clip from what I put on the app's review on the AppStore (I didn't bother mentioning the obvious need for multiplayer since every other review before me came to the same conclusion): (4 stars) This game has high production value for an iPhone game. I'm almost done with the game and definitely feel like I got my money's worth. The 3 classes are fun and differentiated, (Diabloish enough), level progression and itemization are decent, and the art is pretty good. I started with 5 stars and subtracted one for: being tuned to be too easy, collision detection is sticky so you get caught on walls a lot (what others are describing as 'controls suck'), auto targeting is not so great and if you can't reach your target in like a second you attack nothing by default even if ppl are hitting you. Really the game's Achilles heel is being 230 megs... which means of course that you can't download on a whim through 3G. I really wish them luck though and I'm glad to see positive reviews jump from 130 last week to 550+ now.Comments [1]
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