With Castle Crashers being released tomorrow, I figured I better get this up ASAP. Expect a October one in the next couple weeks.

Castle Crashers
X360 - August 27, 2008

This might be the most awaited XBLA game ever. I’ve been looking forward to this for so long I’ve almost lost interest! With a style all its own, The Behemoth is taking everything it made awesome in Alien Hominid and expanding on it. It has the same wacky feel, the same crazy old school game play, but now it has a huge helping of RPG character building.

With so many huge retail releases in the coming weeks (or months), this is actually a perfect time for an awesome XBLA game. It snuggles in perfectly into both my time and money budget, and is definitely a day one buy for me.

Mercenaries 2: World in Flames
Various - August 31, 2008

I cannot calculate how many hours I wasted in the first Mercenaries game blowing the shit out of everything around me. It takes the fun, crazy and absurd action of GTA, wraps in it a military themed wrapper and pushes it to extremes. GTA would be so much easier if you could call in bunker busting air strikes and level Liberty city…

However, as good as the first Mercenaries was, GTA IV has given me enough of this style game for a little while. I would be definitely picking up Mercenaries 2 day one if there wasn’t a certain other game coming out September 7th…

Viva Piñata: Trouble in Paradise
X360 - September 2, 2008

The first Viva Pinata was quite a gem. It was actually one of the first games I picked up for my 360. Sure this IP has been milked for all it’s worth in Merchandising, but the game it self is still quite good. There are not many new games like this out there, and its style really shines on the current Gen consoles. Hopefully the sequel will bring more awesome to the table.

But then I look at the release date. The only way they could have picked a worse date to release this game is if they chose Sept 7th. While Viva Pinata and Spore very different games, they are also somewhat similar. They both are very open ended games with huge time commitments. Why release it so close to a game that’s going to blow it out of the water? This is one I’ll have to wait until some time next year to pick up, it will be much cheaper and I’ll have much more time to play it.

Spore
PC - September 7, 2008

I honestly don’t think I need to say much about this game. I’m just so happy it’s finally coming out. This is going to destroy all my free time for weeks. My other games are going to feel neglected.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
Various - September 16, 2008

This is a game that looks really cool, but it has a very large possibility of sucking. The premise is pretty interesting – Darth Vader’s secret apprentice has an insane amount of control over the force. Now go destroy everything and everyone you meet. But over the years I’ve just lost hope with LucasArts.

I’m defiantly excited for this game, but I’ll have to wait and watch the community’s reaction after its release before I decide if I’ll be picking it up. Besides, I’ll probably still be busy with Spore…

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition
PC - September 16, 2008

About fucking time! Even with all the warnings about this game being neutered on the North American release, I still picked it up and played for a couple hours. Shortly after, I heard of this much better sounding Enhanced Edition and promptly sold my copy to quietly wait for this release.

My wait started many months ago - its been long enough that with all these awesome releases coming out around the same time… I can wait to pick this one up.

I've painted a lot of Nurgle themed models over the years. Every time I start one, I do it in the same way - white primer and a special wash. This wash changes colour with every batch, but it always works out.

I've been asked many times how I make the wash, and I can never really explain the exact method. This is why with the latest batch of Nurgle Wash I decided to document it so I dont have to explain it every time :)

Read More...

So the problem was in the DHTML menu code, but after spending almost the entire day trying to fix it I just gave up. I ended up just wrapping that element in another table with two cells in one row. I placed the menu in the left cell, and a spacer image 1px wide and 44px high in the right most cell. It's not ideal, but I fixed it.

What's this?! Two consecutive posts!? Before you get excited, I'm just here to bitch about something.

Sometimes I just hate html. I've been trying to fix this problem for a couple hours, it should have been a simple thing.



Two tables on top of eachother, one is two rows, the bottom row contains a DHTML menu. The bottom table contains a few images. For whatever reason Firefox displays this fine, IE somehow colapses the top table and pushes the images in the bottom table up underneath the Menu. Like below,



So, due to Firebug not working in IE, I slap some various borders around the elements to try and see whats going on. As you can see in the code below, I've pick various colours to use (and I've showed where the borders come from)



This is how it shows in Firefox, as it should show:



And this is how the elements are showing in IE:



Please note the comepete lack of a bottom row on the top table (the one that should be coloured yellow).

For whatever reason, the menu isn't being containted by the upper table, so the table isn't being sized correctly, so the bottom table isn't sitting correctly. This is stupid. I hate IE. I'm going on lunch.

I had my first DnD game this weekend and I picked up a Confrontation model to represent my Tiefling Warlock. I started painting him and decided to practice with my girlfriend's camera while I painted, so here's a small step by step.

Go read Part One.

This first thing that I'm going to say is that I love GTA IV. I know that I'm not the only one, as this game is getting nothing but praise. While the game is quite amazing, it's not perfect. In fact, I know many people that just pain don't like it.

In my group of friends, only a few of us are 'hardcore' gamers. Those friends of mine that fall closer to the 'casual' group of gamers are quite divided on the game. It's these type of people that have opinions that really matter, as I think they are the closest to 'unbiased' as you can get. They have no real allegiance; while they don't hate games they don't love them all either. They usually come to a game with a fresh outlook, and if on the surface it's just more of the same - they won't like it.

So in no particular order I'm going to outline some things that I think the 'average' gamer would pick out as reasons not to like the game. 

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By now you must have heard of Midway's new fighting game pitting Mortal Kombat characters against DC Comics Characters. I don't think anyone is sure of the projects actual name, but the official site is worldscollide.com, so for now lets assume that will be the game's name.

So what the hell is this? Can anyone see this actually being released as a good game? Let's start with the biggest glaring problem, has any game with DC Characters been worth playing? I may be a Marvel fanboy... but honestly now. Mortal Kombat is another poisoned franchise. When's the last time a decent MK game was released? Other than the fanboy thrill of imagining Subzero and Batman fighting (which I admit to being a pretty cool thought), how does this game in any way sound like a hit?

Then I start thinking about it more. One of the reasons I never got into DC Comics more is that the majority of them are too overpowered. That being said, the majority of Mortal Kombat characters are just your standard "Enhanced Ninja" type. Does this seem like a fair fight to you? Right away you can see that they are going to significantly power-down most of the DC Side. While Batman would translate real easily, how are they going to have Superman or Wonder Woman without making them... well... lame?

Finally, to top it all off, there are rumours that the gore and fatalities have been completely removed. Doesn't this take away a major aspect of why Mortal Kombat is so appealing in the first place? While I do understand DC doesn't want Scorpion to rip out Superman's spine, which just farther shows why this whole project is a bad idea.

But what do I know? Maybe Midway will pull some magic and make something that is fun to play, but I doubt it.

I have written the last chapter in my first Let's Play! It took just over a month, and was a surprising amount of work, but it was worth it. I received a tremendous amount of positive feedback from the folks over at Penny-Arcade forums, they really kept me going. If you haven't already, go read it!

Keep watch in the future as I've already started to think of what do play for my next Let's Play...

I finally converted the rest of my Jurassic Park Let's Play over to HTML, as usual go check it out in the Articles section. There is only one more Chapter to come... then it will be over.

I've added the next Chapter in my Let's Play Jurassic Park. While Chapters 2-5 are not up there yet, Chapter 6 now is. I'm working on converting 2-5 from BB code to HTML, but I just haven't felt like doing so much find-replace yet :P