What is this, high school?

I never cared about what critics had to say (movies, games or anything I play or watch, etc); my parent’s priority was to raise me with a mind of my own and keep me from being another sheep, begging for acceptance.

After going through most of the id Software, Raven, Carmack and Romero titles, I played Daikatana and thought it was fun and actually quite unique.

I could blabber on about this topic for hours but find it pointless since I’ll for sure end up steamrolled by the army of fools who think the truth about anything gaming is waiting inside the mind of “geniuses” like the guys at Penny Arcade or even yourself. Who the hell are you, anyway?

I have two CDs with the Velvet underground right on the label. Both of which, the internet informs me, were records first. And there are at least three I don’t have.

Or did you mean records, and am I just being obnoxiously pedantic?

This is a non-PC reference, but consider: a team at Sony makes Ico. It is well-received, but sells poorly. Normally, this would mean that Fumito Ueda would have ended up heading up Crash Team Explosive Bicycle Derby or something. Instead, they got to make another, more expensive game, Sony actually marketed it this time, and Shadow of the Colossus did well critically and financially. Did “nobody playing” Ico at the beginning doom it to irrelevance? Should that “failure” have scuttled the team’s chances at further ambitious projects? If you think not, consider then how many bright minds haven’t been as fortunate as Ueda and his crew and how many people have managed to successfully trade those frustrations for a set more of their liking by working on their own. It is no longer “big company or fail” these days.

I say an artistic success that isn’t widely-played is still a success. Few people bought the Velvet Underground’s record when it first came out, but everybody ended up hearing bits of it when those that did buy it used it as inspiration. I think it’s just fine for something to have advancing its field as its ambition, and it’s far easier to do that when it’s just you and a few others with money that you’ve already budgeted. Relying on the system to allow itself to be subverted isn’t the greatest thing to bet on.

Re Anachronox combat: It’s less that it’s horrendously bad/broken, which it isn’t, more that it isn’t really fun or compelling. As much as they’ve tried to enliven it with swanky particle effects (which remain rather pretty, albeit less so after you’ve seen them for the fiftieth time) and a swooping camera it does become a grind to push through, particularly in areas where it isn’t broken up with puzzles or dialogue. There are some neat ideas with regards to positioning and experimenting with Mystech, but in practice the former amounts to ensuring your combatants are in range of their targets, have line of sight and little else while the latter doesn’t do enough to redeem the combat.

…after you download a game, you subsequently need to run it once before going offline in order to activate it. The activation step should just happen automatically at the end of the download.

It does. I just checked on four games, two I’d downloaded long ago but not yet played and two that I downloaded immediately before going offline.

You’ll be saying that a lot. I really, really recommend you to ditch their service within the 30-day money-back period. Give it a try. I bet it’s shit and you’ll think “oh, it’ll get better”.

IT WON’T. DITCH THEM NOW.

Anachronox was decent and is worth playing, but there are some places where combat gets tedious. The rest of the game is worth it, though. At least combat gets pretty fast after a while… It’s kind of silly, though, in that you have to talk to EVERYONE IN THE CITY before you can leave town. Every single NPC has something you need in order to leave.

Surely this is the qunitessential dl and play once game, and then have it haunt your games list for all eternity. ;)