Zero Punctuation: Resident Evil 5
escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctua...Posted Mar 25, 2009, 4:00 PM UTC
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escapistmagazine.com
Revolver, flicknife, DS, Creme Egg, jar of Branston pickle, copy of the Beano, bust of Jean-Luc Pickard, Tardis and Vibrator.
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Wait, what do you carry in your pockets?
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Nothing but knives and lint.
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Capital One.
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Do any Americans think that Branston pickle is tasty? I've seen it at the store and thought about buying it, but I don't know if I will like it.
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Oddly enough it's in my cheese and ham sandwich today - it's delicious!
Full disclosure: I'm British.
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pabst blue ribbon, motherfucker.
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Most of his gripes are accurate. Especially the gripe about lack of innovation between 4 and 5. 4 had a lot of charm. The attache case, the creepy vendor guy. The treasure items that you can combine to make another treasure item more expensive. The sidekick that is integral to the story instead of just always with you.
Edit: ...as well as the Operation Ada minigame, the shooting gallery game that helped you collect figurines (instead of 5 where you just play chapters over and over and over to get figurines/inf ammo), having to rearrange your guns/items to fit better in the case was fun, the 9 item 'all sizes same' inventory is dumb. Being able to buy and sell items at virtually any time is dumb. Who are you buying/selling them to? Finding all the emblems is maddening and basically requires you to look in a FAQ. Getting infinite ammo with a strong weapon is nowhere near as fun in RE:5 as it was getting the Chicago Typewriter or Inf. Launcher was in 4. List goes on and on..
4 Was awesome. 5 has updated graphics and is less awesome. Sorry :\
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If half of what he says about the inventory system is true, that's just profoundly stupid. That's like 1980s-style RPG inventory design. WTF.
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It's called Invisible War syndrome.
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Oh, it's true.
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It creates some funny moments... I was playing with a partner and we kind of had this rivalry with the eggs. We never used them... just coveted them. Anyway, we had played through twice and never seen the rare "rotten egg," but then... I saw it... he was pretty far away... but my inventory was full!
I could have used an herb... or discarded some ammo... or even discard some other lame gun I had... but no, I discarded the fully upgraded magnum with infinite ammo. I wanted that egg so much, it didn't matter.
I would say that discarding that gun resulted in about 3 or 4 hours of game play down the drain.
But I got my mf'ing achievement.
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Its really not that bad.
It adds an element of pressure, but its only true lacking aspect is that you cannot place an item down in the world, you must discard it.
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It's only true if you're a dumbass who can't play for 3 minutes straight without using up an absurd amount of herbs and ammo.
At every checkpoint, and there are dozens, you can go to a pre-game screen and rearrange your inventory as needed. You will never need to completely fill your invetory. You will never really need more than 6 or 7 of these 9 slots filled to get past any section. The only people who do are people with personality disorders that go far past this game.
-15
You can also play Mercenaries mode to get figurine "money", which is probably faster. I didn't mind the inventory management, though it's hell trying to swap a piece of equipment out on the fly while being attacked.
I think that 5 is a natural evolution of 4's gameplay - a complete transition into an arcade-like shooter. I was annoyed that you picked chapters to play, until I realized that they're discrete challenges - 1-1 is a big horde rush, 2-3 is a emplacement shooter, etc. The inventory management is streamlined because screwing with your attache case in realtime would've been hell, and pausing the game to swap weapons would've been annoying in co-op. I like being able to set infinite ammo on any gun, not just the two you could get in RE4...and getting the gatling beats the tommy gun for "sweet unlockable" IMHO...to say nothing of the longbow.
From a design perspective, most of the changes make sense to me. The QTEs and melee attacks have sorta grown on me (I think I have more kills with melee than with my pistol), especially the 2-on-2 fight with Wesker (we did it in coop by getting him in between us and letting one person snipe him in the back while the other did the X,X,B,A,X+B combo :).
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The problem with this is that RE4 was a much better arcade-style shooter. Save for level select, RE5 seems like it's stepped backward in every possible way. Making it less intuitive does not make it more 'arcadey'. I know they sacrificed a lot of inventory management and weapon customization items for the much-hyped cooperative play - but this play is gimped by asinine restrictions. While not as bad in single-player, the inability to exchange weapons is stupid and, to be frank, a pain in the dick.
'We're in this together. Until the end. 'Cause we're partners'.
'Can I use the magnum? I don't have any shotgun ammo left.'
'Go fuck yourself.'
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So we're playing online co-op. You give me your upgraded badass magnum. Next checkpoint, I quit. I have your magnum and you have dick. And there's the issue of actually earning your weapons instead of inviting a ringer to co-op and hand you maxed out stuff to use well before you've earned it.
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Here's the thing - there's no reason why you can't have the weapon just return to my/your inventory at each checkpoint. That's precisely how it should have been implemented, and I'm scratching my head over why Capcom felt this and other choices were sound.
Dead Space feels far more like Resident Evil 5 then Resident Evil 5 does. To be fair, they're both fine games, but I think Capcom has fallen short.
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They could get around this by implementing ammo sharing.
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You can't trade weapons in co-op, so your scenario is impossible.
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RE5 seems like it's stepped backward in every possible way.
My thoughts exactly.
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The problem with this is that RE4 was a much better arcade-style shooter. Save for level select, RE5 seems like it's stepped backward in every possible way.
Yea, pretty much. Ashley, arguably the worst element in RE4, was quadrupled in annoyance and replaced with Sheva. The ganados, easily the worst enemy in RE4, were also quadrupled. RE4's inventory system, which finally made some fuckin' sense, was removed. The simplistic control scheme became a convoluted mess. sigh... what a pile of shit this game is.
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[deleted]
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Getting infinite ammo with a strong weapon is nowhere near as fun in RE:5 as it was getting the Chicago Typewriter or Inf. Launcher was in 4.
Anyone who hasn't unlocked the Hand Cannon hasn't really played RE4.
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I was fully aware of what it took to unlock it which was exactly why I never got it.
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Good times...
Unfortunately I find RE5 mercenaries is virtually unplayable because of the inventory system:
'I know I have a herb/grenade but I do really want to risk opening my inventory to use it?'
You might say 'run to where there's no enemies and take two seconds to do it,' but to get the really high scores you need to be constantly killing enemies to keep the combos up; you don't have two seconds. It's simply not worth it to open your inventory.
Or even worse, when you're out of ammo but you can't pick up more because your inventory is full of junk. Forcing the player to do a semi-complicated task like sorting through their inventory in real time while the player character is in mortal danger is tremendously poor game design. All your going to do is frustrate the player.
The inventory system plus the AI partner are why RE5 is fundamentally broken. By designing it to be co-op they ruined the single player aspect.
They did so many things right in RE4 and then they just fucked 'em all up in RE5. It truly is a step backwards.
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By designing it to be co-op they ruined the single player aspect.
This.
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vest in pocket of vest to wear vest
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I want to send him five dollars for that.
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Buy a T-shirt!
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[deleted]
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My biggest disappointment in RE5 was the lack of the RE4 Merchant Guy. He should have been in the game, selling you stuff as always, with no explanation given for why he's in Africa now.
Anyway, Yahtzee's points are fair but I loved 5 anyway. I played co-op so the AI was never an issue, and while the inventory space was occasionally an annoyance, I found I was using up bullets/herbs/eggs/etc fast enough that I never got too overburdened.
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I like to think that Russian dude right at the start was the shady merchant.
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Whose headless corpse follows you around selling you shit?
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I've got some RARE things on sale, stranger!
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I can only check Zero Punctuation after I've played and beaten a game because once I watch it I start seeing all the terrible parts of a game in frustrating detail.
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(Glass Shattering)
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That was a good episode of How I Met Your Mother.
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Well said. When you listen to Yahtzee, it's almost like it has a Pavlovian effect so that when your playing a game and you come across the flaws he points out, it starts to grab your attention, and then you can't help but focus on it until you don't feel like playing the damn game anymore. I stopped watching them for games I planned on buying.
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The bulk of his complaints stem from him being bad at the game, honestly. You don't have anything to worry about if you, say, know how to send Sheva into attack mode and don't feel the need to carry around 6 herbs at a time.
-5
I thought Resident Evil 5 was a piece of crud too.
Edit: Sorry, I fixed the "T" in "thought" for you.
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[deleted]
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Dead Rising was also very frustrating especially with the movement controls.
At this point Left 4 Dead seems like an adequate zombie survival game...
I guess they all cant be as good as Zombies Ate My Neighbors.
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Left 4 Dead can be frustrating, if only because in online mode, I often get stuck with people who just don't seem to realize that this is a game where you have to work as a team.
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I don't find Sheva's AI to be that bad except for her love of the pistol.
Also, I wonder why he didn't mention the quick time events.
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If you put Sheva in "attack" mode she'll stop using the pistol and start using the big guns and grenades. Just give her the rifle and enough ammo and she will fuck shit up.
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Cover = shock stick/conserve ammo/heal me all the time so I don't have to bother with it. And attack = Play like a co-op partner. If he didn't figure this out he hasn't given it a chance.
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I really wish I'd known that sooner. She's a beast with the Sig P226 fully upgraded, though - I can't even S-rank the kills part of the level with all the spiders because she shoots them so quickly.
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I didnt even have to put her in attack mode. I gave her the rifle and hogged all the pistol ammo, and it was the best choice I ever made in a video game. I was looking at my stats, and it appears I have 100% accuracy with rifles.
Edit: oh and I gave her the magnum too. That was fun.
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For the first week I didnt even know that you could change their modes. I just give the AI infinite ammo M500's and let them fend for themselves.
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Because they were actually done pretty well? With the exception of the final boss fight, I thought they were pretty good and added for a change up.
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He just seems to hate them so much I figured he'd mention them good or bad.
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The only thing that got me was the inconsistency - some cutscenes had them, some didn't, leading to my partner saying, "You know, we haven't had a quicktime event in a whi-OH FUCK we're dead" in the Excella QTE.
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Yea, we ran into that a few times too, we'd be watching the story (especially at the end scene in the *****) and it'd give you a second to do it, otherwise dead. Was kind of a pain in the ass, but fun at the same time.
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I loved RE4 and played a few of the previous ones, I have to say I'm happy with RE5. Graphically it looks beautiful, even in Co-op mode it looked great and we had no fps lag. The inventory system wasn't that much of a pain in the ass, although the placing armor in your inventory system was pretty odd.
The boss fights weren't your typical tired "hit the boss 3 times to kill him using the special weapon/knock him down" concept (ala Zelda). They required you to figure out his specific weakness and exploit that, sometimes using quick time events that worked pretty well (and sometimes saved our ass when we had no ammo).
I didn't deal much with the AI as I played through with a friend the entire game. However one problem we ran into is that the guy I was playing with wasn't logged in on my Xbox, and when we went to pick up the game the next day, all his ammo and weapons were gone and I was unable to give him any of the 20 guns sitting my in inventory. Kind of made it difficult fighting the near final bosses with nothing more than a pistol for him.
Overall, I'd say the game was good, it was fun and enjoyable, had a few little problems, but wasn't nearly as disastrous as the review made it out to be.
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The boss fights weren't your typical tired "hit the boss 3 times to kill him using the special weapon/knock him down" concept (ala Zelda). They required you to figure out his specific weakness and exploit that, sometimes using quick time events that worked pretty well (and sometimes saved our ass when we had no ammo).
Are you kidding? Most of the boss fights in this game were absolutely terrible, especially when compared to RE4's.
They were pretty much all "shoot the boss' weak point(s) until it dies a la Zelda."
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[deleted]
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I don't particularly care for ZP reviews, but this one is indeed on the money. I'm a fan of the series so I sort of enjoyed the game, but compared to RE4 it was trash. I played through it in co-op in one (admittedly 12-hour) sitting and had absolutely no desire to play it again. Thank god I didn't have to deal with an ai partner.
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Thats interesting. Because I wanted to play the game immediately after completing it. And then play through it again, and again, and again, and then some mercenaries, and then some Professional.
The game has a strange fun curve. The first play through is pretty tense with ammo conservation and health management. But then you get Infinite ammo, and the harder difficulties are actually less grueling. And then there are speed runs, and treasure collection.
I've had a solid 30 hours of good times from that game so far.
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You're talking about RE4, correct? If so, yeah I was the exact same way (: I have probably played RE4 on GC and Wii for over 100 hours.
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No, I am talking about RE5.
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Weird. Maybe I'll try it again someday. My first run through was not tense at all though, in fact most of the time I found myself just rushing through the levels because I was bored. There was a very distinct "Tomb Raider" feel to certain parts of it that didn't fit at all, IMO.
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I disagree... I like all the resident evil games and am playing through 5 for the 3rd time now. So there. :P
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I haven't been able to figure out quite why, but all of the RE games are the sort that I can play through over and over again and never get tired.
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Only a 3rd time? Surely you must have only purchased it sometime this last weekend.
I've lost count how many times I've completed the game.
Currently going through on Professional mode and having a blast going into "dying" state from 1 hit. :) at least the Dogs don't kill you so easily.
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Almost 20hrs 1st playthrough. Just doing Veteran now. Haven't even tried for the 5hrs IRL yet. Sucks having a job so I can only do 10 or 15 hours in a week. Maybe I should get a co-op partner to speed things up a bit.
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oh man... according to the counter on my Resident Evil 4 save, I beat the game 7 times on Normal, and then 14 times in Professional.
I haven't bought Resident Evil 5 yet (I'm planning on it), but I'm hoping it will at least be good enough to want to play again.
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I played the demo for about 15 minutes, then never touched it again.
I hated having to stop dead in my tracks every time I wanted to shoot my gun or swing my knife.
Seriously, who can't walk around while swinging a knife?
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RE4/5 aren't FPS, they don't play like one and they shouldn't. I can't say I've ever WANTED to run while shooting in either of them anyway, it'd be impossible to aim with the camera.
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Wow. He starts the review by blasting all versions of RE prior to RE:4.
I really wasn't surprised.
The rest of his review was rather accurate though. Inventory wasn't that big of a deal for me and I feel bad for anyone who can't find a real human to play RE:5 with, but it isn't that hard to do considering Live.
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Every single Resident Evil up until #4 was a complete pile of dogshit.
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shrug To each his own. I happen to enjoy survival horror games, and RE:4/5 are just third person shooters. I enjoyed both 4 and 5, but they were a different genre of games.
Resident Evil without puzzles? Blasphemy. If all I want to do is kill things with guns, there's a million games I can play. RE:5 is closer to Gears of War than anything else. I mean, zombies on motorcylces shooting guns?!?!
RE:4 at least had puzzles and a nice lack of gun battles. Gun battles and Resident Evil go to together like water and oil.
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I had the same reaction to 4 and 5: they don't feel like RE.
I watched a buddy play 1, played 2 myself, and some of Code Veronica. I wasn't impressed with 4. It wasn't really RE anymore, opting instead to be a third person shooter that happened to be set in the RE universe, except not really. The thing is, there are better third person shooters, and they went off the reservation with the story (at least it appears that way to someone who only knows RE and RE2, maybe with 3 the transition makes more sense), so you're left with something that doesn't really stand on its own very well.
Supposedly RE4 was the first game to use the over-the-shoulder camera, which I think is great for third person shooters. I also liked the zoom controls for the rifle. I also liked the weapon upgrade system. Now that I think about it, there was actually a lot to like, and I only got about half way through, so maybe I need to try it again.
I rented RE5, and am actually really enjoying it, but I think mostly because it is co-op. The game gets at least as much wrong as it gets right, but its genuinely fun (at least in co-op) and I like the weapon upgrade system.
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Splinter Cell used 3rd person over-the-shoulder shooting mode before RE4 did. I'm trying to think of any other games that did so - Oni, but that's pretty obscure.
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That control scheme for the games before 4 was the most horrific thing ever made.
Maybe RE3 was designed to be played with a spinner, since it basically used the control scheme from Asteroids?
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Yeah, I tried to play RE1 the other day, but ended up stopping in the first couple of rooms because of the crappy, unintuitive controls.
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I tried to play RE1 the other day
There's your problem.
The games were good when they came out a long time ago. The controls and camera angles were done like that on purpose because they wanted a lot of control over what the player was seeing and when. Sort of like how a director controls what you see and when you see it in a movie.
The control scheme went out of style. We now expect much more responsive controls and the ability to control our own camera. Most games if they want to control what we're seeing will go to a cut scene temporarily.
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The problem is that good games should still be good games. Mario is still fun. Fucking Pong is still fun. You don't say His Girl Friday was good "for its time" because it is still one of the funniest movies ever made.
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I dare disagree. Are we supposed to judge ALL games based solely on how they were or played when they first came out? RE1 might have been good then, but it's without a doubt a pile of dog-shit now.
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But you missed out on some of the finest acting ever seen in a video game! Tell me at least you had the honor of nearly seeing a Jill sandwich.
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I HOPE THIS ISN'T CHRIS'S SANDWICH.
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They were a bit painful to play, but the first one was a joyous B-movie parody.
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You guys are nuts. The first Resident Evil was the only game that ever scared me.
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wow I haven't laughed that hard in a while
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Capcom aren't bad people, they're just idiots.
Har! Or should I say, "wee hee hee".
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yeah, laughed my ass off at the inventory rage. haven't played RE5 yet but it seems pretty stupid Edit: crap wrong reply :(
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I like how he says 'Cheech Marin.'
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Worst. controls. ever.
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what da ya buyin'?
what da ya sellin'?
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[deleted]
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Currently playing RE5. Fun ACTION game. My only gripes are:
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The AI partner... I HATE Co-op games and having an AI partner all the time kind of defeats the purpose of a "survival horror" game.
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Daylight! The ENTIRE game takes place during the day. Sure you go through mines, caves, etc. but again, it defeats the purpose of a survival horror game.
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it defeats the purpose of a survival horror game.
Which is... to have a game character which only exists during night time hours?
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One thing that concerns me with game reviewers in general is that there are a lot of variables involved with playing video games. For example, sometimes, I just don't feel like playing a racing game or a FPS or an RPG. I have to be in the right mood to properly enjoy any video game. But with reviewers, I doubt that they don't have that luxury. I mean, this is assuming they aren't paid off by game publishers. I'm talking about the honest game reviewers. Even they might just not be in the mood to play a game they have to review. Sometimes, for me personally, I can enjoy a game like Assassin's Creed or Far Cry 2 without being bothered one bit by their shortcomings. And it all depends on what you want to play.
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It's zero punctuation, but there's punctuation in the title. hahaha, im so original.
Oh, is it Wednesday already?
You mean it's ONLYYY wednesday !!
We're running out of letters. I find this disconcerting.
Tantalizing, I'd say. Just what - WHAT - in the name of smoky fuck is he going to do?
On the 29th of July 2009, we all get to find out.
(Yeah I sat and worked out what date it would be. Fuck you, I'm bored.)
Get a job, or off my lawn. Both work.
Ironically, I'm only qualified to be your gardener, which does pose something of a predicament.
hahah thanks for that. and lets not forget that unused apostrophe.
I will seriously fucking shoot someone if he starts over.
I think we need a letter stimulus package, if he runs out we all die. Because I said so.
jdfong is too big to fail.
That will de-value all the letters we currently have, making it a zero net gain.
If he doesn't stealthily link to goatse on that day instead of Yahtzee i will be thoroughly disappointing.
He can always fall back on the apostrophes and comma.
I didn't realize those lacked links...now it bothers me.
It's zero punctuation, but there's punctuation in jdfong's comment.
Or keep adding 'haha's until he resembles a supervillain.
I could see him start to reply to his own comment with the classical "Oh, is it Wednesday already?". This is a path I could accept.
he could just extend his maniacal laughter indefinitely.
He'll run out of room on June 29.
Someone needs to make him mad and bitter again right before the last letter.
Karma Points Per Week, Graphed
seems a little off
People have been upmodding the earlier ones, then. I seem to recall most of them being well below -100.
Where the hell is the graph?
Welcome back jdfong. I've missed you.
Viewing this post each week is like drinking a tall, cool glass of water on a hot summer day.
It feels good in your throat?
What are you going to do when you run out of letters?!?!
Same repetitive comment gets upvoted every week, I really have to question redditor's intelligence here.
It's on purpose that it gets upvoted numbnuts.
Of course it's on purpose. Every upvote is on purpose, but what's the reason behind it. Is it clever, funny (after 100 times), or raises a good point? Used to be that you'd get upvote for those things, now it's more like Digg lite with all comments, even if they raise valid points that are different from hivemind get downvoted to oblivion.
It's become part of what makes reddit reddit. It doesn't exist to be justified according to your predispositions of what may or may not be clever and/or funny. It simply is. You can't stop him from posting it, and you can't stop random people from upvoting it so you must accept the jdfong and let it flow through you like the Tao.
[deleted]
Go die in a fire you waste of space. I bet your mother wished she had an abortion you excuse for a sentient being.
At least we know yours is proud.
Trolling has moved on, dude. You are boring people.