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Oh god, Pyst... I remember seeing copies of that thing in stores as a kid.

If someone has very explicitly chosen to just be there for the spectacle, i wouldn't begrudge them that. I think the tragedy is when a person who would enjoy the latter experience selects the former and ends up disappointed with the apparently inarticulate gameplay they are being shown. Admittedly, it's not a guarantee that Heroic would be a better experience though, for following reasons and ones touched on elsewhere in the thread. I don't think it's that simple, i've seen a lot of people who have wanted and tried to play through a Halo game on heroic or above, but get caught up just trying to chew through an elite's shields with a battle rifle and end up just getting nowhere. They don't even realize that they're doing something wrong, it just seems unfairly difficult to them. I mean, and everything that is there is still a part of the game on normal, but it's tweaked to the point where you start feeling it, where it starts mattering. The rules are upended on them without any explanation, and even though they want that greater challenge, the game is being opaque about what it's doing. My belief is that this happens pretty frequently, the training wheels come off and people simply don't know what to do. I mean, a lot of things that seem self-explanatory in hindsight are anything but. I'm not for lengthy tutorials being shoved down a person's throat, that would be awful, I just wish that information would be in there somewhere. It's always shocking to me how much of it isn't. I think it would be about making games more accessible to the people who want more out of their games. The vast majority of people are never going to be willing to spend hours experimenting with the mechanics on their own, or start scouring the internet and to search for explanations of the systems in the game. Instead, they'll beat their head against it and eventually give up. I didn't mean to imply that they're just cranking up a knob, that would be silly. I have always felt that a lot of BioShock's issues could be at least helped by toning down the over-abundance of resources. Supplies are uncharacteristically plentiful for that style of game, you never really have to stop and consider what you have on hand.

I also played Skyrim with the difficulty ramped up a fair bit and had a really great experience with it. It turned out that i was finding combat to be a really thrilling thing, instead of a dull slog. What happened wasn't that the difficulty made the combat better, it's was still kind of shit. Instead, all of the things around the combat came out to the forefront of the game. The tools offered by all the peripheral systems became important and sort of filled in the gaps for the experience. Suddenly the potions and supplies i had been hoarding were starting to dry up after lengthy dungeons, i was even using poisons to get just that little extra edge against tougher enemies. I ended up playing it like the numbers rpg that TES games generally try very hard to pretend they are not. I felt like all the gathering of supplies and character building i had been doing was actually paying off in letting me tackle the significant difficulty i had imposed upon myself, and dungeons actually kind of ended up being some of my favorite experiences with Skyrim. I completely understand this mindset. There's the whole thing about not really knowing what you're getting into, you don't know what balance issues a game has or what level of challenge it was generally built around. Still, maybe you want that challenge, you're trying to understand the game and you're doing your best and you even looked up a strategy guide online, but you're still seven hours in and stopped absolutely dead. That happens, it sucks. So yeah, when it comes to a ten hour shooter or something, i am usually prepared to play through it twice if it's a game i enjoy. As such, i'll kind of scope it out on normal first, and then give a shot at the harder difficulties. However, if we're talking about a 70 hour RPG, it just isn't going to happen. I'm not going to play through it twice, and i'm not going to commit to the higher difficulty at the outset. Being able to adjust the difficulty on the fly is probably a reasonably ideal way to handle things, and given that players are generally inclined to take the path of least resistance, having something in there to encourage them to push the limits a little might be one of the better ways to create a game that can be appropriately challenging for a broad range of players. Bastion and Kid Icarus: Uprising come to mind as games with largely successfull takes on such mechanics. THIS! Many games will tell you how to play them, but very few teach you to play them WELL! Right, hey? I feel if games were better at familiarizing players with their mechanics and tactics/strategies, they'd generally be able to take more risks with difficult, nuanced gameplay. The more i think about it, the more i feel like there should be greater responsibility placed on the developer for bringing a player up to speed on how to play the game at the level it wants to operate on. I feel that a developer focusing all their attention around one set of balance rules can still go wrong. I mean, the Assassin's Creed games getting gradually easier with each game. I found Brotherhood to be a distressingly effortless ride. Games were harder. Arcade games were often explicitly designed to eat your coins, while shorter games on the consoles were made brutally difficult to encourage mastery and replay. (Ideally tricking people into thinking that they were getting more value for their money than they actually were.) As a result of the mindset behind the difficulty in those games, and the relative immaturity of the medium, they were also much less balanced and refined. I don't think many of those old games hold up as satisfyingly challenging games. (Fuck Battletoads, guys. Seriously, fuck Battletoads.) I agree with what you're saying, but i don't think it can apply to everything. There's a certain appeal in that kind of raw trial and error play, and i think it works best when the iterations can be fast, though even that isn't always the case. Well, Halo actually does let you tweak the difficulty in a dynamic way with "skulls". They generally add to the difficulty though, they're a lot like the adaptable difficulty system implemented in Bastion. I feel that's the key with a difficulty system like that, that the options are adding to the difficulty rather than subtracting from it, so that they don't ever just become a crutch. I thought Bastion was pretty brilliant about how it offered multiplicative rewards for toggling on more and more of the difficulty modifiers. (Technically, Skulls multiply your campaign score in Halo, but nobody gives a shit about score in those games.) Edit: You know... Ultimately, i don't think i like having tons and tons of options in a difficulty select. There's something nice about a few sets of carefully curated difficulty levels. Putting aside that you could potentially create a sub-optimal play experience for yourself otherwise, being able to say "I beat nightmare difficulty!" also feels a hell of a lot better than having to preface a boast with all the conditions you had set down for yourself. Heh. I feel that in the absence of difficult challenges pushing back against the player, a player will settle into whatever is easiest or quickest. In a brawler they might just mash the attack button repeatedly instead of learning to time dodges and take advantage of better, more damaging combos. So yeah, as the difficulty increases, the advantages afforded to you by the available tools become more crucial. You start having to actually explore the systems. (At which point, it's up to those systems to be up to the task.) To go back to the BioShock thing, i think that game is tragically too easy, even on its hardest difficulty. You can look at that game and be impressed by all the amazing things it's doing and all of the tools it provides to the player, but why would you ever using anything other than the wrench? (The answer is "because it's cool" and not because it's valuable in the context of the game balance.) When every tool is equally applicable to every situation, it's my feeling that essentially no interesting choices are being made. Nothing you do matters, your choices have no impact or worth in the context of that game. (To be clear, i actually do really love BioShock, i just think it's a terribly balanced game.)

I got kind of wrapped up in it and ended up playing through to see every ending and event in 999. I thought the true ending was totally rubbish, but that is otherwise a really, really wonderful little game, definitely amped up about the sequel.

Apparently the third campaign even has a series of awful stealth levels. Honestly though, in the back of my mind, i keep going that this game probably can't be as bad as people are saying. So, everything i'm seeing about RE6 makes me feel like Capcom has just been repeating the same mistakes over and over with some of their games, and that this is just the biggest and most costly those failures have been. I hold the maybe not so popular opinion that RE5 is a way, way worse game than it was received as, while Lost Planet 2 is a much better game than people gave it credit for, and that both are hitting about the same highs and lows over all. (I do actually like both of those games, and maybe Lost Planet 2 just a smidge more.) Check it out though, games with poorly implemented co-op modes that are an active detriment to the solo experience, on top of convoluted, poorly explained controls and mechanics. (The difference between something like these and Dark Souls is a lot of freedom to experiment and about forty hours of play time, i don't think linear action games can afford to be obtuse. It just destroys momentum and pacing.) So you have this experience playing those games where you're struggling against both the control and shoddy partner AI. (The control in RE6 is extremely complex and counter-intuitive, even i was struggling with it in the demo.) All of that, at a glance and from my experience with the demo, seems to be what is going on with RE6's reception. Well, and the fact that me and a lot of other people just don't like that RE is becoming increasingly action centric. (Still, it looks like some people really like it. Granted, there's always going to be somebody that really likes something, but it's still probably important to see that there hasn't been a completely universal condemnation of the game. You know, or throw all that out the window, maybe it's just a shit game. I kind of want to know now. I was probably going to eventually play it anyways, but only out of a sense of obligation after being let down by the demo, now i'm actually curious about this monstrosity Capcom has wrought. Not sure when i might play it though, definitely not a priority right now.

REVIEWS ARE IN! Is it weird that the totally toxic reception to RE6 has made me way more interested in playing the game? People are making it sound like quite a catastrophe.

The first game was much the same, if you don't recall. Both games have been balanced around the expectation of two playthroughs, with legendaries being extremely rare until you're into that higher difficulty mode. Similarly unchanged from the first game is that the role rarity serves is in determining what component parts and modifiers the weapons are assembled from. It doesn't guarantee that the system will always generate blues that are better than greens. Personally, i like it that way, i feel that it gives rise to more variety. I also feel like you've had the poor fortune to get bad drops, or haven't been paying attention. I've seen a fair number of legendaries on my playthrough 1, and lots of weird modifiers and variant weapon types. I saw a shotgun that fired bouncing explosive fireballs, pistols that fire homing energy projectiles, different assault rifles for both grenades and rockets, and missile launchers that fire extremely high-damage projectiles that move so slowly they struggle to remain airborne, etc, etc, etc. Not even talking about boss drops or quest rewards here, there are a lot of oddball weapons in the general item drop rules for the game. Right now i'm using a scoped legendary magnum that fires buckshot. Additionally, there are weapons with spin-up times, the "spingun" assault rifles. I found them very frequently in my playthrough. It's not just the flavor text that indicates a unique weapon with unique attributes, the prefixes and titles also indicate a lot of interesting traits. (As do the manufacturers, in a more general sense. Tediore weapons are the ones that are tossed like grenades or rockets when reloaded, they even explode for more damage if they have ammo left in the clip.) They also already had weapons with cooldowns in the first game and people hated them, so they're gone in BL2.

I never really liked the argument that something can't be funny and grim at the same time, i think there's a pretty good tradition of satirical and outright comedic horror films that would point to the contrary. That kind of uncomfortable humor can be wonderful. It can definitely be done poorly, but i feel Borderlands 2 straddles the line acceptably, i don't think either part of the equation particularly overstays its welcome. It is both goofier and darker than the first game was, and in general has much more personality because of it. I'm nearing the end of playthrough 1 on my Axton, and i want to say that the story has exceeded my expectations. I absolutely don't mean that as lofty praise, but i have genuinely enjoyed this ride. So, as Video game narratives go, i don't find this one horrible. It's fun dumb, and i like fun dumb. Handsome Jack also really is one of the more contemptible Video game villains i can recall, an exaggerated version of a aggravating and frightening personality type you may actually know from life encounters. He's a totally frustrating, hatable villain. I am looking forward to starting on Playthrough 2. I had this weird experience of going back and playing the BL1 DLC right before BL2 came out, doing it in co-op on a playthrough 2/above 50 character, and then playing through to the cap. Might have just been the time away from the game, but it was absolutely savage. BL2 has been super chill, relative to that, but still fun and at times challenging. Also, i was mistaken about the arena side-quests scaling, but they still push you way ahead of the leveling curve. I think i'd generally advise against doing them, if you want to stay in that difficulty sweet spot. Also, save bugs, apparently. Story is that the game has in rare cases reset costume unlocks and badass ranks for players. There's no solution on the PC, but on the 360, if you had a BL1 save and notice the game trying to import it again, immediately dropping out to the dashboard without letting the game save will apparently spare you from the problem. (Other than that, there's a convoluted profile trick involving co-op that can apparently restore an affected save.) Beyond that, there's some quests that will intermittently break, which can be resolved by completing them in co-op with somebody unaffected hosting. (Or, again, immediately bailing out to the dashboard without letting it save and restarting the quest.) ^ I have run into a few borked things, usually quest items falling through the terrain and stuff. BL1, in general, had much more severe launch issues though. (Completely bugged and non-fuctional skills and items, as well as a nasty outright save corruption issue.)

I felt pretty ambivalent about the demo, my opinions are already posted on that. I've been going back and forth on whether or not i still want to play this game. I am very curious about it though, and probably will play it, but i have no plans to grab it at release. I think Capcom is going in the wrong direction with this stuff. I don't think survival horror works in co-op, and I also really hate that the tone and action are kind of doubling down on the RE5 stuff.

You guys are making this game sound uncannily like Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, Julian Gollop's 3DS game. Which is fine. That's probably fine. That's not X-com, but i guess it's fine...

I played through the first Lost Planet in its entirety before discovering that you could roll. You had to goddamned click in the left stick, hold towards a direction, and press A. The game never explained it anywhere, but it completely changes that game and i don't think anybody knew about it. The invincibility frames you get out of it are absolutely crucial against the bosses in that game though, the constant getting knocked down and slowly having to get back up that all the reviews complained about ceases to be a problem. What seemed like a clunky, shitty shooter suddenly becomes pretty awesome. (Capcom wasn't helping their case by making the second game even more inscrutable.) For something from when i was young, back when i was playing Mechwarrior 2 as a kid, i never knew about the weapon grouping mechanic in that game, which is kind of an important thing to miss. (The thing is, it's not explained in the game, you have to manually do it at the start of each mission and the keybinds for it were insane. Being such a hacked in feature, I didn't feel particularly bad for not knowing about it once i knew about it.) I don't know, i think i've always been pretty good about making sure i have an understanding of the systems in a game. I think it's kind of tragic when people have a terrible experience with something because they're missing a crucial detail. Edit: Oh, how about this one? Link's Awakening. Over the course of several years, i restarted that game multiple times and kept dead-ending in the same place each playthrough. When i resorted to guides and faqs, they proved totally useless, i simply could not make progress. Internet research years later gave me the possible explanation of early retail versions of Link's Awakening having game-breaking bugs that i must have been wedging myself into each and every time i played the game. (There's a weird history of quietly released retail revisions for that game.) I'm sure if i followed a faq step-by-step i could probably get through the game and complete it, but Link's Awakening is already ruined for me. A game that i have seen people cite as their favorite Zelda is a game that holds nothing but frustration for me.

A visually striking game in a distinctive city, a pretty okay story with some decent characterization and writing, and the excellent combat system you just said you don't care about. (Really though, it's great, you should care.) You know, and then most of what you probably liked about GTAIV as well, because it is totally aping almost all of that. (I didn't like the driving model as much, though.) What it doesn't have is GTAIV's MP and a ton of peripheral world-building. (There isn't, for example, an entire fake internet or a ton of radio talk shows.)

If you don't want to end up hugely over-leveled, do side-quests as they arise, before doing story quests. The game does a lot of pretty harsh exp-scaling, so doing side-quests of your level will net you almost no experience, and story-quests of a slightly higher level will net you a ton. The arena side-quests can also really throw you off, since enemies and loot there are actually scaled to your level, rather than predefined. I chose to not do them, since they were pushing me way ahead of the curve. Even so, playing the game with a completist mindset has mostly put me in pretty much the right spot for most of the game. The basic thing to keep in mind for when you start tackling quests above your level is that you will level up immediately and be over-leveled for everything else. And yeah, i wouldn't say the game is a huge challenge, and i wasn't expecting it to be on the first playthrough. (Hearsay is that the second playthrough is savage, and that's how it should be.) If you're finding the enemies to be huge bullet sponges, you might consider a respec or finding some better weapons, because that generally hasn't been my experience outside of a few very specific encounters. I have also actually found money to be much more important than in the first game. The potential issue is that the shops are set to the level you are assumed to be when you arrive in a given area, while the sanctuary shops only update at several points throughout the course of the game. Look at the right shops at the right time. (Interestingly, the shops in the arena side-quest areas scale to your player level and are probably the most useful ones in the game.) I'm also curious, how many people do you have in your co-op session? I find two or three to be the ideal number, i think four just ends up being too much of a force. You just end up recklessly steam-rolling through the game with brute force. (Versus opponents that are scaled up to be huge damage sponges because of the co-op scaling, some of the named enemies do get a little ridiculous.)

I feel like it's probably important to point out, though, that there have been some real world factors preventing us from going any further than Crysis. The PC market changed, the economy was bad, people weren't buying fancy videocards. Ultra high-end PC-dedicated games like Crysis suddenly weren't viable anymore, too costly to develop and then sell on only one platform. Then you have the consoles, that's where those games went, and they sold well. (Call of Duty started out on the PC, of course.) There's that economy thing again though, it's a dangerous climate to launch new console hardware in, so we have this unending console cycle built on dated hardware that was obsolete when it was new, it's a huge bottleneck for graphical fidelity. You see companies like Lucas Arts, Square Enix, Kojima Productions, Ubisoft, Crytek, Epic and more all showing off their next generation tech, the industry is bursting for new console hardware. These publishers and developers are making those reveals to coerce the platform holders into getting new shit out on the market so they can do new and even more ambitious things. While outside of that, the PC market has kind of come back around. Visual fidelity in games having effectively been stagnant for years now, it no longer takes a monster PC to do something impressive, and the new business models are beginning to stabilize. So the hardware is affordable, free-to-play isn't a ghetto, and then suddenly you start seeing games that don't look like we've been regressing away from Crysis for the last four years. It'll be new console hardware that sends things flying forward in earnest, though. Dude, four years? Try seven, because FEAR came out in 05. Also, memory has been jostled and i will say that Rage was a recent "oh shit" for me, subdued by the game fumbling all the gameplay intangibles and being kind of tragically blah. Still, tis a shame ZeniMax has IdTech 5 under lock and key.

So i really, really love the two great tastes that taste great together of an RPG that is also an FPS, but i'm getting a little cynical about it. I've seen far too many developers carelessly cram RPG progression into their shooter as a cynical value add. That said, i'm just speaking my mind there, i don't think Valve is the kind of company that would do that. If Half-Life 3 is going to be an RPG, i'm sure they'll do it right. Even so, it would kind of really bum me out to see them not sticking to their guns on the style of game they make. It would be really nice to see a sort of internal consistency through the series, especially when you think about how much HL2 really is like HL1, despite having come out so many years later. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to play the entire series as a coherent experience where you can see the gradual evolution in craft? The last time i was absolutely floored by visuals in a Video game was probably Doom 3. I literally could not believe what i was seeing, that it was being rendered in real-time on a personal computer. The normal mapping, the shadows and lighting effects, it seemed to just be breaking fundamental rules about how i believed Video games would look. We really don't get that anymore, do we? The huge leaps that were being made in the 90's and early 2000's have slowed down to much more subtle, iterative technological progression. I look at Unreal Engine 4 tech demos and i go "yeah, that looks like a game, i recognize what that is." Perhaps i've just grown jaded though, maybe younger gamers are losing their minds over how pretty Halo 4 is, but i imagine that is probably not the case. (Halo 4 does look sexy though, some serious wizardry must be happening to get that thing running on the 360.)

I found both the bane and the nagging snipe in my Axton game, they're pretty hysterical. There's also a hyperion shotgun you can get that delights in the carnage you cause. BL2 features a ton of goofy talking weapons. For non-quest generated weapons, one of the neatest things i've found was a e-tech pistol capable of rapidly spitting out homing blue shock projectiles that would ricochet off of walls endlessly until they found a target. It had a massive 50+ round barrel magazine and a totally superfluous scope too, it was amazing. Anyways, i've got time in on all of the classes now, and i think they're all pretty fantastic. I think Axton is probably the least dynamic of the new characters, but he has some really solid skills available, he's a lot of fun. Zero and Maya both facilitate some really wildly varied playstyles, and Salvador falls somewhere in the middle of everything. Salvador nets you big rewards for putting yourself at risk though, while Axton is more about playing it safe, and Zero can be either. Maya really seems like the most flexible character in the game though, she has probably the least interesting ability, but the most interesting skill trees. I love the idea of the one-point game changer skills too, i think it shows Gearbox's awareness of how people were playing Borderlands. In the first game there were skills where there wasn't a significant difference between having one point in something and having five, and therefore people were just planning their builds around these "one-point wonders", never fully utilizing them. (Roland was particularly guilty of this, notably the supply drop and missile launcher skills for his turret.) So instead of trying to force everything into a unnecessarily rigid skill tree, they've allowed themselves to be a little more flexible in BL2, and it works out great. Also, i was kind of expecting the main story to at least take me to every area, but it seems like there's a fair number of locations that are exclusively for side quests. I'm not all of the way through the game, but there are areas i am well past that no story quest ever took me to. (In one case, there weren't even any side quests pointing me towards a given location, but when i took the initiative to explore the area, found an absolutely enormous space with multiple, lengthy quests.) I don't know if it's good or bad, but it's a little unexpected and odd. Finally, It's a small thing, but i'm kind of glad they get Claptrap out of the way, up front. It would have been really easy for them to ramp up on all the silliness that people latched onto in the first game, but i think they show just enough restraint for it to not overstay its welcome. Whether you think it's actually funny or not is another thing, but i don't think it ever crosses into annoying. (Anybody want to talk builds? At 27, my Axton is sporting 5 on Sentry, 5 on willing, 1 on Scorched Earth, 5 on Healthy, 5 on Preparation, and 1 on Phalanx Shield.)

I always thought the music in the first Borderlands was totally forgettable, but i quite like BL2's soundtrack. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqY1jUXSOVM http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-9x4SnblTk Bonus! - One of the few memorable themes out of the first game, revamped for the sequel.

This game has many easter eggs.

I enjoy the revamped grenades system. Instead of the attribute & element & damage scheme of the first game, radius and fuse are also variables, and multiple attributes can be stacked. (I'm sure i've seen grenades with as many as four combined, you can end up with some pretty weird stuff.)

http://www.giantbomb...jungle/17-6591/ This looks like an absolutely incredible thing, and i am happy that it exists.

I did a sweep and killed a few of them, though i think they were coming in from a crawl space, and there's no fucking way i'm going in there. I haven't seen any more since i did my sweep though, and Black Widows are apparently generally inclined to keep to themselves, so i think i'm going to pretend it's not an issue until i start seeing more. You know, and i'll be careful if i need to start shoving my hand into old boxes.

So i've already managed to sink a considerable amount of time into Borderlands 2, somehow i ended up playing a solo game on top of contributing to two co-op runs. (Playing on the 360, since the first game had such a solid and well-supported 360 version.) I think Borderlands 2 is phenomenal. It's a sequel that is a dramatic improvement while playing it a bit safe. It features some fairly sweeping changes, but none that lead to the core of the game feeling any different. It's the kind of game that i don't necessarily think would win over people who weren't already on board, but i guess it might actually be doing that, judging by the people i've talked to about the game. It feels like Gearbox has kind of figured out what they want Borderlands to be, it's a much more fleshed out game, there aren't a ton of rough edges to look past. It's also a much bigger and more balanced game, with a significantly larger emphasis on narrative and interesting mission design in a much broader range of scenery. It is a much more fully realized game. The revised weapon system is absolutely the best change that has been made, the way they've done so much more to differentiate the different manufacturers in the weapon system, it creates a lot of wildly distinct weapon styles. It ends up feeling more like you can choose your gun by preference, as opposed to gradually distilling your selections down to the highest DPS weapons. I like the new classes, there doesn't seem to be any one character that is dramatically out in front of the others like Lilith was in the first game. (Salvador is a riot to play, if you're not sure who to pick, i'd recommend either him or Axton.) The enemies generally display much more dynamic behavior, they aren't as much of immovable damage sponges this time around. The story is... a story... Handsome Jack is a one-trick pony, but i kind of dig that they've pulled in the player characters from the first game as active participants of the new narrative. I was concerned that the increased emphasis on plot might actually detract from the game, but It's largely inoffensive, it's reasonably well written and it doesn't get in the way of the open-ended gameplay. I think it's also a significantly better looking game, from both a technical and design standpoint, particularly that the weapons are much more interestingly stylized.

What were your issues with the first game?

It needs a bit of context, because it starts, ostensibly, as a person playing around with known and documented Majora's Mask glitches, but on a mysterious used cart with corrupted visuals and music. After only a short period of messing around, even stranger things start happening, and It turns out the cart is haaauunteed! There's three more videos, in addition to the one above.

This is definitely just a creepypasta, and i'm pretty sure i've seen this one before, or one similar to it. For other Video game-themed creepypastas, the "Ben Drowned" one is pretty fun.