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The Cave games are dramatically toned down for the iOS versions, they're nowhere close to authentic. My issue with touchscreen controls is that you don't necessarily know where you stand with your input, given the lack of physical feedback. If you're dealing with a virtualized joystick, unless you're specifically looking at it, you may not have a sense of where the center is or how far out from it you are. Touchscreens are awesome, there's a lot of games that work great on touchscreens, but i roll my eyes whenever i see a virtual d-pad or something. Just... No. No thanks.

I had kind of been going back and forth on whether or not i should buy it, but finally decided on picking up a copy of Shinen's Nano Assault for the 3DS. After waiting so long to buy it, of course it would happen that later the same day i would hear about it being remade and updated for both 3DS eShop and the WiiU, so... Shit, i guess. I've always really enjoyed Shinen's handheld shooters though, Nanostray 2 was probably one of my favorite games on the DS, that was an absolutely wonderful game. Nano Assault seems pretty awesome too. It's a solid, averagely-difficult shooter with some really standout visuals. Parts of the game play out like a 360 degree shooter with you roaming around the surface of oddly shaped cellular blobs while shooting viruses, and other parts play out more like an on-rails game akin to Starfox. I dig it, i would give it a pretty confident recommendation. (Maybe wait for one of the re-releases, i've read the eShop re-release will support the CPP for some proper twin-stick control, which it kind of really should have.)

You must just be on Playthrough 1 then. Pearlescents are the best weapons in the game, they rank above the three tiers of orange legendaries. Originally there was a bug in the game's internal rules that was labeling the highest quality weapons as white, and people started refering to them as pearlescents. Gearbox fixed the bug and later reintroduced the concept of pearlescents as a legitimate part of the game. I have never seen one in all of my time playing the game, is how rare they are.

The issue i've always had with touchscreen controls is just the lack of tactile feedback, the click of a button or a key, the resistance of a stick, the weight of a mouse, etc. I've always felt that is why touch controls feel so clumsy and loose.

I really wanted to play this, i'm still mad it didn't get a North American release. What level did you finish at? Find any pearlescents?

Oh god, i can actually really relate to Mington's thing here. An RPG loaded with heavy, impactful choices can sometimes be really paralyzing for me, or if it has a bad character stat scheme that encourages really, really finicky min-maxing. I end up doing a lot of save scumming to feel out options, and the amount of time the game takes me to play can just double, so i end up thinking long and hard before committing time to a game i know is going to be like that. I mean, and it's not games like Skyrim that bug me, because Skyrim is clearly so completely impossible to be a completist with, and even then, it's so open ended that you can still go back anywhere at any time. It's games with points of no return and finite resources that drive me wacky. It's just a really obsessive, completist thing for me. (I'm generally not even that much of a completist. I like to kind of hit all the low-hanging fruit, but i'll never go after the really ridiculous objectives.) Scariest thing for me, playing an RPG, is searching at Gamefaqs for an answer on something i'm stumped with and seeing that i missed something really important five hours earlier and can no longer get at it.

I just loaded up old games and went from there? I only had Knoxx and Robot Revolution to go through.

Another goddamned Kickstarter! So i think this looks pretty cool. I don't know how realistic their 900k goal is, but if you tell me that people who worked on both Total Annihilation and Supreme Commander want to do another game in that vein, i'm invariably going to be excited. (Because, of course, Total Annihilation is irrefutably the best RTS ever made. Irrefutably!)

I'm not particularly interested in yet another western-fantasy RPG series right now, but Obsidian has such a bad history with publisher meddling, it'll be interesting to see what they can do when they have nobody to answer to but themselves and their fans.

In preparation for Borderlands 2, i dived back into the first game. I have just about everything finished, including the DLC, and am at the level cap on playthrough 2. (Speaking honestly, i still have another character in progress for co-op.) It may shock you to hear, but that game is still pretty good.

My understanding is that it started out development as an original game and was only later picked up by Activision to be the third True Crime game. (With Activision later cancelling it and Eidos/Square coming to the rescue.)

The thing that ultimately sets it apart is that it's very melee focused, and the melee system is really very excellent. Whenever you end up with a gun, it's taken from you fairly soon after. (Restrictive carry limits and scarce ammo.) There's also a little bit of shoot-dodging, a simple skill system, and a rather weird and stilted car-to-car combat mechanic.

I will say, i also quite enjoyed the story. It has that ever-present issue of the dramatic weight not really meshing with the random horrible gameplay violence, but that's such an entrenched problem at this point, it's going to take a lot more to fix than a me-too design that is playing it fairly safe. Yeah, but if you're not into GTA, you are probably not going to be into this game. If you are into GTA even a tiny bit, this is a really, really good one of those. It's kind of hard to make a convincing argument for it, because it really does come back around to it being a very derivative game, but it's just so well done. It feels like a GTA game in the way Darksiders feels like a Zelda game. Even though it can't escape its obvious conceptual origins, it kind of deserves to be regarded on its own merits.

The thing is, this was only true for one of the bosses in the original Deus Ex. Other bosses in that game were just as unimaginative and unavoidable as the boss fights in Human Revolution are.

You can toggle what the main map shows to see locations for the various collect-a-thon items. Items you've collected are highlighted, while items you haven't collected are shown in gray. (Assuming you've completed the requisite dates.)

Holy shit guys, Nintendo is publishing Bayonetta 2 and it's going to be Wii U exclusive. What the fuck. I had been hearing rumors for months that Sega, in their financial woes, had stealth cancelled Bayonetta 2, and i guess Nintendo has moved in to rescue it. Maybe they'll "rescue" Anarchy Reigns from Sega too. (Which is DONE, it came out in Japan, but its western release has been delayed indefinitely.)

What you cite there, why isn't that a good thing? You get an item, the dungeon teaches you how to use it, and the boss is the final exam. There's something really elegant and wonderful about that simple approach. Not interesting enough? Perhaps it's just not to your tastes.

I just spammed grenades. Beat the game on the hardest difficulty with no trouble. When i personally had such a great experience with that game, it really bummed me out to see so many people get hung up on those shitty bosses.

So I'm just about done catching up on the DLC, and I think they're probably some of my favorite add-ons from this generation. Moxxi was a piece of shit, but the Zombie, Knoxx, and Robot Revolution packs were all really fantastic. (Robot Revolution was the only one i hadn't played, and i had some left-overs in Knoxx.) Gearbox really did a ton of great stuff supporting this game, if you can remember how buggy and messed up the original release was. They've really convincingly stretched out the progression too, introducing a ton of new modifiers and parts into the procedural weapon creation system, and rebalancing absolutely everything to support play up to the expanded level cap.

Probably not? Gameplay-wise, Borderlands 2 looks light years beyond the first game. The first game was very much a diamond in the rough. A lot of ambitious ideas begetting spartan execution of those ideas, with some relatively big problems along the way. Story-wise, not much actually happens in Borderlands. The four main characters all had big narrative arcs in the planning stages and none of it made it into the final game, a casualty of its troubled development. If you want a spoilery summary of what happens - With what looks like most of the main characters from the first game returning, you're sure to miss out on lots of little nods and references, but whatever.

If you're expecting it to tie together with HL2 and suddenly make sense, it won't because it doesn't. The finale to HL1 is deliberately obtuse, and where HL2 picks up has literally nothing to do with where HL1 ended.

Borderlands might not be what you think it is, because it's very much a shooter. It's balanced like a shooter, it feels like a good shooter. Shooter tactics and strategies are in play. Your ability to duck behind cover is more important than your defense buffs. Perhaps we should organize a weekly co-op session for the forum or something?

I played through Half-Life like four times before finishing Zen, and even when i did it, i wasn't sure if i didn't just break the game to do it. The jumping puzzles in those levels are utterly inscrutable, you have fucking absolutely no idea if you're doing what you're supposed to be doing.

It's probably because most of my experiences with Borderlands were in playthrough 2, but that absolutely wasn't my experience with the game. If somebody gets left behind on the leveling curve, they are totally boned since the game scales the difficulty to the highest level. Additionally, difficulty is also scaled by the number of players, so if you aren't pulling your weight, you're making it more difficult for everybody else. I mean, i love it, but it can be pretty savage. (Again though, end-of-game on playthrough 2, but being in playthrough 1 wouldn't fix the convoluted quest eligibility scheme.) The game was also ripe with item hacking on all platforms, so public matches couldn't even be a consideration. I do think it works as a solo game though, but that opinion seems to vary from person to person. If you're the kind of gamer that burns out on very shootery shooters, the solo game and its absence of group dynamics probably won't work for you. Anyways, for the first Borderlands, have an organized group or play it alone, is what i'd say. For the sequel, who knows?

Wait, wait... What?