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Has anybody gotten into the new content yet? A few new areas, a few new bosses?

Did anybody finish Knights of the Nine? Is that worth going back and finishing?

I can't remember exactly what i did, but i think i ultimately just booked it up those buttresses and got close enough to incite them into melee, at which point they were actually mostly harmless because their footing was so precarious. Definitely a contender for the most annoying and tricky spot in the entire game. The palace itself isn't easy either, so many knights, and so many mimics.

Admittedly, I'm a life-long Transformers fan, so it was a game kind of made specifically for me, but I was actually really into War for Cybertron. More than just being the best Transformers game anybody has put out, to me it really actually seemed like a pretty tight, balanced shooter on its own merits. Though it succeeds more as a multiplayer game than a solo game. (Three player co-op on its campaign, a suite of fairly popular competitive modes, and its awesome "escalation" mode.) At least give escalation a shot, it won't change your mind, but it's probably the best display of what WFC does right. I'm playing through Fall of Cybertron right now, and this time around they made a much, much better campaign, but simplified some of their mechanics in ways that kind of mess up the balance and make for a less interesting game. There's also perplexingly no co-op support this time around. (Also, it's a small thing, but the added feature of being able to alternate your gun arm on the fly to better take advantage of cover is kind of awesome.) Edit: aaand i just finished it. I approve of FoC, i think that is a cool game.

Blighttown isn't so bad once you clear out the non-respawning blow dart guys. (Also, I had recently heard that if you poison yourself with the dung that some of the other enemies there drop? Poison and toxin can't stack, and poison is way less harmful.) The Tomb of the Giants was what i found to be the most difficult area of the game, holy shit. Confusing, dangerous, narrow pathways, complete pitch-blackness, and swarms of some of the most difficult enemies in the game.

That's what i was getting at, yes.

I couldn't ever get into God Hand, which really bummed me out. It seemed so much like the kind of game i'd be really into, but i kind of just found it boring. I didn't like Mad World either, and was kind of bummed out by that too.

Protip - If you don't feel a confident in an area, don't ping the bonfire. Getting stuck respawning into a zone you're completely ill equipped to deal with can be real bad. Also, that damn graveyard, everybody seems to hit up the graveyard first. Every time i hear a story about somebody having a bad first impression of the game, it's because they immediately went and beat their head against the skeletons fruitlessly.

Did anybody play that DS game that came out a couple years ago?

What scales is the amount of scrap you earn. Theoretically, playing solo is balanced out by being able to build more turrets, but it doesn't quite work out. It just ends up being a little too much to manage, and it's needlessly difficult compared to co-op. Seriously, just play co-op. If you're trying to play Trenched solo, you're doing it wrong.

Literally nothing. It is a label, a valuable one, and EA is going to stick it on anything they feel needs a boost. My understanding is that the team at BioWare Victory is basically still the same crew EA has had on C&C since C&C3, and that Generals 2 was already well into development before the BioWare rebranding happened. (The studio was originally just called Victory Games, and was born out of EALA.) Any involvement of the original BioWare is likely quite limited.

I was always a grumpy pants that felt Generals shouldn't have had the C&C name on it, being such a radical departure from the series. Thing is, now we live in a world where C&C4 was a thing, and in retrospect, i have greater appreciation for what Generals achieved. (In that it was successfully not terrible.) I'm not sure i'm into the idea of having a C&C game without a campaign though. The C&C campaigns were always kind of a big part of why i've kept coming back to that series, they were always pretty consistent about finding cool ways to spin their game dynamics into interesting missions. (I mean, and the hammy FMV doesn't hurt.) Also, since the gauntlet has already been thrown down, i'm going to say Red Alert is still my favorite C&C, followed by Tiberian Sun. (Which is a ridiculously underrated game.)

I did! Those games may have not been much for story, but they had solidly designed and entertaining missions. (I remember especially enjoying the TACC campaign.) Won't be sad if PA doesn't have a campaign though, these games were always much more about the AI skirmishes and the multiplayer, no question. (It does need to have an AI skirmish mode, they've fucked up if it doesn't. TA and SupCom were such huge and intimidating games, offline botstomps were basically the only way you could learn.)

On the topic of TWEWY, it looks like Square is actually getting ready to announce a 3DS sequel. (A countdown is running, and the hints are pretty clear.) That's a thing i would be happy to play.

The mimics in Dark Souls are terrifying the first few times, but you quickly learn how to tell them apart from real chests. Of course, that doesn't really help when they get up and start chasing you.

I am amused by this thread, so i dug out my GBA and my Dawn of Souls cart. My last save has a Knight named Leo, a Ninja named Wedge, a White Wizard named Elia, and a Black Wizard named Kokkol. ... I'm pretty sure i just used the game's name generator to give them names. So yeah, standard party and randomly generated names, i'm pretty awesome.

Having never played a Pokemon game, some friends talked me into playing Heart Gold. I found it charming, but terribly dull. Everything about it just made it such an interminably slow game. The combat requires so little input from the player, and there's so little happening, there's no reason for it to have such a slow pace. I mean, and any time you want to manage your pokemon in any way at all, it feels like there's four or five steps too many. I could feeeeeel time slipping away from me. Also, having to gimp your Pokemon with navigation abilities is super lame.

SS2 would just quietly spawn in enemies outside of your line of sight and have them start roaming around.

God, i hate that, i hate that being how so many people experience that game, i think it is just colossally missing the point. System Shock 2 is scary because you cannot make an area safe, you can have your back turned while you're hacking a door lock, and there are always enemies roaming around in that space behind you.

I think it takes a certain mindset, because playing that game, i don't feel like i've achieved nothing when i die. What i've gained is knowledge of the area, and a better idea of how to tackle it. (So, i guess, a tolerance for trial and error gameplay is prerequisite.) I mean, and you can still do corpse runs to get your souls and humanities back, and you never lose items when you die. (So you can totally do a suicide run for a loot chest.)

What is she resting her arm on?

It's SOOOO furry though. God, is it ever furry.

If you're looking forward to the PC port, i'd encourage keeping your expectations in check. From simply does not make PC games, and all indications are that Dark Souls is going to be a completely, completely straight port. No fancy control retuning, no graphics updates. Exactly, yeah, your ability to communicate is pretty restricted. It probably allows the messages to be clearly translated across language barriers, but it's also just part of the tone for the game, player-to-player communication is very restricted. (During co-op and invasion, for example, there's no voice chat, only character emotes.) Well, countering when the enemy is vulnerable, obviously yes. The other thing less so, this sounds like the person you're watching might not be very good, or is missing some crucial element to the battles. Regardless, trying to game the game is pretty much accepted as part of how you play, using the bow to pull enemies away from a group so you can gradually take them down one at a time, for example. Risk management and all that, slow and cautious play. The combat is very nuanced though, every weapon in the game has a different move set, and most are viable through to the end game if you take the time to upgrade them. (There's multiple upgrade paths on most weapons too.) There were a lot of issues with the localization, my understanding is that From handled it in-house. (There were some misspellings and mistranslations and some other issues that they've actually tried to address in the patches.)

I understand Nappi's feelings. In a typical FPS match, you can have gradients of victory. As long as your KDR is above 50%, you can feel pretty good about how you did. While in an RTS, typically it's very binary. You win or you lose, it can be very trying. I think that's one of the secrets of why FPS's are so huge, it's a style of MP game where less responsibility is placed on the individual. Even if you didn't dominate the score board, you can simply settle for feeling like you contributed to your team or performed above the average. It's the difference between small-team or 1v1 games as opposed to big-team or FFA games. (Or, alternatively, score-based versus elimination.) As for how long a match in Planetary Annihilation will take, it will probably vary quite a lot. A typical, two person TA/SupCom match on a smaller map was usually about half an hour to an hour, and usually topped out at a low-tier tank rush. However, on a huge map with larger groups of people, things can totally spiral out of control. That's the fun stuff, where people have time to build up banks of intercontinental artillery cannons and huge ocean fleets. (Fog of War settings and Commander Death settings also had a very pronounced impact on how long a match will take. Disabling forfeit on commander death makes routing an enemy like trying to stomp out a weed, combine that with fog of war and it can take forever to achieve a definitive victory.) I've seriously had ten hour TA matches, though. Get like eight players fighting for a continent while throwing around nearly a thousand units each, it can quickly turn into something you can't finish in one sitting. (In those games, you could thankfully save in-progress matches to continue later.)

I have been playing this a ton over the last couple days and feel very strongly that it is a thing worth endorsing. For what it's worth, the game's title is a complete lie and It actually has characters from both Persona 3 and Persona 4. (Which means not a lot to me, because i didn't play either of those games. I watched the... Giant Bomb Persona 4 Endurance Run, that's my experience with Persona.) P4A though, four button game. Two buttons are weak and strong attacks for your character, two buttons are commands for your persona. Hitting the persona buttons brings your persona out on screen like an assist, and it has its own health bar and can take damage. In some cases, it can linger on screen and receive follow-up commands, allowing for some really crazy combat dynamics. It can get pretty wild, issuing commands to two seperate onscreen characters. It's an ArcSys game, so big combos, air dashes everywhere, flashy visuals, and just tons and tons of character specific game systems. The thing is, here they've made a lot of concessions to try and make it more accessible. All the specials are quarter circles, there's a lot of shared universal moves, there's even an infuriating-in-concept button-masher combo built into every character. Yet, somehow, none of it seems to break the game, it seems to completely hold up at the high end. You take all the pieces they've given you, start putting them together, and it feels like an absolutely legit fighting game, like nothing was sacrificed. It seems like it might actually be a game that can successfully cater to all skill levels. The 360 version launched with some pretty busted netcode, but it was patched early this morning and now it's perfect. ArcSys has arguably the best fighting game netcode in the industry. I have been having so much fun online with friends. The story mode is kind of the expected ArcSys approach, an extremely lengthy visual novel thing, but here actually written by Atlus' own writers, and apparently regarded as Persona canon. Compared to what you would normally expect from a fighting game, it seems pretty well written and fairly charming, just be ready to do so much reading. I'm bummed to see that the tutorial isn't made to be as extensive and newbie-friendly as what ArcSys had prepared for BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. This tutorial still introduces all of the game systems and pretty well gets you going, but it stops short of high level concepts and any bnb combos to have you safely on your way. Still, even at just that, it's a vastly better tutorial than you'll find in most other fighters. (There are also already loads of character guides online, the fgc seems to have really latched onto this game.) I like this game a ton, i am pretty excited by the potential here, and i am looking forward to digging deeper into it. I'm also kind of pumped about ArcSys announcing Chrono Phantasma alongside P4A's release, BlazBlue is definitely my favorite fighter.