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I actually struggle with even the most basic execution in SF4, i find the precision it demands to be really difficult to grapple with. I've always found that the ArcSys games come to me more naturally, a lot of subtle differences in the control and the style of game. Different things click for different people. (Really, they're dramatically different styles of games. SF4 strongly favors footsies and careful defense, while ArcSys games generally favor rushdown tactics.) Marvel too, i'd argue MvC requires yet another totally different approach. That game is much more about strategies, as opposed to tactics. It's about the plan you have before you even begin the fight. The team you take into a match, the assists you've chosen, the character you have on point, and how you intend to use all of that. I'm kind of terrible at MvC3. While i'm outing myself, let me say that I was also phenomenally terrible at MK9. I'm bad at games.

I think it's fair to want story out of an RTS, there have certainly been a lot of great RTS's with big narrative focuses. (I've never been a fan of Blizzard's games, but there's those. There's also Relic's games, and the C&C games, etc.) You know, but TA isn't that. (Aside from being amusingly grim, it's about as thin a premise as you can get.) SupCom kind of tried to weave a narrative, and fell totally flat in its efforts. Planetary Annihilation looks like it's going to go more for the TA thing, played somewhat less self-seriously.

I feel like there's basically two approaches to horror in games. There's the games that try to intimidate you with noises and images and a narrative, but play essentially like any other game would. Then there are games that that try to engineer gameplay that is itself conducive to fright. In my experience, the latter is the only kind of game that gets me on edge, and i feel like most survival horror games tend to fall into the former. (Particularly in the case of modern survival horror. I think RE4 is one of the best games i've ever played, but what it started kind of destroyed the genre.) I like horror games, i play a lot of horror games, and yet somehow Dark Souls was the only game i've played in recent years that had me genuinely feeling really very tense. Not a "horror" game, but a game that has you constantly on edge with a lot at stake, surrounded by threats that are actually threatening. Scarier than Dead Space, that's for sure. Also, i should definitely play Amnesia. Judging from what i've heard about it, i suspect it has some things in common with Call of Cthlulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth. (Which is a pretty damn great game that kind of falls apart towards its conclusion.) Finally, just as a random aside, i think System Shock 2 is probably the one game that got more under my skin than any other. I've played through it so many times that i can't really look on it as being a scary experience anymore, there's too much familiarity, but calling on vague memories of my first couple playthroughs, i remember being just terrified by the sense of complete fraility forced on the player. (And the game just narratively reinforcing it, showing awareness of how it was making you feel.) You were remarkably weak and frail, your supplies were extremely limited and your gear was barely holding together, and the enemies were constantly respawning and always roaming. I've also always been pretty fond of how Doom 3 handles its admittedly totally arbitrary flashlight mechanic, forcing the player into situations where they are made to feel uncomfortable. I've always seemed to be on the losing side of that argument, though.

I already hit on the Deus Ex theme a page or two back, but that particular Episode 2 song hadn't been posted. Anyways... I have nothing but adoration for these games, i don't care what anybody says. Somewhere along the way it became cool to hate Myst, people completely forgot how mesmerizing those games were, and how devilishly challenging their puzzles were. (Exposed to Riven as a kid, i definitely wasn't prepared for having to decipher an imagined culture's base-25 numerical system.) People might argue that the first game seems really arbitrary, and it is, but that series got way better at contextualizing its puzzles as it went on, and built out a really fascinating universe with it.

TA is easily one of the top three or so games for me, a game i played consistently for years and years. I also really liked Supreme Commander, but it never really clicked for me the way TA did. (On top of that, SupCom 2 is just a complete mess.) SupCom's strategic camera was awesome though, but the way it just let you sit far out looking at a bunch of abstracted icons, and the way the interface was all just a little bit more automated than it was in TA, it made you feel very disconnected from the action in a way TA didn't. Not to say that TA wasn't about macro-management. When you're playing TA right, you're dealing with complex overlapping webs of command queues, basically trying to automate your base to be more efficient and more resilient than the opponent's base, very rarely do you give direct orders. (While attacking with very broad, mixed-force strategies. Scouting and creating distractions, finding a weak flank, and throwing everything you can at it.) Did any of you guys ever play on Boneyards for the short while that was up and running? The huge galactic conquest metagame?

The trailer they open on is a total love letter to Total Annihilation.

The guy has interesting things to say and knows how to be really articulate about those opinions, and i also think Braid is probably one of the cleverest puzzle games i've ever played, so Jonathan Blow is an ok guy in my book as things stand. He is consistently misrepresented in interviews though, does he have anything to do with that, or is he just a victim of his public persona?

This is kind of where i am with fighting games, i love figuring them out and playing them them with some similarly-skilled buddies, but i never stick with any one game long enough to be anything less than terrible. (I'm ok with Soul Calibur.) I don't even have a stick, i really need a stick. Anyways, i'm just going to leave this here incase anybody's interested: Four hours of systems and characters analysis for P4A.

Capcom is fine, it's just that any time they work with an overseas developer, it all goes ten kinds of wrong. This game is, as it would happen, Capcom working with an overseas developer.

What? Half-Life, for better or worse, largely defined the way shooters have been constructed for the last decade and a half. Half-Life 2 was, you know, more of that plus then-impressive physics puzzles, but let's not undersell the significance of that first game. It was quite a bit more than "technically impressive", it was a revelation in design. As for why people want Half-Life 3 so badly, i'd wager a lot of it has to do with Episode 2 ending on a massive cliff-hanger. There hasn't just been two of those games, there's been six. (Arguably seven, depending on how you count Gearbox's contributions.) I'm personally fairly critical of Valve's story-telling in that series, but they've still convincingly built a world, and people are invested in that world. Or maybe people think that with HL3 will come a successor to the Source engine.

Two songs from the two best Gradius games.

I don't know if there's a lot, but I've definitely had long conversations about fighting games on this forum, previously. You definitely don't need to go that far for such a game to be rewarding, just understand the mechanics and find people around your skill level. The interesting dynamics offered by a good fighting game extend well beyond simply throwing out a complicated combo. Don't even look at the execution side of things, learn the systems and the strategies, technical execution comes later. The fun is when you understand your options and the associated risks, trying to discern the best way to respond to your opponent's actions while putting yourself in the right situation to execute on your own tactics. I mean, and that's all just theory. It can be a little arcane, but it's not something you need to spend a hundred hours practicing.

The fact they brought in TWEWY characters almost had me, i almost want to play it, but i just find everything narrative about Kingdom Hearts so completely intolerable.

Looks like North America might be getting Guild 01, Level 5's weird anthology game for the 3DS. I was hoping this might happen, but didn't really expect that it actually would. It's a super, super weird collection of incredibly disparate games from some pretty big names. A top down shooter from Goichi Suda, an airport management sim from Yoot Saito, an... RPG item shop rhythm game thing... and a fourth game, a medieval "adventure RPG". The anthology has been pretty well received, and it certainly sounds interesting, i definitely want to play this. There's also a Guild 02 in development, which will include a game from post-Capcom Keiji Inafune.

Absolutely no interest at all from you guys, hey? That's a shame, it's a really great game.

The problem i had with Trenched/Iron Brigade is that the loot progression is kind of harmful to the game. It's such a sharp, linear progression that you quickly will find no fun or value in replaying older levels. It's a game that kind of locks you out of enjoying it more than once, you're forced into grinding like two or three levels of end-game content to continue to wring value from it. It's a good one-shot five hour game, so play it with friends, you'll have a blast. You may also come to realize why analogue saluting is the greatest gaming innovation of 2011.

^ Bonus secret Contra theme!

I had been thinking about posting a couple from Mighty Switch Force, but i've been beaten to it. Instead, these from Arcade System Works' stylish and savagely difficult Contra spin-off.

Armored Core V was, in theory, From building on a lot of the teamwork conceits from Chromehounds in the more well worn Armored Core framework. In practice, it was all for naught, because its metagame was completely and tragically broken for some really dumb reasons. Just one of the most crushing disappointments i've had in a long time, a game that completely implodes because a poorly designed match-making system.

Chromehounds was badly balanced, and some massive game-breaking bugs were discovered near the end of its life, but that is a game that sorely needed a sequel and the fine-tuning that would have come with it. (Party chat also broke the whole communications conceit, though Microsoft has allowed games released since the introduction of that dashboard feature to disable party chat under certain conditions.) Seriously though, a game just absolutely filled with brilliant, wonderful ideas. God damn, what a great time i had playing that. I usually played a scout too, one of my favorite builds was to pack on fire mortars and smoke mortars. Set down the vision-obscuring smoke mortars, flip on thermal, and start pounding the enemy with fire mortars. (Leading to a situation where the same equipment, if they even had thermal imaging, would do nothing for them, because their vision was obscured with fire.) They'd be completely helpless as their mech slowly overheated. It was so inefficient, it was such a trolling build, I got so much hate mail for playing like that. My main was a four-rocket wheel base that just ran circles around all the howitzer builds that eventually dominated the game.

One of my favorite uses of voice chat in a game was Chromehounds. Having to capture communications towers and then hold them to maintain contiguous radar coverage across multiple towers, so as to be able to communicate with your team across that network. An enemy capturing a tower in the middle of the map could cut your team into two groups with no way to communicate with eachother. (It would affect your commander's radar too, he would no longer be able to see on his map what is happening in the team-controlled radar field he is not connected to.) Chromehounds was awesome. Like, really awesome. (I realize this is not a PC game, i'm just running with the theme.)

So many of the tools available now are just so incredible. Don't be intimidated and just start playing around with stuff, a lot of very high end tools have very low bars of entry. (Often free under certain conditions.)

Has anybody already mentioned or noticed that this has now been stated to be targeted at being a 15 dollar game?

I've taken to messing around in Unity like probably every other wannabe designer on the internet. Heh. I've also made some random mods and maps for various games in the past. I have, as of right now, never made a game. Let's see where i am in a year.

I just picked this up, and have been finding the soundtrack totally infectious. I was never much of a SMT/Persona guy, but i dig ArcSys fighters and am finding P4A pretty awesome.