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JRPG's, however, have a long, sordid history of flagrantly ripping off songs. Sound familiar? .

Hello, new person! Let's think about this for a second though, why do retail stores like Gamestop have any power to begin with? This is relevant, so stay with me here. What i personally believe is the real roadblock slowing adoption of a digital business on the consoles is the kind of people who buy consoles. I've seen it lots, families who have a PS3 kind of just unceremoniously shoved into a dusty corner, hooked up to a TV with SD cables and no ethernet plugged in. Next to it, a small pile of games with a copy of the latest Call of Duty game and a few random other things. It still happens all the time, and i believe the registered user counts touted by Sony and Microsoft relative to the actual number of systems sold shows that it is still an absolutely enormous market. Simply put, people think differently about the consoles, they use consoles differently. Amongst non-gamer people i know, none have ever set up their Wii to connect to the internet. They're still toys to most people. So back to Gamestop and other retailers, they have power because there is currently a market they can reach that digital distribution cannot. However, as that audience is gradually trained to be more receptive to digital distribution, the position held by retailers will crumble. People talk about Gamestop like it's this big nefarious roadblock halting progress, but they really don't have any power at all, their position in the industry is symptomatic of broader issues about how people interact with console hardware. Still, I do think mindsets will change, consoles will gradually shift more towards digital distribution, as has already been happening over the course of just this console generation. (For the 360, XBLA launched as a novelty, and On Demand was never part of the original plan.) The Video game retailers of the world will and already are doing dumb and reactionary things to protect their increasingly irrelevant businesses, but they won't have any power to stop the changes. Right now though, retail is still the main avenue for the consoles, and the platform holders appear to have taken the position of not wanting to rock the boat. (Interestingly though, NSMB2 on 3DS eShop will be day and date with the retail release.) I don't think we're going to see any radical shifts in the next console cycle, i believe the current business model has probably at least another decade in it before anybody is forced to adapt or die. That is, of course, assuming that bandwidth caps don't grow more ridiculous. In which case, everything is fucked. Stagnation, yay. Oh we're definitely already in the midst of such disruptive shifts. Look at the new handhelds, whose biggest threats are not eachother, but the smart phones. This is a whole different, lengthy debate in and of itself. Personally, i do not think the one-console future will ever happen. There will always be issues of technological drift creating compatibility problems, it's endemic to the medium. Just look at iOS and its successive versions, where everything was supposed to be compatible and straightforward, but instead has all just quickly spiraled totally out of control.

Hmm, I wish i had something helpful to suggest, I can relate with the fear of not knowing what's going on.

It's more a matter of individual weapons in UT being more flexible, having more tricks and being applicable to a broader range of situations. You can pick your favorite and stick with it. You have to be much more holistic about how you play Quake 3, you have to understand when to apply the different weapons available to you.

I feel like the conversation about digital distribution being the future that everybody is just going to have to accept and live with is overlooking a few things. For one, there's the matter of ISP's pushing back hard against bandwidth hungry content delivery services by imposing strict bandwidth caps on their users. Digital distribution cannot be the primary method of providing games when many markets are being constrained by such caps. Like, Canadian here, and my bandwidth cap... Is seriously confusing, it seems to change every time i go check what it is, but i think it's around 80 gigabytes right now. You show me Max Payne 3 being a 30 gig download on Steam, and it it's just NOPE. Not happening. I mean, and there's another issue with there being a massive, shocking disparity between the number of registered users on Live and the number of 360's apparently out in the wild. (Like less than half, the last i checked.) There's probably a ton of RROD'd 360s in there, admittedly, but somewhere out there is a huge market of people that is not plugging their systems into the internet at all. This is probably not a market you can sell digitally distributed games to. Not trying to make a stubborn argument in favor of physical media or the consoles, but i feel like the all-digital future is further away than people want to believe it is. (You know, and honestly, i do still prefer having a physical thing. I feel like the digital distribution services are a horrible quagmire of user rights issues just waiting to happen.) Also - Quake 3 Arena is totally better than Unreal Tournament. I mean, but it wasn't so much the gimmicks that bugged me, i always thought Unreal had an incredible and nuanced roster of weapons. (Though there's something to say for the purity and simplicity of Q3A's approach to everything.) The problem i actually had with UT is that it just felt so clumsy and sluggish in comparison to the ultra responsive and precise gameplay of Q3A. I was absolutely hooked in hard by UT2k4 primarily because it felt more like Q3A to me. (Personally, i think UT2k4 is the high water mark for that style of shooter.) Even there, though, raw deathmatch was probably the thing i spent the most time with, and when i later got into Halo, it was again Team Slayer and Team Doubles that i spent the most time with. Q3A was kind of a game made for people like me, i guess. I still really admire the purity of purpose Q3A had, that is a game that knew exactly what it was.

Also on the topic of made-up languages in Video game music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=De_hqrgEacY If you aren't grinning from ear to ear, it's because you're dead inside.

So i really like the ost for Nier. The gibberish languages in the songs are loosely derived from existing languages and meant to simulate thousands of years of linguistic drift, to go with the game's distant post-apocalypse setting. (Incidentally, the songs in Beyond Good & Evil are also built around a fictional language.)

More Unreal! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=burzlYxbUmI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=axehix2KnP0 I don't think the original Unreal gets quite the love it deserves, it's always overshadowed by UT in people's minds. Unreal was just such a great solo game, such a sense of discovery and exploration. A lot like Half-Life in that it was a linear game with a cohesive journey and tons of nooks and crannies to distract yourself with as you move forward.

Sure, yeah, there's a lot of quests that are just completely spit out by the system, and those ones generally stand out pretty sorely. Then there's also the big scripted story quests where just little bits and pieces are being generated on the fly, and for those it can take some careful attention to realize when and how it's happening.

And two from HL2: Episode Two! (imo, the best music in the series.)

An original song from HL2. (A significant portion of the rest of its soundtrack is from HL1.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtqzEA7zbAE One from HL2: Episode One. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0Y6irW4UyE

Two from Half-Life. (Some songs from this soundtrack have been frequently repurposed in later games.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oWGKZNVDfY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSePRs7M2sE

The mech game renaissance continues? The Heavy Gear games may have the dubious distinction of being that thing Activision did because they lost the Battletech license, but they were still really fantastic, distinct games. Definitely not opposed to seeing Heavy Gear make a return to the video game space, assuming this revival even aims to be anything at all like the existing games.

I'm always secretly a little sad when people get all super pumped up about Tribes, because it feels like i'm the only person in the world who would rather see a new Cyberstorm or Earthsiege/Starsiege game. For the uninitiated. Heavy Gear is, of course, something else entirely. These are all games that should be on GoG though, along with the older Battletech PC games too, but convoluted licenses and all that.

Having played TES games since Daggerfall, i think i feel pretty strongly that Skyrim is the best game in the series, or at least the most well made. There are thing about Morrowind that i adore, but i spent so much time with that game that i also haven't forgotten how busted it could be, and how many dubious pieces of design it contained. There's been a pretty linear progression where Bethesda has been getting better at making games in the workmanlike sense of it, they're more consistent and more assured in their quality, and perhaps a little less memorable for it. Well, I understand that Oblivion's dungeons were randomized in development, but then fine-tuned and inserted into the game with a final configuration, so it doesn't practically mean anything to the player. (Well, aside from being noticeably more terrible than Morrowind or Skyrim dungeons.) Anyways, yeah, TES hasn't made significant use of randomized or procedural content since Daggerfall. (Containers are generally randomized, but frequently nothing else.) I wonder if that's where TES needs to go again, with the series kind of coming dangerously close to settling into a predictable formula. Oh, and Skryim has procedurally created quests, and it handles it really well, a lot of players probably don't even notice when it happens. Even a lot of the quests for major faction paths are generated in this system. The most noticeable element is that the dungeon you go to is often randomly selected from a list and then populated with items relevant to the quest. (There are also a lot of other things about skyrim quests that can be randomized, though.)

It is possible to disable notifications on the 360, but i believe it disables all system notifications in a blanket fashion, not just achievement pop-ups. Honestly though, i still prefer hearing the achievement ding in most cases. (The 360 still has the best achievement ding, heh.) Seeing an achievement pop for something really difficult can be an awesome little moment of catharsis. I mean, but I completely agree that it is ruinous for the establishment of tone in a narrative scenario.

So it's more Knights of the Nine, less Shivering Isles.

I prefer when achievements are kind of an honest record of my experiences with a game, instead of a bunch of one-off gimmicks. You know, like beating the Halo games on legendary or something. It's not an exciting achievement in and of itself, but it's denoting an exciting experience.

Definitely agreed. Compare Duke Nukem Forever, which was also disastrously updating a lot of stupid enemies that kind of worked in an earlier, lower-fidelity game. Hey, but Serious Sam again. Serious Sam is how you do it. Those stupid, goofy enemies that look like what you remember Doom monsters looking like. Man, can i gush more about how great those first two Serious Sam games are? Just the wild, creative energy shown by those levels and their contained set piece battles? The weirdly meta subtext about how you're being manipulated by item drops throughout the two games? Those games felt like the product of a decade's worth of pent up observations about Doom clones. Fucking so great.

Woah, hold on guys, i'm going to have to disagree with the idea that crazy true-school 90's-style first-person shooters can't work anymore. I would argue that it's simply a style of FPS that just hasn't been done proper justice in a long time. (And that very few games are even trying. That aformentioned Wolfenstein game certainly wasn't trying to be that. DNF wasn't even trying to be that. I mean, aside from just being atrocious and offensive, it just wasn't even that kind of shooter anymore.) Anyways, Serious Sam 3, how about we not use that as the measuring stick for that genre of shooter. I played through the remakes of the original two Serious Sam games not long ago and felt those games held up extremely well, so much better than i thought they would, they were still hilarious and thrilling and dumb. (In spite of the remakes actually breaking some of the more memorable encounters.) Now, i haven't personally played Serious Sam 3, but i've heard a lot of very conflicted opinions on that game from persons i'm generally inclined to trust. (I understand it makes a few misguided attempts at modernization, and has an incredibly slow start.) So what i'm really saying is... Guys... Just stay with me here... We need Shogo II. Aside: Holy shit, do i ever love Dark Forces, and JK:DF2 is pretty much one of my favorite games.

The existence of this thing just feels like somebody is grasping at straws. Do people care about this? I don't recall Rise of the Triad ever being a particularly big deal. That game definitely passed by with barely a blip, but i think that is a really underappreciated game. Raven Software never seems to get the credit they deserve. Wolfenstein-2009 did a lot of the things people later quite appreciated about Singularity, and did it in an open-ended world too. (Not to say that Singularity was exactly a big hit either.)

I kind of secretly wish for a return to some of the things Morrowind did, the highly restricted fast travel and having to carefully follow road directions given to you by NPC's, all that good stuff. Of course, I don't think that would probably sit well with the bigger audience Bethesda is playing to, these days. (Hey, but maybe it totally would? Skyrim is hardly a game that has been dumbed down, despite the cries of some fans.) I feel like this is probably a pretty accurate assessment. Skyrim probably didn't achieve the same heights that the best content in Oblivion did, but doesn't fumble other things as badly either, it's a much more consistent game. (Which is not something that should be dismissed, it's quite incredible that such a wide breadth of content is all pretty good.) I will say though, remembering back on the game, a couple things do really stand out to me. First the incredible vistas of The Reach, and then the incredibly immense dwarven cavern, Blackreach. Oblivion was knocked for having boring locations, and Bethesda definitely made good on that. The old character build system TES had kind of been running with since Daggerfall was always really obviously flawed and broken, and i think the changes introduced in Skyrim were ultimately very positive ones. Completely dumping classes, getting rid of the old attribute system that forced you to min-max to get anything out of it, and the phenomenally elaborate perks system that came in to fill out the details, all mostly positive changes. (I kind of wish there was a way to respec the perk trees, to be honest. I often went hours and hours without spending my skill points on anything because i was afraid to commit to a build i might end up not wanting to stick with.) It's been so long since i played, i can't remember which shouts i ran with. I don't think shouts ultimately had much of an impact on how i played. Personally, i'd be completely giddy to see Bethesda go all in on another Daggerfall-style TES game, but that is probably going to never happen. It felt to me like Skyrim was meant to be kind of a soft reboot for the series, moving the fiction forward a couple hundred years and re-establishing the major players, like they're setting the table for later games.

I really loath the kind of achievements that require actions outside of the scope of the intended gameplay. Dead Space infamously had an achievement that encourages people to play the entire game using only the plasma cutter. So great, they're encouraging people to have a less than ideal experience, smart move guys.

I haven't played it myself, twenty bucks is a little more than i want to spend on an add-on at the momment, but i really would like to check it out. If it's bigger than Shivering Isles, that's quite an enormous piece of content. Shivering Isles was itself larger than most full-priced games.