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http://www.giantbomb.com/e3-2012-hawken-demo/17-6216/ This gives an excellent look at the mech lab, which is of interest to me. So... Skill trees and cosmetic build parts. Though that's selling it short, but still... Also this - http://www.destructoid.com/e3-hawken-is-getting-its-own-ridiculous-controller-too-229070.phtml And not content to let Hawken have all the fun, this too - http://www.joystiq.com/2012/06/09/check-out-razers-mechwarrior-online-artemis-prototype-and-oth/ If Steel Battalion isn't going to do it, somebody has to, i guess? Heh.

I just played The Darkness II. It was ok. Competent, but forgettable. Warhammer 40k's claims about its Space Marines are just marketing silliness, as even Aliens predates WH40k, and there's other instances of the concept dating back to the 30's. Anyways, if you want more WH40k at the lowest bar of entry, Relic's Dawn of War games are your best bet, even if you're not hugely into RTS games.

The Halo 4 reveal was pretty Fable: The Journey looks awful. The Forza reveal kind of falls flat without the context of it being a more arcade-style racer being developed by a bunch of ex-Bizarre guys. (You know, PGR.) The Smart Glass thing might be something big, way too early to know. Microsoft really wants you to experience the magic of Bing voice search. Internet Explorer, heh. All super, super boring stuff.

They were talking about it as a more global thing, bringing in content from both the world and your friends list. I imagine there's probably going to have to be a toggle so that you can make it just your friends list. You know, for parents that need to protect their children from crudely drawn penises.

Anybody see the Nintendo thing? Some of the stuff they're doing with the Wii U is maybe kinda neat. The general gist is that the Wii U will be populated with contextually appropriate messages from other players. So at the dashboard level, you will see displayed around your game icons some general game-specific conversations, but tunneling in deeper, it might also be that you die in a game and see messages from other people who died in the same place, then being able to reach out and ask those people for advice. Right, you already see problems, right? The internet being full of assholes, i don't imagine the dialogues will be nearly as constructive or polite as Nintendo envisions them being. Or, oh god, what if it's a bad game and people are doing nothing but complain about it? What if that's all people see while they're trying to play it? What's the fallout from that? Will publishers get to censor the conversations? There's a ton of unknowns here, but I kind of like the idea, making games passively communal, bringing the conversations people are already having into the games themselves. I mean, i think it has potential, it's unexpectedly progressive to see out of a company like Nintendo.

Fire Emblem, oh man. I really love those games, but i gradually came to realize that i kind of can't play them. I get into this weird perfectionist/completionist mindset, and i end up never making progress because i always get hung up trying to ace each mission without any losses. There's a lot to love and respect about a game that will deeply characterize a bunch of very unique individual units all with their own stories and dialogue, and then be willing to take them from you permanently for messing up. That's some ballsy action and consequence design, and i can't really deal with it. I mean, those games are generally built around expecting you to take some losses. They're scripted to introduce new characters if you've lost certain other ones, things like that. You really only want to restart a mission if you majorly fuck up, like losing a special-role unit such as a healer or a thief or if you generally just got totally stomped. But, you know... Yeah, and Pikmin 2 was kind of the same way for me, just for the raw gameplay concerns though, it being easy to back yourself into a corner with no way out.

[media=] [/media]So i guess it is to be understood that the extra content for the PC version will be coming to the 360 and PS3 versions as DLC. I am very happy about this news.

Hey, so Crimson Dragon has a new trailer out. (The very overt and direct spiritual successor to Panzer Dragoon.) [media=] [/media]So that is a thing that looks awesome. I swear to god, if i have to, i will buy a Kinect to play this. It doesn't seem like it needs it at all, so i'll be filled with impotent gamer rage for having to go that road, but I'll do it. I mean, I'm hoping it just has a gamepad option like Child of Eden did, though there's been no indication that will be the case. Interestingly, this also seems to be an XBLA game. It's probably going to be one of those new giant-sized XBLA games, with the increased gamerscore cap and twenty dollar price tag.

VbIjwEHgtbc So anybody excited about this? The game will be set 17 years after the last one, the new protagonist and the guy you see at the end of that teaser is Patroklos, who is supposed to be Sophitia's son. He will fight with short sword and shield and would be the fourth character to fight with that general style. Eagh. Siegfried and Nightmare are confirmed as returning, and possibly/probably Voldo? There's concept art of Siegfried floating around looking much older. It seems likely most of the cast will return, just aged up. (Consider that Ivy would be nearly fifty in SCV, and then scrub the image from your mind.) The game is supposed to play much faster than IV did. I had also read they're getting rid of A+K moves, since they're so hard to do on a gamepad. (That would be X/B on a 360 pad, or Square/Circle on a PS3 pad. So yeah, glad to see those gone.) The design lead wanted to call it Soul Edge 2 to suggest a reinvention and a new focus for the series, but was vetoed by Namco execs, and so it's Soul Calibur V.

So a demo for this in on Live, apparently. I don't have a Kinect, so knowing that is no good to me.

Wherein it refers to gaming, a scrub is generally accepted to be a non-novice who still plays like a novice. In the fighting game scene, it's a label usually only applied to people who are unwilling or unable to improve their skill set past a certain point, while also complaining vehemently about their losses. (Such and such strategies being "cheap" and the like.) Complaining about scrubs isn't equivalent to complaining about newbies, a detail that i think some of you guys might of missed. A scrub is the guy who will send you a barely coherent rage mail after you kick their ass online, it is not the broader novice audience.

From the Radiant Silvergun thread and how much that went massively off rails into many different topics, i got the impression that i wasn't the only person here with a fondness for shmups. Still, probably not enough of us to justify new topics for every upcoming game. So this, here. A place to stick anything related to shooters of the forced scrolling variety. SO HEY. Akai Katana is getting a truly unexpected world-wide localization via Europe's Rising Star Games. Those dudes just opened a North American branch, and Akai Katana will be the first game they publish in this region. As is the case with a lot of these games, there isn't a ton of information about it on the English speaking internet, but it seems to have a reputation as being especially excellent. It's a Cave-developed game created, apparently, with some measure of collaboration with Treasure, and people are calling it a spiritual successor to Progear. (On the off chance anybody is familiar with that game.) It looks pretty great, and it's out in a couple weeks. (Also, this world-wide version will apparently be "complete" with various add-ons included.) BtWkcRCC3WM

I have not been this into a 2d shooter since Ikaruga. This game is awesome. God, i wish it was getting more attention, but i know that is a totally unrealistic desire to have of such a niche genre.

I also have a friend playing through it right now that is way into it, it's making it very hard to hold off on this one. From hearing talk about the game, i get the impression that the sharp difficulty curve that a lot of pre-release reviews were complaining about isn't actually much of a problem in the post-launch game. If you hit a wall, you don't grind for hours, you just go temporarily hire a tough pawn through the now active online portion of the game. Very recently, there were some similar things going on with Dark Souls where you would see tons of pre-release reviews with no insight about how the elaborate metagame impacted that experience. This probably needs to stop happening, with this kind of passive multiplayer thing as a continuing and growing trend.

I've meant forever to get a good fight stick, but it seems like whenever there's an affordable one available that gets solid recommendations, they sell out immediately.

So a free add-on was just pushed out to this game today, five new levels and a bunch of other small technical enhancements. (They added a retry button and apparently tweaked the graphics in some small way I'm not really noticing.) Just load up the 3DS shop and it should tell you to update the game if you already have it. Unfortunately, i can't play these new levels because you have to finish all preceding levels before those open up, and the final level of the main game just destroys me. Anyways, a free expansion for one of the best digital download games on the 3DS. (It also seems to be a dollar or two cheaper now than when it launched.) Basically just a reminder that this is a thing people should totally play.

I've heard a lot of exceedingly negative things about the PC port of this, so just a fair warning to do your research before investing in that Steam version. The game itself is apparently a pretty solid and enjoyable adventure, though. I played the demo on Live and found the control a bit swimmy, but otherwise thought it was ok.

This just went up.

I am so curious about your display of disdain towards Bethesda. I mean, are you just unhappy about TESO, or did you not like Skyrim? Not trying to protect a sacred cow or anything, i'm genuinely interested in knowing what the experience was that had led you to feeling like Skyrim was a thoughtlessly and carelessly made game. Divergent opinions are so interesting! I quite like this thought.

First thing I want to say is that I think I'm going crazy, I'm sure I read that Joystiq review and found it filled with vague comments about the game being repetitive. However, looking at it again, i see a review that is doing an acceptable job breaking down what the writer feels is wrong with the game. Joystiq either significantly massaged their review, or i was thinking of another review and had conflated it with Joystiq's. (In which case, oops.) This being the case, it becomes difficult for me to make the points I want to make. Still, I appreciate the response, I think we do agree on a lot of points. However, for the first two paragraphs of your response, i would argue that you've successfully articulated the kinds of points a review should be making instead of the kind of generalities i feel constitute inelegant criticism. It's way too much information to realistically expect a reader would simply infer from such broad terms as the aforementioned, and it's often giving the writer too much credit to assume such depth of meaning.

To clarify on one point, i do think on-disc DLC is bullshit. However, when the reality is that most DLC is planned and at least partially developed well in advance of a given game's release, i also feel that the majority of other DLC schemes are equally just as bullshit. On-disc DLC as the big rallying cry people get around as what we won't tolerate is really a false lead. I think it's going to take a while to sort out which DLC schemes are acceptable and which ones are actively harmful, but we won't get there unless people understand the ways they're being exploited.

I didn't like that Joystiq review either. Warning bells go off for me when people start talking about a game being repetitive as a bad thing. I think it's just incredibly lazy if that's the argument somebody is going to as a means to express their dislike for a game, because games are so fundamentally about repetitive actions. It says to me that person doesn't understand why they play games, and is unable to perceive or articulate what it is that they actually don't like about the game. Anyways, I did end up giving the demo a shot and mostly quite liked it, found the combat mechanics really very interesting. I did have some problems with it though, and the ones that stood out most to me were the camera being terrible, and me definitely finding the party AI to be quite flawed. The latter of which is perhaps expected, because i honestly cannot think of a single recent Capcom game where co-operative AI was acceptably capable or even really functional on a basic level. (Looking at you, RE5 and Lost Planet 2.) WIth that said, i've heard conflicting reports about the pawns getting "smarter" as they earn more experience, which then sounds like a case of terrible design as opposed to terrible execution of a design. If nothing else, it still seems there's a stark division in opinion on whether or not the AI in the game is any good. Either way, i'm getting a little tired of RPG's that let questionable party AI's make complex tactical choices on their own, the apparent lack of control that Dragon's Dogma affords to the player is a definite turn-off. Also, has there been any word on what, exactly, Capcom's internet-infamous DLC plans for this game actually are? Still, I am so curious about this game. It seems like a weird, flawed, and interesting thing. I want to play it, and if i had a little more cash to burn right now, i would take a risk on this. Interested to hear your thoughts on the game, if you're going to pick it up.

No, no, i wasn't being clear. I didn't mean to say that you specifically were raging about anything. I was off-handidly commenting about having seen this conversation about Capcom all over the place lately, and occuring with much vitriol. I think fighting games are a strange standout in all of this, and I don't think there's an easy solution. I believe it's a problem with the development culture behind those games. I mean, just to start out, I don't think simply giving them time to playtest it is really a solution. So much of what makes fighting games live and breath is the metagame that exists once one is out in public hands. People discovering tricks that dramatically shift and change perceived tiers and match-ups. Fighting games kind of have to have that life after the initial release, and i think the problem stems from the 90's where people were willing to pay for those retail SF2 refreshes that let the game evolve alongside the metagame. I think the proponents of the genre are too mired in that past. Why should they do free or fairly priced updates when history shows that people are willing to pay big for minor roster updates? That's the big problem, and that's why you have Capcom still doing that same shit. (Not even a year for MVC3 before Ultimate showed up!) So in this business plan, instead of DLC/patches being the things that let fighting games live after their release, it's just seen as another way to bleed their fans dry in the downtime between retail refreshes. I mean, and then you see shit like how many Tekken games are in development, and it's hard to not see that fighting games are crashing towards another collapse. Friendly, meaningful conversation is awesome!

Dragon's Dogma has on-disc DLC, it was already confirmed. Capcom tried to get out in front of that one and do a bit of damage control, saying it was too late to change their plans. You know, but if they really gave a shit, they'd be giving away some of that on-disc DLC for free, at the very least. So here's the thing though, i think all the rage being leveled against Capcom is a little misguided. There's a huge problem in complaining specifically about on-disc DLC, because other DLC schemes can potentially be every bit as bad a practice. (The difference between the two is in development terms often essentially a technicality.) Letting Capcom say that they won't have on-disc DLC anymore is equivalent to letting them say that they're still going to do this thing you hate them for doing, but they're going to be smarter about it so you don't notice it as much. There's an even bigger problem in only holding Capcom accountable for these shitty DLC practices, they're hardly the worst evil at work here. I've been pretty upset to see that there wasn't more ire over Mass Effect 3 charging real money for randomized packs of useless multiplayer shit. Or what about Namco's persistently grotesque exploitation of DLC microtransaction schemes? Or Square shipping Final Fantasy XIII-2 without either an ending or the character prominently displayed on the box art. (Both are DLC!) Or everybody's horrible pre-order and online pass schemes. It just goes on and on.

I've been thinking about this topic for a while, but never got around to posting it. I went back and forth on whether i should post this in the networking sub-forum, but i'm thinking about it as more of a discussion topic, so i'm putting it here. It occured to me that there's a handful of games i love as multiplayer games that are games with virtually no community around them, no visible following at all. I mean, you know how it goes, right? Games that come out and are just dead on arrival, with things only getting worse from there. You know, i don't mean "Sure doesn't seem like a whole lot of people are playing Brink" or "I like this game, but i hate its community." I mean the games that are, for all intents and purposes, completely flat-lined. Multiplayer games that were never even on the radar for the vast majority of gamers. The game that got me thinking about this, and one game that i personally kept going back to after having successfully talked a handful of friends into giving it a shot, is Guilty Gear 2: Overture. It's kind of got a dota thing going on, but it's all built up around a pretty nuanced 3d combat system. At a glance, you could probably mistake it for a Dynasty Warriors clone, but it definitely isn't. Still, people kind of hated it when it came out, and i think a lot of it can be chalked up to being incredibly obtuse and being billed as a sequel to a cult 2D fighting game. Fans of the series hated it because it wasn't that fighting game, and people who might have liked it never gave it a look because they thought it was a fighting game. (Putting aside for a second that it is also, inarguably, kind of a really janky and cumbersome game.) So it was a game i tried out on a whim and, for whatever reason, i kept messing around with it and sorted out a lot of strategies and combos and ultimately really got into playing it against friends. That's one for me.