Sno

I also enjoyed both shows, for what it's worth. So i guess that's another vote in its favor.

I just finished this. Allowing myself to be distracted by sidequests made it take very, very, very long. My impressions from earlier remain largely unchanged. Setting aside a few qualifications of varying significance, it is a pretty dramatic triumph. People should play this game. Definitely. I look forward to seeing where Monolith Soft goes from here.

People are really freaking out about the screenshots, but i don't think it looks so bad. I mean, it's recognizable enough as TES that i was able to identify a lot of creatures and locations and everything. It is very bright though, that's the most off-putting thing about those shots. It's not exactly neon vomit like WoW, but it's a long way off from TES, which has always been very muted and grounded in its color palette. I've been told by people who actually play MMO's that some of the stuff they're promising sounds pretty awesome. (The public dungeons and even, apparently, having a universal stamina gauge governing blocks and evasion.) The whole thing about how they're going to let the three factions essentially run themselves and ultimately try to install one of their own players as the emperor sounds kinda neat too, that sounds like the kind of craziness it needs. I said i was going to tune out on this one, but i think i'm in too deep. I simply do not play MMO's, but as a huge TES fan, i am super curious about what they're going to do.

... And that's me tuning out.

Wasn't it said that it would be the full continent? It's also apparently going to have some kind of faction-based persistent conflict. Three factions, in fact. The revealed logo for the game, you can note, has three heads. A dragon, a lion, and a hawk. The dragon is obviously the empire, the hawk probably has something to do with the high elves, and i don't know about the lion. The time period also sounds about right, a big blank spot where they can make up a ton of shit about the empire being embroiled in conflict prior to Tiber Septim uniting the continent under its banner. There's also apparently going to be an ongoing plot that seems to basically be Oblivion, but with Molag Bal instead of Mehrunes Dagon. If you're only talking about the main games, the only time jump is from Oblivion to Skyrim, the rest of the games are within relatively short spans of eachother. If you're counting Redguard, it's actually a significantly longer stretch of time across the series than 400 years. Anyways, it's the same kind of technological stagnancy argument that can apply to most of the big collective works of fiction. They want these huge stretches of time to give themselves lots of room to tell distinct stories without different authors stepping on eachother's toes, but every era is the same as the last because the expected status quo must be maintained. It's lazy, and it's not just a problem with TES, it's kind of not worth singling out just one franchise when it's such a wider problem. Though to be fair, TES is a universe were the last race to progress into industry blinked out of existence. You could also argue that magic basically fills most of their needs anyways, and that has caused stagnancy.

To clarify, DOTA is a Lords Management. It's what people are calling that genre. ("multiplayer online battle arena" - Seriously, that's what it actually stands for.)

Well, i think you could argue that EA was the end of Ultima as a series. The proper Ultima series ended around the time EA took control, there were other things happening there, it wasn't necessarily Ultima Online's fault. Could probably make a similar argument for Activision and Blizzard. Anyways, i'm going to be hopeful that scenario doesn't play out here, it has been stated pretty clearly that Bethesda Game Studios has no involvement with this game. (Which doesn't mirror Blizzard's involvement with WoW and Origin's involvement with UO.)

I will almost certainly not play this, because fuck MMO's, but i am fascinated to see what this game is. It's kind of been one of those "industry's worst kept secret" things given that it's been rumored for so long, and i think it was just kind of assumed that it was vaporware. So yeah, it's not Bethesda Game Studios and it has no bearing on the future of Skyrim or whatever follows that. Additionally, Zenimax Online has no track record to speak of, i don't believe they've done anything outside of tooling away on this thing in secrecy for many, many years. Anyways, if it's just WoW, they've fucked up. What i think it needs to be is something that somehow conveys TES's feel of having a living world that reacts to your actions, something that when you push up against the limits can give way and sometimes push back, but doesn't break when you throw thousands of people at it. I don't know what that game is, but i think that's the ideal they need to be chasing. How about a fantasy-themed EVE online? Heh. Curious to see what becomes of this, probably won't play it.

This is kind of crazy, this post just became visible to me. Must be some new anti-spam stuff on the board, hide posts from new-users until they're determined to be a real person, right? Jamestown looks completely legit, just really awesome. It is a game i should play, and have no real excuse for not playing.

Like i said, the iOS versions are dramatically watered down, they're nowhere near as difficult as the real games. (Plus, you know, touchscreen control. Ew.) That's disappointing to hear. Omega V... Omega Five? Why the comparison, how is it similar to Sine Mora? I haven't thought about that game in a long time, that was an early XBLA release, i liked that game.

I forgot about those iOS ports Cave has been doing. I understand those to be super watered down versions of their games, but that's probably the lowest bar of entry for seeing some of Cave's stuff.

As has somewhat strangely been the case with a lot of the better shmups this generation, it's exclusively a 360 game. (Well, and an arcade game.) For whatever reason, the 360 in Japan fostered a really dedicated scene for these kinds of games. I'm honestly not sure what i'd recommend. There's a weird thing where some of the hardest and most intimidating games in the genre also have some of the most leisurely and approachable easy modes, while games of a more moderate difficulty might end up having less of a low-end to ease people in. (Cave's games, actually, seem pretty good about covering the full difficulty spectrum.) Speaking generally, you kind of just have to be willing to beat your head against the game, play through levels over and over. However, since these games play out so quickly, you can iterate on your routine very rapidly. It can one of the most appealing things about the genre, having such immediate feedback that you are in fact gradually getting better at the game. Yes, but to different degrees. A lot of the navigational challenges and the particular style of rigid combo system present in Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun make playing them almost like playing a rhythm game, you don't have much freedom because the marks you're trying to hit are so specific and demanding. In contrast to those, I normally find really raw bullet hell games to be some of the most flexible examples of the genre, you have much more influence over the make-up of the action. (A lot of trying to corral bullets away from safe spots, exerting influence like that. Managing the battles in a very reactive way as opposed to rote memorization.) I don't know if i can agree with that. You're talking about R-Type Dimensions, the remake, right? For one, it's such an older style of shooter, and a game i've personally always found crazy difficult. I've never been fond of checkpoint restarts in shmups though, or specifically R-type in general, to be honest. Heh. For another XBLA recommendation though, G.Rev's Strania is a pretty wonderful and underappreciated little gem. However, while not particularly difficult, it might fall under not having enough of a low-end for a beginner. Raiden Fighters Aces is also definitely an excellent thing. I don't think you could go wrong with that, a huge compilation of three awesome games that are probably the right mix of where the genre eventually ended up without the unmitigated insanity. If you're tolerant of feeling like a total creeper, Deathsmiles is an excellent game, and about as accessible as a genuine bullet hell game can be. Also, has anybody played Sine Mora? The shooter Grasshopper just published on XBLA?

Oh, that makes me sad to hear, Crusader is such a great game.

When i bought the XBLA version, it just made me feel really, really sad. I couldn't keep up with it anymore. (I've heard hardcore types denounce the XBLA version for some subtle pattern changes, though i doubt that played into me being terrible at that version. The XBLA version is also missing a ton of stuff from earlier releases, it's not as immaculate as some of Treasure's other XBLA stuff has been.) I had gotten pretty averagely capable with the gamecube release a few years prior. I could baseline S-rank the first couple stages and have enough extra lives off those chains to carry me through to the insane final two stages and then still totally bone it up on the final boss. Which was good enough for me, i think that was as good as i was ever going to be at that game. Ikaruga is hard. /thread derailment.

Giant Bomb quicklook, brad dies a lot. I think this actually looks really quite cool.

I'm just going to say, you were going about this game the wrong way if it was only about beating the last boss to you.

Anybody remember Space: Above and Beyond? That was a cool show. Only one season. Fox. Also - Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. That show was way, way better than it had any right to be.

I'm confident it'll be a very good game, but I've heard some things that have caused me to raise an eyebrow. I read it quite a while ago now, i don't recall the specifics or even where it was from, but it was a interview where one of the leads was talking about how in focus testing people weren't grasping the time units system from the original X-com, and so they pulled it out in favor of something more straightforward. Focus testing: Ruining everybody's fun, always.

I completely agree with this. There's been a few similar things here and there, but it's always felt to me like a big gap waiting to be filled. Speaking of which, Jonathan Blow's "The Witness" is looking very promising.

The overabundance of resources is a thing that really bothered me about both of the BioShock games, especially coming at them as a huge fan of System Shock, which were incredibly restrained on that front.

The only thing that immediately turns me off a game is if it's fundamentally broken in a way that requires me putting a lot of work into simply getting it running. (Or requiring me to sign up for a bunch of things before i can start playing, or gnarly DRM schemes, or whatever.) For a time, when i was exclusively a PC gamer, i had a tolerance for that kind of stuff. Not anymore. Once things get going though, i probably tolerate a lot more from games than most people do. I mean, i've generally found that the games i end up loving the most tend to be really obtuse and flawed, or slow burns with poorly explained systems. To put it in relevant terms, the games i value most have not always been the kind of game you can know are "good" after only an hour or two. (Deadly Premonition, anybody?) If a game is pissing me off, or if something feels like it's not coming together, i usually do a bit of searching online to see if i'm missing something crucial. Doing this, like 90% of the time i'll end up learning something that makes the game more enjoyable. (It's with some frustration that i consistently see people show adamant refusal to accept the "you're doing it wrong" argument, which i feel is often totally valid. Sometimes you have to meet the game halfway, you know? It is completely possible to brute force through a game without understanding half of what you're doing, and have a terrible experience because of it.) I won't stop if a game makes me angry, whether it be clumsy control or crazy difficulty spikes. I'll beat my head against a difficulty curve for a good while before giving up. It has to be pretty spectacularly fucked to make me give up. If i feel like i've given a game my due diligence and still ultimately just feel bored, that's the nail in the coffin. I'll put up with a lot of busted design to see interesting stuff, but if nothing in a game is clicking, there's no reason to put up with it the aforementioned busted stuff. I apply no set time-limit on this or anything, every game is different. RPG's can be really tricky to gauge, given just how long they can take to wind-up. (Especially JRPG's.) Like Woebin, i usually do a lot of research on any game i intend to play, avoiding spoilers as best i can while just trying to gauge what the game is about.

There's apparently a very impressive demo on PSN and Live, but i haven't checked it out because i am still in the clutches of Xenoblade.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/space-brothers This is my favorite thing from this anime season.

While it is awesome that the game does that, it only does it for generic quests. For a lot of the town affinity quests, you do have to find the original quest giver again. Given that they're active only during certain times of day and that they will also move around while active, they can sometimes be really tricky to track down. That has at times been a source of significant frustration for me. Feels like quite an over-sight in amongst all the other smart, helpful things the game does. (I know they'll show up on the map with the red exclamation mark, but you still have to be near them for that to even appear, and some of the later cities are enormous.) I know that you can do this, but the commands they give you are very cursory, and they aren't very useful in any tactical sense beyond "That flying enemy is over lava, get the fuck out of the lava." Any time there is a battle that makes you consider the game systems in a different way, the AI struggles and the game doesn't give you any way to exert enough direct control over them to make up for it. (Either during the battle or outside of it.) The AI usually shows that it knows what to do when the requirements placed on it change, but it can be very unpredictable with follow-through on those adapted tactics. For example, don't give the AI control of Shulk when you're fighting Mechon, because there's go guarantee he'll cast enchant when he needs to. He has a tendency to make dumb decisions and forestall the proper moves. (Everybody's AI is also really iffy about working together to further break-topple-daze chains.) I think it's a problem with the game, not having access to the nuts and bolts of their AI, so you can prevent them from doing things you don't want them to do while placing greater priority on the things you do want them to do. (That kind of control is a pretty standard feature for games with AI-driven parties.) I mean, the AI is generally very smart, but it still makes dumb choices and has trouble coping whenever strategies need to be mixed up. Anyways, so the AI fucks up sometimes, and sometimes you die because of it. There's a random element to it that you don't have control over, and that can be a little frustrating at times. The instant no-penalty respawn almost seems like an acknowledgement of this. I probably don't need to harp on this one thing though, this is an excellent game. I just think that, in light of doing so much right, the things it gets wrong should be acknowledged. Edit: I also love that the game clearly marks side quests that can be invalidated by points of no-return, how awesome is that? Though there's actually only a handful of notable no-return points in the game, and they're much further into the game than you probably would expect. However, sometimes there's also individual affinity quests that get tagged too, without any apparent relation to the areas affected by the larger points of no-return. Those ones probably shouldn't be ignored if you're concerned about town affinity or a completion percentage.

I am flabbergasted.