Sno

That he's so willing to accept and integrate terrible ideas from anybody who is fronting a positive impression of his project could probably be exploited in really horrible and entertaining ways. Like, the whole hookerbot thing seems to have started out of one person's troll. Also, he seems to have erased the dinosaur barbarian from the kickstarter, i am disappoint. There's also that whole thing about him trying to setup a post-kickstarter investment thing. Is it a money scam? I honestly can't tell. It's clearly a horrible idea, i just don't know if it's born out of maliciousness or naivete. (Sure looks like one sleazy motherfucker though, i would not trust that man with money. Anybody catch all the gold rings he's wearing in the videos?)

Isn't there a toggle for the blood in HL2?

Having gotten about a half to two thirds of the way through this game, i would like to again emphasize that i think this is a game people should be playing. It is EXCELLENT. Really the only issue i have with it is the lack of scripting options for the party AI, but the canned routines they have in place remain mostly capable. The AI seems highly customized to each party member's unique traits, and generally acts very intelligently. (Occasionally in surprising ways.)

Probably don't need to beat a dead horse, but this thing got real, real weird. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/120873716/your-world/posts/208979 http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/120873716/your-world/posts/209457 ^ The comments on this one are incredible, oh my god. "Here is something you all need to think bout. This project once funded is going to create jobs and a lot of jobs. Trying to kill it is only hurting people who need jobs. So for the american people who need jobs they thank you. In the initial phase we will have to hire at a min of 75 people. Once it goes live we could be hiring up to 400 people."

Does there have to be? Have you heard of the card game he's deriving this from?

It kind of breaks down though, when you realize that there have been versions of America's Army that have been sold at retail. I think there is no questioning that America's Army is the more commercial game, it is a product of mainstream development and publishing culture with tons of money behind it, and it is not exclusively a free-to-play thing. It has at varying times been a product consumers have exchanged money for.

It's just a buggy game. Progress stopping bugs, nasty crash bugs, etc, etc. There was a gold version or something, wasn't there? I don't know if that addressed anything, but the original release was a mess. I remember finding like three fairly obvious ways to break the main quest by sequence breaking. (There's also a few places where visiting them too early will just have all the inhabitants attack you, also effectively ending your game.) It's not a game that can cope with completists trying to do things out of order. I at least finished that game though, Dark messiah just straight up locks up hard on certain level loads. I have never seen the end of it. All that said, i'm still willing to say that i like those games, especially Arx, i love Arx. I just hope that studio can get their shit together on the QA stuff.

Looking at those options, i'm not really sure what this conversation should be. Still, I love this topic as an idea, and i hope this is something you continue to do. Hmmm...

I just hope this isn't as broken as Arkane's previous games, which were both games i really loved, but were also undeniably fuuuucked.

I think Minerva's Den was probably the best thing to come out of BioShock 2. I mean, but i also think i probably like the main game quite a lot more than most people. I don't agree with a lot of the comments Wrestle was making, i think BioShock 2 is generally a better balanced and better playing game than the first one, and i think the narrative has some good beats, but it ultimately just feels like such a bolted on and unnecessary sequel. They're really trying hard to force some of the pieces into place, and it ends up feeling really disingenuous. I think Minerva's Den, as a very strong and very stand-alone story that gets to build on the gameplay strengths of BioShock 2, ends up being the best thing about BioShock 2.

Did you play the DLC? You should play Minerva's Den.

I've been trying to avoid spoilers since i'm undecided on whether or not i want to play this, but i keep hearing rumblings of people being totally stumped on what appear to be puzzles about deciphering numerical systems and invented languages. Some really, really perplexing buzz is circulating around this game. Like, it's sounding as if the game somewhere along the way takes a sharp swerve from "charming puzzle platformer" to "hey, but we're also big fans of Riven." (Which, if that's that's the case, i'm suddenly way more interested in Fez.) Has anybody played it? Can anybody clue me in here, without revealing too much?

I think that was actually developed by a group that broke off from the Stalker devs, and it is a very good game.

So there's three games, Shadow of Chernobyl, Clear Sky, and Call of Pripyat. I've only played Shadow of Chernobyl, though i've heard Call of Pripyat is very good, and that Clear Sky is a train wreck. Probably doesn't hurt to start with Shadow of Chernobyl?

I don't think it's very taxing at all, it should run fine. I mean, if you can get it running in the first place. Those are very finicky games.

There was a moment i had while playing this game, where i picked up a random piece of material off a defeated enemy, and the main character's premonition ability kicked in and tagged that material in my inventory as something belonging to a future side quest i had not yet obtained. That was the moment that i decided that i really, really like this game.

I feel like i had a weird experience with Stalker, in that i kind of lucked into the "true" ending on my first playthrough without reading any spoilers or really even trying.

I really can't wait to see what those guys do with the Thief series.

So i've been playing for a while now and i'm going to say that it's probably a game people should play. To just kind of randomly run through some initial impressions - 1 - It gets going pretty quickly, takes about an hour to throw you into an absolutely enormous area with unimpeded freedom, and will rapid fire new game systems at you for a few hours after that. (The premonition system is just the smartest goddamned thing, this is an idea other games need to steal.) 2 - In the capacity that i am not really able to discern whether these British-ass voice actors are actually any good, or if i am just totally enamored with all the accents i am hearing, NoE's localization at least seems very good to me. If nothing else, there's a lot of novelty behind getting a European localization in North America. It ends up giving the game a unique flavor that, while not exactly part of the plan, still works in its favor. 3 - As JRPG's go, Xenoblade can come across as impressively modern. There is just a lot of smart, smart, smart UI and design. (Including a lot of basic usability stuff that is rarely a sure thing in a JRPG, like fast-travel and save-anywhere options.) 4 - People keep comparing its structure and combat to various MMO's and certain Final Fantasy outings, neither of which are things that i like enough to have invested much time in. So for me some of the similar pieces as presented here will perhaps have greater novelty as not already being well trodden concepts in my view, but even so, i am finding this game quite refreshing and enjoyable. I mean, but I can still generally recognize which pieces are coming from which sources. It deserves reiterating that i don't like the games it's being compared to, but i am so far quite enjoying this. 5- I'm not hugely in love with this particular style of RPG combat, but i think it works well here. Unfortunately, I'm not completely convinced that the party AI is holding up on its end of the deal, but it generally seems to be mostly competent. (It seems to, for example, at least sometimes respond appropriately when you're trying to set up for a chain of status effect staggers.) For when you find the AI struggling to keep up with tougher enemies, the only real advice for it i've seen is to just be willing to switch up your party leader so you yourself can take better advantage of individual characters as an adaptation to those different situations. (Failing that, the game is incredibly forgiving about death, it just boots you back to the last fast-travel landmark with inventory and exp intact, so it seems like you can also kind of just leisurely brute-force the game.) 6 - I wish the game had a more obvious warning on screen for when one of your party members was low on health, that can sneak up on you very quickly. 7 - That first area is real, real big. Minutes after getting into that first city, i randomly jumped up against a rail not really expecting that it would let me jump over the rail, but it did. The next thing i expected to happen was that i would die, but instead i fell all the way into the lake below, confirming that the entire region was actively loaded. I might just be too used to the kind of JRPG's that exist in tiny instances filled with invisible walls, but that was a weird "oh shit!" moment for me. 8 - No Raff, you cannot turn off the combat chatter. (My god, and there is a lot of it in this.) 9 - This game has a great soundtrack. 10 - I really dig Xenoblade's take on reputation systems, and the cities feel pretty lively. (In a very scripted and surface-detail kind of way, mind you.) 11 - The setting is super cool, but the story so far seems completely standard.

If i had to make a wild guess, the reason they're going with GFW Live is probably that it gives them a lot of pre-baked tools for securing the MP, and puts the management and policing of it on Microsoft rather than themselves. I also don't believe that GFW Live is actually any form of always-online DRM. I just asked a friend who has spent a lot of time with a few of the GFW Live games and was told that you can play them offline just fine. (Oh, nevermind, i didn't read Toblix's final post.) Even so, don't play Dark Souls offline, you will miss out on so much. If you don't want people invading, just don't restore to a human state, there are still other important benefits to being online with that game. Though the thing is, invasions are neither as frequent or as damaging as you might expect, the game is good about matching you only to people of your level. There are also big benefits to playing in a human state, such as the co-op summons and a lot of one-scripted-chance NPC invaders/summons with special loot drops. (Basically, if you hit those environmental flags while undead, they're gone until the next playthrough.)

New stuff starts a 40 seconds in. The gross giant hand, the dragon, and the lion thing. That would affirm three new bosses and three new areas.

So it sounds like the PC version is getting at least three new areas and at least three new bosses, that is a very significant expansion. It's also going to be GFW Live.

"This is a cleric with the legs of an orc, truck[sic] of a dragon, arms of a cyborg, and head of an elf."

Uh, but isn't that exactly what this is trying to be? The 1.1 million he wants is to fund, apparently, just the first year of development, at which point the naive fellow behind this wants to back the project the rest of the way through investors and his own lottery winnings. I mean, ok... He seems to just be randomly hiring a bunch of kids to draw up concept art for him, and fair enough, no need to shit on their talents. ... but holy shit, that is still a barbarian with dinosaur legs.

It's not even Nintendo that will be bringing over Last Story, is the weird thing. Xseed was granted the job of doing the North American localization. NoA has set a lot of really weird precedents with the North American releases of the Rainfall games. (Xenoblade using the NoE localization, and this issue of allowing Xseed to localize and release Last Story.) (Speaking of Xseed, they just released Falcom's original PC version of Ys: Oath in Felghana on Steam. That is a super, super awesome action RPG that i recommend checking out.) I hope North America gets Pandora's Tower too. Of the remaining two aside from Xenoblade, Pandora's Tower and its dungeon-crawling 3d action looked more interesting to me than Last Story.