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I'm going to guess it was specifically about about F-Zero GX. I have never been as angry at a another game as i was playing through the mission mode in that. Holy shit, what a nightmare. I finished it though, and in an insane fit of masochism, I did it again on the highest difficulty. My greatest triumph! I love and hate that game. I would like for Nintendo to make another one.

I have never understood the appeal of Leisure Suit Larry.

Death Star disco ball... I think i'm in the same boat as Sin. I want to hate this, but it's so cheerfully surreal that i can't help but love it.

3McsgkVx9xM I love this idea.

It definitely was. Metroid II though, that game blew my mind! To my seven year old self, it was terrifying. Terrifying! With all of its weird, creepy .

Are there any good write-ups or summaries about the event floating around?

I've been really looking forward to this game. A lot of the early stuff Capcom was showing off, people were just being utterly dismissive about because of the "fuck Cacpcom" attitude going around, and also because the game has a terrible title and kind of bland aesthetic. It's unfortunate, because the game actually looks incredible. The whole pawn system sounds super intriguing, a cool and different take on passive multiplayer, not just what From was doing with Dark Souls.

I'm not really interested in arguing about it, but i'll just speak up as another person who was totally fine with how Lost ended and loved the show throughout its run. (The first half of season 3 really drags, and some of the halted plot lines created largely unresolved narrative problems, but everything else is great.) Lost, first and foremost, was a mystery. The answers were never going to be as compelling as its mystery, and that it ends very ambiguously is kind of perfect. I'm also not the sort of person who needs a perfect conclusion to justify all the entertainment the show has given me up until that point. About the flash sideways, i kind of felt that it served to show that the characters had matured emotionally, that they had come through their experiences as better people. Given that the show's title is a double meaning about people lost on an island and lost in their lives, given that the characters and their emotional arcs were always such a central part of the series, i don't think the last season is "meaningless". The on-island story arc was being ridiculously rushed along though, there are definitely problems with that last season.

My first gaming experience was with one of the Apple II systems, i don't remember specifically which variant. It was already a few years old by the time i started playing around with it. This was the game though. After that, it was the Gameboy, the SNES, a DOS PC, and then Windows 95 and the internet probably early in 96.

Let me cast another vote for Civ IV, absolutely love that game.

Oh hey! MP bots! Start a "nearby" match without an opponent, and it fills up with bots. They don't seem like particularly smart opponents, but i'm always happy to see games have MP bots.

I just find it odd that Nintendo's acknowledgement of the issue, and their attempt to provide a solution, has made it such a huge and negative story. Especially when there had already been a ton of other DS games that have used the same kind of left-trigger/d-pad/touchscreen control scheme and had been similarly cramp inducing. I suspect nobody would be talking about it, if the stand didn't exist. You could argue that Kid Icarus Uprising has more eyes on it as a major game for the 3DS, but Metroid Prime Hunters was a similarly important game for the DS, it was a major system showpiece. (The original launch systems shipped with an MPH demo!) Talk to anybody who played it, it was definitely a cramp inducing game, but that aspect was never a part of the dialogue surrounding that game. This Kid Icarus Uprising thing is Nintendo acknowledging a problem, and by acknowledging the problem, creating a worse image problem around the product. I guess i'm saying that I don't think it's as bad an issue as people are making it out to be. If you can deal with the control scheme, you don't need the stand. If you can't, you have the stand. A lot of the pieces written about the issue have been getting really hyperbolic.

I really like it, it definitely has Sakurai's design DNA all over it, really seems to be approaching Smash-levels of stuff. So much dumb stuff. All those unlockables and collectibles and extra modes and that ridiculously deep loot system, there's even a totally silly augmented reality collectible card battling game topping it off. (So there's well over 200 AR cards, and each copy of the game got a randomized set of them. Try taking two of those AR cards you got with the game and put them down with the arrows facing eachother while using the AR mode. There's not exactly much depth to it, but as an extra thing they threw into this game, it's weird and neat.) The game itself though... The flight sequences are the highlight, they're immense fun. The game borrows an awful lot from Sin & Punishment, which is a good source to cull inspiration from, those are incredible games. (If you have not played Sin & Punishment 2 on the Wii, you should play Sin & Punishment 2 on the Wii. It's a miracle that game even exists.) That ground combat, however... I don't know. God damn, why isn't it just a mouse look-style interface? Why does dragging the stylus move the cursor independently of the screen, and why do i have to flick the stylus to turn? It's so unintuitive, it's very awkward and hard to adjust to. I don't think it destroys the game, i've slowly been able to adjust to it, but it's such a odd design choice. (A very uniquely japanese design choice.) They give you loads of control options though, you can tweak a lot of it to your satisfaction, but you can't get rid of that control conceit. ("It's like spinning a globe!" the game says.) The rest of it is pretty good though, the kinds of mechanics they have at work in here are the kinds of mechanics i have enjoyed in other games. You're using dodges to tweak your attacks, there's a lot of dashing around, it's very frantic. I enjoy the combat in this game, it's just the control scheme i have problems with. The story has been surprisingly charming. Characters are actively acknowledging that they are inside of a game, the whole tone is unabashedly silly. There's a lot of really, really goofy banter and awful jokes. It really is very charming. Multiplayer seems fun, but being able to bring your loot into it means you want to play the solo game some before diving in. Adaptable difficulty is really cool, i've been playing in the 5-7 range right now. ...And uhh... Use the stand. Just... use the stand. I don't see why people have such an issue with the stand. Anybody who played Metroid Prime Hunters on the DS looked at that thing and instantly understood why it's a good idea, knowing the "claw" you get from how you have to hold the system to play games using that style of control scheme on DS hardware. There's probably an argument to have about what alternative control schemes they could have gone with, or if they should have held it back to ensure deeper support for the circle pad pro, but for what it is, just use the stand. If you insist on playing it without the stand, try wedging the right side of the system into the palm of your right hand, while still holding the stylus in said hand. Your left hand will still cramp up after a while, but it won't be nearly as bad as trying to hold it with just one hand.

Anybody here looking forward to this? Worldwide release is in a couple weeks, but it's been out in Japan for a while now and the buzz around it has been very exciting.

So i want to elaborate on the problem I'm having with ACV right now, it's a strange and complicated issue in a game that i think is otherwise largely executed with aplomb. So there are invasion and conquest missions, and defense missions against both of those. Invasion missions earn a team points that allow the invading team to eventually launch a conquest mission, the victory of which will give that team their own instance of a given territory to develop and protect. Both types of defense missions help teams restore their territory's condition so they don't lose it. So it sounds awesome right? The problem is defense, nobody really bothers to defend their territory, despite significant rewards for doing so. The problem is that to defend your territory, you have to prepare for a defense mission and kind of just wait... Just wait and hope that somebody happens to decide to try and invade that territory and that the system will match your instance of the territory to those invaders while you're waiting. So defense is not properly a reactive move, it ends up a weird preemptive thing, it's silly. (Even so, on invasion defense, you have a reasonably good chance of running into an invading team if you're willing to sit for a few minutes. However, you can pretty much forget about trying to find defensive matching against a much-less-common conquest mission, which is seriously problematic because doing so is the last-ditch condition for reclaiming a territory you have almost lost.) In Japan where just a ton of people are playing this game, it probably works. (In fact, I've heard as much.) Everywhere else, so far at least, you end up mostly fighting just a lot of customized compositions of defensive emplacements because nobody is defending their territories. Actual team vs team engagements are currently so rare that it is common to find people thinking that destroying turrets is all that the game is about. It gets more problematic when you stop to consider that conquest missions will spawn defending AI mechs if no enemy team is present to defend their territory instance, making the turret-ness of standard invasion missions even stranger. (To be fair, fighting through some of the more elaborate and developed defensive compositions that you can come across deeper into the game can be more interesting and challenging than you might expect.) The game has only been out for a few days, so i hope the situation improves as more people come to the game. (It's not even out in Europe right now.) As it is, though, not enough people are playing to allow people the experience they're meant to be having. It makes me a little worrisome about the future of this game. I don't want to make it sound horrible though, it's not broken, it just kind of means the meta-game is sort of limping along right now. It's obvious it's not really working out like it's meant to. It's also only one aspect of the game, there's still a bunch of other ways to organize battles not tied into the failings of the meta-game, and for all of the unavoidable emphasis on the multiplayer, there's actually a real ton of solo content. (10 half-hour story missions filled with hidden side-goals, and 80 "order" missions that range from 1v1 battles with AI Cores to fairly elaborate missions with multiple objectives.) To be absolutely clear, putting the limping meta-game aside, I think this game is goddamned incredible. It is marvelously intricate and demanding, by far the biggest thrills I've ever had with an Armored Core game. I am so fucking stoked about robots right now, i love this game. There's the usual caveat that these are boosting mechas, these are not Battletech mechs, but if you got this far into my post and then read that and wasn't turned off, you should probably play this game. It is glorious robot porn. (Holy shit, wall-jumping! I know, right? Wall jumping is an integral game system in ACV, and it's awesome. It is the right kind of weird and cool, and it's backed up by a seriously interesting implementation.) My understanding is that the only division is between Japan and the rest of the world. (And the PS3/360, obviously.) North Americans should be able to play against Europeans with no problem. If you have a choice between the PS3 version and the 360 version, I've been reading that the PS3 version has a larger community playing despite its framerate troubles. (For the reasons mentioned above, if more people really are playing on the PS3, it would not be an insignificant point in its favor.) Still, if you're looking for a team on the 360 version, you're certainly welcome to join my squad. There's only a few of us, but we all share a good grasp of the game and our team is ranked such that we have access to quite a lot of the shop stock. Edit: A small update, I now understand that the European version of the game is running on servers separate from North America. (Which was itself running separately from Japan.) The situation with the metagame has also deteriorated, it has quickly become all but impossible to find a match. A lot of the peripheral things like the mercenary system and free battle options reveal a small and active community, but it's not enough to sustain the bizarre way the match-making works for the territory control metagame. The thing the game greets you with every time you load it up is essentially non-functioning. It is a remarkably frustrating outcome for a game that is so excellent in every other way.

This game had a pretty rough launch, a lot of stuff was busted online, but it'll probably be ironed out soon enough. (Update: It was.) Anyways, it doesn't seem like anybody really even noticed, there is palpable apathy towards this game from the internet. So yeah, the issue was that ACV is like 90% an online game, you boot straight into your online squad's lobby, there's no offline menu system. Even the campaign stuff is accessed through this online lobby, a lot of features like that were dead-ending because the master server wasn't talking back. (Though if you care, the game does apparently work if played offline, you can still get into the shop and play all the solo content. The game won't let you take your offline save back online though, you have to purge any offline-purchased parts from your warehouse before you can, it seems to be a pretty strict anti-cheating measure.) Still, a lot of the competitive stuff was working, and I do really like this game, what I've played of it. I mean, but the battles revolve around an astoundingly convoluted and layered set of boosting mechanics, the mech lab is thoroughly overwhelming, and the entire front end is just menus inside of menus inside of menus. This is a seriously, seriously hardcore game. You need to be familiar with From's mech games, or you need somebody else who is. This game, i could tell immediately, will be incredibly off putting to anybody who isn't willing to invest some time into it. I am still pretty jazzed about it though, there's exciting stuff here. I can't wait to put more time into this. If anybody is looking for a squad on the 360, i can probably hook you up. It's just me and a couple buddies right now, but we're probably going to be playing a lot of this. Edit: A couple days out, game is working fine, and i'm feeling like i have a good grasp on how everything works. Took some territory, lost it immediately, etc, etc. Unfortunately, there's some really troubling issues with how the match-making works, problems that only exist because the player base is fairly small. Also - Just... Don't read reviews. This is a very obtuse and complex game, but the amount of misinformation being pushed is shocking.

I keep hearing that! The ending can't be that bad, is it really that bad? It can't be, right? I seriously can't believe that ten minutes at the end of the game will turn my opinion around on it that completely. I'm still amazed it isn't being spoiled all over the place, i need to finish the game before people cease to be careful about it.

I really, really find the executions to be an annoyance, but these do at least look miles better than the ones already in the game.

Been playing a bunch of Mass Effect 3. Not near the end yet, but i've got about forty hours in on it. I'm being very completionist. There's so many little things i want to say that i'm just going to bullet-point it. I'll be careful to avoid spoilers, outside of the most general details. - First thing i want to do is make clear where i'm coming from, i didn't think Mass Effect 2 was the huge improvement over the first game that it's popularly held to be. It was enormously polished and well produced, but it was kind of stripped clean of all the weird and interesting stuff BioWare tried to do in that first game. The first game offered up a sometimes clunky and always incredibly strange and ambitious sci-fi RPG, and despite sometimes being tangled up in problematic design, it was a very interesting game. In contrast to that, i feel like Mass Effect 2 was stripped bare and ended up as little more than a third person shooter wrapped up in a really insanely ambitious narrative structure. I still really liked it, but i can't muster the same love for it. - Currently, i feel Mass Effect 3 is somewhere in between, (I'm amazed it hasn't been broadly spoiled, people are generally being pretty careful about Mass Effect 3 spoilers.) - To just barely touch on the story, I find it kind of frustrating. (I didn't really care much for 2 either, to be clear.) , also disappointed that most of the game settles into the same pattern as 2. You're just running around performing errands to gather support for the end-game. I think the first game was the only one that had a genuinely interesting narrative. - I do admire their dedication to delivering payoffs for virtually every character and storyline from the previous two games. - I do not like that that you just keep randomly bumping into people, nobody is seeking anybody out. Every time you run into a character so the game can resolve a previous thread of story, it's treated as a chance encounter. EVERY SINGLE DAMN TIME. This really, really bothers me. There's a lot of dumb magic in this universe that you have to accept, but that bit of lazy writing is the one that irks me more than anything else. - I alluded to this earlier, I think it's a better "game" than 2. It's more of an "RPG" again, there's more stuff going on, a deeper character sheet a lot of other small mechanics. They've definitely just taken the mechanics from 2, but they've fleshed them out to a degree that it doesn't feel just like a third-person shooter with a big emphasis on narrative. - However, conversations don't have quite the branching insanity that was present in 2. So dialogues are on the whole a little bit more structured and rigid, but the things you'd want are still there, it's still Mass Effect. - Hearing some non-spoilery stories about the states of various playthroughs for different people, it is REMARKABLE to me how much BioWare delivered on their promises regarding their save import scheme. There are people who are playing wildly, wildly different incarnations of this game, it's utterly mad. - Speaking of which, my save import went fine, it didn't bug out like some people have reported. My male default-face Infiltrator Shep came over to 3 without a hitch, and i haven't seen any incongruous details pop up in my playthrough. I have really been totally surprised by all the small little things they're providing resolution to. - If you totally fucked up your playthrough, it seems possible you could end up needing the MP to boost your war readiness stat to get a coveted best ending, but my game is well on track to maxing out that bar without having ever touched the MP. (Currently, i'm not even sure how much it matters, i've heard some people note that it actually doesn't really affect the end that much anyways.) - Game is a little buggy, tons of odd quirks here and there, nothing gamebreaking. Mostly just makes it feel a little unpolished. - The loss of the film grain just shines a light on how leathery everybody's face looks, i want the film grain back. - So it's pretty good. It has some issues, but it's a fine game. Seeing the internet response had me really down on it when i started, but after the time i've spent on it, it's become quite evident that Mass Effect fans are fucking goddamned lunatics. Seriously, holy shit. What the hell is going on with all of that, this game is not that bad.

It seems like pretty much every site that works on a letter grade system has at some time or another vented angrily about Metacritic being a bunch of dicks. I've also heard the issue raised for 1-5 scales that don't neatly fit into that 50-100 range that the 10 point and 100 point scales generally work on. A 3/5 is probably a pretty ok game, but looks like critical death as a 60/100 on the Metacritic scale. You know, and then there's the sites that work on a 10 or 100 point scale while endeavoring to utilize that full range. That Metacritic has appointed themselves the sole arbiter of what all of these review scales mean is exceedingly harmful to the industry, and people seriously need to stop using it as a resource.

I understand it's even a fairly common measure in the industry, which is pretty disgusting. I've also heard persistent stories wherein critics complain about how metacritic is, without any external input, deciding how different scoring systems should be weighted in regards to that averaged 1-100 scale. That just makes it all the more insane that publishers use it so rigidly to decide such important things.

Did you guys hear about this?

Gamespy and IGN are in the same corporate family, not Gamespot. That's probably your point of confusion.

You can say that, you can even think it makes sense, but it doesn't change that sites have, time and again, been completely ruined by takeovers like this. Quality content generally isn't the shortest path to a successful website. When business people are involved, people who aren't invested in the quality of that content and only care about how profitable that venture is, you end up with situations where veteran writers are fired to curb costs, and interns are brought on and instructed to start posting top ten lists because those get tons of page views.

About the Tested thing, my mind was definitely blown. That is an incredibly awesome crossover of talent to happen for that site. I have no idea what to make of the Giant Bomb stuff though, I hope it ends up being a positive thing.