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I liked that KOTOR had a morality system, that makes sense. Star Wars is a very black and white universe with clearly delineated lines. I guess it works in Fable too, with its very exaggerated and child-like outlook on good and evil. Still, it's something i've grown to hate, for the story and gameplay problems that always arise from morality systems. I think a lot of the points i'd make are the same ones Rodi has made. I also find it a problem though, when you realize that your view of morality doesn't mesh with the one being pushed by the developer. (The real world being shades of gray and all that.) Fable 3 had some really strange incidents, and all of the Mass Effect games have had moments like this.

I like Other M as a game, i think it does some really cool and interesting things. The story is what i take issue with, having unskippable cutscenes and unavoidable story events in a series people like to speed run, and disastrously offensive and backwards characterization for the series protagonist. I have similar issues with Fusion. That is a game with a built-in goal for speed-runs that clock in under two hours, and you'll end up with like a third of that time being spent trying to punch through its dialogue scenes. (They don't "count" towards the in-game timer of course, it's an issue of it wasting your time.) That seems like maybe an esoteric concern, but Metroid fandom has a long, long history of speed-running.

So for a few hours yesterday, any time somebody earned an achievement on Xbox Live, people were told erroneously that their profile was active on another console, an error followed quickly by all of their achievements disappearing. Server migration gone horribly wrong, apparently. Others who didn't see this happen were still reporting random achievements missing from their profiles, anywhere from a few thousand to everything. Even profiles up in the 100K range were being blanked or reduced to almost nothing. Some people are allegedly missing avatar awards too. Personally, i seem to be missing about 3k, but the only ones standing out to me are a few Mass Effect 3 ones i should already have, given where i am in the game. So, you know, that kind of sucks. If you're into achievements, i mean. Anyways, consider this a PSA. Microsoft is saying that it should be fixed now, and that earning one further achievement should restore all that's missing, though i haven't tried myself yet. What a weird fuck-up.

The only S-ranks i have are Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram, which was just silly in how low-hanging the achievements were, and the first BioShock, which was similarly easy, but took multiple runs through the game. (I also got the extra achievement that was patched in, otherwise it's not a true S-rank. Even the x-box dashboard won't count a game as complete if you only have the vanilla achievements.) I am one achievement off from having an S-rank on the first Dead Space. I keep trying to convince myself i should just go through it on easy and get it. I know what i need to do, it would be very simple. I had S-ranked Borderlands, but then the DLC came out, and fuck Underdome Riot. There is one achievement i just absolutely could never get in vanilla Halo 3. (Fuck you, Steppin Razor.) I gave up once the map packs started piling on more achievements. Most of the time i don't really care, i'm not an obsessive achievement hunter. They're just extra objectives to chase when i've otherwise bled dry a game i like. This, actually, is huge. On Live, somebody sends me a friend request? I'll flip through their game history, and if i see interesting things, i am likely to accept. That ease of access, it just always being quick to bring up from the guide, it being so centrally integrated, that's awesome.

Super Metroid! I don't really have anything to say, but it was great hearing people actually acknowledge how freaking weird it is that Nintendo made such an atmospheric and mature action game. I still think games today could learn a lot from the environmental story-telling that goes on in Super. It's a shame that many of its own sequels seem to have strayed so far from that, with Fusion and Other M being messes of ponderous nonsense dialogue scenes.

I think a lot of it is that Microsoft has taken achievements fairly seriously, i think it's perceptible to people that they take it seriously. They've actually been more aggressive about fighting achievement hacking than many other forms of external system manipulations that are happening in that ecosystem. For me, at least, it's also equal parts that they were the first ones to do it well, and that its the one i am most invested into because it was the first. Well, and the sound. God damn, it's a great sound, isn't it? Gamerscore though, i think is generally a really very silly and superfluous thing. I think it's also a ridiculous assertion that it has anything to say about how good at games you are. I mean, your gamerscore does say things about you, just not necessarily the things you'd like. (From extremely high gamerscores you can infer a person is either a hacker, in the industry or covering it, or is probably a bit crazy. Extremely low gamerscores generally reveal a dummy account just as often as they reveal a newbie.) Still, there's undoubtedly a certain primal appeal in having that number keep going up as you play, but individual achievements are, of course, what actually matter. That and it happening within a system that has perceived integrity, though the current events must be sowing some disillusionment. I do like achievements though, there are specific achievements i have strong memories associated with. It's that this weird, passive system of developer acknowledgement is a nice bit of closure for going out of your way to push a game to its limits. I like that i have an achievement for doing a solo legendary run in Halo Reach. It was really tremendously difficult, but i had a great time doing it. Unlocking that achievement was just an awesome, awesome way to top off that experience.

Well, i don't know about everyone, but I certainly win, i love Armored Core and i loved Chromehounds.

The generally vague details i've been hearing about MWO suggest a fairly inoffensive freemium scheme. I've become fairly hopeful that they'll handle it well. I mean, and really truly awful pay schemes definitely still exist. There is some utterly disgusting, villainous shit happening in the smartphone space. The stigma shouldn't just apply to games that are explicitly free, but any game that is trying to bleed money out of an invested user. For a particularly egregious and current retail example, look to Street Fighter X Tekken. (A game where you can augment your character with new abilities and advantages through a system of "gems", but the best gems are uniformly the ones that were in the collector's edition or have to be purchased separately. Also, that game has twelve DLC characters finished and locked on disc. Way to go, Capcom.)

That's more or less the impression I've been getting from ACV, From is taking much of the multiplayer metagame design they had in place for Chromehounds and hanging it around the framework of considerably more tested Armored Core game systems.

There's also a campaign remix mode that is noticeably more insane.

LbC7w9SN3oE This looks awesome. Holy shit, i am impressed.

ACV's focus seems largely on the multiplayer, but it still has what sounds like a fairly sized campaign apparently with full support for co-op. I understand it to be about ten missions that are each around thirty minutes to an hour in length. There's also going to be a typical-looking suite of multiplayer match-making options, free for all and the like. Also, that territory-control metagame, if you don't have a squad, or your squad is short a man, there's a mercenary system that lets you either be a temporary hire or fill out your own team's ranks.

If anybody is curious what the game actually entails, Namco has been slowly "translating" some tutorial videos From put out a while ago. lmcbwz6m2RY usxwQYeo8vk

cuokqe2_eRM I've always been a sucker for a slick CG intro, ever since Mechwarrior 2.

I think it's a perception from the late 80's and early 90's when the most visible western games were the western games being developed on the consoles, games that were frequently kind of shit. (I think this can lead into an argument that PC games essentially "won", with all of the big western devs now having been small, struggling PC devs in the 90's.) I've read pieces that tried to pin Japan's xenophobia towards western games and western game design on them not really having a similar PC culture in the 90's, and therefore only being exposed only to bad western console games.

If anybody here is interested, we should try and get together on the same platform and form a squad for the online metagame. I ultimately don't really know how feasible it will be within ACV's online environment, but i already had plans for trying to setup a small squad for some friends, something i had previously done with Chromehounds. I'll be playing on the 360, as i tend to with most things, but buzz seems to have pinned it as the best version anyways. PS3 apparently has some pretty bad framerate problems.

Oh man, Metal Wolf Chaos, how could i have forgotten that game? Though i can't say i've ever really noticed much humor in Armored Core or the Souls games, which are the From games i am most familiar with. They always seemed very pervasively morose in tone. Shades of it in Dark Souls, perhaps. Kingseeker Frampt is pretty great. Alright, alright. Ok, i feel way better about Heavy Armor now, realizing that From is certainly aware of what they're making.

I guess i haven't played any From games where they've had much of a sense of humor on display, though i've heard some pretty hilarious things about Ninja Blade. If Heavy Armor is self-aware about all this ridiculousness, i am in love.

Yes? Yes. 2 has often been cited as the hardest game in the series, but not for the right reasons. That game is kind of a dick, and I wouldn't bother trying to struggle through on Legendary. (To that point, it's the one game in the series i've never finished solo on Legendary.) I wouldn't encourage diving into legendary first-thing on any of those games though, there's a fairly significant jump between heroic and legendary. Heroic generally has everything kind of smoothly balanced, those games make the most sense there. All of the mechanics are impactful enough to be clearly surfaced and observable, and all of the available tools are significant and valuable. Legendary starts making you second guess things, standard battle tactics aren't as useful, understanding the systems in play and how you can take advantage of them is the only way to realistically stand a chance. (The plasma pistol becomes the most important weapon in the game.)

And now that you've said this, i have to say that Halo 2 has kind of a terrible campaign. That game was infamously rushed out the door, and it shows. Bungie has openly regarded it as a mark of shame. I mean, and 2 is where a lot of the mechanics the series is built around really coalesced, and its huge innovations in the online space are rightly well regarded, but it's buggy and its campaign is really disjointed and unpolished.

I'm in agreement with Miffy. I try to be careful around it, because i know it always seems really shitty when people take the "you played it wrong" position with games, but Heroic and Legendary do profoundly change how you play Halo. (Heroic is labeled on the menus as "the way the game is meant to be played" for a reason, those games are balanced around the Heroic difficulty.) You don't just have less health, Bungie did good by their difficulty levels. Enemy compositions change, enemies are smarter and more aggressive, damage and resistance values are changed in very comprehensive but subtle ways. So you actually start having to think about using energy weapons to bring down shields, and then using a rifle to finish them off with a headshot, taking care to not waste ammo on the physical armor they're also wearing that has its own unique resistance values. So it's the above considerations, happening within Bungie's "combat triangle" of guns/melee/grenades, while you're surrounded by dozens of combatants both friendly and hostile, as vehicles careen around the edges of the battle governed by their own interactions and rules. They're linear a to b games, but when the battles happen, they are allowed to actually just happen, and the systems that are there are able to support some really dense and interesting gameplay. CoD, in comparison, i always just feel like it's trying to shove a specific narrative of action beats down my throat. I would recommend ODST for seeing Halo at its most emergent and open-ended. (Speaking personally, it's also my favorite campaign in the series.)

That would seem to be what i am saying, yes. Individual battles in Halo games are enormously dynamic and set mostly in large, open spaces. Playing a Halo game is not like playing a CoD game. The CoD games do occasionally open up into larger battles, but frequently funnel you down much narrower paths than Halo ever would. It probably sounds like splitting hairs if you aren't way into one or the other, but it's statement i'll stand by.

Your imagined worst-case-scenario is a thing Bungie kind of already did. (Twice!) I hear you though, nobody wants scripted and linear corridor shooting in Halo. When they choose to reveal details about the campaign, i hope it meets expectations.

I'm actually really excited to see what they do with the story. They're doing some pretty crazy things in the novels to set groundwork for the 343 trilogy, and some of the details that have leaked out about Halo 4 itself sound really cool.

I think that shot is just at a weird angle though, like the Warthog is going up an incline or something.