Sno

Maaaagic?

What is the problem there?

Nope. Halo 1/2/3, ODST, and Reach were all Bungie. Halo Wars was Ensemble. Halo Anniversary was actually kind of stealth-developed by Saber Interactive. (They made the very underrated Time Shift.) Halo 4 will be 343's first game. (Apparently been in development for close to 3 or 4 years.)

AMAZING. Ok, but actual gameplay. QmdYQolndec This game looks weird, the mech combat at the core of it looks pretty great, but all of this kinect stuff looks so gimmicky and forced There's been rumors that the development has been very troubled. I really don't know what to make of it, but the hysterically sincere tone has me wanting to play it now.

There should be support for embedded midi files too.

This is a few days old now, but maybe it's interesting. http://shoryuken.com/2012/03/01/hurtful-speech-time-to-take-a-good-look-in-the-mirror/ This seems very indicative of how divided that scene is over this whole issue.

Short answer is yes. If you only have one account on that hard-drive, and always have it online, you won't even notice anything different. You'll plug the hard-drive into the new system and keep going like nothing has changed. If you use that system offline or want to let other accounts play XBLA games or use DLC you purchased, you need to update the licenses to tie into the new hardware. (I believe the current Metro dashboard finally has this option built in somewhere, it should be a fairly painless process.) The RROD issue was more or less resolved by the time the original batch of Elites hit the market, and i've heard almost no stories of people having problems with the Slims. (I have had plenty or RROD's, myself. I am on my fifth or sixth 360, a black Elite that has lasted longer than all of the others combined. Rarely, the sound will cut out and necessitate a reboot, but it hasn't died yet.) As for the Original/Slim hard-drive issue, the pre-Slim drives sit in an external shell that affixes to the side of the system, while the Slim drives slot into the system itself. From a purely technical standpoint, my understanding is that the drives should be compatible, and it's more the form factor issue that prevents old drives from being used with newer Slim systems and vice versa. If you're thinking about upgrading from an old-style 360 to a Slim, just make sure to get one that has a hard-drive included in the package. (Also, with a certain cable Microsoft provides, you can plug two drives into one system and transfer the old drive's contents to the new one.)

It really looks great though, and like there's a good degree of depth. Man, I don't even know if my PC will be able to run this, i have such a hobbled old machine.

Having been a casual observer of the fighting game scene for a while now, a lot of these community figureheads have struck me as real pieces of shit, none of this is new. Kind of glad to see some of it finally catching up with them.

Well i want Last Window, but not bad enough to import it, so i think we're even.

Apparently the first one actually sold better in NA than it did in Japan. It was a really cool game, a nice mix of heavily-branching visual novel stuff and some Myst-style point and click adventuring. (Though i think the "true ending" was complete nonsense. It was dumb, really just so dumb.)

So the sequel to this game was just confirmed for North America on both the Vita and the 3DS. Zero Escape, is what they're going to be calling it. Cool news, i say.

They were putting a lot of good stuff up on WiiWare and DSiWare too, and then just doing an absolutely terrible job of letting anybody know about it.

Hey, i remember Incoming! That was a pretty fun game. I think the third act of the new EDF game is the only part of that game that feels anything remotely like the Sandlot games it's based on. It just never goes quite as big and ridiculous, but it's still definitely a very cool and fun game. I have the game on the 360, if anybody reading wants to co-op there.

I feel like bullet-sponge humans in FPS's are just always fucking terrible bosses to fight, with almost no exceptions.

Some searches tell me that there are still issues with the PC version, though the volume of complaints isn't nearly as much. I can't tell you if that's simply indicative of how the player base is divided up, or if it's an indication of the PC version's relative stability and quality. I do really like this game though, if the PC version isn't having these problems, i think it's an easy recommendation. Also, to be clear, i am only having problems with the co-op, I encountered no issues during the campaign.

Alright, yeah. So to iterate on those earlier comments, my feelings on this game are more or less that Syndicate is a pretty awesome game that has some kind of tragic problems. The campaign feels noticeably like something is missing from it. I mean, there's a hard swing later on that is completely unearned, and since most of the dialogue and characters are actually reasonably well written, it feels like something is missing rather than it just being a failure of story-telling. I also kind of wish they let you have more upgrade points to play around with by the end of the game, you really have to be careful about how you plan your build, the game is very stingy about upgrades. It's a good campaign though. It's about ten hours long and it's probably the most linear game Starbreeze has made, but it's still a really good, enjoyable campaign. Some of the larger fights in residential spaces are really frantic and really great. There is complete indifference about civilian casualties, gun fights break out, NPC's hit the ground and cower, and grenades will find collateral damage. It's messy and it's awesome. (Less excellent are requisite annoying boss fights that remind me so much of the much hated DX:HR fights, but here you're at least guaranteed to be capable in combat.) Lighting effects and environments look fantastic, faces on NPC's look weird. (Rosario Dawson's virtual likeness is not treated well by this.) The game has a great feel to it. Starbreeze has always had a good commitment to the perspective, you can sense the inertia of your movement, but it's still a very snappy and responsive game. I really, really like the way the game plays. The multiplayer gets points for being an EA game that wasn't begging me for multiple logins and a CD key. It's a pretty impressive suite. There's a simple clan system in place, and character progression is much more elaborate than the solo game. There's also a ton of missions, and it can actually be extremely challenging even on the lowest difficulties. There would be a lot to like in the co-op here if it wasn't so damn buggy. The co-op menus have an annoying tendency to "forget" changes you've made to your character since your last match, and sometimes even dump you into weird, disconnected, broken sub-menus seemingly at random. Moreover, joining games in progress has a tendency to cause all kinds of strangeness. (Mostly harmless, but very noticeable. Frozen NPC's all over the map, presumably enemies that had already been killed.) Most damningly though, the game was crashing really frequently. Though when i was just running random matches, the game never crashed. I think Syndicate might not like the 360's chat parties? The match-making options are also a little too basic. The game doesn't let you bring a party into match-making, you have to hope you're set up with a game that has empty slots you can invite people to. You can still do private matches, but unless you have four people, it's worthless. Those maps are balanced for four people. It was all completely infuriating. I really love what Syndicate is doing as a co-op game, and i want to play it, but it's been trying my patience.

Well, as i had commented, I suspect it was probably sacrifices made in order to be running smoothly at a higher resolution. (Alan Wake, i think ridiculously, took a lot of flak for being a sub-720p game on the 360.) I mean, i'm talking about things like the ghost-image you'd see for a second when you destroyed a poltergeist object, or the much nicer looking shadow effects on the taken. (Which in American Nightmare are just kind of bleeding dark purple sprites all over the place instead.) All those cool post-processing effects are gone, and they were a big part of the look of Alan Wake. Also, playing through American Nightmare, i realized that Wake turns his head to look at enemies sneaking up on you from the side. Did the original game do that too? I don't know if i ever realized it.

Love the solo campaign, but the game feels disjointed near the end, feels like like part of the story is missing. I want to love the co-op, because I like what it's trying to do, but it has major technical problems.

Alan Wake was an absolutely beautiful game to look at, i imagine it holds up extremely well on the PC. It bums me out that American Nightmare seems to have abandoned a lot of that game's awesome visual flourishes in order to run at a higher resolution. (You probably wouldn't notice it right away, but any side by side comparisons make it very clear that sacrifices were made.)

The eShop has some pretty excellent momentum. The two things i've bought are the Kirby's Adventure remake and Mighty Switch Force. (Both of which are flippin` great.) Anybody played the samurai game? What was it called?

That main quest does seem like it ends a bit abruptly, doesn't it? I had a similar experience playing through it.

So American Nightmare is a bit shit... Well, maybe just disappointing. I mean, If you are way into Alan Wake, it is probably a thing you would play and probably like. I feel like Remedy has been trying to curb expectations by saying for a while now that American Nightmare is really about its dumb arcade survival mode, but they're fooling themselves if they think anybody is really going to play this thing for that. I mean, i even actually really like the combat in Alan Wake, i find the mechanics interesting and i think it feels very responsive, but the story is always the draw in a Remedy game. Though to be fair, they do try to introduce a lot of new things here. With the purported focus on the survival mode, the game feels somewhat like an experiment to try and address some of the problems people had with the combat in Alan Wake. (Which i say assuming there's going to be an Alan Wake 2.) There's even an enemy for which it is not necessarily advantageous to be shining your light on, which i thought mixed things up in kind of an interesting way. (And it gives you more of a reason to use that trigger half-hold that lets you aim without focusing the light.) So the story mode, it's three small levels that you are sent through three times. These individual levels are open-ended spaces wherein you are more or less doing just a bunch of fetch quests, with a quest-giver of sorts in each level sending you out to do those things. (The quest givers always have a lot of dialogue, so seek them out even if the objectives don't take you by them.) Also, every time you initially visit and then revisit a level there's a new video and radio sequence to see and hear. There are also continually more story pages to find as the game draws on. (Ultimately quite a few, actually.) There's no big set pieces or lengthy cutscenes, it definitely doesn't have the production values Alan Wake had. Still, if you're into the story, there's actually a lot here. It has its own small semi-important arc, but it also goes into the mythology for that series, clears up a lot of details that might have been confused at the end of the first game, tells you what characters have been up to, and it's all very much in Remedy's style. It's good stuff, i like it. It's what kept me going in what is otherwise a disappointingly sparse adventure. It ends up being about five hours long total, but it also ends up feeling like it's struggling to find things for you to do. I'm very much on this thing.

Now that this has a confirmed release window, i feel even more need to go and play that last Borderlands DLC.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-syndicate/17-5716/ It looks good. It feels like beating a dead horse to keep reiterating how much this is not a Syndicate game. It's going to be more constructive to just put the title of the game out of mind and focus on the fact that, as a thing judged on its own merits, it seems to be pretty awesome. I was also playing the co-op demo with some friends, the game has a really great feel to it, and it's really challenging. (Unfortunately, the demo was crashing very frequently after checkpoint restarts on death, so here's to hoping that's not an issue in the full game.)