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Let the information pumping commence! So what is Hawken going to offer in the way of build customization?

Oh god, that trailer is cringe-inducingly awful. That's also an awful mix of that song, and it doesn't fit the tone of that game at all.

Yes, Zero Mission is a significantly expanded remake of the original game. Making a recommendation though - If you can find a copy of the Metroid Prime Trilogy for Wii, do that. (The North American release can be hard to find, but the European versions are apparently pretty common.) Speaking honestly, the Metroid fan in me could nitpick a lot of things about the Trilogy release, namely that it introduces a couple relatively harmless and really dumb bugs into the third game, and that they've also created a noticeably less than perfect version of the first Prime that is bereft of a ton of small visual flourishes. (It also rebalances the difficulty in the second game though, which that game actually really needed. Echoes is a hard game.) The misgivings are pretty minor, it probably takes a fan to notice anything awry. It's still three incredible games for the price of one. (With the two GC titles pretty successfully overhauled with the the third game's responsive Wii-centric control scheme.) Also just going to throw this out there - I think Super Metroid and Metroid Prime are the best games in that series. I think those are the games that should be played first. I loved the Metal Gear Acid games, i hope Konami revisits that formula again at some point. You know, and with X-com being such a topic these days, i've had conversations about how uncommon that style game has become, only to realize that the Acid games would probably be an incredibly easy recommendation for people who miss really deep turn-based tactics games. The Acid games didn't really get the attention they deserved. This seems to be pretty common place with a lot of the latter Metal Gear games, and it seems to have more to do with Kojima's weird sense of humor than titillation.

I finished Resident Evil: Revelations on the 3DS. That is a better game than Resident Evil 5. There are no qualifications for that statement. This portable gaiden game is a better executed and more fully featured game than the last main entry in the series. The title lies though, there are no revelations, it's a completely stand alone story. (It has about as much to do with the T-Virus/Umbrella mythology as RE4 did, which is not much.) I think Alpha Protocol has some serious problems as an action RPG, and several of the possible story arcs noticeably go nowhere, but i respect the hell out of the dialogue system that game uses. It really made you feel like a spy sparring with words. Oh man! I had totally forgotten about that part, that was an incredible sequence! ... And i see Metroid being discussed, and i kind of want to get into it, but i kind of shouldn't get into it. I don't like Fusion and Other M.

I don't really know anything about the man, but i suppose i can say i appreciated his work. Heart goes out to his family. I'm not sure there's really anything else that can really be said. Fuck cancer.

Revelaitons [sic] is a damn fine Resident Evil game, i am really enjoying it. Some slight performance problems here and there. It's very noticeable that the in-game models don't have any lip-syncing. The rigid check-pointing is really random and kind of sucks. (Especially given that it's very much an RE1-style open-ended environment.) Raid mode is awesome. I was never a fan of the Mercenaries mini-game, and i think this is magnitudes cooler. There's no timer, it's not a survival thing. You have linear start-to-finish stages made out of chopped up and remixed pieces of the single-player campaign, but really difficult and with a ton of arcadey silliness. (With loot drops, character leveling, and online co-op.)

Heh, i have caused a ruckus with my gender specific pronouns. I'm generally of the mind that "he" and "his" are fine in the absence of any indication of gender. Apologies if i've caused offense.

Yeah, BlazBlue: Continuum Shift. If you've played Guilty Gear, i would have assumed that you would have played BlazBlue too. For Soul, i encourage you to just set aside an hour or so and go into training with a character you think you like, and try to really figure out what they can do. Attacks in Soul can be incredibly situational, you need to understand what tools are available to you and have ideas about how and when to use them. It really doesn't take much effort to reach that base level of competency. Saying this all feels a little contrary to the reputation this series has as being super approachable and accessible, but i understand where you're coming from. The game does look really ungainly when two people are button mashing at eachother, i understand how that could make you not want to invest more time with it. I mean, I don't agree with taking that initial reaction at face value, but i understand why you would have it.

I feel like your counterpoint is an argument formulated around having expected different and more polarized responses. Speaking personally, I just don't want to play games where players are conferred advantageous positions based on how much they were willing to pay into it. I don't think that's an unreasonable position at all.

I'm just going to go ahead and say it, that if you played those games in a vacuum, you're probably not as good at them as you think you are. Fighting games have always been terrible at teaching people how to play, and the games you've listed are not exceptions. I had a similar experience with Soulcalibur way back on the Dreamcast, figuring that game out mostly on my own and feeling like i knew it inside and out, but really having no idea what i was doing and being kind of terrible at it. There's so many weird, arcane little elements to fighting games that i don't think the developers even think to explain. (BBCS i think has probably the only good tutorial i've ever seen in a fighting game.) There's certainly not many fighting games out there were 3D movement is more of a thing than it is in Soul. I think it's always been a strength for the series though, because of the verticals/horizontals dynamic. Evasive side-stepping in Tekken and other 3D fighters always seemed really arbitrary to me, relatively speaking. The team battle mode from the first few games has still not returned, no. Like i said, IV and V were and are noticeably lacking on the extra stuff front. Yeah, it sucks, i want it back too.

I think Soulcalibur is probably actually one of the easiest fighting games to pick up, there's a very minimal barrier of technical execution, and most of the challenge in learning is purely knowledge based. (Somewhat in contrast to the norm of the mechanics being relatively simple but incredibly demanding.) With this game, you want to be able to read your opponent's actions and respond appropriately. It's so important to understand how your moves are applicable in different situations, and to have ideas about how to counter certain behaviors in other players. (Or even just straight up play mind games with people. Find a hole in their game, train them to close it up, and then shift to abusing another gap their new behavior has opened up.) You don't have long combos to lock down the opponent with, but once you have control of a fight, once you're in a favorable position, it can be hard for the opponent to break that control. You kind of have to build up momentum, and to do that you have to know your character's moveset really well. For very beginner play, look for what hits low, what can hit grounded opponents, what moves knock them off their feet and in what direction they do that, what your launchers are, and what your pokes, fast attacks, and basic strings are. If it's a character built around multiple stances, have an understanding of how that stuff all flows move-to-move. A defensive game is harder to build up, that just takes experience. Knowing when to sidestep and when to block low, it takes an instinctual understanding the game's horizontal/vertical dichotomy. (Additionally, being quick on those throw counters can also be a pain to learn, but that's true for any game with a throw/counter-throw mechanic.) Also, as a general rule for starting out, block on wake-up, it's the easiest way to be safe when recovering. You can also air control out of juggles, if it's not a true combo, you can move out of it while airborne. I mean, but i'm kind of the blind leading the blind here. I'm not that great, but i think i'm competent, and i feel like i understand the game and can appreciate what works well about it. (If you want to go down that rabbit hole, there are fansites with very advanced character guides, but the lingo and notation for this game would just be incredibly confusing for starting out.) Failing all of that, Soulcalibur games have always had a reputation as casually fun and potentially button mashy games. I mean, and at that kind of level, of course it's going to feel random and cheap. Even Street Fighter is going to seem like bullshit if you don't know how to deal with fireballs.

I find it curious that somebody would argue that Oblivion presented a more interesting place to explore than Skyrim. I mean, obviously that's a very subjective thing, but the common opinion is that Oblivion was kind of the dullest of the three modern TES games. The unresponsive control i find an odd comment too, i've generally felt that Skyrim feels about as bad as Oblivion did. I'd like to hear Daisy Daisy elaborate on his opinions more, i want to know where he's coming from on this.

I'm just not really interested in playing a freemium game, with the connotations that often carries. I'm not one of those people who is irrationally dismissive of the idea, but i'm going to put the impetus on them to show me a model that doesn't sacrifice fair and balanced game design. MWO has made big promises of a model that takes balance seriously, so i'm still interested in that. A level playing field is important to me, is all.

How much do you know about the game, kind of scrub-league stuff or what?

I was told they've announced a freemium model? I have instant disinterest towards this project.

I love the bit where Schafer lays down and gives a thumbs up through the lava, unlocking the achievement "I know now why you cry."

Alright, cool. No love for Soul then. A few days out, i'd like to addendum that this is definitely the best online feature set i've seen in a fighting game. The solo experience is pretty much shit though. I guess that'll be the last to be said on it.

As far as i know, the original version of "The Real Barenziah" is the only particular standout of Daggerfall with regards to texts that were later censored. "Daggerfall, holy shit" was more a comment about that game just in general trying trying very hard to be very adult. All of the goofy pixelated nudity, for example.

Localized? It's been available in Japan on iOS for a while now. I really hope more people play this, it's such a great game.

So i picked this up today, played online for about four hours straight. I like this game an awful, awful lot. My gut reaction is that this is the best Soul Calibur has been in a long time, maybe since II, but i'm saying that as somebody who never really fell out of love with the series. The solo offerings are a little sparse, better than IV, but nowhere near the magnitude of stuff offered in the earlier games. Story mode is trying to do the MK9 thing, except it's a lot of still art and voice over, and you only seem to play two of the characters. (So it kind of sucks.) Everything else is variations on arcade/versus/training stuff, so no mission mode. (Also, apparently no character endings in arcade, i hear? I haven't checked on it myself.) Online is amazing, apparently through dedicated server magic on Namco's end, but really didn't see any latency at all. (The online startup has a notice that they are only obligated to support it for twelve months, but that's a fairly common disclaimer in EULA's, it will not be dead after only a year.) There's a really brilliantly executed lobby system too, and match replays, and a lot of stat tracking. Online really seems to have been the emphasis here. Had such a great experience online, i don't think i can emphasize it enough. There's some tiny hitches here and there, but i was nailing things requiring precise timing and never feeling like it was lag's fault when i couldn't. It's also probably the most different a Soul Calibur game has been since the jump from Soul Edge to Soul Calibur. The game moves at a much, much faster pace. A lot of new systems have been introduced, a lot of old systems are gone. Some characters are mostly intact, some have been radically changed. Some characters are gone, replaced by other characters that are similar and different to their predecessors in varying ways. (Or seemingly amalgams of different absentees in the roster.) A lot of the new characters are really obnoxious/garish. Ezio is pretty fuckin` awesome. Dampierre was apparently a pre-order bonus exclusive to Best Buy, so that's bullshit. (Expect him to be released as paid-DLC in the coming months.) On a more personal note, Siegfried was always my main, and has kind of been garbage in the last few games, but seems like a total monster again. Finally, It's depressing that it's even an issue, but I personally feel that the sexism has been reeled in a bit, it's a little less overt. I mean, Ivy and Tira are still absurd, but i definitely don't think that ridiculous marketing campaign is at all indicative of the game.

So what is everybody looking forward to in 2012? Personally, i am the most excited about Armored Core 5. From is blending a lot of their online factional meta-game know-how from Chromehounds with the Armored Core game mechanics, and everything i've heard about it makes me more and more excited. Squads of players fortifying and defending territory while organizing sieges on others in team battles where each side has a player in a commander role controlling AI forces, issuing orders, and managing radar. The mechlab is supposed to have something like five hundred parts, with players using profits earned from battles to build up their stock of parts and customize their mechs. The solo game is apparently going to be fairly sizable too, allegedly with big hour-long missions. (Following video is a small sample of that solo game.) kLQr2i0IKsI I feel like it's inevitable that the game will be coldly received though. I have no faith it will find a big audience in the west, it's just been the story with all of From's mech games. These games are way, way more complex than they appear, there can be huge learning curves. A lot of bad first experiences, people struggling with control because they've improperly tuned their machine, stuff like that. (Man, and I remember seeing so many Chromehounds reviews that were written based entirely on the single-player tutorials.)

You're definitely not the only person with fond memories of Renegade. I mean, it was a so-so singleplayer game, it's fun seeing all that stuff from the ground level, but it always felt like it should have been so much more than a linear campaign shooter. The MP in that game was incredible though, and it's something that nothing else has really replicated. I spent loads of time playing it back when that game was new. Was pretty thrilled when i first heard about this fan remake, it looks like quite an impressive project.

Yeah... Yeaah... Man, and it was actually looking like they might class it up a bit when SCV was first revealed, that clearly didn't pan out. It's really depressing, that series wasn't always like that, it's just been slowly exaggerated with each new game. Hey, but the game is apparently very good... So there's that...

999 was a very cool game, i'll be quite happy if the 3DS sequel gets localized as well.