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The demo on Live is amazing and i want to play this game very much, but i just can't afford it right now. There is so much amazing stuff coming out right now, Ubisoft has just buried this thing by having it be released at this time.

Oh dear, I feel as though i have been excluded from your internet clique. Anyways, i believe i get the gist, i am just troubled by the low quantity of Thiefness in this stealth-games thread.

So has nobody else actually played any of the Thief games? You should all at least give Deadly Shadows a shot, the game is still readily available, even on Steam. (That was the third game. It was the only one Looking Glass didn't make, and i think the last game Ion Storm made? It came right after Invisible War, but i think it shows that a lot of lessons were learned from the failure of that game.)

Nah, they don't. At one point, i had like 30 "pounds" of quest items in my inventory. So i made a save, dumped everything i could out onto the ground, and still found myself at 0 encumbrance despite the 30 pounds or so of quest items i was unable to drop. So unless the game is bugging out for you or something, i'm quite certain that quest items don't add to your overall inventory encumbrance. However, once such items are unmarked as quest items by finishing their related quests, they are then added to your total inventory encumbrance.

Quest items don't actually take up space, even if they have a listed weight.

The fact that it just kind of sits there without any pegs showing you where exactly it is meant to attach makes it kind of tricky, but once it's in the exact right spot, everything fits together as it appears it should. Though I suppose it's possible, even likely, that many of the statues were missassembled or damaged in transit. Perhaps it's worth looking at some press photos for reference, to ensure that you've at least tried to get it sitting right? (Though this will likely only serve to draw attention to how much less finely detailed the real thing is compared to the prototypes.) While generally impressive, the quality seems a bit shit. Probably not one of the better collectibles i've gotten with a game, but that's the kind of eventuality you have to be prepared for when paying the dumb person tax. (It's also far from the shoddiest collectible i've seen, so i don't feel particularly spurned by it, but mine is at least sitting properly on its base.)

I would also argue that Human Revolution does deal with the implications of people hacking, and that it is more or less the entire point of the plot.

Have you seen the series? It's really fantastic, i think it's probably better than the films.

If you want some cyberpunk that deals with the implications of people hacking, you should check out the Ghost in the Shell. (Particularly the series, Stand Alone Complex.)

I also just played El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron. I couldn't find any mention of this game having being discussed on this board when i ran a search, so i'm going to assume nobody is particularly interested in it. It's a weird, cool game. Has an incredibly basic tool set that it manages to make deep, interesting action gameplay out of. There's a lot of rough spots, a lot of things that feel kind of janky, but i think i'm just on the side of wanting to recommend this game. So the story, right? It's an apocryphal book of abrahamic mythology as lensed through a Japanese game designer who had worked on products such as Okami and Devil May Cry. Which all maybe sounds like it lends to something really crazy, but in the context of this game it ultimately really doesn't matter much. What you get is a pretty straight forward narrative with no apparent ambitions beyond turning the Book of Enoch into an action game. The art though, the art is the reason to play this game. Holy shit. I don't even want to say anything and ruin the impact of those visuals, just incredible art direction in this game.

Well as a whole, it was definitely ahead of its time. The big one is that it was one of the very first normal mapped games on the market, even before Doom 3. I believe it also pioneered that kind of health system that sort of splits the difference between normal and regenerative ones, something a lot of games have used since then. Certainly these aren't the only firsts in Riddick, but they're a couple that stand out to me for whatever reasons. As a stealth game too though, i'm not necessarily sure any part of it stands out as being especially original, but it just seemed very modern for a lot of the little touches. I mean, it was the first time i remember dragging a ragdoll body around in a stealth game. Heh.

The crouch is very specifically the stealth mode, the game makes a big point of it. "Walk" in this context would be equivalent to holding the analog stick halfway out. Remember, it was a console game first. (Also definitely not even the first game to make a distinction of specifically crouching being the only way to be stealthy.) It's possibly a walk and crouch thing to minimize noise? Regardless, for all the things i love about the Riddick game, the stealth actually isn't one of them. It can be very finicky and very binary. It was ahead of its time in a lot of ways, introduced a lot of ideas that have trickled down into many other games, but on its own it definitely feels like an evolutionary step. I don't think it ages especially well, feeling both impressively modern and a bit clunky and dated. Still love that game though.

No, i did not have a bad Wii Remote, certain gestures in that game are simply unresponsive and finicky, it is a known issue with that game. I don't think most people even think about how much leeway they're giving the motion control when they're playing, especially if they're otherwise enjoying themselves. As i said, for me it's not that it was unplayable, it's that there were problems at all. If the control scheme doesn't work flawlessly when it's being bolted to the game in place of a control scheme that would and in fact did work just fine, i have no patience for it. And, man, that game... It's not bad, it's just... Ehhh... No, it's bad. It's a shit game. I don't like Twilight Princess. I was just so bored by it. I mean, for example, some of the items seemed like they were really scraping the bottom of the barrel. You ended up with incredibly situational things that only ever served just one purpose, not quite the ingenuity of the traditional Zelda arsenal on display in that game. I think Minish Cap has an overworld that, despite being way too small, is incredibly tedious to navigate. I also object to having missable items in a Zelda game. (There's a few important upgrades that are easily lost forever, it's dumb.) Though I will grant you one thing, that game had some great dungeons. So for the record, there are only five good Zelda games. LTTP, Ocarina, Majora, Wind Waker, and fuckin` Four Swords Adventure. (This is the one that needs to be remade, the GBA game is boring.) No. No Link's Awakening. Childhood grudge. I have a first run copy with a bunch of gnarly bugs in it.

Was it one of the game's unique pieces or artifacts? Probably unlikely that you'd stumble into one of those early on. If it's just a normal heavy helm with particularly good stats, keep in mind that there are things the game doesn't surface. Heavy armor is dramatically noisier when trying to be stealthy, and heavy armor also impedes the effectiveness of your magic. (Ideally, if a mage, no armor is what you want. So robes and the like.) Also, I guess i don't understand what connection you're drawing between the helm being highly visible and you not having found a better replacement for it. You just want more visual variety? I mean, it's also not really a loot game, you tend to stick to gear for a long time, all of the TES games have been like that. In this, I stuck with some of the first armor i found for a quite a few hours. (I've been using my current cuirass for more than ten hours, actually.) The game also still does some scaling as you level up, just not to the terribly unpopular extent of Oblivion where you had bandits running around in full sets of glass armor by level 20. Still, you definitely notice an upward trend in what shops are carrying and what loot you find. (Also seems it mixes it up a bit, throws some extra nice pieces your way every now and then.) So you will find something better, but it's slower to get there, which is probably a fine compromise between the way Oblivion did and the way Morrowind did it. (Which is to say, Morrowind didn't really scale very much at all. Tons of soft-gating and pre-defined loot in the world. It was more popular with series fans than Oblivion's approach, but it was also easy to completely wreck the game once you knew where stuff was.) I'm not actually sure, i haven't played with a companion at all.

Now i'll just sound like a guy who hates Zelda, because i didn't like Minish Cap either. Heh.

Really? Reeaally? The haphazard and unresponsive motion control ruined my experience with that game, I couldn't tolerate control that only did what i wanted it to do some of the time. Anything more complicated than waggling the remote was disastrous. Seriously, can you imagine if it actually required precision out of some of the advanced maneuvers? If there wasn't room for a control scheme that fails to register maybe as many as a fifth of your inputs? The only reason it was playable is because it was balanced to be so effortlessly easy, it gave the motion control a lot of room to be shitty without completely destroying the game. I seem to like Twilight Princess a whole lot less than most people, though. I just thought it was kind of in general the least interesting Zelda game Nintendo has ever put out. Nintendo gave fans what they wanted, and what fans wanted kind of sucked. Lesson to be had: Ignore the fans. To be fair, i like the DS games even less. That said, i want to believe that a game that was built from the ground up for the use of motion control and released at the end of the platform's life will work better than a game that had it haphazardly bolted on at the start of the platform's life. (I really wish i had instead played the Gamecube version of Twilight Princess, i'm sure it would have been a much more tolerable game.) Anyways, I probably won't play Skyward Sword, but i really actually do want to. It's largely a case of holyshitskyrim that is preventing me from doing so.

Early on i had convinced myself that i wouldn't fast travel, and though that hasn't really happened, i still try to travel on foot when questing and exploring. (It's the trips to offload loot that i make exceptions for.) There's a lot of diverse terrain in this game, it makes on-foot travel much more interesting than Oblivion's fairly uniform plains and forests did. If you want to do a no fast-travel rule, buy a horse. Or have a companion to treat like a pack mule. Or make exception for the carts? (Morrowind style fast-travel!)

Yeah, this is such a big game, people aren't going to see all or even most of it for a very long time, so let's be judicious about spoiler tags.

I love the stupid grins, they're so amused at their own dumb joke.

I always thought Morrowind had a pretty great main quest.

I never played Arena myself, but i've heard people speak in fond regard about it being simultaneously immense and kind of straightforward. Something you can just dive in and toy around with. It's also apparently much, much easier to get running satisfactorily than Daggerfall is. (Nevermind that Daggerfall was always totally fucked.) Daggerfall though, that was my entry into the series, just an incredible, one of a kind game. (That requires patience and a forgiving mindset.) Also played a tiny bit of Redguard, which i remember thinking was pretty cool, but didn't really get into the series again until Morrowind.

Just sell them. I think you can use them to eventually make dragon armor if you put the right perks into smithing, but they seem to otherwise be useless. Additionally, though the frequency is very low, the dragons do spawn infinitely, so it's not a precious resource. Also, i seem to have encountered a bug where arrows are not properly fading from my character, so i've spent a few hours running around with an arrow in my gut.

Really? It's been a while since i played Oblivion last, but as long as you kept feeding on NPC's, it shouldn't have interfered with anything. It seems they've made the downsides significantly more pronounced for Skyrim.

I've heard repeated stories of people thinking being a vampire would be awesome, going and becoming a vampire, and immediately spending the next many hours trying to undo it because it makes the game so much more difficult. Which is sort of awesome, that it actually matters and changes the game, but doesn't seem like something people should be trying for when they first start playing. I have no idea what being a werewolf entails in the game.

In twenty hours of play, the worst thing i've seen is a dead dragon skeleton kind of shuffling around and clipping through stuff. So standard ragdoll quirks. The game seems incredibly solid, but i say that it "seems" to be solid because there's so much content to see that i haven't seen. So i just don't know. (I have a friend telling me that he thinks he broke a quest in Riften.) Also, nobody is really talking about story things, so i'm sure you're not at risk of spoilers right now. If i personally start discussing any of the quest line narratives, i'll make proper use of the spoiler tags.