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I'm going to use Halloween as an excuse to create a topic about scary games, because scary games are pretty rad. So - Favorite scary games? Games you hate because they're scary? Games that weren't necessarily meant to be scary, but were scary to you? General thoughts about executing on horror in a gaming context? System Shock 2 is probably still the most affecting game i've played. For one, it pushes you hard, and i think that's part of what makes it scary. You're always two items away from running out of supplies, your weapons are always on the verge of breaking, and the enemies are always respawning. Environments are constantly hostile, there's nowhere to go where you can just sit back and feel safe for a bit. (Comfort is kind of the antithesis of horror, of course.) The audio in that game also leaves such a lasting impact, some really incredible sound design. It is difficult to convey in words how unnerving the character dialogues in that game are, and how the ambient music is almost subliminally unsettling. A great example of a game being scary with no jump scares. The atmosphere is just so unrelentingly twisted and creepy, and the story really goes to some remarkably disturbing places. The first Condemned is a game i really love, takes on a really awesome "unknowable horror" vibe kind of out of nowhere. (Which the sequel promptly ruins by explaining everything. It also reenvisioned the protagonist as an asshole. It still has some good moments though, like being chased through a cabin by a mutant bear, holy shit.) I also really love Doom 3. Playing Rage has got me thinking about that game again, i had played through Doom 3 a bunch of times and really think it's a terribly misunderstood game. If somebody wants to have that argument with me, i'll take up the cause.

The Butcher Bay remake also retains some of the additions from the game's PC version. (A couple extra levels and a developer commentary.) I think the remade Butcher Bay is actually better than the new Dark Athena campaign, but they're both really good. Butcher Bay holds up really incredibly well though, super dense and ambitious game that did lots of things that were quite ahead of their time.

Gamespy is IGN. 1up is too now, for that matter. It's worth saying that there's still individuals on all of those sites still doing quality work, but... Egh...

I found Jeff Green's response to this fairly amusing.

I also played and finished Rage, i didn't really like it. It was a reasonably well made game, i just found it really dull. You're not actually the first person i've seen comparing Dark Souls to Zelda 2.

So i played Rage. That was a game. Id made a game. Egghhh... I respect that Id tried to do something new here, not just settle into their old habits again. If you were just checking off a list it would look like all the pieces are here for a really great game, but it just feels so soulless. Well-made and ineffectual, i think. The downtime between real missions isn't interesting, none of that stuff is deep or involved enough to be worth all the time it takes. You go through it though, and then the game gets going, and it's actually so unbelievably easy that there's just no spark to any of the action. (I played through on hard.) There's also fucking invisible walls just absolutely everywhere, and a garbage non-ending. I was kind of just bored by the time i got to the end, very disappointed. Also, that sewers DLC is more than just one sewer, there's like ten hidden throughout the two major areas in the game. Man, and the AI cheats like crazy in the rallies, there's always one outlying opponent that is just sitting wherever the next checkpoint will randomly appear. It makes the rallies far more difficult than the races or the time trials.

"you're" Sorry, pet-peeve. Also, platform elitism is lame, don't be on about that. I think we're pretty much at the point where people have been using pads to play shooters for long enough that even with assists out of the equation, people would still be playing on surprisingly even ground. I'm not saying there isn't an advantage in a mouse and a keyboard, i'm just saying there's probably less of one than people are willing to believe. Besides, this is all moot, the wii-mote/nunchuk combo is clearly the ideal FPS controller. (It's because you point it at the screen! It's totally like holding a real gun!)

The north american Arkham City CE comes with a very, very nice statue and a not completely obscene price tag.

WEIRD. I just read that the 360 version has a 167 mb launch-day patch. Weird because Microsoft has pretty rigidly imposed 4-8 megabyte limits on what they will push through their patching system.

I don't think the driving model in GTAIV is perfect, certainly there are some legitimate problems. Terrifying crashes can happen seemingly without reason because the physics model hitched up somewhere along the way, and bikes never felt particularly great in that game, even with the tweaks made in the add-ons.

By making the act of controlling that vehicle more involved, i think it makes all the vehicle action that is so central to that series a hell of a lot more exciting and interesting. Simply put - More can go wrong, so risk and excitement results.

Well i really don't believe that requiring some skill and time to master the driving model can be considered a negative. (I also much prefer the driving model in GTAIV to the driving model of the PS2-era games, but i recognize that i seem to be alone in that.)

I loved the driving model in GTA4, everything had an awesome sense of weight to it. At times it could really feel like one of those excellent old-school car chase movies. I mean, and I never really had trouble drifting around corners while driving or anything, i really don't know what you guys are talking about. How many of you played on the PC? Is it a gamepad vs keyboard thing? For the action, the cover system was kind of useless and the shooting was really clunky, but i still think it was leagues improved over how atrociously awful the shooting action was in the PS2-era games. I'm not sure that would even fix it, writing for a game is very different than writing for a movie or a book, but i'll definitely agree that their stories aren't living up to their lofty ambitions. The story in Red Dead Redemption also drove me crazy, it's so bad. (Marston is likable and everything, but he's also a complete tool with no agency.)

I was seriously grossed out by that photo until i read the accompanying post.

I didn't really find Blight Town particularly difficult, just annoying. It's confusing to navigate, has horrendous framerate problems seen nowhere else in the game, there's the unavoidable poison-state from the swamp, the toxin enemies that are just everywhere, and the infinitely respawning mosquitoes. (At least the blow dart enemies are tagged like mini-bosses, they never come back.) There's also a lot of unique loot seen nowhere else in the game. If you just blew through it quickly, it's worth going back to once you're better equipped to deal with it a little more casually. ( .) Edit: Also, this game is getting to me. I just had a dream where i was just wandering around my home doing daily chores and was suddenly locked by a fog wall into a room to be invaded by a black phantom. I thought to myself "Oh shit, i'm going to lose all my souls" and then brandished out of thin air a shield and an axe. Way better than a Tetris dream.

Well that trailer is definitely not at all indicative of the game, but i think ODST is well worth playing. I'd go so far as to say that it was my favorite campaign experience in the series.

Continuing on from my earlier comments, I would believe that this is a large component of what led to Human Revolution not really taking advantage of the animation studio Eidos Montreal clearly had access to. That game changed a lot over its development, those Square trailers are wildly inconsistent with the released game. Given how long it takes to make CG with that level of detail, it probably wasn't feasible to do have done such cinemas for the configuration DX3 eventually shipped in.

Except for that the game, without the pack, is also clearly using much lower-detail models.

Thousands? My understanding is that trailers like that are millions of dollars per minute. I mean, and i'd imagine the main thing keeping fancier launch/reveal trailers out of their respective games is disc space limitations, because the current generation is hitting up against that hard on the 360. Though I definitely have played games that threw the trailer in as an attract mode on the title screen or as a bonus in a sub-menu. Edit: Of course, that's that's not what you meant, is it? I think i know what you're getting at. It did really bug me that Square did all those really, really incredibly pretty trailers for Human Revolution, and then the pre-rendered cinemas actually used in-game are kind of fucking ugly.

I'm not sure what you've said or done that would make it hypocritical, but i'm going to say no, it absolutely isn't. Fuck Origin.

So BF3 is good, then? Is it wrong to be disappointed in the game's apparent impending success solely for the reason that I selfishly want to see chaos and entertaining stories emerge from EA's two big gambles? I guess there's still TOR. That could be bad, right? Anyways, whatever. I will go on not caring about BF3. I never really liked the series.

To be fair, Lineage is a tie-in short film and not technically a trailer. Anyways, I don't think that it can't be done well, i think it's probably more that people in the games business are better suited to creating one over the other. (Or that the people they're hiring to do it for them just don't care/are equally unable to produce something in live action that isn't complete shit.) There have been a lot of these lately, though. There were a bunch of ARG-ish Deus Ex promos, and also that Prey 2 teaser that was inexplicably just footage of people on a plane for a couple minutes. If we're also going to count webisodes and short-films, there were also okay-ish web things for Alan Wake and MK9, and a magnificently awful Dead Rising tie-in film directed by Keiji Inafune. (Not long before he bailed on Capcom.) Edit: Oh shit, i forgot about those Halo ads, those are amazing. Microsoft has done great things with the marketing for that series. 3S5I0_hjS3c Loved the ODST trailer. There's a few others, and a ton of ARG things too. Also, that Landfall one was directed by Neil Blomkamp as a kind of proof of concept before the Halo movie deal fell apart and he went on to make District 9 instead. More Edit: B6A0s6d7F2k

As for curses, the launch day patch made the game considerably more forgiving about curses, it made it so the undead merchant in the aqueduct sells very expensive curse cures. (Curses also apparently used to stack, halving your health each time. That doesn't seem to happen in the current version of the game.) The alternative cure, which was originally the only option, is an NPC deep in New Londo that can cure curses. If you're playing a faith build and keep upgrading this weapon, it eventually will be a good and reliable tool. (Though the way the numbers add up, divine and occult are some of the weaker the weaker upgrade paths, unless your faith stat is giving gains that make it worthwhile.) If you don't like how it's turning out, but don't want to bail on your estoc, you can revert through the upgrade tree and pick a different path. Just remember that you gain back none of the expended resources doing this, and in fact have to spend souls to do so.

Soon be rolling into year seven for the 360. It's really quite crazy.

I think you only have to fight one of them to get through to the bonfire, though there's about six or seven of them total in the area. (Watch out for the ones with the small shields, they have a parry stance.) When you go over the small rickety wooden bridge, take the next right.