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Yeah, don't use those, they're limited and rare. (I've found... three or four in over sixty hours of playing.) There's a few NPC's scattered around that will use those souls to permanently upgrade the healing potential of your estus flask. Very important. The elevator in the Undead Parish? When you access it from the church side, it creates a permanent shortcut back to Firelink. There's a lot of stuff like that, the environments keep folding back in on themselves, it's very metroidvania. Random note - The earlier conclusions i made about the message system in the game have proven to be completely incorrect, so Dark Souls continues to be inscrutable. On the other hand, you do in fact get extra estus flasks from people kindling, in their own games, the bonfire you are currently tied to.

This is very true, a lot of the big bosses you'll fight will rely on you dashing between their legs and hacking at the backs of their ankles. The lock-on camera will do really screwy things to your orientation when you try to do this. There's also often rewards for hacking tails off of the bosses and the like, which you can't do with the lock-on forcing your view. Fighting normal enemies you'll pretty much always want to have the lock-on active to orient your shield and ranged attacks properly, but with bosses it's more situational. Another bit of advice that i'll spoiler since he didn't want a step-by-step faq is You also have unique attacks for coming out of sprints, rolls, and backsteps. This on top of right/left wielding and the two-handed stances all having their own moves. (Two-handed stances generally favor vertical swings, something to consider in narrow corridors.) Experiment with your weapons, almost every weapon in the game has a unique moveset. That basic kick though, that's one of the most important moves you have since you can use it to break through an enemy's guard. (I think it also breaks through parry stances, and is of course a nice safe way to boot enemies off of narrow ledges.) As for parrying, i believe the ease of that depends on what weapon you're using. I think left-handed daggers give you the widest window for parrying, and standard shields the shortest. The crossbow is very easy to mix into normal combat, something you can't really do with the bow, but what you can do with the bow is snipe. It's the best tool the game gives you for pulling enemies away from groups, so you can tackle them in more manageable numbers.

Behind a sealed door in the Darkroot Garden is a forest area tied to a particular covenant that will summon its members to invade your game to try and prevent your progress through this location. So I got in there and started exploring and ultimately fended off three separate invasions, cleared out all the hostile NPC enemies, and defeated the area boss all in one go. Then i made it back out with nearly seventy thousand souls and leveled up four times. I could not believe that i pulled that off. It actually looks like members of that covenant only get summoned if you're in a human state. I had previously been nosing around that area with no invasions as a hollow, and then I used my last inventory-stored humanity because i was thinking i'd go summon somebody to help me out with the boss, which is when i was hit with a whole string of invasions one after another. (Thing is, i never even saw any summon signs, so i ended up doing it all on my own.) The things this game does with online are really, really fascinating and thrilling.

I've found the easiest way to earn souls is to sit yourself down in front of a boss encounter that is centered right in the main progression path for the game, just set up a summon sign and help people through the encounter. (If you're still the appropriate level, the twin gargoyles are a good early boss to do this with. They're easy to kill and everybody has to fight them.) Just go make a sandwich or something, read stuff on the internet, and keep a distant eye on the game. When somebody summons you, pick up the controller. I mean, but mid-game bosses will earn you like 10-15k per go, it makes a lot more sense than slowly grinding out souls from enemies that drop only a couple hundred souls at a time. Give it a couple hours and you're running around the game world with like five humanities and over sixty thousand souls, a completely terrifying experience.

Ah, seems you're right. So for clarity's sake then, there would be four states of encumbrance. Say you have an encumbrance stat of 50 - the first state is below 12.5, second state is below 25, then 50 and below, and then the over encumbered state.

You're more or less on a rail until you ring the first bell, not that the world is artificially closed off to you, that's really just the only task you could reasonably accomplish as a starter character. After doing that, you have many options for where you could go and what you can do. If something seems too hard, backpedal out of that situation and go find some other location to explore for a while. As i understand it, shields and armor have been considerably buffed to make heavy builds much more viable. (If you want to use heavy weapons, pay attention to your poise stat. High poise will let you take hits without being staggered, important for slow high-damage weapons.) Also, just in general, make sure you're upgrading your weapons and armor. At the disparate ends of the upgrade tree, even a basic starter longsword can become a capable weapon viable for the end-game. One other general thing relevant to gear, i believe there's actually two thresholds in the encumbrance system, one of which is invisible. If your encumbrance is below half of your total, you're a fast character. You can sprint while locked-on, you dodge faster and move faster, i think you even regain stamina faster. That invisible threshold there is what you want to aim for if you want to be fast, equip the best gear you can without going over that. If you're going for a heavy build, just wear the best stuff you can without hitting the limit on your stat sheet. (Raising your endurance raises your encumbrance limit.) This is definitely a From Software kind of thing, nothing is ever explained, the player is never pushed in the right direction. It's the sort of mentality that led to Chromehounds being reviewed by many publications as a single-player game. (Which is a TRAGEDY, the solo in that game was a literal tutorial for an incredibly vast faction-based multiplayer metagame.) Man, i really miss Chromehounds, boo-hiss at Sega for shutting down the server for that game. Really thrilled to see Armored Core 5 being kind of a spiritual successor though, bringing back a lot of that factional metagame stuff. The game will throw at you a lot of enemies you are simply not ready to face. Those black knights, when you come across them early in the game, are harder than the bosses you will fight. Owing to the open-ended nature of the game world, you can always come back later and take another crack at them once you've leveled up some.

Looking past the marketing pitch and reading about what people are actually saying, it might be more accurate to say that it's more balanced than Demon's Souls. They fixed a lot of exploits in the design, plugged a lot of holes in the game mechanics, but there's also a lot of things that are purposefully a bit more forgiving. (It doesn't, for example, become harder when you die. The world tendency system is gone. You also don't lose half of your health bar when you die, the differences between human and hollow states are less pronounced than the Demon's Souls analogue. Even just a lot of general things too. Armor is apparently far more useful and shields can now block a much greater majority of enemy attacks, etc.) It's still absolutely a really brutal game that has induced bouts of swearing in me, but i also definitely don't think any of it is especially fucked. I mean, you can play like a reckless lunatic, you can end up in a nearly unwinnable state, but it would take some blind effort to end up there. It your game stalls out like that, if you really hit a brick wall, it would pretty much have to be your own fault. Learn how the game works, make deliberate and cautious progress, be smart about your resources. It is a game that assumes the player is smart. I like that, there's not enough of that. Randomness - I was playing earlier and realized that every time somebody views one of your guide messages, you magically get an extra estus flask beamed to you as you play. (I think you also get a free humanity if they upvote one of your guide messages, i'm less sure about this one though.) I also realized that you can only place so many messages before new ones start overwriting your oldest ones, and instead of me manually going and deleting the ones that were not performing for me, i ended up accidentally erasing some of my upvoted messages that were getting me lots of bonuses. Boo. I already understood most of the mechanics and stats in the game, but this detail had eluded me. (I never really clued into why i would be exploring and suddenly have one estus flask over my normal limit for the bonfire i had been at.)

The guy in the belltower? He's more important than you think, he clears you of "sins" just in general. So if you've racked up sins by invading other players and don't want to end up being constantly harassed by Darkmoon players, he's kind of important. He also sells a lot of unique, important items. (In particular, indictments and the book of sins.) Seriously, don't attack things unless you're absolutely certain they're hostile. This game just loves to throw valuable non-hostile NPC's at you right when you're tense, barely alive, and really trigger happy. I nearly killed the only NPC in the game that can cure curses at one point. Dude's sitting in the middle of a dungeon with menacing looking robes, surrounded by ghosts, looking like he's going to start hurling fireballs at you if you get close. (Also, I did kill the same guy Sully killed. ) I'm looking forward to doing an NG+ run, trying to make good on all the side events i've fucked up in this NG playthrough.

Your disappeared pyromancer? I read up on it some more, and he shouldn't have disappeared because of that side quest, so i don't know what happened. There is a second pyromancer trainer you can find though, and he's not too far into the game. Different spells, but i think you can at least still upgrade your pyromancy flame.

Are there 3DS games worth talking about? I'm actually still really excited about Kid Icarus Uprising. I have no real interest in that that property, i just think the game actually looks potentially awesome. I just see a lot of Red Bull-sponsored sports videos, awful College Humor-produced comedy shorts, and then a bunch of Blue Man Group videos on that thing.

I have been told that it is very awesome, it apparently feels kind of like a spiritual successor to Canvas Curse.

Speaking generally, even when games are balanced like that, i think that by forcing the player to act more cautiously and intelligently, it can often lead to scenarios wherein more dynamically interesting gameplay comes from what is already there. Anyways, i'm not trying to argue. I've just read a lot of comments that say the game is more enjoyable on the harder difficulties.

I've heard quite a few people complain that the game is in general too easy, it's probably worth just playing on the harder difficulties. (Unless you already are and are finding that too easy, it would be very disappointing to see such a low ceiling in an Id game.)

That's not what i was trying to say, Gears 1 is an actually reasonably difficult game. To chainsaw somebody, just hold down the B button and run at them. It will trigger automatically when you're close enough. If they shoot/melee you, it puts you into a temporary stagger that prevents the chainsaw from doing its thing. So as a general rule, the chainsaw is for catching people off guard. It's easy to defend against, and the AI knows how.

Game came out in 2006, let that sink in for a second. In Gears 2 or 3, hardcore would more or less be the way to play, but the first game was considerably more difficult than the sequels. Even so, it's by no means an outrageously challenging game.

Choosing Knight as my starting class, i got the impression that your starter gear is much, much more important than your starting stats. I ended up using that basic suit of armor for the first ten hours or so that i was playing. A lot of the starter gear for many of the classes is actually extremely good relative to what you find in the early parts of the game. So that is something to consider. As a knight, I've never really felt that i was offered that much protection. In a lot of cases, it's simply that i'll die in two or three hits instead of one, which is still usually enough to try and pull back to heal up before heading back in. I really can't dodge anything very effectively at all. I rely mostly on my shield and the stats relevant to staying standing against strong hits, but some attacks from larger enemies still just totally overwhelm my defense. Even if that doesn't happen, blocking those strong hits with a shield just devours stamina. If that stamina bar bottoms out, your guard is broken anyways. I honestly don't know if it's easier or harder than something more evasive and agile, but it has at least seemed like a totally viable way to play. I have gotten awfully deep into the game and have completely destroyed several hostile invaders. I have also, on the other hand, generally heard that spell-focused builds are potentially some of the stronger builds. It's interesting though, everybody i've talked to about the game has a really different approach that they swear by, different styles of weapons they've gravitated to. It seems like a very well balanced game, just in general. You know, everything in this game seems very deliberate, like it's exactly the way it's supposed to be. Like... The pebbles you can throw off ledges to determine if a leap would be fatal or not, listening for whether they break or not, that is awesome. It's such a dumb little thing, but it works well and it's intensely valuable in the context of this game.

Apparently both the 360 and PS3 versions have severe framerate problems in different areas. On the 360, it's blight town and the swamp below. (Can be very frustrating since, in the town itself, you're fighting high above the ground on very narrow walkways.) I'm not really clear on it myself. From what i've heard, if you encounter one, it'll apparently appear as an invading black phantom that will drop an item if you defeat it. It doesn't seem to be anything you can engineer happening for yourself. My dude is a little bit boring, i guess. Knight in heavy armor with shield, greatsword, and bow. Also a couple miracles, one for healing and one to cast area effect slowing. (Which is an amazingly incredible ability to have.) I was warned ahead of time about the prisoner, so i killed him. I think he just quietly kills off all the NPC's at Firelink, mirroring an NPC from Demon's Souls that did the same to the hub in that. Anyways, I haven't had any Firelink NPC's mysteriously disappear from my game. (I also apparently haven't even found half of them, ngh...) Random, unrelated aside. - (Not a story thing, but I'm going to spoiler this because it's so very weird and surprising.)

This is kind of a hard question to actually answer, because there's just so much going on with the online systems. It's extraordinarily involved, there is a huge meta-game happening, but it's absolutely not a multiplayer game. I mean, i talked a bit about some of the basic things the game is constantly populating your world with, the ghosts and messages and bloodstains. So yeah, beyond that, there's red and white phantoms as the most basic real player interactions. For co-op, you place a sign on the ground, somebody sees that sign and summons you into their game. That has a few conditions - They're within ten levels of your character, actively exploring the location where you placed that sign, have human status to enable them to even see your co-op sign, and even then only if the game's networking has chosen to show this random other person in that area your co-op sign. There's a lot of factors going against the co-op, it kind of requires that the people playing understand how everything works, but co-op still happens pretty frequently. (Especially before bosses, since that is what yields real rewards for the white phantoms, you'll frequently see co-op signs near bosses.) There's no risk for the white phantoms though, no punishment for death. The game basically encourages co-op as a simple way to farm souls. It's probably something that will become a more and more rare occurrence as the active audience dies down and the hardcore and casual players stray further apart in levels and locations. Right now though, it works, i've done a lot of co-op. As for having had so few invasions, there's a few things i think that have led to this. I think i can only be invaded if i'm in a human state, which i've only been triggering when i know i'm going to need it. (The benefits to being human instead of hollow are fairly ambiguous at first, but they are very important. Such as it is, the primary reason you would invade somebody is to steal their humanity.) I'm also in the Way of the White covenant, which is believed to reduce the frequency of the game's networking matching you up with hostile invasions. (Way of the White is a covenant you can access at the very start of the game.) So the covenants are another wrinkle in this, they serve as a loose faction system in the game and offer some basic questing and item vendors, but certain covenants focus largely on the metagame. For example, one later covenant you can join has you hunting down and invading players who have accumulated "sins". (Which, one way to accumulate sin, is to have invaded and killed another player, and for that player to then have used an expendable item to mark you.) Some of the stuff certain covenants do to the meta-game just gets really nested and crazy, it's really truly layered and insane. It's all very impersonal though, the game enforces limited communication, and everything is matched up randomly. (In fact, on the 360, if you try to party chat in co-op, the game boots you to the main screen. The only communication you will have is a small series of collectible in-game emotes.) So it's not a multiplayer game, it's a single-player game with this crazy nested meta-game that is totally integral to the experience, but does not make it a multiplayer game. So that's kind of the un-answer i have for you, it's a weird game. I definitely encourage trying it, but i don't think it's for everyone. If they tried to make a game for everyone, it wouldn't be one ounce as special as it is. Also, about renting this game, i'd just warn against trying to play it on a deadline. That is about the worst thing you could do with this game, playing it like you have to finish by a set time. Moving fast makes you make mistakes, making mistakes makes you lose potentially hours of progress. I mean, it's still not as cruel as particularly hardcore rogue-likes can be or anything. You keep items you find, mini-bosses and bosses you kill will stay dead, and of course you can corpse run if you had amassed a large stockpile of souls and humanities before having an opportunity to spend them. Oh man, about the online though, that's not even everything. Holy shit, there's even crazier stuff, things like vagrant items. Dropped and unwanted gear roaming the network and appearing as black phantoms to attack random players, slowly gaining experience and rewarding the player who finally kills them with hugely leveled-up items. (I haven't even seen one of these, only heard about them.) This post is too damn long, one last aside - I have actually wrecked probably half of the special events/sidequests i have come across, but with the game's manic auto-saving, there are no older save states to revert to. So i'm over thirty hours into the game and and i just killed a valuable NPC because i was freaked out and nearly dead and he looked aggressive. I actually kind of respect that the game lets you fuck yourself over that badly, and then give you no way to back out of it. (To be fair, it doesn't seem like you can render the main quest unwinnable, it just lets you break nearly everything else. Even crucially important items that enable the multiplayer aspects seem to be missable if you're playing like an idiot.) Edit: Man, this is a long fucking post. I apologize for this did-not-sleep stream of consciousness.

I think the game really nails what you'd want out of a dark fantasy aesthetic. Any NPC's you actually find in this grim, fading world are just tired and broken people. I actually really like the voice acting here, everybody just sounds so spent and beyond their limits. I understand Demon's Souls had a really great grasp of that mood as well. It's also interesting, reading up on these games, that they didn't actually just come out of nowhere. From apparently has a very long history of weird, unforgiving action RPG's. It seems like Demon's Souls was just the first time all the pieces coalesced into something really special. Anyways, i have been playing a lot of this game over the last few days, and i feel like i've been exposed to such a wealth of incredibly great RPG's lately, because this game is definitely another major, major hit in my books. I'm apparently about a third to half of the way into the game in at around... twenty? thirty? hours in. (First run through the game is apparently usually anywhere between 40-80 hours, which i assume is probably a disparity created by whether or not you have played Demon's Souls.) The game world opens up in a really bewildering way, it gets to a point where there's maybe six different paths you could try and explore, it's pretty overwhelming. (After ringing the first bell, if something you're trying to do seems particularly fucked, double back and try exploring elsewhere, you have options.) The gameworld is just absolutely sprawling, and eventually begins weaving back in on itself in a lot of really smart ways that prevent navigation from ever becoming too much of a burden. There's also no map, but you spend so much time meticulously exploring and back-tracking around that you can't help but completely memorize the layout. Also been invaded a couple times, got spammed by fireballs the first time, second time i just completely destroyed my invader.

The response to this game has seemed fairly curious, it's like people are shocked that Id made an Id shooter. The game structurally sounds very similar to Raven's perhaps undeservedly overlooked 2009 Wolfenstein game, which was also a series of linear stages set around a central hub, with some light exploration and progression systems. (The Giant Bomb crew was also comparing it to Halo 3: Odious Tea on their podcast this week.) Anyways, playing this is very much on my to do list. Always been an Id fan, so i was always going to get around to it regardless of reviews.

I am pretty in love with this game so far, played for about four or five hours. Really love the weird MP systems, seeing random ghosts appearing around me while i explore, touching bloodstains to see how other players died, co-op requests appearing as signs on the ground, and reading all the messages people have left lying around. In fact, my first death was me seeing a message at the edge of a cliff on an odd little outcropping. "Try Jumping" it said. I looked at my souls, didn't have much to lose, and i thought it looked promising. So of course i died. Impersonal trolling at its finest. Other than that though, i've only died a few times, but nothing that made me feel like flying into a rage. Every time i've died, it was me running recklessly into things and creating unfavorable situations for myself. Whenever i'm playing methodically and deliberately, i remain very in control and i feel like the game is rewarding my patience. (Reading up on some of the basic systems probably helps too, like what humanities do, what being hollowed does, what kindling a bonfire does. The game explains almost nothing.) I don't expect the whole game to be as relatively pleasant as this has been, i'm sure parts of the game are as truly fucked up as everybody says, but thus far i have had an incredibly entertaining time. Protip - If you find humanities and souls as items, don't use them until you need them. If you just add them to your active stock right away you risk losing them on death. Anyways, what kind of builds are you guys trying for? I read that armor was buffed pretty heavily from Demon's, so i'm trying to play as a Knight. The spear and shield combo has been working out pretty well for me, and i have a bow in one of the alt slots for pulling enemies away from groups. A few hours later - I think the people who have been covering this game and reviewing it in an offline capacity have missed out on a fairly crucial element of the game. The degree by which it is an entirely unforgiving trial and error experience is reined in by this weird crowd-sourced hint system they've built into the game. For example, if i am walking up to a door and i check a sign on the ground that has been upvoted a bunch and warns me about a powerful enemy to the immediate left of the doorway, i probably will not die because of that enemy. (Maybe.) I mean, and because it's from the people who have been playing it, it somehow makes it an oddly personal kind of experience. It's like you and gamers everywhere are collectively working together to figure out this weird sadistic japanese RPG. By the same token, it can also be abused, so it's unreliable at times and even malicious at others. That element and the choice to keep it anonymous and limited to very vague terms makes it interesting, it is not so transparent that it spoils the sense of discovery. I am really fucking loving this game. I've gotten into some tougher sections, had some really incredibly tense moments, and definitely some obscenity-inducing deaths. It feels like... Maybe people will think i'm crazy for saying so, but it reminds me of playing Stalker, just the really incredibly cautious and deliberate pace and constant tension. (The games are obviously otherwise nothing alike, i mean.)

This Syndicate reboot may be the product of a lot of negative trends, but god dammit, i like what i see in that trailer. If it is, at least, Starbreeze doing what they do and doing it really well, i am on board.

So i was going to go ahead and transfer my DSi-Ware buys over to my 3DS, but apparently i have 800 points on my DSi. I feel like i should spend that non-refundable monopoly money before i put this thing to bed. Somebody suggest things to me, good things. Edit: I got Mighty Milky Way, and now i have Pikmin transferring my purchases to my 3DS. This Pikmin thing is a really incredibly elaborate set of animations for such a tangential process. Oh Nintendo.

Pffft, I don't think you can really say you've "finished" a game like that unless you are able to 1CC it. Nor is "finishing" a game like that even the point. Anyways, go play Radiant Silvergun now.