Sno

Oh hey, that's awesome to hear! There's not a lot of coverage floating around for that game, even now it's not easy unearthing many details about it. It seems like a weird project, i've heard rumors that it's been actually done for something in the vicinity of two years. It was something they've just been sitting on to try and coordinate a release with Gearbox's troubled thing, but now Infestation is coming out and Gearbox's game is still a ways off. WayForward is a cool studio though, and i've always been a fan of Aliens. I'd definitely like to play this.

Four Swords is a port of the GBA game, the fact that they added a SP mode to it is already more than they needed to do. And it's going to be available until well into 2012, the product description page in the store clearly states that. As for upcoming DS games - Aliens Infestation is a thing i want to play. Squad-based Metroidvania with perma-death!

If you're complaining about the lack of a PC version for Dark Souls, Sony has nothing to do with it. Both of the games were developed by From Software, and Dark Souls is being published by Namco. From Software has just never made PC games.

So this is out in a few days, I am looking forward to playing it. Never played Demon's Souls, but it was one of the games that very nearly had me finally investing in a PS3. Very glad Dark Souls will be multi-platform. Giant Bomb has an enormous hour and a half-long "quick"look for the game that seemed fairly well researched and informative.

I think they could have probably done a better job educating players on how to deal with the many new armored types of enemies. I mean, given how much it's the armored enemies that end up stream-rolling everybody in Horde. Armored Kantus, you hear Dom yell at you "USE EXPLOSIVES" or something during the campaign. Basically any kind of indirect or melee damage will bring them down, not a big deal, but people still waste bullets. Lambent Berserkers have these giant obvious weak points, but people generally don't seem too sure how to go about efficiently bringing them down. (Get them to run at you, take your shots, dive out of the way. You'll never hit that weak point if they're not facing you.) But then regular Berserkers show up in horde and most players just have no idea what to do. Completely new mechanisms for killing them are in place, frequently with no Hammer of Dawn in sight. I haven't fought them that much, so maybe i've just been really lucky executing improper strategies, but fire seems to weaken their armor so other weapons can harm them. So it takes coordinated fire from multiple people who understand what is going on, which just does not ever happen in random matches. The Serapedes and the baby Corpsers generally aren't as much of an issue. Edit: You know, i've begun feeling that games like Halo and Gears could use some kind of higher-level tutorialization just in general, not just how things work, but when you use them and what you use them for. These games are way more complicated than people give them credit for, and it's really stunning just how bad people are at them. Especially with Gears, it's obvious that a lot of people really, really struggle with the mechanics and the interplay between the weapons and everything. (The shotguns should not be an issue in this game, but people will just continue to always leave their cover to try and bull rush me with the chainsaw, and so i will continue to carry the sawed-off. It's not like the chainsaw is underpowered either, people just don't know when to use it.)

I can definitely understand, i've been doing a lot of random matches and just fucking nobody knows how to deal with the armored enemies. God help you if you have to fight an old-school non-lambent Berserker in a boss wave and the only way you have left to harm it is to coordinate fire by having somebody weaken it with the flamethrower while other squaddies hammer on it with other weapons. Best case scenario is that three people instantly die, and two are left to slowly grind away its health for a half hour. (Before running out of ammo and cash and dying anyways.) I've played through the game twice now, and was never actually killed for dawdling, so i really just can't say anything on this. There were a few spots i suspected that the game would kill me if i stopped moving, so in those spots i kept moving. The rest of the time, i moved at my own pace. I never ran into problems. I didn't really like that part either, to be fair.

As somebody who wants to have from games a level playing field for competitive multiplayer, i respect that they've kept such leveling mechanics to a co-operative mode. With how much pressure there seems to be to work progression systems into online shooters as a means to encourage players to stick with games for longer periods of time, it seems like competitively balanced online shooters are becoming increasingly rare.

I can only think of two or three spots in the game where you are potentially killed for idling and maybe only three or four spots with infinitely respawning enemies, so again... I dunno. Playing the game myself, i had the thought that they've made the AI squadmates generally much tougher and more aggressive, probably to compensate for the game being balanced for four live players. If you're just hanging back with a snipe, they might be finishing these battles almost before you get to them. (God, they're still so dumb though, stop throwing smoke grenades!) I'd normally say bumping up the difficulty might make for a more interesting experience, but i don't know if that would have any meaningful impact with the way Gears 2 and Gears 3 handle difficulty levels as player-specific handicaps. (It's unfortunate that they've made the mutators such an ordeal to unlock.) I am surprised that you would be able to, the game gives you far, far less ammo for the snipe than in either of the first two games. I think it's maybe a bit unfortunate they don't have a classic horde mode option in there somewhere, what they've basically ended up with is a way crazier version of CoD Zombies. Epic is still really good at survival modes though, there's a great structure to things, the dynamic wave composition with the predictable peaks and valleys. Having a Brumak randomly appear during a boss wave is pretty thrilling, though it's usually the Berserker variants that end up killing everybody.

We are definitely going to have to disagree on this, because all the time Gears 2 spends engineering scenarios to take me out of the game i am there to play is absolutely the worst thing about that game. I do not think the brumak or tank sequences are enjoyable in that game, and they are even less so when played on higher difficulties because it becomes painfully evident that those mechanics have not been tuned to the same degree that the rest of the game has. "a quick time event dressed up as something else" Huh? I don't know man, just... I think we're just going to keep pulling out examples from both of these games to justify our points of view, there's a lot of weird scenarios in all of those games. I've played through all the Gears games multiple times now, and Gears 3 does not strike me in any was as being more "scripted" than 2. So much of 3 is spent in huge multiple-level spaces with numerous flanking options. The AI acts unpredictably, interesting gameplay is happening constantly. Reload a battle, play through it again, it'll play out in a completely different fashion. That is the mark of good shooter design imo. (And the antithesis of most CoD design.) Gears of War 2 relied much more on distance combat, guys lined up parallel to eachother on opposite sides of a room shooting at each other from cover. I remember spending most of the underground sections of 2 with a sniper rifle in hand, never needing to think tactically about the encounters, never being forced to get close enough for the combat to become risky or particularly engaging. That would be the crux of my argument, right there. I think the campaign in 3 does a great job presenting spaces that make for interesting combat. There is an analogue for that in Gears 3, they've taken that idea and built a weapon around it. It only appears once or twice in the solo game, but you'll run across it fairly frequently as an objective reward in Horde. They've taken a one-off element and made it something that integrates more completely into the game. Just... I think you're misreading the game if you feel like this. There generally aren't infinite respawns or enforced momentum. There are exceptions of course, it's a long game with a lot of scenarios to truck through, but by and large it lets the player control the engagements. I mean, and are you saying Gears of War 2 didn't do this? Because it did, quite frequently. Egh, alright, whatever. Disagreements are allowed, absolutely. We've both been pretty blunt, but i hope this doesn't turn heated, there's no reason for that. What difficulty have you been playing on?

http://www.giantbomb.com/news/vive-la-revolution-a-look-at-deus-exs-unlikely-comeback/3696/

I'm very confused by your comments, and all i can really imagine is that you're not far enough into the game yet. You say you're only up to chapter 3 of the first act? So you've only seen the stuff on the ship so far? That would explain it then, i was feeling similarly lukewarm at first. You've barely even started. I do so disagree about Gears of War 2 though. Personally, i don't like one-off setpieces. I don't want special conditions being drawn up for each encounter, i want the core mechanics to be thoroughly explored in the ways they deserve. I think good design is taking what you've built your game around and making players discover interesting things inside of that existing framework. Gears 2 was not that game, it does not have enough faith in its own design. One level you're driving a tank, another level you're playing a bad panzer dragoon rip-off. Then you're finally playing the game you want to play and what it does is put you in a small ten meter square while enemies pop-up randomly all around you, and tactical ideas about flanking and cover are just gone. Then you ride a Brumak. Then a turret sequence. Then it's poorly lit tunnels for a while until you fight an awful QTE boss. (No, i don't have that all in order, i know... Also, there should be the worm thing and thrilling co-op box-carrying action in there somewhere.) In broader terms of what have been bad second outings in trilogies, i don't think Gears 2 is among the worst, but what it offers is something i didn't enjoy as much as Gears 1 or Gears 3. Gears of War 3 might just have you roaming through corridors again, but they're large, interesting, and well-designed spaces that encourage the kind of creative gameplay that i believe was sorely missing from the parts of Gears of War 2 that actually let you get around to chainsawing dudes. Edit: This all makes it sound like i really hate Gears 2, i don't.

I do feel there is a place for shorter games, and i don't think something being longer is instantly a good thing. In a general sense though, more is better, right? I definitely feel that Gears 3 is making good on having a longer campaign. It never settled into feeling like i was just going through the paces, nearly every scenario they throw at you feels worthwhile and justified. I really enjoyed playing through it, and i'm glad it is as long as it is. As for the novel/comic tie-ins, speaking as somebody who has played a lot of the games but touched nothing else, i came away feeling that the story still makes a good deal of sense. They state clearly that the game is set several years after the last one, so the sudden introduction of several new major characters and plot elements wasn't that jarring. I think they also kind of retroactively make good on the frequently incoherent narratives of the first two games. They don't answer everything, but the answers you do get are satisfying. If you care about the fiction at all, it's a good conclusion. Really, the story is actually kind of one of the strong points. I mean, hey that stuff they do with Cole earlier in the game, that was actually kind of affecting.

So it's been out for a while now, and i would say that Gears of War 3 is pretty incredible. I wasn't really sure what to be expecting, i wasn't particularly hot on Gears 2 since it had ended up being a lot more linear than the first game was, a lot more focused on these kind of cinematic set-pieces. (Bit by that CoD-bug, maybe.) The first few levels of Gears 3 had me worried, the game seemed to almost play itself, but that lets up pretty quickly. Gears 3 seems to try and keep kind of the cinematic intensity of the second game, but opens things up even wider than it was in the first game. Tons of branching paths through environments, a lot of just really enormous combat spaces for interesting and dynamic gameplay. I really fucking loved it, great game. Best campaign experience in the series, no question. It was long too, my playthrough on the hardcore difficulty had logged in around 18 hours according to an in-game clock. Maybe a couple of those are the game idling? That sounds about right, but it's still probably nearly twice as long as either of the first two. There's a few pretty blah boss encounters, but that's proven fairly typical for the series. Vehicle sequences are back too, but there are far fewer of them than there were in the second game, at least. The game is also probably the easiest in the series, with how forgiving the player revives end up being. You can kind of just clumsily and recklessly brute force through some of the tougher spots. Game is gorgeous. I maintain that the Unreal 3 engine is really, really awful at rendering naturalistic environments, and i think that holds true for Gears 3, but the industrial/urban locations are simply the best looking visuals on the 360. The new lighting system they have in place is also just really stunning, though the dynamic water effects from 2 are gone, and it seems like a fairly glaring omission in some spots. I have also been playing a fair bit of versus and horde, and have been having a great time outside of occasional match-making/disconnect woes. I'm probably going to stick with it for a while if it doesn't go horribly awry. I'm not willing to pass judgement on the multiplayer right now, with the way both of the first two games ended up becoming increasingly less playable as time went on. (2, in particular, was just such a technical disaster.) People are already complaining about the shotguns, naturally. I think it's a great game though, CliffyB did good.

This offends me. That somebody was paid to write this offends me.

Now i'm thinking that there's an awful lot of people who i've known through the internet over the years that simply dropped out of communication, with me never giving it a second thought.

With the medical problems i have had, i had the experience of being in a hospital in intensive care and awol from several online communities, only to get out and find that there were people trying to figure out how to get in contact with me to find out if something had gone wrong. Having, in that span of time, come very close to dying on several occasions, it was an interesting realization to have that there would have been a not insignificant number of people to whom i would have simply just stopped communicating with for no evident reason. I wasn't really sure how to feel about it. That i apparently mean enough to some people i have never met in person to cause that kind of concern, but that i have kept my relationships so impersonal that they weren't able to get in touch with me. The internet is weird.

I had started another playthrough a couple years ago that i never ended up finishing, i just found it hard to play. I always did have trouble getting into those infinity engine games though, and it was pretty rough going back. More objectively, i do think Planescape Torment is something that is pretty incredible and worth at least trying.

It starts playing after the post-credits stinger fades out.

So who all is game for some matches, then?

I had a pretty big grin on my face when a remastered version of the original Deus Ex theme kicks in at the end of the credits.

No, it didn't. DX1 had you hopping around a fair bit more though, going back and forth between hubs at scripted intervals while spending less time in each hub area, with less to do in each hub. Only the Hong Kong area of DX1 really matches the scope of the Human Revolution hubs. (And, actually, might still have been larger.)

So Saturday, then? Anybody have a preference for time of day?

I found the audio thing pretty useful, having a clear indication of how far sound was propagating instead of always guessing about it. Definitely not super important augs to have for your build, but the game gives you so many upgrade points that you've probably got the core, necessary stuff you want by maybe a third of the way into the game and can therefore afford to play around a bit with things.

According to an in-game clock, i have spent eighteen hours playing through Gears 3 on hardcore. Some of that was probably the game idling, but that is still a very long campaign. I would agree with this, the first two games still have really entertaining campaigns and co-op, but their competitive multiplayer offerings were always plagued by a host of balance exploits and pretty severe technical problems. I'm not entirely convinced that Gears 3 multiplayer won't end up the same way, but if nothing else, it's a new game people are still figuring out. (How to break.) I also played some of the revised horde mode and the new beast mode, both are pretty cool. Horde now has you earning currency from your kills to build defenses, it's basically stealing back a few ideas from various games that have iterated on the horde/survival concept. Beast mode is really interesting though, it's kind of the inverse of horde, with you playing as the Locust beasts trying to break through defenses to a bunch of entrenched human AI's within a time limit. We should get a group together for this stuff.

I wouldn't mind getting a horde match going, how about something this weekend? I'll go and add some gamer tags, i guess.