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Hit sixty hours on this game, and it's just absolutely one of my favorite JRPG's now. I think it's a very systemic design, it seems very in love with its game mechanics and exploring the ways they work together. I appreciate that it's not one of those games that withholds from you half of your tools for twenty hours while it slowly and agonizingly introduces things to you piece by piece. You kind of have the keys to the car right from the start. Kind of go make of it what you will, there's a lot of potential depth. The sparse and jokey narrative is probably very off putting to people who play JRPG's primarily to be immersed in story. Just... shit... I did not expect that i would like this game as much as i do.

I don't think there was really ever any doubt that this hardware was half baked when it launched with an OS featuring some half a dozen "to be added in a later firmware update" dead end notices. I want to believe this system has a future, and i still really think it does, but Nintendo certainly got out there ahead of themselves. This is a piece of hardware where the early adopters were definitely glorified beta testers.

I don't disagree that it's something that can be worked around, but the fact remains that it is something that has to be worked around. There are a lot of games that will benefit from that second stick just as there were most certainly games on the PSP that would have seen benefit from a second stick. (Seen people doing the Monster Hunter claw? That in itself is probably the reason this peripheral exists.) The portability is the real issue, it really fucks the 3DS up for me, with how i use my 3DS. That thing is no longer pocket sized, not even close. That add-on is fucking enormous.

Hah! The add-on needs a AA battery plugged in it to work! But yeah, looks like all the big games are being designed around it. (MH3G, MH4, Resident Evil: Revelations, MGS: Snake Eater 3D, and a few others things including a just-announced Ace Combat 3D. There's a lot of buzz that Kid Icarus: Uprising is being retooled for it too.) And now people are saying that there was a single screenshot of a Smash game mixed into a montage, heh. I love watching the internet scramble to devour information like this.

Nintendo just streamed their 3DS-themed TGS presser and probably the biggest news was that they've scored not only an updated version of Monster Hunter Tri exclusive for the 3DS with a ton of new stuff, but also a proper exclusive in Monster Hunter 4. (Which looks pretty rad, it really does.) The second-stick hardware add-on is also probably going to be around 20 bucks. It's cheap enough that it's probably going to end up being packed in with a bunch of games. (A whole ton of games are going to support it.) Also, Kid Icarus was delayed again. Shit. And Square Enix announced a game titled "Bravely Default: Flying Fairy." I don't even know or care what that game is about, that is the best name ever, and it must remain unchanged if it ends up getting a North American release. Also, other boring things.

ACE Team's sophomore effort is out on PC and XBLA. They had a really cool debut with their weird first-person brawler Zeno Clash, but they've gone and done something completely different this time I... I don't know how to describe Rock of Ages, but Giant Bomb has done one of their quick looks for it. It looks cool, i want to try this out.

http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/12/come-watch-20-minutes-of-skyrim-gameplay/ It's the Quakecon demo again, but as recorded in a controlled environment without a crowd screaming at them to murder and then teabag everything.

Mines, basically. Just have a lot of frag mines. (Also, if you're trying to do non-lethal, take every advantage you can. Keep those gas grenades. They're quiet and non-lethal.)

It's already on their Justin TV archive, that's how i watched it. It was pretty great, they did loads and loads of awesome stuff this year.

Was a team that split off from the Stalker devs, if i remember correctly.

http://kotaku.com/5839046/the-syndicate-reboot-is-real-first-details-leak-out-of-ea More info was leaked. I don't know why EA is so gun shy about just revealing this thing, but i get the feeling it would have been canned so fast if Human Revolution had tanked. So get ready for a "Visceral FPS Experience" Anyways, it definitely isn't Syndicate, and it certainly does sound an awful, awful lot like Deus Ex. (Minus the stealth, i guess?) Also going to have four player co-op with missions based on levels from the original game, which is sort of neat. They should have just made another Crusader game, that is another EA-absorbed series that would have actually made sense as a cyberpunk FPS.

Russia has quite an active development scene, i don't know how you'd have missed it. Also, guys. Guys. Cargo: The Quest for Gravity.

What exactly are you getting at? I mean, I think it's fairly obvious by now that iOS and Android devices are a genuine threat to the traditional handheld space, but i've never ever gotten the impression that Nintendo is taking them seriously as competition. This dumb second stick peripheral seems entirely geared towards competing directly with the Vita, and i'm fairly certainly it is only the Vita that Nintendo is afraid of and trying to compete with. If anything, Nintendo has even been outwardly dismissive of the emerging smartphone/tablet market, and it's probably something that will come back to bite them in the ass.

It's kind of the weird thing, that. The 3DS has been about as successful as the DS was in its first year, so i think it's way too early to write Nintendo and this hardware off. (Even from a software standpoint, i'd urge you to remember that the DS was absolutely dire in its first year.) On the other hand, between the DS and the 3DS was the breakout success of the Wii, so what was a sales success for Nintendo then is treated as a failure by their current sales expectations. So... Eh, it's a weird situation. The 3D bubble and the Wii fad led Nintendo to have inflated expectations for the 3DS, and now they're having to deal with reality. There's also a lot of people who feel handhelds in general are going to die off because of the iOS and Android devices, but i don't really buy into that, not yet at least.

Everybody was complaining about the Kid Icarus game having no control option for lefties, since it's controlled by the stick/touchscreen. Having it support this second-stick peripheral would address that.

It's more about the second stick, i think Nintendo doesn't want to look like they're lagging behind the PS Vita. When that thing was revealed at a 250 price point, it seems like it sent shock waves through Nintendo. Combined with slower than expected 3DS sales, general 3D-backlash in the market, and apparently Nintendo's investors pushing for Nintendo to start releasing games on iOS, Nintendo seems to be in serious damage control mode. They're being very reactionary and aggressive, and who knows how it's all going to pan out.

I don't know what you're talking about, you're crazy. Clearly the 3DS needed five triggers and a bizarre off-center grip that is twice the size of the system itself.

That's pretty much how it was for me, i dunno. Not saying the boss fights are good or bad, i just really didn't have all that much trouble with them. Also, this is an entertaining read. (The article itself is clear about it, but to extra emphasize it, know that it talks about the end of the game. So don't be clicking over if you haven't finished the game.)

So... http://www.joystiq.com/2011/09/07/gaze-upon-the-3ds-circle-pad-attachment/ I really didn't think the rumors would pan out, but there it is. Now this is certainly just a precursor to a 3DS hardware iteration with two sticks built in. I'm sort of glad they're doing this half-step before they do that, at least. I really didn't want to have to feel compelled to buy new hardware so soon into this thing's life span, now i just need to... buy... a... bizarre add-on. Seriously, that is a phenomenally ugly thing.

I will reply to everyone! Shit, i really don't understand what is so problematic about these bosses. My first run through the game was on the normal difficulty with a stealth-focused build. I had a pistol and a stun gun, i was completely unprepared for that boss, but it took four tries and not twenty. They're bad bosses, but i don't think they're that bad. Somebody who had trouble with them, explain to me what was frustrating about them, what you were trying to do to beat them, and what ultimately worked. I am curious. You can change the difficulty from inside of the game at any time, and... Honestly, you probably should. I don't think there's any reason to force yourself through higher difficulties if it's making you hate the game. It's a competent sequel to a beloved game, but now it's broken out wide and seems to have ended up being played by damn near everybody, it's bound to be that not everybody is going to love the style of gameplay or story it's emulating. Hype backlash is in effect. Egggghhhhh... I think Alpha Pro did some laudable and interesting things with its conversation mechanics and adaptive narrative, but there were a lot of really sour points. Large portions of the story had been fairly visibly gutted from the game, so a lot of story arcs just go nowhere. It is also exceedingly easy to build yourself into a corner, and i had far more trouble with bosses in that game than i did the DX3 bosses. Like, hey, sniper in a tower near the end of the game, except i'm not specced for any kind of long range combat. (It was never necessary!) Alright, not happy about that, but the game then also just arbitrarily decides that this boss should be invulnerable to grenades, actively negating all the points i invested into that skill path. Egghhh... I respect what that game tried to do, but it's really junky, clumsy, and dated. I don't think the last boss can really even count, it's a completely stationary foe that puts absolutely no pressure on you whatsoever. Have you played the other Deus Ex games? Or, for that matter, have you played Warren Spector's previous series, the Thief games? (Which, as it happens, Thief 4 will be Eidos Montreal's next project.) If you like this kind of fluid and adaptive stealth gameplay, you have more things to check out.

Soul Calibur 2 is probably still the best one, but SCV is looking potentially magnificent.

I don't think the bosses themselves are so much the problem, i think it's more the way they're positioned within this game. They're a bottleneck, all your options disappear, and you're left with a task that you very realistically may not be equipped or specced to deal with. They're jarringly disconnected from the rest of the experience. Alpha Protocol had this problem too when it came to bosses, though Alpha Protocol was also kind of just bad in general.

The casie aug isn't terribly useful, the argument/debate scenarios can still be easily won without it. There's a fair number of conversations beyond those that it'll pop up in, but it's still not that common. (There's at least one side quest where the only way to get the ideal outcome is with the casie aug, and a few others where it opens up extra options and and rewards.) It's something you'll see pop up maybe a total of 20 times over the course of the game, it just pops up automatically. It's only two praxis points though, so it's not like it really hurts you to take it. The game is really generous with the progression. I just finished a pretty thorough run on the hardest difficulty and ended up with a 90/95% build, not even ten praxis points shy of maxing out every aug.

For the most part, no. It looks like angry fans just being angry fans. Highlighting interactive objects is kind of necessary when the environments are so much more detailed and cluttered than they were in the other games. I really cannot understand how this is something people are angry about. (The hardest difficulty forces off the highlights anyways.) The game is not so directed that it doesn't feel like you're expressing freedom in how you solve problems, and it is no more of an action game than the original was. (In that, if you want, you can play it like one. The option is there to play however you want.) Losing the original's convoluted health scheme in favor of a simple regenerating hit points system is kind of lame, but it's not exactly CoD regenerating health either, it's still slightly more involved than that. The pre-order DLC does have a lot of game changing content though. I had commented on this earlier, it is shitty and dumb. You do miss out on extra missions that are integrated into the story, and a lot of extra items that are comprehensively integrated into the game environments.

In my personal Indy canon, Fate of Atlantis is the fourth movie. It's a very happy delusion.