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From talking with a buddy, i understand that on the PC version you have to toggle both walk and crouch to be moving slow enough to not set them off.

Oh man, i just got to the second major hub area in the game, and i am having wonderful, wonderful flashbacks to the Hong Kong portions of Deus Ex.

There are a few things the game just kind of expects you to know from the previous games. It never tells you how to disarm mines, for example. (Crawl up to them very slowly and hit the use key on them.) Given that it's a prequel though, it's probably fine to have never played the original, but you will miss out on tons of nods and references to the original, both meta and in-story. You should check out Deus Ex though. Visuals aside, i think it has aged pretty well. The things about it that are annoying now are things that were always annoying. I mean, even the graphics, that game was always kind of ugly. More particularly though, i always felt that game has a really weird and troublesome implementation of reticle bloom, and you'll want to get a couple levels into your preferred weapon type to overcome the severe aim penalties. Also, don't neglect the electronics and lockpicking skills if you're ocd about exploring the maps fully. It's still a really incredible game though.

So yeah, this game is awesome, i want to confidently say that this is the sequel Deus Ex deserves. Also, there is totally a basketball court, and i totally scored a basket, and for scoring that basket i got an achievement. That is exactly the way it should be. Issues i have - The animation is terrible. You stop noticing it after a point, but it's still bad. Not sure i like how it doles out EXP gains so conditionally. You've kind of got a skillshot-type thing going on, but instead of rewarding you for impaling people on a cactus, the rewards are for playing stealthily and cautiously. (And hacking everything, even if you have the code for it.) I'm not decided yet whether this is actually bad, but i feel like i am being pushed to focus on a metagame, rather than be immersed in the experience. The retailer specific bonuses were also apparently quite considerable, and that's not cool, making people miss out on neat game content like that. Otherwise, amazing amazing game.

The animation is really driving me crazy, everybody is so fucking jittery in conversation, like a world full of hyperactive children.

I just started on this. First door code is 0451. That makes me like this game way more than it probably should.

As i understand it, it's supposed to replace the snipe, which is a fairly important bit of context that makes it seem much less horrible. Also, watching those guys play was just painful, ducking in and out of cover like it's CoD instead of backpedal/strafe.

I'm not entirely sure it gets the point across, but it's still pretty amazing.

On the 360, hitting reload detonates those things. Also, i don't really understand the fuss about the difficulty. End every melee combo with an alt attack, grab and execute the stunned enemy, get your free health, repeat. Not exactly Bayonetta or Ninja Gaiden.

The thing about that giant moth side-quest is that it spawns in a central hub area and NEVER LEAVES until it's dead. So if you're ill-prepared for it, you're pretty well boned. (You want to be probably about five levels above what it recommends.)

Ah, I haven't really kept up with all of that, last time i played Shock 2 was a few years ago.

There's a psi ability in the game called anti-entropy that completely stalls degradation for as long as its active, there's the repair skill which can fix weapons that are completely broken, and the maintenance skill which restores them to top condition. (The maintenance skill is absolutely one of the most important skills in the game, up there with hacking.) Or you can use melee, or psi-attacks, or discard weapons as they break, or some combination of the above. Granted, it's questionable design, the game artificially creates a problem and then gives you complicated solutions for that problem, but i think it lends a lot to the atmosphere of the game. Your tools are constantly failing you, you're desperately scrounging for replacements and supplies. I think it's a gameplay element that thematically kind of resonates with a lot of the horror beats in the story. Not quite, the official patch opened it up as something you can tweak, but the official patch doesn't enact those changes on its own. It also doesn't really change what i'm saying, they were responding to what was the biggest complaint about the game, a complaint i don't think is completely justified. Also, those high-res texture packs are pretty great, but i'd recommend steering clear of some of the high-poly fan-made model packs floating around. (Which, for example, redesign the extraordinarily mutilated and scary cyborg midwives as having enormous breasts.)

This makes me sad, i really think the experience loses a lot if you take this route. The weapon degradation is severe, but the game gives you many ways to deal with it. It's kind of part of why i think it helps to play the game once, figure it out, and then start over and have a proper playthrough. The respawn, on the other hand, is exactly what you say, it helps make the game really scary. (In addition to giving you a slow, constant trickle of supplies.) Also, i guess i've hijacked this thread, but Deus Ex and Shock do share lineage. I think System Shock actually has more in common with Deus Ex than BioShock, honestly, aside from the latter kind of wholesale reusing the plot of Shock 2. (I mean, Deus Ex and Shock 2 are mechanically not dissimilar, minus the social and stealth elements of the former. BioShock became really more of a straight-up shooter than anything else, it didn't really matter how you built your character or managed your supplies.)

I'd say give it another go. First time i played Shock 2, i didn't really like it all that much, it wasn't until i came back to it a few years later that it really clicked with me. It's a really unforgiving game, and though it has great tutorials, it kind of just goes 0-60 without any delay. There were a lot of things that i felt like i was just kind of tolerating, but coming back to it second time with foreknowledge of what the game was going to be, i was able to plan out my build in more interesting ways and the game just clicked in a huge way. Ended up loving it for the same reasons i initially hated it. Just absolutely my favorite game.

I agree about the in-game cutscenes though, those being unskippable is aggravating. It's because you get like five of them rapid fire, some times. You get your cutscene, it finishes, you go do something. Just as you're building your little sand bridge, another cutscene. You watch it, it finishes, you go back to your sand bridge. Your bridge has washed away, you start rebuilding it, another cutscene. It's handled in an extremely annoying way, but the cutscenes mostly disappear after the first few levels. It's a shame to see so many people have a terrible experience with the PC version though. I mean, it's definitely a flawed game, but i had a relatively entertaining time with the XBLA version. I would like to see these ideas expanded upon in something else, if not just a sequel.

I got the impression it was hiding the game loading, so this complaint maybe isn't the most valid.

Just out of curiosity, how many of you guys have played the System Shock games? System Shock 2 = My favorite game.

Played the demo, really liked it. Drives me crazy that people keep comparing it to Gears, it very obviously plays nothing like Gears. I mean, Gears of War is a game where you will die in a second flat if you are not making good use of cover, this is a game with a huge melee emphasis that actively rewards you for wading headlong into enemy fire.

Since i last posted in this topic, i mulled over my experiences with Warrior Within a little, and i now remember that literally all i did to break the game was to try and backtrack to find all the life upgrades when i was late into the game. If i remember right, some puzzle in one of the areas reset to an unsolved state, but the mechanisms for solving it did not, and so i got trapped in a loop feeding across a few rooms. (Being a few rooms long, i didn't realize it until it was too late, so course i saved while i was inside of it.) But yeeaaah, yeeaaaaaaaaah. It's competent, from a gameplay standpoint, it's just everything else about that damn game is so offensive. Are you going to play the apparently three very different versions of forgotten sands? (PS3/360, Wii, PSP.)

Oh man, TV Tropes is a fun site, silly way to waste a few hours. Ever play GG2O online at all? A lot of fun. So yeah, third-person Action/RTS games on the 360? I think GG2O is better than Brutal Legend.

Ever notice that Deus Ex's New York skyline is missing the Twin Towers, and that Deus Ex came out a year before 9/11? There's even a paragraph about it on the wikipedia page.

I love Deus Ex so much, probably played through it at least a dozen times, i feel like i know it inside and out. Strange thing about that opening, i've been told by so many people that they tried to play Deus Ex and just couldn't bring themselves to finish that first level, so i push them to keep playing and they end up loving the game. Something about that Liberty Island stage really scares people off. Two years after Half-Life, in fact, a game that you are definitely misremembering.

There is definitely a grind in this game, and normally i think i would hate it for that, but i love this combat system so much. How far in did you get? Once larger enemies start showing up and the fields become anything other than flat plains, you have to start adapting your tactics or the game will destroy you. That has been my experience, at least.

Nier's gameplay structure isn't actually all that novel. If you liked it that much, i'd recommend checking out some other japanese action RPG's like the Ys series. (Ys Seven, in particular, for a very similar kind of game. That's a PSP game though.) I would disagree with your assessment here, but concede that it is misused in the game. (Like in the Aerie, which sits empty for most of the game, but never loses it's incredibly over-dramatic and highly repetitive chanting chorus.)

Oh hey, there was a topic for this too. So i just played this, i'll just pull my comments out of the "recently completed" thread. Yeah, i know about all that, and i could probably motor through new game+ pretty quickly if i really wanted to, but there are parts of that game i did not like at all. So i did the lazy, awful thing; i read a story faq and looked up the alternate endings on youtube. Still, those alternate endings are tied to a lot of achievement points, so I might end up doing it anyways. Heh. I was really down on Nier at first though, i kind of stuck with it because it seemed to be such a cult favorite with some people, and I gradually warmed up to it. I like it, but i don't think i'd recommend it, is kind of where i ended up with it. It's a really terribly ugly game with a lot of really archaic and awful quest design. (Outside of a few fairly brilliant moments.) The combat has a really cool feel to it though, and the story was well above the average JRPG. Thing is, i actually did go and run it again just to see all the extra stuff added to the NG+ mode, and there is quite a bit. If you hadn't already figured out what the story was trying to tell you the first time around, the NG+ lays it out with almost comical clarity. ( ) Anyways, i think i'm done with the game now. I don't feel compelled to run it again only to see the other alternate endings, but as i said, i did still go and at least youtube those. I really enjoyed the story though. As expected with a Japanese RPG it can get a little too far up its ass, just shifting wildly into melodrama without having earned it, or trying to convey important character moments in scenes that shift unevenly between text and spoken dialogue. There's a lot there to remind you that it's a Video game, and that Video game story-telling still has a long way to go. I still appreciate what they tried to do, it's an interesting narrative. It certainly doesn't always work, it's not amazing, but the story is leagues beyond "angsty teen fighting against his evil mentor" or whatever the plot is for most JRPG's. It also apparently has some loose story hooks to an earlier Cavia game that i don't think i would have even noticed had i not read about it online, it's largely immaterial to the game. (Also, Nier was Cavia's last game, they were absorbed into their parent company or some such.) So gameplay... It's a straightforward action RPG, the combat system has nuance without much depth, but that stuff still all works great. The bosses are especially incredible, some of the most impressive and thrilling boss battles I've seen in a long time. The game also does a lot of interesting things with perspective, shifting on the fly from side-scrolling to top-down to fully-3d gameplay. There's even one dungeon that takes on an honest-to-god isometric perspective. Those dungeons are all really short though, and there's surprisingly few of them, and the game has you revisit each one multiple times seemingly just to pad out the game. The sidequests are just totally abhorrent, incredibly simple scenarios that are in the basest sense just grinding for random drops and fetch-questing. A lot of the quest design just in general feels really, really old. Outside of a few flashes of brilliance, , it's the weakest part of the game. You spend a lot of time running back and forth between static, lifeless NPC's. I liked Nier, but it's not a game i think i could easily recommend. Also, that soundtrack is . (The "lyrics" are an invented language!)