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Alright, well let's put this off for another week then.

Heh, we do seem to.

That is very obviously not at all what i am saying. I don't think it's so binary though, that a game is either just good or bad. Deadly Premonition is a game that by traditional measuring sticks is horrible, but you play through the parts that are bad and you get something that is really interesting as a reward. But whatever, i've ended up arguing something i don't really buy into. Of course there's a lot of games i haven't finished because they're obviously total shit, or i was, in fact, just bored by. I return to one of the original comments i made, that i'm speaking from the place of knowing the kind of people who just absolutely never finish games. My friends make me crazy.

Well Sacrifice is available on GoG, so there's that. So is Giants: Citizen Kabuto. There's also games like the almost totally forgotten Uprising and the 90's re-imagining of Battlezone. (Which is an incredible game.) There were really a whole bunch of games like that on the PC in a brief period late into the 90's, but the genre just kind of vanished afterwards. I'm also just going to toss out a recommendation for Guilty Gear 2: Overture for the 360, a game i personally really like. Something to dig out of a bargain bin for ten bucks, maybe. A very strange third-person action game blended with RTS, almost dota-like, elements. A game that absolutely did not get a fair shake when it came out. (Not surprising, as a bizarre RTS/Action hybrid is really not a cool way to sequelize a beloved fighting game series.)

NSFW warning, i guess. Bkzv-3vJn4w Yeah, that's pretty much Eve, it's pretty awesome.

I'm surprised there's a topic for this here. So yeah, i have had some time on my hands and have been going through some JRPG's i've been wanting to play. (I just finished playing through Nier, which i ultimately liked but wouldn't recommend.) So this game... I'm twelve hours in and am just completely hooked, i love this game's combat system so much, it's unlike anything else. It's incredibly tactical, and it never lets you get lazy, things can go wrong frighteningly quick. Love the art direction too, Basel is a very cool setting. I kind of understand why the critical response was a little lukewarm, they've sort of forged a new paradigm here, it would be easy to miss a lot of things. The first time i hit a random battle i was just completely bewildered, there was nothing familiar at all, had to spend two hours going through in-game tutorials. I believe i have a solid grasp of the game mechanics now, including the weird health system and the tri-attacks. I'm feeling like it's kind of tragic this game kind of tanked the way it did, i remember Sega just kind of dumping it into the market alongside a few other ill-promoted JRPG's. (Such as Platinum's Infinite Space for the DS, which is also a super cool game people should play.) Also, it blew my fucking mind when i realized that this is yet another game where Nolan North voices the protagonist, I found that absolutely hysterical.

I guess my point is simply that games can and will, at times, suck balls in ways that are completely disjointed from the rest of the experience. I think people who take their games seriously enough to, for example, post on a vidoegame forum, should know enough about games to accept the occasional design implosion as a given. It will always happen, there will always be that one shitty level.

I don't agree with that assessment at all. Environment and mission design can vary wildly over the course of a game, encounter design and difficulty balance can vary wildly over the course of a game. I'm sure everybody has played a game that has had some awful escort mission that clearly isn't playing the way the developers intended for. Maybe it's not even completely the game's fault, maybe your frustration/boredom as a player stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of the game's mechanics and the tools it has presented you with.

So is this thing dead, or do you people still want to keep going? Mmm? Has anybody caught up to Cloudman? It has been three weeks. I really don't want to bitch, but i'd still enjoy seeing this through.

Well then i think you're just wrong, i don't think there's such a thing as an unassailable ideal of "good gameplay" that can be held to. Shit is subjective, what works for one person won't work for another, you draw that experience out and the odds increase that you'll find something you don't like. So do you stop when you find something you don't like, write off the rest of the experience, or push through and hope you find something on the other end that you do like? Personally, i'll generally try to keep going.

I don't think either of us were making an argument in favor of "filler" content. I think you're conflating several separate threads of conversation. An aversion to grinding through repetitious content is obviously not the only reason a person might stop playing a game.

Man, I am very excited to finally see what Eidos Montreal has made of Deus Ex. Deus Ex is certainly one of my most favorite games, I've probably played through it a dozen or so times over the years.

I try to finish most games i play and it often results in me completely putting off some games for a protracted period of time until i am sure i will have time to go through it. Games i haven't finished tend to be JRPG's, which i find a have a love/hate relationship with. I can end up hating one game and loving another for what seem to be the same reasons. (I've never really had a firm grasp on why.) So right now, in fact, i'm going through a few JRPG's i've been wanting to play for a while. A game i just finished, Nier, took some determination to struggle through some of the bad parts, but i'm glad i did, because the conclusion to the story ended up being pretty rewarding and memorable. I always cringe a little bit when somebody tells me that they gave up on a game because they were bored or stopped having fun or something. When you're dealing with some games that can be multiple dozens of hours, it seems like a given that at some random point it might start being a bit shit, but there's probably a whole lot of rewarding stuff on the other side of that too. Though i'm just speaking out of frustration for knowing people who never finish games.

It was cool to see anybody still doing an action-RTS like that these days, but the reality is that there have been much, much better action RTS's in that vein. (As one example, the game that i believe was even cited as an influence for Brutal Legend, Sacrifice.) I really had some fairly major problems with Brutal Legend. It was charming and fun, but i think it's the weakest game Doublefine has put out. For the strategy battles, i remember thinking i never had enough fine control over my units, that there were some fairly significant failings of the interface. It's been a while since i played it, i'd have to go spend more time with it again to get any more specific, and i'm not going to do that. One thing that i do remember clearly that had really bugged me is just how poorly paced it is, so much time is spent in that first region and then you're just hurried through other massive areas. The game introduces a ton of things in a short span about 3/5's of the way through the game and then just has you scream several huge locations in rapid succession. I mean, and I don't remember the exact number, but there's only a handful of real battles where you have full control over all the game mechanics, and some of the opposing factions only show up once! Entire factions with unique units and strategies, and you'll only battle them once. (When the faction you had been fighting for most of the game was a palette swap of the hero faction!) With how bizarrely misused their distinct factions were, i got the impression they had hopes on it having more of a multiplayer following. (To its credit, it at least has AI skirmishes.)

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.

For no particular reason, I just played through Nier. Really a bad, dated game in a lot of ways. Amazing bosses though, and i dug the story. That game also has an incredible soundtrack. So i guess i'm feeling about it overall.

Giant Bomb did a quick look on this and i was instantly sold on it, i will buy this. Looks like fantastic fun.

The best Video game trailer i have ever seen. Seriously, it's incredible, you know it is.

I think their dumb mechas that are trying to look believable are straining believability. They wouldn't be able to shift weight to either side enough to walk. I am being a nerd.

knzvIyY9uO8 This trailer is hilarious, i love it. Game is controlled with, disappointingly, a 360 pad. (I was holding out hope for another ridiculous joystick peripheral.) Kinect is used for looking around the interior of your mech, doing things like starting the engine and using mounted turrets, or interacting with your mech crew. (You have to manage your team's morale, high five for a job well done! Seriously.) I really hate the mech designs, they're so wide they shouldn't be able to lift a foot off the ground, let alone walk.

Not a huge fan of ZOE specifically, but i love me some crazy mech action, and i love the idea of Kojima doing anything other than another MGS game. So sign me up.

I've kind of been going back and forth on whether or not i should play the HD port. I played the game when it originally came out, it was really great, but i wouldn't count it among my favorites. I remember it being a really gorgeous game, wouldn't mind seeing it touched up. I unno. More thrilled that the sequel might actually finally happen, worried that it might not.

Yeah, i remember Redguard, it's a pretty cool game if you give it a chance. There were a few weird Elder Scrolls spin-offs.

I think it's probably just the nature of that scripted stage demo they've been showing.

Oblivion has something like two hundred and thirty quests, so if you're saying that you really can't find any side quests anywhere, i don't know what you're doing wrong. If you're talking to NPC's, they'll usually bombard you with hints about the location of quest givers in the immediate area. If you're just out exploring in the wilderness, if you happen upon some random shack or small village, there will probably be an associated quest there. You shouldn't even feel like you need a quest though. Not even counting the randomized oblivion gates, there are way over a hundred dungeons in the game, only a small number of which are even tied into quests. Or just go for one of the major quest chains, not even the main quest necessarily, but one of the guilds. Just curious, but how long did you play Oblivion, previously? It's not a game that will just reveal everything to you within five hours, these are games people have played for hundreds of hours without exhausting. To be fair, Morrowind certainly had its share of problems too. The combat was heavily dice rolled in a particularly frustrating way, you would simply miss and have no feedback as to why. Man, and that game had just tons of exploits and bugs and crashes. (Even if you're not interested in the modding scene for the game, there's a few fan patch projects that might be worth looking into if you want to play Morrowind.) Morrowind is definitely my favorite Elder Scrolls game though.