Sno

I was reading an interview with the dev team where those guys were saying Ocarina 3D runs at 30 fps as opposed to the original's 20 fps, making the game slightly easier overall since the smoother gameplay lets you react more quickly. Also, beyond the water temple changes, i've noticed many spots in the dungeons where they've made slight alterations to ease up some of the puzzles. (Assuming my memory of the original game is correct, and i'm reading the situation in the remake properly, at least one small puzzle was literally pre-solved when you arrive to it.)

The epilogue DLC sort of back pedals on some of the more interesting and radical elements of the cliff-hanger, but generally still leaves the game without a conclusion, so it's kind of a double bummer. It's been a long time since i played that thing, i honestly don't really remember much about the game mechanics. I remember enjoying it, at the very least, heh.

Making something darker and edgier isn't exactly a risky business proposition, it's a depressingly common tool for attempting to reinvigorate interest in a property that is perceived as failing. It's painfully obvious that the direction Ubisoft took that game in was not motivated by creative drive. (Nor have "dark and brown" games only been around since the mid oughts, Quake says hi.)

Two Thrones is tolerable, and PoP '08 is actually really quite good aside from ending on a frustrating cliff-hanger with no follow-up in sight. The next main game after that had jumped back to the Sands of Time continuity, serving as a midquel somewhere in amongst those earlier three games. I'm not sure about that one, i didn't play it, but i heard it was ok. Also, if you want to talk weird PoP spin-offs, there was a turn-based strategy game on the DS that incorporated elements of collectible card games. I've even played it, i remember it being actually not that bad, just really terribly ugly.

Oh man, really? You're playing all of them? In order? That's some pretty staggering highs and lows, heh. I seem to remember that game having had a number of fairly notorious delays, yeah. Warrior Within was such a soul crushing experience for me, i was so incredibly excited about it after being one of the people extolling the virtues of Sands of Time. First time i played Warrior Within, i managed to wedge myself into an endless loop in the game's marginally open-ended environment. Created a situation in which some scripting evidently broke, and a series of puzzles across several rooms fed into eachother with no escape. Then there was the disastrous characterization of the Prince, the cataclysmically awful supporting characters, and fucking GodSmack on the fucking soundtrack. Egh...

I really, really don't see how not being able to reset your on-cart save data is supposed to be any incentive to not sell back a game. This is also far, far, far from the first time this has happened for a cartridge based game. There is also no official source affirming that that as the reason for the inability to reset the save data, the source is wild speculation from an enthusiast blog. Seriously, how did this become a story that multiple websites are picking up? Christ.

Man, i was really hoping we'd see something about those at E3 this year, but nothing. Maybe TGS.

I'd be open to some Trenched, i guess i'll start sending out some friend requests.

The music was composed by Akira Yamaoka, formerly of Silent Hill fame, and is the third big name attached to this game in addition to Shinji Mikami and Goichi Suda. And the part you're talking about the ladder, i know exactly what you're talking about. I reloaded immediately and went down that other path and found a bunch of supplies. (There was also a pretty cool atmosphere beat with a bunch of disembodied heads rolling down a hill.) I don't really like that kind of stuff either, making you 50/50 guess about which path will have a reward and which will force you along the critical path, but it happens all the time in linear action games. The other thing though, the blue gem thing, i don't think you can actually miss any blue gems. I'm pretty sure they were all forced on me via cutscene. (Also, don't waste all your white gems on healing items earlier in the game, you'll eventually be able to spend them on red upgrade gems.) Also, color, this game has lots of it. It's such a strange and vivid color palette, really gorgeous game.

The older 360 model can't feed the Kinect enough power on its own, in that situation the Kinect needs its own wall outlet and power cable in addition to a connection to the 360, is how i understand it. I guess there's different cables for the Kinect depending on which model of 360 you have. I don't know where you can get the cables for the old 360 though, i think they're packed in with stand-alone Kinects, but not Kinects bundled with the 360 slim. Anyways, yeah... I've seen some rumors about the sales figures for Child of Eden, and it's just depressing. I find it really troubling that people seem to just generally have no appreciation for concise game experiences, simple experiences that are tuned to be as satisfying as possible, and to reveal hidden depths through mastery. Repetition is such a dirty word when there's no reason for it to be so, games are inherently repetitious. I feel there's value in less content honed to a greater degree than a game bursting will shoddily developed filler. Egh.

Personally, Ridge Racer 3D was my favorite of the launch games, but i've always been a sucker for the series. If you could stand to play a wildly unrealistic and unflinchingly arcade-minded racer, you can't go wrong with it. Incredibly fast, challenging, and fun. Fair warning about Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars, it's a very fun game, but a lot of people have had problems with it. Everything from the game simply locking up to much stranger and more esoteric problems like the quick save causing the mission scripting to spawn additional enemies, which is something i even encountered. Also, now that Ocarina of Time 3D is out, that's an easy recommendation. It's a very faithful remake with lots of small technical improvements and a pretty gorgeous visual upgrade. It hasn't really changed in any meaningful way, but given that the game was arguably already nearly perfect, it is perhaps preferable to needless revisionism. It's just something you'll want to consider before putting down money on it, because assuming you've played Ocarina before, this is still that same game, just much prettier. Nevertheless, it's easily the best game on the system right now. Donkey Kong 94 and Link's Awakening DX are both great games, two of the best original gameboy games, but whether or not they're really worth buying depends largely on whether or not you've already played them. Unlike Ocarina, nothing has changed with those, and if you have copies of those lying around somewhere, you do not need these versions. You should also take a look at the DSi Ware thread.

It's been weird watching the response to this, a lot of fairly universal praise has pretty quickly shifted to general disinterest, it doesn't seem like anybody has actually bothered to play the game. (Judging from what i've seen, at least.) I mean, It seems like a game everybody said they wanted, and now that they can have it, nobody wants it. Egh.

Giant Bomb did a quick look if anybody wants to check that out. So this is out and i played it. It's fine, it's fairly easy to recommend, a reasonably lengthy solo shooter. Aiming is pretty loose, but in the RE4 sense of it, which i would say is good. Been seeing a lot of random complaints about the control, but it took me literally twenty minutes to adjust myself to the aiming, so i think people bitch too much. The puzzle design feels like it sometimes gets in the way of fun though, really actually feels tremendously artificial and forced, perhaps not surprising given the design pedigree. Those puzzle mechanics will probably be the most divisive thing about the game. Suda's "punk is not dead" sensibilities are fairly restrained here, but as a fairly minor spoiler , so there's that. Game definitely does go a little unhinged at points, just not to any Killer 7-like heights of insanity. There's a lot of technical rough spots in Shadows of the Damned, a lot of small harmless things, small animation glitches all over the place. Nothing game-breaking, but it made the game seem like it was lacking some finishing polish. Really mirroring kind of the overall impression i had of the game, it's totally adequate and just lacking something extra to top it off, because for all the incredible talent that collaborated on this game, it doesn't feel like the best work for anybody involved. Also, wondering if transforming guns are going to become a trademark for Shinji Mikami, considering that Vanquish had one too. Heh. Also also, it's probably just that i played them one after the other, but the game kind of felt to me like the anti-Duke Nukem Forever in a way. These are both offensive, violent, and completely sexist games, right? The key is that Shadows of the Damned manages to also actually be really fucking cool and funny where DNF falls completely flat. Also also also - I had this response to the game too. It's really weird that, if you were really reductive about it, they would sound like the same game. In both Alan Wake and Shadows of the Damned, you are using light to peel off impenetrable layers of shadow from enemies before you can harm them will bullets, and there are puzzles that revolve around creating pockets of light to hold back encroaching darkness. I don't mean to actually suggest that the two games are in any way similar, it's just an odd curiosity. It's like Remedy and Grasshopper independently had kind of similar ideas about what they wanted to do, but went about them in just wildly opposite and opposed ways. Shadows of the Damned is much more unnatural about everything, much more of a game.

Definitely can't agree with that, I don't think these gameplay mechanics and this balancing would make for a very good competitive game. I would rather have some kind of endless mode or something to cap off the experience. Anyways, the game is apparently fifteen levels, and i made it through the first 10 in about five hours. (A lot of that time was spent trying to engineer lewd gestures with the analogue salutes.) Not at all awful for a fifteen dollar game, but the escalating equipment progression takes all the challenge out of the earlier stages if you go back to replay them, which is a bummer. Had some small technical problems with the game, started hitching up every couple of seconds after a few hours, had to quit out to resolve it.

Not easy? How so? How far in did you get? As for difficulty scaling, the way i understand it is that it scales by how much scrap it gives you, so more players = less scrap for turrets. What do you mean, exactly? Just objective/survival missions without the defense aspect, or some kind of competitive element?

I've been playing this co-op with some friends, it is amazing. Instantly one of my XBLA favorites. Worried it'll be short though, blew through five of the missions really quickly. If it ends prematurely, i'm hoping there's at least hard-mode remixes of the levels or something. After a few hours, my build is a heavy chassis with armored tripod legs, a cluster-munitions artillery cannon, a rotary automatic shotgun, and a giant two-slot flak cannon. My emplacement summons are less impressive, just average shotguns and field repair stations. (They cost me more to summon because of the heavy chassis too.) I'm basically tanking, letting other people run around worrying about managing the turrets. Love the lobby system, being able to walk up to and inspect a buddy's Trench. Lots of dumb laughter watching people run around saluting eachother. (With analogue trigger control!) The player model is so stoic and lifeless, standing completely motionless while his right arm flails around wildly, it's the kind of bad that ends up being hysterical.

Man, i honestly don't remember the Owl being so annoying in the original version of the game, but he's driving me crazy in this one. Seems like every ten feet he's bugging me with "helpful" information. Also, Nintendo gave Navi new dialogue for frequently reminding you to take short breaks from playing the game. You know, because that's what Nintendo does now.

Huh? You can turn the 3D off at any time if you want, though i think the effect works fairly well for the game. (At a lower intensity, i will say, the depth of Hyrule field versus foreground elements like Link and the hud is a little much to bear.) You can't play it on DS or the DSi, if that's what you're asking. Even without the 3D, the 3DS has some wildly different hardware specs, new generation of hardware and all that. I mean, the DS might have been able to handle a direct port of the original game, but not this remake with this level of detail.

The fourth level is incredible.

So how about an E3 topic, to pool together discussion and news about the show? Some pre-E3 reveals are sneaking out. Just now, and i do mean literally just now, Gearbox has revealed their forever-in-development-hell Aliens: Colonial Marines. Very excited about this one. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/06/01/colonial-marines-preview/ Also, Carmageddon is making a come back on XBLA from Stainless games. (I did not realize that the guys who had been so prolific and successful on XBLA were the Carmageddon guys, but they are, and their series is back in their hands.) http://www.giantbomb.com/news/carmageddon-countdown-site-unsurprisingly-reveals-carmageddon-game/3281/ Edit: Title changed because people are being insane.

The feed i saw of the Sony thing had a close up on Kaz's face during the AT&T reveal, his reaction to the crowd booing was incredible.

Side-scrolling, top-down? What year? What platform? (DOS, i would assume. Shareware and all.) Remember anything else identifiable? What kind of weapons? ?

To quote that Giantbomb piece: This kind of stuff happens all the time, PR types controlling who gets early review copies and who doesn't in an effort to curb the scores. (Favoring sites and writers that are either outright willing to work along with them or have simply expressed a positive interest in the game.) What's different here is that you heard about it. If that guy didn't start blabbing about it on his twitter, nobody would have made a fuss, and 2k wouldn't have had to make good on it. It's pretty horrible, but it happens, it is a reality. You've probably noticed it happen a few times at least without even realizing it, a big game will have a lot of really positive pre-release reviews and then get ripped to shreds upon its release. (I know some people felt this was particularly noticeable with Homefront, for a recent example.) So reviews are kind of fucked, basically.

I ended up getting this. Fuuuuuuck, guuuuys. It's so pretty. It's soo, sooo pretty. Also, about the Kinect vs. gamepad thing, there appears to be separate scoring requirements for progression based on your choice of control scheme, as well as separate leader boards. Regardless, I don't have a Kinect, though i'm reading all over that it's actually incredibly responsive.

Hey again, Radiant Silvergun topic! Saturn-style fake transparency, fuck yeah! In random shmupping news is this, which looks completely amazing.