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They want you read faces to fish out lies, hence all the elaborate face-scanned acting. So look for them to avoid eye contact, be smiling inappropriately, start crossing their arms, things like that. Once you determine if somebody is lying, the evidence should determine whether you go with lie or doubt. (In that, if you don't have applicable evidence, use doubt.) ^ I've personally kind of had a problem with this game where Phelps will take the discussion in wildly unexpected directions. For example, I think i know a person is lying, but the doubt response spins off in a wildly different direction from what i was expecting, and it gets completely shot down. Had i known the direction they were going in, i probably could have successfully accused them of lying. I guess it's kind of like the Mass Effect wheel in some ways, because prior to making your choice, you're shown only the flavor of the response and not the actual response. You can mitigate this somewhat though, by just accusing everybody of lying all the time and then backing out once you get to the evidence selection screen. The doubt response usually follows the same line of thought and sneaking this preview of the lie response can also help you decide if that's what you need to do instead. (Heh, and when you back out of accusing somebody of lying Phelps always makes these awkward apologies that never cease to crack me up.) Also, the intuition points thing is kind of misrepresented to the player, you get far more of them than the game suggests you will. In addition to the extra points earned on a level-up, they also seem to reset in number at the end of each case, so don't be afraid to use them. I spent most of the game thinking they were far more scarce than they actually are. Heh. Finally, it does seem like there's some cases that can play out in fairly different fashions depending on which clues you fish out of witnesses and what actions you take. (Apparently visiting different locations in different orders will occasionally yield different results.) I don't know though, i feel like LA Noire is a game where replaying it would just reveal where all the moving parts are, in something that initially felt really fluid and natural. The body language thing though, it's definitely there and it's definitely intentional. Once you see what they're doing, it's almost comically easy to fish out the liars. It seems that the actors were probably instructed to specifically be leaving such clues in their acting. (And holy shit, it's so weird seeing the faces of actual recognizable actors all over the place in this game.)

I never played either of those games with any sort of completionist eye, i don't see what would compel it in that case, so i breezed through both of these charming puzzle platformers and had a great time. I don't think the sequel has checkpoints either, but to be honest, i never had to restart in the course of my regular playthrough.

The PSP thread reminded me of this one. P9GQGt1oDSc Not original to the game, it's one of the many licensed songs used in that series, but this one stands out for being the first skin you see in the original one.

I have dead triggers on both my DS lite and my DSi, it seems to be a fairly widespread problem. Seems the suspect culprit is just those systems being designed such that it's easy for pocket lint to work its way into the contacts for the triggers. (My original DS still works fine, despite having been through far more abuse.) If your DS lite's triggers never seized up, you probably don't treat your DS in such a fashion that would cause problems with the DSi. Also, yes, the DSi has no GBA slot. The DSi is a nice little system though.

More generally, I've always found abandoned habitation rather unsettling, though perhaps not for quite the same reasons. Not sure quite how to articulate it, but it's something about how impermanent things are. Seeing photos of an abandoned home just gets me thinking of the people who probably lived there, with all of their hopes and things held dear. Chernobyl ruined a lot of lives. Now i'm feeling all melancholy, blah.

A few comments - In my experience, at least, Patapon is pretty much just hard in general. Trying to focus on keeping the beat while also remembering all the commands while also concocting a strategy is a lot to ask. It looks all cutesy and charming, but it's actually kind of not fucking around. Not a game you can play with divided attention. The Lumines games are really great, probably some of the most fun i've ever had with a block puzzler. Still, while Lumines 2 is generally more fully featured, as sequels tend to be, i personally feel the first game had a much more interesting and well-suited soundtrack. (As you'll find, the music is kind of central to those games.) Wipeout Pulse is an absolutely phenomenal game, probably one of the best Wipeout games. (In fact, for Wipeout HD they pretty much just took Pulse, mixed in some stuff from Pure, and called it a day. Don't mess with what ain't broken.) Let me throw out another recommendation - Killzone: Liberation. Not a series i'm personally at all invested in at all, but this game is interesting, it's a fairly unique top-down shooter. It looks like it would just be some kind of arcade action thing, but it's actually kind of trying to be a pretty in-depth cover-based shooter. Has an odd and fairly convoluted control scheme, but if you can get a handle on what it's trying to do, it's a lot of fun.

Is it wrong to be way more in love with the rainbow cat thing than the obviously very amazing FPS thing?

Well i think it's a flawed argument you're making, because i wouldn't say that those "endless" forests in Zelda are meaningless in the first place, since solving the challenges posed by those environments are the core thrust of the gameplay for that series. Neither are those games particularly vast, aside from Wind Waker, i guess. Nevertheless, It is not really an appropriate comparison for the LA of LA Noire, which is essentially just a backdrop for the stories Team Bondi wants to convey. (A backdrop without the kind of obfuscation and restriction necessary to hide the seams.) Let me make your argument for you though. Shadow of the Colossus. Has a massive, massive environment that is devoid of largely anything, and the game is amazing for it. I don't think it's a bad thing to have a large environment expressly for atmosphere, i absolutely agree that can be used to great effect. Here's the thing though, say you're a developer, you've gone and given the player a sandbox game that is also trying to tell a story, now it's up to you to prevent the player from cocking up your story. The problem here is that LA Noire kind of doesn't, not just for seams around the quest scripting, but also just in trying to maintain a consistent tone for characterization of its protagonist. They sort of try, to be fair, but they don't account for everything, and they actively make it worse in some other ways. That's the kind of stuff i am talking about. Of course i can make the mental distinction between my free-roaming antics and the main story, but they keep trying to hammer it home that Phelps is a complete boyscout. So you get out on those free-roaming roads and you smash through a bunch of cars and nearly run over a couple of pedestrians on you way to solve a single murder that the game is treating as deadly serious, while your partner who is also in the car barely reacts to your reckless driving. Dude, it kind of kills the illusion, there is some really crazy dissonance there. Especially in a game that takes itself so completely seriously, I think they either need to go all the way, carry those things through to their logical conclusions, or really restrict what you can do. You know, but now i really am making a big deal out of nothing. It's a complicated problem faced by a lot of games and LA Noire does enough. I think i'm talking more just about open world designs in general, or maybe just games in general. As games try to tell increasingly detailed narratives with increasingly humanized characters, i find gameplay/story segregation more and more noticeable. I mean, in my game of LA Noire, Phelps has killed like sixty guys in random side-mission things, while every gun battle in the main quest line is still treated with great severity. Games are weird.

After many, many car chases in which having your partner in the vehicle will cause him to automatically lean out the side to try and shoot the tires of the vehicle you're chasing, i just ran one sequence where he wouldn't. Completely arbitrarily, no explanation given. I'm fine with contextual game mechanics, but you should at least be able to have a reasonable understanding of when those systems will come into play. I really, really don't like how LA Noire keeps changing the rules. Also, it occurs to me that LA Noire having that immense open-ended city was likely them setting the ground work for lots of episodic DLC, some of which has already been released or at least revealed. I remember reading interviews with Rockstar North concerning GTA4, about how they could easily add new interiors and quest lines into that game's version of Liberty City, and that all being the basis of the two expansions they did. Rockstar and Bondi probably have similar plans for LA Noire. (This is also more-or-less what Rockstar did with Redemption.) With that in mind, I wonder, do you think they could have had that huge city there, and not had the free-roaming? Really enforce pacing and structure for their narratives? Or would have people responded poorly? I suspect probably the best way they could have handled it would have been to give you a chance to explore between cases, but once you commit to a case, prevent you from just wandering off. I think i would have been more ok with that than how the game actually handles it. Or is it really even an issue? Am i making a big deal out of nothing?

If we're talking mods now, have you ever played some of the old-school HL1 solo-focused mods? The Neil Manke stuff was always pretty cool, like the "They Hunger" mods.

I also didn't mean to suggest that LA Noire is a bad game, i've been finding it pretty incredible. I suppose i'm focusing on the negative elements just because the response everywhere seems to be so intensely positive. You can easily completely ignore the open-world elements, and even if you don't, there's almost nothing for you to do out there, which is why i was questioning this game being built around such a vast environment. I mean, I've also been doing the "hold Y to have your partner drive" thing almost all the time. It even still allows the en-route conversations to play out before just skipping to the destination. Its not that the big city actively detracts from the game, it's more that it's frequently not even a factor. I mean, and you can go out there and muck around, and seemingly very urgent cases will just kind of wait for you to return. There's a bunch of side-missions in which you will rack up a really jarring body count that makes the main quest line seem absolutely restrained by comparison. You can drive like a complete lunatic, and the game implies that you'll be punished for causing chaos, but it only seems to lower your end-of-case "score" as if that really matters. It just feels wildly disconnected from the rest of the game. I think this is a game that is worse for being more than it needs to be, but because you can so easily ignore it, i don't think it truly wrecks the experience at all. It's all just so disjointed, tangential, and unnecessary. It's just weird, i feel like it's probably only there because that is the expectation for a Rockstar-published game. I'm also bothered by how contextual all the various actions are, there often seems to be little to no logic governing what you can and can't do in an action sequence. It seems to be subject completely to the whims of what the story needs to have happen. (For example, sometimes you can hold a gun on a suspect to make them stop running, and sometimes holding a gun on a runner will do nothing. Maybe the character can't be threatened into cooperation, maybe that's the intended justification, but that's never conveyed to you during the action.)

So i've been playing this game for a couple days, and... You know, it's great that they've rendered this massive and accurate facsimile of 1940's LA, but it also seems like a ponderous misallocation of development resources. It's such a linear, focused experience, and having that open world does literally almost nothing to enhance the game. I feel like the game would actually be better if it wasn't there, they'd then have the kind of control over their heavily structured narrative experience that they need to maintain the tone and pace they're going for. There's also a few issues with the facial animation, i find. There seems to be a fairly uniform distribution of triangles over the faces, instead of having a greater level of fidelity at the points of focus like the eyes and the nose and the lips. It creates a sensation that is not unlike viewing a blurry FMV game. Jesus, and every time one of those characters reaches up to scratch their blurry FMV face with their jittery polygon hands, the game just dives straight into the uncanny valley. It's cool technology and everything, but i think this approach needs a few iterations before it will stand up to real scrutiny.

Personally, i just don't have as much to say about HL2. I've already talked those games to death in other venues, and i'm sure other people have too. I don't know that there's really a lot to really bring to the table on that topic. My gripe with how HL2 is balanced is more an issue with how i feel scarcity of supplies should be handled. Specifically, HL2 gives you lots and lots of ammo, but only lets you carry a little of it. Whereas HL1 has fairly generous carry limits, but doles out supplies in a fairly restrained fashion, which is just something i much prefer. I think games are probably harder to balance in that fashion, so i appreciate it more when i see it. HL2 is by no means a badly balanced game, it's just... Heh, Doom taught me to not leave supplies behind, and it really makes me really crazy when i have to. I don't like that kind of arbitrary enforced scarcity, i guess it's a player preference thing. I mean, i don't really see any reason why the overwatch rifle in HL2 has such a low carry limit compared even just to other weapons in your arsenal in that game, other than the obvious reason of it being a weapon that is both powerful and common, and so that's simply how they chose to balance it out. I don't really feel it was maybe the best solution, but that's the one they went with. I just think HL1 is a lot more elegant about that kind of balancing. Wait, what? Research and Development? I am not familiar with this.

Shattered Memories is so great, i would have loved to see more Silent Hill games in that vein.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-ex-catherine/17-4137/ For the people who still have no idea what this game is, this should probably finally clear it up.

To go with the comments about Assassin's Creed 2 that some other people have been making, i remember reading some comments from that game's development team arguing that game's DLC is the content that would have never been ready for the retail release. It was the stuff they cut from the game, it was simply never going to be in the retail release, and in the past it would have never been seen by gamers. The argument was made that DLC is just the avenue through which they can go back and complete it and add it to the game in a way that makes business sense. In this way of looking at it, you're basically paying for an extended or director's cut of the game. I don't know if i personally buy that argument, but it sounds like a fair justification, but in general i'm pretty pro DLC i guess. The thing is i still judge it on a fairly case by case basis. Every developer approaches it in such a wildly different fashion. It's a scheme that is abused in some pretty reprehensible ways, to be sure. (Particularly by japanese developers, i find.) As for the facial animation in LA Noire, i think it looks incredible, but one of the things that has been bugging me about it is the necks. Everybody seems a little disjointed around their necks. (If you've seen behind the scenes footage, you know that all the actors' performances are face-scanned while sitting down and being quite motionless. All that is then stitched to obviously very active and mobile bodies, and it doesn't quite always match up perfectly. It's a little unnerving when you start noticing it.)

Some more specific details about what happened would be interesting to hear, this sounds like a very curious and odd incident. Almost might be worth it for you to inquire further about this on Microsoft's support forums for Live.

God dammit, i did do a search to see if there was a similar topic, but nothing relevant was showing up. Anyways - Yag16MwcV2Q jsGPthUe8Po bQ7ruKexLWI aZniwmKLqDM I just played this game, the soundtrack was very awesome.

Does anybody else pay particular attention to the original music used in the video games you play? Do you find a good soundtrack will stick with you for years after having played a game? If so, hey, provide examples. Youtube links/embeds would be preferred. For me, i've always found the soundtrack for MechWarrior 2 completely unforgettable, it set such a somber and interesting mood for that game, and i've never really heard anything else quite like it. 5V5Ssig2rQo And a few other examples from that soundtrack - So does anybody else have any OST's that have just stuck with them for years? Or maybe not even anything so old, maybe it's more recent.

I am very confused by all of this.

I just finished Ys: Oath in Felghana on the PSP. Took a chance on the game because it looked like a fun snappy action RPG and came away completely in love with the game. Searching for a comparison, it reminds me most of the latter-day Castlevanias, despite the top-down perspective. It's very focused on action and exploration, a lot of elaborate boss fights, and a fucking phenomenal soundtrack. Not a huge game, finished it in a little over twelve hours on normal, but the gameplay is really tight and the challenge is enjoyable. I am probably going to do a new game plus run on a higher difficulty. I would recommend this game. The localized retail disc was only released in North America, but it's apparently available on PSN everywhere.

The Halo games have had pretty good, lengthy life cycles. Halo: CE - Nov 2001 Halo 2 - Nov 2004 Halo 3 - Sept 2007 Halo Reach - Sept 2010 That's a 3 year cycle for the main-line Halo games. If a Halo CE remake materializes later this year as rumored, it will probably be what ODST was to Halo 3, a solo/coop-focused "expansion pack sequel" that isn't meant to replace Reach within the multiplayer community. You're not even counting all the earlier console games, like Big Red One and Finest Hour, it actually used to be worse.

Wow, more Call of Duty, huh? I will be every bit as not-surprised when Microsoft announces their Halo: CE remake later this year. Yes? I assume you actually mean to ask if it's Infinity Ward, which it apparently is, but with how that studio was gutted after the MW2 fiasco, i wouldn't put much stock in that. I've also heard some rumors that Raven Software will have a fairly significant ancillary role in developing MW3, in support of the restructured Infinity Ward.

Jeez, dude. You're conflating different parts of my post.

I feel like continues are contrary to the nature of these games, simply reaching the end isn't the point. You should be striving to beat your own high scores. So if you lose? Log your score, start over, try harder. Egh, I don't know. Bumping up the number of continues for every hour or so of play is probably the best solution, because then it's there for the people who really, really want it, but it still at first encourages them to try and play through without a crutch. I think you either misread what i said or don't realize that MK9 is a 2D fighting game.