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You really want a party of at least four people for Castlevania HD, so if other people are willing to commit to it, i could probably be coaxed into it as well.

Yes, this happens all the time. If you look beyond insular communities of arcade game fans and see how broader audiences react to these things, you will see it happen without fail. People will brute force through on infinite continues to the end of a shooter and wonder why they should have paid 10 dollars for something that takes 40 minutes to finish. (Let alone 40-60 bucks.) "Well now i've seen everything in the game, why would i ever replay it?" is literally the full depth of the argument. Other times it's more the idea that because it's a 2d game, it must have been easier to develop, and should be cheap. Senko no Ronde was ripped apart in the western critical community on grounds like this. It's a top-down 2d game, so clearly it should have been on XBLA for 10 bucks, not a retail release. (This doesn't even make sense, read some of the reviews people wrote about that game, it's completely insane!) You know, but SF4 and the re-emergence of 2D fighting games has changed a lot of this latter perception, there isn't nearly as much ghettoizing of the 2D genres. Scrolling shooters are designed to be difficult and encourage mastery and high-score chasing, so they need to be concise and immaculate, there is no room for shoddy filler content. That's basically it, i don't think people appreciate how much effort goes into making those games perfect. (The good ones, at least.) It looks pretty amazing, a few people i know have been raving about it to me, describing it as Ikaruga meets Castlevania.

Well you have four separate paths through that endgame, which is a lot more than you can say about most games, but yeah... Alright, i guess you're always going to be fighting on that dam, no matter who you side with.

I'll agree with that general sentiment, I think Treasure and Bangai-O are very worthy of support. The thing is, while I think Missile Fury's core mechanics are pretty brilliantly designed and balanced, i've grown to really hate a lot of the level design in the game. Too many stages that revolve around some kind of puzzle-like design, and too many last-second curveballs in already grueling and painful minutes-long battles. I mean, i wouldn't be playing games like this if i didn't love a challenge, i even have a few top-ten finishes on some levels for the game's leaderboards. Seriously though, some of this shit makes it feel like Treasure hates me. Me specifically. This game was designed to spite me, is what it feels like. Heh. Hey, but it has over a hundred stages and a level editor, so it's not hard to find something to like in there. Senko No Ronde is amazing, yes. Strania is just trying to be a more accessible main-stream shooter, more of a familiar old-school design as opposed to bullet hell. It seems to be G-Rev trying to make something that people will actually notice. (People didn't notice, and a lot of the people that did still made the dumb arguments about it being too short and too expensive.)

The stuff with Siegfried and Nightmare is just footage from SC4. Soul Calibur 2 was probably the best-playing game in the series.I am completely unfamiliar with Legends, other than it being the weird motion-controlled spin-off.

It's a space combat sim, it's a relaunch of an old old atari series that was a pioneer of that particular genre. Looks like it might be kind of cool, but not really within the scope of this thread, heh.

Deathsmiles 2X will be available through Games on Demand via Live next week. So yeah, not as an XBLA game, and it won't be sold through retail. It's on Games on Demand for 30 bucks as a "digital import" as part of an initiative from Microsoft and Cave and probably eventually other developers to get more japan-only releases overseas. Really, really very odd.

I find this an odd comment, because the story makes it pretty explicitly clear that your actions on the dam are deciding the fate of the whole region and will have implications beyond. You're setting the balance between the two emergent superpowers of the wasteland, changing the whole power structure of the Fallout world. I mean, that's not exactly a stroll down to the mailbox. Why should every finale devolve into a fate-of-the-world scenario, anyways? In Fallout 3 it was so forced and dumb, none of the characters were doing anything that made any sense.

Huh, ok, I didn't know that. Well i've learned something new.

I played through it again about a year or two back, i remember it holding up really surprisingly well. It didn't destroy my memories of it at all, and it's still one of my favorite games. The only problems i really had with it are problems i had with it when it was new. (I think the form of reticle bloom that Deus Ex implements is ridiculous, and actually that's still my only real complaint about Deus Ex.)

Eh? What role did Microsoft have in Psychonauts? I mean, as i had always understood it, Ed Fries did build up a lot of the relationships that allowed the first X-box to be successful in the marketplace. (Including acquiring Bungie and the rights to Halo.) But what involvement was there with Psychonauts?

Have you ever played it before? It's nothing like the handheld Castlevanias, it's a stage-based loot-grind, there's no narrative or anything. It's a lot of fun, but you really do need a big party for it, and a willingness to play the same levels just over and over and over. (Also, at this point, i imagine anybody you would find still playing it in random matches to just have top-end game-breaking builds.) It was still really cool, it had many different characters from different Castlevania games, all representing wildly different styles of gameplay. (Soma Cruz from the Sorrow games, Alucard from Symphony, etc.) It really is a ton of fun, though personally i had my fill of that game when it came out, and the DLC they released is too much of an investment for me.

Oh hey, Fallout: New Vegas is a game i played. Generally really enjoyed the game, it was well written and well designed. The way the core game systems were rebalanced makes a lot of sense, and addresses a lot of the issues i had with FO3. I don't think the quest design was as strong as in Fallout 3, where it often seemed like Bethesda had accounted for every possibility, and i felt like there was kind of a dearth of actual combat after a while. (Particularly in trying to do a completist run. It feels silly making this complaint, but when you're walking around with twelve weapons in your inventory and you realize the game hasn't made you shoot anything for like ten hours, it feels really weird.) A lot of my love for the game was squandered when i had to brute force through the because the game kept crashing every two minutes. (Which was really just the last straw after having to save scum around so, so many broken quests.) Fallout 3 had a lot of issues, but it wasn't egregiously broken like New Vegas was. (I find it silly that people around the internet seem to think New Vegas is Bethesda's fault though. It's not even their game, it was developed by Obsidian.) So they actually issued a recommendation that people not download the latest patch, but i guess then they didn't even bother to pull that patch? Kind of crazy.

Ed Fries has quite a history, very cool dude. I remember trying out his Halo 2600 game when that was circulating around the gaming blogs, it was pretty awesome.

Oh, hey, Vanquish. This is a game i played. I really wanted to love Vanquish, but i had some problems with the game. Fairly small nit picks, mind you, but enough to keep it from being a great game in my mind. I mean, was anybody else bothered by how seriously disjointed the campaign was? They kept breaking up the flow of the game with cutscenes. You'd play for five minutes, be interrupted by a cutscene, be dropped into a new area that is completely disconnected from the previous one, play for five more minutes, see another cutscene, etc, etc. I came to realize how important something like walking from one battle to the next can be for establishing a sense of place and progression, Vanquish really just felt like a lot of completely arbitrary arcade-style scenarios. (Which, to be fair, seemed to be partly what they were going for, but i think it's at odds with the what the end product actually is.) Man, and a lot of the time the cutscenes were showing you action that wasn't even out of the realm of what the in-game gameplay can do. I found it incredibly frustrating that they kept depicting things that should have been playable. I also thought the weapon upgrade system was incredibly counter-intuitive and dumb, that really, really bothered me. (The only way to upgrade your weapons was to have full ammo in them when collecting pick-ups, therefore, you cannot upgrade any weapon you actually use. Dumb.) I mean, small issues though, i did really love the pace and style of that game. Once you get a handle on the mechanics and how they meant for the game to be played, it's just complete madness, it's really amazing. Never would have imagined that a cover based shooter could be so fast and frantic. Would love to see those game systems iterated on in a more fully developed sequel, but that probably won't happen.

Oh, well then i'm very disappointed, i guess.

Amicably resolving disagreements without descending into name calling and swearing fits? I am pleased to be here.

I was always a little bummed that Tribes seems to be the only part of the Metaltech series that people care about. What about the Earthsiege/Starsiege games? Or Cyberstorm? Anyways, not disparaging Tribes, just being grumpy about old games i miss.

I prefer hacking mini-games that don't take you out of the flow of the game world. The problem i have with hacking in BioShock is that you can run up to a stunned turret, initiate the hack and... Ok? So now you're just standing in front of a live turret casually taking your time playing pipe dream? The way games like System Shock 2 and BioShock 2 handle the hacking may not be as deep or as "fun", but they're risky and balanced within the context of the other game systems. BioShock 2 as compared to BioShock 1 makes hacking significantly less easy to abuse. Enemies are still active while you're trying to crack some security, you can't just magically pause the battle and take your time. There's risk involved, and it makes it something you have to think about instead of it being a catch-all solution, which i find much more rewarding and interesting than simply having a charming mini-game associated with it. Also, since we're generally talking about interacting with computer interfaces in a game space, i wish more games did what Doom 3 did. Now I know, a lot of you probably hate Doom 3, but the game certainly wasn't without merit. One such merit, specifically, is that Id did some really, really cool things with simulated in-game computers. You didn't click an object and have a fat ugly UI pop up in your face, you actually interacted with computers as objects in the normal game space. That always struck me as incredibly cool and immersive.

I wasn't as bothered by it as some people were, but i got on board with that game a little after the fact, so the surprise was already common knowledge. The only part of that game i really didn't like was the volcano finale.

Oh, i think they really have to, i don't think they have a choice. The "720" will be a Blu-Ray system, it has to be. I think Microsoft really wants to move to an all-digital distribution scheme, but for a number of reasons, that isn't going to pan out. The next console generation will still need physical media, and blu-ray is the only viable format right now. The 360 though? The current 360 hardware is already too entrenched, they can't just slap a new disc drive on it and expect it to take. (Hey, remember when they totally already tried that? Yeah.)

I think 3D could be a brilliant aid for certain kinds of games, absolutely. I reasonably sure i even read an interview with Miyamoto where he expressed the value of being able to truly gauge distances while making jumps in a 3d platformer. As for Pilot Wings, i had some problems with that experience, in that the higher 3d depth settings were really hard on my eyes. It's that you have a big foreground object sitting right in front of the camera, with especially distant vistas immediately behind it. I don't know how to describe it other than it's like walking around holding your hand five inches in front of you eyes at all times. (Pilotwings situating the targeting reticle for the shooting stages into the depth of the 3d is pretty brilliant though.) I feel like developers have a lot to learn about stereoscopy in games, and my experience with Pilotwings has me worried about other 3rd-person perspective games on the 3DS. (To be fair though, i did find Pilotwings still completely playable with the 3d at lower levels, though it's also the only game i've played on the system i find i have to turn down.) The autostereoscopy shown on the 3DS though, i'm pretty sold on it. I do feel like there is value in having real depth perception in a 3D game, but it has to be like it is here on the 3DS, it has to be unobtrusive.

According to the game's wiki page, Rayman 2 has been on... deep breath... Nintendo 64, PC, Dreamcast, Playstation, Playstation 2, Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, PSN, and iOS. (And Gameboy Color?) It's a great game though, and some people are saying the 3DS port is one of the best versions of it. I never did finish Rayman 2 when i rented it on the Dreamcast, I'd like to hear more about how the 3DS port is. It's not busted in any really egregious or upsetting way, is it? Is there anything noticeably wrong?

The thing that has me on edge about the game was reading that basically all of the in-game goals equate to standing around on a spot while a progress bar ticks down, regardless of your class or the nature of the objective. There are more interesting ways to do objective-oriented MP, you know? I hope i'm wrong though, i hope the game is great.

The 3 disc thing is brutal, but it's going to happen more and more with the 360. Rage is the next game that will ship on multiple discs for the 360. There was also Mass Effect 2 and Dead Space 2 at two discs, and then Lost Odyssey at four... I'm sure there were others. (There was that rumor about Microsoft testing a new DVD format for the 360, stripping out all the copy protection garbage data to free up a couple extra gigs, but...) LA Noire though, this game sounds amazing. I was reading there aren't just obvious game-over states, if you screw up an interrogation, you simply have to figure out the necessary information somewhere else. I'm sure there's narrow limits to how far that can go, but it all sounds very cool.