Sno

As a big Metroid fan, Trilogy is not my favorite version of the Prime games. It introduces a couple log-related bugs into Corruption and changes a whole lot of things in the first game. A bunch of visual effects are pulled out of Metroid Prime for whatever reason, stuff like the 3d water ripples and some other cool little touches are missing. It's fun playing those games with the motion control scheme from Corruption though, that element works great, and the second game was actually rebalanced and is much more enjoyable because of it. There are some bosses in Echoes that are a little bit fucked in its original version. As for Other M. I really like that game, i think it's generally been underrated, but it does makes some pretty offensive and ruinous choices for Samus' characterization.

Heeey, those rope-swinging gimmicks were really impressive back then! Like all of Valve's later games, they also patched the ever-loving shit out of those original "GoldSource" games. I'm almost certain what you're talking about is probably an artifact of later patches, because i don't remember anything like that at all. I just know those games were updated continuously for years. Valve is weird like that. (I actually find this kind of annoying and revisionist. There's a difference between fixing what was broken or imbalanced, and just constantly tweaking and prodding needlessly. Just look at how much TF2 has changed, if you liked the original version of TF2, that is a game you literally cannot play anymore.) Half-Life must have been one of the first games that i was determined play through on higher difficulties without cheating. I mean, outside of console games, which usually didn't have cheats. Still, it was a hugely engrossing experience for my younger mind, and was kind of the first time i realized how much of a game's experience is that sense of risk and reward. So does this just mean that people took longer to play those games, but they weren't necessarily any shorter or longer? I'm not sure what to take from what you've said. Like, collectively, are we all just that much better at figuring out FPS games? The other angle to look at it would be - Reviews grossly inflating the potential duration of a game, which totally still happens all the time.

^ This is what Serious Sam 2 was, and a lot of people hated it. Everything was so garishly bright and colorful, and the dumb doom-inspired monsters were replaced with like... giant wind-up mechanical bulls and all these weird toy-like creatures. It kind of went from being a loving parody of old-school FPS's to being a parody of itself. I've read a few interviews with the Croteam guys where they express as much, and that's where the new look is coming from. More doom, less nerf. (Since i'm bitching about Serious Sam 2, It also showed very obvious signs of having been concurrently developed for the first X-box, with narrow and linear levels that were entirely too small for what they were trying to do. Really disappointing follow-up to the original games, which are still among my favorite FPS's.)

This is kind of what i was talking about earlier, there's enough in there that you can work together some fun theories, but it's important enough to the story that there should be a more concrete answer instead of all of those games just kind of ignoring that Xen ever happened. For what it's worth, i also support the Combine slaves theory, that works the best for the overall story, i feel. I suspect the role of the Xen aliens in Valve's story bible probably changed dramatically over the course of HL2's development, but the current permutation of events does strongly support a reading that the Xen aliens had also been enslaved by the Combine. It's just frustrating that there's really nothing in the game to just frickin` confirm it, it feels so much like a closed chapter in the story that there's no reason to still be so vague about it. So you're onto the Gearbox add-ons next? Opposing Force i think might be one of my favorite expansion packs for any game, it's really, really great. (I think it was Gearbox's first game too.)

Fair enough, point taken. Well first off, i just want to make absolutely sure we're clear on this, there's three games. The First Encounter, The Second Encounter, and Serious Sam 2. I'm just laying that out like that since you're saying you're an outsider to the series. I know a lot of people refer to Second Encounter as Serious Sam 2, when it's more accurately the second half of the first game. (Also, Serious Sam 2 is really quite disappointing.) But the point i'm making - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qT3xPQbMJd4 Serious Sam is not exactly drowning in color. At all. So maybe somebody wants to go "Well Second Encounter has all those awesome jungle levels and stuff" and yes, it does. It also still has a lot of desert environments. So hey, you know what? I bet Serious Sam 3 will probably be the same way. More than anything else though, i think i'm just reacting to the "needs moar color" argument, which always kind of makes me want to pull out my hair.

It actually looks a lot like Banjo Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts. Except... Fucking insane. I want to play this.

I just finished Bulletstorm. It was good, better than i was expecting. An entertaining solo shooter.

I think it might be more accurate to say Ultima Underworld is one of the most influential games of all time, as more or less the immediate predecessor to System Shock. System Shock 2 though, personally, my favorite game. So much love for Looking Glass and Irrational. As for those games being on GoG, the problem with that is that EA holds the rights to Shock, so just like all those amazing old Bullfrog and Origin games, Shock is just simply a series we'll never see on a service like GoG. So boo hiss.

Stalker is so open-ended, i don't think it's really a good example of this. Cryostasis i haven't played, though i do mean to eventually. Metro 2033 though, actually, yeah. Remembering it now, it did have a lot of very obvious loading screens, but it did pretty rigidly adhere to its perspective and seamless progression for the duration of its narrative, didn't it? Edit: Ok though, but so we're on the same page, what then would we describe as a Valve-like experience? For me, it's the rigid adherence to the first-person perspective, it's progression through the narrative with as few apparent seams as possible, it's story-telling via heavily scripted story setpieces and loads of context through subtle environmental details. All in a linear and focused framework. I think Half-Life might have been one of the first FPS's i played that was so heavily just kind of... Point A to B, instead of having big sprawling self-contained levels to explore. That's probably the part of HL's legacy that i am least happy about. (*Cough*CoD*Cough*) So, you know, i don't think it's right to just completely write of the CoD comparison, i do think CoD actually owes a fair bit to Half-Life. You know? Half-Life was all about those heavily scripted setpiece events, and so is CoD. CoD is loaded with level breaks though, you keep jumping around between small 30 minute battles, there's no sense of there being a journey like there is with all the Half-Life games.

Oh man, this was a really phenomenal podcast, i absolutely love this kind of behind-the-scenes stuff.

If you really want to try and argue that Half-Life was the first story-driven first-person shooter, you're just wrong. Period. Even if we're not talking elaborate first-person RPG's like System Shock, there's still games like Dark Forces that predate HL by as much as three years. (Dark Forces has two sequels that each on their own still predate Half-Life.) These are not games with simple info-dump text screens like Doom, these have elaborate fully-constructed narratives that are conveyed through cutscenes and numerous story events within the levels themselves. (System Shock basically pioneered the audio log gimmick that is to this day all over the damn place.)

If anybody wants to add me on Live, just send me a private message and we'll sort it out. Maybe. We'll play Virtual On or something. But probably not.

Haaah, i remember Zone 66, that was cool. How about Major Stryker?

I don't know that i ever heard that, but it did have a lot of weird easter eggs.

I feel like maybe you missed out on some of the fun with the way you watched the show, but all the same you probably wouldn't have given it a chance otherwise. If somebody is willing to commit to watching the whole series though, i don't see why they wouldn't want to watch it through from the start. It's not exactly an especially long series either, it's not a huge investment of time. (Relatively speaking.) You know, and i don't know if you're giving it enough credit. It was kind of a celebratory reinvention and reconstruction of those kind of fun idealistic super robot archetypes, after years and years of sort of darker and deconstructive mecha shows. So it's big, and it's dumb, and hilarious, and it keeps surpassing itself to ever more impossible degrees.

Ever played Raptor: Call of the Shadows? That was an awesome game, still think it's one of the best shmups i've played on the PC. It was weird too, with it's open-ended progression and huge health bar. Earning cash instead of a score to slowly upgrade your ship, with an immense number of upgrades to choose from. Loved that game. GoG has an updated version for sale, but i've heard mixed things about it, it apparently has a number of annoying issues that weren't present in the original DOS version. Maaaan, i think i might spend a couple days diving through old games now. Heh.

Hah! I run into this more than i'd care to admit. I had a copy of Okami i bought on release that i didn't play until just before Okamiden was released.

Vimes... No, dude... You shouldn't recommend something like that for any kind of arc-driven series, even if it is just crazy dumb fun. A major, major part of what makes the insanity of those final episodes so completely memorable is how far the characters have come from the start of the series. TTGL is a series that just keeps one-upping itself at every turn. I... I... No, you absolutely shouldn't start with the end of the show, that's a terrible idea. No. No. No. I would recommend trying to keep a level head about the series though, there's a lot of hyperbole that has been spewed about it, given how massively memetic it went on the internet, and it does lead some people to have needlessly elevated expectations. I mean... Gainax made a really fun and exciting super robot show, you might have a lot of fun, and it probably won't change your life. Can you keep that in perspective? Heh. If you've also managed to avoid spoilers, stick to that. It is an arc-driven series, and the plot does swerve in some unexpected directions.

I don't consider myself a budget gamer, i have to have things when they're new. Heh. I don't think that one specifically ever came out in Europe, but the Aleste series was apparently pretty long-running, it's certainly possible that one of them did. Genuine copies of those games apparently fetch quite handsome eBay prices. Man, 16 bit shmups were rad as shit. Thunder Force III on the Genesis always stood out in memory as a spectacular game, and i always had a soft spot for Axelay, despite its flaws. (Its flaws being its slightly jacked up vertical mode-7 stages.) ^ Axelay was famously the last game developed for Konami by Treasure's founding members. A fact that surprised the hell out of me, learning about it many, many years after having played Axelay as a kid. - An awesome horizontal Axelay stage. - A not as awesome vertical Axelay stage.Now i'm just nerding out.

It sounds like these guys have a good grasp on what they need to do, they're talking up a lot of the right things. The stuff he's saying about trying to find a balance between the two extremes of the genre... (Though I... Wouldn't really consider Virtual On a mech game, it's essentially a fighting game.) Some of the details about how they're balancing it i find interesting, having boosting/dodging/jumping limited by a fuel gauge, and them playing around with recovery frames to discourage abuse of the jump. When i first saw Hawken, i was afraid it was just going to be something like Mech Assault, but it sounds better and better. I still want to see more details on what they're doing for mech lab elements though, it's obvious from the trailers that at least the weapons loadouts are customizable.

Yeah it does, if you over charge. The issue was that in HL: Source, the recoil specifically would kill you, not the overcharge. It was a really annoying bug that rendered the weapon kind of unusable. Edit: Man, am i crazy? Did nobody else have any problems with HL: Source?

I remember this, Half-Life seemed like such a splendidly balanced game. It always really bothered me that HL2 seemed so much less careful about balance, simply giving your weapons extremely low carry limits for ammo instead of carefully restricting what it was giving you. XEEEEEEN. I couldn't understand it at the time, how a game could go from being one of the best things i had ever played, to just... becoming completely unrecognizable and awful in the span of like a few minutes. I played through Half-Life many times, and often would just stop at the big teleporter chamber. Whenever i tried to play Xen, i felt like i was breaking the game just constantly, working myself into positions where i kept thinking that it couldn't possibly be what the designers had actually intended for me to do. Nnnnngh... I guess the best advice i would have for Xen is to take it slow, think about your actions several moves in advance, and try to appreciate the atmosphere more than the game design. (Because really, Xen looks and sounds amazing.) Great, that's awesome, i'm glad to hear that was at least fixed. It seemed so glaring, like they just didn't care. I remember playing HL: Source several times over the course of a few years and being increasingly frustrated about that bug never being dealt with. (I'm certain it wasn't just my PC, or a specific install of the game, those runs were all on different rigs.)

I think Gradius V is only main-series game that doesn't have any Moai heads, but... God dammit, it's just so good. One of my favorite Treasure games. Gradius Collection is very ace, innit? I think i have a fairly solid collection of shmups, and have at least played many more, but i have to draw the line at imports. I just can't justify spending that much money and going through that much trouble for it. My interests are too diverse to focus so much of my resources on any one thing. Wii Virtual Console introduced me to a lot of older shmups i had never heard of, was a really amazing tool for me. Honestly, and i genuinely kind of appreciated have a legitimate avenue for showing some of that stuff support in a way that is kind of "hey, maybe some of that money will get to the right place." (The VC was the first time i had played Sin & Punishment, and sales of that VC release specifically spurred on Sin and Punishment 2, which was also a really phenomenal game. VC releases also introduced me to a lot of things i really wasn't familiar with, games like the "Of Thunder" games, the Star Soldier series, the Aleste games. Amazing stuff.) ^ Musha Aleste is a game that kind of blew my mind, for being such a deep and fast-playing earlier shmup from 1990. ( .)And the 360, for whatever reason, has been amazing. It's just that for every one shmup that is released here, like three more come out in Japan. (For all the shmups that just came out here on XBLA in the last couple weeks, just as many retail shmups were released in Japan.) You know, but we somehow ended up with all the Raiden releases here*, and a ton of other cool things. That Raiden Fighters Aces collection is absolutely amazing. Raiden IV was really fantastic too, so much improved over III, a solid return to form. Really, and XBLA, getting so much love from companies like G. Rev and Cave and Treasure. * - Me forgetting that i'm talking to international people. "Here" is Canada.

I think it's probably one of the coolest things i've ever seen, it's amazing, i love it so much. (Shares a lot of talent with FLCL, so that is kind of an indication of the tone.) Don't watch the dub, the american voice actors are largely unable to do the hot-blooded antics justice.

Hey, don't take it the wrong way, i'm not bitching you out for it, i don't care. I saw the first few episodes of Steins Gate on Crunchyroll, which is all that has aired thus far, it seems pretty cool. Also, with FLCL and NGE in there, i hope you've also seen TTGL. Heh.