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[C] - Control. Uhhh, not really sure what it'll end up being, but it seems to be people using their "futures" as collateral in crazy gorgeous technicolor summoning battles, with a lot of ponderous naval-gazing concerning money and banking. It's very weird, but it really seems like it could be very cool.

So i was joking about it, but i did actually end up playing some Gradius V again, heh. Nnnnnngh, that game is so good, probably the best game in that series, i think. (And it's a Treasure game! Treasure made Gradius V.) The thing that always rubbed me the wrong way about Gradius was how difficult continuing was, with all power-ups lost and checkpoint restarts. Later in those games, a single death could end your run, there was almost no point in having additional lives at all. Gradius V lets you respawn at the point of death and try to grab your lost options before they disappear from the screen, continuing is a less painful thing, and yet even with these concessions it's still regarded as one of the hardest Gradius games. Heh. If there's a complaint, it's the fact there are no Moai heads anywhere in that game. Found a couple random youtube replays of some of the coolest stages in Gradius V - That second one i think is a beautiful example of shmupping game design, i haven't ever seen a level like that in a shmup. Lots of really amazing stuff in that game, so much love for Treasure. (If you're curious, i think the other best Gradius game is probably Gaiden, which i think has only been released outside of Japan via the PSP Gradius Collection, which is a thing i actually have. Huzzah. .)

well i'm just saying that it was guaranteed to be an important high-traffic period for PSN.

^ This man seems to be into the moe animes. Anyways... Hey, let me recommend something current that looks cool. I don't know what the world-wide availability is though, if that's blocking any of you, apologies. So that's an official funimation simulcast of a new series, and that youtube channel will be updating weekly with new episodes if anybody is interested.

Seriously though, this has to have been timed to coincide with those releases. It was one of the biggest weeks for the PS3 in a long time, with two PS3-favoring versions of huge, incredibly successful games, and a proper sequel to one of Sony's old standbys being developed its original creators.

Any of you folks keep up with currently airing animes? A lot of legitimate simulcasts these days.

Hailing from Canada, and i'd like to keep it closer to 500, but hopefully no more than a thousand. I understand a really solid 500 dollar rig shoould be fairly feasible with the current market? (Which feels crazy to me.) I want to go from the ground up, all this stuff is too old to salvage now. I'd also like to stick with AMD and Nvidia parts, just more familiar territory to me. (Which is to say, that was my last build.)

Not even just that, all-girl moe fighting games are surprisingly common. ( just came out on PSN, or... would have... I guess...)Most of it is really very harmless, but some of the things like that are scandalous as shit, yo. I mean, and i have a pretty high tolerance for a lot of real awful and real wrong things, not easily offended, and beggars can't be choosers, right? Not exactly a lot of options for shmupping in the west. You know, but when you're just into something for the gameplay mechanics, being beat over the head with somebody's weird fetish is really uncomfortable, especially when said fetish has so many incredibly uncomfortable parallels to pedophilia. Hey, so Deathsmiles came in a big box, i still have that box lying around because i can't bring myself to throw anything out. So it's kind of hiding around here, and I don't want to ever explain that box, that is not the kind of artwork you can explain to friends and family. Jaaapaaaaaaan!

Oh that's it, the gate has been opened. This thread? Nothing but dirty pictures now. Heh. Shit, but the thing is, these games seem to be the ones that are selling the best, even in North America and Europe. I know a lot of people who knew absolutely nothing about scrolling shooters or Cave, didn't even REALIZE what kind of game Deathsmiles was, were only super interested in it because of the gothic loli angle. The game ended up selling like a hundred thousand copies outside of Japan, twice what it did in Japan! So yeah... Expect more moe girls in your shmups, be made to feel like the guy who tries to argue "Well i read Playboy for the articles."

Konami is going to make me feel like a horrible person by releasing Otomedius Excellent in the US. Nnnngh, maybe i'll just play Gradius V again.

Huuuuuh. I was just searching to see if there was already a conversation about Double D, and here i am looking at a bunch of SS3 screenshots i've never seen before. Man, i think it looks phenomenal. Are you too focused on the ruins to notice all the lush green vegetation and the bright blue sky? Or perhaps your memories of the original two games are foggy. (First Encounter is nothing but desert environments, dude.) This game looks much more in line with the originals, i would say "pulling a Serious Sam 2" is exactly what they're trying to avoid. That game had a very off-putting glossy, toy-like aesthetic to everything. Giant wind-up toys instead of goofy doom-inspired monsters. (Nnnngh, and all the small arenas frustratingly constrained by countless invisible walls.)

So this week on XBLA, it's... Not really a shmup, but still from Cave, . Looks like an amusing diversion, it'll only be five bucks, and profits from it will go to disaster relief in Japan. I think it looks fun, i'll probably get it, good cause and all.There also is an actual side-scrolling shmup on XBLA this week too, a game i hadn't heard of it, apparently out of the doujin scene. . Looks a whoooole lot like Deathsmiles to me, with some slightly different mechanics, and not nearly as frantic.^ Speaking of which, Deathsmiles was, against all odds, apparently actually rather successful in North America, enough that Cave is going to be localizing its sequel as well. Still not the Cave games i want to see released here, but i played Deathsmiles on a whim and came away from it feeling... Well... Really dirty, but also really, really enjoying it. Cave makes great shooters, surprise. Anyways, it seems like the sequel will probably be on XBLA, since it looks like Cave might be self-publishing it. ^ Still on Deathsmiles, the US version of that game rather infamously had all of its slowdown "fixed" for the localization. (Whether it was Aksys or Microsoft or Cave itself isn't really clear.) It took months, but Cave recently released a title update that patches it all back in, bringing the game back in line with its intended level of difficulty. If you're not deeply at odds with the gothic loli aesthetic, i really recommend it, it's a very, very entertaining and actually pretty accessible bullet hell game with a lot of content. Anyways... next week is Bangai-O: Missile Fury on XBLA. Fruit powered mechas, hurrah!

The high definition models only work on the original Half-Life and Blue Shift. Also, unless i remember wrong, it will also work on Opposing Force for the specific relevant models not original to that game, like the Barneys. I might totally be making that up though. It very specifically does not work for Half-Life Source though. (If i remember correctly, it's because none of those "HD" Blue Shift models were rigged for rag dolls, which is something Valve had to do to all the original models when porting HL1 to Source.) If you've got that all accounted for and they still weren't showing up... Uh... God, i don't know, it's been so long since i played those. I think i had to setup the game to launch with a command line through Steam. According to the link you provided, you don't seem to need to do that anymore though. I actually haven't really used Steam in a long time, heh. Edit: Oh, hey, but yeah. You say you only have HL: Source, the model pack won't work then, yeah.

Oh hey, can i jack this thread for my own problems? The computer i have now is... seven... seven years old. It is too old. It is also dying, it has cancer, very sad. Now... I used to be fairly savvy with this stuff? Kind of, i guess? I used to always build my own gaming PC's and stuff, and when i built this PC, it was very top-end and future proofed. It only really started topping out at Crysis, and since everything after that took several steps back, it was fine for a long time. This thing is failing though, slowly and surely. And... I find that i have no idea what kind of computer i should be building now. All my savvy has left me, i'm completely lost, too many console games in the interim. I keep putting it off, but i desperately need to build a new PC. So basically - I'm looking at building a mid-range low-cost PC. Heeeeeeeeelp.

I think you're missing the point here, it's not some kid jacking your account and buying a bunch of DLC, somebody lifted a ton of personal information from their servers. Just because it hasn't already happened doesn't mean it won't. Your information is potentially floating around out there, waiting to be exploited. You're going to want to AT LEAST change your password. (And if you used that same password for any other services, change those too.) This is important to keep in mind, we don't know the extent of the breach. For all we know, they might have ended up with almost nothing, or they might have gotten everything. No way to know. The fact Sony wigged out and pulled the whole service off line probably indicates that it was a serious intrusion. The fact that they pulled it off line also suggests they may have stopped said intrusion while it was happening. The reality is that nothing on the internet is really very secure at all. If somebody wants to get at something, they'll find a way. So unless it comes out that Sony was doing something extraordinarily bone-headed with how they're managing their customers' security, i wouldn't be leaping to put a lot of blame on them. It's more important that the guilty parties be tracked down, stuff like this shouldn't be allowed to pass.

Q-uQWNd540I Is this sufficiently comical for this thread, or am i doing it wrong?

Shit, it's been a long time since i played it, but i know i was really, really upset about it. Heh. There were just lots of little scripting bugs that seemed to crop up only in that version of the game, the physics are all kinds of wrong. (The gauss rifle's secondary attack has recoil, and in the Source port, that recoil kills you.) It just seemed really, really lazy and haphazard. Not unplayable, just... Kind of a worse version of a great game. Maybe some of those things were eventually patched? Though i remember reading something to the effect that Valve had no plans of doing so, since HL:Source was conceived as mostly just a tech demo and a bonus for fans.

Claims were issued on behalf of Anon that this was not part of their protest attacks, but... Anon isn't exactly a unified group.

Don't forget the rampant PSP piracy. This is really disgusting though, this current situation. I want to see Sony go after the people who caused this.

Dude, yes, those ArtStyle games are freaking great. Which ones have you played? Just those two? That ArtStyle series is wonderful though, even on the Wii. Cubello off of Wii-Ware is i think maybe one the raddest block-matching puzzle games i've ever played. Also, if we're going to talk DSi-Ware briefly, also let me strongly endorse X-Scape. ( ) At a basic level, it's like old-school Atari Battlezone, except built around that is a large sprawling open-ended world and a quest system. It is generally gorgeous and amazing. It should have been sold as a retail game, more people would have played it, nobody would have complained they weren't getting enough content for their money.I'm also super fond of . Portable bullet-hell with randomized stages and a fun scoring system.To tie this back into the 3DS, these are DSi-Ware games you should probably check out on your 3DS once the eShop launches.

As long as you're aware of it, at least. It's not that it's outright broken, you can usually play it start to finish without incident, but it kind of carelessly breaks and changes a lot of small little things. I'm mostly just advocating that you be aware of this, so as not to conflate your experience on Half-Life Source with that of the original game. Blue Shift is pretty flimsy, but it's also short, not a huge investment. (Of time, i mean.) Opposing Force is genuinely really, really great though. Blue Shift also has that "HD model pack" which Valve actually does support in Steam. It doesn't work with Half-Life source, but it does work with the add-ons and vanilla Half-Life. I don't remember how you force Steam to download and install it though, you used to have to do some silly stuff with to make it work, but it's actually built into those Steam versions. At least that was how it was when i last tried, i don't know if it's still like that. Mostly just saying that if you want to use that model pack, it's out there, and you can probably find out how to install it pretty easily. The model pack isn't necessarily even an improvement, just a matter of taste. If you want a slightly higher-poly version of Half-Life, there's an actual official option for it.

Ohnononono. I'm not saying anything like that, I actually adore Deadly Premonition. I'm more just generally expressing dislike for Destructoid. Heh.

Come on, this isn't an argument for wanting to have plot shoved down my throat, I'm just saying I don't think there's really enough in those games for one to realistically be able to draw such conclusions about what are significantly important events in the first game. That this fan speculation was eventually given a shrug and a "why not?" on a fan wiki is immaterial to the point I'm making. I mean, all those "hints" the Vortigaunts drop can be taken to mean literally almost anything, it's the kind of vague speak you can go back to when you have a solidified story plan and say "See, we knew what we were doing all along, we're awesome!" I'm not arguing against Valve's story-telling devices, i've been arguing for that in most of my comments. I also just think Valve shouldn't have been so deliberately vague about the things that tie HL1 to HL2, and i've always kind of suspected it came out that way because of how radically HL2 changed over the course of its development.

Actually looks like there's going to be a fair amount of shovelware in the next month or two, but that's no fun... Uhh... Yeaaah... The 3DS is going to be pretty dead for a couple months in NA and Europe, sadly. There's a Raving Rabbids platformer that looks kind of fun, but apparently really isn't, and some kind of weird puzzle shooter thing that looks utterly incomprehensible to me. Other than those, i don't know that there's anything interesting in the next few months until some of the bigger Nintendo stuff finally starts hitting. Oh, also more fighting games. DoA Dimensions and BlazBlue: Continuum Shift II are supposed to be out by the end of may. If DoA is your thing, that should be pretty rad, it's a brand new game built off of DoA4. If Blaz is your thing, you're better off just buying Continuum Shift for the 360/PS3 and getting all the patches and DLC, because the handheld update wont have the near-perfect online play. (Though i think i'll probably get it, because i love that game and wouldn't mind have a portable version of it.)

You also do find a couple Overwatch corpses without their helmets, and then there's the whole deal with the Stalkers. So... Does it bother anybody else that HL2 has only the most tenuous connections to the original game? The Combine are fairly explicitly established to not be the same collective of aliens that you were fighting in the first game, so like... The conclusion of that original game is really left hanging in the air. What the hell is Nihilanth? There's never been a concrete answer, and that kind of sucks. I know the fans have a few theories about it, I know there's some vague hints in that first game and again in the sequel, but that's not a clear answer. It's also not like it is with the G-man, it's not an ongoing mystery. HL2 pretty cleanly began a new story in that universe and, outside of a line of dialogue or two from a Vortigaunt, HL2 never really even alluded to Nihilanth having been a crazy thing Half-Life totally did in a past game. Nobody going "Hey Gordon, remember when you murdered a giant testicle spider and shot a rocket into that giant fetus' brain hole?" I always wanted some freaking closure on that game, and HL2 never had it. I mean, the most obvious answer is that at some point, they dramatically reworked their story bible for the sequel and they don't want to deal with whatever story discrepancies that introduced, but that doesn't give me a satisfying answer! Christ, no wonder JJ Abrams and Valve are such mutual fans. /end silly rant