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Few things: - I'm not sure being crouched speeds up gathering as a whole, but it noticeably speeds up carving. It's a good way to ensure you get all the available drops out of a large monster corpse, especially if you're still being harassed by minor monsters. Just make sure you come to a complete stop before trying to crouch, otherwise you'll dodge, have to reposition, and just end up wasting time instead of saving it. - Keep in mind that focusing attacks on specific areas of the monster can actually wound the monster in different ways, altering its behavior and even causing additional drops on the ground. Also, the monster also has a stamina bar of its own, so when it starts berserking, usually at the mid-point of the fight, start playing more cautiously and move to capitalize on the moment it exhausts itself. - Into the mid and late game hunts, especially on the vastly more difficult multiplayer hunts, bombs and traps are essential for giving your party openings to attack. They are required parts of your battle plans, items are always important. Also, paintballs wear off after a while, try to hit the monster with a new one every few minutes or so. If it limps off to go try and restore its own health and you waste a few minutes trying to find it, the fight will be dragged out for significantly longer. I'd wager that, through asking the questions you've been asking, you're probably already better prepared to play online than most people would be. Still, couple things from my own multiplayer experiences: 1. Don't try to be a hero. If you take damage, go heal. (Safest way is to step out into another area briefly.) Make sure you have lots of healing items going in to facilitate this. If you don't, you can heal by using the bed back at the spawn point, but be extremely mindful and communicative about those absences. The central issue behind all of this is that each mission will have a set number of respawn tickets - i believe you can see how many remain on the quest info screen - and when they're gone, the mission is failed. (Even if people are landing the final hits on a crippled monster scrambling to flee to its nest.) 2. Be considerate and mindful with your attack arcs. You don't exactly inflict friendly damage, but you can knock allies around. Worst case scenario, you could put them directly in harms way, potentially getting them killed by the monster. More likely, you'll just interfere with their carefully orchestrated attacks. (Messing up a long sword user's combo, for example, can be a super shitty thing to do.) ^ To go with this, everybody seems to love playing blademasters, but things can turn chaotic when everybody is dog-piling to attack the monster. Having one or two people play gunners neatly avoids these problems. Keeping some gunner armor and a bow/bowgun around as a situational alternative is a very valuable build to keep in your back pocket. Also, new in 4 and 4U, is that when somebody mounts the monster, if you keep attacking it, you can end up knocking them off. So hang back and give them a chance to successfully stagger it.

Well, seeing as Koji Igarashi isn't with Konami anymore, i wouldn't expect it any time soon.

Wind Waker and Majora are definitely the two 3D Zeldas i would most want to recommend, they are terrific games. I understand the revelatory impact Ocarina had, and it has a well-earned place in the history of video games, but i think if the series is taken holistically and the game is looked at in the same context as Majora and Wind Waker, it feels incredibly stale next to the latter games' vivid creativity. I think Twilight Princess is a terrible game, i think it feels rudderless, like it's Nintendo actually doing the thing people always try to accuse them of doing with the series, playing it safe with a repeated design. I mean, and people give Skyward Sword shit for its controls, but people are definitely forgetting how much leash they gave Twilight Princess for being a Wii launch game. I went back to play it after playing Skyward Sword and literally could not believe how much worse the control was, i was stunned that Nintendo conned everybody with such miserably implemented motion control. (Still, with that all said, i also think it probably has some of the best characters in the entire series, and i sort of wish they were in a better game.) Now i'm going to say that I think Skyward Sword is actually kind of super underrated, that it has some terrific "dungeon" design and that it probably has the best 1 to 1 motion control Nintendo is ever going to wrangle out of the wii remote. (Which is to say that it's kind of still broken, but intermittently brilliant.) Their impressionistic distance blur is incredibly gorgeous too, i love that aesthetic and i hope Nintendo plays with it more in other products. Skyward Sword is, however, unfortunately the absolute height of Nintendo hand-holding, and additionally has an incredibly drab and lifeless overworld area. (The sky, specifically. The ground areas are, for all intents and purposes, dungeons.)

The trick about a well designed metroidvania is that you shouldn't have to back track, the environment design should be pulling you along with forward momentum in big loops that only eventually fold back on themselves. Anyways, the next logical place to go is Symphony of the Night and the GBA/DS Castlevanias. Symphony of the Night has had a wide variety of re-releases over the years, the GBA games are conveniently all available on the Wii U virtual console, and the DS games are... Still only available as DS carts. My personal picks would be SOTN and the two Sorrow games. (One of which is a GBA game, and the other is a DS game.)

None of the weapons are super tough to learn, but the long sword and the hammer both probably have the most straight forward movesets, and the long sword is a ton of fun to use. (It has a cool, layered attack buff mechanic that encourages committing to big flashy chains.) With regards to gathering resources, more is always better. You're eventually get a sense for what you need though, but generally, early on at least, make sure you're collecting lots of herbs and honey and stuff so you can keep making restore potions. Later on, you'll want to keep an eye out for the materials necessary to create buffing potions and bombs/traps. Those are probably the biggest things in the opening hours. Also, be sure to carve up any monsters you down, especially major monsters. Be quick about it too, downed monsters disappear after only a short delay. Their materials, while often not presenting an immediately evident value, can end up being a thing where five hours down the road, you realize you're very happy you've already been collecting that stuff. (Protip: Hit b at a standstill to crouch for stealth movement. Carving monsters when in that stealth mode is faster, you'll be less likely to lose stuff to the fade-out. Also, yes, there's totally a stealth system.) That all said, don't go into a mission setting out to completely harvest an ecosystem, you don't need to grind that much, definitely not. With regards to weapon upgrades, upgrading your weapons is generally the path to better weapons. There are enormous upgrade trees with dozens of branching choices, so it might be valuable to dig up a Monster Hunter wiki for information, so you can make informed choices based on what's further down the trees. With regards to armor, don't bother upgrading armor until you have a set that confers skills you think you really need. When your concern is primarily just getting more defense, just create new armor instead of upgrading your existing stuff. With regards to the rogue felynes, no. They're just dicks. They steal your stuff. Kick their ass. Palico recruiting, despite being revealed to the player very early in the game, apparently doesn't show up until far into the single-player progression. I don't even have it yet. (Also: Guild house = Multiplayer, Outside = Singleplayer. Guild house missions are way, way harder, just in case that division isn't totally clear on its own. You're totally free to tackle multiplayer missions on your own, doing those repeatable resource gathering quests is certainly quite harmless, but do be cautious of the big monsters.) Later weapons in the game, in addition to requiring less sharpening, will also have greater maximum sharpness and be able to strike at tougher and tougher hides without being deflected. Also note that different moves available to your weapon will lose effectiveness at different rates, relative to your weapon's sharpness. You may find yourself in a situation where you have to adapt a combo because one of its moves is being deflected, if in a situation where you don't have time to sharpen your weapon. (Not quite related, and I'm still warming back up myself, but i seem to recall that there were even hidden pierce/slash/bash damage types that vary across individual moves, and that different parts of each monster would have different resistances to those damage types. This is, of course, in addition to variable status effects you can build your weapons to inflict.) Also - Always eat before a mission.

Monster Hunter is a very iterative series, and so while you could broadly infer things about Monster Hunter 4U from older guides, you will just as likely end up really thrown off track by details that are only just accurate enough to sound correct. Move lists will have changed, monsters will have changed, mechanics will have changed. You're better off waiting for 4U-specific guides, or just asking questions. With regards to weapons, in Tri, I mainly played a Lance, which was very difficult to learn, but very fun. Hurling yourself at a monster with the lance's dash attack, and then tanking up hard when you get there, is kind of thrilling. (Apparently now you can leap out of the dash attack into a mounting attack, which would make the lance, along with the bug staff, one of the only weapons in 4U that can do that anywhere on a map regardless of terrain.) In 4U though, i'm presently using the Long Sword, which is pretty great. It's very deliberate and methodical, and quite easy to get a handle on.

So weird thing about that is that Prime and Echoes actually did both have a button to swap lock-on targets seamlessly, but that button was the hard click on the GC controller's left trigger, with the analog press of that same trigger being the lock-on itself. That hard click has no existing equivalent on the wii-remote and nunchuk, and so the easy target swapping is lost in Trilogy.

This sounds about right, your first ten hours or so of the game are going to be spent gathering supplies and learning the mechanics. It's a pretty deep dive. The bug staff is definitely one of the more complex weapons to take on, pepyri did a good job running through the details though. Additionally, make sure you're familiar with the normal attacks. While there's nothing too complex for the bug staff or really any other weapon, if you know the strings well, you will learn that you can link x and a strings into eachother, back and forth and with no significant recovery to deal with. If you're new to the series, definitely run through the weapon tutorials, and also take a look at the move lists under the hunter notes section of the start menu. (There's some things the game kind of glosses over though, like being able to cancel out of recovery into a quick sidestep dodge after most attacks by simply hitting left or right of your character and dodge. There's also a quick draw which is very important for weapon types with an option for blocking. To do that, you just hold R when you hit X if at a standstill, or hit both X & A while sprinting with R held.) I'd recommend running at least a couple weapons as mains, so you can have fallbacks for variable situations and progression gaps where resources are tight on one of the weapon's upgrade paths. When you start upgrading weapons significantly, make sure you have a clear picture of whether or not you like it, and if it suits your play style, because it can be hard to shift course once you've spent your resources on something. Rule of thumb: Everything is important, sell nothing. Assume that everything will eventually have some value until it's absolutely clear, dozens and dozens of hours into your save, that it's used for something completely irrelevant to your build. Additionally, once you have a lot of stuff in your box, go through your combo list and experiment with combinations, one of each thing, so you know what will be available to you and what is needed to create which things. (Keeping in mind that the combination process can randomly fail and produce "garbage".) Basic equipment set for a mission will be some mega potions, well-done steaks, whetstones, pickaxes, bug nets, paintballs, and probably a bbq spit. Fishing supplies are a little more situational, and you can fish for basic catches without them. Bombs and traps of the various kinds will be essential in proper monster hunts, but again tend to be a little situational. (You should always have paintballs to mark and track large monsters on your map though.) Your character has no core stats, everything is based on the gear. Some of the skill bonuses you can gain from gear will increase your health though. (Each piece of armor contributes a certain number of points in a certain skill, and across your set you need to hit a certain threshold for that skill to become active, usually starting at ten and with further thresholds past that for increasingly powerful skill buffs.) Meat does not spoil, no. If you're on a monster hunt, it's best to avoid spending much time gathering supplies, since if you lose, you are reverted to your pre-quest state. If you want to specifically go grind for supplies, choose your missions carefully. Trapping gives you better rewards, but is a significantly larger expenditure of resources that are, especially early on, quite difficult to find in large quantities. It's best, early on, to save those traps for missions that require you to capture a monster alive. You're so lucky to be coming in on Monster Hunter 4, the game is so much better about making itself approachable and accessible, even though it does it without giving up any of its complexity. It has also made big strides in additionally presenting enjoyable singleplayer content on the side, so you can figure the game out on your own without bringing down other people. I came in blind to the series way back with Monster Hunter Freedom, and the game was obtuse in ways that Dark Souls wouldn't dare to be, and without any air of mystery to coax you into continuing to dig. It was also pretty exclusively multiplayer centric, but with only local connectivity. I hated it of course, i didn't understand it at all and i didn't have access to other people who were playing it. So it wasn't until i was coerced into trying the series again with Tri, which had the online multiplayer it desperately required, that it clicked with me. I've kind of come to feel that Monster Hunter is a thing friends inflict on eachother, that you need a good group of people around you to push you to figure out this labyrinthine and bizarre game. Also, speaking of Dark Souls, i've also come to feel that game has sort of ended up being a weird gateway for Monster Hunter, as i've seen a fair number of people be way more open to Monster Hunter's idiosyncracies after being exposed to Dark Souls. (Which almost certainly must draw some influence from Monster Hunter, given the simarities in the combat mechanics and the way equipment is emphasized over character progression.)

Seems like most people are saying the analog nub on the N3DS is garbage. Given that there's a pretty proper suite of online features in this one, if enough people here are interested, it would probably be pretty feasible to do something through the boards.

Since you're the only person i know who has finished it, i'm going to say that I kind of hit a wall with the fog stages, should i go back and keep trying? Is there anything worth my while past that?

Can i ask how far into the game you went? Probably a majority of the stages have their own localized game mechanics, so i'm surprised to hear this opinion. I'm also going to fall on the side that thinks the game is probably actually on the easier side of the spectrum, at least relative to games it has things in common with.

Yeah, those rumors have definitely been going around for a few years at this point. It's anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but there seemed to be a window where there was incredible anticipation for a western launch of PSO2. I personally even had the experience of being approached by multiple people who were quite casual about their gaming habits and most certainly did not follow gaming news, but were asking questions about PSO2. It feels like such a bungled, awful case of a missed opportunity that it never materialized in english. I mean, people actually really like that game, right? That's what i kept hearing about it. It seems to be a common trait in japanese publishers right now, a kind of obliviousness towards the potential of their own products and brands, i don't really understand it.

I always keep my 3DS in a case, but not to keep it pretty or even to protect it from falls, i'm more worried about dust and pocket lint interfering with cartridge and button contacts, things i've definitely had problems with on more than one DS system. That said, store bought cases are always ludicrously oversized and embarassingly gaudy, and as such, i'm kind of super jealous of that pouch Teg has made. Anyways, I picked up that Majora 3D collector's edition. The figurine's sculpt is good and the mask is extravagantly painted, but the rest of the paint job is pretty wobbly and the plastic feels cheap. I think it averages out to "pretty nice", especially considering the fairly tiny premium over the normal edition of the game. I do feel bad for the collector types who are going to end up spending probably well over a hundred dollars for this thing though. Haven't even touched the game yet! Also picked up Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate. With access to a group of friends who are all seriously stoked about hunting monsters, i anticipate that i will end up playing that quite a bit.

Metroid Prime's commitment to a diegetic UI presentation and an incredible attention to detail in its environments is fairly remarkable. (That detail is not just as a matter of visuals! The soundtrack is just fantastic, but try turning it down and appreciating the incredible complexity of the environmental soundscapes they build.) Super's definitely still my favorite in the series though, since i have some small issues with Prime where i have none with Super. First thing is a bit of an edge case these days, but the first few print runs of the game were known for being a bit crash-prone, there's also the item-hunt victory lap at the end that most people seem to be united in disliking, and i also think the scan mechanic tends to overstay its welcome. (Going for 100% log completition can be tedious and at times even a little infuriating because of some very easily missable ones.) Really though, Metroid Prime is phenomenal, it's an easy #2 to what i will argue is legitimately one of the best games ever made.

I mean, i also haven't played it in a long time, i've replayed both Cataclysm and the original Homeworld more recently than Homeworld 2, but i never had problems with either of those and always just found HW2 miserable because of the reactive enemy spawns.

I always wanted to like UaW, it had such incredibly strange and interesting faction dynamics, but the game just seemed like it was seriously constrained by the infrastructure and the hardware they tied themselves to. I don't have any similar sentiments about Grey Goo, or really any reason to, of course. Presently, I think the game is pretty terrific, though i'm experiencing some odd performance related troubles and intermittently unreliable multiplayer connectivity. Surprised to say that i'm also actually really enjoying the campaign, i haven't personally found an RTS campaign to be worth playing in a long time. Yeah, they actually can't. The Beta are setup to be able to quickly expand and entrench almost anywhere on the map, and the goo are similarly incredibly mobile, but not even being tied down by any structures, all while the humans can never expand beyond their base core. They can't establish secondary bases, and expansion via their conduits usually ends up being blocked by terrain features. As it would happen though, speaking as a shameless turtler, they're the faction i'm finding the most enjoyable to play. Their ability to shift defensive towers around via teleportation, nevermind the strength of those towers, makes their bases incredibly tough nuts to crack. They can end up starved for resources in the late game though, having to reach further and further away from that base for resources, building extractors they have no easy way to defend from harassers. (Their artillery drones can ground fire to setup mines, but that's about it for out-of-base static defenses.) (Edit: I misinterpreted that mine laying function, they time out pretty quickly. Seems mostly for target-leading micro in fights.)

I share this odd love of clunky UI. I love, in System Shock 2, having that experience of having your UI open to hack a door, being vulnerable because of it, and hearing enemies moving around behind you. Maybe you've even got the turn keys mapped properly so you can sort of be looking over your shoulder while you've got the hacking UI up on your screen, still fiddling with that and not really able to respond to something that might come your way. The UI not actually being this thing that is distilled down into a super user friendly experience feels like a part of the metaphor of the game design, and there are other games that feel like they've taken ideas like that and really embaced them, games like Dark Souls and Dead Space stick out in mind, being games that do not offer you the courtesy of making the inventory a safe place. Arx though, Arx does some really cool things. I love, love, love that rune-drawing magic system. I hope i'm remembering things correctly, but there's a few combinations that are never charted down in your journal, and can only be used by mimicking spells you see NPC's do at a few points in the game. Also, i love the way you can cook meat not by like... dragging and dropping raw meat from one UI element to another, but actually just leaving it on the ground next to a fire, and without any element of it snapping to an object, it just needs to be near the fire to cook. There's a lot of ambitious little simulation elements in there like that. I'm actually quite surprised that none of Arkane's games are listed among the games the Underworld Ascendant kickstarter lays out as having been inspired by the original two Ultima Underworld games, certainly Dishonored earned enough renown to be worth mentioning, and Arkane's entire history as a developer has kind of been steeped in Looking Glass influences.

Fun Fact: Arkane meant for Arx Fatalis to be a real Ultima Underworld game, but they weren't able to obtain the license back then. Arx Fatalis is pretty terrific though, i really love that game. Those guys clearly have a lot of passion for the Looking Glass-style. (That persists through to today with Dishonored.) The original Ultima Underworld games though, if you can still look at the first System Shock and go "I think i can deal with that", i don't think that the UU games are significantly creakier or more primordial than that is.

Already posted a topic for it. Seems like quite a few Looking Glass guys are reuniting for this, which is probably the most exciting thing about it, i'd say.

Yeah, there appears to be a pretty terrific collection of Looking Glass people reuniting for this thing.

MH4 apparently also runs at a higher framerate and with higher resolution textures on the N3DS.

GB did some coverage of it. As a big, big fan of Banjo Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts, this looks amazing to me.

The only thing i can think of to say is that you must not ignore the lock-on in the Prime games. Trilogy brings twin-input free-aim to the first two, but despite the first-person perspective, they are not first-person shooters. They're still fundamentally games built around locking onto a point and swinging around the target with evasive dodges. (Tap jump while locked-on and holding left or right.) Echoes has some mechanics that confer a distinctive survival gameplay vibe that i really dig, but the world design doesn't have any especially coherent flow, and it's easy to get lost. It also just has some really terrible boss fights which are apparently addressed in Trilogy. Corruption does some pretty terrific things with the Wii Remote, it's still one of the best uses of that thing in the Wii's entire library. It's also little more focused and story-centric than many other games in the series, but hits a nice balance with it that doesn't feel like it detracts from the other elements of the game. They're both very, very good games, but neither have the same impact of the first Prime, where it's just utterly thrilling to see the formula carried into 3D so cleanly and with so much attentive nuance.

It's a small distinction, but it's one i feel like i have to make. The version of Metroid Prime in Trilogy, in its various tweaks and more generally as a result of updating to the engine used with Echoes, loses a bunch of small graphical details and is the worse looking version of the game. That's the trade-off you're making for "improved" control. (Well, and ease of availability.) The other two games in Trilogy are fine, and Echoes actually receives some fairly beneficial rebalancing, since some of the bosses are infuriatingly difficult in the original release. I haven't actually played all the way through Echoes in Trilogy, but i understand that the primary offenders were made a fair bit easier. The GBA Metroids are also very much worth playing. Or at least Zero Mission is, but Fusion is probably worth a run too. I don't personally have a ton of love for Fusion, It's linear and has a bad and unskippable story, but it's a well made 2D Metroid with some clever scenarios and fun bosses. Zero Mission, on the the other hand, is pretty uniformly terrific. If you keep going down that road, the next step on from those would be... I don't know, probably Metroid 2 or the original Metroid. I think the original Metroid is very primordial and hard to go back to, while Metroid 2 feels like it crystalized into something that remains familiar. The environments are clearly defined and more easily navigated, the general aesthetic settles into its still recognizable form, save stations are in place, and Samus gains a more fleshed out set of possible actions. I also love it for just being implausibly atmospheric and forboding given the hardware it was released on. After that, you'd get out into games that are not easily available anymore, like Hunters and Other M. Hunters is a game i like and think is underrated, Other M is... mechanically ambitious and interesting, but weighed down by a bloated and gross narrative.