Sno

I stood in front of a store for an hour before it opened to place a pre-order on that Limited Edition. I was not the only person waiting, there were in fact multiple other people waiting.

Funny thing: Stores of a certain chain in my area apparently aren't even allowed to take in-store amiibo pre-orders anymore because of issues with scalpers.

New Fire Emblem game was announced, i can't help but notice that the combat models no longer have ankle stumps. They're moving past that weird ass aesthetic choice Awakening made. Codename Steam is also going to have playable FE characters to be unlocked with the Smash Bros amiibos of those characters, i guess? Nintendo is claiming that Marth will get a second run, but i suspect it's still going to end up being quite underproduced. Majora's Mask is definitely better than Ocarina of Time. That's a fact, an irrefutable fact. Naysayers are filthy liars!

Well, if that's actually a standard feature in the competition, then it definitely puts more pressure on Nintendo to provide a similar solution. I'm not convinced the Captain Falcon amiibo actually exists, because i definitely searched. Also, it kind of feels like a dick move that Codename Steam will have fully fleshed out, playable FE characters to be unlocked by the smash amiibos of those FE characters, when those amiibos are bound to be wildly underproduced.

Unfortunately, i don't believe you can. It doesn't seem like there's going to be a ton of games that actually need to write to the NFC chip, but yeah, it would be nice if that was addressed as well. They could perhaps release an app for the N3DS and Wii U that allows you store and manage NFC chip saves. They're already doing more than i was expecting out of them though, that the current amiibos are being promised a measure of compatibility going forward is an important gesture.

So Nintendo has clarified something fairly crucial about amiibos while announcing their new Super Mario Bros-specific Amiibo line. So for example, it won't matter what product line your Mario amiibo is from, games will always just see a Mario amiibo as Mario. So you can, in fact, use your Smash Mario with Mario Party 10, the game being made for the new amiibo line. It's also noted that you would have to delete the Amiibo's save data for Smash to do this, however. This sort of stuff was to be expected though, the amount of writable space on an NFC chip is incredibly tiny. This seems like the best possible approach to all of this stuff though.

I felt like Rage was maybe one of the most disappointing games i've ever played. That game basically never gives you a scenario in which it makes sense to for you to ever have bothered building tons and tons of craftable gear, all throughout it feels like a crescendo that never reaches anything, the systems and the shooting just never click. It feels like there was a lot being held back for a second game, considering that it introduces some of its most interesting enemies literally just before it limply concludes on an underwhelming set of scenarios and a story that has gone absolutely nowhere. It also featured some of the most aggressively unavoidable and nonsensical invisible walls i think i have ever seen in a game. There's also some really incredibly intense rubberbanding going on in the racing mini-game, fuck that too. Like, and it's not a badly made game, there's so much craft evident in that thing, but it just doesn't amount to anything more than painfully and forgettably average.

The whole event was really great this year, huge shame about how the Super Metroid race went though. Did anybody else catch that Ninja Gaiden NES-series relay race? That was pretty wild. The glitch-heavy LTTP run was pretty seriously entertaining too. Those in addition to things other people have said, like the Tetris exhibition, the TASbot stuff, and the Dark Souls 2 runs. Also, though perhaps made more entertaining through my personal love of the game, there was a JK:DF2 run that was kind of amazing to watch. Would actually appreciate if people listed out some of their own personal highlights, since i'm sure i missed a lot of stuff given that it basically ran for a solid 24/7.

That whole thing is absolutely garbage.

I'm a big, big fan of the TA-school of RTS, but i've been out of the loop for a while, and while i'm not quite ready to look past all the incredibly toxic things i've been hearing about Planetary Annihilation to go dig into that, the also much-maligned Supreme Commander 2 was available for pretty cheap in the last Steam sale, so i picked that up. I did play a demo when it originally came out and was pretty immediately turned off at the time by what it was trying to do, but this time i'm finding myself being a little more receptive to the changes it tried to make. (Either because i simply gave it more of a chance to make an impression, or i've more settled in with the reality that i have to take what i can get.) There's both good and bad in SupCom2 though. Bear with me, i have some thoughts on this game and i need to stick them somewhere. First and foremost, the reworked economy is kind of a disaster, units and structures being paid for in single sums - that more traditional and theoretically more easily understood RTS economy - ends up being a huge pain in the ass in this style of game. If you have multiple units on multiple construction queues like you kind of have to, but you're running a negative or even a steady economy without any significant growth, small projects end up eating resources before any big projects ever have a chance to start, and it forces you to go in and micromanage things in a way you never had to in other games like this. Construction assists have also been massively downplayed, engineers are now only able to help at unit factories, and the effect caps off pretty hard once a few engineers are in place. The omission of resource storage structures also makes players weirdly more resilient, with any resources gathered being stored safely and untouchably beyond the scope of the game field, allowing players to recover quickly from some pretty devastating losses. It sounds like it could be a good thing, but in practice it deprives offensive strategies of a valuable and interesting target that can easily blunt another player's industry. It also makes rule sets other than the core assassination goal pointless excercises in futility. The absence of persistant energy costs on structures and units also affects the game in a lot of very peculiar ways, such as it being much, much easier to set up large banks of long-range artillery with ceaseless, sustained fire. This seems to have led to artillery being reworked in some strange ways, as it's generally much less powerful and threatening than in earlier games, with shields being much more effective defense against even heavy artillery fire. Artillery also lacks friendly fire now, which is dumb. There are some other more general balance things that i'm also kind of not into, unrelated to the economy stuff. Mainly that I think air power is probably a little too dominant in SupCom 2, and they've given experimentals some pretty crippling flaws that make them very awkward and unpleasant to try and implement in battles, as opposed to being fairly definitive stalemate-enders in Forged Alliance. There are also way, way, way too many small maps. There's nothing wrong with small maps in this style of RTS, those games are fast and dynamic, but people love these games for the big and drawn out battles across large continents. So what's good? Well, i think the streamlined factions and the research system are actually really good. TA and SupCom both had just enormous collections of redundant or irrelevant units, and a great many of them have been condensed down into leaner factions. Where most low tech units were just a stepping stone to late-game stuff, they've sort of formalized that with a pretty interesting research system with some really elaborate trees, and it's probably the most successful part of SupCom2 and it's why i'm still playing it after a couple dozen games. They've also managed to make their factions feel appreciably different and distinct, perhaps in part to condensing things down so much, and that's definitely a first for any of these games. It also does away with the structure adjacency bonuses that SupCom and FA had, which i'm firmly in support of, that was too much minutia. The UI also still does everything a SupCom game should do, it's still kind of brilliantly executed on. There also isn't a horrible game-breaking memory leak in the skirmish AI like there was in SupCom and FA, that's kind of a big thing. Perhaps it could be described as one of those "Disappointing sequel, but totally alright taken on its own" things, but that would dismiss some of the things it does that i would actually hope persist into future games. (GPG's still around, and they got that Total Annihilation license back.) Anyways, i'm pretty firmly on SupCom 2, but i'm also probably going to play it a whole bunch more. (If somebody has not ever played any of these games, this might actually be a fairly accessible entry point, but i don't think the game actually does a particularly good job explaining how anything works, despite trying to work in more easily understood mechanics while streamlining everything else.)

I don't normally play side-scrolling character-based adventure games, so perhaps what follows should be taken in the context of me being a relative outsider to the genre, but Primordia was recommended and gifted to me, so i gave it a chance and ended up playing through it in only a few sittings. I guess i liked it? I mostly liked it, i guess. I could probably feel okay giving it a recommendation. I'm not super sure how i feel about it overall though. It's beautiful, and the puzzles all seemed fairly logical to me. I found the story elaborate and interesting, but the game felt like it was trying to say something, it's weighing a lot of heavy themes and seems to only find some pretty muddled conclusions about them. Perhaps i shouldn't expect more, but the story left me feeling a little cold at the end.

I don't usually make a conscious choice to quit a game, so i don't usually end up posting in this thread with my own additions to the conversation, but here's two: Valkyria Chronicles - I got to the boss battle with the giant tank that sort of upends all the mechanics on you and just... Eghhh... I liked the game i thought i was playing, but suddenly being dumped into a ridiculous boss battle just sucked all my enthusiasm for the game away. Rogue Legacy - I've been ignoring this game for a long time, but it kinda seemed like something i really needed to play... And... I don't think it's a very good game. At all. I think it's ugly, i think the level design is bad, i think the boss fights are awful, i think the control is awful, the hitboxes are incredibly ambiguous, the classes seem wildly unbalanced, and it seems like it enforces a very lengthy grind before you can really realistically achieve anything. I ended up sinking like seven hours into it, just because it's so good at dangling that carrot, tricking you into grinding for more character progress, i had to make that conscious choice to stop even though it just made me miserable playing it. A castlevania-influenced roguelite should be better than this. Why does everybody love this game so damn much? I usually don't feel this at odds with public opinion.

I kind of felt the same way about GTAV, i couldn't get through it. It's a game that is so pervasively angry and cynical, but it has nothing to say, it just wallows in its misery, it was kind of upsetting to me. I mean, and i'm a person who loved GTAIV.

I'd believe that, because Tetris Axis was apparently pulled from the eShop on the same day that the VC version of the GB Tetris went away. Nudge the Tetris Company to let a few licenses lapse and suddenly Ubi's new Tetris is the only game in 3DS town. (Particularly unfortunate, considering that Ubi's new take on the puzzler is allegedly pretty terrible.)

Another trademark was filed for a "Dragon's Dogma Online". *Sigh* Not what i would have hoped for out of a Dragon's Dogma follow-up, if it is indeed what the name implies it is. Seems like Capcom is responding to all the misguided demands for co-op out of that game.

I ended up just remapping the demon heart and the demon head to different keys so they would be more accessible during fights. 8 and 9 are terrible default mappings for exnpendable items you need to grab and use in the middle of a fight. That dash is crazy, it absolutely makes that game, and - i wonder if it's intentional - it feels like a very japanese piece of design. It makes that game just move so fast though, leaping into the middle of a group, unleashing a large sword strike, and then getting out just as quickly. I was playing Shadow Warrior and another game called ZIggurat kind of simultaneously. Ziggurat is a throw back shooter, inspired by Raven's old Heretic and Hexen games, and it therefore is a very, very fast moving game. After finishing Shadow Warrior and going back to Ziggurat, i was bowled over by how slow Ziggurat felt in comparison to Shadow Warrior, which is just such a frantic, fast moving game. I went into Shadow Warrior feeling like that was a 3D Realms IP that should probably just be left alone, but i ended up enjoying the game a whole lot.

Gah, it really hurts me that i'm not playing this right now, but i don't have either a PS3 or a PS4.

Well now i'm hesitant to keep playing. Doesn't look like the patch notes reference anything to do with Okaar, and i can't find any specific information anywhere about game-breaking bugs in Outcast, other than people simply acknowledging that they exist and are caused by seeing certain plot events out of order.

Klepek's never struck me as the sort of guy who's comfortable hanging around in one place for too long. I've always felt he does good work, so i wish him well wherever he ends up.

I just finished Fract OSC and it might be up there with my favorite exploration/puzzle games, just a tremendous little thing that was. I said a little more about it over here.

I feel like i need make an addendum to my earlier list. Shovel Knight - I've been going back and forth on it, but it totally deserves to be on an end of year list. Shovel Knight is just such a superbly designed platformer, it has an overabundance of ideas and executes on them all almost without fault, it may actually be as good as the games it's so clearly inspired by. Ziggurat - Hey, do you like Heretic and Hexen? Does a roguelite inspired by those games sound like something you want to play? Of course it does. It absolutely does. Fract OSC - I'm, admittedly, still going through this one, but i can't envision a sequence of events in that would undo the good will the game has already built up with me. The way the audioscape of its world just builds into this crescendo of an increasingly complex composition that emerges not out of explicitly scripted events, but the actions and choices you make in solving its puzzles, is incredible and absolutely one of the best things i've experienced in a game this year. Not even just the parts where you are explicitly trying to compose a piece of music that fits within a set of rules, but also in the puzzles that precede those sequences. Every action you take has some small effect on the audio, and discordant noise grows seamlessly into an electronic piece of music, with each added note indicating to you that you are closer and closer to the solution you're looking for. That its puzzles are well designed and that its landscape is incredibly beautiful and haunting all seem almost just like icing on the cake. (Edit: Just finished it, it's definitely earned a spot among my goty picks.) (Also, i got Evil Within working, it's pretty damn great. That PC version is still kind of inexcusable.)

Can you say anything else about it? I'm definitely interested, Mutant Mudds was a surprisingly great little game that, for me, kind of ended up evoking old DOS platformers. Anyways, i've been playing Steel Empires on the 3DS. It's a 3DS eShop exclusive remake of an older Genesis shoot em` up i can't say i had ever heard of, but good things have been said about this remake, aside from it being a fairly spartan package and one of the most expensive download-only games on the 3DS eShop. Right now and for the next few weeks, however, it's around 50% off. (Which ended up being around 15 dollars for me.) Mechanically, it's a simple game. There's a progressive, persistant leveling system for your main weapon as you collect power-ups. You can also shoot either left or right, it's the sort of shoot em` up that likes to use the full screen and then scroll around in a variety of directions. It's also pretty light on challenge and offers a very generous health bar, which could either be a negative or a positive depending on a person's point of view. The stages and boss fights are diverse and elaborate, and the sprite work in the game is tremendously attractive and detailed, there's a good steampunk vibe. This 3DS version also sports some nice stereoscopic parallaxing that inadvertantly actually kind of helps the bullets stand out against the detailed backdrops, there's also some other nice little touches like debris from explosions flying into different depths of the image. (The game also checkpoint saves between levels, as a portable shoot em` up should.) Also, one of the playable ships is an armored zepplin. For the current sale price, if anybody's into shmups, it's worth checking out. Seriously great little game.

Oh yeah? What was the bug, any way i can avoid it? They've put out several more patches that all seem to be quest-related fixes, but reading their patch notes, it seems at least some of those bugs came about because of things they've changed with this newly recompiled version of the game.

Wait, what? It's been a couple years since i last played Super, but isn't there a save station within a few rooms of almost every boss in the game?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLQWVj9xrRE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUp0OuUtCLs Outcast's soundtrack goes a long way towards bolstering the game's sense of mystery and adventure.