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Huge fan of Megaman here, so i'm going to go beyond the scope of the question and give you the full run down on the classic series that you did not ask for: Megaman 2 is fairly inarguably the best game in the original series, it's even Keiji Inafune's personal favorite. Second best for the classic series is either 1 or 3, i'd lean towards the original, but a lot of the recognizable secondary mechanics for the series don't really show up and settle in until 3 and 4. (4's pretty alright.) 5 & 6 are totally redundant and easily skipped. They're not exactly bad, they just don't really do anything new or interesting. 7, the SNES game, i personally feel is pretty underrated. That's followed by Megaman & Bass, another SNES game, but one that was never released outside of Japan until a GBA rerelease. (I think Megaman & Bass is pretty great, but it's also notoriously hard.) 8, the PSX game, has some very pretty sprite art, but is otherwise a dreadful game. Megaman 9 was obviously a big passion project and has a lot of creative and clever design throughout. Megaman 10 is the game they made because 9 sold well. (You see what i said about 5 & 6?) Anyways... Megaman 2, play Megaman 2.

Another update just came out that apparently addresses a couple of possible quest issues, the team behind this version of the game has been patching quite aggressively. When i had previously played the game, i don't think i got much past the first major area of the game, i'm into stuff i don't remember at all now. Apparently both times i've played this game, i've made the mistake of taking way too long to go visit the city behind the gate in the Shamazaar village. (The game even prods you to go explore other areas, so i don't think i can blame the game.) That city is absolutely enormous, the scope and simulation in what this game attempts to do is so much more ambitious than i had believed it was. Outcast is kind of wild for 1999, it feels like it was quite a few years ahead of the curve, and experiencing it makes me retroactively a little more wary of what they were wanting to do with their kickstarter. Trying to remake this game on 600k seems crazy, and perhaps things worked out for the best just having a really nice updated version of the original game. Outcast is terrific though, i'm super enamored with it and i'm probably going to end up playing through to the end this time.

It was sounding like the biggest issues with the new version were fixed very quickly, so i decided it was probably worth supporting this version of the game and... I can't say i have any complaints, it's functional, it does what you'd want it to do. It is a totally playable version of that game. The game didn't really seem to like being run at 1920x1080 though, it was very framey and some visual oddities with the voxel engine seemed to be exaggerated at that resolution, but i knocked it down a notch or two from that and it runs perfectly fine now. It's something my memory had glossed over, but apparently the resolution cap in the original version was very low? In which case, anything here is a gain. Things get a little weird here though, because back when it was new, it was a game i liked, but never got deep into and never went back to. Consequently, I was left with some fairly vague memories of the game, so i'm finding that there is way more to this game than i remember there being, it's quite a pleasant surprise. It's kinda great going back to a game you think you remember relatively well and liked for what you remember, and then finding it's actually way bigger and way cooler than you thought. There's lots of fun nuance being displayed with the NPC's, for one. I asked a generic NPC what he thought of a named NPC, and he wouldn't tell me because he was in earshot of the named NPC. I followed the generic NPC out a ways on his routine and then he let me hear his piece. That stuck out to me, because it's an example of something that never happens in other games. The enemy AI also surprised the hell out of me, the enemies act quite intelligently. Game has a slow start though, lots of exposition. It's just dumping names and places on you before you've been shown any reason why you should care about any of it. The control scheme is very strange, another thing my memory had completely glossed over. It's actually a tremendously good fit for a gamepad, but... Gamepad support is new to this version? I will never not be fascinated with real voxel engines. Outcast is awesome. I'm happy to have a vague set of fond memories affirmed. Right now, it's kind of reminding me of the first two Gothic games, which i also have very fond and somewhat foggy memories of. Edit: Also, that soundtrack is crazy good.

They're also either programmed with, or allegedly able to emulate, some fairly high-level tactics. It's not just a matter of perfect machine reactions. Either way, it sounds like they're a few steps beyond beyond the normal AI opponents.

I reluctantly played Shadow Warrior. Given that 3d Realms' attempted revival had so far consisted of the catastrophe that is Duke Nukem Forever, and the well-meaning and unfortunately messy Rise of the Triad remake, presented with the opportunity to play a reboot of the game that perhaps most clearly signaled what Duke Nukem Forever would eventually become, i could not have been less interested. I finally gave into a friend insisting i should play it, and... You know... Kinda loved it. It's an incredibly fast moving FPS with an extremely generous dodge mechanic, a very old-school suite of weapons, a big emphasis on an elaborate melee system, several fairly expansive progression mechanics, and special moves that evoke the adrenaline combos of UT2k4. Your performance in large fights is even scored, pushing you to play better and more stylishly. (The game evokes a Bulletstorm-like vibe to me.) You have this combat flow where you're just switching weapons as much as you can, abusing special moves as much as you can, and always being incredibly mobile. Hanging back for a bit with a shield up and spamming bullets, or dodging into a fight with a special sword strike ready. Early on, it can feel like a bit of modern day FPS bloat, but the game becomes quite relentless and you're really forced to abuse your abilities as much as you can, it ends up feeling like a really cohesive and thought-out set of systems that create some really, really frantic combat. You know though, I also quite liked developer Flying Wild Hog's prior game, Hard Reset, so i think i'm probably on board for whatever they do next. (There's an important question here i'm kind of avoiding, and it's if this Shadow Warrior is gross in the ways the original game was. My answer to that is that i don't know, i'm not sure i can be an effective judge of that. I don't think it is, but i'm not articulate enough about things like this to offer an explanation for why.) Edit: Oh, i also played Antichamber. Holy shit, what a great game. Does a brilliant job coaxing you into thinking about solutions to remarkably abstract and unprecedented problems, there is some pretty masterful puzzle design in there, i think. If there's anything to nitpick, the matter gun mechanics and the mechanics relating to the game's non-euclidean space feel almost like they're from different games, they don't really ever meet up in any puzzles. The matter gun stuff does end up being incredibly interesting and satisfying in its own ways though, it builds up to some pretty outrageous possibilities. There's also that a few peripheral corners of the game seem to be a tiny bit unfinished, apparently waiting for an update that doesn't seem like it's ever coming. Anyways, really should have played this one a long time ago. Blew through it pretty quickly, but it's going to stick with me.

Inspired by Amiibos unearthing the memory of there totally already being way better merchandise of certain Nintendo characters i love, i now have a Samus Figma. (Posed to recreate the box art from Super Metroid, as it should only ever be.) Way cooler than Amiibos.

This is specifically the Super Smash Bros amiibo line, hence the "Super Smash Bros" logo on the packing card, so i assume there's going to be one for every character in the Smash 4 roster. You can bet that, down the road, there will be a Pokemon amiibo line and other various product lines. So there's still those ongoing questions about what kind of compatibility there will actually end up being for amiibos. Super Smash Bros 4 is, of course, the only game out right now making actual extensive use of these amiibos. (In that it's the only game actually writing to the save space on the Amiibo instead of just acknowledging that the Amiibo exists and then unlocking something because of it. Which raises the question of whether or not these specific amiibos will ever be extensively used in anything else ever.) With such questions up in the air, I'd advise collecting them not because of their NFC functions, but because they're cool little figurines of Nintendo characters that haven't necessarily seen a lot of collectible merch previously.

You know, i see Phalanx's box art pop up pretty frequently whenever people decide to compile lists of the worst box art, but just now... I think i just realized... The ship, did they use an image of an X-wing? I swear, it looks like an X-wing, flying left to right, tilted towards the viewer. You can even see the astromech droid. It certainly doesn't look like the ship in the game.

I feel like i can go ahead and probably give a fairly enthusiastic recommendation for Ziggurat, a game available on Steam that is a very overtly Heretic/Hexen influenced roguelite. It's something that i am definitely having a lot of fun with. The shooting and the movement feels quite good and definitely owing to the games it's drawing from, the light progression system seems reasonably fleshed out, and there's multiple unlockable character and difficulty levels to go through. Also, in addition to unlocking characters, more weapons and upgrades gradually unlock as potential drops. The game also has a really vibrant and colorful aesthetic that just looks great, and they have in their hidden rooms little easter eggs where the developer is amusingly pretty open about shit talking their previous games. (Which appear to have mostly been XBLIG faire.) It could probably benefit from a little more visual and layout variety in its environments, but there's definitely enough there as it is, and the developer is apparently still active and adding even more. I like this thing a lot though, it feels like an easy recommendation to make. Edit: I just started a run in a room that was a fairly obvious recreation of the difficulty select stage from Quake. I like this game, this game is pretty alright.

Can we do title screens too?

So this is a weird thing that happened. Kind of bums me out to hear this, having recently found myself surprised that i really quite liked Spintires. Seems like there's a fair number of allegations being thrown back and forth between the publisher and the designer though, glancing at the Steam board for the game.

Well, i'm not sure what the exchange rate works out as, but 15 euros is probably dramatically more expensive than the 13 bucks or so they're selling for in Canada land, so that's kind of crazy right there. Relative to their equivalently priced competition in Skylanders figures and Disney Infinity figures though, they are significantly nicer. (Those Skylanders figures, especially, are real shitty.)

It's equally amazing and depressing to me that many of Deus Ex's most exaggerated and paranoid fantasies ended up being so incredibly prescient.

This game came out a while ago, but i see it's gotten no attention in here, which is unfortunate because it is really quite awesome. So it's a 2d fighting game kind of in the Smash Bros milieu, but the objective here is to smash a ball at your opponents, a ball that goes faster and faster every time it's struck. Addtionally, every time a player hits the ball they earn meter for a super, there's a bunt move for more variable ball control, there's even a parry mechanic that factors into some higher-level hijinks, all among other things. You know, but based on that description, you probably have no idea what the game is, so watch the trailer and probably still have no idea what the game is: Anyways, i've had a blast with this game, and unlike a lot of other indie fighting games coming out on Steam, this one has GGPO for some pretty fantastic netcode. (The soundtrack is also pretty amazing.) Gets really crazy with four players.

Are you using the parry? The games i've played, that seems to be the biggest divider between people who get a handle on the game and people who don't. If you're finding yourself in situations where people are getting all up in your face when the hit lag hits multi-second delays after the ball speeds up a bunch, you can hit the bunt button right near the end of the hit lag to make the ball pulse and cause a clash with somebody trying to dive in and smash the back back in your face. (There's a pair of meters on the boom box UI that track the duration of the hit lag for you, time the parry for the end.) You force people to hang back and play the guessing game for where you're going to send the ball flying, instead of engaging in easy point-blank trades. You spend any meter you have to parry, but if you're consistent enough with it, you'll have your opponents trained to not risk it going for that easy smash, because a successful parry will almost always end with them getting hit by the ball. There's a lot of other mechanics in there that you'd do well to get a handle on, but the parry is kind of what makes the game work.

I mean, Outcast is a great game that deserves another shot at the spotlight, but this updated version does sound real weird. Apparently it launches Windows Media Player to show the intro or something? Super weird.

Well this Kickstarter may have failed, but a more modestly updated version of Outcast, dubbed Outcast 1.1, just showed up on Steam priced at around six bucks. Their Plan B, perhaps. Edit: Sounds like this version of the game is quite problematic right now.

I could probably get on board with this train of thought.

The Amiibo situation is kind of a mess right now. Hey, i guess it's good news for Nintendo, they sure seem to be selling well, but trying to collect the stupid things has been kind of a nightmare.

I'll just swerve this conversation and say Tetris, which i think is a puzzle game design with a timeless quality that has the potential to endure far into the future, but is a game that, despite its simple mechanics and because of its mechanics, could only exist as a video game. On the other hand, if we just want to talk about our most loved games, the (long) answer i gave in that thread Zeus linked back to is probably still accurately reflective of how i feel now.

Divekick, it's called Divekick.

Play Lethal League, it is the best. Do it, do it, do it. Do it.

This is absolutely near the top of a list of upcoming buys for me. I've loved Croteam's games for so many years, i'm so interested to see them apply themselves to something completely different, and in a genre i happen to also love.

You mean arrangements that are just one tile up each step? You run straight up those in the version i'm playing. I was told there's been some fairly significant additions made to the game in the last year or so, though i have no idea what has changed or when exactly those things changed, if they happened even before that.

So i've been fairly resistant to the emergence of the Minecraft genre, the handful i've played around with never clicked, the idea of digital legos built up on a kind of bad survival game framework doesn't really do anything for me. Somebody will say "You can make a sweet castle!" and i would respond "Why? Does it serve a purpose in the game?" I will then, almost immediately, feel like an asshole for so aggressively missing the point, but i kind of can't help it. Building a sweet ten story tall castle in a video game doesn't feel interesting to me when it's essentially an entirely superfluous construct in relation to the sandbox of mechanics underlying the whole experience. It just kind of owes to why i play games and what i want out of games. Anyways, yeah, Minecraft stuff isn't really my thing. I've been coerced into playing Terraria though, which seems like a game i probably should have tried earlier on with regards to this whole phenomenon, but nevertheless, it turns out Terraria's kind of cool. For me, it works as kind of a huge, open-ended cooperative metroidvania. The character progression, the mobility options, the emphasis on combat, the enormous boss fights, and the way the whole digital legos thing actually kind of neatly serves several clear purposes in that game. Maybe all Minecraft clones are like that now and i've just been super out of the loop, but whatever.