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So, a tiny bit afraid that another patch would come out and break the game again for me, i motored through Evil Within fairly quickly, but didn't exactly have to force myself to do so as the game is really, really good. It bears several suspect and debatable elements, but is a fairly excellent game in my mind. It's been seen as kind of a spiritual successor to RE4, but it actually plays like one to RE as a whole. Evil Within generally evokes a lot of much more old-school survival horror design, with far more limited pools of ammunition and combat avoidance formalized in a stealth system. (While the late game, which is incredibly bombastic and weird, more evokes the debated excesses of the later RE games.) I've seen people nitpick about the matches from a logic standpoint, but as a game system it makes perfect sense. The matches serve a variety of functions in the game, but primarily it seemed to me that they've taken the melee finishing moves from later RE games and made them a limited resource. (Shooting an enemy in the leg and lighting him on fire while he's staggered is especially potent in the early game, but you have that very limited supply of matches.) I think the camera zooms in too close when you aim. The game actually lets you hip fire, but tries to contextually apply melee attacks instead if something is in range, which combined with the accuracy debuff makes it something you don't really ever want to do. It might be a small thing, but i really appreciate that the game respects your inventory. If you want to keep saving up crafting materials for a rough situation, you can. There's been a bad trend with survival horror games telling you that your resources are precious, but then upending your inventory on you every few hours. (A lot of the newest RE games do this, so does Alan Wake.) Certain encounters late in the game felt like really frustrating trial and error puzzles to me, there was one sequence where i must have died some twenty times before figuring out the exact string of things i needed to accomplish. Most of the "bosses" elsewhere in the game seemed to play out a little more organically, even when they were still clearly heavily scripted. (The first encounter with the pyramid head wannabe was an excellent standout sequence for the game.) I thought it was actually quite a tense and effective horror game in the sense that traditional survival horror has always been better at creating tension than engendering real fear. It's a far more intense game than its contemporaries in Dead Space and latter-day Resident Evil. I found the... geography, i guess, of the game really disorienting. You're thrown around from scenario to scenario so much, the world is presented as being in constant flux, if not completely abstract, so you virtually never have enough time to produce any sense of place. The few times you're allowed to exist in a clearly defined location for an extended period of time feel like welcome respites, and the game seems to at least be partially aware of this fact, the feelings they're creating are perhaps intentional. Still, I'm not sure how i feel about it, that this modern, narratively driven game spends a large majority of its time in completely undefined locations. It can feel like a cheat, and at worst, it's the most naked kind of "here's a level for you." So the story: It's completely bonkers for one thing, and in a way i enjoyed throughout, i was totally along for that ride. It wants to be Silent Hill, and it's definitely quite overt about trying to be Silent Hill, but it's done through a lens of having no subtlety whatsoever, and it's kind of great. It unfortunately also means that any unanswered questions are pretty obviously exposed as DLC and sequel hooks, and there are a lot of unanswered questions at the end of that game. I like it though, i like Evil Within a lot. I'm just wary of recommending it on account of the technical issues it's had. I guess it's more or less fine on the XBO and PS4?

Well, if this ever actually materializes, they could do a lot, lot worse than Genndy Tartakovsky.

I think it is amusing and wonderful that Talos Principle is coming from the studio that has only ever made Serious Sam games, it seems like such a 180 for them. I'm verious curious to check it out, it's getting quite a lot of praise.

I've been getting some bizarre mouse lag since the patch, seriously like a full second of delay, but i was playing on a gamepad anyways and that's working without issue, and it's honestly just much more important that the game actually runs without crashing or hitching. (I'm really liking the game so far.)

A big four gig update went out for the game that so far seems to have fixed the issues i was having, though the steam forum for the game indicates that this update seems to have broken the game in new ways for a different set of people.

So i played BioShock Infinite: Burial at Sea. A little bittersweet, knowing that it's the final piece of Irrational content. It's a beautiful and fairly substantial pair of expansions. It felt a little wobbly to me though, in the way the first episode tries to scale back on the action with mechanics that aren't really meant for that kind of restrained combat, and even in Episode 2, where many systems are newly introduced or outright redesigned, it still has some clunky things like those arbitrarily restrictive carry limits. Narratively, it's a nice bookend on Irrational's work with the BioShock series, though episode 2 has a few clunky exposition dumps and i'm pretty sure it intorduced a few new plotholes to the series. I don't know though, i don't feel super strongly about the add-ons one way or the other, but i'm happy to have played them and the end of Episode 2 may have hit me harder than i'm entirely comfortable admitting. Clash in the Clouds, the other thing, i thought was a fun throwaway. It doesn't really need to be there, but as somebody who enjoys Infinite's mechanics more than most people seemed to, it's fun to have that arena to really push the game to its limits. Yeah, I mentioned it in the second paragraph. There's a few differences setting it apart, but but it's pretty close to Geometry Wars 2.

It's very interesting to me to note that another big fighting game is skipping the XBO. (It's not as if the 360 wasn't popular as a platform for fighting games, the divide between the PS3 and the 360 was pretty 50/50.)

It just has so, so many layered systems with fun and surprising interactions, RF4 is a great sandbox RPG. (A general consideration to have is that NPC's in that game are not just the signposts you would expect out of a JRPG.)

Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is... Wait... Is that a 3D pun? Fuck this game! Anyways, no, it's actually pretty good. It's essentially Geometry Wars 2 and Geometry Wars Galaxies mashed up into one package. The main mode has the Gradius-like options and mission progression that Galaxies had, but there's another mode that is also pretty much just Geometry Wars 2. (There's also a co-op campaign or something? It even has online play.) The boss fights and some of the other mission types that have been added to the Galaxies-esque mode are pretty fantastic, and i like the new mechanic they introduced for how you collect primary weapon power-ups. Some of the progression restrictions in that mode feel super tight though, i wouldn't be surprised if most people don't get very far. Some people have been bitching about the three dimensional stages limiting your view of the arenas, but the much bigger issue is how muddled the distinct spawn tones are in the audio mix of the game, which is kind of a really important part of being able to keep up with the chaos of Geometry Wars. I feel like i'm getting taken out by small, fast-moving enemies way more frequently without those clear, distinct sounds serving as an alert. It feels like something they could probably patch and they should, it's the only thing that really feels like it's keeping the game down. Also, it's less of an issue and more down to personal taste perhaps, but I don't like the tron aesthetic as much as the vibrantly beautiful vector graphics-aesthetic featured in the previous games. Kind of going to give a "Hey, the first Geometry Wars may be on steam, but Geo 2 and Galaxies aren't, and this is kind of like those" recommendation here. It's not the best Geometry Wars has been, but it's still better than almost any other twin stick shooter out there.

I saw that suggested somewhere so i tried running it with all the graphics options set to minimum and it still ctd'd. (Several times in a row, with only a few minutes in the game each time, even after a reboot.)

This has been known for a while, i think i even posted about it in here a while back, but yeah... It's happening very soon now. Glad to see RF4 get that wider release, it's a great game.

Dark Souls 2 is my goty, there is simply nothing else i've played this year that i have consistently enjoyed as much, or even just played as much. The world building that people loved so much in the other Souls games feels a little wobbly here, but the underlying mechanics, both in pve and pvp, are well executed to such a degree that i cannot imagine going back to the first Dark Souls at this point. Dark Souls 2 is a better game, and i will stand by that. Bonus mentions: Lethal League is awesome and people should play it. It's such a stylish and tightly designed party fighter, and it doesn't hurt that it has virtually lag free online play. Smash 4 is... You know, it's more of that thing you probably already like, and this time there's no tripping. Spintires is a particularly befuddling thing to me, but i'm absolutely ensnared by it. Earth Defense Force 2025 is a game i almost forgot came out this year. It's real dumb and real good, i had so much fun playing it. Wolfenstein: New Order was pretty uneven, but it's slick and engaging and trying just so god damn hard. 2012 game of 2014: Hey, i finally got around to trying to finish up the last few chapters of Fire Emblem: Awakening. That game is still awesome, it is still the best game on the 3DS. Biggest disappointment: The Evil Within, simply because the damn thing doesn't work, and i was really looking forward to playing it too. CTD's constantly and there are no solutions to be found on the internet, the PC version seems like a mess.

I have about 15 hours on it with a couple of the maps completed and a lot of mucking around on others, and i intend to keep playing it for some time. The basic framework of the game is quite thin, it's very loose and open-ended and if you're not good at setting objectives for yourself it'll probably feel like there's barely anything there. (There's actually some really fun, goofy achievements in the game, so don't ignore those. I'd also encourage learning on the casual mode, but then playing on the hardcore mode, since casual essentially negates a lot of the more involved elements of the game's mechanics, such as the shifter, fuel management, and basically ever needing to rescue a vehicle.) Still, i find the mechanics on offer engaging enough that it shines through the relatively spartan context offered by the game. For me, i think it kind of scratches the same itch that Red Lynx's Trials games did, the way this is also so much about sustaining mommentum and balance enough to carry you through rough terrain. Sort of fudging the physical limits of what your vehicle can do to overcome some tricky environmental obtsacle. As to how realistic the physics are, i literally cannot tell you. I'm guessing vehicle damage being modelled as a health bar suggests that it's not aiming for 100% authenticity. The range of what it presents is where its strengths are, because with such a wide range of things being simulated, you often have far more options than you might initially realize. Obviously small trucks can nimbly navigate around obstacles, and larger trucks can move through deep mud and cross rivers relatively safely, but the largest trucks can actually even just bull through light forest and create new paths. It also really is just a very nice and polished game, where these types of niche sims usually tend to come with a certain degree of jank. Instead, there's some really elegant, stylish floating UI and the game controls well and has some really interesting little mechanics. For example, It does this thing where it simulates a little gear shifter in the bottom right corner of your screen, which you control with either the right stick of a gamepad or the mouse, forcing you to manually slam from first into second before you lose your mommentum in the mud and stall your engine. Regarding other controls though, there are some oversights, like there not being any winch controls mapped to the gamepad, which - if playing on a pad - is definitely an issue since the winch will often be the solution to many of your problems. (The developer is allegedly working on full gamepad support, along with various other improvements.) The other issue i'm having with it is that it only allows you one checkpoint save, starting another map overwrites your progress. (Though it's not like a map presents you with a long and involved campaign. As i've noted, each map is only a few hours or so.) If you're apprehensive about risking money on the game, and i can understand why, wait and see if it gets another deep price cut when/if the winter sale comes up.

Does that make you feel old? How about a fun retrospective thread to take the edge off? Which DS games do you look back on fondly? Also: Go play Ghost Trick, goddammit.

So Spintires, that kickstarted offroading sim with the really, really fancy physics simulation and terrain deformation tech. That came down to ten bucks during the Steam sale and i had heard enough good things about it that i decided to give it a shot. By "good things", i mean that it's allegedly one of those weird niche sims that executes on its subject matter well enough that it works perhaps beyond its intended audience. Hell, i've certainly never driven offroad in conditions even remotely like what are depicted in this game, but i'm still really enjoying it. It certainly helps that it's a very polished and elegantly presented game, much moreso than you might expect. The general gist is that you start out on one of a half-dozen or so fairly enormous maps with what is very likely a crappy jeep wholly unsuited to the ultimate goal of the map, so you first go around exploring to map out terrain, hoping to discover new trucks better suited to your needs, then running equipment out to abandoned garages to set them up as resupply points, and ultimately setting out to accomplish whatever the map's ultimate objective is. (Using your UI's map to swap between all of your controlled trucks on the fly, perhaps configuring one at a garage so it can go refuel or repair another truck, or go hook that truck up to a winch and pull it out of the mud.) You start learning to read the terrain and assess which truck is suited to which challenge, and also how you should respond when something goes horribly wrong. Really, and all of the terrain deformation and physics simulation that happens is really, really impressive. Having a road you need to travel back and forth across a bunch become nearly unusable because you've dug a huge ditch through it with careless driving, or trying to cross a river only to notice that your truck is starting to lift off the riverbed while water piling up on one side threatens to tip it over, it's all really tense and pretty great. Not the kind of game i usually end up recommending, but i've been having a bunch of fun with this, it seems to do what it's trying to do very well. (Unfortunately, the 66% off pricing has already ended, but it's still available on a smaller discount until the sale is over.) It also has four player online co-op, i believe? Apparently you can't save in the mp mode though, and based on my experience it seems like a map can take a few hours to complete. There's also a casual mode that eases up on some elements of the simulation and lets you "rescue" a truck to any controlled garages. (Though it forces you to abandon any loads the truck is carrying, so it doesn't let you cheat through the cargo-hauling goals.)

I was definitely not expecting this to be good, surprised the hell out of me when a bunch of glowing 9/10 reviews started showing up.

I did some forum diving and it seems like the general consensus is that a patch that went live in october completely boned the game for a seemingly not insignifcant number of people, just made it start randomly crashing constantly, and there's basically been no official acknowledgement of the issue. The framerate hitching, on the other hand, seems to have been an issue on the PC version from the start. No matter how powerful your PC is or what your graphics settings are, it keeps dropping random frames in otherwise perfectly smooth performance. A lot of people probably wouldn't even care about that one, but inconsistent framerates make me crazy.

I'm definitely not a competitive player with fighting games, i can't offer a super informed and technical perspective, but I'll just throw in that sweeping balance updates have absolutely been a fixture of the fighting game scene for quite a few years now. It more or less started around Street Fighter 4, though that has still mostly contextualized its updates as discrete new releases of the game, but in amongst new characters and other changes, the existing characters are always seeing myriad changes. (Tweaking the damage/startup/recovery/hitbox on a single move can have mind-boggling and branching repercussions that alter how combos work and how a character overall plays.) Players of fighting games keeping up with changes made to their preferred characters is very much like a Dota 2 player keeping up with any changes issued to the characters they play. (I'll still argue that Dota is secretly a fighting game.) I think fighting game crowds tend to be somewhat resistant to rapid fire iteration on a game though, because there are so many examples of a fighting game's meta continuing to evolve over a long period of time. (In the podcast, it's asserted as potentially a unique aspect of Melee, but even the much older Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo is known to still have an evolving meta.) In these games that are defined by matchups, where you can come at a problem from so, so many different angles, there is just so much room for continued discovery years after the developer has ceased its involvement with the game. With examples of metas growing purely on their own because the basis for them is such a complex sandbox of possible interactions, there is sometimes the sentiment that a developer shouldn't issue balance changes to a game, that players are perhaps just "sleeping" on a character and not investing enough effort into figuring out what can make them effective. (Or are not investing enough effort into understanding how to counter a dominant character.) Also, i don't know how the idea of Smash 4 microtransactions was discussed without making mention of Amiibos.

Yeah, the wording about what exactly they're doing on the PC side of things has been super confusing. On the whole, it certainly doesn't seem that they're just updating the visuals or anything, the trailer they put out had new voice-over and footage of new fights in new areas that do not exist in either the DLC packs or the core game, and there's been some murmurs that they may be folding some of the features that have been talked about for Bloodborne back into Dark Souls 2. Whatever it ends up being, it sounds like a fairly significant update. However, the way things are being worded makes it sound like some of it is going to be patched into existing versions and that some of it is potentially going to be exclusive to the new versions on PS4 and XBO, which leaves the PC version in a really murky place with the possibility of two similar versions of the same game appearing alongside eachother and negatively affecting the online experience for both. (It's also worth noting that the trailer they put out does not look like a significant visual upgrade, it looks about par with the PC version. It's probably not going to be a massive visual overhaul that suddenly makes the game look like the early preview builds everybody got so up in arms about.)

Just grabbed this in the Steam sale and after hearing so much buzz about how poorly optimized it is, i'm surprised to find myself running it nearly maxed without any framerate drops. Trying to do the same in Wolfenstein: New Order brought my PC to a screeching halt. (I mean, and i don't feel like there's a significant visual disparity between these two IdTech games, Evil WIthin looks pretty great to me so far.) Has Evil Within just been significantly optimized with post-release patches? I noticed there's now an option to disable the letterboxing. Edit: Well i take that back. A little further into the game and there is just crazy, constant framerate hitching, and nothing i do seems to alleviate it. Edit: Alright, so rebooting the game seems to set things right. Memory leak or something, i guess. Performance seems to steadily degrade with each level or save load... Oh, and it also just crashed. Edit: So yeah, fuck this game. It is crashy as hell, seven CTD's before i've even got an hour on the in-game clock, and i don't see anywhere any solutions for people that have that issue, but other people definitely seem to have had that experience with it. Super bummed out, seems like my kind of game. Very glad i didn't jump on it at release for the full cost, i very nearly did.

So the AI used for the Amiibos in Smash 4 is pretty good, i guess.

I feel it needs reiterating though, that Dark Souls' ambitious online systems work because there's a critical mass of players. There is no universal quick match there, there are multiple covenants with complex interactions that require members of each to all fulfill similar conditions simultaneously, there are multiple PVP zones - both informal and prescripted - that people can search for fights, there is co-op built around somebody happening to see your summon sign in the place you put it, and it's all further divided up by soul memory ranges and the NG/NG+ divide. Playing it again recently, Dark Souls 2 still feels populated and functional at the roughly 5000 daily players it has on Steam, but i seriously wonder if that will still be true if there's another sharp drop-off. If this GOTY release is a separate new version of the game on the Steam store, they're potentially splitting the playerbase and harming the experience for everyone playing on the PC. That is the concern i think people should have. Though, seriously, they should be offering a discount to people who bought the season pass. I'm not demanding more stuff for free, the add-on content From has been doing for the Dark Souls games is fantastic and are well-earned dollars for From, but if a large majority of the cost of this new package is implied to be because of the add-ons people may already own... You know...

Only by the japanese date though, it was another few months before the wordwide releases of the PSP happened.

Just recently, i've started getting just tons of streetpasses again. I'm guessing it's probably Smash 4 reminding people that they still have a 3DS.

The PSP still has a few months to go before it's ten, heh. I mean, but the PSP is relevant to the conversation, it provides the context around the DS. The PSP had an incredible launch line-up of games, they're still some of the best games on that system. The DS's launch was comparatively dire, it had a horrible first year. There was definitely a perception that Nintendo was kind of doomed going into the DS launch, it was a system crammed full of unproven gimmicks and the games were seriously lacking for a good long while. Then the PSP showed up a few months later with a huge screen, better visuals, and a strong launch library. It didn't take people long to proclaim that Sony had usurped Nintendo's position in the portable market.