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I played the MP quite a bit back then, I recall it as being a first-person "discs of tron"-style thing and i remember it being quite fun. I'm going to go ahead and assume that its server browser was run through Gamespy though, hence Steam identifying this re-release as SP only.

When i replayed the Half-Life series a while back, i thought Half-Life actually held up better than its sequels in some respects. Visually, Half-Life 2 has aged astoundingly well, but the emphasis on physics puzzles absolutely dates it, it's a game that keeps side-stepping into gimmicks. You go back to Half-Life though and find a game that was completely redefining the fundamentals of FPS design in a way that sort of creates a situation where it's a game that still feels like a modern shooter, and because it feels like people expect shooters to feel like, maybe people don't realize how amazing it is that it still feels like a modern shooter and get hung up on the small details of movement speed or whatever it may be. What's your stance on Unreal, might i ask? I've always been incredibly fond of the game. Its level design can be very inconsistent, but taken as a whole, that game does kind of a beautiful job making you feel like you're out on a big long, lonely journey through its huge, abandoned spaces. You're piecing together the stories of your fellow shipwreck survivors and being seemingly out of your depth against enemies that alternate between impressively enormous or impressively intelligent. (Halo later invoked an exceedingly similar setup to similar success. Skaarj = Elites, pretty much.) Also, whatever logic leaps led to the initial creation of Unreal's arsenal should still be lauded, because it's still just one of the most inventive and dynamic sets of player weapons in an FPS. Unreal's a great co-op game too, precisely because of those big, tough enemies and open-ended levels. (Now tell me that you hated playing through Unreal.) (Also, out of love for Sin, i definitely bought a copy of Sin Episode(s?) back when that came out. One of the most crushing disappointments i've ever experienced as a gamer.)

Disney put a bunch of games up on Steam. It's mostly licensed nonsense, but it includes a few standouts like the output of the short-lived Blackrock Studios. (Pure and Split/Second are stellar arcade racing games, especially Pure.) Also, Tron 2.0 went up on Steam seemingly as part of all of this, and that is a game i thought would never see the light of day again on account of the labyrinth of licensing around it. So if nobody's ever played Tron 2.0, let me put a recommendation on that game. It's incredible, it's a favorite of mine. It's a Monolith-developed game with some very early bloom tech being used with style and purpose and some FPS/RPG leanings in the vein of Deus Ex. (Notably, your character has a limited amount of memory that you can allocate to upgrade subroutines, but that memory varies with the computer systems you infiltrate over the course of the game.) Tron 2.0 also contains, as a mini-game, one of the better adaptations of the lightcycles concept. On the downside though, you do have some extremely unforgiving stealth mechanics and quite a number of really, really unfortunate first-person jumping puzzles. (My recollection is that most of the required hops are actually quite short and easily controlled by taking advantage of the walk key.) The game is probably particularly interesting to go back to as a strange pop artifact for being a sort-of-official alternate interpretation for how Tron could have been sequelized, an alternate interpretation with which Tron Legacy is completely irreconcilable. They had Bruce Boxleitner on board though! That's gotta count for something.

The Wii U will probably be the first of the next-gen systems i end up getting, but it probably won't happen until .

So i don't think i heard it mentioned in the podcast, and i don't see that anybody's mentioned it on here: This was a thing that was announced.

There are also no-hazard variants of a lot of the stages already in the game that would be totally viable alternatives for competitive play if they were selectable, but they only show up in All-Star mode and - under some difficult to infer conditions - can apparently override their equivalents in normal versus play. There's a lot of strangeness about this game. (Of course there is.)

I like Rising a whole lot, but i would argue that Rising is a much, much less sophisticated design than Bayonetta. I won't try to argue for Bayonetta's stylistic sensibilities, I don't think that's a fight i could or necessarily should win, but i will argue for its mechanics. There are absolutely not many other games like it, because in its genre it stands relatively alone in its technical nuance. It's also much more akin to the Devil May Cry games, particularly DMC3, than any other games being invoked here. (A lot of the multi-weapon dynamics can be seen echoed in the design of those games, for one example. There are many, many other parallels as well.) As for Bayonetta 2, i can't say anything for certain, but i wish i had a Wii U to play it.

Good news on that front! They're still trying to make Rune Factory 4 happen for Europe. (Also, it was the developer shutting down that impeded the european release.)

Yeah, i can't recommend the 3DS version of 3U, unless you're lucky enough to have a bunch of friends who are on board with doing local multiplayer. MH is a miserable solo experience imo. MH4, which will be 3DS exclusive, will have online play on the 3DS and that will probably be pretty easy to recommend. Monster Hunter is a pretty amazing experience when you have a good group of people to play with.

This single game is making me lean towards the XBO over the PS4, but both are purchases i would like to forestall for as long as possible. Holy shit, i hope this comes out on PC.

There really are so many unknowns about how Amiibos will be implemented in Nintendo's games. If every Amiibo is supported on every game with support for Amiibos, will every Nintendo game just become a big ridiculous Nintendo museum like Smash is? Mario Kart 8 is already slowly introducing some non-Mario characters, is that a sign of things to come? I kind of hope it isn't, there's something to say for Nintendo's disparate franchises retaining their individual identities, but i don't know what else Amiibos will be.

In my mind, it's a good amusing game with caveats. Yes, the story is incoherent and awful and it takes too long to introduce all of its characters, but i loved that combat system, finding ways to juggle enemies for big extended combos was a pretty good hook. I would give it the weakest recommendation of any of the games i listed off, but i still like that game quite a lot.

To add to Tegan's list: I still think Fire Emblem: Awakening is the best game on the 3DS, that is a must-play for any strategy-rpg fans. Kid Icarus Uprising is a surprising and wonderful third-person shooter with a pretty solid loot-grind hook. Resident Evil: Revelations is a very good Resident Evil game that is honestly better than the last couple main-series entries. (Look for a "circle pad pro" attachment to go with this one though, it benefits from dual-analog control.) Azure Striker Gunvolt is a recent and pretty good eshop game from IntiCreates of MegaMan/Mighty No 9 fame. If you have fond memories of the MMX series or the MMZ series, you'll probably be into this. Just tons and tons of good to great RPG's on the 3DS too. (Bravely Default, Shin Megami Tensei IV, Etrian Odyssey 4, Rune Factory 4, Project X Zone, and more.) Did nobody say Mario Kart 7? Mario Kart 7 is a pretty good Mario Kart, might even be my personal favorite Mario Kart. Edit: Oh, hey, and "Super Smash Brothers for Nintendo 3DS", obviously.

So this is the first Smash Bros game that i have approached as if it were a real fighting game rather than a big elaborate museum of Nintendo nonsense with a button mashing game affixed to it. As a result, i think i've actually fallen into the "NO ITEMS, FD ONLY" side of the argument. You know what though? I am enjoying this game so much. Also, given the above change of opinion, I think it is awesome that there are FD variants for every stage. I believe i've fallen into old habits though, because i'm mostly playing Lucina. So really just Marth, i guess i'm just playing Marth. Some gripes though: I don't like that Smash Run randomly chooses rules for the final battle after you've gone around building up your character. There's also that challenge board where, by the third board, some of those unlocks are looking like quite a hell of a grind. The online game also lags like insanity with 4 players, but 2 and 3 players have been totally fine in most cases. I'll probably just buy a Samus one. Oh wait, but Captain Falcon's a favorite too. You know, i like Fire Emblem a lot, so maybe i should get a Marth one. I mean, and i have to get a Kirby, how could i not? ...

I do think PC gamers have been spoiled a certain extent by low-key steam indie games and ports from old consoles that were obsolete even when they launched. People have kind of forgotten that PC gaming was traditionally a super expensive hobby because there hasn't been much incentive or need to upgrade in such a long time, a PC has been able to last for years in this last cycle. (My previous PC did, in fact, last for well over six years.) The new platforms are quite capable machines though, an old bottleneck has been removed and hardware requirements are going to spike big time for the PC versions of things.

I have been having that issue as well, but i'm not sure it's the game. I think it's a finicky analog stick messing up inputs, because i've had issues with the 3DS's analog stick dropping inputs in other games under specific use circumstances.

BGS's hands haven't gone anywhere near this game, if you want to have concerns about the technical side of the equation, it's going to be because it's a brand new japanese studio being given an unfamiliar engine in IdTech 5 and not taking advantage of Bethesda's connections with Id. (Back while Carmack was still with Id, he had been quoted as saying that nobody at Id had even spoken with Mikami's team.)

That's really the only explanation for it, there's also a ton of Kid Icarus songs on the soundtrack. I mean, i think i liked Uprising more than most people, but i still find it weird how over-represented it is in Smash 4.

It's probably one of my favorite games of this year, it's a hilarious concept elegantly executed and stylishly presented. It just feels like a game that probably should have received more attention than it got.

Bought the game on cartridge and it locked my 3DS inside of an hour. Then it got real weird, because i had to reboot the system multiple times to get it to recognize that there was a cartridge slot. (There wasn't even the empty cartridge slot icon on the UI, it was a blank space. I have never seen or heard of anything like this happening.) Once my 3DS got whatever that was out of its system, the game has subsequently run fine and without issue, but there's some weird voodoo going on with that game, i'm quite certain. (No other game on the 3DS, for example, fully reboots the system when you quit out to the home screen.) I had a bunch of three-player online matches and was genuinely surprised to see how playable it was, the netcode is actually quite respectable. If somebody's connection is rough, it seems like it can get pretty bad, but the average match was pretty solid. Shulk is great, my favorite character right now.

I really, really want Evil Within to be good, Shinji Mikami is usually great and RE4 is up pretty high on a list of favorites for me, but every piece of footage i've seen of the game looks so rough.

So the long-anticipated series reboot has been revealed as a "free-to-play" MMO. Not really what i was hoping for. A lot of it actually sounds quite nice, but the idea of the game embracing a freemium model worries me.

I haven't been here in a while, so there's a bunch of things i've played and not posted about! Shadowrun Returns: Dragonfall - Really enjoyed this add-on, it comes across as a more assuredly designed product than the original campaign for the game. Many oversights are addressed, you're generally allowed a considerably greater degree of freedom, and SRR continues to be surprisingly well-written. Civilization 5: Complete Edition - Never played Civ 5 before, was always warned away from it earlier on, but i had been hearing such good things about Brave New World, and the sale price the complete pack was going for during the Steam summer sale was pretty hard to ignore. I do think i still like Civ 4 more in some respects, but Civ 5 - as of BNW, i suppose - does some pretty tremendous things with the end-game that i have really, really enjoyed. Definitely been playing a lot of this one. Kentucky Route Zero - Really, really thrilled with this. It's hard to go in depth on what makes it so great without spoiling it, but i ended up playing through all the currently available episodes in one marathon session and can't wait for the rest of it to become available. X-com: Enemy Within - For being a huge expansion pack to one of my favorite games of 2012, it's not clicking with me as much as i would have hoped. The Exalt missions in particular don't exactly end up feeling like you're fighting an insurgency against X-com as much as dealing with an intermittent piece of busywork and an annoying additional resource sink. Lovely Planet - I instantly fell in love this game and it now strikes me as particularly odd that it's something that hasn't really been done before. Mixing simple old-school FPS mechanics with that rapid-fire trial-and-error masocore mentality just makes so much sense to me now. Surgeon Simulator: Anniversary Edition - The new surgery types from the iOS version of the game come across as maybe a little too finicky and precise for the original PC control scheme, and the randomization present in the new corridor environment can completely screw you in a way even the ambulance environment wouldn't have. Hey, but it's like three bucks, and there's a ton of new stuff in it. Shovel Knight - Shovel Knight is tremendous. I think it might be the best platformer i've played in years. Shovel Knight might also be one of the only games of this style that feels like it actually understands what its imitating, it takes the right things it needs to build itself into something that manages to feel simultaneously evocative and new. It reminds me of playing Megaman 9, a game that felt like it benefited from years of hindsight and pent up ideas about its style of game, though Shovel Knight draws from a much broader pallete of inspiration than just Megaman. (Even if it is still mostly drawing from Megaman.)

That bit was a nightmare, they also made it easier to aggro all of them simultaneously than it was on NG.

There were some side-by-side comparisons floating around when Dark Athena came out, and it indicated that they had pretty much completely rebuilt most of the areas in the game and dramatically overhauled their engine.