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I just finished playing Wolfenstein: New Order, which i overall really enjoyed. It's pretty uneven in both its narrative and its design, but given that one could have reasonably expected it to be a disaster, it's actually something of a small triumph. It manages to hit some pretty strong highs along the way. I haven't quite finished it yet, but i also recently played through the Tomb Raider reboot, and... It's alright. It's inoffensive, more interesting to me than the old series ever was, but ultimately kind of forgettable. I enjoyed it enough that I won't immediately write off the sequel they certainly will make. I just hope there's more actual tomb raiding, the game starts looking a little too much like Uncharted. (Edit: What's all this about the QTE's? I didn't have any problem with them.) I've also done a couple playthroughs through Dark Souls 2, which i'm going to just go ahead and say is an early contender for my personal goty. Timegate's add-ons for FEAR are pretty decent, if i remember correctly. I guess they've been discarded from the series' canon by Monolith's own FEAR 2 though. Also, let me throw out a recommendation for Condemned, the other spooky game Monolith put out around the same time as FEAR. It was built up on the same engine and even shares a lot of the same assets, but has an emphasis on melee combat instead of bombastic slow-mo shooting. It retained the smart AI though, with enemies that would try to use the environment to circle around and sneak up on you. It's also, in my opinion, much, much scarier than FEAR. I'll throw another vote in the pile for ODST being my favorite Halo campaign, it really benefited from being a smaller project that Bungie was allowed to take some risks with. It's a tragedy that it seems to be left with the legacy of being "the bad one" because it didn't have a fully featured multiplayer suite. I'm sure they'll eventually pack ODST and Reach together and throw them on the XBO at some point in the future though. One of the Miller brothers gave a retrospective talk on Myst in 2013 at GDC and during the questions segment, Phil Fish shows up out of nowhere and starts expressing what a huge influence the Myst games were on him and then asks to have one of the Myst novels signed. So if you're seeing some Myst influences in Fez, it's probably because there are. The video can be seen here, Phil Fish starts talking around 51 minutes.

You have a lot of options for increasing your invasion priority, if you want that. There's the red string ring the BoB sells, or you can go accumulate sin by invading other players so you start bringing in Blue Sentinel invasions. Tokens of spite also temporarily increase invasion priority, the dried fingers reset the invasion timer, the CoC also increases priority. Also, you are probably on the lower-end of NG+ soul memory ranges. From what i had been reading, which reflected my own experience, it seemed like most of the NG+ pvp was happening around 10 million. Increased soul rewards for defeating enemies and bosses in NG+ will get you there pretty quickly though, so don't worry about trying to inflate that artificially.

This is a great piece.

Concerning those sorts of things, one thing it does do, that i think every game built around checkpoint saves should do, is that if you unlock a perk or find a collectable, it is retained even if you subsequently die and are put back at a checkpoint prior to you accomplishing that task. It infuriates me to no end if a game has a rigid checkpoint system, and after spending maybe twenty mintues carefully exploring through an area and finding all the secrets, i die in some stupid way and have to do all that busy work again. New Order does not make you do that. Also, i guess the choice you make at the start of the diverges into two slightly different campaigns with altered stories and, i am told, different paths through some levels. Anyways, I sort of ended up just marathoning through the game and actually liking it a ton, the game gets better as it goes along. (Did the medium difficulty, Steam says it took 14 hours.) The story goes to some incredibly odd places though, and feels really clunky in a few other spots, i'm not immediately sure what i think of how it developed.

It has a wry self-effacing sense of humor at times, but it's mostly super sternly serious in tone. It's definitely pretty pulpy though, and kind of quietly self-aware about it. I'm actually really liking what they're trying to do with the narrative. The leads behind this game are no strangers to making narratively flimsy source material work surprisingly well, looking back at The Darkness and the two Riddick games. I've heard some later parts come across as a little gross and tone deaf though, we'll have to see how i feel about those.

Man, that... That first level... That's not so good. I went in kind of expecting that you guys were blowing it out of proportion, but a turret sequence and sparsely populated corridor trenches are maybe not the way to make a great first impression. It was so dull, i started getting really worried about the game. After the time-skip is where the game seems like it settles into being what it's going to be, and i'm really enjoying most of what's been happening there. Big multi-pathed combat spaces with lots of dynamic action. The game has some pretensions about being a stealth game, and while it would have been easy for it to have become utterly superfluous, it's reinforced by officers who start summoning extra allies when they're alerted to your presence. It's often in your best interest to strive for stealth kills against them before exploding into violence with everybody else. I like that dynamic, i think it works. The achievement-based perk system is also kind of a weird, interesting thing to tie into a single-player FPS. I don't think i'm buying into the pathos they're trying to infuse into B.J. Blazkowicz, but the game is generally pretty well written. Also, the video that was making the rounds trying to illustrate that the AI in the game is terrible is pretty misleading. The AI is fine, the issue is the behavior of those specific enemies in that one stretch of the game. It's clearly designed as a stealth sequence, but it feels like the game doesn't want to commit to it. Since you can't go guns blazing there, it seems like Machine Games opted to make the enemies laughably ineffectual so as not to roadblock people who wanted to fight through regardless. It comes across as a little confused. (That video also goes to some lengths to make the combat look as bad as possible, but in the game those enemies are immediately dispatched with a simple counter move, there isn't a garish QTE to mash through every time.) It's still problematic, just a different kind of problematic. Uneven, i would say is my first impression of Wolfenstein: New Order, from spending a few hours with it. I don't know if the people who made this game were even involved with it, but the Starbreeze game it most reminds me of is, somewhat unflatteringly, Syndicate. Hey though, i thought Syndicate was pretty underrated.

Holy shit, this is a forty gig download?

I don't doubt, despite the soul memory mechanic, that people will figure out ways to do super optimized builds to still troll new players. Still, it seems like it will prevent them from doing it for very long, at least. Regarding the matching, my NG++ character with a soul memory of around 13 million gets invaded constantly, but i'm getting invaded by the same guys over and over. (Same thing happens with the various duelling outlets, lots of familiar faces.) I think what happens is that the player base at the high end is small enough there are basically no priority queues and everybody is getting matched into anything that is available. It works though, there's enough people playing that it doesn't collapse in on itself. Regardless of where i go looking, there are people doing things. I understand the Blue Sentinels have trouble at the high end though, with significantly fewer players running around in the Way of the Blue. For my own part, I usually switch over to Way of the Blue whenever i'm not specifically doing anything covenant related, i love having a Blue Sentinel show up. (It doesn't look like they show up if you already have a co-op summon though.) The big issue i thought i was going to have with Soul memory, early on, was sunk costs in consumables and souls lost on death creating irrevocable level disparities in pvp, but it feels like it averages out with how much the economy scales up as you keep playing. A crippling twenty thousand soul loss early on is laughably trivial later on. As for the high-end losses, they don't really have to happen. I've had to make my peace with the ring of soul protection, because it costs me so much to level up at this point that i am never able to not have completely absurd numbers of souls on hand. (It costs me 300k to level up!) I'd still argue there needs to be a better system than Soul Memory, i think it undermines a few key points of Dark Souls and creates some problematic edge cases, but it's definitely better than player level being used for matching. It seems to work. Mostly.

I never actually got around to doing her special event, but she apparently uses Wrath of the Gods. I hate running into WOTG in PVP, it is so powerful. The force miracles are supposed to be magic damage, i believe. Use that knowledge when preparing for the fight.

I was running through Heide's Tower and was going to finish off Ornstein, which i hadn't done on this particular playthrough. I stopped just in front of the large round hub room with that large mob of Old Knights and saw a SunBro summon sign. I didn't really need help for the area, but i figured i'd help the guy get a sunlight token. Thing is, just as i finished summoning him, i also saw an invasion warning pop up. As he appeared before me, the red phantom came into view behind him in the middle of the round hub room. SunBro waves at me, i point past him at the red phantom, and the red phantom shrugs back. The invading phantom pulls out an Avelyn and is just going to hang back and try to harass us with projectiles from within the safety of the group of Old Knights. Finally, the perfect opportunity to use a Seed of the Tree of Giants. It was beautiful.

http://www.siliconera.com/2014/05/20/dark-souls-1-will-remain-functional-gfwl-foreseeable-future/ I'm not sure what to make of this.

There's a few other spots where the torch ended up being surprisingly useful, like the Shrine of Amana and the poison filled caverns in Harvest Valley. I seriously can't imagine trying to do a 100% clear of Shrine of Amana without a torch to see the outline of the walkable surface under the water. Though having a torch there plays with some area mechanics in some other fun ways too. The women who sing say they "make the little ones dance" and that this brings peace to the hollows there. You'll notice the fireflies that appear over the hollows while there is singing present. The hollows won't attack you while that is the case, but a torch can scare away the fireflies. The hollows will also attack you from further away when you have a torch out. Don't even bother trying to fight, just run as fast as you can and be mindful of ranged attacks. Rat King players have gotten so good at stacking the deck against summons that you will just never win that fight. Just run the gauntlet and try to escape, you at least have a chance that way.

Exploits are gross, and From is pretty spotty about which bugs they end up fixing in their games, so that's concerning news. Anyways, I can confirm with relative certainty that the two-handed R1 on the halbred moveset is unparryable, doesn't seem like anything else is though. Been lots of fun trolling people who just run up in my face and wait to parry with the monastery scimitar, especially when they don't clue in and keep trying to parry.

A lot of stuff got nerfed because of how it affected the pvp, like tranquil walk. It was an awesome ability for PVE, but it similarly kind of broke PVP, and now it's not even in DS2.

Hush is still in the game, at the very least. There's also the stuff with the environmental camouflage, which isn't really relevant since it's for pvp, but i just want to mention how amazing it is to see a large pot sprinting after a terrified wizard. (That particular ability prevents lock-ons.)

The approach to Velstadt is actually incredibly simple if you do two things: 1 - Make sure you lower that bridge so you don't have to go through the graveyard again, because fuck that stretch. (If you want to grab the items in the last room, i don't see much alternative to just doing a couple suicide runs and trying to destroy the statues that spawn the ghosts.) 2 - In the long hallway before Velstadt, kill the zombie under the stairs before it can ring the bell and summon more of those ghosts. (God dammit, i hate those ghosts.) All you're left with at that point is the... seven or so syan knights to fight through? Which i generally find to be pretty harmless. Easy to dodge, easy to backstab. Them pulling in groups of two doesn't really do much to offset how harmless they are, i think. Bait them into attacking at the same time, attack while they're stuck in recovery. Velstadt himself, he's not that hard. Another favorite fight of mine, but a pretty straight forward one. Edit: Ugh, the insane requirements to rank up in the two main PVP covenants just breaks my spirit whenever i think about trying to participate in those.

I knew it would be like this. I just haven't been able to reliably dodge or flee from its arm attacks, everything else it does is harmless. That halbred has a radically different moveset than my Mastadon Halbred, but the guy in the video makes the claim that all two-handed halbred attacks are unparriable.

RRA honestly isn't that hard, the key is just immediately murdering the other rats in the arena, and you can usually pull that off if you have a weapon with a few good broad attacks. Once RRA itself actually comes out... So his two-step slash with his front legs has a massive hitbox, but it extends outwards away from his body. Dodge towards him through the first hit and get a couple hits on his legs while he's doing the second swing. (You might find the lock-on fighting you a bit here, so it might be good to kill the lock-on.) That attack is probably 70% of what he does, so once you got that down, the fight is pretty simple. (You can also exploit that attack to give you a safe place to heal.) The biggest threat in that fight is the head bash he does as a dash attack, the timing to dodge it i find extremely tricky since it's a very quick attack. LGK itself is a super simple fight. It's a fun fight, but a simple one. It's the pvp that makes it brutal. Hardest boss for me, Ancient Dragon aside, is the Demon of Song. That is the only boss i haven't been able to beat as pure melee. Do you know which attacks? I'm assuming it's probably the "spin to win" attacks. Also, while googling this, i just learned that jump attacks are apparently completely unparriable regardless of the weapon.

Well, i carry a shield, but i have done that fight mostly without blocking. I find that trying to turtle up in the recesses of the wall is actually the worst thing you can do for that boss fight. (Hell, the skeletons were even guard breaking me on NG+.) Get out in the open, kill the skeletons, dodge into the recess of the wall when the chariot swings by. Get out, run up as far as you can until the skeletons catch up, repeat step one. You should be able to get far enough to kill the necromancer after the chariot's next lap, and then repeat the whole cycle for the second necromancer. After that, the actual fight with the two-headed horse is a piece of cake.

I think the relative simplicity of Far Cry 2's systems as compared to other similarly demanding games also make it harder to move past how oppressive it is. Stalker starts out pretty rough, but you can stack the deck pretty significantly in your favor.

I really love Far Cry 2, and i usually like coming into threads like these with lots of advice that might help people discover what's enjoyable about a specific game, but i think this might be one of those games where the things some people love about it and the things other people hate about it are exactly the same. *Shrug* I don't really know how to make a case for Far Cry 2. Can you appreciate and enjoy a game that actively strives to make you feel kind of miserable? That's sort of the question Far Cry 2 poses, and there's not really any way around it, no way to mitigate that through a deeper understanding of its mechanics. It's designed completely to be an upsetting experience. That's why people love it, and that's why other people hate it.

If you think those are annoying, just wait until you get to the Gutter with its poison spitting statuary. (I'm with Rodi on it being one of the best areas in the game, but those statues are still a huge pain in the ass.) I had kind of the opposite experience. I still did NG mostly solo, but called upon co-op phantoms in a few spots and ended up feeling like i was kind of robbed of the chance to learn the bosses myself. I wasn't having any fun having somebody just stroll through my game world and stomp the bosses for me, so fighting the bosses in NG+ purely solo has been much more entertaining for me. (Incidentally, the Smelter Demon is probably one of my favorite fights now.) The exception i've had to make is the Looking Glass Knight, you can't really solo it on NG+ since hostile player phantoms are all but guaranteed. I've been seeing that scimitar just constantly in my soul memory range. The general rule i've had to follow against people who are baiting for parries is to never initiate. Just dodge and punish, hit them in their recovery frames and then pull back and wait to repeat. Don't over-commit, combos are unreliable in Dark Souls, people mash the parry button and sometimes sneak it in between your swings. I've ended up having quite a bit of success against parry-baiters. (Also, if you keep dodging to their side, you're eventually going end up in position to land a backstab.) That said, it gets a little tougher if their primary weapon is something with fast recovery. I generally always have something like the estoc on hand so i can keep even ground, but if i'm outclassed, i'll often just hang back and spam the crossbow and pyromancies. (Which always makes me feel really lame.) Incredibly, some of the most difficult fights i've had are against people just using a damn dagger in their main hand. People also seem to have a ton of trouble parrying the halbred moveset, perhaps because of its versatility and broad range of unusual attacks? Still, strategies that rely on the other guy making a mistake are bad strategies, so i definitely wouldn't advise that against parry-baiters. What would you advise against Santier's? I've pretty consistently been just wrecked by that shit, I hate that damn thing.

I initially thought that too, i was confused and ended up dying during that fight, i wasn't sure if this guy was hostile or friendly. Invaders in the bell keeper arenas can be hostile to both sides, but they only get something if the world host dies, right? They usually want to avoid a fight with the bell keepers, but this blue phantom was actively defending the world host. I guess he might have just been screwing around and capitalizing on the confusion. Like i said though, you don't even need to equip it unless you're specifically corpse running. I'm also going to say that i think dual-stanced avelyn builds are hilarious and ineffectual. The condensed bursts of fire with the huge downtime inbetween means i'm never tight on stamina from dodging, while i can always expect that they are just completely bottomed out. Out of all my Dragon Remnant duels, and excepting a few builds where i'm still not sure what was going on, it was dual-stanced avelyn builds that always tried to pull some bullshit on me, they never wanted a straight up fight because they knew they wouldn't win. Hey, and i never lost to a dual-stanced avelyn. It's a huge threat if you're a caster, not if you're melee. I've actually found the rare bow-user potentially much more threatening, since their rate of fire forces me to bottom out my stamina when dodging. (Definitely starting to feel the limits of that OKS shield's durability when fighting people with beefy stats and fully upgraded weapons.)

About that Lost Sinner fight: In NG+... HEY, HOW ABOUT SOME LORE? Anybody care about that stuff? Isn't lore fun? Edit: I'm just going to throw an extra, unrelated comment in here, which is that i think the ring of soul protection is too good. Instead of breaking and disappearing permanently as its DS1 equivalent did, this one in DS2 only costs 3000 souls to fix and can be fixed as many times as you want. That sounds probably like a big cost, but it only is for about the first third of NG, then it quickly becomes a trivial amount of souls when the alternative is losing seventy thousand. The only real downside is that it's eating up a ring slot you could use for something else, but even there it's... Okay, you can go do your min-maxed build and be all awesome for a while, but you'll eventually die and leave your bloodstain out there with all those souls in it. Then you throw the ring on, because if you die during your corpse run, the ring prevents you from leaving a new bloodstain and allows the original one to persist. This way, it only detracts from your build when you're specifically trying to corpse run. It could really trivialize the punishing nature of the game, it would even be an essential thing to keep in mind for pvp characters, making it easier to get the most out of your soul memory because you've been losing fewer souls. If i had been abusing it on my character, my build would be probably hundreds of thousands of souls more developed than it is now, relative to my soul memory. (I guess it's also worth pointing out that consumables are kind of a sunk cost, i cringe thinking of how many souls i've spent on bolts for my crossbow.) (I guess the compounding issue here is that soul memory is a really shitty system. I mean, it seems to work in a general sense, but that it allows for these edge cases really irks me, perhaps more than it should?) A much later edit: Huh, apparently Blue Sentinels can be summoned into Bell Keeper fights. Somebody probably tried to invade into the arena and the world host was probably with Way of the Blue. If there was an invader though, he was dead by the time i got summoned to defend the belfry.

I am pretty on board with what this trailer is teasing.