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I think the crashes feel really weak, relative to GTAIV. Also, after spending more time with it, i think i've decided that the radio stations in GTAV are kind of terrible.

I disagree with this, but i won't make a big deal out of it, because they're both light years beyond Dead Space 3. The main thing, though, is that i think the first Dead Space delivers on a much broader spectrum of interesting scenarios, it's less scripted and less linear while also doing more with its mechanics. (As one example, the zero gravity sequences in 2 are little more than navigation interludes, while the first game used them to stage inventive combat scenarios.) You know, but it's kind of moot when Dead Space 3 is looming over both. God damn, that game was terrible. The first Dead Space was probably one of my favorite games of the last console cycle though, and the second game is absolutely worth playing if the first one clicks.

I loved the exaggerated suspension and how weighty every car felt, it had the feel of an old-school car chase movie, it was great. The cars in GTAV feel like they're gliding around, by comparison.

I think the hard difficulty is the way to play it, it feels comparable to playing the heroic difficulty in a Halo game. 1999 isn't actually that much more difficult just outright, but the resources are restricted to such a degree that you actually do need to go into it with a plan and some advance knowledge of the game. For both, the late-game vigors are game changers and should not be ignored, they provide you the ability to make a lot of those tougher enemies and scenarios completely manageable. (For example, use Return to Sender to set up shields in front of the thing you're trying to protect in the final battle.) The siren fight is a pain in the ass no matter what, however. If you don't go in there with lots of ammo and end the fight quickly, there aren't really enough supplies in that area to get you reasonably back up to speed once you burn through your ammo, die, and respawn. Also, dying does actually hurt you, that money loss adds up. Elizabeth's found coins seem to be there to kind of normalize the economy to a degree. I believe she'll give you more money if you're behind on things, and less if you're ahead. In 1999, however, she gives you virtually nothing, so don't die in 1999 mode.

I just started playing this a few days ago, Trevor makes me uncomfortable. Does the game want me to like him? I can't tell, it seems like it's going back and forth on that. Lots of little things have been bugging me, i don't like trying to figure out which character should buy which properties, for example. It feels like a pointless and obnoxious choice. I think the character specific powers are kind of dumb too, and Michael seems like he got the short end of the stick on those. It's probably a dumb thing to notice, but the in-game internet is probably less than half the size of the one in IV. A lot of the dumb little world-building nuances from IV feel kind of vestigial here. Mission scripting also feels very rigid, and i don't like the driving model as much as GTAIV's. I don't know how i feel about GTAV so far, I think i like it, mostly? It's definitely not clicking with me the way GTAIV did. It's a goddamned technical marvel, at the very least. San Andreas is beautifully rendered.

Infinite still more or less ends up with you picking a few abilities and focusing on them, yes, but i'm not necessarily saying that's bad, the issue is how it arrives at that. Infinite's resource economy generally being much tighter and the powers themselves having more clearly defined roles makes choosing the few abilities and weapons you're going to invest in somewhat more involved. I think it's so much more fulfilling to play around with than the "You can kind of get everything, it's all pretty effective" present in the original BioShock. It's a bit of a "less is more" thing in my estimation. As for the Vox Populi and Daisy Fitzroy, i think the death of Daisy Fitzroy might be the most frustrating element of the game's story for me. Booker and Elizabeth turn on her at the drop of a hat, completely ready to throw her in with the likes of the Founders, and do so at a point in the story when you have not seen the Vox Populi do anything worse than the player has. It's completely unearned and shockingly tone deaf. It feels like a moment that was meant to come much later in the game, but it probably would have still had some pretty ugly hurdles to get over, and i'm not sure the final implication would be any more appropriate. It's the worst part of the game's story, it absolutely doesn't work.

I haven't played Last Light, but i have played 2033. I love it, i think it's great, but it was an achingly linear excercise with regards to its encounter design. As such, i'm not sure it's actually very relevant with regards to these games. Infinite's battles unfold much more dynamically than you're perhaps giving them credit for. As for BioShock and Infinite, i have the exact opposite impression of the two games. I think the first BioShock is a tremendously non-demanding game. Even on its highest difficulty, i have to be playing incredibly poorly to feel like the game is pushing back at all. I felt that it kind of created a situation where you have all these tools, and none of them matter because everything is the solution to every problem. Having acquired knowledge from exploration of its systems is not at all rewarded. BioShock even held onto that thing from System Shock 2 where all the guns had multiple types of ammo to exploit enemy vulnerabilities, but it basically never matters in BioShock because the player is already so empowered and resources are never scarce. I feel like Infinite does a much better job of pushing the player to make gameplay choices, because it has a tighter resource economy and because its tougher enemies drive the abilities towards being more situational.

I'm kind of an outside observer to both, but am i wrong in feeling like the Yakuza series ended up being the thing Shenmue would have built towards?

Dark Souls! I finally played the add-on, and i really liked Artorias' theme. ^ This was the only good quality upload i could find, the song is only around 5-6 minutes. Also:

I did the same, i wrote a lot of things about the game very early on, but you know what? I'm going to sum up some things again. The narrative has clear problems, the game's own muddled opinions push it towards a kind of gross and uncomfortable thematic nihilism, but i think a second playthrough reveals a lot of strong character arcs, both subtle and overt. I love the game's characters, i think the game works really well as a character story, and i wish it was kind of more that. It also feels, to me, like a lot of the confused ideas in the game might have come about from pieces of the story being hastily shuffled around, like some chunks of the game come earlier than they're meant to. I'm not sure the story being clearly told would alleviate some of the larger concerns about its narrative, though. The mechanics of Elizabeth's abilities definitely don't make sense, but it's not the ending that is breaking a bunch of implicit logic rules - which is actually so vague that almost anything can be inferred - it's the Finkton stretch of the game that is problematic. However, the gameplay is fantastic and it evokes a lot of things i like about Half-Life and Halo. BI's strongest when it opens up into large arenas, and if there's an issue there, it's that i wish there were more of those kinds of fights in the game. I feel that the abilities are balanced and that the difficulty presented on higher levels properly encourages careful specialization to overcome those challenges. (Pick a few vigors you like, pick a few guns you like, then focus your resources. Don't ignore the late-game vigors as viable options.) I've done multiple playthroughs of the game now, all the way up to 1999, and i've utilized widely disparate builds and tactics in each game. The game's battles present enough flexibility for its systems to be expressed in a lot of really distinct ways, it is absolutely not a CoD-style slog. I think the game is mechanically so much more solid than anybody is giving it credit for. (Still, definitely going to say: The fight with the Siren is total bullshit, it doesn't work. It absolutely wrecks me every time, regardless of the difficulty level.) I'm not exactly clear what people even wanted Bioshock Infinite to be, it often seems as though it was expected to be a kind of game Irrational has never made. BioShock Infinite certainly doesn't betray any studio legacy, at least, as Irrational has made many very disparate kinds of FPS over the course of its history.

Gabe's talked about how VAC is purposefully obfuscated to make it more difficult for cheaters to circumvent, so there's no clear notice of when you've triggered it, and no clear guidelines available for what triggers it. If a game is VAC-secured, just don't go poking at it, it's not worth it. It's a scary and complex piece of software, but as one of the few effective anti-cheat mechanisms available on the PC, it's something that's fairly easy to make peace with. Does Valve have a support forum for contesting VAC bans? I'd hope they do, even if 99% of what goes through it are people who deserved the ban.

God dammit, i really liked BioShock Infinite, but you guys always seem so universally down on it that i can't muster any will to try and make a defense of the game.

Cheat engine is definitely supposed to be detected by VAC-secured games, even if it's just running idle in the background i believe, and my understanding is that VAC bans go out in waves, so you'll have to wait a few weeks to see how badly you screwed up. If you feel like doing some game editing, always check and double check to see if it's VAC secured. Valve doesn't joke around with their anti-cheat stuff. (They, quite rightly, believe that cheating erodes faith in their network systems and their business models.)

Mainly magic defense, i guess.

Well, no, i have a plan in mind for how i'm going to play the character, and i'm not going to try to do a SL1 playthrough, i just need to be pointed in a direction with regards to armor for a high-mobility build. I see a lot of people suggest that the only way to get the most out of light armor is mixing sets.

Well, i've started another playthrough, gonna do a pyromancer. Anybody have any suggestions for a light armor build?

The bloathead mages were definitely quite powerful, a direct hit was taking off like 3/4's of my health bar, but my shield was able to absorb a decent amount of that damage and my magic barrier miracles negated the damage almost completely. The other enemies were largely harmless. The stone guardians in the forest area were probably the most threatening normal enemies in the add-on. (Presumably meant to be the same guardians from darkroot, prior to centuries of neglect? Are the tree monsters in Darkroot then versions of the scarecrow monsters overgrown with vines?) I have to say though, this has all made it very difficult to resist heading out and buying Dark Souls 2 right away. I want to hold out for that PC version though, i want to see what it's like. Perhaps i might start a new character in this game. This NG+ playthrough was on my original character and my stats were a mess, just all over the place.

I gave it a few tries, got him down to about a quarter health each time. I probably could do it if i kept at it, but didn't really feel like it for an optional fight. He has a very simple pattern, he doesn't seem to have a lot of options to defend against you if you can get right under him. I used magic barrier miracles to push through his fire to stay in close. (It's pretty much the opposite of Manus, who sort of falls apart if you just keep your distance.) Artorias, by far, seemed like the most difficult boss in the add-on, there was no evident trick there and i went into that fight at least a dozen times. I was just barely able to cause enough poise damage to stagger him out of his buff, but if i missed any of those hits and he managed to cast it, the fight usually ended soon thereafter. (Apparently he's not so bad in a normal playthrough, but this was on NG+.) The Sanctuary Guardian was a pretty cool fight too. Also, the Chasm of the Abyss would have been a tremendously creepy area if the humanity sprites weren't so ineffectual, but Oolacile Township was a great area to go through. (Again though, it feels like there's a massive disparity in that DLC between how easy the normal enemies are to fight and how tough those bosses were.)

Well i have completed the Artorias DLC to what i feel is a satisfactory degree, and you guys are right, it's some of the best content in Dark Souls. The Artorias bossfight, in particular, was pretty damn great.

For what it's worth, i did see your links. I just still thought it was worth an embed.

The low percentage hard-difficulty Zero Mission speedrun from the same livestream was also really, really amazing.

Well this has spiraled out of control and now i'm just replaying a large chunk of Dark Souls in NG+ so i can just even get to the point where the DLC is accessible. Part of it is probably how long it's been since i played the game last, though i still beat Quelaag and Iron Golem without any trouble, but Ornstein & Smough are proving to be just absolutely savage on NG+, and i keep getting swarmed with invasions when i try to revive to go looking for co-op summons in Anor Londo. (Do the dedicated servers on Dark Souls 2 improve the PVP networking? I forgot how laggy and unreliable hit detection could be in Dark Souls, it's no wonder why everybody just goes for backstabs.)

How much content is there in the Dark Souls add-on? While waiting for word on the PC version of Dark Souls 2, i'm thinking about finally going back and doing that DLC. I have an NG+ in progress that should be far enough through the game to just go start it right away, though i don't think i know where that content starts.

From has talked about how their new engine is meant to be scalable for next gen, some of the early demos showing off the game may have been more indicative of that high-end, with the final game scaled back for current platforms. Rather than the PC version being ultra sexy, i think it's more likely that you'd see something like a remixed version of the game in a year or two, as per current industry trends. (If even that. Those early glimpses may have been nothing more that From testing out their new tech.) I'm holding off to see how the PC version pans out, regardless. Even though it's killing me watching everybody go through that wonderful discovery phase with the game.

So if Mighty No 9 wasn't enough, Inti Creates and Keiji Inafune are also doing this for the 3DS. I'm just going to pretend i didn't see anything about a nonsense plot in that video and instead focus on the fact that it looks like another really solid action platformer from Inti Creates.