Sno

I do this as well.

Everything about this game appeals to me immensely, but i'm getting kind of sick of giving EA money. We'll see how much i want to play it when it comes out. GB also did some coverage that's worth looking into: http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/unfinished-titanfall-02-11-2014/2300-8489/ It certainly looks like a great time.

The forum normally only lets you do two embeds per post. Anyways, i might have posted this one before, but probably without the awesome accompanying start screen.

My memory is apparently a little foggy, i don't remember what this parley option is, but people you streetpassed with should show up on the world map as armies you can pick fights with and/or buy stuff from. Also, If you don't want to miss recruitment opportunities, just keep an eye on this reasonably non-spoilerly guide. (The children's missions won't show up until you start pairing off the first-gen characters in marriages.) It's also not really true that the game is just unambiguously sooooo much better with permadeath on. All it's even doing in Awakening is enforcing the playstyle the series is built for. (Which is important to note, because if you're throwing around units on the other setting like they're expendable fodder, remember: That's not what FE is.) That said, if you're finding the early missions very lax, that's because they are. The game doesn't open up at all until you're about ten~twelve missions in. The difficulty starts cranking up and the game starts handing you the items you need to take advantage of the class-changing character-building metagame of Fire Emblem.

It's not just that i found the first few areas funnier though, which is admittedly completely subjective, but it also felt to me like they were much more densely populated with things to prod at. The game starts to feel somewhat more like "This is the joke" as it goes along, instead of letting you feel like you're discovering the humor in its world. That first level begins with you in the middle of an open space that has literally dozens of things to interact with surrounding you in every direction. I probably spent as much time on that one level as i did on most of the rest of the game, even the resort area doesn't feature that kind of density.

I loved the first couple levels, but started to feel a little let down as it closed in on the end and it gradually felt like it was growing lazier with its nonsense. It became clear that the best humor had all been front-loaded, that the first level was deceptively dense with content relative to the later environments. Feeling kind of on it. I did like it though.

Can you say anything else about it? I've been quite curious about that one for a while.

You can simply take it as a comically terrible example of FTP abuses, but since there is an original game to compare and contrast against, you can also take it as an illustrative example of what FTP does to game design. A more direct link, so it doesn't break after a couple days.

Over at GB, Klepek's done a pretty great write up on the whole thing.

How about Knuckle's new Crash Bandicoot proportions? (Speaking of which, the team making this game seems to have been founded by former Naughty Dog members.) God, that trailer though. Skrillex... Ugh.

I don't think the issue is the free to play model so much as many of the things that are emblematic of it and present elsewhere in the industry as well. I would argue that many of the things that EA has been doing in the retail space are just as bad, if not worse. (Given that they're asking for 60 upfront too.) The core of my issue with all of this stuff is that when you play a game, you put a little faith in the developer. You believe that they're on your side, that they want you to have a good time with their game. I think microtransaction models kind of fundamentally betray this implicit trust, you no longer know why that steep difficulty curve is there, it might just be there to psychologically wear you down so you feed a little extra cash back into the game to get over the hump. (Or get a competitive edge in a multiplayer game, perhaps.) (Also, fuck that "like us for a trinket" thing, that's asking people to sell their voices. I think that's really gross.) Dota 2's adherence to purely cosmetic microtransactions in a fiercely competitive game has been fairly remarkable to observe, and it's about as inoffensive as i could possibly imagine a free to play game being, but i have a suspicion that it only works because Dota was already massively popular, in addition to Dota 2 serving as an important gateway into a product ecosystem also controlled by Valve.

It definitely wasn't still novel when BioShock came out, it's a narrative device that's as old as story-driven games, and I think it could be "fixed" simply by showing a little more care with the logic. People keeping personal logs, especially in regimented scientific/military endeavors like you see in the System Shock games, is entirely plausible and not the problem. The issue is when those characters evidently feel the need to record their thoughts during frantic, life-threatening situations. (Without a clear purpose or goal, i should say. It gets a pass if they're perhaps trying to convey some important last piece of information to a specific party, but it should never be the equivalent of trying to tweet about your lunch during a mugging.) Situations where people would reasonably not be thinking about recording their thoughts are where environmental story-telling needs to take over. Stumbling into a room to see the shell casings on the ground, the characters you know slumped over in a corner, things like that could be even more effective than a recording of the event. A bit of "show, don't tell" perhaps. That kind of environmental story-telling might have been hard to do with any real nuance prior to the last decade, but we're well past the the point where that's an excuse. Edit: Also, in response to the initial impetus for this thread, i actually really love search & loot systems. (Speaking mainly outside of the context of RPG's, because that's a whole different thing to consider, i think.) I love feeling like i'm desperately scrounging for survival supplies in a horrible situation, and i'd totally concede that kind of looting can feel massively out of place in games like Deus Ex and Infinite. I think that's mostly the issue, actually. I think that kind of environmental looting can be applied to create a tone, and when it's applied just for the hell of it, it can start to feel weird and out of place. (Why are JC Denton and Adam Jensen robbing all these poor random NPC's blind?) Then you see that kind of supply scrounging in a game like Stalker or System Shock, and it's perfect, it makes complete sense. You're scrambling, you're desperate, you're looking for anything you can use. It totally limits you and shunts you down a path. What ending do you want? Do you want the good ending or the bad ending? Will you kill nobody, or will you kill everybody? Will you use all those sweet combat magics, guns, explosives, or will you just kind of pretend they're not there? That game is so full of weird, self-defeating design choices brought on by its morality system.

Oh wow, really? The Crusader games were fantastic, you should check them out. (I think they're available on GOG.) It's getting hard to think of games that i haven't already posted music for in previous versions of this thread! I'd even already done Crusader posts! How about Shadowrun Returns, i probably already did that, but it's on my mind again with the trailer announcement of the add-on. The game has a great OST where they actually dug up the guys who composed the SNES and Genesis games waaaaaaaaaay back when. ^ I particularly love this ambient piece. ^ But here's one of the of music from the SNES game reworked as a battle theme.

We're going to disagree here, because i think Dishonored's morality system still largely ruins that game by pigeonholing you into either one of two play-styles. You know what i liked? I like what Dragon Age did, where each individual character had their own moral compass and judged your actions based on that. You couldn't make everybody happy, and you were frequently forced to make choices that were much more gray. It was a much more mature and intelligent way to deal with the concept of morality. Shame i didn't actually like much else about the game.

I think morality systems need to go away. I think they've ruined more games than they've improved, all they ever do is create very narrow paths for you to adhere to in your playthrough.

You can go for, it'd be interesting to hear what somebody who plays the series in that light thinks about the promises being made for the new games, but maybe don't expect somebody to shoot back with an equally detailed retort. I love mechanical nuance and i love fighting games, but competitive smash is definitely not something i ever got into. It's been kind of weird seeing Nintendo throw a few bones towards the hardcore crowd with these new games, talking numbers about ledge grab balance changes and stuff, when Nintendo's stance has traditionally been to pretend that scene doesn't exist.

Heh, the NMS comparison struck me as odd too, surely Elite's a more known quantity than something just-announced. Are any of these games going to have solo modes? I'm not really interested in participating in a multiplayer community with these things.

Minter's always seemed like a super interesting dude. He also sums up Space Giraffe in an impressively self-aware manner, i'm not sure i could say too much about the game beyond what he wrote out in that retrospective, but i definitely fell on the side that thought the game was kind of brilliant. When it clicked with me after a couple hours of being kind of baffled by it, i began finding it intriguing how the aggressively obfuscative visual light show made you rely on all the amusingly discordant sound effects as important survival cues, and after making it past that hurdle it was then that it sort of revealed itself as a really complex and interesting deconstruction of Tempest. Space Giraffe is a game that broke a lot of the rules of old-school arcade shooters. It's super counter-intuitive and full of mechanisms that encourage risk-taking instead of careful situation control, it's kind of amazing.

I don't think anybody really thinks about them anymore, few enough games use them that i always have more than enough. I think they were there just as a small incentive to get people to take their 3DS's with them when they head out for their day, so that there might be people out there hopefully streetpassing with their 3DS's. Also, i don't know if this is really the right thread for it, but i enjoyed this Jeff Minter retrospective.

Nah, it's still there.

Maverick Hunter X was a really nice remake, so was Powered Up, the MM1 remake. Powered Up also let you play as the bosses and as other characters, had new stages with all that entails, and even had an awesome level editor with online sharing. ^ It's a huge shame MM2 never got a remake. There was buzz that the cancelled Megaman Universe was, after Powered Up kind of tanked, Inafune trying to slip a Megaman 2 remake through to market by building on Powered Up's content-creation features and emphasizing them as a selling point. The ZX games are definitely distinct from the Zero series, it's a completely different set of systems and is much less punishing, though it can still be rough in its own ways. For example, you had to avoid weak points on bosses, or else you'd damage the power-up you were fighting to take from them, damage that manifested in the form of a permanently reduced energy bar for that item. Which sounds worse than it is, it definitely sounds like a rough system, but not in the way that the systems in the Zero games kind of defeat the purpose of giving you power-ups in the first place. The main thing ZX has going on is that instead of gaining new weapons or upgrades, you gain entirely new forms that each have many different unique attacks, abilities, and mobility options. ZX Advent goes really crazy with the conceit, you end up with dozens of forms from a basic Zero-like form all the way up to screen-filling beasts. I think Advent gets a little too gimmicky and so i like the first ZX more, but they're both very good. More bothersome is that ZX Advent has an abysmal voice-acted english localization, right up there with some of the worst examples from the history of the franchise. It's incredibly grating.

I never really had much fondness for the Playstation MMX games, but the first couple are generally quite well liked. (I think 5 is, in particular?) 6 and 7 were made without Inafune's involvement and are pretty broadly regarded as the worst Megaman games. X8 was then actually a pretty surprising return to form, it's a really underrated game, but the franchise had already been too tarnished for the game to really win anybody over. The Zero and ZX games that came after are mechanically stupendous, they're really solidly built games. I don't actually have a ton of love for the Zero series on the whole, I personally think the governing systems in Zero are punishing in a kind of self-defeating way, but it's hard to argue with how it actually plays, and the two ZX games that followed are simply just awesome. Those two series also have some of the in the entire franchise. If you liked how Zero played in the X games, you should definitely track down some of the Zero and ZX games. If you just like having multiple characters to choose between, put extra emphasis on finding copies of the ZX games. There's a very good collection of the Zero games for the DS, and the ZX games are both also DS games. Unfortunately, they all tend to fetch some premium prices on the secondary market given the fanbase and the lack of current availability. All that said, it's good knowing that IntiCreates is working on Mighty No 9, because their work on latter-day Megaman games was pretty fantastic. (Not just Zero and ZX, but MM9 and MM10 too.)

Megaman 9 is fantastic, it definitely feels like years of pent up ideas from guys who hadn't been allowed to make a game like that for a long time. There's a lot of devious stuff in that game that is kind of specifically there to fuck with knowledgeable players of Megaman games, it's really great. Megaman 10, however, feels like "Now let's go do it again." (Also, 7 and Megaman & Bass are both pretty under appreciated, but 8 is awful. Like, beautiful to look at, but awful to play.) Megaman X, on the other hand, i think is overall the best Megaman game, and it's probably the first one i'd tell somebody to go play. The SNES X games, that's the first three, are all really great. The later PSX and PS2 games are wildly uneven. (Ranging from pretty alright to worst-in-franchise, sometimes in the same game.) Also, like the classic series, X had its own Gameboy spin-off series. Then there's the Zero series and the ZX series, and that still doesn't cover all the Megaman platformers.