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I think Real Myst is quite a beautiful game, actually. It's certainly held up better than Uru, for whatever reason. This is definitely interesting news though, the six Myst games are absolutely my favorite adventure games. I don't need this Kickstarter to be a new Myst game though, i'll be glad to just see Cyan doing something again.

Well, if anybody does play it and has any questions, keep me in mind. A lot of the interactions between the different systems and different stats can be really opaque, that classic From Software vagueness, but i'm pretty confident that i have a solid understanding of everything.

We got up to the start of the Babylon levels when we last played.

It definitely can be, it's a pretty steep cliff. I think one of the main reasons it struggles to find a wider audience in the west is this... just... You see this fast-paced mech game, 5 and Verdict Day even have this hilarious and awesome wall jump as a core mobility mechanic, and so people naturally assume that it controls like one would expect a fast-paced action game to control. So they play it and they slot all the parts into place and they go, and the control feels like shit. Their mech doesn't do anything they want it to do. Not even in the sense that it's just poorly armored or poorly armed, but that it controls poorly. Their free form assemblage of parts has resulted in something that is sluggish to turn, with weapons that can't track anything effectively. At this point, they either think the game is full of shit, or they go deeper. You get to this place where you start to pick apart how the dozens of stats on each part you've assembled your mech from interact from eachother, you get wiser about your choices and you put together a finely-tuned machine that can move faster, aim better, and have more power freed up for boosting. (Or you go the opposite direction, you tank up with insanely high defense and powerful cannons, but tanks have an even harder time managing power, there's even more difficult fine-tuning happening there.) Then you have to learn how to play your role, work in a team, cope with the control and the pace and the systems. (Then there's target spotting, and shared radar recon, or target scanning to decipher armor weaknesses, and an optional operator role for an additional player with a god's eye view of the field to give you waypoints and battle information. A lot of these latter mechanisms might be familiar to anybody who's played Chromehounds. It even has the thing from CH where defeated players respawn on the field as tiny, helpless soldiers to wander around and witness the ongoing battle from a much smaller viewpoint.) Verdict Day also brings in these programmable UNACs that you can use to fill out empty slots on a team, and that whole system was terrifying at first, but i managed to end up with a solid, capable UNAC that has survived more matches than its lost. So yeah, it's quite an involved, complex game. I think it's probably actually a good deal deeper and more nuanced than many other ongoing series of mech sims, and i frickin` absolutely love it. It's delivered on the promise of Armored Core V's vast team-focused multiplayer metagame, and done it without the bone-headed design decisions that completely broke that game. My biggest concern with Verdict Day right now is about how long the community will hang on. The matchmaking works well enough - and there's enough people playing - that i've never had problems getting into a match, but you definitely keep running into the same people. It's clearly a smallish pool of players on the international version of the game. (I'm playing on the 360, it's probably a little better on the PS3.) What you're saying is probably true of 4 and For Answer, the ease of sustained flight in those games made it a very simple matter to move out of a unfavorable position, but the same is most certainly not true of 5 and Verdict Day. Climbing up a building and mounting an attack from an advantageous altitude is completely essential. With the wall climb being the only way to gain any significant altitude, you end up often having these king of the hill-esque fights around tall buildings as each player tries to gain altitude over the other.

I'd be up for doing some more.

Heh, I figured this one would be a longshot here. I really do think it's probably the best Armored Core game i've played though. Most of the dumb, broken stuff from 5 has been sorted out, the teamwork-oriented metagame is awesome now and there seem to be enough people playing, and some of the newly-included elements are super fascinating. (Like programmable AI team-members to fill out your party when looking for matches.) There's still that huge learning curve though, but the deep systems are honestly the appeal. (They're also probably why it continues to be such a harshly criticized series, it's very easy to have a horrible time if you don't have anybody to help you out.)

Dark Forces/Jedi Knight, X-wing/Tie Fighter, Rogue Squadron, etc. Mmmmhmmm, the best. I don't like how more modern Star Wars games keep trying to tie back into the movies so heavily. (Whether it's the original trilogy or the prequels, both are overexposed.) For me at least, part of what made those Star Wars games from the 90's so cool is that they were willing to take you to some far off corner of the Star Wars universe and show you something completely different. It's the Star Wars galaxy, it should be big and full of amazing stories. So sad that Republic Commando never got a sequel. So sad that 1313 got canned.

What exactly broke? Is it simply just not booting at all? Call customer support, i'd be shocked if they didn't have any mechanism in place to deal with situations like this. Concerning your digital purchases, i mean. I know they make it quite a hassle if your system was stolen or lost, but you still have the system, it just doesn't work. I don't know though, those eventualities are why i'm, as much as possible, sticking with retail for 3DS games. (Which didn't stop me from still ending up with a ton of digital games on my 3DS though, the eShop has so much good stuff on it.)

My goal is not to determine whether something is actually being added/omitted to/from the game, my point is that developers almost always want you to believe that the game will be better for the presence of whatever piece of content, that you will be receiving an inferior and incomplete product for missing out. (This ends up being true in enough situations to make it an incredibly frustrating, disheartening practice.) The truth behind the matter is irrelevant when that is the only information you have to go on. I should again reiterate that i am not taking any particular stance against this Mighty No 9 kickstarter, i do not imagine that the things they're marking as exclusive are going to matter all that much. I think that Shantae kickstarter is doing some rather more suspect things, though.

You keep hitting on examples like this as if they're relevant, but it's apples and oranges. You can make assumptions, but you cannot actually know the full breadth and scope of what their backer promise will ultimately entail. The developer behind a given game will certainly always want you to believe a "bonus" piece of content is important, they want it to be an incentive to coax money out of you. This is part of why it's shitty, it's highly misleading. It's a practice that is there not to reward dedicated fans and early adopters, but to make people feel like they're missing out on something important if they're not. Certainly, and there are games that have had meaningful pieces of content tied up in pre-order bonuses and such things. Deus Ex: Human Revolution pops to mind, there was an extra mission and a few unique weapons tied up in pre-orders. Said mission cameos an important character from the original game and is fairly sizable. How about Anarchy Reigns? Pre-orders for that got extra maps and extra modes and Bayonetta as a unique, fully fleshed-out playable character. It was a massive chunk of the game being held back for pre-order bonuses. In both of those cases, those bonuses were eventually sold separately, but they were still initially pitched as exclusive pre-order bonuses. Manipulative and not cool. (I also don't think them eventually being available for purchase necessarily excuses it, but that maybe falls more under the old DLC argument. Relevant perhaps, but i think ultimately a different conversation.) Hey, and remember the whole mess with the Prothean crew member in Mass Effect 3? How it was either included with the collector's edition, or otherwise only available as a ten dollar piece of day one paid content, causing a bunch of people to end up playing through that game without that massively important piece of the story? That was a really, really shitty thing for BioWare and EA to do. Whining? You do realize that you're coming off as the person most agitated by this conversation, right?

Missing the chance to have something signed by its creator is not an appropriate comparison for a product having a piece of content omitted from its flow.

For years, i thought adventure games were bullshit, and it was because i was first exposed to Sierra games. Making a game unwinnable because of something you did in hour one, fuck that.

I don't think it's cool to have actual game content locked up in exclusives that will exclude people who come to the game after the fact from getting the full experience that the initial batch of players fell in love with. Not everybody has money to spare or is even paying attention when it matters, not everybody is making a conscious choice to not care. Whether that content will be meaningful or a glorified pallette swap can never really be gauged until after a game is released, but the developer behind it definitely always wants you to believe it's meaningful, because they want to incentivize you to buy the game. It puts you in the situation of having to assume the worst, that if you aren't in on that first wave, you are being excluded from something cool.

The first few Zelda games were actually way, way more open-ended than later games. Link's Awakening was where the more linear structure sort of started to set in. (Link's Awakening tends to break, like actual game-wrecking scripting breaks, if you try to sequence break.) I remember being able to do the second half of LTTP in mostly any order though.

I'm expecting the exclusive transformation to be something pretty inessential, maybe like the "Model a" transformation from ZX Advent, kind of a bragging-rights award that turned you into an 8-bit classic megaman-style sprite of that game's main transformation, "Model A". I'm going to side with it being super shitty to lock up game content behind exclusivity walls, but i don't think this will be a big deal. Both of the ZX games had a bunch of superfluous end-game transformations that didn't really affect the game, and those were both Inti Creates games, and the games Mighty No 9 sounds the most like.

I am playing the Ace Attorney 5 demo and Phoenix Wright is voiced and it's freaking me out. Also, right up at the start, isn't this the exact court lobby background from the previous games? Except lavishly recreated in 3D, and feeling kind of surreal because of it.

Wow, i am super enthused by that Super Mario 3D World trailer, that looks fantastic.

IT'S OVER! They hit every. single. stretch goal. Even the ones added in the final hours. Mighty No 9 is now the third most highly backed game on Kickstarter after Torment and Project Eternity.

The original Kirby's Dreamland was the first game i was able to beat when i was a child, My casual-gaming niece, who struggles with many games, not only played, but also completed and absolutely adored Kirby's Epic Yarn. Kirby games are not among the spectrum of Nintendo games that should stop treating their players like babies. You know, and while they're super accessible and easy, they've never really done the obnoxious hand-holding that has invaded many other Nintendo games. It allows me to, as an adult, still appreciate them for their cleverness and originality. Also: Rune Factory 4 is out today, i've been hearing really positive things about it.

Holy shit, what kind of sorcery is happening with this kickstarter? They've just been blowing through stretch goals on this final day.

I think it'd be cool if they did something like Guilty Gear Xrd, which will also be rendered completely in 3D on Unreal tech, but will be employing a number of camera and animation tricks to make the art virtually indistinguishable from the high-resolution sprites ArcSys is so known for. ( )

WOOO! 3DS! I will own this game twice over. I want it on Steam, and i want it on 3DS.

It has triggers and bumpers like everything else and two further buttons along the inside of each handle, which i do think is pretty cool.

He also confirms that the thing i'm worried about is still an issue, even with the haptic feedback.

Literally right below that it says: