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It was never going to be 2D. They were talking about 2.5D right from the start, there are even 3D models of Beck being animated in the pitch video. Don't be confused by the concept art on the Kickstarter page. Anyways, prototype/proof of concept/tech demo or whatever, i like the way it looks. Also, that's a good jump Beck has, just right away i can tell that is a good, crisp platformer jump. I am happy if that is representative of the feel they're going for.

ACV is kind of a lost cause for multiplayer, but there's still a lot of good solo content in there. Go through that stuff and then you can import your save into Verdict Day, you retain everything you design/build/acquire. (Even though you'll likely never participate in the metagame and just do single-player content, still make a squad, that is if the game even lets you do anything without first making a squad. Anyways, the point is that shop unlocks are based off of your squad's level.) Verdict Day might be a ticking clock though, because while the last week has been a really terrific experience, the game is still very new. There's no telling how long the game will sustain a community, AC has a relatively tiny western fanbase. (The japanese servers are still segregated from the rest of the world, so that's the main player base off in their own little isolated cocoon. Every other region was thankfully unified for the international version of Verdict Day though, splitting Euorpe off from North America was just one of several really, really dumb things ACV did.) Harmony of Despair is tremendous fun with if you can go through it fresh with friends, that is really what it's built for. Had a lot of fun with it, but the way they tried to nickle & dime on its DLC kind of left a sour taste though.

I've mostly just been rotating through an assortment of crappy cargo haulers, i've largely spent my time without any defensive capability. If a red icon shows up, i flee for the safety offered by crowds. I'm sure i'm not playing in the most efficient manner possible, but i've got a small team of sector traders going and have a few dozen sectors scouted out. Hot tips would be appreciated. I'm interested in getting some stations up, but i'm not really sure where i should build, or what i should build first.

ACV had massive, massive problems. It was a game i very much wanted to be awesome, with its promise of coordinated team tactics and commander role oversight, but much of its potential as a multiplayer game was wasted through a senseless matchmaking infrastructure and Namco never implementing on the international versions many of the fixes From implemented on the japanese version. So i went into Verdict Day pretty apprehensive, but i'm tentatively very happy with it. It seems like its the game ACV should have been, it seems very good. However, like its predecessor, and like Chromehounds from which they both borrow heavily, you really need a squad to play with. (I'm playing on the 360.)

Can i hijack this thread for my Albion Prelude adventures? People have been bugging me to play X3 for years, and now finally doing so, i've ended up pretty deeply ensnared by it. I started the main Argon campaign, but the way it was handing me so much incredibly expensive gear right out of the gate was making me feel like i was missing a big chunk of the experience, and i wasn't really into how insistent and guided the campaign was seeming in the context of the game having such a dynamic and interesting set of systems governing its universe. I was also finding combat pretty savage until i figured out software upgrades, mounted turrets, and missile defense routines. (Apparently that's a thing with Albion Prelude, missiles got really intense.) Regardless, i bailed on that game and fumbled around in a few other false starts before getting a solid game going and feeling like i had a good grasp of the systems. So now I've got a few light cargo haulers and their escorts on sector trader runs across Argon space, while i'm out exploring the territories beyond that. I feel like i've finally got a handle on the game now, but i don't think i'd have figured it out without looking at a few guides. Just so many really important things are just kind of tucked away, buried in nested menus. The game kind of having this OS-like metaphor for its UI, but not letting you move those windows, have multiple windows open, or tab/minimize things is one thing that particularly bugs me. You should really be able to have multiple sector maps open and minimized, instead of having to click through four or more menus every time you want to see what one of your ships is up to. Some other simple little things too, like it never clarifying that the icons above target boxes are to indicate quest givers aboard that object, or going to a shipyard to build a station and being told that you need a near 30 million credit hauler to do it, but not being told that you can also hire such a hauler and that one will be parked nearby every shipyard. It also took me forever to realize that there's a weird veterancy system on individual ships, working in tandem with software packages to unlock extra ship functionality. Figuring out the software packages themselves was itself a weird leap to make when just starting out. Even before trying the main Argon campaign, my very, very first experience with the game was the game expecting me to find, fly to, and hail a tiny starship to start the tutorial that teaches me how to do those things, and then not being able to complete said tutorial because the ship in that campaign start didn't have any weapons mounted on it. You know, but there's also just the fact of me playing the second expansion pack of the third game, so probably don't take these as genuine criticisms as much as my experience learning a complicated game. Did i mention that i absolutely love the game? I really do, i think it's incredible. I'm certainly going to keep playing.

PC RPG's were definitely always really, really long slogs. Those Bethesda games didn't get bigger as the years went on, they got smaller.

You should obviously take this to its logical conclusion and play Ultima Underworld, the secret most influential game ever.

Also, i recently went back to Armored Core V to finish up single-player content in that so i could import my save into the just-released Verdict Day. (I was actually quite surprised to realize that ACV had over 90 single-player missions, that's significantly more than i had thought. I had believed i was near the end, but new missions just kept coming.) ACV was an incredibly promising, but deeply, deeply flawed game. Verdict Day, on the other hand, has been doing everything right. The matchmaking for the factional territory conquest metagame actually works now, and you can even fill out empty team slots with AI units. (You can program combat routines into these AI units, the whole system is one of the most intimidating things i've ever seen in a game.)

There's definitely a lot of ambiguity about stealth in the two original Deus Ex games, yeah. You just have to trust that the spots you are perceiving as being very dark and in shadow are being perceived by the game systems the same way. The Thief games, which came before and after Deus Ex, had a clear UI element to let you know how deep in shadows the game was perceiving you to be. It's a small, excellent detail unfortunately missing from Deus Ex. Also, Human Revolution, which was from an entirely different team, was built on a completely different los-focused stealth system.

Okay, okay. Now i understand why you have your opinion, and i'm not dismissing that opinion but... it's like... The newest Zelda games have become so absolutely terrified of a player becoming lost or stuck, they are egregiously aggressive about hand-holding the player through the proceedings. Darksiders isn't a demanding action game or filled with challenging and puzzling conundrums, but it also doesn't treat you like a child. So playing it as somebody who has kept up with the Zelda series, i did really like it. Anyways, so here's a funny recommendation: You should play Dark Souls, because beneath all the RPG character-building in there, there's world design and combat that actually feels very Zelda-influenced. (Certainly, there are also puzzles, and unlike Zelda, Dark Souls doesn't give a fuck if you can't figure them out.) So yeah, i'm saying Dark Souls is secretly the hardcore Zelda game everybody always seems to have wanted.

I don't know if it's the detail you're missing, but do keep in mind that it's not as much about line-of-sight as other modern stealth games are, it's more like Thief, where it's about hiding in shadows and making as little noise as possible. (The Thief games being what Warren Spector worked on before and after Deus Ex, you should also play those.)

I didn't play it, but I thought Darksiders 2 was supposed to actually be quite dramatically different from the first game? They added a loot grind while also putting significantly less emphasis on puzzles? (With the prevailing sentiment seeming to be that the game was a bit shit.) I feel like i need an extra piece of context for this opinion, have you kept up with the Zelda series?

Still on the RTS thing, is there any love for Nexus: The Jupiter Incident here? I quite liked that game, it was fucking hard though. Superficially similar to Homeworld, but definitely a tactics game more than a traditional RTS. Small groups of highly customizable ships and details-focused battles. It was unfortunate that the kickstarter for the sequel failed.

Well hey, i'm just saying, there just happens to be that big thriving indie scene on Steam filled with games that are very much console-influenced and built around gamepads. Don't underestimate the extent to which the 360's gamepad has become the de facto standard for gamepads on PC. There are absolutely games on Steam designed primarily around gamepads.

So the touch discs can be programmed to emulate any buttons the game might require and, as i understand it, when you press down on the touch surface, you will feel a "click" from the haptic feedback? That's not what you need though, you need those raised edges on a button so your thumb can instantly find it. I am going to remain super, super skeptical of this thing for the time being.

I love that movie so much.

^ Yeah, the steam pad doesn't solve any of that, considering all of its various touch surfaces and the way they've arranged the face buttons. There's still a mess of crap on the upside of that thing. Speaking of which, what they've done with the face buttons is hilariously awful, a lot of platformers and character action games will just be outright unplayable on that thing. (They've made it impossible to press any two of those buttons simultaneously, unless you're taking both thumbs off of both touch discs.) The ergonomics of that thing seem like a nightmare. I'm also incredibly, incredibly skeptical when somebody is trying to sell me on the idea that a touch pad can appropriately emulate the tactile feel and responsiveness of an analog stick or d-pad. (I really don't think it's possible, virtual joysticks have always been such phenomenally miserable things.) I think this looks like a controller made by people who don't have much experience making controllers, it seems like a device that is very narrowly focused on the kind of games they make. (Or, in trying to make a pad that can be used with games that traditionally aren't played with pads, they've made a pad that can't be used with games that do need a pad.)

Ground Control was a really superb game, Supreme Commander has a ton of problems that don't exist in the original TA. Seems like people made good recommendations in there, though. I didn't see anybody mention it, you should look into Battlezone(1998). It's like commanding a game of Starcraft while out on the field as a unit yourself. (Ocassionally sniping the pilot of an opposing vehicle and stealing it.) In the late 90's, there was a very brief explosion of RTS games that had you both commanding and participating in strategic conflicts, and Battlezone was probably the best. (Oh, somebody did mention it. Uprising too!)

Which RTS games are you looking at playing? While It's probably the least well liked of the Westwood games, definitely don't skip over Tiberian Sun, it's a really interesting and terribly underappreciated game. Make sure you hit up Total Annihilation. Both the developer and publisher are gone now, but it was a hugely important game in its time and in my opinion still the near pinnacle of the genre. It was RTS gameplay on a massive scale with an absolute ton of UI innovations that have kept the game incredibly playable in a way that many older RTS's are not. It was also uncommonly moddable, rare for an RTS even now. Along with spawning a huge modding community, it led to Cavedog extensively adding to the game, both as free updates and retail add-ons. The version of the game available on GoG has all the official content patched in, minus the no longer functional galactic conquest multiplayer metagame, and also unfortunately including a final, particularly glitchy and game-breaking Core unit. (The Core "Necro".) Also: Probably ignore the campaign, go straight to skirmish. Also definitely look into Relic's Homeworld series. Gearbox has the rights to HW and HW2 and is apparently working to update and re-release those, but they do not seem to have rights to the rather excellent Homeworld: Cataclysm. As for the two they do, the original is probably one of the best examples of single-player story-telling in the entire genre. Homeworld 2, on the other hand, is probably the weakest game in the series, mainly for its trainwreck of a campaign. It's still quite good as a MP game, but Homeworld wasn't really ever a series people went to for multiplayer. (If you play the games without access to physical copies, try to find scans of their manuals, those games were particularly excellent examples of exhaustive manuals filled with interesting story and gameplay information.)

The high-resolution texture mod for SS2 is very nice, the fan-made model pack less so I'd advise glancing through some of the posts in the thread i linked to, SS2 is complex in ways that can be very off-putting if you don't know what you're getting into. It's very easy to create a broken character build that has none of its disparate elements working together in any harmony.

Yeah, probably don't do that. I did that and i had probably a hundred and fifty hours in the game before finishing it, Xenoblade is a fucking enormous game that can take absolutely forever if you let it dig in like that. If you still want to be semi-completist about it, figure out which persons give unlocks for extra skill trees and leave it at that. You should also totally play System Shock 2. Less stealth and adventuring than Deus Ex, but more planning and nuance. Both are incredible must-play games.

Oh man, i haven't seen anybody mention that game in years. Definitely one of the unsung heroes of the Looking Glass gameography.

I think you guys are insane, that light bloom looks horrible.

I've played a few Tales games, and i'd say Vesperia probably had my favorite characters in the series. (Though maybe the worst story.) I've heard very good things about Xillia, i've heard some people say it's one of the best Tales games ever, though a lot of people were very unhappy about how the localization turned out.

When ranged enemies show up, you just have to kite them around. Lure them around corners so you can shotgun them at point blank, or hit them with carefully aimed shots at just beyond their maximum range. (When you move beyond their maximum range, they put away their gun, reposition themselves, and try to take fire again. Also, when sniping, keep in mind that your gun is actually slightly off center from the indicated trajectory.) As soon as possible, build a detector and upgrade it to an EM detector. Being able to track enemy movement outside of of your line-of-sight is the biggest advantage any of the unique gear gives you. (Turn off the camera zoom in the options too.) Getting some armor should be one of your biggest priorities early in the game, that's the difference between dying in two hits or having some real survivability. After those two levels where you've been fighting enemies that knock off only 2 hp, there's this jarring step up to the rest of the game where everything will just obliterate you without notice. (Try to use your knife as much as possible in those first two levels so you have ammo for later levels.) Also, the little grenade launcher thing. Its usefulness dies off pretty steadily because it's overall pretty weak, but for whatever reason it's almost always a one-hit-kill against infantry enemies, even annoying late-game ones with heavy body armor that can eat up a ton of more precious ammo. (Perhaps it has a high AP value, but low overall damage.) So it's good for swarms AND those guys and little else, it's a good way to save all your bullets for more important tasks. Always look for secrets, some of them are obvious, some of them not so. (They tend to keep showing up in the same spots in the same rooms, even as the rooms are randomly arranged.) Those should be good early game tips, i think. There's a lot more i could say, the game gets magnitudes more complex and difficult in the later levels. (It's good to figure out early on that there's a pretty clear hierarchy of weapons, and that weapons with good armor piercing qualities are your best bets for beating the game. The heavy rifle, HV rifle, and the battery-powered energy weapons will undoubtedly be the backbone of your fights against the toughest enemies, so save ammo for those as much as you can.) Edit: Additionally, the first five slots of your inventory are keyed to 1-5 on your keyboard. Put important things in those slots. (A powerful weapon you can trust on resolving a sudden and panicked situation, stimulants for easy access at the start of a fight, etc.)