Sno

That Sony presser, that's going to be one people remember. That's some Sony undercutting the Saturn kind of shit there. They just dismantled Microsoft's position, It's going to take them years to recover from this damage. Shit, I'm even considering a PS4 at this point.

TitanFall definitely looks pretty rad.

I am shocked, dismayed, and saddened.

I still have no goddamned clue what Quantum Break is, and Swery is making a cell-shaded Kinect adventure game? Also, i'm tickled that they're bringing back Killer Instinct, and i'm glad Rare is being allowed to make real games again, but that trailer looked awful.

There is a spot in Anor Londo that is the most annoying spot in that entire game, and it is such a spot that, i suspect, everybody who has played Dark Souls probably instantly knows what i'm talking about.

And now i've listened to the podcast. And now i have this thought stuck in my head where i can't help but think of JRPG's as all being like Super Black Bass, these things built up on all these little disparate pieces to try and hint at a greater whole.

So i guess you can take screenshots in ACNL and share them online.

Replying to the discussion in the thread regarding crouching - I don't think it takes a sim for it to be useful. It's a huge part of Halo, both in campaign and online, for ducking behind cover and for stealth. (It lowers your profile, but it also caps how fast you can move, making it easier to stay hidden from other players' motion detectors.) Or in Left 4 Dead, if you're up front, you crouch so that the person behind you can have a clear shot. It's something i definitely miss whenever it's not there, even in faster paced shooters. The role it usually plays is subtle and often ignored, but i don't think that's reason for it to not be there. I adore Xenoblade, and after some consideration it ended up being my favorite game of last year. It's a JRPG combat system and a JRPG story, it's still that stuff that you're either going to be on board with or against, but it's a beautiful, enormous game that felt like it was actually trying to address a lot of the dumb bullshit that JRPG's had become mired in. (Admittedly, to varying degress of success, but i think it succeeds far more than it fails.) It felt unmistakably modern in a genre that hasn't felt that way to me for years.

It's a little difficult to pin down why, but the Wii game was probably the least interesting in the series. There's a lot of reasons for it, but It might also just be that Animal Crossing is much, much better suited to a portable format, where it feels more appropriate to play it in the short, daily bursts that it was designed for. Ideally, you spend like twenty-thirty minutes with it a day, and then maybe an hour on the weekends to check in with your friends and see what stuff they've been doing in their villages. Myself, at least, when i sit down in front of a TV, i want to really dig into a game. However, going at Animal Crossing like that quickly reveals that, while there's a whole lot to do overall, there isn't a whole lot to do at any one time. Anyways, ACNL seems awesome. Plug.

I could use peaches, we could trade, do i have your code? I just planted cherries and oranges too. As for tools, i don't have a bug net or a watering can, but i don't have anything to offer either, in that regard. My 3DS' battery just died, so i'm out for right now though.

You can invite people into your town for activities! Through the internet! The internet! There's also apparently now a thing where they'll be able to visit your town while you're offline, but in a "look, but don't touch" sense of interaction.

Of these, i have Brotherhood, Revelations, MW2, Gears and Gears 2, ODST, Reach, L4D2, an RE5... I guess everything except BF3. (I also have Gears 3, Halo 3, and Halo 4. There's a big giant balance update coming soon for Halo 4, i'm looking to get back into it.) I always liked Firefight in ODST more than what they did with it in Reach, so i might be up for that. Gears 3 has a pretty phenomenal Horde mode too. I hope you find a co-op partner for RE5, because it's great in co-op and sucks as solo game, but i'm not sure i'd want to play through it again. Let me add a couple open-requests to this thread, games that were critically panned, but i love regardless: Any of the Armored Core games, or Guilty Gear 2: Overture, or Senko no Ronde, or Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram. (I'm pretty terrible at all of these, so don't worry about getting stomped.) Also, if anybody is into some scrub play for any of the ArcSys fighters, specifically Persona 4 Arena or BlazBlue*, i'd be up for that. (Hell, i have Battle Fantasia too, if anybody has that.) (* = Continuum Shift, specifically, but i have Calamity Trigger as well. I don't have Continuum Shift Extend.)

Woo! I just setup my ACNL town.

You asshole, i was coming here to make that same joke.

What's this about shipping anything to Nintendo? Their consoles all have license transfer tools built-in, i've done the process a few times. That doesn't make it not dumb, but still miles less dumb than what you're suggesting. It's also only digital content that is handled like that, retail games are not tied into anything.

I'm on the same tract right now. I feel like i built a new PC at just the right time, i want to get more back into PC gaming. I'll probably get an XBO, speaking honestly, but i don't think i'm going to be on board with it like i was for the 360. I also think the PS4's online infrastructure is likely to be every bit as offensive to people as the XBO's theoretically is. Sony's been super smart to be as quiet as they are. They made some lofty promises, showed some neat games, and then shut themselves the fuck up until E3. Microsoft, on the other hand, every bit of news that comes out about the XBO is just making people angrier and angrier. They might have been better served to stay quiet until they had games to show at E3, or, hey, opened with the games like Sony did. As for the Wii U, it still needs to show that it has games, literally any interesting games, this is going to be a very important E3 for Nintendo. I think we'll know if the Wii U has a future or not by the time the show is over. So hopefully they'll show off a bunch of great games and then cap it off with a brief jab about how their games still work without an internet connection. Drop the mic, exit stage. (Can't i dream?)

You should probably be pretty sad that the shambling corpse of interplay is where it ended up, because it almost certainly means nothing will come of this.

I just joined the Steam group, but it looks like i missed the Konami one.

There's the third Gearbox add-on too, the co-op one exclusive to the PS2 port of Half-Life. It was called "Decay".

I decided to give the gearbox add-ons another look, and nope, i can't do it. I bailed out about half of the way through Opposing Force, and could barely stand to play Blue Shift. They have a lot of positive attributes, a lot of flashy, ambitious scenarios, and in Opposing Force specifically, a lot of really cool and inventive weapons. (In a weird way, i felt like i could feel some of the ethos that would later inform the Borderlands games. Mainly in the character dialogue and weapon design.) Their battles are also very unflinchingly scripted and narrow in a way HL1's firefights actually weren't, despite that game's reputation as having essentially devised the linear FPS thrill-ride to begin with. Opposing Force's big emphasis on a squad mechanic, built up on HL1's barely functional NPC AI, was also making it pretty frustrating at points.

Uru is pretty good, yeah. It's kind of clunky and clumsy in spots, and it's clearly hacked together from a failed MMO, but some of the ages are really cleverly designed, and there's some fun exploration of that fiction. It's a good Myst game, i'd definitely recommend it. I'm another big fan of the Myst series here too, Riven is phenomenal. As for other Myst-likes, there's Jonathan Blow's upcoming thing, i guess. Starship Damrey on the 3DS is also a bit of a Myst-like thing, but it's quite short and quite easy. I don't know, it's honestly a bit of a dead genre, isn't it? I keep hearing that Fez is secretly a game about Myst-style puzzles, i should probably play that at some point. Edit: Isn't Miasmata really more of a survival horror thing?

eShop games are usually pretty small, it's definitely the retail games that eat up a lot of space.

It's not all RPG's, as i noted. Kid Icarus Uprising and Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon are really great games, and Super Mario 3D Land is legitimately one of the best recent Mario games. I also think Mario Kart 7 might be one of the best Mario Kart games, and Resident Evil: Revelations is also one of the best recent RE games and a pretty amazing feat of software engineering, it looks incredible. There's certainly plenty more, especially on the eShop. As for SD cards, I had done some digging a couple weeks ago here and here. I found that there was a lot of confusion to wade through. I can say, if you end up playing a lot of games on your 3DS, and especially if you're downloading the digital versions of retail games, 4 gigs won't get you very far. Instead, I'd say that 16 gigabytes is probably a really good place to be at. I just put a 32 gigabyte card in my 3DS and it'll probably be more than i'll ever need, even with all the use my 3DS gets. If you aren't sure about it now, it's easy to upgrade SD cards later. Swapping data between cards isn't hard, there's no proprietary process involved, you literally just plug it into a PC and then copy its contents over to the replacement card, making sure the folder structure is intact. (It's the process of transferring software licenses between 3DS's that is slightly more arduous.)

Well there's been a bit of a JRPG renaissance happening on the 3DS. I think FEA is the best thing i've played this year, but i've also just absolutely fallen in love with Etrian Odyssey IV. Instead of repeating myself at length again, i'll just link to this.. Also, Mighty Switch Force 2 is apparently hitting the eShop next week.