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Holy shit, yeah. This is a good one. I'm always so surprised when something can follow me up a ladder, or scramble up a wall to chase me, or whatever. Basically when the AI is able to follow you places that years of gaming tells you they should not.

Argh! I wish i knew about this. I knew they updated the game and broke a lot of things, but i didn't know about this. I'm actually a little bothered by how Valve is constantly tweaking their older games, often to their detriment. I'm not going to say Gabe Newell is the George Lucas of video games, but Gabe Newell might be the George Lucas of video games. Heh.

The thing about the respawning enemies in CoD that always really made me crazy is that those games do nothing to illustrate to the player when they are changing the rules up. Sometimes enemies don't respawn, sometimes hanging back is the smartest tactic, and then sometimes you hang back and enemies just keep coming and it's never clear if you should be moving forward. There's never any indication of when you're in a sequence with respawning enemies and when you're not, you eventually just kind of have to intuit that "Okay, i think the game wants me to keep moving." I think that's really terrible design, changing the rules the player has become accustomed to and doing nothing to inform them of it. I mean, i just played through Alan Wake again, and that game also employs respawning enemies to create forward momentum, but it also has a way of informing the player of when the rules are being changed. That's a really good game. As for the health bar thing, i actually really like when games find a happy medium between the regeneration and permanence. (This is starting to sound like the Halo appreciation thread, but guess what CE/Reach/ODST did.)

Project X Zone's NA version has a demo up on the eShop, if anybody's interested. I don't know about europe.

So i started playing through Half-Life again on a whim and ended up finishing it, and now i'm playing through HL2, and i'm pretty sure i'm probably going to go and play through the episodes too. (I'm not sure if i should give the Gearbox add-ons another go, but since i'm already onto HL2, i probably won't. I remember Opposing Force being a stupendous add-on though.) So Half-Life 2. It is almost disgusting to me how well Half-Life 2 has aged, this game does not feel like it is ten years old. It's unfair to other games. It's still so fucking stylish, and its characters are so well animated, backed with such great voice acting. I'm doing the road trip that happens about half way through the game, and i still think it's just such an absolutely stellar sequence. The somber exploration of this world's quiet apocalypse, it's fantastic. The physics puzzles feel a little kitschy, but when i got to this point where i was clearing a bunch of wrecked cars off a road, i had to pause at the realization of how much more fluid the world of Half-Life 2 felt than those of many other shooters i've been playing recently, all with their beautiful environments that are completely sterile and static, it was very disappointing to realize that was the direction things have gone in. I remember having high hopes for what the fancy physics engine of HL2 might mean for games. Hey, but i played Half-Life too, that's also a thing. It's a bit of a shame that it often kind of ends up being a bit of a foot note to HL2, despite being the far more importan and influential game. As i played through the first Half-Life, it slowly started to sink in that it still feels very much like a modern first-person shooter, which i think both speaks to how little shooters have progressed since then, and how much it was the template for everything that has followed. It's still a great game though, it's filled with interesting setpieces and combat design that was well ahead of its time, looking back on things. Large spaces filled with cover points and flanking opportunities. However, the rudimentary tactical AI in the marines doesn't hold up quite so well, i noticed that they were killing themselves with grenades a lot. I also properly finished Xen, i'm not sure i've ever done that before. I certainly never beat Nihilanth legitimately before. It's an annoying boss fight, having him constantly trying to teleport you away to fight other enemies before you can come back and deal with him some more. Also, god damn all those terrible jumping puzzles. Not just the ones in Xen, but all of them across that game.

The fact that the "Hooray!" is from Viva Pinata just makes it even better.

I would argue that Halo 4 is actually the easiest legendary playthrough in the series. The knights certainly do not feel like they have a ton of health once you realize what actually works. There's a few things to consider: They're resistant to headshots, and the precision rifles are otherwise fairly low-damage weapons. (So no plasma pistol/DMR-style shenanigans.) The knights are also actually fairly slow to react at mid/close-range. (Very dangerous at melee range.) So I found myself throwing myself into the middle of large fights, taking big risks with a scattershot and a suppressor. A lot of the subtle rebalancing that goes on in the legendary difficulties of the Halo games seems centered around making the safest strategies less viable, trying to push players out of hanging back with the precision rifles.

You would, in fact, find that Halo has been cited frequently for a lot of the arguments i made in this thread. I think they're great games. The multiplayer definitely requires a different set of skills, you see the same pieces in different roles, and the strategy overall being much more about coordinated teamwork.

When i've played CoD games on their higher difficulties, it really just felt like the only solution was to try harder. Hit your marks faster and more precisely, just go through those motions ad nauseum until you either luck through it or have tried sufficiently hard enough. I don't think it's so much even an issue with how those games are balanced at their higher difficulties, but rather the higher difficulties shining a light on what is fundamentally wrong with those games. There's no stepping back and re-evaluating the situation, no engineering a clever, risky solution to your combat dilemma. The situations you're thrown into are neither broad or dynamic enough to allow that, and any attempt to do so will simply lead you back to the same conclusion you had started at with no new insight beyond what you already assumed. Which is, simply put, that you need to try harder next time. Fuck that shit. Edit: Hey, there's a point to make in all of this. I feel a good, well-balanced difficult game should reward a player's inspection of and introspection about the challenges laid before them by the game's systems and spaces. It's interesting to me that you would assume that the "intended" experience must always be the one where you are able to stride through the narrative without any roadblocks. Especially when many action games, of course, advertise to the player their higher difficulties as "the way it is meant to be played".

I don't really have anything significant to add to the conversation at this time, i'm just going to throw this out there, because i thought it was interesting, that the original Half-Life is significantly harder on its normal difficulty than Half-Life 2 is on its hard difficulty. (I just built a new PC, and whenever i reinstall Steam, i always see Half-Life sitting there and somehow i always end up playing through the games again.) Also, i really, really loath how the CoD games are balanced at their higher difficulties, that shit is not fun. I don't much like or respect CoD to begin with, though. Reading your posts, Zeus, i wonder if you're feeling a bit of the Treyarch/Infinity Ward divide, with your comparisons to the original Modern Warfare in there.

Hold on, hold on, it's not that crazy. My 360 library is like half-XBLA and half-physical media. I haven't been nearly as thorough with those XBLA games, which furthers my point about the digital media thing. (Edit: Oh no, oh noo. I just counted, i have severely underestimated how many games i own for the 360. I feel terrible about myself now.) I don't think my collection is honestly all that impressive, nor did i set out to collect a lot of games, i've just been a 360 owner since 2006, it's a long time to end up playing a lot of games. I'm kind of a chronic Video game hoarder, i realized early on that i always regreted it when i sold my games, there are painful gaps in my SNES/90's-PC library.

It seems like a lot of people have a fundamentally different relationship with physical media, relative to the games they "own" digitally. Myself included, i look at my Steam library, and it's a weird hodge podge of things i like a lot and things i've barely touched. (If at all.) But then i look at my 360 library, and of those that are disc-based games, there's maybe 5-10% that i haven't played through to completion.

Is that so? I haven't heard that one. Any other details? Man, that being the case, maybe it might just be worth waiting for an iOS port of VLR. If 999 is on iOS now, they'll probably port VLR too at some point. It's such a shame, i really want VLR to be an easier recommendation. I think it's one of the best things on the 3DS.

I already mentioned that, yeah. If you want to be completely safe in VLR, don't mess around with trying to figure out which puzzle rooms are affected by the bug and just completely avoid saving in the puzzle rooms, only save during the visual novel sequences. (There's a story timeline thing that lets you jump between different branches of the narrative, which also has the effect of giving you a way to back out of puzzle rooms so you can save safely.) 999 doesn't have any such technical issues, to be clear.

Yeah, that's it. I don't believe 999 was ever released in europe, but since DS games aren't region locked, it's not a huge problem. (VLR, on the other hand, was released in Europe. As a 3DS game, it is region-locked.) There's also an iOS port of 999 on the way, so if you're willing to wait, that's also an option. You definitely don't want to play VLR without playing 999 first though, and they're both worth playing anyways, they're two awesome visual novels. (Speaking of visual novels, the fifth Phoenix Wright game was confirmed to be getting a localization, but no retail release, it'll be exclusive to the eShop.)

Doesn't the european localization of that have massive, massive problems? Like, they introduced a ton of crash bugs into it. Oh, oh! Also: Virtue's Last Reward, but play 999 on the DS first, and then in VLR, don't save during the puzzle rooms! (It'll corrupt your save! It's a huge bug, but completely avoidable.) Avoid spoilers for both.

The 3DS is not region free, sadly. Probably the main thing to talk about with regards to the 3DS right now is the massive glut of amazing JRPG's that are out and on the way, so if you're into JRPG's at all, you'll be very happy. Shin Megami Tensei IV is out in a few weeks and is apparently pretty amazing, and there's things like Bravely Default or Mario and Luigi 4 a little further down the road. Soul Hackers, a remake of an earlier SMT game that never came out in the west, was also released just a couple weeks ago. Etrian Odyssey IV is out right now and i found it to be a pretty good entry point for that series, i've ended up feeling like it's one of the 3DS's best games right now. The story is very thin though, it's very much a systems RPG, so it's a specific appeal. (It also looks like EOIV is on sale in the eShop right now. There's also a demo for EOIV that has a huge chunk of the game and lets you import your save into the full game.) FEA is definitely a game you want to play, absolutely. Tales of the Abyss, maybe? That port came out last year, but was a pretty good port. Animal Crossing: New Leaf is out in a couple weeks, while things that are already available include: Super Mario 3D Land, Kid Icarus Uprising, Resident Evil: Revelations, Mario Kart 7, or Luigi's Mansion: Dark Moon, those are all easy recommendations. (There's also a demo for Revelations on the eShop.) For eShop stuff, the Guild 01 and Guild 02 games are easy to recommend. Aeroporter can probably be skipped, but Crimson Shroud and Liberation Maiden are both pretty awesome. Starship Damrey, the first released Guild 02 game, is pretty cool too. Pushmo/Crashmo, Mighty Switch Force, Mutant Mudds, Gunman Clive, Tokyo Crash Mobs, and Nano Assault EX are maybe some other things to look at. There's a lot of good things on the eShop right now, it's a pretty healthy store front.

Dark Forces is fantastic, i will hear nothing to the contrary. One of the best "doom clones" of that era, and definitely holds up pretty well.

I also loved the whole angle of diving through conflicting mythologies to try and piece together a historical account that approaches the truth, instead of, at the end of your long journey, having clarity delivered to you through a expository info dump. Even when you talk to people who were alive during the events you are trying to decipher, they give you biased accounts and fragments of the full picture. Daggerfall was an oddity for me, a toy. Morrowind made me a fan. I don't wanna! Boo hiss! Grargh! FIne, alright. Total Annihilation. I think it's tragic and insane that Total Annihilation was not a more influential game than it ended up being. Playing its eventual successor in Supreme Commander feels much like playing a divergent evolution of the RTS genre that never quite existed, where instead of burrowing down into tactics and micromanagement, things kept blowing up bigger and bigger. I've always wanted for more of this emphasis on the macro out of my RTS's, but most games that claim to offer that tend to become mired in more 4x concerns. TA and SupCom are the only things that really offer it, and SupCom has a lot of problems while i think TA holds still holds up all these years later. One of the more enduring elements of Total Annihilation for me was actually its UI, which came across as revelatory in 1997 after coming off of games where you were explicitly limited to one action at a time for any given unit. Bolstered with gradual additions made during Cavedog's support of the game, TA was absolutely just years ahead of its contemporaries. (Including, i feel, Starcraft.) I actually just recently reinstalled Total Annihilation, and its awkward implementation of radar aside, there was no "I wish i could do this" with the UI, it was all already there. The build queues, the patrol AI, the waypoints and order stacking. SupCom, a 2007 game, is a game that had to change surprisingly little when following up on TA. (Many of the changes to the formula seen in the initial release were actually perceived as a step back, and the game was patched to play more like TA.) Just as an example, one of the key things i do in a game of TA is set up an air factory, and from that factory i draw a set of patrol routes, and then i set the factory to start making construction aircraft. The patrolling construction aircraft will assist in construction efforts, repair damaged buildings, and reclaim loose resources on the map if the economy is strained. When i lay down some air repair pads along those patrol routes, the patrolling aircraft will automatically make use of these structures when damaged. When i realized that i could automate things in TA like that and focus on the broader conflict in its entirety, it was just over, no other RTS was going to cut it. I mean, and the massive maps, the hundreds-of-units cap, the colossal artillery cannons and the flimsy walls meant to provide temporary solace, the huge naval battles and the strafing bombers. The Krogoth. The distinctive, sophisticated economy model that provides you immediate feedback on how you're handling things, ideally with enough material in your stores to let you right things before they capsize. Then there's the at-the-time advanced technical details like the physics-simulated projectiles and the 3D terrain. Or things that are still very uncommon, like vehicles leaving behind wrecks that contribute to an evolving battlefield full of obstacles and resources. (Or forest fires! A real problem in maps thick with jungle.) It was also one of Jeremy Soule's first OST's. It's also fairly notable how how extensively moddable TA is. To this day it still has an active modding community, but back then, even Cavedog was in on it. They iterated on the game weekly, always adding new features, new maps, and new units for free on top of and beyond their two retail add-ons. By the end of Cavedog's support, the game saw well over a hundred additional units. (Two entirely brand new catagories of units and a wildly expanded sea game among them.) There was also Cavedog's short-lived multiplayer matchmaking service "Boneyards" with its completely free and hugely ambitious galactic conquest metagame, players registering with either faction and setting out to claim worlds for their side in ranked battles. (The setup would be familiar now, but this was 1997!) Some of the best multiplayer memories i have are from that, there was a great community and Cavedog employees were active participants. I could probably keep going, i adore TA, i think it's still the best RTS i've ever played. I even like the dumb simplicity of its barely-there grimdark narrative. (There are also a ton of missions, and truckloads more with the two add-ons installed, but the campaign content is really a secondary attraction. TA is a skirmish/multiplayer game first and foremost.) TA's available on GoG, so if anybody's never played it, i highly recommend it.

Depending on my mood, it's either Total Annihilation or System Shock 2 for me. Though the more i think about those two, the more i want to blow this out into a big list of favorites. Let's just throw Quake in here too. I fucking love Quake. Edit: Maybe also Morrowind.

I just did a complete run through Half-Life. I dunno why. Hey, but Half-Life is still a pretty good game. Xen is still kind of terrible. Awful, clunky jumping puzzles aside, i'm struck by how much modern FPS's are still designed like Half-Life. Both a sign of how influential, far-reaching, and forward-thinking Half-Life was, and how little everybody else has progressed.

Lumines, anybody? Where scoring well advances you through otherwise looping bars of music, and the sound effects are designed for and meant to accompany each stage's song.

Except the music in Rez isn't actually dynamic in any especially impactful fashion. The music doesn't match up with your play, you're trying to match your play up to the music. Child of Eden is the same way.

I thought this bit was pretty cool in Skyward Sword. I think there's a few other examples in that game, but they're not popping to mind.

I've got like fifty things on my 3DS, counting 3DS-native stuff, ambassador bonuses, and things brought over from the DSi. I feel like i need one of those wallet chains.