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About the Outer Limits comparison, it really, really does. It's a small little contained story that ends on a twist that plants an open-ended idea and metaphor. It just feels so much like an episode of a genre anthology series. Really such a cool little game. The more i ruminate on it, the more i like it. I'll also still insist that FEA is the best thing i've played this year, people should play it. I'd recommend poking around this site for some systems information. Knowing when, where, and which skills can be unlocked, and how promotions and class changes function, is very valuable for enjoying the game to its fullest. (Among other things, like how the dual and pairing systems work, or what is passed down during inheritence.) You don't neeeeed to know any of that to play it, you can certainly get by on the normal difficulty just winging it, but it's a very deep game and i got so much more out of it by trying to understand its systems. It really rewards having long-term plans for your characters. (Though don't feel oppressed by that, you don't even really get any opportunity to start passing out promotions or class changes until chapter ten or so, you definitely have time to figure the game out first.)

It's about 3-4 hours, tiny little game with a clever, twisty story. You know what it actually feels like? It feels like the sci-fi episode of a genre anthology show, like an Outer Limits or a Twilight Zone. That's what the story in Starship Damrey reminds me of.

It's been a while since i played, so let's see what i can remember. For starters, there's just loads of statistical granularity, and you don't gain levels in the traditional sense, most growth your characters see is via crafting/finding better equipment. (Thus allowing a great deal of flexibility in their builds, though you're still going to broadly end up with a tank, a rogue, and a mage no matter what.) You can attack or cast magic and additionally perform a special skill per each character turn, you can combo elements together across turns to earn dice of increasingly higher values as the combo goes on. The dice go into your inventory, and you can spend them to buff hit/damage values for various actions. There's also a bit of a variable turn cooldown depending on which moves you use. I think that's more or less the core of it, as i recall. A lot of the spells and skills themselves also function in fairly interesting ways. I think i might be underselling it, i think it's a really good battle system.

I can't imagine trying to play Dark Souls with the additional pressure of trying to please an attentive audience with timely progress, it would be a total trainwreck. They should definitely do it.

Yeah, i know this, but i did like a dozen battles or more and it still didn't drop. I'm absolutely certain i was doing the right thing in the right place. It's a very indepth, richly complex JRPG. It's supposed to be a shorter, smaller game, but it's a set of systems that could easily support a full-length adventure. It's pretty excellent. I'd say it's more complex than the typical JRPG, but i don't think you should be put off by that. Liberation Maiden is a lot of fun too, i quite like it. I find the unskippable dialogue prompts extremely annoying, but it's a very cool little action game. Aeroporter is probably the toughest Guild 01 game to get into, it's an extremely specific appeal, a very masochistic puzzle game. Don't feel bad about skipping it.

It was released in Europe, so it should be there. It came out a while ago now, so maybe you might have to dig a bit. ... I just checked, it's still on sale too, alongside the other Guild 01 games. (Liberation Maiden and Aeroporter.) Look for the sales heading in the eShop. Edit: In response to a comment Andrej made, I feel like i should point out that Crimson Shroud was designed by Yasumi Matsuno. So if it feels like it's cribbing from old Square stuff like Vagrant Story and Final Fantasy Tactics, it's because it's from the same designer.

I've been stuck in Crimson Shroud forever, apparently i need a random drop to progress, and i just can't get the thing to drop. Seems to be a common roadblock issue people have with the game. Still, huge love for the game. The Guild games have all been very interesting so far, it's been a pretty fascinating little anthology.

About the vaguely retro stylings of the Xbox One, i saw this fan mock-up earlier today. I find myself believing completely that there should be a variant with wood paneling.

I've also played that, it's a super likable little game. I was smiling practically the whole way through because it was clearly designed by a person/people who have upmost fondness for platformers, there were just tons of little nods to classic games, i noticed particularly a lot of little Megaman moments. Apparently that developer is now working on a classic zelda-inspired thing for 3DS.

Throw a 2 in front of that number and you're closer to where i am with the 360.

From a person with way too much time and money invested into his 360, have some random thoughts about the reveal - - I'm okay with the name, my group of friends just immediately took to calling it the X1. - I think the console itself looks really fucking ugly. - The guide button no longer being centered on the pad weirds me out, the new d-pad looks like an honest-to-god real d-pad, the triggers look like garbage, and i'm glad that the battery bump is gone. - 15 exclusive first-party games for the first year, 8 new IP's? Holy shit, that sounds promising. - I love the shit out of Remedy, so i don't care that their trailer is awful, i want to play it. - Halo TV show? You know what? I'm on board. Forward Unto Dawn already came off as good b-grade television sci-fi, if that can be taken to be at all indicative of what they'll do, it might be good fun. - Virtually nobody gets anything out of car games as a showcase for visual fidelity, they've already been looking so amazing for so long. - Hey, it's CoD with more textures. The big ones - Not always-online, but cd keys and account tethering. ^ So this one, it's good that always-online has been clarified as not happening, i feel it's a flagrantly anti-consumer mechanism for DRM. As for CD keys and account tethering, it's what Steam has been doing for years, and like Steam, Live is one of the only services i would trust to handle it in a transparent and inoffesive fashion. It's also a bit more of a trade-off, there will potentially be advantages in having your retail purchases tied into your account permanently. No backwards compatibility ^ This is hot bullshit, and i would be way angrier about it if i hadn't heard about it ahead of time and had some time to mull it over. Ultimately, the conclusion i've personally arrived at is that BWC itself is not what matters, what matters is that Microsoft express real interest in continuing to support the 360's online ecosystem for the forseeable future. I wanted to see BWC happen because it would have been a fairly definitive statement on the matter. I find solace in the fact that they surely must realize that, If at some point the 360's services and online library just go away, they'll have also lost the faith of their consumers. Nobody will want to buy into such an ephemeral product ecosystem. They built a different kind of console with the 360, and now they're going to have to deal with the realities of what that means long-term. KINECT. ARGH! ^ I'm just about done with motion control, i hate it. I don't like the ambiguity and uncertainty in motion control, it is kind of antithetical to the kinds of games i want to play. I mean, hey, you know what works? A goddamned switch. Now let's hook this switch up to a button, press it to complete a circuit. It's on and off, there's two reliable states There's no ambiguity there, you're as close to that machine as you possibly can be. That's awesome, that's beautiful. So why are we trying so hard to get away from that? Instead, we have all these awful layers of obfuscation we're trying to build into our games. You're not jumping to make your guy in the game jump, you're jumping and hoping that the game can divine your intent and arrive at the desired conclusion. So no, fuck that, i want to press a button and make a man jump. Motion control needs to go away, i'm done with it, it's bad for games.

Having never really run matches big enough to be affected by it, i'm a little surprised to find that after about an hour, both versions of Supreme Commander apparently suffer from a pretty crippling memory leak in their AI that progressively slows down the game even on high-end PC's. The end game is effectively crippled in big skirmish matches. So i'm soured on SupCom, but there were always lots of little things i didn't like about it, relative to TA. So I took this to its logical conclusion and i reinstalled TA from my original discs. (I opened my TA case and immediately scratched the skirmish disc, argh!) I had to manually pull the files off the expansion pack discs apparently because the installers were 16-bit software that would not run on this modern PC, and Windows 7 repeatedly objected to me running the core game's own still-functional installer. Game seems to play fine though! Music plays one song and stops, but otherwise the game runs fine. TA is still awesome. SupCom gives you a lot of access to a lot of battlefield information in some fairly elegant ways, and also adds a few important UI shortcuts, but a lot of the essential queuing mechanics are virtually identical to how they were in TA, the original game is still eminently playable. (There's really just the old issue of how TA utilizes the radar in fog of war matches, combined with how the UI doesn't scale with resoultion changes.)

You have to think about this style of RTS in a different way. You're not micromanaging battle tactics and resource collecting as much as you're trying to sustain a balanced, growing economy while orchestrating broad troop movements. They're not necessarily overly complex games in and of themselves, but to ensure that you're able to focus on the things that you need to focus on, they have fairly complex control schemes. Figuring out how the queuing options work is what makes everything click into place and be manageable. Stacked orders, build queues, waypoints, and patrol routes. Especially in TA, everything clicks together when you figure out the many things you can automate with patrol routes. (Engineers will automatically reclaim resources when it's required, and assist in repairs and construction when it won't hurt your economy. Patrolling aircraft will also automatically make use of supply pads while on a route. Patrols tend to be less useful in SupCom because of the vast distances present in its maps, however.) SupCom even gives you an option for automating air transports with their ferry command. I also really appreciate the wealth of viable defensive options, which is not just effective defensive turrets, but the games' signature massive long-range stationary artillery and even those huge defensive bubbleshields in SupCom. Defense is an often ignored element in RTS's, but it's a huge part of these. (Kind of a turtler's dream, definitely games for people who get a kick out of trying to engineer an impregnable fortress.) They're RTS's for people who enjoy long, methodical battles on a grand scale.

When i originally played Supreme Commander, i came at it having been an absolutely gigantic nerd for Total Annihilation, but it ended up being the first PC game my once-awesome computer would prove woefully inadequate for, and so i never really put it through its proper paces. (Honestly, along with Crysis, it remained for years one of the only games my PC couldn't really adequately cope with.) Having recently just built a new PC, i reinstalled Forged Alliance, got it all patched up, maxed out every graphics option and ran a huge 7 AI skirmish with a thousand unit-per-player cap, and i did it on the largest map in the game. It was amazing, and it never dipped below 60 FPS. Supreme Commander is pretty awesome, you guys. (Obligatory: TA is still my one true love.) Also, apparently GPG just released a big game-changing patch for SupCom2, i saw it while i was trying to track down the updates for the disc version of SCFA.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-05-15-jason-rubin-metro-last-light-is-the-triumph-of-an-underdog I found this to be an interesting perspective.

I finished Starship Damrey on the 3DS, which didn't take long, it's about a 4 hour game. It's part of the Guild series Level 5 has been doing for the 3DS, where they've been gathering together notable japanese developers to get creative with small one-offs, and Damrey is the first of the Guild 02 collection to be released. It's very evocative of early-90's first-person point-and-click adventure games, something i have a particular fondness for, so i actually quite enjoyed playing this game. It's not at all challenging, but it's very charming and has a few fun surprises, i'd recommend it.

I maintain that many of the things wrong with Other M can be seen gestating in Fusion. I mean, the combat in Other M is fantastic, it's great. Some really solid 3d platforming too. The first-person thing is handled poorly, but you can see what they were trying to do, trying to bridge all the different takes on Metroid. Then you have the things that simply do not work. You have the unskippable, insulting narrative and the incredible linearity, and those were all there in Fusion too. As such, I don't think there's really any case to make for Other M being Team Ninja's fault. Also, i enjoyed reading this, hah.

And i'm done. It's fairly short, and very easy. It definitely had my attention though, it's a likable, fun little thing. It comes across maaaybe a little thin, but i enjoyed my time with it,

I like this post. video games are pretty fucking sweet.

Starship Damrey. I'm only about an hour and a half into it so far, but i think it's pretty rad. It will seem very familiar if you played any first-person point-and-click adventure games in the 90's, because it's very much that kind of game. I'm particularly reminded of the earlier Journeyman Project games, but Myst is the easiest and most familiar touchstone to grab for. As it happens, i love those kinds of games, so this is proving to be super, super appealing to me.

I never thought that Team Ninja making a Metroid game sounded like a good idea. (The real surprise is that they're probably not at fault for the things most wrong with Other M.) On Prime again, I remember playing a store demo of Metroid Prime for like five minutes before deciding that i needed to buy a Gamecube and a copy of Prime. Went home, came back the next day with money, bought that stuff and took it home. Set everything up, and I just remember sitting for like a good fifteen minutes on that title screen just absolutely in awe of the fact that i was about to play a new Metroid game after i had given up hope of it ever happening. (It had been eight years since Super! It seemed like such a long time.) Speaking of awesome music in Metroid games: My feeling is that it's one of those games that was a big, important step forward for game design when game design was still in its infancy, but was so primordial that it doesn't really hold up at all. I respect it, but i don't like playing it.

I was just catching up on this thread and was going to try to add something meaningful to the conversation, but i don't think i can after seeing the above post.

Huge Metroid fan here, how about we expand this out into a general Metroid love fest? I've never liked how Metroid 2 is so off-handidly dismissed by fans of the series, i feel that it was a completely worthy successor to the original game and features a superb sense of atmosphere. It's also the game where the look and gameplay mechanics of the series really crystalized. It was also the first Metroid game i ever played, i bought it on a whim as a little kid because i thought the box art looked cool, and was just enthralled with how mature and atmospheric it seemed, i had never played anything else like it and actually found it really scary! When people criticize it, it's usually because of it's more linear structure relative to Metroid and Super, and that's true, but i think the visually interesting locations and restrained, creepy ambient music still make it a very entertaining game. I have trouble going back to the original Metroid, but i can always dig back into Metroid 2. Speaking of which, yeah, i've just never been able to get into the original Metroid, i've played it through to the end, but it just doesn't do anything for me. The bland, repetitive environments just leave me wandering aimlessly, confused and annoyed. I probably won't say as much about Super Metroid because it doesn't really need to be defended and certainly not derided. It's one of the most elegant, sophisticated, inventive, and atmospheric games ever released. It's one of the standout achievements of the 16-bit era, and still the best game in this series. As a kid, the eight year gap between Super and Prime was agony. Prime sold me on the GameCube, and I think it's a pretty remarkable achievement for how effectively and completely it translated the mechanics and feel of Super Metroid into a 3D world. A beautiful, well-designed game, and in my opinion the next best in the series after Super. However, I take issue with the version of Prime that showed up in the Trilogy collection, it stripped out a lot of the subtle visual effects from the GC version and looks significantly worse as a result. Play the GC version. Prime 2 usually gets a lot of flak for being extremely hard and its environments not flowing together in as logical a way, leading to you feeling like you're doing a lot of needless back-tracking through difficult encounters. Some of its boss fights are also just absolutely some of the most difficult in the entire series. I really enjoy a difficult game, but some of the bosses in Echoes are ridiculous. I do really like the Dark World stuff though, the threat of the toxic environment and trying to carve out safe spots to allow yourself a moment to sit still and evaluate your situation. (Unlike Prime, the only thing that really changes in Echoes for its Trilogy version is some difficulty rebalancing, so that might make it the version to play.) Corruption, for whatever reason, didn't leave a very strong impact on me, I just don't remember it as well as other games in the series. I recall it being a very straight forward, fast moving game, with some good, inventive applications of the wii remote. More story focused and somewhat more linear, but neither to an overall detriment I think Fusion and the later Other M are the weakest games in the series, with their woefully misguided narrative aspirations. Other M is at least also an interesting and unique take on the series from a gameplay standpoint, but Fusion is just a stripped down and extremely linear take on Super. (Admittedly, the chase sequences are pretty damn neat.) Zero Mission is by far the more successful of the two GBA Metroids, but it's limited by trying to emulate the dull world layout of the original game. I think the huge stealth sequence towards the end was actually somewhat revelatory in terms of 2d game design, though i don't think it really feels like it belongs in that game. Metroid Prime Hunters, i personally feel, is an underrated little thing. It's Metroid as a fast-paced FPS, and if you can accept that as not being a horrible affront to the series, it's actually got a pretty solidly built little campaign and some pretty fun and frantic MP. (With some pretty bad exploits that made the public match-making unplayable.) I believe the last thing to mention is Metroid Prime Pinball which is, much like many of the other themed Pinball games Nintendo has put out, surprisingly good. It's also surprisingly difficult, even coming at it with a history of playing pinball machines, and that rumble cart it shipped with feels rather unpleasantly like a joy buzzer. Is that everything? I think that's everything. I guess there's also that minigame in Nintendo Land, and Samus' appearances in the Smash games.

These aren't examples of genuine confusion, they're joking.