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Oh hey, i didn't realize that Nano Assault EX was already on the eShop. This new version has CPP support and a new survival mode. Hopefully the crash bugs from the retail version have been fixed too. Also, has anybody played Tokyo Crash Mobs, Mitchell's weird spiritual successor to Puzz Loop/Magnetica? I have some e-bucks on my 3DS, but i'm torn between that and Nano Assault EX.

This has been a game i'd like to check out, but i can't bring myself to support something with such a gross DRM scheme.

As somebody who really enjoyed the 3 Gears of War games, but was merely on the fence about Judgement, i think this just pushed it into no-buy. I realize 3 also had microtransactions, but they were purely cosmetic.

That's part of what i hated about the regions in Sim City 4. The idea that you didn't really have to create functional, sustainable cities. You just needed to force it to the point where it can serve the function you need it to serve, and it doesn't matter how unstable it is, because it's locked in time once you go back to another city where you can start reaping the rewards from it.

I have been playing Sim City Creator DS. (Which has no relation to Sim City Creator for the Wii, as i understand it.) Why am i playing an obscure, five year old portable Sim City game? So i said this a while ago, and in subsequently following the Sim City 2013 controversy, i also ended up reading about some of the more obscure entries into the series. It turned out that this was totally a game doing a lot the things i thought would be pretty cool for Sim City to tackle, and later when i saw a used copy of the game sitting in a game store for just a few bucks, i decided to give it a shot. It's a neat thing, i've enjoyed my time with it. Once you accomplish certain goals in a specific age, you kind of "age up" your city and are gradually introduced to a new set of infrastructure and demands that you have to resolve with your existing city. For example, agriculture is gradually phased out as food stops being an essential resource and industry supplants its alternative roles. Once you reach the modern age and "win" the game, there's also a hidden last age unlocked by going and fucking everything up. You pollute your city horrendously, cause global warming, get a small lecture from the game, and unlock a final post-apocalyptic age where your city has been flooded by rising ocean levels. You're left to start over and try to build a floating future city that can clean up the environment as damaged by your previous city. (Including persisting air pollution and garbage.) I don't mean to oversell the game though. While it seems to be derived from Sim City 3k, everything is horrendously compressed, it looks and sounds terrible, the mechanics are somewhat simplified, and the performance is very stuttery. It's about what you'd expect from cramming a complex PC simulation onto a underpowered handheld. For a random, weird thing i stumbled across though, i've had a lot of fun with it.

I had issues in firefox a couple days ago and had to clear my cache before i could post again.

God, Omikron was such a weird thing. No, Omikron was definitely released, it was Quantic Dream's first game and has no ties to the whole Ion Storm mess. There were probably a lot of plans at Ion Storm that never came to fruition, I believe an Anachronox sequel was particularly high on that list.

The NeoGaf thread for Etrian Odyssey IV seems to have collected all or most of the QR codes for the game. The items are only useful for the first region or so, but there are quests for throughout the game.

So i just played this game and i have things to say about it. You know, and just to get it out there, i'm coming at Revengeance with a distant appreciation for Metal Gear, but not really liking the part where you have to play them. I guess a lot of Metal Gear fans are still really angry about how tonally different Rising is from the MGS series, and it's maybe a valid argument. The game is way more Platinum than it is KojiPro, and if you've played Vanquish, you've probably got a sense for what the vibe here will be. It's super, super dumb, but not dumb in a Metal Gear kind of way. On the other hand, it's also very specifically not a "Metal Gear Solid" game, there is no promise of it being a Metal Gear Solid game. Anyways, i really like it. I think it's overall a much more uniformly excellent game than Platinum's other recent release. (The super cool, but ultimately very flawed Anarchy Reigns.) In a pure matter of how far you can stretch the systems, Revengeance is probably one of the more straightforward brawlers Platinum has made. There isn't really room for technical improvisation like there is in Anarchy Reigns, nor is there the sheer bottomless wealth of systems and combos that Bayonetta offered. It is, however, still a much deeper and more interesting brawler than mostly anything else out there. The big defining element here is the blade mode, the idea that you're cutting enemies in half to... something something nanomachines, health and energy, extra customization points. It's very cool, it's awesome, i like it. There's loads of destructible items in the environments, and there's the whole collection game about using your radar vision to identify certain targets who have data chips in their hands, and then cutting off those hands to collect them, that's awesome. The general flow of the combat is to weaken or stagger an enemy with normal attacks, and then finishing them off with the blade mode. There's actually no combos on the light attack, it's pure button mashing, but the heavy attacks do have some simple combos available depending on the selected secondary weapon. Different special moves are unlocked as you progress, including a really quite important dodge attack that isn't ever really explained. That's a fairly annoying problem with the game, because while there's a help menu that will list off all your currently available specials and combos, and VR training missions that explain some other various things, they somehow managed to miss explaining any of the defensive minutia of the game. (Which is all very non-standard to make things even more confusing.) The parry system is never explained, the dodge is never explained, the color-coded heavy enemy attacks aren't even explained. (Based on my own experience, how it worked out is that orange should be parried, yellow should be dodged, and i believe red is simply unblockable? Speaking of which, the yellow and orange are far too similar in color.) There's also a super mode that is unlocked during a boss fight, and it's somewhat crucial for fighting that boss, but the tutorial that explains how to use that super mode is unlocked after that fight ends. So yeah, there's some kind of dumb stuff like that. The camera is also pretty bad, it's really just quite terrible. Interestingly, unexpectedly, the game also has some relatively fleshed out stealth gameplay. It doesn't seem to ever require that you play that way, but there are some distinct rewards for trying to play stealthy, and stealth kills make some of the other goals, like civilian rescues and collecting the left hands, much easier. There's also some token Metal Gear elements there, you have a bunch of sub items to facilitate stealth. (The cardboard box, of course.) Codec conversations are in the game and there's just insane amounts of it, multiple new conversations after every battle, and even more that are contextual to the battles themselves. I guess all this codec stuff is the other big token holdover from Metal Gear. (Also, the walk and talk codec conversations can be fast-forwarded. They're mostly used to hide loads, but once the load has happened, you can skip the rest.) Anyways, I really like it, but i'm not a Metal Gear fan. I think this is a game that will probably just really piss off people who are.

Yeah, this seems to specifically be about the autostereoscopic top-screen on the 3DS.

I recognize what the earlier Etrian Odyssey games are trying to evoke, but i think that style of synthesized sound would really start to grate on me after a while, so i think i can understand where Rodi is coming from. It's a very sharp, hard sound. There's undeniably quite a difference between and . I might be putting words into his mouth though, if he just hates the compositions... Fuck, i don't know.

I will say, i think i would have also found the still 2d enemy sprites quite off-putting. The synthesized music less so, but it's going for a specific kind of nostalgia that i don't have. (I've also seen it said that the classes in EO3 were some of the most restrictive in the series.) You know, but this is clearly a game about its systems, and if those mechanics don't click, there's really not much else to grab onto. It's good that they put out that big demo though, i don't think i'd have ever tried it otherwise, and i hope other people give it a chance too.

I would be heartbroken if Retronauts really came to an end.

Oh, i've actually seen it before. It's just, prompted by Mington, i just wanted to see how many games i could identify, because i recall having recognized most of them. (At the very least, the screen capture on the embed is Assault Suits Valken/Cybernator.) That's a great anecdote, i love that. Except many of these games are japanese, where the opposite is true. Though i suppose the very, very earliest games to establish the convention were american. (Pitfall!)

Wonderful, that video is blocked in my country because of copyright claims. Thanks, Youtube.

I'd like to confirm that we're probably on 9. Probably.

I can't believe i didn't even try that, i feel foolish. Additionally, I'm now also not seeing the new-post stars, even though i could before clearing my cache.

I'm having a pretty different reaction to Etrian Odyssey IV, i really love it. I'm surprised at how much i'm enjoying it, actually. I bumped the game up from casual some time ago because i am definitely on board with what it's offering. (The fact that it actually saves your map even if you wipe out completely makes it much easier to swallow.) I understand that most of what EO4 does is take the things EO3 introduced and refine and build on them, so we probably didn't have terribly different experiences. I imagine it really is down to personal taste. I definitely much more need interesting mechanics in a game more than i need a story. (Though what little of it there has been in EO4 i have found reasonably charming.) There was a point that i felt like the game had settled into a rhythm where i knew what it was going to be, only for it to begin mixing things up in some pretty clever ways. I love what the game does with the on-field miniboss enemies, the FOEs. I've also now filled out enough of the skill trees to surface some really interesting possibilities for complicated interactions between different skills and different classes. I'm actually really loving these classes, they're terrific fun to experiment with. The FOEs though, there was one point still fairly early in the game where i was forced to wander past immobile FOEs who, unlike all other previous FOEs, were not actively moving or seeking me, though i noticed that the random battle alert thing was changing color to red very quickly in this area. I'm quickly thrust into a random battle and i start fighting with the enemies and i notice on the lower map screen that the FOEs in this area have started moving towards my party, one step per in-battle turn. So i'm in this situation where i'm left to try and engineer a way to finish these battles before the FOEs reach my location, join the battle, and potentially wipe out my party. Even before that, there was another area where the FOEs were moving one step per every two steps my party took, and i had to essentially "time" my movements to run past them on their immobile turn. Earlier still, having to pull aggro from the FOEs to lead them around so they can angrily bust open paths for my party. (Potentially running into the same situation as described above if you're pulled into a random battle.) I love it, i think it's all very cool. I also really enjoy the breezy, adventurous vibe, and i'm finding a lot of novelty in charting my maps. The music is also really, really phenomenal. I think i'm henceforth pretty on board with Etrian Odyssey. I've seen a lot of people deride the game as being grindy, but if that's purely in reference the dungeon diving and the combat, that seems to be dismissing the entire point of the game. I'm about 25 hours into it, and i haven't found it necessary to go back to earlier areas and beat on weaker enemies for levels, i haven't had that kind of a grind. If something is too hard, there's probably some other more intermediate new thing you can be off doing at that time. Given the reputation the series has as being ass-kickingly hard, i'm sure it'll probably get there, but i think it's being overplayed a bit. I was really surprised how quickly i took to it.

Ahah, things are looking right now. I had to switch browsers to make this post. The forum isn't letting me submit replies on Firefox anymore.

Oh man, i've been sitting on a copy of Asura's Wrath, i need to play that.

So you can't edit the terrain? And there's only ten regions in the game to pick from? ... I don't think i would be so bothered by that if i wasn't sure it was for them to be able to sell you additional maps down the road. (Probably with expanded city limits, i bet.)

Strange Journey... 2? I like a good complex set of systems in my RPG's, but the ones SMT runs with always struck me as the kind that are fraught with potential for irrevocably damaging player error, the kinds of games you need to play with a guide open. Scary as hell when it's something like a JRPG that is asking for pretty much a guaranteed hundred hour investment of time. As for Orcs & Elves, i think it's probably a little outside the scope of Wizardy-likes, but i definitely agree that it was a really fun little game. I would have liked to see more games in that style out of Id. There was also Doom RPG, right? But that was it, i think. Also, i think i might keep an eye out for Dark Spire, but if it's rare even by Atlus standards... Well, yeah.

I guess we should be moving onto the 8th now. Fuck. I'm still not caught up.

In the GiantBomb quicklook, Jeff touches on one of the things that made me really dislike Sim City 4, where to get the most out of a city, you had to surround it with other cities. You were forced into spreading your attention out across a number of cities that you don't really care about instead of focusing on the one you do. It seems like the absolutely tiny city limits in the new game just exacerbate that issue to extremes.

The SMT series has always seemed particularly intimidating to me, for varying reasons depending on the game, but i've definitely heard excellent things about Strange Journey. (Though i know people who have burned out on it, feeling overwhelmed by how much it throws at the player.) There's that upcoming remake of Soul Hackers for the 3DS, any opinion on that? I also think SMT4 looks pretty interesting. I'm probably not starving for more, but i enjoy exploring unfamiliar genres every now and then.