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Friends have been urging me to check out Binary Domain for a while, and after playing it i'm pretty well on board with the game. I think i ended up ignoring it just because all the marketing made it look so much like Vanquish, just without the immediately visible gameplay hooks that made that game so interesting. I don't think anything really conveyed what Binary Domain's strengths actually are. It has issues though, including some very swimmy gamepad aiming, way too many turret sequences, dumb party AI, and the odd boss or two that lacks enough visual feedback to let you know if you're doing the right thing. On the positive side, it's another in a series of recent shooters that are mixing up some of the tried and true gameplay language as opposed to headshots forever always. (In general, the legs are the first thing to aim for here.) There are also a ton of boss fights, and i thought that actually most of them were quite excellent. The story though, that's what makes this game, that and how it adapts around influence exerted by your squad selections and the affinity system. The story doesn't seem mutable to the extent of a Deus Ex or a Mass Effect game, but it's certainly far more than i was expecting out of a relatively straight forward third-person shooter. I will say, though, the AI's weaknesses are made more prominent by the affinity system. It completely sucks when the AI strolls into your line of fire and likes you less because of it, or asks you for assistance in a battle and it's not exactly completely clear what the condition for completing that request is. There also appears to be quite an extensive multiplayer suite in the game, but with literally nobody playing. I cringe to think of the money and time spent on things like this. That possibly extends to the speech recognition thing, which i honestly didn't even touch. If it works, it might be a better way to play, because the canned dialogue choices are frequently quite ambiguous, while the pop-up for squad commands is contextual and doesn't always give you the options you want. Still, i'd say it's a firmly above average shooter with a really fun and well told sci-fi story. I think its enemies are a ton of fun to fight, and that story really counts for a lot. for Binary Domain.

Or more generally, Linux exclusive? If they're serious about moving PC gaming away from Windows, that is the kind of news bomb that could coerce movement out of gamers. I definitely remember how much people hated Steam when it was new, i was in that crowd too. People thought Steam was the end of PC gaming! (In fact, a lot of the same arguments Gabe is making against Windows 8, funny that.) Half-Life 2 though, i couldn't ignore it, so i made that Steam account.

Well i wasn't interested in the game for the campaign, so that's barely even an issue. Platinum pitched it as a multiplayer-centric brawler, and that's why i wanted to play it. I mean, and after playing the game online for a while, i really want to disagree with you, but i haven't honestly played enough to present any argument beyond NUH-UH. All i can say is that I was having a ton of fun. As for the music, it's a lot of the same independent hip hop artists they hired to do the original music for Mad World. I am a person with no affinity for hip hop whatsoever, but i think what they've done fits these games. (Inasmuch that it's really fucking goofy in a pretty particular way.) Divisive games! Clearly Anarchy Reigns is going to be one.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-kentucky-route-zero/17-6940/ I hadn't actually heard of this game before watching this.

Okay, i thought i was near the end of the game, i was definitely not. I think it was another fifteen to twenty hours or so, but i am finished Skyward Sword. That was a seventy hour game for me. (Most of the other 3D Zeldas are games i have finished in around 40-50 hours with a modestly completist mindset, so this is definitely quite a long game.) I guess i really enjoyed it, I thought they did a lot of really fucking cool stuff all throughout the desert area. A lot of the later dungeons in the game too, some really cool stuff, i thought. Some really fantastic boss fights as well, maybe some of the best in the series, i'm not sure. I still really appreciate save points in dungeons, having to bail out of your progress through an elaborate interlocking environment puzzle was one of the worst things for the Zelda series to hang onto for so long. I think the game seriously underutilizes certain items. I mean, the whip is a lot of fun to use, but they don't really give you very many reasons to use it. I like what they did with crafting and the potion brewing thing, but those fucking once-a-session item descriptions for the crafting objects are such a downer. I cannot fucking figure out why this game decided it had to go with this weird motion-controlled pointer thing, it is so much more unreliable and finicky than the Wii remote's normal led/camera pointer. When you start having to use the bow a lot later in the game, constantly having to manually recenter the aim detection is just completely a pain in the ass. Like, and sometimes when you're staring a puzzle or a menu for a while, the pointer starts drifting off center and going just completely sideways. That shit is busted, and that part of the control became a serious nuisance towards the end. I don't feel like the sword combat ever completely breaks down though, it's always a bit fidgety, but I think Nintendo pretty well found the limit of what that interface can do. They ask you to do interesting things without ever asking too much of it. (Though there's a couple gnarly fights where they throw large groups of enemies that, each on their own, require complex interactions. So admittedly, during those fights, i was kind of just flailing around.) I'm still really bummed out by how much the world is broken up into all these tiny little pieces, it makes the game feel so much smaller than it actually is. I think Fi might be the dullest companion in the entire series, but probably not the most annoying. Tegan, where did the game fall apart for you? There wasn't really anything that stood out to me as awful about the last parts of the game. At the end there, it definitely feels like it's contriving just a few more reasons for you to go back into those environments, but i was pleasantly surprised by how involved and elaborate that stuff actually ended up being. To me, It definitely doesn't feel like the last chunk of Wind Waker, but it was still maybe one step too far for the game. Maybe i enjoyed it so much because i wasn't expecting to like it much at all, that's definitely a possibility, but after being really disappointed witht he last few Zelda games, i thought Skyward Sword was pretty damn great. Definitely not my new favorite game in the series or anything, but i think it is a fine game and one i certainly wouldn't hesitate to recommend.

The eventual third version will obviously be called Z to complete the exhausted 3D pun.

That's what i'm pushing for and that's what i'm going to stick to. We've clearly had a lot of people just starting with this thing this week, so i don't think it's right to move on ahead already. From the 14th out though, one a week, then?

I will second Dark Souls never being a grind, i never felt like i had to go level up a bunch to take on a boss. The solution to a difficult boss was never to grind stats and gear, but to explore new tactics and strategies. That said, it is very possible to create a bad character build in that game, and that can definitely bite you in the ass. (It's nothing particularly arcane, you just need to have a clear understanding of what the various character stats actually do, rather than what you think they should do.)

Most of the buzz i've been hearing is fairly positive. I don't particularly need it to be awesome, i'll be happy if it's just interesting and flawed. What about it didn't you like?

I've been following this game for a while, it's quite overtly inspired by Japanese mech games. (Like a lot of those licensed Macross and Gundam games that will absolutely never be released in the west.)

I didn't realize that there was actual designed technique to the dice rolls, i thought it was all just physics simulation. I've had dice pop off the dice board and seemingly into my personal inventory of dice, but i haven't been able to make it happen reliably. Crimson Shroud has grown on me a lot since i made that post though, really cool game.

This is still a horrible idea, but i don't hate the people they've hired to work on it.

My feeling on the matter is that this was really the first console generation where simply keeping the old hardware isn't going to allow me to keep playing these games i love, there is so much online integration in these games that many are completely unplayable without patches and DLC and active servers. If Microsoft shows a next-gen console with comprehensive backwards compatibility, my idealistic and hopeful mind will take it as a gesture towards those services probably continuing to operate into the forseeable future. (The skeleton in the closet here is of course the 360's own compatibility with the X-box, though that was really anything but comprehensive backwards compatibility. The original X-box was also a much easier limb to sever, its library was much shallower.) The same is all true of Sony and the PS3, of course. Much of it is also true of most big-budget PC games now, and many indie games as well. I don't like that we're venturing into territory where games are so reliant upon outside factors that are never guaranteed, it makes them so much more ephemeral. I mean, the argument you're making Rodi, it applies to old console games too, but how many modern PC games does it actually apply to? Everything relies on Steam, Origin, GFW, uPlay or some other such service, or at worst has its own totally fucked up authentication servers. (Or all of the above and more in layers.) All of this stuff, this is the kind of shit that is going to give historians of this medium nightmares in forty years.

Do we even have any consensus about how far into the game we should be right now? Are we fully on phase two, now? People moving ahead with that second Colossus this week?

Oh god, are you fucking kidding me? I've walked right into the sequence of events that leads to the game-breaking bug. People kept saying that it would happen at a point where i had a choice to explore the three areas at will, but but the game doesn't ever make it clear that you can. It tells you to go to the forest first, and then to the desert. Blaaaah. Whatever, there's that save fix utility on WiiShop. Still, holy shit, that is a bad bug. That is a serious issue. Edit: Or is it? I don't know, i think i may have misinterpreted descriptions of where the bug occurs. Dammit, i hate having a game-breaking bug looming on the horizon when i play a game.

When you're hanging from a vertical surface, whether it's a hand hold or colossus fur, you can hold triangle to charge a jump to propel yourself upwards. The longer you hold down the button, the stronger the jump will be. The same applies to the sword, charge those attacks. A charged stab will do significantly more damage that just rapidly spamming the stab.

You need to jump from hand holds to climb up the ledges on the path leading to the first Colossus, isn't that enough? ... Wait, what is this about the charge meter? I mean, when you charge to jump from a hand hold or raise your sword for a charged attack, the bigger the circle in the stamina gauge is, the more powerful the jump/attack is. That's all it is.

I feel that at the outer fringes of the 360's library, there have been a ton of awesome, weird games that never sold well enough to move beyond being exclusive. There are many such games that i still regularly play, and i'm not ready to give them up.

Man, what are you doing? Don't do that, nooo! Resist the completionist urges! Like i said earlier, i think you're meant to stumble across the fruits and white-tailed lizards as you travel between the tower and the colossus lairs. It creates a relatively natural progression that scales pretty well with the gradually increasing difficulty. I have a tendency to get really wrapped up in completionist bullshit sometimes, but SotC never did that to me on the PS2, and i think a big part of it was the game never really acknowledging that they were even there. Nothing to tell you how many you had and how many were left, and no completion reward for your trouble. I played through SotC several times, and i always ended up just getting however many i felt i needed to be able to finish the game without much trouble. I feel like this might be another thing where the trophies on the PS3 version are creating a different experience. Even if you aren't specifically going for that collection trophy, there's still that little thing there saying "Hey, you should do this." As for the Colossus fight, a couple things: 1- You can use the sword's light reflection ability to identify weak points on the Colossus. 2- Climbing vertical surfaces is made significantly easier when you realize you can jump from a hold, you can even charge your jumps to fly higher.

I just want proper backwards compatibility out of the next consoles. I personally have six years invested on the 360, i am deep into that ecosystem and i would be happy to be able to bring it with me. Good backwards compatibility would make the Durango/720/X-box Next a day one system for me. (I mean, assuming nothing else about the system makes it a flaming pile of shit.)

I also feel that would be the right thing to do, but i think that we should stick to the two weeks for this first one so we're not taking anybody by surprise.

I thought Vicious Cycle made a pretty damn enjoyable game with Insect Armageddon, but i am so thrilled to see Sandlot back on the series after making a string of games we didn't get in the west. Yyeeeesssssss.

I am most immediately looking forward to Anarchy Reigns, the vaguely-defined maybe-sequel to Mad World that will feature an online multiplayer focus. (So it's another game in the God Hand lineage, but with much deeper fighting mechanics and is the first with MP.) The game was in limbo for a good while, it came out in Japan and was well received by the few who bothered to play it, but Sega was looking pretty wary about giving the game a western release. (Sega not being in great shape, and Anarchy Reigns being a game that doesn't exactly have a lot of hype behind it.) Well, it's coming out here with a rather desperate looking chunk of pre-order content and a 30 dollar price tag. (Seriously though, Bayonetta as a bonus character and two multiplayer modes, one of which is a co-op survival mode.) Two days away!..?

There's a few fights later in the game that i particularly remember as being really motherfuckery, while exploration and travel will gradually eat up more and more time the deeper into the game you go, but i don't think it should ever really exceed two hours. I believe the game is generally cited as being between 15-20 hours long. Edit: About the Castlevania thing, there are a ton of 3D action games that have tried to do giant colossus-style bosses since SotC, but they usually end up feeling very much like gimmicks, very scripted and rigid event sequences that clumsily force the game's existing combat mechanics into an unsuitable context. Then there's Dragon's Dogma, which has a very literal adaptation of the SotC mechanics, but applied as an ancillary tool to use against any larger enemy in the game. It's handled very well, allowing you to inflict specific injuries to hamper the enemy in useful ways and net you unique drops. Unfortunately, it also frequently ends up being something you can totally ignore, since it's a game that gives you so many options in battle. Still, Dragon's Dogma and its larger enemies are probably the best SotC-inspired thing i've seen.

I forgot that Akai Katana came out in 2012 for North America and Europe, I should have had that on my list. I know that literally nobody else cares about that game, but i loved the shit out of it.