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I feel that one every two weeks would be completely reasonable and avoid dragging it out, but I honestly have no damn idea. I thought we had settled on a reasonable timeline for this one too and everybody still bailed on it.

You really want to drag this out over sixteen months?

Alright, let me see if i have my facts straight. There are actually three main Darkstalkers games, with multiple weird revisions of the last one. This new compilation will be the second and third game, as i understand it. As for that PSP game, it wasn't exactly a compilation, it was more of a mash-up. It was an updated port of an earlier Japan-only Dreamcast game that combined all of the characters from the different games and let you choose between their game-specific movesets. (I believe these releases are generally overlooked for numerous balancing issues.) There was also already a compilation of all of the main releases, i think only in japan though, and this new one will be bringing online play and a bunch of other new features to the games. (Rather, only to the games that it's updating, since they're skipping the first one and i guess the revisions of the third one.) Beyond that, Yoshinori Ono, the lead on SF4, has also been quite openly pestering Capcom for years to give him the greenlight on a new Darkstalkers game, and it will probably come down to how well this new re-release does. (Honestly, it's probably not going to happen.)

Hey I stayed true, it just took me a year. It bums me out that this whole thing stopped just short of the really meaty, crazy stuff in the game. We didn't even get to the notorious "sex" scene, did we? I mean, and there are so many interesting, weird ways to read into the events conveyed by the last few stages of the game. The revelations can be taken to mean so many different things, it was a large part of why i thought Killer 7 would be great for something like this. I would definitely be interested in doing SotC, i'd love to play through it again. I don't have a PS3 or the HD update though. (I kept telling myself that i would buy a PS3 for Last Guardian...)

Oh god, do i ever want another Darkstalkers game. That compilation Capcom is putting together seems nice, at least. It was delayed to add in a bunch of functionality fans were asking for, and it's being handled by the guys who did the well-received SFIII:3rd Strike update.

As a big fan of both Guillermo Del Toro and giant robot animes, this is probably the most excited i have been for a movie in a long, long time. The only things I see there to sour me on it are the presence of the Inception bwong in yet another trailer, and the requisite inspiring speech.

Guillermo Del Toro's new movie just got a trailer.

I just feel like, at its core, it's a game about exploration. More specifically, it's that balanced combination of the lonely atmosphere, the environmental puzzle solving, and the action mechanics. I've always kind of looked at Metroid as what Zelda would be without an overworld, and i think it's completely fitting that Metroid Prime borrowed a lot of traits from the post-Ocarina games. I'm very much against the growing homogeneity of first-person games, and i loved that Metroid Prime was willing to approach the perspective from a completely different angle. To get back on point, to me Metroid is about exploring a threatening, lonely, and well-realized place and slowly piecing it together, gradually sliding the pieces of the puzzle into place. I think Retro's Prime games do a better job of presenting that experience than Intelligent Systems' GBA games did, and certainly a better job than Team Ninja's Other M did.

The original Metroid is not a game that has aged very well, don't worry about it. As for Metroid 2, i happen to really like Metroid 2, but it's a commonly divisive game.

This game cracks me up, it's got dragons and knights and shit, and is pretty much the most metal shoot em` up ever. . .

Any ideas for what? Episodic things or things otherwise easily broken up into digestable chunks would be ideal.

This thread is my greatest failure. Yeah, it was originally meant to be part of Suda's Silver Case series. (The only game in that series that has been released in North America is a disastrous DS remake of Flower, Sun, and Rain.) With that point of reference, I can pretty much assure that the story probably would have been just as confusing and disjointed had Killer 7 been released in its original, intended form.

Heh, it always made me crazy that you just see Kraid's feet dangling in the background on the North American box art. I have personally felt that, since the revival of the series, the Prime games have been leagues better than the games developed in Japan. Personally speaking, i was very disappointed with Fusion and was left totally bewildered by Other M. I will say that i think Zero Mission was pretty great, but even that has issues. Fusion is an extremely linear Metroid game and is bogged down in interminably slow moving exposition, and Other M just magnifies that to ridiculous degrees, to which you can also add Other M's completely baffling undercurrent of sexism. Even in Zero Mission, the most dramatic addition it makes to the original game is adding an extremely linear sequence at the end of the game. (That is admittedly very creative and cool, it's a sequence that feels like it might have informed the design for a number of other 2d games.) Yeah, but i guess what i'm saying is that if we were to get another 2D Metroid, i'm not sure it would reflect what people love about Metroid. (Unless what you love about Metroid is Fusion, i guess.)

I'm really lookin forward to Last Light, i'm just hoping THQ doesn't bite the dust before it comes out.

Are you not picking up on the cues the game gives you? If an enemy is approaching from beyond the camera perspective, Alan glances over at it. Keep an eye on him, he's basically your monster radar. (I can't remember if he did that in the original game, I don't think he did.) Like, i agree, American Nightmare is kind of a mess, but i didn't find it hard.

If you really like Dawn of Sorrow, you might want to contemplate trying to track down Aria of Sorrow, which Dawn sequelizes. (The GBA games are all fairly well liked as well, though Aria is generally regarded as the best. The other two are Circle of the Moon and Harmony of Dissonance.) You won't be disappointed with Portrait of Ruin though, you definitely can't go wrong with it. Order of Ecclesia, the third DS game, is a bit of a hybrid between "classicvania" and "metroidvania". (Essentially the 2D series before and after SOTN.) It has the progression systems of the latter, but the level design and difficulty of the former. It's a weird game, and it's seriously unforgiving, but it can be pretty cool. Also, if you have a group you can rely on to play with, Castlevania: Harmony of Despair can be pretty fun. (This is the "HD" game on XBLA/PSN that is kind of a weird party-based time-attack loot-gathering game.) You should also definitely check out Super Metroid. I would argue until i am out of breath that Super Metroid is one of the best games ever made. (If you go down that hole, try to check out Zero Mission too, a remake of the original Metroid that comprehensively reinvisions it.) Regarding the upcoming 3DS Castlevania, Konami seems to have buried Koji Igarashi, the lead on most of the Castlevania series since SOTN. It looks like the rebooted MercurySteam series will be what Castlevania is from here on out. (All that Lords of Shadow stuff, which to be fair, people seem to like.)

My hope is that the specifics of the mechanics would be better explained while leaving the world mysterious and confusing. (IE: Not trying to design out the aspect of people accidentally throwing themselves at end game content because they don't know better, making it a more guided experience would be the worst possible thing for this game.) I mean, but i'm sure we all saw people invest points into intelligence thinking that it would affect their pyromancy. Or even just how ambiguous all of the multiplayer components are, the co-op summon stone is even a missable item, isn't it? Stuff like that only makes for a shallower pool of players using those systems to interact with eachother.

Have any of you guys gotten a good portion of the way through a game and lost your saves? Did you just stop playing, or start over? It's been on my mind because i've been playing through the excellent Virtue's Last Reward on the 3DS and hit a really nasty save bug that cost me close to eighteen hours of progress, i had to completely erase my save and start over from scratch. I think it's probably one of the first times i've ever lost progress like this. I was invested enough in the story to start over, and i'm confident that i now know how to avoid the bug. So i have my 3DS sitting a little to my left and i just have it auto-scrolling through the dialogue scenes, ocassionally taking over to make choices or puzzle things out, but mostly waiting things out until i'm back to where i was before. (It's a visual novel, so it's mostly story.) If nothing else, it completely killed the momentum. This is kind of a problem distinct to Video games, isn't it?

I get the impression that there are a lot of people in this thread who haven't played Halo 4 and are assuming that the story is much worse than it actually is.

I feel like there is a vast difference between trying to appeal to a broader audience and trying to find acceptance in a broader audience. It will be the difference between whether they compromised their game for that potential audience, or if they're simply trying to get that audience to give their game a chance. I think you guys are forgetting what a lot of the marketing for the first BioShock looked like, it was pretty terrible and it certainly didn't reflect how that game turned out. It completely emphasized the guns and the action, it was the "genetically enhanced first-person shooter".

Some of the scarce details floating around: Apparently they're going back to a dedicated server architecture for Dark Souls 2, akin to Demon's Souls, instead of the unreliable P2P infrastructure of Dark Souls. People have also been going around saying that it's set in a new world, but the direct quote from From doesn't exactly reflect that. There's a new lead on the game, the creator of the first two games will stepping aside to a more supervisory role. They're also promising more innovative multiplayer twists, whatever that will entail.

I found it strange that Eve Online was on that list. I'm not sure that Eve Online itself is all that interesting, but rather it's the ways that it facilitates community interactions, and the interesting community it has engendered because of that. How would that be represented in a museum context? I was also personally highly critical of the list of games they announced, but i think i've been flipped around by Chris's point about the "nerd canon" already being extremely well represented by so many other institutions, and the importance of having these different perspectives.

999 has very much an anime aesthetic, but maybe not in the blander sense you're probably thinking of. (I mean, Hotel Dusk is also very much drawn in an anime style, but it's not "anime".) Still, if that's the deal breaker for you, that's a shame. VLR shares a similar style, but renders its characters as 3D models.

The trick about the lock-on is knowing when you shouldn't be using it. Activating it so you can orient your shield towards an enemy to block a big attack, and then quickly disabling it so you can, for example, attack a boss's leg instead of swinging wildly at a lock-on point somewhere around their out-of-reach crotch. As for the hidden checkpoints and secrets, that's part of why it's important to play online so you're seeing your game be populated by player messages, blood stains, and player ghosts. It's a cool vibe, seeing the results of so many players struggling against the game. Its also important, because you can essentially learn from their mistakes and otherwise be pointed in the right directions. (You are playing online, right?) I mean, and you can also do co-op summons for those tough areas/bosses. I don't know which version you're on, but i suppose this far out from the game's release, it might be hard to find summons. You also need to be human to summon people, but being human also opens you up to the various forms of invasions, which are also a great thing to experience.

0MwjoFNYu_w First glimpse of the game. Doesn't reveal much, but what they show looks nice. However, some of the other details coming out are incredibly frustrating to me. There's talk of loadout and progression systems in the MP, which is absolutely not the direction Halo should go in. With every other shooter following in CoD's footsteps, the way Halo kind of set itself apart was adamantly refusing to simply fall in line with all of that. It kind of ended up being where you went if what mattered to you was balanced and level fields of play dictated only by personal skill. It will be incredibly upsetting if 343's first game with the series eschews all of this. Rrrr! Fan rage!