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I believe this might be the Kotaku article referenced in the podcast?

I was messing around with GTAIV a bit recently, and it struck me that the game is a remarkably strange time capsule. Poking around the fake internet in that game feels super weird, it has dated in a super weird way.

I may not have loved everything about this game, but i am particularly happy to see that it was successful.

The level in Halo 4 with the the large transport vehicle/tank, you pick up a targeting laser and for the rest of the level can sight air targets for it to shoot down with its cannon. There's a few scripted points where you are forced to take that action, but you can also use it inbetween to shoot down banshees and phantoms during other parts of the level. (It is, admittedly, totally goofy that they require the Chief to laser designate targets that are literally only a couple hundred feet away.) As for the complaint about Legendary and the Promethean Knights being bullet sponges, i don't know. The way 343 has balanced Legendary in Halo 4 seems to tilt the weapon resistances much less significantly, and the result is that even an enemy with as much health as a Promethean Knight will go down much more easily than... say... an Elite in Reach. (Whose shields were so strong that trying to attack them with anything other than explosives or emp was effectively like throwing pebbles at them.) I mean, but once you do bring down their shields, there is a difference in that they won't go down in a single headshot. (Though headshots are still more damaging.) In my own solo legendary playthrough, i've found myself falling back on the shotguns a lot, getting in close and taking out the Knights in two or three shots, something i feel like i would not have gotten away with in past Halo games. I thought the Prometheans were an awesome addition to the roster, but people definitely seem fairly divided on them overall. The Crawlers are just noise, they're just there to be a swarm, and i think that's probably fine. It's the symbiotic relationship between the Watchers and the Knights that i find super interesting, all these little behaviours and abilities that allow them to reinforce eachother.

I laughed at the body pillow, i am amused by that.

So this just leaked: Details on Bungie's Destiny. I like that premise, I like that art. I am instantly excited about this. It seems to suggest that Bungie is sticking to their strengths, in the Halo/Marathon sense of it at least. Some of the concept art could almost be depicting stuff from Halo. (Dudes with customized power armor huddled together under an energy bubble?) Four games, though? One every two years? Downloadable expansions on the off years? I wonder how Bungie will take to working with a meat grinder publisher like Activision, having been afforded pretty generous three year cycles by Microsoft in the past. (Also, the first game shipping on both the 360 and the "720"?)

I need to emphasize that i haven't played All-Stars, so this is me committing the sin of complaining about a game i haven't played, but i've found a lot of the news and details surrounding the game fairly interesting and peculiar. For starters, there are some incredibly bizarre mechanics in that game, like nobody having any health bars. (Health is literally not a mechanic.) The act of dealing damage is simply a means to feed your supers so you can execute on one hit kills, while blocking is purely a means of denying your opponent the ability to grow those supers. It's so weird, but maybe that's the kind of weird that game needs. It's hard to imagine it working better than what Smash does, though. The constant risk and a gradually dwindling possibility of recovery, the feeling of being right on the edge at all times. The combination of the smash attacks and damage percentages is a big part of why Smash is such an enduring and popular design. That All-Stars roster too... It comes across as a little safe. It's all very current, where Smash has frequently succeeded by digging deep into Nintendo's history. Hal knows how to bring the fan service, while All-Stars has ended up looking more like a cross-marketing promotion than a celebration of Sony's history.

The film continuity is: Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. The series continuity is: Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. 2ndGIG, and Ghost in the Shell: S.A.C. Solid State Society

I'm going to fall on the side of being more than a little incredulous at the promises they've been making.

If we're going into more general recommendations, how many of you guys have seen mushishi? The first ten episodes or so where they're just trying to blow through material shared with the first series is incredibly rough and awkward, but the last few arcs of Brotherhood are fucking awesome. It is ABSOLUTELY shonen, but it is just about the best shonen you will find in anime.

Personally, I think the series continuity is much, much better than the film continuity. (So i'm recommending Stand Alone Complex and its sequels.)

They had a problem when the public perception became that it was going to be a linear story-focused game, they weren't being clear at all about what Far Cry 3 was actually going to be.

Yeah, whenever i recommend one of those, it seems natural to recommend the other. They go together quite well, but are very different, all at once.

I'm feeling like randomly making recommendations for two series that i quite like. (Apparently both based on source material from one particular author, as i understand it, but still different stories, to be clear.) Baccano. Durarara. I have no reservations about these recommendations.

You wouldn't really expect it, but stealth is a huge part of the Halo sandbox, especially in the multiplayer. Some of the inventive subterfuge players will use against eachother is really splendid. (The hologram, for example, is all about trying to engineer convincing illusions to distract and fool your opponent, it's definitely the most fun armor mod to use.) As for Nier, It's worth pointing out that the japanese version of Nier actually features a young, attractive male cast as a brother instead of a father. Father Nier was created for the west! Nier is pretty awesome though, and i love that soundtrack. (The songs are sung in invented languages meant to sound like modern languages with an additional thousand years of linguistic drift, to fit with the setting of the game.) Sad that it was Cavia's last game, it was a really interesting action rpg. (With a colossally depressing story.) Edit: (Also, i hope you did at least one NG+ run, the game changes quite dramatically, with further runs beyond that getting different endings and eventually culminating in a pretty flipping great twist.)

I want to live in a world where Segata Sanshiro is a playable character in a kart racer. So is this actually worthwhile? Or is it merely just Sega exploiting nostalgia? You know, and i'm kind of not cool with modern Sega preying on my memories of old Sega, i feel like they're practically two different companies.

Proving once and for all that i am a sponge for shitty fiction. It's explained literally nowhere, it's never even touched on, and it's frustrating when it's such a simple answer. It's Halo's version of the imperial remnant, it's an easy justification, old empires die slowly. The tougher question is why you're still fighting Elites, that one doesn't exactly jive with what came before. (The Elites being forced out of the covenant by the Prophets, pushed into leading a civil war against the Brutes who rose to take their place. The reason for it, of course, is that Elites are more fun to fight than Brutes. So Elites are evil again, but only some, apparently. (You can probably expect to see the Arbiter make a heroic return somewhere in Halo 5.) Unless we assume the Cortana and the Chief read the Halo 3 terminals while running around the Ark, which do talk about the Didact and were events immediately preceding this game, they shouldn't know who the Didact is. It's most easily chalked up to an over eager script that frequently forgets what it hasn't addressed yet. The Waypoint story section is relatively barren and almost completely useless in relation to 4. The Halo 3 terminals would have been mildly informative for where 4 ends up going, but those were really well hidden, extremely opaque, and five years ago. The way 343 dives so hard into everything, i think they overestimated the general familiarity people have with the universe. Bungie's games steadfastly ignored anything beyond the scope of the immediate narrative, and so a lot of people have played a lot of Halo games without actually knowing a whole lot about what's going on. Anyways, yeah, a lot of stuff is only in the books. (Some of which are totally okay!) It seems like Halo 4 was expecting its own terminals to do a lot of the heavy lifting for bringing people up to speed, but having to quit out into the very crashy Waypoint app to view them is kind of bullshit. (Also, the terminal vids are really, really poorly produced. Painfully so.) There's also that giant info dump about half way through the game where they try to compress their remarkably complicated prehistory into a couple minute long monologue, that was pretty terrible. That is a goddamn lot of world building there that needed to be done much more carefully than it was, i can't believe they would just dump that stuff on the player like that. Some crazy revelations about that universe with no fanfare or buildup. (Again, all stuff from the books, but that's not the point.) You know, and it's still the best story in the series. ADDITIONAL THINGS THAT BUGGED ME: Chief is wearing the fancy new Gen 2 Mjolnir with no explanation at all. Ever. (It bizarrely even still has the same specific armor damage Chief's Mark VI had in 3.) The Forward Unto Dawn is also portrayed as much larger and is unrecognizable to its Halo 2/3 counterpart. So yeah, out-of-canon aesthetic retcons is basically all you can chalk it up to. (There's also been like 3 different canon designs for the Mark IV over the course of the series, and New Mombasa changed completely between Halo 2 and Halo 3: ODST.) Requiem also has some seriously confusing geography that isn't really ever adequately explained, i played through the game twice before it made any sense. (It's a big metal sphere surrounding a smaller planetoid with a hollow core.) I don't think they should have made a deliberate plot point out of it or anything, but i feel like there were still probably better ways to convey that information. The implications are way worse when you consider that the only woman in the Chief's life is effectively a clone of his adoptive mother figure. (And, you know, not real.)

God damn, i love Escaflowne, definitely an old favorite.

http://www.crunchyroll.com/space-brothers I am still consistently loving this.

Huh... I wasn't expecting this to be good. Is the game's actual story as obnoxious as the marketing was making it out to be?

I think Dead Rising is another pretty great example. (Its save system, much maligned for having only a few locations to checkpoint at, i feel lent a certain degree of finality to the outcome of your actions.) I've always felt that the difference between enjoying the hell out of Dead Rising and really hating it, is whether or not you could look at the survivor rescue missions as optional. If you can deal with them being kind of fucked from the start, then you can appreciate Dead Rising as this game where you're having to make difficult choices on a tight deadline. I mean, that dude you were trying to bring back to the safe room just got swarmed by zombies, is it worth spending the time trying to save him? The biggest obstacle in Dead Rising is not the horde of zombies or the psycho survivors, it's actually the clock, and making the choice to leave somebody behind because you're on a tight deadline is kind of an awesome one to have to make. (Then once you've learned the campaign, the drops, and have leveled up your character, you get to have the experience of completely nailing things on a new game plus.)

In all this talk about Alpha Protocol's strengths, i feel like somebody needs to be a downer, because there's still this whole side of that game where it's a terrible stealth-action RPG. Bosses in the late game being arbitrarily immune to large swathes of the skill tree, the the bizarrely uncontextualized abilities, the clunky feel of everything. Alpha Protocol could have been an amazing example of less as more, because Obsidian was definitely onto something big with their conversation system and branching narrative. In other words, I think Obsidian should make an adventure game, i'm saying.

I just listened to this week's Giant Bombcast. Is it true that Wii U purchases are still tied into the hardware instead of that new account structure? What the fuck is going on with Nintendo?

This might be one of the last things i would have expected to see somebody bring up in relation to that conversation. I actually quite liked this game, a kind of weirdly sophisticated space combat game with a ton of cool mechanics. It was probably done no favors by being virtually the only game of its kind on the 360 and featuring such a trite and shitty anime narrative. I think that combination just made it a game people never really gave a chance, it was definitely one of those ocassions where most of the reviews written were not even displaying a fundamental understanding of the game's systems. Did anybody else notice the redesign Ashley Williams got in Mass Effect 3? First game. Third game. Evidently, a boob job was got.

... Why was this thread locked earlier today?