Sno

Resident Evil 4 is essentially one long escort mission, and i'd consider that to be one of the best games i've ever played. Or how about Ico?

On from the whole Sim City/X-com/Star Citizen thing, there's also been a weird resurgence of mech games and 90's style PCRPG's. It's definitely weird, everything old is new again. Is it just part of that thing where once you're a decade out from something, it's popular again? That thing where people who grew up in a given decade have grown up enough to have a lot of disposable income to spend on the things they loved as kids. I mean, so we're apparently collectively past the 80's and into reliving the 90's. So Halo, I have things to say about Halo. First off, Halo skyboxes are the best skyboxes. The revised form of the magnum in 4 was actually introduced in Reach, and it's awesome, but the actual successor to the Halo CE pistol has always been the various precision rifles in the game from Halo 2 onward. (By 4, there is the BR, the DMR, the Carbine, and the Lightrifle.) Grunts stopped speaking in goofy english first in Reach. 4's weird little QTE moment in the first level is one of only two in the game, and they're extremely out of place. 4's campaign does have skulls, but they're all unlocked by default, they're accessible in the campaign lobby. (Grunt birthday party is totally still in there.) ODST is awesome, it's a shame that the pricing debacle surrounding it gave it such a poor reputation. As for Reach, i think it is actually one of the more interesting campaigns in the series. Some missions had objectives that could be done out of order, and some even had randomized objectives! Playing the game multiple times would take you through different paths on certain missions. (To be clear, the variances were very small.) The Elites were also never smarter or tougher than they are in Reach. For the conversation about the enemies, i think one of the things Halo is really excellent at is pulling the player deeper into a fight. Primarily, the way the Elites retreat into cover to let their shields recharge, it puts you into this situation of having to either make a risky move by heading deeper into the fight or losing all the ground you've gained. Just the enemies acting with any sense of self-preservation at all, It's one of many small things that makes it feel so different from other shooters. Combined with the constant scavenging of weapons, it's also probably one of the only series of shooters that gets real mileage out of having big, open-ended combat spaces. I mean, elsewhere, the dynamic always seems to be enemies streaming out single-file out into a fight, half-heartedly hunkering behind cover, and there being nothing more to it than that. There are so many shooters that are guilty of going the distance to have big dynamic arenas, but then allowing for all of the battle to occur in the ten feet from the door, with the player planted like a turret behind the most immediate piece of cover. (Which, if they're ever forced out of it, it's probably a bullet sponge enemy making an implacable approach on the player's position.) Also, just the way Halo is so good at emphasizing specific utility and roles for its different weapons and abilities while playing on the higher difficulties and in competitive multiplayer. It's so good. I think Halo's pretty good.

Ikaruga is definitely a game you are trying to "solve", and i do prefer having a little more agency. I find the Cave games to really be some of the most flexible with regards to how you can play. Edit: Thunder Force! Hell yeah! Thunder Force III is a big favorite of mine. My first shoot em up ever was Not a particularly interesting or at all very good game, but that music is pretty sweet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd95jQ57_eM Ikaruga's GC version was probably the first shooter i played that could be considered bullet hell, and even though it's not an insane bullet hell game in the Cave sense of it, it's probably actually way more difficult than many of Cave's games. The mental gymnastics it takes to wrap your brain around its polarity mechanic and its combo scoring system is sheer, cold, unfeeling madness. Edit: Actually, hold on a sec, i played Mars Matrix even before that. That's another great game, but i definitely played that before i had any grasp of how to deal with games like that.

Right, right. Cave's iOS ports, which i always feel compelled to point out as being very watered down, but that doesn't really matter if you're just getting into things. They're an affordable, accessible entry point for the genre.

I have had this exact same response to the Halo 4 sprint. Sprinting into a slide just feels so right, and i miss it when games with a sprint don't have it. I don't think it would even contribute anything meaningful to Halo 4 other than making me feel like a badass.

I wouldn't worry about Deathsmiles 2, it is by all accounts a bit junk. The first game is quite an accomplished and accessible take on bullet hell though. Raiden Fighters Aces is an excellent collection with a ton of great features. (There's also Raiden IV, which is quite good, but smaller in scope. Fighters is a spin-off of the main Raiden series.) Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun are both available on XBLA and are both classics of the genre. (Ikaruga's XBLA version has some dumb omissions and niggling flaws, however.) I'll throw out a recommendation for G.Rev's very underappreciated XBLA-release, Strania. I'll also vouch for Trouble Witches Neo as a seriously dumb, but pretty competent and fun game. Akai Katana though, holy shit, what a great game. I think those are the main ones i'd recommend, there's definitely a ton of other ones available. (Never play Otomedius, just don't.) ...Have i actually talked about R-Type on these forums before? That's funny, i don't even remember that. Yeah, i think R-Type is terrible. If you're into R-Type though, the XBLA remake is pretty classy. These are also all 360 games, the 360 is kind of the de facto platform for 2d shooters, including a ton more that simply never leave Japan. (The 360 being such the dominant platform for this genre is why Under Defeat HD only being released on the PS3 in North America is weird.) Finally, of things available in the west, there's some big Europe-only releases through Rising Star Games, like Dodonpachi Resurrection. (Dodonpachi being Cave's premier series, and Cave being kind of the biggest name in this admittedly very small scene.) Were either of the Mushihimesama games released in Europe?

Man, SCV had a really amazing MP suite, and great netcode too. I couldn't stand to stick with it though, the community around it was unbelievably toxic and the solo content was uncharacteristically sparse. It was a great soft reboot of the series' mechanics though, i would have liked to have had a reason to keep playing it, i've always been a big fan of that series.

Hasn't Kojima pretty much disowned Twin Snakes? I don't think that'd ever be re-released. (Especially with the Silicon Knights connection.)

I played through it a couple times out of curiosity when it came out and I recall there being 2 or 3 significantly different possible arcs through the game, but with a lot of the sub plots kind of just crashing into unresolved dead ends, pretty clearly having been unfinished in development.

Well there's kind of two things being talked about here, there's the 2d shooters, and there's Senko no Ronde. The latter is still sort of born out of the bullet hell tradition of japanese 2d shooters, but is actually more of a mech fighting game in the style of Sega's incredibly wonderful Virtual On series. (That is an entire rabbit hole unto itself.) I really dig Akai Katana though, so let me pimp Akai Katana. The mechanics here are unusually layered for a 2d shooter, and it's been a while since i played, but... I think the gist of it was that you were using a spread shot to charge up a power attack that could be used to generate swords, and when you had enough swords, you could launch a larger power shot that earned you gold bonus points. Uh... More or less. (You also have a focus shot that also generates swords, but in a dramatically smaller amount than the more complicated path, but it was still important because it does more damage and allows more precise movement.) I feel like i'm forgetting a lot, and yes, it's insane. (SWORDS!) Edit: Wait, no! Your focus shot charged up a power mode and your focus shot inside of that mode gave you additional swords. There's also a complicated health bar, bombs, and enemy drops decaying the longer they're on the screen. Shit, that game had a lot going on. (The power-up mode also caused suicide bullets to spawn out of the enemies, which could be fed off of with the sword attack for even more points.) I had some reasonably respectable finishes on the Akai Katana leaderboards, i think. Definitely nothing like this embedded video though, nowhere near it. There were also other gameplay modes in there that played like completely different games, just wildly different mechanics.

My biggest issue with Dishonored is the game constantly telling you not to kill anybody when many of the abilities and tools are explicitly about murdering a ton of dudes. It didn't feel like it was a game designed around alternate styles of playthroughs, it felt like a game that wanted me to play like it was Thief while giving me a Deus Ex-style sandbox. So... You know... I guess i'd like to see the abilities be more broadly applicable, i guess. Or see the game generally be more explicitly about different character paths. Instead of the game just telling you to avoid doing all of these awesome things you can do.

The game seems very Dark Souls/Demon's Souls influenced, down to having anonymous internet messages populating the environments as helpful/trolling notes scrawled across walls.

YES. That game is completely wonderful. It made me so sad to see western reviews shit all over it when Ubisoft brought it over, we will likely never see its sequel get an international release because of that.

I always had the impression that a lot of the tonal peculiarities of the first game were a product of the insanely tight deadlines and resources that game was developed under. (Well, and Bungie being at a time when it was still just its core team.) I also can't say i ever even saw the sequels as being that dramatic of a departure from that original tone. Chief still got all of his wry one-liners, Johnson was still a badass, the games were still vibrantly colorful, the grunts were still wacky. (I also think ODST most feels like the original in that it's a small and focused adventure with exaggerated characters.) 4 is definitely going for a much more serious tone, but i'd say Reach was actually the big point of departure. So i've been thinking about this stuff a bit. (Just a bit.) People love the Elites, but not so much the Brutes and definitely not the Flood. (Personally, i don't have any problem with the latter two, but the Elites are definitely the most fun to fight.) So... I think the trick is that the Elites will retreat into cover to let their shields recharge, while the Brutes and the Flood tend to just charge at you mindlessly. The Elites are pulling you into the battle instead of pushing you back, right? You're being tugged into dangerous close-quarters battles where you're faced with risky choices, instead of just doing your best to hang back and keep your distance. With that dyanmic in mind, i think the Promethean enemies work really, really well. The tools 343 has given these new enemies are basically all about letting them retreat and regroup, and fighting with them is a terrible grind if you aren't willing to take risks. I think they're awesome, though I do not think the knights should be able to teleport multiple times in rapid succession, that seems pretty bullshit when it happens. Additionally, whenever one of them has the binary rifle, things aren't quite so nice. (The binary rifle being a sniper rifle that does not require a headshot, anywhere on the body is an instant kill.) Knights and Crawlers equipped with it display a small circular holographic sighting thing on their character model, but it's not as obvious as the gigantic red laser sight the binary gives off in the MP. Deaths caused by the binary rifle in the campaign and in Spartan Ops often come off as completely untelegraphed. I dig the Prometheans though, i feel they're a successful addition. (I think their designs are pretty cool too! The disintegration effect on the knights is also a great visual, and so is the way the watchers and crawlers burst into debris.) As for the Forerunner guns, i was initially extremely disappointed to see that they were not more inventive, and that they particularly adhere quite closely to the UNSC weapon archetypes. (Rather than the more dynamic covenant and brute catagories of weapons.) The more i think about it though, the more i like them. The monstrously overpowered binary rifle, in particular, creates some incredibly fun dynamics in the competitive modes. Scoping in with it casts a hugely obvious laser sight across the map that people fear and respect. You can effectively paralyze an opponent, cause them to be completely afraid to make a move. The boltshot and the light rifle also create some pretty interesting dynamics. Even so, Halo 4 has ended up with a ton of weapons fulfilling extremely similar roles. With only one of the brute's weapons left in the game, and some of the more distinctive covenant weapons being awol, it suggests that 343 was playing it quite safe with weapon balance. (The important oddballs are there, of course. The plasma pistol and the sword are essential weapons, and fans would probably riot if the needler was omitted.) I've also actually just realized that Halo 4 has culled back the roster of vehicles to quite a small selection, just the standard ones that have always worked very well. (Plus the Mantis.) Further multiplayer-related thoughts - I think the DMR is overpowered. It excels in every role and at all ranges, the other precision rifles tend to be more specialized. I've definitely had matches where i've seen more than 80% of the other players using it. The DMR even has a beefy anti-armor effect, concentrated group fire against vehicles is very effective. People are sleeping on the automatic rifles, they're awesome in this game. (In close quarters fights, they'll always beat the precision rifles. 4 has the best plasma rifle since CE, and the AR is stronger than ever.) Have a precision loadout and an automatic loadout and choose between them based on the gameplay type and the map. For example: Dominion matches tend to be very close quarters despite occuring on very large maps, but if you're playing anything on Ragnarok, always choose a precision rifle loadout. (Haven is a tricky one. Despite being the smallest map in the game, it tends to favor precision rifles with all of its long hallways.) The thruster pack is useless, its potential advantages are such edge cases that they're not convincing arguments. The auto sentry also seems underpowered, and i'm not sure about the hardlight shield either. (Its recovery is too slow to be valuable defending against melee and other close-range attacks, and while it can deflect explosives, it doesn't protect against splash damage. The best argument in its favor is defense against long-range precision weapons.) Complex currently has a geometry bug that is making it hugely exploitable in Infection and Oddball matches. It should be easy for 343 to use kill volumes to fix this, they just haven't yet. Waypoint's stat tracking isn't nearly as comprehensive as Bungie.net's was, and a lot of the peripheral features like fileshare aren't working yet. Specializations seem crazy and rather game-changing, it's a third group of perks that start unlocking at rank fifty. Very few people have any of them thus far, it's hard to tell how they'll affect things. I think the Halo community doesn't deserve a lot of the flak it's been getting, i can count on one hand the amount of actual griefing i've run into while playing 4. The resurgence of "X-box Live is a cesspool" nonsense online following the release of Halo 4 is, i feel, unwarranted. Also, god dammit, i want a team doubles playlist. Grifball too, it's insane to not have that up yet when their evolved Grifball mode was part of the marketing push.

Under Defeat HD is a remake of a G.Rev-developed 2d scrolling shooter from the Dreamcast days, and Rising Star Games will be releasing it on both PS3 and 360 in Europe, but only on PS3 in North America. It's the kind of thing that myself and literally dozens of other people would care about and be bothered by. (So virtually nobody, i'm saying.) Additional explanation: G.Rev is a noted developer of such games with a long history including collaborations with Treasure of Ikaruga and Radiant Silvergun fame. Rising Star Games is a very small publisher that has frequently brought a lot of these ultra-niche games to Europe and recently opened a North American branch as well. (Their first release was Cave's Akai Katana, which is, again, an incredible game.) Shoot em ups. The topic is shoot em ups.

They have a North American branch too now, they brought out Akai Katana here. (Which is an incredible game, easily the best 2d shooter i've played this entire console generation.) For whatever reason, unless i've been completely misinformed, they've elected to only release the PS3 version of Under Defeat HD in North America.

The 360 version of that is apparently not being released in NA, i'm kind of bummed out about that.

I am not, but... i guess i've never actually bought any of the Nintendo consoles at launch, excepting handhelds. Bayonetta 2 might be a system seller for me when that shows up, but nothing in the launch line-up looks particularly interesting, Zombi U aside. I'll probably get a Wii U sooner or later, there will inevitably be those first/second-party Nintendo exclusives that i cannot will myself to skip out on. I anticipate a 3DS-like arc for the Wii U, a rough launch window with a lot of doom-saying, and gradually building momentum.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-zombiu/17-6810/ This looks pretty damn great, i think.

What are you talking about? You can totally co-op the campaign, i played through the entire game with friends. It was great, it's a good campaign. If you mean the free episodic co-op campaign, Spartan Ops, that's a completely different thing, and is more the thing Halo 4 is doing in lieu of Firefight. (For which it is a currently disappointing replacement. Things may improve though, patches have been promised and only two episodes have even been released so far.) About the control scheme conversation, one of the things that has always driven me crazy about console shooters is having jump mapped to A, which prevents you from being able to aim while jumping. Coming from a Quake background, i want to never not be jumping. Bumper jumper in Halo was a great option for a while, but since Reach, it's not doing what i want it to do. (Bumper jumper takes armor abilities off the top buttons, which you also really, really need up there.) So now i'm looking at increasingly insane solutions, like high-end competitive game pads, when really all i want to do is to be able to remap the controls to my personal preferences.

I still like Marty's music more, though. Especially that ODST score, that stuff is amazing. Here's also the beautiful track from Reach, essentially Bungie saying their goodbyes to the franchise.Also, , because why not?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DCrL76vGpNA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oz5imQdccRQ I think the Halo 4 OST is pretty damn good. (Bonus grandeur.)

The thought of being able to have a download version of Animal Crossing sitting on my 3DS just always ready to go is incredibly enticing.

I've read a lot that speaks of Ubisoft priding themselves in having the major assassination targets be accurate to the time and location of death. (If not the cause and circumstances.) The general layouts of the cities are also allegedly quite authentic, albeit scaled, but with major landmarks accurately represented. It all gives the impression that there are some big history buffs working on that series. It definitely puts that series into a weird position though, with how much it muddies everything in its sci-fi conspiracy. Can you really say you've learned anything from a game that blurs the line so much between fiction and real history?