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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6xTT9DSNd0 And these, just because.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xYZi_-vfPg4 I just called it one of my favorite games of the year, so here's the hilarious J-Rock theme you hear every time you start up Dragon's Dogma.

Thread resurrection! 999 and VLR both have excellent, excellent music. If you click through those embeds, i'd recommend doing your best to ignore the spoiler filled comments. I'll probably post some from VLR too whenever i get around to going through the rest of that game.

At the time, it had seemed like ACV was just kind of the hanger-on in the deal to get Dark Souls publishing rights. Namco's marketing push for ACV amounted to poorly translating a couple of From's tutorial videos, opening up a facebook page with absolutely no meaningful information about an incredibly complex game, and asking a tiny fansite to host "official" forums. You know, and then basically completely dumping support for it once it became clear the west wasn't really getting behind it. It can't be completely blamed on Namco though, that game did in all honesty launch with big problems. (Which i understand to finally be fixed on the western version.) It's a shame though, i thought it was a really cool game with a ton of promise. So yeah, definitely my biggest disappointment of the year.

IN ORDER! 1. X-com: Enemy Unknown I think it's a pretty fantastic triumph. Firaxis created a game that is mechanically quite distinct from the original series, but completely nails the feel of the barely contained chaos and the emergent personal narrative. Also, seeing it go on to be relatively successfull makes me retroactively angrier about Syndicate having been re-imagined as a shooter. Arrgh, EA! 2. Xenoblade I will emphasize that if you own a Wii and hold any appreciation for RPG's, you should check this one out. When so many JRPG's feel so stuck in the past, it was incredibly refreshing to play one that is both cleverly modern and briskly paced. (Which does not mean that it's short, I personally spent around 170 hours on the game.) I cannot recommend Xenoblade enough, I loved this game. 3. Borderlands 2 It's more of that thing you like and it's still pretty good, probably even a fair bit better. It really comes down to whether you burnt out on the first game or not. 4. Halo 4 343 didn't fuck it up and they did try some new things. Story is actually pretty decent, if hard to follow for those not already immersed in Halo. I'm deep into the MP right now and mostly loving it, but Spartan Ops is a disappointment and there are a number of issues that 343 needs to address. If 343 gets on that shit, this bumps BL2 out of its spot. 5. Dragon's Dogma People were really down on this game before it came out, but the whole dynamic of the learning AI pawns and the incredibly solid combat system make for a thoroughly entertaining action RPG. Don't expect a story, don't even expect a world, it's an action RPG and it does that very well. Honorable mentions for Persona 4 Arena, the 360 version of The Witcher 2, and Dishonored. (Just barely though, i admire that game more than i like it.) Edit: You know what? I'm going to throw Transformers: Fall of Cybertron in here too. I won't pretend like I can make a convincing defense for it, but I enjoyed the hell out of that game. Now I'm realizing that i've constructed a very boring list. How about some of the 3DS games i've played this year? I think there were some real standouts, like Resident Evil: Revelations, Kid Icarus: Uprising, Code of Princess, and Virtue's Last Reward. I really liked those, i feel like the 3DS really came into its own this year. Big games and weird small stuff alike. Biggest disappointment? Armored Core V, a game that i actually really like and really appreciate on just about every level except for the one where the matchmaking metagame was completely broken at launch. (Leading to confused and wildly inaccurate reviews, a dead-on-arrival community, and a lingering fanbase harassing Namco for months to get updates that had been deployed almost immediately to the From Software-maintained Japanese version.) It's apparently fixed for the west now, but it's too late, they lost everybody but the most hardcore.

This is a tough question to answer, but i think it's a pretty fair one to ask. I'm in the unfortunate position of having almost anything i say run the risk of making it sound like i think Id should just go back to doing the thing they've always done. I don't think that, and i had high hopes for Rage, i really wanted to see Id succeed outside of their comfort zone. I unfortunately just don't think Rage is very good, and it was a pretty painful realization as a huge fan of those guys since the Commander Keen days. Rage was trying to do a lot of new things, but in pursuit of those things, they kind of lost what Id was so good at. It feels like a game from a completely different studio. (Rumors have been that they staffed up so much for Rage that it effectively now is a different studio.) I think they've previously always been extremely good at making games with a real purity of purpose. Straightforward, surprisingly elegant, and highly demanding games. There's a real immediate tangibility to their stuff, i think. On the other hand, Rage has all these mounting little elements that really detract from that feel, like the iron sight aiming and the invisible walls that are absolutely everywhere. If you go running and try to jump over something and you are stopped mid air because of something you could not have possibly known was there, that sucks, and it's all over that game. All these clunky little things slowing it down and making it feel like less of an Id game. I mean, and it's easy too, it's really easy. I'd feel really bad if i loaded up that game and saw that i played through it on normal, but i'm certain that i bumped it as high as i could and still pretty much coasted through. I mean, and i have a real problem with games that give you a big tool box and no reason to use it. I kept waiting for situations where i should start throwing out my crafted robot buddies, but they never really came. I ended up just chewing through the disposable items and the special ammo types simply to mix things up. Everything worked reasonably well against almost everything, and it was just kind of dull. I mean, for me, it's more a case of what they lost there than what they added. There was this very specific feel of game that only really Id delivers, and Rage isn't that. It's a game that just kind of meanders around, and even when the game finally starts ramping up and doing some really interesting things, it ends immediately. (I also thought the vehicle races, while incredibly beautiful, amounted to a really shitty and unfair kart racer. Like "Mario Kart at its worst" levels of bullshit. The way the AI telepathically knows where subsequent checkpoints would spawn on those randomized rally things is utter dogshit.) Still, does it sound like i'm just whinning because Id didn't stick to their strengths and tried something new? I don't think i have a clear perspective on that. I think a lot of the more peripheral pieces they tried to bring to it were interesting, promising things. The weapons feel cool, that crafting system is really awesome, and the open-world vehicle stuff is also pretty great aside from being a touch too limited in scale. I think Rage just really fails on the core feel of the game, for me. I mean, Doom 3 by comparison feels like a really purpose driven game. You use the pistol on the zombies so you have ammo left over for tougher enemies, the balance works and does so in favor of an earnestly tough damn game. (Ammo and health are very scarce.) Carmack has also spoken about how the flashlight was a product of him not wanting to have to render both the flashlight and the muzzle flashes at the same time, but the result is a really effective mechanic. You have to make that conscious choice to put yourself into a compromised situation so that you can defend yourself in battles lit only by ambient lights, fireballs, and muzzle flashes. Accident or not, it makes for an incredibly tense game. There are also just so many little incidental animations used to "monster closet" enemies into battles, and those crazy computer displays that you just stand in front of and manipulate using mouse look like a mouse cursor. Those displays are something that still impress the hell out of me, there are no giant red buttons to be seen in that game. Doom 3 is an atmospheric skin on top of a pretty faithful update of Doom. They kept that core intact, but plastered so much else on top of it, and lost very little in the process. I think it works very well, it's a game i played through many times. Still, I've always felt like one of the few people on that side of the argument, there was so much backlash at Doom 3 for so long. (If you have any serious problems with games that are extremely dark, or having groups of enemies dumped in on you with very little notice, it's probably not for you.) As for Rage, I feel like Rage kind of lost track of the things Id is good at. I mean, and now hearing some of the things going down with the BFG remake of Doom 3, it's hard not to be worried about what the future holds for Id. - Oh god, this post ended up being way, way, way longer than i meant for it to be.

Story is going around that Origin has been hacked. EA is denying it right now, but there are a lot of people coming out and saying they've been affected. Might be time to change your passwords just to be safe, if you have an Origin account. I'm sure it's obvious to everybody by now, but remember good password practices. Don't use the same password twice, don't share security questions between services, and use strong multiple-word passwords.

Your assumption is incorrect though, it's definitely the intended effect. When sequels to that game were made on much more powerful hardware, that aesthetic was retained. The game is deliberately evoking the aesthetic of primitive polygonal VR games, the mechs are even wearing VR goggles! (They're even powered by game consoles on their back!)

On the topic of Rage, I found the game extremely easy and thought that the combat was very narrow and constrained. (So many invisible walls!) It gives you a sandbox-style set of toys that came across as totally inconsequential, you're never given the room or any reason to really play around with them. Also, there was that abrupt non-ending that happens immdiately after they introduce some of the more interesting enemies in the game. Rage was not bad, it was just kind of disappointing and boring. The gameplay stuff and all of the technical shit on top of it has made me worried about what kind of company Id has become. (All the shit surrounding BFG isn't helping matters.) Also, personally, i think Doom 3 was incredible and misunderstood, i love that game.

I feel that games striving for realism tend to date much more quickly than games that are significantly stylized. Wind Waker holds up much, much better than Twilight Princess, i feel. Or, to bring it back around, i would argue this is part of the reason that ZoE2 is such a dramatically better looking game than the first one. I have an easier time buying into a stylized world than one that strives for realism, because the former can be designed around the limitations without descending into the uncanny valley. (Or otherwise showing their mistakes and shortcomings, because you know what the real world is supposed to look like.) You keep bringing up arms clipping through things like that doesn't happen in games that are realistically rendered, but it honestly happens in every game to some extent, and i find it way more jarring when realism is attempting to be maintained..

Sure, it's definitely not the same aesthetic as ZoE. VO is one of those super clean looking polygonal arcade games out of the late 90's. Those detailed mechs are designed around that low polygon count and make it work and are loaded with intricate animations and cool visuals. (Their armor breaks off as an associated defensive gauge decreases.) Or those totally distinctive special effects, those crazy smoothly-animated polygonal explosions that act to give you incredibly precise feedback about damage ranges. Or the fact that it all runs at an incredibly consistent and fast framerate. I think VO:OT still looks incredibly stylish, and i think a lot of the Sega games from that era hold up amazingly well. (Jet Set Radio was one of the first cell-shaded games i can remember, and it still holds up. I don't even like Jet Set Radio, but it's an incredible looking game.) You know, but if you're going to be dismissive about it, then it's not an argument worth having. I can live with that, disagreements are allowed. (Definitely not passive agression, heh.)

Bungie does have a great fondness for peculiarly named things.

Oh, oh, i see now. I missed that. 30th of November. That sucks.

I've been mulling over what my personal games of the year might be and i'll probably write up a longer post sometime later, but i think X-com is probably the one game that stood out more than anything else. That game is a goddamned triumph, and the sort of thing people need to champion.

Second episode of Spartan Ops went live and it's almost entirely the exact same maps as the first episode, just in a different order. Uh, so yeah... If that's going to be what this is, they need to get that campaign scoring stuff patched in quick, and while they're at it they should get rid of the infinite lives and add support for the skulls. I mean, there's some fun enemy composition in there, just huge hordes on a scale you never see anywhere in the main campaign. (They come across as pretty messy scenarios, which is expected.) I mean, but if that's going to be what it ends up being about, the above things are very important and need to be there.

I had a slight twitch reading those comments too, but didn't feel like having the argument. Hang on, what? This HD remake? The one that is being discussed and played right now?

They've been doing the motion comic thing since Odious Tea, which had them very well contextualized in the narrative. It was really, really cleverly done. Anniversary did it again, without the context, but they were still handled quite well. In 4, they're just so incredibly ugly, and they feel so forced, it's just so much mythology to burn through. Personally, i would have dug seeing some Halo 3-style terminals and an updating codex, i think that would have better served the amount of information and history they're trying to convey.

I thought that funny too, listening to the podcast.

I feel like the open-world in RDR did for that game what the open-world did for SotC. Sometimes a big empty space is exactly what you need. Also, Skyrim and Oblivion are absolutely massive compared to RDR. I've talked to other people before who felt like Skyrim was smaller than it actually was. I think it has something to do with the immediacy of the fast travel and how dense the game is, you never go long without finding something new, there's no trek.

The game has some really wonky scale on display in a few spots where it's trying to establish the concept of requiem, it makes requiem seem tiny. (Relatively speaking, of course. It's supposed to be a planet-sized dyson sphere-like construct, but it comes off seeming smaller than a Halo.) The artificial sky in the "daylight" levels is a pretty cool effect though. (Looking up and seeing the other interior surfaces of Requiem, i guess.) Edit: Playing through again on Legendary, i feel like i might have been massively misunderstanding the geography of Requiem, the game isn't really ever clear about any of it. 343 specifically talked about "re-centering" the difficulty, and not blanketly making everything more difficult. I found heroic a bit easier than i was used to it being, and i'm not entirely sure about legendary yet, but i feel like i'm getting away with things that simply would not have flown in Reach. It seems like they have a different approach to balance, too. Enemies are constantly throwing grenades and dodging, but their weapon resistances don't seem to be tilted as much as they would be in one of the Bungie games. As a result, i feel like i'm hanging back more with the precision rifles, instead of making risky moves with a plasma pistol to try and drop an Elite's shields. Edit: Again on Legendary, i'm noticing that this game doesn't do any smart checkpointing like the Bungie games did, It won't pop in an extra checkpoint during a lull in a battle. The game repeatedly jumps the gun on trying to introduce proper names for things and ends up implying familiarity where there is none. I've seen some people get angry about the fact that Chief and Cortana seem to know more than the player about what is going on regarding the Didact, and... I mean, I know that universe pretty well, and Chief and Cortana do not know who the Didact is. (Unless we are to believe that Chief and Cortana actually wandered around Halo 3 reading all those Forerunner terminals, which do talk about the Didact.) Further confusing things is that there are all these (really, really ugly) motion comic things that just burn through the insanely convoluted Forerunner history that has been built up in the novels. It's an important gesture the game makes, but you first have to unlock them by finding terminals in the game - fair enough, but then you have to exit the damn game and go to waypoint to watch them. I think their universe is big enough that they need a built-in Mass Effect-like codex or something. (Which exists, in a manner, but again only on Waypoint.) Some past UNSC ship names: Pillar of Autumn, Aegis Fate, Forward unto Dawn, Spirit of Fire, Heart of Midlothian, and the wryly named "Say my Name". Halo 4 gives you: The imaginatively named UNSC Infinity Though the books were already wildly inconsistent with Bungie's naming scheme. I've also been putting a ton of time into the multiplayer and have already been talking it over a lot. I would say my current assessment is that it has a lot of problems, but i still like it a lot more than Reach. (I'm not sure how i would compare it to 3, let's wait and see what the map packs provide, how the playlists evolve, and what the patches do.) The thing that never really sat well with me about Reach is that it played at dramatically longer ranges, it was a much more sniper friendly game than any of the other Halo games have been. (Barring the original, i guess.) The combat triangle is a little more in balance here, grenades are weaker and more about control, melee is more important again, and ranges are more mid to close range at an average. Any fans of the assault rifle would be happy to know that it's quite viable, especially in close quarters dominion matches. The effect Reach's armor abilities had on its gameplay was also dramatic and unpopular, and Halo 4 is a little more measured about what it does with those. Halo 4's controversial progression system actually ends up being more or less what Reach was already doing, but giving you a choice instead of letting playlists decide the loadouts. Some of the perks are still a little suspect, and some of the armor abilities seem dramatically underpowered relative to the others, but nothing is screaming broken. Reach also had really terrible on-disc maps, but i think a lot of the maps in here are pretty solid. I really like Abandon, in particular. Not really into some of the larger big team maps though, i think the best one of those is simply the remake of Halo 3's Valhalla. Some bugs have shown up, some Halo 2 kind of stuff, animation cancelling bugs and the like. I don't imagine those will stand for long, 343 seems to be a much more aggressive patcher than Bungie. (Considering the sweeping changes they brought to Reach when Bungie handed them the keys.) A lot of gametypes from Halo Reach are missing, and a lot of gametypes that returned have far fewer options in custom gametypes. I've noticed people being particularly unhappy that there is no way to disable instant respawn in custom gametypes. (Instant respawn is pretty bullshit, i don't like it at all, it totally fucks up small slayer games.) I personally feel that the most dramatic changes in 4 are the numerous ways in which weapon spawns have been changed, of which the most immediate component is that when a power weapon spawns, it will be marked on the hud of anybody nearby. I like this change, i feel it's a positive one. Map control was always a big part of Halo strategy, but In the context of the series shifting towards a broader variety of forge variant maps, it frequently was not feasible to learn spawns on all the maps that were in rotation on Reach. Revealing them is a simple and reasonable accessibility fix. That in addition to the other ways weapon spawns have changed, apparently with some purely random drops in the mix on certain maps, it creates a significantly different feeling game. You can play more with an eye towards improvization than pure memorization, and i like that. I am not a fan of their killstreak mechanic, which is powered by medals you earn in play and carries across lives. With a lot of "comeback" style medals, it's supposed to also help out struggling players, but the actual effect is still just that a dominant team will end up with a ton of power weapons and an insurmountable lead. (Granted, those are likely situations you would lose to regardless.) In all fairness, it's a fairly restrained take on that style of mechanic, but i still don't have to like it. Also, the Mantis is awesome and feels completely balanced. It kicks ass and is much fun. The DMR and the BR are pretty redundant, and the DMR is proving to be a superior weapon. (They both kill in five shots, four on the shield and then a headshot, but the DMR fires faster and is better at long range.) Dominion is rad addition with a lot of weird things going on, that is an entire post in and of itself. CTF also finally addresses some persisting issues, Infection has a cool new atmospheric vibe, and Grifball has effectively supplanted Assault. (Also, you can pass the ball now!) There's another new gametype that i haven't looked at, and isn't in any of the playlists right now. Firefight, Race, Headhunter, Territories, Invasion and a couple others are gone. Spartan Ops seems very promising, but it's impossible to tell how it will shake out. The first episode, the one that ships with the game, it's all original geometry, they're not just repurposing campaign stuff. There wasn't much narrative at all though, and there's no campaign scoring for it. (It's hard to know if there will end up being any real story to speak of, but campaign scoring was promised as a patch.) Anyways, I guess there's ten free episodes promised, and that will work out to fifty co-op levels by the end. Forge is also great, Forge is perennially the unsung hero of Halo. It's about the same as it was in Reach, with a few nice additions, but it's still amazing to have such a fantastically accessible and powerful map editor built into the game like that. If you haven't kept up on your Halo and you're under the impression that it's always just hardcore shooting dudes, you might be surprised to see something like Grifball and find that it is effectively Halo rugby. Edit: And a SWAT playlist just went up.

How do you guys feel about the Prometheans as enemies in this game? Also, is anybody else here playing any of the competitive stuff?

For that reason, i completely hated the upgrade system in Vanquish. Vanquish is a great game, but that upgrade system is dumb.

If you have access to a Wii, let me strongly recommend Xenoblade, absolutely fantastic game. (Or just play Witcher 2 on the PC, which is probably more what you're looking for after playing Skyrim and Dark Souls.)

It sounded to me like Rockstar North is actually looking to use the multiple protagonists as a way to embrace all those different gameplay and narrative elements they want to chase, without constantly landing on actions that might be wildly out of character for the protagonist. That's what i'm hoping for, at least.

I vaguely remember the argument being something along the lines of them feeling like they were not getting access to parts of the technology that they felt they had rights to. Epic was internalizing a lot of the most recent developments in the tech for the Gears of War games and, by SK's perspective, wasn't getting them out to licensees in the manner that they should have been. I could be totally pulling that out of my ass though, i don't have the slightest memory of where i read that. Midichlorians were all Lucas, you can't blame that one on the EU.