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I appreciate the heads up. Had i lost another playthrough, i probably would have given up on the game. I'll take more care about where i save from here on out. Huge shame that it has such serious problems, it's otherwise a wonderful game that i would discourage no one from playing.

I had read that only the PEC room is affected by the bug. Are you aware if that is that the full story here, or is there anything more to it?

343 had talked some about "re-centering" the difficulty levels, which probably can be taken to mean that normal is pushing people a bit more, while heroic is a little more accessible. Edit: Man, i just finished watching that giantbomb quicklook, and they're just constantly down on it for not doing anything new, which is crazy to me. Halo 4 brought with it some of the biggest changes the series has seen. I mean, i guess the disconnect is that, if you're not into the multiplayer, it just looks like Halo with a better story. 4 is a radically different game on the multiplayer front though, and it's not just beause there are perks. I'm not sure if those changes are for the best, but there are definitely a lot of changes. So have you heard the one about The Didact, The Librarian, and The Mantle...

There's a new composer on the series. You'll hear some subtle nods to the original soundtracks here and there, but it's mostly new pieces. There's some great ones in there, but i don't think it feels like it has as much of an identity as Marty O'Donnel's scores did. Also, even if you've played all the previous Halo games, if you've only ever done that, i suspect that the story in 4 will be highly confusing. A lot of the things brought to the forefront in this game are things that were always mentioned only in the novels or, if in the games, in an otherwise cryptic fashion. (Remember the Halo 3 terminals?) I've finished that campaign though, i think it's pretty good, maybe one of the better ones. Though, to me, it seemed a touch easy on heroic. The competitive multiplayer has been making a good impression too, i will say. I think it has some not-insignificant problems, but i don't think 343 fucked it up in any dramatic way. I guess i'll check out the first "episode" of Spartan Ops now. (Their weekly story-driven episodic co-op content thing.)

If you're mainly interested in a campaign, Halo 4 probably isn't the game to start with. I'd recommend either ODST or Reach, both are stand-alone story arcs and aren't mired in series history. (Seriously, Halo 4 is thick with it.) ODST, especially, works well as something you can take in by itself, and i think it's probably also the best campaign experience in the series.

So uh... Can i talk about Halo 4 now that it's out, or will i just be subject to more snideness? Just looking around the internet, I'm amazed at how polarized people have been towards Halo 4. I mean, of course it was going to happen, but it seems to have gone so much further for this game. Personal early opinion based on about eight hours straight of not sleeping - It seems cool, it's uncharacteristically rough in spots and i have some concerns about how the mp will shake out, but i am tentatively optimistic about it. I think it also has the best story in the series, though it dives hard into things mentioned only in the books and will probaby leave more casual fans completely bewildered. It really does feel like a game from a new team trying to one up what came before, and maybe not quite getting there. There's a lot of little things that come across as imitative without achieving quite the same effect. It's an interesting game, but i like it so far. It makes a bad first impression though. For all of its insanely high-detail character models, the way it all works together is less than stellar. Flat and dull explosions, harsh lod scaling, and some shockingly inconsistent art quality. Ragnarok, the Valhalla remake, comes across as especially schizophrenic, and the first two levels of the campaign are pretty rough in spots too. The overall effect is that Reach was inarguably a much, much better looking game. (Though in Halo 4's defense, it also maintains a much more consistent framerate and does not suffer from Reach's weird frame blending effect that could be particularly irritating if you were prone to noticing it.) I'm also finding Halo 4's sound design to be really in your face with how crisp and loud everything is, there is no subtlety to it at all. As for gameplay impressions, i feel like i need to play more, but i think it plays quite well. In the campaign, there's still a lot of big combat spaces and i think the new promethean enemies are a lot of fun to fight. For online, i don't have any clear picture of how the significant changes will end up affecting the game.

Also: Tekken 4 is pretty widely regarded as the worst game in that series. Old gaming mags are funny.

So i am finding ZoE2 to be incredibly fucking rad, i feel extra worse for missing out on it all these years, though i feel like i need to say that the script and the voice acting are still both terrible. I don't know why i was expecting anything more than that, maybe just because of the significantly greater production values. I have to say again, it simply does not seem possible that this game is nine years old, visuals like these are an unbelievably high target to have hit right in the middle of the PS2's life span. I had to watch some youtube videos to confirm that they aren't applying extra layers of trickery, and they aren't. It's just HD and wide-screen and and actually a little slower. I'm also finding the lock-on more problematic than it was in the first game, the right stick thing is extremely unreliable. I suspect it might be an inherent problem in the design for the sequel though, the dramatically larger swarms of enemies and the need to find specific targets in those swarms. Still, even though i left the first game with a greater appreciation for it, ZoE2 is the clear gem in this collection. Edit: Now i'm going to say that after an impressive first few hours, i'm starting to sour on ZoE2. Bosses that are contingent around tricks the game does not explain, asshole escort missions, and that fucking lock-on.

When i was worried that this collection would turn out like Silent Hill HD, i'm feeling that a moderately inconsistent framerate is something i can live with.

I just finished ZoE, that game is as short as i remember, though i think i've left off with a better impression of it now than i had when i first played it. I just started on ZoE2, that game does not look 9 years old, holy shit. That is an incredibly attractive game. I'm reading now, though, that ZoE 2 apparently has a poorer framerate in this collection than it did on the PS2. I will say that i have found there to be noticeable slowdown, particularly during certain cutscenes, but during gameplay i am not finding it to be a significant detractor outside of the game ocassionally feeling a little sluggish. I can't say how it compares to the original PS2 version, though. Did the original have any framerate issues as well? Word is that it's mainly the PS3 version that is boned, with a much worse framerate and also apparently some really unpleasant and unavoidable crash bugs. So get the 360 version, i guess.

Well, it is a Dreamcast-era Sega game, so yeah. The other big one you can easily find in the west is Armored Core, which is more its own thing and more of an actual mech sim, but the two AC4 games in particular are . (I think ACFA is a really severely underappreciated game.)ACV is a little more accessible, but was focused around a metagame, and major match-making issues at launch pretty much killed its online community. (It was throwing people into empty matches against hostile territories with no defenders and giving the game an erroneous reputation as a glorified tower defense simulation. Allegedly that's been fixed after months of the community harassing Namco to patch the western versions same as From patched the Japanese version.) ACV still has a ton of solo content too, to be fair. (Which is effectively all AC4 and ACFA have, because nobody plays those online.) AC is also the far end of hardcore, no other mech games boast such indepth mech labs, and getting your build tuned right can be an hours-long process. (Which is awesome if you're into that, and i am. Hooray for poorly explained fiddly numbers.) ... Armored Core is pretty awesome. Probably.

ZoE1 actually uses some really horrendously ugly pre-rendered CG for its cinematics, the animated cutscenes in the sequel look much better and probably indicate that it was a game with a much higher budget. And the whole high-speed mech action thing isn't as rare as you might think. There are games that are exceedingly similar to ZoE, but they've never been been released outside of Japan. ZoE is an uncommon glimpse at one of those genres that just lands with a dull thud whenever it heads westward. For something readily available in the west that is admittedly completely different in the details, but at least in the same ballpark, i'd endorse checking out the XBLA version of Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram. A surprisingly complex 1v1 fighting game that you'll notice shares a lot of similar ideas with ZoE, even if the manner of execution is completely different. Seriously fucking great game, a personal favorite of mine, and the XBLA version of Oratorio Tangram is the best available game in that series. All about controlling vectors of movement while mixing like six different control variables to produce from a ton of potential attacks. (It's really a game that needs a guide, but fan documentation in the west is sparse.)

So Star Wars has tiers of canon with the movies at top, and as long as things in the lower tiers of licensed materials do not contradict with things in the higher tiers, they are considered canon. It's a very organized continuity that even allows for a lot of the older Video games to be part of actual canon. So yeah, there was opportunity for the prequels to mess up A LOT of things, and they did, but not in the sense that it was wiping out established canon. In fact, Lucas ended up adhering pretty closely to the very expanded universe that he has often been quite dismissive of. (Coruscant, for example, originated with the Thrawn trilogy novels.) So while the prequels introduced a whole lot of things people didn't like, like midichlorians, it didn't exactly wipe out huge swaths of the existing canon or anything. The thing i remember people being angriest about is that the prequels overwrote Boba Fett's existing origin story. The subsequent Clone Wars CG cartoon has been way messier about contradicting existing canon. Still, compared to something like Star Trek - which i am also a big fan of - where even different seasons in the same show can have details that are irreconcilable with eachother, Star Wars is an extremely well maintained canon.

Lucas took that stance outwardly, but his own prequels drew a lot of things from the expanded universe. Coruscant, for example, was borne out of the expanded universe. (Specifically from the Thrawn trilogy, in fact.)

It obviously means that the best kind of protest is to wave a fat dick in somebody's face.

To each his own, i personally always liked the Thrawn books.

Really though, I'd be pretty bummed out if Disney chose to just reboot Star Wars or something. There's a lot of terrible junk in the expanded universe, but it's also an impressively large and cohesive canon. It's quite a feat of universe building, and i think it would be a terrible shame to discard it all instead of finding new corners of it to explore. (It is not, for example, like Star Trek, which was always a massive continuity snarl.)

Ok, how you chose your powers, that's right. Still, I definitely remember that there were a lot of little incidental things that affected your alignment on top of how you spent your points. As for the books Katarn shows up in, i don't know if they're actually any good, heh. His Wookieepedia page! The Thrawn trilogy is often held as the high water mark for the Star Wars expanded universe novels, so... I unno.

I loved how JK:DF2 had a subtle little morality system, there were events in the levels that would push you towards the light or the dark side. You could save people in little scripted events or run around recklessly killing civilian npc's. We might hate binary morality systems now, but that was literally one of the first times i had ever seen anything like that done. (Additionally, finding level secrets got you more force stars for upgrades.) I don't believe you ever actually make an explicit choice, do you? The game branches near the end, but it's dictated by Katarn's mindset at that point in the game, as you've established from all the smaller preceding actions. (It's been a long time since i played, so i'm willing to be wrong.) Kyle Katarn is also probably my favorite expanded universe character, and i say that as somebody who is at least formerly a huge fan of Star Wars. (Did you know he showed up in novels set after the games and was a major badass there too?)

I had no luck the last time i tried getting those games running. Much more recently, when i looked into it again, there were still tons of problems being reported for getting them running on a modern machine, glitches and frequent ctds and the like. (Notably, i understand that it's very difficult to get the games running in their hardware accelerated modes.) The Steam versions being just the original games repackaged, the same problems were being reported with those. People were pretty angry about it and LucasArts ended up making a statement about them not being able to update the games because the source code had been lost. I don't know what would have changed, outside of Windows 7 maybe being better for compatibility, and maybe that's it. That's what you played on, i assume?

Holy shit, Virtue is so good, the conclusion of that first playthrough was riveting. I think this is seriously a must-play, it's so good! It's also letting me use the story flowchart to jump freely through story checkpoints i've previously reached, on top of the usual ability to fast-forward through text you've already seen. You know, so instead of zipping back to the start of the game and fast-forwarding until i hit a story decision, i can jump straight back to the branching points. It also starts out seeming fairly stand-alone, but then then the sci-fi stuff starts creeping in. It doesn't seem wildly exclusionary or anything, but the places it goes, i think people would be well served playing 999 first. I hope that doesn't dissuade anybody from checking these games out though, they're both fantastic. The only issue might be that it's apparently pretty difficult to find copies of 999 floating around as of right now. Edit: Non-spoiler version: Seriously, if you own a 3DS, or actually own a Vita for some crazy reason, you really need to play this. In the interest of not having a string of me talking to myself, here's another edit: I suppose nobody here is interested in this one. Even so, public service announcement: Nasty save bug! Don't save in the "PEC" room. It's one single puzzle room somewhere in the middle of the game, it's an issue that is very easy to avoid if you know about it. However, if you do save in that room, a few minutes out from that your game will lock-up and your save will have become corrupted. Apparently it's a known issue, but i had no idea, and it just happened to me. 17 hours gone! I am so sad. At about the same time, my battery died, so i haven't had a chance to see if i can create a new save or if i've bricked my cart. Assuming i can start over, and with the vast majority of the game being non-interactive scenes, i can flip on the auto-scrolling text and try and recreate the condition my save was in fairly easily, it's just going to take a lot of time. I like this game enough that i am not going to give up on it, i'll just let it play itself out while i'm busy with other stuff. Really, really, really wish i knew about that bug beforehand. What a fucking load of shit. It's an unfortunate blemish on a fantastic game.

Yes, absolutely! JK:DF2 and JK:MOTS are two of my most favorite games. I think people make a mistake when they approach those games for the lightsaber combat, which was relatively impressive at the time, but still very primitive. They're definitely better shooters than they are melee games. Just, yeah though, the absolutely enormous levels and all of the force abilities and cool weapons, such great games. You know, and Kyle Katarn is pretty awesome too. heh. I wish they weren't such a pain to get running on a modern PC.

I liked Force Unleashed quite a bit, but an unimpressive demo and toxic critical reception made me steer clear of FU2. I'm hopeful for 1313 though, i'm all for Star Wars games poking into new corners of that universe. Mostly though, i just really don't want to see any more prequel-era games unless it's Republic Commando 2. Star Wars games used to be so incredible, i miss awesome Star Wars games. I want another Dark Forces/Jedi Knight game. I would also settle for a new Rogue Squadron or X-Wing/Tie Fighter game.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-ex-natural-selection-ii/17-6744/ A pretty wild development story behind this game.

I've seen a lot of rumors about management infighting at Lucas Arts, it seems to have effectively paralyzed that company for most of the last decade.