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As a battered and abused one-time fan, I feel like this can only be a good thing for Star Wars. I trust DIsney to better know how to manage a multi-billion dollar media franchise than i trust an aging Lucas.

Virtue's Last Reward is out and seems wonderful. (The visual novel sections are fully voiced!) The opening chunk of the game is a major exposition-heavy slog, but you get through it once and you can skip it on all subsequent playthroughs. Where things get interesting is when you start digging into the possible story branches. Twenty four possible endings, and there is a pretty crazy story flow chart to help you keep track of what you've completed. The puzzle rooms i've seen are pretty sharp, and they have this thing now where you can hit a button to make the other characters start giving out hints, but at the cost of making you miss out on optional rewards. (Little story documents that fill out a bunch of background details.) I haven't found their easy mode necessary though, nothing has been that hard on my first playthrough. I'm going to say that Virtue's Last Reward is a thing people should play, and that maybe people should go back and also play 999 first if they haven't. Also, Grasshopper's Liberation Maiden is up on the eShop. It's pretty flashy and cool, but it feels like it probably worked better as a part of a collection.

Played a whole bunch of games recently! To catch up on a couple prior games - I think Borderlands 2 and X-com are both :tup: I've definitely run into some technical troubles with X-com though, and i've chosen to put the game aside for now. They're relatively small hiccups that would be totally forgiveable if not for the context of an ironman run. BL2, it's only fair to note, also has some issues. (The main thing is to probably just not play any public co-op games, you're only asking for trouble.) Dishonored: I've just finished Dishonored, which i was of on the fence about for most of the game. I don't like their morality system or the way they've balanced their gameplay tools inside of that context, I really think it's problematic and clumsy. The last few levels pushed me over the edge though, i am ultimately okay with Dishonored, it is a pretty fine game. Liberation Maiden: So this was Suda 51's contribution to the Guild 01 anthology for the 3DS, games that are being parsed out as individual releases on the eShop for releases outside of Japan. I like it quite a bunch, it's a very distinctive and flashy little shooter. There's a really clumsy final boss though, and only four levels prior to it, and i don't think its design is quite tight enough to encourage a score attack mindset. (The dialogue boxes that constantly pop up do not help.) Code of Princess: I also recently played Code of Princess, again on the 3DS. (Notably, it's a spiritual successor to Treasure's Guardian Heroes.) It's a 2d side-scrolling brawler with a nice, flexible combo system and some light character progression stuff happening. There's a lot of content and a lot of characters, an extremely goofy and occasionally pretty funny script, and some fairly extensive online MP features that i haven't tried because nobody is playing this game. It's a real shame, because i'm of the mindset that this is probably one of the better games available on the 3DS. The framerate struggles when the 3D is enabled, but that's the only real issue i see with it.

The series of events concerning the girl in the attic were particularly great.

When you paid into that system you were paying for a -chance- at item unlocks, you just as easily could end up with an expendable one-use medkit. I thought it was pretty offensive and gross.

The DOTA2 talk i found somewhat reflective of how i ended up as an interested observer of the competitive fighting game scene. Initially it was just watching matches and using them as kind of a teaching tool, trying to emulate bits and pieces to improve my own play. After a point though, I feel like what happens is that knowledge kind of outpaces skill, and... With fighting games, at least, you get to that point where where you understand all the pieces, all the mechanics, but you just physically cannot execute on them. There is an actual barrier of physical ability there, breaking down the mechanics in your head isn't enough. I cannot make my hands do the things they need to do. So i'm in this place where i still want to have that understanding rewarded, i want to see the narratives that can play out at the high end for these games, and that's kind of where the competitive stuff came in. A few hours every now and then watching an interesting livestream, as opposed to an absolutely enormous and possibly fruitless investment of time to try and get there myself. You end up kind of mentally playing along, understanding the risks and difficulties in every action, letting your knowledge of the game decipher the story for you. A little bit living vicariously through it.

Oh man, oh man! I had completely forgotten about that whole thing. That was an incredible internet tantrum.

It's a very existential kind of horror, a protagonist confronted with being an insignificant bug in bigger happenings that are in their scope unknowable. To harp on Condemned again, i think the first one of those has shades of it. Also, It still kills me that we very recently just barely missed out on getting a Guillermo Del Toro-directed adaptation of Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness. CoC:DCotE kind of implodes about half way through, it just turns into a really awful FPS. (Then back into a stealth game for its wacked out climax.) It's a game i would still recommend highly, though i understand the PC version is extremely troublesome on modern hardware. There's apparently a bug that can cause the timing on the chase sequences to be impossibly tight. I'm also a sucker for needlessly elaborate health systems, and that game does that in spades. Break a leg? Stab yourself with morphine so you can muscle through it and sprint away from the monsters in pursuit.

That was quite a distressing read, holy shit. I had always kind of been rooting for SK, i don't know how to feel about this.

There have not been a lot of games that really got under my skin, but Condemned was definitely one of the few. The unreliable flashlight, weapon degredation and strict carry limits, the way enemy AI would actually try to sneak up on you, their indistinct and ragey obscenities, the filthy and dark environments, the ambiguity about whether or not you're hallucinating or witnessing real events. The sequel got too wrapped up in explaining its mythology, when one of the main reasons the first game was so scary is because you really didn't have any idea what was going on. I mean, there were clues everywhere, a logic behind the scenes that you were not privy to, it was a mystery. The sequel just kind of lays it all out and ends up looking really goofy in the process. (That among other failings, i could go on about why i think Condemned 2 is a tragically flawed sequel. Even so, i would say it's still a worthwhile playthrough.) Ambiguity is a powerful tool for horror! The gaps your mind fills in are always scarier than anything an author can imagine, people are naturally afraid of what they don't understand.

I think what really gets to people is when the victory condition is very binary, either two teams or two players. If the match-making is doing its job, no matter how well you're doing, you're losing half the time. You can't have that string of third place finishes that you can feel mostly okay about, you can't really settle into your comfort zone, it's always one extreme or the other. The experiences i've had playing fighting games online? People just get murderously incensed when they lose, unbelievably toxic environment. Like, i don't really recall people ever getting like that over ffa deathmatches, and i've been playing shooters online since Quake. My personal belief is that for a game to be considered competitive, there needs to not just be balanced mechanics and a high skill ceiling, but also a level playing field. If you can grind out an advantageous position by investing a lot of time into the game, you have an unfair advantage beyond your own skill and the tools immediately before you. So i would not consider any of the persistent online games to be competitive, or any games with progression mechanics for that matter, personally speaking. I thought it was wonderful that Bungie drew a line in the sand with Halo Reach, gave people their exp drip, but only in the form of cosmetic rewards. I am unhappy that 343 has bowed to industry trends. Now i'm just going to rant for a bit, but I really hate progression mechanics in competitive multiplayer games, I also feel they have absolutely ruined a number of promising online games. If your game is not Call of Duty, there will be maybe five people who will play it enough to unlock anything, and those people will proceed to ruin the game for anybody else who might try to play. Just the idea that i am going to jump into this game that i understand and could potentially play well, but other people are going to have this artificial advantage that i can't compare with until i invest another twenty hours? How much worse will it be for people who aren't as experienced in multiplayer gaming? Ridiculous!

So this was a thing.

I think this is probably the right forum for this, what do you mean? Anyways, whenever Evo time rolls around i inevitably end up watching like a week's worth of streams. (The KoF13 finals from this year i would highly recommend.) I really enjoy the more competitive scenes as an observer, and i try to push the groups i play with towards more technical and demanding standards of play, but i generally hate playing with randoms just because the crowds for most games online are totally toxic. (This is a problem, and i think it's something developers and community organizers need to start thinking about, just how to get people to treat eachother in a sportsmanship-like manner. I think some of the cultural trickle-down isn't helping, i cringe whenever i see an official Halo advert that has somebody getting teabagged.) I'll probably end up playing a ton of Halo 4 online though. The Halo community has by an average been pretty decent for a good long time now, I think CoD kind of magnetized the assholes away.

That struck me as weird too. I'm not a fan of Klepek when he does quicklooks, he has a nasty habit of stopping dead for minutes at a time to just ramble on about something.

http://www.giantbomb.com/quick-look-giana-sisters-twisted-dreams/17-6721/ Man, this actually looks really freaking great.

I don't feel like creating a new topic for this question because, in my mind at least, it's potentially a closely related conversation. So how do you guys feel about slow-starts in games? I guess the two extremes being the so-called learning cliff or the gradual "stop helping me" wind-up. How patient are you with a new game? If you play a game that is complex and isn't explaining itself, do you make that concentrated effort to figure it out, or do you just give up? Do you get bored with simple games that feel like they need to gradually, carefully build things up?

Assuming a person has gotten somewhat wrapped up in the ongoing story, is revelations worth it for that? I've seen people say it's kind of the least inspired and essential of the main games, which is why i've been putting it off.

Alpha Protocol is a weird fucking game, i found myself getting really angry at how poorly designed and balanced it was. Now, if it was a game that was just all about that neat conversation system, that might have been pretty cool. Why can't somebody make that game? Wait, no, isn't Walking Dead basically that? I should play that series.

I went through the list again, and i'm still counting about ten that actually require kills.

You should probably not played Condemned.

What about the ending of AC1 was so terrible? I will never argue for it being a flawless game, but i quite admired it. It was a risky, weird game. Edit: Oh, that string of battles right at the end? Yeah, that was a bastard. I think AC2 is the best game in that series though, fucking loved that game. Brotherhood has some seriously careless gameplay balancing issues, it's like no thought at all went into how the new tools they added would affect the overall experience. On command assassinations more or less break that game. It's also mondo buggy, including some nasty game-enders. Then there's Revelations... Has anybody played Revelations? Is it worth picking up cheap?

By my count, only about a fifth of them involved kills, while over half are stealth-related.

They do move around the field a bit in normal, mostly on terror missions, but it's on classic difficulty where they really start roaming. That's weird, it shouldn't be that hard to shoot things down that early in the game, that doesn't sound right. Have you been advancing the timeline a bunch to get monthly funding? The invasion might have ramped up while you were twiddling your thumbs. (Edit: I guess i don't know how far in you are, i'm assuming early goings since you didn't have any weapons researched for your fighters.) Your monthly expenses might have exceeded your income, check your finances in the situation room.

I absolutely love scary games, but i find most don't really have the intended effect for me. I'm one of those people who grew up with horror movies and has grown inured to their intended effects. I mean, but i love hunting for that scare, for that game that can legitimately get under my skin. I've found it generally has much more to do with a game's underlying mechanics than anything else. Dead Space has been mentioned a few times, so Dead Space. Where Dead Space fails is in how it's very easy to suss out the rules of when you're safe and when you're in danger, and how it's easy to discern where enemies will come from and what patterns they operate on. (They do that thing where If you get far enough away, they'll hop into the nearest vent and then re-emerge at the vent closest to you.) The game narratively insists that you're ill-equipped, just a lowly engineer, but the practical effect of the tools you're given is that you're extremely empowered. You actually have quite a lot of health and many powerful abilities. I mean, so if the atmosphere doesn't affect you, that game doesn't have anything going on mechanically to reinforce that you should be scared. My recollection of System Shock 2 is of a game that worked on both sides of the coin, having an phenomenally creepy scenario with game mechanics that reinforced you feeling frail and never safe. (Notably, with the scenario being somewhat conscious of how weak the player is made to feel, and it actually becoming a running thematic point in the game.) I think games like Dark Souls and Stalker are other great examples of games that employ mechanics that can facilitate intense, scary, and unpredictable situations. Though that's just talking about what are primarily action games, there's still the looming spector of all those survival stealth games that have become much more popular in recent years. I really need to play Amnesia, though i'm concerned it'd end up just being a frustrating, linear puzzle. (Concerns i have from it sounding, at least in part, very similar to CoC:DCotE. An extremely clever game that had moments of being fabulously intense, but would wear thin when you were replaying a heavily-scripted chase sequence multiple times, trying to hit marks in an incredibly narrow procedure. Also, all the clumsy FPS nonsense that it should not have had, but Amnesia doesn't seem to go down that road.)

I've been playing on the 360 and the control setup is pretty phenomenal. The camera is a bit fidgety, and i hate that i can't rotate it while aiming rockets and grenades, but it surprised the hell out of me to hear so many people complaining about misclicks and stuff on the PC.