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I don't get their timing at all. First they almost released right after Diablo 3, now they're releasing right after Borderlands 2, another loot-driven game?

Dustforce has an amazing soundtrack and a great super smash brothersy multiplayer (that's local only, sadly) but yeah, I gave up on the actual progression of it very early on.

It's funny, I can totally hear Anthony Birch's style in the writing (at least in the claptrap). Lots of good dorky jokes inserted throughout; reads a lot more clever than the first game already (an hour in). I'm into teaming up if anyone's down. Though it may be a bit early to do so, don't want any story beats spoiled (either by me or to me) or so on.

The whole screen was covered in fire animations! I probably shouldn't have fun forward!

I think an under-appreciated aspect of Minecraft is that it made lava - and fire in general - SO much more dangerous than it usually is in video games. I remember one of the first times I walked by some exposed lava in the game and being all accustomed to weak-ass lava, was incredibly shocked when an ember flew off, landed on me, and set me on fire. I then stumbled in fiery confusion, fell into the lava pit and died. It was awesome.

Just to disclaim: you cannot use the strategy of hiding behind an enemy the entire game. This is fine the first few levels (and only if you're not going for the non-violent bonuses) but once you get dogs who can sniff and enemies with flashlights/night vision and snipers and all other sorts of traps and setups, it becomes completely non-viable. I think what Mark of the Ninja succeeds at is being a puzzle game in execution: (you are given a bunch of problems to solve blocking several avenues forward and must use what you have learned thus far to proceed) without spoiling the player's sense of immersion. I really think SpectreCollie has it right. If you had another game that didn't give you the same visual cues your focus would be directed toward worrying about whether or not you were in some arbitrary AI vision cone, which is fine for a certain kind of experience. But for MotN, the experience is a puzzle/problem solving one that gives you a set of tools and lets you have fun figuring out how to use them in the coolest possible way and gives you a sense of superiority over the obstacles the game presents.

So I just finished it. What a fun experience! And rather unique-feeling too, which is surprising considering the well-tread genre/content. (I guess I shouldn't be that shocked, look at Walking Dead, Telltale managed to squeeze lemonade out of the most well-squeezed lemon conceivable.) It took me a few levels to realize I could get way more points by not killing guards. This completely changed the game for me. I had already started getting tired of the linearity of waiting for a guard to pass>gutting him>looking for a spot to hide the body, repeat. Attempting to complete a level non-violently makes things way, wayyy more interesting. I would recommend it to anyone playing the game, and I'm glad the developers put in the point incentive to make it a viable option. It also really vibes with the attitude of the game: sticking to the shadows, achieving your goals while remaining unseen. When you smoothly achieve that objective, say taking out a target or killing a generator, without alerting any guards, so that to their eyes an invisible hand is changing the environment around them despite their hardest efforts to the contrary, it feels good, it clicks. Not that it's easy in the slightest, and now I'm attempting new game plus, which takes away a lot of the visual indicators of the first play-through, even going so far as to dim the visibility of whatever direction your character is not facing!

I pretty much never killed guards in AC Brotherhood (last one I played) except when it was in closed gameplay sections. It's certainly not a pure stealth game by any stretch but being able to be escape notice is usually not hard. Throw some change down, climb some roofs, blend with the crowd, hire prostitutes or thugs, all tools made easily available by the designers. I'm sure all that will be available in AC3. It's just all the marketing being super violent that's turning me off. I think it's an effort to appeal to a broader base to have trailers that focus on the violent aspects of games that may also have a relatively non-violent route (see Hitman and Dishonored marketing).

I think they've kept pretty true to the visual style of the original game. All 3 outfits look very consistent to me. Also seems like the game is focusing more on woods exploration and less on towns (judging from the trailers), so it also seems like it's going to be less of an issue that he doesn't blend in as well with crowds. What really bothers me is how incredibly violent all these trailers are. Maybe the other games' trailers were just as violent and I'm just not remembering, but the other games certainly didn't encourage you to go after guards en masse. The point should be about silent assassination but everything thus far in Ass3's marketing has been of epic gorefest proportions. Watching guards get stabbed repeatedly in the eye sockets kind of turns me off the whole thing.

Did you guys see Conan's series on GTA IV when it came out? I actually really enjoy them because they're more about making the content into something it's not meant to be and less "argh I don't know how to play Video games!" as his new videos tend to be. http://www.wegame.com/watch/Grand_Theft_Auto_4_Conan_O_brien_Part_1/

Actually, I found that guy the easiest but most likely because there was a pathfinding failure that kept him from coming after me after a certain point. He basically just hung out in a corner trying to shoot me and I'd just pop in and out of cover with that overpowered lazer bazooka and nail him a bunch until he died. Sno, Deus Ex was one of my favorite games of last year. Playing it was a joy and probably the first time since Metal Gear Solid that I had enjoyed a stealth game so very much. Doesn't change anything about the awful implementation of those boss fights.

How long did it take you, incidentally? *nervously eyes calendar, next week's Blands 2 release*

Yeah, I wish I had been smart enough to figure out all the exploits but reading about them later I was like "I NEVER would have figured that out." And I think some of them involved having certain perks unlocked. Like for the Rihanna boss you had to have upgraded your legs to resist electricity and then kept tripping the breakers in the room, but if you didn't have the legs, that clearly wouldn't have worked.

I played through stealthily & non-violently. Oh the amount of quick-loading that went on. I'm tempted to go back and kill everyone for the 'kill everyone' achievement, but I agree with FesteDaFool that it fits my interpretation of the narrative better to be a sneaky private dick type character that has his own version of the Hippocratic oath. Except when forced to awkwardly battle during those insufferable boss fights.

Not really, the first one has a notoriously poor ending. There will doubtlessly be a lot of nods to the first Borderlands in its sequel, and you get to interact with the characters from the first one as well. Except you never learned anything about them in the first game other than bio blurbs so essentially if they have a story, it's starting in Borderlands 2 not in 1.

I've just played through the first few levels and have to say that left brain right brain anology is pretty accurate. Speaking of Arkham City, it recalls the mixture of gamey elements like Batman's tool kit with the immersive results of actually using said tools seamlessly in a fight.

Wait, Metal Gear Solid has vision cones. (Unless you play on hard iirc) And it was mentioned this had multiple routes through levels. It just sounds like you don't want to play this because you're not into the style? Which is fine, but I don't think you can write this off as a bad implementation of stealth mechanics (especially having not played it) because it doesn't look or play like a third person stealth game. They're working on a PC version, Murdoc. Not sure about PS3.

Dude, have a little zen, man.

Yep, I think Black Mesa should be a good excuse to give HL1 another go. I lost interest about halfway in, but it would be nice to fill in the missing bits of story (my brain is unable to absorb the stuff straight out of wikipedia)

I've had some hilarious arguments with my roommate when he wanted to play but I wasn't around so I requested that he only kill trash mobs and not complete any missions objectives if he absolutely had to play otherwise it would throw our whole game out of whack.

I dunno, NPCs don't just loop animations and barks, they respond specifically to everything that happens, whether you toss money or kill someone or climb a wall or shove a bystander. It's deliciously robust. *smacks lips*

I'd say that's a fair expectation. I mostly played the first with friends but the few public games I did join seemed pretty functional. And now that they thankfully fixed the questing issues associated with multiplayer (used to be you had to be on the same quest in SP to receive xp for a MP teammate finishing one) it should be super easy to jump in and jump out, probably similarly to how Diablo 3 works. And if you're on PC, hit me up on Steam. That goes for anyone who wants to team up!

Thanks for the recommendation. Sounds neat, and just up my alley. I was just talking with my friend a couple of days ago about loving that Assassin's Creed video about combining poison and money: and we both realized just how much we love it when a game has robust systems. I guess that makes me of a mind with most here, but playing a game like DMMM really drives how just how important that is to me.

Dark Messiah of Might and Magic (Mouthful). This was a really, really fun game! Usual story: picked it up during a Steam sale for a few bucks, not expecting much. I only knew it was led by part of the Dishonored team and I was interested in seeing their roots. If Dishonored is anything like this, it's going to be amazing. For one thing, the melee combat is super fun, if not incredibly goofy, but the goofiness doesn't take away from the tactility of kicking someone over a bannister in the middle of a sword-fight. Or grabbing a barrel and tossing it down a stairwell at a bunch of approaching guards. Or using telekinesis to grab the dead body of a recently felled enemy and launch it at the ones still standing, knocking them all off the edge of a balcony. The designers essentially built a playground, gave us the controller, and told us to go wild. DMMM is on the surface a linear rpg-like dungeon crawler. You proceed from mob arena to mob arena, following a story that looks like it was cobbled together from the backs of Magic cards. It feels like a story told by an extremely sexually frustrated dungeon master. The main decision you must make in the game is between unrealistic hot fantasy babe 1 or unrealistic hot fantasy babe 2 for example. But the story is easy to push aside. All the things mentioned previously make this a fun 10 hr romp through a series of dungeons, cliffside monasteries, and medieval towns brutally maiming a whole horde of humans and monsters in often hilarious ways. One other thing that stood out to me in a comparison is respect to elite mobs between this and games like God of War. Both used oversized monsters like Cyclopses (Cyclopi?). But where God of War introduced the unfortunate trend in quicktime events to get around how exactly a character of human size would bring down a building sized monster, DMMM actually forces you to think and figure out how to use your environment to kill the monster. Often there will be statues that one can break the base of, or log bundles held precariously by one rope. Failing that, I actually came to the decision, all on my own, to shoot him in the eye with my bow and arrow. The game did not flash it for me in brilliant foot-high lettering "His eye is the weak spot!" I just put two and two together and aimed for the eye, brought him down, drew out my dagger and finished him off. It was all seamless and unspoken and while I bet this makes for less consistent gameplay across the spectrum of people playing, I was so grateful that the game let me figure it out by myself. (And this was a repeated pattern throughout).