Bjorn

Except... Poor Lautrec,

Arkham Asylum, a perfect game if just a few boss fights were cut. Fuck you Mr. Matador-Bull-Rush Boss. It's hard for me to remember the last game that used that enemy type where it was actually fun.

A reasonable, rhetorical question that could be asked would be: What if you made a simulation of trying to run a small business in an impoverished US inner city neighborhood and filled it with all of the terrible movie tropes, cartoonish levels of violence, racist stereotypes and were completely blind to the actual reality of living in such a neighborhood? Would anyone defend it because it was just a game?

Where'd you go to school?

In Kansas making Oz jokes carries an automatic penalty of 50 lashes and Clockwork Orange style behavior modification.

I really don't remember having much of a problem failing hacks in B1, though it's been years since I played it and there may be some rose colored tinting going on.

And I tend to love them. Like the Pipes hacking-game in the original Bioshock? Awesome. Card games in Final Fantasy? Hell yeah! I even enjoyed them in Mass Effect. Like a lot of the things in this thread, it really does seem to come down to implementation more than anything.

I briefly spent some time playing Serious Sam 3 this weekend. I had completely forgotten how much faster paced a shooter is when there is no cover and no regenerating shields/health. I had more fun in an hour of playing it than I have had with a shooter in a long time.

After getting 4-5 hours into it, I'm loving this game. Every battles has a sense of weight to it that I feel has been missing from a lot of other similar games. To be fair, the only recent tactical strategy games I've played are Xcom and King's Bounty, so I'm not up with what the genre has done, particularly from Japanese developers. The conversation/decision gameplay makes me a nervous wreck though. Some decisions have some guidance to them if you've been paying attention, but others are just making guesses. Which makes sense, what with the warning early on about how leaders just have to make it up as they go along sometimes. I've seen a lot of people comment and praise the uniqueness of how Attack and Health come out of the same pool. It took me a few matches before I realized King's Bounty has been doing this for years, but it's also persistent across battles. In KB, you have a stack of units, and as the numbers are killed off, their attack power also drops off, then you have to go get some more between battles. Which actually creates a problem where a lot of people prefer armies that are unlikely to take many casualties and playing for minimal losses, simply to save the time of having to run around the world backtracking to reload your army. Which unfortunately means that a lot of interesting army possibilities end up not being used simply out of annoyance. Since in TBS your units heal between battles, it eliminates that worry about having to restock your army and lets you play with a preferred loadout or strategy. The always alternating turns took some getting used to, realizing that crippling multiple enemies was actually a better strategy than killing them outright. And by the same token, I've intentionally killed off one of my own people a couple of times so that my stronger units get to go more often. I know a lot of people have criticized the turn mechanic as the biggest pet peeve, but ultimately I think I like it for novelty, if nothing else. I do wish that it explained a few things better. Some skills clearly point out that they have friendly fire, while other skills don't mention it, but do still cause ally damage. It would have been nice to know the level cap was 5, I might have leveled up the stats of a couple of characters slightly differently. You should be able to move items around between people on the loadout screen. It's kind of a pointless time waster to force you to camp just to move a necklace from an injured unit to a healthy unit. I think I would love a procedural mashup of FTL/Oregon Trail version of this game as well. You have a goal making it from A to B in a certain number of days. Give the player a small pool of Renown to outfit the caravan initially, then GO! Difficulty could be set by deciding what two points on the map you would like to go between. Give each location on the map a difficulty modifier, so each game is decided by the combined difficulty of the endpoints.

Ugh, we had sustained wind last night of 50MPH, probably gusted up around 60MPH. Ended up tearing about a dozen shingles off our roof. So that's going to be fun fixing with expected highs of balls-ass-freezing-cold for the next couple of days.

This was kind of disappointing all the way around. For a software company, MS seems to have struggled to decide what their role as a game developer should be. You can see the weight of the plodding MS bureaucracy and executive changes in how they've handled the management (and the brief swing away from) internally developed games. They shuttered multiple studios in 2009, let Bungie go, were abandoning internal development. Then 2 years later, whoops!, that maybe wasn't the best idea for a console maker. So they start buying and building studios again. Sony, for all their missteps, have at least had a consistent investment in developing a wide range of IP. As for Epic, I had hoped that projects like Shadow Complex and Infinity Blade were the front wave of some new and interesting games from Epic, but it's looking more like that was a brief creative hiccup and not a brave new direction. Hopefully Chair is working on something new.

Holy crap, I didn't realize that EpicNameBro is actually helping write the strategy guide for DaS2. According to his Twitter, part of his job is to help make it more than a guide, and also help explain the lore and other elements. Whether the guide is worth buying or not, kind of cool that one of the biggest fans got hired to work on that project.

You're all a bunch of swell fuckers.

Killing Solaire so that you can engage in jolly cooperation makes me a little sad.

The thing that gets me about Search and Loot is that it seems to actively work against other goals of a developer. How many times you were moving through these incredible environments in TLoU and BI, ignoring how beautiful it was because you had your camera aimed at a 45 degree down angle so you didn't miss anything? Although ultimately it bothered me a lot less in TLoU than BI as it felt more thematically appropriate.

My two-hander is MY FAVORITE CHARACTER! He's not as efficient as a dex build, nor does he have the flexibility of my intel/faith caster. But crikey it's fun to just crush things. Even if you ultimately use something else, I highly recommend getting your strength up for the most ridiculous of the two handers (tooth, dragon sword and dragon axe).

@JonCole, have you had a chance to play around with steaming yet? I had an hour this afternoon to mess around. The HP laptop is performing MUCH better. It's odd what performs well and what doesn't though. Bioshock Infinite was fine at 720p 30FPS. Serious Sam 3 was near flawless at 1080p 30FPS. But Spelunky and Banner Saga both struggled to maintain framerate. Spelunky in particular is just unplayable no matter what options I use (unplayable in the sense that even brief significant framerate hiccups can so easily get you killed in that game). All the sound problems went away with this machine, but there is no surround sound, just stereo. Apparently, according to the Steam forums, the streaming service currently downmixes the source audio to stereo no matter what. This would be the single biggest deal breaker for me to stream to my living room. Also tried the family sharing that is mysteriously active on my account. It works! Was able to boot multiple games from my wife's account. Interestingly, it appeared to give her account its own saves for everything EXCEPT Spelunky. Spelunky was running off my save data. Which makes sense I suppose, it prevents people from attempting the Daily Challenge multiple times from the same copy of the game. Sidenote, I need to play Serious Sam 3 more. I forget how awesome a shooter can be when it just says, "Hey, here's a gun. There's a bunch of monsters to murder. Oh, and you have a really fast melee that can rip their hearts out in a single hit. HAVE FUN! Cover, ummm...there's a building you can hide behind. If you're a coward."

If the gameplay of that is a fraction of the quality of their design and marketing, we've got an early GOTY contender here.

Huh, so apparently the Family Sharing Beta also got activated on my account. I never got an invite, and it doesn't look like it's public yet, but I've got the option in settings and can configure it. Just noticed it as I was quitting tonight, will have to see if it works tomorrow.

Started this up tonight and really dug the bit I played. It's a bit slow and hand-holdy to get going, would have liked it if they just let me jump in. I think I'll play for another hour or two, then probably start over on purpose once I feel more comfortable with the battle system. It has a completely different flow to it than I was expecting. I'm way to used to Xcom where I can dog pile on enemies with all my troops at once.

Technically it's two different divisions on Namco, who make decisions independently. My guess is that the NA division didn't think there would be enough demand for a boxed PC release, and the EU division thought there would be.

Sweet! I just saw that the tweet was from the programmer on the XBLA version, and assumed it was for that. And thanks for the pics!

That video is incredible. I got really excited about that update, until I realized that it was probably just for the XBLA version.