Erkki

Whew! Finally finished, and immediately uninstalled. I'd say there was about 60% of good game there. What I enjoyed most was the survival type thing where I had to go scavenge some gas for a car, or some food for someone, while avoiding the undead and bashing their heads in. And then driving over them with a car, crashing into a lamp post, then getting on the roof and hitting them from above while they aimed their grabby hands at me in vain. Of course the story seemed really Video gamey (in a bad way) from the start and I mostly ignored that, but it also turned out many missions were these fetch quests repeated again and again. "Hey, my friend is dying here, and despite having 20 or more of my tough-looking buddies around, I can't be arsed to stop scratching my balls and want you four to go fetch his medicine from exactly where I know it is." But yeah, there was definitely something to it, like the ad-hoc weapons, the brutal melee combat, the tougher miniboss zombies, some cool areas to explore, and so on.

So Mark of the Ninja is good, right? How about Dead Light? Also thinking about getting Gods & Kings, but I've yet to complete Civ IV or start Civ V so I might as well wait for another sale with that.

Why do they make these games so long? I'm 85% through and that's been 35 hours. There used to be a time when many people were complaining that games were too short. Now I really feel like some of them are too long. Ass Creed 3 is supposedly a 100 hour game? That, frankly, makes me want to play it less than if it were 5 hours, or actually to not play it at all. Anyway, glad I'm finally getting close to finishing this. It's been a good game with some awesome moments.

I've yet to play the D* Souls games so I have no idea. What kind of mutation of the escort idea do you mean?

I fear I may have And thus I hope Season 2 will forget about all the choices I made in Season 1. I don't want to replay it -- I'd like to live forever with the choices I made the one time I played through it. At the same time I don't want the baggage of those choices around in the next story. Although, I wonder if it would be more effective if it did force me to accept that baggage. (assuming season 2 is even connected to season 1 in any way)

Sniff

Yes, it was definitely toblix, and not me.

"Hitman: Absolution is a triumph, top to bottom. Fans of the series can look forward to the best entry yet, without question." (10/10) - G4TV, WTF?

Well, if there are 4 games you'd prefer to be made it makes sense to vote for only 4, otherwise the rest of your votes will work against your preference. Or if you can't pick only 4 or don't care which ones of your favourite N > 4 get made, it makes sense to vote for all of the N.[edit] Actually this works for any N not just N > 4 -- if you really want only 1 game to win, don't vote for anything else.

They need to patch Costume Quest prototype -- it gets stuck in combat mode sometimes. Also, suprised both by how similar and how different it is from the final game.

This is really cool! I voted for JP's Spacebase, Lee Petty's Autonomous and Brandon Dillon's Hack n' Slash. Seems like a boring vote as those 3 all seem to be in the top 5 or so. I even thought about voting for the White Birch, but I'm a bit sick of platformers (unless they are post-excellent). Still thinking what else I'm going to vote for... maybe The Flock or RedBot's Reboot or Echelon...

You could always try putting on some weight.

Over my dead body

Aaargh.. so now I was finally heading to the jungle, got in the armored truck... and noticed I had still one quest to do in the hotel area. I got out of the car and ran towards the hotel bungalows. Some timer appeared telling me to get back to the vehicle. I ignored it. When it ran out, the quest failed, and all I could do was load last save, which starts at the hotel. And there's no way to run from the hotel to the car quick enough because the quest timer will start again! WTF!? Screwed am I? Whew. There was a workaround where you had to quit to the menu and then it might load you at another place. Luckily it loaded me right beside the vehicle now. http://www.dead-island.com/forums/dead-island-tech-support/2721-devastator.html

I started playing this again since I wanted to clear my backlog somewhat. I still like it, but it's going a bit slow. I've played 25h already, and I feel like I would easily be done with it by now. I haven't seen as much variety as was promised (e.g. there have been hints of a jungle but I'm still bashing heads in the shanty town), and that's what keeps me going, but I also somehow got a bit obsessive-compulsive for some reason and want to solve all quests in each area before moving on. So the thing is that you move from point A to point B rather slowly -- due to the player character being slower than in most games and also because there's always tens of leveled-up zombies in your way. I think the game would work much better if it was harder in some other way but had less zombies (for example only the miniboss types, with only an occasional horde of regular Walkers/Infected), or if some routes would stay clear so you could backtrack more easily. Another thing that is tied to that is that the slowness of the pace amplifies the feeling that so much of the content is filler. There are only so much ways you can bash zombie heads and I would like to be done with it in 20h or so, but it looks like it might be a 50. Maybe if it wouldn't try to be this hub-based thing so much... I think a more linear set of goals would work fine in this game.

I'd love to see Clint Hocking's Far Cry 3 as much as I'd like to see Ron Gilbert's Monkey Island 3, but the Far Cry 3 as it is might still turn out excellent, just like Curse of Monkey Island did. The "playing it safe" thing mentioned by RPS is a bit disappointing, though, but I am not surprised as I never expected those elements of Far Cry 2 to make it into the sequel. I'm rather surprised the fire propagation stayed. I'll wait for reviews, but I expect this is a game where fun can be had, although it probably won't leave as lasting an impression as Far Cry 2 did.

Uh, but how would this actually work for seeing around corners when it's light? I thought their current thingie only works in the dark -- they can't distinguish photons flying at the camera from other sources, right?

I was reminded to buy this by someone in the GOTY thread, and I noticed there wasn't a thread about it. I just played for an hour or so and was blown away! Botanicula feels like the culmination of all the work Amanita Design have done so far with their previous games. I think it's mostly about the music and the fact that you have multiple characters -- the latter immediately makes it feel less lonely, and that seems to make it a better experience for this kind of game. And the dynamic music is just awesome! It doesn't work perfectly on every screen, and might not be technically as impressive as some other dynamic music systems, but to my ears it sounds pretty damn good. Just a few minutes in, it already made me think that if I had a kid I would want to play this game with him or her. Sincerely, Blown Away

That was a good read. I've no interest in playing the game, but the technical problems described are somewhat interesting. It's baffling that 22cans didn't really solve those problems at all.

Same here (actually I always intended to get it but had forgotten it existed). Thanks to the wonders of Steam I now have the game installed 3 minutes after reading that post

I haven't played that many games this year (and only sampled some), but I'm pretty sure of my choices. Even considering Dishonored, Assassin's Creed The New One, and whatever that is still to come out or I've not played yet, The Walking Dead and FTL pretty much have no competition. X-COM deserves a mention, but I think the game wasn't that well executed, actually -- Normal is way easy and Classic is way too brutal unless you switch into an extremely calculating mode of play, which slows the game down and makes the interface clunkiness even more apparent. Journey was amazing, but it was such a brief experience that I wouldn't quite put it as game of the year material. I have still some good games from last year to play (Arkham City, Assassin's Creed The Previous One, Skyrim is still unfinished, so is Dead Island, The Witcher 2 wants another go etc.) so maybe I'm finally old enough that I just can't find the free time any more to play all the great games I would like to. On one hand that is kind of sad but also has made me consider what I really want from games if I don't have infinite time/desire to play all of them. And The Walking Dead and FTL, in quite different ways, are great examples of that. If I must be picky about what to play, I will choose games that try to do something different and interesting and not be all about violence. Something like Uncharted 3 or Far Cry 3 or Assassin's Creed 3, or even Dishonored are games I would surely enjoy, but they have now become secondary. I might even wait for the Christmas sale with Dishonored, though it's of course not guaranteed to go down in price so soon. I'm currently most excited about The Witness, Gone Home and Machine for Pigs, and less so about any Triple A games. I've even mostly stopped following the gaming press* because I just want to care about a few games. So I expect next year in gaming will be similar to this one for me. Then again I just played to completion L.A. Noire, which I thought was interesting, but not a very good game, so what do I know. * still occasionally click a RPS link in Twitter, though

The Guardian interview actually made me more interested again. I still think it will be just like old GTAs, just with multiple player characters, but that can still be fun for hours and hours. And perhaps having proper flight capabilities does necessitate a larger map. If they are making the game as varied as San Andreas was (or even more varied, likely), that might be like the combination best of SA + IV.

No it wasn't. Well, occasionally it did get boring, and occasionally it did feel like getting anywhere took too much time, but it also gave a great feeling of scale and actually being in a big wild world and the landscapes were amazing. With LA Noire, I agree though -- building that world was a total waste for that game. But anyway, I'm disappointed that they keep making things bigger -- because I think that pretty much makes it impossible to make them significantly more detailed or simulated or interesting.

Hmmph...

I think both those skills work. Maybe Squad Sight pays off more in the long term (e.g with Double Tap), but in the short term Snap Shot is pretty good. You can't get a good position that covers all the places you want in all missions anyway, or not quickly enough. I remember one Terror mission where one of my snipers didn't move at all from the starting position, because I had to constantly rely on his squadsight shots as I got some pretty tough enemies revealed quickly. I lost my other sniper stupidly because i moved her on top of a structure where she was vulnerable and my medic didn't have a skeleton suit and couldn't follow her so she died.