Thrik

sold

Right, you TOSSERS. After ruining my desire to play AC3 this had better be good! Going to pick it up after I've finished crying tears of laughter about it being priced at £59.99 on PlayStation Store.

Everything I've heard about the story thus far has me totally interested, although it sounds like the emphasis soon wears off 'saving your friends' and becomes more 'I am going fucking insane in this climate' which is cool. Kind of 28 Days Later. Definitely going to pick this up soon, although I'll wait for a technical analysis before choosing my console platform. I suspect the 360 version will run a bit better but who knows.

This ultra-long tutorial sounds like madness. AC2 didn't do much in that respect and its 'sequels' even less, so why do they feel the need to hold the hand of a world where surely even the most poverty-stricken souls in the heart of Africa know how to play Assassin's Creed?

Man. This game better not be as bad as you're all making it sound, this was going to be my Christmas total immersion game of choice like AS2 was a few years ago!

Back from a time when everyone's monitor resolution wasn't well beyond what's required to see it repeat itself. Jayel's(?) art still rocks, though.

Remember how I was saying that I'm gagging for a new simulation game, and that Prison Architect might be the game to scratch that itch? Well, fuck that shit. Looks like Sim City V is upon us at long last! :tup::tup: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?p=35585202 These are apparently scanned from some German magazine ahead of distribution or something like that. I knew Maxis was imminently revealing a new project but most of me doubted it'd be Sim City.

This is looking great to me, I'll definitely give it a go. There seems to be a disproportionately high number of Far Cry 2 fans on here so I'm sure our perspective is very different as I didn't get on with that game very well. Conversely though, I absolutely loved Far Cry 1 (which this looks startlingly similar to) and Crysis 1 which it also looks like Ubisoft have taken some cues from. In many ways this seems like the kind of game that Crytek would have made if they were actually good at writing, albeit not quite up to the same technical scratch. As for the marketing, Far Cry 2 didn't exactly have brilliant marketing either — in fact I recall it being very similar to this, albeit with less dubstep. But it still made out it was a lot more action-packed and structured than it really was. I think it's safe to say that the current developers understand what the spirit of Far Cry is and are doing a good job of keeping that in place despite the thematic roundabout.

Let's fucking hope so. Nintendo's continued retardedness in relation to online accounts and such going right back to the original DS is touching upon maddening.

Yeah, it's clearly going to struggle. Dizzy is a fond part of many people's childhoods but I'm not that certain too many people — including myself — are really that bothered about seeing a new one. It's a lovely part of my gaming past and that's kind of what I'm happy with.

Are we thinking of the same game? I'm talking about the Dizzy Yolkfolk that was ported to mobiles, which I'm sure was by DNA-something which is why I largely ignored it. It was the Oliver Twins who made the originals anyway really, CodeMasters only ever published Dizzy. This is the first time they've tackled making a new Dizzy since the classics so it's worthy of attention and anything else like half-assed ports is kind of irrelevant.

Basically, no.

Holy shit though, look at the state of the Oliver twins in that video. A far cry from:

Wasn't that just a port done by some other studio? In other news, I just tried to pledge and it seems you have to use an actual card nowadays. Keeps declining my perfectly valid VISA so, er... that's that.

I just jizzed so much money out my cock and into that Kickstarter.

I think with open world games it's sometimes really nice when they're long, as you get so immersed in the world and it leaves a really lasting impression on you as an experience. My memories of the excellent Ass Creed 2 are extremely good, same for Red Dead Redemption. It's almost like I'm remembering a past life, man. Some do try and push it too far though, and the gameplay just becomes stretched so thin and becomes so repetitive you start to resent every quest the game throws at you. Outside of open world though, games are still pretty short — excessively so in many cases. I guess they have to be because almost everything is unique, whereas open world is more about creating an environment and turning it into a labyrinth of missions while teasingly locking certain parts of it away until later. Somewhat like a roller coaster compared to bumper cars. Uncharted 3 was so good, but it seemed to pass so quickly. I guess there's no perfect length for a game. The Metal Gear Solid series has come pretty close, though.

Haha, man. I said in the Curiosity thread I thought the issues were all probably down to a poorly-configured web server infrastructure, but I couldn't have imagined it was only the one server they had taking on all that load. Holy shit, no wonder it pretty much exploded for days on end. With that much traffic hitting a single server it can be hard for admins to even access it, never mind set up a different configuration while being hammered. Not where you ever, ever want to be. But yeah, the interview just further reminds me why I love Molyneux. He seems to just think of himself as the same bedroom programmer he was years ago, and when he discusses his projects it's just like how me and my creative buddies at college would roll ideas around and get excited about them (and never make them of course). It doesn't seem to occur to him he's setting alight the imaginations of billions of people.

Everyone loves Molyneux. Quit hating. In all seriousness, the whole 'Molyneux overpromising' thing has always completely washed over me like a light drizzle. I count Theme Park, Black & White, and Fable amongst the best gaming experiences I've ever had, and while it seems that a lot of people were expecting even more than what they delivered that doesn't take away the fact that they're great games. What I find baffling is that despite everyone knowing exactly what Molyneux is like, they still let themselves expect far too much from his games — even though the logical sides of their brains should be saying "OK there's no way it can actually be as good as its creator is saying" and their expectations should be dimmed accordingly, a lot of people don't seem to be doing that. It's like buying a microwave off a salesman who tells you that it'll completely change your life, then expecting it to actually deliver. Most people wouldn't do that, they'd just expect a very good microwave and nothing more. So why do people get so sucked in by Molyneux? And why not just avoid listening to his interviews and shit like I do, thus circumventing the whole issue altogether? I dunno, to me Molyneux just seems like an extremely passionate creative who literally just can't help but get carried away about the latest thing he wants to bring to the world. I've come across a lot of people like that, it's just usually they don't get anywhere near the kind of exposure Molyneux does. But he's earned that exposure. The fact he's supposedly been breaking down into tears over disappointing gamers kind of says it all regarding how much he loves his craft.

Pickled onions are a Christmas thing? I eat them all year round.

Haha. That's pretty much an epic fail from Microsoft's marketing department. I've not renewed my Gold subscription since I first got my 360 years ago. I just don't spend any real time on multiplayer, and even when I occasionally have my friends have been on the PS3 or PC instead. Other than that I can't see any real benefits I get from a subscription and I haven't missed it in the slightest. I do remember it being a complete pain in the arse to cancel my auto-renewal, though — had to phone and everything. What a pain in the arse.

Nothing's been said either way really, it's the elephant in the room. Twin Snakes is an excellent remake that had more involvement from Kojima and his dudes than has often been acknowledged, but it was created on Nintendo's dime and has some Nintendo-specific content (easter eggs plus the Psycho Mantis saved game thing). So it's kind of stuck on Nintendo's platform unless it's significantly reworked. It's easy to imagine Nintendo just saying 'piss off' to it being ported to any other platform, and maybe Kojima doesn't want to go through the effort of re-engineering an already-aged remake and would prefer to completely redo the project as he's insinuated before — so who knows what may or may not happen in terms of MGS1 being remade for a second time. But until then, there's no reason Twin Snakes couldn't at least be re-released on the Wii U. As emulation has already proven Twin Snakes looks kind of awesome in HD and it'd be a pretty smart move from Nintendo considering them trying to push this console back into the hardcore demographic, especially with the recent HD re-releases of its sequels.

So, someone somehow got into the Miiverse 'debug mode' which amongst other things includes a list of each region's admins, buttons for deleting them (that don't work), plus a bunch of private forums: http://www.neogaf.co...ad.php?t=500411 The one that caught my eye was 'Metal Gear Solid'. What's this? The only sensible things I can think of are either a port of the recent HD re-releases of MGS2 and MGS3 (meh), or a fucking HD re-release of the GameCubes' Twin Snakes. Yes please.

Finally got in after ThunderPeel's tip yesterday. It's undeniably put together well in terms of the experience, so maybe they have put a lot of thought into the concerns above after all and they were simply tripped up by an inadequate web set-up — it happens. While I can't see myself spending any real amount of time with it, I'm glad I tried it out and can say I did long after the hype (and the game) have disappeared. In a weird way it's nice to have been part of it. They should make the game just do nothing once the cube is demolished, rather than going into some kind of demo mode. This will probably sound retarded but I got a really weird Black & White vibe when zooming in on the cube. I think it was the sound design, similar in terms of how the ambience changes as you move around and zoom in (as we did with islands as a god in B&W). I dunno, it just took me back for a moment. God damn I loved those games!

What avatar do I even have on here? Edit: Oh, right. Haha. OK, better Christmas it.

Yeah, very dumb article in some ways. It did get me thinking about how they could possibly manage things such as clearing layers and — most importantly — breaking the final block without serious synchronisation issues. You'd need some very smart code for that, including checking with the database much frequently as the game approaches the aforementioned important events. Of course, the fact I still can't even get into the damn game suggests it may not be so bulletproof. I'm not even convinced they have a reasonable web infrastructure, the amount of traffic they're getting doesn't sound like it should be frying a well-engineered and well-financed set-up.