lobotomy42

You, me, and most of the internet. I'm cautiously optimistic that Inquisition will turn the series around, but I'm trying not to get my hopes up after the feeling a bit burned by DA2 and The Old Republic. With Inquisition, it seems like they're going in a really....Skyrim-y direction. That's not really a direction I want to see the series take. Oh well.

Cautiously optimistic about the episodic model. I'm not totally sold on their "narrate my character's inner thoughts about my dialogue choices before narrating my actual dialogue choice" design, though.

Right, agreed. I'm just saying I don't think Tales of Xillia would be a markedly improved experience for Griddle if the skits stopped every thirty seconds to select a response. But maybe I'm wrong!

Sorry, I have to disagree here. The Mass Effect games - really, almost all Bioware games from the past five years - heavily lean on cutscenes for their storytelling. Many of them are disguised by putting a dialogue wheel in front and waiting for the player to select one of three options, but they are still essentially cutscenes. The only real story-telling that is done through non-cutscene methods in Bioware games are the giant text-dump codex entries. I can understand preferring that style to endless JRPG skits. But might I suggest that at least some of your preference for Western RPGs to JRPGs probably comes down to preferring the *content* of the cutscenes to the fact that there are cutscenes?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. I love going to the movies. Maybe I just haven't had the bad experiences other people have had, but seeing a new movie in a huge crowd in a large dark room is exciting for me in ways that watching movies at home just isn't. It probably doesn't hurt that it removes a lot of the sources of interruption - pausing netflix to get more snacks, checking your phone/laptop, interjecting your own MST3K commentary - which I find happen quite frequently when I watch movies with other people at home.

Kirby's Epic Yarn (for Wii classic) is two-player co-op platformer where, as I understand it, you literally cannot die.

See, I'm the exact opposite. I agree that Tom Cruise is definitely crazy and possibly evil. But I still think he's, if not a great actor, then certainly a very dedicated and intense one. I truly enjoy watching his movies, possibly even more so now that I have some glimmer of how nuts he is behind the scenes. Especially given that so many of his early films were dependent on his then-public-image as an all-American hero. (Crazy to think about now, right?) That's the thing, though, right - he works *really hard* to produce that image. He knows that people think he's crazy, and he knows that the more they learn about his non-professional life, the more people will think that. So he goes intensely overboard at being this inoffensively normal, relatable human being. He's like a minor autistic god trying to understand and emulate these mere mortals and their strange customs. Anyway, as someone who loves Star Wars and is fascinated by Tom Cruise, I really hope this actually happens. I hope he shows up as some kind of crazily-made-up CG'ed over grinning shiny-teethed alien.

A man can only dream: http://whatculture.com/film/tom-cruise-talks-star-wars-episode-7.php

I don't know, I'm glad they're moving away from tutorials, but I think there's an element of nostalgia at play here. When I was 8 years old, I thought Super Mario Bros was the coolest thing, but I don't think I ever learned all the controls or made it past world 1-3 until I was in high school or college, playing it as a "retro" throwback. And the control cruft on Zelda games has piled up over the years. If I were just starting my first game at Skyward Sword.....oof, I don't even know.

I was disappointed that Edge of Tomorrow was as smart as it was. If it had been a lot dumber, it could have been good fun. If it had been a bit better, and ditched the final-obligatory-stakes-raised-thirty-minute-action-sequence, it could have been a classic. As it is, it's sort of stuck right there in the middle.

Yeah, and I guess that makes sense but then why not just set the game in Gotham City, then? Why not include parts of a city that *aren't* run by psychopaths? The whole prison-city premise is an bizarre leap. The open-world-iness would go a lot further, for me at least, if it felt like an actual world rather than some arbitrary map that was obviously contrived for a video game.

So, hey, I just popped the now $5 "GOTY EDITION" of this game into my PS3 to play it because apparently it was the best thing ever in 2011. "Cool, I like Batman" I thought and decided to give this a spin. "Oh yeah this is by those Arkham Asylum guys! That game was rad" I further said to myself as the game booted up and Batman appeared on screen. Here's the thing, though, after a few hours I kind of hate it. The plot seems to be all over the place. I'm having trouble getting past the basic premise of Gotham making their prison into a city -- or is it making a city into a prison? Either way, WHAT THE FUCK. There are all these towers and skyscrapers and indications of industry and all I can think is: Who would run their business in a city of psychopathic prisoners? Why would I ever commute to work to my 12th-floor office job if it means sneaking past several dozens heavily armed thugs that work for one of a handful of super-villains? Or are they prison guards? What kind of economy can possibly prosper in a supervillain prison city? What the fuck is wrong with the people in Batman-universe?!? ("Oh, hey, let's elect a city council on the basis of their successful plan to turn our city into a giant prison.") Even beyond the premise, the plot is nuts. The gameplay is mostly unchanged from Arkham Asylum. Except that the tightly interconnected Metroidvania style overworld has been replaced with a sprawling open city map to explore. And by "explore" I mean hit R1 over and over while occasionally checking the map to verify your trajectory is correct and wait for some dialogue to trigger to indicate you have arrived at whatever the next thing is. (And also, if you want to beat more people up along the way, you can do that, because Batman just loves Are there no ordinary citizens in this prison city? (Sorry, still not over that.)) I guess it's not actually more improbable than a rich man dressing up as a bat to fight poor people, but for some reason Batman's ability to constantly grappling hook across enormous city blocks - or better yet, DIVE HEADFIRST INTO THE STREET and then suddenly grapple hook up - kills believability for me. The combat and stealth seem so far essentially similar to Arkham Asylum. Am I missing something? I feel like this game gets nothing but praise (and spot-the-misogyny side conversations) but is in fact an enormous step backwards from Arkham Asylum in terms of very broad design principles. In some ways it looks and plays very similarly, but it lacks all of the pacing and measured approach of Asylum, where combat and stealth and bosses could all be dealt with as if solving some sort of puzzle, the story was gradually spooned out as the player progressed, and the areas were designed with careful interlocking components. This game feels much more like a checklist of AWESOME GAME FEATURES that were thrown together because it was thought that they were necessary. Maybe my opinion will change later, but at the moment, I maintain that this game is a hot mess.

I agree with this, and I agree that this is something that should have been and could have been planned for. Still, I'd much rather have an industry that employs a diverse group of talented people but produces somewhat predictably unrepresentative games than an industry populated by a single demographic that is well-trained in the art of PR-speak and making games that appear "diverse enough" to avoid creating controversy around themselves. Yes, the obvious retort here is "Well shouldn't we have both???" and the obvious answer is "Yes, both are desirable." I guess my point is that at the end of the day I care more about diversity of actual people than diversity of fictional people. (That said, I have no idea if Ubisoft is more/less diverse by whatever metric you prefer than other game companies. In which case, their entire statement is just BS.)

I have heard good things, but not played, Heroes of Ruin.

I'm guessing it's just a vague statement like "Metroid still exists and we're thinking about it!" or "Retro is sure hard at work these days!"

I definitely felt squeamishly uncomfortable watching the Suda 51 trailer, which I never would have imagined I'd be saying.

Geeze, you're right, it's been so long since I've played Prime 3 that I'd completely forgotten that it still had the lock-on mechanism.

Am I the only one in the world who likes the original Grim Fandango controls? Almost no UI overlay, the ability to easily run in a straight line across screens even as the camera changes angles wildly!

Was the dual-analog system already considered "standard" when Prime released? My recollections was that it was Halo which solidified that control setup for console, which hadn't come out too long before Prime. But I am no shooter expert, so I may be incorrect. Also, didn't the games essentially have free-aiming in the Wii re-release? That would suggest the limited controls were not central to experience, unless I'm wildly misunderstanding how they were implemented.

Not to sidetrack the conversation, but I have never finished Super Metroid because I every time I try to play it I get stuck after about an hour. That didn't happen to me in Prime.

Holy Shit, I thought we were still making absurd predictions and then I browse over to eurogamer to find out you were actually reporting news: http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2014-06-10-after-over-15-years-grim-fandango-finally-comes-to-consoles

It was a swell game. Definitely not the best ever, and the formula got a bit dated by the third entry in the series. My sense is that the all the exploring/visor stuff that seemed so cool then would now seem dated, but possibly I'm projecting. Now I'm curious to play it again and see how well its aged...

Am I crazy for having a strong preference for the SNES Mario Kart where Donkey Kong is red?

That's probably the motivation, but once this peripheral exists, it totally opens the doors to other devs to use GameCube peripherals (in my imagination, at least.) Come on, Bongo-controlled platformer!