lobotomy42

The vita thing seems plausible. Has it worked? As for DLC, I'm skeptical. It feels like half the time or more the offers come with all DLC included.

...And yesterday I was able to claim Machinarium, X-Com, Uncharted 3 and Resident Evil Chronicles in their entirety. Insane. I don't understand how they're making money off of this.

It's crazy good. It's such a better deal than Xbox Live. I have more games than I can play now, even without going out to purchase any.

I haven't played much of the multiplayer yet, but much of what RubixsQube says matches up well with my experience. It was pretty accessible, even for newcomers, and very hectic. I just finished the single-player story mode. This game was great! I'm slightly disappointed that but I'll get over it. What I felt most acutely was the pacing and the sense of balance. I was constantly shifting between exploring, puzzle-solving, fighting bosses and resource management - no element overwhelmed the others too much. The tone also shifts from quiet to hectic depending on what you're doing at any given moment. The whole experience just felt very smooth, everything transitioned from one thing right into the next. Pikmin's "one more day" isn't quite as addictive as Civilization's "one more turn," but it was a similar feeling. (Well, except Pikmin ends.) I don't remember if Pikmin and Pikmin 2 had the balance down this well or not. I seem to recall Pikmin being fairly self-contained as an experience, but Pikmin 2 having some frustrating spikes. (Those caves!) One thing I'm not crazy about is the savegame-rewinding feature. Perfectionism, to me at least, is the antithesis of the chaotic experience of venturing into the unknown, which is so much of the fun of the story game. (I did rewind a few times when I suffered devastating morning losses, but never more than a day. ) The mechanism seems to be there to prevent people from getting stuck, but how much of a threat is that? I had about 50 surplus days' worth of juice by the end and about 1,000 Pikmin. This seems like a problem that could be alleviated by simply doling out some emergency rations if someone is suffering some truly serious losses. All that aside - Pikmin 3 is everything I hoped it would be! It's wonderful!

I'm playing this for realsies now. It's fantastic! Really superb level design with surprises everywhere. It's been long enough that I don't remember Pikmin 2 all that well, but my sense is that these levels are more intricate and bigger. (Although obviously much fewer in number.) The commentary between the crew members is adorable, too. I also dabbled in the multiplayer with my brother and had a blast, although the experience is completely different. I have not tried co-op yet.

"Action Figures?" Come on, guys, those are clearly figurines.

Okay, I finished it. Halfway into Chapter 5 I got sick of these huge repetitive fights and changed the difficulty to easy, at which point the game became more enjoyable and less stupidly frustrating. I will say that the game is not long, and does manage to improve towards the end. But it never really gets *good.* The writing remains sort of hacky and genre-y throughout, like a bad episode of (post-2005) Doctor Who. It's a shame, because I really wanted the story to be good enough that I could say "Well the gameplay sucks but the story's good" but I can't. The gameplay sucks and the story, despite having a cool premise and setting, sucks. *Perhaps* it lost something in translation, but I doubt it. The visuals get better and better creatively and the music remains solid throughout. Those are easily the highlights of the whole game and the main reasons to keep playing. If you're still remotely interested in this game, then I definitely recommend going in on easy mode and keeping your expectations low, writing-wise. If you're just expecting a cool electronic soundtrack and a world made out of augmented-reality UI graphics, you'll be pleased.

They would market Mario, Mario Kart, Smash Bros and Zelda, certainly. But where does Chibi Robo end up? WarioWare? Fire Emblem? 3DS Games -- even the second-stringers -- debut at $40 and stay there for as long as they are published. And Nintendo usually publishes *something* each month, even if it's re-hash or a low-profile title. Most of these second-tier games would fall by the wayside. To say nothing of the fact that they're no longer selling hardware, and are actually now paying a licensing fee to someone else. If your argument is that *some entity* named Nintendo with the rights to Nintendo's back-catalog could reap tons of profit off of iOS games, then I completely agree with you. But Nintendo today has thousands and thousands of employees, dozens of divisions - for both hardware and software - and benefits from strong relationships with brick-and-mortar retailers like GameStop and Wal-Mart. Pursuing an "app" strategy would mean throwing a lot of that away, so I can understand their reluctance to do it. It would basically mean the end of the company in its current form.

I think what would happen is Nintendo would suddenly find their games lost among the huge sea of games in the various App Stores, they would no longer be the huge monster in an ecosystem of their own control, and as a result they'd be forced to knock their prices down to $4.99 just like everyone else. On the Wii U/3DS, they control the platform, are invested in it, can market directly via eShop and Nintendo Direct videos, etc. Having their own console, even an unpopular one, gets them lots of press coverage and attention they would otherwise never get. (Think of all those "BEST 10 GAMES ON PLATFORM X IN YEAR Y" lists that game sites love to run.) It's a huge disincentive for third parties to ever bother making games for Nintendo platforms, but a huge incentive for Nintendo to stick to their own consoles.

Well...maybe. That's their standard line, anyway. But it's not clear to me that 3D is actually a key feature of any of Nintendo's 3DS games (and the existence of the 2DS would seem to confirm this) and they certainly haven't put much effort into using the GamePad on the Wii U. I suppose it's possible there's some killer app waiting in the wings for the GamePad, but frankly, I doubt it. I really think their hardware design since the DS has been finding some unique hook that differentiates them from their competitors, and then seeing if they can work that into game designs after the fact. This isn't necessarily a bad strategy, but the causality seems to be in the other direction from what they'd like us to believe.

I think the main reason to stick it out with Nintendo consoles, especially the 3DS, is that they have a lot of Japanese games that will never come to their competitors. The Wii had some excellent exclusive jRPGs last cycle, as the 3DS does now. It will be interesting to see if the Wii U manages the same feat - so far it's Nintendo games only. But I can completely understand how, if you're not into *really* into Japanese games, there are plenty of choices to be found elsewhere, and keeping a 3DS around wouldn't be worth it. Most of the heavy hitters will eventually make their way to the PS3, it's true. Growing up, video games were for me synonymous with Nintendo and Japan, so it's frustrating to see the ascension of the Call of Dutys and the niche-ization of non-shooters, and Japanese games in particular have taken a hit. But even I have to admit that the games I'm looking forward to the most are not from Nintendo or even their close partners.

Maybe it's just me but something about this new form factor looks really stupid. Maybe it's the curvy corners.

I preordered it, it's sitting on my coffee table. But I haven't played it. (My backlog is pretty huge.)

The weak AI is definitely this games biggest flaw. I can see why it operates the way it does: since losing a unit is one of the worst penalties the game can inflict upon you (unit loss is worse than mission loss for most players,) it does make a certain amount of sense to just have the AI charge after the weakest, closest unit. But it's incredibly infuriating in a way that makes it both unpredictable and stupid. On Hard mode in particular, finishing a difficult map is often just a matter of memorizing a sequence of moves that don't result in unit losses and playing the map over and over as you extend the sequence. These kinds of slogs never feel like you "won" but out-strategizing the opponent as much as outlasting it.

I tried to play both The Witcher and later The Witcher 2, but both times I just could not get into the games. As much as they are lauded for their branching storylines and "real" RPG-ness, they felt to me incredibly linear and scripted, to say nothing of the fixed main character.

I finally got home from being abroad and have had the chance to start catching up on my console games, and I started with this game, which I was pretty excited about. I'm in Episode 4 now, and man is this game all over the place. I agree with a lot of the frustrations cited here - it's not a really very good game, in the normal sense, at all. But there are some neat parts embedded within it if you have the patience to toil through some repetitive combat an atrociously cliched dialogue. The strongest elements are the visual and audio design, which are stellar. The modernist "augmented reality" overlay on all the objects in the world is maybe not a century's worth of technical advances, but I'm willing to let it slide because it looks so cool. I'm approaching the halfway point of the game, and it hasn't gotten old. The "real-world" design is excellent, too, with some cool contrasts between the buildings of old Paris and sci-fi stuff that has sprung up around it. It's all fun to look at, when you're not trudging down a dark corridor, which, sadly, happens way too often. The music is even better - when the dissonant techno track starts up I know it's time for combat, and it's so fun to listen to that it successfully distracts me from the really horribly boring button-mashing that is the combat system. They have their aesthetic nailed down, and I can't get enough of it. It's a shame that so much of the rest of it is so generic. It's never really *bad* bad, if you know what I mean, it's just all so video-gamey. It feels very much like someone had a checklist of features and design elements for 3rd-person action-adventure games and the developers dutifully went and implemented all those dumb features at the expense of the interesting parts of the game. Linear platforming? Check! Lots of zombies to beat up? Check! Special powers? Check! A rebel dude who exists only as voiceover telling you constantly what to do and how awful the bad guys are? Check! It sucks that all of these features suck so much. They end up being the core of the game and they are truly dismal. The writing is ripped from every sci-fi dystopia ever, with not just tradeable memories as a major theme, but also robots and class divisions and explosions and zombies and police in power suits and and and. It's the kind of crap that might be excusable in some weird Japanese game because I could lie to myself with a "Well I'm sure it's deep and stuff in Japanese" but this completely doesn't work coming from France. The gameplay and story items that are actually interesting are the parts that are centered around the memory theme: the memory editing segments, the "memorization" of the location in the environment of items, the lead character and her memory loss, memory manipulation as a way to change people from friend to foe or vice versa. These are the coolest elements but they are just so sidelined that it's frustrating.

Oh, and I really miss using the Gamecube's c-stick to "swing" a bunch of Pikmin at a task at once. Is there any equivalent for the Wii U controls? It seems that, since the second stick on the GamePad is used for the camera, the answer is no.

I started it, but I'm so swamped with life and other games that I haven't had the chance to put much time in. It's pretty, though!

So this means that Jedi Knight: Jedi Academy didn't count as JK3 I guess?

The dot in the "Darth Maul" title makes it look like "Darth & Maul" which I hope is a stoner comedy game about two regular space dudes who have to go on the run after being confused for a Sith Lord and wacky hijinks ensues.

Wait, are those logos official? Do we now know that Episode VII will be titled Shadows of the Sith?

Well, I guarantee you its better than Neverwinter Nights. I haven't played much Icewind Dale, but my sense is it's more approachable than that game as well.

I eventually got through it by putting him in one of those invincibility spheres so he didn't bother me, taking out the cultists, running home, sleeping, rebuffing, then walking back in with a bunch of summoned monsters so that he would attack those instead of me, and just spammed him with every direct damage attack I had. So, there was a solution, although I don't think it makes much sense in the game world context. (Demon arises to take the world, hangs out in a basement doing nothing for a night.)

I think it would be less infuriating if there were clear ways IN GAME to acquire debuffs for certain buffs or at least figure out what the hell debuff you want. When I got to Aec'Letec and he "held person" my entire party, I tried every single potion and spell I could get my hands on to figure out what would prevent that. After some googling, I discovered that I needed a Cleric with "Impervious Sanctity of Mind." I didn't have a cleric, and even if I did, that spell was levels away. Potions of freedom didn't work. More googling revealed that "Cloudkill" was effective. But I didn't have cloudkill. I could have kept googling to find the location of that spell scroll, but at that point, I'm already pretty out of the game. That is weird! The game is suddenly very different once you get to Baldur's Gate, with most of the action happening there rather than throughout the fields and mountains and such.

After a year of on and off playing (vanilla) Baldur's Gate, I decided to dedicate some time to finishing it this past week in anticipation of Shadowrun Returns. Here is my thought-dump: D&D Mechanics are terrible for video games. Is anything less satisfying than the save/rest/oh-crap-random-enemies/reload/rest/rebuff cycle after every major fight? Is it really tactical to rest & "relearn" different spells, cycling through your entire spellbook, just to figure out which obscure buff counters the obscure curse this particular boss casts repeatedly? I posit: No. These mechanics might not be so bad in a leisurely-paced tabletop game where a DM can adapt the challenges of the monsters ahead to match the characters who are playing with him, or "speed up" time where appropriate. But in a computer game they are mostly tedious and I don't think they add any particular layer of strategy beyond "save frequently so you can meta-game." The tone is surprisingly modern. Going into this game, I was thinking of it as a "classic" and "Bioware's first ever RPG" -- something from the past that later RPGs would build on. But what's really striking about it is how not-classic it feels. The tone alternates between serious and humorous quite suddenly, and both other video games and RPG cliches are frequently taken to task. To top it all off, the protagonist - whose character is made evident via the journal entries and dialogue options - seems pretty cynical about the whole endeavor, frequently being outright sarcastic or otherwise belittling the predictability of the events around her. Somewhat ironically, this "classic" almost reads as a parody of RPGs more than a genre-defining piece itself. The protagonist is "fixed" not entirely unlike the way Shepard is. Her options in dialogue frequently amounted to "nice" or "nasty" versions of the same thing, much like the conversation wheel in Mass Effect. In some ways, Baldur's Gate is actually more linear than Mass Effect - there aren't any particularly big choices to be made. You can generally be good or evil, and sometimes kill some dudes instead of talking (or talk instead killing some dudes), but despite hours of aimless wandering in the early game, the course is essentially fixed. Considering all the internet fanboy whining about how much deeper and more sophisticated the older RPGs are supposed to be (when compared to modern Bioware stuff) this was surprising. The expansion content is generally superior to the main game content. Although the expansion content features less open exploration and more linear sidequests, I found most of it to be considerably more developed and interesting than the main game. Better integration of story throughout the gameplay (rather than an infodump at the beginning/end of a quest) and more condensed, interesting content all-around. Christ, that was long. Speaking of content - this game is HUGE. The scripted/main content alone is enormous, and if you count the time I spent dying/reloading, than this game easily ate up hundreds of hours of my life over the last few years. I didn't do every little niggling quest, but I think I saw all of the major elements. Character progression is really satisfying. The double-edged sword of D&D is that, since the combat is so hard and the save/rest/rebuff system so infuriating, every little improvement in your characters stats (mostly via items, not leveling) makes a huge difference and feels very good. Maybe for not totally the right reasons, though. Well, that's that. My comments as usual sound negative, but I really did enjoy this one quite a bit. At least, enough to stick with it (on-and-off) for 18 months.