Roderick

I can't get over the title Binary Domain. They took the two words that would most persuade you this is a service for registering a URL.

I might have taken it too far. The experience of playing mapless is causing a lot of tiresome doldrums as I need to search the entire world for specific waypoints, and don't know where the danger zones are. Also, the weapon selecting seems finnicky enough that I want to see it in the HUD. So I might switch some of it on again. It's hurting the flow, which overrules my pleasure of not looking at interface. I'm sort of projecting here, but I feel that since Ubisoft is primarily a French developer, the French version is super good. The voice acting is splendid, but I haven't listened to others so maybe the quality is high everywhere, also in Russian. Revelations got a bad rep as soon as it was announced, but so did Brotherhood. I'm happy to see that, at least in this thread, a lot of people discovered - just like me! - that iteration can actually mean a terrific experience and should not be discarded out of hand as a bad thing.

That's the emotion for when he peels away your skin after having pinned you to the wall with giant hook hands.

I've finally started playing the new Assassin's Creed... Revelations, that is! Let me post some of my ramblings here as I progress through the game. First thoughts first: I loved Brotherhood and think it's easily the best game in the series so far. It was such a pointed, elegant game, compared to the blustering breadth of AC2 and the beginner's flaws of the first game. I think Brotherhood might actually end up in my top 10 of favorite games. In line with the development of the series, I expect Revelations to be just as streamlined. Perhaps not more so, since they've hit a sweet spot. Instead, Revelations will probably change some dynamics to spice things up. And sure enough, we have tower defense. I'm not sure this is a better alternative to the Borgia towers or the cool sidemissions to steal or sabotage Leonardo's warmachines. But I guess at least it makes it interesting. I like that we travel back to Masyaf in the beginning. I didn't recognize it from the cool trailer with Woodkid - Iron as its soundtrack, but in the game it's very cool. AC revels in building up iconic places and then returning to them for bouts of nostalgia. Brotherhood did it with modern day Monteriggioni, this time we travel back to Altair's crib. Istanbul is a cool place. I don't know yet (don't tell me, please!) if we'll visit other cities, but I hope not. Part of what made Brotherhood so cool was that it took place in one location. Scaled back in size, the game came onto its own. Traveling all over a region to different cities in earlier games meant you never felt truly at home in any one of them. Rome is 'mine', by contrast. I hope I can say the same of Istanbul later on. The pacing so far is good. Yusuf is a fun character and I digggg old Ezio with his cool beard. He started out as such a silly little punk, but he grew on me as he got older himself. Fantastic arc, spread over three games. That takes vision. One thing I don't really like so far are the in-between bits with Desmond in first person mode. Not that they're bad, but they come instead of the cool/weird/disconcerting 'historic puzzles' from the previous two games, where you were tasked to find weird emblems or sigils in the world and then solve brainteasers. Those may not have been all stellar material, but I liked that it added yet another layer of things you could do in the world. Now all that stuff takes place outside it, and that makes it meh. The new hook is cool, but not really necessary. The bombs are fun, but holy cow does Ezio now have a ton of weapons at his disposal. Can't even fit the whole shebang on one dial anymore, two are needed! That's prime feature creep, people. As always, I'm playing without HUD, without looking at the map, and in French. Istanbul, le carrefour du monde!

Hey, maybe I'll check it out. So it's not kinda lame, but an actually fun RPG-ish thing?

I think that's different for everyone. To be sure, I don't doubt a lot of players won't care, either because they want to play the new stuff or they don't have a library of old games. But I played dozens of hours of Psychonauts on the 360, Mario Sunshine on Wii and The Wind Waker too. So it's definitely an important thing for me personally.

I've been rather impressed with the current batch of 3DS Lego games. Batman 2, Pirates and LoTR were all pretty fun and classy. Superheroes should be no different!

Basically, Steam Box is the PC form of Big Dog.

The started Pokemon are... well, they take some getting used to, to put it carefully. Here's the thing: I'm still very slowly playing through Pokemon Diamond. Up until now it has serviced my Pokemon needs pretty well, and unless X/Y brings something really unique and special, I fear Diamond will continue to do just fine.

Oh absolutely, I hate it. I'm banking on Steam to exist forever, essentially. But if it does, at least the PC as a system will ensure I can play all old games (barring always online server stuff and whatnot). I have no answer for myself except to continue this tortuous cycle. I mean, jumping ship entirely to PC would be viable if there weren't so many console exclusives around.

OK so that's basically extinct.

I think there is a severe point to be made about backwards compatibility. I'm with Sno: the next Xbox should have at least backwards compatibility for 360 games (and the odds are terrific that it will have that, because all current consoles have done this and otherwise there is small incentive to switch - not to mention how it opens up your consoles for the hundreds of games already out there on day one!), and possibly still emulation for the original Xbox. The idea of holding onto old consoles is horrible. I do not want my house to become a museum of old consoles that I have to keep just to play old games. I want a unified machine capable of playing all my shit, as much as possible. That's clean living, that's elegance, instead of becoming a warehouse of hardware. It's even more of a good fit considering that Xbox accounts are not tied to your console but can be transferred to new ones. If backwards compatibility was not offered, what's the point of that? Your downloadables might as well have been tied to the machine. Honestly, I'm starting to see (this late in the game, I know!) the extreme benefit of playing games on PC. Games I bought fifteen years ago can still run on the machine I have today: imagine if I had had to keep the entire range or shitty, ridiculous PC's I've owned since then! And had to hook them up every time I wanted to play Little Big Adventure 2, or Mystic Towers! That's what you're proposing, and it's ludicrous. Fuck the extra costs to the console makers: this is the basic service that they should offer in their new hardware, or I can't guarantee I won't just stop bothering with the whole sector when I see my entire, expensive library reduced to unplayable status. As for day one perch, I doubt I'll do that regardless of the features offered. History tells us the first generation of consoles breaks down way too easily and has tons of things wrong with them. This will happen again. Wait until the price drops after the first year, play all the amazing games still coming out for the current console until then instead. Which will be astounding because the console's full potential will be used.

Well, that's why they went extinct! (They are extinct, right?)

What, ananas?

Are you now officially a cyborg, Ys?

We're forgetting the exquisitely interactive Orange Peels.

Sleepy Dogs

Which is the exact half-life of Half-Life 3! Erkki scores again!

Let's make it interesting. By waiting a whole year for disappointment.

Can't look away. Is that Macy Gray? Did she have a lobotomy? I suspect this whole thing was a Truman Show-esque experiment by the producers.

When you can be certain that your child will be Ben, getting children is immoral.

The Last of The Henderson Family

It's an Experiencetm.

That was tangentially related, but as far as I'm concerned, even that one's answered to some degree.

I just remembered that Revengeance is the stupidest name ever, even for a video game, which has literally the lowest bar in coming up with half-decent names ever. YOU WOULDN'T NAME YOUR CHILD REVENGEANCE