miffy495

Yeah, for me it's the Wii's Virtual Console. Playing Sonic (1 through "& Knuckles"), Vector Man, Streets of Rage 1-3, Golden Axe, etc is pretty much what we do on days off together. Working through pretty much anything she used to play before her Genesis broke when she was young. I've also been introducing her to SNES stuff, since I was a Nintendo fanboy back when she was a Sega fangirl. Apparently Donkey Kong's voice sounds incredibly stupid and she can't stand him, but otherwise we spend a ton of time going through the best of mid-90s console gaming. I vehemently deny this. You've even been there when we've talked to each other, Patters. Proof!

Ah, well then I'm exactly the same as you. I guess I'm still platinum-less. Do they not give out platinums for downloadable games? I thought it was just automatic when you get every other trophy that they'll give you a platinum? Weird... And Mike, I've had my savegame on the DS remake of Chrono Trigger right before the fight with Lavos for about a year and a half now. I fought him twice and died horribly as soon as he changed to his final form, so I just assumed I was way underleveled and gave up. Haven't touched it since. This is my usual pattern with a JRPG. Almost did it with Dragon Quest IV too, but instead I walked around for about two hours of game-time leveling my party from 33 to 40 in preparation for the fight. Riveting stuff. The roll I've gotten on this year of actually finishing things (44 games since January! 39 if you don't count each of the Fallout 3 expansions as a thing! 30 if you count Telltale games by season rather than episode! Even at the lowest possible count, that's still pretty incredible!) pushed me to go beyond what I'd normally do to kick Psaro's ass.

Yeah, I just bought Epic Yarn so that I could play it with my girlfriend. Of course, she gets motion sick with anything 3D and has no interest in anything post-sega genesis/SNES that isn't a Pokemon game, so Kirby is a rare treat for us. Sounds like you're looking for something slightly more hardcore than that. Maybe Dead Rising 2's co-op mode? From experience with EDF2017, I'll warn you that while it's a great game, the story is definitely not what you're there for. If you want to play a sketchy 3rd person shooter where you blow up a lot of things and the frame rate drops a bunch because of all the awesome shit you're doing, then you're good. If you want a story based game that will draw two people through together, look elsewhere.

I too finished Costume Quest last night. First Platinum trophy I ever got (that's every achievement, in 360 terms) and I really enjoyed it. Definitely easy, but sharply written and a lot of fun. I would highly recommend it to anyone. Also this past week I've finished Splinter Cell Conviction and Dragon Quest IV for DS. Conviction got much better once I stopped trying to play it like Splinter Cell, but that just says to me that they made the wrong game. It was certainly not bad, but it wasn't anything at all how I'd like the series to be going. Oh well. It may be my last foray into the games. Also, I loved how during the final section of the game I got a good thumbs-related chuckle out of that one. Dragon Quest IV is really really good, despite it having taken me over a year to play the 30 hours from beginning to end. I enjoyed pretty much all the time I spent with it up to the last two hours, which were just spent grinding in anticipation of the final boss. That's a real bummer, especially as up to that point I'd been really impressed with how grind-free the game had been. The localization is brilliant and the gameplay is rock-solid old school RPG. I realized as the credits were rolling that it was the very first JRPG I've ever finished. I've beaten RPGs before, but never one of the Square-Enix variety. In fact, never one that's come from Japan at all. I've played a lot of them, but have either stopped at a save right before the final boss fight (I'm looking at you, Chrono Trigger) or gotten about 20 hours in and lost interest (any Final Fantasy game). It's weird to have been a gamer for so long and have sampled so much of the genre yet just be finishing one of them earlier tonight. Long story short, DQIV is great, and if you can find a copy (I understand that since I picked it up it has become harder to get ahold of) I very much recommend it.

I just got to the second trick or treating section and I have to say I'm really enjoying it. It's a very charming game with nice writing. A simple RPG, sure, but I've also lost a couple of battles, so not a particularly easy one. I love finding the bits for the costumes, and the special abilities can be great. The statue of liberty's heal spell makes me chuckle every time. It's not the best thing, but I'm more than willing to give it a for now. Looking forward to playing more after work tonight.

Older games not having difficulty settings is actually one of the things I don't like about them. The fact that they leave you with nowhere to go if you're having no fun ramming your head against a wall of difficulty surely can't be seen as a plus? It's caused me to quit games and never come back to them far more frequently than it's made me enjoy a game more. Furthermore, I see it as contributing to the old boy's club mentality that makes me uncomfortable with gaming in general. If a game can't be toned down and is made exclusively for the "most of us" that you mentioned (read: someone who is invested in the hobby enough to post on a gaming forum) we've created a barrier for entry that is restricting the hobby from reaching a broader audience. Sure, social games fill a niche, but someone who enjoys Farmville and wants to check out "real" games won't have the skills necessary to jump in. Even as a mental thing, it's helpful for a person who is intimidated by the hobby to see an "easy" option to assuage their fears that they've jumped into the deep end of the pool without ever learning how to doggie paddle. I think an implicit assumption in your complaint is that anyone who will be playing one of these games is already a gamer. Imagine someone going from Mafia Wars into Ninja Gaiden and tell me if you think they'd ever pick up a controller again. In addition, I'm not convinced that difficulty levels could be improved by a developer choosing which variables to change to create them, nor that the problem with difficulty levels can be attributed to poor work on this aspect of the game. As Jon said, even something as minute as a health/shield adjustment in Halo can drastically change the gameplay as it gives the AI more of a lifespan in which to flex its muscles. If you kill an AI before it has the chance to impress you, you'll never be impressed. Yet for a change so simple, Halo is incredibly well regarded for how it handles difficulty. Metal Gear as well, as people have been saying, does a fantastic job of changing your equipment and enemy routines in order to keep the experience fresh. Even on "very easy" mode, you can still die fairly quickly if spotted in Metal Gear Solid, and your equipment is always your life-line. A convincing case could probably be made for giving you shoddier equipment in MGS being equivalent to simply lowering your overall health in a character-action game. These basic and fairly minor tweaks seem incredibly impressive due to the quality of the rest of the systems underpinning the game, not because of what is being done specifically to your or your enemies' health. In essence, that is still all that is being changed, but in these cases it is allowing more of what sets the games apart from the pack to shine through. All of this leads me to suspect that the problem is not in the fact that a difficulty level is not much more than moving sliders determining health and damage, but rather that it is rare that a game is designed well enough for this to make the difference we want it to. On the other hand, I'm with Thunderpeel on Quicksaves. Properly spacing out your autosaves so that you don't need to have quicksaves is an art form. I'm currently finishing a playthrough of Splinter Cell Conviction, and I can't tell you how infuriatingly bad the autosaves are in that game, but I would much rather they be improved than be given a quicksave option.

So yeah, there's that.

...And here is exactly why we do have difficulty levels. I play most games on Normal. If a game does not have a selection, I'll just go through it. There are some games though where the difficulty I have chosen is too much for me (Bioshock 2 is a recent example) and I'll bump it down after getting way too frustrated on a section. If the choice hadn't been between frustrating myself further and bumping down the difficulty, but rather between continuing or not, I never would have finished the game. Yet I've seen people, even on this forum, talking about how damn easy Bioshock 2 was. I've beaten a lot of games that people consider punishing on normal or higher difficulty with no problems as well. The problem is that the things that you mention are near impossible to quantify, meaning that we'll probably never be able to get a baseline reading for the average gamer skill. Given the games that you mention playing, Tanu, I doubt the baseline would be satisfying to you anyway. I'm not against having a normalized level of challenge that "normal mode" could be set to, but I think that outside of hypotheticals it may be impossible. What bothers me is that you seem to think that having this would make it ok to get rid of difficulty levels altogether, which seems ridiculously extreme to me. Eliminating player choice should never be the answer when we're talking about how to reduce frustration in games. To sum up, ideally just clicking on "normal" should get the average player all they need, but I think the problem with difficulty is that yes, it is that difficult to understand.

You're not done yet. Go wander around Blackwater.

Yes, but did you get the real ending, or just the ending?

Currently, I'm working like crazy and in the middle of moving. All of my shit (except for my PC, PS3, and 360, as well as a couple of games for each) is in boxes right now, and most of those boxes are in storage. Unfortunately aside from "not where I am right now" I do not know where I will be living in November yet. Apartment hunting, yeah! Also, the Calgary International Film Festival ended about a week and a half ago, which is the busiest time of year for me at work. Or it would have been, had my theater's 75th anniversary month not come immediately after. I went straight from CIFF into ridiculous amounts of projection work for all of the special events we're hosting. This has meant an average (!) of 5 prints to work on each night at work, as well as almost daily midnight shows. Most of these are selling out as well, as for any show older than 2 years we're making it free with a food bank donation. The food bank is fucking loving us right now, especially after our Tarantino night (Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction) and the standing-room-only Big Lebowski late night show. All of this means that aside from a bit of time on my DS on the bus, I haven't played a thing in a while, and probably won't for another while yet. Whee!

Hey, I have MI 1 and 2 on my ipod. Let us commiserate. At least I only spent two dollars on each...

Agreed. That was easily my favorite moment. When I realized what I was doing, my mind was blown.

If there comes a time when I can get Bioshock 2 for either console for $10 or less, I will play Steve's goddamn DLC. Until then, sorry.

Yeah, after posting I started googling around. It looks like it will be 360 exclusive, but interviews with Inafune are claiming it will also be standalone. I will therefor save the $25 and buy the PC version. I'll also be waiting until work slows down and I finish moving house though, as I won't have time to play it until after both of those things happen. Who knows, there may be a steam sale by then.

Does anyone know if the Case West stuff will be coming to PC? I'm pretty much decided on the PC version, but the thing that's holding me back is that I'd like to play that when it comes out. If it's exclusive to owners of the 360 version, I'll have to think a bit harder on it.

Oh man, I just watched the Giant Bomb quick look. I wasn't sold on this before, and have never bought a $15 PSN or XBLA game before at full price, but this is now totally a day one perch. Well played, Doublefine. I just need to make sure that my PS3 is online on day one (currently in the middle of a move, so now I have to keep the system out of boxes until I've had a chance to get a bit of my CQ on).

Happy birthday Erkki, and to the thread as well. (mostly Erkki)

As I said really early on in this thread, one of my favorite books is Rendevous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke. It's about a group of astronauts working to explore a hollowed out asteroid which springs to life as an alien terrarium. Really interesting, and seems sort of like what you're looking for. No real horror waiting in the darkness or anything though. I've finally gotten around to reading Leonard Cohen's Beautiful Losers. I'm about a third of the way through it now. It's really good, but also really challenging. It jumps back and forth from a regular narrative to poetry at a moment's notice and can get kind of hard to follow at times, but so far it's been really worth paying attention to. There was one chapter that had every single word capitalized and was read like a prayer, one that was only about 50 words long, and one that was a three page long stream-of-consciousness sentence full of sexual screaming and remorse. It's only about 250 pages, but I can see it taking me a while to get through. Very good read though, and recommended. Particularly for those of you who may already be Cohen fans (I booked a trip to California summer of '09 just for the chance to see him live, so I fall into that camp pretty hard).

So? How does it play on PC? Or are you using a gamepad? If that's the case, does the UI change to 360 inputs and such if you're doing that? Can I buy it on Steam, save the $30, and have almost the same experience I'd have on 360?

Yup, as I said earlier, GoG did a stupid thing. A really stupid thing, honestly. Am I still angry? Sure! Is it going to stop me from supporting them when everything they've done besides a boneheaded marketing ploy is exactly what I want from a digital distributor? Fuck no!

Been going through my DS stuff lately as I've been packing all my consoles in boxes in preparation for a move. Finished the first Professor Layton (!!) and Picross 3D up. Perfect scores on every level of Picross 3D, so I'm pretty happy with that. The Gold challenge on level 10 of Hard was crazy, and I finished it with 30 seconds to spare, but I did it, damn it. Layton was really good, but as everyone is talking about 2 sequels past what I've played at this point, I won't bother talking about it much.

I have a few as well (and the Friday meet-up), but haven't bothered to unload photos from my camera yet. When I do, I'll put a few up in this thread.

Birthday!