twmac

That seems to be ignoring a whole slew of games and also regional tweaking. The most prominent in my mind was when I got an import version of strider for the megadrive (I filed the edges of my European console and it worked fine). I remember getting immensely frustrated for ages but beat it after about a month of practice. My friend had a copy and was perplexed by my inability to beat the game. Then he played my version and freaked because I had five lives to beat the game and he had had 5 lives and 5 subsequent continues to finish it. I agree about the 'accessible but difficult' idea (DDR, any shooter, the Virtua fighter series), but then there are games that thrive in Japan that are plain painfully hard and they aren't like anything I've seen from a western developer.

I think that Gears of War most closely resembles Kill.Switch, http://xbox.gamespy.com/xbox/killswitch/6301p1.html It is commonly referred to as a third person shooter; I think that is enough surely? I really liked Kill.switch, the cover mechanics worked really well.

I enjoyed both previous installments of the game, but on this one I need to stand back and wait for people to stop talking about this game. It is like listening to Metal Gear Solid or Final Fantasy fans talk about their franchises like they are god's gift to gaming when (although very passable) they haven't made any progress in years. Halo 2 really was a step up from one, even though some of the cut-scenes failed to load textures for a few seconds, the game play was solid and thye attempted, for the most part to change the scenary. The one thing they pussied out on that could have made a massive impact, basically, I wasn't happy with the outcome between the arbiter and Master Chief.

Holding down the PS3 hate. Avoiding the obvious comments... - Super Puzzle Fighter (although there are several issues that are severely broken) - Streets of Rage 2 - Band of Bugs In terms of XLA titles I've been pleasantly surprised by. - Full Auto - Condemened: Criminal origins - Tombraider: Legend - Kameo Are the other, non essential but really rather enjoyable (and cheap) games I've trawled through.

Same here, I have a hong Kong version of Crackdown (all in English) and it works fine on my North American console. The art work on the frontis hilarious. I put the game down after playing through it once, it was fun. But I just don't like these types of games enough to justify finding everything in it. One of friends, however, comes round and plays it very often and loves it dearly. In a year that has had so surprising moments of gaming fun. Earth Defense Force 2017 is currently sitting in the number one spot.

Damn, got to this thread too late. Fortunately it worked out as Earth Defense Force would have been my number one recommendation. Some of the later levels where you have to use sentry guns against hoards of marauding spiders is amazing. The thing is, on later levels and harder difficulties (struggling through Hardest now) 2 player is essential as the AI is useless in helping you. Marek, have you fought the Mech-Dino or the four legged fortress, the first time you see those is awe inspiring.

Okay, from a very random reference when i did some work for another company, there was going to be a really fuccking awesome Chaos Engine game which you could play 4 player Co-op on GBA except the company went bust. Bitmap brothers have announced that they are doing a sequel (a true sequel to the Speedball 2) on PC... and maybe 360. Please, I work for a testing company. I love this game. If anyone has any links with the remake, I would test this game for free. This game is number 2 overall in my favourite games ever made, I would work all and any hours.

Top five games that make me grit my teeth because I wish i could buy a Ps2 and still look at myself in the mirror each morning without feeling wrong: Virtua Fighter 4 EVo (the Ps2 still has the best D-pad of the last 10 years) Soul Reaver 2 (might require playing the prequels) Katamari Damacy Shadow of the Collossus King of Fighters 2006

Man, I must have been drunk when I wrote this thread, I don't remember any of this. Well the good news is that everything that i have managed to dig up on the game is that it is identical to the original. None of this 'punching opponents while holding the ball' shit. The leagues have been expanded I don't know how many (hopefully it isn't just one additional league), The colour scheme is pretty faithful as witnessed by certain screen shots. What worries me, it seems to be a completely perfect port. Which brings up a couple of issues. The bugs, I love Speedball with all my heart, but there is an exploit whereby you can stand in a certain position and bounce the ball off one of the bounce nodes that give you points and the computer won't stop you, I have racked up over 900 points that way. The second is that the defensive players tend to react incorrectly and it is easy to exploit them in two player. If this is a direct port these will be there. On my wish list: If it is true about the expanded league selection, it would be nice to see a Championship manager style evolution where teams move through the leagues and the competition changes drastically. Why not give it a cup final at the end of each season. Twould be genius.

I don't know about Grim Fandango... I liked the idea of criteria for a great game, although my criteria are a little different. For me great games are ones that I can sit down and play over and over again for any number of time. Whereas Grim and other games in that genre I would say were great experiences, I would have to leave them for a couple of years so that I forgot the plot and the twists to be able to enjoy it again. So much of it is reliant on the novelty of the first experience with diminishing returns with each subsequent replay. I would easily put Speedball 2, SMB3, and Super Streetfighter above Grim Fandango on the list as each of these I can still spend anywhere from 5 minutes to two hours replaying these; finding new things each time I pick up the controller. I enjoyed Psychonauts, Monkey Island etc. But like I said a great game for me has the very bare minimum of story and is never dependant on it to propell me through the levels. I mumbled something about Manhunt recently, again I found the game very compelling at the time. So I tried to replay it. Couldn't as I still remember the twists and turns of the plot too vividly and so I'm left with a simplified version of Splinter Cell with a decent soundtrack.

Okay, cool you guys started talkilng about distrubution. The reality is that, in most cases, a company will change the raing of a game by cutting the points of contention. Fuck all of that, if the game is good and is rated in proportion with what is happening. What does it matter? I'm fucking sick of parents pointing the finger when thye allow their kids to watch ' Hell's Kitchen, 'Survivor# and all those other shitty realiy programs. Fuck that, educate your child and they will uncerdstand the difference between right and wrong. Ban shit and all it will do is encourage children to track down these banned subjects

The original Manhunt was equal parts gruelling and enthralling, at first it was sort of amusing and ridiculous what with the violence being way over the top. Then it got dull as the actions were of a rinse/repeat nature. Half way through the game it started getting really hard, and I started to become engrossed in the game (this happened around the time you were required to save members of your family). I felt the game did a good job of making you really hate the antagonists, and despite the lead being almost as shitty, you rooted for him when it took half an hour of some white supremacist/fucked up rapist taunting you for you to finally get behind them and break their necks letting you get to the next check point. The music was superb, it reminded me of a classic John Carpenter score. Yet you were Michael Myers stalking other serial killers instead of helpless teens Honestly, the first game came from a dark place but the overall experience was cathartic rather than gratuitous. Okay maybe gratutitous to a point, but when the tension of being tracked by 7 sadistic SWAT mebers with flashlights, culminates with you successfully shiving one of them and then turning the tables using an automatic rifle on the rest. It is no more violent, repugnant, engrossing than any one of Arnie's early endeavours. Maybe a bad choice of genres but I still fell it is unfair to come down hard on Manhunt as it had a slow burning, minimilist plot that turned out to be far better and more effective than any over blown bullshit RPG I've played in recent years. Yes, I'm looking at you Final Fantasy. If Manhunt 2 strays from this and focuses too much on the physical violence as cheap entertainment then it will have sorely missed the poitn of the original.

Mentioned in another thread, Earth Defense Force 2017 on the 360 has just catapaulted its way into my heart. There are aproximately 50 levels with 5 difficulty settings, no single level takes more than 15 minutes to finish, the incentive to play harder levels comes in the form of new weapons only available in the more taxing settings. I've beaten it on normal, but I'm going back and replaying the levels I enjoyed the most in Co-op split screen or on Hardest/Inferno stages. Best 50 dollars I've spent in awhile. That and the free download Aegis Wing is fun in drunken four player.

That's a fricking sweet selection of back catalogue of games, incidentally if you or anyone stumbles across the MP3's for Phantom Dust sound track please let me know. In a perverse way I'm pretty keen on getting DiRt, the new colin Mcrae rally game. Apart from that the rest of the games that I'm keen on have already been mentioned.

No probs... I went to see the film again on Saturday (it ranks along side Elephant and Battle Royale as the one of the few films I've seen twice at the cinama). If anything, now that the cheap shocks have been removed because I know what is going to happen the film is even sadder. Went to see it with an ex, she was in tears after the first scene and had to go to the bathroom for a bit. A few other people actually walked out halfway through, it was at a more mainstream theatre so there is a good chance these people thought it was a sequel to a Sandra Bullock film and left... http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0191754/

Okay I posted last night, I've now spent most of the day thinking about the film. As a piece of entertainment the film is predictable, the twists and turns obvious. But the imagery, the imagery is haunting me. Mostly in part because if you replace the infected with normal people and then mentally picture the scenearios in places like Somalia, Dubai, Iraq... The film is still giving me chills. My friends who went with, said it was a piece of shit, and I pointed stuff out that had freaked me and they went 'I didn't get that from the film at all'.

Just saw 28 weeks later, and it was pretty jarring. A lot of references to political unrest in the world, mainly caused by America. The ending was a tad shit and perdictable, other than that it was worth going to see.

I finally got this for my Xbox and it has made me put down my 360 and play it for a seriously solid time (Oblivion being the only thing to drag me back at the moment). Quite simply this game rocks. The general idea is that you command an army on a 3-D battle ground from a camera position not much higher than shoulder height. You have a central unit which contains your hero and usually a contigent of other troops with different abilities. You then spend time making sure your archers get into a position they aren't looking straight into the sun and have a good height advantage, that your knights can charge without getting slowed down by inconvenient obstacles, that your pikemen are repelling the enemy cavalry... there are more units, but then you send in your command unit. Whenever this unit attacks another, you have direct control over your hero and you can enter a dynasty warriotrs style hack and slash, except the combat system is respectable, maybe more so than DW. The fight scenes are epic, the graphics are very good, the story line is a little ridiculous but when you start pounding some one with a 15 foot Orc it really doesn't matter. My only lapses back into 360 have been because of the save system, the game does not allow you to save mid-level, and if you fail it goes back to the beginning. Sucks if you have spent 40 minutes on it. The sequel is coming out some time soonish (Kingdom under Fire: Circle of doom) it is not one to be ignored.

Yeah, the original is nothing like the Xbox version.Take a lookat some of the screen shots: http://www.gamespot.com/xbox/strategy/kingdomunderfireheroes/images.html?om_act=convert&om_clk=tabs&tag=tabs;images These don't quite do it justice as it looks a lot cleaner when running

What?!?!?!? Sure, we have teenagers murdering people, other kids kicked out of school for making maps on Counterstrike. SNK Playmore sucking big time (although DOki doki is number one seller in Japan, the japanese are fucked up). But not every post is negative, maybe you find yourself more affected by the negative posts, and you don't give a shit about VT3, pictures of kittens, Kingdom under fire: Heroes etc. But it isn't all bad, is it?

In relation to the animation of the new Streetfighter, it makes a hell of a lot of difference to the gameplay if you add extra frames. The way the game worked is that certain moves have priority over others, to add frames of animation and keep the prioritiers the same would make some of the moves look extremely stupid. Worse, changing the hit detection has a good chance of comepletely changing the balance of all the moves. I'd love to see all the characters having every frame redrawn, and having more frames added, it just want happen unless you rehaul the entire game (something that won't happen unless Capcom release an official game that costs REAL money). I seriously disagree that only the hard core will notice as it will result in a broken game if they try and change too much. Shit, people will probably end up using T-Hawk. What I want to see is a vastly improved online system (I'm having trouble inviting friends to play on the current XBLA Streetfighter and it is definitely the games' fault), and Capcom, or another third party, releasing a decent controller for fighting games. the current D-pad is one of the most unresponisve pieces of shit I've ever used.

Agreed about the banter at Gamestation, it is weird how for some reason the people in there seem to get hired on the basis that they have an oppinion on games. I miss that shop, in canada it just isn't the same, maybe its because they just aren't as oppinionated (adn by that I mean geared by sales). I used to think EB GAmes were alright, but then they caused me grief.

Forever trying to be the spanner in the works toblix?

Well, I'd previously thought he had some taste when it came to games But, yes, a lesson learned and an expensive one at that.

Bullet Witch is pretty awful. There are a couple of moments of wonder (watching a meteorite descend on to a city) mixed in with extended periods of mediocrity. Avoid this game unless you can get it for cheap/free. The worst part is that my friend bought it because there was a hot girl on the cover. Idiot.