Sombre

July 2010: Pixeljunk Shooter Demon's Souls Valkyria Chronicles Punch-Out Alien Swarm InFamous

Can we please be careful with Max Ideas? It's already reaching Wizard levels of oversaturation.

You motherfuck. I was halfway through making this thread before I forgot 2 months ago. Will write a big thing up later. Minecraft is superb!

Predictions for Snooglebums: Gaynor GOTY All of the moonbase alpha shit Nasty/Good/Badass Hearing Chris talking about being a useless robot man made me roar with laughter

THIS IS WHAT I WANT!!

EA presents: The Killcount of Saint Germain.

I don't think this is a good game at all. Infact, I'd say it's actually quite terrible. I'm playing it at the moment, . It's just ridiculous. The enemies take insane amounts of punishment, and their AI is just bizarre. There's no seeming way to get to one place without being riddled by bullets consistently, it's so sporadic- either jokingly easy, or ass rapingly hard. I can't make it to the next sewer, because I get annihlated when I'm within 50 feet by the INCREDIBLY long ranged enemies, all the time, who have infinite health. Climbing is another problem. Because it's so context insensitive, I can't climb what I want, it just does what it feels like, it's like the world is metal and my guy has a magnet for a dick. Endlessly frustrating.

Patters is the antagonistic ally.

BEWARE OF THIS MAN.

Brilliant. I need to find out how to do this for next time.

If anyone wants to play, hook me up, I can't do shit with AI SID: Fallen189

I just battered Mr Sandman on Punch-Out, finishing the career mode. Great game, made me feel young again. Challenging like all nintendo games are, but not unfair.

I'm in, and I'll play!

In other news, I just won the ORIGINAL Starcraft through a twitter competition. Good times!

Now I don't want to listen.

Lovecraft. Sounds right.

I think with that, you have to be kind of careful that you don't make your game too formulaic by having a like "Here's the bit you can run to. Here's a sniper nest". I think it's a hard thing to make feel "Realistic", in regards to just believable human AI. F.E.A.R was the first thing to make me REALLY get into the mechanics. Because the AI was so brilliant in its time, it really made you use the time freezing stuff, grenades, melee stuff, I found it really exciting how the game made you feel like YOU were the prey for the entire game, which was really cool as a player, because as you said, it puts the pressure on you and forces you to have more dynamic combat situations.

Killzone 2 had that actually. You shot them once and their helmets pinged off. Then one more shot killed them. Weird game.

In relation to that, I know exactly what you mean Chris. Recently on the Bombcast, Jeff Gerstmann was talking about how he felt that "Headshots have ruined video games". It obviously wasn't as black and white as that, but allow me to expand with a personal explaination of how i feel, in relation to what you said. I think locational damage is a good thing, to an extent. It makes games feel more realistic, because hey, if you shoot a guy in the head, his brain is there, and he dies. However, that leads to so many just...sloppy game design choices. I feel with something like (Excuse me) Bioshock, they supply you with a wide enough variety of choices, and ways in which to kill enemies that it's not a pain in the ass to experiment, and set up all these weird traps. But take something like...the new Splinter Cell game, or Metal Gear Solid 4. For games which focus on stealth based mechanics, with a lot of "Gadgetry"- Little robots, mines, grenades, and so on and so forth, essentially a lot of "Fun ways" to try and kill enemies, there's no real incentive to do it. Why would I spend 5 minutes setting up an elaborate trap of barrels, breaking line of sights, and having 5 seconds of "Hey that was cool, I guess", when I can literally grab a rifle, with no relative falloff with bullets (Because games have magic infinite range bullets), and just shoot the dude in the head. In a way, this is what Gerstmann argues, just how basically as games have developed, it's easier and easier to just be like "Okay, I have a rifle, and I COULD make a weird trap...or I could just shoot him in the head". Not to say it's entirely bad, headshots are cool. But when your game essentially becomes min/maxed down to "Hey, shoot these guys in the head", it kind of diminished any kind of new mechanic, or specific gameplay point kind of moot, because there's no player incentive for it. Not played Singularity yet, but from what I've heard about it, the TMD shit sounds cool. I hope this post made sense.

Wish I could be there, but as a UK thumb, I can't make it. I'll be there with you in...heart, I guess. Looking forward very much to the audio, however.

Just finished Valkyria Chronicles. I don't know much of what to say about it, apart from that it was a really really quality title, through and through.

I got that kind of apathy towards the gamea fter a very short period of time. After about 6/7 hours, I just couldn't be bothered to play it anymore. It felt like just too much running and gunning, fancy pants arsing about. While I know a lot of people really liked AC2, I think it follows the modern gaming model of "Here's a big open sandbox and a way to make things happen, please go and do it. And here's a flying machine, sometimes". I guess my problem with AC and AC2 was that I didn't really FEEL like an assassin. I felt like a clumsy idiot trying to make assassinations, but really fucking it up, much akin to Blood Money. I'd try and set up these really elaborate ideas, then I'd accidentally get into the enemies peripheral, and it just derives into clangy clangy sword fighting.

Just finished Flower and Demon's Souls. More to come on Demon's Souls soon. When I've calmed down a bit...

Things are'nt looking good.

Some people are getting bold.