mikemariano

This is a Portal 2 ARG, right?

Dark Leonard, I never got a Playstation 3 because I feared I would have the same experience as you. It doesn't sound bad, but it doesn't sound like it would captivate me. And this is your first post! You should go into the "New people: Read this, say hi." stickied thread. Then Chris Remo will tell you, "Welcome, dude!"

Oh, that is a good question. In Fallout 3 you could stay on the overworld map for hours and never autosave, but to do anything useful you often had to go into buildings or subway tunnels, especially once you got into DC proper. New Vegas seems to have fewer opportunities to shove you inside or underground. Have they really not adapted the autosave to react to that?

"With so much to discover and kill, you’ll be entertained for hours and hours." -- IGN.com

"It's mostly a reminder of a bygone era – when Japan kind of thought we sucked." -- IGN.com "Kirby doesn't suck any more." -- IGN.com

Ha, my completion time and my time spent playing the DS remake of Dragon Quest IV are similar. Actually, if you count playing the NES version halfway through on an emulator, it took me over a decade to beat this game. You're right about the grinding; the first chapters of DQIV are paced amazingly well. I actually thought the same thing about the first parts of Final Fantasies V and VI. I thought they had amazing openings, but I am currently languishing in their endgames. According to online strategy guides I have at least twenty levels of grinding before I can take on Kefka, even though I have completed all sidequests. Not fun! I would give Chrono Trigger another shot. Lavos is tough, but if you can stay alive you should be able to figure out his weak point. Plus in New Game+ he just keeps getting easier.

I'm still playing Fallout 3, so it may be some time before I make my way to New Vegas. I am curious, though, about one aspect of the combat: Do enemies still run in a straight line towards you until they die? This behavior took a lot out of my enjoyment of Fallout 3. A group of Raiders holed up in a home shouldn't abandon their hideout and chase me halfway across the map. PS: I would like to commend Quintin Smith at Rock, Paper, Shotgun for essentially saying, "Shame on you, Obsidian, for not making a game as good as you should have." I suspect New Vegas is good enough for myself and many other players, but everybody needs a good kick now and then. If only there were someone at Bethesda whose name we could curse....

Is this Wired article for real? Kohler mentions that this will be a glasses-less 3D, which...I actually don't know how that works. I guess Wario will be throwing things at us?

Holy cow! Two of my 3DS predictions are coming true! And all within the same game. Level-5, Capcom Announce Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney Chris Kohler's comment is also hilarious:

Indeed. Rock, Paper Shotgun today lovingly details some of the many bugs of New Vegas. Two crashes in four hours? That takes dedication!

Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who never, ever successfully hit a target without using VATS in Fallout 3. I failed to shoot Super Mutants that were within sledgehammering range. My method of fighting became little more than "run backward and frantically hit the R Bumper."

Ah, now that I split those games out in my mind I think you're right. I remember slowly, carefully jumping over lava pits in Sonic 1 and thinking, "this is exactly the opposite of what I thought this game would be." I got lost a lot in Sonic 2/3/Knuckles, but being stuck going in circles is better than being stuck over pits of lava---because when you're lost in a Sonic 2 level you're still moving. I'm wondering how that "torch" zone will play in Sonic 4. Slowly lighting up a level might work in other platformers, but in Sonic you don't know what's ahead of you most of the time, anyway. Being in the dark doesn't seem like too much of a disadvantage.

I'm at work right now, but I'm curious to watch this video titled "Sonic 4 physics and gameplay complaints". <object width="480" height="385"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6-1cGzPn3E?fs=1&hl=en_US"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6-1cGzPn3E?fs=1&hl=en_US" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width="480" height="385"></embed></object> Twelve minutes! I hope this guy becomes the next Phantom Menace review guy. The IGN video review of Sonic 4 made the game look good enough, but if it doesn't play well that's an extremely big turn-off for me. Keep in mind, folks, Sonic has never been perfect. The first three games contained many moments of aimless drowning, absurdly tricky jumps, and other annoyances. But you could ignore all of that and just play Green Hill Zone over and over and still have fun. I don't know if Sonic 4 is giving us any additional fun worth buying.

I liked Chris Kohler's article How I Learned to Stop Being Normal and Love the Sledgehammer. He discusses how much more fun he had with Red Faction: Guerrilla once he became a "casual" gamer. He could finally use the hammer and fulfill the Space Asshole's true potential! I think difficulty settings are at their best when they genuinely change the way in which you have to play the game. A run-and-gun portion of Normal Mass Effect 2 becomes a tense, ammo-less, stay-in-cover experience in Insanity.

I can't get enough of this stuff. Somebody convince Eggers he should start telltaleexposed.wordpress.com. He may want us to think he left on good terms, but we deserve the truth*! *And by truth I mean "entertaining lies about Jake and Sean."

It's depressing to think that this might be why the Mass Effect team made this change. BIOWARE DEVELOPER 1: "Sometimes players push the left thumbstick only halfway. This makes Commander Shepard walk instead of run." BIOWARE DEVELOPER 2: "That's a problem; research indicates that these people really mean to run. Let's get rid of Shepard's normal walking speed." I have recently walked normally in Grand Theft Auto IV, Limbo, and Super Mario Galaxy. I think it's necessary to have a normal movement speed, if only to let the player adjust to the world.

I thought of this podcast as more of a "meeting of the minds" than a straightforward interview, so Levine's interjections didn't bother me. There was a lot of mid-sentence editing, which I'm not used to as a podcast listener. It's still fun to listen to, and I love that the Irrational podcast mission statement is so broad that they'll interview whoever they want. They should bring in some wacky political candidates!

As an Xbox player primarily, I'm surprised with how well its games use the controller to do complex things, even if it takes me as a player a long time to use them well. For example, I played through all of GTA IV without perfecting my shooting ability. Using only the two triggers and right thumbstick, the game let me Target -> Zoom -> Adjust -> Shoot to take down thugs more easily. This might have been how Rockstar wanted me to play the game in the first place, but as a player, the game let me "grow into it." Heck, it took me longer than that to switch from Arrow Keys to WASD. Player expression is always subject to the developers, though. I was very disappointed by the change in movement from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. Shepard used to walk normally when holding the left thumbstick halfway. Now she goes instantly from a crawl into a jog, making it impossible to stroll around the Citadel. There's no way to blend in and treat the Galaxy as a real place. You just run, run everywhere. It really takes a lot out of the game for me.

New world-building features for Left 4 Dead 3 confirmed! Join Bill, Francis, Zoey, and Louis as they frolic with blocky, bouncy animals by day. Then it's back to good ol' zombie killing by night.

Inspired by Kieron Gillen and Steve Gaynor, I put my Xbox copy of Thief: Deadly Shadows into my Xbox 360 to keep the memory of Thief warm as we wait for the sequel. The Xbox 360 conversion of the game is just barely playable. The first thing you must do is go into the options menu and turn the Music volume down to zero. Otherwise, you must listen to a horrible, pulsing, screeching buzz throughout the entire game. Since Thief's music is ambient noise, it removes a lot from the game. Every guard sounds like he's patrolling a hotel lobby. Also buggy: fire effects. Torches shine through the walls, making it extremely difficult to tell if you can douse them from a distance. And load times have not improved at all on the Xbox 360. Other than that, Deadly Shadows still feels like Thief and it's still fun to sneak around and blackjack guys who share the same three voices. I don't know if I'm going to play through to the Shalebridge Cradle, though.

Spammers! I do wonder about Valve's "three pretty big surprises" that will be revealed over the next twelve months. I am going to bet that none of them are Half-Life 2: Episode Three or anything else Gordon Freeman related. We will hear nothing about Half-Life until Fall 2011 at the earliest. They're actually going to do a crossover with Left 4 Dead. Gordon will grow a Smoker tongue.

Still my favorite Rock Paper Shotgun headline: Gabe Confirms Episode 3 Cancelled

NZGamer.com confirms: There are no clowns in Dead Rising 2. As someone who strolls casually down zombie-infested streets, but quakes in fear at the sight of a red nose, this is welcome news to me.

If I remember correctly I did not fight a boss. I just jumped around a lot. I do encourage everybody to at least download the demo. It seems like a solid platformer, and that might appeal to some of you. I am currently having fun with the Xbox Live demo of Sonic Adventure. It consists solely of the first Emerald Coast level of the game, thereby making this demo the best next-gem Sonic game ever. I could buy the whole game, but I know it's just fishing with Big the Cat and VMU-less Chao raising. I think even NyxQuest has less of a drop-off in quality from demo to full game than Sonic Adventure does.

I played the WiiWare demo of NyxQuest a few months ago. It definitely didn't get to any "hard part", though it was mildly fun the whole time. I'm concerned, though, that it gets so difficult. Many of the hazards in the demo were unexpected; I only discovered them through trial and error. Cheap hits and a high difficulty aren't a good combination, if that's what it is! I also have a pet peeve with characters that have wings, but can't really fly. Because of this Nyx got gobbled up by more quicksand than I'd care to admit.