JonCole

Can't say I agree with this. Due to the fast running, I seem to often pass right by a guy that I need to kill to complete a mission. Without that notification, I could reach the end of the level and try to turn in the quest only to have them not reward me. I feel like this is a fairly common game mechanic and not any particular fault of id/Rage.

I'm a little more than an hour into it, so take my comments with a grain of salt. I'm playing on PS3 and not seeing fun-hindering graphical issues, though I do fully acknowledge a fair amount of texture pop-in and whatnot. As far as gameplay goes, it actually reminds me of Borderlands insofar as the quest structure - MMO-type fetch quests squeezed into an FPS. I say it like that because the game really does feel like a corridor-shooter with really huge corridors (rather than an open world game). That said, I'm eager to see if the game opens up a little more and offers a wide enough variety of quests to make me actually want to learn the world and explore it. Other miscellaneous notes - When you die, you have the ability to execute a QTE-like sequence that triggers a defib to revive you and shock nearby enemies. Kinda cool mechanic mostly because your performance in the QTE doesn't determine whether you live or die, rather how much health you recover. Inventory management seems pretty good. Junk items in the world don't get to have a name in your inventory and get dumped into a single slot for later selling. You also can access four weapons plus respective ammo types just by holding a trigger. There's a really hilarious animation when you're driving a buggy and hit an object on the road. You basically fly out of your chair and land face first into the pavement, only to stand back up as though nothing was wrong at all. Great stuff.

I picked up Death Rally again... played it a little bit when it first came out but burned out on it quickly. I started it up again and after playing for about an hour, decided to pay $1 for some DLC that unlocked some items/cars and boost cash rewards. Now that I have a steady flow of cash, I can actually have some upgraded cars which makes the game great. I actually finished a race earlier today by destroying every other car on the track, which was both a miracle and super fun. All in all, a great isometric racing game for iOS and well worth the money if you can get into it long enough to upgrade cars/weapons to a reasonable level.

Oh yeah, the regular Locust Berserkers are easily the worst. Especially on later waves, when they throw... THREE of the fuckers at you along with like 10 grinders and 10 maulers. That said, I've found that with a good team at my back, Horde is definitely doable. In addition, knowing when to abandon my fortress and keep mobile is a very valuable skill.

This is actually one of the worst things about Gears 3, in my opinion. It does a pretty poor job of signaling what difficulty is most appropriate for the player... I honestly think that 90% of the people who have any interest in Gears-type games probably would benefit from overlooking Normal and going straight to Hardcore. Normal just feels way too easy, which is odd because Hardcore was far more challenging in previous games. Also, the mutator problem is certainly annoying... one of the most interesting ways to differentiate multiplayer/arcade mode is locked unless you put a significant period of time into the game. Yeah, this is what I was thinking. There don't seem to be enough Longshots to accomodate a snipe-only experience, especially since they changed the ammo crates to only supply starter weapons and pistols. I wouldn't be entirely surprised to see them reintroduce original Horde in DLC. That said, I think the new mode is a huge improvement. Again, it puts a lot of weight in playing the game frequently, but I think the reward outweighs the risk of alienating beginners. I love that my time directly results in a higher chance of winning, whether it's through better fencing, exploding decoys, or accurate turrets.

Well yeah, you picked out four or five events amidst 8-9 hours of gameplay. Not a particularly depressing amount of cutscenes in the context of so much to offer. I also can't help but notice that you completely glazed over essentially all of Act 2, which had a diverse range of gameplay environments with branching paths and plenty of new, challenging enemy types and scenarios - Those were all off the top of my head, with undoubtedly more fun encounters just in that act. My point is, while I do recognize that there were some cutscenes or even in-game scenes where you passively witness what's happening around you, they represent such a minimal segment of the game that it's hard to accept that they spoil your experience so heavily. At the very least, the setpieces in GoW3 tend to have a much greater narrative reason or at least mechanically rich reason to exist.

I pretty much agree with everything Sno had to say about Gears 3, honestly. There's no question in my mind that the game is both the ending the series deserved and the near-perfect iterative point of all the elements core to the gameplay. My argumentative ass side automatically read this as "It was too long", but you never seemed to suggest that this was negative. In my opinion, the length is one of the best parts of the game. It gave them plenty of time to address pretty much any loose end out there, especially those which were introduced in the novels associated with the series. I was really hoping there would be a nod to guys like me who took the time to read the surprisingly good novels, and there were frankly a handful. I'm curious as to how a person who didn't read the books would react to Also, the game has great checkpointing and plenty of breaking points that make putting down/picking up the game at almost any time natural. I can't disagree too much, but I would like to add that the bosses are kinda the anti-DXHR bosses, in that they at least have a place both narratively and mechanically in the storyline. I don't feel like Epic went particularly out of their way to think up infeasible enemies, more like bosses who you might not have thought of yourself but give you that "oh yeah, that's what happens when you add lambent to X, Y, or Z". Yeah, fuck those guys. Dedicated servers seems to have cleared any "host advantage" issues, meaning everyone can be dicks with shotguns. Just like you have to realize the best way to exploit killstreaks in Call of Duty or whatever, you need to figure out how to best use shotguns.

Eh, the Ultimate Genesis Collection wasn't particularly better on consoles despite having the setup you're talking about. There were achievements, but that was about it as far as I remember.

I dunno... 230 games isn't any less cluttery than 200 games, in my personal situation. I guess if your Steam library is less substantial than mine, it might be more of a problem.

I'm good for Saturday afternoon if we can get a group together. If nobody else wants to call it, I'll go ahead and say around 3 PM EST? Either way, I'll try to be on around then for a couple hours if anyone wants to jump in. Up for Competitive or Horde/Beast.

Easily one of my favorite podcasts. The one thing that I think is key to their success is how well they manage to bring every guest into the show each week and make it seem like a totally natural conversation.

Yeah, this is where I fall on this issue. There wasn't a single point in this game where I felt it was signaling "I promise you that you'll never get into a fight ever". If I was trying to bring down "the powers that be", I kind of expect that they'd try to hunt me down every now and then with something more substantial than some guards. Maybe bosses aren't the most mechanically sound element in Deus Ex, but you can't possibly convince me that there shouldn't be encounters where you have to fight.

I know the US PSN store hasn't had these sales, but I did notice that 3rd Birthday and Tactics Ogre are both $20 on the US store. Good for people like me who want digital versions of stuff.

Speaking of GOG, they now have Ultima IV for free.

This might better belong in "Plug your shit", but I'll drop it in here anyways. Me and my compatriot Jonathan Downin have recently rebooted our CastMedium Podcast to follow the game/tech news website he runs. We're hoping to have a revolving third chair as long as we can sustain it and thus far we've had Shawn Andrich of Gamers with Jobs and Chris Johnston of the Player One Podcast on the show. If anyone's interested, check it out at: http://podcastthingweekly.com/

All I know is that Eidos Montreal is pretty much designed to be the innovative, long-view part of the company that exclusively works on new stuff. Which explains why Deus Ex is so good and kinda came from nowhere to do it.

Thanks for the tip! I guess I wasn't paying enough attention to each part of the tech tree and totally missed that traversal stuff. The high jump and fall invincibility make a great combination to access like... the third and fourth entry points for any given mission, which is totally valuable.

Oh, I totally understand, but even as a completionist I often resign to a difficult quest and implement the "I'll come back to this with a cool head" policy. This is part of a whole thing I'm try to do with games where I stop playing the parts I don't like despite wanting to complete everything.

You quit because of a sidequest? That's really strange.

He actually didn't get a chance to hit me because he kept transforming (or adding more tentacles, whatever) and the animation prevented him from attacking. To get him to do that, I was able to stand right dead center in front of him, use my sniper (which has 15 shots per clip and 3x shock elemental damage, mind you) to continually hit him between the barely opened jaws which would cause a critical every single time. It took about all of my ammo, but he never hit me. I guess I kinda broke it.

After beating the game along the paths, I can easily say that has the most open and enjoyable of the bunch. From what I've seen of the other ones, you have to almost fully submit to their agendas, so they might have some more story context but less room for flexibility.

Borderlands With all the Borderlands 2 news, I decided to finally complete the campaign of this game. I hadn't beaten it after all this time simply because I mostly just began new characters to play co-op with friends, leaving my "solo" "main" character about 80% of the way in and waiting to be picked up. The end of the game is a little more linear than I would have hoped, with fairly small environments in the main path and few sidequests. It's mostly odd because I spent so much of the early game on the open world diversions, which is what brings flavor and energy to a loot game like this. Also, the final boss is completely unexciting, which may have been the case because I was possibly overleveled from all the aforementioned sidquests. That said, I really love how the shooting felt in Borderlands as well as how different each gun felt due to recoil, fire rate, special attributes, and environmental effects. Can't wait for 2.

Unfortunately not, still looks like $10.

Minerva's Den is currently 400 MSP for Gold Members - http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-US/Product/Minervas-Den/00000000-0000-400c-80cf-000654540861

Those items look awesome. I feel like a shameless whore for this, but I honestly think that they pushed me over to buy DXHR. My most played classes in TF2 are Sniper and Engineer, so that definitely plays a part.