SoulChicken

Bravo Hermie

I could see how someone with kids could get really stressed out by the first chunk of the game.

Spoiler - most of the bosses are greek gods. I started playing it last night and kind of I regret buying it. It looks amazing but its still the same average gameplay. I just don't find the fighting to be fun. Especially compared to the recent fun I've had dipping into Bayonetta of an evening and knocking one out. A chapter I mean. Actually that was an unexpected pleasure. I've been playing PC games almost exclusively this year and I got so much pleasure taking a break from that and playing Bayonetta and Super Mario Galaxy. I am living my 10 year old dream, playing two amazing arcade games in my living room and not having to put any quarters in to play. GOW3 may well be a good game and I am just traumatised by QTEs after Shitty Rain. Heavy Rain recently showed me what a bad game looks like and God of War 3 is not a bad game, just not my cup of tea. I'm still going to finish though because I want to see more of the pretty graphics and spectacle.

Time to buy some buttons!

Scoopin' poop.

I just read this in the wiki about the game

Try mashing the buttons faster.

I notice Robert Ashley hasn't dared take on an episode called "What Is Game?" So until he does and concludes that the answer is QWOP, he will be casting pods in the shadow of thumbs.

GRENADE!

"Among other things, I wanted to see if I could make an electronic light feel more human friendly than most, and found rotary controllers are a good way of doing this." Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you... THE "DIMMER" SWITCH!

Idle Thumbs Domination!!! I'm watching the awards now and gave out a little woop. I bet Chris was on the edge of his seat for the Best Social\Online Game award.

I had to read like 6 boxes of text to understand what was going on.

Clint Hocking and Warren Spector didn't want to be my friends!! Ossk, today is going to be awesome. Sounds like some of your expectations were disappointed this week. So drop your expectations and realise you don't know how today is going to go. I am pretty envious of you, you've got a ton of interesting stuff to go and see or listen to at GDC. Make a little plan of panels you want to go to and just go and take them in. Maybe you'll meet some interesting people, maybe you wont (spoiler - you will) but you enjoying your day isn't contingent on that. If you are at a loss for something to do, go do something touristy over sulking in your hotel room. I expect you to learn something interesting about video games that you can tell us poor bastards who dont get to go because we have non video game jobs.

Is this the one where they are hobos like sam fisher?

More wizard unveilings! Hot on the trails of last week's Diablo 3's in-game-male-wizard-model hot scoop, today shows that the magical flurry of wonder continues unabated we sup the potions of March. Final Fantasy XI had some pretty good wizard costumes in it and I know we've all be waiting with baited breath to see what Final Fantasy XIV has in store for Wizard watchers. Wait no more! Huzzah! Sweet. Alas, they will probably be called Mages, as the Japanese do not dare follow the fearless path blazed (like a Fireball!) by Diablo III and Trine.

Depressing slide.

They didn't put it in so as to troll awful nerds.

The stories in FFXI were absolutely brilliant but very difficult to experience. You needed a group of 6 people to do the quests that strung the story together. A lot of these were very exciting boss battles but the time and organization they took meant that once done, doing it again is the last thing you want to do. For fun this year I went back to play an evening a week with some friends. We were determined to finish what we knew was the best story chain. Took us 6 months. At the end of it you opened up this stunning area which the players called Sea. Its really the coolest thing I've seen in the game but I would guess the majority of the people who played the game never got to see it. The epic feel was cool when it worked out but there are so many people that didn't get to see all the stories. They say they have made this more manageable in the new one, I certainly hope so as the idea of engaging story in an MMO is pretty special. Dear god, I know too much about FFXI.

Moogles are ubiquitous in FFXI (online) but yeah you can't play one. However, there was a recent storyline where you had to take down an evil one. Sweet. The little dudes were called Tarutaru in FFXI and something else in the upcoming one. They were actually pretty cool. The great thing about FFXI was the world, it was just so beautiful and imaginative. You had to walk, ride chocobos, airships or boats to get anywhere so there was a nice sense of adventure. Good for me exploring, a pain for doing quests or grinding. The big problem that a lot of the beautiful areas you would step into and get killed. So if you wanted to see most of the good stuff you had to level up. Which was absurdly difficult and time consuming. So I am excited to see the new one and I'm sure I'll poke around a bit when the game comes out, especially if the art direction and music is of the calibr of the first.

I forgot to say the sound is amazing. I have a surround sound setup and aside from Drag Me To Hell, I haven't heard anything as impressive. The score is good but oh man, I could have been sitting in the middle of an orchestra. The game sounds are clear, well positioned, mixed perfectly... It just sounds like a game should sound. It's quite amazing, I'm sorry I can't explain why its so good better. Your pals have little Dragon Age -esque chats... except you are normally running ahead of them, so you overhear them talking behind you, as you would in real life and its easy to miss stuff. I wouldn't have minded them compromising their mix for that...

Thoughts on the first few hours: The first couple of hours are dull. Pretty much the only enjoyment you will eek out of it will be getting a handle on the story. To do that at this point though you should definitely read the datalogs. I begrudgingly started doing this because I didn't have a clue what was going on. You are dropped right in the middle of a story and virtually no explanation is given. However, the datalogs are really short, it alerts you when there is a new one and they quickly fill you in on what these guys are talking about. So its kind of okay, the benefit being there aren't the hideous stretches of exposition that you know would have been the alternative. Right at the moment, the story has the potential to be more interesting than the other modern FFs. You kind of need that hope because they give you practically no control over the battles you encounter running down this long straight road (floating in the air of course.) I only just got to the "levelling" mechanic 3 hours in. They deign to eek out the mechanics one by one and its only now that battles are a little fun. I wish they would open it up faster, again I can see how it could become pretty fantastic, I need the other pieces! Its fine for now though, I'm on Final Fantasy time, I can think back to each of the modern FFs and the starting portions were rubbish. We'll see how it goes, it seems from reviews that this kind of play is going to go on for quite a while. This game looks so good! Once out of the futar dystopian city, things get really pretty. I'm kind of sitting back and enjoying the scenery, mainly because there's not much else to do. The characters look fantastic, in the cutscenes I often don't know if its the movie stuff or ingame models. The voice acting is uncharacteristically good and the lip synching works . That's been my big pet peeve of this generation, its always been a little off (Uncharted 2) to crappy (Heavy Rain). The potentially annoying character Snow ("I'm a hero!") is voiced by the same guy who voiced Kanji in Persona 4, with the Kanji voice. Which makes him pretty awesome. He doesn't say "Get bent!" though. So I enjoyed it but it feels like a guilty pleasure. I'm horribly disposed to being generous to Final Fantasy games (except 8) so bear in mind this where I am coming from. If it really is 20 hours until the game gets into its stride, this will be the FarCry 2 of JRPGS!

Don't worry, the lip synching barely worked with the English voices.

This is pretty cool. http://www.captainforever.com/captainforever.php

Move over Farmville, here comes Combineville. It's only a matter of time now it seems *snort* (Seriously though, I would play a Facebook game where you managed a human harvesting plant to make Combine so I wouldn't mind if that happened.)

I'm sure this will all be worked out before today's US release.