Yasawas

The "Nico: Original concept video" from the special features section on the HD collection is a wonderful thing, I will be watching this before starting on Tuesday to get suitably pumped:

If I can definitely work around it that's not so bad, thanks for clarifying.

VLR is out on 3DS here in Europe but that version apparently features a random save-devouring bug which doesn't seem to afflict the Vita version. Shame, as I'll probably never play it with the knowledge I could lose 20 hours. Coincidentally my copy of 999 turned up this morning! Amazon.co.uk have had it as low as £12, that's where I got it.

I've had a weird year. I spent half of it being utterly consumed by Dark Souls and I'm genuinely starting to feel it's changed my tastes forever, specifically since I finished it I find myself gravitating more toward retro and retro-styled games. I bought a Super Famicom, set up a Wii for emulation, hooked my PS2 back up even. I haven't played XCOM though it looks and sounds like something I would've been all over this time last year, I picked up Dishonored cheap and was bored by it. Nothing else in the second half of the year has really interested me. I've completed a ton of games but almost nothing from 2012. One thing I did buy, finish and thoroughly adore was The Walking Dead. Picked up cheap during a PSN sale and lay untouched until late November when my Twitter feed exploded with people completing the series. I'd always wanted to like a Telltale game but never really had until that, played through it all over three days and was left with that great feeling like the first time I beat Portal, or Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, or Journey where I wanted to grab people who don't play games and force them to try it and experience something unique and special unachievable by other means. Journey is a pretty strong 2012 contender for me too now I think of it, also to a lesser extent The Unfinished Swan. Both thoroughly enjoyable explorative experiences which I loved whilst playing but did not leave as strong an impression as The Walking Dead.

I don't really get Polygon but the RPS spoof was pretty hilarious - http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/12/17/this-is-my-playground/

I am up for this. I bought the HD collection a while ago, completed ICO for the first time then moved on with the intention to come back to this at some point and obviously still haven't. A collos every other week would be a fairly leisurely way to take it in and a thread like this would make me feel like I'm making progress without forcing me to play in big chunks when I maybe don't feel like it. Incidentally Killer 7 is magnificent.

The UI is definitely a bit funky. I'm not sure how much of it is a lack of screen space or just design issues but there were times when I was looking for some more information on an item and it either wasn't there or was presented in an awkward way, some things just aren't adequately explained at all and the likes of using dice in battle to increase your damage/hit probability is a bit clumsy. I didn't really mind the look of it though. In the static story scenes it can look a bit sparse but in battle I thought it was fine and all the flashback stuff is presented very well. It's kind of put me in the mood to try Vagrant Story again.

Just finished Crimson Shroud (3DS), did anyone else pick this up? Really unique little game. Great atmosphere and a superb turn-based combat system, with a lot more depth than I'd expected as this was kind of marketed as a simplified, short RPG (took me seven hours) heavily influenced by tabletop games. I have never rolled an octahedral die myself so I'm not really sure how similar it is but I loved this - it's downloadable and cheap (well, £7) which set my expectations at a certain level but these were promptly exceeded within the first half hour, if it looks like something you'd be vaguely interested in then you should really take the chance.

That's a shame, I adore Blood Money but I think what you say is perfectly valid. I bought it on release on the back of the fanatical gibberings of a guy at work who ruined the opera level for me and where Rab describes the levels of the game as "a series of locked-room mysteries" which I think is spot-on and how I've always looked at it. I'm not trying to immerse myself or think as an actual hitman so much as take in the surroundings and the resources I have to work with, and execute the target cleanly without being seen and get the hell out of there. Also you get to dress up as a big chicken if I remember right which is nice.I've recently given up on Metroid, the original which I bought from the eShop for my 3DS because an episode of Game Center CX made it look fun. I'm a little ashamed by it as I'd like to have more tolerance and appreciation for games of this time than I actually do but man it's hard, and the lack of a map is pretty brutal too. Save states don't help much. Goodbye five pounds or so, I have learnt my lesson and will be more careful with any future NES purchases.

WHAT

Oh man, so many words about Castlevania Looking forward to Portrait of Ruin now although I think I'll play something else in the interim. Me and Super Metroid - About three months ago I decided to buy a Super Famicom and put together a collection of my favourite games, stuff I loved growing up and a few classics I'd missed through having no money to buy games at the time. While I was rebuying my youth I spent a decent chunk on a really nice boxed copy of Super Metroid (that box art :swoon:) and put it aside for a week off I had for my birthday in early November. I was so excited! I played about six hours one day and thought I was progressing nicely, switched it on the next day, nudged the cart and erased everything. The idea I could lose it all again like that puts me off redoing it any time soon but at some point I am going to play through this, maybe on the Wii or hopefully Nintendo will get their finger out and put SNES (and GBA pls) games on the eShop as it'd be ideal for that.

Oh, I didn't know the 3DS one was going to be like the recent home console ones which didn't do anything for me. I've just looked up a gameplay video and kind of wished I hadn't. I'll keep an eye out for the GBA games if I can get legit copies without spending a fortune. It's a shame that it was successful enough for Konami to give it three DS outings but not release a collection of those. I know it's not as easy as them just sticking ROMs on a cart and into a box but with the DSi and onward removing GBA compatability it puts them out of the reach of most people now.

Sweet, I'll definitely be getting that one too as I'd heard it was an improvement over Portrait of Ruin. Basically I'm going to run through these three and totally burn myself out on the series in time for the 3DS game in March. One thing that didn't work for me in Dawn of Sorrow I forgot to mention was the daft "draw a seal on the touch screen" business when you'd whittled a boss down enough, it's a really clumsy jump to be fighting a massive beastie then making an intricate pattern with a fingernail to finish it off. I failed that a few times and it's frustrating to die to something that was a pretty stupid addition to the game to begin with.

Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS) - Really enjoyed this. I bought this at release having somehow never played a Castlevania game up to that point and didn't really take to it and sold it, I'd never played any Metroids either so the whole concept of unlocking skills to be able to re-explore earlier areas was kind of wasted on me. A wee while later I bought Symphony of the Night on XBLA on a whim and became utterly consumed by it, since then I've had a hankering to go back to the DS ones as they seem to be pretty highly rated, particularly this first one. It's a good game. It looks fantastic - especially the animation and the bigger bosses - and the soundtrack is pretty great although people tell me it's one of the weaker entries in the series in that regard. Progression through the different areas of the castle is rapid and I didn't ever get stuck just endlessly wandering which had been a worry, there are a few simple puzzles which as a simple man made me feel pretty damn special when I worked them out without the internet. I'm so proud of me. The bosses are a mixed bag but when they work - oh my. It kept reminding me of a recent Thumbs where (and I think it might've been a talk by a Castlevania designer who was being discussed now I think of it) the topic of 2D fidelity was being discussed, in how it allows the player to gauge distance, space and inertia and react accordingly to much more complex situations than is possible in a 3D title. It's been a while since I'd played a 2D game as old-school as this, with actual bosses and stuff, and figuring out their tells, and where I was safe/not safe was a pleasant reminder of the type of stuff I grew up with albeit far more polished. I have Portrait of Ruin here which is apparently not as good but it does have Yuzo Koshiro on the soundtrack so I'm hoping that will keep me going through the bad times.

Indeed. I sold my DS Lite in about 2008 so I'd missed a lot of great stuff for that too and it's something I'd been thinking about for a while, really glad I bought one now. If you're in Europe they come with a free game until January 15th so there's never been a better time to buy. Felt absolutely spot-on, I used the D-pad.

VVVVVV. I got this a while ago in a Humble Bundle I think but never played it, was convinced to buy it again for the 3DS and I'm glad I did. A simple enough concept but with a surprising amount of variations to keep it fresh, some ingenious level design and a superb soundtrack. Argh, so good.

I just played through these over a 48 hour period, I'm a husk. Absolutely wonderful game. There were tears, and I think the bar has definitely been raised for pun-based achievement names. I have one daft wee question relating to episode 5:

Machinarium! I finally started and finished the free PS+ version of this I got a few months ago, absolutely loved it. I got stuck a few times and had to resort to the inbuilt hints system and even that bit was ludicrously charming and managed to help me out in bits where I might otherwise have gotten frustrated in a way that didn't make me feel like I was dumb and cheating. Fantastic, one of the best things I've played all year.

I think my most extreme example was the day after I'd completed Dark Souls after with about 65 hours on the clock, accidentally deleted the save trying to move it from that clumsy 360 cloud storage thing back with my main saves as I intended to let my gold account lapse. Didn't go back to that game for six months when I bought it with a PS3 and platinum'd it in under 50 hours. Dark Souls is the best. And then just this morning. I was about five or six hours into my first playthrough of Super Metroid there, nudged the cartridge and it's erased everything. Ouennndaaaaaaannnnnn.

Silent Hill 2. I don't like the scary things so I never bothered with this at the time but over the years it seems to have become one of those games that everyone speaks of highly and having received it in a cheap bundle of PS2 titles I bought quite recently I decided to man up and give it a go. It's astounding technically. The use of sound is really well done throughout and graphically it's difficult to believe this game is 11 years old. The grainy effect over everything works in its favour I suppose but the lighting, animation and character design is so good it didn't feel like playing a PS2 game at all, or maybe it's because the last one I'd played was Shadow of Memories which whilst also an enjoyable game is pretty horrific lookin'. The puzzles are a bit more taxing than standard Resident Evil fare and I was pleased I could set the difficulty for those independently of the combat, as I was mainly playing this just to experience it and not to get bogged down on a tough boss fight. I thoroughly enjoyed myself up to about the hospital five hours in. It was nothing design-wise it really did beyond that that annoyed me (bar one maze section I could've done without) but my aforementioned low tolerance of the horror genre - it was just so relentlessly bleak that I found myself making excuses not to turn it on after a hard day and had to make myself finish it. I really liked a lot of what it was doing though and kind of had to see the end and I'm glad I finally did, I can definitely understand why so many people love it but ultimately not really my thing.

Megaman X. You're so pretty and kind of fun and inventive and then you throw in a boss rush at the end, always a desperate move to extend running time, and neglect to tell me the passwords you've been giving me for the last few stages don't actually start me at the beginning of those stages, but way back about an hour's progress behind that. Fuck fighting that spider thing again. You win!

I bought a big pile of PS2 games cheap the other week and not really knowing where to start, pulled out Shadow of Memories at random and gave it a go. I don't know how well-known this is but it's a third person adventurey exploring thing set in a small German town where you begin the game by getting murdered. A helpful fellow gives you a wee time machine so you can go back and try to learn about who killed you and why, and attempt to change the past to remove any motive. It's hideous looking, terribly acted, features some of the worst music I've ever heard and has astonishingly clunky controls but all those negatives cannot mask its genius. It's a superb idea and once I got the hang of what it wanted me to do and started upping the puzzle complexity a bit I really got into it and was able to take the broken bits as a humourous bonus. Very enjoyable and if I didn't have another 30 games to play through I might have run through it again as there are multiple endings and I finished with items I couldn't even guess where to use so I think there's a fair bit I didn't see.

Excellent work sir. I have still never seen anyone scan a QR code in the wild.

Thought someone might like to know this is out on iOS now which means I can play it and that's exciting. I bought it off dotemu a while ago but I don't have a Windows machine and while possible it was a pain trying to get it to run under OSX or Linux.

Everyone got stuck in the level in Sonic 3 where you had to press up and down on that stupid drum, right? I remember in Metal Gear Solid not realising what you were meant to do in the Psycho Mantis fight at all and beating him, very slowly, without switching my controller out and doing slivers of damage at a time. I just thought it was really hard until I loaned it to a friend who got all excited about "that boss fight where you switch controller ports" when I spoke to him the following day. I played it again a couple of months ago and it's so well telegraphed I'm pretty ashamed of myself, although I didn't work out the PAL key thing this time around and had to Google that so maybe I haven't improved as much as I'd like to think.