Raff

At last, Shenmue 3!

I've hardly met any Latin Americans here, although there was weirdly a tiny Brazilian grocery shop on my street in Oxford briefly a couple of years ago. I wouldn't have thought her nationality would be a disadvantage with people/jobs generally as long as can speak English/get visa, but I know nothing about architecture etc.

Norway is in the EEA, I think that does the trick. I know Norwegian students who've had jobs here. Fun diagram: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Supranational_European_Bodies.png

I think there's enough information out there to suggest that it's nothing like what I'm describing as ideal. I'm not sure what you mean about Gamebryo, all sorts of very different games use that so I've always found the criticism layed on it over the drawbacks of Bethesda games (totally unrelated to what I'm talking about) a little flimsy. The neogaf thread claims that the Game informer article says: "-The combat model will not be real time due to latency" Which, if true, actually translates to "-We're having wow style combat because that's what the established audience are used to and it's cheaper." But yeah, I'm not going to moan and judge any further. It's a bit of a sore point for me because I've had some staggeringly great times in MMOs in the past, in games that never had the budget/audience to live up to their potential, or where the really interesting aspects were neglected or removed.

I'm just not interested in this kind of on-the-ground gameplay with the million skill buttons, the disconnected combat and the crude physics. There's no possibility of any sense of place or solidity and the games tend to rely on endless trashy reward schemes to compensate for the massive comprimises of the minute-to-minute gameplay. A lot of people seem to think that this is all an MMO can be because of latency, but other stuff has been done. Darkfall for example has almost Quake-like fidelity (Too much, to be honest. It's far too quick. But their flawed designs are holding it back rather than tech.) with a hell of a lot of people in a totally uninstanced world (and unzoned apart from the dungeons). The client/your computer usually konks out way way before the servers do. When people talk about sandbox games they tend to focus on the macro stuff in EVE, which is great, but there's really little reason why we can't have action-based MMOs which are highly emergent on a micro and macro level. It seems such a waste that the big budget MMOs have such weak ambition at the ground level.

An entirely redundent 'trailer' has been released. Bad Zenimax...

I just handed in the last piece of work for my degree. I also have paid work experience and a paid internship (not many of those in this country) up to early August, so am fortunate not to have immediate job terror. Also, a disproportionate number of the loveliest people in my life are German/half-German.

Right now I'm picturing a 1-0 hotbar at the bottom of the screen, a zoomed out orbital camera and a horse that ceases to exist when you're not riding it. And a storyline where every player is actually the same character. An auction house. Raids. We shall have to see how Fuck Ol' Scrolls: BreckOnline turns out. Prove me wrong!

Don't worry, when Zynga buys The Fullbright Company he'll be back in SF.

video games 5-TQGy9nZ3Q

Can't wait for the sequel, in which they add guns.

Is there any way I can buy just the first episode for PC? I'm not big into adventure games but want to give this a shot. Fair enough if not.

Never heard of this before, looks very odd and possibly hilarious. As if all the clinging to conspicuously convenient low walls in third person shooters wasn't weird enough. Looks a tiny bit like the combat in Resonance of Fate but in real time.

I didn't really enjoy the demo, but the wider game itself might still be interesting. And it's a co-op game at its heart, I hope anyway. The controls are fiddly, especially shooting arrows. All feels clunky in the extreme after playing a lot of Dark Souls and Demon's Souls recently but probably passable when you get used to it. The fights felt very drawn out; doing tiny amounts of damage for a really long time through a din of looping overly dramatic music (always a dumb mistake in safe tutorial stages where there's no genuine threat) and repetetive combat chatter garbage. Not impressed by the big black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, and still a shitty frame-rate at the best of times. The character creator is good, and much more varied than usual. And you can make some proper freaks.

Didn't realise it had already been reissued in Europe years ago. Nintendo is so weird.

Congrats Chris! I'm eager to see how DF make the most of having an in-house journalist minstrel.

I don't mind achievements in theory, but this seems like the kind of game that just throws meaningless 'dings' at you every few minutes. It massively cheapens any real substance the game presumably has hidden somewhere.

I played a few levels of Wizard in a public game then quit. There isn't really anything here for me apart from the cosy familiar sound. Feels overly streamlined but with a billion interface elements punching me in the eye (fuck off achievements). Would be fun with a real crew I suppose, for a little while.

By the bargains?!

I bought the bundle pretty much just for the film (it's the only way the English version has been released as far as I know), looks gorgeous. Will watch it later.

This is too much. I can't watch. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/120873716/your-world/posts/204306

I feel the need to blather on about how much I love this game. It pokes so many of my soft spots that it might well be my most favourite of all of the video games. The world design is just a thing of beauty, constantly blowing me away with its unexpected scale and intricacy. It's particularly impressive how they give these very focused levels such an expansive feel. They'll put you in a ruined city which happens to be perched in some preposterously huge underground cavern below the layer upon layer of equally dramatic scenery you've just fought your way through. Coming out of the Great Hollow into the Ash Lake for the first time recently just knocked home how lavish this all is. I can't think of a game with such an expensive looking hidden area. The perennial problem of permanently blocked off entrances that destroys any sense of place in so many games for me never becomes a problem here, I constantly feel overindulged by what's available to me. And it's not just the looks. The level design has so many moments. I'm particularly fond of the part early in Sen's Fortress, The RPG system in Dark Souls is precisely my cup of tea, and it's the first game to really do it for me. A lot of very popular RPGs totally fail, they're either nothing but a horribly transparent and crude reward scheme or have some glaring issue that dissolves any satisfaction. Dark Souls feels genuinely empowering, meaningful and sufficiently mysterious. Sometimes I'll make a character just on a gradual experiemental whim, sometimes I'll do an entire playthrough where I follow a recipe and see how much of the game I can skip only getting the stuff I need. Then there's the multiplayer. Co-oping stages+bosses are just good dumb fun, I can spend an evening just doing a load of that. It's like PSO with stangers who vanish as soon as the fight's over with barely time to bow. Being invaded while on co-op is magic. Everybody moves from chilled out PvE mode to carefully protecting the host from whatever horrible buffed up NG+ nightmare character has arrived to ruin the party. Finally, just the on-the-ground feel is so spot on. The weight of the character, the precision, the smoothness, the camera, the sound effects. Even though I may be waiting for some convoluted PvP encounter I can happily just muck around because it all just feels so good and so effortless. I for one am glad the PC version will be controller-based, and I'm mostly a PC person. For a while I missed some aspects of Demon's Souls but as I continue to play those feelings have evaporated for the most part. The first game very successfully created a smothering grim, etherealy bleak atmosphere. Dark Souls has some comic relief from NPCs and a number of the areas feel a lot more relaxed. It lost something to gain something. The undead berg feels too much like an easy ramping up area which detracts from the spirit of the game a little. I guess it's still a bit of a nightmare if you're new to things but the atmosphere is definitely lacking a little. Firelink could have been a more interesting hub too. There was no equivalently powerful touch, like those creepy monk boys in the Nexus. Anyway, those sorts of things seem frivalous at this point. Right now I'm working on cloning a DEX/Faith build which looks fun. I had to join the Darkmoon covenant to get a buff miracle, which required me to win some invasions. This went a lot better than expected!

They've done a couple of PC games but yeah nothing regular. I'll be surprised if they're doing it inhouse. There was a PC port of Ninja Blade. They actually released an interesting PC tool kit in 2000 for making your own King's Field campaigns. It even exports them as standalone applications, and the license even allows you to sell them (and people have). Pretty unique. Not that King's Field is any good... you can download the PC version attached to the tool kit on this site if you want to see for yourself. http://www.swordofmoonlight.com/

I'm going to wait for the PC version just like I didn't for Braid, Bastion, Stacking, ad nausium.

This seems likely to me too, and there may be some infrastructure work they can carry over from the 360 version which could explain them choosing it over Steamworks. I bet they'll never publically discuss this though, they'll just ignore the seething internet rage.