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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.

I've been playing Crimson Shroud too, it's an interesting little game. The only off-putting thing I've been finding is that the aesthetic is kind of unpleasantly muddy, the art assets are all a bit ugly. The UI can be a bit clunky as well.

As for being a representation of a table top RPG, it's kind of not. It's kind of only half way there, and hangs on to a lot of elements of more traditional JRPGs. It's an interesting game though, well worth the price, i feel.

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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.

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Instead of Crimson Shroud, I played Aero Porter from the Guild01 collection. Though that's a fun little puzzle games, Crimson Shroud holds way more interest, at first glance.

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How is Aero Porter? It looks very, very straightforward, and the degree to which people have been going off about its difficulty makes me uneasy about it.

The other one, Liberation Maiden, i quite liked. It's just very short and the huge amount of unskippable dialogue kills replayability.

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I've beaten Scribblenauts Unlimited and I'm still getting a few Starites but I have to say... HOW ON EARTH IS THIS A KID'S GAME!?!

It says "Cartoon violence" and "Comic mischief".... I would never let a kid play this game. It has some ridiculously dark moments which traumatize a kid. Not only can you do some very messed up stuff, but the game itself has very messed up moments.

To solve one puzzle, you have to help one person tan... I just used a lamp, yet he EXPLODED into meat and leather, and that wasn't a failure... Just wait to you reach the Santa mission.

I love this game because you can mess around with it in so many ways, but this shouldn't be an "E for everyone" game. It's even gory at moments, just with no blood. (So many dead babies, oh the humanity!)

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How is Aero Porter? It looks very, very straightforward, and the degree to which people have been going off about its difficulty makes me uneasy about it.

It's pretty straightforward, and yes, difficult. The first hour I didn't like it, but when I returned I found there is some enjoyment to be had once you figure out how to manage the chaos. It's not brilliant, but it has a certain, small charm to it. No must-have, though.

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Did a search and did no one here finish Dragon's Dogma? I am not a guy who plays story-heavy RPGs mostly because what I want is awesome battles and dangerous dungeons to explore and this game is just covered in these awesome moments. It takes the best parts of Monster Hunter and Demon's Souls and turns them into a new game. The challenge is in there too, unlike Skyrim, where you can diddle about in the overworld so long as you don't piss off any of the bigger monsters. Anyone else here on a second play through on Hard Mode like me?

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Did a search and did no one here finish Dragon's Dogma?

There was a thread for the game, a bunch of us played it.

I even called it one of my favorite games of the year in the goty thread.

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I knew that it probably just hadn't been mentioned. Fired up Hard Mode with my old character last and it really wasn't that hard in comparison. Guess I'll go with a new char tonight.

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I just beat Ratchet & Clank: Q-Force/Full Frontal Assault, the first thing I noticed was that it was... a tower defense game? Well, it's more like a hybrid's hybrid? Imagine if you took Orcs Must Die and added a level from a R&C game. You have a small tower defense area and the "normal" level. The level is filled with weapon pods which you need to fight the enemies to get money to buy turrets and mines. The game has checkpoints and the wave only seem to start when you are near a weapon pod which makes it a bit easier.

What makes the game a pushover (Only you want to get a medal for a low time) is that if you fail to defend and get a game over, you restart with all the turrets you bought before the checkpoint and you can kill everything in the level to buy more turrets, shields and such, so eventually you have enough to win no matter how much you suck.

The villain is the most annoying thing ever gameplay-wise and character-wise he's constantly talking like people think nerd talks. He actually says stuff like "Semicolon parenthesis" and "OMG"... He even hacks your space ship to play the TROLOLOL song.

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I just finished the Adventure Time game on the 3DS, WayForward's Zelda 2-inspired platformer.

I have no real opinion one way or the other about Adventure Time as a cartoon, but i like Wayforward and i've always thought Zelda 2 was a very interesting game.

So yeah, the Adventure Time game, I liked it. It's a fun, charming, lightweight little game. It's totally fine.

Their dedication to emulating an old school design without emulating that old school difficulty leads to it feeling a little insubstantial, but it's obvious that a lot of care and attention went into the game.

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WayForward has definitely made some really intensely difficult games, but this is not one of them.

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I recently completed Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake, the MSX games as included in Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence, and subsequently the HD Collection. I played them on the Vita. I had dabbled in them both long ago (especially the NES version of MG1), but never made a concerted effort to complete them.

They're totally worth playing if you're into the series. It's crazy how many of the ideas of MGS originated in those first two games. Even iconic moments like super long ladders and elevator rides and all the double crosses and kooky radio conversations are present.

I made heavy use of walkthroughs to save myself a lot of unnecessary backtracking and getting lost… both games heavily focus on having the right piece of equipment for a given situation, and it's easy to miss picking something up.

It was a cool trip through the early history of a series I admire, but they're fun, well-designed games in their own right. They're very sophisticated, but at the same time, they demonstrate why the later games feel kind of clunky and old sometimes. The 3D games are still holding onto control conventions and other logic dating back to the MSX2.

Metal Gear is kind of like a surreal Hollywood version of the original Castle Wolfenstein.

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Didn't complete it per se but I just finished the first week as Andrus in Cart Life.

Damn.

My last day I was set up by campus on Franklin St. and was selling mostly grade B coffee for $3 a cup with continuous customers lined up all day. I made a gross income that week of barely over $250 which wasn't even breaking even after expenses, but I finally felt settled and like a successful cart owner.

I'm kind of disappointed that was it. I guess the divorced mother story is a little longer.

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I made heavy use of walkthroughs to save myself a lot of unnecessary backtracking and getting lost… both games heavily focus on having the right piece of equipment for a given situation, and it's easy to miss picking something up.

It was a cool trip through the early history of a series I admire, but they're fun, well-designed games in their own right.

Can a game be considered well-designed while requiring the use of walkthroughs to not have a frustrating experience with? Not trying to criticize your conclusion, just something I'm curious about generally.

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Can i just say that i think the answer is yes? So many games even today are utterly reliant on people sharing knowledge about the game. (Dark Souls, for example.)

I would prefer that games do a better job of making themselves accessible, but i don't think the absence of that precludes something being "well-designed".

Concerning older games, things are even muddier.

I mean, a lot of those old games relied on peripheral materials and "feelies" that no longer exist. I believe several of the Metal Gear games actually instruct players to look at a screenshot on the back of the box to find an important communication frequency required to keep progressing through the game. Frequently things like that were just a crude form of copy protection, but they were also often meant to create a broader experience. (An experience sometimes beyond the scope of current technology.)

Often it was also the same old thing of people always demanding more and more hours out of their games, for which the answer was to purposefully make them incredibly obtuse and difficult. (The equivalent response today is the multiplayer mode nobody wants and will never play.)

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I guess it's a fine line and it certainly does depend on the game. Fez seems like it's best played in that community oriented puzzle solving manner, as another example.

It would less suitable to have to use walkthroughs to get through a game like Portal, though, where much of the joy comes from those personal 'eureka' moments at solving a particularly difficult puzzle.

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I don't feel like a walkthrough is required for either of the original Metal Gear games. Metal Gear 2 didn't come with the tap codes that were in the manual and it's possible they came with maps in Japan(the NES game had a map in the box), but you can just map yourself as you mostly likely would have done back then. I remember drawing maps for numerous adventure games as well as the original Zelda.

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I don't feel like a walkthrough is required for either of the original Metal Gear games. Metal Gear 2 didn't come with the tap codes that were in the manual and it's possible they came with maps in Japan(the NES game had a map in the box), but you can just map yourself as you mostly likely would have done back then. I remember drawing maps for numerous adventure games as well as the original Zelda.

After playing through them I'd agree that neither game is difficult, but they would have been more time consuming otherwise, and I've had minimal time for games lately. I figured if I didn't rush through, I'd get sidetracked and fail to finish them (again).

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Just beat Puzzle Agent, pretty neat game. I've actually played the first hour twice before on both the iPad and PC, only to come back now to beat it as I'm in the mood to beat some stuff. For some reason noticed that Glori Davner was played by Melissa Hutchinson, as I heard a little bit of Clementine in Glori. Eager to jump into Puzzle Agent 2!

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Played through Uncharted 1 & 2 over the past few weeks (what can I say, it's winter).

It took some serious patience to finish Uncharted the 1st, because that game is mostly not fun at all. It treats you to a light airy narrative that's fun and pulpy and then shoves you into arena after arena full of nameless enemies and tasks you to gun them down in the thousands. I'm not a fan of using the PS3 controller for shooters and there's basically no auto-aim in the first game so that went about as well as you'd expect. But it did help me invest a bit more in the characters which I do think are really, really well done. Naughty Dog absolutely lives up to the hype of being great storytellers. The banter between Drake, Scully, Elena, and Chloe is wonderful. And you get nice little patterns that show up between both games, like Drake's macho urge to drive whenever they grab a car, Elena's transformation from naive reporter to thick-skinned journalist. I eat it up like so much Tree of Life juice.

Uncharted 2 is miles better than its predecessor in terms of pretty much everything, especially gameplay and presentation. Climbing is better, levels are better designed, more varied, and stunning to look at. Finally there's a bit of auto-aim, and actual stealth options. The stealth is actually quite good, and feels more fitting with the general Indiana Jones tone of the game. Sneaking into a base, taking out a few grunts then accidentally turning a corner onto a squad of baddies and backtracking rapidly and often comically. I could totally see Harrison Ford doing this. Of course, I'd have trouble seeing Harrison Ford pick up a gatling gun and mow down dozens of guys as Drake does later in the game, but... video games.

I seem to remember an essay once criticizing Uncharted 2 for having the main boss tell you you're no different than he, how many have you killed, etc. Actually, it may have been in the Tom Bissel book, Extra Lives. It really is a silly moment. I'm like, well maybe you shouldn't employ a small nation as your personal army, dude. Also I don't seem to remember more than a few soldiers coming in with us to Shangri-la but whatever. It really is an agonizing bit of dissonance, the need to make this great story into a fucking video game. My favorite part of the game was waking up in the Tibetan village and wandering around with Tenzin. It was a purposeful reprieve on the designers part but it also felt like a game that could have been. Then the baddies invaded and I felt real anger, not only at what the game was targeting (bad guys fucking up a peaceful village and my friends) but at the game itself for intruding in on such a nice moment.

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My theory: to sustain the zillion dollar budget that it takes to make a game with production values like Uncharted you need to pad out the game's length enough so that people don't feel cheated when they pay $60 for it. That, or the developers don't mind the narrative dissonance and think that shooting people is so awesome in a video game that it more than outweighs the damage it does to the narrative. Thirty Flights of Loving costs $5 if you don't buy it on sale and lots of people are pretty annoyed that it's exactly as long as it needs to be to tell the story - imagine if Uncharted were only as long as it took to tell an Indiana Jones-esque story and Nathan Drake only killed an appropriate amount of people.

Another option is that not only do they like the shooting so much that they let it hurt the narrative, but they like the shooting MORE than the narrative, and if you made them choose one or the other they'd say "we want to save the people who invade the village and discard that awesome feeling you got wandering around the village." With the way their next game is looking, though, and with the effort that it seems like they put into that sort of thing in Uncharted, I suspect Naughty Dog would be pretty happy making games that didn't need excuses for gunfights every 5 minutes if they could get away with making those games. I doubt the market would support them but that's just how life works I suppose.

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Hmm that's really interesting, I wonder how much full on action the last of us will have. Lets hope it's not split 50:50 between stealth and all out fire fights. Will the next trailer be all out warfare? Will that camp in the countryside get raided by an army of bandits? I truly hope not

Take your bets: will there be a turret section? I can envision drake2 grabbing hold of a truck mounted heavy machine gun and mowing down scores of fungus zombies whilst (not) Ellen page try's to drive stick

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