What are you playing?

[benjipwns]

Underground would show up randomly last time. I don't think it was supposed to though.

That shotgun would wreck people last beta, I held the last two bomb points almost by myself by putting up health stations and circling around shotgunning and healing.

The one thing I like is that the enemy is always in red. I think Brink did the same thing.

I got lost in underground after an objective complete because it locked off one path so I was wandering around the tunnels until I could find a place to come back up to the surface.

I can't wait for loadouts because I want to swap weapons on the other medic that they unlocked this beta. The assault rifle has like no range and ironsights are just a bad idea in the game.

Game can be superfun when you have teammates setting up forward bases with health and ammo and the team has a nice mix.

I do wish it'd tell me if the airstrike/artillery is my team if it is.

Also, I got ran over by a train from behind. 

[benjipwns]

Oops didn't mean underground, meant the trainyard one. That would show up randomly last beta.

[Rufus]

Underground is a bit hectic. If they capture the fan controls it's really difficult because they can sit back and pick you off while someone runs in and plants. But you can also lock them down on the escalators. I also love the elevators on this map. Something really quaint about getting on an elevator with half your team in this fast of a game.
Chapel can be a complete shit show if one side gets locked down somewhere. I had a game where we didn't repair the EV for a solid five minutes or so. The entire team had set up shop in the garage behind it and nobody thought to shoot through the windows. Shameful.

Wait, you haven't been getting any crates? I've got like a dozen already, happily switching between loadouts. You do it in the lobby (by clickiing on the right side of the portraits). Arty's weapons all seem kinda crap so far, especially that single fire AR. I feel naked with that thing.

I just love running around like a rabid dog as Proxy. She feels like the TF2 Scout, but I can actually control her.

The grenade strike at least shows as blue if it's your team, but it can be hard to see either way. Not sure about Arty's tagging. You can see the laser, which is blue if it's yours, but I don't think he marks the ground somehow.

[Bebpo]

Took me a long while to really get the hang of Metro 2033 but now that I'm getting towards the end and everything is clicking it's a pretty cool game.  The stealth is satisfying but took a while to get the feel for how it works.  Setting is cool and the supernatural elements are the most interesting.  Gunplay is kind of ho-hum with no real kick or feel to the guns and there's some really crappy parts (turret sequence), but overall enjoying it.

[toku]

Went back to Titanfall and I still get super geeked whenever I climb into a titan or call one down. Love this game.

[chronovore]

Went back to Titanfall and I still get super geeked whenever I climb into a titan or call one down. Love this game.

I regret not picking it up during the XBL sale for US$13 a month or so ago. 

[Stoney Mason]

Went back to Titanfall and I still get super geeked whenever I climb into a titan or call one down. Love this game.

Whenever I go back to it, I have the same feelings.

[kick51]

i keep giving Koudelka more chances and it keeps burning me!  I hit an inventory limit and couldn't pick up a key item.  ok, we survival horror now after like 60 items...then the game froze on a screen transition.   then i found out it's barely related to shadow hearts.  alright, I'm moving on to shadow hearts.

such a shame, a few small changes and it would be really cool.  as it is, the only good things are the conversations between the characters and the atmosphere.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Started playing Persona 4 Golden. Only 1.5 hour in so far and I think I'm about to do my first real battle against Sorry, only registered users can see this content. Please Login or Register..

I love the small town Japan vibe the game is giving me, in some ways it feels like an 80's movie too. It is so interesting and refreshing to play something in another cultural world then the US.

I wish I would have picked this up over FFX HD a while back, since Id be 20 hours in now.

Also played some Valiant Hearts which is another great step into a different world. Game looks stunning, is clever but not too clever and as a history man Im getting what I want too. Usually I dont finish puzzle games but I want to know how the story pans out

[Rufus]

Played some more Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. It's garbage, nothing else to say, really. Controls suck, levels are boring, traversal irritating. Played Kurtis' first level. Utterly boring. Walk down corridor, shoot crazies, fetch keycard.

I looked up an old Making Of I remembered, but also found an old interview with Core starff. tl;dr It was a mess. They didn't know what the fuck they were doing and they wanted to do more regardless. Eidos also seems to have balooned up based on TR alone, which meant they were desperate for the regular fix from this ONE franchise. Rest behind a spoiler, because tragedy.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is that interview. Choice bits:

“Ok. Right,” begins Rummery [then Core’s studio manager], and an explanation that’s been dammed up for three years starts to tumble out. “Angel Of Darkness was a product of the old Core. Internally, we hadn’t changed much as a studio from the first Tomb Raider games. It was a small team, working in isolation- very small teams, actually, the original TR was six people. Even by TR5 it had only got up to the heady heights of 14, 15 people, so suddenly, for TAOD, it was a whole new process. Writing a new engine completely from scratch, even though we’d already developed PS2 engines within Core, because that was the way we worked. Thirty-five-odd people, the biggest team we’d ever had - tiny for a AAA PS2 game, but still the biggest team we’d ever worked with - and we had this deadline. It had to be out in a couple of years, and people just weren’t confident from the start that we could do it. [...] So it got past the Christmas slot, and it got closer and closer to [Eidos'] year-end, and they just said it has to come out, full stop. So at that point it was like a machete was taken to the game and the design, and it was hacked to pieces. The guys on the fan sites have dug around in the code and found all the content that was never wired up in the final game. It was just a shadow of the game it was supposed to be. Things like the character progression - the ‘I feel stronger’ when she pushes boxes - that was just the last stage of a much more complicated system which got cut out.”

[Matt Sansam, executive producer] also acknowledges ‘the kitchen sink problem’. “We were trying to do too much,” he admits. “ There was a muddying of the waters about who was pulling the direction of the game.” explains Rummery, “because it was a bigger team and it didn’t have a real central focus, someone who was saying do this, or don’t do that. We ended up with a bit of a factional thing, which meant that you had things like the Paris section which never really fitted. And that was part of the shame of the game for things like reviews, because that was the one bit of the game that people played, so a lot of the reviews were based on that. Of course, it got more into Tomb Raidery stuff later on, but I doubt many people got beyond those Paris streets where whole sections of gameplay had been utterly, utterly cut out.

More surprisingly, for the team, losing Tomb Raider felt as much like a reward as a punishment. Rummery, one of the team behind the original game, has a veteran’s perspective: “People sometimes forget that when you are an internal studio, you just have to do what you’re being asked to do. By the time we were doing the late PlayStation games the teams here saying: ‘Look, could we work on something else now, or do we have to do another one?’ It really started at the end of TR2. After the first game, when Toby decided to go because he was very ****ed off with the way Eidos had decided to market his game, the rest of us stayed on. [...] We had already put all of our ideas into TR2. In the first game there were things we didn’t get around to putting in, but in the sequel we took it and made it a bit different, made it a bit more James Bondy. The two games complemented each other - we put in many new things, new moves, vehicle sections. I couldn’t really see, at that stage, where to go. And to be honest, where have the other games gone? Just more moves, more stuff, more vehicles. Nothing really has gone into the mix that wasn’t there in the first couple of games.

“It’s been hard. What’s been hard is knowing we could have done it, and knowing we could have done a good job. It would have been very easy to make another game and fix the mistakes of TAOD, because it was not fundamentally broken, it just needed to be finished off, but that opportunity went away. So we just had to sit back and watch Crystal doing it. And the reality is obviously they have produced a good game. But the frustration for us is that they’ve been given all the time they needed and a phenomenal budget. It’s a budget bigger than the we received for the previous six games added together - twice that, in fact - and it’s really frustrating, because if we’d had that money…” Another shrug.

The making of I was looking for originally was interesting too. It's archived.

Able to play the opening level – set in a Parisian backstreet – the disappointment at Lara’s clumsy negotiation of a dumpster followed by some awkward ladder climbing was tangible. “We spent an inordinate amount of time on the animation of Lara and designed the controls around the animation instead of designing the animation around the controls,” explained Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design’s co-founder, shortly after the game was released.

“We got wrapped up in that whole beautiful big animation experience. I don’t know if we ever would have understood what we got wrong with the animation until the game was out. We could have easily used another two or three months. We could have used another year.”

Significantly, Heath-Smith had to present the game at a buyers’ conference several months before the game was released. It was an agonising experience both for the man himself and those attending. "It was the worst opening level to any game,” an anonymous source tells Edge. “I had to sit through Jeremy Heath-Smith cursing through it while attempting to get Lara on top of a bin. It was unusual behaviour at a buyers’ conference to say the least.”

After completing Chronicles at the back end of 2000, lead programmer Richard Morton moved over to Angel Of Darkness, and he was shocked at what he found. “The tech had to be completely rewritten from PS1 to PS2 and scrapped again when the Chronicles team started on the game,” he explains. “We lost the first year due to Chronicles and only had the basic story, character models and concept art.”

It's a classic tale of hubris, with Core’s senior management boasting of innovative features to the press while the artists and programmers tried to keep up with the grand design. “The phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ springs to mind,” continues Morton. “This, coupled with the management trying to cram every new game idea into the design – stealth from Metal Gear, character interaction from Shenmue, upgradeable attributes from RPG games, and so on. Instead of letting the team make a really great Tomb Raider game.”

"It was only when we’d been in development for a while that we realised the world wasn’t ready for episodic games,” [what!? ] adds Morton. “We decided to concentrate on the first part as one boxed game, but even this proved too big a task for us with the time we had. Originally The Angel Of Darkness had four distinct locations: Paris, Castle Kriegler in Germany, Prague and Cappadocia in Turkey. We decided to cut to two, Paris and Prague, leaving Castle Kriegler in Germany and Cappadocia in Turkey as the two main locations to a proposed sequel, The Lost Dominion.” Practically cutting the game in half midway through its development had a deleterious effect on the team’s morale and the end product felt disjointed. Players complained that plot inconsistencies, characters, clues and levels felt tagged on or made no sense in the overarching plot.

“The other main reason for the delay in my opinion was the tech side of things,” explains Morton. “The PS2 hardware was still proving tricky to optimise and get the best results out of it. We were designing and building levels and characters without any real restriction on polygon budgets or memory limits, which obviously came back to bite us in the arse. Levels were shrunk and characters were dropped.”

“There was a lot of material that got cut and changed; the whole process was one of slash and patch, right up to the latest possible moments before release,” recalls Schofield. “There were things that got left so late that their final omission left the game badly crippled, and I mourn them. One example was the range of hero abilities planned for Kurtis. He ended up as such a thin, emasculated version of the character we planned in the early stages of development that I could have wept. I may actually have done so.”

The story that emerges from Angel Of Darkness’ ashes is a bleak one, with members of Core’s staff leaving due to the constant changes in direction and an upper management unwilling to listen. “We weren’t able to fully control the game as a team and there were far too many chiefs,” concludes Morton. “As a result, the game lost direction. It was also technically a nightmare with some editors only coming online in the last eight months of development. We didn’t have full character control in until a year before the game’s completion – we’d been in development for ages before then.”

The game that eventually emerged was beset by bugs and felt disjointed in the extreme. The situation wasn’t helped by Eidos facing financial troubles. An ex-Eidos employee tells us that by March 2003 the game had already been submitted eight times to Sony and was eventually rushed out to hit the April 1 accounting deadline. Core wanted more time to polish the game, but another delay could have tipped the publisher over the edge.

[close]

I also started Yakuza 2. It's Yakuza, nothing new there. Much more fun than AoD, to be sure. Don't have much to say other than that it seems to be bursting at the seams technology wise. Constant loading with pop-in everywhere, slowdown... The camera angle changes constantly, which is supremely irritating with screen-relative controls, but otherwise it's Yakuza. Drink whiskey, beat random thugs with signs, waste money gambling, collect near invisible locker keys, do errands for people, be an impossibly tough and stoic guy in a garish suit. Simple fun.

[chronovore]

Played some more Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. It's garbage, nothing else to say, really. Controls suck, levels are boring, traversal irritating. Played Kurtis' first level. Utterly boring. Walk down corridor, shoot crazies, fetch keycard.

I looked up an old Making Of I remembered, but also found an old interview with Core starff. tl;dr It was a mess. They didn't know what the fuck they were doing and they wanted to do more regardless. Eidos also seems to have balooned up based on TR alone, which meant they were desperate for the regular fix from this ONE franchise. Rest behind a spoiler, because tragedy. (snip)

'“It’s been hard. What’s been hard is knowing we could have done it, and knowing we could have done a good job. It would have been very easy to make another game and fix the mistakes of TAOD, because it was not fundamentally broken, it just needed to be finished off, but that opportunity went away. So we just had to sit back and watch Crystal doing it. And the reality is obviously they have produced a good game. But the frustration for us is that they’ve been given all the time they needed and a phenomenal budget. It’s a budget bigger than the we received for the previous six games added together - twice that, in fact - and it’s really frustrating, because if we’d had that money…” Another shrug.’

It’s sad to hear they were being ridden by EIDOS to rush launch, but it wasn’t “Here’s two years... oh, wait, we meant one.” - They were pushed to launch a game which was already late, right? If that meant they still had a volume of work which required pieces of it to be hacked out, they were already not marching toward a reasonable deadline.

CORE lost the game for diminishing quality and an increasing inability to deliver on a reasonable timeline. Crystal Dynamics did have several advantages over CORE, such as a budget and timeline appropriate to resurrecting a dead franchise, as well as no recent history of repeatedly diminishing returns.

[Rufus]

Three years development time, the first of which seems to have been pissed away entirely.

No surprising revelations. Just a perfect storm of cock-handed mistakes. Feature bloat, tech catastrophe (on both game tech and tool side), wildly irresponsible or nonexisting targets, etc. Same old mistakes repeated by every failing studio. Eidos being desperate for cash didn't help, but they might have made a good game if they had ditched all the extraneous nonsense. Nobody needs dialogue trees in Tomb Raider, or money and character progression. Or an actually controllable side character. All of that while they were learning the PS2. Insanity.

[Take My Breh Away]

Does Skyrim have a point? I'm wandering around aimlessly grabbing quests and managed to get to that abbey on the mountain. But it doesn't really tell you about the critical path or anything. It's fun at times but doesn't really feel I'm progressing.

[Trent Dole]

Does Skyrim have a point? I'm wandering around aimlessly grabbing quests and managed to get to that abbey on the mountain. But it doesn't really tell you about the critical path or anything. It's fun at times but doesn't really feel I'm progressing.

No, it doesn't. You wander around and do stuff for people, to be given more stuff to do by them or other people they've pointed you to, and then NPC have literally no difference in reaction to you than they did previously no matter what you do unless you tried to murder the town.

[kick51]

Played some more Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness. It's garbage, nothing else to say, really. Controls suck, levels are boring, traversal irritating. Played Kurtis' first level. Utterly boring. Walk down corridor, shoot crazies, fetch keycard.

I looked up an old Making Of I remembered, but also found an old interview with Core starff. tl;dr It was a mess. They didn't know what the fuck they were doing and they wanted to do more regardless. Eidos also seems to have balooned up based on TR alone, which meant they were desperate for the regular fix from this ONE franchise. Rest behind a spoiler, because tragedy.

spoiler (click to show/hide)

This is that interview. Choice bits:

“Ok. Right,” begins Rummery [then Core’s studio manager], and an explanation that’s been dammed up for three years starts to tumble out. “Angel Of Darkness was a product of the old Core. Internally, we hadn’t changed much as a studio from the first Tomb Raider games. It was a small team, working in isolation- very small teams, actually, the original TR was six people. Even by TR5 it had only got up to the heady heights of 14, 15 people, so suddenly, for TAOD, it was a whole new process. Writing a new engine completely from scratch, even though we’d already developed PS2 engines within Core, because that was the way we worked. Thirty-five-odd people, the biggest team we’d ever had - tiny for a AAA PS2 game, but still the biggest team we’d ever worked with - and we had this deadline. It had to be out in a couple of years, and people just weren’t confident from the start that we could do it. [...] So it got past the Christmas slot, and it got closer and closer to [Eidos'] year-end, and they just said it has to come out, full stop. So at that point it was like a machete was taken to the game and the design, and it was hacked to pieces. The guys on the fan sites have dug around in the code and found all the content that was never wired up in the final game. It was just a shadow of the game it was supposed to be. Things like the character progression - the ‘I feel stronger’ when she pushes boxes - that was just the last stage of a much more complicated system which got cut out.”

[Matt Sansam, executive producer] also acknowledges ‘the kitchen sink problem’. “We were trying to do too much,” he admits. “ There was a muddying of the waters about who was pulling the direction of the game.” explains Rummery, “because it was a bigger team and it didn’t have a real central focus, someone who was saying do this, or don’t do that. We ended up with a bit of a factional thing, which meant that you had things like the Paris section which never really fitted. And that was part of the shame of the game for things like reviews, because that was the one bit of the game that people played, so a lot of the reviews were based on that. Of course, it got more into Tomb Raidery stuff later on, but I doubt many people got beyond those Paris streets where whole sections of gameplay had been utterly, utterly cut out.

More surprisingly, for the team, losing Tomb Raider felt as much like a reward as a punishment. Rummery, one of the team behind the original game, has a veteran’s perspective: “People sometimes forget that when you are an internal studio, you just have to do what you’re being asked to do. By the time we were doing the late PlayStation games the teams here saying: ‘Look, could we work on something else now, or do we have to do another one?’ It really started at the end of TR2. After the first game, when Toby decided to go because he was very ****ed off with the way Eidos had decided to market his game, the rest of us stayed on. [...] We had already put all of our ideas into TR2. In the first game there were things we didn’t get around to putting in, but in the sequel we took it and made it a bit different, made it a bit more James Bondy. The two games complemented each other - we put in many new things, new moves, vehicle sections. I couldn’t really see, at that stage, where to go. And to be honest, where have the other games gone? Just more moves, more stuff, more vehicles. Nothing really has gone into the mix that wasn’t there in the first couple of games.

“It’s been hard. What’s been hard is knowing we could have done it, and knowing we could have done a good job. It would have been very easy to make another game and fix the mistakes of TAOD, because it was not fundamentally broken, it just needed to be finished off, but that opportunity went away. So we just had to sit back and watch Crystal doing it. And the reality is obviously they have produced a good game. But the frustration for us is that they’ve been given all the time they needed and a phenomenal budget. It’s a budget bigger than the we received for the previous six games added together - twice that, in fact - and it’s really frustrating, because if we’d had that money…” Another shrug.

The making of I was looking for originally was interesting too. It's archived.

Able to play the opening level – set in a Parisian backstreet – the disappointment at Lara’s clumsy negotiation of a dumpster followed by some awkward ladder climbing was tangible. “We spent an inordinate amount of time on the animation of Lara and designed the controls around the animation instead of designing the animation around the controls,” explained Jeremy Heath-Smith, Core Design’s co-founder, shortly after the game was released.

“We got wrapped up in that whole beautiful big animation experience. I don’t know if we ever would have understood what we got wrong with the animation until the game was out. We could have easily used another two or three months. We could have used another year.”

Significantly, Heath-Smith had to present the game at a buyers’ conference several months before the game was released. It was an agonising experience both for the man himself and those attending. "It was the worst opening level to any game,” an anonymous source tells Edge. “I had to sit through Jeremy Heath-Smith cursing through it while attempting to get Lara on top of a bin. It was unusual behaviour at a buyers’ conference to say the least.”

After completing Chronicles at the back end of 2000, lead programmer Richard Morton moved over to Angel Of Darkness, and he was shocked at what he found. “The tech had to be completely rewritten from PS1 to PS2 and scrapped again when the Chronicles team started on the game,” he explains. “We lost the first year due to Chronicles and only had the basic story, character models and concept art.”

It's a classic tale of hubris, with Core’s senior management boasting of innovative features to the press while the artists and programmers tried to keep up with the grand design. “The phrase ‘too many cooks spoil the broth’ springs to mind,” continues Morton. “This, coupled with the management trying to cram every new game idea into the design – stealth from Metal Gear, character interaction from Shenmue, upgradeable attributes from RPG games, and so on. Instead of letting the team make a really great Tomb Raider game.”

"It was only when we’d been in development for a while that we realised the world wasn’t ready for episodic games,” [what!? ] adds Morton. “We decided to concentrate on the first part as one boxed game, but even this proved too big a task for us with the time we had. Originally The Angel Of Darkness had four distinct locations: Paris, Castle Kriegler in Germany, Prague and Cappadocia in Turkey. We decided to cut to two, Paris and Prague, leaving Castle Kriegler in Germany and Cappadocia in Turkey as the two main locations to a proposed sequel, The Lost Dominion.” Practically cutting the game in half midway through its development had a deleterious effect on the team’s morale and the end product felt disjointed. Players complained that plot inconsistencies, characters, clues and levels felt tagged on or made no sense in the overarching plot.

“The other main reason for the delay in my opinion was the tech side of things,” explains Morton. “The PS2 hardware was still proving tricky to optimise and get the best results out of it. We were designing and building levels and characters without any real restriction on polygon budgets or memory limits, which obviously came back to bite us in the arse. Levels were shrunk and characters were dropped.”

“There was a lot of material that got cut and changed; the whole process was one of slash and patch, right up to the latest possible moments before release,” recalls Schofield. “There were things that got left so late that their final omission left the game badly crippled, and I mourn them. One example was the range of hero abilities planned for Kurtis. He ended up as such a thin, emasculated version of the character we planned in the early stages of development that I could have wept. I may actually have done so.”

The story that emerges from Angel Of Darkness’ ashes is a bleak one, with members of Core’s staff leaving due to the constant changes in direction and an upper management unwilling to listen. “We weren’t able to fully control the game as a team and there were far too many chiefs,” concludes Morton. “As a result, the game lost direction. It was also technically a nightmare with some editors only coming online in the last eight months of development. We didn’t have full character control in until a year before the game’s completion – we’d been in development for ages before then.”

The game that eventually emerged was beset by bugs and felt disjointed in the extreme. The situation wasn’t helped by Eidos facing financial troubles. An ex-Eidos employee tells us that by March 2003 the game had already been submitted eight times to Sony and was eventually rushed out to hit the April 1 accounting deadline. Core wanted more time to polish the game, but another delay could have tipped the publisher over the edge.

[close]

I also started Yakuza 2. It's Yakuza, nothing new there. Much more fun than AoD, to be sure. Don't have much to say other than that it seems to be bursting at the seams technology wise. Constant loading with pop-in everywhere, slowdown... The camera angle changes constantly, which is supremely irritating with screen-relative controls, but otherwise it's Yakuza. Drink whiskey, beat random thugs with signs, waste money gambling, collect near invisible locker keys, do errands for people, be an impossibly tough and stoic guy in a garish suit. Simple fun.

I started yakuza 2 recently as well.  Spot on.  Be kazuma kiryu and fuck up everyone. The action is easy but very satisfying. The game's facial modeling and facial animations are pretty awesome.  I miss the fuckin shit out of the fuckin goddamn english VA. Though they retain the spirit a little in the subs.

[toku]

So much exiciting shit happens in Titanfall. It's even cooler now going back to it because I'm playing up the girzzled vet trope in my head.

They pull me back in only for me to discover that I still got it. 

Quick Escape!


Surprise Kill!


First game on that map too so it was extra fitting.

[Cerveza mas fina]

Great write up on Tomb Raider Rufus.

What I took away from it is that TR1 was made by 6 people only. This gives me a lot of faith in the future as that game was pretty complex, and with new tech and the right tools it should be possible for small studios to deliver complex games in the future still when AAA crashes and burns.

[Positive Touch]

been trying to say this for years. so much of what goes into big-budget gaming is all for atmosphere and has fuck-all to do with gameplay. you strip away mocap, voice acting, photorealistic environments, and suddenly your team size and budget drops way down.  I mean a AAA game is just a third-person shooter and no-budget TPSs have been around for decades.

[kick51]

look at EDF 2017.  it just works and is fun as hell despite slowdown and other obvious clipping jank

if your game sucks if it were just stripped down to blank polys, then your game sucks period.  Maybe presentation can add to it and then it's possible to have a "the game sucks, but [X]" qualifier.  but a bad game is a bad game. 

[Stoney Mason]

Does Skyrim have a point? I'm wandering around aimlessly grabbing quests and managed to get to that abbey on the mountain. But it doesn't really tell you about the critical path or anything. It's fun at times but doesn't really feel I'm progressing.

hmmm.... There is a pretty easy to follow straight progression main quest and a shitload of side quests of the just wander around and fuck around type. Most people find the right blend they want to pursue fairly quickly although I've discovered people who couldn't seem to tell the difference between the two. I never really understand that honestly unless maybe its their first time in a elder scrolls game. Which in that case I would chalk it up to just a learning curve.

[MrAngryFace]

Does Skyrim have a point? I'm wandering around aimlessly grabbing quests and managed to get to that abbey on the mountain. But it doesn't really tell you about the critical path or anything. It's fun at times but doesn't really feel I'm progressing.

Punching grizzlies and dragons in the face? Saving entire villages? Finding the best loot?

Bein awesome?

[tiesto]

Still Wild Arms Alter Code F, grinding away fighting apples (yes that's the enemy that gives the most experience, a floating green apple in wizard's garb). Hopefully will get this done before Episode Duscae or whatever its called drops.

[BobFromPikeCreek]

Counter Spy is so goddamn frustrating. Like, there's so much about the game that's really cool, but the clunky ass shooting and the clumsy stealth mechanics just ruin the whole damn thing.

[Stoney Mason]

https://store.xbox.com/en-US/Xbox-One/Dlc/Titanfall-Season-Pass/b58c27b9-9cc1-4031-a37a-4c8e192a95b5?lc=1033

TitanFall season pass free

[BobFromPikeCreek]

Gone Home really caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to think much of it, but I ended up playing it through in one sitting. Very enjoyable.

[archnemesis]

Gone Home really caught me off guard. I wasn't expecting to think much of it, but I ended up playing it through in one sitting. Very enjoyable.

I enjoyed it, but it was very light on gameplay. It would have been a much nicer game if they added a few puzzles or other standard adventure game mechanics.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Gonna be playing Bf Hardline (XBONE) here in about 6 hours give or take

[kick51]

watched Iconoclast's stream and that got me in the mood to revisit Ninja Gaiden 2 360.  which I left off in Mentor mode.  got through about 5 fights in the sewer part of the NYC stage over the course of an hour and a half.  I forgot how fucking hard it is 

[iconoclast]

Just counter-stopped NG2's mission mode.

My tonfa run got cut short by dashing into the floating turret mech's explosion in the 4th loop (which is on Master Ninja difficulty, so it does distinguished mentally-challenged damage). I probably would've been able to get at least 15 million if it weren't for that. Ah well.

watched Iconoclast's stream and that got me in the mood to revisit Ninja Gaiden 2 360.  which I left off in Mentor mode.  got through about 5 fights in the sewer part of the NYC stage over the course of an hour and a half.  I forgot how fucking hard it is 

If you just want to get through that part (which is almost entirely Van Gelfs IIRC) you can try chaining on-landing 360Y UTs with the Lunar. It should kill at least one enemy every time. The claws and Dragon Sword are also good for picking off human enemies.

[kick51]

yeah, I eventually picked up on 360 Lunars and I upgraded my Lunar to 3 (also have the dragon sword at 3.)  got up to the Trial and decided to take a few stabs at it, in which I killed like 2 guys each time before calling it quits for the night.  I'm trying to incorporate head stomps and stuff like you were doing, along with learning my iframes.  Still, the randomness gets me.  I think it's randomness?  Could also be bad movement/spatial awareness on my end.  prob a bit of both.

and holy fuck, congrats on the max score. 

[toku]

Gonna be playing Bf Hardline (XBONE) here in about 6 hours give or take

How'd you get it early?

[Cerveza mas fina]

Do I need to bother with fusing personas in p4g to finish the game?

I hate this kind of fusion stuff

[demi]

Yes, you get stronger personas and kick ass easier

[MrAngryFace]

Fusion stuff rules wtf

[Joe Molotov]

Fusion is easy as fuck in P4G since you can just record all your Personas and then rebuy them whenever you need to.

[Am_I_Anonymous]

Gonna be playing Bf Hardline (XBONE) here in about 6 hours give or take

How'd you get it early?

EA Access

[Cerveza mas fina]

Ok any tips on fusing?

[fistfulofmetal]

If you're playing Golden there's no need for tips. Just take your best Personas and fuse them and pick the strongest attacks. EZ mode.

[archnemesis]

You want to have Personas with all the elemental spells so that you can abuse the weakness system. Resist/block/reflect are also great traits.

[mormapope]

Recently beat MGS3 on European Extreme without killing anybody.

56 continues, most of those were me dying and trying to beat a boss differently. This playthrough was the one that made me appreciate what MGS3 really is.

[Rufus]

Ori and The Blind Forest Xbone - not a good idea to start this game with your kid around. When the fat guy dies my kid started to cry

Aw!

[Cerveza mas fina]

I dont think MH2 is harder then MH1 really, just more wait and see and try to exploit choke points more. 

Borys, you gonna get a PS4 for Bloodborne?

All this socializing in Persona is pretty dumb so far, feels like a job.

[Cheddahz]

Sleeping Dogs - I loved this game whenever I played it a few years back and I still feel like I love it, but my god, this is probably the worst "remaster" I've played so far. There are huge framerate drops in the game and just random things happen that shouldn't happen in the game (like audio cutting out whenever I'm driving). I'm thinking about trading this one in and picking it up whenever it drops in price, because I do love the game and I want to own a physical copy of it, but I really don't feel like dealing with these issues either

Sunset Overdrive - I'm still trying to beat this one and at this point, I have no idea if I like the game or not. It's a game that I want to play for thirty minutes and that's it, which I guess isn't a bad thing, but everytime I boot it up, I tell myself "I'm going to beat it tonight" and I only ever get pass one story mission and I turn it off

Animal Crossing: New Leaf - This is probably the mosy enjoyable gaming experience I'm having right now. It's just a blast to turn the game on and know what I'm going to do with the thirty minutes of my time I put into the game daily (or every other day) and feel satisfied with it. I've put over twenty hours into this save file so far and I know that my time with this game will add up!

Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate - I've tried to get into Monster Hunter for years and I've never been able to get into it, but it finally clicked with me this time around and I'm having a blast with the game! I still suck at the game and I'm trying to learn everything about it, but it's a great game to play for half an hour or if you want to, you could lose the whole day to it

[chronovore]

Defiance is having a double XP weekend, so there are quite a few people on, and the event frequency seems to have been turned up. I’ve finally started seeing weapons drop, and have encountered Common, Uncommon, and Rare items, but there honestly doesn’t seem to be as much divergence between them as there is in, say, Borderlands.

I’m just about at the point where I can take on a Volge Elite with 5 armor pips by myself. However there was an instanced Volge Arkfall yesterday where I sat through the first several waves without a problem, but then they sent in an Elite (no problem), then two Elites and one of the two other players disconnected (uhhhh), and when three Elites spawned next and the other player disconnected, I was facing three Elites solo.

Apparently the difficulty scaling is not completely on-the-fly, because I was repeatedly turned into a smear until I quit out as well. Lame.

The game seems to think “throw more of those in” is a viable catch-all solution. I dunno, sometimes the game seems pretty good, and other times it feels lower-than-average. I’m torn, and not sure how long I’ll stay in.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Managed to pry myself away from Final Fantasy XIV long enough to get a few other things done.

Finished Valiant Hearts: The Great War and did all the item collecting in it. This game does some really neat things with contrast and color that I didn't notice until I started chapter hopping for collectibles. The game starts off with a really high contrast and bright "poppy" colors, even during the scenes where fighting/war is happening, kinda reflecting that initial sense of cheer on how people at the time still thought the war would be nothing to worry about/would be over soon. As the game goes on / years pass by though, the colors used in the levels start getting muddier and muddier, to the point where even the relaxed puzzle segments in the last chapter look really dirty and grim/depressing compared to everything in chapter 1. Cool use of colors for storytelling really, a good combination together with how most characters communicate in gibberish and non-verbal actions.

Also got Real Platinum God in The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth. I did a lot of the early unlocks before the lastest PS4 patch, so I had a lot of unlocked trophies for stuff I'd already completed. Had to start up the second save file and do a lot of extra stuff like beating Isaac with Azazel and Judas, then find the last few items I was missing in my main fail (namely the Holy Grail from the angel room). It was a total pain and I couldn't even abuse glitched seeds to find them reliably because by now I'd unlocked everything in the game, and a lot of the item seeds posted online only account for a limited item pool.  Finally got that out of the way and am ready for the expansion though. 

I've got Type-0 HD and Bloodborne pre-ordered and paid off, so I'm not short on stuff to play for the next few months.

[SpeedStats]

Sunblade... don't forget that both of us have been playing Final Fantasy Record Keeper for weeks now, haha.  I did the Eiko and Aeris events to get Eiko, Steiner, and Aeris.  Did an optional quest to get Cecil DKnight, but haven't done the Paladin quest yet.  Now I'm either doing the hard versions of dungeons or slowly going through the Final Fantasy XIII and Final Fantasy VIII dungeon lines.  I really like it.  It's exactly what ATB should have been like.  If Oscar hadn't talked it up so much, I probably wouldn't have given it a second look.  It should be out in English soon and I hope some people take a look at it.  It's basically all battles, but I like that it lets you craft or level up items, and that it has different events every week to keep you going.  There was a nice Romancing SaGa event a few weeks ago, for example.

Otherwise, I haven't been playing much since I'd gotten busy during February which is a bummer, and I think I've gotten a little jaded towards newer video games, too.  I just don't want to play new stuff right now and would rather revisit old stuff or play old stuff that I hadn't played before.  I think it's because a lot of things in February outside of Under Night In-Birth Exe Late disappointed me and I more or less gave up for a few months.  Plus I got tired of being down on stuff people seemed to really like.

I've been playing this patched version of Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Famicom that presumably makes the game "better".  I shockingly don't hate it.  I mean, sometimes it's a little unfair (like throwing several bosses in the Temple of the Ancients despite being crappily designed in that arena and the bosses' stats are stupidly high also i can't save between bosses but luckily I came out of it okay), but it has a lot of neat ideas.  You level up your weapons for free, you level up every spell on your materia for free (every spell has spell charges), and you can buy weapons/armour now without waiting for them to drop like in the original Famicom version.

All the materia have levels out of 9 and there's one single materia corresponding to each element.  So by the end of the game, you get 7 different types of materia since each character comes equipped with one: Lightning (Cloud), Fire (Red XIII), Water (Cid), Ice (Cait Sith), Earth (Barret), Wind (Tifa), Light (Aeris).  Each materia comes with different spells (ex: Fire, Ice, Lightning, Earth are straight-up offensive.  Water, Wind, Light are both offensive and have healing magic).  There are no buffs at all.  When you reach Materia Lv. 9, the materia gets a final summon spell that corresponds with the materia's element.  So:
Lightning -> Ramuh
Fire -> Ifrit
Ice -> Shiva
Water -> Leviathan
Earth -> Titan
Wind -> Typhon
Light -> Bahamut

You don't see the summons when used, but it's still neat to see that the materia took summons into account.  I like the idea that you have to work for your summons even more, especially since this version of the game is certainly not as grindy as the original Famicom version.

Yuffie and Vincent are not playable in this version of the patch and I don't think they have any intent to add them.  The sprites are weird.  Some of the areas have bad colour palettes.  But the game is serviceable overall, and I've enjoyed my runthrough of it.  Like, looking at stuff like this in this format:



...makes me laugh, and I think I've needed that.  Sure, Palmer doesn't get hit by a truck in this version, but I can still laugh at him asking for lard in his tea.

I also started a playthrough of Chrono Trigger, but it's more or less for the 20th anniversary of that game.  And a small playthrough for Glory of Heracles III since I noticed the fan translation released last year and I wanted to see if the translation was good or not.

[iconoclast]

Ninja Gaiden II
Had a couple good survival runs over the last few days. The other night I got 15+ million with the Falcon Talons, dying somewhere in the fifth loop. That's the highest score I've done with any weapon in survival mode (just edging out the Scythe), which is kinda crazy to me since the Talons are one of the hardest weapons to use imo. I'm pretty sure that's also the second highest legitimate score on XBL, but it's still far behind YROGRVLNT's incredible 24m. I'd guess that he had to looped the game 7 or 8 times to get a score like that since his run lasted 2+ hours. That guy's awesome.

I got 12.6 million with the Vigoorian Flails earlier today as well. I believe that's also the second highest legit score on XBL, but at least this time I was less than a million points behind YRO's score. I made it to the Van Gelf/rocket ninja wave in the 4th loop before getting killed. I kinda got screwed by some bad luck (having one of the mech spiders glitch and spawn in mid-air) and one really bad mistake (going for a UT in the red Gaja/mech fiend wave before a second essence spawned), but I'm still pretty happy with that score. I don't think I'll be trying too hard to improve on it.

Tomb Raider: Definitive Edition
This was on sale for $13 and I've been wanting to play it, so I figured why not. I'm sure I'd like it more if it had more in common with Tomb Raider Anniversary than Uncharted, but so far it's been fun enough.

[The Legend of Sunblade]

Final Fantasy Record Keeper

I didn't have much to say about it besides "I keep grinding on daily and weekly stuff to get shit cause I don't wanna go through the 8 or 13 story". 

I leveled up Steiner and Snow with growth eggs so I have powerhouses during FF9/13 segments. Picked Snow over Tifa/Lightning cause I got a four star glove from i dunno where, whereas I already have Cloud for FF7 stuff and Lightning would still be using a three star sword. I like to think I'm doing good for playing a game I can't read anything about!

[tiesto]

Just did nearly everything there is to accomplish in Alter Code F, save the boring 100 floor dungeon with the impossible boss at the end. Tomorrow night I'm gonna finally go and finish the game after about 70 hours...

...that is, unless my Type-0 copy arrives, then its gonna be playing the FF15 demo.

[Bebpo]

Beat Zero no Kiseki, great rpg.  If they never bring this and Ao over (skipping straight to Sen) it'll be a shame.  Much better paced than Trails in the Sky FC; but there are things I like better about Sky (bigger cast, bigger world to explore), so it's a bit of a wash and they're both good stuff.

[bork]

Spent the last week or so mostly playing DOA5 Last Round PS4 and Hotline Miami 2 PS4/Vita.  I played so much DOA that I took a break and went back to Ultra SF4.  Did really well with Hugo and Chun, so I'm glad my skills haven't diminished. 

Played a little bit of Dragon Quest Heroes and stopped again.  I'm just not really feeling this game like other musous.

[MrAngryFace]

Sat down and played some Second Son and Samurai Warriors 4 this weekend (and Monster Strike)

[Mr. Nobody]

Beat Danganronpa 2 finally.

PHEW

[Cerveza mas fina]

I dunno if I have the stamina to actually play Persona 4 beyond the first 4/5 hours which gave me a taste. Running around town and socializing etc. bleh. This would prob be a 9/10 game for me a decade ago.

[kick51]

I dunno if I have the stamina to actually play Persona 4 beyond the first 4/5 hours which gave me a taste. Running around town and socializing etc. bleh. This would prob be a 9/10 game for me a decade ago.

you've already done everything the game has to offer, now just multiply that by 15 or so.  from here on, you have to care about the story/picking up underage waifus

[Cerveza mas fina]

Guess thats it then. Story us quite cool but not cool enough to put effin 60 hours more into it I think.

[Rufus]

Venetica, or what Deck 13 made before Lords of the Fallen. Probably their first non-adventure game? They made the Ankh and Jack Keane games. Anyway, Venetica is completely forgettable, some okay-ish vistas notwithstanding. Action-RPG with zero depth in either half. The combat is simplistic (one combo per weapon type) and the spells are absolutely horrid. There are half a dozen variants of "stun enemy for x seconds" and they're all a complete waste of mana since it's very easy to never even get hit. You win by stunlocking enemies and occasionally rolling to the side when they block.
I regularly had points left over because there as nothing good to invest them in. Life steal is the only useful spell, and even that becomes obsolete once you can afford the life-regen ring. Why did I finish this?

Bizarre detail: you pick locks by consulting the ghosts of two cousins. They valiantly sacrificed their lives for you two hours or so into the game.

[The Sceneman]

I'm back into the Vidya and have been playing Dark Souls 2 a lot. Never beat it the first time round so I started again and I'm almost done now. WIll totally smang the DLC too because the game is sick. I'm all DEX all the time! Poison Ricard's Rapier OP!

Also beat Medals of Duty: Advanced Combat on my brothers PS4. The game was probably too advanced

[Bebpo]

Finished Infamous: First Light and it was even worse than Second Son.  Sadly the game really has barely any gameplay and it's pretty much this modern day interactive cinema press O to win game.  You watch cutscenes and do little mini-game things and that's it.  The writing isn't any good so without any real meat gameplay it's just totally meh and I would've dropped it completely if it wasn't fairly short.  At least SS had multiple powers going for it.  But really, these games are such shallow experiences compared to Infamous 2 which actually was a pretty fun game with good combat.

[The Sceneman]

AAA gaming