SomTervo

Downloaded all of Neon Genesis for to watch with my flatmate, who hasn't watched an anime before, but is a connoisseur of TV shows. I'm really not a fan of anime. So much of it is the same painful tropes and cliche's and stereotypes rolling around in a melting pot of boke-tastic material. (I've been subjected to a lot of it, especially in my mid-late teens, so this isn't a random uninformed hatred). But there are maybe 3-4 shows that I love and want to watch all the time. I recall Neon Genesis being particularly strong, but I never watched all of it like I did with some other shows, so I downloaded that SHIT. The first couple of episodes are really strong. Flatmate surprisingly really enjoyed them. Although, like with so much anime, it's so hard to look past the painfully poor music and awful tonal shifts. "Oh yeah cool serious chat, okay now they'r unwinding, okay NOW THERE'S A PENGUIN GOING INTO THE BATHROOM LOOKING AT HIS PENIS". My flatmate had literally never seen anything so absurd in a TV show and laughed constantly for about 10 minutes. It's now a flat in-joke. Want to get some FMA going, too. What a show.

Very promotional.

I can't decide yet: I love the first album, but thought the first two tracks of the second album sounded much stronger. Haven't really listened past them, though. After 6669, this is my fave:

Good point. Really, any frustration at all is a failure in the design of your game. The birds can't damage you enough in AW generally to be a frustrating threat, but there are odd moments in certain locations (hazardous ones, I might add) where the birds add to what would already be challenging movement/ platforming.

That's great to hear. I felt really, really guilty in not buying Rayman Origins. It looks a lot more like my cup of tea, but because so many friends had BF3 and I knew I could get a lot of playtime out of it, I went for BF3 over RO. Felt so guilty. If it's still profitable, though, happy days!

Yeah, the DLC story and gameplay and design is so far above most of the regular game. And yeah, birds are definitely an odd enemy. They're right on the line between 'cool/ fun to fight' and 'frustrating as fuck'. I think they spend most of their time on the former side though.

In all the Assassin's Creed games, it doesn't matter which 'side' of a historic conflict any figures are on. Assassins Versus Templars is a meta-battle, individuals are on each side, and each side isn't synonymous with historic groups. There are even Ass vs Temp rivalries within historic groups. I can't remember examples, but I'm sure that happens in Brotherhood. The player in 3 will probably be able to change coat whenever he likes: just like how in II onwards you could get differently coloured capes for different factions. I think the fact that they made him native american is probably significant in suggesting that he will be either side.

I agree. I think it can fill the gap in the market on a separate level from the technology/ power behind the thing, which is all anybody seems to talk about.

All those "gimmick"s you listed, though, are basically one gimmick that you can completely ignore if you want? There were plenty of other great additions to the gameplay that totally justified that one thing. Camouflage, CQC, no Soliton, far better AI, more varied environments... Also, IRL, it's not very easy/ impossible to climb and use trees like that, not that MGS3 is the epitome of realism On harder difficulties especially, I adored the stamina/health system, where you often actually had to eat to keep your stamina up. I actually wish there was a mode that meant you had to eat every couple of hours in-game or you'd die of starvation. On topic: one word defines my disappointment with the trailer: pre-rendered. In terms of how the actual game sounds, though, I'm very hyped.

I can imagine that'd be the case, but with this grass-roots reworking of the gameplay mechanics and control scheme, who the fuck knows! It could be a lot more restricted and challenging, or they might stay with the 'hold Rt and A to free-run' thing. Who knows!

From an interfacing standpoint there's obviously a lot that could be done with a PC/console crossover. You'd have an interface like, say, the Xbox 360 dashboard, which is lovely, but instead of only console games and weird TV/media apps, you'd have Steam through which you can download PC games, and browsers/ other programs through which you can do other fun stuff, with a bigger hard drive and more customisability. I mean, if you put a PC in a front room with a big TV and a controller that's basically what this is anyway, but PC's need more space, more kit, and more work to get started/ maintain. A console-cum-PC could improve on all of those things, though it'd lose out on a lot of the freedom a user gets with straight PC.

It's worth it WaS. Also, I meant to say in my last post, but the stuff that's happened to all the characters in AWAN is actually a pretty realistic and well thought-out advance of where they are in two years. It's really good stuff.

I will be so pissed if they change the moment-to-moment gameplay. I think it's enough that there are a couple enemy types that are uncounterable. I really disagree. While the gameplay is strong from a cinematic perspective, looking at challenge and emergent fun, it's really flat. Everything's basically completely scripted (and feels like it when you think about it), combat is painfully repetitive by the end, the climbing, while cool, is basically a cutscene. 'Press X to awesome'. In combat, those two enemy types are counterable, you just need to have the right weapon in hand. Nothing in the game is uncounterable, except armoured guards strong attack, which comes along once every few hours, and is easy to dodge. However, I did really really like the control scheme in terms of it's structure: the whole 'Y is head, X is sword-hand, B is grab-hand, A is feet' thing. I just feel that the whole series would have benefited massively from a Stamina bar, at least for climbing/running. That would have added a lot of tension and more strategy. If you couldn't just run in a straight line forever, or climb/ hold on forever, you would have actually thought about avoiding/evading your hunters, not just running away from them. See I Am Alive, or Shadow of the Colossus' climbing system for reference.

Serious, bro? Just started listening to these guys. I began by hearing this about 5 hours ago, and literally had to turn it off within a minute. If you've recently been anywhere near experiencing what it's about, it's almost impossible to listen to. Whole album somehow captures the exact sound of that kind of despair.

The animation looks really, really nice. I find Guild Wars more appealing than most MMO's for a variety of reasons, and this looks good. But lack of a good rig means I'm out of the race on it, for at least 2-3 years till I can get a good rig.

Pah, trust him to have old news. I haven't been keeping up to date on anything in that regard.

They said they're reworking the moment-to-moment gameplay mechanics from the ground up, so hopefully that'll change a lot, and stop it being 'press X to win'. Which is something I've wanted since AC1.

Or nearly drowning to death, swimming to shore, and patting fire off your arm to heal up.

Anyone heard about the sign-language stuff? My flatmate just came in, and as I was telling him the goss about AC3, he said apparently for HL3 they're doing work on animating sign language into the game, getting professional signers and stuff to do mo-cap; Alyx Vance's friend is deaf or something in the game. If true: ingenious. The way they innovate communication with the player in that series is just stunning.

I agree, it could be very interesting. The situation at that period was more that specific tribes (the Iroquois were bad for this IIRC) would be like mercenaries, fighting with whichever side (French of American, Canadian or American) that gave them weapons, more land, and usually had the upper hand. They'd add numbers to the Colonists armies, and their skills in forests etc, and weren't tied to any specific side. Oooh, forests! There's a lot of interesting stuff they could do with this.

Ehhh. I don't really see how. I didn't mean it can be 'worked around' per se, I meant that design choice can be 'worked into' the fabric, the seam of the game itself. So there would be no loss of fluidity or immersion, the story wouldn't be tagged on. The level design would simply be stripped back an area or two of pure combat, and the flow between gameplay and cutscene would be intact. I think your statement that this would strip back years of maturation is hyperbole. Mind that combat isn't a synonym of 'gameplay'. There can be plenty of other things for a player to do in a game, which has combat, besides fight. An example of what I'm saying would be like if, say, in a new Uncharted game, where you had combat turned 'off', combat-only segments would be reduced to a brief cutscene of Drake taking guys out in a way, only a few seconds, a montage basically, and then (if required) a couple of lines of dialogue to fill in what's going on. A lot of the most thrilling sequences in Uncharted are nearly cutscenes anyway. Or AI teammates who are present almost the whole time anyway, can take the guys out for you. You'd still have the platforming, adventuring, puzzling (maybe made harder to compensate), enemies removed from levels in general, but when there's an area that would harbour a big fight and a cutscene, a moment could just be added to the start of the cutscene where Drake et al. take out the bad guys. In some games this sort of thing obviously wouldn't work at all, but those games wouldn't make the choice to remove combat, as it'd make the whole game redundant. This really depends on each individual game, and how much weight they put on combat as a gameplay mechanic. EDIT: Also, I'm not too bothered anyway as long as it's a choice. If games started losing challenging segments like combat altogether, in the interest of a casual audience, that would be a real issue. If it's a player choice: not so bad. I guess another argument against this whole thing is that people would start playing games very differently. A new gamer might miss what it's all "about" if they could skip the combat, they'd lose a lot of the unique gameplay that makes the medium what it is. Even if they might like the combat gameplay if they had tried it.

I've felt the series has needed a big rewrite like this, from the ground-up, for a while. The series isn't strong from a gameplay standpoint, and has never been. Since the first game, Ubisoft have needed to add so many elements like weapons and bombs and junk just to make up for how dull the very basic gameplay elements actually are. It's not a good way to go. It's gonna be interesting to see what they come up with.

In general, Dean, I disagree with you. I know a lot, a shockingly large amount of people who actually genuinely play every game on 'Easy' so that they can just get the story. They don't care it's a medium about interaction and challenge, they still want to play it for just the plot and narrative and universe. However, this: ... Is a very good point. BUT, it's one that developers can work around. If you decided, early on in a game's development, to have skippable combat, why would you put important conversations into said combat? Even if you did, it wouldn't be hard to have an alternate version of each following cutscene to keep the players up to date. Just paste the dialogue in there with a moment's more animation. I think, as with so many issues in games, it's the developers choice in design, and its success depends on how well they implement said design.