toxicitizen

Nah, GMG is picky like that these days. You can't use vouchers and credit at the same time and vouchers don't work on VIP deals. I think the VIP thing was a sneaky way of letting you use your credit on top of a "fake" voucher-like discount for selected games.

Clearly, what we're dealing with here is a pre-reveal dog downgrade. We can't let the sneaky bastards get away with this, guys! Come on, let's get ourselves some good old internet outrage going!

It's not happening, man. Let it go. on topic: Well that didn't take long. Arkham Knight wouldn't show up in the VIP deals but this did, so after the base discount and my credit it was like 10 bucks. Which is really nice since it was on my shopping list for the Steam summer sale but I didn't expect it would go low enough for me to pull the trigger. Anyway, I've been really looking forward to trying this one out, I almost impulse bought it at launch. I've been wanting to get into the city building genre for years but I could never get into SimCity 4 and we all know how the new one turned out. It was a bummer but I sure as hell wasn't going to buy that piece of garbage EA shit out. I fully expect the citizens of my first city to all die horribly. This should be fun!

I'm pretty skeptical about this considering Bloodborne and Scholar of the First Sin literally just came out a couple months ago, but apparently Dark Souls 3 might be announced at E3. If true, I imagine it's an early announcement and the game is still quite a ways off. But man, after DS2 turning out slightly disappointing and Bloodborne being PS4-exclusive, having Miyazaki return for Dark Souls 3 would be pretty damn awesome.

From what I've been hearing, it's different but one of the better FF in recent years. The story is supposed to be quite a bit darker, too.

Uplay only, I assume?

I really hope they're not going to wait until E3 to show some damn gameplay.

I was holding off on the GMG deal because I have some credit I wanted to use, so I was waiting for it to show up in the VIP deals again. But I just came across a deal that was too good to pass up. It's 45 bucks over on Funstock Digital and the code BATMAN-COUPRED-10OFF brings it down to 30 bucks (not sure I quite get the math on that one, I'm guessing it must be 10 British pounds off?). Anyway, that's pretty much the exact price I was hoping to get on GMG, and now I get to use my credit on something else. I wonder what's up with all these sick pre-order discounts on the game, though. Based on the gameplay footage, I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the game's quality. Maybe those nVidia promo codes hurt pre-orders on PC?

The point being that some aspects of this version actually predate the other game by quite a few years. I never said fully 9 years, though. Some of it was on and off and the game was "officially in development for five years" according to that Polygon piece. Beyond that, we're just arguing semantics so I'm going to take that as my cue to end this here. I was talking about The Bureau when I mentioned development hell. Actually, Solomon was given a team to make the first prototype back in 2003. That Polygon piece is actually a pretty good read, you guys should check it out. To be fair, he failed on that first attempt. But I think being given a team and six months to prototype his idea qualifies as being in development at least on some level.

Fair enough. And yeah, I'm sure some people transition between teams over the course of the projects . But I don't really see that as being a particularly relevant distinction given the context here. They're still two separate teams working on two separate projects. Transferring people between the two as the projects' needs change is preferable to layoffs. That shooter was announced in what, like 2008? That Polygon piece mentions that Solomon was trying to get his XCOM off the ground as far back as 2003. It's quite possible that the negative reception to the shooter is what prompted 2K to finally give the game the full greenlight, though. But the game itself was never made as a response to it, it's been a dream project of Solomon's for essentially his entire career as a game designer. I dunno, I just don't think it's fair to label it a quickly slapped together response to what I basically view as "Development Hell: The Videogame!".

I think they only ever vaguely said "Spring 2015" but yeah, even that window is closing very soon. Really wonder what's up with that as the only reason I bothered double dipping the first two was because they announced the full trilogy right off the bat. Apparently their streaming service has bombed pretty hard, so some people are saying LR might've been silently canned along with it. That seems like a bit of a stretch but I'd be pretty annoyed if that's actually what happened. I kinda want to hope that they're actually taking the time to do a good port job this time but I just can't bring myself to be that optimistic about S-E these days.

Apparently, this was spotted and quickly removed from MSI's website. Take it with a grain of salt until it's official but yeah, not too surprising if true. I'd definitely pick it up. Guess that makes FFXV PC just a little more likely as well.

That's... not true at all. It's been a while but I'm pretty sure I remember reading that the first XCOM took quite a few years to make. I think it was something like five years or so, all things considered. And Jake Solomon had been trying to get the game made for even longer. So no, it wasn't that quick of a game to make. Not sure why you bring up Beyond Earth at all, though, as that's clearly a different internal team. And I'm sure most of those guys are working on the expansion for BE, anyway. Also, it's only been 2 years since the Enemy Within expansion, which is a fairly standard development cycle that could indicate minimal iteration. Hence why I'm hoping it's been in the works for that full 3 years.

Well, shit. That's not at all what I was expecting. Also, PC exclusivity is a really nice surprise, can't wait to hear more about the logic behind that one (and thank fucking God I upgraded instead of getting a PS4!). I mean, the last game was fairly successful on consoles, so I never expected them to go down that road at all. Hopefully that means they'll be taking full advantage of the platform and designing gameplay features and the UI without having to simplify for gamepads like last time. The November 2015 release worries me a little, though. I'm glad that it's coming so soon but I really hope it hasn't been rushed or anything. Sounds like Jake Solomon is lead designer once again, so considering he wasn't on Enemy Within, I'm hoping development started shortly after Enemy Unknown's release. One of my biggest hope for a sequel was the return of procedurally-generated maps, so I was kind of hoping they'd rebuild the game from the ground up. edit: Actually, reading that IGN piece, it does mention procedurally-generated maps! Yay! I'll have to be careful, though. When Enemy Unknown came out, I played so much that my semester went to complete shit. I'm on track to graduate at the end of next year so I absolutely cannot let that happen again.

I fail to see how that contradicts anything I said. Besides, that's going to vary from game to game. And even when it's an issue, we're talking about a midrange card here. Like I said, if you want to be completely safe then go for a higher end card. Otherwise, yeah, a fucking midrange card isn't going to be able to handle all games at 4K. So?

What? I was replying to Mal and all I said is that the VRAM thing wouldn't have that much of an impact. I didn't say anything about recommending the card as futureproof nor am I backpedaling now.

Sure, there's an impact but will it really make that much of a difference? I mean, at that point you might as well just go for the higher-end models if you really want to be safe. The 70s cards have always been mid-range and the 970 is still exactly that. The problem is only for people that bought one thinking it was more than that.

That was blown WAY out of proportion, imho. It definitely sucks for those that were misled and they have a right to be angry. But otherwise, as far as buying the card now goes, from what I understand it's still a great card for all intents and purposes. I would've gotten one if it hadn't been out of my price range. I really don't think that last 0.5GB of VRAM being slower is going to make or break the card as far as futureproofing goes. If it's still not good enough for you, you can always go with AMD. I'm not a fan but people keep recommending them so they must be doing something right (although it sure as shit isn't their drivers). And if futureproofing is what you want above all and money's not an issue, the GTX 980Ti is just around the corner.

Yeah, between the new Deus Ex announcement and what looks a lot like a new XCOM announcement tomorrow, I think now/the near future is the perfect time to upgrade. I'm certainly glad I did. The current consoles are already feeling fairly outdated hardware-wise, so any decent rig built now should be good to last through the gen. I think I'll be fine with maybe just a GPU upgrade in a few years, and even then it probably won't be absolutely necessary.

1001 Spikes. The final entry in "FLD's NES Fun Times" trilogy. I went into this one not really expecting to be able to beat it. And at first that seemed to be what was going to happen. Holy shit, this game is hard! Some of the early levels felt goddamn impossible at first. But at some point everything just kinda clicked and I got good, and when that happened I fell in love with the game. It is so fucking good! The weird thing is that the game is so full of fucking beginner's traps that it should feel like complete and utter bullshit. Like, shit that you couldn't possibly know is there ahead of time. The game starts you out with 1000 lives and there's a damn good reason for that. You are going to need those lives. Die 20 times getting through that platforming section until you get the timing juuuust right and BAM! You land on a block and fucking hidden spikes come out of it and impale you. But for some reason it never feels cheap, you just kind of accept that that's how the game is. Probably because the level design is actually very good and by the time you actually make it to those spikes you have the preceding section down to a fucking science anyway, so you can redo it pretty easily. For like the first two thirds of the game I wasn't even getting frustrated. I kept dying and dying but it was so much fun and satisfying once I beat a level that it didn't bother me at all. It got pretty insane near the end and I started getting annoyed on some of the levels, but overall I'm really glad I picked this one up. At first, I thought I had made the right move by waiting for a sale. Early on, it seemed like I would've been a bit disappointed if I'd paid full price. But now that I've actually beaten it, I think it would've easily been worth the 15 bucks. Especially considering that over the course of the game I unlocked: 2 extra arcadey game modes, a set of levels called "The Lost Levels" which I haven't touched yet, and at the very end an entire second campaign! Really happy about those last two because I kinda want more! So, that was a fun little nostalgia trip but I think that's enough retro games for now. Gonna focus on finishing Dragonfall now.

What XSEED lady? Like I said, XSEED have nothing to do with Re;Birth whatsoever. It's not their game, they're not localizing it, publishing it or anything. Idea Factory is doing all of that themselves nowadays and I'm pretty sure it was done by NISA before (around the time of the original PS3 releases). Are you sure you're not confusing them with IF? Would make infinitely more sense for her to be an IF lady... Do you mean Sara? I mean, I guess it's possible she worked for IF as well but, if she did, then it wouldn't have anything to do with her work at XSEED. XSEED are little more than a localization outfit. It's just that when it comes to Steam releases they're sometimes able to go a little beyond their usual MO by adding achievements and sometimes other stuff. For example, TitS FC on Steam is pretty much the definitive edition of the game now. They got their one programmer to add a bunch of improvements that were only added for the PSP port, they also touched up the translation a bit and there was talk of even adding HD assets from the Japanese-only PS3 versions (haven't kept up on whether or not that actually happened, though). On the other hand, when it came to the PSP version they didn't patch in the translation adjustments because they had no way of doing that themselves. That would've required sending their edits to Falcom and apparently they no longer have any PSP devkits. Yep, IF are doing it themselves now. And considering how half-assed the localization is, I don't think they're outsourcing anything. I ended up playing the first Re;Birth in Japanese (something I usually never did for games) because I was getting annoyed with how the english dub only had voiceovers for like a third of the lines. Also, considering how ridiculously long SC has been taking, I seriously doubt XSEED are taking outside work. They even had to enlist the Carpe Fulgur guys to help with SC and that didn't go so well, from what I heard.

Holy shit, seriously? Guess I'll stay away for now then. Let me know how the port is, I'm really tempted to get it while it's 50% off. I skipped the Vita version of this one when I found out about the Steam releases, so I've been waiting to play it for a few months. Also, XSEED wouldn't have learned anything from Re;Birth 1 because XSEED had absolutely nothing to do with Re;Birth 1. This is Idea Factory and Compile Heart. FYI, XSEED aren't a dev. They don't do ports or anything like that, only localization work. They only have like one programmer and, IIRC, she's not even full-time staff, they only contract her when they need to implement specific stuff, like Steam achievements or whatever. I think TiTS FC was the biggest thing she'd done for them yet.

Order cancelled in 3... 2...

Castle in the Darkness. Holy shit, this game is fantastic! I beat the fake final boss last night and got the bad ending and went back to get 100% completion and get the good ending just now. I was initially planning on playing Shadowrun: Dragonfall right after FFXIII-2, and I did start Dragonfall, but Castle in the Darkness just sucked me in instantly and I've wanted to play nothing else for the past few days. If you're a fan of retro NES-style action platformers, then trust me: go buy this game right the fuck now. It's still on sale for like 5 bucks on Steam for another day or so (it's normally dirt cheap anyway) and it's easily worth three times as much. They're not all that similar mechanically (this is more of a light Metroidvania), but the entire time I was playing I kept being reminded of Shovel Knight. It has that same "love letter to the NES days" vibe and, imho, it's every bit as good. There's some genuinely funny easter eggs in there and it's shock full of references to stuff like Castlevania, Mega Man and the likes. I'm pretty sure I also caught a Demon's Souls reference in there. Speaking of which, this game is pretty damn hard. It proudly displays a death counter every time you die and by the time I was done with the game it was pretty damn close to 1000. But Castle in the Darkness smartly handles death kinda like Super Meat Boy where you're back into action pretty much instantly, so it never feels frustrating and you always want to keep trying. The boss fights are also pretty well designed. There was only one out of like fifty (yes, fifty!) that felt like bullshit, the vast majority of them feel very doable right off the bat and it's always clear what you did wrong when you fail. So yeah, this one really took me by surprise. I bought it hoping it would be good but I never expected it to blow me away like this. It's fucking criminal how little this game's been talked about. If it wasn't for a short-lived OT on Neogaf when the game came out a few months ago, I probably never would've even heard about it. At this price, it should be a no-brainer for anyone that likes this kind of game. And if all of that didn't convince you, I think this trailer (and dat music!) speaks for itself:

From what I understand, Acquire did the port in-house. So, XSEED aren't to blame for this one. Apparently they warned Acquire about port quality and all that stuff but it sounds like it turned out to be kinda meh anyway. Anyway, I enjoyed it on Vita but I didn't really feel like it was worth full price. I'll double dip when it's on sale for 10-15 bucks.