toxicitizen

Corpse Party. Oh man, that was actually pretty damn good! The story is really what makes the game. The first couple chapters are kinda slow and are mostly used to set up the mood, premise and characters but once things really got going I was completely hooked. It's not scary at all, which was disappointing since I'd heard otherwise, but it does have its moments. A few of them kinda creepy and even downright disturbing. It was kind of awesome. The gameplay is a bit meh, though. Imagine a point-and-click adventure but played like a 16-bit JRPG. If you've played To The Moon then you have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about. It works, not much else to say about it. One thing worth mentioning is that every chapter has one true ending and a bunch of bad ones. This being a Japanese game, I got a bit worried early on that getting those true endings would involve some obscure or convoluted bullshit that would make progression a pain in the ass without a walkthrough. Fortunately, that wasn't the case. I ended up "accidentally" getting the true endings on the first 3 chapters. Most of the bad ones were linked to very clear failure scenarios, i.e. there is a bad thing in here that wants to kill you: do not let it kill you. I did save myself into an unwinnable situation in chapter 3 or 4 but it was at the very beginning of the chapter so I only lost about 30 mins of playtime. Replaying it while skipping all the text was a very minor annoyance. The only really bad one was the final chapter. I literally just spent all night on it because 2-3 hours in I realized I was locked into a bad ending path. I'd made a separate save an hour earlier because I had a hunch I'd made a bad call but that just lead to me wasting another hour. Turns out I'd made a mistake even earlier and had locked myself out of getting a necessary item. That one kinda sucked. But yeah, really enjoyed this one. Story is great. Maybe use a spoiler-free guide for chapter 5.

I was waiting for the PC version but last night I finally said fuck it and decided to just get it off PSN instead. Then today XSEED announced it's coming out on Steam next week. I hadn't bought it yet and considered waiting but my desire to play it on Vita won out over my preference to own things on Steam. I'll probably just double dip the PC version when it goes on sale, like I did with the Ys games.

The Wolf Among Us. Finally got around to playing episodes 4 and 5. They were good but the 2-3 months wait really killed the story's momentum for me. Don't think I'll be jumping into a Telltale game before it's over again. So, I guess that means I'll be waiting a bit longer before starting Walking Dead S2. Overall, I liked Wolf a lot more than Walking Dead. That's not to say that it was necessarily better in any particular way, though. I just liked everything about it a lot more. The world, story and characters were more interesting to me and I just loved the more colorful visual style. Wouldn't mind getting a season 2.

I keep hearing that but I got it without even trying and it wasn't over multiple playthroughs either. I guess I just got really lucky somehow?

They're summaries really. Every so often he may mutter a single word. That is it. Nah, it's pretty much the same thing. Occasionally, someone will ask you something and you'll get to choose between two replies but they're never voiced. To be honest, I barely even noticed he had a VA. I'm not sure he ever makes a single sound outside of battle grunts and shouts. Maybe the occasional one word line like "Right!" or whatever during cutscenes but I really couldn't say for sure. Yeah, from what I heard Celceta is most similar to Seven. And it's six party members in total. I've only played I, II, Oath and now Celceta and I'd rank them in the reverse order I played them (so Celceta > Oath > II > I). I just grabbed Origin on Steam so I'll be adding it to the list soon enough. Here's hoping XSEED releases Ark at some point because I hear the PSP version is abysmal and I don't really feel like hunting down the PS2 version. Also, forgot to mention but I hear Celceta is getting a PC version in China and I really hope it gets localized. The Vita version suffers from some framerate issues and a resolution bump couldn't hurt either.

Ys: Memories of Celceta. I was recently reading a thread about the series on NeoGAF and people started ranking the Ys games in order of preference. I was kinda shocked by how low Celceta was ranked. Most people ranked it at the very bottom, just above Ys I & II, while Oath in Felghana was closer to the top. I haven't played them all yet but so far Celceta is my favorite by far. The story still isn't all that great but I thought it was more interesting and better developed. The overall presentation was also a lot better, especially the character models. I really preferred the more realistically proportioned ones here compared to the chibi style of Felghana. There's also party members that you can control and just significantly more content overall. It took me about 30 hours but I spent a few hours on side stuff and trophies so it's probably closer to 20-25, which is still twice as long as the previous games. It was a bit on the easy side but I just had more fun with one. I'll definitely be giving it a replay down the line and probably go for the platinum.

Holy shit, man. That's some pretty hardcore delusion you've got going on right there. After the last few threads, I honestly couldn't be bothered to read or get into this one. But after skimming the last couple pages, and based on past experience "debating" with you, I expect it went a little bit like this: your "rebuttals" were little more than opinions backed by absolutely nothing and you ignored or dismissed actual evidence and proper arguments when they refuted your own claims. That's simply not how a debate works. You expect us to just accept your word as gospel because... ?

Cowboy, show some respect! The man has a genius-level IQ and has studied at not one, not two but three universities! (I mean, it's not four but, you know...) He is clearly our intellectual superior and we should consider ourselves lucky that he even deems us worth of receiving his wisdom. Now apologize to Elder TC!

Unlike you, I try not to talk out of my ass. That's just the initial kickstarter, do your research right. They're still taking donations. Notice how it says accomplished next to the 48 millions stretch goal? And they're already 34% of the way towards 49. If fans are willing to throw AAA-levels of money to fund a project then yeah, I'd say that qualifies as massive interest. What's your definition?

If you haven't heard of Star Citizen then not many news source must reach that rock you live under. I have zero interest in it and yet I hear about it all the goddamned time. It's hardly unimportant or irrelevant, it's the most massively successful video game crowd-funding campaign. It just doesn't stop raking in the millions. So yeah, I think you're full of shit! I just love how you accuse others of ignoring evidence yet keep doing exactly that yourself. What it proves is that there's massive interest in the space sim genre. This is a project that is nearing 50 millions when its initial kickstarter goal was 500 thousands.

Well, they're both Vita compatible. I think you own one, right? The bundle itself doesn't show up on the Vita store for some reason but the individual games do. I had to buy the bundle from my PS3 but was able to download the games straight to my Vita.

2 for 1 bundle sale on PSN. I've heard really good things about this series and have wanted to try it for a while but 20 bucks a piece seemed a bit much. I would've preferred getting just one to see how I like it first but they don't seem to go on sale very often and I've been waiting for a while so I just went for it. They sound right up my alley, anyway, so I'm not too worried there.

I did say that the trend has been changing for the better. Those examples are all pretty recent. And I'm hardly the only one who feels this way about mechanics. Quantic Dream's games are often bashed for being little more than interactive movies, you know. TWD and Gone Home were similarly criticized. I personally loved them all but I can definitely see how someone might feel that they were lacking something. And the Metal Gear Solid series puts a heavy emphasis on narrative but the series still has very solid mechanics underneath it all. Have you never played MGS3? There's a lot of depth to that gameplay. If it was only about the story then that simply wouldn't be the case. As for JRPGs, what are you going on about? The genre tends to be more narratively-driven than others but the mechanics are still as important as they would be anywhere else. People praise older Final Fantasy titles for things like the job system and the active-time battles. They bash Final Fantasy XIII for basically playing itself and lacking mechanical depth. A JRPG needs solid mechanics every bit as much as it needs a good story. First off, I consider those 90s titles to be fairly modern. So, it's not really the period I was talking about. And yeah, you can find examples of games that had stories even before then. I wasn't making an absolute statement by any means. I still fail to see how that contradicts anything I've said. A game having a story hardly says anything about how mechanically-driven it was or wasn't. I mean, most of your examples are RPGs, for fuck's sake. Do you seriously not realize that those games tend to be based on fairly complex systems and rules under the hood? Besides, your pre-90s examples are a bit more obscure than Pac-Man and Space Invaders, both of which were pretty big hits in their times. And you accuse me of picking confirmation bias examples? Are you for real, man? I never said that storytelling isn't an important part of games, I said that it's secondary to mechanics. Especially when it comes to categorizing them since a lot of them simply don't have stories. That's just a fact. A few cherry-picked examples of story-based games from the late 70s and early 80s doesn't contradict anything.

The current system isn't perfect but there's a reason why it is the way it is. Games are mechanics before anything else. Why do you think so many games had shit stories for the longest time? Because their developers made the game part first and only brought in a writer at the last minute, almost as an afterthought. That writer had no involvement or effect on development whatsoever. That situation has been changing for the best but I still think that says a lot. If mechanics aren't the most important, then how do you explain a game like Minecraft being such a massive hit? It has no story and its aesthetics aren't particularly appealing. It's nothing but a set of mechanics to play with. And the same is true for a lot of games. SimCity is basically a toy box and most 4X games have no story, just a set of rules and systems to play with. There was a time when games didn't even have stories. What's the most important part of Space Invaders and Pac-Man if not the mechanics? Or are they not real games, for some reason?

Bingo. It's the core of the experience that you need to describe. In the case of games, that core is a set of mechanics. Alien is a horror film, Portal is a puzzle game, Civilization is a turn-based strategy game. The what and when of their narratives belong in the plot summary on the back of the box, not tacked onto the genre label. Even perspective is often irrelevant. Spec Ops isn't all that different from Call of Duty from a purely mechanical standpoint. Sub-genres can be useful but few of them provide info you really need to know. Civ plays differently enough from XCOM to specify that it's a 4X. But much like Alien could take place in the present, on a submarine and with a more generic monster and still essentially be the same film, Halo without the sci-fi would be, well, pretty much Call of Duty, come to think of it.

What Ethan said. Most of my friends own a console but if their parents game at all it's casual stuff on phone or PC. I know very few older adults who are dedicated gamers. My mother plays hidden object games and Popcap-type stuff and recently got into facebook games but that's about the extent of it.

You can't just decide that something isn't a matter of opinion simply because you think yours is the correct one. That's asinine. You claim to be a smart guy, maybe try arguing like one? And, again, don't assume someone's offended simply because they disagree with you. I think you're being ridiculous, not offensive. Gamer is a very broad term, it applies to anyone that plays video games as a hobby. Casual or not. Like Ethan said, you don't get to redefine words simply because you think they apply to you more or less than to others. It's not meant to describe only the most dedicated enthusiasts like cinephile would. Pretty much everyone will regularly watch movies or listen to music. The same is not true for video games.

That's... a different conversation altogether? I mean, if I'm understanding you right, you're correct that the money raked in by stuff like Assassin's Creed allows to fund the smaller, artsier stuff like Child of Light and Valiant Hearts. But that's not what we're talking about here.

The thing is, casual is already used to describe people that play nothing but stuff like Bejeweled, hidden object games or facebook games. Nothing against Bejeweled, mind you. Fun game, but a casual one. I'm willing to label those people casual gamers. Not because they play those games but because they play nothing but those games. They'd never own an actual gaming console. Maybe they bought a Wii once but they haven't touched it since they got sick of Wii Bowling. Something being "mainstream" doesn't make it casual and neither does sticking to those bigger titles. And you're seriously overestimating the mainstream here, by the way. Few big game franchises are truly mainstream. GTA would be one, you can't throw a rock without hitting someone who's at least heard about it on the news. The Last of Us and BioShock definitely aren't, though. I know tons of people who play COD but have never even heard of Bioshock. You really think those people know about Dark Souls or an exclusive like TLoU? Gaming is becoming more mainstream, yes, but a lot of it is still very niche outside of enthusiast communities like this one. Shit, even here there's people who have never played a Platinum game. So fucking what? You're a gamer if you play video games enough to own a gaming system. Simple as that. Some people are more passionate about certain hobbies than others, who cares. There's no need for arbitrary distinctions of who's a real gamer and who isn't. That's just being elitist. And we most definitely don't need that. This is the Hate out of Ten thread all over again. You're using your own personal views to needlessly draw arbitrary lines that either aren't or shouldn't be there.

Don't assume people are offended just because they disagree with you. It's possible they just think you're being ridiculous. Please explain to me how Bioshock (or Call of Duty, for that matter) is casual. You can't say random shit like that without explaining yourself because clearly we're working on different definitions of casual here...

Hahahahahaha, no. No, it doesn't. Besides, Bioshock might be a big deal to us but it's hardly as mainstream outside of gaming circles as you might think. If someone knows about and played Bioshock, they're hardly "casual" gamers. Thinking harder about games doesn't make you more of a gamer and neither does seeking out obscure titles. Cut that pretentious crap.

I think I would be qualified to seriously critique games of I knew more about art criticism in general (literature, film, etc, symbolism and whatnot). As is it's not that I think I'm not smart enough, I just don't have the background knowledge to discuss it in much depth. Pretty much this. When I say "not smart enough" I really mean not knowledgeable enough rather than inability to understand.

Yeah, no. I tried and couldn't take more than 10 or so hours. I do think that it says a lot about the game that the only people I ever see defending it seem to not have liked Origins at all. There's trying to appeal to a wider audience and then there's completely alienating your initial audience.

I never finished Wild Arms 1 but I found it to be an enjoyable JRPG. You can't really go wrong for 99 cents, honestly.