Tigranes

Where can you buy that?

Hang on, hang on. Why? My mother just stayed the weekend at a private hospital and got abdominal hysterectomy done for less than 10K NZD. How does this work?

They've had their share of problems, as well. But they've clearly gone from horse armour to something a bit more meaty, like the Pitt, I'm led to believe.

No, his armour regeneration is too fast.

Not really a Bioware thing, I think it's just one of the growing pains with the DLC system. The interface between DLC and other parts of the product are clearly not well worked out yet by most companies. I don't like DLCs, but I assume as companies keep doing this it'll get ironed out.

You can't. Either way, not really important, is it?

Unfortunately, this stuff is indeed up to Sega. I imagine info is not very far away.

If reviewers think stealth is a lot more difficult than shooters, sounds good to me. Easy stealth is a lot less fun than easy shooter, because stealth really lives by that knowledge one wrong move will see you dead.

I don't think the reviewer meant to sound as negative as he did, really. That's the problem with eurogamer reviews (and some others) sometimes - they're so concerned with trying to be witty, poetic or personal that they waste the first 300 words on weird exposition and you don't really get a good idea of what the reviewer's ultimate opinion is.

The thing about meeting a too-tough boss that stops your progress is, though: a) Why would you want to meet perfectly balanced challenges every time? Sometimes you should enjoy a walkover, other times you should be stumped - just not too much. It's a lot more satisfying that way. b) Especially if the story demands it, and provided there are enough sidequests and fun things to do for that 'grind', there's nothing wrong with having your progress stopped for a bit. Again, as long as it's not too extreme and you have to comb the last 10 areas for XP-headed monster babies... you've got to storm the bad guy's fortress and the characters say it's suicide. If the said fortress scaled to me that's pretty dumb. c) Sometimes you just go for it and beat him anyway, using up a lot of your limited resource items and really taking things to the wire. Great! Again, as long as it's not too unbalanced, that's a great moment in that game. The actual idea is fine - the only arguments against this is really against extreme cases. Total level scaling breaks so many things and takes so much fun out of a game, when all you need is some good balancing (which may include light scaling). edit: I'm playing King's Bounty right now, and the game seems to be balanced so that at any given time, you will see a mix of battles a bit easy, mostly 'just right' and a bit too difficult, and sometimes very difficult ones. Of course, in this game, you can choose to go up against the difficult ones and pull it off, losing a lot of your squad, or come back when you can breeze past it. Later on, at Castle Necrocom, the main quest depends on you beating a very tough boss battle before progressing to new areas, and I did have to 'grind' for a couple of hours to come back to it. Given that KB gives you enough stuff to do for this, it wasn't very frustrating - and the satisfaction was immense once I beat it. I think KB overdid it a little making you squeeze XP from every area, but the principle is sound. It's only frustrating when the game ****s up, or you expect to be able to kill everything right now as you see 'em.

Please, no. Anyway, I don't see much of an issue here, but technically speaking, it shouldn't take more than 5 minutes to add.

Wait... I thought SC doesn't get a demo, people were pissed about it.

Naturally. If I didn't exclude those things, I wouldn't be able to call it a typical shooter!

Fair enough, I played DX in 2008.

Deus Ex's gameplay was pretty meh. Its strongest point was that it was very diligent in implementing a rudimentary stealth/hack/shoot solution matrix on a regular basis, but otherwise it was just your typical shooter at the time (pew pew) with some magic powers that, typically, got unbalanced near the end. There's a lot of potential for the augmentations and the like to contribute much more meaningfully to gameplay, and for more modern features to make the gameplay more sophisticated, that should be taken up (of course, it could easily become a health-regen-fest). The setting and plot delivery, on the other hand, was a lot better. Can't comment on C&C since I got near the end then never finished it, but Deus Ex had style. The new trailer's pretty out there, Matrix + Dan Brown, so we'll have to see how it ends up. Fascinating to see the refutation of basic human thought processes such as retroactive thinking? An excellent DX3 will redeem the franchise, and allow more spinoffs/sequels for these devs.

So, is that, like a euphemism for...

Nobody contests that Arcanum was fatally flawed, I think. Even those who love it can't look at it and think "how is it the world doesn't love it?!". Personally, I just wish it could have overcome those balance and combat issues, and serve as an inspiration and reference for more RPGs. There are so so many things arcanum did right that has been lost. Anyway, the degree to which MCA can't talk about stuff is pretty hilarious, actually. I like Bethesda games for what they are and their marketing dept sure do a good job at hyping things up, but they've always been really stuck up about controlling everything and being suits. Iiiiinteresting.

Dear God, fastest way to ruin a country, ever.

Seems to be standard everywhere, Steam is like a different platform, needs different patches, etc.

Yes, agreed. It certainly doesn't hurt to see Alpha Protocol in the top 10 of any kind of preorder list though.

1 million would be a great success if AP was a PC-only release, being a new IP from a relatively young studio and with delay troubles. But this is a 3-platform release, which increases expectations and costs. Also, whatever we might think about the marketing's effect, I think Sega has put in a lot of investment PR-wise and are clearly wanting AP to be a big seller, something they can pump $ with DLCs and start a nice franchise with. It's clearly one of their big projects. I don't know. I mean, I doubt AP could reach Dragon Age / Mass Effect levels of sales right now, and Sega shouldn't/wouldn't expect that. But if AP flatlined at something like 700k after the first couple of months, I'm not so sure how happy they'd be.

Civ 5, Deus Ex 3, Diablo 3, Mafia 2, Alpha Protocol, New Vegas. That 4 out of those 6 belong to franchises old enough to go to school is... interesting.

Looks polished, looks fun, but way too easy with idiot AI that confirms early suspicions from last year. Assuming this is normal difficulty (or maybe easy), considering the slow response times of the enemies, their poor aim, and the somewhat weird shout system where enemies at high vantage points are more blind and deaf than those on the ground (seriously? What's the point of having guys up on those sentry towers if they never see or hear a thing?) means that it's all too easy to take them out one by one. I'd call what you see in the vid balanced if you didn't have any armour, but it seems to regenerate really really fast. Still, as long as the harder difficulties make you a lot more vulnerable, it should be fun and challenging. Even better if higher difficulties mean more alert enemies and wider alert radius. I'd expect that the base armour regeneration rate can be easily modded, as well. The flashforward / talk-with-villain stuff looks interesting, great decision I think. Also, was that my video or was there a lot of skipping lag in the middle portion, i.e. when fighting trucks?

41k for Xbox, 25k for PS3, we can probably expect somewhere in the middle for the PC = that's 100k preorders with 13 weeks to go. I have no frame of reference so it's all wild guesses, but I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that number to get a big boost in the weeks to come, maybe double. Combine that with no-preorder sales on the first day - again, does anyone know what proportion of first day sales are usually preorders? - and you could hope for AP to comfortably break 500k in the first couple days, and hit the 1 million milestone in those first few weeks. As a 3-platform release and a new IP, that's probably the bare minimum for the game to be considered a commercial success by Sega, 2 million to get some congrats going round. To me those numbers sound okay but not yet great... of course, this is all really wild conjecture. I hope for the day when we get these kind of stats properly compiled and released to the public. NB: at 170k Xbox preorders with 6 weeks to go Splinter Cell seems to be doing well, but then it's much closer and with an established franchise, so that's expected.

Ambivalent about animal companions, it's turned into a crazy fad with every single damn game having a dog. To be frank they're actually a sub-par companion - they don't talk and as controllable companions (i.e. DA) they are less varied in what you can do with them. Dogmeat was cool but that was a cult result of the AI and it'd be nice to get over that now.