Cl_Flushentityhero

I hear you. I recently bought a PS3 for a handful of games and the free multiplayer (think about it: if you paid for XBL gold for 6 years, you'd have spent enough money to get a PS3 and play online free of charge). That said, between just those two games you have a lot of actual gameplay hours (assuming you do some multiplayer in Uncharted 2).

Hey, I liked that version! The latest incarnation looks awesome (and almost guaranteed to actually release), though I feel they may have missed out on some gameplay opportunities by trying to appease SC fans. Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed all the SC games up to this point, but the franchise has been ready for a change since Chaos Theory. Also, I find SC's fanbase to be some of the most dogmatic, particular, and inflexible people online. They'll argue for the oddest reasons how Double Agent was an irredeemable piece of crap despite its delivery of a competent linear sneaking experience using mechanics largely identical to the first game (and the second game, and the third game). I often find myself wondering how I like the same franchise as these people.

I'd go out on a limb and say that, whether you get to the point where you need to do no-level playthroughs to offer a challenge or you never make it past the first dungeon, playing Demon's Souls is an experience.

Well, I haven't tried the co-op yet; lemme splain the system to my understanding. As a soul, you can leave a co-op marker in an area of your choosing (a little glowy thing that offers a context-sensitive action). Somebody who is in living form can then activate that marker and bring you along. I haven't been dropping markers yet because I feel too noob and underlevel to be of much assistance. With my tendency for sudden death, it's hard to imagine surviving an entire level I'm unfamiliar with. That said, durability does go up drastically once you start leveling.

The North American release was Oct 6th, I don't know about PAL regions. I haven't entirely figured out the PvP and Co-op systems yet, though I'm pretty sure they're linked to one player being in "body" form, in which I've spent about 5% of my gameplay time thus far. I'm pretty sure that, if you're wandering around as a soul (as I am 95% of the time), you can't entirely initiate co-op and people can't force you into PvP either. Grinding is an option (and a necessity) to lighten the difficulty, but you cannot improve your character's stats until you complete the first dungeon. Doesn't sound too bad in theory, but it took me hours to get through what you could probably do in less than an hour if you got it in one try. There is a brief tutorial with some hand-holding, but then the game starts killing you repeatedly.

I picked it up yesterday and man, that **** is hard. It doesn't really have a story or characters in the traditional sense, but it creates a perfect atmosphere for the rest of the game's elements. The game reminds me of the first DMC game, and in a good way. You're exploring dark and dreary medieval architecture knowing that at any point you could stumble onto a new enemy that kicks your ass back to the beginning of the mission in seconds, robbing you of all your progress. Interesting online functionality as well. Basically, thus far it's struck me as a very unique gaming experience in its synthesis of individually familiar parts.

I have a love-hate relationship with QTEs. On one hand, they allow you the player to do badass things that game developers haven't ever really scripted a good mechanic for (e.g. the recent heavy-rain trailer where the detective wrestles with the robber for a gun; or the special kills in the God of War games). At a basic level, gaming is just pushing buttons with correct timing anyway, not really a one-to-one process in most cases. On the other hand, like any mechanic, developers also demonstrate a skillful ability to screw them up or misuse them. Why do I need to push a button for my character to dodge in this cutscene but not the next one? Cognitive psychology can give developers a good idea of how much time a person needs to react from a state of relaxed awareness, and it's longer than a lot of games' QTE windows. I think ideally QTEs will gradually fade into obscurity as game interfaces improve, but in a timeframe of decades rather than years. In the meantime they pretty much serve their purpose.

Hah, I can think of more immediate complaints to make about multiplayer, like the inability to join a game in progress or some people losing their connection to the master server every 5 minutes.

Hey, this is like the last time they delayed it until "spring."

I'd definitely like to get to this game sometime, though it may be during the hypothetical pre-AP spring lull of 2010.

Star Ocean 4 received a lot of favorable reviews, so I'd view any claims it objectively is "garbage" with skepticism. Operation Darkness has its charms, though the interface requires a lot of micromanagement and the difficulty gets up there about halfway through the game. I never finished it, but I had fun with it.

I used to play, not so much anymore, though I still have it installed.

The Third Courier: http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/issu...IRD_COURIER.php Spy-themed hybrid of dungeon crawling and adventure-game style investigation mechanics.

Oh well, I guess if you want your 2009 spy fix you'll have to play this: http://www.gametrailers.com/video/review-mysims-agents/57169

Wow, lots of doom and gloom here. Some people seem to forget how many otherwise good games get shafted by the publisher for whatever reason.

Following the parallel thread on GFWL, I don't think it's inherently bad, but I do think it's an unnecessary inconvenience born from haphazard 360 ports. The interface is not streamlined for games that actually make use of GFWL functionality (multiplayer matchmaking etc., *not* just achievements), and I find it to be sluggish and unresponsive. For games that *don't* particularly use GFWL functionality save for patches or DLC, it's an additional thing I have to set up when installing that serves no important purpose. It doesn't ruin games, it's just unnecessary.

I can't really say I have a desire to do so, but alright. Well, you said you'd try to at least play it before passing judgment. If you don't, you're writing the game off based on vague criteria that you've imagined rather than any legitimate reasons. Just saying . . .

What's with this whole 'exploration' craze, anyway? I'd have hours of my life back if I didn't spend so much time backtracking from place to place in the Fallout games.

Malcador: I can understand the desire to crucify Codemasters for blaspheming the franchise, but the theories about how it will be dumbed down are pretty weak based on available evidence. At the end of the day we're both giving the game a shot, so it's kind of an academic point.

I'm not sure I could handle another delay past next summer.

My suspicion is that the plot is presented too tongue-in-cheek to trigger a knee-jerk reaction. That said, I thought the same thing about Army of Two and a lot of reviewers suddenly got all patriotic.

How will they do that and why is it a shame? Previews and the first few reviews suggest difficulty is plenty high.

Doublepost.

So are you talking about just taking the finished product they have right now, and just holding it back 8 months? That can't happen because in 8 months, graphics standards go up, as do gameplay standards. What may be a unique bullet point to Alpha Protocol now may not be in that time, hence the selling power of the game falls too. Just because it's a terrible idea doesn't mean people haven't done it. For reference, see SEGA's North American localization of the Yakuza games.

Maybe for you . . .