Drowsy Emperor

But you thought X held up? Tidus is the angstiest teen, spending all game complaining about how his dad didn't love him. That's why I'm no fan of X. I never got that vibe from him. He has "issues" but his general personality is infinitely more upbeat than the likes of Cloud, Squall, the protagonist of Persona 3 all of which are dark and brooding (insofar as they have any personality at all) for the sake of being dark and brooding - both in behavior and visual design. Tidus is a kid. He thinks like a kid, has kid "problems" and behaves like a kid but never at any point commits the sin of pretending to be something else.

New Super Mario Bros 2 never seems to end, I'm 17 hours in and still unlocking new worlds. Its strange to see almost 50% of game content hidden away from the main "story" path in 2016. I finished off a 2euro platformer called Gunman Clive. Very pretty graphical design, rudimentary platforming gameplay. One and a half hour playtime. I felt it was worth it just for the graphical style alone - I wish I could take screenshots but the game doesn't have a miiverse community so the screenshot function doesn't work.

The game was principally famous for being a generation's introduction to fantasy. This is largely the same reason why X is popular, too. It has likable characters and a decent fantasy story with interesting turns. *shrug* I played both VII and X years after release and found that X held up better in almost every way. There was nothing about VII that I felt was really remarkable, whereas Chrono Trigger and FFVI strike me as more relevant titles today. Then again I have a visceral hatred for early 3D graphics, chibis, angsty teenagers and grainy pre-rendered backgrounds, so it was an uphill thing from the start.

I kinda feel like it also depends on how old you are when playing it. The game's very clearly targeted towards younger teenage demographic and I think it works for it, but the moment you start caring about such nonsense as fleshed-out worldbuilding, well... It falls apart. I think Final Fantasy IX aged a lot better, throwing a lot of the angst away and trying to be much more of a fairy tale, which happens to work significantly better for the fantastical worlds Square Enix creates. I played only a little of FFIX but it definitely leaves a better first impression than either VIII or VII. VI and X also start off rather well. So does XII but it takes so long to get anywhere and then, paradoxically, stops and goes nowhere. I only ever finished IV, VII, X, X-2 and XII though. And I might play IX when I'm able to swallow JRPG combat again.

FFVII is a game that really doesn't need a remake. I know a lot of people hold it dear to their hearts but the game was principally famous for looking better than anything else at the time... which is no longer the case. Having played it years later, IMO the story and the characters really don't hold up all that well.

I did a recording for fun and just found out how much I suck at voice acting

Now I have the answer to the question who they keep on making Call of Duty for

I can't tell what its really like, but I downloaded a demo and it seemed like a visual novel with token adventure game elements.

Did you try the Beyond Earth expansion? I heard it made it a lot better, but I'm not sure if I'm willing to throw more money at it. No, IMO there was no saving Beyond Earth. Its problems were not just something that could be patched up - the design was flawed from the start.

Trying to 100% New Super Mario Bros 2, mop up Pushmo and start on Ocarina of Time before GTA Chinatown Wars and Ghost Trick arrive from ebay.

I just want it redone with new graphics that preserve the tone of the old one. Beyond Earth was supposed to be its spiritual sequel and look how that turned out.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri remake, Homeworld 3. Other than that, some of my own ideas.

I meant the new, rebooted ones The old ones were split fairy equally between combat, platforming and puzzles, whereas the new ones are 90% murder simulator and 10% everything else. I mean the old games were clunky as hell but they were an adventure of sorts, wheres I got tired of all the killing and never finished the reboot.

I found the combat tedious and so did my girlfriend so we quit the game relatively quickly. And not just the combat, the game doesn't really motivate you to push forward with anything.

I felt that those weren't really Tomb Raider games anymore.

You also have to suspend your disbelief fairly significantly to get immersed in stealth play when it comes to Thief games. It's very apparent that they were as much tech demonstrations as they were games, with their individual aspects overblown way out of proportion to showcase the engine - shadows being these black holes which captured all light and sight of guards, bizarre footwear of the protagonist which made certain floors explode with sound regardless of how carefully he was moving. Add to that guard AI which was not really stellar because you were supposed to avoid them, not get sighted and ... Well, you get Thief. Don't get me wrong, the games are excellent, but let's not pretend they were perfect. Yes, Dishonored definitely does empower the player, there's no doubt about it. It's worth keeping in mind that this is a design goal so it's pretty difficult to list it as an objective disadvantage - as I said, these games are not Thief because they're not attempting to be Thief in the first place. As for the rest of your post - I disagree strongly that this means design of these games is inconsistent. Gunplay/Swordplay transitions smoothly into stealth into calmer sections without really seeing any seams and given the fact they're designed to empower player, these options also make sense. However, it definitely muddies up design, there's no doubt about it. As a rule of thumb, the more features you stuff into a game, the less complex the individual features are going to get. If all you want out of a game is sneaking around levels and not doing anything else, Thief is very likely going to be the game for you as that is its sole focus. That's just not quite enough for me tho, I want more options at my disposal, even if those individual options are slightly less fleshed out, mostly because they lead to some great mechanical interactions (read: Emergent gameplay). I do love Elder Scrolls games after all, and those are a prime example of games with extreme lack of focus. Thief is eighteen years older than the new Deus Ex and and fourteen years older than Dishonored. Even so, I see it much better at achieving what it set out to do than the other two on the whole. That is what I consider good design. That said, I'm not criticizing Deus Ex and DIshonored because they're not Thief, I'm critical towards them because they're unconvincing at what they do. I'm more fit to comment on Deus Ex HR since its the only game of the two I completed and it felt underwhelming because it bends over backwards at every juncture just to make the player feel cool. Stealth in Deus Ex HR is bogus - the character model protrudes over cover and is often completely within line of sight of enemies, but hidden because their detection field is more akin to a laser than a cone. Violence is weak, with the gunplay being somewhat impotent and obviously intended to play second fiddle to stealth and instant kill animations. Empowerment works when the player feels they've earned the reward through being clever or skilled. It also works when its an upward process and the player's avatar grows in a convincing way. That is not the case in either of these two games - you're empowered because the game simply gives it to you and gimps everyone else - just in case. Not every game has to be from the Dark Souls "kick your face to the curb" school of design, but the core gameplay has to be tight and in a stealth game, the designers should make the stealth part work well and then they can add whatever nonsense they please. I

To be fair, neither of those two games really tried to do Thief-like gameplay per se - Dishonored removes emphasis on shadows and instead focuses on line of sight, which in turn means a lot brighter levels (and system which actually makes sense as opposed to Thief's "That guard won't notice me crouching in this shadow right in front of him"). Both Dishonored and Deus Ex also seek to empower the player as opposed to make him feel helpless, while also adding a lot more feasible options to any given situation outside of 'merely' sneaking past everybody. These decisions significantly affect level design and pace of these games while not necessarily reducing complexity (well I'd say level design in Human Revolution is a fair bit weaker than what we can see in Thief games, but not in Dishonored. Dishonored has some amazing level design at display.) So no, neither Dishonored nor new Deus Ex games are particularly good at being Thief, but that's mostly because they don't really intend to. When it comes to recapturing Thief not being rocket science, you might want to take a look at The Dark Mod (which is standalone and no longer really a mod) which mechanically recaptures Thief games perfectly while offering a healthy community of mapmakers producing some excellent levels, albeit most don't even come close to quality of Thief's levels. A game has to know what its about, you can't sit on two chairs and be good at everything. The stealth in Deus Ex and Dishonored is immersion breaking because most of the time someone or other is looking straight at you in broad daylight and should by all rights be screaming for alarm but they continue staring into you as if they've decided that they're not paid enough to see anything that appears above a chest high wall (or in Dishonor's case, anything that moves above the ground floor). On the flip side you can shoot everyone down but since it has to go both ways the violence is often underwhelming and never actually the primary focus of these types of games. So yes, you get more "options" but the design ends up muddy and inconsistent. I found Human Revolution to be overwhelmingly about ego boosting the player, with the rest of the gameworld being fairly helpless against him in almost every situation. I didn't play enough Dishonored to know how much harder it gets later on, but it had the same superhero vibe at the beginning.

These days open world usually means pointless world. GTA used to be fun because of the arcade driving, the shooting and the music - the world was actually fairly empty and "boring". Now its become The Sims for delinquents, where you play golf, scuba dive, yoga, dating minigames while leading a secret life where you shoot and run down people some of the time as if Rockstar is embarrassed that a crime simulator has actual crime in it. Even worse, other open world games are open world for the sake of being an easy to make sandbox with no care whatsoever for level design. Why bother giving the player context and goals then crafting a world around it, when you can just throw some random stuff together and tell them to find their own fun.

I don't know why it was so hard for subsequent stealth games to do Thief like gameplay. Its not rocket science, yet when you look at the new Deus Ex or Dishonored, you get the impression it must be.

There is a distinct possibility that all we "know" about the NX right know is wrong/deliberate disinformation. Whatever the case may be Nintendo thinks it has something big and they're doing their best not to let the rest of the industry know (which may explain the relatively small period between reveal and getting it on the market). Anyway, the Tokyo Game show starts on Thursday and the reveal will likely happen there (allegedly on the second day).

Its really hard to say whether this means new PS's and Xbox's will keep dropping every 3 years. Sony and Microsoft would love that but I don't see it working out. I also wonder whether there will be PS4Pro only releases and the backlash that will spark. Now they're saying or implying there won't be (because to admit that their PS4 players might get locked out of certain games would make people go bat****) - but one look at Nintendo releasing New3DS only games this year and you can tell which way the wind is blowing. What your friends say was relevant 10 or more years ago. Back in the day when consoles were pushing the technological envelope and PC's were becoming outdated in little over a year of play because of how fast 3D and hardware was developing consoles were simply better value for money - to reach peak performance and keep pace was incredibly expensive with a PC. Nowadays the consoles have become victims of their own success. With the industry focused on making games for their underpowered hardware its trivial for a PC to keep pace money wise - you don't have to buy the best and you still get 1080p maxed out most of the time. And if you like to buy a lot of games, its even better value for money. A good PC can now easily last a whole console generation while delivering better performance and graphics. What you invest in periodic upgrades you get back with AAA games hitting the bomba bin within a month of release (whereas on the console they keep higher prices for longer).

A bit of interesting PS4 Pro commentary. https://seanmalstrom.wordpress.com/ TL:DR : PS4 Pro is made to stop players migrating to the PC during the mid slump of the console generation. As you all know, the PS4 and XbOne are barely differentiated from the PC nowadays apart from being significantly weaker, so the Pro is an attempt to keep the console relevant for people looking to invest in a platform, particularly those that care about graphics and performance (who will naturally look to the PC).

I remember that game, although I gave up on it quickly for some reason. I think it had stability issues

I thought Canada was less dramatic about granting citizenship

I want my Mad Max hentai porn mods on the couch dammit, can't always be doing that on the PC.