Play them now and you may redeem yourself. Otherwise the paranoid schizophrenic mask salesman will haunt your dreams for the rest of your days because you didn't beat Majora's Mask.

"You've met with a terrible fate, haven't you?"

I'm not having that. There's no way any Telltale game let alone their interactive movies are better than Pandora Directive, Gabriel Knight 2 or Amber: Journeys Beyond.

Hmm, fair point. I always go for the Xardas ending (the one which sort of leads into Risen), so I never really take part in city liberations. When it comes to killing Rhobar and Zuben, I generally assassinate them quickly then teleport out of there. The only truly difficult thing is the Hammer Clan's mine in Nordmar, and clearing out all of the orcs, but I freely admit to cheating with that by using the console to remove the AI follower limit, then go around gathering all of Nameless' friends (Diego, Lares, Lee, Gorn, Lester, Milten and Angar) for one last fight with them. It balances out the odds while also being a great narrative ending for all of those characters. It's cheaty, for sure, but it still feels so right. But yeah, that aside, I see how goddamn tough it'd be with AB on. For the record, I use AB on medium difficulty. The melee system really isn't bilt for fighting more than one NPC, but two is certainly manageable. My recommendation is to duel wield katanas. Their length is so ludicrous for a one handed weapon. Weapon length in Gothic 3 is very, very important as you can maintain distance while your enemy is kept at bay (doesn't work too well against orcs with halberds, though).

If you wish to liberate cities though.. eh, all I can recommend is temporarily lowering the difficulty to easy, I guess? I'd recommend using AB though, because it just makes the combat so fun when you learn how it works, and is more in line with what PB originally intended. Failing that, you could just go a battlemage and blast the hell out of liberations with magic. Stand at a gateway with fireball and just machine-gun it "rat-tat-tat-tatting" spells, haha. Flamewave has been changed to work at a distance as well, so that's made more useful against groups of enemies. So melee in general, magic for liberations. That could work.

Sorry, I meant interactive movie FMVs ala A Fork in the Tale, Star Trek: Borg, Foxhunt, The X-Files Game, etc, rather than adventure games packed with lots of FMV sequences. Telltale beats out all those "I-Movies" tenfold; not so much your Tex Murphys or your Gabriel Knights (although I still have yet to play a single GK game to completion ).



Good lord that sounds epic. The mine is definitely one of the game's most gorgeous locations anyway (although honestly almost everything in the game looks fucking incredible already). I may just have to try that myself sometime... But how do you deal with all of the orc patrols in Nordmar? The same way?

Also: do you know if there's any updates regarding the Gothic 3 Story Mod?

I don't usually deal with many orc patrols. Only one or two that are annoyingly in the way of something. I mostly roleplay a middleman who doesn't really take sides in the conflict, so seeking out orcs with the sole purpose of slaying them isn't a priority. So I can't really say for sure, but the ones I do deal with I kill from a distance of their camp and just slaughter them one or two at a time as they charge to my position. By the time I travel to Nordmar, I have Angar as a follower, so it's made a lot easier with him beside me, seeing as how the CP turned him into an unstoppable beast and all. The advantage with Nordmar is there are a lot of vantage points and wild beasts to assist you.

As for the story project, no idea. They're still working on it, but I'm unsure if it'll ever see the light of day in a finished form. It's an incredibly ambitious undertaking, and the game is much, much harder to work on than something by Bethesda, where ambitious mods have a better chance of succeeding. Having said that, the playablility of Gothic 3 today is thanks to passionate modders, so who knows? I'd love to see it done some day.

Yeah that's a good guess. I know that some of the earlier Kickstarter megahits, like Wasteland 2, did look for traditional investors before turning to Kickstarter. For them Kickstarter was a last resort, but obviously since their success it's seen as a much more viable option.

https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=qcUk8N6Cn2VpwVzb - thief gold

https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=xU3V4tVerMb7Ckwn - hitman 2

https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=wBnAaWFf8Mqde7SF - anachronox

https://www.humblebundle.com/gift?key=uF3YhGRpceu8fG2M - deus ex invisible war

for the first people to get em (you need steam)

Terraria is video game heroin. I enjoyed Minecraft, certainly not the extent that some do, but I logged some decent hours doing survival mulitplayer and stuff. But man, Terraria...An addicting blend of Metroidvania exploration/combat with an equally addicting weapon/armor system and enough room for your Minecraft-esque building on the side without needing to spend 90% of your life on it. Hit me up if you want to join my friend and my server; we just started hardmode.

Just claimed Hitman 2, thank you very much.

Quake Live is coming to Steam (finally). I hope it revitalizes the community because every time I get that itch, I log in and can't find a decent FFA or CTF server to play in. -_-

It starts to get reeeeeeeally repetitive though, moreso than Minecraft. After the first few iterations, the gear is just straight stat upgrades that lets you fight stat-boosted clones of enemies you've been fighting for hours.

Well yeah, much like the aforementioned Metroidvanias the big appeal comes from seeing new dungeons and bosses, thus I couldn't really see playing the vanilla game through once I'm done with all the hardmode bosses (that includes the new ones from the 1.2 patch.)

Got Deus Ex: Invisible War. Thanks, man!

So I was mildly interested in Lords of the Fallen despite the meh artstyle and even meher angry bald white protagonist, since the combat is supposed to be a lot like Dark Souls, but then I saw this trailer:

What is this God of War shit?
Well, this game just took a trip to PS+ freebietown for me.

Y'all should read this. It's about Hegel. And about why Jim Sterlings's (justified) criticism of Steam misses the point. And a lot more.

http://blog.brendanvance.com/2014/07/16/usurpers/

Don't see why that trailer reduces any hope. The gameplay doesn't look like God of War at all. It looks like the same sort of stuff we saw before, intermingled with some cinematic CGI that you almost always get in pre-release hype trailers.

So in less terrible trailer news... the first English peak at Risen 3!!!



And in case you're (and by "you're" I mean BloodSacrificeShaman) worried that magic combat would be wholly ancillary to the melee system ala TWitcher2, you can rest easy. (yes, I know he whipped out a sword on more than one occasion, but I'm pretty sure that's just for show rather than necessity)

I never got the appeal to Gothic 3, I finally bought it a while ago and it doesn't have the same feel to it as the first two (which are probably my all-time favorite games, I grew up with the first Gothic game). I just kinda wandered around until I got slaughtered by some camped orcs. With that being said, I'd still take Gothic 3 over that terrible Arcania spin-off they tried doing on the consoles awhile back.. good lord that was a terrible game.
I loved Risen 1 and 2, never beat either of them but they were fun to play for a while. Definitely will have to look out for that new one now.

That Risen 3 vid looks interesting.

What's a good introduction to the series(es)? Risen 1 I'm guessing, if I want something that's still fairly modern in graphics and whatnot?

I actually played a few minutes of Risen 1, it seemed cool. Definitely felt less hand-holdy and shallow than the newer Elder Scrolls games. And maybe even Witcher to an extent.

Yeah, Gothic 3 was a really weird turn for the series; whereas Gothic 1, 2 and NotR were linear-ish, story-based aRPGs, Gothic 3 was an aggressively non-linear, completely free-form open world aRPG, with essentially no story or character development whatsoever. They also switched up the art-style in a slightly misguided effort to crack the lucrative American market (although, in some ways I prefer this style to any of their other games, strangely enough). This is probably the lamest-sounding recommendation ever, but it took something like 20 or so hours before I actually felt significant progress in the world; at that point I was hooked, and I've played it at least once a year since it first came out 8 years ago. In essence, it's a game about shaping an entire world to your whim; you're basically a god and everyone in the game is your disciple. It also helps that there is absolutely no respawns; everything is static. There are no rules; you can kill every single NPC in the game and still successfully complete it. If that sounds appealing, go for it. If not...



Yep, Risen 1 for sure. It's a great start to Piranha Bytes games in general because it's actually quite small (relatively speaking; it'll still take 20-40 hours depending on difficulty/play style), and it's probably their most bug-free game too. Keep in mind that the beginning's a bit of a slog though, especially if you want to maximize XP gains (you'll want to start with the Bandit Camp, then go to Harbor Town, and then the Mage's Tower), and there's a bit of an exposition/dialog overload because of this (although thankfully, the writing and especially the voice acting are universally excellent). Just keep in mind the game opens up (and shuts up!) considerably from there to the finish.

They're just putting two and two together. Everyone's talking about how Dark Souls' combat is superior to western action rpgs, so apparently what people want is Dark Souls-like combat. But western audiences still dig power-fantasies, and hunky pissed-off looking males with stubbles, and LotR-on-steroids aesthetics. Combine the two and you've got the perfect product.

Show me where I said the gameplay looked like God of War?


Seems like it. It's cynical, soulless, pandering bollocks. Barf.

Yeah, the "fanservice for the sake of it" deal is quite annoying. Quite disappointing to see the devs resort to that, really

Well with the whole dismissal of the game, that's the vibes I got from it. The whole apocalyptic "it's turned to shit" vibe from that post, which to me, seems a pretty colossal overreaction.

"Well, this game just took a trip to PS+ freebietown for me." All because of some CGI cinematic in a hype trailer which affects nothing important. Just seems unnecessary to me.



Yeah that video has certainly raised my spirits toward the game. What initially had me concerned has mostly been laid to rest. It's looking damn fine. However, there are still some worries. Chiefly, the world itself. It still looks like there's a lot of narrow areas hemmed in by mountains. I'm not asking for Gothic 3 level's of open, but even Risen 1, as small as it is, was mostly open and allowed you to travel all over the map. Risen 2's linearity annoyed me, and the world felt small and restricted as a result. It can be hard to fully gauge this from a few minutes of footage though, and some scenes certainly appeared more open than Risen 2, so I'm still on the fence about that.

My biggest concern, the combat, is mostly appeased now. From what I can tell, it's an improved version of Risen 2's upgraded combat. Risen 2's combat could, sometimes, be fun once you had invested some skills into it (parry, riposte, kicks etc) and it looks like Risen 3 will have those abilities available off the bat, which would alleviate that horribly broken mess that is un-upgraded Risen 2 combat that you were forced to suffer for the first 5 or so hours with. It still doesn't look as good as the melee systems of Gothic 2 or Risen 1, but then, for me at least, little actually does so that isn't saying too much (I stand by saying Gothic 2 has the most enjoyable melee combat I've ever played).

As for magic, it certainly looks interesting. Not too sure about all the flashy animations, and how necessary they are. Maybe they'll explain it in the lore that the magics power is determined by mass and velocity (so moving your arms and body in such manners can increase its effectiveness). I dunno. Overall, everything looks much, much better than Risen 2 so I'm now quite optimistic toward the game.

As a Piranha Bytes fanboy, I'm pleased. I so fucking want this to be amazing.

I'm giving Destiny another shot and playing the beta. I played the PS4 alpha a while back and wasn't entirely sold on it. The world is really interesting, as is the Borderlands/Halo mash-up shoot and loot system, but the MMO elements really rip me out of the experience. Whenever I play MMO-style games I get bored extremely quickly, and that was much the case when I played the alpha. I really, really want to love this game but so far it's been kind of underwhelming especially under all of the ridiculous hype the game has gotten on various gaming sites.

EDIT: The Beta is leaps and bounds better than the Alpha was. Now that we get to experience some of the actual plot, the game is incredibly good. I'm definitely going to be buying Destiny day one, I love many things about it even though it doesn't bring anything groundbreaking to the table.

Summarizing Crytek's PR statement about their recent debacle:

Cool. Those are my basic worries too. Fetch quests and boring NPC's get old.

Think I've been sold on the Destiny bundle for awhile now though. Either way, there's actually a lot coming out soon I want, so I guess no biggie if Destiny itself is kind of hit or miss with me.

I get platinum status on Club Nintendo and can get a free game.

https://club.nintendo.com/elite-status-gifts.do

I'm not sure which to get. Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D. I hear Earthbound is good too.

Such a hilariously hit or miss game. I'm of the unpopular crew that "doesn't get it". DON'T BELIEVE THE HYPE!

Hmmmm, I'm strongly considering getting Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Been watching some gameplay videos and stuff, and I like that the combat seems flashy while still being functional and requiring a sense of crowd control. The aesthetics strike me as a tad generic, but eh, I can live with that.

Any of you guys played it?

I beat it, though it took me forever. Game is way too long and kind of overstays its welcome, though I'm a bit completist and cleared most of the side quests, it's certainly much shorter if you don't bother with those.

Here's the mini-review I wrote about it last year:

viewtopic.php?p=2327300#p2327300
Another point I'd add to the "Dark Souls vs KoA comparison":
- Dark Souls's dungeons are meticulously designed, with great exploration and verticality; KoA's dungeons are all copy/paste and while they're not randomly generated, they might as well be, there is very little thought (and sometimes none) put into the dungeon design.
- Art direction is very, very meh. Environments are kind of nice when they aren't too pastel-coloured megabloom-filled pixie dust, but character art is atrocious and monsters are a bit uninteresting.

Not much has changed about my opinion since I beat it after that, but I want to emphasize that even when you play on Hard, the game is still absurdly easy. If you are getting it on PC, I hear there are mods to make it more challenging, so you might want to look into that, it might make the game far more interesting, to be honest, because just button mashing your way to victory got rather boring. Crowd control? Nah, not really. Even if you play super sloppily, the game throws so many potions your ways you can just spam heals (and of course obligatory alchemy system to make potions so you can have even more healing potions, not to mention all manners of buffs that can stack together, becoming almost invincible). The only times I died, it was pretty much on purpose (not bothering to heal and say "meh I'll just try again" instead of really trying to survive).

I would recommend Dragon's Dogma: Dark Arisen over Kingdoms of Amalur. I don't regret playing KoA, it's not a bad game and hey, it was free for me after all, but I'd only recommend it if you're really craving an aRPG and have nothing else to scratch that itch.

Well, that's a tad disappointing to know, though I still would probably get KOA if I found it for cheap, going off what you're saying. I certainly have an interest in Dragon's Dogma, though I haven't looked much into it (or at least don't remember doing so). Should probably remedy that.

Yahtzee recently reviewed Earthbound.

Bit of trivia: Earthbound is the U.S. release of the Japanese game Mother 2. Mother 1 & 3 were only released in Japanese. There are, however, fan translations (rom hacks) for all three Japanese games. I haven't tried them though.

http://mother12.earthboundcentral.com/
http://mother3.fobby.net/

What system would you be playing it on, Xlxlx?

Xlxlx : yeah, definitely get Dragon's Dogma over KoA if you can, much better game overall with some decent challenges. It's not without many flaws, but overall it's a much stronger package than KoA, and the combat is and enemy encounters are far, far superior, as is the atmosphere. The Dark Arisen expansion content is the best part of the game too, and the hardest so it should be kept for end-game stuff or NG+ (there is no added difficulty to NG+, sadly, unlike in the Souls games).

If you are on PS3, both games were at some point free on PS+. For those two alone, the yearly subscription was well worth the money. I think you're on Xbox though, right? Too bad you can't borrow my pawn from Dragon's Dogma then. IIRC, Dragon's Dogma performs with a better framerate on the 360, but it has awful screen tearing, whereas the PS3 version has vsync but massive framerate drops during some hectic fights. Also, no PC port, unfortunately.

I'm definitely in the camp that fucking loves Earthbound. I haven't played Mother 1 but I have played Mother 3, and it's definitely worth it if you liked Earthbound. Fucking weird game, as expected, with magical alien drag queens and all sorts of fun stuff like that.

If Yahtzee likes it, does that mean Earthbound's basically a JRPG for people who hate JRPG's? If so I'm definitely trying it out.

I kinda forgot all about the Destiny beta. The alpha was PS4 only and invite-only so I neglected to pay attention to the beta, but it's open to everyone even on PS3, so I'm downloading it. But it ends tomorrow at 11:59 PDT so I only have tonight and tomorrow left to try it.

To be honest the videos and screenshots I saw left me pretty cold, and I wasn't that interested, but who knows, maybe the beta will sell me on it... might as well try it. If I do decide to get it, it'll be on PS4 though since I'll get one for Bloodborne anyway. Or maybe HB will want us to wait for the inevitable PC port so he can play with his precious m/kb...

@Morrigan: I am actually on PS3, so I might borrow that pawn after all After watching some gameplays and stuff, I think I'll hunt myself down a copy of the game once I grab some cash, probably by the end of next month. Framerate issues shouldn't be a problem either (done co-op in Blighttown, so I oughtta be ready for that shit ).

Speaking of Bloodborne, this video shows a lot of what we'd seen before but in a more seamless fashion that gives a better sense of the gameplay experience/frame rate. Some of you might have seen this already but I'd missed it, so maybe it'll be fun for some here. Ladder climbing! Always exciting.

Got Donkey Kong Country Returns.

I figure it's the more expensive one so if I want to try Earthbound it'll be cheaper than if I got Earthbound but wanted to try Donkey Kong.