I'm not saying Ninja Blade does that. You just get quick QTE's of the guy surfing on rockets or riding on walls with a motorcycle. The combat is still completely legit and miles deeper than half the shit out there nowadays. Give it a shot.

What I didn't like was Otogi, for From stuff.

Uhhh, did we play the same game? Whenever you weren't QTE-ing (which really wasn't all that often) you were mashing like there was no tomorrow. Sure, lots of cool shit would happen on screen, but the amount of player control for most of it was extremely low.

Well it's not that hard to be better than God of War.

I'm definitely not about to disagree with that .

Yeah, but that's Borderlands, hardly a test of twitch precision aiming. Not a lot of mainstream shooters are, precisely because they've had to make it work with controllers and de-emphasize high skill aiming.
Try and play Tribes Ascend with a controller. Makes Dark Souls with Keyboard and Mouse look like a mild inconveniance.

Are the graphics better through HDMI?



Um, what? Diablo's combat has always been pretty simplistic and mashy, that has hardly changed. In fact, Diablo 3 allows more active skills to be equipped at once than previous games (D2 still just had left and right clicks as I recall, right?), so combat variety has actually been improved. Sure, some other systems were streamlined/dumbed-down but... that would hardly address Morri's biggest issues with the game. The core gameplay in the much revered Diablo 2 is just as much of a mindless loot-grind. Though... at least you can run. <_<

So why are people complaining that it's too hard, then?

I never said it wasn't. Blizzard could quite easily have created something as evolved and advanced (even moreso!) as Path of Exile for D3; they have the budget, technology and manpower to make something truly "next-gen," but instead they decided to keep it simple, and I'd argue at least one of those reasons (besides, of course, accessibility and lowest-common-denominator pandering) is because consoles necessitate more simplistic interfaces.


Because a lot of people suck at video games? Remember that the majority of challenge in Borderlands isn't through technical skill mastery but rather fighting the right enemies at the right times with the right weapons with the right ammo types. A lot of people find that hard, because a lot of gamers either have only a 6th grade education or are themselves in 6th grade.

I think PSX games look pretty awesome via PS3/HDMI myself. There's also a smoothing option (way better than the PS2's) that seems to work pretty well for the 3D rendered games.

source: Just replayed RE2/RE3, looked amazing.

@BastardHead: There are adapters out there that you can use to transfer memory card saves to the PS3 harddrive. Which as you probably saw, lets you create virtual memory cards. I managed to salvage just about all of my old saves on the dozen or so of my old memory cards and got them all backed up on the PS3... felt good, haha.

But the console versions of D3 came out over a year after the original PC version, and the Reaper of Souls version also came out months later on consoles. The biggest userbase is on PC and always has been. The claims that it's being "dumbed down for consoles" seems completely unjustified (the evidence even suggests it's factually wrong), to be honest. And HellBlazer is correct that my issues with the games are unrelated to that, anyway.

Pretty sure the reason Blizzard isn't making an effort is because they simply don't have to. They'll swim in money no matter what kind of product they release.

Beats me too

But the interface is already completely different in the console version...

Blizzard had ALWAYS planned to release D3 cross-platform, since the very early planning stages of the game. Yes they denied it early on but as time went by they grew more and more open about it.

Buuuuuut...

I completely agree with this too. Reasonably sure their rabid fanbase would describe the CEO's fecal emissions as "nothing short of ambrosial!"

Fuck Blizzard. No matter how good Starcraft and Brood War are. Fuck Blizzard.

It's all part of the anti-master race conspiracy to fool you into thinking uh... what are we even talking about again

Edit: Oh yeah, I just remembered that Diablo 1 was also released on the PlayStation, so the whole notion about Diablo 3 changing its gameplay for the sake of consoles just got even stupider.

Diablo 3 is balls, Path of Exile is the true D2 successor.

Blizzard have sucked since they released Brood War/D2 to me. I know a lot of people liked Warcraft 3 but I never did.

I didn't notice too horribly much of a difference between I and II, graphics wise on the PS3 (which means II doesn't look markedly different from my PS2 to PS3). Unless there's some smoothing option I haven't fucked around with, they look really similar.

The problem is that it looks like this:


Instead of like this:


Like, notice how the character portraits in the first game look more pixelated while in II they look immaculate? They look very low quality in II as well for me.

So even on the hardest difficulty setting the combat is actually challenging? Well hell, that's at least something in its favour. I'm definitely morbidly curious to make a start on it though. I've been wondering if the majority of its reputation is just because of idiotic Gothic 1 fanboys who dislike everything that came after. I guess I'll see how true that may be in the near future.

If anything, the cover art is cool. Gorn and Lester look nicely painted.

I also picked that up last Friday. My girlfriend and I put maybe ten hours into it over the weekend. There's a surprising amount of content in there, and I'm loving the largely brainless combat. Strangely, I didn't have this much fun with Samurai Warriors, but eh. There are enough tits in the game to remind you that it was made by Team Ninja. I was surprised to be slaughtering Gorons. Did not see that coming.

It was a gamey weekend for me. I also bought:
Uninvited for NES
Tax Avoiders for Atari 2600
Section Z for NES
Alien Storm for Genesis

Maybe someone here can answer a question I have. I have the Xbox One Titanfall bundle that I wish to sell. I want to perform a factory reset so i can erase all my data, apps and downloads before I sell it. Will the person I sell it to be able to still download Titanfall with that redemption card that the Kinect read to enable the download of the game? Because I want to include it in the package.

Yes, if you're going the melee route, "Gothic" difficulty actually provides some genuine challenge. While one-on-one with enemies is always extremely easy, they're often clustered in groups of 4-8 at a time, meaning you'll need to dodge and strike effectively. The way the melee combat works is very similar to Witcher 1 where you'll need to specifically time your flurries on the heels of the previous in order to get the best attacks. It's nowhere NEAR Risen's brilliance, though, so don't be expecting that. Collision has no real 'weight' in the game, so it often feels like you're just striking air even when you make a successful hit. I do quite love the "bandage system," where you can really only heal outside of combat (yes there, there are healing potions/food items that you can scarf down during combat, but they were quite expensive and I found them antithetical to the challenge of the game).

Also, I STRONGLY suggest picking your choice-cuts from this site before you start playing (there are two pages). I found Sprinting and Static Camera to be indispensable. Alternate Rolling is interesting, but I never got the hang of it to be comfortable enough to use it on the hardest difficulty setting.

I maintain that Arcania is a shit Gothic game but a good (not great) action game. I'd definitely play it again over any of the Arkham or AssCreed games (aside from AssCreed 2, which I still think rules).

Just try not to pay attention to the acting and writing and decimation of PB's canon.

Uh... I'm pretty sure that Suikoden 2 shot is from an emulator with a smoothing filter. It's pretty apparent from the font and character sprites. Hell, the hero has some ugly artifacts around his head from the filtering. That screenshot is 800x600 anyway, the PS1 outputs at 640x480, there's no way the unfiltered output was blown up and still looks this good.

It's supposed to look pixelated, dude; it's a PS1 game.

Speaking of Suikoden, there's a Konami sale on PSN right now:
https://store.sonyentertainmentnetwork. ... ONAMISALE1
Noteworthy deals are Suikoden 1 and Silent Hill 1 at $3 each ($2.70 for PS+ subscribers), MGS1 at $5, and uh, I suppose MGS5 GZ at $10 (which still seems overpriced to me XD).
Edit: oh apparently SotN is also on sale at $5, though it doesn't show up on the list for some reason:
https://store.sonyentertainmentnetwork. ... sp-ps-vita)/cid=UP9000-NPUJ00067_00-0000000000000001

20 hours into Wasteland 2, pretty great. The canyon is kind of annoying, but nice to have gotten through.

Definitely Fallout 1/2 vibes throughout the game. Very similar in some ways. Which is a huge treat for me, because those are two of my favorite games ever.

So I guess it's been out for a while but I've only just now watched it:

Gameplay trailer for the new Dragon Age.

Animations still look like DA2 (i.e., teh suck), colors are too bright and sound effects are as ridiculous and cartoony as ever BUT the actual combat--tactical RTWP--doesn't look half bad for a AAA 2014 150+ hour RPG. Hopefully there'll be full mouse support for the tactical camera on the PC version.

Of course it won't be even remotely close to Pillars or Wasteland or even Divinity: Original Sin, but I'm still cautiously optimistic, especially since Bioware has recently said DA: I will be one of their hardest games to date (not exactly a typical claim in today's casual-friendly gamer market).

I still consider Dragon Age: Origins to be a truly great game, but a recent attempt to replay DA2 definitely made me completely switch sides on that one. Horrible game.

DAO had some of the good elements of NWN 2 in the gameplay it seemed like. I'm not sure about the writing/characters/plot, but it certainly wasn't as bad as Elder Scrolls. My anti-fantasy bias is running strong, so that doesn't help.

The writing was good, even great at times, except for the romance shit. But even that was handled far more skillfully than in any other game I can think of.

Morrigan--played by Farscape/SG-1's Claudia Black--was one helluva good character. Possibly one of the only non-openly feminist but still totally feminist characters I can think of in a game.

I really appreciated how the game displayed almost painfully cliche and formulaic fantasy on the outside (primarily for marketing purposes I'm sure), but once you really begin to dig and sift through the lore, beneath it was a strikingly unique and well-realized setting.

Did you ever play DA:O:Awakening? That shit kind of tainted my experience of DA:O in a severe way. Basically your options are: play through the campaign using your character from the main game, in which case we'll conveniently ignore every major decision you ever made and important character deaths, OR, play through the campaign as an Orlesian Warden with all of the awesome political/social implications that would come along with doing something like that.

Obviously, I didn't want to bother with option a, so I went with the Orlesian Warden option instead. Spoiler: it doesn't fucking matter that you're from Orlais at all, and nothing from the base game carries over in any meaningful way.

That's honestly one of my biggest gripes about recent Bioware games in general. Too often do they push the importance of making big choices and sacrifices and changing character attitudes and stuff only to have none of that shit ever actually matter at all in expansions or subsequent games.

What's the deal with Harmony of Dissonance? When I played this game years ago it was on the combo release with AoS and I figured it was the earlier game so justifiably a bit more primitive in comparison. Then I finally played CotM and couldn't understand what happened. Going back to play HoD now, I feel it's quite lacking. Aside from the occasionally more fancy background graphics, had I not known, I'd have figured this game was the earliest release of the three.

Things I'm not liking:

Lack of variety in weapons/magic. CotM had so much shit going on with it, that on my first play through I hadn't even found everything yet. In this game, you get the whip, your sub-weapons and your magic which just alters the sub-weapon's attack. And of course, the elemental attachments for the whip (which are made even more boring by lack of any graphical indication of what element you're attacking with), yawn. If they were going to give you nothing but the whip, they could have at least done what everyone would have loved and made it the 8-directional SC4 style whip.

Castle isn't as fun to explore. I don't know what it is, it just feels less exciting, despite the decent atmospheric backgrounds. I almost cracked up when I got the part where Death reveals that I'm gonna be exploring the same damn map twice over. Cheeeeeeap.

Enemies are way less interesting. Even the skeletons are goofy as fuck looking, never mind the cookie-cutter witches. And those flying barrel things? What the fuck?

I understand the graphics were made brighter in this one to prevent bitching about the original GBA's dark screen, but yeah, the graphics just aren't as appropriate. Too bright (duh), but sprites are messier looking, they seem blurred or something. And of course, the music in this game sounding way less impressive than the previous title adds to the overall surprise that this one is actually the sequel.

Difficulty... many bosses could be beaten with your eyes closed, that is no exaggeration.

I should mention that I'm still enjoying playing through this game a lot, but it's just astounding how... shallow, I suppose, it feels compared to the other two. Less engrossing and I find myself playing it in smaller sessions than I did CotM.

HoD was indeed rather bizarre; I have good memories of it as it was my first-ever Castlevania game, but it wasn't until I played Aria of Sorrow later that I realize how poor some of the design was. The saturated colors I didn't mind as much, but the original-Game Boy-esque music (the opening castle theme is pretty cool, though) and easy bosses (I beat the "fake" final boss just by spamming the rain spell over and over) are pretty lame.

Order of Eclessia, though...now there's an excellent and hard-as-fuck Castlevania game. Trying to grab another copy since I stupidly sold mine a few years ago.

Harmony of Dissonance definitely blows. What really kills it for me, are the terribly awkward physics and controls. Everything just feels Sonic 4 bad and off. Not cool.

Otherwise I love all the other Metroidvania's... Eclessia definitely being the toughest one. I'd put Aria a little above Dawn, and Circle of the Moon is very high on the list. Probably a toss up between AoS, CotM, and OoE for my favorite (outside of SoTN). I think CotM has the most charm and character though. From that point on, they all were pretty much copy pasting SoTN down the sprites, designs, and everything, but CotM looks grittier and a lot different. Probably my favorite music out of the handheld ones too, damn good stuff.

Absolutely, was going to bring this up but thought I'd done enough bitching for one post. You get accustomed to it soon enough, but the first thing you notice when you play this game straight after playing the shit out of CotM is that the control feels a bit stiff and slow. Could certainly be worse, but it's yet another reason to forgive someone if they were to assume this was the first GBA Castlevania rather than the second.

Also, I don't remember having any problems with the recovery time after taking a hit in CotM. In HoD, on the other hand, there was an incident where I went from full health to close to zero and there was nothing I could do. Sort of funny actually, was just thinking about how easy the game had been so far when I entered the next room. It was the first time you meet the Slimes, and I took a hit causing me to launch backwards into a corner and also turn to stone. The Slimes had now ganged up on me and as soon as the stone effect wore off I would be immediately frozen again. Total fucking bullshit!

Are the pc ports of the Final Fantasy games on Steam worth buying?

Check pages 608-610 of this thread (short answer: no).

Yep; it was way too expensive for how short it was ($40 for an 8-hour RTWP RPG expansion?), but I thought it was pretty cool in and of itself, with some really enjoyable boss battles and a nice overarching plot that wrapped up the loose ends from the first game.

It really didn't bother me much that virtually none of the choices from DA:O carried over; there was no direct conflict with canon, iirc, (possibly Leliana ret-conned into being alive for DA2, can't remember), and DA:O hadn't advertised that the choices in that game would have vast impact on all future DA games. That trend started (or rather, re-started, since that was a staple of the Ultima games) with Mass Effect 2. What matters most to me is choice and effect WITHIN each game, and both DA:O and Awakening performed exceptionally well on that front, with often wildly different outcomes based on your choices, as well as many choices coming to fruition so far after you'd made them you'd all but forgotten them already. DA2 on the other hand... not so much.

Honestly, I despised Mass Effect 2/3's "consequences" to your choices in the previous games. Because of the sheer number of variables that had to be accounted for, almost all (if not all) of those consequences were extremely minor, isolated and almost exclusively consisted of a truncated dialog sequence that usually went something along the lines of: "Hi Shephard! You selected the (Paragon/Renegade) option during our encounter in the previous game. I thought I would remind you of this. I am now doing/living exactly the way I said I would after you made your binary selection, thus making this entire conversation pointless. Here's 100 credits. Bye."

Rather than taking those choices in new and interesting directions or casting them in different lights, Bioware instead resolved them as lazily as possible by simply acknowledging the fact you made a choice. I would've preferred they skipped them altogether even if they hadn't claimed your choices would have "huge consequences on the how the game/s played out," because redundant exposition sucks. I still can't believe people were shocked by the ternary ending. It was in the cards looooooong before ME3 was even announced.


Oh, also:

Nice one .

That's not a nice one. You should not be getting shit on your taint. You could be pooping wrong!

Well, I should say that I played DA:O back when I was short on funds in general so the price tag didn't even enter into it (i.e., I pirated both the main game and the expansion). I honestly can't even remember but I suppose the actual gameplay in DA:O:A was just as solid as it was in the base game, but I guess I just got suckered into the marketing/hype that led me to believe that there was going to be this whole other leg of the story that pulled from all of the stuff I'd done before, but basically it either just retconned everything or just, as you said, "acknowledged" choices without actually changing how anything functions.

Basically I just wish Bioware would stop promising stuff like that where it's impossible to deliver on it. Since at this point their franchises all have at least two links in the choice-chain, making third or fourth entries that account for all of the possible choices is just too much to really hope for, so really they should just stick to making each game its own choice-isolated story.

Just to make sure we're on the same page, I'm talking about the Darkspawn Taint, not the other one.

I bought the base game but pirated the expansion and the eight million other DLCs without even the slightest compunction I was doing something immoral, especially given how sparse and lame most of them ended up being. Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think Awakening was ever advertised as having huge repercussions for your choices in the base game and/or DLC; that said, I think it came out almost immediately after Mass Effect 2 (which DID purport to have massive consequences from the first game, although most if not all of those were bunk), so I can understand the expectation.

Yeah, the whole Mass Effect trilogy really just promised way more than it could deliver. With all the choices you could make in the first game, to make the sequels work on a similar level they would've either had to 1) lock you into a path light side/dark side style, where you essentially get two fully fleshed-out stories for the price of one (which the Paragon/Renegade thing definitely doesn't count as), or 2) continue adding more and more branching paths until they had a ridiculous amount of content, but abandoned the full voice acting for every bit of dialog. Instead they just kinda took the margarine route of letting you do whatever, but not really making most choices consequential to other choices.

Actually, an interesting third route to take would've been to have every iteration focus on a new crew, like Star Trek - instead of every game being about Commander Shepard, each one is about a new captain, with the previous dude becoming a legendary NPC type character. That way choices from previous games wouldn't need to factor so heavily into the newer games, but could be referenced mainly through how Commander Shepard et al are talked about. If you fuck over the Krogans in one game, maybe in a later game they're super suspicious of humans, and spit at the sound of Commander Shepard's name. If you helped them, maybe there's a statue of him in town and they help you out.

Basically what I'm saying is, Bioware should've given me millions of dollars to write Mass Effect.

When it comes to games with the budget Bioware is working with, it isn't the fact the game has voice acting that prevents it from having more fully fleshed-out consequences for choices; it's the actual content itself.

Dragon Age: Origins alone had about the same amount of voiced dialog as Planescape Torment had written words (about 800,000), and not only was everything voiced except the P.C., but the cast of around 150 people included names like Janeway, Tuvok and the aformentioned Aeryun Sun, among others.

At this point, animations and textures are becoming so intricate and detailed, a character itself's cost is far, far greater than the voice actor who portrays her or him.

You're missing the point - one-to-one comparisons with an old game like Planescape: Torment make no sense, because Torment's budget was way smaller in general, as were all game budgets. What you should be thinking about is how much more actual content they could've added to DA:O if they hadn't hired all those voice actors. Of course the same thing applies to cutting-edge graphics, but it's all just pissing in the wind at this point. Like AAA FPSs, AAA RPGs are basically just "cinematic experiences" at this point and that will probably never change.

I'd probably be okay with cinematic experiences if they were actually compelling.

Did people find Mass Effect compelling? I wanted to but it just wasn't there for me.