What are you playing these days?

[Ace!]

Yeah, saying that you might never buy a Bioware game again because of five bad minutes in 100 great hours is kind of childish and, honestly, it sets back outsider perspective of the gaming community light years. I still haven't played ME2 however, so in a year when I get ME2 from the states and then can find 3 for under $20 I'll come back and share my thoughts. Maybe I'll agree. But by that point everyone will have forgotten this and they'll be complaining about the ending to something else.

[Bahamut Chris]

Trying to force a different ending is a dangerous precedent, and it rarely ends well.

Hey, it turned out well for Arthur Conan Doyle and Douglas Adams, though in the latter case he only wanted to rewrite his finale, told the radio drama team to do so, and then kicked the bucket before he could.

Look, a broseidon team writer from Alpha Protocol also agrees with the "excessive" reaction (and, verily, the ME3 staff writer who did everything on the Citadel, most of the characters barring Garrus and Miranda, a number of missions excepting

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

Tuchanka

, but Bioware made him take down his blogged reaction of disgust at the product he put so much time into designing), so it's not like this is just unprofessional slobs who haven't read a book since high school talkin' shit.

Also to be entirely fair, it's like Enix. It's not just one game with an immensely bad ending that made me never want to spend money on another Bioware game again. They already burned me with DA2, and then they screwed me even harder with this. Enix, they gave me the finger with SO3 and then they shat in my mouth with FF12. And now neither of those companies are ever going to see a cent from me again.

[Henry Jones]

Hey, it turned out well for Arthur Conan Doyle and Douglas Adams, though in the latter case he only wanted to rewrite his finale, told the radio drama team to do so, and then kicked the bucket before he could.

Look, a broseidon team writer from Alpha Protocol also agrees with the "excessive" reaction (and, verily, the ME3 staff writer who did everything on the Citadel, most of the characters barring Garrus and Miranda, a number of missions excepting

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

Tuchanka

, but Bioware made him take down his blogged reaction of disgust at the product he put so much time into designing), so it's not like this is just unprofessional slobs who haven't read a book since high school talkin' shit.

Also to be entirely fair, it's like Enix. It's not just one game with an immensely bad ending that made me never want to spend money on another Bioware game again. They already burned me with DA2, and then they screwed me even harder with this. Enix, they gave me the finger with SO3 and then they shat in my mouth with FF12. And now neither of those companies are ever going to see a cent from me again.

Uh, the return of Sherlock Holmes felt extremely idiotic and forced, like an author who was pretty much done with was series was forced to make more..... which is what happened. I can't say much for Douglas Adams, because-and I'll lose infinite geek cred for this-I never found Douglas Adams that funny. No venom for his work at all. Just some things don't strike me as funny.

What I DO find it funny that a writer of Alpha Protocol is agreeing with the excessive reaction towards the ending when Alpha Protocol was a very enjoyable game based around a system of choice that has an extremely underwhelming ending. Seriously, for all your picking and choosing throughout the game, almost all it changes with the ending is who's on the motorboat with you at the one minute ending and what's in the boring audio newscast during the credits. Despite the ending, though, it's a really good game. I've played through it at least 3 times myself. Oh, and that's not to mention Alpha Protocol was firebombed by extreme overreaction. Boy, this story sounds really familiar, doesn't it?...... Though to be fair, Alpha Protocol's overreaction was before people shelled out cash for it and hurt it a LOT more.

And I never really got burned by DA 2 because I kind of smelled a rat on that one. Seriously, it felt like I just got done with Dragon Age: Origins when I saw ads for Dragon Age 2 on TV. I don't care how good you are, you just don't release a good, top-of-the-line sequel to a 40-60-hour RPG a year and three months after the first one hits the shelf, you're still working on an expansion pack for the first game, AND you're re-doing the engine to be more action oriented. So I waited for word on that one. I have $10 of Amazon credit and it's selling for $19.99. I might pick it up at that cost.

[Ace!]

So, apparently sometime during the last five years I got REALLY bad at Mega Man X. Don't know when that happened and I can't say I like it very much.

[Bahamut Chris]

Oh, and that's not to mention Alpha Protocol was firebombed by extreme overreaction. Boy, this story sounds really familiar, doesn't it?...... Though to be fair, Alpha Protocol's overreaction was before people shelled out cash for it and hurt it a LOT more.

You are aware that

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

the other two endings are NEARLY EXACTLY THE SAME, image for image, except the color of the laser is different, right? EXACTLY THE SAME. Look 'em up on Youtube. The codex and the devs themselves state that everyone in the Sol system (most of the galaxy's forces) is going to die because the Sol system is only sustained by shipments through Mass Relays from colonial and mining worlds. Wrex, Hackett, the entire Quarian fleet. I assume you chose Synthesis: the problem therein is that Synthesis is what the Reapers want you to do, and it causes an existential holocaust. Control is what The Illusive Man wanted, and it was proven multiple times throughout the game that he was just outright wrong and this solution is what destroyed the Protheans. The only thing that doesn't give the enemy what they want is Destroy, and that's committing genocide against AIs like EDI and the Geth, the existence of both that proves the error in Space Haley Joel Osment's logic that synthetics and organics can NEVER COEXIST.

Oh, and Synthesis? It's the one ending where the FMV is different. How is it different? Well when you choose Control or Destroy, the soldiers on earth cheer. With Synthesis, it cuts away before they cheer. Because getting their bodies turned half-synthetic fucking sucks. Destroy SHOULD have EDI dead, but they were so goddamn lazy with this ending that they had MONTHS AND MONTHS AND INFINITE MONEY to develop that she walks out of the ship anyway because of a logic discrepancy in their programming (the characters shown walking out of the ship are your love interest (or whichever character you had the highest friendship score with, which will always be astronomical with EDI as long as your dialogue pointed her towards hooking her up with Joker) and whoever you used most often, and if that's EDI, well. The same can be said of the "flashback" shit at the end that has more major programming discrepancies in it so it almost always shows Liara regardless of who it's supposed to show).

Alpha Protocol, on the other hand, was completely rushed by Sega. "It makes this release date or it doesn't get released at all fuck you developers." Mass Effect 3 went gold in October, but they delayed the release and still fucked up not only their shitty, thematically-inconsistent ending, but they couldn't even get their core program right.

That is to say little of the fact that this whole game is about cake or death or chicken, but when it comes down to it, Space Sixth Sense Brat makes you choose between death, death, or death. Not only is it mechanically inconsistent with the rest of the entire series, but it's thematically inconsistent. Mass Effect is not a tragedy. It's an American action movie space opera. To be consistent with the tone they've spent two-and-ninety-nine-one-hundredths of a game setting up, there needs to be a reversal of fortune. There isn't, and it ends on the bleakest note they can possibly manage with some shitty biblical imagery. And Buzz Aldrin being creepy.

[Henry Jones]

Alpha Protocol wasn't rushed out the door. Even before its release date was pushed back five months, it had a relatively decent development cycle. The lack of polish was all Obsidian. Note all the other games they've made. And a longer development cycle probably wouldn't have changed the ultra-short ending. Not saying it's a bad game, but blaming it on Sega pretty much ignores everything that Obsidian has done.

And for the ending,

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

The theme of the game is sacrifice. It's not a subtle theme. You're constantly having to give up something or someone for the greater good. The writing's on the wall on that one. And people ragging about the kid is pissing all over something just to piss on it, like the ending to Contact. The ending to Contact completed the character arc and brought home the theme of science and religion being two different ways of trying to find the same thing, and making the alien a giant squid creature instead of something recognizable would've distracted from the actual ideas being presented. The endings not being that different is very lazy I can admit that, but not enough to nullify the journey. People don't enjoy the journey anymore. I sincerely hope my life isn't judged by the last two years spent with senile ramblings and colostomy bags. Did you save the Rachni? Did you get the poet Krogan to get with the Asari? Did you get the moment where the two converge and you have to deliver a poem back to the Krogan's love? And that moment is completely laid out by the choices YOU made. You did ALL of that. These were not lazy moments crafted by people who didn't give a shit. Just because the ending isn't what it could be doesn't erase this no matter how many butthurt first world problem screechers cry to the stars.

[joe_cam]

Hello Gamers, meet Journey. Destination asked that I introduce you two.

At first thought, I was wondering when you bought a PS3 since you were talking about Journey. Then I remembered the menstrual-fest going on in here about Mass Effect and it made sense.
Seriously. To discount all the time spent playing the games over the ending is pretty damned dumb. But whatever. It's a stupid argument mostly started by stupid people, so I say "let the stupid assholes keep being stupid" while I play more multiplayer.

Enix, they gave me the finger with SO3 and then they shat in my mouth with FF12.

Yeah. Between your cryfest here and now saying SE shat in your mouth with FFXII? Your thoughts when it comes to gaming are forever invalidated in my eyes. Sorry dude. If you said FFX-2 or FFX or FFXIII or something, I'd understand, but XII is a turd in your mouth? Wow. I would hate to have your taste in RPGs.


Now, back to ME3. I haven't beat the game and I don't know the ending at all and I've done my best to avoid spoilers, but to me it seems like one of those stories where there just won't be a happy ending. It seems like a story where the thing that everybody is trying to stop is what NEEDS to happen no matter what. I'm kind of expecting a scenario where everybody dies because that's what needs to happen and there's really no way to stop it. I'd like to be thrown a curveball, but I'll see in a couple days I guess. I've been taking my time on it, so I'm a bit behind the curve on things.
All I know is that I've had fun getting there and unless the ending is a pop up screen saying that Bioware has my bank account info and social security number and my identity and money is gone forever, I think I'll be OK with what they decide the ending to the story is.
I mean shit, that's what DLC is for, right? They'll charge everybody $10-15 for an epilogue or something to either change the ending or give some kind of follow up to the ending that happened.
They DID mention to not get rid of your save files, so they've gotta have SOMETHING planned.

Even still, a shit game or a shit ending shouldn't be reason to never support a developer again, especially one as talented as Bioware. Shit. If I gave up on a company for making shitty games that I regret buying, I'd have given up on Square-Enix ages ago. And SEGA wouldn't have seen a penny of mine since the Dreamcast days. And EA? Fuck. EA were the epitome of pure evil a couple of years ago and now it seems that every other game that comes out that I play is a goddamned EA game. Plus Activision is evil incarnate now anyways.


Moral of the story is that Bahamut Chris needs a hearty cockpunching.

[Henry Jones]

I don't have malicious intent on the argument. It's just this response as a whole is so extreme and drama queen that I wish people would take a few steps back and breathe. Calm down. There are literally dozens of games that have underwhelming-crappy endings that I like and even love. Many extremely story driven. One of my favorite games is Silent Hill 3, and its normal ending is as stupid as toasted ice cream and its evil one is pretty much blink and you'll miss it. Oh well.

But hey, fans now have the power to screw up Dragon Age 3: http://kotaku.com/5894716/bioware-ta...-drawing-board
I sincerely hope they go End of Evangelion and take everything the fans suggest and warp it into something so sick and twisted that it casts a reflection that is uglier than a darkspawn brood mother. That would be brilliant. "I am so fucked up!"

Anyway, let's all calm ourselves and take in the wonderful, serene beauty that is Journey. It's like Ico if your companion were actually a companion and not a constant bother who failed rope climbing in gym class. It's so simple, yet so beautiful. It goes beyond even the gorgeous visuals and one of the best scores to a video game I've ever heard. I was genuinely sad when PlayStation network booted me off a run-through I had played mostly with someone else. We could never speak except with that one noise, but we waited for each other before activating each mural, we tried to signal each other when we found the little emblems that extended our floating powers, we huddled together to hide from the giant dragon creatures....... It really upset me even if we'll probably never play any games with each other again. That's a weird kind of magic right there.

[Bahamut Chris]

Moral of the story is that Bahamut Chris needs a hearty cockpunching.

Man you know I ain't never been a fan of XII. Honestly I've never really liked Matsuno on the whole, Ogre Battle excepted, but that's another can of worms, though suffice to say I would like to go toe to toe with that muthafucka someday.

But Henry is right, and it's just time for me to close the door on ME3 forever and never speak of it again, like that retarded brother your parents leave chained up in the basement. But I will say that my opinion of it is mine alone. I went in with no expectations and I had absolutely no clue what I was in for. When I walked away, it just felt so empty, and the more I thought about it the worse it got which is why it's just gotten sourer over the past week. Hell, I didn't even just piss and moan like most of the whiners, I made a goddamn storyboard of what I would've preferred, but it didn't help. Shit, it made it worse because I could see in front of my face what I came so close to getting but just got spat in it instead. All I can do is grit my teeth and beat myself up over an ending I hated so much that it colored the rest of the journey pitch black, and I hate that this is the case, but that's just how it's going.

We picked up Left 4 Dead 2 tonight. I'm horrible at it but that just means that it's intense as hell for me.

[Jesus]

But Henry is right, and it's just time for me to close the door on ME3 forever and never speak of it again, like that retarded brother your parents leave chained up in the basement. But I will say that my opinion of it is mine alone. I went in with no expectations and I had absolutely no clue what I was in for. When I walked away, it just felt so empty, and the more I thought about it the worse it got which is why it's just gotten sourer over the past week.

Yeah, all I've been hearing about ME3 is how badly the plot resolution sucks donkey balls to the extreme. Regardless of ALL the shit you have/haven't done, ALL the choices you have/haven't made, ALL the crew buddies that did/didn't make it, ALL of those elements from the past two games really don't have any solid affect on the three "different" versions of the same ending of the game.

I've also heard a lot of rumors that bioware might exploit this in order to sell DLC that might eventually have a "better" ending, but that might just be conspiracy-based speculation from the Bioware Haters.

Either way, I've been hearing a lot about how Bioware has been screwing the pooch pretty hard over how they've been handling DLC as of late.

We picked up Left 4 Dead 2 tonight. I'm horrible at it but that just means that it's intense as hell for me.

On console or PC? I still love jamming on that game...

[joe_cam]

I beat Mass Effect 3 today and I can officially say with all of my heart, anybody bitching about the ending is an entitled, whiny bitch.
The ending was fucking fine. There have been plenty of worse endings in the history of gaming and this one was actually pretty good. I'm one of those people that figured the last 30 minutes of the game pretty much WAS the ending and it was just an interactive ending. Even still, the final cutscene was perfectly suitable as an ending to the trilogy.

Oh and let me spoiler this shit as the best reason why the ending was just fine:

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

THE WHOLE FUCKING TRILOGY WAS A STORY BEING TOLD BY BUZZ LIGHTYEAR ALDRIN TO A CHILD. IT WAS A STORY. YOU PLAYED A STORY.
Jesus Christ people. If you're some old ass dude who is probably telling a story 30th hand, don't you think some of the info would be lost or changed? Shit, look at the Bible for fuck's sake.
The entire trilogy was an old man telling a story and the ending to the story was that of an optimistic future. Maybe the Legend of Shepherd will continue. Shit, at the end of MY ending, since I'm a badass motherfucker and I actually did all the sidequests and played online multiplayer and bumped my readiness to 99% with 6400+ whatever rating points, I got the extra little cutscene of Shepherd covered in rubble where he takes a breath and is still alive.

Bottom line. People who took up arms and made petitions and bitched and whined about the ending are all idiots who need to get some fresh air and talk a walk. And this is coming from a bonafide fucking idiot who needs to get some fresh air and take a walk.
The ending was fine. Shut up.

[Henry Jones]

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

I just like that it's BUZZ FUCKING ALDRIN! Shepard is BUZZ FUCKING ALDRIN's hero, and that makes him/her even more awesome.

Oh, and Ghosts 'n Goblins, you are terminated. The trilogy is complete. Granted, I finished them bass ackwards, but it was done.

[Jesus]

In response to Joe's spoiler content:

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

Did the trilogy start off as a narration or was this something you didn't find out until the end of 3?

The games constantly boasted of how you have to deal with the consequences of your actions, the ramifications of your choices and how they affect the shaping of the universe as a whole because of it. Yet instead of receiving an ending that reflects all that you have/have not accomplished in the trilogy, you end up with one of three endings which are virtually identical save for some minor/trivial details (And whether or not you were badass enough to get the "Shepherd lives" addendum).

I think people are raging out not because the ending that's in the game is unsatisfactory in and of itself but because they were expecting a much more varied set of endings that would accurately reflect their actions over the course of the series instead of three endings that were pretty much the same thing.

Take Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. Your decisions and gameplay defined the endgame. You still complete the game the same way, but the final outcomes are polar opposites. You either save the galaxy/kingdom or you conquer it (There were even more differences depending on the gender of your character to boot). Either way, you were rewarded with an ending that reflects your style of gameplay.

ME seems to expand upon this in that all the shit you did in the first game comes back to haunt you in the second and so on. Only problem is that it doesn't matter if you're the most ruthless asshole in the 'verse or the living paragon of virtue, you're still getting stuck with the same ending regardless.

I wouldn't mind "The whole ME series was a story" aspect, but you can still have that aspect fit with three completely different endings leading up to it.

To put it simply... People are pissed because they were expecting endings A, B and C as opposed to A1, A2 and A3. They're pissed because they put all this time and effort into a trilogy of games only to be "rewarded" with a lackluster catch-all ending that does a mediocre job of covering all the bases.

I don't know if any of makes sense and I've never played the games so I can't really get to the brass tacks (and I might be completely talking out my ass), but that's how I'm perceiving the anger of the masses.

[joe_cam]

I will admit this. Did Bioware get lazy with the ending? Sure they did.
But did people expect WAAAAYYY too much out of it? Goddamn right.

Bioware could've (and probably should've) gone the route of Bethesda with their Fallout endings where it touches on all of the people you've met and seen in the game. But as it stands, I don't think the ending is horrible or a black mark on the entire franchise. Was it lazy? Sure. Was it horrible and evil? No. Was it a perfectly acceptable ending to the games if you aren't some super insane fanboy? Yes it was. It was a perfectly fine ending.

Also, Aeris dies.

[Ybrik Metaknight]

Also, Aeris dies.

Also,

Oh, and Ghosts 'n Goblins, you are terminated. The trilogy is complete. Granted, I finished them bass ackwards, but it was done.

Congrats. You have better stats than I will ever have.

[Jesus]

Bioware could've (and probably should've) gone the route of Bethesda with their Fallout endings where it touches on all of the people you've met and seen in the game. But as it stands, I don't think the ending is horrible or a black mark on the entire franchise. Was it lazy? Sure. Was it horrible and evil? No. Was it a perfectly acceptable ending to the games if you aren't some super insane fanboy? Yes it was. It was a perfectly fine ending.

That right there is pretty much the kind of feedback I was looking for.

Also, Aeris dies.

[Ybrik Metaknight]

Great scene, but my favorite is Palpatine's phone call from Darth Vader.



"What do you mean they blew up the Death Star? ... What the hell is an aluminum falcon?"

[Ace!]

The last two hours of Metal Gear Solid 2 are insane. Like, out of its mind, stupid insane. I once hated this game for the rudest one-two punch (alongside Final Fantasy X). But now? Now that I get the joke? I think I kind of love it. It's the biggest prank ever pulled, and I love it for that, for being this insane.

[Henry Jones]

Well, considering Kojima didn't WANT to make MGS2 and the game was kind of "I hate you for making me do this," I love it. It's my favorite in the series. The biggest twist of the knife: Raiden is the least whiny character in Metal Gear Solid outside of Boss. At least in 2, anyway. While everyone and their cousins throws their torturous pasts in your face at every opportunity, they have to practically force Raiden to tell them the shit he's been through. The problem is more who he has to be saddled with the whole time.

[Ace!]

My one problem with it, really, is that it's so cutscene heavy. I do appreciate that it didn't stick QTEs in there, but still. Out of the last three hours of the game,

SPOILER - click box below to reveal

you only run around naked for five minutes, kill three waves of bad guys, then 20 Rays and Solidus.

That's about thirty minutes of the last three hours. The rest is insane storytelling. I love this prank more than any other, now.

The first one is still my favorite, but I'm enjoying Snake Eater quite a bit right now. I wish the first one was on Sexbox Live so I could play it again.

[joe_cam]

Man. Been getting into Tiger 13, but it seems like the game is determined to piss me off and chase me away despite the fun I'm having with it.
First off, the new swing mechanic was hard to get into but I'm getting the hang of it, except the putting. I can't find a way to NOT overswing on damn near every put. My precise control of an analog stick just isn't up to snuff, I guess. I feel bad for anybody playing this on a PS3 with how goddamned loose those sticks are.
Then we have the DLC. 11 courses to buy on day one. OR. OR... Or you could play the game a lot and earn coins that you can use to RENT those courses. If you do well enough on the rented course, you can eventually earn it to KEEP it. DLC that you can earn for free? I like that idea! Seems like a really awesome way to get people to play more and save them a few bucks. Granted, it takes a long time to earn enough coins to purchase the minimum six rounds needed to Gold Master a course to unlock it for good.
Then I saw EA had a sale on the Waialae Course! Normally 3 rounds is 12,000 coins. For 3 days only they doubled it to 6 rounds for 12,000! Works for me! Just enough plays to unlock it for good if I do as well as I usually do!
Fire up the first round and get to hole 8. Doing quite well. Hit A to load the next hole and the screen goes black. System is unresponsive. System froze up.
Did I mention that apparently there's issues with the Masters Edition of the game freezing up a good bit? Yeah. This is about the 8th time my game froze up on me.
Sadly, this time happened to be on a "rented" round of golf. Fire up the game and instead of 6 plays, I only have 5 left. So the game froze the fuck up on me and I lost one of the course rentals that I paid my goddamned coins for.
Needless to say, EA Sports got a sternly worded email from me about this that they will promptly ignore and do nothing about.

The game would be great if it didn't freeze up to the point of me wanting to throw a brick at a small child.

[Henry Jones]

Silent Hill Downpour is a very flawed game. The framerate can be atrocious, especially when the game is doing one of its many auto-saves to keep stupid statistics (Yeah, I don't care how long I've had a flashlight on). The combat is stilted and frustrating (I don't care if you're monsters. You can't make a full block of a fire axe with your bare hands!). It has a couple good ideas with a morality system, but then kind of drops it and the multiple endings can be pretty much a surprise even if you know what you're doing. You can't fuck around in town too much or you'll get ganged up on and murdered, and since the game sometimes lacks direction, that can be a problem especially early on when there aren't very many buildings to duck into and reset the rain (If you stay outside too long, it starts to rain more and more, which means more creatures and they're more aggressive).

Buuuuuuuuuuuuut, it's the first game in awhile that has the first three-and-a-half game's spirit without feeling like a dull copy (Shattered Memories is good, but it's like Halloween: Season of the Witch. It's cool, but it kind of goes off and does its own thing). The story is good and while some of it is predictable, it does have some nice sleight of hand moments that sneak up while you're paying attention to the main conflict (The ending you get when you lose in the final encounter is actually the best one even if it's the shortest, because it makes so much damn sense with what the game is saying). Composer Daniel Licht does a commendable at following Akira Yamaoka and even if the licensed music on the radio placed around town is a blatant lift from Alan Wake, it works (Though it would be nice if credits actually listed what the songs were. I had to Google lyrics on one song I liked to figure out who did it). The graphics are finally at solid current generation even with the frame rate problems. None of this Homecoming crap where everyone and all the monsters look like they're made of plastic.

And then there's the side quests. Some of them are just simple time wasters, but a good amount of them capture one of the little things the classic Silent Hills had that the recent ones slacked on: Telling disturbing little mini-stories. Sometimes you didn't even know there was a story there. In SH 3, the room where you get the sub-machine gun has a little story about a man in a wheelchair who was shoved down a flight of stairs, shot a few times, and then crawled bleeding into the elevator for escape while the killer waited a little bit before finishing the job and dropped the machine gun and left just before you get there to pick it up. The only reason people know about that is the high-res PC port. That's the essence of the side quests of Downpour, and some them are really fucked up. The search for the autistic child alone will mess you up on the inside. You reach the last point in the search and things don't make sense. Then...... you put the pieces together, and........... No, it can't be....... Oh....... Oh God....... That says something when the side quests can affect me like that. On top of a solid regular story and it's just like the classics. A somewhat rough game forgiven by a good atmosphere and story (Let's remember, Silent Hill 2, the damn standard for which all others are judged, feels like a half-finished game. Their idea of dark Silent Hill is regular Silent Hill with a few more lights out). It's just missing a few memorable creatures (It has one that's very clever and original, but the rest are unremarkable at best). I'd say check it out.

[joe_cam]

Mass Effect 3 getting new multiplayer characters and maps on Tuesday! Yay! No more playing the Reactor 5 times in a row!

[Ace!]

I had forgotten pretty much everything about the end of Snake Eater, and watching it again, with this much time and distance away from it, it startled me by how moving it actually was. The entire story of Snake Eater is told about as clumsily as possible much of the time, with the occasional beautiful metaphor or subtly directed moment (usually wordless), but the actual core narrative was quite powerful. I almost feel like jumping in again, see what else I can play with, as I didn't do anything this time through. But I do have Peace Walker right here... and Fez comes out on Friday...

[pappy]

I come back after a 60 day hiatus and this is what I find? Name calling over video game preferences?


I missed you guys.

[Ace!]

So far, I only have one problem with Fez. It has these really strange technical limitations. The game starts and everything flows beautifully. Transitions between screens are smooth and very creatively mask the load times. But then, for whatever reason, after a few hours, transitions began to stutter, sometimes actually having to resort to the standard black load screen to buy some time. I don't know why it was suddenly loading more information, as this happened even when revisiting old areas. There is a variable that gets introduced here and there, but honestly, after five years this shit should have been ironed out.

That said, I have 21 cubes, 4 anti-cubes, two artifacts and five treasure maps and there is still so much more game. I finally made it to the part where music that kind of sounds like end music plays, and it feels like the surroundings provide an answer to questions I wasn't really sure I was asking yet, but there is still more game.

This is a beautiful thing, this game. In many ways it's like Myst in its approach. Yes, there is a thing that tells you some (but far from all of the) pertinent information, but then it generally keeps quiet. Puzzles, the actual puzzles that require serious thought, give you all the pieces right there, and you have to make it work on your own, without any hints. There are some things I've found that I think I need more information about (and I did kind of find proof, I think), and there has been a lot of stuff that I think I had to write down, but it's all so refreshing.

Initially, the game felt overwhelming, but as I learned the moves and the tricks, as I learned how to make this toy work, it became much less daunting to navigate, and there is always just one more door. I've made it this far in one night, putting off going to bed, because, well, just one more door.

I am quite pleased with this purchase, and I look forward to diving back in with coffee tomorrow morning.

[Ace!]

Man, Fez got straight up rude in its New Game +. Just about everything is open for you to see before the end (which is more of a midway point), but the puzzles that come after... Straight up rude. In most cases, I see the solution, I'm just missing one piece of information, or I'm doing one thing wrong. I spent most of tonight in a few rooms, puzzling out two or three puzzles. I got a huge ah ha moment, and now I see the next path I'm going to take to take care of this thing.

I love this game. It goes further and deeper than I ever thought possible, and the fucking stones on this thing. There have been some absolutely amazing clues that I didn't realize were even clues until I had been staring at them for ten minutes. And the one that cracks the alphabet... Brilliant.

[Ace!]

Having access to Fez's alphabet is amazing. I'm reading everything I can find, and it all adds so much subtle depth to this world. This thing continues to surprise me at every turn. If you have a Sexbox, then you have no excuse to not play Fez. And when you do finally take the plunge, don't read anything about it and play through to 32 cubes. After that point, the entire game changes completely. It becomes incredibly difficult and incredibly rewarding. It requires you to use your brain in ways you might never have had to use it before (I know, for me at least, I'm solving puzzles unlike any I've ever had the patience for before).

It's ten bucks and worth five times that.

[joe_cam]

Fez is really awesome. I agree.
Also awesome? The Witcher 2 for 360 (and PC like 9 years ago...)
Console gaming have reached the point where we have fully exposed bush in a mainstream M rated game. It's an incredible landmark for our medium.
The gameplay itself is fantastic as well. Not Amalur good in my eyes, but still damn awesome.

[Ace!]

So, Fez is over, and it was wonderful. Before you ask, yes, I cheated. I cheated on the extra puzzles because fucking hell. One of the puzzles in particular was solved on the internet by brute force, so if there is actually a solution in the game, no one has found it yet. That's amazing. The extra ending was nice, but I think I prefer the normal ending. That said, amazing game, if you have a Sexbox and like good things you owe it to yourself to get it.

Time to switch gears.

Tags weren't working, so here's the gameplay video.

I'm terrible at this game, but I'm in love with it. It's a fun little thing, one that rewards skill but doesn't punish a lack of it. And it's three bucks.