What are you playing? [SPOILER TAGS PLEASE]

[Inkidu]

Well, for starters, you get to customize how you look. In my books, that alone is enough to make an MP shooter more interesting.

Probably the most interesting feature, though, is the parkour-ish system of getting around. It's sort of like ... Call of Duty meets Assassin's Creed. Meets Bulletstorm.

Well you killed it for me. That explains its T rating though. It's a multiplayer shooter. Holy Standardization and people paying real money instead of working for their gear Batman!

[Hemingway]

Hey, Mirror's Edge was fun! It's also supposed to be very dynamic.

Ahh, and now ... my brother made me want to get Crysis 2, but ... well, it goes against my principles, and I'm not sure I can afford it at the moment. The flipside of that being ... well, when did I ever let either of those things get in the way of me buying a game?

[Inkidu]

It's nice to know you stick by your guns, Hemingway. -_-

I was talking about Brink. I've never played Mirror's Edge. I understood it was a single player game.

[Hemingway]

Well, according to my brother, the SP part is some 13 hours, which isn't that bad for a modern shooter. If it's a decent shooter on top of that, that's not all bad. My main reason for not wanting it is the setting. As far as being able to afford it ... well, it's not like getting the game is going to ruin me, it's mostly my conscience that suffers, and that passes in a day or two.

ANYWAY.

I know, I was responding to Wolfy.

If the fact it's a multiplayer shooter bothers you, then, well, I understand. I don't care much for them myself. Or, that's a lie. I like them, but they have to offer something more than just shooting people for me to be able to stay interested. I've played Black Ops for 36 hours, at which point I'd already unlocked everything in a game that wasn't that good to begin with. MW2, I've played almost twice as long. Bad Company 2, almost four times that. Because that game is actually fun to play. Brink, I'm hoping, will offer enough stuff aside from shooting people and acting like an ass, that I'll stay interested for a while.

[Oniya]

Mr. Oniya and I are doing a re-playthrough of Legend of Dragoon.  It's funny - so many people had criticized it as an FF7 rip-off, but now that I've seen FF7, I have to say that LOD is much better quality graphics (and more consistent - no PlaySkool people walking around ornate matte paintings).  True, you have the spiky-haired hero and the silver-haired bishie, but it's hard to claim that either of them was 'first' with that idea. (*cough* every anime/manga story ever written *cough*)

[Inkidu]

Heck what do I know. The next game I get to buy won't be until mid April. I just need to get paid, so I can get my new 360. Sure I don't exactly need a new one right now, but I might as well jump the gun on it. Seriously. I have two thirds of it in money people are going to to pay me. Tragedies of having a job where your money is under the table. I'm looking into the new Mortal Kombat, but I might wait it out or get Bulletstorm.

Now, I'm going to get up on my soap box for a bit. You know, I read where people are pissed at Dead Space 2's commercials. They call them immature and whatnot. They say there setting gaming back. That it's advocating underage sales. You people are so full of crap! Do you realize how many seventeen-year-old buyers live with their parents. It is a little immature but I thought it was brilliant for selling a violent, scary horror game. Plus I bet you twenty bucks and all the coins in the Mushroom Kingdom those same people advocating game maturity and all that are going to go buy Duke Nukem Forever. That's right all the coins.

[Hemingway]

Yeah, I can justify buying Crysis 2 by pointing to the fact there aren't any games I want coming in April. At least not full-priced ones.

Come to think of it, May is going to be hell. I'm going to be neck-deep in exams, stressed out of my mind, in the midst of some of the most exciting games of the year being released. I wonder how I'm going to manage that ... to say nothing of all the other stuff I'm going to have on my mind ... God, I need to sort this stuff out, or I'm going to explode without getting to experience the end of Mass Effect later this year. After that, I can explode. But not before.

[Wolfy]

Mr. Oniya and I are doing a re-playthrough of Legend of Dragoon.  It's funny - so many people had criticized it as an FF7 rip-off, but now that I've seen FF7, I have to say that LOD is much better quality graphics (and more consistent - no PlaySkool people walking around ornate matte paintings).  True, you have the spiky-haired hero and the silver-haired bishie, but it's hard to claim that either of them was 'first' with that idea. (*cough* every anime/manga story ever written *cough*)

Legend of Dragoon is one of the games that has a requested Sequel.

Seriously..if they announced a Legend of Dragoon 2, I think every RPG nerd would creme their pants in unison.


Anyway...what do you mean no games are coming out in April? Portal 2 is one of them! D: Then In May we have Duke Nukem Forever and..some other games, probably.

Oh crap..May or June is also when Ocarina of time 3D comes out for the 3DS here Stateside!

[Hemingway]

Portal 2 isn't that interesting to me. I never got into Portal, so if I get Portal 2, it'll probably just be to shut my brother up and play co-op.

[Inkidu]

I thought Portal was okay. It loses a lot of its luster when you realize that ninety percent of it is tutorial and you're just being babied through it. :(

"Still Alive" is awesome though.
There's no use crying over every mistake / you just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake / and I'm glad I got burned because of all the thing I learned / for the people who are... still alive.

[Wolfy]

It's supposed to be 90% Tutorial. D: That's how it was designed. :/

And I disagree. You aren't babied through it. Some of the puzzles are actually kind of difficult.

[Inkidu]

It's supposed to be 90% Tutorial. D: That's how it was designed. :/

And I disagree. You aren't babied through it. Some of the puzzles are actually kind of difficult.

I didn't really get that. I kind of felt like it gave you an answer to everything.

[Wolfy]

What? How did it give you an answer to everything? o3o...

[Inkidu]

What? How did it give you an answer to everything? o3o...

Well not overtly, obviously. There was no, "Do this here." but the game doesn't let up on the tutorial so you can pretty much be assured that there are going to be some softball hints everywhere. It never really drops you into a just a "You're on your own" situation. I just couldn't shake the feeling it was holding my hand the entire way.

[Sabby]

Crysis 2 is an interesting game... it brings absolutely nothing new to the table, and if you look at it part by part, it's completely uninteresting. You fight aliens. Your in a city. You shoot. You sneak. You have vision modes. You upgrade your suit. Yeah, all sounds very generic, but when you look at the entire thing instead of dissecting it, its actually pretty awesome. Just the way they took all these uninspired elements and put them together in such a way...

I guess what made the game for me was how you actually feel like a super soldier. Instead of being a floating gun with a long health meter, you really did feel like a versatile, effecient but still quite killable machine of death.

Climbing up onto a ledge and turning invisible, activating Predator heat vision, zooming in and marking the enemies with blips, deactivating heat view to check a good flanking path... hop back down, recharge energy, stealth mode, dash across the open, hide, recharge energy, get closer... hold up shotgun, screw in silencer, silently blast two soldiers off of their feet. Stealth, get behind, toss grenade into group. Bang. They fire at you, you stealth, slip out, get behind them, jump on top of jeep, punch the gunner, rip off turret.

Everyone turns to you.

"MAXIMUM ARMOR!" brakkabrakkabrakkabrakka!!

Its like the best of Farcry and Arkham Asylum rolled into one generic but well functioning machine of awesome.

[Hemingway]

I thought the intro bit was a bit ... I don't know, I just felt like the way your character gets dragged into it seems a bit like a deus ex machina.

[Inkidu]

There are so many good games I want that aren't here yet! D:

Batman: Arkham City
Deus Ex: Human Revolution
L.A. Noir
Heck the new Mortal Kombat is even looking awesome.

[Hemingway]

Hmm... I'm not quite sure why, but Crysis 2 to Crysis feels sort of like what FEAR2 was to FEAR. I liked FEAR2, so that's not a bad thing in and of itself, but ... yeah, it's just this weird feeling I get. I guess the main reasons are that both sequels were more streamlined, and that both were ... basically console games.

Yeah, these checkpoints are problematic. I'm playing the game on Veteran or whatever, so it's pretty unforgiving ... and when checkpoints are as much as five minutes apart, that can be annoying. Weapons feel ... I don't know ... the way you'd expect them to feel in a console port. It's like aiming is less of a necessity, and thus ... more difficult.

I'm also still in doubt about the story. I mean, it'll probably develop in some interesting way, they've got a proper writer, after all. But the character I'm playing is even more faceless ( and voiceless ) than Nomad from Crysis. Which is a real letdown. I'd hoped they'd have gone the other way, and made the protagonist, you know, an actual character. Gordon Freeman gets away with being a silent protagonist, by virtue of the sheer absurdity of the situations he finds himself in ( I'd be speechless, too ), but this is ... eh, slightly disappointing.

Still an entertaining game, though, and ... well, with my exams coming up and me suddenly having no time at all for games, I think it'll last a while.

Edit: One more thing. I'm actually liking the changes to the suit more than I thought I would, but there's still a problem: too many features require energy. Sprinting, at a pace that's far from superhuman, drains your energy. If the suit is a 200 pound thing, then it's justified. Otherwise, it's just ... well, it's a bit annoying, because movement in the game is pretty slow, and so you're often tempted to sprint, but can't because you might suddenly get spotted and need to stealth or switch to armor mode. Nanovision ( basically thermal vision ) does the same thing, which ... well, it's more justified, but it's still a bit annoying.

On the plus side, stealth is easier to use, and armor feels like actual armor, instead of the default mode of the suit, which basically acts like a Halo-style shield. When you switch it on, you genuinely feel ... armored.

[Inkidu]

Dragon Age 2. I realized something too. Mages are freaking weaklings in the early game. You blow through two abilities and if your still rocking a standard staff you can guarantee that if your tank dies or something you're going to get smeared.

[Hemingway]

Yeah, especially if, like me, you're trying to be a little more creative with your build. Entropy doesn't make for a strong early-game character ...

Edit: Crysis 2: It's hard. I turned the difficulty down from Veteran to Soldier, and it's still hard enough that I die pretty frequently when things go south. Like, I decide I want to take on a group of enemies by going into armor mode and blasting them ... then it turns out one of them has an SMG that fires FRICKING ELECTRICITY and it basically short-circuits my suit and I die.

Basically, the game forces you to be stealthy, and makes that fairly tedious by giving your suit very little energy. I mean, maybe this is what they were going for, making you feel less like a one-man army and more like an instrument of doom ... made out of glass.

I guess the real problem is the lack of quicksaves. Slow pace is fine. But they'd better let me save whenever I want to make up for it. If I screw up and die, I don't want to go back five minutes.

Edit 2: I didn't reduce the difficulty, apparently. I guess that explains why it's still hard as all hell. I guess if you reduce the difficulty and then die, it ... raises it again. Makes perfect sense.

[Sabby]

Well, I just finished Crysis 2... it was AMAZING!! The final stretch was just tense and made me drop my jaw a few times. Only thing that ruined it was the end boss fight, which just plain sucked, and the AI overall was pretty bad.

Spoiler: Click to Show/Hide

Watching Central Park rise up into the sky was just too awesome.

[Sel Nar]

Still playing Guild Wars, waiting for GW2 and Arkham City.

[Inkidu]

I finally got to see the Arkham City Trailer. That game is going to rock.

[Wolfy]

3DS. Comes out Tommorow. JOY. :D Can't wait to pick mine up at 11.

[Inkidu]

3DS. Comes out Tommorow. JOY. :D Can't wait to pick mine up at 11.

I hear it can damage the eyes of anyone under ten. Which, considering Nintendo still has the kid image, may be another flame point for the politicians against video gaming. Still, what kind of parent buys their ten-year-old child a $325 hand-held device. My parents only ever got me a Gameboy color at that age.

I had a Gameboy at five, but damn you couldn't break those things if you tried. You do not break Gameboy, Gameboy break you!