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[jamie]

I'm playing Breath of Fire IV. It's good! I'll talk about it some later. Those Breath of Fire games...I sure would like to see what they did with a sixth one.

[Mittens]

I tried out Warframe

Have never played a game that tried so hard to make their environments impossible to navigate.
-Everything is the same grey color,
-the walls are lined with irrelevant doors,
-locked doors look the same as unlocked doors.

Instead of the tutorial telling me that the label on the HUD reading "100hp" means that I have 100 hp, maybe it could have told players how to navigate their horrible bloody labyrinths.

Also combat was clunky and boring, dropped it after about an hour, 1 our of 5 stars, would not recommend

[Blambo]

Neptune's Pride. Stomping the galaxy.

[Sharkoss]

Bubble Symphony.  Game is adorable and fun.

[awesometeam22]

Right now it's Natural Selection 2 and Overlord.  Natural Selection will require more of my time before I know what the heck is going on in those matches. 

[SirNiko]

The new Paper Mario is still pretty cute. I like how every level tries faithfully to make everything look like it's constructed out of bits of paper, down to puddles of water you can flip over with a hammer strike to reveal paper backing underneath. The level design seems pretty consistent too, but I think I'm just past the 50% mark. Whether or not it keeps up that quality past this point is going to be the game breaker.

One thing that gives me mixed feelings are the chapter-end boss battles. The bosses are pretty brutally strong, with huge HP counts and high defense that makes multi-hit stickers optimal for most of the fight. The secret is that every boss has a crippling weakness to one of the "Thing" stickers you can find in his region, and using it makes the boss go from grueling to trivial. For the first boss, this isn't too bad, since you only have about 4 Things to choose from and two are his weakness, so odds are high that you've been saving a good sticker for the fight. The others, though, are trickier. The second boss's weakness is heavily telegraphed by the arena where you meet him, and the third boss requires a little bit of thought regarding what kinds of attacks he's going to use on you. While it's satisfying when you correctly find and exploit a weakness, the bosses become extremely trivial when you do - the second boss takes 250HP out of 300HP with one attack when you use the right sticker against him at the right time, and the third boss becomes blind, takes heavy damage for four turns, and loses all his bonus defense when you find his weakness. If you fail to exploit a weakness, your Navi-like helper chastises you for using so many stickers but you don't get a chance to try again and find the weakness, which means a player who doesn't reset the game or read a walkthough to see what they did wrong loses the chance to learn the pattern.

The rest of the game is high quality, though. The levels are varied, and Nintendo did a good job making sure every stage has some interesting design feature to make it feel unique from all the other stages. Collecting stickers and pasting them on the walls of the sticker museum one at a time is cathartic, and if you're the type who doesn't care for collect-em-all gameplay you can skip it entirely at what appears to be zero penalty. Contrary to previous paper mario games, you have the opportunity to skip ahead and visit later chapters early, since the methods of unlocking each don't require you to defeat the chapter bosses - reaching chapter 2, for example, just requires an assortment of normal stickers you can find in chapter 1, and chapter 3 just requires a Thing you receive shortly before the chapter 1 boss fight. There doesn't seem to be a clear advantage to skipping ahead, though, since the availability of more powerful stickers in later chapters is balanced by the fact that you have a smaller inventory to keep them in, since inventory upgrades are rewarded for beating bosses.

Hopefully it keeps up into the second half.

[s0]

speaking of 3ds gams, is luigi's mansion 2 any good if you're not going to play the multiplayer?

[J-Snake]

Considering to get Braid and Anodyne.

[baconman]

Just wrapped up a day of Tekken Tag 2 and Terraria, a tag-team of total trash-trashing!

Systematically destroying Tekkenite opponents felt SO GOOD against this busy week's worth of ragebonering, and digging up treasures in Terraria and building there gave me that renewed creative spark and sense of small victory I'd been clamoring for.

I guess having them both now accounts for part of that treasury-victory feeling, too.

[saibot216]

Thinkin about playing some Dreamweb tonight. Looks like a pretty interesting game.

[TeeGee]

Finished Just Cause 2. Gotta say I really warmed up to it along the way. The controls may suck at times (I hate it when buttons switch their usual role in different context), but it's still silly sandbox done right.

I like that there's a total freedom since the very beginning, both in where you can go and how you approach missions. This is what I hated in the GTAs. A whole game based around stealing cars and playing around with the sandbox, but if a mission gives you a car, you better not do anything with it or it's lost. In JC2 anything goes, so you can get creative. Like, a mission where you are supposed to destroy two jets while hanging from a chopper and raining them with grenades. I just dropped down instead. Hijacked one of the jets and rammed it into the other. Mission: accomplished, sandbox fun level: fuck yeah!


Now onto Kingdoms of Amalur, which unfortunately looks simply boring. It's like they tried to pack too much into what essentially is a simple hack and slash. Makes you appreciate the elegant minimalistic design of Dark Souls even more.

[s0]

i found kingdums of amalur dull as piss tbh. lame button mashy combat, mmo style fetch quests, formulaic level design, uninteresting skill and gear choices, story and setting just rattle off every fantasy cliche ever, graphics style copied from WoW etc.

it's not always entirely devoid of fun but even at its best it just made me want to play other games instead

[TeeGee]

Yeah, similar impressions so far. It just seems to copy everything some higher-up deemed good in other games, without rhyme or reason, or any consideration for how it adds up to the core experience, if at all. It's a total kitchen sink design. Could be more fun if it was just hack and slash. But no, it tries to engage you with its awfully generic fantasy plot and dialogues and fetch quests. It's also way too easy even on the Hard difficulty.

About the only thing I really like is that the mage can also do cool weapon combat with staves and chakrams.

[feminazi]

helo profesional gamers wat is a game thats not boring

[crowe]

[saibot216]

Space Panda
http://arcade.gamesalad.com/game/37326

We came across this game in my game design class (we're using the same software to make our puzzle game) and it's so funny. I love the very literal soundtrack.

[melos]

helo profesional gamers wat is a game thats not boring

bejelwed

[crowe]

[Sharkoss]

helo profesional gamers wat is a game thats not boring

Bubble Symphony.

[s0]

what is that