Gods, I think I tried Grandia once, years ago. I usually don't finish games (mostly JRPGs) for the time investment. But I liked what I saw. Will have to give Grandia II a go.

I've been working on some iPhone achievements. Trying to get Hoplite's Hoplite Master.

 

Reminder: Star Wars Battlefront open beta weekend starts today at 1000 PST (1800 BST). Pre-load is available on Origin, and I believe on consoles as well.

 

Played the 1 mission as couch co-op with the best friend, was quite fun even as someone who is trash at shooters, there were bugs but they were minor....

The Hoth fight seems cool but honestly the game had major issues. We're only a month from launch guys...

 

I think I've settled on SMT: Devil Survivor once the price drops to $9.99 in a couple of days. Yay/nay?

 

Yay. Overclocked or the original, though? If you can get Overclocked for the 3DS, choose that one.
Many facets of the original game are improved and extra story content was added.

 

I am curious what are the major issues that you've come across with STB Zircon?

 

Ten days til Life is Strange's final installment, thinking of running a different version with a few switches in place after I finish my first one.

 

After the ending of Ep. 4, I'm so tense for the next part.

 

I'm interested to see how it wraps up. May not be my favorite game but it's a lot better than I initially expected.

 

Good. And Overclocked. Just a matter of waiting for the price drop at some point today.

EDIT: Bought it. Gonna try it out soon and see how it goes.
EDIT2: Should be sleeping instead of playing. This game is fun, better than I'd expected. Definitely worth the purchase so far.
EDIT3: Fantastic game. Need sleep, don't want to stop.

 

I wanted to write up a big review of this, with good and bad points, but it's just too much to talk about on the bad side. I can't remember the last thing I was this disappointed by, in any form - not just a game. It's horribly depressing how much potential there is in this that's just left to rot on the vine.

It was a very good time for a weekend that I didn't have to pay for, but they're insane if they want 60 bucks for a horribly dumbed-down Battlefield game re-skinned to Star Wars. It's probably the prettiest un-modded game I'll play for a long time - Witcher 3 is the only thing close right now IMHO, and that's only if you have a very beefy PC to run everything on ultra. The Star Wars geekgasm can't be overlooked of course - if there's one thing they got right, it's the aesthetics. Sound, visual, music... all perfect. But that's not enough for me.

Basically, all they had to do to NOT fuck it up was take Battlefront 2, give it to someone other than EA, and re-make it in this engine. Instead, they're going to end up charging 60 bucks for a shell of a game, then $15 more at a time for DLC every 6 months (if we're lucky) that completes an experience that still won't be as good as the 10-year-old game it's supposed to be the successor to.


EDIT: Here is an excellent article that's kind of a counterpoint, and brings up good points. TLDR is that it's made to be a very casual shooter.

 

Cbf going in depth why, but I really didn't like it. I'm not surprised that die hard SW fans dob though, the nostalgia is strong in this one.

I'll pin the blame on Destiny though. While not perfect, mechanically, it's superior in every way.

 

Lol, ICYMI VG247 published an article claiming Uncharted 4 was too formulaic based on the 'hands-on' they had at TGS.

Naturally, no one has been hands on with it yet. What they were playing was Uncharted 2 from the ND collection.

Here's their apology.

 

So there's a RWBY game on Steam Greenlight for those who are fans of the show

 

As this post is pretty damn long I'll post the TLDR here so that people don't have to scroll the who way to the bottom. I have missed out more pros and cons than I have listed but I've already written 2500 words and I'm only doing this for fun.

TLDR: The game features a badly implemented health regeneration system, the maps could have been designed much better, the weapons and perks are going to cause major unbalancing problems and the weapon and perks seem to have a few faults that make the game that much less fun to play and the game modes aren't that good either.

The only good things about the game are how (some of) it's maps are nice looking and there can be some epic moments.

I played the Beta for quite a while so I'm gonna share some of my thoughts here.

Cons:

Yes, I'm starting with cons first because there are quite a few of them and it's easier to think of bad things than it is good.

1)

This game features health regeneration which in itself isn't a bad thing but, the way it is implemented leaves a lot to be desired. If you take any damage (it doesn't matter if you lose 5HP or 95HP) all you have to do is wait a few seconds without taking any damage you'll suddenly be back up to one hundred percent health. When combined with the maps the game offers the system shows it's flaws.

Both Hoth and Sullust have lots of objects that you can hide behind. On Hoth this means I don't have to worry about standing up to try and gun down oncoming storm troopers because I know if I do take any damage I can just crouch, recover and carry on what I was doing. On the other map I can do the exact same thing, except this time I duck behind a rocky outcrop rather than a trench.

This takes most of the tension out of the game as there isn't much fear of death, especially with the instant respawns. The only thing that made me fear death was the long trek I would have to make to get back into the action and that was less a fear of death and more a fear of boredom.

2)

This brings me quite well onto my next point: the maps. Whilst the maps were breathtaking (alright, that was mostly just Hoth) I think they were designed badly. On Hoth you had a 20 vs 20 battle and on Sullust you had a 10 vs 10 battle. I'll talk about Sullust first.

Sullust

The biggest problem I have with Sullust is it's size. For a 10 vs 10 battle it is way too large. When I died, despite my liberal use of the health regeneration mechanic, there was a 30 second trek back to where the action was. When you consider that the battle is opnly 10 minutes (or less) long you can see where the problem lies. When playing the Sullust map around three or four minutes of my time were spent trying to get back into the fighting and quite frankly, it was boring. Extremely so in fact, which is why I didn't play the map more than three times. I'm sure this problem would be eliminated if I had had the jetpack perk/card/hand but at this point I was rank 1 and the game was encouraging me to play Sullust before I tried Hoth. In the end I ignored the games advice and I played Hoth and Hoth only for the rest of my time.

The second problem I have with Sullust comes from it's layout. Sullust consists of lots of rock outcrops and twisting paths (they didn't help getting me back to the fighting) which means that sniping wasn't really a major option on this map. Even if I climbed up onto one of these outcrops my view would mostly be blocked by another outcrop. When combined with the way the game forced the fighting to change location through the use of the escape pods that you had to capture, well, sniping stopped being even remotely possible if you didn't want to spend the majority of your time trying to run around to find a sniping location only to have to change your position five seconds later.

The third problem I have with Sullust is how it looks. To put it simply, it's hideous. The colour palette of the map is varying shades of brown which does help to emphasize the fact that this is war and that war isn't pretty but it doesn't make me want to play the map. The colours just made be bored and the repetitiveness of the map (I think they built the map with only two assets: rocky outcrop and dirt path) made the gameplay tiring rather than fun.

Hoth

In the Hoth map the climax invloves the ATAts walking toward the generatopr with the Rebels trrying to destroy them while hiding in trenches. The problem is that the trenches aren't laid out like real trenches. Real trenches should be in straight(ish) lines, one behind the other, where the second line of trenches don't connect to the first line. In Hoth it isn't done this way. The trenches are just a tangled mess and I think it took away from what could have been a very nice part of the map that wouldn't have had to have been force by objectives.

Let me explain, if the trenches had been laid out properly you would have eventually had the Stormtroopers in one trench and the Rebels in another. It would have lead to actual trench warfare being developed organically and it would have made for a very nice climax to the map - what with the rebels trying to hold their trenches and destroy the ATATs before they reached the generator and the Imperials trying to force the Rebels out of the trenches to make them easier to kill and give them less time to destroy the ATATs.

Another similar thing occurs with the Rebel Bunker in the map. Where the bunker could have been used to create and tight and difficult battle where the Imperials are trying to force their way in and the Rebels are trying to keep them out. As it is now, this doesn't happen, instead you get a couple of Imperials on the turrets outside whilst one or two people run in about three meters and use the uplink station. To me, it seems as if the bunker isn't there to enhance gameplay but to be a throwback to the films.

These problems with Hoth are mainly caused by the limited number of people that can be on a server. With a larger number of people things like this could be done as you would naturally get large groups of people who would all focus on holding the trenches or defending the bunker rather than everyone running off and doing their own thing which is what happens now. With only twenty people on each side things like this could only happen if the players on each side were forced to do these things through arbitrary objectives or something similar.

3)

Weapons and Perks. The main problem is that the weapons are going to majorly unbalance the game. Even the machine gun you got at rank 5 was much, much more powerful than the default gun. When I died I was really only killed by people with this machine gun. The others were pretty weak in comparison. When you get people who are rank 50 (or whatever the maximum rank in this game is) going against people who are rank 1 then the new players are going to get discouraged pretty damn quick.

Secondly, I don't like how the bullets/lasers travel; to me the seem unusually slow and whilst I like it when you have to aim infront of an enemy to hit them whilst they are running I don't like it when you have to aim so far infront of them that you can't even see them in your scope. Alright, I may be exaggerating a bit but my point still stands. It makes it extremely difficult to hit an opponent who is more than twenty meters away from you.

Thirdly, the damage of a laser decreases over distance which is a good thing as it would make for a bad game if the bullets could do the same damage to someone who is one hundred meters away as they do someone who is next to you. However I think they have scaled the damage down a bit too much as now the only way to even damage a player noticeably from a long distance is to use the Cycler Rifle. However, you can only use this rifle if you have selected the right perk which means you can't be effective at long range and use a perk combination like the ion blaster, thermal detonators and the jetpack, which incidentally is actually a pretty good combo.

Even if you do have the cycler rifle perk the rifle itself can only be fired once before there is a seven second cool down applied. The cool down isn't exactly a bad thing as the gun would be way too overpowered but it is the length of the cool down which cause problems. From a long range the rifle wont insta-kill an enemy. It will deal about 80 damage so you have to be able to hit them twice to kill them, or be able to use your primary weapon with enough accuracy to deplete the remaining 20hp which is quite a hard task. IF you aren't a good enough shot with your primary weapon then the enemy will have enough time duck behind a mound of snow and by the time your cool down for the rifle is done, they have recovered all of their HP.

I shit you not, I had one moment on Hoth where this exact thing happened to me. I had to hit them 3 times with the cycler rifle before the guy died. And in the end I wasn't even the one who killed him.

4)

The game modes themselves are boring. The Sullust mode consists of just running to the location of an escape pod, defending it for a small amount if time and then running to the next escape pod. The Hoth mode is slighlty better but still quite boring. All you have to do is run to where the uplink stations are activate them and then defend them before running to another uplink station location. The single player (or co-op) mode looked quite interesting until I realised that the Horde/Wave mode had a wave cap of 15. I like wave modes a lot, like a lot a lot. I've put 80+ hours into the Horde Sandcastle mod for Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. I once spent 18 hours straight playing this horde mod. So when I say I was disappointed by this mode you should know that I actually mean I almost cried.

Putting a wave cap on a wave mode doesn't make any sense. The entire point of playing a wave based game is to play, die, see what round you got to and then try to do better the next time. If there's a limit this doesn't happen, so once I complete it for the first time I'll never go back.

Pros:

There are more negatives about the game but I can't go on anymore. I feel like I'm ragging on the game a bit too much so I'll list the games few positives.

1)

The game is beautiful. When I first loaded the Tatooine map I was blown away. With everything turned up to the max and with DSR enabled the game looks incredible. It's the best looking game I've played in a long time and it will probably hold that title for quite a while. Tatooine used very bright colours and there was a lot of contrast between the brown rocks and the blue sky which made everything 'pop' which meant I never got bored or tired of the map. Hoth was similar but to a lesser extent and Sullust was just terrible with it's dark colour palette making the map dull.

2)

There are moments in the game that are just epic. You almost feel as if you are in a huge battle and with the music in the background you can't help but feel awesome. TIE fighters can spiral out of the sky and crash to the ground just infront of you, wiping out the Stormtroopers who were just about to kill you. Luke Skywalker can be crushed by an ATAT just before he kills you and a hundred other things can happen that make you feel like this is really a real battle.

This really comes from the fact that the game is not a regular FPS where only ground combat is possible. You can control an ATAT or a TIE Fighter to protect the aforementioned ATAT (although the controls are quite simplistic). You can shoot down TIE Fighters with smart rocket pickups (although more often than not you will miss due to the ease with which they can be evaded) and you can control a Jedi or Sith (but you don't feel like as much of a god as you did in Battlefront 2) and when these things happen it does feel really good.

Conclusion:

The previous paragraph actually highlights why I'm not a great fan of the game and why many others aren't either. Nearly every time the game does something well (and there are quite a few places where this does happen) there is always some way in which it could be better and so, the game doesn't live up to all the expectations that people had for it. The game isn't terrible but neither is it great. For me it is just an overwhelming 'meh'.

I'll probably still pick the game up so that I can play with friends but I will only be doing that way down the line, when the game is on sale (I'm talking 50 to 75% off) as there is no chance I will paying £50 for the game brand new or £90 if I want the Season Pass included.

I thought I'd never have to write an essay again. Turns out I was wrong.

 

I played the beta and I agree to an extent about your cons, though the regen thing is something that virtually all shooters have these days so I don't knock them on that. What I will knock them on is that the game is ugly, doesn't really have much in the way of a campaign/single player content, and in general wasn't very fun when the maps only had a few people playing them. Maybe I'm just spoiled by Destiny but this game is coming out over a year later and isn't half as good. I won't be buying it period.

 

Prepare to be disappointed. Grandia was great, but Grandia II was a shitty game with an even shittier port.

 

paging 911Disaster to defend his true love.

I picked up the SNES version of Dragon Quest III, and have played just an hour or so, it's pretty impressive and I'll be returning to it once I've cleared out some higher priority games.

I'm starting Fallout 3 or New Vegas tonight, and I'd love some arguments for/against one over the other so I can pick one, I'm playing to prepare for 4 FWIW.

I own the GotY versions of both on PC, and I'm happy to mod, but I only want to use mods that fix bugs or make it look better, not anything that has major effects on gameplay.

Thoughts DLP?

 

New Vegas is the better game, though if you're preparing for FO4 then FO3's probably the one it'll follow most off of.

 

Oh man, that's a hot debate. There are many threads on the reddit Fallout board that debate it, and I can see both sides of the argument personally. To me, Fallout 3 felt more like a fallout game aesthetically, as it's in the middle of a ruined Washington DC, and just looks more like my mind thinks it should. New Vegas probably has the better storyline overall, I'll grudgingly admit, but it's not by much. The music is way better in 3 in my opinion. The DLC is better for New Vegas. Mods are about the same.

What I'm saying, I guess, is flip a coin.