Atlas

OK, my TLOU status is I played about 3 hours of it and lost all my progress due to the save bug, but I definitely had some gripes about the game during that time. My general impressions are pretty good, despite that, but there's definitely stuff that sticks out at me. If these complaints are common for Naughty Dog games, then I wouldn't know, because I haven't played any of the Uncharted games. OK, here we go:

• Sometimes, combat and movement feel really stiff. There are times where I feel like I want to look at something without turning my whole body towards it, and the game doesn't want to let me. I don't think the combat is especially tight, but I suppose it makes up for it with just the sheer tension that surrounds it. A lot of enemies absorb a lot of bullets, which sucks since if you're playing on hard, you're super fragile, and can't take many yourself.
• I thought the prologue was pretty good, but I'm rather baffled by people describing it as one of the greatest sequences in recent gaming memory. Yeah, it was a pretty cool cold open, but I kinda just dragged myself through it without feeling like I was really feeling the moment. Too mechanical for its own good.
• The game's basic premise is sooo tired. I know it's like that TWD thing, where it's not about doing something groundbreaking or original thematically, but it's about taking an idea and taking it to a dark and deeply emotional place. But so far the game has just felt like deja vu all over again, and there's nothing that stands out about the world they've created.
• Sometimes the game is drop dead gorgeous. Sometimes the textures look a little grungy, and the animation stiff. The flaws stand out more when the rest of the game looks so good.
• It's yet another goddamn third person game where you walk into a room, see a bunch of chest high walls, and know immediately that you're entering a combat area. And I am so fucking tired of it. They're trying to create this tension about the combat which at times is completely undermined by the level design.
• I appreciate them not feeling obliged to tutorialise the player to death, but there was one sequence I had to redo about six times because the game wouldn't tell me a very basic interface/inventory thing. Maybe modern games have just made me soft, but it seemed like an egregious oversight to not tell me that.

But overall I think the game's biggest fault is that I feel like I can nitpick it until it falls apart - I wouldn't be doing that if I was more engaged in the drama of the world, and in the characters. But in spite of some really good character modelling, and some pretty good writing and voice acting, my experience with the game so far has mostly been pretty academic; I'm playing it like a critic, not like a player, and there's something wrong about that when I'm not a critic. It's the same problem I had with The Walking Dead.

In my life, I have loved dozens of turn based games - Advanced Wars, Civ 5, the Pokemon games, and most recently XCOM: EU and Fire Emblem: Awakening - and I have loved one RTS game (Age of Empires II). So while I definitely appreciate RTS games, and like plenty of them, I prefer the slower and more tactical style of turn based combat, and I have more TBS games among my favourite games than I have RTS games.

Yup, bit me real hard. I was up to the part where the three of them were just approaching the Capital Building, and I hadn't made any hard saves and the option to do so was greyed out. I had to restart the console, and my last autosave was during the fucking prologue.

I cannot describe how pissed I am right now. I've been real lucky in the past with not experiencing game breaking bugs - no save corruption in The Walking Dead, no major issues with XCOM: EU, minor crashes but nothing game breaking in Skyrim etc. - and this is the first time I've been hit with a bug like this. It hurts so bad.

In some cases, yes. Older games aside, I still occasionally buy current gen games used if it is a game that's unlikely to get a significant price drop, such as Nintendo games. If I know that there's a good chance that at some point a game will be £5-10 new on Amazon, then I prefer to wait and buy it new at a low price.

But it's worth saying that just because some of the people who are complaining about used game restrictions don't buy used games themselves doesn't invalidate anything. It's due to a little thing called altruism. I've never taken hard drugs in my life, but I'd be pretty pissed if my government said it would going to close all its drug counselling and rehabilitation programs. We all want the whole world to be able to play the best and newest games.

Microsoft actually showed some pretty interesting games, and I was pleasantly surprised by how focused they were on games during their conference. I'm naturally attracted to Ryse's setting, and their stronger focus on smaller games, Japanese games, and European games is encouraging.

I was asleep during the PS4 press conference, and boy does it sound like I missed a lot. I've seen the highlights, and am now contemplating getting a PS4 day one. They showed a lot of promising looking games as well.

There is no game currently in development that I want and hope to be good as much as I want Dragon Age Inquisition to be a return to form for the franchise that gave me one of my all-time favourite game experiences. The rest of EA's showing was promising, but obviously less mindblowing than the platform holder's conferences.

And Ubisoft continues to quietly be one of the best publishers in games. Assassin's Creed fatigue aside, I'm interested in Blacklist and The Division, South Park: SoT was a big pick-up, and I like how they take themselves less seriously than the other publishers; they aren't afraid to give Cartman, the Rabbids and Rayman some love during their conference.

1) Civilization 5 - 808hrs

2) Crusader Kings 2 - 653hrs

3) Mount&Blade: Warband - 439hrs

4) Total War: Shogun 2 - 224hrs

5) Team Fortress 2 - 204hrs

6) The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - 201hrs

I cancelled around a year ago. I barely played any online at all so the only reason for me to have it was that it meant I could play MP if I wanted to, and for the discounts on games. 360 has barely been used since I became a PC gamer - the only exclusive game I've played on it in the last year was Forza Horizon. And I have a PS3 to be my Netflix machine, and that shit isn't behind a pay-wall.

Once Upon a Time in the West.

@jonny_anonymous: I read Gardens of the Moon last year, and it's really interesting, and has some really strong aspects of it, but the worldbuilding is less appealing - it's obvious that Martin's world is based on history and Erikson's is based on fantasy games, and I find the former significantly more appealing in literature - the way it uses magic as a plot device is much more heavy handed, and Erikson just isn't as good of a storyteller as Martin is IMO. I guess maybe whether you like one or the other says something about one.

There really is no reason for this. Fable 1 is a good game, but Fable 2 took everything that was good about the original, fleshed it out, and polished it up as well. Even the basic beats of the story are almost identical.