Caliginous

Fine with it if they let Atlus USA stay as it is. Would be incredibly happy if they let them actually localize the bunch of games Sega has held in Japan for years on end. I have a feeling quite a few Atlus fans might increase sales of Sega IPs if Atlus helped put some marketing behind franchises like Yakuza, Valkyria Chronicles and Phantasy Star. An even crazier thought would be to develop an old school Phantasy Star crossover with Etrian Odyssey.

I doubt any of that will come to pass, so for now just hoping that they leave the amazing localisation team at Atlus USA intact.

The level design and difficulty level of 2 will be more satisfying. Both games are pretty fun, but the 2nd one is a better game and has more game time per dollar spent.

I'd say it's probably worth it if you wait for a really solid holiday bundle. I used to use my 360 for everything and moved over to PS3 mainly because no one I play online games with uses a 360 and have moved to steam. There's pretty much zero exclusives for xbox 360, with the exceptions being a few notable XBLA titles, Gears of War 3, Forza and anything Halo. I'll admit that I readily dusted off my 360 to play all those games when they arrived, but honestly my 360 will barely get used until Halo 4 arrives.

PS3 also had some really entertaining stuff built up for me since I bought it fairly late into this generation. If you're not particularly interested in Uncharted but still like 3rd person action stuff, then try Infamous which is a lot of fun. Demon's Souls is obviously a huge game for me personally and I played through it right before Dark Souls came out and then went back for more afterwords. In addition I enjoyed Journey, buying the thatgamecompany collection is definitely something I'd do if I was new to PS3, Gran Turismo 5 was really fun for awhile (still Forza > GT5 though), bought some cool PS2 HD collections as well for cheap, having ICO, SOTC and the MGS collections are awesome, Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction is also a very good game, MGS4 if you've never played it as well and I just got Tokyo Jungle.

If you can get a deal on at least 1 game bundled with the system that you'd be interested in then I'd pull the trigger at $200-250 dollars. Playing through Demon's Souls while the servers are still active is honestly worth the price of admission alone, I hope that FROM learns from the horrible online connectivity Dark Souls has and at least attempts a fix for future titles. Overall if you have cash to burn on Black Friday I'd definitely lean towards a yes.

Can't believe I lived long enough to see a Halo story that doesn't sound like Halo 2's bullshit.

This sounds like what I wanted out of the series when my hype about the story in Halo 2 and 3 disappeared as I rattled off missions of the campaign. If they can match the narrative pace of Reach and even create a few levels that rival the nostalgia I have for the original, then I'll gladly buy into the trilogy that 343 has started. Sucks that I won't know til I play it, but I'm glad to see them trying to move away from the story perspective that Bungie took.

Great panel, wish I could have been at the convention for some of these indie games.

@MrKlorox: You find the gold golem at the back side of the lake. You have to leave the area or just reload the save after the hydra is dead to see it.

Link contains SPOILERS!

@neojb1989: http://darksoulswiki.wikispaces.com/PTDE+content+and+changes

The official wiki page has also been updated with a bit more information. Please be warned this contains very big SPOILERS for the DLC content of the game.

@MonetaryDread said:

@Raven10 said:

I haven't played the game but if a strict console port can't maintain 30 fps on an even decent PC then this game doesn't deserve your money. I can play Battlefield 3 on High settings at that framerate on a mid range PC. If you are dropping to 15 fps on a console port that has no PC specific enhancements then either the game is programmed like shit or you have a godawful PC and you probably shouldn't be playing games on it. Honestly even if it was poorly programmed it seems unlikely that you would go below 15 fps on a decent PC. On my mid range PC I can play Crysis 2 in DX11 mode all maxed out at higher framerates than that. It just doesn't seem possible to me that a game could be so poorly programmed that it wouldn't be able to hit 15 fps on a mid range PC. I think the only major question you need to ask yourself is do you have a spare 360 controller to play it on. If the answer is yes then I would assume performance would be fine. Again, I haven't played the game but I just can't imagine framerates going that low without DX11, supersampling/Ubersampling AA, or PhysX support.

The only people complaining about frame-rates are the people running ATI hardware and the resolution mod by Durante. My 8800gt, 2gig of ram, and a core 2 duo PC runs the game at 1080p without dipping below 30fps (according to FRAPS) even in Blighttown. The solution to the ATI problem is to not install the mod that allows 1080p in the first place, according to the developer himself, "Do not run this mod on ATI hardware."

Edit: Buy this game on PC if you have a controller that works on PC (i picked up a wired 360 pad for $30 not even a month ago). Even with the 720p lock (fixable with mods), Games for Windows (no different than xbox live, except that it is free to use), and shit mouse + keyboard support this is still the best version of the game.

Many people don't realize that the PS3 and 360 versions are running at sub-720p (they are upscaled to higher resolutions on console) and on both platforms they have troubles running to the point where a majority of the areas run at 25 fps.

There is a fairly easy fix for ATI cards on the newest drivers (12.8) or if you just are a RadeonPro user. All you have to do is setup a profile in RadeonPro for the executable of the game and change mode to "Override application settings", turn on Anti-Aliasing to 8x and to Supersample. Then change the Anisotropic Filtering to 16x. The game forces V-Sync so should just stay capped on 30 Fps consistently with these settings. A fair warning though, I'm using a 7970 with these settings so you may need to tone down the sliders and AF to 8x or 4x.

This is using the 0.4 version of Durante's mod, with the following settings.

3840x2160 rendering resolution

DoF set to 1080, DoF scaling enabled and enable supersampling by downscaling.

This resulted in zero stutters and a capped 30 fps for about 60% of the game. Can't comment on the final areas haven't finished those yet.

If anyone is playing and has questions or needs screenshots I'd be more than happy to help.

1. Super Metroid

2. Chrono Trigger

3. Super Mario 64

I enjoyed your article seeing as I just got back to finishing the game the past few days. I didn't appreciate a few of the minor plot holes in the story and the difficulty of the game was probably what kept me from enjoying the sequence of levels on the cruise ship. I get the need for ND to attempt to raise the stakes of Drake's quest by putting him in constant peril, but did anyone else just not get the point of that 2 hour sequence? All I felt it did was allow me to play a 3rd person shooter, which honestly doesn't have the best shooting mechanics, with one of my favourite video game characters. Honestly, I could have easily skipped that entire sequence and not really noticed. It felt to me as if they needed to showcase how amazing their graphic designers and animators were rather then just cutting it out of the story.

That doesn't change the fact that this is one of the few modern action game that tells a story that everyone can actually follow and enjoy the narrative in the process. It is truly a testament that this game didn't fall as far as I thought it should have from Uncharted 2. Uncharted 2 was perfectly paced in terms of difficulty, story telling, action sequences and fewer buggy platformer sequences. The very last cut scene of the Uncharted 3 was too familiar after the first two games and I was hoping for a more decisive conclusion to Drake's time as an adventurer of the modern age. That way if Sony ever hires another studio to revive the franchise, and we all know its coming at some point, they would have to create original material outside of this trilogy, rather then direct sequels. I wouldn't have any particular problem with gap fillers or prequels for the series, but there shouldn't ever be a sequel considering the ending sequence for Uncharted 3.

Thanks again for the enjoyable read!