davidh219

Listen, I barely play video games these days and I read 60-70 books a year. My best friend spends every spare minute he has playing video games and hasn't read a book since high school, and that's only because he had to. He cringes when I bring up Shakespeare. We're still best friends, and I still respect the shit out of him and think he's one of the smartest people I know. Maybe don't be so judgmental about how other people spend their free time? Saying you judge the shit out of people who don't read makes you sound like a total asshole, and I say that as someone who loves literature and hopes to be a published author someday. Divorce yourself of that attitude asap.

I'd say movies are far and away the most unusual of the three, because they're a totally passive activity. Games and books are both active forms of entertainment that take large amounts of energy, focus, and time which some people just don't have to spare. I know plenty of people that either don't read or don't play video games, or don't do either, but I don't know a single person that just straight up doesn't watch movies.

Now, if somebody is giving you shit and belittling you because you like playing games, well that's an entirely different conversation, but there's nothing weird about someone who just personally isn't interested in playing video games or reading, that's absurd.

I kind of had the opposite. All through my childhood my family, teachers, and friends called me by my middle name, which is pretty unique. At some point in my late teens I just started going by my first name instead, which is a very common name, because I'm just more comfortable with it and it seemed more adult at the time. My family and super old friends still call me by my middle name, but most people call me by my first. No idea how to get my family to start using my first name, haven't cared enough to try and there are too many people with the same name in my family that it would probably create confusion. If it really means that much to you though, just ask them. I'm sure they'd understand.

@the_last_starfighter: Your friend groups are absolutely the weird ones then. Everybody I know, with the sole exception of my girlfriend's brother, loves Zelda and is excited about new games in the series. My girlfriend barely plays games and she's pumped for it. Her brother's girlfriend is a huge gamer and Zelda is her favorite franchise. Her brother has two tattoos; one is a triforce and the other is the fox hound logo. When I go to C2E2 I see hardly any cosplay or merchandise that's video game related, most of it is comicbook and anime stuff, because it's a comics convention, but you know what always finds a way? Zelda stuff. Zelda everywhere. Zelda shirts, full-size mastersword replicas, ocarinas, paintings, stencils, prints. Women dressed up as Zelda, women dressed up as Link. Zelda parody videos and rap songs are still among the most popular on youtube, surpassed only by stuff like minecraft and pokemon. The three versions of Twilight Princess (Wii, Wii U, Gamecube) sold as much as the entire Dark Souls series. People love Zelda. They love the fuck out of it. 34 is, to be fair, getting kind of up there in years. Perhaps you're just out of touch?

I've no idea, but I'm way into it. Any game that looks like this instantly has my attention. @slag might have a point. I've found myself weirdly interested in PS1 games lately, and how they look is a big part of it. Me and a friend played through Tomba! and we're going to finish Tomba! 2 next time he comes over. There's just something about PS1 games that are super charming. I guess it's just their time to be appreciated.

It's Nintendo. They don't really make bad Zelda games. Some people like to give Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword a lot of shit, but the reality check is that they were both fantastic games that have 95 and 93 on metacritic, which most games would kill to have. I implicitly trust them to make something that is at the very least good enough to be worth buying and playing if you actually still like Zelda and not just some memory of it from your childhood that a real game could never live up to. I'm sure only Dan will play it and have positive things to say (even if it's a perfect masterpiece), because Zelda is just one of those things that brings out the cynical, jaded, dead-inside old men that lurk at the core of Jeff and Brad, but I've been at peace with that for a long time now. Point is, it'll be good, don't worry.

@laxbro19: Oh, I can imagine. Vanilla burning finger has nothing on the stupidity of the, "erupting burning finger sekiha love love tenkyoken," though.

I've only seen G Gundam, but as far as I can tell the theme is, "if you're really good at fingering people, you can conquer the world," or somesuch.

I bought this on steam like 8 months ago or so and played it for the first time. It's quite incredible. Definitely holds up, and it's interesting to see where some of Bioshock's influences came from. First time I saw my outstretched hand squeezing a metal orb I was like, "oh, yup, that's some straight up Bioshock shit."

@efesell: Like 85% of video games stories are still complete garbage though, and there was zero reason to think this would be an exception to that. Seriously, who cares? The last game I played that actually had an okay story was Broken Age, and the story was the whole point of the game. We're just not at the point yet where you should be expecting a game's story to be any good if there's not some kind of storytelling pedigree behind it, which as far as I'm aware isn't something DICE is known for.

This is only tangentially related, but you know what would be super cool? If video game stories stopped copying film, because film will always do that better. Film copied literature for a long time too, before figuring out what the medium is actually good at (turns out it's not lots of talking, internal monologues, and mandatory narrators). You know what game stories actually take advantage of the medium they're a part of? Not many.

I love it. It's everything I expected and wanted. Still don't understand the negativity, but then again the first game got a lot of completely undeserved shit as well so I guess people just hate the kind of games I want to play, which is just great for me. First, the controls are super tight. Much improved on the first game (which I played through yet again a couple weeks ago in anticipation). Makes Alex's performance in the quick look even more baffling.

The city (which isn't so much open-world as a big maze with metroidvania elements), is very well crafted. I love how it looks, I love how it plays. You'll learn the layout of it by going back and forth through it just like you learned the levels of the first game, but you don't have to play the game a second time to capitalize on that knowledge and actually have fun. This feels a lot more organic, and a lot more like what doing actual parkour is like. You don't just run through a linear obstacle course, you go to "spots" that have fun stuff to parkour off of and you make your own paths, attack it from different angles. The people who say the more open city doesn't serve the running well or that it goes against the principles of the first game make my head explode from how demonstrably, frustratingly wrong they are. In addition to that, there are linear levels for the main missions just like the first game, which you can replay at any time from a menu, just like the first game.

The side stuff is fun, and pretty much what you'd expect to be doing in a Mirror's Edge game. The inclusion of user-created time trials was a smart one, I've had a lot of fun with those. The collectibles are kind of a disappointment. There's a small handful of runner's bags in each area which are well hidden and often tricky to get to, and those are fun. The big gridleak orbs are sometimes placed to make you do a cool move to get, but are also all over the place and there's way too many of them. Everything else is just laying around for you to hit x on and thus serves zero purpose.

The combat, while having some janky animations (that are kind of charming?), and being relatively simplistic, is actually kind of awesome. It's super fun making guys stumble around like idiots, and if you're comfortable with the controls and know what you're doing you can take down groups of even the tougher enemies really, really fast, which feels amazing. It's kind of like the movement in that way. You find a flow and it feels great. When you suck and fail to find that flow it feels terrible as a punishment to encourage you to git gud. It's so fun I sometimes find myself staying and fighting rather than running, which you can do almost all the time, and which is easier to do than ever. They've put in a lot of smart systems for letting you just bowl through dudes while keeping your momentum up and it feels so, so good.

The story sucks, but was it ever not going to suck? I just shake my head at anyone complaining about/disappointed in the story, because that just does not matter and it was always going to be bad. At the very least I was way into how dumbly cyber as fuck it all was, with terms like "data sluice." I mean, come on, that's pretty good. I miss Ryan, I bet he'd get a kick out of that.

For the record I'm playing on PS4, and performance is fine. I haven't really noticed any framerate problems, hitching, or tearing. There is definitely pop-in, but not a deal-breaking amount. Not for a console game. I've definitely seen and had to be okay with way, way worse. Does nobody remember Gears of War and Mass Effect? Far off textures can also look pretty muddy, but meh. If literally anybody else was making games like this maybe those are nits I would pick, but I'm too enamored to care.