CilliaBlack

I'm probably one of the few people who never understand why people wanted multiplayer for this. It's one of my all time favorite weird Japanese-as-heck video games, but nothing about the game made me want to include another human being. Pawns were fine as AI drones.

Really looking forward to playing this again. Magick Archer is one of the most fun I've had with this type of RPG, but I think for the PC release I'm going to pursue my dreams of Assassin Heaven.

The best advice I can ever give to anyone playing Earthbound for the first time is to find some way to get the official strategy guide. It's not terribly accurate and has more than a few glaring mistakes, but is by itself incredible. The writers went to incredible lengths to make a guide that followed the soul of the game they were writing it for. It is full of funny, off-beat newspaper clippings about the game, tons of custom artwork, and even has a couple scratch n' sniff cards at the end!

It's weird, and funny, and well worth anything you put into getting your hands on one if you're a big fan of the game.

@YummyTreeSap said:

@Crysack said:

I can't imagine that there are too many fighting game aficionados hanging around the comments section here, but does anyone else find Myers' article rather insulting? The whole thing where she presents the fight night regulars as a bunch of socially maladjusted nerds who can't interact with women just smacks of passive aggression to me. It isn't at all a fair representation of the FGC at all - as one can see from simply watching events like WNF.

Au contraire, I've found the fighting game community to be probably by far the worst in all of video gaming.

This, but also that the article wasn't exactly pointed at the FGC. It's really just the experience of a woman gamer as she tries to do the exact same things a guy would do, but gets hit with entirely different situations than a guy would for no reason. Nothing in the article really screams how awful the writer thinks the community is, it's just her personal experience where she lets the reader make their own conclusions.

The only part of the article I thought was off was the very end, where she loses her cool because the dude just walks off after she won. Opponents being pissed that you won is pretty gender neutral (though their reasons may not be), and you can't let sore losers ruin your own time.

I wish he hadn't posted that Interview video. Don't give that company's shitty self-pandering hypocritical awful meme-filled crap any extra views.

@Darkstorn said:

Patrick, have you played through Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth? As a horror game fanatic myself, it made my skin crawl and appeased my Lovecraft bug in one fell swoop. Highly recommended if you haven't checked it out yet.

Second this recommendation. But perhaps not so soon after Amnesia. The first section especially of Dark Corners is pretty similar to the most horrifying moments of Amensia in how it creates and maintains tension, and a break from that is probably warranted. System Shock 2 and Eternal Darkness are cool though, they're more about everpresent creepiness than oppressive terror.

The original game really is good but it's also about 20 hours too long. I was pretty well ready for the game to be over halfway through. Ultimately the journey is still fun, but it's a long form zelda game and that doesn't entirely work.

All in all though, you should play Okami.

Eternal Darkness is one of my absolute favorite games of all time, but it isn't particularly scary. The game is home to probably the single best jump scare of all time (not even the dogs in RE are as good in my opinion), but other than that it just never got under my skin.

I found the Lovecraftian setting, characters and overall story to be highly appealing, and got a lot of kicks out of the gameplay as well. I've got no idea how well that gameplay would hold up now if I tried to play it, but back when the gamecube was still current, it was one of the very few games I replayed enough to get every secret.

Fantastic game, all told, but It never managed to really scare me.

@HoboZero said:

If Blizzard forums are to be believed, no one is ever happy with PvP in any rpg/mmo. Seems like regardless of how much time they put into the feature it will be shat upon mercilessly by the 'hardcore' PvP players. Glad they're putting the feature to bed in order to make a speedier release for the rest of us :)

To be fair, if Blizzard forums are to be believed, no one is happy with anything. It's a wasteland of whiny, entitled gamers who think they know the game better than the developers. The Blizzard official forums are basically youtube commenters for wow. WoW pvp is pretty good, even though I don't personally care enough to bother with it, they do a pretty decent job with balance and such. Definitely not perfect by any stretch, but considering what else they have to balance at the same time it's fairly impressive.

That said, I couldn't give two shits about pvp in Diablo 3 so it's very very nice to hear they're going to axe it for the moment and finally release that sweet sweet drug.

Also, Desmond is boring as fuck as a character and while a modern AC setting would be rad just because it'd be modern, I could care less about playing him for any longer than the story requires in any given AC game.

Choosing a native american is interesting because it lets them have the main character be neutral in this conflict. He'll doubtless be running around killing folks, but since he won't presumably be an actual colonial or redshirt, he can take out whoever needs taking out. A girl main character would have been more interesting, and the box art definitely suggests male, but I like the route they're going quite a lot for everything else.

The native american main character is also interesting because it lets them present the story from a perspective outside of the HOORAH jingoism the international community most likely expects from anything american in this day and age. I wouldn't be surprised to see several characters presented which act with that jingoism who the main character will then make fun of. This would make it more appealing to international people who might be put off by the distinctly american setting.