lylebot

Surprised no one's mentioned Epic Sax Game yet. (I mean, it's a joke game, but still!)

Does it really need to be said that going online to download a patch is not "always online"? You can just connect, download the patch, and then disconnect, you know? That's "sometimes online" at worst.

The whole thing with "always online" is not that people don't have internet connections. Yes, some people don't, but those people have had problems since before this generation started. The thing with "always online" is that people have internet connections with data caps and overage charges, or that are prone to long downtime or other instabilities, or that are just slow. Having to go online to download a patch can be difficult in those cases, but it's not like it's impossible for everyone without a constant, stable, fast connection.

Earthen Peak is way worse in SotFS than in vanilla DS2. Those Manikins just pop out everywhere. Even knowing where some of them were hiding and sniping them down in advance, I still died a bunch of times there. (Although I didn't have a problem with the fire ladies one-shotting me.) I think it's the only area that I liked significantly less in SotFS, in most other areas I quite liked the changes they made.

@devil240z: that's exactly the source of the sickness. Your eyes see movement and your body doesn't feel movement, or your body isn't in control of the movement, and (for some people) the disconnect causes nausea.

It's definitely the case for me. I get bad motion sickness whenever I'm a passenger in any moving vehicle. I wanted to try VR to see how bad it would be, so I went with the cheap Google Cardboard. I did get motion sickness, and it's a strange kind unlike any I've had before: after just a few minutes I start to feel a little bit of nausea, but it doesn't really kick in until 15-20 minutes after I've stopped using it. At that point I feel like I need to lie down for a while. Definitely tells me that VR is not for me :(

I agree, there's no reason that the things you care about when you're 11 should be the same things you care about when you're 17.

Here's some old person (38--I don't feel like an old person, but I think when I was 17, 38 seemed really old) perspective, feel free to ignore. The year I turned 17 was the year of the very first E3. I was completely unaware of it, and remained unaware of it for a very long time.

Around 1999 (the year you were born, if I have my math right), I decided to quit playing video games for a while. I didn't play a video game again until 2010--coincidentally the year you turned 11. Between 2010 and now, I got married, bought a house, and had two kids. But I'm still playing video games.

My point, I guess, is that a lot can change in 7 years, even more can change in 17 years, and a whole lot can change in 27 years. But the more things change, the more they stay the same.

OK, so I'm only just past The Pain, but so far 50% of MGS3 is Ocelot spinning his revolvers, and the other 50% is futzing around in menus. I am only slightly exaggerating.

I just watched a cutscene where Ocelot put one bullet in one chamber of three guns, then said he'd pull the triggers six times. Then he juggled the guns and pulled triggers. I mean.. this went on about six times longer than it needed to practically by definition, and the sheer ridiculousness of watching this guy juggle his revolvers made it lose any sense of tension it might have had. I thought every cutscene in MGS2 (which I played for the first time ever last year) was at least twice as long as it needed to be; MGS3 is taking it to insane levels. (I've never played MGS4 but from what I've heard that game takes it to the absolute limit.)

To be fair, there's a lot I like about MGS3. But I like it best when it's grounded in real human emotion and behavior. The Pain doing ridiculous karate moves, shouting "tommy gun!" and shooting bees at me was too much. Ocelot's revolvers are too much. MGS2 had its share of craziness, but I feel like it didn't go as far over the top as often as MGS3 has so far.

Just my 2 cents.

I played Demon's Souls first, but I think it and Dark Souls I are tied for my favorite--I just can't choose between them.

I'll never forget the experience in World 1-1 of Demon's Souls, getting to some new point, dying, getting slightly further before dying, not knowing how close I was to finishing, opening shortcuts past areas I had gone through a dozen times, and all of it based on learning how to play the game rather than making numbers go up, since you can't level up until you've finished 1-1. Once you can level up it gets a little less mysterious, and a lot of the bosses were poorly balanced (I was able to defeat almost all of them by just hanging back and shooting fire arrows). But the world design is great throughout, and there are still bosses like Firelurker that evoke that same feeling of having to learn how to play the game rathe than just overpowering it.

With Dark Souls, it was the fully-interconnected world that drew me in and that I love the best. Everything about the game through Anor Londo is amazing, and if that was the whole game it would probably top Demon's Souls for me. After Anor Londo the areas get less interesting and less well-developed, enough so that I can't say I prefer the game as a whole to Demon's Souls.

I think you're making a lot of very good points in this thread, but I have to disagree with this: adventure games are not puzzle games. I like puzzle games, I used to like adventure games (I don't much anymore), but never have I ever though that a typical adventure game "puzzle" is much like a good puzzle game puzzle.

Good puzzle games work by giving you a handful of rules, then presenting you with a series of increasingly difficult problems that you can solve using those rules and those rules only. The Swapper, which somebody mentioned upthread, is a good example: there's about 7 things you have to remember, then every puzzle is solved using those 7 things in different combinations. The only bad thing about The Swapper is that it's too short and too easy ;)

Adventure games have no rules, essentially, because they are devoted to telling a story and keeping the telling of that story as open as possible. The only rules are "the developers thought to make something happen when you try this" and "the developers didn't think to make anything happen when you try that". That's not inherently bad---like I said, I used to like adventure games, and when I think of the Sierra and LucasArts games I enjoyed in the past I never think of the unfair or obtuse "puzzles"---but there's very little sense of learning how to use each of the tools the game gives you, learning how to combine tools in new ways, and learning about how puzzles can be constructed making use of those tools.

"I'm interested, but I don't think I'll be able to get past the motion sickness."

I get pretty bad motion sickness anytime I'm a passenger in any moving vehicle. Not having tried VR, I've been wondering whether motion sickness would be a problem for me.

I think this video pretty definitively answered that: if I start to feel motion sick just from watching the "social screen" scaled down to my phone's screen, then VR is definitely not for me. :(

Edited to add: for whatever reason, watching FPSs and driving games doesn't make me feel nauseous, but this does. I think it's experiencing the unfettered head movement of Brad Shoemaker.