MechaMarshmallow

City of Heroes. RIP. I would pay an embarrassing amount of money to bring that back. Everything about it from gameplay to community was the best I've seen in an MMO to date.

Phantasy Star Online is a close second for me, but that's nostalgia for the hundreds of wasted hours that I should have been studying talking.

GALAK-Z is my 'I should love this but I don't' game. I love the 'stylistically poorly Americanized 80s anime' aesthetic they're going for a la Robotech, I love roguelike game mechanics, I love dumb awesome spaceships that turn into giant robots and all that jazz. I really like anything that lets me shoot a billion missiles en masse at all kinds of curved angles.

But I'm SO BAD at playing it.

There's something about the fast-paced nature of the gameplay combined with the tactical finesse required in positioning yourself to shoot the enemies, not get shot by the enemies and not plow yourself into lava constantly that, when controlled with Newtonian physics and inertia based movement, is utterly impenetrable to me. Everything about the game on paper is stuff I should love, and I really want to enjoy the game because it seems like the sort of thing I could sink hours into, but I can't for the life of me get past the 'tutorial' stages. With the season-based checkpoint system this means need to replay the early tutorial levels from scratch when I inevitably die to driving into a wall of lava and have to restart from the beginning of the tutorial season, and it sucks.

@alavapenguin: I doubt anyone will, which is why I was so spartan in my reply, but in case anyone argues otherwise I'll elaborate my position - Base defense mainly consists of just building a bunch of turrets (or other emplacements) to increase a defense number, which is compared against the sum total of your food and water scores to determine how likely raider attacks are. When an attack does happen, you get a little alert and need to go back and shoot a bunch of raiders or... nothing happens that I've noticed. Maybe happiness goes down but I don't think that does anything, other than maybe lower population growth and make your shops less profitable? I'm not sure. It doesn't seem important at all, and there's only as much depth to it as you want to spend time with a clunky interface to build a deterrent to something you can prevent by just plonking down a few turrets wherever.

I really like the game in spite of this weak aspect and recommend it even more highly than Jeff's review because I've not enjoyed the gunplay of a Fallout game enough to stick with it before this, so a lot of it is new to me. But if the base defense is what you're primarily looking for in it, you probably shouldn't buy it full price. There's just nothing substantial there.

No.

Sorry.

It depends on your difficulty level.

@zombievac said:

Negative, I am a meat popsicle. (What?)

There are difficulties?! This is the first I've heard of it. I guess I'm on the default, whatever that is.

Lookin' good, duders. I wish there were multiple VO options, since the female one doesn't fit my sole survivor... but here she is!

'Hot garbage' of course. I do say 'Super ___' and '___ ass ___', but I honestly might have said things like that before listening to GB, too.

Most recently, however, I have picked up Austin's 'OH. GOOD. THAT'S GOOD.' when something terrible happens.

If you found the game boring, easy and short, that's because... well... it is!

Easy and short, yes. Boring, if you're just there for the game in itself. The real value of the game, as far as I see it, is that it managed to be very pretty without powerful hyper-realistic graphics, and use non-vocal storytelling in the early PS3 era, when there really wasn't the deluge of that sort of thing we have now.

I think that a lot of people who didn't experience the game at the time will go back and not get what made it special, because since Journey came out we have seen what feels like dozens of indie projects trying to do the same thing every month, along with our pixel art platformers.

Personally, I'm not an 'art game' sort of person. I thought Journey was really cool for what it was doing at the time, and I still do, but I don't really have the personality to get emotionally invested in video games, so I never quite appreciated it on the same level as some people did.

I'll echo what everyone else said, though. I don't quite understand what religion has to do with any of it.