Raven10

It actually isn't in the final game yet. They were going to patch it in this week but they pushed it back and it is now tbd.

To anyone wondering, as far as I can tell there is no way to create a custom Funko Pop on Funko's website. So someone literally designed all of that and created it just for this mailbag. I cannot yet explain how I feel about that.

First off, this looks like they nailed the gameplay of crash mode from Burnout 3 which is what long time fans have been wanting. So after 15 years of effort they have finally achieved that. Also, using UE4 has allowed them to have some pretty great looking crashes without the need for a huge art and animation team. It's actually impressive what just a handful of people can do with UE these days.

All those (very noteworthy) positives aside, though, a good UI artist would do wonders for these guys. Hell even a mediocre UI artist would do wonders. Surely there is a student at some local university that they could contract to do some menu and font work for them? As a college student they would likely be happy to do it for pizza money and the exposure and even a student effort would likely look mounds better than the placeholder font in place here.

Music wise, there is plenty of royalty free music available online. Maybe it wouldn't be perfect, but it would definitely increase the feeling of polish here. I get that without EA money it is impossible to expect the level of polish and presentation found in the Burnout games, but a lot of indie games made with less money and fewer people than this have found ways to get the assets they need. How about a crowd sourced option? Surely there are some graphical artists out there who would jump at a chance to be part of the next Burnout even if the pay was fairly low? Hell I bet you could find some people who would do it for free just to try and recreate that Burnout feel.

For the first time Three Fields seems to have gotten the fundamentals down and that is great. Now if Dangerous Driving can up the ante on the presentation front they will have a solid arcade racer on their hands.

Man someone at DONTNOD really loves Twin Peaks. First Life is Strange and now this. Of course then you have the crazy fantastical people at the studio who make things like Remember Me and Vampyr. So odd.

As a third person in the same boat I think the Dan(s) here nailed it with their talk of the controls. DKC and these new DK games have a very unique feel to them that is very different from a traditional Nintendo platformer. As Danielle kept coming back to, DK doesn't get additional momentum off of running, which makes the act of playing these games very different than most other platformers, especially Nintendo ones. If you think about it, Mario, Yoshi, Kirby, Wario, hell even Starfy, all get momentum from running and have to do a bit of a slide to come to a stop. As Nintendo's only American made platformer series I often wonder if the lack of direct oversight from Miyamoto and the other senior EAD designers is a big part of what makes this series always seem so different from other Nintendo platformers. I often feel like they lack that Nintendo feel that makes even their most mediocre platformers still so enjoyable for me.

@karwowski: It kind of sounds like someone didn't like the game you like and therefore you are trying to discredit that person to make you feel better about your purchase. This review was largely well written and the arguments made supported with decent examples, so I don't really know what your issue is with it. You liked it and Dan didn't I get but this site specifically focuses on the editor's personal experience with a game over a more objective statistical approach. That has been the site's MO from day one and Jeff has never denied that. He has in fact spoken at length about the reasoning behind the system when he talks about reviewing games like the N64 Zeldas or Metal Gear Solid back in the Gamespot days, where he had to give the games good scores despite not enjoying them as much as the score might indicate.

@steveurkel: I would give you two responses. First off, imagine any collectable card game like Magic or Pokémon. Now imagine that you are attempting to demonstrate that game without knowing what any of your cards do or fully grasping the mechanics of play. That demo would make whatever game you were showing look awful. To give an example from this quick look, the erase skills can all be dodged or blocked using block spells. The explanation in the quest log even directly says this. Yet Ben didn't once block the incoming erase attack or even attempt to do so. Because of that he kept losing his attack skills which made the battle look quite drawn out and boring. Imagine, though, if instead he was using last minute blocks to counter the erase attack, causing his enemy to lose the ability instead. I'm not saying that there aren't some valid complaints raised in the video. The partner AI in the single player can be pretty bad for example, and the tutorial is quite slowly paced and understanding the game without playing it is all but impossible. But once you get out of the tutorial the game really opens up. That one hallway leads to an entire underground city filled with interesting characters who give you a variety of quests. Beating each mission becomes both a matter of quick reflexes as well as thoughtful deck building. And using the environment to destroy your enemies was a joy back then and is still super fun and unique to this day. Add to that a thrilling story that goes in some moving and unexpected directions and you have yourself a great single player mode that does a great if slow job of preparing you to jump online. And then the online combines the reaction-based systems of a fighting game with the deck building strategy of a collectable card game.

This was just a poor showing for a very complex game. But I would say it provides a style of gameplay that you won't get in many games these days and it overcomes its flaws which also include an occasionally annoying camera and incredibly difficult enemy AI in the later stages.

@necromanti: It's a bit more than that. The hub world that Ben mentioned but didn't show is much larger than just that room. It's a little underground town. You don't do any combat there but there are characters to talk to who will give you quests and items to purchase and so on. There isn't an overworld where you walk to and from missions, but Ben was still in the tutorial so he likely undersold the scope of the single player. Despite what he said he is far from the end. Also, while slow paced at the start, once you know the spells the battles become far more engaging. And not reading what a spell does before you pick it up is just asking to fail.

While I haven't played this game yet, I did play the first title and Of Orcs and Humans, and while none of Styx's adventures could be described as great or maybe even good, they are nowhere near as bad as Brad is making this game look. Stealth games are always hard to quick look and if this is like the first game it is not at all forgiving of sloppy play. Not for everyone but definitely worthwhile for anyone who liked the OG Xbox Splinter Cell titles or other stealth games of that era.

@paulunga: I have a feeling that they recorded the video and then the patch hit right after so Brad felt bad about putting up the video without noting the changes. Also, you can assume that with a major AAA release bugs will be fixed over time. That's just how the big budget game industry works. And especially with something huge like these new Bioware games, it's all but certain it will launch with a bunch of bugs and then players will find them and then the team will fix them. But for a game developed by only a couple of people there is no guarantee that things will ever be fixed. Furthermore, the issues shown here (outside of some of the ragdoll issues) are the types of issues that some developers might describe as features and refuse to change even when their player base dislikes some elements. The patch Brad linked to increased the amount of food and karma flowers in the area he was in, and let you go back through that door at the lowest karma level. So basically it fixed two of the main problems he was having in the video which weren't certain to ever be changed. So I think the note was worth including.

As far as having notes below videos, that is something they have been able to do almost since the beginning of the site I believe. They just use the feature very sparingly, and mainly in cases where there was a mistake made in the video that they want to correct or in a couple cases where spoilers were revealed in a quick look and they want to warn people.

@zaldar: Neko is just the Japanese word for cat. I don't know if they have a specific term for "cat girl" or not but neko is not it. I was watching K on Netflix a couple months ago and found it odd that they decided to call the cat girl Neko for the english translation when in Japanese he is just calling her a cat since she doesn't have a name. Anyways, point is, neko just means cat.