dwarf

I'm game. Importing Demon's Souls was probably the peak of excitement I felt this gen. Only topped by the purchase of Freeloader + Brawl back in the day when the US got special treatment with that game too. Edit: As for the box, I don't know what you're driving at Dazzy. It's important because it's necessary to connect the whole concept behind the system to something concrete, otherwise it doesn't really exist as a product. Sure we won't talk about it for long, but the hurdle needs clearing. You can't deny there is a certain glitz appeal to these things, consoles don't come round often.

Are they concealing a Popemobile under there?

24 was gash. A voice actor choice shouldn't be that off-putting, but it is.

Looks like MAG and Starhawk had a baby. When FPS maps go above 30 players I think things turn a bit shitty.

Oh I thought he was real dgmw I listened to the album 4 times today, it's gone from good to amazeballs

Super Mario Galaxy ain't the game of the generation kids. It would speak volumes about the games industry if it was, so I'm glad there are hundreds of reasons why it doesn't deserve to be put on that pedestal. The game of the generation is Fallout 3.

I think this is the appropriate thread. Yes. Shall we say 7.30 for the scoop? @JonSt

During an Uncharted session. Edited because Kaz

Are you feeling any better than you were earlier?

I really don't think they're doing that. They might've kept their cards close to their chest to see how the public would react to the MS reveal, but they're unlikely to be able to retract their deals with Publishers and make a quick decision on DRM this late on, that's assuming they'd even want to.

Working video [for now]. It looks intense.

Every game with RPG elements these days seems to have you mindlessly stripping the environment of its assets like some crazed Mitt Romney figure. I've stopped appreciating the detail, now I'm all about hunting for those shiny trinkets. I make myself sick. Has looting become tiring for anyone else?

It's a good album, and that means it's slightly underwhelming (BUT NOT REALLY. IDK. It's a bit concept albumy which might've seeped into the DP DNA after Tron). But Daft Punk set their own agenda and I admire them for it, they're drawing on the past more with this and they nail it in moments. I really like Give Your Life Back To Music, Get Lucky is an unreal tune, Contact is phwoar and people are just plain wrong about Georgio, the narration is fine because it's so simple and conversational, in my head he's a cute old man. 'Why don't I use the synthesiser, which is the sound of the future?' It's cool. Funky shiiiit.

[FFS. Lost a huge post about this, so this one will probably be slightly less incisive] Critique I think this is one of those strange cases where an intriguing concept behind a game blinds people from its actual execution, which happens to be pretty average in Dishonored. Critics and users alike have seemed hesitant in showering praise upon it unremittingly, but at the same time they haven’t been very articulate about the flaws to be found in the game. Blink is simultaneously the best and worst thing about Dishonored. On the one hand it makes exploration fun, it grants you agency in approach and it really makes you feel like a supercharged bandit who’s accountable to nothing and to nobody. On the other hand, it makes a mockery of the level design. After completing five missions having scarcely been spotted and having eliminated only a few guards, I came upon a tough section of the game that I wanted to complete more stealthily and more conservatively than I had managed previously. I reloaded the save and failed a few times. Jokingly, I then decided to galumph through the centre of the level, Blinking past every enemy and obstacle in my path. To my astonishment I had reached my destination in seconds without any hassle, and had there been any problems the abundance of ammo and auto-aim weaponry would’ve nullified them if I were willing to degrade myself. There are drawbacks to every approach you can take in the game. The middle ground semi-stealth semi-action style I favoured was too easy. A doddle. My sprint/blink/ignore method rendered all of those runes and bone charms pointless, and there were no significant upgrades to make the money worth collecting either (including the stealth boots). If you’ve killed one guard, or been spotted even once in the play-through, there’s no incentive to reign in your exuberance because by the game’s ruling you’ve already done things half-measured. You may as well storm ahead - blow shit away with the crossbow or fly past it with your upgraded Blink. Sure, you could take the middle ground and plonk for the ‘good’ low-chaos ending, but the body-count parameters are restrictive to the extent that you’d incur a serious loss of enjoyment in the attempt, because you’d have to monitor your kills and abstain from using most weapons and items placed at your disposal, which means they’re left sitting there. The potential pay-off attained from a good ending isn’t enough to justify that self-regulation. If there were intermittent moments of consequence related to your blood thirst then perhaps it would work, but the ending is the only thing at stake (other than the volume of weepers in a level, and that doesn’t actually matter). On the opposite end of the spectrum, playing exclusively in a ghostly, humanitarian fashion would be incredibly tedious. You have to ditch variety at the front door. There would be even more waiting around and you’d have to save more frequently in the event of blink mishaps and the like, which are bound to happen. I’d be saving constantly. The pacing is shot to pieces in two major ways: 1) The game appeals to your OCD side. It encourages you to scavenge for items in every nook and cranny of the environment. For me this meant I enacted a policy of dispatching every guard in the area before turning the place upside down for trinkets. This is a boring stuttering period that all completionists will feel obliged to put themselves through in the hope they don’t miss anything. Yet it prevents players from coasting through the level at a steady pace. It completely breaks the flow. It isn’t an issue in open world games like Fallout for reasons that should be obvious to gamers. 2) For the majority of the game you have to revisit the rebel complex after each mission. This means more moments where you aren’t in control of your character, because you’re either stuck in a boat or you’re engaging one of those patent archetypal traitors. The game doesn’t need further slowdown, but you get the impression the game required some sort of padding solution and unfortunately this was it. The world/story they were going for also fell short due to the shoddy implementation of lore and interaction. There are far too many books and notes in the game. Story-related information should be drip-fed to the player, here you’re inundated with the crap. Conversation eavesdropping was another technique used to bleed narrative into the game, but seldom was the chatter interesting. Exposition was also painfully blatant. Take the moment you collapse from poisoning for example, the characters responsible stand over your semi-conscious body and rattle off stupid dialogue like ‘look, our plan worked. He is not around anymore. We will look heroic. This means we have legitimate power.’ Why the fuck are they talking like this, as if the consequences of their plan have only just dawned on them? Rubbish. And don’t tell me the world was special, because you know it wasn’t. It was dead static. It was crying out for more instances like the one in the penultimate mission when the freight carriage dumps dozens of corpses off in a run-down corner of the district, and a nearby citizen can be seen despairing over the condition of his plagued friend. A city in ruin demands those touches at every corner, but they were so very very rare. It had no soul. If you don’t pack the environment with stuff like that of course the bland textures are going to stand out. The numerable similarities it shares with the latest BioShock haven’t been kind. Infinite pulls off everything with panache, it explores more avenues of storytelling, and it possesses a degree of polish sadly absent from a dystopian title that appeared to promise so much more.

http://www.gamefreaks.co.nz/2013/06/04/last-multiplayer-detailed-screenshots/ Multiplayer details and screens. Visuals seem to have taken a dramatic step down from the campaign.

When you're in the middle of writing an extremely long and thoughtful post and then you press the back button by accident. For fuck sake. FUCK OFF. FUCK IT. FUCK EVERYTHING

Yeah it's a pretty uninspiring interview, but that's Guerilla for you. Do you expect more from the team that made 'Killzone'? C'mon. That said, my shaft has remained flaccid throughout this whole slew of developer diaries. Sony might as well put out some fanboy vox-pops to do their marketing instead, because beneath the veil that's all this is: marketing. They've incentivized the developers to wax lyrical about the PS4 and how these big changes have afforded them all new scope and potential, but none of the games showcased so far have really tapped into it on any practical level. I'm not concerned about the fact these videos are forced and unconvincing because I'm confident Sony will continue to lead the way with regards to ground-breaking games, they're always looking to push boundaries and support ambitious projects. They also have to spread their risks by churning out a few stodgy franchises. Killzone is one of those. Hopefully E3 will prove to be the Viagra to my dysfunction.

I've made my way through a few classics this year: Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, The Catcher in the Rye, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, To Kill a Mockingbird, Of Mice and Men, Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Great Expectations, Catch 22 and (perhaps they don't qualify) The Bell Jar & Diary of a Nobody. While Jane Eyre and Great Expectations are fine reads, they're excessively sentimental at points. Jane Eyre was much more satisfying to me because it really looked like things were heading in a pitiful direction for her character, but relationship closure was sweet in the end. Frankenstein really surprised me, it was much darker than I was expecting and because of Hollywood my preconception of the monster's appearance was miles off. In the book it's scarcely elucidated, he's just a large, ugly, yellow-skinned wretch with superhuman speed and strength; no bolt to speak of and he's not ungainly or boneheaded in the slightest. I want to watch Young Frankenstein again now. Nineteen Eighty-Four is as good as everyone says. I'm ashamed to say I've not read many books but it's undoubtedly my favourite. I smile wondering how many adolescent boys it has left in awe. Once you've read it you realise the scale of its influence, the themes and plot devices are ubiquitous in modern culture. People should check out this video: Christopher Hitchens + George Orwell = Dizzying levels of win. An interesting point raised at around the 9 minute mark about a group of Soviets coming into possession of the novel, obviously illicitly, and how it draws a parallel with the fiction of Goldstein's underground book featured in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Animal Farm is incredible as well, there's something so haunting about the rules of the farm getting defiled one by one, capitals have never been used so effectively: Diary of a Nobody is lightly amusing, you can see the beginnings of Alan Partridge in there. The Catcher in the Rye is brilliant. Holden Caulfield is dislikeable on the surface - he's snarky, obnoxious and his virginity rules him, but underneath you know he's conscious of his flaws and he shows the faintest touches of humility every now and then. The subtleties are contained in his observations and can easily be overlooked. Loved this bit: The Bell Jar - I wouldn't recommend the novel, Plath is respected more as a poet, but it was still an interesting read. The character Esther is extremely passive throughout and events in her life are written in a watery and distant way. It captures depression well. When depressed you don't make things happen, things happen to you. You're left in free-fall, you're at the mercy of the world. In the book reality becomes hazier and hazier with every page. It achieves what it sets out to achieve but it's hard to identify with Plath. She was far gone by the time she wrote it. Her own tale is so sad. I advise against reading her Wikipedia page. Catch 22 - this is riotous fun for the most part because there isn't a straight character in it. Extracts in the link: http://matthew-serendipity.tumblr.com/post/44319909718/extracts-from-catch-22 To Kill a Mockingbird - I adore this book. GO READ IT. It holds you by the hand and takes you to a different era. It's absolutely bursting with charm. // I also recommend: Description: Set in the mid-1970s in India, A Fine Balance tells the story of four unlikely people whose lives come together during a time of political turmoil soon after the government declares a ‘State of Internal Emergency’. Through days of bleakness and hope, their circumstances - and their fates - becomes inextricably linked in ways no one could have foreseen That undersells it though. This section might do a better job: It is not a comforting read at all, but it is incredibly powerful.

I played Okami for a couple of hours and grew terrifically bored with it. Critics give it a free pass because it's arty, but if truth be told the gameplay is dull and it isn't even that pretty. Journey absolutely shits on it from an artistic standpoint. Plus it has the worst opening sequence ever. I've heard Ico is a tad tedious so I might just skip straight to Colossus.

Why anyone is entertaining the idea of a £600 price tag is beyond me. I'm convinced it won't even approach £400.

EA were involved with 007 Nightfire in some capacity, so they can't be completely evil. Anyone who played that game in splitscreen eventually discovered the joys of cross-map Sentinel battles on the cable car map, rocket launchers with controllable first-person rockets. Amazing. The game's flaws made it better somehow.

The classic switcheroo! @ReZourceman

I wouldn't recommend it. The last time I asked Daft to come and play with me he interpreted it in a way I wasn't quite anticipating. Who am I kidding? Of course I'd recommend it.