Posts by Taylor

If I come up with a good name do I get to play a new build?

Jellyfish Air Pirates

Wait. Damn, nevermind.

Finished Mass Effect 2 Arrival. I've read reviews that it wasn't great, but I hadn't played ME2 in ages so it was fun just to go around blasting people and teleport punching. Though it is slightly worrying when the lead into a sequel - one with a lot to explain - doesn't make any sense.

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I love the reapers! But I'm still going to create a rocket asteroid to foil their plans! And if I get caught perhaps Shepard will rescue me, and I’ll invite him on board, explain everything and keep him alive!

Thanks for doing my unsanctioned and unsupported mission, I agree with your actions 100%, which is why I want you - and not me - to be the scapegoat for all humankind. 300,000+ dead? Woo, that’s a lot! But I can’t be bothered to read your report and study the details for the upcoming peace negotiations.

Quote from Rick_D

no no no no NO!

Oh mama mia, mama mia...

I’m with you anyway; I think autosave should be common and handled well. Though I think we’ll disagree when I go further and say as quicksave is used as a clutch 99.9% of the time it should be gone.

I have another problem in that I don’t like games using frequent saves as an excuse to dole out death for the slightest mistake or simply not doing what it wants me to. Call of Duty is a maze of instant death triggers, Medal of Honors Simon Says gunfights put me in the habit in the first place (I’m not even religious), Uncharted has no qualms making a wall look climbable and having me fall an inch to my death, etc.

Don’t get your comment on arcade games though. It’s a misconception that arcades used to shake all the change out of your pocket with cheap, fake difficulty and some idiots from a bygone age put up with it. Bloody MAME.

Spam quicksave all day. Everything from walking to the end of a long corridor to ducking behind a pillar reloading gets F6'd.

Brought Yakuza 4, played it until the final chapter already like a big fat loser. The melodrama can get a bit too light-hearted, and there’s a lot of lol-so-random Japanese slapstick, but since you spend all your time between story sequences stomping on faces and yelling at your hostess for not pulling enough customers it all balances out.

My only gripe is how predictable it can be. Most of the plot-advancing grilling goes on for 30 minutes before your character even bothers asking them what you actually want to know about, then the conversation will appear to end about 3 times but everyone in the story is the Japanese equivalent of Columbo, and then the guy you're talking to will be shot by an off-screen gunman, who I like to think is an angry producer.

Quote from the0rthopaedicsurgeon

The BBC has been like this since the day after the quake. At the time, the plant was under control and being cooled. It only became more serious a few days ago when it caught fire and even then it's still not as serious as it's made out to be. But while tens of thousands were still missing (and an oil refinery burnt not far away, which says it all about nuclear vs fossil fuels and how people perceive them), they almost totally ignored that and went on and on about 'nuclear explosions' or getting Greenpeace in to tell us all how this will be like Chernobyl x100.A nuclear reactor survives one of the world's worst ever natural disasters and everyone starts calling for nuclear to be abandoned. BP causes one of the worst man-made disasters in all of history, and months later we're back to deep-water drilling.

The reporting on this disaster has been awful. Like you said all these claims were made almost instantly, as did Green Peace coming out with their "too soon?" commentary on nuclear power. At the time this was going on the reported radiation levels were, despite being some scary looking numbers, at 30 banana's. Though of course it's much worse now. And a lot of the American coverage seems to be about how it'll affect them, or maybe I'm just being directed to the wrong ones.

Incidentally, there was a fantastically hateful piece in the Daily Mail:

Why my wife's PoW grandad wouldn't mark a minute's silence for the Japanese by Richard Littlejohn.

Quote from Thrik

Sackboy's physics [...] my favourite physics model in a platformer.

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I didn't buy the second due to the unresponsive, floaty jump of the first. How's that for petty?

Quote from SpicyTanuki

arcana heart link is timing out for me. Despite the name I'm way out of touch with japanese developments. Interesting to see another fighter contender (in it's 3rd iteration no less).

If it went down it's up now! There’s also a tutorial comic uploaded on the first page that goes through the unique aspects of the game if you can stomach it. Though the biggest feature is you pick one of 23 characters then one of 23 ‘arcana.’ The arcana is your forth attack button and changes how characters work; for example water gives any character 3-frame super command grab, whereas Magnetism gives everyone a homing projectile and during activation your opponent is dragged towards you.

Oh, and I found a good example of the Raizing games. This is Battle Bakraid's first boss done perfectly:

http://www.ikaruga.co.uk/files/fw/st_ba ... ntgain.avi

That said, in Battle Bakraid (and Pink Sweets Arrange) there is also score incentive for suicides because it resets the time-out on your multiplier (abd so do bombs), it's not just for keeping the Rank/Dynamic Difficulty/AI Director/Buzzword in check.

About to lose internet at home for a while as I move house, so I'm going to have to stop playing World of Warcraft and build my reflexes back up. My copies of Arcana Heart 3 and the Pink Sweets / Muchi Muchi Pork bundle are here, but I have managed to spill coffee all over my arcade stick just in time.

If anyone here has heard of Arcana Heart 3 it’s probably because of the creepy otaku pandering and, while that certainly exists, it's also a surprisingly deep game. Probably the deepest commercially released fighter this generation, in fact, and it’s nice to see fighting games coming out that aren’t compromised with contrived comeback mechanics and grossly powerful option selects. But, no matter how I big it up, the Japanese sub-culture side of it is extremely prominent; I am playing as a 13 year old dog girl in her school gym kit, and the limited edition came with a ‘hand towel’ of the two main characters embracing each other... Should be ideal for small spills, anyway.

Muchi Muchi Pork is the sequel to Pink Sweets which is the sequel to Ibara which is the spiritual sequel to Battle Garegga and other classic Raizing shmups. These are all famous for having a completely counter intuitive play style once you start trying to 1CC (no continues, only way to play arcade games) or score well; there is an unholy Rank system that gradually increases difficulty as you perform well until it becomes impossible, so you need to perform ritual suicides funded by score extends, avoid powering up too much, etc. Weird but it works.

Hello, I’m from the past.

Whoa. Well, I never played DA, I just get trolled easily when consoles are used as a scapegoat for the shift in demographic.

Anyway, I am supposedly still playing WoW

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Console game dumbed down for console sequel?

And they dumbed down Cataclysm. The joypad bastards.

http://blog.brentknowles.com/2010/08/15 ... mment-2398

I have never played any of the Dragon Age games but I enjoyed Mass Effect a lot. This is a disclaimer.

Rather than paraphrase stuff he's read on SRK.

Ugh, Gamasutra. Only unmentioned site I'd put forwards is Auntie Pixelante, though sometimes the content isn't worksafe. I generally find myself reading websites like sonichurricane.com, which aren't about design in themselves but just passionate players analysing the games they like, which I find inspirational. I'm surprised there's so few decent, practical design blogs out there.

I generally don't like playing as some fratboy who uses the word "party" as a verb, but I liked the tongue-in-cheek story, scoring and general craziness of Vanquish, so maybe I should check this out.

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“Holy crap, I am going to make a boatload of cash of this game,” said Fork Parker, chief financial officer at Devolver Digital, the Serious Sam 3: BFE publisher. “I mean that’s what this is all about, right? If this thing comes out in the summer my wife is totally getting the tit job she’s been asking for.”

Cue awkward silence.

Your Mii is so hot.

More releases means more money, simple fact. Just look at guitar hero.

ITT: People enjoyed games and would like to play updated versions of them, the unimaginative freaks.

Sega need to make another Streets of Rage, and they can give it to Platinum Games or Arc System Works (or me). Keep it a 2D brawler with modern fighting game snazziness dropped in, and avoid the mistakes of Final Fight: Streetwise. Yuzo Koshiro is doing retro XBLIG right now so I'm sure he can be coaxed in.

Ah, I got it for PS3. I don't have a 360 fight stick yet.

I've not played any real people yet because I want to decide a team before I head online, but I've kind of been put off following the London fighting game scenes opinion of it (not that I’ve even popped into the London arcade this year). At high-level play most characters can turn a random hit into ToD 100% combos. MvC2 was broken, but there's different kinds... Pheonix in X-Factor - X-Factor - can viably chip your entire team to death ((((

Also, it's dangerous to go alone! Take this!

Kotaku shouldn't post this crap in the first place. Surely as any calibre of journalist you can find out whether a company has just let thirty employees go before your run straight into the news feed with your hot exclusive story about it from a completely anonymous source (not a tipster who wanted to remain anonymous)? It's a phone call. But truth is they wouldn't want to do that, because they would prefer the web-hits from their completely unresearched article.