What are you playing now?

[Froyok]

Playing Assassin's creed II. I'm in Venise now.

It's so fucking awesome !

Everything is excellent in this game !

And I like so much to find how they made it ! The lod system, the multi-textures in one, and so one.

The game looks so beautiful, and the textures are so small... A good example of optimisation !

[madgernader]

Picked up White Knight Chronicles and Enslaved Odyssey to the West, not too far into either but so far I'm definitely enjoying both!

[Erratic]

Getting back to some BC2: Vietnam. Gotta shoot something till Brink.

[Sentura]

League of Legends should be a controlled substance

same goes for heroes of newerth. it's like injecting crack cocaine into your body

[Jetsetlemming]

don't take it personally babe, it just ain't your story. A lot of people I've seen talking about it miss the overall forest for the trees, but to be fair that particular tree (possibly making out with your student) is pretty distracting. I like the overall story, it gives you an interesting moral dilemma to deal with, balancing your moral obligations with human nature.

[AlexM]

League of Legends should be a controlled substance

same goes for heroes of newerth. it's like injecting crack cocaine into your body

yeah moba games have all those qualities. For instance I feel bad after playing them

[AlexM]

Been getting back into Uncharted 2 multiplayer. U2's multiplayer is so surprisingly good, I remember thinking it would be a tack-on. It certainly isn't.

Co-op is really fun too but I don't like how matchmaking doesn't wait for a 3rd player after about 30 seconds.

[madgernader]

Picked up the Sly Collection, and I must say I'm having a lot of fun. I had never played a sly cooper game previous to this. I just finished the first one and am starting the second.

[Campaignjunkie]

Finished AssCreedBros. Good stuff except the insta-fail missions. "Everything is permitted," huh?

I'm glad I got to see Kristen Bell's character stabbed.

[Thrik]

Just finished LittleBigPlanet 2. Wow! Really, really impressed. I'd honestly say it sits alongside Donkey Kong Country, Super Mario World, etc as one of the finest platformers in gaming history. I thought there'd never again be an addition to that hall of excellence yet here it is.

It pushes boundaries and expectations so much that it literally makes LBP1 look like a basic prototype in comparison. The level design and production in particular is incredible: so much more detailed, so much more dynamic, and so much more innovative gameplay-wise.

There're so many small enhancements that make it sit well above its predecessor. To list just a few:

• 
  [*:115lu86w]Extensive use of sprites and 2D visual effects, including complete retro-style levels
  [*:115lu86w]Ability to directly control anything using native controls (like this:

)
[*:115lu86w]Actual overworlds rather than a long chain of levels
[*:115lu86w]Regular cool-as-fuck bosses
[*:115lu86w]A storyline that — I never thought I'd say this about a platformer — builds up to a genuinely epic final world
[*:115lu86w]Less emphasis on being able to see how levels and such were put together and more on simply looking awesome
[*:115lu86w]Extensive use of NPCs, cutscenes, and humour
[*:115lu86w]Gadgets: grappling hook, heavy lifting gloves, and gun that can shoot anything the level designer chooses
[*:115lu86w]Tremendous soundtrack

As far as I'm concerned this is up there with the best of the best. An absolutely fantastic experience that will leave you with a huge smile on your face, in large part because of the extremely loveable cast. And I'm only talking about the core single-player game — not touched the online or creation side yet.

To answer an earlier question: yes level designers have complete control over player physics (or rather gravity, which basically makes it more or less floaty). However I do maintain that the base physics work perfectly with the insane level design seen in LBP2.

[Jetsetlemming]

Parasite Eve 3: The 3rd Birthday on PSP. A very frustrating game. It's got a lot of genius mechanics that perfectly weasel into my brain, for example the RPG system involves combining and leveling up positive and negative effect genes on a grid, and customizing guns with parts you earn via a learning by doing system with each type of firearm and BP (like PE2) you earn by killing enemies and accomplishing side goals called merits (stuff like "do this section without getting hurt", "save the civilians", "kill this hard monster quickly", "use overdive a lot", etc).

But at the same time it has a camera that would make PS1 era games blush, with seemingly random disabling of the d-pad manual camera panning and the L button serving dual purposes of centering the camera behind Aya and locking on to enemies, making running away from things or pointing Aya in a certain direction a pain in the ass. Also some guns use manual aiming, like the sniper rifles or grenade launchers, and they don't default when you press L to aim in the general direction Aya's body is facing. No, because that would be smart. They instead will point right where the camera already is, so most of the time you go to use one of these guns you'll start zoomed in on the nearest wall and have to slowly pan over until you can actually see the monstrous thing that's been spitting acid at you this whole time.

Frequently related to the camera issue is the abymsal difficulty design. I had no less than six or seven insta-deaths in chapter 1, because at one point they spawn an invincible enemy and make you run away from it, and at multiple points along this run they lock you in an arena where you just have to dodge it until an opportunity to "overdive" (body snatch) into some other shmuck and flee arises. But the camera refuses to just point at the fucking thing without locking onto it, and when you're in combat locked on to an enemy you point your gun at it and slow down and take tiny little side jump dodges instead of full on metal gear body roll dodges, and oh by the way the fucking monster can teleport, and stunlock you, and kill you in two swipes of its 10 foot reach claw.

Also you're a body snatching time traveler but other main characters in the past can recognize you instantly in the bodies of other random people and refer to your current actions in the context of attempting to change the past. That breaks the expected logic of time travel so hard I feel significantly stupider for having experienced it.

[Serenius]

Picked up Dead Space 2 on Friday night and spent most of the weekend playing through the campaign.

I was rather disappointed at first, with how little horror there was, and thought the sequel had devolved into a somewhat scary third person shooter rather than a survival horror game. All that changed about halfway through the game. I was literally freaking out when the game s

ends you back aboard the Ishimura, which starts empty, but soon fills with swarms of Necromorphs. The disturbing whispering came back, and I regained that overwhelming paranoia that the first game instilled.

Really well done!

Now I'm nearing the end of the game, and it's clearly entered the "you're the player, fuck you!" stage

with swarms of difficult enemies in room after room (plus those annoying fuckers who can't die)

, and really not enough resources to survive. Then again, playing on Survivalist and only using the Plasma Cutter, so it's probably my own damn fault.

Other than the current segment I'm on, and the goddamn tripod necromorphs with their uber-cheap attacks, I'm loving the shit out of this game and it will likely be one of the very few games that earns a second playthrough.

[ElectroSheep]

I played it 3 times already. I completly love this game. I know there's a lot of necromorphs a the end and a lot of people don't like it, but... it's the end, hey !!! It's totally epic.

[Jetsetlemming]

The more I play and think about The Third Birthday, the more annoyed and angry I become at how much of a travesty some of it is, for example, the entire script, 100%. In past games Aya was basically as close as the game industry's ever come to a strong woman: yes, even more than Samus, as Aya is actually in the modern world and interacts with people. She was arguably even more human than Ellen Ripley, given her more balanced behavior around other people as a cop in PE1 compared to Ripley's distant/angry act (depending on the movie) when talking with other people. She stood in a crowd of people spontaneously combusting and reacted by chasing after the instigator. She watched a woman gorily, disgustingly mutate into a monster and attack her. She's killed her sister like three times, as well as many genetic offshoots. She's saved the entire world twice, and even more impressive, managed to have two realistic but not important or focused on relationships with men (her aborted date in PE1, and the PI in the good ending of PE2). Nobody got shit on Aya Brea.

And then, in the intro cutscene to The Third Birthday, Aya gasps and covers her mouth after seeing blood in a recording of past events. The people around her command her to go into the past and she follows orders without a word. She's been given plot amnesia, and has handlers talking in her ear throughout every mission. Their most bragged about gameplay feature pre-release was how injuries would shred Aya's clothes, leaving her half naked and covered in wounds if you didn't repair your armor. The game comes with a card showing off the various cosplay alternate outfits you can unlock. A meek, shy character from the first game returns, portrayed as a disgusting pervert, and openly salivates at the thought of Aya's "nubile" little sister.

To sum it up easily: It's offensive. That's a word that gets thrown around a lot as "really bad" but Third Birthday really is honestly offensive. Offensive in its treatment of women in general and Aya in particular, and offensive in how it shits all over what was my absolute favorite games from the PS1 era.

Edit: I should get PE2 on my PSP. Need to play an actually good game on this thing...

Edit 2: Also this is the game's manual. This is the first thing you see when you open up the game.

[dux]

ugh