Andrew7

@LENSconcept

I liked the original Killzone campaign quite a lot. It was long, too. The gameplay was a bit clumsy but I never understood why the game wasn't well received. I didn't like 2 and 3 much, all style and no substance.

You people are really weird. I loved DA2 and started second playthrough immediately after. I also started The Witcher 2 and got bored in the third act with endless fetch quests. Still didn't get around to finish it. DA2 has much better pacing - The Witcher 2 just hits a brick wall story-wise in that army camp. Never mind numerous technical glitches or the difficulty profile. DA1 had its own share of problems such as massively screwed up leveling system - if the story wasn't good I would have given up on it due to battles becoming impossible just because I chose to level up my characters differently than the developer intended (thus removing RP from RPG). I replayed DAO and the expansion as a mage recently, following the recommended area completion sequence and leveling up strategy and had a much better time - but I shouldn't have had to do that.

Yes, recycling environment sucks and that's why the game is 8-9 instead of 9-10. And some boss battles in Deep Roads might force you to redo several hours of play if you picked party members badly. But it's a firm step forward in storytelling, pacing and gameplay compared to the first one.

@mattwestcott

Uhm, I played through it twice and only found about a half of these. How does them being achievements doesn't make them secret? I mean sure, you can specifically google for achievements but Portal isn't a trivially easy game so finding secrets is not easy either, especially if you don't know what they are.

@godzillaWax
Yes, actually 60 hours IS definitely notable and not normal for software development. I've been working in software development for 15 years at 5 different companies and while it can be said that some overtime (occasional few hours in the evenings or weekends for maintenance or whatnot) is normal, and some places enforce working extra on occasion (translating into about 50 hours) for a few weeks or months, permanent 60 hour week in week out is most definitely an exception. Sure, I heard of people working in jobs like that, but it's not typical. Ironically, people I knew who were doing those hours certainly didn't find neither pay nor job stability any better - most of them got laid off anyway. I understand that young people these days must accept any job in hopes of gaining experience but they really should make sure they invest the time wisely. If the job demands long hours and the pay is low, then you better be gaining very valuable skills on the job, and fast.

@cpeninja

Freespace 2 is on my list of top 10 games of all time (and that list goes all the way to late 80's early 90's). The genre peaked and simultaneously died with it.

I'm really surprised people compare it to Starlancer/Freelancer, maybe because those had multiplayer? In all 25 years that I've been gaming it was the ONLY game ever for which I learned to use the mission editor. I created a bunch of missions and had plans for an entire campaign. Ah well. I don't think they'll ever make a sequel, as the guy said it's been far too long and the kind of story they had has been dragged around for the last decade and is quite stale by now (not that I wouldn't want to play it but it would have no ability to create much buzz anymore and commercially it just wouldn't fly).

Oh I get it. It's now cool to hate FPS. Especially if it has a story, never mind lots of cutscenes.

How about this - STOP KILLING GENRES I LIKE PLAYING, ALREADY!!

You're not happy you killed adventure games? Not happy you killed space sims? Now you want to kill single player story driven shooters, too?

You freakin' generation Y make me sick. Leave my games alone.

@Arturis

Wait, WHAT?? Heavenly Sword's story?? I've been gaming for over 20 years and played 20-30 games a year and I can count on fingers of one hand how many times I decided to abandon a game halfway through. And I did just that for Heavenly Sword because of its absolutely ridiculous story, over the top difficulty and unfair gameplay (esp. bosses) - but especially story that made me feel my character is a total loser and the ah-so-powerful sword is just a stick. And oh by the way everybody dies - you spend chapter after chapter trying to save this or that and you NEVER succeed. The villain just laughs in your face and you can't do anything about it. What the hell? Was there any sense in this?

I made a point of finding out WHO was responsible for the story and making sure I never buy a game that involved that person (e.g. Mirror's Edge). I was planning on boycotting the studio as well but I did ended up buying Enslaved (2010 holiday season was pretty weak). The game was all right. But you could still tell it suffered from the same unfair gameplay that HS did so I'm kind of glad that bad karma is catching up to them.

@Rollins

You're not the only person in the world that think Mass Effect 2 story is much weaker than the first one. As you said, the gameplay improvements are major and manage to make up for some of it. And luckily characters and their missions are great, dialogue and voice acting is great too. It's just that the main story is a) disjointed from the first game and b) much weaker.

What I'm surprised is that no one picked up on AC: Brotherhood being MUCH inferior to AC2. I finished them back to back and was astonished to see that almost EVERY SINGLE thing from AC2 was tweaked - and made worse in the Brotherhood. Climbing is worse than even the first game, getting around and even finding the next mission - terribly tedious and confusing, getting outfitted or hell, just shopping, is now a major hassle (so much so I didn't even bother buying much weapons), introduction of many annoying stealth missions is infuriating, making memory half-synced unless you do the task in seemingly impossible time frame is insulting, combat has been changed AGAIN (understandable but very annoying when you can't just jump in), locales are much worse than AC2 (even if this is not really UBI's fault) and the list goes on and on... how nobody picked on that is beyond me. Perhaps it's because I played the games back to back that I noticed this problem. AC2 was utterly amazing. I finished Brotherhood with half optional missions not completed and no desire to do so.

It was excellent - I finished it just a few days ago. On PC graphics were great and framerate very, very smooth. When I played PS3 demo I wasn't very impressed but on PC it worked well and wasn't too difficult on normal setting. Story was good, jokes funny, voice acting appropriate and it's a fairly long game by today's standards. Oh, and PC version is rather cheap at CDN $35 too.

A generic JRPG? From gameplay videos it looks like anything but. Even if that's all that is, the quality of cutscenes was like nothing I've seen short of Square Enix. If "even Japan didn't like it" is true, this can only be good news - they like their stuff generic, so if this one wasn't... Anyway very little has trickled here about the game so far, except for that one mediocre impression from some snotty website.