To a degree, it's more of the same, but a damn sight prettier. There are a lot of subtle improvements, though - the whole thing seems a lot more involving, like a high-octane 'Shenmue'. Much as I loved that aforementioned Dreamcast classic, it didn't 'alf need a jalapeno up the tailpipe...

I actually got to see some GTA4 this weekend being played. While it was pretty damned pretty, and I enjoyed some of the storyline I got to see, and the gameplay actually looked like there might be an inkling of challenge to it, I didnt like the idea of having to go on dates with every storyline NPC to raise or lower faction with them. Im not sure if Ill buy or not. Still sitting on a strong maybe. Like... maybe after the price drops.

Warm coffee was amusing though. :3

Dead Rising on the Xbox 360 - it's fantastic, tons of fun. At last count I have killed around four and a half thousand zombies, and it's still not boring. Whey!

I may have to pick that up again soon. Killing zombies with stuff is a passtime that can never get old.

Dead Rising, at least to me, wasnt that special. The annoyances of the radio killed me very much. Other than that, I have a blast mindlessly rocking zombies. That and the psychopaths were annoying as hell the first couple of times I attempted their deaths.

I picked up GTA4 today! Played after knocking back a pint... Im a bad driver. :x

The driving is not easy this time around. A mere few minutes into starting, I executed a simple handbrake turn which sent my arse-end spiralling into a clump of pedestrians. A few hours later and I wasn't much better. Thankfully, mowing down innocent bystanders is all part of my general strategy. Hooray for that.

I picked up GTA4 on Tuesday, having been awake for 36 hours at that point (travelled back from the US). I stayed awake for a further 8 playing it then spent the next day playing it too. It is addictive and I like what they've done with the phone and internet features.

In the process of buying it I came back to find someone eyeing up the lock on my bike! I wasn't thinking quick enough to get my camera phone out and snap them but they slunk off anyways when they realised it was my bike. There's something amusing about someone trying to steal your transport while you buy a GTA game though.

I keep meaning to get Dead Rising. It looks pretty awesome to me and so far none of the negative stuff people have said about it (mainly the save system) has put me off.

I've still been caning the GTA (the intrigue! the danger! the swearing!), but my wife has been playing Persona 3, which looks like fun on a bun. I love the grapical style - a sort-of cel shadey malarky - and the anime cutscenes are teriffic. Plot is mad as badgers as well. I may have to give it a go myself.

EDIT - I have since done just that, and can safely report that the badger-madness translates itself into an oddly pleasant gaming experience. Who'da thunk?

GTA4 - it is very good, but it has annoying aspects too. It's also not actually an open-world game: it's a linear game where you have several threads that you have to drive between and mini-games added in to distract you from the linear structure. The presentation is utterly amazing - the amount of effort that has gone into fleshing out a uniquely cynical and satirical game world is so far beyond any other game that I'm not sure if any team will ever have the resources to make anything more detailed in the future. The game cost $100m to make, which is five times the usual budget for a very big title, and you can see where it went in the quality of the writing.

The technology behind the game is also jaw-dropping. Being able to smoothly stream in so much of the world is an amazing feat. I'm not sure if even the Ratchet & Clank game engine could do what the GTA4 one does.

But the gameplay... It's great at what it does, which is allow you to sneak around a bit then shoot people, or drive and shoot people, but there's no real variety. I enjoy the shooting because it's well paced and reasonably responsive, but it seems odd that with a whole wonderfully constructed city and the resources that they had that they couldn't give more variety in the central missions.

I don't know... I was just expecting something a bit more from the game that's had universal praise. It concerns me that they haven't found anything new to do with the series.

But still, the writing is amazing. I don't think any game has ever said so much about the effects of war as GTA4. The silences of Niko when he's asked about his history, before he replies, or while he chooses his words, are perfectly judged.

However, it's got Ricky Gervais in it, which should instantly remove score points. Why does that man still have a career?

Anyway...

Dead Rising? Really? I've tried to love that game, I really have, but the sheer number of difficulty spikes and the infuriatingly stupid companion AI have irritated me time and again.

I started playing Lost Odyssey on the 360 last night. I now have bruising on my chin from where my jaw hit the floor after seeing how astonishingly beautiful it is. I've only played it for 90 minutes so far, but some of the writing is excellent - it's already made me cry (although I am a big girl's blouse, so perhaps this shouldn't be used as a marker of excellence). I hope the main character becomes a bit less surly. Still it's a traditional JRPG, which after all the active battle stuff of recent RPGs is a nice change. I'm really looking forward to playing it more.

Lost Odyssey is a stunner, it's true, and there's some very tight plotting and characterisation that's been missing from Square Enix offerings lately. Plus, it is, as you have said, flippin' gorgeous.

Inky, youve made a wonderful move picking up P3 and giving it a go. Its bar far one of the best RPGs Ive played.

And much to my absolute joy, being as I own all the persona games (minus the one game that was never released out of japan), Persona 4 is preparing to make a splash in japan in the near future. We probably wont see it in the west until '09, sadly.

If you want, Inky, I can give you and/or your wife some links to the official persona anime that Atlus released not terribly long ago. It takes places after P3 though, so you might not want to ruin anything by watching it early.

That's a very interesting offer, cheese. I'm still working through the game right now, but the idea of an anime follow-up does appeal. I'm also very excited at the prospect of a fourth game - I've played the first one too, and I can safely say that it's a series that never fails to be interesting and different.

Loving the new banner sig, too.

On other playing news, I've recently come out of a serious addiction to 'We Love Katamari'. Who would've thought rolling a giant ball around could be so utterly captivating? Maybe it's the soundtrack...

Well, if you want some P4 video goodness, Ill happily link you (they dont appear to have any call backs to P3 and from the rough translations of moon speak, it appears to be a complete stand alone game [much like most of the series]) And the anime series links, I have them favorated multiple times, so whenever you want, Ill send it your direction. :3

And thanks, Ive used this banner around various gaming circles Ive been in, figured its time to revive it again. What can I say? Teenagers holding guns to their heads just makes me melt. <3Yukari. /sigh

Yes yes! Katamari games are always wonderful and wonderous and...... filled with wonder. I didnt like the xbox 360 version, sadly... too glitchy for my tastes. Constantly falling through the world = pissed off me. It was also very very unresponsive on the controls. Phailure, imo. The soundtrack was great though. I need to find an OST for it.

I'd read poor reviews of the 360 edition, so I tracked down the old PS2 one instead. Glad I did too - top ball-rolling satisfaction.

Yeah, drop me any Persona links you've got. I'm very interested, I have to admit. Cheers!

Yay! P4 spam = <3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ko3EC5RvMIw appears to something of one of the opening videos to the game, much like the Burn My Dread video that P3 opened with. <3 the song, I want a full version.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5xia_klAU8...feature=related Is some random bits of gameplay out in the world and interactions with NPCs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7GWGd2mqdE&feature=related Is in battle gameplay and persona usage.



http://www.megavideo.com/?c=search&s=persona+trinity&p=1 is a list of all Persona -Trinity Soul- episodes on Megavideo. There will be a good handful, along with repeats of episodes, possibly with subs in other languages. (The anime itself is in all moon speak). I generally ran with the episodes titled Persona - Trinity Soul # Eng Sub.


(How obessive do I look right now? I feel like I look well crazy. =D)

You're in good company, cheese, trust me...

Thanks for that, dude. It'll make my late shifts go that little bit more easily at the very least.

Haha, well thats good. :3

I remember reading some time ago before P3 was officially released stateside that there was a group online taking Persona 2: Innocent Sin and translating it into various languages, english being one of them. I should really look into that again.

Also, did you play the Snow Queen quest in P1? You kinda need to... cheat a little to get it, as atlus didnt want to let anyone out of japan play it. Its similar to the hot coffee mod on San Andreas. A little game shark action though and you get a complete new different section of the game. =D (its all in moonspeak or indecipherable garbage though... but you get alternate graphics for some of the player characters. =D)

I never did, no. Makes me want to dig out my old chipped Playstation just to check it out...

On the topic of the links, I'm loving the vids from YouTube - nice graphical style again, brilliantly inappropriate chirpy J-Pop tunes, some weird thing with a zip-up neck... All in all it promises to be another corking installment. I'm getting a bit excited.

Mega Man 9. This is awesome. But sooooooo hard!

Played a little bit of Mega Man 9 the other night. It's brilliant.

I'm mostly on Tenchu Z at the moment for a bit of old-school ninj-ing, but Wipeout HD is getting a fair bit of my time too. It's so shiny!

The Solitaire on my iPod. It's fuuun. Heh, I was playing it during maths, and the teacher came up behind my and started shaking my shoulder and told me to put it away.

I bought Spore, DRM issues aside, it's pretty good.

Mucking about on Persona 3 for the second time around. I'm intending to pull one of the main characters - I'll keep you posted on developments. Come to me, Mitsuru...

Just finished Fable II on the Xbox this week, and have belatedly begun Fallout 3 now that my husband's finally done with it. If the demo's crazy camera angles don't make me ill, Mirror's Edge will be up after that.

(this thread needed some love. the holiday gaming season is in full swing these days!)

Ahh... Fable II. What a thing of glory. Yes, there are occasional bugs and niggles, but overall it's lovely. I've happily worked my way up to owning pretty much everything I can see. I think I get about 10k of gold every five minutes, have well over a million gold in total, and have only recently found the second hero. I'm abling very slowly through the game, doing nearly everything I find, and thoroughly enjoying the experience.

When nto doing single-player stuff, I'm playing Little Big Planet. Just the simple fact that it had myself and my friend giggling like little schoolgirls with delight should tell you how lovely I think that game is. I've not even started making things in it yet, and I hear that is perhaps even more fun than the 'proper' game. Hooray! It's ace!

I'm stuck rolling up roses in We Love Katamari. A million of the f@ckers. I'm almost 9% done on this particular task, and already I am feeling the mental strain. By the time I reach a million, I'll probably have eaten my clothes, painted my arse blue and started speaking in a language of my own invention. Either that or I'll have jacked the whole thing in in favour of Soul Calibur.

That said .. Soul Calibur.
As much as I love using Ivy, she teaches you very quickly how to button mash and stare at the enormous, jiggling 3-D breasts parading across the screen. It's really difficult at first.

They really are huge aren't they? Mind you, Sophitia has been coming along in the cup stakes as the series went on. Maybe it's after she had kids...

Fable II's storyline left me a bit underwhelmed, but I had great fun with the simplistic combat system and buying everything in sight. First game I'd finished for a good long time.



Stop it, you're making me want to buy a PS3. Sackboy is super cute.

im playing world of warcraft

A huge amount of people have finished that game. Given that 80% or more of players never finish *any* games, the numbers of people who have gone all the way through Fable II is a real credit to the designers.

Does anyone else still play Kingdom of Loathing?

Never heard of it.

Oh, so I suck at Bioshock. Medium mode was too hard, so I switched to easy and then made Eli play when all the zombies started jumping out.. >_>

I've just started up on Overlord 2. It's a slow beginning, but I loved the gentle pace of the last one, so I think this will do nicely.

I've also recently played through Infamous on the PS3 (good game, nice presentation, bit too much repetition in some of the missions) and Kane & Lynch (in co-op mode, some very good things in there and quite a few very poor things, I probably wouldn't recommend it).

I'm also playing:
Prototype (a bit bonkers, character is over-powered and the movement is rubbish for any fine movement control such as checkpoint races, but the combat is decent fun)
Resident Evil 5 (in co-op, and I'm liking it a lot more than Resi 4, but everything is better in co-op).

I love Resi 5! Initially Paul forced me to play it with him to get some of the trophies for doing it in co-op but it quickly became me bugging him to play it!

Opened the thread and at the top of the page is Fable 2. Well I've been playing Fable 1 recently, pretty fun but not quite the non-linear personality choice game I was told.

I've been playing GTA 3. My favorite thing about it is that Claude doesn't talk.

It's quite a lot harder than the later ones.

I finished Fallout 3. I enjoyed it. It's a little glitchy though. The DLC will come out on PS3 on Saturday. I look forward to it.

Despite the fact I have GTA IV installed, and sitting ready to be played, I am still in the process of completing GTA: San Andreas... which is, I suppose, something like GTA 3.66, and GTA: Vice City must be GTA 3.33. The only reason for this is that, despite the games being pretty much entirely separate from the other (apart from the odd in-joke, or repeating characters), and thus entirely playable out of sequence, I personally cannot bring myself to play the LATER game without first completing the EARLIER game. Much like reading a series of novels out of sequence, or watching a film's sequel before the original; I just can't bring myself to do it.

I bought Mirror's Edge yesterday, and spent a lot of time today playing it. I have seen/heard mixed reviews about it, but so far I am really enjoying it. Not many games provoke a sense of panic within me, but this does.

Mirror's Edge had a lot of things I liked, then lots of other small weird oversights that I didn't - the collision world was sometimes poorly structured so you could get stuck behind small railings and have to laboriously work your way out, and for a game that was about making you run fast and jump over things, they were very keen on forcing you to stop moving and turn around in small spaces. Overall I liked it, but I think I'll like the (inevitable) sequel more once they've had time to work out what they're really aiming to achieve with their level design.

Currently I'm playing Uncharted 2 (singleplayer and online) and Rainbow Six Vegas 2 (co-op with my housemate).

U2 is incredibly slick, brilliantly presented, and generally great. Sadly, I think the story in the first one benefitted from having less characters and a more defined purpose, but it's still approximately 17.37 times better than the average game story.

RSV2 is a little crude in the graphics, but the AI is solid, the buddies work, and generally it's a good blast with a mate.

I'm gearing up for Dragon Age: Origins coming out on Fridyah. Been waiting about five years for this one, and I'm very much looking forward to Bioware getting back to what they do best, especially since they demonstrated their original IP can be easily as good as anything they've had licensed in the past with Mass Effect.

I'm with you on the Mirror's Edge issue, Mata, they really could have made it a bit more flowing. A lot of the early stuff works just great, but when you start getting into bits with mandatory fights and single, fickle routes that aren't well constructed enough to not drop you off a ledge twenty times just because you're not doing it properly, it can get a bit frustrating. That said, when I went back to play some of the time trial stuff I was amazed at the alternative routes I could find. The tutorial level is great for this; I had played through the entire game already, on hard, without firing a gun, on my first playthrough (I had been looking forward to the challenge), and yet when I did a flawless lap on the tutorial's time-trial, I was about 40 seconds or so behind the lead time on the table.
I was a bit confused, until I figured out a few tricks, combinations of moves that I had never even considered using in the main campaign. For example, in the tutorial stage, where you're supposed to leap to catch a horizontal pole, jump sideways to a ledge, then jump up and mantle sideways round to a point where you can climb up, then do the wall-run, turn, jump combo to ascend (something that takes about 25-30 secs if you're quick), I found that you could skip the entire bit. There's some scaffolding to the right just before you jump, and a big vent on the wall next to it; turns out you can jump at the vent, turn 180 before you fall back, jump onto the scaffolding, sprint across, jump at another, higher vent, turn 180 again, jump again and land at the top, just before the flying-fox bit, saving you somewhere in the region of 25 seconds if you don't mess it up.
/Long post

I agree with the both of you, Mata & Tarantio. The combat in the game isn't great, unless you choose to fire a gun (which I'm avoiding doing). And some elements require practically pixel-perfect jumps - which can be frustrating. But I'm still enjoying it

I am also playing FarCry - which got a lot of rave reviews when it came out. I have yet to see what the fuss is about...

I had heard that the designers of Mirror's Edge balanced the whole game with the assumption that only hard core players would possibly want to do something as bloody-minded as going through the whole game without killing anyone... Suffice to say, they've been shocked at how many people have gone through it playing that way!

I completed Mirror's Edge last night. Turned out I was only about 5 minutes from the end of the game when I stopped playing the other night, so I should have just kept at it. Although I was finding a particular level especially frustrating.

I was a little disappointed by the ending which was somewhat anti-climactic. This is most likely due to a sequel that surely must be around the corner.

I think if I did use the weapons in the game, I would have completed it even quicker. But for whatever reason, I felt like I shouldn't be bullet happy.

This week I have been mostly playing Dragon Age: Origins, much to the detriment of any uni work I *should* be getting on with.

Steam's time counter says a shameful 54.4 hours. Since friday.

...don't tell my project group >.<

I just completed Mirror's Edge. I started a new game as I had forgotten the plot after about 10 months of not playing it.

Why did I stop playing it? It was great! The most original game I've played in a while.

I just played through the whole of Portal - a game that, when I first had a little go on it, I thought was somewhat unsettlingly disorientating, and pointless. I didn't enjoy it remotely, and gave up after just a couple of minutes.

This evening I decided to play it again, and cottoned on to what the idea was a bit quicker And then enjoyed the humour.

But most of all, loved the ending

And I just played XCOM: UFO Defense (known as UFO: Enemy Unknown here in the UK). It is 16 years old, and available to download on Steam for about £2.99. And it still scares the hell outta me.