What [not shmup] game are you playing now?

[TransatlanticFoe]

Assassin's Creed III

6 hours in and I really hope the naval combat tutorial is the last tutorial. The game has been cutscenes, tediously simple tutorial missions that explain everything but the shitty unintuitive menu UIs, loads of boring walking/running to get somewhere, and shitty wolf attack QTEs.

It's not even that I hate modern AAA cliches (I liked the previous games) but bugger me this one takes the piss. I hope something more closely resembling a game happens soon but I don't hold out much hope.

[Blinge]

Haha nope. time to learn how to upgrade a little village you don't give a shit about!

I was playing that for a while but then stopped for no apparent reason and haven't wanted to pick it up since. Lost momentum.
I didn't know the Boston Tea Party also involved an absolute massacre perpetrated by one man! Gotta spice up that history..

Meanwhile I'm playing Monster Hunter P3rd. Fuck this game!!
We've seen the Dark Souls comparisons before, but the higher in rank I get the more I notice how awful the combat is compared to muh souls.

Edit: However, I have been trying to run before I can walk - obviously trying to coast on my old armour after reaching high rank isn't going to work. Unless I can play perfectly without getting hit ever. (unlikely)

[atheistgod1999]

Haha nope. time to learn how to upgrade a little village you don't give a shit about!

One of the first things I did in ACII was fully upgrade the town

[Blinge]

Monteriggioni? Where did you get the money to fully upgrade in the early game?

So upgrading that place in II is pretty pointless but in III the Homestead is far bigger/more involved, but I can't remember if there's a point to that either. It IS a lot of tutorial

[TransatlanticFoe]

Oh yay, I'll skip most of that then. I liked doing the upgrades in II and its sequels but then the freerunning was more fun and so was recruiting random oppressed civilians. Treerunning is not fun. Wolf QTEs are not fun. Boring missions to rescue people I have no cause to care about is not fun. On the plus side, my character is now an adult albeit with the same voice he had as a child.

My favourite moment has been cutscene ends, walk a few steps into a tent, new cutscene begins. The amount of walking in this game that I wish were cutscenes has been incredible.

[atheistgod1999]

The amount of walking in this game that I wish were cutscenes has been incredible.

Guess I'm not the only one who thinks this. I have a hard time focusing on the damn dialogue because I have to weave through the crowd and not lose the people I'm walking with!

[FRO]

I have been playing the original Legend of Zelda the last week or so, for the first time. I had previously played for a few minutes here or there at a friend's house as a kid, but even though I've owned the cart for several years now as an adult, I've never really put time into it. I always understood the general appeal of Zelda games, but have never clicked with any of them, except briefly with Ocarina of Time when I played my brother-in-law's copy back in 2001. I've had that "eureka" moment now, however, and am totally digging it. I will finally be able to go back and properly enjoy Link's Awakening, which I bought as a new release, but never truly played or appreciated. Same goes for A Link To The Past, which I bought on the Wii U eShop and played some of a few months back, but didn't quite get very far. And it will give me a good excuse to finally plug in the Wind Waker HD copy I got a while back.

[atheistgod1999]

I beat the church boss a few hours ago (I'm starting to progress faster; was trying to rush through before). Here were my stats (plus one endurance) when I beat it, if anyone's interested:

Spoiler

[Obiwanshinobi]

I have been playing the original Legend of Zelda the last week or so, for the first time. I had previously played for a few minutes here or there at a friend's house as a kid, but even though I've owned the cart for several years now as an adult, I've never really put time into it. I always understood the general appeal of Zelda games, but have never clicked with any of them, except briefly with Ocarina of Time when I played my brother-in-law's copy back in 2001. I've had that "eureka" moment now, however, and am totally digging it. I will finally be able to go back and properly enjoy Link's Awakening, which I bought as a new release, but never truly played or appreciated. Same goes for A Link To The Past, which I bought on the Wii U eShop and played some of a few months back, but didn't quite get very far. And it will give me a good excuse to finally plug in the Wind Waker HD copy I got a while back.

If you are going to buy any more Zelda games, make it Oracle of Ages/Seasons. Capcom ftw.

[Leandro]

Order of Ecclesia and I'm getting my ass kicked.

[iconoclast]

Devil's Third

I thought this game looked bad when it was announced, and it looked even worse when they re-revealed it for the Wii U. So much so that I didn't bother playing it until a few months ago, despite thinking that this team's previous game, Ninja Gaiden II, is most likely the best action game that will ever exist. But I was wrong to doubt them. Devil's Third is actually great and unlike anything else in the genre. It's a shame that it went through development hell, because I'd love to see what they could have done without all of the setbacks.

The last time I looked through youtube and nico for some skillfully played footage, I couldn't find anything. So I tried to upload some myself: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=P ... C1HDyC8tKe

I think part of the reason why this game gets a bad rap is because most people don't understand how it's meant to be played. I suppose the closest comparison would be Vanquish, since the levels and enemy designs are similar, and it emphasizes player movement with sprinting, sliding, wall climbing, and leaping attacks. The key difference is that it focuses on melee instead of shooting, so you're encouraged to get in an enemy's face instead of picking them off from behind cover. But shooting is still a very strong option. In fact, it's usually the easiest way to play. The game's scoring system takes that into account though, so it's good to have that option.

I believe this only costs $30 now, so if you like action games and own a Wii U, I definitely recommend buying it. It's easily one of my top 10 action games.

Full review:

+ Excellent mechanics, and they're really well thought out, down to the finest detail. I can't really think of anything cool they could add besides wall running. They showed that in the original reveal trailer, but I guess they decided it didn't fit the game. I'd love Ninja Gaiden style melee counters as well, but they would probably be overpowered.
+ Shooting is pretty much identical to Call of Duty. Press LT and your aim snaps to an enemy if he's in your crosshairs. It's really important that they added this because the terrible framerate makes it really hard to aim manually. Thankfully, you don't need to aim.
+ The Enbaku gauge. Activating it makes you a little bit stronger, a little bit faster, sends out a shockwave that damages nearby enemies, instantly refills your health, and in score attack mode, you get bonus points for every enemy you kill while powered up. Killing enemies with melee attacks also seems to extend how long it lasts. This reminds me of using hypers in Dodonpachi Daioujou. It's a great mechanic.
+ Melee combat is simple, but it always feels good. The animations get screwed up pretty frequently when terrain gets in the way, but they're stylish and have impact.
+ Good level design and flow. Almost every enemy can be killed quickly and you move from one encounter to the next with very little down time in between. It's very fast-paced.
+ Lots of weapon variety. There's a whole bunch of guns and nine melee weapons in total.
+ Good enemy variety and encounter design. Every enemy type serves a different purpose and they mix them all together quite well. There's also a lot of verticality in the environments and plenty of objects to take cover behind, so they encourage you to make full use of your mobility options. No two encounters feel the same.
+ This has one of the best scoring systems in any 3D action game. It fixes the fundamental design flaw that made campaign scoring in both Ninja Gaidens bad. NG rewarded you for playing in the safest and lamest way possible, whereas Devil's Third rewards you for playing in the riskiest way possible. That's the crux of any good scoring system. These guys figured that out a long time ago when they made Ninja Gaiden II's incredible survival missions (which are still, by far, the high point of action gaming), so it's not surprising to see them follow it with another great system.
+ Good bosses. They're pretty simple, but fun to fight.
+ Nice soundtrack.
+ Ivan is perfect bald man. He is cool.
+ I think the balance could use a little more fine tuning, but it's pretty good as-is. Ivan is very fragile - a basic grunt can tear you apart within seconds if they hit all of their machine gun shots. Grenades and rockets can kill you instantly depending on the point of impact. But the threat of dying at any moment makes diving into a group of enemies and cutting them down one by one all the more intense. Each mission can be beaten in 17~ minutes or less, so playing through one from start to finish without dying is a perfectly reasonable challenge.

- The game's short. There are only 9 missions, and like I just said, all of them can be beaten in 17 minutes or less. I don't think this is a major negative though because everything that's in the campaign is very good. It's highly replayable.
- I'd like more animations for finishing blows. It gets repetitive seeing the same one over and over. Adding more finisher animations could affect the balance of the game, though, since you recover health during the invincibility period. From a gameplay standpoint, it's better to know that each weapon's animation will always take a certain amount of time to play out, instead of getting a shorter or longer one at random. There are context-sensitive finishers too, so there is some variety.
- The scoring is very well designed, but it's also easy to exploit. Valhalla went with the lazy Platinum approach of giving you an autosave after every battle instead of continuing with Ninja Gaiden's style of smartly placed save points. I guess the one saving grace here is how your Enbaku gauge is emptied whenever you reload a save point, so you can't maximize score unless you do everything consecutively.
- God awful performance. You can make a game with a shitty engine or you can make a game for a shitty console, but you should never combine the two. Throw in Japanese developers, who have always struggled with UE3, and you have a perfect recipe for disaster.
- You can't play through the entire game while wearing the cat mask. This is unforgivable.
- This is not the game (or developer) for you if you're looking for an Oscar-worthy story. With that being said, Ivan's team of Call of Duty rejects couldn't be more lame. The boss characters have unique personalities, so it would have been cool if Ivan had a more interesting group to surround himself with. They also blend in with some of the enemies, so that's bad from a gameplay standpoint too.

(No comment on the multiplayer because I haven't played it and I really don't care about it. I guess this isn't a full review after all.)

[Mischief Maker]

No Man's Sky on the PC.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Why, why, why did I allow myself to get this hyped about a game and foolishly preorder it?

In my weak defense I thought this was a PC game getting ported to the PS4, not vice-versa.

In short it's a goddamn mess with the framerate drops, the terrible menu interface designed with a controller in mind, and various CTD problems. Right now if you're on the fence I say avoid, avoid, avoid until you hear different.

Maybe it gets fun if they manage to patch it into a functional state? The music is great and I've seen some crazy-ass procedurally generated ships.

[BrianC]

Started playing Kirby: Planet Robobot. Feels similar to Kirby Triple Deluxe, which isn't a bad thing. The robots are fun so far. I especially like what the happens when the mech gets a jet power up.

[Durandal]

I just finished Kasteelvanie: Harmonie der Dissonantie

Spoiler

Well, I got the good ending, but apparently the best ending where you fight Dracula for reals required me to find the four out of six remaining Dracula's remains scattered all over the edges of the map(s) which I simply couldn't be bothered doing anymore

You play as Juste (Juiced) Belmont who ventures into some random castle infested with monsters together with your best friend-and-definitely-not-a-turncoat Maxim because your girl got kidnapped, so now you must save her
At first sight, HoD is indeed a graphical improvement over CotM, but the use of colors is just egregious. Isn't Dracula's Castle supposed to be a dark and haunted place crawling with devious monsters hellbent on taking your soul? The NES Castlevania games had very bright color palettes, but managed to fit in with the overall artstyle and atmosphere of the games. HoD is just trying too hard not to be dark (aside from that one unlit passage). Any screenshots of HoD which don't have some kind of smoothing look like an assault on your eyes. Even that blue afterimage effect when you dash or jump is incredibly overdone, thankfully Juiced's coat is a bright red to compensate for that. It's got some nice backgrounds for the most part (except for that demoscene-tier blue windy sky background effect, what the fuck is daylight doing in my Castlevania games besides the ending?)

What also immediately stands out is the music, or how crappy it sounds. The sound quality resembles something inbetween a NES and SNES while anything aside from Offense and Defense, Chapel of Dissonance and maybe Successor of Fate just sound forgettable. Successor of Fate has that godawful dissonant (titledrop!) part with the screeching keyboard which ruins the song for me entirely. My boredom with the game made me pay less attention to the music so most of it sounded like something gothic.

Instead of CotM's DSS, we now have spell books which are scattered around the castle for you to find. Each spell book comes with its own element, and the effect of the spell depends on the subweapon you currently have equipped. Ice/Cross will summon a flying cross which shoots projectiles at enemies, Fire/Axe envelops you in a firestorm which deals damage to everything near you, Wind/Fist shoots a forward projectile, and so on. I just stuck with Ice/Axe and Ice/Fist because of their sweet damage output and i-frames, with Ice/Book occasionally as a screen-clearing attack. I did not really care much about the other spellbooks, because their uses tend to be the same. Each subweapon's function tends to vary with each different spellbook, so once you get all 4/5, one subweapon alone is usually capable of a long-range/short-range/screen clear attack. More powerful attacks drain more MP. Instead of hearts, these magic attack cost MP which regenerates over time. However, since you won't be using your subweapons all the time and magic attacks are simply more effective in terms of damage and versatility, it's the magic attacks you'll be sticking to despite the numerous heart max upgrades you will find. Hearts just end up being useless. Sadly, there's no MP max upgrades.

Speaking of versatility, the Spellbooks lack that over DSS and SotN. Instead of having all kinds of abilities which are useful in some situation and let you toy with all kinds of playstyles, you now have some special attack of some element. Compared to previous entries, it just feels barebones. You are invincible when casting magic, so you can use some attacks as a makeshift guard or invincible dash like Ice/Fist, which is kind of neat. Sliding in HoD is now as strong as your whip attack (minus elemental bonuses) and can be used as a cool finisher attack as opposed to the whip, sliding doesn't have any wind-up frames and can be faster, so I just slid into most enemies to finish them off (Inafune is a hack)

On top of that, you can now dash left and right, each bound to their respective shoulder buttons. This does bring a nice flow to combat by attacking, backdashing, and then dashing forward for another attack. There's a bit more freedom in dashing than SotN by being able to dash in multiple directions and to move quickly by repeatedly dashing in one direction (your only means of going fast in this game). However, the forward momentum of your dashing does not carry over to your jumps, which plays a part in the shitty air control of Juiced.
Through dashing in CotM you could control the horizontal jumping distance, which was necessary for bosses and most platforming sections. In the air, you can control your movement to some extent, double jump, and so on. However, when you use your whip mid-air, you are a floating cinderblock and will get damaged if you fly into anything that moves. For Castlevania, this isn't anything new. However, the behavior of most enemies and bosses make this more aggravating than it ever was. Bosses tend to just float about randomly if they aren't doing anything and it becomes much harder to calculate whether a boss will bump into you or not. The movements of bosses in earlier games were much more straightforward and easier to predict. You can't dash mid-air or cancel a whip attack into a magic attack to abuse the i-frames, unfortunately. Thankfully the magic attacks (and subweapons if need be) alleviate the need of having to use your jumping attacks, but MP is not infinite.

Another odd thing about HoD is how it handles knockback. If you get hit in the air, you get knocked back like in most CV games. If you get hit while on the ground, you get stunned for about half a second or so and only get invincibility for another half second or so. Rather than knocking you away from the boss while getting hit and using your invincibility as a means to reposition yourself, in HoD you barely have any time to act in any other way than mash a dash button and hope you move away from an enemy before you helplessly get hit again. God forbid if you get hit by curse.

About the castle layout: it sucks. Enemy placement and stage layout used to go hand in hand in previous CV games. CotM nailed this fairly well for a Metroidvania by placing tougher enemy types in nasty spots aside from your generic monster hallways, but in HoD the layout barely has any influence on the combat anymore. There are some sections with Harpies being able to pass through walls in vertical sections and some average skeleton in (again) vertical sections, but in HoD the layouts make no effort to stand out at all. CotM made up for the lackluster rooms through enemies which were dangerous enough on their own, but even those are missing in HoD. Majority of HoD enemies are either cannon fodder, HP bloats, or easily dodgeable/avoidable. The end result is that the whole game feels too easy for something called Castlevania. There's a HARDMODE, but all it does is increase damage dealt by enemies which is the worst kind of hard mode.

Halfway through the game, it is revealed you've been actually traversing two identical castles through dimensional portals, something which is as stupidly excused through the plot as it is through the lack of exploration. The two castles are identical in layout, differentiated only by a different color palette and enemy placement. However, you still have to traverse between them to get some key items so you can get past some obstacles in both castles. Apparently someone thought there wasn't enough backtracking, so they decided to have you run through the whole fucking boring castle twice. There's much less secrets obtainable through backtracking in HoD compared to CotM, and the items you receive are either useless to your current playstyle or occasionally useful. There's no guaranteed HP/MP/Heart max up when discovering secrets in HoD. Which is a shame, because finding another secret HP/MP up could prolong your exploration as it refilled your HP/MP and saved you from another trip to a far away save room. And more importantly, the backtracking that is present in HoD seems to rely more on keys and such rather than making use of your movement abilities. Granted, tackling in CotM was barely used, but the secrets you found through application of your many jump techniques in CotM made exploration feel rewarding. There's little application of skill to be found in HoD through what little movement upgrades you find.

I guess there's some shit like 'what you do in one world affects the other world' puzzles, but I've rarely noticed them. Having to walk all the way to another dimensional transporter to find out what happened isn't exactly what one would call fun either. And most of these dimensional gates are placed in far off places too, one even requires you to walk through an inward spiral which leads nowhere else. HoD also gives you pieces of the maps, outlining what you should explore. The thing is that these maps tend to make the position of save rooms rather obvious (I wonder what kind of room this lone square would be?), and not knowing where the save room is, desperately trying to explore every nook and cranny to restore your health is what made being low on health in some unexplored part of the castle of CotM so exhilarating. Now you just pop a potion. CotM didn't even have that many potions, let alone potions healing you for a great amount, let alone there being a merchant at all which could sell you an infinite amount of potions.

The economy in HoD never really has you tight on money unless you don't whip every candle and fire you see (which is what most Castlevania players will be doing), nor is the price of the stuff you can buy ever that expensive that you can't get almost everything you need in one run. Merchants offer an infinite amount of health potions for you to buy (if you are some kind of dirty creditfeeder, that is) amongst other status-negating potions. At least if you have enough money (which you probably will have in most cases), you'll never be underequipped. Unlike CotM, HoD doesn't rely too much on RNG for item and weapon drops (which is a good thing), but the downside that in combination with the limited Spellbook system, progression feels too linear. Especially when you look at the path you have to take to complete the game, as enemy strength increases in a straight line with each new area you discover, whereas in CotM enemies became harder everywhere in the castle, not just the areas you haven't explored yet.

Because you need to explore two similar castles, twice the amount of bosses had to be added too. And most of them are just plain forgettable. Most of them are huge walls of HP with wobbly unpredictable movement and/or easily predicted heavy-hitting attacks, that balance is what caused so many deaths thanks to the shitty air control. Even (the) Legion(s) and Death are massive pushovers, as I could clear over half of the bosses in my first try (no Castlevania game worth its salt should let you clear later bosses in one try). The Maxim fight is pretty easy too for a supposed final boss fight.

You also get to screw around with elemental crap, in the form of your spellbooks and attaching some stones to your whip. What this means is that you'll pause the game to look up an enemy's weaknesses in the encyclopedia, apply the proper elemental stone, and repeat this for every enemy type. Alternatively you can switch your spellbook type in real-time, but the desired elemental type of each spell might be overkill or simply unwieldy to use against one enemy. As some enemies are also resistant to some elements, you'll have to keep changing those fucking stones. Later on you get the Steel Tip which upgrades your whip strength when equipped, but why this can't just be a permanent upgrade is beyond me. Then you also get the Charging Stone which is primarily used to charge your whip like a Buster and break walls, but considering the rigidity of your whip attacks, it's kind of ineffective to use charged attacks all the time, especially considering how long it takes to charge it. This could have also been a passive upgrade, had it not been for the whip's alternative attack which you can perform by holding B, where you can manually control the whip like in SCIV in order to block minor projectiles and enemies, though this feature isn't as useful as it was in SCIV and should've been just replaced with the charge stone.

And to pad out the game some more, HoD also presents you with The Absolutely Useless Sidequest of Collecting Furniture in Dracula's Castle. Juiced comes across a room in a castle filled to the brim with monsters and decides to decorate it. Why? I dunno. I thought the Belmonts weren't a vain bunch. It does nothing but look pretty, and has absolutely no use besides affecting one line at the ending sequence. GREAT JOB AT COLLECTING ALL THOSE USELESS PIECES OF FURNITURE, HERO

You don't get all the classes to play as like you did in CotM, though there is a Maxim mode which is basically this game's Richter mode and has his own unique inputs (which are hinted by those empty secret number rooms, I guess?) which function as secret attacks, and doesn't rely on leveling at all. There's also a Simon Belmont mode, with identical sprite and controls et al. What I can't forgive is the usage of Kojima's red-haired portrait of Simon. Simon is a hero like Arnold Schwarzenegger as Conan the Barbarian and not some frilly pretty boy that Richter was in DCX. SIMON BELMONT FOREVER

HoD takes the worst out of the IGAvanias and adds some new cool stuff, but just ends up being an absolute bore to play through.

[Durandal]

No Man's Sky on the PC.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Why, why, why did I allow myself to get this hyped about a game and foolishly preorder it?

In my weak defense I thought this was a PC game getting ported to the PS4, not vice-versa.

In short it's a goddamn mess with the framerate drops, the terrible menu interface designed with a controller in mind, and various CTD problems. Right now if you're on the fence I say avoid, avoid, avoid until you hear different.

Maybe it gets fun if they manage to patch it into a functional state? The music is great and I've seen some crazy-ass procedurally generated ships.

Surely the base game is still good, right?

Spoiler

[TransatlanticFoe]

No Man's Sky on the PC.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

Why, why, why did I allow myself to get this hyped about a game and foolishly preorder it?

In my weak defense I thought this was a PC game getting ported to the PS4, not vice-versa.

In short it's a goddamn mess with the framerate drops, the terrible menu interface designed with a controller in mind, and various CTD problems. Right now if you're on the fence I say avoid, avoid, avoid until you hear different.

Maybe it gets fun if they manage to patch it into a functional state? The music is great and I've seen some crazy-ass procedurally generated ships.

Shoddy ports is what put me back to console gaming for this gen! I'm not surprised the PC version is buggy and poorly optimised but I'm surprised it's as bad and widespread as reported.

I won't even be playing this until either I get a PS4 or it comes out on xbone but already there are reviews whining about the survival aspect of the game early on. Did people honestly expect a game where you just flew and wandered around? Now that'd be boring quickly.

The OST is superb though, if you like it I recommend checking out 65daysofstatic's back catalogue. The laat couple of records (Wild Light and their Silent Running score) are in a similar vein.

[dunpeal2064]

Devil's Third

I wanted this game to be good so bad, but I had never seen a review from someone that actually understood 3D Action games. Appreciate the rundown, will definitely pick this up now.

[BIL]

I guess there's some shit like 'what you do in one world affects the other world' puzzles, but I've rarely noticed them. Having to walk all the way to another dimensional transporter to find out what happened isn't exactly what one would call fun either. And most of these dimensional gates are placed in far off places too, one even requires you to walk through an inward spiral which leads nowhere else.

Not sure if you know this already (it's vaguely alluded to by one of the game's Hint Cards), but crouching in front of a gate will let you warp between all those you've visited previously. Makes things a bit less annoying, though not by much. ;3

[Durandal]

I guess there's some shit like 'what you do in one world affects the other world' puzzles, but I've rarely noticed them. Having to walk all the way to another dimensional transporter to find out what happened isn't exactly what one would call fun either. And most of these dimensional gates are placed in far off places too, one even requires you to walk through an inward spiral which leads nowhere else.

Not sure if you know this already (it's vaguely alluded to by one of the game's Hint Cards), but crouching in front of a gate will let you warp between all those you've visited previously. Makes things a bit less annoying, though not by much. ;3

I already figured that one out, though initially using these teleporters is a massive walk in the park.

[Stevens]

With the talk of remakes I've been playing SOR Remake.

[BIL]

I already figured that one out, though initially using these teleporters is a massive walk in the park.

Oh yeah, HOD's map bloat is godawful. As much as I enjoy reassembling the bi-dimensional breadcrumb trail on replays, the blotches of black useless space that I know are either dead ends or useless doohicky hunts are fugly to see. And yet, even ignoring huge chunks of the map and taking full advantage of teleports, the castle still feels massive. A rueful case study in bigger=/=better. IIRC, at the time of release, IGA was absolutely bonering on about how monstrous a map they'd crammed into a tiny GBA cart. 3:

A leaner map that made more interesting use of the dual layered concept would've been nice. HOD has good content buried in there - IGA's games at least always have a nice sense of impact - but it's blatantly padded out and at times punishingly fugly to boot. Hard game to like.

[Mischief Maker]

Been playing some more No Man's Sky on my PC and... I am having some fun!

Make no mistake, if you got a refund you made the right choice. If you're on the fence, DO NOT BUY unless some heroic patches arrive. (I'm holding out hope based on a reddit thread where someone said the problem was with Nvidia cards and that a new driver was forthcoming next week)

But once I got the graphics settings tweaked to something approaching acceptable and understood that every time I moved to a new location the game would chug for a couple seconds as it generated the landscape... I started having some fun.

Now mind you I always was just expecting a 3D SPAZ with great ambiance, so I'm probably not as let down as people who were expecting some kind of living universe.

I actually started over again several times (in part because preorder DLC ships fuck up the tutorial missions at the moment) and it seems to me the game is more linear than it pretends, with planets growing more and more populated by structures the closer you get to the center. I expect as I continue on I'll encounter more hostile wildlife and more space battles. You CAN hang out on one planet collecting upgrades, but that seems to be a recipe for over-leveling.

Atmospheric and space flight isn't that awful, actually. The KB+M controls are just fucked up at the moment. It's supposed to be flight control method. Mouse vertical is pitch, horizontal is yaw, A & D are roll. If you use roll + pitch, not only is your turn speed improved, it also seems to override some of that passive autopilot that prevents you from crashing.

I like how every planet has its own procedural music. I've visited several shitholes, but when I finally came across a pretty planet with a good song, yeah it created that mood I was looking for since the trailer.

So at the moment I would NOT recommend buying this game... but I don't necessarily regret my own purchase.

[atheistgod1999]

I was playing some Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast I just got because Demon's Souls is pretty dark both figuratively and literally and I wanted to play something with bright colors and pure ADHD gameplay to cheer me up a little.

It's alright, but like all Sega games the controls leave something to be desired. Then again, this is probably because the analog stick on my controller is broken (pops out of place when tilted to the far right and have to press on it to reconnect it) and I'm stuck using the d-pad.

Also, the Dreamcast has got to be the loudest fucking console ever. Couldn't have they made the disc drive at least a little quieter!?

[Obiwanshinobi]

After some PS2 CD-Rs (Gradius V, Sengoku Ace) spinning like mad (even in the - usually quiet - PS2 Slim), the Dreamcast didn't even seem that loud to me.

The very first Super Monkey Ball for GameCube and OutRun 2006 played with analogue sticks only (AT of course) are two Sega titles where I cannot fault the controls (SMB's camera became acquired taste soon enough).
Moreover, even Super Monkey Ball Jr. for GBA (albeit outsourced) controls like a charm, which is one of the gaming's greatest little miracles. What little I played of ChuChu Rocket! GBA port (with Advanced controls) was also playable enough for my liking (although I haven't played the Dreamcast version). Then there's Virtua Tennis - I don't like that there's no analogue movement on consoles (whereas Capcom did deign to put it in home ports of Power Stone 2 and Gundam vs around that time), but it controls sweetly as is.

[null1024]

I was playing some Crazy Taxi on the Dreamcast I just got because Demon's Souls is pretty dark both figuratively and literally and I wanted to play something with bright colors and pure ADHD gameplay to cheer me up a little.

It's alright, but like all Sega games the controls leave something to be desired. Then again, this is probably because the analog stick on my controller is broken (pops out of place when tilted to the far right and have to press on it to reconnect it) and I'm stuck using the d-pad.

Also, the Dreamcast has got to be the loudest fucking console ever. Couldn't have they made the disc drive at least a little quieter!?

Man, I got used to playing Crazy Taxi strictly on the D-pad. Occasionally causes a few issues [really easy to massively overturn when precision is needed], but works fairly well.
The game's fun, but it takes a bit of getting used to.
read this: http://www.crazytaxi.net/skills.html so you can actually move in not slow motion if you haven't already -- it's written for the arcade release, but the DC port is 1:1 and everything inside works on all ports of the game
It's much easier to do most of the techniques on a controller anyway.

And fuck, the DC is the second loudest console I've owned. That disc seek noise, jeeeeeeeez.

[TransatlanticFoe]

WTF is the loudest? DC is like a howling banshee

[Obiwanshinobi]

Dude, Sengoku Ace on PS2 seems to take off ALL THE TIME while it's on. Or so I remember.

[Ed Oscuro]

Agh, up to Castle Cimmeria in Lands of Lore 1. Unfortunately I bunged up my mouse wrist when playing this a while back (new chair + wrong height setting), so I've been taking it easy for a while. Did the Knowles' dungeon (killing the Xeobs), why did this need to be in the game? The game was building up to something in Yvel but pisses away that momentum with a couple ugly, irrelevant dungeons after. Thank goodness I can use F-keys for melee attacks, at least.

Also annoying: The Knowles' reward just rounds up your magic level, so I gained a tiny amount of exp on Baccata. The armor-eating attacks throughout the Dungeon are also incredibly obnoxious.

[null1024]

WTF is the loudest? DC is like a howling banshee

Loudest I've owned is a faulty PS3 when it kicks the fan into MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE.

[Tarma]

Final Fight CD and Final Fight 2 & Final Fight 3