bigsocrates

The reviews haven't been THAT bad. It has a 60 on Metacritic as opposed to Knack's 55 and a fair number of the reviews are positive. I think things seem negative because the pre-release anti-hype was BRUTAL. Tons of podcasts and other places where people were like "RYSE looks pretty but is going to be AWFUL." Then it came out and it was just sort of viewed as mediocre. I'll pick it up on sale at some point and I think in the end it will go down as just another pretty but kinda shallow launch title, not some special car crash of terrible like it was shaping up to be.

Forza Horizon. Yes Ryan put it in his top 10, and I'll be surprised if it's not in Jeff's, but it just hasn't been getting a lot of mention in general, which is too bad because it was one of the best racing games in years. It seems like the guys from those British racing studios can't catch a break in terms of sales or attention even when they put out a top-notch product. Is racing just on the outs as a genre? Because if an accessible game where you can tune and race Ferraris and ALSO go toe to toe in a Mustang against a plane can't get any traction...

@Getz said:

premium stuff is nice, but mostly I'm subsidizing the continued existence of Giant Bomb. Plus, 5 bucks ain't all that much .

This. Especially the bombcast, which I love so much that I look forward to Wednesdays when i know my commute will actually be enjoyable. I've been around since the beginning (When are they going to go back to reviewing drinks and talking about Cobra for hours? WHEN?) and I don't want to face a world without a bombcast.

Some of the premium stuff is great too. Wish there were more of it and they did more in depth stuff about specific games but oh well.

@qawsed said:

Crimson Skies?

Did that have Japanese lyrics in it? Wasn't it Western? Also a really great game that I wish they'd make a sequel, spiritual or otherwise, to. God I loved it, including the awesome multiplayer on original Xbox Live. I'm old.

More on topic, can you narrow down the era? When did you play it? Any idea around when it would have been released?

@L44 said:

@BigSocrates: Funny that you mention Prey as one that left no impressions on you. It's probably my best choice for this question, it was the game that made me realise we were experiencing next gen.

I played Prey long after release and it's kind of funny, because it definitely felt like a relic of the previous generation. That's not to say it's a bad game, I played through the campaign and there were some good points, but the design felt kind of...haphazard. The weapons were cool looking but generic feeling (to me) and there were some very neat ideas like the gravity thing and the portals that got repeated a LOT to not a ton of effect. Also the story was pretty bare bones despite having some scenes that should have been absolute stand outs, like the last time you run into your girlfriend in the campaign.

There are some games that you know you will remember for a long time almost as soon as you start them, like Grand Theft Auto Vice City, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, Driver: San Francisco, and Batman: Arkham Asylum. Then there are games that are completely disposable. I know I finished Prey, Dead to Rights: Retribution, and Dark Void*, but they left almost no impression, in fact I had to look at my achievements to even pull those examples out.

Then there are the games that seem like they'll fall into category 2 but stick with you for some reason. For me these are often open world games. I played the first Just Cause out of curiosity many years after its release, and though it played like a PS2 game ported up to the 360, for some reason the lame cinematics, wonky controls, and gorgeous water effects created an experience that has me thinking back on it from time to time with a lot of fondness. I have similar feelings about Prototype, which is inferior in almost every way to Infamous, but stuck with me much longer despite the incomprehensible story and lack of polish. Brutal Legend had a weird and only semi-functional RTS combat system, but an incredibly memorable world and cast of characters that I desperately wish I could return to. That's not to say that every open world game grabs me in this way or that it's only open-world games (Spider Man: Shattered Dimensions is somewhat mediocre but also very memorable) but it's always interesting when upon finishing a game I'm somewhat lukewarm to it but my mind keeps returning to it and I find myself thinking about well after completion.

Do other people have these experiences? With what kinds of games?

*Dark Void is kind of an exception because the ending is so out of nowhere and leaves so many loose threads that I was left holding my controller and legitimately wondering whether I had somehow skipped three or four levels by some weird bug. I do remember that about it.

I disagree on Bioware games. I think playing for 45-90 minutes a night can make it feel like a good TV series and avoid some of the burnout I get from playing the games for long stretches of playing Mass Effect. Go to planet, doing some mining on the way. Shoot way through corridor-like mission, get story nugget, repeat.

Open world games (including Bethesda games), on the other hand, I tend to like to lose myself in. I don't want to be like "Oh I can't run off and do that because I only have an hour to play and I want to finish this mission." If I want to hijack a bunch of helicopters and go after the hive achievement in Prototype then goddamnit that's what I'm gonna do! Or play a bunch of that Saints Row minigame where you rack up doctor bills by getting hit by cars. I like to visit open world games and really feel like I'm playing as the character, and you can't do that in short bites.

I watched it in person a couple times when I was a kid, but see no appeal to watching it on television. It is, indeed, exceptionally boring.

This is about this console cycle lasting too long. We're tired of the same games on the same technology we've been playing. How many sequels this year were just more of the same, not just in the way sequels always are, but in terms of not getting more out of the hardware and not even being bigger and more exciting. Borderlands 2 was, according to Jeff, just more Borderlands. Need for Speed Most Wanted was just a less over the top version of Burnout Paradise. Skylanders Giants was just Skylanders. Giant Bomb gave out few five star ratings this year, but those games that did get them tended to be something new and interesting (Mark of the Ninja, Dust an Elysian Tale) or at least something not beaten to death this cycle (Xcom.) The biggest exception i can see is Forza Horizon and that A) Tried something new for the series and B) Is the least enthused five star review I can remember for quite awhile. Even the new Halo game which is very pretty and plays well is getting a reaction of fatigue. Oh. More Halo. This is why, I think, a janky and repetitive game like ZombiU can get Patrick so excited, because at least it's DIFFERENT.

Last year was the peak for these consoles and this year, and most of next, are just sort of a plateau coda. The generation lasted too long.

Phones and handhelds will probably merge in some way. This might not be the last gen, since Nintendo will want to replace the 3DS eventually, but 10 years from now ther probably will not be a pure dedicated handheld. Now a Sony branded Android smartphone with built in controls or something? I could see that happening. Unless touchscreen controls get much better. To be fair though, the dedicated game console is probably dead after the Wii U. Sure the Xbox720 and PS4 will play games but they will be comprehensive entertainment centers. To be fair this gen is basically there already.