The interface is a work of art. It’s like contemporary Japanese calligraphy in interface form. The introductions to missions are a pleasure to watch.

Unfortunately the missions themselves are super easy, super short, and mostly super boring. But just way too straightforward, they require no strategy and barely any reconfiguration of your AC to succeed. Money is also never an issue at all, which means you get NO satisfaction in completing boring missions, whereas in the old games at least you were accumulating the much-needed money to get better parts, and that actually made it fun to do boring missions since it felt like easy money. The environments are very nice looking though.

The game provides access to an overwhelming amount of stats. It’s not clear what they all do, or even which parts are better than others. Some look almost exactly the same. Complexity is never something I complain about in a game because it pays off when you learn it, but my problem with this is that instead of adding so many silly things here that made this Armored Core game (which always leaned more to the arcade side of the mech theme) feel more like a sim (the Mechwarrior side of the mech theme), they could’ve added better features. I don’t understand the reason for giving so much freedom in tweaking the ACs when the missions are so simple. Did they expect competitive multiplayer to be the real focus here?

But one of the most important features in the original games was the email system in which you’d get corporate-looking emails from companies, but personal ones from other Ravens you encountered during missions, like threats or congratulations and stuff. It was especially immersive with the diversity of missions, because they came from all different types of sources with all different agendas, and you often got two conflicting mission offers to either defend or destroy a target, and your choice shaped the rest of the game. It felt like you were actually playing with real people, not just playing against a set of levels.

And in this I feel like they missed the biggest opportunity in the leap since the first generation: they should’ve taken advantage of the highly-integrated internet and made all the missions actually involve other players in some ways, like sometimes splitting bounties in tackling missions together or with swearing allegiance to different corporations and thwarting mission attempts against them by other players.

Even though it’s repetitive, enough strange things seem to happen every game to keep it interesting, like when we saw a zombie who looked like somebody we knew, or the dog who dipped both of our shotgun blasts, or the zombie who apparently appeared out of thin air behind one of us because there wasn’t a single window open, or the zombie who somebody else noticed walking around with a knife sticking out of his head because I had shot it into him 5 minutes earlier, or dramatically diving off staircases. Plus there’s the easter eggs like looking at the portraits on the wall, and playing the progressive-metal song (which is about the zombies mode itself) which makes things intense, and a great variety of weapons with the pack-a-punch. And of course, the characters and the lines they use to interact with each other (and we seem to hear a new one every time). As much as I would REALLY like some ultimate goal, even if it were just an impossibly-high round so you could feel that you “beat the game”, this thing unbelievably somehow doesn’t feel as repetitive as it should, and I could imagine playing a match or two, every once in a while, for years.

The game builds great suspense in between rounds, and the one map (Kino Der Toten) is surprisingly atmospheric, at once cozy and scary.

I’m expecting Treyarch will probably make a standalone game about the zombies mode soon, and I think they’d do well to expand things like these:

• Make zombies spawn with random attributes like different hair, clothing, deformities.
• Make tons and tons of lines for the characters to speak.
• Ability to manipulate objects and build blockades or obstacles
• More players would be fun, if possible

It’s great to see a modern 2.5d fighter, something I’ve wanted to do for a looong time. This is a nice specimen, but there’s more that could’ve been done to take advantage of the current technology and the old genre.

Personalization here is very nice as almost every character in the game is playable. Nice selection of weapons. Volleyball is super fun.

I think it’s important that the fighting system in a game like this NOT be conducive to button mashing. In Castle Crashers it’s mostly not, but let’s see more variety in what the different attacks are used for, especially in PK. There is a good variety of attacks and combos though, and some of the fights just turn out awesome, what with tossing one enemy into another who is then smashed into a wall, socking him and bouncing him off it again, then stomping him into the ground before you uppercut him into the other direction and bowl down 4 more people.

There’s a very important lesson in this game, I think: making a game with simple art and animations makes it easy to include lots of characters.

But considering the mechanics of the game are good, plus the customization is really fun, I wish there were more of an “endgame.” I mean there’s a lot of time required to unlock most characters, and then nothing much to do but go through the game again, or play arena or volleyball. But what else could be done? Maybe the multiplayer-involved story mode as written about for Bitkind, with new levels available monthly for a cheap price.

Better yet, maybe an entire arena endgame where you have to progress through different player-vs-player matches: sometimes free-for-all, sometimes with teams, sometimes maybe even 1 vs 2 or 1 vs 3 against players who are a lower level. Also, I would’ve LOVED to see an arena that wasn’t just a pit but rather a maze with items scattered through it. Maybe throw in really valuable treasure to encourage players not to camp and to attract people who aren’t in it just for player-killing. Remember the awesome dungeon-maze in that one MUD? Super hard to get through the traps, but the items inside were legendary.

Definitely a pretty polished combat-racing game. The developer (not Sega) did a nice job of commemorating Sega characters, music, and games.

This game has no brake button. There’s just a drift button in its place.

4-player split-screen thank god. This should be a requirement for modern games.

Would’ve liked to see more dimension in the combat, like a lot more weapons and random events during races. Can never really have too much of that. But I’m definitely pleased with the way racers with the best max speed aren’t required to win races. (The change here is that drifting or slowing down is common so acceleration is more important, and most of a good player’s speed comes from his ability to drift and boost rather than his character’s innate max speed.) But it’s a pretty good balance mostly.

The rule-set problems in this game are the same with pretty much every combat-racing game: you quickly get stuck elbowing for room inside the subset of racers you end up with, and it’s really hard to break out of it. So if you get hit with a few items early on and are lagging behind the leaders, you’re going to be constantly jockeying back and forth one or two positions as the surrounding racers focus their attacks on you. Whoever takes a clear lead in the beginning will remain the leader since the only obstacles he really has to avoid are on the course. Any attack from players behind him can be easily negated by firing a weapon backwards, and he has no one else to use his weapons against, so all weapons are a way to defend the lead position, while everyone behind him has to manage weapons as both offensive (to gain a position) and defensive (to avoid losing a position). The “all star” weapon is a great wildcard for this that appears to players who are all the way in the back, but for some retarded reason it’s not available when playing online. Sux.

Taps right into modern humanity’s addiction to customization. And why not? Customizing your character, especially when playing with people online, feels so much fun, however vain. It’s not just about fashion — since, after all, we’re playing as sand-filled dolls — but rather about personality.

Obviously being able to create your own levels and themes pretty much guarantees the game will remain popular long after launch, especially with the seamless online integration. The physics are also responsible for most of the fun gameplay. Co-op play gets SO exciting, and is doubled for every bit of actual cooperation that goes on, like dragging other players out of the way or hanging onto each other while swinging across a chasm. The sixaxis ability to move your character’s head, plus facial expressions, plus control each arm, adds to the immersion. There’s a thin barrier across which a game transforms from a game into something personal.

I would’ve liked to see a little more “spotlight” on each player. Each level is pretty much a series of short puzzles so it doesn’t usually come down to one player saving the day (though sometimes it does and when it does, it’s intense).

Forcing players to specify an ability or class would create more spotlight. And I think inside of this is a compelling foundation for an alternative RPG engine: rather than start with the usual classes, start with no classes and add abilities one at a time. Stop when things become specialized enough. This way you won’t end up with the trite DPS/Healer/Tank archetypes. Kind of reminds me of the simplified rock-paper-scissors approach from the Pokemon games.

The SNES version feels like it was inspired more by Eastern RPGs with the dialogue screens and the way the hit points appear on-screen.

Being forced to point and click on everything sucks. Still something attractive about the RPG elements of this version.

Peter Molyneux has some great visions. I really loved the ambience of Fable 1, but as an RPG overall it was just okay. Definitely nice enough to play again.

The animations, wow. They’re beyond beautiful, and yet why can’t every game look like this? The little things like the way your character walks when leaning against a wall, the slow-motion replays on certain kills, and the poses after an attack with a gun or sword are exactly what it takes to give you that feeling like it’s not just a pleasure to play, it’s a pleasure to watch.

Character customization is also wonderful here. There could certainly be more options, and I did sort of miss the idea of wearing armor, but being able to choose how your character looks means so much more, it offers so much more personalization and immersion. And yet I recently read an interview in which Peter Molyneux said that most players didn’t bother doing this in Fable 2. Why do people play this game? It’s not for the challenge, obviously.

This is also one of the few games to actually make me genuinely crack the hell up. Descriptions for items like the Shiny Apple (“The crack as your teeth break the skin will be heard for miles.”) and Rotten Apple (“One thing you never want to hear from an apple: silence.”) are just hilarious to me, I can’t get enough of that. Also a lot of other clever puns like Fred Itchy’s seminal work, “Avo is Dead” (Friedrich Nietzsche’s God is Dead).

But the things I didn’t like about Fable 2 were easy to pinpoint. For one, the game supervises way too much. Although being able to teleport anywhere at any time saves a lot of your real-life time spent traveling, you 1. miss a lot of the world and 2. don’t allow yourself to get lost in it. I remember when Morrowind came out and critics universally reproved it for being “too aimless, too big”. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before on here, but that was the quality which made that game the best I’ve ever played, and both Fable games could’ve stood to have more of that. Without it, I felt so focused on objectives and quests that I rarely stopped to look around. However, the game doesn’t offer so much in that respect, despite its hook being that it allows you to “go anywhere, be anyone, do anything.” Morrowind did a much better job at those things, but it risked alienating casual players. Since Fable 2 was intended to be more accessible to all players, there was no way they would’ve done this, and consequently Fable 2 doesn’t actually provide that much freedom.

Also, where’s the challenge? I think this is the only video game I’ve ever played where you can’t actually lose.

If you had asked me in the 1990s what I thought the future of games would look like, I would’ve said this.

Another World plays like a (likeable) cross between FMV games and a platformer. You have a lot more control than any FMV game, but it still plays out across short scenes which require you to make the right move in the situation.

I think that games like this could thrive if only there were a different type of difficulty than most of what Another World relies on, which is micromanagement and forcing you to repeat a scene 500 times before you figure out the solution. Being forced to repeat the first mindless 40 seconds of a scene before you get to the difficult part of timing your jumps right just isn’t fun. Don’t get me wrong, I love games that punish you for not jumping off the last pixel, but a game like this should focus more on the puzzles.

This is a cinematic game, and the effect of the above is that you become too cautious and it breaks up the pace. The difficulty, again, is misplaced; I want to find out what happens to the ogre friend I had who helped me escape into the vents, but instead I just spent three hours rolling through those vents trying to dodge splashes of water and falling rocks in the cave that followed. By the time I get back to anything resembling the plot, I’ll have lost a lot of enthusiasm.

I guess this is the same problem that Choose Your Own Adventure books had. There has to be a way to lose, but how do you do that without disrupting the pace? Ideally you would never die or lose, but every conflict would be a super close call where you barely escape. You would stay on the edge of your seat at all times because you’d still be making decisions, pushed to your limits, believing that you COULD lose. But, like a dream, everything around you would actually be accommodating your actions.

More practically, maybe something like “failing” a scene just takes you down another path.

Also, this is still the weirdest game I’ve ever played, no contest.

Genesis version of Shadowrun. Probably the most complex game on Genesis.

Things I love:

• Weapon customization is so much more fun than adding amulets or runes to weapons for elemental powers (the typical fantasy counterpart)
• Nonlinear progress with multiple ways to make money, including hacking and selling the data you find
• Involved RPG-stats for combat plus even more involved hacking scenes
• Mature dialogue, great cyberpunk theme
• Random events
• Diversity of skills from shooting to social engineering to breaking into buildings
• Shops with certain clientele, some selling illegal weapons, some restricted to only lawful items
• Buying contacts to access black-market items and information

Things that could’ve made it even better:

• Seeing your character’s appearance change with new equipment
• “Findable” weapons and items
• More weapon types
• Better hit reaction

One of the great games from a golden era.

The only problem with the 2d Worms series is that it’s barely changed at all since Worms 2.

Still super, super fun with people you know. The PHYSICS and their unpredictability are what make this game crazy, and the suspense built by the time limit for each player’s turn only mixes perfectly.

Some good customization with the voices, and being able to name your team and each Worm is a game in itself and provides so much humor. Would’ve liked to see more options for individual worms though, because once the game’s started, you barely notice who’s who — just having a name to match a worm to gets forgotten quick. Even just choosing a different voice for each worm could double the amount of personality the team has.

Destructible terrain is obviously as important as the physics, and the ease of making your own maps, plus choosing a theme out of a dropdown list is swell.

The music makes you determined, too…which is all the more funny considering it’s about worms with tough faces that tell they mean business.