LawGamer

It's the rule of threes for me:

1. Mass Effect 3: All Bioware needed to do was write an OK ending. It didn't need to be great, just OK. Instead, we got an ending that was a butt-fumble combined with the final play of the Seahawks-Patriots Superbowl level fuck up.

2. Fable 3: Fable 2 was one of my favorite games of all time. Fable 3 stripped all of the charm and variety out of the game in favor of a lot of celebrity voice acting. Terrible game.

3. Assassin's Creed 3: Ubisoft - "You know how Assassin's Creed 2 was really fun and everyone liked the protagonist? Let's make a game without the impressive architecture and a main character who is the biggest stick-in-the-mud in history. That'll be a good follow-up."

4. Diablo 3: Remember when Diablo was a dark and gothic RPG with awesome loot that you could play offline? Neither does Blizzard.

@changethel1ghts: Just fair warning as a fellow fighting game noob who tried Injustice 2 - the tutorial is terrible. I mean, kudos to them for at least trying to put something in there, but it utterly fails to teach you the timing of the inputs, or the terminology behind anything it has you doing. I banged my head against the wall jump attack tutorial for like 30 minutes before I figured out because it did such a bad job at telling me what I was doing wrong. It's clearly a tutorial built by people who are really, really good at fighting games and so assume the "base" level of a player is much higher than it actually is for someone new to the genre.

Just prepare to be frustrated. That's all I'm saying.

XBOX 720(P)ro

Been reading A World Undone, which is a history of WWI. It's pretty fascinating and depressing at the same time.

Are you a cop? You have to tell us if you're a cop.

@cameron said:

The case kind of mentioned that in passing. Lexmark had a microchip installed in their cartridges for people in its "Preferred Program" or whatever that was supposed to prevent them from being refilled unless they got sent directly back to Lexmark. The re-manufacturers cracked it. The Court only used it as an opportunity to make a light joke (or what passes for a joke in a Roberts opinion) at Lexmark's expense.

A step forward on flat ground, maybe? The stages are bigger, but not necessarily more interesting, and a lot of the targets were just sort of there, without a lot of motivation for why you might want to kill them. I thought the first game, when presented with the problem of a less developed member of the conspiracy, at lest made an effort to put them in a really imaginative level (e.g. Lady Boyle's party). I don't know that Dishonored 2 did as good a job with that. Some of the targets, like the Witch Lady, combined "who is this person again?" with boring level design.

Also, I think the game might have been better served by just having Emily as the playable character and getting a bit crazier with her powers. As others have said, Corvo's stuff is just more useful than Emily's in most situations.

I'll also echo what other posters have said and say that I thought the plot and gameplay was a little too re-tread-y from the first game. For example, now there's flies instead of rats but they both work in fundamentally the same way. Emily gets a quick movement ability, but it's just a less useful Blink, etc.

I still enjoyed my time with it but I think if I go back to the series, I'd go back to Dishonored 1 as opposed to playing through 2 again. If they make another one, I'd want them to move past Corvo/Emily and do something different with the structure of the game.

It thought it was OK. There's a lot of cool visual design going on. Like a lot of other Arkane games, they do a really good job of creating a sense of place, so if your in it purely for visual design, then it might be up your alley.

As far as gameplay goes, I was little turned off. The mimics are a cool idea at first, but you quickly get an ability that pretty much negates them as a threat. The combat was something I thought was in the outright "bad" territory, even after the fix. Melee feels imprecise and flail-y and the ranged combat doesn't have any sense of impact.

I think the bigger problem is that the game starts out fairly difficult, especially by modern standards, but by the end of the game you have more ability points than interesting things to spend them on.

The other big problem is that the game vastly overstays its welcome. It's easily 30% too long, with a lot of plot twists that start happening for what feel like no other reason than to pad the game length out. A lot of the end game side-quest stuff requires A LOT of passing between pretty interminable loading screens, and that gets real tedious, real quickly. I just starting running past combat encounters by the end because I was just ready to be done with the game.

I think Dan put out a tweet about a week ago that something to the effect of that he played it for a few hours, generally enjoyed it, and will completely forget it in a couple of months, which I feel like is an accurate assessment.

I was neutral on this point. Nothing stuck out as being particularly bad, but but it seemed like there was a limited pallet of sounds they were drawing from, so it got somewhat repetitive after awhile.

Persona 5

Gameplay - 7

Graphics - 7

Sound - 10

Value - 8

Tilt - 7

Overall: 7.4

Persona 5 is a game that will make you love it, until all its little problems make you hate it.

Mass Effect: Andromeda

Gameplay: 7

Graphics: 7

Sound: 7

Value: 7

Tilt: 5

Overall: 6.3

Mediocrity /mēdēˈäkrədē/ (noun): See, Mass Effect: Andromeda

Prey

Gameplay: 7

Graphics: 7

Sound: 7

Value: 7

Tilt: 6

Overall: 6.7

Prey attempts to mimic better games, with mixed results.

Play XII. It makes Chocobo Knights non-stupid at least plausible as war-mounts. Promise.

Also I should ask what you currently think if Sin as an antagonist? When I played I was never able to get over the fact that (a) I always thought it was sort of dumb looking and thus non-threatening and (b) is literally named "Sin," which I find obnoxious in its lack of subtlety.