Little_Socrates

...wait for BlazBlue: Chronophantasia?

I've only lightly enjoyed Guilty Gear or Persona Arena in the max, and I've never really liked BlazBlue. I'm looking to try to get into anime fighters, and I don't know which is the best bet. I'd be getting Ultimax for 360, if it makes a difference.

@brodehouse: Man, Alex's dad SUCKS.

And Boyle is the WOOOOORST i love boyle

Man, that will be one of the the fucking wildest podcast deliberations of the year, callin it. Up there with Minerva's Den.

Uh, my 3 looks like:

1) Alien Isolation: just goddamned incredible end to end, perfect textures, lighting, and direction on where those things should go.

2) P.T.: the visual design combined with the absurd technical prowess of the game lead to a disorienting experience like none other. The fact that you're a little too tall for that hallway; the fact that its walls aren't quite vertical or symmetrical, but you'll only notice if you look closely. The fact that the chandelier light swings so slowly and still so believably. That's what makes P.T. so impressive.

3) Far Cry 4: this one's mostly art direction; Kyrat looks rad, from its mountains and vistas to its beautiful carpets and statues.

And I'm sorry to disagree with you, but Shadow of Mordor was hideous to me. Ugly Gollum, boring looking humans/elves, bad character design for anyone who didn't just look exactly like a movie character, and the first map is just so boring. The art very distinctly put me off Shadow of Mordor. And I'd probably argue The Witcher 2 beats it in a "technical" comparison, whatever that means now.

Also, I'm leaving out Guilty Gear Xrd because I haven't played the retail release, but that demo looks CRAZY. Captain Toad and Mario Kart 8 were my other strong considerations because goddamn those games look good. Oh, and I really like the way Nidhogg moves. It's lively.

It really bothers me that P.T. doesn't have its own wiki page on Giant Bomb. We have no evidence of overlap between P.T. and Silent Hills and they're two totally separate releases.

I only trust people who have kept up with Bombin the AM, 'cause GBwest is pretty ambivalent on this year's games.

It's definitely mine, but I got super lucky. The games I banked on were exactly what I'd hoped (games like Mario Kart 8, Super Smash Brothers, Captain Toad, Alien: Isolation, Far Cry 4, and Persona Q) and the games that turned out to be major disappointments (like Assassin's Creed or Master Chief) had no real appeal to me. The only games that were close were inFamous: Second Son (which was actually mostly neat, except that they failed to do the thing that pulled me to inFamous in the first place) and Metal Gear Solid: Ground Zeroes (which plays better than I'd ever hoped and has a bad, mostly non-present story.) I was a little disappointed by Middle-Earth after hearing so much about it, but it's still neat, too.

But Transistor, as I said above, did nothing for me. It's passable and has some well-drawn stuff in a style I like, but the actual things being drawn have no appeal to me. And nothing about the music, story, character control, mechanics, level design, skill tree, or characters ever interested me.

I actually haven't played the Top 4, but Mario Kart 8 is absolutely one of my favorite games of the year.

...well played.

Jaffe's an irrelevant turd and Ryan was capable of being nice to almost anybody. I've listened to him be a stubborn old fart too many times to care what he thinks of Giant Bomb. I'm glad to know Jeff was always reserved with him because GB's affiliation with Jaffe always rubbed me the wrong way.

I didn't finish it because I thought it was a huge bummer. Messy art design, unremarkable music, clunky, heavy gameplay, and a story I could neither relate to or find thematically interesting. Bastion's one of the best games ever made; Transistor doesn't make the cut.

I would actually argue a few of the Persona characters are better than ever. Naoto's no longer forced to just spout exposition all the time, they're leaning into Yukiko's dark sarcasm in a great way, and Chie's not "dumbly hitting upon the right answer" like she does throughout the back of Persona 4. It's so much better than P4A, which reduced Yukiko to a cooking maniac, Chie to a dumb steak monster, and so on. It's more consistent scene-to-scene than the original game. Haven't hit the Persona 3 cast yet, but if the same love is given to the characters, this might be the best written Persona game yet.