To be fair though, that has been the exception rather than the rule. Sports gaming, which used to be that kind of a thing, has taken a major downturn. Those franchises were churning money like crazy compared to what they do now.

But it's still out there, definitely part of the equation. I mean, it's hard to argue with all-time sales record after all-time sales record.

I think the sports games are hurting with adults but anecdotal evidence (i.e. my own kid & his peers) suggests to me that the younger gamers aren't being affected.

Behind the COD franchise shooters, the most played and most commonly purchased are still the classic sports genres. From about 12-24, those are still what they play night after night, interspersed with the major FPS titles. And they play 'em until the next one comes out, and for most they're still a first day (or at worst first week) purchase.

Beyond those, I see them playing a pretty mixed bag. Usually any other major title has maybe 2-4 owners among his core group of 15 or so players. And because of that limited number, those games get less play (because of the shortage of regular MP partners).

Is it really going that way though ? dunno how trustworthy these numbers are, but here´s what i found with a quick look around one website : http://www.vgchartz.com

According to them NBA 2k13 sold 3,3 mion on 360+ps3, whereas 2K12 sold just 2.5 and 2k11 sold 2.3 mio units (both counted at dec 31st of the release year), FIFA had yet another record year and not small increases either, going from about 8 mio to 9,7 360/PS3 combined.
And that´s not considering the fact that EA and 2K (and other firms) is making more and more money for comparably low cost input with their digital content.
Even Madden 13 sold more copies in 2012 than Madden12 in 2011 (2.2 mio, up from 2 mio for both platforms).

And then you have all those sequels (and onwards ...) in other genres selling like crazy as well.

This game has me excited...

Matrix Games - Buzz Aldrin's Space Program Manager

It would be awesome if you can punch conspiracy theorists with Buzz's fist.

http://www.amctv.com/shows/the-walki...e-walking-dead

Walking dead game out in March. Seems early.

Gah, one too many Dixon's in this game.

J.J. Abrams, Valve in talks for game and Half-Life or Portal*film | Polygon

J.J. Abrahms and Valve are looking to team up for a movie and a game.

This is what I'm more interested in. Looking forward to seeing what comes out in the next year for devices that will let me just pause my game on the PC, pick up a controller and resume playing on my TV in another room.

Completed Act I in PoE. Clarity rocks on a witch. I'm almost near being on auto pilot with Freezing Pulse, and I'm going Ice witch as well. I had to be reminded support gems need to be linked to do anything. Once I can get some better items to link up some stuff I'll be even happier with the build. I'm really wanting to try out Fork with Ice Shard even though Fork is dex based and that's really low on my witch right now.

Played a little bit with Path of Exile-a nice innovation or two like the fact that you don't sell stuff for money but instead for various items to improve your items and such. A new take on the skills tree too-its huge and you can take many different routes around it-makes you really plan out how you want to play your character.

Many Questions: System Shock 2 Comes To GOG | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Perfect way to get ready for Bioshock Infinite.

So I finished Ni No Kuni last weekend. Great game, but there are some flaws that hold it back from that upper echelon of RPG's.

The Good:
Graphics, Sound, Presentation:
The game is beautiful. Rendered anime style with cell shading, it really appears as if you're playing an anime. Similarly, the music is fantastic, really setting the tone of the game well. The voice acting is also superb, and really adds a lot of personality to the game.

Gameplay:
The battle sequences are intriguing, with a dynamic combat system that allows you to wander around the battlefield in real time in an effort to get better position on your opponents for an attack or to get away for defense/evasion. The party system allows you to fluidly swap between 12 different characters in any single battle, and while that sounds like a lot, you only have three characters active at a time, one each from three 'teams' of four. Two of the three active characters are controlled by the AI, and there are some pretty simple commands you can give to have your compatriots either engage all out or go on the defensive on the fly. There are also literally hundreds of creatures that you can recruit to have on your team, enabling you to concoct a diverse team that has a wide array of talents, from physical attacks to magic attacks, high defensive units and healers as well. Though I'll go over its shortcomings in a bit, the combat system is fun as hell and stays interesting throughout the 50-ish hour game.

The Story:
The story is quite well done, with a good bit of behind-the-scenes type subterfuge going on while you follow the main theme. You get to develop a real sense of the main characters involved and why they are doing what they are doing.

The Bad:
Difficulty:
The game is ridiculously easy. There are two difficulty levels, Normal and Easy. On Normal, I was able to plow ahead for nearly the entire game with my stock group of characters without running into ANY problems. Early on in the game, I actually ended up taking on a mini-boss during a side quest with a team that was entirely unsuited for it (Fire damage mob, my team was entirely fire damage dealers and my main physical damage guy had on a fire sword), and we still steamrolled it pretty easily. Not only that, they hold your hand completely throughout the entire game, telling you exactly where to go, when to go there and what to do there when you get there. There are a couple of side quests that make you actually use your head, but they are very few and far between. The game is fun enough that this isn't a major detriment, as it's easy to enjoy even while you're steamrolling it, but it would have been nice if there was a little more difficulty.

Timing in the combat system:
The game is active battle, and some of the spells/abilities/effects have a cast time and/or an animation. Certain animations stop everything and simply cancel any other casts that are going off at the time. It's incredibly frustrating to be in the middle of a heal on your main active character, and have one of the AI controlled characters fire off a spell that literally cancels the ability you were using on your main character. This wouldn't be as bad if it weren't so inconsistent. Some abilities aren't interruptable, and your cast will finish just fine after the animation. Others aren't. Some only get interrupted sometimes.

Similarly, one of the major mechanics of the game is keeping an eye on the enemy to be able to see when they are about to launch a massive attack. When they do, you have a limited amount of time to hit "Defend" so it doesn't crush you. It's a pretty neat system, and once you start to get the hang of it, it's a really fulfilling experience to time it right and nail a defense down before a huge attack lands. However, some of the enemy animations are so long that it doesn't matter if you hit defend at the last moment or not, the animation will take the time of the entire defend action and you are powerless to avoid it...which sort of renders the whole system moot when that happens, and it incredibly annoying.

The AI:
For a game in which the majority of the time you are only controlling one of three characters, the AI is horrendously limited. You have several options on the 'tactics' screen, but what they really amount to are just two choices: "Blow all your MP as soon as humanly possible" or "Never use MP at all." So basically you turn your companions' abilities off until you reach a boss, then have them go all out. There is very little in the way of middle ground here.

Production Value:
The game is utterly phenomenal at this for about the first 35% of the game (15 hours or so). Voice acting (which is superb) everywhere, lots of cut scenes which are short enough that they aren't intrusive. Then, abruptly, the voice acting stops almost completely for the next 20-30 hours of game play. At the end, you get a nice burst of it again, but the gap in the middle just screams "we ran out of money or time during development."

Brute Force-able:
I mentioned this a little in the difficulty section, but your main battle team is comprised of familiars. Each one has a bunch of different attributes, resistances and strengths to various elements. There's a ton of room for customization, and there are hundreds of different familiars you can mix and match to dial your team in as well as you'd like. The problem is that it really doesn't matter. You can use just about any team and make it win. And about halfway through the game, your main character gets so strong that you sort of stop using the team you've built up anyway.

NPC's/Side Quests:
Who cares? There really isn't a lot of personality to the NPCs in the game. Despite a robust side-quest portion of the game in which there is a lot to do, it very quickly boils down to 'walk up to person, read two lines of dialogue, pick the proper spell from the spell menu that pops up, collect reward.' There's also an entire line of quests that only pop up after you've beaten the game. I found myself wondering why they didn't just give them to me before I was done so I didn't have to go back afterward.

---

That may sound like an overly harsh criticism of the game...don't get me wrong, I loved the hell out of it. But there were some decent sized flaws that kept it from being truly fantastic. I'd give it an 8/10.

Seriously disappointed over the reviews for Aliens: Colonial Marines. :(

Same here.

I don't get it. Aliens is just naturally set up for a FPS and if your company can make Borderlands 1 and 2, which are great games in my opinion, how in the hell do you f-up Aliens?? Just wow.

Supposedly Gearbox had a few different studios work on this. TimeGate (made the Fear games) were the ones that did most of the work.

That's the rumor anyway (and one that Gearbox didn't really shoot down when they commented on it).

Who Made Aliens? Here’s What We (Sorta) Know | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Attachment 4553

So I'm playing The Witcher 2, and it's fantastic. Last night I had one of the biggest laugh out loud moments I've ever had in a video game.

In the middle portion of the game, an entire chapter is devoted to curing a woman of poison. You run all over the place, gather a ton of ingredients, and a sorceress begins the process of healing her. It's a pretty dramatic cut scene, the woman is laid out with poison, and the sorceress is tending to her as you and a few dwarves stand by watching. She feeds the woman a magic potion, then uses a comically large syringe in the Pulp Fiction fashion, and finally as the last step takes a magic rose petal, puts it on her lips and proceeds to bend down to give the woman some sort of mouth-to-mouth. Suddenly, in the midst of this fairly intense scene, the dwarf next to you pipes up (voice acted, so he actually speaks):

"Ah, my favorite kind of magic. Lesbomancy."

I'm about 35 hours into the first game and have really been enjoying it so far, though looking forward to finishing it so I can start on 2.

Gearbox is probably in a tough spot here. They don't want to admit it was mostly their work because it's terrible and hurt their reputations, though saying they had another developer do most the work would probably make publishers wary of working with them in the future more than just releasing a bad game would. Who's going to want to sign Gearbox to do their game if they're not sure they're actually going to have it made by Gearbox?

Did you end up going with Iorveth instead of Roche? That scene doesn't sound familiar to me and wonder if that's why.

I am in chapter 3 right now. Very much enjoying this game. It's awesome. Best $7.50 I've spent in ages.

The Wii U sold between 45k and 59k consoles in the US in January according to NPD.

Ouch

Having zero interest in a Wii anything, I'm assuming from your ouch that this is not the figure they were hoping for?

I think they really screwed themselves. Borderlands is great, so they set that bar and that's what everyone expects. I think you nailed it. Any future collaborators have to consider if Gearbox is just going to call it in or they going to farm it out to a substandard 3rd party? It will be interesting to see the fall out from this in the next few months.

Especially when it isn't even a game that the publisher wanted rushed out and they needed an outside crew to help finish in time. Gearbox got the project in 2006.

Yeah, the article I read said that those numbers are lower than any month in PS3 or 360 history. Probably not a good sign for Nintendo. They really need the Zelda game to get here.

I've followed the game since it was announced and IIRC it was initially hyped as a tactical squad based shooter. Kind of like XCom on the ground.

Instead it turned into a laughable pile of shit.

My favorite bit from the RPS review:


and Penny Arcade:

Going to be harder to manufacture scarcity to drive demand this time.

Hopefully they get knocked down to a 3rd party at some point. Don't want another underpowered console just for the 3-5 A+++ games I really want to play.

A new Zelda game may give a brief boost, but it's not going to help that console overall. I'm shocked that anyone's surprised the Wii U is doing so poorly. It made no sense from the moment they announced it and it still doesn't make sense now.

The only thing worse is the leaked PS4 prototype that came out this week with a touch screen in the controller. This just in......if a system sucks (i.e. the Wii U), don't mimic its controller in any way.

Looks like a Dungeon Keeper-like game sneaked up on us.

From Paradox Interactive and Cyanide Montreal: Impire.

Impire on Steam

No official reviews out, but user reviews look promising.

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/arti...Dungeon-Keeper

Dungeon Keeper + Dawn Of War sounds good.

They didn't send out any copies to reviewers prior to release, which usually isn't a good sign, though I haven't read anything bad about it yet. I had seen a video TB did on it while it was in alpha and it looked alright.

Given how Paradox games recently have gone on sale 3 or 4 of them together with all DLC for $10 I think it's probably best to wait on it though.

I did think it was funny how the developers made a point of saying they weren't a part of the main Cyanide sudio.

This guy is streaming the game: BigDrock

The voicework and writing has been excellent so far. Gameplay looks good.

Buying this one now. I'll give a heads up if it's cool.

Yeah, went with Iorveth. I'd be interested to compare notes when we're done to see how much the game diverged because of that. I just started Chapter 3, and the game is really good.

Tweaked my Ice Witch in PoE and somehow came out worse. I did some more tweaking. I got some key gems and the right items to really use them well and now I'm very happy. I got Ice Shard backed with Fork and Increased Crit Damage and 14% quality on the Crit Damage gem.

They are doing one final wipe on passives tomorrow. I'm guessing it is to buff Duelists as that's the one class that gets ripped on.

TBH I prefer the Wii U to the Wii. I never cared for 'waggle' and it became more of a pain in the ass when I moved out of my parents' home, since I have found exactly zero way to get the sensor bar calibrated properly in my current circumstances. I went from playing single player Wii games on a reasonably regular basis to only playing Wii games when visiting friends who have Wii consoles.

My Wii's got 4+ years' worth of dust on it for that reason - it's physically impossible to play in my one-bedroom apartment.

Wii U, at least, the sensor bar doesn't get involved unless players 2-4 are also involved, and practically speaking, I don't play multiplayer games that often anyway. So I can actually *play* Wii U, where I basically couldn't/can't play Wii.

Bioshock Infinite Trailer #2.


These trailers are amazing.

I think I am going to be taking the Witcher plunge real soon.

Looks lile somebody was full of it. I saw no patch notes and I had didn't have to patch anything in.

Still not fond of the distances between way points at times.

I'm really enjoying the demo so far for this Indie game.



Good news! There is a demo version of turn-based tactical strategy game «Crasleen: Drums of War».
In the demo-version there are 4 missions for orc Tharshan and multiplayers (hotseat). The game supports English and Russian languages. Please, leave your comments here or on the forum of the official game site.

Unfortunately, game release postponed to 1Q 2013.
«Crasleen: Drums of War» got in the top-100 best indie-games of year 2012 according to site www.indiedb.com.

Demo-version:
crasleen-game.crasleen.com/crasleen-setup.exe

Official site:
Crasleen.com

News page:
www.moddb.com/games/crasleen-drums-of-wa...-of-war-demo-version

Some more on Aliens: Colonial Marines.


Also, someone uploaded some alpha or beta gameplay of the cancelled Aliens game that Obsidian was working on.



Plus some info from someone who worked on it.

Well that's disappointing.

Orcs Vs Everything: Crasleen – Drums Of War Demo | Rock, Paper, Shotgun

I think everyone is kind of waiting to see what the hell happens, but the PS4 announcement is at 6:00 EST tonight. Should be interesting to see if the leaked prototypes resemble the final product they reveal.

PoE needs to extend the time a portal can last. Killed the boss for the end of Act II. I went to town to dump my earnings and go back to grab more. Without walking away from my PC the portal went away before I was done. From the way point onward was reset. Um, yeah.

I would be interested in that as well. Very curious to see how different things end up depending on that one choice.

Witcher 3 articles starting to emerge. It's going to be open world.

Fuck me. There goes 2014. And I was finally going to start that exercise regimen and quit smoking, too.

Oh boy, looks like it could be really bad for them. Allegations that they used the money SEGA gave them for ACM to work on Duke Nukem Forever and Borderlands. Though since all they had to do was ship ACM to hold up their end of the contract they may be in the clear legally.

Gearbox 'embezzled' Aliens: Colonial Marines money - Destructoid

Seeing as its from Team Meat and sounds bizarre I'll have to give this a try when it's out.

edmundm.com/post/43820398014/mew-genics-official-announcement-on-gameplay