What Games are you playing 2015?

[Grefter]

Well... I tend to consider stuff patched in just before expansion as expansion related.  Souls games are living world games like MMOs tend to be, so since the base game and the expansion share servers etc there is a need to mix some of the content in with the base game even if you gate a bunch of the other stuff (like even just to have entrance to the zone like in Dank Souls 2).

Its also a damn good excuse to just go back and patch in extra stuff you think you fucked up or that is low effort decent yield.  (Also tie in hype events etcetcetc)

Presumably the covenant also will fuck around with match making like they always do in ways that are a pain in the arse to document.

Also of course there is Latria call backs in there somewhere (it might not be close tonally, but yeah its probably hearkening back to it) because Latria is Lovecraft and Bloodborne is Lovecraft.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Bravely Default - Start of chapter 4.

Ice Golem (1 reset) - After restocking on items we get another boss right away. Ice Golem is a lot like Behemoth, but largely worse: whatever advantage he gets from not having a type weakness is made up for by 25% less HP, he's still all physical, and now he's almost all ice, too, which is very helpful: I come in with an Iceflame Shield on my Swordmaster and Ice Charms on everyone else (I need to buy a third of these, the first reset is before doing so). He still has a MT attack and some ST attacks.

Nothing Ventured counters with Drain spellblade still make him unhappy, as do default-then-drain-blitz with those who can't use this strategy. The big ripple aside from the usual speedhax problems is that one of his ST attacks can inflict Stop, which I can't block, has a random duration, and is generally kinda annoying. But I'm not in too much danger of being overwhelmed overall.


I arrive in Eternia! Which means I can restock all my items, marvel at the cool new bow upgrade, and promptly not be able to afford it (due to back-to-back bosses draining my item supply). I can also buy X-Potions now to restock between boss fights (I've been trying not to use more than 5 per boss) but they are really expensive, so I'll be trying not to rely on them too much, at least for now.

Eternia map randoms can be pretty mean. Silver Wolves paralyse me which kinda wreck me until I pull out Ranger's passive to immune that, then they can die to the normal strategies of default-then-blitz and "default to 1 BP, drain and Nothing Ventured, spam Nothing Ventured". Mandragoras appear in packs of six which can be kinda overwhelming with their MT attacks (which poison!), but drain counters completely wreck them (getting everyone to survive the battle is slightly trickier, but not essential anyway). Liliths charm, not much I can do about that noise beyond the usual "switch to a shield and punch them" strategy.


Victoria & Victor (1 reset) - The first fight since i got swordmaster which really makes the counterers not very good. Too much status/utility, and it's all ST, so the chance of a counter activating is pretty low. I still decide to have my Swordmaster spam the magic counter because those ST spells (Dark and Holy) can hit pretty hard and halving/autohealing them is nice, especially when Victoria is below half HP and often braves to use Dark twice. Otherwise Victoira will use MT poison (I block this with everyone, to seal off Exterminate), and Corpse which kills someone after 4 turns (no BP gained the turn it kicks in). Corpse is a real pain but at least it means I don't have to worry about healing the afflicted. I do try to get their BP up to 3 when they die in case reviving them proves hairy in some way.

Victor, aside from Holy, mostly uses Fairy's Aid which boosts elemental damage of one of them by 50%, but costs an extra BP. Not a great move, even though I can't dispel it! He'll heal either of them when their HP is low but this can't outpace my offence and isn't a big deal, though does drag out the low-HP Victoria phase a bit.

Not a trivial fight, hence the reset, but also not too bad. Once I kill Victoria, the fight becomes super-easy, the only ripple being that I burn loads of Phoenix Downs in the first phase (either an elemental spell OHKOing a non-defaulting, non-countering PC, or Corpse, or just other damage adding up at a bad time / speed-haxing) such that I actually only have 3 left by the time Victoria falls. This proves more than enough for the rest of the fight. I'm Level 45.


Oh yeah I also rolled my final job and it is Dark Knight, oh ho ho. This leaves my final team as Monk, Spell Fencer, Ranger, Swordmaster, Dark Knight. Very physical! Currently my big upcoming problem is Gigas Lich, who immunes my overreliance on draining and buffs his stats (which I have no way to dispel or remove)... and aside from good offence and draining, I have nothing particularly good against the final two bosses, so it'll be interesting to see how they go.

[AndrewRogue]

Watched Ashley play Journey.

it is pretty much as good as advertised. She made a friend. Quite a touching little journey.

[Twilkitri]

Half-Life - played through

At this point in time, I can't really consider the game to be particularly impressive. Who can say how I would have felt about it if I played it back in the day.

On several occasions I got stuck in geometry, and not intricate geometry either. I'm talking like the 'airlock' you walk through right near the start of the game, the game decided that I was walking close enough to the edge of the wall during a map transition to get me stuck in it. Got stuck in geometry across a map transition which occurred in a pipe a couple times until I jumped across the transition point.

Pretty much every time the game decided to have something I was walking in break and fall down that I can remember it didn't work properly the first time and ended up killing me or severely injuring me.

Tanks are the worst things, and I was playing on easy, so I don't want to know what they do to you on harder difficulties.

The teleport tower was terrible, as far as I could tell you typically couldn't see where you were going to end up even once you knew where a particular teleporter was going to go so you couldn't really time landing on platforms, and actually jumping into the tower was bizarrely finicky for some reason and most of the time I'd end up falling to the bottom.

The fight against the spider/crab boss broke in a non-obvious way and eventually lead to me having to restart the map once I looked into why it wasn't dying.

Shotgun didn't seem anywhere near as powerful as it ought to have. This isn't really a problem per se, just something I was disappointed in.

Tranq bow was very difficult to use properly underwater, given that it's theoretically the main underwater weapon. Not sure how well I would have done with underwater fights on harder difficulties.

Game was fine when it wasn't being actively annoying. Or setting up close-range fights with military.



Tick Tock Isle - played through

It's fairly enjoyable but has much too much backtracking. Also very short, but was entertaining enough to counteract that. But the backtracking.

Ultimately I didn't end up completing some 'sidequests' because once you get close enough to the end of the game you get locked off from doing so, and it's set up such that you can't really see it coming. Didn't really feel like replaying, although to be fair there should be less backtracking on a replay if you can remember where most things are.



Card City Nights - played through

Fairly enjoyable. Can't really offer an opinion on how well-balanced it was.

My decks mainly fell on the side of trying to disable as many of the opponent's cards as possible and ideally run them out of free spaces. This didn't work with everyone, although most people it didn't work against I was at least able to wait out until they ran out of cards.

I'd say that the most difficult opponent in the game is Fiery Woman, who has a hyper-aggressive deck and also has the Ittle Dew DX card (which essentially makes you lose one HP every turn). It took me innumerable attempts to beat her, and I had to end up falling back on attacking her directly rather than disabling her cards (which was at least helped by her having very little in the way of HP restoration).

It took me several attempts to beat the final boss as well, but that's mainly due to the final boss being a jerk rather than them actually being a good player. Didn't take me anywhere near as many attempts as it took to beat Fiery Woman.

I'd like to get a complete card collection but the game doesn't actually give you any aid with this (i.e. there's no list of which cards you don't have, or even a count of which cards you don't have, and so on). So I'm not going to do that.

There are a fair amount of interface issues with the game. A few of them are as follows:

• All lists can only be shifted one row at a time. In a per-click sense via arrow icons, or in an accelerating way by dragging what would typically be the pane slider to the top or bottom. (i.e. you drag it to the bottom, the list shifts down one row. After a short delay if shifts down another row. As you hold it down the delay gets shorter.) You can't select a position with the thing which is in the place of the pane slider, and you can't shift a page at a time by clicking between the thing which is in the place of the pane slider and the arrow buttons.
• The alchemy interface lists all your cards, not just ones which can be used in alchemy. The ones which can be used are highlighted, so it's not like it's supposed to be secret. Even further, once you've selected a card, it reduces the highlighting to ones which work in combination with that card, but you still need to look for them through the entirety of your library.
• Say you put together an attack combo, and the opponent doesn't have any cards on the field so the only available target is their HP. You still have to manually click on their HP, despite it being the only thing you can actually do. There's an argument that what you're doing needs to be clear, but there must be a better way of going about it. (Setting up a revive combo when there are no valid targets doesn't force you to hit anything to accept that that's what's happening or anything.)

When there are competing rules, for example if there are two cards on the field which both do things at the start of a turn, it isn't clear which one of them is going to trigger first.

The card shop only sells cards which you already have (and which aren't rare). So say you have one copy of a card, which is currently buyable. You use your copy in alchemy. Now you can't buy it any more to replace the one you used. From one perspective you should've bought another copy beforehand, but you typically don't know what you're going to be using in alchemy ahead of time, so that changes the steps to 'Go to the science lab and enter the alchemy tool. Find a pair of cards you want to alchemize. Leave and go to the mall and go to the card shop and re-find the cards in question and buy extra copies. Then leave and go back to the science lab and re-enter the alchemy tool and re-find the pair of cards in question and actually go ahead with it.'.

It feels like the deck builder could really have used some filters - for example, to find every 'attack' card which has arrows pointing left and right, for example. Currently all you can do is change the ordering.

You can't use every ordering in every instance of the list. I can't remember the situation exactly, but there was at least one time where I wanted the list ordered in a way which was available elsewhere but it wouldn't let me order it that way in that particular instance.

You can't have rematches with every character. I was hoping that they would be unlocked after the end of the game, but that just unlocks rematches with the people who had legendary cards. There's no way to rematch Magical Fox, for example. The game teases having some sort of superboss rematch against Excitable Student but as far as I can tell that never actually happens.

The Card Gods suck and I'm pretty sure I beat them all on my first attempts.



Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, And The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist - played through twice

Pretty enjoyable. Pretty short. Pretty free.

No real branches like Stanley Parable, in case anyone wanted to hope for that going in. I did a second playthrough as an obedient helper and it didn't really change anything.

Tried to collect all the money on my first run without realising that it was an actual goal, ended up failing anyway. Not going to bother retrying that.

Apparently I missed a tape recorder on both runs so that's something you might want to look for.

[SnowFire]

Dr. Langeskov, The Tiger, And The Terribly Cursed Emerald: A Whirlwind Heist -  Thanks for the tip, Twikiltiri!  Still...  it's short, yet I'm still disappointed.  Maybe that was the intent?  Also...  why are they giving this away for free?  What's their angle here?

I guess it's fine, but play The Stanley Parable first if you haven't already, because it's better and actually has some sort of agency / variety in it.

[Fenrir]

Dr Langeskov was different enough from Stanley Parable to be worth it.
I really liked that final punchline.

[Dark Holy Elf]

Legend of Legacy - So the final boss has two targets. One of them, the one I arbitrarily decided to kill first, apparently has infinite HP, with no clues to this (e.g. auto-healing after a certain point, regen, taking no damage, etc.). I fought the fight for over an hour and a half before figuring this out. That's definitely a bit of a "good will towards the game is shot" moment.


Braev Lee Defaults

Eternia Command has a pretty rough mix of randoms overall. The Eternian soldiers themselves include a mage which does magic damage (duh) and can cast sleep which is annoying: both of these mix up counterstrats. Also messing up counterstrats is the fact that the spearman has an initiative attack which can sometimes beat out the counterstance (both the counter and the damage halving). Actually that can mess up everyone. Fortunately they're all weak to lightning and not super-durable. The Raikiri makes it (presumably?) final appearance here.

Liliths are back, they still have physicals that charm. There's a bigger, uglier Archdemon who also has a physical that charms, for those who are into that. I only have one charm-blocker, it goes on the swordmaster, which says much about how much I lean on that class here. She switches to the Birch Bow (demon-slayer) against these guys, and I can take 'em down with whatever. Yet another demon, the Teufel, sometimes uses weak lightning magic, which can be nulled by Raikiri or countered with Before Swine... but not at the same time, I learn.

I generally haven't bothered with FAQing or searching for hidden treasure, but I do here, picking up the Excalibur, anticipating any holy weaponry being potentially valuable against Gigas Lich. It sees no use before him, though, as its power far trails the bows, particularly the Killer Bows I can buy now.

Killer Bows aren't nearly 25% in practice, for the record, but it's nice when they do kick in. I do wonder how status odds work in this game. Int stat...?


Braev - He's a bit reminscient of Artemia, in that he defaults a lot, generally building up BP, then as his HP drops he increasingly uses it up instead (only going into negative BP at the end of a round if his listed HP is below half). The big difference is this repeats three times, as he has three HP bars, and he swaps back and forth between his general AI trends as the battle goes on. The trends are just that: trends, and I can never 100% predict when he'll default and when he'll brave, except that he always braves if he reaches 3 BP.

The big problem here is Radiant Blast. Buying Light Charms would help, but I don't. It ignores default and can pull OHKOs. Ow! What does it not ignore? Why yes, counterstances, so those are huuuge here, I have two PCs using them with drain spellblade of course. I generally default more when I expect him to default, and Nothing Ventured when I don't, leaving spare BP for various things. The attackers are vulnerable to just dying, but do reasonable damage/draining otherwise. Qigong Wave and Targetting give them both methods to ignore his damage-quartering(!) Default, so I never actually have to deal with that. This party really matches up well against Braev, in general.

It's still a pretty rough fight, and it's kinda surprising that I have no resets on it since it's honestly the hardest of the three C4 boss fights so far (spoiler: it won't be the hardest overall). I burn through some ungodly number of Phoenix Downs (40?) and burn a few X-Potions but not too many (5-10). But not too bad. I'm Level... I forgot to write it down, damnit. But around 48 or 49.


On to Everlast Tower. The randoms here are a bit different, and I end up dropping counterstrats as a major thing here (so the swordmaster uses Multitask-enhanced physicals), because the bread-and-butter enemy here is the Earth Lantern, which uses ST magic about half the time. More? Incidentally, that magic is earth, and Swordmaster has Abate Earth as a Level 2 ability. I anticipated this and got it for everyone. It helps.

Other than them there are a few 13.5k HP (pretty bulky) randoms. Gastric Worms aren't too bad, they have a MT physical that low 2HKOs though. Still, all physical, so counterstrats can work, and lowish defence + bug weakness means I can fell them pretty fast. They're also pretty easy to put to sleep and always appear either solo or with a single Earth Lantern. Far more dangerous is the Mailed Dragon, which hits really hard (solid ST 2HKO or solid OHKO with a 1-BP-cost Rush), and surprisingly durable (high defence, often defaults), and can appear in pairs. Finally, appearing late in the dungeon there's the Daedalus, some big beast enemy which can berserk itself to hit really hard but isn't too bad otherwise. Sleep works pretty well on them too, especially since once berserked there's no downside to sleep-then-wake-up on the same turn (which gives them a BP in exchange for cancelling their turn... but berserked enemies can't use BP).

As you can tell sleep makes a bit of a return in this dungeon, for all that earth lanterns are immune and dragons resistant. So does Squeaky Wheel, which is great for controlling one dangerous enemy when that's all I'm down to (it does break sleep though, so I need to be careful). Drain spellblade still gets a bit workout, and counters do see play against non-earth-lanterns. A few resets here and there, certainly.


Gigas Lich - Hey this doesn't seem so bad, drain may be walled but Quaga's weaker than I remembered and Fear/Death are okay, I've totally got this- *fully boosted Slam does over 4k damage to non-defaulting PCs, with no warning* oh fuck

[AndrewRogue]

Shantae and the Pirate's Curse: Fuck that last Cacklebat. Took an annoyingly long time to find. Also, kinda annoyed they suddenly introduced a ton of precision platforming in the last dungeon.

Fun, but I think kinda overrated? There are a lot, lot, lot of little niggling problems with the game.

[Shale]

Guacamelee! - Played through, beat, got all the secret collectables and beat again for the frue ending. Very fun luchador-themed Metroidvania beat-em-up, in no small part because it is a lucha libre metroidvania beat-em-up. Good combat, great style, and while there's not a ton of exploration relative to the rest of the genre it's more than enough to make the game fun to poke through. The platforming gets frustrating at times, especially later on, would be my main complaint.
Also, it's definitely worth shelling out an extra couple of bucks for the updated version of the game (Super Turbo Championship Edition instead of Gold Edition); it's got better controls, better combat, more stuff to find, just a far more enjoyable experience start to finish.

Borderlands The Pre-Sequel! - Started this because it was cheap on the Steam fall sale, playing as Baroness Hammerlock because I'm 2/2 playing Borderlands as a sniper and might as well make it 3/3. It's definitely a stand-alone Borderlands 2 expansion, but I haven't touched BL2 since 2013 so it feels fresh enough to me.

[Sierra]

The existence of a character named Baroness Hammerlock almost makes me want to play something just so I can be a character named Baroness Hammerlock, but my brief experience of BL1 was considerably less than stellar (flat humor, rote shooter gameplay, blargh randoloot etc.)

[Shale]

Also she's DLC.

[Excal]

BL1 is easily the worst of the series, though the only thing to really see a lot of improvement is the writing.  The rest is just a lot of polishing.

[Grefter]

They are also terrible solo.  Newer ones are better than BL1 solo, but they are still pretty terrible.  So you would want to play with like Super or something (there is no friendly fire).

[Fenrir]

Cid, in BL1, the loot and shooting get even worse as you play more. I played BL2 and it didn't change anything about it.

The loot system works well with a Diablo style overhead / isometric view, because you can quickly look at new loot and compare with your stuff, plus move and look at menus at the same time.
The field of view also means that enemies can be physically close to you but not aggroed (just a little bit off-screen), so you can go back to the fray right away.
 
In Borderlands the first person view and loot system actively work against each other, as looking at different weapon stats is slower because you have to manage the weapons in a 3D environment, the big menus get in the way and you can't move at the same time, you have to look down / up to look at new gunz all the time and it will give you a migraine.
And the enemies are pretty far apart so you have to walk a lot.

In the end there's way more tedium than action, and the action doesn't have any punch anyway, plus levels matter way too much and skill doesn't.

Multi? Couch co-op is out of the question unless you have a huge TV because these hard lines will make split screen unwatchable. Also play Towerfall instead.
Online? This solves the problem, but it's probably more boring, and I hope your buddies don't take too much time comparing stats or you will go mad. Play Duck Game instead.

Man. BL1 would have been Game of All Time in 2005, yet I find it 100% unbearable now. BRB going to lower its rating again in the ratings topic

[Fenrir]

Anyway I haven't had time to play Bloodborne much.

So I have played inflation rpg. This shit is weird. Probably has stolen art from 30 different games.
At least this isn't a skinner box.
In short it is half minute hero but less good and always on the same huge map instead of different levels, and you can keep your stuff when the timer runs over. (But not levels) There's no timer but there's a set of random battles you can do before the game ends.
Yeah this doesn't sound like half minute hero anymore but trust me.

[The Duck]

Borderlands games are mostly okay if you do couch co-op. Playing solo makes you a little more aware of how lousy the shooting is. It not being skill based at all is also a huge problem. I did co-op lower leveled than my friend and was completely worthless until I caught up.

BL1's world is super drab and boring upon second glance although I think I like its cast more. BL2 adds more to the world but the writing is obnoxious, juvenile, and meme-y (Tiny Tina and Handsome Jack are pretty insufferable). Tales from the Borderlands is supposedly pretty good which is surprising since I can't imagine caring about anything in this world, but maybe that's Telltale helping with most of the writing duties.

Life is Strange: I didn't play this but watched a friend get through it this weekend. The writing in the first episode is very cringeworthy at points, with weird projections of teenspeak like "hella," like a bunch of 40 year old dudes came together and figured that this is how millennialyouthteens talk. Also the main character makes reference to how awesome Final Fantasy: Spirits Within is. Sometimes corporate overlord decisions are hilarious, but this just made me groan. The writing tightens up after the first episode as the game gets more time to let its characters grow. Many of the secondary characters in the school seem a bit one note but the game does a fairly good job avoiding making them just one dimensional high school caricatures. I'm not too big into time travel and some of the advantages that you get from the knowledge you gain from rewinding are weird. Like, one character is standoffish until you rewind and find out her last name? Or some dumb skater kid calls you a poser until you learn about tre flips from him, rewind, and then he says "oh you're not a poser" even though Max clearly doesn't know what she's talking about.

The best use of the time travel mechanic to me came from small, constrained situations where many of the situations involves you fucking up so you keep rewinding and trying new things in order to find a way forward, and the best ones are like Rube Goldberg contraptions. There are at least two situations that stood out to me that did it well, and they reflect the limits of what you (Max, a teenage girl) can realistically do in order to affect change in situations where she doesn't actually have much physical control. She has to get by on knowledge acquired by failing.

The game also does a good job having background things going on in terms of Max's journal and her text threads with various characters, which aren't necessarily part of the gameplay. Max chronicles major events that happened before the game to give you some background and her interactions with friends and parents often reflect her inner state and reactions from these events.

I didn't necessarily love it but I also wasn't playing it myself so I didn't have a ton of control over the choices made. My friend was really thorough and tried to get all the flavor text from the game, so I do have a decent idea of what it had to offer. It has some good ideas for sure and is probably worth playing ($20 total so not that bad) if you like this kind of adventure game. I do think playing it during the time it was released and waiting for episodes instead of playing it all at once may have helped a bit, since the game does a good job of ending episodes on a dramatic note.

SPOLIARS
So I've read that people complain that all of the choices you've made up until the final choice don't matter since the endings don't change. While that is true on the face of it, I think that is missing the point a bit. Your choices do matter insofar that how you have chosen to interact with the characters in major or minor interactions will have an effect on how you make your final choice. In essence, the final choice is a version of the trolley problem in philosophy/ethics, where your decision will result in one person killed or an entire town getting destroyed. The twist is is that the one person is your best friend. An interview with one of the Telltale people said that their ideal when it came to choices was for there to be an even split for players between two decisions, and that is basically what the playerbase has here.

To me (and my friend agreed), it wasn't much of a dilemma, and part of that is because I don't think either of us ended up actually liking Chloe very much. She is brash (endangering herself and others, including Max) and often selfish and she doesn't necessarily treat Max very well. While her circumstances and many of her outcomes are tragic, in the end, she does ask Max to sacrifice her, which is one of Chloe's truly selfless acts and shows maturity and acceptance. The dilemma comes in whether Max herself could make that decision, I suppose, but my friend had gone out of her way to try and maintain good relationships with most of the characters. It seems cruel to save Kate Marsh from suicide only to have her wiped away in a tornado, for instance. That made the decision much less difficult than it could be, since this Max had a lot of stake with several of the townspeople and her peers vs her childhood friend who popped into her life last week. From what I've read, some people really fucking love Chloe and they saw her as more of a romantic option, and maybe then the calculus becomes different (other versions of the trolley problem use a loved one dying vs like five people dying for instance), but that wasn't how things played out for us.

The way that the final decision came down to those binary options is pretty contrived, so I do think that is a fair criticism.

*Kate Marsh's situation mirrors a friend I had growing up who attempted suicide, so that did resonate with me. I don't know what I would have been able to say in a situation where you are literally talking them out of it, so I can't speak to whether the game's dialogue here is accurate, but it did strike a cord. Seeing the video where you mess up and she kills herself was pretty sad (I know I know, video game characters).
*Jefferson is a scuzzy piece of shit who I disliked from the moment the game started. After he victim blamed Kate I knew something was off with him.
*Victoria didn't get much of a redeeming arc for us, but in a demonstration of how making a choice can have unintended consequences, if you are nice to Victoria and warn her about Nathan, she goes to Jefferson and is murdered.
*I think an interesting question is what kind of person Max is, and I guess that is kind of reflective of what you decide to do. Are you really connecting with some of the characters or telling them what you want them to hear in order to get a favorable reaction? If you really don't know them well enough to cheer them up or to get them to help you, are you really their friend or are you actually meant to be friends? Max doesn't seem to be a manipulative person (Victoria with these powers for instance would be monstrous), but in a lot of ways she's a blank slate as a teenager without much self confidence, at least in the beginning.
*The situations where the time travel mechanic looked the most interesting was in the scene where you are trying to hide the keys from Chloe's dad and the scene where you have to do things in order to warn David about Jefferson so that he can save you.

[Twilkitri]

As far as I understood things the issue was less that the endings don't change and more that both endings essentially obliterate the choices which were made. In the Sacrifice Chloe ending, in addition to the events of the week turning out significantly differently in the first place, 'interim' Max who doesn't know that she has time powers or any of the things which 'main' Max knows is in control until she gets tossed out at the end of the week. In the Sacrifice Arcadia ending there are arguments that a lot of the people involved may have died.

I personally went with Sacrifice Arcadia mainly because I didn't believe that it was going to be played as straight as the option was named. Infuriatingly, the ending refuses to actually say anything about how lethal the destruction actually was, although I'm pretty sure you can see the diner being suspiciously nonexploded. There's also the issue I've since seen brought up that no-one who blames the time travel for the environmental crisis & tornado actually has any authority on the matter to stand on, so as far as Sacrifice Chloe is concerned you could be engineering her death for no actual benefit. (I'll note that I haven't seen the Sacrifice Chloe ending, so I don't really know what it says with regards to the crisis/tornado.)

It also raises the question of whether the tornado was caused by time travel itself or by Chloe's continued existence. The segment with Chloe's father slams stakes into both options - the crisis/tornado doesn't show up in the past after you were time travelling in the past or after Chloe's father continues living. Only the same time it was seemingly always going to turn up.

If you go with it being caused by time travel itself, then you can make the argument that the reaction to the time travel is always going to happen in the 'real' time, but personally that argument feels kind of dodgy.

One somewhat interesting theory I've seen around is that Max is actually an 'interim' Max herself, suggested as a way to explain some of her confusion at the start of the game. I don't remember the start of the game too well, so I can't really say how well that stands up as a possibility. But, if it's true it's interesting in that it means that interim Maxes can learn time travel themselves, making Sacrifice Chloe even less of a guaranteed option, and it means that she will be annihilated at some point for an further outer 'main' Max to take over.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

Borderlands games are mostly okay if you do couch co-op.

Couch co-op makes basically every game better and that's why I'm so sad that most games anymore don't have it

[Sierra]

Couch co-op stood out as the only redeeming feature when I did play it (was killing time at the brother's place). The squashed split-screen was kinda painful but still seemed way more fun than playing it solo could possibly be.

[Excal]

I feel odd.  Unlike every other shooter I have ever played, I just don't like Borderlands split screen.  I've enjoyed it well enough, but just because the people I've played it with have added enough to the experience to make up for the detraction of the splitscreen.  Whereas I find more than enough gratification in the single player shooter mode.

As for what I'm playing...  continuing with my fascination with the old, I decided to whip out FF8.  Of course, since I couldn't find FF8, this proved to be a problem.  I'd make a crack at this point about "since I didn't want to play anything good..." but I went with Legend of Dragoon.  And frankly, just because it isn't FFT, or Xenogears, or Suikoden 2 doesn't mean it isn't good.

Of course, let's start with the terribleness that we all knew was coming!  PSX Voice Acting!  It is every bit as bad as I remembered!  It also takes those old pre rendered backgrounds and sticks the guidance arrows FF7 had and forces you to use them.  It's good they have them, because you need them, so much.  But you can't turn them off on the many occasions where you don't.  The dialogue is also stilted in a lot of places, which isn't too surprising since this is about the point where people started to pay for decent translations, and the really good jobs therefore all still suffered from some kind of issue (though I'll still argue that Woolsey's artistic vision was generally for the best, I am far more ambivalent about Working Design's.)  Then there's Shana, whose whole purpose so far is to be a plot device and generally be devoted to Dart, and nothing else.  Oh, and be weak.  Y'know, I just realized it, but there's a lot of similarities between her and Rosa.  Granted, every now and then they switch things up, like when she grabs the bow and arrow to fight, or when it's Lavitz that slips and falls instead of her (bad move Shanna, saving someone who just slipped is a sure fire lead in to romance!  And how can Dart say no to a guy named Slambert?), but yeah...

On the other hand, the game play is reasonably interesting, and it's still my favourite take on the timed hit system.  I had forgotten that Dart, unlike a lot of RPG protagonists, is actually making decisions and has his head screwed on straight pretty much from the beginning.  He was adventuring before the plot started, sure his home town getting destroyed kicked off the plot, but it specifically started this plot, Dart would have been out fighting anyways.  When he gets the opportunity to find a place to hide, or at least get back to his personal problems and goals, he chooses to get involved because he has the skills to help Basil, and he wants to help them.  And all of this happens before he becomes a Dragoon, so at this point he's just a badass fighter, but nothing really special.

Adding to this, you've got the Dartmaster Bromance, which is pretty excellent.  The two of them really do work well together, and they have the best chemistry in the cast so far.  And you've got Rose.  Right now she's pretty much all style, but she's harsh and practical and is willing to go along and help the group.  Now, if her mysteries weren't revealed, or if they were bad, then she'd be a much worse character, but I recall them being solid enough. 

As for the plot, it's a nice low stakes beginning.  You've got a simple civil war, an ancient legend which wasn't 1000 years ago (though, I think they don't quite get how freaking long 11,000 years is), and a few hints that the two are actually connected.  It all holds up quite well after the years.

[Fenrir]

Compare Borderlands split screen with Goldeneye split screen and a big issue with Borderlands co-op becomes pretty obvious.





That clutter man.
(Though again it might be tolerable on a gigantic screen)

Borderlands couch co-op is honestly one of the worst couch multiplayer experiences you can get nowadays, but it does provide progression, which is often absent from couch MP. As far as progression based couch multiplayer games go I'd rather recommend Diablolikes over it (GC Baldur's gate, Dungeon Siege 3, I'm probably missing new ones)

[Shale]

Couch co-op would require playing an FPS with a controller. Fuck that.

[Grefter]

You play Borderlands on 4 PCs with voice chat or in the same room what the fuck is wrong with you guys.

[Anthony Edward Stark]

You play Borderlands on 4 PCs with voice chat or in the same room what the fuck is wrong with you guys.

Lesser races don't understand the glory, Gref. 

[Grefter]

They could at least I dunno play on Vita or something?

You guys should probably maximise your ability to talk shit about the shooters I play at the moment though.  Counterstrike introduced a new gun that is some amazingly bad balance, so for once the most popular CS variant isn't the best competition FPS at the moment.