wholehole

May as well get Hardcore out the way, eh? I've just done the bit from the demo and swapped to disc 2. The people who said this isn't scary aren't doing it right. There's been times where I've been bricking it due to not knowing what's likely to jump out at me next. It's been fucking brilliant. I'm not finding it as tough as I was now I've upgraded my RIG's health and armor to max, along with loads more weapon upgrades. Plus, I'm absolutely lousy with medpacks and stasis packs, I'm constantly filling my inventory with them and having to offload the overflow into my safe. Last count was like 41 small and 35 medium medpacks. I was thinking about selling the small ones and using the gels to create medium and large packs but I'm not sure it'll be worth it overall. The one thing I am struggling with is lack of ammo. Constantly scraping the barrel, even had to craft some a few times just to tide me over. It means shooting off the arms and making full use of the blade with Kinesis is absolutely necessary to survival most of the time. I'll never get tired of pinning Necro's to the wall with them though. Totally agree with the Force Gun, it's a beast, as usual. Doesn't do alot of damage but knocks everything in front of you over and pushes them back. I was using the Shotgun with it but since upgraded to another Force Gun with a compressed tip, which acts more like the Contact Beam. Basically one shot to knock them over, the next shot to make them explode. It's so satisfying to explode a Necro after stasis'ing him them grabbing an armblade out the air and firing at another running toward you.

I'm pretty far in now, around the 30 hour-ish mark. The story is excellent so far but the combat can sometimes really tick me off. Most of the time it's fine but there's a few situations like when your familiar gets blocked by the other two familiars and spends it's attack just trying to run towards it's target. Or when you hit Attack and it inexplicably stands there doing nothing at all for the duration. Usually it's just a case of hitting cancel and eating the short cooldown, it's still very infuriating though as you don't have direct control. Or when you hit All Out Defend and no one actually defends so everyone eats a massive attack. The main problem with the All Out Defend command is that you aren't included in that command. You still have to hit defend yourself. The wind ups for the big attacks aren't that long so you have a choice: Hit All Out Defend and hope at least one of the other familiars has listened or forget about it and just defend yourself, you very rarely have time to do both. The worst is when you fight something that has initially run away from you on the world map and you finish the fight on your last legs I've managed to find and tame a Dinocerus, replacing my faithful Mite, which wrecks almost everything and most of my original familiars are in their final forms so normal fights don't last very long thankfully.

Cheers Sly. I was going to ask... When is best to use the Golden Keys? As soon as you can or wait until you're a higher level. I think I have around 16 of them atm.

This is getting a bit old now. So what if a reviewer gave a game 4 arbitrary stars out of 5, they clearly enjoyed it and I'm sure others will as well. We really shouldn't go around calling foul or conspiracy whenever a review score doesn't follow suit with the rest or doesn't fit in with an average consensus. Should the reviewer mark it down so it's more in line with the rest? Of course not. I'm not really sure why we can't just make our own minds up after just playing it instead of this culture of a heavy reliance on review scores and other media tainting opinions before it's even in our hands. I'm a little surprised at the bad reviews tbh, it's not the worst game ever created, certainly no Duke Nukem. If you're a fan of the Alien franchise you'll get some enjoyment out of it, even if it is just a superficial "the Pulse Rifle sounds cool." ASMR. I knew it wasn't going to be an excellent game, I'd also read some of the bad reviews it had received. Despite this, I played it for over an hour last night and whilst it's flaws are plain as day, I still enjoyed playing it just because of the ties to the franchise and I'm glad I bought it.

A friend gifted me this on Steam today, planning on doing it four-player co-op. Played it for a bit earlier on... God damn it's fuuuuun. Why the eff did I wait so long??

Antichamber - Great game, probably most similar to Portal but with less handholding. Almost none in fact, bar a few cryptic clues dotted around. Feels good when you work out and add to the games rules. DmC The Cave Bayonetta Dead Space - Hard - One Gun Kentucky Route Zero Act 1

Super Monsters Ate My Condo is free on iOS at the moment.

Not sure how long these are on sale. Jet Set Radio looks ace on the iPad

Any specific reason to do with the game or just cba? Couldn't see anything on the achievement list that would cause any major problems, except for the Hardcore one as usual, just the time it takes to play the game through multiple times.

Did the first optional mission aboard the CMS Greely, boy was that an ordeal. Bloody excellent though. It seems like the optional stuff nets you loads of extra resources, parts and upgrades so they're definitely worth doing as soon as possible. Also, Force Gun + broken gravity plating = tons of dead Necros. Why waste the ammo?

Go for Normal, you'll be fine. You can always drop it down later if you need to and the only achievement for completion is regardless of difficulty, if that's a concern. I've noticed the standard Slashers will now charge you at the drop of a hat. No more easy targets sauntering carelessly towards you. With the few parts I've found I've only managed to attach a Line Gun underneath my Submachine gun, may as well be using harsh language for all the good it does though. I'll be happier once I've gotten my hands on a Force Gun and stuck some upgrades on it I think.

Erk. May have spoken too soon. Looks like the first chapter is there to get you tooled up a bit before setting off to the far reaches of the galaxy. It's actually quite tough now, very tough in fact. I tried your eyes-open-eyes-closed technique Sam, but my head and arms kept falling off for some reason The enemies are fucking relentless. I mentioned picking your shots on the Wasters... shooting their legs and having them evolve into a super fast, triple-tentacled crawler is not good, especially when you end up with a pack of them coming at you. Hitting them with stasis is almost no help at all as doesn't last anywhere near as long as it used to in the previous games. I'm absolutely gasping to upgrade it and get some better weapons. It's absolutely brilliant though, even better than I expected. I was playing it until 3am last night and still wanted to continue on, I'll just investigate one more room, one more area.

I had no idea there was even an english patch for this. Downloading now

The opening to this game is incredible, they went full blown Uncharted this time around and it works brilliantly. Very glad to see the game proper starts with interleaved vid screen static, I was getting worried as it's kind of a tradition for the series. First things first, make sure you pop into the options menu before you start and switch on classic aiming. This will turn on the classic Dead Space laser sights rather just a reticle. Not sure why this isn't on by default tbh. The change to universal ammo seems to work okay if a little wonky. The two initial weapons you have, a plasma cutter and a submachine gun, don't add up. Reloading the Plasma Cutter from empty uses up 5 clips and gives 10 shots, whereas the Submachine gun uses up 4 clips and give 20 shots. There doesn't appear to be any stats up front for the guns so this is a bit puzzling. I just assumed that universal ammo clips would reload all guns on a one-to-one ratio i.e. one clip per refill. Probably should worry too much, but I like to know how far my resources will go at all times. I really need to get out of the habit of constantly reloading as I usually would in the previous games. Doing this will use up your clips fast as even refilling one shot will use up one clip at a minimum. The new Waster enemies you meet early on are very cool, like a thinking mans Slasher. Because of the way they evolve as you dismember them, going for the easy shots may not be the best way to tackle them depending on the other enemies you're facing. Not liking that they've kept the stamp enemies for loot thing from Dead Space 2, it's kind of annoying to have to stamp everything and see if items jump out. I always imagine Isaac catching these in mid air like the Fonz or something. I'm wondering how the difficulty will pan out as I quickly filled my inventory up with med-packs and ammo during the early part of the first chapter. I started on Hard, but I think this is more like Normal from the previous games. May have to ramp it up another notch if this carries on. I don't want to have plentiful ammo and health constantly as it really lowers the tension.

Loved Jeff's description of The Rock and Vin Diesel fighting, "two meatheads beating the piss out of each other" lol.

@ Simply Games

Never did manage to get through Dead Space 2 on Hardcore. Just didn't have the patience for it in the end I can't decided if the hardcore mode in DS3 sounds better or worse than the previous game. You can save as many times as you like but if you die, that's it. The permadeath thing seems to be the soup du jour at the moment, probably a better way of doing it considering the game's length though. The 8-bit retro mode just applies a filter and derezzes the graphics a bit from what I've seen. Doesn't look great if I'm honest, would've expected something more from finishing it on hardcore.

Still no dispatch from ShopTo. I can see the photo of the jiffy bag it's in on the order summary though, cheeky fuckers. Someone pointed this out to me: Dev Team Edition on eBay. Mental people Just bought The Art of Dead Space, and also the Salvage and Liberation graphic novels. I like Dead Space

DmC - I don't really understand or care what certain "hardcore" circles are moaning about, this game is amazing. As far as I'm concerned it's brilliant, especially with what Ninja Theory have done with the environments and feel of the game in general. It's such a shame that an exception was taken by the players so early on in it's development as it now means that the sales are dwindling and a sequel is less and less likely :( The Cave - Interesting concept, disappointing execution. Needed more puzzles, both individual character based and larger group based ones. An overall puzzle based on piecing together info from cleared areas would've been cool as well. I'd like to go back through with the other characters at some point, but there's no incentive to do so. Bayonetta Dead Space - Hard - One Gun Kentucky Route Zero Act 1

Giant Bomb's Quick Look is up: <iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/4GdgSLs6_mE" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe> Also, DLC coming in March: Source: VG24/7 Sounds awesome, let's hope it can live up to that promise. I won't be watching the Quick Look until I'm fully into the game. I think I may have spoiled a few bits for myself looking through the art book though. Bugger

Cheers Ed. Bought this again for the iPad seeing as it was so good.

9.75? Never understood scoring scales like that. How do you even quantify .25 of a game to be able mark it down such a miniscule amount. Just round up or down gaddammit <blockquote class="ipsBlockquote" data-author="Nag" data-cid="135707" data-time="1360068425"><p>ShopTo have taken my money ... really hoping they dispatch this today.</p></blockquote> Same here. It's going to be an awesome weekend

Bit weird they're releasing them in reverse order, but at least they're coming.

The interest in this is very surprising but I think even if you don't recognise the style as being from Studio Ghibli, it's so striking that people can't help but be charmed by it. I just hope that it's not assumed from this that JRPGs are making a comeback and we end up with a glut of shoddy localised Japanese re-releases. When leveling familiars, the basic food is pretty cheap so it's worth spending any extra cash you have on treats and leveling their stats as much as possible, at least in the early stages before they evolve. I haven't come across a shop that sells the next tier of food yet so I'm not sure whether these have to be alchemised or not. I also found an online Nazcaan translator buried within the Kotaku review: http://www.shiftlimits.com/

Didn't realise Raptr doesn't track PS game time automatically. Bit of a ballache adding the time on in 6 hour increments