Uncharted 2, generally regarded as the best in the series, is indeed still in the running.
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Probably gonna get a lot of commentary about this one. So much so that I have two speeches to post up about it! Next up...
And number two...Quote:
It's easy to lose sight of things in a world as wide as this one, but if you keep going you are sure to find what you are looking for sooner or later.
Final Fantasy 13 was perhaps the weakest of the numbered final fantasy games. Many criticised the battle system, the linearity, the lack of side quests and the confusing plot. While all these are true, there is still something about FF13 I find so endearing.
While there are many opinions about the battle system, I for one am a big fan. The ability to jump between 6 individual roles and 3 characters per battle offers over 600 variants of style to choose from for you battle (while it suffers from the same issue FF10 and FF12 had of everyone having the same abilities in end game). Changing up the system mid battle to give an edge leads to the fast paced nature of the battle system and is a change from the traditional turn based systems and leads to a more fluid experience.
One of the greatest joys I received from FF13 was from the monster hunting side quest. Find a stone, locate a tough monster and test your skills. This proved very challenging especially if you were attempting a low level Neochu battle.
One of the main issues with Final Fantasy 13 for me is the plot. To this day, I still don't really understand what happened in the game. I just know that there was a bad dude who needed to be smote and that was enough for me.
The best part of FF13 however is the soundtrack. The soundtrack is glorious.
Blinded by Light
The Yaschas Massif
Desperate Struggle
Chocobo Theme
All in all, Despite its flaws, FF13 is next-gen Final Fantasy. It may have been designed to cater to the Call of Halo 2: Bad Company market that developed during this generation which is why it feels so drastically different from previous iterations of the series, however it still has the same core of a final fantasy game: Dumb hair, an adventure to kill a bad guy, and chocobos.
Go on, one more song.
The Sunleth Waterscape
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We've talked about this one to death to be perfectly honest. I've talked about it, WK talked about it, all of you talked about it. Frankly, I'm not going to say anything new about it and I'm sick of talking about it so I'm going to talk about something else:
http://www.hyundaicanada.com/images/...Page_Intro.jpg
The 2013 Hyundai Accent.
You take one look at it and you think "oh, well this looks pretty sporty," or "I bet this is fun to drive." Just look at it. It's got all of these lines in the body work making it look all sleek and aerodynamic I guess. And it's headlamps look angry like it's just waiting to run over a pedestrian, or at the very least the neighbours dog. But you couldn't be more wrong if you said that insurance companies running healthcare is a good thing.
To start, once you get past the exterior there's just not a whole lot there. You'll be excited as anything when you first jump in and turn that ignition key, but you'll be terribly disappointed when you find that you've put the accelerator to the floor and had time to start and finish reading Game of Thrones by the time you make it to 60mph.
But since it's small and looks sporty, surely it must be fun to drive around a turn? Except you'd be wrong again. The suspension is too soft, and because it's so slow, you'll never be at the edge of your seat wondering if you're going to stick a corner. It won't be a problem because, like so many television dramas, you're not really going anywhere very quickly. And when you do get there you'll wonder why you bothered while wiping away the tears of boredom.
Performance is a no go, but surely their must be something about this car to like. Perhaps the interior is well adorned with all sorts of switches, shiny chrome, perhaps some leather here and there? But there's the final nail in the coffin. Scratch the cars misleading surface and what are you left with? Drab grey plastic interior panels, drab grey fabric seats, and beyond your standard air con and climate controls and iPod connectivity, there's not much else. Underneath that flashy green exterior trying to fool you into thinking this car is something special, there's just not much depth to speak of. No fancy touch screens, sat nav, or leather trim. Just a whole bunch of boring grey.
But worst of all, for such a tiny car, it's fuel economy is just too good. Set out on a full tank of petrol and your trip will last far longer than you will. By the end you'll be begging for someone to syphon your tank while you drain the old gentleman's sausage at the next petrol station, if only so the dreariness will end. But that person, desperate for fuel and short on money never arrives. No matter how many gods you plead to.
So in short, I can't recommend this car at all. It may be a bit pricier, but buy a Ford Focus ST instead. 120 more horsepowers under the hood, 170 more torques, and an exterior that isn't lying to your face.
PS: BoB's stupid.
And some more runner ups:
Mirror's Edge (4)
Kirby's Epic Yarn (2)
Super Smash Bros Brawl (2)
Sleeping Dogs (2)
Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed (1)
LEGO: Lord of the Rings (1)
Final Fantasy Tactics: War of the Lions (1)
Dynasty Warriors 8 (1)
Tribes Ascend (1)
Rayman Origins (1)
I was close to nominating Darksiders.
This much is true. Blinded By Light ranks pretty high on the list of best FF battle themes. Not the top, but pretty high.Quote:
The best part of FF13 however is the soundtrack. The soundtrack is glorious.
Even if LOL is mechanically better (and honestly, I couldn't get into it and haven't played enough to say one way or the other), it's hampered by falling into all of the same free to play traps a lot of games fall into. I'm sorry, but I can't take a competitive game where the full meta game is locked behind endless grind and pay barriers seriously. There's no good reason for it and it saddens me that the most popular MOBA is the one that forces people to put up with that kind of uncompetitive silly bulltrout.
Well when Riot was a fledgling company they didn't really have the existing financial support or an audience the size of Valve's to profiteer off of by drawing in resources from stuff completely unrelated to DOTA2. (Didn't most of the prize money for the International this year come from sales of completely unrelated games?)
The F2P model worked for Riot. LoL is pretty much the most played PC game in the world right now (complete dwarfing the likes of StarCraft in Korea, the place where SC was king for nearly 15 years) and is effectively a license to print money every time they release a new champion. Considering how much money some players have invested into this game, this is a very tricky thing to suddenly change the payment model and game structure of - and Riot, with all due respect, have gone out of their way to refund players when they've re-released limited edition skins etc if players happened to have purchased them when they first went on sale.
And really, to get involved in ranked - where the meta is actually a big deal, you actually have to play it for about 2 months straight to get to max level to unlock ranked. By which point if you're seriously considering taking part in ranked you'll have been able to purchase 2 champions with the RP they give you for free, and will probably have earned enough IP to purchase a 3rd champion and make a full runeset. You also get 7 free champions each week which means even if you never pay a penny, you can still try out a variety of roles.
Whether or not LoL is better than DOTA2 or vice versa, is a different strokes for different folks thing, really.
Whether the model worked for them or not doesn't make it a good model. Honestly, their free to play model is outdated at best and definitely bad for a competitive game. Whether someone can buy a champion or three by the time they start playing ranked doesn't really matter. Giving people a few free ones every week and letting them buy a few by grinding is a terrible way to try out over 100 heroes to figure out what you like, and if your tastes or abilities change as you keep playing, well, tough trout. Pay or grind or gtfo.
And the idea of having to play for months before you can play ranked is also ridiculous. If you want to have a tutorial mode for people to learn the ins and outs, do it. But no matter how bad a player is, there's never a reason to lock them out of ranked play unless you're too incompetent to create a decent matchmaking system. And considering player ranking systems were pretty well figured out decades ago, there's really no excuse.
LOL could be the best competitive game in the world. Too bad it's all locked behind some really bad game design and business decisions and is now completely hamstrung by it now.
Arguing that any of these things aren't that bad would be like arguing that it'd be okay if StarCraft only let you play Terran unless you grinded for months or paid a few hundred dollars, and if the only way to play ranked games was to play through the single player on the hardest difficulty, unlock every achievement, and then play unranked until you've got enough games to unlock all of the portraits for each race.
If they'd been serious about creating a great competitive game from the beginning, they might have tried other pay models like selling character skins instead of characters. But their entire business model feels more like they wanted to make money by any means necessary, then kind of realized after the fact that they had a popular competitive game.
Okay Vivi, you're making a lot of assumptions, and in the interests of not derailing this thread from it's actual purpose I'm just going to agree to disagree with you on this one. :)
The only thing new I have to add about FFXIII is that playing FFVII lately, I see where the origins of this game design came from. VII had so many cinematic sequences in unique environments that are all about getting to the end for a plot revelation. It's part of what separated VII from RPGs that came before it, but in making an entire game based on this concept, they lost the faux-exploration of the world map, the town investigating, the puzzle solving, and the story-based mini-games. Still a good game, though and I don't have a problem with it being on this list.
I apologize, but I get off on denying creeps just before my opponent's attack animation would otherwise have gotten them the gold for the last hit. Exploiting your advantage in skill and mechanics knowledge is what competitive games are all about, and it's incredibly rewarding when you win 45-minute to 1-hour games based on exploiting this throughout. Likewise, the first few minutes of the game didn't need to be fixed - the laning phase can be the most intense part of the game, where you and your opponent lay bare just how good each of you really are at Dota 2.
Vivi summed up how arbitrarily greedy the pay-to-play model is but I'm also turned off as a player. We can go try out any of Dota 2's 106 playable heroes right now if we wanted to; they are all unique to the extent that many of them seem like they belong in other games! This variety is what keeps the game fresh, and there are entire game modes where the beginning consists of each team picking and counter-picking heroes, and the meta game of understanding how to compose and counter a good team is a fascinating aspect all on its own. This is something League players just don't have, not just picking a team with balanced roles, but how one hero pick could completely change the dynamic and outcome of the game. Dota 2 also has a group of heroes which are incredibly difficult to play and learn, and being able to master Storm Spirit, Invoker, and Meepo, regardless of which free heroes I have that day, is such an unbelievably rewarding part of the experience, not only because of how far it shows you've come as a player, but because everyone in the game will understand what you did and why they're losing to you. I'm sure League capitalizes on this same emotion, but Dota 2 just takes it higher IMO.
And not only are your heroes limited in League, but they all share similar qualities - everyone has a heal, a tp, a summon, a skill shot. From what I understand Dota 2 has a much steeper learning curve with more intensity and variety and I would never be willing to give these things up, even if League was a better designed game.
No offence to Aulayna (maybe to Spuuky (SPOILER)jk! :P).
All this discussion about a game not even on the list. xD
Kind of surprised this one made it. I found it to be thoroughly mediocre, and there were plenty of better RPGs this generation. The music was good and it looked pretty, but other than that I found it to be pretty lacking. Interesting.