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Console Gaming Thread!
You know the score.

Thread for all your console gaming needs, discussions, game recommendations, questions, feedback, reviews, etc etc.

Post and enjoy!

P.S. Including old consoles too, although it's the newer ones people seem most excited about.
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Mirror's Edge 
I still think it's one of the best looking games in a while, I still regularly look through the 200+ screenshots I took while playing for inspiration.
Yeah the story is pretty much, and those cutscenes are horrible.
I loved the innovative gameplay though, it had it's flaws, but at least it was doing something new. 
MIrror's Edge (continued) 
Not sure why I forgot I had more stuff to talk about:

UI

Mirror's Edge has no HUD at all (almost -- you have a crosshair which is alway visible by default but you can turn off entirely, or you can set it to only appear when you are holding a gun. Player health is represented by screen effects (first the screen gets desaturated, then red haze appears on the edges, then you die.)

Also the health regenerates. If you wait 5-10 seconds after getting hurt, you will heal back to full health. So as long as you at least survive a gunfight you will be as good as new in short time.

Finally, the other stat you need to worry about is your "bullet time" mode, which is a one-use ability that regenerates after some time has passed (or you run a certain distance, i think.) Once again, no HUD for this, you just remember if you used it or not.

I would say that this is one of the areas where the UI could have been better. There is no sound effect to indicate that you have entered bullet time mode, no obvious sound/ambience change during bullet time, and no sound effect when attempting to use it when it has already expired. Those little changes (plus maybe a screen blend when in bullet time) might have helped polish this feature a bit more and make it nicer to use.

Finally, there is a "disarm" mechanic where you have to hit the "grab gun" button at a certain moment during an enemy's armed-melee move (enemy will attempt to hit you with his gun and you can grab it and disable him with a special move.) It's timing based and your clue is that his gun turns red at the split second when you should hit the button. Good so far, but probably an audio success cue and failure cue might have helped reinforce this mechanic.

These are minor complaints though, overall the gameplay UI is really good.

Trademark Dispute

Another thing that's great about this game is it gave EA a reason to sue that Edge Games guy and win. In case you're not aware, there's this guy who makes no games himself, but spends his time suing anybody who has the word "Edge" in their products. This includes the excellent iPhone game "Edge", "Mirror's Edge", EDGE Magazine, and others. Anyway, EA went after him and he lost his trademarks. 
Yeah 
Mirror's Edge is fun. Its gameplay feels very smooth, a bit like speedrunning made easy. I didn't mind the comic cutscenes, but I agree they weren't particularly great, either. 
Also 
People did comment on the game in the PC games thread. 
Crosshair 
think I read in an interview that it was only added to have something for people to focus on to not get dizzy (I might be confusing this with some other game though) 
XBox Kinect 
Quite fun actually. Some facts: The damn thing moves by itself! It can adjust its vertical pitch. Mine worked on a really old 1st gen XBox which has never been hooked up to the net. Its really easy to use :) 
Hadn't Heard About The Edge Guy 
Wow, what a shit for brains. 
What... 
Mirror's Edge had bullet time?!
Is it possible that I played through the whole game without using it? Or did I just forget about it. 
Fable 3 
Fable 3

Whoops. It would appear that Peter Molyneux thought that even Fable 2 wasn't "accessible" enough for his grand vision, and so decided to aim Fable 3 at a demographic that seems to lie somewhere between "casual gamer" and "vegetable". Maybe he was upset because his pet dog struggled to get to grips with the xbox controller. We all know how he likes his little doggies.

The game basically plays itself. You can't die, combat is practically automated (just mash the "shoot gun" button if enemies are vaguely in the same shire as you and the computer takes care of all that pesky aiming and killing and stuff). There's no need to accumulate money because you can literally just sleepwalk through the game without bothering to purchase a single item, but if you get bored and decide to play monopoly you can buy up every single property in the game well before the end and you'll soon have more money than Lionhead pissed away on the voice cast (but with absolutely nothing in the game to spend it on).

Apparently it was decided that hardcore concepts like menu systems and HUDs are too confusing for the game's (likely sub-simian) target audience, so every little micro-task (like selecting a different weapon or accessing a map screen) now requires you to quit into a sort of in-game lobby where you have to physically walk your character into different rooms to do basic character management shit that really does not need to be this drawn out and involved. It's a novelty for all of the first three times that you do it, but every time thereafter you're just pulling your hair out in disbelief and screaming "WHY??"

However, in going through the motions of "gameplay" (in the sense that a Russian circus bear goes through the motions of "dancing"), you are exposed (in a highly scripted way) to the storyline and to Fable's unique brand of charm and humour, and it is as good and as clever as ever. Does it make up for the shit gameplay? Does it bollocks
 
Hadn't heard of the Edge guy either. What a total fuckwit. Global trademark laws must have some massive holes for him to get away for that for decades. 
Bitches Don't Know 
about my Kirby's Epic Yarn,OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOHHHHHHHHHHHH. 
Donkey Kong Country Returns 
Short review: Brilliant platformer. Genius secrets, gorgeous to look at, insanely maddening at times as a good platformer should be. If you like platformers and have a Wii this is a good one to get imo. I still have to go back to almost every single level to get all of the items and get 100%, which will probably have me playing for another ~6-10 hours just for the pickups. 
OMG 
A Golden Temple is revealed after the credits! Fuck! Another world to play through. 
Oh :( 
I need to find eight more rare orbs to enter the temple :( Damn you secret-filled game! 
DKC Returns 
Yeah, really great game, love all the secrets.
Didn't really like some of the train and rocket levels, they feel overly simple (they both only require one button for interaction) and hard in a non-fun way.
The rest is awesome though, even my mom loves it. 
Epic Mickey 
Been playing this for ~5 hours, and so far it's a pretty bad game. Horrible controls and painfully dark graphics mar what could have been a good game. You can't see shit, both because of how dark and samey everything looks and also because the camera is completely shit.

Mickey feels very awkward with slow move speed and clumsy physics - his hitbox causes him to bump into things and miss easy jumps, often resulting in falling into bottomless pits or acid (paint thinner.)

This game is not Deus Ex in Mickey form even though the 'good choice/bad choice' theme is prevalent throughout - often times choices are not clear enough to make a choice really. Several times I failed a mission by doing something I thought I was supposed to, but turned out wasn't the case. This resulted in me failing even though I thought I was doing the right thing. Mission goals sometimes seem straight forward but are sometimes not so clear.

Overall I think I will quit playing as it's been nothing but frustrating. 
Mickey... 
I have been hell-bent on finishing it, too, but I keep completing missions out of sequence and leaving obvious rewards behind thinking that I will have a chance to backtrack to them.

The first few levels and Space Voyage are especially guilty of this.

It is also bizarre how talking to some of the Mean Street townsfolk multiple times ends up giving you multiple items o_O 
Alan Wake 
got this for 10 bucks.

Just started - first level, looking for the gas station.
Does anyone know if this gets better? 
 
first level, looking for the gas station.

This whole realism in games is just going way to far, the next level will be getting a gas pump, then walking across the lot without getting run over. After that will be inside the convenience store, looking for a drink that doesn't have to come with insulin strapped to it and some kind of food that won't give you dysentery. The boss fight will be with the store; clerk getting them to actually stop smoking their tobacco product outside, ring up your items and 25dollah on the correct pump. 
Real Is Boring. 
 
If It Makes You Feel Any Better 
I *am* fighting ghosty darkness zombies with a flashlight and a pistol.

So far the set up has been pretty weak, and the story and dialogue has been uniformly pretty not good. 
That's 
what the trailers looked like :( 
 
Amuses me that reading magazines and other cack like that when talking about Max Payne they go 'omg the story, the story, the gritty setting and story'

Only morons played Max Payne for the story. They played it for the fucking graphics and bullet time combat :P

I played a brief bit of Alan Wake and it felt like they'd ke[t the most irritating bits of Max Payne and removed the fun. 
 
*kept 
Alan Wake Looks Kind Of Ass 
Probably one of the last games I would ever get around to checking out from the game library at work. It just didn't look very inspiring at all really, not sure what all the hype was about. 
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